First a few epigraphs (cited from memory without looking up the sources):
When it seizes the masses theory itself becomes a material force ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The arm of criticism must be completed by the criticism of arms ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Mutual ruin of the contending classes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Poverty of Philosophy ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I examine in this light two passages, one from from John St. Clair's post and one from Alterman's March 2 Nation editorial:
Alterman: "It would behoove Democratic candidates and progressive activists to examine Clinton's agenda to figure out why it is so damn popular--and how it might be refined to create a stable progressive majority for the future." "Clinton's Foundation," _Nation_ March 2, p. 6.
John (quoting Rorty): "In that book I claim that "theory" cannot do much to bring the excluded in from the margins--to enlarge the community whose consensus sets the standards of objectivity--that that other kinds of writing (notably novels and newspaper stories) can do quite a lot."
At the present time revolution is out of the question--which means that the kind of reform which the Altermans, the vanden Heuvens and their ilk claim to want is _also_ out of the question. The reforms we need desperately are simply beyond the imagination of an Alterman, a Rorty, or a vanden Heuten, and the allegedly practical leftists of Rorty's utopian fantasies will in fact attempt to preempt the mass struggles necessary to win those reforms.
As Yoshie has noted, Rorty (as quoted by John) assumes that the excluded are not people until real people (whoever they are) by an act of compassion appoint the excluded as "honorary people." By itself this would be sufficient grounds to reject out of hand any politics based on the "enlargement of community," for the community so defined is itself anti-human. Even within the limits of bourgeois individualism and legality, the slogan (roughly remembered) "We're here, we're queer, get used to us" is superior (far more practical!) to the spinning of stories, novels, or theories to enlarge community. In so far as we did help shorten the U.S. invasion of Viet Nam we achieved that by threatening to disrupt community. (We even closed down Southern Illinois University for a while.) And certainly any community which can carry the modifier "American" can be nothing but a continuing threat to human survival.
So theory , it is true, can't do _anything_ (let alone, "much") to enlarge community to include the "marginal," but it and _only_ it can provide the sinew by means of which the excluded (including those who at any given time falsely believe themselves to be within the "community") can unite to resist the continuing assault of the Carter-Reagan-Clinton administration on the living standards, dignity, and very lives of U.S. workers. Of course, the majority of workers are non-white or female, and it is among non-whites and females that the core of such resistance must emerge. A working class that can't defend Mumia can't defend itself either. See End Note for further comment on this.
[Note: by theory I mean _Capital_, _Theories of Surplus Value_, _Wages, Price and Profit_, _State and Revolution_, _Eighteenth Brumaire_, _Imperialism, the Latest Stage of Capitalism_, and similar works. They don't do our thinking for us, but they are still the best guides to the thinking we need to do.]
In this moment of capitalist triumphalism, the only reforms we can expect are Welfare Reform, Social Security Reform, Regulatory Reform, Tax Reform, Medicare and Medicaid Reform, all the kinds of reform which come under the heading of "Destroying the village to save it." The core task of progressives at the present time is to fight viciously to block those reforms and other even more threatening ones ahead. And theory is as central to that defensive task as it is to revolution (and in fact the same theory is needed).
The reforms the rabbit pack at the _Nation_ want are the kind of reforms which a compassionate establishment, moved by appeals to reason and human decency, will kindly grant to the millions who are in need. So the desired leaders are those who can carry out this bargaining with the ruling class for treating the rest of us charitably. And that is the context for Alterman's editorial in the March 2 _Nation_, as well as for the objective homophobia of Rorty. Probably some of Rorty's best friends are gay, but I think Doug got it very precisely in a recent post: "...my sense is that he [Rorty] wishes the queers would just behave." That seems, in fact, the _Nation_'s attitude towards Mumia, towards the disabled whose Social Security benefits are being savaged, towards impoverished mothers, towards the dead and dying people of Iraq, towards the uncouth muckraking of a Noam Chomsky, apparently (given the recent rarity of articles by Edward Said) towards the Palestinians. The list goes on and on, including anyone that disrupts the delicate task of edging the Demireps a bit left, so that the magazine's support for them will not appear totally shameless.
Only mass struggle, througought the nation, *outside* the framework of the neoliberal Democratic Party, will save social security, will challenge the Taft-Hartley ban on secondary boycotts, will stop or reverse the steady degeneration of health care, will buffer the death-squad activities of police in the inner cities. The list goes on and on. And none of these reforms are achievable through negotiation with the leaders. Clinton is not spineless. He does not wobble. He is firm and courageous in his commitment to capitalist triumphalism and the maintenance of the foreign and domestic policies that entails. And frankly unless vanden Heuven and the _Nation_ are (at some level) themselves committed to that triumphalism it is difficult to see how they could so firmly take their stand on "Clinton's foundation."
Carrol
End Note. The following passage from _Wages, Price and Profit_ is most appropriate as a commentary on the failure of the responsible left to take seriously the defense of Mumia, the battle against racism, the preservation of a decent welfare system, the resistance to the "War on Crime," with its focus on non-whites and young people. "Wages" must be understood to stand for the total condition of the working class, and especially its core of non-whites and women.
Such being the tendency of *things* in this system, is this saying
that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against
the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the
best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they
did they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past
salvation. I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard
of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that
in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts
at maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of
debating their price with the capitalist is inherent in their condition
of having to sell themselves as commodities. By cowardly giving way
in their everyday conflict with capitall, they would certainly
disqualify themselves for initiating any larger movement.
(*Selected Works* [Moscow, 1969], Vol. 2, p. 75)
Economist and liberal (social democratic) readings of this would ignore the principle omnipresent in Marx's work, that the struggle for an improved condition of life ALSO involves a struggle for the power and organization that make struggle possible. That latter struggle, at this time, puts to the forefront of honest progressive thought the necessity to battle against racism, sexism, and homophobia both *within* the working class and in the society as a whole. A cowardly refusal to maintain the battle against the death penalty, against the suppression of the Palestinian people, against all the conditions which Rorty and the _Nation_ apparently think are marginal, constitutes an abject surrender to capital.
Carrol Cox
(For marxism list readers who do not subscribe to lbo-talk I have included the whole of John St. Clair's post, which to some extent summarizes the ongoing battle on lbo-talk over Alterman and the whole rightward drift in the _Nation_ which Alterman so splendidly makes visible.
> Replying to Doug and Frances:
> Doug writes:
> > Ok, then it's just the queers I guess.
> Ha. Guess we can end that thread on "Humor and the Left." Doug then adds:
> > And, answering myself, I should add that I bet that American purity
> > thinking is behind Alterman and other vulgar versions of
> antipostmodernism.
> I'm unsure what to make of what you mean by "being against the queers." If
> you're asking if Rorty is homophobic, then I think the answer is no. If
> you're asking would he object to certain forms of essentialist queer
> identity-theory, then the answer is probably yes. But let's not confuse
> identity politics with the politics of identity-theory.
> Re: the second part, suffice it to say that I don't think Rorty is
> advocating a version of Emerson, e.g. "The American Scholar." Rorty's
> anti-postmodernism, as such, is a little more nuanced than that. Topic for
> another message.
> Frances writes:
> > don't necessarly fit together in any coherent whole. Sure, Rorty likes
> > what Derrida is doing to _philosophy_, but we're not talking philosophy
> > right now, we're talking politics. And I am far from convinced that Rorty
> > has any affinities for the political implications. Looking through
> > Rorty's paper "Ironism and theory," Rorty is clearly only interested in
> > Derrida's ability to _privatize_ his theorizing. That is, Derrida's
> Insofar as Doug's original post concerned:
> > Isn't this just one more attempt (by Rorty on the high end and Alterman on
> > the low) to assert some pragmatic, pure native strain Americanism, against
> > all that decadent and foreign stuff going on in the humanities
> > departments?
> > In the 50s it was Marxists; in the 90s it's Derrideans and queers.
> I directed my reply to the question of whether Rorty was part of "some
> pragmatic" attempt to keep "decadent and foreign stuff" out of humanities
> departments (which, I assumed, included philosophy departments). So, I
> think, we agree on that part. But turning from _philosophy_ to _politics_,
> since you write:
> > ..., but we're not talking philosophy
> > right now, we're talking politics. And I am far from convinced that Rorty
> (though I think my reply had more to do with the former (see above).
> Here's the relevant bit:
> > Derrida's ability to _privatize_ his theorizing. That is, Derrida's
> > theoirizng has nothing to do with anything outside his own theorizing. He
> > doesn't even take into account the history of philosophy, much less the
> > political implications and quietistic stance that might come out of taking
> > his work seriously as a political tool.
> Well, Frances, I'm not sure about some of this. Doesn't take into account
> the history of philosophy? That's like saying Coletrane doesn't take into
> consideration the history of jazz. I read Derrida as one extended riff on
> the history of philosophy. In a book like _Margins of Philosopy_, for
> example, he touches upon just about everybody, and demonstrates that he
> really does know the stuff. As far as the implications of Derrida's thought,
> I'm not sure that is a settled question (I've got his _The Other Heading:
> Reflections on Today's Europe_ in front of me, but as you know, I'm in the
> middle of comps, so no fun reading--anybody read it?). However, I think it
> is characteristic of most mis-readings of Derrida to claim that he has
> uncovered some radically new method in philosophy/interpretation, and then
> to debate about whether this method leads to quietism or activism. In that
> sense, I think Rorty's reading is _right_. In "Is Derrida a transendental
> philosopher?", footnote 6 summarizes chapter 6 of _Contingency..._:
> "In that book I claim that "theory" cannot do much to bring the excluded in
> from the margins--to enlarge the community whose consensus sets the
> standards of objectivity--that that other kinds of writing (notably novels
> and newspaper stories) can do quite a lot."
> Now if you're going to make some claim about the political implications,
> like Rakesh Bhandari (talking about Alterman's article):
> > 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.
> I don't think that for Rorty this can be taken at face-value. If you're
> asserting a connection between the abstraction of theory and subversion,
> then you've got to make a lot stronger case than "...critique of wage labor
> is ...pretty abstract." Because what Rorty is talking about is the
> metaethical, or ethical psychology (I think) of expanding community. Of
> course some theories are going to be abstract, since abstraction expands
> their domain. But an expanded domain is _not_ the same as an expanded
> community.
> Hey, this is fun, but got to get back to Locke and Nietzsche (finishing
> Thursday),,
>
> John
>
>
> John St. Clair