kenneth morgan wrote: While lurking on Marxmail, I have been put off by the caricature of democratic centralism, and the occassional ISO bashing by members of this list. This is reflected in the lack of postings on the recent ISO organized conference, Socialism 2009 held in two different cities this year, Chicago and San Francisco. While the event, previously held only in Chicago, usually draws around 1,000 this year each site drew around 900 each. Even allowing for 100 (I doubt that many) who attended both conferences, that's 1700. Regardless of one's feelings toward Leninism/vanguardism, and the ISO, this was a significant event which I would have thought could not have been ignored.
Reply: Ken, the Internet operates on a different basis than the ISO which generally (with the exception of a Dan Russell) does not involve itself with mailing lists. Although there are a slew of ISO'ers on Marxmail, they generally do not post. For example, an ISO'er named Svengali or something like that posted an item about a year ago. I do know that they keep track of the discussions here with great interest, but this is *not* their preferred way of communicating electronically. And we do things on a voluntary basis here. We don't "assign" people to cover events. If a Marxmail subscriber went to one of these gatherings and decided to report on it, then that's that. I go to the Left Forum every year and prepare a report because I am motivated to do so. If somebody decided to do the same thing with the ISO gatherings, then we'd obviously be interested in reading it. ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
