August 21, 2001, 10:45
a.m.
How sad is it when the only kids who show up
for a Bay Area roundtable forum on people of color in punk rock came
all the way from Sacramento?
12:12 a.m.
Wedged into a tight corner of a side street cafe, M. told me horror
stories about a scholarly Marxism conference she attended this last
spring. Several panels were disrupted by a band of orthodox
Marxists apparently "protecting" the true spirit of revolution in
red berets and black combat boots. (When she described their collective
costume, I asked all incredulous, "Um, are you sure they're not a
performance group? You know, doing a 'happining'?") This
group regularly accuses all stripes of Marxist and post-Marxist
scholars of "mysticism" and "idealism" and other
materialist-philosophical cusswords. At the conference they wanted to
know what each paper would do to further the revolution, and denounced
all posts- as bourgeois: poststructuralism, postmodernism,
postcolonialism, post-Marxism, et cetera.
After giving her paper on political despair in 20th century
German philosophy, M. was told that when the time came to draw the line
in the sand, M. would be on the other side, an enemy.
M. put her hands (and organic burrito) up as I rolled my head in my
hands, laughing. "And they accused me of mysticism? What else
are they doing but mystifying 'the proletariat' and 'the revolution'?
They act like it's still 1910, not 2001, and they're the vanguard. I
mean, they think David Harvey is a sell-out because he tried to make
Marxist theory relevant to the present context. But isn't that what a
historical materialist is supposed to do?"
August 20, 2001, 11:23 p.m.
It's weird, frustrating, and amusing to me that when I'm accused of
being "too theoretical," it's usually when I'm making an attempt to
historicize and contextualize the uses of certain ideological notions in
discursive and institutional relations of power -- and usually those
making the accusation are using these concepts ("justice," "revolution,"
et cetera) as intellectual abstractions.