Date: Thu, 03 Apr 1997 12:51:27 +0000
From: Mark Jones <majones-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: M-I: Its' Frothy, Man


> >
> >Since I know you are a person who is prepared to abide by the rules of
> >debate, we can and I hope shall discuss whether or not the USA is not 
> >A Place but THE Place where revolution must happen if the world as a whole 
> >is ever to become socialist. 
> >
> 
> Louis Proyect:
> 
> There are groups in the United States that have attempted to make
> revolutions [snip] ... whites of their eyes
> completely surrounding the pupils and spittle in the corner of their mouths [snip] ... unfortunate souls if a movie had ever been made about the
> ultra-Stalinist left [snip]... lonely
> places. [snip]... a pathetic lot: men and women my age[snip]... dogmatic and> sectarian, and more than a little bit frightening.[snip]... tiny sects that live in an imaginary landscape of
> "World Mobilizations" and "Calls to Action" [snip]... ideologically calcified [snip]...> I regard you and Adolfo on one side, and Hugh Rodwell and David Bedggood on
> the other, to represent the same exact thing,[snip]... self-destruct [snip]... splits, expulsions and trials. [snip]... You Stalin-worshippers  [snip]... Why would any sane person want to
> be on a mailing list with people like you and Adolfo [snip]
> Who wants to be around men who say sexist things like "having balls" instead
> of using some other less provocative phrase. [snip. Oh, really, Lou!] ... Being a
> Bolshevik meant wearing black leather jackets, cursing, drinking whiskey out
> of the bottle, and, most importantly, being a man's man.[snip]...
> 
> You [snip] snarling thug. I
> see that blackjack in your back pocket, even if it is concealed in a
> rolled-up copy of the 18th Brumaire [whoa! That's *your* bedside reading, not mine!].
>  your
> counterpart Rahul trading daily insults.[now, be reasonable, Lou. I donl;t trade insults on a *daily* basis, and never with Rahul, who lost his first argument with me and has never come back for more].
>  you
> are not even a genuine presence on the list.[snip]
> If you weren't around, he might have to write about something boring like
> Mezsaros, god forbid.[I must tell you that Meszaros is OK, but not *that* scintiallating, Lou]
> 
> I say this now to my Stalinist and anti-Stalinist brethren and sistren: let
> them go [snip]

Hello Lou!

I believe we can do better than this. I must stop tweaking your 
nose. I am going to write it out fifty times. And you must stop 
yanking my tail.
We all need to find the moral strength to listen to our pet 
hate-objects once in a while and not routinely dehumanise 
them (more than they already are).
For instance 

The best Marxism I have seen for a while on M-Int (ie since 
my own last contributions on LOV) was Rodwell's piece on 
the Soviet Union yesterday. Rodwell is an acute and a fine 
Marxist thinker. I have written to tell him I think so.

BTW Karl Marx was a theoretician as well as the journalist 
who wrote 'The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon', which 
may as well be the name of a gangsta-rap band, Lou, for all 
*its* throbbing contemporary relevance. Your attempts to 
make of Marx a belle-lettrist and journalist, and to excise the 
core of Marxism, its critique of political economy, are as 
balefully negative as any of my scatological name-calling or 
Rodwell's intrigues. 

But let us make and continue to make efforts to overcome the 
psychology of outgrouping and rejection which afflicts us all. 
For eg, at this moment in time I cannot stand to read anything 
Godena writes -- either because he said something hurtful 
about me or because I said something hurtful about him or 
because actually he really *is* the charlatan I sometimes think 
he is but generaly suspect he is not: but my *real* problem if I 
am honest is that he writes damn well and I'm interested in 
what he has to say. 
Dammit!

Ditto you, you old red-meat eating, cigar-smoking whiskey-
drinker you.

I also read Malecki cover-to-cover. He even puts a smile on 
my face.

I even learnt something from Tufeckioglu's stuff on women's 
day, and not just more negative thoughts about her. Who 
knows, maybe she isn't a charlatan either, in which case it is 
unforgivable to force her to make compromising statements 
which might endanger her, altho not as unforgivable as the 
fools who put her in this untenable position in the first place, 
by making a person in such an exposed position moderator of 
a list like this It's because I couldn't believe anyone would be 
*that* incredibly foolish, and risk a comrade's safely like that, 
that I decided she must be, could only be a charlatan or 
someone's stooge. But anything's possible, I might be wrong 
and I would hate to have her get in trouble on my account.

That, as Rodwell rightly says, is what you get with open petit-
bourgeois lists - misunderstandings between revolutionaries, 
most of whom are tossers or charlatans but a few of whom 
may really be involved in proper conspiratorial activity (which 
as far as I know, I hasten to add, none of the abovementioned 
are).

[use of the word 'tosser' is without intended insult to any 
people who read this and also masturbate -- which everyone 
has done at some point anyway. See, I'm trying to be more 
PC, Lou].

Even Rahul has a few points to make, altho I can't comment 
about Adriatic hotels since I've never been in one. The only 
little prick I really can't stand (by the way, Lou, why is it OK 
to call someone a prick but not OK to say someone has no 
cojones?) is Austin, but that's only because he has read more 
Marx and understood proportionately less than any human 
being I have ever met, which is why I suspect he actually fell 
off a comet-tailing UFO and is really an over-earnest alien.

Perhaps one day you will explain to us why all revolutionaries 
who actually believe in revolution in the USA are drooling 
cretins, while the instant you migrate beyond US borders you 
become a matinee idol?
I personally have visited Maoist bookshops and even once 
bought the truck-driver's guide to philosophy in one of them, 
and a very nice thermos flask which had a cork but did not 
leak and worked well for some years. It had a nice floral 
design on the side and was made in Shanghai.

When I was a student in 1967 I owned a copy of the 
Thoughts which I even read, once. However I never 
persuaded myself even in those days that these activities were 
likely to result in revolution and I cannot say I have become 
more wild eyed and slavering since then. Not before drinking 
eight pints of Wadworth's  6X anyway.

It is all very well you saying good riddance because we've 
gone off into what Levy, Zarembka et al hope will be a 
ghetto, and which I promise those gentlemen is not and will 
not be a ghetto,  but you never made it possible for us to stay. 
Neither you nor the moderators of this list defended our right 
to speak freely on it, not to have our wall-posters defaced and 
ripped off, not to speak of being told, as I memorably was by 
Levy, that I am in 'holocost [sic] denial' etc every ten minutes. 

Yes, you bear your share of the blame, old pal. I warned you 
what would happen. I told you I am inhabited by poltergeists, 
that I am the very model for RLS's Jekyll and Hyde, that I am 
as schizoid as any nice English gentleman who carved his way 
across half the globe in between High Tea and Evensong. I 
*told* you I was a thug, I warned you what I would do to 
people like Pudding-head and Chamberpot if they riled me up 
and if the moderators didn't moderate (damn, here I go again, 
it's my low-level lycanthropy,  kind of a chronic undulant 
fever which certain names and propositions trigger -- now, 
where is the damn antidote? Ahh, not here, where it should be 
right beside me on the bedside table, between the quinine 
tablets, the Baedeker, the Browning, the garlic perles and the 
empty Lagavulin bottle -- but here, on my wife's bedside 
table, wedged between Hegel's Philosophy of Right and the 
collected Maria Tsvetaeva in Russian of course -- no reason 
for it to be there she knows how this damn comet has been 
playing havoc with my lunar rhythms -- hang on a mo -- let 
me just take a swig -- Ahh! now that's better. Yes. Yes. My 
toes are straightening, the hair is vanishing again). 

OK, where was I?

Ah, yes. 

Revolution.

My dear old Lou, how on earth can there ever be socialism in 
the world *outside* the US and only mad-Maoist bookshops 
inside? If you think socialism cannot happen in the US then 
you think it is impossible everywhere, surely?

How can there be Marxism, for that matter, when feminist 
trade unionists like Yoshi Furahashi think they are Marxists 
but consider that the main problem is not bringing socialism to 
the US but the exact opposite, ie, the export of Hollywood 
values to the rest of us by means of expensive affirmative 
action programmes to make the rest of the world, especially 
Japanese men, more American, more in thrall to the canons of 
American civil society, with its notable and ongoing 
achievements in the realm of women's emancipation, trade 
union rights etc? 

If you have nothing more to say on the subject of revolution 
in the US than this, then you only confirm my worst fears. 

 But before you assume we on the famous LeninList, which is 
what you mostly all talk about nowadays, are no better and 
probably even more Ranting and Frothy than Maoist 
boksellers, I should warn you that we are doing fine, that 
Hugh must stop holding his breath -- his head has already 
gone the shape and colour of a pumpkin -- we don't want his 
fine brain to be damaged -- because there is not and will be no 
split between Adolfo and me and on the contrary, we are 
going to try to extend our deliberations and conversations 
even with yourselves, and on a comradely and principled basis 
at that.

And we are going to be talking a lot about the thing which 
sent you into such a paroxysm, Lou.
Regards,

Mark X



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