Date: Sun, 12 Oct 1997 08:13:06 -0400
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Bedggood favored to win 1997 Bad Writing contest


David Bedggood:
So the real cause of the post-war boom were the massive defeats suffered by
the international working class, including the victorious workers and
peasants of the USSR, who had been drawn into a war against fascism instead
of a civil war against capitalism.

Louis Proyect:
I was not discussing the cause of  the post-war boom, just making the point
that the American Trotskyite movement didn't anticipate it. It assumed that
economic catastrophe was inevitable, given the existing international
relationship of class forces. They took a look at capitalist Western Europe
after WWII and figured that the same combination of hyperinflation and
depression that followed WWI would repeat itself. If you have some ideas
about the cause of the post-war boom being *dependent* on Stalinist
betrayal of revolutions in France and elsewhere, why don't you flesh these
out. You should stop being so obsessed with what I say and trying to
correct every single point I make. Right now you and the other Trotskyite
half-wits are functioning  parasitically on my posts to this mailing-list.

David Bedggood:
In NZ for example, hardly the heartland of the workers movement, the labour
movement fought their "own" Labour government attempts to maintain wartime
austerity measures. Right around the world the US and its allies unlaunched
the cold war in an orchestrated fashion. Dulles visited NZ around the time
of the Korean war, and shortly after in 1951, a National government,
longtime enemy of the working class, made a pre-emptive strike against the
most powerful unions including a major clampdown on civil rights. The
communist and syndicalist leadership of the main unions was destroyed as
the "enemy within" and NZ became locked into the global western alliance in
ANZAS.

Louis Proyect:
God bless you, child. This is the first time that you have ever written
about your native New Zealand. There may be hope for Trotskyism after all.
Some of us had begun to suspect that you were from another planet, like
Uranus.

David Bedgood:
While capitalist restoration in Russia and China allows huge new chunks of
the world to be repartitioned among the imperialist powers, this does not
overcome the fundamental causes of crisis. It allows a further
concentration and centralisation of capital, and renewed accumulation at
the core, but it intensifies the global contradiction, further destroys the
forces of production, and widens the gap between capitalist and working
classes. 

Louis Proyect:
The fundamental causes of crisis? You mean the falling rate of profit or
something like that? I don't expect that to ever go away as long as there
is capitalism. But the existence of this law doesn't necessarily mean that
global depressions arrive like 17 year cicadas, least of all today given
the reality that capitalism has been strengthened by the collapse of the
USSR and by China's imminent decision to privatize state industry. These
events, to my way of thinking,  mean that the capitalist class gain access
to raw materials and cheap labor that were prohibited in the past. This is
some kind of high-falutin' dialectical analysis you got goin' on. The more
freedom capitalism has to operate, the weaker it becomes. Maybe we should
all go to work as strike-breakers or cops, just to speed up the transition
to socialism.

David Bedggood:
You forget the basic contradiction which means that capitalism's dynamism
is dependent upon realising use-values as exchange values 

Louis Proyect:
I am breathless. May I call you Karl Marx Junior?

David Bedggod:
UNLESS the labour movement renews itself as a militant rank and file which
breaks out of the chauvinist bureaucratic stranglehold of the union bosses
and links up with organised workers in other countries. This cannot happen
without a Bolshevik-Leninist vanguard
party in the lead.

Louis Proyect
I think you have stumbled across something of deep significance here. The
use of upper-case in the word UNLESS dramatizes the urgency of renewing the
labour movement.  This
 is more than a proposal. It is an ULTIMATUM. Can I pass this sentence
along to my contacts in the Teamster's union? I think an ultimatum like
this is just what they need to wake them up.

David Bedgood:
The SWP under Cannon applied Trotsky's pre-war perspectives blindly after
the war and talked of the war continuing in  1946. And this was the same
SWP that Proyect now considers to be a revolutionary trotskyist
organisation in the 1970's when you happened to be a member?  You can't
have it both ways.

Louis Proyect:
Are you out of your mind? The SWP was a sick, ultraleft cult, not a
revolutionary party when I was in. If I knew back then what I know now, I
would have never wasted my time with this pathetic group. I would have
built a Marxist tendency in genuine mass organizations like the Peace and
Freedom Party and SDS with an eye to forming a revolutionary socialist
party when sufficient forces had been gathered, like 10,000 or 20,000
activists. An organization of 20,000 activists can influence American
politics. as well as help you have a more interesting social life. Your
pathetic outfit of two dozen people can't even influence members of your
immediate family.

David Bedggood:
If you had taken the trouble to read and understand Trotsky like you
claimed on the Third International after Lenin you would see that the
sources of this catastrophism were the evolutionary marxism of 2nd
International, reproduced in the 3rd around leading theorists such as
Bukharin who took this theory into the Comintern in the form, as Trotsky
commented, of a bastardised "permanent revolution".

Louis Proyect:
You may have the germ of an idea, but you are biting off more than you can
chew. What comes out is undigested thought--the mental equivalent of what a
colicky cow throws up. You should stop trying to answer everything I write
and take on an assignment to expand on these potentially interesting
points. Wouldn't everybody just love it if a sociology professor like David
Bedggood wrote 5,000 intelligent words explaining how the seeds of
"catastrophism" existed in the 2nd International? Instead you and your
partner in crime Rodwell root through your incoming mail each day to try to
find some message of mine to comment on. Why don't we exchange roles for
the next six months or so. You write fully developed, well-researched,
substantial posts and I will snip away at them like an angry Chihuahua. Oh,
I forgot. You can't do this because you lack a brain.

David Bedggood:
So the degeneration of the Comintern after the death of Lenin and the
sidelining of Trotsky followed from its bureaucratisation which allowed the
menshevik polarity of catastrophism/economism to gain the ascendancy over
the genuine Bolsheviks. The common source of these twin deviations from
revolutionary marxism is the separation of objective and subjective reality
by the liquiation of the working class vanguard, and has its material roots
in the petty bourgeoisie. 

Louis Proyect:
Do I have your permission to enter this in the 1997 Bad Writing Contest?
Last year's winner was Frederic Jameson. This thicket of ungainly,
incoherent jargon has the inside track for first prize.

David Bedggood:
Workers will continue to vote for the "lesser evil" unless and until there
is a revolutionary alternative based on the Bolshevik model.

Louis Proyect:
Judging by your progress on these mailing lists, I suggest you look some
other models to build--like plastic ships or racing cars--rather than
Bolsheviki organizations The people here are avowed Marxists, many without
any affiliations, and you have not attracted a soul. The only new person to
enlist in the Malecki-Bedggood-Rodwell Trotskyite/Bad Writing faction since
you have been here was Vladimir Bilenkin. Now he considers the three of you
to be a curse on the working class. Shortly afterward, your ally Malecki
decided that your LCMRCI group was pro-cop. Your group then issued a
communique that said that Malecki was disturbed and hostile to the
revolutionary movement. With continuing progress like this, I expect you to
grow a second head pretty soon which will begin denouncing the first head
as Mensheviki.




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