by cormac » Tue Oct 17, 2017 1:41 pm
I enjoy a lot of left communist theories because they are so nuanced about not just economic capital, but the cultural inscription of value, how it is affected by identity, and how it changes shape so quickly and finds new ways of reproducing itself, in the face of crisis. I'm not a leninist by any means, so the specific formulations of the vanguard party and state control aren't completely what I would envision when it comes to usurping capital. The "state control" that leads to oppressive regimes is not something I would ever advocate. I also personally see no contradiction with the use of poststruturalist explanations of cultural rhetoric as an addition to non-leninist marxism, which to many seems heretical. I think that the "superstructure" has much, much more cultural clout than most marxists seem to give it credit for, for many of the reasons you touched on.
The problem that you're generally identifying is one that I've thought of before, most tangibly when we covered Frantz Fanon in a political theory class. The Algerians found all these ways to resist french colonialism, successfully pushed them out of Algeria, gained their independence, and then didn't know how to govern themselves in a way too terribly different from the French colonizers, and while national self-determination is better than being the victim of colonial violence, the internal problem of evolving from the binary of colonizer/colonized, ruler/follower is still there.
I think that language itself structures the difficulty of something truly "new." I just read some of Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, so your last paragraph definitely resonates with me for the same reasons as the example I just brought up. This is seemingly a problem with the practical playing out of the dialectic process, as well. instead of negating and creating synthesis, what seems to be happening is that the thesis and antithesis remain extant, but topologically morphed into something that must again clash, if that makes any sense. It's not quite a stalemate, but true progress in the sense of the negation of the entire state of things isn't being made from the contradictions that are supposedly within capitalist culture.
I think difficulty also arises in that a clean break with past parameters of oppression is practically almost impossible. Anything "new" seems like it must still ear the mark of the system from which it was borne, the same way that words and other signs evolve based on developing cultural connotations and etymologies,heretical uses in seminal works, etc. Basically, humanity is stuck in a true mess. Dialectic can't yield the new in the way that Hegel and so on thought it could, but we're also seemingly caught in a dialectic to be navigated.
Anyway, have you heard of object-oriented ontology? Seems like Haraway's writing is steeped in that in addition to poststructuralism at large.