Re: AUT: taste this, it's awful!

[chris wright <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here's the thing:

The Cuba Libre article is pretty good, a nice antidote to Castroist
fantasies.  Another article is quite Harry Cleaver-friendly.  Another is
quite E.P. Thompson friendly (and of course little of it is Althusser
friendly, but so what?) and raises some good points about the death (a
most deserved one) of Marxism, which maybe frees us up to read Marx and
other material for what it is: contributions to the critique of capital
and its overthrow. Then again, i find the article on productive and
unproductive labor to be just so-so and the reply to the Cuba Libre
article is dogmatic Castroism.

So the issue itself is a mixed bag and from a journal which I sense is
not made up of a group of people who, per se, agree.

However, they have a point up of value on the problem of language and
bad writing that is intentionally obscurantist.  However left-ish
intellectuals may claim this is a form of resistance, it is in fact
perfectly in tune with the need to create their own little arenas from
which they can publish authoritatively and frequently.  It is perfect
for the publish-or-parish environment of Left-ish academia.  Sure, the
treatment of Tronti and autonomia/operaismo is simply silly, since
Tronti and the operaists, at least, were not clearly anti-Leninist in
any sense nor were they to blame for the collapse of the radical social
movements of the late 60's and 70's.  Many of them were quite clearly
Leninists and vanguardists and some of them never lost an orientation ot
the PCI.  But that is no less silly than much of what passes as analysis
here, is it?

Cheers,
Chris



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