leninist-international  

Re: [L-I] Notes from Louise Bryant "Six Red Months in Russia" [reformatted]

Louis Proyect
Tue, 16 Jan 2001 12:59:33 -0800

At 12:59 PM 1/16/01 -0800, you wrote:
>> Lenin 'will flay an opponent in debate and walk out of the hall
>> arm-in-arm with him.[...]'
>
>*******
>
>The purpose of L-I summed up 84 years ago.
>
>Macdonald

I want to expand upon this a little. In a very real sense, these mailing
lists are a microcosm of the kind of revolutionary party we aspire to build
in real space. If people come to a mailing list, especially a Marxist
mailing list, with the attitude that it is someplace just to "make the
record", then it will not get off the ground. Mailing lists require a
certain amount of loyalty and committment. They require people to conform
to a certain open-minded culture that might be at odds with the kind of
"them versus us" mentality that characterizes the vanguard left today. I
strongly suspect that in our socialist future (and without socialism, we
have no future), people will look back at these dark ages we are living in
and wonder how such a destructive subculture operated in the name of
socialism. More than anything, Lenin's gesture symbolizes the kind of
culture we need to build.


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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