Re: [Marxism] Attitude toward Iraqi CP

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Alex LoCascio wrote:

> Dear Comrade Brian,
>
> If I were you, I wouldn't get too worked up over our 
> Laptop Guerillas on Marxmail, who are the sort of absurd 
> funhouse mirror reflection of Cruise Missile liberals 
> like Christopher Hitchens and David Rieff.
>  
Is this like what my high school teachers used to tell me in the 
1950s--that the USSR and the USA were looking more and more like each 
other and would meet in the middle? I never really understood this. 
Well, I do enjoy my cocktails. So maybe that makes me and Christopher 
Hitchens kissing cousins.

> My late comrade and teacher Martin Glaberman use to
> tell an old story about George Rawick, when the latter
> was a member of the Workers Party while it tried
> to formulate a position on Sri Lanka.  After receiving
> a negative answer to the question of whether the WP
> had any forces on the ground, he asked "what the hell
> do we need an official position for?"
>  
But it is very important for the Marxmail party to have a position on 
everything in the world. Our Cyprus commission is working on a line at 
this very moment. After Jim Farmelant presents the majority position, we 
expect all Marxmailers to defend the line in public until the next 
convention meets in my living room. Drinks are on me.

> Assuming that post participants on this list agree on
> a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, I don't understand what the
> point is about drawing lines in the sand about which forces
> one "supports."  I must've missed the call out for the
> Marxmail.org Abraham Lincoln Brigade for Iraq.
>  
I guess the issue is what attitude to take toward the Iraq CP or 
something. I personally have more animus toward their comrades in 
Nicaragua who urged a vote for Violetta Chamorro in 1990, but I wouldn't 
wish that they got shot or something. Maybe somebody should force them 
to listen to Michael Bolton CD's as punishment.

> Macho chest-beating and warrior posturing isn't just political 
> empty, it's also just totally goofy.
>  
Ah, what the hell. There's nothing wrong with letting off a little 
steam. If you hold things in, you might develop bipolar symptoms or 
something.

> Some words of wisdom:
>
> "What is tiresome in ideological arguments is that one is necessarily
> swept away by the 'model of war.'  That is to say that when you find
> yourself facing someone with ideas different from your own, you are
> always led to identify that person as an enemy (of your class, your
> society, etc.).  And we know that it is necessary to wage combat
> against the enemy until triumphing over him. 
Hmmm. Foucault. Have you read what Alain Badiou had to say on the matter?

What must be emphasized is that to purify the real means to extract it 
from the reality that envelops and occults it. Whence the violent taste 
for surface and transparency. The century attempts to react against 
depth. It carries out a fierce critique of foundations and of the 
beyond, it promotes the immediate and the surface of sensation. It 
proposes, as heir to Nietzsche, to abandon all other-worlds, and to pose 
that the real is identical to appearance. Thought, precisely because 
what drives it is not the ideal but the real, must seize hold of 
appearance as appearance, or of the real as pure event of its own 
appearance. To achieve this, it must destroy every density, every claim 
to substantiality, every assertion of reality. It is reality that acts 
as an obstacle to the discovery of the real as pure surface. Here lies 
the struggle against semblance. But since the semblance-of-reality 
adheres to the real, the destruction of semblance comes to be identified 
with destruction pure and simple. At the end of its purification, the 
real, as total absence of reality, is the nothing. This path, undertaken 
by innumerable ventures in the century – political, artistic, scientific 
ventures – is the path of terrorist nihilism. Since its subjective 
motivation is the passion for the real, it is not a consent to anything, 
it is a creation, and one should recognise in it the traits of an active 
nihilism.

--
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org




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