«I share these concerns, and so I do not say that there is no point in being a Marxist today. There may be. But if there is, the only kind of Marxist that an intellectually honest person can be today is one who is thoroughly disillusioned about Marxism, if not about emancipation, without any hopes in the foreseeable future for the revival of the movements bearing the name, using the vocabulary, or embodied in the traditional form. [...] When I submitted an earlier draft of this piece to a socialist journal, it was rejected (by one of many journals that rejected it on similar grounds) with the comment that it was a “cry of despair.” I do not think that it is, although I cannot pretend that it is a cheery message of hope. It is rather an expression of the pessimism of the mind that Gramsci said must accompany optimism of the will. There is hope, but circling the wagons and reciting the rituals of the old faith in the gathering dark cannot sustain that hope or contribute to its realization. The insights of the tradition, and they are deep and vast, must be preserved and developed. But as a movement the tradition itself is at an end in any historically recognizable form. Resistance to oppression, not least in in its virulently ultra-capitalist neoliberal form, will continue, and may succeed to a greater or lesser degree, but rarely if ever under the old banners. Must we not say, with Marx himself, “Ce qui’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste”? To reject this possibility is to hold off despair with delusion, and coffin the real hopes of our movements in the organic forms they take inside religious traditions that, if effective, threaten to smother those movements; and if not effective, will sideline the true believers as irrelevant. In the Preface to the first edition of Capital, vol. 1, Marx, welcomed “every opinion based on scientific criticism.” The last thing anyone ever seriously influenced by Marx should want to be, is a true believer.» (Justin Schwartz)
Posted on: Thu, 20 Jun 2013 01:33:19 +0000
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