History is contigency
KXX4493553 at aol.com
KXX4493553 at aol.com
Fri Apr 27 16:10:32 CDT 2001
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
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