Allow me to open this retraction and new exposal with some pertinent history. During the ending year of the French Revolution, '94, three claßes came together to seek its destruction. The ultra-leftists and anarchists, under the combined group called Hebertists, the intellectuals such as Camille Desmoulins and the other writers of Le Vieux Cordelier, and the egotists, that conspiracy of betters who believe that their way of running the organisation or institution is superior to the ways of those currently steering it. There is much overlap betwixt these trends, but all of them are united against the current administration they are confronted with.
Ic erroneously thought that it was the General-Secretary of the Left Margin Book Club whose aim it was to licwidate the Executive Committee of the Reading Club. A speech recently given by an upstanding citizen of the Club has shed new light onto the facts of the situation. The General-Secretary himself is merely trying to appease an anti-Committee faction within the Club, who has as of late been putting preßure on him to 'democratise the Club' and to, in veiled terms, weaken or abolish the Executive Committee. This insane demand echoes its incarnation of 1794, and likewise remains a counter-revolutionary plot in nature.
The General-Secretary has not yet committed any wrong-doing himself, so long as he ends his policy of anti-Committee appeasement, and then reprimands the Literati Cleecke. Democracy is a hollow term, particularly when a club is too small to practise it in a timely manner, not to mention an efficient manner. Democratic centralism through a committee (the Executive Committee) is the perfect balance betwixt time, labour, and choice. If the academicists had their way, the Club would either buckle under the greater demands of democracy, or would become a dictatorship of the academia, bereft of whatever democratic procedure. It is the duty of the General-Secretary to the Club for the worse, the belief of some being that he is disastrously caving to the whims of this academic cabal called Literati. The Executive Committee ought to be renamed the Supreme Executive Committee for Club Affairs. Only by reaffirming the role of the Committee can we demonstrate to Literati Capet and his factional accomplices that a functional form of democratic right already exists in the Club via committee-republicanism. Literati Capet pretends to be a friend, but in actuality he is truly a fiend of the citizenry. The academic complains that he can do better, yet he is just an armchair critic.
Now, Ic shall leave ye with a transcript of the aforementioned citizen's speech to a seßion of the Executive Committee, published with permißion of the author.
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My dear General-Secretary, great helmsman of the truly best of clubs I have ever partook in, I thank you for the opportunity to raise some questions pivotal both to my understanding of the nature of the Club, and probably to the character of the Club, despite this meeting technically being not mine, and so as well not mine at which to speak [this citizen was not the one who called for the meeting held that day- Pub].
There seems to be a trend within the Club whose ideal of the Club's purpose is in contrast to what I thought the purpose of the Club was. To tell my view first, I considered the object of the Club two-fold: to be a school for new leftists, yet at the same time to be a think-tank, a conference for current leftists. The new trend, let us call it the Literati Trend, seems to desire a more 'intellectually oriented' Club, a traditional gentlemen's club akin to the Newcastle Literary and Philosophy Society in Britain.
Do not be mistaken, fellow citizen-committeemen. I am not against us pioneering a leftist intellectual gentlemen's club, or selecting works to read in this club of such a nature. To erase and substitute my view of the Club's purpose for that of the Literati Trend's, however, would ruin the political accomplishments of the Club hitherto made. But this is the crux of the ißue, and coincidentally shall also prepare the ground for my conclusion.
The Literati Trend wishes to keep political activism out of the Club. I do not here mean organising political events or actions, for all of us agree that this is not the purpose of the Club. I, and the Literati Trend. mean to determine any thing which takes a political stance, that, in other words, violates the academic code of good faith and mutual respect videlicet the political stances that schools (not universities mind you) and think-tanks must by neceßity take, and in the case of our club, id est politically critiquing rather than academically entreating a book.
To my ultimate conclusion; I fully intended to put Settlers on the stand as a hostile witneß, for the Club to discuß not if Sakai is correct, but how we on the Left can formulate first a strong critique, and then a finishing rebuttal, as well as determining the origin of the work, and why, from what corner is it popular again. Not for a second like the Literati Trend did I think of parleying on a mutual openneß with the historically inaccurate racist lunacy of Sakai. The Literati Trend hoped to welcome Sakai with the hospitality of a fellow academic intellectual, for critique is far too political. Champaign socialism in its tenured form, my dear citizens! The correctneß of my selection of work rests on what the purpose of the Reading Club is: is the Reading Club a leftist academy, that is a combined school and think-tank, or is it an academic gentlemen's club for left intellectuals to leisurely paß the time, entreating texts with sterile vapidity masquerading as sophisticated refinement?
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