From owner-marxism-international  Thu Apr 17 17:34:24 1997
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 17:33:48 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Amrohini J. Sahay" <ajsahay@mailbox.syr.edu>
Subject: M-I: PANIC LEFTIST: FRAME ELEVEN
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.95.970417172621.12616A-100000@forbin.syr.edu>



Revolutionary Marxist Collective (Buffalo/Syracuse) 
**************************************************



PANIC LEFTIST: FRAME ELEVEN



John Barkley Rosser Jr.... declares  ("buffalo cult") that we are indeed
quite ridiculous and thus deserve to be, well, ridiculed.  The reason?  We
have no "individuality".  He, however, is endowed with unique
individuality and is an independent thinker.  Signs of his "independent"
thinking? He calls us "cult" and repeats, lexia by lexia (B I G words
coming!) all the cliches that have been recycled over and over again
against us...


--What an innovation!

--What a uniqueness of expression and thought!



What "difference"? Your names are different so you are different?




	He mystifies the fact that difference is an effect of power even
as he performs this: Proof ? He tells us that the difference between his
"buffalo cult" on M-I and M-TH is because "Jon B.M. is on his high horse
about 'cross-posting'." Malecki,... word-for-word... also locates power as
an effect of individual agency (in response to Nowlan he says we all are
on an "ego tripping high horse" and expects that such descriptions of our
practices represent "critique" of our extended theorizations of the
contemporary left). Critique, however, is interrogation of the material
conditions of possibility of social practices NOT denunciation on basis of
a moral/rational/libidinal/formal... apriori. Such performances that
equate critique with spectacular voluntarist denunciations serve to
familiarize power... they "cultify" power making it seem like an
on-again-off-again prerogative that everyone equally possesses (Austin's
"pluralism") and may potentially realize but.. and this is what makes
Malecki et. al. so angry with us... that an "intolerant" (i.e., not
LIBERAL) few have "monopolized". Such a conception of free-floating power
(Laclau/Mouffe's "hegemony") is in fact a product of the dominant ideology
which occults the connection between moral/cultural "values" ("tolerance",
"pluralism" etc.) and the actual relations of the class struggle. This
occulting of class is the ideology behind charges of "cultism" that
constitutes the net-left's "problem" with our communist collectivism and
gives it the semblance of coherence. Both John Barkley Rosser Jr. and
Robert Malecki really know -- they see the threats -- that the only ones
who are to pay for recent boundary crossings are the critique-al...
revolutionaries in deed: not themselves.  


  Jon Beasley-Murray asks why is it that "epistemological break" is
"bourgeois" and the Marxist notion of "continuity" is not: "This notion of
historical continuity... equally a very bourgeois one, no?  Isn't marxism
about liberation?  Is liberation not a break, a rupture of some kind?" he
writes ("M-TH: More Althusser"). The Marxist notion of "continuity: is not
the "monumental" historian's or the pragmatic epistemologist's. Marxist
notion of "continuity" is a dialectical one: it is the effect of
dialectical supersession: it "preserves" and at the same time "transforms"
("breaks" to use your word...). Liberation is not the same as
"emancipation": one is an individualistic project while the other a
"collective" one.




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