Re: Dialectical Emptyness

[Margaret Trawick <trawick@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stan wrote:

>
>Slap for a slap.  You know I disapprove of flame wars, and personalizing
>these arguments through name calling.  But drop the "troll" comment, and
>there is a real question here.  This did appear an attempt to trivialze the
>contention of left anticommunism.
>

If I gave that impression, I'm sorry.  Some people have referred to the left as
McCarthyites for (allegedly) attempting to silence people to the right.  You
know, the whole "PC" business.  Such charges get hurled around constantly.

Left anticommunism would be a good thing to talk about, intelligently and
without flames.  Somehow, this topic should be separated from the matter of
people feeling personally snubbed by their cohorts.  Otherwise, if people dwell
upon the latter, the discussion does risk becoming trivial.


(MT:)
>>And whose fault is this?  If some self-professed communists waste their
>time by
>>flaming each other on a public website, they just show themselves to be damn
>>fools.
>

(Stan:)
>Ad hominem argument.  A staple of the blame shifting tactic.

(MT:)
Not entirely.  Carrol had already pointed to communists charging other
communists with simply reciting some orthodoxy, and therefore dismissing their
arguments.  If people who call themselves communists dismiss other communists
on the same grounds that Carrol says the public-at-large dismisses them,  then
they do have to share some of the blame for their plight.


(Stan:)
>
>Caricaturing.  Straw man.
>


(MT:)

Yeah, I know.  I was angry.  Sorry.


(Stan:)
>
>Now the straw man is constructed, we can proceed to tear it apart.  This
>whole description has nothing to do with the millions of communists around
>the world who work their tails off every day, and who have genuinely
>internalized social change as a vocation.  I would again appeal to you to
>examine your own reactions to your own possible preconceptions about
>communists and communism.
>

(MT:)
If I built a straw man (which I admit that I did), it was intended to represent
not communists as a whole, but the people on this list and their quarrels.  I
do not have any preconceptions about "communists" except that before coming to
this list, I thought of American communists as mainly people who lived on
communes and shared all their material possessions, and other Communists (such
as in Kerala) as people who belong to Communist parties, and engage in party
politics,  and sometimes are communists in name only, and sometimes engage in
good work.

(Carrol wrote:)
>>
>>>Probably there is no more deeply held conviction amongst the majority
>>>of people in the United States (including many who either think of
>>>themselves or really are marxists) than that communists (or *other*
>>>communists) don't think, they merely parrot an orthodoxy. All U.S.
>>>intellectuals must parrot some version of this to establish their
>credentials
>>>as  independent thinkers and free spirits in contrast to that thundering
>>>herd out there of "orthodox marxists."
>>

(MT wrote:)

>>Thus "communists" and "other communists" are hanging themselves.  Who's the
>>troll here?

(Stan:)
>Thus?  Peggy, this doesn't respond to the argument at all.  It is only
>responding to your own redefinition of the argument as invalid, based on
>your characterization of communists.

(MT)

No.  I was in fact responding to what Carrol said:  (some) communists diss
other communists, and accuse them of doing what anti-communists accuse all
communists of doing.  Therefore, communists who do this are colluding in the
dismissal-as-trivial of communism as a whole.

You (Stan) brought up the issue of anti-communism on the left, and you used the
word "McCarthyism,"  about which I _do_ have a lot of preconceptions, to do
with HUAC, witch-hunts and so forth.

Carrol, in a subsequent post, suggested that McCarthyism was an imprecise word
to describe the problem that you are describing.  I would agree with him on
this point, because  the word "McCarthyism" is too fraught with specific
historical memories to describe what is going on in the left right now.

Does that clear things up a bit?

MT
(Peggy)