[lbo-talk] Excellent article on Egypt

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Feb 2 17:25:17 PST 2011


Your problem is you fought in the lecture hall and small meeting rooms. You


:-) Well, as a matter of fact I id; my adrenaline was too high at the time
to notice -- Ijust wanted to get away from that mob. Buyt Jan told me later I had taken a pretty hard blow on the back. 600 angry high-school stuents (the fucking weathemen had beaten up a student a few days before we leafleted) -- anyhow, 600 angry high school students are a joke afterwards but not ajoke at all when they are after you.

But there's no need for argument because I'm among those intellectuals at whose rush to judgment amuses me. I've done it every day since the uproar began, & I think even gave into it and posted a couple of times.

But on the substance, as Chuck says, it's all very familiar: such events do follow a sort of common ground plan, but almost no one ever predicts clearly what the results are going to be. You and Chuck were not on the Marxism list at the time of the upheavals in Venezuela and Bolivia: In each such case, Trotskyists first do the tea-leaf reading within their paradigm, then as the results don't match the formula begin to speak gravely of "critical support," and then move to an analysis of how the leadership betrayed the struggle. You don't see a lot of that on this list, though it raises its head occasionally in some passing comment.

Reality never quite matches the hope. It didn't for us in the '60s.

Carrol



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