[lbo-talk] British SWP's Marxism 2009

Bhaskar Sunkara bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com
Sun Jul 12 17:26:28 PDT 2009


Sorry I wasn't actually trying intentionally to be glib, I was in a rush at the time. Harvey's very liberalesque call for a New New Deal and the fetishism for the 1930s I think he has exhibited lately represents a misreading of this period in American history. I don't endorse everything he states (I have some qualms about his "left-centric", subjectivist interpretation of modern history, but I think Chris Cutrone's critique of Harvey makes some important points:

Harvey's talk is relentlessly philistine and crudely concretistic, especially in its political implications, from its first moments in insisting that the present crisis is borne of an "irrational attempt to rationalize an irrational system" -- which means, by implication, if not simply plainly, that Keynesian Fordism was better because it was at least a "rational" attempt to rationalize an irrational system! -- to his disenchantment of "revolution" (when he comments on Zizek) in favor of what he calls an attempt to build a "radically different kind of society."

The present crisis is not (merely) one of idle human labor and idle technology standing side by side in the face of unfulfilled human needs, but (also) a pathological political form of organized power that must be challenged, revolutionized and replaced. It's not a (relatively simpler) matter of figuring out how to better employ labor and technology that the (on-going, never-ending) crisis of capital confronts us with, but rather the task of transforming social politics.

[...]

So we need, especially nowadays, not to build socialism but to build the revolution. We need to recognize (the present configuration of) capital as the potential basis for doing this.

This is why the one-sided and undialectical conceptions of capital such as Harvey and Zizek's (inherited from prior forms of "vulgar Marxism" such as Stalinism and reformist Social Democracy) cannot help us. They already oppose the present society in an ideologically simplistic and thus blind manner. They think that capital is what the capitalists do. And, politically, they don't address the inevitable necessity of the present and foreseeable future, the revolutionizing of the U.S., which should be the goal and overriding concern of every single purported "Leftist," especially any supposed Marxist (who ought to believe, following Marx, that capital can and must be overcome only on the basis of capital) throughout the world.



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