Left-Wing Melancholy Re: Marx After Marxism

Thomas Seay entheogens at yahoo.com
Fri Jan 10 08:55:09 PST 2003


Looking at this post, I felt that I was reading a political "Wasteland" without the poetry. Where do the quotes end and Yoshie's opinion begin? What do you think on this matter Yoshie? I dont get it.

However, yo quote this from Brennan and I will respond to this:


> ***** We can approach the issue by considering
. 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?

Brennan has a very static approach to words and philosophy. Apparently, a "Communist" or a "Marxist" can only refer to a Leninist, according to him. I bet if you had decided to do a "geneology" of the terms "Communist" or "Marxist" (as you did with the word "popular" in an earlier quote) you would discover that these words preceded Lenin and the Leninists have no fucking monopoly on these words. So, who the hell is Brennan to decide what these words mean. Yes, the "Italians" (I suppose that refers to those of the workerist or autonomist tradition) renounce the party or state form. No, they have not renounced the "class" orientation but expanded it.

Yoshie, why dont you make comments on Empire, JKS essay, "the Italians" directly instead of hiding behind the skirt tails of Brennan or some other reviewer?

Thomas

===== "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."

"Money eats quality and shits out quantity" -William Burroughs

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