RE: [OPE] End

Hi Jurriaan:
 
 
Thank you for your explanation and for your participation over the years
on OPE-L which must have required a considerable expenditure of time and
effort and must have been occasionally frustrating for you. I'm sure that
listemembers and archives readers will have occasion to read and re-read
many of your contributions and ponder their merits. I can readily
comprehend your reasons: there is life, after all, outside of OPE-L and
being able to find the time and energy to manage to participate in all that
we need and want to do is always a challenge.
 
 
On behalf of the Administrative Committee and the entire list, I thank you
and wish you well.
 
 
On a personal level, you know how to reach me by email and - of course -
on Facebook and I look forward to hearing from you in the future.
 
 
In solidarity,
 
Jerry

> The main reason is simply practical. I just have too many other things to
> do, among other things job-hunting, a legal dispute, editing a book by
> Marcel van der Linden, Robin Blackburn et al., and so forth, possibly get
> another place to live. The other reason is that I don't think I am going to
> make any more scientific progress on this list. I can post more stuff that I
> think is of interest to list members, but really it isn't what I should be
> doing. Really what I ought to be doing academically, insofar as I have the
> time for it, is to write up more stuff for publication, including the
> Stiglitz critique and a book on the evolution of the state. I am not a paid
> professional scholar with a safe, established job and a list of publications
> as long as your arm, and everything I write, has to be written off-the-cuff
> and "in between the scenes" in spare hours in the morning or at night, when
> I am not in my paid fulltime job and not doing reading. It's not really
> satisfactory, because really when you deal with big topics you should go
> over issues much more carefully and thoroughly, but I just don't have the
> time to write stuff up, and have to condense things down far too much, it
> becomes like blogging. It is just not possible neurologically to sustain a
> 12 hour working day practically every day of the week, and I should be
> looking at getting more pay for less work of a higher quality, and rest
> more. In the second half of this year I was sick too often with flu viruses,
> which doesn't make my employer particularly happy, and the surgeon
> discovered I have a midriff hernia. So I have to be much more concerned with
> attaining good health, a better lifestyle, and keeping it; when you are
> young, you aren't concerned about these things too much but when you are 50
> you do notice you just cannot do everything that you used to. Qua
> interests, I am just not so much interested in Marxism anymore, and the more
> I have studied Marx & Engels, the less convincing I have found Marxist
> interpretations of their life and works. Since the list is basically a
> Marxist list as Ian Wright notes, I don't really belong there, I just get
> offside with people. And I nowadays am concerned much more really with new
> types of analysis which go well beyond Marxist doctrines, and pick up topics
> and issues that Marx never talked about, sort of like, Capital Volume 5.
> This only gets Marxists' backs up, because it is a departure from orthodoxy,
> and I want to avoid getting embroiled in the whole controversy about
> orthodoxy, or whether something is Marxist or not Marxist. I am very
> grateful as non-academic worker for having had the opportunity to be able to
> discuss a bunch of topics on the list with sympathetic and generally patient
> academics across 12 years, I learnt a lot from the experience, but I feel
> now have to move on, and associate with things more productive to what I
> need to achieve. I wish the list well, I hope I made a useful contribution,
> and for the rest I'm sure that you will have plenty to discuss without me.
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Received on Sun Dec 6 10:58:53 2009