Re: activism and academia

Louis

Your mail interested me - it is something I have noticed myself - I'm 
entering my forties and entered academia several years ago after 
working in various un-skilled factory and labouring jobs. As a 
card-carrying member of the British Labour Party for nearly eighteen 
years (until after the last general election that is), I am well 
acquainted with public demonstration (supporting miner's strike and 
anti-Thatcherism for example). Although I have always read books, I 
wasn't aware of 'literary criticism', and 'de-constuction' until this 
entry into academia, and am still just as puzzled now as to why 
academia and public disobedience are often treated at odds by many in 
both communities.

I suppose it all boils down to why one becomes an academic in the 
first place. As someone working in the field of development studies 
and with those of the world who are amongst the most underprivileged, 
I thought I could make a difference. I gain much insight and many 
ideas from 'academic' lists such as WSN - but am disturbed as I (and 
others) don't seem to be able to translate some of their contents on 
to the street.  After all, if change is the goal of lists such as WSN 
(and it certainly should be if it is concerned with a theory of a 
world system) surely this has to be the ultimate goal - or am I being 
utopian?

Paul.

>
>I don't know why I find this thread so amusing. I am a 55 year old computer
>programmer who spent 11 years in the Trotskyist movement from 1967 to 1978.
>Then from 1981 to 1990 I was involved in Central America and Southern
>Africa solidarity, mostly with the goal of sending computer experts
>overseas in a kind of radical version of the Peace Corps.
>
>It has only been over the past 10 years while working at Columbia
>University and having access to the Internet from 9 to 5 as part of my job
>that I have become aware of "theory". For 23 years, when I was an activist,
>all of my ideas were tightly coupled to my activity. So for example in the
>1960s and 70s I read Bernard Fall, Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano and party
>literature since I had a need to speak at meetings and write leaflets on
>the topic of Vietnam, Latin America or the Mideast.
>
>So you can imagine my astonishment when I began rubbing shoulders on
>leftwing mailing lists on the Internet with "Marxist" professors whose
>entire career revolved around the transformation problem, wedding Marx to
>Nietzsche or Heidegger, wedding Marx to British analytical philosophy,
>explaining the rise of Great Britain on the basis of 13th century farming,
>justifying the spread of foreign investment into the third world on the
>basis of Marx's Herald Tribune articles on India, and all sorts of other
>peculiar notions. It was like Alice falling into a rabbit hole and
>discovering an entirely different dimension.
>
>That is one of the reasons I became pals with Jim Blaut. Despite all his
>awards and despite all his published articles, he always felt a stronger
>affinity with me and the desperadoes on my mailing list than with academic
>Marxists. I used to love to watch him raise hell on PEN-L. God bless him.
>
>Louis Proyect
>Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org

-- 

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"The Macintosh isn't a computer...
it's a way of life."  Don Rittner.
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Paul Broome
Centre for Developing Areas Research
Department of Geography
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham, Surrey, TW20 OEX, UK

Tel (Work):+44 (0)178 444 3574
Fax:      :+44 (0)178 447 2386
Voice Mail:+44 (0)207 681 2867
http://www.appleonline.net/pbroome
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