From sctumino@acsu.buffalo.edu  Sun Apr 13 19:45:23 1997
From: sctumino@acsu.buffalo.edu (Stephen C Tumino)
Date: Sun, 13 Apr 1997 14:45:23 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: M-TH: PANIC LEFTIST: FRAME FIVE
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970413143956.2133A-100000@conciliator.acsu.buffalo.edu>




**************************************************  
Revolutionary Marxist Collective at Buffalo/SUNY




PANIC LEFTIST: FRAME FIVE   



YOUSHI has to make up her mind rather than (like Uncle Lou)
opportunistically use Adorno whenever his writings fit her immediate local
agenda and bracket his texts whenever that is more convenient.  This sort
of eclectic pragmatism (that she has come to regard as an effective left)
is simply a ruse for mystifying her own bourgeois politics. (Her defense
of the "bourgeois" by moralizing our critique -- that we regard all that
is "good" as bourgeois, etc., is part of this strategy of mystification.
Had she thought about what she is quoting and had she at least read our
annotation of Adorno, she would have realized that Adorno's text is based
upon the very "foundation" of bourgeois life which is divided "between"
the "private" (the space of "withdrawal") and the public (the site of
"activity"). This division is an extension of the capitalist political
economy. Youshi's text simply reifies it by valorizing one over the other.
The "moralism" that marks Y's entire political theory (the "good" and the
"bad") needless to say, is a reproduction of the postmodern displacement
of politics by "ethics".  The part of Adorno that she "loves" is the
moralist Adorno who has affinity not with Marx but with Levinas.  In
shifting the analysis from "politics" to "morals" -- like all bourgeois
ethicists, Y, manages to shift the theoretical and political focus from
"production" (of surplus value) to its "distribution" and thus place the
"graduate student" and not the "capitalist" at the center of the political
economy.  This is, of course, an invaluable service to the owners. This is
how reformists like Y, by criticizing "theory" (which is represented by
the trope of "graduate school") manage to make "experience" the site of
the truth of the everyday.  This is, to repeat, the service that the ludic
academy (as marked by the Buffalo Conference, "Between Capitalism and
Democracy" which, for example is more concerned with "greening" of Marxism
than class struggle) offers the ruling class by displacing "production"
with "consumption".  Y's naturalization of "experience" and attack on
"theory" is further secured by her marking of all Leninist theory at the
moment of cybercapitalism as "virtual". There is the essence of
pragmatism: the "philosophy" of the reformist left.   




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