Michael Hardt:
The dogmatic division that I find most prevalent and troublesome today is
the one that separates Marxism from poststructuralism. First of all, the
division is simply historically inaccurate. Poststructuralism is a vague
term, but the majority of the French philosophers who are generally grouped
under that rubric developed their thought within one vein or another of the
Marxist tradition. The fact that many of them at various points of their
careers challenged established Marxist doctrines or Marx's own writings
does not warrant our posing some theoretical opposition: such challenges
are what commonly keep traditions alive. Poststructuralism in the U.S. is
not so easily characterized, but recently someone criticized me of
eclecticism when I crossed the Marxist / poststructuralist divide and
discussed Donna Haraway's cyborg manifesto in the context of a communist
project. There is obviously some historical amnesia involved when we cannot
remember that Haraway's cyborg manifesto was explicitly a project of
socialist feminism.
Secondly, and more important than any such historical arguments, enforcing
an intellectual division between poststructuralism and Marxism distorts the
content of both traditions and deprives us of many significant theoretical
and practical possibilities. I must admit that I have only recently become
aware of the division and the dedication many have to it. Previously I
crossed the lines in blissful ignorance. The Left Conservatism debate
(featured in an earlier issue of Theory & Event) and reactions to my own
work have forced me to recognize the problem. Negri and I often prefer to
conceive of our orientation as communist rather than Marxist and, for us at
least, this serves to circumvent this kind of dogmatic division. Dedicating
a tradition to a single thinker, rather than a set of methods, principles,
and ideas, always runs the risk of precluding innovation and creating a new
dogmatism. We certainly have as substantial criticisms of Marx as we do of
Spinoza, Deleuze, Machiavelli, and others. In fact, the tradition of
communist thought and practice has perhaps been too dominated by the name
of Marx, eclipsing its various alternatives and possibilities. Communist
thought, in other words, is much bigger than Marx. We claim, for example,
that Spinoza was a communist thinker long before Marx -- how else can we
understand his proposal of an "absolute democracy" -- and Deleuze was a
communist thinker even if he did not conceive of himself as one.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_&_event/v004/4.3hardt.html#authbio
Louis Proyect
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