That Obscure Object of Discipline (was lingua franca on"stars" in academia)

Carrol Cox cbcox at mail.ilstu.edu
Mon Jan 25 17:15:17 PST 1999


Dingbat wrote:


> 3. It's also nice to play the "whaddya mean by workers game" Wastes even
> more time when ya gotta sit around spelling everything out for everyone

The rather passive-aggressive refusal of these lists to play that game and play it seriously is perhaps their greatest weakness. (By lists I mean lbo, marxism, l-i, and m-fem). I sometimes think the most important marxist work since the death of Lenin is Mao's *Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan*. It has nothing whatever that is *directly* relevant to any other nation but China in the 1930s, but it stands as a superb model of where concrete marxist thought must always begin.

Kelley is being obtuse (deliberately?) when she pretends that our shared knowledge of class in the United States (or Australia or France or India) is so clearcut that nothing needs to be "spelled out."

Carrol



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