This is a subject that I am qualified only to read with attention. I am not particularly going around looking for views that feel comfortable to me personally. In fact, it is through being exposed to disagreeable ideas that I often find most rewarding and stimulationg, particularly if such ideas are accompanied with factual information that I had been previously be unaware of. But I find the more-than-clever-by-half type potshots tiresome on a relentless basis, because such noises are distractive and misleading for those of us who are not well informed on some subjects and wish to learn and expand our reach. Some of my best friends are capitalists and I have no personal grudge against neo-liberals. But I do find mean spirited nit-picking a waste of everyone's time. I am sure DeLong has a good mind. I only wish he uses it on his posts.
Henry C.K. Liu
Peter Kilander wrote:
> Henry C.K. Liu wrote:
>
> >Excellent rebuttal, Daniel. Although I am not sure Delong deserves such
> >serious treatment.
> >Irrelevant potshots are in deed his specialty, for since I joined this list
> a
> >few months ago, that's all I ever got from any of his posts.
> >Delong is an anti-Marxist, which is no crime, but he is not a well informed
> or
> >honest one, and that is an intellectual crime for an academic.
>
> Always wary of siding with DeLong and admittedly not well informed, I am not
> anti-Marxist if not Marxist - depending on which kind you mean - and honest,
> I like to think. I've always thought of Ehrenreich as knowledgable and I
> don't see what the problem is. I've heard Cockburn make her point also, not
> a very complicated one. His father used to tell a story about the Communist
> soap boxer at the square who was all Sturm und Drang and depressing about
> "All our Brethren are enslaved under the lash of the bestial capitalist
> sytem! As I speak they are being ground under its heavy machinery", etc.,
> etc., and then finally "Come join the Communist Party."
>
> Daniel says the issue is practice, not personality. I'm curious as to what
> your [Henry or Daniel] take is on Che Guevara - his practice, not
> personality. At least he practiced what he preached when he expected people
> to be as ascetic as him.
>
> Not really on the subject, but was he correct in his ruthlessness concerning
> the executions he was in charge of shortly after the Cuban revolution (40
> years and counting)? I understand that he felt Arbenz's faltering in this
> area allowed his overthrow in Guatemala. Either you kill first or you get
> killed. Am I right in saying that one of Luxemburg's main points in her
> original criticism of Leninism is that methods and rationalizations of this
> kind have ways of establishing themselves, not as "emergency measures" but
> as administrative means of dealing with all opposition?
>
> It seems to me Ehrenreich was discussing approaches to social change, not
> transhistorical personality types.
>
> Daniel F. Vukovich wrote:
> >> How do you define the "fun" Type Personality anyway? Is there a handbook
> I
> >> am missing, and does it provide all the correct interpretations of my
> >> dreams too?
> >>
> >> Lenin was indeed a prude and a cultural conservative in many ways, in
> terms
> >> of gender, sexuality, and art and culture generally; these traits no
> doubt
> >> in part derive from the fact that he was born into a late victorian and a
> >> bourgeois era himself. Barbara E's point was different; she was
> spoutting
> >> gibberish about *the* (?!) Leninist "personality type" and about Lenin;
> the
> >> very notion of personality-typing is stupid and insulting. She offered
> no
> >> "proof" or substantiation to this or to any of her other sloppy
> >> generalizations about the state of the world wide left. Still, your post
> >> makes her look like Einstein. I gave my reasons for not liking these
> >> things, as well as my stance in re Lenin. I would have thought that
> >> marxist "types" can see the pitfalls of transhistorical psychologizing,
> and
> >> moreover can see that the more important questions are about practices
> and
> >> about contexts -- that that is where we begin.