Žižek on Mao

"Mao Zedong: the Marxist Lord of Misrule"

by Slavoj Žižek
Please see the full article at
http://www.lacan.com/zizmaozedong.htm
[....]
It is ONLY this reference to what happens AFTER the revolution, to the "morning after," that allows us to distinguish between libertarian pathetic outbursts and true revolutionary upheavals: these upheavals lose their energy when one has to approach the prosaic work of social reconstruction - at this point, lethargy sets in. In contrast to it, recall the immense creativity of the Jacobins just prior to their fall, the numerous proposals about new civic religion, about how to sustain the dignity of old people, and so on. Therein also resides the interest of reading the reports about daily life in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, with the enthusiastic urge to invent new rules for quotidian existence: how does one get married? What are the new rules of courting? How does one celebrate a birthday? How does one get buried?... [25]

At this point, the Cultural Revolution miserably failed. It is difficult to miss the irony of the fact that Badiou, who adamantly opposes the notion of act as negative, locates the historical significance of the Maoist Cultural Revolution precisely in the negative gesture of signaling "the end of the party-State as the central production of revolutionary political activity" - it is here that he should have been consequent and deny the evental status of the Cultural Revolution: far from being an Event, it was rather a supreme display of what Badiou likes to refer to as the "morbid death drive." Destroying old monuments was not a true negation of the past, it was rather an impotent passage à l'acte bearing witness to the failure to get rid of the past.

So, in a way, there is a kind of poetic justice in the fact that the final result of Mao's Cultural Revolution is today's unheard-of explosion of capitalist dynamics in China. That is to say, with the full deployment of capitalism, especially today's "late capitalism," it is the predominant "normal" life itself which, in a way, gets "carnivalized," with its constant self-revolutionizing, with its reversals, crises, reinventions. Brian Massumi formulated clearly this deadlock, which is based on the fact that today's capitalism already overcame the logic of totalizing normality and adopted the logic of the erratic excess:

the more varied, and even erratic, the better. Normalcy starts to lose its hold. The regularities start to loosen. This loosening of normalcy is part of capitalism's dynamic. It's not a simple liberation. It's capitalism's own form of power. It's no longer disciplinary institutional power that defines everything, it's capitalism's power to produce variety - because markets get saturated. Produce variety and you produce a niche market. The oddest of affective tendencies are okay - as long as they pay. Capitalism starts intensifying or diversifying affect, but only in order to extract surplus-value. It hijacks affect in order to intensify profit potential. It literally valorises affect. The capitalist logic of surplus-value production starts to take over the relational field that is also the domain of political ecology, the ethical field of resistance to identity and predictable paths. It's very troubling and confusing, because it seems to me that there's been a certain kind of convergence between the dynamic of capitalist power and the dynamic of resistance. [26]

There IS thus, beyond all cheap jibes and superficial analogies, a profound structural homology between the Maoist permanent self-revolutionizing, the permanent struggle against the ossification of State structures, and the inherent dynamics of capitalism. One is tempted to paraphrase here Brecht, his "What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?", yet again: what are the violent and destructive outbursts of a Red Guardist caught in the Cultural Revolution compared to the true Cultural Revolution, the permanent dissolution of all life-forms necessitated by the capitalist reproduction? It is the reign of today's global capitalism which is the true Lord of Misrule. No wonder, then, that, in order to curb the excess of social disintegration caused by the capitalist explosion, Chinese officials not celebrate religions and traditional ideologies which sustain social stability, from Buddhism to Confucianism, i.e., the very ideologies that were the target of the Cultural Revolution. In April 2006, Ye Xiaowen, China's top religious official, told the Xinhua News Agency that "religion is one of the important forces from which China draws strength," and he singled out Buddhism for its 'unique role in promoting a harmonious society," the official formula for combining economic expansion with social development and care; the same week, China hosted the World Buddhist Forum. [27] The role of religion as the force of stability against the capitalist dynamics is thus officially sanctioned - what is bothering Chinese authorities in the case of sects like Falun Gong is merely their independence from the state control. (This is why one should also reject the argument that Cultural Revolution strengthened socialist attitudes among the people and thus helped to curb the worst disintegrative excesses of today's capitalist development: quite on the contrary, by undermining traditional stabilizing ideologies like Confucianism, it rendered the people all the more vulnerable to the destabilizing effects of capitalism.)

This capitalist reappropriation of the revolutionary dynamics is not without its comic side-effects. It was recently made public that, in order to conceptualize the IDF urban warfare against the Palestinians, the IDF military academies systematically refer to Deleuze and Guattari, especially to Thousand Plateaux, using it as "operational theory" - the catchwords used are "Formless Rival Entities", "Fractal Manoeuvre", "Velocity vs. Rhythms", "The Wahabi War Machine", "Postmodern Anarchists", "Nomadic Terrorists". One of the key distinctions they rely on is the one between "smooth" and "striated" space, which reflect the organizational concepts of the "war machine" and the "state apparatus". The IDF now often uses the term "to smooth out space" when they want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. Palestinian areas are thought of as "striated" in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, road blocks and so on:

The attack conducted by units of the IDF on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, as "inverse geometry", which he explained as "the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions". During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of overground tunnels carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manoeuvring simultaneously in the city, they were so "saturated" into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city's streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as "infestation", seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF's strategy of "walking through walls" involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare "a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux. [28]

So what does it follow from all this? Not, of course, the nonsensical accusation of Deleuze and Guattari as theorists of militaristic colonization - but the conclusion that the conceptual machine articulated by Deleuze and Guattari, far from being simply "subversive," also fits the (military, economic, and ideologico-political) operational mode of today's capitalism. - How, then, are we to revolutionize an order whose very principle is constant self-revolutionizing? This, perhaps, is THE question today, and this is the way one should REPEAT Mao, re-inventing his message to the hundreds of millions of the anonymous downtrodden, a simple and touching message of courage: "Bigness is nothing to be afraid of. The big will be overthrown by the small. The small will become big." The same message of courage sustains also Mao's (in)famous stance towards a new atomic world war:

We stand firmly for peace and against war. But if the imperialists insist on unleashing another war, we should not be afraid of it. Our attitude on this question is the same as our attitude towards any disturbance: first, we are against it; second, we are not afraid of it. The First World War was followed by the birth of the Soviet Union with a population of 200 million. The Second World War was followed by the emergence of the socialist camp with a combined population of 900 million. If the imperialists insist on launching a third world war, it is certain that several hundred million more will turn to socialism, and then there will not be much room left on earth for the imperialists.

It is all too easy to dismiss these lines as empty posturing of a leader ready to sacrifice millions for his political goals (the extension ad absurdum of Mao's ruthless decision to starve tens of millions to death in the late 1950s) - the other side of this dismissive attitude is the basic message: "we should not be afraid." Is this not the only correct attitude apropos war: "first, we are against it; second, we are not afraid of it"? There is definitely something terrifying about this attitude - however, this terror is nothing less than the condition of freedom.

Notes:
[....]

[25] Was Che Guevara's withdrawal from all official functions, even from Cuban citizenship, in 1965, in order to dedicate himself to world revolution - this suicidal gesture of cutting the links with the institutional universe - really an ACT? Or, was it an escape from the impossible task of the positive construction of socialism, from remaining faithful to the CONSEQUENCES of the revolution, namely, an implicit admission of failure?

[26] Brian Massumi, "Navigating Movements," in Hope, ed. Mary Zournazi, New York: Routledge 2002, p. 224.

[27] See the report "Renewed Faith," Time, May 8 2006, p. 34-35.

[28] Eyal Weizman, "Israeli Military Using Post-Structuralism as 'Operational Theory'," available online at www.frieze.com.

Karatani on Earthquake and Japan

From "Earthquake and Japan"
by Kojin Karatani
http://www.kojinkaratani.com/en/article/earthquake-and-japan.html
[....]
It is commonly thought that when order dissipates, a Hobbesian natural state arises in which people behave as wolves toward one another. The reality, however, is that people who regarded one another with fear when living in the social order created by the state form communities of mutual aid amid the chaos following disaster, a spontaneous type of order that differs from that which exists under the state.

It was this type of community that was born in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake. Yet Japan's particular historical experience also came into play. For the ruins of the earthquake strongly evoked the psychological conditions following World War II, when people came together to reflect upon the war and the history of modern Japan that led to it. The "paradise" formed in the wake of the disaster, however, was short-lived, and the memory of the war disappeared along with it.

When order was restored following the Kobe earthquake, the dominant tendency was to try to use the disaster as a business opportunity to effect economic revival. Prime Minister Koizumi encouraged neoliberalist policies all the more, and he trampled on the postwar pacifist constitution by pushing through the dispatch of Self-Defense forces to Iraq. Yet the end result was continuing economic stagnation and a widening gap between rich and poor. As a result, the Liberal Democratic Party, which had held sway for so long, yielded power to the Democratic Party of Japan. Yet the new administration was unable to embark on a new course.

This was the situation in which the recent earthquake occurred. Once more, the disaster evoked the burnt-out ruins after the war. In addition, the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant cannot help but call forth memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Postwar Japanese have had a strong, even excessive, aversion to nuclear weapons and to nuclear power in general. Needless to say, there was strong opposition to the building of nuclear power plants in Japan. Nonetheless, following the oil shocks of the 1970s, the state affirmed and encouraged the development of nuclear power plants. Early campaigns proclaimed the necessity of nuclear power for economic growth, while in recent years it was claimed that nuclear power could help reduce carbon emissions and therefore benefit the environment. That such claims were a form of criminal deception on the part of industry and government has been made all too clear by recent events.

In the ruins of postwar Japan, people reflected upon the path the country had taken in modern times. Standing against the Western powers, modern Japan strived to achieve the status of a great military power. The shattering of this dream in the nation's defeat led to another goal, to become a great economic power. The ultimate collapse of this ambition has been brought into sharp relief by the recent earthquake. Even without the earthquake, it was fated for destruction. In truth, it is not the Japanese economy alone that is failing. In the early 1970s, global capitalism entered a period of serious recession, and since then it has been unable to overcome the decline in the general rate of profit. Capital has sought a way out of this decline through global financial investment and by extending industrial investment into what had formerly been "third world" regions. The collapse of the former strategy has been exposed by the so-called Lehman shock. Meanwhile, the accelerated development of countries such as China, India, and Brazil, continues. Yet such accelerated growth cannot last long. It is inevitable that wages will rise and a limit on consumption be reached.

For this reason, global capitalism will no doubt become unsustainable in 20 or 30 years. The end of capitalism, however, is not the end of human life. Even without capitalist economic development or competition, people are able to live. Or rather, it is only then that people will, for the first time, truly be able to live. Of course, the capitalist economy will not simply come to an end. Resisting such an outcome, the great powers will no doubt continue to fight over natural resources and markets. Yet I believe that the Japanese should never again choose such a path. Without the recent earthquake, Japan would no doubt have continued its hollow struggle for great power status, but such a dream is now unthinkable and should be abandoned. It is not Japan's demise that the earthquake has produced, but rather the possibility of its rebirth. It may be that only amid the ruins can people gain the courage to stride down a new path.

(March 16, 2011)

(Translated by Seiji M. Lippit)

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

by: Joel Wendland Tuesday 5 April 2011

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/23-things-they-don-t-tell-you-about-capitalism/

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism is a nice little book from University of Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang, incidentally a supporter of capitalism, and is worth a careful read. It is easy to follow and avoids difficult jargon.

Chang's focus is primarily on a critique of "free market" ideology and policies, which in his introduction he identifies as the cause of the current economic and financial catastrophe (xiii).

He also notes that over the past 30 years the countries that have implemented "free market" reforms have seen "slower growth, rising inequality and heightened instability." And in countries, like the U.S. where stagnant wages in the face of increased working hours, this dour economic picture has been covered up by expanded credit – a system that has now collapsed (xiv). Countries like China and India, by contrast, refused to go all out with "free market" reforms and have consequently seen tremendous growth (xv).

Chang goes to special pains to emphasize his pro-capitalist credentials, calling it "the best economic system that humanity has invented." His goal is to improve it.

Of course, Marxists respond by noting that while reforms that increase equality, reduce exploitation, or generally improve economic conditions for working families are good policies to pursue, "free market" ideology and policies are not the sole problem or glitch in an otherwise well-functioning capitalist system.

"Free market" ideology and policies, while they specificallyare designed to increase the intensity of exploitation and inequality and to inflict great damage, are a but symptom of the basic problem with capitalism. This will sound abstract, but "free market" policies are put in place when social democratic policies – generally the social wage for working families – seem (from the perspective of capitalists) to inhibit the maximization of profits. This explains why some far-right politicians today want to eliminate child labor laws, civil rights protections, health and safety protections, healthcare coverage, anti-poverty programs, etc. They use the cover of balancing budgets to do so.

Consider this perspective: there is NO urgent fiscal reason for emphasizing a balanced federal budget. Indeed, paying for social goods (like education, healthcare, infrastructure) with debt that will ultimately be repaid with inflated dollars actually makes more fiscal sense that paying for everything now with more expensive dollars. Contrary to rhetoric of right-wing politicians, a national debt is nothing like your family budget.

The point is that capitalists would like to shift resources away from working families – especially during a crisis – in order to ensure their bottom line, hence massive new tax cuts as the primary if only real goal of the congressional Republicans. This power differential and the private appropriation of social wealth is a defining feature of capitalism that is contradicted by another defining element: a system of commodity production depends on consumption by workers for its sustenance. And as exploitation increases (wages fall) that commodity system is jeopardized, demanding further exploitation to protect profits.

A strong safety net, planning and public ownership are the best protections against this inherent capitalist contradiction, and as Chang notes, despite the revulsion of the "free marketeers" toward these protections, they are always present in capitalist economies – to one degree or another with varying amounts of success. Primarily they serve the interests of the most powerful, Chang admits, and it is up to everyday folks to understand what's going on and why in order to deploy their "active economic citizenship" to counter this trend.

In the end, Chang explains that "human decisions" rather than market "forces" cause economic outcomes. Human decisions led to the decline in real wages, technological developments, choices to allow manufacturing sectors to collapse, and the emergence of financialization of the economy as separate from the "real economy."

Marx Reloaded

Sen. Bernie Sanders: The Worst Corporate Tax Avoiders

USA: Right-Wing Indoctrination

Mike Huckabee Wants Americans to Be Indoctrinated at Gunpoint

By B.E. Wilson, AlterNet

31 March 11

id Mike Huckabee just flush his presidential aspirations down the proverbial toilet? Well, if American mainstream media has an ounce of journalistic gumption remaining the answer most certainly would be "yes". Huckabee has just been caught on video, at a Christian supremacist conference, stating that Americans should be forcibly indoctrinated at gunpoint. The organization which hosted the "Rediscover God In America" conference, United in Purpose, has edited Huckabee's comment from footage of his speech, but not before People For The American Way's Kyle Mantyla captured the unedited footage, in which Mike Huckabee states, "I almost wish that there would be, like, a simultaneous telecast, and all Americans would be forced - forced at gunpoint no less - to listen to every David Barton message, and I think our country would be better for it."

David Barton is the leading promoter of a brand of falsified American history altered to support the claim that America was founded as a Christian, rather than a secular, nation. As Chris Rodda, who has authored an entire book debunking Barton's brand of pseudo-history, writes,

I was quite surprised ... to come across a video clip from this conference on the People for the American Way (PFAW) Right Wing Watch blog with the headline "Huckabee: Americans Should Be Forced, At Gunpoint, To Learn From David Barton." I had watched Huckabee's speech. How on earth could I have missed a statement like that? Well, I didn't. It had been edited out of the webcast that I had watched.

Kyle Mantyla over at PFAW's Right Wing Watch had recorded Huckabee's speech when it was streamed live on Thursday, and posted the "forced at gunpoint" clip on Friday. By Saturday, when I watched the webcast on the United in Purpose website, that part of Huckabee's speech had been edited out.

The webcast that I saw showed Barton leaving the stage as he ended his presentation, then the screen going black for a moment, and then what appeared to be the beginning of Huckabee's speech. What was edited out was Barton returning to the stage to introduce Huckabee, and the first two minutes and forty-five seconds of Huckabee's speech, during which Huckabee made his "gunpoint" comment and praised David Lane, the man behind all of the American "Renewal" and "Restoration" projects that have popped up across the country during the past few elections.

[below: the unedited footage from Huckabee's speech, with the "joke" about indoctrinating Americans at gunpoint. Footage courtesy of Kyle Mantyla of Rightwing Watch, who might have almost single-handedly consigned Huckabee's presidential hopes to the dustbin of history.]

I should also note that what Chris Rodda has to say about this has especial weight given that she's arguably been the most indefatigable author to challenge David Barton's sprawling falsified American history oeuvre, as a Talk To Action site search on Rodda's extensive posts debunking Barton would suggest. Chris Rodda is author of the book Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History which prominently features David Barton, head of Wallbuilders and arguably king of the "liars for Jesus". Rodda is also Head Researcher for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

Joke

When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300 C.
The Russians used a pencil.