RE: [A-List] Fw: Autobiographical Writing For Reality: It's A Da mn Good Thing For All Of Us

["Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Hunter Gray writes:
>
> If I'm going to expect anyone to listen to me, I'm packing that Ego with
all
> the rest of the tools of my trade -- the Rigging -- that I carry wherever
I
> go. And that happens to be right here, right now.
>
> -----
>
> With respect, comrade...
>
> I'm not going to dispute with you the importance and value of personal
experience, and the undoubted role that ego plays in all our activities --
including the composition of this message. But some perspective is in order.
>
> Just over a year ago on Marxmail you and I had a brief exchange regarding
your blanket dismissal of Swedish-speaking Finns, based, as with your
favourable impressions of Mormonism, on your personal experience. I can just
as equally cite very good personal experiences with Swedish-speaking Finns,
some of whom are my colleagues and others of whom are my personal friends.
Then there are those Swedish-speaking Finns who are involved, in one way or
another, in various branches of left politics. You ignored the relative
poverty of Swedish-speaking communities in the west of Finland traditionally
reliant on fishing and farming. Your dismissal of Swedish-speaking Finns
rested then on your experience of them as restricting themselves to their
own circle, and always identifying themselves first and foremost by
reference to their linguistic heritage. This is a bit ironic from one who
goes to great lengths to parade his heritage on-line. Since then you have
augmented your original fatwa b!
> y referring to historical Swedish linguistic and cultural imperialism in
Finland. The implication is that the Swedish-speaking minority should
assimilate totally and renounce the sins of their forebears. If you think I
have misinterpreted you I will supply you with quotations from your own
published writings as an explanation.
>
> I was, however, prepared to follow your own example...
>
> "So when there's a sullen, clenched-teeth growl in the brush and thickets,
> when there's a bitter little  sting from the jaundiced shadows --  I shrug
> our Native shrug and keep right on keeping on Blazing Trail."
>
> ...until the recent dispute over Mormonism, followed by the publication of
this rather self-serving screed. It's not that I don't appreciate the value
of experience, or even the value of your own efforts here and elsewhere.
Rather, it's the fact that, in the case of both the Swedish-speaking Finns
and the Mormons, your analysis is totally devoid of class, and depends
instead upon exclusively personal impressions of a sort that, in other
circumstances, would be leapt upon as mistaken indulgence or prejudice. What
if I were to condemn Blackfoot Indians because a few I had met were always
insistent upon identifying themselves by their heritage, including their
language? What if I were to reconsider the Ku Klux Klan in light of my
acquaintance with a few working class members of that organisation who had
showed me kindness and hospitality?
>
> Re Mormonism, it is still an institutionally racist organisation, as a
cursory Google search would confirm. The Mormon Church, whilst welcoming
darker-skinned converts (including, most famously, Gladys Knight) and even
permitting non-white priests, does not sanction inter-racial marriage.
Apparently the "cultures" don't mix.
>
> As for autobiographical writing, as a contribution to political work at
least, it is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
>
> Michael Keaney

Response (Jim C): My favorite reading from the Collected Works of Lenin is
his notebooks that reveal his sources, adductive and inductive reasoning,
data and the "shoulders" of those before him on which he stood on a given
issue. Lenin, like Marx, Engels, Mao and others understood that one cannot
change, smash or transform that which is not understood concretely and one
cannot understand concretely without concrete investigation and without
concrete praxis. Anecdotal stuff can be important and part of the puzzle but
cannot ever constitute complete and concrete evidence to solve the whole
puzzle.

On this medium, the internet, there are some blessings and some curses--it
is all very dialectical. This medium allows us to gather, exchange
information, articles, whole files, coded messages or whatever. This medium
also facilitates some short-cuts to understanding that actually sabotage or
can sabotage real understanding and effective praxis. One example I gave
before, in which Jeffrey St. Clair, putting together some pieces from the
internet on Eloise Cabell, a Blackfeet with a case against the U.S.
Government, in some cases he was merely acting as a transcriber without
analysis, put forward the notion that Eloise Cabell was a sort of "Rosa
Parks" of the "Blackfeet" Tribe or Band in Montana. Never mind calling me,
all he had to do was make a few selected phone calls, perhaps only two, to
Browning itself, and he would have been quickly disabused of any notion of
Cobell as some sort of Rosa Parks unless one wants to commit slurs against
Rosa Parks. There is a lesson in this: When removed from a concrete
situation, in which there are some concrete issues (never mind lives, jobs
etc) at stake, cherry-picking data and sources, personal anecdotes from
limited sources, throwing out "analysis" based on some sources and slogans
that sort of sound revolutionary just ain't going to cut it. It can cause
real damage to real people.

This medium allows all sorts of predators to pose as adolescents to recruit
and it also allows, with elaborate websites etc, all sorts of
legends-in-their-own-minds to pose as real legends. I think we all suffer to
some extent from the phenomenon of "The older I get the better I used to be"
and therefore personal anecdotes, experiences, remembrances etc must be
taken carefully, never taken as "definitive evidence" of anything,
supplanted with wider data and other anecdotal evidence and put to the test
of praxis: What do I do with this information concretely and what do the
results from the application of this infomration tell me about its sources,
veracity etc. When I told a highly respected Elder at Browning that Eloise
Cabell had been portrayed as some kind of revolutionary heroine (I do
applaud any chaos caused to the BIA, Dept of Interior and U.S. Government
and the issues of the litigation are sound) and "Rosa Parks" of the
Blackfeet, at first she laughed heartily but then got pissed. She noted that
those who do not know Browning and have not been there, should not write
about what they do not really know about; they can cause real damage and
give legitimacy to those undeserving of it thus allowing them to gain
stature and influence among the ill-informed or uninformed.

So it is with these lists. All sorts may trade on their revolutionary pasts
(or perhaps their own self-created revolutionary pasts) to leverage
credibility and standing in the present. Doesn't mean shit. We have all
sorts of examples of individuals with sterling revolutionary pasts now
working for forces of repression and reaction for their own purposes. It
only matters what we DO in the present, on which side we STAND, whom we
SERVE (implicitly as well as explicitly) and frankly, I have usually found
my own ego to be more of a liability than asset in concrete struggle and
concrete analysis.

As for the Mormons, no amount of rhetoric, personal anecdotes or whatever
will ever change or hide what they are and what they intend; they are a
sick, twisted, phony, authoritarian, racist, sexist, homophobic,
proto-fascist,predatory, deceitful, genocidal and very dangerous and
well-connected (with the upper echelons of imperialism and reaction
everywhere) cult. The evidence is overwhelming, from their own writings and
mouths and from those who have left them, and experiences with individual
Mormons has nothing to do with the essence of Mormonism which is a matter
for evidence and analysis rather than trips down memory lane of any
individual--no matter what his/her supposed or self-declared "standing" in
revolutionary circles.

Remember the nazis, particularly the SA, had lumpen elements, working class
elements etc who bought into and touted the supposed "socialism" in the
title of the nazi party (NSDAP) and whose crude pseudo-socialist sympathies
were used effectively to build the foundations of fascism after which they
were purged to reveal the real face of fascism that built camps first for
socialists and communists before building them for Jews and Roma/Sinti, Gays
etc.

Jim Craven