What I argue for is the importance of the 1960s as first exemplifying "Democracy Against Capitalism"; what I argue against (with unapologetic contempt for those who do not see the core of it) is that the '60s cannot be seen through the media clichés (youth, appearqnce, tactics, etc.) I also argue for the historic importance of the Panthers; their discovery of the route to a unified left in the United States, a discovery which is the basis of Black Agenda. It was my expression of a couple of those points on the '60s list that evoked Ted's post to my announcing his book. In his book I found documented the history through which those clichés had triumphed over the actual contents of '60s struggles, a content which I had incorporated in my own thought through my own involvement in the period. Above all it was my own political practice and that of many I worked with that brought me to the only really essential piece of knowledge: That thought is emergent from human activity, that ideas do not fall from the sky. Without a half century of proletarian struggle, and without a number of writings (one especially emphasized by Sandwichman) Marx would never have written Capital. Only by the efforts of humanity to change the world does thought develop.
Tamas is important because of his argument that all previous socialist revolutions were in fact under the 'sign' of Rousseau rather than Marx, that they all were extensions of the struggle embedded in the key term of the French Revolution: Citizen. That made sense of what I myself had written in "Citizen Angels: Civil Society and the Abstract Individual in Paradise Lost" (a reading of two episodes: the meeting of Uriel and the Cherub and the debate between Satan and Abdiel). In writing that I had discovered the crucial importance of "choice" in bourgeois ideology and the viciousness of bourgeois emphasis on this "free choice." ("Free" here meaning detached, meaningless).
I never of course suggested that one needed to read Morgan in order to understand Morgan. I began with the abysmal ignorance of the '60s in almost every post on this list that referenced the '60s; it was that ignorance, recognition of which was grounded in my own experience, that I attacked, & Morgan's book (as said above) documented the sources of that ignorance.
My interest is not, then, in Morgan's book as a book; my interest is in the importance of the material for leftists who were attempting to take an active part in the present revival of political activity.
Actually, bowing to the suggestions of Bill Q & Angelus, the single most important text in my "post-M-L" political history is one that I do not even remember the title of; it was an article by Paul Sweezy in which he pointed out that the (false) concept of socialism as science was profoundly anti-democratic and for that reason profoundly anti-socialist. It was that that eventually led to my intense concern with Marx's remark on the anatomy of the ape.
Carrol