Date: Mon, 16 Mar 1998 10:17:28 -0500 From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com> Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: listen, vanguardists! Hugh Rodwell wrote: >>>From Judith Butler's "Merely Cultural," published in both the current >>Social Text and the current New Left Review: >> >>"To fault new social movements for their vitality, as some have done, is >>precisely to refuse to understand that any future for the Left will have to >>build on the basis of movements that compel democratic participation, and >>that any effort to impose unity upon such movements from the outside will >>be rejected once again as a form of vanguardism dedicated to the production >>of hierarchy and dissension, producing the very factionalization that it >>asserts is coming from outside itself." > > >Doug obviously thinks this paragraph has something important to say, but of >course it would never cross his mind to spell out what it is. Why the hell should I have to gloss something that makes perfect sense on its own, Hugh? Let me spell it out for those of you who can see the world only as refracted through the Transitional Program. Complaints from dinosaur leftists about the fractionation of the left are, whether they know it or not, expressions of nostalgia for the days when women, queers, racial "minorities," and greens didn't make such a fuss. The dinosaurs' call for "unity" is, whether they know it or not, a plea for the troublemakers to shut up. But it's precisely that false unity, which is achieved through the silencing of dissent in the name of "vanguardism," produces exactly the kinds of ruptures that the vanguardists mourn. For example, if the male dinosaurs didn't tell women (and men interested in gender issues) that their concerns were secondary, bourgeois even, then there probably would not be so many anti-marxist feminists in the world. Ditto those orthodox Marxists who told homosexuals that their desires are symptoms of bourgeois decadence. Is that clear enough, Hugh? Doug --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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