Okay. It's simple. You interpreted the actions against Pinochet as a sign that the bourgeoisie is still progressive. As Tom Kruse explained to Jim Heartfield, this is not where he is coming from. He rather looks at it as an opportunity to advance the people's cause. Tom is a grass-roots activist who has no faith in politicians like Blair and Clinton. And stop the god-damned whining about how "uncomradely" I am to you. I don't regard you as a comrade, but a groveling reformist. I just stop subscribing to the Nation Magazine because the stinking reformism has gotten too much for me.
> LP is on record as
>having dismissed these events as the product of a maverick Spanish judge,
>and did not see the more powerful underlying dynamic, which is merely
>expressed through individual actors.
Well, there is an underlying dynamic, but we disagree on what it is. There were lots of leftist Spaniards in Chile who got tortured or murdered by Pinochet. The judge, for reasons that are impossible to explain, decided to do the right thing and prosecute Pinochet on their behalf. By analogy, former attorney general Ramsey Clark has become an outspoken opponent of US foreign policy. He knows exactly the same things that he knew when he worked for LBJ. What made him turn against his class? That's an interesting topic for scholars. What I reject is the notion that people like the Spanish judge or Ramsey Clark are a sign that the capitalist system is worth defending. I want to drive a stake through its heart.
>In particular politically he has been
>insisting as a matter of permanent revolution on the permanent irrelevance
>of making any marxist distinction between sections of the bourgeois and
>sections of their representatives. Indeed not just the irrelevance but in
>his view the culpable revisionism of even discussing such a difference of
>politics and practice.
What Burford is trying to say is that I am opposed to the class-collaborationism of social democracy and the post-Popular Front Communist movement. This is accurate. I refuse to support bourgeois parties or foster illusions in their progressive possibilities. Since Buford is about as knowledgable about "permanent revolution" as he is about Unix programming techniques, I will not try to engage him in a debate on this question. Suffice it to say, he tries to make it seem that it is "trotskyist" deviation to oppose bourgeois politicians. If he studied socialist and Marxist history, he would discover to his surprise that hostility to bourgeois politicians was universal until the great betrayal in 1914 when Socialist parliamentarians voted for WWI. In earlier debates on NATO bombing of the Serbs, Burford seemed baffled by the Zimmerwaldist position on WWI so that should give you some sense of his basic cluelessness on class-collaborationist politics.
>Concretely now the next most important decision on Pinochet will be taken
>by Jack Straw in whom Tom Kruse has promoted reformist illusions, by
>encouraging us all to contact him (so LP if he were consistent, would have
>to argue.) As a principle of permanent childishness Louis Proyect must
>insist marxists make *no* distinction between the presence in the Home
>Office of Jack Straw rather than Michael Howard at this point.
This is correct if by this you mean that Marxists should be as opposed to Labor as they are to the Tories. Michael Howard, who was in charge of foreign affairs during John Major's rule, is opposed to the extradition of Pinochet, as one might expect. So reformists would find this a sufficient excuse to back Blair against Major. In the US, we hear similar arguments for the need to elect Clinton or Gore all the time. We hear that Janet Reno is "better" than her Republican predecessor. And so on. And so on. This is not how Marx viewed politics. Marx was hostile to liberal and conservative alike. He advocated that the working-class form its own parties and struggle at the ballot box and in the streets for the overthrow of all bourgeois parties. The Communist Manifesto concludes with this "trotskyite" burst of "permanent childishness": "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."
>The decision of three British law lords to two in a stuffy reactionary
>chamber of the oldest imperialist power in the world, is literally a
>defining moment in world history. This is a time when the phrase is no mere
>cliche.
The problem is that it is the capitalist system itself that accounts for violation of democratic rights. Capitalism and democracy are incompatible. So in order to win full democracy it is necessary to abolish capitalism. Since your main goal in life seems to be to provide free public relations for bourgeois governments, you are an enemy of democracy.
>The left revisionist views of Louis Proyect (I suggest we no longer accept
>that ultra-leftists may have free fire to denounce anyone label as having
>rightist deviations as a revisionist, as if there is not also a revision of
>marxism to the left, to dogmatism, and sectarianism, and idealism)... are
>related to his undialectical views on the state, and in this case the law.
God, I haven't read such a pant's load of bombastic garbage since the days of the "Shining Path" flame wars. It makes me want to scream like the character in the famous Munch painting.
>I urge all subscribers with an interest in the implications of the Pinochet
>case to turn to Engels's letter to C. Schmidt 27 October 1890:
>
>"Similarly with the law. As soon as the new division of labour which
>creates professional lawyers becomes necessary, another new and independent
>sphere is opened up which, for all its general dependence on production and
>trade, still has also a special capacity for reacting upon these spheres.
>In a modern state, law must not only correspond to the general economic
>condition and be its expression, but must also be an *internally coherent*
>[emphasis by Engels] expression which does not, owing to inner
>contradictions, reduce itself to nought. And in order to achieve this, the
>faithful reflection of economic conditions suffers increasingly. All the
>more so the more rarely it happens that a code of law is the blunt,
>unmitigated, unadulterated expression of the domination of a class..."
The correct political conclusion to draw from this is that it necessary for the revolutionary movement to have trained lawyers who can use the court system to defend the rights of workers. Indeed, Lenin went to law school with this very goal in mind. He used to read Czarist law codes late at night trying to figure out loopholes that could be used to support strikes and demonstrations. If he or Engels knew that you were using this paragraph as an excuse to plead for the need to vote for Blair or Gore, they'd rise out of their grave like characters from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", track you down, and bite your head off.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)