>
> What is the point of this sort of comment, Michael? Is
> Carrol supposed to abase himself, cover himself in
> sackcloth and ashes, because his former group may have
> said something boneheaded, possibly after C left the
> group? Or are you just establishing that you area beautiful soul (Hegel),
> having avoided all
> entanglerments with anything yucky? Just so we are
> clear in my case, although I was an anti-Stalinist and
> told them so, I joined the CWP knowing that it was
> soft on Stalinism and Maoism, and I joined Soli
> despite the fact that it contains may self-avoided
> "Bolsheviks," and I used to support the Democratic
> Party, even despites its many crimes. So I am not a
> beautiful soul. And I do not abse myself either,
> although I condemn the crimes of Stalin, Mao, the
> Bolsheviks, and the Democrats. jks
Yes ;-) When the August 7th caucus of NAM, at the last NAM convention before merger w/ DSOC, said pro-merger majority was worse than SDUSA, in typical social fascist fashion, their slogan was, "Who Killed Rosa Luxemburg?" Why obviously, Michael Harrington and Dorothy Healey!
Entanglements w/ anything yucky? Well its been many yrs. since I read Weber's lecture, "Politics as a Vocation, " in the C. Wright Mills and Hans Gerth Weber reader from Oxford, so I'll allude to a more recent cite of its lesson from Daniel Bell's, "Marxian Socialism in the U.S., " that political action, from any point on the spectrum isn't an arena for beautiful souls of any sort, being the terrain dominated by st8 power concepts and not ethico or aesthetic concerns. What you call abasement, back in my NAM days in the 80's in good maoist fashion we called crit and self crit. As the decades wear on, the timid moves towards self-criticism, inhside the Communist tradition, whether by the Euro-Communists or Trotskyist tendencies, have left little trace in the consciousness of the activist sectors of the left, and the institutional memory of the academic left, where studies of Stalinism abound, absent the links that have withered between the academics and the activists who are by and large, pragmatists w/o theoretical or historical grounding, go into a deep hole. Bahro, whozzat? Medvedev? Dorothy Healy? Al Richmond? Irwin Silber? Joseph Starobin? Carrol, in particular, is a particularly obnoxious example of someone w/ decades of activist experience that trashes, one and all, those to his left, to his right, or right where he's at (that narcissism of small differences thingeroo) and I've yet to see him over the last three yrs. when blasting either supposed social imperialist socdems to his right or anarchists and others to his left, give any weight to any consideration that either, positions by polemical opponents are just as riven by ambivalences he refuses to admit in his set of positions, or are honest criticisms of his and his traditions inability to own up to the crimes of Communists against zillions of communist cadre and militants, socialists, workers and peasants. All of us were radicalized (well those of us 40+) by the slaughter of millions of Vietnamese, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Indonesians and all the rest. What I don't sense is any corresponding comprehension of the political and ethical lessons and costs that one wing of the Left, exacted against its own sector of the left, and by extension, in terms of a broad movement, the ideological silences and coercive pressures exercised over the rest of the explicitly anti-capitalist left.
If you, Justin, want to feel, that is is akin to say, white leaders saying to Jesse Jackson, Sr. or Ben Chavis, y'all have to disown Farrakhan, well I wouldn't be surprised. Is that the, "Theory Of The Offensive." ? I'm trying to joke, but, in a lousy mood, this is what that was http://www.marxists.org/glossary/events/g/e.htm
-- Michael Pugliese