notes to Postone and the Spartacists for Week A. reading group session (9/11/10)
Christopher Cutrone
These are preliminary readings, meant to establish certain concrete themes -- specifically, the post-'60s "Left," with its problematic conceptions of "imperialism" and "resistance." These writings (especially Postone's) were foundational for the formation of the Platypus project and organization, and they speak to the Platypus "synthesis." The primary Marxist reading group syllabus is structured, over its year-long course, to elaborate on the Platypus synthesis, which takes two different registers: 1.) Adorno and Trotsky; and 2.) Postone and the Spartacists. We thus begin with Postone and the Spartacists, and build towards the end of the academic year, culminating and concluding with Trotsky and Adorno.
For this week's readings, we have, beyond the Postone and Spartacist articles, two further readings that were influential for the foundation of Platypus: the Iraqi Communist Party's letter of January 2006, and Liza Featherstone, (her husband) Doug Henwood and Christian Parenti's 2002 essay "'Action Will Be Taken'," a critique of the Afghanistan anti-war movement (and anticipating problems with the growth of this movement with the Iraq war).
All of the readings for this week are problematic in certain key respects not the case in readings for the rest of the course of the academic year's syllabus. This must be kept in mind. These readings are meant to present problems to be addressed (better) and clarified by subsequent readings.
The Postone essay is the primary one for this week.
As is tempting, but which should be avoided, Postone would appear to offer the theory while the Spartacists the practice. But neither is the case. Rather, what we have in these two instances are two different, problematic configurations of the theory-practice problem. It is not the case that Postone is reflective while the Spartacists are earnest. It is also not exactly the case that Postone is more historically conscious while the Spartacists are static and blind in their conception of history -- the Spartacists fossilized in a (pre-)Fordist moment while Postone is attempting to address post-Fordism (post-1960s New Leftism/postmodernism).
It is noteworthy that the Postone and Spartacist articles have similar moments of emphasis. For instance:
Postone: "However difficult the task of grasping and confronting global capital might be, it is crucially important that a global internationalism be recovered and reformulated. . . . None of the massive demonstrations against the war featured oppositional progressive Iraqis who could provide a more nuanced and critical perspective on the Middle East, a telling political failure on the part of the Left."
Iraqi Communist Party: "We have to note, with regret, that the Iraqi democratic forces have not received, in their difficult struggle, effective solidarity and support from international forces of the Left."
Postone: "The reemergence of imperialist rivalries calls for the recovery of nondualistic forms of internationalism. However objectionable the current American administration is, the Left should be very careful about becoming, unwittingly, the stalking horse for a would-be rival hegemon[and] constituting a form of politics that, from the standpoint of human emancipation, would be questionable, at the very best, however many people it may rouse."
Spartacists: "In practice, the sanctimonious anti-power idealism preached by Hardt, Negri & Co. degenerates into the grubby politics of 'lesser evil' capitalism . . . promoting the butchers of Auschwitz and Algeria as more benevolent and progressive than their U.S. rivals."
Postone: "[After the failure of the 1960s New Left,] the underlying despair with regard to the real efficacy of political will, of political agency, in a historical situation of heightened helplessness, became a self-constitution as outsider, as other, rather than an instrument of transformation. Focused on the bureaucratic stasis of the Fordist, late 20th Century world, the Left echoed the destruction of that world by the dynamics of capital: neoliberalism and globalization. The idea of a fundamental transformation became bracketed and, instead, was replaced by the more ambiguous notion of 'resistance.' The notion of resistance, however, says little about the nature of that which is being resisted, or of the politics of the resistance involved. 'Resistance' is rarely based on a reflexive analysis of possibilities for fundamental change that are both generated and suppressed by the dynamic heteronomous order of capital. 'Resistance' is an undialectical
category that does not grasp its own conditions of possibility; it fails to grasp the dynamic historical context of capital and its reconstitution of possibilities for both domination and emancipation, of which the 'resisters' do not recognize that that they are a part."
Spartacists: "Claiming to update Marx, Hardt and Negri jettison the programmatic core of Marxism: proletarian revolution to overthrow the capitalist system. They dismiss the lessons distilled from the 1871 Paris Commune, the first proletarian insurrection, and the subsequent history of the revolutionary workers movement. They deride class war and proletarian power as “old, tired and faded” notions (ibid.). But far from proposing anything new, Hardt and Negri offer up an amalgam of anarchistic lifestyle radicalism and utopian reformism reminiscent of the “counterculture” trend in the 1960s New Left: “As we will argue in the course of this book, resistance, exodus, the emptying out of the enemy’s power, and the multitude’s construction of a new society are one and the same process” (ibid.)."
One can too easily be misled into contention over the minor, subordinate points in Postone's essay, for instance the lengthy discussion of "Fanonian violence" (and Arendt's critique of it). While important in certain respects, this is really (potentially very) digressive and it is easy to lose sight of how it is meant to be subordinated to Postone's greater concerns in the essay, which is concerned with diagnosing such symptoms of "helplessness" that comes with the loss of a Marxian (and, importantly, "Old Left," of, e.g., the Stalinist-influenced ANC) approach. Hence, I think Postone's critique of Fanon ought to be bracketed/avoided, even if it is true in certain respects (about Fanon's Wretched of the Earth -- but really about Sartre's influential introduction to it).
Postone's essay is most important as a critique of the (post-)New Left, a balance-sheet of the ways the "Left" degenerated, specifically owing to some crucial undigested/unaddressed problems of the mid-20th Century. Most significantly, it is an "ideology-critique" of the (pseudo-)"Left," rather than an estimation of (its) "objective" ("historical") conditions. Postone's is a plea for regarding history in order to inform consciousness.
The Spartacists' "review" of Hardt/Negri and Holloway, et al., is, as we say "as good as far as it goes," and so with which, however good it is, we must remain unsatisfied. Postone provides a theoretical self-understanding on the issue of "freedom" that the Spartacists lack. This raises the question of "the Left" that will be addressed later (especially in Kolakowski's 1968 essay on "The Concept of the Left").
The fact that the Spartacists and Postone would not recognize each other in such a configuration as we give them is, in fact, our (ultimate) point about reading them (both).
A shared problem in both articles is the spectre of a re-emergent Cold War dualism. For Postone, such dualism is threatened in habits of thinking and politicization on the "Left," but also as part of a potential re-polarization of the world. The Spartacists also expect this -- for instance in their section on China as potentially taking the place of the USSR in a future inter-imperialist conflagration. Both perspectives reflect the cast-about for explanation for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Both express more fear/wishful thinking (it would seem to make things clearer) than a true prognosis of the future. While inter-imperialist rivalries are possible, this would reflect a turn for the worse (that all the major powers will seek to avoid, working together), and so is neither to be expected or hoped for.
Similarly, there are problems with both Postone's and the Spartacists' historical periodizations. Postone emphasizes the 1960s turning point in emancipatory potential for capital, while the Spartacists, in orthodox (Engelsian) fashion, emphasize the late-19th century "imperlialist" epoch. But the problem is that we neither have continued to live in a perpetual 1960s nor in a perpetual Belle Epoque/imperialist capitalism. What both accounts leave out, but which is of primary concern to us in Platypus, is the history of the *Left*, and the fundamental difference between the 2nd International radicalism of Belle Epoque socialism and the New Left.
Both the Spartacists and Postone have a conception of regression (Postone's is post-1968, the Spartacists' post-1917; both emphasizing regretfully what seems to have been forgotten since these moments), but both are quite different from ours. Theirs is a linear conception of both regression and progress. For the Spartacists this comes out most clearly in their vilification of any return to classical bourgeois thought: as they put it "the savagery of imperialist capitalism . . . is the natural offspring of the bourgeois republic of the 18th century," neglecting the problem of post-Industrial Revolution capital, which is not the simple "logical," "natural" outcome of liberalism, but a historically new problem.
Similarly, Postone regrets the lack of consciousness of "the period since the early 1970s . . . of massive historical structural transformations of the global order, frequently referred to as the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism (or, better, from Fordism to post-Fordism to neoliberal global capitalism) . . . [the] transformation of social, economic, and cultural life." Despite the fact that Postone begins his essay with the phrase "As is well known," clearly it is not so "well known," or, at least, not so well conceived or theorized, as he points out: "the major theories of the immediate post-Fordist era -- those of Michel Foucault,
Jacques Derrida, and Jürgen Habermas . . . have been retrospective, focused critically on the Fordist era, but no longer adequate to the contemporary post-Fordist world."
But this begs the question of not only the Fordist era of the mid-20th century, but, more importantly,a that which preceded and conditioned it, the Belle Epoque era of 2nd International socialism, which will be the central focus of the readings throughout the academic year's Platypus primary Marxist reading group syllabus, which Postone thinks has been superseded by subsequent history (even if he wrote that "it is crucially important that a global internationalism [like that of the 2nd Intl.] be recovered and reformulated," he fears the recapitulation of a nationalist turn with any crisis of neolberal post-Fordism), and which the Spartacists can only remember schematically-dogmatically, melancholically fixated on it, in their own version of what Postone calls "helpless" consciousness.
So, in what way(s) are Postone and the Spartacists to be "synthesized?" They are not, as such. Rather, each points back, in a different manner, to what must be (re)worked-through and (re)synthesized by us in the Platypus project, namely the revolutionary Marxism of the late 19th-early 20th centuries Belle Epoque era of the 2nd Intl. that underwent terminal crisis in the 1914-19 period of war, revolution and counterrevolution, and whose disintegrated aspects of the problem of theory and practice were held by Trotsky and the Frankfurt School (Adorno in particular). It is this earlier moment whose coherence must be reconstructed, as both Postone and the Spartacists indicate, each in their own (partial and inadequate) ways.
This will not be a literal return (for which the Spartacists yearn and Postone fears, however ambivalently), but rather a speculative reconstruction in thought that we in Platypus judge to be necessary to inform at future Left, if the history of Marxism is to have any relevance.
-- Chris
Christopher Cutrone
An important point with respect to the Spartacist article is their formulation that there remains the "need for would-be revolutionaries to ally with the social power of the proletariat."
This half-sentence in the Spartacist discourse, otherwise disclaiming the "petty bourgeois intellectual," is important because it is a restatement of Lenin's formulation (in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back [1904]) that,
"A Jacobin who wholly identifies himself with the organisation of the proletariat -- a proletariat conscious of its class interests -- is a revolutionary Social-Democrat. A Girondist who sighs after professors and high-school students, who is afraid of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and who yearns for the absolute value of democratic demands is an opportunist."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1904/onestep/q.htm
Now, the great, inestimable difference between Lenin's time (and place, the Tsarist Russian Empire) and our own is crucial, for formal education is much more widely available, and so the place of "bourgeois intellectuals" in society is much more diffuse.
It is no longer the case, as it was in Marx and Lenin's time, that we can conceive of the revolutionary social-democratic or communist workers' party as the meeting of bourgeois intellectuals with working class militants. Rather, there are no such bourgeois intellectuals (bourgeois culture has itself declined) and there are no such revolutionary working class militants. So our tasks are different from the party-political programmatic agenda envisioned by the Spartacist League. They thus think that they can critique Hard, Negri, Holloway, et al. on the basis of their status as "(petty) bourgeois intellectuals" divorced from the workers. But where are the workers with whom to "ally?" And where are the intellectuals who are to be led into such an alliance? The Spartacists think that they can read Lenin's statement (above) and clearly recognize the problem before them today. But they are severely mistaken.
The point of Platypus is to change, however marginally, the intellectual environment of Leftist politics, to revalorize Marxism at the level of ideas, and thus change the ideological landscape such that workers could begin to entertain the question of socialism. Only then would it make sense to propose political formations such as parties.
The point is that Hardt, Negri, et al. have an audience that the Spartacists do not (seek to have), and that is the audience for whom we in Platypus will be competing for attention, first in terms of contention and debate about the meaning of the "Left," and then, eventually, to offer a rival version of Marxism that could supersede the clearly thin and inadequate existing discourse. This is a concretely realizable goal -- it is ours.
-- Chris
--- On Thu, 9/9/10, Christopher Cutrone <ccut...@speedsite.com> wrote:
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