Marxist update: 2021

Below are excerpts from the Socialist Workers Party 2007 resolution “The Stewardship of Nature Also Falls to the Working Class: In Defense of Land and Labor.” It is available in issue no. 14 of New International, a magazine of Marxist politics and theory.

Labor’s transformation of nature is the source of all wealth, all advances in social productivity, culture, and conservation. It is the very foundation for the ongoing existence of our species.

At the same time, from the earliest stages of class-divided society, the propertied classes have organized labor to advance their private gain. They have done so with no concern for the social consequences of their methods. The exploiters use labor as an expendable beast of burden, while they simultaneously deplete the soil, destroy forests through slash-and-burn or other farming methods, wipe out animal life through overhunting and overfishing, and poison streams, ponds, and other bodies of water.

Thus, over the thousands of years since the rise of private property, the relationship between social labor and the natural environment has been marked by the mutually contradictory poles of transformation and destruction. …

The capitalist mode of production dominant for the last few hundred years, however, takes on its own particular lawful historical forms and tempos, with ruinous consequences for the producers of wealth themselves. Under capitalism neither nature, tools, nor machinery; neither science, knowledge, nor technique add directly to the value created by workers and appropriated by the exploiting class. The store of value is increased only through the transformation of land and other natural resources by human labor, the use of tools and machines by workers, the toilers’ application of science, knowledge, and technology.

By incorporating the two primary sources of wealth — labor-power and land — Marx observed, “capital acquires a power of expansion that permits it to augment the elements of its accumulation beyond the limits apparently fixed by its own magnitude.” In fact, capital is forced to extend its reach over nature and labor by the cutthroat competition of the system itself and by the workers’ fierce resistance bred by this exploitation.

In just a few hundred years, capitalism — initially germinated in a few parts of Europe — has employed that “power of expansion,” reinforced by military might, not only to engulf the vast majority of the earth but to contaminate its lands, seas, and atmosphere and to extend finance capital’s armed dominion into space.

‘Capitalism contaminates land, sea and air for profit’ – The Militant

Rittenhouse verdict upholds political rights workers need – The Militant

[....]Accusing those you disagree with of being racist or a “white supremacist” has become the stock-in-trade of the left. It’s a way of stifling debate, as well as glorifying anything done in the name of “anti-racism,” including thuggery and looting. All of this is dangerous for the working class.

Both Rittenhouse and his attorney, Mark Richards, denounced those who’ve tried to claim the 18 year old as their own. Richards called out conservative political figures seeking to profit from the acquittal. “They’re raising money on it and you have all these Republican congressmen saying come work for me,” he said. “They want to trade on his celebrity and I think it’s disgusting.”

“This is something I wish never would have happened, but it did, and we can’t change that,” Rittenhouse said. “But how polarized it became is absolutely sickening. Right or left, people using me for a cause that should never have been used as a cause.”

Rittenhouse verdict upholds political rights workers need – The Militant

Defend political rights won in blood! – The Militant

[....]The facts presented in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse clearly showed he was not guilty of murder in the killing of two men in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and that he acted in self-defense. The jury voted unanimously after lengthy deliberation. But it did not stop liberals, from the president on down, and middle-class radicals from disregarding the evidence, vilifying Rittenhouse as a “white supremacist,” denouncing the verdict as racist, and, in some cities, visiting destruction in working-class neighborhoods. They trampled on rights working people and our unions need.

Defending our fundamental political rights, is critical for the working class and our struggles — today and in bigger battles to come.

Defend political rights won in blood! – The Militant

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Two views of the Rittenhouse Trial and Acquittal: The Militant versus the petty bourgeois left

Excerpt:

....Those rioting with wild abandon, almost all of them Caucasian, were not supporters of the struggle but out and out enemies and wreckers of the movement and bear primary responsibility for what happened.

Joseph Rosenbaum was a lumpen criminal and sadly, mentally ill, and was filmed, along with others, pushing a lit dumpster towards a gas station located in a working-class, residential neighborhood, and near a hospital.

Gaige Grosskreutz testified during the trial that he wasn't political and did not affiliate to either side, one way or the other.

Most of those plundering the neighborhood were engaged in the destruction of local businesses and destroying cars, those on the car lots and those parked along the road. I'm guessing a good number or workers couldn't make it to work the next day and weren't really in the position to afford a day without pay. Or make repairs to their damaged (or destroyed) property.

Wayne Huber seems to be the one exception of those killed or injured, but when all is said and done, you can't beat someone over the head with a skateboard and not expect a defensive reaction. From the onset it was Rittenhouse who was being chased, which made a guilty verdict not a serious option for people (like the jury) who are not interested in creating narratives that reinforce a preconceived Wokeist view. The same thing applies when you point a Glock at someone's head....

Full:

https://theunionofworkers.wordpress.com/2021/11/24/the-militant-and-world-outlook-discuss-the-kyle-rittenhouse-trial-and-acquittal/

Monday, November 22, 2021

Second Amendment important for rights of the working class – The Militant

Excerpt:

[....]Absent from the debate in bourgeois politics over “gun control” is a working-class point of view.
With the exception of the Socialist Workers Party virtually every organization in the U.S. that calls itself socialist — including the Communist Party, Workers World Party, International Socialist Organization, Socialist Alternative and others — has caved into the pressure from the liberal left and embraced the protests as a road forward.
[....]As the class struggle heats up, the rulers will be more and more interested in curtailing our rights and at the same time assuring that their cops and rightist goons are armed to the teeth. The stakes for the working class — and most everyone else — are huge.
We can push back anti-social violence of every description in only one way — with working people in their millions standing up and fighting for better working conditions, against police brutality, for women’s rights, against imperialism’s wars around the world. A byproduct of young people and others having something to fight for, of seeing solidarity in action, will be a decline in crime and in senseless acts of violence.
This can only be made permanent through a social revolution, where the working class takes political and economic power out of the hands of the capitalist class once and for all, transforming ourselves in the process, and joins the worldwide fight for socialism.

Full article:

Second Amendment important for rights of the working class – The Militant

Saturday, November 20, 2021

Kyle Rittenhouse trial in Kenosha poses question of rights workers need – The Militant

[....]Much of the “left” argues that it will be a great injustice if Rittenhouse is acquitted. They insist he’s a “white supremacist,” though there’s no evidence that’s true and it’s not an issue in the trial. “Rittenhouse was driven by undoubtedly racist motivations to wield a gun against demonstrators taking part in the movement for Black lives,” says a Nov. 11 article on the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s website. “There is no question that Kyle Rittenhouse is guilty.”

But facts do matter, for the working class and our political rights. No one should be convicted without a trial and due process. And, as the liberal Washington Post put it, the prosecution in this case faces a lot of “inconvenient facts.” The working class should jealously guard the right to presumption of innocence and constitutional rights, no matter who the defendant is. In this case — in contrast to the Minneapolis trial of cop Derek Chauvin earlier this year — the judge has mostly upheld those rights.
As the prosecution’s case tottered, the judge has come under attack by the middle-class left. He’s been called a “secret Trumpist” and a “racist.”
The case went to the jury Nov. 15.

Kyle Rittenhouse trial in Kenosha poses question of rights workers need – The Militant

Thursday, November 18, 2021

Maoism: Organizer of defeats around the world

Background on Mao and Maoism

Maoism: An anti-working-class record of defeats around the world

BY ROY LANDERSEN

November 1, 2021

As he moves to tighten state control over the Chinese economy, President Xi Jinping is portraying his regime and its policies as the continuation of the teachings of Mao Zedong. Mao commanded the Stalinized Chinese Communist Party, from the late 1920s through the 1949 overturn of capitalist rule and for decades afterward — a period of disastrous policies imposed on working people at home and Maoist forces abroad.

Xi's regime fears mounting inequalities and uncertainty could lead to a rise in working-class struggles. It has curbed some profiteering by a few of the country's private capitalists and claims to be defending socialism. His regime's praise of Maoism is aimed at reinforcing its political authority at home as its trade and political conflicts with Washington sharpen.

Xi's policies, like Mao's, have nothing to do with working-class rule or advancing the class struggle worldwide.

The Chinese Communist Party was corrupted and destroyed as a communist organization shortly after its founding, at least two decades before the 1949 revolution. Maoism has its roots in the degeneration of the Russian Revolution at the hands of growing bureaucratic petty-bourgeois layers in the Soviet state headed by Joseph Stalin.

Under the leadership of V.I. Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, workers and farmers were led to take power in Russia in 1917, inspiring a wave of revolutionary struggles worldwide and the growth of the world communist movement. But in less than a decade workers and peasants were driven from power in the Soviet Union in a political counterrevolution that advanced the special interests of a ruthless ruling bureaucracy. As it crystalized into a privileged caste, standing above and against the toiling majority, the bureaucracy played a reactionary role not only at home but throughout the Communist International.

Nowhere was Stalin's overturn of Lenin's proletarian internationalist course clearer than his directives to the Chinese Communist Party as the mighty 1925-27 Chinese Revolution unfolded.

Under the impetus of the Russian Revolution, workers and peasants in China fought revolutionary struggles against both local exploiting classes and imperialist intervention in their country. Peasants seized land. In March 1927, workers in Shanghai took over the city. But the leaders of the CCP were ordered by Stalin to lay down their arms and subordinate working-class interests to seek an alliance with the Kuomintang, the central party defending capitalist interests. Its leader, Chiang Kai-shek, then launched a massacre of tens of thousands of vanguard workers in Shanghai.

To silence opposition to the disastrous results of this course, Stalin ordered the ruthless purging of revolutionaries who had opposed this deadly policy. Mao then rose to head the party, as it was transformed into an obedient tool for the Soviet bureaucracy's anti-revolutionary foreign policy worldwide.

Anti-working-class regime

Out of the slaughter of the second imperialist world war, the CCP still sought alliances with capitalist parties and opposed revolutionary action by working people. But confronted with the inevitable U.S.-led Korean war, Mao moved to transform the country.

The victorious Chinese Revolution of 1949, carried out using Stalinist methods that crushed any independent working-class action, freed a fifth of humanity from imperialist plunder, overturned capitalist rule and opened the door to economic development. But the CCP, consistent with its Stalinist training and outlook, came into collision with workers and farmers at every step. In a poverty-stricken country, with a party subservient to Moscow and no mass communist organization to challenge it, conditions "favored the growth of a caste on the Soviet model," wrote Socialist Workers Party leader Joseph Hansen in 1974.

"This process had in fact already begun before 1949 in the remote rural areas where the petty-bourgeois Stalinist leaders exercised command over hundreds of thousands and even millions of peasants through the Maoist 'Red Army,'" Hansen wrote. His article can be found in his invaluable booklet Maoism vs. Bolshevism.

As Washington drove against both the Korean and Chinese Revolutions during the 1950-53 Korean War, the Stalinist rulers in China were compelled to carry out sweeping expropriations establishing a workers state deformed at birth.

Stalinist-led defeats and disasters

In power, Mao treated working people as objects to be manipulated or savagely suppressed.

His regime decreed a "Great Leap Forward" in 1958, claiming China would rapidly surpass the industrial output of the most developed capitalist countries. It instituted forced collectivization, driving peasants off the land and into "Peoples Communes," where their labor was mostly wasted in primitive and unproductive labor. Grain production plummeted, causing a famine and the deaths of millions.

Even with these anti-working-class policies, the CCP had tremendous prestige among oppressed peoples across the world. But Mao's foreign policy was an extension of his actions at home. Like the regime in Moscow, his government sought an accommodation with U.S. imperialism and collaborated with other capitalist regimes to strangle any working-class struggles threatening capitalist rule, hoping to gain "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism in return.

Mao sought an alliance with Indonesia's President Sukarno. He blocked the Maoist Indonesian Communist Party from developing a revolutionary policy to put workers and farmers in power.

The Indonesian CP had 3 million members, and 20 million more were in organizations affiliated to it. The Indonesian army stood at only 350,000 strong. But under Mao's orders the Indonesian CP continued to back the Indonesian regime and was left defenseless when the military turned on them and carried out the slaughter of over a million members and supporters of the party in 1965. Hansen described the massacre as "the most devastating defeat for the working-class since the fascist victory in Germany in 1933."

When Mao's adversaries inside the CCP moved to oust him, he launched the so-called Cultural Revolution in 1966, aimed at bolstering his rule and liquidating his opponents. He set in motion a brutal witch hunt by Red Guard youth targeting both working people and his rivals in the bureaucracy. Within a year, he turned to the army to suppress the anti-working-class movement he had unleashed by exiling many of the Red Guards to the countryside. Millions were killed or imprisoned.

Maoism became the dominant Stalinist current across Asia and beyond.

Under Maoist leadership, the ruling Pol Pot regime in Kampuchea in the late 1970s unleashed barbaric repression, forcing mass evacuations from the cities to labor camps in the countryside and liquidating anyone who it considered might stand in its way.

A sharp rift between the Stalinist parties in Moscow and Beijing opened in 1960. Two regimes with conflicting bureaucratic national interests could no longer find a common front in world politics. Moscow pulled its advisers out of China, deepening the crisis of world Stalinism and splitting Stalinist parties around the world. But neither side in the bitter dispute broke from counterrevolutionary Stalinism.

Mao increasingly feared the impact of revolutionary struggles abroad on workers and peasants in China. His regime openly sided with U.S. imperialist-backed reactionary forces during the Cold War, while continuing to mouth anti-imperialist platitudes.

Beijing turned its back on the Vietnamese people's victorious struggle to defeat Washington's bombardment and to reunify their country, in return for improved relations with the U.S. rulers. In contrast, revolutionary Cuba offered every assistance to the liberation forces.

Fidel Castro, the central leader of Cuba's socialist revolution, described the Maoist regime as one of "imperialism's brand-new allies in the camp of counterrevolution."

"Mao Tse-tung is deifying himself," Castro said in 1966. "Someday the Chinese people will settle accounts with its leaders."

Xi's identification with Maoism today will only succeed for a time in stifling working-class struggle — an inevitable consequence of state capitalist methods utilized by his regime and its predecessors. The massive expansion of industry in China has drawn millions out of the countryside and into the industrial working class, chafing at their conditions. There have been mighty explosions against Stalinist rule in China, like the mass protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, brutally repressed by the regime.

Deepening exploitation and rising social tensions will eventually drive working people to seek ways to defend themselves. This process will be greatly aided by revolutionary upsurges in other parts of the world.

In the coming battles, workers and farmers in China will have an opportunity to establish a government they can truly call their own for the first time.

https://themilitant.com/2021/10/23/maoism-an-anti-working-class-record-of-defeats-around-the-world-2/

Background to Xi's "Maoist" ideological rationalizations

Background on Mao and Maoism

….in 1955 Mao launched an adventurous course of administratively trying to speed up the pace of development without the mobilization or leadership of the rural and urban masses. The peasant-led cooperatives were replaced by bureaucratically imposed "higher-stage" cooperatives in which party and government officials, not those working the land, became the administrators. Some peasants resisted the change, including by slaughtering their livestock.

In 1958 the CCP declared the "Great Leap Forward, "a campaign to supposedly turn China rapidly into an industrial giant under the slogan "Catch up with England in 15 years." A sizable segment of the rural population was organized into industrial production and construction. "People's communes" were decreed. Each such unit grouped together 5,000 peasant families who were to give up their private homes and plots of land to live communally and work under near military conditions. This policy followed the course of forced collectivization of land that the Stalin regime had brutally imposed on peasants in the Soviet Union.

Families were pressed to set up primitive steel-making furnaces in their backyards and to collect scrap metal, including personal belongings, to melt down. A productivity push also took place in the factories, with callous disregard for workers' health and safety.

The Great Leap Forward was a disaster. Food grain production dropped from about 200 million to 150 million metric tons from 1958 to 1960. Famine began to spread, claiming an estimated one million lives. In industry, the frantic drive for production led to a sharp decline in the quality of goods produced. The backyard steel furnaces made little usable steel but wasted enormous amounts of labor. By 1959 the Mao regime was forced to back away from that policy and the "people's communes."

Defeat in Indonesia

Not long afterward, the Stalinist misleadership in China was responsible for a devastating defeat for the working class, this time in Indonesia. As in many semicolonial countries, the Indonesian toilers identified with the Chinese revolution and looked to its leadership.

The Chinese CP advised the Indonesian Communist Party to bloc with the "progressive" wing of the bourgeoisie represented by President Sukarno. From the narrow nationalist—as opposed to internationalist—perspective of the CCP, it was preferable to maintain good relations with Sukarno, who had diplomatic relations and carried out trade with China, than to lead Indonesian working people to organize for socialist revolution.

Politically demobilized, workers were unprepared in 1965 when General Suharto led a coup that, with little resistance, crushed the workers movement and massacred hundreds of thousands of members and supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party, the third-largest CP in the world. It was the biggest defeat for the international working class since the victory of fascism in Germany in the 1930s.

'Cultural Revolution,' Red Guards

Shortly after the disaster in Indonesia, the Mao leadership launched what it called the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in China. It had nothing to do with advancing the proletariat, culture, or revolution. Its goal was to purge Mao's opponents from party and government positions of power and to consolidate his faction in control.

Millions of teenage youth were mobilized across the country into contingents of the "Red Guards" to root out those branded as "capitalist roaders" and "bourgeois" elements. The targets were Mao's political rivals, but a wide range of cultural figures and intellectuals were the initial victims. Instead of an open debate on questions that sorely needed discussion—from the Indonesia debacle, to how to advance the Chinese economy, to the lack of workers' democracy—Mao's opponents were simply accused of being counterrevolutionaries seeking to restore capitalism.

What followed was a giant assault on progress and culture. Following the bureaucrats' dictates, the Red Guards arbitrarily went after anything they deemed might deviate from "Mao Zedong Thought": Greek and Roman statues, plays by Shakespeare, anyone wearing jewelry or sporting a "bourgeois" haircut. Many schools were closed for several years. The number of periodicals in the country dropped 1,300 to about 50. Most books became unobtainable. The exception was the writings of Mao—books of catechisms whose possession proved one's loyalty to the CP chairman, the very opposite of scientific socialism.

Thousands were killed in sharp clashes between rival factions. Many party and government office holders were removed and imprisoned, or publicly humiliated and brutalized.

In 1969, once Mao felt his faction was securely in control of the party, army, and government, he unceremoniously dumped the Red Guards, many of whom were shipped off to the countryside for a lifetime of forced "reeducation."

While this destructive factional warfare raged in China, the workers and peasants of nearby Vietnam were battling half a million U.S. troops. Precious little political or material aid was extended to the Vietnam liberation fighters by either Moscow or Beijing. Both Stalinist regimes rejected the pressing need for a united front against the imperialist war, based on the narrow interests of their respective bureaucratic castes.

Mao died in 1976. In the subsequent power grab by competing bureaucrats, his faction was ousted. But the new leaders of China were cut from the same cloth as the old. The next article will take up the developments that ensued.

China: consequences of Stalinist 'Cultural Revolution'

January 14, 2008

https://themilitant.com/2008/7202/720251.html

Saturday, November 13, 2021

What do the 2021 election results mean for the US working class? – The Militant

[....]From increasing use of government “mandates” imposed by liberals who are convinced workers are too stupid to know what is good for them, to school board officials imposing “critical race theory,” including on math classes, many working people expressed their anger in the distorted arena of capitalist elections.

What do the 2021 election results mean for the US working class? – The Militant

Thursday, November 11, 2021

Reading notes on Hope Without Optimism by Terry Eagleton (Yale, 2015)

The more philosophically elevated the concept, the more abstract and free of class content, the more esoteric - not to say opaque - Eagleton becomes.

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the swarming anthill of rhetorical windbaggery that is Hope Without Optimism.

Moral:

"….The petty-bourgeois intellectuals are introspective by nature. They mistake their own emotions, their uncertainties, their fears, and their own egoistic concern about their personal fate for the sentiments and movements of the great masses. They measure the world's agony by their own inconsequential aches and pains."

James P. Cannon, 1940. The Struggle for a Proletarian Party

❖

1 The Banality of Optimism

[....]what expands the productive forces most effectively is capitalism, and capitalism in Marx's eyes is a question of injustice. This, then, is why he insists that "the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of individuals and even classes."

[....]"What has happened to the human beings who have fallen, " comments Max Horkheimer, "no future can repair. . . . Amid this immense indifference, human consciousness alone can become the site where the injustice suffered can be abolished, the only agency that does not give in

[....]It is striking how few Marxists appear to have asked themselves whether even the most resplendently emancipated future could outweigh this saga of sorrow. And this is one sense in which Marx's theory, despite himself, can properly be called tragic.

[....]For a more orthodox current of Marxism, as for the Catholic lineage of Christianity, a valid future must be dimly discernible in the present. For Marxism, it can be found in those forces which are bred by the current system yet which are capable of unlocking its contradictions.

2 What Is Hope?

[....]Claire Colebrook, for example, toys with the idea of a "hopeless feminism." "Feminism, it seems, " she writes, "may need to abandon hope— hope for a richer boyfriend, a larger pair of breasts, a slimmer pair of thighs and an even more unattainable handbag of the day— in order to imagine a future that would release 'us' from the clichés on which we have glutted and which have drugged us into a lack of nerve. Utopia could only be achieved through an intense hopelessness."

[....]the left's suspicion of hope is not entirely groundless. Images of utopia are always in danger of confiscating the energies that might otherwise be invested in its construction.

[....]Yet even the most terrible events of our epoch can yield grounds for hope. As Raymond Williams points out, if there were those who perished in the Nazi camps, there were also those who gave their lives to rid the world of those who built them

[....]In Aquinas's view, faith and charity are logically prior to hope, whereas for both Kant and John Stuart Mill it is hope in God which leads us to postulate his existence. The same is true of Miguel de Unamuno, who claims in The Tragic Sense of Life that we believe because we hope, not vice versa.

[....]What, however, if hope were an illusion? It would be no obvious reason to write it off. For Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, hope is a therapeutic fiction, one that sustains us in existence by persuading us to pursue one chimerical goal after another: Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never is, but always to be blest. It is a deceptive statement, considerably less positive than the brisk heroic couplet form makes it sound.

[....]There may be no hope; but unless we act as though there is, that possibility is likely to become a certainty. The Freud of The Future of an Illusion views religious hope as a nurse recounting fairy tales to a child, and wishes to purge the world of such consoling fictions. Erik Erikson regards hope, which first manifests itself in the infant's trust in its parents, as "both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue in being alive"; yet he also writes that in the course of the small child's development, "concrete hopes will, at a time when a hoped- for event or state comes to pass, prove to have been quietly superseded by a more advanced set of hopes, "9 a periphrastic way of suggesting that as soon as we get what we want, we want something else.

[....]In Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, Prometheus tells the Chorus that among his other benefactions to humankind has been the gift of "blind hopefulness, "

[....]to which they reply, unironically, "Your gift brought them great blessing." Perhaps the only happiness we can attain is a hope that it will arrive.

[....]there is a utopian core even to the most baneful or megalomaniac of hopes, as we shall see later in the work of Ernst Bloch.

[....]Precisely because it anticipates rather than simply desires, hope must intend the possible, or at least what those in the grip of it regard as possible, which is not necessarily true of desire.

[....]Thomas Hobbes.... speaks of hope in Leviathan as "an appetite with an opinion of attaining, " while Paul Ricoeur famously describes it as "a passion for the possible."

[....]There is nothing necessarily foolish about hoping in vain, but it is foolish to hope unreasonably. Gabriel Marcel maintains that one can hope for anything short of the impossible, so that a hope is not invalidated by the gross improbability of it ever coming to pass.

[....]If hope involves reason, what is one to make of Antonio Gramsci's celebrated political slogan "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will"? The maxim is a warning to the political left not to allow its clear- eyed estimate of the problems it confronts to sap its resolve. Yet is cognitive dissonance really the best policy? Are the two faculties quite so easily dissociable? They can, to be sure, be divorced to some degree. You might consider, for example, that things will turn out well but hope that they will not, which is more or less the opposite of what Gramsci recommends. In general, no doubt, Gramsci well understood that the will must be rationally informed if it is to issue in constructive action. Pressed too far, however, his battle cry is in danger of lapsing into voluntarism or even adventurism. It might also in the end prove strictly impossible. You can act positively even when you regard the situation as hopeless, but you cannot act hopefully if you regard it as hopeless.

[....]In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch, who believes likewise that the self is not a possession, sees the present moment as elusive and unreadable, a surplus that eludes the concept, and in this sense as a dim prefiguring of the future. We have a foretaste of the future in our very inability to seize the impenetrable present or unpack the enigma of the self. If we were indeed able to "bite the day to the core, " in Edward Thomas's pregnant phrase, we would doubtless find ourselves in the presence not of the future but of eternity. Perhaps leisure, which bucks the tyranny of time, is one of our closest approximations to it. In Bloch's view, the "now" can be lived but not grasped, and it is in this felt opacity— this gap between the experiential and the conceptual— that the shadowy profile of the future can be discerned. Fredric Jameson detects a similar hiatus in Proust, for whom the raw material of the present must be recollected in tranquillity, mediated by art and language, if Erlebnis is to be converted into Erfahrung and experience lived through for real as though for the first time.

[....]If one could count on what is coming, Derrida argues in Specters of Marx, hope would be a calculative, programmatic affair. But there is no reason to pay the positivists the compliment of taking on board their reified version of rationality, if only hope is not simply an anticipation of the future but an active force in its constitution. As Shelley writes in Prometheus Unbound, "to hope till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates." The lines combine a tragic view of hope with a performative one.

[....] To ensure that one's victories are minor is to warrant that one's failures are equally modest. If the good life is one of placid self- possession, it is necessary to abandon both hope and despair, moods that render us prey to the ravages of time. To jettison the future is an instant cure for anxiety. Plato's Republic sees the contented soul as one immune to shifts of fortune, resting placidly in itself rather than risking attachment to others. Aristotle, by contrast, argues in both the Ethics and the Politics that a life without risk and vulnerability is an impoverished one. Cicero writes of those fortunate souls who are "alarmed by no fears, anguished by no distresses, disturbed by no cravings, dissolved into no voluptuous languors by fatuous transports of delight." 96 In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus admonishes us to abandon hope, at least of the religious kind.

For the Stoics, the most gratifying solution to the indignities of life is death; but this goal can always be prefigured in the present in the living death or cultivated impassivity of those who lay violent hands upon themselves, rendering themselves immune to both desire and disenchantment. "Where there's death, there's hope, " remarks Don Fabrizio in Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard. If it is the catchword of the Stoic, it could also be the motto of the martyr. To be virtuous for the Stoic is not to educate one's appetites but to surmount them. The point of life is not to court Fortune but to disdain it.

[....]Schopenhauer regards hope as the root of evil, disturbing one's tranquillity with false expectations. "Every wish soon dies, " he writes, "and so can beget no more pain [i.e., of disappointment], if no hope nourishes it." 98 For Theodore Hickey of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, to abandon hope means that "you can let go of yourself at last. Let yourself sink down to the bottom of the sea. Rest in peace. There's no further you have to go. Not a single damned hope or dream left to nag you" (act 2). It is not a view that proves particularly fruitful for the bums and barflies around him, or in the end for himself.

3 The Philosopher of Hope

[....]Despite some passages of burnished splendor, Bloch's overstuffed rhetoric, slipshod poeticisms, and pseudoprofundities are the kind of thing that gives Marxist theory a bad name. If his style prefigures utopia in its imaginative brio, it also does so in its obscurity. Rarely has St. Paul's remark about seeing the kingdom of God through a glass darkly been more apposite. One turns with relief from Bloch's rhapsodic prose to the terse, aphoristic economy of a Benjamin or Adorno.

[....]"for the sake of the future he made a Faustian pact with the duplicitous present." 4 He became, in short, a full- blooded apologist for Stalinism, defending the Moscow show trials and branding Trotsky a Gestapo agent.

[....]Bloch had no doubt that the road to freedom and plurality led through state power, violence, centralized planning, collectivism, and doctrinal orthodoxy. 5 Like many of his colleagues on the left, he saw the key choice of the era as one between Stalin and Hitler. Even so, to glimpse the seeds of utopia in the Soviet Union represented a signal triumph of hope over experience, rather

[....]The Principle of Hope is in search of a form of Marxism that would rival the depth and scope of religion while serving as a critique of it. It ranges accordingly from the Gnostics to the modernists, Boehme to Bolshevism, Eldorado to Joachim de Fiore, the Orinoco delta to roast pigeons and Aladdin's lamp.

[....]Bloch's writing is at once too little Marxist and too much so— too eager to assume that almost every historical phenomenon, however remote from modern politics, can be milked for its emancipatory value, yet too intent on funneling this prodigious mass of material into the mold of historical materialism. The past may be diverse, but it has a single destination. So it is that Bloch the Stalinist exists cheek by jowl with Bloch the snapper- up of unconsidered trifles, the apologist for the heretical and offbeat, scouring the crooked alleyways and inconspicuous backstreets of human culture.

[....]It is not just that one must have material grounds for hope, but that hope for Bloch is in some sense an objective dynamic in the world— not only in human history, indeed, but in the cosmos itself. He is intent, he tells us, on producing nothing less than a communist cosmology. Marx, by contrast, may trust to the evolution of the productive forces, but he does not claim that this unfolding is somehow inscribed in the stuff of the world. It is not a metaphysical principle, as with Hegel's Geist or Bergson's élan vital. Instead, it is confined to the historical arena. Marx is impatient with metaphysical speculation, and appears to take no interest in how the cosmos is faring. He does

not claim that the world itself is trekking toward a beneficent end. Bloch speaks of "the classless man" as representing "the ultimately intended propensity- possibility of history up to now, "13 but Marx indulges in no such transhistorical fantasies. Indeed, he is at pains to deny that history has purposes of its own. Nor does he argue for some tale of unbroken progress at the moral level, as we have noted already. Fascism is no advance on feudalism.

[....]The worst is in some perverse sense a source of hope, bringing as it does the assurance that one can sink no further. One may now relax, since no amount of effort is likely to repair one's condition. One calls to mind the conundrum in which one speaker insists to another, "Things can't get any worse, " to which the other replies, "Oh yes, they can." Which of them is the optimist and which the pessimist? "If one has settled into the worst position, the lowest and most forgotten by fortune, " writes Enrique Vila- Matas in his novel Dublinesque, "one can always still hope and not live in fear." Max Horkheimer comments in his Critique of Instrumental Reason that Schopenhauer knows more than any other thinker of hope precisely because he confronts a condition of utter hopelessness. 13 For Pascal, the very direness of our condition is an ironic source of hope, since it suggests just what resources of divine grace must lie to hand to remedy it. Malcolm Bull speaks of the Muselmen or living dead of the Nazi concentration camps as "redeemed by their own hopelessness, " invulnerable to hope and therefore to hurt. 14 Power can have no hold over those who are oblivious to its stratagems. Men and women who have nothing to lose, like the beggar whose persona Edgar adopts, or like the psychopathic Barnadine in Measure for Measure, may prove to be fearless, invulnerable, and therefore dangerous. Pressed to an extreme, self- dispossession can capsize into a curious kind of freedom, as something rich and rare is born of nothing.

[....]The struggle for a just society involves an instrumental rationality, but it is not only that. The left would continue to protest against sweated labor and mass unemployment even if it were morally certain that capitalism is here to stay. Bertolt Brecht speaks in his poem "An die Nachgeborenen" of despairing only where there is injustice and no rebellion; but even if rebellion were to evaporate altogether, the fact that men and women have fought for their freedom so tenaciously over the centuries would still be a source of value. There would still, so to speak, be something to be salvaged on Judgment Day. Though justice may not flourish in the end, a life devoted to the pursuit of it remains a creditable one. Not to succeed in the end is not necessarily to have failed, any more than it is true that all's well that ends well. It is only the lure of teleology that persuades us of this fallacy. Even if history were to fall into utter ruin, it would be a matter for despair only if that catastrophe were predestined; and even then it is possible, like many a tragic protagonist, to pluck value from combating the inevitable. Indeed, unless one combats the inevitable, one will never know how inevitable it was in the first place. The truth, however, is that catastrophe is not written into the march of history, any more than hope is. However desolate the future may prove, it might always have been different. The contingency that can make for misfortune can also make for success. As Aristotle appreciates, the reason why things can decline (mutability) is also the reason why they can prosper. Besides, a lamentable future would almost certainly be the handiwork of a rapacious ruling minority, not the product of humanity as a whole.

[....]if this appalling din of hacking and gouging is to be attributed simply to human nature, it is hard to see how there could be much prospect of our condition improving. That it indeed involves human nature is not to be doubted. If human beings are capable of behaving in this way, then it follows that they have it in their natures to do so. This, then, is the bad news. The good news is that that nature is by no means unconstrained. It is molded by historical circumstance, which has not so far been greatly in our favor. Politics throughout human history has been for the most part violent and corrupt. Virtue, where it has flourished, has been largely a private or minority affair. The poet Seamus Heaney speaks in The Cure at Troy of those quasi- miraculous moments when hope and history rhyme, but the relationship between the two has more commonly resembled that of the line endings of blank verse. This, however, is partly because men and women have been forced to live under social systems that generate scarcity, violence, and mutual antagonism. It is this which Marx has in mind when he speaks of the whole of past history as weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And there is always so much more of the past than there is of the present. It is always liable, as in an Ibsen tragedy, to weigh in at a moment of crisis to crush the prospect of an emancipated future…..

Jay

11 November 2021

Tuesday, November 9, 2021

Eagleton, Williams, Debord, Baudrillard: concluding Anshen Chapter Two

Reading notes on: Marxist Literary and Cultural Theory by David Anshen (2017)

* * *

Chapter Two: Major Marxists' Approaches to Literature and Culture

EAGLETON'S ECONOMIC MARXIST LITERARY THEORY

To conclude the analysis and overview of Eagleton's generic classification of Marxist literary, we come to what he terms the 'economic' approaches....

[....]the 'topic might be called modes of cultural production' [italics in original] by which he refers to the historic implications of 'material apparatuses of cultural production, all the way from theatres and printing presses to literary coteries' through to 'a new form of culture whose material apparatuses (film, radio, television, sound recording)' have an 'obvious and intimate relation to "content"'.

[....]'modern cultural technology violently estranged these familiar perceptions forcing us' 'to register the way a particular medium generates specific sorts of meanings […] and making dramatically clear the interpenetration between these cultural institutions and the power of capital itself' (13).

[....]This mode of Marxist analysis tends toward sociological analysis of the conditions surrounding the work of culture.

[....]such critics focus on the culture surrounding the aesthetic realm and its function within a given historical, technical period and how various cultural, artistic mediums and technologies determine the role and function of art.

"[....]Benjamin argues that the politics of art lies, largely, not in the ostensible or even interpreted political meaning of works of art, but rather in the relations of the artist to the institutions that control the production of art and their function in capitalist society. In other words, message aside, the class position and relations of the artist and their use of advanced techniques to critique society function politically more than the message...."

[....]attempted to situate works of art in the range of cultural institutions and realities they were placed under and to apply literary critical methods to aspects of daily life. One form developed around Raymond Williams and associates in what became known as the Birmingham school, with studies of classical British literature and its connections to British social life. Another strand developed in France around Henri Lefebvre, with his magisterial multi-volume work titled The Critique of Everyday Life. Lefebvre, with his analysis of architecture, spatial relations, gender, entertainment and other measures that tried to evaluate the entire life process influenced the avant-garde, largely anti-art movement 'The Situationists' and their influential main theorist Guy Debord. Debord calls for the abolition of art and its replacement by real life, perceiving representations as only pseudo-life.

[....]Debord remains best known for his influential work The Society of the Spectacle (1967), which argues that 'spectacles' or mass media impressions of life replace meaningful experiences in late capitalism. This leads to an extreme critique of all aspects of modern culture as almost completely successful in colonising the minds of masses of people.

[....]The work of Guy Debord morphed into the work of Jean Baudrillard, an extreme postmodernist thinker who believes that the world of signs and culture dominates life so completely that no reality or basis for opposition remains. Ours is a world in which references to objective reality dissolve and we live among a plethora of signs and signifiers with either no reality or signified at all, or they remain completely inaccessible. Of course, if truth unmitigated by ideology remains permanently closed off, the potential for any relationship with reality close enough to aid in changing the world seems foreclosed.

[....]as cultural studies migrated from its original British home, it has largely transformed into a study of popular culture and mass media phenomena.

[....]such approaches tend towards being respectable and increasingly popular methods of analysing a range of material not previously thought of as either political or aesthetic. However, the discipline grows in importance while Marxism grows increasingly attenuated.

Anshen adds this summation to conclude Chapter Two:

[....]The previous consideration of the organisation and generic classification of Marxist literary theorists serves two functions. The first allows the grouping together of theorists with common features despite their different moments in time and space. This illustrates continuity within Marxist literary theory. In the second, we detect changes shaped by history even within similar approaches. This affirms the Marxist conviction that thought remains historically situated but not in an absolute manner, since a given mode of production determines the general contours. Yet, I hope that the plurality of approaches allows readers to see the richness and breadth of concerns in contrast to the ascription to Marxism of dogmatism and simplicity. There remain many key Marxist thinkers that interested readers can and should investigate. And, hopefully – perhaps certainly – many more will come.

Jay

9 November 2021