Re: JUST WHAT IN THE HELL IS GOING ON?
>And BTW, does anyone know if I've been dropped from Mark's list for some
>reason?
It is hard for me to deny an element of Schadenfreude, but Leninist-International appears to have imploded dramatically within a bare four weeks of the unprincipled personal attack that Mark launched on me on LBO-talk on 25th October. I obviously do not think the following was critical but I am bound to recall it with some wryness.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Gimme a break. If I challenged you on the Tobin Tax you either wouldn't
even realise your head was off until it fell to the ground, or if you did
you'd shut up for a week and then post on something different and within
your level of competence like the gendering of underskirts in Louisa
Alcott's Little Women. You promiscuous slut, why you go whoring around
hell knows what other lists with your loony ideas about Lenin but sit
like a gopher in a hole with your mouth zipped up on L-I, I don't know.
In any case I am not going to debate Tobin with you. I am not going to
debate Lenin with you. If you do drag your theoretical carrion round to
L-I, I shall kick you unceremoniously off. Stick that bit of DoP
up your Khyber Pass.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
To give Mark his due, he did not repeat this in the same terms and when I challenged him on Leninist International directly he adopted a more correct tone.
The dramatic collapse of Leninist-International appears to be an object lesson in the management of marxist lists. It needs to be discussed but because of the way the collapse occurred it is not easy to do so there. Perhaps Mark will make a statement here. Here at least seems preferable to marxism-unmoderated.
The cause of the contradictions was partly a pure symptom, a spark of possibly wider mistrust on the central committee of the new Communist Party Refoundation (of Britain). It was about homosexuality.
Lists with more than one moderator are inherently unstable, and participants are quick to notice discrepancies of emphasis between two moderators and to intensify them. (It seems to me that Doug and Louis P have a much more stable symbiosis on panix.com through not running a joint list, but complementary ones.)
When the two moderators are members of the same party, especially a new party, and when they claim the list is a list of the party, that is inherently very unstable.
The flashpoint was homosexuality, for some a yardstick of commitment to absolutely basic democratic rights, for others a much more complex issue on which they wish to differentiate themselves from liberalism. That a list and a party should split on such an issue I suggest is a sign of the times and an indication of the difficulty of trying to form a single Leninist democratic centralist party in each state. That does not mean that serious marxist or Leninist parties should not exist, but I suggest they will have, like the rest of us, to participate in a network or a united front if they are to achieve anything, and will have to tolerate that there may be different marxist approaches to an issue as complex as homosexuality.
Certain subscribers, as I recall from Turkey, criticised a number of posts against homophobia and suggested that the item was not of the first importance. Others suspected them in turn of homophobia. One of the moderators started to intervene increasingly explicitly without consulting the other moderator and working in unity with him. The other moderator started to signal disapproval and reproof.
The issue quickly switched from one of the particular policy issue to one of discipline within the new Leninist party. Within a week the whole list was being told when there would be a meeting of the central committee coming up. After this meeting an announcement was posted, to give it due credit, which maintained some courtesies, thanked the other moderator, announced that he would be amicably leaving the party and the list would be reorganised.
There there followed a period in which all posts were forwarded. Then an announcement that a new step of moderation would be introduced, that all posts had to be forwarded as a matter of routine, so every post had to be the subject of approval. The volume collapsed At the moment the main posts seem to come from the remaining moderator, and one other contributor who is copying to 5 other lists, in a way that will not assist dialogue to start again on the list.
Stages on the way was a post from one of those cricising liberal views on homosexuality, that consisted of a series of quotations from Lenin against opportunism, with the presumed implication that the moderator who was list owner, was guilty of opportunism. This led to that moderator expelling the subscriber and one other subscriber for promoting a "hostile" attitude on the list. The seriousness of the exchanges between the two moderators mounted in gravity immediately after this.
A close associate of the moderator who lost out announced the formation of another leninist list, which would be run by him in a personal capacity and would not be linked to any party as such.
This person itonically shortly after got expelled from marxism-international for posting an allegedly revisionist announcement about the new list.
I do not know the volume on this list as I have not at present subsribed as the introduction could itself imply a dogmatic definition of revisionism. But an interpretation of the fall in volume of the reconstructed old list is that much of the volume for the leninist list came from marxists in various parties across the world who regard themselves as Leninist, wanting to meet and to argue. A list too closely allied with one party, the CPR, with a restrictive moderation policy would not meet that need. And a list that does not have anything to struggle about dies.
Another interesting feature is how conscious Leninists cope with the internet. There are clearly various strands of self-declared Leninism. One is the strand associated with the Chinese-led anti-revisionist movement of the early 60's which was a precursor to the cultural revolution and collated all Lenin's statements against revisionism. This trend is now repesented in what has become the extremely specialised marxism-international list that moved to Emory, after the closing of the Virginia Spoons site. There have been a series of explusions.
Another Leninist trend, which Mark represented, was a respect for the achievements of the Bolshevik revolution and the attempts to build socialism in the Soviet Union, which came to an end at some date, about which debate might occur.
Another Leninist trend was towards the evolution of parties linked closely to trade union movements and social democracy in the western states.
Whether Cuba is a socialist state or not, is an inevitable cause for a split between certain types of Leninists.
The conflict between Leninism and opportunism and revisionism presents particular problems for Leninists on the internet. Some may wish to elevate the struggle against revionism to be synonymous with the struggle for marxism, and to carry it out mercilessly in the ideological sphere alone with little link with practical political struggles. Some may link it to a disciplined democratic centralism, which does not appear to be observed, even given the benefit of the doubt, by more than a handful of posters in marxism space. Others see opportunism and revisionism as question of the belittling of the armed struggle. Though how that can easily be argued for explicitly on the internet is very difficult, under advanced technical conditions of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois dictatorship.
Others see opportunism as evasiveness and unreliability in political line. But if Leninists denounce this too stridently they just risk getting excluded from lists for promoting a hostile atmosphere. One answer I suggest is that they could tone down the charges of this sort of opportunism, by arguing that the Leninist struggle against opportunism and revisionism is one that should be carried out over a long period of time in the context of the development of political lines, and not in any abstract ideological struggle capable of being quickly decided.
One of the ironies is that the original LeninList was intended to allow the serious Leninists to regroup so that they could participate more effectively in the lists of marxism space. This does not appear to have happened. Rather the reverse.
Broadly therefore I see the current misfortunes of Leninist-international as a significant loss of credibility by sectarian versions of marxism within marxism-space.
No doubt Leninist-international may re-emerge with a new idiom and range of interests. After all, marxism-thaxis went through a period of long silences after a particularly acromonious phase. But as a list moderated by one person it remains to be seen how it will develop a particular niche in competition with more established lists like marxism at panix, or marxism-thaxis at utah.
Obviously I am strongly critical of Mark on a number of grounds, but he has also posted many committed contributions on the environment and on the history of the Soviet Union, and the recent changes on Leninist-international seemed to take on a momentum independent of the will of anyone. Moderating lists is a much more challenging job than it appears. I therefore want to do much more than indulge in Schadenfreude in posting these observations. We need to develop a much better understanding of how to use the net to foster creative marxist and left-wing thinking.
Chris Burford
London.