Re: Civility

At 08:20 AM 3/30/99 -0800, Patrick Preston wrote:
>I think that it is interesting that someone who identifies himself as a
>person trying to change society today will not suffer his views to be
>challenged.  This latest diatribe started out after his receiving a
>request for 'civility' in writing on the wsn list brings out a long,
>boring series of  'points' of how civility is a politicized term. Ugh!

My dear sir, we belong to different ideological traditions which have
completely different notions of what should and shouldn't be said in a
debate. I happen to think that Marx, Lenin, Rosa Luxemberg and Leon Trotsky
were well within their bounds when they answered attacks on Marxism.
Marxism is not for the faculty lounge. It is a contentious, sharp, and
aggressive discourse that has nothing to do with the mealy-mouthed, phoney
"collegiality" that is shared by people with a common ideological framework
rooted in the academy. When thought is disconnected from action, as seems
to be the case with world systems theory, there is no reason for harsh
language to be used, just as there would be little reason for
anthropologists studying American Indian skeletons to use sharp language
with each other when trying to date their specimen's cause of death. Of
course, an American Indian activist like Ward Churchill might use a
completely different language...

Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)