PEN-L exchange between Jim Blaut and Jim Craven (Oct. 3, 1999)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nathan:

I think you undervalue the power and progressiveness of the old Civil
Rights Movement, but let that be.

After an academic gets tenure, he or she has lots of wriggle room. If you
don't have special financial needs, such as a large family, big debts,
etc., you have a choice: you can devote all your efforts to the kinds of
work that get you ahead, big grants, deanships, prestigious offices in
academic organizations, or just money-making. But you don't have to do any
of that. You can devote maybe 15-20 hours a week to subversive activities
-- if you want to.

My beef with academics is: they don't want to make a difference. Like most
victims of capitalism, they want to just make it in the system.

There are indeed organic intellectuals in the academy.

Trouble is, most lefties who are professors DON'T WANT TO make a
difference. Shame on them. Don't blame the system.

Jim Blaut

===

Response to above:

As my dear mother and father used to say: "can't 'buy' what's not for
'sale'. Often the worst forms of censorship in academia are self-censorship
borne out of cowardice and opportunism. At my institution, I have never
been placed on tenure committees or any committee on which the skills of an
economist are required; they place the insider toadies and whores on their
committees to ensure the proper votes on any issue before any issue is even
raised. . .

I will never be published in the "right", "acceptable" and career-enhancing
journals, but that's OK too because I consider them filthy rags full of
lies and bourgeois mystifications. If I were accepted in the "mainstream",
it would cause me serious psychological distress from wondering what I had
not done to make it clear where I stand and to delineate myself from the
"mainstream". And it comes down to that, like the old union song: "Which
side are you on?" Because as there are fundamental and irreconcilable
contradictions, there are "sides"--oppressors and their sycophants versus
oppressed and their supporters of conscience. I was once at a private
meeting with Kim Dae Jung in 1983 and he was speaking about peacefully
"negotiating" with the U.S. to remove U.S. forces and weapons in the
southern part of Korea; I asked him a question that caused him to smile:
"Can the 'lion lie down with the lamb' without the lion becoming a
vegetarian?".

I sometimes see some serious scholarship and critiques of capitalism,
addressing issues of various segments of the oppressed populations, but
these serious critiques are often written in jargon and venues that are
inaccessible to those who are the subjects and objects of the critiques
being made. I also wonder how many times oppressed peoples and issues are
used for progressive "research" and cv-building and after they have been
used, they are summarily dropped with no further inquiries as to how they
are doing or offers of help--the oppressed peoples and issues are just
commodities by the researchers in some of the same ways that capitalism
commodifies. . .

Only the one who is ready to die, starve, be totally marginalized and
demonized or become unemployed for a just cause is truly free. History is
full of the examples of such people; they are not so rare as one might
believe.

Among those who are tenured, as I am, we have a special responsibility in
that for the time being, tenure does make it more difficult to be fired
without a lot of specifics "for cause" and because the tenure also protects
the whores and sycophants of the system, such as the "Bell Curve" types and
Schockley types, the powers-that-be do and must make concessions to
preserve their illusions of "academic freedom" and these concessions may
offer more scope and freedom of expression than non-tenured have or can
command. I will say also, that I believe that sometimes it is quite
principled to make some concessions (something not discussed or discussed
in more "acceptable" language) on some particulars to get some broader work
published and read in wider venues in order to have a wider impact.

But in the end, those few at the very "top" who have and exercise the most
wealth and power, at the expense of basic necessities and civil rights of
the many, do so only with the explicit or tacit collaboration of others in
academia, politics, law, religion, education, media etc who do their
Faustian Bargains through outright whoring/toadying, cowardly
self-censorship of what they privately believe to be true, refusal to
seriously consider alternative reasoning/evidence (self-blindness) and or
acquiescence to "politeness" and "Roberts' Rules of Order"--out of fear of
being caricatured or ostracized.

Fuck the "mainstream". As R.D. Laing noted: "Insanity is a sane response to
an insane world [system]." What does it mean to be a malcontent, insane
person, marginalized demon etc in nazi Germany?; it means one is not a
nazi. I'm with a better class of folks on the demonized margin thank you
very much.

Jim Craven

Louis Proyect
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