[PEN-L:36019] apologies

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2003-03-22 13:27 -0500, you wrote:


> My passions will be my undoing. I
> can explain nothing on the basis of "hegemony" because that
> sector of the working class I interact with is driven differently. 
> I should stay out of the continuing debate between you and Lou - both men
> of deep respect, that have been waged over the years. 
>
> Sorry,
>
> Melvin P. 

I do not want to appear churlish by spurning apologies, but this does not
feel quite right. Not just because you praise Louis Proyect and me in the
same breath, which is even more embarrassing than being criticised
together in the same breath. 

It is partly because the exchange of ideas and argument, so long as it is
not abusive, is what gives an email list richness.

It is also that I do not really agree with your explanation. At times you
seem to teach, at times, you seem to have been influenced by valuable
teachers. I am not trying to insult you by characterising you, but to put
my finger on a dilemma. I think it is related to something wrong in the
way you approach the relationship between theory and practice. Yes it is
true that in a sense, as Lenin argued in What is to be done? ideas have
to come to the working masses/class from outside. But fundamentally ideas
are not purely abstract divorced from real material interests and class
struggle. 

The working people you talk with may be will not recognise the word
"hegemon" but they will recognise an agitational equivalent of
it. What is the US doing going round playing biggest kid on the block?
What is it like for the supplies troops who have just been ambushed and
interviewed on Iraqi television? What is it like for the black sergeant
who threw grenades into tents in Camp Pensylvania two nights ago? Why
does CNN this morning still report his motivation as a mystery?

What are the feelings of black, or other, members of the US military
about what they are doing policing the world? Why does someone like Akbar
turn to a reactive ideology (I say reactive to avoid the dismissive
connotations of reactionary, although it means the same literally) like
being a black muslim. 

If you assume a mainly theoretical, pedagogical approach to politics,
while this is not always wrong, you will not see that agitational work
can provide a bridge between theory and practice, testing theory but also
enriching it.

Now I may be teaching my grandfather to suck eggs, because email can
create a strange sense of intimacy, when one only sees aspects of the
other person, and sometimes they are our own aspects projected onto the
other person at that.

In another post your referred to your excess passion apologetically again
and commented on the decisive thing in the fall of the Nazi army in front
of Stalingrad: 

> What was decisive about the battle for
> Stalingrad was that it was the turning point in preserving public
> property relations in the socially necessary means of production.


Here my reaction is that I do not understand how you relate the abstract
and the concrete. This feels to me like an abstract assertion without any
obvious intervening concrete links with the complexity of what actually
happened. 

I suspect that passion is not your undoing but that like all of us it is
the contradiction between passion and intellect, which are dialectically
related to one another in unity, as well as opposition. 

Most of us on these lists could be accused of just thinking and writing
and doing little, so I do not want to ask an unfair question, but how do
your personal passions relate to this present war, and then in turn with
your theories. They may be valuable, and not something for which you
should apologise.

Also technically, as someone who writes excessively long contributions
like yourself, they are not best designed to engage in dialogue. They
have the merit of presenting a reasonably coherent case, which people
cannot take cheap potshots at, and which as it were establish some
intellectual territory. However they may often be skimmed over even by
people who would otherwise be sympathetic. As we are at the end of the
weekend I regret I will not be able to respond to your replies at any
length. But if I have misunderstood our differences please accept my
apologies in turn.

Chris Burford
London