Theory and the Resistance to Marx

Socrates said that he knew nothing. But people didn't take him seriously. They thought that he meant that he, himself knew nothing, and that this was unfortunate for him. They didn't realize that in fact he was saying something else. Namely: that knowledge is impossible. Few people realize this, and those that do, find it hard to say. And there is a reasons for this. How do you say Nothing? One needs to invent a language - and as soon as one does this, than one can be misunderstood.

Recent communications with my redoubtable associate in Le Maquis have sharpened this problem to a pointlately. The idea that somehow a coherent revolutionary politics could be constructed from the ground of a superior moral fortitude - to my mind there no stance whatsoever that finally is less radical than this one. And not only on account for theoretical reasons either - the real point here is the strategic one: what kind of praxis does a moralistic framework of this nature ultimately suppose? In the last analysis, only an ineffective and hysterical one - in short: a politics of the very worst, one which ultimately is not worthy of that name.

In Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon wrote: "If you get them asking the wrong questions, you don't need to worry about the answers." And along these lines: somehow the idea has arisen, in the minds of the rebel class of our privileged Western post-societies, that exploitation is somehow always elsewhere. That capital is somehow always elsewhere. That these ideas, and these processes, are both realities that somehow only "they" are labouring under - they, the unhappy poor of the third, fourth, fifth, or fifteenth world. So that thus, from this, the resolution that is not one is arrived at: we must help them. Help them how? It is not known. But nonetheless - it only is the struggle of the outside which possesses meaning.

Suffice to say, this axiom is more theological than political. And for his part, Marx took pains to emphasize this fact. "If however, the German reader shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the English industrial and agricultural labourers," he writes at the beginning of Capital, "or in optimist fashion comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad; I must plainly tell him, "De te fabula narratur!" - This story is about you!"

And no doubt - the same point in inverse also holds true. Displaced pessissim equally is a great sedative comfort. Because after all: if it is only what is happening over there that has any substance, and if I am not there, then, well, what can I do? The answer here is simple: nothing. And thus I deliver myself completely from all responsibility whatsoever, and further - knowing frankly that at root that this delivery has been illegitimate, slide as consequence into sanctimony and ressentiment.