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

[Michael Pugliese]

More anecdotage. In one of the two classes I took with Paul Lubeck, at UCSC
(the one where we read Capital, Vol. I), one of the students went off on the
difficulty of the text. He essentially said, if you want to change the world
you gotta understand it first. She felt "dissed" left the class. Showed up
later in two of my other classes. In John Borrego's Community Studies class
(BTW, John said getting a grant from the Ford Foundation to organize in New
Mexico in the early 70's made him a Maoist), one day I was summarizing the
NLR piece of Aidan Foster-Carter (oner of his students, btw, was one of the
members of the punks, Gang of Four) on articulation of modes of production,
and the student again complained that she thought ACTION was needed not all
this highbrow theory. John and I tried to convince her, that undferstanding,
say, whether one saw the social formation and the corresponding class
structure and class conflicts as being derived from whether one saw a
particular society as being feudal or dependent capitalist or whatevah, had
large implications for political strategy. The mistaken Stalinist approach
of the L. American C.P's rooted in a Sta(linear), stagist teleology and an
alliance with the "national bourgeoisie" bla bla bla. (Which led later,
natch, to the militarist foco illusions, cf. "A Critique of Arms, " Regis
Debray, Penguin Books or the Casteneda volume.
Final time, this student showed up in a class  I took. One of the final
sessions with Walter Goldfrank (class on Wallerstein and the MWS, great
class. There was a conference later on campus, Wallerstein, Scott, Popkin,
Scocpol, Kaplan, sparks flew, what fun), she asking, not being mock naive,
"What is this Cold War, you are all taliking about? The Berlin Wall?" This
was '83 or '84. As Russell Jacoby said once in Telos, instead of debating
the tendency for the rate of profit to fall due to the rising organic
composition of capital, radicals should worry more about the declining rate
of intelligence.
Michael Pugliese, "Where is that panix.com autorespondo guillotine threat
;-)"
http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/current/0589.html