Compelling comparison of police reactions to two very different types of student protest.
All posts by Nicholas Kiersey
The Living Dead: On the Strange Persistence of Zombie International Relations « The Disorder Of Things
Kafka, Huxley and Orwell used speculative work to highlight complex political issues which went unaddressed by standard genres. The best academic work in this field does this too, using non-traditional themes and issues as imaginative sources by which to open up fields of enquiry. Michael Shapiro, Cynthia Weber, Jutta Weldes, Iver Neumann, China Miéville and others focus on big, important issues: power and the production of knowledge; identity and representation; the blurriness of reality and fiction. In contrast, Drezner’s book serves up the same old stories, told by the same old theories. By the end of the book, I was not even sure how much he knew about zombies, at least not beyond the recent vogue for Anglo-American books and films on the subject.
Three thoughts on #Occupy | openDemocracy
But these are well-trod criticisms. What interests me is that the minimal programme of 99%ism – that it is so attractive and so immediate a rallying cry. No doubt some of this is to do with the liberating sensation that one doesn’t need a fully fledged theory of political economy to take part in action. It’s diffuse groups with similarly minimal programmes that have been peculiarly successful here, too – especially UKUncut. Like many, I share a disquiet that hesitancy to voice radical critiques of wage labour and capitalist culture (because we’re scared of spooking the horses) means that these minimal programmes will find themselves as acting, essentially, as parliamentary pressure groups, articulating basically cosmetic and reformist demands. The worst outcome of 99%ism could well be a response to one of its structuring logics – that there are some bad people in the 1%, that they have behaved badly, and that once they’re suitably chastised, we can all go home and return to normal. Continue reading Three thoughts on #Occupy | openDemocracy
Hardt and Negri on “The Problem of Transition” – Harvard University Press Blog
Antonio Gramsci’s notion of “passive revolution” and its limitations helps us understand how the relation between political diagonal and biopolitical diagram addresses the conundrum of the transition. As he does with many of his key concepts, Gramsci employs “passive revolution” in a variety of contexts with slightly different meanings, using multiple standpoints to give the concept greater amplitude. His first and primary usage is to contrast the passive transformation of bourgeois society in nineteenth-century Italy with the active revolutionary process of the bourgeoisie in France. Passive revolution, Gramsci explains, is a revolution without a revolution, that is, a transformation of the political and institutional structures without there emerging centrally a strong process for the production of subjectivity. The “facts” rather than social actors are the real protagonists. Second, Gramsci also applies the term “passive revolution” to the mutations of the structures of capitalist economic production that he recognizes primarily in the development of the U.S. factory system of the 1920s and 1930s. “Americanism” and “Fordism” name what Marx calls the passage from the “formal” to the “real subsumption” of labor within capital, that is, the construction of a properly capitalist society. This structural transformation of capital is passive in the sense that it evolves over an extended period and is not driven by a strong subject. After using “passive revolution” as a descriptive tool of historical analysis, regarding both the superstructural and structural changes of capitalist society, Gramsci seems to employ it, third, to suggest a path for struggle. How can we make revolution in a society subsumed within capital? The only answer Gramsci can see is a relatively “passive” one, that is, a long march through the institutions of civil society.
via Hardt and Negri on “The Problem of Transition” – Harvard University Press Blog.
Steve Bell on Greeces euro bailout referendum – cartoon | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Subscribers vs. Authors
Sorry – just realized that those of you who joined up were listed only as subscribers. Seeing as that’s pretty useless, I’ve upgraded you all to Authors. Hopefully that’ll allow you make contributions. Still learning how this works!
Henceforth, all new users will be authors. (Heavens, what would Foucault say???!!!).
Nick
Of American Revolutionaries and American Occupiers | Britannica Blog
“Five similarities between the 1773 destroyers of the British tea and the 2011 occupiers of Wall Street”
via Of American Revolutionaries and American Occupiers | Britannica Blog.
Failure Mode?
How comfortable are people with the idea that recent events bespeak a sort of collective overreaching on the part of capitalism? I’m sure its a truism at this stage to suggest that the financial elites exhibited a form of economic stupidity in putting us in this predicament in the first place. But are they politically stupid, too? Today’s commentary from Jacobin seems to suggest as much. The piece starts by stating the protests seem to be exceeding the systems ability to manage them. Here, once again, the crisis is framed in Graeber’s terms:
What’s going on here? A clue, I think, is to be found in a remark that comes near the end of David Graeber’s recent magnum opus on debt: ‘The last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world . . . with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win’.
In this, Graeber is echoing one of my favorite, often-quoted lines from Fredric Jameson: “The mass of people . . . do not themselves have to believe in any hegemonic ideology of the system, but only to be convinced of its permanence.”
But, as the piece continues, a certain fragility has crept into the system, as is no evident from recent global events. Perhaps it is because capitalism has so perfected its ability to perform efficiently? It is incredibly vulnerable now to asymmetrical shocks. There are ways of mitigating this, of course, but only expensive, Keynesian ones.
Thus neoliberalism has systematically dismantled the supports and failsafe systems that kept dissent in check, and has relied instead on preventing dissent from arising in the first place. The 99% have been cut off from institutional channels for influencing policy or voicing their grievances, and thus have been left with no choice but to take it to the streets. And now that we have done so, we are seeing the chaotic and unpredictable failure mode of neoliberal governance.
via Failure Mode.
Hmm, failure mode? I guess we’ll have to see. But certainly asserting something doesn’t make it so, as Kautsky reminded Lenin. And while it took some time for Kautsky to be proved right, in our own time its not clear that we’re even close to seeing a replay of that debate in the offing. Which raises the sort of question a Mick Cox might be willing to ask: at what point WOULD we want to start asking that question? What sort of things would we have to see going on around us before we started to talk about the demise of (the current mode of) capitalism? The main players in the EU are obviously hoping to bid for time and eject Greece gently from the Euro. Papandreou’s hand grenade notwithstanding, that probably remains the plan. In the meantime, the Greeks have been given what Zizek would no doubt call an “unfree” choice. As economic theorist Yanis Varoufakis puts it:
In short, rather than an exercise in participatory democracy, the referendum is a shoddy, strategically ill-fated, morally corrupt and politically damaging ploy. Contrary to what is implied by the Greek PM’s minders, the referendum was never meant as a means of strengthening Mr Papandreou’s bargaining power over his European colleagues and the IMF. Had he cared to oppose the October Agreement, he ought to have done so in Brussels. No, the referendum is a means of extracting, first, a vote of confidence from his party’s battered MPs and, secondly, to impose upon the Greek people a hideous dilemma which identifies consent to the terrible October Agreement with a continued commitment to remaining in Europe. Rather than a gesture of granting Greeks a voice, this referendum is an attempt to gag the electorate.
Via Yanis Varoufakis
Anthropology, Moral Optimism, and Capitalism: A Four-Field Manifesto
Thanks to Kole Kilibarda for referring us to this excellent manifesto from the world of Anthropology scholarship. The list of demands towards the end are particularly important, as are the parting words: “Let the deep modification of the human sciences begin. Anthropologists have nothing to lose but our irrelevance.” Might not scholars of IR and IPE say the same for themselves?
It is high time that the Anthropologists openly set forth before the whole world their perspective, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this fairy tale about Capitalism with a Four-Field Manifesto. To this end, Anthropologists of the most diverse nationalities and subfields assemble on open threads like Academia and #OWS, informing the following Manifesto. Please read, share, and comment, joining our contentious anthropological tradition.
via Anthropology, Moral Optimism, and Capitalism: A Four-Field Manifesto.
Unemployed Negativity: I Owe You an Explanation: Graeber and Marx on Origin Stories
Jason Read takes a light jab at David Graeber’s book, Debt, The First 5000 Years. Indeed, it would seem Graeber has a kind of Nietzschean/Deleuzian reading of debt as originating in a moral or normative field of equivalences, itself underwritten by the state.
Graeber gives more credit (I actually don’t know if I intended that pun or not) to a different account of money, primordial debt theory, which argues that money emerged from the taxes, from the state’s need to generate money. This theory begins with a fundamental asymmetry, not an equivalence, an asymmetry that is often founded on religion, on the sense of debt owed to the world.
What this habituated mentality of debt as having some sort of special sovereignty over other human relations ignores, however, is the “communism of everyday life”. Kind of like Hardt and Negri’s argument in Commonwealth, the point here is to draw attention to an ontology that denies the highly distributed (and social) nature of the way real value production takes place. What is interesting about Read’s argument though is the way he sets up Graeber’s narrative about the foundational fiction nature of debt as one that runs in parallel with another foundational fiction, that of primitive accumulation. Not that these narratives should be seen as competing strains (Read explicitly disavows a desire to counterpose anarchism and communism here), but rather that the simultaneous plausibility of both is in itself insufficient in our efforts to grasp what it is specifically about capitalism that inflects this particular moment in the historical drama of man’s relation with debt.
Capitalism is not a matter of thrift, waste, or greed, it is a matter of surplus value, labor power, and other real abstractions. Thus, communism may be the foundation of all sociability, but capitalism is often indifferent to the sociability, or, worse still, exploits it … As a topic of inquiry debt crosses back and forth from the economic to the moral, and thus it is tempting to locate its history in attitudes and ideas, but a true history of debt needs to also examine the structure that are indifferent to those ideas.
via Unemployed Negativity: I Owe You an Explanation: Graeber and Marx on Origin Stories.
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