Long Sunday

working days

(What follows is by Chris Okane, a graduate student in social and political thought.  His blog is here.)

As the punditry weighs in on how Hilary Clinton's inevitability became evitable, Clinton has responded in a number of desperate ways.  The brash attacks have got the headlines- as they always do- but I want to focus on her new commercial running in Ohio, as it is far more illuminating for those of us interested in the politics that underlie neo-liberal posturing.

I believe Clinton's new ad was introduced following her speech in Youngstown, a steel town, which has been particularly devastated by the effects of globalization.  This setting reflects the Ad's purpose:  to appeal to the traditional democratic base of lower income workers i.e. the working class.  But the content of the ad backfires because Clinton's attempt to identify with working class is made palpably ludicrous, first by her patronizing empathy, then by the way she identifies with their lives:

Abstract: Marx and Individualism

Here's the abstract to a paper submission to "Marx's Vitalism and Its Relation to Individualism"

Topic: Marx and Philosophy Society fifth annual conference Final call for papers

Conference Title: Is there a Marxian philosophy?

Location: London, Saturday 24th May 2008

Keynote speaker: Andrew Feenberg (Simon Fraser University)

Marx had a theory of individualism that is a surprise for many people to learn about. His belief was that the crowning achievement of the proletarian movement would not be the production of a socialist state that would organize society's product in such a way as to benefit the greatest number of people possible, thus producing a picture of Marx as a radical or revolutionary utilitarian, but rather that the dynamics of development and struggle that characterized modern bourgeois society would result in a situation where, for the first time, real individuals would be created that were liberated from the restrictions of class existence. Membership in a class, Marx believed, led to the creation of what he called "average individuals"; individuals who didn't really have their own individuality at their disposal, but rather people who had to live out the life of an average member of a class, taking on the opinions, the world view, the newspapers, the popular beliefs associated with a particular class, rather than developing their own and independent ideas and understandings of the world around them. Precisely the point of the proletarian movement was to create a situation in which individuals were created who were not defined by their class position and by membership in a class. This paper will explore Marx's theory of individualism and its relationship to his peculiar brand of vitalism. [end of abstract]

Everyone wish me luck!

hacia la multitud

Because it seems the thing to do (plenty more here), and having been a little more critical over on Posthegemony, a snippet from Pablo Neruda, specifically (almost) the end of his monumental Canto General:

serious, serious problem

The site we all know and love, marxists.org, is under serious, life-threatening attack, possibly - seemingly - directed by the Chinese Government.

In early November we came under sustained denial of service attack from Internet hosts in China attempting to exploit a misconfiguration in our server's operating system. The nature and origin of the attack, our previous history with the PRC, and the experience of others suggest that this maybe politically motivated and directed by the Chinese government. Protecting ourselves necessitated rebuilding part of the kernel and rebooting the system remotely. The failure of the system to properly boot into the new kernel caused a prolonged outage as we scrambled to find someone with the necessary access to get the system back into the previous configuration.

While the attacks continued and greatly degraded MIA performance, we were understandably cautious about rebuilding the kernel and trying again. On January 15, the server became unresponsive and we asked for it to be remotely rebooted, taking the opportunity to bring it up with the new kernel.

While this alleviated the previous issue, it seems to have uncovered another, more serious, problem with our CPU that causes random errors (machine check exceptions) and cause the system to reboot.

Each time the system reboots, it causes our RAID storage system to reinitialize and rebuild, a lengthy process that severely degrades performance. To make matters worse, the redundant disk in the array seems to be failing.

As if that weren't bad enough, while attempting to make arrangements to buy a new server, we learned that our colocation facility will be closing on February 1, leaving MIA literally homeless.

At the moment, our redundant disk is back online and we are rebuilding the array to protect against data loss on the server. We also have offsite backups of all MIA content should the worst come to pass. We are furiously searching for new hosting space, but our data transfer needs (approximately 1.3TB a month) make this a very difficult choice compared with our previous non-profit host.

The bottom line: there is a significant probability that we will not be able to find and deploy an acceptable solution in time to meet the February 1 lights-out date. This means that the MIA will be off the air. We will make every attempt to bridge the gap with the help of our dedicated mirror operators though we may need to stop serving some of our more "expensive" content such as MP3s and PDFs. There is also a chance that our ultimate solution may require us to make a long-term evaluation of the type of content we serve and make things like PDFs available via alternate distribution channels (e.g. BitTorrent). However, despite our recent litany of seemingly fatal problems, the MIA remains a strong organization with a wealth of content, committed to providing the premiere electronic library of Marxist writings. Despite the political, technical, or economic pressures, rest assured that we will find a way to keep these works available to the world.

Now, look. I'll admit to something of a fascination with the PRC. Veteran blogtypes even know the long form of my pseudo-handle. I am fully aware of the human-rights abuses, of the not-actually existing socialism of the place. I've been there, I've seen it with my own eyes. But seriously, if this is true, forget it, forget my half-affection, the grain of salt with which I read all the western critiques of the place. I'm going to burn the fucking Little Red Book I bought there. I am going to forget semi-plans to figure out the viability of attending the Beijing Olympics. My university has a bigtime exchange agreement with several universities in China; I was just today looking at the brochures, thinking about taking part. No more!!!! Marxists.org is one of the good things in the world. What someone else might call a "category killer" of the left internet - I use it on an almost daily basis as just about everything is there.

Seriously, you've driven me to it:

(democratic?) multitudes good and bad

The question regarding democracy is whether or not we can imagine an anti-democratic, or better non-democratic, politics.  In other words, is politics tied to democracy, or can it be imagined beyond democracy?

(A supplementary question might then be whether or not we can and should imagine a beyond to politics itself: a post-politics.)

The prevailing consensus would seem to be that politics is unimaginable without democracy, that it is only democracy that opens up the possibility for politics.  Without democracy, all we are left with is (variously, or perhaps in combination) power, administration, fanaticism, hatred.

Such is the view of Ernesto Laclau, but also, for instance, Jacques Rancière, who writes:

There is politics, the art and science of politics, because there is democracy.  Politics is encountered as already present in the factuality of democracy, in the very strangeness of the combination of words which joins the unassignable quantity of the demos to the indefinable action of kratein.  (On the Shores of Politics 94)

Rancière traces the mixed fortunes of both politics and democracy from its invention in Athens to the current "end of politics." 

Schmitt and Mao

Spike Lee’s Inside Man is about a bank robbery, and one of the many twists in the film is that the chairman of the bank being robbed, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) derived his initial wealth from collaboration with the Nazis during the war. These tainted beginnings are ones which apparently continue to haunt him throughout his life—leading him, on the one hand, to devote himself to philanthropy and humanitarianism in an attempt to assuage his guilt and, on the other hand, to keep the physical evidence of his wartime complicity locked away in a secret safe deposit box in the main branch of the bank. The contents of that safe deposit box, in turn, become a crucial fulcrum point around which revolve questions of the legitimacy of each of the principle players in the drama—including not only bank chairman Case and the head robber (Clive Owen), but also the principle detective (Denzel Washington) assigned to negotiate with the bank robbers, as well as the mysterious power broker (Jodie Foster) hired by Case to try to protect his interests.

The central question posed by Spike Lee’s film, therefore, is an ethical one—in effect, the film asks whether there are situations in which the ethics of robbing a bank might supercede those of founding and running the bank in the first place. In framing in the film in this way, Lee (or script-writer Russell Gewirtz) may have been inspired by Brecht’s famous rhetorical question in The Three-Penny Opera: “What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”

Partisan of No Part

(The following is a guest post by Nate Hawthorne, who authors the blog, What in the hell...?)

In 1972 Mario Tronti presented a paper dealing with Carl Schmitt at the University of Turin. Whether beginning or example, this presentation is of a conceptual turn in which "Schmittian elements became part of a thoroughgoing 'Marxist critique of Marxism' which sought (...) to put a practical theory of power squarely at the centre of revolutionary theorizing." (Muller, A Dangerous Mind, 179.) The Marxisti Schmittiani exemplify the problematic relationship of "Karl und Carl" which Tronti later characterizes, albeit not critically enough, as foundational to political theory.

There are several aspects in Schmitt's Theory of the Partisan resonant with the sensibility of operaismo and subsequent developments which take Tronti's early work as a touchstone. One such similarity is the relationship posited between resistance and constituted power wherein the former forces the latter to attempt to render resistance productive of innovation in the forms of power-over. In response to the partisan's irregularity, there are produced "new concepts of warfare (...) along with a new doctrine of war and politics" (3), such as that embodied in the Prussian Landsturm edict of 1813. A similar point can be seen in the chapter on the working day in volume one of Capital, concepts and law are produced in response to working class struggle. Technology as well. "The partisan too participates in the development - in the progress - of modern technology and its science." (54.) Again there is a Marxian parallel: "It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working-class.” (Capital v1, ch15.)

Karl (und Carl)

May 5th is Karl Marx's birthday.  Happy birthday Uncle Karl! 

In the trajectories of blogweaving, and by way of an invitation sent out rather late, what would it mean to assemble a conversation not at Marx's funeral but at his birthday?   I'll leave it for Craig to post here about (the other) Carl.

Resistance with irony

The following is a guest post by Brett Neilson, blogger at the irregular Life During Wartime.

1. ‘Triumphant global finance capital/world trade can only be resisted with irony.’ I am simultaneously drawn and worried by this claim from Spivak’s 2000 essay ‘From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom, What’s Left of Theory.’ Perhaps this is because the work of irony is never done. Reaching on the one hand toward insubordinate refusal and on the other toward an unbearable ontological lightness, irony holds forth a promise it cannot keep. As such, it provides no chart of programmatic action--no twelve steps for overcoming global capitalism. Its tactics are inevitably polluted with ideological longings that, as Spivak’s teacher Paul de Man points out, it can know but never quite overcome.

Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world

Is this precisely the impossibility that drives Spivak to rewrite her observations on reading Marx after Derrida so many times?

The insane mechanics of the 'fear ritual' of capitalism

The following is a guest post by Aren Airuza, blogger at the moving going somewhere?.

I've spent the last week trying to decide whether to engage––as may be expected on a 'literary' blog––in 'close reading' in a philosophical/literary manner, or to get eclectic on your asses, and tie some questions Spivak asks to questions I'd like people to think more about.  I ended up going with the latter, and at length.  But first, prefatory caveats.  Part of the oddness of my response to "Scattered Speculations", I think, is that capitalism has never seemed that coherent or smooth to me.  It has always seemed crazy.  Now, I am not a scholar of Marx, and I lack skills in parsing the distinctions in debates about use-value, exchange-value and surplus-value unless they are explained to me very slowly.  But it still seems 'intuitive' that capitalism runs on crisis.  There's an interview in Hatred of Capitalism where Jack Smith calls capitalism (or rather, landlordism, but he saw landlordism as an extension of capitalism) a fear ritual, completely counterintuitive:  "We have to spend the rest of our time struggling against the uses we make of our money against us."  This might be about antagonism rather than indeterminacy, I know, but I will come back to Jack Smith later.  (I also committed to blogging against heteronormativity today, and later I'll try to address that in regard to value.)  What I get from "Scattered Speculations" is yet another insight into the precise mechanics of that insanity; and, more importantly, the role of imperialism and 'culture' in that mechanics.