[lbo-talk] FW: [URPE] Come off the cross,

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Thu Feb 9 05:28:55 PST 2012


Nathan writes: "Third this email completely ignores the third group of academics and bloggers. Yves Smith is a consistent participant as is that "liberal geek" (allegedly) Matt Stoller. Then Michael Hudson and a couple of his friends come around to. There are other people who participate also that are hard to peg. but it's far too simplistic to declare it a meeting of a bunch of ignoramuses and bank lovers as i perceive this email to imply. By all means, i encourage anyone to come out and participate but I think this email is very misleading about this working group."

There's a mixture of 'voices'/perspectives in the original post, more in my fwd, and now here I am having some difficulty in identifying which voice in reference to which people is at issue. Perhaps as I reread it this will clear up. But on one point I think there may be some real confusion here; if this isn't relevant, skip it.

On expertise. What is at issue in this post is NOT the correctness or incorrectness of a given expert; assume whatever expert is in question is correct; THEN the question becomesd the relationship assumed/enacted by the 'expert' to the Occupation. That relationship, I argue, has to include _real_ acknowledgement by the "expert" that he/she must learn from the Occupiers as well as _offer_ them his/her expertise. The expert who does not _really_ and not juse nominally recognize this mutuality of learning, who does not _really_ and not just nominally recognize that his/her expertise by itself is empty, _that_ expert is not needed. The writer whose post I fwd does recognize and act on this process of _mutual_ learning, as revealed in the content and tone of those last two paragraphs. Put another way, at any given point a given abstract 'truth' may or may not be a _relevant_ truth. That relevance cannot be determined by the expert who offers that truth; it may well be irrelevant, it may well be that the _relevant_ 'view' is a technically inaccurzgd ond (as Engels incidentally recognizes in his Preface to the German edition of Poverty of Philosophy). So the expert is not and should not be, on her own, a judge of the usefulness, of the practical accuracy, of her own knowledge.

Carrol

P.S. A query that I considerd sending as a separate post: What is a good non-sexist and non-ageist synonym for "old women" (as used in Rosa Luxembutg's 1898 Stuttgart speeches? She had an extremely important, even absolutely vital, point to make, dnd the phrase which drives home the point is "would have been old women and not heroes."



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list