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

[Sean Andrews]

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