<HTML>Every year at the Socialist Scholars Conference, there is some small outfit with usual modest name [Workers Something Or Other] which sponsors a panel of why, in their opinion, Heidegger's thought is essential to the working class movement. It is fitting that it seems to be pretty much the same panel every year, no matter what is happening. They seems to have attracted at times a leftish political philosopher with Frankfurt type sentiments from Notre Dame, Fred Dallmayr. I would agree with Justin that Heidegger needs serious attention, not so much because his ideas are directly assimilable into a left project, but because he is one of the leading philosophers of the 20th century, and arguably the best of the continental types. But he is like Carl Schmitt: there are some intrinsic links between his ideas and his political affiliations with the Nazis, and they must be approached with a critical edge. It is not accidental that _Telos'_ slide into nasty racial conservatism, one might even say proto-fascist ideology, accompanied their embrace of Schmitt.   But contrary to Justin, I can't think of any good reason to learn German. For a native English speaker, it has to be the most wretchedly difficult language to learn [English fulfilling that role for others, due in no small part to its German antecedents], with is compound to the fifth degree terms and its convoluted sentence structure. I have to admit that I was never a great one for skills which require hearing aptitude [I am pretty tone deaf], and so I have never loved language acquisition to begin with. But learning German was the worst part of my Ph.D. degree, and I forget it all as soon as I passed the test. Whatever fictions academia would like to believe, I knew that I was not going to produce better English translations of Hegel and Marx than professional translators, and I stuck with some few exceptions to the published translation. 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 -- </HTML>