playing soldiers

As an offshoot from a quickly -- though not quickly enough -- deleted comment on Kasey's blog, Joshua Clover (a.k.a. Jane Dark) and I had a brief e-mail exchange about Marxism, revolutions and "The Terror", related to Kent Johnson's note that such fashionable thinkers as Alain Badiou[1] have disturbingly uncritical relations to such figures as Mao and Pol Pot.

Josh and I didn't have a very friendly exchange once he discovered that I thought Karl Marx, whatever his relevance to pleasant armchair thoughts, was entirely discredited as an economic thinker. For Josh,

Marx's descriptive abilities in re economics seem hard to gainsay even now -- do you really not think that profit comes from the differential between what what labor is paid and how much the products of that labor are sold for, less fixed infrastructural costs? I am excited to hear about your alternative description. Lacking one, it remains the case that the common *modifiable* source of misery is wage relations . . .

Josh's notion of the essential Marxist thought -- which to me seems to be just a fragment of algebra and a commonplace from the progressive movement entirely unrelated to what I understand as the torqued Hegel that is our friend K.M. -- aside, my own thoughts are that actually advocating any kind of structural economic change based on the details (as opposed to definitions?) of Marxism is akin to treating a broken leg with medicinal herbs (or, to push perhaps the one or two buttons that remain, treating schizophrenia with Freudianism instead of Abilify.)

Josh and I disagree on a great number of theoretical issues (though I doubt, for all the talk of "violence", that he actually would like to see more of it); Josh, for example, thinks violence is the "franchise of the state" whereas I think it's pretty clear from reading, say, the police reports in my neighbourhood (Hyde Park, Illinois being apparently more dangerous than Davis, California), that the overwhelming majority of violence is practiced by the poor, on the poor.

It takes a certain kind of intellectual involution (or a massive self-imposed system of censorship on your newspaper reading) to believe that the violence -- not metaphorical violence, actual violence -- in American cities is dominated by the state. Meanwhile, I think it's pretty clear that our invasion of Iraq was driven primarily by greed and a bizarre cultural confluence à la Edward Said's Orientalism than by a highly specific inexorable narrowing of profit margins at the final stage of capitalism (or some Leninist notion of the autonomy of the periphery in colonialism.)

When you talk about Marxism, it's important, I think, to abstract the data from the theory. Marx and Engels were perceptive observers of working class misery, no doubt; but their bizarre notions of how profit and wage relations progress and interact with culture seem to be, again, something interesting to think about, fertile in the same way Saint Thomas Aquinas is. (For Josh, on the other hand, my work on the Howard Dean campaign and my donations to him, Kerry and various Senators and Congressmen through actblue is "veritably theological".)

As vague as "tenured radicals" like to be about what they actually mean by "radical action" or (even more amusingly) "revolutionary" thought made praxis, to me it seems just a lot of boys playing soldier. Indeed, the country that produced Dad's Army produced also a wide array of Oxbridge corporals in the Marxist army, Eric Hobsbawm among the most famous.

Leszek Kołakowski , on the other hand -- a man who lived through the horror of iron curtain Marxism -- ends his Main Currents of Marxism with pretty much the same assesment I give: that it was, and only further developed into, an intellectually curious absurdity. A little like reading Heidegger or Nietzsche, reading Marx is a slightly nervous pleasure akin to disappearing down the rabbit hole.

It's important to note that those who play soldiers often don't like to meet them; as with Josh's (and apparently Slavoj Žižek's) reiterated complaints that demands for "revolutionary change" seem to unfairly get ordinary people to refer to Pol Pot and Stalin, simply suggesting that Kołakowski might have better insight than Hobsbawm into both the theory and pragmatics of Marxism because he lived in a Communist hell is considered an unfair move -- this from a intellectual segment likely to claim in other areas that direct experience (of being a woman, of being African-American, &c.) gives knowledge otherwise inaccessible.[2]

Which brings me around to my own writing -- on the "violence" of capitalism, on anarchism, on (forthcoming) ecopoiesis. I think Josh was confused by of my own writings -- I suppose I needed more scare quotes if, unlike Noam Chomsky, I'm going to evolve notions such as anarchism beyond the politically reasonable.

I think it is clear, for example, that there is a great deal of "violence" in captialism; what I am most engaged by is that this is a deeply indirect violence, a violence done to the psyche, to the soul, to the spirit. It's an armchair thought in many ways, but I, at least, am aware that the greatest suffering of this psychic violence are precisely those that we -- meaning people like Josh and I -- are most concerned with politically.

I am concerned, when I take political writings -- such as those from the anarchists -- that I think are often dangerous suggestions for actual political change to remake them, to give, in Harold Bloom's terminology, a strong misreading. In other fields this is not the case: for example, I think that Chomsky's notion of generative grammar is true, is factual, and that it's a fact that poets (or at least their critics) need to confront and acknoledge.

I think in the realm of the capitalist impovrishment of the spirit "all bets are off"; the quack medicine of Marxism is a tool just as much as the insane, egotistical or megalomanical, manifestos and poems that are produced by much of the avant garde. In the meantime, those who transpose what I think are reasonable, noble politics into poetry are usually some of the worst dullest poets around. You can't take Martha Nussbaum or John Rawls and make a manifesto of the anti-real.

Perhaps it's an occupational hazard that poets who engage, like me, in what I think are strong misreadings of the Western political tradition to think that they are actually thinking about politics. If there isn't a legend about the poet who wrote about having wings and thereby died falling off a tower (or, escaped from a Pisan cage, in an asylum), I hereby begin it.

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[1]. The only Badiou I've read is his Being and Event, an insane metaphysics based around set theory. I highly recommend it both for the language, which is gorgeous, and for the fact that, indeed, if you read it and understand it you will actually learn a hell of a lot about mathematics, all the way up to Paul Cohen's set forcing. Whatever else you can say about Badiou, he's not lazy.

[2]. At least Terry Eagleton, with his distain for identity politics, is consistent on this point.