RE: John Holloway debate

["Tom O'Lincoln" <suarsos@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Craven:
>>Some of the shit on the net that passes for "leftist" analysis--and
praxis--is truly amazing. In some cases it is nothing more than some kind
of specialized academic market niche<<

Quite a lot of cases. Of course this sort of thing has existed for quite a
long time, but it seemed to become a major phenomenon when a) the radical
students of the sixties moved into academic jobs and b)society moved to the
right. So then you got a layer of left academics less and less interested
in the actual struggle. From here it was not far to something called
"theoretical practice" which said that writing stuff was itself part of the
struggle and that this took place on a plane of its own -- so who cares if
nobody can understand it. [You will deduce from this that I have a
lingering grudge against Althusser. :-) ]

Associated with this was a whole publishing industry:  Socialist Register,
NLR, Verso, Pluto, and others more obscure, which of course produced a lot
of useful stuff but also satisfied the publish-or-perish imperative. A lot
of trees died that arcane prose might live.

In fact one article that Rick Kuhn and I wrote about the falling rate of
profit was rendered semi-incomprehensible by the petty-fogging demands of
journal editors.

I would have expected this phenomenon to start to decline since by now many
of them would be quite senior and prosperous and no longer pretending to be
left wing. Plus some would be ready to retire. But we seem to have a new
crop by now, as big as the old. I wonder where they came from...

One good thing though: it has put pressure on some of us non-academic
revolutionaries to write in a rigorous way. Like footnote your sources.
I've been involved in getting a modest amount of theoretical material into
print, and I think it was better for having met (or mimicked) basic
academic standards.