From: Louis ProyectTo: marxism-international Subject: Re: M-I: Proyect fires a salvo at the moon Date: Monday, April 13, 1998 6:50 AM Ben Seattle: >Louis, I do have a theory. My theory is that you and Carrol >get upset when I say that the communist movement is naked >in the presense of its enemies because it is guided by bankrupt, >reformist theory. Please tell me: is my theory that this upsets >you correct? Ben, you have nothing to say that is substantially different from Joseph Green, "neil", Bob Malecki, David Stevens, Hugh Rodwell, or Louis Godena. Therefore, I have about as much intention of having an lengthy exchange with you as I would with any of them. I simply don't waste my time having a conversation with anybody who starts out on the basis that they are in some kind of revolutionary continuity with Marx, Engels, and Lenin. And that--by the same token--I am in reformist continuity with Bernstein, Kautsky and Allende. It took me a while to read through your blizzard of words to figure out that was what you were saying. Now that I have, I will simply ignore you the way I do the rest of this crowd. What you fail to understand is that revolutionary politics is what you do, not what you say. If you showed up at a jazz workshop and announced that you were a jazz musician, people would ask you to play something. On a Internet Marxism list, there is not much point announcing that you are a revolutionary because there is not any way to test you. Nobody can ask you to play a few bars the way they would a jazz musician. What your "revolutionary" politics consists of is an pastiche of all the ultraleft positions that the rest of the gang adheres to. Your attitude toward the Labor Party is identical to Joseph Green's and Bob Malecki's and Louis Godena's. When you tell us that you are opposed to rotten compromises with the bourgeoisie, we can only observe that in your case this can never occur. Compromises are made between parties with roughly equal power. Unions compromise with the boss. The Vietnamese compromised with US imperialism from time to time. You and the rest of the gang are idle dreamers who will never be in a position of power to have to compromise anything. Don Quixote never compromised anything because all of his struggles were in his mind, like yours. You are tilting at windmills. Again, you have a concept of politics that is fundamentally idealist. You are sure that you will never betray any struggle because in your brain there are rock-solid, granite-hard revolutionary ideas. The problem is that these revolutionary ideas have never been tested. You spend every minute of the day polishing them and burnishing them and lavishing all sorts of care on them. The problem is that they remain bottled up in your brain, where they do nobody any good except you. My reaction to you is the same as it is to all the self-declared revolutionaries on the Internet who seek nothing else more fervently than to find me guilty of gross reformism. You remind me of the New Yorker cartoon which depicts two dogs, one sitting at a computer terminal and the other looking over his shoulder. The one at the terminal is telling the other, "Nobody can detect that you are just a dog on the Internet." Substitute revolutionary for dog and you get a sense of the problem. The other New Yorker cartoon which has appeared in one form or another over the past fifty years has as its subject a man in robes and long beard carrying a sign that says, "THE END OF THE WORLD IS COMING." I had a good idea for a submission on this theme. The sign would include small lettering beneath the big apocalyptic message that read, "This space available for advertising." In any case, you and Malecki and the rest of the gang are just like one of those end-of-the-world characters. Instead of walking around carrying a sign, you are posting email on the Internet that says, "COMMUNISM ALONE CAN DESTROY CAPITALISM". It accomplishes the same thing, but is far less witty. Louis Proyect --- from list marxism-international@lists.village.virginia.edu ---