When you read Alex Callinicos’s reply to John Rees on the Socialist
Unity blog, the first thing you note is the well-places reproaches. As
somebody striving to hold high the banner of proletarian discourse,
Callinicos is disappointed that Rees “has had to engage in quite a lot
of inflation, distortion, and innuendo.” Unlike Rees, Callinicos assures
his readers that he’ll “try to stay on the high ground.”
Whenever I read this sort of nonsense in a Marxist polemic, I cannot
help but think of Seth Pecksniff, one of Charles Dickens’s most
memorable characters who inspired the term Pecksniffian, which Webster’s
defines as unctuously hypocritical. I couldn’t describe it better,
especially when you keep in mind that Callinicos was the hatchet-man
responsible for booting the American ISO out of their international
movement.
Callinicos in fact directs a spitball at the ISO in the course of
answering Rees’s charge that the SWP was dragging its feet in its
response to the financial crisis:
"In the first place, I completely reject the claim that the present
leadership has been slow to face up to the impact of the crisis. As a
theoretical tendency we have consistently defended an analysis of the
prolonged period of crises and slow growth that capitalism entered at
the end of the 1960s as a result of a pronounced fall in the general
rate of profit against bourgeois boosters of globalization, sundry
reformists and academic leftists, and even some of our sister
organizations (this analysis was an issue in the debates with the
International Socialist Organization in the United States at the end of
the 1990s)."
Now it is not exactly clear whether Callinicos is making an amalgam
between the ISO and “bourgeois boosters” et al, or just stating that
they have the same theoretical weaknesses on this particular question.
More to the point, the real issue was not theoretical but the ISO’s
refusal to bend to the will of the SWP’s Central Committee. After they
built the largest group on the left in the U.S., why should they allow
themselves to be bossed around, even if they relied initially on the
support of the SWP?
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/12/24/the-fight-in-the-swp-part-4-alex-callinicos/
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