@skepoet / Derick Varn, 4 décembre 2021 -
"The reason why battles about political correctness, call-out culture, and cancel culture (to name its many incarnations) seem key is that they are a sign of a left without a movement or a program. Furthermore, it is not just political will why such a program does not exist. Without this, distinctions emerge, and mutual constitutive feedback loops emerge (...). Without a program that is in dialogue with and emergent from the social base of Marxian socialism—the proletariat and those who are proletarianized—the focus on consumption and self-identity is what follows.
I left North Star and Zero for this reason: I saw neither as trying to understand Marxists’ historical contribution to liberal problems (which were due to Marxist political groupings, research programs, and political programs stagnating in the middle of the twentieth century). The reasons for that are beyond the scope of this one letter and has been my own research focus for at least five years. Moral panics and five-minute hates are inevitable in this environment as one’s politics cannot be manifested as part of a larger movement but only as an assertion of one’s priorities. I have seen this in the debates about the Democratic Socialists of America trying to form anything like a coherent program to which it could bind members, seeing the continual re-emergence of sectarian consciousness, even within the new Democratic Socialist left, that has become increasingly important to its internal functioning. The fact so much hay has been made about the true political character of small business transactions by people who identify as socialists illustrates that people are either profoundly confused or that the political mission seems profoundly stalled. To engage in the debates about “wokeness” or “anti-wokeness” is to grant the dominant narrative legitimacy—if you want to undermine this impasse, one must expose historical and material origins, not merely by asserting its intellectual genealogy, but looking at what the causal matrix is behind the genealogy.
(...) I have come to point to the deeper pathologies to which we could not escape and hopefully bury them. If you found much of this letter boring, this is a good sign. What was important is the inability of any involved to look at what led to the kinds of dysfunctions of the left today, not merely to condemn them as if it were just political bad faith or a capitalist conspiracy that leads to these breakdowns. (...)
I miss Mark Fisher and several of the other people I have mentioned in this letter—whatever my disagreements with them. You may have noticed how much I have used the adjective “late.” Many of the people involved did not live to see this impasse and were involved for decades, and their deaths come from varied reasons: age, cancer, strokes, depression. Many involved in these debates have died and died young. Let us honor them, not by hagiography, but by doing what they tried to do and could not finish: understanding why we got here so one day we can see a way out beyond merely pointing to the mote in someone else’s eye. (...) While political betrayal and ideological bad faith are real things and should be monitored against, there are times where one should hate the game and not the players. Obsessions with political errors as a proof of a capitalist conspiracy to suppress some supposedly socialist truths are not just a simpleton’s understanding history, but they cut against the Marxist tradition of analysis to which many of us claim a commitment."
Source : https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/12/letter-letting-the-dead-be-buried
