[lbo-talk] Michael Turner picks apart Cooper's "Rorschach" analogy

[Michael Pugliese]

On 10/16/06, Stephen E Philion <philion at hawaii.edu> wrote:
--I am impressed you can acknowledge anything positive I've done re:
China or class struggle, even Cooper can't bring himself to
acknowledge as much, it's just cheapshot city over there.  But
seriously, or more seriously that is, one of my favorite assigned
books to students is by Hillel Ticktin on Soviet Socialism...not to
mention Carmen Sirianni's WOrkers Control and the Soviet Experience
[have you heard of these books and do they meet the true pure
socialist test of purity?].

   I have been familiar with Ticktin since buying issues of,
"Critique, " his journal on the fSU that started back in the 70's.
First issue I bought at a Maoist bookstore in Venice, Ca., long gone,
in 1978 had pieces on Bahro and Ernest Mandel. That bookstore was near
a food co-op where a friend and I in '79 saw the documentary on the
Weather Underground, from the mid 70's, directed by de Antonio that
the FBI tried to get the outtakes from.
after the viewing, the folks who had shown it, groddy (George Harrison
would have called them, "grotty.") hippies tried to recrcuit Larry and
I into the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade of the RCP. I showed
them my membership card in the Campaign for Economic Democracy of
Hayden.Snort.

CRITIQUE 10-11
F CLAUDIN: The October Revolution & The International Communist Movement
M SAWER: Russian Socialism & The Question of the AMP 1906-1931
BELOTSERKOVSKY: Workers Struggles in the USSR in the Sixties
I SZELENYI: The Position of the Intelligentsia in the Class Structure
of State Socialist Societies
KLINGER, REINSTEIN, MANDEL, TICKTIN: Forum on Bahro

   I've read long articles by Sirianni, but, not more than a chapter
or two of the book. This was the piece I've read.
Sirianni, C. Production and power in a classless society: A critical
analysis of the. utopian dimensions of Marxist theory. Socialist
Review, 1981, 11(5).

   And, yes, I appove of those two writers. Along with Sam Farber,
"Before Stalinism, " Verso, on Bolshevism before JVS destroyed it, and
texts like, "Dictatorship Over Needs, " by Agnes Heller, F. Feher and
M. Vajda, and, "The Stalinist Legacy, " ed. by Tariq Ali, for
starters, they are essential to understanding what went wrong in the
fSU.

   And, even if I didn't like their texts, I'd still read them. Too
many lefties, esp. the activist inclined, only read what they appove
of ideologically.
-- 
Michael Pugliese