[FRA:] [marxistphilosophy] Purge of the Left

[Fred Welfare]

Concerning Marxism, the teleological aspects must be jettisoned. Contestation for the state is taking dramatically different directions than predicted by Marx. Fresh predictions are necessary - to rewrite or rehash old marxist analyses in terms of revolution is simply nonsense. The class analysis of marxism is too weak. Consider merely the Russian Revolution and the importance of understanding the relative sizes of the classes in question, the increased number of classes from Marx's analysis and their definitions, their forms of organization, their relationships to each other, the ease in which Stalin manipulated them, the nature of disagreement within his own party, and the putative end in which he did it for! I won't go into Mao's and Ho's manipulations!!  The analytic of capitalism from Marx in  terms of the history of economics is the strongest remaining piece left. What we need is a way of seeing how capitalism operates from our more informed
 historical perspective.
 
Concerning the student left, police reactions, read bureaucratic reactions, to student protests from 68 on became more and more violent, consider Japan and Mexico City. Due to the lack of guidance from "professional" leftists, these students metamorphosed into current terror units but not eclipsing the traditional mafias, IRA, neonazi's, etc. and their dialectic with the police. It just seems to me that Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and even Habermas were unable to produce the necessary guidance and anarchy reigned. This implies to me an underlying conservatism in their views on social movements: they are not addressing the socializing subsystems of society. 
 
 The definition of the 'left' has changed dramatically. Consider the tremendous rise in crime from the early 60's which did not abate until the 90's. Now the atmosphere of security against terror has become almost complete but it was an obvious result (increasing regulations even in the context of idolatrous deregulation) by the late 70's.
 
The disappearance of left wing content is glaring. Marx pointed out that we must start with the analysis of the population but then he dropped that line in the Grundisse. Instead of understanding the nonsense of reproduction and marriage in our traditional society, gay folk want to get married and now have  the legal right. Our species being has eclipsed our social being and we live in disorder and complexity.  The basis for mate selection, the basis of the decision to raise a child under one or another religion (which still persists), the basis of the identity of offspring in the context of parental voluntarism (to carry to term or not), the basis of student's value commitments, and the basis of affective bias in gender relations in the family and in kinship structures generally from family to tribe? to clan?? to ethnic group to race, has been completely missing since the interest in genetic analyses and statistical analysis has become dominant. (I
 once had hope that Levi-Strauss would solve the puzzles!) There is no political label that serves as a solution: socialism is as bad or worse than capitalism or democracy. These terms have lost their concrete meaning. Unless we are completely overshadowed by a secret plutocracy, the meaning and relevance of freedom, equality, and power has taken on a sinister valence. Humans are the mercy of a pattern of continuous war-making which impacts decisively on life-styles, occupations, and all of the "choices" we think we have.
 
Gouldner's article in Telos, "Stalinism" and his book, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology" which is a continuation of his "Coming Crisis of Western Sociology," are very insightful and states the objective of my post better than I have. However, if we look for alternatives, Parsons analysis of the problem in 1977, 'Evolution of Societies,' albeit filled with nonsense, does make some important claims, at least in terms of his main theme: 'the problem is - integration.' Lastly, Habermas' work was dismissed by Gouldner in '76, and Habermas' latest moves towards a somewhat complicated religious compromise do not auger well for a political transformation, but his main themes concerning communication and normativity seem to have created some ground or space to work in. 
 
What is missing is an agenda that is relevant: we could at least insist on cost-limiting and price-setting for sex.

Mr. Fred G. Welfare