Date: Tue, 19 Aug 1997 11:02:03 -0400
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: On the Madrid conference: A question


Louis Godena:
>
>
>I notice that we've been spammed lately with various reports on that Madrid
>thing on neo-liberalism.

Louis Proyect:
Godena, if you think that news on the "Madrid thing" is spam, you don't
have the political judgment to be a moderator. It is depressing to see how
you have reverted to the sort of bitter, angry, antagonistic, carping
ultraleft politics you brought to the Spoons list when you first appeared.


> But is
>this not, to the say the least, a rather disingenuous view of human history?
>Except for a handful of notable failures (one thinks of the early American
>communes), the history of human society is one of fierce competition, often
>"red in tooth and claw", between warring clans, families, cities and
>nations, which have sharpened down to our own day even while accumulating
>the cultural trappings of "democracy" and its attendant pieties and
shibboleths.
>

Fierce competition between clans? Where in the hell did you learn your
Marxism, from Samuel Huntington? Certainly, not Herbert Aptheker, let alone
Marxist anthropology. What an odd duck you are. A head full of obscure
Harvard graduate school bourgeois social science mixed up with Maoist
shibboleths. Now I understand why the biggest PL/SDS chapter in the country
was at Harvard University.

> No socialist society has existed -- in our own day or
>any other -- under what could reasonably be termed "ordinary circumstances".
>They were birthed and struggled to survive in a world dominated by a
>powerful and rapacious enemy sworn to their destruction.  Their record on
>individual rights, therefore, must forever be flawed and ambiguous.  
>

Their recond must be flawed and ambiguous? Does this mean that Stalin
should be excused for putting nearly the entire top echelons of the Red
Army in front of the firing squad after signing a peace pact with Hitler?
By the way, your remark the other day about Trotsky taking 30 pieces of
silver was absolutely despicable. Trotsky, for better or for worse, had the
same politics in 1905 that he had in 1935. That he wrote for Le Monde is no
more a sign that he is a enemy agent than it is that Doug Henwood writes
for the Financial Times. Also, your snooping around in the Chris Hani
affair is really a seamy business. The marxism-international list is the
last place in the world to have a commission of inquiry.


>Do the organizers and publicizers of the Madrid conference really believe in
>this dichotomy, I wonder?  Or are they speaking merely to amuse their
>current (and future) parishioners?   Is there some sort of complex
>dialectical wisdom afoot here? 
>

There is dialectical wisdom afoot here absolutely. As a case in point, the
Zapatistas by combining themes of indigenous Mexio with cyberspace
communications are about as dialectically contradictory as you can get.
Your remark the other day about how "absolute poverty" is needed to have a
revolution shows that you can not think dialectically yourself. Germany in
1921 did not have "absolute poverty" but it was in a prerevolutionary
situation. The most militant organized faction of the working class was the
Revolutionary Shop Stewards who had armed themselves.

Godena, your rude remarks to Carroll Cox the other day really pissed me
off. Who in the hell gave you the chutzpah to tell him to "toddle off". If
you lack the temperament to be a moderator, then get the hell out. You are
a disgrace.



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