File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1995/95-03-31.000, message 225


Date: Wed, 15 Mar 1995 09:50:44 -0800 (PST)
From: Kenny Mostern <kennym-AT-uclink2.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Re: determination


Thank you to people for responding to my determination post.  Here are a 
few inadequate replies, perhaps one day to be more adequate:

To Chodos and others,
There is a huge tendency, and CLR James is a large part of it these days, 
to want to simply turn around "social being determines consciousness" and 
make it "and also consciousness determines social being".  I have been 
part of this tendency.  However, I hope it is clear that Williams' 
formulations do not, actually, do this, and I'm starting to think that it 
is facile to do this in general.  The point of recognizing the objective 
as a starting point outside of consciousness is recognizing that the 
space left for consciousness to work is, relatively speaking, small and 
constrained.  Consciousness therefore can adjust one's reactions to 
social being--i.e. do you fight back or do you maintain the status 
quo--but it cannot, without the substantial change in material variables, 
change social being.  One remains black, or a factory worker, or a 
woman.  (And if one doesn't, it is not because one's "consciousness" 
changes.)  The importance of the Bourdieuian formulation I cited is to 
say "free will" is always, and only, the free will to act in one's 
context.  Contexts change, but not through the actions of individuals as 
individuals.  The challenge of revolutionary strategy, is, of course, to 
see whether the actions of the individuals we are can be made to be 
collective, "class" actions (with class understood, in my writing, more 
broadly than "working class").

Totality:  I am influenced by Jameson's definition of totality as the 
mode of production, a definition which I believe must draw from world 
systems theory, though he does not note this.  We need the concept of 
totality not because it is apprehendable--clearly it is not--but because 
without it there is no way to be systematic about our thinking.  That is, 
unless we imagine that there really is a world trade network which unites 
all of us in global capitalism, there is no way to attempt (at whatever 
level) to understand why the actions of first world professionals (as I 
always, I speak of myself) might actually be oppressing people throughout 
the world who I will never see or meet.  Totality is the only plausible 
excuse for saying, we want to change the system rather than simply be 
ethical people wherever we are--which is the explicit position of the big 
names in poststructuralism, including Foucault and Derrida to name just 
two.  (In fact, we generally end up doing no 
more than the latter, and sometimes less than the latter, because, citing 
my last paragraph, we have not on the whole figured out how to act as a 
class rather than as individuals.)

Now, it remains necessary for us to try to define this totality, 
something which is never entirely accomplished.  It has become clear to 
me that there are objective sociological and possibly psychological 
conditions which contribute to the mode of production in the same sense 
that capitalism does.  If this is true, the equation totality = mode of 
production does *not* mean totality = capitalism, as traditional marxism 
(and Jameson himself)
would have it.  Rather it means something more nearly like totality = 
white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, as bell hooks, one of the most 
interesting writers around, puts it.  (Her politics are something like 
the closest nonmarxist equivalent to mine:  cf. *Black Looks*, her best 
book.)

Note again that saying that "white supremacy" and "patriarchy" are part 
of the productive system would not mean that "consciousness" determines 
social being, since people are socially determined to be a race and a 
gender quite apart from consciousness.  The rejoinder that people fight 
against the social system that insists on their race and gender positions 
is neither more nor less true than it is for class; in any event 
understanding this fight does require a notion of objective social 
location which is relatively stable and nonarbitrary, contra Laclau and 
Mouffe.

Finally, regarding social structure enabling action:  absolutely true.  
No activity is possible outside the enabling structure.  This statement 
is the flip side of the limitations the structure provides.  (I am 
limited by my position in the academy.  It is also the only source I have 
for the time and money it takes to do this kind of theorizing.  What is 
important to analyze is how that limits my usefulness as a 
revolutionary, and what circumstances it would take for me to get out of 
the academy and be limited less.)  The point is that "enablement" is both 
real, and always within limits.  And keep in mind, before we recite that 
old marxist notion that the factory system enables the working class to 
come together, that decentralization is capitalism's response to that 
fact.  Fragmentation of the international working class is much more 
nearly the case.

Finally, to Rakesh:

No, I don't believe that capitalism is directional, which is why, in the 
mode of the Frankfurt philosophers, I tend to be pessimistic.  There is 
too much evidence of reproduction being effective.  What it means to 
actively fight for a marxist overturning is to understand that socialism 
is, materially *possible*.  But possible is not necessary, nor even 
likely.  Gayatri Spivak, who I continue to have a love/hate 
relationship with, makes this point pretty well in her essay in 
*Whither Marxism?*  Finally (and for those of you who don't realize this, 
Rakesh and I have sparred on and off for years on this stuff--we're in the same 
graduate program) if I choose to do anti-racist work on the ground it is 
because I don't believe the socialist revolution is happening in my 
lifetime and I think that, in the U.S. context, the most plausible space 
to begin its overturning is an attack on the racial system.  The most 
convincing class analyses of the U.S., from Du Bois to Robert Allen, have 
always begun from this premise.    

Kenny Mostern
UC-Berkeley Ethnic Studies Graduate Group

Against:  racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, militarism
For:  the truth--and the funk!



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

     ------------------

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005