"Mr P.A. Van Heusden" wrote:
> In my experience, trying to develop a 'Marxism in plain English' way of
> explaining, understanding and discussing things is not just an academic
> exercise
O.K. I have no objection to this -- but after you develop that "Marxism in plain English" you have to *stick* to that chosen plain english, and then that by definition becomes a jargon. On the other hand, if you keep changing it so it doesn't become a jargon, you force all your followers to keep learning a new vocabulary, and once again the movement is in the hands oif a small elite who by education are prepared to constantly change their vocabulary.
Isn't the problem that of teaching people the word apatheid -- and then sticking to that word so they don't have to learn a new one each week?
Let me give an example. A combination of depression and the effect of some anti-depressants is to cause frequent short bouts of word forgetting. This could be a problem for someone who earns (earned before I retired) his living talking to classes. My experience was that if the word I forgot was a reasonably complicated one I could manage a paraphrase on the run -- but if it was a simple everyday term -- I was stuck. How do you paraphrase "table."
I suggest most paraphrases for imperialism or for apartheid would sound as silly as a paraphrase for table.
This whole discussion of jargon would probably make more sense if (perhaps only if) it were developed in reference to particular words or expressions with accompanying descriptions of the situation in which they were or were not subject to that jargon term "jargon." I suppose in fact that "jargon" is the second most popular bit of jargon used by anti-marxists, the first being "dogmatic." How are you ever going to persuade a marxist she's wrong if you try to persuade her with such outlandish jargon as "jargon," "dogmatism," "authoritarianism," "stalinism," "utopianism," etc.
Carrol