end of anti-capitalism as we knew it: Reflections on postmodern marxism, The

Socialist Review, 2001 by Poitevin, Rene Francisco

I want to seize this special issue on anti-capitalism to talk about the ways in which the U.S. Left thinks and talks about "capitalism." More specifically, I want to look at the ways in which the U.S. Left itself has undermined its own capacity for anti-capitalist organizing by increasingly being unable to articulate a political agenda that can go beyond liberal reform. This assessment of left politics comes out of a specific political and theoretical context. A Latino from a poor working-class background, I came to voice politically and intellectually during the late 1980s and early 1990s, while attending college at an elite university. During that time I willingly embraced and inhabited the identity politics/urban direct action/new social movements paradigm -- from abortion clinic defenses, to organizing against police brutality, to defending affirmative action. I was able to immerse myself in the writings of Marx and Lenin, and further discovered their enduring influence through the lenses of Foucault, Gramsci, and Spivak. To realize early in my education that someone in my subject and class position had little chance of getting a good college education, much less of pursuing an academic career, had a strong politicizing effect on me. The awareness of that material contradiction and how it relates to the world outside of the university evolved into a burning desire to formulate a new Marxism that could incorporate the best of what previous Lefts had offered, with the best ideas contributed by a new generation of radicals. I felt then, and I still do, that in order to expose and denounce and supersede a regime that was profoundly unjust, Marxism had to be part of the solution.

I ended the 1990s, however, profoundly dissatisfied with both the theory and the practice of what constitutes "the Left" in this country. When I look around and see what passes for radical politics today, I see a Left so acquiescent and timid in its demands that one has to wonder what is left of the Left. And the theory and action that claims recognition as critical, or oppositional, is not only more dogmatically anti-Marxist than ever, it is also masquerading itself as socialist discourse. What I see is a U.S. Left political practice - vehement in rhetoric and tone -- more invested in pursuing a reformist intra-middle class liberal agenda, all in the name of "going beyond Marx," than with the well-being of the majority of people in this country. This is a Left that insists on downplaying institutional and structural inequality, the asymmetric distribution of social and economic power, in favor of issues concerning language, cultural representation, procedural democracy, access to elite employment, and environmental degradation as a quality-of-life issue. So my critique of actually existing U.S. Lefts comes out of my own need for intellectual and political self-clarification, but more importantly, it is a way to look forward to what must be done.

This approach, however, requires by way of introduction a preliminary inventory and assessment of what I mean by "actually existing U.S. Lefts." While I acknowledge that "the Left" is by no means monolithic, it is possible to provide a critique of radical politics by looking at the academic Left in the university.

This paper is first a critique of what constitutes the Left in academia - the poverty of politics and theory in the ivory tower relates directly to the crisis of the broader Left. Within this academic context, "radical democracy"' has been the Left's dominant theoretical orientation for the last two decades. And within the radical democracy tradition itself, the "Amherst School" of postmodern Marxism, which I will explain in more detail shortly, has been the most vocal trend in academic circles since the mid 1990s (as anybody who went to their Marxism 2000 Conference or who has looked at their journal Rethinking Marxism can testify.) As the title of this paper suggests, a close reading of the Amherst School of postmodern Marxism as standard bearer for an academic Left will allow me to engage with the broader current political crisis in Left politics -- and radical democracy.

I begin with the postmodern (mis)appropriation of Althusser's notion of "overdetermination," namely the intuition that reality is so complex that it is better understood as a multicausal process rather than as a "structural" or systemic mechanism, as in the traditional Marxist explanation of capitalism. Then, through a close reading of J.K. Gibson-Graham's (which is the professional name of scholars Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It),2 I show that despite its intuitive analytical appeal and theoretical sophistication, their book espouses an unconvincing and ultimately reactionary postmodern/post-Marxist politics - one that is ultimately predicated around how to make capitalism more user friendly. I will show that to practice or "perform" postmodern Marxist politics in our present situation is not to engage in what the Amherst School of postmodern Marxism describes as a "politics of opportunity and attainment,"3 but to practice the politics of surrender instead. I will make clear that what ultimately gives internal consistency to many of the critiques of postmodern and post-Marxist theorists is a profound distortion and co-optation of the most critical, unique, and politically mobilizing features of Marxist theory, on one hand, combined with a renaturalization of a capitalism predicated on liberal notions of social and economic reform, on the other.4