[PEN-L:7421] Footnote to J. Donald Hughes on Mayan collapse

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:

"I appreciate his excellent efforts through LBO at pressuring the US government
and business interests into fair play."

It will be several days or more before I can quite wrap my mind around
this whole new spat between Doug and Lou and post on the crucial
issues it opens -- issues rather more important than *any* of those
with which *either* has been explicitly concerned. Broadly, the exchange
seems to indicate that the hope for an American revolutionary socialist
party is an empty dream and maillists are a joke -- for a socialist party
that could not contain both Doug and Lou (and others with even more
clashing opinions) would not be a socialist party worth belonging to.

However, that is for later. Immediately, the quoted sentence it is pure
bullshit. LBO does not pressure "US government and business
interests  into fair play." It is an armory of weapons for the use of us who
are actually talking to people every day instead of indulging in reveries of
"how we can reach the workers," and who couldn't proceed without
the kind of information LBO provides. (It is not the only source of
such information, but a typical issue is the equivalent of searching
through a dozen issues of MR, ATC, Nation, etc. and painfully making
a synthesis that those of us utterly untrained in economics could not
make on our own or could make only at the expenditure of more time
and effort than is available.)

That said, one more immediate point. Doug's one-line zingers very rarely
contribute to reasoned debate.

Carrol