Marx on free trade

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Thu Sep 30 10:21:42 PDT 1999



>>> Max Sawicky <sawicky at epinet.org> 09/29/99 06:37PM >>>
Max:

I was not referring to the original analysis (Imp the Final Stage . . .) which I read 30 years ago, probably didn't understand then, and have long since forgotten.

Charles: Oh of course you have to give the mandatory , cookie cutter, joking insult against this text from the dogmatic, tyrannical, all around evil person , Lenin and his dumb ideas. It's part of the liberal ritual. I understand.
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Max: ???? What joke? Wherefore "dogmatic, tyrannical . . . evil . . . dumb"???

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Charles: Don't even try it ,Max. I've been watching your act on here for over a year now.

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Max: I didn't say anything like that. I said I read Lenin long ago and not since, at the time I read him I hadn't much understanding of economics, so I was ill-prepared to evaluate Imp the final stage etc. And whatever I did read I forgot, with one little exception, if you wanna tussle about this:

My overriding negative impression of Lenin is that under his philosophy it is too easy to shoot people. Other than that, no problem.

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Charles: No joke here either , right Max ? Trouble is under your philosophy more people have been shot than under Lenin's. The above is just another example of the liberal dogma (false dogma) that Leninists have been responsible for shooting more people than liberals. And , oh Max, you ARE a liberal, whether you admit it or not. Your positions on these lists are objectively liberal.

On shooting, for example, right now your liberal comrade Clinton is shooting up a bunch of people (and starving them, which is the equivalent of shooting them) in Iraq as we speak. A little while ago he was shooting bombs into Yugoslavia. As a matter of fact your liberal cohort Wilson was shooting at Lenin right after the Bolsheviks had pulled out of the biggest war of all times. Leninism is peacloving. Liberalism is warloving.

In other words, your little joke is based on a false empirical base. Your philosophy is more of a shooting philosophy than Lenin's.

Or maybe rather than forgetting what you read, you disremembered it ,because there ain't nothin' about shooting anybody in _Imperialism_ .

ha ha.

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Charles:>> . . . To return to one of your themes, I am pointing out that your comments on issues are guided as much by ideology (anti-communist ideology) as those like me who you acuse of being guided by ideology in some improper sense. You do recall criticizing my posts as if their objectivity was compromised by my ideology, don't you ? And then my reply was you are as much ideological as I am. This is a clear example of how your political and economic theory is ideological too. CB ((((((((((

Max: I plead guilty to ideology.

I'm not in any position to get into a debate about the wheat and the chaff in Lenin's oeuvre, so I won't contest on it except by abstention and summary rejection. Nobody can read and become an expert on everything. If half the world was in the sway of Leninist revolutions, it would obviously be worth more of my attention.

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Charles: Of course you are in a position to get into such a debate. These lists have plenty of time for it. What you mean is one of the methods of opposing Leninism is to ignore it. Well, you can ignore what I say on these lists, but you shouldn't pretend you are on the left , if you want to pretend that more than half of the revolutions that have occurred in this century have been significantly influenced and supported by Leninism. Not only that, there are NO revolutions following your ideology that have or are occurring in the last 100 years or more right through to today. As a matter of fact much of the counterrevolution has been along lines related your ideology.

So, if revolutions are what is determining what ideology you engage or pay attention to on the lists, you should disengage and pay less attention to your own philosophy. You don't claim to be putting forth a revolutionary ideology that is guiding half the revolutions in sway in the world today, do you ?

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Max: A more important point, going back to the inter-imperialist rivalry thing, is that there is a tendency to use heavy-duty methodologies, philosophies, or theories (bourgeois and otherwise) to explain what is often more simple, or which add nothing to description. A tendency to graft some kind of favored narrative onto something else.

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Charles: I wouldn't know much about that tendency, because I am not part of it. Leninism is not heavy-duty. It is fairly straightforward. Lenin wrote so that masses of people could understand what he said. His theory of imperialism as simple as anything you say. As a matter of fact , usually your type of criticism is that Leninist and Marxist explanations are too simple, dogmatic recitations of simple formulas. You try to have it both ways.

"Favored narrative" ? I thought you were anti-postmod. No grafting with Leninism. It is a complete, elegant theory in itself . No need to graft onto it or graft it on.

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Max: In this sense I am skeptical (not invariably disbelieving) of all theory and inclined to strive for more matter-of-fact, transparent ways of talking. One reason the POMO stuff revolts me so much, incidentally. I also think there is a question of vanity in devoting oneself to the Theory of Everything. I'd be quite content to have made an important contribution to getting universal health care, or juking the public share of GDP up from 30 to, say, 40 percent. My tombstone don't need much.

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Charles: American anti-theory and knownothingism is part of why the bourgeoisie have been so successful in fooling the U.S. working class. That oh gosh gee by golly stuff is one of the main reason the U.S. working class keeps getting outsmarted by the U.S. ruling class. You aggravate that by this attitude as a intellectual purporting think in assistance to the working class struggle.

And no, you don't speak more plainly than I do. Workers understand me just fine.

CB



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