I started thinking about a few things in an email exchange with Shane, but these thoughts got so self-involved that they really belonged here... :-)
In the rambling conclusion to his book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson makes a vivid but troubling argument: that the oft-noted "nostalgia for [old-skool] class politics" in the face of the "new social movements" might actually be a "nostalgia" for politics tout court, and that calling this "nostalgia" is as useful as calling one's hunger before dinner "a nostalgia for food". Obviously, he's making an intervention against the fashionable claims of the 1980s that class had somehow disappeared, but I've always been appalled by the way he does this: by (i) levelling a myriad of struggles -- not unrelated to class in the very least -- to a pathetic kind of apolitical pluralism that provides an alibi for capitalist exploitation, and thus (ii) implicitly defending the authenticity of socialist "class politics" -- that potential grandaddy of unacknowledged and often authoritarian identity politics -- from any possible complications. I don't doubt the capacity for corporatist beytrayals amongst "new social movements", but it's probably as high as it is for Jameson's fond memories of "class politics". Just what is politics, tout court, to Jameson? In a recent debate with the SWP (via Steve Wright), Jameson's friend Michael Hardt nobly faces the problem of nostalgic (and necessarily exclusionary) visions of "the working class" with these words: "this is the very bad tradition on our shoulders". He also notes that these kinds of ridiculous choices -- between the programmatised identity of "the working class" and "difference" -- have finally bitten the dust with the recent rise of global anticapitalist networks, in which the practice of acting-in-common raises a kind of radical ethics above the tussles of mutually antagonistic identity-maintenance.
I have my own limited relationship with these questions. Yesterday, as I cleaned out our biohazardous fridge, I was reminded of a time, almost ten years ago, when I did the same at Kirsten's place in Newtown. (They had an eggplant that had somehow been reduced to a transparent and gelatinous shadow of itself. And that night, Tasj taught me how to make pesto, which I've been doing ever since with great gusto.) Fast forward to the recent weekend of Kirsten's wedding -- I don't remember a time in recent memory when I've seen so many old Left Alliance people. There was a bunch of old friends at the Iraq/Palestine fundraiser the night before, and at the wedding there was only a handful of people of our age who weren't old LA hacks. It was good to see them. I'm not fond of LA nostalgia, but a recent answer by Steve Wright to a query on an email list made me smile:
LA was Left Alliance, a national student organisation of the late eighties/early nineties. From it have come a range of interesting people prominent in many political activities here (in particular, around the detention camps, but also in the antiwar movement, the recently evicted social centre in Sydney etc). Former LA members have also been prominent in the publicity and discussion of Italian theory in Australia...
And last year, it was Sergio who wondered out loud why every other leftist cult churns out cadres who often eventually flee political engagement forever, while there are ex-LA people still out there, stubbornly engaging, and yet not so attached to their own political nostalgia, and open to new things. Obviously, this in itself is a mild form of nostalgia, but it raises some interesting questions. I think that despite its considerable faults, LA was boosted by a critical level of political agnosticism -- a general distrust of other people's structures that were obviously there for authoritarian control (e.g. various Leninist party apparatuses and programmes, despite the fact that some of us were actually Leninists), leavened by an appreciation of structures that could facilitate democratic processes; a distrust of easily labelled political identities for their own sake (paranoid Leninism, anarchism, etc.), leavened by a priority for feminism that was wary of the way issues of gender could easily fall off the map without a clear affiliation.
As for LA's relationship with the problematic that Jameson and Hardt dance out, and with more current questions brought by "autonomy", elements of our critical culture prefigured the current disgust at choosing between the identity of the "working class" and "difference" (which was always bizarrely paraded by the Leninist parties as the struggle between "identity politics" or "postmodernism" on one hand and "Marxism" on the other). But in our overestimation of policy as a "stage" for politics, and despite our commitment to various activist collectives, we only scratched the surface of how those insights could be given practical experimentation. And despite a vague enthusiasm for the general assortment of post-May '68 anti-authoritarian revolutionisms (Negri was read before he was hyper-fashionable, the ISO and DSP routinely written off with Situationist disdain), the most obvious impact this had on the organisation was our penchant for producing obscure propaganda, in the manner of various Semiotext(e) and Autonomedia productions, that made the Leninist cults angry.
Ensconced in our representative student organisations, there was no context for debates about how to organise on the ground in mass mobilisations. Our skills at factional maneouvering and delivering theoretically biting critiques of our enemies were great, but they also made us overwhelmingly academic; we had none of the often non-rhetorical skills needed for moving within other social spaces, to establish trust towards engaging in actions that didn't involve getting the numbers (no matter how nobly).
Towards the end of my time in LA, I'd developed an interest in affinity groups as a mode of organising (outside the orthodox anarchist ghetto), and a fascination with the way parts of the European far left were engaging in grass-roots fashion with questions of power in urban space. No doubt others were on a similar track. But I was really in another (tired) place, practically, and these questions were left hanging. I started working. Feh. And since I never wanted my politics to be framed by my work, I began working in the culture industry, while my politics went into writing naff metaphorical plays about the urban power relations of postapocalyptic zombie cities. And I still wonder if that's where they belong...
