From owner-marxism-international
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 14:40:50 -0400 (EDT)
From: “Amrohini J. Sahay” <ajsahay@mailbox.syr.edu>
Subject: M-I: PANIC LEFT - 11
The Revolutionary Marxist Collective
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PANIC LEFT - 11
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Hugh Rodwell, scared of anything that even approaches a
revolutionary practice, is now attempting to hide his reactionary
and counter-revolutionary tendencies under the well-worn
mask of a tired and discredited trade-unionism. Arrogance is not
encountering the most advanced thought on the boundaries and
situating them in a materialist critique and examining their
counter-revolutionary consequences and thus clarifying the
existing state of the world and the ways in which it is
understood. It is upon such understandings that the practices and
policies of the ruling class is founded. Without such a coherent,
total understanding the left is reduced to nothing more than a
series of incoherent spastic REACTIONS. This is one reason that
net-left
has become a REACTIVE left, a left whose only
response to us is to dismiss, shout down and try to respond to
rational discourse by hysterical moves.... Arrogance is the
ossified paternalism that Hugh Rodwell and Uncle Lou adopt to
conceal their fear of the new by appeal to their “old”
experiences — old experiences that have led the left to one
disaster after another... because of ignorance, reactivity and
sheer cowardice — a cowardice nowhere more clear than in
their use of obscenity and scatological images to deal with
focused analysis and new ideas. A paternalism, in short, that is a
poor substitute for a clear understanding of the world-as-is:
world, that is, in its stubborn realities that do not yield to an
anecdotal explanation. Neither Hugh Rodwell nor Uncle Lou have
said a word — beyond the scatological and the
sadistic—about WHAT we are writing, our analysis of the
existing world situation. Hugh Rodwell cannot even read: he takes
our critique of Althusser for a support of Althusser! With such
knowledge!
In our previous post, we theorized a bourgeois theory of history
founded upon “breaks”. This theory is not, of course,
limited to mere historiography or exclusively deployed by
bourgeois historians. It is a way of looking (which at times
passes as an “analysis") of the world: it segmentizes the
social sphere into autonomous zones and fetishizes each zone as a
zone acting with its own unique LOGIC. Hugh Rodwell, Uncle Lou,
Yoshie and their philistine anti-intellectual gang have separated
the zone of “labor” from all the others. How could you
possible deal with labor (except for mindless actionism which is
typical of cowboy politics and which has nothing to do with
Marxism-Leninism) without, for example, a “labor theory of
value"?! (We can hear all the other counter-revolutionaries
shouting: BUT WE DON'T NEED “LABOR THEORY OF VALUE” AS
THEY HAVE BEEN SAYING FOR MONTHS ON THIS LIST).... Hugh Rodwell,
Uncle Lou,... have no integrated ideas, no coherent understanding
of the proletariat, labor.... They are the net-left equivalent of
Weitling: they substitute emotional appeals for analytical and
rigorous thinking. They advocate ignorance... knowledge is
“gray”, spontaneous ignorance (which for some reason
they think of as “life” and “radical") is
“green”. It is a thingy-feely reformist left
that, once again, now using the trope of “working
class” (because that is all it is for them), to marginalize
a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary move, has appealed to a most
backward form of trade-unionism. It
is in such a context that one should take Jonathan Flanders's
response to Christi-Ann: He asks her to tell us more about her
EXPERIENCE! Instead of critiquing her for her economism—she
simply wants a “better” life under capitalism and has
no interest in revolutionary work. She is the exemplary instance
of what Lenin called a practitioner of “economism”. If
Christi-Ann,... indeed wants different working conditions,
then she should aim not at simply shorter hours, etc., for herself
and others but participate in overthrowing the regime of
wage-labor. Jonathan Flanders by his “tell us about your
EXPERIENCE” shows that he has no coherent understanding of
labor (the fact that he himself HAS EXPERIENCE does not mean that
he KNOWS the meaning of that EXPERIENCE. He, Hugh Rodwell, Uncle
Lou,... reduce labor and the working class to simply a postmodern
“identity politics” and they do not even know it
because they have never even bothered to know the postmodern. The
postmodern is, as far as they are concerned,
“obnoxious”. Well they are doing what they themselves
think is obnoxious: reducing proletariat to a touchy-feely
“identity politics”. As Marx said to Weitling: to call
on the workers without any scientific ideas or coherent theory is
counter-revolutionary....
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