File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9804, message 351


From: Carrol Cox <cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: A new home for m-i (Was: Tumbrils away!)
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 1998 22:31:06 -0500 (CDT)


Lou,

There are a number of (legitimate) conflicting "visions" of what a
maillist should be. As *visions* they all leave out what every good
maillist will absolutely need to keep it going: some junk, some offensive
material. I believe someone pointed out earlier that some of your best
posts have been "counter punching." Some of your worst posts have too, but
each medium has its strengths, and a strength of maillists that published
journals cannot afford (it would destroy them) is that they *allow* a
substantial number of *misfires*. And to allow any misfires at all, they
must also allow a considerable amount of free-floating junk.

Now some junk reveals itself almost at once. I'm thinking of Malecki and
Levy. But take Hugh. I stopped reading his posts even before marxism(1)
collapsed, and in the days before I left Thaxis I stopped reading the
posts of anyone who quoted Hugh. But I think that a really useful marxism
post needs one or two such characters. (Now when Hugh turned to a really
slimy opportunism in joining in with Levy and Malecki to defend Murray,
that was of course grounds for immediate expulsion from any healthy list
-- and I think thaxis shows, incidentally, that Rob's weakness as a
moderator was not that he lacked courage but that he honestly believed
that a maillist should be run as an ideal bourgeois democracy (i.e., as a
never-never land), and really could not understand that principles that
apply to state power are irrelevant in some other situations.

But I still strongly urge that a maillist that would have excluded Hugh
because of the utter vapidity of his posts would have ended up excluding
those whose posts would have triggered (sometimes despite their
intentions) in valuable threads. The debate you and I carried on with Ben
Seattle was exemplary. Seattle has nothing to say -- but in responding to
his nothingness I have moved into explorations which I believe are a real
advance in my own thinking, and which eventually (when the very existence
of some maillist is re-established) I hope to share with others in a
series of posts on the _Nation_. So not having Seattle on the maillist
would have been a real loss (and one which we never would have become
aware of).

And for these reasons I am leary of (though also in partial agreement
with) the following from your recent post:

> Last night I had a long talk with Louis G. and I told him (and Mark
> privately) that what we should be shooting for is the quality of discussion
> that marked M-I in the first few months. If you turn the clock back and
> examine the archives, you will find tip-top analysis of the East Asian
> economy by Godena, thoughtful contributions from Adolfo on the situation in
> Peru and a truly inspired reflection on Soviet history by Mark.

Yes. All the things you name were indeed wonderful. I want more of
them. I want a maillist which will allow for and encourage them. But I do
not believe it is possible *or even desirable* to have a maillist made up
solely of such materials. In fact a maillist confined to such ought not to
be a maillist, it ought to be a web site with a strong and perceptive
editor.

You continue:

> And then
> everything started to come apart at the seams. The unspeakably evil Jerry
> Levy decided to use Mark's post as an excuse to open up a big campaign
> against "Stalinists" and all hell broke loose. My position at the time was
> that Levy was trying to destroy M-I, as he openly claimed on thaxis. That
> he was able to accomplish so much destruction in a short time shows that he
> is highly skilled at this one thing.

I've already indicated my agreement on Levy. He clearly lives to generate
dissension, and gives new meaning to the circle for sowers of dissension
in Dante's hell. But actually "unspeakably evil" maillist dwellers are
relatively few. "Almost unbelievably annoying"  would be a better
description of many, and I suggest that a maillist attempts to exclude the
"unbelievably annoying" at peril of killing itself.

> 
> At around the same time, I was doing what I like to do which is research
> some topic and write longish posts. Frankly, I am not particularly
> interested in "debating" anybody because nobody is willing to do their
> homework. That is why people like Rodwell and Bedggood were such a waste of
> time. They lived for debate, but could be less interested in information.
> Argument without information is not only a waste of bandwidth, it is an
> insult to the memory of people like Marx and Lenin, who spent countless
> hours in libraries collecting facts to buttress their arguments.

Lou, beware, you are on the edge here of falling into the kind of
tautologies that haunt Hugh day and night. Also, it's not true that you
dislike argument. Also, the value of your "long posts" (like Lenin's long
hours in the library: Marx is a slightly different case) is that they
provide the material on which useful argument flourishes. What was wrong
with Hugh's and B's long arguments was not that they were arguments but
that (a) they were inappropriately long for the medium and (b) they
weren't really arguments at all but attempts to make pure tautology
replace thinking and knowing. It is as though one were to ask the length
of a spot of wall available to position a desk and get the reply that "A+B
= B + A or that the space available was equal to the length of the wall
minus the length of those parts not available for desk position.

I suspect that if one checked the archives one might even find valuable
posts which turned out to have been provoked by one of Hugh's.

And back to Marx: a substantial share of his long hours in the library
were spent studying the arguments of fools or knaves. It is always
important to remember the subtitle of *Capital*. A critique *not* of
capitalism, nor even of capital, but of *political economy*. And even in
the case of Lenin, though a book you and I both admire, *The Development
of Capitalism in Russia*, required immense empirical study, its style is
not really typical of the *whole* of Lenin's career. Actually, his
attacks on "factory exposures" as a central mode of agitation and
propaganda were perhaps more typical of the role he assigned himself as a
revolutionary. No No No he kept saying over and over again. That is not
right. That new notion of yours is not new and it is not right.

Just because m-i was plagued with arguers who, really, had nothing to
argue about, don't sell argument short. And on the basis that often we
can't know in advance what we need to argue about and what we don't need
to argue about, don't even sell stupid and annoying argument short.

> 
> The recent discussion of the "wharfie" strike is a sign of how good M-I can
> be when we are all travelling down the same road. If the new M-I can serve
> to facilitate this kind of exchange, then it is absolutely worth fighting for.

Yes. Yes. Yes. BUT:

	Do you think such things fall from the air. What in the history of
marxism and marxism 2 and m-i made this series of reports possible. I want
you to at least consider the possibility that a lot of that history which
appears solely negative went into forging the context where these ongoing
reports on Australia seem worth writing to our friends from Oz. I am
becoming tired, and have some tasks to do before I sleep, so I'm stopping
here arbitrarily. At least for now.

Carrol

> 
> I have to admit that I am still a little unsure about what Louis G. has in
> mind. He obviously has his own notion about what "real" Marxism consists of
> and has made no secret that he regards much of what I say as reformist
> poison. On the other hand, Louis G. is somebody who needs a foil like me to
> operate off of, so there's a bit of a symbiosis implied in the
> relationship. Of course, when he is paying the bills for the new list,
> there is an added leverage he has in enforcing any disciplinary decisions
> against someone like myself, who not only has rotten, Mensheviki,
> opportunist, social-fascist politics, but is quite obstreperous in
> defending them. Grrrr!
> 
> In any case, if we can decide that the model of M-I in its early days is
> what we want, then I think we are in good shape. If not, then it is
> important for Louis G. to spell out what he has in mind so that we can
> provide input into the decision-making process or make alternative choices.
> 
> Louis Proyect
> 
> 
> 
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> 



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