Althusser's Machiavelli vs. "Virtue Militant" (was Re: Naomi Klein: "The Vision Thing")

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Jul 12 12:04:02 PDT 2000


Doug:


>>Charles Brown wrote: Actually, isn't capital becoming more centralized ?
>
>Ownership is; production isn't.

As long as ownership is in capital's hands, the autonomy of "each intersection" only guards, well, nothing, no?


>>The workers of the world must unite in one big organization to
>>counter this, so our movement must be more centralized.
>
>Why? Centralized under whose command? On what principles? If you
>emulate capital, don't you run the risk of becoming
>indistinguishable from it?

On the other hand, few -- the least of all, _you_ -- want to live in the world according to Zerzan. There has to be a happy middle ground. Doesn't the kind of lifestyle you and most other people favor require at least a certain level of economy of scale?

More importantly, Charles' point is not about what we fight for, but how we fight for it. Francis Mulhern writes in "Althusser and Us" (a book review of Louis Althusser's _Machiavelli and Us_) _Radical Philosophy_ 101 (May/June 2000):

***** Over the past thirty-odd years, there has been a widespread conversion of sensibility on the radical Left, which, for now, might pointedly be captioned 'the rise of the anti-Machiavellian principle'. The gist of this principle is that the forms of organization and practice of the Left should be embodiments of its animating social values, instantiations of its ends -- in other words, that emancipatory _virtu_ is virtue militant. The Machiavellian reprise is not that this is undesirable, or merely sentimental, but that it is self-contradictory. Politics is a specific and therefore (conditionally) autonomous form of social practice with a specific object -- the maintenance or transformation of the ensemble of social relations in a given space -- and specific norms of judgement, which are not reducible to the order of the moral. In an Althusserian term that Althusser might usefully have mobilized for his commentary, political practice is _non-expressive_ in structure; _virtu_ cannot simply and sufficiently embody any 'virtue', including the ones for which it fights. Here, for all his historical remoteness, as distastefully as ever, Althusser's Machiavelli speaks to _us_. *****

Yoshie



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