Jim>...(my late friend al szymanski (sp.?) Nope, you got it right. He was one of the editors of the journal, The Insurgent Sociologist now called Critical Sociology. Another friend, wrote the below. (After another google hit...) Michael Pugliese, the creepy one;-)
logical errors of leninist fundamentalism ... in this day and age*!" As did Ted Goertzel, who on Tue, 14 Dec ... Leninist doctrines of the late great Al Szymanski or our own Comrade Berch Berberoglu ... http://www.stile.lut.ac.uk/~gyedb/STILE/Email0002101/m15.html Albert Szymanski: A Personal and Political Memoir by Ted Goertzel Versions of this essay appeared as "Albert Szymanski: A Personal and Political Memoir," Critical Sociology, 15: 139-144 (Fall, 1988) and in my 1992 book Turncoats and True Believers. The 1969 meetings of the American Sociological Association were held in the sterile towers of the San Francisco Hilton. The meetings were particularly incongruous at the climax of the social upheavals of the sixties. While blacks rioted in the streets and students bombed draft boards, the sociologists hid in their dummy variables and multiple dimensions, speculating about the functions of conflict and the need for values to maintain the social equilibrium. Colorless men in business suits read bland papers full of theoretical frippery and statistical fastidiousness. Al Szymanski was an oasis of genuineness in this desert of scholasticism. He dressed casually in faded jeans and a work shirt, with a disheveled mop of dishwater blond hair topping his large round head. He was only a few months older than me, having been born in 1941. At 6'2" and 190 pounds he was the largest of a small group of radicals who stood quietly in the back of a meeting room holding up a sign saying "bull shit" whenever the speaker made a particularly galling remark. The shy grin on his cherubic face revealed his embarrassment with this tactic, which he had agreed to as an experiment in ethnomethodology. Al quickly recruited me into the sociology radical caucus, which gave me a support group of other young professors to replace the political groups I had belonged to as a student. We were committed to direct action and had little patience with the stuffy professionalism of academic sociology. We had missed the deadline to place a resolution condemning American involvement in Vietnam on the agenda for the business meeting. Courtesy resolutions, on occasions such as the death of a colleague, could be introduced at any time, however. Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader, had died during the meetings. We felt that he was our colleague and sought to extend the courtesy to him. When our parliamentary maneuver failed we simply marched to the front of the room and held our ceremony anyway. The officials wisely retreated to resume their deliberations in another room, allowing our action to fizzle out gracefully. Al was the son of a Polish-American Rhode Island lobster fisherman who loved to work with his hands and never really understood his son's intellectual and political inclinations. It was his strong- minded, deeply religious, Italian-American mother who nurtured his precociousness, taking him to get his first library card as soon as he became eligible on his sixth birthday. When he first entered school, she told him that "other children could be cruel to another child who was different because of color or how he dressed and if he saw anyone alone or rejected to become a friend to them." Al read Freud and Marx at the University of Rhode Island and tried to shock his mother first with the revelation that he had loved her unconsciously as a child, then with his discovery of Marxism. She professed to be flattered by the first revelation, and did her best to understand the second. She believed he was true to the fundamental values she had taught him, and defended his right to political views she did not share. Al became involved in a group called Students for Democratic Affairs in 1963, writing a letter to the Providence Journal advocating that students be allowed to visit Cuba. He argued that students might return finding that Castro was not as bad as they had been told, or they might return as staunch anti-communists. In any event, they would be better off with first hand knowledge instead of repeating sterile clichés composed by people who had never left the state of Rhode Island. On April 14, 1963 he organized an appearance by Hyman Lumer of the Communist Party on the Rhode Island campus. He thought that the communist system was a "tremendously important ideology in the world today." The Worker quoted him as stating that "if, after eighteen years of being schooled in the American way, two hours of listening to Dr. Lumer could change a student's political views, something would indeed be wrong with our system." Al abandoned physics for sociology as an undergraduate major, and went on to do a doctorate at Columbia University, where he organized a radical sociology journal. He was a compulsive worker who produced a massive, two volume dissertation on Chile. He also found time to travel to Orangeburg, South Carolina, where he was arrested in a demonstration protesting a "slow down" by voting registrars. He was also arrested in a demonstration at Fairweather Hall, Columbia University, in 1968, but the case was apparently dropped and the FBI never got his fingerprints. They suspect he was at times affiliated with Youth Against War and Fascism, the Workers World Party, the Weathermen, the Worker Student Alliance, the Progressive Labor Party, the Revolutionary Youth Movement, the Peoples Coalition for Peace and Justice, the Venceremos Brigade and the Revolutionary Union, but his file includes few details. Both of our FBI files are heavy on hearsay and newspaper clippings. They did, however, uncover both of our "aliases." Mine was Ted Goerge Geortzel (instead of George Goertzel). His was John Albert Szymanski (instead of Albert John) or sometimes simply "Al". By the time I met Al in San Francisco he was finishing up at Columbia and looking for a job. Oregon was hiring, and we brought Al out for an interview. Al's charisma and intellectual brilliance were apparent to even the most stodgy of Oregon's senior professors, who accepted Al's reassurance that he would not advocate armed revolution until social conditions had reached the point that it was unavoidable. Al had been involved in the Sociology Liberation Movement for several years before I met him in San Francisco, and had helped to edit The Human Factor, a radical journal produced by students at Columbia. In an article titled "Toward a Radical Sociology," Al stated that the goal was to "explain how badly the present society functions, how people's frustrations stem from the social structure, how unnecessary and oppressive the present institutional arrangements are and how much better an alternative social order world work." When Al came to Oregon, he brought the Sociology Liberation Movement's newsletter, The Insurgent Sociologist, with him, with the intention of turning it into a journal of socialist scholarship. We formed a collective with interested graduate students, solicited articles, collated and addressed the copies, and mailed them out free to anyone who'd signed a list at an annual meeting. The costs were covered by a film series which we ran on the Oregon campus. The mailing parties were fun, probably the only cooperative work most of us had ever done, and spouses and children joined in. When somebody asked my son if he knew what his daddy did for a living, he said, "yeah, he puts things in piles to go to different cities." We agreed that The Insurgent Sociologist should be open to a wide range of radical and socialist perspectives, instead of trying to define a narrow political line. A similar agreement enabled Al and me to work together for many years, despite the fact that I was a "wishy washy social democrat" while he was an staunch Leninist. What made him so intriguing was his insistence on combining theoretical orthodoxy with exhaustive empirical work. While many radicals retreated into theoretical speculation or utopian visions, Al focused on the difficult issues others ignored such as human rights in the Soviet Union. He relied largely on mainstream specialists for factual information, always carefully footnoted, and made the best case possible for an orthodox Marxist interpretation. His books are most fascinating when they defend positions I find outrageous, such as supporting the Polish government against the Solidarity movement. The conflicts within University of Oregon sociology department became more complex when issues of preferential hiring for women and minorities were added to the splits between Marxists and mainstream sociologists and between Leninists and cultural Marxists. As an untenured white male Marxist with an "abrasive personality," my future in the department didn't look good and the gloomy winters became wearing on my psyche. I left for safer and sunnier climes at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey, where everything was peaceful and my personality was unproblematic. Al remained, got tenure at Oregon, and took over my role as the department's scapegoat. He gradually became more and more isolated from his colleagues, especially from the feminists and the cultural Marxists. My marriage finally broke up as Carol deepened her commitment to feminism and I envied the swinging singles. I dealt with the divorce by getting involved in humanistic psychology and personal growth, sampling the singles scene, and eventually remarrying. For Al, personal life was always secondary to political and intellectual projects. I can remember his telling me that he feared his wife's getting pregnant as he would have only nine months to complete the book he was working on. I already had two small children at the time, and no book. He, also, was divorced, but he responded by becoming more and more involved in his work. The annual ASA meetings were a pleasure largely because I would get to spend time with Al. He would stay the full five days at the meetings, but would only attend one or two sessions, spending the rest of the time sitting at a table selling copies of The Insurgent Sociologist. It was a great way to meet interesting people and find out what was going on around the country. We also helped to organize the radical caucus at each year's ASA meetings, and prepared resolutions on all the burning issues for the business meetings As the radical movements around us waned, we became more professionalized, and I felt that our sessions often weren't any more exciting than the traditional ones. Academic Marxists were retreating into scholasticism, debating obtuse points in Marxist theory or developing complex conceptual schemes to disguise the fact that the world really wasn't evolving as we had expected. Much of the Marxist work was, in my view, just as obtuse as the worst of the establishment sociology we had protested as students. As a tenured professor, I could have gone on giving the same lectures year after year, but I began to feel that I was more of a relic than a revolutionary. I moved on to other interests, but Al remained loyal to Marxism-Leninism. He knew that few students were persuaded by his arguments, but he took comfort in what he called the "lazy dog effect," which meant that years later, when social contradictions had reached a peak, they would think back to what their radical sociology instructor had said and the truth would "click" in their heads. He also continued to search for a Marxist-Leninist movement which would follow the correct line and bring revolutionary consciousness to the masses. For years, he was involved with a group which was centered in Philadelphia and kept asking me if I had heard about its activities. I had to tell him it was a minor sect with no real political influence, and teased him about his eternal quest for a nonsectarian sect. When the Philadelphia group fell apart, he grudgingly acknowledged that there was truth to my remarks. I knew Al was disappointed in political trends, but he seemed personally contented when I saw him at the 1984 International Institute of Sociology meetings in Seattle. He conceded at a panel that he had no idea how to bring about a revolution in America, but he was good natured about it and insisted that we go out drinking afterwards. He was even quite charming on a brief visit to my parents' home, taking an interest in my mother's work on health food faddism. It was a complete shock when I got a call from my ex-wife the next March with the news, "Al Szymanski has committed suicide." She'd heard from his ex-wife, who gave her no clue as to why he did it. As the reality of his death sank in, I felt worse and worse. Losing a friend my own age, 43, was bad enough. But Al was someone I genuinely admired, not just as a scholar but, more importantly, as a man who lived for and by his convictions. What principle could have led him to this? I realized that the writing I was doing at the time was meaningful to me largely as part of a dialogue with Al. Why should I go on if he had decided it wasn't worth living for? After the burial, Al's girl friend told me that he had been taking antidepressants for a long time but had avoided psychotherapy or even medical attention for what he thought was liver cancer but was only gall stones. I remembered conversations years ago when he urged me to keep a gun in the house in preparation for the revolution. Carol and I wouldn't consider such a thing with small children in the house, even if we had believed that a violent revolution might someday be necessary. We certainly never anticipated that Al would keep his gun by his bedside to comfort himself during bouts of depression, then, finally, one lonely agonizing weekend, use it on himself. Many people asked if I knew why he had done it. I wasn't sure. If he had intended it as a political statement, he would have written a political testament. All he left was a 3 by 5 card asking that his retirement money be divided among a number of radical journals, and a small fund for his dogs. Looking back, my biggest regret is that I didn't urge him to encourage his wife to have children even if it meant delaying his book a year or two. At least I could have responded more seriously, in later years, to his questions about my successful second marriage, and encouraged him to talk more freely about his difficulties in establishing a committed relationship. I don't know that talking with me would have helped. But at least I would have the comfort of knowing that I had done everything I could to help. There is a sense in which the personal is political, but Al went too far in subordinating his personal life to his politics. Although Al was my own age, he was also something of a mentor for me because of his brilliance, personal charisma and strong sense of commitment. He shared my disillusionment with the scholasticism in Marxist sociology and insisted on dealing with difficult political and empirical issues. In a sense, his death was the end of my youth. I realized that we weren't young people having a good time tweaking the establishment's nose. This was real life. >--- Original Message --- >From: "Devine, James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >To: "'[EMAIL PROTECTED] '" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Date: 4/3/02 8:23:04 PM > >CB:>Isn't "bureaucracy" a Weberian and not Marxist concept ? ... < the issue is not whether it's a "marxist" concept in the sense of whether marx talked about it as much as whether it fits with marx's materialist conception of history. but see, for example, hal draper's book karl marx's theory of revolution (several volumes, monthly review press), especially volume i. marx talked a lot about bureaucracy. for example, in capital, he talks about how bureaucrats (hired managers) were doing more and more of the work that capitalists took credit for doing. btw, marx was quite familiar with a quasi-weberian view of the state bureaucracy, that of hegel. weber & marx have different theories of bureaucracy. weber was pro-bureaucracy, seeing hierarchies of this sort as an efficient and "rational" way of attaining goals. (my late friend al szymanski (sp.?) once embraced this view, arguing for his version of "leninism" by saying that a top-down (bureaucratic) organization was the most efficient way to organize a revolution. if corporations use hierarchy, why can't we?) draper quotes marx again and again as being anti-bureaucracy (and in favor of democracy, as with the paris commune) or at least as having a more realistic vision of bureaucracy than weber. >...When a "giant bureaucracy" is mentioned, I get this picture of an >enormous collection of people sitting at desks in office buildings. >HOWEVER, it is not this bureau-proletariat of secretaries, clerks, >mailboys, receptionists, beancounters, etc. that is the "cratic", the >power in either Russia or the New Deal, or any government. This mass of >deskclerks is not the cause of "redtape" or anti-democratic rule from >above, as if they took a vote among the vast bureaucracy to exercise its >power on major questions before whatever institution with whatever >bureaucracy. "Bureaucracy" is a very misleading concept that is rife in >liberal political analysis.< the thing about bureaucracy is that the power of any individual rises as you go up the hierarchy (though that power is hardly absolute, since people down below can often block the effectiveness of the organization --that's one of the things that "red tape" is about). the difference between the top bureaucrats and the petty bureaucrats is a little like the difference between the grand and petty bourgeoisie. (unlike weber, i see a bureaucracy as involving a lot of competition.) usually these days, however, the bureaucracy is only a means to an end: the corporate owners use it to try to attain maximum profits by organizing production, marketing, etc. the state bureaucracy is similarly a tool of the state elite, which under capitalism by and large serves the preservation of the system. getting beyond capitalism, there are lots of cases where the bureaucracy could be seen as a ruling class of some sort. the pharoah couldn't rule ancient egypt without relying on the bureaucracy, so the latter got a lot of the power. in pre-modern china, the bureaucracy was clearly a powerful and self-perpetuating stratum, bringing in only those who could pass the calligraphy test (and the like) to run the show. in pre-revolutionary (and in many ways, pre-capitalist) russia, the upper bureaucrats had noble titles and quite a bit of power, often combining "feudal" power with a piece of state power. under the soviet system, the ruling stratum was bureaucratic: the leadership of the communist party ruled their party in a top-down way, while that party held a monopoly of political power. (state force was mobilized to suppress or buy off any opposition.) that is, the party "owned" the state, which in turn officially owned the means of production and controlled the economy (to the extent that the planning process worked), i.e., they had more control than anyone else did over the process of the production and utilization of surplus-labor and the accumulation of fixed means of production. >Perhaps the kernel of truth in this demogogy is the hierarchy in >"bureaucracy" . In other words, the bosses of the bureausitters, the >"cracy' of the bureaucsitters not the bureausitters en masse. It's the >SMALLNESS of the bureacracy at the top that is the problem. We want a >big bureaucracy, in the sense of masses people having the power and >control over society and their lives. Yes, it's the top-down nature of the rule -- hierarchy as opposed to democracy -- that's the problem. If bureaucracy were to be held democratically responsible at each level and stage, the bureaucracy can be more an means to an end, one determined democratically. Thus the problem with bureaucracy is ultimately that of forcing it to be subordinate to democracy. Jim Devine >
