Personally, I find this Stalinist baiting really tired. It is also stupid, counterproductive, destructive, reactionary, harmful, and contemptible. Stalinism is over. The Cold War is ten years done. The Stalinists lost. They are not a force. We don't have to worry about them. They will never threaten to rule anything again. Bringing them up is just splitting, divisive, and right wing.
For some reason Yoshie gets a lot of this Stalinsit baitimg crap. Yoshie's main left-group activism is with Solidarity, which I induced her to join after about a decade of argument. Soli is a left-Schachmanite, formerly Trot outfit, now totally Menshevik whatever some of its members who have sentimental attachments to the October Revo might say. You don't even have to be a Marxist -- I'm not -- to be in Soli, and the only "line" it has is political independence, which used to mean, no Stalinists and no Demicans, but there are no more Stalinists to meaningfuly distinguish ourselves from.
The ANSWER baiting is tedious too. In my capacity as a Guild mass defense lawyer, I work with ANSWER folks here. Most of them are nice antiwar folks of no discernable ideology. Dennis would call them dupes. I think that is stupid. Some of them are RCP or WWP cadre. These folks do good work organizing demos. if they do so because they think they will bring about Communist Revolution thereby, I say more power to 'em. If Dennsi, etc. want to organize demos that don't have Stalinist speakers on the platform saying dreadful things like End The War, Troops Out Now, let them do it. I'll do mass defense for them too. If you don't organize, keep your fucking trap shut.
jks
--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> After a busy day of tabling, I look into the
> LBO-talk archive and
> happen on this gem of WWP-baiting.
>
> At 2:56 PM -0700 9/22/03, Michael Pugliese wrote:
> >What Dennis, Nathan, Thomas Seay, me and others
> argue is not that
> >one should abstain from attending but, draw, 'er,
> "lines of
> >demarcation, " between cadre like Yoshie that work
> with and pressure
> >other coalitions like UfPJ, to build a united front
> w/ such
> >Stalinist formations, whose conception of socialism
> is what the
> >young Marx called "barracks communism".
>
> I suppose that some American leftists will be
> forever prisoners of
> the rhetoric of the Red Purge, which insinuates that
> so and so is
> secretly a card-carrying a member of such and such
> (CPUSA back then,
> WWP now, something else in the future).
>
> Just out of curiosity, what organizations of which
> do you think I am a "cadre"?
>
> Beyond doing local activist work, I am a National
> Committee member of
> Solidarity, a Coordinating Committee member of
> Al-Awda, and a
> Steering Committee member of United for Peace and
> Justice.
>
> Locally, I'm involved in the Committee for Justice
> in Palestine
> <http://www.osudivest.org/> among many other
> organizations, and CJP
> is hosting the Third Annual Conference of the
> Palestine at the Ohio
> State University (to the displeasure of the
> ANSWER/FPA folks who are
> backing New Jersey Solidarity, which has lost the
> confidence of a
> number of Palestine solidarity groups, I may add):
> Registration,
> <http://www.palestineconference.com/register.htm>;
> Endorsement,
> <http://www.palestineconference.com/endorsers.htm>;
> Donation (via
> PayPal), <http://www.osudivest.org/> (click on the
> link "Donate Now").
> --
> Yoshie
>
> * Bring Them Home Now!
> <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
> * Calendars of Events in Columbus:
> <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>,
> <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, &
> <http://www.cpanews.org/>
> * Student International Forum:
> <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
> * Committee for Justice in Palestine:
> <http://www.osudivest.org/>
> * Al-Awda-Ohio:
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
> ___________________________________
>
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