Jim Devine wrote: >Louis, don't you think it is a mistake to use "guilt by association >techniques" against Doug? After all, should we dump on Doug because he gets >published in the lily-livered liberal NATION magazine? (to its credit, the >NATION mostly opposed the Grand Patriotic War Against the Serbs.) Can we >criticize you for working for Columbia University? Jim, I don't think you know the history of this outfit well enough to draw such analogies. They are viewed as an upscale version of Larouche's outfit by the British left that I have been in touch with for the past 3 years since I have begun studying them. This is not like Alex Cockburn publishing a column in the Wall Street Journal. The group around the magazine has an activist component that has worked to discredit the British left over the past decade. During a bitter strike by miners in which everything was on the line, this outfit chose that time to open up a campaign against Arthur Scargill, the miner's leader. This was around the time people first started wondering if they were getting paid by the bosses. Also, despite what Doug says, they still have an interest in pretending to be leftists of some sort. Jim Heartfield is a self-avowed "Marxist" despite his basically libertarian ideas. They bamboozled Monthly Review into publishing one of their books, which Harry Magdoff regretted deeply. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
