From rdumain@igc.apc.org  Tue Apr 15 19:20:56 1997
From: rdumain@igc.apc.org (Ralph Dumain)
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 11:20:56 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: M-TH: TERESA EBERT FOLLOW-UP
Message-ID: <199704151820.LAA16633@igc6.igc.org>

The only reason I have not yet unsubscribed from death-and-thaxis
is because I promised to follow up on Teresa Ebert per Doug
Henwood's request.  I have not exactly found a smoking gun, but
here are the references I have been able to find so far.

The first NEWS & LETTERS article on Teresa Ebert is on p. 2 of the
Aug.-Sept. 1996 issue.  Author is Laurie Cashdan.  (Top of my copy
of newspaper is torn off, so I can't read the title.)  Basically,
Cashdan engages in sterile debate over Lenin's MATERIALISM AND
MATERIO-CRITICISM, counterpoising dialectics of absolute
negativity to mere historical materialism.

Ebert's rebuttal comes in the Oct. 1996 issue, p. 2 & 11.

Cashdan has an article "Feminist Subjectivity Center of Debate",
in NEWS & LETTERS, Nov. 1996, p. 2, not specifically addressed to
Ebert but perhaps still in response.

In the December 1996 NEW & LETTERS, there is a round of
correspondence in reaction to this debate (p. 6), including
rebuttals by Ebert and Zavarzadeh.  There is also a round of
commentary by various authors on this subject on p. 5 under the
title "Dialectics of Revolution and Women's Liberation."

I am usually the last person to defend the News & Letters people,
and their contributions here are as weak as anything Ebert writes
in these pages.  So where is the incriminating information on
Ebert I thought I found in NEWS & LETTERS?  I must have dimly
remembered reading the allegations contained in the following
letters:

>From Julia Jones in the October issue, p. 7:

"I was surprised to read that Teresa Ebert has developed a
critique of the 'post-al' movement  from a (however vulgar)
Marxist perspective.  As a teacher in the late '80s at Northern
Illinois University, Ebert was pushing the very ideas she now
claims to be against, post-modernity, post-feminism, and
'post-structuralist assumptions about linguistic play, difference,
and the priority of discourse.'  Her lateral move to an Engelsian
brand of Marxism raises new questions about the theoretical ties
between post-modernism and post-Marx Marxism.  Both her former
view and her current one deny the historic element of the
'creativity of cognition.'"

>From Jim Guthrie in the November 1996 issue, p. 6:

"I got a good laugh out of Teresa Ebert's conversion to
'historical materialism.'  In the late eighties when Ebert was a
professor making a name for herself as the 'bearer' of post
modernism at Northern Illinois University, I was in the
Marxist-Humanist Forum .... Unfortunately Ebert's rejection of
Marx as a 'modernist' managed to disorient a number of radical
students.  Despite her current 'profound' discovery that
materialism is at the center of Marx's thought, I am skeptical
when I hear her lecture others about being bourgeois."

I will leave it to others to confirm or disconfirm these
allegations.  I do stand by my original denunciation of the
Alternative Orange people at Syracuse.  The evidence is in their
own newspapers.  Their abuse of their own students is criminal,
but characteristic of intellectuals who know nothing of real
life.

Undoubtedly Henwood is attracted to the likes of Ebert because of
the hard leftism she now espouses, perhaps for the same reasons he
feels it necessary to defend his pal, another hard leftist, Lou
"Prozac" Proyect, whose recent behavior forever casts doubt on his
sanity.  This business and other heretofore inexplicable behavior
of Doug Henwood, editor of prestigious LEFT BUSINESS OBSERVER,
begins to make sense now.  Most likely I will unsubscribe from
this list in the next week.  I see no future for any marxism list
on spoons, and I feel morally soiled keeping the sort of company
that is stinking up the room.


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