From owner-marxism-international
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 1997 20:07:49 -0400 (EDT)
From: Stephen C Tumino <sctumino@acsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: M-I: PANIC LEFT-6
Revolutionary Marxist Collective/SUNY Buffalo
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PANIC LEFT-6
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In the small petty bourgeois universe of Doug Henwood, to place in
the public space a text for public critique and discussion
“takes nerve”. It is, in short, an act of
“personal” courage. This is only one of the symptoms
of cyberfascism that we have pointed out: it is a cult of
personality and secrecy and a buddy system that has made any
exchange of ideas and views other than the ones that support the
net left clique almost impossible. We are Revolutionary Marxists:
we believe not in
buddy systems or the pedagogy of support (Holstun) but in open
discussion. We have spent most of our time at Buffalo struggling
for such a space. Why do you think James Holstun and his clique
are so hostile to us? Recall that like the clique-ish leftist
Henwood, Prof. Holstun also tells us that speaking out in this
fascist climate is all about “nerve” and
“guts”. In his response to us he doubts if we even
have the “guts to write back at all”. Henwood and
Holstun—net-left and academic left — deploy
the identical strong-arm techniques against any attempts to
open up discussion and break up their personality cults of secrecy
and buddy networks. Where do you think the unrelenting VIOLENCE in
Prof. Holstun's text orginates? Here is a “teacher”
who presents himself as the essence of the pedagogy of support and
yet his own text is nothing but naked violence. Holstun is relying
on this violence (supported by his institutional power) to silence
oppositional students. He himself declares that to critique and
engage with campus groups is hopelessly idealist and localist: why
then he is he sending his “gossip column” to us? His
gossip column — a collection of clique-ish rumors and
personal attacks ("stoop-id") unleashes the VIOLENCE of the
bourgeois academic left against critique-al and revolutionary
Marxist knowledges. That is why. The reason Henwood and Sprouse
(and undoubtedly many others) find his text interesting is not
simply because it echoes their politics back to them. It is
interesting above all because the violence in his text acts as a
proxy violence for all who are unable to engage our RED CRITIQUE,
those who have either used diversionary detours (style) or simply
outright ignored the issues we have raised. Sprouse says he is a
student of literature: he, then should know that the very form of
our text is
an intertextual (oops big words again) reply to
Holstun (remember the petty bourgeois poetics of Wallace Stevens
and his “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"?). There
is nothing in Holstun (except perhaps his more violent violence)
that has not already been said about our text and has not already
been responded to in our PANIC LEFT series: Holstun repeats Leo
Casey's comments about Laclau and Mouffe, repeats Proyect's
defense of Ellen Meiksins Wood against pomo, dismisses us as
“cult studies” like Proyect, laughs the nervous
laughter of Scott McLemee, wonders what we are actually
“doing” for workers in Buffalo like Malecki, repeats
the fascist clique-ism of Henwood.... This is the melancholic
story of the net/academic left that is recirculated over and over
again and signed over and over again by Henwood, Sprouse, Proyect,
Cox, and now Holstun (HAVE YOU READ IT?)... this is not our
“story”....
Sprouse himself says he has never seen the entire net left so
united against anything as they are now against us. Do you know
WHY? WE are , as one of the posts on this list said: from the
wrong side of the tracks. We are the “other” of the
reformist left. We remind all of you what you could have done and
the way you compromise and are compromising with the right
wing. We are showing you the way you are all wrapped up in your
petty professional concerns (Sprouse says his exams are more
important to him than participation in public debate, and while
attacking the academy is getting ready for a job there... the
stylistic commentary of Holstun, the English professor... the
dissertation wars of Proyect, Henwood and the net-left... ). RED
CRITIQUE puts all of you — the petty
professionalists—on the spot and now you are all united in a
communal ritual of, as Ralph Dumain says: expelling the
“immigrant."
We are the RED immigrant on this list and all of your efforts have
been focused on finding “legal” ways to il-legalize
us... this is the core of the comprador left....
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