Leo, you are a fool. You insist on personalizing everything. That is foolish itself: it prevents rational discussion. You cannot read, failing to register my extended rejection of "revolutionary" politics, and instead take my disgust at your illiteracy as an occasion to sneer at my supposed identity as a "revolutionary," and when I call you on it, you say you were talking about other people. Which shows as well that if you were doing that too, you cannot write. You identify taking your own positions with righteousness and insist that not only you, but everyone, must smite the unbelievers. Thus, it is not enought that I register my disagreements with my friend and comrade and long-time co-worker Yoshie, I must denounce her as an apologist for murder and tyranny. You lack elementary respect for others: _I_ wouldn't know about redbaiting, _me_? Leo, stop. Use whatever you used to get your Ph.D. for what God meant it for. Why am I a lawyer, Leo? Why am I not a professor anymore? Yeah, I think I can recognize redbaiting. And I recognize it when you do it. The redbaiting isn't your critique of Leninism. It it your attacks on lil old antiLeninist me, the Hayekian market socialist liberal democrat. It is I, not Lenin, who is too red for you, it seems.
I don't argue for "Leninism." I disagree with your appraisal of it; I think it can be distinguished from Stalinism; I think it has it points. I know no version of it that I would advocate. I am, as I have explained, a liberal democrat. I think that promoting Leninism "today" is just silly; it's irrelevant and alienating, but not wicked. You are fighting old boring wars.
You say you base yourself in existing mass institutions: as far as I can tell this involves encourgaging unions to accept the team concept and support the Democratic Party. "The mighty roar of their waters," indeed. Feh, as Kelly would say.
--jks
>
>Justin:
>
>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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