AUT: RE: CLR James, Negri, etc.

[chris wright <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris,

Interestingly, I think that this relates to your comments on Negri and
Hardt.  James' respect for Lenin has a great deal to do with Lenin's
close attention to detail and to the concrete problems facing revolution
in Russia.  Lenin's weaknesses aside for the moment, he paid very
concrete attention to what was necessary to carry out socialist
revolution in Russia as he understood the idea of socialist revolution.

I think it is undeniable that Lenin far more than most attempted to
understand what Marxism meant under Russian conditions in a systematic
fashion.  So for example it is not surprising that his position, IMO,
remains firmly entrenched in the idea, and he does not depart from that
idea for Trotsky's Permanent Revolution ever, that bourgeois revolution
is in fact the first item on the agenda in Russia, and that maybe it is
possible to maintain a 'democratic dictatorship of the workers and
peasants' over bourgeois property relations.  I will not go into the
problems involved in such an approach, as if somehow one could separate
the state from the social relations of which it is a form (a problem
that will haunt Lenin's analysis until his death), but rather insist
that within the limits of this framework, Lenin paid extremely close
attention to the details of the situation and took the relationship of
theory and practice seriously.

Now, James does move away from the vanguard party in the sense of the
party-to-lead.  This is not based on an a priori rejection of the
vanguard party, but because James believes that such a party was
necessitated by the immaturity of the class as a class for-itself, which
he does not consider to be a problem in the epoch of state capitalism.

This does NOT mean that there is no role for an organization of
revolutionaries, but that the role is different.  To quote from Loren
Goldner's essay:

"Another (in my view) unique aspect of the book, again in contrast to so
much libertarian theory, is its affirmation of the idea of leadership,
simultaneous with its rejection of reducing leadership to some formal
vanguard grouping. Most libertarian anti-vanguard formulations always
immediately reduce any "leaders" to "bureaucrats". What James et al.
reject is the FORMAL relationship of self-appointed vanguards to the
historical experience of the class, much of which the latter are
incapable of recognizing. In their view (and here I fully agree with
them) the leaders of different struggles are not pre-selected by formal
association in a vanguard organization, but from among those with the
particular talents and skills of leaders, adequate (or not) to the tasks
of the real movement. A great strength of this text, in my opinion, is
that it avoids both the conventional libertarian rejection of "leaders"
as a swear word, and at the same time the formal understanding of
leadership stemming from the conventional, incarnationist-body of Christ
concept of the Trotskyist milieu (from which the authors all emerged).

Those of us shaped by "1968" have lived through such a long and bleak
historical period since then (without precedent, in length, in the
history of the movement since 1848) that the book's description of the
problems of vanguardism acquires a ring of truth it would not have had,
to many, in the 1968-1973 period, which seemed to be an historical
"recovery" of the vanguard concept, with the proliferation of sects
claiming the mantle of Bolshevism ("proletarian Jesuits", as James et
al. call them)." http://home.earthlink.net/%7Elrgoldner/james.html
<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Elrgoldner/james.html>



A note by Ralph Dumain is appropriate here on James: "The Johnson-Forest
Tendency was a sect against sectarianism, a vanguard against
vanguardism. People who come out of such a background can be very
irritating."



This is not meant to be dismissive of James, who is far more important
than most understand, but to point to a problem that also infects the
libertarian communist milieu as a whole.  We look to autonomia or
council communism or the SI as an alternative, and that is fundamentally
a mistake.   The truth is in the whole, not in this or that portion,
this or that tendency.  As such, Lenin takes on a different cast, as do
James, Dunayevskaya, operaismo, the SI, anarchism, etc.  The problem is
not to imagine that one or the other is the solution to a problem, but
to move beyond such sectarian nonsense and to think in terms of what we
do in the world.  Negri and Hardt, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault and
Althusser, these are not answers and IMO not interesting as answers.
Leftism looks for a new truth, and the problem with the critiques of
Hegel and Marx's dialectic by people like Deleuze and Guattari and bad
version sof that critique by people like Negri and Hardt is that it
misses the point.  They have no purchase because their project is
neither Hegel nor Marx's.  Maybe that explains Deleuze's infantile
critique of Hegel.



Anyway, the bigger problem is the irrelevance of Lenin for the current
period except in so far as it is worth looking at his painstaking
attention to the concrete, and the attempt to adequately theorize the
concrete.  James attempts to do something of the sort in at least 3
major pieces: State Capitalism and World Revolution (coauthored by Raya
Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs), Notes on Dialectics, and American
Civilization.  Success or failure, Lenin is concerned exactly with that
in all of his post-1914 works.  It is not a mistake, IMO, that Hegel
re-emerges among the Social Democratic Left, during and after WWI, and
first of all with Lenin.



BTW, I don't mean to sound all lovey-dovey about V.I., but to get beyond
Leftism requires getting beyond making bogeymen out of people.  And by
comparison, Negri and Hardt cherish not what is most challenging in
Lenin, but discard it as they seem to have nothing but contempt for the
concrete and the empirical in their daze.  By comparison, James brings
Hegel, in the three works above (I have only read small pieces of Notes
on dialectics and wish there were a full HTML or PDF version) into
almost common language and makes it very accessible.  It is an
indicative difference.



Cheers,
Chris



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