File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9802, message 652


Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 21:47:48 -0800 (PST)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Left conservatism?


At 04:46 PM 2/26/98 EST, boddhisatva wrote:
>Wait a second.  Louis Proyect posted this blasphemy: "Let me
>suggest the following propositions: First, political radicalism shouldn't
>be defined by epistemological positions, one way or another.  Second,
>let's stop trying to associate those who disagree with us about such
>matters with the right. Finally, there are far more important issues out
>there. We need a left broad enough for everyone who is willing to do
>something about them, in theory or in practice." 
>
>What can a stunned reader expect next?

I too am stunned.  Evidently, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand
is doing (all puns intended).  For Louis has the most proprietary attitude
to Marxism of anybody on these lists, including the Trot-robots.  (How about
Trotbots, like the gobots?)  We can't get very far with this hypocritical
nonsense.  So let me propose a more refined thesis: we have to disaggregate
the struggle over ideas from the issue of organizational discipline and
censure.  It's not useful to repeat the experience of the Comintern such as
in 1924 when Deborin denounced Lukacs and Korsch in an organizational
context.  The struggle over ideas must be disaggregated from the concrete
struggles over specific political objectives, so that people don't get
excluded from concrete, overtly political participation because of heretical
views.  But this doesn't mean that the struggle for the human mind is
irrelevant, only that it has its own logic, laws, times, and places, which
are not to be collapsed into the imposition of organizational discipline.
This is not news: polemical as he was against religion, empiriocriticism,
etc., Lenin recognized this.

Pomo is ideological poison, and the danger comes when it spills over into
popular culture.  My particular point of attack is the space where it has
invaded Afro-American thought and channeled out to the public by two-faced
academic charlatans who keep one face towards the white left and the other
towards obscurantist nationalists.  The attack on the Enlightenment, on
science, and reason, progress and universalism, translates directly into
support for the religious, ideological, paranoid mystifications that keeps
the black working class dependent on the black elites and power-brokers that
exploit their fear and provincialism, or lie about imaginary deficiencies in
order to promote themselves.  In spite of the opposition to "essentialism",
the pomo black intellectuals in the last instance support and buttress the
most reactionary essentialisms, whether it's Cornel bending over for
Farrakhan and shilling for Jesus, Skippy getting big speakers' fees to
lecture to white businessmen over their rubber chicken lunches how lazy and
shiftless ghetto blacks are, etc.

"Welcome to New York, where socialism is who you know."



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