Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Nathan Newman wrote:
>
> >But there is a rhetoric of excommunication, that looks for reasons why people
> >who agree on 95% of the issues are "waffling" or are not really a leftist.
>
> Yup. Or on the other hand, potential heretics are "rigid" and
> "purist." It'd be nice if we could get over that.
>
These pieties are like proverbs -- for every one that says X there is another just as famous one that says Not X.
They can be expressed in somewhat more illuminating ways, as John Mage did on this list sometime in the last year in a post I have lost. He quoted someone as saying something like, "Right opportunists treat enemies as friends; left opportunists treat friends as enemies." And to quote a reactionary here, T. S. Eliot once remarked on literary criticism that there was no method other than being very very intelligent. Nathan is being deliberately obtuse: that is, he is trying to pretend he has a method that avoids the necessity of thinking, and that since that method (which he of course always follows) is a methematical certainty (count the agreements; count the disagreements: figure the percentage, and boom you know who your friends are), anyone who disagrees with him must not be rational -- i.e., they must be squeaky little purists.
Now notice, I am attacking Nathan here -- but I am attacking in on the basis of the arguments he has expressed. I am not attacking the arguments on the basis of alleged bad motives on Nathan's part. On the other hand, when he squeaks about purism, he is first of all attacking the motives or characters of those who hold contrary ideas, without out giving any argument at all in respect to their ideas.
I know many exceptions to the following, but I think it exhibits a general tendency: followers of Trotky are apt to treat friends as enemies. That is, their definition of what makes friends _tends_ to be extremely narrow, which in turn is based on (again just a tendency, not universally true) overestimating the "subversive" quality of capitalist ideology: one must be eternally on one's guard against being misled by that power.
I would _not_, however, start out an argument with a Trotsky follower by saying "You just believe that because you're a purist." _First_ one would have to establish, independently of the motive of anyone, that a give position _did_ narrow, in practice, the circle of "friends" and boraden the circle of "enemies." _And_, in making that argument you would have to honor, in the sense of at least recognizing the existence of, the premises of the contrary argument.
Someone who counsels against unprotected anal intercourse is a purist. So is someone that insists one must wash one's hands every 10 minutes. But there might well be circumstances that it _would_ be correct to wash one's hands every ten minutes. And there may well be cases where it would be silly to insist on use of a condom in anal sex.
Those cute little saws or proverbs or whatever simply don't tell us very much.
They are very true -- and invoking them constantly is mere pomposity or perhaps a love of cliche.
Carrol
Carrol