From the communist perspective, humanity has no foundation and no ends, it is the definition of groundlessness. Its metaphysical function lies not in a philosophical essence but in its non-essence, the incessant surprising of the human condition and its exposure to the event that radically changes the world. (100)
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While narrativity stresses otherness and the fluidity of the boundaries between the self and others, authoritarian and repressive movements respond to the search for certainly, for rigid definitions, for boundaries and markers…. Theories of fragmentary and dispersed subjectivity, which were so fashionable at the height of postmodernism, ignored these demands for stability, control, and understanding. (360)
Seyla Benhabib, The Reenchantment of the World.
Postmodernism has put into crisis the identities of reified subjects, by radically historicizing these identities and noting how contingent these identities are. This deconstruction of the identity of subjects is good, because it undermines arbitrary structures of power. However, as I see it, does not give these newly, decentred subjects an alternative discourse to fill the void left over by the deconstruction. The most postmodernism does is give one the tools, or forms, to rebuild their new, hybrid identities. Most people, still, I think, do have those tools to actually proactively engage in this constant process of renegotiating their identities.
The postmodern approach largely ignores the existence and power of discourses conservative discourses that seek to re-articulate the differences between subjects as real. The deconstruction of subjects leaves a void that other forces struggle to fill with certainty. That is, we must recognize the importance of politics and collective subjects in creating narratives and subjects. Individuals cannot do this on their own, and politics (antagonism) is the core of identity. The conservative worldview is one of constitutive antagonism between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Postmodern approaches to politics are, I believe, unable to effectively counter this discourse of reifying and simplifying ‘the enemy’.
For example, conservative forces have been able to take the fundamental instability that neoliberal globalization have engendered in a way to point the cause of instablity to be the ‘radical other’ by providing a clear narrative. The very approach of postmodernism, with its particularities and constant deconstruction does not provide the tools to challenge this conservative worldview.
One needs to look at the discourses of the Tea Party and the conservative movement as a plausibility case. The postmodern moment of hybridity embodied in Obama is reversed and is used against Obama as a unknowable other: ‘the Muslim’, ‘the radical’, ‘the black man’= not American. Clearly false, but powerful.
…the leftist does not simply violate the liberal’s impartial neutrality; what he claims is that there is no such neutrality. The cliche of the liberal centre, of course, is that both suspensions, the rightist and the leftist, ultimately amount to the same thing, to a totalitarian threat to the rule of Law. The entire consistency of the Left hinges on proving that, on the contrary, each of the two suspensions follows a different logic. While the Right legitimizes its suspension of the Ethical by its anti-universalist stance,…. the Left legitimizes its suspension of the Ethical precisely by means of a reference to the true universality to come….. the leftist perspective, accepting the radically antagonistic - that is, political - character of social life, accepting the necessity of ‘taking sides’, is the only way effectively to be Universal (178)
Slavoj Zizek, Multiculturalism, or, the cultural logic of multinational capitalism
This is what distinguishes the left from the rest. There is no such thing as a organcist society, there is no unity before the fall characteristic of the ideologies right. The right lives in the world of mythical principles derived from religion or its secular offshoots (libertarianism?) making it immune to reason and evidence. In addition, it is based on the whitewashed history of the dominant that distorts history to fit the narrative instead of the narrative fitting history. Throughout its history, the right denies at every step that there is structural inequality that they disproportionately benefit from; however, reality is too powerful, and slowly, they lose their position as the ideologies that they justified their control over others is undermined by more progressive and ‘rational’ discourses. As they loose the hegemonic battle, they descend more and more into euphemisms and visuals to get the same message across to a smaller audience. It is at this moment, when they are declining that they become more rabid and radical.
The liberal centre is more perverse in that it denies its ideological, partial character altogether. The left stands for universality as well, but it is not a formal universality of the liberal centrist; rather, it is a universality of the exception, accepting that antagonism is, indeed, constitutive. Liberals claim universality in the name of ‘neutrality’. This supposed neutrality and pragmatism is the most effective form of ideology yet used because it denies its own ideological character and calls everything else irrational and ideological. But just because it does not enunciate it’s positive content does not mean that the very forms they claim to be neutral does not contain that positive ideology within it. That is, the forms determine the very limits of the outcome.
The postmodern on the other hand is, through its negation of totality, serves capital’s interests by turning the universal struggle into a number of particular struggles; but all the while ignoring, or not providing the tools to prevent the successes of the micro-struggles from being appropriated by capital and creating even more diffuse, but more total forms of inequality and power.
Q:I have a quite tremendous respect for your blog madame.
Thanks, good to know that there are fans! However, I’m a man, haha.
A certain particular demand possesses, at a specific moment, a global detonating power; if functions as a metaphoric stand-in for the global revolution: if we unconditionally insist on it, the system will explode; if however we wait too long, the metaphoric short-circuit between this particular demand and the global overthrow is dissolved…. The art of what Lukacs called Augenblick—the moment when, briefly, there is an opening for an act to intervene in a situation is the art of seizing the right moment, of aggravating the conflict before the system can accomodate itself to our demand…. an intervention that cannot be accounted for in the terms of its pre-existing ‘objective conditions’ (164)
This is an interesting piece of work, as it brings to light the division in the left between those who believe in the ‘objective’ conditions of change and those who believe in the power of ‘subjective’ causes of change. The Russian Revolution, it is argued by Lukacs, would not have happened if it were not for the agency of the Leninist party to take the situation by the horns. However, it did fail in the end, and this may be because the objective preconditions for a socialist society were simply not present in Russia. The revolution of 1917 had to complete the task of the bourgeois revolution, but under ‘proletarian’ rule. Coupled with the fact that the USSR was surrounded by enemies, it created a very distorted form of path dependent development.
I suppose this is the problem. Yes, agency is important to create the conditions for radical change, since ‘structures’ need agents to do the work actualizing the potential of a situation. I can see the importance of agents stepping into ‘history’ and intervening in it to fashion a new reality; however, in so doing, by trying to recreate reality through sheer will, is it possible that ‘history’ will creep up and bring us back to where we were?
Conservatism and fascism thus depend for their existence on the construction of ‘monstrous’ figures – revolutionaries, communists, subversives, perverts, muggers and all sorts of entities in the darkness of history – to help keep alive the kind of fears and insecurities on which domination depends…. The fantasy and actuality of ‘horror’ or ‘terror’ are thus mutually entwined, and any political argument which ignores such fears, fantasies and nightmares thus risks missing a crucial dimension of the way political discourse in general, and fascist discourse in particular, functions. (7)
Mark Neocleous, The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism
I think we on the left need to be aware of this kernel of the ‘irrational’ that pervades the minds of most people, and how irrational fears are used by the enemies of progress. There is a belief out there still that people have this correspondence between what is happening to them and their reactions, but politics hardly ever works in this fashion. It is of supreme irony that it is the policies of the right that largely create the sort of things they then badger as subversive and evil. The victims of their policies serve a self-perpetuating source of legitimation.
April 27, 1937: Comrade Antonio Gramsci, co-founder of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) and Marxist theoretician, died while a political prisoner of Musolini’s fascist regime.
Source: fuckyeahmarxismleninism
I got these books at a random booksale at Regis College. This is what I call a steal! I got these, mostly new, books for less than $15! It’s insane…
The President of Argentina, Cristina Fernández, announced the take over to YPF by the Argentine state by buying 51% of the company’s shares, effectively buying out Spanish multinational, Respol. This was in response to the fact that Argentina’s production capacity has been declining for a decade, the same decade that Respol has been in charge of the company after its total privatization in 1999.
This is just another example of Latin America’s rejection of neoliberalism, and its ahistorical assumptions of the inability of the state to do anything and the inherent superiority of the private sector. Argentina is merely re-establishing its economic sovereignty over its natural resources and to help secure that the country is not exploited by the interests of corporate capital. I also hope and believe that the Argentine state is more coherent and powerful vis-a-vis social forces that were de-legitimized in the crisis of 2001. This should allow nationally run firms to be run more efficiently that they were pre-1991.
The party’s existence is no longer rooted in a mass learning process; it now finds itself at the summit of the technical bureaucracies in charge or running an industrial society in which workers appear as simple subordinates. Where before, Lukacs could write that ‘consequences of a false theory would soon destroy’ the party, now it is the people who must pay the price for their leaders’ errors. The back-and-forth which both were supposed to advance in synergy, is replaced by the command structure of modern management. By no stretch of the imagination can the acts of the party at this point be described as moments in the self-reflection of the class. (69)
Very interesting read on the synthesis that Lukacs proposed between the humanist Marxism-Luxemburg position of revolution and the Leninist interpretation. By the 1920s, it was clear that Leninism had won, indeed, from Gramsci to Lukacs the tradition had accepted the doctrine of the party. However, Lukacs and Gramsci both understood that the party should not merely see itself as a vanguard, but had to articulate a new hegemony a new common sense. In other words, to reduce the division between ‘objective’ social forces (knowledge of the structures) and subjective thought (ideology).
