°neither/nor
Simmering arguments in the comments of various blogs come to have their direct posts. On second thoughts, simmering might be the understatement of the year. K-Punk has had enough of Le Colonel, who swipes back.
I’m still having some difficulty getting my head around the vision of Le Colonel as currency trader who persistently berates others on their insufficient adherence to socialism and the class struggle - the ex-advertiser who insists that not watching television (but effusing about opera) is the critical anti-capitalist strategy, and the endless stream of posts whose purpose is to declare (because the rest of us are lacking such knowledge, apparently) that capitalism is awful and that the class struggle exists - without laughing. Out loud. It’s difficult to take seriously, really, particularly since Le Colonel surely doesn’t - no matter, or maybe because, of how much she enjoys it as self-righteous performance. It sure takes a lot of work, though, to sustain the credibililty.
Curious as all that is, it’s worth pointing out that the currency markets are, despite the inclination to think finance capital as global - to take the monetary abstraction at face value, as it were - nationalism mediated by money. There would be no such thing as currency differentials, no profit on investment in currency markets, without nation-states. Inter-national, then, but hardly global. Hardly without any interest - and I do mean interest as money accrued - in the rates of exploitation each nation-state (each enclosure) is able to muster and command as it becomes indexed by national productivity measures, balances of trade, credit ratings and relative foreign exchange holdings.
Nationalism as abstraction. Abstraction (money) moving around and though the world as nationalism. And it’s this that perhaps explains the confluence between nationalism, populism and a geopolitical perspective in which all salient agents - in what is only nominally and for rhetoricity’s sake presented by Chabert as ‘the class struggle’ - are nation-states or ethnicised categories of identity. Which is as racialised a view of the world as one might come across.
In any case, K-Punk’s proferring of a choice between a capitalism which destroys all ‘homes’ and that which is rooted in ethnicity is really only a somewhat partial reading of Marx. To be sure, Marx does celebrate the ostensibly progressive capacities of capitalist destruction at times, but just as similarly deplores this ‘progress’ as a misfortune and a catastrophe.
So, while one could bemoan the absence (though I would say, the inversion) of Marxism among, say, the SWP, the argument here really shouldn’t be, can’t be, over who has more fidelity to Marxism. This too, is a rhetorics. At worst, it elevates an individual and (their often contradictory texts) into a cultish figure. At best, it’s can only incite an interminable exercise in marxological nit-picking.
More seriously, the choice between capitalist progressivism (K-Punk) and reactioanary nostalgia (Le Colonel) is a false one. Does it really need to be pointed out, again, that capitalism cannot do without nationalisms? That it, at the same time, induces an abstraction and equalisation that cannot, ever, be universalised, but only rationed, and whose distribution is often rationalised and naturalised according to a racial and gendered logic?
These aren’t separate processes, which one might choose, as if by the force of some idealistic will, to decide that the trajectory of capitalism tends toward degeneracy or progress. The ‘world market’ is a differential and segmented market, cut across by the enclosures without which capitalism cannot be stabilised. What the social democrats describe and deride as ‘corporate globalisation’ and the rise and fortification of nationalism go hand in hand. How difficult is this to see?
Neither nationalism nor inter-nationalism. Nor socialism - since the proposition of such has always been marked by a notion of ’stages’ and infinite deferral, as well as the calculation of modes of address to, and persuasion of, some fictitious ‘masses’, usually delineated along populist, nationalist lines. Not Washington, nor Moscow, nor Tehran, nor Europe, nor any other mode of politics reduced to geopolitics and an ambassadorial register. But communism.
Hi Angela,
Well put. I’m tempted, in the spirit Chris Wright, to accuse you of being a sober dialectician, having rendered all players aufgehoben (triple word score, comrade!).
I’m curious if you have anything to say to the conversations (both explicit and implicit) about public intellectuals that cross-cut some of these arguments, and the relation of that figure to visions of communism. In one sense, Tronti’s Leninist figure of the intellectual - at least implied, I can’t remember if it’s explicit - is a radicalized version of this, for good in that it’s the only kind I can stomach but for bad in that it paves the way for future invocations and occupations of the position of public intellectual, remember all the old Leninists queing up to tell folk in France to vote yes - Zizek, Negri, (and that’s not to mention those one just spits on rather than bothers to name) interestingly enough not Badiou: http://www.lacan.com/badeu.htm.
The socialist public intellectual would, of course, accuse you of not understanding what it takes to get to communism, while I at least, and I think you, would riposte that they are more likely the old wine in a new bottle such that their proposals only continue the deferral of communism. Another way to put it is like this: can the public intellectual ever be communist, or only social-democratic? The answer is clear in my mind, but for me it’s much for bile than argument tipping the scales.
fondly,
Nate
Nate [March 20, 2006 @ 3:44 pm]
The public intellectual must be shot.
TCO [March 20, 2006 @ 7:52 pm]
Nate,
I’ve posted a some thing.
Take care,
Matt
Matt [March 20, 2006 @ 7:53 pm]
Telecommunism
Really excellent post by Angela Mitropoulos at s0metim3s, which allows me to make some clarifications. (I can only imagine that the Hectoring Heiress has straw-manned me, that’s one of her standard techniques - but as I say I’ll be…
k-punk [March 21, 2006 @ 8:20 pm]
Five Provisional Theses on the Politics of Communism
Two excellent posts from Angela and then k-punk. Common to both, a shared desire - namely, for a politics of communism proper. This desire can be summarized in the form of the following theses…
josef k. [March 22, 2006 @ 10:07 am]
Dialectics and sobriety be damned, Nate. :)
K-Punk, et al, I have some things to attend to today, but will come back to all of this.
In the meantime, there are some really lovely posts coming through on Tronti’s “The Strategy of the Refusal” over at the LongSunday symposium, which are both relevant and more attentive to some of the questions raised here than I’m able to be today.
s0metim3s [March 22, 2006 @ 12:04 pm]
I elaborated some in this more recent post. Or, perhaps it’s just adding another layer to the discussion, but one that can’t be evaded I think.
Nate, on intellectual practice, I think there are important permutations that this has undergone, without necessarily altering some of the problems you note. More here, which I know you’ve seen, but anyway.
s0metim3s [March 25, 2006 @ 12:19 pm]