"sounds _exactly_ like what "Marxist bureaucrats" used to say when people disagreed with the Party Line,"
That is also exactly why I use this terminology, and not just for show, but because I personally hate them. OK, it's wiser I think not to use this terminology on PEN-L, but as against this, it is important to define where you stand in relation to these people - just because they are academics earning rich helpings of tax money, doesn't mean you should respect them when they sell out the cause from which they finally make a comfortable living. You have no experience of Achcar, I have, so I know what an opportunist misleader he is. Achcar treated me with nothing but contempt, and thus he can hardly expect I am going to kiss his ass when he becomes a cheerleader for imperialism. To the contrary, I am going to kick his ass, and kick it hard. Your definition of bureaucracy as democratic centralism is a nonsense, and symptomatic of the degeneration of the Left. Bureaucrats are not elected, but appointed functionaries, and if perchance they are elected, then almost per definition it is not a free election, but a "stage-managed" or "rigged" election which excludes anybody not in the favour of the bureaucrats. Any democratic organisation which functions on the basis of majority rule obliges subjects to accept and work with the decisions of the majority. If that was not so, the organisation could not "function as organisation", it could not organise things. The term "centralism" adds nothing except that the bureaucrats like to have an authority over and beyond the will of the people. BTW Lenin did not invent the concept of democratic centralism, the idea was already used in the German social democracy, and Lenin's concept changed quite a lot across the years. Jurriaan _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
