[lbo-talk] Re: What Is Red-Baiting?

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Tue Sep 23 16:47:40 PDT 2003


Like I said to Chip when he came to SF a few months ago, the problem isn't "Reds, " (indeed my analysis and feelings about capitalism and imperialism are just as influenced by marxist theories and journals as NLR as MR, as they were when I first reading them when I was 14, jeesh almost 30 yrs. ago) but Leninist-Stalinist apologetics and the baneful influence in debates and in mass work on the left of such as your allies Greg Elich, Jared Israel, Michael Parenti and Lou Proyect on such issues, among many, as ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the genocide in Columbia, where demogogy on FARC, as if they have the cred or level of mass support of the NLF of Vietnam or the FSLN or FDR-FMLN, is laughable.

Like, the instance a few months ago when you egocentrically assumed I was thinking of you when I posted the anarchist critique of Palestine solidarity, your hubris is truly remarkable. Citing such marxist vols. as , "The Stalinist Legacy, " edited by Tariq Ali or, "The Alternative In Eastern Europe, " by Bahro, to somehow innoculate myself from these charges of "red-baiting", will never work to CB, Yoshie, or it appears Justin 'cuz...well their mind is made up, with dogmas fashioned by Old Left dinosaurs. Of what use was the efforts of E.P. Thompson and many others much less well known to construct a New Left out of the wreckage of Comrade Khruschev's speech in '56 and tanks in Budapest, inspired by Marx writings in 1844 on alienation, to have to see such crappy tailing of the crudities of WWP and bullying tactics to build a united front w/ the creeps?

-- Michael Pugliese



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