shag writes below: awww. come on. I liked being among the ultralefties and other " narcissists. I'd hate to think it was a strawman! :(
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Don't worry. We can remain comfortably among them and still note Mike's idocy in the quoted statement. The idiocy (the historical ignorance) lies in the slovenly use of "ultra-let" as a term with no content but merely a swear word, like "asshole" or "narcissists." Marv Gandall has the same slovenly understanding of the term. Let's look at the Weatherman faction of SDS. My personal opinion is that they were political trash and to call them ultra-left is too kind. But they do usefully c onnform to both the actual sense of "Ultar-left" in Marxists history and to the slovenly sense in which the term is just used as a synonym for "assholes." First the actual sense and then I'll return to Weatherman to illustrate it. I have somewhere around the house a pamphlet put out by the Sojourner Truth Organization in the early '70s. STO was a very sedate group but very intelligent. In that pamphlet somewhere they remark, "SWP, everyone's favorite ultra-left organization." Now at the time, of course, the mark of SWP policy for everyone was its dogmatic sectarianism in insisting that anti-war demonstrations must be totally peaceful and single-issue. Why was that an ultra-left line: Because it exhibited an over-estimation of the strength of capitalist ideology. The single-issue line was designed to prevent anti-war demonstrators from developing a left politics except under the tutelage of the SWP. If the demos were multi-issue, that meant, horrors, independent political discussion among the participants, and since the participants were undoubtedly slaves to the all-powerul ideology of capitalism, their political development would be aborted. But if they could be taken under the wing of SWP cadre than they could be carefully guided down the right path, safe from that all-powerful capitalist ideology." Now let's take that definition and apply it to Weatherman, and I think its correctness will become obvious.
There was a young woman that I recruited to SDS. She was a very brilliant young woman, the daughter of a prominent local merchant. In the spring of 1969 there was an SDS confernence of some sort held in Austin Texas. I subsidized M's going to it, and as it happened she rode down there with some SDS people from Chciago - all Weatherman types, and when the split came that summer she went with Weatherman. Well skip a bit; after the fireworks had calmed down a bit she visited locally and came to the meeting of a local left-liberal group of which I had been one of the founders. At that meeting she expressed the opinion that there was no way the American working class could on its own excape its racism and national chauvinism. She in fact suggested that it would probably take an occupation by the People's Liberation Army for a lengthy period to wean the American Working Class away from its racism and chauvinism. (She of course specified "White Workers.) And apparently many of the Weatherman leadership at the time was about this extreme in their view of the weakness of the Americna working class and the strength of cappialist culture and ideology. In the early fall of 1969 before the split had been fully formalized, SDS here invited Mark Rudd to speak. When he got his jaw broken, Jeff Jones came in his stead. Jeff of course was one of the major Weatherman leaders and ideologists. I didn't go to the speech but afterwards we had an SDS meeting in a student apartment that lasted until around 2:30 in the morning. There was a strike of ISU janitors, cooks, etc goingon at the time, and SDS had been supporting it. Jeff started the conversation by characterizing that support as right opportunism, since of course those campus workers were a bunch of racists and chauvinists. The debate went on and on, gradually narrowing down to Jeff & me, and most of the SDS students present bought his argument. It was kind of sad. And oh yes, Jeff had a little squirt of a sidekick who took no part in the conversation but sat there twirling a bicycle chain - Jan remarked later on that it wasn't entirely clear whether that chain was meant for the cops if they came in but for recalcitrant right opportunists who didn't buy the Weatherman Truth.
In other words the ideological foundation of both the SWP's super-peaceful line and Weatherman's "Custeristic" line (iFred Hampton's word term for them) was a profound distrust of the American Working Class and overestimation of the cultural power of capitalism. And a final point, if you read Lars Lih you will find a series of Trotskyist leaders being quoted as seeing that the heart of Lenin's "theory" was a profound distrust of Russian Woerkes. That is, the Trotskyist tradition has more or less grounded its ultra-leftism in a (false) description of Lenin and in a gross misreading of WITBD.
Incidentally, I picked up this definition of ultra-leftism or left-opportunism from a pamphlet written by an Australian and originally published by The Communist Party of Australia. It was reprinted in the U.S. by the Communist Labor Party - it is a glossary of Marxist terminology. I have it around the house someplace but it got misplaced and I can't put my hands on it.
Now, back to shag and me. From Mike's perspective we probably are (in some slovenly definition of ultra-leftism he works from) both ultra-left and, since that is a moral failing rather than a political position, both narcissists. We are on the left of lbo-talk, whether ultra-left or not is of course a matter of debate. I take the position that "we" (the working-classes of the world) might well lose; that capitalist barbarism may triumph, and from those still bitten by the Bug of Progress that is plenty ultra-left.
Carrol
On 10/25/2011 3:03 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 7:50 PM, Doug Henwood<dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
On Oct 24, 2011, at 8:44 PM, Mike Beggs wrote:
Incidentally, I don't at all see the important dividing line as being between Marxistsand anarchists, but between people who think strategically about social change on the one hand and ultraleftists and other narcissists on the other. There are marxists and anarchists on both sides of that divide, and 'radical liberals' too.
[From Wikipedia, alas]
Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber has distinguished the two philosophies as follows:
o Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy. o Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice
I'm a little mystified as to why you brought this up in response to Mike's perfectly cogent point (though "ultraleftists and other narcissists," without elaboration, sounds like strawman building to me),
awww. come on. I liked being among the ultralefties and other narcissists. I'd hate to think it was a strawman! :(
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