Date: Tue, 28 May 2002 16:04:28 -0400 From: "Michael Hoover" <hooverm at scc-fl.edu> Subject: Re: Rain, Rain, Go Away, Come again some other Day
.in any event, dissent is magazine for/by people who call themselves socialists despite having long ago given up on the possibilities of socialism... michael hoover
This touches on something I've wanted to write for a while, since Yoshie wrote earlier with characteristic simplicity, "don't mourn, organise". My view is that communism is not only possible, but necessary for any sort of long term notion of civilisation and human development. However, I don't think that "organisation" alone (what a multitude of sins can be hidden under that label!) is a sufficient condition for progress towards that eventual outcome. So I want to make the case for mourning.
My favourite philosopher, the late and very great Gillian Rose, wrote an interesting set of essays in her last years, published as Mourning Becomes the Law. In one of these essays she uses an analysis of the film and book, Remains of the Day, as well as a painting by Nicholas Poussin called The ashes of Phocion collected by his widow, to make her point about mourning. She talks about mourning that is not 'inaugurated', her main target here being post-modernism (that "despairing rationalism without reason"). But what she says can be applied to a great many approaches to politics, which she says offer us the dawn or the beginning of the day, e.g. by claiming to have finally banished metaphysics, etc. This is mourning that has not been inaugurated. Nazism offered a new dawn. But in its own way so does anarchism. What these disparate political philosophies have in common is a refusal or inability to inaugurate mourning. But the owl of Minerva flies at dusk not at dawn. Instead o! f ! the false promise of a new dawn it is better to be at the remains of the day, looking back.
I think that our comrades who simply believe that organisation is everything (anti-intellectuals that they truly are), are unwilling to do that looking back, that coming to terms through 'mourning' with the past, in particular the most recent and bloodiest century that history has seen. I recently challenged a particular one of these to say where he stood in relation to the history of the communist movement, without a response. I'm not surprised. Our 'organisers' want to take us straight to the new dawn. I say no thanks. The most important question that the 20th century throws up for me is that of bolshevism. If we are not prepared to look critically at this experience and to learn from it and to do something different next time, then no one will have any confidence in communists to provide any sort of leadership role in the future. And damn right they would be to take that position. Workers in particular, with characteristic down-to-earthness, are wary of those who preach t! he!
new dawn.
Frankly I don't think that anyone should ever be allowed to preach (yes they unashamedly preach) communism or socialism without being prepared to say where they stand in relation to the history of the movement. The mentality of thinking that any critique of famous leaders and parties of the movement's past represents some kind of abandonment of the movement are badly misguided for reasons that I have sketched above. They think that any sort of critical reflection on the deepest questions facing the movement is a sign of weakness or abandonment of the project. They are wrong, wrong, wrong and their refusal to engage in or to inaugurate this 'mourning' here is an index of intellectual timidity masquerading as confidence. It's not impressive and will not succeed in impressing through a neurotic and anxious running around trying to look like the busiest, most action-orientated activists this side of Lenin.
Tahir