If that was truly a dominant tendency, then it seems strange that the movement would have pretty much run out of steam after securing what are now considered the standard regulations, rather than fundamentally challenging the mode of production itself. Of course, there was no small measure of repression, active and passive, involved in the undermining of that movement, but to blame its failure entirely on external factors is disingenuous. There was very likely some degree of reflective recognition of the kind you point out, but that’s not what I’m advocating. Rather, my point is that the goal must be to explicitly overturn capitalism, as this is the only way to prevent the appropriation of one’s struggle by one’s enemy. This sentiment was very marginal, and only became moreso during WWII and the red scares.

You must not hang out with a lot environmental activists!

If you’re not trying to convince me then don’t try to convince me. Because when you write all this it makes me want to respond. Which will likely continue to bother you. I’ve written a little on it here if you care to read it. http://itself.wordpress.com/2008/01/14/marxism-and-environmentalism/

I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on the first point, because in both his writing and private conversation, I’ve seen nothing deriding or condemning political activism. He is critical, and I think rightly, of the temptation to make the admittedly clear scientific evidence for the necessity of intervening on climate change (as well as feel-good Bono-politics of curing all the world’s diseases and feeding the hungry, etc) a means of removing the political emphasis from these problems – they become administrative difficulties that someone has overlooked, and we have to fight to get capital and state to fix their accidental oversights. It’s a matter of using such clear problems as a means of undermining the real political task of not only fixing them, but recognizing what caused them to happen and how we can fundamentally change that system itself. So the criticism isn’t directed at activists themselves, who are doing great work for the most part, but at the ideology operative not only amongst them, but amongst the population at large and in the media especially, that this is simply an unfortunate mistake and not a symptom of a fundamentally flawed political-economic system that deserves to be replaced.

Obviously that is easier said than done, and no one is suggesting we postpone all action until we’ve gotten rid of capitalism or something vulgar like that. We want activists to do what they do (for the most part), and I for one want to join them in whatever capacity I can, even if its just moral support for now. The question is one of how to prevent such activism from playing into the very system which created the problems it is attempting to solve, and how to get apolitical people active by undermining the ideological fantasy that ‘the activists, those subjects-supposed-to-act, and the government, will take care of climate change for us’.

Now if we can, say, get the major contributing factors of climate change cut by means of assistance from the state and capital, and do so expediently, that’s great and we should obviously do it. I’m all for it. And the same goes for Bono-style third-world relief (on a side note, I’m not sure why you’re equating k-punk with Bono, as even in your view he is opposed to these sorts of instant-cure solutions to big problems). The threat of this approach, however, is that it will then leave the very cause of the problems themselves untouched. Historically, whenever political movements have forced capital’s hand into cleaning up after itself, it has only reproduced those methods on ever more horrible scales, only doing so out of sight until it can systematically decimate the movement.

I’m thinking, for example, of the labor movement in the US from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. Workers were forced into unbelievably harsh and dangerous conditions, working for terrible durations at minuscule pay – and not just adult male workers, but women and children as well. The labor movement eventually grew very strong in response to these atrocities, and indeed progressively challenged capital to such an extent that many of these conditions were corrected and replaced with far more tolerable forms of exploitation. But then what happened? Capital fled the country, beginning a campaign of stripping rural populations in ‘undeveloped countries’ of any possibility of subsistence in the traditional manner (just as it had done in Europe centuries prior), leaving them with no other option than consenting to reinstituted forms of labor exploitation more horrible than the relatively coddled workers in the west could now imagine. It wouldn’t make the same mistake of letting movements grow here, fleeing at the slightest hint of organization, thereby leaving the new workers in even more dire straights than the sweatshop. And back in the west (especially the US), the labor movement was systematically destroyed in only about two generations, while capital found ways to get around the now mandatory minimum working conditions by ever increasing the extraction of relative surplus value, chaining workers to ever increasing and ever more necessary amounts of debt, and undermining job security, thereby removing any possibility of leverage in the workplace.

Sorry to get all preachy, but I’ve been studying this for a long time and it’s important to me. I think it serves as a telling example of what can happen when activism rests on the ‘solving of clear problems’ without simultaneously trying to undermine the conditions which created them. I’m not saying all activists fall prey to this kind of thinking, but it seems to these eyes at least that the general logic of activism has taken this form. I don’t hear very many environmental activists, for example, claiming that capital is intrinsically a threat to our ecological existence, even if we ‘fix’ climate change – and rightfully so, given the extent to which such a claim would marginalize them. The goal is to undermine both the dominant logic at work and the discursive-libidinal conditions which necessitate it, not to deride the good work of activists themselves. I’ve never seen k-punk do the latter, unless you are referring to the potent critique of ‘activism’ content to protest a problem and wait for the state to respond.

If you don’t think capital, upon capitulating to the environmental movement and doing something about climate change (or otherwise, doing something about conditions in Africa, or poverty worldwide), will circumvent the very intent of these reforms by finding ever newer and more insidious means of externalizing costs onto people and the environment, and moreover, will undermine the movement which forced its hand in the first place, then I’m worried. I think k-punk’s work is tremendously valuable for worrying about this longer-term question. The question is how to immunize such activism against this danger from the start (and also, how to repoliticize populations already stripped of the will to act), not how to undermine them from the start because they aren’t ‘dark’ enough.

Okay, but if you don’t like his work for whatever reason, fine, I’m not going to try to convince you. I’ve said my piece. I’m not really sure how you’ve gotten the image of it you do have, but you’re free to have it nonetheless.

‘He fills his head with culture
He feels just like an actor’

‘It’s all about the Benjamins’

I don’t see K-Punk as a political ally and that is because I don’t see him as a practical or theoretical ally. Like I’ve said before, I tend not to say this stuff because in the circles I run in the man is somewhat sacrosanct. I’m reticent to go into it now, as I’m not sure it is worth arguing against a position unless it is actually dangerous. In some ways I see his arguments undercutting support for important ACTUAL activism like Climate Camp amongst lefty intellectuals, but I doubt they’d listen to me anyway and so I’m not sure it is worth going on about. I’ll wager that I am correct in calling it an impotent smugness that cascades his dark Bonoism.

I was careful in my original comment not to say that the aesthetic and political are unrelated. Still, and this is a problem in Adorno too with his writings on jazz, there is a real tendency to conflate aesthetic decisions with political ones in an over determined manner. There is a certain sense that, “I have the right politics AND I listen to the right music, whereas these fucks listen to that poser shit.” That moves outside of the realm of practice and theory and becomes nothing interesting at all. To me.

Of course, I have an aesthetico-political reaction going on here. I recognize that. Still, I don’t feel like there is anything to argue with here because someone like myself, someone who thinks and has seen the scientific evidence for the overwhelming need to address environmental issues in tandem if not before social-justice issues, has already been categorized and placed in the etymology book of incorrect “vitalist common sense”. There is a moralism inherent to all of this, albeit a dark moralism, that means there is no room for argument. So, for me anyway, I see no space available to discussing this in a comradely, sympathetic manner. Tactically that would mean that I would have to change my discourse to match the dysphoric discourse. It would mean, essentially, giving up from the start.

If the intention is to create a music-loving vanguard on the campus, good luck with that – squeezed as they are between signing ‘attendance agreements’ to ensure uni funding is maintained, and working 30 hours (non-unionised of course) on top of that to pay the rent. Maybe they can squeeze in ten minutes to download the latest Shakira hit (or indeed satisfy those naively physical ‘libidinal impulses’). And that’s just the middle-class ones.

My mother is deeply ‘dysmorphic’ (try watching TV with anyone over 55 and watch their bewilderment), and has pretty much the same diagnosis of social malaise as the M.D. writers (without requiring reference to French philosphers). However, if I were to bring up George Romero or Joy Division (or even Zizek – his self-publicity has gone a loooong way) she’d benignly wonder why I’m not applying my political energies to something a little more substantial – in a time of imperialist invasions, wages and benefit cuts and nazis on prime time TV.