Rethinking Marxism

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[Some comrades have mentioned to me that they will be attending the
quadrennial Rethinking Marxism conference at the end of the month up in
Amherst, Massachusetts. It is sponsored by an academic journal edited by
Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio and David Ruccio. Although they started
out as the American branch office of French Structural-Marxist Louis
Althusser, they have morphed into a kind of postmodernism that continues to
pay lip-service to Marx's writings. Doug Henwood is part of this group. How
this happened is an interesting story. Four years ago, at the last
conference, there was a lot of ruckus from the floor by opponents of
postmodernism, including yours truly. You can read my write up of the
conference, which originally appeared in the German left journal
Sozialismus, at:

http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/mydocs/modernism/amherst.htm.

[I have no plans to attend this year. Partly this is due to my belief that
postmodernism is a dying fad. A search on Lexis-Nexis for "postmodernism"
in the first 6 months of 2000 turned up 26 articles. Ten years ago there
were 315. Anxious to avoid any more disturbances, the conference organizers
drafted Henwood to help them map out plenaries that would include speakers
with a classical Marxist perspective. Doug had written some articles for
Monthly Review that were critical of postmodernism and seemed like a
reasonable counter-balance at the time. Shortly after discussions with
Cullenberg and Callari began, Doug realized that he agreed with him more
than he did with Monthly Review. In any case, there has been a bit of a
dust-up on PEN-L recently over postmodernism. Cullenberg, who lurks on
PEN-L with many other academic celebrities too refined to take part in
debates there, announced the conference as well as new book titled
"Postmodernist Economics" that he and his crew edited and wrote the
introduction for. For those of you with a morbid fascination with academic
cults, you can read the introduction at:

http://www.ucr.edu/CHSS/depts/econ/00-06.pdf.

My response on PEN-L to it, with minor modifications, appears below.]

CULLENBERG, AMARIGLIO, RUCCIO: "Jameson, it should be noted, is a devotee
of the late Belgian Marxist economist, Ernest Mandel (1978), whose book on
"late capitalism" serves as the veritable bible for those (mostly cultural
critics) who are looking to describe and define, from the left,
capitalism?s most recent trajectory."

RESPONSE:  Poor Ernest Mandel, to be dragged into a postmodernist muddle
such as this. Thrown into a concentration camp as a teenager in
Nazi-occupied Belgium after apprehended distributing socialist leaflets to
German soldiers (he saved his life by pleading the socialist cause to one
of his captors who had once been a socialist himself), he spent his entire
life writing for the Marxist movement and working-class audiences. In
reality, Jameson appropriated only what might be described as the
epiphenomenal aspects of Mandel's work, which is not so much about what
distinguishes "late capitalism" from its precedents but what unites it.
Mandel's research revolves around the EVER-SHARPENING contradictions of
capitalism within Kondratievian long waves. The last thing on Mandel's mind
was to delineate some qualitatively new kind of system, which Jameson and
his Amherst co-thinkers describe as 'postmodernism' in language only
comprehensible to the academically initiated.

===

CULLENBERG, AMARIGLIO, RUCCIO:  "Be that as it may, we note again that for
many literary and cultural theorists like Jameson, the realm of the
postmodern denotes rampant commodification, unchecked by oppositional
forces--avant-gardes, say--that find themselves subverted or even co-opted
by the very power and allure of the market. And, again, this world
structured according to the object-life of the commodity has been thought
to have received an enormous recent boost by the emergence of new
information technologies, especially the internet. According to this view,
computers have made commodity time and space ultimately traversable in ways
unthinkable for past generations of producers and consumers. In addition to
the use of computer technology in such "post-Fordist" production methods as
"flexible specialization," it is claimed that one need not leave one?s
chair (in front of one?s screen, of course) to be bombarded by commodity
images and the cornucopia of goods that exist and are transacted in
cyberspace. This obliteration of previous constraints of time and
geographical location in buying and selling (lowering considerably
transactions costs and reducing to rubble other past barriers to the
international flow of financial capital and goods) reconstructs all notions
and experiences pertaining to community and nation, hence the idea of the
"global economy" that is said to be the hallmark of the postmodern.

RESPONSE: I have no idea what this is supposed to do with Marxism.
Capitalism is constantly changing, but there is one constant: society is
divided into classes; the struggle between classes is the locomotive of
history. It doesn't matter particularly whether we are in a "Fordist" or
"Post-Fordist" economy, whether people make entries into a ledger book with
a quill or into a computer spreadsheet. The relationship between the worker
and the boss is based on who owns and controls the quill or the computer.
In the Amherst postmodernist world, class relations are shoved into the
background or else they are misrepresented in a cavalier manner as
'unequal' power relations like those between a parent and a child.

===

CULLENBERG, AMARIGLIO, RUCCIO:  Lyotard?s "report on knowledge," as he
calls it, is concerned largely with two interrelated issues. One is
rejection and (hoped-for) disappearance of what he terms the "grand
metanarratives" that have structured much thought and practice since the
Enlightenment. Hence, to the degree that "modernity" may be said to be
contemporaneous with the rise and spread of Enlightenment thinking, Lyotard
is offering a diagnosis of life after modernism. These metanarratives have
ranged in their overarching scope from the promise of political
independence and human liberation through representative democracy and/or
the victory of the masses to the claims for the efficacy of scientific
knowledge as the harbinger of social progress through victory over a now
mostly tamed nature and through social engineering. Lyotard calls
particular attention to those metanarratives, like liberalism and Marxism,
that have held out the hope for total change in society and culture (and
economy) through advocacy of particular principles and perspectives. In
both liberalism and Marxism, for example, there has been the tendency to
measure human progress partly in terms of the ability of humankind to
harness technology and science to human designs, most especially the end of
political oppression and/or economic exploitation.

RESPONSE:  I find this linkage between liberalism and Marxism outrageous.
Marxism, as pointed out by Thomas Patterson in the excellent "Inventing
Western Civilization" is a CRITIQUE of Enlightenment thought. Why do you
suppose Marx took the trouble to write such works as "The German Ideology"
which debunk the entire tradition of idealist thought going back to the
17th century?

The terrible injustice done to Marxism by Lyotard and his Amherst fans
fundamentally rests on this false amalgam. What they call 'essentialism' is
nothing more nor less than the idealist philosophical tradition that
culminated in Hegel's massive systematic attempt to interpret all
philosophy as culminating in the modern Prussian state. Marx and Engels
proposed to demolish not only the idealist foundations of this system, but
the militarist state that Hegel wrote apologetics for.

The problem with the Amherst postmodernists is that by relying so heavily
on Foucault, Lyotard, Althusser and other philosophers responding to the
dead weight of French Stalinism, they embrace one pole of a dialectic that
has nothing to do with classical Marxism. The French CP was once a
hegemonic force not only in France but influenced the intelligentsia across
Europe. Most of the "postal" figures were either in the CP or
operated--like Lyotard--in a segment of the revolutionary left that felt
compelled to put a minus where the CP put a plus.

Translated into the idiom of American academic leftism, this original
connection to the French context gets lost. The American franchise of
Althusserian corporate headquarters devotes oceans of ink to a problematic
that is obvious to nobody but themselves. This country has nothing like the
French CP. Instead the left has been fundamentally engaged with every new
social movement that has emerged, going back to the civil rights movement.

Ironically, the activists and revolutionaries who helped to launch the
modern social movements in almost every instance received training in the
CP milieu. While rejecting the dogmatic workerist orthodoxy of the party,
they still retained the mass action orientation of the best phases of the
party's history, particularly during the formation of the CIO.

The Montgomery bus boycott would have never been successful without the key
role played by black veterans of the trade union movement around the CP.

The very first homosexual rights group was launched by CP'ers in Hollywood
who sought to gain legitimacy for same-sexers on partially the same basis
that the right to collective bargaining was won in the 1930s: through
forceful challenges to the cops and the courts.

According to a recent biography of Betty Friedan, there is little doubt
that she was no ordinary housewife when she wrote "Feminine Mystique". She
had been a reporter for the CP-dominated United Electrical Workers Union
(UE) and a political activist since her student days in the 1940s.

In fact, the notion that 'postmodernism' could be an aid to integrating
class and social movements is completely absurd. If anything, social
movements in the United States have relied on the participation of Marxist
activists from the very beginning. My gut feeling is that none of them ever
read Lyotard. They were too busy making leaflets.


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/