At 10:55 PM 5/24/99 -0500, Carrol Cox wrote: >Lou, > >I'm just recovering from a migraine and can't read this too carefully, >but it seems to me that you are suggesting that the readers of a book review >should already have read the book. Actually, after 12 hours I have achieved a certain epiphany around this question of academic journals and publishing houses that publish Marxish literature. This transcends my disgust with what I went through over the Harvey article submission. Since you are a professor yourself, you may not appreciate the power relationships that lie beneath the surface. In essence, these journals (CNS, S&S, Rethinking Marxism, Social Text, etc.) mainly function as an outlet for left-wing professors to maintain their scholarly credentials. The publishing houses (St. Martins Press, Guilford) play the same role. It is important to understand that genuine Marxists, the people who organize political parties, trade unions, anti-imperialist coalitions, can go through life without having any awareness that such operations exist. I only learned that there were people like David Harvey floating around through my participation on the Internet. Furthermore, the social and economic function of these journals and publishing houses is commodity production, just like any capitalist firm. The other night I went to hear Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas speak at the Tamiment Library in NYC on the occasion of the release of the latest edition of Encyclopedia of the American Left, which they co-edit. It was also a book party for the reissue of Dan's "Detroit: I do mind dying", a book about the black nationalist trade union movement of the 1960s and 70s. He commented that it had been out of print for years, because St. Martins had decided to drop it, even though it was selling 400 copies a year on a consistent basis. They decided it wasn't marketable, by some criteria that had nothing to do with its political importance. On Michael Perelman's urging, I had sent St. Martins a book proposal on "Marxism and the American Indian". They never got back to me, not even to the extent of writing rambling, impressionistic "night thoughts" that I should have been entitled to at the very least. When I was east coast coordinator of Tecnica in the 1980s, I used to get an average of 35 phone calls a week on volunteer placements in Nicaragua or campaigns to end contra funding. Despite having a full time job, I made a point of answering every phone call. You know why? People who are involved in such work are VOLUNTEERS, who in this capitalist society are rejecting the very principle that makes it work: competition. On the other hand, the cavalier treatment afforded people who are submitting to academic journals and publishing houses is no accident. They are replicating class relations that exist throughout this society. Every time you get a book or article published, it is part of a career move. Part of the game is to make this whole process as difficult as possible, so as to weed out people who are not strong-stomached enough to put up with the nonsense. People like myself in other words. One of the advantages of the Internet is that it cuts through this crap. Matt Drudge set up a webpage to scandalize Clinton and eventually found that the bourgeois press was following his lead. I can write an article on David Harvey and post it to mailing lists and newsgroups that at least double the circulation of CNS, which is what I have been doing all along. My reward is getting feedback from people on the net, who appreciate what I write. The Internet will very likely put these obscure academic journals out of business one of these days. Couldn't happen soon enough for me. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
