I haven’t read it. Sounds interesting; besides personal interest, I also actually tend to incorporate a lot on writing into the Logic classes that I occasionally teach, so I’ll be sure to check it out.
schizo,
I largely agree with you. (Although I don’t have anything in principle against ivory towers; I actually have a great deal of respect for the notion of a community of scholars. But that’s no excuse for writing which is unnecessarily obtuse, particularly not in magazines, and particularly not when you are trying to say something about history.)
Unfortunately, alienating potential working-class supporters
is actually considered either a matter of indifference, or even a positive good, by many of the people who write for AJODA. This is supposed to be part of building a post-Left anarchism,
and those who object are waved off as workerist
drudges.
Have you, by any chance, read any of the books on style by Joseph M. Williams? I remember checking one out in the library and he performed seemingly miraculous transformations of opaque, headache-inducing passages into perfectly clear English prose using fairly straightforward techniques.
]]>“… and the working class, peasantry and those sections of the intelligentsia supporting independence on the other — and the common interest all proletarians have in the elimination of their elites, regardless of nationality.”
The work uses “the working class” and “the proletariat” interchangeably, a move which blinds the author, and potentially the reader, to some of the anti-worker ideas within Marxism.
Marx himself distinguishes between the proletariat – what most people today think of as the working class – and what he calls the petit-bourgeoisie – including the peasantry, artisans, and various entepreneurs. The peasants and artisans are indisputably workers, and make up additional working classes, and the entepreneurs are also another working class. Marx himself calls for policies to hurt these working classes in the name of the proletariat (Manifesto, section 4).
To confuse “the working class” with “the proletariat” can disguise the specific needs of the proletariat, and, more important, disguise anti-worker policies which directly hurt the other working classes, and indirectly hurt the proletariat by removing alternatives to wage labor, as pro-worker policies.
I, frankly, wish we could expect better from other anarchists.
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