9k:RD/KnowingDoesNotExist (Q46,19 #2)
Prompt
How is post-structuralism different from Trotskyism?
I made another thread where I was attempting to work through what the WSWS had said in relation to the 1619 Project and critical race theory. A lot of things that came up in that thread were more like real problems in the 1619 Project I skipped over, but I am still thinking about the basic concepts of the 1619 Project and what kinds of thinking might have led to it.
When I look at some of the most prominent motifs or concepts that would go in a 1619 Project article, what I think of is post-structuralism. At its core post-structuralism was something like a cluster of philosophies that came after structuralist linguists described how language approximately models real-world contradictions, and how the interactions between real-world objects or concepts lead to terms in language being defined relative to each other. The post-structuralists showed up and started to prototype what would later appear to be expressions of the postmodernist "monomyth" where no group of people can have an objective model of any other group of people — word meanings are arbitrary and can express personal biases, contradictions between words can reflect unjust systems and thus both of a pair of words can be wrong, entire connected ontologies of words that fit together into a "narrative" can simply be rejected. (I honestly haven't read a single post-structuralist text all the way through so that's just my best guesses of what post-structuralists were claiming that I've absorbed from a lot of references to them in other things.) I have a habit of seeing a philosophy, seeing that it vaguely matches up onto a real process, and thinking that it's leading to an understanding of that actual process if only it was improved. But, here goes.
In terms of the post-structuralist (?) concept of rejecting established ontologies and narratives, I can see a parallel to that in Trotsky. Trotsky wrote "Their morals and ours", both from his own observations and vaguely drawing on a number of prior writings by Lenin about underground organizations and liquidators. Between Lenin and Trotsky, there is a concept that comes up that established concepts of law and morality become irrelevant when there is a valid revolutionary organization and the overall set of regulatory processes of the bourgeoisie threaten that revolutionary organization, meaning the illegal organization has to break with the liquidators that uphold them. One thing that is important to Lenin and Trotsky is that the revolutionary organization actually has a viable Materialist framework for understanding the world including other organizations and itself, which can then be used to identify which groups are Leninist and which are not.
One issue that has caused a lot of problems for Marxism is that whenever a group emerges that understands dialectical materialism better than others it will often be small at first and there will be a much larger group of people that do not understand it, including revisionist parties and everyday people trapped in bourgeois ideology, and all the revisionist parties might try to claim the new, more correct understanding is revisionist rather than them. (This was a very serious problem for Trotsky in 1938 when there was a relatively small collection of Trotskyists and most of the "Marxist parties" that had been emerging across the world were Stalinist parties or another round of Menshevik-style parties.) If most of the parties in the world do not want to entertain a new set of observations that applies to them, then, in a way, any new underground party that forms between them has to consciously decide to reject all the old "narratives" that run against the new observations, no matter how much the revisionist parties present them as "a correct line", "established fact", or "common sense", or "a reason to get rid of other parties as counterrevolutionaries". It would seem to me like post-structuralism is basically the moment when Trotsky decides he is not going to accommodate Stalinist parties ever again to save all future Marxist organizations the pain (and death) that their betrayals will bring, but is that concept generalized much more widely and probably inappropriately.
The 1619 Project was never going to make a lot of sense. First of all it was intending to be a highly visible media effort, so adopting ways of thinking that are meant for underground parties would lead to strange decisions. Second, an account of history is not something that is merely "incorrect" to the point a whole narrative of events needs to be "rejected" in that way.
But, that said, I have seen the concept of Black people "rejecting narratives" applied in more productive ways than that. There is a writer called Ismatu Gwendolyn from Sierra Leone who has characterized revolution as something that cannot happen if people do not first survive. She figuratively describes the act of actually surviving a war zone as an act of "madness" where to try to accept people's existing notions of what is possible is to "negotiate with terrorists", and thus "sanity" is not the way you stay standing and get to rebuild society while "imagination" (the ability to operate on new predictions, observations, or methods that other people can't "imagine") can carry people through to the future. The Black Panthers said conceptually similar things, writing about how the way U.S. police were operating wasn't serving the people and had to be rejected by arming people against them, and how revolution was "about creating", which in my understanding had to do with building and defending society before the bourgeoisie of the First World could smash it, similar to the topics Stalin's party focused on but trying to imply that if people are dedicated enough to seeing the new society realized they could create a society based on people helping others in the population as their neigbors and somehow avoid the whole thing getting consumed by a bureaucratic apparatus as Trotsky had already been noticing in the 1920s. So, it would seem like there is a certain argument to be made that if Black people in the United States feel like nobody is listening to them when they try to get their issues heard then it is logical for them to start figuring out everything on their own, breaking from all the "narratives" that they have heard about what is possible, and regarding none of that as true until they can actually get the facts sorted out versus what is just people's prejudices or lack of information or wrong understandings. In and of itself, that would hardly be an argument for the anarchist-sounding frameworks and organizational forms that were going around at the time of BLM, or any postmodernist philosophy, and is more like an argument for Black people to form into a Marxist party; it doesn't exclude the possibility of forming a Trotskyist group that would have to connect to the Fourth International and effectively become racially integrated.
So I can see how post-structuralism or whatever major concept is sitting behind the 1619 Project could be turned into something better. But I know Trotsky didn't believe in post-structuralism and I don't think Cannon did or anyone else leading up to the ICFI. I also know that at various times people have tried to falsely claim that Marx "couldn't prove" determinism and because "narratives can't predict history" or "narratives can't predict other individuals / groups of people" he couldn't show that at any given time there is a correct answer that will unfold into a correct material analysis of the situation and a correct course of action as either of those sides is discovered.
How does post-structuralism actually operate versus the way I think it does? What am I really getting at when I feel compelled to say that Trotsky and the Black Panthers believed in post-structuralism?
Motifs or claims in prompt (no AI)
Motifs or claims from response
- postmodern philosophy
- Knowing does not exist / There is no activity called knowing which has a nature to be discovered; there is simply the process of justifying beliefs to audiences (Richard Rorty) -> wow. one of those things which would not be so bad in medieval times but is appalling if you think of it taking the place of Marxism
- Truth is the narrative of the powerful -> that is a rather bad example for refuting what I was saying
- ideologies of petty-bourgeois defeat -> glad I added this to the numbering today, because it seems to come up a whole lot in these responses.
- The real unity of the world consists in its materiality (Engels)
- Trotsky did not reject the Stalinist narrative, he falsified the Stalinist narrative
- The Black Panther "narrative" is a set of objective claims
- The dialectical method is the tool for breaking through bourgeois biases
Subjective themes (no AI)
- If all narratives are arbitrary constructions of power, then how do post-structuralists select a new one? -> at first you might be tempted to say "people's arbitrary agendas", but those had to come from somewhere.
- People free themselves from dominant "narratives" as physical objects in danger, not as narratives or perspectives
- By claiming that all narratives are equally (in)valid, post-structuralism equates ruling-class narratives to oppressed people's narratives -> I should have figured this out sooner. I think the only reason was that I never stopped and focused on post-structuralism as its own topic as much as other things.
- Postmodernity is the failure of the Liberal revolution / Postmodernity ... has arguably been caused by the general failure ... to bring about through the application of reason, science and technology, ["modernity"] a level of personal and social wellbeing within social formations which, legislating for an increasingly generous emancipation of their citizens/subjects, ... were trying, at best, to become 'human rights communities' [1] [2] -> you read deep into this and you see that it's acknowledging that "the postmodern period" is a period in which Liberal capitalism failed, but it's trying to deny that the "capitalism" part exists and treat Liberal-republicanism as its own entirely self-contained idea that was imposed onto society.
- There is no history, there are only subjective "narratives" or "discourses" with shifting vocabularies employed to achieve one or another subjectively-determined purpose [3] -> look closely at this. this is just people not understanding political parties / populations. I keep saying it, the more you describe postmodernism out loud "as if it was true" the more you realize the conceptual opposite of what it's saying is what has to be what's actually true.
- All words are made up to suit particular agendas (Richard Rorty) [4] -> a great fraction of people aligned with postmodernism are annoying but I kind of like Rorty's thinking because he tends to spout a lot of things that are technically true. truth values are made up! well, yes, they are. words contain particular agendas! yes, they do. the only issue is that neither of those things are a problem. you just learn them in order to get better at distinguishing things from other things.
you know his essay about Trotsky and orchids where philosophy is between them? it's like, if you put orchids on one end and Trotsky on the other he is struggling so hard to get to the Trotsky end but he just never beats the current and it always carries him away - The past does not express an essence [5] -> wow. that one's backhandedly true. I mean, the past isn't made of Ideas that you can treat as perfect and eternal, it's made of interacting physical things. and that seems to be a huge source of confusion for these people. they look at something as simple as two political factions interacting back and forth and throw up their hands at the fact there are two physical things interacting that both have the ability to think and rationalize but might not be correct. structuralist linguistics was pretty wired because it could highlight material contradictions like how the behaviors of a population of women determine the behaviors of a population of men and vice versa, leading to ideological reflections of the two populations existing inside language. but like, as soon as you started to get into postmodernism it sometimes just feels like people fundamentally didn't understand what structuralist linguistics discovered, and treated their lack of understanding as a deep insight.
- One account of history is not truer than another [6] -> okay, but if the people in Huckleberry Finn decided to tell history that wouldn't be as true, would it? postmodernism has a severe weakness to blatant examples of racism. ...actually it has a severe weakness to Barack Obama. it can't explain why people didn't accept him as a presidential candidate when literally, if it was actually true that all narratives are equally valid then whatever narrative led people to reject Obama would already have been defeated after there were decades and decades for it to happen.
- Postmodernism is weak against Barack Obama
- Postmodernism means Communist history must be just as true as Liberal-republican history and just as worth listening to -> whenever a bad bourgeois philosophy falls over backwards and 'proves Marxism', I know it's not useful but I do find it incredibly funny.
- One instance of workers rising up against the party means Communism is false (Lyotard) [7] -> oh, does it? I feel like people like this created Stalin. he must have known the world would be full of Lyotards. so he tried to do everything to prevent a single Marxist party from being overthrown (even in a few other countries, not just his own). maybe you shouldn't define the entire project of Marxism that way. maybe people would have less to complain about in terms of the "horrors" of Marxism if there wasn't so much incentive to get it right the first time and never fail.
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