Re: Red Baiting Labor Studies

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

I've said this before on pen-l, but since there are new people on the list these days, it won't hurt to be repetitious: I actually know Horowitz (I even attended his wedding, since he was a friend of my then-girlfriend -- though I don't know if his marriage survived). My three encounters with him: 

1) not knowing who he was, I casually remarked that the beer he was drinking was made by Coors (then being boycotted). He struck back, saying that he thought that Coors was much better than the Teamsters' Union, one of the forces behind the boycott. (My silent response: what a jerk!)

2) at a bar in Berkeley, he told me that in order to understand his viewpoint, I'd have to undergo a personality change. (again, what a jerk! what did he know about me? nothing!)

3) at a forum in Berkeley, he said something to me about working with the right-wing Heritage foundation. He referred to the Heritage person as "Aryan-looking." I told him that "Aryan" was a language group, not a racial type. He actually respected this comment, but was clearly spinning out of this world, into the world where the right-wing millionaires reward you for being a right-wing asshole. 

Horowitz dates his shift to right to the time when the Black Panther Party killed a friend of his (who did their accounts). But at that time, he was one of the few people in the San Francisco Bay Area (outside the Panthers themselves) who hadn't become leery of them and hadn't dropped their adulation of them. The fact is that he was a jerk when he was a leftist and he is still one. 

------------------------
Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine




> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jurriaan Bendien [mailto:bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 6:30 PM
> To: PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Red Baiting Labor Studies
> 
> 
> 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
>