Marx on the freedom of concepts...

rc-am rcollins at netlink.com.au
Fri Oct 1 22:39:43 PDT 1999


hey peter,


> 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 <

and so you should be, but following on from the other offlisted comments, i very much doubt that there is as vast a gap between theoretical practice and organising as you seem to think is the case or think is a function of a certain theoretical tendency.

but i think increasingly there are two things happening here: a) people are reading critiques of material as a substitute for reading the work themselves or only reading the smattering of stuff in e-list polemics. i'm not one to give out required reading, but i do think that laziness is an easy ground for rumours and assertions to be heard as fact. and, b) there is a problem in assuming that any theoretical project is or should be reducible to the tasks of political action. i don't find much in _capital_ that would lead me to concretely do x, y or z; but i do find it an immense resource for even beginning to think about how or what this x, y or z might be. if people want handbooks for concrete strategies today, then we might as well ditch most of what marx wrote, becuase most of what he wrote is simply not reducible to that kind of an unmediated obligation.

as for retreats, a citation from a book that i've little inclination to assert should be read, given my previous comments on it, but a passage to indicate that what is being said about retreats from politics is simply plain wrong. now, either people haven't read it, in which case, assertions about it are misinformed. or, they have read it and are lying. you or i might well have strong queries and objections to the particular formulations of strategies and organisation being proposed, as we might of any specific formulations, including those which come from what is hardly related to 'pomo' in most people's minds (marxism and socialism being quite broad traditions when it comes to organisational forms and strategies, no?); but it's hardly accurate to insist that simply because there is not a familiar soundtrack there is no politics, concrete or otherwise.

"Now if there is a spirit of Marxism which I will never be ready to renounce, it is not only the critical idea or the questioning stance... It is rather a certain emancipatory and messianic affirmation, a certain experience and a promise that one can try and liberate from any dogmatic and even from any metaphysic0-religious determination, from any messianism. And a promise must be kept, that is, not to remain 'spiritual' or 'abstract', but to produce events, new forms of action, of practice, of organisation, etc. To break with the 'party form' or with such and such forms of the State or the International does not mean to renounce every form of practical or effective organisation. It is exactly the contrary that matters to us here." (Derrida, _Spectres of Marx_)

if the soundtrack here includes the need to affirm the promise of redemption, of transformation, of an end to capitalism, whilst at the same time negating the redemptive as an endlessly deferred promise, then it strikes me as a much more concrete politics than those which indeed do locate themselves as endless deferral and/or dim hope. otoh, there is little to recommend a displacement of any organisational form in the morass we now find ourselves in i would think, contra derrida. but for all that, i would think that the role of the PCF and the PCI in blocking certain emergent forms of action has obviously and understandably left a bad taste in people's mouths, and where the debate over 'the party form' came out of. if in the US and Australia, this debate has less resonance, that's perhaps because we have not had the mass communist parties of those countries for a very long time. we have the ALP and the Democrats, and our responses have been quite different to the accomodations and complicities enacted by those organisations. as i said, idiom has to be taken into account; but then again, derrida's rather vague assertion of the need for the founding of a new International has, it seems, a concrete manifestation in a way that has still to be given credence.

derrida continues, "And there are signs. It is like a new International, but without a party, or organisation, or membership. It is searching and suffering, it beleives that something is wrong, it does not accept the 'new world order'." note, _Spectres of Marx_ was written in 1993. and, it looks to me like a definition of the J18 and anti-WTO campaigns of the last year. if derrida could spot those signs years ago, it doesn't quite seem that he's so divorced from the world does it? certainly not as divorced as those who insist, still, that there is nothing happening becuase, well, they keep straining to hear familiar soundtracks. and, none of this means that there are not certain criticism i would have of those actions (which i've been noting), but i would suggest that those who are asserting most stridently that the writings of derrida or balibar or whomever indicate a retreat from politics have been remarkably deaf to the real movements of the class struggle at the end of the century. at least lenin knew, if a little late, to recognise the soviets as an innovation; and marx the paris commune. what of the struggles in iran, indonesia, chile? i've seen very little in the way of concrete analyses of class composition, especially from those most hostile to 'pomo' for its apparent 'depoliticisation' and 'diversions'.

Angela _________



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