Spivak's hic Rhodos hic cacas

Spivak says she's a Europeanist and also that she is a Marxist- but does she know anything about either Europe or Marx? Let us see-

Marx presents the proletarian revolution as responding to situational imperatives from the outside, pushed to keep its promise, rather than choose a planned moment.  Marx does this by way of a story which is about not being able to keep a false promise – where the guy in Aesop said he could jump across the Straits of Rhodes and was told Here is Rhodes don’t jump here. This is implicitly to stage the scientific impossibility of a proletarian revolution: who can jump the Straits of Rhodes?

The Straits of Rhodes aint a thing. Aesop never said any athlete claimed to have jumped from Rhodes to anywhere else. Spivak is thinking of the Hindu god Hanuman who jumped across the Palk Straits. The punch line of the story about the guy who claimed to have jumped a prodigious distance when he was in Rhodes is- 'Here is Rhodes. Jump now.' Stop boasting. If you could do it there, you can do it here. Just jump already.

Similarly, Hegel and then Marx were ridiculing pamphleteers who professed membership of Illuminati type Secret Societies spread across all lands secretly directing the course of History. These shitheads claimed to wield immense power in some shadowy manner- everything was 'sub rosa'- i.e. secret- and yet they could be seen cadging drinks and pimping their daughters from Tavern to Tavern. If these Freemasonries were genuinely powerful, they could effect a Revolution here and now.

Marx is revising a Hegelian passage from the Philosophy of Right which is actually talking about Rosicrucianism and mystical action. He makes some interesting changes. He changes Hic Rhodos hic saltus – this is Rhodes this is where to jump – to Hic Rhodos hic salta– jump in the imperative and then, going back to Hegel in a peculiar way and saying here is the rose dance here. We need to hold onto this metaphor of “dance,” if we are to understand that revolution cannot be formally defined

Marx garbled Hegel's garbled allusion to a line by Goethe- 'Here is the rose, dance you rascal!'- but his meaning was plain enough. Essentially he was saying proletarian revolutions are different from bourgeois ones because the former are self-critical and complex  and messy and thus like real life whereas the latter are operatic and sublime but more or less unreal.

Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day – but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer [cat’s winge] takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period soberly. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out:

Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
[Here is the rose, here dance!] ^[NOTE]

 Why was Marx writing this? The answer is that some Leftists looked to Napoleon III as a Socialist Messiah. They were seduced by the glamour of the dynasty and had got drunk on spurious rhetoric. Marx was saying- 'develop your own strength rather than look to some Dynast. Grapple with real problems. No doubt, you will over-reach yourself and beat a retreat, but you will try again and make a better job of it. Keep going. Keep building up your own strength. In the end, you will be like that athlete who really can make a prodigious jump right here and now.'

No doubt, Marx's stupidity and drunken prolixity militated against his ever saying anything sensible, still this is the only sensible reception of his text.

It isn't Spivak's. She thinks Marx said
1) Proletarian revolutions are pushed from the outside. They don't arise because the proletariat gathers strength by grappling with real problems by itself.

This is nonsense. Marx lived at a time when Europe would unite to crush a proletarian revolution in France. No 'outside push' was feasible. By contrast, the Kaiser was willing to send Lenin to Russia to foment a Revolution.  But, Marx died long before any European power contemplated so drastic a step.

2) Proletarian revolutions are a scientific impossibility. 'Who can jump the straits of Rhodes'?

Marx did not say this because...urm... we're talking about Karl Marx here not Groucho. He was a Communist. Believing in Proletarian Revolution is what he did for a living. The straits of Rhodes don't exist. Spivak invented them. She is a crap Europeanist.

3) Marx had a 'metaphor of the dance' which we need to bear in mind to understand that Revolution can't be formally defined.

This is nonsense. Neither jumping nor dancing are important. What is important is that the proletariat build up its own strength by grappling with practical problems even though this means it will experience a lot of frustration and self-criticism. Still, the only way you get good at jumping or dancing is by actually jumping or dancing. It's no good saying 'I could jump very well in Rhodes' or 'my dancing must remain sub rosa- the world is not ready for my booty shake', because people will think you are a self-deluded booby.

Marx says that the Proletariat refine their definition of Revolution by grappling with messy, real life problems. Spivak thinks the guy was talking about some mystic dance.

She says-

Marx was a formalist in his theory of value – the labor theory of value. Value, which he famously defined as inhaltlos und einfach, regularly translated into English not as contentless inhaltlos but as “slight in content,” thus closing up the possibility for English-readers to understand what Marx was talking about. Value is commensurability – close to data.

Marx was Ricardian in his theory of value. English readers know what Marx meant better than Germans because Marx was a drunken shithead whereas Ricardo was smart.
Essentially, his claim is that- under perfect information, convexity, perfect competition etc.- there may be a steady state equilibrium such that a labour numeraire exists. This labour numeraire would be independent of distribution and technology and thus a pure 'form' with only the minimal content whereby Labour maintains itself.

Spivak can't understand a word of this definition. Instead she fixates on 'inhaltlos' as 'contentless' which, obviously, it can't be because it represents actual human labour not killed or destroyed in the production process. 

Spivak, however, believes she has made a great discovery. Everybody else misunderstood Marx because they were reading an erroneous translation-

If Spivak is right then Marxism endorses industrial processes in which the workers are killed during the production process and holds the commodities they produce to be wholly commensurable with industrial processes which do not kill or otherwise reduce the stock of Labour.

Since Spivak is an 'Europeanist' whereas I'm just a Curry & Chips Cockney soon to be cut off from the Continent by Brexit, perhaps I should give her the benefit of the doubt.

On the other hand, she thinks that the Straits of Rhodes exist on the map. So, though doing a better job than me of shitting on Marx, I am obliged to say that though Marx was stupid he wasn't Spivak level stupid.

In any case, what difference does it make what infelicity of language Marx was guilty off? Economics is a mathematical discipline. What maths has clarified no mere linguist can gainsay.

Spivak is not a mathematican, nor an Economist. She has studied Literature. She must know that any human being who says 'Value is commensurability' must be either stupid or lying. Value is almost always wholly incommensurable. The exception is- under open markets with almost zero income effects, no hedging, no externalities, no learning or addiction type effects, no uncertainty- Values are commensurable provided Time travel is instant and costless. 

Is Spivak channeling Arrow Debreu here?-

The answer is no. She's just being silly. The Labour in the Labour theory of Value is an abstract sort of yardstick or no intrinsic importance. It isn't a Platonic form.  It is a metric- an artificially constructed numeraire. Nobody can actually compute it- but that doesn't matter. Nobody needs to presuppose it. 

It is possible that there is a mediating agent between my poetic genius (which can't appear)  and my neighbor's cat's Nicaraguan horcrux  which must be presupposed in order to grasp the mechanics of the production of the World- or at least that Department concerned with providing or denying Nicaraguan horcruxes for felines in Fulham. But the possibility of that possibility does not establish any exchange or appropriation or surplus extraction. For my part, I'd gladly trade my poetic genius for the cat's Nicaraguan horcrux. What is lacking is not the possibility of a mediating agent, nor the possibility of that possibility, but that agent's actual existence. 

A missing market which possibly might not be missing is still a missing market. It gives rise to a 'second best' solution. Notice in a perfect market with no surpluses, first best solutions could always be non-coercively unwound to get back to the original position. Thus the whole trajectory is 'zero regret' and 'super fair'. It might appear that Spivak isn't just mindlessly applying Derrida's theory of mediation which, in this context, cashes out as denying time reversal for symbolic systems such that the 'origin would be recoverable in all its determinations'. However, if markets or symbolic systems deal with co-evolved processes on an uncertain fitness landscape, then notions like 'zero regret' and 'super fair' and 'complete mediation' which fully recovers an originary position are all quite worthless and not worth bothering with. My point is that Derrida and Baumol and others of that generation were misguided by the fallacies of their age which we feel superior to. In Derrida's case, the problem was Husserl's 'Origin of Geometry' which came out at about the time Turing was using Brouwer choice sequences to establish an 'eidetic' result of the sort Phenomenology had sought in vain. But Derrida didn't know he was barking up the wrong tree. Similarly, Brouwer didn't account for Complexity theory. This does not mean their work is worthless, just that we need to compensate for their ignorance. The same holds true of Hegel and Marx.

Spivak, of course, is no Derrida. Still her web of fallacies is shared in common with other Bengali careerists like Amartya Sen. In particular, they all share some highly mischievous blindspots when it comes to Ethics and Morality. Is it a coincidence that, though they were outside India, their moral imbecility tracks the criminalization of the Academy in India? It must be. The more likely explanation has to do with the equation Bengalis made between the CPM and corrupt hooliganism. Being genuine Socialists, they felt that they too needed to cultivate sociopathy- at least in bookish form.

However, as unconditional ethics must be conditioned when practiced as politics, and democratic freedoms must be bound to particular occasions when practiced, in the same way, we cannot have a revolution unless it is tied to content. And the double-bind, in this particular essay, is preserved by Marx by the concept metaphors of dance, poetry, and the overarching figure of theater. We do not know the form of our revolution today, we look forward to a content that we must be able to project by our flexibility of the imagination to be able to imagine – let us read the whole passage: “The social revolution of the 19th century can only create its poetry from the future, not the past. . . . Here is the rose, dance here!”

Is Spivak mentioning any content at all for a Revolution we can have here and now? Nope. She is talking about a guy who died a long time ago. Has she created any poetry for our future? No. She has written cacophonous claptrap.

Marx thought Hegel calculated everything for the mind. therefore for the heterogeneous dialectic of knowing and doing, we go not to The Science of Logic, as Lenin had suggested, but to “The Beautiful Soul” in The Phenomenology of the Spirit, which Lacan describes as metonymic of psychoanalysis.[1]

If Spivak believes that 'Marx thought Hegel calculated everything for the mind' then, since Value-as-Labour represents a heterogeneous dialectic, it can't have a formalist or mathematical definition. Spivak is not deconstructing herself here. She told a lie and then showed the truth in another context. Her mention of psychoanalysis is telling. She is explaining why she has produced nothing but worthless shite and why she thinks producing more and more worthless shite is somehow 'Revolutionary' more particularly if that worthless shite damages minds inside the teaching machine.
You see, she thinks Hegel's 'Beautiful Soul'- which produces nothing but catachrestic pseudo-ethical shite- is actually something desirable. She herself incarnates it- a subaltern Saint like Amartya Sen-who is referred to as the Mother Theresa of Economics, not because he cares for the poor but because he garnered fame by fucking them over.