Why the publishing wing of the AMM is called Unkant … (a reply to Jacob Bard-Rosenberg's post of Kant writing about fire)
Occasionally some bright spark reads a bit of Kant they like, then asks us "why do hate Kant so?" Here's why. We don't deny that there are some thought-provoking things in there. Quite deliberately, the brief biographical note on Theodor Adorno included in the first Unkant publication, Ben Watson's Adorno for Revolutionaries, finished with the information that Adorno "read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason together with his friend Siegfried Kracauer on Saturday afternoons. Later he would claim that he owed more to these readings than to any of his academic studies." On the other hand, as Marxists, we are aware how quickly neo-Kantian revivals become apologies for bourgeois normality.
The reason? Kant's moral philosophy - the ‘categorical imperative’ - provides the theoretical framework for bourgeois law and sociology, and is utterly useless in providing political orientation for today's workers. As Gramsci put it: "Kant's maxim ‘act in such a way that your conduct can become a norm for all men in similar conditions’ is less simple and obvious than it appears at first sight. What is meant by ‘similar conditions’? … Kant's maxim presupposes a single culture, a single religion, a "world-wide" conformism … Kant's maxim is connected with his time, with the cosmopolitan enlightenment and the critical conception of the author. In brief, it is linked to the philosophy of the intellectuals as a cosmopolitan stratum. Therefore the agent is the bearer of the ‘similar conditions’ and indeed their creator. That is, he ‘must’ act according to a ‘model’ which he would like to see diffused among all mankind, according to a type of civilisation for whose coming he is working — or for whose preservation he is "resisting" the forces that threaten its disintegration." (Selections from Prison Notebooks, 1971, p. 374). The AMM wants to unKant the intellectuals because we see how Kant's philosophy leads to neo-liberalism; when the followers of Moishe Postone ("anti-Deutsch", Platypus etc) find they cannot oppose US war plans in the Middle East, it is, finally, because they believe in bourgeois justice and the "rule of law". A world of shopping malls and universities with student audiences applauding their latest oh-so-honed "ethical" paper must be brought about (‘a "world-wide" conformism’). If a few classical civilizations and unmonetized economies were blown up in the process, who cares, that's "progress". The AMM, on the other hand, follow Pashukanis in believing that bourgeois "law" is simply a set of rules for the "fair" exchange of commodities. Marx's Capital showed that those without capital, who can only sell their labour power, always lose out. We are against Kant because we think his moral idealism is an active force scarfing up the world, and wish to mobilise actual and as-yet-unconceived forces of resistance against it: an effective negative dialectic. A few pretty words about fire are not going to change that. AMM (with thanks to Craig Brandist, whose reference to Gramsci in his essay on Bakhtin in Historical Materialism 5 got us reading the Prison Notebooks). Back to AMM Sub FrontBack to AMM