[lbo-talk] the autumn of the communes?

// ravi ravi at platosbeard.org
Sat Oct 29 19:19:38 PDT 2011


On Oct 29, 2011, at 9:39 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Oct 29, 2011, at 9:29 PM, SA wrote:
>> On 10/29/2011 9:15 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>>
>>> Why does a bright and knowledgeable fellow like you feel the necessity of acting like a pure and unadulterated asshole with these clumsy quibbles?
>>
>> I thought we weren't doing one-liners.
>
> But Carrol is the last to follow his own directives.
>

I don’t think one-liner equals a question that is formulated in one sentence. For instance, most definitions of “one-liners” on the Googles suggest some form of joke, snark, witticism, and in our case, I think that would imply a deflection, a bit of cleverness, or throw-away comment. The question above from Carrol does not seem to qualify.

I disagree with my friend Joanna on the fuckyous and invectives. They wouldn’t be needed if everyone wrote like Joanna or Michael Pollak. But that’s not the case. And sometimes the explicit “fuck you” reveals and illuminates the implicit one in the original message. My own testy debate with TJG on Lisp/etc is a good example. My untimely go at McCarthy was (in retrospect) a “fuck you” to his disciples, and that brought out the “ugly side” and “fundamental errors” responses. So on. That’s a lot of "fuck you”s. :-)

Similarly, the anonymous poster from Target who wonders if we have ever dealt with working class people. As if somehow he is more working class than list-members. More authentic. As if somehow his singular opinion, because of this authenticity, rises to the level of empirical substantiation of a hypothesis in what was an unsettled difference.

Julio writes:
>
> 4. As I wrote before, Jodi Dean is correct in saying that we need a
> political party. We need a disciplined organization. There is
> nothing wrong with discipline and commitment and all that.

Who is the Jodi Dean and Julio Huato “we”? Having warned in #2 or #3 that models might be getting proved wrong by OWS, I am afraid Julio is falling back to some familiar model which offers the definition for such a “we”. To me, the value of OWS is that it is creating and clarifying the “we”s. I just volunteered with the “Internet Working Group” of OWS three days ago and I have been chatting with them online and trying to help out. IMHO, if anyone thinks these people are not disciplined or committed, they haven’t looked deep enough. Dean will likely dismiss such activities as mere “process” (ironic that her process-phobia is shared by the OWS IWG which has adopted an Agile process), but that’s fine with me.

—ravi



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list