From owner-marxism-international  Sun Apr  6 08:05:55 1997
Message-Id: <199704061204.AAA06747@mailhost.auckland.ac.nz>
From: dr.bedggood@auckland.ac.nz
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 1997 00:08:11 +0000
Subject: M-I: PANIC LEFT

> Date:          Sat, 5 Apr 1997 13:19:17 -0500 (EST)
> From:          Brian M Ganter <bmganter@acsu.buffalo.edu>
> To:            marxism-international@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> Cc:            marxism-thaxis@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> Subject:       M-I: PANIC LEFT: TAKE THREE
> Reply-to:      marxism-international@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU

> 
>Dear Red Critique,
> 
I thought the original posting from the Red Critique was quite a 
good attack on pomo marxists.  To survive pomo with ones faculties 
intact is quite a feat  Also I thought that the reponses of the Red Critique 
comrades to various flakey left members of this list like Proyect and 
Cox were generally on target.

However you are totally off target with Maleki.  Maleki's reponse to 
you puts you in your place.   If you can't see where he is coming 
from, then that does not bode well for your reading of reality, of 
which this list is only a pathetic microcomic.

On that point I have a problem with your appeal to Engels and the 
materialist  method, and at the same time your  equasion of pomo 
marxism with fascism. Something is very wrong here. Unless I have 
read you wrong.

As I understand it, you are saying that the antics of a bunch of 
media lefties, who have no contact with the class struggle, except to 
offer a ludicrous cover for capitalism,  is fascism?  Come on! 

You are applying this term to a bunch of  intellectuals doing party 
tricks for the bosses.  The bosses will need much more to stop the 
working class when it gets up an goes.  Or are you saying that capitalism no 
longer needs a fascist movement with guns and rubber hoses to 
smash a revolutionary  working class because it  is already smashed
in the head by hegemony? Have they installed microchips so that the 
barricades are now on TV?

If you trivialise the term fascism to mean an adaptation to 
neo-lilberalism by the left intelligensia, you are disarming the 
working class theoretically and programmatically.  Or perhaps you are 
just arming yourselves as Marxist intellectuals to take over the 
responsiblity of defeating the "fascists" in the theoretical struggle?
Well you will have already lost because it will not be Marx or Engels
that you are using as your weapon. And as  Maleki says, then the 
temptation to join the other side will be difficult to turn up. 

Lets get back to the real class struggle. The struggle to win the 
academy from the trendy lefties was always part of the class 
struggle, but don't substitute this for the whole thing. We need a 
theoretical analysis which explains the causes of fascism and a 
programme that applies the lessons of the fight against fascism  
as part of a revolutionary programme for today. That programme will 
be developed with the help of marxist intellectuals, but only those 
intellectuals who do not cut themselves off in isolated 
"collectives", but rather join the revolutionary vanguard. 

Dave
[for Permanent Revolution not least on this list]



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