[PEN-L:7198] Re: Re: jim o'connor on harvey review

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:

>Actually, after 12 hours I have achieved a certain epiphany around this
>question of academic journals and publishing houses that publish Marxish
>literature. This transcends my disgust with what I went through over the
>Harvey article submission. Since you are a professor yourself, you may not
>appreciate the power relationships that lie beneath the surface.
>
>In essence, these journals (CNS, S&S, Rethinking Marxism, Social Text,
>etc.) mainly function as an outlet for left-wing professors to maintain
>their scholarly credentials.

At first I vowed not to say anything about this, but I can't keep my vow.
Lou, this is crap. Yeah, sure there are some hacks and hypocrites who do
just as you say, but that's far from the whole story. There are some
serious and dedicated people who write the kind of stuff you're talking
about. Being a Marxist, even in a field like cultural studies, is generally
not a great career move for an academic in the U.S. Besides their academic
work, a lot of them are involved with real political movements too.

And your "review" of David Harvey in the RRPE was an embarrassment - beyond
the realm of mere disagreement into the realm of serious misunderstanding.
Harvey was trying to think seriously about the meanings of place and
community - how sometimes these can be virtues and how sometimes they can
support horrors. Those are really complicated issues, but instead of
acknowledging their complexity in your disagreement with Harvey, you do
little but denounce him. And you use his analysis of the relations between
society and nature, in which he used the words "evolutionary approach," as
a launching pad for a rant about Marxians stagism, which has next to
nothing to do with what Harvey wrote. If Jim O'Connor and several CNS
reviewers didn't comprehend what you were up to, there may be good reason
for that.

I admire the work of Jim O'Connor and David Harvey a lot, and they don't
deserve this kind of treatment on PEN-L.

Doug