Doug Henwood wrote:
> I'm not arguing with you, or commenting on your style; for all our
> differences, I've never seen you talk like these guys at the Labor
> Party meeting did. And while there were quite a few Marxists at the
> LP meeting, there were quite a few non-Marxists too, just ordinary
> unionists of radical bent.
I know you're not. We have differences, but I like to think they are comradely ones.
I still don't know exactly how they talked. Were some of them under the discipline of some political grouping? That can be one source of inappropriate jargon: the necessity to maintain a political line which one does not understand or with which one does not thoroughly agree.
I am only half-critical of such a condition. People have a right, even an obligation sometimes, to accept a position on the basis that while they don't know enough, they trust the honesty / intellect / commitment of the people who push the view. Most of us, for example, are in that position in respect to the content of the physical/biological sciences. I accept the accuracy of Planck's Constant though I don't, really, have the slightest idea what it means. If I were to have to explain it to someone I would have to go to some source and memorize the explanation without understanding what I was saying. And I would be right to do so. If my presentation were too stilted and failed to persuade people, it would be more their lost than mine.
Carrol