It's hard to know how to reply to Valis on Cockburn, etc. Where does tongue in cheek end and imbecile sarcasm begin. Cockburn's so-called antics during the Spanish civil war are described in part in his own memoirs. If true --and Philip Knightly assumes they were in his book, The First Casualty-- they make clear that Cockburn had no hesitation in inventing a military victory for the Republicans in order to increase the prospects of assistance from the French. That is, to his immense credit, he had no loyalty to the bourgeois idealisation of his journalistic craft in the face of his political commitments. Hail Cockburn. Meanwhile, what is this crap that Marx and Engels --sorry, "Moses and Aaron"-- ignored the "inconsistences of their culture and origin" like most exiles? The political exiles I've known in England --from Ireland, Chile, Iraq, etc.-- live out the pain of those inconsistencies everyday; but, they also get on with their political work (as opposed to academic memo-writing). What's the answer: a few years of expensive psychoanalysis to convince them their politics is all screwed up? If you think Engels ignored his contradictions of his upbringing and his politics, trace the development of his thoughts on Ireland, from the prejudices in The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844 to his later, more mature comprehension of the Irish. Much of this transformation was due to his long relationship and cohabitation with Mary Burns, an Irish factory worker; this relationship, as Steven Marcus observes, represented, for Engels, a "shifting and consolidation in conscious and unconscious identitifications," about which, of course, it would be interesting to know more. But, our ignorance of further knowledge about the details and complexities of that relationship is one thing; another --and more important-- is what the hell difference does it make to the ultimate meaning of Engels' work? Eric Ross Institute of Social Studies The Hague The Netherlands
