RE: [Marxism] Victoria Woodhull and dogmatic Marxism

["Mark Lause" <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

All books and articles deserve a "critical scrutiny," but I find it
hysterically funny that the doctrinaire approach to these old faction fights
prevails.

Messer-Kruse was kind enough to credit some of my early work debunking the
old assertions about the class nature of the split in the IWA.  People
steeped in the Marxist tradition may find "The American Radicals and
Organized Marxism" from 1992 more accessible than Messer-Kruse's work.
http://us.share.geocities.com/m_lause.geo/vita/LauseIWALHv33Win92p55.pdf

The split was fundamentally ethnic and Sorge's lot purged all Americans on
the grounds that Americans were all petty bourgeois anyway.  It was as
transparently stupid as it sounds.  This not only excluded the only
trade-based sections in the US but people who had been clearly the vanguard
of the movement in the U.S. since the days of the Workies.  (See my own
YOUNG AMERICA on this home-grown worker-based radical tradition.)

As to Messer-Kruse's work on Haymarket, I defend what's been published of it
as entirely legitimate work without hesitation.  What Tom Chisholm refers to
as "the post-Haymarket left scholarship" reflects decades of efforts by the
official labor movement and the ACLU types to recast the anarchists as kind
of verbally indiscrete but ultimately innocent visionaries and
cuddle-bunnies--poster boys for the injustice of the American judicial
system.  If Tom was "at last year's Wayne State labor history conference,"
he might recall my short remarks from the floor on John Brown, who was a
model for what the anarchists were attempting to do in 1886.

They continually smudge the legal question as to whether prosecution proved
that the anarchists threw the bomb with the historical question as whether
or not an anarchist threw the bomb.  Very different things, with very
different standards of evidence, and very different consequences.  There's
no question in anybody's mind, I think, but that the prosecution did not
prove its case in the courtroom.

As to the historical question as to whether an anarchist or a cop actually
threw the bomb, there is not a smidge of evidence for the latter while the
former was advocating bomb-making, teaching each other how to do it, and
urging their use.  Oddly, the same folks who denounce Messer-Kruse's
assumption of anarchist responsibility for the deed rightly praise Paul
Avrich's work on the subject as definitive.  Avrich not only clearly states
his belief that an anarchist threw the bomb but gives us intelligent
speculation as to which one (none of the folks arrested, tried, convicted,
and killed, btw).

As to why it's accepted when Avrich says it explicitly and not when
Messer-Kruse assumes it is simply beyond my concern.

Solidarity!
Mark L.



 







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