Strange to find myself on the other side here. Still every list needs a reactionary philistine ...
>> "a 'spectorial, disgusted, mocking left' that believes
>> the higher is its level of abstraction, the more subversive
>> it is.... [T]his left lacks even the most rudimentary
>> strategy for translating theory into practice..."
>
>A meaningless statement unless he clarifies what he means by practice.
>And sometimes the higher the level the abstraction, the more subversive
>the critique. A critique of wage labor as a historically specific social
>relation of production is pretty abstract after all.
Cornel West speaks of walking 'the tightrope between the Scylla of reductionism and the Charybdis of aestheticism', the need for 'a critical organic catalyst' for 'a critical coming-together' but not 'a narrow closing of ranks'. Now, I haven't read enough of this bloke to know whether the rest of his writing is as Charybdistic (neologisms are all the go these days, so there's my contribution for the day) as this, but I have squinted bemusedly at many a postal text.
>From Lyotard, I 'learn' (scare quotes are in too - I keep my finger on the
pulse, y'know) that all is *bricolage* (I'd learned about residual and
emergent cultural components always inhabiting a place and time from
Raymond Williams and Antonio Gramsci, but they were only modernists - and
anyway, perhaps bricolage isn't bricolage if it's not conscious
*transavantgardist* ironic play) and that gone is our belief in the
capacity of a grounding in the arts, technology, knowledge and liberty to
help humanity (*motricity* is seen as driving us, insensible to human need
- as Adorno, Mumford and Ellul had already told me). Oh, and we must
analyse and *anamnese*, or *arbeit durch* our unconscios associations (like
Marcuse had already suggested in *Eros and Civilisation* and Habermas had
already suggested in *Knowledge and Human Interests*).
Our job as good pomos seems to be to worry about, and respond to, the same things as Marx and the Critical Theorists of yore had - only to do so with subversive *bricolic* ironic play (and why should the self-proclaimed left be playing anyway? The other side ain't playing!), a bunch of new words (where old ones would do), and playful attempts at rendering ourselves unreadable (thus fulfilling comrade Derrida's theory of *differance* and its infinitely deferred and multiplied signifiers). Now THAT'S Charybdis - and that's abstraction (a) of such an order it doesn't notice that we can in fact communicate (which we couldn't if infinite signifiers were applicable to any utterance), (b) of such an order it han't noticed nobody ever changed the world with bloody ironic game-playing, (c) of such an order it has no referant (d) of such an order it had better constitute practice in itself because there's now nothing meaningful outside itself, and (e) of such an order that nobody's gonna be able to emancipate themselves even if it weren't useless toss, because they couldn't begin to understand it - awright, at least I can't).
As for the historicity of the wage relation, on the other hand ...
>> coupled with denunciations of the reformist left as:
>>
>> "extremely eloquent in elite debates... entirely without
>> troops when the lecture is over. Its class-based analysis
>> appeals neither to the racism/sexism/homophobia crowd
>> nor to the self-images of most Americans."
>
>This is not a criticism of the reformist left of which Alterman is a
>representative. It is another criticism of the RSH crowd. And it is a
>criticism of the masses. The reformist left are the knights in shining
>armour here.
Well, I admit I didn't go along with this bit. I thought the reformists didn't have any troops because they'd deserted the ones they used to have. They have, in fact,chucked class out the window, and when you do that, an awful lot of black, female and (I suspect) homosexual people go with it. As, by the way, do most white heterosexual men. Class ain't good politics precisely because the reformists shut up about it two decades ago - effectively forcing oppressed people to fall back on equally valid but less politically potent identities (by which I'm alluding to numerical and potentially political economic might). Class politics that ignored, say, women, weakened itself in terms of its own legitimating banner, but gender politics without class seeks to unite opposing interests (which it only can by way of the individualising 'super-mum-succeeds-in-business' hegemony we see in mainstream feminism today - I can cite Australian evidence - am I wrong on the US evidence?). As Albert and Hahnel said, these categories are inextricably integrated: without reference to all of the other 'pillars of the totality', no category can stand!
>> "The fledgling labor/scholar alliance is designed
>> to replicate just such cooperation. The most powerful
>> speech at the labor/academic conference was given by
>> Betty Dumas, a Trinidadian immigrant who was jailed
>> and fired for her attempts to unionize the Avondale
>> shipyards in New Orleans. Dumas siad the hardest part
>> of her struggle was trying to explain to her children
>> why their mother was going to jail, when she had spent
>> their whole lives drilling them about the importance of
>> obeying the law.
>>
>> "A left that cannot find a way to unite behind the
>> Betty Dumases of this world is no left at all."
>
>First, unions are not a good in themselves; they can help rationalize
>terminatons, they can unionize workers only to legitimize arbitrary
>workplace hierarchies (as Herbert Hill has argued for years); they can
>limit workers' initiative and lock them into conservative agreements.
Yeah - and you don't have to work hard to prove all you say. But the alternative comrade Dumas faced was an ununionised workplace - unions *might* impose arbitrary hierarchies - uninhibited shipyard bosses simply *will*. Oh, and such hierarchies are not absolutely arbitrary - where are black women usually to be found in ununionised workplaces?
>The question Alterman should have asked, given his concerns, is what the
>AFL-CIO is going to do for the Betty Dumases of the world. Will they
>organize such workers only to then counsel against action until that
>moving target of a critical mass has been reached? Will the AFL-CIO
>attempt to attract support from the HSR crowd on the promise that they
>are organizing the Betty Dumases while in fact doing nothing for
>her--except taking her dues to elect Slick Willie like candidates.
Awright. Have that point. After all, we're back to the knights in rusty armour.
I'm prepared to be told that I'm not just missing the textual context but also the cultural context - if so, please disregard foregoing diatribe - which was at least a lot shorter than my last one.
Cheers, Rob.