[Tani says:] One of the subchapters of Lenin's book asks the question
   "Did Nature exist prior to man" like what the fuck kind of MORON
   question, considering WHO you are asking to read this book..... Lenin
   was arguing with the equivalent of Karl's grotto morons and xians.
   Nature existed prior to cellular life and whatever who doesn't know
   this today? And all that rubbish about potential. Jesus fucking
   christ. One could say that first generation stars were all POTENTIAL
   HUMAN BEINGS because DUH ER UH we are in fact star stuff right now.
   What's this, cosmic teleology? STUPID shit.
   
   ----------- [MIM3 says:] It took a FEW YEARS and it took a few HUNDRED
   K of letters, but FINALLY Tani admits her stuff is NOT the same as our
   stuff and no we are not united and no MIM should not be going to this
   gang and acting like we are the same as Tani. We are NOT the same.
   Tani wants to act so much more educated than Lenin was or could have
   been, but it took Tani all this time to figure out why MIM, an avowed
   Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party has so much difficulty with her
   philosophy. Did we ever claim NOT to be Leninist? Sheesh.
   
   She raised various Hobbesian stratagems like I was being ego-centered,
   didn't have the sex thing right or that MIM was being white or various
   other arguments usually used by cops. I insisted over and over again
   that to knock down MIM's line you should knock down Lenin and Huey
   Newton first. And why did Tani resist this for so long? It's not that
   she couldn't get the books. Anyone with all of the notes from
   Lysenko's labs surely can get a book in the millions of copies. No the
   reason Tani didn't do it was that it exposed the contradictions in her
   idealist philosophy of science. If she had to rebut Lenin and Newton,
   then that only proved that anti-solipsism is NOT something MIM
   invented. It is NOT something specific to being white or anything else
   of our time and yes anti-solipsism IS implied by the point that Lenin
   had to raise about there being an earth before there was a humyn. Yes,
   it's a stupid point to have to make, but there it is: it's not
   accepted by the Amerikan majority yet and it certainly is not accepted
   by Tani's philosophy. In short, MIM forced the subject into scientific
   channels and this has driven the Hobbesian solipsist in Tani into the
   broad daylight. That's if anyone else is reading.
   
   The idea of separate sciences for different classes leads naturally to
   solipsism. Her arguments about taste-buds will go no where with us.
   The fact that taste-buds are different and observably so only shows to
   us that it would be possible to alter them and KNOW what pineapple
   tastes like to Tani. For post-modernists of the Bogdanov tradition,
   (and I don't know that Bogdanov would have gone so far down the
   Hobbesian road as Tani does with the tastebuds argument) there are
   simply islands of truth unknowable to each other. Tani is a
   post-modernist and idealist. End of story. MIM is materialist. Do not
   let us waste each other's time not understanding our serious
   differences.
   
   For that matter, Tani should stop claiming Stalin too. Bogdanov and
   Lysenko, I'm prepared to believe that Tani may be akin to them. I'm
   still listening. I know enough about Lenin and Stalin to say with
   confidence that Tani's line is not theirs.
   
   Stalin said this (which will only make sense if you read what Tani
   just said against dialectical materialism). "The Georgian disciples of
   the metaphysician Proudhon come out and try to 'prove' that
   'dialectics is metaphysics,' that metaphysics recognizes the
   'unknowable' and the 'thing-in-itself,' and in the long run passes
   into vapid theology."
   
   Works, vol. 1, pp. 250-1.
   
   You want to talk about prediction? How long has MIM been telling you
   that your line sounds a lot like the ultraleft PLP or Fifth Estate
   anarchist line? There's Stalin telling you again. It's your philosophy
   starting with Bogdanov leading you to anarchism. B., did you go to PLP
   yet?
   
   Or listen again to Stalin in 1938, "Accusing Bogdanov, Bazarov,
   Yushkevich and the other followers of Mach of fideism, and defending
   the well-known materialist thesis that our scientific knowledge of the
   laws of nature is authentic knowledge, and that the laws of science
   represent objective truth, Lenin says:
   
   "'Contemporary fideism does not at all reject science; all it rejects
   is the 'exaggerated claims' of science, to wit, its claim to objective
   truth. If objective truth exists (as the materialists think), if
   natural science, reflecting the outer world in human 'experience,' is
   alone capable of giving us objective truth, then all fideism is
   absolutely refuted."
   
   Such, in brief, are the characteristic features of the Marxist
   philosophical materialism." Stalin, 1938, "Dialectical and Historical
   Materialism." This is one of the more common essays from Stalin,
   available in Bruce Franklin, intro. The Essential Stalin. So no,
   Stalin did not break with Lenin.
   
   BTW, I want to note that Tani's "broken child" argument about
   MacKinnon and MacKinnon is exactly what I read some cops and a
   university president say recently about demonstrators on their campus.
   That kind of shit flies with solipsists, but won't carry the least
   weight with a materialist. A real scientist dismisses it as quackery.