Date: 24 Nov 96 21:48:34 EST
From: robert scheetz <76550.1064-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: M-I: List sociology



Well, well, well..., comes this:

"At 8:30 PM 11/22/96, robert scheetz wrote:

">I put it to ya, Can there be a grosser list-bitch in
">all of virtuality?

"I know we're supposed to ignore this, and I may be violating my quota, but
"this is vile on many counts. Can someone do something about this creep?

"Doug

ominously followed by this:


"Robert,

"While we have no intention of banning political debate or political "insults
"for that matter, insulting someone by dubbing them "Mother" and ""list-bitch"
"seems rather inappropriate, bordering on sexism. More important, your
"interventions seem specifically designed to be disruptive, as evidenced by
"the overall style as much as by the specific epithets. We expect you to "bear
"this warning in mind in your further contributions.

"Zeynep (co-moderator)

I guess we know what this means...which (tho their solicitude is wasted, witness
Mother Proyect's recent on the Sokal hoax: he and some Wisconson lit prof type
positively luxuriating in their- Is there any other word for it?-bitchiness... I
swear I'm only naming what'sapparent to all)) graphically illustrates how a
little of "le stil" Orwell smokes the stalinists: weasel-Boy Henwood's thugg-ish
idiom followed
by The Threat.

The stalinist type is essentially lumpen; his marxism a pure
opportunism, his goal, ever the blessed bourgeois.
The recent momentous occurrance in the USSR is notable for being
manifestly (scarcely a shot fired in anger) a natural evolution.  
That is to say, those great stalinist institutions, Party, KGB, Red Army,
the caste that captained them, did not suffer a devolution at all; but rather,
with no hint of a scruple for the laboring masses, abondoned Communism and
consolidated their loot under a bourgeois modality.

The "evil" Stalin of propaganda fame, the wholesale police terror: gulag & co.,
is to be explained structurally as the inevitable counter thesis to the massive
and ceaseless aggression from the Capitalist West.  
The huge cruelty of policies as agricultural collectivization is
the simple-mindedness/ham-handedness of the obtuse.  The inner-circle
intrigue/dagger stuff, the purge trials, murder of Trotsky, etc.,  the
machiavellianism invariably part of the power game.  So, basically,
Stalin was just another white bourgeois liberal with the instincts
of a thug.  He eagerly slit the throats of countless authentic
Communists, the Greek Resistence, Mao,... to ingratiate himself with the West.
Yeltsin is his logical and legitimate issue.  The rulership of
the Russian empire is still stalinist, still exploiting the workers;
only now in open collaboration with the Harvard Business School.

This pattern, thug-opportunist-bourgeois, is very familiar.  In small
 it is the classic type of the US labor boss (Teamsters, Longshoremen,...)who
sends his kid to Cornell, etc.  On a larger scale, the browderism of the CPUSA
is its perrenial betrayal of the working class in its quest for bourgeois
participation.  And on a larger scale still it is Castro and Danny Ortega
betraying the desparate peasants and indigenes from Chiapas to Tiera del Fuego.

Cordially,
Bob Scheetz




     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---