From owner-marxism-international  Fri Apr  4 18:28:52 1997
From: cbcox@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Message-Id: <9704042328.AA44764@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>
Subject: Re: Fwd: M-TH: Re: M-I: Grammatica...Playing Word Games
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 1997 17:28:39 -0600 (CST)
In-Reply-To: <970404130959_-2072402344@emout17.mail.aol.com> from "Braderr@aol.com" at Apr 4, 97 01:10:00 pm

    Apparently our Revolutionary Band of Buffalos prefer to play (and
I am accuising them of being, to use their own language, ludic politicians)
against verbal constructs mostly of their own production. They are of
course mostly ignorant of m-i history, or they would be at least minimally
aware that to take any one posting by Louis P and set it up as one's
ideological warfare is already to have wandered off through the looking
glass. (In simple language: they don't understand what Louis is trying
to say, and are in no position to either criticize his errors or under-
stand his position. That makes their critique of him pure sophomoric
play with words.)And they are off in cloud cuckooland when they haul
debates with Ralph Dumain into m-i. So that part of their Red Critique
has to be ignored as without content or grip on any reality.

    Now, Brad Rothrock's reply to Henwood. Again we have schoolboy
errors of a sort which will pass in a dormitory bullsession, but
not in serious conflict over principle. "The academy has been taken
over by bourgeois idealists and must be returned [!!!!] to revolutionary
marxist theory...." Pray tell when did revolutionary marxist theory everoc
occupy the academy? It is hard to find a parallel to this, but we might
fantasize St. Paul arguing that the Roman Empire must be returned to
its Christian roots? This is nursery school *playground* activity to
speak of bourgeois idealists *taking over* the academy. Along these
lines, we might expect any day that GM commandos will be raiding
the Fisher Body Plant to recapture it from the Red Berets. (Actually,
the Red Berets, originally called the Ladies Auxiliary of the UAW,
did enter into the battle for Fisher Body during the great sitdown
strikes.)

    I hope their infatuation with this silly rhetoric of recapturing
what we never held has not entered seriously into their thought, but
it may well have. I have read and reread texts in *Transformation* and
*Red Orange* which touch on this theme (though without the silly
rhetoric of "recapture"), and this yoking of campus academic struggle
to the building of an international communist movement is one of
the weak spots of their argument--or, rather, one of the aspects
over which serious struggle should be waged. This question gets
blurred by the rhetoric of "recapture."

    Next: I apologized for objecting to the formatting of the first
Buffalo posting, but the ALL CAPS of the reply to Henwood *is*
obnoxious: is Brad deliberately trying to make grasping his thought
as physically painful (and as time consuming) as possible. To make
sense of it I had to log it to disk, load it into my word processor,
get rid of the all=caps, and print it out.

    Next: "Ideology," as anyone who has been even a dilettantish marxist
for more than a few months, is a term of many different usages among
serious marxists, and one cannot use it in polemics without confronting
its varied history. I won't argue the point here, but in what I would
consider the primary uses of the term (or at least a major usage by
important Marxist thinkers), the phrase "ideologies of the ruling
class" is unintelligible. I *know* what you *want* to mean Brad, so
don't send me to the dictionary: I'm claiming that your use of it is
itself ideological and does not name anything real. This is particularly
clear when you use the oxymoron ideas/ideology. Ideas are precisely what
an ideology is NOT. And when you speak of "ideology" you are merely
echoing, without understanding, that ideology which our daily experience
makes seem an obvious fact to us: School is where our ideas come from.
But it isn't a fact. The source of our ideas is far more complex than
in your simplistic manifestos. (T

    I've spent all the time on m-i that I can afford today. Perhaps
another time.

    Carrol





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