[lbo-talk] Just Do Something!

Lance Murdoch lancemurdoch at lycos.com
Thu May 6 20:52:30 PDT 2004


Michael Pugliese unleashes a barrage of his syntax and copy:


>http://www.google.com/search?q=socialist+scholars+conference+Chomsky
> Alternative Radio - Programs
>... Noam Chomsky/Barbara Ehrenreich/Michael Dyson, et al. 1999 Socialist
>Scholars
>Conference(2 Tape Set) #CHON-EHRB-DYSM001. Noam Chomsky/Howard Zinn. ...
>http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/speakers/CHON.html

I stand corrected. In my memory of one of his statements, I had forgotten the word almost:

http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/chomsky/chomsky/5/

"What are called 'conferences' -­ gatherings of intellectuals, ­ I almost never attend. I do give endless talks and take part in many forums, but not the kind that would be called conferences. I almost always turn down invitations to these. Thus I almost never go to the Socialist Scholars Conference (though I have a lot of personal friends there), or to academic and professional conferences, etc. Virtually all of my talks are for popular and activist groups, though typically, they are combined with talks at universities, sometimes seminars, but more often for mass audiences interested in the general area."

on the topic of theory, Noam says:

"It`s extremely rare, outside of the natural sciences, to find things that *can`t* be said in monosyllables: there are just interesting, simple ideas, which are often extremely difficult to come up with and hard to work out. Like, if you wanted to try to understand how the modern industrial economy developed, let`s say, that can take a lot of work. But the 'theory' will be extremely thin, if by 'theory' we mean something with principles which are not obvious when you first look at them, and from which you can deduce surprising consequences and try to confirm the principles - you`re not going to find anything like that in the social world.

Incidentally, I should say that my own political writing is often denounced from both the left and the right for being non-theoretical - and that`s completely correct. But it`s exactly as theoretical as anyone else`s, I just don`t call it 'theoretical', I call it 'trivial' - which is in fact what it is.[...] Anything that`s at all understood can probably be described pretty simply. And when words like `dialectics` come along, or `heremeneutics`, and all of this kind of stuff that`s supposed to be very profound, like Goering, I reach for my revolver"

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