Anti-Thermidor

IN PRAISE OF LOVE!

EXCELLENT article from the Guardian (Stuart Jeffries) on Alain Badiou:

“Love, says France’s greatest living philosopher, “is not a contract between two narcissists. It’s more than that. It’s a construction that compels the participants to go beyond narcissism. In order that love lasts one has to reinvent oneself.”

Alain Badiou, venerable Maoist, 75-year-old soixante-huitard, vituperative excoriator of Sarkozy and Hollande and such a controversial figure in France that when he was profiled in Marianne magazine they used the headline “Badiou: is the star of philosophy a bastard?”, smiles at me sweetly across the living room of his Paris flat. “Everybody says love is about finding the person who is right for me and then everything will be fine. But it’s not like that. It involves work. An old man tells you this!”

In his new book, Badiou writes about his love life. “I have only once in my life given up on a love. It was my first love, and then gradually I became so aware this step had been a mistake I tried to recover that initial love, late, very late – the death of the loved one was approaching – but with a unique intensity and feeling of necessity.” That abandonment and attempt at recovery marked all the philosopher’s subsequent love affairs. “There have been dramas and heart-wrenching and doubts, but I have never again abandoned a love. And I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always.”

But isn’t such laborious commitment a pointless fuss in this age of ready pleasures and easily disposable lovers? “No! I insist on this – that solving the existential problems of love is life’s great joy,” he says and then looks across the coffee table at his translator, Isabelle Vodoz, with a big, half-ironic grin. “There is a kind of serenity in love which is almost a paradise,” he adds, popping a biscuit in his mouth and giggling. She giggles, too. “I am not only his translator,” she tells me later. Below this sixth-floor apartment, an RER train screeches along the rails out of Denfert-Rochereau station.

I think about the distinction Badiou describes in In Praise of Love. “While desire focuses on the other, always in a somewhat fetishist[ic] manner, on particular objects, like breasts, buttocks and cock,” writes Badiou, “love focuses on the very being of the other, on the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life that is consequently disrupted and re-fashioned.”

In other words love is, in many respects, the opposite of sex. Love, for Badiou, is what follows a deranging chance eruption in one’s life. He puts it philosophically: “The absolute contingency of the encounter takes on the appearance of destiny. The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny and that’s why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright.” Love’s work consists in conquering that fright. Badiou cites Mallarmé, who saw poetry as “chance defeated word by word”. A loving relationship is similar. “In love, fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure,” writes Badiou.

But this encomium to creative fidelity surely shows Badiou to be a man out of his time. “In Paris now half of couples don’t stay together more than five years,” he says. “I think it’s sad because I don’t think many of these people know the joy of love. They know sexual pleasure – but we all know what Lacan said about sexual pleasure.”

Indeed. Jacques Lacan argued that sexual relationships don’t exist. (Badiou will shortly publish a book of conversations between Lacan and his biographer,Elisabeth Roudinesco.) What is real is narcissistic, Lacan suggested, what binds imaginary. “To an extent, I agree with him. If you limit yourself to sexual pleasure it’s narcissistic. You don’t connect with the other, you take what pleasure you want from them.”

But wasn’t the rampant hedonism unleashed during Paris’s May 1968 événements, in which Badiou participated, all about libidinal liberation from social constraint? How can he, of all people, hymn bourgeois notions such as commitment and conjugal felicity? “Well, I absolutely agree that sex needs to be freed from morality. I’m not going to speak against the freedom to experiment sexually like some old arse” – “un vieux connard” – “but when you liberate sexuality, you don’t solve the problems of love. That’s why I propose a new philosophy of love, wherein you can’t avoid problems or working to solve them.”

But, he argues, avoiding love’s problems is just what we do in our risk-averse, commitment-phobic society. Badiou was struck by publicity slogans for French online dating site Méetic such as “Get perfect love without suffering” or “Be in love without falling in love”. “For me these posters destroy the poetry of existence. They try to suppress the adventure of love. Their idea is you calculate who has the same tastes, the same fantasies, the same holidays, wants the same number of children. Méetic try to go back to organised marriages – not by parents but by the lovers themselves.” Aren’t they meeting a demand? “Sure. Everybody wants a contract that guarantees them against risk. Love isn’t like that. You can’t buy a lover. Sex, yes, but not a lover.”

For Badiou, love is becoming a consumer product like everything else. The French anti-globalisation campaigner José Bové once wrote a book entitled Le Monde n’est pas une Marchandise (The World Isn’t a Commodity). Badiou’s book is, in a sense, its sequel and could have been entitled L’Amour n’est pas une Marchandise non plus (Love Isn’t a Commodity Either).

Surely that makes him an old romantic? “I think that romanticism is a reaction against classicism. Romanticism exalted love against classical arranged marriages – hence l’amour fou, antisocial love. In that sense I’m neither romantic nor classic. My approach is that love is both an encounter and a construction. You have to resolve the problems in love – live together or not, to have a child or not, what one does in the evening.”

This new book on love is an application of Badiou’s singular philosophy of the subject and his outré conception of truth set out in incredibly forbidding books steeped in mathematics and deploying Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, such as Theory of the Subject, Being and Event and Logics of Worlds. These books have led him to be hailed as a great philosopher. “A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us,” Slavoj Žižek has written.

Badiou’s philosophy of the subject is an extrapolation of Sartre’s existentialist slogan “Existence precedes essence” and incorporates a communist hypothesis that Althusser might have liked. It’s also a rebuke to postwar and often postmodern French philosophers such as Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Foucault with whom he argued and all of whom he has outlived. What is a subject for Badiou? “Simone de Beauvoir wrote that you are not born a woman, you become one. I would say you are not a subject or human being, you become one. You become a subject to the extent to which you can respond to events. For me personally, I responded to the events of ‘68, I accepted my romantic destiny, became interested in mathematics – all these chance events made me what I am.”

How does truth come into all this? “You discover truth in your response to the event. Truth is a construction after the event. The example of love is the clearest. It starts with an encounter that’s not calculable but afterwards you realise what it was. The same with science: you discover something unexpected – mountains on the moon, say – and afterwards there is mathematical work to give it sense. That is a process of truth because in that subjective experience there is a certain universal value. It is a truth procedure because it leads from subjective experience and chance to universal value.”

Badiou’s very odd, post-existentialist, heretically Marxist and defiantly anti-parliamentary conception of politics has a similar trajectory. “Real politics is that which gives enthusiasm,” he says. “Love and politics are the two great figures of social engagement. Politics is enthusiasm with a collective; with love, two people. So love is the minimal form of communism.”

He defines his “real politics” in opposition to what he calls “parliamentary cretinism”. His politics starts with subjective experience, involves a truth procedure and ends, fingers crossed, in a communist society. Why? “It’s necessary to invent a politics that is not identical with power. Real politics is to engage to resolve problems within a collective with enthusiasm. It’s not simply to delegate problems to the professionals. Love is like politics in that it’s not a professional affair. There are no professionals in love, and none in real politics.”

Badiou hasn’t voted since 1968, a habit he didn’t break in France’s recent presidential election. But he says he is writing a book about politics, a sequel to his 2007 succès de scandale De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? (The Meaning of Sarkozy), in which he notoriously called the last French president “rat man” for playing on public concerns about crime and immigration. Earlier this month he wrote a marvellously vituperative column for Le Monde that has been trending across the francophone world. Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen, he maintained, weren’t the only politicians responsible for “the rise of rampant fascism” in France. He argued that there was a Socialist party tradition of colluding with right-wing racism – from Mitterrand through Jospin and, no doubt, into Hollande’s first term. Ingeniously, Badiou suggested that mainstream politicians were disappointed in the French people for having a racist sensibility for which they, the “parliamentary cretins” (aided by some fellow intellectuals whom Badiou excoriated), were actually responsible for creating. “It is this stubborn encouragement of the state that shapes the ugly racialist opinion and reaction, and not vice versa … In order to improve democracy, then, it’s necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed.” The article nicely conveys his sense that democracy as currently practised in France is a charade inimical to true rule of the people.

Badiou’s far-left politics were burnished in the late 60s. In 1969, he joined the Maoist Union des Communistes de France marxiste-léniniste (UCFml), enthused by Mao’s Cultural Revolution that had begun three years earlier. Just as he has been faithful to all but one of his lovers, he has remained true to Maoism. Marianne magazine called him a “fossil of the 60s and 70s”, but Badiou is unrepentant. He still holds that the Cultural Revolution was inspirational, as deranging and fertile for him as falling in love – despite the deaths, rapes, tortures, mass displacements and infringements of human rights with which it has been associated.

When I ask him why, Badiou explains that the success of Lenin’s disciplined Bolshevik party in the 1917 October Revolution spawned a series of other workers’ revolutions, notably in China in 1949. “One soon saw that this instrument that was capable of achieving victory was not very capable of knowing what to do with its victory.” Maoist bureaucracy was corrupt and self-serving, party activists were bourgeois and anti-socialist, and the communist revolution under threat. “So the Cultural Revolution was important because it was the last attempt within that history to modify that in a revolutionary manner. That’s to say they made an attack on the communist state itself to revolutionise communism. It was a failure but many interesting events are failures.” He cites the Paris Commune and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht’s failed German revolution among such interesting failures.

In his 2010 book The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou wrote about the importance of failure for like-minded communists (many of whom gathered with him and Žižek at Birkbeck College, London in 2009 for a conference called On the Idea of Communism). “Any failure,” he writes, “is a lesson which, ultimately, can be incorporated into the positive universality of the construction of a truth.” Which means that Badiou at least has not lost faith in communism. “The old Marxist idea of creating an international society is truly the order of the day now,” he says. “Today things are much more international than they have ever been – commodities and people are much more international than before.” So the time is more ripe than ever for international workers’ revolution? “I wouldn’t say that. Certainly at the world level there can be more hope than hitherto. We’re climbing a very big ladder.”

Badiou was born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1937. His mother was a professor of philosophy, his father a maths professor and socialist mayor of Toulouse from 1944-58. His philosophical training began in 1950s Paris. He quickly became a Sartrean, devoted to the paradoxical philosophy that, he says, involved “a complicated synthesis between a very determinist Marxist theory of history and an anti-determinist philosophy of conscience”.

In a new book of essays entitled The Adventure of French Philosophy, Badiou argues that between the appearance of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in 1943 and the publication of Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? in 1991, French philosophy enjoyed a golden age akin to classical Greece or Enlightenment Germany. Badiou’s great fortune was to be part of that adventure. Like wine and cheese, French philosophy should, he says, be considered part of France’s glory. ”I tell our ambassadors you have with us philosophers the greatest export product.”

He speaks fondly of his times at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Deniswhich, founded in the late 60s, fast became a bastion of countercultural thought. There he engaged in fierce intellectual debates with his fellow professors Deleuze and Lyotard, even though he considered them traitors to the communist cause. “These men were my rivals and my neighbours, people whom I admired and differed profoundly from.”

But why, if he’s right, did France have this postwar adventure, this dizzying explosion of intellectual life? “I think because of the political catastrophe in France – Pétain and the disaster of collaboration. That resulted in a philosophy that had a duty to respond to those disgraces, to propose a different way. What’s more, there is a French model of being a philosopher which isn’t enclosed in the academy as in England – a philosopher who is an intellectual interested in all the things in their age. Such were Diderot, Rousseau and above all Pascal.”

He credits Sartre with revivifying that French model of what a philosopher could be. “All my eminent colleagues were profs because they had to live, but that wasn’t their vocation – they wanted to be politically engaged public intellectuals and often artists, like Sartre. Me, too.” Badiou, like a mini-Sartre, is not just a publicly engaged philosopher, but a dramatist and novelist. Unlike Sartre, he has appeared in a Jean-Luc Godard film - as a philosopher lecturer on a luxury cruise ship in 2010’s Film Socialisme. His says his overwhelming ambition has been to change the relationship between workers and intellectuals. “For me what was especially important from May 1968 to 1980 was that we created new political forms of organisations linking intellectuals and workers. Those links helped me reinvent myself as a human subject. One could say that attempt failed, but I keep dazzling memories of that time.” Badiou’s eyes gleam as if he’s recalling an old love affair he can never forget, still less disown. Perhaps politics and love are not, if you’re a French Maoist, so very different.

Badiou chuckles bitterly. “France always exists through its exceptions. There are temporary exceptions that aren’t representative of an overwhelmingly reactionary country but are what make it less disgusting than it would be without them. I mean exceptions like 1789, 1848, 1871, the resistance, French philosophy after the war. They are the underside to the reactionary tradition of Louis Philippe, Napoleon III, Pétain, Sarkozy.” And you’re one of those exceptions? “Why not? Certainly philosophy from Sartre to Deleuze and me has made France better than it would otherwise have been.”

Original Article:http://apps.facebook.com/theguardian/culture/2012/may/18/alain-badiou-life-in-writing

Being a Communist in 2012

Here is an excellent and inspirational essay by Santiago Zabala:

“Barcelona, Spain - Being a communist in 2012 is not a political choice, but rather an existential matter. The global levels of political, economic and social inequality we are going to reach this year because of capitalism’s logics of production not only are alarming, but also threaten our existence. Unfortunately, war with Iran is likely to begin, public protest might increase throughout the West because of government austerity programmes, and these very disorders will probably be suppressed with sophisticated high-tech weapons.

These issues are existential; that is, they touch our Being. And as philosophers (sometimes called the “shepherds of Being”), we must fight against Being’s ongoing annihilation. Certain contemporary philosophers ignore this vital matter in favour of technical, artificial or analytic problems not only because of the short-term profit they can obtain from them, but also because they are themselves already annihilated, an annihilation brought about by their obliviousness to existential questions, the question of Being.

However, for readers of Al Jazeera still interested in the existential nature of philosophy, where our own Being is always at stake, communism might become a way to return to philosophy’s original sociopolitical task. After all, it should not be a surprise that distinguished contemporary philosophers who focus on existential matters (such as Alain Badiou, Gianni Vattimo and Slavoj Zizek) have also reconsidered the meaning of communism for this new century.

This question is still crucial for philosophers, because it characterises all the other problems, and it determines them. For example, the solution to most technical problems are already available in the prejudices, history and culture that characterise a thinker’s life, but the technical philosopher forgets that his life is the fundamental starting point for his investigations. This is why so few analytic philosophers comment on great sociopolitical events such as 9/11 or the current economic crisis: they believe philosophy has nothing to do with our existence in this world.

While some might argue that it is not necessary to turn to communism in order to recognise these existential emergencies, it might turn out to be a useful practical theory given the meaning it has acquired today. As the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida explained, communism, together with Being, is a remnant of the past, the specter of a conquered fear overcome by Western capitalism and the artificial annihilation of philosophy.

It is precisely in its great weakness as a political force that communism can be recuperated as an authentic alternative to capitalism. But the fact that it has virtually disappeared from Western politics, that is, as an electoral programme, does not imply it is not valuable as a social motivation or alternative. The point I wish to make is that being a communist (or a protester) today is not only necessary given the existential threats posed by capitalism, but also actually possible because of the failure of Soviet communism.

Contrary to the opinion of most disillusioned Marxist, it is just this historical defeat that constitutes communism’s greatest possibility to redeem itself not only as a political force, but also as the salvation of human beings in the 21st century. Instead of pursuing once again the contest against capitalism for unfettered development, weak communism can now embrace the cause of economic degrowth, social distribution and dialogic education as an effective alternative to the inequity that global capitalism has submitted us to.

This is probably why Eric Hobsbawm has suggested that the communism of the 21st century must become first and foremost a

critique of capitalism, critique of an unjust society that is developing its own contradictions; the ideal of a society with more equality, freedom, and fraternity; the passion of political action, the recognition of the necessity for common actions; the defence of the causes of the poorest and oppressed. This does not mean anymore a social order as the Soviet one, an economic order of total organisation and collectivity: I believe this experiment failed. Communism as a motivation is still valid, but not as programme. (E. Hobsbawm, “El comunismo continúa vigente como motivación y como utopía,” interview by Aurora Intxausti, El Pais, April 12, 2003)

The weakened communism we are left with in 2012 does not aspire to construct another Soviet Union, but rather proposes democratic models of social resistance outside the intellectual paradigms that dominated classical Marxism. These paradigms have been overcome because Marxism has gone through a profound deconstruction that has contributed to dismantling its rigid, violent and ideological claims in favour of democratic edification. Being weakened from its own scientific pretexts for unfettered development allows communism to finally unite together its supporters. But who and where are the supporters of a weak communism?

In response, social movements, especially in South America, have begun to fight back by electing their own representatives (Lula, Morales, and many others) in order to defend the Being of the weak and apply much-needed social reforms. As it turns out, the shapers of these new political alternatives have managed to defend not only their own existential interests, but also our own through the pressure they have recently exerted against a military intervention in Iran or the WB’seconomic impositions.

As I have explained elsewhere with Gianni Vattimo, the remains of communism are constituted of everything that is not framed within “the iron cage of capitalism,” as Max Weber used to say, that is, at its margins. These are the slums, underdeveloped nations and un-useful shareholders who, despite the fact they represent three-quarters of the world’s population, are being annihilated existentially through economic and military oppression.

These democratically elected governments show an alternative model that the West could follow in order to escape the ongoing annihilation of human Being. It is interesting to note how the mainstream media portray as “communist” the OWS movement and the Spanish indignados for their anti-capitalist demands - although it is not entirely accurate. In doing so, they are trying not only to mock these protesters’ demands, but also to annihilate their view from the consent of public opinion. Being a communist in 2012 is a way to avoid being annihilated, a way to escape the annihilation of Being in the world.”

Original article: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/201223111316317303.html

The Black Book of Capitalism

http://50.56.48.50/article/new-communism-resurrecting-utopian-delusion

Alan Johnson is both right and wrong. Right because the new Communism is something to take seriously as a political movement developing within Capitalist anarchy. Wrong because what makes the emergence of the ‘third era of communism’ properly ‘serious’ is precisely its break with the ‘old’ communism. Every neo-McCarthyite and Thermidorean should be panicking: not because the communism spoken about today promises to bring about a repetition of ‘totalitarian’ terror, but rather because the new communism spoken about today might actually harbour within it the possibility to liquidate capitalism, replacing it with an alternative organization of society that is both egalitarian and properly democratic. 

To say that Johnson’s treatment of Zizek, Badiou, Toscano, etc.’s writings are superficial and cheap would be to state the obvious. He completely disregards the important distinctions and nuanced analyses produced by this wide-range of contemporary thinkers that both critique/condemn Soviet-style socialism (‘Actually-existing’) and Stalinism, and distinguish what is proper to the Idea of Communism, and potential of the Communist hypothesis, that serves as the basis for the New Communism.

The neo-McCarthyite ideological tremor in Johnson’s bric-a-brac construction of straw-man arguments is disgustingly palpable. Even if we look beyond Johnson’s pathetic attempt to understand these thinkers, his over-aching argument is weak. Johnson autistically gestures again and again to the ‘crimes of Communism’, as if these crimes in themselves suggest that Communism, in any form or theory, ought to be condemned and Capitalism celebrated. This sort of argument is moot: if we were to tally up the body count from the development of Capitalism, (i.e. colonialism, slavery, imperial wars, proxy wars, etc.), the crimes of Communism pale in comparison. Which is not to say the old Communism is off the hook for its crimes. The point is that I’m not sure if comparing body counts is the right standard of measure with which to be determining how we ought to rationally organize society. All hitherto systems are guilty of atrocity in their development, and some require atrocity for their perpetuation (Capital’s crises which serve as the footnote to so many civil-wars in impoverished areas). The real question is: can there be a system that develops tendentially towards the cessation of atrocity? I would not want to substantiate the link between Communism and a cheap utopianism (a hallmark of anti-Communism): there will still be car-crashes and hurricanes in a Communist society - the question is whether this society will overall be qualitatively better than the one we already know. 

Certainly the old Communism was a disaster, guilty of all its crimes, and ought to be condemned. We ought to ask, however, why did it fail? Among so many complex theories and empirically researched analyses, and disregarding cheap thermidorean narratives, I would argue that one factor in old Communism’s demise sticks out: it deterred from the Communist hypothesis. The party-form and state-form certainly had a hand in this, replacing class hierarchy mediated by capital by political hierarchy mediated by raw power. 

And, this is precisely what distinguishes the essence of the New Communism: a renewed commitment to the hypothesis, knowing that the hypothesis will require us to jettison the party-form, the state-form, and require a new democratic praxis without mediation/representation. Easier said than done? Of course! But at least we’ve started. 

I am out of time, read Badiou’s Communist Hypothesis for further details.

Shit.

I’m so pissed - I just came back here to finish my rant on that Thermidorean Margaret Wente and I delted the post by accident - SHIT.

“Save the Greeks from their Saviours!”

The following is an essay put together by some European intellectuals on the crisis in Greece. The key thesis: that what we see in Greece, the technocratic enforcement of austerity, the outlawing of democracy and the condemnation of ‘disposable’ populations to extreme poverty and servitude, is a vision of the coming reality for all nations and peoples of this planet if we do not act against the tyrannical and reactionary forces of (neo-)liberalism. 

“At this moment, that one out of two Greeks is unemployed, 25.000 homeless wander in the streets of Athens, 30% of the population is living below the poverty line, thousands of families have to put their children in institutions so they won’t die of hunger and cold, and refugees and newly poor citizens struggle for garbage bins in public places, the “saviors” of Greece, under the pretext of the Greeks “not putting lots of effort” impose a new plan of help that doubles the given lethal dose. A plan that eliminates the labor law, and condemns the already poor people to extreme poverty, while vanishing the middle classes.

There is no chance this idea is the “salvation” of Greece: all the -worthy of the name- economists agree on that. The goal is to win time in order to save the creditors while the country is driven to a prescribed bankruptcy. Primarily, the aim is to transform Greece into a laboratory of social transformation that will be generalized later across Europe. The model tested over the Greeks is a model of a society without public services, in which schools, hospitals and medical centers are demolished, health becomes a privilege of the rich, vulnerable populations are destined for a planned extermination, while those who still have a job will be working under extreme insecurity and economic misery.

But in order that the counterattack of neoliberalism to achieve its goal, needs a system to established, that abolishes the most basic democratic rights. Under orders of the rescuers, we see that in Europe are installed governments of technocrats who despise popular sovereignty. This is a turning point concerning the parliamentary systems in which we see the “representatives” of the people to empower professionals and bankers, “carte blanche”, denying the alleged authority to make decisions. A type of parliamentary coup, which refer, inter alia, in an expanded repressive arsenal against the protests of the people. Therefore, once the Members ratified the diametrically opposed to the mandate dictated by the Troika agreement (European Union, European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund), a power lacking democratic legitimacy mortgaging the future of the country for the next thirty or forty years.

Furthermore, the European Union is ready to create a blocked bank account in which the aid to Greece will be deposited directly in order to be used exclusively for the benefit of the debt. The revenues of the country must be the “absolute priority” to repay creditors and, if need comes up should be directly deposited into this account that is managed by the European Union. The Convention explicitly requires that any new obligations that may arise will be governed by the English law, which requires material guarantees, and the disputes will be decided by the courts of Luxembourg and Greece will have been a priori lost every right of appeal against any seizure the creditors may decide. To complete the picture, privatization assigned to a fund managed by Troika which will hold the ownership titles of public goods. To complete the picture, privatization assigned to a fund managed by Troika which will hold the titles of ownership of public goods. In short, we are dealing with a generalized looting, a characteri stic of the financial capitalism that in this case offers himself an institutional betrayal. To the extent that sellers and buyers will sit on the same side of the table, we have not the slightest doubt that the privatization project is a real symposium for the buyers.

All the measures taken so far had only result in deepening the Greek national debt which, with the help of the rescuers who lend to usurious interest rates, has literally skyrocketing approaching 170% of a gross national product in free fall, while in 2009 represented only 120%.

Everyone can bet that those many rescue plans that are presented each time as “final” - were intended to weaken more and more Greece’s position so that, lacking any opportunity to propose its own terms of a reconstruction, to be forced to sell everything to the creditors under the blackmail of “destruction or austerity.” The artificial and forced deterioration of the debt issue was used as a weapon of assault for the fall of a society as a whole.

We are deliberately using here terms that belong to the military terminology: this is clearly a war conducted by the means of economy, politics and law, a class war against the entire society. And the spoils that the financial system expects to distract from “the enemy” are the social gains and democratic rights, but what is ultimately at stake is the ability for a human life. And the life of those who do not produce or consume enough compared with the profit-maximizing strategies should not be maintained.

So, the inability of a country caught in the vise of unlimited speculation and destructive plans of salvation, is the secret door from where a model -society violently invades in accordance with the requirements of the neo-liberal fundamentalism. A model for whole Europe and beyond. This is the real challenge, and therefore the defense of the Greek people is not limited to a gesture of solidarity or abstract humanity: the future of democracy and the fate of European nations are at stake. Everywhere the “urgent necessity” of a “painful but life-saving” austerity is presented as the means to avoid the fate of Greece, but this leads directly to it.

Against this organized attack against society, in front of the disaster of the last islands of democracy, we call our fellow citizens, the French and European friends to express themselves strongly. We must not allow the monopoly of speech to the “experts” and politicians. The fact that the request of mainly German and French leaders now is to ban elections in Greece can really leave us indifferent? The stigmatization and the systematic denigration of the people does not really deserve an answer? Is it possible for us not to raise our voice against this institutional murder of the Greek people? And can we stay silent in front of the forced establishment of a system that outlaws even the very idea of social solidarity?

We are at a no turning back point. It is urgent to fight the battle of numbers and the war of words to stop the extreme-liberal rhetoric of fear and misinformation. It is urgent to deconstruct the moral lessons that obscure the real process that takes place in society. It is more than urgent to demystify the racist Greek insistence on a “characteristic” that aims to elevate the supposed national character of a nation (laziness or intended guile) to the root cause of a crisis that is actually global. What counts today is not the differences, real or imaginary, but the commons: the fate of a nation who will influence others.

Many technical solutions have been proposed in order to get out of the dilemma “either destruction of society or bankruptcy” (meaning, as we see it today: “and destruction and bankruptcy”). All solutions should be examined as elements of thought in order to build an other Europe.But first we must denounce the crime, bring out the situation of the Greek people, because of “aid projects” which were conceived by and for the speculators and creditors. Once a support movement is woven around the world, where networks of the Internet are buzzing initiatives of solidarity, the French intellectuals would it be the last to speak up in support of Greece? Without waiting any longer, let’s multiply the articles, the media interventions, the conversations, the calls, the demonstrations. Because any initiative is welcome , any initiative is urgent. In what concerns us, here’s what we suggest: to move quickly to the creation of a European intellectuals and artists comittee in solidarity with the Greek people to resist.

If not us, who will?

If not now, when will it be?

Daniel ALVARO, Alain BADIOU, Jean-Christophe BAILLY, Étienne BALIBAR, Fernanda BERNARDO, Barbara CASSIN, Bruno CLÉMENT, Danièle COHEN-LEVINAS, Yannick COURTEL, Claire DENIS, Georges DIDI-HUBERMANN, Roberto ESPOSITO, Francesca ISIDORI, Pierre-Philippe JANDIN, Jérôme LÈBRE, Jean-Clet MARTIN, Jean-Luc NANCY, Jacques RANCIÈRE, Judith REVEL, Elisabeth RIGAL; Jacob ROGOZINSKI, Avital RONELLI, Ugo SANTIAGO, Beppe SEBASTE, Michèle SINAPI, Enzo TRAVERSO, Frieder Otto WOLF.”

Source: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/save-the-greeks-from-their-saviors/

On Universality

I have been busy writing my MA in Critical Theory at McMaster - The bad news: it is as we have all been told: the embourgeoisiement of the intelligentsia continues under the aegis of the neo-liberal university as evidenced by the growing number of academics committed to the petty trivialities of ‘identity politics’ and ‘cultural studies’. The good news: My comrades in the program are fully aware of this - we have been in total intellectual revolt since we arrived there. 

I am posting some of my essays on here. They are far from meeting the standards of any academic journal, and for that I am proud. As shitty as these essays are, I have realized that I commit a crime by leaving them sequestered to the gaze of academia. If they can even contribute one iota the revolution that must come, then the dissemination of these essays will have been tantamount to the ‘fuck you’ that I everyday wish to spit in the face of the ivory tower vanguard.

Cheers, comrades.

“The essence of politics is not the plurality of opinions. It is the prescription of a possibility in rupture with what exists.” (Badiou 24)

 

INTRODUCTION: Class Antagonism

 

            Is there a theoretically defensible argument to be made today that class antagonism over-determines the field of contemporary political discourse and struggle? It has been difficult to argue in the affirmative to this question ever since Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe published their monumental Hegemony and Socialist Strategy in which they conduct a re-assessment of the contemporary political landscape. Upon finding the old Marxist political categories (specifically class) devoid of explanatory power in regards to the newly emerging political phenomena of the 80’s and 90’s, Laclau and Mouffe develop a new political analytic, a neo-Gramscian model of Hegemony, that is more amenable to navigating this new political landscape. The most important consequence of this new political logic is that class antagonism is not to be understood as an over-determining factor in politics, but as another antagonism amongst a multiplicity of others.

            It is this conclusion concerning the role of class antagonism that I find to be the most theoretically suspect in Laclau and Mouffe’s formulation given the contemporary development of capitalism into its globally pervasive and technologically advanced, ‘third’ or ‘late’ stage. Nor am I the only one to harbour this suspicion. In Class Struggle or Post-Modernism? Slavoj Žižek contests Laclau’s treatment of class antagonism by arguing that Laclau has failed to properly understand the relation between universality and the Political due to his rejection of Hegelian concrete universality. It is the possibility of concrete universality that makes possible within the functioning of the Political the dynamics of a structural antagonism that over-determines the antagonistic field of struggle. From this Žižek radically concludes that Laclau, by dismissing concrete universality, has missed the mark regarding the functioning of the Political itself. Furthermore, this indictment opens up Laclau’s political analytic to further questioning as to whether the analytic itself is over-determined by class antagonism.

            While this last move of Žižek’s is highly suggestive, Žižek unfortunately does not develop this line of argument in more depth to make a convincing argument that it is class antagonism today that is the over-determining antagonism of the Political. Žižek’s argument makes a definitive case for radical antagonism as an over-determining feature of the Political (that is we are given the form), yet he has not followed through far enough on his critical suggestion that we re-orient our critical gaze to examine Laclau’s analytic for signs that it is over-determined by class antagonism (the content). If it is the case that Laclau’s analytic can be said to be over-determined by class then, despite not being exhaustive, it suggests that there is a theoretically defensible case to be made for class antagonism as a structuring principle in contemporary political discourse. I think that Laclau’s analytic can be theoretically demonstrated to be over-determined by class antagonism with reference to how Laclau has employed the use of universals. Karl Marx had similarly been able to root out the ideological pretensions of Hegel’s political philosophy by arguing that Hegel’s peculiarly restricted use of universals in regards to politics was over-determined by the class antagonism of early liberal–democratic capitalism. This same form of critique can be transplanted on to Laclau’s political analytic to demonstrate its over-determination specifically by class antagonism.

            Therefore, this essay will serve a two-fold purpose: (1) to re-state Slavoj Žižek’s critique of Laclau’s political analytic, and (2) to expand, and make a case for, Žižek’s implicit suggestion that Laclau’s analytic is itself over-determined by class antagonism. It is hoped that by completing these two objectives, this essay will create some theoretical heft for understanding class antagonism as an over-determining feature of contemporary politics[1].

HEGEMONY: MARX, GRAMSCI, LACLAU

           

            At the beginning of his essay Identity and Hegemony[2], Laclau juxtaposes two quotations from Karl Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:

The proletariat is coming into being in Germany only as the result of rising industrial development. For it is not the naturally arising poor, but the artificially impoverished, not the human masses mechanically oppressed by the gravity of society but the masses resulting from the drastic dissolution of society, mainly of the middle estate, that form the proletariat… By proclaiming the dissolution of the hitherto world order the proletariat merely states the secret of its own existence, for it is in fact the dissolution of that world order. By demanding the negation of private property, the proletariat simply rises to the rank of a principle of society what society has made the principle of the proletariat, what, without its co-operation, is already incorporated in it as the negative result of society… As philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapons in philosophy. And once the lightning of thought has squarely struck the ingenious soil of the people the emancipation of the Germans into human beings will take place (qtd. in Butler, Laclau and Žižek 44).

 

And:

 

On what is a partial, a merely political revolution based? On the fact that part of civil society emancipates itself and attains general domination; on the fact that a definite class, proceeding from a particular situation, undertakes the general emancipation of society… For the revolution of a nation and the emancipation of a particular class of civil society to coincide, for one estate to be acknowledged as the state of the whole society, all the defects of society must conversely be concentrated in another class, a particular estate must be looked upon as the notorious crime of the whole of society, so that liberation from that sphere appears as general self-liberation. For one estate to be par excellence the estate of liberation, another estate must conversely be the obvious estate of oppression (qtd. in. Butler, Laclau and Žižek 45).

 

In the first quotation, Marx has described the emergence of the proletarian class from the development of the capitalist economic mode: a universal class that will subsequently negate the conditions of its existence through the dissolution of capitalism, thereby resulting in a fully emancipated (classless) society. In the second quotation, Marx elucidates the dynamics of class politics as they have hitherto operated: all previous revolutions have been carried out by a particular class under the universalized pretense to liberate the whole of society from the rule of another particular class that represents universalized crime against that society. As two different potential political analytics, Laclau draws our attention to the fact that with the first quotation all power-relations are dissolved thereby bringing an end to the Political (46). It is important to note that for Laclau (drawing on the work of Carl Schmitt) the Political is constituted only when there is an adversarial confrontation between heterogeneous groups or classes to which no neutral mediation is applicable. Therefore, in regards to the first Marx quote, what is achieved is the dissolution of the Political: society will have achieved a non-alienated state of emancipation in which power (ever the product of inequality according to Laclau) will cease to function as all particular groups and classes will be dissolved into a universal class. However, in regards to the second Marx quote, Laclau highlights the continued role of the Political: throughout any number of revolutions, or emancipations, society continues to be fragmented by power relations since universality is always only ever the product of political strategies/tactics employed by particular classes in an attempt to subvert a dominant class that holds the place of power and occupy it themselves (which leaves intact the plurality of particulars) (46).

            It is clear that a version of the political analytic that can be developed from the first quotation has traditionally been a central feature for many Marxisms. Laclau is quick to critically dispense with it. Laclau argues that this analytic is predicated on the assumption that society will increasingly become simplified throughout the course of history, eventually becoming ossified into two clear-cut adversarial classes (i.e. the proletariat and the bourgeoisie)(46). Laclau argues that precisely the opposite historical reality has borne out: “It is sufficient that the logic of capital does not move in that direction for the realm of particularism to be prolonged sine die” (46). Society has become increasingly complexified under capitalism, with the constitution of political subjectivities tending towards multiple differentiation and hybridity as opposed to homogenization and fixity into two opposed class categories with distinct modes of life. This historical fact becomes particularly evident from the increasing philosophical quandaries and inconsistencies traditional Marxism found itself embroiled in as it tried to use essentialized conceptual tools of class analysis that were not calibrated to operate in an increasingly diverse and pluralized world.

            Alternatively, Laclau opts for taking the insights from the second Marx quote as axiomatic, much in the same way that Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci had in his political theory. Gramsci had argued that if it is the case that particular classes are able to manipulate universality into undergirding political strategies that represent their particular interests as the general interests of the whole of society, then this paradoxical relationship between particularity and universality breaks with the rigid base/superstructure determinations of traditional Marxism. Instead, it asserts that the superstructure has to have an autonomous dimension that is not solely determined by the economic base (the site of class antagonism) in so far as a particular class with particular economic interests is able to ideologically co-opt universality to perpetuate those interests. It is from this insight that Gramsci develops his political analytic of Hegemony that views politics as a ‘war of position’ amongst particular classes to hold a strategic position of power which allows them to disseminate their interests, norms and practices as universal.

            Laclau expands on, and radicalizes Gramsci’s notion of Hegemony by arguing that the Political functions autonomously in articulating the formation of society. This theoretical assertion can be summed up into four theoretical principles:

1) The Political functions Hegemonically: since the existence of power is predicated on there being an unequal distribution of it, this implies that the field of political struggle is characterized by relative positions of subordination and domination, which further implies that there is a position of Hegemony that can be occupied by a particular class or group (Butler, Laclau and Žižek 54). 

2) The Political is Contingent: given Gramsci’s insight that the superstructure, the realm of ideas is operating on an autonomous level no deterministic objectivity since the actions and discourses of subjects also partially mediate ‘objective reality’. Therefore, there is no necessity, in so far as it is impossible for reality to completely disclose itself to us. Instead there are only historical blocs of objectivity, the transient product of the hegemonic class, that colonize an otherwise contingent field of political struggle (Butler, Laclau and Žižek 49).

3) The Political is Constitutive of Society: it follows from the first consequence that subjects are always the product of a contingent configuration of the political field defined by a historical bloc. There is no ‘subject of history’: the particular classes that animate society are a product of a contingent Hegemonic formation (Butler, Laclau and Žižek 49).  

4) The dichotomy between the universal and particular is suspended in the Political: Within the Political, governed by the logic of Hegemony, universality is only ever a product of a particular class subverting another particular class. However, universality as a political tactic is necessary to achieve hegemony (to paint one’s class as the liberators of society from a class designated as the universal ‘criminal’ class).  In this sense the universal is both necessary and impossible. Therefore, total emancipation is impossible to achieve: the ideal of attaining a ‘full’ non-alienated society, is impossible, but will remain necessary as a regulative ideal to from which to enact emancipations (Butler, Laclau and Žižek 56-57).

            The major implication of Laclau’s political analytic of Hegemony is that it clearly breaks with the possibility of class being the factor that over-determines the field of politics: a multiplicity of particular groups and classes compete on a contingent field for the position of hegemony – there is no structural antagonism that structures the functioning of Political other than the contingent logic of Hegemony.

CRITIQUE OF HEGEMONY:

            At this stage, it needs to be mentioned that the salience of Laclau’s position here is undeniable: it removes the essentialist underpinnings of a former political logic of class politics as conceived by traditional Marxisms, the theoretical underpinnings of which had impeded the Left from properly addressing the possibilities opened up for political discourse and practice by the ‘new’ social movements (post-colonialisms, anti-racisms, feminisms, environmentalisms, etc.). It is important to note then, that a wholesale rejection of Laclau’s analytic is undesirable. Laclau’s insight regarding the complexification of society is almost (I think) indisputable, and the centrality given to antagonism as being constitutive of political identities is certainly an excellent axiomatic with which to ward off the ever-present threat of the apolitical. The real points of contention in Laclau’s analytic reside in the first and fourth principles and the complex relation between the two.

I - CONCRETE UNIVERSALITY

            In Class Struggle or Post-Modernism, Žižek draws our attention to the fact that regardless of how many emancipations are enacted, the existing Political-as-Hegemony framework remains intact in Laclau’s analytic (93). Apropos this observation, Žižek asks how Laclau’s political analytic can square with the large-scale historical transformations in the organization and operations of the Political, if the Political is always the Political-as-Hegemony? For example, how does Laclau’s political analytic explain the transition from Feudal Monarchy to Bourgeois Democracy? There is arguably a radical alteration between these two political epochs in the functioning of political institutions, the organization and division of political factions, the political practices they employ, and the operation and transmission of power itself (which are all elements that comprise the Political). However, it would seem that Laclau would have to deny any real radical changes since, for him, the Political only ever functions by the logic of Hegemony, and would therefore have to somehow accommodate the radical political upheaval between these epochs into the analytic of Hegemony. Here, it becomes possible to suggest that the anti-essentialism that motivated Laclau’s theory has returned in the form of an essentialization of the political logic of Hegemony itself.

             This return of essentialism in Laclau’s analytic constitutes a far bigger problem than simply lacking explanatory power for historical phenomena: it makes Hegemony inconsistent with the principle of contingency. Therefore, if we are to remain consistent to the principle of contingency, the contingency of a specific historical configuration also needs to be extended to the functioning of the Political itself as the product contingency. This requires us to introduce into our political ontology the concept of a structural antagonism: yes, a multiplicity of antagonistic groups can struggle and achieve Hegemony without this exchange resulting in any changes to the Political, yet there must be at least one particular antagonism that, if negated (the subordinated group overthrowing the dominant), would result in a radical alteration of the Political itself, and consequently the whole of society.            However, the entry of a structural antagonism into our political ontology implies that we necessarily also introduce the logic of concrete universality as the negation of radical antagonism since, amongst all the partial universalities that can potentially animate the political field, there must be a universality that operates beyond ideology. To this Laclau might counter that this is precisely where this critique runs aground: it risks reintroducing a form of universality that would negate the Political altogether. Yet, this counter-criticism of Laclau’s would only work if one subscribes to the popular ‘totalitarian’ reading of Hegelian universality. Against this reading, Žižek offers us a novel and promising alternative way of understanding concrete universality:

If we take a closer look at Hegel, we see that – in so far as every particular species of a genus does not ‘fit’ its universal genus – when we finally arrive at a particular species that fully fits its notion, the very universal notion is transformed into another notion. No existing historical shape of state fits fully the notion of State – the necessity of dialectical passage from State (‘objective spirit’, history) into Religion (Absolute Spirit) involves the fact that the only existing state that effectively fits its notion is a religious community – which, precisely, is no longer a state (Butler Laclau and Žižek 99).

 

This formulation of concrete universality links up with the notion of structural antagonism developed above: if the structural antagonism over-determines the functioning of the Political (which articulates the particular classes that animate society) then the very dissolution of this antagonism will simultaneously dissolve the conditions of its negation (concrete universality). The key here resides in Žižek’s injunction for us to read Hegel as a philosopher of contingency: if the developmental ground of different structural formations is contingent, then instead of terminating into a static state, the realization of concrete universality only ever acts as a principle of generalized change in an endlessly dynamic procession of particular contingent physiognomies. In regards to political ontology, for any contingent formation of the Political a certain particular antagonism comes to occupy a universal structuring role. Its negation, signalled forth by the overthrow of the dominant elements by the subordinate elements that are constitutive of that antagonism, is the realization of concrete universality that simultaneously cancels itself out and reverts into a new particularity by virtue of the total restructuring of the Political.

            I think that this critique deals a devastating blow to the first and fourth principles of Laclau’s Hegemony. It also fashions us with a political analytic with which to think the over-determination of the field of political struggle via a structural antagonism.

 

II - ABSTRACT UNIVERSALITY

 

             At this stage I would like to follow up on Žižek’s suggestion that we fold Laclau’s thesis on Hegemony back on itself, and try to determine how the analytic is over-determined by the hegemonic ideology of late capitalism (320). This exercise ought to fill in the content of the new political analytic we obtained above: that it is specifically class antagonism is over-determining political field of struggle. To begin, I want to suggest that the restricted use of the role of universals in Laclau’s political analytic bears a similar resemblance to the restricted way in which Hegel employs universality in his political philosophy; a political philosophy which was convincingly argued by Karl Marx to be inconsistent with Hegel’s philosophical universality. More radically, Marx argues that this is not a deficiency in reasoning, but a symptom of the ideological limit that exposes how Hegel’s thought was over-determined by class antagonism.

            Recalling our formulation of concrete universality, it needs to be noted that this formulation of concrete universality functions as a negation of the negation of the contradictions between multiplicity of particular classes and the multiple partial-universals (ideologies, in Laclau’s formulation) they employ in vying for hegemony in that specific contingent political formation. The concrete universal (which appears, at first, as only another partial-universal), when realized, cancels out the contradiction between singular and particular in so far as it negates the structural antagonism that had over-determined the political field thereby radically re-organizing the co-ordinates and conditions of existence of what is singular and particular and how they are conceived. Both Hegel and Marx had a specific term for partial-universals: abstract universals. Abstract universals are abstract in the sense that, although being properly universal, they remain only ideational configurations, and therefore, if realized (i.e. being the ideology of a particular group that has attained hegemony), would lead to a general shift in the ideological atmosphere, altering social relations to varying degrees but only within specific limits to the fact that the structural antagonism remains intact throughout this transition. Or, the same: the realization of an abstract universal does not negate the contradiction between singular and particular in that specific political constellation.

            In his political philosophy, Hegel had argued that a form of perpetual concrete universality was realized in the institution of the modern liberal-democratic state (Hegel 383). Hegel saw in the liberal-democratic state form a political model in which conditions for the concrete universal (total social re-organization) always remained open given the democratic distribution of power, and the dissolution of particular groups and factions into a mass of individuals in a civil society. Hegel saw in the political universality, embedded in the state constitution (i.e. formal equality before the law, democratic elections, etc.) and the liberties of civil society, the cancelling out of the contradiction between the singular and the particular.

            Irrespective of the fact that the ‘perpetual’ character of this political concrete universal is already inconsistent with Hegel’s ‘philosophical’ concrete universality, Karl Marx was highly sceptical of the idea that the liberal-democratic political form actually achieved a negation of the negation of the contradiction between the singular and particular. Instead, Marx is led to argue that Hegel is celebrating only the embodiment of abstract universality, since the liberal-democratic political form can does not realize this negation:

The perfected political state is, in its essence, the species-life of man as opposed to his material life […] Where the political state has attained its true development, man – not only in his thought, in his consciousness, but in reality, in life – leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community, in which he counts to himself as a communal being, and life in civil society, where he is active as a private individual. Where he counts to himself and to others as a real individual, he is an untrue appearance. In the state, on the other hand, where man counts as a species-being, he is the imaginary member of an imagined sovereignty, is deprived of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal universality (qtd. in. Chitty and McIvor 4).

 

More specifically, there is not a total re-organization of the Political with the emergence of the liberal-democratic political form, since it leaves intact the structural antagonism making this transition only another moment within the same political constellation.

             Marx’s critique here reveals to us the major impediment to Hegel’s political philosophy was that the liberal-democratic political form could not properly tolerate the radical logic of concrete universality as formulated in his philosophy. More precisely, what are left intact with the emergence of the liberal-democratic political form are the class antagonisms that animate civil society. How is it that we are to determine that Hegel’s political philosophy is over-determined by class antagonism, instead of only an accidental omission of class antagonism from its analyses? The over-determination becomes observable if one draws out the consequences of the abstract universality that lies at the heart of the liberal-democratic political form. The division between singular and particular, state and civil society determines that the realization of the idea universality can only ever terminate into a meritocracy: regardless of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or creed, everyone should be insured, at the political level, the equal opportunity to exploit each other in a civil society characterized by the capitalist relations of production. The point here is that it is not inconsistent with the logic of liberal-democracy to conceive of a liberal-democratic society characterized by equal relations between the races or sexes (although this is not to say that this is actually possible within capitalism). What is inconceivable for the liberal-democratic ideology is the dissolution of class relations as such, and the emergence of material equality. This possibility is outside of the liberal-democratic scope; indeed it would be its very undoing. It is this singular enigmatic exception of class antagonism from the resolutions brought forward by the Hegel’s political philosophy that allows Marx to draw the conclusion that capitalist ideology is over-determining the limits of Hegel’s political analyses.

            And can we not apply this same form of critique be turned on Laclau’s Hegemony? Today, under the aegis of late capitalism, an intensified form of the liberal-democratic political ideology, (neo-)liberalism, although not unchallenged by other political models, occupies the position of Hegemony: it is the default political logic of our time. The similar operation of universality (only partial) in Laclau’s analytic and the Political as it functions under the logic of neo-liberalism (which is nothing but an intensified version of the liberal-democratic political form), implies that Hegemony has a parallel logic with this specific form of the Political. This link is further strengthened in Laclau’s naturalization (essentialization) of this logic as the sine qua non of the Political, and his argument that all alternative forms to it would spell the dissolution of the Political: a seemingly ideological gesture that back steps on the earlier assertions of a principle of contingency (much in the way Hegel had). Therefore, with only the abstract universal to work with, class antagonism comes to occupy the same singular position of exception it had in Hegel’s political philosophy, since there can only be ideological change in Laclau’s model with material-structural change remaining completely outside of its scope.

CONCLUSION:

            This essay has moved through two inter-related arguments. First, that the possibility of concrete universality implies that there is a structural antagonism for any given contingent political field, and therefore contradicts principles one and four of Laclau’s Hegemony. And, the first argument gave us to the tools to argue the second: that Laclau’s Hegemony is itself structured by contemporary structural antagonism of class by virtue of the exceptional position class antagonism holds within this logic. It is hoped that this second argument has suggestively made a case for the continued understanding of class antagonism as an over-determining factor in the field of political struggle and discourse.

WORKS CITED:

Chitty, Andrew, Martin McIvor. Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

 

Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, 2000.

 

Hegel, Georg W.F. The Hegel Reader. Trans. and Ed. Stephen Houlgate. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 1998.

The Court Jesters of Capital: Cameron, and Buffett

Today, again, I have to be brief. A short analysis of two news-bits circulating the bourgeois media today offer an excellent opportunity (although there really is no shortage of such opportunities these days) to point out some ideological tactics employed by elites when addressing the public regarding phenomena that explicitly have their origin in Capital; these origins must at all costs be obscured to save face in light of the otherwise obviousness of the irrationally bogus operational workings of the system’s machinery. Of course, there is no novelty in such analytic exercise here; rather, the sheer absurdity of the public ruminations of British Prime Minister David Cameron and investment tycoon Warren Buffett in the past 24 hours should have Leftist critics everywhere in stitches from an excess of hilarity - the ideology is just far-too palpable, hence sickeningly comical.

First: David Cameron’s address today regarding the London riots:http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/08/15/uk-riots-cameron.html - The content: the usual cultural conservative tripe about decreasing morality, broken families, blah blah blah. What is interesting on this level is the very reactionary opportunism taken to actually attribute causality of these phenomena to an ‘over-abundant’ social security and welfare system. Of course, no welfare system has ever adequately addressed the immiseration of peoples under a Capitalist economy; it simply can’t perpetually stand in the way as a limit to the internal expansionist dynamic of Capital itself (hence the collapse of Social Democratic hegemony post-1970’s). Nor does it need to be restated how welfare economics only serve to sustain Capital. Regardless, and to be ‘fair’ here, the welfare state does mitigate the cruel harshness of Capital in many ways, and does deserve much credit it putting social justice on the agenda in many social sectors. If anything, these policies do go quite a way in dissipating discontent by opening up channels of social mobility to the disenfranchised who otherwise would never have had the opportunity to succeed. The point to be made here: these partial Socialist technics do a great deal in actually curtailing the disorder observed in the streets of London the past few weeks (that this was no principled organization of revolutionaries should not deter those on the Left being adamant that the origin of the chaos was a justified response given the circumstances; that this sequence was quickly absorbed by un-principled violence and petty hooliganism is, of course, reprehensible).

Thus: 1) Cameron is right; but only in so far as the social welfare system was never adequate to the task it was created to amend; only in so far as the political will to radicalize the welfare system further had failed, thereby leaving it to be devoured and picked away at by Neo-Liberalism’s dogs: it is Capital’s dynamics that has got the better of any possible Social Democratic solution to today’s crises and social discontent. It is true, as all Conservatives never fail to remind us, that the welfare system does potentially create a class of welfare recipients that may indeed develop a sense of entitlement without actually contributing to society - the problem here, however, is that what is on display here are not the failures of welfare economics, but the failures of Capitalism in so far as welfare economics are capitalist, and the capitalist system can not address the chronic unemployment of welfare recipients in the First-World nations. The attribution of blame alone to welfare is empty rhetoric devoid of reason; Cameron, like all parliamentarians, is a master at that. 

2) Social Democracy; Socialism itself, is dead. As Zizek urges us to consider: the state of things under Late Capital requires a drastically revolutionary solution to it’s crises; the old model of State Socialism, with a planned economy will not be able to transcend it’s nationalist underpinnings to thereby gain a secure enough economic foot-hold in a internationally globalized economy run by the logic Capital. It is literally a question of Communism or extinction at the ‘hidden-hand’ of Capital.

That is simply a brief look at the content; the form however of Cameron’s childish bitching is equally preposterous: Again, the form of his argumentation takes the form of moralistic-psychologizing; something I have reviled since the inception of this journal as the hallmark of reactionary thought. Again, I simply repeat: this reductionist fantasy of responsible individuals with choices to do good or evil has to be averred by anyone amenable to reason! Systematicity must be appealed to: economics, politics, and their inter-relation and their total influence on everything today from the riots in the streets of the ghetto to the CEO fucking his secretary on top floor of the Bank-owned skyscraper. 

This post will be completed later; I am out of time.