Lefebvre on irony

[Carrol Cox]

Doug, what I read in the whole of Lefebvre's piece is an extended
chanting of "Thank god that I Lefebvre am not as other men." In
other words, I see not self-consciousness or "irony" in his sense
but sort of a dour puritanism.

I still say that irony is a weapon to use against others, to consolidate

a rather smug "we" against "them." While I don't doubt, actually, the
goodness of Swift's intention, the *effect* from its day of publication
of "A Modest Proposal" has been not to aid Irish peasants but to
create a fraternity/sorority of "those who know" (those who "get
it" in such smug superiority to the great unwashed. And Swift was
perhaps the only satirist (at least according to some of his critics)
who aimed at his blows striking the reader. All other ironic
satirists as well as unsatiric ironists that I know of aim at the
creation of this smug society of the intellectual elite. That was
certainly the effect aimed at by Plato in the creation of that
master ironist, Socrates.

It is also important to recognize that over time just a small proportion

of marxists are intellectuals, or even very skilled readers. The
insistence
that marxists be ironists is an insistence that marxism should remain
the private property of a small intellectual elite.

Carrol