Re: Red Baiting Labor Studies

["David S. Shemano" <dshemano@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jurriaan Bendien writes, among other things:


>> 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.

Hey, you got us conservatives all wrong.  We are not ignorant projecting immoral suckups.  According to a recent scientific study conducted by a real social scientist at a real university, conservatives are instead defined by: (1) fear and aggression, (2)  dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, (3) uncertainty avoidance, (4) need for cognitive closure, and (5) terror management.   http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/07/22_politics.shtml

Therefore, before you speculate about conservatives, please review the scientific literature.

David Shemano