File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9803, message 394


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





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