Date: Sun, 19 Jan 1997 12:27:54 -0500 (EST) From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu> Subject: Re: M-I: Academic Marxism Comrades, This anti-intellectualism is absurd. There are "good" and "bad" Marxists in and out of the Academy. The correct critique of academia is not the few Marxists who manage to wiggle their way into liberal institutions, but the role the university has played in the reification of bourgeois social logic. This critique has most usefully been conducted by academic Marxists (such as Baran and Sweezy) and libertarians (such as C. Wright Mills). One of the more important books recently published, *Promoting Polyarchy*, by William Robinson is exactly this: a devastating critique of the role of the organic intellectual in legitimating first imperialism and now transnationalization. This is the critique of academia that Louis, if he wishes to help the struggle, might pursue, rather than bashing Marxist who "waste" their time writing books of enduring importance. Marxists who have latched onto deconstruction and postmodernism are in fact NOT Marxist. Postmodernism grows out of the Weberian mode of analysis (philosophically underpinned by Nietzsche's attack on truth), the critique of modernity, and it is a superficial form of analysis (it should be noted that the most useful postmodernist analyses are those that drew from Lukacs' theory of commodification and reification, and latter critical theoretical formulations of the Marx-Weberian synthesis). Postmodernism is also largely disappearing in academia, being replaced by the more objective analytical construct of globalization (although postmodernism is lingering in the literary field, where is continues to be a source of amusement). Louis, buzzwords come and go--don't treat a fad as a habit. (Although I will agree with a critique that extends to the "left" in general regarding identity politics and the fragmenting of struggle into "mini"-struggles based on superficial socially-constructed "traits.") Louis' characterization of academia is therefore incorrect. His ignorance of the actual character of academics leads him to make absurd statements that reflect something other than a reality. He exaggerates out of all proportion what sort of Marxists there are in academia. The fact is that the academy needs Marxists there; Marxists who can understand the production of bourgeois theory; Marxists who are permitted the skills, the time, the resources (what little they can scare up in the absence of corporate funding for their research projects) to produce critical analysis of the social world and of bourgeois intellectual production. What is missing is a connection between what Marxists do in the university and the struggle for democracy. But we won't get there if people condemn academic Marxism as somehow intrinsically evil (and this is the definite impression I am left with here). People like Louis stand in between the worker and their advocates, condemning the intellectual as subversive to the worker movement. This line of rhetoric has always struck me as the expression of fear of usurpation: Please don't listen to them! Listen to me! They are bunch of snots in the ivy tower who only want to.... What? I can't follow this logic. Louis' argument also completely ignores the objective reality that academics are proletarians. Those Marxists who move in academic circles, if even remotely self-reflexive, are far less likely to suffer from contradictory consciousness, and far more likely to have an opportunity to undermine hegemony of liberal intellectual production *at its source*. The whole attack against the dominant bourgeois theory of modernization-- theories of underdevelopment--I would remind Louis, came from intellectuals out of the universities in South America. The current defunding of many sociology departments is a direct reflection of the increasing inability of the bourgeoisie to impose liberal hegemony over that discipline. So, Louis, whether you are a proletarian who buys the capitalist line and manages other proletarians in the factory for the boss, or you are a proletarian who buys the capitalist line and produces intellectual products to be used by capitalists in furthering their international domination of the working and peasant classes, you are a sell out (and suffering from false consciousness). But, by the same token, if you are proletarian on the shop floor working to educate your fellow workers on socialism, or if you are a proletarian in the academy working to advance the theory of historical materialism into ever more damning critiques of bourgeois practice, then you are in the service of the working class, and you do not deserve to be degenerated in the fashion that you have set forth here. The great thinkers of socialism wedded academics with activism. Rather than divide the two falsely, I would suggest we reaffirm the role of intellectual endeavors in our socialist praxis. Andrew --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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