From: Christopher Gray <rasputin-AT-teleport.com>
Date: 01 Jul 2009 02:49:48 UTC   (07:49:48 PM in author's locale)
To: SMIRK <smirkers_of_the_world-AT-yahoogroups.com>

Chapter V: The Politics of Subjectivity
pages 101-118 taken from Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary
Psychology from Adler to Laing
by Russell Jacoby
previously published in the Telos journal - (Number 9; 1971)

The political left has not escaped the ravages of social amnesia and
subjective reductionism. The very effort to think through and back,
which in different forms belongs to the best of psychoanalytic and
Marxist thought, is undermined by the individual in crisis unable to
think beyond itself. Evidence of this is everywhere, in revisionist
and conformist psychology as well as in the left. The crisis is no
fraud; the chill of social relations numbs the living. The effort to
keep psychically warm, to stave off the cold that seeps in, shunts
aside any time for or possibility of sustained thought and theory. The
permanent emergency of the individual blocks the permanent and social
solution.

Within the left this assumes a definite form. Because the political
left is a left it retains a social analysis of society. The very
problem, however, is that this social analysis decays more and more
into slogans, thoughtless finds of the moment. The individual stripped
of memory and mind magnetically attracts reified slogans that serve
more to sort out one's friends and enemies than to figure out the
structure of reality. This is a dynamic that keeps society rattling
along; the very breathing space that could give life to critical
theory is lost in the desperate search for life itself. The search
without reflection grooves along in the ruts of society.

Social amnesia takes two forms within the left: the construction of
instant and novel theories of reform and revolution, and, recently and
increasingly, the hasty refurbishing of older slogans and tactics.
Both proceed simultaneously because both live off the suppression of
the past. The pop theories are fabricated out of scraps and pieces of
personal experience and the morning news. Jaded ones are picked out of
left archives and, once cleansed of their historical context, content,
and critique, are restored to service. These forms of social
forgetting render a discussion of trends in the left doubly
irrelevant; not only is such a discussion distant from the immediate
needs of the individual, but it is obsolete, examining political
thought and slogans that have already been discarded and forgotten. So
rapidly does the left change that discussion and analysis seem doomed
to lag behind.

Evidently this is part of the problem: attending to the emergency of
the individual has absorbed sustained political energy and theory. The
slogans that replace and dislodge theory shift with the moment. These
shifts are not made through choice, discussion, and thought, but
"automatically" - thoughtlessly and unconsciously. If the latest
political opinions are improvements over former ones, it is not
because the latter have been surpassed, but because they have been
forgotten. They pass as they arose, uncritically, and promise to
return. The hex that haunts left thought is the hex of bourgeois
society: memoryless repetition. Thinking falls under the sway of
fashion: change without change. If ideas such as "smash monogamy" are
not promoted with the same vigor as previously this does not mean that
they have been critically transcended, but simply that they have been
dropped, to be elsewhere and later recycled and reused. Inasmuch as
this discarding and forgetting is a continuing process, an examination
of slogans, even if they are obsolete - which is by no means certain -
may indicate forces that are hardly obsolete, that are as vital as
society itself.

This analysis does not intend to simply equate developments within the
left proper with those outside it, as if the two canceled each other
out, confirming the wisdom that it is best to do nothing. That a
political left and nQnleft participate in the same drive toward
subjectivity, that both suffer from social amnesia, is proof only of
the virulence of society, not of the meaninglessness of political
distinctions.

Further, it need hardly be said, the left itself is more and more
fragmented; these thoughts are concerned with trends which tend to
exert themselves, but are not evident everywhere. Such an analysis
does not claim universal validity. It should be noted also that while
it is impossible to discuss the left without drawing material from the
women's movement, Weathermen, and so on, it would violate the very
spirit and intent to read this as an indictment of specific groups. At
best, one can say certain groups express with greater clarity trends
that are present everywhere. But nothing more; neither that such
developments are restricted to particular groups or, more erroneously,
that these groups brought them about. Here, as elsewhere, the issue is
society as a whole.

The rejection of theory and theorizing is grounded in the affirmation
of subjectivity. Theory seems politically impotent and personally
unreal and distant. Only human subjectivity - the personal life - is
meaningful and concrete. The personal is said (or was said?) to be
political, the political, personal. The identity of the two eliminates
the need to pursue either separately. Theory and critical thought give
way to human relations, feelings, and intuitions. The immediacy of
these cuts to the quick of theory and thought: mediacy. The presence
of the here and now in the form of subjective feelings banishes
thoughts to afterthoughts and second thoughts. It instills an
immediacy that stills reflection.

The promise held out by a focus on human subjectivity is lost if no
attention is given to its place within society in general. Here the
relation of phenomena within and outside a left is at once critical
and fluid. For the cult of human subjectivity is not the negation of
bourgeois society but its substance. Against a Marxist dogma that
proscribed all subjectivity in the name of science, its articulation
within the left was progress; but when this articulation becomes an
exclusive pursuit it courts a regression that constitutes bourgeois
society's own progress. The fetish of subjectivity and human
relationships is progress in fetishism. The rejection of theory which
seeks insight into objectivity in favor of subjective feelings
reconstitutes a suspect Cartesian tradition in the reverse: I feel,
therefore I am. The inner drive of bourgeois society was to throw the
human subject back on itself. Descartes's thought illustrates this
tendency. "My third maxim was to endeavor always to conquer myself
rather than fortune, and to change my desires rather than the order of
the world." c1 Human subjectivity was left to shift for itself: to
examine and transform the self, not the universe of the self. To
prescribe more subjectivity as aid to the damaged subject is to
prescribe the illness for the cure.

The wholesale rejection of theory incurs the constitutional failing of
the individual retailer; apparently free to buy and sell he is a
victim of objective laws without knowing them. The private individual,
free to pick and choose, was a fraud from the beginning; not only were
the allotments already picked and chosen, but the contents of the
choice followed the dictates of the social not the individual world.
The "private interest is already a socially determined interest, which
can be achieved only within the conditions laid down by society and
with the means provided by society. . . . It is the interest of
private persons; but its content, as well as the form and means of its
realization, is given by social conditions independent of all." c2
Even as society announced it, the idea of the individual as an
autonomous being was ideological. The unemployed, like the employed,
were to think that their lack of luck, or their luck, was due to
private abilities and was not determined by the social whole. No less
are the private hopes, desires, and nightmares cued by public and
social forces. The social does not "inHuence" the private; it dwells
within it. "Above all we must avoid postulating 'Society' again as an
abstraction vis-a.-vis the individual. The individual is the social
being". c3

The fetish of human relations, responses, emotions, perpetuates the
myth; abstracted from the social whole they appear as the
individualized responses of free men and women to particular
situations and not, as they are, the subhuman responses to a nonhuman
world. As noted previously, a rat psychology befits humans only when a
suffocating world has transformed men and women into rats. The endless
talk on human relations and responses is utopian; it assumes what is
obsolete or yet to be realized: human relations. Today these relations
are inhuman; they partake more of rats than of humans, more of things
than of people. And not because of bad will but because of an evil
society. To forget this is to indulge in the ideology of sensitivity
groups that work to desensitize by cutting off human relations from
the social roots that have made them brutal. More sensitivity today
means revolution or madness. The rest is chatter.

The cult of subjectivity is a direct response to its eclipse. As
authentic human experience and relationships disappear, they are
invoked the more. Autobiographical accounts replace analysis because
autobiographies as the history of a unique individual cease to exist.
"To get in touch with one's feelings" -- a slogan picked up by parts
of the women's movement - hopes to affirm an individual existence
already suspect. Self and mutual affirmation and confirmation work to
revitalize experience denatured long ago. Bewitched by the commodity,
the individual turns into one. The atomized particle called the
individual gains an afterlife as an advertisement for itself.

The exclusive pursuit of subjectivity insures its decline. Not against
the drive of society but in tune with it, it judges a social product
to be a private woe or utopia. What was exacted from the individual at
the beginning of its history - that the individual's freedom, labor,
and so on, were only subjective and personal- is promoted later as its
salvation. That parts of the women's movement have made subjectivity
programmatic, repudiating all objective theoretical thought, indicates
only the extent to which the revolt recapitulates the oppression:
women, allegedly incapable of thought and systematic thinking but
superior in sentiments and feelings, have repeated this in their very
rebellion. Yet the point is not to resuscitate an official orthodoxy
that eliminated any role for the subject. Critical theory and vIable
Marxist thought have worked precisely against this orthodoxy; it is a
question of restoring a subject-object dialectic. The alternatives of
pure subjectivity and pure objectivity are the alternatives of
positivist thought itself. Marxist and critical thought must use
another logic, dialectical logic.

The promise of radical subjectivity to escape political and personal
irrelevancy is unfulfilled. While there was positive progress against
an older, scientific Stalinist orthodoxy, it repeated in reverse the
same sin: an indifference toward the content of bourgeois society that
perpetuates this content. "The passage to theory-less praxis was
motivated by the objective impotence of theory," wrote T. W. Adorno,
"and multiplied that impotence by the isolation and fetishization of
the subjective moment of the historical movement." c4 Subjectivity
that forsakes sustained theory gravitates toward slogans that are not
the crystallizations of discussion and thought but secretions of the
existing. society. As such they serve not to popularize thought, but
to replace it. From "armed struggle" to "smash monogamy" they are not
necessarily wrong in themselves, but wrong insofar as they are blank
labels, indifferent, or rather antagonistic, toward content. They are
to be applied anywhere and everywhere, as if indifference to concrete
and definite conditions were the hallmark of revolutionary theory and
not its negation.

Blindness to content is the social logic of a society that deals in
exchange values: how much? No matter their tone, blank categories of
affirmation (or condemnation) of armed struggle, the third world,
leadership, men, and the rest, do not resist, but succumb to the inner
mechanism of this society. The preservation of concrete dialectical
analysis, even in idealistic form - to follow Lenin - makes
intelligent idealism closer to dialectical materialism than vulgar
materialism that is primitive and indifferent. The former, in its
loyalty to the particular, preserves what a crude materialism, blind
to distinctions, loses. What Lenin said of idealism can be said
perhaps, for the same reason, of pacifism. Intelligent pacifism is
closer to revolution than simplistic armed struggle.

The slogan of "smash monogamy" is of particular interest in
elucidating the political content of a current slogan; to be examined
is the extent to which such a slogan resists the drive of bourgeois
society or, appearances notwithstanding, seconds it. From the start it
suggests a violence that is hardly commensurate with its object, as if
the forces out to sustain monogamy were to do so with cannon and gun.
Rather to "smash" monogamy is to smash something unprotected, weak and
frail, already despised and hated, openly or secretly. The open scorn
and popular ridicule reveal the profound ambiguity of society toward
its own product: maintaining marriage as a means of transmitting
authority while suspecting it to be obsolete.

In fact, as discussed previously, the bourgeois family -- and monogamy
-- as instruments of authority are being eclipsed by more efficient
means: schools, television, etc. The father, as the wielder of the
absolute power of condemnation or inheritance, is being phased out.
The erosion of the economic content of the family unit ultimately saps
its authoritarian structure in favor of complete fragmentation.
Important in this context is that the family in its "classic" form was
not merely a tool of society, but contained an antiauthoritarian
moment. The family as an independent and (relatively) isolated unit
preserved a "space" in which the individual could develop against the
society; as a mediator of authority, and not merely an instrument of
it, it resisted as well as complied. It supplied an intellectual, and
sometimes physical, refuge which is the source of resistance. The
notion - practically extinct? -- that you can always come home
indicates the protection offered against social domination. Within
this space, the family relationships not only partook of the
prevailing in humanity, but also preserved the possibility of
something else and better. "In contradiction to public life, in the
family where the relations are not mediated through the market and the
individuals do not confront each other as competitors, the possibility
exists for men and women to act not merely as functions, but as
individuals." c5 The use of "sisters and brothers" by the left itself
recalls the solidarity that at least for a moment was nurtured in the
family.

That the family - and monogamy - was a form of humanity as well as a
form of inhumanity is crucial to the Marxist critique. To lose this
dialectic is to invite regression; it means falling behind bourgeois
monogamy, not realizing its human moment but eradicating it in favor
of a new and repressive equality. It is this repressive equality that
inspires and fuels the hatred and attack on monogamy, as well as that
on privilege and exclusion in general. It belongs to the bourgeoisie's
most progressive and regressive program: progressive in its democratic
content against feudal privilege, and regressive in that it is
ultimately grounded in the market of "equal" exchange and works to
further the domain of the market. This equality is abstract, as money
is abstract; knowing neither quality nor content, it registers only
numbers. In its indifference toward the actual content of life, a
critique sustained by equality signals its bourgeois ideal "that
tolerates nothing qualitatively different." c6

In different guises -- always resisted by Marx -- it emerged within
and outside Marxism, as in critiques of wage-labor, classes, private
property -- and monogamy. Such critiques were directed against
inequalities and sought only equalization or democratization. In
recognizing only privilege and inequalities they worked to level --
capital ism's own task. In losing the dialectical moment, they
regressed; not the abolition of classes but their equalization, c7 not
the abolition of capitalist property but its democratization, not the
abolition of wage-labor but its extension to all, were programs based
on a bourgeois ideal of equality. Equality fixated on forms forgot the
content that was in human, equal or not. A critique of capitalist
property in spired solely by equality promises only an equality of
domination, not its end. Rather bourgeois property contains both human
and inhuman moments, as does monogamy. Marcuse's essay on Marx's
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts is emphatic on this: Marxism
seeks the abolition of alienated labor and class property, not "labor"
and "property" which are the praxis of free men and women. c8

It rejects both of the abstract alternatives that a cri-tique founded
on equality proposes: the abolition of all property -- primitive
communism -- or wage-labor for all -- utopia as a workgang. Rather,
Marxism seeks to realize the human and individual moment in labor and
property that goes beyond formal equality. Marx ridiculed those who
saw communism as the abolition or equalization of all property. In his
piece on the Commune, he wrote, "The Commune, they explain, intends to
abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the
Commune intended to abolish that class property It wanted to make
individual property a truth." c9 Or in the Communist Manifesto: with
the end of capitalism "personal property is not thereby transformed
into social property. It is only the social character of the property
that is changed. It loses its class character." c10

A passage in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts gives the
fullest discussion of the communism that does not transform
capitalism, but by equalizing universalizes it. To Marx it is no
accident that the key to such communism is its critique of bourgeois
monogamy. The passage is worth citing. Primitive communism:
wants to destroy everything which is not capable of being possessed by
all as private property. It wants to do away by force with talent,
etc. For it the sole purpose of life and existence is direct physical
possession. The task of the laborer is not done away with, but
extended to all men.... Finally this movement of opposing universal
private property to private property finds expression in the animal
form of opposing to marriage (certainly a form of exclusive private
property) the community of women, in which a woman becomes a piece of
communal and common property. It may be said that this idea of the
community of women gives away the secret of this as yet completely
crude and thoughtless communism. Just as a woman passes from marriage
to general prostitution, so the entire world of wealth (that is, of
man's objective substance) passes from the relationships of exclusive
marriage with the owner of private property to a state of universal
prostitution with the community. In negating the personality of man in
every sphere, this type of communism is really nothing but the logical
expression of private property.... General envy constituting itself as
a power is the disguise in which greed re-establishes itself.... In
the form of envy and the urge to reduce things to a common level....
this... even constitute[s] the essence of competition. The crude
communism is only the culmination of this envy and of this
levelingdown proceeding. c11
The full content of the regressive critique of capitalism is here
articulated; founded on the bourgeois notion of equal ity, and partly
driven by envy and resentment, it works to spread capitalism. Blind to
content, it registers only privilege and exclusion and seeks formal
equality. The denunciation -- of leadership, theory, talent,
relationships between two people or between a man and a woman as forms
of exclusion and privilege - is part of this "crude and thoughtless"
communism. Privilege seen only as a violation of equality is privilege
seen through the eyes of the bourgeoisie. "The developed modern state
is not based ... on a society of privileges but on a society in which
privileges are abolished and dissolved Free industry and free trade
abolish privileged exclusivity... and set man free from privilege....
They produce the universal struggle of man against man, individual
against individual." c12 The logic of equality that sustains these
critiques of exclusion and privilege is the logic of the market
itself. It seeks to level -- a utopia of complete pulverization of
human relations and an interchangeability of individuals. The
universalization of alienation, not its abolition, is its unconscious
goal; it promises as liberation an equality of domination.

The point is not the mindless defense of monogamy, bourgeois property,
leadership. Rather it is to understand their dialectical content which
will make their abolition not regressive but progressive. It is to
understand their human as well as inhuman content: monogamy not simply
as mutual oppression, but as the attempt at a sustained relationship
between two people; theory not simply as elitism, but as necessary
insight into objective reality; leader ship not simply as
manipulation, but as a rational form of organization. The inability or
refusal to grasp the dialectical content, as well as the open
resentment, make talk about their abolition suspect; they express the
desire to break down privilege and exclusion not so as to liberate but
so as to share the spoils. The envy which would destroy in the name of
freedom is too often apparent, e.g., communal groups which
systematically set out to destroy exclusive relationships as threats
to their own. The endless talk on human relations within the insular
group works to promote group domination; it flushes out the last
hiding place.

The critique of unique and exclusive relationships as crimes against
democracy and equality has been formulated by bourgeois society's own
advanced representatives, notably de Sade. The human individual -- and
body -- is rendered totally functional, subject to all and everything.
The progressive and regressive elements of bourgeois society have
rarely been so clearly articulated: equality and democracy serve as a
critique of privilege, to make way for mutual and equal domination.
The indifference toward the actual human content of relationships
makes de Sade's program at one with the bourgeoisie's own dream of
liberation: liberation as a spree in the bargain-basement of human
sexuality. In "Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If you would become
Republicans," he proposed:
Never may an act of possession be exercised upon a free being; the
exclusive possession of a woman is no less unjust than the possession
of slaves; all men are born free; all have equal rights: never should
we lose sight of those principles; according to which never may there
be granted to one sex the legitimate right to lay monopolizing hands
upon the other, and never may one of these sexes or classes
arbitrarily possess the other.... Love, which may be termed the soul's
madness, is no more than a trifle by which ... constancy may be
justified: Love, satisfying two persons only, the beloved and the
loving, cannot serve the happiness of others, and it is for the sake
of the happiness of everyone, and not for egotistical and privileged
happiness, that women have been given to us. All men therefore have an
equal right of enjoyment of all women.
That this is not just an equality of women for men, but an for all is
clear.
If we admit... that all women ought to be subjugated to our desires we
may certainly allow them ample satisfaction of theirs.... I would have
them accorded the enjoyment of all sexes, and, as in the case of men,
the enjoyment of all parts of the body; and under the special clause
prescribing their surrender to all who desire them, there must be
subjoined another guaranteeing them a similar freedom to enjoy all
they deem worthy to satisfy them. c13
This is the full content of the bourgeois equality and democracy
unfolded: a utopia of total fragmentation and mutual exploitation. The
rights championed are the rights of money that have been doled out to
all; alienation is transcended by universalizing it. As such, these
rights, like equality, are informed by the market - and forget the
market; focusing on the abstract, they leave to one side the concrete
economic content. "Right can never be higher than the economic
structure of society." c14 The rights advanced of late by some on the
left - rights of homosexuals, of control over one's body, and the like
- participate 1 in the same dialectic of bourgeois equality and
rights; they are both progress in freedom and progress in domination.
The right to free labor was the right to wage-slavery. The right to
freedom of speech is the right to read a massproduced newspaper. Their
essential content was dictated by the economic-social structure of
society, not by formal and abstract rights and equalities. And yet
they were progress -- against serf labor and state-run newspapers. So,
too, with the newer rights championed.

This is not to argue that they are not worth struggling for; they are
- just as wage-labor and freedom of speech were, and are. Yet not to
be forgotten is the content; rights do not negate the prevailing
society, but affirm and extend it. The right to "free" labor as that
to free sex is ironic. It is the freedom of individuality which has
already been killed in its substance. It is the gloss of freedom under
conditions of its denial. When this content is ignored, then the
relationship of these reforms and rights as part of a revolutionary
process, but distinct from a revolution that would revolutionize the
content itself, is mystified. Where these rights are announced as ends
in themselves, the democratization of reification is dubbed its
dissolution. The glorification of the rights of homosexuals, control
over one's own body, group relations, masturbation, and the rest
confuse equality-within-alienation with liberation. To. romanticize
masturbation is to hawk the quintessence of bourgeois society for its
negation. The systematic destruction of human relationships has left
the decimated subject. only with itself. The concept of freedom lies
elsewhere; it is anchored in the sustained relation between two
individuals; it can transcend and go beyond this - and ultimately must
-- but cannot bypass it.

It was this moment which was saved in the Marxist "abolition" of
bourgeois monogamy, and this is why Marx and Engels spoke of monogamy
as being realized, not obliterated. c15 The relation of two
individuals, of loved and lover, belongs to the core of human freedom.
c16 The positive content of this is unclear, as it must be till the
liberated society has arrived. c17 Yet from Marx through Freud to the
Surrealists and to the Frankfurt School, unique and individual love
and relationships have been seen as elements of freedom, the rejection
of a repressive civilization.

The drive to level, to reduce all to identical monads efficient and
adept at shifting relationships with anyone or anything is the form of
love of late capitalism. Unique love harbors a threat to this
indifferent and collective form which is fabricated by bourgeois
society or promoted by parts of the left. Eros is lethal for the
repressive collective, and ultimately lethal for the lovers. The
etymological link between (love) "potion" and "poison" indicates the
psychological and historical one. Two people in love, by excluding the
larger society, incite its wrath. "Two people coming together for the
purpose of sexual satisfaction, insofar as they seek solitude are
making a demonstration against the herd instinct, the group feeling,"
wrote Freud. c18 "The antithesis between civilization and sexuality,"
he wrote elsewhere, is derived "from the circumstances that sexual
love is a relationship between two individuals in which a third can
only be superfluous or disturbing, whereas civilization depends on
relationships between a considerable number of individuals." c19 When
human relations fall under the dictates of planned obsolescence, the
unique relationship between two individuals smacks of freedom and
resistance - and foolishness, exactly as foolish as repairing an old
commodity when a new one is cheaper. According to Horkheimer,
"Realistic science has objectified sex till it is manipulative.... In
the mass society the sexes are leveled so that they both relate to
their sex as a thing, which they control coldly and without illusion."
Freedom is elsewhere. "The lovers are those who preserve and protect
neither themselves nor the collective. In disregarding themselves,
they earn its anger. Romeo and Juliet die against a society for that
which it itself proclaims. Insofar as they unreasonably sacrifice
themselves, they assert the freedom of the individual against the
domination of property." c20

If the intensification of subjectivity is a direct response to its
actual decline, it ultimately works to accelerate the decline. To the
damaged subject it proposes more of the same. The objective loss of
human relationships and experience is eased by their endless pursuit.
A cult of subjectivity - complete with drugs - dopes the discontented
into taking their own death, figuratively and in fact, for life
itself. The immediacy of it all drives out mediacy of any of it.
Sustained political and theoretical thought is not simply rejected but
forgotten and repressed. The slogans and rhetoric that replace it are
as vacant and thoughtless as the society that tosses them up. The
specter not only of society, but of its opposition, that has lost its
memory and mind, haunts history.

The tone of the slogans notwithstanding, their collaboration with
society is barely hidden. Empty concepts, too often fired by
resentment and envy, perpetuate the essential content of this society.
A critique of monogamy, theory, leadership, relationships between two
people as forms of exclusion and privilege is a critique that falls
behind bourgeois society, not advances over it; it is akin to the
"thoughtless" communism outlined by Marx. What is perpetually lost
under the sway of immediacy is a dialectical analysis: monogamy as
both human and inhuman - as the bad refuge from a worse world and a
bad solution for a better world; theory as insight into objectivity as
well as elitism. To see only one moment is to trade the worse for the
bad: no theory instead of elitist theory, inhuman fragmented relations
for damaged human ones. The dialectical path is elsewhere.

The depletion of political concepts in favor of psychological and
subjective ones is a by-product of the scramble for the remnants of
human experience. Yet the subjectivization of objective concepts is
not the repudiation of the loss of human experience but forms its
prehistory. The reduction of the Marxist theory of alienation to a
subjective condition by liberal sociologists has its counterpart in
the left in the reduction of oppression to a whim of the individual.
Alienation becomes a headache and oppression mere annoyance. "I'm
oppressed," announces someone, and that's that.

Inside and outside the left radical subjectivity announces its own
end; it resists reification by colluding with it. Hence the
totalitarian urge of radical subjectivity to control everything.
Endless talk about human relationships within the closed group
promotes domination. Bad subjectivity seeks the bad collective that
secures subjectivity by annihilating it. "Collectivism and
individualism complete each other in the false." c21 The bourgeois
individual whittled down to identical monads pursues its last
fragments in and for a public only too anxious to share the remains.
The individual goes public in a desperate attempt to maintain
solvency. Blank and vacant affirmations or condemnations of the
women's movement, men, armed struggle, recent political and personal
events serve as tools of interpersonal relations. Thought is reduced
to slogans and slogans to symbols of mutual- and self-confirmation.

Rampant narcissism surfaces as the final form of individualism; it at
once negates the ego and perpetuates its mangled form. Vague
conceptions of guilt, the universal oppression of women by men, one's
"own" oppression, function as instruments of an ego that is regressing
in the face of a disintegrating society. That men, too, have suffered
and died in the massacre of history is affirmed or denied, but is in
any case irrelevant. What counts is the immediate, and here an
economism-turned-feminism is promoted as if the blind endorsement of
what every worker did or thought is improved when it is as blindly
applied to women. Social analysis decays into group loyalty. The
jealousy with which the oppression of women, children, homosexuals,
and so on, is defended as a private preserve, off-limits to others,
expresses an urge to corner the market of oppression.

Again, the point here is not to argue for a return to a "scientific"
objective theory that proscribed any role for the subject; and again,
the alternatives of pure subjectivity and pure objectivity are the
either/or of bourgeois culture itself. The choice between instant
subjectivity and instant slogans, between unorthodox individual needs
and political orthodoxy is no choice at all. Nor are the practical and
communal attempts to overcome the deadly privacy and coldness of
existence to be rejected. Rather they are to be advanced; but advanced
not by a mode of thought and action that damns them to be more of the
same. The political and personal praxis that is sustained by bad
subjectivity and abstract slogans issues into the very prison that is
the bourgeois world. What is to be sought is a concrete subject/object
dialectic that reconstructs the new out of the decay; only the praxis
that shuns the fetish can hope for liberation. There are no guarantees
nor tried-and-tested methods. Mistakes have been and will be made; but
the efforts must remain continually alive to the tension between the
"personal" and the "political" without abdicating either or reducing
one to the other.

The line that inspired the Weatherman name suggested one metaphor for
the path of theory and praxis: you don't need a weatherman to know
which way the wind is blowing. In classical Marxist theory this
metaphor indicates opportunism, that is, subjectivism or the lack of
principles; the willingness to swim with the current, be what it may.
Obviously, Weatherman was a direct repudiation of social-democratic
opportunism; not only by their actions and program, but also by their
courage and dedication. And yet, as argued here, they as others
unwittingly collapsed into a subjectivity and abstract sloganeering
that is part and parcel of bourgeois society itself. The Lukacs of
History and Class Consciousness suggested another metaphor for
revolutionary theory and praxis; he wrote there of the sailor. The
sailor, like the weatherman, takes exact readings from the wind -- but
with a decisive difference: "without letting the wind determine his
direction, on the contrary, he defies and exploits it so as to hold
fast to his original course." c22

Citations

c1 Rene Descartes; "Discourse on Method," part III, in
Philosophical Writings; Norman K. Smith (New York: 1958); page 113.

c2 Karl Marx; Grundrisse; (Middlesex, England: 1973); page 158.

c3 Karl Marx; The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; ed.
Dirk J. Struik; (New York: 1964); pages 137-38.

c4 Theodor W. Adorno; "Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis,"
Stichworte (Frankfurt: 1969); page 177.

c5 Max Horkheimer; "Authoritat und Familie," Kritische Theorie der
Gesellschaft, Band I (Frankfurt: 1969); page 346.

c6 Theodor W. Adorno; Negativ Dialektik; (Frankfurt: 1970); page 148.

c7 See Karl Marx's comments on Mikhail Bakunin's program in: Karl
Marx and Frederich Engels; Werke, vol. 18; (Berlin: 1969); page 14 If.

c8 Herbert Marcuse; "Neue Quellen zur Grundlegung des Historischen
Materialismus" in Ideen zu Einer Kritischen Theorie; (Frankfurt:
1967); page 35 If. English translation in Marcuse; Studies in Critical
Philosophy; (Boston: 1973).

c9 Karl Marx; Civil War in France; (New York: 1940); page 61.

c10 Cf. Karl Marx; Capital, vol. 1; (Moscow: 1961); page 763.

c11 Karl Marx; The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844;
pages 132-33.

c12 Karl Marx and Frederich Engels; The Holy Family (Moscow: 1956);
pages 156-157.

c13 Marquis de Sade; Justine, Philosophy of the Bedroom; (New York:
1966); pages 318-19 and 321.

c14 Karl Marx; Critique of the Gotha Programme (New York: 1966);
page 10.

c15 For a good discussion of Marxism and monogamy, see the work
from the 1920s by the Russian scholar David Riazanov, available in
French translation, "Communis me et marriage" in Partisans 32-33
(1966); page 69 If.

c16 See the letter of Karl Marx to Jenny Marx cited in Alfred
Schmidt; Der BegrifJ der Natur in der Lehre von Marx; (Frankfurt:
1967); page113.

c17 Yet if utopian thought is in order there is nowhere better to
turn than to the most determined foe of bourgeois sexuality and
civilization, Charles Fourier, and especially to his long-suppressed
work, Le nouveau monde amoureux (Paris, 1967). Of particular interest
is his notion of "pivotal love" (page 290 If.) - a love relation which
is neither "simple fidelity" nor indifferent and brutal
interchangeability. And see Freud's comments to Wortis: "We don't know
what the future of monogamy will be, and cannot prophesy.... If
socialism comes, we shall see what happens" (Joseph Wortis; Fragments
of an Analysis with Freud; (New York: 1954]; page 42).

c18 Sigmund Freud; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego;
(New York: 1960); page 93.

c19 Sigmund Freud; Civilization and Its Discontents; (New York:
1971); page 55.

c20 Max Horkheimer; "Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung," in Autoritiirer
Staat (Amsterdam: 1968); pages 111 and 113. Cf. the beautiful
aphorism of Adorno, "Constanz" in Minima Moralia (Frankfurt: 1964);
page 226. It is translated in Reimut Reiche's Sexuality and Class
Struggle; (London: 1970); page 163.

c21 Theodor W. Adorno; Negativ Dialektik; page 278.

c22 Georg Lukacs; Geschichte und Klassenbewusstein; (Amsterdam,
1967); page 267. See also: Georg Lukacs; History and Class
Consciousness; (London, 1971); page 262.----
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