RE: [Marxism] Genocide and intentionality

["Mark Lause" <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fred and friends,

Frankly, the doings and rationalizations of coherent political groups
that call themselves "Marxist" seem far more appropriate subject for
discussion by a "Marxist" list.  Such groups are "insignificant and
irrelevant" only in a relative sense.

On the other hand, the focus on academic debates seems to me to be a
kind of back-handed respect for the credentials and the hierarchy they
shape.  Remember that the purpose of academic debates is not to
formulate application in the real world but to explain (what I call
"rationalize") the status quo, and to do so in original ways.  This
requires a great deal of discussion to produce self-referencing
theories, method and vocabularies.  These provide ample sources for
heated debate but threaten no assumptions essential to the preservation
of order.

Frankly, the tendency isn't just academic, but it reveals the
ideological and social origins of academe in theology.  It's what Karl
Kautsky brilliantly criticized as "rabbinical wisdom," which "did not
undertake to study life, but to drive into their students' heads an
exact knowledge of the sacred writings and to bring their
disputatiousness and subtlety in exegesis to its highest point. . . .
the longer the rabbinical wisdom of the schools developed the more it
ceased to be a means of understanding life and hence mastering it, and
became on the one hand the art of outwitting everybody, even the Lord
God himself, by amazing legalistic pettifogging and chicanery, and on
the other of consoling and edifying oneself in any situation by a pious
quotation. This learning contributed nothing to knowledge of the world,
and became more and more ignorant of the world."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1908/christ/ch08b.htm
(I'd only add that Christian theology has yielded nothing to its Jewish
predecessors in the quality of its knuckle-headedness.)

While I'm all in favor of dissecting and answering commentaries by
academics that enter the public discourse, I don't want to follow them
into their handball court and use their own rules to play polemical
"gotcha" with them...or having pissing contests over whose sense of
moral self-righteousness is superior.

We've already seen this tendency in the discussion of "genocide."
Giving them that word to chew permits a heated and pointless debate that
avoids pinning them to the mat over what actually happened.

On a related point, I think that, the debate over whether blacks
constitute a "nation" has performed a similar function...at least when I
was in the SWP, it was way to discuss race without actually engaging the
issue of racism.  It involves us in what is really an unwinnable (and
therefore pointless) argument about what to call things, rather than
actually getting at the essence of the problem in the real world.

Nothing demonstrates the politics implicit in this method as completely
as the way it has suckered the academic Left into become nothing more
than an especially polemical kind of hyperliberalism.  This is evident
in the way radicals have become simply noisier versions of liberals in
defending "affirmative action," as though this pathetically cosmetic and
symbolic reform in the marketability of an institution represented a
solution to the problem of racism.  And let's not even get into the
institutionalization of feminism through Women's Students programs that
safely ghettoize issues of gender in higher education into what it
literally "the women's sphere."

Look, if we invested a fraction of the effort bullshitting about words
into actually documenting the very real and demonstrable rootedness of
our present institutions and their present functioning in Indian
removal, slavery, child labor, imperialism, etc., we'd actually be
raising questions of legitimacy....which is precisely why liberal
academics don't do it, right?

And precisely why trying to contest liberal academics on their terms
keeps us from doing something so downright useful.

Solidarity!
Mark L.




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