Why I Love Principia Dialectica...
Dec 15 2008 22:16
For all the disrespect they got on this board, they continue to prove why they're among the few worthy projects in the English-speaking (Post-)Marxist milieu:
Quote:
The barbaric murder of six Jewish people singled out by terrorists in Mumbai at Chabad House should be a wake-up call for all those dozy leftists who see the Palestinian struggle as their generation’s Spain 1936. Anyone who thinks ‘armed struggle’ is the solution for the Palestinian people are deluded. It is essential the left stop applying the categories of 1930s Europe to the current Middle East - in the absence of their ‘proletarian subject’ desperation leads to unsavoury and sleazy bedfellows.
May Principia Dialectica continue to prosper.
Dec 15 2008 23:44
#2
Who exactly is it that is supporting Jihadist terrorism and comparing it to the spanish civil war???
I'm probably first to assert that national liberation struggles are not deserving of our support, and I do agree that there is a fair bit of that going on within the left (mostly among Trots and other Leninists). What this has to do with the historical "absence of the proletarian subject" is completely beyond me.
I think that if anything, the widespread prevalence of National-Liberation ideology has to do with the fact that the left has failed to comprehend class-dynamics and at times abandoned class-struggle analysis altogether, thus leading sectors of the left into the bourgeois trap of nationalism.
As Catch quite rightly points out however, this has been a dominant thread in Trot and Leninist politics in general for a long time.
PD and Postone confuse the class struggle with Leninism and other "communisms", and merges them into a straw man
Dec 15 2008 23:52
#3
Quote:
The barbaric murder of six Jewish people singled out by terrorists in Mumbai at Chabad House should be a wake-up call for all those dozy leftists who see the Palestinian struggle as their generation’s Spain 1936. Anyone who thinks ‘armed struggle’ is the solution for the Palestinian people are deluded. It is essential the left stop applying the categories of 1930s Europe to the current Middle East - in the absence of their ‘proletarian subject’ desperation leads to unsavoury and sleazy bedfellows.
This is really insightful, how come no one else is saying anything like this?
Dec 16 2008 00:06
#4
catch wrote:
They're great because they can point out the obvious flaws of Trotskyist support for national liberation? And do so in a way which ignores this support being at the heart of Leninist politics long before the 1930s - i.e. Brest-Litovsk? Yeah, great.
It's a comfortable myth in non-Leninist circles that only Trots and Maoists engage in cheerleading for questionable/reactionary movements. The house journal of West German Operaismo in the 1970s/1980s, Autonomie, was involved in hailing the Iranian revolution of 1979, as well as trying to analyze the first Intifada and third-world hunger revolts from the perspective of "class composition".
A more contemporary example: the two leading journals of the North American Stupid Professional Activist Left, Left Turn and Upping the Anti, are both decidedly anti-Leninist publications that engage in total ass-licking for the Palestinian cause. Both are distributed by the "anarchist" AK Press.
So let's dispense with the comforting lie that it's only the Bolshies who espouse the virtues of "the nation".
tsi wrote:
I think that if anything, the widespread prevalence of National-Liberation ideology has to do with the fact that the left has failed to comprehend class-dynamics and at times abandoned class-struggle analysis altogether, thus leading sectors of the left into the bourgeois trap of nationalism.
Good god, what the hell do "class dynamics" tell us about the Israel/Palestine conflict? Seriously, I'm not posing a rhetorical question. If I were to attempt to analyze the issue in terms of class struggle, I doubt I would be able to say anything meaningful about the conflict at all. I think "the state" and "the nation" are social forms coterminous with the commodity form, but I don't think the former merely derive from the latter, and I think conflicts between states and national collectives can follow an immanent logic that can't be explained simply in terms of the expropriation of surplus labor-time.
Dec 16 2008 00:15
#5
Quote:
Good god, what the hell do "class dynamics" tell us about the Israel/Palestine conflict?
Very little, other than the fact that workers have no country.
Quote:
I think "the state" and "the nation" are social forms coterminous with the commodity form, but I don't think the former merely derive from the latter, and I think conflicts between states and national collectives can follow an immanent logic that can't be explained simply in terms of the expropriation of surplus labor-time.
So, unless I misread you, "the state" has nothing to do with Class rule??
Dec 16 2008 00:27
#6
tsi wrote:
So, unless I misread you, "the state" has nothing to do with Class rule??
Yes, you misread me. The state has a lot to do with class rule, except that not everything concrete states do can be explained in terms of the expropriation of surplus labor-time in the immediate production process. And contra the Leninists, the state does not act in the interest of individual capitalists or even certain fractions of capital. What the state does is guarantee the framework within which the accumulation process occurs, and to that extent is indispensable to class rule.
But that doesn't mean that the activity of concrete states can be explained purely in terms of their functional relationship to capital. Seriously, there must be dozens of potential "solutions" to the Israel/Palestine conflict that would be amenable to capital that would bypass to the present barbaric conflict. To even begin to try to explain why teenagers willingly blow themselves up in pizza parlors, you probably need a completely different set of theoretical tools than terms like "value", "money", "abstract labor", etc. Which is not to say that everything in the world doesn't happen against a material backdrop that can be analyzed using those categories, it's just that, to wax Althusserian, concrete capitalist societies are articulated totalities, not expressive totalities.
Dec 16 2008 00:44
#7
Quote:
To even begin to try to explain why teenagers willingly blow themselves up in pizza parlors, you probably need a completely different set of theoretical tools than terms like "value", "money", "abstract labor", etc.
Theoretical tools like "ruling class ideology" and "religious superstition" do a pretty good job of this. I'm not saying that "Reification", "the commodity" etc. aren't also useful, but I just don't see how jettisoning the proletariat as the revolutionary subject helps matters.
Dec 16 2008 01:02
#8
tsi wrote:
but I just don't see how jettisoning the proletariat as the revolutionary subject helps matters.
Yeah, we can open up another thread on this if you want, basically, I only go "part of the way with LBJ" as far as Principia Dialectica's approach to class struggle goes. To the extent that Principia's understanding of class overlaps with Krisis, it's rather superficial: http://www.krisis.org/2005/the-metaphysical-subtleties-of-class-struggle
Basically, Krisis's entire frame of reference is the classical German worker's movement as embodied in the history of the SPD and its various offshoots (KPD, SED, etc.), and on a philosophical level, Lukacs' contorted historical-philosophical constructions. The assumption is that class struggle = the workers' movement, which I think most people on this BBS would not subscribe to.
Postone's blindspot is the fact that he's pretty much reacting against the Frankfurt School (an important point missed by people who try to number Postone among them), and as a result, as pointed out by both Chris Arthur and Loren Goldner, he completely ignores heterodox traditions in Marxism that arrived at similar conclusions (BTW, I thought it was weird that Principia are doing an event on the contemporary relevance of Sohn-Rethel, since Sohn-Rethel is basically one of the figures that Postone is developing his theory against).
And as I pointed out before, Robert Kurz's rejection of class struggle at a categorical level does not imply rejection at a phenomenological level, cf. his repeated support for various strikes in the last couple of years in his newspaper column.
Dec 16 2008 01:06
#9
Angelus Novus wrote:
It's a comfortable myth in non-Leninist circles that only Trots and Maoists engage in cheerleading for questionable/reactionary movements.
I brought up Trotskyists to show that some of the the main left groups which claim to have both a class analysis and support national liberation movements, did so long before the 1930s - so the 'disappearance' of the proletarian subject can't be given as a reason for this.
This site has been defined by long and bitter arguments about national liberation between various anarchist groups so it's far from a 'comfortable myth' here.
Having said that, your examples are poor:
Quote:
The house journal of West German Operaismo in the 1970s/1980s, Autonomie, was involved in hailing the Iranian revolution of 1979, as well as trying to analyze the first Intifada and third-world hunger revolts from the perspective of "class composition".
Operaismo came out of Leninism. Various discussions on these boards have pointed to the dodgy practical conclusions of 'autonomist marxism' when it comes to national liberation movements.
Quote:
A more contemporary example: the two leading journals of the North American Stupid Professional Activist Left, Left Turn and Upping the Anti, are both decidedly anti-Leninist publications that engage in total ass-licking for the Palestinian cause. Both are distributed by the "anarchist" AK Press.
Left Turn wrote:
We recognize the importance of struggles waged by people and communities most affected by the policies of globalization and empire
I'm not really familiar with either of these publications, but neither appear to have much interest in class struggle? Or to have moved from a position of class politics towards one of national liberation?
Quote:
So let's dispense with the comforting lie that it's only the Bolshies who espouse the virtues of "the nation".
No, let's dispense with very poor straw-man arguments, thanks.
Dec 16 2008 01:19
#10
Left Turn moved from from crappy Trotskyism (they stuck with the International Socialist tendency [the SWPs International] when the ISO was kicked out for not embracing the anticapitalist movement enough and being too workerist) into anarchoid anticapitalism light. So not much about class there.
Dec 16 2008 01:34
#11
Quote:
Yeah, we can open up another thread on this if you want, basically, I only go "part of the way with LBJ" as far as Principia Dialectica's approach to class struggle goes.
I wasn't intending to derail, apologies if I have, but what I was primarily reacting to was this:
Quote:
It is essential the left stop applying the categories of 1930s Europe to the current Middle East - in the absence of their ‘proletarian subject’ desperation leads to unsavoury and sleazy bedfellows.
The assertion that lefties are supporting nasty stuff like nationalism, Jihad, and "finance bad, real economy good" because the proletariat itself has disappeared or has shown itself to be hollow as a category is inane. It parrots the "everyone is middle class" stuff we hear from the Liberal media. Moreover, when we look at global class composition it's just plain wrong.
Also, the appearance of a disappearing proletariat in the 1st world is pretty transparent as a dynamic of class-war: sectors of working class power are dismantled in efforts to restore the rate of profit.
Dec 16 2008 01:42
#12
Yeah, Left Turn are as dumb as rocks. Upping the Anti, on the other hand, claim to be influenced by C.L.R. James and "Autonomist" currents (and I think that we can all agree that "Autonomist" in the English-speaking world is very poorly defined). Upping the Anti was started by the "Autonomy and Solidarity" group that broke from the Canadian "New Socialist Group", the latter a post-Trot "regroupment" project like the U.S. "Solidarity".
I think both currents basically arose from an opportunistic orientation by former Trots towards the brief post-Seattle mood. I think almost ten years after the fact, it's pretty clear that the summit-hopping movement was relatively short-lived. "Left Turn" and "Upping the Anti" haven't gotten the memo, and continue to comfort themselves with the mythology that "the movement" still exists. Left Turn have basically transitioned into a non-theoretical activist-ism indistinguishable from Z Magazine, whereas I think "Upping the Anti" still nurture some illusions of being vaguely communist or "autonomist". But they are kindred spirits in terms of pretending that barbarism engendered by desperation constitutes a unified "social movement".
Dec 16 2008 01:50
#13
tsi wrote:
The assertion that lefties are supporting nasty stuff like nationalism, Jihad, and "finance bad, real economy good" because the proletariat itself has disappeared or has shown itself to be hollow as a category is inane.
Yeah sure, this was also catch's point, and I agree, most lefties have been supporting shitty things for a long time. Nonetheless, I think the rational kernel of Principia Dialectica's attitude is basically that the absence of any strong, non-system-immanent class struggle in the developed capitalist countries of North America and Western Europe probably plays a big role in the marginal left's search for some sort of projection screen to pin their aspirations on.
Let's not forget, there was a time, especially in the early New Left, when the "Israel-Palestine" issue was irrelevant, largely ignored, or if at all present, as a kind of vaguely philosemitic attitude of support for "socialist" Israel. I think the major role that "Palestine" plays for what remains of the "left" is probably at least partly a result of the general desperation and hopelessness of the prospects for revolution.
Dec 16 2008 01:51
#14
Angelus Novus wrote:
Yeah, Left Turn are as dumb as rocks. Upping the Anti, on the other hand, claim to be influenced by C.L.R. James and "Autonomist" currents (and I think that we can all agree that "Autonomist" in the English-speaking world is very poorly defined). Upping the Anti was started by the "Autonomy and Solidarity" group that broke from the Canadian "New Socialist Group", the latter a post-Trot "regroupment" project like the U.S. "Solidarity".I think both currents basically arose from an opportunistic orientation by former Trots towards the brief post-Seattle mood. I think almost ten years after the fact, it's pretty clear that the summit-hopping movement was relatively short-lived. "Left Turn" and "Upping the Anti" haven't gotten the memo, and continue to comfort themselves with the mythology that "the movement" still exists. Left Turn have basically transitioned into a non-theoretical activist-ism indistinguishable from Z Magazine, whereas I think "Upping the Anti" still nurture some illusions of being vaguely communist or "autonomist". But they are kindred spirits in terms of pretending that barbarism engendered by desperation constitutes a unified "social movement".
Well they both sound pretty bad, but please explain how either fits neatly into:
Principia Dialectica wrote:
It is essential the left stop applying the categories of 1930s Europe to the current Middle East - in the absence of their ‘proletarian subject’ desperation leads to unsavoury and sleazy bedfellows.
Dec 16 2008 01:52
#15
catch wrote:
Well they both sound pretty bad, but please explain how either fits neatly into:
Principia Dialectica wrote:
It is essential the left stop applying the categories of 1930s Europe to the current Middle East - in the absence of their ‘proletarian subject’ desperation leads to unsavoury and sleazy bedfellows.
See post #13 above.
Dec 16 2008 05:59
#16
I don't know much about 'Principa Dialectica'. They seem to have picked some pretty 'unsavoury and sleazy bedfellows' themselves around the anti Jerusalem day demonstration.
Then again I think that being anti-Muslim is much more acceptable in certain left wing circles than being anti-Jewish, particularly in Germany.
I don't think that there is anybody who posts regularly on Libcom who supports Palestinian nationalism.
Devrim
Dec 16 2008 07:59
#17
Ah... upping the anti. It gets a wide distribution. They're a mixed bag. Some people who broke with the International Socialists (Canada's opportunist trotskyists). Some people who were expelled from NEFAC. Some people who probably still call themselves anarchists. A lot of grad students. The magazine is filled with identity politics and third worldism.
Dec 16 2008 08:42
#18
Angelus Novus wrote:
Let's not forget, there was a time, especially in the early New Left, when the "Israel-Palestine" issue was irrelevant, largely ignored, or if at all present, as a kind of vaguely philosemitic attitude of support for "socialist" Israel. I think the major role that "Palestine" plays for what remains of the "left" is probably at least partly a result of the general desperation and hopelessness of the prospects for revolution.
Lets not forget that it was largely the 6 day war that made it an issue in the American New Left too.
Dec 16 2008 09:10
#19
quint wrote:
Ah... upping the anti. It gets a wide distribution. They're a mixed bag. Some people who broke with the International Socialists (Canada's opportunist trotskyists). Some people who were expelled from NEFAC. Some people who probably still call themselves anarchists. A lot of grad students. The magazine is filled with identity politics and third worldism.
To NEFACs credit the expelled folks were active members of trotskyist organizations at the time.
Dec 16 2008 09:22
#20
Wow, look at Principia Dialectica go, knocking down more strawmen. Perhaps they ought to go line up with fascists on the streets of London again? Or maybe blow our minds by telling us work ought to be abolished.
Dec 16 2008 10:01
#21
They've broken some tough old left shibboleths, such as the one against voting for ken.
Dec 17 2008 15:00
#22
Angelus Novus wrote:
Good god, what the hell do "class dynamics" tell us about the Israel/Palestine conflict? Seriously, I'm not posing a rhetorical question. If I were to attempt to analyze the issue in terms of class struggle, I doubt I would be able to say anything meaningful about the conflict at all. I think "the state" and "the nation" are social forms coterminous with the commodity form, but I don't think the former merely derive from the latter, and I think conflicts between states and national collectives can follow an immanent logic that can't be explained simply in terms of the expropriation of surplus labor-time.
I think a lot can be learned about Israel/Palestine by looking at class struggle and "class dynamics".
Post-48 and especially post-67 the Palestinian diaspora was on the front lines of class struggle in oil producing states in the middle east. Because of this they were massacred by the thousands by the Jordanian state, for example. Through outright repression and mass murder and then also through political "recuperation", Palestinians were redirected to a suicidal ethnic war against Israel. Anti-Zionism became state ideology throughout the middle east, the west funded Islamists to fight the USSR and as a counter weight to the PLO's secular nationalism.
There is, of course, more to the story. Even before '48 there was a strong tendency towards fascism/anti-semitism in the Palestinian national movement. The Muslim Brotherhood, the father organization to Hamas, was organizing SS divisions before Israel was ever formed, and of course everyone knows about the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Clearly anti-semitism was not limited to leadership and had a popular/mass character to it as well.
I think anti-Zionism is at best a gross mystification of a history of the region but at worst a fundamentally anti-semitic ideology. Why is anti-Zionism/Palestinian nationalism so appealing to Leftists? In Palestine you have the appearance of a fight for "local autonomy" (forgetting that the PA is essentially a tool of the wealthy in Ramallah), beautiful and eloquent art, academically appealing post-modern issues about borders, isolation, and decolonizing (again forgetting that most of those intellectuals are from an elite class and likely have not been back to Palestine, due in no small part incidentally to Israel's visa policy), and the thornier issue of Left anti-semitism and the ideological transformation of Jews from the personification of finance capital to the personification of imperialism/colonialism.
Honestly, Left Turn and Upping the Anti are not the worst of it. Take a look at this article on Counter Punch: http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann0604.html (warning, it may make your head explode) or the paragraphs about Israel in this Kevin Keating article about the Iraq war: http://libcom.org/library/american-defeat-an-anti-state-communist-perspective-on-the-current-war-in-iraq (including the lovely - "The United States is at the beck and call of the Israeli ruling class, and will endlessly cater to Israel’s military and economic needs. This includes allowing Israel to spy on the US and attack the US militarily during time of war. All factions of the US political elite have made it clear that the US will also back any action the Zionist state takes against the original inhabitants of the territory it occupies, no matter how much this damages long-term US imperial interests in predominantly Arab and Muslim regions of the world.")
There is a tendency by both anti-Zionists and anti-anti-Zionists to ignore or gloss over class struggle within Israel and Palestine, to treat both countries as homogeneous "special cases". I think that the turn away from class analysis mystifies things and leaves both positions open to nationalism and racism. It is not a coincidence that many of the anti-deutsch, for example, went in the direction of open anti-arab racism or that 'well meaning' leftists can end up propagating horrid anti-semitic conspiracy theories. So yes, I think a lot can be learned by looking at class struggle and "class dynamics" in the region. In fact, I am not sure how one could make sense of things without doing so.
As far as Principia Dialectica goes, I am not very impressed by their blog (haven't actually seen the publication yet). It mostly seems to be a lot of mimicking and ass-licking of the German theorists they're trying to emulate without much original to say.
Dec 17 2008 16:10
#23
Yoshomon wrote:
Why is anti-Zionism/Palestinian nationalism so appealing to Leftists? (...) I think that the turn away from class analysis mystifies things and leaves both positions open to nationalism and racism.
i think you've answered your own question. from my own experience doing palestine stuff as a political virgin 5 or 6 years ago most of those who do it are not racists but leftists without a class analysis, looking around for noble victims to save since they're powerless to change their everyday life. it's a politics of ressentiment, and any anti-semitism is strictly 'structural', since i've known several jews involved with ISM/PSC stuff and all the activists i've known (bar one openly nationalist palestinian guy who tried a sartrean defence of suicide bombings) are sincere anti-racists.
Dec 17 2008 17:59
#24
One would like to think so, but reading articles on Counterpunch or the New England Committee to Defend Palestine ( www.onepalestine.org ) I think there is more to it than just "well intentioned" leftist nationalism.
Christopher Hitchens has a good point when he writes:
Quote:
And meanwhile I would never expect to read the sort of criticism of Pakistan that I read every day about Israel. Yet of these two states, born at almost the same moment at the close of Britain’s imperium, can it really be said that Israel is so much the greater offender in terms of democratic rights for citizens, invasions of neighbours like Afghanistan, oppressions of non-Punjabi minority inhabitants, massacres of co-religionists as in Bangladesh, and illegal acquisition of nuclear weapons? One can just about picture a worldwide campaign to redress the injustices of Pakistan, in which unions of British teachers and journalists would join with their own courageous boycotts, but I confess to a slight difficulty in picturing the same level of enthusiasm and commitment. There is some sense in which any challenge to what can be viewed as specifically Jewish power is more exciting and possibly more “transgressive”, and we might be more honest if we admitted as much.
We have to look deeper to understand why there is an obsession with Israel on the Left. The thing with anti-semitism is that it is not racism, it is another beast altogether. This is why leftist anti-semites can be "sincere anti-racists". Remember, in most contemporary leftist understandings of racism, they use the equation 'prejudice + power'. This formulation is problematic because it ignores changes in relative social power, but in that formulation if one sees "Jews" as "powerful" then anti-semitism becomes a "legitimate response to oppression" similar to hatred of white people in the United States or whatever. Of course, anti-Zionists see Zionism (which is rarely defined or defined very vaguely) as a global force, so suddenly anti-semitism becomes a "reasonable" response to global Jewish .. er Zionist domination. Maybe I'm painting too broad of a brush.
Something else that comes up in a lot of anarchist language is Israel being talked about as a "white" nation in the middle east, which is a total non-understanding of the situation, and allows them to just stick the "Palestinian question" into their ready-made formula of 'Third Worldist revolt vs. white supremacy'.
Dec 17 2008 18:28
#25
I think Israel gets singled out for attention because it is seen as white, as an extension of western europe in the middle east, anti Zionism embraced on the left in so much as it is deemed an ideology of white supremacy. The singling out of Israel by leftists is infact the greatest honour that can be bestowed on it, it through it's whiteness is deemed to be now worthy or criticism, Israel is now held to higher standards than western leftists hold for 'non whites', who are essentially denied any subjectivity and responsibility, instead being nothing more than reactions to Imperialism both past and present.
Of course the latent white supremacy in such logic is rather repellant, with non whites reduced to mere infantilised victims whose sins and abuses are excused way as they aren't expected to 'know any better'.
Dec 17 2008 18:53
#26
^^^
which kinda answers Hitchens' pakistan point too
Dec 17 2008 22:54
#27
The other thing with Israel is that although it is 'white' it isn't seen as part of imperialism, which means 'we' don't have to take the blame for it.
Also the PLO looked pretty cool in the 70s.
I mainly wanted to post because this thread will look like 'Why I love Jef Costello" on the front page 
Dec 18 2008 00:36
#28
Good posts all around on this thread, especially from Yoshomon. *sniff* You guys give me hope for the english-speaking communist milieu. I should have titled this thread "I Love Libcom".
Query: before the outbreak of the third Persian Gulf War, Wildcat (Germany) published a translation of a text by Mouvement Communiste called "Israel-Palestine: Two States Against the Proletariat", which if memory serves me correctly covers a lot of the same ground as Yoshomon's post. Was this text ever published in English? Worth digging up, I think, and spamming any friends you might have who feel compelled to take a side in the territorial claims of national collectives.
Dec 18 2008 00:43
#29
Devrim wrote:
Then again I think that being anti-Muslim is much more acceptable in certain left wing circles than being anti-Jewish, particularly in Germany.
Eh, pretty much only in Germany, I would say.
But there are folks around remedying this.
My favorite commies at the moment, Gruppe soziale Kämpfe, http://www.gruppe-soziale-kaempfe.org/ are doing a lot of work around anti-Muslim racism, and making interesting theoretical contributions concerning the "culturalisation of the social question". (They are a split from the non-defunct Kritik&Praxis Berlin, itself a split from the now-defunct Antifaschistische Aktion Berlin. They are the "better half of the better half", so to speak).
Dec 18 2008 03:13
#30
Angelus Novus wrote:
Good posts all around on this thread, especially from Yoshomon. *sniff* You guys give me hope for the english-speaking communist milieu. I should have titled this thread "I Love Libcom".Query: before the outbreak of the third Persian Gulf War, Wildcat (Germany) published a translation of a text by Mouvement Communiste called "Israel-Palestine: Two States Against the Proletariat", which if memory serves me correctly covers a lot of the same ground as Yoshomon's post. Was this text ever published in English? Worth digging up, I think, and spamming any friends you might have who feel compelled to take a side in the territorial claims of national collectives.
I have never seen the Mouvement Communiste article.
Will you defend your assertion that class analysis is useless for understanding Israel/Palestine? You have a tendency for "agreeing" with people even when they contradict things you say, and it makes it seem as though you don't actually believe anything.
They're great because they can point out the obvious flaws of Trotskyist support for national liberation? And do so in a way which ignores this support being at the heart of Leninist politics long before the 1930s - i.e. Brest-Litovsk? Yeah, great.