>Okay. Maybe on that occasion you can explain why the Socialist Foreign
>Minister of Chile is urging that Pinochet be set free.
I think Tom Kruse has demonstrated why simply denouncing revisionism, opportunism, or social democracy without concretely looking at the balance of forces in a country is not a serious approach. The implication seems to me to be that the criticism of social democracy, revisionism, or opportunism must not be divorced from the concrete situation that the individuals are in.
>By the way, I want
>to congratulate you on your new-found ability to express anger. I find this
>much more authentic than that phoney blandness you tend to adopt.
There are big cultural differences in how anger is expressed and understood in New York and in England.
About "phoney" blandness, addressing other members of a left wing or marxism list *as if* they were comrades, is a pure convention. Obviously both Louis Proyect and I think the other is an opportunist, or at the very least has very large errors of opportunism in his approach. What LP fails to understand is that such opportunism will be *better* exposed over the months and years in the course of maintaining a convention of reasonable serious debate, than if an appearance is created of a personal dog-fight. I am quite in touch with my angry feelings while writing this post for example. I am just more determined to use that anger to ensure that I win. (Or at least that what I would call reasonable marxist ideas win.)
I have never visited LP's web-site and it never occurred to me that there would be a picture of him there. I cannot see why it is wise or necessary for us all to see each other. The different types of opportunism that LP and I think the other represents, will manifest themselves in all sorts of people with different names and faces who will crop up from time to time on these lists, independent of the will of any one individual.
BTW I have taken the liberty of copying the article about the Chilean socialist foreign minister to marxism-unmoderated. If LP can defend his position there rather than on a closed list, including against all the noise that he (and I) are mensheviks, that would be a more impressive test of his position. After all if I should be denounced as a liberal social democrat, why should LP be protected from being denounced as a menshevik?
Anyway as individuals LP and CB are not important in the course of world history: but according to the Observer this Sunday, Straw may be strongly tempted to return Pinochet to some sort of trial in Chile. Should we oppose that?
My feeling is yes, it would be better to have him tied up for 5 years in international legal processes as a step towards a strong international crimes against humanities court. It would also undermine his supporters in Chile more, without giving them an excuse to attack the left. Therefore the most helpful support to the Chilean socialist foreign minister is to decline his request. But I would like to hear comments, expecially with information, about the concrete balance of power in Chile at the moment.
Chris Burford
London.