Date: Mon, 16 Mar 1998 11:05:13 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: listen, vanguardists!



I nearly threw NLR 227 through a window when I started to read the article
by Butler that Doug quotes. The sentences that triggered this violentr
response from me were those in the first paragraph that say, "if I fail to
give the names of those I take to hold these views [it is because] to
linlk individuals to such views runs the risk of defecting atention to the
meanig and effect of [the views I attack] to the pettier politics to who
said what. . . ." Well, pardonnez _moi_ Professeur Butler! Or perhaps I
should avoid the petty politics of actually attributing to anyone in
particular any specifiable views. Citation and precisions are after all
petty politics. 

The reason Butler declines to cite anyone is, I presume, because no one
actually holds the views she attacks. In nearly 20 years ofa ctive left
politics I have never encountered any real person who believes anything
remotely like the dinosaur views Butler thinks it important enough to
criticize and NLR thinks it important enough to give her a platform to
denounce. Well, that's not quite true. I have met one such person, Ernie
Haberkern, Hal Draper's editor. I realize it's pettet politics to name
names and give cites, but you can see Ernie advocating such views in
criticizinbg my own defense of the proposition that Marxists have
something to learn from the New Left in an issue of Against the Current in
late 1994 or early 1995. 

One person who maintains these views in about 20 years--is that unusual? I
don't think so. My own experience on the left is not so unusual. I was in
the CWP, then in Solidarity. I worked in the British Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament, then in the American anti-nuclear and Central America and
Philippine Solidarity movements, and most recently in the labor movement.
I have met and had extended practical and intellectual interactions with
people of every political persuasion. I am pretty well familiar with the
literture of the left. I don't think the views that Butler attacks are
widely enough held to be worth discussing.

So what's going on? I think what Butler's attack on the "false unity" is a
code for is an attack on class politics and Marxism. It is of a piece with
her participation in the UCSC conference on "left conservatism, where she
may have givem for all I know, this very paper. The theme of that
conference was that realism and amterialism are reactionary and
"antitheory"; the point of the NLR piece is that if you say "class" you
are dissing the queers and the women, and the Blacks, etc, none of whom,
of course, are workers, and you are denying the reality--uh, anyway, the
importance, since nothing is real or true--of "culture." Where is Ralph
when you need him? This sort of pernicious, obscurantist crap should be
exterminated. 

I don't get it, Doug. Your own writing is clear, precise, solid,
class-conscious, _Marxist_. What on eath do you see in a bucket of shit
like Butler?

--jks 

On Mon, 16 Mar 1998, Doug Henwood wrote:

> Hugh Rodwell wrote:
> 
> >>>From Judith Butler's "Merely Cultural," published in both the current
> >>Social Text and the current New Left Review:
> >>
> >>"To fault new social movements for their vitality, as some have done, is
> >>precisely to refuse to understand that any future for the Left will have to
> >>build on the basis of movements that compel democratic participation, and
> >>that any effort to impose unity upon such movements from the outside will
> >>be rejected once again as a form of vanguardism dedicated to the production
> >>of hierarchy and dissension, producing the very factionalization that it
> >>asserts is coming from outside itself."
> >
> >
> >Doug obviously thinks this paragraph has something important to say, but of
> >course it would never cross his mind to spell out what it is.
> 
> Why the hell should I have to gloss something that makes perfect sense on
> its own, Hugh?
> 
> Let me spell it out for those of you who can see the world only as
> refracted through the Transitional Program. Complaints from dinosaur
> leftists about the fractionation of the left are, whether they know it or
> not, expressions of nostalgia for the days when women, queers, racial
> "minorities," and greens didn't make such a fuss. The dinosaurs' call for
> "unity" is, whether they know it or not, a plea for the troublemakers to
> shut up. But it's precisely that false unity, which is achieved through the
> silencing of dissent in the name of "vanguardism," produces exactly the
> kinds of ruptures that the vanguardists mourn. For example, if the male
> dinosaurs didn't tell women (and men interested in gender issues) that
> their concerns were secondary, bourgeois even, then there probably would
> not be so many anti-marxist feminists in the world. Ditto those orthodox
> Marxists who told homosexuals that their desires are symptoms of bourgeois
> decadence.
> 
> Is that clear enough, Hugh?
> 
> Doug
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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