The dedication in Tariq Ali's "Revolution from Above": For Boris Kargalitsky, socialist writer and activist who founded the Popular Front for Perestroika in Moscow and Boris Yeltsin a leading member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, whose political courage has made him a leading symbol throughout the country.
In bourgeois society, the artist is often undermined by his or her own success. You become too big for your britches. After Woody Allen became the NY Times’s darling, they refrained from telling him that his movies were becoming crap. The same thing with Saul Bellow. After the success of “Herzog”, his editors would not dare tell him that a novel like “Mr. Sammler’s Planet” was racist tripe. It would seem that Marxist celebrities have the same problem. Slavoj Zizek, the Elvis superstar of Marxism, writes an article for the New Statesman that is based almost exclusively on a website that has about much credibility as Infowars or Global Research. The magazine issues a retraction stating that the paragraphs drawn from the website were being deleted because they made false claims. Tariq Ali gives a speech to an antiwar rally in London that proves England had plans to invade Syria with a “rebel army”. How does he know? Because a doddering old fool named Roland Dumas who had zero connection to the French state said so in a TV interview. Don’t celebrities like Tariq Ali and Slavoj Zizek understand that they look like idiots when they make such outrageous claims? Don’t they care? I guess once you have reached such a hallowed status on the left, you can get away with anything—except on this blog. full: http://louisproyect.org/2015/12/17/the-hazards-of-success-especially-for-marxists/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
