Tony, I agree with most of your remarks, and I'm glad you're here and also that you
are struggling heroically at Solidarity.
In particular I agree that "the phobic iSWor/
> Kagarlitsky crowd" is just a front. You're right: they "trumpet within the Left
> of the imperialist bloc countries a hysterical fear that a Russian 'Red
> -Brown' uprising is the world's greatest menace" and this is "thoroughly
> repugnant and reactionary. "
However I also agree with what Lou said the other day: that people who are active on
a list, must share some kind of basic commitment to the purpose of the list. People
who are actually fronting imperialist, anti-working class propaganda, who are just
stooges, obviously do not share this commitment to leninism. It is not searching for
purity that motivates me to want to draw a line, but the fact that it is impossible
to have any kind of serious discussion while this trench warfare is going on. The
fact that the miscreants have gone does not necessarily mean that we shall now get
serious debate, because that depends on the energy and input of the rest of us. But
it is surely a start.
It is noteworthy that people like Doug Henwood and Slavoj Zizek - cynical
opportunists and leftwing careerists - have starting talking again about Lenin. I
think this is because people sense that things like an economic slowdown or
recession, combined with the incoming Bush regime, are going to sharpen social
tensions, increase workplace struggles and polarise politics etc. I'm sure they are
quite cynical about this: they think there is a political cycle just like the
business cycle, and probably in lockstep with it. In a recession you have to sound a
little more militant, otherwise you start to look stale and uninteresting. Doug H.
is a great one for finding out where the "mainstream" is, and his antenna work. On
the one hand, it's fine that people are talking more militantly; but on the other,
it makes it all the more important that we don't let these people, who are our
political enemies, drown out the real message about what is a real revolutionary,
leninist politics. To do this, we have to have some kind of material base or
presence, and an elist is one possibility (there are others, obviously). If we were
a leninist party, we wouldn't let anti-leninists or imperialist stooges in. So why
should we let them in here, since this is the workshop or foundry where we have to
try and forge new theory, analysis etc?
I agree that there is a fine distinction between censorship and liberal
over-indulgence -- lenin himself talked about that all the time and in the excerpts
I just posted from Lenin on the press + media, you can see clearly how he saw the
problem. And it was never solved in the USSR. And the death of real debate
practically guaranteed the eventual death of the Soviet state itself. However
Lenin's position was simple: any accommodation between the USSR and the encircling
capitalist powers was bound to be illusory and transient, and war to the death was
inevitable in the long run. In *that* situation, the party monopoly of power and
control of the press was essential for survival; so here is an insoluble
contradiction or paradox. If you monopolise power, you guarantee corruption,
political senility and bureaucracy. If you permit pluralism, OTOH, you're dead just
the same only quicker. The only sure way out of the impasse is to *beat the enemy*,
ie destroy world capitalism. That IS the only way.
We're not trying to make believe that an elist can be a workers' party, let alone a
wrokers' state, but it is important that we do what Lenin wanted to do in 1901, in
WITBD: to draw a line between ourselves and the others. Before you unite, you have
to split: you have to get ideological and political clarity. That is what we should
be trying to do here. Get clarity. It is still possible to debate Myers etc, and
even possible to invite them back (btw, it was the moderators who unsubbed them, not
me). If it was me, I'd argue the shit out of the sods, but I'm damn sure they'd soon
run away anyway, they always do. You wouldn't need to expel them. But then you
really would get a gigantic flame war. I'm particularly good at that, but what's the
point? Nothing is achieved that way.
mark
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