As the global economic crisis spreads and mutates into a political crisis--with all the attendant, predictable attempts by the ruling classes to contain it through a combination of brute force and empty electoral politics--it would seem wise to review some of the ideas about resistance and strategy, both past and current, and to give our opinion on the relationship between anticapitalism and the state. It is unclear, at this time, whether a genuine “turn to the left” has occurred either in the field of popular politics or amongst the large numbers of people who refuse to participate in the present system. Certainly we share their disgust, and would offer whatever aid they feel is appropriate.
The primary source of this anger and profound near society-wide disaffection both here in the U.S. and in most parts of the globe is the continued control of vast sums of capital by finance, resources that could be used to rebuild and even to transform the economy. As a means of control, we would like to point out at the outset, finance is historically unstable and unconvincing. Control by finance has a long history of destroying the systems it was intended to help save. It is mostly a stop-gap measure, and an extremely contingent strategy, and it tends to unravel the moment large scale resistance emerges and applies counter-pressure. This accounts in part for the hyper-sensitive nature of power at all levels and in almost every country at present--expressed in the dual fixation with “security” (internal control) and “humanitarian intervention” (external control, or at least attempts by the Euro-American core to control certain developing areas).
We should also note from the outset that these analyses are meant as suggestions, and not hard and fast rules. In the words of Capt. Jack Sparrow and his compatriots: "They be more like a set of guidelines."
We should also reiterate here what we have said many times before: people should do whatever they think is right. The system is too large and too varied, and both the individual and group positionalities within it, and the modes of possible resistance too great in number and type to be able to allow for any effective centralization of resistance. Here we would go beyond Hardt and Negri. Here we are flagrant Deleuzians (with more than a hint of Bakunin), as we proclaim: Let the forms of resistance mutate and multiply in all their smashing glory!
From the farmer who stops his tractor in the road and refuses to budge, to the “rogue trader” who crashes exploitive markets, to the “security expert” who lets sensitive data leak, to the millions engaged in local, national, and global social movements…have at it!
There has never been a time when struggle was more important. And even pure, destructive, permissive, cleansing CHAOS is often underrated. Even the small-business, petty bourgeois classes, which are such an obstacle and such an annoyance right now, can be mobilized against capital, once they are made to realize by effort and by already developing conditions what the system has in store for them, and what absolute and impassable barriers exist to “going back” to some entirely imaginary period of relative class détente.
The Regime of Finance Capital
The control of finance is very simple (as we have said many times, power is not subtle, it is what is happening right in front of you): it’s a threat, let’s say a snotty threat, issued from the upper middle and ruling classes to poor and working people everywhere, and which says, in effect, “we” have a stranglehold on “your” money, and there’s nothing “you” can do about it. Indebtedness in Europe, both between countries and between classes (so called “personal debt”) is an attempt to keep political control at the top of the class structure. Likewise in America where indebtedness has penetrated even further into the social fabric, and the rape of the poor by those at the top has been sanctioned by large corporations and criminal government at every level and on both sides of the imaginary political “divide” in the aging, unproductive bourgeois system, debt is a shackle, it is never a solution or a “benefit.”
At the same time, internationally, America is increasingly the problem, as the buildup of reactionary opinion by a corporate media--fixated on right-wing ideas across the supposed political "spectrum," and supplemented with sadistic, reactionary pop culture--hides the almost totally moribund state of the productive economy and real-material social conditions: hollowed out manufacturing, large numbers of very poor service industry workers without unions or any mechanism for expression other than violence, a broken housing market, a 3-million-plus incarcerated population composed inordinately of minorities, a violent immigration system set on police-state tactics, and most disturbingly, an increasingly criminal small-business class that has turned to a Thermidorean, “defense of property” mode of politics, that is, to proto-fascism.
America, once the global leader, has become the biggest drag on the global economy and global politics. It was mostly overextended derivatives and other hedges, sold by American institutions to local entities, that has already in real social terms collapsed the eurozone and sent East Europe into deep poverty, just as these countries were beginning to emerge from years of failed neoliberal policies on the one hand, and frozen bureaucracy under “real socialism” on the other. Instead they moved from one form of state capitalism to another--from the ridiculous pro-business "soft conservatism" of dying social democracies, or the neo-imperialism of Russian diktats, to the unvarnished super-exploitation and global imperialism of EU-ECB-IMF diktats. The methods of control are different, but the present results, if anything, are much worse.
In this situation one is liable to vacillate between the ideologies on offer, and to point out that at least socialism only failed once, whereas capitalism has failed again and again in country after country.
But the rise of workerist and social movements, along with new political formations, in Latin America; the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring; and the recent swing to nominally leftist candidates--accompanied by large abstention movements--throughout Western Europe; and the sudden rise of labor politics in America around issues of public expenditure all suggest that something new is trying to emerge. We are witnessing the birth of a new form of resistance, which is also in some ways quite old, and which has come all at once front and center in the battle against global capital. This is the multitude.
On the Multiple Emergences of the Multitude
Today Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are the theorists most associated with the idea of the multitude, but it has a long history. Machiavelli speaks of the multitude in alternately hushed and disdainful tones, Spinoza picks up the concept in a radically different sense, and so it gets transformed, through a series of overturnings: from Hegel (the real driver behind Aufhebung, even if the idealist Hegel can’t see it), to Marx (proletarian struggle, the agency of history), even to Hayek (one of the narrowest conceptions of the multitude can be found in Hayek’s solution to the “coordination problem,” leaving the distribution of information squarely in the hands of the marketplace, that is, in the hands of private capital), and finally back to the Marxist fold via the postmodernists, the ever so tragic ex-left, and the ever useful deconstructionists. With such variety in conceptualization, a brief real-material history of modern emergences of the multitude is in order.
Michel Foucault describes in The Birth of the Prison how in the late Middle Ages the crowds of peasants once subjected to the spectacle of power in gory local executions began to take control of these events. They rose up all over and all at once throughout France and England. Sometimes they let the accused go, sometimes they punished them even more brutally. Sometimes they killed the attending officials of the crown and church. Sometimes they turned the event into a bacchanal and carried the central participants away on their shoulders, only to dump them in a ravine outside town. The authorities, fearing they were losing control of the impoverished countryside, and wanting to move in the direction of the mercantile classes, began to formalize legal codes. They built prisons, removed executions and other punishments to private spaces, and set about producing propaganda centering on the evils of crimes against private property. Confessions, once extorted in private by torture, were ritualized in public courtroom procedures. An air of “objectivity” developed around a previously blatant system. The exercise of juridical power remained unfair--indeed in some ways, through the further segmentation of the labor force and the unequal application of the new laws, it became more so--but it now responded, or at least pretended to respond, to “the people.” Power, in other words, yielded to the multitude, and a new phase of struggle began.
Again, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a series of struggles emerged that challenged the hegemony of capital. These modern emergences of the multitude yielded gains for some of the working classes in industrializing countries. New wage schedules, better working conditions, an expansion of the franchise, all these developments were due to the pressure exerted by workers through mass struggle. These were not individual achievements, despite the fixation in capitalist histories on certain labor leaders or on the activities of “philanthropists.” One of the greatest achievements in this era was the theorizing of capital by Karl Marx, who investigated its history from a scientific point of view, including tracing the most powerful trends within its own development that lead again and again to crisis and to economic and political paralysis. The multitude was once again the agent of history, and power was forced to respond. And yet again, a new phase of struggle began…
Indeed it is not too much to say that modern history itself can be seen as the back and forth, the tug and pull, between the multitude and power. In most cases the main actors on the side of the multitude were large numbers of organized workers and peasants, while power was represented by the agents and structures of capital. The law, it should be noted, was never an impartial observer--it was a participant, almost always on the side of capital.
As the twentieth century wore on and more countries were industrialized, these struggles were repeated in many places. Here we are looking at probably the only period in the modern canon where the idea of a linear, consistent development happening at different speeds in different parts of the world is a valid lens through which to view macro-historical events. As the system on a global level became more tightly interdependent, and more financialized, development began to look more and more alike everywhere it was taking place, and the local structures became less and less unique. Even in the Soviet system, from Kruschev on, there was an acceleration of private competition funded by large capitals associated with the state. On top of this, the so called “real socialist” countries were increasingly put at the service of a Soviet productive system dedicated to huge arms expenditures--just as upwards of 40% of manufacturing productivity in the U.S. was tied to the same enterprise--and this brought the two "cold war" systems together in the first genuinely global market, an arms market which spread massive amounts of weapons of mass destruction around the world, along with the wars that followed from their use. It is probably most accurate to view the so called “cold war” as the most profitable business arrangement in history. (See Michael Kidron, Western Capitalism Since the War and Capitalism and Theory.)
During this period industrial workers in the U.S. and Western Europe, and certain favored layers of workers in the Soviet system, enjoyed a consistent (if unequal) level of patronage from local capital. As the arrangement aged, and the capitals became very large, they began with the assistance of finance to exert considerable political clout. By the end of the Soviet period, there was already a class of super-capitalists in Russia and many of the East Europe bloc countries, just as there was a group of multinationals and their investors in the West, who held a virtual veto over all economically significant political and financial decisions. Along with the rise in consumer spending afforded by the spread of cheap goods (through improved production, research, and the conversion of military technology to consumer uses) and growth in certain of the central players’ dependency states (especially Germany and Japan for the West) the “cold war” was enough to keep the global economy humming, and protect many workers’ gains, for about forty years. When the structures were no longer practical, they were discarded, along with their objectified ideologies and their networks of patronage. And financialized global capital, which had been building throughout the previous period, came forward as the main structure of economic, political, and social control.
This is the period we live in today, and the question we must answer is, “How will the multitude organize once again in light of the new masters and their new-old system?”
Already a number of social and political movements around the world have taken up the fight. From the anti-WTO battles in Seattle and Genoa, to the group of poor nations that stymied the WTO over farm subsidies; from the eco-movements against industrialized farming and the use of growth hormones, genetically altered seeds, and other questionable products and practices, to the massive work stoppages in France, China and other parts of the terra-zone; from the insurgencies against imperialist violence (masquerading as “humanitarianism”) that wage brave battles for basic self-determination around the globe, to the landless peasant movements that form the backbone of new political formations in Latin America, India, and increasingly (although often misidentified as “immigration rights” groups) in North America. All over and all at once what has been raised is a giant shout of “NO!” NO to global capital. NO to indebtedness. And NO to the increasingly brutal means used to keep the tottering system in place. (For a really thorough review of some of the most pronounced strains in the contemporary anticapitalist evolution, with excellent critical-historical gloss, see Chris Harman, “Anticapitalism: Theory and Practice” at http://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/2000/xx/anticap.htm)
At the same time that some victories are being registered, it may seem like many of the hard-won previous gains are being taken away by power. But this has always been the case. In each new period of struggle, much of what previously existed, much of what was previously effective at holding back power and forcing a space to open up for the multitude, is swept away. Battles against enclosures and for a wider franchise would make no sense in Europe or America today. It may be that voting rights are being threatened, but that gives us a well developed, complex terrain on which to wage the fight. The important thing is not to get too distracted protecting certain “rights”--always a matter of legal articulation v. unequal exercise--and forget to make demands and push for changes that conform more to the present landscape. For instance…
Wages and work hour schedules (including regular overtime) are important things to defend. But does it really make sense to spend all our time struggling alongside large, well established industrial unions that represent mostly aging workers, and that have already given in to demands for two-tier wage systems for younger workers, when huge numbers of service industry employees don’t even enjoy organized representation? Aren’t the younger industrial workers in the same position now as the service workers? Who really represents them? Shouldn’t both groups form a common struggle, and their own organizations, to fight for themselves? And if the response to this is…“that would divide the working class”… or again… “service workers already have a union in the U.S.” … then maybe the counter-argument should be…really? Really? A divide in the working classes, along type-of-work and age lines, has already opened up. And the union that pretends to represent service workers in the U.S. today seems more set on currying favor with the U.S. government, a fully corporatized, totally hostile government, than it does on fighting back. The time for workers to organize in their own structures is long past. The old structures are still useful in some ways, yes, but they will never be able to meet the challenges of this new phase in the historical struggle, the tug-of-war, between the multitude and power.
On New Formations, and New Problems
It is very difficult to discuss strategy and be engaged in it at the same time. The world is not really a giant chessboard. As popular discontent has emerged in many places at once, the responses of capital, and the discussion of strategy on all sides, have often been overridden and engulfed by the spontaneous actions of the participants “on the ground.” The Egyptian Revolution provides one of the most dramatic examples. The continued unrest, even after some cosmetic reforms were instituted, an old-generation despot was removed, and new elections were called, is difficult for the regime of global capital to interpret. These are the only measures that make sense to it. On the other hand, old style leftists and anti-imperialists are dismayed by the lack of political organizing on the part of large sections of workers, the poor, and students, those who formed the main body of defenders of the uprising. The wildcat strikes, flare-up protests, and continuous agitation in services and state sectors confuse and tend to frustrate the believers in traditional class struggle. The participation of religious elements further complicates the picture. But this is a society in a revolutionary state. Nothing has calmed down, or refocused, under the military junta’s rule. Why should it? The multitude has been activated. Theorists, politicians, generals, cadres, union bureaucrats, piss off.
However, even in this buzzing, often manic set of global conditions, a few things are clear…
1. Capitalism, on a worldwide scale, is not making people happier or freer. Or, to put it another way, capital is not happy. For we experience capital as both the moment and its encompassing situation. Capital is everywhere. And, slowly, but without pause, even during one of its worst phases of crisis, it is filtering into everything. Even our ethics are up for sale. It’s only a matter of time, so let’s get the question out of the way: How much will our votes cost in the future? What kind of system of democracy do we want?
2. The political situation is much worse than the most apocalyptic critics think. That’s because they picture a future without stability, and that’s the worst thing they can imagine. These critics belong to capital. They would prefer terrorism, including the terrorism of the state at home and the global terrorism of imperial powers, to revolution. However, what we know from history is that it is the reformers who come to power in the aftermath of the failure of the system to solve the crisis--to “right itself”--who act as the most ruthless agents of suppression. The Thermidoreans are on the way. They will provide the intrinsic failure of the system with plausible cover, and make those who feel their voices have not been heard during the initial spasm of resistance that there is HOPE FOR CHANGE. Of course this is nonsense within the current limitations of power. If the slogans of today’s pseudo-left in America were not so obvious, it would be out of keeping with an age of obviousness, an age when capital feels no need to hide its shams and crimes. All the images from Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib have been accurately described by intelligent critics as “power porn,” or simply the system showing off. One should add the videos of the NYPD brutalizing protesters at the Occupy encampments, and the people being beaten in Tahrir Square and the streets of Bahrain, to this category. And all this is just the system, and the multitude, warming up. (See Alain Badiou’s essay on the historical Thermidoreans in Metapolitics for some clue as to what is on the way.)
3. Acquiescence is no option, either. To all those followers of Chomsky and the ex-left who emphasize continually the overwhelming power and violence represented by the contemporary state, we say, “Do you really think that not trying to abolish the state will work!?” To acquiesce--and anything less than trying to abolish it is interpreted by the state as acquiescence--is to assume a supine position from the vantage of the state. And anyway, this is now considered a threatening stance as well. If you play dead, the state, which is not a subjectivity that can be appealed to, will come and find you. Especially you, because the response will be that much more extreme. For those who play dead, the response of the state is simple: “Better make sure they’re not up to something, and make them really dead.” Remember, even in its subjectless status, the state is the most paranoid of the paranoiacs, and nothing sets off paranoia quite as much as being partially obeyed.
4. We are at war with the state. We would go so far as to say that the basic situation of subjectivity in today’s society of global capital, a society overdetermined at every level by this subjectless presence, is a being-at-war-with-the-state. Furthermore, this is always already the case. It is not a choice, one cannot say, “No, I do not want to be at war with the state.” To utter this is to witness a disappearance, a self-disappearing act. One ceases to exist in any meaningful way. There is only struggle, and non-existence.
5. So what is the state? Is it the officers in a police cordon facing down protesters as part of the daily routine in any of a dozen countries at present? No. It is the presence behind the officers, it is what animates them. But what is this presence, this activity without a subjectivity? It is a phantasm. A poltergeist, to be more specific. It is a reactive, dangerous spirit-substance. The state, in our time, is an evil ghost.
Ghostbusters, or “What is to be done?”
WE THINK THAT THERE IS ONLY ONE HISTORICALLY PROVEN COUNTER TO THE HEGEMONIC RULE OF CAPITAL, AND THAT IS THE REAL HISTORICAL DREAM OF GLOBAL COMMUNISM. THERE IS NO OTHER IDEA THAT CAN EFFECTIVELY COUNTER THE ONSLAUGHT OF CAPITAL FOR ANY LENGTH OF TIME AT THE REQUIRED LEVEL OF INTENSITY. IN ORDER FOR ANY SIGNIFICANT RELIEF AT ALL FOR THE VAST MASS OF PEOPLE ON THIS PLANET FROM THE UNIVERSALLY CONSTANT AND UTTERLY DESTRUCTIVE PRESENCE OF CAPITAL, THE DREAM OF GLOBAL COMMUNISM MUST BE REVIVED AND EXPANDED TO INCLUDE THE DESTRUCTION OF GLOBAL CAPITAL AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A REAL GLOBAL SOCIALIST STATE. THIS NEW STATE, THIS STATE WITH A SUBJECTIVITY, MUST BE CONTROLLED BY THE WILL OF THE VAST MASS OF PEOPLE ON THIS PLANET, FOR SOCIAL NEED AND THE SOCIAL GOOD. THIS PROJECT PRESUPPOSES THE ABOLISHING OF PROFIT AS THE MOTIVATING FORCE OF HISTORY, AS WELL AS THE ABOLISHING OF THE CAPITALIST STATE IN ANY FORM WHATSOEVER. END OF COMMUNIQUE.
Not the End
But that is not the final word. It is only one beginning. Here's another...
In their study, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Hardt and Negri state that it is war that has become the main obstacle to the emergence of a new global form of democracy organized by and around the multitude. They discuss ways in which war has become spatially and temporally unlimited, and how it has expanded to become both internal and external to the state. At the same time the arguments for war have been reorganized around fighting a “just” war against an “evil” enemy, a concept alien to modern realistic-political philosophy, which supposedly the modern state attempts to adhere to. (We realize that our conception of the state differs from the more familiar one being deployed by H&N here, but then, in other places in their work, they deploy something very similar to ours. Besides, we're uninterested in academic consistency, we want maximum effectiveness, whatever the expressions used.) Modernity, then, according to H&N’s critique, has been abandoned, or rather, put in permanent suspension pending the outcome of endless warfare. In this sense, H&N picture postmodern conceptions of the “clash of civilizations” as part of an essentially anti-modern attempt to prevent a new form of global democracy from coming into being.
In the next post we will examine what H&N's work has to teach us about this present situation of endless war, and how to struggle both against and within it to reach our final goal.
Video of Alex Callinicos and Jane Hardy at the 2012 International Socialist Journal Conference, discussing the crisis and its sources and the different strategies being deployed to solve it (or make it worse, depending on your point of view):
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green_glass_buddha
Deborah Méndez Wilson
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Comments
Bet you're right, of course, this constant state of war is the means by which people continue to be tied in some way--fear, "Oh, no, save us!"--to a state that has long ago ceased to be anything that cares whether they live or die. It's not even a machine really, just a way that global finance has of expressing its wishes, and stirring up the right sentiments in the right places to make sure the violent mess keep going.
I'm not sure if I'm as optimistic as Hardt and Negri about our chances on the other side of the coin. They seem to suggest in their books that the whole thing can be reversed, that that's what this intensification of violence at all levels, including domestically, is all about. We're going to have some kind of global government structure, it's just a matter of what kind. They seem to feel it's within our reach to have a global democracy for the vast mass of folks. I suppose that's true in terms of technology and the means. But look at what stands in the way......
Mobilization will have to be massive if people want to have some say. Whatever the case, though, they're right about one thing. People had better WAKE UP and get in there, or the system we do end up with will be terrifying. The generals and the banks will decide everything.
RATED
You're also right abou the uselessness of the middle class political structures in all this. They're little more than cyphers for the will of global finance, and their policy apparatus is easily manipulated and redirected from moment to moment. But there are already very big mobilizations all over the world against the terrifying future the creepy wannabe rulers have in mind.
When Naomi Klein talks about disaster capitalism, she doesn't see the endgame. The idea is that when a disaster strikes, or a crisis, or when one is caused, which is sometimes the case, you go in and take advantage of the situation. Force compliance and debt on people and gobble up their assets at greatly reduced prices. This also leaves you with control, of cities, of regions, of entire countries sometimes.
Now here comes a global economic crisis--not planned, no doubt, but no less a crisis and a disaster. And now the same thing is being done, but on a much, much grander scale. It's not "secret grove" stuff, hell no. Fuck, Jamie Dimon makes Kissinger and all his weird robed friends dancing around in a circle look like a bunch of pussies and posers. This is the REAL THING. And you're right, there's nothing subtle about it. Already replaced two elected governments in Europe--went well, didn't it? Well, it went. And it's going to keep going. I can't tell whether the politicians are party to this, or whether the speed and extremity of it has taken them by such surprise they don't know what to do. At any rate, they're not in control anymore. Just look at the video of Dimon I mentioned on my site, the one at money.com on the article about the connections between JPMorgan and Darfur, where he's talking and laughing about the importance of having a strong U.S. military. What's a banker doing having this discussion? Because he can say the things outright the president doesn't dare utter (might blow what's left of his "progressive" image). And anyway, Jamie knows who's in charge, even if there are some in Washington still flailing away at the illusion that it's them.
Chilling. Rated.
It's a series of interlocking institutions and state interests (notice, not whole states so much as certain parts of their apparatus that are useful at any one time to the interests of the most powerful players in the markets) that are making a bid for global governance. We've had a truly global economy for some time, but as you point out, it's the conditions created by the crisis that allow for this unprecendented move on democracy: replacing governments by technocratic fiat, manipulating baseline global market values like LIBOR and even the rate over at the Fed for that matter. Do you think anyone over at the Fed, even that group of indifferent, power-grasping assholes, would have dared to suggest giving the banks trillions at 0% before the crisis? It has facilitated a whole new level of criminality and a power grab like nothing this planet has ever seen.
During the Clinton administration, the US and a lot of Western Europe got involved in what used to be Yugoslavia to stop the genocide (a term I do not use lightly - I'm afraid this looked like the real thing, not what gets tossed around to demonize whomever one wants to target) of the Bosnian Muslims. You said that there is no such thing as an armed humanitarian intervention. Why doesn't that example qualify?
I'm not being argumentative here, I'm really asking. How do you suggest responding to what Milosevic was doing?
I'm not familiar with most of the authors you cite, so I can't comment on their work. I have reasons for suspecting that communism won't work, reasons that aren't about the corruptions represented by the Soviet oligarchy model, but there are, at least in theory, two reasons for examining it as a realistic possibility:
1. It's more moral than what we've got.
2. Capitalism isn't working. Money and power are rapidly concentrating more and more in the hands of a smaller and smaller population who ultimately and paradoxically destroy the creation of wealth in favor of narrowing its distribution. The path to power now takes more and more money because of how media works (and who owns it), which gives more and more of an advantage to those who already have money. I wish I saw a way of reversing this process, but so far I don't. One self-limiting factor I thought would accomplish this is the simple realization that businesses can't ultimately survive without customers and this process is bankrupting the ultimate source of business wealth: the customer base. Capital is, after all, only borrowed money, not profits, unless you're in banking. This simple realization is hardly realized anywhere, emphatically including in the White House. If the trend continues, and I see nothing stopping it, something will collapse. Actually, it's possible everything will collapse, because we're now in the bizarre position of having the extreme upper classes guarding the gashes in the Titanic to prevent their repair, I guess because they're looking forward to their end of the boat being lifted so much higher than the rest of the boat, not understanding that that means the damned thing is about to sink.
A tortured metaphor, but what the Hell.
I want to know how this works. I want to know where it goes. Revolution to get rid of corruption doesn't exactly have a favorable history. In too many instances, it leads to zealots who kill a whole lot of people. "Things can't be any worse" is rarely true. I want to know how this could play out ideally. What is a good outcome? What is a feasible way it could occur? How could we get there from here, and what does There look like?
I don't think that there is any one part of the system that can just collapse and "bring everything down," as people usually say. No. This is a global system of finance that protects itself quite well in those terms. Once you have a direct line to central banks, and you're talking about extracting trillions upon trillions in free money and putting the weight on state books, the social descent that results is a seemingly endless decline. One can see the whole of humanity sinking into barbarity. It happens through various circuitous routes on the other side of the books, so to speak (and we're living through the consequences, so there's no use in anyone denying that's the real-material effect anymore).
I'm very pessimistic about our chances actually. I think the dream of world communism is important because it counters the ever-persistent drive to concentrate more and more control in the hands of private capital. It's the only thing that has ever effectively challenged and even temporarily stymied the ideologies of the ruling capitalist classes.
As for the bankers, I can see what their game is alright. They've got it dialed in and the pols are more than willing. Grab a hatchet, friend, we've got a lot of cutting to do.
performance or
per server ence?ah? ha
Well, now it's really not. It's not Ours at all. It's Theirs, it belongs to the Rich, all of it. Was all along. Fooled ya.
Good post. Will watch for next part.
mrvoulezvous - To those who still want to believe in those fundamental fantasies, I think it's unfortunate that they refuse to recognize how it is impoverishing themselves and plunging the world further into economic chaos and more rounds of finance-war-finance-war-finance-war. They are complicit, whether they really see it or not. It's getting damn hard to believe they don't.
Also, I can see the discussion heading off in the direction of nationalism and an examination of its psychology--or maybe it's more appropriate to call it sociopathology, at this point, when you look at not only the economic real-material fallout, but the ecological side as well.
For a nice little demonstration of this attitude without all its usual apologies and excuses, for a naked version of it, I decided to offer the hash to that video themanhattankid recommended with Jamie Dimon, master of the universe, talking about the importance of a strong U.S. military.
It's about halfway down the page in this surprisingly revealing story, and it's titled "Dimon: US 'has a royal straight flush.'" Who is royal and who gets the flush, he doesn't say:
http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/11/markets/jpmorgan-petrochina-sudan-genocide/index.htm
But then, in recent history -- no empire has had to contend with planetary climate change and a global economy.
To question the international ruling order of bankers and generals takes real cojones. Hardt and Negri in particular of course, that old jail bird autonomist, have proven themselves. The multitude is indeed roused, and it is trying to decide exactly which course to take. Interesting you mention Egypt and how we are in a pause there. Tomatoes don't equal a policy, but it's a start, and a damn finely aimed one at that.
My own take is that this will be one fucking close call. Whether enough people can raise enough hell and cause enough ruckus to be able to shake the globalists loose from their too-high perch, or whether we will try and fail, and fall, remains to be seen. If it's the latter, say sayonara to every Freedom you ever held dear. These Creeps have already demonstrated what the "liberal" side of this sicko system will look like.
rate
But the unprecedented scale on which this version of empire is built--which should not simply be associated with the U.S.--is speeding up all these trends. What might have happened over many decades, or even centuries, in the case of previous imperial systems, is happening in a few years, a decade, tops. And what emerges is an all-out war for global control. This is not nation-state based, either, despite the misconception that seems to hold sway in Washington. Wall Street knows better, in this sense, they really know who and what represents power today. Capital flows are king, and that is not simply a matter of financialization. Not all flows are financialized, or weaponized. Much of the capital in the markets represents labor. And as the financialized elements become less and less effective at wielding and maintaining power, the balance shifts. This is where the multitude enters into power, in the most intimate and most effective sense. This is where we have a shot.
RATED****
http://www.flashrolls.com/arcade-games/Spank-The-Banker-Game.htm
You're right about sovereignty being an important point of focus, too. Look at how having a single economy, and single currency, in Europe, without ever seriously consdering a single power structure, has led to the ad-hoc strucutures, and rampant opportunism of the present. So Germany says this, and the ECB says that, and Italy responds accordingly...it's all nonsense. Money is being passed out of central banks and redirected to the institutions, and at the end of the day the indebted countries are even more indebted. This is private debts--or not even that, simply funding for present and future speculation--being put on the public books. Grotesque.
There was some attempt to mask the enormous imbalance in power built into the system with ill conceived treaties, but they either failed or the ones that succeeded only abetted the imbalance: the Maastricht treaty is only the most egregious example, a direct assault on sovereignty. It may seem strange for someone like myself, who agrees that there is a desperate need for global power structures, especially a taxing authority for the institutions, to be attacking the "troika" based on sovereignty claims, but there's no inconsistency. My attachment isn't to nationalism v. globalism--in fact I admit that global governance may be unworkable--but rather to democracy in a form that has real-material benefits for the vast mass of people.
I think the largest pay-off is likely to come from organizing women. Their exposure over the last four decades to feminist ideology has sensitized them to the amount of unpaid labor they do (which is part of the reason so many opt for single parenthood, as opposed to traditional marriage). They also have the ability to become extremely militant in a hurry when they have hungry kids.
When the next crash comes, it will be a doozy. One wonders whether the next time our overlords will be able to salvage themselves out of our deathstar econnomy. Somehow, I have my doubts.
old new lefty - True, true, and true. But one can't just sit around and wait for "something" to happen. That's like saying, the Marxist analysis of capital shows it has fatal internal contradictions that will lead inexorably to its demise, and then we'll all run into the streets and the revolution will be here.... Um, no, it doesn't work that way. Workers are the agents of history, and again, the entry is through all the cracks in the system, not just the big ones.
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OK, so you think a version of communism is the answer, which it may very well be.
That brings us to the next task:
Selling it.
So, what do the beginnings of a sales pitch look like? This isn't a capitalistic question, because I'm not talking about sales as in money, I'm talking about sales as in presenting a case.
In simple terms, though. Without using language that reminds people of nutcase conspiracy theories, or of failed revolutions, or of ivory-tower academics.
This isn't a challenge I'm trying to knock down. It's actually a challenge I'm willing to help you with, among other things because I'm still not clear what this will look like and I want to clarify it.
I understand this taste for decentralized revolution, but I think if there aren't any common concepts, just generalized malaise, nothing will be coordinated, and different factions will just alienate each other. Not an umbrella organization but an umbrella goal, with reasoning, and at least a vague idea of a goal that involves something other than mere destruction of the status quo.
Will SOMEBODY, ANYBODY, dare to throw a rock through the windows of Goldman? Will anyone dare to demonstrate without getting a required permit? Will anyone not go home when the cops tell them the demonstration is over?
Sheesh. We are doomed. At least in my lifetime.
r
Goldman Sax is not afraid of rocks through windows.
Nothing changes however unless there are bloodied heads on the front pages or the 21st century equivalent. Ask the civil rights marchers and lunch counter sitters.
When we have to ask permission to demonstrate or assemble and then we go home when the permission slip says so, then nothing changes. It is the way of a soft dictatorship. It is the illusion of being free.
When 200,000 screamers occupy wall street during the rush hour without permission, carrying a few red flags then we get attention - it is at least a start.
Regards.
I think that people need to decide for themselves, especially in the long term and with regards to the big picture. A system for social need will have to be established, in the end, or there'll be nothing. People will know when and where they see it being brought into being because they'll be doing/directing it...
I'd also like to see a return to 60% tax rates on the upper two tiered income groups and I'd really like to see a financial transactions tax (which already exists in several major markets--Hollande is pushing through a rise in France's version right now)...
I'm not suggesting doing nothing. What scares these people is two things: Legal accountability and financial accountability. In other words, prosecution for what they and their ilk have done and either the regulatory climate or the market itself making life a lot less lucrative.
Boko,
What you're suggesting actually makes a great deal of sense. So, the tax structure changes, the regulatory structure changes, how we handle banking changes, we start supporting small family farms instead of agribusiness. I'm good with all of that. I basically think that banks have screwed us up more than anything.
However, it sounds like what in high school debating we used to call a Negative Repairs case - fix the system instead of throwing it out. This doesn't sound comparatively radical. Is this transitional or are you looking for an end result where businesses still are privately owned and make profits?
I'm not opposed to anything you've laid out, and I'm in business. (Tiny business, but still...) So now I want to know where you want to go.
I agree more than completely about negotiating with drug companies. That is the biggest indicator of how badly they've failed us. That's just irresponsible, corrupt, and generally insane.
I find the persistent part in your comments here and elsewhere about reviving the small family farm to be interesting. What to do about the reactionary culture that's developed in rural America is not a question that's even asked in progressive circles anymore. They just take it as a given (and, I think, they sympathize to some extent).
It's not just a question of culture, is it? The economic basis of it is the collapse of small family farming, and the rise of big agra business plantations--might as well call them what they are. Alongside of this is the growth in what should be considered a patronage network. The only real businesses are agra, big box retail and small stuff that feeds off the rest. It's a WalMart economy. Until that is broken up, the reactionary stuff will continue to grow.
1. the proposal to ringfence the banks would bring finance back into line with social need by eliminating much of it and sucking in the wealth represented by it. it's not productive capital, in any sense, and that's why the bain-or-not-to-bain argument is so deceptive...there is no such thing as good finance capital...
2. taxing the upper tiers at 60, 70, 80, or a 100%! only means drawing down class power, it's not just about the money, it's not even primarily about the money, and until this is done, nothing and i mean nothing will be possible that doesn't serve big profit and big upper class interests...
3. using some of the money obtained through 1 and 2 for a renewal in america's rural areas is a smart idea, one that is often skipped over by too-smart pseudo-leftists that have written the hinterlands off just because it doesn't suit their bourgeois political interests...and yes, b, you're very right, the problem with kansas is not all the god talk, it's all the money talking down the line, a very narrow line of a few super-rich interests...diversify, man diversify...
4. drug prices are high and the gatekeepers are there to keep people aware of how their lives depend on an industry that is set on keeping that situation in place...people in 'merica (and increasingly everywhere) are threatened on a daily basis by a drug industry that knows they hold the key to survival for many millions...this is the real face of capital, and not the nice smiley joes and janes on the nightly news, m'merry colonists...and nice addition to end subsidies, b, the big sticking point for the poorest countries in the frozen wto...
5. renewables must be increased to stem the bloody spout of petrodollars round the globe, and not just to stem the bloody torture of our dear earth.
wanted to make that clear. on my own note, i'd take up where skinny dave left off about public funded elections...another part of citizens united that doesn't get much media play is how it allows superpacs and third-party scaries to spend huge amounts hiring volunteers and staff. basically, the two parties of big business are paying large numbers of people to say involved in the dying bourgeois political process. otherwise they're running virtual campaigns. much of the dough is going to create the illusion of participation. conclusion: the political class is increasingly isolated, and afraid. yeah.
So...a "turn to the left" and another "turn to the right" are definitely implied in what we've been saying.
Yes, alright, you got me, you Leninist.
heh-heh-heh
and on your day, a little ontology...
i've been thinking about this, and, i think that finance, enery, farming, and other industries are objectifications of the central thing itself alright: capital. it's not all about the economic indices, or the market movements this way or that on any given day... it's about the way finance, and energy, and farming, and healthcare, and all big industry is done, and the way of life that supports--or doesn't. it's about the power over LIFE wielded by these industries, and their institutions, and how that is used to torture, and cajole, and threaten, and extort. this is what zizek and others mean when they talk about the importance of how ideology constructs subjectivity. and this is what we mean by structure: the way in which people act, and how it gets organized. a social-organic system for social need would construct subjectivity from the vast mass of people instead, for the vast mass of people, and it would produce very different ways of life...
biopower. hmf. quite a concept.
As for the ecological question, we need to have a twenty year horizon, tops, and then outlaw gas vehicles. I don't see any reason to make anything other than electric cars beyond that point. Once renewables are used to generate most of the power, we're home. All this "hybrid" stuff is bullshit.
I think of 'being-at-war-with-the-state' as a form of subjectivity constructed by the system itself. It doesn't imply any voluntaristic violence, or require anything voluntaristic on anyone's part at all. It's the Self of global-capital.