Here’s a look at the kind of scholarship Bill Ayers is producing, a review of an obscure Marxist tract by UCLA professor Peter McLaren, subtitled: “Notes From A Self-Realizing, Sensuous, Species-Being.”

This is simply a knotty rehash of the discredited line of the old U.S. Communist Party—“Black and White Unite and Fight”—after it had abandoned revolution: class is all that counts, and everything else is just a distraction. Again, there’s nothing easy about contributing to a further understanding of the peculiar intersection of race and class, of hierarchies of color mapped onto relations to production—particularly the murderous role of white supremacy in blocking unity and revolutionary change—but there is an important and relevant conversation underway from W.E.B. DuBois to James and Grace Lee Boggs, from Audre Lorde to Robin D.G. Kelley, Angela Davis, and bell hooks that could be acknowledged and engaged. Race and gender, gender and class, class and race—a lot has been done and there’s a lot left to do, but smart white male lefties like Peter naming and then dismissing the “triplet” seems more than a little glib. It seems to point toward a limiting white blind-spot and a severely pinched vision of social justice.

In an aside, McLaren manages to both accept and deflect two weaknesses often associated with his work: “While some criticism is substantive—including a welcomed critique of the enciphered language of some academics and a challenge to radical educators to come up with concrete possibilities—much of it is small-minded and petty … ” (p. 30). Note the “some academics”—Not me! Not me!—and the active “enciphering” to boot. There is, in fact, a self-conscious performativeness on almost every page:

Through policies of increasing its military-industrial-financial interest, it continues to purse its quivering bourgeois lips, bare its imperialist fangs, and suck the lifeblood from the open veins of South America and other regions of the globe. (p. 23)

Watered by the tears of the poor and cultivated by working-class labor, the dreams that sprout from the unmolested soil of capital are those engineered by the ruling class. (p. 20)

On and on and on like that. Who needs waterboarding? We can just force terrorists to read a few paragraphs from the published works of Bill Ayers.