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I agree with everything Pat said, none of which mediates the points that they are about as fascist as most "Marxist" English professors are Marxists.... The punchline, though, is the leap from people shouting over abortion to the blanket assertion that they are "definitely capable of violence." I think that almost everybody's capable of violence and that reactionaries always have been bullies. But the bottom line is that political violence in the U.S. used to be a hell of a lot more common than it is now. And it used to be done by organized public mobs of thugs rather than small groups of would be militias, clinic bombers or homophobic yahoos. Prattling about fascism disserves the movement on several levels.... As Marxists, we should value precision and reserving the term "fascist" for what's actually fascist should work. More immediately, though, tossing the word into the mix is regularly used to justify a desperate strategic alliance with liberalism to "buy time." "The people need to get it together," runs the argument, "but we're not prepared now, so we have no choice but to vote for what we can elect." At this stage in the election cycle, the threat of a Republican resurgence in Congress is used to justify voting Democratic. I was just listening to a Green Party official who voted for Obama explain to me how necessary it was to buy time, because McCain was going to just extend Bush's policies. However, I first heard this in 1964, when the Left was "all the way with LBJ" because if Goldwater got elected, we'd wind up at war in Vietnam. In fact, though, the argument is so old it predates fascism. Remember the 1916 argument that socialists needed to vote for Woodrow Wilson because he "kept us out of war"? The Left helped elect the pompous segregationist fossil, who had his second inauguration March 6, 1917 and took us into the world war on April 6. When will we learn? ML ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
