Love him or hate him, Slavoj Žižek is no ordinary thinker, with a reputation for his always provocative and take-no-prisoners approach to social analysis. In an interview for Al-Jazeera released at the end of the year just passed, the Slovenian philosopher takes the audience through an intellectual journey across the momentous changes and the subsequent upheavals that have shaken the global financial and political system. As ever, his analysis is controversial and yet fascinating. It starts from the protests movements, and goes on touching the widest possible span of issues, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the rise of China, challenging our understanding of the world order as we (think we) know it.
In the wake of the most severe global crisis of our times, Žižek suggests that the much needed ‘revolutionary change’ will not come about in the form of a miraculous solution. Change is already taking place, and it is manifesting itself though the growing, fast-spreading awareness that the difficulties we are all confronting are neither temporary nor compartmentalised. The current global issues have not been merely caused by some bad, greedy guys operating in an otherwise good system—they are part and parcel of the system itself, and the recent protest movements have clearly shed light on this. Hence, what really matters in this specific conjuncture is not to find fast solutions, but to break what Žižek calls ‘the iconic Fukuyama-taboo’—the so far largely unquestioned “unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism” and its assumed irreplaceability.
From this angle, the very remarkable achievement of the protests lies in the way in which they have exposed how the system is not simply ‘faulty’ and needing fixing but, rather, it is likely to implode— because it has lost its self-evidence and ‘automatic legitimacy’. This is why, in Žižek’s view, it is beyond the remit of protest movements such as ‘Occupy’ to make realistic demands or to suggest for stable solutions to the global crisis. Their truly revolutionary aim has been fulfilled: they have removed the lid of one of the most cumbersome Pandora’s boxes of our age—they have revealed the limits of the “End of History”, and released a large flux of energy of protest in this way. However, Žižek concludes, what the future has in store for us is uncertain, because it will depend on the result of the final and most difficult of the battles— the struggle for who will appropriate such great energy.
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If you’d asked me while I was still at school, it’s pretty likely I would have said ‘yes’. A decade later, having watched this video, I realise that I feel the same way. Except that having now watched this great TED talk from Ken Robinson, education guru and all round interesting guy, the reasons I’d cite for this are a bit more intellectual than they would have been during my school days.
Robinson argues that the assumptions embedded within prevailing education paradigms are increasingly anachronistic, structuring the education process around an abstracted and inadequate understanding of ‘intelligence’ which leads to students being divided into the ‘academic’ and the ‘non-academic’, frustrating a great deal of human potential in the process. So too the Fordist assumptions underlying school as institutions, arbitrarily dividing students into age cohorts – which, when you think about it, is a bit weird really – before shuttling them, en masse, through the school/factory system. It’s individualising and atomising, with the omnipresence of standardised testing leading to widespread disengagement and alienated learning. If we’re going to prepare students for the 21st century economy we need to do things differently.
«Вместе победим!» ('Together we shall win!'). Russian Legislative elections: 2011. Source: National Post (http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/12/03/russian-vote-monitor-detained-in-moscow-before-election/)
As someone who is half-Russian myself and counts Russian as her first language, but who has never set foot in Russia (only to Ukraine), I often find myself torn between a ‘Western’ and a ‘Russian’ logic. This is not something I can analyse: for better or worse, sociology does not give you the tools to rationalise your own self; in Marx’ expression, I am unable to see underneath my own feet. I seem to understand both, to some extent, but when they clash (and they quite often do), I often cannot make up my mind.
Good analyses of Russian affairs by Western authors are few and far between. This is why I was so impressed by Mark Harris’ brief but excellent analysis of Russian attitude to democracy, in the context of the recent elections in Russia that took place on 4 Dec 2011 and have not finished yet. Harrison’s argument cuts through a usual misunderstanding and a clash in the basic meanings taken for granted by people on both sides of Europe. His analysis also touches on the issue of translation – not only linguistic, but also cultural. In a nutshell: before judging, we need to make sure we are aware what exactly it is that the two sides understand when they use the same term, in this case – democracy and the terminology surrounding it. As Harris argues, and the Russian, Bulgarian, and English sections of my brain all agree, democracy does not necessarily mean the same thing in the different [national, cultural, and political] languages.
Mark Harrison writes about economics, public policy, and international affairs. He is a Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick and a research fellow of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.
In this article, Kristen Howerton unveils some of the secrets behind Haloween treats (and other chocolate). What happens in the modern globalised world is that the products that we consume often have extremely long ‘trails’ about which the ordinary consumer has no idea. Similarly to the 2010 Gap child labour scandal, Howerton argues that ‘hundreds of thousands of children in West Africa are enslaved harvesting cocoa beans’.
After reading this, I think I’ll opt for home made pancakes and roast pumpkin this year.
Max Scheler, following up some clues in Nietzsche, developed a sociology of ‘ressentiment’, which – as a first pass — refers to the creation of scapegoats to deflect attention from one’s own inadequacies. Ressentiment was meant to explain how the desire for self-transcendence is perverted as the faithful come to believe that others have managed to reach much the same end by illegitimate means. In practice, the concept tends to refer to a rightward ideological turn by, say, working class or petit bourgeois who think that Jews or foreigners have usurped their prerogative. The left has not been traditionally implicated in this spoiler position because of its ‘progressive’ outlook, which was always constructive of the future, even as it laid waste to the past. Ressentiment, in contrast, is meant to be an exclusively negative – even nihilistic – sentiment born of fearful incomprehension.
Enter Nobel Prize economist and NY Times op-ed author, Paul Krugman, who may be the highest profile author to attempt to demonise the Republican Party as ‘anti-science’ in a way that is reminiscent of how US conservatives demonised the political and cultural left as ‘anti-American’ in the 20th century. In a piece originally published in the NYT and reprinted in the Guardian, Krugman scaremongers about the prospects for the US if Republican candidates who deny evolution and anthropocentric climate change manage to get into the White House. Krugman appears to believe that taking a loyalty oath to whatever happens to be the scientific consensus ought to be an entry requirement for anyone seeking elected office.
Perhaps the most odious feature of this suggestion is its appeal to science as a superordinate authority on the democratic political process. Whereas the right might try to co-opt the military under comparable circumstances, the left turns to science to threaten opponents who otherwise appear to be ascendant. Krugman’s suggestion also serves to corrupt science. No doubt Republicans are trying to gain advantage by casting doubt on various policy-relevant scientific views. Nevertheless there is legitimate room for disagreement and the offering of alternatives by scientists themselves, and exaggerated claims for consensus and certainty – simply to trump a group of politicians – does the cause of free scientific inquiry no favours. If anything, it reinforces the stereotype of scientists as an elite class contemptuous of the public.
When it comes to strictly scientific issues, what matters isn’t whether Texas governor Rick Perry (dis)believes in global warming or Darwinism, but what he believes should be taught and researched on these matters. However, even this somewhat misses the point. For when Perry makes statements denying global warming and Darwin, he is not mainly trying to say anything about science at all. Rather he is engaging in ‘dog whistle politics’, in which scientific opinions are meant to stand ‘metonymically’ (apologies for the old structuralist jargon) for a set of conservative cultural positions that appeal to a wide range of voters. Liberals like Krugman are so completely alienated from these positions that they can only register them as dangerous pathologies of the intellect (aka scientific illiteracy). But unless liberals change their tune, they will continue to fail to deal with the democratic process as it exists in the US today.
In the chapter titled “Third World,” the historian Eric Hobsbawm writes in his autobiography Interesting Times that, “Columbia was, and continues to be, proof that gradual reform in the framework of liberal democracy is not the only, or even the most plausible, alternative to social and political revolutions, including the ones that fail or are aborted. I discovered a country in which the failure to make a social revolution had made violence the constant, universal, omnipresent core of public life.” This is the sad truth of an empire a little more than sixty years ago reduced to ruins in a matter of thirty years or so and being forced into a process of third worldization with its government and people pitted against each other. It needs a life as long as that of Hobsbawm to notice rapid changes that are strikingly historical and yet unpleasant in terms of the role they play in day-to-day life.
In a way there is a sinister resemblance between the Norway attacks in July and the UK riots just now. Both have the look of being predetermined and waiting to happen. Somebody had to throw the match for the leaking fuel tank to catch fire and explode. It could be as simple as that. In all such cases of violence of a larger kind which have the apparent look of “suddenness” there is no doubt the tacit support of a significant section of the masses, no matter how hard the corporate-driven media might try to make it look like this is the work of a few fringe “criminal” elements. That’s definitely not the case. Both the Norway attacks and UK disturbances are expressions of individual and collective bitterness and hatred towards a non-responsive and indifferent government that does not hesitate in using violence against them to keep a semblance of order.
In the case of UK the difference is that the riots had a forewarning. When the vehement student tuition fee protest was ignored towards the end of the last year the government created the conditions for these riots. I was surprised then that the government dared to ignore a protest of that magnitude, something that would’ve scared those at the helm of affairs in a poorer nation as well. When it did ignore the warning, it clearly demonstrated to the person on the street that it would not relent to popular pressure and was determined to go against the will of ordinary Britons. When a normal person is violent it is usually because all avenues to dialogue are closed and he or she wants you to hear them out. In cases where it is carefully thought out the violence turns into revolutionary action. In any other case the very fact that all customary restraints are broken down is a sign that there is nothing to stop people on streets from turning into mobs out of anger and frustration. The looting is a symptom of a larger malaise that stems from the fact that most people consciously or unconsciously feel unjustly treated.
This is a serious reminder to the David Cameron government on two counts. First, they – this includes the other European governments as well – better wake up and provide welfare measures to a large number of people especially working class whites who feel grieved by the fact that they’re being completely neglected in their own country along with the ill-founded perception that the government sucks up to immigrants, in addition to moving the jobs abroad at their expense. The truth is that the foreign policy pursued by western governments is a treacherous one where corporations draw the blood of cheap third world labor and make massive profits. The multinational companies are colonial in character and not bound by rules that operate in western liberal democracies. The terrible abuse of workers who get paid enough by local standards to barely survive will simply not be accepted in a developed nation. The “immigrant” is another word for cheap labor and the devastation caused by outsourcing to bodies of the third world poor is not a guarded secret as such.
I can see where men like Anders Brevik responsible for the death of seventy innocent lives come from. They’re victims in a way no different from rioters on the streets of London and other cities. They feel their way of life has been threatened and the government is prejudiced against them. They’re not completely wrong in feeling that way. An enlightened government needs to understand, assuage and respond to their grievances through positive and inclusive means that will give them a chance to education and a decent life. Economic reservations have to be made in terms of jobs and other benefits to local citizens who come from deprived backgrounds. That’s a practical solution. The world is not a global village and the locals are as local as ever before. Therefore there is nothing wrong in prioritizing their interests and giving consideration to their feelings.
The second count is that there is no point in pursuing a policy of vengeance. The arrests and harsh punishments meted out to rioters only convince the people that the intentions of the government are malafide. As such every section of British society ranging from students to workers has serious doubts about the credibility of the Tory government. The punishments will add to their disastrous resume as the party in power. The violence could temporarily be suppressed. But, if the government has the slightest imagination it should know that they will not be seeing the last of either the riots or the rioters.
Back in the 1920s when the young John Steinbeck was ready to embark on his life as a writer, he received a piece of advice from his teacher who asked him to go to Europe since he had no money. She told him that “in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful.” Globalization, in the last couple of decades has ended up making the whole world ashamed of being poor, and with the weakening of conventional social bonds across the planet the poor are condemned to isolation in addition to the burden of poverty. The result is endemic violence which is “the constant, universal, omnipresent core of public life.” While this is painfully accepted as a fact of life in most parts of the third world we’re getting to see more and more of it in the nations of the first world as well.
There is something terribly British about the English Catholic saints and a little of that quaint practicality we see in Thomas More who ironically authored the Utopia. They’re not the kinds of saints who you would expect to intercede with God on your behalf. Nothing of the poetic passion of an Italian Saint Francis who epitomizes Mediterranean madness or the Spanish Saint Teresa of Avila with a golden spear on fire directed towards her breast by the angel as immortalized in Bernini’s Ecstasy. An English saint is frankly incapable of such excesses and would neither go begging and singing naked on streets nor would angels be allowed to throw them into unwarranted states of ecstasies.
The English saints are a bit too English for such high drama. The idealism however is alive both in More and in the eminent Cardinal Newman (1801 – 1890) who is on the way to canonization by the Roman Catholic Church. Just as More’s Utopia is a harsh critique of a classist social order, Newman’s The Idea of a University is an idealistic view of what universities ought to be like and thus could be read as an attack on the existing state of the universities. Its idealism is contained by a sense of practicality. That could just be the Victorian style of writing descriptive prose to a society that depends on writers to offer intense imagery for its visual satisfaction.
There is however something deeply sincere in how Newman talks about “liberal” education which these days like “liberal” everything else has suffered the onslaught of abuse of every kind from poststructuralists, post-colonialists, postmodernists, post-feminists, post-Marxists and liberals themselves too afraid for their own good to be seen as liberals. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Newman’s understanding of the University is a product of a colonial mindset. That’s not the case. His vision is oriented towards the future and I’m sure he’s more than aware that no university comes remotely close to the one he is imagining.
A specified form of death penalty occurs in the following cases:-gibbeting (on the spot where crime was committed) for burglary, later also for encroaching on the king’s highway, for getting a slave-brand obliterated, for procuring husband’s death; burning for incest with own mother, for vestal entering or opening tavern, for theft at fire (on the spot); drowning for adultery, rape of betrothed maiden, bigamy, bad conduct as wife, seduction of daughter-in-law. The Code of Hammurabi (1795-1750 BC)
The stand that World Socialist Web Site took on the Strauss-Kahn affair in an article titled “The serious questions raised by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair” has increased my respect for the online news center. The main point in the article is that “As of yet, no one has heard Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s side of the story.” That’s the point. No one knows what the alleged victim went through and no one knows what Strauss-Kahn has to say for himself. The stage is occupied by everyone else except the “victim” and the “victimizer” – I put these two words in quotes because they need to be clarified depending on what emerges from the inquiry.
“It was foul, and I loved it,” says Saint Augustine for stealing pears along with “some lewd young fellows” adding further “I loved to perish.” With the Roman Empire sacked by the Goths on the verge of collapse, it is hard to believe that Saint Augustine attributed such a strong motive as “perishing” to stealing pears – something that Mark Twain in the 19th century would’ve laughed at as a normal thing that boys do for lack of anything better. In fact most boys do worse than steal pears. Even the self-righteous judges at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague whose faces are death-masks and who speak like the God of the Old Testament would not include stealing pears in the list of crimes against humanity. Yet Saint Augustine the Carthaginian, with the poignancy of a true convert and the poetry of the North African sun burning in his veins makes you want to feel with the pain of having stolen pears.
Augustine’s Confessions was meant to be a kind of a spiritual autobiography. Mine is a parody of other confessions. If I were my own biographer this would be the title of the book: Confessions of a Dystopian Marxist. A dystopian I always was. The Marxism came later. To be a dystopian is to have no expectations of the world. Marxism is the antidote to such a feeling because it invents expectations where seemingly there are none. Dystopias make you conscious of time. Marxism rejects time except as a man-made category and recognizes only one time: that of the revolution. Dystopias are about no-worlds or just about the whole universe. Marxism is the rest of the universe seen through the prism of this world. I’m writing about two people in the same book: one is the dystopian and another is the Marxist.
