Re: On Struggle

[Carrol Cox]

Michael Perelman wrote:

>
> Jim Devine once told me that organizing anything on pen-l -- we were
> discussing the possibility of creating a textbook -- was like herding
> cats.  I would love to prove him wrong.

Wonderful. But I don't believe that is because of the kind of people on pen-l
but lies in the very nature of maillists. The discredited author of an
Introduction to a now infamous work had a very good point to make. Lin Piao
argued that *Quotations from Chairman Mao* should be read only in constant
relationship to collective practice. I think for all leftists and not just
(orthodox?) marxists this holds considerable truth, even in respect to fairly
abstruse issues of theory. Discussions on the left among women and men not
involved in collective practice together are apt to resemble a herd of cats.

Carrol