Re: Rethinking Marxism

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Posted to PEN-L by Colin Danby:

Just a couple of notes on Lou's substantive critique.

1. I share Lou's skepticism over Jameson's abrupt discovery that we live
in a "postmodern" age, and that there's a qualitatively new stage of
capitalism to go with it.  I'm absolutely mystified by the authority
Jameson has exerted on this question.  He's an important critical
theorist to be sure, but he does not even make an effort to do material
or economic analysis, a project that Mandel obviously took very
seriously.

Jameson pulled a cute rhetorical move by simply claiming that modernism
was dead and we could move on.  But it's not, and the result is a false
closure.  (In fact it's a highly modernist move, this notion that we
have suddenly aufgehoben modernism and moved on to a more advanced stage
of history/thought.  A lot that flies under the banner of postmodernism
turns out to be modernism in new clothes.)   Aijaz Ahmad's critique of
Jameson is a great way to see how this false closure operates, and its
cost.

On a subject perhaps closer to the tradtional concerns of pen-l, Jameson
does seem to be a key source for claims that we are in the midst of
something fundamentally new called "globalization."  We've been over
this before on the list; I and others have argued that actually-existing
capitalism has been global for a long time.  It may explain the
mushiness of much globalization analysis (e.g. Giddens) that it is
conceived of at the level of Geist.

Lou is absolutely right that the tendency to slice capitalism into
discrete stages is a barrier to analysis and a misreading of Mandel and
Marx.

2. Re critique of Marx: essentialism is not the same thing as idealism,
in the sense that essentialism is a property of certain kinds of thought
or analysis while idealism is an ontology, or a category of ontologies.
(It's also possible to critique Enlightenment thought while remaining an
Enlightenment thinker-- Enlightenment is a loose category anyway.)  So I
think the RM folks would say that there are non-idealist essentialisms,
and that some marxism suffers from that.  (I would argue *they* suffer
from that with all this Althusserian "last instance" and "subsumed"
stuff, which somehow lets you be a class-essentialist and critique
essentialism at the same time.)

Best, Colin


Louis Proyect
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