From: LeoCasey-AT-aol.com
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1998 16:38:43 EST
Subject: Re: Give Me A Bourgeois Humanist, Please!


Doug Henwood's need to comment on and police my "moralism" is an old story,
running back through at least three incarnations of Spoons Marxism lists where
he defended his version of orthodox Marxism against the radical democratic
politics I advocated. It is a rather tired and tiresome story by now. Either
he has an awful lot of free time on his hands, or he has some unfulfilled need
to constantly relive old battles in which he would have himself appear as the
ironic and droll hero, and others as his bumbling foils. He will have to
construct this fantasy without my assistance on this list.

As to the issue at hand --
When "sophisticated" advocates of "post-modernism" present it as a pose of
detached pure Nietzschean irony in which every struggle of resistance becomes
just one more expression of the 'will to power', when Pinochet, on the one
hand, and the Chileans he slaughtered and the Chileans who seek some righting
of his wrongs, on the other hand, are reduced to a single common denominator
as advocates of humanist concepts of justice, then those who do not chose to
stand outside those struggles will find little of value in it worthy of
engagement. By contrast, when the theories dumped into this residual category
of 'post-modernism' are developed to provide some insight into the nature and
parameters of those resistance struggles, then there might be good reason for
these same folks to intellectually engage them.

Leo Casey