Uuuuuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, what was the point you missed? -------------------------------------------------------- Uuuuummmmm.....I think it's your causal "what y'all need" attitude that pisses me off. Which of the stunning revelations below do you think I don't already know? And which ones do you think I've served as an apologist for? Just how many hours am I supposed to spend denouncing the crimes of official enemies that are denounced continuously by people with megaphones much bigger than mine before you grant me the right to focus on the crimes I've helped pay for and benefit from?
For that matter, I always thought this particular stance involved a liberal democratic view of citizenship that was rather at odds with a Leninist understanding of political responsibility.
MM
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What, y'all need to acquire is a more nuanced view of history that incorporates the unfortunate tragedy that, as much as the Kapitalist Empire structures every possible moment of our being on this planet, the record of the revolutionary left, esp. the Leninist sector of it, in the 20th century was, in many ways, a competing Class Society with Imperial mechanisms in which the ruling bureaucracies extracted privileges due to the fusion of political/ideological/economic power in a State/Party apparatus that was a Dictatorship Over the proletariat and peasantry. (See, a book with with a preface by Wallerstein or Chomsky, I forget which, "Revolution In The Third World, " by G. Chaliand, for starters.)
We, have to simultaneously, keep our eyes on the main enemy, but, the Left is damned again if in this century, it does engage in a thorough going ruhless critique of it's past practice and ideological bases. Why should anyone on the shopfloor or in an office cubical listen to anything a leftist spouting rhetoric like one sees on too many left fora or from a rally stage that has no concrete referent to any reality they know of? That excuses slaughter (of Communists and other left tendencies, by Stalinists, Kronstadt, GULAG, land reform in North Vietnam in the 50's, Ho Chi Minh killing Trotskyists, homosexuals being thrown off briges in Shanghai during the GPCR, queers quarinteened in Cuba in the 70's... ) Aaargh. Michael Pugliese