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On 6/18/14 10:53 AM, Mark Lause wrote:
I don't usually bother with ad hominem threads like this, but the biggest offense that's passed under my eyes was that he's unfriending people on Fb for what others deem to be trivial reasons, , , , And that HM is generally an elitist operation. From my perspective, cn onferences, publishing, etc. tend to mirror the familiar hierarchies of the academic world. For as long as I've been around, I've never seen a Left organization that didn't genuflect before the right degrees from the right places. And I suspect that it's gone on for a lot longer than I've been around. I see no reason to expect that to change or any necessity that it do so in the immediate future.
There's another dimension that has to be understood. The British SWP (even now after the rape cover-up scandal) and the ISO have a heavy investment in HM. There's an overlap of the conferences, the paywall journals, and publishing houses that allows them to present their views without putting up with the hoi polloi.
The academic conference (and that for the most part is what the Left Forum and HM events really are) allows a group of tenured professors on the left to hold forth for a half-hour or so without being very much accountable for what they have said. I have run into two incidents already where I was basically heckled down when trying to respond to HM contributors Charles Post and Paul Le Blanc.
Ironically, as they enjoy the privilege that attends a tenured professorship, the ground beneath them is melting away faster than the polar ice caps. As the Guernica article I forwarded earlier indicates, only about a third of American professors are on a tenure track while a movement is underfoot to challenge the paywall print journal model with Open Source publications.
The strange thing is that some of the most vociferous defenders of "classical" Marxism like Vivek Chibber seem utterly oblivious to the sea change taking place and are preoccupied by the widespread influence of Derrida, Foucault et al--as if that matters to an adjunct who can't afford a dentist.
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