Date: Sun, 13 Apr 1997 15:22:28 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Amrohini J. Sahay" <ajsahay-AT-mailbox.syr.edu>
Subject: M-I: PERFORMATIVE LEFT: THE RED CRITIQUE



We are re-posting this text as the orignal was corrupted in translation.


	PERFORMATIVE LEFT: A RED CRITIQUE OF THE THEATRE CALLED
		 "BETWEEN CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY"     

The "Between Capitalism and Democracy" conference at SUNY-Buffalo (April
18, 1997) held by the Graduate Group in Marxist Studies (GGMS) is an
occasion to place the left academy in a world-historical context and
examine some of its practices that have made it the most trusted ally of
capitalism now.  The theatre that passes as "left" at SUNY-Buffalo,
should not be treated simply as an amusing but irrelevant side-show.  The
performative left is representative of the academic left in the U.S. 
today. As such it requires a sustained analysis.
	At the core of this performative left lies the idea that
"identity" is founded on an "impossibility" -- the "lack" of a reliable
anchorage in the extra-discursive real -- which when "revealed" subverts
the "concept" and leads to the free and equal dissemination of "pleasure"
for everyone.  "Pleasure" is meant to reference that moment when everyday
means-end rationality -- the conventional adequation of signifier to
signified -- is disrupted and "meaning" is liberated from its compulsory
cultural normativity.  The performative left does not accept that there
finally is an "outside" of normative cultural "values" however -- in other
words, a practical economic basis (exploitation) that causes and thus
explains the seemingly autonomous status of such cultural superstructures
like "morality", the "everyday" and what gets marked as "compulsory"
itself -- and this leads them to valorize "resignification" as an end in
itself; as a transhistorically and universally effective means for the
personal "liberation" of "pleasure" in the "undecidability" of
"meaning"/"values". It is, in fact, the subject as a subject-of-a-lack
(the subject-of-desire who lacks concept) who pursues his own "pleasure"
regardless of the systematic consequences of this that is the dominant
identity of postmodern capitalism and its compulsory regime of
consumption.  It is the performative left's support of this dominant
subject that makes it the trusted ally of capital today.  The seeming
universality of "resignification" as a means for the realization of
personal liberation is thus not only NOT universally applicable but in
fact a class based practice: it corresponds to the position of the petty
bourgeois who, already having his primary needs met, has nothing left to
do but speculate on the expansion of "new" opportunities of consumption.
The performative left gives the petty bourgeoisie a false consciousness
about its social position, however, which is designed to make its
particular form of exploitation -- which stems from the fact that it can
not accumulate capital and thus cannot enter the ranks of the ruling class
who have already monopolized the means of production -- the sign of its
radical difference from the mass of the working class.  
	Not only is "resignification" not universally socially relevant as
a means of transformation but it is also an historically determined form
of "pleasure" as well.  The performative left advocates "resignification"
rather than revolution as a means of liberation at a time when the petty
bourgeoisie has already been massively proletarianized (i.e. has entered
the ranks of wage laborers).  Because the performative left has abandoned
Marxism however it does not have the capacity (we don't say the will) to
understand the political economy of its own emergence as the false
consciousness of the postmodern petty bourgeoisie.  As a result it sees
the current class polarization of the world not as the vindication of
Marxism -- the global consolidation of  world capitalism and its division
into two antagonistic classes already foreseen in the Manifesto of the
Communist Party and Capital -- but as itself a symptom of a finally
unknowable, because "absent", cause that  Zizek calls the "Real" and
Lyotard the "sublime" (to name a few).  In  other words, the performative
left takes the collective "lack" of unmet primary needs that has been
socially engineered by the bourgeoisie through, among other things, the
defeat of the Soviet Union (which was the primary means to insure the most
massive transfer of social wealth in the industrialized countries from the
workers to the owners since the 30s), as a transcendental given (an
"event") in need of no explanation.  It is in  Zizek's work most of all
that the compulsory subject of consumption is secured by trivializing
recent history by making class struggle itself a transcendental
("sublime") object of ideology.  In his texts class struggle becomes an
automatic "structure of repetition" that mimics the "libidinal economy" of
"desire" (projection, identification, disavowal) that has no objective
connection to the daily exploitation of labor-power (the extraction of
surplus-labor) which is what finally divides the owning-ruling class from
the working class.  The performative left is constantly searching to
"resignify" the effects of this class antagonism in the workday into such
unconsciously compulsive repetitive structures of everyday "desire"
because such troping of real social contradictions as imaginative ones is
the epistemological pre-condition of the "subversion" of "identity"
through new methods of consumption; their particular panacea for the
growing inequality and escalating social crisis of capitalism in decline.
They think that through the "subversion" of normative cultural "identity"
the masses will "learn to live with lack" (Silverman, Male  Subjectivity
65) of their primary needs being met and the social crisis thus become
diffused.  But all that this deconstruction of identity produces is the
same old liberal pluralism which serves to whitewash the ruling class, the
only social class who actually benefits from the racist patriarchal
subjectivities the performative left overstates as "compulsory" to
capitalism.  By reducing these reactionary ideologies to habitually
(unconsciously) repeated "necessary fictions" in the way that the
performative left does when it treats "identity" as a cultural practice
fueled by "desire" with no necessary relation to economic exploitation
they sever them from the materiality of existing social relations and
imply that workers have an (unconscious libidinal) interest in maintaining
their own oppression and exploitation.  The obverse side of this perverse
notion of the "libidinal economists" of the performative left is the idea
that the actual oppressors and exploiters of others can "desire" their own
undoing and morally reform themselves through the "conspicuous
consumption" of their property through socially symbolic acts like
shopping!   
	The "Between Capitalism and Democracy" conference is another
instance of the ludic "subversion" of "identity" as a means to produce the
pleasures of anti-theory.  The title itself announces that it is to be a
"critical" gathering where the normative identity of "capitalism" with
"democracy" is deconstructed.  But, because it is not explained how such a
deconstruction of identity leads to practical transformative results
within the conditions of the ongoing class struggle (i.e. in the
"pleasure" of the "non-concept" according to the dominant ideology), it is
self-evidently accepted by the authors of the flyer that "critique"
amounts to such deconstruction and that this "critique" is a sufficient
end in itself that need not be interrogated for its presuppositions and
consequences.  It is because they dogmatically assume that the
epistemological deconstruction of "identity" marks the limit of critique
that the authors of the conference flyer feel free to bypass  concepts
altogether and represent their position graphically ("")[[ NOTE: THE
CHARACTER BETWEEN "" DOES NOT NECESSARILY REGISTER AS THE SYMBOL FOR "IS
NOT EQUAL TO" ON THE DISCUSSION LISTS]].  In  short, we are here marking
this "" graphic as the practical "moment of  pleasure" of the conference
announcement text that occupies the space of their "lack" of theoretical
engagement with other (critique-al) knowledges and attests to their
allegiance to the reigning ideology.  "" means "is  not equal to"; the
beginning and end of deconstruction as critique.  On encountering this ""
potential conference attendees are reassured that the conference will be a
space in which concepts are not taken seriously (i.e.  "literally" in
contestation with and in a position of antagonism to other concepts) but
"figurally" and thus allowed to "play".  "Antagonistic?  Parasitic?
Mutually supportive?" are possible signifieds the GGMS thinks to be
relevant and valid at this time so to appreciate the plenitude of ""
(inequality).  This series of free-floating signifieds implies that the
list of possible significants is endless and thus "exceeds" theoretical
reduction which not only points up the positive value the GGMS assigns to
philosophical eclecticism as a counter to the determination of the concept
through class struggle at the level of theory, but underlines the liberal
pluralism that is to rule the conference.  Such a "playful" ("pluralist")
space is premised on the suppression of critique-al contestation.  Such a
playful space makes it impossible to show how "" naturalizes inequality by
making the political economy of inequality into  a graphic self-evidency.
Bourgeois ideology is constructed of such local self-evidencies that
disguise class.  "" is like when Justice Bork and his Republican friends
say "equality of outcomes" is "impossible" or when Chantal Mouffe calls
socialism "the dangerous dream" of "substantial  homogeneity" founded on
the impossibility of "perfect consensus, of a harmonious collective will"
(Radical Democracy 20).  "Inequality of  outcomes", in other words, is the
common-sense of late capitalism.  "Inequality of outcomes" ("") is
common-sense because it merely  (re)describes in figurative language the
actual equal opportunity to sell one's private labor-power to the highest
bidder under the general conditions of existing social inequality where
the means to consume labor is privately owned and like all individual
rights already secured by law.  "Inequality of outcomes" is the socially
necessary form of equality under capitalist relations of production.  The
program of "radical democrats" like Laclau and Mouffe, as well as Judge
Bork, is in fact to "extend" (Mouffe 20) such equal "rights" while leaving
the dominant political economy untouched and uninterrogated.  "Radical
democracy" does the work  of the ruling class because it makes "equal
rights" a panacea for economic  exploitation and thus legitimates the
existing class structure.  
	What are the politics of holding a conference whose "theme", to
use the words of the conference announcement, is "between capitalism and
democracy" under the banner of Marxism in today's "death to communism"
climate under the dominance of postmodern intelligibilities?  To read the
conference flyer symptomatically the reactionary tendency becomes clear,
it asks "What is the relationship between these two terms?"  For
revolutionary Marxism "between" capitalism and democracy is, of course,
revolution which would be the attainment of control over the means of
production by the working class lead by its vanguard party.  It is only
through social revolution that the global majority (the proletariat)  will
be enabled to finally realize their democratic freedoms -- political and
economic self-determination.  This worker's democracy would be, at the
same time, a dictatorship against the bourgeoisie and its allies, a
reversal in fact of the present dictatorship of the bourgeoisie against
the workers and their allies, but, of course, in the process of withering
away with the spread of revolution on an international scale.  Marxism
makes it absolutely clear -- EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME -- that there can be
no  "democracy" so long as classes exist; i.e., no "democracy" as such as
the  conference flier implies.  Democracy is ALWAYS a means to an end
dictated by historic class interests and NEVER an end in itself.  To imply
that it is possible to theoretically abstract "democracy" as a "term"
(another kind of floating signifier like "") from the totality of present
social relations in order to consider "alternative" possibilities in the
way that the conference flyer does is a thin alibi to renounce taking an
active and interventionary role in present social contestations.  Even
postmodern  intelligibilities already problematize this kind of "neutral"
and  "contemplative" cognitive formalism from a "political" position (in
which "politics" signals embeddedness in the signifying chain and the
absolute lack of transcendence).  Capitalism and democracy, in short, are
not abstract "terms" that are opposable to an atheoretical practice
transpiring "elsewhere" or in "the future", but are themselves already
concrete (i.e. theoretical) practices.  It is the historical series of
these practices that one must first grasp in their social materiality (the
labor relations) as a precondition for changing the world.  It is because
the conference announcement does not situate itself in relation to the
latest knowledges while it presupposes their self-evidency and blurs them
with liberal humanist categories in an eclectic way that suggests their
possible peaceful co-existence that we say it plots a reactionary
tendency.  Furthermore, what's "between" "terms" (what we are calling
practices) like "capitalism" and "democracy" is not reducible to a "theme"
that is innocently being proposed to be "investigated" or "surveyed", but
a part of a more encompassing social practice that either
goes-along-to-get-along with the existing or is in irreconcilable
opposition.  In the case of the GGMS conference, which reduces the
historical praxis of Marxism in relation to capitalism and democracy to a
"theme" of cognitive contemplation (haven't they heard that the
philosophers have already interpreted the world?), what is given a space
is what is already given a space everywhere else; the dominant ideology
that says opposition to the existing "might" take the form of a
post-marxist "radical democracy" of the type found in Ellen Meiksens
Wood's Democracy Against Capitalism.  We contest this abdication to the
dominant that would imply that "radical democracy" had anything
oppositional about it.  It is in fact "radical democracy" itself which is
the dominant ideology of late capitalism because it reproduces and
maintains the common sense self-evidencies of bourgeois rule under the
guise of the "new".  The "new"-est version of the "new" "radical
democracy" is of course Wood's Democracy Against Capitalism which
disguises itself as a Marxist critique of post-marxism while practically
ending up in exactly the same place.  The rise of Wood to the status of a
"folk hero" of the left these days is itself highly symptomatic of the
complicity of the left (especially its so-called "radical" wing that in
its literature critiques more obviously reactionary moves such as neo/post
Marxism) with cybercapitalism.  Wood's recent appointment to the board of
editors of the left reformist Monthly Review (whose current editors Sweezy
and Magdoff have done so much to "revise" Marxist political economy and
thus prepare the road for the post-al orthodoxy of "market socialism") has
been celebrated in left circles (both on the internet and other places) as
a moment of triumph of the radical Marxism.  The only way to "read" this
jubilation is to understand it as a death-wish of the left: what Sweezy
and Magdoff's revisionary economics has done to Marxist political economy,
Wood's revisionary analytics (her destruction, for example, of "base and
superstructure") is doing to Marxist epistemology.  How she -- a
bourgeois radical democrat who is continuing the conservative humanism of
E.P. Thompson -- becomes the "hero" of the "radical" left in the U.S.
above all shows the theoretical backwardness of the U.S. left.
"Democracy against capitalism" is an old story of the left.  What  seems
to give it a "new" found social relevance is the return to it on the part
of the academic left after the historical "detour" through, and
subsequent bankruptcy of, poststructuralist intelligibilities.  The
academic left is now in high-gear attempting to reconcile the theoretical
presuppositions of "ludic" theory (premised on the "play"-full-ness of the
signifier) with the existing extra-discursive objects of the activist left
(the "body" "pleasure" "community" "identity" etc.) in the attempt to
reform capitalism through "the extension of the democratic ideals of
liberty and equality to more and more areas of social life" (Mouffe,
Radical Democracy 20). They have united, therefore, against the
revolutionary opposition who maintain theory as a guide for social
transformation (Marxism).  For the reformists theory as praxis is the
problem because it establishes a relation of priority between the
extra-discursive and the discursive wherein the former is explained as
causing and thus determining the latter.  The reformists all say that by
maintaining a scientific relation between the subject and the world
Marxism reproduces the violence of capitalism.  Whether they come to this
conclusion through old New Left critique of "theory" as bureaucratic
"instrumental reason" that "alienates" the humanist subject of the
traditional romantic left or through the postmodern critique of theory as
"totalitarian" irradication of "difference" doesn't finally make much
difference.  Marx called the idea that his "method of determining the
value of labour-power, a method prescribed by the very nature of the case,
is brutal" "an extraordinarily cheap kind of sentimentality" (Capital
277).  Without revolutionary theory (Marxism) all that's left for
oppositional practice is "volunteer-ism";  the ideology of
business-as-usual.  Behind the self-consciousness of the reformists who
are all (always) very decided in that they don't want theory as
critique-al praxis lies the problem of those who must manage the social
contradictions of late capitalism in decline; how best to determine the
limits of the working day in a manner least conducive to antagonizing the
working class.  The GGMS conference, albeit symptomatically, is "aware" of
this historical problem but it presents it as an epistemological one only
in this way to "resolve" the pressure upon ideology through an eclectic
pluralism.  The conference, we are told, is to determine what is "between
capitalism and democracy" by "how... each [is] related to that entity
known as 'the Enlightenment'". By attempting to determine this relation --
which for the reformists is basically the problem of the "rate" of
exploitation, on whether it should be increased absolutely through the
de(con)struction of the social wage, for example, or relatively through
incremental technological innovations and ad hoc legislation etc. --
through reference to an "idea" the conference shows the dominant that they
are "good" subjects because they can agree-to-disagree about the
"heritage" of the Enlightenment (whether it should be "extended" [ la
Habermas/Clinton] or "ended" [Lyotard/Gingrich] etc.).  In maintaining the
idealist tradition the GGMS occults the determination of the conference by
the political economy of capitalism in decline (which is nothing else than
the decline in the rate of profit due to the inevitably increasing organic
composition of capital that Marx explained scientifically).  The academy's
(renewed) support for "socially relevant" (basically cultural materialist)
knowledges  by, for example, funding such things as the GGMS conference
is a direct result of this economic crisis.  Finally, in  a typical move,
they opt to "resolve" the contradiction for themselves  by  (what else?),
an appeal to a higher authority; they make Professor Wood a "keynote
speaker".   
	The consistent attempts by the GGMS to suppress the ongoing and
incessant critique-al oppositions generated by existing social
arrangements -- be it through such high-tech devices like computer
graphics (""); old-tech means that attempt to preserve the relevance of
liberal humanist scholarly categories ("theme", "terms" etc.); or simply
low-tech attacks on others like when on 24 November 1995 one of their
members physically assaulted us as he acted out his racist imaginary
(saying, "Get your ass out of UB...  English courses. Give... us...
room!") --  manifests itself yet again in the way they have
(pre)determined the conference "theme".  The "theme" of the "show"
"between capitalism and democracy" is what it is because the "star" (what
the flyer announcement calls a "keynote speaker") is the "author" of
Democracy Against Capitalism and other "Great Books" (that they list).
What is the ideological function of "keynote speaker"?  Why "conference"
now?  Why should anybody be interested in going to a "conference" on
"democracy and capitalism"?  Although the GGMS do not even formulate such
questions -- such questions problematize the business-as-usual of the
movers-and-shakers they imagine themselves to be as they "mingle" with the
academic "celebs" -- we do not have to depend on their own lack of
theorization for the answer.  We simply read back to them the literality
of their own practices from which a "subject-of-conference" is implied. We
have already seen him swelling  with pride when he encountered the "" of
the flyer announcement (as he  is already familiar with aesthetic
de-familiarization), but now we want to read him at the "conference"
itself.  "Conference" is a "scholarly" safe haven from contestation from
which knowledges are abstracted from their cruel literality, the
historicity of their presuppositions and  consequences, in which he feels
secure as a "participant" who has "questions".  At "conference" one can
not implicate practices in the  reigning political economy by showing how
their formal self-reflexivity  contradicts their practical implication in
maintaining exploitation. Such pressuring and pushing contradictions to
crisis, which is, at least  initially, the purpose of an ideology
critique, is seen as "crude".  It is already decided at "conference", in
other words, that critique is to be an immanent affair (NO IDEOLOGY
CRITIQUE).  It is always already decided at conferences that if one
critiques "conference" as a repressive bourgeois institution that
segregates knowledge practices from the systematicity of dominant social
arrangements one simply lacks  self-reflexivity because you are at
conference!  Just like when the GGMS  member who assaulted us because we
critique our courses first said, "If this course isn't good enough for
you, then don't take it" and then said "if the presence of such a course
offends you so, get your ass out of UB!"  (see, the Alternative Orange
Fall/Winter 1995-96 Vol. 5 No. 1, 19).  In  the "conference" "about"
"democracy" (and "capitalism") it is already decided that these are
"terms" that above all are never (never!?) equal (just say, "").  At such
"conferences" about "democracy" it is already  decided that Red Critique
is "undemocratic" because it does not privilege what individuals think or
feel they are doing and bases its practices on the reliable knowledge of
social totality instead.  As we have written  "we are, by any standards of
a bourgeois democracy 'authoritarian' -- we  simply do not accept the
masquerade of democracy which is put forth by the  liberal state as
'democratic'; we believe that radical equality is not the function of
purely political practices... but entails struggles to completely
restructure all the social... institutions of the liberal state and to
abolish the regime of exploitation that undergirds them" (Alternative
Orange Fall/Winter 1995-96 Vol.5 No.1, 4).       

The Revolutionary Marxist Collective at the University of Buffalo (SUNY).    

April 2, 1997    

Full text to be published in the upcoming issue of the Alternative  Orange
(Spring/Summer 1997).  Send response/critique and/or subscription
requests to Brian Ganter and Stephen Tumino at sctumino-AT-acsu.buffalo.edu




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