Date: Sat, 11 Oct 1997 22:35:04 +0200 (MET DST)
From: m-18043-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se (Stuart Sheild)
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: Get back in the kitchen and rattle them pots & pans!


Doug asks Hugh:
>And how do you go about building "mass authoritative revolutionary
>working-class leadership." You make it sound like a simple failure of will,
>rather than an intensely complex problem. Socialism has virtually no
>credibility anywhere in the world today. None. What do you do about that,
>aside from issuing pronouncements to Internet lists with 300 subscribers?

I don't see your problem. If you accept the *need* for mass authoritative 
revolutionary working-class leadership, then issuing pronouncements backed 
by reasoned argument and analysis on a list whose members' chief 
preocupation is (or should be) capitalism and its destruction *must* be 
better than keeping your mouth shut. It's as simple as that. *Too* simple 
apparently. 
Hugh refuses to go quietly and this gets up your nose. But why should you 
care? Why the constant harping about Hugh's lack of serious political 
commitment or legitimate credentials? The insiduous, and not so insiduous, 
exercises in character assassination (and I'm not primarily alluding to you 
here)? Why go to all that trouble if, as you say, there's no one out there 
listening?

If you're so offended by calls for revolutionary working-class leadership, 
you should take your own advice and ignore them. Somehow you seem unable to 
do this. Why? And please spare me the we're-only-joshing-you-can't-you- 
Britishers-ever-take-a-joke line.

What else Hugh does/has done about his "tedious" preocupation is not 
particularly relevant nor necessarily the business of everyone here, though 
he'd probably tell you if he felt you had a good reason for asking.

This list, pace Louis P., is a discussion forum, not a Brownie points 
exchange where people purchase the "authority" to speak using revelations of 
their revolutionary exploits and heroic sacrifices as hard currency. It'd be 
pretty quiet around here if it was. Apart from Lunchtime O'Prozac of course, 
whose Homeric feats shame us all. 

Stuart Sheild
Stuart



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