Now you may be right that their goals or proposed means are bad and their vocabulary quaint and irrelevant at best. But there is a long tradition of anti-Communism in the US left -- I mean, think of Dissent and the old Commentary, and the old Partisan Review, and so forth. So it is not as if Bolshevik-bashing (I don't use the term invidiously) is not something important currents in the broad left have not done over the years. It can be at least debated how much good it has done for the left. Some people might even argue that it exemplifies some of the pig-headed sectarian behavior you decry.
I wonder, too, whether there is the sort of point in it that there was before. Back when there was a USSR, and a Stalin or even a Mao, and Stalinism was a pole of attraction for revolutionary movements, I can seethere was a point in saying Not Us! But now, that's all over. There are no revolutionary movements --sorry Louis P! (Louis G, too) -- though there may be again someday. Stalinism is gone. The CPs that remain are old-folks' clubs. The self-styled Marxist-Leninists in the Trotskyist movement -- like Callinicos, for that matter -- but less the WWP people who have been attracting so much static here -- are just silly or quaint, and no one takes them seriously, even if they understand a tenth of what they are saying, when they start reciting the old formulae. So what is the point of the demarcation drawing?
To be quite honest with you, I think that you, and Thomas S. too, don't have a political purpose in this. You strike me as morally nauseated by the crimes of Stalinism and Bolshevism, and disgusted by groups or people who don't hate them as much as you do. Well, I hate those crimes too, but I really need to be persuaded that there is political payoff in dwelling on them, even when you are dealing with people who don't agree. I mean, some of us also think it is useful to collabereate with Democrats for political purposes, and they havea lot of crimes to answer for too.
jks
Michael P said: I
'd have to say that too many leftists cannot/will not examine the faults internal to the AmeriKKKan left, in our sectarian pig-headedness and disingenuous evasions of when the idiots and thugs on the left have betrayed left ideals, both here and abroad. And invoking the more than obvious crimes and greater slaughters of the USG is never gonna hide the fact that not taking a careful, soul- searching inventory of what we have gotten wrong in the past in the name of fighting the greater enemy and, "Unity on the Left, " "No Enemies On The Left, " always invoked by those w/ the longest knives, lowest ethics and often the biggest trust funds
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