Date: Thu, 6 Nov 1997 17:10:43 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: New List



Jim Blaut writes:

>Now we are beginning to learn the dirty facts of the case. Leninlist, you
>tell us, was started "as a forum for spreading PCP propaganda and
>agitation." The Communist Party of Peru (aka Sendero Luminoso) has
>condemned other communist movements all around the world, including of
>course Cuba's CP. It is for this reason mainly that it has few friends on
>the Left, and it is for this reason that Leftists do not dismiss out of
>hand the reports in the bourgeois press about Senderos massacring peasants
>who have not aided the Peruvian army.


Two things.  While I have no desire to revisit the PCP wars, nor to continue
a debate on the vagaries of Leninlist, I have to disagree with virtually
every point in Jim's post.  If his academic writing matches this in candor
and analysis, he should join our friend Andy down at Pigeon Forge State
Teachers.  In the Sociology Department.

I was not privy to the moderators' aims and sympathies when Leninlist was
being formed, though I did carry on a brief, acrimonious correspondence with
Hillier and Jones, the particulars of which I would just as soon forget.  I
considered them then a couple of petulant, disaffected political buggerers,
and I was quite concerned when Adolfo teamed up with them.  But, live and learn.

Contrary to Jim's assertion, Leninlist never expected its members to adhere
to any "party line" of Adolfo's or the PCP.  Hillier now admits, however,
that we were all unknowingly held hostage to the discipline of his
impecunious little "Communist Action Group", and in fact accuses the rest of
us of trying to "break party discipline" on the Cuba question.  This
hack-like behavior is, I believe, what drove the original Leninlist off the
cliff. 

The Cuba question is not the issue here (I do take exception, though, with
Blaut's characterization of universal support for Castro as a given.  That
view may prevail in the US and Western Europe; it is decidedly in the
minority elsewhere on the planet, where most Marxists actually live).  The
issue for me, and most others, I suspect, is the high-handed manner in which
a political underling sabotaged a mailing list, and whose aims were
obviously quite foreign to his professed object, as well to those of the
people he claimed to serve.

Louis Godena    




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