From: Allin Cottrell (cottrell@wfu.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 12 2004 - 21:52:21 EDT
On Tue, 12 Oct 2004, Gerald A. Levy wrote: >> Of course you do, but then we knew that in Edinburgh thirty years ago. > > John H and Paul C, > > What were the 2 of you doing 30 years ago? Was Allin there then? > What was the Edinburgh political scene like then? I'm not sure you really want to know ;-). John [Holloway] ran a Marxism seminar in the Politics Department at Edinburgh University at that time, which I attended (as a grad student). Paul [Cockshott] was not at the University at that time but was "around". We were running a Marxism study group as I recall. This was pre-Thatcher and a "middle-of-the-road" Labour government was in office, implementing cuts in public expenditure mandated by the IMF. Scottish Nationalism was in the air, but there was also a small, contested space for left critiques of Labour. As for John's comment, I'm not sure that the implied predictability of Paul's approval of Tariq Ali's recent comments [if I'm reading this exchange correctly!] is quite correct. Paul and I would probably have been labeled "Maoists" in the Edinburgh of the mid-1970s, and as such were not necessarily in tune with Tariq Ali, who was a prominent Trotskyist. Allin Cottrell
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