Danny Yee reviews FASHIOnABLE NONSENSE

[d-m-c at worldnet.att.net]

At 01:42 PM 1/31/1999 -0500, you wrote:
>rc-am wrote:
>
>>doug mentioned spivak giving a paper and beginning and ending with the
>>sentence: 'i am not a post-marxist'.   without knowing the paper, i
>>think she was referring to those attempts to, as you say, declare marx
>>dead.  doug? you know the title of the paper?
>
>No I don't know the title; she gave it at the first Rethinking Marxism
>conference, in 1989 (I think). I understood virtually nothing she said
>between those two identical sentences though. My grad school friends Donna
>Landry & Gerald "Mac" MacLean, say she writes all her conference talks in
>longhand on legal paper sitting in front of a mirror.
>
>Doug
>
Now I know why I always disliked Spivak.  As for post-marxism, I've always
thought it was an attempt to 1) maintain that there is no "social" no
object of investigation that is stable and thus ammenable to our
examination, theorizing, predictions,  and the corollary is 2} there is no
'subject' of revolution that we can locate (the proletariat, the
intellectual vanguard, the marginalized) and 3) relatedly, though this
isn't the case for all pm's, there is the claim that capitalism is
*different* and must be theorized differently.  Declaring Marx dead seems a
bit of an overstatement.  Quite underwhelming if'n you ask me.  Oh you
didn't?  Well lemme get out a mirror and put it in front of my 'fuser then.

Kelley.