Beyond post-socialism : dialogues with the far-left

244 Pages·2015·1.15 MB·English

by  El-Ojeili

Beyond Post- Socialism
This page intentionally left blank
Beyond Post- S ocialism
Dialogues with the Far-Left
Chamsy el- Ojeili
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
© Chamsy el- Ojeili 2015
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6– 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2015 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndsmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978– 1 – 137– 47452– 0
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
El-Ojeili, Chamsy.
Beyond post-socialism : dialogues with the far-left / Chamsy el-Ojeili.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–1–137–47452–0 (alk. paper)
1. Communism. 2. Socialism. I. Title.
HX45.E42 2015
335—dc23 2014049655
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.
To my five great teachers – Sandy Davie, Charles Peter Fury,
Gregor McLennan, Brennon Wood, Peter Beilharz – to my
SOSC 401 students of 2014, and to my family
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1 Post- Marxist Trajectories: Diagnosis, Criticism, Utopia 16
2 ‘No, We Have Not Finished Reflecting on Communism’:
Castoriadis, Lefort and Psychoanalytic Leninism 35
3 Forget Debord? 54
4 ‘Many Flowers, Little Fruit’? The Dilemmas of Workerism 67
5 ‘Communism … Is the Affirmation of a New Community’:
Notes on Jacques Camatte 85
6 Anarchism as the Contemporary Spirit of A nti- Capitalism?:
A Critical Survey of Recent Debates 103
7 Reflections on Wallerstein: The Modern W orld- System
Four Decades On 123
8 Narrating Socialism – Four Voices 150
9 Concluding Comments 175
Notes 179
Bibliography 197
Index 224
vii
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my thanks to the following for kind permission
to reproduce copyright material: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. for e l- Ojeili,
C. (2010). ‘P ost- Marxist Trajectories: Diagnosis, Criticism, Utopia’, in
S ociological Inquiry, 80 (2), pp. 2 61- 282, which appears in modified form
as Chapter 1; Sage Publications for el- Ojeili, C. (2008). ‘“No, We Have
Not Finished Reflecting on Communism”: Beyond Post- Socialism’, in
Thesis Eleven, 93 (May), pp. 1 10– 129, which appears in modified form
as Chapter 2; Sage Publications for e l- Ojeili, C. (2007). ‘Forget Debord?’,
in Thesis Eleven, 89 (May), pp. 1 15– 127, which appears in modified form
as Chapter 3; Sage Publications for e l- Ojeili, C. (2004). ‘“Many Flowers,
Little Fruit”?: The Dilemmas of Workerism’, in Thesis Eleven, Number 79
(November), pp. 112– 123, which appears in modified form as Chapter 4;
Sage Publications for e l- Ojeili (2014). ‘“Communism … is the affirma-
tion of a New Community”: Notes on Jacques Camatte’, in Capital and
Class, 38 (2), pp. 3 42–3 61, which appears in modified form as Chapter 5;
Sage Publications for e l- Ojeili, C. (2014). ‘Anarchism as the Spirit of
Contemporary Anti- Capitalism? A Critical Survey of Recent Debates’, in
Critical Sociology, 40 (3), pp. 451- 468, which appears in modified form
as Chapter 6; Sage Publications for el- Ojeili, C. (2014). ‘Reflections on
Wallerstein: the Modern W orld- System, Four Decades On’, in Critical
Sociology, online first 9 May 2014, pp. 1 – 22, which appears in modi-
fied form as Chapter 7; and Sage Publications for el-O jeili, C. (2011).
‘Narrating Socialism: Three Voices’, in Thesis Eleven, Number 105, May,
pp. 102– 117, which appears in modified form as Chapter 8.
A big thank you, as well, to Richard Bouwman and Dylan Taylor for
their work on the manuscript. Finally, I would also like to acknowledge
the following for their feedback, dialogue and intellectual camaraderie
over the span of time during which this book was written: Esref Aksu,
Peter Beilharz, Tim Corballis, Lincoln Dahlberg, Kevin Dew, Greg
Gilbert, Patrick Hayden, Mike Lloyd, Gregor McLennan, Patricia Nickel,
Sean Phelan, Alistair Shaw, Dylan Taylor and Warwick Tie.
viii
Introduction
Some time back, over a decade ago now, two closely placed encounters
had me reflecting on the contemporary situation of communism, both
of them on the terrain of that horribly ‘lost cause’, Palestine– Israel. The
first occurred during a meeting at which the Australasian representa-
tive of the Palestine Authority spoke. At the conclusion of his talk, a
communist from a small Trotskyist group stood up and demanded that
the Palestinian Authority immediately ‘unleash the awesome power
of the working class’ on the Israeli settler state. The only thought that
came to my mind in response to this demand was a Simpsons episode in
which executives from a company manufacturing energy bars slogan-
ize that their product ‘unleashes the awesome power of apples’. Here,
communism, socialism, Marxism would seem hopelessly out- of- time,
exhausted and embarrassing, tediously and meaninglessly clichéd, a
dead family of languages unable to speak to the present, let alone about
the future.
The second encounter reverses or troubles this assessment, though.
Around the same time, I was reading the chaotically humorous novel
The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, by the Palestinian communist
Emile Habiby. Here, in spite of the four decades that have passed since
its original publication, communism and Marxism remain powerful
and present as analytical tools and as the imagination of other, better
worlds, full, that is, of utopian significance, which Levitas (2013: 12)
describes as ‘a secular form of grace’, encompassing loss, longing,
redemption, fulfilment.1 Communism, as represented by Habiby, can
feel like the heroic, egalitarian, solidaristic and universalistic orienta-
tion, still, to the unyielding difficulties of our times. In one of the many
lovely passages of the book, the anti- hero Saeed (whose stupidity and
1