[Marxism] Marxmail is ten years old

Fri May 2 17:26:03 MDT 2008

Somehow late, due to political obligations, I am answering to Lou´s e-mail.

Marxmail has provided me with an invaluable tool.

And through this list I have made not few new comrades and, I think,
also friends in the deepest sense of the concept.

That´s all I thing needs to be said.

Thank you all.

2008/5/1, Louis Proyect <lnp3 en panix.com>:
> This is the tenth anniversary of the Marxism mailing list (also known as
> Marxmail, the name of the accompanying website http://www.marxmail.org/)
> that was launched on May 1, 2008. It started off with about sixty
> subscribers (it now numbers 1103) who were fleeing the Marxism list that
> preceded it, which had been hijacked by supporters of the Shining Path
> in Peru, including one Adolfo Olaechea. Adolfo and his co-thinkers soon
> lost interest in the mailing list and went on to other projects. Adolfo,
> bless his soul, successfully defended himself recently against trumped
> up charges of terrorism in Peru and continues to rally people around the
> Maoist banner.
>
> With all due respect to the Maoist left, it was not the kind of
> political culture that lent itself to a free and open exchange of ideas.
> After the Maoist comrades had seized the moderator's reins, they began
> expelling people left and right—yours truly was the first to go.
> Ironically, I had written a defense of the Shining Path a few months
> before I was
> booted.(http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/indian/sendero.htm)
>
> That did not save me from being punished as a "Trotskyite". Those stormy
> days of 1998 seem like a century ago, while my genuine Trotskyist past,
>  from 1967 to 1978 now seems like a millennium ago. History marches on,
> to use a cliché.
>
> The Marxism list now has 1103 subscribers. I serve as moderator and Les
> Schaffer serves as technical moderator. I have had a long and fruitful
> collaboration with Les whose solid grasp of subscribers' psychologies,
> including my own, helps to keep the list on an even keel. To a large
> extent, my ideas about how to build a non-sectarian and non-dogmatic
> left are reflected in the way I moderate the list. Most of all, this
> involves a firm hand when it comes to any attempts to divide the list
> between 'Bolsheviks' and 'Mensheviks'. Since Internet mailing lists tend
> to operate as pressure cookers to begin with, the worst thing for a
> Marxism mailing list would be to artificially raise the temperature.
> Labeling people as "revisionists" or "reformists" is an invitation to
> the kinds of flame wars that destroyed the mailing lists that preceded
> Marxmail.
>
> While the list does not have nearly as many female subscribers that it
> needs, the global representation is pretty good—including many
> subscribers from the Third World. On a typical day, there will be posts
> from subscribers in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Germany, and
> Great Britain. The political representation is also pretty good, with
> subscribers reflecting Trotskyist, Communist, state capitalist, and
> syndicalist traditions.
>
> The mailing list has grown by about 100 new subscribers per year and I
> expect that it will continue at this rate unless there is a qualitative
> change in the political situation. If there was a radicalization as deep
> as that of 1968 (another anniversary now being celebrated) I can easily
> imagine adding 3 or 4 hundred subscribers per year. Given the economic
> crisis we are now entering, as well as the prospect of continuing
> imperialist war and environmental degradation, that could be in the cards.
>
> Nearly 40 years ago, the Trotskyist sect that I belonged to embarked on
> a major infrastructure expansion campaign in anticipation of the same
> kind of future radicalization. Members gave millions of dollars to
> purchase an office building near the Hudson River and an expensive Web
> Press, which prints on continuous rolls of paper. The offices were seen
> as necessary to administer an explosive growth in membership and the Web
> Press would allow the massive circulation of party organs as the
> radicalization deepened. Although there were opportunities for the group
> after the 60s radicalization came to an end, they did not understand how
> to take advantage of them. Instead of growing, they shrank. The building
> and all the contents, including the Web Press, were sold a couple of
> years ago.
>
> Although there will obviously always be a need for "dead tree" media
> such as books and newspapers, the Internet—which is a Web Press after a
> fashion—is as geared to our epoch as the Gutenberg press was geared to
> the epoch of peasant revolts. I like to think of the Marxism mailing
> list as the same kind of investment in infrastructure as the SWP's
> office building and Web Press, even though it costs very little. In the
>  coming years and decades, even after my ashes have been scattered in
> the Hudson River, Marxmail will enable revolutionaries worldwide to
> exchange information and debate ideas all through the auspices of a
> technology that originated in the American military's research into how
> state power could be maintained after a nuclear war! Talk about
> contradictions…
>
> The Marxism list remains grateful to the support of Professor Hans
> Ehrbar of the University of Utah Economics department, one of the few
> schools in the country that allows scholarly critiques of the capitalist
> system to be mounted. Our mailing list operates on a computer that Hans
> donated and his technical support, along with Les's, allows our
> communications to run smoothly.
>
> I would also wish our comrade Doug Henwood well, whose LBO-Talk mailing
> list was launched on the very same day as Marxmail.
> (http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/lbo-talk.html) Doug was a survivor
> of the early wild and woolly days of Marxism mailing lists on the
> Internet as well as senseless provocations from your moderator before I
> (and Doug) had reached our current Zen-like state of equanimity.
>
>
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Néstor Gorojovsky
El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi autoría