Left-Wing Melancholy Re: Marx After Marxism

Christian Gregory christian11 at mindspring.com
Fri Jan 10 12:06:28 PST 2003



>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.

This is what H&N's said too: Brennan's "policing" the term communist. But he doesn't do anything of the sort. He's not asking what it really means but whether in this context it means anything. He says that H&N use it against "the weight and sense of acquired usage." The point is proved by the fact that you would have to _undertake_ a genealogy to get past the sedimentation of meanings that have basically accrued around the Leninist ones.

Brennan's point is not to say who can or can't use the term communist--that's totally a figment of H&N's sensitive imagination, in which all critics become potential censors with despotic agency. H&N use "communist" because they get all the symbolic credit for doing so but bear no significant risk for doing it. While H&N feel it necessary to get rid of a term like "proletariat" to designate the world historical agent (it is evidently unusable--probably the "weight and sense of acquired usage," and they couldn't possibly resignify _that_), somehow the term communist can and must be retrieved. I find that choice suspicious, whatever the use they make of "communist."

Christian



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