>Chris Burford wrote:
>
>> Mark Jones has challenged me again on the Tobin tax, this time on Louis
>> Proyect's list. I am therefore copying this post there.
>
>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,
You did just challenge me.
But you seem to be as unaware of the fact, as I am unaware that my head has hit the ground.
Where is your head? You seem to be unwilling or unable to engage me theoretically.
I have not challenged you on Leninist-international because despite enrolling everyone who was previously on marxism-international, unless they objected, you wanted to use it to build a party of which I could not logically be a member, as I am a member of Democratic Left. Though if it stood in elections it is possible I might vote for it, as in Italy I might under certain circumstances vote for the CPR.
But it sounds as if you just want to abuse me rather than criticise what I am arguing for theoretically. So I do not understand how that fits in with the guidelines in the welcome notes that:
"The Leninist-International listserv is moderated by Jim Hillier and Mark Jones. It is open to anyone of any political persuasion but the moderators expect contributions to be constructive as well as being relevant and not overly personal."
Chris Burford
_______________________________________________________
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.
>
>I have spent much of the weekend reading assholes like Ian Macdonald on
>the subject of Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. He reminds me of you.
>This is odd because Macdonald is so virulently antisoviet that when you
>log onto his website a stream virtual halitosis pours off the screen
>like ammonia and you have to stand back, whereas you, Burford, like
>to pose as some kind of closet pal of the Soviets. But not so odd, because
>you're a damn fraud.
>
>Macdonald is so antisoviet he makes Joe Mccarthy look like a red.
>He is neither sovietologist, nor political historian nor musicologist nor
>discographer. But he has been a British tabloid journo. This obviously
>qualifies him as a huge expert on Soviet history, political theory,
>and music. Macdobnald has made it the task of his life to prove
>that Shostakovich was actually an anticommunist whose lifelong secret
>mission was to destroy the USSR by means of composing music which was
>subversive of communism (but not subersive enough for stupid
>bureaucrats or Stalin himself to notice).
>
>None of this might matter were it not for the ballooning popularity
>of Shostakovich, which has made his communist provenance hard to swallow
>to the many groupies now on the Shostakovich bandwagon. I have
>discovered that the Net is awash with Shostakovich websites, that
>in Japan he is bigger than Beethoven and there is even a Japanese
>orchestra specialising in Shostakovich. Why Shostakovich has
>suddenly become so fin-de-siecle fashionable in the West is an interesting
>question; whatever the reason, he speaks to the terminal pomo angst of
>the intelligentsia. This is what makes it very necessary to
>prove beyond all doubt that Dmitry was not actually a communist and
>indeed passionately hated communism. Apocryphal memoirs like the egregious
>Dmitry Volkov's 'Testimony' have tried to prove as much, and the
>corrosive Macdonald, as I say, has devoted his life to the minute
>footnoting of every breath, utterance or passing word
>of Shostakovich which supports this idea.
>
>The fact that Shostakovich could easily have become a dissident and gone
>to live in the West, but didn't, the fact that he joined the CPSU as
>late as 1960 and died a communist; the fact that all his utterances on
>the subject prove only a deep and abiding faith in the great cause of
>October, does not embarrass these vultures one whit. Just as Burford
>has colonised Lenin (counterposing Lenin to the 'hard left' -
>Wow!) so the Shostakovich revisionists have colonised this century's
>perhaps greatest composer. IMHO Burford, Macdonald and others are due for a
>little colonic irrigation. I'm here to tell you that Lenin was a
>revolutionary, and Shostakovich was a communist. That the greatest music
>of this century, like the greatest literature, film and poetry, came
>in the vast cultural outpouring which the Soviet Union bequeathed humankind
>(cf. the cultural outpourings from modern 'free'
>Russia); and that it is imposible to understand politics without being a
>leninist or music without being a communist, and that you, Chris Burford, can
>kiss my ass. You belong in the same bowge of hell as Bradford deLong, only
>lower down because he at least is an open apologist of capital and not a
>goddamn insufferable hypocrite and an *intrigan* as the Rusian has it, like
>you are.
>
>Yours very truly
>
>Mark Jones
>
>