The Key Feature of Contemporary Capitalism

"This is why the key feature of contemporary capitalism is not only the hegemony, but also the (relative) autonomy of financial capital:  it may seem like the banks are just engaging in speculation, shuffling numbers here and there, and nobody is exploited, since exploitation happens in "real" production. But why did we have to give billions of dollars to the banks in 2008 and 2009?  Because, without a functioning banking system, the entire (capitalist) economy collapses.  Banks should thus also count as privatized commons:  insofar as private banks control the flow of investments and thus represent, for individual companies, the universal dimension of social capital, their profit is really a rent we pay for their role as universal mediator.  This is why state or other forms of social control over banks and collective capital in general (like pension funds) are crucial in taking a first step towards the social control of commons.  Apropos the reproach that such control is economically inefficient, we should recall not only those cases in which social control was very effective (this was, for example, how Malaysia avoided crisis in the late 1990s), but also the obvious fact that the 2008 financial crisis was triggered precisely by the failure of the banking system."
--Less Than Nothing, p. 247

The Conscience of a Liberal

Paul Krugman

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/finance-capitalism/

JULY 17, 2012, 6:18 PM

Finance Capitalism

One more point about this whole business of "attacking capitalism": to the extent that Obama is attacking anything other than Mitt Romney, he's questioning a system in which the financial sector has grown to an unprecedented share of the economy (pdf):

[…]

So we're hearing a lot of people -- including some alleged progressives -- declaring that you can't criticize the way we've run our economy for the past 30 years. Why not? The metastasizing finance sector eventually led us into the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression; that seems reason enough to question the model.

And bear in mind that Mitt Romney has pledged to repeal financial reform. It seems to me that in the wake of the global financial crisis, that -- not Obama's very mild reformism -- is the radical position.

Presentations by Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek

European University at St Petersburg

http://www.eu.spb.ru/en/index/news/4912-presentationmladendolarslavojiek

Department of Political Science and Sociology and Chair of Democratic Theory present presentations by Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek in which scientists will share their reflections on the current science and society and will discuss them with the leading Russian critical intellectuals

August 22 

17.00—19.00 Mladen Dolar (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; Van Eyck Academy, Netherlands): WHAT, IF ANYTHING, IS AN ATOM

20.00 – Screening of a film by the art-group “Chto Delat”, “The Russian Forest”.

August 23

16.00–19.00 – Slavoj Žižek (Birckbeck University, UK, Society for Theoretical psychoanalysis, Ljubljana, Slovenia): WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF POST-IDEOLOGY

19.30-21.30 IS THERE A REASON IN HISTORY? STATE AND REVOLUTION TODAY. Panel discussion.

Participants: Artemy Magun, Alexey Penzin, Alexander Skidan, Oxana Timofeeva, Dmitry Vilensky (all – group “Chto Delat”), Keti Chukhrov (SCCA, Moscow), Mladen Dolar, Slavoj Žižek.

The European University at Saint-Petersburg: Gagarinskaya 3.
Tel. (7-812) 386-7633
A free pre-reservation is required ( sociopol@eu.spb.ru).

The Act as "Bartleby" Inactivity

Quote from Living in the End Times, pp. 400-401:

"rather than actively resisting power, the Bartleby gesture of 'preferring not to' suspends the subject's libidinal investment in it -- the subject stops dreaming about power. To put it in mockingly Stalinist terms, emancipatory struggle begins with the ruthless work of self-censorship and auto-critique -- not of reality, but of one's own dreams.
   The best way to grasp the core of the obsessive attitude is through the notion of false activity: you think you are active, but your true position, as embodied in the fetish, is passive. Do we not encounter something akin to this false activity in the typical strategy of the obsessive neurotic, who becomes frantically active in order to prevent the real thing from happening (in a tense group situation, the obsessive talks continually, cracks jokes, etc., in order to ward off that awkward moment of silence in which the underlying tension would become unbearable)? The 'Bartleby act' is violent precisely insofar as it entails refusing this obsessive activity -- in it, not only do violence and non-violence overlap (non-violence appears as the highest violence), so too do act and inactivity (here the most radical act is to do nothing).
[...]
   If theology is again emerging as a point of reference for radical politics, it is so not by way of supplying a divine 'big Other' who would guarantee the final success of our endeavors, but, on the contrary,
as a token of our radical freedom in having no big Other to rely on."

Please see my comments below this post.

Capitalism as (inherently-ethical) Drive?

http://bigthink.com/ideas/45126

Slavoj Zizek: Capitalism is . . . and this, almost I’m tempted to say is what is great about it, although I’m very critical of it . . . Capitalism is more an ethical/religious category for me.  It’s not true when people attack capitalists as egotists.  “They don't care.”  No!  An ideal capitalist is someone who is ready, again, to stake his life, to risk everything just so that production grows, profit grows, capital circulates.  His personal or her happiness is totally subordinated to this.  This is what I think Walter Benjamin, the great Frankfurt School companion, thinker, had in mind when he said capitalism is a form of religion.  You cannot explain, account for, a figure of a passionate capitalist, obsessed with expanded circulation, with rise of his company, in terms of personal happiness.

I am, of course, fundamentally anti-capitalist.  But let’s not have any illusions here.  No.  What shocks me is that most of the critics of today’s capitalism feel even embarrassed, that's my experience, when you confront them with a simple question, “Okay, we heard your story . . . protest horrible, big banks depriving us of billions, hundreds, thousands of billions of common people's money. . . . Okay, but what do you really want?  What should replace the system?”  And then you get one big confusion. You get either a general moralistic answer, like “People shouldn't serve money.  Money should serve people.”  Well, frankly, Hitler would have agreed with it, especially because he would say, “When people serve money, money’s controlled by Jews,” and so on, no?  So either this or some kind of a vague connection, social democracy, or a simple moralistic critique, and so on and so on.  So, you know, it’s easy to be just formally anti-capitalist, but what does it really mean?  It’s totally open.  

This is why, as I always repeat, with all my sympathy for Occupy Wall Street movement, it’s result was . . . I call it a Bartleby lesson.  Bartleby, of course, Herman Melville’s Bartleby, you know, who always answered his favorite “I would prefer not to” . . . The message of Occupy Wall Street is, I would prefer not to play the existing game.  There is something fundamentally wrong with the system and the existing forms of institutionalized democracy are not strong enough to deal with problems.  Beyond this, they don't have an answer and neither do I.  For me, Occupy Wall Street is just a signal.  It’s like clearing the table.  Time to start thinking.

The other thing, you know, it’s a little bit boring to listen to this mantra of “Capitalism is in its last stage.”  When this mantra started, if you read early critics of capitalism, I’m not kidding, a couple of decades before French Revolution, in late eighteenth century.  No, the miracle of capitalism is that it’s rotting in decay, but the more it’s rotting, the more it thrives.  So, let’s confront that serious problem here. 

Also, let’s not remember--and I’m saying this as some kind of a communist--that the twentieth century alternatives to capitalism and market miserably failed. . . . Like, okay, in Soviet Union they did try to get rid of the predominance of money market economy.  The price they paid was a return to violent direct master and servant, direct domination, like you no longer will even formally flee.  You had to obey orders, a new authoritarian society. . . . And this is a serious problem: how to abolish market without regressing again into relations of servitude and domination.

My advice would be--because I don't have simple answers--two things: (a) precisely to start thinking.  Don't get caught into this pseudo-activist pressure.  Do something. Let’s do it, and so on.  So, no, the time is to think.  I even provoked some of the leftist friends when I told them that if the famous Marxist formula was, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the time is to change it” . . . thesis 11 . . . , that maybe today we should say, “In the twentieth century, we maybe tried to change the world too quickly.  The time is to interpret it again, to start thinking.” 

Second thing, I’m not saying people are suffering, enduring horrible things, that we should just sit and think, but we should be very careful what we do.  Here, let me give you a surprising example.  I think that, okay, it’s so fashionable today to be disappointed at President Obama, of course, but sometimes I’m a little bit shocked by this disappointment because what did the people expect, that he will introduce socialism in United States or what?  But for example, the ongoing universal health care debate is an important one.  This is a great thing.  Why?  Because, on the one hand, this debate which taxes the very roots of ordinary American ideology, you know, freedom of choice, states wants to take freedom from us and so on.  I think this freedom of choice that Republicans attacking Obama are using, its pure ideology.  But at the same time, universal health care is not some crazy, radically leftist notion.  It’s something that exists all around and functions basically relatively well--Canada, most of Western European countries. 

So the beauty is to select a topic which touches the fundamentals of our ideology, but at the same time, we cannot be accused of promoting an impossible agenda--like abolish all private property or what.  No, it’s something that can be done and is done relatively successfully and so on.  So that would be my idea, to carefully select issues like this where we do stir up public debate but we cannot be accused of being utopians in the bad sense of the term.

DARPA is developing brain-control capability (8)

http://hrnel.pitt.edu/images/DARPA_brochure.pdf

DARPA is developing brain-control capability (7)