Sunday, February 12, 2012
Saturday, February 11, 2012
A Conversation with Slavoj Zizek
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/2/10/theres-this-slovenian-saying/
By BRADLEY G. BOLMAN and TARA RAGHUVEER, CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
Published: Friday, February 10, 2012
FM staff writer Tara Raghuveer ’14 and contributing writer Bradley G. Bolman ’15 discuss the Occupy movement, pop culture, and modern academia with Slavoj Zizek.
When Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek visited Harvard for a lecture on the ontology of sexual difference last October, FM staff writer Tara Raghuveer ’14 and contributing writer Bradley G. Bolman ’15 sat down to discuss the Occupy movement, pop culture, and modern academia.
Fifteen Minutes: What is the role of academia at an institution like Harvard in the current global crisis?
Slavoj Žižek: What is crucial and also I think—especially today, when we have some kind of re-emergence of at least some kind of practical spirit, protest, and so on—one of the dangers I see amongst some radical academia circles is this mistrust in theory, you know, saying, “Who needs fat books on Hegel and logic? My god, they have to act!”
No, I think quite on the contrary. More than ever, today it’s crucial to emphasize that on the one hand, yes, every empirical example undermines theory. There are no full examples. But, point two, this does not mean that we should turn the examples against theory. At the same time, there is no exception. There are no examples outside theories. Every example of a theory is an indication of the inner split dynamics of the theory itself, and here dialectics begins, and so on....
Don’t fall into the trap of feeling guilty, especially if you have the luck of studying in such a rich place. All this bullshit like, “Somalian children are starving....” No! Somalian children are not starving because you have a good time here. There are others who are much more guilty. Rather, use the opportunity. Society will need more and more intellectual work. It’s this topic of intellectuals being privileged—this is typical petty-bourgeois manipulation to make you feel guilty. You know who told me the best story? The British Marxist, Terry Eagleton. He told me that 20 or 30 years ago he saw a big British Marxist figure, Eric Hobsbawm, the historian, giving a talk to ordinary workers in a factory.
Hobsbawm wanted to appear popular, not elitist, so he started by saying to the workers, “Listen, I’m not here to teach you. I am here to exchange experiences. I will probably learn more from you than you will from me.” Then he got the answer of a lifetime. One ordinary worker interrupted him and said, “Fuck off! You are privileged to study, to know. You are here to teach us! Yes, we should learn from you! Don’t give us this bullshit, ‘We all know the same.’ You are elite in the sense that you were privileged to learn and to know a lot. So of course we should learn from you. Don’t play this false egalitarianism.”
Again, I think there is a certain strategy today even more, and I speak so bitterly about it because in Europe they are approaching it. I think Europe is approaching some kind of intellectual suicide in the sense that higher education is becoming more and more streamlined. They are talking the same way communists were talking 40 years ago when they wanted to crush intellectual life. They claimed that intellectuals are too abstract in their ivory towers; they are not dealing with real problems; we need education so that it will help real people—real societies’ problems. And then, again, in a debate I had in France, some high politician made it clear what he thinks and he said...in that time in France there were those demonstrations in Paris, the car burnings. He said, “Look, cars are burning in the suburbs of Paris: We don’t need your abstract Marxist theories. We need psychologists to tell us how to control the mob. We need urban planners to tell us how to organize the suburbs to make demonstrations difficult.”
But this is a job for experts, and the whole point of being intellectual today is to be more than an expert. Experts are doing what? They are solving problems formulated by others. You know, if a politician comes to you, “Fuck it! Cars are burning! Tell me what’s the psychological mechanism, how do we dominate it?” No, an intellectual asks a totally different question: “What are the roots? Is the system guilty?” An intellectual, before answering a question, changes the question. He starts with, “But is this the right way to formulate the question?”
FM: You spoke at Occupy Wall Street a few months ago. What is your personal involvement with the Occupy Wall Street movement, and what do you think the protests signify?
SZ: None. My personal involvement was some guy who was connected with it, and he told me, “Would you go there, come there?” And I said, “Okay. Why not?”
Then the same guy told me,“Be careful, because microphones are prohibited, you know, it’s this echoing, repeating.” So my friend told me, frankly, to be demagogic: “Just try to be as much as possible effective, short, slow,” and so on, and that was it. I didn’t even drop my work.
What does [Occupy] mean? Then they tell you, “Oh, Wall Street should work for the Main Street, not the opposite,” but the problem is not this. The problem is that the system stated that there is no Main Street without Wall Street. That is to say that banking and credits are absolutely crucial for the system to function today.
That is why I understand Obama when—two years ago you know when the first, I think it was, $750 billion and a bit more—it was simply blackmail and it was not possible to say no because that’s how the system functions. If Wall Street were to break down, everything would break. We should think more radically. So again, the formula “Give money to Main Street and not to Wall Street” is ruined. That is to say, all these honest, hardworking people who do their jobs cannot find work now. Think how to change that. Think how to change [the] mechanisms of that. We are no longer dealing with short-term crises like in 2008.
FM: Why do you believe that the Right and the Left in America have failed to provide answers to the problems of inequality and the crises they predict?
SZ: It’s crazy but I’m convinced about it: look at the last two seasons of “24.” Look closely, something very interesting happens. It’s not only superficial, political correctness. In season seven, Jack Bauer investigates some Muslim attacks and then he discovers it’s not Muslims at all: it’s some American mega-security company who is manipulating these attacks. Something much more tragic happened in the last season, which I quite liked. It’s that, at the end, Jack Bauer breaks out of this authoritarian logic. Somebody has to do the dirty job, torturing, and so on. He says, “Maybe I should say it publicly, everything, I cannot live with it.” So this logic of “The true heroes are those who are ready to do the dirty job—torture for the country,” it breaks down. His liberal counterpoint, the president, Allison Taylor, also breaks down and has to quit. So that, at the end, you get a very honest assessment of a deadlock and the message is: within the present global systemic coordinates, whatever you do, you end up in a deadlock. I think this honest confrontation with the ethical deadlock is much more valuable than the Hollywood Left “feel-good” attitude of movies like Pelican Brief or All the President’s Men, which may appear radical in their accusation: “Oh my god, even the President of the United States can be corrupted blah blah blah.” Nonetheless, these are all “feel-good” movies because at the end the final message is: “Wow, what a great country! Two ordinary guys can overthrow the mightiest man in the world!” If I were to choose between this Leftist, liberal All the President’s Men or Jack Bauer, I [would] choose Jack Bauer every day. I’m sorry to tell you.
Because it does what honest conservatives want—not reactionaries: reactionaries are stupid, they think if we go back to lost values, it will work. Liberals are stupid progressives. What we can learn from honest conservatives is that they are ready to accept a deadlock.
For example, Marx said about Balzac: precisely as a conservative, Balzac depicted the deadlock of French society. Even [American political scientist] Francis Fukuyama, he no longer believes in this bullshit “end of history.” He told me that the very fact of the possibility of biogenetic manipulations makes his thesis on the “end of history” obsolete. And he thinks that to cope with this problem we need much stronger forms of social control, which liberal-democratic capitalism cannot provide. This is what I like and this is what we can learn from honest conservatives: they don’t bullshit you. And maybe this is the duty of us intellectuals. You know when people ask me on Wall Street, “What should we do?” I was so embarrassed because, fuck you, what do I know? I don’t. But what we should do is simply break the rules in the sense of opening new space. [The world is] confused as it is, always, from Wall Street to Egypt. Nonetheless, it is opening up space. People are becoming aware. It’s the first move, but nonetheless, we have to start to think about some kind of radical change. All these Leftist, liberal things—more gay rights, more abortion—of course we fight for that, but that’s not enough. Ironically, when I was young, we were dreaming about socialism with a human face; these guys are offering us global capitalism with a human face. It’s the same system but a little bit more.... We have to break this taboo, which was very strong until now: nobody even dared to imagine an alternative. Everyone was, in a way as I say, a Fukuyamist. Even radicals, we somehow accept that global capitalism and liberal democracy are here to stay, and the point is only to make the system a little bit more efficient.
No, it is clear we have to start thinking.
And this is a great responsibility, because of course there is no way back to the glories of 20th century communism. No, but that’s our duty at this point, just to open up the field and, at the same time, to undermine, break. We have to be very destructive at this point, destructive in the sense of breaking false illusions....
Who would have expected the Arab Spring, or whatever you call it? It did happen. Who would have expected these big demonstrations in Europe that are occurring? They are happening. People at the beginning thought, “Oh this is something that will explode.” No, it goes on. There is a tremendous potential in dissatisfaction. But again, this is always a potential danger.
FM: It seems that a similar deadlock appears in the context of both the economic crisis and global warming—experts can’t seem to predict them, nor will politicians or society act to stop them.
SZ: I especially hate, from my own experience, when people say, “Oh, who could have predicted this [economic crisis]?” No. I know a couple of leftists and empiricists who exactly predicted this. These are not the kinds of cheap catastrophists who all of the time give bad predictions and then something happens so that they go awry. No, no. They were very precise and predicted this crisis. Paul Krugman said something deeply true. A guy asked him, “But now that we know, wouldn’t things be radically different if we were to know 10 years back what we know now?” He said, “No, no, it wouldn’t. The system pushes you to act in a certain way.” The illusion is much stronger. Like, you may know that there may be a catastrophe, but nonetheless, we would have done exactly the same thing. I mean, it’s no longer a question of knowledge. Today many, even sociologists, have this wonderful idea of how, although we live in a society of knowledge—even scientific knowledge—[it] is becoming more and more contingent, non-binding. I think it was the German theorist Ulrich Beck who drew attention to the simple fact: today we speak about expert opinions. Are we aware how paradoxical this term is? The idea is that we ordinary people have opinions. They tell you the truth. Now experts all of a sudden are telling us different opinions and we have to decide how, who knows, if even they don’t know. This is the tragedy of our predicament of freedom of choice. The problem is...we are often forced to choose without having serious cognitive coordinates of how or what to choose.... The price is that science is no longer a homogenous science but it’s turning into kind of a pluralistic field of opinions.
For example, I once had a debate with a quantum physicist. And he accused me, “You stupid guys with your French theory, total bullshit.” He made fun precisely of this: “You can just say whatever you want.” And I told him, “Fuck you! Look at quantum physics: literally anything goes. You can claim that there is a Big Bang, that there is no Big Bang, there were multiple Big Bangs…” It’s incredible how, when science approaches a certain limit, how open it becomes. It’s as if anything you can imagine, you find scientists who advocate. I’m not saying science is just laughable. It is real. I’m just saying how difficult it is to decide today without a proper cognitive base. We are more and more compelled to this.
Andre Depui said that the problem when people say, “Oh but we don’t know if it’s really global warming.” The problem is that if you want to wait until we really know, it will be, by definition, too late. Because we will really know when the catastrophe is here. This is maybe one of the great things that has to be decided as a specific problem—in Germany there were working with certain proponents of risk society—how to decide some basic rules of decision-making in situations that are cognitively non-transparent. You have to decide because not doing anything is also a decision. You have to decide, but you don’t know. The situation is not transparent.
FM: Thank you so much for the interview. Can we get a photo with you?
SZ: Okay, okay. But I hate my stupid face. Oh, this photo will look like something that should be titled “Dumb and Dumber.” Ugh, my stupid face. It’s horrible, just horrible. There’s a Slovenian saying. It looks like it’s been pulled out of a cow’s ass.
By BRADLEY G. BOLMAN and TARA RAGHUVEER, CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
Published: Friday, February 10, 2012
FM staff writer Tara Raghuveer ’14 and contributing writer Bradley G. Bolman ’15 discuss the Occupy movement, pop culture, and modern academia with Slavoj Zizek.
When Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek visited Harvard for a lecture on the ontology of sexual difference last October, FM staff writer Tara Raghuveer ’14 and contributing writer Bradley G. Bolman ’15 sat down to discuss the Occupy movement, pop culture, and modern academia.
Fifteen Minutes: What is the role of academia at an institution like Harvard in the current global crisis?
Slavoj Žižek: What is crucial and also I think—especially today, when we have some kind of re-emergence of at least some kind of practical spirit, protest, and so on—one of the dangers I see amongst some radical academia circles is this mistrust in theory, you know, saying, “Who needs fat books on Hegel and logic? My god, they have to act!”
No, I think quite on the contrary. More than ever, today it’s crucial to emphasize that on the one hand, yes, every empirical example undermines theory. There are no full examples. But, point two, this does not mean that we should turn the examples against theory. At the same time, there is no exception. There are no examples outside theories. Every example of a theory is an indication of the inner split dynamics of the theory itself, and here dialectics begins, and so on....
Don’t fall into the trap of feeling guilty, especially if you have the luck of studying in such a rich place. All this bullshit like, “Somalian children are starving....” No! Somalian children are not starving because you have a good time here. There are others who are much more guilty. Rather, use the opportunity. Society will need more and more intellectual work. It’s this topic of intellectuals being privileged—this is typical petty-bourgeois manipulation to make you feel guilty. You know who told me the best story? The British Marxist, Terry Eagleton. He told me that 20 or 30 years ago he saw a big British Marxist figure, Eric Hobsbawm, the historian, giving a talk to ordinary workers in a factory.
Hobsbawm wanted to appear popular, not elitist, so he started by saying to the workers, “Listen, I’m not here to teach you. I am here to exchange experiences. I will probably learn more from you than you will from me.” Then he got the answer of a lifetime. One ordinary worker interrupted him and said, “Fuck off! You are privileged to study, to know. You are here to teach us! Yes, we should learn from you! Don’t give us this bullshit, ‘We all know the same.’ You are elite in the sense that you were privileged to learn and to know a lot. So of course we should learn from you. Don’t play this false egalitarianism.”
Again, I think there is a certain strategy today even more, and I speak so bitterly about it because in Europe they are approaching it. I think Europe is approaching some kind of intellectual suicide in the sense that higher education is becoming more and more streamlined. They are talking the same way communists were talking 40 years ago when they wanted to crush intellectual life. They claimed that intellectuals are too abstract in their ivory towers; they are not dealing with real problems; we need education so that it will help real people—real societies’ problems. And then, again, in a debate I had in France, some high politician made it clear what he thinks and he said...in that time in France there were those demonstrations in Paris, the car burnings. He said, “Look, cars are burning in the suburbs of Paris: We don’t need your abstract Marxist theories. We need psychologists to tell us how to control the mob. We need urban planners to tell us how to organize the suburbs to make demonstrations difficult.”
But this is a job for experts, and the whole point of being intellectual today is to be more than an expert. Experts are doing what? They are solving problems formulated by others. You know, if a politician comes to you, “Fuck it! Cars are burning! Tell me what’s the psychological mechanism, how do we dominate it?” No, an intellectual asks a totally different question: “What are the roots? Is the system guilty?” An intellectual, before answering a question, changes the question. He starts with, “But is this the right way to formulate the question?”
FM: You spoke at Occupy Wall Street a few months ago. What is your personal involvement with the Occupy Wall Street movement, and what do you think the protests signify?
SZ: None. My personal involvement was some guy who was connected with it, and he told me, “Would you go there, come there?” And I said, “Okay. Why not?”
Then the same guy told me,“Be careful, because microphones are prohibited, you know, it’s this echoing, repeating.” So my friend told me, frankly, to be demagogic: “Just try to be as much as possible effective, short, slow,” and so on, and that was it. I didn’t even drop my work.
What does [Occupy] mean? Then they tell you, “Oh, Wall Street should work for the Main Street, not the opposite,” but the problem is not this. The problem is that the system stated that there is no Main Street without Wall Street. That is to say that banking and credits are absolutely crucial for the system to function today.
That is why I understand Obama when—two years ago you know when the first, I think it was, $750 billion and a bit more—it was simply blackmail and it was not possible to say no because that’s how the system functions. If Wall Street were to break down, everything would break. We should think more radically. So again, the formula “Give money to Main Street and not to Wall Street” is ruined. That is to say, all these honest, hardworking people who do their jobs cannot find work now. Think how to change that. Think how to change [the] mechanisms of that. We are no longer dealing with short-term crises like in 2008.
FM: Why do you believe that the Right and the Left in America have failed to provide answers to the problems of inequality and the crises they predict?
SZ: It’s crazy but I’m convinced about it: look at the last two seasons of “24.” Look closely, something very interesting happens. It’s not only superficial, political correctness. In season seven, Jack Bauer investigates some Muslim attacks and then he discovers it’s not Muslims at all: it’s some American mega-security company who is manipulating these attacks. Something much more tragic happened in the last season, which I quite liked. It’s that, at the end, Jack Bauer breaks out of this authoritarian logic. Somebody has to do the dirty job, torturing, and so on. He says, “Maybe I should say it publicly, everything, I cannot live with it.” So this logic of “The true heroes are those who are ready to do the dirty job—torture for the country,” it breaks down. His liberal counterpoint, the president, Allison Taylor, also breaks down and has to quit. So that, at the end, you get a very honest assessment of a deadlock and the message is: within the present global systemic coordinates, whatever you do, you end up in a deadlock. I think this honest confrontation with the ethical deadlock is much more valuable than the Hollywood Left “feel-good” attitude of movies like Pelican Brief or All the President’s Men, which may appear radical in their accusation: “Oh my god, even the President of the United States can be corrupted blah blah blah.” Nonetheless, these are all “feel-good” movies because at the end the final message is: “Wow, what a great country! Two ordinary guys can overthrow the mightiest man in the world!” If I were to choose between this Leftist, liberal All the President’s Men or Jack Bauer, I [would] choose Jack Bauer every day. I’m sorry to tell you.
Because it does what honest conservatives want—not reactionaries: reactionaries are stupid, they think if we go back to lost values, it will work. Liberals are stupid progressives. What we can learn from honest conservatives is that they are ready to accept a deadlock.
For example, Marx said about Balzac: precisely as a conservative, Balzac depicted the deadlock of French society. Even [American political scientist] Francis Fukuyama, he no longer believes in this bullshit “end of history.” He told me that the very fact of the possibility of biogenetic manipulations makes his thesis on the “end of history” obsolete. And he thinks that to cope with this problem we need much stronger forms of social control, which liberal-democratic capitalism cannot provide. This is what I like and this is what we can learn from honest conservatives: they don’t bullshit you. And maybe this is the duty of us intellectuals. You know when people ask me on Wall Street, “What should we do?” I was so embarrassed because, fuck you, what do I know? I don’t. But what we should do is simply break the rules in the sense of opening new space. [The world is] confused as it is, always, from Wall Street to Egypt. Nonetheless, it is opening up space. People are becoming aware. It’s the first move, but nonetheless, we have to start to think about some kind of radical change. All these Leftist, liberal things—more gay rights, more abortion—of course we fight for that, but that’s not enough. Ironically, when I was young, we were dreaming about socialism with a human face; these guys are offering us global capitalism with a human face. It’s the same system but a little bit more.... We have to break this taboo, which was very strong until now: nobody even dared to imagine an alternative. Everyone was, in a way as I say, a Fukuyamist. Even radicals, we somehow accept that global capitalism and liberal democracy are here to stay, and the point is only to make the system a little bit more efficient.
No, it is clear we have to start thinking.
And this is a great responsibility, because of course there is no way back to the glories of 20th century communism. No, but that’s our duty at this point, just to open up the field and, at the same time, to undermine, break. We have to be very destructive at this point, destructive in the sense of breaking false illusions....
Who would have expected the Arab Spring, or whatever you call it? It did happen. Who would have expected these big demonstrations in Europe that are occurring? They are happening. People at the beginning thought, “Oh this is something that will explode.” No, it goes on. There is a tremendous potential in dissatisfaction. But again, this is always a potential danger.
FM: It seems that a similar deadlock appears in the context of both the economic crisis and global warming—experts can’t seem to predict them, nor will politicians or society act to stop them.
SZ: I especially hate, from my own experience, when people say, “Oh, who could have predicted this [economic crisis]?” No. I know a couple of leftists and empiricists who exactly predicted this. These are not the kinds of cheap catastrophists who all of the time give bad predictions and then something happens so that they go awry. No, no. They were very precise and predicted this crisis. Paul Krugman said something deeply true. A guy asked him, “But now that we know, wouldn’t things be radically different if we were to know 10 years back what we know now?” He said, “No, no, it wouldn’t. The system pushes you to act in a certain way.” The illusion is much stronger. Like, you may know that there may be a catastrophe, but nonetheless, we would have done exactly the same thing. I mean, it’s no longer a question of knowledge. Today many, even sociologists, have this wonderful idea of how, although we live in a society of knowledge—even scientific knowledge—[it] is becoming more and more contingent, non-binding. I think it was the German theorist Ulrich Beck who drew attention to the simple fact: today we speak about expert opinions. Are we aware how paradoxical this term is? The idea is that we ordinary people have opinions. They tell you the truth. Now experts all of a sudden are telling us different opinions and we have to decide how, who knows, if even they don’t know. This is the tragedy of our predicament of freedom of choice. The problem is...we are often forced to choose without having serious cognitive coordinates of how or what to choose.... The price is that science is no longer a homogenous science but it’s turning into kind of a pluralistic field of opinions.
For example, I once had a debate with a quantum physicist. And he accused me, “You stupid guys with your French theory, total bullshit.” He made fun precisely of this: “You can just say whatever you want.” And I told him, “Fuck you! Look at quantum physics: literally anything goes. You can claim that there is a Big Bang, that there is no Big Bang, there were multiple Big Bangs…” It’s incredible how, when science approaches a certain limit, how open it becomes. It’s as if anything you can imagine, you find scientists who advocate. I’m not saying science is just laughable. It is real. I’m just saying how difficult it is to decide today without a proper cognitive base. We are more and more compelled to this.
Andre Depui said that the problem when people say, “Oh but we don’t know if it’s really global warming.” The problem is that if you want to wait until we really know, it will be, by definition, too late. Because we will really know when the catastrophe is here. This is maybe one of the great things that has to be decided as a specific problem—in Germany there were working with certain proponents of risk society—how to decide some basic rules of decision-making in situations that are cognitively non-transparent. You have to decide because not doing anything is also a decision. You have to decide, but you don’t know. The situation is not transparent.
FM: Thank you so much for the interview. Can we get a photo with you?
SZ: Okay, okay. But I hate my stupid face. Oh, this photo will look like something that should be titled “Dumb and Dumber.” Ugh, my stupid face. It’s horrible, just horrible. There’s a Slovenian saying. It looks like it’s been pulled out of a cow’s ass.
Friday, February 10, 2012
MARX RELOADED RELEASED
http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/theatrical-reviews/marx-reloaded-17920
February 9 2012
DIRECTED BY Jason Barker
STARRING Jason Barker, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri
This engaging hour-long talking-head-meets-animation doc examines the potentially terminal crisis of the free market system through Karl Marx.
Shane Herrick
The American filmmaker explains how an innovative new videogame inspired him to pose 12 film stars the most challenging of moral dilemmas.
“We are in deep shit, and we know it. But secretly, we don’t really believe it can all fall apart.”
As the global economy continues to boil, and national debts and bailouts continue to heave into the trillions, these words, by rock star philosopher Slavoj Žižek, ring louder than ever. Time to dust off your copy of ‘Das Kapital’ and put capitalism back under the microscope.
An engaging hour-long talking-head-meets-animation doc, Marx Reloaded examines the potentially terminal crisis of the free market system through Marx, posing the question of whether late capitalism is a sustainable economic force and whether communism could provide a more viable alternative.
Barker calls on several established minds to provide a balanced stream of information. Through interviews with the likes of Zizek, Eammon Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt of ‘Empire’ fame, and French philosopher Jacques Rancière, the film shines a light on the many causes of the financial crumble, creating a compelling dialogue of Marx’s theories on capitalism as they apply to its contemporary form.
As the film comes to a close, it seems the focus falls less on the idea of blame, as capitalism as the sole culprit, or on the viability of another form of communism despite the spectre of Soviet horrors, but more on the transformative power of new ideas. Through the slightly comical animated Matrix metaphor with Marx as Neo and Trotsky as Morpheus, the doc poses the question of “Which pill?” do we want to take: blue or red? Maybe neither.
As such, Marx Reloaded becomes more of a call to action: it is no longer about choosing from what is and has been, but of acting towards creating a third pill or ditching the pills all together; to finish reading, to start writing, and try something else.
Marx Reloaded is showing at ICA London from February 10-16. Book tickets now at ica.org.uk
February 9 2012
DIRECTED BY Jason Barker
STARRING Jason Barker, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri
This engaging hour-long talking-head-meets-animation doc examines the potentially terminal crisis of the free market system through Karl Marx.
Shane Herrick
The American filmmaker explains how an innovative new videogame inspired him to pose 12 film stars the most challenging of moral dilemmas.
“We are in deep shit, and we know it. But secretly, we don’t really believe it can all fall apart.”
As the global economy continues to boil, and national debts and bailouts continue to heave into the trillions, these words, by rock star philosopher Slavoj Žižek, ring louder than ever. Time to dust off your copy of ‘Das Kapital’ and put capitalism back under the microscope.
An engaging hour-long talking-head-meets-animation doc, Marx Reloaded examines the potentially terminal crisis of the free market system through Marx, posing the question of whether late capitalism is a sustainable economic force and whether communism could provide a more viable alternative.
Barker calls on several established minds to provide a balanced stream of information. Through interviews with the likes of Zizek, Eammon Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt of ‘Empire’ fame, and French philosopher Jacques Rancière, the film shines a light on the many causes of the financial crumble, creating a compelling dialogue of Marx’s theories on capitalism as they apply to its contemporary form.
As the film comes to a close, it seems the focus falls less on the idea of blame, as capitalism as the sole culprit, or on the viability of another form of communism despite the spectre of Soviet horrors, but more on the transformative power of new ideas. Through the slightly comical animated Matrix metaphor with Marx as Neo and Trotsky as Morpheus, the doc poses the question of “Which pill?” do we want to take: blue or red? Maybe neither.
As such, Marx Reloaded becomes more of a call to action: it is no longer about choosing from what is and has been, but of acting towards creating a third pill or ditching the pills all together; to finish reading, to start writing, and try something else.
Marx Reloaded is showing at ICA London from February 10-16. Book tickets now at ica.org.uk
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Nobody has to be vile
London Review of Books
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/slavoj-zizek/nobody-has-to-be-vile
Slavoj Žižek
Since 2001, Davos and Porto Alegre have been the twin cities of globalisation: Davos, the exclusive Swiss resort where the global elite of managers, statesmen and media personalities meets for the World Economic Forum under heavy police protection, trying to convince us (and themselves) that globalisation is its own best remedy; Porto Alegre, the subtropical Brazilian city where the counter-elite of the anti-globalisation movement meets, trying to convince us (and themselves) that capitalist globalisation is not our inevitable fate – that, as the official slogan puts it, ‘another world is possible.’ It seems, however, that the Porto Alegre reunions have somehow lost their impetus – we have heard less and less about them over the past couple of years. Where did the bright stars of Porto Alegre go?
Some of them, at least, moved to Davos. The tone of the Davos meetings is now predominantly set by the group of entrepreneurs who ironically refer to themselves as ‘liberal communists’ and who no longer accept the opposition between Davos and Porto Alegre: their claim is that we can have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat it (endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility, ecological concern etc). There is no need for Porto Alegre: instead, Davos can become Porto Davos.
So who are these liberal communists? The usual suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman. The true conservatives today, they argue, are not only the old right, with its ridiculous belief in authority, order and parochial patriotism, but also the old left, with its war against capitalism: both fight their shadow-theatre battles in disregard of the new realities. The signifier of this new reality in the liberal communist Newspeak is ‘smart’. Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and co-operation as against central authority; in flexibility as against routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis as against fixed hierarchy.
Bill Gates is the icon of what he has called ‘frictionless capitalism’, the post-industrial society and the ‘end of labour’. Software is winning over hardware and the young nerd over the old manager in his black suit. In the new company headquarters, there is little external discipline; former hackers dominate the scene, working long hours, enjoying free drinks in green surroundings. The underlying notion here is that Gates is a subversive marginal hooligan, an ex-hacker, who has taken over and dressed himself up as a respectable chairman.
Liberal communists are top executives reviving the spirit of contest or, to put it the other way round, countercultural geeks who have taken over big corporations. Their dogma is a new, postmodernised version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: the market and social responsibility are not opposites, but can be reunited for mutual benefit. As Friedman puts it, nobody has to be vile in order to do business these days; collaboration with employees, dialogue with customers, respect for the environment, transparency of deals – these are the keys to success. Olivier Malnuit recently drew up the liberal communist’s ten commandments in the French magazine Technikart:
1. You shall give everything away free (free access, no copyright); just charge for the additional services, which will make you rich.
2. You shall change the world, not just sell things.
3. You shall be sharing, aware of social responsibility.
4. You shall be creative: focus on design, new technologies and science.
5. You shall tell all: have no secrets, endorse and practise the cult of transparency and the free flow of information; all humanity should collaborate and interact.
6. You shall not work: have no fixed 9 to 5 job, but engage in smart, dynamic, flexible communication.
7. You shall return to school: engage in permanent education.
8. You shall act as an enzyme: work not only for the market, but trigger new forms of social collaboration.
9. You shall die poor: return your wealth to those who need it, since you have more than you can ever spend.
10. You shall be the state: companies should be in partnership with the state.
Liberal communists are pragmatic; they hate a doctrinaire approach. There is no exploited working class today, only concrete problems to be solved: starvation in Africa, the plight of Muslim women, religious fundamentalist violence. When there is a humanitarian crisis in Africa (liberal communists love a humanitarian crisis; it brings out the best in them), instead of engaging in anti-imperialist rhetoric, we should get together and work out the best way of solving the problem, engage people, governments and business in a common enterprise, start moving things instead of relying on centralised state help, approach the crisis in a creative and unconventional way.
Liberal communists like to point out that the decision of some large international corporations to ignore apartheid rules within their companies was as important as the direct political struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Abolishing segregation within the company, paying blacks and whites the same salary for the same job etc: this was a perfect instance of the overlap between the struggle for political freedom and business interests, since the same companies can now thrive in post-apartheid South Africa.
Liberal communists love May 1968. What an explosion of youthful energy and creativity! How it shattered the bureaucratic order! What an impetus it gave to economic and social life after the political illusions dropped away! Those who were old enough were themselves protesting and fighting on the streets: now they have changed in order to change the world, to revolutionise our lives for real. Didn’t Marx say that all political upheavals were unimportant compared to the invention of the steam engine? And would Marx not have said today: what are all the protests against global capitalism in comparison with the internet?
Above all, liberal communists are true citizens of the world – good people who worry. They worry about populist fundamentalism and irresponsible greedy capitalist corporations. They see the ‘deeper causes’ of today’s problems: mass poverty and hopelessness breed fundamentalist terror. Their goal is not to earn money, but to change the world (and, as a by-product, make even more money).
Bill Gates is already the single greatest benefactor in the history of humanity, displaying his love for his neighbours by giving hundreds of millions of dollars for education, the fight against hunger and malaria etc. The catch is that before you can give all this away you have to take it (or, as the liberal communists would put it, create it). In order to help people, the justification goes, you must have the means to do so, and experience – that is, recognition of the dismal failure of all centralised statist and collectivist approaches – teaches us that private enterprise is by far the most effective way. By regulating their business, taxing them excessively, the state is undermining the official goal of its own activity (to make life better for the majority, to help those in need).
Liberal communists do not want to be mere profit-machines: they want their lives to have deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned religion and for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation (everybody knows that Buddhism foreshadows brain science, that the power of meditation can be measured scientifically). Their motto is social responsibility and gratitude: they are the first to admit that society has been incredibly good to them, allowing them to deploy their talents and amass wealth, so they feel that it is their duty to give something back to society and help people. This beneficence is what makes business success worthwhile.
This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Remember Andrew Carnegie, who employed a private army to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his wealth for educational, cultural and humanitarian causes, proving that, although a man of steel, he had a heart of gold? In the same way, today’s liberal communists give away with one hand what they grabbed with the other.
There is a chocolate-flavoured laxative available on the shelves of US stores which is publicised with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! – i.e. eat more of something that itself causes constipation. The structure of the chocolate laxative can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape; it is what makes a figure like Soros so objectionable. He stands for ruthless financial exploitation combined with its counter-agent, humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. Soros’s daily routine is a lie embodied: half of his working time is devoted to financial speculation, the other half to ‘humanitarian’ activities (financing cultural and democratic activities in post-Communist countries, writing essays and books) which work against the effects of his own speculations. The two faces of Bill Gates are exactly like the two faces of Soros: on the one hand, a cruel businessman, destroying or buying out competitors, aiming at a virtual monopoly; on the other, the great philanthropist who makes a point of saying: ‘What does it serve to have computers if people do not have enough to eat?’
According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World. As for the opposition between ‘smart’ and ‘non-smart’, outsourcing is the key notion. You export the (necessary) dark side of production – disciplined, hierarchical labour, ecological pollution – to ‘non-smart’ Third World locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible Third World sweat shops.
We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today. All other enemies – religious fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracies – depend on contingent local circumstances. Precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what they are up to.
Etienne Balibar, in La Crainte des masses (1997), distinguishes the two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today’s capitalism: the objective (structural) violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism (the automatic creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed), and the subjective violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious (in short: racist) fundamentalisms. They may fight subjective violence, but liberal communists are the agents of the structural violence that creates the conditions for explosions of subjective violence. The same Soros who gives millions to fund education has ruined the lives of thousands thanks to his financial speculations and in doing so created the conditions for the rise of the intolerance he denounces.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/slavoj-zizek/nobody-has-to-be-vile
Slavoj Žižek
Since 2001, Davos and Porto Alegre have been the twin cities of globalisation: Davos, the exclusive Swiss resort where the global elite of managers, statesmen and media personalities meets for the World Economic Forum under heavy police protection, trying to convince us (and themselves) that globalisation is its own best remedy; Porto Alegre, the subtropical Brazilian city where the counter-elite of the anti-globalisation movement meets, trying to convince us (and themselves) that capitalist globalisation is not our inevitable fate – that, as the official slogan puts it, ‘another world is possible.’ It seems, however, that the Porto Alegre reunions have somehow lost their impetus – we have heard less and less about them over the past couple of years. Where did the bright stars of Porto Alegre go?
Some of them, at least, moved to Davos. The tone of the Davos meetings is now predominantly set by the group of entrepreneurs who ironically refer to themselves as ‘liberal communists’ and who no longer accept the opposition between Davos and Porto Alegre: their claim is that we can have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat it (endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility, ecological concern etc). There is no need for Porto Alegre: instead, Davos can become Porto Davos.
So who are these liberal communists? The usual suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman. The true conservatives today, they argue, are not only the old right, with its ridiculous belief in authority, order and parochial patriotism, but also the old left, with its war against capitalism: both fight their shadow-theatre battles in disregard of the new realities. The signifier of this new reality in the liberal communist Newspeak is ‘smart’. Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and co-operation as against central authority; in flexibility as against routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis as against fixed hierarchy.
Bill Gates is the icon of what he has called ‘frictionless capitalism’, the post-industrial society and the ‘end of labour’. Software is winning over hardware and the young nerd over the old manager in his black suit. In the new company headquarters, there is little external discipline; former hackers dominate the scene, working long hours, enjoying free drinks in green surroundings. The underlying notion here is that Gates is a subversive marginal hooligan, an ex-hacker, who has taken over and dressed himself up as a respectable chairman.
Liberal communists are top executives reviving the spirit of contest or, to put it the other way round, countercultural geeks who have taken over big corporations. Their dogma is a new, postmodernised version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: the market and social responsibility are not opposites, but can be reunited for mutual benefit. As Friedman puts it, nobody has to be vile in order to do business these days; collaboration with employees, dialogue with customers, respect for the environment, transparency of deals – these are the keys to success. Olivier Malnuit recently drew up the liberal communist’s ten commandments in the French magazine Technikart:
1. You shall give everything away free (free access, no copyright); just charge for the additional services, which will make you rich.
2. You shall change the world, not just sell things.
3. You shall be sharing, aware of social responsibility.
4. You shall be creative: focus on design, new technologies and science.
5. You shall tell all: have no secrets, endorse and practise the cult of transparency and the free flow of information; all humanity should collaborate and interact.
6. You shall not work: have no fixed 9 to 5 job, but engage in smart, dynamic, flexible communication.
7. You shall return to school: engage in permanent education.
8. You shall act as an enzyme: work not only for the market, but trigger new forms of social collaboration.
9. You shall die poor: return your wealth to those who need it, since you have more than you can ever spend.
10. You shall be the state: companies should be in partnership with the state.
Liberal communists are pragmatic; they hate a doctrinaire approach. There is no exploited working class today, only concrete problems to be solved: starvation in Africa, the plight of Muslim women, religious fundamentalist violence. When there is a humanitarian crisis in Africa (liberal communists love a humanitarian crisis; it brings out the best in them), instead of engaging in anti-imperialist rhetoric, we should get together and work out the best way of solving the problem, engage people, governments and business in a common enterprise, start moving things instead of relying on centralised state help, approach the crisis in a creative and unconventional way.
Liberal communists like to point out that the decision of some large international corporations to ignore apartheid rules within their companies was as important as the direct political struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Abolishing segregation within the company, paying blacks and whites the same salary for the same job etc: this was a perfect instance of the overlap between the struggle for political freedom and business interests, since the same companies can now thrive in post-apartheid South Africa.
Liberal communists love May 1968. What an explosion of youthful energy and creativity! How it shattered the bureaucratic order! What an impetus it gave to economic and social life after the political illusions dropped away! Those who were old enough were themselves protesting and fighting on the streets: now they have changed in order to change the world, to revolutionise our lives for real. Didn’t Marx say that all political upheavals were unimportant compared to the invention of the steam engine? And would Marx not have said today: what are all the protests against global capitalism in comparison with the internet?
Above all, liberal communists are true citizens of the world – good people who worry. They worry about populist fundamentalism and irresponsible greedy capitalist corporations. They see the ‘deeper causes’ of today’s problems: mass poverty and hopelessness breed fundamentalist terror. Their goal is not to earn money, but to change the world (and, as a by-product, make even more money).
Bill Gates is already the single greatest benefactor in the history of humanity, displaying his love for his neighbours by giving hundreds of millions of dollars for education, the fight against hunger and malaria etc. The catch is that before you can give all this away you have to take it (or, as the liberal communists would put it, create it). In order to help people, the justification goes, you must have the means to do so, and experience – that is, recognition of the dismal failure of all centralised statist and collectivist approaches – teaches us that private enterprise is by far the most effective way. By regulating their business, taxing them excessively, the state is undermining the official goal of its own activity (to make life better for the majority, to help those in need).
Liberal communists do not want to be mere profit-machines: they want their lives to have deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned religion and for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation (everybody knows that Buddhism foreshadows brain science, that the power of meditation can be measured scientifically). Their motto is social responsibility and gratitude: they are the first to admit that society has been incredibly good to them, allowing them to deploy their talents and amass wealth, so they feel that it is their duty to give something back to society and help people. This beneficence is what makes business success worthwhile.
This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Remember Andrew Carnegie, who employed a private army to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his wealth for educational, cultural and humanitarian causes, proving that, although a man of steel, he had a heart of gold? In the same way, today’s liberal communists give away with one hand what they grabbed with the other.
There is a chocolate-flavoured laxative available on the shelves of US stores which is publicised with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! – i.e. eat more of something that itself causes constipation. The structure of the chocolate laxative can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape; it is what makes a figure like Soros so objectionable. He stands for ruthless financial exploitation combined with its counter-agent, humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. Soros’s daily routine is a lie embodied: half of his working time is devoted to financial speculation, the other half to ‘humanitarian’ activities (financing cultural and democratic activities in post-Communist countries, writing essays and books) which work against the effects of his own speculations. The two faces of Bill Gates are exactly like the two faces of Soros: on the one hand, a cruel businessman, destroying or buying out competitors, aiming at a virtual monopoly; on the other, the great philanthropist who makes a point of saying: ‘What does it serve to have computers if people do not have enough to eat?’
According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World. As for the opposition between ‘smart’ and ‘non-smart’, outsourcing is the key notion. You export the (necessary) dark side of production – disciplined, hierarchical labour, ecological pollution – to ‘non-smart’ Third World locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible Third World sweat shops.
We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today. All other enemies – religious fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracies – depend on contingent local circumstances. Precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what they are up to.
Etienne Balibar, in La Crainte des masses (1997), distinguishes the two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today’s capitalism: the objective (structural) violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism (the automatic creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed), and the subjective violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious (in short: racist) fundamentalisms. They may fight subjective violence, but liberal communists are the agents of the structural violence that creates the conditions for explosions of subjective violence. The same Soros who gives millions to fund education has ruined the lives of thousands thanks to his financial speculations and in doing so created the conditions for the rise of the intolerance he denounces.
US elections: no matter who you vote for, money always wins
Gary Younge, guardian.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/29/us-politics-vote-money-wins
Dollars play a decisive role in US politics. And more so since the supreme court allowed unlimited campaign contributions
Republican presidential debates are not for the faint-hearted. Last week in Jacksonville, Florida, Rick Santorum warned of the "threat of radical Islam growing" in Central and South America. Newt Gingrich advocated sending up to seven flights a day to the moon, where private industry might set up a colony, and reaffirmed his claim that Palestinians were invented in the late 70s. Mitt Romney argued that if you make things tough enough for undocumented people, they will "self-deport".
Given the general state of the Republican party, such comments now attract precious little attention. Truth and facts are but two options among many. The party's base, overrun by birthers, climate change deniers and creationists, floats its warped theories and every now and then one makes it to the top and bobs out into the airwaves.
So the oft-touted notion that these debates have been responsible for shifting the trajectory of this primary race would be worrying if it were true. It is difficult to think of anywhere else in the western world where these debates would have any credibility outside of a fringe party (even if the fringes in Europe are now spreading). Far from indicating America's exceptionalism, it looks more like an awful parody of the stereotypes most outsiders already believed about American politics at its most bizarre. "Those who follow this race daily may have long since lost perspective on how absurd it is," said the German magazine Der Spiegel last week. "Each candidate loves Israel. They all love Ronald Reagan. Each loves his wife, a born first lady, for a number of reasons."
The good news is, with the exception of Perry's demise, the debates have not been pivotal. The bad news is that the truly decisive element has been something even more insidious: money. Lots of it.
This is not new. But since a 2010 supreme court ruling allowing unlimited campaign contributions by corporations and unions, it has become particularly acute. Moreover, the contributors can remain anonymous. The organisations that are taking advantage of this new law are known as Super Pacs. Even at this early stage of the presidential cycle, their potential for framing the race is clear. In the whole of 2008 individuals, parties and other groups spent $168.8m independently on the presidential election. This year on Republican candidates alone, where voting started less than a month ago, the Super Pacs have reported independent expenditures of almost $40m. In 2008 election spending doubled compared with 2004. This year industry analysts believe the money spent just on television ads is set to leap by almost 80% compared with four years ago.
Money in American politics was already an elephant in the room. Now the supreme court has given it a laxative, taken away the shovel, and asked us to ignore both the sight and the stench.
The only real restriction is that there should be no co-ordination between the candidate and the Super Pac. In practice, this is little more than a fig leaf. A few weeks ago one of the ads, funded by the Super Pac supporting Gingrich, was slated for its many brazen inaccuracies. At a campaign stop in Orlando, Gingrich told supporters: "I am calling on this Super Pac – I cannot co-ordinate with them and I cannot communicate directly, but I can speak out as a citizen as I'm talking to you – I call on them to either edit out every single mistake or to pull the entire film."
Romney is no less compromised. His former chief campaign fundraiser and political director work for the main Super Pac supporting him, which was set up with the help of a $1m cheque from an ex-business partner. "This legalism of 'no co-ordination' is a filament-thin G-string," wrote Timothy Egan in the New York Times recently. "Everyone co-ordinates."
Money alone can't guarantee success. Santorum spent around 74 cents a voter in Iowa and narrowly won; Perry spent around $358 per vote and came a distant fourth. Debate performances, policy positions, personal histories and retail politics play a role. But the fact that money is not the sole determinant doesn't mean it's not the key one. Two months ago Gingrich's surge in Iowa was halted after Romney's Super Pac ploughed millions of dollars into campaign ads attacking him. Romney's commanding lead in South Carolina was similarly thwarted when Gingrich's Super Pac injected several million dollars.
This is not a partisan point. Almost two-thirds of Americans believe the government should limit individual contributions – with a majority among Republicans, Democrats and independents. The influence of money at this level corrupts an entire political culture and in no small part explains the depth of cynicism, alienation and mistrust Americans now have for their politicians.
The trend towards oligarchy in the polity is already clear. There are 250 millionaires in Congress. As a whole, the polity's median net worth is $891,506, nine times the typical US household. Around 11% are in the nation's top 1%, including 34 Republicans and 23 Democrats. And that's before you get to Romney, whose personal wealth is double that of the last eight presidents combined. All of this would be problematic at the best of times, but in a period of rising inequality it is obscene.
The issue here is not class envy, hating rich people because they are rich, but class interests – cementing the advantages of the privileged over the rest. The problem is not personal, it's systemic. In the current climate, it means a group of wealthy people in business will decide which wealthy people in Congress they would like to tell poor people what they can't have because times are hard. And unless the ruling is overturned there is precious little that can be done about it.
Last week in a Massachusetts Senate race, both the Republican incumbent and his likely Democratic challenger signed a pact agreeing not to use third-party money. The trouble is that the agreement is completely unenforceable. Already at least one pro-Republican group has refused to commit to it.
Downplaying money's central role at this point merely buys into the illusion of participatory democracy, where ideas, character and strategy are paramount, while others are actually buying the candidates and access to power. The result is a charade.
[....]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/29/us-politics-vote-money-wins
Dollars play a decisive role in US politics. And more so since the supreme court allowed unlimited campaign contributions
Republican presidential debates are not for the faint-hearted. Last week in Jacksonville, Florida, Rick Santorum warned of the "threat of radical Islam growing" in Central and South America. Newt Gingrich advocated sending up to seven flights a day to the moon, where private industry might set up a colony, and reaffirmed his claim that Palestinians were invented in the late 70s. Mitt Romney argued that if you make things tough enough for undocumented people, they will "self-deport".
Given the general state of the Republican party, such comments now attract precious little attention. Truth and facts are but two options among many. The party's base, overrun by birthers, climate change deniers and creationists, floats its warped theories and every now and then one makes it to the top and bobs out into the airwaves.
So the oft-touted notion that these debates have been responsible for shifting the trajectory of this primary race would be worrying if it were true. It is difficult to think of anywhere else in the western world where these debates would have any credibility outside of a fringe party (even if the fringes in Europe are now spreading). Far from indicating America's exceptionalism, it looks more like an awful parody of the stereotypes most outsiders already believed about American politics at its most bizarre. "Those who follow this race daily may have long since lost perspective on how absurd it is," said the German magazine Der Spiegel last week. "Each candidate loves Israel. They all love Ronald Reagan. Each loves his wife, a born first lady, for a number of reasons."
The good news is, with the exception of Perry's demise, the debates have not been pivotal. The bad news is that the truly decisive element has been something even more insidious: money. Lots of it.
This is not new. But since a 2010 supreme court ruling allowing unlimited campaign contributions by corporations and unions, it has become particularly acute. Moreover, the contributors can remain anonymous. The organisations that are taking advantage of this new law are known as Super Pacs. Even at this early stage of the presidential cycle, their potential for framing the race is clear. In the whole of 2008 individuals, parties and other groups spent $168.8m independently on the presidential election. This year on Republican candidates alone, where voting started less than a month ago, the Super Pacs have reported independent expenditures of almost $40m. In 2008 election spending doubled compared with 2004. This year industry analysts believe the money spent just on television ads is set to leap by almost 80% compared with four years ago.
Money in American politics was already an elephant in the room. Now the supreme court has given it a laxative, taken away the shovel, and asked us to ignore both the sight and the stench.
The only real restriction is that there should be no co-ordination between the candidate and the Super Pac. In practice, this is little more than a fig leaf. A few weeks ago one of the ads, funded by the Super Pac supporting Gingrich, was slated for its many brazen inaccuracies. At a campaign stop in Orlando, Gingrich told supporters: "I am calling on this Super Pac – I cannot co-ordinate with them and I cannot communicate directly, but I can speak out as a citizen as I'm talking to you – I call on them to either edit out every single mistake or to pull the entire film."
Romney is no less compromised. His former chief campaign fundraiser and political director work for the main Super Pac supporting him, which was set up with the help of a $1m cheque from an ex-business partner. "This legalism of 'no co-ordination' is a filament-thin G-string," wrote Timothy Egan in the New York Times recently. "Everyone co-ordinates."
Money alone can't guarantee success. Santorum spent around 74 cents a voter in Iowa and narrowly won; Perry spent around $358 per vote and came a distant fourth. Debate performances, policy positions, personal histories and retail politics play a role. But the fact that money is not the sole determinant doesn't mean it's not the key one. Two months ago Gingrich's surge in Iowa was halted after Romney's Super Pac ploughed millions of dollars into campaign ads attacking him. Romney's commanding lead in South Carolina was similarly thwarted when Gingrich's Super Pac injected several million dollars.
This is not a partisan point. Almost two-thirds of Americans believe the government should limit individual contributions – with a majority among Republicans, Democrats and independents. The influence of money at this level corrupts an entire political culture and in no small part explains the depth of cynicism, alienation and mistrust Americans now have for their politicians.
The trend towards oligarchy in the polity is already clear. There are 250 millionaires in Congress. As a whole, the polity's median net worth is $891,506, nine times the typical US household. Around 11% are in the nation's top 1%, including 34 Republicans and 23 Democrats. And that's before you get to Romney, whose personal wealth is double that of the last eight presidents combined. All of this would be problematic at the best of times, but in a period of rising inequality it is obscene.
The issue here is not class envy, hating rich people because they are rich, but class interests – cementing the advantages of the privileged over the rest. The problem is not personal, it's systemic. In the current climate, it means a group of wealthy people in business will decide which wealthy people in Congress they would like to tell poor people what they can't have because times are hard. And unless the ruling is overturned there is precious little that can be done about it.
Last week in a Massachusetts Senate race, both the Republican incumbent and his likely Democratic challenger signed a pact agreeing not to use third-party money. The trouble is that the agreement is completely unenforceable. Already at least one pro-Republican group has refused to commit to it.
Downplaying money's central role at this point merely buys into the illusion of participatory democracy, where ideas, character and strategy are paramount, while others are actually buying the candidates and access to power. The result is a charade.
[....]
White Supremacists Love Ron Paul
By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/9801-white-supremacists-love-ron-paul
[....]
Hacktivist collective Anonymous struck a gold mine with Operation Blitzkrieg - an effort to hack into and shut down White Nationalist (WN) websites and forums. Anonymous leaked thousands of emails and private messages from the white supremacist network American Third Position, which is defined as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Anonymous also leaked the address, phone number, social security number and resume of White News Now owner and administrator Jamie Kelso on this website. But in leaking the emails and messages, Anonymous also discovered that a vast number of A3P members claim to be high-ranking members of the Ron Paul campaign. Ron Paul's campaign has some serious explaining to do if this is true. Read what the SPLC has to say about A3P:
The American Third Position is a political party initially established by racist Southern California skinheads that aims to deport immigrants and return the United States to white rule. The group is now led by a coterie of prominent white nationalists, including corporate lawyer William D. Johnson, virulent anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald and white nationalist radio host James Edwards. David Duke's former right-hand man, Jamie Kelso, helps with organizing. The party has big plans to run candidates nationwide.
The SPLC also has quotes from Kelso and Johnson, in detailed profiles from their website.
"No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race.... Only citizens shall have the right and privilege to reside permanently in the United States." - Bill D. Johnson, 1985
"... in a mixed-race environment, altruism towards other sub-species, like Jews, Mestizos, Blacks, and Asians, is always damaging to our own kind's survival ... The non-Whites, who don't share these White traits, must be doubled-over with laughter at times as they watch, in astonishment, as we help them in every way we can to give away our lands, our women, our savings, our safety, our happiness, and our lives for their benefit." - Jamie Kelso, 2006
In leaked private messages, Kelso claims that he and Johnson are top organizers for Ron Paul's campaign.
"I'll give you some more real-life examples of WN folks like us who are very successfully navigating back and forth between great White Nationalism and full mainstream activism. I'll introduce you to folks like William Daniel Johnson, the chairman of the A3P, who is simultaneously Ron Paul's #1 man in Southern California. When Ron has VIP get-togethers at $2,000 a plate they are in Bill's dining room on his 80-acre estate."
Kelso also boasted repeatedly about meeting with both Ron and Rand Paul during the 2011 CPAC for three consecutive days.
"Then I'm heading to DC to meet up with Ron Paul and Rand Paul, personally, at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference Feb. 10-12.
"Bill and I will be meeting with Ron and Rand Paul. I'm in a teleconference call with Bill (and Ron Paul) tonight. Much more later. Things are starting to happen.
"We'll be meeting with Ron Paul and Rand Paul. Bill and I got to talk with Ron tonight by phone."
In private messages, Ron Paul organizers in A3P forums essentially admitted to each other that Ron Paul's base was overwhelmingly white, and ripe for inclusion in their own network. They even spoke of being the bridge being the White Nationalist movement and Ron Paul supporters.
"All of us who have helped organize events among these Ron Paul millions are keenly aware that 98% of these folks are White (look at any photo of a Ron Paul rally ... look at my photos of the crowds of 15,000 each on the west lawn of the Capitol on July 12, 2008 and at the Minneapolis counter-convention on September 2, 2008), and that almost all of these White folks want the non-White invasion of our White lands stopped yesterday."
"Anyone who can't see that Ron Paul is the best viable candidate from a pro-White perspective is not bright enough to be of any value to the pro-White movement."
"The most important of those innovations is BRIDGING from our tiny EXPLICITLY pro-White movement to the huge IMPLICITLY pro-White revolution that has been gathering ever since Ron Paul started it rolling in mid-2007."
Even when confronted with any of the ugly, bigoted remarks in his newsletters, or the more recent evidence that Ron Paul actually signed off on each newsletter before they went public, or when shown the picture of Ron Paul posing with campaign donor Don Black of Stormfront, Ron Paul's campaign has soldiered on. But his campaign owes the people and the media a direct response to A3P's claims that Ron and Rand Paul met in private at CPAC with a former Klan leader's right-hand man.
Ron Paul supporters are always quick to dismiss accusations of racism when they point to his opposition to the drug war. Indeed, his pro-decriminalization platform along with his anti-war credentials and his advocacy for tighter regulation of the Federal Reserve have won supporters from the right and the left. But now, no mainstream American should be able to throw their support behind Ron Paul with a clear conscience until he openly disavows his associations with the white supremacist movement and returns all the money donated to his campaign from its leaders and members.
[....]
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/9801-white-supremacists-love-ron-paul
[....]
Hacktivist collective Anonymous struck a gold mine with Operation Blitzkrieg - an effort to hack into and shut down White Nationalist (WN) websites and forums. Anonymous leaked thousands of emails and private messages from the white supremacist network American Third Position, which is defined as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Anonymous also leaked the address, phone number, social security number and resume of White News Now owner and administrator Jamie Kelso on this website. But in leaking the emails and messages, Anonymous also discovered that a vast number of A3P members claim to be high-ranking members of the Ron Paul campaign. Ron Paul's campaign has some serious explaining to do if this is true. Read what the SPLC has to say about A3P:
The American Third Position is a political party initially established by racist Southern California skinheads that aims to deport immigrants and return the United States to white rule. The group is now led by a coterie of prominent white nationalists, including corporate lawyer William D. Johnson, virulent anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald and white nationalist radio host James Edwards. David Duke's former right-hand man, Jamie Kelso, helps with organizing. The party has big plans to run candidates nationwide.
The SPLC also has quotes from Kelso and Johnson, in detailed profiles from their website.
"No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race.... Only citizens shall have the right and privilege to reside permanently in the United States." - Bill D. Johnson, 1985
"... in a mixed-race environment, altruism towards other sub-species, like Jews, Mestizos, Blacks, and Asians, is always damaging to our own kind's survival ... The non-Whites, who don't share these White traits, must be doubled-over with laughter at times as they watch, in astonishment, as we help them in every way we can to give away our lands, our women, our savings, our safety, our happiness, and our lives for their benefit." - Jamie Kelso, 2006
In leaked private messages, Kelso claims that he and Johnson are top organizers for Ron Paul's campaign.
"I'll give you some more real-life examples of WN folks like us who are very successfully navigating back and forth between great White Nationalism and full mainstream activism. I'll introduce you to folks like William Daniel Johnson, the chairman of the A3P, who is simultaneously Ron Paul's #1 man in Southern California. When Ron has VIP get-togethers at $2,000 a plate they are in Bill's dining room on his 80-acre estate."
Kelso also boasted repeatedly about meeting with both Ron and Rand Paul during the 2011 CPAC for three consecutive days.
"Then I'm heading to DC to meet up with Ron Paul and Rand Paul, personally, at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference Feb. 10-12.
"Bill and I will be meeting with Ron and Rand Paul. I'm in a teleconference call with Bill (and Ron Paul) tonight. Much more later. Things are starting to happen.
"We'll be meeting with Ron Paul and Rand Paul. Bill and I got to talk with Ron tonight by phone."
In private messages, Ron Paul organizers in A3P forums essentially admitted to each other that Ron Paul's base was overwhelmingly white, and ripe for inclusion in their own network. They even spoke of being the bridge being the White Nationalist movement and Ron Paul supporters.
"All of us who have helped organize events among these Ron Paul millions are keenly aware that 98% of these folks are White (look at any photo of a Ron Paul rally ... look at my photos of the crowds of 15,000 each on the west lawn of the Capitol on July 12, 2008 and at the Minneapolis counter-convention on September 2, 2008), and that almost all of these White folks want the non-White invasion of our White lands stopped yesterday."
"Anyone who can't see that Ron Paul is the best viable candidate from a pro-White perspective is not bright enough to be of any value to the pro-White movement."
"The most important of those innovations is BRIDGING from our tiny EXPLICITLY pro-White movement to the huge IMPLICITLY pro-White revolution that has been gathering ever since Ron Paul started it rolling in mid-2007."
Even when confronted with any of the ugly, bigoted remarks in his newsletters, or the more recent evidence that Ron Paul actually signed off on each newsletter before they went public, or when shown the picture of Ron Paul posing with campaign donor Don Black of Stormfront, Ron Paul's campaign has soldiered on. But his campaign owes the people and the media a direct response to A3P's claims that Ron and Rand Paul met in private at CPAC with a former Klan leader's right-hand man.
Ron Paul supporters are always quick to dismiss accusations of racism when they point to his opposition to the drug war. Indeed, his pro-decriminalization platform along with his anti-war credentials and his advocacy for tighter regulation of the Federal Reserve have won supporters from the right and the left. But now, no mainstream American should be able to throw their support behind Ron Paul with a clear conscience until he openly disavows his associations with the white supremacist movement and returns all the money donated to his campaign from its leaders and members.
[....]
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