06.03.10
A few good…communists?
Chris Hedges’ Columns: This Country Needs a Few Good Communists
This article disappeared to the back pages fairly quickly (took me ten minutes to find it). Clearly in the age of Tea Party idiots, commies don’t sell. Hedges is to be commended for a kamikazi article, which I found interesting.
It is not clear what Hedges is up to here: there are plenty of leftist blogs, websites, orgs, etc, so his wish would seem to have been resolved. Or else he is ironic: none of the above are the ‘good communists’ he wishes for.
The situation is suffering from the decayed tradition of the left, which has created a void, and an obstacle course toward renewal of the subject.
Let’s face it, Marx was overrated as a thinker (though not as a tactician, and as a critic of economic ideology) and produced a body of theory that doesn’t have traction any more. However, it is a cleverly created illusion of theory, and freezes many in place thinking they are initiates to rocket science.
So we need a whole new analysis of the question of capitalism in the context of liberalism. Simply praying for a few good communists is like praying for rain.
We don’t even have much of working class anymore, it having been outsourced to China, I guess. And the Chinese must have at least a few good communists. No? Not even one?
More on this some other time.
We have commented here many times on the failures of the left, on the way to a perspective that is ‘ultra far left’, in fact, we have already dealt with the liquidation of Hitchens (http://darwiniana.com/2009/04/18/dialectics-of-the-red-terror-liquidating-hitchens/).
Liquidating Hitchens won’t really solve the problem.
The whole subject needs to start from scratch, but this it cannot do, because the whole game has become a kind of dead mass living in the past, and unable to disassociate itself even from Stalinism.
A renewed left is absolutely needed at this point, but none such seems possible.
The left needs a Kantian critique of Hegel, and better version of Feuerbach, a postdarwinian perspective, something better than a hyped ‘historical materialsim’, a motion beyond scientism, and much else…
Every time anyone tries to do anything here the same group of deadbeats chants all the Second Internationale ideologies, mixed the Leninist mantras that ditched real communism for a new brand of Blanquist revolutionary adventurism. After the working class voted the WWI war credits, the left died, as Lenin sensed, cleverly creating a kind of leftist elitism that said the hell with the proletariat even as it claimed to be its agent.
Anyone care to start over and do the job right?