Who Says "Bourgeois Liberal"? (was Re: LBO = flame city?)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Fri Oct 27 17:37:14 PDT 2000


Kelly wrote:


>here, we can do a study. go to google. type in site: (with colon
>afterward). then follow with the address for the archives <dhs.org>
>and the expression you are looking for <"bourgeois liberal"> (put
>quotes around it for a phrase search)

Upon your recommendation, I did a Google search for "site:nuance.dhs.org 'bourgeois liberal'," and I got only 22 results, with many of them quoting the same person.

Not surprisingly, the majority of the results show folks using the term ironically, referring to him/herself, like this:

***** Subject: Re: Outlawing Fascistic Racist Speech: Biblio-fetishism From: Doug Henwood (dhenwood at panix.com) Date: Thu Mar 23 2000 - 15:43:03 EST <snip>
>Why don't you tell me what you think is the rationale underlying
>freedom of speech ?

I don't trust states or any other agglomerations of power (e.g. capital) to be the arbiters of what I should be allowed to read, think, or say. Call me a bourgeois liberal if you like, though your average bourgeois liberal wouldn't include capital among the potential censors.

Doug *****

***** Subject: Re: Responsibility JKSCHW at aol.com Date: Fri Jan 21 2000 - 23:07:10 EST <snip> I guess I am just a bourgeois liberal, then. Or maybe I think that free debate, including airiing and developing my ideas about what is true, however erroneous, will advance the workers' cause more than any lies I might tell on the guess that it would have that effect. Lenin unfashoinably said that Marxism is omnipotent because it is true. In that case, it has nothing to fear from the truth, or attemots to find the truth.

--jks *****

***** Subject: Re: Why Decry the Wealth Gap? JKSCHW at aol.com Date: Tue Jan 25 2000 - 22:54:16 EST <snip> Well _I_ am in favor ot it, although I don't think it is as old as Hammurabi--I think it is a hard won victory of the bourgeois revolution. But in politics I am a bourgeois liberal small-d-democrat. What _Marx_ would think of the principle is another thing entirely.

--jks *****

Etc.

A few straightforward uses do show up -- for instance, this post from Wojtek:

***** death penalty and working class (was: Gentrification) Wojtek Sokolowski (sokol at jhu.edu) Tue, 24 Aug 1999 18:15:49 -0400 <snip> I may add that opposition to DP is an expression of bourgeois liberal/individualistic ethics vis a vis 'retribution' - the latter often attributed to lower classes. So from the symbol manipulation point of view, the working class support for DP can also be interepreted as rejection of elitism.

wojtek *****

In contrast, a Google search on "site:nuance.dhs.org 'stalinist'" returns 177 results. With "trot," you get 28 results.

Enjoy your symptom!

Yoshie



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