[lbo-talk] Sane and really dumb

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Nov 3 11:27:31 PDT 2010


Chris Sturr:

Wait a minute: people who either don't know what Keynesianism is, or who misread the word as "Kenyan," on a sign intended to encourage that misreading, are "morons"?

.....maybe it's not because they are "*incapable *of viewing economy from any but a small business perspective" (emphasis added), but because people on the left have such contempt ("morons"; "incapable") for them that they couldn't possibly regard them as worth organizing (which is what it would take to spread a left understanding of economics beyond 1%).

.==xxx===

This is a start, but has some serious errors of its own. First of all, anyone who calls people "morons" because their ideas are stupidly wrong is himself not among the "people on the left," and any statement grounded in that assumption is a bit moronic itself. That is, "criticism" of "the left" (not, at present, an actual entity) has to start by clarifying his/her own understanding of the current conjuncture (by which I mean roughly the last 30 years)-one of the periods of normalcy that has characterized capitalism for the last two centuries. These interims need no particular explanation, being as I say the normal condition of capitalist society. What needs explanation are the rare but explosive occasions when "a left" emerges and challenges capitalist hegemony.

Now, the pprinciple, "Trust the people," is of course fundamental to left political action, but intelligence (which is the feature in question here) resembles genes - as genes are always excpressed in an environment, so is intelligence is expressed in a social/political environment. It is quite normal, then, for highly intelligent people to be quite ignornant, and certainly this is no justification for sociopaths who pretend to be leftists to call them "morons."

But Chris is in error in another respect. He assumes that the first task of "leftists" is to organize those who clearly cannot, at the preent time be organized. Rather, the _present_ task of leftists is to find each other, to form the kernels under which, when the conjuncture changes, will be the center of action which will begin to attract more and more of these "morons" to join the growing left, and through their activity begin the process of creating that environment (of people in motion) cwithin which such (temporary) ignorance)as not knowing who Keynes is begins to dissipate.

Sitting on the sidelines, confusing sociopaths with leftists, and then arguing with them is not a useful application of left intelligence.

Carrol



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