marx's revenge for our times?

[Carrol Cox]

JCWisc at aol.com wrote:
> 
> And isn't this what all 19th century European democrats and radicals thought?
>  Some may have had their doubts about America, but Tsarist Russia was
> indubitably the very citadel of backwardness and blackest reaction.
> Everybody knows that.  Where's the great contrarian insight here?

I made my own major discovery about a core feature of "bourgeois"
culture several years before I found myself involved in radical
politics. I was writing a doctoral dissertaion on critical treatment of
Alexander Pope in the early 20th century, and I was reading all these
half-pint critics who, repeating cliches about Pope over a century old
were still somehow presenting themselves as contrarian. Read through the
archives on this list and see how often the poster will repeat some
really banal (and quite popular) opinion and pass it off as being a
minority and independent position. (Most statements about "The Left"
fall into this category.)

Carrol