Justin wrote:
>If you view "the theory" as a toolkit that doesn't involve substantive
>commitments, it wonm't have the defects of orthodox Marxism, but it also
>won't have the inspiring message that gave orthodoxy its power. I doubt that
>substantce and method can be prised apart in the way you suggest. Lukacs, for
>example, was pretty orthodox in his substantive views. He would have been
>horrified by my own substantive views, for example. Anyway, I was attacking
>orthodox Marxism of Louis' variety, not a watered-down methodological
>Marxism. I regatd Louis, and probably Mine and Yoshie (sorry, Yoshie) as
>millenarian Marxists, although not the cultified sort. I am aware that there
>are jerks of all political persuasions. Used to be there were more on the
>right, maybe still are, if only because the right is so much bigger. --jks
No apology necessary. I get to play an "Orthodox Marxist" perhaps
only in the minds of posters on LBO-talk & PEN-L. :)
Given my views on sex, gender, sexuality, and many other topics, I
couldn't have been called "Orthodox" even a decade ago. If I have
really become "Orthodox," perhaps the Marxist tradition has made more
progress on what used to be quaintly called the "Woman Question" than
I have been aware.
As for millenarianism, here's what Doug's favorite thinker of the
moment has to say:
***** Against the old liberal slander which draws on the parallel
between the Christian and Marxist 'Messianic' notion of history as
the process of the final deliverance of the faithful (the notorious
'Communist-parties-are-secularized-religious-sects' theme), should
one not emphasize how this holds only for ossified 'dogmatic'
Marxism, not for its authentic liberating kernel? Following Alain
Badiou's path-breaking book on Saint Paul, our premiss here is
exactly the opposite one: instead of adopting such a defensive
stance, allowing the enemy to define the terrain of the struggle,
what one should do is to reverse the strategy by _fully endorsing
what one is accused of_: yes, there _is_ a direct lineage from
Christianity to Marxism; yes, Christianity and Marxism _should_ fight
on the same side of the barricade against the onslaught of new
spiritualisms -- the authentic Christian legacy is much too precious
to be left to the fundamentalist freaks.
(Slavoj Zizek, _The Fragile Absolute_ 2) *****
Needless to say, I disagree with Zizek, in that taking the stance
opposite to denial and "fully endorsing what one is accused of" still
allow "the terrain of the struggle" to be defined by name-calling.
When someone says you are "X (millenarian, dogmatic, Stalinist, you
name it)," it's silly to say, "I'm not X"; on the other hand, it's as
silly to say, "I _am_ X," unless you really think you are X.
Yoshie
