Michael, I get your drift. I have to prepare for a job interview now, so I cannot reply at length now anyway.
All I really want to say is, that, of course, if you are a thinker who intends to go to the root of things, people are going to find you offensive sometimes. They would prefer to think that the problem does not exist, or that there is no answer to the problem they know of. I have met people who found Noam Chomsky, the anarchist gentleman, “offensive” because he touched a raw nerve. Actually, almost any significant social critic attracted the reproach that they were “offensive,” Marx included. What else can you expect? I have lampooned the NMEC and infantile realpolitik, very deliberately, though I have never claimed, that ALL Marxists fall in that category. I made that point very explicit on OPE-L years ago. I did not invent the NMEC concept, that was Michael Voslensky, in his book “Nomenklatura: Anatomy of the Soviet Ruling Class”, chapter 4. He was a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and had doctorates in history and philosophy. To my knowledge almost all the Trotskyists, Maoists and Stalinists were deeply silent about this work. In the West, there were of course earlier theories of a new exploiting class (see Marcel van der Linden’s Western Marxism and the Soviet Union, which I translated – Brill Publishers and Haymarket Press), but they were not formulated by Soviet citizens themselves. Fact is, Marxists never got to grips with what Marxists have actually done to humanity in the last 100 or so years, good and bad. Marxists wanted to liberate the workers, and they ended up presiding over systems which oppressed and exploited the workers. Marxists have failed to come to grips with this political somersault, for a hundred years, so far. They just pretended it never really happened, or that if it did happen, it was not very significant in the scheme of things. Why? If you apply Marxism to Marxism, you cannot just say, that “it will all come out in the wash”! That is (partly) what my own Phd is about. Sure, there are people who find my research offensive, even although I mainly just read books. They want to steal it, neutralize it, kill it, ridicule it. Through the years, I have been burgled, hacked, spied on, harassed and robbed, and all sorts. It suggests to me I am on to something, really. I can’t wait to do more research! At the time that Dr Mine Doyran was pontificating at me, I was depressed, among other things because of my father suddenly dying of a heart attack on the other side of the world, and I was wondering whether I should resign my job as documentalist. Of course, Louis Proyect never has mental problems like that. He just does a bit of cooking, and sits at home with his computer, listening to high quality stereo or watches a video. But I have a lot more going on in life, that typing messages in cyberspace. At some point, something snaps, when I get another bit of nonsense from the arrogant leftist “jeer and sneer” brigade, i.e. the people who believe they have the moral high ground, when they have no shred of ethics worth mentioning. I’ll do you a favour, and just not post anymore. J.
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