Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2000 16:07:27 -0600 From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at mail.ilstu.edu>
Doug Henwood wrote:
> A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
> <http://www.ainfos.ca/>
> ________________________________________________
>
> Bias # 4 (or perhaps dilemma #1) is
> that there is an inherent friction between these two needs of
> involving more people and amplifying the edge of protest.
This illustrates my reasons for being, to put it mildly, concerned at what seem to me dogmatic, knee jerk reactions by intellectuals to the use of jargon. (Incidentally, "jargon" is to the rhetoric of petty bourgeois individualist thought and rhetoric what "petty bourgeois individutalist thought" was to the stalinist parties -- a way of avoiding thinking.) The rejection of jargon (for discussion *among* leftists) by leftists is always inadvertently and sometimes deliberately a way of denying history, of affirming the speaker/ writer's originality and freedom of thought. In other words, the repudiation of jargon is in effect (and sometimes in intention) a declaration that it is right to reinvent the wheel each time transportation is needed.
What Jeff (whoever he is) has done here is to claim as entirely orgiinal to himself and to the present what has been the core concern of the left from its infancy. John Mage recently gave a fine condensed statement of what Jeff seems to think is either a personal bias of his own or a brand new dilemma. Right oppotunist thought leads us to treat our enemies as friends. Left opportunist thought leads us to treat our friends as enemies. It is not a dilemma (another piece of academic jargon designed to make us forget history) but a contradiction, and one that has always permeated and always will permeate working-class struggle. Calling it a contradiction, and realizing its quasi-universality in the present epoch of struggle against capital, also lets us know that it is *not* a theoretical question. All the theoretical work has been done. It is a practical question of concrete analysis of a particular time and place.
Repeat: All theoretical work has been done. Activists who want seriously to confront such contradictions as the one Jeff identifies will of course know (unless their vocabulary hides it from them) that the tools for struggling with the contradiction (but not the particular answer in the particular case) have been prepared for them by generations of struggle (of which theory is but the summary). Those who want to be original will have to invent new tools as they go along, and will mostly make fools of themselves -- as we did in the '60s, cut off from history as we were by our own history and by our arrogant pride in our status as a "NEW" left.
Carrol