Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1999 04:30:04 -0800 (PST)
From: Wolf Factory <wolf_factory-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Lenin (and Spivak), Political Economy, and (Post)colonialism


Mr. Azfar: please stop perverting the English
language. I tried to read what you had written but
half way through I realised that you couldnŐt possibly
have had the human race in mind when you wrote it.  I
should imagine there are very few extraterrestrials
subscribing to this list.


--- Azfar Hussain <azfar-AT-wsu.edu> wrote:
> 
> I suspect this post might sound terribly odd to many
> pomo-poco folks on
> this massive--rather "global"--listserve. But I'll
> take the risk--the risk
> of sharing a few things, particularly with those who
> might be interested in
> political economy in the Marxist-Leninist sense(s)
> of the field. Please
> forgive me for trying your patience with this rather
> long note.
> 
> I'm currently working on my article tentatively
> titled "Lenin, Political
> Economy, and (Post)colonialism" for the Bengali
> journal called _Anushtup_.
> I advance several arguments about Lenin's usefulness
> in the contemporary
> crtico-political contexts, while particularly
> contesting some pomo readings
> of the mediatized and even mythologized Lenin(s) in
> the metropolis.
> 
> That Lenin is elitist; that Lenin is all empiricism;
> that Lenin is
> positivist and essentialist; that Lenin is deaf or
> blind to questions of
> nationalism and colonialism, and so on and so
> forth--all such formulations,
> informed and inspired by what Garcia Marquez
> interestingly calls "the
> hermeneutical delirium" of some pomo-poco
> enterprises, have been contested
> by way of looking at Lenin's engagements with
> "political economy." I
> argue--through a re-reading of Lenin's _Imperialism_
> and other texts--that
> it was Lenin who first nuanced and povocatively "put
> under erasure" the
> "possible Enlightenment linearism" supposedly
> inherent in Marx's famous
> circuit of Capital-- M--C--M' -- in ways in which
> Lenin still enables us to
> conceptualize "globalization"--particularly its
> political economy on the
> "glocal" scale even today.  Baudrillard's jubilant
> and repeated
> declarations of the death of Marxist political
> economy in favor of the
> birth of his (Baudrillard's) "new" (?) political
> economy of signs,
> simulations, and simulacra don't simply fly, of
> course if Lenin is brought
> back to show that the very logic of the "C" in the
> circuit of M--C--M'
> transforms "signs" themselves into commodities or
> even into finance capital
> (read multinational capital also), depending on the
> nature of the specific
> geo-historical site(s) from which--or within
> which--those signs keep
> circulating.  After all, signs do not fall from the
> skies!
> 
> I also argue that Lenin does not necessarily
> underwrite any singular logic
> of capital (of course some orthodox Marxists do),
> while he seems
> theoretically alive to the differential, uneven,
> genealogical (even in the
> "Nietzschean-Foucauldian" sense of being multiplily
> branched--not in the
> sense of being "originary"), and  "invisible"
> ("spectral") movements of
> "capital"(s) [mark the plural here] at different
> historical conjunctures.
> My use of the "spectral" here is not meant to be
> understood as a tribute to
> the pun(k)ster Derrida's formulation of
> "spectro-capitalism" as such,
> simply because the "spectral" in Derrida marks a
> decisive move in the
> direction of de-materializing both capitalism and
> marxism, while the
> "spectral" in Lenin is specifically historicized and
> materially grounded,
> all "semiotic playfulnesses" of the circuit of
> M--C--M' notwithstanding.
> 
> I further argue that the kind of political economy
> Lenin envisages and
> engages is not merely the political economy of
> capitalism as such but also
> the political economy of colonialism (or colonialist
> capitalism or
> capitalist colonialism, to use Lenin's own terms
> here)--something from
> which Frantz Fanon himself takes his cues and clues
> in _The Wreteched of
> the Earth_.
> 
> Now this Lenin, as I keep arguing, is certainly not
> positivist, not
> essentialist! (An aside: the notion of "strategic
> essentialism," however,
> comes straight from Lenin and subsequently gets
> taken up by Gramsci in his
> "Notes", while Spivak's return to it, without any
> acknowledgement of Lenin
> of course,  raises some important political
> questions in the face of the
> semioclastic dance of signifiers and simulacra in
> today's pomo "world").
> 
> But please don't get me wrong! By no means am I
> trying to "postmodernize"
> Lenin. I am only suggesting that at a time when
> "globalization-talks" are
> copiously circulating in terms of "globalization"'s
> semiological-cultural-discursive implications and
> effects without any
> rigorous engagement with political economy as such,
> it might be
> theoretically and politically useful to bring back
> Lenin--yes, I emphasize
> this point with full force--bring back the kind of
> Lenin who does not
> merely "think State" (as Spivak, however, would have
> us think in her most
> recent book _A Critique of Postcolonial Reason_) but
> thinks differential
> movements of capital and (neo)colonial productions
> on both local and global
> scales--rather in terms of the "glocal." And of
> course Lenin thinks and
> re-thinks that very political economy in the service
> of various kinds of
> anti-capitalist movements (not merely
> socialist-class-struggles but also
> "decolonization" and "national" movements).
> 
> While foregrounding Lenin in the face of some hip
> pomo-poco attempts to
> pooh-pooh him with relish or with their "pleasures
> of the text" (just think
> of the Michael Ryan of _Marxism and Deconstruction_,
> whose reading of Lenin
> seems to be sinking into an idiocy that has no
> past!), I also draw
> attention to what I wish to call contemporary
> culturalist "Gramsciology" or
> ("Gramsci-mania"?) that brutally wipes all traces of
> "Leninism" off
> Gramsci's formulations. As if, like those
> working-class folks so
> instructively described by Garcia Marquez in his
> _One Hundred Years of
> Solitude_, "Lenin didn't exist."
> 
> Of course, Gramsci the "superstructuralist" or
> Gramsci the non-foundational
> and non-positivist cultural theorist is more than
> welcome in the privileged
> metropolitan theoretical spaces but, as they say
> (the "your-most-trulys" of
> some pomo-poco industries), the Leninist Gramsci of
> political economy or
> for that matter the Leninist Gramsci of
> programmatic, organized, and
> organic socialist struggles must be killed in their
> deep, dense discursive
> jungles. I can't simply hip-hip-hooray for their
> writing-degree-zero-kind-of-adventures with
> Gramsci--a Gramsci brutally
> yanked from his Leninism.
> 
> As I was working on the Leninist analytics of
> political economy (on which
> I've to work more of course), I thought I should
> read Spivak's _A Critique
> of Postcolonial Reason_. I did. I found this work
> absolutely fascinating,
> profoundly disturbing, and certainly problematical.
> As I say this, I should
> not be taken to endorse that metropolitan academic
> "Marxist" --Terry
> Eagleton--who had already proven his own kind of
> Frankfurt-schooling in
> Marxism. Eagleton's sweeping and over-generalizing
> review of Spivak is also
> a classic instance of his gruff, glib, gossipy
> Marxism.
> 
> That Spivak is a sell-out or that she has completely
> succumbed to the
> captalist logic of commodification or that she is
> fashioning and packaging
> her discourses and languages in response to the
> demand-and-supply curves
> dictated by the capitalist markets and so on and so
> forth don't simply wash
> 
=== message truncated ==

===="All the wolves in the wolf factory paused at noon, 
for a moment of silence."
........from laughing Gravy by John Ashbery.
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