Of sterile flowers, poisonous weeds and a political smokescreen

By Alex Steiner and Frank Brenner

On Jan. 6, the WSWS carried yet another polemic against us, the second one in a week. This one came with a purple prose title, “Adam Haig responds to Alex Steiner’s burst of outrage”.

Burst of outrage? This same Haig had four days earlier posted a 17-page attack on us in which he baldly declared that we “cannot be regarded as Marxist-Trotskyists”, claimed that we reject the materialist conception of history, are skeptical about the revolutionary role of the working class and much else.

We posted a brief response (a little over a page in length) on our website blog in which we pointed out that most of the essay was devoted to using Herbert Marcuse as a straw man and that much of the rest of it brought in irrelevant material regarding Erich Fromm and Slavoj Žižek.

There was no “burst of outrage” in what we wrote. It is true that we called the title of Haig’s piece pretentious and we characterized his ruminations on Fromm and Žižek as the kind of padding a clever graduate student would engage in, but this is pretty routine stuff in the cut-and-thrust of polemical debate, and given what we were dealing with, it was eminently fair comment. By any objective measure, our criticisms of Haig were a good deal more restrained than his accusations against us.

But that isn’t how Haig saw it. Our brief note enraged him and he vented his anger in a new posting which the WSWS editors were only too happy to run (a point we will come back to). In this latest posting we are accused of writing an “angry response”, of making “several outrageous charges” in our brief note, and that we are supposedly “intent on discrediting the ICFI.” Steiner, “in his hysteria,” apparently “employs a deceitful use of quotation marks”. Later we are told that Steiner “exploded” and later still that Steiner “has no capacity for logical argumentation.” The piece winds up by consigning us to the garbage heap of history (having “embraced Herbert Marcuse, Freudo-Marxism, and Utopia … it is fairly clear where they [i.e. Steiner and Brenner] will end up”).

“Hysteria”, “exploded”, “burst of outrage” – the violence of this language is striking. Clearly, the “hysteria” here is Haig’s, not ours. In psychology this is known as projection; in a more familiar idiom it is a case of the pot calling the kettle black...

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Shallow moralizing instead of Marxism

But many socialist ideologues (ideologues in the bad sense of the word – those who stand everything on its head) speak of preparing the proletariat for socialism in the sense of its being morally regenerated. The proletariat, and even ‘humanity’ in general, must first of all cast out its old egoistical nature, and altruism must become predominant in social life, etc. As we are as yet far from such a state of affairs, and ‘human nature’ changes very slowly, socialism is put off for several centuries. Such a point of view probably seems very realistic and evolutionary, and so forth, but as a matter of fact it is really nothing but shallow moralizing... (from Trotsky, Results and Prospects)

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Unable to answer our political criticisms the WSWS resorts to a smear campaign

by Alex Steiner

In politics a sure sign that you can’t answer criticism is that you try to change the subject. And one of the most tried and true methods for doing that is to smear the reputation of your opponent: discredit the critic so as to ignore the criticism. That is precisely what the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has done with its series, “The Frankfurt School vs. Marxism: The Political and Intellectual Odyssey of Alex Steiner.”... More >>

Comments on "Leon Trotsky, Soviet Historiography and the Fate of Classical Marxism"

by Andrew River

It has long been the case that David North is engaged in a systematic campaign to blur the distinction between Marxism and objectivism. North’s latest foray in this endeavor was a speech he recently presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) at its 2008 National Convention in Philadelphia on November 20-23. The speech, with the title “Leon Trotsky, Soviet Historiography, and the Fate of Classical Marxism” was subsequently published on the World Socialist Web Site.

Before examining what North said, we must note that the venue itself is of some interest. The AAASS is a typical academic association that includes representatives from various political and theoretical orientations, undoubtedly including some very right wing individuals. Founded in 1938, the AAASS’ website reveals that “its representatives serve on such bodies as the U.S. State Department's Advisory Committee for Studies of Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the former Soviet Union, and the International Council for Central and East European Studies.” Such organizations during the Cold War years were heavily infiltrated and financed by the CIA. (Indeed, when the past president of the AAASS, James R. Millar, died recently, it was noted in his obituary in the Washington Post that he had been a resident academic scholar employed by the CIA.)..More>>