Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 21:44:11 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: The Teresa Ebert thread


Louis wrote:
>What's interesting is that they have appropriated the political culture of
>"Marxism-Leninism" but grafted it onto the style and discourse of academic
>Marxism. Lenin is invoked to support a body of ideas that demands
>familiarity with a range of thinkers who are inaccessible to the average
>person.

Exactly! It is this strange admixture that made them look so ridiculous as
to become beyond, or beneath, serious critique.

>What is sad is that Teresa Ebert deserves the widest audience. She has a lot
>to say, even if her prose is filled with jargon and neologisms. Yet her
>acolytes are giving people the impression that there must be something fishy
>going on in the narrow academic circles of upstate New York. When people
>start to associate the names of people like Steven Tumino with Teresa Ebert,
>the unfortunate reaction might be the grating of teeth and raising of the
>hair on the back of the neck. She deserves better.

I agree that Ebert should be read. But I have some objections to her
reliance on people like Masao Miyoshi in her critique of what she calls
"globalism," "transnational bourgeoisie," "global civil society," etc. I
think she made a fatal short-cut by not thinking through the current
conjuncture on her own.

Her call for workers' internationalism is good, but she doesn't have much
to say about how it can be squared with her criticisms of what she calls
anti-statism. I am not saying that they are necessarily contradictory. (As
your commentary on her article indicates, they don't have to be.) But she
needs to theorize the relationship between the two. In her book, I got a
distinct impression that she was too busy fighting postmodernism to
articulate a marxist theory of her own that truly confronts the
complexities, difficulties, dangers, and possibilities in the current
situation.

Yoshie Furuhashi




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