From:    Carrol Cox 
To:      marxism-international
Subject: M-I: A Brief Note in Response to Ben's April 12 Post.
Date:    Monday, April 13, 1998 7:06 AM

Ben writes:

My view is that the working class movement
> should work with reformists whenever it is possible to
> do so in a principled way--but that the reformist *ideology*
> (which limits itself to those reforms which do not threaten
> bourgeois class rule) must always be firmly rejected.

1) I am seriously interested in the political possibilites of the
internet, and of political maillists in general. Whatever the scope and
limits of such maillists may be, limits do exist, and the understanding of
those limits (physical and social) is a precondition for any effective use
whatever of e-mail. And all modes of communication *do* have *physical*
limits. For an extreme example, one would never write household memos in
Sumerian cuneiform. 

Mark Jones, Dennis Grammenos, and Lou Proyect have offered us concrete
instances of long or very long posts which do not violate the decorum
(principles of linkage between writer/reader, including physical limits of
the mode) of maillist posts, but all those posts I am thinking of
(including, wonderfully, Mark's very first post to the list on the fall of
the Soviet Union) were filled with *information*, and information which
most of us would not have had access to. ("Access to": subjective and
objective criteria: I have a fairly large library of books and articles on
U.S. crimes in Latin America, so I have physical access. For various
reasons (time, health, general obligations, etc.) particular to me I have
either not read or read too quickly to remember much of the material in
those books and articles. Lou's long posts on Nicaragua, Guatemala,
history of interaction between the invading Europeans, etc. have been for
the most part information-laden. The same is true of Dennis's forwardings
from csn-l. 

With such posts one can either go to the trouble of breaking through the
physical limits on the reading of electronic text *or* read them to a disk
file for later browsing, indexing, and/or printing. They repay such
effort. 

But except under extraordinary conditions, I will not (I invite comment
from others on this) and I doubt that very many others will read long
polemical posts on screen. The monitor screen (even my
17-inch one with very good screen image) is simply too tiring in
comparison with the printed text. 

I reformatted and printed out one of Ben's posts on this thread, that on
Saturday, Apr 11, Subject: Louis Proyect smashes reformism (Jesse Jackson
edition). Ben represents an anti-marxist position (the oldest one,
preceding Marx by over 2000 years, that of Plato) that needs to be
continually recognized, and while there are far better and more subtle
Platonists within the workers' movement than Ben, his expounding of
Platonism, long winded as it is, is sharply and clearly expressed and
worth keeping as a memo of that strain. Any further interventions by me in
this thread will be based primarily on that text, or on any further posts
from Ben in which he chooses to honor the decorum of length in electronic
polemics. 

2) Egotism; Tautologies: their use and abuse

> My view is that the working class movement 
> should work with reformists whenever it is possible to

Ben, while their are important exceptions, the use of variations of "I
think" is all too often an index to the fact that the writer is less
interested in the truth of his/her ideas than in the fact that HE (SHE) is
the holders of those ideas. There is in fact no way in which the platonic
principles existing only in Ben's Head can be shared among comrades and
corrected, expounded. (See Marx on Providence in *The Poverty of
Philosophy*. Ben is a believer in Providence, the Will of which *he*
knows.)

A second index of thought gone mad is the use of tautologies as though
they were contingent propositions. "The working class should work..." Sez
who? Actually this sentence is a tautology, like "a+b = b+a."  This is
what we *mean* when we say "The Working Class" in histories or analyses of
capitalism. But that "Working Class" is only rarely manifested in an
actual class of workers in a particular capitalist regime. Tautologies,
properly used, are of crucial importance. One of the greatest of Marx's
own works, Chaps. 1-4 of Volume 2 of Capital, consists of the continuous
repetition of a tautology (or class of tautologies), but *each* repetition
illuminates, more and more gloriously, the embodiment of those tautologies
in the dynamic of actual capitalism. (The tautologies by themselves would
give us a Platonic Capitalism, a capitalism which has no existence except
in eternity.) 

3) "Reformism" and "Revolution" as Platonic Forms

> do so in a principled way--but that the reformist *ideology*
> (which limits itself to those reforms which do not threaten
> bourgeois class rule) must always be firmly rejected.

There simply is neither a "class of reforms which threaten" nor a "class
of reforms which do not threaten" bourgeios class rule. This
differentiation is wholly a matter of practice and self-criticism, not of
a theory of the sort which Mao mocks in denying that correct ideas fall
from heaven (or from the angelic intellects of a Duhring or a Seattle). 

This is line 96 of text in this post. around 5 screens) -- about 2/3 of
what I propose are the outermost limits of a polemical text in cyberspace.
I shall reserve further responses to Ben for another day. 

Carrol


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