Date: Fri, 29 Mar 1996 01:57:22 -0600
To: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
From: rahul-AT-peaches.ph.utexas.edu (Rahul Mahajan)
Subject: Re: A List Proposal -Forwarded


Gary:

>Lisa. Please do not take this personally.  My feelings for  you remain
>unaltered. Meeting you in cyber space has been a joy. But Jon has made a
>mistake here. He works slowly  and generally to good effect but this time
>no.  It is wrong to leave them the open field.  we should have unsubscribed
>them temporarily and then had a debate. It is my reading of the list that
>overwhelmingly they would have been chopped off.
>
>But the problem now is that they have succeeded in making us bend the stick
>away from an attempt to join theory and practice.  the new list will spin
>off towards theory and become indistinguishable from lists such as the
>Bhaskar or Post colonial one.  all that is very sad.
>
>We were engaged in nothing less than the modernisation of Marxism and a
>handful of trogs full of obscure spite and mere passionate intensity have
>totally derailed us.
>
>Yes they have had a glorious victory.  They have made a desert and they call
>it peace.
>
>I  will stay subscribed for the next week and then will in all probability
>leave.

Sorry, Carrol, but it seems a crisis has developed.

I agree unequivocally with Gary. The thing that made this list special was
the unity of theory and practice. I didn't always read the posts on union
politics, nor did I always read the 3J's discussions on value, but I was
glad they were all there if I wished to read them. There was a serious
potential for a crossfertilization to develop between some of the different
threads, leading to, as Gary said, the modernization of Marxism. A list
that is explicitly about theoretical-philosophical matters and that
discourages exchanges about party politics will lose much of this
potential. Furthermore, it may well encourage the invasion of academic
wankers (I have nothing against academic non-wankers) who want only to talk
about the "construction of identity" or the "privileging of the subject" or
the "reification of the postcolonial other" or whatever. This is one of the
few places where you can come to talk about serious matters at a high
theoretical level in plain unvarnished easily-decipherable language. I
strongly suggest that the Spoons Collective not take any action without
consulting the list, minus, of course, the clearly offensive elements.

Rahul




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