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Whoa…. I… Excuse me… I thought that no one was… I’m sorry…. I’ll come back later… 

Fascinating, strange photo-collection from Françoise Huguier, who in 2002 subleased and moved into a room in one of the still extant communal apartment buildings in Russia. Apparently, 11 million Russians still live in the kommounalki, as they’re called. The story’s a little bit hard to follow, at least for me, but you should go take a look at the Rue89 piece about it. 

I’d love to see the book, but won’t likely, because it costs €46, which comes out to something like $460 or so according to current exchange rates.* But what is interesting about the images on display at Rue89 is the fact that they seem to enact what I imagine to be a relatively common fantasy of one upside of life in this sort of situation would be like, a fantasy that takes up probably the oldest and deepest utopian projections going. I mean, of course, the combination of communal economic life with sexual commonality. I have no doubt at all that these places weren’t at all like that, and if they are now I’m sure it ain’t a pretty scene, but it is something that Huguier makes it seem so, for her and our benefit now. 

How long do you imagine it will be before we see the first ad spread derived from Huguier’s pictures? American Apparel? Beyond what I’ve said above, what are we to make of the fact that they are so deeply reminiscent of one of the dominant ad aesthetics of our time? It may well be that the photographs are simply derivative of the ads themselves, but if something like the reverse is or is also the case, then, well, things do get a bit more interesting… 

* Unrelatedly, I visited Buenos Aires not long after the devaluation, and noticed in the big bookstores that were clearly set up to cater to a very cosmopolitan population, with big sections bracketed off for libros en Inglés, francés, alemán, that clearly a resupply hadn’t happened in quite awhile and only the unsalable dregs were left. This seemed incredibly sad to me, the thought that a place like Argentina suddenly simply couldn’t afford to import books. I don’t rely all that much on imports, but I used to buy them sometimes, but not so much anymore… 

From the NYTimes today:

Although Enrique Del Risco knows what has happened on the island where he was born 40 years ago, he still gets odd looks from college students when he tries to explain Cuba’s reality. He left Cuba in 1996 and settled in New York two years later, teaching Spanish at New York University.

“I grew up believing in the system,” he said. “Quite a believer. My parents, too.”

He, too, thought there would be change during the late 1980s. Instead, he found himself slowly suffocating, with his writings earning him reprimands.

“I was more scared of surrendering than being put in jail,” he said. “I was scared that I would stop being myself. I was someone who thinks independently and expresses that.” Yet to try and tell that to some of his students, he said, was like talking about extraterrestrial life. He knows to expect a dual riposte — yes, but what about universal health care and education?

“At the root of that is a great belittling of Cubans,” he said. “It’s like we are some sort of little animals who only need a veterinarian and someone to teach us tricks and we’ll be fine.”

Somewhat per the Badiou article I linked to the other day, it is amazing to note, when you at time step back a bit from the shuffle, how insistently if quietly we’re still negotiating this now only spectral question…

Is there a name for the rhetorical form that supplies answer upon answer to questions that can’t be (permitted to be) asked?

Badiou in the new issue of the New Left Review:

At this point, during an interval dominated by the enemy, when new experiments are tightly circumscribed, it is not possible to say with certainty what the character of the third sequence will be. But the general direction seems discernible: it will involve a new relation between the political movement and the level of the ideological—one that was prefigured in the expression ‘cultural revolution’ or in the May 68 notion of a ‘revolution of the mind’. We will still retain the theoretical and historical lessons that issued from the first sequence, and the centrality of victory that issued from the second. But the solution will be neither the formless, or multi-form, popular movement inspired by the intelligence of the multitude—as Negri and the alter-globalists believe—nor the renewed and democratized mass communist party, as some of the Trotskyists and Maoists hope. The (19th-century) movement and the (20th-century) party were specific modes of the communist hypothesis; it is no longer possible to return to them. Instead, after the negative experiences of the ‘socialist’ states and the ambiguous lessons of the Cultural Revolution and May 68, our task is to bring the communist hypothesis into existence in another mode, to help it emerge within new forms of political experience. This is why our work is so complicated, so experimental. We must focus on its conditions of existence, rather than just improving its methods. We need to re-install the communist hypothesis—the proposition that the subordination of labour to the dominant class is not inevitable—within the ideological sphere.

We do - I do - suffer from a certain amount of confusion when it comes to the question of the right way to work as a left intellectual. By “right way to work,” I don’t so much mean the specific frame of engagement, whether to work in the academy or in the papers or on the streets or make art etc. Rather, I am confused about the bearing of the work that I should be doing within the practical framework that I have chosen (or which has chosen me). I mean, would it be best to plan, to advertise, or to design? Are the most useful answers at this point practical or conceptual or ethical? Should one be a hauntologist, a pragmatic engineer, or a philosopher of the question itself?

Badiou, as we might expect, decides in this piece. And while there is something unsettling about the fact that the sort of work that he decides in favor of is exactly the sort of work for which intellectuals are best suited by aptitude, inclination, and situation, I find this piece very encouraging (en-couraging?)

(xposted to Long Sunday)

The long-standing allergy to the “s” word may in fact be on its way out. Amazing poll, this… The conventional wisdom has for so long been 1) if you’d like to propose a policy or program that is essentially socialist in nature, you need to find a benign term to use for it. “Universal” is about as close as you’re allowed to come, but even that sounds a bit too pinky and 2) opponents of socialist reform need take one only course of action to stop it in its tracks - that is, label the socialist reform “socialist,” and your work is done….

So this poll, yes, is amazing to see… Hate to think this justifies the reflexive leninism (worse before better etc) that has defined the period of my political consciousness…

(via Yglesias)

Strange and a bit refreshing to see this from Brad Delong….

But, over the past generation, confidence in the “Kuznets curve” has faded. Social-democratic governments have been on the defensive against those who claim that redistributing wealth exacts too high a cost on economic growth, and unable to convince voters to fund yet another massive expansion of higher education.

On the private supply side, higher returns have not called forth more investment in people. America’s college-to-high-school wage premium may now be 100%, yet this generation of white, native-born American males may well wind up getting no more education than their immediate predecessors. And increasing rewards for those at the increasingly sharp peak of the income distribution have not called forth enough enterprising market competition to erode that peak.

The consequence has been a loss of morale among those of us who trusted market forces and social-democratic governments to prove Marx wrong about income distribution in the long run – and a search for new and different tools of economic management.

Never thought I’d see the day….

The glorious thing about the end of history and the triumph of capitalism is the way that it relieves us of the obligation to know our history. There’s something exhilarating about students completely ignorant about their country twenty-years since - something that proves some point about something. And really, in the free market of ideas that is the high school classroom, communism exposes itself as really frigging boring compared to the vivid dramatics of liberalism and open markets, especially when they offer the possibility (unique to capitalism!) to spend twenty hours a weekend im-ing with friends in Thailand and suburban Chicago.

Thankfully, also, all of this is entirely representative of the mindset of Germany as a whole.

Nothing new, I suppose.

My opinion is that the left is not able to offer a true alternative
to global capitalism. Yes, it is true that ‘capitalism will not be
around for ever’ (it is the advocates of the new politics of resistance
who think that capitalism and the democratic state are here to stay);
it will not be able to cope with the antagonisms it produces. But there
is a gap between this negative insight and a basic positive vision. I
do not think that today’s candidates – the anti-globalisation movement
etc – do the job.

So what are we to do? Everything possible (and
impossible), just with a proper dose of modesty, avoiding moralising
self-satisfaction. I am aware that when the left builds a protest
movement, one should not measure its success by the degree to which its
specific demands are met: more important than achieving the immediate
target is the raising of critical awareness and finding new ways to
organise. However, I don’t think this holds for protests against the
war in Iraq, which fitted all too smoothly the space allotted to
‘democratic protests’ by the hegemonic state and ideological order.
Which is why they did not, even minimally, scare those in power.
Afterwards, both government and protesters felt smug, as if each side
had succeeded in making its point.

I agree, I guess. But maybe we need to enter into a pact to sit quietly and not speak or write until we’ve come up with even the tiniest “basic positive vision.” Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, at least at the moment, etc etc.

(x-posted to Long Sunday)

Really like this piece that everyone is linking to from Zizek in the LRB, except I don’t really understand the last two paragraphs. Specifically, the relationship between the last two paragraphs:

It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chávez has embarked since 2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left: far from resisting state power, he grabbed it (first by an attempted coup, then democratically), ruthlessly using the Venezuelan state apparatuses to promote his goals. Furthermore, he is militarising the barrios, and organising the training of armed units there. And, the ultimate scare: now that he is feeling the economic effects of capital’s ‘resistance’ to his rule (temporary shortages of some goods in the state-subsidised supermarkets), he has announced plans to consolidate the 24 parties that support him into a single party. Even some of his allies are sceptical about this move: will it come at the expense of the popular movements that have given the Venezuelan revolution its élan? However, this choice, though risky, should be fully endorsed: the task is to make the new party function not as a typical state socialist (or Peronist) party, but as a vehicle for the mobilisation of new forms of politics (like the grass roots slum committees). What should we say to someone like Chávez? ‘No, do not grab state power, just withdraw, leave the state and the current situation in place’? Chávez is often dismissed as a clown – but wouldn’t such a withdrawal just reduce him to a version of Subcomandante Marcos, whom many Mexican leftists now refer to as ‘Subcomediante Marcos’? Today, it is the great capitalists – Bill Gates, corporate polluters, fox hunters – who ‘resist’ the state.

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfil. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’ The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.

That last line doesn’t seem to me to be in sync with the previous paragraph and its praise for Chavez’s seizing and refitting of state power. Chavez doesn’t seem to me to be issuing “demands,” precise, finite, vague, or infinite. There is, I think, a huge gap between the two paragraphs, and the gap re instantiates the very problem of left posture (or, the problem of the postural left) that Zizek so artfully describes at the opening of the piece. The gap is the gap between the “he” of the first paragraph above and the “we” of the second. It is clear that Zizek wants us to think and act more pragmatically and less through the lens of utopia. But the big question - the only question - persists across this inconclusive finale: how are we to do that?

From the boilerplate describing the newest entry in the SimCity series of games, SimCity Societies…

Shape your city through its values and priorities.

More than just a city-building simulator, SimCity Societies puts you in the new role of social engineer. Mix and match six “social energies”—productivity, prosperity, creativity, spirituality, authority, and knowledge—to determine the core attributes that will be reflected in the infrastructure of your city as well as in its people. After you plant these seeds you’ll witness the evolution of your city as everything from its physical appearance to the sounds heard on its streets adapt to reflect these values

Well, at least we know what “social energies” are on the table and which are off. But never fear, commies, while “Vertovian Wonderland” doesn’t seem to be an option in version 1.0, you do still have the ability to construct what is repeatedly called an “Orwellian City.”

Another world is possible, I guess. Precociously ostalgic eleven-year olds, you have nothing to lose but your windfarms!

All this reminds me of something that I might well have posted before, but I can’t help rerunning. It’s a paragraph from Steven Berlin Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You.

Several years ago I found myself on a family vacation with my seven-year-old nephew, and on one rainy day I decided to introduce him to the wonders of SimCity 2000, the legenday city simulator that allows you to play Robert Moses to a growing virtual metropolis. For most of our session, I was controlling the game, pointing out landmarks as I scrolled around my little town. I suspect I was a somewhat condescending guide - treating the virtual world as more of a model train layout than a complex system. But he was picking up the game’s inner logic nonetheless. After about an hour of tinkering, I was concentrating on trying to revive one particularly run-down manufacturing district. As I contemplated my options, my nephew piped up: “I think we need to lower our industrial tax rates.” He said it as naturally, and as confidently, as he might have said, “I think we need to shoot the bad guy.”

I wish I could believe that Johnson knew how hilarious the last two lines are, but I’m afraid not. They are as inadvertantly ironic as the title of the book in which we find them.

Nice article on Yugoslav socialist computer art at metamute.

(Xposted to long sunday…)

I’ve been reading The Communist Manifesto, as well as the truly excellent (and book-length, really) introduction in the new Penguin edition by Gareth Stedman Jones. A few passages toward the end have provoked my interest tonight.

First from the section on Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism:

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

And another, related passage from the section on Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism:

The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?

The second one is a bit tougher than the first, but I must admit that I feel some half-guilty self-recognition here. I am not sure that I do not, in my heart of hearts, dream of a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.

The thing is, I also do not think I am alone on this point, even in contemporary leftist circles. Is it possible to believe in a proletariat anymore? In the developed world? If you were to say that it exists in the US, you would have to stretch the definition to enormous, distorted dimensions. In short, while Marx and Engels were in 1848 trying to argue the nascent-proletariat into existence in the first place, we who remain invested in Marx wonder if the revolutionary class has not already come and gone, at least here, where we live and think and write.

(This is of course not at all to deny the very, very tangible examples of poverty and degradation and alienation both economic and psychological that exist all around us in the US and other developed nations. It is, rather, to doubt the existence of the very specific configuration that Marx and others labeled the proletariat - and to doubt whether, if change were to come, change would come from even the remnants or the afterlife of this class…)

Isn’t the Bourgeois Socialism that Marx describes something all too familiar to us American leftists? Isn’t it something close to the US fantasy of welfare-state Europe: government by an enlightened, socialized bourgeoisie that, yes, has eliminated (upward!) the proletariat altogether. Of course it is a dream, a falsehood - it is the dream that we Americans often call “Sweden.” And it is a dream that surely has something very much to do with race, the old secrets-in-plain-sight of the American experiment.

There are no easy answers, it seems to me, to this problem. One might be tempted to claim that my problem is simply one of misunderstanding (or choosing not to acknowledge) the global division of labor. One might respond that the proletariat exists, it simply lives elsewhere, and due to the construction of global society, the US must be completely written off as a locale for revolution or reform.

I do not accept this answer. I will perhaps go into the question more deeply, but I cannot help but believe that a socialized United States would be - if done properly* - a gift to the world. There is great suffering here in the US - definitely not on the scale of so many other places - and here is exactly where I tilt toward the second passage from Marx above - there is suffering spread across the economic strata of society.

Dangerous thoughts, I know. They likely will provoke angry responses from some - which I welcome. Just do ask yourselves first whether the policies that you support are truly aimed exclusively or even primarily at the lowest quadrants of society. There are quite a few things that we all like to discuss that are perhaps selected - unconsciously or not - because of their dual applicability to the poor and the relatively well-off at once. I can think, for instance, of reforms that would do more immediate good for the working classes than socialized medicine, which we never stop discussing.

In short, I am left with the same question that I am almost always left with - and the primary question that mobilizes my work on the blogs. I cannot tell whether my self-recognition as what Marx calls bourgeois socialist is:

1) simply an effect of my own class-standing, one that (completely naturally) naturalizes my own classed perspective at universal, as the “truth.”

or

2) a moment of recognition that work needs to be done to reconfigure the terms of Marx’s (of the socialist) argument to present day conditions and in terms more distinct and workable than, say, Hardt and Negri’s turn to the amorphous (and amorphously useless) “Multitude.”

In concluding with this question, you will see that I remain, perhaps, methodologically dogmatic if not programmatically or ideologically so. But - whether or not my questions are the right ones - we do not listen to Marx if we fail to adapt his claims to the current socio-economic conditions, which are distinctly different from those of 1848. I am beginning to feel that resting on the wrong side of some of these questions is stunting out growth as a movement. I am beginning to believe, in other words, that failing to define exactly what it is that we mean, today, by the words socialism and communism, will lock us into a permanent cage of obsolescence, nostalgic hubris, and doctrinal impossibility.

* Of course there is always the possibility of what has been labeled (by Hobson I believe and others) “welfare imperialism.” Which may in fact be one way to label exactly the thing that the US glides toward now. And the extreme form of “welfare imperialism” we usually know as “national socialism.”

Yesterday, the latest in the long-running New York Times series “Why Each and Every Attempt at Even the Mildest of Socialist Programs in the Developing World is Grounded in Very Serious Cheating!”

Usually, it is Venezuela’s oil wealth that makes for the totally unfair and unsustainable advantage co-opted by shady leftists. Now it’s the Indian state of Kerala - which apparently receives some cash from workers who have gone abroad. (The same disqualification has long applied to Cuba, of course).

TRIVANDRUM, India — This verdant swath of southern Indian coastline is a famously good place to be poor. People in the state of Kerala live nearly as long as Americans do, on a sliver of the income. They read at nearly the same rates.

With leftist governments here in the state capital spending heavily on health and schools, a generation of scholars has celebrated the “Kerala model” as a humane alternative to market-driven development, a vision of social equality in an unequal capitalist world. But the Kerala model is under attack, one outbound worker at a time.

Plagued by chronic unemployment, more Keralites than ever work abroad, often at sun-scorched jobs in the Persian Gulf that pay about $1 an hour and keep them from their families for years. The cash flowing home now helps support nearly one Kerala resident in three. That has some local scholars rewriting the Kerala story: far from escaping capitalism, they say, this celebrated corner of the developing world is painfully dependent on it.

“Remittances from global capitalism are carrying the whole Kerala economy,” said S. Irudaya Rajan, a demographer at the Center for Development Studies, a local research group. “There would have been starvation deaths in Kerala if there had been no migration. The Kerala model is good to read about but not practically applicable to any part of the world, including Kerala.”

I think this is fair on the part of the paper. Until a socialist utopia is brought into existence in a state that possesses no natural resources, no industry, no currency reserves, no pre-existing infrastructure, the NYT is right, socialism will remain a debased program that can only win by cheating the system. Everyone knows that things like oil and cash are, by divine right, always already property of international capitalism - any attempt to harness their value for the advancement of equality is not only dishonest, it is abominably perverse.

And the fact that we don’t see articles about, say, the way that the Mexican capitalist economy would likely be unsustainable without the currency Western Unioned home by the folks (no longer) building out the sprawl and cleaning floors or cutting lawns at the McMansions is quite understandable. For capitalism generates the international economic disparities that force these workers to cross the border in the first place - therefore, capitalist economies are playing fair when they subsist on the fruits of the disparity.

Interesting….

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I think this is actually a good sign. Someone feels that the “threat” of universal health care is worth spending money to combat…

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Excellent piece today on opendemocracy by Richard Barbrook which recounts the strange history of the internet as a US project that arose in reaction to Soviet advances toward cybernetic communism. The most interesting thing - something I’d definitely like to hear even more about - is the way that what would become the internet took its shape in a certain sense under the influence / the pressure of a non-capitalist sense of what it should or might be (The story is rather telegraphic in the piece - I’ve ordered Barbrook’s book tonight to see if it gets more thoroughly fleshed out there…) and then had to be, only afterwards, properly commoditized. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the difficulty it has had in properly commoditizing itself derives from an initial formal insistence on openness, gift-structure, and non-proprietariness.

More to come, from me, I hope, on parallel topics. I’m thinking about writing a longer piece on, what to call it, the persistent intimations of socialist culture in our benighted world.

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