Mao's shift with regard to Lenin and Stalin concerns the relationship between the working class and peasantry: both Lenin and Stalin were deeply distrustful towards the peasantry, they saw as one of the main tasks of Soviet power to break the inertia of the peasants, their substantial attachment to the land, to 'proletarianize' them and thus fully expose them to the dynamics of modernization - in clear contrast to Mao who, in his critical notes on Stalin's "Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR" (from 1958) remarked that 'Stalin's point of view... it is almost completely wrong. The basic error is mistrust of the peasants.' The theoretical and political consequences of this shift are properly shattering: they imply no less than a thorough reworking of Marx's Hegelian notion of the proletarian position as the position of 'substanceless subjectivity', of those who are reduced to the abyss of their subjectivity.- Slavoj Zizek intorduction to "Mao: On Practice and Contradiction"
This is the movement of 'concrete universality', this radical 'transubstantiation' through which the original theory has to reinvent itself in a new context: only by way of surviving this transplant can it emerge as effectively universal. And, of course, the point is not that we are dealing here with the pseudo-Hegelian process of 'alienation' and 'disalienation', of how the original theory is 'alienated' and then has to incorporate the foreign context radically affects the original theory itself, so that, when the theory 'returns to itself in its' otherness' (reinvents itself in the foreign context), its very substance changes - and yet this shift is not just the reaction to an external shock, it remains an inherent transformation of the same theory of the overcoming of capitalism. This is how capitalism is a 'concrete universality': it is not a question of isolating what all the particular forms have in common, their shared universal features, but of grasping this matrix as a positive force in itself, as something which all actual particular forms try to counteract, in order to contain its destructive effects.
Sunday, April 22, 2018
On the Essence of Anti-Capitalism
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2 comments:
The essen/ce of anti-Capitalism is ESS-AITCH-EYE-TEA!
PERIOD!
Why bother to discuss it?
Anti-Capitalists re anti-AMERICAN., and should be rendered FAR more uncomgfortable and pontedly UNWELCOME as ancient "Sexual Predators" are today.
Let's have a MeToo Movement based in anti-MARXISM, and start havung Show Trials for the mouthy hypocrites who work 'round thle cock to impoverish us, destroy our ascendancy, and put us all in chains.
I can tell you're not into dialectic, FT. If you were, you would be in a better position to understand what it is that makes the Commies spew the theories and ideas they do. To me, this is very revealing, that they understand precisely what they need to do to successfully implement their policies... and even Mao was unwilling to do it, to reduce the peasants to a position of "substanceless subjectivity" (aka absolute and complete poverty with no property at all.
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