Follow-up to Marshall and Cockshott

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis:

Many thanks to Paul Cockshott and Scott Marshall for their prompt
private and public replies to my questions.

I urge everybody on the list to take Scott's recruitment pitch seriously.
Join the CPUSA, and you too will be able to explain after six months
of basic training how Browder hijacked the CP during WWII under
Stalin's watchful eye, and how the CP's no-strike pledge during WWII
*only* applied to defense industries (steel, rail, auto, coal,
shipbuilding, electrical, arms, aircraft, rubber, longshore, etc.--OK,
milliners, hit the picket line.) Only two people are excused from
joining the CP--Ralph Dumain and myself, who are both incorrigible.

Paul Cockshott does admire the Shining Path from afar, but seems a
little unsure of what they stand for. Well, that's OK, Paul, why not just
fill us in on the origin and program of your own outfit over there in
Scotland. What's it called? "Revenge of the Proletariat", or "Red Fists
of Fury", or something like that.

I would also like to throw down the challenge to any Trotskyist
"vanguardists" out there on the list. Isn't Walter Daum, the publisher
of "Angry Workers on Parade" or "Hammer and Sickle Forever"--the
name escapes me--qualified to represent himself as the Trotsky of the
modern era. His group has, as we in the SWP used to delicately put it,
fewer than 10,000 members, but its IDEAS put it in the vanguard, I
would suppose.

What is the debate about exactly? Its not about something so sterile
and unimportant as permanent revolution vs 2-stage theory, popular
front vs united front, support or non-support for WWII, etc. The
debate is about the psychopathology of groups of "Marxist-Leninists",
Trotskyists, etc. numbering less than 1/10th of 1/10th of the
population of a given country representing themselves as the vanguard
of anything. This approach has led to dogmatism and sectarianism and
is an obstacle to the building of a genuine revolutionary party.

Maybe Scott Marshall, Paul Cockshott and Walter Daum should
caucus together and defend the methodology they share in common.
We all know how well pro-Moscow, pro-Peking and Trotskyist
vanguard parties have collaborated in the past.

Sometime next weekend I will submit the first installment of my
critique of the type of "Marxism-Leninism" represented by comrades
Marshall, Cockshott and Daum. Prepare yourselves.



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