Louis P. writes:
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.
=====
Whoah! You wouldn't necessarily be giving these to first or second year
undergraduates either, except maybe Michael P.'s book. Doug Dowd is very
conscious of the problem you identify here and tries very hard to overcome
it. So, too, does MR.
There's nothing wrong with debate between scholars. It sure beats the
alternative. Connecting to people beyond the academy is a problem, not
helped by academia's innate tendency to frown upon fellow professors who do
just that, as with John Kenneth Galbraith, although it never helped that
Galbraith did not peddle the conventional wisdom, to use his phrase.
=====
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.
=====
The internet is a useful addition to the armoury, but it cannot be a
substitute for as long as large numbers of ordinary people do not have
physical and/or intellectual access to this means of communication.
=====
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columnists that was filled with absolutely howlingly outdated information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.
=====
CNS strikes me as fairly eclectic, and there are clearly a few contributors
who get past whatever ideological screening Jim allegedly employs. Why not
try to respond to (I presume) Hughes by simply tackling his points one by
one. I don't know the literature personally, but it's exactly people like me
who would benefit from an informed debate on the issue. It's possible that
Jim would not want too much space being taken up in some abstruse debate of
interest only to afficionados, but if the offences are sufficiently serious
then it should not be difficult to make a considered response to them.
Michael K.
