Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 13:08:53 -0500 (EST)
Subject: M2 List



I'd like to see M2 stay alive.  I'd like to see more discussion of
dialectics, Marx's philosophy, Ollman, evolution, theory, etc.  The things
Lisa Rogers discussed kept me tuned in to the group discussion.  Ralph can
be brutal sometimes but I like to know what he thinks.  I'd contribute
more but I'm interested in literary, philosophical and sociological stuff,
finding my positions somewhere between Laclau and Mouffe, Marx and Raymond
Williams and Stuart Hall.  That puts me somewhere in the Cultural Studies
camp, an academically oriented bourgeois son of the working class.  I
think most things I would write here would be taken as flame bait and
everyone else who posts here debates so well and seems so well read that 
I don't think I'd be much sport.   

There are some things I've wondered about though in connection to this
list: 

1.  What do people think of Stanley Aronowitz's _The Crisis in Historical
Materialism_ (U. of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed.)?  Colin MacCabe and Cornel
West seem to like it quite a bit, but I know that there are quite a few
people, considering the Sokal affair, who think Aronowitz is a chump, and
a "smelly" chump at that.  Is his TCIHM a crock?   

2.  What of voices on the Left such as MacCabe or West?  Or Henry Louis
Gates?  Or Edward Said?  The first two like Stanley's stuff, but why?  Are
there any reasons that they would publicly endorse his book?  And the
second two, while ethnically inflecting their critiques, are academic,
some might say elitist.  Would you say that they just aren't Marxist? or
that they are only mildly Marxist sympathetic? and that therefore we
should be very suspicious of them and their opinions?  Don't they flirt
too much with Foucauldian and Derridean procedures and terms in their
analyses?  It's hard to read Said without seeing the poststructural
influence--if muted by his humanism.  And Gates on the "signifying monkey"
seems indebted to Derrida for his analysis of representation and racism. 

3.  Finally, THE NATION is the only "paper" on the Left that I'm
subscribed to, and it's difficult to find any other analysis that's as
good.  I want to check out the Left Business Observer--someone want to
send me a copy?  But, what other daily or weekly papers or online
magazines are people plugging into for current analysis of the media,
politics, culture and the economy?  Some of the magazines or newspapers
I've seen from the Greens, or from Unions or from socialists or communists
are hard to obtain and seem poorly written and reported.  The problem I
suppose is that it's hard to get good bourgeois journalism professionals
to write in underfunded and understaffed communist and socialist
newspapers. 


4.  So I guess one thing I'd like to see more of is political, cultural,
economic and media analysis from people on this list: less fighting and
dissing each other and more reporting on your local conditions.  I guess 
that steers M2 a little more toward M1, but without the in-fighting.  

I suppose all this may sound naive.  I don't follow every move the Spoons
Hierarchs make or contemplate, and so there may already be a list that
does what I'd like to read.  If so, in the immortal words of SNL's Gilda,
"Never mind." 


Van




















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