An apocryphal story of relating to Freud is of the man who came to visit him, disturbed by dreams of a sexual nature. ‘All I know” he says, “is that the woman in my dreams isn’t my mother.’ For Freud, of course, that is exactly who it was. It felt a bit like that listening to Andrew Kliman in London last Friday. As a member of the newly formed Marxist Humanist Committee, and author of the impressive study “Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital’” his friends this side of the pond constitute the ‘Hobgoblin’ group. Ostensibly, Kliman had been invited over to discuss ‘alternatives to capitalism’ but ended up forcefully denying that Moishe Postone’s magisterial study, ‘Time Labour and Social Domination’ (TL&SD) is really what we need to comprehend and, eventually, supercede. Kliman’s talk mirrored Postone’s own ideas so closely that’s it’s hard not to conclude that Postone’s book is having a much more profound effect on the non-sectarian left than any of them are prepared to admit, lest they are seen to lose that most important and very peculiar left-wing virility test - who can claim to remain most loyal to ‘the working class.’

In his talk Kliman spelt out in a clear manner that value – as the mediator of human relations – is the subject that needs to be overcome if we are all to move towards creating a fully human society.

It is of no coincidence that a former colleague and teacher of Kliman and his colleagues in the USA was Raya Dunayevskaya, one-time secretary to Leon Trotsky, and herself one of the most seriously engaged scholars of Hegel and Marx in the Twentieth Century. She broke with Trotsky over the question of Soviet Russia, and went on to help cleave an important section of the American civil rights movement towards Marxism in the 1960s. She engaged in a long and critical dialogue with Herbert Marcuse, himself was one of the century’s leading Marxist philosophers, and who remains to this day criminally misunderstood by (and to their own detriment) nearly the whole of the mainstream Left.

Moishe Postone, one of the most sophisticated ‘dissident’ Marxists of recent times, has been seriously assessed and critiqued by members of Kliman’s group, with some more than others prepared to see the potential charge within the ideas of his book TL&SD. (The only other Anglo-Saxon group who admit to having actually tried to engage with Moishe Postone’s book TL&SD are the Brighton based group ‘Aufheben’; the hatchet job they attempted to make on it a little while ago was so poor that the authors couldn’t even bring themselves to sign their names to it; all this in a journal that has become so wooden it’s hardly surprising they only manage to knock out a couple of hundred each issue. What the Aufhebeners need to get to grips with is that we can and should seek to open up the Marxian categories in an exciting and engaging way to people, and not keep ideas locked away in the academic branch of ‘Hotel Abyss.’ Some hope indeed!)

At Kliman’s talk in London it was evident that Postone’s influence had rubbed off in a positive manner, although, just like Freud’s famous patient, he was loathe to admit it himself. And so it was that Marcuse’s ghost stalked the room that night as well! His negative dialectic underpinned Kliman’s analysis throughout most of the talk. Kliman outlined the nature of society as it is constituted in 2008, and then put under the spotlight those solutions offered up by anti-capitalists today. He interrogated the adherents of Proudhon past and present, whose most vocal antecedents today attack finance capital for being the root of all evil. Another school of thought ranged in opposition to free-market capitalism, and who attempt to offer up a vision of an alternative society are supporters of the PARECON movement. Kliman outlined why opponents of capitalism cannot sidestep the issue of that most important Marxian category –value- and the absolutely critical role that labour-time plays in the creation of surplus value, the category that gives capital its fluid and dynamic character, and at the same time keeps us all in chains.

Kliman’s colleague and partner Anne Jaclard, extended this line of thought to show how the befuddled thinking within most of the Left today means that ‘capital’ as a category has become totally reified. This process has led to all kinds of glaring errors, whereby any enemy of what is perceived to be ‘American imperialism’ is given affirmation by it’s critics, hence the creation of a completely suicidal ontology by the mainstream Left. The most noisy, vulgar manifestation of this position has assumed control at the helm of the anti-war movement in Britain, and has helped to ensure that no engagement with critical thought is acceptable, except the shouty shouty megaphone one, the one parroting out demands for the destruction of the so called ‘American client state’ in the Middle East - Israel. And behind this barricade of course, lurks the most disgusting anti-semitism. Such a viewpoint does nothing to assist the Palestinians, but does in fact ensure the entrenchment of hard-line attitudes everywhere. It’s a line most vociferously peddled by the ever dwindling band of the Socialist Workers; others only tend to join their receding ranks at anti-war demos out of naivety or a misplaced desperation to at least ‘do something.’

And so Kliman and Jaclard’s talk was in danger of developing into a bracing and sophisticated analysis, one that, if replicated, is more than capable of winning a large and sympathetic audience in these dark days.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before from the floor the bear-baiting started, and Kliman’s analysis receded into that well worn defensive position shared amongst all the traditional-marxists everywhere. Some troglodyte from one of the 57 varieties of Trotskyism - who had, it seemed, completely failed to grasp the underlying tenor of Kliman’s analysis - held him to account for his failure to mention ‘the working class’ and their role in leading us to the glorious socialist paradise. And so Kliman declared himself a fully paid up, red in tooth and claw adherent to the cause of the proletariat: and this is where, we are sorry to say, his project loses its moorings and is cast adrift. In 2008, the minute we start to posit a supra-historical agent capable of leading us out of this barbaric society, opponents of the system lose any of the critical charge they might be building up.

And so the auto-marxist robot in the audience reminded us of that worn out and very tired formula, where ‘the working class’ would take upon its shoulders the historical mission and set everything the right way up, and we could all go marching into the future, prepared to fulfill whatever task the party/proletariat/committee/bureau of Ideas-on-the-back of the Worker’s Fag-Packet had decided was our duty. For the auto-marxists, it remains a simple case of taking your side – between ‘the bourgeoisie’ and ‘the proletariat.’ If only things were so simple! Instead, such an analysis, which fails to account for the deep structure of capital, fools itself into supposing that an enlightened bureaucracy can short-cut the imperative of valorisation; time and time again this has shown to lead to the hunting out of scapegoats for the failure of the system to meet basic needs. The firing squad is never far behind.

To be fair, Kliman did qualify his support for such a position. In contrast to the sectarian simpleton in the audience trying to bracket him in, Kliman pointed out that there is more than just the one agent able to act other than the (fetishised) working class, and furthermore, that he concurred with Marx’s vision – the project facing humanity was the self abolition of the working class.

In 2008 such a phrase can, however, hide a multitude of sins. In today’s sophisticated society, where people are, - often against their will - press-ganged into joining The Forced Labour Front, where the modern day equivalent of the 1945 American Martial Plan is the roping-in of everyone at all levels of society, to the only cause worth fighting for; left-wing and neo-con politicians alike, the clergy, TV celebrities and pop stars – all of them united in one demand - for the creation of work, work work! And despite their gargantuan efforts, still they fail dismally in the task. Increasingly, we live in a society where millions, if not billions, are forced to actually live outside of society itself, as ‘monetary subjects without money’ as the German writer and critic Robert Kurz puts it. This is a society where the working class is shrinking in size, as that invisible mediator, surplus value operates unmolested, and where technology succeeds in throwing people out of jobs and abolishing livelihoods every minute of the day - everywhere. More and more, people scrabble around, desperate for a job, any job, even if that job is diametrically opposed in helping them and all those around them meet their actual needs, now or in our (polluted) future. At the same time, this is a society of incredible intellectual sophistication, with more people than ever before able to engage in all kinds of activities devoid of physical exploitation: But, on the flipside of this, is a society where the highest echelons of the working class are busily engaged in the cutting edge of the ‘valorization process’ itself, and who increasingly come to resemble a technologically elite caste, cut off from the rest of society. To reduce the project of liberation to a simple minded binary of ‘either/or’ and ‘bourgeoisie versus proletariat’ won’t convince anyone worth their salt of the usefulness of trying to revive the socialist project in 2008.

Towards the end of his talk, Kliman denied that Postone had any real relevance to the utopian project. Wrong. (Freud called this act of denial repression) Someone else claimed that the working class are growing in size. Wrong again. What is growing in size are the slums and favellas, whose polluted winds cover everyone in a finely powdered dust of human shit, whether they be rich or poor, order-giver or order-taker. Kliman summed up by claiming that Postone, in his book TL&SD, sees the liberating subject as ‘technology’ instead of the working class (Sorry, wrong again.) On the contrary, it is fair to say that Postone maintains that, still, the abolition of the working class is the act of the working class themselves. No mind; for our part we look forward to Andrew Kliman’s next visit to our lil’ ol’ London town; we just hope he goes away and meditates on the implications of Moishe Postone’s ideas a little more deeply for the return trip…

               

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Critical Fragments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.