Stacy-
hey hey.  good to hear from you again.  i like what your thinking, although
i have to admit, that i am not a fan of althusser (who strangled his wife
to death) or jameson (who seems trapped in a kind of american
malaise)...but more on that in detail some other time.  have you looked at
aijaz ahmad's _in theory_?  he has one of the best critiques of jameson i
have seen, without dismissing the importance of jameson's work.  but let me
respond to some things you brought up in your post.
 
At 04:44 AM 2/24/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Kevin -- Cool, I'm glad someone's out there.
>
>Revolution seems to be a hot topic in Marxism these days, probably because
>it's getting harder and harder to theorize it.  My own position follows
>Marx's, Althusser's, and Jameson's (and maybe Antonio Negri's if I
>understood him better).  Along these lines, I've had some disheartening
>discussions with the director of my dis., Richard Dienst (a disciple of
>Jameson and Brian Massumi).  He claims that truly subversive activism died
>when the economy went global (1973 by some claims, when Kissinger and
>Nixon abandoned the Gold Standard and money became a signifier floating
>in space without even a supposed referent).
 
first, i think your director is wrong.  the whole notion of the 'floating
signifier' of post-gold standard currency is a willful denial of marx's
analysis of money in volume one of capital.  for marx, gold became the
standard of currency because 1) it was a commodity like every other
commodity, thus containing labor; and 2) that it was easily divisible into
units of exchange.  but, by itself gold is not the measure of value,
abstract human labor is. in other words, marx argues that the only way that
commodities can be exchanged is if they have something in common, something
that they share that can be used as a common referrent.  the mistake of
bourgeoisie economists, they assume that gold was somehow different than
other commodities, and some kind of social consensus of value distinct from
other commodities.  on the contrary, marx argued that what commodities
share is not mysterious, but is rather the amount of abstract human labor
contained in any commodity.  this was the infamous labor theory of value
that solved one of the most predominant problems in bourgeois political
economy.  anyway, i don't know if this is making sense, it took me about
three years to actually grasp the significance of this concept, and i am
not sure how well i am articulating it.
 
secondly, in terms of the claim that revolution is out-dated because of the
globalization of the economy is, as far as i am concerned, a capitulation
to capital.  globalization ENABLES a re-invigorated notion of revoltionary
action, one where the global division of labor is more rationalized and
interconnected.  this makes possible trans-national action in a way that
was next to impossible during the beginning of this century.  the problem
is, that marxists (not only marxists) have an undertheorized notion of
collective politics.  most radical or revolutionary theories of
organization still rely upon a localized/national revoltionary theory...and
THIS theory is outdated.  what the answer(s) are here, i don't know
specifically, but perhaps we can figure that out!
 
>
>My feeling is that Jameson is right -- when the economy goes global,
>there's no real "outside" (no critical distance possible) from which to
>launch an attack.  Additionally, with late capitalism's commodity
>reification in place, and Taylorization in place in the workforce (our own
>as well as the working class's) the possibility of class consciousness
>disappears and with it the possibility of that sort of revolution.
>
 
to be honest this is one thing that annoys me about jameson.  this is where
he (this is the influence of ahmad here) is trapped in a very western
episteme and because of this cannot even THINK dialectically, to his own
admission in the end of his article "POMO: CULT LOGIC OF LT CPT".  he says
something along the lines of "marx asks us to think the impossible".
impossible for him perhaps.  but this "thinking all at once" is a political
praxis built into feminism (catherine mackinnon is a great example) and is
so much a part of raymond williams' work.  i would say that there is NEVER
an outside...all we have is our actual life process, that is our direct
engagement with capitalism.  i believe that marx's dialectic is not simply
an analytic tool, but is the best attempt thus far to understand our actual
life process in motion.  in other words, the concepts we generate are 1)
historically limited and enabled; and 2) we are constantly presented with
historically specific problems to be solved.  our problem, at least as i
see it is how to contend with this "new" globalization.  i put the new in
quotes because to me globalization was accomplished by the early 1700's at
the latest, but i definitly think we are looking at a new historical
formation.
 
>To make things worse, for revolution to succeed, it would now have to
>occur on the global level or be forced into the compromise positions of
>China and Cuba who find that in global capitalism and its abolishment of
>conventional modes of "nationality" a nation can be forced through
>economic pressures to bow to more capitalist modes of production.  Russia
>strikes me as the most prominent example, actually, although the Chinese
>privatization surge recently is pretty scary.
>
 
i don't think these are the only two examples.  i am growing more and more
convinced that the failure of left in this half of this century has also
been a failure of marxism.  i don't mean that marxism is wrong, but i think
that feminist critiques  of marxist PRACTICE--maria mies, catherine
mackinnon, rosemary hennesey, nancy hartsock--have continued to
problematize the belief that one can practically disarticulate oneself from
material conditions.  mackinnon argues, along with terry eagleton, that one
can not go AROUND social categories like the state, gender, race,
sexuality, but one must go THROUGH them.  althusser and so much of the
theory that follows from his work, seems to be somewhat dismayed at the
loss of an ideological and practical "outside", and yet, this seems to me
to be a fiction to begin with.  the "outside" was a construct, one that was
shown in practice to be gender blind (that is, affording a "free space" for
men on the back of women's labour) as well as preserving a certain
theoretic elitism--that has more in common with stalin than marx.
 
perry anderson has an excellent analysis of this tendency in western
marxism in his text "considerations on western marxism".  anderson points
to the critiques of trotsky and luxemborg as those that preserve the
connection to mass movement that was abandoned by stalin and by many post
war marxist intellectuals sequestered to the academy.  check it out...its a
short book and i think one of the most consice and important texts on the
history of 20th century marxism.
 
>Anyway, drawing on Althusser, if we can barely begin to imagine (and can
>never really "know" existentially) the ways in which we are
>interpellated into the global economy, then how can we ever mobilize a
>whole class?  To paraphrase Jameson, you just can't imagine the whole
>world at once -- it's too damn big.
>
 
again, this is the problem of marxism becoming a philosophy of ideas and
not a philosophy of praxis.  to make marxism a problem of "imagining" is a
problem of hegelian philosophy not of marxist praxis.  this is not to
underestimate the real problem of knowing...but the problem of knowing that
jameson laments, is the problem of the INDIVIDUAL knower.  feminists have
been arguing for decades now of the necessity of collecive knowing, of
collective praxis, something that the majority of marxists have abandoned
as they earned their entry into the academy.  i am not saying this is easy
to overcome...i struggle with this all of the time.  it is so much easier
to concentrate on my OWN work and not do collective work...it is a very
real state of academic work.  but not the only state.  i guess that was one
of the ideas behind this grad collective thing.
 
e, more for the students, less lecturing,
>more discussing, etc..  I try to give them some control over their
>means of producing their education. But what is to be done besides that?
>That's what stumps me.
>
>I'm obviously starved for talk.  I should probably join some more
>listservs to avoid pouring too much into this one.
>
 
well, stacy, responding to you has also made me quite aware of my own
starvation i guess.  there are few people here that i can talk to in these
terms and i apologize if i got a bit overzealous here...especially in my
rhetoric.  i recognize that i am using terminology that may not be
self-explanatory.  but i hope this will only make possible more discussion
not less.  thank you for your message...it has helped invigorate me to read
read read (i am taking my exams this summer).  stay in touch!
 
kevin
 
>Anyway, thanks for getting in touch.  Now I need to write to a zine
>columnist who calls himself Lefty Hooligan.  I think he's a Trotskyite,
>but he's all over the map.  Still, I seem to need pen pals.
>
>Stacy
>