Hi Raicopk,
First, thank you for your thoughtful reply.
Now I understand where you are coming from.
Here is the situation:
(1) I am old. My minutes on this earth are limited. I wish it were different, but reality is a bitch.
(2) Certain principles are important for the development of our movement.
(3) One of the most important of these principles is the need to aggregate content from all anti-capitalist trends (ie: to collect, index and provide a democratic gateway to this content--including articles and discussion threads).
(4) In my essay, I point out the hypocrisy of the WSWS, which is unlikely to ever lift a finger to support the kind of aggregation which is necessary.
(5) In doing the above, I am making use of a tactic which has been practiced for more than 100 years (and probably a hell of a lot longer than that) of asking them to do the right thing.
If they respond by failing to do the right thing--they expose themselves in the eyes of their supporters. That would be a good thing.
If they do (by some miracle) the right thing--the movement still wins because it puts pressure on all the similar groups to do the right thing.
(6) Based on your comments, your subreddit appears to have a general ban on any mention of the WSWS, even posts which are critical of them.
(7) You folks need to make your own decisions, of course.
(8) I would argue that the healthy movement we need cannot be creating by simply avoiding mention of (or comment about) every group which has evolved into a cult that rapes, abuses or otherwise exploits its supporters--because these kinds of practices are far more widespread than most people realise. And these practices will not go away if we simply ignore them.
Germs and disease are killed by sunlight.
That is a principle the movement needs.
That is the main point of my article (ie: transparency).
(9) I suggest that you take this up with your entire moderator team. The bottom line is that people who want to see a world that is not ruled by capital need to have access to essays which discuss the principles which are decisive.
(10) I do not have time to skillfully rewrite a 7,000 word article to avoid mention of the name of the organization whose hypocrisy instigated the article. I am old and I could fucking die tomorrow and I have no time to jump through a bunch of hoops to accomodate the impractical practices of a subreddit that cannot see any way forward except to close its eyes to the inevitable result of the domination of our movement by cargo cults.
(11) I would be willing to resubmit my post with modified versions of my graphics--in which all mentions of "WSWS" have been replaced by the famous black rectangles denoting unacceptable content. That may seem silly--but, imho, so is the idea of not talking about *specific examples* of the diseases which weaken our movement.
(12) Other than that, there is little more I have time to do.
(13) I do hope to hear back from you after you have had an opportunity to discuss this with your moderator team.
(14) Transparency is coming. Nothing can stop it.
Many are afraid of it. Many are inconvenienced by it. It's still coming.
All the best,
Ben Seattle
This thread is archived at: http://communism.org/node/4010
