--- Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
so to speak.
> Ford or Dostoyevsky are especially due denunciation,
> because they abuse
> their talents.
How did Dostoevesky abuse his talents? The problem that Leftists or most types of ideologically inspired people have is that art has to be "tightly coupled" (to use a computer systems expression) with their particular ideology. It was the psychologist Maslow (I believe..maybe it was someone else) who said something like, "Give a child a hammer and the whole world becomes a nail." This is the way it is with a lot (not all) Marxists. They just see class conflict everywhere and in everything. It impoverishes their vision.
And this is true not just of marxists. Look at Tolstoy. True, he became a much nicer person after his conversion to a sort of radical Christianity. What did he write of the greatness of his earlier works? Nothing. His religious message tainted everything and did not permit him to investigate the world authentically. The world got mediated through the prism of his ideology/religion.
Thomas
Plus, if they are so smart , they
> should know better. They
> are wilfully doing bad. They can't plead ignorance.
> According to them, they
> are the opposite of ignorant.
>
> Of course, many of the bourgeoisie and their agents
> have profound incites
> into human consciousness and life. That is part of
> how the ruling class
> retains its rule. But I despise rather than admire
> those who help the
> bourgeoisie by using their great skill in service of
> bondage rather than
> freedom.
>
> The sort of original on this in class society in
> general is Plato, great,
> fucking poet. Eat shit , Plato.
>
> We shouldn't forget that in origin, the antagonism
> between predominantly
> mental and predominantly physical labor correlates
> with oppressing and
> oppressed classes. Although, as Marxists we champion
> the service of
> intellectuals to the working class, in the long run,
> there is an elitist
> scholastic tradition, which is the very opposite of
> Marxist intelletuals.
> And we are the newcomer upstarts. Reaction has more
> to do with "thinkers"
> in the long run.
>
> The fact that their works are beautiful does not
> exempt them from political
> judgment. In fact, the beauty of form demands extra
> scrutiny because
> something beautiful is more easily used abusively to
> persuade people the
> wrong way.
>
> Maybe we could develop a way for extracting the
> rational kernels from this.
> What is the rational kernel in Ezra Pound ?
> Seriously. It reminds of the
> question what's so great about Heidegger ?
>
> Why is there the repeated pattern of a Pound and
> then a Bellow ? Classicism
> and reaction have a logical affinity. Fascism is a
> form of Romanticism ( It
> was even founded in Rome :>0).
>
> Anyway, as intellectuals for the poor, we have
> sharply distinguish ourselves
> from the longer term tradition of intellecutuals. (
> I notice Bellow tries to
> make "writers" out as distinct from "intellectuals".
> Cute)
>
>
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<<We are at such a point in mankind's evolution where changed conditions invalidate all our policies that have been so successful even in the recent past, and that presumably have constituted the ideal response to a presumably unchanging and unchangeable human condition. No wonder we are stupefied and confused-but our mistake is the same which many cultures have made before us, namely to force a rigid model upon a fluid reality.
Erich Jantsch - "Design for Evolution: Self-Organization and Planning in the Life of Human Systems"
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