[Marxism] Moderator's note

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Recently, I have noticed a kind of "talk" tendency seeping into Marxmail. I
want to get us to refrain from this. Let me explain.

By "talk," I mean the kind of discourse that exists on Doug Henwood's
LBO-Talk, where you will find hundreds of exchanges around a question that
by its nature cannot be resolved through email. These usually involve
clashes of opinion around really vaporous topics like whether socialism is
a good idea or not, or whether religion has any value. Since Henwood
himself refuses to write more than 3 sentences on email and sees email
itself as a kind of diversion from more substantive, revenue-generating
print journalism assignments, it is no surprise that he has created a list
ecology after his own style.

I see Marxmail in an entirely different light. I want this list to function
like the letters section of a serious journal, where there are no space
limitations. I also would hope that when you sit down to write something to
the list, in the back of your mind questions such as this will be posed:
"What new information will comrades learn from my post?"; "How will my post
serve to *resolve* a controversy rather than to keep it going?"; "What
avenues of research will be opened up by my post?"; etc. In addition, I
would hope that comrades refrain from seeing the list as a kind of open
invitation to debate. It is *not* necessary to challenge every viewpoint
that you disagree with, especially if it involves issues that have been
hashed over countless times.

You should also think of ways to simply comment on something you have read
somewhere off the list, or on a movie that you have seen, etc. I obviously
try to do this myself.

Basically, I would like to see the quantity of posts LESSENED, and the
quality of posts INCREASED.

Marxmail does not have formal rules on the number of posts per day, but you
should use a rough guideline of 3 per day. This is particularly true when
it comes to these open-ended topics like how to assess Michael Moore. What
I have noticed in this thread is a tendency for comrades to REPEAT
themselves. This is not good. Let's try to do better.


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