khukuri Rotating Header Image

Zizek: Preserve the vacuum

Nov 1st, 2011
by John Steele.
2 comments

Zizek spoke October 26 at St Mark’s Bookshop in Manhattan. What follows is not the complete talk, but some interesting parts. Reprinted from impose (with a few corrections),  where the complete transcript can be found.

Bill Clinton says ominously, “because your demands create a vacuum, and if you don’t bring quickly concrete proposals which will fill in this vacuum, who knows who will fill in this vacuum?” But at this point, I claim, precisely we should maintain this openness in all ominous directions. We don’t need dialogue with those in power. We need critical dialogue with ourselves. We need time to think. We effectively don’t know. And nobody knows. On the one hand we should reject the cheap — because Mao was never so stupid — psuedo-Maoist idea, “Learn from the people, people know”. No, they don’t know. Do we intellectuals know? Also, we don’t know. I mean, any intellectual who says, “Okay, people now have some confused ideas, oh I have a ready and precise plan of what to do,” they are bluffing. We don’t know where we are.

But I think that this openness is precisely what is great about these protests. It means that precisely a certain vacuum open the fundamental dissatisfactions in the system. The vacuum simply means open space for thinking, for new freedom, and so on. Let’s not fill in this vacuum too quickly.

Zizek speaks at St. Mark’s Bookshop

So, while the standard reaction of the Wall Street itself against the protest is the expected, vulgar bullshitting, I want to draw your attention to a more intelligent, but I think even more disgusting reaction; a critical rejection of Wall Street; a very liberal, sophisticated one: it was done a couple of days ago by Anne Applebaum, you know, the lady who wrote a book on gulag and so on. Again, it’s a very sophisticated argumentation. She even, in a slightly tasteless but almost convincing way, she [?] the [?] Monty Python film, The Life of Brian, where this Brian, the new Christ figure shouts to the people, “You are free individuals!” and then all of them shout, together as a crowd, “Yes we are free individuals!”; claiming that my functioning of repetition reminds her of that.

Okay, but nonetheless I claim… her reaction to it, and I will just read you two long paragraphs; I think they are worth quoting. It’s ideology at its purest, precisely in the way they make her argumentation appear convincing.

Continue reading →

Posted in: Current events, Philosophy, Revolutionary Strategy, Zizek.

Some contributions to thinking in the present moment

Oct 26th, 2011
by John Steele.
No comments yet

There’s a new wind 

blowing across this globalized world, from Tunisia to Egypt to Greece to Spain to Occupy Wall Street. How do the theoretical investigations of this site relate to this, to what’s new and emerging? 

This question of the emergence of novelty, of understanding this very changing world so as to help to change it fundamentally, has always been central to this site. And some pivotal issues of the Occupy movement (Who are the 1%? for example) have been explored here as well.

At the urging of Mike Ely from Kasama, we’ve put together a guide to some important writings on khukuri, organized by topic:

What is current the structure of global capital? See essays concerning a transnational capitalist class (TNC) — truly the global 1% (or less) – by Leslie Sklair, by William Robinson, Jerry Harris, and by William K. Carroll, as well as in the recent piece on global corporate networks.

How do we analyze the present crisis, and how do we go forward from it? See this by David Harvey, as well as essays by Don Hamerquist, on the crisis of both capitalism and the left, and hollow states in a time of austerity and chaos, and John Steele’s notes from a conference devoted to this subject.

What is the relevance of Marxism today? This important question is explored in this essay by Vern Gray and in these by John Steele:

Our Relation to Revolutionary Tradition;

We Need a Politics We Haven’t Got;

and To what extent is revolutionary theory detachable?

as well as Bill Martin’s extensive essay Into the Wild.

How can we understand the present historical moment in a way that can also prepare us for the eruption of something new? And what is the relevance of the contemporary thinker Alain Badiou?

John Steele has written a series of essays: Another take on revolutionary theory; on Badiou and the event; Revolutionary fidelity and the radically new; on Badiou’s political value; and on Badiou’s Maoism.

Relatedly, there is J. Ramsey’s essay addressing the question.

And see these by Don Hamerquist: Barack, Badiou, and Bilal-al-hasan; and “…that which in them divides itself from the old”.

(And here too, Bill Martin, in the essay cited above.)

Finally, in terms of understanding the “new wind,” although this is a topic we’ll have more on, for now it’s worth noting an essay by Don Hamerquist on the earlier parts of this sequence.

Posted in: Alan Badiou, Bill Martin, Communism, Current events, David Harvey, Don Hamerquist, J. Ramsey, Jerry Harris, John Steele, Marxism, Nat W., Philosophy, Political Economy, Revolutionary Strategy, Social Theory, William I. Robinson, William K. Carroll.

Global Corporate Networks

Oct 25th, 2011
by John Steele.
No comments yet

Image at right: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue.

The fact of highly concentrated global capitalist networks — as well as the related question of a transnational capitalist class — will be familiar ones to readers of this site. We’ve published a number of essays and interviews which center on these topics. And now these are also central questions for the Occupy Wall Street movement and all its offshoots.

The analysis we’ve seen so far, naturally enough, has come from thinkers with a Marxist background. The following essay, published in a recent issue of New Scientist, deals with a research project from the world of systems analysis, and as the authors of the following article make clear, a main concern is finding ways to make global capitalism more stable and secure. The analytic conclusions, though, have points of strong similarity.

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world

by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere. But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs).

“Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says James Glattfelder. “Our analysis is reality-based.”

Continue reading →

Posted in: Political Economy, Social Theory.

Badiou on existence

Oct 21st, 2011
by John Steele.
No comments yet

The following is a bit more abstract than what we usually publish here, but for those who want to understand what Badiou is doing philosophically, this essay (originally a talk) will repay the effort.

The talk was obviously given several years ago, and was originally published in lacanian ink 29 (Spring 2007). It is republished here from the symptom.

My proposal will be in three parts.  First, a very short ontological part.  What is our concept of being qua being?  The answer will be: multiple, a multiplicity.  Second, what is our concept of the localization of something which is?  What is being-there? The answer will be: a transcendental field, without subject.  Third, what is existence? The answer will be: the degree of something’s identity to itself in a world is its existence in this world.

Towards a New Concept of Existence

Alain Badiou

Tonight I am not going to engage in any kind of criticism.  Instead, I intend to propose a new concept of existence.  And I shall be as abstract as this intention forces me to be.  You can find a less arid but not complete exposition in a chapter of my “Briefings on Existence,” and a complete one in my last book, Logiques des mondes, which is out in French and will be published in English at the end of next year, I hope.

As all of you know perfectly well, the fundamental problem is to distinguish on the one hand, being as such, being qua being, and, on the other hand, existence, as a category which precisely is not reducible to that of being.  It is the heart of the matter.  This difference between being and existence is often the result of the consideration of a special type of being.  It is the case for Heidegger, with the distinction between Sein and Dasein.  If we take into account the etymological framework, we can see that “existence,” which depends on Dasein, is a topological concept.  It means to be here, to be in the world.  And in fact, I also shall propose to determine the very general concept of “existence” by the necessity of thinking the place, or the world, of everything which is.  And this place is not deducible from being as such.

Continue reading →

Posted in: Alan Badiou, Philosophy.

A crisis of the post-colonial state

Oct 15th, 2011
by John Steele.
No comments yet

The Arab revolts of the past year represent an important shift politically (and not only for the Arab world) that is important to seek to understand. The following essay, reprinted from a recent issue of New Left Review, is valuable not only for a beginning analysis but for its historical sketch of the development of the “gearbox of imperial control.” We have previously published an interview with van der Pijl.

The dominion of the West today is often analysed in terms of transnational capital’s ability to entangle prior modes of production in its net; but it is equally urgent to analyse the structures of imperialism in terms of modes of foreign relations.

The Arab world, in revolt and once again under attack, finds itself in the midst of a triple crisis: the crisis of Western hegemony, the crisis of capital and the crisis of the nation-state.

This is not, then, a revolution in which the social forces associated with a new way of life press forward to take the place of defunct governing classes, no longer able to hold the line. Instead, it may well be that the current storms raging across the Middle East are part of a planetary depression, signalling a structural weakening of the post-colonial state form through which the West has long exercised its control.

ARAB REVOLTS AND NATION-STATE CRISIS

Kees van der Pijl

The shockwaves of popular rebellion reverberating across the Arab world since the start of 2011 have put to the test the West’s dominion over the region; a rule that has long aimed at securing access to the Middle East’s oil and gas, while supporting Israel’s ongoing colonization of Palestine. The means by which imperial control is exercised were vividly exposed to public view, as Western officials scrambled to ‘stabilize’ the states that had long served as their clients in the region. In Egypt, a favoured destination for CIA rendition flights, the annual subsidy of $1.3bn in US military aid since 1979 has famously bought the Pentagon a direct line to the Army high command, giving Washington a control panel from which to manage the handling of the mass protests. The US Defense Secretary Robert Gates was on the phone to Cairo ‘every few hours’. Daily exhortations from the Obama Administration urged, first, ‘an orderly transition’ with Mubarak stepping down in September; then, as mass pressure grew, ‘an orderly transition now’, to the spymaster, Omar Suleiman; finally, a seizure of power by the Supreme Military Council (SMC), an outcome announced to Congress by Leon Panetta, then head of the CIA, on February 10, the day before it happened. All pointed to the urgency of American actions in stabilizing the 80-million-strong centre of gravity of Arab discontent, through the mechanisms of the post-colonial state.

Continue reading →

Posted in: Current events, History, Imperialist strategy.

Financialization and hegemony

Oct 11th, 2011
by John Steele.
3 comments

How does (or can) theoretical investigations relate to the rapidly developing “Occupy….” movement? This is a question I was asked recently, and to which I don’t have a ready answer. But the following essay covers a lot of important ground whose relationship to the present moment should be clear — the need for a revolutionary subject, on the one hand; how state power is exercised through the development of an illusory general interest, on the other; and how transnational financialization, and the consequent contradictions for existing state structures, has brought issues of the legitimacy of state power closer to the surface.

Don Hamerquist has published several essays previously on khukuri.

“…that which in them divides itself from the old”

Don Hamerquist

I would like to say a few things on the form and the content of the argument in Anselm Jappe’s article, in order to open up some issues that hopefully will go beyond this starting point.

Jappe, who I only know through this short piece, advances a generic Marxist conception of the limits of capitalist accumulation as if that is sufficient demonstration that most of what the contemporary left is writing and thinking about the current crisis is just stupidity – and probably reformist as well. While the conclusion has undeniable merit, the method falls well short of what we need. Jappe states:

(Karl Marx) also foresaw the eventuality that some day the capitalist machine would stop running on its own, through the exhaustion of its dynamic. Why? Capitalist commodity production contains, from its very inception an internal contradiction, a veritable time bomb built into its very structure.

We have waited a long time on this… “veritable time bomb.“

I have big questions about any explanations and prescriptions from decades in the past (in this instance, centuries) that are presented as what is needed for us to properly understand the politics of our present and immediate future.

Continue reading →

Posted in: Current events, Don Hamerquist, Marxism, Political Economy, Revolutionary Strategy.

Can capitalism exit from this crisis?

Oct 9th, 2011
by John Steele.
1 comment

Perhaps it’s time to resume some discussion of the economic crisis. The author of the following, Anselm Jappe, teaches philosophy in Italy and is a member of the Krisis-Gruppe. 

Translated from the Spanish translation posted at Comunización: Materiales para una concepción integral del movimiento comunista, and republished here from libcom.

Who Is To Blame?

Anselm Jappe

This time, all the commentators agree: what is now taking place is not a simple temporary adjustment of the financial markets. We are facing a crisis that is deemed to be the worst since the Second World War, or since 1929. But whose fault is it, and how can it be overcome? The answer is almost always the same: the “real economy” is healthy; the world economy is endangered by the insane mechanisms of a financial system that is totally out of control. The most facile answer, but also the most widespread, attributes all responsibility for this to the “greed” of a clique of speculators who have been gambling with everyone’s money as if they were in a casino.

However, this artifice of reducing the arcana of the capitalist economy, when the latter is not functioning properly, to the schemes of an evil conspiracy, has a long and dangerous history. The search for scapegoats, for “Jewish bankers” or other culprits, to serve as targets for the indignation of the “honest folk” composed of workers and small savers, would be the worst possible solution.

To contrast a “bad”, predatory and unbridled “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism with a “good”, more responsible “continental” capitalism, is not a serious proposition either. During the last few weeks we have seen that they are distinguishable only by minor details. All who demand—from ATTAC to Sarkozy—“more regulation” of the financial markets perceive the madness of the stock markets as merely an “excess”, or a tumor on an otherwise healthy body.

But what if financialization, far from having ruined the real economy, has helped it to survive past its expiration date?

Continue reading →

Posted in: Current events, Marxism, Political Economy.

Zizek on our situation — and communism

Oct 3rd, 2011
by John Steele.
No comments yet

Slovaj Zizek is always interesting, always changing, often irritating or apparently dismissable, but always (I believe) serious and radical in intent.

The following is republished here from the symptom.

Our task is thus to remain faithful to this eternal Idea of communism: to the egalitarian spirit kept alive over thousands of years in revolts and utopian dreams. The problem is how to avoid the choice between radical social uprisings which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, and the retreat into an ideal displaced to a domain outside social reality.

……

Our situation is the very opposite of the classical twentieth-century predicament in which the Left knew what it had to do, but simply had to wait patiently for the opportunity to offer itself. Today, we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequences of inaction could be catastrophic. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss of the New in totally inappropriate situations….

Communism is today not the name of a solution but the name of a problem….

Why the Idea and Why Communism?

Slavoj Zizek

The Left is facing the difficult task of emphasizing that we are dealing withpolitical economy—that there is nothing “natural” in the present crisis, that the existing global economic system relies on a series of political decisions—while simultaneously acknowledging that, insofar as we remain within the capitalist system, violating its rules will indeed cause economic breakdown, since the system obeys a pseudo-natural logic of its own. So, although we are clearly entering a new phase of enhanced exploitation, facilitated by global market conditions (outsourcing, etc.), we should also bear in mind that this is not the result of an evil plot by capitalists, but an urgency imposed by the functioning of the system itself, always on the brink of financial collapse. For this reason, what is now required is not a moralizing critique of capitalism, but the full re-affirmation of the Idea of communism.

Continue reading →

Posted in: Communism, Philosophy, Revolutionary Strategy, Zizek.

What do we recognize a revolution?

Sep 27th, 2011
by John Steele.
1 comment

Wu Ming is a novelist collective, a pseudonym for a group of Italian novelists who have written several novels, some of which (Manituana, Altai, and 54) have been translated into English.

Rather than a sociological or analytic approach (‘what are the necessary features of a revolution?’) these two members of Wu Ming take a rather different approach.

The following comprise parts of talks given by two members of the Wu Ming collective at the University of North Carolina on April 5, 2011. The full versions can be found at Wu Ming Foundation.

Apparently, the kind of revolutionary tale which our brain is most fond of is that of the great 20th century revolutions: the people in the streets, the seizure of power. We do not consider that there may be different kinds of revolution-narrative. Nation-States have changed since October of 1917, perhaps our concept of revolution should change accordingly. Also because, as said, a revolution is not always just about power, state control, the right of expression and so on. A revolution is certainly made on the streets, but above all it’s a creative drive to change the world, to call it with new names, to try the impossible.

WE ARE ALL FEBRUARY OF 1917

by Wu Ming 1

A few weeks ago, the Guardian newspaper published an article by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt entitled “Arabs are democracy’s new pioneers”. The authors tried to provide a frame in which to interpret the recent popular uprisings in North Africa and theMiddle East. At a certain point they wrote that «calling these struggles “revolutions” seems to mislead commentators who assume the progression of events must obey the logic of 1789 or 1917, or some other past European rebellion against kings and czars.»

Our question while preparing this talk was: Is it possible to acknowledge a present-day uprising as a ‘revolution’ without being misled in such a way? And how can we narrate of a present-day revolution?

Continue reading →

Posted in: Current events, History, Revolutionary Strategy, Social Theory.

To what extent is revolutionary theory detachable?

Sep 12th, 2011
by John Steele.
12 comments

John Steele

We’ve had a continuing discussion on this site of the status, relevance, and use of Marxism (and other ‘-isms’ – Lenin, Mao, and anarch) today, in relation to revolutionary work or the possibilities of an emancipatory politics in today’s world. Most recently, we’ve had some debate and a series of contributions, beginning with my “Marxism or Anarchism or —-,” continuing through Vern Gray’s response, “One, Two, Many Marxisms?” and the comments to this by Nat W., myself, and Vern Gray.

Here I want to continue one strand of that discussion: the question of the adequacy of Marxism (or Maoism, or —) as the basis for an emancipatory politics today. My own position is that, although I’ve been and in some sense still am a Marxist and a Maoist (a sense which will hopefully be made clearer below), I don’t believe that either or both provide such a basis. We need what we haven’t got.

Continue reading →

Posted in: John Steele, Marxism, Revolutionary Strategy.