thought flight

The second occasion is the structural crisis of capitalism as a world system, which is facing, in my opinion, its certain demise in the next twenty to forty years. This is the middle run. And if the left has no plan for this middle run, what replaces capitalism as a world system will be something worse, probably far worse, than the terrible system in which we have been living for the past five centuries.

Most importantly, very few protest movements enjoy perfect clarity about tactics or command widespread support when they begin; they’re designed to spark conversation, raise awareness, attract others to the cause, and build those structural planks as they grow and develop. Dismissing these incipient protests because they lack fully developed, sophisticated professionalization is akin to pronouncing a three-year-old child worthless because he can’t read Schopenhauer: those who are actually interested in helping it develop will work toward improving those deficiencies, not harp on them in order to belittle its worth.

..change is generally incremental, but that doesn’t mean you adopt incrementalism as a rhetoric, political practice, virtue, or philosophy. If there’s any overmining or undermining here it lies in the incrementalist reducing the field of the possible to the prejudices of the rabble. Those struggles for racial equality, gender equality, or economic justice would have never accomplished anything (nor motivated people to do anything) had they adopted this sad, pathetic, disempowering, offensive political philosophy… A political philosophy premised on the uninspiring notion of procedure that paternalistically believes daddy knows best (elected officials) and that also has a profoundly mistaken understanding of how historical change takes place.

Nothing allows one to explain why the Algerian Department of Intelligence and Security, suspected of having orchestrated — with the knowledge of the DST[3] — the wave of attacks in 1995, is not classed among the international terrorist organizations. Nothing allows one to explain the sudden transformation of “terrorists” into heroes in the manner of the Liberation, into partners suitable for the Evian Accords, into Iraqi police officers and “moderate members of the Taliban,” according to the most recent sudden reversal of the American strategic doctrine.

[It means] nothing, if not sovereignty. It is the sovereign in this world who designates the terrorist. He who refuses to take part in this sovereignty will take care not to respond to your question. He who covets a few crumbs will comply [with the question] promptly. He who doesn’t suffocate from bad faith will find instructive the case of the two ex-”terrorists” who became the Prime Minister of Israel and the President of the Palestinian Authority, respectively, and who — to top it all off — were both given Noble Peace Prizes.

The person that believes that politicians are disinclined to do the right thing because of the powerful economic interests they have to contend with will also believe that they have to be dragged kicking and screaming through engaged activism that perpetually holds their feet to the fire and makes life uncomfortable for them. The job of the activist is to make politicians fear the people. Right now they fear the corporations. Occassionally they fear us. They need to fear us more. Latour says we’ll never do better than a politician and uses this to lampoon activists. He might very well be right, but he is inconsistent in not noticing that this means activists too must form themselves into forces that politicians must negotiate or translate. The point is not to cede power to landed forces such as corporations and dynasties. The person who believes in authority and that elected officials are motivated by the best interests of the people will believe their work is done when they have voted. The person that believes politicians are buffetted by all sorts of vested interests that make it difficult to do the right thing lest they risk their re-election chances will believe their work never ends and will always proceed with caution with the figures they put in office. To many ardent Obama supporters have read strong criticism of the president as a rejection and abandonment of him (and indeed, some are doing this), when this resistance is a continuation of politics (I believe most on the left will nonetheless vote for this zombie return of Reagan-Nixon because president Perry, Romney, or Bachman is unthinkable, especially with regard to cultural politics).

when politics is all about the formation of alliances, networks and compromise, this causes one to ‘pre-emptively’ choose the way of compromise. And, ‘Of course, in having pre-emptively declared that certain things are not possible, the pragmatic realist insures that they aren’t possible by virtue of never pursuing them and re-structuring the social space by creating popular consensus rendering them possible.’

Traditionally, the left was universalist, basing its claims on notions of reason, truth, human rights, justice and democracy. On the postmodernist view, however, these standards themselves, indeed all norms whatsoever, merely express particular interests or power relations that arbitrarily favour some people, cultures or outlooks over others. On this basis, progressive postmodernists are in a position to ‘deconstruct’ the norms of dominant or privileged social groups. It is, however, obvious that precisely the same corrosive procedure can then be applied to progressive ideals too. The justice sought by indigenous people, for example, is, on the postmodernist view, merely an expression of their will to power, no more worthy than that of the groups they are opposing. Postmodernism leads to an ethical stand-off, and consequently to political paralysis. Indeed, the reducing of all ethical debate to terms of power can only benefit those who possess the power already. The powerless are then stripped of their principal weapon, the moral force of appeals to justice. Politically, the logic of postmodernism leads to conservativism.

3. What is all too often overlooked in such calls for moral transformation is the central institutional fact of our society: what might be called the global “treadmill of production.” The logic of this treadmill can be broken down into six elements. First, built into this global system, and constituting its central rationale, is the increasing accumulation of wealth by a relatively small section of the population at the top of the social pyramid. Second, there is a long-term movement of workers away from self-employment and into wage jobs that are contingent on the continual expansion of production. Third, the competitive struggle between businesses necessitates on pain of extinction of the allocation of accumulated wealth to new, revolutionary technologies that serve to expand production. Fourth, wants are manufactured in a manner that creates an insatiable hunger for more. Fifth, government becomes increasingly responsible for promoting national economic development, while ensuring some degree of “social security” for a least a portion of its citizens. Sixth, the dominant means of communication and education are part of the treadmill, serving to reinforce its priorities and values.

4. A defining trait of the system is that it is a kind of giant squirrel cage. Everyone, or nearly everyone, is part of this treadmill and is unable or unwilling to get off. Investors and managers are driven by the need to accumulate wealth and to expand the scale of their operations in order to prosper within a globally competitive milieu. For the vast majority the commitment to the treadmill is more limited and indirect: they simply need to obtain jobs at livable wages. But to retain those jobs and to maintain a given standard of living in these circumstances it is necessary, like the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, to run faster and faster in order to stay in the same place.

…ruling groups can in their thinking become so intensively interest-bound to a situation that they are simply no longer able to see certain facts which would undermine their sense of domination…