Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 21:10:22 -0500
From: Mary Murphy&Salstrand <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: An Idea whose time will never come


Steve/All:

I find it interesting you mentioned "Just Gaming" in your "Return to
Marx" post.  As it happens, I have also been rereading this book
recently.  There are some things discussed in it I think can be related
in a positive way to the further development of Marxism after the Soviet
demise.

First, I think it needs to be acknowledged there are many Marxisms and
certainly within the last half century there has been a schism between
mainstream Marxism represented by Lenin, Mao, and Trotsky and the
various heretical tendencies. These include the Johnson-Forest tendency
in the United States, the Socialisme ou barbarie movement in France,
Autonomia and Operismo in Italy and various other groups worldwide.

Each criticized Russia and China as forms of state capitalism,
mistrusted Lenin and Trotsky on organization and leadership, extended
the movement towards youth, women and minorities and, in a word,
practiced subjectivity.  

Against the economism and determinism of dialectical materialism, these
groups emphasized both the need for struggle and the recognition of
worker's inherent power.  I think the case could be made that these
movements also anticipated Lyotard's concepts of dissensus and the
differend.   

In "Just Gaming" Lyotard criticizes Marx for the same reason he
criticizes Plato.  Each creates an ontology, a model of what is true
which is then used to validate prescriptions.  Justice is obtained to
extent mimesis occurs.  Against this, Lyotard offers his pagan notion of
justice whereby one judges without criteria and no rational politics is
possible because it is always based on opinions and never upon truth. 
No description can yield the prescription.  As Levinas states, in the
obligation you are addressed by a stranger, but, unlike Levinas, there
is no need to become pious about this and privilege the ethical as
something transcendental.  Pagans like Aristotle and the Sophists shared
a similar insight as well.  

Lyotard rolls this into a variation of the Kantian Idea. This Idea, as
Lyotard points out, is strictly regulative. It can not be proved or
disproved empirically.  It is not a concept that can be realized. It
will never have historical fulfillment.  One engages it "as if" it were
a kind of social imaginary that generates its own criteria.

Lyotard breaks with Kant, however, on the topic of universality, that
totality of all rational beings who morally constitute the kingdom of
ends in the supersensible realm.  Instead, Lyotard appropriates the
Kantian Idea toward "a patchwork of language pragmatics that vibrate at
all times."

Applying this to Marxism, I would say this.  Once an Open Marxism
emerges that jettisons those nineteenth century ghosts such as
determinism, economism, historical dialectics, etc coming from a Hegel
buried with his head in the sand, doesn't Marx morph into someone like
Kant: perhaps merely one who has read more history and economics in the
British Museum instead of attending church.

One of the most remarkable social movements in the nineteenth century
was the Abolitionist movement that began with the simple Idea "slavery
is wrong".  This Idea was never realized.  Jim Crow and Reconstruction
saw to that, but it did impact significantly on history and brought
about a number of positive changes.  

As those in the labor movement, including Marx, recognized, Wage Slavery
continues this domination in the forms of child labor, sweatshops, the
working poor, alienation and exploitation.  The Idea that slavery is
wrong continues to regulate action and praxis as multitudes seek to
change those institutions that continue to perpetuate this injustice for
"reasons" that remain remarkably similar to those the South previously
gave. 

Even though its temporal horizons cannot be seen, Marxism remains an
Idea whose time will never come, but this doesn't make it obsolete. 
Quite the contrary.  It is this very Idea which regulates, judges and
gives scope to the imagination to invent. It propels the multitudes
towards actions which are not even understood when they first happen.

There is one further criticism Lyotard makes of Kant and it applies
directly to renegade Marxism.  This has to do with the idea of autonomy
- the enlightenment notion that we are little gods who create ourselves
out of nothing. Causa sui.  Lyotard points out that this is
characteristic of contemporary Marxist movements as well.  There is a
"renewal of interest in various movements of that name in Italy and
Germany, movements that, insofar as they use the word autonomy in their
names, are implicated... there is a close relation between autonomy and
self-determination: one gives oneself one's own laws."

Against this, Lyotard opposes the example of the Cashinahua Indians who
do not see themselves as authors, but simply as relays.  "He presents
himself as having first been the addressee of a story of which he is now
the teller."  What Lyotard also points out about this is that it isn't
the normal sense of tradition as an identity without difference in which
changes do not occur.  Instead there is experimentation, the stories are
revised and edited, deletions are made.  What matters most is the
narrational etiquette, to tell while being a relay.

Lyotard compares this to John Cage's notion of repetitive musics:  "It
lies in the fact that they cause the forgetting of what is being
repeated and they make for a nonforgetting of time as a beat in place. 
Tradition is what concerns time, not content.  Whereas what the West
wants from autonomy, invention, novelty, self-determination, is the
opposite - to forget time and to preserve, acquire, and accumulate
contents.  Th turn them into what we call history, and to think it
progresses because it accumulates."

So there you have it, a Kantian Marxism that refuses autonomy because it
engages a new social contract since God is finally dead, even that God
once named humanity.  As it beats the drum in syncopated time, it asks
again and again: "Is it happening?"  

Marxism is an Idea whose time will never come because it, like the
Desire of Levinas, is a desire that can never be satisfied. Therefore,
it persists in time like the beat of your heart.