From owner-marxism-international  Tue Apr 15 15:57:59 1997
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 15:57:15 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <199704151957.PAA10698@mailhub1.cc.columbia.edu>
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Abstract theorizing, no thanks

Steven Tumino:

>  As far as
>they are concerned there are only one set of pre-decided questions that
>are legitimate for discussion on the net-left -- i. e. questions that THEY
>feel comfortable with -- questions around which they have established a
>net-club.   

Louis: Steven, are you really interested in discussion, or debate for that
matter? I can't imagine having one with you. For one thing, my orientation
is to the living class struggle, not the constellation of theoreticians who
preoccupy left academicians (Althusser, Zizek, Derrida, Deleuze-Guattari,
Laclau-Mouffe, etc.) I only dipped into Althusser when a youngster from
Australia kept telling me that my life would not be complete without a
look-see. I did the same thing with Deleuze-Guattari after Jon
Beasley-Murray kept dropping their names. I've managed to get through life
without ever reading Laclau-Mouffe, I have to admit.

But basically this is the stuff of thaxis, not marxism-international. Most
people over there dote on that stuff. My guess, however, is that you can't
seem to get a discussion or debate going over there because you and your
friends are just too off-putting. You remind me of the sort of cult that
Lyndon Larouche had built around himself at Columbia University back in the
1960s. Different politics, same pod-people style. When you build a cult
around a favorite professor like Navaradzeh or Teresa Ebert, to the point of
using the same buzzwords (problematize, contestation) and the same
ideological themes, you run the risk of alienating people. Even if I was up
to speed on Zizek, Lacan, Derrida et al, I wouldn't dream of having a
discussion with you. You are all too strange, like "Heaven's Gate" strange.
And I mean that.

What your group reminds me of is the tiny cybersect called MIM (Maoist
International Movement) that showed up here about 2 years ago. They made a
point of not using their names, but numbers (MIM number 3, etc.). Despite
the fact that you guys use your names, I detect no individual personalities.
It is the same voice, the same style, the same ideas, the same hostile tone.
The net effect is to cut off discussion. I have yet to notice a scintilla of
difference between what you say or what Brian says. The Bolshevik Party was
not a monolithic cult, by the way. During WWI, Bukharin was the editor of a
official Bolshevik newspaper in exile that used to attack Lenin like it was
going out of style. Your little collective seems to breed intellectual
conformity. How sad.

Perhaps you should simply stop cross-posting to marxism-international. There
is very little interest in theory for theory's sake over here. We, who are
the descendants of the old M1 list, are not very academically inclined even
though a number of us get very good grades on a regular basis. The sort of
issues that have tended to capture our philistine imaginations are ecology,
the militia movement, the civil war in former Yugoslavia, black nationalism,
Zaire, market socialism, etc. I personally think there is some honor in this
since these were exactly the sort of topics that preoccupied Marx and Engels
for the better part of a decade (1850 to 1860). The table of contents of the
collected Marx-Engels will reveal very little abstract theorizing in the
style that you seem fond of. Mostly what they were writing about was the
civil wars in France, the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Germany,
colonialism in China or India, the American Civil War, etc. If you awfully
smart guys ever wake up some morning and find a burning desire to talk about
such matters, you will lots of people willing to chat with you, including me.







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