Michael K:
>But not Marxist computer programmers? What you report here is unavoidable
>and probably rightly so. As social animals we tend to congregate within
>certain communities that feed us and enable us to contribute. Openness to
>the views of others can just as readily be interpreted as "selling out" or
>"betraying" the cause, whatever that may be. One person's sectarianism can
>be another's solidarity. Singling out academia (and including Monthly
>Review, of all publications, within that) as a special case works only with
>respect to the scientistic pretensions of some professors who would have
>everyone believe that they are immune to such conventions.
I have a totally different concept of what's needed. I believe that the
Internet is the proper form of communication for Marxist activists, not
print journals. These journals are hardly relevant to the sort of people
who are organizing demonstrations in places like Quebec. Do you think that
a 20 year old student who is dodging rubber bullets has any incentive to
read Science and Society? MR, which likes to flatter itself as some kind of
voice of the mass movement, is nowhere near that. I have vivid
recollections of trying to convince an old friend from the Trotskyist
movement to read MR 5 years or so ago, and Ellen Meiksins Wood in
particular. This woman was an assembly-line worker at the GE plant in Lynn,
Massachussets. She told me that after a day on the job, she doesn't have
the patience to read that kind of thing. She even made an attempt to read
Wood's books on my recommendation and couldn't get past page 10. Do you
seriously think that people such as this are going to sit down and read
Perry Anderson's tomes on the rise of the absolutist state? Or Michael
Perelman's book on primitive accumulation? Or Blaut for that matter? As
much as I admire these sorts of works--and identify with them
politically--they are written for other academics and not the grass roots
who organized antiwar demonstrations, fought against Jim Crow, for abortion
rights, etc.
That is why the Internet is needed. It gives ordinary people who seek
socialist solutions to communicate with each other, without the heavy hand
of party bureaucrats or tenured professors to dictate what can be said or
read.
>Come off it. You're a bigger celebrity than most of these guys. Are you sure
>you weren't simply trying to push the envelope by incorporating a few jokes
>or digs, like you did with Wallerstein?
The articles, all about American Indians, are on my website. As befits the
subject, there are no jokes.
>What constitutes "better"? Is there not a case that subscribers to MR, for
>instance, should be able to rely on a certain view (or amalgam of views)
>being articulated consistently? I can imagine the howls of protest were
>Sweezy and Magdoff suddenly to give space to pomo analyses of contemporary
>US media rather than those regularly served up by Robert McChesney, for
>instance.
What constitutes better? This would involve revealing confidential
information.
>Personally I think he's trying to be helpful, and I believe he is also
>conscious of the need to reach beyond the confines not only of academe, but
>also orthodox Marxism, however that may be construed. Maybe it comes across
>differently, but I don't believe for a second that Jim would have terminated
>any of your contributions with the extreme prejudice that sometimes passes
>for peer review.
Actually, as if often the case with O'Connor apparently, the articles were
rejected not because of quality but because of politics. CNS has a blind
spot on indigenous questions. Shortly after I went through my encounter
with O'Connor, I read an article in the journal by one of his regular
columnists that was filled with absolutely howlingly outdated information
on the collapse of Mayan society as a function of "wasteful" farming
practices. It was of a piece with a literal barrage of propaganda that has
appeared in recent years about the "unecological" Indian. Shepherd Krech's
misnamed "The Ecological Indian" is the crowning jewel of this ideological
offensive.
Louis Proyect
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