On 2011-07-06, at 8:03 PM, Angelus Novus wrote:
> Those of us who have those radical commitments now are the least likely to be opportunists of any sort, as Horkheimer said, a "revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, to interesting research and professorial salaries, but rather to misery, shame, ungratefulness, the prison of the unknown, which only a superhuman belief illuminates."
You flatter yourself. Our safe and comfortable political environment nowhere resembles that of revolutionaries who were (and are) typically forced to to engage in underground political activity in the absence of the most elementary democratic rights of free speech and assembly. They do not even approximate the repressive conditions faced by reformists - early trade unionists, feminists, national minorities and other powerless groups who fought for the peaceful reform of the system rather than its forceful overthrow. Unless you are engaged in illegal underground activity - which I doubt given your interest in online debate - you are not cut off from family and friends, hounded by police agents, trampled by horses, threatened with blacklisting, risking jail, torture, and death. Against this historical backdrop, only a self-aggrandizing intellectual could describe a "revolutionary career" or a "radical commitment" as marked by the forefeiture of "banquests, honorary titles, interesting research and professorial salaries". For all their theoretical brilliance, Horkheimer, Adorno, and the rest of the idealist Frankfurt School were academics, not revolutionaries, forerunners of today's Marxist left concentrated in and around universities rather than in the working class communities of the past.