Re: Rethinking Marxism

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 10 Sep 2000, Louis Proyect wrote:

> Capitalism is constantly changing, but there is one constant: society is
> divided into classes; the struggle between classes is the locomotive of
> history.

More like the CPU of history, these days: the most complex, rarefied of
all mediations, which mediates all the other mediations (like nationalism,
corporate identity, etc.). Or maybe the Linux freeware of
multinational history would be a better metaphor.

> 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.

But the postmodernists (defined, very loosely, as information idealists)
did have one important contribution to make: that is the notion of the
stupendous *complexity* of multinational capital. The jargon and
conceptual inflation of the theory-markets is an attempt, however
insufficient, to map out the multinational, to generate codes capable of
understanding the thing.

My own beef with Jameson is this: he does such a great job of giving you
the sense of the sublime of the world-system, but has no clue about
Eurocapitalism, Asia's keiretsu capitalism, or the new class struggles of
the service-sector (check out his latest contribution in the New Left
Review, e.g.). That said, DJ Freddy J, as I like to call him, was
indispensable in (1) introducing the Continental Marxisms to several
generations of students, and (2) insisting that multinational capitalism
and the media culture require new forms of theory, critique and political
praxis.

-- Dennis