Joanna wrote:
Wojtek writes.... "As the left became more academic, it lost its taste for simplistic anecdotes and engaged in post modern gobbledygook (err.. "textual analysis and deconstruction" ) or straightforward neo-liberalism (esp. in Europe) ceding the ground to right wing demagogues. I think that it has a lot to do with material condition of the production of ideas - especially a growing cultural divide between the masses and the increasingly rarefied nature of academic discourse. Simplistic anecdotes did not win tenures and research grants."
Cbc: If one asked Wojtek why the Marines on Wake Island at the beginning of the war didn't do better, he would pompously deliver a lecture on recent events at Johns Hopkins and present that as an explanation of why the stupid marines on Wake Island lost the battle after 21 days. He is utterly ignorant, he doesn't know a fucking thing, about what leftists have been doing for the last 40 years. He knows nothing of CISPES, he knows nothing of the anti-Apartheid movement in the U.S., which contributed signiificanly to its final overtharow. He knows nothing of Witness for Peace. He knows nothing of Solidarity, LRS, Committees of Crorrespondence, the Palesti ian support movement, the innlumeralbe struggles for a living wage ordinance, the Farah strike and the support for that, the Hormel strike, the attempts to build a Labor Party, the annual Scholars & Activists forums Carl Davidson sponsored in Chicago for a number of years, of the two Rainbow campaigns of Jackson, of the Peace & Freedom Party in California, of the Students for a Free Palestine organization which got Normal Illinois listed as a hotbed of anti-semitism by some Zionist organization; he knows nothing of the struggles of campus workers (janitors etc) which were strongly supported by - guess who: those post-modernists he blames for everything; he knows nothing of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union and their struggles; he knows nothing of Labor Noites and the many struggles reported on there. In fact he knows nothing at all about the subject of left activity in the U.S. during the last 40 years, and hence all he can do is spout endlesds bullshit based on his own non-existent experience in left organizing.
Many, even most, of these struggles were losing struggles. But some asshole who would blame the Marines on Wake Island for losing doesn't need to know anything more about WW2 than Wojtek knows about left activity in the U.S.
It is really incredible that a allegedly educated intellectual such as Wojtek is so willing to enunciate pompous nonsense aboaut subjects of which he is utterly ignorant.
Carrol
I have a friend with a Ph.D. in Physics, who minored in economics as an undergraduate. He has an IQ of 170. He was arguing the other day (after reading most of the first volume of Capital) that I was a capitalist because I had some savings (capital). He also argues that anybody who has a 401K is a capitalist....
It's not just the uneducated masses.
TSigh,
Joanna