Yoshie writes:
>In the case of many -- though by no means all -- postmodernists, they have
>progressed from anti-Stalinism to anti-Leninism to anti-Marxism to finally
>anti-Jacobinism. Most explicitly in the case of Laclau & Mouffe:
<ellipsis>
>... Laclau and Mouffe assert that the concept of the working class as an
>actor in history is a "Jacobin imaginary" (a term interchangeable for them
>with "Stalinist imaginary") and that it is illegitimate -- and
>"utopian" -- to move from the description of a subject position to the
>"naming of an agent."
Hi, Yoshie.
According to Hal Draper (in one of the volumes of his KARL MARX'S THEORY OF
REVOLUTION), Marx himself was anti-Jacobin, since the Jacobins were
petty-bourgeois, professionals, or even haute bourgeois. He sided instead
with the plebeian _sans culottes_, and if memory serves me well, with the
Hebertistes (sorry but I don't remember the what kind of accents there are
on this term) and to some extent with Graccus Babeuf, though Marx did not
like the latter's conspiratorial methods after he himself grew out of them.
There was not yet a true proletariat of significant size in Paris (the
locus of most revolutionary activity).
The CP of France, on the other hand, has always favored the Jacobin side of
the 1789 revolution.
This probably doesn't undermine your point, since L & M probably were using
"Jacobin" as synonymous with revolutionary.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
