Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 01:29:08 -0800 (PST)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] re: Ebert: "The Knowable Good"


Ebert also reveals herself to be an unapologetically
statist and more generally authoritarian Marxist, when
she states:


"We see the anarchism of post-al politics perhaps most
clearly expressed in the claims being made for
“radical democracy” by ludic leftists. Stanley
Aronowitz, for instance, rejects socialism and the
“old” left, in large part, for their “sexism” and
substitutes radical democracy as an effective politics
of liberation...This in
turn becomes one of the main alibis for dismissing
socialism because of its “authoritarian political
legacy." But this simplistic ludic opposition of
emancipation and authority completely rejects the
revolutionary necessity of appropriating the power and
authority of the state (the executive committee of the
owners of the means of production) for social
transformation. It so focuses on the (bourgeois)
priority of individual freedom from any constraints on
desires and differences, that it denies the
revolutionary necessity of appropriating power to end
the ways in which the individual desires and
differences of the few are used to exploit the many.
Let us not forget the revolutionary uses of state
authority, for example, in the People's Republic of
China, to (until recently) successfully eliminate the
most severe socio-economic exploitation of
women--including female infanticide, indenture, sexual
slavery and prostitution--and provide women with
extensive health care, education and economic
opportunities."

What is interesting about this article though is that
she sees poststructuralist critics as threatening to
the "transformative" socialist project because of
their skepticism and lack of faith in the State a
viable instrument of revolution, in other words, and
as she explicitly states, for their similarities to
*anarchism*! This is like the negative authoritarian
Marxist inversion of the work of Todd May, Saul Newman
and Andrew Koch, in a way :)

Jason

===="“Marx says, revolutions are the locomotives of world history.  But perhaps it is really totally different.  Perhaps revolutions are the grasp by the human race traveling in this train for the emergency brake.” 

- Walter Benjamin

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