RE: [Marxism] assisting the work of the police

[Steve Gabosch <sgabosch@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have a couple questions I need to ask to help me better understand the
context of the April 2003 post on alt.politics.socialism.trotsky by Louis
Proyect that I was responding to.  It is the one Lance M. had posted a url
to the other day at
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=un7t9v0gjtksj3ihe92h2t84anu5h78vtj%404ax.com

In my opinion, the purpose of this post by Louis Proyect was to intimidate
a poster named Yvette, using ridicule.  Here is the paragraph I was
particularly focused on:

"Btw, any idea what Jack is going to do with the 20 million dollars he
got from selling West Street? Is that salted away in some Swiss bank?
If it is, I can completely understand why the membership is being
coerced to cough up the funds for the move out of West Street. After
all, nobody would want to touch the fortune of the Beloved Leader who
keeps most of the financial records of his sect-cult to himself."

This paragraph implies Barnes is doing something underhanded with a large
amount of money.

Now, I am not going to back off a millimeter from my position on class
solidarity and the position I advocate of not placing leftists and left
groups in jeopardy with false accusations of criminal activity, even if
these accusations are made in some kind of jest and are intended to be
interpreted as "irony," or whatever other excuse for making such
accusations one might invent.  In the revolutionary and leftist movement in
general, such talk, when put in public writing such as on the internet, can
indeed eventually aid the police and right-wing and other enemies of the
left and should be avoided on principle.  I am glad to see that no one on
Marxmail made any attempt to question the truth of this concept - everyone
so far has just left it alone.  Most know better, I believe.  However,
should anyone be tempted to cross this line - for whatever reason - I
suggest they think it through before they do.  Think Cointelpro.  Enough said?

But ... there is more to the background to Louis Proyect's 2003 post than I
was aware of.  I did not do all of my homework.  So here are my questions.

One, I didn't know that there was an article on the sale of 410 West Street
in the NY Times.  Is this article in the Marxmail archives or on someone's
computer?  I would like to please see that.

Two, I could only find one post by Yvette, who posted a Militant article on
the apst list, so I did not understand what Louis Proyect was talking about
when he accused her of flooding that news group with articles from the
Militant.  What is the big deal about posting some Militant articles? I
wondered.  Well, a little more rummaging, and I got a bigger picture of
just how bad posting articles from the Militant can get.  A Google search
of news groups came up with an unbelievable 19,500 postings from and about
Brian Hauk, who for some years was indeed flooding apparently dozens of
news groups with what seems like every Militant article available on the
Militant site - every single week.  People on multiple sites, many with
probably only a few postings a day, were being inundated with the same
lengthy - and unwelcome - postings, over and over. Holy cow!  Talk about
spam, that is ugly.  REALLY ugly, and really wrong.  I had no idea anyone
had been doing such a thing.  And to make it worse, in one post on apst,
Louis Proyect explained that Hauk apparently was changing e-mail addresses
so it made trying to filter his spam out difficult or impossible.    So my
second question is, just what the heck was that all about?  Do I have the
story right?  And has this stopped?

Two final points.  On some things Joaquin said, I believe he is telling
untruths when he says the SWP is "breaking out the cheerleading pom-poms
for the imperialists storm troopers in Iraq" and that the Militant is
spouting "Pentagon propaganda."   He is welcome to his opinions and
attitudes, but his statements, to be truthful, require positive evidence
from the actual newspaper, and not just his negative opinions and attitudes
toward it.  Were he to seriously attempt this, he would find no such
evidence.  The Militant is unambiguously anti-imperialist through and through.

On various things Fred and others say about the internal affairs and
organization of the SWP, I am simply not interested in judging these
claims.  I am just too far away from the internal life of the SWP to get an
accurate enough picture to judge what it should and should not be doing to
concretely organize itself, and, quite frankly, I see no reason to believe
what hostile opponents of the SWP have to say about its internal life.  I
remain neutral on principle - I am quite happy to leave the internal
affairs of any group, especially a group like the SWP, to the members and
leaders to figure out on their own.  What I do try to pay close attention
to is program and strategy (of which an organization's general
organizational principles are of course a part of - it is how they are
executed that I do not try to judge from a distance).  Two new issues of
the journal the New International are scheduled to come out soon, and I
will be reading them closely.

In solidarity,
- Steve

PS  Walter L., to save you the trouble, there are about 915 words in this
post.  :-))
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