I am writing to suggest that you open a new section in the Alternative Orange for the review of books, films, newspapers.... I am also sending you a book review to be considered for publication in your paper.

I submitting my review of a book on "critique" because I believe one of the interventionary practices of an "alternative" publication should be an emphasis on and development of "alternative" modes of reading. At the moment various forms of reading (from deconstructive tropological reading to traditional aesthetic close reading and, more familiar, thematic—daily—reading) are contesting each other in determining how texts of culture and society should be "read" that is how to make sense of existing reality. I believe "critique" (not to be confused with "criticism")—a reading devise deployed by Marx in his sustained reunderstandings of capitalism and in his explaining the existing reality in "alternative" modes—has not received much attention by general students who learn how to read mostly in traditional literature/writing courses. I do believe that it is urgent that students—especially those who are not in humanities programs—should be made familiar with this mode of reading texts of culture. Needless to say, "critique" is, of course, not exhaustive of what Marx designates as "praxis": rather it is (a necessary) inauguration of political and revolutionary praxis.

Having read Alternative Orange and the argument of some of its writers/editors, I am sending you this text with full awareness that some of you who believe in more communitarian, humanist and experiential forms of activism might find the tone, language and conceptual syntax of my review a little too abstract, theoretical and thus not quite appropriate for Alternative Orange. My critique of your position will be that no revolutionary practice (as Marx has taught us) can proceed on the basis of an ad hoc, experiential activism. That while it is true that exploitation and oppression is always experienced in terms of being a worker, a woman, a gay, a lesbian, a person of color, a... it cannot ever be explained by such an experience. Explanation requires a sustained historical knowledge of social totality, in short, a "theory": a set of concepts that can make the world intelligible in terms of "alternative" (revolutionary) practices. According to Marx—in his critique of Weitling‘s populism—one has to have "well-thought-out reasons" (a coherent understanding of the social totality) to bring about collective action and emancipatory social change because without them one simply "deceives" people and "raises fantastic hopes." I believe that the left (especially revolutionary marxism), in the name of experiential activism, should not concede the domain of knowledge production (theory) to the reactionary and counter-revolutionary elements who have occupied the universities.

Sincerely, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh Professor