Comrades,
Just thought I would forward this to the list. Does anyone know
whether Ellen Wood is the ideal person to be editing the Monthly
Review or if the board was right in removing her to make way for
someone more radical.
John
Date sent: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 15:38:12 +0000
Organization: University of Warwick
Subject: Urgent -- Crisis at Monthly Review/Ellen Wood's
removal From: "Mr. Gregory Schwartz"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Send reply to: "Mr. Gregory
Schwartz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Comrades,
Moves to remove Ellen Wood as an editor of Monthly Review are
underway. Please find below a letter addressed to members of the Board
of the Monthly Review Foundation. Hope you will sign it. Please
include your name and (if applicable) your affiliation at the bottom
of the letter (following 'Yours in solidarity,'). Pass it on to anyone
else who might be supportive. A modest number of signatures has been
collected in the past three days -- among them Chomsky, Brenner, Aijaz
Ahmad -- but time is short. Please address your reply directly to me,
at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--------------------------------------------------------
To Members of the Board of the Monthly Review Foundation
Dear friends,
We are writing to express our alarm about reports that some Board
members of the MR Foundation are seeking the resignation or removal of
Ellen Meiksins Wood as an editor of Monthly Review. We believe such a
move would do irreparable damage to MR’s future as a significant
institution of the socialist left. As people who have read, subscribed
to, supported, and written for Monthly Review, we implore you to do
whatever is necessary to prevent Ellen’s resignation or removal.
We are well aware that we lack knowledge of the specific disputes and
grievances, imagined or real, which have caused some Board members to
contemplate this destructive course of action. Yet, this can be
something of an advantage at a moment like this. Removal from the
day-to-day operations often provides a distance from which to better
see the larger picture. And what we see is a terrible threat to MR’s
position as a major institution of the left.
One of the great and enduring strengths of MR has been its spirit of
socialist pluralism – its tolerance, indeed encouragement, of a range
of differences and viewpoints that inhabit a common space of critical
Marxism, of an independent socialism that, as Paul Sweezy puts it in
the May 1999 MR is "revolutionary, non-reformist, non-revisionist and
at the same time non-dogmatic, non-fundamentalist." The addition of
Ellen as an editor fit beautifully with this ethos. The author of many
major books of socialist scholarship, Ellen’s work is distinguished by
its critical, independent, non-sectarian spirit and its exceptional
originality. When Paul and Harry wrote in the March 1997 MR that, with
Ellen’s appointment as an editor, they had an answer – and "a good
one" – to the "essential continuity" of MR, we agreed wholeheartedly.
We couldn’t imagine a better person to carry forward MR’s commitment
to intelligent, thoughtful and provocative socialist analysis. And her
untiring work on behalf of Monthly Review over the past three years
has fully vindicated that judgment. To throw away everything that the
addition of Ellen has meant to MR would be irresponsible and reckless
in the extreme.
What Noam Chomsky wrote in MR’s November 1999 fundraising appeal
bears
quoting in this context. We all appreciate, he wrote, the importance
of "stable, long-lasting institutions of an independent left –
reliable, searching, stimulating thought and debate without the
debilitating factionalism that has been such a painful internal
barrier to progress."
"I have to admit," he continued, "that a while back, I was personally
concerned about the continuity of this enterprise, which has played
such a critically important role. With Ellen now taking on a leading
role, those concerns are gone. There couldn’t have been a finer choice
. . ."
We agree – as, we think, do hundreds upon hundreds of others who have
supported MR over the years. A move to push Ellen out of Monthly
Review could only hurt the magazine and damage MR’s public image, its
reputation as a bastion of socialist sanity free of the splits, purges
and factionalism that have repeatedly undermined the left.
We call on all members of the Board of the Monthly Review Foundation
to do everything in their power to avert this course of events. We
implore you to find the intelligence, good sense, solidarity, and
generosity of spirit to resolve differences without a damaging and
debilitating parting of the ways. You owe it to yourselves. And you
owe it to the many of us who look to MR for another fifty years of
work "stimulating thought and debate without the debilitating
factionalism that has been such a painful barrier to progress."
The future of a major institution of the left is yours to preserve, or
to squander. We urge you to act wisely – and in the spirit we have
come to associate with Monthly Review.
Yours in solidarity,
--- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
