Fight the Power
Slavoj Zizek says something interesting in the Voice.
“I am a mastodon,” he says. “I still believe in the big theories popular back in the ’70s. This distrust in big universal theory is the most dangerous ideology today. Look at all totalitarians, the really bad guys, Hitler, Stalin. Sorry, but none of them believed in big theory. Hitler was a historicist-relativist and so was Stalin! Often a reference to some absolute truth is necessary to resist totalitarian political power, so you can not lose hope.”
Right on. Good mastodon. Pat pat pat.
No, nothing really, just congrats for the “Fight the Power” title…
The big theories in the seventies as far as I recall were:
Marxism and its descendants
Freudianism
Modernism (art, engineering and architecture)
Feminism
All made their contributions, but dear me… mastodons are extinct for what reason?
The BEST big theory of that time was plate tectonics (the ‘unified field theory’ of geology).
I found the article muddled and confusing, but then would it to be possible to be clear throwing Lacan and the vaguest implication of a coherent moral system into one short piece? It was probably a model of lucidity at 2500 words, but then the editor…
Hang on! Feminism killed people? You do mean ‘people’, don’t you, not foetuses? Of course if you say ‘people’ and mean ‘foetuses’, that’s a whole other really angry argument we can have….
OTOH, if you have any quality pics of feminazi militiawomen in full combat gear, my office wall could use livening up….
Hey, we 21st century mammals’ve some pretty cool Big Theories, too – in Evo Devo, say.
Yes, what’s this about feminism? Only mastodons are feminist, and feminism is vapouring that killed people? So – what? Female subordination is a good thing?
Typical – Freud and Marx overshadowing women, as always. Classic guy stuff.
snicker
G Tingey – where the acceptance of plate tectonics was indeed delayed in the Soviet Union, this has nothing to do with Marxism. Lysenkoism was popular under Stalin, even where Marx and Engels enthused about Darwin in their time – and Darwinism is much more compatible with Marxism than Lysenkoism. Similarly plate tectonics would seem to me to be more compatible with at least dialectical materialist varieties of Marxism than steady-state versions of geology.
There is very little “Marxist” about Stalinism, and even less about Maoism. I consider Maoism to be about equal to fascism on my unpleasantness scale – somehow Maoists getting into power always seems to lead to half the people being shot and the rest reduced to eating insects and each other. Campus Maoists, on the other hand, I find faintly ridiculous. But I do not confuse it with Marxism.
What Zizek seems to point out, and I agree, is that before some point in the seventies, or maybe the early eighties, there were still forward-looking, progressive ideologies around. Whether it was Marxism before the student radicals messed up everything and turned it into an ideologically frigid Althusserian totalitarian construct punctuated by enthusiasm about every third world movement with guns; or whether it was Feminism before the student radicals messed up everything and turned it into some strangely totalitarian gender-theoretical navel-staring exercise.
Currently, both have been replaced by politically exhausted ideologies afflicted to various degrees by self-defeating relativism. Which is NOT a good thing for society. I want my “Grand Narratives” back, preferably in a form which avoids either the totalitarian false-consciousness infalsifiability trap of Stalinism and 70s Leftism, and the Postmodernist “Everything is mush. Let’s fool some people into thinking this is somehow a profound thought.” trap.
I’ll stop now before my posting length gets me nominated for a John C. Halasz reward :)
Make that “award”.
Oh, Merlijn – good heavens – that’s nowhere near long enough to be eligible for a JCH award. It doesn’t even fill a whole screen! To win an award it would have to require serious scrolling. Plus – a fatal error – it has paragraphs. Four of them, even, in a brief post. No no, I’m sorry, you’re not even in the running.
>Darwinism is much more Darwinism is much more compatible with Marxism than Lysenkoism… Similarly plate tectonics would seem to me to be more compatible with at least dialectical materialist varieties of Marxism than steady-state versions of geology.< Verily Marxism is one of the great over-arching theories of (almost) everything. In the 1940s all over the world, not just in the Soviet Union, Marxists (with some honourable exceptions) argued against the “bourgeois” notion of genes. Now Merlijn assures us that Marxism is “much more compatible” with Darwinism than with Lysenkoism. Moreover, Godelpus, Merlijn adds that plate tectonics is more compatible with “dialectical materialist varieties of Marxism” than steady state geology. Funny, I don’t recall that Marxists came out in favour of the plate tectonics theory when it was disregarded. That’s the wonderful thing about an over-arching theory – you can use it to make a case for almost any position. Lysenkoism prior to 1950, Darwinism post-1950, whatever.
Allen – which is why I added “dialectical materialist versions of”. Which I happen to be very uncomfortable with for much the same reasons you cited, though I would word things differently. In any event, there is a serious current within Marxism (George Lukács among others, if I am not mistaken) which rejects dialectical materialism. If that is done, Marxism is restricted to social history. Dialectical materialism, however, happened to be elevated to Soviet state ideology (at least pre-Khrushchev) and therefore relevant to my point.
But the point I was making does not necessarily go into that, as far as it concerns Darwinism. It is hardly an accident that Marx and Engels worked at the same time that a historical or diachronic viewpoint had a breakthrough almost everywhere – linguistics, geology, biology, etcetera. Darwinism became the most famous of these breakthroughs because it swept away the last refuge of Creationism. It inspired Marx to the extent that he asked Darwin to write a preface to “Das Kapital”. Without success, by the way.
You might be aware that Marxism is materialist. Meaning, matter being primary, spirit secondary. Darwinism is compatible with materialism. Lamarckianism and Lysenkoism are not. Therefore, Darwinism is more compatible with Marxism than Lysenkoism is.
You know – that’s another sweatshirt, I think. ‘I want my Grand Narratives back.’
>You might be aware that Marxism is materialist. Meaning, matter being primary, spirit secondary. Darwinism is compatible with materialism. Lamarckianism and Lysenkoism are not. Therefore, Darwinism is more compatible with Marxism than Lysenkoism is.< How come that all those dialectical materialistic Marxists didn’t recognize this in the 1940s? Judgements about the validity of competing scientific theories can’t be made on the basis of the question “Which is more compatible with dialectical materialism?” They have stand up, over time, to rigorous scientific examination, regardless of the pre-judgement of dialectical materialist Marxists. > You might be aware that Marxism is materialist< That doesn’t mean that the converse has to be the case, i.e., that materialist scientific theories must be Marxist.
My previous postings brings to mind the ultimate belief in over-arching theory expressed by the Marxists (I’m sure they would identify themselves as dialectical materialists) Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins in their book *Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA*:
“There is nothing in Marx, Lenin, or Mao that is or can be in contradiction with the particular physical facts and processes of a particular set of phenomena in the objective world.”
(R. C. Lewontin and R. Levins. “Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA”, p. 107)
And one more point!
> Darwinism is compatible with materialism. Lamarckianism and Lysenkoism are not.< Is Lamarckianism so evidently incompatible with materialism? Why is the notion that the gonads may be influenced by material conditions during an animal’s lifetime *in itself* incompatible with materialism? The danger of this kind of notion is exemplified by the fact that many Marxists dismissed genetic theory on the grounds that it was “idealist”, since there was at that time no evidence that genes existed.
Ah, Biology as Ideology. That book gets some teasing in the Fash. Dictionary.
Allen, I cannot seem to identify with the points you are arguing against. I would most definitely NOT judge scientific theories on the basis of their compatibility with dialectical materialism – which I already said I don’t like very much. And what I think about the sad events surrounding, say, E.O. Wilson and his radical left detractors in the 70s should be quite clear from my original comment. Lewontin’s and Levins’ statement sounds, at first sight, like a religious confession to me.
But I insist on a distinction between Marxism and Soviet state ideology, Chinese state ideology, and whatever fad was in vogue in university campuses during the 70s. Which was the point of my original response to G. Tingey.
And obviously, materialist scientific doctrines need not be “Marxist”. Only if you regard the dialectic as inherent somehow in the natural world do you enter Engels/Lenin/Stalin dialectical materialism, which is a overarching and in a real sense religious doctrine. But once you depart from that idea _as many Marxists have done and do_ you end up with a doctrine on social history which has nothing to say about natural science – and all talk about “Marxist biology” or some such nonsense would become irrelevant.
Whether or not Lamarckianism would necessarily imply a departure from materialism is an interesting question, which I may have answered too hastily before. But even if we would allow for a materialist way of acquired characteristics making its way to the gonads, Darwinism would still be the more obvious materialist doctrine (as intentionality seems to be required for the acquirement of the characteristics themselves).
Genetics, incidentally, flourished in the Soviet Union before the advent of Lysenkoism in the 1930s. Its demise had much more to do with the whims of Stalin than with Marxism proper. Interestingly, Lysenkoism had an analogue on the linguistic field (Marrism) and here, too, progress made in the 1920s suddenly stalled for decades.
Back to the original points: regardless of the flaws of Marxism – the ideology, like classical Liberalism (its older sister, in many ways) provided a forward-looking perspective on society, with mankind gradually gaining more control over its own fate. Both are now marginal – genuine Liberalism, in its Libertarian form, as much as genuine Marxism. The postmodernist relativism that takes their place is not only anti-progressive (no human rights being universal, every custom, no matter how backwards, being equally valid) but erodes confidence in the scientific process (mankind gradually gaining more control over its own fate) itself. Mentioning “theories that work” as G. Tingey did does not replace them.
Just for clarity: I would not call myself a Marxist. Too much doubts about the doctrine itself, not to speak of its current-day representatives. Used to be an active Trot, though. In any event, I have nothing against defending Marxism if I feel it is needed.
Merlijn has a point, to defend him against his detractors. Marxism shares with the majority of great ideologies born in the nineteenth century a terrible fate in the twentieth. Emergent at a time when material progress could genuinely be believed in through regard for the evidence of everyday experience, and when essentialist definitions of human nature were routinely deployed on all sides of political and social debate, Marxism, like nationalism, conservatism [and perhaps even to a lesser extent liberalism] was distorted into a dangerously rabid version of itself under the pressures of the mid-twentieth century, and subsequently declined into a grotesque parody of its original goals. For the campus Marxist, read also the Bosnian-Serb nationalist, the ‘compassionate conservative’ [ha!], or the British social democrat who proposes detention without trial.
Now, my immediate caveat is that Marxism went more wrong than most, under the specific, nay extraordinary conditions of the USSR and Mao’s China, and that 80-odd million deaths is a grave burden for an ideological label to bear, but on the other hand, given that all the other major ideological choices of the last 200 years are [if less murderous] almost equally fucked-up at the intellectual level, it is perhaps time to lay off Marxism for a bit…
If you want a grand narrative, how about ‘We’re All Doomed!’? It has the advantage of pithy brevity, combined with every likelihood of being right…
But, G, Marx also had some very perceptive and interesting analyses that have not been debunked so completely. Marxism as an analytical tool, not a social/political program solution/program?
In response to “Marx made specific historical and social predictions. None of which were true” Brian Miller suggests “Marxism as an analytical tool, not a social/political program solution/program?”
It is true, as Brian says, that “Marx also had some very perceptive and interesting analyses”. Nevertheless I’m reminded of a passage by Lukacs quoted in *Marxian Utopia* by N. Sesardic and D. Settembrini in which he argues that even if one were to assume that “recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses”, a Marxist would not have “to renounce his orthodoxy”, since “orthodoxy refers exclusively to *method*”. The authors comment that this “manifests a fundamentally irrational attitude because he admits that he will adhere to his method regardless of the results to which it leads him”.