Charles asked for a substantive argument. This isn't an argument at all.
What were you like on the high school debating team? Did you just get up on the podium, write some bibliographic references on the chalkboard, declare victory and go home?
--- Michael Pugliese <michael098762001 at earthlink.net>
wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 16:48:12 -0400, Charles Brown
> <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> goes clippitty cloppin':
> > CB: You are gonna have to bring the substantive
> arguments here, not
> > citations. Then we'll see whose musty. There have
> been plenty of failed
> > attempts to critique Comrade Dimitrov. What makes
> you think I take your
> > word
> > for it on these ? You're an anti-Communist , no ?
> >
> > ^^^
> Taking the last sentence first...Suspect our
> definitions and examples
> of anti-Communist(s)/anti-Communism(s) and
> anti-communist/anti-communism(s) would be as
> different as the politics of
> say, A.J. Muste, Dorothy Day and the Berrigan
> brothers to Cardinal
> Spellman, Thomas Dooley and Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Or
> mine to Tail Gunner
> Joe or J. Edgar Hoover, who three yrs. ago or so
> you, at least three times
> in a heated exchange w/ me on Stalinism and your
> lack of knowledge of
> anti-Stalinist marxist writings like the 2 vols. by
> Fernando Claudin on
> the int'l. Communist movement, translated by Monthly
> Review Press in the
> mid-70's, or more theoretical accts. like Nicos
> Poulantzas, "State, Power,
> Socialism, " that I was glad to see Verso reissue in
> their Verso Classics
> series. Though you did tell me offlist a while ago
> you have read Dorothy
> Healy autobiography and agreed with the reasons for
> the (long overdue)
> CofC/CCDS split w/ the "Hallites" (in my volumnious
> reading on the CPUSA
> I've never seen such an awkward construction, just
> made it up...perhaps
> I'll just call the folks like Tim Wheeler in the
> CPUSA, loyal to the
> moribund Gus Hall tendencies, the Old Guard, which
> is what the "Militant"
> tendency of the Socialist Party here in the 30's
> called the pro-FDR needle
> trades union Social Democrats in the SPA. Next a
> more direct, less
> roundabout answer...or at least the beginning of
> one.
> If my great-grandparents hadn't moved from the
> Puglia region of Italy,
> just before WWI, to settle just outside of
> Pittsburgh (down the street
> from where my Grandma lived was the first Heinz
> factory. From the time I
> was about 13, I became more and more alienated from
> that side of my
> families roots, their conservative pre-Vatican II
> Catholicism, support of
> the Vietnam War, racism and other parochialisms and
> chauvinisms...moving
> away from that was a chief fuel for my budding angry
> teenage marxist and
> punk rawk moves in the period just after, though as
> a elementary school
> kid I was intensely conscious of Kent State, My Lai
> and Attica. What kind
> of 2nd grader walks to school despondent that Nixon
> had just won in '68 or
> 4th grader that Rockefeller slaughtered tons at
> Attica, or 5th grader puts
> on his walls the
> photos of the massacred children and women in the
> ditch at My Lai from
> Life magazine?) and I had grown up in Italy, in the
> 70's and 80's I would
> have been a proud member of the PCI and later of
> their successor the DL.
> Though, in the earlier period, the parties to the
> left of the PCI, like
> the Il Manifesto group, the PdUP or Autonomia
> Operaia (Workers Power) I
> could have been recruited into. (The writings of
> Sergio Bolognia and Mario
> Tronti, in Telos and collected in, S. Lotringer & C.
> Marazzi (Eds.),
> "Italy:Autonomia: post-political politics, "
> published by Autonomedia,
> though I am far, far, far from being as expert in
> them compared to the
> longtimers at the aut-op-sy list, have had their
> attractions to me. Though
> my pragmatism, would I expect have made me happier
> and more productive as
> a communist in the PCI.
> All that above is a roundabout way of conveying
> that the type of
> communist politics I could identify with, the
> Eurocommunism of a
> Berlinguer or Poulantzas or Hobsbawm, has
> unfortunately, little to do with
> the historical theory or practice of the bulk of US
> Communist politics,
> whether CPUSA (talking majority tendencies in the
> main, in '56 or '57 I
> would have spoken in favor of the approach of A.J.
> Muste and Sid Lens via
> the united front/realignment/regroupment effort te
> American Forum for
> Socialist Education to coalesce anti-Stalinist
> communists, Socialists and
> independent marxists and progressives.
> And, over the last decades, I haven't had any
> difficulty working with
> (and haven't had conveyed to me, face to face,
> feedback along the lines
> of, "You red-baiting, anti-Communist, revisionist,
> running dog Pugliese,
> come the Revolution, the Cheka is gonna re-educate
> your punk ass..."
> Though the WWW is another kettle o' fish [note to
> self, google,
> "Pugliese+'social fascist,' " heh!] with communists
> from CofC/CCDS, Line
> of March, Freedom Road Socialist Organization,
> former cadre of the DWP of
> Marlene Dixon, a gaggle of Trotskyists from the 57
> varieties of LDT'ism,
> and communist/socialist comrades on the WWW (the
> ones who have contempt
> for Proyectism, unlike Yoshie and you and Jim F.,
> the occasional hate mail
> I get [except for the death threats from a U. of
> Chicago neo-nazi,
> enamored w/ Ezra Pound, I got in 2000, though lnp3
> has wished me an early
> death too] almost all come from Proyectians) in
> Europe mainly that have
> decades of experiernce in maoist, post-maoist,
> trotskyist and
> post-trotskyist and Eurocommunist formations, though
> we polemicize back
> and forth, none level the type of invective your
> type of Communist does at
> folks like me, which at the highest volume you can
> reach, when you get
> going, resembles the worst caricature of what
> Communists believe. No
> wonder why Rakesh called you once, the cliche of the
> Bolshevik. (Though,
> the abundent historiography on the CPSU, from
> academics and CPSU'ers
> themselves, on the period till the consolidation of
> Stalinism, reveals a
> rich, free wheeling, democratic debate, only
> drenched in blood later.)
> >
> CB>...You are most frustrating when you cite such
> musty stuff as Dimitrov
> > and
> > Aptheker...
> >
> > ^^^^
> > Well, if it frustrates you, I'll keep citing it.
>
> Isn't that childish? If I said, say, I don't
> like eggplant(I do, btw)
> and you were the owner of the only vegetable stand
> for miles, would you
> refuse my $'ers for any veg. except eggplant?
> >
> > Charles,fresh as a daisy.
>
> Charles=polibot.
>
> --
> Michael Pugliese, hella' phat, phresh for a geek.
> P.S. Slang dictionary
> http://www.slangsite.com/slang/P.html
> has a great one I'd never heard before
> >...phillatio: Licking a stamp.
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