Reply to Leo Panitch

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Leo Panitch wrote:
> Please forward to Michael Yates in response to his message.
> Dear Michael,
> I was away for a few days, hence my lack of response. Let me put
> it this way. If someone had heard you give a radio interview on,
> say, Bush's tax cuts, based on a long essay you had written on
> this, but had prefaced an attack on what you said with a 'bio'
> that said you were anti-union, what would you have written in
> response? Wouldn't you have been inclined to invite him to read
> the essay rather than rely on the radio talk as a way of inviting
> a substantive debate, but also pointed out - by way of addressing
> the prejudicial 'bio'  itself- that everything you had ever
> written was from the side of being favourable to unions? And what
> if he then had written back quoting you saying business unionism
> was not the way forward (which was not at all what he accused you
> of at all to begin with) and then now added absurd allegations
> you had opposed a student-teacher strike at your university and
> been on the side of the administration (saying to boot that in
> any case Marxist students were not inclined to have you as their
> supervisor when in fact you were supervising the Dissertations of
> more of them than anyone else at your university), when you had
> been on their picket line all the time during their strike and
> intervened against the Chair of your own department who was
> seeking to get some of strikers expelled for disrupting one of
> his classes during the strike -- what would you make of all this?
> Is this someone who is looking for a genuine debate, or someone
> who is seeking to smear you rather than have such a debate?
> Leo

Dear Leo,

This is being sent to Michael Yates as you requested. I am also cc'ing
Patrick Bond, who has been involved in this discussion, as well as John
Bellamy Foster.

I want to apologize for ever sending you my original post. I had no idea
that you would become so defensive over what seemed to be a totally
innocent critique. I did not label you as pro-imperialist. That is why
your anguished defense over being pro-working class is besides the
point. Nobody thinks that you are against the working class or for
imperialism.

Instead, the issue is about how to theorize imperialism. I don't need to
read your article in order to understand that your ideas overlapped with
John Willoughby's. Both you and Willoughby are socialists. Neither of
you are for capitalism. But the real issue before us is whether your
distinction between "strong" ties between the USA and G7 nations versus
"weak" or "brittle" ties with the South is coherent. I don't think it
is. This is an important theoretical question that you didn't feel
necessary to engage with. You preferred that I read your paper first.

But even then, Leo, I wouldn't have expected a reply from you. You never
replied to me on the Socialist Register mailing list. It was obvious
that you are not comfortable debating with riff-raff like me. You have
nothing to gain and everything to lose. This was the attitude of Doug
Henwood as well, who evaded every challenge that I posed to him on your
mailing list. I suppose that when somebody achieves a certain status in
the world as a celebrated academic or journalist, it relieves them of
the need to answer somebody so low on the totem pole as me. To put it
bluntly, for all your genuflections to democracy, I find your attitudes
singlularly elitist. In the final analysis, this really has little to do
with how you treat your graduate students or whether or not you
participated in a picket-line. Instead, it is about whether we will have
a united left or one that is divided between the ivory tower and common
people who make up the activist left.

Louis Proyect