Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 18:53:06 +0100
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk>
Subject: radical positions...


A radical intellectual position in the 21st Century surely must contain 
the overt Marx - lets be clear that if we want to continue with the 
reclamation of Marx, so necessary if we are to struggle against the 
neo-imperialism of the G8 countries. This variant of left thought does 
not stand on the absurdly constraining trinary structure:= the 
dialectical philosophy of history, the labour theory of value, the 
theory of the withering away of the state. Though it's probably 
necessary to say that Marxism is for me completely synonomous with 
modern materialsim,  understood as such as being an expression of the 
trend that has occupied aspects of modernity and which has seemingly 
always been attacked by it;  this is the route that "leads from 
Machiavelli to Spinoza and on to Marx " and beyond. The recovery of 
Marxism has a powerful  resonence in the present circumstances for it 
does represent a return to the first principles of the trend. The idea 
that Eric for example expresses - that i'd paraphrase as accepting the 
necessity of  continuing to work the hybrid of the various "posts" with 
the work of the different Marxist threads  (I conflate postmodernisn, 
postcolonialism, poststructuralisms here to simplify the issue) seems 
precisely to the point.  

Lyotard was perhaps right when he placed the differend between himself 
and Souryi in  terms of whether the new direction that the world had 
taken since the second world war (1982 ) could be still understood  and 
perhaps transformed again with "Marxism". It was a differend that could 
never be resolved from, the moment when Lyotard "contested or even 
suspected Marxism's ability to express the changes of the contemporary 
world..."  At that moment with the counter reformation in full swing I 
would have agreed with him - but not now when we should accept the 
necessity of the long history of the leftist critique.  This assumes 
incidentally that the young militants of the multitude will decide 
themselves what they want to do against the empire - they seem better 
equipped to engage in such a struggle than I was when I was young. For 
myself though I am heading off to look at the "start the peace" and work 
to ensure that the labour party pays the absolute maximum possible 
political price for taking britain into the war with iraq...

To take this thought forward then - and we need to recognise that 
various things can be taken forward - perhaps most importantly the idea 
of working on  the analyses of value and valorization through the 
concept of the general intellect (aka the human subject) in the wake of 
the almost total subsumption of society by capital. This seems an 
extraordinarily attractive way forward - it would for example - to use 
part of an ongoing argument - probably have to counter the developmental 
notion of the cyborg for an analysis of our positions as cyber-flanuers.

Perhaps then the first question is - "is there anything which has not be 
subsumed by capital ?"

regards
steve