Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 14:40:50 -0400 (EDT) From: "Amrohini J. Sahay" <ajsahay-AT-mailbox.syr.edu> Subject: M-TH: PANIC LEFT - 11 The Revolutionary Marxist Collective ******************************* PANIC LEFT - 11 ******************************* 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... --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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