Underground weirdness
Brockley, South London, mid August. It’s a balmy evening and the sun is just setting a beautiful shade of red. We have arranged to meet the Platypus London collective. In the Brockley Barge, a more bucolic setting is hard to imagine, but upon arrival our spirits drop when we realize our destination is in fact a typical Wetherspoons boozer, replete with the familiar royal blue ash-tray franchise coating. It looms up to dominate the high street with its tarty but severe wedding cake outside decor. It doesn’t look much fun. We descend into its jaws. We are soon relieved, however, to find that it is an affable local. The general blitz spirit fug of ‘we are all in this together’ has yet to lift in this particular post-riot London settling of spit and sawdust.
The Platypus group leader is in town, over from Chicago, having been engaged in tentative kisses and cuddles with one of the British Communist parties. I have opted to come down to south London and shake the Chairman’s hand and buy him a drink. The Chairman has been a student of Moishe Postone at Chicago university, the author of the seminal (and much banged on about at Principia Dialectica) Time, Labor and Social Domination. I want to see where it all went wrong. How could the Chairman be so well read, well taught, but still, as they say in south London, well stupid? The plot would be unraveled.
We descended lower and lower, into the eerie depths of the Barge. Our eyes gradually accustomed to the dank light . It didn’t take long to find them – they had a poster of the Platypus group logo on the wall to help people like us find our way in the gloom. As we stumbled over, an uncomfortable change in the atmosphere registered on the mood-o-meter. A Platypi asked my friend what group she was with. My friend smiled friendly back. ‘I’m not in a fucking group’, she said to me, sideways. Maybe the Chairman and his pals thought we were going to be as rude to him in person as we are when he comes praising comrade Lenin at the Principia Dialectica website, but as George Orwell once explained, you can’t be rude to people half as easily once you’ve met them in person. George, you ol’ softie.
We put our drinks down. After the hellos, the conversation drifted back to Marxist dialectics and all that jazz really fast. People were huddled in small groups. Being the perennial gob that abhors a vacuum, I witter on about the first thing that comes into my head, which doesn’t usually happen to be anything to do with the subtle nuances of Hegel’s philosophy of history. I want to badger the Chairman about the brilliant philosophers Herbert Marcuse and Gillian Rose, but he is busy eating pub fish and chips. Everyone is talking about dialectics this, Marxist that, and my mate hasn’t got a clue what they are going on about. She normally lives above ground, but tonight, thanks to me, she has accidentally descended into the dank deep reaches of a Marxist philosophy pothole, and the air is thin here, not many people are able to stand this kind of atmosphere – it takes years of practice to learn how to tolerate these kinds of bends. Often you find weird and wonderful creatures at such depths; always fascinating, if a bit cold.
Some of the Platypi are looking at me weird: Having descended into this strange cave, where the shadow of Postone and Lenin mix and so make weird dances on the walls, I talk loudly and laugh nervously. More than anything I want my friend, who has never been in the Marxist potholes, to feel at ease. I want everyone to have a good time. My angry Superego, which looks like a cross between my dad and Robespierre, admonishes me: Revolution isn’t a joke you fool! Its not about enjoyment or fun on a Friday night! I need to calm down so I go buy some drinks. Upon my return a young German chap has defrosted. He knows his Backhaus from his Hliferding. I get all excited – you don’t get many scholars of German value critique to the square yard above ground in this part of town! He also knows what a good German lager is. A young woman of intelligence opens a conversation with my friend about something normal. I am relieved to see my friend starting to relax.
At this point I buy the Chairman’s Lieutenant a beer. The Lieutenant is talking knowledgeably about Adam Smith, and suggests there are subtle dialectical nuances still yet to be teased out of his Wealth of Nations. This is all fascinating. I join the Lieutenant outside for a cigarette to hear more. The combination of the fresh air, nicotine and hazy summer setting sun makes me do a weird little dance on the pavement – ‘Lenin died in 1968’ I rant, as I contort in rhythm. The Lieutenant gives me a bemused sideways glance, and probably condescends to ignore me. I dance a bit more, in between puffs, the nicotine whirling like a shiny pinball in my brain. I hardly ever smoke. Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor and Social Domination reads as poetry in today’s grim world, I say. The Lieutenant laughs loudly. I then say something admiring about Postone’s critique of Georg Lukacs seminal work Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat. I say that I have heard that Moishe is now working on a whole book about Lukacs. The Lieutenant laughs even louder now. I am glad I am such good entertainment. Now the red setting sun, the nicotine, the alcohol , the camaradarie and atmosphere at the Brockley Barge is conjoining to tip my soapy drunkenness into animated pontification; a dance of denunciation, of Chicago to south London Bed and Breakfast travelling Lenin-salesmen, a crazy limbo from the side step of the Brockley Wetherspoon hostelry. Instead the Lieutenant explains how he sees it: the American 1960s New Left split off into factions after the Weather Underground emerged at the fag-end of the 1960s. In the wake of the WU idiocy, anyone who was still reading Marx ‘seriously’ left the sunlight behind and went down certain Maoist shafts never to be seen again – or at least, not for a long time. The current value critique theory has its origins here, explained the Lieutenant, and as such, still carries the scars of its birth.
This close encounter with the Deep cave dwelling Platypus was strange. The people who gravitate around groups like this are clever, erudite, well read. But they suffer from the perennial problem of the Marxist left: an inability to talk in the language of ordinary people, despite their allegiance to the idea of creating a world befitting the people. The lieutenant himself was an old student of Moishe Postone as well, but he seemed to have quite a low opinion of his old prof’s ideas, despite the fact that people like Postone have managed to help bring to the surface the Hegelian dialectic still living in the subterranean marxist world. The problem is the Platypi collective seem intent on creating this weird monster out of the DNA; an alien creature that can only inhabit thinly oxygenated spaces many miles below the surface, a place where people just don’t choose to go, unless by accident. There is no dialogue in the world this creature inhabits, except between a small coterie of people who can breathe in this rarefied atmosphere, who recognize and value each others’ apartness, who inhabit a kind of academic gang culture, whose leaders are venerated for being intellectual dunderheads, who have read more dense books of Marxist jargonese than anyone else, have written more than anyone will ever be bothered to read, who have succeeded in securing some poxy academic stipend above ground in the sunlight, some prestige, security, and so can enjoy a very bourgeois form of respect – an odd duality. Membership of caves like these depend upon being able to have high fallutin’ conversations with some of your rock gods so as you can enjoy the prestige from others in your circle for being able to have these high fallutin pretentious coversations with the rock gods. But not much of it actually sheds any light.
This is the truly negative side to critical theory – it is, as philosophy always has been, the royal language of the underground, the poor, the dispossessed, the marginal. The problem is our would-be subterranean emperors (and some empresses) are without any clothes. But they are constantly told they are fully dressed, and their courtiers and pages and followers tell them they are resplendent in all their finery. They have their conferences and seminars, and meetings on class struggle, and no one really goes, much less listens, let alone intervenes to create or join in a dialogue, because the discourse is so rarefied and boring. Hardly anyone cares to comprehend it, except for a few courtiers. That isn’t to say it isn’t all a waste of time – Chairman Cutrone has written some excellent stuff on critical theory and psychoanalysis. Terry Eagleton, the English marxist professor delivers interesting papers at conferences on Shakespeare, but this is life lived at the level of bureaucracy. The Platypus collective and all the assorted trot groups that are clinging on are a new elite in waiting, despite whatever their best intentions may be.
As with all cliques and rackets like this, you have to know the secret hand signals, be able to swear allegiance, to follow through, be prepared to order others die for your cause. It’s a bit grim down there, the place where not many people go. Similarly, Herbert Marcuse’s response to Raya Dunayevskaya in their correspondence of the 1960s demonstrates how creative his thinking was in comparison to hers, still stuck as she was in marginal and largely irrelevant trotskyist paradigms while his ideas, along with Guy Debord’s Situationist International in Europe, were taking the world by storm.
But eventually that evening we re-emerged into the sunlight, blinking, a bit disorientated after our visit to the Brockley Barge. My friend muttered darkly on the train on the way home: ‘fucking Hegelian fucking dialectics my arse!’
SD
Principia Dialectica 
This is a highly tendentious, even dishonest report. First of all, it should be said that we took seriously the idea that SD came to meet Marxists about whom he writes on this blog in order to discuss Marxism, not the football match. I, at least, took for granted that it was a good thing to read dense books of Marxism such as those referenced here (What are the writings of Marcuse, expressly admired here, if not dense works of Marxism?). Of course, I have my own private life – family, friends, and peculiar interests – but I didn’t imagine that anyone came to a Platypus pub night simply in order to get to know strangers. Presumably, it would be more pleasant simply to hang out with ones friends.
SD seems torn about the very idea of intellectualism, Marxist or otherwise. What’s the point of doing anything other than talking “in the language of ordinary people” anyway? Presumably we’re just a couple of regular chaps talking about Marx’s Capital, Lukacs on reification, and the collapse of the project of human emancipation in just the same that any other good pint-quaffing bloke would do.
Mixed with the anti-intellectualism on display here is a palpable identification with the agressor. Apparently, we’re to be impressed by ideas that take the world by storm, except, of course, when Marxism leads actual revolutions. We’re to hold a lighter up to 1968 long after the band stopped playing, the drugs wore off, and everybody else went home. But the Russian Revolution is to be shunned as such as the product of a conspiratorial clique. Marcuse, no problem; Lenin, no way!
But back to the main point, what’s the point in talking to a leftist who longs for relevance at a time when the left doesn’t deserve to be relevant? At the same time, respecting those who care enough to try to work through the collapse of the left, he has nothing but the same ole contempt that every anti-Marxist has, “They have their conferences and seminars, and meetings on class struggle, and no one really goes, much less listens, let alone intervenes to create or join in a dialogue, because the discourse is so rarefied and boring. Hardly anyone cares to comprehend it.” And yet… it isn’t all pointless, we are assured, since “the Chairman” (actually quite an unassuming person) “has written some excellent stuff.” Clearly, it’s time for SD to give up on this whole Hegelian fucking dialectics thing, and go out and join what he takes to be the sunlit “real world” that awaits him. The left is motley bunch anyway. And he can always hold one to his “really excellent stuff” there on the book shelf- Maybe even from time to time go back, flip through it, and feel superior to those others whose language he imagines he doesn’t speak.
As for what pertains directly to myself. I’m not Chris’s or anyone else’s “Lieutenant.” The fact of the matter is that, though Platypus hasn’t yet taken the world by storm quickly enough to gain SD’s admiration, we are an organization. I have held a number of positions within that organization, most notably as a former editor of the Platypus Review. Of course this talk of holding positions must all smack of authority and bureaucracy to SD, who much prefers movements to organizations – especially when they are spontaneous, defeated, and safely contained between two covers. But, modest as it is, Platypus is an organization with an elected leadership and various leadership appointed positions. The model is not a Trotskyist political party. Those already exist. If I wanted to be a member of a Trotskyist sect, I wouldn’t feel the need to help found one, but would rather join one of the many that already exist, such as, for instance, the IBT, some of whose members were there at the Brockley Barge. Some of the positions in Platypus might be conceived as lieutenant-like, but I do not hold one of those, unless one were to view my current position on the staff of the PR in that light. More substantively, I would say that while I feel no need to distance myself from the views of my old friend and comrade, Chris Cutrone, I think for myself and bring my own resources to any discussion. Nor am I bound to Chris or Platypus by any sort of cultish tie, but out of the same political and intellectual commitments that bind others to it. It is perfectly possible that Platypus could change into something I no longer wished to be a part of. Chris feels no differently – we participate in Platypus so long as it makes sense for us to do so. Each of us makes our own choices and the basis of our own moral, political, and intellectual judgement. It is in fact a constitutive aspect of my political relationship to Chris that we would both dissolve our tie to the organization when and if we ceased to be committed to its purpose. This is politics (and voluntary association and individuality) 101, but SD can see in it only the philistine anti-Marxist’s notion of “the impulse to join.” I would counter that the sort of deep aversion to political organization evinced here is, pardon my saying so, expressive of the herd instinct.
As for our conversation, the idea that I once acted as if I “condescended to ignore [SD]” is pure fancy. The fact of the matter is that I was talking to David Black, but as soon as SD joined us, we included him in our conversation. Indeed, I remember the conversation outside as being quite affable, and that afterwards SD was kind enough to buy me a pint. But apparently my memory fails me. At any rate, I soon discovered that SD had not to converse with me so much as to prod me for responses. (This was even more the case inside, where he seemed embarrassed of his entire association with Marxism in front of his “friend”). SD asked me questions. Unsurprisingly, he wanted to know about my relationship to Postone. My answers to his queries bear no resemblance to the scurrilous misrepresentations written here.
The notion that I “seemed to have quite a low opinion of his old prof’s ideas” is false and I deny that I gave any such impression. What I did was hold my own views, and I don’t think SD has met many people his own age who manage to have views of their own. Apparently, this came off as quite off-putting and arrogant. Certainly, he himself seems content to admire Debord, Marcuse, Postone et al. That said, I certainly did not neglect to express not only my admiration for Postone, but my deep sense of obligation and, now, mutual regard and friendship. I made it clear that I felt the genus “people like Postone” had only one species.
It is true that I expressed my “low” opinion of Postone’s article on Lukacs. I believe I expressed my opinion that it is not one of the best things he has written. This was in response to something SD said, and was not spontaneously proffered. It was made clear to me, moreover, in the comment about Moishe’s book being “the poetry of ’68,” that I was dealing with someone who idolized Postone in a way (and, I suspect, for reasons) Postone himself would not have approved of. So, I pushed on the Lukacs argument in a comradely, which is to say in an unsparing but non-belligerent, way. I’ve had this discussion with Postone and we disagree. But SD was talking to me, not Postone, and certainly, as I say, he was more inclined to listen than to talk. The same was not true, I might add, of David Black. One thing was certain, which is that I wasn’t making small talk, as, it seems, I was supposed to have done.
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Hey, Sean, it was great to meet you in South London, if however briefly! — But you should have attended my talk at the CPGB: I think you would have approved:
http://chriscutrone.platypus1917.org/?p=1352
Spencer and I were struck at the CPGB by just how “Postonist” we in fact are — which of course must endlessly surprise you. (We were also struck by how “Spartacist” we are.)
It’s not a “theoretical” matter of agreeing with Postone’s “analysis” or not, but rather drawing (somewhat) different political conclusions than Postone himself does. — Is that a crime? Indeed, what do you imagine Postone’s political conclusions actually are, supposedly so different from ours? We all agree on the necessity to overcome labor as social mediation. But then it’s a matter of how to get there from here.
How’s this for “Hegelianism:”
Of course proletarian socialism (as in Russia 1917 and Germany 1918-19, etc.) was “capital constituting.” But that doesn’t mean that 1968 was, by contrast, “capital transcending,” as subsequent history has clearly demonstrated!
Capital was indeed reconstituted, not merely *despite* but in fact *because of* Debord, Marcuse, et al. — including Postone. And it will continue to be. — Why else do you think that Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (alongside Foucault, and indeed Benjamin, Adorno and Marx) has become required reading for undergraduates in “poxy” academia?!
The point is that there will be no “capital transcending” moment that is not also, inevitably, a “capital constituting” moment! — How’s that for “dialectics?!”
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Spencer’s talk at the CPGB, on “Marx’s critique of political economy,” about Marx’s Hegelianism in Capital, which you missed as well, is great:
http://platypus1917.org/2011/08/13/platypus-at-communist-party-of-great-britain-pcc-communist-university-2011-london/
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@Spencer Leonard: “the Russian Revolution is to be shunned as such as the product of a conspiratorial clique. Marcuse, no problem; Lenin, no way!” More like the Russian Revolution is to be shunned because it resulted in the most ruthless appropriation of private property in human history. Lenin made this happen. The man is one of the worst capitalists, yes capitalists, in human history. I suppose the massacre at Kronstadt is just so much historical dust to be swept under the carpet. There is nothing Marxist about Lenin except for the most superficial and bourgeois reading of Capital possible. I don’t know what your meeting was like but the fact that PD is calling you on your Leninism is totally valid as it speaks volumes about your ideas and your character. (Especially considering that you have had the opportunity to know better by being Postone’s student).
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“Similarly, Herbert Marcuse’s response to Raya Dunayevskaya in their correspondence of the 1960s demonstrates how creative his thinking was in comparison to hers, still stuck as she was in marginal and largely irrelevant trotskyist paradigms.”
WHAT “trotskyist paradigm” are you talking about Sean?
One of differences between PD and the Marxist-Humanists is that we DISCUSS what Marcuse actually said. You don’t.
See for example the new article by Kelly Green , ‘Technology, Labor, and the Transcendence of Capital: Revisiting the Marcuse-Dunayevskaya Debate’
‘ Rather than making life easier for workers, or undermining the value relationship in capitalism [as Marcuse argues], Marx writes that “machinery is intended to cheapen commodities” and act as “a means for producing surplus-value” (p. 492). In the factory “the automaton itself is the subject, and the workers are merely conscious organs, coordinated with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and together with the latter subordinated to the central moving force” (p. 544-545). With “the advent of machinery,” the capitalist mode of production “develops into a complete and total antagonism” (p. 558); “the instrument of labor strikes down the worker” (p. 559); machinery acts “as a superior competitor to the worker, always on the point of making him superfluous” (p. 562); “It is a power inimical to him, and capital proclaims this fact loudly and deliberately, as well as making use of it” (p. 562). As Dunayevskaya notes, it appears that Marcuse has “failed to let Marx speak for himself, and [has] used instead isolated quotations from the Grundrisse to bolster” his analysis (P&R, p. 63). ‘
Finally Sean, I have to say that this article isn’t one of your best. Suffice it to say that:
1. No one having had a serious conversation with Spencer Leonard could
regard him a ANYONE’S “lieutenant.”
2. Writing up private pub conversations as copy is no substitute for proper debate and might well shorten your list of drinking companions (yes, you did leave me out of it – thanks but no thanks).
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Cor! What a shitstorm I kicked up there. I was just having a laugh, officer. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone with it.
There is always something worth reading in the Platypus parish newsletter, and, in your favour, you are prepared to go to places the rest of the poxy left are too dogmatic to go — re: your attempt to think differently with regards the knee jerk anti americanism/anti israel bullshit that passes for ‘critique’ amongst the Leninist sects.
And Chairman Chris does understand the concept of humour, which he needs to explain to the rest of the comrades it seems.
But your project does appear to amount to a case of love bombing fellow academics, which I suppose amounts to typical Leninist entrist strategy – or rather, cut the heads off the intellectuals first, and follow on later with the plebs.
And Spencer, as regards your accusation that I am trying to imply you were speaking badly of a your friend Moishe Postone behind his back, I can’t see how anything I represented in this post suggests such a thing. The Platypus ‘critique’ of M Postone’s work is all very public – if anything, what is interesting is your critique of his take on Lukacs, which is certainly worth exploring because I have yet to read a better interpretation of History and Class Consciousness.
I love potholing with the Marxists! Its just funny when you bring someone along to these things who isn’t versed in the intricacies of the debates/language. Only then do you realise how byzantine it can all be, and what danger there is in turning inwards, when what we really need is to make dialectics a game for every worker.
Sean
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@ Ally:
One doesn’t need a sophisticated theory of capital to know that murder is wrong! If that’s all you get from Postone then you’re missing a lot!
But war is not simply murder: it is politics. If the suppression of the Kronstadt garrison military mutiny was problematic, it is not because Lenin was “bourgeois!”
The point is that the division between avowed “Leninists” and “anti-Leninists” may not be the most important among “Marxists” or on the “Left” more generally.
My own opinion is that the problems of “Leninism” are not best addressed via either reference to Kronstadt or Lenin’s supposedly inadequate “theory.” Also, that by ignoring Lenin, one tries to avoid inevitable problems of Marxism itself, which can’t be wished away.
If that’s the way you want to go, it is likely best to just declare oneself to be an “anarchist” and forget about Marx, Postone, et al.
But if “Lenin(ism)” keeps you up at night, it might be important to inquire into why rather than just compulsively forswear “Leninism” or anything like it. It’s a phobia not a true thought.
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“A new elite in waiting” — well said. The Left has always aspired towards leading the rest of us to the sunlit uplands along the paths of their enlightenment.
Trots/Tankies seem like the Jesuits of the Left, fanatical and inward looking. They try to ensure that, in the words of the libretto to “Nixon In China” they “speak according to the book” as they “lift up the weak above the strong”. It’s a very Christian message.
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