From: LeoCasey-AT-aol.com
Date: Sat, 8 Nov 1997 17:42:36 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: Post-Marxism and Paleo-Marxism


I approach this thread with some ambivalence. It started as my attempt to
explain what I meant when I said (via an introduction to the list) that
politics and theory were not reducible to each other, that my politics were
best described as radical democratic, and that after a long engagement with
the Marxist theoretical tradition, my theoretical presuppositions could be
best described as 'post-Marxist'. The thread quickly went off into the
question of what constitutes 'post-Marxism', and I was -- and am -- willing
to try to explain what I understand to be the substance of that stance. But I
have no desire to proselytize my theoretical perspective. Politics is my
passion; theory informs my politics, and is more of an advocation than a
passion. I have long since abandoned what I think is a fundamentally
sectarian faith in the power of "correct" ideas to lead to "correct" politics
to lead to "revolution". For a tradition such as Marxism, which places great
stake on its 'materialism', this obsession with "correct" ideas (expressed in
the fetish of the 'program') is the crudest of idealist practices. If my
theoretical ideas and perspective shed some light for some, fine; if others
find them less helpful, no great loss. I have become something of a
theoretical agnostic and pragmatist. What is important for me is the capacity
to develop common ground on political questions.

This having been said, I would like to comment briefly on some of the issues
raised by Justin and Ralph, if only because I think that my comments -- and
post-Marxism more generally -- has been seriously distorted at points. Common
understanding will emerge only when we engage each other on the ground on
which we actually stand.

I do not find it very helpful to define differences here by beginnings with
appeals to authority, especially Norman Geras and Ellen Wood, on the part of
Justin, and Bryan Palmer, on the part of Ralph. It should really not come as
any surprise that I have read their work, and am not in the slightest
convinced by it. Indeed, if you are going to make an argument to authority,
let's produce some real, substantive authorities in the Marxist tradition,
not these third rate, third generation reproductions (epigones of epigones).
Geras is as pedestrian and stupidly orthodox a philosopher as they come, Wood
is nothing but a crude polemicist with the thinnest veneers of theoretical
sophistication and Palmer, when not just ranting and raving about how his
experiences at the Mayday anti-war demonstration of three decades past was
the real class struggle, is, in Ralph's favorite phraseology of the moment,
rather (b)anal. (It is interesting to note that the cited texts of these
three writers are all polemics against what they perceive as heretical
post-Marxist assaults on Marxism, and serve the narrow purpose of reassuring
the faithful that there is nothing to be worried about, that there is no need
to actually engage the works or the theory in question. So it is a little
hard not to be annoyed by the recitation of the litany of Marxist classics
which allegedly refute my comments {as if I had never read them and knew
nothing of them} when there is no evidence of any corresponding familiarity
with, to cite one obvious example I had made reference to, labor history
informed by discourse analysis.)

I also think it is mistake to impute to the other a position one does not
take. (Some would call this arguing against a 'straw man'.) Justin writes:
<<I suspect that what's going on here is that Leo has a more fundamental
doubt. He thinks the workers are incapable of making revolution. Where this
pessimism comes from in his case I cannot guess from what he's said. I am
intermittently attracted to it myself, partly on the grounds of personal
experience and the facts of American history, partly because there are
powerful theoretical arguments--not the ones Leo invokes--to doubt it.
Nonetheless I think that if the workers cannot do it, no one
can, and if they cannot, we are doomed. So I try not to dwell on that and
(like Leo) spend my time trying to enhance the fighting power of the
organized working class.>>
The problem in imputing ("I suspect...") this position to me is that it just
does a poor job of representing what I think, and mixes together issues about
which I have distinct positions. With respect to the power and capacity of
working people, my position is simply what I stated originally: I do not see
them as the ONLY social agent capable of leading fundamental social change.
When -- and if -- you give up the poetic eschatology of the 'riddle of
history solved', there is no reason, other than disembodied faith in a
messiah of the past who has no meaning in a disenchanted present, to insist
that only the 'working class' can perform that role. (By the same token, I
think it is no less an act of faith (disguised as anti-faith) to dismiss for
all time the capacity of working people to effect such change -- it is the
village atheist's simplistic response to the realization that there is no
messiah.)

Further, I have problems with the way in which the category 'class' is
employed within the mainstream of the Marxist tradition, as I do not find
this framework very helpful in understanding and furthering the role of
working people in making change. The radical separation between the
'objective' class-in-itself and the 'subjective' class-for-itself which is
central to Marx's exposition of class is extremely problematic: my point in
referring to its Hegelian antcedents was not that Hegel somehow used the same
terminology (a proposition self-evidently false to anyone with a passing
familiarity with Hegel's writings), but that it relied upon the idealist
teleology of Hegel, in which the implicit idea-in-itself (the germ, the seed)
develops, through the negation of the negation, into a fully actualized and
realized idea-for-itself. Insofar as E. P. Thompson has valuable things to
say about the development of the English working class, or Eugene Genovese
has insight into the culture of enslaved African-Americans, and I would never
deny that they do, it is in spite of, rather than because of, this Marxist
conceptual framework. The separation of objective and subjective, social
being and consciousness, upon which the theory is based, is simply not a
very, yes, dialectical way of conceptualizing the question. Whatever the
contributions of figures such as <<Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Ho, Fidel>> which
Justin cites, and I am one who thinks that the contributions of this
particular lot were largely negative, especially in their embrace of
authoritarianism, I don't see how they added anything to an understanding of
class. And those politically active and more democratic figures in the
Marxist tradition which did make contributions in terms of political
intervention, such as a Gramsci or a Cabral, did so despite of and around
Marxist theories of class.

Finally, it is about time that we recognize that Marxism is not the only way
to theorize the role of working people in fundamental social change, contra
the foolish arguments of Wood and Palmer. To cite just one example, there is
the left-Weberian analysis of Anthony Giddens. However one wants to add up
the strengths and weaknesses of his efforts -- and I believe that it has both
-- why do some find it so hard to recognize the existence of alternatives to
the Marxist theory of class.

Now, what I do longer accept is the opposition between 'reform' and
'revolution', drawn with the purpose of affirming 'revolution' over 'reform'.
I no longer believe in the New Jerusalem, the transparent society without
social conflict, and thus in the need for a 'revolution', rather than
'reform', to attain that end. This opposition is, in my view, part and parcel
of the eschatology found in the Marxist tradition, and it contributes to
fundamentally authoritarian notions of social change. I continue to believe
in fundamental social change in the sense of radically modifying existing
power relations, but I do not identify that with the pursuit of revolution.

Leo