File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9802, message 157


Date: Tue, 10 Feb 1998 16:06:55 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: Re: M-I: Walicki



Lou responds to my reference to *Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of
Freedom* with:

>A capsule description of a Walicki article from the University of Notre
>Dame's "The Review of Politics":


So, rather than discuss Walicki's *book*, Lou dredges up an article in an
obscure journal (I am as innocent of the text in question as I'm sure Lou is
of the book we are ostensibly discussing).  He then proceeds to indict me on
his well-known charge of his opponents "moving to the Right", a charge that
I categorically reject.  Indeed, I am one with Walicki only in rejecting
Western Marxism's shibboleth that Marx was at bottom a social democrat whose
vision was denatured by Russian backwardness.  As a corollary, I reaffirm
(with Walicki) that Lenin's wager on class struggle and political
determination to reach socialism was closer to Marx than the Second
International's (and Western Marxism's) commitmnent to "social necessity"
and its concomitant taxing of the market to support the welfare state.

But to hidebound, housebroken labor-tailers like Lou Proyect and Carrol Cox,
any deviation from Western Marxist orthodoxy easily assumes the appearance
of disloyalty.  The flabby, fashionable "Left" epitomized by Monthly Review
and Rethinking Marxism is irretrievably sinking into a well-deserved
obscurity.  I am looking ahead at what will likely take its place.  I hope
that at the very least it will be develop into a Left willing to confront,
rather than conflate, State power.  

This is where I am politically right now; I have no use for the politics of
the Right, whether straight up from Pipes or Walicki, or sugar-coated from
the likes of Jesse Jackson or Bernie Saunders.  And I detest Hannah Arendt
and the whole totalitarianism crowd to a far greater extent than dear
Comrade Proyect.  In fact, it was I who posted in this forum the first real
challenge to the totalitarian model, in the form of a post about Alan
Walder's *Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry*.

So there.

Louis Godena   




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