[PEN-L:3970] Re: Postmodernist Marxism

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Of course, _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_ was written in 1848, 22 years before Lenin was born. But seeing the scientific principles in that manuscript as pertinent to capitalism 1999 is more like considering the writing of Darwin as still valid in biology than treating the Manifesto like a religious document. Likewise with Lenin, the age of his writing does not necessarily make it religious rather than scientific. By this standard of age,  Einstein might be a religious figure because physicists still rely rigorously  on his writing somewhat contemporary with Lenin's.

The charge of religious dogma against Marxism is often a confusion of scientific rigor with religious ritual. But Leninism is critical thinking par excellence, quite the opposite of religious stupor.

Some things have changed since the 1917 era in world capitalism. Some very important things are the same or "even more so" than in 1917. There is MORE monopoly and more financial oligarchism than in the 1917 era. Lenin wrote both very specifically and very generally. His more concrete writings are a dialectical unity of the specific and the general, and serve as models for concrete writing in 1999. His more general writing is very much cogent for 1999 world capitalism and proletarian revolution against world capitalism. Superdeluxe state-monopoly capitalism and the financial oligarchy still create and produce postmodern alienation, ennui and nihilism. To organize ever more scattered workers , one must popularize the divisive effect of exactly the underlying political economic structure that Lenin elucidated, with some quantitative updating ( which has been done by living Leninist political economists; see for example _Superprofits and  Crises_ by Victor Perlo International, 19!
83; )

The objective economic analysis of Lenin must still be digested by 10's of millions of workers in the U.S. if they are to understand the atomized, alienated, super-dupper dog-eat-dog, rat race, war-of-all-against meta-narrative dividing them and preventing the solidarity needed to overthrow capitalism.
So, although it does not specifically address organizing working class action, as Louis and Doug are debating, in "Lenin and the Rentier State", (_Nature, Society and Thought_ Vol. 10, No.4; 1997) , David Eisenhower says:

"The term "globalism" is merely the contemporary euphemism for imperialism. This is the very same imperialism whose features Lenin outlined in his famous 1916 pamphlet, _Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism_

It is useful to review some of these features. To begin with, imperialism is the stage of capitalism:

* where the "financial oligarchy" is dominant;

* where banks greatly intensify and accelerate the process of the concentration of capital and the formation of monopolies;

* where the "financial monopolists" engage in the "conscious regulation of economic life";

* where the big profits go to the "geniuses" of financial manipulation;

* where "the export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentier [sector] from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by the  [global] exploitation of labor";

*where the income of this rentier sector is far greater than the income obtained from trade -- this being the essence of imperialist parasitism and the reason why the term "rentier state is passing into current use";

* where "the rentier state is a state of parasitic, decaying capitalism and these circumstances cannot fail to influence all the social-political conditions of the countries affected generally"; and

* where institutions like the British navy "play the part of bailiff to guard against the indignation of debtors. " (It would take thirty years before the IMF made its appearance and with infinitely more deadly consequences.)

Over the rest of the century these features have developed and matured as their center shifted from Great Britain to the United States. " ( end quote)


Thus, Leninism is very much alive and cogent to what is happenin' now, far from deadheaded or religious dogma. Even Marx's OLDER writing on capitalism is alive, as a specter still haunting globalism.

Charles Brown

Workers of the World , Unite 1999 !

>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx> 03/01/99 10:24AM >>>
Louis Proyect wrote:

>Doug, the critique of SWP's "workerism" is not to be found in Foucault, but
>in Lenin. Postmodernist Marxism does not address the topic of how to build
>socialist organizations.

Lenin wrote and strategized about Russia in the early 20th century - a
partly industrialized, mainly rural society at the periphery of the
Eurocapitalist world. We live in the United States in 1999, an economic and
imperial giant whose citizens (and residents) are atomized, mediatized, and
alienated, with little faith in any institutions. To think that Lenin holds
the key to this situation is to treat his writing as scripture, which isn't
something you want to do, is it?

Doug