A Bit More Detail

If I were a Marxist, it would ideally be in the scholar of American cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, a scholar whose writings--it seems to me--do engage with reality and do not retreat into ideological blind alleys and flights of meaningless rhetoric, an awareness that capitalism hasn't reached a climax phase, all produced by a man who's aware of the liberating potential of the shock of the new.

Gerry Canavan linked to an interview with rabble.ca's Aaron Leonard on the occasion of Jameson's new book Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One, a revisiting Marx's capital. Canavan highlighted in hsi link the same passage that caught my attention on reading the interview.

AL: In the book you write, "Marx alone sought to combine a politics of revolt with the "poetry of the future" and applied himself to demonstrate that socialism was more modern than capitalism and more productive. To recover that futurism and that excitement is surely the fundamental task of any left 'discursive struggle' today." Could you talk more about this, and how one might begin to conceive a futuristic socialism?

FJ: Marx himself was always quite excited about new discoveries -- things like chemical fertilizers (which don't seem so good today, but lead to a green revolution in their time), undersea cable, and other discoveries of the day. It is very clear that he thought of socialism as more advanced technologically and in every other way. Raymond Williams wrote about how people think that socialism is a nostalgic return to a simpler society. Williams challenged that saying socialism won't be simpler, it will be much more complicated.

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.

Thoughts?