Re: Into our bedrooms, and under the sheets!

Rebirth, as I conceive it, does not include the possibility for theoretical insights gained during one’s life to be preserved in a subsequent life. The new life incarnates only the karmic consequences of the previous one. So for there to be enduring value to any such insights, they must somehow be transmitted from the dying generation to those younger. This is a discouraging perspective for me. While I feel I continue to make sporadic intellectual progress, my ability to articulate this progress seems more impaired than ever. My hope, I guess, as I approach an inevitable terminus, is that others more articulate than myself must have trod the same paths as I. They, I must believe, will succeed where I have so conspicuously failed. After all, the materials I have explored are available to all. I claim no unique ability to derive their implications. That Burnham in power bears little relationship to Burnham seeking power does not surprise me. Would Corbyn have been any different? Would Polanski be? I have not given up my skepticism about electoral politics. But Laclau has at least interested me in a way of interpreting political history that differs from what I used before. For example, I always considered UK politics superior to the US politics because the UK at least had a “labor” party. The Trotskyists whose views I tended to align with claimed this was what the US lacked, and needed. Laclau’s analysis suggests, on the contrary, that the left’s “labor” orientation, long considered a fundamental principle of Marxism, might have helped to bring about the Reagan-Thatcher reaction of the 1980s. This perspective suggests a focus on the crises of capitalism in the 1970s and how the left and right parties reacted to and exploited them. Two problems with Laclau’s theoretical machinery, however, complicate the matter. The first of these is his emphasis on contingency. This implies that every political development requires taking into account the multitude of specific factors that were operative at any particular time. He eschews attempts to derive general rules applicable to all situations, arguing that these are attempts to impose a rational structure on events that in reality depend on human agency. The second problem is his reliance on overdetermination, a concept derived from Freudian psychology and applied to politics in a well-known essay by Louis Althusser (linked below). Political events, according to Althusser and Laclau, are overdetermined, meaning that multiple sufficient causes combine to bring them about. This means that claiming some factor caused something to happen can never be correct, because it impliedly excludes other factors that must also have been present. Thus, to say that a historical event was caused by some particular contributing factor can only amount to a suggestion that this factor has previously not received the emphasis it deserved. I again recommend Michael Hardt’s 2023 book The Subversive Seventies for evidence that already in that decade the techniques of mediation that had allowed the developed nations, after World War II, to satisfy popular demands while preserving corporate profits had broken down. (Hardt is the co-author, with Antonio Negri, of the influential trilogy beginning with Empire in 2000. There is a lecture available online in which Hardt talks about this book.) One event during this decade which has continued to resonate in UK politics in subsequent decades is the “Winter of Discontent” in 1978-79. Subject to the qualifications mentioned above (contingency and overdetermination), I would venture a hypothesis that the victory of the Reagan-Thatcher reaction was at least in part due to their ability to mobilize a discourse of the people in opposition to the discourse of workers toward which Marxist politics had oriented the UK Labour party. Marxist class analysis led Labour to identify its program with “workers” rather than with “the people” in general, creating an opening for Thatcher to oppose to this a discourse opposing “the people” to “workers” (or, more specifically, “unions”). In other words, Thatcher hegemonized a populist reaction to a Labour program that was perceived as subservient to labor unions. One reason this worked as well as it did is that UK unions were dominated by white males at a time when females and racial minorities were becoming an increasing segment of the labor force. Many other factors were at play during this period. But what I think Laclau suggests is that a discourse based on “workers,” from which the Labour party could not effectively distance itself in the wake of the dislocations of 1978-79 because this discourse was a part and parcel of the essentialist class analysis which was its Marxist heritage, left it fatally vulnerable to Thatcher’s populist rhetoric. hugzu ;-p (https site) Althusser, Contradiction and Overdetermination (pdf) [@nonymouse] [Guardster] [Proxify] [Anonymisierungsdienst]