Re: Anti-Jacobin (was anti-Pomo babble)

[Jim Devine]

Yoshie writes:
In the case of many -- though by no means all -- postmodernists, they have 
progressed from anti-Stalinism to anti-Leninism to anti-Marxism to finally 
anti-Jacobinism.  Most explicitly in the case of Laclau  Mouffe:

ellipsis

... Laclau and Mouffe assert that the concept of the working class as an 
actor in history is a "Jacobin imaginary" (a term interchangeable for them 
with "Stalinist imaginary") and that it is illegitimate  --  and 
"utopian"  --  to move from the description of a subject position to the 
"naming of an agent."

Hi, Yoshie.

According to Hal Draper (in one of the volumes of his KARL MARX'S THEORY OF 
REVOLUTION), Marx himself was anti-Jacobin, since the Jacobins were 
petty-bourgeois, professionals, or even haute bourgeois. He sided instead 
with the plebeian  _sans culottes_, and if memory serves me well, with the 
Hebertistes (sorry but I don't remember the what kind of accents there are 
on this term) and to some extent with Graccus Babeuf, though Marx did not 
like the latter's conspiratorial methods after he himself grew out of them. 
There was not yet a true proletariat of significant size in Paris (the 
locus of most revolutionary activity).

The CP of France, on the other hand, has always favored the Jacobin side of 
the 1789 revolution.

This probably doesn't undermine your point, since L  M probably were using 
"Jacobin" as synonymous with revolutionary.

Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]   http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine

Anti-Jacobin (was anti-Pomo babble)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Hi Jim:

According to Hal Draper (in one of the volumes of his KARL MARX'S 
THEORY OF REVOLUTION), Marx himself was anti-Jacobin, since the 
Jacobins were petty-bourgeois, professionals, or even haute 
bourgeois. He sided instead with the plebeian  _sans culottes_, and 
if memory serves me well, with the Hebertistes (sorry but I don't 
remember the what kind of accents there are on this term) and to 
some extent with Graccus Babeuf, though Marx did not like the 
latter's conspiratorial methods after he himself grew out of them. 
There was not yet a true proletariat of significant size in Paris 
(the locus of most revolutionary activity).

The CP of France, on the other hand, has always favored the Jacobin 
side of the 1789 revolution.

This probably doesn't undermine your point, since L  M probably 
were using "Jacobin" as synonymous with revolutionary.

Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]   http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine

Draper's is a possible interpretation of the Jacobins (as real 
historical actors, not as strawmen of Laclau  Mouffe's making). 
However, Gramsci provides an alternative interpretation.  He argues 
that "The Jacobins strove with determination to ensure a bond between 
town and country" (_Prison Notebooks_ 63)  "made the demands of the 
popular masses one's own" (66).  Of course, the Jacobins did so 
within the limits of the bourgeois revolution  enlightenment 
philosophy (e.g., they maintained the Le Chapelier law, which denied 
the workers the right of combination), but Gramsci says that the 
absence of the Jacobins in Italy created many problems: the Southern 
Question (oppression of peasants in the South by landlordism  
underdevelopment); the lack of religious reform through 
anti-clericalism; the failure to forge progressive  republican 
national culture; and so forth.  In contrast to France, Italy only 
experienced what he calls "passive revolution,": "restoration becomes 
the first policy whereby social struggles find sufficiently elastic 
frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain power without dramatic 
upheavals, without the French machinery of terror.  The old feudal 
classes are demoted from their dominant position to a 'governing' 
one, but are not eliminated, nor is there any attempt to liquidate 
them as an organic whole; instead of a class they become a 'caste' 
with specific cultural and psychological characteristics, but no 
longer with predominant economic functions" (115).  The absence of 
Jacobinism, in short, left Italy under material  cultural conditions 
vulnerable to the rise of fascism (itself a kind of passive 
revolution).

In other words, Gramsci took strong exception to conservative 
historians' one-sided interpretation of Jacobinism: "If the 
conservative historicists, theorists of the old, are well placed to 
criticise the utopian character of the mummified Jacobin ideologies, 
philosophers of praxis are better placed to appreciate the real and 
not abstract value that Jacobinism had as an element in the creation 
of the new French nation (that is to say as a fact of circumscribed 
activity in specific circumstances and not as something ideolgised) 
and are better placed also to appreciate the historical role of the 
conservatives themselves, who were in reality the shame-faced 
children of the Jacobins, who damned their excesses while carefully 
administering their heritage" (399).

Hailing from Japan (itself a country with no Jacobin tradition, 
modernized through passive revolution  militarism), I am inclined to 
agree with Gramsci.  Japan would have been a better country now if it 
had been led by the Japanese Jacobins into modernity.  At least, we 
would have had a song like La Marseillaise for "national anthem," 
instead of Kimigayo (a praise song for the imperial dynasty!):

*   Kimi ga yo wa
Chiyo ni yachiyo ni
Sazare ishi no iwao to narite
Koko no musu made.
 
Thousands of years of happy reign be time;
Rule on, my lord, till what are pebbles now
By age united to mighty rocks shall grow
Whose venerable sides the moss doth line.

Translated by Basil H. Chamberlain   *

Here's the JCP's view of Kimigayo  Hinomaru: 
http://www.jcp.or.jp/english/e-990315-flag_song.html

Yoshie

Re: Anti-Jacobin (was anti-Pomo babble)

[Jim Devine]

Yoshie wrote:
... In contrast to France, Italy only experienced what he [Gramsci] calls 
"passive revolution,": "restoration becomes the first policy whereby 
social struggles find sufficiently elastic frameworks to allow the 
bourgeoisie to gain power without dramatic upheavals, without the French 
machinery of terror.  The old feudal classes are demoted from their 
dominant position to a 'governing' one, but are not eliminated, nor is 
there any attempt to liquidate them as an organic whole; instead of a 
class they become a 'caste' with specific cultural and psychological 
characteristics, but no longer with predominant economic functions" 
(115).  The absence of Jacobinism, in short, left Italy under material  
cultural conditions vulnerable to the rise of fascism (itself a kind of 
passive revolution)

Of course, just because Marx opposed the Jacobins doesn't mean they're all 
bad. In Western Europe, the Jacobins and their ilk led the process that 
didn't simply undermine the traditional "feudal" ruling classes. They 
helped the process of the unification of the nation-state and the creation 
of the state as an institution largely separate from civil society -- all 
of which had been started under Absolutism.

All of this creates possibilities for the development of capital and in 
fact continues to this day, with "bourgeois revolution" being instituted 
world-wide nowadays by the IMF and its friends. It also creates 
possibilities for working people getting more and even for transforming 
capitalism into socialism, though there's clearly nothing automatic about 
realizing these possibilities.

Now that I'm at home, I could skim a little of Draper's exposition of 
Marx's position: he was arguing that workers couldn't trust the 
bourgeoisie, that they could only fight exploitation and the like via 
struggle independent of the capitalists, and that revolution from above was 
not the solution to the specific problems of the working class. Tactically 
and strategically, Marx opposed the conspiratorial or putschist methods 
that grew out of the Jacobin tradition and had been taken up by Auguste 
Blanqui. The bottom line was that only the self-organization of the working 
class could liberate that class.

BTW, I was wrong about Marx's support for the Hebertists, who were 
left-Jacobins. Babeuf was a non-Jacobin who "invented" modern communism, 
but Marx opposed his conspiratorial bent.

Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine