Professor Albo, I am wondering about your judgement lately. I respect your work on Socialist Register, a journal that is indispensable for young academics on the left trying to get tenured. After all, publish or perish is tough enough in its own right but when you want to get an article on the world capitalist crisis added as a notch on your CV, there's not that many academic journals that you can submit to. Thank goodness for SR, Science and Society, and HM. Where would the left academy be without them?
I did start worrying a bit when you published Andrew Murray's meretricious defense of the Labour Party against attempts to build something to its left. In my view, Murray is pure poison. Not only is he the British equivalent of all those wretches who stumped for Obama; he is also an old-school "tankie" who writes propaganda for Putin and Bashar al-Assad, the kind of person who belongs in the 10th circle of hell if Dante had thought of one. In this piece of garbage, Murray smears Richard Seymour as being soft on US imperialism: http://21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com/2014/03/06/andrew-murray-on-the-ukraine-and-attacks-on-the-stop-the-war-coalition/. I am in no position of course to advise the brilliant editorial board of SR who to align with, but most young people moving against capitalism on the streets and in the academy would find Seymour's views more amenable than Murray's, a man who counted the USSR as "successful" in promoting "the cultural, linguistic and educational development of each ethnic group". This sort of garbage, of course, is what made Stalinism seem so cynical and degraded to anybody outside its ranks. Now, getting to the point, I noticed that you signed an open letter (defending the anti-Maidan movement in Ukraine that was initiated by the Workers Revolutionary Party in Greece, a bizarre sect led by one Savas Matsas. I thought it was significant that among the signatories, there was only one person from Ukraine but nine from Russia. Surely this is a symptom of what Lenin called Great Russian chauvinism whatever the intention of the sectarians who drafted the letter. Among the florid formulations in the letter is this: >>The Odessa pogrom is the last warning not only for the tragedy that falls upon the entire people of Ukraine, both in the Eastern and the Western part of the country, but furthermore, for a more vast and terrible tragedy involving the entire region, Europe and the world. It is reminiscent of the Kristallnacht, the “Crystal Night” that preceded in Nazi Germany the genocide of the Jewish people of Europe.<< Really? Don't you realize how idiotic this sounds? To start with, official Jewry in Ukraine is far more worried about Russia than the Right Sector. Aren't you aware that Russian TV keeps referring to Tymoshenko's Jewish ethnicity? Aren't you aware that the anti-Maidan movement has been quite open about its hatred of Jews? Here's what one observer noted: >>On one particular occasion, an activist speaking at an Anti-Maidan meeting declared: ‘Yes, a nationalist coup has taken place in the state, but we need to understand what nation is behind it. Let’s look at those who have come to power. Tymoshenko-Kapitelman, Tyahnybok-Frontman, Yatsenyuk – a Jew. This is a Zionist coup, all [go] to Kyiv!’ The crowd started to yell ‘Kikes!’ At the same time, this Anti-Maidan meeting was presented as ‘anti-fascist.’ This is hardly a paradox: the anti-Semitic narrative of some elements of Anti-Maidan implies that Jews are ‘fascists’, so anti-Semitism is interpreted as anti-fascism. Numerous demotivational posters associating the Jews with Ukrainian ultranationalists are flooding the web-sites of Anti-Maidan activists.<< Now you are a big boy, a tenured professor with probably 113 articles in refereed journals to your name. But surely you should understand that you made a horse's ass out of yourself by signing this letter and dragging SR's good name into the mud. Yours, Louis Proyect _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
