[lbo-talk] Dustup - final installment

Julio Huato juliohuato at gmail.com
Sun Jul 27 19:54:13 PDT 2008


Carrol wrote:


> I don't have the slightest idea from those
> quotationns what you are talking about.

It's in the archives. They are public.


> All I know is that you reject categorically
> the ONLY KNOWN METHOD by which substantial
> social change has ever occurred or ever will
> occur.

What is that ONLY KNOWN METHOD? Where, when, how do I reject it categorically? I may not be the only person here to demand that you provide specific quotes to back up your accusations.


> You practice a politics of quietism;

Explain. What is quietism? How do I practice that?


> When/if a new growing left movement
> emerges then _then_ and only then will you be
> concretely confronted with the choice, "Which
> side are you on?" Then you will join that
> (non-electoral and minority) struggle or you
> will sit on the sidelines. You obviously cannot
> contribute to the preliminaries for such a
> struggle; you cannot even usefully join in
> discussion of _what_ those preliminaries, under
> present conditions should and can consist of.

I don't have the slightest idea what you mean by "quietism," but if that term is associated with the word "quiet," then you are the one who is predicating quietism with the preposterous notion that people should wait until a crisis erupts to take a personal stance, that people can't contribute to the preliminaries for such a struggle, etc.

I'm arguing the exact opposite of standing still. I'm saying that people can and should engage politically even now, before some ideal left movement erupts. You're saying that personal political involvement is irrelevant, unless a "crisis" has fallen from the sky and everybody is doing the same thing.

Look, Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky's biographer and Marxist thinker with a vast command of historiographic material, once made the point that bourgeois thinkers rarely grant importance to the activity of individuals or small groups, to their doctrinal disputes and differences, etc., in periods of relatively political calm. Those skirmishes seem like nothing. They are irrelevant. So, it is only when momentous historical conflicts come to a head that the personalities of leaders, then sharply in relief, attract suddenly the sight of the bourgeois philistine. This said, Deutscher gets into the detailed activities, even intrigues and personal differences of the small group of individuals who founded the Group for Labor Emancipation in 1883 in Russia, Lenin among them.

I don't know whether we can establish a priori whether an individual decision is more consequential during the ebb or the flow of mass political activity. In my mind, this is an empirical issue that to be determined in actual practice. What I deny is that the political involvement of an individual is necessarily irrelevant.



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