Reviewed: Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1989) by Fredric Jameson

Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1989) by Fredric Jameson

This is the most politically confusing and unMarxist of Jameson's books. It floats on a stream of euphemisms when scientific terms would have been simpler and clearer. Example: his use of "world system" instead of imperialism is especially grating. (At least we are spared "hegemony," "precariat," and "globalization").

The thesis: postmodernism is the post-1970 mode of capitalist "cultural production" -- in which superstructural factors are determinant even in the final instance over economics. 

(This yearning on the part of the middle class left to write-off the multinational US working class and workers and farmers around the world is even more widespread today than it was when this study came out).

And for a book on capitalist "cultural production" from 1989, there is remarkably little curiosity about some of the big events in the class struggle circa 1979-1989. Internationally, these include: the advances of the Cuban revolution; the Reagan-Thatcher anti-labor drive; the 1979 revolutions in Grenada, Iran, and Nicaragua; the battle of Cuito Cuanavale and the coming revolution in South Africa; the UK miners strike; the strike wave in the USSR and Eastern European workers states.

Notable labor milestones in the US that escape even parenthetical "mapping" by Jameson: the 1978-79 UMWA strike; the breaking of PATCO; the Hormel P9 strike, and the strikes in copper mining in the southwest. 

References to works by Marx are often to material of secondary importance: some journalism and the Grundrisse. The latter was an extensive notebook, but not a text prepared by Marx and Engels for publication, and so not as rigorously revised and edited as the initial volume of Capital. Jameson is much more comfortable with the theoretical wiggle-room offered by the earlier work's imprecisions. (Similar to academic Marxists who comb Lukacs and Gramsci after passing-by Lenin and Trotsky).

Many of Jameson's insights into cultural theory are clearly presented. But he has no nose for recognizing and assessing POLITICAL WEIGHT. There is not a more severe handicap for a Marxist of any type.

Jay

21 June 2024

The 10 Commandments shouldn't be posted in schools

Excerpt:

Separation of church, state is a right

Working people cannot rely on the courts or political maneuvers to protect our rights. The rightists are counting on being able to clog judicial machinery and reverse previous rulings. Freedom of religion and separation of church and state are hard-won gains of the First American Revolution. A broad campaign to defend these rights needs to be organized.

When I was in grade school and through much of junior high school in Pennsylvania, a state law (passed in 1949 as part of the anticommunist witchhunt) required the school day be opened with a reading of 10 verses from the Bible and a recitation of the Lord's Prayer. Teachers could be fired for failing to comply. Students who declined to participate faced harassment.

The purpose these exercises served was to instill blind obedience, conformity, and discipline. The Supreme Court finally outlawed those compulsory religious exercises in 1963 after lawsuits by the Unitarian family of Edward Schempp in Abington, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore atheists Madalyn Murray and her son.

What's wrong with posting the Ten Commandments? Harrisburg dentist Michael Cook, who addressed the board, said the Ten Commandments should be posted to "remind our students there is a standard of moral conduct."

It's not true that the Ten Commandments are just good rules to live by. They are ancient statutes codifying compulsory monotheism. Posting them in public schools a violation of the fundamental right of working people to freely decide their religious views.

The Ten Commandments are a small portion of an elaborate set of ancient laws recorded in the Old Testament. Among other things this body of law spelt out that the penalty for violating strictures on worshipping one almighty God was death by stoning.

Monotheism reflected the emergence of the father-dominated family, private property, and classes.

The state developed as the supreme power through which the ruling class oppressed and extracted tribute from all others. Monotheism provided the ideological heavy artillery of the oppressing classes by hallowing the family patriarch, governing authorities, and priesthood, and the state headed by priests.

The Tenth Commandment is abbreviated in the Harrisburg version as "Thou shall not covet." In its unabridged form it sanctified private property, which was still a new, and difficult to impose, social relation in ancient times. This holy mandate classified women and slaves as chattel, along with oxen and donkeys.

Class-conscious workers defend the democratic right of believers of all faiths to practice their religion free from discrimination. Imposing a religious document on all those attending a public school is the opposite of this right.

In the culture war the rightists seek to roll back women's rights and the rights of all working people and youth—often in the name of defending "Christian values." One student was heard commenting after the meeting, "These are the same people that want to take away abortion rights." This is part of the employers' drive against our wages, heath care, and union rights, and part of the rulers' drive to war. 

Full:

https://themilitant.com/2000/6401/640137.html 

[Shared Post] Silence of the ‘allies’: The clanging warning bells of anti-Semitism and the strange deafness of the middle-class left

https://convincingreasons.wordpress.com/2024/06/21/silence-of-the-allies-the-clanging-warning-bells-of-anti-semitism-and-the-strange-deafness-of-the-middle-class-left/ 

A road forward to unite workers in Israel, Iran and Palestine – The Militant

✔️The goal of Hamas and Tehran has never been about advancing the rights of Palestinian working people. Their goal is to extend the reactionary influence of the bourgeois clerical regime in Tehran throughout the Middle East, hand in hand with the destruction of Israel....

✔️Only the unequivocal defeat of Hamas and the dismantling of its military and leadership structures can create conditions where Jewish, Arab and other working people can come together to defend their interests against the capitalist rulers in Israel, the Palestinian territories and more broadly in the region, and, in so doing, forge a revolutionary road forward....

Full:

A road forward to unite workers in Israel, Iran and Palestine – The Militant

Constitutional freedoms are fruit of hard-fought political struggle – The Militant

....Ever since Trump clinched the Republican nomination in 2016, Democrats have unleashed the FBI to go after him. FBI boss James Comey and former chief Robert Mueller were tasked with bringing Trump down both before the election and trying to impeach him afterward on utterly fabricated claims that he “colluded” with Moscow.

Learning the true history of the capitalist rulers’ political police is essential for working people.

The Socialist Workers Party launched an unprecedented lawsuit against the FBI in 1973, as more became known about FBI spying, harassment and disruption against fighters opposing Jim Crow segregation and Washington’s war in Vietnam. The victorious case helped uncover the massive scope of FBI abuses against the party and other opponents of government policy.

In 1986 federal Judge Thomas Griesa ruled that the use of cop informers to infiltrate and spy on communists violated the Constitution’s guarantee of privacy and freedom of association; that the FBI’s burglaries, planting of microphones and opening of mail at party offices was illegal; and that the FBI’s Cointelpro disruption of SWP activity and harassment of its members was against the law. The party’s campaign and legal victory defended the political space for all working people.

Today prosecutor Smith is seeking to refurbish the FBI and deal a blow to political rights, insisting that Trump “does not have an unlimited right to speak.”

Full:

Constitutional freedoms are fruit of hard-fought political struggle – The Militant

New video of Hamas abuse of women hostages shows Jew-hatred, brutality – The Militant

New video of Hamas abuse of women hostages shows Jew-hatred, brutality – The Militant