Re: AUT: report from Argentina

[Scott Hamilton <s_h_hamilton@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Tom,

I think that the question of tone is quite subjective,
partly because tone is very difficult to convey over e
mail. Political argument is not by its very nature a
humble activity, and in the case of East Timor we are
talking about activists making decisions which cost
people their lives (or didn't, according to opinion).

What about misrepresenting people's positions? No
doubt this is ethically wrong, but I don't think we
can judge someone guilty of it without looking at the
substance of the arguments being made. You accuse me
of 'combing the web' looking for things to discredit
them. But is this necessarily unethical? What if, say,
Hardt's article really does discredit his take on
Marxism, just as the behaviour of Second International
discredited some of Kautsky's take on Marxism in 1914?
I think we do have to find our way from the lecture
hall to the barricade, and find how some of these
ideas pan out in practice.

I did some reading on East Timor several months ago,
for a meeting I was supposed to speak at, but I did
also go to some trouble to comb the net for new
references for my arguments, so that people like you
could check the veracity of what I was saying.

For instance, you seemed to believe that the East
Timorese were defenceless in 1999, and that it would
have taken either the UN or an expeditionary force of
people like me(!) to defend them. In response to this
I dug up a couple of references, one to a far left
site, and one to the Australian Financial Review,
which suggested that the East Timorese were far from
defenceless - in other words, that the problem was not
military but political. As far as I can tell no one
has acknowledged this evidence, which I regard as a
devastating, horrific indictment of the East Timorese
leadership. So many other inconvenient pieces of
evidence have gone unacknowledged, too - for instance,
the role of the UN in smashing the unemployed workers'
movement in Dili in January 2000.

How about the point of offering support as well as
criticism? I agree with you wholeheartedly here -
whenever peple are acting together they should balance
criticism with action. Going back a month or so, I
emphasised my basic support for No War But the Class
War when I comented on their literature on the
firefighters' dispute (some of which I printed out
photocopied and distributed at a meeting of the AIC).
But in the case of, say, the base-superstructure
problem we're not really talking about a United Front,
so it may seem a bit redundant to say 'by the way, I
think you're a good fella really'.

Here's something I wrote about this problem of
criticism and support a while back on a NZ list
(ironically, it relies on the despised
base-superstructure distinction):

"Another distinction I find useful is the one between
being subjectively and objectively revolutionary and
counter-revolutionary. Take my debate with Nick over
East Timor: I consider that his position in 1999 was
objectively counter-revolutionary, but I wouldn't want
to say that he was subjectively counter-revolutionary,
that he wasn't sincere in taking up that position. If
I did that then I'd be falling into the same trap as
the tiresome anarchists who believe that every
Leninist is a conscious agent of counter-revolution,
determined to see the construction of gulags and the
shooting of anarchists (to be fair, I haven't met any
anarchists like this in NZ).

The truth is that we don't know for sure in advance
whether the positions we take on different issues are
correct: we only know when we look at the results of
practice, and even then we might disagree. And
everyone will be wrong often, especially in New
Zealand, where we are isolated and weak. I'm for UFs
partly because they enable us to test in practice
who's right and who's wrong, and alter our ideas (and,
sometimes, party memberships) accordingly."

Cheers
Scott





=====
"Revolution is not like cricket, not even one day cricket"

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