B, you can call me Jerry, I feel that we are on a first name basis. But I also have to say that this rest of this post is right-on. I agree. So any other explanation below should merely show you the context of my agreement with your post.
But to state up-front my basic point in the context of your post:
Business institutions and government institutions are set up to maintain the class structure. This also means emphasizing the divide between "intellectual" work and "manual" work. The bureaucratic obscurantism of these organizations are often set up to maintain a "rule" of "equality of treatment", while creating filtering systems that reproduces social inequality. Precisely this is one of the purposes of those institutions. That is why I oppose these institutions, and consider those who run them the "class enemy."
I expect something different from those of us who consider themselves on the left. I expect us to at least _try_ _not_ to reproduce the same social divisions in the way we speak and act. I expect us not to reinforce exclusivity. I expect us to recognize how the institutions we work in, do produce such social inequalities and how the institutions we work in, act with-in class society as a whole. We, who consider ourselves on the left, should try to write and act differently than the ruling class institutions. That doesn't mean we will succeed. But we should try. This is the whole point of what I try to "foist" on people here, when I rather obsessively refer to an _ethics of rhetoric_.
> is why you waste your time on something so utterly
> insignificant?
Well, because I have been directly confronted by deconstruction, post-structuralism, pomo, and I have found that many of the people doing it might otherwise be, say, volunteering as lawyers to help people being evicted from their houses in New Orleans, or helping restaurant workers in New York. In other words they are people that in the course of making their living, have walked down an ideological path that excludes them from writing for and to and advocating for people that they otherwise sympathize with. It is a small, but significant, part of the cultural divide between intellectuals, who otherwise might choose to become "class traitors, and the people who they could support after their treachery against their class.
> There are manifold examples in people's everyday, ordinary
> life when language is used in obscurantist ways to harm people. Consider,
> for example, my never ending quest for a job.
I agree with you completely, and in my own intellectual life I mainly think about these issues in relation to the law and legal writing and the institutions that "reproduce" lawyers and judges. And these areas are ultimately more important to how the world is run, than the institutions that produce intellectual star-systems, or even, for Athena's sake, the similar problems of the auteur "theory" in the movies.
> And lo! I found, of course, ridiculous language that meant nothing to me,
> acronyms and initialisms galore. In short, all many of ways in which
> language was used to keep people OUT. That is, to weed down the talent pool
> or make the process so frustrating, so insider, that I can see how people
> would just give up from feeling excluded.
Again I agree with you completely. But there is a difference. The people on the top of these institutions, and similar institutions are often the class enemy, to use a very old fashion and simplistic notion. So I wouldn't spend time arguing "with" them, but only arguing "against" their exclusion. But I have friends in unions. They have sent me stuff that they have written for their union. When I find the stuff they have written in someway exclusive, I argue with them as "friends" not to be exclusive or to work against exclusivity. It is same with some leftists who have found in post-modernism a justification for defeatism or exclusivity. They are not the "class enemy." They should be urged to live up to their underlying ideals of inclusiveness and, yes, rationality and intuitive impulse to hate oppression and injustice.
> That really happens. It really happens that tax forms are so complicated,
> people who are low-income do not apply for the Earned Income Tax credit.
> That even the EZ form is so complicated, that poor people needlessly have
> to spend money on someone like my dad to fill it out for them.
>
> Those are real fucking problems. And to be fair to the people who write
> this stuff, at least with IRS material, what is amazingly clear to me,
> experienced with this stuff, is that you can *tell* someone was working
> hard trying to make it intelligible. But it doesn't work out that way.
>
> Again, these are REAL fucking problems, that affect people's lives every
> fucking godamned day. The government is probably filled to the brim with
> incompetence because of their supposedly "meritorious" hiring system which
> ends up turning the application process into a nightmare of obscurantist
> lingo, a grand insider's game that gives those with a built-in advantage a
> leg up over those with none -- and thus reproducing the system.
>
> But no, the focus is on the least significant issue to people, given that
> the work of the pomos affects less than 1 percent of the fucking
> population. And this would be because .... it's easier to rant about this
> shit, which means nothing, than to actually address the other shit which
> might make a difference if changed. At the very least, it would matter to
> people that lefties actually, you know, gave a shit about the crap they
> contend with every day.
>
> And I should poit out, of course, that having lots of exposure to young men
> (testosterone central) always on the hunt for better jobs, it does not end
> with the Feds but extends to corporations and their looney application
> process which, again, weeds people out who find the whole thing
> mindbogglingly obscurantist, difficult, etc. etc. One kid was over here two
> weeks ago, recently fired, I had to stop every five minutes to help him
> wade through online applications to places like Home Despot (not a typo!).
>
>
>
My experience is similar. I used to be a manager at a large
bookstore, and I know the barriers and filters at all levels, set-up
before a person even fills out an application. (For instance
women-of-color somehow automatically get filtered to working the cash
registers and not helping customers with books. And this begins with
the application process and its absurdities and practical
absurdities.)
But let me point out again. We have a responsibility to change this, somehow but we shouldn't expect corporations to be on our side in changing this.
My "ideal" way of changing this. We should aim in retail areas of towns and cities to have one single "retail" union, not organized by store or shop but by retail district, and then we should institute union hiring halls, which of course will have their own problems of exclusivity.
Jerry Moanco