Archer.Todd at ic.gc.ca wrote:
>
> > Your post seemed to me to come a smidge too close for comfort to accepting
> accredited authorities just blowing off people who make "basic" errors,
> instead of trying to show them their mistakes.
>
Just bending the stick a little. But did you ever try gently to persuade a bright and fairly well educated "creationist" that she was making a mistake. Or did you ever try to persuade a bright and aggressive marxist that he was making a mistake when he threw out the whole of modern neurology and psychiatry to ride with some kook from the '50s? All forms of knowledge get distorted under capitalism -- and we can take for granted that there are at present great errors and/or lacunae in all the sciences because of the the pressures of capitalist ideology. BUT the errors in neurology are going to be discovered and corrected _inside_ neurology. (The utter amateur who makes astounding discoveries the experts have overlooked is more a part of modern folklore without much basis.)
Notice that Marx did not sit down and invent a whole new set of premises -- he exploded bourgeois political economy from the inside.
Let me take a really controversial question, in respect to which everyone on this list is on more or less equal ground (or could be with a little work). It is fairly certain that "Democratic Centralism" -- as worked out in the Third International -- is a bust. That model will (with a qualification to be introduced) never take us anywhere.
But what happens if we throw out the model and sit down to invent a new one from scratch? We will end up _at the very best_ with mass parties with a couple charismatic leaders that will sink away with the leaders into nothing. When a new political form of working-class organization is developed, it will emerge from within some organization that on paper will look like the old 3rd international parties. No mass party will ever do any better than the German SPD that led the working class to slaughter in the trenches or Debs's Socialist Party (which tolerated overt racists within its ranks). The IWW and the left wing of the SP did leave behind them a fine legacy: the CPUSA. And the CPUSA left us the CIO, the civil rights movement, and the anti-war movement. But the form of those movements is even deader than social democracy or orthodox democratic centralism.
Carrol