[lbo-talk] Re:Pugliese on Soli reading lists

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Sat Jun 14 09:48:39 PDT 2003


Ask Callinicos, http://www.marxists.de/trotism/callinicos/4- 1_heresies.htm

I have a much more positive pov on the Trotskyist tradition(s) on the revo left, than Thiago and other post-marxist autonomists, even if over the past quarter century I've found too many individual Trots, cranky and useless in building mvmnts. or even small demos.

Trotskyist polemic, unlike almost all Maoist or Stalinist texts, esp. from the Mandelites or Shactmanites (New International in the 40's and 50's, New Politics from the 60's onward, the Cliffite ISR these days too or the UK SWP magazine, International Socialism, which for example had a good piece by August Nimtz on Marx and Engels contributions to radical democracy) or Cliffites, has a style that melds careful historical excavation with a political line that avoids both ultra-left sectarianism or socdem opportunistic revisionism.

(Though on the latter, Verso published Massimo Salvadori's, "Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, " a much more insightful reading of that Pope, than, "The Proletarian Revo and the Renegade Kautsky." Frederic Jameson thought Verso having put out a translation of the Salvadori on Kautsky was NLR's comment on Eurocommunism.)

And, even if a book I read recently, "Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Transition To Socialism, " by Peter Beilharz (Jim O' Connor among many other luminaries thanked in acknowledgements), effectively rubbishes LDT's economistic, reductionist, schematic and teleological method immune to anything but empirical fact, starts out with Castoriadis quip that, "Trotskyism is the Stalinist bureaucracy in exile, " I continue to value the contributions of Trots to the Left. No need for MacIntyre or Justin to be defensive about Trots in Soli. Plenty of ex-Trots in DSA, too. (As well as those that spent too many decades in the CPUSA, too.)



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