History is contigency

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

I know, Jane, sweet heart, capitalism is a wonderful thing, as long we are 
priviliged (more or less) coach potatoes who have no sorrows and know what we 
will eat tomorrow - or something like that. No, "socialism" was not the 
better thing - I think it was p a r t of the world market, and had a special 
function in a specific historical situation, and without the worker's 
movement we wouldn't speak about social welfare and security, the rich and 
the poor, the role of multinational corporations, etc etc. Now we can discuss 
for example if there had been no Hitler if the November Revolution 1918 in 
Germany had success - if it had success, the USA would play a complete 
different role in the world (perhaps a marginal), the October Revolution in 
the USSR would have played another role in history and would have had another 
course - after ww I the Leninists waited for the revolution in Germany, 
France, England - but it didn't happen or it failed. And, some day, they 
created the "socialism in one country". And if they had no civil war until 
1923, cases of cannibalism in the countryside, an enemy who for a while 
controlled 90 % of the country - if Lenin's NEP (New Economical Policy) had 
success (a mixture of private capitalism and planned socialism) -history is 
contigency. If the industrial revolution hadn't take place in Europe but in 
China or in the Arabic hemisphere (it was possible!) - what would capitalism 
look like now? Fragen ueber Fragen... what you can learn from Pynchon is to 
ask questions like these. Not more, and not less. The point of my little 
"enlightment trash"  essay was that our whole thinking categories  a r e 
capitalist ones - our logic, our way of abstracitification, our 
"epistemology", our every-day-life. Or, to speak in the tradition of the very 
German Critical Theory (but the "Dialectics of Enlightment" was written in 
the US!) - the capitalist "Realabstraktion" the belief that everything is 
exchangeable and "equal" (W - G - W, commodity - money - commodity - the 
German word "Ware" was translated in the English versions of Marx' Kapital in 
such a way, not "good") "kills" the non-identical. And that is what Critical 
Theory a n d Pynchon have in common. In some way, Pynchon is a very European 
thinker, and the Anglo-Saxon way of thinking, is, at last, also a very 
European thing.

Kurt-Werner Pörtner