tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33808699911215843252024-03-16T08:08:27.679+01:00HermogenSašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.comBlogger115125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-64533344967652492952012-06-03T02:50:00.000+02:002012-06-03T23:40:07.312+02:00We need some bolsheviks up in this motherfucker: some reflections on anti-austerity movementsI will confine myself to a couple of short theses:<br />
1.) A few victories notwithstandind (hooray for the comrades in Quebec) we are losing the war. We are losing the war because we are weak.<br />
2.) Our weakness has multiple aspects. The first is spineless oportunism of "left" parties and unions, fighting on a political terrain that has over recent decades become ever more favourable to the right. The second is the radical and politically naive anti-authoritarianism of social movements. The third, perhaps most important, is the seemingly unbridgeable divide that has sprung up between these two: organizations that have absolutely no clue about the true desires of the masses on the one side, and spontaneous outbursts that reflect these desires in an authentic, but completely ephemeral, politically ineffective way on the other. Neither side is either willing or able to communicate.<br />
3.) With political weakness comes intellectual weakness. Even the brightest minds, having a thorough theoretical understanding of capitalism, therefore knowing full well that its crises can not be reduced to hyperproduction (or the opposite side of the coin: underconsumption), that its paradoxes do not originate and can not be resolved in the realm of consumption, fall prey to a spontaneous social-democratism after being forced by objective circumstances to try and defend what is left of the welfare state. Necessity is turned into virtue and thus delusions about the emancipatory potential of social-democratic opportunism proliferate, despite all historical proof to the contrary.<br />
4.) The most pertinent symptom of intellectual weakness is the inability to propose a positive program, even more, the unwillingness to attempt such a task. The plain fact of the matter is that as long as we do not even have ambition to take power and a plan to overcome capitalims when we do, the bourgeoise has absolutely no incentive to give in to critique or pressure. Reformist critique addressed at the bourgeoisie only strengthens their confidence that there is no real power able to challenge their position as the ruling class. They might back off for a moment where opposition is fierce, but only because they are confident in final victory.<br />
5.) This intellectual weakness works to further erode what little political power we have. Lacking a positive program, we are unable to organise and build political power around it. Critiques of the madness of austerity do not serve to strengthen our position, because we do not have a position. They either promote a futile hope of an enlightened bourgeoisie or cynicism and withdrawal.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-28982820613627295712012-02-08T15:42:00.000+01:002012-02-08T15:42:43.174+01:00Why capitalism is inherently romanticIn his work Jacques Ellul makes an interesting point about propaganda. He claims that the basic mechanism by which it operates is not to change specific subjective dispositions like beliefs and opinions but by connecting existing subjective dispositions with actions it wants us to perform. It does not manipulate desire but proposes an object to it. For example Reagan and Thathcher did not teach people to be dissatisfied with the existing society, rather they addressed the already existing discontent with its rigidity, uniformity, undemocratic nature, where more and more decisions become the prerogative of trained experts, and managed to present themsleves as the solution to these problems. This means that the way we commonly think about propaganda is wrong, or at least unproductive, and another path should be explored. When looking for the effects of propaganda, we should focus on changes to the structure of the individual psyche rather than specific changes in its contents, and how propaganda changes the way individuals are integrated into society. In the abscence of propaganda the mechanism by which subjective dispositions are transformed into actions remains a psychological one: the individual experiences a certain emotion, or drive, holds a certain opinion etc. and then acts on it in regard to objects they encounter in their surroundings. In a propagandized society this link becomes socialized: the individual acts because propaganda has proposed a certain object to them and in a way that propaganda suggests.<br />
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To the propagandist - not the individual propagandist, but the collective propagandist of society - this poses two problems. The first is the one that propaganda research has commonly been concerned with: it is how to effectively propose objects to individuals so that they will in deed act in a way beneficial to the propagandist. The other is trickier and has been neglected in the study of propaganda. It arises from the fact that the propagandist moves people to action on his own and not on their terms. The solutions propaganda proposes are not solutions for its victims, the satisfactions propaganda provides are necessarily partial: they may fulfill some desires to a certain extent when it suits the propagandist, but those that are of no use are ignored. If propaganda were to propose solutions that would truly satisfy desires, it would cease to be effective. Making propaganda is like walking a tight rope: you must never disapoint your victioms, but neither can you satisfy them. The second problem is therefore the management of free-floating desires.<br />
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Under capitalism propagana becomes the main mechanism through which individuals are integrated into society. To the degree that markets become the universal mediating principle of society economic propaganda becomes the face society presents to individuals. As the political system behaves in a similar manner, propaganda is also its predominant way of relating to "voters". As propaganda becomes dominant it severs the ties between subjective dispositions and action: individuals become less capable of autonomous action and are reliant on propaganda to supply objects to which their desire might attach itself. But what to do with desires for which propaganda has no use, let's call them unprofitable desires? If capitalist society is to persevere it must find a way to manage them lest they become a destructive force - all unchecked desire is disruptive, as Freud well knew - and that way is romanticism. I don't mean romanticism in the narrow historical sense, in this context I refer to romanticism as management of unprofitable desires in a way that cuts them off both from their causes and from action.<br />
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The emotionalism of the eighteenth century as manifested in Greuze's paintings, Hoggarth's prints or Richardson's novels was of a very instrumental sort: it aimed to move the audience in order to impart some moral lesson. The feelings it presented in its characters were therefore always rooted in action: whether it was virtuous action rewarded according to the maxim of poetic justice or virtue persevering through adversity in order to strengthen the audience in its own pursuit of virtue. Rousseau's <i>Julie, or the New Heloise</i> heralds a new age, the age of spontaneity and authenticity. Feeling becomes severed from action and reason, becoming an end of poetic creation in itself. Soon a new social institution will have been born, that of autonomous art, which takes on the task of managing unprofitable desires. The new creed as proclaimed by Wordsworth or Schiller is that of giving satisfaction to an utterly abstract individual. Adorno and Marcuse are quite correct in noticing that autonomous art is a repository for unprofitable desires, yet they fail to grasp the significance of this fact. In his aversion to the historical avant-garde Adorno failed to see the contradictions of autonomy that the historical avant-garde exposed. The culture industry is not a negation of autonomous art, rather it is the proper capitalist way of fulfilling the same function: management of unprofitable desires, only that it does it in a profitable way. Only through autonomy has art become fully integrated into propaganda. Resistance to propaganda can therefore never occur from the standpoint of autonomy. It must be from the standpoint of social practice.<br />
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The underground current of philosophical pornography that was quite strong in the eighteenth century but is nowadays hardly ever remembered - the name of the Marquis de Sade is sometimes mentioned only as a grotesque curiosity - perhaps offers the possibility of a different path. You should not be fooled by the term philosophical, these were hardcore books full of precise and vivid descriptions, they were books one read "with one hand" (I have found this description attributed both to Rousseau and Diderot respectively). And you should not be fooled by their pornographical nature, philosophy was as central to them as the arousal of sexual desire. Its creed was the supremacy of desire and it was communicated through desire itself. There is no task better suited to emancipatory art: the organisation of unprofitable desire in a way that affirms its supremacy.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-84533001618619746402011-06-01T03:12:00.000+02:002011-06-01T03:12:12.643+02:00DebtocracyA brilliant documentary about the dictatorship of financial markets:<br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="314" src="http://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/xik4kh?width=560" width="560"></iframe><br />
<a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xik4kh_debtocracy-international-version_shortfilms" target="_blank">Debtocracy International Version</a> <i>by <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/BitsnBytes" target="_blank">BitsnBytes</a></i>Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-73386790328318899782011-05-25T19:51:00.002+02:002011-05-25T20:17:35.522+02:00Ad 5. or Against the enclosure of the commonsEnclosure of the commons is a term that refers to the historical process through which common property was appropriated by a few individuals and transformed into the modern form of private property. Marx has referred to the process as <a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm">primitive accumulation of capital</a> and his historical overview is remarkably precise given the limited sources at his disposal. The process was carried out with varying degrees of violence but always ruthlessly since it gradually robbed the rural population of its means of subsistence. It was also a process that enabled the capitalist mode of production to take root in the first place since it created a sufficient degree of concentration of property in the hands of few and forced many into subservience to capital either as labourers in manufactures and later factories (what Marx has called real subsumption under capital) or as individual producers indirectly subordinated to capitalists (what Marx has called formal subsumption under capital). Even as early capitalism flourished in Britain the living standard of a large part of the working class declined: the wages, even when and where they were relatively high, could not make up for the theft of common land that used to provide people with means of subsistence. Modern apologists of capitalism often forget that capitalism did not take root simply because of its supreme efficiency - although, to be fair, the efficiency of organising labour in manufactures and factories was an important factor in the decline of earlier modes of production - but needed violence and coercion to force people into factories and prevent workers from organising politically.<br />
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Once a legal framework for securing private property was firmly established capitalism no longer needed such brutal measures to ensure that products of social labour were privately appropriated, yet that did not motivate the ruling classes to become too faithful followers of the laissez-faire principle. They don't shy away from government intervention whenever it helps them to appropriate surplus profit and that is why the enclosure of the commons has been repeated many times over. Today it is an ongoing process institutionalised in the form of intellectual property rights. Knowledge, which is produced and can be produced only collectively, is being turned into private property, an unlimited resources is being made scarce to enable appropriation of surplus profits. Unlike industrial production, where the appropriation of surplus value by the capitalist needs but a legal guarantee of private property, appropriation of surplus value of cognitive production demands constant state intervention: it must grant patents and trademarks and it must constantly increase the scope of intellectual property (whether broadening it to include for example <a href="http://www.actionbioscience.org/genomic/crg.html">biological organisms</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Ac">increasing its duration</a> or forcing it on "developing" countries <a href="http://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/27-trips_03_e.htm">through the WTO</a>).<br />
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The amount of state intervention needed to create and uphold the private character of cognitive production suggests that a central paradox of capitalism (collectively produced value being privately appropriated) is being manifested in its purest form. Asserting that creation of intellectual property rights has gone too far and is therefore hampering development, as for example <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1758-5899.2010.00048.x/full">Henry and Stieglitz</a> or <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/">Lawrence Lessig</a> do, misses this fundamental point. We are not dealing with the question of finding the right degree of property "protection" but with a paradox that can not be resolved under capitalism. Far from being the solution to the problems of capitalism, cognitive production is the point where capitalism is most frail. Political struggles for the right to infringe upon copyright (the best know example is perhaps the <a href="http://www.piratpartiet.se/international/english">Swedish pirate party</a>) are about far more than downloading music and movies, they are at the core of anticapitalist struggles today.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-44932381062129975342011-04-26T19:41:00.000+02:002011-04-26T19:41:29.056+02:00Crash course on MaxismPeter Thompson is currently writing a nice set of articles for the Guardian, offering insight into some central tenants of Marxism and controversies surrounding it. Check them out:<br />
1. <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/04/karl-marx-religion">Religion, the right answer to the wrong question</a>;<br />
2. <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/11/marx-engels-science-marxism">How Marxism came to dominate socialist thinking</a>;<br />
3. <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/18/karl-marx-men-make-history">Men make their own history</a>;<br />
4. <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/25/karl-marx-communist-manifesto">"Workers of the world, unite!"</a>;Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-77519770043291798372011-04-17T13:09:00.000+02:002011-04-17T13:09:30.534+02:00Ad 2. Universal basic incomeUniversal basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all individuals (for info on the universal basic income you can check out the <a href="http://www.basicincome.org/bien/">Basic Income Earth Network</a>). The concept has been gaining prominence among scholars and politicians and has already been introduced in a limited form in some countries. The best thing about it is that it reduces the power of coercion of the labour market by taking away its threat of death by hunger. As Rev. Townshend remarked, the legal imposition of work “gives too much trouble, requires too much violence and makes too much noise. Hunger, on the contrary, is not only a pressure which is peaceful, silent and incessant, but as it is the most natural motive for work and industry, it also provokes to the most powerful efforts.” (quoted in Paul Lafargue's <a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/ch02.htm">The Right to be Lazy</a>) An income not conditional upon work takes into consideration the fact that the valorization on a market is an imperfect mechanism of judging the social merit of labour at best, an utterly flawed one at worst. Together with a reduction of working hours it can lead to a significant increase in the independence of individuals from markets and can enable them to immediately begin building alternative modes of production, modes that are not based on ruthless exploitation, where supply responds to demand an not vice versa, where individuals are not alienated from the products of labour and from each other.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-8013849597773273582011-04-17T03:42:00.000+02:002011-04-17T03:42:32.022+02:00Ad 1. Drastic reduction of working hours in the private sector.There are a number of reasons. First of all, labour productivity per hour worked in the developed world has been steadily increasing throughout the twentieth century. The rise in productivity only between the years 1990 and 2008 has been roughly 26% in Denmark, 25% in France, 16% in Italy, 58% in Finland, 45% in Sweden, and 41% in Norway (source: <a href="http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/product_details/dataset?p_product_code=TSDEC310">Eurostat</a>, percentage points were calculated for all countries where data for both years is available). Throughout this time there has been no reduction in working hours and wages have failed to keep pace with GDP growth. Secondly, a reduction of working hours does not necessarily translate into an equivalent reduction of productivity. We can assume that employees are able to maintain a level of productivity for say four hours that they could not maintain for eight. Thirdly, we can expect a reduction of living costs and a reduced dependency on markets for the procurement of everyday goods and services like childcare, home repairs and food. All in all this means that we would be facing not only a significant increase in the quality of life, but also a partial emancipation from the labour market, which would open up space for further political actions.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-81389021617487424092011-04-17T02:14:00.014+02:002011-05-02T14:35:17.005+02:00Contribution to a new communist manifestoThe <a href="http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/wacquant/wacquant_pdf/neoliberal.pdf">new planetary vulgate</a> has reached an unprecedented level of vulgarity. A long time has passed since Hegel has developed a philosophical system that remains to this day the most magnificent apology of a status quo - any status quo - ever devised. Since then we have witnessed a tremendous development of productive forces accompanied by an even greater degradation of consciousness. Contemporary neoliberal defenders of capitalism are incapable of even the most basic cognitive achievements. The likes of Parsons, Friedman and Hayek were still able to formulate a theoretical defense of capitalism, flawed and contradictory as their attempts were. In their footsteps followed Alan Greenspan, a pathetic figure in every respect. The place of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, truly formidable foes in their time, is today occupied by imbeciles and village idiots: George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy. It seems that among the ruling classes there is not a single individual whose cognitive abilities have developed past the stage of a seven year old child.<br />
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Contemporary ideology is a reflection of this development. It has regressed to an incoherent mass of slogans, force fed to us through the propaganda machine that monopoly media have become. Their lies are so thinly veiled, their deceptions so obvious that one wonders whether they even care about being believed. Citizens are being threatened with the wrath of international financial markets lest they agree to the dismantling of the welfare state, "flexibilisation" of the labour market and an utterly vicious privatisation of public infrastructure and services. Politicians and their technocrats want to make us believe that the same international financial markets who have triggered the contemporary crisis and who are currently creating a new bubble by speculating on food are capable of solving our problems. They are willing to leave us at the mercy of private credit rating agencies who were giving top marks to even the most irresponsible financial speculators on the eve of the financial meltdown. To save the sheep from getting lost in the woods politicians want to entrust them to wolves. The remedies they propose are no better than the people chosen to administer them. The current crisis is a typical crisis of overproduction: it was not caused by bad credit, bad credit proliferated because demand could not keep up with supply. It is blatantly obvious that measures which decrease the buying power of households can do nothing but lead to an even more devastating crisis. Far from being able to formulate a critique of political economy, the academic lackeys of the global bourgeoisie are unable even to achieve a limited technocratic understanding of capitalism and its laws. As they recite their litanies the public debt of Greece is rising, completely untroubled by the brutal austerity measures imposed on its people.<br />
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Two things follow from this. First of all it has become obvious that the ruling classes have lost their ability to rule. Today the power of the global bourgeoisie is greater than ever. They have brought states to their knees through threats of capital flight and vengeance of international financial markets. The concentration of global wealth is unprecedented in human history. The productive forces they control have developed to an awe inspiring level. Yet for all its power the bourgeoisie is incapable to keep at least half of the world population safe from poverty. For all its liberalism it is unable to stem the tide of new racism and authoritarianism in the "developed" world. For all its ingenuity it must muster all its strength just to keep capitalism afloat. Their impotence is increasing proportionally to their power. Man has walked on the moon. From the distance he should have been able to see one thing clearly: something is fundamentally wrong with a system that is able to send a man to the moon yet unable to allow the poor to feed themselves.<br />
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Secondly, critique is not the weapon we must use in our fight against the bourgeoisie. Their myths do not need demystification, they are so improbable that living experience of the masses refutes them every day. They are immune to demystification because they are not based on reasoning but on the ceaseless howling of the all-pervasive propaganda machinery. We do not need new theory. Partly because the world has failed to progress in any substantive way since Marx wrote his Capital, partly because our collective capability to formulate theory is in ruin (universities have long since fallen prey to the neoliberal offensive). In fact, the university has never been a place where a blueprint of a better world could have been sketched out. The university is hermetically sealed of from any emancipatory social praxis, the very praxis that is constitutive for critical theory. The Communist manifesto was written in 1848, at a time when the working classes of Britain were largely subdued. Preceding it were six decades of struggles and defeats, of smashing machinery, joining the middle classes in their fight for suffrage, of strikes and mass rallies, each fight contributing to the collective learning process. The Communist manifesto was written by the working classes of Britain, written in blood on the streets among charging cavalry and cannon fire, written in sweat to the rhythm of pounding machinery.<br />
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What we need first of all is a political gesture, what is today perhaps THE political gesture. It has been performed by citizens all over the world, from Paris to London, from Rome to Zagreb, from Egypt to Wisconsin. There and elsewhere the words: "We will not pay for your crisis!" have become flesh. What we need is a radical break with the past - for, as we know, the crisis to be paid for is not a crisis of capitalism, it is the crisis that is capitalism - a resolute decision that whatever the world looks like tomorrow, it will look nothing like it does today or as it did yesterday. This decision is not utopian. What is utopian is the belief that a total social disaster can be avoided within the parameters of the current system. We know that their ways do not work and we know that an attempt to reinstate the crumbling welfare state with its oppressing eight hour work day and rotten social compromises is as senseless as it is futile. We do not have a plan for what comes after capitalism, but we do not have it precisely because under capitalism we are being denied the freedom needed to formulate it. Only a gesture of total refusal will open up this space of freedom.We must refuse the criterion of fiscal stability, for unless we do we are accepting the fact that democracy has effectively been undermined by international financial capital. We must refuse the imperative of creating new jobs. We do not need new jobs, we need a fair distribution of socially produced goods. We do not need higher wages, we must demand that coercion in the form of wage labour is abolished. Only then will the window of possibility be opened for a free society to rise from the rubble of capitalism as once the commune did from the rubble of Paris.<br />
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To the radicalism of mainstream politics we must oppose a most moderate position: that nobody should go hungry, that the products of social labour should be fairly distributed, that welfare and sustainability should be the benchmarks of development, that labour should allow for personal growth of individuals and their need to contribute meaningfully to society, that forms of political organization are legitimate only insofar as they allow for every individual to be fully empowered but most of all that there is no valid criterion for political decisions save that of lasting happiness for all. The only reforms we can accept are those that contribute to these goals. Total refusal of capitalism does not mean calling for violent revolution or demanding the immediate destruction of capitalism. It means that we resolutely refuse to take a single step in the direction of strengthening or preserving the capitalist mode of production. It means that we carve out the space needed for an emancipatory praxis to emerge in embryo before it can become universal. We must first create the space of freedom that allowed the revolts of 68 to flourish before we can complete what they have begun.<br />
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Here is a provisional list of some realistic immediate measures that could loosen the stranglehold of capitalism:<br />
1. Drastic reduction of working hours in the private sector.<br />
2. Universal basic income.<br />
3. A tax on financial transactions that would discourage short-term speculation (Tobin tax or a variation thereof).<br />
4. Creation of public credit rating agencies, instituting measures that would enable them to fully substitute private agencies<br />
5. Radical reduction in the scope and duration of intellectual property rights and a complete amnesty for infringements by countries below a specified GDP level.<br />
6. Legalisation of the theft of food for personal consumption.<br />
7. Legalisation of squatting in all buildings that have not been used for a specified time period. <br />
8. A complete ban on private contributions to political parties and candidates.<br />
9. Strengthening the power of the European Parliament in relation to the European Commission.<br />
10. Abolishment of tuition fees and full inclusion of students and the academic proletariat in the decision making bodies of universities.<br />
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The list is not completely thought out, some of the suggested measures might turn out to be unreasonable, some crucial measures were probably omitted, but that is beside the point. The scope of public debate has been narrowed to the point where we are almost unable to seriously discuss anything but the specifics of the ways in which capitalism might be saved at all costs. We will refuse to play that game. Until the terms of debate change radically we will continue to protest, we will continue to occupy stores, banks and universities, we will go on strike, we will march together and we will not cease until the ruling classes concede to us the freedom needed to abolish classes altogether.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-85270125506649325302010-12-08T01:39:00.001+01:002010-12-08T01:49:36.892+01:00Report from LondonSomething 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.<br />
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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 <a href="http://lseoccupation2010.blogspot.com/">LSE is under occupation</a>. „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.<br />
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About half an hours walk to the north the students of <a href="http://blog.ucloccupation.com/">UCL</a> 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.<br />
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Neither did Topshop security when a bunch of people <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/dec/05/cuts-protesters-close-topshop">started blowing whistles inside the store on Oxford street</a>. 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!“Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-75953994159342997382010-11-25T01:51:00.004+01:002011-04-23T20:47:34.155+02:00Personal growthI forgot to add a third thing to the list of most depressing phenomena, namely this:<br />
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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.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-61083531698810358042010-11-01T01:11:00.000+01:002010-11-01T01:11:02.022+01:00The SecretTwo of the most depressing phenomena for me lately are neo-nazism and this:<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-68576246479812406272010-10-29T23:03:00.004+02:002010-10-29T23:11:11.091+02:00Against 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.<br />
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A leaflet Marx and Engels wrote in 1848 bears the title <a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/03/24.htm">Demands of the communist party in Germany</a>. 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.<br />
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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.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-80381248243050012192010-10-23T22:07:00.004+02:002010-10-24T12:21:54.322+02:00Multiculturalism is deadAt least that is what German chancellor Angela Merkel has declared in a <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11559451">speech</a> 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, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdDxl9DAiVM">published a book</a> 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.<br />
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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?Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-44661216524562014712010-10-18T15:15:00.002+02:002010-10-18T16:24:44.893+02:00On emptinessA feeling of emptiness, lack of meaning, the never ending search for ones "true" self, they are perhaps what best characterizes the modern <span style="font-style: italic;">Zeitgeist</span>. 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">bellum omnia contra omnes</span> 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.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-538271197262592002010-10-12T18:45:00.003+02:002010-10-23T22:39:20.178+02:00The un-heroDuring 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. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001437/">Emir Kusturica</a> has gained some international acclaim (winning the Palme d'or twice, for <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089748/">When father was away on business</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114787/">Underground</a>, and then there is <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083089/">Do you remember Dolly Bell</a>, arguably his best movie, and of course <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097223/">Time of the Gypsies</a>), but does he measure up to the greats of earlier generations? Not really. One needs only to take a look at <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0538445/">Dušan Makavejev's</a> early feature length films like <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059063/">Čovek nije tica</a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061912/">Ljubavni slučaj ili tragedija službenice PTT</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067958/">Misterije organizma</a>, or Saša Petrović's masterpieces <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062277/">Skupljači Perja</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059829/">Tri</a>. And then in the comedy department there is Paskaljević's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088338/">Varljivo leto 68</a> and Kovačević's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086935/">Balkanski Špijun</a> (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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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:<br />
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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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Minima Moralia</span> 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.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-58820050550356624392010-02-01T22:40:00.003+01:002010-02-02T02:13:36.841+01:00Revolution in the technological societyMarx 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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).<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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).<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-12542706078203958642010-01-08T11:40:00.003+01:002010-01-08T14:04:00.757+01:00Bare necessitiesIn <span style="font-style: italic;">Minima Moralia, Sur l'eau</span> 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."<br /><br />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:<br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/eeGjTGWzFh0&hl=en_GB&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/eeGjTGWzFh0&hl=en_GB&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />It is interesting to compare this to the German translation:<br /><br /><object height="340" width="560"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/CNYCM1Zi7sw&hl=en_GB&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/CNYCM1Zi7sw&hl=en_GB&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="340" width="560"></embed></object><br /><br />In the English version the first stanza goes like this:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Look for the bare necessities</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> The simple bare necessities</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Forget about your worries and your strife</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> I mean the bare necessities</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Old Mother Nature's recipes</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> That brings the bare necessities of life</span><br /><br />In the German version it is:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Probiers mal mit Gemütlickeit </span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Mit Ruhe und Gemütlichkeit </span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">jagst du den Alltag und die Sorgen weg </span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Und wenn du stets gemütlich bist </span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Und etwas appetitlich isst </span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Dann nimm es dir egal von welchem Fleck</span><br /><br />The meaning of the lines could be translated as:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Why don't you try relaxation</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">With calm and relaxation</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">You can chase away the everyday worries</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If you are always relaxed</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">And something is attractive</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Take it and do not concern yourself</span><br /><br />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.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-73066843020111697422009-12-30T14:56:00.002+01:002009-12-30T16:31:28.401+01:00Consumerist ideologyThe arrogance of the intellectual class is particularly aggravating when it is disguised as "critical" thought. Roland Barthes is by far not the only one who indulged in "demystification" - analysing myths of the "ruling classes" so that the myths themselves will lose their power to captivate and indoctrinate. Some intellectuals have transferred this "critical" impulse to the analysis of consumer society: they teach us that consumption is giving us illusionary satisfaction, they preach that the needs promoted by advertising and served by consumption are false needs, yet they can say hardly anything about what is to be done. Their political programme is as devoid of substance as the grandiose phrases they employ and just as revolutionary as the semi-erudite followers that duplicate their jargon of arrogance. This is because the impulse is not critical at all, it is self serving idle banter of a self righteous elite.<br /><br />This banter is based on two crucial assumptions, both of them dead wrong. The first is that all people - of course excluding the intellectuals - are dumb. They are being exploited and this exploitation is being effectively covered up with a bit of sweet talk. When Marx wrote in the first part of Capital: "they are doing it, but they do not know it," it was not meant to denigrate those who do not know, it was a critique of political economy - yes, of intellectuals - for failing to come up with an adequate theory. People do not know that when trading goods they are implicitly judging the amount of labour needed to produce those goods because intellectuals have failed miserably in their task to produce an adequate theory of value and an explanation of how value is created. Marx did not want to show the proletariat the blatantly obvious, namely that they are being exploited. He wanted to analyse the not at all obvious, namely the structural logic of capitalism and its implications for the specific political form proletarian class struggle must take to be successful. For this end he was employing resources that the proletariat did not have access to: economic theory, philosophical methodology and statistical data. When intellectuals today tell us that advertisement tells lies, an experience everyone can make first hand, they must assume that everyone save them is lacking in intellect. They forget that they are distinguished from the "common man" merely by access to intellectual productive forces, not their inherent genius.<br /><br />The second assumption is that the happiness consumerism provides is merely illusory. I for myself think that having a heated apartment during winter, owning a car (with air conditioning), being able to order affordable books from the internet, enjoy music on a quality stereo or rip through singletrack on a mountain bike strong enough to handle hits from rocks, roots and 4 foot drops to flat yet efficient enough for a cross-country ride lasting a few hours, are very real pleasures. When Marcuse was writing of false needs, he did not mean illusory satisfactions, imposed on the people by an omnipotent ideological apparatus. He was talking of needs that are not working towards lasting happiness. Working hard to be rich and enjoy the things consumer society has to offer has very real benefits, yet it precludes working towards a form of society in which lasting happiness of all people could be achieved and in this respect can consumer society be thought of as fostering "false" needs.<br /><br />The term "fordism" applies to an age in which the proletariat was given its share - albeit a small one - of the pleasures of consumerism. The key was that capitalists discovered that the working classes are not only employees, but that they are also consumers (a paradox Marx noted already in his <span style="font-style: italic;">Grundrisse</span>) and that paying them higher wages could be beneficial, since it would increase the buying power of consumers. The problem is not that the market offers illusory satisfactions, it is that the satisfactions of private life have taken on the task of compensating for the frustrations of working life. That expectations regarding sexual relationships are becoming ever more demanding while relationships are becoming ever more ephemeral, not being able to live up to expectations, is one symptom of this process. That advertising has abandoned presenting characteristics of products in favour of presenting the happiness ensuing from their use is another. In the realm of production we are not able to meaningfully contribute to a meaningful world, therefore we seek to compensate for that lack in private life. <span style="font-style: italic;">Talcott Parsons,</span> a radical conservative, glimpsed a fragment of this process when he wrote that the role of the wife is an "expressive" one: creating a soothing environment in which the bread winner can relax. Advertisement is fulfilling very real needs, but these needs can be thought of as false ones, because they do not question the nature of the productive forces and the unhappiness their organisation creates. Instead of revolutionising productive relations, which could bring lasting happiness to all, we are compensating for our frustrations by consumption. The promise of happiness that advertisement makes touches upon a real need, yet it is not through consumption that this need could be fully satisfied.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-89913449439259231852009-11-29T12:38:00.003+01:002010-01-14T12:35:00.356+01:00The culture industry and FreudThe interpretation of dreams was for Freud an important element of psychoanalysis. What Roland Barthes later claimed about art, namely that there is no "noise", was for Freud the basic premise for entering the dream world. Phenomena that were believed to be banal, arbitrary and inconsequential, like dreams or slips of the tongue, fascinated Freud; not in and of themselves but as symptoms of unconscious mental processes. What happens when we dream, according to Freud, is that some elements of our waking life (e.g. experiences, persons, events) are selected and arranged into a new whole, which is the manifest content of the dream. To the naive observer, even to the dreamers themselves, this manifest content seems chaotic and without meaning, it is all "noise". Actually it is all signal, because there is a latent structure underlying this apparent chaos: dreams fulfil repressed wishes in a symbolic manner, where elements of the manifest dream content represent objects of the wish. Because the superego censors these wishes, they can be expressed only indirectly as symbols. Freud mentions the example of a lady patient who dreamed of a friend, who had just recently married. From the context in which this person appears in the dream (the dreamer had bought some theatre tickets early and found out she could have latter bought them at a better price, like her friend did), Freud interprets the friend to represent a repressed regret of the patient: she had gotten married too early. If she had just waited, she could have snatched a better husband.<br /><br />Perhaps you are expecting that I will now furnish examples of how products of the culture industry cater to these repressed desires, reducing art to a sort of phantasmal wanking off, perhaps explaining how Popeye represents repressed aggression towards sexual competitors (Bluto always behaves in a manner that legitimises aggression, circumventing the cultural taboo and enabling the male audience to live out their aggression in a way that is not sanctioned by the superego):<br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/9UjM9UI40jk&hl=en_GB&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/9UjM9UI40jk&hl=en_GB&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />What I am more interested in are the changes the models of the culture industry are going through. Surely Freud's analysis of how suppressed desires are being satisfied through art is correct enough. But at the same time it fails to grasp the truth of the phenomenon. One part of that is the new guise Hollywood has given standard formats. Advertising nowadays likes to tell us that a picture is "epic" and I guess this is meant as praise. The funny part is that advertising is telling the pure and simple truth here (it rarely tells outright lies, but it tends toward using hyperboles lavishly). Motion pictures today might most adequately be described as "epic", a few recent examples:<br /><br />Ninja assassin:<br /><object height="340" width="560"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/KdZa8E7pQAQ&hl=en_GB&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/KdZa8E7pQAQ&hl=en_GB&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="340" width="560"></embed></object><br /><br />The road:<br /><object height="340" width="560"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/i4aNZGniOG4&hl=en_GB&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/i4aNZGniOG4&hl=en_GB&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="340" width="560"></embed></object><br /><br />2012<br /><object height="340" width="560"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Hz86TsGx3fc&hl=en_GB&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Hz86TsGx3fc&hl=en_GB&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="340" width="560"></embed></object><br /><br />Sherlock Holmes (a bastard child of James Bond and Night of the living dead)<br /><object height="340" width="560"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Egcx63-FfTE&hl=en_GB&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Egcx63-FfTE&hl=en_GB&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="340" width="560"></embed></object><br /><br />The perplexing thing is that epic forms abound today, when none of the social circumstances that gave them meaning in antiquity are present. In Greece for example the epic form developed under the auspices of warlords, it was a sort of propaganda for their great deeds (mostly consisting of murder, rape and plundering). The warrior hero ethics were also a way of promoting enlistment, recruiting soldiers who would willingly give up their lives in battle ("May you live forever" was one of the most insulting things you could say to a man in Sparta). When the merchant class gained power in city states like Athens, culture was becoming more refined, focusing on feeling and creativity, largely abandoning the heroic epos of yore.<br /><br />What, then, is the charm contemporary epos exhibits over contemporary audiences? Surely the events portrayed are utterly alien to their lives and their perception of themselves. In complex societies, one can hardly imagine oneself as a heroic figure, which is able to change the course of the world with its solitary actions. One is rather embedded in the many subsystems of society, which mediate our actions and make it nearly impossible to gauge their final consequences: we are told that buying a more efficient vehicle will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, that our contribution to a charity will benefit some village in Africa, that responsible consumption habits can contribute to a more humane economy, that our vote counts, but the effectiveness - even the meaningfulness - of our actions remains utterly opaque to us.<br /><br />Whose story is the contemporary epos telling? If the answer can not be found on the side of the users, it must be on the side of the producers. Yet what aim could the producers be following in serving audiences contents they can not meaningfully relate to? Is there a secret plot to militarise our societies with Hollywood as the vanguard (the epos of the Third Reich comes to mind)? It would seem that art should be distinguished from dreams (a distinction Freud never made) in that its manifest content is determined by two layers of latent factors. If we only focus on the psyche of producers and recipients, we are unable to achieve insight into the workings of the culture industry. The second layer of latent factors is the economic system. The products of the culture industry are exactly that, namely products. Individual desires are an important determining factor in the production process since they determine use value, as Marx called it, without which exchange value could not exist. Yet individual desires are qualitatively transformed once they become an impetus for consumption. They become a variable in the equation of profitability and in this sphere achieve a striking independence from the minds of individuals that gave birth to them.<br /><br />Karl Marx painted a picture of the world in which the living individual is passive, while dead labour (capital) is active, determining the life of society. The hero of contemporary epos is none other than capital itself, an exquisite parody of the dialectics of spirit, as told by Hegel (history does have a talent for parodying Hegel, does it not?). Producers are merely following through the logic of the market: since substantive innovation is too risky a business the culture industry exhibits a tendency to follow certain proven stereotypes (today's plots basically repeat those from the 1920s, albeit in a more sophisticated manner) - with stereotypical cultural formats the investors can anticipate future profits, and advertisers know what type of audience to expect (by the way, do you really believe MPAA ratings were instituted to protect children?). Innovation in Hollywood is rather showcasing the sheer might of productive forces: grandiose special effects are the main difference between the pictures of today and those 50 years ago. The grandiose Mannerist style of Hollywood is not a fad, the epos is not a symptom of nostalgia: it is the ideology of capital, told by capital itself.<br /><br />The unease, which the first Terminator movie is still able to cause, stems from the melting away of borders between humanity and its productive forces and the - not at all imaginary - feeling that the unleashed productive forces have grown far beyond our control. The terminator is the best metaphor for the culture industry of today: a machine, masquerading as a human. The Academy awards its Oscars to outstanding individuals. Truth be told, the true recipient is never on the stage of that festive event.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-16272515754638267222009-09-27T21:27:00.002+02:002009-09-27T22:11:51.922+02:00Perpetum mobileFirst I must apologize for my long absence, I have been tangled up in real life. This time I will let some quotes speak almost by themselves. They are basically about reification:<br /><br />1. Martin Heidegger, <span style="font-style: italic;">Die Technik</span>:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Everywhere it is put to stand to availability. To stand as a standing-reserve for being available further. What is so set to be available has its own stance. We will call it the standing-reserve.</span><br /><br />2. Ernst Jünger, <span style="font-style: italic;">Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt</span> (The working man: dominion and form):<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The task of total mobilization is the transformation of life into energy, as it is unveiled in the economy, technology and traffic in the whirring of wheels or on the battlefield as fire and movement.</span><br /><br />3. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: <span style="font-style: italic;">Futurist Manifesto</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed. </span><br /><br />4. Karl Marx and Friederich Engels: <span style="font-style: italic;">Manifesto of the Communist Party, chapter one: Bourgeois and Proletarians</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. </span><br /><br />You will notice that the first three quotes are from fascist ideologues or sympathizers (Heidegger's text was written later, it records a lecture held in 1949). M&E's prediction that the new state of affairs will enable people to see the true nature of productive forces is refuted by the eagerness with which fascism engaged in total mobilisation of society as a standing-reserve: the capitalist model in which raw materials and people are reified in the productive process is let loose upon the whole of society: sports, education, culture, procreation, friendship, everything is bound into the demand to produce a standing-reserve for the needs of the totalitarian state (its needs were quite basic: production and warfare). The humanity, with which the bourgeois era tried to soothe its guilty conscience, was abolished, the productive process made to truly dominate the whole of social totality. Besides proving that capitalism is by far more persistent and far less progressive than M&E believed, able to mobilise seemingly outlived modes of subjectivity (Like the identification with a race or folk) to come to its defence in a time of crisis it makes a point about the affinity between capitalism and fascism that members of the Frankfurt school have stressed. Not only does fascism utilize a certain type of personality that is bred under the conditions of liberal democracy - the <span style="font-style: italic;">Authoritarian personality</span>, as Adorno et al. called it in their seminal study, it can also be seen as totalizing in the sense that it subjects the whole of society to the reification inherent in the productive process.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-42427191259345848642009-07-11T00:42:00.002+02:002009-07-11T01:06:45.016+02:00ProstitutionIt is puzzling how much contempt societies, based upon the principle of exchanging bodily functions for an universal equivalent, have for the sale of one particular bodily function. I make my living selling my intellect, which could be regarded as more integral to my self than my genitals, yet the first is deemed acceptable, while the latter is scorned. Love is not to be sold, after all. Love, a specifically capitalist phenomenon, is the prime alibi of capitalism, its prime obfuscation. Prostitution lays bare the ideological denial of universal mediatedness at work in the bourgeois idea of love, reveals that abstract negation - reserving a sphere of complete self-will in the midst of universal servitude - is hypocrisy. In the hysteric reaction towards prostitution the subject denies the painful realisation that he or she is sold daily and that this transaction is the basis of subjectivity. Prostitution is the lens through which society can be comprehended in its totality. As such it deserves scorn just as much as Galilei's telescope.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-64377044515514921572009-06-29T01:41:00.003+02:002009-06-29T02:08:25.616+02:00The enemy never sleepsSome time ago I analysed the subtle ideology of RPG games. They do come less subtle than that. The goal of Kirby superstar, an old Super Nintendo game, is to venture:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Gq3ZPvNbPPU/SkgAhc0GKkI/AAAAAAAAAA4/voJZNKfNGow/s1600-h/Kirby.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 238px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Gq3ZPvNbPPU/SkgAhc0GKkI/AAAAAAAAAA4/voJZNKfNGow/s320/Kirby.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5352528731800218178" border="0" /></a>P.S.: Honest to Marx, I used Photoshop only to paste, crop and save the image.Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-79328989185261856932009-06-27T22:43:00.003+02:002009-06-29T02:05:35.349+02:00Hegel on Kafka's MetamorphosisThe reader of Kafka's story is immediately struck not so much by the bizarre transformation of the protagonist into an enormous insect - surely not the most bizarre in the history of literature - as with the indifferent response the transformation is met with. Gregor Samsa at first feels no discomfort with his new shape, which leads us to reject the interpretation that his transformation is in itself a punishment. Indeed he finds pleasure in new habits that come with the new form: eating rotten food, crawling on the ceiling etc. The interpretation that the transformation is actually fulfilling a latent desire might seem far fetched at first, but let us see if it can help us make sense of the story. Gregor is working at a job he distinctly dislikes (that are his first thoughts upon waking) but to which he is bound by debts his father had incurred. The fantasy is not a positive one, a desire to become an insect, but a negative one, a desire to escape inescapable social obligations.<br /><br />The insect can be read as a metonymy of nature (that Kafka declared a <span style="font-style: italic;">Bilderverbot</span> regarding the insect in a letter to Kurt Wolff would indicate that the insect is a place holder for a more abstract idea), nature not as a positive idea, but as a purely abstract negation of human sociality, a wishing-away of the mediatedness of the subject through social institutions, a fantasy of pure immediacy in the midst of universal mediation. The tragedy of the insect testifies to the impossibility of an abstract negation. As Adorno noted in one of the most orthodoxly Hegelian parts of <span style="font-style: italic;">Minima Moralia</span>, the bourgeois demand for purely spontaneous love functions as an alibi for the untrue society - it is not as pure spontaneity that love can offer resistance to the existing, only as specific negation, as "stubborn opposition" as Adorno put it. Note that the motive of family love (especially that of Gregor to his sister) is central to Kafka's story.<br /><br />The answer to the question what the nature of mediation is, of what Gregor is running from, takes us beyond Hegel to Marx. On all the central parts of the story money is of paramount importance. The debt of the father is forcing Gregor to stick to a job he dislikes. Georg only finds displeasure in his new form when he realizes it will cause him to miss work. Gregor's family start neglecting him because of the jobs they in turn have to take to compensate for his missing pay check and they completely reject him after he has scared away the tenants inhabiting a spare room of their apartment. Gregor's sister put it most succinctly: "When one has to work so hard as we do it is impossible to put up with this incessant torture at home." Brecht's <span style="font-style: italic;">Good person of Szechwan </span>immediately comes to mind, where <span style="font-style: italic;">Shen Te</span> is confronted with an analogous dilemma: "How can I be good, when everything is so expensive?"<br /><br />The transformation can then be read as a parable, the moral of which is that "there is no right life in the wrong."Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-32667248310211856932009-06-16T15:47:00.003+02:002009-06-16T15:59:04.503+02:00Value neutralityNorms are not stars, glittering on a horizon beyond being. They are an integral part of social reality. The norm of neutrality - besides the obvious fact that a normative demand for the absence of normative demands is a <span style="font-style: italic;">contradictio in adjecto</span> - is nothing but the dictate of applicability. The results of research technique should be free from value statements so that they can be used broadly and efficiently. The measure of neutrality is the extent of capitulation to the existing. The attempt to eliminate the normative moment of cognition wrongs the object (unresolved antagonisms of society are paradoxes calling to be resolved) and the subject, equipping it with blinders that prevent it from seeing beyond the <span style="font-style: italic;">sensus communis</span>. Research does not aim to satisfy a fickle curiosity as Popper had childishly imagined, it is productive work. As all productive work it aims to achieve an effect, that is provoke some change in the world. The question is therefore not whether research should or should not be value free, but what the nature of the values should be: should they be subjective, conforming to<span style="font-style: italic;"> doxa</span> (what is today deemed objective) or objective, following from the inherent paradoxes of the object (what is today deemed subjective).Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3380869991121584325.post-61069444269516181912009-05-26T23:06:00.002+02:002009-05-26T23:30:18.493+02:00ShizophreniaIn <span style="font-style: italic;">The good person of Szechuan</span> Brecht portrays the protagonist faced with contradictory demands of reality and morality. Schizophrenia is a natural reaction then: Shen Te develops the alter ego of Shui Ta, who steps in when the dictate of being good threatens to destroy Shen Te. "How can I be good," she asks, "when everything is so expensive?" The only rational response to a pathological world is pathological.<br /><br />When Freud developed his theoretical system he acknowledged that there is an inherent contradiction between desire and reality (what he termed the dynamic aspect of a metapsychological inquiry). When later on in life desire is hampered by reality libido regresses to an earlier stage (Freud gives the example of fetishism), but this regression is unacceptable to the superego, which censors the desire and neurotic symptoms are the only way libido can find an expression. What Freud has missed is that psychological contradictions originate from social ones, the contradiction between desire and reality is secondary, the primary contradiction is between the dictates of authority and the reality it creates. Ruling ideas take on a universal character which transcends particular class rule, hence the individual is faced with the task of yielding to moral imperatives which reality makes impossible to follow. The pathologies of the individual mirror the pathologies of society, the resolution of the psychical dialectic is possible only by resolving the dialectics of society. Until then we can resist totality only by being consistently pathological. As Horkheimer and Adorno noted in <span style="font-style: italic;">Dialectics of enlightenment</span>, the task of philosophy is to be naively consistent, believing the whole of ruling ideology: "She believes that division of labour serves humanity and that progress leads to freedom."Sašohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13456395844653983485noreply@blogger.com0