bourgeois highdomes

Michael Hoover hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us
Thu Jan 6 15:43:57 PST 2000



> 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

Not sure above amounts to 'a lot of Marxists' which is how you described this current. And if number above is 'a lot of Marxists' then the aggregate number of them is even fewer than I thought (and I tend to think there are relatively few).

Living here in Orblando affords me few opportunities to 'run into' Monthly Review authors and editors. In fact, I think I only know one other left celeb besides you, Doug, and this person is an ostensibly well-known pomo who not one single academic (marxist or otherwise & irrespective of discipline) or activist (marxist or otherwise) had ever heard of before when introduced.

I've never attended a Rethinking Marxism, Socialist Scholars, or any other 'left intellectual' conference (I went to some Mobe conferences years ago but they were activist oriented). So I guess I have a different conception of some of this stuff. While most marxists I've known and worked with haven't written and published articles & books, they've functioned in various ways in manner akin to Gramsci's notion of 'organic intellectual.'

As for postmodernism being 'so 20th century,' sounds too much like a grand narrative to me, I'll stick give a decade and reiterate: it's sooo 80s (big shoulder pads and everything!). Michael Hoover

btw: Several listers have pointed out that my e-mail indicates the year as 100 rather than 2000, apparent problem that freenet folks are trying to fix, a small y2k glitch, I guess....



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