Why I Am So Obnoxious;-) To Some Fellow Leftists!

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Sun May 12 07:22:51 PDT 2002


Hmm, Um, is,"Fellow, " a sexist term? Time to call a wimmin or womyn, like my premature feminist Mom...

Born in '61, growing up in the 'burbs of Washington, D.C.during the Vietnam War(watching nightly on the NBC Hnter-Brinkley network news, I asked my folks sometime around 7 yrs. or so, "Why Are We Killing Children in Vietnam?" I wasn't allowed to watch the news for a while after that.I was a kid that paid close attn. to politics, When Humphrey lost to Nixon in '68, I remember walkiong to 2nd grade being bummed out.I watched the coverage of Attica and Wounded Knee on the Today show, before I went to school.My Mom and I went to one of the huge Mobe's against the War in '71. I still have photos I took of hippie waving a National Liberation Front flag from the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

We moved to California in '74. Moved into the house in Oxnard, the day after Nixon resigned. Growing tension in my Parents marriage, and already bookish bent, with my accelerating radicalization fueled by listening to Pacifica Radio and meeting Iranian and South African student radicals at CSUN, going to NAM meetings led by Dorothy Healey, ex-cade of the CPUSA, and monthly jaunsts to a great newsstand in Hollywood where I baught, Monthly Review, Marxist Perspectives, Dissent, Telos, Socialist Revolution and the Review of Radical Political Economics (and like Woody Allen, porn, except mine was stuff like Blueboy, heh.)Two best memories of my CSUN days, were a rally against the draft I helped to organize that had a large crowd. Some speakers were, my mentor there, the radical Jesuit kicked out of Guatemala in '66, Blase Bonpane and Phyllis Bennis. And, when the U.S. Army recruiters came on campus with a goddamn tank and within minutes there was a crowd of hundreds of us chanting and doing street theater to get them off campus. Which happened after a few hours.

Transfered to USCs, in early 80, after my Mom seemed over the worst of the beginning stages of the divorse from my Dad, long in coming.Joined NAM and DSOC and went to CISPES meetings, walked precincts to elect a majority leftist city council in Santa Cruz.

First representive anecdote I can tell of a bitter intra-leftist squabble that illustrates my underlying theme in this post is this. After reading a brilliant piece in Dissent, by Gabriel Zaid, translated from the Mexican journal edited by Octavio Paz, on the murder of communist poet, Roque Dalton, (accusing, spurreously of being a CIA agent) by futute FMLN guerilla leader, Joaquin Villalobos, and arguing over this with other CISPES members, gave me some personal experiernce of leftist intellectuals rationalizations for what Comrade Khruschev in '56 called, "violationas of socialist legality, "

The UCSC library was lucky to have the fill set of the 100 volume approximately, Greenwood Press reprint series, "Radical Periodicals in the U.S." Everything from the Debsian ere, Socialist Party and Emma Goldman's, , "Mother Earth," Dwight Macdonald's, "Politics, " (C.Wright Mills idea was to call it, "No!."), "New Foundations, " the Stalinst YCL monthly edited by Robert Fogel (who gained notoriety later for his cliometric study of slavery.), Monthly Review back to 1949, dissident libertarian communist journals like, "The New International Eeview, ' from the 30's and, "Living Marxism, " edited by Paul Mattick, Sr. Delving deep into the Stalinist journals of the 30's like the New Masses, microfilm of the Daily #orker at the Hoover Institute, buying yellowed copies of discussion bulletins of the SWP, Workers Party and the Sparts (callng, John's brother, Shane! "Shane, we need you!" His polemic against Herbert Aptheker's Stalinist hack job on the Hungarian revolution of '56 in The American Socialist, edited by ex-Trotskyist Bert Cochran, is great I think the Young Sparticus portion of the MIA has the discussion bulletin version of the same polemic.)

Reading (and meeting over the yrs.) way too many autobiographies of ex- Communists (most of whom retained left committments) like the following authors, Al Richmond, Dorothy Healey, Junius Scales, Joseph Starobin, John Gates and histories of the communist movement like the two volumes by Spanish communist, Fernando Claudin, and more narrowly focused works like, "Radical Paraxes:Dilemmas of the American Left, " by Peter Clecak (focuses on Paul Sweezy, Paul Baran, Marcuse and Mills, before moving on to New Left praxis.Heh, haven't typed that word in yrs.)Studies of the Old Left intelligentsia like, "Radical Visions and American Dreams, " by Richard Pells and Alan wald on the NY intellectuals, as well as bios and critiques of Lukacs by Michael Lowy (Lukacs: from Revolutionary Romanticism to Bolshevism." and Paul Breines and Andrew Arato, "The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism, " as well as aquaintances with Illinois CPUSA leader and Lincoln Brigader, William, "Bill, " Sennett, deppened my anti-Stalinist leftism, as well as friendships with Trotskyists of the non-Sparticist persuasion. (Though I love reading, Workers Vanguard.)

Time to cut this off, I need some caffeine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyway, for those in the 20's who might wonder why a lefty that seems to harp too much on the gaps in political knowledge (esp. left history) that too many current radicals exhibit and who think folks like me and Nathan are soft on the crimes of U.S. Imperialism, well, I say (defensively ;-( , been there, done that, know way too much about CIA counter-revolutionary bloodbaths from Indonesia to Chile. Time for those that have a one sided focus on the USG to get up to speed on things like this. The Iran-Iraq war of the 80's and slughter of the Kurds. History of Bosnia and Kosovo. The former Soviet Union and the GPCR in the PRC. Nope, I'm not saying anyone here (except for Charles, Casrrol and sadly Yoshie, harbors desires to throw any of us into a GULAG[ which will never hapeen again anywhere, thank gawd. Leninism is dead, never to retrn, buried in '89-91.] But, there needs to be more hard strategic AND ethical/moral reflection on the AmeriKKKan (I can never resist ironic digs at leftist cant.) Left, if we are ever again to appeal to the majority in the belly of the beast, that so badly needs leadership to move beyond a decaying, decadent, overripe for radical change polity and kultur. Michael Pugliese



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