Morons online

 In 2020, MR Online republished the outline of a report by the Qiao Collective that disputed allegations of genocide and slavery in China's persecution of Uyghur Muslim minorities in Xinjiang and suggested that "the politicization of China’s anti-terrorism policies in Xinjiang is another front of the U.S.-led hybrid war on China".

YOU DO THE BARAN-SWEEZY MATH

MARXIST SWP(US) leader Morris Stein in 1941;

“We are monopolists in the field of politics. We can’t stand any competition. We can tolerate no rivals. The working class, to make the revolution can do it only through one party and one program. This is the lesson of the Russian Revolution. That is the lesson of all history since the October Revolution. Isn’t that a fact? This is why we are out to destroy every single party in the field that makes any pretence of being a working-class revolutionary party. Ours is the only correct program that can lead to revolution. Everything else is deception, treachery. We are monopolists in politics and we operate like monopolists.”

MRZine: goodbye and good riddance

The susceptibility of Wood and Foster to this sort of stuff was very much a function of a drift in Marxism toward a knee-jerk reaction to anything with the slightest whiff of postmodernism, making it especially vulnerable to the RCP’s interventions on the left. Of course, nobody could possibly make the same mistake today since LM is long gone with the group having mutated into an openly libertarian think-tank funded in all likelihood by major corporations.

In 1997, after Wood had come on board, MR republished a Pluto book titled “Science and the Retreat from Reason” by John Gillot and Manjit Kumar. At the time I was so shocked by this that I contacted MR immediately to alert them to the fact that the authors were RCP members and that their book contained an attack on Rachel Carsons. Since it was too late to cancel the contract with Pluto, Foster was put in the awkward position of having to pan the book in MR. Now I don’t know if this all happened before Wood was in the driver’s seat but it should give you a sense of the disorientation that was widespread at the time.

People like John Bellamy Foster and Ellen Meiksins Wood live in a very rarified world, one circumscribed by Historical Materialism, NLR, Verso Press, the Left Forum and other institutions that tend to be isolated from criticism.