YOU HAVE a columnist who always gets personal when he is unable to engage academic-like debates which he himself initiates. The man says that Randy Persaud and Prem Misir are ‘incompetents’. I did not want to get into this, but will do so now. The man has been a university faculty member for more than quarter of a century, but is yet to publish a single peer-reviewed article. That is the mother of all incompetence. He has one little thing in a volume edited by a friend.
I wonder if the man knows that I actually had a hand in planning the conference which facilitated his lone publication. I am, of course, referring to the Conflict Resolution conference led by Prof. Cedric Grant. Clarence Ellis and I were the principal planners for the initial conference in Washington DC in 2002. I did not come to the Guyana leg because, after supplying names for the Guyana event, the conference program was withheld from me until the ‘last minute’. I was given two weeks to write an academic paper and refused to accept such a low standard. Your man, Kissoon, was one of the presenters at the Georgetown event and his first, last, and only publication emerged from that meeting.
Incidentally, I was the one who suggested Alissa Trotz and Naresh Singh. Prof. Grant did not want David Hinds to be part of the event.
No back to what I would like to characterize as more bogus analysis by Kissoon.
Your lead columnist does not understand the difference between using a specific concept and a theoretical framework. In my article, ‘Bogus Marxist Analysis’, I suggested that Kissoon would have been better served if he had first provided a brief (one paragraph) overview of Alavi’s work. Having done that, he would have been able to more systematically use the notion of the ‘overdeveloped state’ in his stuff about the Guyanese state. But hey! That means you must have read Alavi’s work. Go figure!
In his latest column, Kissoon again makes elementary mistakes. He referred to Marx’s use of an ‘employee class’. Please tell readers, sir, where Marx ever used such a construct. The construct, ‘employee’, would have been viewed by Marx as neo-Weberian.
Let me help your columnist here. ‘Employee’ is a historically specific juridical form of class relations. It is quite possible to be subjected to ‘exploitation’ without the employer-employee structure of relations. The columnist may want to read my article, ‘Racial Assumptions of Global Labor Supply’, published in Alternatives (Oct.-Dec. 2001) and reproduced in many other outlets, including the Encyclopedia globalization. Incidentally, readers should note that selling your labour (time) does not make you an employee.
I am offering to come to U.G. and explain some of this stuff.
Your main columnist also states that you could analyze the state through the concept of the overdeveloped state and without recourse to ‘class analysis’. Does he not understand that the overdeveloped state was a particular expression of colonial political economy?
Further, the man wants to do Marxist analysis without reference to class. This is what makes his so called ‘analysis’ bogus. No Marxist or neo-Marxist analysis of the state would or ever abandon class relations in the analysis of the state. Prove me wrong on that.
Finally Editor, I want to make a point for any students who might happen upon this article. There is a huge difference between employing concepts and categories in your analysis, within a theoretical framework, and simply referring to concepts. The first operation is what makes your work theoretical; the second makes it notional.
The first can make real contributions to knowledge; the second is for entertainment. The work of the columnist in question falls within the second class.