I had the opportunity to speak to Prof. Keen at an impromptu lecture last year and I asked him whether he was familiar with the TSSI approach of Kliman et al. To hear Keen tell it, he may have a hard time approaching the matter in good faith; he claims that Prof. Kliman at one point said that “Keen should be shot for what did to Marx.”
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: OPE-L on behalf of ajit sinha
> > Sent: Sun 7/4/2004 1:57 PM
> > To: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU
> > Cc:
> > Subject: A Message from Mr. Kliman
> > Today, out of the blue I got a message in my mail
> > box without any subject from a guy called
> > 'Drewk'. Once I saw the message, I thought it was one of
> > those spam from some idiot, so I deleted it, but then I
> > realized that the senders address is none other than
> > our old friend Mr. Kliman. So I retrived the message from the
> > trash to share it with you, so that we all know a
> > little more about our friend Mr. Kliman. The message
> > is pasted below in full. Cheers, ajit sinha
> > From: "Drewk" <Andrew_Kliman@msn.com>
> > To: sinha_a99@YAHOO.COM
> > Subject:
> > Date: Sat, 3 Jul 2004 20:27:58 -0400
> > Yahoo! Briefcase ]
> > You are scum.
> > Go fuck yourself.
Hell Yeah
gyrofry posted:isn't that guy some kind of trot
More like a sort of left communist, but definitely quite far from a Stalinist tankie.
Crow posted:Stalinist tankie bippy
hrm
stegosaurus posted:Thomas the Tankie
Now I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals; and I heard one of the four living creatures saying with a voice like thunder, “Come and see.” And I looked, and behold, a white horse. He who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer.
Edited by Themselves ()
like, you read a lot of pro-Marxist writing from the 70's - 80's, and there's all these caveats. "yes, Marx may have been wrong about certain things, but he was a poet of the whirling dervish that is capitalism!" i mean, what were the Marxistant texts that had the most contemporary impact -- maybe David Harvey's "Limits to Capital" and Jameson's "Postmodernism"? (perhaps one day we'll look back and say "Settlers").
Kliman didn't singlehandedly invent TSSI, but he was its most prominent advocate and writer. he laid a lot of groundwork, got kneedeep in debates with academics who were a little too comfortable with "Marxist Themes in 1960's Cinema" as the height of praxis -- people were not happy with him, and you had all sorts of pathetic comedies with self-proclaimed Marxists insisting that "NO, MARX WAS WRONG!" but the effect was that for people my age, it was no longer ridiculous to say that Marx was a consistent systematic thinker. as best i can tell, these conversations aren't even occurring among socialists even a little bit younger than me. that's a good thing. again, Kliman wasn't single-handedly responsible for that, but he was a part of it. on some level, he has shaped the discourse in a positive way
on the other hand, i'm pretty sure he would be horrified to discover that he is partially responsible for the discourse of today's Marxists. he is anti-Lenin (Stalin is a complete non-starter) and Marxist-Leninism as a whole. as best i can tell, his politics are in line with Raya Dunayavskeya, as a sort of anti-Leninist Marxism that heavily emphasizes the 1844 Manuscripts and a Hegelian reading of Marx's corpus. and as someone with a very strong background in Marxist economics, he's totally opposed to any sort of Keynesianism.
but this leads to some very weird political positions, ones where he's predisposed to rule out actually-existing socialist countries (which he would claim aren't actually socialist) AND democratic socialist countries that use neo-Keynesian politics to build strong welfare states. the 2016 election stressed those antimonies even further, leading to all sorts of talks of "red-brown alliances" seemingly straight from Trotsky, all leading to his conclusion that the only truly Marxist position was to vote for Hillary Clinton
shapes posted:a Hegelian reading of Marx's corpus.
Petrol posted:Someone get that man an account and then delete the account
the more sociopaths the better i always say /sarcasm /daria
shapes posted:on the other hand, i'm pretty sure he would be horrified to discover that he is partially responsible for the discourse of today's Marxists. he is anti-Lenin (Stalin is a complete non-starter) and Marxist-Leninism as a whole. as best i can tell, his politics are in line with Raya Dunayavskeya, as a sort of anti-Leninist Marxism that heavily emphasizes the 1844 Manuscripts and a Hegelian reading of Marx's corpus. and as someone with a very strong background in Marxist economics, he's totally opposed to any sort of Keynesianism.
but this leads to some very weird political positions, ones where he's predisposed to rule out actually-existing socialist countries (which he would claim aren't actually socialist) AND democratic socialist countries that use neo-Keynesian politics to build strong welfare states. the 2016 election stressed those antimonies even further, leading to all sorts of talks of "red-brown alliances" seemingly straight from Trotsky, all leading to his conclusion that the only truly Marxist position was to vote for Hillary Clinton
exactly this, yeah. his latest screed even embeds the word "imperialism" in scarequotes because people who use the word are russian bots
it's weird; he clearly grasps marx's value theory better than his regular academic opponents, but every other element of marxism he mangles into some straight-up clown shit
anyway i've had a bunch of encounters with AK over the years, both positive and tense, and i just wanna throw out there that if you wanna get him really mad, refer to him as a "popularizer" of the TSSI
