Marx on the freedom of concepts...

[Mr P.A. Van Heusden]

Hi Angela (and the other listers)

I've chosen to not use the normal e-list method of quoting bits of your
post, since I think that would fragment my reply into bits.

Firstly, I recognise that when I say 'human' I'm being inconsistent. I'm
happy to live with the inconsistency, and modify it when necessary. I
agree with you on the 'instability' in Marxism - it is inevitable if what
we write is just a set of rhetorical formulations, and inevitably
provisional.

I'd be truly inconsistent if I settled for, and defended, the term (or
terminology) 'to be human' as the be-all and end-all of the revolutionary
project. I don't.

On the question of dissolution of concepts - I think what I'm trying say
is that when I see people focussing on a "twisting of the dominant
discourse", I am on guard against an analysis which is aimed at a
programme of playfullness, reducing revolutionary practice to a kind of
shadow-boxing with the "dominant discourse", which turns the philosophical
anxiety about the inability to achieve theoretical mastery (or dissolution
of dominant concepts) into a retreat from political action (the logics of
failed revolt Yoshie mentioned). To organise is to be organised by the
process of organisation - for socialists, as for capitalists. This doesn't
mean that we should disavow organisation, though. 

My inability as a person living in this society to get beyond the
state/society dichotomy means that I acknowledge that I cannot tell you
what 'beyond capitalism' will look like. I can guess, based on my
experience of working collectively with people, instead of against them.
But I can't predict the future.

I think, however, that it is important to always state, when discussing
topics such as this, that despite the fact that we cannot stand 'outside
ourselves' (self seen not as individual self, but including also self as
species-being) at present, this does not mean that history has ended. We
hopefully won't be ping-ponging the same concepts around forever. 

(BTW. if you've seen Mike Leigh's Naked (1993), I think there is a case to
be made that it is informed by the collapse of the USSR. The agonised
dialogue that Johnny has with the security guard over the dialectic
suggests to me the anxiety that most people who see themselves as
socialists feel (or felt at the time). The USSR, the dream of a workers
state for three generations, is gone, and Johnny's frenetic dialectic
which constantly obliterates the present emerges as the anxious response.
See 'High Hopes' (1988) for comparison.) 

As to your final point, I agree entirely. After all, I rant on about the
politics of software engineering to my computer programming friends (who
blankly stare back at me most of the time). I think Hegel somewhere says
something about the effect that the guillotine had on the concept of
freedom in philosophy. And the 1840s attack on Hegel is hardly
co-incidental either. It's just that I think a lot of intellectuals run
around all day and point to these things (using unnecessarily obscure
language) as if they've discovered something radical and new, and then
leave it at that, and go and vote Democrat at the ballot box. 

I think it is high time Marx got properly dug out of the grave - he's a
hell of a lot more scary than a lot of the modern 'radicals'.

Like someone said - if you thought the WTO was bad, wait till you see
capitalism.

Peter
P.S. I haven't read Negri much, but I'll look it up in the library when I
get a chance.
--
Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available
Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man
shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the 
chain and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx 
           NOTE: I do not speak for the HGMP or the MRC.