The left: still dying (was Re: European Unions)

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Sun Apr 8 07:02:16 PDT 2001


Gordon:
> >I note with feigned surprise the conflation of "academic" with
> >"intellectual" along with the implication that "intellectual"
> >is the same as "intelligent" or "mentally competent." Can't
> >think until graded and stamped by bourgeois institutions, eh?

Yoshie Furuhashi:
> That's because in an anti-intellectual attack, "academic" &
> "intellectual" are ideological conflated & used interchangeably.
> That is why DP can get away with attacking Engels (of all
> leftists!!!) as an instance of "academic Marxism," though Engels was
> not an academic.

Funny, I could have sworn some people were doing the conflation positively.

I see in that the same sort of suckering into bourgeois institutions that that long article about people not voting seems to come out of. The reason people don't vote, of course, is because they understand that the problem has now been solved by the ruling class in such a way that voting is meaningless. The various markets are evidently still unsolved in terms of ruling-class control, which is why (as the author noted) consumer boycotts and street protests have been much more effective than government regulation at backing off some of the more egregious corporate evils. That's surprising, given the enormous amount of effort that has gone into the study of opinion manipulation, but one can't argue with phenomena. (Possibly the libbits are right and markets are too diffuse to be effectively controlled.)

Y'all radicals should try to catch up with the folk.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list