From owner-marxism-international
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
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 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 distinguish
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 breakthroughs: 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! According 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 rrrrevolutionary 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 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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