Is the funeral for the wrong corpse?

Bret Schneider and Omair Hussain

Hal Foster is a prominent critic and art historian who contributes regularly to Artforum, New Left Review, and The Nation. He is also an editor of October. In the fall of 2009, he sent out a questionnaire to 70 critics and curators, asking them what “contemporary” means today. Foster notes that the term “contemporary” is not new, but that “What is new is the sense that, in its very heterogeneity, much present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment.”[1] 35 critics and historians attempted to answer to the problems implied in this observation.

Bret Schneider: About the What Is Contemporary? survey that appeared in the journal October this past fall—I am interested to learn your motives in surveying critics and curators in this way, i.e. by questionaire. It seems to imply some bewilderment, or maybe even discontent with the recent heterogeneity of contemporary art. What was at stake for you in this questionnaire?

Hal Foster: Perhaps it was fueled by discontent, but bewilderment also played a part. For my generation contemporary art seemed to have a special purchase on the present; the sense that art is an index of the moment appears lost in today’s profusion of practices. That is a source of discontent for me. As for bewilderment, well, that could just be another name for ignorance.

Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, a major work of the Russian avant-garde, at the “Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10” in Petrograd in 1915.

Of course, any present is made up of many presents. One of the definitions of contemporary is not that we are all in the same time, but that many times coexist at once. We live in a plurality of moments, and I am ill at ease with the relativism that such a temporality implies. There used to be a way in which contemporary art was still connected to prior art as well as to its own moment. That, too, does not seem to be powerfully the case anymore. This is why I framed the questions in the survey around two models that appear dysfunctional now: modernism/postmodernism and avant-garde/ neo-avant-garde. This framing was also an avowal of my relative distance from contemporary art, which is odd for a person who, for a long time, was active as a critic.

Omair Hussain: I am interested in the discussion of times when contemporary art was seemingly a more acute expression of its contemporary moment, but also understood itself as expressing and reflecting upon an entire history of art making. If, by contrast, contemporary art today can be characterized as both pluralistic and lacking in historical awareness, how do you perceive the relationship between these two attributes? Is contemporary plurality antithetical to historical consciousness?

HF: One excellent response to the survey speaks to this question. Kelly Baum, a young curator at Princeton, argues that the heterogeneity of art today actually performs the greater heterogeneity found in the social field at large. Rather than chaotic, then, it represents the dispersal that characterizes societal relations today. In this view plurality does not invalidate contemporary art as an index of the present but guarantees it. This take is interesting, but it is also a little sophistical—and it gives art too much of a pass.

What drew me to contemporary art originally was the way it seemed both to engage the historical field and to access the contemporary moment. Art history suggested that if you could follow a line, say, from the 19^th century to the present, you might grasp the very trajectory of history. That was an illusion, of course, but a powerful one; it was an ego trip, too, to imagine you could surf the dialectic in this manner. Yet it made for a historical consciousness on the part of particular artists and critics that is not so evident today. The terms have changed, and the October questionnaire was a way to get at how the old terms no longer function, and to see what new terms might be taken up in their place.

BS: Why did you not ask any artists to participate in the “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’”? What was the significance of asking only critics and curators? Do you think that this domain is where the problems of contemporary art are best addressed, and if so, why, considering the current interest in decentralizing art discourse? What does the lack of response from curators express?

HF: I did not ask artists because I felt it was not their problem really—that it bore more heavily on critics, historians, and curators. At first I was puzzled as to why more curators did not respond. It is likely this silence speaks to an anxiety in institutions dedicated to contemporary art, but I can only guess. Certainly in the discipline of art history the contemporary is putting great pressure not just on the modern field but also on other fields. If you are trained in traditional Chinese or Indian art history, say, you might think that contemporary art, with the great pull of the market, has distorted your field.

BS: Could you clarify the ways in which art of the past had a purchase on its own historical moment? This implies that there was some sort of cohesive promise or at least some guiding principles. If there was once a promise of contemporary art, what was it?

HF: By the late 1930s, with Stalinism in particular, there was the sense that radical innovation in society was thwarted, but that it might be continued elsewhere, in the realm of culture—“to keep culture moving” is how Clement Greenberg put it in 1939. It’s an idea that comes out of the disappointments of 1917, out of a long history of the failure of radical politics in the 20^th century. In this way the Trotskyist notion of “permanent revolution” was displaced onto advanced art, and in large part it kept the idea of the avant-garde alive in the postwar period (Michael Fried argued this point in 1965). If the political seemed to be thwarted somehow, maybe the idea could be preserved within the sphere of the artistic. Yet even in that formulation there was already a reactive, or at least a conservative, displacement from politics to art.

Robert Smithson’s monumental earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970) is located on the Great Salt Lake, Utah. Built of black basalt rocks and earth from the site, the artist created a coil 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide that stretches out counter-clockwise into the water.

BS: There has been a lot of theorization about the avant-garde being a project committed to breaking down the barriers between art and life. Do you see this characterization as valid, and if so, what have been effects of that project?

HF: That idea that the avant-garde aimed to break down the division between art and life was never my understanding, at least as far as most movements were concerned. That is an idea that critics like Peter Bürger supported, but it is just not specific enough.

BS: You called it a “romanticized” view somewhere.

HF: Yes. Nevertheless, it is not untrue for some avant-gardes. Certainly there was a desublimation of art in Dada, but its effects were very ambiguous. Did it produce a politicization of art or an aestheticization of much else? That is the old question, and I cannot answer definitively. Later, if a breakdown of the division between art and life did occur, it occurred in the interests of the culture industry, not of anything else. That recuperation, too, is an old story now, and for a long time artists have developed other projects in its wake.

OH: Yet I think the problem is raised anew by new social art practices and relational aesthetics, art practices that are still very much concerned with the breakdown of boundaries between art and the everyday. How do you understand the curious persistence of that mission within contemporary art today? If that project is continued, what do you foresee as the repercussions for art as a specific genre of production?

HF: My sense is that one cannot decide once and for all between artistic autonomy and social embeddedness. It is a tension that should persist. Sometimes I am on the side of Adorno, and sometimes I am opposed. It depends on the situation. To me that is not opportunistic, it is simply being responsive. Even if the autonomy of art is always only semi-autonomy, it is important to insist on. Otherwise art becomes instrumental, which is problematic even if that means it is an instrument in the hands of progressive artists.

One thing that strikes me about relational art is that it treats art spaces like a last refuge of the social—as if social interaction had become so difficult or so depleted elsewhere that it could only happen in the vacated spaces of art. It was such a sad take on the state of sociability at large. I also felt that, for all its worthy attempt to work against the spectacular basis of contemporary art, there was a way in which it posed participation as a spectacle of its own. I suppose I am more interested in practices that use art as a guise or ruse for other practices altogether, such as pedagogy, say, or politics.

BS: It seems like there has been a return to Adorno in your recent writing. For instance, in your essay “This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse,”[2] you begin with an Adorno quotation that posits the uncertainty of the existence of art, and continually recall Adorno throughout the essay, replacing “philosophy” with “art” when quoting his famous line from Negative Dialectics, “philosophy lives on because the moment of its realization has been missed.” Have you made a return to Adorno in your recent writing? If so, what pressures of the contemporary moment is that a reaction or response to?

HF: My first edited book was The Anti-Aesthetic (1983), which was explicitly anti-Adornian. As it was concerned to posit a “postmodernism of resistance,” it was mostly Gramscian in its view of cultural politics. That was right for its moment, but as the interdisciplinarity of postmodernism became routine, the attack on autonomy became counterproductive. Most of the relevant institutions, from the academy to the art museums, absorbed the blows and gave them back with redoubled force. At that point it was important to insist on disciplinary difference again. All these positions are time-sensitive and site-specific. Again, it is not opportunistic to move from position to position; it is often necessary—and sometimes dogmatic not to do so.

BS: To return to this non-art aspect of recent artist talks, and supplementary discourse—what you suggest in your book The Return of the Real, is this neo-avant-garde shift from addressing “intrinsic” concerns within art to confronting the “discursive” problems of art. In the absence of a cohesive avant-garde or neo-avant-garde, can this confrontation take place? If the neo-avant-garde has somehow “run into the ground” can there still be a persistence of this kind of shift from intrinsic concerns to discursive problems?

HF: I think there can be, but the connection to prior attempts to make these articulations has become attenuated, and that makes it all the more difficult. My concern here might be dismissed as merely territorial—that is, I care about these prior attempts because I am an art historian. It might have little or no bearing on contemporary practice; for the most part that is not how work is generated today. For a while in the 1990s and 2000s many artists returned to certain moments in the 1960s and the 1970s; there was an attempt to establish a further “neo” relation to that neo-avant-garde. But that seems faded now. Ultimately what concerns me is that if we do not have some terms in common for contemporary art, it is hard to determine what is at stake and of value in it. That is as directly as I can put the problem.

Thomas Hirschhorn’s Hotel Democarcy installed at “Art Unlimited” in Art Basel in 2003.

BS: If the contemporary moment is disconnected from the history of the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde, where do you locate the breaking point? Would you attribute it to the moment in the 1960s when Debord and the Situationists deliberately attempted to break with modernism?

HF: That was part of it. Obviously, Debord broke with the artistic side of the avant-garde project, but his moment could allow such a gesture. As the 1960s developed, there was an immense expansion in art, one that provoked Adorno’s worry about the end of art. Think of the heterogeneity of an artist like Robert Smithson alone: It is only articulate against the foil of a rigid idea of what counts as art. Smithson had such a foil. Do artists now? Perhaps it might not matter anymore if work has a historical connection. Maybe that is just no longer the point. But, if so, consider what is lost. Not so long ago art not only “made it new” but also made things count, or made the attempt to count. Art was conceived as an intervention, one that might revalue other interventions too. The goal was to be radical in terms of history as well. If that ambition has faded, that to me is a loss.

BS: What is your interest in Dada? On the one hand, you acknowledge that the contemporary moment is both largely disconnected and uninterested in the history of modern art. Yet, in your writing, you seek to return particular modernist moments, like Dada.

HF: Maybe this contradicts what I just said. There is a Dada spirit in some work today, if you think about artists like Thomas Hirschhorn and Isa Genzken. In part, they have led me to look back again at Dada. But I do not see their work as “neo-Dada.”

BS: Can this connection be characterized by recent styles of “the unmonumental” and is that problematic?

HF: Is it already a style? Too bad. Shows like “The Unmonumental” at the New Museum throw a lot of different work together. Some is indeed neo-Dada, but some is not. Again, some is Dadaist in spirit in this sense: it practices a mimesis, an exacerbation, of the awful conditions of capitalist society, as a form of critique. Historically, it has to do with Hugo Ball far more than Duchamp or Fluxus.

BS: I was curious about whether or not artists like Isa Genzken or Thomas Hirschhorn self-identify in this vein of “unmonumental” or neo-Dada. There is a general reception of this art today that frames the work as a polemic against the purported monumental qualities of modernism. This polemic seems to project sweeping and vague notions of a grand narrative onto modernism. But that projection seems to be in opposition to your view of modernism, a view that does not perceive modernism simply as a unified, cohesive movement.

HF: Yes. For me it is a mistake—an old postmodernist mistake—to monumentalize or to totalize modernism. And sometimes these artists do that. Genzken does it, for example, in her work on the Bauhaus. But as an artist she is not obliged to be historically precise. Hirschhorn, on the other hand, is clear about his commitments—not just his political commitments but also his artistic commitments.

BS: In “This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse,” you discuss Rosalind Krauss’s idea that postmodern art incorporated modernist art and “trumped” it at the same time. You go on to suggest that today postmodern art is being trumped in turn. In what ways is postmodern art being trumped? By what?

HF: This is what I had in mind when I said postmodernism has become routine. In the first moment, postmodernism’s attempt to reach out beyond given forms and disciplines was progressive in all kinds of ways, and in her essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” Krauss provided one map of these moves. (It was a particular map, a structuralist grid; it was unconcerned with historical process or social connection.) What happened is that over time those moves became routine. To move into the space of architecture, for example, became easy, almost automatic, even decorative. In short, the expanded field imploded, and artists had to reposition.

OH: I wonder if you perceive any relationship between a once-radical gesture become routine and the nature of the initial gesture itself. Was there something about the way in which these artists of the 1960s attempted to break with modernism that could be seen as consequential to the ineffectuality of postmodernism? Or does its failure lies outside of the control of artists?

HF: That is a good question and a difficult one. It is incumbent on artists to anticipate as much as possible how their work will be received and positioned. But, after a certain point, it is not in their control to do so. Could one have foreseen that interdisciplinarity would become routine? Maybe not. Did Daniel Buren have to become a decorator? No. And so on.

OH: Yet there seems to be a qualitatively different type of rupture in that moment than in previous modernist moments. With formal innovation serving as the primary project of the modernist avant-garde, the neo-avant-garde was often concerned with the institutions of art. Is there a relationship between the neo-avant-garde’s rejection of modernism’s formal concerns in favor of institutional concerns and the falling out of that project today? In retrospect, what have been the successes and failures of the neo-avant-garde project? When we look back on “Sculpture in The Expanded Field” from the culture industry which has absorbed and routinized it, did this ideology clarify previous “missed” moments like modernism, for example, or dismiss them ?

HF: My distinction between an avant-garde focus on conventions and a neo-avant-garde focus on institutions was too neat. Conventions both imply and require institutions, and if you change forms radically enough, as the Russians did a century ago, you also change institutions. Of course, the avant-garde moment was one of revolutionary change at large, in a way that, arguably, the neo-avant-garde moment was not.

Hugo Ball reciting sound poetry in cubist costume at Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich in 1917.

I still find helpful an old essay by the historian Perry Anderson that discusses the conditions of the historical avant-garde. First, there was a rigid academy to be resisted. Then there was a technological transformation to be addressed. Finally, there was a socialist revolution to be engaged. In his account—it is schematic—they drove the historical avant-garde, in its many varieties, in the moment of World War I. For the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s those conditions no longer obtained, but new ones provided an analogous context nonetheless. If there was not an art academy to resist, there was a mass-media culture to contest. If there was not a second industrial revolution to address, there was a post-industrial transformation to consider. And if there was not a socialist revolution to engage, there were struggles of other kinds to join somehow—postcolonial, racial, sexual. These forces persist, and the need to develop forms and institutions accordingly also persists. So, in principle, the avant-garde project should be alive and well. Why does it not seem so? Is it my myopia—or is it blocked by other forces? Probably both.

BS: You speak of a kind of historical trajectory, with the shift from the avant-garde to the neo-avant-garde marked by a shift in objects of reaction and resistance. How do you understand the contemporary moment in relationship to this trajectory? What are the “objects of resistance and reaction” for contemporary art? Are artists reacting to or cohesively resisting anything? Is an organized resistance or reaction still important for an art in the culture industry?

HF: In The Anti-Aesthetic I argued that there was a shift from the transgressive to a resistant model of the avant-garde. Maybe that language needs to be revised. For several years now there has been talk about the post-critical, but I do not buy it. The young artists and critics I know are very concerned with critical projects. They simply approach the critical in different ways.

On the one hand, it is a moment to insist again on the semi-autonomy of art as a basis of critique, and to find, in art making, models of subjectivity and sociality that are blotted out elsewhere in the culture. That seems crucial to me: There are sensuous and cognitive experiences that art still allows and that screen culture does not. On that score, then, art now and art forever. On the other hand, one might argue that all this does not matter anymore, that all that is left to art is to use art as a disguise or ruse with which to do other things—to be activists or educators or hackers or whatever. That argument makes sense to me too. And no doubt there are positions in-between. But unless young artists, critics, and curators develop the terms for these options, nothing much will be developed at either extreme or in the positions of mediation in-between.

OH: In reference to the two poles you have established— art as the sensual and cognitive, and art as disguise for activism and participation—does the latter endanger the former?

HF: Of course they challenge each other. That is part of the point! But they are the terms of a debate at least, if they could be made precise. It is not to decide one way or the other, it is to develop each position agonistically. That is a debate that is needed, it seems to me.

BS: What is suggested here is that maybe the current social climate is so changed that it cannot allow for the radical systemic rethinking for which avant-garde art was pivotal. But, conversely, I also get the impression that through your writing you would not be writing about Dada if you did not think that maybe this situation is not so much different…that maybe it is actually a lot less changed than we think it is? What are the possibilities for art to have a purchase on the present? How far removed are we from the historical possibilities presented by past avant-gardes?

HF: It is easy to make claims about the end of this, that, and the other thing. That kind of nondialectical dialectic is very seductive because it is, weirdly, very triumphal in its defeatism. Certainly, innovative art, if not radical art, is not as central to the society as it once was, but that does not mean the project is kaput. The forces of amnesia have not won out altogether! I do not think this project is dead, by any means. I would not continue to do what I do if I did. There are art practices that do have effects beyond the art world. I think there are exhibitions that have effects that cannot be anticipated. It is what artists want to make of those historical episodes, if anything at all.

Another opposition we talked about that seems really crucial is, to what extent is it important for contemporary art to be reflexive historically, to draw on the past, and to transform the past. I think either position could be argued right now. It should be argued right now. And if these debates could be articulate enough, there will be effects. Not only in art, but elsewhere.

BS: Yet, in “This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse,” you also characterize the contemporary moment as having a ghostly or spectral quality. What is your interest in this spectral aspect and why are past moments still “living on” and open to interpretation by today’s artists?

HF: My interest in the spectral is not a melancholic lament about the end of art. It is to suggest that, rather than fixate on stories of rupture and death, we think about other narratives, ones of living on or after, of creative aftermath. For me the spectral has the force of the revenant, the figure that returns to surprise, even to haunt. I am very interested in the afterlives of the modern, as art historians like Aby Warburg were interested in the afterlives of the classical. That was what was at stake in the essay. It was not to say, “Oh, dead body, how sad.” It was to say, “Wow, this dead body is not so dead. It is alive in ways we do not recognize.”

BS: In response to what you characterize as “an allergy” to grand narratives, in “This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse,” you suggest that maybe we should not simply dismiss grand narratives, that perhaps they contain something necessary. What is significant to you about grand narratives? What about this moment expresses a need to return to broader historical purview, or at least reevaluations?

HF: The polemic against grand narratives became a doxa of the postmodern. But I think Habermas was largely right in his debate with Lyotard: There are values in the project of modernity that should not be thrown out altogether. Certainly narratives are oppressive when they are only grand. But we all need stories to make sense of what we do. There is no project without a story that situates our actions. Finally, as Jameson argues, postmodernism is not the end of narrative: It is a new chapter in the grandest of all modern narratives, the history of capitalism.

BS: Has the project of replacing a paradigm of grand narratives with one of more local, specialized, micropolitics proved itself to be equally ineffective in dealing with the present as a failure of previous hopes in the history of capitalism?

HF: I do not know, but I do not think so. I think the microalternative is only problematic when it becomes so micro that it is atomistic in an identitarian way and lacks any articulate connection to other stories, other projects, other struggles. But I do not think that is necessarily the case. How that is made articulate in art criticism or history seems to be a really important project. To do that in the space of the contemporary, which is more and more vast every day, or so it seems, is very difficult to do. I think, to go back to form-discourse-institution connection—that would be an extraordinary project for a collective, or for a school to entertain, to really sit down and work through some of these questions seriously. | P

[2] Hal Foster, “This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse,” in Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (London: Verso, 2003), 123–144.

IN HIS 1932 NOVEL BANJO, the radical black intellectual Claude McKay portrays the vibrancy of black cosmopolitanism in the French port city of Marseilles in the decade following the end of World War I. McKay’s characters—boys of the docks, mendicants, and drifters—grapple with the racism of the wider society, while in their relations to one another live beyond race’s narrowness. One in particular, the novel’s protagonist, an itinerant intellectual named Ray, is driven by French police brutality to reflect on the reality of his race. In a powerful passage, McKay describes Ray as refusing “to accept the idea of the Negro simply, as a ‘problem.’ All of life was a problem….To Ray the Negro was one significant and challenging aspect of the human life of the world as a whole….If the Negro had to be defined, there was every reason to define him as a challenge rather than a ‘problem’ to Western civilization.”[1] To this day, Ray’s challenge remains unmet, not only in France, but in the United States and the rest of the world.

Following Ray, the term “challenge” is used here to signify a refusal of the traditional labeling of anti-black racism and racially justified segregation as a “problem.” Naming racism and segregation as a problem merely acknowledges and passively describes a fact. However, the challenge is to elevate the problem’s mere existence to the level of reality, to shape it through thought and action into a material that, because consciously formed, can be transformed and overcome.

For the American Left in the first half the 20^th century—commonly referred to as the “Old Left”— the task of advancing freedom entailed a thoroughgoing critique of the racist institutions in American society, a socioeconomic and historical analysis of their origins and contemporary function, as well as practical efforts to eradicate these structures. In other words, racism was the challenge faced by the American Old Left. However, to a large extent it evaded the very challenge it set for itself by accepting the characterization of the black population’s political situation as “the Negro problem.” Only the best of the Old Left pushed against this characterization. The New Left, seeking to overcome the Old Left’s shortcomings and receiving a great impulse from the demands of the Civil Rights movement to do so, would nevertheless come to reenact the previous generation’s failings. This brings forth an uncomfortable question: if Marxists in the United States were unable to meet the challenge of raising racism to the level of a transformable reality, then to what extent can we speak of an American tradition of Marxism—a Marxism adequate to the situation of American capitalism—at all?

Claude McKay addressing the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1922.

Marxism was at first a transplant to the United States, brought with the arrival of radicals who were compelled to leave Europe after the failed revolutions of 1848. However, as an organized political movement, it was forged with the great inspiration and impetus given by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, and the subsequent revolutions that swept through Europe and the world. These profoundly radicalizing events led to the formation of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CP), first in 1919 as two separate and competing tendencies, and then as a unified Workers Party in 1921. According to James P. Cannon, one of the Communist Party’s leaders in the 1920s, and one of the leaders of the Trotskyist fight against Stalinism from 1928 onward, the first years of the Communist Party were dominated by foreign émigrés with direct experience in Europe’s mass Marxist parties. Their experience within Marxism led them to believe that it was their duty to preserve the integrity of Marxism against any misinterpretations by its new, less experienced American practitioners. However, this inadvertently led to a neglect of specific aspects of the historical development of the United States, most crucially the struggle against slavery, segregation, and racism. This theoretical deficiency remained even after the growth enjoyed by the CP in the 1920s and 1930s.

Thus limited by its theoretical outlook, the American Communist Party neglected the critical question: How should Marxists account for the specificity of national historical development, while, at the same time, attempting to overcome the nation-state as a political framework? In the case of anti-black racism and segregation, this requires us to critically reevaluate the dialectic of separatism and integration/assimilation in the race politics of the United States.

Concurrent with the formation of the Communist Party in the United States was a reactionary intensification of segregation, the roots of which extended back to the defeat of the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War. As a result of that defeat in the 1870s, many black ex-slaves fled the penury of the sharecropper system in the South to enter into northern industrial production. This process accelerated with the increased need for industrial labor generated by World War I. During this period the racist attitudes of the white working class were inextricably bound up with the assault on the liberties, freedoms, and personal safety of black Americans. So, while there were certainly many important examples of racial solidarity among members of the working class at the time—such as the black and white working class’s defense of the black population during the Chicago race riots of 1919—still, in the eyes of many of its black counterparts and their leadership anti-black racism characterized America’s white working class. The exclusionist practices of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) were a particularly egregious example of this in the labor movement itself. The AFL claimed at the time of its founding in 1886 to follow in the tradition of the Knights of Labor, and to practice the principle of labor solidarity without racial prejudice. However, this soon became a dead letter, as many of the affiliated craft unions refused to include black workers. Historian Theodore Draper has emphasized the equivocations made by the organization when confronted by this problem, describing how “[a]s early as 1900 the AFL’s leaders resorted to the futile and tainted device of issuing its own charters to separate Negro locals. As a result, the AFL for half a century largely evaded the problem of, or blocked the way to, organizing Negroes.”[2] The concessions made to Jim Crow in order to placate racist workers and advance labor’s short-term goals combined with the paranoia of white workers who feared having their position undercut by cheap black labor to produce extremely difficult obstacles for the communist movement to overcome.

It was in this context of Reconstruction’s failure and the racialized division of the working class that the Jamaican black separatist Marcus Garvey first gained for himself and for his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) a mass following in the United States under the slogans “Africa for the Africans” and “Back to Africa.” Garvey’s movement was both courted and contested by the Communists in the immediate post-war years.[3]

While the large following Garvey had garnered could not be ignored, the communists resisted interpreting it as an actual longing for African repatriation, viewing Garvey’s slogans as quixotic and unlikely to garner appeal among black Americans.[4] Communists in the early 1920s concluded that the militant stance that Garvey took toward white domination expressed black Americans’ frustration with the slow pace of social integration and their anger at the betrayal of the democratic ideals for which many black soldiers thought they had fought in World War I. Garvey’s black nationalism had little theoretical impact on the communists until later in the decade, when Stalin tightened his grip over the Third International. Indeed, it is ironic that the Communist Party only truly began to absorb Garvey’s influence in 1928, after the collapse of the UNIA due to Garvey’s personal failings and outright fraudulence. Yet, the Stalinist ideal of “socialism in one country” retrospectively justified Garveyist ideas, and so the Back to Africa movement enjoyed posthumous influence in the form of the Communist Party’s “Black Belt thesis.”

The Black Belt formula, first developed in 1928 and instated as official policy in 1930, held that the black population in a portion of the United States constituted a nation within a nation. James S. Allen, who by the early thirties had become one of the Party’s authorities on this matter, defined the “Black Belt” as a territory stretching from east of Dallas, Texas to just south of Washington D.C., encompassing portions of twelve southern states. According to Allen, this crescent contained a string of contiguous counties inhabited predominately by segregated black sharecroppers working on cotton plantations under conditions not dissimilar from the chattel slavery that had defined the region prior to the Civil War. Shaped by the history of slavery, and hardened by decades of segregation, this “black nation” represented to the Communist Party the North American equivalent of an oppressed colony.[5] Construing the problem in this way, Communists were compelled to advocate for the Black Belt’s “national self-determination.” For black Americans living outside of the south the Party retained the slogan, “full social, political and economic equality.” Thus, the Black Belt thesis was elaborated within the Party during the same years that Stalin’s theory of “socialism in one country” naturalized the nation-state as the “organic” boundary for revolutionary politics.[6] In sundering the part (the south) from the whole (the United States and global capitalism), the American Communist Party’s call for black self-determination contributed to the global defeat of Marxist internationalism and, with it, the dissolution of the spirit of radical cosmopolitanism articulated by intellectuals like McKay. The national frame ceased to be the immediate context of American politics and became its absolute horizon and insurmountable limit.

Map included in James S. Allen’s 1936 The Negro Question in the United States.

The American Communist Party’s theoretical failings regarding race and racism were extreme and had profoundly destructive effects not only on the struggle against anti-black racism and segregation but also on the entire international struggle for human emancipation through the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism. But, to speak only of the immediate consequences, there were two: First, the Communist Party smuggled into Marxism a disguised apology for the existence of racial segregation by misunderstanding the separation of the races as being derived from and expressive of national difference. The overcoming of racism had been a matter of revolution per se. Now, it was reformulated as a national question distinct from and thus free of considerations of international proletarian revolution. Second, the Communist Party neglected to recognize that Garvey’s separatism saw the oppression of black people worldwide as part of a unified reality, and thus contained within itself at least a germ of internationalism, however distorted by the ideology of racial separatism. This potential internationalism within black separatism was precisely what was at stake for McKay in his portrayal of the black cosmopolitanism burgeoning in the Marseilles of the 1920s, a result of the black participation in the World War I and the increased incorporation of black workers into world industry.

It would be easy, given the now commonplace critique of Stalinism, to simply attribute the theoretical problems of the Communist Party in the United States to the political direction determined for it by the Stalinist Comintern. However, when we look to the history of the opposition to Stalinism—the Left Opposition, and, later, the Fourth International—we find no tradition worthy of unqualified endorsement. Instead, there is the history of a more adequate perspective being eschewed in favor of rearticulations, in various forms, of the Communist Party’s basic misconceptions. Not until 1933 did there emerge a potentially more adequate perspective with the composition of a pamphlet by Max Shachtman entitled Communism and the Negro and the discussions in Turkey between Arne Swabeck and Trotsky.[7] Unfortunately, the insights of these perspectives were neglected, as well.

Shachtman’s pamphlet was never published by the Communist League of America (CLA), and although it was clearly intended as a contribution to the thoroughgoing study called for by the CLA’s 1931 National Conference, it is unclear how widely it was circulated.[8] From Shachtman’s letters it is certain that the pamphlet’s immediate purpose was to persuade Trotsky to his point of view. However, it appears Trotsky never gave it due attention. This was unfortunate, since Shachtman’s argument represented a major theoretical advance in the Marxist understanding of the challenges of race and racism. It emphasized that black ex-slaves played a crucial role in restructuring southern society after what Shachtman called “the Second American Revolution,” i.e. the destruction of slavery that accompanied the Union’s victory in the Civil War. Shachtman further pointed out that their defeat by the counterrevolutionary, racist denouement of Reconstruction established the fundamental challenge faced by the Marxists of his day: a conservative, chauvinistic, and racist working class. Shachtman argued that the possibility of integrating the United States required an awakening of the revolutionary class consciousness of the American proletariat and that this in turn required the proletariat to realize that, in order to liberate itself, it must, as Marx and Engels said in The Holy Family, destroy the conditions for its own existence. In the specific context of the United States this meant, inter alia, destroying the working class’s racial segregation and the racist consciousness that accompanied it.

A large section of Shachtman’s pamphlet was devoted to exposing the fallacies of James S. Allen’s conclusions about the nature of the South and its agrarian black population. Allen’s work attempted to justify on sociological grounds the national self-determination slogan. Through the interpretation of census data, Allen claimed that the southern black population, which comprised the majority of the American black population at the time, would permanently adhere to the region.[9] Implicit in this analysis was a conservative reading of the historical conditions faced by the American black population, one that assumed the experience of slavery and segregation was so indelible as to permanently entrench the separation of the races. Thus, to Allen, southern blacks were not only likely to remain an unintegrated part of American economic and social life, but their exclusion had produced a nascent national identity separate from that of the “white” American nation. Today’s world has clearly demonstrated the incorrectness of these views. Even by the 1960s Draper could write,

If the Communists made any progress among Negroes in the 1930, it was due to their militant championing of “equal rights,” not “self-determination.” One reason for the failure of self-determination was that it went against the tide of history….In effect, the Black Belt has been getting smaller and less black for half a century, gradually cutting the ground from under the thesis of its “self-determination.”[10]

Decades before the “tide of history” was readily apparent, Shachtman was able to expose just how dubious was Allen’s reasoning. Although Shachtman painstakingly mobilized sociological data to undermine Allen’s argument, the strength of his analysis lay in his recognition of the force inherent in the unfulfilled possibilities of the Civil War and Reconstruction, on the one hand, and industrial integration, on the other. Allen’s myopia, by contrast, resulted from his one-sided emphasis on the brutality of slavery and segregation. Even if Shachtman’s pamphlet had no other merit than this, it would represent an important contribution to the Left’s capacity to meet the challenge of race and racism.

Shachtman’s pamphlet unfortunately had much less effect on the trajectory of the CLA, the American section of the Left Opposition, than did the results of the 1933 discussions in Turkey between Trotsky and Arne Swabeck. In these talks, Swabeck emphasized the same revolutionary potential of the demand for integration that Shachtman emphasized in his pamphlet, but Trotsky remained unconvinced. It is important to note, however, the lack of conviction that characterized Trotsky’s perspective, as he himself admitted to being unfamiliar with the circumstances. Still, Trotsky considered the demand for equality as essentially liberal, whereas, extrapolating from his experiences in the Russian Revolution, he thought the demand for self-determination and, by extension, the politics of black separatism might have considerable revolutionary potential. From 1933 onward, then, the CLA’s perspective was muddled. The stagnation and then regression of a Leftist theory of race is made painfully clear by the 1939 conversation in Mexico between Trotsky and West Indian Marxist C. L. R. James. The product of this conversation was a resolution on the “Negro Question” which mirrored the very shortcomings in the Communist Party’s program that the CLA (now renamed The Socialist Workers Party (SWP)) had previously criticized.

Taking Trotsky’s tentative conclusions in his conversation with Swabeck and his later dialog with James as a dictum, the Fourth International, in a 1939–1940 resolution, came out in favor of black national self determination, “should they want it.” But this missed Trotsky’s most important point: the correct perspective towards the struggles against racism and segregation could only be developed in the course of attempting to practically intervene in the reality of the problem. This would have meant an attempt to build a black Trotskyist leadership and to wage war against the chauvinistic racist attitudes of the American proletariat both white and black, but especially white. But instead of this, the Trotskyists left the issue still unresolved, adopting the view that “we must wait and see.” In a politically impoverished situation, the Trotskyists, like the Communist Party, left black workers to fend for themselves. The black proletariat was expected to raise itself to the task of “determining themselves,” to pull their politics up by their bootstraps. During this time, the black recruits to the Trotskyist SWP almost entirely abandoned it.

The next phase of the attempt to recognize the challenge posed to Marxism by racism and segregation began in the context of the full-scale liquidation of the revolutionary content of Marxism by the SWP, characterized by a continued acceptance of the notion of Black Nationalism. By the 1950s Trotskyism was wrecked by the loss of an internationalist perspective—a loss represented by “Pabloism” and an anti-theoretical mentality that maintained that revolutionary theory had only to be completed by practical implementation. Opposition to this development began to form within the SWP, led in part by Richard Fraser. Fraser argued against the party’s line on black nationalism, returning to the arguments of Shachtman and Swabeck. Advancing a theory of revolutionary integrationism, he argued that black workers were destined to take up a vanguard role in the revolutionary struggle.

Writing in the 1950s, Fraser stressed the importance of consciousness and theory as necessary elements of the struggle to overcome capitalism and, more particularly, the racist form it had taken in the United States.[11] However, Fraser’s perspective was limited by two factors. First, in his understanding of revolution and integration he tacitly accepted the national frame. Second, despite his emphasis on the critical role of consciousness in the fight against racism and segregation, he nevertheless argued that, simply because blacks faced extraordinary repression from the racist U.S. state, the black worker could be expected, by virtue of this super-exploitation, to develop a consciousness of their situation. By this retreat into a liberal conception of interest-driven politics, Fraser repeated the anti-theoretical attitude of his opponents within the SWP and thus missed the opportunity to critically grasp race dynamics in American capitalism.

Reducing in theory the dialectic of separatism and integration to a national question, the Communist Party’s positions on race, and in particular its support of black nationalism, had ramifications beyond its immediate moment. Indeed, it was just this Stalinist legacy that resulted in the revolutionary posturing of the New Left as it came up against the limits of the Civil Rights movement. But the challenge of adequately understanding race and racism did not disappear simply because a politics adequate to it was given up. Instead, as Draper puts it, the ideological issues posed by black nationalism were “rediscovered” by the New Left in the 1960s. Because this younger generation of social thinkers failed to address the theoretical failures of the Old Left, they ultimately ended up reproducing the same ideological shortcomings. What the New Left found was an attenuated form of ideology relevant—albeit in problematic ways—to historical, sociopolitical, economic, and cultural conditions that had since undergone significant change. This was recognized at the onset of the “Black Power turn” in the late 1960s by Harold Cruse, whose Crisis of the Negro Intellectual represents perhaps the most profound reflection on the intergenerational connections between the Old and New Left’s understanding of the challenge of race and racism. In the chapter entitled “Postscript on Black Power,” Cruse wrote, “When the direct-action methods [of the Civil Rights movement] failed against hardening barriers, they had to fall back on…the slogan of Black Power, as if to convince themselves that they were taking a revolutionary step forward….Whatever it is, it is essentially another variation of the Old Communist leftwing doctrine of ‘self-determination in the black belt areas of Negro majority.’”[12]

If we take Cruse’s insight seriously then we cannot escape the fact that the history of the challenge posed by anti-black racism and the errors of Marxists in attempting to overcome it have left a bitter legacy for the Left. If today’s Left hopes to digest this history then it is incumbent upon us to consider how and why the communist Left did not raise an adequate opposition to race and racism. Such historical analysis could help illuminate why, despite the important progress made in the struggle against the racial structuring of American society, an adequate theory of the correlation between poverty and race and racism in advanced capitalist societies is still lacking. While the solution is unlikely to be identical to what was proposed 80 years ago, we must nevertheless reflect on how the political mistakes of the Stalinist Communist Party, and the Left Opposition’s abandonment of its critique, has left the class-consciousness of the American working class, situated at the heart of global capitalism in the postwar period, deformed by racism. We live with the consequences today. |P

[2] Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period (New York: The Viking Press, 1960), 316.

[3] See Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-36 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 22–29.

[4] For example, see John Reed’s argument in his speech at the Second Congress of the Communist International: “The Negros do not pose the demand of national independence…. They hold themselves above all to be Americans, they feel at home in the United States.” John Reed, “America and the Negro Question,” The Minutes of Second Congress of the Communist international, Fourth Session, 25 July 1920.

[5] James S. Allen, The Negro Question in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1936), 13–24.

[6] Stalin himself may have overtly intervened in the matter, personally seeing to it that black national self-determination became the orthodox communist position regarding race in America. According to Theodore Draper, a delegation of black American communists visiting the Comintern in 1925 were told by Stalin that black Americans were a “national minority with some of the characteristics of a nation.” The delegation’s reaction, that this sounded like “Jim Crow in a revolutionary guise,” was ignored. See Draper, American Communism, 334.

[7] Max Shachtman, Race and Revolution (New York: Verso Press, 2003).

[8] Writing from Büyükada, Turkey, Shachtman complained to Martin Abern that he had been unable to discuss the CLA’s program for black Americans with Trotsky. He then indicated that he felt his pamphlet was being ignored, writing, “By the way, has my pamphlet completely disappeared? Is it never to see light?” [Max Shachtman to Martin Abern, 22 June 1933, Box 2, Folder 48B, Max Shachtman Papers (TAM 103), The Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University].

[9] Allen, Negro Question, 24–31.

[10] Theodore Draper, The Rediscovery of Black Nationalism (New York: The Viking Press, 1970), 65.

[11] See Richard Fraser, “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution”.

[12] Harold Cruse, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), 547.

Toward a Theory of Historical Regression

On April 18, 2009, the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted the following panel discussion at the Left Forum Conference at Pace University in New York City. The panel was organized around four significant moments in the progressive diremption of theory and practice over the course of the 20th century: 2001 (Spencer A. Leonard), 1968 (Atiya Khan), 1933 (Richard Rubin), and 1917 (Chris Cutrone). The following is an edited transcript of the introduction to the panel by Benjamin Blumberg, the panelists’ prepared statements, and the Q&A session that followed. The Platypus Review encourages interested readers to view the complete video recording of the event.

2001

Spencer Leonard

THE ABANDONMENT OF EMANCIPATORY POLITICS in our time has not been, as past revolutionary thinkers may have feared, an abandonment of revolution in favor of reformism. Rather, because the revolutionary overcoming of capital is no longer imagined, reformism too is dead. As the task of achieving human society beyond capital has been abandoned, nothing worthy of the name of politics takes its place, nor could it. The project of freedom has now altogether receded from view. For, while bourgeois thinkers like Hegel were no doubt mistaken in their identification of capital with freedom, they nevertheless grasped that the question of freedom only poses itself with reference to the capital problematic. Realizing for the first time a noble savagery that never was before, contemporary humanity is sunk in the immediacy of second nature.

The year 2001 itself arrived late and now it, too, has slipped into the past. Still, it retains its significance as the moment when the light of freedom was definitively eclipsed, when mankind ceased to be able to discern whether or not night had fallen. For, since 2001, all recognize that we now live in what the Marxist thinker and critic of the New Left, Moishe Postone, has termed the “time of helplessness” (or, as the Spartacist League more colorfully describes it, the “senile dementia of post-Marxism.”) Though time continues to pass and, in some sense, continues to intensify, history—understood as the time when the tasks of freedom can still be performed—seems to have come to an abrupt, late-afternoon halt. This has caught most on the Left unawares, though one suspects a widespread relief among many that the task might finally be abandoned, for good and all.

Accumulated into the year 2001 is what precedes it in time, a mass of folly and wasted opportunities that may be disaggregated into three constituent moments. Each of these three stages in the “death of the Left” conveniently ends in the digit 9: 1979, 1989, and 1999. Each represents a stage in a process of retrogression that culminates in what is, after all, a crisis far more portentous than the current economic crisis that so dominates our discourse: the crisis of the Left, whose prospects for recovery are, at this stage, very grim. Rather than a crisis date in the history of the Left, 2001 is therefore the year in which the crisis of history became clear, though few noticed, and when it became unmistakable, though few caught the scent, that what passes for the Left today is a “stinking corpse.” It was the year in which the founding of Platypus became a necessity, though, here again, consciousness lagged behind events.

Demonstration during the Islamic Revolution in Iran, 1979.

The Iranian Revolution in 1979 was and remains a catastrophe. Since the triumph of the Khomeini-ites the country has been dominated by a regime far more backward and repressive than its predecessor, governed in a manner even more reactionary than the way the country was governed under the Shah. With the Stalinist Tudeh Party subordinating itself to the Khomeini faction, the road to Islamist power was paved with the corpses of betrayed Iranian workers and self-betrayed Stalinists, even as the Western Left drowned out all dissent with its loud applause for the blow dealt to American imperialism. As the Iranian unorganized urban masses and the landlord class joined hands under Islamist leadership to crush the Tudeh Party and other leftist groups, the Left of the core capitalist states, hopelessly deluded by a specious Third Worldism, failed almost entirely to recognize the unfolding catastrophe. As David Greason has observed, prior to the Iranian Revolution most had simply assumed that any movement able to oust the Shah would have to come from the Left.[1] The actuality of Khomeini-style Islamism as a reactionary ideology, rather than an authentic “cultural expression” of the masses, was denied, and instead the Western Left acquiesced in the elevation of Khomeini’s mullahs to a dominant position in Iran. The Left was incapable of recognizing in Khomeini, who was hailed as a unifier, a threat no less grave than the Shah himself had been. Substituting criticism of American imperialism for the critique of capitalism, dominant strands of the New Left reshaped anti-Americanism as the touchstone of Leftist thought. This rendered impossible an adequate analysis of the Iranian Revolution, and of the Mujahideen’s “resistance” to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan as well. In place of an adequate analysis of the Iranian Revolution, defeat was transmuted into “victory” by the conjuring tricks of the New Left. It was an act of self-deception that had, by this time, become almost second nature for a generation that, despite its professions of anti-Stalinism, still worshipped the Stalinist idol of the accomplished fact. Accordingly, icons of the New Left like Michel Foucault saluted the Islamic Revolution as representative of a new “spiritual” politics, supposedly free of the instrumental rationality operative in both East and West during the Cold War.

Lech Walesa leaves the Gdansk Lenin shipyards to prepare for his meeting with John Paul II.

Other events circa 1979 that registered the degradation and disintegration of the Left were its uncritical responses to the Solidarnosc movement in Poland, and the Mujahideen’s resistance to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, both of which found support among a disoriented Left, with slogans—now forgotten in embarrassment—of “Ten million Polish workers can’t be wrong!” and “Allah-u-Akbar!” The Left failed to recognize the conservatism manifesting before their eyes, the right that they themselves joined. Indeed, by 1979, it was by no means clear, even to leading thinkers of the New Left, how the project of freedom might be advanced. Fred Halliday reports a conversation he had with fellow New Left Review editor Tariq Ali, with whom he was politically parting ways, in which he told Ali the following: “God, Allah, called the two of us to His presence and said to us, ‘One of you is to go the Left, and one of you is to go to the Right.’ The problem is, He didn’t tell us which was which, and maybe He didn’t know Himself.” Halliday then adds, “Tariq laughed. He understood exactly what I was saying, and he didn’t dispute it.”^[2]

The practice of self-deceit, uncritical celebration of supposed revolts against reification, and the retreat from the project of freedom, was again in evidence in the second stage leading up to 2001, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. As the final, anti-climactic collapse of the failed attempt to overcome capital launched in 1917, the rightward fall of the Soviet Union was remarkable for its failure to prompt serious reconsideration on the Left. Instead, it was heralded as a rebirth of freedom, as though what happened were not the institution of neoliberalism but the de-Stalinization of the revolution. With scarcely a thought respecting the now definitive failure of the trajectory of the October Revolution that conserved, in however degraded a form, the emancipatory impulses of Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, and Lenin, the zombie-Left in 1989 congratulated itself on yet another supposed accomplishment of 1960s-style anti-authoritarianism. Celebrating what it ought to have analyzed, dominant strains on the Left helped legitimize the neo-Tzarism that rose on the ruins of Soviet Russia. Mirroring Marxism’s degeneration in the Soviet Union to an ideology affirmative of the status quo, and in place of the realization of the emancipatory potential of capitalism, in 1989 capitalism itself was celebrated as emancipation.

The third phase in the total exhaustion of the Left that culminated in 2001 comes in 1999, the year of the anti-globalization protests in Seattle. This event marked the triumph of our current “post-political” activist culture, what Liza Feathersone, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti have termed “activist-ism.”^[3] As Platypus members Ben Blumberg and Ian Morrison have observed, with respect both to activist-ism in general and the new anarchism that dominated proceedings in Seattle in particular, “Today’s protesters celebrate simple altercations with the police as victories… Each blow of the truncheon dramatizes the difference between protesters [and the society to which they are being integrated].”[4] It is not unfair to say, they argue, “Protesters elicit a police beating to sensationalize their own submission to authority.”[5] Here, the regression already in evidence in the 1960s has reached full flower.

Black Bloc protest

Reenacting not only the defeat but the defeatism of the 1960s Left, the Seattle protesters no longer even bother with the old talk about students or youth as a new “revolutionary force.” Nor do these new would-be radicals require elaborate rationalizations of their failure. Theirs is a disarmingly frank acting-out of a discontented middle-class youth, for whom the schedule of international trade meetings takes the place of rock concert tours as the site for a peripatetic anti-authoritarian subculture. This generation of activists fulfills rather than rejects the low expectations of their political parents, namely that they should either numb themselves with the pleasures on offer in neoliberalism—“sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll”—or else engage in revolution “for the hell of it.” Only, in the new protest culture, one can do both at the same time, achieving in the process only the sensationalizing of one’s own submission to authority and social integration of which Blumberg and Morrison speak. Politically, the embrace of the cult of death that characterized the dominant Leftist response to 1979 reaches its anti-climax in the full-blown Romantic-reactionary rejectionism, anti-modernism, and anti-globalization of “black bloc” anarchism and “turtle protest.”

The historic Left of bourgeois radicalism, culminating in Marx’s auto-critique of utopian socialism, isolates history as its problematic and freedom as its project. As Marx realized, capitalism posed a question that could only be answered by the overcoming of capitalism. In a similar vein, Postone has argued that proletarian society, the society of commodity-producing commodities, “points beyond itself.” But regression has advanced so far now that critical recognitions such as Postone’s are the affair of only a handful of intellectuals, while the labor movement, the necessary condition for the practical politics of the Left, is in full-scale rout globally. The point of saying this plainly is not simply to voice a knowing pessimism, but to recognize the actual character of our times. Platypus harps on the “death of the Left” in order to begin the work of rebuilding. After all, the reconstitution of Critical Theory, the specific task to which Platypus is devoted, does not occur in conditions of our own choosing, but in conditions we inherit from the past. Indeed, theory can be reformulated not by supplementing new bits to rectify the supposed inadequacies of past theory, but only by actually working through of the history of the Left. |P

Next presentation: 1968

I am not now, nor have I ever been, either a Maoist or sympathetic to Maoism. I am also not a member of SDS. I was outraged however, by the blatant red-baiting of Rachel Haut in a recent Platypus Review Interview and disturbed that it seems to have gone unchallenged by PR. Rachel Haut was quoted as saying: “To say that the Maoists can be part of the ideological debate would mean to condone them being in this organization, which is something I don’t do. In the New York City SDS I have spoken numerous times with SDSers who are not Maoists about having the Maoists or certain kinds of anarchists in our organization, because both sides hurt us. If we want to build a democratic society, and we want to be relevant, both of these opposing forces are working against us. There are varying degrees of anarchism, definitely, as well as varying degrees of socialism. But, I think ideas that conflict with our vision and our goals need to be clearly defined and excluded before we can actually start talking about our ideological differences formally as a national organization.”

Essentially, what Rachel Haut is saying that first one needs to exclude people whom one disagrees with, so that after the organization has been ideologically purified, one can “actually start talking about ideological differences” when there aren’t any anymore. This is an attitude worthy of a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution!

Aside from general considerations of democratic principle, such an attitude is extremely dangerous to those who consider themselves leftists. I am reminded of a famous old radical cartoon I once saw. A cop is beating up a striking worker, who protests “But I am an anti-Communist”, to which the cop replies “Anti-communist, shmanti-communist. I don’t care what kind of communist you are.”

—Richard Rubin, October 2008

. . .

Laurie Rojas responds:

Rachel Haut’s comments during the interview printed in September 2008 Issue of the Platypus Review did not express my views, or those of the editors of the Platypus Review. I should have made this explicit at the time. Haut’s red-baiting went unchallenged during the interview, and that should not have been the case.

I disagreed with Haut when she said, “I think it is inappropriate to have conversations about ideological differences when we still have Maoists in the organization.” As the interviewer, however, I (wrongly) thought it indecorous to challenge her position at that point.

Beyond this, I continued the conversation because it made manifest a profound and worrisome behavior I had encountered in SDS during my participation in the 2008 National Convention: the promulgation of whisper campaigns against individuals that appear to have defined ideological positions, coupled with an unspoken agreement to avoid ideological conversations. The first two days of the convention were plagued by disputes about the decision-making process that had clearly ideological undertones, but were never expressed as such; instead, there were numerous interruptions that chastised the decision-making process as “undemocratic” — a vague blanket term that anybody, no matter what side of the argument they were on, used to legitimize their discontent.

Furthermore, I did not directly challenge Haut’s redbaiting because at the time I considered it an anachronistic, ill-informed gesture used simply to avoid a political conversation about the long-term goals of SDS. Haut’s red-baiting had no concrete grounding, and was fully devoid of actual relevance to political practice in the present; it was mostly justified by the historical reputation of Maoists. It was never made clear why Maoists would pose such a grave threat to SDS. What is then, the real “danger” posed by a Maoist, or any “red,” today? The only explanation given was: “[Maoist] ideology is in direct opposition to building a democratic society.” “Democracy,” although vaguely understood, is the only goal all SDSers can agree on. Yet it is also the main weapon some use to show contempt for other members of the group.

I hoped the interview would be treated as symptomatic of tendencies in the Left today whose public manifestation would help clarify our situation. In other words, I let Haut’s opinions stand because they were in some way representative of problems and dangers facing the young Left today, especially in the new SDS. As an “umbrella organization,” SDS has attracted members with a wide spectrum of opinions. But because ideological conversations about the political goals of the organization have not been a central part of SDS — mostly due to the fear of splits — its members end up grouping themselves into social cliques. Fragmentation occurs under the auspices of petty interpersonal disagreements instead of political disputes with practical and political consequences.

The larger problem, however, is that the majority of people in SDS can only organize actions in frustrated reaction to the deplorable situations in which they find themselves. They can only protest their helplessness, and have no clear idea of how their actions relate to long-term goals of gaining political power to effect real social transformation.

The absence of concrete political aims produces a politics of “acting out,” an unreflective and compulsive desire for “agitation.” With this orientation, the new SDS does not stray far from its predecessor, the original SDS. Activism- for-its-own-sake is an indication that the organization “refuses to reflect on its own impotence,” as Adorno once said of the student activism in the 60’s. The concepts of “revolution” and “democracy” are abstract ideas in SDS whose emptiness leaves them useful only as bludgeons for crushing dissent.

The counterposing of thought and action, the kneejerk anti-intellectualism, the taboos behind political ideas, and the impulse to resist indiscriminately hierarchy and leadership, has left SDS powerless. But worse than that, because of this deep political dilemma, many members are insecure and quick to accuse others for not being “with the movement.” The perverse tendency to “purge” is a result of fear, a dearth of ideas, and the unwillingness to discuss the meaning and direction of the group. When things are not going well—blame the “foreign elements.”

The bitter truth about Wright’s cartoon is that all kinds of Marxists are still cast under the same blinding light. It would do us well to remember: everybody has an ideology. Being anti-ideology is one of the oldest ideologies in the book. The question is why should those who are believed to have defined ideological positions invoke a desire to squelch, to expel, to purge?

This anti-ideology sentiment, an anachronistic residue of the anti-Stalinism of the 60’s, is more pervasive — if less explicit — today, without any “anti-anti-communism” clause to block its path. The irony is that in a post-USSR world, the Stalinophobes unknowingly become practicing Stalinists. If one considers the pathologies created by political powerlessness and the unwillingness to engage with ideas, red-baiting can be understood as a naturalized form of ideological purging; real authoritarianism masked as “the defense of democracy.”

Chris Cutrone

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
— Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)

“The theorist who intervenes in practical controversies nowadays discovers on a regular basis and to his shame that whatever ideas he might contribute were expressed long ago — and usually better the first time around.”
— Theodor W. Adorno, “Sexual Taboos and the Law Today” (1963)

ACCORDING TO LENIN, the greatest contribution of the German Marxist radical Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) to the fight for socialism was the statement that her Social Democratic Party of Germany had become a “stinking corpse” as a result of voting for war credits on August 4, 1914. Lenin wrote this about Luxemburg in 1922, at the close of the period of war, revolution, counterrevolution and reaction in which Luxemburg was murdered. Lenin remarked that Luxemburg would be remembered well for her incisive critique at a crucial moment of crisis in the movement to which she had dedicated and ultimately gave her life. Instead, ironically, Luxemburg has been remembered — for her occasional criticisms of Lenin and the Bolsheviks!

Two lessons can be drawn from this story: that the Left suffers, as a result of the accumulated wreckage of intervening defeats and failures, from a very partial and distorted memory of its own history; and that at crucial moments the best work on the Left is its own critique, motivated by the attempt to escape this history and its outcomes. At certain times, the most necessary contribution one can make is to declare that the Left is dead.

Hence, Platypus makes the proclamation, for our time: “The Left is dead! — Long live the Left!” — We say this so that the future possibility of the Left might live.

Platypus began in December, 2004 as a project for an international journal of critical letters and emancipatory politics, envisioned by a core group of students of University of Chicago professor Moishe Postone, who has studied and written on Marx’s mature critical theory in the Grundrisse and Capital towards the imagination of postcapitalist society since the 1960s.

Platypus developed and grew in Spring 2006 into a reading group of our students interested in pursuing the continued purchase of Marxian critical theory. The Platypus Affiliated Society is a recently established (in December, 2006) political organization seeking to investigate possibilities for reconstituting a Marxian Left after the demise of the historical Marxist Left.

We take our namesake from the platypus, which suffered at its moment of zoological discovery from its unclassifiability according to prevailing science. We think that an authentic emancipatory Left today would suffer from a similar problem of (mis)recognition, in part because the tasks and project of social emancipation have disintegrated and so exist for us only in fragments and shards.

We have grown from at first about a dozen graduate students and teachers to over thirty undergraduate and graduate students and teachers and others from the greater Chicago community and beyond (for instance, developing corresponding members in New York and Toronto).

We have worked with various other groups on the Left in Chicago and beyond, for instance giving a workshop on the Iraqi Left for the new SDS conference on the Iraq occupation in Chicago in February. In January, we held the first of a series of Platypus public fora in Chicago, on the topic of “imperialism” and the Left, including panelists Kevin Anderson from News and Letters (Marxist Humanists), Nick Kreitman from the newly refounded Students for a Democratic Society, Danny Postel from OpenDemocracy.net, and Adam Turl from the International Socialist Organization.

We have organized our critical investigation of the history of the Left in order to help discern emancipatory social possibilities in the present, a present that has been determined by the history of defeat and failure on the Left. As seekers after a highly problematic legacy from which we are separated by a definite historical distance, we are dedicated to approaching the history of thought and action on the Left from which we must learn in a deliberately non-dogmatic manner, taking nothing as given.

Why Marx? Why now? We find Marx’s thought to be the focal point and vital nerve center for the fundamental critique of the modern world in which we still live that emerged in Marx’s time with the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century. We take Marx’s thought in relation both to the preceding history of critical social thought, including the philosophy of Kant and Hegel, as well as the work by those inspired later to follow Marx in the critique of social modernity, most prominently Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Hence, Platypus is committed to the reconsideration of the entire critical theoretical tradition spanning the 19th and 20th Centuries. As Leszek Kolakowski put it (in his 1968 essay “The Concept of the Left”) the Left must be defined ideologically and not sociologically; thought, not society, is divided into Right and Left: the Left is defined by its utopianism, the Right by its opportunism. — Or, as Robert Pippin has put it, the problem with critical theory today is that it is not critical (Critical Inquiry, 2003).

Platypus is dedicated to re-opening various historical questions of the Left in order to read that history “against the grain” (as Benjamin put it, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 1940), attempting to grasp past moments of defeat and failure on the Left not as given but rather in their unfulfilled potential, regarding the present as the product not of historical necessity, but rather of what happened that need not have been. We struggle to escape the dead hand of at least two preceding generations of problematic action and thinking on the Left, the 1920s-30s and the 1960s-70s. More proximally, we suffer the effects of the depoliticization — the deliberate “postmodernist” abandonment of any “grand narratives” of social emancipation — on the Left in the 1980s-90s.

But the “tradition” of the “dead generation” that “weighs” most heavily as a “nightmare” on our minds is that of the 1960s New Left, especially in its history of anti-Bolshevism — expressed by both the complementary bad alternatives of Stalinophobic anti-Communism (of Cold War liberalism and social democracy) and Stalinophilic “militancy” (e.g., Maoism, Guevarism, etc.) — that led to the naturalization of the degeneration of the Left into resignation and abdication, originating in the inadequate response by the 1960s “New” Left to the problems of the post-1920s-30s “Old” Left. In our estimation, the 1960s New Left remained beholden to Stalinism — including the lie that Lenin led to Stalin — to the great detriment of possibilities for emancipatory politics up to today.

In attempting to read this history of the accelerated demise and self-liquidation of the Left after the 1960s “against the grain,” we face a problem discussed by Nietzsche in his essay “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” (1873):

“A person must have the power and from time to time use it to break a past and to dissolve it, in order to be able to live. . . . People or ages serving life in this way, by judging and destroying a past, are always dangerous and in danger. . . . It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were, a past after the fact, out of which we may be descended in opposition to the one from which we are descended.” [Nietzsche translation by Ian Johnston at: http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/history.htm]

However, as Karl Korsch wrote, in “Marxism and Philosophy” (1923):

“[Marx wrote that] ‘[Humanity] always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely it will always be found that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or are at least understood to be in the process of emergence’ [Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)]. This dictum is not affected by the fact that a problem which supersedes present relations may have been formulated in an anterior epoch.” [Karl Korsch, “Marxism and Philosophy,” Marxism and Philosophy (NLB: New York and London, 1970), 58]

As Adorno wrote, in Negative Dialectics (1966):

“The liquidation of theory by dogmatization and thought taboos contributed to the bad practice. . . . The interrelation of both moments [of theory and practice] is not settled once and for all but fluctuates historically. . . . Those who chide theory [for being] anachronistic obey the topos of dismissing, as obsolete, what remains painful [because it was] thwarted. . . . The fact that history has rolled over certain positions will be respected as a verdict on their truth content only by those who agree with Schiller that ‘world history is the world tribunal’. What has been cast aside but not absorbed theoretically will often yield its truth content only later. It festers as a sore on the prevailing health; this will lead back to it in changed situations.”
[T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (Continuum: New York, 1983), 143-144]

Platypus is concerned with exploring the improbable but not impossible tasks and project of the reemergence of a critical Left with emancipatory social intent. We look forward to making a critical but vital contribution towards a possible “return to Marx” for the potential reinvigoration of the Left in coming years. We invite and welcome those who wish to share in and contribute to this project. | P

The Platypus Historians Group is a collective of members of Platypus who are researchers into the history of the Left. We will be publishing this series on the History of the Left under this collective authorship to indicate the collaborative nature of our research and the questions it raises. Each article under this byline will be written by one or several members of this collective, but with contributions and review by as many others of this group as possible and appropriate to the topics essayed.

Preparation for these articles on the History of the Left was done through a series of lectures and discussions conducted in Chicago in summer 2007 by members of the Platypus Historians Group. These lecture-discussions addressed a broad overview of movements and events in the emergence and trajectory — and passing — of the revolutionary Marxist Left, in an attempt to formulate a perspective on this history that is specific to the Platypus project. Hence, the development of our perspective on the history of the Left is our development of a theory of the present.