Marcuse and Benhabib / political economy

[Dennis R Redmond]

Friends --

I hate to weigh in here with a shameless plug, but as
far as critiques of Actually Cannibalistic Capitalism go, one of the
most useful guides to the trials and travails of global accumulation is 
not a book, but a newsletter: none other than Doug Henwood's 
"Left Business Observer" -- simply the finest digest of socialist
economic commentary, facts, figures and statistics on who owns/owes what
to whom around here, and worth its weight in refinery-grade 
platinum (you know, all that stuff which used to be called the
relations of production, before the cybermarketeers and theory-markets 
abolished things like "class struggle" and "foodstamps" with even 
greater ideological zeal than their McCarthyite predescessors). LBO's 
address is 250 W 85th Str, New York, NY 10024-3217  -- I know Doug is a
contributor to this listserv, so maybe he can give you more info about
upcoming stuff/websites/subversions (I think he's writing a
book on Wall Street, among other things... yo Doug, you listening to
this?). 

As for Third Wave theory, well, there's lots of good stuff out there, but
one problem is the curious provincialism of American intellectuals:
we're all children of the military-industrial complex, a.k.a. the Cold
War. Hewlett-Kentor is probably correct in saying that 
we need to go back to Adorno, who mapped out a host of Cold 
War ideologies in his Sixties works; the existing English 
translations are unfortunately not so hot (hopefully Bob will remedy this 
problem in the near future), but the original texts (especially 
"Three Studies on Hegel" and "Negative
Dialectics) are startlingly prescient about the 
transformation of the world into Hotel Microsoft. The problem is, the 
Left by and large does not understand or acknowledge the fundamental
reality that the American Empire is shot to hell, that its economic
structures are deeply archaic, its credit superstructure increasingly
worthless, its Cold War economic strategy uncompetitive,
and that the class struggles happening in East Asia
and Central Europe -- the new metropoles of the world-system -- 
are playing the preponderant role in that reorganization of the world
economy taking place before our eyes in the Nineties. In hindsight, you 
couldn't have Thatcherism without Japan Incorporated; nor Reaganomics
without the EC-qua-Eurostate (where else could those financial
surplus-rents be valorized?); nor postmodernism without cable/satellite
TV. 

What Adorno offers, I think, is a blueprint of all this: a series of 
incomparable models of dialectical thought, that is to
say the most general, abstract critiques of the totality -- an
incipient multinational dialectics, if you will, still awaiting its
transnational praxis -- matched by an equivalent commitment (not 
always stated, but resonating in the charge of every word and the 
placement of each concept: proto-feminisms, ecological sympathies, etc.)
to the micropolitical struggles of the day. In other words, a dialectics
attuned to the video age, which can at least give us pointers about a
how and where to start a new kind of collective
intellectual/aesthetic/political Left project.

An overlong way of saying that we intellectuals/activists still have
plenty of work to do.

Peace & out,

Dennis Redmond