Marx revisitado na crise do séc. XXI

Documentário imperdível. Com Žižek, Rancière, Sloterdijk, Negri, inter alia.

"Marx Reloaded" is a cultural documentary that examines the relevance of German socialist and philosopher Karl Marx's ideas for understanding the global economic and financial crisis of 2008—09. The crisis triggered the deepest global recession in 70 years and prompted the US government to spend more than 1 trillion dollars in order to rescue its banking system from collapse. Today the full implications of the crisis in Europe and around the world still remain unclear. Nevertheless, should we accept the crisis as an unfortunate side-effect of the free market? Or is there another explanation as to why it happened and its likely effects on our society, our economy and our whole way of life?

Today a new generation of philosophers, artists and political activists are returning to Marx's ideas in order to try to make sense of the crisis and to consider whether a world without or beyond capitalism is possible. Is the severity of the ongoing recession a sign that the capitalist system's days are numbered? Ironically, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, could it be that communism might provide the solution to the growing economic and environmental challenges facing the planet?

Written and directed by Jason Barker – himself an experienced writer, lecturer, translator and doctor of philosophy – "Marx Reloaded" comprises interviews with leading thinkers on Marxism, including those at the forefront of a popular revival in Marxist and communist ideas. The film also includes interviews with leading skeptics of this revival as well as light-hearted animation sequences which follow Marx's adventures through the matrix of his own ideas.

Interviews with leading experts include: Norbert Bolz, Micha Brumlik, John Gray, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Nina Power, Jacques Rancière, Peter Sloterdijk, Alberto Toscano, Slavoj Zizek.

Sloterdijk, lapidar

Peter Sloterdijk, autor de Crítica da Razão Cínica, aborda o tema "Ni Société, ni religion". Fundamental para a compreensão de uma modernidade que não se deseja pós-moderna.

A longa noite da luta

Jacques Rancière, magistral:

12M e 15M

Será que os da dita 'Geração à Rasca' já ouviram falar do movimento autonomista (de Negri et alii?). Uni-vos, precários. Pensem, teorizem, reflictam. Agir não é vir para a rua gritar ao som de palhaços como o Jel.
A causa é justa, mas a massa encefálica é fraca...

Giorgio Agamben, a ontologia do Estado e a essência da 'soberania'

Leitura fundamental: aqui e aqui.

Acabar com uma ilusão

Toni Negri - Il n'y a pas d'évolution - Conférence por www-colline-fr

Zizek e o capitalismo chinês

De um blogue a seguir atentamente. Sobre o que pensa o Pensador -- não o Mário Crespo -- do momento -- e que será mais do que o "deste" momento histórico -- sobre um aspecto assaz "curioso": Slavoj Zizek: Zizek e a China.

Antonio Negri

Excelente documentário sobre um dos mais brilhantes e corajosos intelectuais vivos:

(Over the years, few intellectuals have experienced as much admiration and hatred as Antonio Negri. His international best-selling book, Empire, a critical analysis of the new global economy coauthored with Michael Hardt, was hailed as a new manifesto for the 21st century, and turned Negri into a leading spokesperson for the international anti-globalization movement. Antonio Negri: A Revolt that Never Ends profiles the controversial life and times of this important moral and political philosopher, militant, prisoner, refugee, and so-called “enemy of the state.” It traces his roots in the radical left-wing movements in Italy during the 60s and 70s, illustrated through incredible archival footage of strikes, factory occupations, terrorist actions, violent street confrontations, and government trials of dissidents. During these tumultuous decades Negri spent ten years in prison and fourteen years in Parisian exile, where he contributed to philosophical debates with authors such as Gilles Deleuze. The film features interviews with Negri (conducted following his April 2003 release from confinement), public speaking appearances, plus commentary from his coauthor Michael Hardt, and Italian and French colleagues. Antonio Negri explores this visionary theoretician’s lifelong political struggle, now being expressed in works of contemporary relevance such as Empire and its sequel, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, a powerful intellectual project in protest of the new global order.)

Tragédia, farsa, realidade...

(Anti-)aggiornamento (PT)

Já decorreram seis meses desde a minha última entrada.
O silêncio nem sempre é de ouro, mas permite, ou concita, uma maior abertura à contemplação e à maturação. Assim se espera.
As coisas neste país transformaram-se de forma indizível, para (o) pior, e são meramente confirmativas de que tudo irá, por força das "coisas", permanecer inalterado. O mundo ultrapassa-nos. Nós ultrapassamos o -- ou ultrapassamo-nos ao -- mundo.
É mister dizer. Intervir. Pronunciar o verbo que antecede o agir com norte.
Outrora escrevera apenas em inglês, por razões de proximidade ao meu "público" diminuto e aos temas de natureza transcultural que abordava.
Embora não querendo abandonar as metas que determinaram a criação deste blogue, sinto-me obrigado a mudar de agulhas em pleno trânsito, para que possa dedicar alguma atenção a áreas da maior premência: as brutais crises que ora afectam Portugal e a Europa.
Encontramo-nos numa encruzilhada decisiva e cada ser pensante tem o dever de tentar reflectir sobre o mar de mutações que a todos ameaça afogar.
É inteiramente natural que, face ao enunciado, comece a redigir este blogue tembém em português. Sempre que pertinente, todavia, publicarei versões bilíngues de futuros textos.

(Anti-)aggiornamento (EN)

It has been nearly six months since my last post.
Silence is not always golden, but is does render one more open to contemplation and inner growth. Hopefully.
Things have undergone untold transformations in my country, for the worse (and worst), only to confirm that everything shall, per force, remain the same. The world is too much for us. We are too much for the world.
It is time to speak up. To intervene. To propound the verb that must precede coherent action.
Heretofore, I have written solely in English, for reasons of proximity, both to my diminutive "audience" and to topics of a cross-cultural nature.
While not wishing to abandon the aims that led to the creation of this blog, I feel obligated to switch lanes in mid-traffic, to delve into other areas of concern: the enormous crises which are affecting Portugal and Europe. We are at a decisive crossroads, and each and every thinking person has the duty to (attempt to) reflect on the sea of change that is drowning us all.
It is only natural, as such, to begin blogging also in Portuguese. Whenever pertinent, however, I shall present bilingual versions of future posts originally written in that language.

No choice

2011. Another year. A step forward or one more wasted moment in a time without momentum?

Let's be frank. Things are going to get much worse before they can become any better.

Europe is at a crossroads, dangling over a financial abyss and a political crevasse. 

China is moving, leaps and bounds, through uncertain paths towards 'greatness'.

The US is torn between a progressive, but timid, leadership, and the constraints of a feckless population and the incredible greed of corporate America.

The rest of the world tags along, amidst sweat shops, growing inequality and emulations of the worst that capitalism has to offer.

Since the tribulations of 2008, we have been living on borrowed time, borrowed money, borrowed hope. 

We are feeling the full force of the foreseen -- and the unforeseen -- ramifications of the sub-prime crash, a veritable whirlpool which has pulled in sovereign finances, government expenditure, private debts and global confidence.

Less income, higher taxes, lower social benefits, more unemployment and greater hardship. In a word: more poverty. In an age of plenty, the poor get poorer, the middle class is impoverished and the well-to-do become richer.

We know how all this happened. We understand the direct and efficient causes, as Aristotle would say. But we do not fully grasp the depths of the root problem: capitalism in and by itself, as a system where markets are kept unregulated to satisfy the non-productive generation of wealth.
Speculative capitalism plainly counteracts the positive features of the keynesian model of socialised market economies. The real 'third way', the blending and trading-off between the State and free enterprise, has all but been replaced by the 'invisible hand' of market 'forces'.
This development, brought along by the bullish 1990's and early 2000's, reenacts, as if by déjà vu, the errors of the 1890's, 1920's, 1970's and 1980's.
When will we learn to avoid the same mistakes?
When will we see that a model that breathes on cyclical crises, and has become totally dematerialised in a financial Alice in Wonderland, is alienated from the palpable world, from the production of real value?
When will we recognize that capitalism, in its current stage of 'evolution', encourages the multiplication of parasitic investment and the accruing of profit beyond the 'realities' of the 'real' economy?
We should stop being complacent and all-accepting of the 'inevitabilities' of the status quo.
We must do something, each and every one of us, to start a movement for change. Transforming social and economic systems in a peaceful and democratic fashion is the ideal rite of passage for a truly civilised epoch.
Are we up to the challenge of belonging to such a brave new world?
We have no choice. As the Orator pointed out: "Cuiusvis hominis est errare, nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare." (Anyone can err, but only the fool persists in his fault.)
I shall return to this issue shortly.
Meanwhile, happy new year!

The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer:

Mandatory reading, by one of the world's most important thinkers:

Solomon's House: Utopia

Francis Bacon, New Atlantis (1627):

"God bless thee, my son; I will give thee the greatest jewel I have. For I will impart unto thee, for the love of God and men, a relation of the true state of Salomon's House. Son, to make you know the true state of Salomon's House, I will keep this order. First, I will set forth unto you the end of our foundation. Secondly, the preparations and instruments we have for our works. Thirdly, the several employments and functions whereto our fellows are assigned. And fourthly, the ordinances and rites which we observe.
"The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.
"The preparations and instruments are these: We have large and deep caves of several depths; the deepest are sunk 600 fathoms; and some of them are digged and made under great hills and mountains; so that if you reckon together the depth of the hill and the depth of the cave, they are, some of them, above three miles deep. For we find that the depth of a hill and the depth of a cave from the flat are the same thing; both remote alike from the sun and heaven's beams, and from the open air. These caves we call the lower region. And we use them for all coagulations, indurations, refrigerations, and conservations of bodies. We use them likewise for the imitation of natural mines and the producing also of new artificial metals, by compositions and materials which we use and lay there for many years. We use them also sometimes (which may seem strange) for curing of some diseases, and for prolongation of life, in some hermits that choose to live there, well accommodated of all things necessary, and indeed live very long; by whom also we learn many things.
"We have burials in several earths, where we put divers cements, as the Chinese do their porcelain. But we have them in greater variety, and some of them more fine. We also have great variety of composts and soils, for the making of the earth fruitful.
"We have high towers, the highest about half a mile in height, and some of them likewise set upon high mountains, so that the vantage of the hill with the tower is in the highest of them three miles at least. And these places we call the upper region, account the air between the high places and the low as a middle region. We use these towers, according to their several heights and situations, for insulation, refrigeration, conservation, and for the view of divers meteors -- as winds, rain, snow, hail, and some of the fiery meteors also. And upon them in some places are dwellings of hermits, whom we visit sometimes and instruct what to observe.
"We have great lakes, both salt and fresh, whereof we have use for the fish and fowl. We use them also for burials of some natural bodies, for we find a difference in things buried in earth, or in air below the earth, and things buried in water. We have also pools, of which some do strain fresh water out of salt, and others by art do turn fresh water into salt. We have also some rocks in the midst of the sea, and some bays upon the shore for some works, wherein are required the air and vapor of the sea. We have likewise violent streams and cataracts, which serve us for many motions; and likewise engines for multiplying and enforcing of winds to set also on divers motions.
"We have also a number of artificial wells and fountains, made in imitation of the natural sources and baths, as tincted upon vitriol, sulphur, steel, brass, lead, nitre, and other minerals; and again, we have little wells for infusions of many things, where the waters take the virtue quicker and better than in vessels or basins. And among them we have a water, which we call water of paradise, being by that we do it made very sovereign for health and prolongation of life.
"We have also great and spacious houses, where we imitate and demonstrate meteors -- as snow, hail, rain, some artificial rains of bodies and not of water, thunders, lightnings; also generations of bodies in air -- as frogs, flies, and divers others.
"We have also certain chambers, which we call chambers of health, where we qualify the air as we think good and proper for the cure of divers diseases and preservation of health.
"We have also fair and large baths, of several mixtures, for the cure of diseases, and the restoring of man's body from arefaction; and others for the confirming of it in strength of sinews, vital parts, and the very juice and substance of the body.
"We have also large and various orchards and gardens, wherein we do not so much respect beauty as variety of ground and soil, proper for divers trees and herbs, and some very spacious, where trees and berries are set, whereof we make divers kinds of drinks, beside the vineyards. In these we practise likewise all conclusions of grafting, and inoculating, as well of wild-trees as fruit-trees, which produceth many effects. And we make by art, in the same orchards and gardens, trees and flowers, to come earlier or later than their seasons, and to come up and bear more speedily than by their natural course they do. We make them also by art greater much than their nature; and their fruit greater and sweeter, and of differing taste, smell, color, and figure, from their nature. And many of them we so order as that they become of medicinal use.
"We have also means to make divers plants rise by mixtures of earths without seeds, and likewise to make divers new plants, differing from the vulgar, and to make one tree or plant turn into another.
"We have also parks, and enclosures of all sorts, of beasts and birds; which we use not only for view or rareness, but likewise for dissections and trials, that thereby may take light what may be wrought upon the body of man. Wherein we find many strange effects: as continuing life in them, though divers parts, which you account vital, be perished and taken forth; resuscitating of some that seem dead in appearance, and the like. We try also all poisons, and other medicines upon them, as well of chirurgery as physic. By art likewise we make them greater or smaller than their kind is, and contrariwise dwarf them and stay their growth; we make them more fruitful and bearing than their kind is, and contrariwise barren and not generative. Also we make them differ in color, shape, activity, many ways. We find means to make commixtures and copulations of divers kinds, which have produced many new kinds, and them not barren, as the general opinion is. We make a number of kinds of serpents, worms, flies, fishes of putrefaction, whereof some are advanced (in effect) to be perfect creatures, like beasts or birds, and have sexes, and do propagate. Neither do we this by chance, but we know beforehand of what matter and commixture, what kind of those creatures will arise.
"We have also particular pools where we make trials upon fishes, as we have said before of beasts and birds.
"We have also places for breed and generation of those kinds of worms and flies which are of special use; such as are with you your silkworms and bees.
"I will not hold you long with recounting of our brewhouses, bake-houses, and kitchens, where are made divers drinks, breads, and meats, rare and of special effects. Wines we have of grapes, and drinks of other juice, of fruits, of grains, and of roots, and of mixtures with honey, sugar, manna, and fruits dried and decocted; also of the tears or wounding of trees and of the pulp of canes. And these drinks are of several ages, some to the age or last of forty years. We have drinks also brewed with several herbs and roots and spices; yea, with several fleshes and white meats; whereof some of the drinks are such as they are in effect meat and drink both, so that divers, especially in age, do desire to live with them with little or no meat or bread. And above all we strive to have drinks of extreme thin parts, to insinuate into the body, and yet without all biting, sharpness, or fretting; insomuch as some of them put upon the back of your hand, will with a little stay pass through to the palm, and yet taste mild to the mouth. We have also waters, which we ripen in that fashion, as they become nourishing, so that they are indeed excellent drinks, and many will use no other. Bread we have of several grains, roots, and kernels; yea, and some of flesh, and fish, dried; with divers kinds of leavings and seasonings; so that some do extremely move appetites, some do nourish so as divers do live of them, without any other meat, who live very long. So for meats, we have some of them so beaten, and made tender, and mortified, yet without all corrupting, as a weak heat of the stomach will turn them into good chilus, as well as a strong heat would meat otherwise prepared. We have some meats also and bread, and drinks, which, taken by men, enable them to fast long after; and some other, that used make the very flesh of men's bodies sensibly more hard and tough, and their strength far greater than otherwise it would be.
"We have dispensatories or shops of medicines; wherein you may easily think, if we have such variety of plants, and living creatures, more than you have in Europe (for we know what you have), the simples, drugs, and ingredients of medicines, must likewise be in so much the greater variety. We have them likewise of divers ages, and long fermentations. And for their preparations, we have not only all manner of exquisite distillations, and separations, and especially by gentle heats, and percolations through divers strainers, yea, and substances; but also exact forms of composition, whereby they incorporate almost as they were natural simples.
"We have also divers mechanical arts, which you have not; and stuffs made by them, as papers, linen, silks, tissues, dainty works of feathers of wonderful lustre, excellent dyes, and many others, and shops likewise as well for such as are not brought into vulgar use among us, as for those that are. For you must know, that of the things before recited, many of them are grown into use throughout the kingdom, but yet, if they did flow from our invention, we have of them also for patterns and principals.
"We have also furnaces of great diversities, and that keep great diversity of heats; fierce and quick, strong and constant, soft and mild, blown, quiet, dry, moist, and the like. But above all we have heats, in imitation of the sun's and heavenly bodies' heats, that pass divers inequalities, and as it were orbs, progresses, and returns whereby we produce admirable effects. Besides, we have heats of dungs, and of bellies and maws of living creatures and of their bloods and bodies, and of hays and herbs laid up moist, of lime unquenched, and such like. Instruments also which generate heat only by motion. And farther, places for strong insulations; and, again, places under the earth, which by nature or art yield heat. These divers heats we use as the nature of the operation which we intend requireth.
"We have also perspective houses, where we make demonstrations of all lights and radiations and of all colors; and out of things uncolored and transparent we can represent unto you all several colors, not in rainbows, as it is in gems and prisms, but of themselves single. We represent also all multiplications of light, which we carry to great distance, and make so sharp as to discern small points and lines. Also all colorations of light: all delusions and deceits of the sight, in figures, magnitudes, motions, colors; all demonstrations of shadows. We find also divers means, yet unknown to you, of producing of light, originally from divers bodies. We procure means of seeing objects afar off, as in the heaven and remote places; and represent things near as afar off, and things afar off as near; making feigned distances. We have also helps for the sight far above spectacles and glasses in use; we have also glasses and means to see small and minute bodies, perfectly and distinctly; as the shapes and colors of small flies and worms, grains, and flaws in gems which cannot otherwise be seen, observations in urine and blood not otherwise to be seen. We make artificial rainbows, halos, and circles about light. We represent also all manner of reflections, refractions, and multiplications of visual beams of objects.
"We have also precious stones, of all kinds, many of them of great beauty and to you unknown, crystals likewise, and glasses of divers kind; and among them some of metals vitrificated, and other materials, besides those of which you make glass. Also a number of fossils and imperfect minerals, which you have not. Likewise loadstones of prodigious virtue, and other rare stones, both natural and artificial.
"We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.
"We have also perfume-houses, wherewith we join also practices of taste. We multiply smells which may seem strange: we imitate smells, making all smells to breathe out of other mixtures than those that give them. We make divers imitations of taste likewise, so that they will deceive any man's taste. And in this house we contain also a confiture-house, where we make all sweatmeats, dry and moist, and divers pleasant wines, milks, broths, and salads, far in greater variety than you have.
"We have also engine-houses, where are prepared engines and instruments for all sorts of motions. There we imitate and practise to make swifter motions than any you have, either out of your muskets or any engine that you have; and to make them and multiply them more easily and with small force, by wheels and other means, and to make them stronger and more violent than yours are, exceeding your greatest cannons and basilisks. We represent also ordnance and instruments of war and engines of all kinds; and likewise new mixtures and compositions of gunpowder, wild-fires burning in water and unquenchable, also fire-works of all variety, both for pleasure and use. We imitate also flights of birds; we have some degrees of flying in the air. We have ships and boats for going under water and brooking of seas, also swimming-girdles and supporters. We have divers curious clocks and other like motions of return, and some perpetual motions. We imitate also motions of living creatures by images of men, beasts, birds, fishes, and serpents; we have also a great number of other various motions, strange for equality, fineness, and subtilty.
"We have also a mathematical-house, where are represented all instruments, as well of geometry as astronomy, exquisitely made.
"We have also houses of deceits of the senses, where we represent all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures and illusions, and their fallacies. And surely you will easily believe that we, that have so many things truly natural which induce admiration, could in a world of particulars deceive the senses if we would disguise those things, and labor to make them more miraculous. But we do hate all impostures and lies, insomuch as we have severely forbidden it to all our fellows, under pain of ignominy and fines, that they do not show any natural work or thing adorned or swelling, but only pure as it is, and without all affectation of strangeness.
"These are, my son, the riches of Salomon's House.
"For the several employments and offices of our fellows, we have twelve that sail into foreign countries under the names of other nations (for our own we conceal), who bring us the books and abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other parts. These we call merchants of light.
"We have three that collect the experiments which are in all books. These we call depredators.
"We have three that collect the experiments of all mechanical arts, and also of liberal sciences, and also of practices which are not brought into arts. These we call mystery-men.
"We have three that try new experiments, such as themselves think good. These we call pioneers or miners.
"We have three that draw the experiments of the former four into titles and tables, to give the better light for the drawing of observations and axioms out of them. These we call compilers. We have three that bend themselves, looking into the experiments of their fellows, and cast about how to draw out of them things of use and practice for man's life and knowledge, as well for works as for plain demonstration of causes, means of natural divinations, and the easy and clear discovery of the virtues and parts of bodies. These we call dowry-men or benefactors.
"Then after divers meetings and consults of our whole number, to consider of the former labors and collections, we have three that take care out of them to direct new experiments, of a higher light, more penetrating into nature than the former. These we call lamps.
"We have three others that do execute the experiments so directed, and report them. These we call inoculators.
"Lastly, we have three that raise the former discoveries by experiments into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms. These we call interpreters of nature.
"We have also, as you must think, novices and apprentices, that the succession of the former employed men do not fail; besides a great number of servants and attendants, men and women. And this we do also: we have consultations, which of the inventions and experiences which we have discovered shall be published, and which not; and take all an oath of secrecy for the concealing of those which we think fit to keep secret; though some of those we do reveal sometime to the State, and some not.
"For our ordinances and rites we have two very long and fair galleries. In one of these we place patterns and samples of all manner of the more rare and excellent inventions; in the other we place the statues of all principal inventors. There we have the statue of your Columbus, that discovered the West Indies, also the inventor of ships, your monk that was the inventor of ordnance and of gunpowder, the inventor of music, the inventor of letters, the inventor of printing, the inventor of observations of astronomy, the inventor of works in metal, the inventor of glass, the inventor of silk of the worm, the inventor of wine, the inventor of corn and bread, the inventor of sugars; and all these by more certain tradition than you have. Then we have divers inventors of our own, of excellent works; which, since you have not seen) it were too long to make descriptions of them; and besides, in the right understanding of those descriptions you might easily err. For upon every invention of value we erect a statue to the inventor, and give him a liberal and honorable reward. These statues are some of brass, some of marble and touchstone, some of cedar and other special woods gilt and adorned; some of iron, some of silver, some of gold.
"We have certain hymns and services, which we say daily, of laud and thanks to God for His marvellous works. And forms of prayers, imploring His aid and blessing for the illumination of our labors; and turning them into good and holy uses.
"Lastly, we have circuits or visits, of divers principal cities of the kingdom; where as it cometh to pass we do publish such new profitable inventions as we think good. And we do also declare natural divinations of diseases, plagues, swarms of hurtful creatures, scarcity, tempest, earthquakes, great inundations, comets, temperature of the year, and divers other things; and we give counsel thereupon, what the people shall do for the prevention and remedy of them."
And when he had said this he stood up, and I, as I had been taught, knelt down; and he laid his right hand upon my head, and said: "God bless thee, my son, and God bless this relation which I have made. I give thee leave to publish it, for the good of other nations; for we here are in God's bosom, a land unknown." And so he left me; having assigned a value of about 2,000 ducats for a bounty to me and my fellows. For they give great largesses, where they come, upon all occasions."
[The manuscript ends here]

Die Toten mahnen uns

Memorial to Rosa Luxemburg

Too much?

The film at the centre of a storm in Germany (the clip below might sicken the unprepared):

The question is: are the gory details necessary to enlighten us to the horrors of the Holocaust? Does the struggle against revisionism and negationism require such awful scenes, such "realism"?

Failure

"Every fascism is an index of a failed revolution." (Walter Benjamin).

Maybe every crisis of capitalism is an index of a failed Left, inasmuch as the economic system that it opposes (?) is a failed one.

Zizek speaks the truth (again)

Simply magnificent!

Bigmouth strikes again

God's Bigmouths

Men like Bishop Eddie Long are fouling the legacy of the civil rights movement. 

By Christopher Hitchens

Posted on Slate.com Monday, Sept. 27, 2010, at 11:10 AM

Passing through Union Station in Washington, D.C., last week, I made my usual nod to the statue of A. Phillip Randolph. You can miss it if you are not looking for it, and it has been allowed to suffer defacement. (The sculpted pair of reading glasses held in the great man's hand was snapped off some years ago and was never replaced.) Randolph built a powerful trade union for black railroad workers and proposed the first march on Washington when Franklin Roosevelt was president. His role in the later civil rights movement was germinal and dynamic. But you never hear his name anymore, and it is not taught to schoolchildren. Nor is the name of Bayard Rustin, a charismatic black intellectual and pioneer of gay rights, who organized the March on Washington in 1963. Along with many other secular democratic heroes, Randolph and Rustin have been airbrushed from history. The easiest way to gain instant acceptance as a black "leader" these days is to shove the word Reverend in front of your name.

Or, if you are really greedy and ambitious, the word Bishop. Bishop Eddie Long of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Georgia preaches that Bayard Rustin was a vile sinner who suffered from the curable "disease" of homosexuality. I have a rule of thumb for such clerics and have never known it to fail: Set your watch and sit back, and pretty soon they will be found sprawling lustily on the floor of the men's room. It may be a bit early to claim the scalp of Eddie Long for this collection, but I doubt I shall have to withdraw. Here, after all, is what his friend the Rev. Timothy McDonald III, of the First Iconium Baptist Church (no less!), has to say: "This is the issue: how can you be against homosexuality and you are allegedly participating in it? That is the epitome of hypocrisy." Cynicism and naivete seem to coexist happily in this statement. The Rev. McDonald does not quite seem to believe the rather unimpressive denials issued by his richly draped brother in Christ. And he talks as if fevered denunciation of homosexuality has never before been an early warning of repressed desire.

One of his alleged partners in depravity may have been on the borderline of the age of consent, but otherwise I can't make myself care about whether the self-anointed Bish was rogering his flock. What concerns me isn't even the laughable obviousness of his cupidity: the jewels and gold chains and limos and bodyguards. This is all a familiar part of the tawdry business of "Churchianity" now finding loopholes for the rich and venal at a well-upholstered religious establishment somewhere near you. No, what offends me is that Long was able to get four presidents of the United States to attend his opulent circus for the funeral of Coretta Scott King in 2006. What a steep and awful decline from the mule cart that carried her husband's coffin in 1968. And the decline can be measured out in dog collars, from the Rev. Jesse Jackson all the way down to the Rev. Al Sharpton and the venomous Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Many other charlatans have benefited from the clerical racket, and the most notorious of them—Jerry Falwell, Ted Haggard, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart—have been white. But there is something especially horrible about the way in which the black pulpit gets a sort of free pass, almost as if white society has assured itself that black Americans just love them some preaching. In this fog of ethnic condescension, it is much easier for mountebanks and demagogues to get away with it.

It is not amazing to me that the Bish is still standing and getting moist applause from the pews after the testimony of his boys brigade of LongFellows. (What the hell is that name, if not a giveaway?) It is amazing that he is still around after the ceaseless exposure of his personal finances. What I should like to know is this: How much of that funding and expenditure has been tax-deductible or written off as "charitable"? In a time of widespread discussion of the spread of the tax burden, why is it never proposed that the vast sums raised by the churches be subject to the scrutiny of the IRS? And still another question: In 2006, Long's church received about $1 million of U.S. taxpayers' money from the "faith-based initiative" of the George W. Bush administration. It was suggested at the time that this might be a quid pro quo for the Bish's militant stand against gay marriage and other homosexual abominations. If so, it would make my follow-up question even more amusing: How did Long and his young friends, "bonded" as they were in strong male "covenants," actually spend our cash?

To those young friends, then, "Thank you all very much for coming out"—as Sen. Larry Craig actually did say at the opening of his own post-men's-room press conference. The day can't be far off when Long follows the traditional script and starts to yowl for prayer and repentance. And this would all be the greatest fun if it didn't also involve the degradation of the King family and the steady erosion of the real memory of the civil rights movement, which is not safe when left in the keeping of God's bigmouths and tree-shakers.

The power of 'radical' thought

A brief overview of a genius:

Slavoj Žižek: interview

The Marxist provocateur and bestselling philosopher on communism, poststructural theory and his reluctance to play poster boy for the fashionable European left

The Observer, Sunday 27 June 2010 

The large lecture hall of the French Institute in Barcelona is full to overflowing. People line the walls, sit in the aisles and stand three-deep at the back. There are a few middle-aged, smartly dressed people in attendance as well as a handful of old leftists with long hair and caps, but the majority of the audience are young and stylishly dishevelled, the kind of people one would expect to see at a Hot Chip or Vampire Weekend gig.

They have gathered here to listen to a 61-year-old Slovenian philosopher called Slavoj Žižek, whose critique of global capitalism now stretches to more than 50 books translated into more than 20 languages. Žižek describes himself as "a complicated communist" and, as if to complicate things further, he deploys the psychoanalytical theories of the late French thinker Jacques Lacan to illustrate the ways in which capitalist ideology works on the collective imagination. "I don't give clear answers to even the simplest, most direct questions," Žižek says. "I like to complicate issues. I hate simple narratives. I suspect them. This is my automatic reaction."

Žižek's book titles reflect his playful and often self-contradictory theoretical thrust. They include: The Ticklish Subject, which deals with "the spectre of the Cartesian subject in western thought"; The Plague of Fantasies, which analyses the ways in which "audiovisual media clouds the ability to reason and understand the world"; and the wonderfully titled Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, a fierce critique of "the liberal-democratic consensus".

He seems drawn to taking unfashionable stances that make him unpopular with traditionalists of whatever political hue. A recent book, In Defence of Lost Causes, argued that, in philosophical-political terms, Heidegger's fascist sympathies and Foucault's support of the Iranian revolution were "right steps in the wrong direction". Rebecca Mead, writing in the New Yorker, dubbed him "the Marx Brother" and described his approach thus: "His favoured form of argument is paradox, and his favoured mode of delivery is a kind of vaudevillian overstatement, buttressed by the appearance of utter conviction." That just about nails it – except that it overlooks the seriousness of Žižek's thinking and the way he has managed to bring dialectics into the mainstream.

"Slavoj is unique in that he operates between two different and, for the most part, exclusive, places," says the film-maker Sophie Fiennes, who directed him in The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, a documentary that is as provocative as its title suggests, but in a strictly intellectual way. "He has been incredibly successful in taking theory out of the ivory tower of academia and into the world. He challenges the current fear of words like 'ideology' and, correctly in my view, sees this fear as a product of our information culture. It is also, he argues, a fear of what real, deep political thinking might generate in terms of unrest and discontent."

Žižek, though, is also a political provocateur and an absurdist prankster. For one of his books, he wrote a (rejected) fictional autobiographical blurb: "In his free time, Žižek likes to surf the internet for child pornography and teach his small son how to pull the legs off spiders."

As an avowed atheist, he sees no contradiction in arguing, as he did in The Fragile Absolute: Or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, for a world in which Christians and Marxists unite against "the contemporary onslaught of vapid spirituality". This kind of thing does not sit well with traditional analytical philosophers. Neither does his tendency to roam freely through high and low culture, illuminating the Lacanian undercurrents in Hitchcock as well as Hegel, Leibniz and David Lynch. (In his new book, Living in the End Times, there is a serious, and seriously funny, essay on Kung Fu Panda, the recent DreamWorks animation, which Žižek insists is "a somewhat naive, but nonetheless basically accurate, illustration of an important aspect of Lacanian theory.")

Despite, or perhaps because of, his iconoclasm, his tendency to contradict himself, and his general political incorrectness – which may, one suspects, be more mischievous than heartfelt – Žižek is to today what Jacques Derrida was to the 80s: the thinker of choice for Europe's young intellectual vanguard. This fills him with dismay. Unlike Derrida, though, he is determinedly left wing, if not in the traditional sense.

"I am what you might call abstractly anti-capitalist," he says. "For instance, I am suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. What about Chinese neo-colonialism? Why are the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. Good! My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions."

Unlike the dapper Derrida, Žižek is a sight for sore eyes: pale to the point of sallow, bearded, overweight and effortlessly eccentric. In the 2005 documentary, Žižek!, he gives director Astra Taylor a tour of his kitchen, opening drawers and cupboards containing not cutlery and china, but his socks, underpants, trousers and shirts. His day-to-day style – if that is not too extravagant a word – consists of several dull variations on the proletarian outfit of ill-fitting T-shirt, baggy jeans, free airline socks – "Lufthansa are the best" – and lumpen footwear surely sold exclusively by a Slovenian shoeshop that has somehow missed the collapse of the Soviet bloc. (A Slovenian friend claims she recently saw him striding though Ljubljana in a T-shirt bearing the slogan "I Am Beautiful"; it's difficult to imagine any other philosopher doing that.)

When he speaks, or writes, Žižek comes alive and his thoughts flow out in what seem like uncontrollably tangential torrents. His message, at least what one can decipher of it from his scattergun approach, is both politically pessimistic and philosophically elusive.

"If you ask me if I am an optimist, I would have to say no. I am not one of those old-fashioned communists who says, with that old tragi-comic Marxist satisfaction, at least history is on our side. No. If anything, the train of history is hurtling towards a precipice. The task of the leftist thinker today is, to quote Walter Benjamin, not to ride the train of history, but to pull the brake."

In the jam-packed auditorium of the French Institute in Barcelona, Žižek speaks for more than two-and-a-half hours without once pulling the brake. His central thesis, also explored in his new book, Living in the End Times, is that "the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero point." Žižek, though, regards the idea of a central thesis in much the same way that the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane regarded a melody – as something to riff off, extemporise on, and return to only when all associated sub-themes have been exhausted. This approach has its problems, not least the sense that a single Žižek riff could perhaps more profitably be extended into an entire lecture that might be both deeper and more illuminating. Tonight, for instance, he barely addresses the reason why he resolutely believes in communism despite its shredded reputation.

"I don't see any continuity with old-style communism in my approach. So why do I then call it communism?" he says when I ask him about it later. "As to its contents, though, the problem is always the same. It's the enclosure of the commons. Marx was talking about land and property when he wrote about this, but today intellectual property is our commons, information is our commons. Something that Marx could not have predicted is taking place today: we are witnessing a strange regression to the same kind of enclosure of the commons, and people having to pay rent to people like Bill Gates for intellectual property."

He seems a slave to the speed of his thoughts, his motor-mouth delivery barely keeping pace with the frenetic motion of his overcrowded mind. Silence, even a pause for breath, seems to make him intensely uncomfortable. So, too, does the company of strangers. "I avoid other people if I can. The ultimate nightmare for me is a party in my honour in the United States. Having to mix and talk, to strangers, maybe 20 or 30 people who want to have a debate or, even worse, polite conversation. My God, I hate this above all, but it is the nature of my tragic life."

To witness Žižek in full flight is a wonderful and at times alarming experience, part philosophical tightrope-walk, part performance-art marathon, part intellectual roller-coaster ride. Most startling of all are the nervous tics that accompany his every utterance: the constant wiping of his beard and lips, the incessant dabbing of his furrowed brow, the closed eyes, clenched fists and the strange gutteral noises that punctuate his speech. Then, there's his lisp and his odd mispronunciations – in Barcelona, he kept using the term "a dollar cent", which I assumed was an example of fiscal insider jargon until I realised he actually meant "adolescent".

In my notebook, I map out the contours of his lecture in a series of headings. He begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the inevitable, in his view, rebirth of some kind of post-digital global communism, before touching on the writings of his beloved Hegel via the thoughts of Pascal. Suddenly though, in the first of many conceptual swerves, he is comparing the fall of communism to the end of the silent movie era which leads him into a riff on ideology as represented by "the disembodied voice" in Chaplin's City Lights and Hitchcock's Psycho. From there, we learn how the scene in Fight Club where Brad Pitt's character punches himself in the face is a metaphor for revolution – "Before you beat the bosses, you must first beat yourself."

By this point, the faithful are enthralled, the curious baffled and the traditionalists utterly bemused. Žižek, though, is just warming up. On and on he roams, through the French and Haitian revolutions, the Iraq war, Rumsfeld's famous speech about "known unknowns". (What about the "unknown knowns?", asks Žižek. "This is exactly how capitalist ideology works; you follow an illusion without even knowing it.") He cites the myth of Santa Claus as a supreme example of ideological indoctrination, dismisses Hollywood's love of the Dalai Lama and "all this vague, insipid Buddhist bullshit". He tells us how cynicism has become western culture's current default mode, what Christianity can teach communism, and why God is essentially a narcissist. He touches on biogenics by way of the inevitable Richard Dawkins – "This kind of extreme atheism misses the point of religion entirely" – and illustrates how science has lost its monopoly on truth. Eventually he realises there is a limit to the collective power of the audience's concentration, and he ends, as he began, with the communist revolution, informing us that the next one will succeed only if it embraces the essentially Christian, conservative social etiquette of politeness and deference. About 155 minutes after he started, he suddenly stops, drenched in sweat and bathed in applause. On cue, an old Trotskyist stands up and takes him to task for betraying the cause….

"I hate these civilised debates followed by the questions from the audience," he tells me the next morning. "So I keep going to subvert this boring ritual, but always there will be one old unreconstructed leftist who will stand up and accuse me of being a Stalinist. This," he says, sighing, "is how it goes."

The son of Slovenian communists, Žižek was born on 21 March 1949 in what was then Yugoslavia. His father was a state economist, his mother an accountant for a state-run business. I ask him if, growing up by the sea in Portorož, he had a happy childhood. "No. You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed."

As a teenager, living in the capital Ljubljana, he read voraciously and, he says, "did pretty well at high school though I completely ignored the curriculum". At 15, he wanted to be a "movie director" but soon realised that his love of theory surpassed even his passion for film. At university in the 1960s, he was seduced by the new wave of French post-structuralist theorists – Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva and, above all, Jacques Lacan. His postgraduate thesis was initially rejected for being too critical of Marx, and even though he amended it, he was deemed unfit to teach philosophy. "It is very ironic how professors who attacked me for not being a Marxist have now turned nationalist and attack me for being a Marxist. But, really, I don't care."

In the 1970s, Žižek made a living by translating works of philosophy and, at one point, took himself off to France for four years. He also did four years' national service in the Yugoslavian army. He has no bitterness about that. "My formative experience was Yugoslav self-management socialism," he says, "but Slovenia had communist rule without an official philosophy so it was superficially better than anywhere else."

In 1978, he finally landed a job at what he calls" a marginal research institute". It was, he says, "a kind of banishment but also a wonderful post. Just pure research." He made contacts with philosophy institutions in France and the US, which stood him in good stead when he finally published his breakthrough book, 1989's The Sublime Object of Ideology. "Without the communist oppression," he says, quite seriously, "I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana."

In 1990, he baffled his leftist friends and supporters by standing for election as a Liberal Democratic party candidate. He came fifth. "Politics is my tragedy," he tells me dolefully. "It shadows me."

When not travelling or teaching in America or Europe – he has held posts at Columbia, Princeton and is international director of humanities at Birkbeck College, London – Žižek lives alone in Ljubljana in a small apartment full of books, DVDs, classical music CDs – "I am a committed Wagnerian and, this will shock you, I even like Elgar." Depending on whom you believe, he has been married and divorced two or three times. He is not saying. On April Fool's day, 2005, he famously wed a 27-year-old former lingerie model and Lacanian scholar from Argentina. He has two sons, one in his early 30s, the other nine years old. When I leave him, he heads off to find an iPad as a present for his youngest child. "I am a hypocritical communist, no?"

In the flesh, Žižek is, if anything, more demonic and unhealthy-looking than his photographs, his matted hair and greying beard surrounding a face that looks like it's never seen sunlight. He suffers from diabetes, a condition not helped by his nomadic lifestyle and manic disposition. "I have exploited you," he says by way of greeting, "in order to have a few hours free from the duties these Spanish leftists expect me to perform."

He seems both eager and uncomfortable and ushers me quickly upstairs to the apartment that is his temporary home. As a cleaner flits about, I ask him if he is surprised at his popularity, particularly among the young.

"My God, I am the last person to know the answer to these questions," he says, looking genuinely dismayed. "But, really, I am now thinking there is so much pressure on me to perform. I am getting really bored with it. I am a thinker, but people all the time want this kind of shitty political interventions: the books, the talks, the discussions and so forth." He sighs and closes his eyes and seems to deflate before my eyes. "I will tell you my problem openly and for this my publisher will hate me. All the talk and the writing about politics, this is not where my heart is. No. I have been sidetracked. I really mean this."

He opens a copy of Living in the End Times, and finds the contents page. "I will tell you the truth now," he says, pointing to the first chapter, then the second. "Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah, blah." He flicks furiously through the pages. "Chapter 3, where I try to read Marx anew, is maybe OK. I like this part where I analyse Kafka's last story and here where I use the community of outcasts in the TV series Heroes as a model for the communist collective. But, this section, the Architectural Parallax, this is pure bluff. Also the part where I analyse Avatar, the movie, that is also pure bluff. When I wrote it, I had not even seen the film, but I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality."

Why, then, given that he does not like most of his books and does not have any enthusiasm for the lecture circuit, does he not call a stop to the Žižek show? "I am doing that right now!" he shouts. "I am writing a mega-book about Hegel with regard to Plato, Kant and maybe Heidegger. Already, this Hegel book is 700 pages. It is a true work of love. This is my true life's work. Even Lacan is just a tool for me to read Hegel. For me, always it is Hegel, Hegel, Hegel," he says, sighing again. "But people just want the shitty politics."

Reviewing In Defence of Lost Causes, the British Marxist critic Terry Eagleton concluded that it was "a frenetic, eclectic parody of intellectual scholarship, by one so assured in his grasp of the finer points of Kafka or John le Carré that he can afford to ham it up a little." Only time will tell if Žižek is serious about becoming utterly serious, but if he devotes the rest of his brilliant, brainy, slightly bonkers, utterly singular life to Hegel, and Hegel alone, it will be a great gain for pure philosophy and a great loss to radical, risk-taking political theory.

"He is very much a thinker for our turbulent, high speed, information-led lives," says Sophie Fiennes, "precisely because he insists on the freedom to stop and think hard about who you are as an individual in this fragmented society. We need a radical hip priest and Slavoj is that in many ways." The very thought, I suspect, would have him quaking in his proletarian boots – and free airline socks.

Living in the End Times is published on 5 July by Verso, £20. To order a copy for a special price go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6847. Žižek appears at the London literature festival, Southbank Centre, London SE1 on 5 July, 7.30pm.

Slavoj ŽiŽek Life in brief

1949 Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (at that time part of Yugoslavia), to atheist communist parents. Spends his childhood in the seaside town of Portorož, developing an interest in philosophy and popular culture in its relatively free cultural environment. In his teens the family returns to Ljubljana.

1967 Studies philosophy and sociology at the university of Ljubljana, completing his PhD on German idealism by 1981. Writes for Slovenian dissident political and philosophical journals. Becomes renowned for playing devil's advocate with outrageous and colourful theories that combine Lacanian theory with Marxism, and for using popular culture to illustrate complex philosophical theory.

1981-1985 Moves to Paris to study under Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller. Writes for French and other European intellectual journals (by this point he is multilingual).

1989 His first English-language book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, launches his international reputation as a cultural and critical theorist. Other popular works follow such as For They Know Not What They Do and The Ticklish Subject follow in the 90s.

2000s Starts to realise his ambition of being involved in film-making, with documentaries about himself – The Reality of the Virtual and Žižek! – and, with Sophie Fiennes, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Octavia Morris

Video (5min 37sec), 'Things cannot go on the way they are'

(Source: guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010)

Click on the image to watch the video.

No pasarán!(?) - the Left today

Thanks to the dissemination of silly Fukuyama's equally silly central thesis, we are all fed up with, and take for granted, the notion of the 'end of ideologies' -- capitalism excepted, bereft of its 'ideological trappings', at the very least up to the crisis of 2008.
Another worn-out cliché is the need to reinvent capitalism and the inevitability of profound reforms to the present European model of the social or welfare State.

A commonly-held standpoint of political and economic observers entertains the idea that all and any changes must be inward-looking and self-serving, to preserve the essence of capitalism as the 'lesser of all economic evils', just as representative democracy is -- rightly -- purported to be the 'lesser of all political evils'. 

Whichever paths capitalism might take, the widespread conviction -- an intuitive, irrational and desired one -- is that such economic system and its right-wing superstructure shall successfully adapt and evolve, until the next cyclical crises force further transformations down the road. 

An unforgiving dialectic? Certainly not a harmful genetic mutation of an organism perceived as autopoietic, or self-contained, rather the confirmation, most feel, of capitalism's destiny as the 'chosen' system, the one deemed to be the best and fittest through Darwinian natural-historical selection.

The outlook for the Left is far from promising.

The traditional working class has either disappeared or has become the recipient of sporadic crumbs fallen from the table of capitalism, a mirage in a desert with few oases. Those in the middle class just want to keep on spending beyond their means and only dream of becoming rich. Whereas the wealthy do not care one bit about the rest of society.

Conditions for social mobilization against rapidly increasing unfairness and inequality are lacking, and without active resistance it is difficult to foresee any erosion of the edifice of injustice, the veritable 21st century counterpart of the 'pyramid of exploitation', a symbol of the Industrial Age.

The examples of contemporary political struggle -- such as the anti-globalization movement and others, mostly restricted to single issues -- are still in their infancy, most being insufficient and some alas misguided or misdirected. Let us not forget that the Green movement had to wait for over 30 years before its message of environmental awareness became accepted.

A new political -- and ideological -- project is sorely needed. One that is truly progressive, libertarian and free from accommodations, stripped of complacency and immune to hybrid or 'third' ways. A project which aims to destroy capitalism insofar as to -- perhaps even -- 'save it from itself', in a fashion not dissimilar to that famous incident during the Vietnam War, when a Viet Cong village was 'destroyed in order to be saved'.

I am not stating anything new.

What project might this be? The current mainstream Left has no idea, nor does it seem to want to have one, a situation aggravated by the silent majority's refusal to contemplate changes to the status quo.

There is nothing innovative in this assertion either.

Unfortunately, as most serious political critics -- Noam Chomsky* comes to mind immediately, as the doyen of 'radical' thinkers who forgo momentary intellectual dalliances and genuinely attempt to create a systemic discourse within a coherent worldview and in the context of a hitherto untested alternative paradigm -- are generally ignored and frowned upon, we are rewarded with a panoply of so-called, or self-labeled, Left-leaning 'experts' and political 'commentators', who excel at pseudo-analysis and at what I might call 'mitigation theory': proposing austerity measures as necessary palliatives to the recurrent 'ailments' of capitalism, in their minds an otherwise healthy system.

Action has been replaced by illusion, and the future is being postponed, inasmuch as the will to think of, and to achieve, a better tomorrow is being thwarted. The politics of progress are more often than not completely subdued by the politics -- and policies -- of 'realism'.

I believe that unqualified respect is something that only those with the courage to act upon their convictions should be entitled to, those who practice what they say, who follow their utterances with deeds. If one does not possess such courage, or the capacity to act in accordance, then one should refrain from communicating grandiloquently in the public sphere.

Enough, I say, of talking heads and opinion makers elevated to positions of influence by the masses, wrongly convinced, poor folk, that they are listening to people with an iota of social conscience and the desire to lessen suffering.

Earnest resignation by the humble in the face of a tough reality is preferable to the self-righteous indignation of those who falsely claim to know how to effect change.

We may still console ourselves with the fact that the West enjoys a relatively free and democratic form of capitalism.

I hope that the unfathomable future does not follow a route in emulation of the Russian or East Asian forms of authoritarian capitalism.
In any event, we must theorize about new ways to confront capitalism. New revolutionary politics (of the non-violent persuasion, I should stress) are required.

*I do not mean to exclude other progressive public intellectuals. My apologies to, inter alia, Naomi Klein.

About the title: 'No pasarán!' ("They shall not go forward!") was coined by Dolores Ibárruri, 'La Pasionaria', a heroic figure of the Spanish Left. It was a powerful rallying cry of the Republicans during the Siege of Madrid by the Fascist forces of Franco.

A 'new' Left?

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, on the rebuilding of the Left:

When is enough really enough?

Christopher Hitchens, lucid as ever:

"A Call for Earthly Justice

Holding the Catholic Church accountable for its crimes.

By Christopher Hitchens

 Posted to Slate, Monday, Sept. 13, 2010, at 11:16 AM ET

Reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's extraordinary and limpid new work Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (a history informed by a general, if Anglican, sympathy for its subject), I came across the following passage from Cardinal John Henry Newman's classic statement of belief, his Apologia Pro Vita Sua:

The Catholic Church holds it better for the Sun and Moon to drop from Heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die from starvation in extremest agony … than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.

In a few days, Joseph Ratzinger will make one of the most portentous voyages of his papacy, landing in Britain to announce the beatification of the author of those remarkable words. I am not writing about Catholic dogma today, and in any case do not have the space to discuss the hysterical, totalitarian fanaticism of Newman's statement, coming as it does from a learned man celebrated for his relative "moderation." I thought I would simply ask how the church would emerge if anything remotely like Newman's criterion were to be applied to it.

As we have recently been forcibly reminded, the Roman Catholic Church holds it better for the cries of raped and violated children to be ignored, and for the excuses and alibis of their rapists and torturers indulged, and for a host of dirty and wilful untruths to be manufactured wholesale, and for the funds raised ostensibly for the poor to be paid out in hush money and shameful bribery, rather than that one tiny indignity or inconvenience be visited on the robed majesty of a man-made church or any limit set to its self-proclaimed right to be judge in its own cause.

Earlier this year, as Roman Catholic authorities from Ireland to Germany to Australia to Belgium to the United States were being confronted with the fallout of decades of sexual assault and subsequent denial, I asked a simple question in print. Why was this not considered a matter for the police and the courts? Why were we asking the church to "put its own house in order," an expression that was the exact definition of the problem to begin with? Why had almost no offending priest or bishop faced justice, and even then usually after a long period of protection from the church's own "courts"? I followed this up with a telephone call to Geoffrey Robertson, a British barrister with a second-to-none record in international human rights cases. (If it matters, the last time we had both cooperated was in a campaign against the British Act of Succession, an archaic piece of legislation that explicitly discriminates against Catholics.) This was one of the best dimes I have ever dropped. After a group of generous humanists and atheists agreed to pay his extremely modest fee, Robertson produced a detailed legal brief against the papacy and has made it widely available for the use of all interested or aggrieved parties. Titled The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse, it has just been published in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books. (It will be available in the United States in October.)

As if almost timed to coincide with its publication, and with the impending arrival of Ratzinger on British soil, the recent disclosures of the putrid state of the church in Belgium have thrown the whole scandal into an even sharper relief. Consider: The now-resigned bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, stands revealed by his own eventual confession as being guilty of incest as well as rape, having regularly "abused" his male nephew between the ages of 5 and 18. The man's superior as head of the Belgian church, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, has been caught on tape urging the victim to keep quiet. A subsequent official report, commissioned by the country's secular authorities, has established that this level of morality was the rule throughout the hierarchy, with the church taking it upon itself to "forgive" the rapists and to lean upon their victims. Very belatedly, a few months ago, the Belgian police finally rose from their notorious torpor and raided some ecclesiastical offices in search of evidence that was being concealed. Joseph Ratzinger, who had not thus far found a voice in which to mention the doings of his Belgian underlings, promptly emitted a squeal of protest — at the intervention of the law.

Robertson's brief begins with a meticulous summary of the systematic fashion in which child-rape was covered up by collusion between local Catholic authorities and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, an office that under the last pope was run by Ratzinger himself. (So flagrant was this obstruction of justice that many senior Catholic apologists have now started to blame the deceased pontiff in an effort to excuse his deputy and successor, all the while continuing to put forward Pope John Paul II as a candidate for sainthood!) The brief continues with a close examination of the Vatican's claim to be a state, and its related claim that statehood confers legal immunity on the pope, even in gross cases of abuse of human rights. Without undue difficulty, Robertson shows both claims to be laughably void and based, furthermore, on a history of disgraceful collaboration with dictatorship and sheltering of wanted criminals.

Cardinal Newman himself was rather dubious about the late-19^th-century proclamation of papal infallibility. He also asked to be buried in the same grave as his lifelong companion, Ambrose St. John. The Catholic authorities have now rudely disinterred the bodies, finding nothing that had survived decay or could serve as a relic. This is grotesque enough, but not as grotesque as the air of persecuted innocence that they wear when confronted with their obscene offenses. Now at last there is a careful guide to legal redress, which can be taken up either by a victim or by a prosecutor and used to bring a man-made outfit, and its chief executive, within the rule of law. The sun and moon don't need to fall and the species doesn't have to die in agony in order to expiate this sin—a little application of simple earthly justice is all that is required. Will it really continue to be withheld?".

Sarkozy and the Roma people (II)

Come here for an in-depth analysis, by the French daily Libération, of the host of issues surrounding the deportation of the Roma from France.

Sarkozy and the Roma people (I)

From The New Republic:

What Can France Teach Us About Botched Immigration Policies? 

David A. Bell

September 3, 2010 | 12:00 am

On both sides of the Atlantic, it has been an uncomfortable summer for immigrant groups. Here in the United States there have been the quarrels over the "Ground Zero Mosque," “anchor babies,” and Arizona’s new illegal immigrant bill (not to mention yet more calls for the deportation of our “Muslim” president to his “native” Kenya by the surprisingly large proportion of the Republican Party that seems to have taken up permanent residence on Planet Zorg). Meanwhile, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, faced with removal from office by the voters in 2012, has continued to push legislation outlawing the wearing of the burqa in public and acted to expel several hundred Roma to Romania and Bulgaria. This last move in particular has earned him widespread criticism from the media, and widespread support from the French public.
Sarkozy’s actions and France’s continuing struggles with the immigration issue have gotten relatively little coverage in the United States. They are worth taking a closer look at, however, because they starkly illustrate many of the issues that arise from the world-wide movement of populations—issues that the United States will be confronting more and more over the coming decades.
In its attitudes toward foreigners and “immigrant-origin populations” (i.e. both immigrants and the children and grandchildren of immigrants), the French government is increasingly trying to establish French “values” as a basis for policy. For instance, earlier this summer, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux ordered the deportation of Egyptian Islamist imam Ali Ibrahim El Soudany, claiming that he “despised the values of our society,” and that his message of religious hatred “had nothing to do with religious liberty.” The ban on the burqa is similarly justified by reference not only to human rights, but more nebulously to values such as the importance of face-to-face contact. In this shift, France has followed the lead of countries like the Netherlands, where would-be citizens must now watch a film that shows two men kissing, and a topless woman on a beach, so as to understand Dutch “values.”
This all raises the obvious problem of how national “values” can possibly be defined. Sixty years ago, by most present-day definitions, a large majority of the French (like a large majority in most countries on earth) held homophobic and bigoted attitudes. So should national values depend on shifting majority opinion? If not, who decides their content? Perhaps Sarkozy’s new “Ministry of Immigration, Integration and National Identity”? Moreover, if the values of “the French” can be so neatly packaged, why can the same not be done with other groups, whose values might be judged fundamentally antithetical to “French” ones? What of “Muslim” values, for instance?
Meanwhile, the expulsion of the Roma illustrates the tensions between the politics of immigration and citizenship on the one hand, and the realities of population movements on the other. Sarkozy, in an Arizonan vein, describes the people expelled as threats to public order who, as foreigners, had no right to stay on French soil. Yet, in practice, like most Western countries, France has many categories of resident foreigners (legal immigrants, temporary workers, asylum-seekers, citizens of other EU countries, etc.) who enjoy a wide variety of rights. The Roma expelled this summer are mostly citizens of EU member states Bulgaria and Romania, and, while France had the right to expel them, under EU law, the Roma had the right to re-enter the country the day after their expulsion.
The point, in both cases, is that nationality is not a single, rigidly bounded thing, defined by a particular set of values or a single legal rule. French officials, of all people, should have no trouble understanding this point. In recent years, they have repeatedly changed French nationality law (introducing complex special provisions, for instance, for children born on French soil to foreign parents). And, during the long history of the French overseas empire, their predecessors created a bewildering variety of categories of what amounted to partial or quasi-citizenship, so as to distinguish certain groups under French rule (e.g. Algerian Muslims) from others, and to limit their rights and movement.
Yet, in politics, the temptation is always to divide the world neatly into two parts: “citizens” and “non-citizens,” “us” and “them.” This is hardly, by itself, a bad thing. Democracy requires a clearly bounded community of citizens. And, arguably, elite civil servants in France, with their concern for the construction of a complex, technocratic European super-state, have only fueled populist anger by giving this point too little importance in past years and equating all opposition (including the 2005 referendum vote against the proposed European Constitution) with xenophobia.
Pushing too hard in the other direction, however, quickly devolves into sheer demagoguery. Modern nations are not hermetically walled, ideologically and ethnically homogenous little city states. The complexities of population movements and cultural diversity have to be respected. And Nicolas Sarkozy would do well to remember that strife over “immigrant-origin populations” does not only, or even principally, arise because of conflicts over “values” or an ambiguous legal status. It arises when these groups are actively made to feel alien and unwelcome. Some American politicians could use a refresher on this point as well.

David A. Bell, a contributing editor to The New Republic, teaches history at Princeton.