maggie coleman: >world is not going to be saved by one man, even Louis Proyect. And that is >the essence of what I read from your comments -- Karl Marx the individual man >spent HIS life trying to preach to the dense and uneducated and Louis Proyect >is now spending HIS life preaching to the dense and uneducated and how dare >anyone not fucking pay attention. I am sorry, Maggie, but this has nothing to do with the political differences between Doug and me. I am an intolerably arrogant and obnoxious individual, but there are still substantial political differences that deserve consideration. On that note, I picked up the book that came out of the first Rethinking Marxism conference that I want to recommend to one and all as a background to understanding these differences over Marxism. In the introduction by Antonio Callari, Stephen Cullenberg and Carole Biewener, they state that "we are now some time removed from the mid-1970s when the crisis of Marxism first emerged." I scratched my head when I read this and wondered what exact crisis the three were talking about? The mid-70s were a time of tremendous advance for the sort of Marxism that I was involved with. The Trotskyist movement was larger than at any time since the 1930s and had earned the respect of a broad milieu in the arts and intelligentsia. After getting an assignment from the NY Times Magazine to profile the SWP, Walter and Miriam Schneir had their article rejected because it was too flattering. The Maoists were also going great guns. The Guardian Newspaper was convening conferences attended by various pro-Chinese parties, each numbering in the thousands. They had made significant gains in recruiting black members, including Amiri Baraka, while being deeply involved in important union organizing drives in the south. The crisis that the Amherst people were talking about was actually a crisis in French Marxism, and revolved around the Communist Party specifically. This was an enormous party with hundreds of thousands of industrial workers and university professors on its membership rolls, including people like Althusser and Foucault. The CP leadership was socially and politically unlike anything in the US, however. Picture French versions of Albert Shanker or Walter Reuther defending the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Moscow trials, while attacking student radicals as anti-social and you get a sense of the problem. What really brought the crisis to a head was the failure of the French Communist Party to challenge De Gaulle during the May-June events in 1968. It saw its role as one of cooling down student and working-class discontent. French CP intellectuals saw this behavior as a sign of Marxism's irrelevance and held up the student movement under attack as more in keeping with a politics of liberation. This pretty much defined DeLeuze/Guattari and Laclau/Mouffe's new leftism. Another tendency among left intellectuals was to seek an explanation for the French CP's leftist conservatism in some underlying flaws in Marxist theory. That is where Althusser's concern with the base-superstructure problematic enters the picture. While this started out as a legitimate attempt to move away from the heavy-handed 2nd International methodology of the CP, it degenerated into a belief that ideas have much more autonomy than Marx or Engels ever considered. This approach melded with the new Maoist movement in France, which was filled with all sorts of Cultural Revolution nonsense about the need for "ideological warfare" to cleanse the workers movement of its bad thinking enemies. Some of the most zealous Maoists, as we know from history, moved to the ultraright, after the 60s radicalization died down. They simply shifted to a new target to conduct "ideological warfare" against: the radical movement. Nobody in the organized Marxist movement in the US had a clue that these fights were going on. Deleuze-Guattari, Laclau-Mouffe, Foucault and Althusser were being discussed in the NY Review of Books or academic journals, but the average activist never heard of them. What did happen, however, is that the academic left in the United States, consisting of people who by and large never belonged to left groups, took up their cause. As opposed to the French intellectuals, who were directing their fire at real institutions that could affect the lives of millions of workers or students, the Americans who became their emissaries used these ideas to carve out a space in academia for a version of Marxism that would be compatible with a career path. I know of very few sixties radicals who went to graduate school except those men who used it as an expedient to stay out of the army. They often dropped out, like I did, when political responsibilities made significant demands on our time. Those I know who did get a degree have had trouble getting jobs and keeping them. Paul LeBlanc, an ex-SWPer and author of an excellent study of Lenin, bounces around as an adjunct at various colleges in the Pittsburgh area trying to cobble out a living. Sixties radicals tended to be extremely anti-authoritarian. Today's academic leftists are like nobody I ever met in the radical movement. Unlike the professors who lent their considerable talents to the antiwar movement, and who spoke in clear, concise ways about the evils of US foreign policy, their concerns seem more tied to their niche in academia. It does not rock the boat to appropriate bits and pieces of Foucault. During the long strike of mostly black and female administrative workers at Barnard College last year, the irony was lost on very few that Dr. Judith Shapiro, the president of the school, had impeccable credentials as a feminist scholar specializing in cross-gender studies. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
