Re: [OPE] Marta Harnecker's Ideas

Jurriaan, it seems to me that you are focussing too much in the forms. The content of Harnecker’s proposal worth a discussion. My problem with her (and many OPE’s members) is that her programmatic ideas and current stands about issues like Cuba are poles apart. There are too many contradictions in Harnecker own praxis.  A. Agafonow ________________________________ De: Jurriaan Bendien <adsl675281@telfort.nl> Para: Outline on Political Economy mailing list <ope@lists.csuchico.edu> Enviado: vie,4 diciembre, 2009 08:30 Asunto: [OPE] Marta Harnecker's Ideas Jerry, I do normally write what I intend, and if Professor so-and-so comes out with an astonishingly dumb idea then the appelation "Professor" might serve to highlight that he should know better than that. Conversely, Professor so-and-so might come out with a really luminous idea which is derived from years of research, and in that case the appelation "Professor" might indicate that we are dealing here with the full weight of scientific authority. The bourgeois Left and the bureaucratic Left think that ordinary mortals should be in reverence of authority, but for us that is a reification - real authority is a matter of proven competence, humanity and experience. Hierarchies there will be, but everything depends on the criteria on which they are based. In the bureaucracy, the (academically trained) cadres can sometimes be a bit like Alice and the Mad Hatter - "words mean what I want them to mean", except that it is not a joke anymore - in the political sense they want to control the use of words, and rule out certain meanings which are not in their interest. The rational basis for that is that if you have an organisation, people have to understand work processes in an organisation in the same way. If they don't, you get misunderstandings and this leads to inefficiency. But this presupposes that they understand the work processes - in fact however what often happens is that control is exercised by defining the meaning of what participants in the work process do, and that communication about information becomes a technique for asserting power and for negotiating between interests. In other words, the negotiation of meaning becomes a negotiation of interests and an assertion of power.  It turns out that people rise to power not so much because they really profoundly understand things, but because they are clever with words, and are able to silence the words of the workers. And in fact they often don't really understand that workers can understand very much even if they cannot put all this nicely into academic words or into bureaucratically precise language. That makes language use itself often directly political, to the point where people start thinking "never mind the bullshit, no tell us for god's sake what is really going on". Because the language may hide as much as it reveals. And this means that a person of integrity has to be very aware of the use of language. I do not like Martha's paper, in part not even because of the content, but because of its form of expression. And I think that if then somebody says that I should hail this scripture because it is written by a "great authority", we are dealing with a mystification. I am not really prepared to decipher an academic paper in which the words could mean all kinds of things, unless I have a particular interest in doing so. As a translator you strike this problem sometimes because academic so-and-so sloppily writes a paper, and expects the translator to turn it all into perfect and persuasive language. Which is possible. But it can be sort of like, I have the grandiose idea, originality and the superior intelligence, and you can just "spruce up my fantastic ideas". In reality that is elitist, and the content of the paper cannot be separated from its form. Effectively, the translator then has the job of doing the academic work for the academic - the "fantastic ideas" and "originality" are not even apparent except for his work. Well if the translator is paid for it, he might do it, but by the time you are entering into a scholarly discussion translating the meaning of what another scholar says, you have bought into bulshit. The onus is on the scholar to explain himself clearly, and if he cannot do it, then why is he a scholar? It depends on what you want to do, but if you want to be a fuhrer and make grandiose claims about "what the Left should do", my own advice is to communicate in a way which is clear, precise and to the point, adduce salient and incontrovertible evidence to make the case, and apply sound logic. Because otherwise you and your grandiose ideas are not part of the solution, but part of the problem. Jurriaan _______________________________________________ ope mailing list ope@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope

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Received on Fri Dec 4 02:59:46 2009