What follows are impression about Jacobin - a magazine of culture and polemic, and Louis Proyect's blog, Was Che a Stalinist? This was a great blog BTW and interesting to read.
I've read several Jacobin contributors who are also list members and was glad they got published. So who knows. I don't think it's a matter of magazine editorial policy, so much as an uneven left conceptualization. In other words, there is more than one left. In fact it's obviously a spectrum and always has been. Bloodworth's essay only proves he is an idiot, at least on this one. Part of the trip at Jacobin is a critique of the `old' left which I am afraid includes my generation. This motivation probably explains publishing the Bloodworth essay that goes after Che as revolutionary icon and tries to prove him a Stalinist. Let's take down an old hero. Certainly not a bad idea. I've done it myself. Later sometimes I was right, sometimes I was a fool. There are interesting problems that are not just a quibble about which left is left or which left is a good left and which is a bad left. The left is under a constant re-construction so old and new, good and bad follow in cycles that get very confusing. For example, if we consider the current cycle the recently dead postmodern left are now old. But when I was in my 30s during the 1970s, they were the new left. They were also dominated by cultural and social topics. I got very tired of the postmodern critique and its themes in arts and culture and started reading Marx and very recently Trotsky. Back in the late 90s I started on a selection of Marx to figure out what on earth the various postmodern movements had to do with Marxism. The historical answer is pretty complex, but it goes back to the Frankfurters of Weimar who saw a lack of Marxist analysis of modern industrial culture. Marx could easily be applied to sociology and economic structures of society. But what did all that have to do with the arts? I found an answer but it took a long time, so I won't go into it. More recently Marx and Trotsky have been reconstructed in terms of point of view and spirit rather than abstract analytics. For example having recently read both, the present world is well understood by a straight forward Marxism. The rich are so rich and the rest of us are going down or are already down. This means that the world easily divides into have and have not. What should frighten the Haves, is that the solution to this vast global inequality is looking more and more like the events and forces described in Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution. Back in the 1950-70s when there was a large middle between the have and have not, it was much more difficult to make the case that society had two classes. For example, an engineer working in electronics like my stepfather made enough money to easily afford an Austin Healey, a Cadillac, my humble vechicles, plus a quarter acre ranch style house with a horse in the backyard. My mother was a school teacher and spent her own salary as she pleased. One of my friends on the block had a swimming pool and a horse. Now does that sound like class struggle? Marxism and the essential features of communism seemed very out of date, hence `old' left. In fact, most of the prosperous `middle' class were told and believed that communism meant their prosperous lives would be ruined by any sort of socialist or communist structural change. The social protest and civil rights movements of the period were almost entirely about the people kept out of the big middle and those forced to go to ridiculous wars like Vietnam. Now back to Louis Proyect's blog titled `Was Che a Stalinist.' ``In September 2011 Jacobin Magazine published an article by James Bloodworth titled `The Cult of Che' that repeats the slander about Che’s Stalinism.'' If you are interested in the topic you should read Bloodworth's essay here: http://jacobinmag.com/2011/09/the-cult-of-che/ Back to the past. This was the standard liberal and reactionary line of the 1950s forward. Anything to do with Marx was communist, and communism was Stalinism, and all that meant totalitarian dictatorship. This cold war story made it impossible to understand the events and figures of the Cuban Revolution then and now. Bloodworth's essay gave the now `old' cold war story a shine with research like details and sold it as a `new' look at Che Guevara. Sure facts matter, but so does context and Bloodworth has no understanding of context. By the fluke of my circumstances, until my mother married the engineer when I was thirteen, we had lived in much different conditions in downtown LA and briefly in Mexico. That meant that I had grown up before middle teens and seen the Other world, which most of my peers 1959-62 had not. It was no mystery to me why the Cubans lead a peasant army, marched on Havana, and took it by force. It is a story out of Latino folklore long before Che and that's where the Cubans got the basic idea. It was no mystery why that was a good thing to do, the right thing to do, and in fact the only thing to do. An alliance with the Russians made perfect sense after the Bay of Pigs, because it was obvious the US was totally untrustworthy and hostile. Again by circumstance, I rode my horse through large tracks of orange groves, corn fields, and pastures to get to the northern hills beyond and I knew what landowners and their hired men were like. If they didn't want you riding on their land they would and did shoot at you. They used shotguns loaded with rock salt, but I got the idea. The hills were not entirely free either. In the spring, Basque sheep herders managed flocks and lived in small ratty trailors. They carried guns. Guess who I watched spray the trees with DDT, dig the irrigation channels, and pick the fruit? Migrant laborers did seasonal work right across the street from our house. That's why there was and is a cult of Che and why there was a Cuban Revolution. Connect the dots. Landowners are a bad lot. They are assholes as a class. CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
