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An Epistemology for the Next Revolution

2011; eScholarship Publishing, University of California; Volume: 1; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5070/t412011808

2154-1353

Linda Martín Alcoff,

Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

It is my intention, by this optimistic title, to mark the need for a newly revised and reformulated language of liberation.To explain this idea, let me begin with two distinct and important claims made by Sylvia Wynter and by Enrique Dussel.Wynter has suggested that the principal oversight of Marxist revolutionary discourses was to forsake the epistemological question of social theory, that is, the question of who knows.To be sure, Marx developed the beginnings of an epistemology of ideology in his account of how the fetish can appear as the real and in his idea of bourgeois ideology's camera obscura effect on perception.But neither he nor his followers paid sufficient attention, in Wynter's view, to the political circumstances in which knowledges of all sorts are produced.These political circumstances include how authority and authoritativeness are distributed, how certain sites and processes and methodologies are valorized while others are repudiated, and how the production of theory mirrors the production of social inequity.Thus, although Marx gave us a new and revolutionary analysis of how the general political economy is reproduced, he did not provide tools for maintaining and improving on that analysis or for creating revolutionary and democratic conditions for critical social theory.He did not provide a radical critique of the legitimation processes of knowledge.Wynter is suggesting, I take it, that the devolution of Marxism into positivism and patriarchal authoritarianism as well as bureaucratic capitalism that we witnessed throughout the twentieth century might be directly linked to this oversight.The extreme centralism of the Soviets as well as the general inability of Marxist movements and governments to acknowledge their own mistakes and limitations are usually attributed as a political problem, but perhaps their source is actually an epistemological problem (Foucault's own criticisms of Marxism echo this idea).The lesson from this is that the epistemological question must be explicitly addressed in the next era of revolutionary thought and practice.I want to relate Wynter's insight with Enrique Dussel's argument that we need to develop an analectical method.While Marxist dialectics stays within the realm of intelligibility, in a dialogical opposition and sublation of the dominant worldview, analectics seeks to bring that which is beyond the dialectic into visibility.Dialectics remains in an internal critique by contradicting what exists, but it takes its terms of reference from the existing foundational concepts.New formulations are indeed possible through dialectics, but they will be achieved through the conflictual process of counterpoint.Dussel's analysis of Marx's treatment of "living labor" shows that Marx developed an account through which it was possible to think beyond the terms of the current system, to imagine that which has been made unintelligible by capitalism.Living labor is that essence of labor that preexisted private property and commodification and even use value as traditionally understood.Under capitalism living labor has been reduced and transformed into a commodity form, and it is