[PEN-L:30319] Re: Re: college students

[Michael Perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Please, let's not get started.

On Tue, Sep 17, 2002 at 03:54:06PM -0400, Louis Proyect wrote:
>
> >Someone wrote the other day:
>
> How amusing. Doug is afraid to mention my name like in Beetlejuice.
> Everybody knows that if you say "Proyect" 3 times in rapid succession, the
> gates of hell will open up and engorge the U. Mass economics department.
>
> In any case, the news he posted on undergraduates is reassuring. It is
> their flag-waving liberal professors, however, who I really worry about.
> BTW, here's what one of the vanguard elements of the undergraduate
> population has to say on the good Toni Negri.
>
> ---
>
> First of all, I don't even understand what the hell language Negri is
> speaking. In terms of "exodus" and "multitudes" and "molecular characters"
> and "bio-power" his responses read like Scripture on steroids. If you pick
> up an article by say Zinn or Chomsky (with some concentration), you can
> quickly understand their points, examples, overall arguments, all of that.
> Instead with Negri, he seems to be stuck on the theoretical-masturbationist
> plane of thought; he practically doesn't even mention any concrete events
> of the war on terror, their weight and impact, anything. I suppose I should
> be used to this now, especially as I have a friend in Texas who takes
> classes with Harry Cleaver, but it never ceases to amaze me.
>
> "What is absolutely new with respect to the book's structure is the fact
> that the American reaction is configuring itself as a regressive backlash
> contrary to the imperial tendency. It is an imperialist backlash within and
> against Empire that is linked to old structures of power, old methods of
> command, and a monocratic and substantialist conception of sovereignty that
> represents a counter tendency with respect to the molecular and relational
> characters of the imperial bio-power that we had analysed."
>
> Translation: we were wrong about the death of imperialism, we were wrong
> about the (un)importance of the state, we were wrong to hold
> 'globalization' as a messiah that 'transcended' capitalism as a whole.
>
> "But to think that Bush's government is America does not make any sense.
> Despite all that is happening, American society is still a completely open
> machine. Therefore even if Bush's project is monocratic and imperialist it
> is wrong to regard the United States as such as monocratic and imperialist."
>
> This is like tautology in reverse. How is American society an "open
> machine" in any social or political sense of the word in regards to
> tolerance of radical opinions? Earlier he says there is no countervailing
> tendency to the media. If it is open in the sense that there are better
> capitalists out there who are more farsighted than Bush that can take over,
> it is not at all clear how this waves away imperialism. It seems to me that
> reality has contradicted Empire's thesis, so Negri has invented a
> 'contradiction' whereby his principle stands on one side, with the full
> weight of postmodernism behind it (read: none), and some especially
> reactionary and unsavory group of capitalists just happen to currently
> occupy the other side, the removal of which will end imperialism.
>
> This obsession with 'transcending' the boundaries of the nation-state as an
> assumption for all analysis leaves something to be desired. In the Cold
> War, the West formed supra-national organizations to strangle the birth of
> socialist movements whenever and wherever possible. But in the absence of a
> big countervailing power, the most powerful Western country, on a political
> level, has no real reason to tie itself down. In a sense America is
> maneuvering against Europe to gain further control of energy and oil
> reserves, though Negri treats this as if it is a very strange occurence.
>
> This trend called autonomist Marxism sounds like the GQ and Croquet Club of
> anarchism.
>
> M. Junaid Alam
>
>
>
> Louis Proyect
> www.marxmail.org
>

--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx