From owner-marxism-international  Tue Apr 15 13:11:37 1997
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 13:11:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: Stephen C Tumino <sctumino@acsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: M-I: PANIC LEFT-10
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970415125855.28538A-100000@autarch.acsu.buffalo.edu>


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

PANIC LEFT - 10

If indeed "cyberfascism" is such a silly concept and the Red Critique of
the "Performative Left" an idiotic text, then why is Robert Malecki so
angry and worried about them?  So defensive and irrational in his
response?  He should, instead of such defensive anger, which seems like
"denial", be quite amused by them... OR, as we suspect, "cyberfascism"
explains and its explanation transgresses the safe boundaries he had built
around himself...?  
	
	Robert Malecki and Yoshie Furuhashi ..... are in agreement that
our texts are silly and that their silliness places them in the space of
the "pathetic" -- beyond the need of commentary.  The "silliness" of our
texts derive -- it is now clear (even to Hugh Rodwell) -- from their
un-packing the un-saids of the texts that pass as "analysis" among the
net-leftists: Yoshie and the style clique.  To prohibit our critique, they
have decided to discredit the questions that we have raised.  As far as
they are concerned there are only one set of pre-decided questions that
are legitimate for discussion on the net-left -- i. e. questions that THEY
feel comfortable with -- questions around which they have established a
net-club.  Any questioning of these questions -- opening them up so that
their conditions of possibility are examined (what, for example makes
Yoshies marginalization of "theory" a legitimate act while our questioning
of her act "pathetic") is simply a "silly" act which shows we are not
simply "pathetic" but so confused that we do not even know the meaning of
the word "fascism". . .  Yoshie and Malecki (acting on the dominant
"sentiment" on the net-left) are simply protecting their turf (from the
"Buffalo boys" who "are from the wrong side of the tracks" as they see
it)... they simply want a safe space ("Club Net") to chat about familiar
issues... that explains the present in terms of the past and displaces
history by anecdote. (Why are their anecdotes about "shopping"
(consumption) no less ?  McLemee's consumption of HUSTLER, Levy's of
NATIONAL ENQUIRER and Malecki's lumpen narco-peddling/consuming pacifists
are cult. studs. moments on how the "excessiveness" of everyday
consumption disrupts priority of base (exploitation) over superstructure
politically indistinguishable from those of the academic left stars... 
like Penley's celebration of Trek-y fanzines, Haraway's Cyborg or the
current celebration of Nina Hartley on the radical left. Calling the
academy "bad" names doesnt hide this fact)... 

the safety is gone... how "pathetic"... how indeed ...    

	We are now getting to the core of the desedimented net-left: the
(re)united club against "theory", "science", "analytical thinking",... all
things intellectual.  The net-left has consequently ended up in a place in
which nothing but its own pet topics are discussed endlessly and
uselessly... It has run away from new physics (it only knows how to mock
"string theory"), it has run away from poststructuralism (it only knows
how to ridicule Derrida's STYLE) it has run away from New Historicism (it
only knows the actual in opposition to the REAL),...  The resistance
against introducing anything other than what the club members are familiar
with and feel comfortable with is, of course, a strategy of protecting
this isolated left from the "other".  Confronted with the "other", the
net-left mocks, shouts ("pretentious"!), and runs away... The upshot of
being scared of the "other" is that now the net-left is reduced to dealing
with the "other" in these "philosophical" concepts: 

PISSING: critique is pissing (Utica Rose)  

BEASTIALIZING: we are "buffaloes", "cats...." (John Barkely Rosser Jr.,
	Hugh Rodwell, Utica Rose)  

INFANTILIZATION: Buffalo BOYS (with all its racial connotations of "boyz"
	and the POWER that it inscribes on the "other")  

DIMINUTION-EFFECT: "Stevo" (if you do not understand the "other", reduce
	him, it at least makes you feel superior)  

HOITY-TOITY: The net-left's concept that surpasses all other concepts.   


The vanguard, however needs to encounter the NEW and engage with the most
advanced form of (bourgeois) knowledges of the boundaries.  In his
"Address at the Congress of the Russian Young Communist League", Lenin
said:  

	But you would be committing a great mistake if you attempted to 
	draw the conclusion that one can become a Communist without
	acquiring what human knowledge has accumulated.  

But for the net-left and it's philistine (*Yoshie: "philistine" is Engel's
term not ours*) anti-intellectualism the difficult knowledge is
marginalized as "classy" which only makes it easier for the net-left to
avoid it.  It is a travesty of the tradition of the left (which has always
been on the boundaries of knowledges) to bracket new knowledges simply
because the club net does not understand them and assign them to the
category of "classy".  What is classy is to turn the left into a CLUB...
and exclude the "other" from it...

	The latest bourgeois knowledges demand to be engaged because they
are active responses to shifts in labor relations (caused by the
acceleration of capital accumulation) whose very formal "newness"
threatens to dis-organize the revolutionary opposition. The increasing
commodification of the world (as Marx explains with his concept of the
OCC) leads to more densely mediated and highly complex divisions of labor
that bourgeois knowledges isolate analytically as post-exploitative
tendencies of capitalism to reform itself.  Bourgeois knowledges thus have
a practical (class) basis in covering over the social contradictions
caused by new patterns of exploitation... like multicultural/national
production lines; postmodernism; cyberfascism... (hence their continual
innovation), while maintaining traditional political conclusions that do
not threaten the regime of wage-labor itself (hence their fundamental
conservatism). If revolutionary Marxism does not expose/oppose the
reification that the "new" concepts the bourgeois knowledge industry uses
to misrecognize the historical development of capitalism by default these
knowledges circulate unimpeded and define the opposition.  The abandonment
of critique on the part of the left is thus the most blatant act of class
collaboration.  "Proletarian revolutions, on the other hand, ... critique
[kritik] themselves constantly" (Marx)... 

	
		"... critique represents a class... " (Marx).     
	
	
	Zeynep's suddenly "beginning to notice/think there's a pattern" to
our contestation with the net-left is, as Malecki was quick to note and
celebrate when he saw his opportunity to do so through Yoshie's text,
another panicked attempt of this anti-theory clique to trivialize our
critique by eliciting gut-level responses and moral effrontery from the
petty-bourgeois philistines.  Once again, by implying that critique is a
pathology (the product of "sickos" and "wackos") Yoshie offers a
psychoanalytic solution: a (self)consciousness of "PROJECTIONS".  What
does Yoshie think Utica Rose's "pissing contest" or Walter Daum's implying
that we, like other imperialists, "like mispronouncing the names" of
others means if not the "irony" that our unconscious libidinal
"PROJECTION" somehow proves the inadequacy of our arguments?  Why is
Malecki so sure that Yoshie says "the same thing" (in "better" LANGUAGE)
as he...  She, like Melecki, fails to read our critique of POMO Left -- of
why "PROJECTION" makes of the global contradiction between
forces/relations of production ("First/Third World") a local problem
("lack" of vigilance... ) and the moral responsibility of individuals
themselves (Humanism) outside class struggle.  [Melecki is now so
disturbed about being on the wrong side of the barricade and confused by
his own ranting and raving that he "disproves" our Leninism by describing
(once again) the way that the cyberfascists (for whom HOW things are done
is ALL IMPORTANT) have "buried" it under an eclectic array of
pathologies.]  Zeynep only "begins to notice" racism when it is convenient
to alibi the racist/sexist violence against us -- international Marxists
-- that has gone on now unabated since we first critiqued the net-left on
materialist/economic grounds and disrupted their rule of "conversation".
Where was she on the issue of their masculinizing ("one-ups-MAN-ship"; U.
Rose) us (despite our genders) or our "first-worlding" (despite our
color)? The latest round of trivializing (TRIVIALIZING = NOT CONNECTING TO
CAPITALIST RULE OF PROFIT) of race/gender by linking them to "unconscious
desires" (Daum's post-al concept of "racist pleasure" that "likes
mispronouncing the name of the other") is a cheap bosses attempt to break
our collective's international solidarity.  As we have said repeatedly --
there is no "agency" (Zeynep's "I am beginning to think") outside of the
political economy of the class struggle.  

	The net-left, we must say, has turned out, to be the site of some
of the most virulent archconservatives we have ever encountered... people
so frightened by the "other" and "other" ideas that all they can do is to
"erase" the "other" (I "deleted" you) or ...animalize , infantilize, piss
on them....not even read what is being said but respond anyway (comment on
or post on Althusser and our attempt to re-articulate "agency"  and
"production" in relation to each other...)... and, of course, there is
always Doug Henwood: one foot in pomo, thus his problematizing ("hey here
is that WORD" again) "origin", etc. to get rid of "arche" and "telos" at
the same time, and the other one in (whatever it is that he calls
"marxism") which , at least formally, obligates him to some notion of
"origin" (as in origin of surplus value?) and "telos" (socialism?)....

 




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