Left-Wing Melancholy Re: Marx After Marxism

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

*****   We can approach the issue by considering David Schweickart's 
_Against Capitalism_, a defense of democratic market socialism which 
I regard as the most significant work of socialist theory of the 
1990s.  I agree with almost everything Schweickart says, but my 
concern is with how the view is characterized.  After avoiding the 
term for over 300 pages, Schweickart comes out in the final chapter 
of the book as some sort of Marxist.  He even contends, I think most 
implausibly, that his market socialist model can be identified with 
Marx's "higher phase of communism."  Many self-described Marxists 
would disagree that he is any sort of a Marxist.  They would argue 
that Marxism means getting beyond markets; that Schweickart's market 
socialism is more like Proudhon and other targets of Marx's own 
criticisms; that Schweickart's project of envisaging a feasible 
alternative violates Marx's strictures against writing recipes for 
the cookshops of the future.  Still, setting aside whether Marx's 
communism is compatible with markets, a point on which I agree with 
the orthodox Marxists, Schweickart's ideas have respectable Marxist 
antecedents in the self-management of Tito's Yugoslavia, and 
affinities to Gorbachev's perestroika and Lenin's New Economic 
Policy.  There's a sense in which it doesn't matter--if Schweickart 
had said instead, "Of course this isn't Marxism," that would not 
affect whether he had a plausible alternative to capitalism.  And 
there are advocates of economic democracy like Michael Walzer who say 
just this: they broadly agree with Schweickart about the shape of a 
desirable society but don't see the point of being Marxists.  But 
this sharpens the questions: what's the point of saying, as 
Schweickart does, "And, oh yes, I'm a Marxist," if it doesn't matter?

(Justin Schwartz, "Marx after Marxism: A Theory without a Movement," 
Draft of May 6, 2002, <http://pulpculture.org/MarxAfterMarxism.html>) 
*****

*****   Equally important would be the need to explain the pattern of 
reverential borrowings from Marxism that involve, simultaneously, its 
rejection and diminishment.  With respect to the new Italians, why 
does one need or even want a label like communist (as in Negri and 
Guattari's _Communists Like Us_) when to enlist it means inverting 
its traditional meanings so that, against all the weight of acquired 
sense and usage, it now suggests hostility to the state, to party 
organization,and to strategic military and class orientations?  What, 
in short, is the need among those hostile to Marxism to assume a 
Marxist mantle while throwing flames at Marxist mannequins?  Could it 
be that the term communist lends power by virtue of its status as an 
object of fear and loathing in middle-class reason and one that 
cannot be outdone by anything more radical?  In so many ways 
communism remains the ultimate margin, the far reaches of social 
unacceptability.  Communism operates like an impassable psychological 
fissure and thereby provides a metaphorical _frisson_ that, as long 
as it remains metaphorical, entails no risks.

(Timothy Brennan, "The Empire's New Clothes," _Critical Inquiry_ 29.2 
[Winter 2003], 
<http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?CI290206PDF>) 
*****

*****   Its political significance, however, was exhausted by the 
transposition of revolutionary reflexes (insofar as they arose in the 
bourgeoisie) into objects of distraction, of amusement, which can be 
supplied for consumption....What, then, does the "intellectual elite" 
discover as it begins to take stock of its feelings?  Those feelings 
themselves?  They have long since been remaindered.  What is left is 
the empty spaces where, in dusty heart-shaped velvet trays, the 
feelings -- nature and love, enthusiasm and humanity -- once rested. 
Now the hollow forms are absentmindedly caressed.  A know-all irony 
thinks it has much more in these supposed stereotypes than in the 
things themselves; it makes a great display of its poverty and turns 
the yawning emptiness into a celebration....[I]t takes as much pride 
in the traces of former spiritual goods as the bourgeois do in their 
material goods.  Never have such comfortable arrangements been made 
in such an uncomfortable situation.

In short, this left-wing radicalism is precisely the attitude to 
which there is no longer, in general, any corresponding political 
action.  It is not to the left of this or that tendency, but simply 
to the left of what is in general possible.

(Walter Benjamin, "Left-Wing Melancholy," _Selected Writings_ Vol. 2, 
Trans. Rodney Livingstone, et al., Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999, 
pp. 424-425)   *****
-- 
Yoshie

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