To the Straussians, rationality does not provide an adequate basis for a stable social order. To the contrary, the Age of Enlightenment has ushered in the crisis of modernity, in which nihilism – the moral vacuum left behind by the death of God – inevitably leads to decadence, decline and, ultimately, genocide.
That logical leap from Jefferson to Hitler might seem like the intellectual equivalent of Evel Knieval’s outlandish attempt to jump the Snake River canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle. But it’s essential to the Straussian world view – just as it provides the crucial angst that gives neo-conservatism such sharp political edges.
Back to Main
April 28, 2005
Billmon: The Grand Delusion
Comments
what’s the point of saying injustice is part of American history? Yeah. Obviously. 3/5 votes doesn’t take Marxian or Straussian text reading to see the obvious. So what’s the point?
It seems the marxian approach and Straussian approaches are equally perfect because both cleverly eliminate crucial tests and metrics in the lives of actual flesh and blood humans in the test and null conditions. Makes for a great con.
Posted by: razor | May 2 2005 22:44 utc | 202
Prior to 1860s, white America was inherently egalitarian.
yeah? tell it to the Irish… tell it to the Jews [oh sorry, they weren’t considered “white” back then]. tell it to the DAR… well you get the drift. egalitarian it was not: even among whites the hierarchy of caste and recency of arrival was scrupulously observed. Herrenvolk egalitarianism…
I have zero interest in red baiting. I didn’t even know it was still possible, he said, red-baiting away zestfully 🙂
Gramps was an immigrant, a wobbly, and organized for Mother Jones, but he was no stinking commie — more gratuitous provocation and baiting? or just quoting “Gramps” himself? if so, please include quotation marks to indicate the source of the insult 🙂
The Wobblies were the Industrial Workers of the World — the most militant and radical socialist workers’ organisation ever to grace this sprawling robber-barony called the US. They were generally anarcho-syndicalists (my favourite flavour of Old Lefty), and with their “little red songbook,” way more fun than any of the latter-day Trots or Sparts I ever met. Their goal was precisely the opposite of the “company union” on the Japanese plan: they dreamed of uniting all American workers in “One Big Union” to contest with the moneyed classes for control of the economy. They lost. They were murdered, beaten up, tortured, jailed, betrayed, exhausted, wrecked on the reefs of endemic worker racism, and eventually sidelined by FDR’s brilliant brokerage of a compromise deal for labour.
I recommend Cosma Shalizi as the example of a modern socialist thinker who disavows Marx (as doctrine or sacred text) w/o jettisoning the power of the Marxian analysis, but rather building on it as modern evolutionary biology builds on Darwin. speaking of which has anyone read Gar Alperovitz yet? naybe I’ll take him along on my upcoming guilt-inducing plane flight, as one of the two books I am permitted by “law” (hello, Constitutionality has left the building) in the U.S. of Illiteracy.
deanander
i’m ploughing my memory – was there a figure in the wobblies called big bill hayward – who was a friend to the magnificent american boxer jack johnson, a friend to the great american singers paul robeson, woody guthrie & cisco houston & sometime drinking pal to the great american writer dashiell hammet – commies all
& that is the fundamental difference between us marxists & the straussians – they cannot sing nor are capable of holding a tune – as any red knows
horst wessel lieder – the robbie williams of fascism
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 2 2005 23:07 utc | 204
Haywood. but yes. he and Robeson were not, afaik, contemporaries — Robeson was pilloried by HUAC, decades later. here’s a capsule summary of the FBI’s campaigns against labour organisers and civil rights (for Blacks) organisers.
Bill Haywood’s working life began at the age of nine [that is not a typo, and quite “Constitutional,” as that sacred document contains no language forbidding child labour] in Utah mining; his labour organising career took off as he rose through the ranks of the WFM — an industry-wide union for western mineworkers.
he was convicted under the Alien and Sedition act (PATRIOT Act of its time) during WWI, on charges of organising a strike during wartime. the IWW, the union with which his name is most persistently associated, was notorious in its day for that very egalitarianism which razor admires so much: they tried to organise both men and women, Blacks and Whites, natives and recent immigrants. this was, of course, viewed by capital and its boughten media of the day as deeply subversive and “unAmerican.” a fair chunk of the labour force, of course, agreed 🙂
whether Haywood was set up/framed in the early 1900s for plotting the assassination of a politician or whether he actually considered such violent action, we may never know. certainly it was a smear that stuck, damaging his rep with both allies and enemies. when I think about it I am inclined to remember the woman in my recent news post who was anonymously accused of “threatening to cut off the President’s head.” or that poor damn biologist/artist who is still dragging his expensive way through the courts trying to throw off ludicrous accusations of bioterrorism. Big Bill was a lot more threatening to the money establishment than either of those folks, though the biotech interests do seem to have it in for Kurtz.
Big Bill wrote a lot of songs — mostly iirc pastiche and satirical — and was a major contributor to the Little Red Songbook. Poet Carl Sandburg, also author of the charming, wistful and uniquely American “Rutabaga Stories” for children, was sympathetic to the Wobbly cause and interviewed Big Bill in jail.
btw, Stan Goff comments today on the trial of Hasan Akbar and in so doing, touches on a lot of the essential questions about law, jurisprudence, the construction of State power, the illusion of objectivity, etc.
this should probably be filed under “Rush to Judgment” but the threads seem to be cross-pollinating anyway…
“Prior to 1860s, white America was inherently egalitarian.”
I phrased that incorrectly. What I meant was that the distribution of wealth was fairly narrow prior to 1860, compared to say after 1885.
The economic entities were mostly sole proprietorships contracting with sole proprietors. As you get closer to 1860 this becomes less so. Indeed, New England states had corporations, especially in textile mills, and common law rulings increasingly established limited liability for many of these entities. In regard to the Irish, this is precisely the environment they stepped into. It was the beginning of squalor, but nothing compared to the Gilded Age.
Also, as the 19th century progressed, the frontier moves farther and farther west. That means the opportunity cost that employers had to bargained against shrank, putting down word pressure on labor. The Irish were notable for not choosing to pick up farming, but instead congregated in the cities. This is understandable as their poverty was the result of a crop failure from an agrarian setting in Ireland.
But over all, the disparities in wealth and power in the 19th century were nothing compared to that which emerges in the Gilded Age. And that disparity was triggered by the widespread diffusion of the limited liability corporation, which came about in the 1860s.
The Gilded Age created a class that abhores equality.
Posted by: Timka | May 3 2005 0:39 utc | 207
Jeez, fellers. Big Bill was a wobbly, not a communist (marxist). On the other hand, the class basis of the appeal of arcane doctrines with opaque terminology to clerics/academics is too obvious.
Posted by: citizen k | May 3 2005 1:40 utc | 208
citizen k
You don’t say much, but do so with great style. Much appreciated. About your example of Braudel as declamation of class struggle. Not entirely true. He recognized constantly in Civilization & Capitalism the fact of interclass exploitation. He recoghnized capital as a system of the integration of class interests.
About his relation to Marxism and his divergences with Marx, much is to be admired about Braudel. First, Braudel is right about the uneven development of capital. He is right about the important difference between the market economy and global monopoly capitalism. He is right about the danger of destroying entrepreneurial capitalism, as advocated by Lenin.
He was wrong about the preference to preserve capitalism in order to avoid the violence of revolution. As the people of Iraq know in their bodies and minds, capitalism kills.
Braudel was a marxist who demonstrated the complex ways capitalism expanded by its own set of logics.
Posted by: slothrop | May 3 2005 2:37 utc | 209
hold on a sec, citizen k. your little BTW comment @ 6:13 is a bit too dishonest to let pass w/o calling you out on it. my point was not that paine was a land speculator, which i don’t know enough of the man to pass comment on, but rather one particular example of a crass expression of economics over flesh & blood, of a statesman who has figured a way to cover expenses while ignoring the human element. This was directly in response to your comment at 12:36 that the “reduction of human beings to economic cogs” is not a valid critique of that era, nor any, i take it. your revisionism weakens your credibility, imho.
@Timka – here’s an interesting read you might find insightful – essay review of “Inequality in Early America” [pdf]
Posted by: b real | May 3 2005 3:27 utc | 211
God is not on the side of the heavy battalions, but of the best shots.
– Voltaire –
Just one more reason to take aim carefully, even if it requires extra study.
Posted by: citizen | May 3 2005 5:55 utc | 212
Timka makes a good point, in practical experience as outlined in the’ Its a Wonderful Life’ analogy. This nicely makes the seperation between the innovation (better mousetrap) involved in entrepreneurship, and monoply instinct of crushing competition (along with innovation) as the method of domination. The problem, of course is that the consolidation impulse sucks the oxygen out of competitivness, both locally and globaly. Its a simple distinction that somehow has been lost on the American public over the last 30 or 40 years — but one most have experienced in some way personaly. The Dems should articulate this point.
Posted by: anna missed | May 3 2005 10:10 utc | 213
Tyrone: You said “history is class struggle”, and I said that real historians, such as Braudel (one could add many others) don’t follow such reductionist view. I did not say, or believe, that interclass struggles don’t exist or that capitalism does not involve exploitation or that one needs to renounce Marx or anything similar. However, to me, any attempt to reduce the liberatory element of the American revolution to a upper class charade plastered over naked exploitation is bad history, tin-eared politics, and reflective of an economism that is profoundly anti-human. Thompson’s “Poverty of Theory”, while bizzarely dated, is a far more eloquent and insightful exploration of this argument than I could ever approach.
Whether one finds capitalism to be good or bad is a different question – and maybe a question with little utility. Is there any evidence to show that human rights, personal liberty, and community are superstructural emanations of economic machinery? Domination and exploitation run through human history just as freedom and community do – and even though Marx didn’t have the benefit of the insights of e.g. Feminist analysis or anthropology beyond Victorian orientalism, we do.
Show a little appreciation for the dialectic and evolution.
b real: History is not a sports event where one roots for a team and boos the opponents. If you think Paine’s work can be summed up by an appendix showing a lack of modern regard for Indigenous Rights, you are very wrong.
Posted by: citizen k | May 3 2005 10:37 utc | 214
Anna M. Timka’s “Wonderful Life” point deserves applause. Of course, our comrades from academe will have a harder time appreciating “trade” but it would benefit them. In my reading of Braudel, he becomes wonderfully corrupted over time as his appreciation of the complexity and richness of trade and industry overcomes his initial Sorbonnesque disdain for mere merchants.
Posted by: citizen k | May 3 2005 10:48 utc | 215
@citizen k – If you think Paine’s work can be summed up by an appendix showing a lack of modern regard for Indigenous Rights, you are very wrong. we both know that i never made that claim. also revealing is your own claim that Domination and exploitation run through human history….
Posted by: b real | May 3 2005 14:40 utc | 216
citizen k
Thank you for acclaim and wonderment for the impressive complexity of things. Thank you also for reminding us the folly to “reduce” demonstrable conflict to the solution of theory.
However, to me, any attempt to reduce the liberatory element of the American revolution to a upper class charade plastered over naked exploitation is bad history, tin-eared politics, and reflective of an economism that is profoundly anti-human.
This is just hyperbolic, a privileged condescension of history tacking onto the immense detail of elite machinations the “but, the ideal was so “liberatory””…trope.
In any case, your posts are fun to read.
Posted by: slothrop | May 3 2005 15:53 utc | 217
The thread here is enormously consistent. Strauss v. Liberals, positivists v. realists.
Posted by: slothrop | May 3 2005 16:04 utc | 218
b: You write also revealing is your own claim that Domination and exploitation run through human history….. Is that a controversial claim? Do you have new evidence of the egalitarian kibutzim of Akkadia or of the Yellow Emperor period? Maybe you want to hark back to the idyllic Bonobo period? You’ve got my vote – this land ape shit is just not working out.
Posted by: citizen k | May 3 2005 17:29 utc | 219
Jeez, fellers. Big Bill was a wobbly, not a communist (marxist).
Yet, when the US government was poised to execute him, he jumped bail and sought refuge in the Soviet Union, where he lived from 1921 until his death iin 1928. He didn’t run away to Panama, Tahiti, the Left Bank, S Africa or other popular spots for wanted men to lose themselves. He went to the young USSR, a country which he and many other Wobblies deeply admired.
It seems to me that citizen has caught a bad case of red-phobia and believes that there is an intrinsic contradiction between being a big, bold, funny, courageous American working class hero and being a “red.” To citizen, it seems, “commies” are effete, timid, overeducated intellectuals hiding under the ivy-covered stones of the academy, so Big Bill could not possibly have been a Communist.
What citizen seems to forget is that Communism in the teens and twenties was an exciting new force in the world, at the time seeming to offer a way forward and out from under the stifling class hierarchy of both Euroland and the US. The USCP counted among its members many people whose primary focus was not polishing their obscure Marxist jargon and knifing each other in the back in the Letters pages of journals with a sub list of fewer than 1000, but facing up to Pinkertons’ thugs, publishing investigative journalism at the risk of having their presses and their kneecaps smashed, rescuing Black folks from lynch mobs and indentured labour, and the like. There was, for a period of time, a truly “American Communism,” the communism of Carl Sandburg, Dash Hammett, and — I say with reasonable confidence — Big Bill. But this homegrown American Left was deftly sidelined by FDR and then beaten into the ground by McCarthy, Cohn, the Dulles (“Kray”) brothers, and J Edgar… then came the crushing, heartbreaking revelations about the crimes and stupidities of the Stalin era, and anyone who wasn’t a complete hardcore ideologue/zealot had a crisis of faith (kinda like the storm of revelations about priestly paedophilia, though on a grander scale — even more undermining to the loyalty of the faithful). The Party, as you might say, was Over.
Citizen K
In the spirit of Monty Python letters to the editor, I must strenuously object to the “idyllic Bonobo period.” As you must know, Adrienne Rich uses this idealized bonobo period to claim that the “patriarchy” was started by sons raping their mothers and denying the naked ape egg carriers the pleasures of egg carrier on egg carrier sexual enjoyment, yet, the bonobos are only cousins, not ancestors!
Not that I actually disagree, or, am making this stuff up.
Posted by: razor | May 3 2005 17:56 utc | 221
Ah, Rocketman, please don’t try the idealist/materialist gambit on someone as crass as me. Liberal ideals are interesting not because we can cleverly point out the moral flaws of the long dead or because we can attempt to put labels on things so we don’t have to think about them, but because they have value to actual human beings. Instead of sneering about Tom Paine, it would be more pertinent to consider Rosa Luxemberg’s insight ” … liberalism as such is now absolutely useless to bourgeois society it has become, on the other hand, a direct impediment to capitalism from other standpoints.”
Posted by: citizen k | May 3 2005 17:58 utc | 222
Citizen K
Assuming I am rocketman, my veering off on a tangent on a tangent in the interest of humor caused only confusion.
Tom Paine is fine with me, and I cannot distinguish idealism from realism in a blind test. I was just enjoying the cite to bonobos, and trying to mimic Graham Chapman reading a blustering letter that undermines itself, by sharing a famous (in some circles) instance where bonobos have entered American leftist discourse in a degraded sloppy science, 180 degrees out of kilter, kind of way.
To get back to Strauss, the point is, that in an era where bonobos and homo sapien sapiens are known to both be apes, study of the western classics as the source of wisdom, is appallingly anti intellectual. The insistence of some on mandatory use of the marxist schools to define the issues and solutions to American civic issues is a similarl appalling waste.
Posted by: razor | May 3 2005 18:37 utc | 223
razor,
think slothrop is rocketman, and come to think of it, most of the other threads here at the moon find analogy to gravitys rainbow, iraq and the freedom of post war pre- government — an extended engagement. And that scatological general, was his name meyers? living that book aside, the reading here also fits, if not as full spectrum intellectual amusment, then in sheer exhaustion! pant, pant, don’t stop now
Posted by: anna missed | May 3 2005 18:59 utc | 224
citizen k
anti-dühring, 18th rumaire of louis bonaparte, civil war in france, grundrisse, gerlan ideology, class struggle in france, misery of philosophy, the holy family the economoc & philosophic manuscripts
just a few works by the old boy – it is clear that they have escaped your attention
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 3 2005 19:06 utc | 225
razor
The insistence of some on mandatory use of the marxist schools to define the issues and solutions to American civic issues is a similarl appalling waste.
You positivists need to back up what you say, rather than posing admonitions as obvious common sense.
But, that’s positivism. It’s easy to be brilliant by constantly confirming what exists, rather than by answering why things exist.
Posted by: slothrop | May 3 2005 19:22 utc | 226
And let’s be honest, Strauss was a good positivist, also (and so it follows) a moral relativist. Power for power’s sake, harbinger of endless pomo “ironies.”
Some of us here, though, continue to believe in morality.
Posted by: slothrop | May 3 2005 19:31 utc | 227
my last post à razor – my argument with citizen k is entirely other
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 3 2005 19:32 utc | 228
I’m taking notes. And we know where you all live. Whatever else, you can all be be positive about that.
Posted by: Joseph McCarthy | May 3 2005 19:42 utc | 230
Slothrop and Citizen K
I apologize for the presumption and am relieved to learn that I am not rocketman. And barely ashamed not to remember enough of the part of Gravity’s Rainbow I uncomprehendingly read to have got it right at the start.
“It’s easy to be brilliant by constantly confirming what exists, rather than by answering why things exist.”
When I play the sage I find the opposite to be true, source questions allow speculative flights of fancy that pass for brilliance, avoid all accountability, and give the source endeavor a bad name; nor, have I read any answers here of why things exist; nor, frankly, will I; nor, do I find it consistent with the claim to be typing away on the internet against “confirming what exists”. Where’s that internet and its nodes comes from anyway? However, these are but more tangents.
Labeling those, who took it for granted that it is long past time to move on from marxism, positivists, does not make it so, as comforting as the labeling may be to the labeler. However, this tangent is one that is consistently diverting resources from the fight of the day on precisely critical questions of Why.
The startling thing to me is that a post, and a great post by a great writer, about Strauss, and about the paleo conservative attack on enlightment liberalism, has run aground on a tangent about whether marxist analysis is receiving its merited due.
I have seen no one on this post deny that marxist analysis is a tradition with much of intellectual value, though, clearly marxist analysis is inadequate and wrong in fundamental ways, but, mostly, who gives a shit now, aside from starving north Koreans and Cubans who want a better job than whoring for tourists? Get on with it.
Aristotle, I was told by a ref who isn’t working now, thought smoke went up because it had upness in it, yet Aristotle can be rewarding and if I had to pick a team of the five all time greats for a Why vs Why competition, I would consider Aristotle, though I think I would go with Chang Tsai instead. But Aristotle’s time has past and he is little help on the Why work that needs to be done. Like Aristotle, Marx’ time has passed. Straussian and marxians should both get on with it but many, apparently, like republicans, have emotional priorities and prime allegiances based on what cannon they suckled on.
For a better future or for one self?
Posted by: razor | May 3 2005 20:13 utc | 232
razor
when i read your posts i feel i am before a judge in a county court – enough learning to get by but not enough to make real judgement
perhaps that is why in modern america journalese & jurisprudence mirror one another in their shallowness & in the infantile approach they take to the why’s
i am not defending the marxxist canon as if i am sucking on its teat – it is quite substantial enough to defend itself from what are in essence paranthetic & essentially thin attacks
you speak of economic determinism but i read nothing in your work which reflects a deeper understanding of karl or of his interpreter & transformers in our time & there are very many
some even in your own apparent area of interest – legal theory – but i do not have to repeat that what passes for jurisprudence is little more than an aside & has become so corrupted as not to be given the enoprmous weight that you do
& yes in part – the poverty & corruption of jurisprudence has a great deal to do with leo strauss & his intellectual companions. however the corruption of modern jurisprudence can not be blamed on commies like me you old son of a son of an immigrant from odessa – if my mammaries serve me well
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 3 2005 20:31 utc | 233
razor – no problem. Appreciate your insight re. bonobos and Ms. Reich. Given the alternatives, rather the life of a bonobo than the class struggles of a chimp – although Bonobos are currently suffering the fate of all primates that don’t have enough automatic weapons, class struggles or not.
Giap. Have mercy – what a tedious list. In english, I think it’s the “poverty of philosophy” although certainly plowing through the Grundrisse is misery. I liked the 18th brumaire for the sheer snarkiness of the writing. Imagine the 18th Brumaire rewritten by a modern academic Marxist “History manifests itself as contradiction between the reified concept of the tragedy developed to obscure the imperialist aims of the bloodthirsty Athenian pre-capitalist class, and as a comedy in which the proletarian humor of the working class as objectified in placing a foot on the superstructure of a yellow colored tropical labor product …
Posted by: citizen k | May 3 2005 20:50 utc | 234
ô citizen k
it is so easy to say yet so difficult to believe anybody who has actually read these works could actually say what you are saying. it not only lacks imagination but it also hints at a real absence of coprehension. however you are right misère de la philosophie(which i believe was written in french) would translate in english as the poverty of philosophy
i believe the tedium you feign is actorly but it is not substantial
nor do either razor or you mention any of the strauss’s marxist contemporaries benjamin lukacs & adorno for example nor any others of the franfurt school
how you & razor can somehow mel marx into strauss is a little beyond me even as a rhetorical exercise. the affinities of strauss with heidegger you never mention – nor mention the parlous influence that has had in most modern philosophy continental or otherwise
your judgements of marx & co are so lacking in depth – i wonder whether your attack from strauss comes from idealised state i know not where. there is a concrete basis to the work of leo strauss & there are concrete conditions of his influence
i suggested that we follow alabama’s suggestion & read the bastard himself – that seems to me the least we can do with our enemies & with the enemies of liberty
but your anti communist catcalling is a routine worth of jackie gleason reading a j ayers
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 3 2005 21:19 utc | 235
how you & razor can somehow mel marx into strauss is a little beyond me even as a rhetorical exercise.
Ideologies are dangerous. They have a deadly tendency to become more important than people.
i suggested that we follow alabama’s suggestion & read the bastard himself – that seems to me the least we can do with our enemies & with the enemies of liberty
Nah, I can think of a thousand better ways of spending that time. Listen to your own advice on this one and ignore him.
colman my irish friend – i see knowledge as a tool & also because knowledge is as passionate to me as are the pleasures of the flesh. they arer equal parts debauch & rigour
marxism as a tool has been a part of my life since my childhood & i have found it completely transforming & a key to wonderment
i accept i might have a yeatsian ‘fanatic’s heart’ but if that is so i have always accepted that this knowledge is not a baton to whack over the heads of other people – i simply do not like it denigrated when i know the persons have either not read the work or have conciously misread it
citizen k made an allusion to thompsons poverty of philosophy which is an empiricist’s attack on althusser yet i do not find it impossible to use practically the texts that thompson attacks & thompson himself – i think that is what thinking is – a holding in tension of ideas – to paraphrase f scott fitgerald
i agree with you that when ideologies are just flag to tap the other on the head then they are counterproductive & offensive. slothrops approach i find to be a honest questioning
& to add just another bibliographic note bothe adorno & habermas have written well on jargon
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 3 2005 21:57 utc | 238
“The time that August Spies anticipated came soon, and the voice for an eight-hour day was soon heard beyond the United States and Canada to the whole world, as workers, peasants, students celebrated May Day and with it, to quote Oscar Ameringer, “the divine message of more money and less work.” That “divine message” is actually a faith-based initiative if there ever was one. However, it has been lost in those modern forms of enslavement, debt peonage, forced labor in penitentiaries, export zone sweatshops, mandatory overtime, multiple job-holding, and feminization of poverty which, even if we are not all comfortable calling it the work of satan, certainly characterizes contemporary planetary labor. For if the eight hour day actually came as a result of May Day struggles, it surely has long since gone.
So, that’s what most of us know about Magna Carta and May Day. And what they have in common is loss — the lost liberties, the lost eight-hour day. They seem to have little to do with each other, separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of years. Even if we put aside geography and chronology for a moment and compared them on the basis of class struggle, it is the difference that seems to stand out. The feudal barons who stood up against King John were themselves large landed magnates, latifundista, who commanded the labor of serfs and villains in the feudal mode of production. The struggle in Chicago in contrast was a class struggle between industrialists and the proletariat, a new type of ruling class even though we dub them robber barons, and a new type of worker, huddled in slums crammed into factories.
While it is true that Magna Carta contained provisions to benefit or to protect Jews, city-dwellers, and merchants, acknowledging in these commercial interests a new historical force, a force which was relatively weak at the time, yet its inclusion signified that Magna Carta attempted to weld together a class bloc, or coalition, providing to the disparate elements methods of dispute settlement, policy making, and over-arching spiritual supremacy of the Christian church.
Magna Carta was a treaty in the class war, and it helped to make a ruling class. As for King John, as soon as he could, he resumed war and discarded Magna Carta but then he dropped dead. The story of his death became the stuff of legend among the peasant commoners conveyed by word of mouth and remembered as oral history even by William Morris who in breathing its bold and blunt heroism I paraphrase. Fleeing his enemies King John lost all his baggage in an onrushing tide of the sea, and in a foul mood took shelter in Swinestead Abbey, Lincolnshire,. “How much is this loaf sold for?” he asked at dinner, and when told one penny he answered, “by God, if I live for one year such a loaf shall be sold for twelve pence!
peter linebaugh magna carta & may day counterpunch
also a very good article in counterpunch on the panzer pope by navarro
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 3 2005 22:28 utc | 239
razor:
I cannot distinguish idealism from realism in a blind test.
The difference is that a realist believes that events are caused by real things. An idealist believes that events should be. The realist studies and tries to learn what really causes things. The idealist fabulates. It is all the difference in the world.
citizen k:
Ah, Rocketman, please don’t try the idealist/materialist gambit on someone as crass as me.
I believe the actual distinction was between realism and idealism. Materialism without realism is probably just more of the same mushy relativism.
razor:
The startling thing to me is that a post, and a great post by a great writer, about Strauss, and about the paleo conservative attack on enlightment liberalism, has run aground on a tangent about whether marxist analysis is receiving its merited due.
I have seen no one on this post deny that marxist analysis is a tradition with much of intellectual value, though, clearly marxist analysis is inadequate and wrong in fundamental ways, but, mostly, who gives a shit now, aside from starving north Koreans and Cubans who want a better job than whoring for tourists? Get on with it.
I’m sorry that all this seems like a tangent. Let me rephrase: I don’t care if you are Marxist, only if you are a realist. If you do not believe that events are caused by real things (and I don’t mean empirical ones – but real ones. The empirical is always and only data. Causes are always at least partly beyond experience.) then I have no reason to believe that you accept the enlightenment, or science, or any of the bridges whereby people relate as equals committed to a shared world. In short, if you are not a realist, then eventually I expect you to submit to the myths of the fascists whenever they overwhelm you. In this I am responding to the power of billmon’s post:
Billmon’s post
To the Straussians, rationality does not provide an adequate basis for a stable social order. To the contrary, the Age of Enlightenment has ushered in the crisis of modernity, in which nihilism – the moral vacuum left behind by the death of God – inevitably leads to decadence, decline and, ultimately, genocide.
—major snip—
As I’ve said before, the American constitutional edifice reminds me of a house riddled by termites – it looks solid enough from the outside, but lean too hard against a wall and big pieces might start toppling over. And right now, the neocons and their Bible Belt allies are leaning pretty damned hard. There are days (like “Justice Sunday”) when the Weimar analogy no longer seems so far fetched.
If you do not believe that the world is caused by the real, what reason would you have to resist when the fascists say – “forget the constitution, and here is your invitation to join our youth group”? What was amazing about the communists in the mid-20th century is that they were the only people all over the world who fought the fascists after the fascists won. How could they do this? Ratzinger doesn’t know because he does not believe in anything more real than power.
We are not discussing trivia, but the only grounds we know for staring power in the eye and knowing that it is doomed. Marx is not the last answer for all time, but he was the first theorist of the social who articulated how the social is not just an idea, but something real – and we honor that…
…because there is no longer any aristocratic position of making the virtuous result happen.
The reality of social power has overcome all that. Me, I’m just looking for some pals who can handle (and help me handle) that the best you can do in this world of ours is know a little about what is causing all this creation and destruction. To make subtle skillful differences when society shows openings. Of course this requires a a knowledgeable eye – maybe those labels could help.
Those who aim for to make everything come out right believe in themselves, and they become neo-Straussians. Perhaps we are each trying to avoid this position as best we can. That is my hope.
Posted by: citizen | May 4 2005 0:05 utc | 240
citizen
how our friend deanander confuses you with citizern k – is cause for concern but reading deanander as we do – it is clear that it is a typographique rupture & not an epistemologique one
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 4 2005 0:12 utc | 241
I’m really amused about the serendipity of “citizen k” because elsewhere I have used “citizen kilroy” when I forgot my password.
I wonder if maybe it is a Kafka reference for citizen K, though.
Posted by: citizen | May 4 2005 0:15 utc | 242
sorry about that citizen. I just noticed the confusing name convergence. one of yez needs to apply for a name change, say to “Ever-Loving Howitzer of Constructive Criticism”… 🙂
meanwhile razor continues to irritate me with these shallow fanfaronades such as but, mostly, who gives a shit now, aside from starving north Koreans and Cubans who want a better job than whoring for tourists?
to conflate Cuba and N Korea as if they were identical instances of “actually existing socialism” is imho a mere Coulterism. “who gives a shit” might, for a start, be poor people in Venezuela and elsewhere in S America who are getting medical care courtesy of well-educated, compassionate Cuban volunteers. NK is in no position to do likewise. [and, of course, there are no hungry prostitutes in the US who wish they had a better job… right?]
afaik starvation, NK style, did not happen in Cuba even in the worst of the Emergency Period (just after they had their own localised Peak Oil event, several decades before the rest of us). looking around at the US today, I don’t expect government or people to deal as well with global peak oil as the Cubans did with the withdrawal of the Soviet teat. if given a choice between emigration to Cuba or NK, would one really flip a coin? it sure wouldn’t take me more than about 5ms to make up my mind 🙂 hardly apples and apples.
to subsume all ideological opponents into one strawman — all Reds are evil, all Cubans are starving prostitutes, all Reds are as evil as all other Reds, to be a Cuban is just the same as being a North Korean, if you are not with us you are against us — and then hurl rocks at the artificial construct, is easy. it goes well with the glib, kneejerk swipe at feminism in the person of philosopher/poet Adrienne Rich — whose work I kinda doubt the poster has actually read. I can’t recall any refs to bonobos in Rich’s essays or poems, though admittedly it has been a couple of decades since I last read them. or is the en passant kick at Rich just a “economic girlie man” slur (but with reversed gender) tossed at liberals/feminists?
This marxist tangent is revealing.
First, it helps explains why Bush is in office. Some just won’t let go.
this imputation upthread (also from our friend razor) i.e. that old lefties/marxists are somehow to blame for BushCo’s election (or election theft — in 2000 only, or 2004? or both?) is more smoke and mirrors. there aren’t enough old lefties to make a power voting bloc that could have swung the outcome of an honest election — the WTC takedown was not a marxist plot designed to consolidate BushCo power — and marxists certainly don’t own the three leading voting machine companies 🙂 these are, unsurprisingly, owned by Republicans. exactly how marxists (whether vulgar or academic) could have prevented the BushCo putsch or the 20 year Repub Party buildup to it, or the craven collapse of the Dem Party, is unclear to me. in fact, the largest anti-Bush, anti-war rallies on my coast were organised by a bunch of rather tedious diehard Trots who should not, repeat not, be allowed to play with megaphones. whether ideologically obsessed or not, they provided enough portaPotties and dealt with the City bureacracy quite well. they stepped up to the plate when the organising needed doing.
oh wait. oops, I forgot for a moment — Everything Bad in the Whole World is Somehow the Fault of Marxism. there, that explains everything 🙂
truly it is written than those who claim to have “no ideology” invariably mean that their ideology is of the Right… 🙂
Dear citizen. Sorry for the confusingly similar nom-de-blab,maybe I should adopt “real absence of comprehension” as a homage to the memory of the General. Something appealing in that name, it brings back memories of my school years and my poor, long suffering, professors.
When you say Ratzinger doesn’t know because he does not believe in anything more real than power. I think you hit the mark. Strauss is obsessed with dominion over others – that’s part of what makes his writing so painful to read.
I have to point out, however, that unless you want to consider the Polish Army communists, to pick just one example, the communists were far from alone in resisting the Nazis/fascists.
The interesting question is why the Communists (big C) were so hapless to resist Stalin and even the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Posted by: citizen k | May 4 2005 1:18 utc | 246
b real: Thanks for the reference. Have printed it out, will look at as soon as I sign off.
In regard to Marx: I was always taught that he was the first theorist to take into account the impact of technology and how it changes things. Prior to that most theorist assumed a static environment.
My objection to Straussianism, is its presence in the American political dialogue to begin with, and the idea it brings with it of imposing a blanket ideology over society. I must say that much of the conversation on this thread is over my head. But my point in bringing up realism, as in legal realism, is that it is a mechanism that is pragmatic, and makes use of whatever philosophy suits the specific instance, or no particular philosophy at all. My second, and more important point, was that the culture at large and the political culture were being shaped by the legal culture and so we have been evolving into a highly pragmatic political system that mirrored the legal system. In my mind this makes both society and politics more stable. You may be a liberal or a conservative, but one small loss over a small question doesn’t wipe out your philosophical view point – so you can live with it and move on to the next battle.
What Strauss is bringing to our society is monolythic ideologicalism or ideological hegemony: one ideology for all questions – one answer. This means that we are most likely to get the wrong answer most of the time and that the ideological battle escalates because no one can afford to lose: from being a small patchwork battle field politics becomes a large all or nothing battlefield. This, as I said, makes the filibuster battle one of epic proportions.
I have many friends who believe the good guys will not win. And others who say that the only way the good guys win is if we have major economic catastrophy as we did in 1929 (btw – Roosevelt felt that the only thing that could rescue the Dems in the 20s was a catastrophy – and eventually we got it!). That catastrophy also gave us Hitler and the holocaust. If Senator Reid can hold the fort for another year, and if the Republicans continue to appear distasteful in a fascist religious sort of way, maybe the public will respond, and the Republican majority will whither, at least some. Perhaps then we can demand better policies, enough to see us through to 2008. Like Bill Mons suggest, when the credit card gets maxed out, then the colamity begins.
Posted by: Timka | May 4 2005 1:35 utc | 247
Fair enough brother k (and I am very much enjoying the nom-de-blab flap). It was not just communists.
But I am still impressed by the international record of communists in country after country who provided the conscience of their countries after the war was over. In Vietnam, Korea, China and so many other countries. The success of Marxism in academics was backed less by Uncle Joe’s propaganda than by real moral examples that must have had some insight behind them to occur in so many places around the world, so many cultures.
And I do imagine that you can already answer the question of why the big C Communists were hapless to resist Stalin and the Hitler-Stalin pact – you are living in the United States right now, yes?
Posted by: citizen | May 4 2005 1:49 utc | 248
DeA- wrote:
afaik starvation, NK style, did not happen in Cuba even in the worst of the Emergency Period (just after they had their own localised Peak Oil event, several decades before the rest of us)”
The reason it didn’t is very interesting. Castro actually cares about the welfare of Cubans and particularly in setting an example for Latin America. So they immediately implemented the knowledge of organic farming that had been previously limited to the Universities. NK had no agriculture system to put in place w/out fossil fuels. Hence, Cubans eating & NK starving.
Posted by: jj | May 4 2005 1:50 utc | 249
There are books the sentences of which resemble highways, or even motor roads. But there are also books the sentences of which resemble rather winding paths which lead along precipices concealed by thickets and sometimes even along well-hidden and spacious caves. These depths and caves are not noticed by the busy workmen hurrying to their fields, but they gradually become known and familiar to the leisured and attentive wayfarer. For is not every sentence rich in potential recesses? May not every noun be explained by a relative clause which may profoundly affect the meaning of the principal sentence and which, even if omitted by a careful writer, will be read by the careful reader? –from Leo Strauss, “The Literary Character of the Guide to the Perplexed”
Posted by: alabama | May 4 2005 2:04 utc | 250
It is humbling and disturbingly revealing to find I have upset people for taking positions I have not taken. Apparently some do believe there really is a shortage of marxist study, and, that it is evil baiting to offer up the two examples of marxist leninists in action today.
I appreciate the chance to mull over what this post and these comments have offered. I have a better understanding of why there is yet no effective opposition to the 43rd President of the U.S. and the gang he runs with and why there is great hope there can be.
I admire remembering’s bravery for establishing that intellectual rigor is a standard for posting.
DeAnander
Re bonobo’s. Wanna bet? I even heard Rich read her poems in person. Assumptions, watch ’em. Principles, live by them.
And, I think that this comment software is helping me write sloppy and I do not need help.
Posted by: razor | May 4 2005 2:16 utc | 251
Alabama: I’m sure RGiap will not be surprised, but Althusser, Strauss, DeMann. and Pope Ratzi all seem so similar to me. Perhaps it is because they are all smart, and my Bonobo level intellect recoils in fear to more comfortable issues. But perhaps it is rather (or also) because they construct repellent gray worlds in which they are experts and I much prefer those who become experts about the world as God made it (or as it created itself if you don”t like poetry).
Posted by: citizen k | May 4 2005 2:48 utc | 252
No problem, citizen k. I was only trying to imagine what Strauss himself might have posted on this particular thread.
Posted by: alabama | May 4 2005 2:59 utc | 253
Okay, you can all fight among each other, but when you bring in my cousins, then you’re getting crossing the line.
Whether Rich claimed an idyllic bonobo past is relevant to…what? When feminism was finding a voice back a few decades ago, some people (and who knows if Rich was one) believed their was a former “utopian” state that represented equality that seemed only possible via matrilineal structures. But who hasn’t created myths to empower their group?
I mean, what was the idea of a homonculus, except to let men claim maternity, and deny humanity to females?
Throughout history smart people (like Da Vinci) have made stupid claims based upon ideology…which doesn’t appear to be ideology because it’s the “perceived wisdom.”
Anyway, back to bonobos- the really interesting thing about them is that they are yet another example of a social group among primates that undermines the deterministic view of “boys will be boys” and “apes will fight wars, too, to solve problems.”
Gorillas have yet another social structure, and the interesting things about these issues is not some bullshit claim that the western classics are not read because humans are apes (in fact, that’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve heard claimed about education for while), but that the study of bipedalism also intersects into the issue of bonobos…of the non-human primates, they walk upright more than either gorillas or apes.
studying them can give hints (and destroy assumptions) long held…and yet their habitat is severely stressed.
The study of primates includes bone structures, and the sort of teeth that existed and patterns of migration…how this is not relevant for study, as it also relates to eco-systems and geology and geography and botany and general biology, is beyond me.
I never knew that people were kept from reading the classics because they also learned about punnet squares or climate types.
And, whatever way someone may or may not have mythologized bonobos, the truth of the matter is that they use sex to decrease group tensions, rather than dominance displays. If Rich did make some story about bonobos, her misinformation or your presentation of it, has nothing to do with the value of studying nature and its creatures.
Just as Darwin was able to observe different species and deduce some (uncomfortable for him) more rational explanations than Lamarkism, humans can observe other primates and recognize more plasticity in human actions/choices than reductionist science or religious tradition considers possible.
Posted by: fauxreal | May 4 2005 6:39 utc | 255
razor:
It’s not “evil baiting” to offer up NK and Cuba as examples of communist societies. But it might be a huge mistake. Sort of like offering up GWBush as an example of the world’s most democratic person.
Posted by: citizen | May 4 2005 6:39 utc | 256
Timka:
I can live with your approach. Reality always trumps the theory – but reality is exactly that which theory is attempting to ascertain; so this is a process of constant adjustment as one learns more. True intellectual revolutions tend to conserve knowledge and elaborate it.
Posted by: citizen | May 4 2005 6:47 utc | 257
DeAnander
Far far off thread. I found old notes and I was dead wrong about Rich talking about Bonobos and so should have said nothing. “False consciousness” is part of the pitch that I did not remember, which is more to the point of the tangent on the need for and value of marxism. Rich slandered sons, not bonobos when she wrote, in Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Identity:
“Susan Cavin, in a rich and provocative, if highly speculative, dissertation, suggests that patriarchy becomes possible when the original female band, which includes children but ejects adolescent males, becomes invaded and outnumbered by males; that not patriarchal marriage, but the rape of the mother by the son, becomes the first act of male domination. The entering wedge, or leverage, which allows this to happen is not just a simple change in sex ratios; it is also the mother-child bond, manipulated by adolescent males in order to remain within the matrix past the age of exclusion. Maternal affection is used to establish male right of sexual access, which, however, must ever after be held by force (or thorugh control of consciousness) since the original deep adult bonding is that of woman for woman. I find this hypothesis extremely suggestive, since, one form of false consciousness which serves compulsory heterosexuality is the maintenance of a mother-son relationship between women and men,…..”
The bonobo connection is not Rich’s, it is that the bonobo is the only ape that fits this description: a strong mother/son primate bond, where adult males are not in control of the group, but, that doesn’t make bonobos mother rapers.
Fauxreal.
The study of nature is a wonder open to all, that does not exclude study of the classics that should protect future generations from making Straussian mistakes. Whether plasticity is a fair conclusion on the evidence is iffier.
Posted by: razor | May 4 2005 8:00 utc | 258
i found it necessary to skip over much of the discussion above – i lack the background to appreciate what is being talked about – but i am reminded of a quote i’ve heard attributed to john kenneth galbraith (and i heard this so long ago that the androcentrism of the language was unremarkable at the time)
“under capitalism man exploits man – whereas under communism it’s just the reverse”
Posted by: mistah charley | May 4 2005 12:09 utc | 259
In our memories, there has never been an “under communism” that is not under capitalism. When Marx analysed capital in a disciplined way, he was critiquing society not showing a positive theory of how to govern. Just as rocket science doesn’t abolish gravity but works with it, communism doesn’t abolish capital but works with it. Communists sometimes attempt to ameliorate capitalism – I consider Cuba an example in this way. But Marxist reasoning is nothing without capitalism. As history, USSR was simply capitalism with state ownership of the capital. Read any of their economic plans if you have the stomach. Capital/growth… capital/growth… capital/growth.
One point of the critique is that capital has its own “subjectivity,” and capital (or, in a time under capital, “society”) doesn’t care about the human point of view.
An attentive person knows that JKGalbraith was foxily fooling himself. If he were more honest, he would have said:
Under capitalism, capitalists exploit man. Whereas under communism, communists do. Would he have actually argued that the party officials managed something that was not capital? No. So why should we?
Posted by: citizen | May 4 2005 14:59 utc | 260
… the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage …
–Adrienne Rich
Like he said: We have the poets.
Posted by: slothrop | May 4 2005 15:42 utc | 261
This thread is getting mighty long and involved. Are we solving anything?
Posted by: rapt | May 4 2005 16:04 utc | 262
rapt
this is among the best threads, imo. In it, straussians are discovered (positivism, the relativist assertion of power, the assiduous mythology of law as the best it can be given the reality of social relations always encumbered by domination), and the others of strauss (the ones who believe in a moral basis of interaction, the perfectibility of humanity, realists who constantly guard against the intrusion of myth in the affairs of individuals, and who are arrogant to believe victims can make a better history than victors).
Posted by: slothrop | May 4 2005 16:20 utc | 263
careful about those solutions. we solved the enemy good in ’45, but before we finished we had become Shiva.
I’m aiming to understand things better. And if you and I actually do understand a little better some of the real causes of how things work, that’s a real change.
Let me put it this way – Capitalism yearns to one ending and suppresses another:
BOOM! vs. yawn…
Either we blow each other up, or we all become more and more un-capitalists and the people at the top (managers of capital, no capitalists left) get so bad at playing the game that they lose track, and we introduce a new game for everyone to move on to. We’re going to have to make ourselves pretty freaking clever to make this new attraction, so understanding more may be the only way to avoid “boom!”
The more we understand how to play brilliantly, and the more the badass capitalists are jealous, the closer we are to a new game, one with more room for, yes, love.
Both endings so improbable – but one of them is ours.
Posted by: citizen | May 4 2005 16:50 utc | 264
Slothrop:
the assiduous mythology of law as the best it can be given the reality of social relations always encumbered by domination
Now I get what you mean way back up there. Cool. Thanks.
Correction on my above post:
…the more the badass un-capitalists (managers) are jealous…
Posted by: citizen | May 4 2005 16:55 utc | 265
Razor- The issue is the assumptions away from the idea that early human societies were harems. Gorillas live in harems, and they are not as closely related to humans as are common chimps or bonobos. But harems have existed in human cultures, in certain conditions, and continue to exist, in spite of other options.
Common chimpanzees have less in common with humans than bonobos do. This makes some people uneasy, because it challenges the assumptions dominance and also the “humans developed as male bands of killers/warmakers” idea. In fact, however, evidence suggests that our earlier ancestors, australeopithicines, were prey, not predators, for large cats. The ability to figure out ways to herd animals off cliffs went a long way toward moving humans out of environments inhabited by those who would prey on them. Did humans move to the savannah to find other food sources, or to avoid being a food source? Or a combination of both?
Bonobos are interesting because they share more human-like traits than chimpanzees, such as more bipedalism, but also because they have sex when females are not ovulating. Common chimpanzees do not do this. Unlike (most) humans, bonobos live in groups that, basically, use indiscriminate orgies to ease social tensions (college years accepted.)
This does not mean humans came out of orgiastic ancestors. However, the fact that both humans and bonobos have sex for pleasure, not just for procreation, means that humans also found uses for sex as a social “lubricant” and as a way to create emotional bonds.
So the plasticity is about the movement away from assumptions that have been based upon lack of knowledge and, again, ideological positions that were fostered by certain religions. Hunter-gatherer societies have been found that are both more egalitarian or less (when gathering was the primary source of food vs hunting). These bands have also demonstrated that people have long lived in groups that were formed in various ways.
Matrilineal societies are one way of dealing with male anxiety about parenthood, so that male uncles and cousins become the important male figures. Patrilineal societies found that it was useful to make women dependent or property in order to assure paternity. Maybe a history of modern civilization could be written from the perspective of male anxiety. (Engels seems to have had some things right, and some things wrong.)
All these societies have existed, continue to exist, and may exist into the future. This is plasticity. This is not determinism based upon some assumption of the “natural” order of things by looking at primates that are less like us than ones that we have only known about since the 1920s.
Posted by: fauxreal | May 4 2005 16:57 utc | 266
Rapt, quite right about the thread being awfully long. How about we start a new one under the heading of “Strauss vs. reality-based social science”? I’d be very happy to write up something trying to yank my attention back toward thinking in ways that counteract Straussian creations of new ignorances.
Let me see what I can slap together by, say, tomorrow? Or actually, I like slothrop’s last summary as the framework for a new thread. We could just re-order the sentences a bit and go. Slothrop?
Posted by: citizen | May 4 2005 17:01 utc | 267
Slothrop, dude: what’s real about “history is class struggle”? The critique of Marxism by the anarchists and later by Sartre and people like E.P. Thompson who was definitely out of the Marxist mainstream is essentially that it imposes a totalizing ideology that is prone to delusion and authoritarianism like all totalizing ideologies. (perhaps this is why Althusser and so many French Communist luminaries along with US stalinist hacks like Horowitz and the ex-trotskyites neo-cons found it so easy to switch to more profitable myths ). Some of us are here for the wreck, not the story of the wreck (nice quote). The Marxist myth is now relegated to the backwaters and the myths of the Evangelicals, Straussians, Jihadis, and others rule the world. But to survive the wreck or even to enjoy the ride, we have to see it for what it is.
Posted by: citizen k | May 4 2005 17:11 utc | 268
@razor, imho you’re reaching. what is “slanderous” about the mention of a text as rich and provocative, if highly speculative? Rich strongly emphasises the hypothetical nature of the “patriarchy starts as mother/son incest in hominid kin groups” theory. other people have other theories. to see this somehow as a “slander” on any contemporary members of the post-industrial nuclear family seems to be taking pre-history (and speculative theory) rather personally 🙂 did Freud “slander” all sons when he theorised the Oedipal complex? [I don’t like the old Viennese bastard one bit, but even I wouldn’t say that about him]…
as to the infantilisation of privilege — whether it be the infantilisation of men who don’t feel a need to know how to cook, clean, or pick up after themselves ‘cos they have a traditional Wifey, or the infantilisation of rich people ditto because they have a maid and butler, that hardly seems controversial. pseudo-parenting relationships where the person with less power/money is coerced or structurally situated as a faux-Mommy to the more privileged person are quite typical in human society — from “Mammy” on the plantation to Bertie Wooster’s Jeeves, to the old-fashioned office secretary who’s supposed to straighten the boss’ tie and keep track of his birthday list for him. people with a bit of privilege are always wanting to have their Mommy back in a controllable, docile form. Rich may have expressed this in somewhat hifalutin language but it’s hardly rocket science; and the connection with male sexual prerogative is hardly far fetched — after all, what is the excuse commonly made for male sexual predation and misbehaviour? “Boys will be boys” — more infantilisation and shrugging off adult responsibility.
afaik there is a continuous tradition of matrilineal macaques in Japan — primatologists studying ranking behaviour in their bands were fascinated to find out that the macaques inherited social standing from their mothers.
Ahemm – if someone could please summarize the above in a few hundred words I`ll be happy to open a new thread on this very interesting item :-||.
Mailto: MoonofA-at-aol.com
Brother k!
I agree that Marxian thought has to leave behind part of the class struggle idea, for reasons I’ve hinted at above. As long as there is a capitalist class, it will rule – very simple – even if it has to call itself a dictatorship of the proletariat to do so. Captal is the trickster coyote, and even when you kill off that damn coyote he comes back for another story. So, sure, I agree not to stand Hegel on his head anymore, not to totalize falsely. I agree not to think that the point of philosophy is to change the world – but rather to understand it and work with it.
Does it work for you if I concede that Marx should have learned to surf in his spare afternoons off between feeding his kids when he could and researching at the library? Well, Marx is learning to surf.
Realist social science (brought to you first by KMarx) helps us see that the logics of capital and old Father Time are reducing the population of capitalists. Trust funds, corporations, etc., the time is in view when no one will directly control his wealth. I mean, who the hell who’s ‘anyone’ actually lives in those off shore bank countries?
The funny thing that happens when you put all those tax saving legal baffles between you and your wealth is that you lose control.
And realist social science can actually teach us something about where the logic of capitalism will come from as it comes more and more entirely ‘over the heads’ of any individual empirically acting in the world. And in our world, more and more people are getting less and less to say about the rules that control their capital, and so their time. No?
And why is that? To get more money for those who can arbitrage the rules. So, do you seriously mean to say that class struggle is not history? Then how did my country go from being a population of farmers who could feed themselves without cash, to a country populated almost entirely by laborers, including more and more millionaire laborers who can’t afford to lose their paychecks for a year? That’s some serious historical change. No?
Posted by: citizen | May 4 2005 18:03 utc | 271
b
seems the last post of slothrop would be a good beginning
tho deep in my heart i think neither slothrop or i need to defend critical marxism – it does that well enough itself but i find the bibliographies people offer a real help – generally
rapt i do not think the thread is as oblique as it seems – the lines are quite clear & there seems to me to be interaction even if it is a little sensitive
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 4 2005 19:05 utc | 273
Not sure about the appropriation of Nietzsche by Strauss, but I’d imagine something like Rand: capitalism as an expression of will to power, as a justification for goal oriented behavior, “instrumental-purposive rationality,” the heroic capitalist who violates the second imperative as a matter of business.
Now, that’s vulgar fuckover of our man (“ours,” comrades):
“The old habit, however, of associating a goal with every event … is so powerful that it requires an effort for a thinker not to fall into thinking of the very aimlessness of the world as intended. This notion-that the world intentionally avoids a goal. . .-must occur to all those who would like to force on the world the capacity for eternal novelty. … The world, as force, may not be thought of as unlimited, for it cannot be so thought of. . . . Thus-the world also lacks the capacity for eternal novelty.”
We have created the weightiest thought-now let us create the being for whom it is light and pleasing!” –Nietzsche
Posted by: slothrop | May 4 2005 21:34 utc | 274
citizen k
WRT history as class struggle, it is true the historical narrative of this struggle is translated by ideology. For example, Marx recognized this during the Paris commune and aftermath:
“In the ideas of the proletarians…. who confused the finance aristocracy with the bourgeoisie in general; in the imagination of good old republicans, who denied the very existence of classes or, at most, admitted them as a result of the constitutional monarchy; in the hypocritical phrases of the segments of the bourgeoisie up till now excluded from power-in all these, the rule of the bourgeoisie was abolished with the introduction of the republic. All the royalists were transformed into republicans, and all the millionaires of Paris into workers. The phrase which corresponded to this imagined liquidation of class relations was fraternite.” Karl Marx
Put another way: we may choose to ignore history, but history will not ignore us.
Posted by: slothrop | May 4 2005 22:08 utc | 275
Slothrop: In plain language, you say there is class struggle and delusion. But this is exactly what I reject. The french peasants won substantial and lasting gains from the French Revolution and the mass of French workers live extraordinarily well compared with how the same group lived at the start of the 1900s despite the continued rule of the capitalists. Marx often veers towards a “ha ha, you fools, don’t understand what is really going on” mechanical view of social change with a dismissal of reformism despite the actual effects on the lives of humans. Of course, the women’s movement in the US and the civil rights movement were pulled and pushed by class differences, but they changed lives in ways that cut accross class lines as well. Of course the liberation struggle in South Africa brought a class of black bureaucrats and managers above a huge proletariat that remains impoverished and exploited. But while a European academic may dismiss the change of not having to carry around a passbook and be called kaffir as mere superstructure, that’s a shallow dismissal.
Posted by: citizen k | May 4 2005 23:58 utc | 276
Brother citizen. Smart words. Surf more, totalize less.
One of the distinctive characteristics of our time is this rise of commerce in the most elaborated abstractions and of an all powerful managerial class that as Bernie Ebbers put is “know[s] nothing about technology and finance”. Time to think about this discussion a bit.
Posted by: citizen k | May 5 2005 13:04 utc | 277
citizen k:
The french peasants won substantial and lasting gains from the French Revolution and the mass of French workers live extraordinarily well compared with how the same group lived at the start of the 1900s despite the continued rule of the capitalists.
Me (citizen) above:
go from being a population of farmers who could feed themselves without cash, to a country populated almost entirely by laborers, including more and more millionaire laborers who can’t afford to lose their paychecks for a year
These both seem to be solid empirical data, and I take it they are both true. And I am also tempted toward’s citizen k’s description that Marxist critique views social change ‘mechanically’. But – I credit Marxian critique with the same insight used by Foucault, namely that power is not primarily a matter of repression, but also of positively producing and reproducing living activity. So yes, capitalism produces lots of goods, including pretty much everything that we approve in the world. But this should not come as a surprise – Marxism critiques all of this world, considering both the desirable and the undesirable.
My guide in this is Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination: a reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory. If pressed for time, read his article in Historical Materialism 12.3, “Critique and Historical Transformation”. The whole issue is devoted to his book, so there are people critiquing his so called abandonment of class struggle, etc. but I have not read those yet. Postone reads the Grundrisse intensely, something I have yet to attempt, so I comment as a novice.
If Marxist critique is all about labor, then let’s say that Postone’s critique is all about time, and how the capitalist mathematics of time is concerned with how time makes capital (time is money). To a capitalist, it may be all about the money, but in reality exchange is done for both the profits and for an eventual use – the commodity form. So every advance in social domination (via abstract labor) is also an increase in use values. So yes, citizen k, the world must grow wealthier in “goods” in order for social domination to proceed via the routes of abstract time, abstract labor, and abstract social domination.
Abstract social domination – happens in a world where the primary form of wealth is abstract (this scarcely needs introducing: who among us does not bank, and more importantly fret endlessly, in a world of sheer numbers which, despite their near irreality, ensure our wealth). Because Postone works on these lines, he does not focus on forms of distribution in capitalism, his critique differs from this tradition with which citizen k engages.
Within the framework of this reading, the basic categories of Marx’s critique not only delineate a mode of exploitation. They are also temporally dynamic categories that seek to grasp modern capitalist society as a mode of social life characterised by quasi-objective forms of domination (commodity, capital) that underlie an intrinsic historical dynamic. This dialectical dynamic is a socially-constituted historically-specific core feature of capitalism, one that gives rise to, and, at the same time, constrains the possibility of a postcapitalist, emancipated form of life. It is grounded, ultimately, in a form of wealth specific to capitalism, namely value, that is at the same time, a form of social mediation, which Marx distinguishes sharply from what he terms material wealth.
Postone is working from knowledge of what has actually been happening under capitalism in our lifetimes, and he has re-examined Marx to see how it is that wealth and social domination intertwine, and his take on Marx provides a way to know the existence of general structural constraints on political, social, and economic decisions, such as those that brought down the USSR. In Postone’s words:
A position that grounds such historical patterns in the categories of Marx’s critique (commodity, capital) does not, then, regard such patterns affirmatively, but takes their existence as a manifestation of heteronomy.
Nietschze would have just said “slavery”. Postone is a social scientist, so he throws no bombs, but instead says this: “attempts to rescue human agency that posit historical contingency abstractly and transhistorically, bracket and veil the existence of historically specific structures of domination. They are thereby, ironically, profoundly disempowering.
I hear him saying – if you follow Strauss and those other slavers into their trap of saying that ancient Greeks read Plato etc. as we do, you demoralize and disarm yourself. Study Marx. The rules have changed. Wealth does not equal freedom.
Posted by: citizen | May 5 2005 14:50 utc | 278
Sorry about the unclosed tag. Somehow I didn’t see it in preview.
Posted by: citizen | May 5 2005 14:52 utc | 279
citizen
when I read citizen k’s bold attempt to win the last word, the rejection of class conflict is justified by mr. k in a familiar tautology of logic:
a) the positive account of 1st world workers suggests an accomplishment of capital, because
b) workers are no longer proletarians, but demonstrate intergenerational income mobility, therefore,
c) class conflict cannot, seldom if ever, exists, because workers no longer act in accord with a consciousness of class conflict
Another way of restating the same logic is via Timka above, who notes the constitutiveness of culture and law in the transformation of life. That is, persons make law which is reproduced culturally and reflexively (“structurated” as some sociologists put it), so that the social relations appear natural and “pragmatic” as Timka would say.
There are two ways to look at this process of structuration: as reification/myth, or as a positive account of the “pragmatic” outcomes of structuration.
What citizen k accomplishes is the second assessment: there is no real class conflict, because among workers, the fables of capitalist “progress,” “the American Dream,” are constantly reproduced by law and culture, and therefore obviate the reality of class conflict.
This is nothing more than postivistic vindication of inequality. Note: the hip postmodern, cultural studies, ethnographic research, not to mention economics–all too often worship, as citizen k apparently does, the false consciousness (what else do we call it?) of consumerist liberty, this constant structuration of power assuring decisive inequality and pain.
So, citizen, I think you give k too much credit. I think he has swallowed the bait of the mystification offered of freedom offered by the “chaos of production” in which the seeming arbitrariness of the allocation of resources seems to give us all our freedom to choose.
Citizen, you would have done better to simply remind k the excellent progress won by French workers was made largely possible by colonialist exploition and murder–that the spectacle of fraternite given its luster by the sweat of the colonies.
Posted by: slothrop | May 5 2005 15:37 utc | 280
Slothrop: what is your alternative vision? Let us take as given that Marx is a supreme critic of capitalism, that from the point of view of his time he was pretty damn good at it. Now, what is to be done? What is the alternative vision that we should be working towards?
colman
Planned production, of course.
Read deanander’s voluminous posts on ecology. It’s pretty obvious humans must abandon capitalist resource appropriation as a matter of survival. If, for no other reason.
Posted by: slothrop | May 5 2005 15:57 utc | 282
alabama
I was only trying to imagine what Strauss himself might have posted on this particular thread.
You don’t have to look any further than timka, razor, citizen k. Though, what is lacking obviously in razor’s posts, and substantially in citizen k’s posts, is the acknowledgment of the subterfuge of capitalist progress, of this progress as a ruse to keep all the happy people happy.
Posted by: slothrop | May 5 2005 16:08 utc | 283
Colman
By whom?
By me.
Deanander and others no far more than I do about the practice of “sustainability.” As I’ve said before, autochthonous, localized production, outlined by Murray Bookchin and others seems a good blueprint.
Added to this is the socialization of the production of telecoms, energy, transportation, medicine, utilities in general.
Posted by: slothrop | May 5 2005 16:22 utc | 285
Also realize some of my comments seem mean, arrogant. I respect the posts here by citizen k, etc. as inspiring.
just puttin mustard on the bitch, you know.
Posted by: slothrop | May 5 2005 16:24 utc | 286
Slothrop, planned production, but it could not work in the infamous sense tried in the USSR or PRC.
The aristocratic (bolshevist, Straussian, whatever) attempts to judge the good from their limited perspective has been failing quite spectacularly for at least several centuries now. This I see as one of the reasons capitalism could get going so strongly. So planned production could not be elitist AND work, especially in its process of knowing “what time it is.”
But the disaster of so-called laissez faire demands planning. So, perhaps we are seeing the rudiments of a distributed knowledge and decision process coming into being. Whatever, the positive alternative demanded by Colman b>cannot come into being because some bolshie Straussian (or platonic virtuoso) figures out a great idea that will work. So it is no use demanding a dictatorship.
What can work is trial and error, and critique and trial and error…. you know, the scientific method. Only this is a social problem, so the whole society is the scientist.
Society-the-scientist relies on good critique from we individuals. If we articulate our critique well, others may take up the thought as their own. When enough do, then the society can begin to sustain the thought socially, to sustain the good method that has been tried to test the thought, and so to solve the problem, socially. That is my solution for you Colman – more poetry. Or rather – Enlightenment.
About my credit accorded to citizen k: I agree that the progress for French wealth in the lower classes, for example, was in many ways stolen from elsewhere. But I also mean to say that capitalism does produce more wealth. The problem is that it is a modern form of wealth, and one that induces (to use language loosely) slavery. I am interested also in the ways that that French wealth is also French insecurity and French subordination to capital, subordination to an inhumane world. We are looking at Midas’s bad wealth.
Posted by: citizen | May 5 2005 16:31 utc | 287
Actually, I think the Buddhists have best articulated this key step I am on about in trying to articulate a solution:
Right Vision
The Straussians are just trying to pervert this good idea. “Straussverts” Strauss had such a boner for ignorance. Argh… my mind reels trying to confront his corruption.
Posted by: citizen | May 5 2005 16:42 utc | 288
So what you’re saying is that you have no clue what we should do, just that you don’t like what we’re doing? Great. Well, you won’t mind if the experiment we try is using the regulated market where appropriate, trying to balance individual property rights against the requirements of fairness.
As for planned production, if someone has a method that won’t turn into an aristocracy or feudalism almost immediately, I’d be interested in hearing it.
colman
I said: about agriculture/energy, waste management, etc. others here know more than me. I’m in the middle of reading stuff suggested by some of our comrades.
Also, please note: I said socialization of industries crucial to material reproduction. I’ll also add what I’ve mentioned elsewher: these crucial industries are also ones demonstrating increasing returns to scale–these should be centrally planned. Healthcare is weird case: elasticity whacked aqnd these resources require rationing which no “free” market can accomplish.
These are specific solutions, in outline form, colman.
Posted by: slothrop | May 5 2005 16:56 utc | 290
As I’ve said before, autochthonous, localized production, outlined by Murray Bookchin and others seems a good blueprint.
I’ve always wondered: how does concentrating the power locally prevent locals from forming an aristocracy? What prevents the rise of a local boss?
Colman – don’t be an ass. I said scientific method, which involves respecting the data, but also seeking to go beyond it.
The “regulated market” is not regulated.
Faith in the markets is a big P.T. Barnum target we paint on the whole world to forget what we meant when aimed to be “citizens.” Iraqis are now on the pointy end of that delusion-stick. Poetry and scientific retroduction are two different words for looking actively for a better explanation than this one that is taking us appreciably close rot mutual annihilation. Poetry is not “no clue”, it is getting a clue.
The experiment is not working. Why do you profess satisfaction?
Posted by: citizen | May 5 2005 17:03 utc | 292
Slothrop: Your deduction that lack of belief in “history is class conflict” means that I am a Straussian stooge who believes there is no such thing as class conflict, illustrates the shortcoming of your analytical methodology quite comprehensively. My basic critique of Marxianism, is that like Straussianism and Opus Dei Catholicism it defines a totalizing ideology interpreted by an elite who must not be questioned. Of course, since you approvingly refer to Bookchin and Rich, I confess that I have similarly typecast you wrongly.
In any case – happily offer the last word to others and return to trying to earn some money.
Later.
Posted by: citizen k | May 5 2005 17:19 utc | 293
back to basics
a) communist societies have never existed except perhaps in humanity’s nascence
b) communist moments have existed for very short periods of time – the commune of paris – 1917 -1919 in russia , in the yenan period in china especially during the anti japanese war, it existed for 5 minutes in hungary, another 10 minutes in certain german towns after the great war,
c) socialism in different form has existed but really much closer to social democracy with an elite
d) cuba, as a society has really tried, valiantly before the tyranny of u s capital & they have made remarkable progress in education & health & race relations that would shame its larger neighbour & indeed the whole of latin america but it is fighting a losing war surrounded as it is by meance & threat
e) i don’t know what north korea is but it is in part an entire construction of american foreign policy – it certainly has very little to do with communism
f) the vienamese are far closer to social democracies than a closed mind would except
g) one german jew does not make another german jew. marx is not strauss is not benjamin
h) razor, timka & citizen k have expressed profound ignorance in knowledge of the old man’s text & that much is proven by what they have written here
i) they conflate so many things that i end up being lost in a meaning that is itself without much meaning
j) the ideas of srauss have a particular but concrete history – the use of strauss is another history but both tendencies are clearly anti democratic, gnostic, misanthropic & are open to use by tyranny more than they are by ‘open’ societies
k) america is not now an ‘open’ society so the thoughts of strauss & his children & heirs in american conservatism want a totalitarian state – effectively
l) to speak as some do here as if legal theory, as if laws & justice had a meaning in the current context is baffling when it is not a bad joke
m) some here speak as if common law came to us from the vagina of mother mary – pure & unaffected by interests or ideology & that ever since it has existed in an uncontaminated state waiting only for a few learned fellows from the bar or from the university to enact it
n) some here describe this straussian moment as if it is just that but everything from the the cod war onwards would tell us that that thinking is integrated whole into the american body politic
o) it is a long life for some & i would suggest that the strauss’s, the friedmans, the schmitt’s need to be read because they provide ample proof of their own corruption & vanity. it is not an excuse that they wrote well. some of the more thoughtful thinking in philosophy is necessarily speculative & sometimes oblique & therefore clumsy. haberas for example is a thoughtful & clumsy writer, so is baudrillard for example, virrilio yet another
p) as i have posted before such damage has been done to the legislative & judicial appareil that it requires revolutionary change even within its own terms
q) as citizen has pointed out some of the most important ideas of our time have come from poets – adonis from syria/lebanon, elytis, cavafy & ritsos from greece, darwich from occupied palestine, many pets from iraq, nazim hikmet from turkey rene char from france, erich fried from germany, taduesz rocewicz from poland, & of course my papa valdimir vlamirovich mayakovsky
r) that poetry has elucidated our world in a clearer, more criticial & more instinctual way than the vagaries of legal theory
one day the poor & the oppressed will express & articulate & practice their justice & i think it will far way from the meditations of razor, of citizen k & of timka
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 5 2005 17:48 utc | 294
citizen k
slothrop is not calling you that(a straussian stooge) & you know it – this is a spirited debate & it seems to me that you are the one doing the totalising
i think, put simply your critique & that of razors infers a world that does not exist. perhaps, in the same way that i feel communism has not existed – marxism is transforming, contradictory & vital & necessarily speculative
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 5 2005 17:56 utc | 295
Call it a matter of “faith” on my part, slothrop (@12:08 PM), but I hold to the absolute singularity of a person, and certainly of an author–any author. Strauss is never to be confused with his readers–which is not to say that his work lacks responsibility for the way it’s read. I know of no place, for example, where he spells out his own plan for a good society, or a strategy for founding one, and yet it’s hard to read him without being tempted, as it were, to “fill in the blanks”. And I know of no place where he discourages us from doing so. My own tendency is to read him for his positive assertions. He seems to regard the Hebrew Bible as the site of Absolute Truth, for example, and to evaluate everyone in terms of their proximity to this site. It’s a defining singularity of his thought, and has to affect the take of any “Straussian”–especially those who can’t be bothered to read him, and might even think they disagree with him.
Posted by: alabama | May 5 2005 17:58 utc | 296
citizen k
like I say, much respect for your posts here, and Timka too.
There is a difference between “totalizing” and “social totality.” The notion of class-conflict is intended to capture in an understandable way social totality. But, i agree “totalizing ideology” is always to be avoided, and the notion of class conflict seems malleable enough to avoid “totalizing.”
I suppose to characterize our misapprehensions of each other: you seemed to needlessly “reduce” class conflict as plausible description of social pathology, while I did the reverse for you. And in fact, neither is really the case.
And, for me at least, the limited form of blog fora provokes tendetiousness, which I accuse myself.
Posted by: slothrop | May 5 2005 18:04 utc | 298
alabama
well, you are honored as the catalyst for this monstrous, informative thread, and w/out your scolding, would never have read strauss.
Posted by: slothrop | May 5 2005 18:07 utc | 299
alabama
here is where disagree. tho i think it is necessary to read leo strauss, which i have – i believe him to be a worthless thinker especially his commentaries
there is no more magisterial work on who & what what we are – than the nooks & crannies of walter benjamin’s das passagen werk – uhrkmp verlag, frankfurt am main, 1982, there is a magnificent translation in french by les edition du cerf, 1989
benjamin rest perhaps one of the few german intellectuals of that time whose work i trust completely & without reserve
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 5 2005 18:09 utc | 300