I must be in a mood today– half irritated, half amused –because I find myself ranting. Of course, that’s not entirely unusual. So this afternoon I came across a post by a friend quoting something discussing the environmental movement that pushed all the right button. As the post read,
For mainstream environmentalism– conservationism, green consumerism, and resource management –humans are conceptually separated out of nature and mythically placed in privileged positions of authority and control over ecological communities and their nonhuman constituents. What emerges is the fiction of a marketplace of ‘raw materials’ and ‘resources’ through which human-centered wants, constructed as needs, might be satisfied. The mainstream narratives are replete with such metaphors [carbon trading!]. Natural complexity,, mutuality, and diversity are rendered virtually meaningless given discursive parameters that reduce nature to discrete units of exchange measuring extractive capacities. Jeff Shantz, “Green Syndicalism”
While finding elements this description perplexing– I can’t say that I see many environmentalists treating nature and culture as distinct or suggesting that we’re sovereigns of nature –I do agree that we conceive much of our relationship to the natural world in economic terms (not a surprise that capitalism is today a universal). This, however, is not what bothers me about this passage.
What I wonder is just what we’re supposed to do even if all of this is true? What, given existing conditions, are we to do if all of this is right? At least green consumerism, conservation, resource management, and things like carbon trading are engaging in activities that are making real differences. From this passage– and maybe the entire text would disabuse me of this conclusion –it sounds like we are to reject all of these interventions because they remain tied to a capitalist model of production that the author (and myself) find abhorrent. The idea seems to be that if we endorse these things we are tainting our hands and would therefore do well to reject them altogether.
The problem as I see it is that this is the worst sort of abstraction (in the Marxist sense) and wishful thinking. Within a Marxo-Hegelian context, a thought is abstract when it ignores all of the mediations in which a thing is embedded. For example, I understand a robust tree abstractly when I attribute its robustness, say, to its genetics alone, ignoring the complex relations to its soil, the air, sunshine, rainfall, etc., that also allowed it to grow robustly in this way. This is the sort of critique we’re always leveling against the neoliberals. They are abstract thinkers. In their doxa that individuals are entirely responsible for themselves and that they completely make themselves by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, neoliberals ignore all the mediations belonging to the social and material context in which human beings develop that play a role in determining the vectors of their life. They ignore, for example, that George W. Bush grew up in a family that was highly connected to the world of business and government and that this gave him opportunities that someone living in a remote region of Alaska in a very different material infrastructure and set of family relations does not have. To think concretely is to engage in a cartography of these mediations, a mapping of these networks, from circumstance to circumstance (what I call an “onto-cartography”). It is to map assemblages, networks, or ecologies in the constitution of entities.
Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park:
The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this:
Phase 1: Collect Underpants
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit!
They even have a catchy song to go with their work:
Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows:
Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Revolution and complete social transformation!
Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing?
But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done!
But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion people. These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption. That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc.
What are your proposals? How will you meet these problems? How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure? Marx and Lenin had proposals. Do you? Have you even explored the cartography of the problem? Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization. Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was the Negri & Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement). At least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically. Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists. We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another critical paradigm, Laruelle.
I would love, just for a moment, to hear a radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound. How would he provide for the energy needs of that school? How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound way? How would she provide food for the students? What would be her plan for waste disposal? And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature, the federal government, and all the families of these students? What is your plan? What is your alternative? I think there are alternatives. I saw one that approached an alternative in Rotterdam. If you want to make a truly revolutionary contribution, this is where you should start. Why should anyone even bother listening to you if you aren’t proposing real plans? But we haven’t even gotten to that point. Instead we’re like underpants gnomes, saying “revolution is the answer!” without addressing any of the infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would concretely go about building those alternatives. Masturbation.
“Underpants gnome” deserves to be a category in critical theory; a sort of synonym for self-congratulatory masturbation. We need less critique not because critique isn’t important or necessary– it is –but because we know the critiques, we know the problems. We’re intoxicated with critique because it’s easy and safe. We best every opponent with critique. We occupy a position of moral superiority with critique. But do we really do anything with critique? What we need today, more than ever, is composition or carpentry. Everyone knows something is wrong. Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against them. Even the Tea Party knows something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory. None of us, however, are proposing alternatives. Instead we prefer to shout and denounce. Good luck with that.
Larval Subjects . 
November 12, 2012 at 12:31 am
There’s a great Bruno Latour piece on this:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/421123?uid=3739832
I’ve tired of a lot of the post-structural and critical theory critiques as well. I think one needs to pass through them and then start reconstructing. I’m not convinced the academy is the place to do this, sadly. Although it certainly could be, but that would involve changing a lot of the incentive structures that currently shape much of our work.
November 12, 2012 at 12:35 am
This is an excellent article!
You’ve addressed something that I’ve just been needing to hear, in a clear and succinct and entertaining fashion.
On (ironic for this article) NPR the other day your ‘No plan? Don’t bother’ was evoked. Talking about the election, how so many opposite of educated (for stark, sweeping contrast) grow defensive and shut down when asked why they feel certain ways about policy matters. But when asked to explain how they work, phase 2, they tended to grow awatebof their own ignorance, and grew receptive to discussion, if not open to changing their long-held, may I say indoctrinated views.
It is my brief opinion that whatever grand phase 1 for a political system of governance we should most properly strive towards and adhere to must be based in the nature of balance, in ethics of humanist nature, and of an end toward sustainability with optimum conditions for the growth of the human spirit, if one will.
But seriously… Great farkin’ article! ^o^
November 12, 2012 at 12:55 am
This is very good. You might want to check out some things that have been done by my colleagues at the University of North Texas, like the work done by Pete Gunter to protect the big thicket (http://petegunter.net/big-thicket), the hands on work being done by Adam Briggle on local gas fracking (http://dentondrilling.blogspot.com) and this piece current piece by Robert Frodeman on “Philosophy Dedisciplined” (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-012-0181-0?null). The last appears in an academic journal but began as a piece in the NYTimes philosophy blog the Stone, “Experiments in Field Philosophy” (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/experiments-in-field-philosophy/).
November 12, 2012 at 1:13 am
Note: ‘awatebof’ is cell phone keyboard mash for ‘aware of’. Sorry for any ‘wtfs’.
November 12, 2012 at 1:35 am
Adam Phillips claims that we should strive to bear our frustrations rather than evacuate them. Your “Phase 1” sounds to me like the evacuation of frustration — even the evacuation of guilt. When I join in the fight of boycotting, for instance, I feel relief from guilt because I am demanding punishment of the guilty others. This demand for punishment or humiliation of the other is, of course, sadism, which in my opinion is disavowed/projected masochism. Maybe I am a sado-masochist: I masochistically punish myself while denouncing others (i.e. demanding their punishment). Such boycotting works, though! It does its job, if we accept that the job of such boycotting is to relieve guilt. I am able to evacuate my guilt and frustration precisely by creating a “fictimization” of myself at the hands of some metonym: Big Pharma, greedy bankers, capitalism or whatever the chosen villain might be. Timothy Morton explains this logic in BEAUTIFUL SOUL SYNDROME (2009): I see myself as good-intentioned, kind, gentle healer or doctor, then I identify some innocent people who must be protected from some other guilty evildoers. Such a worldview is precisely what spreads evil itself, that is, perpetuates the very conditions it decries.
Your discussion of moral superiority and masturbation also reminds me of the idea: all moral outrage is the search for narcissistic supply. My theory about narcissistic supply (N.S.) is that it is not pleasure, but rather meaning which it provides. Life loses its color when we do not get enough N.S. Moral outrage is a “quick fix,” it gives our lives meaning. But this is only a stopgap measure which treats the effects rather than the cause of such nihilism.
I do think the Stoic idea of bearance and forbearance is relevant here. The idea from Stoicism is that we should bear those things which irritate us (read: our obsessions), and forbear those reactions which alleviate our irritation (read: our compulsions). This is not the philosophy of tolerance, which as Zizek pointed out, amounts to the same thing as a philosophy of intolerance. Rather, Stoicism advocates that it is virtuous to withhold judgment of externals and to reserve judgment only to internal things, judgments themselves. Any belief that something out there is evil _is itself the evil it sees in the world_. As Timothy Morton put it, evil is not in the eye of the beholder, evil is the eye that sees evil as something “out there.” Stoicism is identical with Jung’s retraction of projection as part of the Shadow integration work which occurs during individuation. Retracting projections means no longer seeing the other as a villain, as an X which prevents society from functioning harmoniously or prevents your personal happiness from fully actualizing. Realizing the lack in the Other means not only accepting that the Other doesn’t have the answer you’re looking for, but also that the Other is powerless to affect you — all affection is auto-affection, in some sense. So it’s up to us whether we want to get worked up in moral outrage while blaming someone or something else for outraging us, or to accept that we can only ever cause ourselves to be outraged — that we are not only the effects but also the cause of our own mental state at any given moment. And, that we are powerless to change the effects but that changing the cause is in our power, i.e. we do have the power to stop judging external things as good/bad and to reserve value judgments only to internal judgments themselves.
Maybe Stoicism is utterly boring in this conversation, and if so I apologize, but I really like the idea of bearance/forbearance. If those words are unusual, think of bearance as abstinence from those compulsions which would relieve us of the suffering caused by our obsessions. As CG Jung put it, all neurosis is caused by the avoidance of suffering. I even think, in some way, all guilt is caused by the avoidance of suffering, because to avoid suffering is an act of self-betrayal. Thus Lacan’s mysterious quip “the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one’s [unconscious] desire” can be read as follows: giving ground relative to my desire is avoiding suffering. Giving ground is submitting to the Other’s mastery. I submit precisely out of this avoidance of suffering, out of a compulsive evacuation of frustration, whereas the master is the one who is willing to suffer more, to give up more. I might even say, the master gives up where the slave gives in. All submission is a “giving in” to those who have “given up” more — excuse the poetic language, I am just trying to get across the point that the dominant term in any pair is the one willing to sacrifice more, while the submissive term is the one unwilling to bear the pain of suffering. I may claim that I am suffering from guilt, but indeed, I only feel guilt because I already avoided suffering before — I am haunted by a residual of my own avoidance of suffering. Hence Jung’s claim that pain avoidance is at the root of all neurosis.
On the critique of abstraction: Hilman makes the same claim, that abstraction is general, imprecise, decoupled from practicality. Hillman argues that it is the image which is particular, precise, inexhaustible, non-diminishing, over-determined. Deleuze also critiques abstract generalization in BERGSONISM (1966) by claiming that, for instance, all opposition/dualism/black-and-white binary thinking is hindered by its inability to think precisely: opposites are hopelessly general, and two generalities does not a precision make. Opposition, indeed all quantitative thinking is abstract, because experience is continuous. Abstractions “cut into” this continuity when they perceive continuous qualities as discrete quantities, and in so doing, change them irrevocably — collapsing the virtual into the concrete, for instance.
What’s funny is that concrete is usually thought of as the antonym of abstract, but in my opinion, I would reverse this: concrete (in the sense of actually-existing quantities) is the abstraction, for all we actually have are continuous (non-discrete) qualities. We think of the abstraction as continuity, but indeed, continuity is all we know, and the discrete is what is truly the abstraction — definition, distinction, cleaving into the continuous of experience (which seems to be a verb) and producing the discrete (i.e. nouns).
So, now the question of concrete proposals — to this I defer to Buckminster Fuller and Design Science. I do think that there is something hysteric about asking “what can be done?” insofar as the demand for an answer is the mode of relating of the hysteric. I should know, I’ve been a hysteric most of my life! (Do these things change? Maybe my hysteria has dissolved into something more a bit more rigorous, say, psychosis, who knows…). On a personal level, I have played the hysteric for many years, questioning anyone I perceived as being in power: “Yes, very well, I understand what you’re saying, but what can be done?” I must have confronted hundreds of perceived masters, typically older men, challenging them, undermining them, revealing their impotence, their inability to say what we should really do at the end of the day. Now I have come to think that such behavior is immature on my part. After reading authors like Robert Bly who discuss the “naive man” who sees himself as a good-intentioned healer, helper of others etc, and goes through life on a crusade against injustice … well, that was me up until very recently! Bly nailed me. Now I try to not ask such hysteric questions. This is not to say that concrete things can’t be done, but that asking “what can be done?” is always a hysteric question which gives away power. It is an unanswerable question, made only to be dismissed. Instead of even asking, just do something. There is no “one thing” to be done, there are only things, a plurality, too many things even! If you start now, you will be lucky to have made a tiny dent in all the things you set out to do, so instead of asking what precisely can be done, it’s better to just do the things that need to be done, when they need to be done. Some questions can’t be answered, they can only be dismissed as hysteric (i.e. giving one’s power away). I defer, again, to Bucky Fuller: he never asked perceived masters “yes, but what can be done?” Instead, he invented things that could be done by him.
In a way, asking “what can be done?” is meant to demonstrate that I don’t know what can be done, but this is false — we all know, unconsciously, what we should be doing, what we can do. The desire for bite-size answers is an oral fixation, a demand to be fed. Isn’t asking what can be done precisely the most general or abstract question of all, the most decoupled from reality in some way? Asking precisely, what concrete things can we do, fails to acknowledge that such a question is the most open-ended, general, abstract question there is.
November 12, 2012 at 1:45 am
Levi, I especially enjoyed this blog. I only wish that you had returned to the very citation that opened into this larger criticism of a mode of theory. I’m very invested in the critique of a (certain kind of) critique of conservationism / preservationism, and particularly one focused on the dangers involved in taking too far the rather simple-minded idea that “humans are a part of nature, therefore everything they do is natural, and hence the very concept of nature is undermined.” I think you’ve tapped into one of the many consequences of this line of reasoning, and that it originates in a particular rationalization that is ultimately exceptionalist — an exceptionalist debunking of exceptionalism! This is what we get with a particular reading of Latour and Morton, and a thinking of nature not unlike (a perhaps simplified version of) Cronon. The problem with this Cronon-inspired (or aligned) thinking is that it is fully dependent upon a history of human discourse about nature, and ignores ontology and metaphysics entirely. Not much is to be gained by deconstructing conservationist and preservationist texts to poke fun at their anthropocentrism and exceptionalism, because the entire deconstructive endeavor is first predicated on these!
November 12, 2012 at 2:15 am
Ben,
Sadly I’m in the Spinozist camp that argues there’s only nature or immanence. So alas, I can’t help you there. The thing to be avoided is the idea that all manifestations of nature are “good”. There are plenty of terrible things in immanence and networks won’t save us.
November 12, 2012 at 2:31 am
I am as well. Spinoza provides the better response to this critique: it’s not that there is no nature, but that there is only nature. What I generally find is that the points of agreement in these perspectives with Spinoza are few and slight. And your last point here is also answered in Ethics — that which is good preserves life and happiness (and his happiness is Epicurean).
November 12, 2012 at 2:42 am
Dr Sinthome, those beasty pictures are GORGEOUS.
November 12, 2012 at 2:43 am
Sorry that comment should have been on the top post
November 12, 2012 at 7:46 am
I think EP Thompson made these general points 35 years ago in “The Poverty of Theory, or an Orrery of Errors” (http://www.scribd.com/doc/33540213/Poverty-of-Theory-Thompson-E-P), using “theology” rather than “underpants gnomes.” Will this rant be more successful? Only time will tell!
November 12, 2012 at 10:29 am
A critique that renders nothing critical (i.e. unstable) isn’t worthy of the name — it’s just talk. More genuine *political* critiques were written from prison than from the academy. Is it even possible to be genuinely critical from within an academic environment? The whole system seems set against it. In the university you can just talk — and I’m liberal enough to think that ‘just talk’ is extremely valuable in its own right but it’s not critique.
When people talk about ‘being critical’ as an ‘attitude’ or ‘position’ or, even worse, a ‘perspective’ I lose my mind. Critique qua rendering critical should be an *aspiration* — something that few have realised and which is only usually realisable some time after the text is written. The Communist Manifesto wasn’t a ‘critical’ text in the important sense when Marx and Engels finished writing it. It became such as it was translated, printed, re-printed, smuggled into workplaces, heatedly debated, burned, denounced, etc.
‘How significant are your signifiers? … Not so much? Then chasten your self-righteousness!’
The thing about the ‘miniaturisation of critique,’ as Latour puts it, is that we all get to play at it — whatever we do. We get ‘a critical thinker in every home.’ As such anyone can be critical at pretty much any time about anything — and us ‘Critical Scholars’ pride ourselves in taking *everything* critically, a quizzically askew smirk fixed to our faces at all times, nose curled, eyes rolling, ostentatiously broadcasting our theatrical disdain for all things seemingly fixed and firm. Actually, a better word for this so-called ‘critique’ is ‘cynicism’ — a generic, nonspecific, all-encompassing naysaying, to no end at all.
Critique is something far more, something that eludes almost all of us. Perhaps it is something that eludes any individual; perhaps it is a collective accomplishment that is as much to do with what we do with texts as what we write in them.
November 12, 2012 at 3:43 pm
for those of us outside the paywall:
Click to access 89-CRITICAL-INQUIRY-GB.pdf
November 12, 2012 at 8:57 pm
What to do with critique, what to do with critique…
There’s some hard truth being spilt here, and this community of critics – this ‘we’ – often falls into the routine of launching attacks from a safe distance at people who are not “doing it right”. But there are some mischaracterizations here of critical theorists (in the broad sense of the term as I see it used here, beyond than the Frankfurt School).
I think it is a leap to say that anti-capitalist critics all want a complete revolution of the social that will follow from their work. Many of the honest postructuralists, deconstructionists, and critical theorists that you don’t believe go far enough in positing a program that will enact real change in material conditions are cautious about writing such a program. Revolution in the party system of social movements has a pretty horrific track record and you rightly note their shortcomings, but this came from trying to ‘write a perfect society’ and then construct it. A writer and critic should not be tasked with partaking in suh a construction, disaster soon arises, and those plans need to be subjected to what other writer/critics do best – internal critique of peers.
But the narrow practice of critique and its wide, grand theorizing can still have a positive effect on the network by giving the conceptual tools to spot an egotistical pretender and shift debates around more vital topics. The disconnect is a serious problem between the academies and public sphere, but radical construction need not follow radical critique for something “real” to “happen”; there must have been all kinds of theory-infused conversations that occurred imperceptibly before something as “action-packed” as the Occupy movement could take place. I see thinkers like Foucault and Derrida as extremely sensitive to vanguard parties yet still using their analytic and literary genius to turn their reader’s attention on the right problems. Thisis not the same as coming up with a plan though.
Thanks for the steady stream of blog posts, you yourself are opening up a space to debate and critique of each other’s thought and that is something.
November 12, 2012 at 10:05 pm
Good rant Levi.
The reference to Latour’s article provided above is appropriate. The point your make also reminds of a problem presented by David Hume, also known as Hume’s Guillotine. According to Hume, many social commentators proceed from descriptive statements about “what is” to prescriptive statements about “what ought to be”. The problem, as you also point out, is that they do not infer how to achieve prescription out of description.
As Hume writes in his Treatise of Human Nature,
“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.”
I think this is where Latour’s notion/practice of compositionism is useful, since it is not anchored on the negation of what-is (as critique usually does) but on the construction of what ought-to-be.
November 13, 2012 at 4:26 am
Here’s a whole chapter full of answers, divided up into phases and everything. It’s the most comprehensive solution I have ever read:
Click to access dgr-strategy-full.pdf
November 16, 2012 at 1:09 am
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2012/10/do-you-get-it-now.html
November 16, 2012 at 1:10 am
…I omitted from the post the fact that I was described as a hysteric for recommending that something, rather than nothing at all than carp, might be a good thing to do…
November 16, 2012 at 8:57 pm
Spoke with a ‘Marxist’ phd candidate recently who claimed David Graeber was an ‘opportunist’ and that his work was ‘transhistorical’; honestly, a computer algorithm completing representing this ‘style’ of ‘critique’ wouldn’t exceed a hundred lines of code. The best thinkers, particularly in terms of political economics, tend to have read Capital (unlike most academic Marxists) but tend not too eagerly to identify with any one political position or movement. The average academic Marxist talks loudly about the supposed implications of capital without having even once opened the business section of the newspaper. The divergence between their methodology, particularly their engagement with empirical data, and that of Marx himself is stunning. Academic Marxism is largely identical with the ‘critical critics’ that the young Marx lampoons in The Holy Family.
The affinity toward Marxism for most academic Marxists overwhelmingly originates out of a vague affinity toward the politics of Marx, or rather the fashionable appearance of these politics. For them, using Marx’s writing to understand economics and society is an afterthought at best.
November 17, 2012 at 2:06 am
You point out that Jeff Shantz’s entire text could disabuse you of your position. Although your wider argument is notable, in his case to assume that there are no concrete proposals might indeed be an error. I haven’t read it, but from the blurb at http://jeffshantz.ca/greensyndicalismbook :
‘In Green Syndicalism, Shantz issues a call to action to the environmental movement and labor activists, particularly rank and file workers, to join forces in a common struggle to protect the environment from capitalism, corporate greed, and the extraction of resources. He argues for a major transformation to address the “jobs versus the environment” rhetoric that divides these two groups along lines of race and class. Combining practical initiatives and theoretical perspectives, Shantz offers an approach that brings together radical ecology and revolutionary unionism in a promising vision of green politics.’
November 17, 2012 at 1:21 pm
[…] https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/ […]
November 19, 2012 at 3:35 pm
“What I wonder is just what we’re supposed to do even if all of this is true? What, given existing conditions, are we to do if all of this is right? At least green consumerism, conservation, resource management, and things like carbon trading are engaging in activities that are making real differences.” …”But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes.”
Impressive rant. I would argue the cardinal sin of the progressive left is Karl Marx’s “improvement” of the Gotha program and the scheme was ever replicated since by adherents of his school. Even today the remaining marxists explain how Marx improved the insufficient Gotha Program. I’d say Lassalle was right, Marx was wrong.
I am not a supporter of left wing revolutionary social politics, esp. when it is ignorant of technological transformation. However, I acknowledge that the “Keimform” debate within the Left does address the underpant gnome issues.