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.) --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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