But Brad, you're holding two things constant here - on the one hand socialist consciousness, and on the other hand capitalism. As the quote Kelley forwarded of Seidman in response to Carrol's forwarding of the Ollman bit on Marx's ethics, suggested, one of the big changes in post-XXX thought is the abandonment of any fixed point of view - a feature I rather imagine is evident in Marx's thought (thought it dissapears in Kautskian / Plekhanovian Marxism). To get back to the questions I asked initially, I think the problem of a fixed point of view is no abstraction, but rather a very concrete problem in the history of left thought. Of course, the problem is there in liberalism and other 'bourgeois' modes of thought, but also very prominently in much Marxism and Bolshevism.
By Marxism I am not referring to some simple 'building on Marx's work', but rather a complex line of interpretations of Marx, from Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov, and then others - Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, Luckacs and so on.
Anyway, back to the Russian Revolution and Lenin - my own movement away from Lenin was fueled by a search for the authoritarian, the repressive elements within Leninism, having encountered them far too many times in the history of the South African and other Leninist milieu. Its pretty clear that in the history of the 2nd International, and in the history of Bolshevism, an invocation of a fixed point of view (the proleterian or socialist p.o.v.) was used to repressive ends quite extensively. Bernstein and Kautsky used it to justify their respective projects, and Lenin used it prominently, both pre-1917, and during and post 1917. This was no mere philosophical matter - the viscious attacks on contending left forces (including the factory committee movement) and opposition within the Bolshevik party (notably the Workers Opposition) were discursively constructed around access to the 'proletarian position'.
And these attacks served to quench the fire of the Revolution, even before encirclement by hostile forces. The history of the suppression of the factory committee movement in late 1917 to mid 1918 is a testament to the folly of this course.
Someone (I think Ken) said on LBO-talk that a universal is an idea is an idea which has forgotten its own history. This is as relevant to the 'cover-history' which acts as a discursive block to e.g. discussing the racist foundations of European 'civilisation' as it is to the similar 'cover histories' which have too often been used by left figures to evade scrutiny. Seidman says: "we cannot appeal to an extra-discursive social reality as the final arbiter of disciplinary disputes." I agree - examining the 'cover art' of the Cultural Logic WWW site whose URL Doug posted (http://eserver.org/clogic/), I'm struck by how Riviera's 'Night of the Rich' counterposes the masculinity of the armed men at door with the scene inside - filled with effeminate men, highly sexualised women, etc. It would take decades for the critique of this kind of presentation to become a common feature of the left. Might a left which was more situated, less sure of its viewpoint been more flexible, less inclined to homogenize difference? I tend to think so, which is why I'm rather disturbed by what Kagarlitsky leaves out.
>
> However, it is plain that many people would like to imagine a variety of
> post-capitalist futures. This is an objective fact of the present
> situation, produced by (well known) facts concerning capitalism. The
> problem with things like postmodern thought is that it has been lees than
> an optimal means for imagining the possibilities for alternative futures,
> let alone calculate the probabilities, for which purpose it has been
> useless and even harmful.
What, exactly, is the point of sketching out alternative futures? Do we need to hope? Well, we can do so without a view of what the future looks like. Marx got on quite fine. As for day to day life, our business should surely be critique, not imagining transcendence.
And as for the uselessness of post-XXX thought - this lunchtime I attended a seminar on the 'Othering' in modern Europe, which focussed on the discursive processes whereby foreigners were made Other in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. The framework was steeped in texts - an analysis rooted in the subjective, concerned not primarily with the 'facts' of racism (facts in quotes because each set of facts expresses merely a preference of selection), but rather with the discursive structure of Othering. No 'alternate future' was imagined - rather the present was critiqued, with an eye to revealing the blockages, the coverups which needed to be uncovered. And I got a sense amongst the people there that this opening up was an opening up not just of the world to all of us as participants in the seminar, but it was also an opening up of ourselves, a process which implicated the self through situating it.
Seidman's comment, "Knowledge is a means to action in the world; a re-leasing of the potentialities of the world." is quite compatible with Marx - certainly with the Marx who saw alienation as a rupture, the hostile confrontation between humanity and its possibility. Awareness of this rupture is uncomfortable - but the refusal to accept comfort is merely the admission that the revolution will never end.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "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, 1844 k*256^2+2083 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B