Dialectical Confusions

Saying "yes" to Hiroshima

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:53:00 +0000

The contemporary West is built, not on Auschwitz and Treblinka to which we have said 'No’, but on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to which we have said 'Yes.’

- Desmond Fennell, The Postwestern Condition: Between Chaos and Civilisation

What will you do?

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 22:16:00 +0000

You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of art or life as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile and cunning.

- from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Responsibility

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 01:57:00 +0000

I came across this article by Edward Said in Al-Ahram Weekly, written shortly after the September 11th attacks. At the end of the article, most of which is fairly unsurprising stuff, after referring to the beginnings of the development of a constituency of Americans willing to take a more reflective and critical look at US policies in the Middle East, Said says this:

Perhaps this constituency may grow in the United States, but speaking as a Palestinian, I must also hope that a similar constituency should be emerging in the Arab and Muslim world. We must start thinking about ourselves as responsible for the poverty, ignorance, illiteracy, and repression that have come to dominate our societies, evils that we have allowed to grow despite our complaints about Zionism and imperialism. How many of us, for example, have openly and honestly stood up for secular politics and have condemned the use of religion in the Islamic world as roundly and as earnestly as we have denounced the manipulation of Judaism and Christianity in Israel and the West? How many of us have denounced all suicidal missions as immoral and wrong, even though we have suffered the ravages of colonial settlers and inhuman collective punishment? We can no longer hide behind the injustices done to us, anymore than we can passively bewail the American support for our unpopular leaders. A new secular Arab politics must now make itself known, without for a moment condoning or supporting the militancy (it is madness) of people willing to kill indiscriminately. There can be no more ambiguity on that score.
I have been arguing for years that our main weapons as Arabs today are not military but moral, and that one reason why, unlike the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the Palestinian struggle for self- determination against Israeli oppression has not caught the world's imagination is that we cannot seem to be clear about our goals and our methods, and we have not stated unambiguously enough that our purpose is coexistence and inclusion, not exclusivism and a return to some idyllic and mythical past. The time has come for us to be forthright and to start immediately to examine, re-examine and reflect on our own policies as so many Americans and Europeans are now doing. We should expect no less of ourselves than we should of others. Would that all people took the time to try to see where our leaders seem to be taking us, and for what reason. Scepticism and re- evaluation are necessities, not luxuries.

Noble sentiments, and a corrective, perhaps, to any perception that Said was one-dimensional in his political outlook when it came to the Middle East.

"Tax and spend"

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 22:51:00 +0000

I know political slogans and attack-phrases are supposed to be meaningless and idiotic, but I've never really understood why "tax and spend" is supposed to carry such pejorative charge. Clearly taxing and spending is the very essence of government, and in so far as politics is a contest for control of the state all politicians, regardless of the level and types of taxing and spending they favour, are going to be intimately involved in the whole activity of forcibly extracting financial resources from people and allocating them to some end or another.

As I say, I'm aware it's naive of me to be puzzled when a widely-used slogan turns out to be intellectually incoherent, but this one has always seemed especially meaningless (and possibly ineffective) when compared even with other examples, such as "soft on crime", that could plausibly be thrown at left-liberal types like myself.

Growing up out of religion

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 19:23:00 +0000

Norm recently quoted Christopher Hitchens' claim that "Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud...looked upon religion as virtually ineradicable..." and rejected it with respect to Marx, on the grounds that he did in fact envisage the "abolition" of religion. The following, from the same lecture quoted in the previous post, would seem to indicate Hitchens was wrong about Freud too:

If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilised individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.

Mind you I haven't finished reading the lecture yet so I'll let you know if he changes his mind before the end.

UPDATE: Nope, he stuck to his guns and Hitchens was doubly wrong.

Of truth and tolerance

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 22:34:00 +0000

It is inadmissible to declare that science is one field of human intellectual activity, and that religion and philosophy are others, at least as valuable, and that science has no business to interfere with the other two, that they all have an equal claim to truth, and that everyone is free to choose whence he shall draw his convictions and in what he shall place his belief. Such an attitude is considered particularly respectable, tolerant, broad-minded and free from narrow prejudices. Unfortunately it is not tenable; it shares all the pernicious qualities of an entirely unscientific Weltanschauung and in practice comes to much the same thing. The bare fact is that truth cannot be tolerant and cannot admit compromise or limitations, that scientific research looks on the whole field of human activity as its own, and must adopt an uncompromisingly critical attitude towards any other power that seeks to usurp any part of its province.

- from Freud's "Philosophy of Life" lecture.

The fruits of self-restraint

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 18:58:00 +0000

I think this, from Henry Farrell, succintly expresses a key point in favour of international law:

Actors that are completely unconstrained are ipso facto not able to give credible commitments to others. This actually limits their effective ability to get things done in a world where there are other important players....This doesn’t mean that states such as the US are always going to obey international law, but it does mean that their compliance or non-compliance doesn’t flow in any simple or obvious way from their narrow self-interest.

On the other hand, while I tend to think the EU has played (and continues to play) a huge part in making war between its member-states "inconceivable" - this by normalising an enforced regime of law among nation-states - an international law-skeptic would nevertheless be justified in countering that war between, say, the US and Canada (or even Mexico) appears not much more conceivable than one between Germany and France.

Things banned by authoritarian regimes down the years - Greek edition

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 00:13:00 +0000

Although one shouldn't really be surprised at the things banned by authoritarian regimes down the years, and certainly not at the banning of works of literature, it is nevertheless somewhat, well, surprising to discover that the Greek military junta banned...Sophocles.

Also banned, and to varying degrees of surprise: Euripides, Aristophanes, short skirts, long hair, Russian, Bulgarian and sociology.

This is learned from Tony Judt's Postwar, which doesn't mention Anthony Summers' claim that the Greek generals won support from the US admninistration by funding the Nixon-Agnew re-election campaign to the tune of something like a million 1972 dollars (one possible motiavation behind the Watergate break-in). You can read a succinct review of Summers' The Arrogance of Power; The Secret World of Richard Nixon by Christopher Hitchens here.

Ne me quitte pas

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 22:36:00 +0000

In Stahlgewittern

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 21:12:00 +0000

...I felt a piercing jolt in the chest - as though I had been hit like a gamebird. With a sharp cry that seemed to cost me all the air I had, I spun on my axis and crashed to the ground.

It had got me at last. At the same time as feeling I had been hit, I felt the bullet taking away my life. I had felt Death's hand once before, on the road at Mory - but this time his grip was firmer and more determined. As I came down heavily on the bottom of the trench, I was convinced it was all over. Strangely that moment is one of the very few in my life of which I am able to say they were utterly happy. I understood, as in a flash of lightening, the true inner purpose and form of my life. I felt surprise and disbelief that it was to end there and then, but this surprise had something untroubled and almost merry about it. Then I heard the firing grow less, as if I were a stone sinking under the surface of some turbulent water. Where I was going, there was neither war nor enmity.

- from Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel (trans. Michael Hoffman), pp. 281 - 282.

Working against the clampdown

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 21:14:00 +0000

A propos of which (and via) is another piece in the theme of work: Bob Black's Abolition of Work (1985).

This is a solid point:

Let's pretend for a moment that work doesn't turn people into stultified submissives. Let's pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And let's pretend that work isn't as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would still make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time.... Because of work, no matter what we do we keep looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work.

I also like this passing comment:

Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.

This one, referring to the serious question of work-related death but, for me, cringe-makingly insensitive, I like less:

People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of any egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors.*

But the next quote touches on a thought I've had before - to what extent is there a systemic need or tendency to create purposeless work - work that only functions as a Sisyphean burden to keep us busy and cut subversion of power hierarchies off at the pass? Black:

Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the "tertiary sector," the service sector, is growing while the "secondary sector" (industry) stagnates and the "primary sector" (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order.

And finally, one has to admire this (half-serious?) proposition:

Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organized in "Little Hordes" to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding.

*Likewise a further reference by Black to schools as "concentration camps" is, at the risk of bourgois conformism, less than satisfactory...

Feed the beast

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 16:08:00 +0000

So I've done one of these things now.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DialecticalConfusions

Work

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 22:38:00 +0000

Leaving aside gratuitous antisemitism, Paul Lafargue's The Right to be Lazy is an enjoyable polemic ("a masterpiece of studied contempt" in the apt words of Dave Renton) which advocated, in 1880, a three-hour day, with the rest of our time to be spent "resting and banqueting" (although there would presumably be some time for hunting, fishing and criticism as well).

It is brought to mind by Anders Hayden's interesting account (PDF) of the 35-hour week introduced in France nearly ten years ago. Hayden suggests that, contrary to what Anglo-Saxon and French neo-liberals alike (not to mention less ideological but amply lazy media observers) would have you believe, the timidly implemented Working Time Reduction probably created about 350,000 jobs over a three or four year period, besides bringing significant "quality of life" improvements to a majority of workers, in particular mothers of young children.

Hayden's analysis does, on the other hand, support a point made here by Yglesias, which is that the better-off are of course in a better position to enjoy time-off than poorer workers - not just in terms of having money to spend on foreign trips etc., but also in having greater leverage to negotiate the structure of their time-off (it makes a big difference if your reduced working time comes in the form of a last-minute phone-call from the boss saying "we don't need you next week", just as likely to become a last-minute call the following week saying "we need you to work double shifts next week"). The innumerable variety of non-financial resources accumulated over a life of relative advantage also increase the relative value of time-off for the better-off.

Thus the 35-hour week, and the implicit value-choice it made, prioritising increased free time over increased income, is clearly likely to please post-materialist types like me more than low-income workers - but only in so far as it is implemented in the manner of a transfer of wage-income from the already employed (through wage-moderation) to those who get jobs because of it and not in the manner of a transfer from capital to labour. If the latter approach were taken (as it wasn't in France) there's no reason why working time reduction couldn't be a straightforward distributive and quality-of-life gain all round (for workers at least). All the more so given the dynamic fiscal, labour market and consumption effects of increased employment and decreased unemployment.

Coincidentally, although it was Hayden's article that reminded me of Lafargue's, Dave Renton's commentary on the latter brought me full circle:

Among Paul Lafargue's surprising admirers can be counted the [then, i.e. Socialist] current French government. In 1999 Lionel Jospin's socialists passed a new law introducing the 35-hour week. French workers already benefit from five week's paid holiday, two month's summer vacation, and a range of public holidays to make their confreres in Britain and America weep. Indeed Jospin has dropped his own hints suggesting the influence of Paul Lafargue on the new law.

And then:

it seems to me that Paul Lafargue's notion of a work-less future provides a compelling vision of the alternative society that most labour movement activists would actually like to bring about. Indeed I suspect that his utopia would be compelling to much wider layers of people, even than that.

Me too. And one last quote:

Each year seems to bring new advances in labour-saving technology, but the working week never shortens - not for Spanish-speaking workers who are now challenging African-Americans to take on the roles of labourer, driver and cleaner for white urban America; not in Russia, where life expectancy has fallen over the past fifteen years; not in France where unemployment remains at 10 per cent; and not in Britain where the gap between rich and poor has hardly narrowed in the 100 years since statistics were first collected.

It's quite a mystery really when you think about it, isn't it? Anyway read Hayden if you're interested in the details of France's 35-hour week

Auto-critique*

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:11:00 +0000

As Chris Brooke says, this is quite a good piece. I particularly liked:

There is a more resonant parallel between Thomas Paine and the pro-war left that Hitchens mentions only briefly. For a brief period, Paine supported Napoleon and his acts of aggression, believing they were expressions of revolutionary Enlightenment values when, in reality, they were squalid expressions of realpolitik. Hitchens notes wistfully that Paine "had fallen victim to a gigantic counter-revolution in revolutionary guise, which had succeeded in entrenching rather than undermining his original foes."

It is a moment of horrible clarity....

Also:

the only extended passage in which he engages with the disaster in Iraq is where he blames it, bizarrely, on the left: "The liberals gave aid and comfort [the definition of treason in the US Constitution] to the Islamists and the Baathists. The 'insurgents' were able to use the liberals' slogans - 'It's all about oil!' 'It's illegal!' - and to taunt their opponents with the indisputauble fact that even their supposed liberal allies in New York, London, Berlin and Paris didn't support them."

Cohen seems, by the time he writes passages like this, to have lost touch with reality....

Indeed. I wonder, on the other hand, whether Norm would so readily describe himself as having "recant[ed]"?

*Well, OK, not really, since I believe Hari has long since recanted and handed in his pro-war left badge and pistol, and he doesn't go much into his own history in the article, but that's the general background.

Postscript

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 19:17:00 +0000

It strikes me, on reflection, that the poll question I gave out about in the previous post actually reflects the situation of the isolated consumer in the private economy - in that sphere the individual really is faced with the choice between expending more of their own money on such and such a commodity (which may well indeed be a "public service", such as a health service, transport, education etc. in commodity form).

But the beauty of the political sphere is that acting as a thinking, communicating (and wanting!) citizen, the individual can get their hands on money that the egotism of wealth would have you believe "belongs" in some moral sense to others (i.e. the rich) in order to get more commodities and/or better publicly-provided services.

What annoys me

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 20:57:00 +0000

What annoys me is when journalists and pollsters analyse the response of survey respondants to the question:

Would you be willing to pay higher taxes in order to fund better public services?

as though it had something to do with the way politics works. Which of course it doesn't. A question that would better reflect the way politics works would be:

Would you be willing for other people to pay higher taxes in order to fund better public services?

There's no reason for a left-wing political party seeking improved funding of public services etc. to appeal to altruism, or even public-spiritedness and egalitarianism on the part of those it seeks to represent. It could, after all, come up with some scheme likely to benefit, say, the bottom 60% of society against the top 40% (or whatever it may be).

In Ireland, where the main left-wing party would dissolve into paroxysms of heavenly delight if were to break the 15% mark, these reflections seem particularly apt.

(OK achieving support for left-wing politics maybe isn't as easy as I make it sound, but I think there's a legitimate point somewhere here. If you find it let me know!)

Bauman's left

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 20:11:00 +0000

This piece by Zygmunt Bauman is food for thought. He refers to:

two assumptions essential for a specifically left perception of the human condition and its prospects and untapped possibilities. These assumptions are the basis for a self-assertive left, which, instead of apologising for its opposition to the mainstream, strives to create, protect, and be tested against values which it regards as non-negotiable. This way of grasping the defining features of the left is one that realises the left's ubiquitous and steadfast presence in modern forms of life, and understands that its frequently alleged demise always turns out to be no more than a relatively brief period of hibernation and/or recuperation.
The first assumption is that it is the duty of the community to insure its individual members against individual misfortune. And the second is that, just as the carrying capacity of a bridge is measured by the strength of its weakest support, so the quality of a society should be measured by the quality of life of its weakest members. These two constant and non-negotiable assumptions set the left on a perpetual collision course with the realities of the human condition under the rule of capitalism; they necessarily lead to charges against the capitalist order, with its twin sins of wastefulness and immorality, manifested in social injustice. [My emphasis - DC]

Via Norm, some weeks back.

Pulverise the nation

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 20:06:00 +0000

Gosh I'm surprised never to have read this quote before:

Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set back your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.

That's Thomas Friedman, liberal interventionist, 1999 vintage.

What a scumbag.

(Via)

Therborn on social theory

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 17:39:00 +0000

Just a note to recommend this impressive survey of contemporary left social theory by Goran Therborn in the NLR. (Sub required).

That is all. Oh and I've responded to a comment in the last post, which may or may not interest you, whoever you are.

Global warming and Habermas

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 22:14:00 +0000

This is an article on the global warming crisis worth reading. It deals briefly with the history of the idea, the contours of the problem, the urgency of action. It suggests that nuclear power is necessary in the short term (the next two decades) since we can't wait for alternatives to step into the fossil-fuel gap.

On the history:

The basic science of [global warming] was not in dispute, but the area was also not one of much scientific interest except to one or two mavericks.//One of them was a young American physicist called James Hansen, whose 1967 PhD thesis studied Venus and came to the conclusion that it was the greenhouse effect which made the planet so warm...

I find it impressive how ahead of the game Jurgen Habermas was in Legitimation Crisis:

Even on optimistic assumptions, however, one absolute limitation on growth can be stated...namely, the limit of the environment's ability to absorb heat from energy consumption. (p. 41)

He went on to point out that while this ecological limit upon economic growth applied to "all complex social systems" (i.e. regardless of their economic organisation), the principles of capitalist organisation severely constrained the possible means of dealing with the problem. This was written in 1973, and since it now appears to be in some ways "too late" it's a pity more people didn't listen to him then.

Fransisco Franco re-elected mayor of Salamanca

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 21:31:00 +0000

Well that's interesting.

Mandelay

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 17:36:00 +0000

I read somewhere a while back that the greatest opening line of a novel was

Last night I went to Mandelay again.

And I have to say that while I don't know why, what book it's from or where Mandelay is, it's a pretty great opening line.

Seeking salvation

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 00:41:00 +0000

What's interesting is that while many people will have heard of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in Algeria, and more of the Committee of Public Safety in revolutionary France, less will be aware that in the French titles the same word ("salut") is used for salvation as for safety.

Id and ego

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 11:19:00 +0000

So far today I have been mostly examining my soul. Results so far: mostly absence. On the one hand I ponder our radical aloneness within our consciousness*, what Sartre called "abandonment" - the absence of God. Yet while accepting the impossibility of any conception of the soul as "God's presence in man" (or something of the sort), I also am keenly aware of the turmoil possible within one consciousness, seemingly originating in a kind of conflict-like relationship between, on the one side, a longing that demands to be expressed in the soul-metaphor and, on the other, the intellect, the conscious consciousness, the consciousness of which we are conscious.

Well, it is a Saturday!

*See how I have to say "our" here rather than the surely more accurate "my"? In any case this post should clearly be written in German. Anybody understanding it in English is invited to share their enlightenment in the comments section.

Remarks in response to Norman Geras and Jeff Weintraub

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:56:00 +0000

Norm and Jeff Weintraub have responded to my last post.

Norm says that whatever about "the precise terms on which negotiations are to be entered by either side," his "main point was to draw attention to the imbalance in how the Guardian presented the situation, as if Israel were the sole offender."

The point I would make is that the Israeli government is in fact the sole offender, in the relevant sense - it refuses to enter substantial negotiations with its Palestinian counterpart. If I'm not mistaken the new Palestinian government is seeking substantial negotiations, but is being "boycotted" by the Israeli government (with the support of the EU and US - so I suppose it's wrong to say Israel is the sole offender after all). It was this boycott that the Guardian editorial Norm criticized referred to.

Now maybe Norm would say that this is a difference without a distinction - OK, Israel boycotts Hamas, but then Hamas doesn't recognise Israel, so there's two of them at it. And so the Guardian fails to be even-handed when it calls on Israel to end its boycott without making a similar call upon Hamas to end its non-recognition.

But as I see it this objection doesn't work, because if we take it to be the case that calling on Israel to end its Hamas boycott is the same as calling on Israel to recognize Hamas (and should therefore be matched with a call for Hamas to reciprocate) then it must be the case that in not boycotting Israel, in seeking negotiations with it, Hamas is already implicitly recognizing Israel.

In fact this view is not without merit. Ultimately Hamas will have to recognise Israel if peace and justice are to come about, but it is wrong to demand that they do so as a precondition for substantial negotiations, especially when there are signs that this is a position they may be moving towards - by entering into a coalition with Israel-recognizing Fatah in a government that has said it will respect previous (Israel-recognizing) agreements and also by observing an incomplete but nevertheless significant ceasefire. And it is reasonable to criticize the Israeli government (and its international supporters in this respect) for refusing seriously to negotiate, particularly when there is reason to doubt the sincerity of its public reasons for doing so.

To breifly address Jeff's points now:

As noted above, the new government's position seems to be that it will in practice respect agreements previously entered into by the PA. So long as the official negotiating position of the Palestinian government is that it seeks sovereignty only within the pre-1967 borders I wouldn't make it my priority to have Hamas publicly humiliate itself by very explicitly jumping through Israel-recognizing hoops - and I would suspect the motives of those who would. I would also note that it is hardly unprecedented that a change in government would see one side seek to redefine the political reality formed by the Oslo process - Sharon was elected against, so to speak, that process and proceeded unilaterally to declare the other party to the agreement (Arafat) an unfit partner for negotiations.

On the Irish analogy (which was made by Norm of course) - it can be dismissed in the same way as all analogies by pointing to relevant differences. It's true that there was far less at stake for Britain than for Israel. But I think Jeff might get more analogical joy from the comparison if he thinks about the decision of the Northern Ireland Protestants (led by David Trimble), rather than that of the UK government, to negotiate with the IRA at a time when the latter, while on ceasefire, continued formally to deny their right to self-determination.