Marxmail is 10 years old today

This is the tenth anniversary of the Marxism mailing list (also known as Marxmail, the name of the accompanying website) that was launched on May 1, 2008. It started off with about sixty subscribers 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.

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. 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.