Date: Mon, 16 Dec 1996 16:09:55 -0800 (PST)
From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: BHA: tasks


 
 
What I love about the list is my ability to stay current with all
the necessary labels.  I've got down now the wonderful "postisms"
as the couple of positivism, and pomo, postruct and pomoma.  Each
richly deserved.  Nothing but the text.  Prey for whorled p's.  
 
Howie Chodos has added a dimension to the discussion which I, and
obviously others, welcome.  One of the sessions at RM I picked up
only at the very end was the Friday morning session on Black
Marxism.  I was surprised and invigorated by a politically engaged
discussion of the responsibility (international) of the black
intellectual in the current period.  This question has not been at
the top of other left agendas over the last many years and to raise
it has raised eyebrows of the "what kind of moralizing are you hung
up on" sort.  I read Howie to have raised that question here and
gone a good long way to offering some direction on it.  I agree our
task is to show how it is possible to invite difference in a
context which promotes unity of action.  I also agree that grasping
the connection between ontological realism, epistemic relativism
and judgmental rationalism is an anchor for that task.  
 
Consider also an alternative way of asking the question:  Some now
have party responsibilities.  Others ask: what are the tasks of a
party intellectual in a non-party period?  I put the question this
way because I think the hegemony of the postisms is directly
connected to the lack of responsibility of academic marxisms to a
practical political movement.  The class position of the
intellectual is petty bourgeois.  What counts is not class origins
or occupied position, but class stance; but class origin and
position suggest generative mechanisms which significantly
influence class stance.  They can be overridden, but the override
is not so easy to see if there is no alternative in practical
motion.  Consider for example the first flourishing of postwar
Western Marxism, the climate in which Bhaskar first cut his
political teeth:  the political liberation movements of the third
world were in full career and a plausible claim could be made on
the floor of the UN that the third world was the main force of
world history, a range of fresh revolutionary alternatives
presented themselves from China to Cuba to Yugoslavia, the Chicano
liberation movement was occupying land in the Southwest and
organizing farmworkers in California, a black power movement
organized communities for defense against poverty and racist
intrusion, a worldwide antiwar movement organized against
imperialist war, feminists put equal rights on the table (and took
coathangers off) and in the labor movement wildcats reached a peak
as the rank and file went into its own motion more militantly than
at any time since the depression.  ETc. ETc.  All this was
reflected in a struggle for theory also, and Colin's question, are
you for or against science, was the subject of sharp ideological
struggle on the floor of autoplants in Detroit.  Line workers and
diversely employed or unemployed youth with little formal schooling
buried themselves in marxist classics for a science to change the
world.  Sought them out.  If it wasn't science, they didn't want
it; you couldn't rely on it.  In that context alternatives opened
to intellectuals that were subsequently blurred as a quarter of a
century of global reaction so dramatically put people everywhere on
the defensive.  Jobs were lost, countries lost, organizations
collapsed and most people confronted questions of personal survival
more starkly.
 
The hegemony of the postisms reflects this condition of retreat. 
Jim Hightower, a populist and sometime public official from Texas,
recently raised Howie's question in this fashion:  "uniting
progressives is like trying to load frogs in a wheelbarrow."  
Those with hegemony at the RM conference argue as if to celebrate
the circumstance.  Aberystwyth depressed is more clearsighted.
 
Here is an excerpt from the response I sent to Steve Cullenberg in
regards to the comment of his on overdetermination that was posted
to our list last summer:
 
The idea that nothing is more important than anything else confuses
epistemic relativism with judgmental relativism.  Epistemic
relativism is a consequence of our contingent condition in the
world.  As far as we know we are an accident.  We did not need to
happen.  Knowledge did not need to happen.  Insofar as it has
happened it is historically limited and limited also by the social
forms of its production -- all of which is to say that it can at
best fallibly grasp the object of study.  Epistemic relativism
correctly reflects the humilitity necessary in the task of
knowledge production in the face of the limits we confront.  But
judgmental relativism (the idea that "there is no meaningful way to
argue that something is more important than something else," as you
[Steve C.] put it) does not follow.  Instead, if we are to act at
all there must be a basis (fallible) for preferring one belief to
another.  Thus epistemic relativism makes sense only if coupled
with judgmental rationalism.  This lays the foundation for dialogue
because although we come from different perspectives we can learn
our references refer to things common to us -- the earth under our
feet, neutrinos, atoms, molecules, cells, modes of production, etc. 
In this context epistemic relativism lays the basis for dialogue as
a method for resolving differences and establishing a foundation
for common action.  By contrast epistemic relativism coupled with
judgmental relativism makes each isolate perspective its own
dogmatism and leaves nothing but power and its exercise to resolve
difference.  Common action can go no futher than a coincidence of
isolate dogmatisms.  
 
As Hans pointed out, the postisms sought to reclaim the subject,
but the emphasis, unsituated ontologically, took root in a bog of
subjectivisms, localisms, me firstisms, and came to express a petty
bourgeois individualist class stance.  For postism, the plurality
of our many come froms -- gender, race, geography, language, moment
in history, etc. -- yield a plurality of knowledges, a plurality of
sciences.  Amariglio, the editor of the journal Rethinking Marxism,
added in Thursday night's plenary that this doesn't mean we can't
struggle politically over consequences. But since our paradigms
don't speak to each other and our sciences exhaust their efficacies
in the boundaries we draw, in terms of exactly what do we struggle
over consequences?  
 
One of the plenary speakers emphasized the degree to which most of
the third world had been left out of the chemical revolution and a
good thing it was too.  Local knowledges survive and biodiversity
with them.  A methodology for the left would see in the local
character of all knowledges a challenge to embrace the
contributions of others.  The international working class shall be
the human race:  the limits of any one person or group are
completed by the contributions of others.  But this requires an
ability to get beyond the subjective limits which define any of us. 
Not even the interests of all peoples of the world can define the
limit of our perspective or context of our flourishing for we are
not the only species on earth.  Critical realism recognizes the
fallible and contingent character of all knowledge but makes an
opportunity of it, and we have, as intellectuals, a responsiblity
to (of all things!) *absence*, viz. to the broad based and popular
political movement we need.  For this we show how unity is
facilitated by being grounded in the ontological realism, epistemic
relativism and judgmental rationalism.  From the real, to the real
and democratic struggle over difference is possible because of a
context independent of our thinking of it.
 
For those interested, the best discussions I'm aware of in the
marxist tradition on the problem of overcoming subjectivism and the
organizational sectarianism that inevitably accompanies it are in
Mao's writings on party rectification in the early forties (in the
Selected Works), and also those from the campaign in the late 50s
against the bourgeois rightists (in volume 5; v. 5 is not so well
known and has some very good stuff).  
 
I have some differences with Howie's posts which I think will
sharpen some of these points, but I will have to come back to them.
 
Howard
 



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