Federation Interviews Louis Proyect
Press Action
Monday, February 21, 2005
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/federation02212005/
The Glorious Revolutionary Federation of Fortune 500 Killers announces a new weekly feature: interviews with our rank-and-file. Our first interview is with Comrade Louis Proyect. Comrade Proyect is a programmer at Columbia University, and a former member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). He operates the famous marxmail.org mailing list. He is also known for hilarious missives on culture and politics, available at http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mypage.htm.
Recently, the Federation honored Comrade Proyect with a Glorious Revolutionary Lifetime Achievement Award in Consciousness Raising for his efforts. The Federation spoke to him recently.
Question: Comrade Proyect, thanks for doing this interview. Could you tell us a little bit about your life and political history?
Comrade Proyect: After graduating from Bard College in 1965, I went to work for the welfare department in NYC in Harlem. After being radicalized by the poverty I saw in Harlem and the war in Vietnam, I joined the Socialist Workers Party in 1967. I remained a member until late 1978, when I was unwilling to give up my computer programming job and take unskilled factory jobs as part of the party’s “colonization” effort. Within a couple of years, I came in contact with Peter Camejo who had been expelled from the rapidly evolving SWP, who sent me a copy of his article “Against Sectarianism.” This article convinced me that a different approach to politics than the SWP’s workerist vanguardism was necessary. I got involved with him in setting up something called the North Star Network, which eventually joined forces with members of the disbanded Line of March group. These were Maoists who had come to the same conclusion as us. The joined forces put out a magazine called “Crossroads” that ceased publication in August 1996.
In the late 1980s, my contacts with Peter came to an end over personal matters. From that point on, I concentrated on Central America solidarity and he began working with the Green Party in California. My enthusiasm for the Nader-Camejo campaign this year prompted me to make contact with Peter again, although I have no plans to get involved with the Green Party at this point.
From 1987 to 1991, I was involved with an organization called Tecnica. It sent computer programmers, engineers, etc. to work with the Sandinista government, frontline states in Africa and the ANC, which was still in exile. After the FSLN was voted out of power, the organization folded within a year or so.
This was around the time I went to work for Columbia University and began writing political and cultural pieces on the Internet. At Columbia, I work on Intranet applications for Administrative Information Services.
Question: Comrade Proyect, can you talk a little bit more about the SWP colonization program?
Comrade Proyect: In 1977, the SWP announced that all members would have to go into industry in order to take advantage of opportunities to recruit workers and to lead the peace movements, the woman’s movement, etc. through the industrial trade unions. This was a fantasy that led to mass demoralization and the exit of more than 75 percent of the members over the years.
Question: What do you identify as today? What were some of the major political figures and works that influenced you, and why?
Comrade Proyect: I am an independent Marxist. I have been strongly influenced by Cuban Marxism, Mariategui and a magazine called American Socialist that was put out by people who left the SWP in the 1950s for reasons similar to my own. The magazine was co-edited by Bert Cochran and Harry Braverman. After the magazine ceased publishing in 1959, Braverman joined the Monthly Review staff and wrote “Labor and Monopoly Capital.”
Question: Comrade Proyect, what is Marxmail? When did you start it, and what was its impetus?
Comrade Proyect: Marxmail was started on May 1, 1998. The list that it grew out of had been hijacked by Maoists who had begun to expel people for “bourgeois tendencies”, etc. One of them was Alfredo Olaechea, a Peruvian living in Great Britain, where he had become a prominent spokesman for the Shining Path. The Peruvian government had offered a million dollar reward for his capture. A year or so ago, he was seized in Spain while on a business trip and sent back to Peru.
Most of the regulars on the list that preceded Marxmail had no real animosity toward Olaechea and his comrades, but preferred a more tolerant atmosphere where it was permissible to think out loud without being castigated as a traitor to the revolution.
Question: How does Marxmail differ from other popular left-wing mailing lists, such as Doug Henwood’s lbo-talk?
Comrade Proyect: Henwood was a veteran of the old Marxism list, who launched lbo-talk the same day Marxmail was launched. Henwood advertised his list as a place where Marxists, ostensibly like himself, and non-Marxists could dialogue. Many Marxists, including myself, signed up but left after a year or two because it was not really conducive to serious discussion. Henwood had been moving away from Marxism and his list attracted a number of people, who were really hostile to Marxism. Even though he gives lip-service occasionally to the original premise of the list, it is fairly obvious that it has evolved into a forum for left liberals, social democrats and a scattering of anarchists. What seems to unite them is a total dislike for Marxism.
Marxmail’s goal is to unite Marxists and allow discussion between people who never spoke civilly to each other before. It includes state capitalists, Fidelistas, CP’ers, WWP but mostly it is made up of independent Marxists trying to figure things out. It is one of the more internationalist listservs on the Internet and nearly 40 percent of the subscribers live outside the USA, including such far-flung places as South Korea, Vietnam, South Africa, Hungary, Russia, Brazil and Argentina. The archives receive about 125,000 visits per month from people who like to keep track of the discussion without being subbed.
Question: Speaking of which, one of the great characteristics of your writing is the skewering of prominent figures of the establishment “left.” Who are three or four people you include in this rogues gallery, and why?
Comrade Proyect: 1. Joanne Landy: for pompously interjecting herself in between the USA and its enemy of the month through the circulation of petitions that objectively serve the interests of the State Department.
2. Ted Glick: for doing everything he can to destroy independent political action while proclaiming his dedication to it.
3. Michael Hardt: for writing a book “refuting” the existence of imperialism without a single piece of useful data.
Joanne Landy is an editor at “New Politics,” a 3rd camp journal that was launched by followers of Max Shachtman. The 3rd camp described itself as an alternative to US and Soviet “imperialism”. As the Cold War deepened, Shachtman dumped his 3rd camp politics and became an open defender of US imperialism. Landy launched something called the Campaign for Peace and Democracy in the waning days of the Cold War. While it made pro forma attacks on US foreign policy, most of its energy was spent on condemning the USSR. With the collapse of the USSR, Landy has sought other targets. First, there was Milosevic. She was tireless in taking up the cause of the Bosnian Muslims, joining Christopher Hitchens and others in trying to transform an admittedly bloody internecine struggle into a new crusade against fascism. More recently, she has campaigned against Cuba’s right to defend itself against “dissident” groups funded and organized by the USA.
Ted Glick was one of the early critics within the Green Party against another Ralph Nader campaign. Along with Medea Benjamin and Norman Solomon, they thought that the Greens should not draw votes away from a Democrat in the 2004 election. If the Greens did run, they run a low-profile “stealth” campaign like the one David Cobb ran. As might have been expected, the Cobb campaign was a disaster for the Greens. They lost ballot status in a number of states because Cobb’s vote totals were so low. There has not been the slightest acknowledgement from Glick that this approach will destroy the Greens. Like Medea Benjamin and Cobb, Glick has been a staff member of a nonprofit for a number of years. These nonprofits tend to rely on the largesse of wealthy funders who are tied to the Democratic Party, so it is no surprise that they bend to pressures from the liberal establishment.
Michael Hardt is the co-author with Toni Negri of the gaseous, postmodernist “Empire,” a book that was hyped by the media when it appeared several years ago even though the authors did their best to represent themselves as revolutionaries. Part of the appeal of the book was that it put a leftist spin on globalization, arguing that it was beneficial for McDonalds to cover the planet. They cited Marx’s journalistic pieces on British rule over India, which did look favorably on the introduction of railway and telegraph. What they failed to mention is Marx’s later writings which characterized the British presence as nothing less than thievery.
Question: What kind of response do you get when you mail these missives to the subjects directly?
Comrade Proyect: None, generally. But I write them mostly for the amusement of Marxmailers and to keep myself from smashing my fist through a wall.
Question: Comrade Proyect, so many publications of the establishment “left” advocated the disastrous ABB strategy. Where can people turn for refuge?
Comrade Proyect: There are many good leftwing outlets on the Internet. Swans, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Press Action, Yoshie Furuhashi’s Critical Montages blog. I also salute the work of the ISO on independent electoral politics, even though I have strong differences with them on Cuba.
Question: What is your view of academics in general? My guess, from reading your pieces, is not very high in general. Who are some exceptions?
Comrade Proyect: I would regard the academics who participate on Marxmail as good people, especially the late James M. Blaut who died a couple of years ago. Jim’s books on eurocentrism are classics. He was just as proud of his membership in the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, however. I also have a high regard for Will Miller, a philosophy professor at the U. of Vermont who is struggling with terminal lung cancer right now. Will has been on the barricades of every student struggle at his school since the 1970s, which nearly got him fired. After the school failed to fire him, they froze his salary. I also have a lot of respect for Michael Yates, who is a retired economics professor. His Monthly Review books are consumed with the rights of working people and he writes in a clear, understandable style.
Question: Tell us a bit about your famous political and cultural commentaries and where people can read more about them.
Comrade Proyect: As a Columbia employee, I enjoy a rather large disk quota where my articles can be found under various categories like culture, war and fascism, etc. I invite people to review them at:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mypage.htm
Question: Speaking of Columbia, what does your position entail?
Comrade Proyect: I am a programmer assigned to Financial Systems. I work in Unix, perl and java.
Question: What is your opinion of the Columbia undergraduate population? The “best and the brightest,” as they like to think of themselves?
Comrade Proyect: Honestly, I don’t have sufficient contact with them to make a fair judgment.
Question: Could you elaborate more on the Cuba petitions signed by most of the establishment left?
Comrade Proyect: Could you imagine if the antiwar movement was being financed by the Cuban government and had meetings at the Cuban embassy? We wouldn’t be thrown in jail; we’d be thrown underneath the jail. The hypocrisy is just mind-boggling. If people like Joanne Landy were serious about less repression in Cuba, they’d focus on ending US subversion and economic pressure. Considering what Cuba has to put up with, the government is positively lenient.
Question: Your writings have a cult Internet following—have you considered actually publishing the best ones?
Comrade Proyect: Actually, I was approached by Pluto Press to write a book but I decided against it. It would interfere with my Internet activity, which reaches more people and which is less subject to the whims of editors.
Question: Comrade Proyect, I want to end by talking about the 2004 Presidential election. You were one of the few leftists in this country willing to publicly denounce and ridicule the “Anybody But Bush” (Nobody But Kerry) strategy and announce support for Nader. Explain how you came to that decision, your feelings DURING the election, and afterwards in retrospect.
Comrade Proyect: For me, the question of the Democratic Party is *the question* of the American revolution. Unless the left can build an independent vehicle for both electoral and extraparliamentary activity, it will remain marginalized. The Nader campaign of 2000 showed what can be done under difficult circumstances. It is a terrible shame that so many leftists were stampeded into backing Kerry. My hope is that the left pulls itself together in 2006 or so and begins mapping out plans for a radical challenge to the two-party system. I suspect that worsening economic conditions and war abroad will be our greatest recruiter.
Question: And finally, Comrade Proyect, strategically what direction are we heading from here, given the disastrous conduct of the Green Party and the utter depravity of the Democrats?
Comrade Proyect: I spoke to Peter Camejo briefly when he was speaking in NYC. He thinks that we should not write off the Greens. You have to remember that the California and NY Greens were not pro-Cobb. The only way that he became the candidate in 2004 was by operating behind the backs of the party rank-and-file. The biggest shot in the arm for the Greens and for radical politics in general would be an upsurge of the working class. I have a feeling that this assault that is being prepared on the last vestiges of the New Deal will begin to shake working people to their foundations and open them up to new ideas.
The Glorious Revolutionary Federation of Fortune 500 Killers is a Columbia University-based anti-capitalist, anti-racist student insurgent group. To learn more about the group, e-mail ceodeath@ceodeath.org, or visit its site at www.ceodeath.org.