The Value of Total Critique and Escape From Left-Wing (and Right-Wing) Fundamentalism
author: unbridled
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From the surveillance camera on the street corner to the genetically engineered soy product, from the strip mine in the West Papua jungle to the increasingly broad and far-reaching "anti-terrorist" laws, the world is becoming an interwoven network of control and exploitation coupled to an unending parade of environmental and social catastrophes that are used to justify the increase in control. For those of us who imagine and desire a world in which we, as individuals, truly determines our own existence, together with those we enjoy sharing our lives with, it is necessary to develop a critique of this world that goes to the roots of all this, a total critique of the existence that has been imposed on us.
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Excerpts from "Everything Must Go" by Venomous Butterfly
 http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/vb/wd4-2go.html
[Total critique] is by no means an easy task. We have been taught to simply accept things as they are, and when we start to question, it is much easier to examine things piece-meal, not trying to make connections or keeping those connections on a surface level.
(... )
If we view the killing of an unarmed person by a cop, the war against Iraq, the clear-cutting of a forest, the sweatshop in Taiwan and the emptiness of our daily lives as separate matters, we can easily conceive of them as mere aberrations. Our task then simply becomes that of pointing out the problem to the right authorities, so that they can correct the problem. Voting, petitions, litigation, appeals for legislation and public non-violent demonstrations before the symbols of the institutions responsible for taking care of these matters become the order of the day. The aim is simply to make the institutions live up to their own proclaimed ideals. But in the present reality, this reformist perspective either requires one to put on blinders so as to only see one's own narrow issues, or to continually scurry from one isolated problem to the next, on and on in the activist rat race until one burns oneself out.
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As true as this may be, all that we have done if we do this is given a label to this totality, and labeling a thing is not the same as understanding it adequately to be able to confront and challenge it. In fact, without an adequate analysis of the nature of the state, capital or civilization, they merely function as abstractions that can distract us from the actual realities we face...
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Deeper connections - connections that show how the ruling order can recuperate partial oppositions (anti-racism, feminism, gay liberation, even those forms of opposition to capitalism, the state and civilization that continue to operate within a political activist framework) to its own ends - can only spring from a different kind of critique.
Even when a critique places the various oppressions under a single conceptual umbrella (e.g., the state, capital, patriarchy, civilization) in order to explain them, this critique is not necessarily a total critique. Such critiques may in fact be broad without having depth.
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...a total critique requires depth; it needs to get to the bottom of things, to the roots.
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a total critique is qualitatively different from a partial critique. All partial critiques, regardless of how extreme they may be, start from the perspective of this society. ...The more extreme and broader partial critiques simply lead to an ideological rejection of major aspects of this society or even of all of it considered abstractly because this society is deemed to have failed on its own terms. Such ideological rejections offer little of practical use to the immediate struggle against this society since they are based on the same reifications through which this society seeks to justify itself. In developing a total critique, one starts from herself, from her desire to determine his existence on his own terms. This critique is thus the act - or better, the ongoing practice - of confronting this society with oneself and one's hostility to its intrusion into one's existence. It is from this basis that one can indeed plumb the depths of this society and begin to recognize the intertwining networks of control through which it defines every moment of our existence.
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homepage: http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/vb/wd4-2go.html
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add a comment on this article
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"And from here solidarity and revolutionary practice can develop."
But where is the "here"? Is "here" any attempted "total critique," some particular already articulated "total critique," or is "here" simply the idea that a "total critique" is the way to go?
Very "partial" thinking, so far.