Re: Red Baiting Labor Studies

[Jurriaan Bendien <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The reason why you cannot trust someone like Horowitz is because his
integrity is highly questionable. He was once a convinced Marxist who
delighted in the company of various wellknown Marxist intellectuals. Indeed
he edited a Monthly Review publication on Marxist economics. Now he prances
around as a convinced neo-conservative, takes trips to Israel to fraternize
with Zionists claiming to preserve civilisation against the onslaught of
"Arab hordes", and approaches his erstwhile leftwing associates with bilious
hatred. His obsessive preoccupation with "debunking myths" and "uncovering
conspiracies" signifies in reality a paranoid incomprehension of social
life, if you ask me. Lacking any genuine programme for social amelioration
of his own, beyond mouthing banale neo-conservative phrases and fulminating
moral righteousness, all he really wants to do is to restrict the freedoms
of others, and re-establish safe sex in the world of thought. Ironically,
the liberal American academic culture which originally allowed and
encouraged David Horowitz to develop his own views freely and critically is
now the target of his petty criticism - now he wants to deny the
intellectual opportunities that he himself was blessed with so generously to
others, with all sorts of vulgar cant... what a moral disaster.

The main effect of neoconservative and neo-liberal recipes for higher
education is the increasing denial of free inquiry, masked with some or
other "capture" argument, commercial argument, or crude sociologism.
"Capture" arguments are interesting, because they suggest that you do not
actually have to argue cogently with your political opponents, rather you
dismiss them a priori on the basis of their outlook, culture, values or
background, while simultaneusly denying the existence and politics of social
classes. The net result of "capture" arguments in the New Zealand rightwing
frenzy was, that academics in higher education became more regimented, and
had to spend more time on budgets and administration, while access to higher
education became more difficult and expensive, and learning opportunities
were converted into marketable "products" aimed not at improving pedagogic
quality, but rather at balancing budgets and winning power games. Students
ended up with having to pay off huge loans without any job guarantees.
"User-pays" principles and market mechanisms did not promote more cultural
diversity and equality of opportunity, but rather made higher education a
more elite activity than it ever was before. The stinking hypocrisy of these
right-wing red-gone-rotten scoundrels is, that instead of promoting better
education, they effectuate more educational mediocrity; instead of promoting
more educational opportunities, they effectuate greater exclusion of the
less well-off from educational opportunities; instead of improving pedagogic
quality, they just regiment teaching staff more and more, and force them to
spend more and more of their time on non-pedagogic, non-research activities.
Educational programmes are less aimed at what is really needed in society,
but at what sells, and what sells, is what those who have the money are
willing to buy. But if they can buy it, are willing to meet the expense of
the "product", that just means that the people most in need of education, in
other words the poor, are shut out. Horowitz however wants not just to shut
out the poor, but also the concern with the poor, arguing this concern is
misplaced anyway, because leftists cannot understand it, having sufficient
money to educate themselves and "capture" the academy. The question is
raised, what is Horowitz able to understand ? Mainly, the permutations of
hatred, envy, jealousy and bickering.

When you survey these "right-wing think-tanks", you are struck by how
shoddy, banale, vulgar, and unscholarly their arguments and so-called
"research" mostly are. It is a veritable psychopathology of projection,
whereby you whinge that your opponents are whingers, you bleat that your
opponents are bleaters, you assert with hatred that your opponents hate
humanity, you falsely impute values and motives to your opponent, while
hiding your own real motives and real values; you complain about hidden
financial motives on the part of your opponents, while you are the
beneficiary of generous helpings from the wealthy yourself. The real reason
that most of these right-wing "think-tanks" exist at all, is because if they
were to spout their decrepit and deformed ideologies in the company of
genuine scholars and genuine scientists, they would be made mincemeat of.
What sustains these right-wing think-tanks, in other words, is not genuine
intellectual credit, but rather lots of money from rich donors, who, unable
to think for themselves, seek arguments and evidences manufactured on demand
by their generously paid servants, to suit their purpose or whim, and which
permits their "researchers" to probe and fish around at leisure in popular
gripes, dissatisfactions and social diseases, in order to rake up some dirt
on whomever they want to discredit. How pathetic ! What a horrible,
deceitful culture !

The strength of the Left resides precisely in the fact that our intellectual
culture is not dependent on copious financial injections.
Sure, we need to earn a living, we appreciate donations, but those donations
do not shape our intellect to please a master, they fund our own
intellectual work and activism, for which we have freely chosen. Our
intellectual expression takes shape through rigorous, critical and
self-critical inquiry and dialogue, not influenced in its content by any
financial considerations or intellectual whoring. Indeed we champion the
revolt of sexworkers against a rotting capitalist culture, which denies them
a decent life, and makes people suffer sexual persecution, psychic injuries
and moral straightjackets. Our books are for sale, but our thought is not.
We express our thought, even if we aren't paid of it, and even if our
thought is expropriated and plagiarised. We may run out of money, but we
never run out of ideas, because the corrupt and dehumanising realities of
capitalism and the revolts against it, provide an inexhaustible source of
ideas. Our discipline is, ultimately, not an academic dicipline, but a
discipline forged by a real concern with, and a real engagement with, the
forms of social oppression and exploitation under capitalism such as they
have manifested themselves in our own lived experience. And this is why,
ultimately, these "rightwing thinktanks", although their employees may fly
around the world for important meetings,  have no argument beyond "dirt
digging", allusions to conspiracies, and scratching around with sly
insinuations, a dastardly consultancy business which assumes no
responsibility for the policy consequences of its "advice". Yet, in making
their petty attacks, they reveal their own personal and moral decrepitude,
the slow but steady rotting and corruption of the bourgeois class, who, in
its perpetual bid to reduce the social problems of capitalist society to the
personal problems of individuals, is increasingly blinkered to the real
issues affecting ordinary folks and the forms that they take... issues in
which they are only interested ever so briefly, in order to glean some
selective anecdotal evidence to "prove" the correctness of their rightwing
prejudices in some media chat.

David Horowitz, renegade from Marxism, now cast in the role of populist
fundraiser among "ordinary people" to prosylitize the mangnanimous
conceptions of the neo-conservative bourgeoisie, seeking the moral
reconstruction of America in its own image. One ought to pity the poor man,
really.

Jurriaan