On 5/14/13 10:45 AM, Julio Huato wrote: > Hm, no. There are trees and then there's the forest. Instead of > taking this post in isolation, I think you have to address the overall > impulse at its source. This is part of Louis' long-standing crusade > against academics, which -- like most other crusades he champions, > comes straight from the seat of his pants.
Actually it comes from Savage Minds, a blog that is very much within the anthropology profession and highly respected. > To be sure, there's no cell in a capitalist society that doesn't, one > way or another, synthesize and reproduce the system's crap, some in > uglier forms than others. Except that places like Goldman-Sachs don't pretend to be other than what they are--shark tanks. This is relevant, something I posted yesterday to Marxmail: NYU sociology professor Jeff Goodwin unsubbed this morning. My guess is that he got fed up with just one too many swipes at his colleague Vivek Chibber. I really didn't have any idea what Goodwin's research project was about but apparently it dovetailed with Chibber's, namely that it was getting lonely out there in academia for hard-core Marxists. In doing a brief survey on his work, I found a paper titled "The Strange Disappearance of Capitalism from Social Movement Studies" (http://www2.asanet.org/sectionchs/09conf/goodwin.pdf) that bemoans the disappearance of "anti-capitalist" research such as "Charles Tilly’s 'resolutely pro-Marxian' 'From Mobilization to Revolution' (1978: 48) (and many other of Tilly’s writings from this period [e.g., Tilly, Tilly, and Tilly 1975, Tilly 1982])". Now I know a bit more about Charles Tilly than what his articles reveal. About 13 years ago my friend John Hartman's contract was not renewed in the sociology department at Columbia University after Tilly took over. Tilly had been hired to replace the department chair that had hired John and to purge the department of all the senior but untenured professors. This was a strategy Columbia had perfected over the years. I lost track of the link but there was an economics professor who got screwed this way and did not take it lying down. He wrote a powerful public attack on Columbia's vicious treatment of tenure-track professors that made Chronicle of Higher Education. Unlike state schools that rely on adjuncts, Columbia tends to keep full-timers on staff until their time is up like pigs being fattened up for eventual slaughter. John was an interesting guy. He was a Marxist but had zero interest in writing for journals like "Science and Society" or "New Left Review". He was primarily interested in statistical studies and used a large bank of Unix servers to crunch numbers. He didn't sound like a professor either. When he spoke to you, there was a four-letter word scattered throughout his plain-spoken sentences. He absolutely hated pretensions of any kind. I remember the time we spoke about me getting the run-around from James O'Connor. O'Connor had asked me to write an article critiquing David Harvey after he saw some comments I had made on PEN-L. I spent about a month working on the article but he decided to reject it at the last minute because it didn't meet CNS's editorial goals or something like that. I finally figured out that the article was too critical of the kind of idealism that was not only found in Harvey's Leibniz enthusiasm at the time but the Frankfurt orientation of CNS as well. Hartman laughed when I told him about the whole story. He said, "Do you have any idea of how few people read those fucking journals?" He mentioned some survey that revealed that the number was vanishingly low. About a year after we had this discussion, Tilly came in and "cleaned house". John told me that he was no different than Tony Soprano, a thug for hire who would destroy someone's career for money. This was John's last teaching job. He got a job as a statistician with an insurance company and was glad to leave academia behind. Tilly might write good articles, but as a human being he was no different than any other corporate hack brought in to cut heads just like they do on Wall Street. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
