Dear Brian, I totally agree with you, as usual. I'd like to highlight your last sentence: "What we are missing is a theory of social relations in the future" - but, let me play with your sentence, what future? A universal subject could have been the green one, the wretched of the Earth (aka Gaia); but it did not happen, or its advent is, like, buried in a national-populist grave. At least we have his/her ghost, the ghost of the collective that could have been able to embody the planetary exploited subject. Not sure this ghost dares to haunt us. (Okay, I read too much Mark Fisher these days...)
Best, Frédéric On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 12:00 AM Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 8:48 AM ari <a...@kein.org> wrote: > >> Does an understanding of politics as transformative action not clash with >> one of it as a practice of belonging? >> > > Certainly not. The whole Marxist tradition conceived of class > consciousness as a practice of belonging. > However there are problems the Marxist tradition never solved. You want a > universal working class conscious of its own transformative agency; but you > will not be able to describe this class in terms concrete enough to address > any member of it in particular. No one can, those days are over, the > language does not fit the times. > When the *industrial* working class could still be conceived as a > revolutionary subject, such a description was possible. Marx and Engels did > it brilliantly, by spending years debating their ideas directly directly > with the workers. But after the crisis of the 1930s, all capitalist states > recognized the danger represented by the working class and made > extraordinary efforts to integrate the industrial workers to capitalist > practice, first through wage bargaining, then through benefits, then > through a variety of cultural and even military appeals, culminating in the > current situation where industrial workers are recruited to fascism with > anti-immigrant nationalism and the vague promise of industrial jobs. > This doesn't mean there is no transformative potential left in the > industrial working classes. But they can't hold the place of a universal > political subject,and the class you are looking for - singular, concrete, > conscious of itself and ready to act - is not solely defined by work > anymore. > In fact, the focus of the state on work and the workplace encouraged > anyone who cared about class to look outside the factory and even the wage > relation for the inequality and injustice of capitalist societies. Because > those societies now focused as much on consumption - and more broadly, on > what Marxists call "social reproduction" - as they did on production, > direct oppression exerted by the capitalist state and by the forms of > social reproduction that it mandated could be found in many different > places. Identity politics emerged as a way of naming those sites of > oppression, and even more importantly, as a way to gain transformative > agency through the consciousness of belonging to an oppressed group. > The upshot is, that if you wanted to redo Marx and Engels, you would have > to start not by rereading their books and their tradition, but by taking > new ideas of both oppression and transformation down to the places where > identity politics is debated, and giving those new ideas a go. > Now, this all does not mean everything is fine with identity politics as > it is practiced today. Certainly just abandoning the question of work is > the wrong path (but no one serious does it, so I don't know what the > problem is?). A new universal is definitely lacking, and much can be > learned from the attempts to conceive a universal working class. However, > it does mean that you can't just diss off identity in favor of some > supposedly correct concept which you have totally dehistoricized, > particularly by ignoring the dialectical negations to which it was subject. > No one will take you seriously if you do. Today, pretty much every "return > to Marx" is a return to some nostalgic and usually privileged self, alone > even in the typically tiny groups, trying to convince themselves that their > pure idea from the past can overcome everything that has happened in global > society since 1968. > > Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "Marx to the trashcan." I'm just saying > that if you do go to the barricades, you will not find a universal working > class, and the language with which you seek to invoke or catalyze one, will > remain empty and useless. Doing real politics is far more demanding than > most of us can handle. The "back to class' posts in this thread are so > vague, so nostalgic, so empty, that they do not come anywhere near the goal. > > What we are missing is a theory of social relations in the future. To be > transformative it will have to be inclusive, combative and aspirational, > attuned to a possible life beyond the dead-ends of the twentieth century. > > best, BH > # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission > # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
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