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Note: Hyper link paths such as ".../5/v5n2_p/00112233.html" point to a file containing a copy of original email post, where "00112233" comes from the "Date:" field as follows:
"00" is day of month of April 1997, "11" is military hour, "22" is minutes and "33" is seconds.
The “Between Capitalism and Democracy” conference at SUNY-Buffalo (April 18, 1997), organized by the Graduate Group in Marxist Studies (GGMS), is an occasion to place the left academy in a world-historical context and examine some of the practices that have made it the most trusted ally of capitalism today. The theatre that passes as left at SUNY-Buffalo should not be treated simply as an amusing, but irrelevant, side-show. The performative left is representative of the academic left in the U.S. today. As such it requires a sustained analysis.
At the core of this performative left lies the idea that “identity” is founded on an “impossibility”—the “lack” of a reliable anchorage in the extra-discursive real — which, when “revealed”, subverts the “concept” and leads to the free and equal dissemination of “pleasure” for everyone. “Pleasure” is meant to reference that moment when “everyday” instrumental rationality — the conventional adequation of signifier to signified — is disrupted and meaning is liberated from its compulsory cultural normativity. The performative left does not accept that there is finally, an “outside” to normative cultural values. That, in other words, there is a practical economic basis (exploitation) that causes and thus explains the seemingly autonomous status of such cultural superstructures like “morality," the “everyday” and what gets marked as “compulsory” itself. Consequently, this leads them to valorize “resignification” (the “creative” consumption of discourses/commodities) as an end in itself: as a transhistorically and universally effective means for personal “liberation” by way of pleasure in the “undecidability” of “meaning"/"values”. It is, in fact, this very subject as the subject-of-lack — that is, as a subject-of-desire who lacks concept and who thus pursues his own “pleasure” regardless of the systemic consequences of this — that is the dominant “identity” of postmodern capitalism and its compulsory regime of consumption. It is the performative left's support of this dominant subject that makes it the trusted ally of capital today. Moreover, while resignification as a means for the realization of personal liberation is heralded as a universal panacea applicable to all, not only is it not universally applicable but, it is, in fact a petty-bourgeois practice which — as we argue below—registers the contradictions of the shifting position of this class fraction. In its main ideological thrust as a “strategy” for change, resignification (alongside such other idealist categories of the performative left as “recoding”, “remetaphorization”, “restylization” ... ) appeals to the position of the petty bourgeois subject who, already having had his basic needs met, has nothing left to do but to speculate on the expansion of new opportunities of consumption. And yet, of course, what such a celebration of the “diversities” and shifting pleasures of relations of consumption has as its ultimate effect is to give the petty-bourgeoisie a false consciousness about its social position in the relations of production. A false consciousness which is designed to make its particular form of exploitation (which stems from the fact that it cannot accumulate capital and thus cannot enter the ranks of the ruling class who have already monopolized the means of production) the sign of its “radical” difference from the mass of the working class.
In other words, not only is “resignification” not universally socially relevant as a means of social change but, we argue, it is also the name of an historically determined form of "pleasure”. The performative left advocates “resignification” rather than revolution as a means of liberation at a time when the petty-bourgeoisie has already been massively proletarianized (i.e. has entered the ranks of wage laborers). Because the performative left has abandoned Marxism however it does not have the capacity ("concept") to understand the political economy of its own emergence as the false consciousness of the postmodern petty bourgeoisie. As a result it sees the current class polarization of the world not as the vindication of Marxism—the global consolidation of world capitalism and its division into two antagonistic classes already foreseen in the Manifesto of the Communist Party and Capital — but as itself a symptom of a finally unknowable, because “absent”, cause that Zizek calls the “Real” and Lyotard the “sublime” (to name only a few). Through such strategies, the performative left renders the collective “lack” (of UNMET NEEDS) that has been socially engineered by the bourgeoisie through, among other things, the defeat of the Soviet Union (which was the primary means to ensure the most massive transfer of social wealth in the industrialized countries from the workers to the owners since the 30s), as a transcendental given (an “event") in need of no explanation. It is in Zizek's work most of all that the compulsory subject of consumption is secured by trivializing recent history by making class struggle itself a transcendental ("sublime") object of ideology. In his texts class struggle becomes an automatic “structure of repetition” that mimics the “libidinal economy” of “desire” (projection, identification, disavowal) that has no objective connection to the daily exploitation of labor-power (the extraction of surplus labor) which is what finally divides the owning-ruling class from the working class. The performative left is constantly searching to resignify the effects of this class antagonism in the workday into such unconsciously compulsive repetitive structures of “desire” because such troping of real social contradictions as imaginative ones is the epistemological pre-condition of the “subversion” of identity through new methods of consumption: their particular panacea for the growing inequality and escalating social crisis of capitalism in decline. They think that through the “subversion” of normative cultural identity the masses will “learn to live with lack” (Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992: 65) and the social crisis thus become diffused. But all that this deconstruction of identity produces is the same old liberal pluralism which serves to whitewash the ruling class, the only social class who actually benefits from the racist patriarchal subjectivities the performative left overstates as “compulsory” to capitalism. It is by reducing these reactionary ideologies to habitually (unconsciously) repeated “necessary fictions," as it does when it treats “identity" as a cultural practice fueled by “desire” (with no necessary relation to economic exploitation) that the performative left severs them from the materiality of existing social relations and implies that workers have an (unconscious, libidinal) interest in maintaining their own oppression and exploitation. The obverse side of this perverse notion of the “libidinal economists” of the performative left is the idea that the actual oppressors and exploiters of others can desire their own undoing and morally reform themselves through, for example, the “conspicuous consumption” of their property; through socially symbolic acts like shopping!
The “Between Capitalism and Democracy” conference is another instance of the ludic “subversion” of “identity” as a means to produce the pleasures of anti-theory. The title itself announces that it is to be a critical gathering where the normative identity of “capitalism” with “democracy” is deconstructed. But, because it is not explained how such a deconstruction of identity leads to practical results within the conditions of the ongoing class struggle (i.e. the “pleasure” of the “non-concept” according to the dominant ideology), it is self-evidently accepted by the authors of the flyer that “critique” amounts to such deconstruction and that this critique is a sufficient end-in-itself that need not be interrogated for its presuppositions and consequences. It is because they dogmatically assume that the epistemological deconstruction of identity marks the limit of critique that the authors of the conference flyer feel free to bypass concepts altogether and represent their position graphically ("≠"). In short, we are here marking this "≠" graphic as the practical “moment of pleasure” of the conference announcement text that occupies the space of their “lack” of theoretical engagement with other (critique-al) knowledges and attests to their allegiance to the reigning ideology. "≠" means “is not equal to”; the beginning and end of deconstruction as critique. On encountering this "≠" potential conference attendees are reassured that the conference will be a space in which concepts are not taken seriously (i.e. literally in contestation with and in a position of antagonism to other concepts) but figurally and thus allowed to “play”. “Antagonistic? Parasitic? Mutually supportive?" are possible signifieds the GGMS thinks to be relevant and valid at this time so as to appreciate the plenitude of "≠" (inequality). This series of free-floating signifieds implies that the list of possible significants is endless and thus “exceeds” theoretical reduction, a move which not only points to the positive value the GGMS assigns to philosophical eclecticism as a counter to the determination of the concept through class struggle at the level of theory, but marks the liberal pluralism that is to rule the conference. Such a “playful” ("pluralist") space is premised on the suppression of critique-al contestation. Such a playful space makes it impossible to show how "≠" naturalizes inequality by making the political economy of inequality into a graphic self-evidency. Bourgeois ideology is constructed of such local self-evidencies that disguise class. "≠" is like when Judge Bork and his Republican friends say “equality of outcomes” is “impossible” or when Chantal Mouffe calls socialism “the dangerous dream” of “substantial homogeneity” founded on the impossibility of “perfect consensus, of a harmonious collective will” ("Radical Democracy or Liberal Democracy?" Radical Democracy; Identity, Citizenship, and the State. Ed. David Trent. New York and London: Routledge, 1996: 20). “Inequality of outcomes," in other words, is the common sense of late capitalism. “Inequality of outcomes” ("≠") is common-sense because it merely (re)describes in figurative language the actual equal opportunity to sell one's private labor power to the highest bidder under the general conditions of existing social inequality where the means to consume labor is privately owned and, like all individual rights, already secured by law. “Inequality of outcomes” is the socially necessary form of equality under capitalist relations of production. The program of “radical democrats” like Laclau and Mouffe, as well as Judge Bork, is in fact to “extend” (Mouffe 20) such equal “rights” while leaving the dominant political economy untouched and uninterrogated. “Radical democracy” does the work of the ruling class because it makes “equal rights” a panacea for economic exploitation and thus legitimates the existing class structure.
What are the politics of holding a conference whose “theme”, to use the words of the conference announcement, is “between capitalism and democracy," under the banner of Marxism in today's “death to communism” climate promoted under the dominance of postmodern intelligibilities? To read the conference flyer symptomatically the reactionary tendency becomes clear, it asks “What is the relationship between these two terms?" For revolutionary Marxism “between” capitalism and democracy is, of course, revolution, which would be the attainment of collective ownership and control over the means of production by the international working class led by its vanguard party. It is only through social revolution that the global majority (the proletariat) will be enabled to finally realize their democratic freedoms — political and economic self-determination. This worker's democracy would be, at the same time, a dictatorship against the bourgeoisie and its allies, a reversal in fact of the present dictatorship of the bourgeoisie against the workers and their allies, but, of course, in the process of withering away with the spread of revolution on an international scale. Marxism makes it absolutely clear — everywhere, all the time — that there can be no “democracy” so long as classes exist; i.e., no “democracy” as such as the conference flier implies. Democracy is always a means to an end dictated by historic class interests and never an end in itself. To imply that it is possible to theoretically abstract “democracy” as a “term” (another kind of floating signifier like "≠") from the totality of present social relations in order to consider “alternative” possibilities (in the way that the conference flyer does), is a thin alibi to renounce taking an active and interventionary role in present social contestations. Even postmodern intelligibilities already problematize this kind of “neutral” and “contemplative” cognitive formalism from a political position (in which “politics” signals embeddedness in the signifying chain and the absolute lack of transcendence). Capitalism and democracy, in short, are not abstract “terms” that are opposable to an atheoretical practice transpiring “elsewhere” or in “the future," but are themselves already concrete (i.e. theoretical) practices. It is the historical series of these practices that one must first grasp in their social materiality (the labor relations) as a precondition for changing the world. It is because the conference announcement does not situate itself in relation to the latest knowledges, while it presupposes their self-evidency and blurs them with liberal humanist categories in an eclectic way that suggests their possible peaceful co-existence, that we say it plots a reactionary tendency.
Furthermore, what's “between” “terms” (what we are calling practices) like “capitalism” and “democracy” is not reducible to a “theme” that is innocently being proposed to be “investigated” or “surveyed”, but is a part of a more encompassing social practice that either goes-along-to-get-along with the existing or is in irreconcilable opposition to it. In the case of the GGMS conference, which reduces the historical praxis of Marxism in relation to capitalism and democracy to a “theme” of cognitive contemplation (haven't they heard that the philosophers have already interpreted the world?), what is given a space is what is already given a space everywhere else: the dominant ideology that says opposition to the existing “might” take the form of a post-marxist “radical democracy” of the type found in Ellen Meiksins Wood's Democracy Against Capitalism (1995). We contest this abdication to the dominant which implies that “radical democracy” has anything oppositional about it. It is in fact “radical democracy” itself which is the dominant ideology of late capitalism because it reproduces and maintains the common sense self-evidencies of bourgeois rule under the guise of the “new”. The “new"-est version of the “new” radical democracy is of course Wood's Democracy Against Capitalism which disguises itself as a Marxist critique of post-marxism while practically ending up in exactly the same place. The rise of Wood to the status of a “folk hero” of the left these days is itself highly symptomatic of the complicity of the left (especially its so-called “radical” wing that in its literature critiques more obviously reactionary moves such as neo/post Marxism) with cybercapitalism. Wood's recent appointment to the board of editors of the left reformist Monthly Review (whose current editors Sweezy and Magdoff have done so much to “revise” Marxist political economy and thus prepare the road for the post-al orthodoxy of “market socialism") has been celebrated in left circles (both on the Internet and other places) as a moment of triumph of the radical Marxism. The only way to “read” this jubilation is to understand it as a death-wish of the left: what Sweezy and Magdoff's revisionary economics has done to Marxist political economy, Wood's revisionary analytics (her destruction, for example, of “base and superstructure") is doing to Marxist epistemology. How she — a bourgeois radical democrat who is continuing the conservative humanism of E.P. Thompson — becomes the “hero” of the “radical” left in the U.S. above all shows the theoretical backwardness of the U.S. left.
"Democracy against capitalism” is an old story of the left. What seems to give it a “new” found social relevance is the return to it on the part of the academic left after the historical “detour” through, and subsequent bankruptcy of, poststructuralist intelligibilities. The academic left is now in high-gear attempting to reconcile the theoretical presuppositions of “ludic” theory (premised on the “play"-full-ness of the signifier) with the existing extra-discursive objects of the activist left (the “body," “pleasure," “community," "identity," etc.) in the attempt to reform capitalism through “the extension of the democratic ideals of liberty and equality to more and more areas of social life” (Mouffe 20). They have united, therefore, against the revolutionary opposition which maintains theory as a guide for social transformation (Marxism-Leninism). For the reformists, theory as praxis is the problem because it establishes a relation of priority between the extra-discursive and the discursive wherein the former is explained as causing and thus determining the latter. The reformists all say that by maintaining a scientific relation between the subject and the world Marxism reproduces the violence of capitalism. Whether they come to this conclusion through the old New Left critique of “theory” as bureaucratic “instrumental reason” that “alienates” the humanist subject of the traditional romantic left, or through the postmodern critique of theory as a “totalitarian” erasure of “difference”, doesn't finally make much difference. Marx called the idea that his “method of determining the value of labour-power, a method prescribed by the very nature of the case, is brutal” “an extraordinarily cheap kind of sentimentality” (Capital 277). Without revolutionary theory (Marxism) all that's left for oppositional practice is “volunteer-ism”; the ideology of business-as-usual.
Behind the self-consciousness of the reformists — who are all (always) very decided in that they don't want theory-as-critique-al praxis — lies, of course, the problem of those who must manage the social contradictions of late capitalism in decline: how best to determine the limits of the working day in a manner least conducive to antagonizing the working class. The GGMS conference, albeit symptomatically, is "aware" of this historical problem but presents it as an epistemological one so as to “resolve” the pressure upon ideology through an eclectic pluralism. The conference, we are told, is to determine what is “between capitalism and democracy” by “how... each [is] related to that entity known as 'the Enlightenment'." By attempting to determine this relation — which for the reformists is basically the problem of the “rate” of exploitation: whether it should be increased absolutely through the de(con)struction of the social wage, for example, or relatively through incremental technological innovations and ad hoc legislation (etc.) — through reference to an “idea” the conference shows the dominant that they are “good” subjects because they can agree-to-disagree about the “heritage” of the Enlightenment (whether it should be “extended” [à la Habermas/Clinton) or “ended” [Lyotard/Gingrich] etc.). In maintaining the idealist tradition, the GGMS occults the determination of the conference by the political economy of capitalism in decline (which is nothing other than the decline in the rate of profit due to the inevitably increasing organic composition of capital that Marx explained scientifically). Finally, in a typical move, they opt to “resolve” the contradiction for themselves by (what else?), an appeal to a higher authority: they make Professor Wood a “keynote speaker."
The consistent attempts by the GGMS to suppress the ongoing and incessant critique-al oppositions generated by existing social arrangements — be it through such high-tech devices like computer graphics ("≠"); old-tech means that attempt to preserve the relevance of liberal humanist scholarly categories ("theme," “terms," etc.); or simply low-tech attacks on others like when one of their members physically assaulted us as he acted out his racist imaginary (saying “Get your ass out of UB... English courses. Give... us... room!") — manifests itself yet again in the way they have (pre)determined the conference “theme”. The “theme” of the “show” “between capitalism and democracy” is what it is because the “star” (what the flyer announcement calls a “keynote speaker") is the “author” of Democracy Against Capitalism and other “Great Books” (that they list). What is the ideological function of “keynote speaker"? Why “conference” now? Why should anybody be interested in going to a “conference” on “democracy and capitalism"? Although the GGMS do not even formulate such questions — such questions problematize the business-as-usual of the movers-and-shakers they imagine themselves to be as they “mingle” with the academic “celebs” — we do not have to depend on their own lack of theorization for an answer. We simply read back to them the literality of their own practices from which a “subject-of-conference” is implied. We have already seen him swelling with pride when he encountered the "≠" of the flyer announcement (as he is already familiar with aesthetic defamiliarization), but now we want to read him at the “conference” itself. “Conference” is a "scholarly” safe haven from contestation (where knowledges are abstracted from their cruel literality, the historicity of their presuppositions and consequences), in which he “feels” secure as a “participant” who has "questions”. At “conference” one cannot implicate practices in the reigning political economy by showing how their formal self-reflexivity contradicts their practical implication in maintaining exploitation. Such pressuring and pushing of contradictions to crisis, which is, at least initially, the purpose of an ideology critique, is seen as “crude”. It is already decided at “conference," in other words, that critique is to be an immanent affair (NO IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE). It is always already decided at conferences that if one critiques “conference” as a repressive bourgeois institution that segregates knowledge practices from the systematicity of dominant social arrangements one simply lacks self-reflexivity because... you are at conference! Just like when the GGMS member who assaulted us because we critique our courses first said, “If this course isn't good enough for you, then don't take it” and then said, “if the presence of such a course offends you so, get your ass out of UB!" (see, the Alternative Orange 5.1 [Fall/Winter 1995-96]:19). In the “conference” “about” “democracy” (and “capitalism") it is already decided that these are “terms” that above all are never (never!?) equal (just say, "≠"). At such “conferences” about “democracy” it is already decided that Red Critique is “undemocratic” because it does not privilege what individuals think or feel they are doing and bases its practices on the reliable knowledge of social totality instead. As we have written we are, by any standards of a bourgeois democracy “authoritarian” — we simply do not accept the masquerade of democracy which is put forth by the liberal state as “democratic”; we believe that radical equality is not the function of purely political practices... but entails struggles to completely restructure all the social... institutions of the liberal state and to abolish the regime of exploitation that undergirds them (Alternative Orange 5.1 [Fall/Winter 1995-96]: 9).
The Revolutionary Marxist Collective at the University of Buffalo (SUNY)
4/2/97