[Marxism] re: facts are important

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Katan Alder:

Also, could Fred perhaps say whether he thinks that this relates to all
of
the coverage, or just that on subscription drives.

Please dont take me to be challenging you fred- i always find your
comments
interesting- i am simply following up your post.

I am raising this because i think it is important (especially in light
of
the recent discussions on the US SWP)  for 'Marxmailers' to be given a
clear
picture of what can, and what cannot be verified by facts.

Thanks.

Katan Alder:

Well, it's a subjective thing partly, and I think that Katan is right to
challenge me.  I don't know that the Militant coverage of subscription
drives are falsified at all.

And I suspect that worker (and other) readership of the paper is on the
rise.  Why not? How many radical papers are selling among workers right
now, and isn't dissatisfaction on the rise?

So I probably shouldn't have speculated.  But I don't now how the drives
are carried out. In the old days  (what I call the Later Barnes era when
the party became an iron bureaucratic dictatorship but not, in my
opinion a cult), there were constant threats to accept Trotsky's
basically informal suggestion to require every member to sell a certain
number of subscriptions to workers or be reduced to the status of
sympathizer.  IF that has happened, and it never happened while I was a
member despite the threats which were intended to blame the members for
the inwardness of the party which had been driven out of the mass
movement and real mass work with whips and torches by the leadership. If
anything like that has happened, the sub goals would be like a sink of
corruption in the style of Soviet industry meeting quotas, as every
member tried to keep their membership by meeting their goal by hook or
by crook in order to remain members. But really I have no proof that
this has been adopted, despite the heightening "centralism" and the
declining scale of what is truly "voluntary"  in party life.

Most likely (and, in my opinion, consistent with current trends in
general) the Militant is getting a better response from workers, and its
lack or real opposition to the war in Iraq aside from ritual calls for
withdrawal in the abstract -- and its phrases and layout (photos, etc.)
suggesting support for the US troops in Fallujah and Samarra against
Islamists, and its denunciation of the protests against the cartoons as
Islamist attacks on the rights of US working people -- no doubt make it
salable to the patriotic-minded who also may be moving to the left on
economic questions.  (I don't favor ignoring such workers at all, just
not adopting to their patriotic or half-pro-war, half antiwar views.
My read is that there is real motion in the working class, but it is
primitive as one would expect after so many blows and so much retreat.

 Not every dictator has a cult even if he requires homogeneity with his
shifting positions -- I think Mark Lause came very close to nailing it
as modelled on the corporation that keeps an eye on the lives of the
employee headed by a "dynamic," "creative," CEO. Is GE a cult.  This
would be a stretch in my opinion.

Barnes runs a dictatorship that runs on the basis of his
indispensability and the hardness of the times, which require iron
discipline.  Barnes was fond of quoting Lenin's assertion that the NEP
retreat that the NEP retreat required an even tighter dictatorship than
the civil war.  Personally, I have come to the conclusion that this was
a harmful error that left the bureaucracy a free hand to tighten its
grip while all eyes were on the Nepmen and the real and supposed "rich
peasants" as the source of capitalist restoration.  In the end,
restoration came not from the petty capitalists and the peasants who
owned horses but most fundamentally from the bureaucracy itself.  By the
time Lenin started trying to reverse course, opposing Stalin on the
national question and other issues of the "dictatorship," it was too
late.

But it was a mistake for me, and misleading, to make an assertion like
that without any proof at all.  The Militant has become more unreliable
on international questions. Political errors routinely go unrecognized.
The infallibility of the leader (although individual leaders are often
sacrificed to appease the angry god) is a fact of life that everyone has
learned to live with.  Yet the atmosphere remains businesslike rather
than cultist -- without for instance the sexual abuse and sexual
harassment that or gross exhibitions of economic privilege that became
SOP in quite a few other, more cultist sects (whose primary character is
still sectarian rather than cultist)  like the Spartacist League or the
late Healyite Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain.  But as to the
truth, well,I think it is no longer quite in them, as it was to a
considerable degree once, and I simply don't have a clue exactly where
this shows up.
Fred
________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism