On Wed, 29 Mar 2000 10:31:03 -0500 Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> writes:
>
>
> For people unfamiliar with this magazine, a word or two should be
> sufficient. The books editor Jim Heartfield used to be subbed to
> this list,
> but departed with his friend Doug Henwood during a heated debate
> about
> whether underdevelopment in the third world was a function of too
> little
> investment. I argued that unless you put things into a class context,
> "investment" has no meaning. There has been plenty of investment in
> Nigeria, but the people keep getting poorer.
Some folk may remember all of the fisticuffs that I (and Andrew Austin and Charles Brown) used to have with Jim Heartfield on this list, on Doug's list and on Thaxis.
>
> LM used to be called Living Marxism, but dropped the reference to
> Marxism
> around the same time that the group associated with the magazine--the
> Revolutionary Communist Party (why do all left groups insist on the
> same
> hackneyed names?)--disbanded itself.
>
> Some of the more high-profile LM cyberfigures like Heartfield could
> quote
> Marx like the devil quoting scripture, but the magazine itself never
> mentioned Marx or any other Marxist figure in the last 2 or 3 years.
> Major
> concerns included panics about getting skin cancer from excess
> sun-bathing,
> the need to defend fox-hunting and smoking in restaurants, why
> Project
> Cassini (a plutonium laden satellite) is good for mankind, etc. If
> you
> press them about what all this has to do with socialism, they will
> argue
> that society has become infantilized and that until the citizenry
> (they
> never refer to workers) becomes mature and capable of independent
> thought,
> all challenges to the state are impossible.
>
> The beef over their Bosnia coverage is in some ways related to their
> past.
> They stuck their neck out on questions like Yugoslavia and Iraq like
> the
> rest of the left, but not so much recently. The ITN suit has been in
> the
> courts for a long time and finally got resolved. All in all, I don't
> think
> that it is good that they got shut down this way even though I am
> violently
> opposed to their politics.
I don't have much liking for their politics but their shutting down is an ominous sign IMO. If the British Establishment couldn't tolerate LM, how much tolerance can they be expected to have for those whose politics are explicitly anticapitalist?
>Are there any lessons to be drawn? I
> suspect
> that one of the reasons that LM proved vulnerable is that they took
> their
> own propaganda about how terms like "left" and "right" are
> meaningless
> nowadays. The right wing did not come to their aid because they were
> suspicious of any Marxists, including ex-Marxists. The left wing did
> not
> come to their aid because they were viewed as turncoats.
No doubt something like that is the explanation of what happened to LM, but the failure of the British left (such as it is) to come to the aid of LM does them no credit. It must be said that a big part of what happened here is that much of the British left (including many of the Trots) have in fact been tailing the Labour Party on issues like Yugoslavia so from their perspective they saw little reason to side with LM against ITN. So to that extent one can say that they helped to make the world a little safer for corporate media giants like ITN. While for those groups that did take an explicitly anti-imperialist stance against NATO but failed to come to the aid of LM, one can only say that they were incredibly short sighted. LM's fate can easily be their own.
>So in this
> state
> of splendid, cranky and arrogant isolation, they lacked sufficient
> solidarity from any quarters to survive an attack from the liberal
> wing of
> the ruling class.
Which goes to show that "liberals" and "social democrats" can be just as deadly enemies of freedom of the press and freedom of speech as Tories or Republicans, nay even more dangerous since they can cloak their repesssiveness with a progressive-sounding veneer.
Jim F.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Louis Proyect
>
> (The Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org)
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