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I read Odran Waldron's article (http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=13575) and it is very good. But I have a somewhat different take on what is happening. For a start we would all agree that the Centre is a relational concept. It is not something that one would meet at the bottom of the garden. As it is relational, it has geographical (spatial) and historical (time) dimensions. Basically, it helps me to think of Centres as clusters of common sense - what people expect and what people think is normal. Against Waldron, I would argue that he is exactly wrong to say that centrists are always homeless. For the Centre is precisely where we feel at home. We do this, as Luckacs pointed out, by converting time into space. To put this another way, we create the illusion that time has stopped or been abolished. We indulge in what Bhaskar called 'endism'. For example, we had Fukuyama talk about reaching the end of history. I am not denying that Gary Liniker is being insincere when he tweets he feels homeless. But what he is experiencing is the return of the flow of time. Think of the Heraclitus fragment - "It is impossible to step into the same river twice for new waters are forever closing around you". That is a feeling we fear, probably because Consciousness does not want to die. We all desperately want to proclaim the end of time. I have lived under two distinct Centres - First there was the Keynesian-Social Security Centre which lasted approximately from 1945 to about 1973-1975. We then entered what Koselleck terms a 'saddle-time'. Roughly, this was from 1975-1984 during which time a new Centre - the Neoliberal Centre was established. I think some things are worth pointing out. The Neoliberal Centre was established though great struggles. These included the brutal Pinochet Coup in Chile and the UK miner's strike of 1984-5. In Australia we had the sacking of the Labor Government in 1975 and the crushing of the electricity workers strike in Queensland in 1985. On a philosophical level, the fact that I can name the Neoliberal Centre shows that there is thinking which is more universal than neoliberalism and that therefore it is in crisis. Hegel puts it like this. 'If I inquire after their origin and confine them to the point whence they arose, then I have transcended them; for now it is I who am the universal, and they are the conditioned and limited. If they are supposed to be validated by my insight, then I have already denied their unshakeable, intrinsic being' (Phenomenology: 437). That is why the Right instinctively hate everyone talking about "neoliberalism", for to name neoliberalism is to challenge it and to suggest that to say "There is no alternative" is to lie. Here we have the clue to the power of the Corbynistas' slogan "Another world is possible". That is also why Barthes talked about the 'ex-nomination' of the ruling class. When we revolutionaries use the phrase 'ruling class' outside of our circles, everyone else rolls their eyes and taps their foreheads. We sound mad. Trust me on that one. The ruling class are so powerful that they do not have a name. It was not until the Occupy Movement of 2011 that they universally became "the 1%", that is, they were named. Neoliberalism has lasted until the present but we are in the throes of a crisis of the Neoliberal Centre and we may emerge from this into a new centre. Hopefully, that will be something like the centre that Corbyn is offering in the UK. But my Trotskyist background prompts me to think that there will have to be a huge struggle around getting the ruling class to accept a Keynesian Centre. It is this struggle that we are seeing at the moment. The defenders of the Neoliberal Centre fear the masses who are pushing for a new Centre. When the new Centre is established the struggles will die down but the potential for struggle will always be there. But that is enough for today comradely Gary On Sat, Jul 15, 2017 at 7:43 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > ******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** > #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. > #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. > ***************************************************************** > > Politically homeless was how Gary Lineker put it, not realising that he > was summing up nicely why it was that people had abandoned the centrism he > was tweeting about craving. > > Centrism always has been and always will be homeless, an absence of > ideology sheltering itself from the rain with a cardboard box made of > subservience to the mythological fancies of market that have served just > enough people to save it from being drenched. With the electoral success of > Jeremy Corbyn showing the agenda pursued by Labour from Blair to Milliband > to have been completely lacking of substance, the centrists have started > their attempts to undermine and strip away the democracy they constantly > reminded us we were lucky to have. > > full: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=13575 > _________________________________________________________ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/opt > ions/marxism/gary.maclennan1%40gmail.com > _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
