From:    Louis Proyect 
To:      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



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