Re: Parting words on Leo Panitch and company

["Patrick Bond" <pbond@xxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Xxxx Xxxxxx" <xxxx.xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Frankly, I have found Pat's post overly rude and patronizing.

Hey comrade, you live in New York? I'm impressed with myself. We're very
gentle in Jo'burg, actually.

> Here is a man,
> may be 15 years younger than Lou,

You'll do well if you visit Africa, Xxxx. Generational respect is still the
rage. Allegedly that's why Mbeki doesn't push Mugabe around (an explanation
I think's a bit stale, but that's another story).

> telling him not to "fuck up" with Leo, so
> he will buy him a beer. What a "fucked up" attitude from a person
occupying
> a position in a university (to use the same language)!

Ok, will buy you *two* beers, Xxxx, if you forgive me. And I have two other
secrets just for you. Not only am I working at a bourgeois university for my
bread, and not only is this true:

> It also seems to me that there are other issues at stake here. Pat
> occasionally writes for the Socialist Register from South Africa. Leo is
the
> editor of the journal.

but I'll be at York on sabbatical beginning in September, and last time I
taught at York, in mid-2001, I house-sat for Colin Leys.

So it's a conspiracy. Now you know.

(I think those York comrades, especially my guru Saul, are all wonderful,
and I think the same of O'Connor, Brenner, Wood, Harvey and various others
whom Lou one day glorifies, the next day shits on. But I also think Lou is
wonderful over a beer at breakfast -- the penultimate time I saw him in
person, that was... and last time, about six weeks ago at a CU seminar, he
was brutal with his questions but gave me a nice smile, if you can imagine
that.)

But don't worry, no one told me to tell Lou to behave. I wrote that myself,
because I really enjoyed his postings to our SA listserve, and felt his
attack on both Panitch and Leys was off-target, and that he would damage his
good reputation on our list.

Ok, maybe a) I was wrong that he has a good rep; b) I was wrong that this
attack would damage his reputation; c) I was wrong to care about his
reputation; d) I was wrong to send him a comradely note about netiquette;
and/or e) I was wrong to assume the offlist note telling him not to fuck up
anymore would simply stay in his folder. Whatever, I won't be intimidated
from sending Lou lots of notes in future, don't worry Lou.

> Although, I beleive, this is a magazine with a
> limited scholarly value, it is obvious that Pat does not like the
criticism
> of Leo Panitch.

Right. Let's get to substance. I want *better* and more comradely criticism
of Leo (and the day after seeing Lou in April, I met Leo and Sam in Toronto
and haven't stopped fighting with them on interpretations of the
contemporary global capitalist crisis since). Because, in these obviously
useless academic circuits, Leo is one of the world's most serious scholars
of the class struggle writ large. I think Lou was dead wrong, as his own
rebuttal to Leo indicates.

My own background, by the way, is much more based on the
capital-accumulationist side of Marx (that and reproduction of labour power,
not the production process). We all have our baggage and weaknesses. The
main reason I'm going to York this year is to pick up the exceptionally good
insights into broader politics that Leo, Sam and their comrades have been
developing.

For example, I highly recommend the forthcoming SR chapter that Leo
suggested Lou read (I only got the hard copy otherwise I'd send it along).
As Lou knows, I quote from it extensively in a paper I wrote last month.
It's an attempt to develop a theory of US imperialism via a political theory
of the state, instead of the usual way round: the economic theory of uneven
development (which David Harvey does extremely well in the forthcoming SR,
in my view -- and also, I think, in Lou's). To me, both these projects have
to take place together, otherwise the idea of uneven and combined
development, and the geopolitics of territorial alliances that are the key
features of imperialism, cannot be understood. So I'm hoping someone comes
up with a synthesis of some very valuable work. Maybe all you comrades who
have read this far will also buy the Socialist Register 2004, which looks to
be a fantastic issue. (I'm spending this evening helping edit a potentially
great input on carbon-trading-imperialism.)

And as Lou can tell you, I think revisiting Rosa Luxemburg on these issues
may be more rewarding than regurgitating Lenin's five features of
imperialism again and again. (While I don't agree with Willoughby's
conclusions in that particular article, the material that Lou cited about
Lenin's weaknesses isn't all that bad, is it?)

Look, I could well be completely wrong; the only debates from that era that
I put really serious time into going through were Hilferding/Grossmann, as
we chatted about once, Mine. So I've got to do some harder work on the old
texts, once I get out of the SA/Zimbabwe cauldrons.

> If we put things in perspective, allowing people to
> challenge Panitch means that he won't be on the pay roll of  the journal
> anymore. The issue is about politics and who gets what in the end.

Ahem comrade, if you don't know how much it 'costs' in financial terms to be
a completely peripheral contributing editor of a 'journal of limited
scholarly value' like SR, trying to sell copies to low-income
worker-intellectuals and host events once every couple of years, well...try
it! I know you've got better insults up your sleeves!

> Or should I say that all these African specialists are somehow related to
> "development projects" with the South African government or some type of
> populist NGO? This developmentalist Marxism strikes me as a great
> project..:-))

Another secret: I used to do those drugs (1990-2002), but gave them up when
the high wore off too fast, don't worry. Kicked the habit. Been clean for
months.

> Obviously these people do not want a civil debate, but resort to
"warnings"
> as a means of censorship. What an inconsistent behavior with the values of
> the left! Such fake Marxists need to be challenged and exposed.

Ok, keep firing! But this has gotten silly as it is, so I'll buy you the
beers, Mine, and hear your latest on finance capital if you want to take up
a two-year old offlist discussion.

Meanwhile, RELAX. Isn't it a nice day in NYC today? We had a very chilly but
bright, sunny and athletic afternoon, my wee eight year old putting on his
Ronaldo shirt and running me ragged around a neaby park --yes, I admit, it's
called Rhodes Park -- with his township mates. After several of his slide
tackles, I'm massaging the cleat marks that penetrated my ankles, right now.

But no fear, the skin does grow very thick in Jo'burg -- it has to,
politically.

Cheers,
P.