From bmganter@acsu.buffalo.edu  Wed Apr  9 01:58:57 1997
From: bmganter@acsu.buffalo.edu (Brian M Ganter)
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 20:58:57 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: M-TH: Red Critique (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970408205742.12361C-100000@autarch.acsu.buffalo.edu>




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Below we are forwarding a response to our initial post ("Performative
Left: A Red Critique of the Theatre called 'Between Capitalism and
Democracy'") on marxism thaxis-and marxism-international.  This letter of
response is from James Holstun, a professor of English at State
University of New York/Buffalo that works closely with the GGMS (Graduate
Group in Marxist Studies), organizers of the upcoming 'Between Capitalism
and Democracy' conference.  The net-left (the Proyect, Henwood, Dumain,
Cox ... axis)  and the academy left (the Holstun /GGMS gang) will see from
this post and our short critique that follows--PANIC HOLSTUN: FIFTEEN WAYS
OF LOOKING AT A CENTRIST COMPRADOR--their own ideological complicity with
one another.   They will see, in other words, how very un-different they
have become (despite their own claims) as well as their common alliance
and shared strategies, arguments and word-for-word alibis for 
marginalizing Marxist theory and critique today, both "inside" AND
"outside" the academy.
 

-Revolutionary Marxist Collective SUNY/Buffalo
     
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Dear Revolutionary Marxist Collective at the University of Buffalo (SUNY):
        Hi Brian!  Hi Steve!  I read with great interest your "Performative
Left:  A Red Critique of the Theatre called 'Between Capitalism and
Democracy,'" posted on the Marxism International List Serve
(marxism-international@jefferson.village, Virginia.EDU).  I laughed and
laughed--it was without a doubt the funniest thing I've read since Homi
Bhabha's "DissemiNation," which it resembles not a little.  The same
thoroughly post-al belief that a proper discursive ATTITUDE will change the
world.  The same circumscribed audience (postcolonialist fools for him;
small sectors of the English Departments at SUNYAB, SUNYAA, and Syracuse
University for you).  The same hermetic and alienating prose, which strikes
me as unlikely to win over many Erie County proletarians, or to convince
them to follow you as their party vanguard (Marx was  among many other
things, a brilliant writer--not a stylistic apparatchik).  The same slightly
nervous stridency, which shouts out things like "E. P. Thompson was a
conservative humanist" in order to drown out a creeping awareness of the
vast trainwreck of theoretical antihumanism, from Derrida, Foucault, and
Lyotard, to your boy Althusser.  The same "cultural studies" technique of
analyzing a few found objects that waft by rather than reading and thinking
and engaging in serious scholarly work--I can just hear you shouting in
Marx's ear, "Hey, Karl--stop reading those damned blue books and join us in
some world-transforming theoretical praxis--we're going to analyze the
posters advertising the Crystal Palace!"
        Specifically, you have created an entire critique of a conference
that has not yet happend on the basis of a one-page flier announcing it.
Like the most ennervated poststructuralist idealist from Paris, or New
Haven, or Buffalo, you compensate for the thinness of your text by
descending to the level of an unflinching ideological analysis of hyphens
("Can VIRGULES be far behind?--does nothing scare these men?")  Similarly,
you have conducted an entire, scathing critique of Ellen Meiksins Wood's
writing on the basis of what seems to be no more than a quick scan of the
title page of DEMOCRACY AGAINST CAPITALISM.
        The result is passionate, I grant you, but deeply stoop-id (yes,
that's "super-ego"s brother and critique-al's cousin).  How could anyone
collapse Wood and Chantal Mouffe--have you ever read Wood's devastating
critique of Laclau and Mouffe in THE RETREAT FROM CLASS?  How could anyone
pronounce Wood a partisan of "radical democracy" or "market socialism" or a
"bourgeois radical democrat"?  How could anyone fail to take away from
DEMOCRACY AGAINST CAPITALISM the thesis that the very center of capitalism
is not identity politics or discursive play or the slippage of the
signifier, but exploitation:  the automatic, systemic extraction of surplus
value at the point of production itself?  Come on now, guys, if you have the
guts to write back at all, tell me the truth:  have you read the book?  HAVE
YOU READ THE BOOK?  Even if the rest of your response is the usual
hyper-diacritical mendacious claptrap, please answer this question directly.
        And where did you get the idea that MONTHLY REVIEW is a flak for
market socialism, when it consistently subjects market socialism and other
bourgeois cons to a search historical materialist critique--a critique you
might well imitate and learn from if you had the patience actually to sit
down and read an essay carefully.  Pray tell, who told you this about
MONTHLY REVIEW--Professor Zavarzadeh?  Professor Morton?  Oh, incidentally,
given the somewhat--shall we say--FAMILIAR quality of your polemics, your
terms of art, even your punctuation, your thoroughgoing critique of an
insidious personality cult implicit in the act of inviting someone to be a
keynote speaker at a conference becomes absolutely exquisite.
        Truly, this "intervention" caps off your theoretical/practical coups
of the last year with a bang.  I remember with great fondness your radical
memoing, your unflinching critique of actually-existing course descriptions,
and your world-historical encounter with Dan Moos on "24 Novembert 1995," as
you elegiacally recall it--a day that will live in infamy!  (are the "24
Novembrist" cadres in training?).  If Mao had his Long March, you had your
tiff at the photocopy machine:  adversity breeds radical WILL.  When
Victorial Tillotson invited you to join in the collective intellectual life
of the GGMS, I applauded as you denounced her cunning ploy for what it
was--a sneaky liberal attempt to contain your oppositional voice and blunt
your revolutionary zeal.  How wise you were to avoid engaging in a comradely
way with other rational human beings--of course, proper dialectical
materialism positively FORBIDS such anthropological humanist delusions as
DIALOGUE.
        I was most impressed, however, by what you did to the feminist
materialist reading group organized by Myungho Lee and others.  What an
astute act of critique-al praxis it was for you to bully and alienate a
roomful of sisters by monopolizing discussion with diatribes, by denouncing
your fellow students as bourgeois idealists ignorant of Marx, to the point
that one of them, at least, became physically sick.  Now THAT'S feminism!
This was an effort which ranks just (but only JUST) beneath the Battle of
Stalingrad in the annals of anti-fascist struggle.  This was a particularly
impressive display, considering that several women in that reading group had
risked their lives in the Korean students movement.  Truly, anyone who has
merely survived the batons and guns of the ROK National Guard needs to do
some time in the Syracuse University English Department to see what REAL
oppression and REAL struggle are all about.
        Way to go, guys--keep up the good work!  Given that The
Revolutionary Marxist Collective at UB has now pared itself down from last
year's cumbersome and hard-to-mobilize mass of three to a hardened
revolutionary vanguard of two--a lean-and-mean, communist
fighting-machine--I'm sure that some truly dramatic interventions are on the
way.  I can't wait!

        One last word.  Let me quote a few favorite phrases from your
anti-GGMS manifesto:

1."For revolutionary Marxism, 'between' capitalism and democracy is, of
course, revolution. . . ."

2."Marxism makes it absolutely clear--everwhere all the time--that there can
be no 'democracy' so long as classes exist."

3."We contest this abdication to the dominant that would imply that 'radical
democracy' had 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 commonsense self-evidencies of bourgeois
rule under the guise of the 'new.'"

Have you braced yourself for some dumb-assed "ludic" or "post-al" whimsy in
response?  Do you think I've quoted those sentences as examples of outmoded,
old-timey paleo-marxism?  Then more fool you:  I believe in all three of
them in my heart of hearts.  So does Ellen Meiksins Wood.  So, I think, do
many members of the Graduate Group in Marxist Studies.  The sad thing is
that, at a time when marxists are as embattled as we are today, otherwise
intelligent people like yourselves recode points of shared belief as points
of DIVISION, turning potential comrades into personal enemies.  Though it's
always possible to gain a sense of spurious power by alienating your natural
allies, there's nothing clever about doing so:  you thus gain only the
ascetic purity of the impotent solipsist.
        You had a chance to do some righteous good here at UB--by learning,
teaching, and helping to slay the beast, who is all around us, devouring us
every day.  You blew it, big time.  Think it over and try something different.

Love people, hate capital,

Jim Holstun
Jim Holstun






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