Re: On Academe and the list was Re: NACLA and Colombia

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

George Snedeker wrote:
>this is true enough, but how does it all work?  we come up for
>reappointment, tenure or promotion and our fellow teachers and the
>administration look at our personnel file for signs of "professional
>development." they look for team players. the rewards are not great. still,
>they matter to many.

George,  this is not about whether teachers work hard or not. It is rather
a question of how Marxism gets defined. In the collapse of the "vanguard"
left in the 1970s, certain academic conferences and journals have filled a
vacuum. For example, the Rethinking Marxism conferences draw in a lot of
non-academic people even though it is truly an academic conference.

The other day you invited people to submit a review of Jim Blaut's "8
Eurocentric Historians" to a journal you're involved with called "Socialism
and Democracy." I happen to know one of the founders Frank Rosengarten
extremely well. I happen to have a soft spot in my heart for Frank since he
paid me generously to give him lessons on the Internet at his apartment,
but quite honestly his ability to interject himself into these sorts of
questions is something to behold.

I first met Frank when I was on the executive committee of the Chelsea
branch of the SWP in 1977. Frank was still teaching out in Queens and he
used to sit in the back row of the meetings with another couple of comrades
who were also full-time academics. One of them, as I remember, was either
assistant dean of his own school or some other college out in Queens. They
all joined when the SWP was at its pinnacle. It had nearly 2000 members and
had become the largest group on the left next to the CPUSA. It also had a
much younger and more dynamic membership. The NY Times Magazine
commissioned Walter and Miriam Schneir to do a profile on the party in the
context of the legal suit against the FBI, but ultimately refused to print
the piece because it was too flattering.

Frank and the other two comrades were good-hearted souls but I never got
the impression that they knew exactly what they had gotten themselves into.
Frank was in the CP earlier on and appeared to be like many CP'ers: for the
good fight but somewhat weak on theory. This despite the fact that he was a
professor of Italian studies. After the SWP adopted its sectarian workerist
"turn toward industry", the three dropped out.

Years later I sort of discovered why Frank seemed somewhat underdeveloped
on the theory front. Liz Mestres, director of the NY Marxist School, told
me that Frank, who was a Gramsci scholar, refused to read Marx on
principle. I chuckled at the time and said to myself, "Of course."

Eventually Frank, Michael Brown (an open-minded CP'er) and Randy Martin
(who got suckered by Alan Sokal at Social Text) launched "Socialism and
Democracy". Essentially it involves the same revolving door of contributors
who end up speaking at the Socialist Scholars Conference each year. 90
percent are PhD's. Contributing to the journal is just part of what's
expected to maintain the image of a left professor. The sad truth is that
nobody reads the journal except other PhD's who are part of the same
milieu. You are mostly in your forties to sixties and white.

I suppose you knew better than to invite me to review Blaut's book, even
though I am credited in the preface for giving him wise counsel.

If you had, I would have told you that my days of submitting to high toned
journals is past. After I crossposted my latest critique of Brenner to the
world systems mailing list, Wallerstein wrote me to invite me to submit it
to his journal but without the jokes. I wrote him back saying no thanks--
the jokes were the best part.

What we are dealing with here is what Bourdieu calls "intellectual
capital". Although professors have to put up with a lot of shit, what they
get back in return is a certain institutional power to define the
parameters of what is called Marxism, broadly speaking. This is the
privilege of a mandarin.

In the long detour of the left over the past 25 years or so, deviations
such as postmodernism, analytical Marxism, market socialism, regulation
theory, etc. have penetrated the broader Marxist movement like an oil spill
into a river. It is the fact that none of this would have happened without
the institutional power of the university which allows journals like
Socialism and Democracy and conferences like Rethinking Marxism to exist.

I have found myself thrust into the unlikely position of an Internet critic
of all this for obvious reasons. I am an impudent upstart by nature. What
gives me pleasure is knowing that this long detour is finally coming to an
end. As the NY Times put it, Argentina is boiling.

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/