File spoon-archives/marxism-general.archive/marxism-general_1997/marxism-general.9711, message 50


From: mim3-AT-mim.org
Date: Fri, 7 Nov 1997 01:13:56 -0500 (EST)
Subject: M-G: How many angels can dance on Rolf Martens' pin-head?


Rolf, I see you have attracted quite a Trotskyist following
there. You are absolutely right to ally with Malackey in your
fronts and the other Trots are absolutely right to chase after
you, because there is no fundamental difference between your
method and theirs. They sense this like a shark to blood.

You see it's very simple Rolf Martens: you piss on all the
available leaders in 1976 in China after Mao died; yet, you
claim to uphold Mao and Marxism-Leninism without spitting
on the Chinese masses. You LIE the way all idealists do when they
deal with consistent materialists. This sort of lie told while
speaking in the name of Marxism-Leninism and Mao is called revisionism.
 
If Deng, Hua and the "Gang of Four" were all bourgeois, YOU are saying
there were no leaders around Mao at his death that were not bourgeois.
That leaves only two possibilities:  a) Mao fronted for and chose
bourgeois leaders before his death, and merely oversaw intra-bourgeois
fighting like the ultraleft crypto-Trotskyist Progressive Labor Party
says. That means Mao was either a bourgeois himself or certainly not
someone worth following. It also means his main theory of the Cultural
Revolution would be wrong, because it was not a "handful of high-ranking
party leaders on the capitalist-road."  No, by this way of thinking, they
were ALL on the capitalist-road.  The only other possibility while
treating Mao in the fashion YOU do is:  b) It wasn't Mao's fault, because
the Chinese masses did not produce anyone worth Mao's choosing as a leader
to work with. This is spitting on the exploited and oppressed Chinese
masses. It would be quite OK to spit on Swedish imperialist country
masses, but it's not OK for you to be dumping your
made-in-the-Pentagon-bowels-spit on the world's majority of people. 

There are no other MATERIAL possibilities within your point of view, Rolf
Martens, no matter how many times you re-write the Ten Commandments and no
matter how many angels dance on your head to help you come up with this
drivel. If as you say there were no proletarian leaders in 1976 once Mao
died, either Mao was a bourgeois screw-up or the Chinese masses
produced no proletarian leaders, according to Rolf Martens. For the
idealists this post will provoke a thousand different irrelevant and
invented responses. For materialists it's quite clear that Rolf Martens's
point of view is hopelessly inconsistent. 

P.S. You continue the work of the Hua/Deng clique and the CIA pulling for
them against the "Gang of Four" by attributing the "Gang of Four" line to
the RCP-USA. Before the craven RCP leaders ever spoke out to give
half-hearted support, academics and a Colorado Study group of
Marxism-Leninism stepped forward. You are also intentionally ignorant of
the global struggle to defend the "Gang of Four." Your pointing to the
statements of various organizations sent to Hua Guofeng condemning the
"Gang of Four" is OBVIOUSLY pro-Hua. That is why I asked you to come clean
FOR Hua. Instead, you chose your idealist Trotarchist-cum-PLP posture and
the Trots love you.  That's very inconsistent. If even according to you
Hua was a bourgeois, then don't be quoting the joint communiques he had
with various organizations aimed at the "Gang of Four." Since when
do we value the opinions of bourgeois court systems on the 
"Case of the Gang of Four" or anyone else?

CIA protege Yeltsin also thanks you for undercutting the "Gang of Four,"
because they wrote and published the articles explaining the basis for the
new bourgeoisie right in the party. None of these other leaders you equate
with them as bourgeois were able to do that. Yeltsin was a regional party
leader by 1968. How do you explain that without the theories the
"Gang of Four" were famous for? It's impossible for anyone with
scientific integrity.

You are echoing the Trotskyists and other revisionists who
were then (and now, stupid fools) criticizing Mao and Maoists for
targetting the bourgeoisie in the party, not old exploiter classes
or middle-classes. Get it through your thick skulls idealists!
It was not an imperialist invasion, nor a coup by old landlords
nor a rising of the middle classes that brought capitalist to the
Soviet bloc. It was the bourgeois faction right in the party
JUST as Mao (and no other leader of state besides maybe Hoxha) said.


**********************

12 step Young Hegelian recovery therapy

1. Recognize your addiction to ideas for their own sake and unattached to 
meaningful action. Therapy can only work for those who wish to be cured.

2.  Give up your daytime job, if you've been getting paid to have
"original" ideas at the expense of a relationship to reality AND the
ability to change that reality. 

3. Examine the Marxist pharmaceutical lab. Pick the "Holy Family" cure.

4. Re-read and try really hard to figure out why Marx said:

"Ideas can never lead beyond an old-world system but only beyond the 
ideas of the old-world system. Ideas cannot carry anything out at all. In 
order to carry out ideas men are needed who dispose of a certain practical 
force." ("The French Revolution" *The Holy Family* David McLellan ed., 
Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 147.)

5. Now figure out if Marx thought "Absolute Criticism" was a good thing 
or not and why not:

"Absolute Criticism has declared the 'mass' to be the true enemy of the 
spirit. This it develops as follows:

"'The spirit now knows where to look for its only adversary--in the self-
deception and the pithlessness of the mass.' [Go forward five steps if you 
can figure out if Marx was for the overuse of the concept of false 
consciousness or not.]

"Absolute Criticism proceeds from the dogma of the absolute competency of
the 'spirit'. Furthermore, it proceeds from the dogma of the extramundane
existence of the spirit, i.e. of its existence outside the mass of
humanity. Finally it transforms 'the spirit', 'progress', on the one hand,
and the 'mass', on the other, into fixed beings, into concepts, and
relates them one to the other in that form as given invariable extremes.
It does not occur to Absolute Criticism to investigate the 'spirit'
itself, to find out whether it is not its own spiritualistic nature, its
airy pretensions that justify 'the phrase', 'self-deception' and
'pithlessness'. The spirit, on the contrary, is absolute, but
unfortunately at the same time it continually falls into spiritlessness;
it continually calculates without the master, hence it must necessarily
have an adversary that intrigues against it. That adversary is the mass." 

("The Idealist View of History," *The Holy Family* David McLellan ed., 
Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 142.)

6. Realize you must give up your misanthropic intellectualism and now 
defend existing or historically existing social movements.

7. Did you just say Trotsky in 1917? If all you can say is Trotsky in
1917, then welcome to the movement for socialism in one and only one
country. Deposit your internationalist credentials in the nearest outdoor
latrine.  Mr. Zhironovsky will escort you out of this program for a more
suitable one. 

8. If you were a Trotskyist once, and if you only picked one more country
that happens to be led by another great speech-maker, military leader and
otherwise lucky devil who made it to power without painstaking party-
building, go forward one step for picking Castro anyway. (We know it was a
lot of work for you to pick TWO countries' revolutions existing in reality
that you actually have something positive to say about.) 

9. Ask yourself why you are now defending social-democratic, bourgeois 
religious and other watery movements if you are still criticizing all the 
original "Stalinist" movements in China, Korea, Vietnam, Kampuchea, 
Albania, World War II Yugoslavia, Peru, the Philippines etc. Choose 
between bourgeois pragmatism and Marxist materialism. Exit therapy 
immediately if you realize you no longer wish to be a Marxist, if for 
instance you don't think revolutions are necessary. Side effects of this 
program may be hazardous to the health of social-democrats.

10. If your name is Rolf Martens or Malecki, return to step 1.

11. We can reach a peaceful world, classlessness and economic harmony 
without violence!

12. Go back to step 1 if you believed number 11.

13. Did you just say we promised only 12 steps? We could have done it in 
11? Go back to step 1 with the other baby-kissing opportunist campaigners 
who speak "of 'truths which are understood of themselves from the start.'"
("The Idealist View of History," *The Holy Family* David McLellan ed., 
Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 139.)











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