W/o the >> using a freeware/shareware tool, eCLEANER,
http://www.pccontrolanywhere.com/ecleaner/
Michael Pugliese
Lemme guess...Carrol!
W/o the >> using a freeware/shareware tool, eCLEANER,
Michael Pugliese, don't be a Menshevik http://www.hup.harvard.edu/reviews/LIEFRO_R.html
! Clip extraneous text before sending!
--- Original Message ---
From: Michael Perelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: 1/26/02 7:43:45 PM
I got a note today complaining about the formatting of many of
the
messages on pen-l, which are difficult to decipher and contain
too much
extraneous text. Could we be more careful in the future?
On Sat, Jan 26, 2002 at 07:35:40PM -0800, Michael Pugliese wrote:
--- Original Message ---
From: Battaglia comunista <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: 1/26/02 4:25:01 AM
...
the near-hysterical tone and insults of your latest
reply indicates to me that the contradictions in your
position are really starting to bite.
The contradiction that strikes me particularly
strongly is the one between your advocacy of working
class struggle, on the one hand, and your efforts to
the remove from this discussion any concrete
references to or suggestions for working class
struggle, on the other hand.
You talk a lot about class struggle, but when faced
with, for instance, the reality that class struggle
almost always takes place around demands for reforms,
you throw up your hands in horror. Similarly, you
regard class struggle in Argentina as the way forward,
but refuse to face the fact that class struggle in
that country is very obviously being undertaken mostly
by workers who still have a reformist worldview, and
also around various demands for more or less radical
reforms.
You want to escape the contradiction in your position
and the obvious absurdity of repudiating class
struggle in Argentina in the name of class struggle by
withdrawing from concrete debate about Argentina, and
you try to cover this withdrawal with the suggestion
that people like me who do want to discuss the
situation in that country in detail are guilty of not
discussing Argentina in our own 'communities'.
This is a strange accusation to make of me, since I
have posted very recently the record of a picket and
public meeting on Argentina held by the AIC in
Auckland. I want to tell you a little bit about this
meeting and about the group that held it in the hope
of pointing up what I see as the absurdity of your
total repudiation of fighting for reforms, work with
reformists, and also work with Leninists.
At our meeting a couple of short talks were followed
by questions and then informal discussion. One of the
first questions asked came from a man who seemingly
thought that liberation theology and, perhaps, the
Catholic Church were a progressive force in Latin
America.
The person who had just given the talk argued that
liberation theology was not a genuinely radical strand
in thinking but rather a gesture by the church to
maintain influence over rebellious peasants and
workers. She pointed to the reactionary role that the
Pope had played in Latin American conflicts - for
instance, his refusal to condemn American aggression
in Nicaragua during a visit to the country in the 80s
-as evidence for her point of view. She did emphasise,
though, that the ideology of liberation theology could
be construed as radical by individual priests looking
to justify their association with radical struggles,
in the same way that the ideology of Christianity has
frequently been commandeered for radical purposes
during events like the English revolution and the
colonisation of New Zealand. The person who had asked
the question about liberation theology seemed
interested in this answer - it seemed that his
sympathy for liberation theology had stemmed from an
acquaintance with some radical individual priests,
rather than any devotion to the Catholic Church as
such.
Another aspect of our recent Argentina solidarity
activities that I'd like to dwell on is the
conversation I had with an Argentinean employee of
Aerolinas Argentinas who came to our solidarity picket
of the US Consulate General. This guy thought of the
crisis in his country in quite nationalistic terms,
and put forward the view that "all of the small
countries, New Zealand, Argentina, should get together
and fight the US, oppose its policies". At the same
time, he expressed his great sympathy for the
anti-capitalist protests in Seattle and Genoa, saying
he was delighted to hear about them.
What I tried to do, talking to this guy, was
respectfully and gently suggest that there was a
contradiction between some of the politics of the
anti-capitalist movement and the nationalist course he
was advocating, and that nationalism of the Peronists
might even be heavily implicated in the economic chaos
which threatened his future. This person was also a
staunch advocate of reforms like nationalisation of
the banks, but did not seek to give those reforms a
class line did not, for instance, seek
renationalisation of the banks under workers control.
The third example that I want to give concerns a
member of the AIC, the group that organised the picket
and public meeting. It was after coming into touch
with this man several months ago that I realised
particulalry strongly that I would have to revise my
view that all Leninists were contemptible would-be
bureaucrats.
The guy in question is eighty-eight years old, and has
been involved in virtually every major social movement
in NZ over the past fifty years. He was one of the
founders of the anti-Vietnam War movement, which began
in Auckland with I think a march of three people. He
was involved in anti-racist rugby tour protests
decades before they became an issue that split and
seriously destabilised the country in 1981. He was
involved in an army mutiny over conditions in 1942. He
did an amazing amount of work for our group, including
standing outside the conference of the governing
Labour Party last year with us and chanting Baby
killers, murderers to shame-faced delegates and cops
afraid to muscle an elderly man. He also happens to be
a Maoist.
Trying to understand the contradiction between this
mans deeds and some of his views, I was forced to
consider the history of communism in this country.
Alone in the West, the NZ Communist Party sided with
Albania and China in the Sino-Soviet split in the
early 60s. A puppet Moscow party was soon set up to
match the Peking parrots, and it gained a
stranglehold over the trade union movement, advocating
very conservative, economistic, semi-reformist ideas.
The only opposition to this party, at least until the
emergence of small Trotskyists groups on campus in the
late 60s, was the CP, which adopted a sort of
supermilitant Maoism. There were no organised
autonomist Marxists, or council communists, or
anarchists, or anything else that might be contained
by the term libertarian left. In these
circumstances, I can see how the CP, distorted by
Stalinism though it was, might seem some sort of
radical alternative to reformism. Inevitably, the CP
bred splits in the 70s, and I think the guy I am
speaking of ended up in one of these splits.
The point I am making is that in each of these
examples we encounter someone holding a
position/engaged in a practice which has good as well
as bad features, and which must be engaged with in a
sophisticated, sympathetic manner. Under your
criteria, each of the people I have mentioned would be
rejected out of hand. The first person would be a
symapthiser of a hierachical institution, pushing
alien class ideas, who should be exposed as bourgeois.
The second person would be condemned as an enemy of
class struggle, despite the fact that he had been
engaged in the most whitehot class struggle in the
world at the moment. The third person you would class
as bourgeois, compare to a fascist, and seek to
expose inside protest movements. In the name of
class struggle, you would repudiate a person
sympathetic to class struggle, a person engaged in
class struggle as we speak, and a person who has been
involved in class struggle for longer proabably than
your parents have been alive.
If your position does not allow you to have comradely
feelings towards these people, and leads you to
condemn and abuse me as some sort of traitor, then I
wonder you expect to be able to do the 'community
outreach' work on Argentina you advocate. How are you
going to deal with what may be by and large the most
reactionary population in the world? If reformists,
Maoists and fellow autopsy list members like me are
too heretical, how will Joe Blow from Idaho, who
thinks everyone has a fair deal in America and thinks
President Bush had no option but to attack
Afghanistan, fare? How will any member of the American
working class who is brave enought to strike or
protest for a reform in the present atmosphere fare?
Surely your latest coments are digging you into a
ultra-leftist and incredibly sectarian hole, a hole
which you will have to climb out of to engage in any
sort of practical political activity?
Cheers
Scott
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
For "a ruthless criticism of every existing idea":
THR@LL, NZ's class struggle anarchist paper http://www.freespeech.org/th=
rall/
THIRD EYE, a Kiwi lib left project, at http://www.geocities.com/the_thir=
d_eye_website/
and 'REVOLUTION' magazine, a Frankfurt-Christchurch production,
http://c=
antua.canterbury.ac.nz/%7
Ejho32/
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>--- Original Message ---
>From: Michael Perelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Date: 1/26/02 7:43:45 PM
>
>I got a note today complaining about the formatting of many
of the
>messages on pen-l, which are difficult to decipher and contain
too much
>extraneous text. Could we be more careful in the future?
>
>On Sat, Jan 26, 2002 at 07:35:40PM -0800, Michael Pugliese wrote:
>>
>>
>> >--- Original Message ---
>> >From: Battaglia comunista <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> >Date: 1/26/02 4:25:01 AM
>>
>> ...
>> >
>> >> the near-hysterical tone and insults of your latest
>> >
>> >> reply indicates to me that the contradictions in your
>> >
>> >> position are really starting to bite.
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> The contradiction that strikes me particularly
>> >
>> >> strongly is the one between your advocacy of working
>> >
>> >> class struggle, on the one hand, and your efforts to
>> >
>> >> the remove from this discussion any concrete
>> >
>> >> references to or suggestions for working class
>> >
>> >> struggle, on the other hand.
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> You talk a lot about class struggle, but when faced
>> >
>> >> with, for instance, the reality that class struggle
>> >
>> >> almost always takes place around demands for reforms,
>> >
>> >> you throw up your hands in horror. Similarly, you
>> >
>> >> regard class struggle in Argentina as the way forward,
>> >
>> >> but refuse to face the fact that class struggle in
>> >
>> >> that country is very obviously being undertaken mostly
>> >
>> >> by workers who still have a reformist worldview, and
>> >
>> >> also around various demands for more or less radical
>> >
>> >> reforms.
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> You want to escape the contradiction in your position
>> >
>> >> and the obvious absurdity of repudiating class
>> >
>> >> struggle in Argentina in the name of class struggle by
>> >
>> >> withdrawing from concrete debate about Argentina, and
>> >
>> >> you try to cover this withdrawal with the suggestion
>> >
>> >> that people like me who do want to discuss the
>> >
>> >> situation in that country in detail are guilty of not
>> >
>> >> discussing Argentina in our own 'communities'.
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> This is a strange accusation to make of me, since I
>> >
>> >> have posted very recently the record of a picket and
>> >
>> >> public meeting on Argentina held by the AIC in
>> >
>> >> Auckland. I want to tell you a little bit about this
>> >
>> >> meeting and about the group that held it in the hope
>> >
>> >> of pointing up what I see as the absurdity of your
>> >
>> >> total repudiation of fighting for reforms, work with
>> >
>> >> reformists, and also work with Leninists.
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> At our meeting a couple of short talks were followed
>> >
>> >> by questions and then informal discussion. One of the
>> >
>> >> first questions asked came from a man who seemingly
>> >
>> >> thought that liberation theology and, perhaps, the
>> >
>> >> Catholic Church were a progressive force in Latin
>> >
>> >> America.
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> The person who had just given the talk argued that
>> >
>> >> liberation theology was not a genuinely radical strand
>> >
>> >> in thinking but rather a gesture by the church to
>> >
>> >> maintain influence over rebellious peasants and
>> >
>> >> workers. She pointed to the reactionary role that the
>> >
>> >> Pope had played in Latin American conflicts - for
>> >
>> >> instance, his refusal to condemn American aggression
>> >
>> >> in Nicaragua during a visit to the country in the 80s
>> >
>> >> -as evidence for her point of view. She did emphasise,
>> >
>> >> though, that the ideology of liberation theology could
>> >
>> >> be construed as radical by individual priests looking
>> >
>> >> to justify their association with radical struggles,
>> >
>> >> in the same way that the ideology of Christianity has
>> >
>> >> frequently been commandeered for radical purposes
>> >
>> >> during events like the English revolution and the
>> >
>> >> colonisation of New Zealand. The person who had asked
>> >
>> >> the question about liberation theology seemed
>> >
>> >> interested in this answer - it seemed that his
>> >
>> >> sympathy for liberation theology had stemmed from an
>> >
>> >> acquaintance with some radical individual priests,
>> >
>> >> rather than any devotion to the Catholic Church as
>> >
>> >> such.
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> Another aspect of our recent Argentina solidarity
>> >
>> >> activities that I'd like to dwell on is the
>> >
>> >> conversation I had with an Argentinean employee of
>> >
>> >> Aerolinas Argentinas who came to our solidarity picket
>> >
>> >> of the US Consulate General. This guy thought of the
>> >
>> >> crisis in his country in quite nationalistic terms,
>> >
>> >> and put forward the view that "all of the small
>> >
>> >> countries, New Zealand, Argentina, should get together
>> >
>> >> and fight the US, oppose its policies". At the same
>> >
>> >> time, he expressed his great sympathy for the
>> >
>> >> anti-capitalist protests in Seattle and Genoa, saying
>> >
>> >> he was delighted to hear about them.
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> What I tried to do, talking to this guy, was
>> >
>> >> respectfully and gently suggest that there was a
>> >
>> >> contradiction between some of the politics of the
>> >
>> >> anti-capitalist movement and the nationalist course he
>> >
>> >> was advocating, and that nationalism of the Peronists
>> >
>> >> might even be heavily implicated in the economic chaos
>> >
>> >> which threatened his future. This person was also a
>> >
>> >> staunch advocate of reforms like nationalisation of
>> >
>> >> the banks, but did not seek to give those reforms a
>> >
>> >> class line did not, for instance, seek
>> >
>> >> renationalisation of the banks under workers control.
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> The third example that I want to give concerns a
>> >
>> >> member of the AIC, the group that organised the picket
>> >
>> >> and public meeting. It was after coming into touch
>> >
>> >> with this man several months ago that I realised
>> >
>> >> particulalry strongly that I would have to revise my
>> >
>> >> view that all Leninists were contemptible would-be
>> >
>> >> bureaucrats.
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> The guy in question is eighty-eight years old, and has
>> >
>> >> been involved in virtually every major social movement
>> >
>> >> in NZ over the past fifty years. He was one of the
>> >
>> >> founders of the anti-Vietnam War movement, which began
>> >
>> >> in Auckland with I think a march of three people. He
>> >
>> >> was involved in anti-racist rugby tour protests
>> >
>> >> decades before they became an issue that split and
>> >
>> >> seriously destabilised the country in 1981. He was
>> >
>> >> involved in an army mutiny over conditions in 1942. He
>> >
>> >> did an amazing amount of work for our group, including
>> >
>> >> standing outside the conference of the governing
>> >
>> >> Labour Party last year with us and chanting Baby
>> >
>> >> killers, murderers to shame-faced delegates and cops
>> >
>> >> afraid to muscle an elderly man. He also happens to be
>> >
>> >> a Maoist.
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> Trying to understand the contradiction between this
>> >
>> >> mans deeds and some of his views, I was forced to
>> >
>> >> consider the history of communism in this country.
>> >
>> >> Alone in the West, the NZ Communist Party sided with
>> >
>> >> Albania and China in the Sino-Soviet split in the
>> >
>> >> early 60s. A puppet Moscow party was soon set up to
>> >
>> >> match the Peking parrots, and it gained a
>> >
>> >> stranglehold over the trade union movement, advocating
>> >
>> >> very conservative, economistic, semi-reformist ideas.
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> The only opposition to this party, at least until the
>> >
>> >> emergence of small Trotskyists groups on campus in the
>> >
>> >> late 60s, was the CP, which adopted a sort of
>> >
>> >> supermilitant Maoism. There were no organised
>> >
>> >> autonomist Marxists, or council communists, or
>> >
>> >> anarchists, or anything else that might be contained
>> >
>> >> by the term libertarian left. In these
>> >
>> >> circumstances, I can see how the CP, distorted by
>> >
>> >> Stalinism though it was, might seem some sort of
>> >
>> >> radical alternative to reformism. Inevitably, the CP
>> >
>> >> bred splits in the 70s, and I think the guy I am
>> >
>> >> speaking of ended up in one of these splits.
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> The point I am making is that in each of these
>> >
>> >> examples we encounter someone holding a
>> >
>> >> position/engaged in a practice which has good as well
>> >
>> >> as bad features, and which must be engaged with in a
>> >
>> >> sophisticated, sympathetic manner. Under your
>> >
>> >> criteria, each of the people I have mentioned would be
>> >
>> >> rejected out of hand. The first person would be a
>> >
>> >> symapthiser of a hierachical institution, pushing
>> >
>> >> alien class ideas, who should be exposed as bourgeois.
>> >
>> >> The second person would be condemned as an enemy of
>> >
>> >> class struggle, despite the fact that he had been
>> >
>> >> engaged in the most whitehot class struggle in the
>> >
>> >> world at the moment. The third person you would class
>> >
>> >> as bourgeois, compare to a fascist, and seek to
>> >
>> >> expose inside protest movements. In the name of
>> >
>> >> class struggle, you would repudiate a person
>> >
>> >> sympathetic to class struggle, a person engaged in
>> >
>> >> class struggle as we speak, and a person who has been
>> >
>> >> involved in class struggle for longer proabably than
>> >
>> >> your parents have been alive.
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> If your position does not allow you to have comradely
>> >
>> >> feelings towards these people, and leads you to
>> >
>> >> condemn and abuse me as some sort of traitor, then I
>> >
>> >> wonder you expect to be able to do the 'community
>> >
>> >> outreach' work on Argentina you advocate. How are you
>> >
>> >> going to deal with what may be by and large the most
>> >
>> >> reactionary population in the world? If reformists,
>> >
>> >> Maoists and fellow autopsy list members like me are
>> >
>> >> too heretical, how will Joe Blow from Idaho, who
>> >
>> >> thinks everyone has a fair deal in America and thinks
>> >
>> >> President Bush had no option but to attack
>> >
>> >> Afghanistan, fare? How will any member of the American
>> >
>> >> working class who is brave enought to strike or
>> >
>> >> protest for a reform in the present atmosphere fare?
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> Surely your latest coments are digging you into a
>> >
>> >> ultra-leftist and incredibly sectarian hole, a hole
>> >
>> >> which you will have to climb out of to engage in any
>> >
>> >> sort of practical political activity?
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> Cheers
>> >
>> >> Scott
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>> >
>> >> For "a ruthless criticism of every existing idea":
>> >
>> >> THR@LL, NZ's class struggle anarchist paper http://www.freespeech.org/th=
>> >rall/
>> >
>> >> THIRD EYE, a Kiwi lib left project, at http://www.geocities.com/the_thir=
>> >d_eye_website/
>> >
>> >> and 'REVOLUTION' magazine, a Frankfurt-Christchurch production,
>> http://c=
>> >antua.canterbury.ac.nz/%7
>> >Ejho32/
>> >
>> >>
>>
>
>--
>Michael Perelman
>Economics Department
>California State University
>Chico, CA 95929
>
>Tel. 530-898-5321
>E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
