Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 21:31:50 +0200
Subject: Re: A new co-moderator. Welcome!


Doug H wrote:

>It's impossible to have a serious conversation with people whose view of
>the world is that you're either an uncritical supporter or you're a
>fascist.
>
>One of the awful things about the cowardly splitting of this list is that
>M2 is now the home of theoretical exchanges, and praxis has been ceded to
>the lunatics on M1.


About the first bit. It's too simplistic to characterize their view of the
world this way. We know much more about them, including their unblushing
adherence to the most oppressive traditions of Stalinism. We ought to be
asking what got this kind of crap into the working class movement in the
first place and how it could usurp the name of Marxism.

Very little of the discussion concerning the Stalinists has been
historical. Very little has concerned the actual battles fought against
this kind of thing in the late twenties and thirties. If people on a
cyberlist at no physical risk turn their backs and run, what do they think
Trotsky and his supporters were supposed to do when confronted physically
with halls full of howling Stalinists?
Imagine debating this crew in the flesh if they were armed with guns or
clubs. A posting on the Oakland post office gave us a hint of this kind of
thing in fairly recent class struggle.

A useful thread sometime would be one on the mindless linking of Trotsky Stalin. Someone - Marcus or Michael I think it was - juxtaposed 'Committee
Sol Stalin' and 'Committee Sol Trotsky', as if Stalin and Trotsky and what
they stood for were equally worthless pieces of junk. Would either of them
consider doing any serious work on, say, the Russian revolutions, the rise
of Nazism or the Chinese and Spanish revolutions without giving Trotsky's
work a central place in it?

As for the second point it's too early to judge. As far as I can see we're
just playing Marxical chairs.

It's amazing to see people who can discuss Marx's 'Platonism' without
turning a hair according the most incredible projected reality to a
cyberpresence whose intrusiveness is in their own minds and non-activated
delete buttons. Lisa R writes that it is impossible to discuss certain
matters under a barrage of negative comments. Again I would remind everyone
of the conditions under which Trotsky and his supporters had to work, and
of the fact that the subject he was discussing when he was assassinated was
dialectical materialism.

Louis P is working very hard on a sour grapes job trying to label M1 as the
Shining Path List. With his absence, however, there are few people who
actually engage the Gang of Four. They can plaster the place with leaflets
as much as they like - that bit of the wall will have no spectators.

I wonder if the sensitive souls who just *had* to read *everything* the
Stalinists wrote would dream of reading a newspaper in this way? Every line
of the leaders, every line of every story, even every ad? I doubt it.
Perhaps it was the thrill of seeing your own name or your buddy's in
cyberprint?

Oh well, back to work. The character of value and the relationship between
the processes of history and human consciousness give us a lot more to chew
on than this narcissistic frog king huffing and puffing.

Anybody want to open a book on when it'll be time for M3?

M1+M2=dialectics.

Cheers,

Hugh





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