In recent period, what w/ this awful imperialist slaughter going on in Iraq, widening economic inequality and social decay here and abroad, I've been working on trying to swallow my rage against the Stalinoid pricks of WWP, Jew haters (which they don't make easier, by sending me death threats and invective calling me Joe McCarthy and Goebbels and saying my Mom must be Jewish, when she was raised Protestant) and orthodox Trotskyists here locally w/ orgs. that the Trotskyists I have as friends in other orgs. (or none, as they quit in disgust, yrs. ago the SWP, etc.) tell me have all of a dozen members, at that, which doesn't stop them (the WWP, Socialist Action Trots and Socialist Viewpoint in a United Front in BAUAW and other constituent orgs in the UfPJ affiliate) from exercising dominant position in UfPJ, and exercising influence in the Gonzalez campaign, way out of proportion to their merits, and keep focused, intellectually, politically and emotionally on the fact that I am far from the first on the Left (Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Rudolf Bahro, LDT, ex-CPUSA'ers that remained on the socialist left like Joseph Clark, who became a Dissent writer and to his deep regret was not able to pass on lessons to his daughter who bacame a Weather Underground cadre, friends of mine like the just decaesed Bill Sennett who fought in Spain in the Lincoln Brigades or Tim Wohlforth, ex-Trotskyist who I am closer to than I ever had the opportunity to w/ Bill, who started out on the Left in thed Henry Wallace campaign in '48, as did McGovern...now where is that train of thought? Heh. "The Train Left The station...drawls Mick Jagger...
Anyway, Justin and y'all, yes there is a moral component to all my raging about this, as well as a political one, not that they can be easily detached as seperate levels of analysis and feeling. The pricks I polemicize against, as individuals and orgs. and ideological currents that still exercise influence way beyond their #'ical strength given that the Comintern was dissolved in '43 and '89-'91 destroyed the material basis of the sector of the Left, through sheer hard headed toughness, time expenditure and demogogic verbal and emotional BS directed as much as their periphery and core as folks like me, designed to produce the very result they prophesy in their sick minds (See those anti-Stalinist Leftists? They Were Always Cold War Finks With Brownshirts, anyway...") since they cannot get anywhere close to calling the real fascists and reactionaries like Rummy what they are to their face, wear down those that have just a sharp eye, given their own process of radicalization during the Vietnam War and the assaults on Nicaragua, Grenada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, for the crimes of the USG, rooted in structural imperatives, as the crimes against the Left by those that ascended the pyramid of bthe Stalinist bureaucracy (and what an insecure perch that was, Stalin killed more loyal Bolsheviks~ and as a good neo-Trot, it is, get this st8 Justin lawyer/logician, as you know quite well, Stalinism was the betrayal of Bolshevism in rivers of blood, that did much more than anything dreamed up and enacted by the Pentagopn, NSC, CIA and FBI to destroy the first chance we had to create a revolutionary proletarian democracy.
Anti-Communism, (which has/had a left, right and center), it's Left and Center and Right, often led by ex-Communists as distingued from anti- communism ala counter-insurgency of the USG with it's motive of protecting kapital and empire, is something that as more people like me (after all I was the first ideological leftist in the family tree, either direction, though my Mom is a liberal Democrat who voted for Camejo and Sister is a good liberal Unitarian w/ a boyfriend who was in SDS) work through what has worked to build the Left and what has been an albatross, driving away potential "converts" who (as Aronowitz noted in the autobiographical chapter of, 'Roll Over Beethoven.") 'cuz they might or do have concrete knowledge, through family or reading and travel, of the betrayals by certain sectors of the left, with marxist-leninist motive and background, of socialism and the working class when the State and Party interests of the Bureaucrats intervene as in Budapest in '56, or Tienanmen in '91 or Prague in '68...well you get the point? You act as if I get this from folks that are Rightists always opposed to the Left, when I've known and met many like Dorothy Healey who went through the CPUSA who fought in '56 or earlier or later, whenever their bile finally got the better of them and they said, "NO MORE OF THIS SHIT! These tanks are not why I joined the movement against capitalism...
Now, I'll more than admit that giving up Catholicism in the period a few yrs. before becoming a teenage marxist and joining DSOC, NAM, CED and CISPES, doubtless has a bit to do w/ my obsessivesness on all these themes of faith and betrayal (your, Thomas, ex-Maoist and me, never was a M-L, armchair analysis that we are just moralists w/o a political goal...How do you know? Are you my therapist? Can you up my paxil dose, if so? Is there a Red Pill I can take for Stalinophobia?)
Last comment, New Politics is a journal to the Left of Dissent, that I am in alignment w/ much more than Dissent, as whole. You consider them anti-communist? Why Lou P. has even had a piece there once.
New Politics: a journal of socialist thought New Politics, a journal of socialist thought. A selection of articles from the journal, back issue indexes, subscription information, and more! ... http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/default.htm
-- Michael Pugliese American imperialism has been made plausible and attractive in part by the insistence that it is not imperialistic. Harold Innis, 1948 http://www.monthlyreview.org/sr2004.htm