Kevin -
A quick warning -- this one's really long. I really let myself go. So,
when you have the time:
Good to hear from you again,too. My first post was pretty scattershot, so
I'm glad you focused it a bit. I like your adherence to Marx, but I want
to take a swing at why Jameson hasn't strayed as far as you might think.
I'm not a huge fan of Althusser, either, but I like a few things that I
can lift from him. Also, his models of the relations between the base and
the superstructure are very interesting. I've heard of Ahmad but haven't
read him. But I will. Lately, I've been concentrating on Capital Vol. 1.
I have about 150 pages of it left, plus the appendices. I definitely need
to look at some critiques of Jameson soon.
> 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.
I think you articulate it very well; I certainly couldn't have done any
better. However, I don't think the labor theory of value precludes the
symbolic importance of the gold standard. Along post-structuralist lines,
at least, it becomes theoretically interesting when gold becomes once more
removed from the human labor for which it can be exchanged. Granted, gold
represented nothing more than the price of labor (in a strictly Marxist
sense) and not its value. Anyway, this is not a point I want to spend a
lot of time on; for Jameson, I think it's simply a convenient economic
development to employ in the service of periodization. I'm much more
seduced by the end of the American involvement in Vietnam as the marker of
the beginning of postmodernity (understood as a component of a scheme for
periodizing as opposed to "postmodernism" which I would argue with Jameson
begins when multinational capitalism becomes the global cultural dominant.
> 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.
A couple of things about this. First, I would argue that we're beyond the
point of not capitulating to capital. At brief moments, in rare
circumstances, perhaps we separate ourselves from it. But how can we
avoid capitulating? Although I refuse to own a car and don't own a lot of
stuff, absolutely everything that I own is made up of some degree of dead
labor, meaning (as I'm sure you know) labor that capitalists never paid
for and will never pay for regardless of whether I pay full price for
commodities or not. For me to possess commodities (and it's not hard to
argue that absolutely everything, including death, has been commodified)
means that workers somewhere are not being paid for their surplus labor so
that capitalists can leach surplus value out of them in the form of labor
(as you pointed out). Then the capitalist converts that surplus value
into revenue (for his/her own use) and pours the rest, in the shape of
capital, back into variable and fixed capital, but always less variable
capital than before (almost always), meaning that fewer and fewer workers
can be expoited to a greater and greater extent.
Sorry for that ramble. I imagine you know all of this, and I hope my
overly brief sum made sense.
In addition, of course, I work for Purdue, or a teaching factory( for
Marx,)meaning that I'm never being fully compensated for the labor that I'm
forced to sell to provide myself with my means of subsistence. So at a
materialist level, we're all always already guilty of colluding with
capital. Also, Marx as much as says that capitalism is both the best and
the worst mode of production that has ever existed. Dialectically, it
needs to be brought together with a socialist mode of production to create
a third term (not a perfect term, though) which would still profit from
capitalism. Very interestingly, Marx points out in Vol. 1 that capitalism
is great for revolutionizing the means of production, meaning that the
shittiest jobs can be done with increasingly less labor -- which is great
until the capitalist mode of prod. forces people to work only at those
jobs and to work at them for much longer than they would need to in order
to provide themselves with their means of subsistence. In short,
capitalism allows us to cut down on the socially required almount of labor
in general, which means that in a more utoian society we could satisfy the
needs of our realm of necessity more easily and have much more time for
the realm of freedom that the realm of necessity supports. You probably
know all of this, and I apologize if I'm putting it down unnecessarily,
but it's great to talk about Marx with someone besides my major prof. To
mis-quote The Maltese Falcon, which I'm teaching this week, "I love to
talk to a man about Marx who loves to talk about Marx." Mr. Gutman (alias
"The Fat Man") says something like that.
> this makespossible 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!
I'm game. I like your optimism, although I think that I'm fairly
optimistic as well. But -- whenever I hear about international
collectivity I start to fear idealism, in the philosophical sense, meaning
a move away from the material practices underlying ideas. Can you really
imagine a non-capitalist world? I guess I mean a possible/probable one.
> 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.
Me too. In this case, though, I think you misread Jameson (not that all
readings aren't misreadings, blah blah). What Jameson's getting at,
which he fleshes out in his Postmodernism book (the chapter on the
continued need for utopian thought) is that, aside from a few naive and
overly-ambitious early writings (the Manifesto included), Marx never lays
out any specific schematization of a socialist or communist society. The
closest he comes is on p. 173 of Capital Vol 1. ("The veil is not removed
. . .") and p. 959 in Volume 3. ("Freedom, in this sphere . . .") In
short, Marx demands that we strive toward greater collectivity, toward
control over the means of production, toward an extended sphere of
freedom and a smaller sphere of necessity, but simultaneously leaves the
third term of his dialectic open and demands that we do the same. If we
could imagine utopia, in a materialist sense, it would cease to be
utopia, nor will any perfectly ordered utopia ever exist (obviously). Of
course, this doesn't mean that there aren't gradations in the urgency to
imagine the unimaginable and work toward it, and, following Derrida and
Spectres of Marx, I would argue that we need to turn to Marx now more
than ever. Anyway, that's my take on Jameson's dialectic: he's not
going for the easy answer, the thesis plus antithesis equals synthesis.
The third term has to remain open. This leads into Adorno's dialectic
and the power of negation as a dialectical tool of political praxis, but
I'll save that for some other time.
> 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.
I think I dealt with that up above. Have you read Teresa Ebert's "Ludic
Feminism"? She's too much of an orthodox Marxist-Lenninist for me, but
she makes a good case for why feminism can't afford to ignore Marx.
Another thought: Jameson treats Marxism as an open question, an open
problem, capable of using/encompassing other theory including Freud,
feminism, and an immense batch of unlikely bedfellows. Anyway, I'll have
to devote a whole post to the feminism question; it's something that I
think I'm weak on, although I know enough not to claim that gener, race,
sexuality, etc. can be quickly subsumed within the concept of class.
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.
About that, I'd like to know more. What would that look like?
> 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.
I've tried to order that book and been told it's out of print. Have you
seen it recently? You're definitely right about the Jameson and Frankfurt
nostalgia for the "outside" of capitalism. What they really miss, I
think, is the possibility of "high modernist" and "avant-garde" art that
could formally resist commodification. Although I understand Jameson's
nostalgia, I don't share it. That's why I work much more with pop.
culture. Recently, I've been theorizing punk rock; I also participate in
the small local punk scene (not in a band, though, unfortunately, but I'm
thinking about fixing that). I've been especially interested in Dischord
Records (I have no idea how much you know about punk, but most people know
Fugazi and Ian MacKaye, their lead singer, owns the label that puts out
Fugazi as well as about 140 other bands) and Lookout! Records and their
attempts to sidestep/resist capitalism/commodity culture, etc. "You are
not what you own" and all that. Another thought -- Jameson explains his
dialectic to some extent in the intro. to Marxism and Form -- it's short
and too the point and highly recommended. He argues that he tries to
write dialectic sentences.
>
> 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.
>
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!
>
Well, I think I've probably upped the rhetoric ante, so now I hope I don't
come off like a raving zealot. Reading Capital has really got my head
going. I haven't been able to read this weak, because I've been grading
papers, but I finished that two hours ago, so now I can go back to it.
Good luck with exams. I finished mine last August and boy am I happy
about that. Write when you can, and if anything collective is ever
happening in Oxford (right?) let me know. I'd like to visit Pegeen and
Doug anyway; I haven't seen Pegeen in over a year.
Stacy
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