Great essay and discussion on your blog, Louis (and here Michael). It brings to mind an old anecdote about the volatile Andrew Kliman.
Around May/June of 1983 UofUtah Economics Dept. Chair and marxist E. Kay Hunt took the initiative to invite thirty or more local Salt Lake socialists and radicals he had met since returning to Salt Lake (from UCRiverside) to a meeting to consider starting a local chapter of the newly established Democratic Socialists of America. I had left the SWP a year before in 1982, went to the meeting and decided to help establish the Utah DSA. The DSA chapter became a vital ally/asset in my already underway project of building the Central America Solidarity Coalition. Kay explained at that 1983 meeting that as a National Board member of the New American Movement he had opposed from the left the 1982 merger with DSOC to create DSA but he had now concluded that the best way for him to be politically active in Utah would be via a local DSA chapter. Kay said he envisioned the Utah DSA at the far left end of the DSA's "multi-tendency" spectrum. That suited me. A year later, latter summer 1984, among the new crop of graduate students arriving at one of the few Econ Departments in the U.S. that offered study of marxist economics was a DSA member coming from the NYC area, Andrew Kliman. I think i politically assessed Kliman accurately at the time as an archetypal right-wing social democrat. I think it was at Andrew Kliman's first Utah DSA meeting in fall 1984 that i reported some of my friends in the local CP had been threatened with arrest and kicked off the UofU campus for petitioning to get CP presidential candidate Gus Hall on the Utah ballot. I proposed that we/DSA sponsor the CP to be able to petition on the UofU campus. Andrew went ballistic, arguing strenuously and at length that we should not dissolve our democratic and humanitarian principles in any sympathy - not to mention actual assistance - for totalitarian Communism. There may have been an abstention but i recall the vote was everyone united against Andrew's one vote in opposition. I thought that was the end of it but i didn't know Andrew. Before our next monthly meeting Andrew obtained a Utah DSA membership list and mailed to every member hefty documentation on the crimes of communism and appealed for everyone to come to the next meeting and rectify the previous decision. There were some members at the next meeting i hadn't met before and i'm quite sure it was there where Andrew got one sympathetic abstention, otherwise same result. Andrew was not at all discouraged from prolonged vociferous disagreement and in order to move on i eventually proposed that the Utah DSA arrange a public debate on the issue of 'freedom of speech for communists?' I would be debating Andrew. I don't remember anything new or particularly interesting coming up at our public debate. It was obvious to me that we in the U.S. should defend freedom of speech for members of the Communist Party. Andrew continued to dwell on historical horror stories from elsewhere. There was a decent turnout of new people in the Union Building meeting room; several had come with Andrew. As the debate concluded a straw poll was taken with the same one-sided result; the people who came with Andrew abstained. My perception is that Andrew was so angry with the Utah DSA that he ceased to participate. Next i noticed that he was hanging out with an Econ graduate student who had already been at the UofU for a year or two, Ted McGlone. McGlone had arrived at the UofU as a member of Dunayevskaya's News & Letters group and must have been instrumental in recruiting Andrew Kliman (btw my impression is that McGlone has wandered away from orthodox News & Letters while Kliman is still there). I wasn't a university student but i was familiar with the UofU economics department back in those days partly because i was the janitor responsible for cleaning the department (and its building). On Sat, Jan 23, 2021 at 6:43 PM Michael Meeropol <[email protected]> wrote: > As someone who had to "unlearn" neo-classical Economics AND what Joan > Robinson called "bastard Keynesianism" (by which she meant the American > version of Keynesianism that permeated the Samuelson style Principles > textbooks from 1949 to the 1970s) I was very interested to see Louis' post. > . . . > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#5789): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/5789 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/80067657/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
