[lbo-talk] Solnit, "puppeteer who thinks, " responds to activistism piece

[Dennis Redmond]

> <http://www.utne.com/pub/2004_126/promo/11447-1.html>
>
> We Are Thinking -- In New Ways
> -By David Solnit, Utne magazine
>
> I am a carpenter, an activist, and a puppeteer who thinks. The
> contributions in the book come from other grassroots intellectuals --
> immigrant farmworkers in South Florida, Critical Mass agitators in
> San Francisco, immigrant rights activists in Toronto, neighborhood
> assembly participants in Buenos Aires, European anticapitalist
> performance artists. These thinkers have replaced the professional
> intellectuals of past eras.

So one doesn't need libraries, or years of study, or a certain amount of
free time, or usable data, or complex social theories, or a fair share of
cultural and symbolic capital in order to understand a multinational
capitalist world-system of 6.4 billion people, 50 trillion EUR annual
output, 170 nations and a zillion cultures? Does theory grow on trees or
something?


> The era of monolithic ideologies is over.

But not the era of monolithic capitalism, which in its multinational
phase, grows ever more integrated.

Solnit will probably dismiss this as the sour grapes of a well-heeled prof
with tenure. Ha. I'm an unemployed intellectual, I've spent five miserable
years trying to find even the shittiest of teaching jobs, and failing,
because there are no goddamn jobs to be had anymore. And I have to say
this: the covert anti-intellectualism and hostility I get from the academy
is mirrored by the overt one of self-appointed activistisms. It's the same
story -- we're redundant labor, our cognitions and abilities are not
needed, etc.

I don't blame him personally - he's probably had some bad experiences with
do-nothing academics. But we Leftists (whatever that means these days)
have got to stop assembling circular firing squads.

-- DRR