Re: AUT: Re:Sylvie and George (fwd)

[pmargin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Paul, I will try to come up with some useful questions/comments for "Reeve"
- perhaps others on the list might want to add their own.

As for maoists, soft or otherwise, in Chiapas: I certainly wasn't trying to
suggest that Marcos et al. came from soft maoism. The formal lineage of the
EZLN is pretty clearly established, I think; again both the Carr review I
mentioned, and Le Bot's introduction, spell this out, and it sounds like
pretty standard ML fare. Marcos himself talks to Le Bot about the initial
importance for him of guevarism, but again the emphasis in his narrative is
upon the impact of the communities upon those who had come from outside
thinking they would "lead" them, only to themselves be subverted in the
process.

While I would dearly like to hear more of how participants other than
Marcos tell this tale of seduction/conversion/whatever, and see what can be
made of their accounts, it doesn't strike me as completely implausible.
That's why I found somewhat glib the argument within the ab irato text
which took for granted that any assemblies in the communities must
necessarily be piloted by "marxist-leninist wolves" (as Sergio Bologna once
characterised the role of the various maoist cliques within the early
German Green movement). Maybe the community assemblies in Chiapas were/are
piloted - after all, mass assemblies are as vulnerable to manipulation as
any other form of organisation - but simply deducing it in this sort of way
doesn't prove it.

That, anyhow, is how I remember the argument of the ab irato text. Of
course, I can't find it on my hard disk right now to check, so apologies in
advance if I've misrepresented the authors' position . . .

Steve




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