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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Sunday, June 07, 2009
I wrote a while back on the effect of the current recession on right-wing politics. For the sake of entertainment, if nothing else, here's its leftwing counterpart:"Is it time for a return to communism? And, if so, to which idea of communism must we turn?... 'On the Idea of Communism' was about Alain Badiou's idea of communism. Badiou doggedly kept faith with the concept of communism at a time, after 1989, when it was both pronounced dead and criminalized , identified with the totalitarianism that a triumphalist liberal capitalism defined itself against. The key reference points for Badiou’s anti-statist version of communism are Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Jacobins and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The most obvious absence from this list is Karl Marx, and Badiou’s interjection in the closing discussion (see clip below) confirmed that he rejects the idea – fundamental to Marx – that the economic and the political are indivisible. For Badiou, the political must always hold itself at a principled distance from the economic. But is 'communism' the best name for Badiou's egalitarian and emancipatory philosophy? And does the word 'communism' have any further political viability?
An ambiguous spectre hangs over new formulations of Communist theory: a spectre called Marxism. In new Communist theory it cannot be fully discerned whether Marx has finally been put to rest, whether some organ without body of his theory persists; or rather, if his ghost is laughing, distraught, at the inscription of R.I.P. on his headstone, as the gears of global political economy grind on.
Still, there are good reasons for this ambiguity. Unlike Marx’s prophetic vision, the gravedigging of history turned out not to be capitalism digging its own hole, but rather capitalism, and a generation or two of disillusioned post-Marxists, digging the grave for Marxism itself. After all, the Marx of historical materialism appeared to die when capitalism emerged triumphant from the Cold War; the Marx of class struggle as the dialectical-historical motor of change appeared to die with the defeat of working class; and the Marx of revolutionary philosophy appeared to die with the turn to the anti-dialectical forms of 'resistance' propounded by Foucault, Deleuze, Laclau et al. Consequentially, when in recent years the term Communism has been resuscitated by theorists such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou, it has been at the expense of a presumed caesura between Marxism and Communism. "
I suppose this makes a pleasant change from attempts to explain that communism as implemented had nothing to do with its Marxist origins, but it's still not especially convincing. From the look of how matters are actually progressing, a resurgence in communism, Marxist or otherwise, is the last thing that we can expect. When I voted in the European elections last week I was somewhat mortified to look at the long list of parties on the ballot paper, a list that was so long the paper had to have a perforated extensions to fit the remaining parties on it. The tendency of parties to dissolve into sectarian factions over points of doctrine is something I tend to associate with the left (Labour, the Liberal Democrats, No2EU and the Socialist Labour Party were all represented) but this paper seemed to suggest that it's become as much of a tendency for the right (quite a long list of nationalist parties like UKIP or the EDP, as well as the unwelcome presence of a christian party as clearly the absence of the religious right was a grave loss for British politics). It's slightly amusing to see both the left and the right campaign against the EU on entirely contradictory and opposed grounds. The BNP were of course present as well, although the content of their election pamphlets was not much different to that of UKIP. The result was a fragmented vote, in which the left-wing share declined as the working class switched to the extreme right and the middle class switched to the Greens, thereby allowing free market parties like the Tories to benefit from a recession caused by excessive free market deregulation. Here's Jonathan Derbyshire's analysis:"One of the most striking things about the period since 15 September 2008 – the day that Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States – has been the lack of any concerted intellectual response to the financial crisis on the left. A "sort of deathly hush" has descended, when the conditions might have led one to expect increasing "ideological polarisation"... Murdoch recommended that the left rediscover its taste for moral, rather than mechanical, reform, and reach back beyond welfarism and utilitarianism to ideas that could be found in William Morris as well as Marx. This prescription is echoed here... the crisis of neoliberalism is also a crisis of a certain conception of the individual human being – as "financialised subject" or "rational" preference-maximiser."Labels: Communism Politics
posted by Richard 6:46 pm
