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> It was always politically cynical, not to stay incredibly stupid, to imagine that literary theory was going to do any of the things that it promised--allegorically or otherwise. In the classroom Nietzsche and Marx can be an eye-opener for students. But Dennis, Nathan, Marta, Doug, Max, Yoshie, and, okay, everybody on the list, have a lot more to say about how to make a difference in the world outside the classroom than theorists ever did. And even if they are all to one degree or another familiar with theory, their effectiveness wasn't because of it. Seems like an obvious point, but such things take academics 30 years to figure out.
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> Christian
I know Doug, Yoshie, and Marta owe a great deal of their insight to Marx and other theorists, because they have explicitly said so on occassion. I suspect the same of Dennis, Nathan and Max, but don't want to make claims on their behalf.
Heck: I'm pretty strongly not a Marxist, and I would still hate to try being an activist without Marx's insights. For that matter I just finished a 20,000 word article on energy, and the economics are pretty much straight Marx, with a dash of Engels.
Basically the bulk of it demonstrates that, as far as energy contraints go, we could supply a ten billion population with a U.S. per capita GDP in a sustainable fashion, at less cost than the market price of fossil fuels - not taking social costs into account. And then the question comes, if efficiency measures and renewable source are available now at a lower market price than fossil fuels, why aren't we doing it? And it turns out that old whiskers pretty much tells us why.
And now I've got to figure out where to submit it. 20,000 words is a damn awkward length - about four to five times as long as most magazines will accept for an article, less than half the minimum most publishers want in a book.