The Middle East and Revolutionary Communication

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have identified two very important aspects that block the communication of struggles:  1. Clarifying the nature of the common enemy and 2. To construct a new common language that facilitates communication (57).  What kind of communication is at the heart of this matter? The type of ‘communication’ and ‘language’ that Hardt and Negri speak of is not meant to be interpreted as a specific vernacular. This communication is not even necessarily verbal.  The power of revolutionary communication is based in the plurality of the struggle, i.e. the common enemy being translated within all political struggles in a universal manner in which a global multitude can react in solidarity. The Middle East and its vast protest movements of the past few months have accomplished this enormous task in both areas. The protestors have identified a common enemy and they have communicated their solidarity against that enemy.

The Middle East protestors have communicated their struggle to each other (and the world) without even sharing a single word of the fact amongst one another. Yes, the protestors have used the internet as a tool to arouse global support but that support has not physically crossed national borders (Egyptians were not joined by Bahrainis and Bahrainis were not aided by Libyans, etc). That support has been ignited within national borders and against a national enemy (dictatorship, autocracy, etc). Of course, the economy transcends borders and this is where the real power of the protests has found strength – the critique of political economy transcends the nation and the state and it is able to travel amongst global ctizens. The point to be made is that this revolutionary communication has become global. There are millions of people that feel akin to what is happening in the Middle East even if they will never meet with those that are directly participating in the protest. This type of communication is on a non-verbal surface. It is felt and not spoken. The communication is a dialectical understanding and it is one that is spreading the world over.  

The communication has spread like fire and is encompassing many different revolutionary movements in the Middle East. Tunisia was first, then Egypt, and now it is Bahrain, Libya, Jordan, Gaza, Iran, and growing. Communication is at core of this solidarity. The protestors in Egypt never met with those in Bahrain, or Tunisia, etc, but the unspoken dialectic of revolution (i.e. political and social freedoms) is the universal ideal that is catching the attention of the multuitude. The dialectic is spreading. The dialectic is an ongoing discourse.

The communication of the Middle East protest movements have existed in a very interesting political reality. The protestors have united in their idealism with no references or basis in: a political party, religion, ethnicity, gender, or within any state institution and/or organization. The protestors of the Middle East appear to have transcended basic sectarian representations and have organized under the basic pretext of ‘freedom’ (maybe this is just an ‘appearance’ but for the time being it seems more than that). The struggle for freedom has, at this moment, trumped all sectarian and socialized biases among these multitudes. The multiplicity of the multitude has resulted in a powerful singularity of struggle.  There are many backgrounds that are united for one cause.

The critique of political economy is a strong under-current in the communication of these protest movements. Young workers are angry and the time has come for their voices to be heard. I will explore this point further in the future

 Reference:

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press

The Egyptian Revolution

As I write this I am watching several videos on the Al Jazeera English network and I am overcome with feelings of solidarity for this political movement. I could write a wonderful text on proletarian struggle and the power of the multitude within this Egyptian revolution but that might just be self-serving to my agenda so I will refrain from that, even though I believe it to be true.

The multitude of the Egyptian protestors is made up of mostly young peoples who share one common idea: they are disillusioned with autocratic power and are ready for a realized democracy in both name and deed. The time has come for this multitude to realize their role in history.  The outcome is not for sure at this point but the intent is: radical democratic change. The old regime and its authoritarian control are preparing their own death knell. And as Slavoj Zizek states: ‘Mubarak and his party elites are like a Tom and Jerry cartoon, in that when one of the characters runs of a cliff they are suspended in air and it is not until they realize they have no solid foundation that they drop off the cliff’. Mubarak has yet to look down and see that he has no foundation to stand upon and when he does he too will drop off the cliff.

Real ‘democracy’ is being won in the streets against the ruling ‘National Democratic Party’, in which  Hosni Mubarak is the leader. ‘National democracy’ is the chicken that has finally come home to roost; the irony is beautiful.

It is amazing how this movement has spread so quickly and with serious intent for radical change.  Egypt is proving all the Western sceptics wrong in terms of the Muslim understanding of modern democracy. Egypt is a contagion of democratic hope in this day and age. The Egyptian protestors are proving that their collective belief in the power of democratic change is much more actual and potent than any of the major proponents who claim to be the ideological bearers of democracy, i.e. Israel, Europe, and the US.

It was quite shocking seeing the approach that US political power has taken in regard to an actual home-grown Egyptian democratic revolution. Fear was the first response rather than support. Israel and its outright support for Mubarak accompanied by taunts of those that support the protestors, has been deplorable. Israel holds Mubarak as an ally and the leadership of Israel are tremendously frightened to witness what true Egyptian democracy will foster in the years to come; they are completely in fear of true democracy. Fear is the ruling ideology among those ‘true bearers’ of democracy and this demonstrates their contempt for the actualization of democracy.

This revolution is based upon the very simple ideological thought of ’freedom’. Is this not the realization of true democracy?

Here is a great video of the protests and the responses from power. It is called “Egypt Burning” and it is beautifully shot and it tells a wonderful story with its images.

http://www.youtube.com/v/w3FQXYdyHCg

Cultural Capitalism

What is cultural capitalism?

Cultural capitalism is a new brand of ideology that most businesses have incorporated into their marketing strategy; in order to persuade a new and younger type of consumer. In its essence, cultural capitalism is a new type of branding strategy that has shifted the focus from products and onto global issues. The branding strategy directly takes the emphasis away from the material product, i.e. as a physical commodity, and it shifts the focus upon how the purchase of this commodity will positively affect the world for a greater good. The mass shift toward an ethical ‘appearance’ represents the cultural aspect of this new capitalism. The message that is being sold to consumers, overtly or covertly, always states something like this: ‘if you purchase this product then you are directly contributing to creating a better and safer world’.  This is ideology.

This new capitalist strategy consists of selling back to us our own moral and ethical values; those that the society (the multitude) have deemed as being of some importance and significance in this generation. Global politics, grassroots movements, local issues, environmental issues, and free trade have opened up new types of ethical attitudes that involve an ‘appearance’ of solidarity with global workers and even global citizenship. This type of solidarity through the aid of business is very intriguing and runs counter to the desires of capital; this is where the ‘appearance’ falls short and the real motive becomes apparent.  Capital is not actually concerned about global issues because capital is not a thing, it is a relation. Capitalists are not actually concerned about these global issues because capitalists are the living embodiment of capital and as such, money is the only culture that matters to the capitalist.

Some examples that are being overtly exploited on a daily basis are ideas regarding: fair trade, conditions of impoverished peoples in the Southern hemisphere, environmental issues/global warming, healthcare issues, food and water quality, and even issues revolving around natural disaster relief.

Capital is selling an ethic and an image but at the base of that ethic and image is always a material commodity. If we ignore this commodity reality (who, where , when, how, and what – about the commodity) then we have perfected commodity fetishism and we too will become blind ideologues to capital.

Cultural capitalism allows the consumer to forgo the display of basic compassion, in that we no longer have to give any of our wages to the ugly impoverished. We no longer need to even care!  Capital has it covered for all of us sinners. All we need to do is buy a cup of coffee, or whatever, and we end up serving the common good. The commodity stands in place of our generosity. The commodity is the object (e.g. cup of coffee) that emancipates the subject (e.g. poor farmers in Mexico)- “buy a cup of coffee and we will give some proceeds to……..”  This is a dangerous thought. 

Here are 2 basic examples of cultural capitalism:

1. The Body Shop: “The Body Shop® believes that there is only one way to be beautiful — Nature’s Way.

For many years, The Body Shop® has constantly sought out wonderful natural ingredients from all four corners of the globe, and brings you products bursting with effectiveness to enhance your natural beauty. While doing all of this The Body Shop® also strives to protect this beautiful planet and the people who depend on it — not because it’s fashionable, but based on the belief that it’s the only way to do business.

http://www.thebodyshop.ca/about-us.html

 

2.  Starbucks:

Our mission: to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.

 http://www.starbucks.com/about-us/company-information/mission-statement

(click the links and read on) 

Why is this ideology? Aren’t these companies just acting ethically?

This is the most basic type of ideology. The consumer appears to be doing a common good through their purchase and feels a sense of relief after their purchase. The consumer feels “ethical” by the very act of their purchase. The purchase has provided the consumer with 2 things: 1. a material desire and 2. a sense of accomplishment of a moral duty. The trick is that the consumer remains blind to their re-fuelling of a system that is actively exploiting workers, generating massive amounts of wealth for 0.01% of the global pop., creating large impoverishment for billions of peoples, exploiting natural resources, escalating global warming, etc, etc, etc. The consumer remains caught in the world of the fetish, or the illusion. 

Ethics has no part to play in capital. Capital is not a person, or a thing, it is a constant fluid motion of processes and relations. It is constantly moving forward and attempting to realize its ultimate goal = surplus-value. And if it can utilize our own ideals, values, mores, and ethics to reach that goal then it will do that as well.

Let’s not be fooled. We are not acting ‘ethically’ when we buy a commodity, we are simply satisfying a material want/need. True ethics and morality are not so easily commodified.

 To quote The Clash: ” I went to the market to realise my soul, ’cause what I need I just don’t have” (The Clash, “Rudie Can’t Fail”, London Calling).

The Common in Communism

Michael Hardt is a great voice in political theory concerning ideas about the ‘common’.  I want to discuss his ideas about the situation of the common in communism.

Hardt locates the ‘common’ as being established completely outside of capitalist private property and socialist public property. The common in communism is not to be located within the market and/or the state, which are the hegemonic forces in our daily lives. The common is to be found in the hypothesis of communism, i.e. a new communist hypothesis that is modern and based in the production of the present. The essential point to understand is that the ‘common’ is not a form of property.  There are 2 basic types of the common:  1. the common refers to the earth and all of its resources (land, air, waters, minerals, etc), and 2. the direct results of human labour and creativity (ideas, languages, affects, etc.) (136). These two types of the common have been increasingly usurped under forms of private and public property in the past few centuries: under classic liberal capitalist accumulation and neo-liberal capital of the past 30 years.

The industrial era is over and is no longer dominant in capitalism, as it was in Marx’s day. What is now dominant is, according to Hardt, ‘immaterial and biopolitical production’. Industrial production is thoroughly based in the creation of material goods that are moveable through the aid of commodification and consumerism. Industrialization is still prevalent but not dominant. Whereas, immaterial production refers to the production of ideas, images, knowledges, code, languages, social relationships, affects, etc. These designate occupations ranging from high end to low end workers found all over the capitalist spectrum (e.g. health care workers, flight attendants, educators, software programmers, fast-food workers, call-centre workers, designers, advertisers, and on and on) (134). These types of workers are not producing a material commodity, as such, because they are the living commodity that they are producing; a piece of their biological commodity is being marketed. What gets sold to the consumer is not exactly a material need rather it is a service or an intellectual form of property or some other non-material affect. What these workers are producing is the immaterial realization of their own commodity, i.e. labour-power, and they are selling their own exploitation; in some ways.  

The common, as was established above, is being bought and sold through very new and mysterious forms (fetishistic forms). The privatization and sale of the traditional common is easy to spot: i.e. privatization of water, minerals, etc. but the sale of the second type of common is much more elusive than we think; for Hardt this is based on the notion of ‘rent’ and not a direct sale of material goods.  Direct results of human intellectual labour are hard to privatize because these are based in something that is not exactly physical and material.  A great example is found in the worlds of patents. What exactly gets patented? It is usually an idea of some sort, not a material good but the idea as to how to utilize that material good in a new or better fashion. There are also patents on all sorts of other immaterial things; the world of computer technology (software) is a great place to find these new areas of intellectual property. For Hardt, the solution is not that we should have a great pool of public property to protect all of this knowledge and/or natural resource. Rather, we should organize to protect ourselves from creating a system of ownership; from the hands of the market or the state, i.e. the eradication of property relations.

What is the answer to re-establishing the common? Organization is the simple solution, but of course we are referring to a communistic organization that is beyond the state and the marketplace. How else could we liberate the common with rational interest? Certainly the capitalist market and the state have selfish interests in regard to the common and it is apparent that these entities have failed in providing meaningful parameters as to the public usage of the common – their usage turns into commodification, exploitation, and property. So then an organization is essential (not a singular political party) that has the primary interest of liberation of the common from capital and the state; i.e. to eradicate the exploitation of the common and implement autonomy of the common.  

This communist organization is not a part of the vulgar realities of state powers of the past century rather it is located in a more powerful location, i.e. the multitude.

Property is the antagonism of the common. To quote Marx: “private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it” (Marx, 345). Hardt adds that “we have been made so stupid that we can only recognize the world as private or public. We have become blind to the common” (Hardt, 139).

So then, where is the critique of political economy to be found in all this discussion of the common? To quote Hardt again “capitalist production increasingly relies on the common and (…) the autonomy of the common is the essence of communism…. the conditions and weapons of a communist project are available today more than ever. Now to us the task or organizing it” (144).

Autonomy of the common – this is the essence of the common in communism!

References:

Hardt, Michael. “The Common in Communism.” In The Idea of Communism, ed. Slavoj Zizek and Costas Douzinas. New York: Verso, 2010. pp. 131-144

Marx, Karl. Early Writings. London: Penguin, 1975.

Beyond the Party?

How do we do it, how do we get beyond the party form?

We all know that the political party form is the very banality of politics. Its form is not only outdated but is ineffective as a tool for mobilizing a lethargic generation of voters.  Voters are becoming more apathetic and less-interested in the mainstream political process. The mainstream parties are inherently flawed by the very system they propagate. The mainstream parties run campaigns based upon catch-phrases and slogans, i.e. the lowest common denominator of political intelligence. The method of the parties is insulting to all voters and citizens in its presupposition. The party-form crushes the fluidity of political life and its diverse realities, relations, and processes. The political life of any community cannot be dumbed-down to a few popular words spoken by a well-groomed figure-head.

Do I belong to the centre-right or centre-left? Here is a more important question: what is the difference in 2010 when capitalism is the hegemonic ideology?  We live in a completely cynical age. We too are cynical in that we accept these dominant relations, systems, and ideologies as fact. We are cynical about liberal-democracy, we are cynical about capitalism, we are cynical about the economy, and we are cynical about the political system. But cynicism is not a true politics. If it were we would be in a political utopia instead of what is quickly approaching a dystopia. Capital itself is completely cynical. Capital truly believes that there is no alternative to its ideology; its message to the masses is to behave and obey because there is no alternative.  

The party-form is a tremendous failure wherever it has been chosen to represent political ideas. Just think about it for a second, we vote for the most basic and broad ideas and there is very little difference between what the parties actually claim. Certainly their claim to cease power is exactly the same, it is cynical.

So how do we get to post-party?

Now of course you will say, well the communist party was also a party and it was a tremendous failure. Of course it was, the Idea was crushed once the party-form was established as the basic representation for the Idea. Yes it was a failure, it was perhaps the greatest perversion of a political idea in modern democracy.

As Alain Badiou says, we can no longer posit the immensity of the Idea of communism as a mere adjective, i.e. communist party, or communist state. It is time to rethink our political process and its blatant failure.  The party is a ridiculous form of representation. The party is not a representation, it is a symptom.

The Idea of Communism

Alain Badiou: The Idea of  Communism

First off, the Idea is a political truth, but this is too empty a phrase to be universally true. So then let us break it down to its core. We need to get to matter of Idea but we must first establish its parameters. For Badiou there are 3 elements that establish the Communist Idea:

1. The political element – this is the realm of political truths, as such.  Badiou uses the Chinese Cultural Revolution, from 1965-1968, as his prime example but he also uses the French Revolution from 1792 to 1794, and Bolshevism in Russia from 1902-1917. But what is a political truth, as such? “It is a concrete and time-specific sequence in which a new thought and a new practice of collective emancipation arise, exist, and eventually disappear” (Badiou, 231). Quite simply, it is a window of opportunity when new thoughts emerge, exist, and then emancipate their subjective existence into an external objective one, i.e. a revolutionary movement.
2. The historical element – history, for Badiou, is purely symbolic and totally empty of any deep philosophical reality but it is a powerful symbol nonetheless. History places itself in a clear and present time frame and localization (China circa 1968, French circa 1792, or Canadian circa 2010, etc). “Within a given type of truth the historical inscription encompasses an interplay between types of truth that are different from one another and are therefore situated at different points in human time in general” (Badiou, 233). This day and age in politics is not the same as a past epoch and what happened then is only a pure symbol of the present; but this symbolic truth of a past existence can become a retroactive influence.
3.  The subjective element -  all humans are individual actors and potential agents of change within society but each one has to decide to step-up and act, i.e. to decide to become a part of a political truth procedure.  The individual finds their ‘subjectivation’ (their will and decision) within their own incorporation into a collective project of emancipation. “A subjectivation is always the process whereby an individual determines the place of a truth with respect to his or her own vital existence and to the world in which this existence is lived out” (Badiou, 235).  

Thus we come to the crux of the matter, what is the Idea?

“an Idea is the subjectivation of an interplay between the singularity of a truth procedure and a representation of History” (Badiou, 235).

“an Idea is the possibility for an individual to understand that his or her participation in a singular political process (his or her entry into a body-of-truth) is also, in a certain way, a historical decision” (Badiou, 235).

An Idea is the point in an individual’s mind where they decide, for historical reasoning, that in the here and now they need to take decisive political action and join with a collective in a struggle for total emancipation from oppression.  ‘Communism’ perfectly fits the title of ‘Idea’.

Again we refer to Badiou: “the word ‘Communism’ has the status of an Idea, meaning that, once an incorporation has taken place, hence from within a political subjectivation, this term denotes a synthesis of politics, history, and ideology” (Badiou, 237).

“The communist Idea exists only at the border between the individual and the political procedure, as that element of subjectivation that is based on a historical projection of politics” (Badiou, 237).

The communist Idea has existed throughout history in many phases and examples, not just French Revolution, USSR, and state socialism, and it is our imperative to re-imagine the Idea and even attempt to rescue it from the vulgarity of its representation of the past decades. We must be ruthless and remain critical. We must not accept an easy and vulgar determination of the Idea.  We must live with an Idea. We must rescue the Idea especially when it is forgotten, outlawed, and despised by the majority of society. We can, so we must!

references:

Badiou, Alain. 2010. The Communist Hypothesis. New York: Verso.

Zizek’s Idea of a True Ethics

We most commonly think of ethics as a sort of personal-individual analysis of right versus wrong. The individual is pressed with a dilemma and then decides to act upon their own subjective idea of what it right and wrong - but this is the most vulgar idea of ethics. I personally adhere to Zizek’s brutal idea about what a true approach to ethics is. In Zizek’s thought, a true ethics is not based on either a question of right versus wrong, but what needs to be done for the good of the other – based on the objective need and not a subjective battle of wills.

Zizek uses a similar example to this one to demonstrate his point on ethics:

There is a beautiful young German girl who tends after local children and is known to be very friendly and cordial with those children. One day a train taking Jews to a concentration camp passes by her town. She happens to live near the train station and is taking a walk, along with the children she regularly looks after. The Jewish children on the train are all starving and are in desperate need of water. The beautiful young girl has both at her immediate disposal. She takes some bread in one hand and water in the other and proceeds toward the train. She stops abrubtly. All the Jewish children are crying out for her attention. Before she gets to the train she eats the bread and drinks the water in full view of all the Jewish prisoners, as well as in front of the children she is caring for. She then gives a Nazi salute to the train and walks back to the children she is attending. She then goes back to her home thinking she has acted in the appropriate manner. Two of the children she is watching over slip away from her and proceed to the tool shed. They grab a full bottle of acid. The two children proceed back to the young girl and they throw the entire bottle of acid directly into the face of the beautiful girl.  She is horribly injured and disfigured, but she lives. The two children admit their behaviour to the local authorities and explain why they acted in this way.

The two children who avenged the Jewish prisoners acted in the right way, i.e. ethically speaking, as brutal as it may sound. They acted in the right way because they performed a necessary act for the good of the community. The punishment the young German girl received for her atrocious behaviour was not equal to the deaths of the Jewish prisoners but the disfigured face of the young girl stands as a powerful symbol to those around her; those who normalized her ideas. No, this is not an ethics for everyone but it is an ethics that deals with the necessary, and this is the important thought.

Here is a similar example to follow:

You hate one of your co-workers for very sound reasons; i.e. a true hatred in all senses of the word with no delusions about the character of the other person, or yourself. It is a cold winters night and you are driving on a dark empty street. You see an individual person in the distance and their car is stuck in a massive snowbank. This person is desperately trying to get the car out of the snowbank. You get closer and notice that it is the co-worker whom you despise. You stop, get out of your car, and lend a helping hand. The car is freed. You immediately walk away and offer no words and accept none in return. The next day at work you make no mention of the act and forget about the kindness. You still despise your co-worker with great intensity.

This is a true ethics and it is one that I can support. You do what is absolutely necessary for the good of the community and/or the other rather than what is perceived to be right. You act and do not need to think about the action before hand. You do what is necessary for the good of the other.

Orthodox Marxism

What does this mean, this term orthodox Marxism? No, it is not that vulgar idea that there can only be a single type of Marxist research, thesis, philosophical message, or even idea; in truth we know that there are many various streams of Marxist practice and theory that are equally powerful and relevant. Marx was not a myth creator (nor a faith preacher) and his research, analyses, theses, theoretical and philosophical ideas were not supernatural in their scope. He was a social analyst and this is where the power of his analyses and their theses have their base. The critique of capitalist society is the main focus and the theses in his research reflect this basic analytical starting point. The total philosophy of Marx is best stated by his own statement regarding philosophy in general: “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach). Praxis is the point! Yes, the intent to ‘change the world’ is the starting point of the total analysis from the Young Marx to the Old Marx and it is this plan that attracts fellow researchers to follow in the shadows of his immense ideas.  But even this is not the totality of ‘orthodox Marxism’ rather it is just the tipping point; to change the world is what points all Marxist researchers into action but there is something else that sustains them as the keepers of this strange orthodoxy.

 Orthodox Marxists desire not to rearrange Marx or even prove that he was right (this is a vulgar interpretation) but the point is to change our material social-life and to provide the best possible critiques and analyses about its processes, this is the point.

Here is what orthodox Marxism is and Georg Lukacs stated it best and with the most authority almost a hundred years ago:

“Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to be proved [it has not been], every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx’s theses in toto [as a whole] – without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment. Orthodox Marxism, therefore does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers to exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders” (Lukacs, What is Orthodox Marxism)

This is kind of orthodoxy that is based on the search for truth that neither upholds a utopian outlook nor a mythological worldview!

The Lesson of Victor Kravchenko

Victor Kravchenko defected from the USSR in 1944 while in New York. He wrote a stunning memoir entitled I Chose Freedom, in which he decried the crimes and evils of the Stalinist Soviet Union. Needless to say the book was a best-seller and a great indictment as to the superiority of liberal-democratic-capitalism over the evils of all communist practice. Kravchenko became a celebrity of some regard and was hailed as a Cold War hero. A few years later (post 1949), Kravchenko became worried that the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunt, which was prevalent in US politics for decades, was not only a hypocritical image of Stalinism rather it was a mirror image. Kravchenko then wrote a new book entitled I Chose Justice which was an attempt to leave behind Stalin and McCarthy as ideological archetypes. The book was a failure.

His success and fame were done with and the true face of liberal-democratic-capitalism showed its power. Kravchenko then moved from the US to Bolivia where he set-up collectives of poor rural farmers, which indicated a return to his true roots and beliefs.  But after this was a failure he returned to New York where he shot himself.

What is the lesson to be learned in his life?

Slavoj Zizek states it best:

“Today, new Kravchenkos are emerging from everywhere, from the US to India, China and Japan, from Latin America to Africa, the Middle East to Western and Eastern Europe. They are disparate and speak different languages but they are not as few as they appear -  and the greatest fear of the rulers is that these voices will start to reverberate and reinforce each other in solidarity.  Aware that the odds are pulling us toward catastrophe, these actors are ready to act against all odds. Disappointed by twentieth-century Communism, they are ready to ‘begin from the beginning’ and reinvent it on a new basis. Decried by enemies as dangerous utopians, they are the only people who have really awakened from the utopian dream which holds most of us under its sway (156).”

“In the Christian past, it was common for people who had led dissolute lives to return to the safe haven of the church in old age, so they might die reconciled with God. Something similar is happening today with many anti-communist Leftists. In their final years, they return to communism as if, after their life of depraved betrayal, they want to die reconciled with the communist Idea. As with the old Christians, these conversions carry the same basic message: that we have spent our lives rebelling vainly against what we knew all the time to be the truth. So, when even a great anti-communist like Kravchenko can in a certain sense return to his faith, our message today should be: do not be afraid, join us, come back!  You’ve had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it – time to get serious once again!  (156-157)”

Yes, indeed it is time for all Leftists to come back and join the only Idea that can effectively eradicate, critique, and expose liberal-democratic-capitalism for what it really is and what it is really doing to our lives today. Come back and join us all, in the hopes of changing all our lives for the better.

Quotations from:

Zizek, Slavoj. 2009. First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. New York: Verso Books.

Marx’s Method

I have been reading so much of the man in the past 2 months that I am becoming strange and weird and beginning to speak in thoughts and phrase-ology that are prevalent in his books.

Here is the simplified crux of the method: appearances, dualities, contradictions!

Things in the capitalist mode of production and in our society are not what they appear to be, this is to say that our day to day relations and interactions as workers and members of this society, our lives as a totality under capitalism, are condradictory to our own personal freedoms and desires, etc, etc, etc. Everything apparently has a dual nature wrapped inside a singularity =  I am a possessor of labour-power and I am composed of a use-value and an exchange value, as a commodity, but I only produce a surplus-value for my employer and I produce a subsistence for myself and hopefully my loved ones. 

My ‘socially necesary labour-time’ is meant to keep me alive on the one hand but on the other it is meant to reproduce the class that is exploiting me as a worker, the class that has alienated me from my own personal production and means of production and means of subsistence; the class that reproduces me as a wage-labourer and continues to exploit the generations. This thing, or living person that is capital has robbed me of my abilities to subsist on my own thus I am compelled to work for it in order to survive, as we all are.

The contradictions are ever-present in my life. I am a worker and I like to have conveniences and free time and access to my own abilities and thoughts but when I am on the clock I am owned by somethinig external to me; contradictory to my own will and passions. Contradictory to itself in that it creates its own means of extinction through me and my cohorts; who will not be reproduced in this fashion forever and one day it will have to account for its misgivings and exploitations.

Contradictory in that it needs healthy and educated workers in order to survive. Thus it trains me to speak and subsist and smile but inside I know that this appearance is false. I am not what it says I am, I am not this thing, this relation, this process, this reproduction. I too am a contradiction because I produce those things that is says I am but I know that intrinsically I am not what it says I am. I am not what I appear to be, in some sense. 

I am a worker and I do not even own the product that I produce with my hands and my mind. My production is external to me and the property I produce is not mine, it is owned by something I will never meet.

To paraphrase that amazing introduction to No Country For Old Men:

“The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say, O.K., I’ll be part of this world.”

Appearances, dualities, contradictions!