>The net effect of the overproduction on the public aspect of
>discourse has been counterrevolutionary. This would not be the
>first time capitalist overproduction has had a counterrevolutionary
>effect - look at the over-proliferation of TV, automobile and
>suburb, to cite some salient examples. What to do with the
>inheritance of all this crap will be a real problem for any
>post-capitalist society. But I digress - the point here is that
>this is an objective process, not a conspiracy of "bad"
>intellectuals. The solution is not to "go back" to traditional
>forms of public presentation, but to create new forms out of the new
>material. This is actually one of the tasks of the reconstruction
>of the working class and socialist movement - one that faces us
>_immediately_, and not at some forlornly remote point in the future.
>The enthusiastic (re)creation of our public language in connection
>with real struggles will be a healthy source of optimism and a
>antidote to the cynicism that pervades American leftism. Until
>then, there is no free speech without real public speech that
>ruptures the daily repression of social space almost totally
>occupied by privatized discourse here in the US.
I'm with you on the latter part of this. But there does seem to be a tendency among certain left intellectuals to blame "postmodernism" for what's really the political/discursive structure of 21stC capitalist society. It's too easy to do that. The hard thing is what you point to at the end of the paragraph - to reconstruct the socialist movement, or even a language for socialism, given that even a lot of socialists are nervous about the label these days.
> But did you read Kagarlitskys' article? He is currently on a
>speaking tour in the US and will speak at UC Berkeley this Friday
>(04/06). I plan to go - wanna report?
Yes, would love to hear about it. Boris is always worth listening to.
Doug