----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages at gmail.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Friday, October 20, 2006 11:22 AM Subject: [lbo-talk] Feminism and the False Memory Syndrome
> As far as I'm concerned, feminism in general ought to be about
> combating gender inequality, and feminism on the Left in particular
> ought to be about combating capitalism and gender inequality.
This seems a fairly exclusive prescription for feminism, as is the material below:
> More fundamentally, sex is one of the important issues that feminists
> must tackle, but it shouldn't eclipse all other concerns...
Nobody has said that it should eclipse all other concerns. This critique resembles the socially conservative Betty Friedan in her last years.
For other left responses to Bettina Aptheker's memoir, see below: Jesse Lemisch, "Portside as Soviet Journalism,” Historians of American Communism list, October 17; History News Network, October 17: http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/30882.html
After extended delay and embarrassing criticisms by many, Portside has finally decided to take notice of former Communist Bettina Aptheker’s new book, Intimate Politics (see below). But the way they have backed into this notice is reminiscent of the worst of Soviet journalism. (Portside is the “discussion and debate service” of the Committees of Correspondence, a descendant of the US Communist Party.) They have presented a short piece by Aptheker with a rigged rebuttal – only one side of the debate that has taken place in the period of Portside’s shameful silence. In the process they have airbrushed out my role in precipitating and participating this debate because they don’t like the position I have taken. What a fate for a Red Diaper Baby!
By way of rebuttal to Aptheker’s criticisms of the Communist Party and account of her sexual molestation by her late father (CP theoretician Herbert Aptheker), Portside selects from a debate that took place on the Historians of American Communism list. I kicked off the debate there with what later became my History News Network posting, “Shhh! Don’t Talk about Herbert Aptheker,” October 8, 2006: www.hnn.us/articles/30522.html (this followed up my October 4 HNN piece, “About the Herbert Aptheker Sexual Revelations” : www.hnn.us/articles/30519.html.) After my posting on HOAC, I was the central participant in the ensuing debate, fielding numerous, bunts, hits and foul balls that were sent my way by adversaries. But as far as Portside is concerned, my piece and role in the debate don’t exist. Every one of the people they post from HOAC was writing in response to me and (except for Stephen Schwartz), each was writing to attack my position; further, in all these cases I replied: Portside takes no notice of any of this. In other words, I have been erased from a debate in which I was the central participant. Portside sends curious readers around Robin Hood's barn – literally, to an archive -- to get to "other contributions to the HOAC discussion" -- in other words, me. The net effect and clear intent of Portside's incredibly tendentious selection is to provide a rebuttal to Bettina Aptheker. Schwartz's passing mention of me by name has to be mysterious to Portside readers, since they have no idea from Portside of my participation in the debate. Portside must have worked hard to come up with such a corrupt sampling. (Portside just doesn’t want people to read any parts of the debate that don’t fit their line. It should also be noted that for Chris Phelps's October 6 Chronicle of Higher Education review, which started the discussion of Aptheker’s book, Portside sends readers to a kind of a memory hole, the Chronicle’s subscribers-only site, when it is available to all on HNN, where it is linked to my “About the Herbert Aptheker Sexual Revelations.”
Portside’s erasure of me might also have something to do with my direct criticism of the group in my October 8 HNN piece:
“The reeling first reactions to the revelations seem almost a mini-version of the first reactions to Khruschev’s 1956 Secret Speech on the crimes of Stalin... It should be reported that somebody (not I) sent a copy of Chris Phelps’s article on Bettina’s memoir to Portside around Sunday or Monday October 3-4. Portside, which manages in any case to do a good job of finding things on its own, is the normally fairly catholic and inclusive “discussion and debate” list of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, the sane wing of the former CP. As of this writing, nothing about this matter has been posted there, although Portside has posted various items about what we might call merely bourgeois molestation scandals. Famous Red Diaper types have been strangely silent about the important issues raised by Bettina, presumably dismissing it as a merely private matter. It sounds like a case of keeping dirty linen out of the laundromat. A friend who is an ex-CPer sees Portside’s silence as tending “to confirm my sense that the habits of hypocrisy, and the refusal to deal with women’s experience, have survived intact from the CP itself.”
It may shed some additional light on Portside’s action – or non-action – to note that Bettina’s parents and others urged her to join the Committees of Correspondence – which Herbert had named, in imitation of the Committees of Correspondence of the American Revolution -- but that, as she writes, “I had no inclination to do so… I was through with Communist politics…” (p. 495). (One friend, formerly in the Party, speculates that Bettina may have little sympathy among former CPers because she left the Party, as they see it, “too soon” – although it was 1981; p. 406ff.)”
I have no ego wrapped up in my erasure by Portside. Indeed it is a badge of honor. But it’s like reading Pravda in America.
Jesse Lemisch