I really like these comments from Sebastian Budgen, which I am taking to heart: Strange times: when I became a revolutionary Marxist, in 1987, becoming so meant defining oneself against Stuart Hall, Eric Hobsbawm, Ernesto Laclau and the prophets of post-Marxist New Times. And now they are gone, but so are so many of our combatants - Harman, Geras, Bensaïd. I think that fighting those battles was necessary, but it left deep scars and deformations. Most definitely not nostalgic. ... [M]y view is that the awfulness of the political positions of the MT and Post-Marxist crowd (depicting the trade union movement as totally hidebound, patriarchal and archaic but at the same time developing no critique of the bureaucracy, for example in the case of miners strike; sidelining class politics generally; calling for electoral alliances with the Lib Dems/SDP and sidling up to wet Tories; refusing to provide solidarity with the Militant in Liverpool and generally tail-ending the Labour Party etc etc etc) caused us to be so defensive as to blind ourselves as to some of the important questions they were asking. Clearly, the theoretical tools they were using (post-Fordism, for example) were quite inadequate to the task, but they were putting their fingers on real changes in class composition, subjectivity, race, the nature of the neoliberal project etc that we are still grappling with now. Generally speaking, the revolutionary Marxists bunkered down and refused to engage because we were so concerned (rightly) with rejecting the political conclusions. To cite an example: the political conclusions of HSS are appalling, but there is no reason why we could not have defanged it more effectively by engaging with the critiques of essentialism, economism and teleology, all of which are actually at the root of the heterodox Trotskyism of the IS tradition. Similarly with Hall: our anti-racism could have been strengthened, not weakened, by engaging productively with his work on this (Policing the Crisis and so on). Instead, we created this bogeyman called Postmodernism - a term that doesnt mean anything and conflates poststructuralism, post-Marxism and postindustrialism - and then shouted Bollocks! at it. So again, more missed opportunities in engaging with the more interesting insights of Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida because we were so het up about Baudrillard and the Gulf War. Of course, there were a handful of exceptions (such as Callinicos, back in his eclectic days...), but they were generally treated with suspicion as potential fifth columnists. All of this has left us with an enormous mess and the task of sifting through to separate the wheat from the chaff. We have to do better this time with regard to currents (which are politically much more interesting) such as communisation, accelerationism, Marxist feminism, postworkerism etc
Posted on: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 15:39:18 +0000
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