RE: [Marxism] Reply to Carl Davidson

[Julio Huato <juliohuato@xxxxxxxxx>]

This is my last post on this list.

A sure sign that a discussion has ended its useful cycle is when it
gets personal.  With no prior knowledge of somebody's opinions or
background, one should just take people at face value.  Then, as we
get to learn their views directly from them, we can adjust our prior
accordingly.

Being a list member should be reason enough for people to be treated
with respect.  One should not need to apply for a certificate of moral
or ideological authentication to be signed ab arbitrium by the list
owner.

I'm a veteran of this list.  There's enough material signed by me on
the archives for people to infer something about me, both as a human
being and as a political animal.  To update a long political bio I
once posted here: Last year, my family (both my wife and I are
workers, we live off our work) supported Kerry for president and the
NY 13th district's Democratic candidate for Congress, Frank Barbaro. 
We helped the Democrats in suburban Pennsylvania, northern Ohio, and
here, in Brooklyn.  I'm not a U.S. citizen, I cannot be a member of
the DP, and I cannot vote.  But I can volunteer and fetch votes if I
have to, which I did.  I'm glad I did it.

But the issue here is not who I am or what I did or do.  The issue is
my views.  If, to some extent, my views are logically consistent and
also consistent with the problems workers and socialists face in
practice, and if I get to make my point clear to a couple of
fair-minded readers, then I don't think Louis Proyect is going to be
very comfortable, because my views clash with his deeply felt beliefs
on many areas: the strategy and tactics of the U.S. left, the
character of the phenomenon of imperialism, the development of
capitalism in the rest of the world, the social nature of China, the
place of environmental politics in the working class movement, etc.

If David McDonald or M. Junaid Alam or Louis Proyect, or anybody else
for that matter, had showed that my personal background, occupation,
etc., was relevant to the debate *or* if they had just asked politely,
then I could have satisfied their curiosity.  But they did not. 
McDonald, out of the blue, wants to see my party ID.  What's his
point?  That being a DP member would disqualify me and my views?  I'm
not a DP member, but I reject that being a DP is disqualifying.  M.
Junaid Alam insinuates that I have personal financial interests tied
to the views I defend on the list.  That's a cheap shot.  Obviously,
there's no genuine interest in my background, it just helps them as a
decoy.

Louis Proyect writes:

> I would urge comrades not to waste too much time in debate with Julio. He 
> is a rather ideologically hardened opponent of revolutionary socialism who 
> obviously enjoys a good debate. 
>
> In years past, I used to enjoy being the 
> bolshevique gadfly on lists like socialist-register or lbo-talk, but have 
> learned that the Internet is more productive when it is used for discussion 
> between people who share certain basic principles.
>
> I know next to nothing about Julio, except that he is an economics 
> professor in New Jersey who is originally from Mexico. 

This is slander, Louis.  

"An opponent of revolutionary socialism"?  How can you make such a
statement when, as you admit, you know "next to nothing" about me?  If
you know "next to nothing" about me, then you can only make a judgment
based on the disputes we've had here.  In other words, on the basis of
my attempts to refute your version of revolutionary socialism and
presenting my own.  But that's precisely the matter of dispute!

The dispute may not be resolved to your satisfaction, but then maybe
the true opponent of revolutionary socialism is not me, but you. 
Fair-minded readers should be the judge.  The Internet is more
productive when people are tough on ideas and treat each other with
respect.  I make an effort to be an scrupulous debater and focus hard
on the ideas.  I strive to treat people respectfully in spite of
disagreements, and only reciprocate with disrespect when I'm treated
disrespectfully.  Everybody is entitled to her own defense.

All I know about Louis Proyect is his Internet persona, the opinions
he expresses here.  And that's really all I want to know about him.  I
have little or zero interest in meeting him personally.  There are
others on this list, many who don't share my views on the DP and other
matters, that I'd be very interested in getting to know personally,
but not Louis.  Still, I'm at peace with the idea that Louis will
never endorse my views or stop characterizing me as a "Kautsky-" or
"NAFTA-" lover.  There are worse things in life that Louis Proyect's
slander.

Since he takes it upon himself to warn the readers about me, I'll
reciprocate describing his character as it's come across to me on the
net:

Proyect is a rather complex character.  On the one hand, he makes this
list available to us as a public resource, at his personal expense in
time and financial resources.  That's very generous of him.  He also
frequently finds and posts interesting materials on the lists from an
array of sources.  And he is a movie critic with two or three
impressionistic literary tricks that read well on the screen.  I
appreciate him for all that.

On the other hand, he has taken upon himself the mission of an "an
ideological hit man," the enforcer of discipline in an amorphous,
virtual, and ever shifting group with no other ideological compass
that the humors in his lower digestive tract.  He holds deep grudges
against some people on the left, apparently because they haven't
granted him the recognition he feels entitled to receive.  He's
predisposed against workers in academia, although he makes exceptions
when they are willing to praise him and carefully avoid criticizing
him.  The evidence of this dynamics is all over the archives.  One of
his frequent practices is something I'd call "line drawing" rampages. 
He wants to make sure people in the left are all branded and labeled
properly so that innocent rookies don't get the wrong idea: the
hyper-revolutionaries on his side, the rest of the world on the other
side.

Consider his recent exchange with Carl Davidson, which led to this
thread.  Instead of confronting head on Davidson's main argument to
justify his backing John Kerry in 2004, Louis decided to feel insulted
because -- according to him -- Davidson mischaracterized the stance of
U.S. Trotskyists during World War II!  That was "disgusting" -- Louis
wrote.  When Davidson complained about the adjective, Louis ratcheted
up his attack, not on Davidson's main line of argument, but on
Davidson as a person.

I have read no more from Davidson than has been posted here, but it
incensed me the way he was being treated for a reason that was nowhere
to be found in the postings alluded.  It also offended me that, for
the n-th time in the last few months, Louis was implying that
supporting Kerry in 2004 was a political crime.  Since I committed
such crime myself, as many others in the left, I reacted.  Given the
(to put it mildly) very modest results of the Nader campaign, which
Louis touted on the list as the "revolutionary socialist" alternative
to the two party system, one'd have expected some measure of -- I
don't know -- humble or at least cautious introspection in dealing
with the matter.  When I told McDonald to tackle Davidson's real
argument, instead of inventing a more convenient one to refute, Louis
replied calling everybody in the left who supported Kerry "political
prostitutes," infected of "political syphilis," etc.  That's him
drawing the class line.

In debating the issue of the 2004 presidential elections, he didn't
bother to make any argument, good or bad, in defense of his views.  He
just presumed that the "socialist revolutionary" thing to do in 2004
was to join Nader and he dropped the usual code words that give
comfort to some infantile radicals.  However, not everybody in the
left believes that line.  Not everybody in the ranks of the U.S.
working class believes that.  In fact, the opposite is true: the
people who believe that the Nader campaign was worth anything is a
tiny group of people in the left and in the libertarian right.  So,
given that fact of life, if we debates somebody with such views,
shouldn't we be trying to attack the substantive arguments?  Shouldn't
one show some respect to people's intelligence?

> As I once stated 
> here in the context of a posting on the Brenner thesis, the Mexican academy 
> is strongly influenced by Spanish Communism, or what some people less 
> charitably inclined call Stalinism. 

This charge of Stalinism leaves me unmoved.  Again, the terrifying
label is an attempt to disqualify my views without taking the trouble
to refute them.

> It appears that after Franco's victory, 
> many intellectuals and college professors fled to Mexico where they took up 
> influential posts. Concretely, this meant a strong predisposition to 
> Kautsky's Marxism.

This whole thing is also a figment of Louis Proyect's imagination.  In
Mexico, most of the Marxist influence on my generation comes from
South American exiles.  Based on a couple of Lexis-Nexis searches in
the heat of a polemical exchange we had on this list a few years ago,
Louis decided that Mexico's Marxism had been crippled by the influence
of the Spanish Republican emigres to Mexico.  And he decided that such
influence was Kautskyan!  Have you ever studied the works of Adolfo
Sánchez Vázquez or Wenceslao Roces?

> For Julio, this took the form of being soft on NAFTA which he tended to 
> view in terms of Marx's 1853 articles on India. He got Nestor so upset at 
> one point that he unsubbed rather than being on the same list with him. I 
> had to spend a small fortune in a phone call to Argentina to get Nestor back.

This is hilarious.  

In that old dispute, Louis (and some others) could never get a handle
of basic concepts in Marx's thought such as the dual character of
capitalist production or the distinction between the capitalist mode
of production and a concrete capitalist social formation.  So, this
charge of Kautskyism came about because I claimed -- as I continue to
do -- that the process of social and economic integration of Mexico
into North America has a dual character.  On the one hand, it has a
progressive potential, most likely unintended by those who pushed
NAFTA.  Clearly, the treaty was the consequence of deeper shifts in
the demographics and economics of the region, not only the result of a
debt crisis that pushed Mexico against the wall.  And also clearly,
such realities have created better conditions for the working class in
Mexico and for a higher level of international cooperation between the
working classes in the region.  That was the *content* of the process
underlying NAFTA.  On the other hand, as I made clear, the *form* of
the treaty was something else.  It reflected the fundamental asymmetry
of economic power between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and it was
clearly pushed to advance the interests of the capitalists in these
countries.

That seems to me basic.  Hardly an iconoclastic view for anyone who
has spent a minute reflecting seriously on Marx's main works.  But
this kind of argument is too subtle for Louis Proyect's taste.  In his
world view, there is no possibility that the social and economic
integration of Mexico in the North America region can be viewed as
progressive at all, not even potentially.  It was bad and bad.  Well,
I disagree.

This whole debate between Louis et alia and myself is on the archives
for anyone to peruse.  When I first joined Marxmail, I was castigated
by Louis and friends because I suggested that, in spite of the U.S.
boom, there was a gradual convergence in productivity levels between
the poor and rich countries of the world, a convergence that validated
Marx's prediction in his German preface to the first edition of
Capital.  That was Kautskyism, he declared.  Actually, it is curious
that, in the last few months, we've seen Louis Proyect come around to
this very view or, at least, be a bit more open minded about it.

> For all my reputation of being a Marxist Torquemada, I am not interested in 
> driving Julio out. I am far more interested in comrades listening to what 
> he has to say, answering him with one or two emails, and then moving on. We 
> have far more urgent tasks confronting us than to rehash the Lenin-Kautsky 
> debate. 

The Lenin-Kautsky debate is irrelevant to the debates I've had here.

> It is bad enough that I have to keep fending off the Stalin-Trotsky 
> debate without seeing our time wasted in arguments about why revolution is 
> necessary.

Whatever.  

I've been loyal to this list, but it is time to leave it once and for
all.  Thank you, Louis, for the space to write and debate.  Thank you
everyone for reading me and for engaging with my arguments.

Best,

Julio

PS: Hope the anti-war protests went well.  I couldn't attend because
there's a newborn member in my family.  He'll be marching against the
occupation of Iraq and in defense of Venezuela as soon as the
pediatrician gives us the green light.  :-)

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