New Socialism, Eco-Politics and Radical Critique
“Living their death, dying their life” (Heraclitus)
The modernity-postmodernity debate crosses the possibility of rethinking and renovating socialist principles, transforming the landscape of the vocabulary of progress, modernization and development. New socialism entails escaping the traps of developmentalism.
The socialist imaginary is living through a profound deconstruction of its foundations [desfundamentación], which impedes us from thinking from any epistemologically privileged place, sentencing “laws of history” in the name of “the” “modern” socialism. Neither Engels, nor Kaustky, nor Lenin can serve anymore to assure that a certain stratus of intellectuals is epistemologically privileged with access to the course of a “natural process” of history. One day the Darwinian premises in the very mechanics of blind wills within socialism will dissipate.
The “objective truth” and the “laws of history” no longer accompany the proletariat in the triumphal march over capitalism, liberating the “productive forces” from the obstacles in the ancient “relations of production,” from all the inertias of a stale “juridico-political superstructure,” with its corresponding “ideological forms.” Absolute silence regarding capital’s “destructive forces.”
Bureaucratic socialist thought of the Soviet type buried all the revolutionary principles that had been accumulated by the struggles of libertarian thought, by the radical movements that defied the logics of domination. The “domination of nature” is not foreign to bureaucratic socialism, to its “engineering of the soul.”
The deep causes of the disasters of bureaucratic socialism are too palpable to keep taking speculative bites from that laminated rationality of progress. There is no possibility of swindling societies with a publi-propagandistic presentation of “21st Century Socialism.”
What happens when revolutionary enthusiasm is left without ideas, without concepts, without categories? We must take seriously what it means to construct alternatives to capitalist barbarism, to its “political realism and pragmatism,” to its “principle of returns.” Despotic collectivism is paved with campaigns of “reeducation of intellectuals,” with the “control of social incidents,” with the “monitoring of dissidents.” There is not a correct geometry of socialism, just as there isn’t one in the natural world.
Without the creation of multitudes that vibrate in resonance with the possibility of living in full sensorial, affective and aesthetic existence, there will be no revolution.
To not question these small tyrannies of the spirit, would be to allow for any variety of “Soviet Marxism” to be the true “virus worm” that takes over the strategies of emancipation.
The matter at hand is that no one discusses what is important (Which socialism? Which development? Which quality of life?), nor do they take on a core debate with concrete political consequences. If what is important is to build counter-systemic alternatives, to provide consistency to a socialist debate (at the moment it is neither socialist nor a debate), without creating a masquerade for State capitalism, for developmentalism with leftist gestures, for the very productivism, consumption and standard of values that annihilate the life of the planet.
There will be no collapse whatsoever of capitalism, nor a more or less inevitable triumph of the proletariat, nor the dismantling of all dogmatisms in the aesthetic, cognitive and ethico-moral field if there is not a radical critique, if each person does not take charge of the heavy bundle of “common sense,” of the frozen “shared beliefs” that threaten the life of the planet.
There will be no possibility of making the characterization of a socialist project advance by using the old concepts that were left stamped in the manuals of an eschatological Marxism. There will be no radical critique without knowing about the polemic between modernity-postmodernity-transmodernity. There will be no new socialism without assuming an epistemological, aesthetic, ethical, affective revolution that shakes the spiritual foundations of a civilization in ruins.
Translator’s Note: A slightly longer version of this text in the original Spanish was published online in early April.
{ Javier Biardeau, El Nacional, 25 April 2009 }
Showing posts with label A Tres Manos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A Tres Manos. Show all posts
4.06.2009
¿Democracia protagónica revolucionaria? / Javier Biardeau R.
Protagonistic Revolutionary Democracy?
In the Proyecto Nacional Simón Bolívar – Primer Plan Socialista, among the central strategic directions, “protagonistic revolutionary democracy” stands out. For each one of the seven strategic directions there is a methodological enunciation of a focus, objectives, strategies and policies.
It is significant that one of the objectives is: “To irrevocably achieve protagonistic revolutionary democracy, in which the sovereign majority personifies the substantive process of making decisions.” Is this process reduced to the electoral plane? The revolution’s high strategic directory faces the impasse of its own discourse.
We have to debate how the “leader’s moment” seems unbalanced when facing the “moment of popular protagonism.” A democratic and socialist revolution is founded on protagonism “from below,” with intellectual and moral autonomy, as Gramsci would say, for the growing self-government. Something very different from the Jacobin-Blanquist imaginary that is inevitably generated by an irreparable disjunction between democratic revolution and the construction of socialism. The “revolutionary elite” end up being a “political oligarchy,” a new core. It’s one thing to surpass political liberalism, but quite another to destroy the possibility of deepening the social liberty of the people, their self-government and protagonism in making decisions.
Socialist democracy is a radical critique of the inconsistencies of democratic liberalism, of the latter’s deep commitment not to a “libertarian society of equality, substantive justice and the common good,” but rather to a capitalist society of exploitation, coercion, ideological hegemony, cultural negation and social exclusion. But a socialist democracy is a libertarian protagonistic democracy, not a plebiscite democracy under the leadership of a progressive Caesarism. A democratic revolution procures a higher grade of liberty, not its liquidation in the name of the techno-bureaucracy of the party-State. Authoritarian statism and a personalist politics were the ABC of Stalinism. Rosa Luxemburg warned against the mistake of separating “democratic revolution” from “revolutionary democracy,” what eventually became the substitution of the “dominion of the majority” by the “dominion over the majority”; which is to say the reinstallation of the political oligarchy, Milovan Djilas’s “new class.”
That a sovereign majority personifies the process of making decisions does not mean in any way that the personalized incarnation of State power substitutes the majority’s sovereignty. This gives rise to special conditions of state power. The government oscillates between foreign and domestic capital, between the weak national bourgeoisie and the relatively powerful proletariat. This confers on the government a Bonapartist aspect sui generis, a distinctive aspect. It is elevated, to say it in that manner, above classes.
For Gramsci the distinctive quality between regressive Caesarism and progressive Caesarism was its position when facing the dialectic of “revolution-restoration.” It’s true that progressive Caesarism-Bonapartism can be beneficial for national-popular demands; Cárdenas, Perón and Nasser are examples, but that doesn’t mean we should confuse them with democratic participatory socialism. It’s true that popular revolutionary nationalism represents a mechanism of patriotic affirmation when facing tendencies of imperial subordination. But bread for bread, and wine for wine. Without protagonism, initiative, the effective power of popular protagonism there is no socialism.
“It is not the same thing to speak of democratic revolution than to speak of revolutionary democracy. The first concept has a conservative brake; the second one is liberating.” Here we display our substantive difference of criteria. There is no participatory socialism, constituent popular process, without democratic revolution. The history of revolutions serves a purpose. That is why we propose 4Rs: revision, rectification, reimpulse, but above all the renovation of socialist ideas, so that we are not left trapped in any figure of bureaucratic collectivism. For the people what belongs to the people!
Translator’s note: A slightly longer version of this essay was published last month in the original Spanish.
{ Javier Biardeau R., El Nacional, 24 March 2009 }
In the Proyecto Nacional Simón Bolívar – Primer Plan Socialista, among the central strategic directions, “protagonistic revolutionary democracy” stands out. For each one of the seven strategic directions there is a methodological enunciation of a focus, objectives, strategies and policies.
It is significant that one of the objectives is: “To irrevocably achieve protagonistic revolutionary democracy, in which the sovereign majority personifies the substantive process of making decisions.” Is this process reduced to the electoral plane? The revolution’s high strategic directory faces the impasse of its own discourse.
We have to debate how the “leader’s moment” seems unbalanced when facing the “moment of popular protagonism.” A democratic and socialist revolution is founded on protagonism “from below,” with intellectual and moral autonomy, as Gramsci would say, for the growing self-government. Something very different from the Jacobin-Blanquist imaginary that is inevitably generated by an irreparable disjunction between democratic revolution and the construction of socialism. The “revolutionary elite” end up being a “political oligarchy,” a new core. It’s one thing to surpass political liberalism, but quite another to destroy the possibility of deepening the social liberty of the people, their self-government and protagonism in making decisions.
Socialist democracy is a radical critique of the inconsistencies of democratic liberalism, of the latter’s deep commitment not to a “libertarian society of equality, substantive justice and the common good,” but rather to a capitalist society of exploitation, coercion, ideological hegemony, cultural negation and social exclusion. But a socialist democracy is a libertarian protagonistic democracy, not a plebiscite democracy under the leadership of a progressive Caesarism. A democratic revolution procures a higher grade of liberty, not its liquidation in the name of the techno-bureaucracy of the party-State. Authoritarian statism and a personalist politics were the ABC of Stalinism. Rosa Luxemburg warned against the mistake of separating “democratic revolution” from “revolutionary democracy,” what eventually became the substitution of the “dominion of the majority” by the “dominion over the majority”; which is to say the reinstallation of the political oligarchy, Milovan Djilas’s “new class.”
That a sovereign majority personifies the process of making decisions does not mean in any way that the personalized incarnation of State power substitutes the majority’s sovereignty. This gives rise to special conditions of state power. The government oscillates between foreign and domestic capital, between the weak national bourgeoisie and the relatively powerful proletariat. This confers on the government a Bonapartist aspect sui generis, a distinctive aspect. It is elevated, to say it in that manner, above classes.
For Gramsci the distinctive quality between regressive Caesarism and progressive Caesarism was its position when facing the dialectic of “revolution-restoration.” It’s true that progressive Caesarism-Bonapartism can be beneficial for national-popular demands; Cárdenas, Perón and Nasser are examples, but that doesn’t mean we should confuse them with democratic participatory socialism. It’s true that popular revolutionary nationalism represents a mechanism of patriotic affirmation when facing tendencies of imperial subordination. But bread for bread, and wine for wine. Without protagonism, initiative, the effective power of popular protagonism there is no socialism.
“It is not the same thing to speak of democratic revolution than to speak of revolutionary democracy. The first concept has a conservative brake; the second one is liberating.” Here we display our substantive difference of criteria. There is no participatory socialism, constituent popular process, without democratic revolution. The history of revolutions serves a purpose. That is why we propose 4Rs: revision, rectification, reimpulse, but above all the renovation of socialist ideas, so that we are not left trapped in any figure of bureaucratic collectivism. For the people what belongs to the people!
Translator’s note: A slightly longer version of this essay was published last month in the original Spanish.
{ Javier Biardeau R., El Nacional, 24 March 2009 }
3.02.2009
Descolonización del pensamiento marxista (II) / Javier Biardeau
Decolonization of Marxist Thought (II)
If democratic and socialist decolonizing revolutions have any relevance for the movements and national-popular forces now emerging in Latin America, we must knock down certain myths of Eurocentric internationals, without falling into national populism. During the nineteen twenties, the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui dared to recover “Inca communism” as a historical-cultural premise for socialist struggles. The Peruvian historian Alberto Flores Galindo in the epilogue to his book of essays Buscando un Inca. Sueños y pesadillas, follows Mariátegui, analyzing like him how the emancipating imaginary of the Andean communities could be articulated within modern socialism.
The conjunction between the popular imaginary of emancipation and a program of intellectual and moral renovation takes place in a double sense, as part of the unity between theory and practice in “the philosophy of praxis,” in a critical theory with historical efficacy. However, today we find ourselves amidst the decline of bureaucratic socialism as configured by western modernity. Does it maybe signal the definitive collapse of the socialist idea alongside the crisis of Eurocentric modernity? It was modernity’s very own Eurocentric foundation that justified the distinction between “utopian socialism” and Federick Engels’ “scientific socialism.” In times when we’ve long ago surpassed positivism, mechanicism, determinism: what remains of so called “scientific socialism”? It was this foundation that justified the myth of ideological-cultural neutrality of “the development of productive forces” (Stalin), with the devastating consequences for the Marxist left, which assumed the “developmental fallacy” as a natural axis for emancipatory discourse.
The power of technocracy in conjunction with the dominance of capitalist economy, define the horizon of development for nations. On these bases is organized the predominance of transnationals in the system-world, in their close alliance with the capitalist States of the planet. The decolonizing agenda surges not only with the function of building alternatives from the South, but with the function of rearticulating the struggles of the counter hegemonic blocks of the North. We need to fine tune the nodes of a broad web made up of the space of the socialist intellectual collective, with no attachment to the thesis of the school of cadres-political formation.
Both these fields for the production of knowledge are strongly linked to speech/action in western modernity. We must liberate socialist critical thought from bureaucratic-despotic Marxism and, at the same time, we must decolonize it from Eurocentric modernism and its ideas of progress, development, history, science, technology and knowledge, among others.
Is Marxism a central component of the Latin American rebellion or is it simply a “foreign ideology,” as national populisms or authoritarian regimes proclaimed? Mariátegui was convincing in assuming a creative use of the critical Marxist tradition. He not only cited Marx, but also assumed the intellectual and moral effort of configuring his own thought, dilucidating central aspects of the indigenous problem, articulating the anticapitalist struggles, anti-imperialism and socialism, Confronting both the national populism of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre as well as the Stalinism of Victorio Codovilla, Mariátegui inaugurated the Indo-Americanization of Marxism. In Venezuela, to say Marxism was to say Marxism-Leninism. Betancourt intellectually maneuvered throughout its reaches. The socialist imaginary can be paralyzed by acritical imitation of models from bureaucratic socialism, or by its cooptation by forces promoting a national populist direction, with a project of State capitalism, as a horizon for the revolutionary simulacrum. In both cases, it is the nonexistence of the socialist intellectual collective, the condition of the historical blockade, of the slowness of changes, and of its generalized disorientation. We must wager for intellectual and moral decolonization in order to build revolutionary popular-national unity.
Translator’s note: A longer version of this essay, “El imaginario de emancipación socialista y la descolonización del pensamiento marxista (II),” was published in January.
{ Javier Biardeau, El Nacional, 21 February 2009 }
If democratic and socialist decolonizing revolutions have any relevance for the movements and national-popular forces now emerging in Latin America, we must knock down certain myths of Eurocentric internationals, without falling into national populism. During the nineteen twenties, the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui dared to recover “Inca communism” as a historical-cultural premise for socialist struggles. The Peruvian historian Alberto Flores Galindo in the epilogue to his book of essays Buscando un Inca. Sueños y pesadillas, follows Mariátegui, analyzing like him how the emancipating imaginary of the Andean communities could be articulated within modern socialism.
The conjunction between the popular imaginary of emancipation and a program of intellectual and moral renovation takes place in a double sense, as part of the unity between theory and practice in “the philosophy of praxis,” in a critical theory with historical efficacy. However, today we find ourselves amidst the decline of bureaucratic socialism as configured by western modernity. Does it maybe signal the definitive collapse of the socialist idea alongside the crisis of Eurocentric modernity? It was modernity’s very own Eurocentric foundation that justified the distinction between “utopian socialism” and Federick Engels’ “scientific socialism.” In times when we’ve long ago surpassed positivism, mechanicism, determinism: what remains of so called “scientific socialism”? It was this foundation that justified the myth of ideological-cultural neutrality of “the development of productive forces” (Stalin), with the devastating consequences for the Marxist left, which assumed the “developmental fallacy” as a natural axis for emancipatory discourse.
The power of technocracy in conjunction with the dominance of capitalist economy, define the horizon of development for nations. On these bases is organized the predominance of transnationals in the system-world, in their close alliance with the capitalist States of the planet. The decolonizing agenda surges not only with the function of building alternatives from the South, but with the function of rearticulating the struggles of the counter hegemonic blocks of the North. We need to fine tune the nodes of a broad web made up of the space of the socialist intellectual collective, with no attachment to the thesis of the school of cadres-political formation.
Both these fields for the production of knowledge are strongly linked to speech/action in western modernity. We must liberate socialist critical thought from bureaucratic-despotic Marxism and, at the same time, we must decolonize it from Eurocentric modernism and its ideas of progress, development, history, science, technology and knowledge, among others.
Is Marxism a central component of the Latin American rebellion or is it simply a “foreign ideology,” as national populisms or authoritarian regimes proclaimed? Mariátegui was convincing in assuming a creative use of the critical Marxist tradition. He not only cited Marx, but also assumed the intellectual and moral effort of configuring his own thought, dilucidating central aspects of the indigenous problem, articulating the anticapitalist struggles, anti-imperialism and socialism, Confronting both the national populism of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre as well as the Stalinism of Victorio Codovilla, Mariátegui inaugurated the Indo-Americanization of Marxism. In Venezuela, to say Marxism was to say Marxism-Leninism. Betancourt intellectually maneuvered throughout its reaches. The socialist imaginary can be paralyzed by acritical imitation of models from bureaucratic socialism, or by its cooptation by forces promoting a national populist direction, with a project of State capitalism, as a horizon for the revolutionary simulacrum. In both cases, it is the nonexistence of the socialist intellectual collective, the condition of the historical blockade, of the slowness of changes, and of its generalized disorientation. We must wager for intellectual and moral decolonization in order to build revolutionary popular-national unity.
Translator’s note: A longer version of this essay, “El imaginario de emancipación socialista y la descolonización del pensamiento marxista (II),” was published in January.
{ Javier Biardeau, El Nacional, 21 February 2009 }
2.03.2009
Descolonización del pensamiento marxista (I) / Javier Biardeau
Decolonization of Marxist Thought (I)
The national-popular movements that are being activated in our America’s societies are configuring the ideological horizon of new socialist imaginaries, bringing to the agenda questions about the place of the Marxist tradition and its role in the transformations that are taking place. In multiple interventions we have wagered on the thesis of the decolonization and de-dogmatization of the Marxist tradition, as an indispensable premise for the renovation of the socialist imaginary, an idea that is constitutively articulated with the proposals of a democratic an ethical-cultural counter-hegemonic revolution. This leads to the decolonization of the tradition of the Marxist left itself, which supposes a process of disassembly, dislocation, detachment and opening towards new horizons of theoretical reflection, that mark spaces beyond Eurocentrism’s politico-cultural canon.
In a strict sense this implies a double negation in the heart of the Marxist tradition: superseding social democratic and Marxist-Leninist reformism; that is, the Eurocentric internationals. The time has come to provincialize the universal fallacies. There also exists an agenda of knowledge production that can and should enunciate that our north is the South. Does this double supersession implicate the liquidation of the program of Marxist research-action? It absolutely implicates its radical aperture and renovation. In this way, the imaginary of new socialisms from the South acquires a historical-cultural density that is rooted in the specificity of concrete circumstances, without abandoning the problematization of the existential condition of the human race, understood as a conjunction of differential experiences of civilizing, cultural and national circles.
There is no abstract humanity. There exist diverse humanities, incarnated in historic multi-diversity, in cultural dialogue. In fact, intercultural dialogue which is the condition for the possibility of other socialisms, even for communal imaginaries (different from any form of industrialism, or bureaucratic collectivism), armed from an eco-political platform that uncovers the disease-development of blind industrialism-productivism and the consumerist mentality. This supposes an even more profound rupture from developmental inertias, more than the indispensable epistemological turn, articulated to the complex, decolonizing thought that would overcome the crisis of a modernity in ruins.
Today we know where the abstract universalisms were elaborated, their categorical and conceptual measures, their historic “a priori.” We recognize their epistemological devices, their ontological wagers and their ethical principles. We know from which legitimate tongues, from which hegemonic apparatuses truths are enunciated and legitimized. We know how intellectual fields are accredited and how the legitimization of symbolic domination takes place. Today the word “intellectual” is a problematic sign crossed by its function as a support to multiple regimes of power. “Intellectual” today is a sign that distinguishes and articulates a specific social function for determined epistemological, political and cultural projects. So we have to mistrust the projections of purity, honesty and decontamination of “intellectuals,” since, in a certain sense, they are modernity’s new clergy.
Although in Europe the French Revolution liquidated to a certain degree the stew of religious superstitions disseminated by the block of dominant power, it installed the superstition of the symbolic authority of illustrated intellectuals, without considering that they carried their own ethical-mythical horizon.
In postcolonial America both sources of authority disputed the intellectual and moral hegemony over what they considered a popular field subjected to racial classifications, plagued by the need for a “pastoral power” and for a “coercive leadership.” The cross and the sword have been modified by the incitement to consume and the right to die of hunger.
Translator’s note: A slightly longer version of this essay in the original Spanish was published last month as “El imaginario de emancipación socialista y la descolonización del pensamiento marxista (I).”
{ Javier Biardeau, El Nacional, 31 January 2009 }
The national-popular movements that are being activated in our America’s societies are configuring the ideological horizon of new socialist imaginaries, bringing to the agenda questions about the place of the Marxist tradition and its role in the transformations that are taking place. In multiple interventions we have wagered on the thesis of the decolonization and de-dogmatization of the Marxist tradition, as an indispensable premise for the renovation of the socialist imaginary, an idea that is constitutively articulated with the proposals of a democratic an ethical-cultural counter-hegemonic revolution. This leads to the decolonization of the tradition of the Marxist left itself, which supposes a process of disassembly, dislocation, detachment and opening towards new horizons of theoretical reflection, that mark spaces beyond Eurocentrism’s politico-cultural canon.
In a strict sense this implies a double negation in the heart of the Marxist tradition: superseding social democratic and Marxist-Leninist reformism; that is, the Eurocentric internationals. The time has come to provincialize the universal fallacies. There also exists an agenda of knowledge production that can and should enunciate that our north is the South. Does this double supersession implicate the liquidation of the program of Marxist research-action? It absolutely implicates its radical aperture and renovation. In this way, the imaginary of new socialisms from the South acquires a historical-cultural density that is rooted in the specificity of concrete circumstances, without abandoning the problematization of the existential condition of the human race, understood as a conjunction of differential experiences of civilizing, cultural and national circles.
There is no abstract humanity. There exist diverse humanities, incarnated in historic multi-diversity, in cultural dialogue. In fact, intercultural dialogue which is the condition for the possibility of other socialisms, even for communal imaginaries (different from any form of industrialism, or bureaucratic collectivism), armed from an eco-political platform that uncovers the disease-development of blind industrialism-productivism and the consumerist mentality. This supposes an even more profound rupture from developmental inertias, more than the indispensable epistemological turn, articulated to the complex, decolonizing thought that would overcome the crisis of a modernity in ruins.
Today we know where the abstract universalisms were elaborated, their categorical and conceptual measures, their historic “a priori.” We recognize their epistemological devices, their ontological wagers and their ethical principles. We know from which legitimate tongues, from which hegemonic apparatuses truths are enunciated and legitimized. We know how intellectual fields are accredited and how the legitimization of symbolic domination takes place. Today the word “intellectual” is a problematic sign crossed by its function as a support to multiple regimes of power. “Intellectual” today is a sign that distinguishes and articulates a specific social function for determined epistemological, political and cultural projects. So we have to mistrust the projections of purity, honesty and decontamination of “intellectuals,” since, in a certain sense, they are modernity’s new clergy.
Although in Europe the French Revolution liquidated to a certain degree the stew of religious superstitions disseminated by the block of dominant power, it installed the superstition of the symbolic authority of illustrated intellectuals, without considering that they carried their own ethical-mythical horizon.
In postcolonial America both sources of authority disputed the intellectual and moral hegemony over what they considered a popular field subjected to racial classifications, plagued by the need for a “pastoral power” and for a “coercive leadership.” The cross and the sword have been modified by the incitement to consume and the right to die of hunger.
Translator’s note: A slightly longer version of this essay in the original Spanish was published last month as “El imaginario de emancipación socialista y la descolonización del pensamiento marxista (I).”
{ Javier Biardeau, El Nacional, 31 January 2009 }
11.30.2008
Que siga el debate / Javier Biardeau
May the Debate Continue
I think it’s prudent to complement the matter of Marx, as an unfinished theoretical revolution, with its place in a theoretical agenda for fertilizing a radical critical theory (Modern? Postmodern? Transmodern?) that would rebuild itself by means of what Said calls, unlike Derrida, the “mundanity” of the text. With Derrida we know that contexts open or close interpretations, that they’re not closed (the polemic with Searle): context is another text, “nothing exists beyond the text.” But with Said we move on to another matter of greater significance, from “mundanity” we open what Puerta calls the practical-discursive textures of determined “logics of meaning” (Deleuze), because meaning generates affects: practical effects in forms of life (once again, mundanity, but by the hand of Wittgenstein and Winch). Jakobson has been cited, but I lean towards citing a less valued triad (Bakhtin, Vygotsky and Lotman), because beyond the linguistic selection and combination, there is a vaster scene of semiotic interaction tied to the conflicts of civilization, culture, nation, society and politics.
Once again, the “mundanity” of texts. That’s where I affirmed that “revolutionary Marxism” is constitutive of a critical socialist imaginary. This was the problematic, the “perceptive bubble” from which I proposed the matter of Marx, as a counterpoint to the affirmation: Marx is dead. I also pointed out that abolishing the sieve of a Marxist-Leninist interpretation of Marx (and let those who did or didn’t do anything to defenestrate this idiocy in some political-party space go elsewehere) we would gain a great deal by opening readings of more interesting characters, instead of the reiterations of Marxist manuals.
Marx is dead, for what problematic, or for what agenda, for what intellectual tonic, for what places of enunciation? For those who don’t wish to venture into the practical task of thinking the “modes of transformation,” not just the modes of production or reproduction, the matter of Marx does not appear as a death. From my point of view, Marx won’t die just like cultural documents don’t die nor do the documents of barbarism. They remain, and they generate effects, they function in ideological-discursive blocks, beyond how we might substitute the term ideology with “tradition,” with prejudices and presuppositions. Marx’s mundanity is to be found in his practical effects on the hegemonic way of life and its dominant social relations. That the tone of this affirmation might reek of dogmatism or mothballs, that it might inspire certain doubts because it appears to be stripped of an affability, of a “dialogue” conceived from the liberal horizon (a conversation between citizens who don’t put their prejudices about their way of life at risk) can be read as the entrance into the game of “another mundanity.” Situations are not changed by talking in a friendly manner, but instead by means of polemic, risking (why not?) error and acting “without measure or proportion,” without Aristotelian moderation and prudence; acknowledging that the word is a field of forces, accents and evaluations (Bakhtin). Is that why they aren’t neutral? Because in order to say it in the most mundane way possible, the matter of Chávez is a minor aspect of the matter of the “modes of social transformation.”
Because without radical social imaginaries that institute ways of saying-doing (Castoriadis) that are radically antagonistic to the existing capitalist-civilization, there will be no possibility of transformation. That this personal mania is not a mania shared by an imaginary community called the postmodern tribe, or one which is dedicated to reflection (which is already a great deal), is not a problem for proposing the matter. As for me, I open fire for a polemical dialogue, respectful but polemical, with a polemos marked within a democratic agon. This is not a mere detail, if we specify that by polemos we can derive the sentence of Mao and “president Gonzalo” that truth is born from the mouth of a rifle. No, perhaps truth might just be a sign of a regime of forces that operate not by the crude means of the stick or the gunshot, but rather by means of the enchantment of sophistic effects.
{ Javier Biardeau, El Nacional, 29 November 2008 }
I think it’s prudent to complement the matter of Marx, as an unfinished theoretical revolution, with its place in a theoretical agenda for fertilizing a radical critical theory (Modern? Postmodern? Transmodern?) that would rebuild itself by means of what Said calls, unlike Derrida, the “mundanity” of the text. With Derrida we know that contexts open or close interpretations, that they’re not closed (the polemic with Searle): context is another text, “nothing exists beyond the text.” But with Said we move on to another matter of greater significance, from “mundanity” we open what Puerta calls the practical-discursive textures of determined “logics of meaning” (Deleuze), because meaning generates affects: practical effects in forms of life (once again, mundanity, but by the hand of Wittgenstein and Winch). Jakobson has been cited, but I lean towards citing a less valued triad (Bakhtin, Vygotsky and Lotman), because beyond the linguistic selection and combination, there is a vaster scene of semiotic interaction tied to the conflicts of civilization, culture, nation, society and politics.
Once again, the “mundanity” of texts. That’s where I affirmed that “revolutionary Marxism” is constitutive of a critical socialist imaginary. This was the problematic, the “perceptive bubble” from which I proposed the matter of Marx, as a counterpoint to the affirmation: Marx is dead. I also pointed out that abolishing the sieve of a Marxist-Leninist interpretation of Marx (and let those who did or didn’t do anything to defenestrate this idiocy in some political-party space go elsewehere) we would gain a great deal by opening readings of more interesting characters, instead of the reiterations of Marxist manuals.
Marx is dead, for what problematic, or for what agenda, for what intellectual tonic, for what places of enunciation? For those who don’t wish to venture into the practical task of thinking the “modes of transformation,” not just the modes of production or reproduction, the matter of Marx does not appear as a death. From my point of view, Marx won’t die just like cultural documents don’t die nor do the documents of barbarism. They remain, and they generate effects, they function in ideological-discursive blocks, beyond how we might substitute the term ideology with “tradition,” with prejudices and presuppositions. Marx’s mundanity is to be found in his practical effects on the hegemonic way of life and its dominant social relations. That the tone of this affirmation might reek of dogmatism or mothballs, that it might inspire certain doubts because it appears to be stripped of an affability, of a “dialogue” conceived from the liberal horizon (a conversation between citizens who don’t put their prejudices about their way of life at risk) can be read as the entrance into the game of “another mundanity.” Situations are not changed by talking in a friendly manner, but instead by means of polemic, risking (why not?) error and acting “without measure or proportion,” without Aristotelian moderation and prudence; acknowledging that the word is a field of forces, accents and evaluations (Bakhtin). Is that why they aren’t neutral? Because in order to say it in the most mundane way possible, the matter of Chávez is a minor aspect of the matter of the “modes of social transformation.”
Because without radical social imaginaries that institute ways of saying-doing (Castoriadis) that are radically antagonistic to the existing capitalist-civilization, there will be no possibility of transformation. That this personal mania is not a mania shared by an imaginary community called the postmodern tribe, or one which is dedicated to reflection (which is already a great deal), is not a problem for proposing the matter. As for me, I open fire for a polemical dialogue, respectful but polemical, with a polemos marked within a democratic agon. This is not a mere detail, if we specify that by polemos we can derive the sentence of Mao and “president Gonzalo” that truth is born from the mouth of a rifle. No, perhaps truth might just be a sign of a regime of forces that operate not by the crude means of the stick or the gunshot, but rather by means of the enchantment of sophistic effects.
{ Javier Biardeau, El Nacional, 29 November 2008 }
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