Angel of History (was Re: Geras vs Laclau)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

> Geras, I might add, has changed his views since that debate. On
> two occasions,  at a conference and as an invited speaker at York,
> I noted that in his presentation he seemed to be trying to get away
> from the idea of a 'single principle underlying the differences'. I
> asked, in a roundabout way, if he no longer stood by the position
> he had adopted in that debate, and he answered he no longer
> thought marxism could be the rallying point of a radical politics - a
> conclusion reached earlier by L&M with their idea of "radical
> democracy".

The fundamental practical problem is less an opposition between
mono-causal & multi-causal explanations (a straw man in my opinion)
than the death of Marxism as a revolutionary political project,
though it lives on as theory with endless debates (among Marxists,
between Marxists and post-Marxists, etc.), in the core capitalist
nations; and we don't know how to resurrect it.  Lou complains of
reformism of the SACP, the Mexican CP, FARC, & a host of other
outfits in the periphery, but in this they are merely following the
trend that happened much, much earlier in the core.  The Socialist
bloc collapsed; China has turned to the market; Cuba, while still
cautious, has seen inequality rise between those who have dollars &
those who don't; & North Korea is in the process of rapprochement
with South Korea on the latter's terms.  Vigorous defense of what we
still have, in the core & the periphery, is a good & necessary fight,
but it does take on a backward-looking perspective.  Perhaps that
explains in part the enormous energy expended in the recurring
debates on the origin of capitalism.

An image of the angel of history evoked by Walter Benjamin comes to my mind:

*****   A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as
though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly
contemplating.  His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings
are spread.  This is how one pictures the angel of history.  His face
is turned toward the past.  Where we perceive a chain of events, he
sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it
in front of his feet.  The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead,
and make whole what has been smashed.  But a storm is blowing in from
Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that
the angel can no longer close them.  The storm irresistibly propels
him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of
debris before him grows skyward.  This storm is what we call
progress.   (Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History,
IX")   *****

Yoshie