On the “Coming Out” Fluctuations of a Particularly Persistent Subject Position within the Context of a New (Contextual) Political Project

This response to the letter “Dear Majority of the A.O. Staff” (October 8, 1993) begins with an interpretation of the quotations above in order to explain the origins of the “Dear Majority” letter. Later on, I will attempt to explain how the social force represented in that letter comes into conflict (on the levels of politics, execution of a particular political project, and that of “fact”) with the “majority” of the Alternative Orange staff (and its chosen interests).

The key to understanding the origin of said letter is contained within the admission that the author “had grown quite accustomed to reading and thinking about [the terms “theorize,” “articulate,” and “oppositional knowledge”] in the silence of [his] room,” coupled with the fact that the author has indeed made a truly admirable attempt to supersede the restrictions of that room in order to be (once again) engaged through active political struggle. The author is not alone in this “coming out,” since a few other staff members have also escaped from the silence of a dark room upon coming to the realization that to be in the dark is to be complicitous with the system of social relations which currently entails severe exploitation and oppression for the vast majority of the population.

The next step is to see the “dark room” as a shell for a particular class position—for relatively privileged, middle- to upper-middle class caucasian students, it is the petit-bourgeoisie. During the moment of transition, when one becomes implicated in the workings of an oppositional group, one “feels” one’s class position as a tension resulting from being positioned between two global forces while as yet being “confused” about, not only one’s subject position, but the nature of the forces which define the terms of the (class) struggle. At that moment, the “lexicon” is no longer a free-floating mental force (with the exception, of course, of the lexicon commanded by the evil “majority”), but becomes a material force insofar as it requires “time” and “energy” to exist. However, the required inputs, to the hypothetical newcomer, are experienced as restrictions to the “freedom of speech” rather than the disciplinary requirements which were lacking all along.

Furthermore, the author of the “Dear Majority” letter reveals an “opinion” when it is imagined that the “majority” uses the term “theory” in a way which is diametrically opposed to its intended usage: the majority is as “bad” as the Ku Klux Klan or a religious institution, since we not only have adopted the formal tactics of those groups but we are either 100% deceitful or are unconsciously building—almost exclusively through the use of theory—the roots of a totalitarian, repressive, and undemocratic society, a conclusion which is as tried and true for the petty-bourgeois moralist as the class position that supports such a conclusion. In order to formally resolve this complex mess of contradictory concepts, the moralist finds recourse to “the norms obligatory upon all” (Trotsky) since it is precisely these norms which evade both of the so-called “extremes.” With such norms intact, the concept of the “newcomer” elucidated in the “Dear Majority” letter logically follows as an ahistorical subject who has acquired familiarity with a “lexicon” but who has not developed, beyond such commonplace theories as “we cannot escape contradiction as long as we are existing in capitalism,” a workable theory of their own subject position.

The reference to: “studies I have conducted of meetings of the Ku Klux Klan… as a covert investigator” has a significance unto itself, but first I would like to amend “the record” based upon personal interactions with the author. After the author first attended a staff meeting, I inquired into his interests in the publication. He seemed somewhat focused upon the question of the Marxist Collective at Syracuse University, and whether it was a “closed” or an “open” group. Showing above average interest in the Collective, I provided a copy of an article authored by the Collective called “Leninism Lives!”, which had been printed in student-funded Manas in its Spring 1992 issue, in order to provide part of a history of the public positioning of the group. Later, after indicating that he had read nothing by Lenin, I indicated that a reading of the Selected Works, as opposed to the Collected Works, of Lenin would probably suffice. This recounting is useful in clarifying the obtuse reference to “I have been on the receiving end of [indoctrination]” in the “Dear Majority” letter.

What, then, is an appropriate resolution to being cuffed from the left and the right, receiving bumps on both halves of one’s skull? Clearly, the first step is to choose sides, and I have intentionally chosen to face the “risks” that accrue to prefacing a text with two quotes from a work by Trotsky, written about two years prior to his assassination by an agent of Stalin. This move, of being able to identify oneself with a global political current—communism being one such current—is where quite a few people will begin. If the author of the “Dear Majority” letter is to be “concerned for the future of Marxism on this campus,” he should take seriously—and rigorously—the centrality of class struggle, an in particular its implications for his own position, today.

Without that beginning, in other words, without theorizing, independently from or in spite of one’s own class position, the motion of social relations on a global scale as the accumulation of “conflict resolutions” between various classes, nearly all accurate theorizations which do not halt at the level of appearance become impossible, and theorizations which coincide with one’s claims about what one supports are also nearly non-existent. In this way, the “Dear Majority” subject position comes into conflict with the “majority’s” rigorous pursuit—pursuit of what it agrees is simultaneously a politically necessary intervention and the production of oppositional knowledges—as a matter of course, as a necessary part of the Alternative Orange’s political project as long as there is a set of subject positions defined by a dynamic of “crisis” confronted with discipline: but this discipline is required to overcome crisis.

The “amoralism” of Lenin, that is, his rejection of supraclass morals, did not hinder him from remaining faithful to one and the same ideal throughout his whole life; from devoting his whole being to the cause of the oppressed; from displaying the highest conscientiousness in the sphere of ideas and the highest fearlessness in the sphere of action; from maintaining an attitude untainted by the least superiority to an “ordinary” worker, to a defenseless woman, to a child. Does it not seem that “amoralism” in the given case is only a pseudonym for higher human morality? (Trotsky, 45; emphasis added)

Robert Cymbala

October 14, 1993

[Proposals appended to text:]

A proposal to staff meeting of October 14th: the Alternative Orange should postpone all teach- ins in order to carry through with the publishing and dissemination of the texts by Zavarzadeh, Cotter, and A.O. Staff, and, in addition, an announcement for a new “auto-critique” section, as proposed elsewhere, to be inaugurated in the third issue, to be exclusively combined into the second issue of Volume III. Any other course of action which seeks to spontaneously include the flood of critiques and counter-critiques which have been produced just recently with the four texts mentioned above is an ill-fated attempt to combine into one issue what must be drawn-out and institutionalized over the course of several months. Furthermore, the four main texts will—if published “separately”—raise the political effectivity of the Alternative Orange to its next highest level. Lastly, to reprint “as is” one, convoluted mass of texts, some of which were written less than 24 hours before the October 14th meeting, which represents the entire development of a period of staff politics, is a faulty strategy.