I’m doing a review of WOLVES IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING for the British parapolitiics journal LOBSTER and for my own websites at http://www.blindsamurai.com and alsoww.abhartach.com (the latter of which isn’t up yet). It will fit in your empirical observations about the hegemonic role that renegade lefts perform for late capitalism from the vantage point of a critique of Stalinism.

If you have time could you contact me as a “pseduo interview” would make it much livelier than a plain and simple review.

You can contact me on corkfilsm@hotmail.com which can be posted on a bulletin board as I’m sure that MI5 and the FBI know it and screw the fascists who keep sending me death threats - bring it on you Nazi scum!

The important thing to remember about Hitchens and former lefts who now service the Bourgeois hegemony (we don’t use “liberal” in the same way in Britain COS WE’RE SUPOPOSED TO BE SOCIALISTS!!) is that this isn’t just some individual betrayal that can be explained in terms of perosnal psychology and history. Rather, it’s a continuation of the oprcoess whereby Stalinism started to disconnect Marxism from the living struggle of the working class from 1924 with the twin Bukharinist dogmas of SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY and STATE MONOPOLY CAPITAL THEORY.

These ideas have been central to attacks on Marxism from “the left” ever since, in such forms as Althusser’s interpretation of Marxism as a species of structuralism and all the post-strusturalist and post-modernist crap that has passed for cultural criticism in MARXISM TODAY, SCREEN, THE NEW STATESMAN and everything else that New Labour has looked to, to intellectualise its adaptation to the world that Thatcherism built.

After the second world war the settlement with Stalinism enabled a section of it to be absorbed into the mainstream bourgeois hegemony while the Trotskyist movement (ignoring the publication of Marx;s Economic and Philosophical manuscripts and Grundrisse in the 1950s) succumbed to the pressure of Stalinism upon it and recreated its methods, beginning with iys support for the Viet Cong’s murder of Trotskyists in 1949. This led to the end of the Fourth International in 1953 following a failed working class revolution in Bolivia which Chomsky significantly failed to mention in his history of South America.

Stalinism’s absorbtion into the dominat hegemony went into overdrive after the political defeat of the working class in the a980s and after the collapse of the USSR was represented as a failure of socialism. It found New Labour adapting to Thatcherite economics and the transition from postwar social democracy to the coercive state.

The problem with the new political movements is that they have come together on the basis of a defeat of the working class, rightfully skeptical about the old bolsheivik parties of the past (which I was a member of, never again!) but also as disconnected from the kind of theoretical conquests that followed from Healy’s expulsion from the WRP as from the living struggle of the working class itself. It has turned them into a kind of sixties New left for slow learners. The left needs to reconnect with theory and its own history if its to progress.

Good further reading would of course include my own novel, ENEMY WITHIN, on the WRP and Miners Strike, available on http://www.blindsamurai.com but also Cyril smith’s MARX AT THE MILLEMIUM (Pluto Press) and ANYTHING in the journals REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY (Socialist Platform) and CRITIQUE.

And anyone can contact me on corkfilms@hotmail.com

Keep up the good work.

Thanks for mentioning and briefly reviewing Amin’s book. I read it soon after it was published by Monthly Review, and it had to read and reread to get his message, which is quite clear, and profound, and should be read by all- especially leftists. I am looking forward to reading your book as well.

roger

I am looking forward to the read … and will also definitely be coming back here once and a while to read the book version of the DVD extras.

It would be super cool to have access to some interesting audio or video you might have used for the book too … seems like this site can be a great promo tool … but also a companion to the book in a time where events move much quicker than the pen.

Best of luck.

(Diisinformation books have been the bomb since back int he da when Chomsky was only known for his linguistics … F-Yeah)