Re: Whom I identify with and Why

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis: Very interesting. I am on the faculty of the Brecht Forum in NY
where I give a workshop on the Internet. I have met and talked to
Kargalitsky on a number of occasions and agree with your assessment
completely. As you know already, I am absolutely opposed to Alec Nove's
market socialism. I put the question to Kargalitsky at one point what he
thought of Nove and market socialism. His reply: "of course market
socialism". I made a mental note to myself there and then: "oh no".

On Buzgalin. He spoke at a Brecht Forum weekend symposium on Lenin
co-sponsored by "Science and Society". I thought his understanding of
Lenin was indistinguishable from the rest of the academics there. He went
on and on about civil society, etc. in a manner that reminded all too much
of some of the authors who contribute regularly to "Social Text".

This is really too bad. I think that they are very good at analysis, but
not so good at posing solutions. Your approach seems to have much more
promise even though I hazard to guess that you are in a small minority.
Don't let this bother you. At this early stage of the reconstitution of a
revolutionary socialist movement, it is better to be clear than to be
popular.

On Wed, 29 May 1996, Vladimir Bilenkin wrote:

> Western counterparts.  The Party of Labor is a "pocket" party,
> sometimes called the party of the "computer programists." It consists
> of a small group of people who came from the leftish dissident circles
> of the late 1970s and who are hopelessly flesh and blood of the Soviet
> middle-brow intelligentsia. As it is often the case, their visibility
> in the West is completely out of proportion with their weight in the
> Russian Left. The reason for this is that they are "literary" or
> "academic marxists" virtually indistinguishable from the middle-class
> left establishment in the West. Thus, Kagarlitsky - a prolific writer
> who, to my knowledge, has never published a book in Russian - is an
> incomplete Russian edition of S. Aronowitz. With one Russian twist
> though. While the American original suffers through ideological
> "evolution" in time, his Russian edition - free from the controls of
> Western intellectual order - can enjoy holding opposite views
> simultenuously: to "plea for "derevising" Marx at the NYC Brecht Forum,
> and to dismiss the Marxist "mythology of the proletariat" in the
> "prestigious" bourgeois journal in Moscow. Enough of this ilk.
>



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