[lbo-talk] Marxism 2009

[Alan Rudy]

>
> Bob Morris <bob.morris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > So where is the Left? Absent, far as I can tell. I'm not
> > trying to start a
> > flame war. I genuinely don't understand why a left that put
> > hundreds of
> > thousands in the streets in Iraq war protests has done
> > little during this
> > crisis, one which seems custom-made for it and a
> > once-in-a-lifetime
> > opportunity.
>
> [WS:]  I think demographic composition of modern society may explain why
> the left gained so much popularity then but not now.  To make a long story
> short - the working class of the industrial age maintained strong group
> cohesion aka solidarity and the left's appeals to that solidarity fell on
> sympathetic ears.  The modern working class aka lower middle class lost that
> sense of solidarity, thanks to suburbanization, television and popular
> culture extolling individualism - therefore left's appeals to solidarity
> fall on deaf ears.  However, without appeal to working class solidarity, the
> left is reduced to post modernist "deconstruction" of ideas - a largely
> meaningless babble whose appeal is limited to narrow literati circles.
>
> [APR] I'm broadly in agreement with this, though I think the last sentence
close-minded.  Part of the post-modern condition is the disintegration of
the more-or-less singular and deproblematized modern identities upon which
earlier solidarities were built.  A major part of the problem with the
modern left, today, is that it continues to appeal to modern identities.
I'm not saying that terms like "the working class" are useless but I am say
that a great deal of the ethnic, racial, religious, occupational,
patriarchal, progressive, spatial, nationalistic and heteronormative ground
upon which earlier forms of working class organizing were based have been
blown apart - and, in many ways, for good reason.

It seems to me and, from discussions on this list, it appears to a number of
others here, that the historical and material semiotic elements of what so
many derisively refer to as deconstruction look an awful lot like what folks
on the left used to call ideology critique.  The problem with even that
stance, today, is that - painting in broad strokes - both the left and the
right largely base their appeals on modern (or premodern) categories and
relationships as they engage in ideology critique in world of fractured and
unstable identities and partial and situated knowledges.

Hell, look at the debate here on Iran, go back and read the modes of
production debate, take some time to review the arguments about feminist
standpoint epistemologies, look at Marxist and post-structuralist science
studies in re: the production of nature, the construction of science and the
contradictions of technology... part of the problem the left has is that the
categories we've traditionally used are largely in flux, are deeply
contested and are no longer as easy to rank.  Given global climate change,
what do we prioritize and which we are we talking about?  Given
environmental injustice, ought we to be more concerned with wilderness,
resources, parks, health, pollution, production, outdoor activities, or
(urban, suburban, rural or Southern) aesthetics.

I think the left - whatever that actually means, today - largely imploded as
a result of a lack of internal democracy and a surfeit of internal
differentiation - at exactly the same time that its
ever-so-partial-victories within social/liberal democracy can under virulent
neoliberal political, fiscal and ideological attack AND at exactly the same
time that the taken-for-granted economic, environmental and spatial
conditions of the left became increasingly transformed by globalization.
Pulling this all apart in order to produce a useful political narrative may
in fact require deconstruction, even if it ought to completely avoid the
kinds of texts-about-texts-about-texts-about-me navel gazing of
late-80s/early-90s postmodernism.