pssst. Carrol. come'ere. this is just between you'n'me: i promise not to tell Dennis that, in the past, you've griped because we weren't discussing how to effectively put left ideas in action.
as to the issue of academic writing: i have always been told that i write academic stuff in an engaging way and, indeed, rec'd a couple of research positions precisely because of this skill. the last one i held, we wrote a book from our research. our goal was that it was to be scholarly writing geared toward the nonspecialist audience. the research director was Gerald Grant, who'd worked as a Washpost journalist before heading off to Harvard to work with David Reissman. there he met the granddaddies of what is considered the "best of" the sociological imagination published for the literate audience: Krystal, Bell, Glazer, Howe.
Jerry wanted to carry on in that tradition. so did Manfred Stanley, after a considerable amount of nagging from grad students enamored of postmodernist anthro/soc theory which bashes the social sciences for exploiting participants in ethnographic research.
we held a conference to wrap up our work and begin academic/community collaboration on the issues. In that spirit, Jerry had us invite people who had actually been research subjects, or were at least hypothetically members of the surveyed population. people who did stuff on museums invited patrons and curators, etc. people who worked on print media invited editors,etc.
later we clinked wine glass and spread cheese dip with some of these folks at a post-research party. you'd be surprised how many people found some of what we'd discussed hard to follow. e.g., in my addendum/postscript, i discussed the problem with community benchmarking, economic indicators and the structure of the political economy. _this_ was beyond the comprehension of several folks who'd read.
i was a more than a little surprised. we all read one another's work with an eye toward making it accessible. we got into _extraordinary_ arguments with the editors about alterations for accessibility reasons. i mean, she wanted to scratch the phrase, "sycophantic strata of middle managers..."!! come on! how can you pass up the alliteration! what can possibly be better than sycophantic!? :) (anyone who has published/worked with editors knows that i'm having a little fun with the "process". i'm surprised more people don't kill one another over it!)
but it was true: for some folks, it was just a little too specialized. i suspect that this was more because it really needed to be polished up by ditching the social science paper presentation format. but time constraints...
i proudly gave copies to my folks, both of whom complained about it being too difficult. now, in my mother's case, someone who i _know_ to be really smart, she nonetheless feels really stupid sometimes. especially when she hears me and my stepdad go off the deep end into some obscure convo--which really isn't all that obscure, from my view. but she thinks so. i can understand my dad, he never graduated from high school.
i also distinctly recall many a dinner party i'd throw with the exbeau who was a delievery truck driver who'd been in the marines, tho he liked to read "the classics" and fancied himself a poet. a bright guy. nonetheless, he and the wife of my friend mike were often intimidated by the convos. and _she_ was a social work phd student! she was hardly stupid, hardly completely isolated from these theories. she just didn't know the finer points of philosophy and she probably didn't follow me and my social science phud stud friends going on about some wanker soc theory after inbibing way too many bottles of vino.
while i don't agree with Dennis's gripe entirely, i think his gripe worth keeping in mind in general. it's an old one here dennis--and it gets trotted out frequently. we _do_ get too isolated, to obscure. but it isn't about secret handshakes. it's simply about the fact that language is specialized. it isn't any different than the auto mechanics language. or the restaurant workers language.
i also think that underlying Dennis's comments was a poorly articulated complaint, which was possibly one of two things, or both.
1. the assumption that Yoshie (and Marxists in general) is interested _in_ workers' well-being and authorizes what she says by virtue of the claim that capitalism is bad for workers and socialism good for workers.
but i think it's not especially wise to assume this. i think it's based on vulgarized Marxist standpoint theories which, essentially, misunderstand what Marx meant by class consciousness. (it's far more complicated than many accounts would have it.)
2. irritation at what appears to be a _very_ isolated view of the world, a kind of dissociation with people's actual daily struggles in so far as Yoshie often advocates positions and ideas that simply would _not_ sit well with many workers. as an example, Yoshie's and Carrol's claim that it was (uhm) reactionary (?) or, at least, not Marxist/revolutionary enough to use the state to go after deadbeat dads. a better strategy, both of you argued, was to make "the state" provide an adequate social safety net so people could rely on, as Nancy Fraser put it (sorta), marriage to the state rather than to patriarchy. HA!
now, i can intellectually understand the position the two of you took. but as someone who experiences this first hand, i can tell you without a doubt that it does my life no good when i hear two people yammering away about how "bad" the crackdown on deadbeat dads is and how we ought to put our energies into bringing about a socialist revolution (via the strategies you both suggested at the time) since it does me and my kid absolutely NO good right now, whereas clamoring for a crackdown on deadbeat dads and agitating for a more responsible parental/familial understanding of the obligations one has to one's children does me _far_ more good, right now.
I'm tempted to trot out Marx's letter to Arnold Ruge--instructive comments there as to the problems with banners/slogans and the tendency for purists to keep their noses in the air and out of messy bourgeois politics which are just so much, supposedly, reactionary hoohah. (i've posted it here before google: "lbo-talk marx ruge" (june/july 2000)
otherwise, i agree that a mailing list isn't exactly supposed to be a venue for everyone to talk about how to plan the revo. and it's certainly not supposed to be limited in the kinds of ideas that are engaged or _how_ they are engaged. rather, it should be like a noisy pub where people carry on any number of conversation, with some people wandering from group to group, lobbing commentary here and getting into tussles/debates there, depending on their capacities, skills, interests. some will only ever talk about a limited range of things. others have something to say about _everything_. you've all been in that kind of pub (or public space) before, so you must know what i mean.
academics write for academic audiences--and that ranges from students to other specialists. people like Doug write for other audiences.
and the fact is, at least for me, if i were to write something popular or just widely read by the "literate" audience _before_ i'd established a name for myself, i would be laughed out of academia as not serious enough.
_that's_ why i asked about why people think academics are supposed to write for non-ac's. it is a stupid request. it's like asking a sysadmin to come over and tell you why you can't figure out how to use Adobe photoshop or asking that an auto mechanic figure out why your lawn mower isn't working. they both may actually be quite capable of doing so, but that's not what they do for a living.