End of ‘Left-politics’ in India?

Saturday 3 August 2019

by Sunil Ray

https://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article8900.html

The massive electoral defeat of the Leftist parties in India in the recent Lok Sabha election seems to have pushed many to despair and left nothing to hope for its revival. While commoners are increasingly feeling its gradual disappearance in India, scholars, especially those who are from the non-Marxist persuasion, find some reason to reaffirm their claim that it has lost its relevance in Indian politics. However, Marxist scholars continue to retain their position that it can never lose its relevance so long as the material conditions of survival of the people in India continue to be worse. This is what has been the position of the Marxist scholars ever since India gained freedom. But the question that was raised by Nikhil Chakravartty way back in 1983 (more than three-and-a-half decades ago) is equally important even today. He observed “The basic question that comes to one’s mind is: after sixty years of tireless works, why is it that the communist movement in this country has not become a national force? No doubt, they have strongholds here and there; they have regional influence as, for instance, in West Bengal and Kerala, but these do not make them a national force.” (“Marx and Marxism, A personal Testament” was first published in Mainstream, April 2, 1983. Reproduced from N.C.’s writings Mainstream, May 18, 2019) Not to talk about the States that had strongholds but are now almost extinct in the parliamentary election. While self-introspection may be of some help, my purpose here is not advise or caution those who are practising Left politics led by the Marxist Leftist parties in India. My purpose here is to develop a critique against the rootless thought of ‘Left-politics’ having lost its relevance to India.

Let me begin my argument with what I mean by ’Left-politics’ on the basis of my comprehensive understanding about it. The Left-politics then must not necessarily stem from the political engagement of only those who are practising politics under the banner of the political parties with Marxist persuasion. Of course, there are several political parties with Marxist persuasion in India that have been putting a great deal of efforts for decades to justify how one is comparatively more relevant than others in respect of understanding and analysing the concrete conditions of India. It has been a competitive expedition, as it were, to reach the intellectual height of perfect blending between theory and practice that none has touched so far. I first learnt about it when I was an undergraduate student doing Economics in a college in Calcutta. Once a friend of mine took me to the party office of Marxist persuasion of his choice. He along with the members of the party office relentlessly tried to convince me how relevant was the understanding of his political party of Marxist political philosophy to Indian conditions as compared to the other Marxist political parties. Once I was getting ready to move out from the same party office, I was immediately cautioned not to do so for some time because two Marxist political parties were fighting on the streets for each other’s blood.

I was completely confused. More so, I came from a poor middle-class family of a remote village of West Bengal where I had seen how the impoverished men, women and children had been struggling to survive with dignity. My exposure to politics of the Left in Calcutta in those days was fresh but I was curious to know how impoverishment of the people of my village could be banished once and for all. I was unable to relate my experience of my village with all that I was observing. Without almost no deeper understanding of great Leftist thinkers of all ages at that point of time, the only questions that used to invade my mind in those days were: (1) Why were there many Marxist political parties when the purpose of each one was the same? (2) Why were they after each other’s blood? (3) Why was there no development of the rural areas in general and of the poor, the largest majority, in particular?

Only in respect of the land reforms programme implemented by the Left Front Government of West Bengal, I felt I was able to relate myself to the deprived poverty-stricken people of my village and, of course, rural Bengal. It touched me not as a politically conscious individual, nor as an intellectual with an edge over deep theoretical understanding, but as a human being, a young student who dreamt of a new India. The emergence of a new India, I was convinced, was possible only through decolonising itself from the abuse of humanism that manifest in the form of massive deprivation, perpetual backwardness and undignified life. And, no such decolonisation project, I increasingly felt over time, can succeed without transforming its basic socio-economic and political structure. No doubt feudal autocracy was crushed in West Bengal as a result of land reforms, but I wondered why the voice that grew against injustice and call for empowering the powerless disappeared subsequently.

The objective of empowering the powerless is never denied by the non-Marxist political party either. If so, why is it pushed to the back-burner in real-life situation? May be that it was not politically feasible. For, to make it happen it has to seek structural transformation that, in all likelihood, peripheralises the vested interest. What was, however, actually politically feasible, as it unfolded gradually, was the welfare dose of neo-liberalism. A great substitute to structural transformation and the route to empowering the powerless! While this is no less than a mockery of both, political feasibility of ‘real’ structural transformation that can create the conditions for empowering the powerless went on haunting my mind. It compounded when I learnt that the complex caste structure, in which Dalits primarily comprised of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, was yet to enter the discourse of ‘standardised’ Left politics.

I felt I was besieged by the bewilderment on the question of political feasibility in parliamentary democracy at two levels. The first one was which Marxist political party was more relevant to fall in line with the idea of a new India that I once dreamt and the second one was which were the non-Marxist political parties to do the same. However, an important turn came as a result of my encounter during the last few years with the people living in the villages, including farmers, agricultural labourers, petty traders and school teachers from different social groups and development professionals from several civil society organisations. It taught me how to liberate myself from the intellectual imprisonment of the kind of ideological fixation that tends to destroy the dialectical process of arriving at the truth of doing justice to the humanity and its progress. In fact, they only spoke about a set of simple actionable agendas for development. I have mentioned them below. However, once I tried to examine them in relation to each other, I found that they were actually hinting at deep structural transformation both at the levels of the society and economy. What needs to be seen is how the state designs its intervention mechanism to make it happen and achieve what has never been achieved so far.

• Creation of Productive Employment

• Access to natural resources including land, water etc. to all equally

• Agriculture as a source of livelihood and income and employment generation

• Availability of basic minimum facilities to provide quality health-care and education for all

• Ensuring dignified living with peace for every human species through creation of the culture of reciprocity and solidarity

• No environmental degeneration

• Triggering off local forces of change instead of trying to ‘catch-up’ with the capitalist developed countries

• Systemic accountability to development.

These are nothing new. One may claim that no political party will ever antagonise any of these agendas. One may even go a step further to claim that this actionable agenda has been figuring for decades in all parliamentary political parties. If so, then where does the problem lie? Immediately somebody may jump to point out that that the problem lies with the bureaucracy associated with the faulty intervention mechanism. Somebody else will say, no, it is political will that matters, nothing else. If I take a cue from the second one, while leaving aside the first one for the time being, it is definitely not an over-statement. For instance, I have never heard anybody agonising why natural resources like land should not be made available to all equally. But many political leaders, especially from the non-Marxist tradition, may choose to remain quiet if land reforms as a means to gain access to land by the landless as a part of the fulfilment of the constitutional obligation is pushed forward for implementation. It is precisely here that the problem lies. Land reforms transforms the power structure of the rural economy and opens up the route to economic and social empowerment of the vast majority of the people living in the rural hinterlands. They are the landless and powerless poor. However, it is the vested interest, as mentioned earlier, of the powerful that works on the ground against such transformation to take place. In other words, it is the power relations architected by the powerful to perpetuate its hegemony in all fields of activity. It is this again that has designed the systemic order through which, needless to mention, power relations mediate. What is true in respect of providing access to land through land reforms is equally true for other actionable agenda as mentioned above

The logical corollary is that no development paradigm that antagonises such a systemic order through which power relations of the powerful mediates is acceptable to the existing system. What, however, the latter wants is that they must complement each other. The development story of India ever since it became an independent nation clearly shows how this complementarity has been producing development aberrations. It is in this relational context that one may have reasons to see why no ‘real’ structural transformation that has a bearing on the actionable agenda, as spelt out, could come about leading to implementation of desirable change. Even if one finds such transformation has taken place based on the parameters of market economics and has impacted economic growth positively, it is immiserating growth since no sustainable positive impact could it make on the growing incidence of impoverishment of the people in India.

In order to expand the scope for creation of productive employment, if we continue to depend on corporate (monopoly) capital-led structural transformation as it happens, it is not the one that country like India is looking for. For, it creates limited scope for employability. The real structural transformation that could create employment can take place through construction of a niche structure that creates larger scope for employment that the country needs now. The construction of the niche structure may give rise to innumerable associated producers’ self-organisations in all lines of activities including processing, marketing, servicing, producing, trading etc. to be spread over rural to peri-urban to urban areas.

Similarly, when one talks about agricultural development and farmers’ endless distress one zeros in on productivity rise and availability of easy credit as the way out. No doubt these are important but their minimal impact, both long and short term, on the farmers’ distress never speaks high of market rationality. They can never substitute structural transformation also. However, if the market rationality is preceded by the non-market rationality such as land reforms and market reforms (institutional) that entail real structural transformation, farmers’ distress can be eliminated. It may then trigger off agricultural prosperity. Without agricultural market reforms how does one hope that the market will pay remunerative prices to the farmers for their produce? The repelling effect of the existing market structure in agriculture can be countered only through restructuring its market relations (through institutional reforms) both forward and backward. The myth of free market explodes when one sees how the farmers are pushed to pay exorbitantly high prices for inputs, they buy including seed, fertiliser, informal credit etc. It is needless to mention that prices are higher for they are determined by the quasi-oligopoly market, not by a free competitive market. Had the market prices been determined through competition, average prices of these inputs would have been much lower. However, this never happens. On the other hand, when the farmers sell their produce one knows how the monopsony market structure operates to squeeze them. This suggests why it is necessary to transform the market structure of agriculture at both ends.

In the absence of structural transformation incremental changes, however positive they are, have failed to generate declining impact on the misery of both humans and nature. Is it that the faulty development paradigm which we follow and is rooted in the capital system never wants the basic systemic order to dismantle? Of course, it wants differentiation based on caste, religion and other cultural and regional traits to continue while it continues to produce slavery in different forms in different fields of activities. Besides, it never antagonises the systemic order that nurtures rent-seeking behaviour (remini-scent of the crusade against it by Anna Hazare) ranging from monetary corruption to bribery, favouritism, appeasement politics etc. in the name of perfect democracy and competitive market economy.

All these non-market forces work sometimes in tandem and some other times discretely in an attempt to constantly shift the focus from one to another so that people may find it difficult to crystallise their understanding/opinion about the development miscarriage. The common man then fails to establish the link between the development miscarriage and faulty development paradigm and the systemic order which is detrimental to human progress. She/he also fails to understand how the actionable agendas, as elucidated earlier, is in conflict with the development paradigm which the country is following. All these directly or indirectly subvert the process of achieving substantive freedom leading to halting the emancipation of the impoverished.

Hence, what are those that the majority Indians, who are ravaged by the humanitarian crisis, looking for? They are looking for (1) a new systemic order (2) a new development paradigm and (3) a new synthesis in order to achieve the actionable agendas. If these development agendas are not in conflict with the Constitution of the democratic India, they are automatically politically feasible. Hence, structural transformation in all spheres of activities that matters to the powerless may find its real expression once the actionable agendas are implemented. What is, however, needed is to counter false development priorities inherited from false development epistemology. If the development paradigm is overhauled by way of prioritising what the nation needs to do to overcome the humanitarian crisis and trigger off the local development process without being dictated by the capital system, it may not be difficult to redesign the systemic order to gain what we failed to gain, to recover what we already lost. It is here that one may find how the new logic of capital unlocks the possibilities for epochal change.

The ‘Left-politics’ begins here without having been confined to the political philosophy of any political party as practised now in India. What it implies is that those who are seeking the change of the systemic order and development paradigm, as explained, are the natural harbingers of Left-politics. This must give rise to a new political philosophy. If so, why is no unveiling of a new political era of assimilation of ‘great’ understanding leading to sow the seeds of solidarity? Solidarity between humans on the one hand and humans and nature on the other? It may cut across ideological fixation and sectarianism in any form as they exist now, but give way to the emergence of a new ideological platform based on collective understanding for emancipation of the impoverished in particular and human progress in general. The ideological reinvention of the political entities in India at this historical moment may have huge transcendental effect on the culmination of the evolving ideological platform in the 21st century.

It is this ‘Left-politics’ that simplifies the idea of living together with each other on the one hand and with nature on the other while acknowledging the centrality of co-evolution of humans and nature in the determination of the social metabolic order. Its confluence with any anti-systemic movement to put an end to the growing accumulation of misery of both humans and nature may give rise to massive political upheaval in the Indian subcontinent in the near future. The cry for ‘cohesive development’ growing out of solidarity of all those who believe in the change of the systemic order to implement a new development paradigm is going to gain ground soon, no matter which political party one belongs to, which religious sect one has chosen to ally with, what system of faith one adheres to, what colour one is born with, whether one is female, male or transgender, what social group one belongs to, what language one speaks and what region one comes from. This is what I understand as Left-politics and its fundamentals of social engineering. The birth of a new political dispensation to bring about cohesive development based on the forces of solidarity may be a historical necessity. Its emergence being glued to humanism may prove sooner or later that Left-politics in India has not ended.

The author is a former Director, A.N. Sinha Institute of Social Studies, Patna.

FRANÇOIS LARUELLE (Part 1) / "New Forms of Realism in Contemporary Philosophy"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qfKpAE7FJM

François Laruelle - Inhuman Symposium

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj3NOFBZOlo

Question: What’s wrong with OOO? Answer: philosophy without political theory is no philosophy at all

https://itself.blog/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/

A response to Graham Harman’s “Marginalia on Radical Thinking”

SUNDAY, JUNE 3, 2012 ~ ALEXANDER GALLOWAY

First let me say that, while this post will likely come across as confrontational, I do have a respect for Harman, particularly for his intellectual energy and literary output. I’ve never met him and can’t count him a friend, but I have corresponded with him on a few occasions. I must admit that his philosophy and politics (or lack thereof) leave me cold. A bit of context: my dissertation of 2001, which became my first book in 2004, is an analysis of networks as political systems, so I feel I have a lot to say about the topic of objects and networks. I’m also a computer programmer and, similar to someone like Ian Bogost, have actually coded the kind of object-oriented systems that OOO describes. (To his credit Harman rejects this association, claiming that “his” OO has nothing to do with computer science’s OO. But that’s a flimsy argument in my view, particularly when the congruencies are so clear. As Zizek might say, channeling Groucho Marx: if it’s called a duck, and quacks like a duck, don’t let that fool you — it really is a duck!)

I already wrote a bit about some shortcomings of the new realism particularly with Meillassoux. And I have a forthcoming long article that expands my position, in which I argue that SR/OOO is politically naive because it parrots a kind of postfordist/cybernetic thought, and that this constitutes a secondary correlation between thought and the mode of production that SR/OOO can’t explain. Shaviro, Bogost, and Bryant have all read this paper privately, but as I said, due to the ridiculous slowness of academic publishing, it’s still forthcoming.

Again, I do respect Harman’s energy, but like David Berry and Christian Thorne I’m more and more concerned about the political shortcomings of OOO. A case in point is this recent interview with Harman titled “Marginalia on Radical Thinking.” Harman’s comments in this interview coalesce a number of different threads in OOO, and for me galvanize precisely what I see as some of its main challenges.

So what exactly are Harman’s political instincts? Let’s use this paragraph as a starting point:

Harman: “I saw parts of the Arab Spring up close, and the events of that period taught me something, as genuine events should. There were plenty of protest movements throughout my time in Egypt against Hosni Mubarak, against torture, against the Emergency Law. And one could always agree with these criticisms while still thinking that ‘for now, Egypt is probably better off than it might be under other circumstances.’ But in January 2011, I like others was shocked into realizing suddenly what a wrong-headed attitude that was. Mubarak became for me, retroactively, something terrible that always had to be thrown out all along. The Revolutionaries showed me this through provoking a brutal response that showed the truth of the situation in Egypt, which I now see that I had accepted too lazily as a given. Indeed, I had been guilty of a failure of imagination, which is what philosophers should always be ready to avoid. The killings by snipers, the use of plainclothes thugs on camels and horses, and the cynical machinations of Mubarak in response to calls for his ouster, may simply have brought the pre-existent life of the Egyptian dungeons onto the street, as one of the human rights groups remarked at the time. But it took the events on the street to shake me from slumber, and I have not yet recovered from that experience.”

I cite this as a textbook example of the liberal bourgeois position that people from the likes of Zizek to Carl Schmitt have called “depoliticization and neutralization.” It shows Harman’s anti-political position quite clearly. Today we might even call this an anti-badiousian position (although Harman of course has no interest in being badiousian in the first place!). The reason is because he has no opposition to the state of the situation. By his own admission, he only expresses revulsion *after* the confrontation with the state has taken place, after he witnesses the excesses to which the state will go to hold on to power. That’s a classic case of liberal neutralization (“don’t rock the boat,” “we just need to go along to get along,” “this is the best of all possible worlds,” “ontology shouldn’t be political,” etc.). This is thus not a political desire of any kind, merely an affective emotional response at the sight of blood. But such palpitations of the “sensitive” bourgeois heart, no matter how reformed, do not a politics make.

By contrast, Badiou’s position is so useful today because he says that it’s all about the *first* antagonism, not the last. To be political means that you have to *start* from the position of incompatibility with the state. In other words the political is always asymmetrical to the state of the situation. The political is always “trenchant” in this sense, always a “cutting” or polarization. Hence the appeal of Badiou’s “theory of points” which forces all of the equal-footed-objects in OOO into a trenchant decision of the two: yes or no, stop or go, fight or retreat. Hardt and Negri say something similar when they show how “resistance is primary vis-a-vis power.” For his part Harman essentially argues the reverse in this interview: ontology is primary (OOO “is not the handmaid of anything else”), power is secondary (Mubarak), resistance is a tertiary afterthought (the Arab Spring). Yes we should applaud the Spring when it arrives, Harman admits, but it’s still just an afterthought that arrived from who knows where.

If you’re still skeptical just use the old categorial imperative: if everyone in Cairo were clones of Harman, the revolution would never have happened. That’s political neutralization in a nutshell. In other words there is no event for Harman. And here I agree with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem’s recent characterization of Tristan Garcia’s ontology, modeled closely after Harman’s, as essentially a treatise on “Being Without Event.”

It’s also symptomatic that throughout the interview Harman assumes that the political means “liberation.” Liberation may be involved with certain kinds of political projects. And certainly liberty and freedom are appealing social virtues that should be promoted when appropriate. But political means liberation only for a liberal. (And let’s not forget that liberalism itself is quite limited historically and more or less coincides with the history of western capitalism.) A more expansive view on politics will quickly reveal that the political means something else. The political means *justice* first and foremost, not liberation. Justice and liberation may, of course, coincide during certain socio-historical situations, but politics does not and should not mean liberation exclusively. Political theory is full of examples where people must in fact *curb* their own liberty for the sake of justice. This is why people like Zizek and Badiou talk about discipline and militancy, but not so much about liberty as such.

This brings out a secondary problem with OOO in that it falls prey to a kind of “Citizens United fallacy”.. everything is an object, and thus Monsanto and Exxon Mobil are objects on equal footing just like the rest. Like other (human) objects, Monsanto is free to make unlimited campaign donations, contribute to the degradation of the environment, etc.

The way out of this problem, at least for Bogost and Bryant, seems to be a kind of cake-and-eat-it-too Animal Farm koan: that all objects are equal, but some objects are more equal than others. This seems to be rather nonsensical, since on the one hand they want to reject correlation and put all objects on equal footing, but on the other hand retain a pop science view of the world in which some equal-footed objects nevertheless have more “gravity attraction” than other equal-footed objects. What this produces is a kind of marketplace ontology that essentializes and reinforces hierarchy even as it claims to circumvent it. The only thing worse than inequality is an inequality founded in equality. But that’s capitalism for you: everyone is equal in the marketplace except for, ta-da, the 1%. Or American race relations: we take these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, but, ta-da, in comes Jim Crow. Or protocological control online: universal adoption of networking standards between peers, but, ta-da, Google owns you. In other words inequality rooted in equality is not a very “liberating” political theory.

Harman and these others in OOO often take pride in calling this a “democratization.” But now let’s be clear, it is actually an anti-democratization, in two ways. First because it removes the point of decision from people (the demos) to the object world at large. So the word simply doesn’t make sense in the context of OOO. In fact the closest English word we have for Harman’s cosmology is “bureaucracy” (rule by office furniture), but “pragmacracy” (rule by things) or “hylecracy” (rule by stuff) are probably closer to Harman’s intent. And second because it allows certain objects to have more natural “gravity” than others, thus in essence letting their “votes” count double or triple.

So despite their protestations OOO still doesn’t have a reliable way to distinguish between “good” and “bad” objects. In other words OOO doesn’t make much room for a theory of judgment, since it’s busy kneecapping the human. And this is why we’ve seen that OOO can’t seem to produce the two things that philosophy has always grounded in a theory of judgment: an aesthetics and a politics.

(We should of course cite the evolution of Harman’s position, and his flirtations with aesthetics: “metaphysics may be a branch of aesthetics, and causation merely a form of beauty” [Towards Speculative Realism, 139]. Shaviro picks up on this in his essay “The Actual Volcano,” where he argues that Harman is essentially a modernist who is ultimately focused on the sublime.)

It’s easy to see how a non-flat ontology allows for a theory of judgment. If things are non-flat then there’s always some kind of dynamic or asymmetry to rely on. The dynamic could be “the human” or it could be “God.” It could be some other kind of arbiter like “nature” or “the natural state of things,” or even “the essence of the thing, to which it must accord.” Politics in a non-flat ontology is so easy it’s basically cheating.

However it’s harder to see how a *flat* ontology allows for a theory of judgment. The most notorious flat ontology that we know of today is that old friend capitalism: all things are reduced to objects on equal footing with everything else, be they wool or machine or man; everything has a use-value which recedes and is masked over by the sensual skin of exchange value; no arbiter impedes the endless flow of objects through circuits of exchange, no arbiter except that ultimate mystical medium, the marketplace. This is obviously the world of Latour, and now more recently the world of Harman (likewise De Landa falls prey to some of these same pitfalls, as he lauds a kind of market ontology, a kind of deleuzian awesome-ology of emergence and becoming). Harman has of course denied on several occasions that his ontology “looks like” capitalism, but if it quacks like a duck…

I don’t know if flat ontologies are bad per se, but they are certainly dangerous, particularly in this day and age, because they can be so easily co-opted by power. Hence the most successful flat ontologies are the ones that fortify their flatness with some newfound political dynamic. The two best examples I can think of here are Deleuze and Laruelle. Deleuze because of his timeliness and his sense that deterritorialization (in the late ’60s and ’70s) would really be the most political thing that could happen faced with the then current form of power as territorialized capitalism, territorialized patriarchy, territorialized subjectivity, etc. His flatness was thus a *strategic* flatness. Although that was forty years ago now, and already in the early ’90s when he wrote the “control society” essay near the end of his life, he was perhaps realizing that power had already co-opted his rhizomatic relational ontology in new ways. And in fact today it’s not that difficult to show how deleuzian ontology is quite compatible with capitalism (i.e. how Google or Facebook valorizes multiplicity and distributed networks, etc.).

Laruelle is the other good example, only now because of his profound untimeliness. Laruelle has a kind of flat ontology after all, being the “original” anti-correlationist, twenty years before Meillassoux made the tactic fashionable. But of course Laruelle’s flatness is *so* flat that it becomes “one,” unilateral, deterministic, etc. And here we see again how the deepest form of justice might actually have nothing to do with liberation, but rather with a kind of ontological determination, a kind of “destiny” (to use an extremely unfashionable word). It’s also why Laruelle has been roundly excluded by everyone involved in OOO, both the insiders like Harman and Bogost, but also some of the outliers like Shaviro.

Laruelle starts from many of the same assumptions that OOO endorses — to reject correlationism, to introduce democracy into ontology, such ideas all come from Laruelle — but Laruelle actually walks the walk! He actually follows these axioms all the way to the end of the line. And what he discovers is a profoundly weird kind of realism. But also a profoundly political one — in my view Laruelle is one of the most radical political thinkers of recent years. Let’s not forget that Harman never rejects correlationism. On the contrary he merely “democratizes” correlation so that all entities including humans follow the as-structure. I think this is ultimately why Harman and OOO “can’t handle” Laruelle. (See for example Harman’s now notorious review of Laruelle’s book Philosophies of Differencein which he muddles and misreads even the most rudimentary axioms in Laruelle.)

If we look at the argument from The Exploit (the second book on networks I wrote in 2007 with Eugene Thacker), Harman is stuck in step two of the three historical steps we describe. That is, he’s willing to admit that there’s a new hegemony of flatness, even a new hegemony of relation/networks. That’s precisely what we describe in the opening section of The Exploit as the “new symmetry” position, or the “networks contra networks” position. This is more or less the position of a kind of global Latourianism or even a global Deleuzianism, where both power and resistance are flat, networked, and rhizomatic. But what Harman is unwilling to do is to take the third step, which requires the superimposition of a new asymmetry. This is what we call the “exceptional topology,” or for short the “exploit.”

Step two is essentially the position of today’s liberal — the dot-com exec, the Obama supporter, the OOO philosopher, those who ultimately desire a kind of capitalism-with-a-friendly-face. But this is not a “political” position proper, or at the least we can’t really call these kinds of people leftists. (Which is fine, since Harman doesn’t want to be called a leftist in the first place!) Only step three is today’s political position proper. This is where you will find the Occupy movement, Wikileaks and Anonymous, radical feminism, Tiqqun, Act Up, anti-racist campaigns, anti-capitalist parties, and so on.

Maybe in the end it’s a very boring tale to tell, because it’s just the same old story. It’s the liberals versus the radicals. The New Philosophers versus the old Marxists. The third way liberals versus the Leninists or Maoists. The reformers versus the revolutionaries. It’s OOO versus Zizek/Badiou/Laruelle/whomever. I’m not trying to change the debate, I just want it to be clear. Harman is not the vanguard of “radical thinking,” whatever that means. And Harman is most certainly not a political thinker of any caliber. In fact it’s the opposite. Harman’s self-stated goal is to remove politics from ontology, creating a new kind of pure ontology in which, as he says in the interview, philosophy should not be the handmaid of anything else. So we have to ask the old question again: Does Harman descend into the street? And if not, should we trust what he says about being? In the age of Occupy and Monsanto, of Citizens United and ecological collapse, of the Obama drone assassinations and unpaid online microlabor — there’s a litany for you! — I think the answer is a resounding no. Let’s hope that OOO wakes up soon and realizes that a philosophy without a political theory is no philosophy at all.

—-

[Note: My several previous attempts to address “the political question” in OOO have all been met with, shall we say, some skepticism by those involved, whether it be on Facebook, on blogs, or in personal correspondence. When they’re not accusing me of bad faith or attacking me personally they usually either (1) put their head in the sand and pretend the political question will go away as they hunker down with the ontological purism argument (La trahison des clercs!; “ontology shouldn’t be polluted by politics in the first place!”), (2) position themselves as “victims” of a leftist faculty cabal who forced them to read too much Haraway and Butler in graduate school, or (3) simply ignore me and go play somewhere else. So let me issue a preemptive challenge to OOO: surprise me! how about an *actual* response that *actually* addresses the political question? My guess is it won’t happen — although, if anyone, Bryant is probably the one to do it.]

Elitists Roll Out “Stop Rebelling And Support Biden, You Insolent Little Shits” Campaign

Caitlin Johnstone

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/08/04/elitists-roll-out-stop-rebelling-and-support-biden-you-insolent-little-shits-campaign/

The US presidential election is more than 15 months away, and already we’re seeing elitist establishment narrative managers rolling out their long-anticipated “Stop Rebelling and Support Biden, You Insolent Little Shits” campaign. HBO’s Bill Maher spent his “New Rule” monologue segment last night admonishing his audience to abandon any notion of progressive reform and embrace the former vice president instead.

“All the Democrats have to do to win is to come off less crazy than Trump, and of course they’re blowing it, coming across as unserious people who are going to take your money so that migrants from Honduras can go to college for free and get a major in America Sucks,” Maher said. “Now do I want Biden to be president? Not really, but Biden’s the only Democrat who beats Trump in Ohio. He’s like non-dairy creamer: nobody loves it, but in a jam it gets the job done.”

“I’m sick of hearing that Democrats need to excite the base; Trump excites the base,” Maher said. “It’s the fatigue, stupid. Let’s make it hard for Donald Trump to play on voters’ fears and let the fatigue win the election for us. We’ll get to the revolution, but remember: put on your oxygen mask before assisting your child.”

Boy, Bill. If that’s not the kind of inspiring rallying cry that can galvanize people against the president, I don’t know what is.

Weirdly, Maher inadvertently explains why his brilliant Biden strategy is doomed to failure earlier on in this exact same segment. Maher praises the Trump economy, saying “It’s hard to beat an incumbent in a good economy; every incumbent since FDR has won if they avoided a recession leading up to the election year.”

“The voters that Democrats need to win, moderates who have Trump fatigue, will vote against a good economy, I think, just to get back to normalcy,” Maher said. “But they won’t trade it away for left-wing extremism. You say you want a revolution, well, you know, you gotta get elected first.”

Maher has all the facts right there in front of him, but because he is a propagandist who is only famous because he knows how to spout pro-establishment lines in an authoritative tone of voice, he manages to interpret them in the dumbest way possible. Yes, on paper the US economy is doing well, but only by the standards used by neoliberal politicians and mass media outlets to determine economic success. In real terms a population that used to be able to support a family on a single income now mostly requires two incomes, and most of them would struggle to pay even a thousand-dollar emergency expense.

Americans have gotten much poorer in terms of real income and income inequality has been exploding, but because both parties have been normalizing this paradigm and deceitfully using stock markets and unemployment rates to measure economic success, Trump is able to say he’s performing amazingly well economically. In terms of real American spending power he’s actually performing abysmally, but Democrats are resistant to saying so because it will mean conceding that the Obama/Biden administration did, too.

The path to beating Trump, then, is obviously not to hope that Americans will “vote against a good economy” for the first time in living memory as Bill Maher suggests, but to address the elephant in the room of growing income and wealth inequality and how more and more Americans have to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet. If you can offer Americans more in terms of real economic justice instead of crap about the stock exchange that puts bread on nobody’s table, voters will listen. There are some candidates who are campaigning on exactly this platform, and none of them are named Joe Biden.

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Joe Biden has a message for the millennial generation: Stop complaining. http://huffp.st/PbofqMu 

Joe Biden To Millennials: 'Don't Tell Me How Bad It Is. Change It.'

Young people are facing a dark financial future, but the Democratic presidential candidate doesn't want to hear it.

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Biden’s platform, in contrast, seems more and more to consist of him just telling progressives to shut up and stop whining. Asked on a recent AFSCME forum about his controversial comments in January of last year that he has “no empathy” for young Americans who fear crippling college debt and rising cost of living, The Huffington Post reports that Biden not only stood by his comments, but doubled down on them, saying that if things are bad then the younger generation is to blame for not engaging in the political process.

“Don’t tell me how bad it is, change it,” Biden said. “Change it. Change it. My generation did.”

Biden, like Bill Maher, is inadvertently giving progressives all the information they need. Yes, they should change it. And the very first thing they should change is a political dynamic which elevates warmongering Wall Street cronies like Joe Biden. There’s absolutely no reason for anyone to accept a status quo that insists the only way to beat Trump is to take a Hail Mary gamble on trying to elect a Democrat who’s no better than Trump. They tried that in 2016 and there’s no reason to believe they’ll be able to bully everyone into playing along in 2020.

The former vice president is about one click away from coming right out and saying “Vote for me, because fuck you that’s why.” And elitist establishment narrative managers are already essentially saying it for him.

As the Far Right Goes Global, So Do Anti-BDS Bills

Rachel Hodes, 

Foreign Policy in Focus

August 3, 2019

https://fpif.org/as-the-far-right-goes-global-so-do-anti-bds-bills/

Israeli politics have moved into uncharted territory over the past several months, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu found himself unable to form a coalition large enough to claim victory in last spring’s elections. However, even as the Israeli state enters into political turmoil at home, it is becoming increasingly immune to criticism from the international community abroad.

In May, Germany’s government passed an anti-BDS resolutioncondemning the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, a nonviolent campaign to protest Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, as anti-Semitic, and vowed that the country would not participate in any boycotts of Israeli products. The law is similar to an anti-BDS resolution that was just passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, and to several even more severe laws previously passed by U.S. states.

More broadly, measures like these protect the Israeli government from facing any economic consequences for isolating and discriminating against its Palestinian population. And the German measure shows that the campaign to ensure this impunity is going global, particularly as Israel makes common cause with far-right governments around the world (even, in some cases, those with well documented anti-Semitic sympathies).

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Netanyahu, who is facing charges of corruption, has been prime minister for the past 10 years. During his tenure, he has moved Israel increasingly to the right politically, with severe consequences for Palestinian rights. Under his leadership, the expansion of Israeli settlements has led to what many have called the death of a two-state solution. Meanwhile, his government has instituted policies that legalize discrimination against non-Jews and strengthen Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

I, for one, am scared of a world where the Israeli government can continue to advance these discriminatory policies — especially as it goes unquestioned by the international powers that provide it with ongoing financial and ideological support. And as a Jew dedicated to fighting for Palestinian rights, I’m scared of a world where dissenting movements are silenced, and accusations of anti-Semitism overwhelm critiques of a powerful government.

Finally, I’m scared of a world where the attitudes of a United States headed by Donald Trump can worm their way into the international community — and I’m scared to watch as the uncritical U.S. support for Israel is exported to Germany, the rest of Europe, and around the world.

In reality, supporters of Israel and anti-BDS legislation are often those who do the least to advocate for Jewish safety. In a striking example, white nationalist Richard Spencer has self-identified as a “white Zionist.” Steve Bannon’s appearance at a Zionist Organization of America event seems out of place as well, given that his tenure as an editor at the alt-right Breitbart News was marked by the use of anti-Semitic language. Most recently, President Trump justified his racist attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) with his support for Israel. However, his 2016 campaign was also marked by the use of anti-Semitic rhetoric, from campaign ads referencing “global special interests” to the invocation of stereotypes that portray Jews as greedy and money-obsessed. In Europe, Hungary’s right-wing government has undergone scrutiny for the seeming contradiction between its close relationship with Israel and its denial of Hungary’s role in the Holocaust.

Instances like these make it clear that the voices most ardently in favor of Israel are often the same voices that make their careers preaching hate against Jews and people of color. We should all be concerned when the U.S. government aligns itself with authoritarian or fascist ideologues on any issue — and Israel is no exception.

Germany’s anti-BDS legislation offers yet another example of seemingly incongruous support of Israel from notorious anti-Semites. The far-right party Alternative for Germany, whose sympathy for the Nazi party has led to its denunciation by German Jewish leaders, proposed the strictest version of the bill— a total ban on BDS-related actions within Germany. Contradictions like these make it clear that, unlike far-right politicians would have you believe, support for Israel has no connection to solidarity with Jewish people.

Instead of a genuine rejection of anti-Semitism, the right’s championing of Israel stems from its love of nationalist rhetoric. To these figures, support for Israel acts as a convenient pass to continue espousing hate. Instead of defending the Jewish people, members of the right are embracing something altogether different: ethno-nationalism, whether it involves the removal of immigrants at America’s southern border or the colonization of Palestinians in Israel.

The question then becomes whether we, as Jewish communities, want to align ourselves with these ideologies — ideologies held by people who have open disgust for our beliefs and our humanity, not to mention the humanity of Muslims, immigrants and people of color around the world.

Meanwhile, the BDS movement, which was launched in 2005 by a coalition of 170 organizations representing Palestinian civil society, has never advocated for anti-Semitism. Instead, it is brave enough to call the Israeli state what it is: a perpetuation of apartheid in a country that has a segregated road system to facilitate the separation of Israelis and Palestinians. Instead of opposing BDS, Jewish leaders and their allies should be focusing on the real threat to Jewish communities: white nationalism in all its forms.

If the international community wants to advocate for Jewish safety, the solution does not lie in wholesale support of the Israeli state. In fact, the violent actions of Israel make us all less safe.

It’s time for the United States to acknowledge the global consequences of our uncritical endorsement of the Israeli state, which includes everything from unchecked violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank to anti-BDS laws like Germany’s. And it’s time for Germany to hold itself accountable for the white supremacy still present within its political landscape, rather than leveling vitriol at human rights campaigns like BDS.

And it’s time for everyone, from the U.S. to Germany to members of Israel’s own government, to stand against injustice in Palestine wherever and whenever it occurs.

This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and In These Times.

Trump deepens war of words with black leaders

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIJKWskg05g