Re: AUT: RE: CLR James, Negri, etc.

[Nate Holdren <nateholdren@xxxxxxxxx>]

A long erudite hegelphiliac post, it's like Chris Wright has retur-
wait, could it really -
*faints*

;)
nice to hear from you Chris.


On 03 Nov 2004 07:50:40 -0500, chris wright <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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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