Report from London

Something was different this time around. London itself has not changed much, it still feels like a giant machine. Not a particularly well oiled one, not one that is functioning smoothly (perhaps the snow that had prevented some trains from running contributed a bit to the impression), not one of those seamless and noiseless gadgets seen in sci-fi movies. Rather it is reminiscent of a monstrous steam engine. It is entirely too big, terribly inefficient, not particularly user friendly, yet it still somehow manages to persist against the grain of history. Its main purpose? Extraction of surplus value. The city hardly conveys the impression of being constructed for people to live in. Every inch of it feels like it was built by capital for capital. Every footstep sounds a bit like the stroke of a piston. Yet something was different this time around. If you put your ear to the ground you could hear the facade of cold concrete beginning to crack. If you looked attentively you could see fresh buds making their way through the cracks. They are fragile yet persistent, unwavering in their battle against the weight of dead material piled upon them. They are the people claiming what ought to be theirs.

Walking down Kingsway from Holborn station one passes LSE's new academic building. The contrast between the name and the architecture defies belief. The facade towering menacingly above the pavement appears like a bastard child of a high security prison and a bank. Tall gray monoliths that vaguely resemble doors speak no invitations, they guard. I walk on. I turn the corner, then another and there it is: an invitation. A makeshift banner is hanging from a window of the old academic building, informing passers by that LSE is under occupation. „Join us!“ it says. How can I refuse? Inside it hardly resembles an occupation; it is a place of learning, of coming together, of critical thinking and action, and most certainly of fun. It is what a place of higher learning ought to be. It is not occupied, the remainder of LSE is. Howard Davies, LSE's director, has refused the students' invitation, which is hardly surprising. He is a former banker and bankers have a hard time understanding the importance of learning, coming together, critical thinking and action, and they almost certainly do not understand why people need to have fun.

About half an hours walk to the north the students of UCL have put quite some effort in redesigning the exterior of their university. Bright red signs are anouncing a closing down sale and promising further reductions. For now the commercial discourse is ironic. The most likely result of the vote in parliament on Thursday will make it bitter reality (irony is another thing bankers fail to understand). Some very pompous stairs guarded by pompous columns are covered with witty messages written in chalk, demonstrating that irony can effectively take away the power of threats. „How can I afford my caviar?“ one of them reads. UCL's management on the other hand has responded with sarcasm (or was it a farce?) when their demand to have students evicted was rejected in court. I somehow doubt they see the funny side of it.

Neither did Topshop security when a bunch of people started blowing whistles inside the store on Oxford street. This time around irony was supplied by the police. In response to the protest they barricaded the entrance, either not realising or not caring (reductions in their salaries are also part of the government's austerity measures) that completely closing down the store was something protesters never could have achieved without their help. Again sarcasm is to be found higher up in the hierarchy: while government is cutting public spending in ways absolutely devastating for working people it is turning a blind eye toward tax evasion by the rich. The people have decided that they have taken about as much of it as they can take. Their chants were without irony this time: „If you wanna sell your clothes pay your tax!“

Personal growth

I forgot to add a third thing to the list of most depressing phenomena, namely this:




This is ideology at its subtlest and at its cruelest. It presents itself as humane and authentic, yet it is the perfect perversion of both. So, what's wrong with cherishing "the little things in life", with seeking "true love", seeking "personal growth" and a rich "inner life"? Everything. This type of propaganda presents personal growth as an individualistic endeavor, as something we do alone as we run from others, as we abandon them and set our own interests as the measure of the world. It is what capitalism does to us, there is no need that we should try and bring this curse upon ourselves. It wants to present itself to us as the most tender thing. The worldview that breaks us asunder, that affirms the world as a cold, hostile place, full of pain and suffering and loneliness, is not tender, it is ruthless and inhumane. "Only the roughest would be tender," Adorno once wrote, "the demand that nobody must go hungry." Only radical thought and action can be tender. Radical in that they refuse to accept the world as it is and stubbornly affirm the right to happiness as a universal human right. The vicious propaganda of personal growth reduces individuals to mere objects. They become sources of profit or experiences and little more. Personal growth is then a result of the manipulation of oneself and others as resources. The truth is that we can grow only together by collectively working to improve the world and our relationships among ourselves. This new world is what represents our growth. The new world which we can only build together and that we can enter only together.

The Secret

Two of the most depressing phenomena for me lately are neo-nazism and this:



They are depressing not just because they are signs that the world is going fundamentally in the wrong direction, but because they are proof of our failure. We have failed miserably in painting a vision of the world for which the oppressed would be willing to fight. We have failed to show them that a sense of belonging can only be won in our common struggle for a just society. We have failed to show them that a sense of self-worth can be attained by building that world. We have failed to offer a credible vision of happiness. Oh, we like to scorn racism, nationalism, new-age cults, but have we even the slightest idea of why people are turning to them? Perhaps we do not even want to know because then we would have to admit our own share of the guilt.

What I see in all these different phenomena is a compensatory function. Put together they are the dark mirror of contemporary capitalist societies. The Secret asks the audience to regress, as Freud would say, to one of the earliest phases of childhood. It is the phase Freud called infantile narcissism, when the reality principle has not yet manifested in the psyche of the child. A happy time when the constraints of reality were ignored, when they did not yet manifest as a psychic conflict (this conflict being, by the way, the constitutive element of the subconscious according to Freud). It is the last resort of the beaten and battered creature. It is total surrender, a complete removal from the world. Have their desires been frustrated to such a point that they do not even believe it is worth to fight for them? I am sorry. We have not given you hope when you most needed it.

And then there is neo-nazism, a rapidly growing trend in Europe. If the Secret chooses to surrender without a fight, neo-nazism chooses to lash out blindly. In a world in which true and lasting solidarity is made impossible, it chooses to adhere blindly to a completely arbitrary category, defined mostly by its hatred of those who are even worse off. The weak are thus bound together by their hate of the weakest, they become brothers and sisters in crime and thus, perversely, claim the solidarity that was denied to them. Why the weakest? Because the weak dare not lash out against the strong. I am so, so sorry. We have failed to acknowledge your hatred and to give you the support you needed to turn it against those who oppress you.

Against theory!

While intellectuals are laboring away to bring us ever newer and better theoretical explanations of the world they have lost sight of the gulf that has sprung up between theory and practice. I am not talking about the "ivory tower" of academia, the way it has become self-sufficient and has failed to be part of the most important emancipatory struggles. I am talking about the curious fact that the state of the world has failed to progress and has recently even regressed so far that theories have ceased to be applicable. Not because there is something wrong with theories, but because the world is lagging so far behind in its development that the most advanced theories fail to describe it. The gap is roughly 150 years. The most advanced theories of that day are those that best describe our contemporary reality.

A leaflet Marx and Engels wrote in 1848 bears the title Demands of the communist party in Germany. One of the demands is quite interesting in the present-day context: "8. Mortgages on peasant lands shall be declared the property of the state. Interest on such mortgages shall be paid by the peasants to the state." What a simple and brilliant solution to the recent mortgage crisis in the US. Give banks the money they need to stay afloat, but at the same time nationalize mortgages. This would have directly guaranteed that the money given to banks benefited citizens, would have stopped or at least significantly slowed down the further erosion of housing prices and prevented misuses of the generous contribution of the US Government - once said to be of the people, by the people and for the people - to the corporate world. It would have also spared Obama from offering that embarrassing lip-service to justice in which he scolded CEOs for rewarding themselves with million dollar bonuses. You would expect that after managing to plunder the federal budget they would be quite proud of that feat and would see it fitting to reward their success.

Given the situation the government had basically three options, two of which were completely unacceptable. The first was standing by idly as the whole economic system came crashing down around their ears. The second - perhaps even worse than the first - was to give a vast amount of money to people who have proven themselves to be perfectly incapably of responsibly handling money. This would be the fiscal equivalent of trying to cure an alcoholic by giving them a crate of vodka. The third option was some form of nationalization (either of banks directly or of mortgages, as Marx and Engels had suggested). How is it possible that a democratically elected government has decided upon an obviously ludicrous course of action just because it brought profit to a corrupt, irresponsible and cruel elite. It has become obvious that such a government is not susceptible to reason. And the US merely set the pace, European governments have by now outdone it in its monstrosity and idiocy. The time for reasoning is past, it is the pressure from the streets that these committees of the global bourgeoisie will listen to once it has become so strong that it strikes fear in their hearts. It has become obvious that we are in a state of war, war of the combined forces of bourgeois and states against the people. In war we must not try to understand our opponent but try to hit them where it hurts. In this context we need only the theory that can serve us as a weapon in this struggle.

Multiculturalism is dead

At least that is what German chancellor Angela Merkel has declared in a speech to the youth branch of the CDU, sparking a heated polemic around the globe. It is not long ago that Thilo Sarrazin, at the time member of the executive board of the Deutsche Bundesbank, published a book in which he openly propagates racist theories (for example that genetic deficiencies are to blame for low academic performance of Turkish immigrants). He has been relieved of his post, not surprisingly. That the book has become a bestseller on the other hand is cause for concern. That Merkel has shifted to a national-chauvinist rhetoric is cause for concern.

Yet she speaks the truth. Multiculturalism has failed utterly. What is more it was madness to ever believe it could work. While coexisting together peacefully might seem fine on paper, in reality some groups have stubbornly refused to integrate. Time and time again they have proven themselves unable to accept the most basic rules of society. Today their antisocial behavior, their moral depravity and ruthless criminality have become blatantly obvious, but were they really any different in the past? No. Although I consider myself a tolerant person, here is where I must draw the line: the bourgeoisie must go. There is no way we can coexist peacefully with them. It is not the case that they were not given a chance to integrate. We have asked them time and time again to accept our most basic social norms and time and time again they have refused. Every chance they have gotten they chose greed over charity, ruthlessness over compassion, egoism over altruism. They are the cancer that is destroying our societies. So I ask you this: should we try to coexist peacefully with the cancer whose only aim is to destroy us, or should we fight it with every ounce of strength?

On emptiness

A feeling of emptiness, lack of meaning, the never ending search for ones "true" self, they are perhaps what best characterizes the modern Zeitgeist. The symptoms are many: expressive consumption (buying to satisfy emotional needs or needs of belonging), the grotesque inflation of expectations regarding erotic relationships and child rearing, new age cults, a surge in national chauvinism. Reactionaries have been preaching for some time now that we need more religion, more indoctrination, more propaganda, more ideology. They believe meaning is socially created and from that assumption they derive the demand for social institutions that create meaning. Truth be told we need more indoctrination like we need another hole in the head. We have way too much of it already and most of it of the wrong kind: the one that tries to convince us to ignore our interests in the interest of the powerful, that tells us our hurt is not real, that our frustrations are imaginary, that our anger is unjustified but most of all that we should not act on our feelings.

This is perhaps the most pervasive and most diabolic effect of propaganda: not that it changes our opinions and attitudes (almost a century of scientific investigation has demonstrated that propaganda is terribly ineffective at changing attitudes) but that it constructs a wall between perception, feelings, knowledge on the one hand and action on the other. To change someone's attitude you need to provide proof, you have to argue, you have to inform, you have to plead, and even then the results are unreliable at best and only make themselves felt in the long run. To change behavior turns out to be much easier. Change the structural conditions and people behave differently (not that hard to do for someone acting from a position of power). Associate the feelings of people with the action you want them to perform - that is why washing powders don't clean clothes anymore, at least as far as advertising is concerned, they create happy families, just as toothpaste makes you attractive, SUVs make you powerful, and Marlboro cigarettes make you independent. When you trick people into changing their behavior, you get their attitudes for free, since people try really hard to convince themselves that an action they had already performed was justified (another thing scientific investigation has shown us). To change their attitudes after they have acted is easy, since at that point they want to be convinced.

The all-pervasive feeling of emptiness is a consequence of this rift between cognition and feeling and action. Indoctrination will not cure it since it is actively contributing to the problem. The argument also rests on a flawed epistemology. Meaning is not created by ideological apparatuses, but by action. The only proof we have that the world exists is because we are able to interact with it meaningfully. All the philosophical proofs that we can not be certain of the existence of the world will mean nothing to the person who has just bumped his or her head against a wall. They can feel the pain, they can not feel philosophical arguments. All the sermons of love for ones fellows will remain futile as long as our society is structured by a logic of competition instead of cooperation. The world is meaningful insofar it is able to satisfy needs and desires: sufficient food and shelter (a minority of people on our planet is able to enjoy these), safety and belonging. A society in which the achievement of basic needs is based on a bellum omnia contra omnes can never lead to happiness. Meaningless of life today is quite objective. The problem will not be solved until a humane society has been built. Until that day our best bet is the happiness ensuing from the anticipation of that better world, the belonging we feel when we are building it together.

The un-hero

During the latter half of the twentieth century Serbia had been one of the leading global centers of movie production. Not in terms the market would acknowledge - quantity or popularity, or global sales figures - but by the power of their visions, the capacity to condense the state of the world into a few hours of film. Emir Kusturica has gained some international acclaim (winning the Palme d'or twice, for When father was away on business and Underground, and then there is Do you remember Dolly Bell, arguably his best movie, and of course Time of the Gypsies), but does he measure up to the greats of earlier generations? Not really. One needs only to take a look at Dušan Makavejev's early feature length films like Čovek nije tica, Ljubavni slučaj ili tragedija službenice PTT and Misterije organizma, or Saša Petrović's masterpieces Skupljači Perja and Tri. And then in the comedy department there is Paskaljević's Varljivo leto 68 and Kovačević's Balkanski Špijun (before Underground was an award winning movie, it was a play by Kovačević, who has also co-written the script for the movie together with Kusturica) and so so many more.

If I were forced to make an impossible choice and pick one I thought was the best, I would go with Tri. But before I focus on it I will solve the mystery of the title: tri is the serbian word (or number?) for three. The title is fitting since we are presented with three stories, containing one violent death each (adding up to three deaths in all). The first story is from the beginning of World war II, the second from the middle, the last happens toward the end. The connection between them is established by the protagonist, who acts as witness in all three cases.

Luckily someone took the time to upload the whole movie on Youtube, here is the first part, I'm sure you'll find your way after that:



Now that the mystery of the movie title is solved, how about the title of this post? The un-hero acts as witness to the three deaths and little more. What is happening in the movie happens around him, never through him or even to him. In Minima Moralia Adorno claimed that all attempts to turn the horror of the war into drama are doomed to failure, since what happened was far beyond the subject, beyond the subject's ability to act and beyond the subject's ability to comprehend. The catastrophe was objective, hence impossible to translate into actions of subjects, on which drama must rely. I don't know if Petrović has read Adorno, but he certainly solved his paradox: if the war can not be understood through actions of subjects, well then my protagonist will not act. Petrović took the camera and pointed it at the paradox itself. The un-hero (I don't believe he even has a name) is faced three times with his inability to act, to change the course of events, to save a life. The movie brilliantly subverts the expectations of the audience. We can not identify with the un-hero, not because he is alien to us, but because he is us. He does not convey to us his frustration, his feeling of powerlessness, we feel them first hand with him. We are watching events unfold on screen, unable to interfere with them, and so is he, telling us that the subject has become so hollowed out that his capacity to act has been reduced to acting as a silent witness to the course of the world.

Revolution in the technological society

Marx wrote about communism as a fulfilment of history. It was to be not so much a complete break with history as a final qualitative leap in its development. While we are rightfully sceptical of this teleological argument (that claims history has an inherent end), we must remember that its merits are not purely metaphysical. The political implication of Marx' eschatology is that the proletariat is to take possession of the means of production at the height of their development. The productive forces will develop to their final stage under capitalism and their socialization will unleash their full potential for human emancipation. The contradiction is between capitalist productive relations and the productive forces that capitalism has unleashed and this contradiction needs to be solved. When the proletariat takes control of the political apparatus it can abolish private ownership of the means of production and after a short period of centrally planned production it will somehow start to harmonize spontaneously. While Marx was always a bit vague about how this spontaneous harmonizing of production, consumption and circulation is to come about, another assumption of his political programme has come to be just as problematic: namely that the state can effectively take control of the means of production.

Marx bases his economic analysis on the assumption that all labour is simple unskilled labour (he is of course aware that skilled labour exists but argues that the difference is merely a quantitative one and makes no difference to his analysis). I would like to argue that this is not the case. By making this assumption Marx ignores the possibility of exploitation not just by the capitalist but by other wage-labourers. Marx claims that the wage-labourer is paid less than he produces and that the difference is appropriated by the owner of the means of production. While this claim is not problematic in the case of unskilled workers it does seem out of place when applied to say top managers. A wage-labourer can also be paid more than he produces (multi million dollar bonuses in a time of recession come to mind), which means that the surplus value some wage-labourers create is not appropriated only by the capitalist but also by other wage-labourers. In this sense the assumption is problematic from the vantage point of economics.

Another problem of the assumption is that it would have us see the means of production as material artefacts. If we analyse all labour as unskilled labour, we must assume that the whole of western rationalization is manifested in material artefacts, not in skills and knowledge. If we demand that the proletarian state takes over the means of production this seems possible if we think of means of production as bricks and mortar and cogs and wheels. If these are developed to the highest degree under capitalism, the state can take control of them without loss of their productive potential (why should machines care whether they are run by a capitalist or by the state?). But if we take into account that skilled labour is also produced and that it and its production (manifested in the form of pedagogical and research institutions) are integral components of the means of production, we encounter some difficulties.

As Ulrich Beck has argued in Risk society a central feature (and problem) of contemporary societies is the inflation of complexity. It is not that the world per se has grown more complex (the basic natural laws are the same as they always were) but that rationalization has begun to demolish its own footing. In the time of the industrial revolution the task seemed simple enough: conquest of nature. Progress meant better protection from the arbitrariness of natural forces. For western societies today nature itself has become socialized (google earth provides a good illustration: it is hard to find a piece of soil that does not bear the mark of human intervention). The risks we face today do not originate from an independent nature but are in part socially produced. This means that the simple logic of means and ends has run amok. Whatever action we take is bound to have important side-effects (what Beck calls risks): if a new factory is built to solve the problem of unemployment it might have detrimental effects on the environment, clearing a forest to grow crops might cause avalanches, higher GDP might increase pollution and crime etc. Any action taken to combat these side-effects is bound to have side-effects of its own: building wind farms can endanger birds and upset the ecosystem, recycling can be even more detrimental effects on the environment than just letting junk accumulate (the famous example of the Shell oil platform comes to mind).

Laymen often complain that scientists are unable to agree on anything, they don't know whether global warming is happening or not and if it is, whether it is caused by humanity or not etc. It seems that disagreement among experts is an indispensable way of dealing with the increase in complexity. If experts were forced to agree it is likely the whole system would collapse in a short while because the low internal complexity of science would be ill-fitted to deal with the high complexity of its object. At this point we are able to return to Marx' initial political programme: the idea that the state can take over the means of production without a significant loss of productivity is essentially flawed. Since central planning would significantly reduce the complexity of the scientific subsystem of society (which, as I have argued, is an integral part of the means of production), the subsystem would be unable to effectively deal with the complexity of its environment. The state would have in its hands not the means of production at the height of their development but in a crippled state.

Where does this leave us in terms of a communist revolution? Since a world in which more than half of the world population is living in poverty while the level of development of the productive forces in western nations would in principle allow poverty to be eliminated almost instantaneously is clearly intolerable, since the impossibility of realising an utopian vision can only be proven after everything in our power has been attempted to bring it about, and since the impossibility of realising an utopian vision - were it possible to prove it - does not diminish its necessity, just coming to terms with the existing is not an option. The struggle against capitalism must be radically rethought.

First of all it seems that taking over the state can not be the final goal of proletarian political organization. The impossibility of achieving a high enough level of democratic support for a radical communist party has become evident during the 20th century. The catastrophic consequences of a communist party taking over the state without mass support, which would also put a check on its power, has equally been demonstrated by Stalin and the like. Furthermore the state itself is withering away: partly it is outsourcing the provision of public goods (transport, healthcare, education etc.) to private bodies, partly it is delegating its decision making to bodies beyond democratic control (it is shocking how little attention the delegation of policy formation - the sine qua non of parliaments - to private think tanks is receiving).

If the state is being emptied of power class struggle must follow. What is needed is a decentralization that would at once attack the new centres of power and by its internal complexity be able to cope with the heightened complexity of social action in the risk society. Surely the diverse "new social movements" springing all around the globe satisfy that criterion. Why then do all protests seem hopelessly futile, affording some amusement to the scavenging media organisations at best? Why has capitalism been steadily entrenching itself during the last 30 years? Why have autocratic global centres of power flourished so vividly? Why does the darkness that covers us seem more impenetrable than ever?

It is because the manifold centres of opposition that are springing up around the globe lack coordination. If the classical model of class struggle via parliamentary parties that aim to finally take over the state and abolish private ownership over the means of production was overly centralized the new model is overly decentralized. What is lacking is a coordinating ideology that would channel all the disparate streams, the trickles of discontent, into a fierce river. The streams flow hot with tears, which show no sign of drying up. The task of criticism today is not to show the people a mirror, which will shock them with their misery. The misery is obvious enough. A lens is needed to channel the rays into one fierce, burning spot. What is needed most of all is a new communist international: a loose association of forces that would coordinate rather than command, that would unify ideologically rather than administratively.

The models for such an organising exist. Whether it is the communards and their very effective ad hoc organisation or the spontaneous growth of the November revolution in Germany, they all have in common a spontaneous outburst, channelled by a coherent ideology. It is because these outbursts were of a local nature that they were easily crushed by brute force. In a globalising world not only the free movement of capital, its freedom to undermine democracy and keep billions in poverty, is expanding, also the possibilities of a global struggle against this tyranny become imaginable.

Bare necessities

In Minima Moralia, Sur l'eau Adorno argued against modelling the image of emancipated society on the productive process. Unbounded productivity and ceaseless activity are not expressions of freedom, but of the blind subordination under the unleashed means of production. The emancipated society would be one in which the internalised imperatives of productive forces would not be the essence of the individual but a tool to be used to satisfy human needs. In such circumstances possibilities could be left unexploited. Happiness, not boundless productivity, would be the final word. "To lie on the water and peacefully gaze into the sky," would take the place of "process, activity, achievement." The immanent demand of emancipated society is quite simple: "Only the roughest would be tender: that nobody should go hungry."

One would not expect to find such critical materialist views expressed in a Disney movie, but in the Jungle book this is exactly the case:



It is interesting to compare this to the German translation:



In the English version the first stanza goes like this:

Look for the bare necessities
The simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife
I mean the bare necessities
Old Mother Nature's recipes
That brings the bare necessities of life

In the German version it is:

Probiers mal mit Gemütlickeit
Mit Ruhe und Gemütlichkeit
jagst du den Alltag und die Sorgen weg
Und wenn du stets gemütlich bist
Und etwas appetitlich isst
Dann nimm es dir egal von welchem Fleck

The meaning of the lines could be translated as:

Why don't you try relaxation
With calm and relaxation
You can chase away the everyday worries
If you are always relaxed
And something is attractive
Take it and do not concern yourself

The materialism of the English version is lost completely. The idea that satisfying basic needs is a precondition for happiness and that human needs, not the quest for ceaseless accumulation, should be the driving force of life, gives way to a litany that preaches a subjective attitude as a way of transcending "everyday worries". In this version the dictate of being happy in not political, but becomes the responsibility of individuals. Not only does the present society inhibit the possibilities for happiness, failures of the system are grotesquely transformed into failures of individuals. Bare necessities are the demand that goes against the grain of this ideology.