Commentary on Álvaro García Linera's essay "Once Again on So-called "Extractivism""

MrZine have published an essay "Once Again on So-called "Extractivism"", which is an extract from a longer essay, "Geopolitics of the Amazon" by Bolivia's Vice-President Álvaro García Linera. This is a commentary on the "Extractivism" essay, perhaps with a view of writing more about some of its themes. As a commentary it does not aim to be critical of García Linera's text, merely to try to understand it, its place within some of his other works and its relation to certain tendencies and arguments within Marxism. All unreferenced quotes are from "Once Again on So-called "Extractivism"". 

Modes of Production and Totality

Perhaps the first thing that will strike a European reader of García Linera’s text is that a senior politician has written a text which is both unapologetically Marxist - the essay begins with an exegesis of the meaning of “mode of production” in Marx focusing particularly on the relation to nature – and of a rare theoretical rigour ambition, aiming both to clarify certain theoretical issues in Marx and intervene in a crucial argument in contemporary Bolivian politics. Of course, the particular unity of theory and practice entailed by leading politicians producing valuable theoretical work (Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin) or leading theorists taking up important political posts (Korsch, Luxemburg, Lukács) was not alien to Europe in the Russian revolution or the central European revolutions following it but it is a link has now long gone. 

García Linera’s initial focus on the totality of the “mode of production” feels similarly alien and perhaps even old-fashioned. In “Marxism and Postmodernism”, Jameson argues that late capitalism makes analysis in terms of mode of production difficult, drawing on the pre-Marxist history of the concept, particularly in the Scottish Enlightenment, Jameson argues grasping the mode of production relies on uneven development, “distinct and coexisting modes of production are registered together in the life world of the thinker in question” and that 18^th century Scotland saw the “coexistence of radically different zones of production and culture.” Jameson contrasts 18^th century Scotland and 19^th century Europe for Marx with today with the postmodern rejection of totality grounded in a “purer and more homogenous expression...from which many of the hitherto surviving enclaves of socio-economic difference have been effaced by way of their colonisation and absorption by the commodity form.” In “State Crisis and Popular Power”, written before the election of Morales as President and  García Linera as vice-President, García Linera writes, “due to the social and civilisational diversity of the country, large stretches of territory and sections of the population remain outside, or have not interiorised, the disciplines of the capitalist labour process; they recognise other temporalities, other systems of authority, and affirm collective aims and values different from those offered by the Bolivian state.” The externality of large sections of the Bolivian population to the capitalist labour process and the aims and values of the (old) Bolivian state, that is the coexistence of different modes of production registered by García Linera is the condition of possibility of representing capitalism as a mode of production. This point may be taken further, and it could be argued that an encounter with the non-capitalist productive processes in the Third World may be the only way capitalism can be represented and we can continue to be Marxists in any real sense in Europe. 

Emir Sader and Leftist Critiques of Chávez

“They [the European left] show solidarity with our defeats, but they cannot stand our victories.” Gabriel García Márquez

“Questions that are essential for any strategy for power, such as the nature of power itself, the state, strategies, alliances, the development of alternative blocs of forces, imperialism, foreign alliances, analyses of the balance of forces, the building of support, the development of a hegemonic bloc, and others were either set aside or disappeared altogether. This was especially the case insofar as the social movements came to play the leading role in anti neoliberal struggles. The passage from defensive struggles to a dispute over hegemony has to mean – as it does in the texts of the Comuna group or in the speeches of Hugo Chávez and Rafael Correa – a return to these questions, updating them for the period of neoliberal hegemony and the struggle against the tyranny of markets. Relying on mere denunciation with no commitment to formulate and develop particular political alternatives, tends to distance much of the intelligentsia from the concrete historical processes faced by the popular movements in the region. These in term are condemned to endless processes of trial and error, because they do not have the support of a body of theory committed to the processes of change that really exist.

The opposite temptation is a strong one. Since Fidel Castro is not Lenin, Che is not Trotsky, Hugo Chávez is not Mao Zedong, Evo Morales is not Ho Chi Minh and Rafael Correa is not Gramsci, it might seem easier to reject the processes that really exist, because they do not correspond to the dreams of revolution cast in the image of another era, than to try understand contemporary history as it is, with all its enigmas. In other words, either we recognize the signs left by the new Latin American mole, or we resign ourselves to the anthologies to which classic texts have been reduced to the nervous and sectarian hands of those who are afraid of history.

Taking refuge in classic texts is the most comfortable path but also the surest route to failure. Defeats are usually attributed not to political causes but to moral ones. ‘Betrayal’ is the most common. The inability to give political explanations leads to sub-political, moral accounts….

The defence of principles supposedly contained in those classic texts seems to explain everything, except the most important thing: why is it that doctrinaire, extremist views of the ultra-left never triumph, never manage to convince the majority of the population, never build organizations capable of leading the revolutionary processes? They identify with the great balance sheet of defeats, but never to the growth of revolutionary political forces…Those who only appear in public to criticize others on the left, often taking advantage of spaces in the right-wing media, have lost sight of who the main enemies are, and of the central confrontation with the right.

The challenge is to face the contradictions of history as it really exists, in the concrete conditions of Latin America today, and to tease out the elements with which to build a post neoliberal order. The Comuna group were able to do this because they reread Bolivia’s history, particularly since the 1952 Revolution; deciphered its significance, identified the country’s subsequent historical periods, understood the cycles that led to the decline of neoliberalism, managed to avoid the mistakes of the traditional left in relation to historical subjects, and did the indispensible theoretical work needed to marry Evo Morales’s leadership with the re-emergence of the indigenous movement as the essential protagonist of the current period of Bolivian history. In this way they were able to re-establish the link between theoretical and political practice and help the new popular movement to carry their economic and social demands into the ethnic and political arenas.

Such theoretical work is indispensible and can only be done on the basis of the concrete reality of each country, combined with reflection on the historical experiences and theories acquired by the popular movement over the years. Reality has no mercy on theoretical errors. Latin America in the twenty-first century needs and deserves a theory that is up to the challenges of the time.”

Emir Sader, The NewMole: Paths of the Latin American Left, pp. 77-9.

The vast majority of left-wing (liberal, social democratic, communist, anarchist), repeat on the level of politics (with praxis taking the place of production), the problems of left-wing literary hacks polemicised against by Brecht, "production makes them uncomfortable. You never know where you are with production; production is the unforseeable. You never know what's going to come out. And they themselves don't want to produce. They want to play the apparatchik and exercise control over other people. Every one of their criticisms contains a threat."  

Žižek’s defence of Chávez merely reverses the judgement entailed by this ahistorical, idealist (whether invoking liberal, social democratic, communist or anarchist principles) critique. The categories of the classical texts now support rather than indict Chávez but it is still the classical texts that guide interpretation. To put it another way, no effort is made to understand contemporary history in all its enigmas, Chávez is supported because, apparently, he did “correspond to the dreams of revolution cast in the image of another [Leninist] era.”

As with Graeber’s (and the stench of snobbery here is utterly overwhelming) reply to Žižek, “Why is Chávez the model? Why not, say, Evo Morales, who, unlike Chávez, really was placed in power by, and remains answerable to, genuine social movements? Could we imagine Žižek, even in his fantasies, patiently listening to the demands of the directly democratic assemblies of El Alto? Chávez may be a virtuoso performer but he is also a political comedian holding power with no real responsibility except to give his audience pleasure” and Critchley’s particularly repulsive taking up of this line of argument, Bolivia and Morales are often invoked against Venezuela and Chávez. The invocation of Morales remains, in the last instance, an idealist critique (as any appeal to one abstract model of how politics should be done is bound to be), the concrete realities and historical differences between Bolivia and Venezuela are ignored. No attention is paid to Bolivia’s class and ethnic composition, the significance of the 1952-3 revolution and the defeats of the Trade Union  movement in the 1980s- the lesson that the revolution could not be constructed around a workers and peasants’ alliance as in the Bolshevik Revolution. Similarly, Graeber and Critchley pay no attention to the theoretical work done by Comuna, as Sader writes, “it was the specific, concrete reconstruction of Bolivian history, beginning in the pre-colonial period that allowed García Linera to grasp the decisive elements of the native people’s identity, of their indigenous condition – more specifically their condition as Aymara, Quechua or Guaraní. It was this kind of analysis that made it possible to grasp the identity of the indigenous people as a whole, that allowed them to assume this identity politically and elect Evo Morales as president, as well as build a party – the MAS – as a vehicle to establish their hegemony over Bolivian society as a whole.” (Sader, p. 107) Finally, and most importantly, they pay no attention to the popular uprisings from 2000-5 that not only led to Morales’s electoral victory in 2005 but entailed, (García Linera) the “growing incorporation of broader social sectors into political decision making (water, land, gas, Constituent Assembly) through their union, communal, neighbourhood or guild organizations; there has been a continual weakening of governmental authority and fragmentation of state sovereignty”.    

With Venezuela lacking these conditions in 1998, to condemn Chávez for not being Morales is merely idealist. Evaluating Chávez from the left, our task is to strip away these sub-political critiques and instead explore the achievements and limitations of Chavismo, paying attention to the specific conditions of Venezuela and the impact of imperialism. There are three main sets of questions for the left critique of Chávez.

Firstly, could the left have come to power in Venezuela (not Bolivia, not Ecuador, not Brazil, not Spain in the 1930s or Russia in 1917) without a figure like Chavez to mobilize around?  Secondly, could the concrete achievements of Chavismo particularly in poverty reduction and the construction of ALBA as a model for international trade based on solidarity rather than charity or neoliberalism have been achieved without this taking of state power and, if so, how? If not why are you prepared to sacrifice them? Finally, how far were the distortions within the Venezuelan political project attributable to how had to win and exercise power taking power? Or, perhaps better, given the necessity of taking power in this way and the very real possibility of Chávez being bloodily overthrown, not an abstract possibility given the failed coup of 2002, would it have been possible to go beyond a national-popular reformism which retained the support of some sectors of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie towards something more radical and beyond the forms of power exercised by Chavez personally? Chávez seems to have learnt three lessons from Allende that are pertinent. The first, from the left of the necessity of obvious, popular improvements to the everyday life of the poor; Allende, despite everything, was insufficiently popular with the Chilean working class. The second from the right, Allende unnecessarily offended powerful sections of national bourgeoisie. Both these failings were compounded by Allende winning the election on 36% of the popular vote. Thirdly, from the perspective of authority, Allende failed to take control of the army and disarmed the workers' militias of Santiago and Valparaiso. Chávez, elected always with a substantial majority of the popular vote, learnt the lessons of these three mistakes from Allende, small-scale but significant and popular improvements to the everyday life of the poor were achieved without a radical break with existing economic relations or with the form of the state.

It strikes me that the answer to the first question is almost definitely no, to the second no, and the answer to the final set of questions, possibly but  with some difficulty and at considerable risk not just for Chávez personally or the political process but, given what happened in Chile after the overthrow of Allende, or, more recently, in Haiti after the Franco-American instigated overthrow of Aristide, for the thousands of left-wing militants and ordinary poor people. The point is not so much the answers themselves but that any left attempt to reckon with Chávez confronts the actual situation and does not proceed through wishful thinking, a fetish for heroic defeat or preserving the classic texts of anarchism or Marxist-Leninism in idealist uselessness. 

Labour's Southern Question- Book Chapter

After the inevitable analyses of Eastleigh from the Labour right, which “depend on a highly impressionistic kind of political sociology” or which have “expressed littlemore than their authors’ particular likes and dislikes, projected on to theminds of the electorate”, and with presumably much more of the same to come, I thought it might be worth posting this book chapter which I wrote in late 2011. It attempts to suggest an alternative way of winning vital seats in the South.

More than a year after writing it, I’m not sure that I agree with the whole argument, I think it overstates what Labour can do, and I’m more dubious about the usefulness of applying, fairly directly, Gramsci’s conceptions of a revolutionary Communist party to a barely reformist Social Democratic party. Re-reading it, there’s something striking and profoundly depressing about the opportunities missed for Labour to break out of a populism that aims to cancel the gap between politicians and the people, ideologically, instead of (Aristide) “struggling with and in the midst of the people.”

Where I think this chapter is still useful is in staking out a different way, through the commonality of interest and experience of the very poor and the “squeezed middle” within Southern capitalism, of forming an election winning bloc. Unfortunately, the Blue or One-Nation Labour approach of cross-class solidarity at the expense of immigrants and the “undeserving” poor is even more dominant now than in late 2011.

If I was writing something on a similar topic today, I’d pay more attention to the contradictory nature of Social Democracy. Stuart Hall’s analysis in 1979 is clearly valid today, Hall writes that the “contradiction within social democracy is the principal key to the whole rightward shift of the political spectrum” and that, pertinent to “One-Nation” Labour, that it is in invocations of the “national interest” that the limitations and contradictions in Social Democracy show through in their attempted resolution. For Hall, the contradiction emerges from the necessity for Social Democracy to “maximize its claims as the political representative” of the working class and to defend “within the constraints imposed by the recession working class interests”. From this stems various crucial questions around representation. However, opposed to this pole, because reformist solutions are always solutions within capitalism, Social Democracy must, be able to win support or at least acquiescence from some key sections of capital, so the link, party-class is also used to discipline the working class. The appeal to national interest then attempts to neutralize the party-class link in favour of the articulation government-people in which the nation is invoked against “sectional interest” or “irresponsible Trade Unions”. This chapter was an attempt to oppose this articulation. 

Bibliography here.

On Labour Left's Bedroom Tax Protests

I posted this as a comment on this Labour Left post on the Bedroom tax. They don't seem to have allowed the comment yet, which I find a little disappointing.

I was quite reluctant to post this as I think Labour Left can do good work and I contributed a chapter to “The Red Book” but to call for the bedroom tax to be postponed for a year is an arrogant and insipid instrumentalisation of those affected that is sadly symptomatic of Labour at the moment.

Why are we calling for the bedroom tax to be postponed for a year rather than be completely abandoned? I understand that were the government to postpone for a year this would be welcome both as it would provide a year’s relief and maybe mean the bedroom tax wouldn’t happen at all. Indeed, postponing something and then appearing totally to abandon it has often been the way Cameron has U-turned, though this has often meant the policy has reappeared later just in a more limited form. However, surely the function of the Labour party, let alone a campaigning group on the left of Labour should be to campaign for something genuinely desirable than the weak fudge that might happen as a consequence of more radical campaigning.

Why criticize the bedroom tax in terms of its affects on the “deserving poor” groups who might, apparently inadvertently lose out. What about families who are “just” poor not soliders, carers or whoever? What right to we have to throw them under the bus and what right to we have to reproduce a whole vicious ideological structure of deserving/undeserving for the sake of seeming reasonable? Even if the “deserving” groups were protected, the bedroom tax would be a catastrophe. Secondly, surely it is a mistake to imply, as this argument does, that the policy is a consequence of a mere oversight from the essentially pleasant Cameron and Duncan-Smith.

The nub of the problem, for me, why present the argument as our campaigning on behalf of a group of passive victims with the mention of neighbour in the penultimate paragraph? This is the arrogant and useless presumption that Labour exists to protect the most vulnerable not as the vehicle of the vulnerable to stop being vulnerable. It is this that leads to the arrogance of trying to mediate people’s experience into “reasonable” non divisive language that doesn’t frighten some notional “mainstream voters.” In the end, in its insipidity it is the demand that however welcoming we are to those outside Labour that makes this bedroom tax campaign sectarian.

In the end, what’s the point of Labour, let alone a self-styled Labour Left if we go out of our way to emphasise how similar we are to the Tories, which is precisely what this campaign suggests. As Ralph Miliband argued Labour’s concern  “to reassure their opponents rather than enthuse their supporters.” Is symptomatic of a sick and directionless party that is inevitability “hesitant, fumbling, petulant and boring.”

No Messiah Other than The People: A Review of Simon Critchley's The Faith of the Faithless

This is the version of the review which I sent to Tribune. I'm also tidying up a much longer version which might interest some people and I'll post soon.

No Messiah Other than the People

Simon Critchley’s latest book takes the form of what he describes as “experiments” into links between politics, religion and violence, through which he aims to intervene in a number of questions preoccupying contemporary philosophy and disseminate these debates to a wider audience. Given the importance of these questions it is unfortunate that the arguments of The Faith of the Faithless are unconvincing and that the style in which Critchley disseminates his thoughts causes considerable problems.

Ultimately, the book’s limitations stem from Critchley’s adoption of two points from the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. Firstly, that all political concepts “are secularized theological concepts” and, secondly Schmitt’s reduction of this secularization to the question of original sin (or the perfectibility or otherwise of man in politics). Like Schmitt, Critchley believes in a political version of original sin, the unavoidability of imperfection is “the most enigmatic aspect of being human.” Together these points make new political inventions impossible as the new will have already been anticipated by theology and a complete break with today’s world is impossible due to our imperfection.

Critchley describes what he sees as this recurring temptation to break entirely with things as they are and affirm the possibility of perfection as “crypto-Marcionite” after Marcion the second century follower of St. Paul. For Marcion divine grace totally redeems the faithful from the creaturely state of original sin and, with it, the necessity of law. Thus, Critchley reads contemporary attempts by Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben to enlist Paul in the invention of new forms of emancipatory politics as being closer to Marcion than Paul himself. Critchley’s tendency to reject as “crypto-Marcionite” all emancipatory politics as impossible relies on the illegitimate presentation of Agamben or Badiou’s politics as mere secularisations of theological positions, collapsing theological redemption through the immediacy of divine grace and political emancipation through collective action. This also flattens history, ignoring the changes of the last two hundred and fifty years which have created the political actors able to realise emancipation.

“Crypto-Marcionite” is not the only instance of erudite mystification; often Critchley bases his interpretations of philosophers on minor texts such as Heidegger’s early letters on St. Paul, which allows him to present a particular “Heidegger” as the spokesman for his own views. Critchley also ventriloquises, among others, “Benjamin”, “St. Paul” and “Levinas”. These mystifications are compounded by Critchley’s tendency to slip into philosophical jargon, which he juxtaposes with a slangy informality. This (deliberate) contradiction is at the heart of Critchley’s literary-philosophical technique. To the slangy informality Critchley adds incuriosity about the material world, further intending to bring him closer to the reader. At the same time the jargon and erudition distances, affirming that despite the similarities, Critchley remains, unlike the reader, a philosopher. Furthermore, the erudtion flatters the incuriosity of the imagined reader with the history of Africa (and most of Latin America, and much of Asia) being treated as beneath the interest of the philosopher. Why, for example, examine the differing histories of post-colonial countries, when “theology”, revealing that breaks with the past are impossible, allows you to write that in decolonialisation “violence exerts a repetition effect from which subjects cannot seem to free themselves”?

These contradictions create a chasm between everyday life and philosophy, which is, therefore, left with no material but the philosopher’s own inwardness. From inwardness, Critchley emphasises “conscience”, derived largely from Heidegger, against the “crypto-Marcionism” of emancipatory politics. Conscience is “the imprint of a profound powerlessness… [and] impotence is what makes us human.” This affirmation of weakness allows a redemption through conscience that renounces the futile attempt to change anything, in favour of merely “seeing inauthentic, fallen life in the world in a different light.”

This complacent prizing of conscience derived from imperfection converges with the book’s other faults in the final chapter on violence, which continues Critchley’s dispute with Slavoj Zizek. The book’s already uneven style is supplemented by a peculiar decision to write a parody of his opponent including attempting to psychoanalyse Zizek, offering the unedifying spectacle of philosophy as petulant playground squabble.

The argument surrounds “divine violence” in Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence". Critchley goes to great lengths to present it as a phenomenon of conscience and imperfection rather than, as Zizek does, a sign of perfection, focusing on Benjamin’s mention of “solitude” as essential in divine violence to suggest that divine violence is constituted by the lonely moral dilemmas of the individual of the rightness of using violence. However, this misses the collective dimension of Benjamin’s essay, in which the central figure of divine violence is the revolutionary proletariat undertaking a general strike, a dimension suggested by Zizek’s examples: the Jacobin terror, the Paris Commune and Père Lebrun (the self-defence of Haitian slum dwellers).

The reconciliation of divine violence’s solitude and its collectivity is evident in the most heroic contemporary linking of politics and theology, that undertaken by Aristide and the people of Haiti (not that one would know of this heroism reading The Faith of the Faithless- the only mention of which is the brief reference to Père Lebrun). Aristide’s declaration that “there is no Messiah other than the people” includes both the collective dimension and solitude. The people are alone, there is no external Messiah and the oppressed people of Haiti take the place of God through political action, and, in so doing, precisely, assume divine perfection.

Ignoring Haiti is symptomatic of Critchley’s inability to imagine that the struggling oppressed class, by transforming individual weakness into collective strength, can be a political subject. Efforts to break with the past are treated as so many unsophisticated returns to something which has already been repeatedly refuted in the only genuine site of history- the western philosophical and theological tradition. If Critchley’s book has any virtue it is as, in the Chinese phrase, "a teacher by negative example", revealing the smug uselessness of a politics which refuses to learn from attempts outside Europe and the USA from the struggling oppressed classes to transform history.

Happy New Year

Coming up in the New Year: the completion of the pornography essay, a longer version of a review I wrote for Tribune on Simon Critchley's execrable Faith of the Faithless and a long piece on how being a Labour party member is intellectually and morally justifiable. After that, there's either going to be much more or we'll end the blog. It is necessary to think through, quite clearly, what is the political function of this sort of blogging- is, following some of Benjamin's "Author as Producer" an operative blog possible? Can the distracted reading of blogs offer certain Brechtian possibilities? (Jodi Dean is an idiot here, but that should be obvious.) We might be supplementing these reflections with another Brechtian plan to revolutionise the radio phone-in.

Merry Christmas

We had intended to do something longer but ran out of time. As Aimé Césaire writes:

It had agoraphobia,   Christmas did.
What it wanted was a whole day of bustling,   preparing,
a cooking and cleaning spree,   endless jitters,
about-not-having-enough,
about-running-short,
about-getting-bored,

So, a Spotify playlist and two of the songs:

Merry Christmas

Left-Wing Pornography and Ideology Critique: Pornography and Late Capitalism: Autonomy, Liberation and Authenticity

This is a long essay divided into six parts, the next three of which we'll post over the next week or two. Part one is entitled "Pornography and Obscenity", Part two "An Aesthetics of Spectatorship or a Politics of Production?", Part Four, "Pornographic Idealism: The Cock made Mind", Part Five, "Sensation: The Pornographic Hell, Pornography and the Avant-Garde/ Pornography and the Entertainment Industry"  and Part Six "Can anything be done?".

Notes and Warnings:

1. Some fairly unpleasant things are described in these posts, especially at the end of Part two. We thought about leaving them out but, on balance felt including the descriptions and quotes was necessary.

2. This essay doesn't claim to be exhaustive, there are a number of important areas that have been excluded or treated in less detail than they deserve, these include racism in pornography, violence in gay pornography and the movement between material and immaterial labour and the economics of "free" pornography within post-Fordism.

3. In the Marx and Adorno quotes, we've let "men", "mankind" and "his" pass without comment. It should be obvious that, in most cases, what Marx and Adorno argue about men applies even more strongly to women. Further, as Hobsbawm writes of Marx's "men make their own history...", "the German word means men and women." 

Left-Wing Pornography and Late Capitalism: Autonomy, Liberation, Authenticity

A politics of production with regard to pornography demands that pornography be situated within production, that is, within late capitalism. MacKinnon’s argument linking bourgeois culture to the lie of pornography (that the woman enjoys what is being done to her, that the woman has freely chosen to submit to what is being done to her) already begins to show how the brutality of pornography should be situated.

In The New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello analyse the post-1960s flourishing the “artistic critique” of capitalism based on “a desire for liberation, autonomy and authenticity” (p. 419) and the response entailing “forms of capitalism which have developed over the thirty years…incorporating whole sections of the artistic critique and subordinating it to profit-making.” (p. 420) The new left-wing pornography represents one of the most significant incorporations of the artistic critique and its subordination to profit making- “the dirty little secret of the left-wing pornography industry is not sex but commerce”- its grounding in a certain critique of capitalism, albeit one that has easily been subordinated to profit-making, explains some left-wing men’s, if one is being generous, confusion, if one is being less generous, desperate searching for alibis for complicity with rape. For many men on the left, pornography’s place within this critique of capitalism, justifies as progressive even utopian.

Liberation figures as liberation from repressive constraints. The generalisation of the Walsh case becomes problematic here, the homophobic prosecution of Walsh was an unjustifiable, moralistic instance of repression; conclusions about the Walsh case being generalised to pornography are illegitimate but clearly stem from an identification of all objections to pornography as stemming from the same repressive moralism which produces homophobia. Liberation becomes the tolerance of an almost limitless range of sexual tastes but pornography (unlike obscenity) is not a question of taste.

Left-Wing Pornography and Ideology Critique: Part Two, An Aesthetics of Spectatorship or a Politics of Production?

This is a long essay divided into six parts, the next three of which we'll post over the next week or two. Part one is entitled "Pornography and Obscenity", Part three, "Left-Wing Pornography in Late Capitalism: Autonomy, Liberation and Authenticity", Part Four, "Pornographic Idealism: The Cock made Mind", Part Five, "Sensation: The Pornographic Hell, Pornography and the Avant-Garde/ Pornography and the Entertainment Industry"  and Part Six "Can anything be done?".

Notes and Warnings:

1. Some fairly unpleasant things are described in these posts, especially at the end of this part. We thought about leaving them out but, on balance felt including the descriptions and quotes was necessary.

2. This essay doesn't claim to be exhaustive, there are a number of important areas that have been excluded or treated in less detail than they deserve, these include racism in pornography, violence in gay pornography and the movement between material and immaterial labour and the economics of "free" pornography within post-Fordism.

3. In the Marx and Adorno quotes, we've let "men", "mankind" and "his" pass without comment. It should be obvious that, in most cases, what Marx and Adorno argue about men applies even more strongly to women. Further, as Hobsbawm writes of Marx's "men make their own history...", "the German word means men and women." 

Left-Wing Pornography and Ideology Critique: Part Two, An Aesthetics of Spectatorship or A Politics of Production?

The law on “extreme” pornography defines a pornographic image as of “a nature that it must reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal”.

In a true identity of opposites, the law on extreme pornography and its opponents on the left, by discounting the pornography as produced and pornography as a political practice collapse pornography and obscenity. It is only by collapsing pornography and obscenity that the images Walsh possessed could be described as pornographic. For both sides, pornography becomes a merely moral or aesthetic question, for social conservatives obscenity is sufficient to demand possession of the images be prosecuted. Liberals, accepting the conservative collapsing of obscenity and pornography, failing to see it as produced and political, can only treat all critiques of pornography as oppressive invasions of the privacy of adults and their right to make autonomous moral and aesthetic decisions. It is only on this basis that the triteness of framing the problem of pornography as one of spectators being offended by the images and the solution “is not to possess them.”

The liberals are correct to argue that the law on “extreme” pornography is problematic, but it is not problematic for the reasons they stress. The law is underpinned- and here there are certain affinities with the sporadically useful but unsatisfactory debates over the sexualisation of children- by a wide range of positions, some of which are profoundly regressive, some of which are not. Firstly, the law (and in many ways its use to prosecute Walsh) responds to right-wing moralizing, as with the liberals who they claim to oppose, the problem of pornography is elided with the question of obscenity. However, right-wing moralizing does not exhaust the law even less than it exhausts the possible objections to pornography. The law is also underpinned by more general worries about the harmful effects on both the individuals who use pornography and society as a whole of pornography. The trigger for the law was the murder of Jane Longhurst by a habitual user of necrophiliac and especially violent (it’s important to note, following MacKinnon and Dworkin’s definitions that all pornography is violence) pornography. Finally, the law responds, confusedly and limitedly, to feminist concerns both about the effects of the consumption of pornography and the violence inherent in the production of the pornography covered by the law (and, indeed, feminist concerns about the production of all pornography). 

Left-Wing Pornography and Ideology Critique: Part One, Pornography and Obscenity

This is a long essay divided into six parts which we'll post over the next week or two. Part two is entitled "An Aesthetics of Spectatorship or a Politics of Production?", Part three, "Left-Wing Pornography in Late Capitalism: Autonomy, Liberation and Authenticity", Part Four, "Pornographic Idealism: The Cock made Mind", Part Five, "Sensation: The Pornographic Hell, Pornography and the Avant-Garde/ Pornography and the Entertainment Industry" and Part Six "Can anything be done?".

Notes and Warnings:

1. Some fairly unpleasant things are described in these posts, especially at the end of Part two. We thought about leaving them out but, on balance felt including the descriptions and quotes was necessary.

2. This essay doesn't claim to be exhaustive, there are a number of important areas that have been excluded or treated in less detail than they deserve, these include racism in pornography, violence in gay pornography and the movement between material and immaterial labour and the economics of "free" pornography within post-Fordism.

3. In the Marx and Adorno quotes, we've let "men", "mankind" and "his" pass without comment. It should be obvious that, in most cases, what Marx and Adorno argue about men applies even more strongly to women. Further, as Hobsbawm writes of Marx's "men make their own history...", "the German word means men and women." 

Left-Wing Pornography and Ideology Critique: Part One, Pornography and Obscenity

“The old pornography industry was a right-wing industry: secret money, secret sin, secret sex, secret promiscuity, secret buying and selling of women, secret profit, secret pleasure not only from sex but from the buying and selling. The new pornography industry is a left-wing industry: promoted especially by the boys of the sixties as simple pleasure, lusty fun, public sex, the whore brought out of the bourgeois (sic) home into the streets for the democratic consumption of all men; her freedom, her free sexuality, is as his whore- and she likes it. It is her political will as well as her sexual will; it is liberation. The dirty little secret of the left-wing pornography industry is not sex but commerce.” Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, p. 208.

“The left has a long history of fighting capitalist ownership of the media. From Karl Marx to Antonio Gramsci to Noam Chomsky, leftist thinkers have understood the corporate media to be the propaganda machine for capitalist ideas and values…No one in progressive circles would suggest for a moment that criticism of the corporate media is a moral panic. Chomsky has never, as far as we know, been called a “moral entrepreneur”, yet those of us who organise against the corporations that churn out sexist imagery are regularly dismissed as stirring moral panic”. Gail Dines and Julia Long.

Large sections of the left, perfectly capable of critiquing the capitalist mass media’s role in reproducing capitalism, manage to make an exception for pornography. Large sections of the left, (and the most generous explanation is that they do not wish to seem prudish, unfashionable or conservative) have outsourced their position on pornography to liberals.

The left’s response to the failed prosecution of Simon Walsh are characterised by  sanctimony- a sanctimony that must have been all the more enjoyable for how its sexual frankness gave a sense of superiority over conservative sanctimony- shrill claims and woefully inadequate conclusions. The prosecution of Walsh was farcical, almost certainly a vindictive response to Walsh’s work in prosecuting corrupt police officers and quite probably homophobic.