Michael, thank you—this is a substantive reply, and it lets me sharpen rather than repeat.
*On the lesser evil.* I think you have quoted the sentence that settles the matter in my favor, and I want to show you why. The November 1914 Manifesto says that from the standpoint of the international proletariat, it is impossible to determine which group's defeat would be the lesser evil for socialism and then says that for Russian Social Democrats, there is no doubt that Tsarist defeat would be the lesser evil. That is precisely my (a)/(b) distinction, in Lenin's own words, in the document you chose to refute me. He brackets the international comparison as impossible and reserves the comparative judgment for the Russian case. Your gloss is that the slogan distributes: Germany's defeat is the lesser evil for German socialists, Britain's for British socialists, and so on. But watch what "lesser" is doing in that sentence. Lesser than what ? The only available answer is "lesser than the victory that would strengthen reaction in that country," which is a substantive, Russia-type judgment about a particular state's defeat, made one country at a time. It is not the symmetrical slogan. The symmetrical slogan needs no comparative at all: every socialist works for the defeat of his own government, full stop, and "lesser evil" adds nothing. So you face the fork I named. Either "lesser evil" means the symmetrical line, in which case the comparative word is "misleading surplus" and should be dropped; or it means a real comparison, in which case it is the Russia-specific judgment and cannot be generalized into a method for ranking imperialisms in 2026. The Berne resolution and the Seven Theses are all of register (b); they are about Russia. None of them license extending the comparison across states today, which is what Chapter 9 needs them to do. You have given me the texts that prove the equivocation is Lenin's occasional looseness, not Draper's invention. *On Draper and the genetic fallacy.* Your women's-liberation analogy is the heart of it, so let me meet it directly rather than wave "fallacy" at you. The analogy fails because it conflates two different things a person's politics can bear on: motivation and validity. A man steeped in sexist prejudice may indeed be a poor author of a liberation program, because writing a program is a practical-political act that expresses one's commitments. But identifying an equivocation in someone else's text is not a practical-political act; it is a reading, and a reading is checked against the text, not against the reader's voting record. Draper's claim is "Lenin used this phrase in two registers. "That claim is true or false depending on what Lenin wrote, and you have just supplied the passages that make it true. Shachtman's position on Palestine in 1948 cannot make a correct reading of Lenin incorrect. If it could, then a Stalinist's reading of Marx would be falsified by the Moscow Trials, and we'd never be able to quote anyone. You don't actually believe that, because elsewhere you cite figures whose politics you reject when their reading happens to suit you. The materialist point—that ideas come from humans in conditions—is true and irrelevant here; it explains why Draper wrote when he did, not whether the equivocation he names is in the text. It is in the text. You quoted it. *On campism and the "platonic anti-imperialism" charge.* This is your strongest move, so I'll take it head-on, because it's an empirical challenge and it deserves an empirical answer, not a methodological one. You ask whether accepting the imperialist/semi-colonial distinction has any consequence for me if it doesn't issue in support for the semi-colonial state. It has a large consequence: it tells me whose people I stand with and against whose state. What it does not do is convert into political support for the bourgeois or clerical regime that claims to command those people. That is not abstention. It is the difference between supporting a struggle and supporting a state. And the record is not empty; that's simply false, and the tradition I come from has the receipts. My own organization, Solidarity, took its name as an homage to Solidarność, the Polish workers' movement that challenged a Stalinist state from the left. We backed that movement, its self-managing-republic program, and its ten million members while refusing the instrumentalization of it by Reagan, the AFL-CIO, and the NED, who were funding it for their own ends. We backed the Iranian workers and the 2022 uprising against the very clerical regime you would have me give "military support" to the women in the streets against the morality police and the oil workers' strikes, not the mullahs' war aims. We backed the South African Black trade unions against apartheid without subordinating them to any state's foreign policy. In every case the structure is identical: support the class in struggle and decline to hand it over to a state or a great-power patron. So when you say my anti-imperialism "guarantees that I never had to support any concrete struggle," you have it backwards. It guarantees I supported the concrete thing, the workers, the uprising, and the strike rather than the abstraction you offer in its place, which is the state that claims to speak for them. Tehran is not the Iranian masses. The Iranian state shooting its own workers and women is not the lever of anti-imperialism; it is one of the things the Iranian masses are fighting. Your framework cannot tell those apart because it derives "support the regime" from "the regime opposes the greater power." "That is the move I reject, and it is the same move as Register (b) doing geopolitical work: a comparative ranking of states substituted for an independent class line. Which is the thread through all of it and where I'll leave it. The lesser-evil equivocation, the genetic treatment of Draper, and the campist reading of anti-imperialism are one structure seen three times: in each, a comparison between states is asked to do the work that only the independent action of the working class can do. Drop the comparison, and the symmetrical slogan stands clean—defeat your own ruling class, support the people fighting theirs, and hand neither over to any state. That is not platonic. It is the only anti-imperialism that doesn't end with workers dying for a flag that isn't even their own. In solidarity, Tony -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42237): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42237 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119987077/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
