[lbo-talk] Sweezy, Stalin, etc.

[Tahir Wood]

I have to say this has been a tedious day (it's near the end ot the working day here) on the list and a low point in terms of content. The debate about Sweezy degenerates into "was he a friend of Stalin's?" and the debate on Stalin into "was he better than Yeltsin?". Unfortunately this is all too similar to: "are the Democrats the same as the Republicans?". Doug, maybe you should use your prerogative to be a bit more critical of the line of rhetoric that your posters follow.

What might be just a tad more interesting is a debate about (a) Sweezy's brand of marxism, which seems to fall somewhere between Keynes and Lenin's 'Imperialism, the highest stage ...' (and quite far away from Marx), and (b) the nature of Soviet-style socialism as defined successively by Lenin and Stalin. I can't think of two more important topics for a leftist list - instead we have this circular debate that just goes on and on. Chris, you are particularly prone to saying the same thing over and over in ever more sarcastic language - yet you sang a different tune, I thought, in your brief off-list comment to me about Stalin a while ago.

Please - I know this isn't an academic list - but can't we have just a little more content, whether historical, theoretical or whatever? Despite my interest in the topics that were under discussion, I wouldn't have wanted to reply to one of the messages that were posted today. And the periodic debate about "principles" is just, well, the pits (so we don't appear to share the same principles, well boo-hoo!)

Tahir