Postmodernism: Materialist?--autodidactic sectarianism

[rdumain@igc.org]

There are ways in which I much more troubled by the argumentative style of Jim Jaszewski than I am by the usual academic folderol.  On many occasions, I've been arguing this same issue online for over half a decade now without being able to get through.  I think it began when certain activist types, thinking me a soul brother because of my hostility to academia, discovered the hard way that I oppose them just as vigorously.  It began when that ex-Trot half-wit creep Lou Proyect and I had a falling out after he had originally supported me supposing I share the provincial philistinism and anti-intellectualism of the sectarian left.  I had begun the 1990s inexperienced in the ways of creepy leftism, and it was only when I progressed from reading the historical documents left behind by Trotskyism and circles around CLR James to dealing personally with the malformed and stunted human beings that the far left actually produces that I really began to understand the profundity of the !
!
issue of the development of human beings vs. the development of (incompetent and unaccountable) professional revolutionaries (a joke in the USA in any event).  To borrow the phraseology of the Raya Dunayevskaya cult, I became conscious that the universal is de-alienated humanity, not social protest.  I also discovered while organizing an aborted conference session for the Socialist Scholars Conference (my program was aborted by bureaucratic ineptitude) to commemmorate the 150th anniversary of THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY, that is, while researching Marx's early development, that there has prevailed a fundamental misunderstanding about the relation of theory to practice.  This fundamental misconception surfaces every time there is a debate over cultural issues or the value of intellectual work, whether it's the value of jazz or rap music, or now that of postmodernism.  When one finds others in an inescapable dead end, the only recourse is to bail out.

More later.