WHAT IS THIS SUPPOSED TO ACCOMPLISH?

Nothing specific. My method is to throw stuff at the wall, and see what sticks. Or if you like more organic metaphors, it’s being like a ferret in the dark. You just keeping poking your nose into places and see what you come up with. No illusions here about blogs, or whatever this is, resolving all the world’s problems. It’s just a medium where a lot of us are pouring in content. The content and interactivity create a character, for howsoever many people even bother to look. It’s textual, and that has a certain character, too. It’s a place to have certain kinds of conversations. For it to go beyond that, the conversations have to play some part in provoking decisions about things people do besides hang around on the internet. But that doesn’t mean having conversations is a bad thing, or a waste of time. Too many people are doing things without thinking or talking them over already.

WHY DOES THIS SITE HAVE THE WEIRD NAME? WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

De Clarke used the term once, to describe what Gramsci calls organic intellectuals. I like her name better. Too many people are disrespectful of scholarship and intellectual rigor. I know people who say they never read anything longer than a page. Political activists who say shit like this! Then they sit around and whine when their stuff doesn’t work. Education is good. Study is necessary. Anti-intellectualism is an excuse for laziness and sloppiness. On the other hand, if we are waiting for our beneficient rulers to let us into their institutions, or worse yet, to set the curricula, then we are smoking some extremely good stuff. Breaking down this intellectual division of labor is a critical piece of the revolutionary project… and I believe there must and eventually will be a social revolution. What we have now is a horror giving birth to bigger and better horrors, and it has to go… root and branch. That means the direction of our intellectual activity has to be determined not by ruling-class institutions but by scholars who are not domesticated within them. Feral. Thinkers and activists within these institutions have a role to play, too. But they need those of us on the outside now.

ARE YOU A COMMUNIST? PEOPLE SAY YOU ARE A COMMUNIST.

That depends on how you define it. I study and apply the interpretive methods pioneered by Karl Marx; but I don’t treat him as an omniscient messiah. If the question means do I believe class must be abolished to forge a sustainable, decent society for the world’s human inhabitants, then color me blood red. If the question means do I subscribe to some political orthodoxy that has its onw Pantheon, ie, Marxist-Leninist-Trostskyist-Maoist-Guevarist… NO! I belong to an organization, whose practice and goals I agree with, that calls itself ML, but it is open enough to allow some of us to argue that we need to drop that kind of language and all the sectarian baggage that goes with it. All those guys (1) are dead, (2) lived outside the US, and (3) lived in a different epoch. And they were all guys… and that matters, too.

WHAT’S THE OBSESSION WITH GENDER ABOUT?

I could flip that question. Why aren’t more people obsessesd with it? Based on my own life, which was largely lived in exclusively male environments, and which was defined by militarism in the service of imperialism, I at first became convinced that gender had a powerful formative effect on the most deeply embedded and affectively consolidated aspects of the human personality. Then I discovered Marxism, which taught me that social life is organized around power, and that our individuality is largely determined by that social context. Then I discovered that Marxism, as taught and practiced in most cases, rejected calls for worker “equality” with bosses as an illusion created by the the production of knowledge by the powerful, yet the only time this was applied to women was when they were workers… even though women often suffer some of their worst oppression outside the waged workplace. Finally, I discovered radical feminism, or what some people dismiss as “second wave” feminism, had actually gone a long way to correct this problem… that sexuality itself served as a system of power just like capitalism… but that they had been pushed to the margins by my fellow (and I mean that as mostly male) Marxists. Now a lot of them sit around in meetings asking, why can’t we get more women involved, whereupon they answer their own question with painfully drawn analyses that never conclude that orthodox Marxism has, from the very beginning, committed the same errors in its anlysis of gender as any liberal. I think that is a very bad thing. Women need revolution. The revolution needs women. The Marxists were wrong on this one. We need to get right. This is so important, that until we become a pain in the ass about it, nothing seems likely to get done. I gave it five years, three years ago. If by 2008 there is no organization on the left that takes this issue seriously — that is, gives it equal status with class and national oppression — then I’m out of organizations. I don’t want to do that. So I’m being a pain in the ass about it.

WHY DO YOU CENSOR SOME POSTS?

Because they are racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, or in some cases just trolls who are trying to start flame wars. I also have rules that are designed to make this a woman-friendly space:

Strongly discouraged!!! are…

(1) Macho debating styles that attempt to crush opponents
(2) Grandiose cyber-Personnae
(3) Unexamined language embedded with sexist notions
(4) Suggestions about your sexual prowess (no one believes it or cares)
(5) Tendencies to simply pronounce approval or disapproval (like an appointed judge) instead of addressing the content of an argument
(6) Tough-guy talk

ISN’T THIS UNDEMOCRATIC?

No. Loudmouths, disrupters, and bullies are undemocratic.

HOW DO I LINK OR GET LINKED?

Send me an email at stan@feralscholar.org/blog.

CAN I SEND COPIOUS SUMS OF MONEY TO SUPPORT THIS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT WORK?

Yes.

HOW?

Hit the “Support This Site” button on the top-right of the page.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PIE?

Let me get back to you on that. That’s a tough one.