[lbo-talk] Finkestein hangs Marty P out to dry

[Michael McIntyre]

I'm determined not to get into a flame war on this list, so please  
forgive my use of the word "crap".  I just spent about a year and a  
half reading Capital with two comrades in my local Solidarity  
branch.  In the last month before I started graduate school (now more  
than twenty years ago), I decided the one book I needed to reread  
very, very closely was History and Class Consciousness.  And one of  
these days I really will read Postone's book!  I promise!  Right now,  
though, it's Gramsci (whose complete notebooks are very slowly being  
translated into English), as well as some thoroughly bourgeois  
authors (Wittgenstein, LaFontaine, and Lorca).

For the record, I don't think that capitalism is the rule of sinister  
Jews.  I do think that greedy corporations and unscrupulous  
governments abound in capitalism, but:
(a) even an "ideal type" of capitalism without those institutions  
would be exploitative and alienating
(b) that "ideal type," of course, is a pure fiction - there will be  
powerful greedy corporations and unscrupulous governments as long as  
there's capitalism
(c) so, the greedy corporations and unscrupulous governments are a  
necessary by-product of capitalism, but the struggle against  
capitalism is only incidentally (but no less necessarily) a struggle  
against greedy corporations and unscrupulous governments.

So we are going to continue to disagree about Chomsky and  
Finkelstein.  Do we agree about capitalism and the struggle against it?

Chomsky and Finkelstein aside, the left has made so many wrong turns  
in the U.S. (and elsewhere), that the left "deserves" to lose.  But  
the struggle against capitalism doesn't deserve to lose, and  
unfortunately it's stuck with us as its paltry bearers.

Michael McIntyre

On Oct 18, 2006, at 2:07 PM, Angelus Novus wrote:


> A left that reads Chomsky and Finkelstein rather than
> Marx or Lukacs deserves to lose, and lose badly.
> There are enough right-wing populists promoting
> foreshortened models of capitalism as merely the rule
> of sinister Jews, greedy corporations, and
> unscrupulous governments.  If you go in for that sort
> of thing, at least become a Haider or Buchanan
> supporter and get it in undiluted form.

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