[lbo-talk] Fwd: for quotation if you want

Sean Andrews cultstud76 at gmail.com
Thu Feb 15 22:38:26 PST 2007


On 2/15/07, Dwayne Monroe <idoru345 at yahoo.com> wrote
> Ironically, none of the -- what was it..."illiterate"?
> -- posters around these parts summoned Berlin. It was
> one of the very Iranian thinkers Postel (correctly)
> would like us to pay more attention to. A minor point
> but worth mentioning because it seems McLemee brought
> it up to illustrate how allegedly out-of-touch or
> perhaps, misled, thread participants are.

And Postel is the one who wants to pay more attention to Berlin, who he thinks provides us some important insights on, among other things, the difference between positive and negative liberty (42)--something which I'm sure the right wing judicial advocates in the US would be happy to hear the liberals are finally getting straight. Even better if they help the Iranians learn it so we don't have to spend so much time and effort re-writing their constitution as we did the one in Iraq.

On 2/15/07, bitch at pulpculture.org <bitch at pulpculture.org> wrote:
> *sputter* what a jackass. does he even engage with marxists at all? like
> rosa and marx on fr. of press are foreign to anyone? wtf?

Yeah. Not sure what to make of this part or why it's relevant except that it might be something Postel would be interested to know about since he doesn't seem to think these people have any real sense of "freedom!" [Exclamation mark required]


> as for illiterate, what is a cold war liberal?
>

To quote C. Wright Mills (since he seems to be a fairly popular guy right in these circles right now) in his "Letter to the New Left" (New Left Review 5 Sept/Oct 1960) where he begins by talking about the intellectual closure of Cold War liberalism (among other things) I think the most pertinent quote comes at the beginning of the second paragraph, but I'll include a bit more for the sake of context. The third paragraph is just gravy:

"Many intellectual fashions, of course, do [lead to apathy]; they stand in the way of a release of the imagination—about the cold war, the Soviet bloc, the politics of peace, about any new beginnings at home and abroad. But the fashion I have in mind is the weariness of many NATO intellectuals with what they call "ideology", and their proclamation of "the end of ideology". So far as I know, this began in the mid-fifties, mainly in intellectual circles more or less associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the magazine Encounter. Reports on the Milan Conference of 1955 heralded it; since then, many cultural gossips have taken it up as a posture and an unexamined slogan. Does it amount to anything?

"Its common denominator is not liberalism as a political philosophy, but the liberal rhetoric, become formal and sophisticated and used as an uncriticised weapon with which to attack Marxism. In the approved style, various of the elements of this rhetoric appear simply as snobbish assumptions. Its sophistication is one of tone rather than of ideas: in it, the New Yorker style of reportage has become politically triumphant. The disclosure of fact—set forth in a bright-faced or in a dead-pan manner—is the rule. The facts are duly weighed, carefully balanced, always hedged. Their power to outrage, their power truly to enlighten in a political way, their power to aid decision, even their power to clarify some situation—all that is blunted or destroyed.

"So reasoning collapses into reasonableness. By the more naive and snobbish celebrants of complacency, arguments and facts of a displeasing kind are simply ignored; by the more knowing, they are duly recognised, but they are neither connected with one another nor related to any general view. Acknowledged in a scattered way, they are never put together: to do so is to risk being called, curiously enough, "one-sided". This refusal to relate isolated facts and fragmentary comment with the changing institutions of society makes it impossible to understand the structural realities which these facts might reveal; the longer-run trends of which they might be tokens. In brief, fact and idea are isolated, so the real questions are not even raised, analysis of the meanings of fact not even begun."

As Dwayne already pointed out, I didn't accuse anyone of being a cold war liberal (or really say anything at all about McLemee except that he had a pretty predictable response to the critique of his "interview" with Postel), but come to think of it, that sounds about right. In the above Mill's following from Daniel Bell's "end of ideology" argument--which figures into Mill's critique of both the US and the USSR later in the article--but we could just as easily substitute Fukuyama's "end of history" argument for the background of some of the more recently minted "cold war liberals" like Postel. Aside from all the stuff about Iran in the book there's a big fat chapter on how he wants to replace the "failed and moribund Third Worldism of the Left and its inheritors" (Postal, 51) [which are, as far as I can tell, any "radical" theories like "Marxism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, subaltern studies, and various blends thereof" that haven't been wildly embraced by the contingent of intellectuals he's interested in] with "a liberal Third Worldism" which should "proactively claim that turf as our own, advancing liberalism as a superior framework to address the problems of the Third World today--parts of it in particular" (51).

Thus I think Leninology is spot on with most of their assessment of Postel's convoluted position since the book itself is not really a call for solidarity on Iran as much as it is a call for liberals (who, unlike leftists, evidently, are concerned with "the struggle for human rights [cf: Zizek on this concept] women's rights, civil liberties, pluralism, religious tolerance, freedom of expression, and multiparty democracy" [36]) to be more proactive in their attention to global affairs. It is a strange demand overall since I'd say that liberals have pretty much been in charge of world affairs for the better part of the past two centuries. Still, I mustn't close without this extended quote which is where Postel makes good on his early promise not to be "an uncritical champion of Actually Existing Liberalism"(15). Here he cautions his new recruits that:

<blockquote> "We have to be able to operate effectively away from the home court [of rights and international law] too. Some struggles in the world today are tailor-made for a liberal internationalist analysis--but many are not. Where core issues at stake involve the core principles of liberalism [again, issues of "human rights" which are, evidently, separate from the list below], our role is crystal clear. But where the core issues are poverty, development, trade policy, capital flows, financial markets, sweatshops, structural adjustment, landless workers, transnational corporations, ecological destruction, genetically engineered crops and the like, we find ourselves on the home court of Marxists, anarchists, Third Worldists, and other radicals in the anti-globalization [to quote Thomas Friedman] movement. It is generally they, and not we, who organize the forums and the demonstrations, who publish the magazines and the websites, who write the books and working papers on these issues."

"This needs to change. If we fail to engage the Third World ourselves, we will be seen precisely as 'oddly tangential' to its most pressing concerns" (54) <end blockquote>

I couldn't agree more. What I don't understand is why people feel they need to completely re-invent the wheel every time these issues come up. Theories such as those he describes as always need some tweaking to overcome what Raymond Williams described as "a tendency for any materialism, at any point in history, to find itself stuck with its own recent generalizations, and in defense of these to mistake it's own character;" but it seems a bit "tangential" to try to stage an answer to all of these which does everything in its power to avoid relying on any of these other currents of thought simply because one finds them to be "failed and moribund."

BTW the "oddly tangential" quote in Postel's quote is taken from Nina Power, commenting on Negri's visit to Iran. Postel claims that this was the feeling of "most of those" in attendence at the lecture Negri gave, despite Jehanbegloo's telling Postel the latter is well respected and his own appreciation of Negri much deeper than Postel's charicature could allow. Postel doesn't say where Power says this or even in what context. But it fits with his picture of the Left in Iran, even if it doesn't apply to the rest of the problems in the "third world" for which Liberals need to come up with some solutions pronto. For him, the need is to propose some "concrete, piecemeal, reformist organizing" and "tinkering" with the global economy by insinuating liberals into the institutions of the global economy (golly how will they ever do that) to make "pragmatic" changes by bending the ears of "green and labor friendly bureaucrats." (Notice who the ultimate agents of change are...Golly you can just hear the freedom ringing can't ya?!)

After this I feel that we'd all do better to have CW Mills finish us off by defining the thing that Danny Postel seems to avoid throughout his diatribe against the Left, i.e. the Left. I don't think I'd agree with all he says about this, but at least he tries to define it. I'll leave it as grist for the Mills mill anyway:

The Right, among other things, means—what you are doing, celebrating society as it is, a going concern. Left means, or ought to mean, just the opposite. It means: structural criticism and reportage and theories of society, which at some point or another are focussed politically as demands and programmes. These criticisms, demands, theories, programmes are guided morally by the humanist and secular ideals of Western civilisation—above all, reason and freedom and justice. To be "Left" means to connect up cultural with political criticism, and both with demands and programmes. And it means all this inside every country of the world.

Only one more point of definition: absence of public issues there may well be, but this is not due to any absence of problems or of contradictions, antagonistic and otherwise. Impersonal and structural changes have not eliminated problems or issues. Their absence from many discussions—that is an ideological condition, regulated in the first place by whether or not intellectuals detect and state problems as potential issues for probable publics, and as troubles for a variety of individuals. One indispensible means of such work on these central tasks is what can only be described as ideological analysis. To be actively Left, among other things, is to carry on just such analysis.

To take seriously the problem of the need for a political orientation is not of course to seek for A Fanatical and Apocalyptic Vision, for An Infallible and Monolithic Lever of Change, for Dogmatic Ideology, for A Startling New Rhetoric, for Treacherous Abstractions—and all the other bogeymen of the dead-enders. These are of course "the extremes", the straw men, the red herrings, used by our political enemies as the polar opposite of where they think they stand. [sound familiar?]

They tell us, for example, that ordinary men can't always be political "heroes". Who said they could? But keep looking around you; and why not search out the conditions of such heroism as men do and might display? They tell us we are too "impatient", that our "pretentious" theories are not well enough grounded. That is true, but neither are they trivial; why don't they get to work, refuting or grounding them? They tell us we "don't really understand" Russia— and China—today. That is true; we don't; neither do they; we are studying it. They tell us we are "ominous" in our formulations. That is true: we do have enough imagination to be frightened—and we don't have to hide it: we are not afraid we'll panic. They tell us we "are grinding axes". Of course we are: we do have, among other points of view, morally grounded ones; and we are aware of them. They tell us, in their wisdom, we don't understand that The Struggle is Without End. True: we want to change its form, its focus, its object.

We are frequently accused of being "utopian" —in our criticisms and in our proposals; and along with this, of basing our hopes for a New Left politics "merely on reason", or more concretely, upon the intelligentsia in its broadest sense.

There is truth in these charges. But must we not ask: what now is really meant by utopian? And: Is not our utopianism a major source of our strength? "Utopian" nowadays I think refers to any criticism or proposal that transcends the up-close milieux of a scatter of individuals: the milieux which men and women can understand directly and which they can reasonably hope directly to change. In this exact sense, our theoretical work is indeed utopian—in my own case, at least, deliberately so. What needs to be understood, and what needs to be changed, is not merely first this and then that detail of some institution or policy. If there is to be a politics of a New Left, what needs to be analysed is the structure of institutions, the foundation of policies. In this sense, both in its criticisms and in its proposals, our work is necessarily structural— and so, for us, just now—utopian. <Blockquote end.>

s



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list