The Poetry of the Future
There is a tendency among the Left today — and I mean all varieties of the Left — of being reduced to protecting things. It is a kind of conservatism; saving all the things that capitalism destroys which range from nature to communities, cities, culture and so on. The Left is placed in a very self-defeating nostalgic position, just trying to slow down the movement of history. There is a line by Walter Benjamin that epitomizes that — though I don’t know how he thought of that himself — revolutions are “pulling the emergency chord,” stopping the onrush of the train. I don’t think Marx thought about it like that at all. It seems to me that Marx thought that productivity would increase by getting rid of capitalism. On the level of organization, technology and production, Marx did not want a return to handicraft labour, but to go on into all kinds of complex forms of automation and computerization [as it would emerge] and so.
The historical accident of something like socialism or communism taking place in a place what was essentially a third world country, Russia, an underdeveloped country, that’s made us think of socialism in a way that was not Marx’s way of imagining it. The socialist movement has to itself be inspired by this other type of vision.
Fredric Jameson is interviewed by rabble.ca.
[...] Canavan linked to an interview with rabble.ca’s Aaron Leonard on the occasion of Jameson’s new book [...]
[LINK] Jameson on the future, innovation, and Marxism « A Bit More Detail
February 16, 2012 at 11:59 pm
and that’s why I no longer think of myself as a Marxist.
abushri
February 17, 2012 at 10:34 am
Really? If the revolution has lost you, they could be in real trouble.
gerrycanavan
February 17, 2012 at 10:35 am
The revolution’s not what I’m talking about; more the techno-utopianism/coupled with belief in the concept of History (capital H).
“Productivity would increase by getting rid of capitalism.” What the fuck does that even mean? Productivity is a nationalist idea. It hardly should hold sway for left politics.
abushri
February 17, 2012 at 11:23 am
Well, you know I prefer the less Promethean strains of Marxist thought, say, John Bellamy Foster. Ecological Marxism is still Marxism, don’t you think?
gerrycanavan
February 17, 2012 at 11:44 am
In any argument between feminists and Marxists, identity-theorists and Marxists, anarchists and Marxists, shit, even Keynesians and Marxists, I find myself siding against the Marxists. To me, that’s a pretty significant indicator. I still like Marx, but that’s in spite of anyone who actually considers themselves a Marxist.
abushri
February 18, 2012 at 2:38 am
i think one of the nice things about JBF though is he’s not all that invested in the marxist (western or eastern) notion of History. there’s a small group of academic marxists, of which unfortunately jameson is a part, who are advancing a critique of capitalism based on its inefficiency and wastefulness, basically, and/or its betrayal of enlightenment values, modernity, etc. it’s rhetorically satisfying but pernicious and i think tied to a petit-bourgeois managerial attitude toward capitalism that accepts capitalism’s ideology about itself (progress, universalism, techno-futurism, productivity, etc.) as equivalent to general human flourishing. so that trying to centrally value the things that matter the most to actual people is read as inherently ‘nostalgic,’ ‘defensive,’ ‘against the movement of history.’ and they’re doing this at a time when capitalism has basically given up on trying to legitimize itself, and its ideals are themselves increasingly moribund and ‘nostalgic.’ there’s a version of ‘socialism’ (i’d call it utopian) that’s more or less the manifestation of all the things capitalism promised its middle class but without the the downsides, and that’s the one i think we need to get away from.
traxus4420
February 19, 2012 at 12:16 pm
I don’t disagree that this is a strain of thought, but it seems to me that Jameson pretty commonly frames the sort of demand you’re talking about as the New Left’s “demanding the impossible” — demand that the system actually fulfill its promises, to prove it can’t. I’m not sure the next step necessarily needs to be the claim that socialism can fulfill the promises, either for Fred or more generally.
It seems to me that the whole claim Fred is advancing in his later work on utopia is precisely that utopia ISN’T the perfected version of capitalism’s self-perception; we only mistake that fantasy for utopia because we’re so deep inside the system we can’t think outside its terms.
gerrycanavan
February 19, 2012 at 12:54 pm
i think i made the mistake of conflating capitalism’s ideals (i.e. liberalism and modernism) with its material promises. these actually seem distinct to me. like i would put most of the new left’s “demanding the impossible” rhetoric under the category of “what people actually want,” however imperfectly understood at times. in the interview he uses the example of full employment, which for him is an example of a nostalgic, conservative demand (there he also sidesteps the common tactical understanding of “demanding the impossible,” that it’s used not in ignorance of capitalism’s incapacity to satisfy the demand, but to expose that incapacity). what i’m sloppily calling capitalism’s ‘ideals’ are ideological systems alternately used to legitimate or apologize for it and to criticize/regulate its ‘excesses’ (socialism too can be recruited for this purpose). i also conflated jameson with a broader utopian discourse, and you’re right that for him utopia is negative and critical. but i question how much of a difference that makes in practice – it seems a lot like negative theology, where god exists and we’re ethically obligated to choose him, but our approach is infinitely deferred, and all we can do is trace the form of history/revelation. but that’s where i’d follow someone like graeber, who denies ‘we’ are so deep in the system that we can’t think outside its terms, insisting that we can, and re-narrating our history is one way of doing that.
traxus4420
February 19, 2012 at 2:08 pm
like for example, jameson is (with marx, though i’m not sure if that’s accurate) using capitalism’s terms (productivity, technological progress, etc.) to point the way beyond capitalism. you could say he’s just engaging in critical utopistics here, just critiquing the positive, naive utopian content of nostalgic, conservative anticapitalism and not advocating a positive technomodernist utopia. but it’s hard for me to see that as a very functional difference, or what value it has if you think (like me) that futurism and modernism are just as outmoded as a return to nature.
traxus4420
February 19, 2012 at 2:19 pm
On these points I think you and I share a critique of Jameson – I’m pretty sympathetic to the position that utopia doesn’t have to be mere negative theology.
gerrycanavan
February 19, 2012 at 2:24 pm