Category: political

The Combahee River Collective Statement

NONAME BOOK CLUB

https://nonamebooks.com/Free-Reading-Program#combahee-river-collective-statement

We are excited to announce the launch of our political education series! Each month we will offer 1 essay as an alternative to our monthly book picks. For #BlackAugust we will read “Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free”.

Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free: Barbara Smith and the Black feminist visionaries of the Combahee River Collective
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Reference reading:
The Combahee River Collective Statement
by The Combahee River Collective

Neoliberalism and its discontents

Ezra Klein Show, October 24 2019

Wendy Brown is a professor of political theory at UC Berkeley, author of Undoing the Demos and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, and one of the foremost critics of neoliberalism, not only as a set of economic policies but a “governing rationality” that infects almost all aspects of our existence.

Noah Smith is an economist, a columnist at Bloomberg, and is known for his robust defenses of some (though not all) neoliberal positions, which earned him the prestigious title of Chief Neoliberal Shill of 2018.

BLM

There are services police providYake that can be provided by

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1745746499555

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-june-1-2020-1.5592953/police-brutality-continually-treated-like-a-one-off-in-canada-says-desmond-cole-1.5592954

Community led safety solutions. Sinking money into policing while scrapping programs that keep like affordable housing, health, violence prevention, renter protection, community solutions, make critical investments in things we know keep people safe. George Floyd died for counterfeit $20 bill that is a crime of poverty.

Not our call to tell our communities how to grieve.

Desmond Cole

Regis Korchinski-Paquet: 5 hours after she fell to ground, her body was still on the ground in a body bag.

Defunding the police: money could be going to organizations to better protect the community. The way to stop violence is to go to the source, the police are the source of the violence for black people. It’s legalized force, up to taking somebody’s life.

Transforming violence into services and support for black people. The uncomfortable conversation is that white people are be protected by police violence, white people and their property. When police get paid $110,000 year to police black communities … indigenous children in child welfare today, and white people have made careers of managing the files … the racism white people get to benefit.

Until people burned down a police station, then murder charges

That flame was a hope. We are allowed to defend ourselves and fight back. We have to build on this one moment after 400 years of oppression. Stop policing, stop sending people with a gun for somebody in crisis.

DESMOND COLE: I’m really tired of using the term relationship as though these are two equal parties. The black community is not an equal party to the state sponsored police force. We are under subjugation to the state sponsored police force. And there are so many different ways that that’s happening that there isn’t even enough time in this segment. But in Toronto, this situation with Regis Korchinski-Paquet of her falling off of this balcony after an interaction with the police might seem strange or rare to people, but there are so many instances just in the last year or two in Ontario of people hearing a knock on the door. Police. It’s police. It’s police. And then that person ends up on the ground dead. No charges against the officer. Someone has a warrant for breaching probation. Police come and knock on their door. They’re found dead at the bottom of an apartment building. This is happening in Ontario all the time. But we’re not focused on accountability for the police, we’re focused on clearing the police and saying it wasn’t their fault. And so black people, people on low incomes, living in some of these high rise apartment buildings, people who may be in crisis, we are all falling victims to police brutality and it’s being treated every time like a one off and it’s very insulting to see that.

Continue reading “BLM”

Runciman

LRB Vol. 42 No. 7 · 2 April 2020
Too early or too late?
David Runciman on political timing and the pandemic

But it isn’t just Johnson. In the fights about crisis management we have all been following our political instincts, even when we insist we’re just talking about the science. It’s true that there has been a big difference between the response of the British government – which appears genuinely to have been guided by the scientific advice it received – and that of the US government, which for a long time seemed to be operating on a wing and a prayer. Yet there’s no such thing as simply doing what the science says. This is partly because the science itself is political – how could it not be, when so much of it is the science of human behaviour? […]

 If you believe that most citizens are more or less capable of doing what is asked of them at the appropriate time then a more interventionist approach will almost certainly save lives in the long run. This is a real argument, based on real evidence. But it still starts with an ‘if’.

Hayek was wrong about the slippery slope. If planning inevitably led to public demands for more and more preferential treatment and therefore to more and more planning we would hardly be where we are today, trying to deal with a crisis for which we are so ill-prepared, with government bureaucracies stripped of many of the capabilities they are going to need. But the reason we’re in this situation is that Hayek won the argument. Some Western democracies elected Hayekians to government, beginning with Thatcher, who once banged down a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty in a meeting and declared: ‘This, gentlemen, is what we believe!’ The direction of travel over the last forty years has been in the Hayekians’ favour: towards deregulation, market competition, global interdependence and winner-take-all economies. The 2008 financial crisis arrested the momentum of that movement but didn’t fundamentally alter its course. Now, though, the future may be more open to lasting change. If this crisis does represent a turning point towards the assertion of greater government control over economic outcomes it won’t be because we were on that slippery slope all along. It will be because – as Hayek claimed to believe, without ever seeming to think the lesson applied to him – politics is never predictable.

Elif Shafik on CBC Ideas

Women in their own private space can be matriarchs of the house, how they navigate their way through patriarchy but the same time public space is very partriarchal

Authoritarian regimes first thing that is curbed is HUMOUR. Laugh at yourself, laugh at people holding positions of power. Once you lose that it indicates loss of democracy as well.

Nostalgia, political Imperial Nostalgia. come to power with liberal promises, but longer stay in power, they become more inward looking, authoritarian, illusions of a golden era that we have lost, lost it because of foreigners, US/THEM, etc.

Golden Imperial past, re-constructed, re-invented, symbols and rhetoric, posing with Ottoman soldiers, assumption that we were one big great empire, homogenous, but we were not, story of Ottoman empire changes
concubine in harem, slave, Armenian silversmith, Jewish miller, prostitute working in brothel, or shamam. Offical history wants only one history

Head scarf ban created backlash. resentment.

EMOTIONS
21:00 something is happening in the cultural sphere, a culture clash within every society, not between countries. People’s perceptions are determined/shaped by emotions. A fundamental fact is that we humans are emotional creatures, but in poly sci, emotions are not measurable data, quantitative data fails to capture what is happening right now, because what is happening right now can’t be captured in empirical data

Liberal Elite versus Real people
Who are not part of the ‘real people’ immigrants, race, class. Romanticization of the ‘real’ people is dangerous. the VOLK, real people, not corrupted. untainted by western ideology, resentment against intellectuals and educated.

Leaders of populist movement are elites, just as elitist as people they claim to criticize, Marie Le Pen, Nigel Farage, vested interests in business world and political establishment.

Little people, poor people and the ELITES. Duality re-cast for the 21st century.
Pareto: Italian sociologist, swing from liberal elites to republican elites. Liberal elites fail to understand nationalism, republican elites rise in nationalism, jingoism. 100 years later, we have forgotten this.

32:00 Sweden, there is a re-branding right-wing nationalists are calling themselves democrats

Badiou Critical Inquiry Summer 2008

December 2, 2012

Question: If today you disqualify any emancipatory dimension for a politics of destruction, what then is the place reserved for violence in politics?

BADIOU: Here, again, we touch upon the link between philosophy and
politics. I maintain that today it is a question of creating independent
spaces in such a way that the question of violence takes a defensive turn. Continue reading “Badiou Critical Inquiry Summer 2008”

wallerstein what about China

Immanuel Wallerstein November 1, 2017. From his blog post

A structural crisis is chaotic. This means that instead of the normal standard set of combinations or alliances that were previously used to maintain the stability of the system, they constantly shift these alliances in search of short-term gains. This only makes the situation worse. We notice here a paradox – the certainty of the end of the existing system and the intrinsic uncertainty of what will eventually replace it and create thereby a new system (or new systems) to stabilize realities.

During the longish period of structural crisis, we observe a bifurcation between two alternative modes of resolving the crisis – one by replacing it with a different system that somehow preserves the essential elements of the dying system and one that transforms it radically.

Concretely, in our present capitalist system, there are those who seek to found a non-capitalist system that nonetheless maintains capitalism’s worst features: hierarchy, exploitation, and polarization. And there are those who wish to establish a system that is relatively democratic and egalitarian, a type of historical system that has never existed before. We are in the midst of this political battle.

In terms of the present system, China seems to be gaining much advantage. To argue that this means the continuing functioning of capitalism as a system is basically to (re)assert the invalid point that systems are eternal and that China is replacing the United States in the same way as the United States replaced Great Britain as the hegemonic power. Were this true, in another 20-30 years China (or perhaps northeast Asia) would be able to set its rules for the capitalist world-system.

But is this really happening?

First of all, China’s economic edge, while still greater than that of the North, has been declining significantly. And this decline may well amplify soon, as political resistance to China’s attempts to control neighboring countries and entice (that is, buy) the support of faraway countries grows, which seems to be occurring.

Can China then depend on widening internal demand to maintain its global edge? There are two reasons why not. The present authorities worry that a widening middle stratum could jeopardize their political control and seek to limit it.

The second reason, more important, is that much of the internal demand is the result of reckless borrowing by regional banks, which are facing an inability to sustain their investments. If they collapse, even partially, this could end the entire economic edge of China.

In addition, there have been, and will continue to be, wild swings in geopolitical alliances. In a sense, the key zones are not in the North, but in areas such as Russia, India, Iran, Turkey, and southeastern Europe, all of them pursuing their own roles by a game of swiftly and repeatedly changing sides. The bottom line is that, though China plays a very big role in the short run, it is not as big a role as China would wish and that some in the rest of the world-system fear. It is not possible for China to stop the disintegration of the capitalist system. It can only try to secure its place in a future world-system.

General Will by Rousseau

General Will:
that the laws decided upon by subjects will operate equally for all: ‘since each man gives himself to all, he gives himself to no one; and since there is no associate over whom he does not gain the same rights as others gain over him, each man recovers the equivalent of everything he loses, and in the bargain he acquires more power to preserve what he has’.

cited in Towards an Anthropology of Infinitude: Badiou and the Political Subject by Nina Power in The Praxis of Alain Badiou. Eds. Paul Ashton, A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens 2006

stavrakakis the political

The unmitigated real provokes anxiety, and this in turn gives rise to never-ending, defensive, imaginary constructs’.

Following from this, ‘all human productions [Society itself, culture, religion, science] …can be understood in the light of that structural failure of the symbolic in relationship to the real’. It is the moment of this failure, the moment of our encounter with the real, that is revealed as the moment of the political par excellence in our reading of Lacan.

It is the constitutivity of this moment in Lacanian psychoanalysis that proves our fantasmatic conception of the socio-political institution of society as a harmonious totality to be no more than a mirage.

It is this traumatic moment of the political qua encounter with the real that initiates again and again a process of symbolisation, and initiates the ever-present hegemonic play between different symbolisations of this real. 73

This play leads to the emergence of politics, to the political institution of a new social fantasy (or of many antagonistic fantasies engaged in a struggle for hegemony) in the place of the dislocated one, and so on and so forth.

It is the lack created by dislocation that causes the desire for a new discursive articulation. It is this lack created by a dislocation of the social which forms the kernel of the political as an encounter with the Lacanian real.

Every dislocatory event leads to the antagonistic articulation of different discourses that attempt to symbolise its traumatic nature, to suture the lack it creates. In that sense the political stands at the root of politics, dislocation at the root of the articulation of a new sociopolitical order, an encounter with the real moment of the political at the root of our symbolisation of political reality. 74

Panitch

Panitch and Gindin’s story of the rise of finance is straightforward and compelling. The US was a financial and manufacturing powerhouse by the end of WWI but lacked the vision and institutional capacity to play a leading role in the global economy. Through the New Deal, World War II, and the formation of Bretton Woods, the US developed this capacity and emerged, at war’s end, a superpower ready to re-launch global capitalism.

Coming out of World War II, “The explicit long-term goal of the American state was to create the material and legal conditions for the free movement of capital throughout the world.” Panitch and Gindin argue that a key element of this project for an American empire was the regulation and expansion of US finance. By the 1950s US finance was growing in step with (and often ahead of) US manufacturing, “deepen[ing] markets at home, expand[ing] abroad, and lay[ing] the basis for the explosion of global finance that occurred in the last decades of the twentieth century.”

But as finance got stronger, the cradle of Bretton Woods turned into a cage. The regulatory framework of the New Deal became a barrier finance sought to overcome. US banks followed US companies overseas, setting up shop outside the US to avoid restrictions. At the same time the contradictions of Keynesianism (strong capital plus strong labor) intensified. Profits for US corporations declined amidst new competition from Europe and Japan, and US workers grew unruly, demanding (and getting) increased wages and benefits. By the late 1960s the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates and capital controls was strained to the breaking-point.

As the crisis of stagflation and dollar devaluation increased during the 1970s the US state fumbled around for a solution. To overcome what Panitch and Gindin call a “crisis of business confidence” the US needed to show that it could resolve the contradictions of Keynesianism at home and Third World nationalism abroad. Ultimately it did, through Volcker’s ‘shock and austerity’ campaign.

The imposition of class discipline to break the great inflation and the wage militancy of US labor strongly confirmed the American state’s commitment to property, the value of the dollar, and the inviolability of its debt. The way in which this was achieved – high interest rates, a deep recession, and the liberalization of markets – also laid the basis, not only for the new age of finance, but also for the restructuring of US industry.

In addition to the Volcker shock, Congress phased out ‘Regulation Q’ ceilings beginning in 1980, continuing an ongoing policy of deregulation to keep pace with developments in the private financial sector. Cutting the New Deal apron strings enabled finance to develop its global capacity further, while Volcker’s monetary shock swiftly re-directed capital flows toward the US, re-establishing Wall Street as the center of the global financial world.

But Gindin and Panitch don’t define the 80s and 90s by the rise of finance as many scholars do. Instead, they see the rise of finance as one of a number of transformations occurring at the time, along with the “restructuring of manufacturing, the explosion of high-tech, the ubiquity of business services, and the profound weakening of working-class organization and labor identity.” Collectively, these transformations “re-constituted the material base of American empire,” enabling a deep restructuring of the US economy to restore competitiveness and profitability. In the process a truly global capitalism was made.

The machinations of the US state revived corporate profitability with a vengeance. But, it also created a volatile global economy dominated by the whims of finance. There were seventy-two financial crises in the 1990s alone. To keep the whole thing going the US state had to increase its capacity for regulation and rescue. The US Treasury’s ability to “control contagion and orchestrate supplemental interventions,” along with the Fed’s function as “lender of last resort,” were increasingly called upon as global financial crises (Mexico, East Asia, Argentina) got bigger and bigger.

The 2007 US financial crisis was the mother of them all, and pushed the US state’s role as container of crises further: it became “market maker of last resort.” Yet, the crisis wasn’t a sign of systemic breakdown. Instead, Panitch and Gindin argue that the crisis actually strengthened the US empire, that the ability of the US to rein in the crisis demonstrated its centrality to the functioning of global capitalism. Muted criticism of quantitative easing, and the continued Treasury bond feeding frenzy, showed that the US was the only game in town. The power of finance was also bolstered by the crisis: “[I]n spite of the widespread anger at the role of Wall Street in causing the crisis, US finance emerged not only more concentrated, but also still encompassing the general interest of capital amid a broad neoliberal consolidation of class power.”

So if we sum up the properties of global capitalism according to Panitch and Gindin, the system is locally volatile but globally stable. Why? The global ruling classes (North and South) benefit from and support the system, and the global working class is in a state of near total defeat, eliminating the greatest potential source of change. Until the working classes rebel and put new political systems in place the US Empire isn’t going anywhere. And as for finance:

Ž strategy protests

London Review of Books, 28 June 2013
Trouble in Paradise Slavoj Žižek on the protests in Turkey and Greece

It is also important to recognise that the protesters aren’t pursuing any identifiable ‘real’ goal. The protests are not ‘really’ against global capitalism, ‘really’ against religious fundamentalism, ‘really’ for civil freedoms and democracy, or ‘really’ about any one thing in particular. What the majority of those who have participated in the protests are aware of is a fluid feeling of unease and discontent that sustains and unites various specific demands. The struggle to understand the protests is not just an epistemological one, with journalists and theorists trying to explain their true content; it is also an ontological struggle over the thing itself, which is taking place within the protests themselves. Is this just a struggle against corrupt city administration? Is it a struggle against authoritarian Islamist rule? Is it a struggle against the privatisation of public space? The question is open, and how it is answered will depend on the result of an ongoing political process.

Today’s protests and revolts are sustained by the combination of overlapping demands, and this accounts for their strength: they fight for (‘normal’, parliamentary) democracy against authoritarian regimes; against racism and sexism, especially when directed at immigrants and refugees; against corruption in politics and business (industrial pollution of the environment etc); for the welfare state against neoliberalism; and for new forms of democracy that reach beyond multi-party rituals. They also question the global capitalist system as such and try to keep alive the idea of a society beyond capitalism.

Two traps are to be avoided here: false radicalism (‘what really matters is the abolition of liberal-parliamentary capitalism, all other fights are secondary’), but also false gradualism (‘right now we should fight against military dictatorship and for basic democracy, all dreams of socialism should be put aside for now’). Here there is no shame in recalling the Maoist distinction between principal and secondary antagonisms, between those that matter most in the end and those that dominate now. There are situations in which to insist on the principal antagonism means to miss the opportunity to strike a significant blow in the struggle.

Only a politics that fully takes into account the complexity of overdetermination deserves to be called a strategy. When we join a specific struggle, the key question is: how will our engagement in it or disengagement from it affect other struggles? The general rule is that when a revolt against an oppressive half-democratic regime begins, as with the Middle East in 2011, it is easy to mobilise large crowds with slogans – for democracy, against corruption etc.

But we are soon faced with more difficult choices. When the revolt succeeds in its initial goal, we come to realise that what is really bothering us (our lack of freedom, our humiliation, corruption, poor prospects) persists in a new guise, so that we are forced to recognise that there was a flaw in the goal itself. This may mean coming to see that democracy can itself be a form of un-freedom, or that we must demand more than merely political democracy: social and economic life must be democratised too.

In short, what we first took as a failure fully to apply a noble principle (democratic freedom) is in fact a failure inherent in the principle itself. This realisation – that failure may be inherent in the principle we’re fighting for – is a big step in a political education.

[…]

In a more directly political sense, the US has consistently pursued a strategy of damage control in its foreign policy by re-channelling popular uprisings into acceptable parliamentary-capitalist forms: in South Africa after apartheid, in the Philippines after the fall of Marcos, in Indonesia after Suharto etc.

This is where politics proper begins: the question is how to push further once the first, exciting wave of change is over, how to take the next step without succumbing to the ‘totalitarian’ temptation, how to move beyond Mandela without becoming Mugabe.