John Ransom wrote:
>Communists have been incredibly puritanical. Stalin's movement to
>"eliminate the Kulak's as a class"; Mao and Chiang Ching's cultural
>revolution are both real big examples.<<
Doug: >>This is deeply unfair to Marxists and Marxism. Why is it that
anyone who generalizes wildly about "postmodernism" is rebuked for doing
violence to a diverse collection of thinkers, but you can get away with
the same sort of recklessness when characterizing Marxists. You know,
Marxists have been among the most severe critics of Stalinism and Maoism,
and for all the right reasons. Many of the early Bolsheviks even were
sexual and aesthetic radicals, as are many, if not most, of the Marxists
I know today. These puritanical/oppressive tendencies of Stalin and Mao
have as much to do with Russian and Chinese history as they do with that
grand abstraction known as Marxism. Doug <<<
I wonder if we're not all into a bit of slippage here: Is the state and
party sanctioned -- but also popularly supported, I'm told -- "purges" of
the kulaks in the 1920's and during the *civil war*, and also of the
"capitalist roaders" [read: CCP bureaucrats and bourgeois intellectuals] in
the cultural revolution period the same thing as racial, or ethnic, or,
say, aesthetic-based purges/purifications? Doesn't the policy, or
mandate, of permanent class struggle (or revolution) within
post-revolutionary states require -- and rightfully so, I'd argue -- such
"purifications" of exploitative classes, or counterevolutionary
intellectuals? "Purification" is simply the wrong word for class
struggle -- and its attendant policies, etc. -- and I, for one, think it
is the State's (and populace's) responsibility to create and sustain a
genuinely democartic and socialist culture. In short, why be against
"purging" class "enemies"? Which does not mean, a la Stalin, murdering
them. Power is a tool, and there is no such thing as freedom, or autonomy
either. Even so establishmentarian, and liberal, a political scientist as
Charles Lindbloom can see the value,and really the necessity, of
fomenting and, yes, institutionalizing a "perceptoral" system which is
out to educate and re-educate, out to create a, say, socialist or a
liberal democratic culture and society (check out his words on the GPCR
in Politics and Markets). Isn't something like that always
already happening, and wouldn't Foucault -- the implied author of DP
and HS and BOC, at least -- agree with this? If not, why not?
This means, of course, that power will be at work evrywhere, *as
always.* The point is to make its deployment as humanely rational and
participatory as possible, and the later Foucault, I acknowledge,
might turn in his grave over my saying this; at the same time, he might
not: depends upon how much of a "liberal" -- or how much a
"materialist" -- you want to make him to be. He certainly wasn't naive
about the inevitability of power in comlpex societies, nor is there much
warrant for a *libertarian*-anarchic perspective or ideology in his work.
It ain't that simple. But I have no idea how one can use him to raise or
help answer questions about collective or class struggle, and such -- at
least, how to do this and remain "in the true" to the liberal or anarcho
reading of him. I'm game for hearing answers to my questions here.
And with Colin, I'd love to hear what a genuinely subversive
left-liberal is? Rorty? Ralph Nader? FDR?
In other, longer, words, two points here:
1.) I'm all for purging kulaks, landlords, Trumps, etc, even if this means
hanging them -- a la Lenin -- in a time of civil war in which the fate of
"the masses" and socialism lies in the balance. Yes, this is rather
pretentious and condescending for me to say so, but then so is the
knee-jerk, opposite reaction to condemn or dismiss Lenin or Mao, and
the millions who worked "with" them, and for justice. This is not to
endorse Stalin's real and horrible and I'd say much different purges
of so many. Nor is this directed towards John's responses, per se.
2.) On Mao: has anyone, anywhere, actually read Mao, or
researched the Cultural Revolution or Great Leap. I exaggerate, but let
me defend not so much Mao as the real problems he sought to adress, his
writings, and esp. the well nigh unrepresentable complexity of the GPCR.
NOt to mention the currently insurmountable difficulties in researching
this. But I can't resist: in Mao's writings during the GPCR you do not find
him advocating real, Stalinist purges. The word was always rehabilitation,
not execution . I think waging war against a social division of labor is
different than "purging"; or if you want this word, then I'm all for this
type of purging, in these contexts. I'm down with a "rehabilitation"- project,
in that context and for those reasons. You bet I'd go down to the countryside
for 5 months. Who was responsible for most of the deaths then? The PLA.
Who claimed the most victims? The Red Guards. Were they ultimately betrayed?
Yes, and Mao has a lot to answer for. So do we all.
But let's beware eurocentrism, shall we? No one adequately
understands what happened, or for what reasons.
Certainly the avant-garde (Yimou/ Kaige, others) doesn't simply demonize
Mao and the GPCR, nor do other dissident intellectuals I've read. To
equate Mao, and all that happened during his now-in, now-out, often
tenuous "reign", with Stalin and the USSR is, at best, ignorant. btw,
the best single history of all this (that I know of) is Gerald Meisner's
*Mao's China and After*: he's a leftist (which I think can only mean
socialist or some anarchic version thereof, a fine scholar, and he holds
Mao et al. up to the (marxian) standards they ought to be judged by, so
there's much balanced criticism and evaluation in the text.)
>> Steve and John:
Foucault's remarks are rightly interpreted as liberal... They
arise from a concern with the status of the subject and an awareness of
the bureaucratic rationalism of biopolitics. Weber and Freud would
have said the same thing - Freud actually did, wondering would would
replace the cathartic function of the class struggle in the USSR after
the revolution (Civ and Its Discontents).<<
Freud and Weber as liberals? Only in some complex sense, I'd think. You
could also check the ft notes to Freud's Future of an Illusion, where he
explicitly and affirmatively exempts the USSR from his criticism of the
arrested development of
Western, bourgeois society-- I beleive he calls it a fascinating, brave
experiment, or some such. Weber was a staunch imperialist, despite his
anti anti-semitism, which does, come to think of it, fit in well with
actually existing liberalism. Liberalism *is* bureaucratic rationalism
and biopolitics. I have no idea how Foucault could be anything like a
liberal in Freud's or Weber's sense. Check out his interview in re Weber
in The Foucault Effect, where he explicitly distances himself from W's
project (of ideal-types, and critique of a certain "rationality" as
such). "Questions of Method" I think. Plus, his work is anti- Freud
(for better or worse in re. psychic, Ucs. repression).
I'd said:
>>Isn't the level of abstraction -- and the homology it would require --
needed to equate the "purification"-impulse within revolutionary
movements/moments (and I wouldn't agree with the word-choice here,
myself), to racial purges/cleanses a rather high one? Too high, I'd
argue, because it negates the specificities of each of these moments.<<
John:
>>> The "because" in the last sentence above doesn't
work. An abstraction can't be too high because it negates specificities,
as that is what abstractions do. <<
John, good point. Plus, abstraction is absolutely crucial. But not all
of them are equal, of course, and they've gottta have that movement nack
and forth, from the abstract to the concrete and back again (a la Marx,
for one). In other words, I'd need the details -- and the
determinations -- to be at all convinced, myself, that there is an
instructive or real homology, or regularity in dispersion, at work here.
Remember how Foucault once refused to answer questions about the gulag by
way of a concept? Of course I don't have all the details or answers
here-- we've just got different assumptions, perspectives or starting
points. We can at this time only be more or less aware of these, but they
do indeed matter, as I'm sure you'd agree. Alas, the time of research and
writing is not the time of email (!).
>>If it sounds like a cheap shot to you, then it sounds like a
cheap shot to you. But I respectfully disagree. Communists have been incredibly
puritanical. Stalin's movement to "eliminate the Kulak's as a class"; Mao
and Chiang Ching's cultural revolution are both real big examples. Need I
mention the "purge trials"? For more tempest in a teacup versions of the
same we can look to the rampant sectarianism and endless splits typical
of the history of communist groups in Europe and the United States --
though this was somewhat muted in the U.S. <<< [John]
Yes, I've been all too close to some of these tempests-in-teapots. Sparts?!
As for Mao, I've rambled enough I'm sure. One has to be ambivalent about
him, his writings, and "his" policies and actions as "post-revolutionary"
leader (not an adjective he'd accept); I don't think there is any
informed way around that. I think Doug and I are
correct, though, in questioning this easy equivalence b/w race/ethnicity
and class, and purges thereof. Same goes for the GPCR. I hope I'm
teasing out the complexities of this, and not sounding like Kurtz
("exterminate all the brutes"). The point, too, is to suggest that my
positions here are not, I think, antithetical to Foucaultian-informed ones.
The time of email....
Best,
Daniel Vukovich
Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
University of Illinois at U-C
Urbana, IL 61801