Shane Mage wrote:
On Oct 2, 2008, at 2:11 PM, Jim Devine wrote:
...This kind of insult (snidely implying that Doug
is not a leftist...
I used the scare quotes because I agree with Disraeli that the business
of the Opposition is to oppose. Not to side with the capitalist
establishment, with Bush, Obama, Pelosi, Paulson, Rubin, Clinton et. al.
Lenin had some pretty harsh words for Kautsky not because he supported
the war (he didn't) but because he (ie., his comrades in the Reichstag)
refused to oppose the party Majority that supported the war and submitted
to party discipline in the vote on "war credits."
=====================================
Maybe it would be a good idea to wait until the question of power is posed
for a mass left party, to which many of us would presumably belong, before
we begin to engage in the kind of urgent and angry polemics which divided
the social democratic parties in the early decades of the last century.
Until then, these kinds of characterizations and insults have a make-believe
quality about them whose only consequence is to poison discussion.
The PEN-L list is better n this respect than some others. One of the ironies
is that the worst perpetrators tend to be those who were supposedly educated
in "the art of defensive formulations" in the Trotskyist movement.
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