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THE RED CRITIQUE |
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ORTHODOX MARXISM AND THE CONTEMPORARY
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The
inaugural issue of The Red Critique is devoted to "Orthodox
Marxism and the Contemporary." The essays explore "Orthodox
Marxism" and its implications for the contemporary situation. But the
environment of intelligibility in contemporary theory and politics is so
deeply influenced by neoliberal propaganda and market populism that a
heavy layer of interpretative smugness in the culture industry and the
academy smothers any rigorous discussion of Marxist political theory and
substitutes for Marxism a floating radicalism. In this climate of
intelligibility the immediate response of the reformist left to
"orthodox" Marxism is that of a reflexive cringing and backing
away: bourgeois pluralism crumbles and shows itself for what it has always
been—monolism without mercy. The implied position here is that the
floating left is too heterodox (too complicating) to have any use for
orthodoxy. To all the heterodox subjects of the post- we say: There is
nothing more heterodox than to be orthodox in the age of heterodoxy.
Complicate this! In
This Issue: "Globalization"
has sharpened the economic contradictions and devastating inequalities of
wage-labor. It has also produced theoretical and political crisis on the
left since the postmarxist theories (from feminism, to poststructuralism,
to cultural studies) which have produced "left" justifications
for capitalism can no longer do so without losing their own political
credibility—which is to say becoming useless to capitalism which has
funded them and supported them. The "left" has justified
monopoly capitalism in its global phase by diverting attention away from
relations of labor and capital and instead putting the focus on
"human rights," "multiculturalism," localist cultural
reforms of various kinds, and by intensifying its reification of the
individual and her/his desires and consuming passions. Now,
after decades of denying the significance of Marxism to struggles against
inequality, the liberal-left is anxious to declare a "return" to
Marx and to Marxism (usually as "marxism") in order to prove its
own practical relevance to addressing the (class) contradictions of
transnational capitalism. Yet
it is a very strange "Marxism" that is currently being activated
by the liberal-left: On the one hand (for example, in the work of writers
from Zizek to Paul Smith and in left journals such as Rethinking
Marxism and New Left Review), what is put forward is a (flexodox)
"Marxism" emptied of the explanatory force of its red concepts
of exploitation, labor, need, production, revolution (and which now even
rejects as "capitalocentric" any englobing—that is, systematic
and non-dispersionist—analysis of capitalism). On the other hand (as
what is often opposed to liberal, hybridizing flexodoxy but in fact forms
its "popular" flank), is a vapid leftism, which, while it
appropriates the concepts of Orthodox Marxism, accommodates the political
needs of the ruling class by valorizing the "spontaneous"
"agency" of "the people" as the only mode of
"authentic" resistance. "Spontaneity"—which forms
the undergirding structure of bourgeois "radicalism" that
displaces organized class conscious actions with (fragmentary)
"rebellions" against the existing—is of course the means by
which the ruling class attempts to discredit Orthodox Marxism's insistence
on the formative role and unyielding organizational necessity of the
international proletarian vanguard party in the development of united
and coherent class struggle praxis across national boundaries. In
its analytical evacuation of the concepts of Orthodox Marxism as well as
in its valorization of "spontaneity," the "new"
flexodoxy thus repeats the opportunistic revisionism long ago critiqued by
Lenin as the ("democratic") arm of the bourgeoisie in the world
socialist movement that blocks the emergence of struggles for any
"total" change. In short, the aim of this left opportunism
remains today as yesterday in the substitution of "reforms"
(local political and cultural changes which mask the integral and total
dynamics of economic exploitation in production) for world-revolution.
Finally, the depth of theoretical crisis on the left might be measured by
its desperate embracing of Spinoza as an exemplary
"materialist"! Contesting
the various shapes that this updated reformism is taking—from providing
a detailed mapping of the new "marxist" flexodoxy in philosophy
and cultural theory, to critiquing theories of "post-work,"
"emotional labor," and the "transnational left," to
articulating a "red internationalism" which demonstrates how
globality functions as a reflex of the labor relations of monopoly
capital, to elaborating the place of (Marxist-Leninist) theory in
transformative struggles—the essays provide a close critique-al
engagement with the dominant moves of the reformist left to repackage its
political accommodationism and populist sentimentalism as a "cutting
edge" politics for transnational capitalism. In opposition to left
accommodationism and opportunism in all its forms, The Red Critique
argues that what is needed now in the struggle for social emancipation
from capitalist exploitation and all modes of oppression are not the
hybrid "marxisms" of post-ality (which are alibis of capitalist
"radical democracy") but the Orthodox Marxism of Marx, Engels,
Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg. In short, what is needed is the
revolutionary Marxism capable of explaining class and its material
conditions of production, which determine whether society is organized for
the profit of some or for freedom from necessity for all. Without
knowledge of class—that is, without knowledge of the social relations of
production which allow some to privately own the means of production and
material resources of society and, thus, have command over the
surplus-labor of others while the vast majority have only their own labor
to sell to survive and are exploited—the revolutionary praxis that can
emancipate all people from economic exploitation is not possible. This is
because emancipation from exploitation and meeting collective need
requires public ownership and control over the material resources of
society (of the means of production) and, thus, it requires knowledge that
can explain existing relations of production and serve as a guide for
praxis to transform them. Thus in the contemporary historical fights over
Marxism which form a central part of the class struggle today, The Red
Critique takes the partisan position (following Lenin) that
"without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary
movement." It further argues that only Orthodox Marxism
provides the revolutionary theoretical understandings capable of educating
and guiding vanguard fighters of the proletariat in internationalist
praxis to overthrow capitalist private property for profit and found a new
socialist society based on meeting the collective needs of all
people globally. THE
RED CRITIQUE 1(Spring 2001) |