PANIC LEFT
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • Summer/Fall 1997 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 5, No. 2 (pp. 61-83). | ||
| • September 29, 2003 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.7) from original. | ||
Introduction (by A.O. Editors)
On April 2, 1997, the Revolutionary Marxist Collective (RMC) at Buffalo posted a critique of the “Between Capitalism and Democracy” conference at SUNY/Buffalo (held on April 18, 1997 featuring Ellen Meiksins Wood as keynote speaker) on the Spoon Marxism Internet lists. This symptomatic reading of the proposed conference was the inaugural volley in what has become an ongoing series of critique-al exchanges on the Net, exchanges which have elicited violent counterattacks orchestrated by a range of defenders of counter-revolutionary intellectual and political practices: from activist leftists, editors and writers to post-Marxist/pomo theorists, to trade unionists from around the world. The RMC/Buffalo's initial critique entitled “Performative Left: A Red Critique of the Theatre Called 'Between Capitalism and Democracy'" (reproduced below) which speaks from a revolutionary/classical Marxist position has subsequently been extended and deepened into a sustained analysis of the bankruptcy of the contemporary “net-left” — an analysis first made in solidarity with, and eventually with the active support of, other revolutionary collectives from across the U.S.: the Red Theory Collective (Albany, NY), Red Orange Editorial Collective, and the Revolutionary Marxist Collectives at Rutgers (NJ), Syracuse (NY) and Binghamton (NY). We are reproducing here for our readers a limited selection of these exchanges because we find a great deal of political urgency to the issues and questions being raised. The international effectivity of these controversial interventions is further testified to by the range of responses from beyond the U.S. left that they have called forth — a fact which reconfirms the urgency and centrality of the contestations engaged in in these critiques for revolutionary Marxists the world over. (We should add that the breadth of the contestation places it beyond our capacity to republish all the arguments fully and so we urge our readers who are interested in the few key posts and exchanges that we have reproduced below to engage with the series in its entirety on the Spoon Philosophy Homepage [the Marxism-International and Marxism-Thaxis lists at “listshttp://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/%7Espoons/"]). [sic.]
The primary series of analyses — the PANIC LEFT series that we have reproduced for our readers below — range from issues of cyberfascism, localist politics, left populism and anti-theory to the politics of Althusser's Marxism, Marxian pedagogy and the Laclau-Mouffe/Meiksins Wood axis (who, despite formal differences, are now dismantling Marxist-Leninist theory through a co-operative attack on “base/superstructure” [see PANIC LEFT 8 below]). While PANIC LEFT has constituted the main channel of contestation with the reformist left on the Internet, it is not by any means the only front of the ongoing Red Critique. The PANIC LEFTIST and RED-NET series (both accessible at the Spoon Internet page) have also engaged with other divergent ideological idioms, philosophical strategies and alibis of the left — not only in order to break the hold of its entrenched “buddy systems” but to break up its established network of cyber-goons who operate through outright harassment and (not so) subtle racism, sexism and homophobia... (see PANIC LEFT 6 below). As our readers will see, the PANIC LEFT series is also an intervention into the logic of the “dialogical”—the non-closural conversations and anecdotal modes of knowing through which bourgeois knowledges maintain a “safe” space in which the density of the theoretical issues is displaced and the sharp lines of class antagonism — what Althusser calls “class struggle at the level of theory” — are more easily blurred. As such its mode of engagement is by way of a sustained, serious and polemical un-packing of complex politico-philosophical issues. In fact, it is just this thorough un-packing of the politico-philosophical that has met with a vehement resistance from the net-left at every turn, as is evident even in the handful of responses of this reformist left that we have been able to reproduce here. These few responses clearly indicate the broader outlines of what has become a philosophically impoverished and politically defensive anti-theory left that is more of a “memory left” than a vanguard fighter for building a communist future. The net-left in short, is more interested in reminiscing and exchanging anecdotes and confessions — that is, in preserving its right to “ignorance” (see OLD MAN OF THE LEFT) — than in a serious world-historical analysis of capitalism. On the contrary, the struggle for a RED-NET is the bringing back of the “serious” as the site for sustained Marxist analysis of the boundaries which is the only way forward to class political consciousness today.
We want to call our readers' attention to the fact that what underwrites all of the Internet exchanges is the deep complicity which surfaces again and again between the reformist left on the Net and the pomo left in the academy (thus the concept of “panic”: see PANIC LEFT-4). The response to the RMC's original posting by James Holstun, an English Professor at SUNY-Buffalo, for example, shows exactly how very un-different these two factions — net-left and pomo/academic left — have become (despite their own claims), as well as their common alliance and shared strategies, arguments and word-for-word alibis for marginalizing Marxist theory and critique today, both “inside” AND “outside” the academy (see PANIC HOLSTUN: FIFTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A CENTRIST COMPRADOR). While one appeals to the Monthly Review crowd, and the other appeals to pomo commonsense, both are nonetheless engaged in the identical strongarm tactics against RED CRITIQUE. The violence that both unleash against Marxism is indistinguishable: one of Professor Holstun's texts calls the RMC/Buffalo “stoop-id” and “gut-less," while the net-left echoes this violence, suggesting that those who want to read Engels should be put in a “cage" (PANIC LEFT 5). But it is important to recognize that all of the orchestrated violences of the left are not simply outbursts and random "flame wars”; they are, like all violences, historical acts, and as such are shaped by the emerging conflicts and contradictions of cybercapitalism — above all the need to keep the ratio of exploitation high and the space for resistance and critique at a minimum. The cultural climate of cyberfascism (which extends beyond the Net) and its utility to capitalism is evident in the writings of Baudrillard for one who argues that the skyrocketing U.S. “national debt” — increasing at a rate of $20,000 a second — is not the surest sign of the crisis of U.S. capital but should be seen rather as an aesthetic object, a nonconceptual virtual experience of “acceleration” that Wall Street itself proudly and triumphantly displays in a billboard of neon lights in Times Square for everyday pedestrians ("Global Debt and Parallel Universe”. Digital Delirium Ed. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. New York: St. Martins Press, 1997). The ideology of cyberfascism which haunts the pomo/cult studies/Wall Street left is carried over from the writings of Baudrillard into the trajectory of the PANIC LEFT exchanges. One of the major strategies of the ideologues of cyberfascism on the Net has also been to aestheticize the space of the capitalist everyday (like network commentator Laura Ingraham who is working to make fascism “stylish” in the postmodern moment; PANIC LEFT 2) and furthermore, through a mode of linguistic fascism, to legitimate a climate in which red critique becomes easily marked and dismissed as the “illegal immigrant” of the Net. As the cyberfascist ideologue and net-leftist Ralph Dumain proclaims, the net-left has found itself united in a communal fascist ritual of, as he says, expelling the “immigrant” (red critique) from where it “doesn't belong” (PANIC LEFT 6).
Like all of the texts published in the Alternative Orange, this series below is not a journalistic “report” but is a call to action, an opening up of spaces for further interventionary practices. It is politically urgent to continue to intervene on the Net in order to bring to crisis the reactive ("experientialist") knowledges and obsolete ("activist”, “localist") politics that occupy this space, a space that is assisting in disarticulating Marxist praxis from any sustained engagement with the most advanced and subtle forms of bourgeois ideology today. The (cyber)space of the NET-LEFT in other words, remains a highly contained and policed site in which the “left” perpetuates its cult of “ignorance”, dilutes Marxist politics into bourgeois economism and voluntarism, substitutes criticism of “style” for theoretical “analysis”, and, consolidating a reactionary nostalgia, endlessly reminisces on the “good old days”. A determined and resolute struggle is required to combat these tendencies and to forge a RED-NET. We urge our readers to declare their solidarity in this struggle and... join us in the
FIGHT FOR A RED-NET FOR INTERNATIONAL COMMUNISM!
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