by GEORGE BARBARIE
I became acquainted with his work while taking a nighttime Postmodern Theory seminar at a state university in Alabama’s Magic City. I was a working-class poet trying to go legit by becoming a middle-class pedant. I wasn’t a rarity in the 1980s and 90s; for evidence, just take a gander at the middle-aged legion of burnt out high school English teachers and adjunct humanities instructors who can’t pay back their student loans or afford their antidepressants.
Of all the theorists covered in that course, there was something about Lyotard that resonated.
It’s really no surprise that Lyotard would attract an artsy-fartsy, hyperactive mind like mine. Of the philosophers France produced in the wake of such giants as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he was one of the more poetic and mercurial. It also strikes me as more than coincidental that someone who’d joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) at the age of eighteen would, a few years later in grad school, find a kindred spirit in a postmodern rock star philosopher who had started out as a bona fide radical leftist.
Like a freshly converted acolyte, I read everything he wrote on master-narratives, language games, pagan ethics, libidinal economies, the postmodern sublime, and the différend. Ate. It. Up.
After a while, I stumbled on Lyotard’s explicitly political writings. I witnessed something in those that saddened and repelled me in a way that I couldn’t put my finger on back then, but have since. Through all the cool terminology and clever rhetoric, I saw a man grief-stricken because the left hadn’t added up to his youthful expectations, expectations rooted in more orthodox early-20th-century interpretations of Karl Marx’s work. I saw a Socialism or Barbarism guy who oedipally and indelibly parted ways with Marx. I realized that, after the divorce, he spent the rest of his brilliance chasing down the sublime je ne sais quoi, shooing off totalizing narratives, and pumping out inconsistent, ephemeral critiques of the insidious, hydra-like totalitarianism of late capitalism.
I, more or less, parted ways with Lyotard.
Not in the “kill the father” way he had with Marx. Not because I was some dyed in the wool Marxist, which I wasn’t. Not because I thought everything he’d written was moot. To this day, I maintain that Lyotard’s work in ethics and aesthetics is underrated, that his artistic approach to philosophical problems and his insights into “the crisis of knowledge” aren’t valued enough. And I find good things in Lyotard’s ex-Marxist, postmodern politics, which is an ethical politics centered on bearing witness to and demanding justice for the colonized, the displaced, the silenced, the “impious,” and the “pagan.” In fact, I find that some of his later political theories and those of, say, Luxemburg or Pyotr Kropotkin are compatible.
I parted ways because his postmodern critiques of capitalism tended toward abstractions and sophisticated musings, which danced in the air above material reality and political struggle.
I parted ways because, along with his New Left contemporaries, he joined a trend that would become a commonplace among 20th- and 21st-century leftist intellectuals: If you couldn’t beat the empire, then be absorbed by it and yap incessantly about challenging and reforming it from within, all the while drawing a hefty salary from a comfy university and maybe pulling in good cash from sweet speaking gigs.
By moving away from radical engagement with the empire of late capital, leftists like Lyotard have practically condemned the left to obsolescence. They’ve thus given liberals a huge pass and the right a huge gift. Even while parroting terminology memorized from courses in critical theory and cultural studies, liberals can and do abandon all but the most superficial concern for anyone who doesn’t have a degree from a top-tier school, a marketable persona, an entrepreneurial spirit, or an investment portfolio—whether that anyone is black, brown, white, gay, straight, transgender, female, or male. And the right-wingers grin.
By abandoning the revolutionary left—anarchist, antifascist, antiracist, antiwar, autonomist, ecosocialist, Marxist, or other—the opportunistic and disgruntled leftists of the last few decades have played a significant role in suffocating viable leftist opposition against the empire of late capital. Regardless of their intentions, they’ve enabled the almost complete subjugation of those the empire deems to be barbaric, which would be 90-plus percent of the human species.
Barbaric Yawp
About 60 white nationalists, skinheads, and walking bed linens took to the streets of a Southern city under a low pewter sky on a summer day. Protected by white and black cops and a nine-foot-high chain-link fence, the demonstrators marched defiantly to a 52-foot-high obelisk in a public park across from a public building named after a mayor who held office when black citizens were attacked by the city’s police dogs and fire hoses. The counter-demonstrators—a few heroes of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, scores of black locals, a smattering of black, brown, and white leftists—mocked the spectacle in large part for its irony: in 1990s Birmingham, Alabama, a bunch of white guys with a police escort were gathering in what was formerly named Woodrow Wilson Park around a conspicuous Confederate monument where they would claim Alabama as a “designated white homeland,” across from Boutwell Auditorium, under the shadows of businesses which owed much of their spoils to an economy that had recently been based on the racist exploitation of black people. The obvious question on counter-demonstrators’ lips: “Alabama, and America for that matter, stopped being a white homeland when exactly?”
A lanky, long-haired nineteen-year-old who was maybe 160 pounds when wet, I was prepared to take a pounding from some white-powered fists. I didn’t have to take one, and the kind of terror that recently charged through Charlottesville, Virginia, didn’t come to pass that day. Yet what those fascists represented and the possibilities they foretold were no less harrowing.
It’s tempting to call those right-wingers barbarians. They’re not. They’re enforcers of the dominant regime. They’re the types that rulers throughout history have dispatched to terrorize and subdue barbarians.
I get it: bad people and their bad actions need a noun, adjective, or -ism attached to them. The connotations of “barbarian,” “barbaric,” and “barbarism” we’ve inherited from the Ancient Roman and Holy Roman Empires seem like a natural fit for those fascists who stormed the streets of Birmingham and Charlottesville.
But taking a closer look at “barbarian” invites a serious review of its application.
Early on, “barbarian” indicated someone was just an outsider or foreigner; then, a bit later, it came to connote a peasant or commoner or, more negatively, a country bumpkin. So, a barbarian was someone not connected to or taken seriously by a given society’s ruling order.
Over time, though, political and economic elites began to realize the barbarian nobodies were actually somebodies who could, in fact, pose a threat to their dominions. Just ask the Romans about the Celts and Parthians who didn’t give unto Caesar what Caesar wanted.
On that note, the diverse peoples who gave the Roman Empire hell weren’t quite what the Romans and their descendants have made them out to be. In a popular book and film series, Monty Pythoner and medieval historian Terry Jones humorously corrects the record about the European and Middle Eastern barbarians, pointing a finger back at the chauvinism and hypocrisy of the invading Romans who were pretty damn barbaric to the barbarians. Some American historians have done the same for the “savage,” “heathen” (read “barbaric”) Native Americans and African slaves terrorized and slaughtered by America’s Young Goodmen and Manifest Destinarians.
Barbarians, then, aren’t necessarily the bad guys when the power dynamics of particular situations are considered.
So, what’s to be done with “Socialism or Barbarism,” a slogan whose spirit I embrace?
Beyond etymological curiosity, it contains a logical problem when we take into account the fact that today’s ruling civilization—the empire of late capital—is the most destructive and expansive force in human history. It’s a rapacious force stealing from, tormenting, and conquering most people and all the natural world. On top of that, the beneficiaries of this empire aren’t the ones in whom socialism will take root; today’s “barbarians” are.
Here’s a possible replacement, then: “Barbarian Left or Extinction.”
In our time, the barbarians are the ones from whom the possibility of an up-to-date, situation-specific left will emerge to counter the full-spectrum right (neo-liberal to fascist) which expands and defends the empire.
In America, the barbarian left is more than a cadre of declared leftists. It draws from many of the working folks, poor folks, and young folks of all colors, genders, and sexualities who’re disgusted by a rigged political system that insists on being called egalitarian and democratic. It’s composed of people sick from the economic pie-crust promises that their supposed betters have been feeding them for decades. It includes those who’ve figured out that appeals to vague hope and crude nationalism are guarantees of growing impoverishment and increased alienation.
Some within the barbarian left may read Alain Badiou or Mikhail Bakunin or Noam Chomsky or Gene Debs or Frantz Fanon or Emma Goldman or Martin Luther King or Rosa Luxemburg or Karl Marx or Antonio Negri or Malcolm X. But they don’t have to in order to reach the same conclusions reached by those leftist visionaries. The barbarians have their experiences and the experiences of those around them to inform them that they’ve been railroaded into giving away their labor, their time, their communities, their health, their freedom—and that they’re expected to cherish the privilege of doing so.
What will undoubtedly disappoint quite a few orthodox and genteel leftists about the emergence of a barbarian left is that it won’t be predictable or polite; it won’t abide by meticulously crafted theories or protocols.
For those very reasons, a barbarian left might succeed where the civilized left—composed of both dogmatists and opportunists—has failed.
The barbarian left has endured the civilized left long enough.
The compromises of opportunist German Social Democrats in the early 1900s played no small part in what led to Red Rosa’s execution and the rise of the Third Reich. The complacent social-democratic Spanish Republicans of the 1930s repeatedly shot themselves in the foot and hamstrung other leftists, thus practically handing Spain to Francisco Franco’s fascists for a big chunk of the remaining century. More than a few so-called American leftists and liberals played key roles in the “Red cleansing” waged inside and outside the US during and after the Cold War.
More recently, many leftists in the Western and Northern Hemispheres have at best remained silent while the US-headed empire of late capital has undermined, terrorized, or disappeared leftists in Cuba, El Salvador, Greece, Haiti, Honduras, Venezuela, Vietnam, and on and on.
Today in the US, there are aptly named roadkill leftists who delude themselves into believing they can both police the left and reform the hopelessly pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist, pro-bomb-the-brown-people Democratic Party. And there’s even a handful of leftish types who think collaborating with fascists is a nifty idea. Good grief.
Again, the barbarian left has endured the civilized left long enough.
And the empire’s gates aren’t going to hold forever.
ADDENDUM: A Quick Glance at Postwar Counter-revolutionary Intelligentsia
On professional anti-communists, Russophobes, deconstructionistes, and nouveaux [contrefait] philosophes
Warning: This quick review of the pretentious mumbo jumbo and treacherous ideas subsuming the "new philosophers" and the postmodernists' main theses is not intended to be elegant or conclusive.
Apostates from avowed Communism are naturally prized. A curious trait of most of these former Marxists (and it applies, too, to US Neocons), is that they are usually erstwhile militants in the Trotskyist faction. What makes the Trots so prone to this violent about face in core beliefs is surely something worthy of exploration. In any case in the postwar, by the 1960s when a great many young people were ready to question the capitalist status quo, there arose in France (where else?) a new generation of political pseudo-theoreticians and obscurantist philosophers, the Nouveaux Philosophes (a tag chosen by one of the more self-aggrandizing in a repulsively self-impressed bunch, Bernard Henri-Levy). Incidentally, these people laid the groundwork for—inter alia—what has come to be known as identity politics. The Wiki provides a helpful summary that can serve as an introduction to this bunch (I've added the "French Zionist" categorization to some of the names because it can help us to understand where these people may be coming from.).
The New Philosophers (French: nouveaux philosophes) is a term which refers to a generation of French philosophers who broke with Marxism in the early 1970s. They include Alain Finkielkraut (French Zionist), André Glucksmann (French Zionist), Pascal Bruckner, Bernard-Henri Lévy, French Zionist), Jean-Marie Benoist, Christian Jambet, Guy Lardreau, Claude Gandelman (French Zionist), Jean-Paul Dollé and Gilles Susong. They criticized Jean-Paul Sartre and post-structuralism, as well as the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.
Birds of a feather...
The "philosophes" found ready de facto allies in another cultural and political trend with similar noxious implications for the prospect of global social change: the post-modernists. Postmodernism —from the capitalist establishment's perspective—is almost too good to be true. It pushes back with arrogant ferocity against just about anything that could help people make some sense of their oppressive reality. In net effect, postmodernism can therefore be fairly defined as bourgeois jadedness taken to absurd extremes, albeit packaged in the requisite abstruse prose favored by the new breed of faux philosophers. The good that postmodernist insight and attitude can yield are, in my view, easily overwhelmed by their toxic support of the reigning capitalist paradigm.
Postmodernism describes a broad movement that developed in the mid- to late 20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture and criticism which marked a departure from modernism.[1][2][3] While encompassing a broad range of ideas, postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony or rejection toward grand narratives, ideologies and various tenets of universalism, including objective notions of reason, human nature, social progress, moral universalism, absolute truth, and objective reality.[4] Instead, it asserts to varying degrees that claims to knowledge and truth are products of social, historical or political discourses or interpretations, and are therefore contextual or socially constructed. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, irreverence and self-referentiality.[4]
Source: Wikipedia
By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them
A couple of examples from this basket (excerpts gleaned from the Wiki which can be trusted for this kind of errand) tells us a great deal about whether they deserve all the accolades bestowed on them by a grateful bourgeois media and establishment. Bold ours.
André Glucksmann (French: [ɡlyksman]; 19 June 1937 – 10 November 2015) was a French philosopher, activist and writer. He was a member of the French new philosophers. Glucksmann began his career as a Marxist, but went on to reject communism in the popular book La Cuisinière et le Mangeur d'Hommes (1975), and later became an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russian foreign policy. He was a strong supporter of human rights. In recent years he opposed the claim that Islamic terrorism is the product of the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West.
André Glucksmann was born in 1937 in Boulogne-Billancourt, the son of Ashkenazi Jewish parents from Austria-Hungary. His father was from Bukovina, which later became part of Romania, and his mother from Prague, which later became the capital of Czechoslovakia.[1]
In 1975 he published the anti-Marxist book La Cuisinière et le Mangeur d'Hommes - subtitled Réflexions sur l'État, le marxisme et les camps de concentration, in which he argued that Marxism leads inevitably to totalitarianism, tracing parallels between the crimes of Nazism and Communism.[3] In his next book Les maitres penseurs, published in 1977 and translated into English as Master Thinkers (Harper & Row, 1980), he traced the intellectual justification for totalitarianism back to the ideas articulated by various German philosophers such as Fichte, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche.[4] In the years of the Vietnam War, Glucksmann rose to national prominence after expressing his support for Vietnamese boat people.[3] He began working with Bernard-Henri Lévy criticizing Communism.[5] Both had formerly been well known Marxists. Shortly afterwards they became known, along with others of their generation who rejected Marxism, as New Philosophers, a term coined by Lévy.[5]
In 1985, Glucksmann signed a petition to President Reagan urging him to continue his support for the Contras in Nicaragua.[6] After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Glucksmann became an advocate for the use of nuclear power.[3] In 1995 he supported the resumption of nuclear tests by Jacques Chirac.[7] He supported the NATO intervention in Serbian 1999. He also called for Chechnya to become independent.[8]
Glucksmann supported military action by the West in Afghanistan and Iraq, and was highly critical of Russian foreign policy, supporting for example Chechen independence.[11]
SOURCE: Wikipedia
Glucksmann's evil twin—BHL, the "playboy philosopher"
The Wiki, again:
Bernard-Henri Lévy (French: [bɛʁnaʁ ɑ̃ʁi levi]; born 5 November 1948) is a French public intellectual, media personality, and author. Often referred to in France simply as BHL,[1] he was one of the leaders of the "Nouveaux Philosophes" (New Philosophers) movement in 1976. The Boston Globe has said that he is "perhaps the most prominent intellectual in France today".[2]Lévy was born in 1948 in Béni Saf, French Algeria, to an affluent Algerian Jewish family. His family moved to Paris a few months after his birth. His father, André Lévy, was the founder and manager of a timber company, Becob, and became a multimillionaire from his business. [BHL is today estimated to be worth more than 225 million euros, roughly 265 million dollars.]
Early essays, such as Le Testament de Dieu or L'Idéologie française faced strong rebuttals from noted intellectuals on all sides of the ideological spectrum, such as historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet and philosophers Cornelius Castoriadis, Raymond Aron, and Gilles Deleuze, who called Lévy's methods "vile".[44]
More recently, Lévy was publicly embarrassed when his essay De la guerre en philosophie (2010) cited the writings of French "philosopher" Jean-Baptiste Botul.[45] Botul's writings are actually well-known spoofs, and Botul himself is the purely fictional creation of a living French journalist and philosopher, Frédéric Pagès. The obviousness of the hoax led to suspicions that Levy had not read Botul, and that he consequently might have used a ghostwriter for his book. Responding in an opinion piece, Levy wrote: "It was a truly brilliant and very believable hoax from the mind of a Canard Enchaîné journalist who remains a good philosopher all the same. So I was caught, as were the critics who reviewed the book when it came out. The only thing left to say, with no hard feelings, is kudos to the artist."[46]
In the essay Une imposture française, journalists Nicolas Beau and Olivier Toscer claim that Lévy uses his unique position as an influential member of both the literary and business establishments in France to be the go-between of the two worlds, which helps him to get positive reviews as marks of gratitude, while silencing dissenters.[47]
For instance, Beau and Toscer noted that most of the reviews published in France for Who Killed Daniel Pearl? didn't mention strong denials about the book given by experts and Pearl's own family including wife Mariane Pearl who called Lévy "a man whose intelligence is destroyed by his own ego".[10][48]
In 2017, upon selling for six million euros his house in Tangiers, Morocco, he complained that he owned "too many houses."[53]
Ass-kissing on a grand scale.
Below, a taste of the deference accorded this insufferable, self-promoting egomaniac and reactionary intellectual, who continues to boast that "his"intervention (he is a pal of Sarkosy) was decisive in the toppling of Gaddafi. BHL with Charlie Rose, a man who himself owes most of his fame (and many millions) to assiduous asskissing of the powers that be, the right socialite connections, and eternal deference to Judaism and Zionism (BHL is a fierce, unapologetic Zionist), a logical policy for a careerist like Rose since it is an open secret that much of the Western media are owned, controlled or influenced by Jewish players. [It hardly needs stating that Henri-Levy is also a strong and energetic supporter of Washington's neocon agenda of American global supremacy.]
Conclusion
In sum, the soi-dissant "nouveaux philosophes" and postmodernists, a bunch of egomaniacs and poseurs that emerged in the 1960s in France as part of the regular outbursts of anti-Marxism generated by the global capitalist establishment, is surely one of the most insidious developments of the period. Almost designed to impress the easily impressionable, and mouthing theories whose very abstruseness sold them to the neophyte as "profound", this tendencies (which promptly found kindred currents in America and Britain) planted the soil with notions that denied the value of historical materialism as a tool to interpret history, and even sought to retire "the class struggle" and "ideology" itself. It bears repeating that, whatever the value of their esoteric notions, the importance of their posture and notoriety to global imperialism was that they were all fiercely anti-communist. Not surprising, then, that most were made into celebrities by a capitalist establishment that is always happy to embrace those who work to defeat the rise of genuine revolutionary movements.
..
—Patrice Greanville
The barbarian left has endured the civilized left long enough. The compromises of opportunist German Social Democrats in the early 1900s played no small part in what led to Red Rosa’s execution and the rise of the Third Reich. The complacent social-democratic Spanish Republicans of the 1930s repeatedly shot themselves in the foot and hamstrung other leftists, thus practically handing Spain to Francisco Franco’s fascists for a big chunk of the remaining century. More than a few so-called American leftists and liberals played key roles in the “Red cleansing” waged inside and outside the US during and after the Cold War.
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We all know that Amazon is an uber-capitalist octopus swallowing ever more industries and openly collaborating with the CIA. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, probably the #2 richest man on earth, is no friend of radicals, or socialist revolution, that's for sure. But this app, ironically, promises to donate some money to whoever uses it to search and make a purchase on Amazon. Since many people will go on using Amazon due to habit or convenience, make it kick back a few dollars our way to continue our pro-peace and anti-imperialist work. Our financial situation leaves us no choice at this point. So consider it. A boycott of Amazon by lefties at this point is hardly going to register on their radar. But any funding we get, at our puny level, will keep us going. Simple as that.
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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
Very nice text and post modernist added explaination!