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Introduction Notes Introduction 1. Throughout the chapters, my comments on utopia are reliant on the work of Ruth Levitas (1990; 2003; 2005; 2007; 2013). Defining utopia in a non- restrictive manner, as the desire for a better way of being, Levitas has long argued that utopianism is everywhere, across popular culture, political debates, social thought, and she has insisted on utopian analysis as an indis- pensable method (as archaeology, ontology and architecture) for the human sciences. See, in particular, Levitas (2013). 2. In 1977 Althusser (1978) declared a ‘crisis of Marxism’. See Keucheyan (2013) for an analysis of the period of Left defeat, 1977– 1993. 3. For an insightful, accessible, mordant Gramscian analysis of the various ‘Princes’ before us at this moment – anti- globalist/Occupy, nationalist, reli- gious, austerity/ re- asserted neo- liberal – see Worth (2013). 4. For proximate treatments of this current, see, for instance, el- Ojeili (2003); Prichard et al. (eds) (2012); Rubel and Crump (eds) (1987); Schecter (1994; 2007). Schecter (2007), for example, brings together a range of thinkers and traditions – Marx, Western Marxism, critical theory, syndicalism, council communism, guild socialism, anarchism, the surrealists and the situationists, Italian workerism, and Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari – drawing out ele- ments from each as a way forward for a reinvigorated Left that must combine a critique of political economy with a critique of everyday life and bio- power. 5. As just one instance of this partial quality, we might remark upon the absence from this map of ‘impossibilism’. For a discussion of impossibilism, see Coleman (1987). Similarly, guild socialism, and its major thinker G. D. H. Cole, might have been included. For efforts to push a renewed ‘libertarian socialism’ centred on this guild socialism, see Wyatt (2011) and Dawson (2013): Wyatt centres his critique of the present on commodity fetishism, alienation and oligarchy, and suggests ‘new economic democracy’ (centred on guilds and councils) as an alternative to both state socialism and liberal capitalism; Dawson sets out to demonstrate in convincing detail that this variety of socialism is both compatible with the individualism and pluralism of late modernity and equipped with the analytical and normative resources to undermine neo- liberal positions. Fotopoulos (1997) and Albert (2004) provide other recent examples, from the libertarian socialist/Left communist direction, of work that combines an extensive critique of the present with detailed socialist institutional alternatives. 6. For a discussion of the varieties of anarchism and some good efforts to dia- grammize these, see Kinna (2005: 15– 26). 7. For extensive critiques along these lines, see, for instance, Harvey (2007) or Dawson (2013). 179 180 Notes 8. See Levitas (2013) for an extended critique of neo- liberalism and, especially in Chapter Ten, for a poignant defence of socialist values and institutions. See also Dawson (2013). 1 Post- Marxist Trajectories: Diagnosis, Criticism, Utopia 1. See, for instance, Wood (1986), Geras (1987, 1988), Sivananden (1990), Cloud (1994) and Ebert (1995). 2. For instance, Docherty (1996) and Tormey (2001a; 2001b). 3. For instance, ‘Perhaps it is time to admit that Marxism is beyond revision, either as a method or body of principles … and that all that remains [in post- Marxism] is a nostalgia for the ideal it appeared to be offering’ (Sim, 1998: 9); ‘ post- Marxism marks not a new beginning, nor a way out of a theoretical cul- de- sac, but the recognition of defeat’ (10). 4. Including Laclau, Mouffe, Negri, Badiou, Rancie`re, Castoriadis, Lefort, Heller, Bauman, Spivak and Hall. 5. For similar sentiments, see Butler et al. (2000a: 13– 14) and Said (2001: 129, 195, 465, 467). 6. For instance, for Mouffe (2000: 85– 6), ‘What we are witnessing with the current infatuation with humanitarian crusades and ethically good causes is the triumph of a sort of moralizing liberalism that is increasingly filling the void left by the collapse of any project of real political transformation. This moralization of society is in my view a consequence of the lack of any credible political alternative to the current dominance of neo- liberalism’. See also Butler (2000b). 7. A ‘prohibition against thinking’, for Žižek (2001a: 3). 8. Castoriadis (1997b: 47), it should be noted, was deeply unsympathetic towards the post- moderns, perhaps surprisingly, given his association of autonomy with the rejection of the vision of history as progress or libera- tion, the rejection of the notion of a single, universal reason, and an empha- sis instead on the instituted, historical, political and specific. 9. See, for instance, Castoriadis (1991: 5– 12). 10. For further discussion of this, see McLennan (2006). 11. There are multiple examples of this. See, for instance, Rorty (1997; 1999); Bourdieu (1998); Wallerstein (1998); Rawls (1999); Harvey (2000); Hudson (2003); Levitas (2003; 2005; 2007; 2013); Jacoby (2005); Jameson (2005; 2009); Santos (2005a; 2006; 2008); Bell (2006); Tamdgidi (2007); another instance would be the work led by Eric Olin Wright around ‘real utopias’. 12. McLennan’s example here is the work of Manuel Castells, despite the latter’s language leaning towards complexity analysis. 13. Tormey and Townshend referring, here, to Spivak’s (1988) critique of Foucault and Deleuze’s discussion of intellectuals. 14. In Laclau’s last book, this Marxian complexity is acknowledged in pass- ing (2014: 124), a mention uncomfortably embedded within a text that rehearses, again and again, arguments against an ineradicably flawed Marxism (for instance, 70– 71). 15. This is a much stronger take than Sim’s (2000: 2) later assessment of the ‘hardly showbiz’ role of a ‘limited Marxism’ that ‘remains in dialogue with Notes 181 other theoretical developments in an open- minded, non- doctrinal fashion’; and a post- Marxism that has the function of ‘remaining in dialogue with that narrative [Marxism, thus keeping] … some of its principles alive … while also acting as a check on the more anarchic versions of the postmodern narra- tive’ (171). It is much closer to Tormey and Townshend’s (2006: 227) more strongly Marxian pluralism: ‘just as “ Post- marxism” represents a challenge to the reductive Marxism of “actually existing socialism”, so Marxism can surely be regarded as a kind of corrective to the wilder flights of wishful thinking displayed by many post- Marxists. The world is still capitalist; the lives of the many are hostage to the wishes of the few. Inequality, power- lessness and oppression are, notwithstanding the heralds of the “End of History”, still with us. … we will probably need both Marxism and its scepti- cal “outside”, Post- Marxism.’ 2 ‘No, We Have Not Finished Reflecting on Communism’: Castoriadis, Lefort and Psychoanalytic Leninism 1. Lefort (2007: 30). 2. See the extensive anonymous translator’s Forewords to the first two Castoriadis volumes, The Rising Tide of Insignificancy and Figures of the Thinkable, Scott McLemee’s (2004) ‘The Strange Afterlife of Cornelius Castoriadis’, and David Ames Curtis’s (2005) ‘Statement of David Ames Curtis Concerning the Announcement of the PDF Electronic Publication of Cornelius Castoriadis/Paul Cardan’s Figures of the Thinkable’. 3. See, for instance, Bowman and Stamp (2007), Kay (2003), Parker (2004) and Sharpe and Boucher (2010). 4. See also Losurdo’s (2004) devastating criticism of the category of totalitarianism. 5. See, for instance, Gregory Elliott (1994; 2006). It is interesting to note the peculiarly French turn to anti- totalitarianism, at a time when the concept was losing traction elsewhere, under pressure from changes taking place post- Stalin and challenges to ‘really existing democracy’ from the Left (Elliott, 1994; 2006). Castoriadis and Lefort are frequently, here, carelessly lumped together with the new philosophers and with a post- modern line that was to equate totalizing thought with totalitarianism and the erasure of difference, as well as a revisionist line of emboldened liberal thinking that came to lay the blame for the disasters of modernity with the French Revolution (Elliott, 1994; 2006). One sign of the vital differences, here, is given by Castoriadis’s (2010a) insistence on the major discontinuities between communism and fascism. 6. See Castoriadis (1988a: 107– 58), ‘The Relations of Production in Russia’, in Political and Social Writings, Volume 1. 7. Here, Lefort is fundamentally restating earlier (Lefort, 1986; 1988) arguments. 8. And Castoriadis (2003: 299) explicitly connects totalitarianism to capitalism – totalitarianism as ‘immanent in the capitalist imaginary’. 9. The anonymous translator of The Rising Tide of Insignificancy notes that, in his last interview, Castoriadis insisted he would always remain a revolutionary. 182 Notes 10. Interestingly, returning again to a contention from his Socialism or Barbarism days, Castoriadis emphasizes the importance in the development of capitalism of internal contestation, of autonomy. Because individuals are creations of society, and because more and more our age is characterized by only ‘unlimited expansion of the economy, of production, and of consump- tion’ (2005: 226), where in the future, Castoriadis (2005: 237) asks, will we find the characters that have been central to the functioning and evolution of the social system – the dedicated teacher, the bureaucrat who is a stickler for rules, the honest judge?: ‘we are also witnessing the destruction of the anthropological
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