[Marxism] Russell Jacoby versus Eric Lott

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

There's a rather negative book review of Eric Lott's "The Disappearing
Liberal Intellectual" in the latest Nation Magazine by Russell
Jacoby
(<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060410/jacoby>http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060410/jacoby).
Jacoby pokes fun at what he sees as Lott's academic pretensions, even if
they are ostensibly tied to a worthy goal, namely carving out "a space for
radicals to the left of detestable 'boomer liberals,' who have seized the
limelight and distorted politics."

These 'boomer liberals' include Todd Gitlin, Michael Lind, Joe Klein,
Martha Nussbaum, Paul Berman, Stanley Crouch, Greil Marcus, Sean Wilentz
and Henry Louis Gates Jr. I myself am not sure about Stanley Crouch's
"liberalism" since most of his writing nowadays seems consumed with bashing
Black Nationalism and making the ideas of Booker T. Washington popular once
again. On most days, Crouch sounds dismayingly like Clarence Thomas--that
is, if Thomas actually would ever *say anything*.

Summarizing Lott's thesis, Jacoby puts it this way:

>>For Lott this "new liberal front" oozes with a "piecemeal, reformist
self-satisfaction." The new reformers represent a "bone headed degeneration
of the radical spirit." They have "created the political fog that obscured
the left from view" and buried the "liberal alternative to hawkish
conservatism." These liberals pander to state power and American
nationalism. They yearn for the "old-boys' left" that was largely white and
that claimed to be universal. Their work is "anti-corporate" rather than
anticapitalist. (Disclosure alert: Along with Mark Crispin Miller and
Thomas Frank, I am listed as suffering from this particular ailment.) They
turn politics into adjuncts of the John Kerry presidential bid. They are a
"secret sharer of neoconservative ideology," and they legitimate the Bush
White House and its politics. They constitute an intellectual and political
"disaster."<<

I don't know. This sounds like a book that should have been written long
ago. Lott obviously has a handle on the Dissentoid left and anybody else
who wants to turn back the clock to a New Deal type politics that long ago
lost any objective basis for its existence, if one ever existed.

Since Jacoby is a sworn enemy of post-Marxism and anything remotely
smacking of academic obscurantism (he was seen as an ally of Alan Sokal in
a Lingua Franca article on the fight against jargon, while Lott has taken
Sokal down a notch or two in the pages of the Village Voice:
<http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/vls/159/lott.shtml>http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/vls/159/lott.shtml),
it is to be expected that he would attempt to smear Lott with alleged
connections to figures such as Etienne Balibar (frankly, there are much
worse than Balibar) and a propensity for terms like "intersectionality" and
"the praxis potential of antinormativity." Frankly, with what I have
learned about Alan Sokal and his anti-postmodernist rightwing allies over
the past 8 years or so, I am more inclined to line up with the winners of
Denis Dutton's Bad Writing Contests of yore.

Improbably invoking Lenin, Jacoby suggests that Lott's work smacks of
'infantile leftism,' but when "Lenin used the term he was referring to new
political parties, not professorial posturing." I don't quite know how to
put this, but there should be a law against somebody like Russell Jacoby
invoking Lenin. This is what the Turks call chutzpah.

But you can really figure out where Jacoby is coming from through his
defense of Todd Gitlin's and other "old fogies" call for a "universal
left." Let's get something straight. This "universal left" has nothing to
do with reconstituting the Communist International. All it is a call for
rebuilding the Labor-Civil Rights-Democratic Party coalition under the
leadership of a latter-day Hubert Humphrey. Gitlin voted for Humphrey in
1968 and will never forgive the radical movement for telling the truth
about Humphrey, namely that he was a warmonger and a corporate stooge.

Russell Jacoby is coming from the same place ideologically as Gitlin and
others who have complained about how multiculturalism (ie, uppity women,
gays and Blacks) alienates blue collar workers from voting Democrat. It is
really a tiresome litany that has appeared in many guises, from Gitlin's
"The Twilight of Common Dreams" to Robert Hughes's "The Culture of Complaint."

I think that Eric Lott has it right. In many ways, the "culture wars"
involving postmodernism and its detractors (Russell Jacoby, Alan Sokal, et
al) are basically reflecting genuine problems facing the mass movement that
have to be resolved in order for fundamental change to occur in American
society. They are actually not new debates, since Marxism has always had to
grapple with tendencies within it that pit some "universal" working class
against "sectoral" impediments thrown up by forces outside the point of
production. In a previous lifetime, I used to refer to this phenomenon as
"workerism" and it is unpalatable coming from within the dogmatic left or
from tenured professors like Russell Jacoby

--

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