From owner-marxism-international
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 13:11:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: Stephen C Tumino <sctumino@acsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: M-I: PANIC LEFT-10
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 Yoshie's
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 INQUIRER 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 doesn't 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 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 multi-cultural/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)...
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," Utica 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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