[lbo-talk] One Michael Moore is worth a hundred cult-crit professors

John Lacny jlacny at earthlink.net
Sat Aug 21 00:15:27 PDT 2004


Dennis Redmond writes:


> As much as I bash mainstream academia for being worthless,
> sinecured and clueless, I have to disagree. Theory should not
> and cannot be useful. Theory should critique -- which means,
> grappling with what exists.

Practice always enriches theory. E.P. Thompson did his greatest and most theoretically innovative work -- the writing of The Making of the English Working Class -- during and in the wake of his teaching at workers' schools, not during his later tenure at Warwick University. (I am indebted to Staughton Lynd for this observation.)


> If you teach three classes a quarter, you're feeding 360 young
> minds a year with vital information, narratives, stories, concepts,
> etc. they otherwise would never have. That could be just as
> revolutionary an act as an anti-war demo, or organizing a union.

I'm as Gramscian as the next person, and like I said, I'm not one to disparage theory. What I don't like is dogma and pedantry masquerading as theory. Here you have a guy who attempts to intervene in the mass movement, or rather comment on a mass political phenomenon, with the willful intention of making the perfect the enemy of the good. I respect the role of intellectuals (be they academics or otherwise -- and many intellectuals are not academics) in elucidating broad themes and setting the tone. I don't think that their role is solely that of the technician or practical expert in progressive political activity; we also need theory. But when their practical interventions are so out of line with where the people really are, and when they fail to recognize basic reality out of fetishistic attachment to their precise verbiology (e.g., failing to recognize that segments of Bowling for Columbine are probably the most wholesale denunciations of white supremacy in any major film before or since), they're not being helpful at all. They're sectarians.

- - - - - John Lacny http://www.johnlacny.com

People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!



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