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Abstract
This article uses the narratives of the popular films The Matrix, Matrix: Reloaded, and Matrix: Revolutions as a lens through which to discuss the problems of the real and human agency in contemporary critical theory. Alongside a reading of the films’ invocations of social theory, the article describes parallel academic theories whose strongest structuralist and poststructuralist manifestations abandon conceptions of the real and willful human agency. In a field whose pessimistic narrative of Marxism often begins with anti-humanist structuralism, classical Marxist discourse theories offer a viable standpoint-based concept of reality upon which to found solidaristic human action.
The author would like to thank the editor and the reviewers for their help with this work. In addition, she is grateful for the valuable advice of Angela Aguayo, Barry Brummett, Kathleen Feyh, Joshua Gunn, and Kristen Hoerl.
Notes
1. Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1979).
2. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 2.
3. Larry and Andy Wachowski, The Matrix [motion picture] (Warner Brothers, 1999); Larry and Andy Wachowski, Matrix Reloaded [motion picture] (Warner Brothers, 2003); Larry and Andy Wachowski, Matrix: Revolutions [motion picture] (Warner Brothers, 2003).
4. This vision strongly echoes the vision of human constraint in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, who describe power as machine. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
5. As when Neo is seen reading Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1–42. On the films’ intentional incorporation of critical discourse theory into The Matrix, see William Irwin, ed., The Matrix and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2002); and Glenn Yeffeth, ed., Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy, and the Religion in the Matrix (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2003).
6. Ronald Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998): 21–41.
7. For a very different read, see Thomas Frentz and Janice Hocker Rushing, “‘Mother Isn't Quite Herself Today’: Myth and Spectacle in The Matrix,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 64–86.
8. Leon Trotsky, Art and Revolution: Writings on Literature, Politics, and Culture (New York: Pathfinder, 1992); Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket, 2005).
9. Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: An Essay in Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2000).
10. The category of experience in theory is a muddled one. Many scholars, including many Marxists, would include the experience of the symbolic in the category of the real, while others equate the material (economic and bodily) with the real. See Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Raymond Guess, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975).
11. On standpoint theory, see Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: Towards a Feminist Historical Materialism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985); Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness; Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 149–59, 165 has a discussion of the standpoint of the working class.
12. Lukács, 169.
13. As opposed to dialectical, historical materialism, rhetorical studies sometimes acknowledges the materiality of the body as a conditioning influence on consciousness and discourse. See Sharon Crowley and Jack Selzer, ed., Rhetorical Bodies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954).
14. Along with Perry Anderson, I define classical Marxism as the set of Marxist ideas produced between the 1840s and the Second World War, including the writings of Marx and Engels, Antonio Gramsci, and Georg Lukács, among others. This tradition includes the political, rhetorical, and philosophical theories of Bolsheviks, including Lenin and Trotsky, but regards Stalinism as a repudiation and a defeat of their revolution and approaches toward organizing and discourse.
15. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1998).
16. Robert L. Scott, “On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic,” Central States Speech Journal 18 (1967): 9–17; Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric”; and Ronald Greene “Rhetoric and Capitalism,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 37 (2004): 188–206.
17. For more extensive accounts of definitions of ideology criticism in rhetoric, see James Arnt Aune, Rhetoric and Marxism (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994); Dana L. Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron,” Western Journal of Communication 58 (1994): 141–63; Sharon S. Crowley, “Reflections on an Argument that Won't Go Away: Or, a Turn of the Ideological Screw,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 450–465. Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 235–49; Michael Calvin McGee, “The Ideograph: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 1–17; Philip Wander, “The Ideological Turn in Modern Criticism,” Central States Speech Journal 34 (1983): 1–18; “The Third Persona: An Ideological Turn in Rhetorical Theory,” Central States Speech Journal 35 (1984): 197–216.
18. See Stuart Hall, “Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” and “The Problem of Ideology,” both in Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986); see also T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony,” American Historical Review (June 1985): 572; and Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in John Higgins, ed., The Raymond Williams Reader (London: Blackwell, 2001), 158–78.
19. Kenneth Burke, whose work originated in a Marxist context, defined class as a symbolic construction and argued at the (Communist) American Writers’ Congress in 1935. Kenneth Burke, “Revolutionary Symbolism in America” (speech to American Writer's Congress, 26 April 1935), in Herbert Simons and Trevor Melia, eds., The Legacy of Kenneth Burke (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 267–73. See also Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change; Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric of Motives (1950; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). Michael Calvin McGee, “In Search of ‘the People’: A Rhetorical Alternative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 235–49.
20. On the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools, see Douglass Kellner and Stephen Eric Bronner, Critical Theory and Society: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1989); Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); see also Simon During, ed. The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999). In the concept of “cultural materialism” and his rejection of the base–superstructure distinction, Williams makes an idealist break with the Marxist tradition. See also Lawrence Grossberg, “On Postmodernism and Articulation: Interview with Stuart Hall,” in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, ed., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), 131–50.
21. Similarly, my first seminar in rhetoric and ideology as a graduate student began with Althusser and other structuralists and included no readings from the classical Marxist tradition. Although a web search for similar classes led to a few syllabi that made minor mention of the classical tradition, many did not include classical Marxism at all.
22. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1971; New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 127–86
23. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 154.
24. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 154.
25. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 155.
26. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 156–57.
27. See Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 162–63, 165 where the Lacanian idea of the Imaginary is invoked to explain the way in which ISAs produce a materially real construct that represents people's real conditions of their existence to themselves.
28. Louis Althusser, “On the Marxist Dialectic,” in For Marx (London: Verso, 1979), 167–69.
29. Edith Kurzweil, The Age of Structuralism: Lévis-Strauss to Foucault (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
30. Just to be clear, I have no truck with the idea of the “duped masses.”
31. Sue Clegg, “The Remains of Louis Althusser,” International Socialism Journal 53 (winter 1991): 57–78.
32. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 147.
33. Althusser was also heavily influenced by Stalinism, which may have led him to stress the penetration of state power into private life as form of indoctrination.
34. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1980); Paul Rabinow and James Faubion, ed., Essential Works of Foucault (three volumes), trans. Robert Hurley (New York: New Press, 1998–2001). See also Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).
35. In early interviews , Foucault acknowledges economic and extra-discursive coercive levels of power; see “Truth and Power,” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
36. Like Gramsci and Althusser, Foucault's work usefully points out that modern power is not only or even primarily a matter of outright repression, but a process of persuasion. Unlike Gramsci, however, Foucault and Althusser posit that there is nothing outside governing apparatuses, ironically re-establishing a de-facto absolute repression.
37. See Jean Baudrillard, Mirror of Production, Mark Poster, trans. (St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1995); Butler, Bodies that Matter; Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985); Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans., Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 84.
38. This argument is developed by Dana L. Cloud, “The Affirmative Masquerade,” American Communication Journal 4 (2001), http://www.acjournal.org/holdings/vol4/iss3/special/cloud.htm (accessed 1 April 2001).
39. Antonio Gramsci, “War of Position and War of Manoeuvre or Frontal War,” in An Antonio Gramsci Reader (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/editions/reader/index.htm.
40. Ironically, it could be Agent Smith in solidarity with the replicas of himself who has the material power to bring down the machines. On this interpretation, Neo (as metonym for the reformism of the academic Left) actually thwarts revolutionary change.
41. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2001), 3. This is straightforward liberalism, not anything resembling Marxism.
42. Laclau and Mouffe, 2, 176. For a more complete summary and critique of Laclau and Mouffe's post-Marxist project, see Cloud, “Socialism.”
43. Yet Zizek also posits real experiential antagonism as a springboard for oppositional consciousness. See Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 153–99 for his more thorough discussion of the Real.
44. Slavoj Zizek, “Ideology Reloaded,” In These Times, 6 June 2003, http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=220_0_4_0_C (accessed 12 June 2003).
45. Zizek, “Ideology Reloaded.”
46. See Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/index.htm (accessed 12 June 2003).
47. Reform and Revolution, chapter 9, at http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch09.htm, emphasis added (accessed 5 June 2003).
48. Marx makes a similar critique of Hegelian mysticism in The German Ideology, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/index.htm (accessed 5 June 2003) and The Grundrisse, excerpted in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), 237.
49. V.I. Lenin, What is to be Done? (New York: Penguin, 1988).
50. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 59.
51. Ronald Walter Greene, “The Aesthetic Turn and the Rhetorical Perspective on Argumentation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 35 (1998). Downloaded from EBSCO Academic Search Premier on 23 October 2003; Greene, “Another Materialism.” More recently, on the premise that capitalism no longer takes a shape confrontable by organized instrumental antagonism, Greene argues material real as basis for instrumental political action; “Rhetoric and Capitalism.”
52. Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism” 203. Jim Aune, Dana Cloud, and Stephen Macek have argued that Greene's account of capitalism's development is inaccurate and unnecessarily pessimistic. See James Arndt Aune, Dana L. Cloud, and Stephen Macek, “'The Limbo of Ethical Simulacra’: A Reply to Ron Greene,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 39 (2006): 72–84; also Dana L. Cloud, “Bringing Down Suharto: Globalization, the State, and Social Movement in Indonesia,” in Robert Asen and Dan Brouwer, eds., Counterpublics and the State (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001): 235–64.
53. Foucault, “Truth and Power,”58.
54. Laclau and Mouffe are something of an exception to this rule, as they embrace collective movement.
55. Barbara A. Biesecker, “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women Into the History of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 155.
56. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Multitude (New York: Penguin, 2005); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
57. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 362.
58. Ronald Walter Geeene, “The Concept of Global Citizenship in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire: A Challenge to Three Ideas of Rhetorical Mediation,” In Gerard Hauser and Amy Grim, Eds., Rhetorical Democracy: Discursive Practices of Civic Engagement (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence-Erlbaum, 2004), 166.
59. Empire, 404.
60. Greene “Global Citizenship” 168.
61. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London: Verso, 2003), 6; see also Gopal Balakrishnan, Debating Empire (London: Verso, 2003) and Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, eds., Empire Reloaded (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005).
62. Ellen Meiksins Wood, “A Manifesto for Global Capital?” in Gopal Balakrishnan, ed., Debating Empire (London: Verso, 2003), 61.
63. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 154.
64. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus.
65. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Athlone, 1994), 69.
66. “Capitalism” 204.
67. For a discussion of this “doomsday globalization hypothesis,” see Cloud, “Suharto” 235–64. See also J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996); Hardt and Negri; Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
68. Ahmad, 120.
69. Marxists have long accounted for the complexities of global capitalism; see, for example Lenin's observations on globalization in Imperialism; The Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (1918; New York: International, 1939). To put the lie to the irrelevance of collective action against neoliberalism today, one need only look at recent events in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela, the Ukraine, and many others. See Larry Rohter, “Leftist Chief is Installed in Urugray,” New York Times (2 March 2005), A1; Juan Forero, “The Chavez Victory: A Blow to the Bush Administration,” New York Times (20 August 2004), A1. “Bolivia's Leader Says He Plans to Offer his Resignation Today,” New York Times (7 March 2005), A1; Myers, Steven Lee, “Ukrainians Enact Reforms, Clearing Way for New Vote,” New York Times (9 December 2004), A3; Tom Lewis, “Rebellion in Bolivia,” http://www.socialistworker.org/2003-2/473/473_12_Bolivia.shtml and “The New Surge in Bolivia's Rebellion,” http://www.isreview.org/issues/42/. Jesse Muldoon, “Argentina Rocked by General Strike, http://www.socialistworker.org/2001/374/374_07_Argentina.shtml; Closer to home, the UPS strike of 1997 and the global justice movement exploding out of Seattle in 1999 are cases in point.
70. Aune.
71. Aune, 2.
72. Michelle Barrett, Politics of Truth (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 71–80. Regarding Barrett's and other critiques of Marxist epistemology, see Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 14–39; Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Guess, The Idea of a Critical Theory.
73. There is too a large body of work and significant controversy regarding Marxist dialectics to cover in this article; see Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch02.htm#014 (accessed 30 June 2005); Anti-Duhring (1877), http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/index.htm (accessed 30 June 2005); Leon Trotsky, “The ABCs of Materialist Dialectics,” http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1939/1939-abc.htm (accessed XXXX) and Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, excerpted in Tucker, 66–125. Lukács in History and Class Consciousness elaborated on the concept of dialectics in ways that emphasized the rhetorical intervention of the party and on the worker's will and consciousness. See Anderson, 60–70.
74. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 168.
75. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 171.
76. Paraphrase of Frederick Douglass, “Without struggle there is no progress.”
77. See Aune, 72.
78. David Forgacs, introduction to “Hegemony, Relations of Force, Historical Bloc,” [excerpts], in An Antonio Gramsci Reader, p. 190.
79. Hall, “Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.”
80. In David Forgacs, ed., An Antonio Gramsci Reader (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), 72.
81. “Hegemony, Relations of Force, Historical Bloc,” in Forgacs, 197.
82. Audre Lorde, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984). Aune, 38, notes this ambivalence.
83. Marx's use of the word “rhetoric”sometimes occurs when he is deriding one of his opponents (such as the anarchist Proudhon) for superficial reasoning or emotional excess. In various places, he and Engels called rhetoric hollow “liquefying pap.” Engels, in Anti-Duhring, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch07.htm (accessed 15 July 2005). In other places, the word is used to describe the flowery mystifications of ruling class discourse, in an equation of rhetoric with ideology; for example, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, when he mentions the failures of the hollow rhetoric of Louis Napoleon's minister Barrot, at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch04.htm (accessed 15 July 2005); likewise when he accuses the anarchist Proudhon of getting worked up into a “sudden flush of rhetoric”; http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/letters/65_01_24.htm (accessed 15 July 2005). And in the Communist Manifesto he writes that the ruling class cloaks itself in “speculative cobwebs, embroidered with the flowers of rhetoric,” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/manifest.txt. In The Poverty of Philosophy, he accuses Proudhon of having proficiency in “rhetoric rather than in logic.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch01.htm (accessed 15 July 2005).
84. The Rheinische Zeitung was a democratic reform periodical opposed to Prussian Absolutism from 1842 until 1843, when it was suppressed. Marx edited this publication; it is also where he met and began his collaboration with Friedrich Engels.
85. “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung,” in Rhenische Zeitung N. 191, 10 July 1842, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1842/01/10.htm (accessed 15 July 2005).
86. He would also condemn psychoanalytic theory on these grounds. While utopian socialists such as Charles Fourier advocated manipulation of workers’ desires and drives to organize them, Marx, in Habermasian mode, insisted on a reasonable eloquence. In practice, however, he was not against stirring the emotions.
87. “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung,” in Rhenische Zeitung N. 191, 10 July 1842, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1842/01/10.htm (accessed 15 July 2005).
88. Aune. 38; see also Dominick LaCapra, “Reading Marx,” Rethinking Intellectual History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).
89. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848; New York: Monthly Review, 1998).
90. Aune also argues that Marxism needs to understand that persuasion always happens in a cultural context and must not neglect the role of “communal values, emotions, and the need for identification” (48). I agree, yet believe that in the analysis of cultural texts as ideology, many Marxist critics are finely attuned to, and critical of, the rhetorical force of values, emotion, and identification, particularly with regard to nationalism. In practical politics, it is true that Marxists must adapt discourse to the situation and use the available means of persuasion, yet not at the expense of articulating specifically a class consciousness.
91. For an elaboration of this perspective on class, see Lindsay German, A Question of Class (London: Bookmarks, 1973); Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America's Best-Kept Secret (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 200); Wood, Retreat from Class.
92. See Laclau and Mouffe; Paul Hirst, “Economic Classes and Politics,” in Alan Hunt, ed., Class and Class Structure (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977); for a critique see Wood, Retreat from Class; also Dana Cloud, “Socialism of the Mind,” In Herbert W. Simons and Michael Billig, ed. After Postmodernism: Reconstructing Ideology Critique (London: Sage, 1994): 222–52.
93. Eagleton, Ideology, 206.
94. Lukács, 70–71, chastises what he calls “vulgar Marxists” who assume consciousness proceeds directly from experience. As I am arguing, however, even Marx and Engels did not express a “vulgar” position in this regard.
95. Lukács, 279.
96. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 250.
97. One common misconception about the vanguard party is that it comes from outside the class and imposes a party line on workers. On the idea of the organic party organization, see Antonio Gramsci, “The Modern Prince” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/editions/spn/modern_prince/ch15.htm (accessed 30 July 2005); also see Negt & Kluge, 258–63, 54–95; and Lukács 295–342. Of course, the Stalinist party did not enact the role of rhetorical catalyst of a democratic movement. In Trotsky's writings and the activities of other Marxists through the 4th International, the party offers rhetorical and organizational leadership; however, the idea of the “vanguard” really means no more in this context than it would in any liberal or conservative political party that sees as its role the education and mobilization of constituents around shared interests and goals that may not have been spontaneously recognized.
98. Aune, 14.
99. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Part 4 (“Marx”), http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/index.htm (accessed 15 July 2005).
100. Negt and Kluge, 250.
101. Originally articulated by Marx (“Strikes and Combinations of Workers,” Collected Works, vol. 6 [1845], 211; http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02e.htm), this distinction was taken up by a succession of Marxists interested in the role of discourse, intellectuals, and political organizations (i.e., parties) in the production of class-consciousness and organization. (http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/editions/spn/modern_prince/ch15.htm) (accessed 30 June 2005); likewise, Lukács credits the dialectic between ideas and material experience for the production of a class for itself in The Young Hegel (1938, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/youngheg/ch38.htm) (accessed 30 June 2005). In 1932, Trotsky wrote, “The proletariat assumes an independent role only at that moment when, from a social class in itself, it becomes a political class for itself. This cannot take place other than through the medium of a party. The party is that historical organ by means of which the class becomes class conscious” (“What's Next?,” http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/ibt/bt02.htm) (accessed 30 July 2005). Following this line, Negt and Kluge argue that the working class forms a public that can respond to bourgeois ideas and the political state in party organization (p. 61).
102. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm (accessed 30 June 2005). See Negt and Kluge, 83.
103. See Eskatarina Haskins in Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004). Alisdair MacIntyre identifies Trotskyism with Aristotelian “philosophy of action.” See Emile Pereau Saussine, “Alisdair MacIntyre Between Aristotle and Marx” (monograph) (Chicago: Committee on Social Thought, ?). Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1984).
104. Kairos generally refers to situated judgment, opportunity, and timing on the part of a rhetor. Haskins opposes it to the stiffer category of genre, which summarizes an audience's formal expectations of a situation rather than the flexibility, judgment and timing of the kairotic.
105. The Burkean distinction between motion and action, respectively, maps readily onto the distinction between a class in, which simply moves, and a class for itself, moved to identity and action. See Kenneth Burke, Grammar of Motives (1945; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 135–37. Burke argues in Rhetoric of Motives, 19–59, that identification is the primal rhetorical force, produced when people with something substantial in common “share substances” through communication, and is made stronger in the invocation of antagonism against a shared foe. Although Burke broke with the idea of extra-rhetorical class interests and class antagonism, theory of identification and the distinction between action and motion are fruitful ways to understand class-based rhetorical intervention.
106. Negt and Kluge, 43.
107. Marx, Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.
108. Ahmad, 6. Ahmad notes the irony of poststructuralism's theories of agency as actually much more constrained than Marxism's.
109. Marx, Communist Manifesto, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm (accessed 15 June 2005).
110. The anti-racist theorist Cornell West even makes a cameo appearance as a Zion elder, indicating a self-conscious anti-racism in the film. The diverse and radical community of Zion does not seem to embrace homosexuality, however, as there are no visible gay or lesbian characters in the mix.
111. The basic definition of solidarity, from the Marxist Internet archive, is “ the fundamental ethical value of the workers’ movement, which obliges workers to support the struggles of other workers.” http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/o.htm (accessed 30 June 2005). This definition does not elaborate the basis for solidarity, which is located in a realist concept of workers as a discrete class with real interests of their own.
112. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000). With regard to gender essentialism, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble.
113. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 189.
114. Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988), 276. Ahmad likewise rejects poststructuralism's end of the social, impossibility of stable subject positions, and death of politics as antithetical to a project that can confront imperialism; Ahmad, 65.
115. Burke, Grammar 76–77.
116. Marx, Communist Manifesto, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm (accessed 15 June 2005).
117. While I agree with Rorty that there is no universal basis for human solidarity, there is a class basis for it; in other words, it can be constructed out of very large and very real pieces. Marxist scholar Norman Geras criticizes Rorty for giving up on the possibility of foundational solidarity, nullifying the ethical content of the term in rendering it a matter of one language game or the other. Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty (London: Verso, 1995), 112–13.
118. Ahmad, 5–11, 82–104, 195–230, 267–71.
119. What Marx called the “petit bourgeoisie,” a very small category that shifts over time but generally includes students (who will likely, however, have to work for a living), small farmers, intellectuals, professionals (though doctors and pilots increasingly have been proletarianized), and small business owners, who generally identify with capitalist interests and are generally conservative during times of social struggle. Solidarity between middle class persons and workers is evident when students in the US demanding divestment from the South African economy become instrumental in bringing down apartheid in South African, when activists in the US challenge corporations employing sweated labor at home and abroad, and when intellectuals take off their esoteric robes and stop telling people the world is too complex for them to fight.
120. Mary Triece, Protest and Popular Culture: Women in the US Labor Movement, 1894–1917 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000).
121. It should be said that there are sweatshops here in the US and very close to home at the US–Mexico border and elsewhere. See United Students Against Sweatshops (http://www.usas.org) (accessed 25 May 2005) and the student-led Workers’ Rights Consortium (http://www.workersrights.org) (accessed 25 May 2005). There are some sweatshop union activists who argue that consumer boycotts in the West are counterproductive and jeopardize workers’ jobs, such as they are. For suggestions on how we can help, see http://www.globalexchange.org/getInvolved/actnow/ (accessed 25 May 2005).
122. For example, the UPS strike of 1997 cost UPS $1.6 billion and won workers’ demands.
123. Spivak, 276.
124. Online at http://www.geekroar.com/film/archives/000250.php (accessed 30 May 2005), where there is a 635-page-long discussion of the Architect's speech.
125. Amid rampant spending on war and occupation, attacks on health care and social security at home and an incredible consumer and debt crisis internationally, the gap between rich and poor is growing. See Tom Lewis, “The Growing Gap Between Rich and Poor,” Report from the 2003 Global Policy Forum, http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/inequal/2003/0801gap.htm. Paul Krugman, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004). Institute of Governmental Studies, Public Affairs Report (Berkeley: University of California 2001), http://www.igs.berkeley.edu/publications/par/summer2001/poverty.html (accessed 30 June 2005).
126. Lukács, 164.
127. This phrase was the infamous pronouncement of right-wing pundit Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). He took back his claim that capitalism had triumphed once and for all after the explosion of the global justice movement in Seattle, in 1999.
128. See Justin Akers-Chacón, “The New Immigrant Civil Rights Movement, International Socialist Review 47 (May–June 2006), http://isreview.org/issues/47/newmovement.shtml (accessed 9 May 2006); Tom Lewis, “Latin America on Fire,” International Socialist Review 46 (March–April 2006), http://isreview.org/issues/44/latinamericafire.shtml (accessed 9 May 2006). Capitalism has indeed “produced” the categories of illegal worker and revolutionary agent, but only in reference to a real capitalist system that benefits from the first and is in reality threatened by the second.