On Mon, 6 Oct 1997, Louis N Proyect wrote:
> So what's the problem with historical materialism? I happen to find it
> very useful in understanding fascism. What methodology D&G use in
> understanding fascism is simply beyond me, but their conclusions are nuts:
>
Louis: My problems with historical materialism are several. First, I have
NOT found it useful. At one point I tried to use it as a frame of
reference for thinking about several different problems I was working on
--having to do with capitalist social engineering in the Third World-- and
found it unhelpful in understanding what was going on. In every version I
have come across I have found only rigid formulas into which various
historical phenomena are to be fitted and a lack of concepts to help me
understand the dynamics of whatever I have been studying at the time. I
think the machine illustrations in E.P.Thompson's book The Poverty of
Theory were very much to the point, even tho Thompson himself failed,
IMHO, to break free of the structuralism he was critiquing. I like some
of his students' work (in Albion's Fatal Tree, and The London Hanged) much
better.
Second, methodologically I think HM violates Marx's discussion in the
Grundrisse about not retrospectively projecting concepts from contemporary
society, i.e., capitalism, back onto earlier social relationships. In as
much as concepts are generated within specific historical contexts, and
are more or less adequate to grasping them, they are marked and limited by
those contexts. I think this applies to Marxist theory as well. I neither
project/apply it to human society backwards and forwards, a la HM, or in
all directions a la Dialectical Materialism qua cosmology.
[D&G]
> "The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macropolitical
> level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and
> centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of
> molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before
> beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural
> fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's
> fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the
> couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a
> micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others,
> before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole."
>
[LP]
> This is a totally superficial understanding of how fascism came about.
> What is Left fascism? It is true that the Communist Party employed
> thuggish behavior on occasion during the ultraleft "Third Period". They
> broke up meetings of small Trotskyist groups while the Nazis were breaking
> up the meetings of trade unions or Communists. Does this behavior equal
> left Fascism? Fascism is a class term. It describes a mass movement of the
> petty-bourgeoisie that seeks to destroy all vestiges of the working-class
> movement. This at least is the Marxist definition.
>
Louis: Your characterization of fascism as "a mass movement of the
petty-bourgeoisie that seeks to destroy all vestiges of the working-class
movement" certainly grasps some aspects of that pheonmenon. But except for
reminding people that it IS anti-working class, I don't think it is very
helpful. I don't find the concept of "petty-bourgeoisie" helpful at all,
but even if it did denote some meaningfully distinct group, the label
doesn't help us understand what was going on in the genesis of fascism.
You say D&G's discussion of "how it came about" is superficial, but you
offer no alternative. Defining it doesn't explain its genesis.
What D&G are trying to theorize is precisely the emergence of that body of
behaviors and policies that we call fascism. They are offering a
formulation which interconnects what's going on at the "molecular level",
i.e., with individuals, families, schools, etc., and the emergence of a
social movement. This seems to me to be exactly what is required to
understand how fascism came about as such a devastatingly destructive
social force. The same kind of analysis is needed, I think, for the
emergence of cycles of working class struggle, especially the powerful
ones that rupture capitalist development and/or precipitate revolution. A
lot of interesting work has been done in recent years about the struggles
of everyday life, e.g., popular culture theorists, students of peasant
struggles. But what has been missing is analysis of how widespread
"resistance" reaches a point where it coallesces into revolutionary
upheaval. What were the molecular forces (to use D&G term) that generated
macro upheavals? What came together in 1789, in 1848, in 1870, in 1905, in
1910, in 1917 and so on in such a way as to explode? We can perhaps find
limits to D&G's analysis, but what they are offering, it seems to me, is
exactly the KIND of analysis we need. In comparison, to return to the
earlier point, HM comments about contraditions between base and
superstructure strike me as rather empty formalisms.
> Fascism is not intolerance, bad attitudes, meanness or insensitivity. It
> is a violent, procapitalist mass movement of the middle-class that employs
> socialist phrase-mongering.
>
>
Louis: Fascism is not JUST intolerance, etc., but it includes these
things. We have to deal with the character of the "mass movement" at all
levels, including the "molecular" one, if we want to really understand
what it --or any other social movement-- is all about.
> > I don't know if "primitive" is the best word for this kind of work, but it
> > was the one that came to mind. D&G's work which shifts our attention from
> > domination to desire (and studies the former in terms of constraints on
> > the latter) evokes, for me, the centrality of living labor (one form of
> > human self activity) in Marx's own work, but is broader and evocative of
> > more diverse meanings of self-activity. THAT moves us away from the
> > productivist interpretation of Marx (despite their prediliction for
> > talking about desiring-machines and production).
> >
>
> What the heck does "Desire" have to do with the recent UPS strike?
Louis: It has to do with the motivations and aspirations of the strikers,
and all of those who supported them because they saw that what was at
issue included but went far beyond the particular details of the contract
dispute. "Desire" concerns everything beyond mere reaction; it concerns
the positive driving forces that motivate workers to fight for what they
want, as well as against that which threatens them.
> "Domination" seems like a much more useful term. D&G seem to occupy a
> mid-point between classical Marxism and the sort pomo Marxism that
> Laclau-Mouffe set forward.
>
Louis: "Domination" is certainly a useful term, but it implies precisely
the limitation and perversion of desire in all its forms. This is another
way of talking about living labor --which in Marx appears as a moment
of kind of primordial life force-- which is "dominated" by capital, i.e.,
limited, constrained, alienated, used as a vehicle of social control
instead of being a form of self-realization. The term "desire", like the
generic term "self-valorization" draws our attention to our own being
for-itself beyond being which-resists-capital.
>
> > You know, like everyone else, I was delighted to have their stuff back in
> > the 60s, it helped in denouncing capitalist excesses. It was only when I
> > wanted to answer Lenin's question of what is to be done, and realized that
> > it could only be answered fruitfully on the basis of understanding what
> > kind of power we already had, that I realized that they had virtually
> > nothing to offer in the way of conceptual tools to generate such an
> > understanding. Oh, well, back I went to Marx and found a different guy
> > than the one they told us about.
> >
>
> The Monthly Review school had the merit of trying to keep a classical
> vision of Marxism alive in the 1950s and early 60s, no matter what
> particular mistakes they made about Stalin, Mao, etc. I suspect that
> Deleuze-Guattari, Laclau-Mouffe, et al, will go the same way as Herbert
> Marcuse. The relative prosperity of the 1960s and the 1980s sent
> philosophers and psychologists down all sorts of blind alleys.
>
Louis: My problem with them was that they weren't keeping Marxism "alive"
but had either replaced it with Hansen-Keynesian-Frankfurt School theory
or interpreted it in ways which led directly to "blind alleys". Their
formulations gave us no help in recognizing and assessing our own power
but redirected our attention elsewhere and dazzled us with odes to
capitalist power. As for Marcuse, I think many of his writings, such as
Eros & Civilization (which gave a Freudian perspective on desire/eros) are
classic and worthy of study today. I don't agree with a lot of his theory
but the general thrust of his understanding of the instrumentalization of
desire (however narrowly conceived as libido) as central to a work based
society and the possibilities of desire rupturing that instrumentalization
constitutes an important moment in the tradition of trying to grasp the
postive movement of communist-becoming that includes D&G more recently.
> Around the time I looked at Thousand Plateaus, I also took a look at Felix
> Guattari and Toni Negri's "Communists like Us". Unlike Deleuze/Guattari's
> word-salad collaborations, this is a perfectly straightforward political
> manifesto that puts forward a basic challenge to Marxism. It is deeply
> inspired by a reading of the 1968 struggle in France as a mass movement
> for personal liberation. Students and other peripheral sectors move into
> the foreground while workers become secondary. It is as dated as Herbert
> Marcuse's "One Dimensional Man".
>
Louis: You say "workers become secondary" to "students and other
peripheral sectors" because you don't define the former as including the
latter. D&N, on the other hand do, as the quote you cite below suggests.
The "new collective subjectivities" they are talking about are the ones
they have focused on in their efforts to understand the changing
composition of the working class: what they call "immaterial labor"
whether inthe factor or in the university research lab or in the software
or textile industry. The importance of the student movement in France in
the 80s was only connected at a distance to that of '68. D&N, based on
empirical studies of several industries, including the clothing industry
in France (le Sentier) and Italy (the Northern diffused factory) were
fascinated by the historically unexpected reconfiguration of mental and
manual labor in the leading sectors of capitalist industry. They saw a
great many workers having more direct control over the means of production
than at any time since the destruction of skilled labor by Taylor and
Ford and were trying to theorize the implications for working class
struggle. Marcuseans they were not. This continues to be one preoccupation
of the journal Futur Anterieur.
> The pamphlet was written in 1985 but has the redolence of tie-dyed
> paisley, patchouli oil and granny glasses. Get a whiff of this:
>
> "Since the 1960's, new collective subjectivities have been affirmed in the
> dramas of social transformation. We have noted what they owe to
> modifications in the organization of work and to developments in
> socialization; we have tried to establish that the antagonisms which they
> contain are no longer recuperable within the traditional horizon of the
> political. But it remains to be demonstrated that the innovations of the
> '60s should above all be understood within the universe of
> consciousnesses, of desires, and of modes of behaviour."
>
> I have some trouble understanding why Deleuze and Guattari are such big
> favorites with some people. Why read this sort of silliness when you can
> spend time with a good novel, book of poetry, or some solid Marxist
> historical materialism, like Mike Goldfield's important new book "The
> Color of Politics."
>
Louis: Well, I guess you can CALL it "silliness" but that's not the same
as explaining how or why it is "silly". At any rate I would not use the
terms in as much as I think that explaining the positive side of struggles
is not silly at all but deadly serious. I like a good novel, poetry and
history as much as anyone, but I read those things in part to grasp the
struggles of the human spirit (and I don't mean that in a Hegelian sense)
to free itself and stretch itself in new directions. What they are talking
about here is the development of the working class subject, or
subjectivities, i.e., self-deterimining, self-directed being for-itself,
which not only reacts to domination and exploitation but affirms itself. I
fail to see anyting "silly" about that. I would guess that it's actually
rather important to you too, when it is formulated in some other way.
After all the Marxist vision is not just one of staving off exploitation
but freeing the process of crafting a new world, or worlds..
> My guess is that a lot of people who think D&G are groovy feel a certain
> nostalgia for the counterculture of the 1960's and in a funny sort of way,
> Deleuza/Guattari take that nostalgia and cater to it but in an
> ultrasophisticated manner. The fans of D&G wouldn't bother with Paul
> Goodman and Charles Reich. But French and Italian theorists who write in a
> highly allusive and self-referential manner: Like wow, man!
>
> Louis Proyect
>
Louis: If you knew more people who take D&G seriously you might be
surprised. I have as much Goodman on my shelves as D&G and there are a
whole series of "French and Italian theorists" whose work interest me not
at all, e.g., Baudrillard after Mirror of Production and Political Economy
of the Sign. As I said in an earlier post, the intentionally opaque
irritates me as much as it does anyone and I have little patience with
European fads in the US, e.g., Althusser in the 70s or Derida in the '80s.
At any rate, I hope I have been successful in clarifying some of the
reasons why I think D&G are worth the trouble to work through --and there
is NO DOUBT, unfortunately, that it is work.
Harry
.............................................................................
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA
Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427
(off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cleaver homepage:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html
Chiapas95 homepage:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html
Accion Zapatista homepage:
http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
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