"The Problem" and it's problems

Steven Shaviro has an excellent post on the rising anti-State tendencies of the intellectual left.

His conclusion is one I can pretty much agree with, but with notes:

I take the rather unfashionable position that a progressive and democratic politics today must conceptualize and affirm some form of the State, and that “politics without the State” is a chimera.

note 1, the "today" is essential I's use it to mean now and for the short term (next couple decades most likely) future.

note 2, the "unfashionable" is pretty funny. Its true for a particular subsection of leftist intellectuals, but doesn't really scale much at all. The anti State leftists are on the radical fringes with Chomsky and Hardt/Negri being about as close as these ideas even get to major "progressive" information channels.

Now while I agree with Shaviro's conclusions, I'm not sure I can say the same with all the stops along the road. Here he gets into one of his major disagreements with the anti-State crew:

I wish that anarcho-collectivists, like Veroli et al, would get over their negative fetishization of “the State” as the source of all evil. I know this may make me sound like an old-line marxist fundamentalist, but I’m sorry: the State is not the problem, multi- and transnational capital is.

Its that last line that kills me. Its not like this is a multiple choice test, with either the State or multinational capital being "the problem". In fact I'd start by saying its far clear that anything at all is "the problem". There are problems for sure, problems with both states and with multinational corporations. But to bundle the multitude of issues up into "the problem" seems to me to be highly problematic in itself.

Fundamentally I find it really hard to take seriously anyone's claims that they actually understand how such enormous, interwoven and somewhat abstract entities such as "the State" and transnational capital actually function. The reality is that we just don't have a great understanding of their workings. Marx made perhaps the best attempt to break it all down. And a hundred years ago you could probably make a good case that he was reasonably accurate. But given radical economic transformations of the past century, his analysis doesn't look so accurate. Yet his claim that surplus labor will lead to the inevitable collapse of "capitalism" remains the only rigorous leftist critique of contemporary economic mechanics. And quite honestly its laughable.

Increasing I get a sense that the left has a deep seed personal need to believe that there is something seriously wrong with the world. And of course there are numerous localized problems that can identified. But there also appears to be a need to extrapolate these problems into a massive boogeyman of "capitalism" or "the State". The process of this extrapolation is beyond me.

Perhaps the same brain centers that produce belief in the supernatural are at work, those that have killed god seek to fill the void with another amorphous entity. The left traditionally looks to capitalism as jealous and vengeful god, while the right prefers the kind "invisible hand" god driven by "free" markets.

The action of producing these massive amorphous entities is also one of an odd personal liberation. Suddenly the problems of the world are driven by operations larger then the mind can quite grasp. They are several steps away from day to day existence, part of an imaginary system, that can be critiqued at will, but desperately hard to change and isolated from acts of living and working. Only the clergy, the hardcore protesters and activists end up dealing with the concepts and problems created by "capitalism" and "the State".

I've got no use for this bullshit. We live and world filled both with great beauty and substantive problems. And those problems are ones that we can do a lot towards solving. But in order to begin solving these issues its important to set aside many of tropes that have left the left stagnating in their own outdated concepts. Its time to move beyond the notions of "resistance", "revolution" and the excessive reliance on "critical" theory. There is no known war for the left to fight, no proven "system" to revolt against. There is a time and space for the critical, but there also need for the constructive and positive, both in reality and theory.

Posted by William Blaze at January 18, 2004 02:57 PM | TrackBack