If you are not familiar with Bowles and Gintis on education, you don't have to comment on what I said about their analysis. I did not say that your position [or Kelley's position] was the same as their position, or call upon either of you to defend it.
We come to these questions from different perspectives, with different interests. You apparently want the thread to move in one direction, and one direction only. I saw some potential tangents of it as at least as interesting as a discussion of historical materialism as a grand narrative of history -- which itself began as a tangent on a thread on the intersection of class and race. Although intellectual discourse for its own sake does have its pleasures, I am always trying to use my participation in these discussions to help me figure out issues that are practical and live political questions for my other, organizing life. You don't have to share my interests or anyone else's interests, and you don't have to find the tangents I or anyone else introduces as worthy of following up. If it doesn't interest anyone, it will just die. But it is just not very constructive to building dialogue and conversation in general when we start throwing around those types of personal insults.
Justin:
> I think it's not approppriate to attack the tenability of people's views by
> remarking on where they ended up when they changed their minds. You said
> nice things about Genovese, with which I agree; but look where he is now.
> Gerry Cohen, who taught me more than I can say, appears to have lost it
> entirely. (I say "appears" because, while I have read his lectures with
> horror; I have not yet seen the "new" edition of KMTH.) I don't think you
> are a Stalinist, but the "look where he ended up" is a Stalinist pattern of
> argument. --jks
I made an argument that there is an intellectual continuity in Gintis' evolution on education issues, that he had a functionalist view of schooling in _Schooling in Capitalist America_ and that the argument for school vouchers which he makes continues to be functionalist. You can agree or disagree with that view, or you can decide that you are in no position to make an argument one way or the other, but it is entirely uncalled for to label such an argument Stalinist. And not only because the argument I made did not in any way justify such accusations, but because Stalinist is one of those epithets, like fascist, racist and sexist, that we should be very careful about throwing around, and use only when it fits a situation quite precisely. Its use is sure to bring an end to any reasonable give and take in a conversation.
As much as I think Genovese's corpus is interesting and very important, there are clearly lines of intellectual continuity between his earlier texts and his current positions. Ditto Gerry Cohen. Ditto Leo Casey circa 1975 as Gramscian Marxist and Leo Casey circa 2001 as radical democrat. Human beings change and evolve our views, but barring physiological damage, we don't completely metamorphize. I think it is an entirely valid exercise to try to understand how people work through particular theoretical problematics, seeing what remains the same and what changes. Disagree if you want, but don't pretend that this is the equivalent of Michael Gold or William Z. Foster policing the boundaries of "proletarian" thought.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20010314/eb9987f8/attachment.htm>