You always start these debates, and then complain when you are answered. It seems that you believe that you are entitled to get free shots to cast whatever political aspersions strike your fancy on a particular day, but it is "tiresome" when someone takes up the gauntlet, and responds.
A simple reading of what I wrote in this thread will find no accusation on my part that you are a "Leninist." I responded to your suggestion that Yoshie, who wears her Leninism everywhere like a Catholic priest wears his Roman collar, was not an advocate of -- in the term you introduced into the discussion -- "bloody red revolution." I argued that this Leninist evangelism, after a century of mass murders on the part of Leninist regimes and parties around the world, was clearly the advocacy of "bloody red revolution," and that those who engage it -- Zizek, and not you, was the specific name mentioned in that context -- are grossly irresponsible. I pointed out, in response to your characteristically obnoxious comment on these matters that you wondered what "side" I would be on in future struggles, that for all of your continual self-promotion as a paragon of liberal democracy, you seem to find ways to avoid 'plain talk' about the meaning of promoting Leninism today, in the here and now -- is it, or is it, the advocacy of revolution which is not simply bloody, but also profoundly authoritarian? What exactly is the political significance of Yoshie's endless quotations of Lenin, or of Zizek's 'tarrying' with Lenin? It does not do to say that the prospects for the success of the Leninism resurrected are next to nil; the prospects for all of our political projects are hardly great at this particular moment. The test must be: should any of us succeed, what will result?
I put it to you this way, so there can be no mistake about my position: to separate Leninism from the actual historical record of Leninist states and parties, from the Gulag to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the Khymer Rouge, is no different than separating fascism from its actual historical record, from the concentration camps and gas ovens to the apartheid prisons and Chilean prison ships. To argue for Leninism in the abstract is no different than to argue for fascism in the abstract. If you want to contend otherwise, then have the intellectual honesty to do so openly and directly. [And please don't pretend that this is an argument about whether or not armed struggle is ever justified; it clearly is justified in many circumstances. This is an argument about whether Leninist revolution is ever justified, and whether or not it can be described as anything but "bloody" and "authoritarian."]
If it is "red baiting" to offer a political critique of Leninism, to point out the unnecessarily violent and authoritarian history of Leninist regimes and movements, and to criticize those who would attempt to resurrect that political trend, then the only meaning the term has in political discourse is as a rhetorical device to prevent such a critique. We have been through this particular line of argumentation on LBO-Talk before, and I have yet to see anyone even attempt to present an intelligible case for the loose and self-serving way you use the term. This is not altogether surprising, since this use of the term, like the loose and self-serving use of "racism," "anti-Semitism" and "sexism" to trump political arguments, serves only to discredit the general application it could have. Heaven help you if you ever run across real McCarthyism in cyberspace, since terms that might have some real meaning when applied to it would have been long since emptied of all content.
You seem to think that someone who roots and bases him/herself in the existing _mass_ institutions of the American left, in trade unions, civil rights, feminist and gay organizations, and has a reference point those political elements that represent that mass left, such as the Progressive Caucus, is bound to prevent the emergence of social democracy and radical democracy. In your insistence upon the irrelevance of these institutions and forces, and in your insistence that the genuine left will rise up from outside of them, you express a classically 'vanguardist' politics. Left authenticity becomes synonymous with marginality, and any attempt to move out of that marginality is identified with betrayal and selling out. It is an old story, and one that troubles me very little. I worry about how to make the mass left more substantial and more effective, not how to replace it with the 'elect' of the "true" left.
> Leo, this is tiresome. You must always be red-baiting. I am an unlikely
> target. If it weren't for you, I'd be the local right-winger. I am a fan of
> Hayek market economics. I am a long-time, proud, and unshamed liberal
> democrat. I have sworn several times to defend the Constitution of the
> United States, and I meant it. (I have some amendments I'd like to see, of
> course.) I am not a Leninist. I make no pretense to "revolutionary"
> credentials. In a practical sense,I have no idea what it would be to be a
> "revolutionary" in an advanced capitalist country today, and neither does
> anyone else. I was making fun of the idea of bloody red revolution. I have
> slammed Stalinism--here! on this list! during the last few days!--as hard
> as
> could be. I do not think, however, that armed struggle, in places where it
> makes sense, necessarily leads to the Gulag: the Sandinista experiment,
> among others, shows otherwise. That does not mean that it mskes sense as a
> political steategy.
>
> And my point about social democracy was not the we should reconcile
> ourselves to it as all we can get--I still think that we can do better--but
> that everyone on this list supports it, at least as far as it goes. You say
> you support it too, but I don't think so. You ally yourself with forces who
> are basically committed not to advancing it, but to explaining and
> justifying why we can't get it, and to opposing all those forces and
> activities that might help achieve it. Who is iot who wants the ocean
> without the awful roar of its waters? I think it is clear what side you are
> on. You are a Democrat, but no democrat.
>
>
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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