Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 20:54:38 +0100
Subject: Re: LOOKING BACK IN ANGER


Ralph doesn't know a thing about what's been going on on m1.

It's the ideological confrontation forced on the working class and its
political consciousness in its parties by the collapse of the world
Stalinist leadership in the late 1980s. We are still working out materially
the consequences of October in the age of imperialism and world wars. This
isn't resuscitating long-dead corpses, it's dealing with living
contradictions that have been suppressed and denied. It's an absolutely
necessary part of the struggle today -- much more necessary than I would
have imagined possible before I subscribed to these lists.

The most important struggle is obviously organizing within the working
class. But even that needs to answer questions about how and what we
organize -- and we're back at square one. *There is no consensus*. The
strategic positions must be formulated and fought for. Over the past few
months we've been seeing clearer lines drawn up, mainly between an emerging
block of non-party reformists and non-revolutionary Marxists on the one
hand and party-building partisans on the other.


>Coming back to this list, I have tried to remain dignified in the
>aftermath of this tragedy, but I am seething about the
>trivialization of Lisa's death by political creeps, above all by
>Hugh's interjections,

Death, as I said before, is too important a question to remain silent on.
My comments were *against* trivialization. I'm sorry Ralph doesn't
appreciate this.


>but also by the silly round of satiric
>obituaries that were tossed around.  Have you no shame at all?  Or
>there is a connection between keeping company with the sectarian
>left and losing the common human touch?

Gerry L was in there slugging. He is the most hermetically sealed off of
the Ivory Tower crowd. Maybe Ralph's keyboard slipped? He surely didn't
mean to imply that M2s stalwarts are sectarian? They are of course, but not
in the way they think.

I have noticed remarkably little shame on either list, and an awful lot of
unbelievably brazen accusations and hypocrisy. Ralph seems to think it has
no connection whatever with the battle between Stalinism and
Bolshevik-Leninism for the leadership of the world proletariat. For him,
both sides are equally blameworthy. Well and good, but this removes him
>from the real fight to change the world by using the levers of political
change available to us in the real world of late imperialist decay.


>And perhaps those of us who live in
>relatively affluent, bourgeois democratic countries, who by the
>very social circumstances of those societies are the most
>rudderless and self-indulgent of all comrades, might exercise a
>bit of perspective (and that means me, too) before wasting any
>more bandwidth with trivial nonsense.

I don't think Ralph writes trivial nonsense. His stuff is indirect, though.
It's useful, but he doesn't address the most important issues facing the
working class.


>Marxism2 gave us the
>opportunity to break out of our old, bad habits, and we have
>partially succeeded in altering our cybercultural ethos.  Perhaps
>now we can move on to a new level.

M2 shunted a lot of the philosophical discussion into a blind siding.

Cyberspace is not a party or a meeting, it's a bookshop or a newspaper
stand -- it holds everything from Mein Kampf to Capital. It's a tribune
where Mensheviks and Bolsheviks (for instance) can present their ideas in
closer proximity than they otherwise would. Obviously conflicts will arise,
especially if people kid themselves that either of the marxism lists is
like a single newspaper with a single editorial board.

The conflicts we have are real, they are rooted in greater and deeper
social contradictions than we are conscious of.

What we can aspire to is to be more conscious of what we're fighting about
and reflect this in what we write.

Cheers,

Hugh



Ralph's welcome to his opinion of me. He's the one who loses by it.

I still think that nothing better has been written on the subject of Lisa
on m1&2 than the contributions by Ralph and Hans E.




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