God is My Co-Brander

What a week:  September 23;  the annual Yom Kippur day parade took over  Manhattan. Thousands of atoning Jewish men and women wearing their heaviest, and scratchiest wool suits,  shod in their least comfortable, but fashionable shoes,  marched down Fifth Avenue, fanning themselves with pledge cards in a demonstration of virtual self-flagellation, while keening to the heavens "Oy vay, my feet.  My feet!"

The march, led this year by Woody Allen, passed the Guggenheim, the Neue Galerie (bowing ever so slightly to the lost glory of dem Deutschen Juden), the Met, and finished at Bergdorf's where the penitents, or rather those who completed fully the walk of pain, where awarded a gift card entitling them to a 10 percent discount valid on any day other than a high holy day.  Rosie Ruiz was denied a card on the grounds that she was wearing Nikes, and took the subway.

September 24:  The New York Philharmonic opened its season at Avery Fisher Hall, I mean David Geffen Hall.  Back in the day, when Lincoln Center opened, it was simply known as Philharmonic Hall, but since Phil hadn't dropped a big chunk of change for the honor of having his name attached to the columns, the rights to naming the hall was put up for bid, and Avery Fisher won with a bid of a little more than ten million dollars in 1973. 

Well, that was a significant amount in those days, but now... ten million and a metrocard will get you a ride on the subway, provided it isn't shut down for some sort of security threat, or programmed maintenance or police shooting of a dark-skinned individual wielding  loose cigarettes in a threatening manner.

So... up for bid again goes the name, and this time we want 21st century amounts of money, and Dutch Schultz's last words are the auctioneer's chant:  "Come on get some money in that treasury. We need it.  Come on please get it."

Guess who won? David? Right. Koch? Wrong.  He already has a theater named after him in Lincoln
Center, proving that owning companies convicted of felonies, of stealing resources from Native American and public lands, doesn't mean you're not a gentleman.

Different David.  Geffen.  Hooray for Hollywood.  One hundred million dollars and he gets his name up there....well not forever, but probably for 40 years or so.

This gala event was highlighted by the Philharmonic's performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony in A major, Opus 92.  In honor of Beethoven, the rich and famous attending the concert renamed themselves, adding the German von to their surnames, as in David von Koch, David von Geffen, Barbara von Walters, Calvin von Klein, Oprah von Winfrey, Barry von Diller.  Diane von Furstenberg did not change her name.

The New York Philharmonic, taking its cue from Lincoln Center, then auctioned off the rights to rename it. After the concert, the musical director of the orchestra, Alan Gilbert announced that the orchestra would henceforth be known as the Dreamworks Blackstone Starbucks Philharmonic Orchestra and Barista School.  Mr. Gilbert announced he had changed his name to David.

The string section was auctioned off to Uber, and the musicians have been reclassified as "consultants."


The brass was sold to Rio Tinto and has been scrapped.

September 25: Your show of shows:  The Pope's in the house.  I say the Pope's representin'.   The Pope raises the roof.  Actually, the Pope is here to restore the roof-- Michaelangelo's paintings of the book of Genesis requiring extensive, and expensive restoration.   The Pope, after meeting with Schwarzman, Geffen, former mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Eli Zabar announced that the chapel will be renamed the Sistine Chapel Investment Bank and Delicatessen.   Pope Francis  announced he too has a new name: Zayde

September 25, 2015 

Here Comes Johnny Yen Again

With the liquor and drugs
 ...and the Lenin cap. 
Or something like that.
He stands for old Labour against austerity. 
Loves the political flesh machine.
And the Trident submarine.
It's all the same.
It's just a game.

He's gonna do another striptease
lip synching God Save the Queen
He's the next big thing.
He's a dancing fiend
In the London air
Silver-haired
And he's hypnotizing chickens
I said hypnotizing chickens

Well I'm just a modern guy
Of course, I've had it in both ears before.
I lost one in '73
With Dr. Allende
Lost the other in a mining town
When the ANC shot us down

Got a lust for life
Got a lust for life 

JC's got a shadow named McDonnell
He's a real bad actor
Said he wanted to kill Thatcher
Now says that was just a joke
Regrets how he spoke
Promises to mind his manners
Fold away the red banners
Buy a Union Jack
Buy a Union Jack

Well, I'm just a modern guy
Of course I've been burned before
Didn't learn before
So I'm back for more

Turns out Tsipras is worth a million in prizes

Vacations on yachts
Private schools for his tots
I wanna be like him
Custom chrome rims
On my GTO
Easy gig,  hypnotizing chickens
I said hypnotizing chickens

Well, I'm just a modern guy
Of course I've had it in both ears before
Got one  punctured in Greece
We were golden fleeced 
Can't hear a thing with either ear
Can't use the phone
Got no fear
Cause I'm good at hypnotizing chickens
I said hypnotizing chickens

Got a lust for life
Got a lust for life 




September 19, 2015

Anti-theses. Anti-crisis 1

1. The problem, predicament, and conceit of and for Marxists (present company not excepted) is that we are all, more or less, and once, always, and forever Hegelians.  We think we are channeling the movement of the great critical spirit; that purpose, goal, of history-- namely human emancipation.  We think that when we're not thinking that we are channeling the great spirit of the "great man" himself.  We think that we're somehow speeding things up, and forward, to a great fruition which  is nothing other than subduing the world to and with the great logic that explains the world to itself.  And where does that get us?

2. Where does that get us? The answer is where it has already gotten us. Pretty close to zero.  Official Marxism, by which I mean that of 2, 3, 4, 5, many Internationals positions itself as the channel of channels, the mediation of the advancing big C creative spirit and the reluctant backsliding flesh. It gets us to that point where we're conducting Marxism the way the medium conducts messages from the dead at a s矇ance.  "Give us a sign, oh great spirit, if you're with us today."  And sure enough we always get the sign.  "There's a crisis!  Look, over there.  Isn't that a crisis I see?"  Sure thing.  There's always a crisis. The stock markets tank, unemployment rises, profits fall.   "Sooner or later" and "I told you so" are the paltry best we come up with.

3. So let's just say, it isn't a spirit thing. And "crisis" isn't a message from the dead,or the living, that capitalism has come undone when the undoing is itself the form for capitalist reconstitution. Confusing?

4. Then try this:  It's a social thing, relation where the obstruction to capitalist accumulation is made manifest in the inability of the social beings to reproduce themselves as the vital players in such accumulation while at the same time, this marginalization of the producers and consumers allows capitalism to drive down the cost of its own reproduction through a sequence of social "distress sales" so that value, profit,  is not realized, but re-imagined. Got it?  Capital shuts down, demobilizes, marginalizes, and what remains is capital re-imagined.

5. The failure of the left is that its every move is but a  re-imagination of profit.  The left re-imagines profit in the forms of taxation; in nationalization; in stipends, subsidies, distributions etc.  That and those are not at all all nonsense, but they are all derivatives of value production, imaginings derived from profit. 

6. Syriza's "capitulation" wasn't in its agreement to a new memorandum, and the agreement isn't a betrayal.    The capitulation was predetermined in the paucity of its imagination-- where "the best" it could come up with was the re-imagination of profit as a European Union "New Deal," as a second Marshall plan.  That's not imagination.  It's nostalgia.  Worse, it's delusional nostalgia, a memory of a past there never was; one scrubbed clean of its origins in blood, gore, and shit. 

7. Clearly, the material basis for imagination is class struggle; the struggle for the overthrow of value production, for  the abolition of value... and  for the throttling of "productive labor" in that all notions of "productive labor" are class based. The revolutionary class has to imagine first and foremost its own abolition as laborers, as workers, as sources of value, as liquid pools of labor serving the purposes of exchange.  It's not the "will to power" that informs history; it's the imagination of power that historical materialism grasps.

8.  "We will work  cooperatively toward our regeneration, the birth of communal luxury, future splendors and the Universal Republic."-- Manifesto of the Artists' Federation of Paris, April 15, 1971, cited in Communal Luxury:  The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. Kristin Ross, Verso, 2015, a book that is as indispensable in its way as Maksakovsky's The Capitalist Cycle. 

August 25, 2015

Down to the Bare Walls, Fixtures Included

1. Somewhere that guy Marx, collaborating with that guy Engels-- a man a bit too taken with the military side of things, wrote that "the history of hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."  A revolutionary proposition to be sure, back then and there, and here and now; and a revolutionary challenge to the purveyors, hawkers, merchants of natural law, social contracts, rational market, the rights of man, etc. etc. and forever etc.

The challenge was  developed, refined, deepened over the course of four decades, manifesting in a hundred different texts in a hundred different expressions a core content: that human history is  indeed fashioned, constructed, built by human beings, but only in their existence as social producers.

Content isn't exactly of big concern to the bourgeoisie........until of course, it is made a big concern by events outside their control.  Even then, realization of value, market history, determines the limits of concern.  But packaging?  Packaging is everything.  "Packaging is what we do," say the market makers, market players.  History, to the bourgeoisie, isn't class struggle.  It's merchandise. It gets wrapped.  It gets advertised.  It gets announced.  It gets sold not in the package of value; the package gets sold as the value.

Asset-stripping becomes competitiveness.   Exploitation is entrepreneurship.  Poverty is economic stimulus.  Ketchup is a vegetable, arbeit macht frei, and what's the problem?  The trains are on time even if the destination is an abattoir.  Presentation is everything. History can be represented as, replaced by, merchandise.  And merchandise can always be liquidated

"Presentation"  is all there is to those who think they are intermediaries between the hammer and the anvil of class struggle.   "Presentation"-- the as if -- is what you get from those who act as if they can alter the condition of capitalism in lieu of altering the condition of labor which makes capital capital. 

Of course, that altering of the condition of labor, that overcoming of the condition in which labor is expressed as a commodity for purchase, as wage-labor can only be accomplished by the social producers, themselves, but that's exactly what the packaging is supposed to obscure.  Like Powerpoint.

2. We start from the recognition that at no time from 2009 on, has Greece existed in what is generally called a "revolutionary situation."  Despite all the unemployment, the decline in living standards; despite the social catastrophe that is called "austerity" or "the memorandum," or the "MFFA," Greece was not, and is not,  in a revolutionary situation.  There was no moment when another class, a class in opposition to the existing ruling class, had organized itself into "competing" centers of power; into organs that could, and must, compete with the parliament, the ministries, the military, of capitalism.

Still, the "economics," that is to say, the predicament in the reproduction of capital, neither waits for, nor depends upon the "readiness" of the working class before it eats away at the bourgeoisie's institutions for administering its rule.  And that erosion was and is the determining characteristic of the conditions in Greece. 

With each memorandum yet another party, yet another "package" presenting capitalism as a viable social order, was disgraced; yet another package was broken open, yielding up the big nothing that is value when it can no longer accumulate value.  New Democracy, PASOK  a "neutral" "technocrat"government-- each in turn, all together, exposed; discarded .

Enter Syriza.  Syriza had a package, and that package was the Thessaloniki program.  The "program" demanded a write down the face value of the debt to make it "sustainable."  The program demanded "growth"  "moratorium" "grace periods" "a European New Deal." 

The program promised "reconstruction,"  "restoration of wages and pensions," "rebuilding the welfare state."  The program promised to do all these things regardless of the outcome of negotiations with the Troika.

What the program really promised was the continued containment of the working class.  What the program delivered was the preservation of the institutions of bourgeois rule; the parliament, the military, the cops, the courts, the ministries.

Precisely because Greece was not, and is not, in a "revolutionary situation" but was and is in situation of social catastrophe,  Syriza deserved no support.  Precisely because conditions could only get worse, with or without a new memorandum, with or without exiting the eurozone,  there was, and is, no point to debating the terms of any memorandum, no point to debating the exit from the eurozone, no pointing in arguing with the nonsense claims of the Thessaloniki program. 

There was only one argument engaged; one debate to be joined; one demand to be raised: complete and immediate repudiation of the debt, a debt accrued of by and for a government of by and for the preservation of capitalism. 

August 5, 2015

Latest from TPTG

Latest (I think) posted on Dialectical Delinquents.

Question

Are the only ones who understand Marx, as opposed to Marx-ism; who understand that Marx was first and foremost a revolutionist, that all Marx wanted to do was to place social revolution on the strongest, definitive,  irrefutable platform possible: are only those who identify with anarchism; who draw their inspiration from Situationist texts; who in fact spit on everything and everyone who already reeks of accommodation to things as they are, which of course, is only the relation that is?

I think so.  Nobody understands Marx but those who spit from top to bottom on the bourgeoisie, who can't even utter the term without spitting. 

FWIW, I know I have never written "bourgeoisie" without spitting.  I keep a bucket by my desk.

July 26, 2015

SA(S)R Syndrome Moves On

Short-Attention-Span-Radicalism has quickly recovered from its setback in Greece,  finding solace in  its own unique spin on Joe Hill's supposed last words-- "Don't mourn, Don't organize; Forget, Ignore, Repeat." The SARs brigade made up of VIBs; SIPs; near, neo, quasi, democratic, semi, hemi, demi, erratic, mo, po, po-mo socialists is done sitting shiva for Greece and has moved on to its next challenge, its once and future failure, Britain.

"Greece?  Oh, that's so yesterday. Greece? What did you expect?  Greece?  We told you it wasn't a revolutionary situation," say our SARs.  "We're over Greece."

The VIB, Richard Seymour, is once again waxing, and waning, eloquent in this demonstration of obsessive-compulsive behavior, this repetition in the service of failure.  Opining on the candidacy of Jeremy Corbyn for the leadersip of Britain's Labour Party, Seymour writes that Corbyn is the candidate the Conservative Party most fears.  Absolutely correct, but the Tory fear is miniscule compared to that of the Labour Party itself.  Seymour points out that the right-bloc of the party threatens a split, a coup, collective suicide, but not yet car bombings, if Corbyn wins.

Panicked by the flood of new members into the party, the "right bloc" [if such a thing can be said to exist in this party] has called for the election to be suspended until a proper check of the credentials of the new members can be vetted, highlighting how dangerous becoming the majority really is to the right-bloc of the Labour Party.

John Mann, Labour MP, has written that the election "threatens to become a farce" due to the return to the party of "some of the Militant-Tendency types," proving once again that Labour may be "a big house" but it's a mortgaged big house,  a sub-prime ARM with a big fat balloon payment callable at the whim of the bankers.

Corbyn, loyal first and last, says he only wants "genuine Labour supporters"  Says Corbyn, "I only want people to register as Labour supporters if they are genuine supporters and intend to stay for the longer course."  Word.

Really?  Sure thing.  Seymour says:

So, Corbyn could win.  This does not mean that I am going to pay my £3 and join up as a 'supporter' in order to vote for Corbyn.  There's quite a lot of bandwagon-hopping at the moment - it was the same with the Greens last year - and joining the Labour Party just to have a vote and then leaving is pointless.  Why vote for Corbyn if you're not going to hang around and try to support him and try to reconstitute the Labour Party?  He'll be weak enough against the established power of the old right-wing bureaucracy, without a big chunk of his base fucking off the day after the polls close.  Corbyn will not win by pulling in outside forces who have no interested in the Labour Party's long-term future, and no identification with it; he will win by shaking up the Labour Party, and drawing in new members who are just becoming politicised. 

Indecisiveness is essential to the manifestation, and maintenance of SAR syndrome, so a paragraph or so later, we get:

However, that tactical point doesn't change the overall situation, and it doesn't mean we don't have a responsibility to support Corbyn's bid...It's not just the Labour Left that is weak.  It is the Left as a whole.  Yes, Corbyn would be relatively isolated at the top, and top-heavy successes are extremely vulnerable.  Yes, he will be trying to shift the balance of forces in favour of the Left, in a situation in which our forces are incredibly depleted. But it is a structural aspect of today's situation that in the growing vacuum created by the breakdown of the old party-base relationship, individuals and groups can suddenly project influence well beyond their actual social basis, if what they say finds an ideological resonance in lived experience.  We don't get to change that just be force of will.  So we have to work with the grain of our few advantages.  Corbyn has made a breakthrough, and that presents opportunities that it would be stupid and irresponsible to opt out of.

 Well, what do you know?  What can you say,  after you say: 

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig,

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

To market, to market, to buy a fat hog,

Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.

To market, to market, to buy a plum bun,

Home again, home again, market is done

We can say: "let's try this"-- Everywhere in Seymour's article for the words Tory, Conservative, Tories, substitute New Democracy; for the word Labor, substitute PASOK, for Corbyn substitute Syriza or Tsipras (your pick).  Now read it again.  Does this sound familiar?  To those not (yet) infected with SARs (no guarantees as to anyone's "natural" immunity), it should.  

For our VIP bogger, not so much. It must be  the deep shock of Syriza's capitulation, a "world-historic" defeat that compels Seymour into one more iteration of repetition in the service of failure.  However, if it really is a "world-historic defeat" then surely it deserves an analysis, an explanation, an examination, something more material than the pathetic sentimentality Seymour has provided. 

Or maybe-- maybe the so yesterday events in Greece aren't a defeat at all, a position advanced by Panitch and Gindin and echoed oddly or not by Insurgent Notes, which after producing a single article in 2010, couldn't muster another examination of the struggle in Greece until this -- seven paragraphs in half-an-article, which more rather than less, dismisses the events, as its author later makes explicit in his comments, as not amounting to a reversal to the struggle against capitalism in Greece, Europe, the globe.   

I wish I could say I'm surprised by this lack of insight, the superficiality of analysis, the disavowal of  and disdain for the struggle in Greece promoted by Insurgent Notes.  I am not.  So-called "left communism"can be just as much leftism as anything and anyone else-- concerned with its own status, its own credentials, its own package.

There has been a reversal in Greece.  The struggle against capitalism has suffered a defeat.  Still, history hasn't come to an end.  It's not quite yet over in Greece.  Greece 2015 is not yet Chile 1973.  It's not yet time to move on and plan the next disaster.   The class struggle in Greece deserves better treatment. 

July 26, 2015