Stephen E Philion wrote:
> people on this list are suddenly talking about Pat Bond like he is
> anything but what he actually is, a damn sharp committed anti-imperialist
> activist-intellectual. So, I find such an attitude toward a solid comrade
> to be less than worthy of serious consideration, hence my
> irony. I think Pat Bond's politics are bang-up and even when I don't
> agree with an argument he is making I learn something from him.
All of a sudden if you criticise Pat Bond or Doug Henwood, or *don't*
criticise S African president Mbeki (or so I've just been told on Pat's own
Debate list) you're *unworthy*. What I would like would be for Doug or Pat or
you to actually respond, to rebut, criticisms, not try to stifle discussion by
petulance or one-liner put-downs a la Henwood. This is not an academic list.
This is a list where revolutionaries analyse capitalist crisis and critique
alternative analyses. That's what it was set up for: to analyse the *Crash*.
Over on pen-l on the other hand Doug (who for years has been celebrating the
birth of a new capitalist golden age of growth) is right now lambasting people
who don't understand that the big difference between the Japanese slump
post-1989 and the Wall St slump now happening, is that the Bank of Japan
raised interest rates by a little under 2 percent in response to their crisis,
wherease the US Federal Reserve has dropped them by about one percent (if I
understood him aright, and since I don't really give a solitary fuck one way
or the other, I probably didn't). Pretty profound stuff, huh? This is what we
must stand in awe of?
I'd like to think we should not be afraid of being a little more radical than
that. And I also think that among the hot air now being let out of punctured
balloons, there is the flatulence which has clogged our debates for years with
the most asinine, futile reformism and defeatism.
Mark
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