----- Original Message ----- From: "andie nachgeborenen" <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
"You have to be careful to not to stuff me into an incorrect narrative frame. You are answering Sidney Hook or Max Eastman, someone who used to be a Marxist, and has given up on histotical materialism, socialism and the working class. That's not me. I haven't."
All right, fair enough, but....
"But Marxism has come a cropper. To answer my worry, you have to explain why it is rational to live as if there is a reasonable prospect that Marxism as it has traditionally existed, with the organizational form and vicabulary characteristic of the movements that trace their inspiration to the Octiber Revolution, will ever again matter in anything like the way that it mattered in the early and mid-20th century."
But what are you really talking about? "Look and feel issues"? Red flags? Phrases like "dictatorship of the proletariat"? Pictures of Lenin? I readily concede that "vocabularies" (as distinct from theory) are secondary. As to "organizational forms", that's another matter, but you have to specify your argument more. Maybe we don't disagree as much as you think we do, or maybe we do.
Really I think we may be approaching this argument from the wrong direction. Suppose you want to use this argument to demonstrate to me that WWP's "organizational forms" are doomed to irrelevance. First, we would have to agree on what WWP's organizational forms actually are. I can't assume that you would take my word for it. People with no experience with WWP are always telling me things about WWP's organizational forms which are nonsense in terms of my experience. Second, we would have to agree on how "Marxism has traditionally existed" and on what forms and vocabulary are "characteristic of" movements descended from October. There is no guarantee that we would agree on THAT. Third, we would have to determine whether WWP's organizational forms fell within those limits. Fourth, you would then have to demonstrate why all forms within those limits are outdated. This may all seem like common sense to you, but the devil is in the details.
So, why don't we turn it around, and you tell us, or give us examples of, what organizational forms and vocabularies would or could be relevant in the 21st century for historical materialist theory and for fighting capitalism using that theory - and then explain how you think those differ from "characteristic Marxism"?
lp