Folk på Forumet har tidligere fått artikler på engelsk uten å la seg
skremme. Jeg har fått hjelp til å få scannet inn en artikkel fra Monthly
Reviews mars-nummer i år som jeg synes er svært relevant for diskusjonen om
kultur som nå pågår. Den er riktignok rimelig lang. På den annen side er jo
vi på KK-Forum slettes ikke anti-intellektuelle.
Artikkelen sendes vedlagt.
Monthly Review har egen hjemmeside der du kan be om gratis eks. av siste
nummer, og ellers er det både bokliste og diverse artikler på sida. den
ligger på: http://www.igc.apc.org/MonthlyReview
Erik Ness
PS.
jeg har to artikler til som er ganske spennende. Det er en fyr som heter
Roger Burbach som har skrevet en artikkel om zapatistene og som mener de er
påvirket av postmodernismen. Det er en retning forfatteren sjøl har sympati
for. Ellen Meiksins Wood og John Bellamy Foster svarer han. Ganske
interessant og lærerikt.
Hvis noen er interessert, så gi beskjed så kan jeg sende dem direkte.
IS THERE ANY HOPE FOR CULTURAL STUDIES?
by ROBERT W. McCHESNEY
Robert W. McChesney teaches journalism and mass communication at the
University of Wisconsin Madison. This is an edited versjon of a talk given
to a conference on the future of cultural studies at the University of
Illinois in November 1995. He thanks Allen Ruff, Dan Schiller, and W. H.
Locke Anderson for their suggestions and assistance with the manuscript.
Cultural studies has developed as a significant new academic discipline at
the end of the 20th century. An important spawning ground for contemporary
cultural studies was the intellectual ferment surrounding the British new
left of the 1950s and 1960s. Associated with such figures as Richard Hoggart
and Raymond Williams, cultural studies sought to link working class culture
to domination and social liberation. Although linked with socialist
politics, cultural studies was among the new left currents that rejected
some of the old left's tendency toward economism. It also revealed an
openness to a range of complex cultural and social issues that the left had
placed less emphasis upon in previous generations. In the 1970s, led by
Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,
British cultural studies produced innovative studies of mass media and
ideology. Since then cultural studies has spread rapidly across the globe
and it has been especially well received in the English speaking world,
including the United States. Today cultural studies exerts a prominent
influence in departments of communication, literature, film, American
studies, modem languages, and some social sciences.
When I ask whether there is any hope for cultural studies, I do not mean
whether there is any hope for cultural studies to survive institutionally as
a viable discipline. That seems to be fairly certain. I mean to ask whether
there is any hope for cultural studies to survive as a politically left
enterprise: anticapitalist, antimarket, prodispossessed, prodemocratic, and
therefore socialist. The socialist political project of cultural studies has
receded in importance over the pest two decades. In my view cultural studies
without explicitly radical politics is uninteresting and produces work of no
greater or lesser value than that of mainstream social science. Two
necessary measures to reassert the radical political project in cultural
studies are that it develop a more systematic critique of capitalism and the
market, and that it pay closer attention to actual movements for social
charge. Many in cultural studies share some of these concerns, and some of
them are doing important work, but until I see more explicit criticism along
the lines that follow from within cultural studies, I can only believe the
trajectory of the field is in the other direction.
An excellent way for American cultural studies scholars to begin would be by
examining the work of those writers associated with Monthly Review, the New
York based socialist magazine founded in 1949. I am not alone in this
assessment. Aijaz Ahmad, in his seminar In Theory, specifically chastises
U.S. cultural theorists for ignoring the Monthly Review tradition, while
Raymond Williams himself commented on more than one occasion that he felt
most comfortable politically and intellectually with Monthly Review.
I remember that when I began graduate work in the early 1980s cultural
studies had an air of excitement and rebellion to it. It was the radical
alternative to a positivism that seemed best suited to showing
"scientifically" that this was the best of all possible worlds. It was
cultural studies=BEin communication at least=BEthat led the way in demanding
that mainstream social science explain why it assumed capitalist social
relations were a given and why there could be no alternative. Today that is
long gone. In a way similar to Marx and Engels'
characterization of the new German philosophers in the opening paragraphs of
The German Ideology, cultural studies generates much noise, but little
understanding. At some universities the very term cultural studies has
become an ongoing punchline to a bad joke. It signifies half assed research,
selfcongratulation, and farcical pretension. At its worst, the proponents of
this newfangled cultural studies are unable to defend their work, so they no
longer try, merely claiming that their critics are hung up on outmoded
notions like evidence, logic, science, and rationality.
In my view there are two reasons for the decline of political radicalism in
cultural studies. First, this is the normal consequence of becoming
institutionalized in the academy. As RussellJacoby has pointed out, this has
tended to undermine intellectual radicalism regardless of the discipline.
The professionalization of cultural studies implicitly encourages
depoliticization, which makes it far easier to get funding. For those who
abhor radical politics or believe that radical politics must be secondary to
institutional success, this depoliticization is a welcome turn of events, a
sign of the field's maturity. Needless to say, institutionalization is
especially damaging to cultural studies, in view of its explicitly populist
origins and project.
Second, the postmodern or poststructural turn in cultural studies has had
disastrous implications for its politics. I acknowledge that postmodernism
has produced some keen insights. But it is too much like mainstream
quantitative social science: each is well suited for specific types of
taske, usually narrowly defined, but neither is especially useful for the
"big picture. "
Neither quantitative researchers nor postmodernists are Bager to accept that
they deal with small potatoes while other scholars deal with the big issues.
The quantitative types assume away the big issues, whereas the
postmodernists claim that big issues do not exist or that they are
impossible to understand. I recognize that some cultural studies scholars
influenced by postmodernism remain politically active on the left. I would
argue that these people tend to bring their strong politics to
postmodernism, they do not get their politics from postmodernism. Alan Wald
argues that postmodernism may have the same politicizing effect on young
people today that existentialism did on youth in the 1960s and early 1970s.
I hope he is right, but after years of first hand experience in Madison I
have seen little evidence to support such a view. To the contrary, it points
the way to disillusion, apathy, and inactivity. As Paul Loeb noted after his
seven year study of U.S. student activists in the late 1980s and early
1990s, what is striking is how unaffected activists are by postmodernism. 1)
Perhaps people like Doug Kellner will succeed in their efforts to reconcile
cultural studies, postmodernism, and critical theory. Once again, however, I
am not hopeful. Whatever gems can be mined from postmodernism are small
compared to what could be gained by pusting the same amount of attention
elsewhere.
Politically oriented postmodernists in cultural studies and elsewhere might
recoil at what I have just stated. To them postmodernism offers a basic
repudiation of old fashioned out of date left analysis and politics and
points the way to a new radical democratic future. In particular,
traditional leftists have put too much emphasis on economics and class
exploitation and not enough on culture, sexism, and racism. To replace
traditional socialist politics, postmodernism offers identity politics, a
series of loosely related social movements linked to the distinct interests
of groups usually defined by ethnicity and/or sexuality, that have no clear
overarching political vision. There is a great deal to criticize in
traditional left politics and theory concerning racism, sexism, and much
else, but in my view postmodernists are being disingenuous to leap from this
to calling for a rejection of materialism and class based politics in favor
of identity based politics. Even a rudimentary study of history also shows
that the left invariably has been among the leaders in battles against
racism and sexism, despite its shortcomings. Radicals are opposed to all
forms of oppression and it is ludicrous to debate which of sexism, racism,
"classism," or homophobia is most terrible, as if we were in some zero sum
game. Socialists have traditionally
emphasized class=BEand continue to do so today=BEbecause the engine of a
capitalist society is profit maximization and class struggle. Moreover, it
is only through class politics that human liberation can truly be reached.
At times, it seems that postmodernists have a notion of a U.S. working class
that is made up of middle aged overweight white men, people who look like
me. In fact, the U.S. working class is the truly multicultural segment of
our society. What is meaningful social change for African Americans or non
upper middle class women unless it includes radical changes in the political
economy? Those changes will not be sufficient, but they will be the basis
for the creation of a genuinely democratic society.
Yet if the intellectuals are unclear about where power lies in our society
and what the real threat to it is, those who rule have no doubt whatsoever.
When Spike Lee's X was released in 1992, a mainstream news magazine senta
reporter to do a Freedom of Information Act report on the government's
harassment of the big bad Nation of Islam, the ultimate identity politics
group. To the reporter's surprise there was scarcely any paperwork
concerning the NOI, yet there were file cabinets full of government secret
papers concerning the Black Panthers and other lesser known black activist
groups. In fact, through the COINTELPRO operation, the government did
everything it could to infiltrate these groups, have their agents lead the
groups into violent gestures that would divide them, undermine their
credibility, and bring down the full weight of the state. The reporter
concluded that the government seemed only interested in smashing those
groups that attacked capitalism and spoke of political alliances along class
lines. It had no particular problem with the "kili whitey" crowd.
But explicit state repression is not the primary enemy of the left or of
democracy today. We have the makings of a racist police state, true, but
this is in accordance with the standard job of policing and terrorizing the
victims of a vicious class society, something formerly found primarily in
the Third World, but increasingly seen as necessary in our rapidly
polarizing society. As radical intellectuals, the key battle we fight is
with the culture of depoliticization that is a hallmark of monopoly
capitalism, and which infects even the most oppressed elements of society.
In general, the social order reproduces political apathy. Our job is to show
that the deterioration of urban America is related to the decline of labor
and the working class, which is related to the assault on the environment,
which is related to the rise of racism and sexual assault and to the overall
crisis of community. It is to show these connections=BEto study and comprehend
this social order=BEso we can understand what we must and can do to change
these things. Our job is to pursue this politicization in the face of
extreme pressures to do exactly the opposite and to never think social
change is possible or desirable. The current crisis of capitalism has given
the material whip to these pressures, so that to be a radical student on a
U.S. campus today takes courage.
To reinvigorate its politics, I recommend that cultural studies acquaint
itself with Monthly Review and the MR tradition. This should not be the only
stop on a tour of radical literature, but it should be on the itinerary. MR
was founded as a monthly journal in 1949 by Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy.
Huberman was a journalist, activist, and popularize of radical ideas. Sweezy
is a Harvard educated economist who worked with Joseph Schumpeter and Harold
Laski. Sweezy's work has been strongly influenced by Veblen, Keynes, and the
radical economists interested in the same issues as Keynes. When Huberman
died in 1968, his place as co editor was taken by Harry Magdoff, an
economist who had been a New Deal whiz kid during the Second World War.
Sweezy and Magdoff remains MR' s editors today. Other key influences include
the economist Paul Baran, who came to the United States after working at the
Frankfurt School, and Harry Braverman, a radical activist and working class
intellectual best known for Labor and Monopoly Capital. Other intellectuals
whose work fits comfortably within the MR tradition are I. F. Stone, C.
Wright Mills, and Noam Chomsky. Younger scholars associated with the MR
tradition include John Bellamy Foster and Ellen Meiksins Wood. For the most
part, the MR tradition
emerged independent of the academy, and has maintained that independence.
Among other things, this probably accounts for the clarity of language and
lack of jargon that is the hallmark of MR The purpose of MR from its
inception has been to speak intelligently to progressives about contemporary
politics.
Monthly Review calls itself an independent socialist magazine and would
probably also be characterized as Marxist. 2) A core problem for U.S.
Marxism has been the same as that of U.S. cultural studies: in reactionary
times it has become the province of intellectuals operating without any
popular base in society and it has lost its bearings. Monthly Review points
the way for how radical intellectuals can maintain their principles and
honesty in times that bode poorly for the left. For most of its forty six
years, MR has been in a political culture where the ideas and values it
promotes are marginalized and the prospects for socialism are minuscule. MR
has faced up to the situation by taking what Paul Baran termed "the longer
view," making a hard analysis of the existing situation and working to
support those elements of society which suffer the most from the status quo.
If MR has only one lesson for cultural studies I hope it is this: history
does not always deliver victories within your own lifetime. Do we admire the
person who opposed slavery and fought it on principle in the year 1750 or do
we dismiss that person as a fool and admire the person in 1750 who knew
slavery was wrong but decided that since it was entrenched it would be best
to go with the flow? We understand the latter person but we admire the
former. And who can predict if we are 100 years away from radical change or
500 years or 20 years? If inequality, poverty, greed, plutocracy, and
exploitation are wrong in principle they remain wrong even if the forces of
darkness seem in control of society, and even if their ideologues fill the
air with propaganda. In this situation, the duty of the intellectual is to
analyze why we are in that situation and what we need to do to get out of
it. While intellectuals may not be paying attention, material conditions for
the mass of humanity are worsening and the prospects for the future
everywhere are grim. At the United Nations fiftieth anniversary ceremony,
Fidel Castro compared the carnage produced by global capitalism today to the
misery produced by the Second World War. Although understandable, it is
morally unconscionable for intellectuals to throw in the towel because it
does not look like there is hope for change in the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, the victims of this system do not have the privilege of throwing
in any towel, as they are already lying face down on the canvas. There are
many difficult issues that need much debate and study=BEnot the least of which
is how to build a democratic socialist society=BEbut the core principles
remain in place.
Monthly Review can take a principled "longer view" of contemporary issues
because of its capacity to see "the present as history." This is where the
MR tradition draws quite directly from classical Marxism. This was once a
trait too of cultural studies, and it certainly permeated Williams's work.
Although there is historical work being done in cultural studies today=BE and
some of it is quite good=BEthere is little sense of history as a process in
much of the work. This is especially true in cultural studies of U.S.
television. As my own work analyzed the battle to establish a nonprofit U.S.
broadcasting system in the 1930s, I never cease to be amazed by the
historically complacent and misinformed attitudes cultural studies scholars
take toward U.S. commercial broadcasting. Cultural studies needs more than
social history and it needs more than histories of texts and audiences. It
needs three dimensional histories of culture industries and political fights
over their control and development.
The centerpiece of the Monthly Review tradition has been its critique of
contemporary capitalism, or what Baran and Sweezy term monopoly capitalism
because it is dominated by large corporations working in oligopolistic
markets. It is in their political economy that the brilliance of the MR
tradition shines through. Unlike some Marxist political economy, the MR
tradition never bies to show how existing capitalism conforms to predictions
made by Marx in 1867 or Lenin in 1914. Rather, the object is to understand
how contemporary
capitalism works based on its actual behavior using tools provided by Marx,
Veblen, Keynes, Steindl, Kalecki, and Hansen among others. Unlike mainstream
economists, those in the MR tradition do not assume the market is neutral,
that class inequality is natural, and that capitalism is ahistorical. And
unlike both Marxist and mainstream economists, the MR analysis refreshingly
integrates in to its theory the finance and corporate behavior of actual
world capitalism.
Baran and Sweezy's core argument is that monopoly capitalism has a strong
tendency toward economic stagnation. Unlike neoclassical theory, which
argues that the system tends toward full employment if the market is left to
its own devices, Baran and Sweezy's theory argues that the system tends
toward crisis and depression. They laid this out in a book entitled Monopoly
Capital, published in 1966. Talk about taking a long view! After twenty
years of historically unprecedented economic growth, MR argued that the
tendency of modem capitalism was toward stagnation and depression.
In fact, while there is a good deal of debate over the merits of the MR
position, their fundamental argument has been proven true and provides a
superior con text for understanding economic policymaking in the l990s. This
would be a magnificent lesson from political economy to cultural studies:
capitalism is a flawed, irrational , and contradictory economic system with
inherent problems, which must be studied and understood. The workings of the
capital accumulation process profoundly influence every segment of our
social existence. In its dismissal of anything but cultural studies as
economic reductionism, too many cultural studies people have accepted an
ahistorical notion of a capitalism which delivers the goods. As Wood points
out, cultural studies and postmodernism often reveal a sense of capitalism
as it operated during the halcyon days of the 1960s, not the actual system
that is in crisis everywhere and in free fall in some parts of the world. 3)
Baran and Sweezy, drawing heavily on Veblen, have also provided the most
penetrating analysis of the political economy of advertising. They answer
the question that mainstream commentators ignore: why does advertising
become prominent in modem capitalism and why is it so bogus? Given the
importance of advertising in the creation and production of popular culture,
and in determining the overall direction of the media, this alone would be
valuable material for cultural studies. It is astonishing still how such a
central cultural institution is so commonly misunderstood. Those familiar
with Raymond Williams' work on advertising as the "magic system" will find
the unmistakable imprint of Baran and Sweezy upon his argument.4
Indeed, a distinguishing feature of MR's political economy is its emphasis
upon the political economy of consumption, in contras" to the traditional
concentration upon production and distribution. This, too, suggests that MR
is particularly important to cultural studies.
Perhaps the stupidity=BEand there is no better word for it=BEof some cultural
studies is best shown by its stance toward the market. I have heard leading
figures in cultural studies argue that the market is not the top down
authoritarian mechanism that political economists claim, where bosses force
the masses to swallow whatever they are fear. To the contrary, they exult,
the market is where the masses can contest with the bosses over economic
matters; it is a fight without a predetermined outcome. One cultural studies
scholar goes so far as to characterize the market as "an expansive popular
system."5
Perhaps these are extreme examples, but almost nowhere in cultural studies
do we see sustained criticism of the market today. How it has fallen from
Stuart Hall's brilliant 1979 conception of the market and its relation to
class inequality!6
What t a grotesque and callous mischaracterization of the political economic
critique of the market. All radical political economy recognizes that the
market is based on competition and has formal voluntarism. Of course people
receive value for their money, otherwise they would not speed it! I am not
opposed to the market per se; there may be some creative ways to use it in a
post capitalist world. But it is absurd=BEeven vile=BEwhen one considers the
human toll generated by neoliberal free market policies around the world
today=BEto extrapolate from this that the market is an "expansive popular
system." The market is hardly a democratic mechanism; participation on the
demand side is based on one dollar, one-vote, rather than one person, one
vote. The rich have many votes and the poor have very few. Is it any
surprise that the market reproduces class inequality? Participation on the
supply side has distinct strings attached; it is not so much a matter of
"giving the people what they want" as it is of "giving the people what they
want within a range that is profitable and in the interests of the suppliers
to produce."
Moreover, the market is the mortal enemy of community, a term invoked widely
and glowingly in cultural studies circles. Markets do not respect community
or traditions, only profit and personal gain. Markets encourage some of the
worst traits of humanity and discourage some of our best traits, including
selQessness and compassion. This, of course, is the grand hypocrisy of the
religious right: they claim to want a combination of free market policies
and a return to family and community values. In fact, markets are destroying
families and communities faster than beef production is laying waste to the
Amazon rainforest. This is where Marxism still provides the keenest insights
into the flaws of bourgeois society; it has never been better stated than by
Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto with their discussion of how
capitalism reduces social relations to "the cash nexus."
As flawed as this characterization of the market is in general, it is utter
nonsense when applied to journalism or political ideas. The political
marketplace of ideas is not under any circumstances an "expansive popular
system." The quality of our journalism and public affairs=BEat the hands of
the market=BEis abysmal and it is deteriorating. There are volumes of studies
of the news media revealing the anti democratic biases of a corporate,
commercial news media system. There is no blind marketplace servicing the
needs of the citizenry; to the contrary, our journalism tends strongly to
conform to elite interests and to marginalize positions critical of the
existing order. One of the most impressive areas in cultural activism
concerns progressive attempts to monitor and improve journalism, both
working through mainstream channels and also building alternative media and
networks. In the 1970s, cultural studies would have been at the forefront of
groups like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), but no more.
Likewise, an enormous public relations industry working for corporate
America has emerged this century with the general project of shaping our
political culture to suit the interests of business. It accounts for a
significant percentage of our news and has played a central role in
providing the ideological basis for the right-wing victories of the pest two
decades. Activists in labor, women's, environmental, and other progressive
groups are well aware of the battle they are engaged in with this supremely
well oiled propaganda machine. But cultural studies has little apparent
interest in examining corporate public relations and propaganda onslaughts.
I am at a loss to understand why.
In fact, this naiveté about the market is the logical result of a
culturalist reductionism now prevalent in cultural studies. As Francis
Mulhern notes, it seems to be based on the assumption that anything but
culturalist reductionism is economic reductionism. As he concludes, this has
had the ironic effect of removing the politics of culture from cultural
studies.7
Cultural studies has very little to say about the actual politics of
culture. To the extent that it weighs in on policy issues, it seems to be on
the side of the market, though it appears mostly disinterested in
establishing the institutional basis for democratic communication. Consider
George GerLner's new Cultural Environment Movement (CEM), a coalition of
labor, women's, environmental, religious, educational, and minority group
organizations that has been organized to battle the corporate domination and
commercialization of global culture. Why is cultural studies not at the
center of this movement, rather than nowhere to be found? If people in
cultural studies disagree with the CEM or FAIR, then they should get
involved and explain why. Work with people who are working for social
charge. Indeed, the cultural studies work concerning the Internet tends to
be utopian or dystopian and technologically determinist. It is worthless
politically and often plays directly into the hands of the transnational
firms striving to capitalize upon the new technologies .
Reading much of cultural studies, one is struck by the sense that the
writers find the market and capitalism invincible and socialism either
impossible or even dangerous. In short, cultural studies has accepted the
primary ideological defense of the status quo. In my view, this is a
critical area where the Monthly Review tradition can be distinguished from
what reigns in cultural studies. In fact, I would go so far as to say that
this is the defining issue of whether one is or is not on the political
left. The issue is not whether capitalism and the market appear to be in
full command for the foreseeable future; on that point there is agreement.
Nor is the issue even whether the humane and rational thing to do
accordingly is to make the best of the situation and attempt to improve the
quality of life that is adversely effected by capitalism, i.e. to work for
reforms. On that point there is agreement too. The critical issue, then, is
whether one maintains a principled critique of capitalism, continues to
examine capitalism thoroughly, and works to lay the foundations for a post
capitalist social order. In MR' s approach, capitalism, despite its power is
a fundamentally unstable, non-egalitarian, irrational, and inhumane system
that is recklessly driving humanity toward ecological and social disaster.
This left position, the Monthly Review position, is hardly sectarian. To
maintain a commitment to continue studying capitalism with the eventual goal
of replacing it with a truly democratic order is hardly a narrow litmus test
for admission to the left. It just means keeping our eyes on the prize.
There is room under this tent for social democrats, anarchists, liberation
theologians, feminists, environmentalists, trade unionists, Moslems,
Christians, Jews, atheists, punk rockers, rapiers, vegetarians, carnivores,
nudists, and Marxists, among others.
Contrast this with most of postmodernism and too much of cultural studies,
on the other hand. If capitalism is a given, then why speed much time
studying it critically? As a result much of cultural studies has a
completely undeveloped or asinine notion of how capitalism actually works
and with what result. Capitalism goes from being all powerful because the
system has temporarily neutralized or crushed its opposition , to being all
powerful because it must represent the natural order of things and accords
to human nature, to being allpowerful because it is good. Once you stop
thinking about capitalism critically, you gradually accept its dictates and
eventually become as concerned with successfully managing the system as with
advocating the interests of the dispossessed. Your politics gradually move
from being progressive to being regressive. You are neck deep in a pool of
reaction without a paddle or a clue. And all this is done without ever
candidly studying and analyzing capitalism. Moreover, since reforms that
were commonplace within capitalism twenty five years ego seem nearly
impossible nowadays, without a firm effort to understand how capitalism
operates as a mode of production and as a social system, this "capitalism is
off limits approach will almost certainly lead to cynicism and
depoliticization, if not outright reaction.
This abandonment of criticizing capitalism has been accompanied by an
apparent disinterest in understanding and working with organized radical
movements, the only possible manner to exact social charge. Many in cultural
studies make no pretense of being concerned with social charge, except
perhaps as a hypothetical exercise. Some cultural studies people want to
maintain an oppositional air about them, yet with such a shoddy intellectual
foundation they often trivialize politics beyond recognition.
At its worst, cultural studies has elevated individual consumption of
commercial culture to the lever of political activity, or it regards any
siges that oppressed individuals do not accept the ideology of the ruling
class in toto as a significant political gesture. One prominent cultural
studies scholar, for example, points to the "tiny" victories=BEsuch as, in the
extreme example, when slaves committed suicide rather than go to work on the
plantations=BEas the true liberation politics, demonstrating the slaves'
"ultimate undefeatability."8 I suspect the slaveowners were willing to
concede some "tiny" victories to their slaves as long as their system
remained intact. Contrast this with the idea that true liberation politics
might also be organizing to smash slavery=BEa "big" victory=BEso that people
would not have to kill themselves to subvert the system.
As for the impossibility of socialism, there are legitimate grounds for
concern here and we do need to apply all our energies to determining how to
establish an egalitarian, libertarian, democratic society. It will recluii e
much experimentation and openness. Perhaps conventional wisdom and
postmodernism are right and it cannot be done. But what, exactly, is the
evidence for this claim? That the Soviet Union failed? By that logic I guess
we can throw capitalism overboard too, because it has made an even bigger
mess in Russia. The failures of anti democratic state socialism hardly
establish the excellence of capitalism, it only established the failure of
anti democratic state socialism. Or is it that such social democracies as
Sweden have come crashing down? There I submit the problem is more one of
what reforms capitalism can and cannot permit, rather than one of the
inherent weakness of socialism. In the Monthly Review perspective, socialism
is as possible now as it ever was. At any rate, if we do not develop a
democratic socialist alternative, the responses to global crises will tend
to be highly reactionary. We really have no choice in the matter. As Bob
Dylan put it, we are going 100 miles an hour down a dead end street. Paul
Sweezy argues that unless we come up with something to replace the profit
system, it is unlikely that civilization can survive as we know it much
beyond another century. In the end, the rejection of the possibility of
democratic socialism is the rejection of the possibility of democracy, or
the idea that people can govern their own lives in a humane manner
Monthly Revie7v not only continues to provide a forum for critical analysis
of actually existing capitalism, it also offers useful insights on the
question of socialism. MR has devoted much time to the study of left social
movements and socialist societies to evaluate their strengths and
weaknesses. It has made a Marxist analysis of socialism. It has been
concerned with understanding exactly why left movements have failed and what
needs to be done to build a popular left. These are critical questions and
they will be answered in the real world of practice as much as in the pages
of a magazine. At one time these were defining issues in cultural studies,
but they are no more.
What seems clear from the Soviet experience and the experience of the left
everywhere is that any socialist society will only be as democratic as the
movement that brings it into existence. The Monthly Review position has been
characterized by Harry Magdoff as "if you are not part of the problem, you
are part of the solution." The MR stance toward building a democratic left
movement that might be the basis for a democratic socialist society is in
direct contras" to the prevailing conception of left building found among
the denizens of identity politics. It was best stated by L. A. Kauffman, who
worked at Monthly Review in the late 1980s before leaving to pursue her
interests in postmodernism and identic politics. She criticized MR' s old
fashioned politics in The Progressive a few years later while promoting the
new world of identity politics activism.9 In her piece Kauffman described
how MR holds weekly lunchtime brownbags in which progressives from around
the world get together to discuss their work and politics. Kauffman noted
how regardless of their race, "gender, or nationality these leftists
invariably looked upon each other as brothers and sisters and comrades.
There was a great warmth and sense of community. Although Kauffman
acknowledged the attraction of this political culture, she dismissed it as
outdated and as irrelevant as socialism itself. Kauffman offered as a
superior model one in which various identities stake out their private turf
and reveal limited trust for others based on their identities. I ask you
which of these positions is one that suggests a future of community and
shared interests and which is one teeming with suspicion and fraught with
contradiction. What type of new society will emerge from the success of
identity politics activism? Ultimately, which world do you want to live in?
What Martin Luther King said about all Americans is especially true for the
left and those that seek to provide a democratic socialist alternative: we
will either learn to live together as brothers and sisters or we will perish
together as fools.
Please do not misunderstand me, I am not naive about how "integration" per
se has suggested that identity groups sacrifice their interests at the
expense of the dominant position. And I recognize that some identity
politics can be quite progressive in certain contexts. But Kauffman, in my
view, is making a virtue of a necessity, extolling identity politics as
superior to the left when, in fact, they exist in effective absence of a
left. That we need a left is not disproved. But there is something even more
fundamental at stake here. As Eric Foner put it brilliantly in a recent
issue of The Nation, the left position is not to build a world of separate
but equal and it is not to abandon the cause of building a genuine community
of men and women.' It is the socialist position to integrate society in a
revolutionary context. What distinguishes Foner and Monthly Review from the
identity politics crowd is the term "revolutionary context. "If you do not
believe that people can ever truly live as one, then this seems wildly
utopian. But then ultimately identity politics exposes itself for what it
is, a nonrevolutionary movement at best, a reactionary movement at worst.
So is there any hope for cultural studies? As an academic entity in U.S.
universities, I think cultural studies has done well and should remain in
existence. As an occasional producer of superb scholarship and a frequent
producer of poor scholarship , I think there is hope too . But is there any
hope for cultural studies as a participant in movements for radical social
charge?
In the short term, probably not. Not only is cultural studies eschewing a
critique of capitalism, the trajectory of cultural studies is away from left
politics, and there is little sense that many in cultural studies are
interested in participating and assisting organized left social movements.
Cultural studies divorced from political activism is a recipe for decay, as
the pest decade shows, and it appears still to be the order of the day. We
see signs, for example, of a resurgent, militant and multicultural U.S.
labor movement today. Moreover, it is a labor movement that for the first
time since the 1940s understands that it is in a cultural as well as a
political and economic battle for survival. In the old days cultural studies
would have been present in its creation, but those days are long gone. At
best, cultural studies will lag behind a resurgent popular movement and jump
on the caboose well after the train gets moving. At worst, cultural studies
will continue on its present course, denying the necessity and possibility
of social charge. In doing so it will finally and forever repudiate its charter.
NOTES
1. Paul Rogat Loeb, Generation at the Crossroads (Rutgers University Press,
1995).
2. In my view the term Marxism has been so manglecl by its supporters and
detractors that it has lost much of its meaning. I tend to agree with
Chomsky that it would be best to just junk the term, as it is treated more
like a religion than a social theory or mode of social analysis. But if I am
to be called a Marxist, MR provides the type of Marxism with which I would
be proudly associated.
3. Ellen Meiksins Wood, "What is the 'Postmodern' Agenda? An Introduction,"
Monthly Review 3, v. 47, (July/August, 1995).
4. Raymond Williams, Problems in Malenalism and Culture (Verve, 1980), pp.
17U I'J5.
5. Comment of Angela McRobbie. Cited in Lawrence Crossburg, "Cultural
Studies Vs. Political Economy: Is Anyone Else Bored with this Debate?"
rntic~lSindies in Mass Communication I v. 12, (March 1995), p. 81.
6. Stuan Hall, Culture, Media, and the Ideological Effect,. in J. Glrran, et
al., eds., Mass Communications and Society (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1979).
7. Francis Mulhern, "The Politics of Cultural Studies " Monthly Review 3 v.
47, July/August 1995)
8. John Fiske, Power Plays Power Works (Verve, 1993), p. 312.
9. L. A. Kauffman, What's Left? Socialism No," The Progressive, April 1993.
10. Eric Foner, "The Divide," The Nation, 30 October 1995.