Date: Wed, 1 Oct 1997 09:44:20 +0200
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-TH: Adorno, Dennis G and utopian flooze


In a soundbite, Dennis G's position is utopian to the core. It's anarchist
in relation to the state, reformist in relation to strategy and opportunist
in relation to mobilization. Philosophically it's idealist. A sure recipe
for political disaster and letting capitalism off the hook -- again.

Because those of us who remember 1968 remember the incredible illusions
people had about the marvels of modern communication etc substituting for
the need of a party -- this was Marcuse and Marshall Macluhan time, and all
you needed was love (and maybe for the street-fighting man -- the
"Katangans" in Paris or the Panthers -- a Molotov cocktail and a rifle or
two). And meanwhile the French CP was working its arse off deceiving the
workers and pacifying them to save De Gaulle's skin and his capitalist
state.

This ahistorical flooze is being perpertrated today by the Usec and whole
swarms of other petty-bourgeois anti-party "leftists" worldwide.

Imagine for a second that these people were serious about revolutionary
social and economic change as the cure for the ills of capitalism. Imagine
that they were willing to sink their differences for the sake of this great
general objective. Imagine them organized in a party that meant business
and was seen by the workers and poor of the world to do so.

The world wouldn't look the way it does today.

Cheers,

Hugh

PS This is no attack on the personal character of Dennis or others who
think like him. It's a comment on the positions they hold, which are quite
capable of being changed to something better, ie views more likely to
actually help rid the world of capitalism and replace it with socialism.


___________________________________________________



>On Mon, 29 Sep 1997, Michael Hoover wrote:
>> are you familiar with an address that A gave to the German Sociological
>> Conference in 1968 (a year before his death)?...Tom Bottomore cites
>> this in his thin primer entitled *The Frankfurt School*/1984...
>>
>> According to Bottomore, Adorno pursues an argument in which he
>> concludes that "the system", now independent of all members
>> of society, including those in the commanding positions, is driven on
>> by the impersonal forces of technological rationality...Michael
>
>Yes, it was called "Late Capitalism or Industrial Society", I think. It's
>quite a good essay. I've not run across Bottomore's argument, but it
>sounds similar to the usual rap on Adorno, namely that he was (1)
>apolitical or (2) hopelessly gloomy. My response to this is, Adorno was
>plenty political, but not in the sense of heaving Molotov cocktails into
>the streets of Paris. In Adorno's essay, he makes the point that the usual
>arguments about capitalism being either "late capitalism" or
>"industrial society" don't hold water: in fact, capitalism circa 1968 was
>both of those things. This means that a genuine resistance has to fight on
>both fronts at once: we have to find a planetary alternative to
>transnational accumulation, and we also have to find local alternatives to
>the deadening homogenization and authoritarian identity-politics of
>capital. Some may call this being gloomy, because it makes the futility of
>rioting in the streets palpable; I call it bracingly realistic, because it
>acknowledges the utopian impulse of 1968, but also insists that the
>Revolution can't happen that way. Adorno's model would be countless
>micro-revolutions, tied together in strategic ensembles; in "Negative
>Dialectics" he points out that true dialectical thinking in late
>capitalism has to avoid centralizing its categories, and must think in an
>ensemble of "Modellanalysen" or thought-models. This is where the Greens,
>the identity movements, lesbian-gay liberation, multi-culturalism,
>feminism et. al. come into play: such movements are indeed revolutionary,
>to the extent that they organized against the reigning Wealthy White Male
>Power Establishment, and invented new kinds of incipiently
>transnational solidarity. Today, these solidarities are
>becoming Resistances, e.g. the transference from 1968's
>"the personal is the political" to the 1997 UPS "the personal
>packaging-service is political". Which makes it all the more important to
>think through Adorno's work for the coming millenium. In a soundbite,
>Adorno is postmodernism's Karl Marx.
>
>-- Dennis
>
>
>
>     --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---





     --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---