From owner-marxism-international  Fri Apr  4 14:30:48 1997
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 1997 14:29:37 -0500 (EST)
From: Brian M Ganter <bmganter@acsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: M-I: PANIC LEFT, Pt.1
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970404103423.6081B-100000@autarch.acsu.buffalo.edu>



PANIC LEFT, Pt. 1


Louis Proyect's panicked claim for backing his bankrupt populism is that
he has abandoned philosophical thinking and has in fact consistently
avoided it since the "mid-sixties"-- his "Husserl" days (another
reminiscence for his memoirs); he was really thinking then but 
"that was enough".  Now when the frustrated post-Husserlian encounters
ideas/concepts he proudly announces that he makes it a point to 
"dismantle" them just as he does in his numerous book reviews,  adding
that if he finds any "ideas" in the critiques of RMC/Buffalo he "would
take them apart also".  Rather than hearing another chapter in this Tales
of the Crypt of the experientialist left: the horror-stricken fear of
conceptuality, the ongoing panic in the face of Red Critique and the
flight from Marxist theory we want to suggest following our last response,
that Louis Proyect LEARN TO READ.  We want to suggest that he LEARN TO
READ and furthermore that he he begin this time not with Husserl but
with Engels ... whose philosophical writings have been suppressed and
discredited in large part due to the history of the experientialist New
Left of the past twenty years.  There Proyect will not only learn to read
the fundamental difference that lies behind all differences in
theory--that between "materialism" and "idealism"--but he will also see
his activist confusion (the confusion of the panicked left that is
scrambling for its vocabulary handbooks) engaged with and critiqued. This
is the confusion of the panicked leftist that, as Engels says cannot
distinguish between materialism and idealism in theory, and as such cannot
distingush between "idealism" and the pursuit of "ideal aims" (Ludwig
Feuerbach). 
	Ralph Dumain's claims to a panicked leftism are strikingly similar
to Proyect's: posed in a more "thoughtful" frame but with identical
reactionary conclusions.  Dumain, for one,  cannot "read" or hold more
than a declarative sentence at any given time in his mind and what is more
anyone who can must be in his words a "wacko".  The "real" left for him
(like the Chicago crowd of *News and Letters* that Teresa Ebert demolished
in her text responding to them) is sentimental and teary-eyed.  It is not
just in the domain of pop philosophy that Dumain is making breakthroughts:
he is now the first to formulate a new theory of "revolution".  He advises
revolutionaries to first obtain permission from the institutions that
they are working in to change!  Acording to this novel theory of pedagogy
the pedagogues who work to transform teaching practices must ask the
students: would you like to change or do what you have been doing all of
your life--continue eating up bourgeois crap in the name of knowledge?
In short Mr. Dumain wants more "conversation" before we can really 
conclude anything about the need for change.  Dumain, with his policies
of mono-clausal sentences and the rule of ignorance advocates the same
pedagogical tactics of deferral and delay--putting a "human face" on
capitalism and its institutions--now being circulated by the "elite"
bourgeois circles of theory.  WE are interested in reading ONE 
journal of bourgeois pedagogy (the followers of Friere, Ulmer, Giroux,
Graff...) that is not valorizing the exact same conversational pedagogy as
Dumain ... in seeing one single text that is not peddling this retreat
>from social change in the name of extending the "conversation" of the left.
	There is more: Dumain's unspoken rrrrrrrevolutionary credentials
are his close collaboration with Stanley Crouch.  Who is Stanley Crouch?
The darling black conservative of Saul Bellow, CBS and the "Association of
Literary Scholarship and Critics."  To get a taste of what Dumain-Crouch
axis has offered the "people" just look at Crouch's "Barbarians on Either
Sides: The New York Blues of Mr. Sammler's Planet" in the current issue of
*Philosophy and Literature*.  As for "Comrade Zavarzadeh": we will talk
about him if Dumain  provides evidence that he can read one page written
by him!  Finally it should be said that the "spectre" of stalinism that
Dumain invokes is not the sign of a depth of knowledge and experience that
beyond the understanding of younger revolutionaries--it is an outright
advocation of ignorance.  It is scaring the "people" and preventing them
>from becoming critique-al.  The Carrol Cox-Louis Proyect-Doug
Henwood-Ralph Dumain clique thinks because they use the language of the
*New York Daily News* they are taking to the "people".  They are not--they
are simply helping to reify the consciousness of the "people".**

-----       

** A good place to find a definition of "reification" is Marx's
Capital--Chapter 1, Vol.1 or if that is not available Lukacs's *History
and Class Consciousness* ...oops, we forget Ralph Dumain cannot read
sentences with subordinate clauses ...sorry!  Try the Left Business
Observer!













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