On Wed, 31 Dec 1997, William S. Lear wrote:
> I'm tempted to say that the one thing that postmodernism and Marxism
> can't offer to people, just ordinary people, is insight into how to
> think. Postmodernists might be able to tell Marxists a thing or two,
> and vice-versa. Perhaps postmodernism is just the sort of solvent
> that Marxism needs to break out of its self-imposed boundaries. But
> outside the halls of academe this stuff really is meaningless. The
> one thing the left does not need is more obscure prose describing
> society; clarity and simplicity should be sought, and the sooner the
> better.
If only. There's nothing simple about global capitalism. Even the simplest
things in the world-economy today -- the bills in your pocket, the
commodities in the drugstore, the coffee-maker we turn on in the morning
-- are incredibly complicated commodities in a vast and largely
unanalyzed system of global exchange. Playing off the academic
pointy-heads against an allegedly sound, humane
common-sense makes for great populism, but lousy politics; there's a
difference between delving into the silicon innards of global capitalism,
using whatever models we have (for us literary theorists, this means
analyzing our media culture; for economists, it means sniping at the IMF;
for land reformers in Kerala, India, it'll mean something else entirely)
and delivering a ready-made, instantly-applicable formula which will solve
our problems for us.
Thinking is not just a privilege; it's damnably hard, often frustrating
labor, and ought to be respected just as much as someone digging ditches
somewhere. As for the whole Marxism thing, well, this is really the wrong
list to engage in a debate about Western Marxism; let me just say that the
whole point of thinking dialectically is to think through contradictions,
indeed to learn to think for oneself on a whole new level (check out
Theodor Adorno's stuff if you don't believe me). The notion that Marx was
some scheming Stalinoid hack or that the Soviet Union was a Marxist state
is the most ludicrous sort of Cold War propaganda, and about on the same
level as the Soviet apparat's defamation of Rousseau, Thoreau and Kant as
scum-sucking petit bourgeoisie.
-- Dennis
