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781 [lbo-talk] Heartfield on Derrida -- rank: 1000

Shag: "which one says "objectively imperialist" "objectively conservative" etc? is that a trot thing? Stalnist? CPUSA?" Maybe the cadences are different in the US, but if I heard 'objectively imperialist' that would definitely have me thinking of some kind of orthodox Trotskyist forcing the argument, like the Workers Revoloutionary Party (as was) or nowadays Sean Matgamna's 'Workers' Liberty' group. They would be there saying that the anti-Israel position was 'objec ...

Document Size:	5170
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Apr 15 13:25:40 PDT 2009

782 [lbo-talk] Voice of America, voice of reason? -- rank: 1000

Somali Piracy - An Overstated Threat? By Joe DeCapua Washington D.C 10 April 2009 While the piracy problem off the Somali coast is getting a lot of media attention, exactly how big a threat to maritime safety do the pirates pose? John Patch is an associate professor for strategic intelligence at the US Army War College and a retired Navy surface warfare officer and career intelligence officer. He's written an article - appearing on the US Naval Institute website - on Somali piracy. His comments ...

Document Size:	5451
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Apr 11 06:16:59 PDT 2009

783 [lbo-talk] Heartfield on Derrida -- rank: 1000

Eric Beck writes "it's a little surprising to hear you endorse the possibility of "philosophy...independent of any political conclusions" while defending at the same time defending Marx. " Well, I take your point, but Marx's programme of reuniting philosophy and social transformation.. ('As philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy', Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right) ...was not realised. T ...

Document Size:	5805
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Apr 10 18:56:10 PDT 2009

784 [lbo-talk] Did someone say totalitarianism? (was Heartfield on Derrida) -- rank: 1000

One reason to be suspicious about the proposed identity of communism, capitalism and fascism, is that they are all slippages that the Nazi Heidegger made, trying to obscure his own unlovely manouevring. First off he identified American and Soviet societies, where he saw 'the same etcetera of indifference' - a statement of the urgency of German distinctiveness. Then, under denazification, with his books and pension seized, he re-wrote the argument to say that he had misunderstood the trajectory o ...

Document Size:	6081
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Apr 10 18:31:23 PDT 2009

785 [lbo-talk] Derrida on Heartfield -- rank: 1000

Chris writes >From the standpoint of a historian in the future, or that of a Disembodied Floating Head in the present, liberalism and marxism and fascism will probably actually appear to be variants of a single set of ideas, much as in retrospect the religious wars of the 1600s appear to us today as a squabble between two insignificantly varying sects, even though it certainly wasn't experienced that way by the participants. Which only goes to show that historians of the future or disembodied ...

Document Size:	5031
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Apr 10 11:39:05 PDT 2009

786 [lbo-talk] Heartfield on Derrida -- rank: 1000

Doug asks "By the way, James, there are a lot of traditional leftists who hate Derrida for promoting self-doubt among intellectuals. You rightly point to the decline of the radical labor movement as key to the crisis of Marxism, but do you think the intellectuals were/are wrong to become so self-questioning, and skeptical of, yadda yadda, master narratives?" It is a good question, but first a proviso. Derrida was a philosopher, and deserves to have his philosophy looked at in its own r ...

Document Size:	7310
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Apr 10 09:48:16 PDT 2009

787 [lbo-talk] note of thanks -- rank: 1000

Chris writes "In Derrida it's even more obvious (and explicit). Anyway I was never much interested in that period of French thought, which the exception of the very early and very late Derrida." I wrote a review of Derrida's engagement with Marxism here: http://www.culturewars.org.uk/index.php/site/article/ghostly_demarcations2/ (Unfortunately the web-publisher took all the footnotes off it)

Document Size:	4888
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Apr 10 05:38:39 PDT 2009

788 [lbo-talk] Note of thanks -- rank: 1000

"Way way way back in grad school, I thought about one day writing a study of Heidegger's influence on rightwing, liberal, and Marxist thought, using Straus, Arendt, and Marcuse as my examples." There is quite a good book by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut about how the post-modern left took up Heidegger as a substitute for the 'disappointing' Marx

Document Size:	4772
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Apr 9 06:46:35 PDT 2009

789 [lbo-talk] Joseph Massad gets tenure -- rank: 1000

"Amazing. Maybe the wind really is shifting?" Well, maybe it is, but I would guess that the main reason Massad got tenure was that he is a very bright guy.

Document Size:	4744
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Apr 9 00:22:37 PDT 2009

790 [lbo-talk] Marx without quotation marks -- rank: 1000

Charles wrote about Clifford Geertz's "thick description" - that always made me laugh, that Geertz called his descriptions "thick". Wasn't he another one of those cold war liberals on the government payroll?

Document Size:	4739
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Apr 8 16:25:33 PDT 2009

791 [lbo-talk] "Doing History Backward" (Partial Draft) -- rank: 1000

Phil writes: "My favourite example of this, which was not only one of the first steps in this direction, but seems highly pertinent today, was the movement under the British Thatcher government to get working-class people to buy their council houses - houses that today are being repossessed." Apart from what sounds like gloating at other people's misfortune, your point lacks proportion. nearly two million council homes were bought by their tenants under the right to buy scheme between ...

Document Size:	5975
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Apr 8 13:55:17 PDT 2009

792 [lbo-talk] Christian Parenti responds -- rank: 1000

Chris writes: > People keep saying this, and it isn't true. 1917 surprised MARXISTS, Yes, and if memory serves me, Lenin begged the central committee not to abandon the "retributive" death penalty. A revolution is not a tea-party, comrades!

Document Size:	4784
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Apr 8 13:37:06 PDT 2009

793 [lbo-talk] Doing history backwards -- rank: 1000

Philip writes '"The 60s" or whatever its called seems to me to have been coming for at least 20 years and no one really recognised it as part of a broader historical current except maybe Adorno and a few others.' Didn't Adorno recoil in horror at the student occupations, and denounce the hippies as 'red fascists'?

Document Size:	4812
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Apr 8 13:35:18 PDT 2009

794 [lbo-talk] Christian Parenti responds -- rank: 1000

Ravi: "Your answer to them is, effectively, to create, offer and support a system that tortures the few of these guys you manage to catch *after* they commit these crimes" Well, that is better than catching them *before* they commit these crimes. The record of anti-social profiling is well-established now: the crapulous prejudices of probation officers. Retributive justice is as primitive as the exchange-based societies in which it flourishes; but attempts to drop a "rational&quo ...

Document Size:	6448
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Apr 8 13:21:38 PDT 2009

795 [lbo-talk] Marx without quotations -- rank: 1000

Philip: "Marx's claims about class are NOT transhistorical. Marx's position is exactly like Geertz's. The history of all hitherto existing societies IS the history of class struggle but the classes are not the same," Yes, and I would say that, notwithstanding the quote about all hitherto existing societies, it is not really right to call the estates in feudal society classes (nor the pharoahs for that matter). Class implies a certain sponaneity of self-reproduction that you only fin ...

Document Size:	5006
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Apr 1 16:33:20 PDT 2009