File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9802, message 158


Date: Tue, 10 Feb 1998 22:43:23 +0000
From: "M.A.&N.G. Jones" <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-I: Walicki


This response of Lou Godena's is helpful - he at last has begun to set out his
stall.
I should hope that all sides, starting  with myself, will now cease looking for the
demarcations between reformism and truly revolutionary politics in personalities,
and instead look for them in programmes. If Lou Godena is a revolutionary (he is)
then so by any rational test is Lou Proyect or Carroll Cox.

Proceed. No more bickering, please.



Louis R Godena wrote:

> 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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