Mr. Levin's World

Jim Neilson & Gregory Meyerson Mr. Levin's World We don't have the space to respond to Levin's numerous errors and mischaracterizations, so—befitting two writers who can't appreciate complexity and uncertainty—we'll reduce his multiple mistakes to a few basic ones, which derive from a single mistake: Uberal individualism . Amidst his blunderbuss attack on us, alleging that we fight against an imaginary demon and aligning us with a rouges gaUery of apocalyptic doomsayers and neo-Nazis, Levin ignores our central point—that capitalism systematically reproduces inequality. This omission is central to his liberal individualism. Erasing the fact of structural inequality (while vaguely acknowledging that the world is imperfect), Levin creates a world where free individuals rationally choose for themselves (in lieu ofhaving their decisions made for them by inhumane totalitarian planners like NeUson and Meyerson). Un Levin's world, capitalism becomes inevitable and fundamentaUy neutral , if not benign, while class struggle becomes an impertinent intrusion into an otherwise rational and largely harmonious process. We begin with Levin's criticism ofour opposition to closing graduate programs. He's particularly troubled by our suggestion that a graduate education in literature be a political education, which for him translates into indoctrination. Acouple ofpoints need to be madehere. First, we modified our position, saying that Bérubé was "right to take us to task for our optimism aboutthe demystifying potential ofgraduate studies " (247). Our argument repeated the very thing we criticized Bérubé for: overlooking the substantial institutional limits on leftist politicizing . Levin ignores this point because, first, acknowledgment that we can change our position is inconsistent with his caricature of us as rigid ideologues and, second, it contradicts his guiding beUef in level playing fields. The notion that individuals are free to choose rests on the assumption that individual struggle is unaffected by larger social forces, that there exists a rough equaUty of opportunity within capitalism, that we're all playing on the same level field. His anxiety about Marxists brainwashing students, in fact, stems from a beUef that the academy is a bastion of free speech that likewise transcends institutional strictures (strictures, we might add, that seem for Levin not to exist at aU). Further, Levin assumes that Marxists in the classroom are totalitarians , an assumption deriving in part from the view that a methodological commitment to totaUty leads to political and pedagogical totalitarianism . The chain goes something like this: Marxian poUtical 278 the minnesota review correctness means partisanship means indoctrination and all-or-nothing thinking. Levin's charge rests on false assumptions: that to be neutral is to be objective, that to be partisan is to dismiss objectivity, that structural explanation equals total explanation. Given uneven playing fields—that is, given the structural limits on leftist politicizing and the structural endorsement of conventional belief and nonthreatening nonconformity—Levin's neutrality itself becomes a kind of partisanship. In other words, neutrality within a system that marginaUzes and suppresses radical dissent amounts to tacit support for the status quo. Levin anticipates this point ("education that claims to be nonpartisan is really indoctrinating for the right") but offers no counter-argument. His inabüity to reconcUe partisanship and truth, his collapsing ofneutrality and objectivity, his maintenanceofthe false dichotomy between his objective nonpartisanship and our absolutism mystifies his own commitment and contradictions. He is nonpartisan , thus a broad-minded rationalist; we are "committed" and "activist ," thus purist, partisan control freaks. At the same time, however , Levin objects to Marxists' asssertion that non-Marxists aren't really committed to principles. Consequently, he argues that he is both neutral and committed. To do so, he splits commitment into good and bad, the latter associated with indoctrination, the former with caring liberalism. That this commitment might compromise his nonpartisanship, which allows him to distinguish himself from us in all-or-nothing fashion, escapes his notice. For Levin, Marxists are also guilty of "setfish motivation," ritualistically neutraUzing criticism of their arguments by attacking others' motives. As Levin has argued elsewhere, Marxists "have an all-purpose answer to those who object to their theory—they attack the motivation of their objectors" (400). According to Levin, since we believe commitment an exclusive property ofMarxists, we assume "that...