bourgeois highdomes

[Michael Yates]

I seems we have been around and around on this issue of postmodernists
versus Marxists.  It's good to have debate, but what purpose is served
by using words like "Marxoid?"  This has utterly negative connotations
and does not serve any good purpose except to score some email points
against one's email antagonists.  And, Doug, after all you are a Monthly
Review author too.  If you don't agree with Ellen Wood or John Foster,
debate them in the magazine.  Don't tar the whole enterprise to score a
couple of points on the list.  What is the point of it?  

Michael Yates

Doug Henwood wrote:
> 
> Michael Hoover wrote:
> 
> >And who are these marxists?  The usual suspects - Callinicos, Wood,
> >Eagleton, etc. - who have written critically about postmodernism?
> >A few folks on e-lists (where sovereign individualism reigns)?  And
> >which e-lists?  I used to sub to bunches of them where self-identified
> >marxists uttered nary a sound about postmodernism/postmodernists.
> >Nor have most marxists I've known and worked with outside academia
> >and 'left intellectual' circles ever sat around and agonized over
> >postmodernism.  In any event, postmodernism is sooo '80s.
> 
> Oh I had in mind several posters to several e-lists - we both know
> who they are - and people I run into here & there, like Labor Party
> types or Monthly Review authors and editors. There was the great
> brouhaha in the wake of the 1996 Rethinking Marxism conference, about
> which there was great complaint (my voice among the complainers,
> before I came to know better) that it had been hijacked by those evil
> posties. It was only what, two years ago, not the 1980s, that MR
> published In Defense of History - history's abusers being those evil
> posties.
> 
> But you have a point; as Ted Byfield might put it, postmodernism is
> so 20th century.
> 
> Doug