The state does provide some safeguard against the Randian dystopia of totally unfettered dollar power dreamed of by capitalist libertarians. But the problems facing the 99% are fundamental ones that can’t be solved by regulatory band-aids. It isn’t a question of the state doling out a little less freedom to the few in order to protect the rights of the many. The state’s primary crime is not a sin of omission but of commission: legitimating, and enforcing, the tyranny of the 1%.
Essays
On the surface, it has never shown so attractive a face to the world. In the evening, walking back towards City Road, the glass and steel of the newly-finished law building frame the sloping green of Victoria Park, and beyond that, the lights of the city. The sight has the dimensions and composition of a picture-postcard: serene, iconic, a little too neat. Continue on, and you will find that the bridge to cross City Road, which is also brand-new. Which seems a little strange … wasn’t there a perfectly functional old bridge there a couple of years ago?
My three-part series of posts on critique, cynicism and realism is up on Overland – excerpt:
So what are we left with? Critique is a way of retreating and retrenching, to maintain a degree of distance both from the world we inhabit and the life we lead. We are, each of us, so compromised by our involvement in a deeply cynical society, that critique becomes more a matter of psychic self-defence than an instrument of political change. One can pick over the old bones of ideology, pull apart this or that piece of discourse, and take a dismal pleasure in our own cleverness and freedom from illusion; but it is an empty cleverness and a bitter freedom without agency.
And links:
Part one: ‘Enlightened false consciousnsess’
Part two: ‘Keeping ‘em honest’
Part three: The Speculative Turn
At the beginning, a counter-cultural phenomenon, alien and insidious, begins to spread from the East (like a weed, as Morton puts it), considered thoroughly disreputable by respectable citizens: ‘a most mischievous superstition … again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.’ That was Tacitus, talking about the early Christians, but it could just as easily be a conservative American in the 1950s looking askance at the Zen-inspired notions of Ginsberg and Kerouac taking root in cosmopolitan San Francisco.
…As the demands of capital and the relentless ideology of corporate media hem in the scope of democratically elected politicians to differ substantially from each other, personality and identity become the surrogates for real political debate. Celebrating Australia’s first woman prime minister is fine, but let’s not delude ourselves about how much difference it makes. For myself, growing up in the UK under a Thatcher government erased any illusions I may have had – as the anonymous writers of the The Coming Insurrection put it, ‘patriarchy survives by attributing to women all the worst attributes of men’. In the 2008 Democratic primaries in the US, Clinton’s tough talk of ‘obliterating’ Iran was an attempt to deflect sexist stereotypes and prove that she had – as her loyal follower James Carville put it – the ‘testicular fortitude’ to be an effective commander-in-chief.
In the wake of Synthetic Genomics’ dramatic achievement, ‘playing God’ was the predictable cry in the media. The verb is misleading. It implies that whereas God works, Venter and his colleagues are merely playing; a blasphemous mockery, the trifling mimicry of a monkey, carrying out the form of creation while missing its content of the original – the ineffable master plan, the solemn and mysterious ways in which He moves.
In fact, the comparison between this human achievement and the processes that led to the existence of the human species would be better understood in the reverse. Not just human evolution, but the series of events that led to the conditions in which the emergence of life was possible – the distance of the Earth from the sun, the gravitational pull of the moon steadying our orbit – are contingent on an interplay of factors of immense complexity. This cosmic dynamic, if we are to anthropomorphise it, would be more aptly described as whimsy than as work; or, the better to appreciate its radical difference from human activity, as the kind of explosive creativity we witness in storms and volcanoes. What we have done in synthesising life is to copy the effect of that play by means of diligent work.
The consumer-choice model of democracy tends to encourage the same behaviour from political parties as from corporations: marketing, branding, advertising and other forms of mendacity, which in turn generate cynicism and a distaste for the political system – a deserved distaste. Honesty and principle are punished; the scum rise to the top. The expenses scandal was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Ordinary people don’t like politicians, don’t trust them, don’t respect them. Nor should they.
Some of us, disillusioned by other charismatic and supposedly transformational leaders (Tony Blair, in my case) or philosophically predisposed to see the changing of the guard at the top of the capitalo-parliamentarian state apparatus as a charade, did not expect much. But to the starving, a crust is a feast, and after eight years of intransigent climate denial, war crimes, atrocities, profiteering and the privatisation of war, Obama’s emollient rhetoric was music to the ears of many on the Left. Who can blame them? Once installed in office, however, as Guardian columnist Gary Younge noted at the time, ‘the issue is no longer what he is and means, but what he does’. Sarah Palin, of all people, posed the unavoidable question: ‘How’s that hopey, changey stuff working out for ya?’
We all remember the end of last year for the dismal outcome, at Copenhagen, for concerted international action to deal with the world’s problems. Just a few weeks before, however, another meeting took place. In November last year, the International Encounter of Left Parties met in Caracas. At that meeting, Hugo Chávez, in typically theatrical style, declared that it was time ‘to convene the Fifth International, and I dare to make the call, which I think is a necessity’.
What would a Fifth International look like? More of the same Trotskyist rhetoric, or something new and radical that, while rejecting the neoliberal consensus, does not tie itself up in dogma, recognising that all theory is contingent – that nineteenth-century critiques of capital, however brilliant for their time, are not the be-all and end-all?
Once people have had a taste of a proper public healthcare system, they won’t give it up. It’s a one-way street. In the UK, which is in general more closely aligned to the politics of the US (a neoliberal consensus on the centre right) than the mainstream of Europe, the NHS is the one public service on which the political classes dare not ravage with market fundamentalism.
