Date: Tue, 21 Oct 1997 12:42:27 +0200 From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se> Subject: M-G: Tragedy and farce -- free speech/free smeech Stephen P wrote: >Free speech/free smeech and we'll never let him forget it. Ralph D wrote: >Remember, if socialism means I've got to start being nice to >people, you can shove your revolution. Now, does the "I" here mean everybody or just Ralph himself? The problem with the arbitrary management of discussion we're seeing over on M-International is that some of us are being excluded for not being nice to others who can be as obnoxious as they please. Now if Ralph reserves to himself the right to be nasty, but would have others thrown out for it, this is inconsistent and arbitrary, and as such out of place in a Marxist movement aiming at changing society. But as Dave B has shown in another post against Justin S, ethics and morals aren't the moving forces of history, they're superstructural reflections of material processes in the reproduction of human society. So the level of nastiness is a good indicator of the kind of tensions racking the society you're living in. Ours is full of the most murderous contradictions, based as it is on class antagonisms that have no solution within the capitalist system and the bourgeois states attempting its political management. As James H (and others) have repeated many times, nastiness of the name-calling kind can be dealt with by using the delete button or by brushing it aside as an irrelevance and concentrating on the political issues. Particularly nasty personal slurs can also be met by counterattack in self-defence, I might add. In an amazing post commenting on one of Ralph's nastier outbursts, Justin S wrote the following: >I'll second that. We formed m2, the ancestor of thaxis, precisely to get >way from this sort of rubbish. --jks > >On Thu, 16 Oct 1997, Ralph Dumain wrote: > >> Now that I've rejoined thaxis at last, I'm getting mighty sick of >> seeing this shit resurface. You new moderators, stop being >> pusillanimous pussies: get Bedggood, Rodwell, and Walton off this >> list immediately! Their simian whooping together with Proyect's >> delicious ripostes belong in the zoos of m-general and >> m-international, where these lower primates can pile as much poop >> in their cages as they please. I don't want to see another of >> these turds dropped into thaxis. Have the guts to act like >> moderators or get the fuck out of here! Now this from someone who is full of the milk of bourgeois justice and can't contemplate the dictatorship of the proletariat without seeing kangaroo courts and mob rule everywhere, and thus arbitrary inconsistency rooted in private interest. But as soon as a real live example of this kangaroo court mentality he claims to detest shoves itself into his face on his favourite mailing list in this best of all possible petty-bourgeois worlds of justice, rule of law and equality before it, what does he do?? Nothing but capitulate to the bullies and butchers in the most abject fashion!!! This of course is all very revealing to those who wonder how the Stalinist counter-revolution can ever have succeeded in pushing through its trumped-up charges and its banishments, torture and executions in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s. The mechanisms (then tragic, this time farcical) are exactly the ones being brought into play by the self-confessed Stalinist honcho Louis Godena and his neo-Stalinist allies behind the figurehead of Louis Proyect. A really ridiculous aspect of it is the connivance of such "pure socialist" petty-bourgeois fellow-travellers as Justin and the silent trimmers who let this travesty be perpetrated. In a while, when Adolfo is back in charge of M-International not just through his adept Godena but in the cyber-flesh, we shall hear first the "pure socialists" and then the neo-Stalinists screaming foul and this isn't why we got rid of the bad guys. And the whole thing will self-destruct like the Lenin List. The only thing that unites this crowd politically is their hatred of consistent revolutionary Marxism. They need enemies to feel strong together. Once left to their own devices without "outsiders" (revolutionary Marxists "outsiders" on a Marxist discussion list -- what a farce!!) they'll just start tearing each other to pieces. It reflects the development of capitalism with the removal of the workers' state apparatuses that in spite of everything defended the basic conquests of the October revolution. Its innate instability is a thousand times worse today, and the cannibalism is intensifying. Cheers, Hugh --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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