Saint Marx, Literalism and American Academic Revolutionary Marxism
It would be churlish to be other than pleased when someone as prominent as Richard A. Brosio – the doyen of American revolutionary Marxism – should go to the trouble of reviewing my book and even to call it “worthwhile” along with a number of other praiseworthy epithets. And if the title of my response is a little facile and facetious the message is anything but. The points I wish to make have been accumulating over my short career and now fall out like so many lost coins to be refound, counted and reinvested. A warning then: if I sound a little miffed Richard Brosio should not take it to heart entirely as the criticisms I am about to raise in this response are more of a broadcast directed at those, especially American academics, who appropriate the label “revolutionary Marxists” and apply it themselves self-consciously. The process of canonisation in academia is a vital part of “disciple” and “discipline” probably to be uncovered in the scholastic ruins of the medieval university. And the popular saying “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” goes some way to explaining the importance of imitation and copying behaviour not only as a form of pedagogy but also as a form of academic self-stylization. There are many different aspects to this process from the unconscious adoption of mannerisms and habits to the more sophisticated modelling of one’s writing and thinking. So we have (unashameably) little Wittgensteinians, little Heideggerians and little Marxians. (I was a little Wittgensteinian when I was growing up.) We need them! This is, in part, social reproduction in the academy. We hear of it with students who are educated by professor so-and-so, or examined by professor such-and-such. Academic genealogies. After all many of us after the PhD never attain the same levels of scholarship again. Increasingly, government and state pressures are such that they direct us and our students to “useful knowledge” defined for us by national research agendas and funding patterns. Yet there is a sense where we should question our relationships to those thinkers we value, to examine the nature