I reserve the right to refer to Weathermanas political trash.
Carrol
On 10/25/2011 10:43 PM, Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
> For those of us who don't know what ultra-leftism means, this is the
> best explanation I've found:
> http://www.anarchistblackcat.org/index.php?topic=8816.0
>
> One thing which stuck in my mind was how absurd it is to sound like
> you're insulting someone for being even more leftist than you are.
> (Not to mention the other reasons not to use that insult, even if the
> person's philosophy deserves to be criticized.)
>
>
> All the best,
> Tj
>
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 1:05 AM, Carrol Cox<cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>>
>> shag writes below: awww. come on. I liked being among the ultralefties and
>> other " narcissists. I'd hate to think it was a strawman! :(
>>
>> -------
>>
>> 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! :(
>>
>> This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from
>> http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm
>> ___________________________________
>> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk