Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 14:40:50 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Amrohini J. Sahay" <ajsahay-AT-mailbox.syr.edu>
Subject: M-I: PANIC LEFT - 11



The Revolutionary Marxist Collective
 
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PANIC LEFT - 11  

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Hugh Rodwell, scared of anything that even approaches a revolutionary
practice, is now attempting to hide his reactionary and
counter-revolutionary tendencies under the well-worn mask of a tired and
discredited trade-unionism.  

	Arrogance is not encountering the most advanced thought on the
boundaries and situating them in a materialist critique and examining
their counter-revolutionary consequences and thus clarifying the existing
state of the world and the ways in which it is understood.  It is upon
such understandings that the practices and policies of the ruling class is
founded.  Without such a coherent, total understanding the left is reduced
to nothing more than a series of incoherent spastic REACTIONS.  This is
one reason that net-let has become a REACTIVE left, a left whose only
response to us is to dismiss, shout down and try to respond to rational
discourse by hysterical moves...  Arrogance is the ossified paternalism
that Hugh Rodwell and Uncle Lou adopt to conceal their fear of the new by
appeal to their "old" experiences -- old experiences that have lead the
left to one disaster after another ... because of ignorance, reactivity
and sheer cowardice -- a cowardice nowhere more clear than in their use of
obscenity and scatological images to deal with focused analysis and new
ideas.  A paternalism, in short, that is a poor substitute for a clear
understanding of the world-as-is: world, that is, in its stubborn
realities that do not yield to an anecdotal explanation.  Neither Hugh
Rodwell nor Uncle Lou have said a word -- beyond the scatological and the
sadistic -- about WHAT we are writing, our analysis of the existing world
situation.  Hugh Rodwell cannot even read: he takes our critique of
Althusser for a support of Althusser!  
With such knowledge!  

	In our previous post, we theorized a bourgeois theory of history
founded upon "breaks".  This theory is not, of course, limited to mere
historiography or exclusively deployed by bourgeois historians.  It is a
way of looking (which at times passes as an "analysis") of the world: it
segmentizes the social sphere into autonomous zones and fetishizes each
zone as a zone acting with its own unique LOGIC.  Hugh Rodwell, Uncle Lou,
Yoshie and their philistine anti-intellectual gang have separated the zone
of "labor" from all the others.  How could you possible deal with labor
(except for mindless actionism which is typical of cowboy politics and
which has nothing to do with Marxism-Leninism) without, for example, a
"labor theory of value"  (We can hear all the other
counter-revolutionaries shouting: BUT WE DON'T NEED "LABOR THEORY OF
VALUE" AS THEY HAVE BEEN SAYING FOR MONTHS ON THIS LIST)...  Hugh Rodwell,
Uncle Lou... have no integrated ideas, no coherent understanding of the
proletariat, labor...  They are the net-left equivalent of Weitling: they
substitute emotional appeals for analytical and rigorous thinking.  They
advocate ignorance... knowledge is "gray", spontaneous ignorance (which
for some reason they think of as "life" and "radical" and "green").  It is
a thingy-feely reformist left that, once again, now using the trope of
"working class" (because that is all it is for them), to marginalize a
Marxist-Leninist revolutionary move, has appealed to a most backward form
of trade-unionism.  It is in such a context that one should take Jonathan
Flanders's response to Christi-Ann: He asks her to tell us more about her
EXPERIENCE!  Instead of critiquing her for her economism -- she simply
wants a "better" life under capitalism and has no interest in
revolutionary work.  She is the exemplary instance of what Lenin called a
practitioner of "economism".  If Christi-Ann ..., indeed wants different
working conditions, then she should aim not at simply shorter hours, etc.,
for herself and others but participate in overthrowing the regime of
wage-labor.  Jonathan Flanders by his "tell us about your EXPERIENCE"
shows that he has no coherent understanding of labor (the fact that he
himself HAS EXPERIENCE does not mean that he KNOWS the meaning of that
EXPERIENCE.  He, Hugh Rodwell, Uncle Lou... reduce labor and the working
class to simply a postmodern "identity politics" and they do not even know
it because they have never even bothered to know the postmodern.  The
postmodern is, as far as they are concerned, "obnoxious".  Well they are
doing what they themselves think is obnoxious: reducing proletaria to a
touchy-feely "identity politics".  As Marx said to Weitling: to call on
the workers without any scientific ideas or coherent theory is
counter-revolutionary...




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