Footnote on LBO

Max Sawicky sawicky at epinet.org
Tue Jun 1 09:48:27 PDT 1999


. . . Louis is too ornery and Doug is too principled. And those are good things. >


> CB: These are false innuendos about the relationship between
facts and revolution. Reality and the facts are radical. The status quo is preserved by falsehoods, non-facts. >

My statement went to the relationship between revolutionaries and facts, not to revolution per se. And then only to certain revolutionaries. My evidence is LP (and others) continuous harvesting of one-sided, highly impeachable information re: the Balkans. No objective-minded person can fail to see this, whatever their stance on the bombing.


> Nor do individual thinkers have some general advantage over
collectives, such as hard-line communist cadre , in stubborness, principledness or stubborn adherence to principle. Max offers no facts to support his assertion of a self-congratulatory , academic stereotype. >

Collectives is a little vague; we've got some coop natural foods stores down here. They could be construed as collectives but would not fall under the scope of my statement. Real Communist cadre groups are a whole different matter. The plain fact is that if you are in such a group, bullshit is one of the daily dietary requirements, and adherence to principle is carefully rationed. This has nothing to do with academics or non-academics, nor with any claim to principle by myself.

You can't prove something like this. You can either live it or read about it. Reading is a lot easier. I recommend "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison. Or Hemingway on the Spanish civil war. And if you haven't lived it and don't believe what you read, you wouldn't know.

mbs



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