[Marxism] Slippery John Holloway

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Over on Jerry Levy's OPE-L mailing list, which is pretty much restricted to
middle-aged, white, male economics professors, there's been a bit of a
dust-up between Holloway and Michael Lebowitz. In Holloway's "How to Change
the World Without Taking Power," you get a kind of adulation of the
Zapatistas and a denunciation of traditional Marxist strategies of seizing
state power. To make his argument work, he omits any discussion of the
Cuban revolution or any other revolution that was influenced by it--from
the Sandinistas to Hugo Chavez. His only interest in Latin America except
for the Zapatistas is the piqueteros in Argentina.

The one thing that is consistent about Holloway is his utter refusal to
answer anybody who he deems beneath him on the pecking order. So when I
posted a critique of his book on aut-op-sy, he said nothing. When Jerry
Levy forwarded Junaid's critique to OPE-L, he once again said nothing. But
Michael Lebowitz is a horse of another color. He is professor emeritus from
Simon Fraser University and winner of the Isaac Deutscher Prize last year.

When Michael told Holloway that the unfolding revolution in Venezuela
refuted his book, he could not run away from a reply. I found Holloway's
response singularly oleaginous:

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/OPE/archive/0505/0056.html

The full thread is at:

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/OPE/archive/0505/date.html

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