>> [The first two names should be familiar to lbo-listers. The attack on Rick
>> Wolff by Deb Kelsh is a fine example of Orange Marxist madness.]
>
>"Orange Marxist"? Is this some new tendency?
Well not so new. Orange as in the school color of Syracuse University, home base of this tendency, which proliferates across an archipelago of upstate New York universities, including SUNY-Buffalo and SUNY-Albany. Intensely disputatious, the cult seems to be led by Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, who wrote a 100-page polemic in the debut issue of their journal, Red Orange, denouncing, among other things, the "Routledge-Verso" cartel, whose main fault seems to be failing to publish the works of Zavarzadeh. Their saner face is Teresa Ebert, author of Ludic Feminism, who is married to Zavarzadeh. Over the years, they've dispatched several grad students to harass various email lists, including the first Spoons Marxism list and the Marxist Literary Group list. They're characterized by a strange jargon ("ludic," "critique-al"), extreme logorrhea, a habit of numbering paragraphs, and the curious belief that the main site of the class struggle today is in the literature departments of research universities.
Their Donald Morton, editor of The Material Queer, blurbed James Heartfield's recent pamphlet (Need & Desire in the Post-Material Economy), which makes me scratch my head a bit.
For a taste, see <http://ils.unc.edu/~lindgren/RedOrange/index.html>.
Doug