Ganter —•— M-I: SIDE NOTE: PANIC HOLSTUN

  10 of 24

  TEXT VERSION: M-I

IMPORTANT: M-TH: Red Critique (fwd) (text from Jim Holstun, post by Brian M Ganter)

 

See also: M-I: Red Critique (fwd)   (post by Brian M Ganter)

See also: Re: M-I: Red Critique (fwd)   (post by Doug Henwood)

See also: M-TH: Re: M-I: Red Critique (fwd)   (post by Doug Henwood)

See also: M-TH: Red Critique (fwd)   (post by Gerald Levy)

See also: M-TH: SIDE NOTE: PANIC HOLSTUN   (post by Scott McLemee)

See also: Re: M-I: SIDE NOTE: PANIC HOLSTUN   (post by Keith Alan Sprouse)

See also: Re: M-I: SIDE NOTE: PANIC HOLSTUN. Note to Keith's Response   (post by Carrol Cox)

See also: Re: M-I: Red Critique (fwd)   (post by Kevin Cabral)

See also: M-I: Hi, Bryan   (post by Louis Proyect)

See also: M-TH: SIDE NOTE: PANIC HOLSTUN   (post by Scott McLemee)

See also: M-TH: SIDE NOTE: PANIC HOLSTUN   (post by Russell Pearson)

From owner-marxism-international
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 20:53:29 -0400 (EDT)
From: Brian M Ganter <bmganter@acsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: M-I: SIDE NOTE: PANIC HOLSTUN

— — — — — — — — — — 
Revolutionary Marxist Collective U/Buffalo
 
**************************************************
PANIC HOLSTUN:
FIFTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A CENTRIST COMPRADOR
**************************************************

We have read your text and did not find it funny at all. It is such a sad text: a text which is utterly devoid of any “originality," “voice," “tone” (these are, by the way, “values” that you teach — they are NOT ours) and is completely lacking in any ability to grasp its own conditions of production. (e.g., the political complicity of the “Thompsonite” left with the ludic left in their rejection of “principles” and “ruthless critique” and advocation instead of “consensus” and “conversation” ["DIALOGUE"] as the markers of “good” [authentic] politics). Both of these are of course the conditions of possibility for the abandonment of class struggle politics in favor of the bourgeois subtleties of the diverse hegemonic coalition — of “shared beliefs”. (This is radical democracy NOT Marxist-Leninism, Prof. Holstun, in case we still have to spell it out for you). Having long ago abandoned the concepts which could provide you with a rigorous understanding of the world-historical situation, your panic-ky “response” is reduced to echoing what is by now a set of clichés endlessly reiterated in all encounters with our text. All of these encounters have the exact same deep structure — with variations depending on where they are published and who is speaking them:

They all

1. Find our text very funny (the nervous laughter of the petty bourgeois in the presence of ideas)

2. They all present to us their own credentials as Marxists ("I believe... in my heart of hearts")

3. They all have one or two choice words for Zavarzadeh, Morton, Syracuse University...

4. They all say our text is unreadable (but its unreadability in no way, it seems, prevent our critics from responding to it!!!!)

5. They all tell us what good activists the writers are (the zone of REAL politics).

6. They laugh some more and reassure us that they have found us funny.

7. They find gaps in our logic (in the very text that they say is “unreadable").

8. They laugh some more (it looks like that whenever they cannot understand something they just find their own ignorance quite funny).

9. They laugh some more.

10. And they tell us we are funny.

11. They all begin by going on about how stoop-id we are but end up saying we are “intelligent people." This incoherence is the core strategy of a centrist comprador that treats everything as a “deal”.

12. They say we do not reach anyone and yet they try very hard to protect their constituency from us. In fact most of these texts are written not to us but to the various writers own constituencies in whose eyes they have lost credibility. The attack on us is simply a way of gaining credibility with their (former?) clients in the academy.

13. They advise us to “learn” from them—“hit the books”.

14. They say: you have not read the book you are writing about , have you? If we say, “yes” they say , you have mis-read it, if we say “no”, they say: I told you so (the game of the deal-er).

15. They say we are very funny.

We find all these texts quite sad: grown men and women who are thrown into an identity crisis under pressure from a critique. Grown men and women who have “selected” Wood (thinking that by choosing her they have, once and for all proven their radical credentials) only to see that choice looks more like the choice of a comprador tied to more trade with Monthly Review and its bankrupt agenda.

Keep correcting punctuation!... and oh, yes: aestheticize at all costs. Use STYLE as a marker: who said the aestheticization of the everyday is the sure sign of cyberfascism? All these texts are quite sad: uncureable cases of mourning and melancholia...

from list marxism-international@lists.village.virginia.edu