Julio:
I respect him deeply. He just wrote a very rich and thoughtful essay, where he submits his personal rejection of organized Marxism in the U.S.
I plan to write a reply to Stan at some point but mostly he is dealing with the question of traditional attempts to build a "vanguard" party and why he has given up on that project. I made that decision myself in 1980 shortly after coming into contact with Peter Camejo, who I worked closely with for about 5 years. However, it should be understood that Peter and I were interested in developing "organized Marxism" in the USA, but this meant approaching that goal in a more dialectical fashion than was commonly understood. I imagine that few people here are interested in the arcane of where Zinoviev differed from Lenin on what it meant to build a vanguard party, but my writings on this topic are collected here: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/organization.htm I have also begun work on a swans article titled "Does Socialism Have a Future" that deals with some of these concerns, but on a broader level. I plan to take apart Gabriel Kolko's "After Socialism" (a perfectly dreadful book), Samir Amin's "Beyond Us Hegemony: Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World" (a book that hopes that the US will enjoy a smaller piece of the pie globally than has been the case historically--talk about diminished expectations) and Michael Lebowitz's 21st century socialism book. Michael's arguments, as I anticipate them, will pose a sharp dialectical opposition to Tariq Ali's interpretation of what Chavez believes. Frankly, for all the various ideologists that claim that Chavez vindicates them (Grant-Woods, Stiglitz, David Schweickart), I am beginning to come around to the point of view that Chavismo might function politically like a Rorschach test. Of course, that could never be said about Lenin, could it?
