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March Nepal Maoism Bookmarks

2009-03-25T09:14:00.004+08:00

Notice:

1. The single article introduction below is the latest posting of this month's bookmarks for news items or opinion pieces on the Maoist revolution in Nepal. To see all this months bookmarks to date, use the "Read More" link following this first article introduction.

2. The introductions to articles are excerpts from the original publication. The original publication is accessed from the article title link or at the link at the end of the introduction "... go to original article".

3. To obtain last month's Nepal Maoism bookmarks only go here or when available next month's Nepal Maoism book marks will be available here.

4. To obtain a display of blog postings including all monthly bookmarks as well as all other blog postings including the tag "nepal maoism" please go here.

The following two news items concern the continuing key issue of integration of the National Army of Nepal(former Royal Army) with the Maoist Peoples Liberation Army - listed most recent first:

Supreme Court Orders the Government to Reinstate Generals of the Nepal Army

March 25 - Failing to get their term extended, the army officials reached Supreme Court on Sunday saying that government decision was illegal.. says the government decision not to the extend terms for the army generals did not complete legal procedures. The order would remain as final verdict of the court unless government supplies sufficient reasons to prove that its decision completed all legal procedures.. [Democracy and Class Struggle (who posted the news item) says now the Judiciary has weighed in against the UCPN Maoist led Government in support of the Nepal Army and against the Ministry of Defense. The Judiciary the Nepal Army and the Bureaucratic apparatus of The Nepali State are throwing down challenges to the Maoist led government and Koirala is ratcheting up the anti Maoist rhetoric - it is time for the UCPN Maoist to seize the initiative and smash this rotten Nepali State apparatus before it destroys them and their government.] ... go to complete original article

PM Prachanda Says Army Integration Complete in Four Months

March 23 - Prime Minister Prachanda said on Monday that integration and rehabilitation of the Maoist People's Liberation Army (PLA) would be completed in four months. PM Prachanda , who heads the army integration special committee (AISC), said this during a meeting with US ambassador to Nepal, Nancy J. Powell. During the meeting at the PMO, the US ambassador is known to have queried if army integration would complete when the renewed term of United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) expires, in four months. Constitution-drafting process and the ongoing dispute over the retirement of eight Nepal Army Generals also figured during the meeting. Meanwhile, a meeting of the AISC today discussed the army integration issue, but no formal decision was taken. The meeting also discussed matters concerning the technical committee that would be formed to assist the AISC, according to Mohammad Habibullah, a Madhesi Janadhikar Forum leader and AISC member. ... go to complete original article

To get a display of all this months Nepal Maoism bookmarks

Maoists Unveil New Proposed Constitution for Nepal

March 18 - Dr Baburam Bhattarai, who heads a committee formed by his party, Unified CPN (Maoist), for determining the party’s vision on democracy has unveiled the party’s draft proposal through his personal website. The Maoists’ draft maintains liberal stance on fundamental rights of the people such as freedom of expression, right to form political parties, right to assembly, among others. The draft divided into 21 parts and 145 articles authorises the state governments to form paramilitary force or militia but the national army would be formed after integration between the People’s Liberation Army and Nepal Army. The party has proposed an Audit Commission as the highest auditing body of the country in place of the Office of the Auditor General. The Women’s Commission and Dalit Commission as the constitutional bodies of the country have been removed and three new commissions have been proposed - inclusion commission, development commission and inter-state relation commission. ... go to complete original article

March 16 - (Photo Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal "Prachanda") The following news items came in today in the following sequence:

Tensions High Following Government Refusal to Nepal Army Request

With Nepal’s Supreme Court legitimizing fresh recruitment carried by the Nepal Army, it was the turn of Mr. Ram Bahadur Thapa Badal the Maoists’ Minister for defense to take the revenge against the Nepal Army Chief Rookmangad Katawal. Which, he did so, by refusing to prolong the term of eight Nepal Army Brigadier Generals- who were considered to be close to Mr. Rookmangad Katawal. The Nepal Army headquarters had sent a request letter to the government demanding extension of the tenure of the eight generals for more three years, which was summarily rejected by the Ministry of Defense. Ramindra Chhetri, the NA spokesperson described Rookmangad Katawal’s immediate call to President Ram Baran Yadav, Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Defense Minister Badal on Tuesday March 16, 2009, a routine one, but sources say that during his separate meetings with the three stalwarts, Mr. Katawal expressed his utter displeasure over the fresh act of the Ministry of Defense. ... go to complete original article

Nepal Maoists' Party Okays Government Decision on Army Retirement

The United Maoists’ Party has supported Nepal Government’s decision not to prolong the term of eight Nepal Army generals. The Maoists’ party top-hats held a meeting at Prime Minister’s residence in Baluatar on Tuesday, March 17, 2009, evening. The meeting also criticized the stand taken by coalition partner-the UML and the main opposition- Nepali Congress over the issue. “The decision was not taken in a haste, we had discussed this issue in advance, thus the government will not retract from the decision”, said Mr. Mohan Baidya Kiran, a Maoists senior leader later talking to reporters. In the mean time, the Nepali Congress and the UML has intensified its criticism against the decision made by the Maoists led government which only the other day sacked some eight functioning and experienced Brigadier generals. ... go to complete original article

Merge PLA-Nepal Army Soon: PLA Commanders

The Commanders of the Maoists’ Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA) who have gathered in the capital Kathmandu threatened that further delay in the integration of Maoists combatants into the Nepal Army will break the patience of the PLA men. In the ongoing meeting, there is the presence of Maoists’ PLA Commanders and Deputy Commanders from all seven cantonments spread across the country. “The PLA must be integrated into the Nepal Army to boost their waning morale”, the PLA commanders said, say reports. “We request the Special committee for Army Integration to initiate the Nepal Army –Maoists PLA merger at the earliest”, the speakers also demanded. Attending the program, the Commander of the Maoists’ Peoples’ Liberation Army Mr. Nanda Kishor Pun alias Pasang had said that the fresh decision of the Supreme Court of Nepal legitimizing fresh recruitment carried out by the Nepal Army has side by side legitimized the PLA recruitment as well. ... go to complete original article

Govt-Tharu Representatives Sign Six Point Pact; Tharu Agitation Withdrawn

March 15 - PM Prachanda attends. talks ending with a proposal to amend the constitution to address the demands of the agitating Tharu community along with other ethnic groups. Tharu organisations and other ethnic communities supporting the agitation have called off all programmes of agitation with the agreement. A general strike called by the Muslim community has also been called off. According to the agreement, the government will declare four cadres killed during the agitation as martyrs, bear the cost of treatment of those injured and release all cadres arrested in connection with the agitation. Chairman of Tharuhat Struggle Committee Laxman Tharu, General Secretary of Tharu Kalyankarini Sabha Raj Kumar Lekhi, Babu Ram Chaudhary from Nepal Loktantrik Tharu Sangh, Indrajeet Chaudhary from Tharu Rastriya Mukti Morcha and chairman Janajati Mahasangh Pasang Sherpa on behalf of the agitators and peace minister Janardan Sharma on behalf of the government have signed the agreement. ... go to complete original article

Nepal: War for Peace « Revolution in South Asia

March 12 (Originally published March 8) - PLA will not be directly under the Unified CPN (Maoist) here after. Unified Maoist has a new responsibility to legalize and fuse PLA by bringing it under Army Integration Special Committee (AISC). He added, “PLA will be directly under the leadership of AISC. Theoretically, PLA is already under it. We will be connected for a long time contemplatively that is another thing. However, PLA will not be under unified CPN (Maoist) anymore, morally and theoretically.” Because of the changed situation, the changed role and the responsibility of PLA should be ready to guarantee the victory of struggle for peace. For that, premier Prachanda has stressed, “PLA should follow and implement the directives of AISC unconditionally.” There are many challenges in front of the Maoist-led government to write new constitution on time. Criminal elements and gangsters are trying to spread the communal violence all over the country. ... go to complete original article

Revolutionary Land Reform: Essence and Aim « Revolution in South Asia

March 12 (Originally published March 7) - Krishna Das Shrestha - As said above, to abolish feudal land ownership is the foremost and primary task to be done in the economic sector, whether land reform program is revolutionary or not must be judged on the basis of the commission’s policy towards the task and of its manner of implementing the policy. The main policy of the revolutionary land reform is “land to the tillers”. Therefore, the reform program must be guided by the real sense and spirit of that principle. A truly revolutionary program must set itself to accomplish the following tasks: •The confiscation of land property of the feudal lords without compensation and the transfer it to the tillers and poor peasants. •The abolition of debt taken by the peasants from the landlords, usurers, banks etc. •The emancipation of the peasants from all kinds of feudal exploitation and expression. •Gratis distribution of cultivable follow land to the landless and poor peasants. ... go to complete original article

Major Seven Parties Reach Agreement to Address Tharu Demands

March 11 - (Photo: Maoist Minister for Law and Justice Dev Gurung) The major seven parties—five ruling and two opposition—Wednesday reached an agreement on Wednesday to address the demands of the agitating Tharu communities even by bringing in a new ordinance.. the seven parties including the main opposition party Nepali Congress and Tarai Madhesh Loktantrik Party (TMLP) .. agreed to fulfill the demands of the Tharu groups after meeting the legal and constitutional process. Emerging from the meeting, UML leader Ishwor Pokhrel said that the demands of the disgruntled Tharus, who are launching their strike to press their demands in the southern plains, would be resolved by rectifying the error of the ordinance. The Tarai region is witnessing a life crippling bandha since the past ten days due to the strike called by the Tharu communities in protest of the ordinance that categorises them as Madheshi.. “We have opened the legal and constitutional roads to address Tharus’ demands,” said Pokhrel, “All the parties have agreed on that". ... go to complete original article

Government-Tharu Talks Inconclusive

March 10 - .. talks between the government and the agitating Tharus and other janajati groups ended inconclusively Tuesday evening. The talks .. were adjourned as the government team headed by Peace and Reconstruction Minister Janardan Sharma said it could not decide on the demands of the agitating groups without discussing them with the Prime Minister. ".. told us that he would clarify the government's position on our demands tomorrow," Laxman Tharu, who led a nine-member team of Tharu Joint Struggle Committee.. He said the agitations would continue unless the demands, which include scrapping of the ordinance that put Tharus in the Madhesi category, were met. Seven-member team of Tharu Kalyankarini Sabha (TKS), Muslims and other janajati groups led by TKS general secretary Raj Kumar Lekhi, Maoist-affiliated Tharu National Liberation Front led by Indrajeet Choudhary and a team of UML-affiliated Nepal Democratic Tharu Association also participated in the talks. ... go to complete original article

C.P. Gajurel: "Maoist Party Never Took Tharu as Madhesis”

March 8 -Mr. C.P. Gajurel, the United Maoists’ Central Committee member rejected the idea that says that the indigenous Tharu Community too fell in the Madhesi category. The United Maoist party is the one that advocated first in favor of Ethnic Awareness but unfortunately it is turning communal and threatening the existence of the Nation- State, say experts.

“Our party never took the Tharu Community as Madhesis”, he clarified. Mr. Gajurel said, India has occupied Nepali lands in 58 different locations along the open border including Susta, Kalapani and Ilam, our party will soon launch a National Awareness Program against this continued Indian aggression”. Mr. Matrika Yadav, a Madesh and renegade leader however, believes that the Pahadiya Rulers of Nepal ( he Means Prachanda and Bhattarai ) are trying to create fissures between the indigenous Tharu community and the Madhesi community to create unrest in Terai. ... go to complete original article

Telegraph Nepal : Address Tharu demands: Nepal’s political actors

March 8 - With the Tharu uprising taking on a violent turn after the death of two innocent civilians and a police official on Friday March 6, 2009, Nepal’s political actors have begun making statements in favor of the Tharu Community. Minister Bijaya Kumar Gacchedhar, though, a member of the indigenous Tharu community, who has time and again made confusing statements, sometime in favor of the Tharu community and sometime against them... Mr. Mahanta Thakur the president of Tarai Madhesh Loktantrik Party too has slightly toned-down his pro-Madhesi demands and asked the government to address the Tharu demands.. Mr. C.P. Gajurel, the United Maoists’ Central Committee member rejected the idea that says that the indigenous Tharu Community too fell in the Madhesi category.. Matrika Yadav, a Nepal Communist Party (Maoist) leader.. [says] Prachanda led government of Nepal [and] .. Pahadiya Rulers [are] trying to divide the population.

Mr. Matrika Yadav, a Nepal Communist Party (Maoist) leader however, believes that the Pahadiya Rulers of Nepal are trying to create fissures between the indigenous Tharu community and the Madhesi community to create unrest in Tarai. "The Prachanda led government of Nepal is trying to divide the population first and rule in an absolute manner”, said Mr. Yadav talking to the pressmen in Rautahat on Friday, March 6, 2009. “Even if Nepal gets the new constitution, it will be just in favor of Khas (Chhetri and Brahmins) Community”, Mr. Yadav predicted. “The pro-Madhesi parties want to occupy power and exploit the Madhesis themselves”, Mr. Yadav also said. ... go to complete original article

Nepal: “Peoples Liberation Army Won’t Stop Recruitment"

March 8 - Unified Communist Party Nepal (Maoist) PLA Drill (Photo) This originally published on eKantipur.com originally entitled: PLA Commander: PM Doesn’t Count Mar 7 - A commander of the Maoist People’s Liberation Army (PLA) said on Friday that PLA’s seventh division based in Bhangadhi would go ahead with recruitment, come what may. “The PLA will not stop the recruitment even if the party Chairman and Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal himself issues directives against the fresh intake. Not even comrade Prachanda can stop us,” said division commander Mahendra Bahadur Shahi as a local newspaper published the vacancy announcement in its Friday edition. The division plans to recruit some 1,906 combatants. He said the PLA initiated the recruitment as the Nepal Army (NA) was taking in recruits. On Thursday, Dahal had said the recruitment controversies surrounding the NA and PLA would be over within a few days. ... go to complete original article

Maoists: Reactionaries Mistreating the Tharu people « Revolution in South Asia

March 6 - This article was originally published on Nepal News under the title: Maoist, Madhesi leaders speak out in favour of Tharu people. With Chitwan district and many parts of Terai remaining tense because of government categorisation of Tharus as Madhesis, a senior Unified CPN (Maoist) leader Friday argued that Tharus are not Madhesis but indigenous people. C.P Gajurel, who is also the foreign department head of the Maoist party, said the government led by his party erroneously decided to put Tharus in the Madhesi category coming under pressure from “other political parties” and claimed that his party never considered Tharus as Madhesis. He didn’t say under whose pressure the government made this decision, but it is believed that junior coalition partner Madhesi Janadhikar Forum, which has long been trying to woo the indigenous Tharu community, may have some hand in this. ... go to complete original article

Nepal Maoists 'recruit thousands'

March 4 - The Maoist former rebel group in Nepal, the People's Liberation Army (PLA), says it has begun recruiting thousands of young people. The announcement comes just days after the army said it had filled 3,000 vacancies, a move that has been condemned by the former rebels. They said it was a violation of the peace deal that ended their insurgency. The Maoists came to power last year after a landslide poll win but the role of the army is an unresolved issue. The BBC's Charles Haviland in Kathmandu says this game of tit-for-tat on recruitment has raised tensions but that most observers do not believe the Maoists seriously intend to go back to war. Rising tensions The head of the PLA, Nanda Kishore Pun, told the BBC that his organisation would take on more than 11,000 fighters, bringing the size of his army up to more than 31,000. He said that the recruitment process would continue unless the Maoist-led government intervened. It has yet to comment. ... go to complete original article

The Recruitment that Threatens to Derail the Peace Process

March 4 - Maoist People’s Liberation Army (PLA) cantonments have started recruiting new soldiers apparently in response to the ongoing recruitment in Nepal Army (NA). Though the Maoist party itself has yet to officially comment on the recruitment, key political parties have come out strongly against the drive saying it violates past pacts, most notably the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of November 2006. Maoists, who head the defense ministry, said the same when Army recruitment row broke out. The other political parties gave the nod to Army recruitment. Ram Sharan Mahat, who represents Nepali Congress at the Army Integration Special Commitee (AISC), reacted to what PLA Chief Nanda Kishor Pun had said on Monday: “How can this combatant commander talk about additional recruitment when the AISC is talking of rehabilitation and integration of ex-combatants? ... go to complete original article

Young Communist League Merges With Youth Group of Masal

March 1 - Young Communist League Merges With Youth Group of Masal March 1, 2009 The Young Communist League (YCL), affiliated to the erstwhile CPN (Maoists), has merged with All Nepal Janabadi Youth Association, affiliated to the erstwhile CPN (Ekata Kendra – Masal) following the unification of their mother parties to form Unified CPN (Maoists). A 255-member committee led by Ganesh Man Pun, the erstwhile chairman of YCL, was also announced at the function. Raju Khadka and Uma Bhujel are deputy co-ordinators of the committee. The name of the new organisation will remain YCL. Earlier, the two organisations had decided to add a ‘democratic’ epithet to the name after the merger. It will adopt the flag of the Janabadi Youth Association. Addressing the function, Kul Prasad KC, alias Sonam, said YCL would be developed as the successor organisation of the Maoists. Maoist leader Narayan Kaji Shrestha and Minister for Information and Communications Krishna Bahadur Mahara also addressed the function. ... go to complete original article

Developing a Federal Structure

March 1 (Originally posted Feb 27) - We find mainly two models of the state structure implementing in the world: Unitary system and Federal system. Unified Maoist Leader and Minister of Law and Justice Dev Gurung says if the production-relation had developed in a capitalistic way, the ‘nationalities’ would have been merged and advanced ahead towards the ‘nation’. Therefore, to pave the way for nation building, the existing situation of nationalities should be addressed properly and scioentifically. They should be brought into a national unity by providing them the right of autonomy. Dev Gurung further says, “The nation remained ‘mono nationalities’ or ‘mono nation’, though the specialities of the country is still ‘multi-nationalities.’ The modality of federalism should provide autonomy on the base of nationalities. The re-structure of the state should be on the foundation of social unity created by the production-relation of the contemporary society in Nepal. ... go to complete original article

ZNet - Beginning of a New Nepal

March 1 (Originally posted Feb 23) - 2065: The Beginning of a New Nepal April 23, 2008 By Alberto Cru Alberto Cruz's ZSpace Page. Nepal has entered the year 2065 of its calendar and (after two postponements) has already held elections for the Constituent Assembly that may end the monarchy and open the way to the proclamation of a republic. This is an aspiration of a majority of the Nepali people and has been symbolized by the political and military struggle of the Maoist Communist Party of Nepal (CPN-M) since 1996. Nepal thus enters a new era following the popular rebellion that defeated the coup d'état of the feudal monarchy and forced King Gyanendra to leave public life while maintaining the institution of the monarchy. Now, the principal task of the Constituent Assembly is to proclaim a Republic, assuming that the 23 point Agreement between the Seven Party Alliance and the Maoists is honoured. That agreement followed the Maoists' abandonment of the interim government when previous agreements were not kept. ... go to complete original article

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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Nepal: Revolution Reports (Prologue - Section 2)

2009-03-09T14:36:00.004+08:00

I have been reading the International Crisis Group reports since shortly after its inception in the mid-90s. Among my Nepal Maoism bookmarks you will find all the reports on the conflict in Nepal. The ICG reports are excellent factual accounts of history. The recommendations they provide are reflective of course of the viewpoints of the many national governments, foundations and individuals comprising its donor base - but we understand they are being as "objective" as possible. The content is quite clear of language entailing ideological or political stances. Understanding the critical developments at this time, they have very recently issued a major report on the current situation in Nepal - which will be discussed.

The ICG report dated 19 February 2009 is entitled “Nepal’s Faltering Peace Process”. I will provide a truncated version in notes from its executive summary. I also select some of the points of in the recommendations of the report I think are most significant. Of course this should be no alternative to the reader reading the complete executive summary or the full 45+ pages of the report. Like everybody else, I have my own agenda. My Notes on the Executive Summary:

Major issues remain unresolved: no agreement on the future of the two armies, little of the land seized during the conflict has been returned, and little progress made writing a new constitution. The April 2008 CA elections was a victory for the Maoists but short of a majority. The NC refused to join the government. There is little unity of intent between the Maoists and the largest governing coalition partner, the UML. With continued instability has come armed protest and burgeoning identity-based movements. The immediate threat is not Maoist totalitarianism but a dangerous weakening of the state’s capacity to govern. Debate within the party – renamed the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), UCPN(M), following its merger with a smaller group – shows the goal of a communist “people’s republic” is still in place. Maoist leaders continue to threaten renewed revolutionary struggle and the “capture of state power” - underlined by cadres’ continued violent behaviour and by consolidating alternative power bases through affiliated organisations like trade unions. With the November 2005 agreement between the CPN(M) and the mainstream seven-party alliance, old politics was discredited; but the established parties still need to earn legitimacy. The Maoists may have made a greater effort to change than other parties, but they should take the lead to rebuild confidence by unambiguously renouncing violence and reaffirming their commitment to political pluralism; even though the NC, the UML and the other parties suffer from exclusiveness and weakened support. The state of public security is worrying. Districts across the Tarai, the heartland of the Madhesi movement, face a near collapse of governance and policing. While the police are demoralised, the Nepalese Army (NA) remains a law unto itself, resisting both democratic control and investigation of alleged war crimes during the conflict. International influences, India, the UN and donors, need to maintain consistent pressure on all parties to live up to their commitments.

Comments on the ICG Executive Summary:

(a) “Maoist totalitarianism” is an assumption that a communist peoples republic in Nepal would be a return to a failed communist model.

(b) There is an underlying assumption that there is an imperative for a multi-party state to maintain its “capacity to govern”; that such a model of governance is the only thing that would work.

(c) There is a bias against self-organizing, such as unionizing efforts, as being undesirable “alternative power bases”.

(d) There is asserted the need of “political pluralism”, but it is an assertion that assumes the Maoist “capture of state power” would necessarily exclude any pluralism or internal debate.

(e) The glorification of the role of the ICG donor base (International influences, India, the UN and donor community) is rather blatant – Nepal needs, they believe, an external element to “maintain consistent pressure on all parties”.

Yes, the problems clearly identified and the factual history of events is most useful. However, one needs to note how the Madhesi movement (and others unmentioned such as the Tharu people) are characterized as problematic, almost dismissed by the superior vision of the international meta-structure. We can say that even the royalist elements within the National Army, or factions such as the Madhesi and others, whether we support them as political forces or not, are nonetheless legitimate and significant elements of the set of Nepal peoples.

From the general ICG Recommendations - again I select certain key ideas (that are nevertheless there) and say again to the reader do not forgo a thorough reading of the many pages of detailed expansion of these ideas in the report itself:

1. Re-establishing consensus on continuing the peace process by: a high-level commission and an independent monitoring body for the purposes of, instituting international technical and/or secretarial support, and ensuring the Army Integration Special Committee (AISC) promptly starts integration and rehabilitation of Maoist army combatants.

2. Independent monitoring mechanisms established for commissions and committees specified in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).

3. Seek donor support by requests for bilateral and multilateral technical assistance.

4. Deliver tangible improvements in the weak law and order situation, by: requesting international support for the home ministry’s public security task force (for example in controlling party youth wings).

5. Requesting international technical assistance for investigations: ending a culture of impunity of serious alleged crimes; taking action against individuals and institutions seeking to pervert the course of justice; responding substantively to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

6. Improve the management of state security forces, by: Providing the National Defense Council secretariat support, that is, international support, on the joint administrative training of military and civilian officers.

Comment on the ICG Recommendations

Given the on-going events, especially since the start of March, subsequent to this issue of this report, that the Maoist led peace process is in dire need of solutions to the key problems well identified by the ICG report. The ICG is genuinely and rightfully concerned that Nepal will become a failed state – some begin to argue it already is. If you look at the ideas in the pages of careful analysis of Nepal’s situation by the ICG, as well as at the comprehensive detailed solutions it offers, there is a lot to be learned about the methods of conflict resolution that would work.

The question is, I think, who is it that should have power and control of this peace process for the greatest benefit of the people of Nepal? I read above that there would be a tremendous amount of international intervention. I also read that the bias of the ICG is that this is a necessity because the political forces and civil society in Nepal are not capable of self-management of a peaceful resolution. Supporting this bias is the apparent failure of the multi-party government to date; resulting in what may indeed be a failing state. The result in the day to day life of the people is appalling: the power infrastructure is literally failing – 16 hours a day with no electricity; uncontrolled violence, criminal activity exploding and rampant corruption at every turn. This is the daily fare of the people.

Conclusion

The conflict resolution methodologies that have been suggested by the ICG are in themselves valid. They should in essence be employed. By who seems to be a matter of who has the guns. The international influences are working diplomatically, economically and militarily to position a great deal of external influence and control over Nepal – I don’t think anyone is so naive to think it is about their love of peace and the Nepali people. Geopolitical and ideological apparatus concerns and economic concerns (e.g. hydro-power for India) may have something to do with it.

The Maoists too have an agenda, one based on the communist hypothesis if we can believe in the complete purity of their character. Many, myself included, would want a new phase, a novel phase of manifestation of communism in Nepal that would both refute the failure of its earlier manifestations and avoid the on-going world tragedy of the current coordinates of power, capitalo-parliamentarianism (the neologism of Alain Badiou introduced many times to any reader of this blog).

It is a fact in the present situation that the Maoists were given the mandate by the people to create a new Nepal. Can they keep that mandate is in question, as is also; will they create a communist state that can fulfill the promises to the people? There is no doubt such a move to create that communist state is the intention. Somehow they have to prove their purity of character and no doubt not all the Maoists possess such purity (that would be too much to ask as one moves lower down the power structure). It is a task of leadership for Prachanda and Bhattarai, CP Gajurel, Mohan Baidya, Dina Nath Sharma and others whose ideas have been covered in on -going entries here.

If we will ever know if the Maoists could be what they say they are now depends on the guns again I am afraid. Civil Society doesn’t seem to have much clout in the impasse between the NA and the PLA, or for the rising specter of Indian intervention that seems to be raising its head in the opposition of the Tharus and the Madhesi. Will the Maoists be able to forcibly avoid a totally failed state and stave off international intervention, would that be a good thing? Most importantly, will the people avoid both giving up in despair about or simply having faith in a party leadership and mobilize itself somehow by an act of extraordinary group will – the essence of true revolution.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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Nepal: Revolution Reports (Prologue - Section 1)

2009-02-28T18:01:00.022+08:00

This is the beginning of a project of any number of posts on the revolution in Nepal. The previous posting was of articles from collected bookmarks during the last two months. In the future, such bookmark updates will be featured in an effort to keep up with the news. My plan is to next take up an analysis of the report from the International Crisis Group (ICG) on the disintegrating situation (the "non-leftist" or "non-communist" position). This will be followed by a thorough review of the debate on the situation from various communist to anarchist writers that is taking place at The Kasama Project. At some point the coverage will begin from within Nepal as anticipated. In this post I will provide a synopsis of the coverage and opinion on the revolution I have provided in earlier posts on this blog followed by some background information on the ICG and the Kasama project. Perhaps the title "Nepal: Revolution Reports" seems odd to some readers. The international press will tell you the revolution has already occurred but I believe I am not alone in thinking it is far from over.

First, I want to discuss that this entry in the blog marks a kind of departure from the former content. I have been in the past mainly focused on theoretical issues. Writing of these will continue from time to time, but the coverage of the situation in Nepal is a transition more to a greater focus on practice vs theory. In this way the content will include more day to day news coverage as well as a web journal aspect. Another practice will be to post entries as they are being developed. Often it takes me as much as a week to prepare a post for publication, so instead of waiting till the item is done I will post to the internet with a notification to readers that the posting is "in progress".

Readers should know about a well done documentary, Between Two Stones, on the Maoist revolution in Nepal that can be viewed from the Stefandav TV widget found in the sidebar to the right. Information on how to use the widget for video on demand can be read at my blog entry. There are also 66 bookmarks and counting at my Delicious website. My prior entries are:

The Maoist Debate in Nepal - Part 3

The Maoist Debate in Nepal - Part 2

The Maoist Debate in Nepal – Part 1

I will provide a synopsis of these three entries beginning with the first two paragraphs of Part 3 and then adding a synopsis of Part 3 itself:

Part 1 of this series of entries provided back ground on why there is fear the Maoists are merely engaging in a strategic process aimed at ending parliamentarian government and creating a communist party state. At the same time it was pointed out that in the ranks of the Maoists, is another fear of a reactionary or reformist “Maoist” controlled country that leaves Nepal subjected to an elite class within the coordinates of global capitalist power. The first aspect of my opinion was that those who are rebellious have already jumped to the conclusion that they have the right to rebel and it would be better to continue vigilance at this point about whether the path being proposed by Prachanda and Bhattarai is merely a quantitative accumulation based on the collaboration with existing parliamentary power or whether it engenders a qualitative leap in its application of Marxist theory (the theme of my analysis of current events in Nepal has been developed in the context of theoretical questions, specifically with reference to the ideas of Alain Badiou on Mao’s fidelity to the communist hypothesis).

Writing Part 2 coincided with a stunning development: announcement of a unified statement by the Maoist’s that, although they are participating in the institution of a democratic republic, the question of a single party people’s republic is to remain open. I went into some articles and opinion that were quite rancorous by those opposed to the Prachanda/Bhattarai line. The synthesis of the two sides of the debate, as I discussed, seemed a resounding defeat for these opponents. At the same time it was noted that the new position may prove problematic in garnering international support. Part 3 is to take a closer look at the positions of those advocating an immediate move to a people’s republic, and also return to my thesis: the Nepal Maoist’s application of theory in contradiction with practice may prove to be an event ushering in a novel phase of Maoism, a new phase in evolution of the communist hypothesis that might be the kind of event anticipated by Badiou’s analysis of prior periods of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist history as indicative of needing a new manifestation of fidelity .

Part 3 opened with the synopsis of the first two parts as provided above. I then proceeded to examine a series of articles by prominent Maoists who are to lesser or greater degree suggesting a theoretical argument counter to the new government’s performance, to the theory in practice as “Prachanda Path”. Most interestingly,these counter-propositions were shown to be not actually as “hardline” as they have been portrayed by many. In fact, I attempted to clarify how the recent synthesis of several internal factions has occurred because the concept of “people’s republic” itself has been subjected to a radical transformation. I made a presentation of 5 major points indicated by what the "hardliners" say to suggest that the Prachanda-Bhattarai line is corrupt. However, counter to such a premature conclusion was my analysis of a number articles by other prominent Maoist leaders including Kul Prasad KC “Sonam”, Mohan Baidya “Kiran” and Chandra Prakash Gajurel.

Of course I would want readers to read the entire entries, but let me just conclude with a reprint of the final section of Part 3 wherein I return to the conception of the communist hypothesis and the exposition of world communism today according to the philosopher Alain Badiou:

Is there not the idea that communism should be both egalitarian and inclusive of all people. Does it really necessarily call for the elimination of the functions of the bourgeoisie in a form that is not exploitive of others? Consider the definition of the communist hypothesis as defined by Alain Badiou that was taken up in some detail in a prior post:

"What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away."

The question remains. Will the Nepali Maoists manifest a novel form of communism in their vision of a people’s republic? There is nothing about this vision that precludes the possibility of revolution against the logic of class despite the obvious dangers. We are in a completely different historical period calling not for a victory of the hypothesis as it existed and ultimately succumbed in prior phases, but as it calls for practice in the context of conflict between old and new theory in the modern context. Badiou:

"In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis . . . Which is no doubt why, as in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground."

So the block quote above is the theoretical position I follow. Also, I feel the three part series on the Maoist debate provides an adequate snapshot of the internal politics of the Maoists in Nepal. The previous post as designed, was to bring the reader up to date on the most recent developments - they suggest we are now entering into a critical period wherein internal political opposition to the Maoists along with international powers will confront the Maoists final push to establish a communist peoples republic. As I said at the outset above, I will continue to publish articles from breaking news periodically under the title "Current Nepal Maoist Bookmarks" - probably dating the entry the 15th of each month. As soon as I am able I will return to Nepal to provide coverage from there.

In the meantime I plan to develop this prologue, beginning with additional sections comprising an an overview of viewpoints from a number of international observers. I will introduce our guests below:

Quoting from the Wiki on the International Crisis Group:

"The ICG is considered the world’s leading independent, non-partisan, source of analysis and advice to governments, and intergovernmental bodies like the United Nations, European Union and World Bank, on the prevention and resolution of deadly conflict. Its primary goals are a unique combination of field-based analysis, sharp-edged policy prescription, and high-level advocacy, with key roles being played by a senior management team highly experienced in government and by a highly active Board of Trustees containing many senior diplomats."

I have been reading the ICG reports since shortly after its inception in the mid-90s. Among my bookmarks referenced above you will find all the reports on the conflict in Nepal. The ICG reports are excellent factual accounts of history. The recommendations they provide are reflective of course of the viewpoints of the many national governments, foundations and individuals comprising its donor base - but we understand they are being as "objective" as possible. The content is quite clear of language entailing ideological or political stances. Understanding the critical developments at this time, they have very recently issued a major report on the current situation in Nepal - which will be discussed.

From the website at the other end of the spectrum:

"Kasama is a communist project for the forcible overthrow and transformation of all existing social conditions. We are open to learning, unafraid to admit our own uncertainties. At the same time, we will not shrink from what we do know: the solutions cannot be found within the current world order or the choices it provides. We are for revolution. We seek to find the forms of organization and action for the people most dispossessed by this system to free themselves and all humanity."

The writing there is well referenced and provided by a range of "socialist" thinkers who have obviously been at the study of communist theory and practice for a long time. The coverage of the Nepali revolution has been extensive - recently a sister site dedicated almost exclusively to the Maoist revolution in Nepal and the Naxilites in Northern India was started - Revolution in South Asia. Prachanda's and other's proclamations to move to the final phases of revolution has generated tremendous interest and debate there, some of which I want to share.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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Current Nepal Maoism Bookmarks

2009-02-15T10:38:00.017+08:00

Alain Badiou and Cornel West

2009-02-05T15:43:00.014+08:00

This 9 part video features a presentation by Alain Badiou, for most of its duration, which is an excellent and accessible explanation of his analysis of the current world situation in the framework of his philosophical system. I really want people to listen to it. The follow up on Badiou's presentation by Cornel West is a brilliant and inspiring oratory. I will be providing notes on Badiou's talk below as a means of learning (and for sharing for what its worth):

Notes:

The title of the presentation is introduced as "Personal Liberty and Collective Equality".

Badiou begins with a sketch of his concept of the "Event" which ruptures the existing "Situation" and results in a new situation wherein elements in the pre-evental "State" which were not experienced as related become involved in a relationship in the novel state following the event.

The theme of his talk is proposed as concerning the relationship of ethics and politics. He takes up what he says have been the three classical conceptions of ethics (theological, natural and formal ethics), and in the end states he is opposed to each. The theological posits a difference between good and evil determined transcendentally by God, characterized by submission to divine law. The natural determines what is good and evil from a sense of pity, for humanity, for victims. Formal ethics posits imperatives for subjective intentions that are followed (good) or not (bad).

Badiou agrees that some actions are better than others but that neither law, pity or intention can be foundational for ethics. Rather one must find in each singular situation a new rule of action. He contrasts attention to the concrete situation in determining ethical action to belief in something external to the situation for that determination. The example is the the September 11 event and the subsequent reaction - his point being the action of terrorists and the subsequent revenge for that action have emerged from ethical decisions that were not rooted in attention to the real concrete political situation.

Badiou then speaks to the situation of politics today as being characterized by the continued failure of what he calls "expressive dialectics" - to which he proposes attention instead to non-expressive dialects. The former refers to political struggle in the last century as expressive of social contradictions (he refers to Lenin on Marxism: classes are expressed by parties and parties are expressed by leaders - as Badiou says, the proper name of whom express the becoming of the political process).

Non-expressive political dialectics would need to be a new form of collective action, the conception of which is virtual and yet to be actualized; it would be a political dialectics not the result of social contradictions (which nonetheless are real and to which we must be attentive), and a dialectics not expressive of conflicts of opinion in our objective world. Such conception of the possibility of a novel truth, and its actual generation, rather than a struggle between opinions means in fact maintaining separation from the actual objective situation of the expressive dialectics of politics today.

The expressive dialectic of our current objective world - that which we must move beyond, is between conservative and progressive politics, oppressive preservation of power versus creative justice, between desire for law and order versus the collective desire for another world as possible. Both sides of this expressive dialectic are proponents of "prophetic democracy" - which Badiou (prior to stating he will disagree with) outlines as essentially oriented to the principles of human rights, of tolerance and of freedom for all: the individual subject has the right to satisfy desires, all cultures are equal, and subjects must be allowed maximal expressive capacity.

Badiou builds his disagreement with the three main orientations of prophetic democracy on aspects of its formal internal contradictions - on the fact of problematic relationships between human rights, cultural tolerance and freedom. He points out that though people must have the right to exercise their will to satisfy desire there is no parameters of what is "normal" desire eminent to the concept of human rights as such. Likewise there is no parameters for "normal" cultural practices. Finally, freedom in some cultures is only maximized not by how much individual creativity is allowable but by obedience and sacrifice. Again, returning to the example of the "war on terror", Badiou states that on a philosophical level this is a war between enjoyment and sacrifice, between comfort and money on one side and death and obedience on the other. In either case there is not in either case an ethical framework in which we might wish to participate.

The argument continues against prophetic democracy with an explicit outline of what Badiou has coined "political dialectics" whereby there is participation in novel freedom rather than expressive freedom. We have to grasp in this the meaning of the poetry of saying freedom is like the experience of the possibility of something that is impossible. Badiou introduces the distinction between actual freedom being always a matter of production of novelty rather than the expression or realization of something already existing in the political situation.

In the productive scheme of political dialectics the struggle always involves making a choice against the expression of something intimate to oneself and for something that is social, that is inclusive of that beyond oneself. This would be a human rights orientation that is heroic in opposition to juridical rights because some existing and even allowable behaviors are unacceptable as are some practices in some cultures. What Badiou posits here is that there is "what is" - that is subjects and cultures (individuals and languages of social group expression); but there also exist universal "Truths". What he means precisely needs careful enunciation.

Universal Truths (I employ capital T) are precisely that, not particular individual or particular cultural truths. They are as Badiou says, exceptions to the situation of individuals in their cultural milieu: "There are only bodies and languages except that there are truths". To this he is careful to point out this does not mean there are Truths in addition to individuals and cultures. Truths are not transcendental either inasmuch as they operate in individuals and cultures while not being reducible to either.

Political dialectics today, unlike prophetic democracy, is a new democratic political activity engaging Truth rather than a repeating the failed political struggle of the last century. It is not an effort to produce an expressive harmony, a negotiation between multiple cultures. Subjects in the productive action of participation in a becoming of a novel "truth body" do so, according to Badiou, primarily through existing situational modalities of politics, art, science and/or love. What is more, he says, the individual in political dialectics is becoming more than herself in the existing situation, doing more incorporating truth than was possible with her proper ability.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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Revolution of the Mind (Amphibolies)

2009-02-02T13:43:00.016+08:00

February is to be a personal struggle. I have began the practice of making the first blog entry of the month something of a diary of my philosophical journey. Actually as I write this I am well into the future of the month and pre-dating the entry so it becomes somewhat of the truth written in future anterior. The fact is, there was (is to be) too little time and too much confusion to keep up with writing in line with actual events. I have been contemplating different scenarios for relocating out of China where I have been working for six years. This has been taking my time in its difficulties around personal life; while the confusion has been in the area of my study of philosophy - about which we get to the title of this entry, a title appropriately quite ambiguous.

First, as if it is February 2, I provide the usual re-cap of what happened the month before (all prior entries are linked at the bottom of this page). The one I did on the Obama Inauguration was fun. It was based on opinion pieces about Obama by a range of thinkers including Noam Chomsky (on Obama and the Palestinian situation), Paul Street, and Savoj Zizek; and on Alain Badiou's analysis of the electoral system of Western nations, what he calls capitalo-parliamentarianism. The point made was: that it is from within the new situation that something novel can arise, that we are given new and better scope for our personal decisions as a result of the election. It is a much more profound and performative requirement for us to take action once we are awake to the tragedy of the mere formal freedom afforded by the electoral system. The spectacular advent of Barak Hussein Obama in the existing coordinates of power may evoke at least a paucity of hope to be found not in the person, but in the gaps of the new situation he rules - openings for our greater scope of action; a critical analysis of the suppressed reality of the Palestinian situation may enable us to see beyond the illusions we are fed under the ideological signifiers such as "democracy"; but these are but examples within a greater systemic problem. A truly eloquent expression of the idea of world emancipation from the confines of the current "global" situation was described in a quote from Badiou:

"Contemporary capitalism boasts, of course, that it has created a global order;.. The ‘one world’ of globalization is solely one of things—objects for sale—and monetary signs: the world market as foreseen by Marx. The overwhelming majority of the population have at best restricted access to this world. They are locked out, often literally so... The price of the supposedly unified world of capital is the brutal division of human existence into regions separated by police dogs, bureaucratic controls, naval patrols, barbed wire and expulsions. The ‘problem of immigration’ is, in reality, the fact that the conditions faced by workers from other countries provide living proof that—in human terms—the ‘unified world’ of globalization is a sham... The simple phrase, ‘there is only one world’, is not an objective conclusion. It is performative: we are deciding that this is how it is for us.."

Most of January however, was spent on an initial reading of several articles about Lacan, newly published by the International Journal of Zizek Studies, about which I was only able to briefly comment. Most of my intellectual energy was put into beginning an i n-depth re-reading of Sam Gillespie's The Mathematics of Novelty which explores the core of Badiou's philosophy: ontology = mathematics. The writing was comprised of a two part series introducing how it is that these thinkers, Lacan and Badiou, can speak of engendering zero: calling forth or bringing forth what? Precisely Nothing. Engendering zero implies generation and bringing into being in relation with the Void as it were. Why and how the Void? That was and has been my question. The first part of that series, Engendering Zero (Part 1), resulted in a 10-point schematic about what I think I know about Badiou's ontology=mathematics and its relationship to his key concepts of the Event and the Truth procedure that ensues; adding importantly that, in Badiou's theory, the truth (small t) in situations is categorized as existing in basically four quadrants: love, science, art and politics. Situations are transformed following the Event, thus being verified as novel in an anterior sense, to have transformed. In the interim, the individual is functioning in relation to inconsistent multiplicity in the Truth (capital T) procedure by which the situation and the individual herself are transformed.

The second part, Engendering Zero (Part 2), anticipated where I am going in my thesis conflating Badiou and Zizek and Lacan: Being (ontology, being qua being) exists not just as our mere biological life (our situation), but is sustained by an excess of life (inconsistent multiplicity); the fundamental alienation / death drive (the fundamental Event) is a constant impulse to heal the wound (establish a novel situation). The questioning going on in me has to do with the perhaps repetitive and therefore non-novel resolution characteristic of thought itself in the thought of subjectivity as an ultimate name/place in the world. As I understand it, Lacan as per Zizek, posits this very impossibility of thought encompassing all of experience - that the subject as the thought of one's place in relation to the world is not the Subject. I want to put it this way: I know I exist and I know the world exists - isn't this our common experience as human beings? I mean this is the framework of daily existence. We can actually for a period observe this duality - and then experience that we forget to observe this fragmentation in the field of thought. Nonetheless, such observation provides an insight that the knower is the known in that the subject and its objects in the world are in the field of thought. We then say this is "my insight", however, and so perpetuate subjectivity (small s) rather than remain in fidelity to our insight. We continue to experience ourselves as a subject with external objects as comprising the total unity of life. But the fact is, that however we experience the subject there is some excess to the subject from which this experience is occurring - this would be the Subject (a name for no thing of thought - of Nothing, of the Void).

So began February. I continued since working on trying to understand each step in Gillespie's book, now I think I can write about it sometime up to about page 60 - essentially to the point where he has clarified Badiou's alignment of his philosophy with three positions in contention within modern mathematics: zero exists, one exists as an operation generated from zero, and thirdly that infinity exists. Its complex, I will be trying to understand it better for some time as it also requires gaining some familiarity with the mathematical terrain of the founding thinkers of these three positions: Frege and Russell, most importantly Cantor and his followers (Zermelo, Fraenkel and Von Neumann). For reasons I will discuss, I don't see myself getting back to the core ideas on engendering the Void for some time.

I continue to write as if its February 2, though in fact I am describing the coming month. It was refreshing to encounter an excellent video featuring a "debate" between Alain Badiou and Cornel West. I cover that in the entry subsequent to this one, so I won't go into it now other than to say its a hell of a lot more accessible than the mathematics. Its an inspiring presentation of political dialectics that is nonetheless substantiated by the formal mathematics - but we are spared the details of the substantiation! Political dialectics today he explains, unlike prophetic democracy, is a new democratic political activity engaging Truth rather than a repeating the failed political struggle of the last century. It is not an effort to produce an expressive harmony, a negotiation between multiple cultures. Subjects in the productive action of participation in a becoming of a novel "truth body" do so, according to Badiou, primarily through existing situational modalities of politics, art, science and/or love. What is more, he says, the individual in political dialectics is becoming more than herself in the existing situation, doing more incorporating truth than was possible with her proper ability.

Now we get to talking about what is to have been written in February that has not yet been written. The reason I have not kept up is that I am preparing to exit China after six years here. Its not clear where I will be living most of the time, although it will be a few weeks once a year in New York, Brooklyn to be exact, where I have a couple of grandchild units. The primary indication from my personal life situation is that New Zealand will be in the picture. With regards to my interests in revolutionary practice, however, I anticipate at least some initial time in making a return to Nepal. I was there in 2005 and have been following and writing on the revolution there since well before that time. Coinciding with my present transitioning is the perceived "deterioration" of the political situation in Nepal. I tend to think the general misconception, perhaps fostered by those in opposition to the revolution, is that the revolution happened and resulted in a wonderful opportunity for the Nepal Maoists to take part and lead a democratic parliamentary government. It is actually the case I, and many others would argue, that the real revolution has yet to occur. Obviously then, I have been concentrating on reading extensively on what is happening there now - such will be the topic of the post following the discussion of the Badiou video.

Now Nepal is clearly my focus as to revolutionary practice. What is becoming rather confusing and deeply interesting at the same time is the aspect of my theoretical learning. My reading has centered on Badiou and Zizek and this in turn has involved some study of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist writings as well as some study of psychoanalysis per Lacan. Zizek studies gets one into a wildly diverse range of topics and the deeper understanding of Badiou and Lacan is difficult for me and a long-term continuing project obviously. At the same time this area of seeming focus involves a diffuse involvement with other lines of philosophical thought that converge in certain figures of the past as well as other modern trends.

At this point I have been experiencing the topic of the Void as intimately connected to my feelings of mortality and also my immortality. This has drawn me to a growing interest in the juxtaposition of Badiou and Zizek thought to that of Martin Heidegger - who after all is about Being and in a mood toward death. Badiou uses "Being" as does Heidegger (Dasein).. there is distinctions but deep similarities. Void/Death? Its about the meaning of it, being or not, living or not. Then also there is meaning or not. Badiou and Heidegger are much about the important meaning of it and yet Ray Brassier, who has studied Badiou deeply and translated some of his works, is a nihilist. It seems, for him, the Void (Badiou, Lacan)may engender the Event (Badiou) and transform the Situation (Badiou) for Being-in-the-World (Heidegger) - but the Void is (according to Brassier) a mind-independent reality indifferent to to our ideas of meaningfulness; our way of making existence feel more hospitable, more palatable to our self-aggrandizement.

It is Brassier who uses the term "amphibolies" to describe much of what goes on, has gone on, in philosophy. By definition it is the use of words that create grammatical confusion in conveying meaning (like the phrase "They are flying airplanes"). Intuitively I experience they are talking about the same thing, but when Badiou, Zizek, Lacan, Heidegger or Brassier use terms such as being, void, death and so on - are they about pilots or flying objects? My God, its wonderful to be in the process of theoretical inquiry, this revolution of the mind. This is all for later writing if I can, but first is the area of practice: the revolution in Nepal.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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Engendering Zero (Part 2)

2009-01-28T13:36:00.026+08:00

As stated at the beginning of Part 1, the title of this entry refers to a reading of Alain Badiou's mathematics and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory - and specifically my reading Sam Gillespie's The Mathematics of Novelty; as well as reading secondary sources on Lacan, notibably Savoj Zizek and several others. How is it that these thinkers can speak of engendering zero: calling forth or bringing forth what? Precisely Nothing. Engendering zero implies generation and bringing into being in relation with the Void as it were. Why and how the Void? That has been my question.

Part I restricted the exploration to Badiou's ontology=mathematics. I think we made a minimal beginning (perhaps discussing about the first 13 pages of Gillespie's book). I will recap what was my personal concern, my learning as it were, keeping in mind this should not be conclusive - in fact there is a self-questioning going on:

(a) Epistemology encompasses the whole domain of thought itself, knowledge as such. Ontology would encompass the domain of epistemology inasmuch as thought, knowledge would not be separate from being qua being; however, thought and new thought are always coming into being and do not encompass what is not known . Being qua being is where thought is situated, namely in the Void.

(b) What I think I know is, if thought is the virtual past, thought of the new is not the new. I am predisposed to think any part of thought would be based on memory and therefore the past. Furthermore, would not the thought of the Void, which is not, be essentially a virtual past?

(c) The "count as one" is a reference to Badiou's application of set theory; the terms or elements of a situation form the set, are included in the set. One knows them as such, it is knowledge, it is thought in the domain of epistemological order. It is unified or consistent presentation.

(d) The term "Situation" is used to signify a set of consistent presentation. The thought of the Void as in (b) above is not the Void, it is part of consistent presentation. The unthinkable Void in nonetheless experienced as that which escapes the "count as one" - multiplicity within the situation plus inconsistent multiplicity are signified by the term "State".

(e) Applying the language of set-theory: new situations (consistent multiplicities) which are not, that which are possible because of inconsistent multiplicity, are possible being sutured in the power set of that situation because it includes the empty set as well as all subsets generated by its presented elements.

(f) Novelty for Badiou is engendered from the Void (a name for that in excess of presentation). We are to understand this with reference to his conception of the Event (which by chance occurs because it is possible). The situation in any State has its presented truth, the Truth of the Event (emerging by virtue of inconsistent multiplicity) engenders transformation of the situation, engenders a novel situation and a novel State.

(g) The Event then must be pure operation. The situation can be seen as a "subtraction" from the State. In the condition for the new is a "subtraction from the subtraction" - or a "plus-one", a novel situation and its truth. The Truth procedure inaugurated by the Event is an operation from the Void.

(h) This operation occurs in the experience of the Subject - the subtraction and the subtraction from subtraction are related to the two categories of human experience. The consistency of the situation and the State is one register of human experience, another register is inaugurated by the Event.

(i) We are all individuals. As such, we participate in a given State as an individual Subject in that State. A novel State then, would logically require a transformation of the situation of at least one individual. In terms of this blog and its thesis, the process of allegiance to Truth is a revolution of the mind.

(j) This idea of allegiance or fidelity in Badiou is a matter of atheistic faith. If indeed an Event occurs it manifests as a rupture in the situation, and the mind of the individual(s) subject in that situation, who for a period of time are directly acting in response to that rupture until the novel situation is established. That an Event has occurred is thus known in an anterior sense to have taken place. In the interim, the transforming individual is functioning in relation to inconsistent multiplicity.

The above is a very sketchy schematic of what I think I know about Badiou's ontology=mathematics. This was discussed in greater detail in Part 1 of this series. Important to add is that in Badiou's theory the truth (small t) in situations is categorized as existing in basically four quadrants: love, science, art and politics. The latter is obviously the primary domain of revolutionary practice. Important to Badiou and the thinkers featured in this blog is that the current political situation in the world at this time is established in the authority of capitalist power - and that the Event which is rupture in this situation is the advent of the communist hypothesis.

I think it is clear that this topic focus is on the nature of subjectivity, our personal relationship to the Void - which is also the focus in reading Lacan's engendering of zero in psychoanalysis - and so we turn to the content for Part 2:

I spoke a couple of posts ago, in leading in to this current series, that the original work of Lacan is not easily accessible to those of us who do not know French and who are not professionally schooled and experienced psychoanalysts. Badiou was deeply influenced by Lacan as is well known and he has been a secondary source on Lacan's system for me. Even more so I have read Savoj Zizek on Lacan and I will get to that soon enough. There are some other good writers I have been reading, also secondary sources on Lacan whose thoughts I want to reference - but also writings about Zizek on Lacan, which will be my starting point.

A very good introduction to Zizek is Zizek: A Primer by Glyn Daly. Having established Zizek's background and getting to his psychoanalytic stance rooted in the idea of Death Drive (itself rooted in Zizek's reading of Hegel), the article then says:

"It is neither a cancellation nor any kind of physical death but is rather a certain excessive impulse that persists beyond mere existence or biological life. As Zizek argues: 'Human life is never just life, it is always sustained by an excess of life' (Zizek, 2001b: 104). The human being is precisely that entity that is sustained by a "more than human". It is this "inhuman" excess - born of a fundamental alienation - which is the death drive and which is constitutive of humanity as such. Death drive is a constant impulse to resolve the gap, or heal the wound, in the order of Being; to overcome dislocation and establish the full presence of subjectivity by finding its ultimate name/place in the world."

So let me anticipate already where I am going in my thesis conflating Badiou and Zizek on Lacan: order of Being (ontology, being qua being) exists not just as our mere biological life (our situation), but is sustained by an excess of life (inconsistent multiplicity); the fundamental alienation / death drive (the fundamental Event) is a constant impulse to heal the wound (establish a novel situation).

The questioning going on in me has to do with the perhaps repetitive and therefore non-novel resolution characteristic of thought itself in the thought of subjectivity as an ultimate name/place in the world. As I understand it, Lacan as per Zizek, posits this very impossibility of thought encompassing all of experience - that the subject as the thought of one's place in relation to the world is not the Subject. Glyn Daly does not provide this gloss on Zizek with application of the capital "S", but otherwise what she says lends to my thesis:

"Zizek insists on the validity of the notion of [S]ubject (Zizek, 1999: 158-59). The [S]ubject is neither a positive entity nor an identifiable locus but is thoroughly de-substantialised - it is precisely 'this empty nothing' of which Hegel speaks. This is why the Lacanian mark for the subject is $ (S-barred, the empty place or void that cannot be filled out in an ultimate sense)."

So we begin Lacanian algebra with $ (S-barred). What follows in the article text is a continuation of the Hegelian theme:

"Subjectivity [small s I say] will be more or less stable according to context. Under the impact of a traumatic experience, however, we experience a certain 'night of the world'[Hegel] where coherence and cohesion become radically undermined: that is, the condition of subject."Here it is hard to say small s because we are speaking I believe of the situation under assault of the Subject whose domain is inconsistent multiplicity.

Glyn Daly then states the Lacanian idea $ (S-barred), having traced Zizek's evolution on the same concept:

"We might say that the subject gets caught in an impossible attempt to produce a framework of [S]ubjectivity (to find its name/place), but from which it is already ontologically excluded. In this sense, the subject marks the site where an irresolvable economy of lack and excess are played out."

I want to put it this way: I know I exist and I know the world exists - isn't this our common experience as human beings? I mean this is the framework of daily existence. We can actually for a period observe this duality - and then experience that we forget to observe this fragmentation in the field of thought. Nonetheless, such observation provides an insight that the knower is the known in that the subject and its objects in the world are in the field of thought. We then say this is "my insight" so continue subjectivity (small s). We continue to experience ourselves as a subject with external objects as comprising the total unity of life. But the fact is that however we experience the subject there is some excess to the subject from which this experience is occurring - this would be the Subject (a name for no thing of thought - of Nothing, of the Void).

My point is that the subject itself in the field of thought along with thought of that separate from the subject comprise a situation which is a subtraction from the State which would include the excess, the Subject. These are my ideas and I may learn that I am not seeing this clearly.. I want to find out. Returning to the text of the article we have the introduction of another Lacanian algabraic symbol "a" as she continues on "an irresolvable economy of lack and excess":

"This economy is perhaps best illustrated by the relationship between subject and its 'objects a'(objets petit a - objects small Other). Lacan's object a refers to the object-cause of desire: that which is in the object more than the object and which makes us desire it in the first place. It alludes to the originally lost object (the missing element that would resolve drive and 'restore' fulfilment) and, at the same time, functions as an embodiment of lack; as a loss positivised (Zizek, 1997: 81; Zizek, 1999: 107).. Object a bears witness to an empty structure of desire - a structure that can never be filled out. Desire is always elsewhere and alludes to an absence whose central reference is a fundamental void around which drive constantly circulates and constantly misses its target. Zizek refers to object a in terms of a Kantian 'negative magnitude': something that acts as a stand-in for Nothingness (Zizek, 1999: 107). There exists a metonymy of lack whereby any empirical object can act as this stand-in. Object a is doubly paradoxical in that it refers to an original "lost" object (of completion/unity) that never existed, and also in that its own existence depends on its very unattainability."

In Badiou we saw how what I have called "engendering zero" consisted in production of a novel State composed of a new relationship of consistent multiplicity, the situation, with inconsistent multiplicity, being qua being. The situation, with its modalities of love, art, science and politics exists as a consistent multiplicity, but always in relation to the possibility of the Event. It can be said I think that inconsistent multiplicity is that excess in relation to which the situation always lacks. Lacanian psychoanalysis appears to approach analysis by positing the human psyche as a situation, its consistency maintained by the subject $ in relation to object a. The death drive arises with desire for the excess which is unattainable, the from which it is subtracted. I am speculating and questioning, but this is what I make of the statement later in the text:

"The 'manyi identifications and forms of collective objective life are made possible through the persistence of the "one" of radical negativity. The infinitude of signification is the result ultimately of the one true signified...void.

Glyn Daly's article is indeed a comprehensive primer on Zizek. She goes on to discuss much more of Zizek's Lacan, then how that is foundation to his political philosophy. This effort begins with a sketch of Lacan's psychoanalysis:

"The persistence of radical negativity is what the later Lacan generically characterised as the Real: the ultimate 'signified' around which all signification is constituted and simultaneously finds its limitation and inexorable failure. As is well documented elsewhere (e.g. Fink, 1995), the Real is inextricably linked with the registers of the Symbolic and the Imaginary and together these form a basic triadic structure for all (human) Being. In general terms, both the Symbolic and the Imaginary may be said to belong to the order of signification. While the Symbolic refers to the (potentially) infinite uses of signification through language and symbols, the Imaginary refers to the particular ways in which signification becomes arrested around certain fundamental images of ourselves that offer a sense of coherence and place in the world. It is through the Imaginary that we achieve particular forms of identification and which enable us to resolve the basic question(s) of who we are for the Other; we "narrate" ourselves around certain basic images with which we identify and/or wish to project."

I have to leave it at that for now. I barely scratched the surface of Badiou in Part 1, and I fear I did even less in beginning to explore Lacan in Part 2. Its a long process.. I rather think I can spend the rest of my life adding parts now and then. My intention is to continue working through Gillespie's book while also going back to further study of Zizek's How to Read Lacan. Its really hard to clearly express how this study is affecting me. I can just say certain insight seems to be growing from it about both life and death. I closing I want to relate a story I heard from someone very wise I was lucky enough to know - the story has come to mind lately while writing these posts and maybe it will be obvious why.

The story is one about Abraham Lincoln. I don't know if I have all the facts straight but the point will be made anyway. Lincoln it seems was always fascinated by the question of whether there was such a thing as immortality. As he often had the chance to meet and speak with many great intellects, it was known that he would sometimes chose to pose a question such as "Do you believe in immortality and if so why? It seems he never got a satisfactory reply. One day however he put the question to a famous Shakespearean actor (I forget his name). The actor replied "Yes I am sure of it!" Of course Lincoln pressed him as to why. "Because I cannot conceive of nothing without myself as witness of that nothing." Lincoln leaps to his feet exclaiming "That's the philosophy for me!".

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Obama Slama Inaugurama!

2009-01-22T20:32:00.030+08:00

"Photo" by Juan Rafael Santos
Really, sorry if this photo conveys some cynicism.. it's not exactly that I am feeling about the inaugural extravaganza. I'll get to the picture caption and source shortly, but first I want to say my sentiments on the new pres are much in agreement with Savoj Zizek's comments in the article Why Cynics Are Wrong:

"The true battle begins now, after the victory: The battle for what this victory will effectively mean, especially within the context of two other much more ominous signs of history: 9/11 and the financial meltdown. Nothing was decided by Obama’s victory, but his victory widens our freedom and thereby the scope of our decisions. But regardless of whether we succeed or fail, Obama’s victory will remain a sign of hope in our otherwise dark times"

Dark times indeed. In particular the recent long nights in Gaza. The caption for the picture is "Obama Inauguration Thru Gazan Eyes". It was sent by a reader of Paul Street's (an article from whom will be cited below), who in turn posted it in a comment Street made on Noam Chomsky's submission "Exterminate all the Brutes": Gaza 2009 Chomsky produces again a very well documented expose of the criminal terrorism of the U.S.-Israel axis of evil. Some overview of that will follow, but sticking with the Obama Slama theme I cite this - Chomsky refers to a point a few days before the inauguration (to many days left for the attack on Gaza to actually be stopped given the opportunity prior to the new presidency):

At the United Nations, the United States prevented the Security Council from issuing a formal statement on Saturday night calling for an immediate ceasefire,' the New York Times mentioned in passing. The official reason was that 'there was no indication Hamas would abide by any agreement.' In the annals of justifications for delighting in slaughter, this must rank among the most cynical. That of course was Bush and Rice, soon to be displaced by Obama who compassionately repeats that 'if missiles were falling where my two daughters sleep, I would do everything in order to stop that.' He is referring to Israeli children, not the many hundreds being torn to shreds in Gaza by US arms. Beyond that Obama maintained his silence."

And so we see the Star of David on the ties in the picture, the pin in the lapel (where he forgot to put the American flag). But the striking feature is the bipartisan crowd. WTF are they laughing about? Well. I'm sure the photoshop genius had in mind the span of pres that has consistently vetoed world consensus on UN resolutions that would have ended the mutual slaughter years ago. Chomsky goes into that ruthlessly. The author of the picture shows more than he knows perhaps (I allude to Zizek's "unknown knowns" in his gloss on the amateur philosophy of Donald Rumsfeld - "there are the known knowns," etc.). The complicity of the Democratic and Republican parties in the ideological apparatus they have maintained with regard to the Palestinian issue is merely symptomatic of the situational fact that the U.S.electoral system effectively excludes dissent:

"An initial factor was the way in which the outcome affirmed the manifest powerlessness of any genuinely emancipatory programme within the electoral system: preferences are duly recorded, in the passive manner of a seismograph, but the process is one that by its nature excludes any embodiments of dissenting political will." from Alain Badiou - The Communist Hypothesis

OK, I confess, the quote is Badiou on the Sarkozy election in France, but as I have argued in an earlier entry, McBama? No, the Communist Hypothesis, the same applies to the U.S. and many other places that are part and parcel to what Badiou calls "capitalo-parliamentarianism

So there are two thematic elements in the set of my topic: first, the fact of our choices regarding the persons and their actions composing our governmental situation being merely a formal freedom of choice within the coordinates of established elitist power; then the particular manifestation of this ideological state apparatus (Althusser) in the political management of our choices involving the mutual slaughter continuing between Israel and the Palestinians. On the latter we return to commentary and excerpts on Chomsky from "Exterminate all the Brutes": Gaza 2009 beginning with his general thesis:

"Hamas is regularly described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.' One will be hard put to find something like 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus' -- blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel, which flatly and explicitly reject the right of Palestinians to self-determination.

As Chomsky painfully details, this policy will no doubt continue into the Obama regime. The dark nature of this rejection of self-determination, in the proclaimed defense against terrorism, is revealed as essentially a rejection of Palestinian society - the truth Chomsky quotes early in the article:

"Like others familiar with the region, Middle East specialist Fawwaz Gerges observes that 'What Israeli officials and their American allies do not appreciate is that Hamas is not merely an armed militia but a social movement with a large popular base that is deeply entrenched in society.' Hence when they carry out their plans to destroy Hamas's 'social wing,' they are aiming to destroy Palestinian society."

The invasion of Gaza just witnessed,a mass slaughter of defenseless civilians, a large percentage of them children, trapped with nowhere to flee, thus makes some kind of perverse sense to the U.S.-Israel elite. In fact, the invasion of Gaza, that may at first seem a radical new element of policy, is actually an extension of a long standing practice:

"In the West Bank, Israel can pursue its criminal programs with US support and no disturbance, thanks to its effective military control and by now the cooperation of the collaborationist Palestinian security forces armed and trained by the US and allied dictatorships. It can also carry out regular assassinations and other crimes, while settlers rampage under IDF protection. But while the West Bank has been effectively subdued by terror, there is still resistance in the other half of Palestine, the Gaza Strip. That too must be quelled for the US-Israeli programs of annexation and destruction of Palestine to proceed undisturbed...Hence the invasion of Gaza."

Chomsky goes deeply into a long history of explicit examples - the core of the issue is that the violence perpetrated by the U.S. and Israel is simply a matter of choice:

The reactions to crimes of an occupying power can be condemned as criminal and politically foolish, but those who offer no alternative have no moral grounds to issue such judgments. The conclusion holds with particular force for those in the US who choose to be directly implicated in Israel's ongoing crimes -- by their words, their actions, or their silence. All the more so because there are very clear non-violent alternatives - which, however, have the disadvantage that they bar the programs of illegal expansion... Israel has a straightforward means to defend itself: put an end to its criminal actions in occupied territories, and accept the long-standing international consensus on a two-state settlement that has been blocked by the US and Israel for over 30 years, since the US first vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a political settlement in these terms in 1976. I will not once again run through the inglorious record, but it is important to be aware that US-Israeli rejectionism today is even more blatant than in the past. The Arab League has gone even beyond the consensus, calling for full normalization of relations with Israel. Hamas has repeatedly called for a two-state settlement in terms of the international consensus. Iran and Hezbollah have made it clear that they will abide by any agreement that Palestinians accept. That leaves the US-Israel in splendid isolation, not only in words.

So it can be seen clearly from Chomsky's entire detailed account that there has been an on-going historical suppression, denial and brutal disregard of the political will of the vast majority of people in the world by the capitalo-parliamentarian elite of the isolated U.S.-Israel block. Can we really expect Obama to change this if he is a member of this elite and has been ensconced as pres by this very power structure? There is a hope, but there is reason to believe change will not come from the man himself; yet perhaps from the gaps in the more open situation of his regime. The real Obama, not the dream Obama many voted for, is something we might appreciate to some extent nonetheless; but a sober analysis should guide our vigilance. Such an analysis is provided by Paul Street (who posted the photo to Chomsky) in his article How Obama Happened: The Real Story - some excerpts and observations beginning with his general thesis:

"..the real story is also and equally about advantages of birth and socialization, remarkable ambition, astonishing good luck, and --- last but not all least --- the pursuit and landing of sponsorship from rich and powerful elites who rain down good fortune on their carefully Chosen Ones."

That Obama was less than truly disadvantaged as his propaganda suggests:

".. family used its more-than-negligible financial resources (his maternal grandmother was a banking executive) and family connections to given young "Barry" an elite private prep-school education at Honolulu's posh Punahou Academy. They paid for his undergraduate education at Occidental College in Los Angeles and Columbia University in New York City.. Young Obama matured amidst considerable cultural capital at home and school.. "

That Obama from early on demonstrated caution and calculation as a political player primarily following his self-interest:

"..Numerous accounts of Obama's Springfield tenure (1996-2004)indicate a calculating conservative and accommodating side that was more than consistent with the centrism that has concerned some of his current day liberal-left supporters..

..sponsored.. campaign finance "reform" bill..set no limits on contributions from corporations or the exaggerated campaign spending..

..joined Republicans and conservative Democrats and opposed much of the black Illinois legislative delegation by supporting the imposition of "work [punitive low-income wage-labor] requirements" on single mothers receiving family cash assistance..

..helping the insurance industry kill legislative efforts towards universal health coverage in Illinois.. worked to water down the state's "Health Care Justice Act".. the state's progressive health-care advocates had high hopes.. for passing a bill that would have made it official state policy to ensure that all Illinois residents could access 'quality healthcare at costs that are reasonable.' Insurers expressed their fear that such language would lead to a 'government takeover of healthcare.' By the time the bill became law, containing three amendments written by Obama, the legislation merely established universal healthcare as a policy goal.

Obama claimed to be a staunch champion of abortion rights. He strongly criticized a U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding a controversial ban on a late-term abortion procedure..In the Illinois legislature, however, Obama voted "present" instead of "no" on seven bills restricting abortion."

In description of Obama's calculations in being a low-risk progressive:

"..There is little risk involved in.. seeming to take.. progressive positions in predominantly black voting districts. Running and legislating to some extent as a nominal progressive in such a district would be entirely consistent with higher political ambitions hitched to a more conservative, "vacuous to repressive neoliberal" (left black political scientist Adolph Reed Jr.'s description of Obama in 1996) world view. After all, one has to show their capacity to win elections in order to be taken seriously by the power brokers who control access to more elevated elected positions.."

"And that's why Obama was nowhere to be seen around the great Chicago marches held against the actual (no longer just planned) beginning of the U.S. assault on Iraq on the evenings of March 19 and March 20, 2003. It's also why his subsequently famous October 2002 speech (an oration that tellingly called Bush's planned war "dumb" but NOT criminal or immoral)..

On Obama at Harvard Law School:

..where he utilized his willingness to give editorial power to arch-conservative members of the Republican Federalist Society to win election to the highly prestigious position of president of that school's law review..that came between his community organizing and legal careers.. consistent with the goal of making the elite connections required to make a serious run for the upper reaches of U.S elective office. It would prove very useful in the fall of 2003 and early 2004, when Obama received an early "audition" with the national money and politics class.. "

Street quotes extensively from John Judis'essay titled "Creation Myth: What Barack Obama Won't Tell You About His Community Organizing Past" - excerpts below:

"In truth, however, if you examine carefully how Obama conducted himself as an organizer and how he has conducted himself as a politician, if you consider what he said about organizing to his fellow organizers, and if you look at the reasons he gave friends and colleagues for abandoning organizing, then a very different picture emerges: that of a disillusioned activist who fashioned his political identity not as an extension of community organizing but as a wholesale rejection of it. Indeed, the most important thing to know about Barack Obama's time as a community organizer in Chicago may not be what he gained from the experience - but rather why, in late 1987, he decided to quit."

Then Street goes on to add to Judis' comments:

"..Also deleted by Obama's marketers was the fact that he practiced little if any actual "civil rights law" after graduating from Harvard. It appears likely that he spent more time dealing with mundane aspects of real estate litigation (including work on behalf of his early sponsor and "slumlord" Tony Rezko) than with anything related to civil rights.."

The next part of Paul Street's piece covers the creation of the Obama "brand" once he reached Washington as a Senator. He quotes extensively from, Tribune Washington Bureau reporters Mike Dorning and Christi Parsons in an article entitled "Carefully Crafting the Obama Brand." which details a history of Obama's marketing by and with his closest advisors - from this article:

"The way to get there, they decided, was by carefully building a record that matched the brand identity: Obama as a unifier and consensus-builder, and almost postpolitical leader.."

Street:

"It was an important and revealing report on numerous levels. The term "brand Obama" is of course deeply suggestive of the commodified nature of a U.S. political culture that tends to reduce elections to "carefully [corporate-] craft[ed" marketing contests revolving less around significant policy and ideological differences than competing candidate images packaged and sold by corporate consultants and public relations experts like Obama's well-known media manager and former Tribune reporter David Axlerod.. The image of Obama as a humble and hardworking rookie who got along with his colleagues across partisan lines was a crucial part of their marketing strategy.. They were naturally unconcerned about the authoritarian implications of the concept of a 'postpolitical leader' --- a commercialized trademark who would rise above democratic and ideological contestation on the path to ultimate authority atop 'the most powerful nation in history.'"

Street then provides a devastating enumeration of team Obama's deceit in the marketing of the pres:

* His false claim (in a speech to black civil rights veterans in Selma, Alabama in March 2007) to owe his biracial conception to Deep South Civil Rights struggles in Birmingham (1963) and Selma (1965). (Obama was conceived in relatively racially tolerant and multi-cultural Hawaii in 1960).

* Obama's false claim to reporters that that he asked Jeremiah Wright not to give a prayer before Obama announced his presidential candidacy (in December of 2006) out of a desire to "protect" Wright (Obama was obviously trying to protect his presidential viability).

* Obama's false promise to abide by the spending limits imposed by the public presidential election financing system if he ran against a Republic opponent who pledged to do the same thing (John McCain tried sincerely but unsuccessfully to take Obama up on his public financing pledge)

* Obama's false claim that his private fundraising system amounted to "a system of parallel public financing." (He actually set new records for corporate sponsorship).

* Obama's related and repeated reference to the fact that 91 percent of his contributions came from small donors - a technically accurate detail that deleted the more significant fact that Obama received only a quarter of his total money take from small donors, just like George W. Bush in 2004.

* Obama's repeated false claim in the Iowa campaign to have passed a bill tightening federal regulation of nuclear plant leaks after an emission incident took place at a Braidwood, Illinois nuclear plant in 2005.

* His recurrent efforts in the presidential campaign (especially in the primaries) to sell himself to progressive voters as a peace candidate, something that was flatly contradicted by his many brazenly imperial and militarist statements to elite foreign policy bodies (and by his political and policy behavior in regard to Iraq and Afghanistan).

Such an ambitious and calculated approach, highlighted in the end by a campaign of deception is still not enough to secure a run for the presidency. We come at last to what Street has to say that converges with the theses of this post:

".. how his remarkable personal ambition and skills brought him into the chance-narrowing realm of power elite politics. In the actuality of American 'democracy' , officially 'electable' candidates for top offices (like U.S. Senator and President) are vetted in advance by what the left author and activist Laurence Shoup calls 'the hidden primary of the ruling class'. By prior Establishment selection, most if not all 'viable' contenders are closely tied to corporate and military-imperial power in numerous and interrelated ways. There's little if any room for mere luck to propel a risky --- an excessively 'populist' or even left --- presidential candidate past the nation's corporate-imperial gatekeepers of power."

What ensues is actually an expose of the completion of the creation of a president by elite coordinates of power.. beginning with his selection for the seminal keynote address (when most of us dummies first heard his funny name) onwards:

"As Ken Silverstein noted in an important Harper's article in the fall of 2006, 'If the speech was his debut to the wider American public, he had already undergone an equally successful but much quieter audition with Democratic Party leaders and fund-raisers, without whose support he would surely never have been chosen for such a prominent role at the convention [emphasis added].'"

"A national corporate, financial, and legal vetting of Obama, with an emphasis on the critical money-politics nexus of Washington DC, began in October of 2003. That's when Vernon Jordan, the well-known power broker and corporate board-member who chaired Bill Clinton's presidential transition team after the 1992 election, placed calls to roughly twenty of his friends and invited them to a fund-raiser at his home. That event," Silverstein noted, 'marked his entry into a well-established Washington ritual—the gauntlet of fund-raising parties and meet-and-greets through which potential stars are vetted by fixers, donors, and lobbyists.'"

"'On condition of anonymity,' Silverstein reported, 'one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn't see him as a ‘player.' The lobbyist added: ‘What's the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?'"

Obama would demonstrate his "reasonable" nature over the next few years, helping himself become the most prolific corporate fundraiser in American political history. He received more than $33 million from "FIRE" --- the finance, real estate, and insurance industries ---- and got nearly $900,000 just from the super-powerful Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs... This was part of the deeper plutocratic reality beneath his deeply misleading claim to have developed 'a parallel system of public financing' during the presidential campaign."

So much for Obama the man, better though he may be now we are out of the Bushes. But really it is from within the new situation that something novel can arise - as Zizek said above, from the new scope of our personal decisions. This is a much more profound and performative requirement for us once we are awake to the tragedy of our mere formal freedom. The spectacular advent of Barak Hussein Obama in the existing coordinates of power may evoke at least a paucity of hope to be found not in the person, but in the gaps of the new situation he rules - openings for our greater scope of action; a critical analysis of the suppressed reality of the Palestinian situation may enable us to see beyond the illusions we are fed under the ideological signifiers such as "democracy"; but these are but examples within a greater systemic problem. A truly eloquent expression of the idea of world emancipation from the confines of the current "global" situation may be described in continuing to quote from Badiou:

"Contemporary capitalism boasts, of course, that it has created a global order;.. The ‘one world’ of globalization is solely one of things—objects for sale—and monetary signs: the world market as foreseen by Marx. The overwhelming majority of the population have at best restricted access to this world. They are locked out, often literally so... The price of the supposedly unified world of capital is the brutal division of human existence into regions separated by police dogs, bureaucratic controls, naval patrols, barbed wire and expulsions. The ‘problem of immigration’ is, in reality, the fact that the conditions faced by workers from other countries provide living proof that—in human terms—the ‘unified world’ of globalization is a sham... The simple phrase, ‘there is only one world’, is not an objective conclusion. It is performative: we are deciding that this is how it is for us.."

What we will do is indeterminate in Badiou's analysis. A repetition of the communist phases of the past is certainly undesirable, yet the hypothesis remains as Badiou defines it:

"..the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome.. a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away."

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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Engendering Zero (Part 1)

2009-01-11T11:07:00.046+08:00

The blog entry title refers to a reading of Alain Badiou, on Jacques Lacan' s psychoanalytic theory that was introduced in the last entry. As I said there, I am slowly making my way through Sam Gillespie's The Mathematics of Novelty (MON), as well as reading secondary sources on Lacan by Savoj Zizek and several others that were introduced. This is a long term project. I am sharing the journey and probably will make many wrong turns.

Zero gets defined as a mathematical element that when added to a number yields the same number. Historically, it took a long time before zero was even posited as a numeric element. It was hard to say zero should be in the company of that designating quantity. When we consider it is exactly zilch, zip,nada, nil and so on it gets a reputation for being at best a quantity of no importance. Indeed, the empty set signified as {} supplies not even a "0". Then to speak of engendering zero: to call forth or bring forth what? Precisely Nothing. The word implies generation and bringing into being in relation with the Void as it were. Yet these thinkers, (Badiou, Lacan, Zizek, and others al.) who I have come to appreciate from their political activism and historical analysis and/or other registers of thought, can, it seems to me, be conflated in their engendering of zero. That is to say there is plenty of scope for fusion and confusion. I need to understand. I thought this first post in the series should be mostly about what I have been reading on Lacan; but I will get to that in a later posting, first a bit on the beginning made in reading about Badiou's ontology=mathematics.

Alain Badiou: Being Qua Being and the Void

Badiou expresses ontology as "being qua being" and, as I see it, this is his engendering of the Void. When we consider the googled definition of ontology, we encounter reference to the nature, the meaning and the essence of being. One also finds the definition as having to do with presentation and representation of existence. I found it most helpful to look at the contrast of ontology with what it is often juxtaposed, that is in contrast to epistemology. Definitions from the net suggest epistemology generally means the study of how we know what we know - and the foundational sources of knowledge.

I may be wrong in expressing it this way, but whatI understand is that epistemology encompasses the whole domain of thought itself, knowledge as such. Ontology would encompass the domain of epistemology inasmuch as thought, knowledge would not be separate from being qua being; however, thought and new thought are always coming into being and do not encompass what is not known. Being qua being is where thought is situated, namely in the Void. I can try to trace support for my understandings from my reading of Gillespie in Mathematics of Novelty (MON); that is, as I work my way though the structure of the book I can't expect to convey adequately what is said there - but I can tell about what is said there and provide excerpts with commentary on my personal experience with the effects of the information on my thinking.

To be clear then, this series is a commentary on a learning process composed of studies on both Lacanian psychoanalysis and Badiouan ontology, finding the bridge from the Void. We are proceeding first on the latter for the time being. In telling you about what Sam Gillespie writes, the first section of the book "1. Conditions of the New" makes distinctions between the conditions of novelty for Badiou and those of Gilles Deleuze, one of the most influential and prolific French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Why:

".. Badiou shares with Deleuze the fundamental convictions that philosophy as a project is far from over, that being is inherently multiple and is irreducible to the tenets of language, that philosophical novelty proceeds from an event, and that, despite its different manifestations in the world, being in and of itself is inherently univocal." (MON pg. 3)

Yet being qua being has unequivocal meaning in Badiou distinctly different than that in Deleuze, and the distinctions also extend to the shades of meaning for multiplicity and the event. This is what Gillespie's writing is about in this first section of his book. The essential distinction to put it in terms of my own thesis here is that unlike Deleuze, Badiou engenders the Void. This creativity, the emergence of the new or novelty, the conditions of this are the question. Both Badiou and Deleuze do not see philosophy as seeking discovery of the eternal unchanging One, rather they posit being as pure multiplicity, states of irreducible differences. Instead of a unifying unchanging abstraction of oneness, they see continuous change, the creation of the new. So from here we learn how they differ in the practice of philosophy.

Sam Gillespie explains that for Deleuze the concept of creativity is engendered from..

".. a free act of the philosopher that operates alongside the concept's self-positing.."

and in this correspondence, the philosopher's..

".. subjective capacity to generate concepts is the concept's objective potential to exist.." (MON pg. 2)

The text the goes on to quote Deleuze on this ".. auto-poetic characteristic.." whereby ".. the most subjective will be the most objective..". What is most significant here for my thesis, congruent with that of Gillespie, is that though Deleuze departs from the point of multiplicity, this multiplicity has this auto-poetic characteristic; while Badiou does not assume the creative power of being..

".. but rather that to think being, we need nothing more than a formal assertion that nothing - that is the empty-set or zero - exists.. having in itself no descriptive properties or content.. then the being it formalizes is simply nothing, void. As Badiou puts it.. 'the sole term from which ontology's compositions without concept are woven is inevitably the void'.." (MON pg. 3)

The impasse between the two thinkers of the multiplicity, then, is precisely on the issue of the conditions of the new. Deleuze posits the multiplicity in its entirety and conceives novelty as its creative capacity of difference in repetition of the whole of the past. Problematic is the question of there being a novelty, a creation, if what is posited as new is repetition. Still, it would be something emerging from something - as opposed to Badiou's conception of something new from nothing. The beginning of resolution of this impasse, for me, came with the first line of the second part of the first section (1. Conditions of the New, II. Badiou's Novelty - following I. Deleuzian Novelty):

"On the basis of the above, Badiou is led to conclude that for Deleuze, 'the thought of the new plunges the latter into that part of it which is its virtual past'." (MON pg. 7)

The emphasis here is on the nature of thought itself. I am going to discuss what I anticipate based on what I think I know. Later we will see how Badiou will utilize the axioms of set theory launched from the axiom of the empty set, but for now I focus on the issue of temporality to which set-theory will return. What I think I know is, if thought is the virtual past, what Badiou may mean in the above statement is that thought of the new is not the new. I might venture to say that part of thought which he suggests exists, not the past, has particular significance. I would not attribute it to Badiou, but I am predisposed to think any part of thought would be based on memory and therefore the past. Furthermore, would not the thought of the Void, which is not, be essentially a virtual past? I take this thought forward in learning what Badiou says about being qua being and the Void. The next key sentences from Gillespie (for me) are a page later:

".. Badiou divides the domain of experience into two distinct categories.. there is the situation.. unified presentation (the 'count as one'); consistency (an order to the multiple terms that appear within it); and [secondly] representation."

I would relate this to what I said earlier about epistemology and thought. The "count as one" is a reference to Badiou's application of set theory; the terms or elements of a situation form the set, are included in the set. One knows them as such, it is knowledge, it is thought in the domain of epistemological order. It is unified or consistent presentation. The empty set {} is axiomatically said to exist. Presentation of a situation is symbolized in set theory as the order of the situation's elements {A.B,C,..}. As for representation:

".. can be said to supplement the situation.. to render the gap between consistency.. and inconsistency (the void that escapes, or exceeds, the count for one).." (MON pg.8)

These two categories of experience can be distinguished in set-theory by the axiom of the power set. The elements belonging to set are simultaneously terms of subsets included in the set - the power set is the set of all subsets of a given set. I provided a somewhat more detailed discussion of Badiou's application of set theory last month in the entry entitled The Stupid Christ (Part 2) wherein the following was quoted from an entry at the blog The Parallel Campaign:

“.. the Void as Badiou sometimes calls it, cannot be presented, but it founds all possible presentation. The empty set is therefore what Badiou calls a pure, or empty name, it is not the presentation of the Void but its name. Therefore inconsistent and consistent multiplicity are linked through this axiomatic naming through the application of the count for one, the empty set sutures the presentation of consistent multiplicities, which are not, to inconsistent multiplicity, which is: Æ, the empty set, is the proper name of being. It also has a strange universal property; it is included in every set but never belongs. Therefore every set represents the void, but it is never presented and its universal property does not amount to much, it is simply the representation of nothing..”

Novelty then, for Badiou, is engendered from the Void (a name for that in excess of presentation). We are to understand this with reference to his conception of the Event. In the above quotation there is depicted the action of suturing: new situations (consistent multiplicities) which are not, that which are possible because of inconsistent multiplicity, are possible being sutured in the power set of that situation because it includes the empty set as well as all subsets generated by its presented elements. The aphorism from Badiou:

"All radical transformative action originates in a point which, from the interior of a situation, is an evental site." (Being and Event pg. 197)

This procedure, which Badiou terms a "Truth" procedure results in a novel situation. Prior to the Event (unpredictable except as a possibility, arising by chance - aleatory) being qua being consists in the situation (which should be understood to be the power set of all situations or any presented number of elements known as a set), which is consistent multiplicity, which is the count as one; and in addition to the situation is the empty set . This is the "State" of the situation in Badiou's lexicon, the actual existing of the situation and the Void naming inconsistent multiplicity. The situation in any State has its truth, the Truth of the Event engenders transformation of the situation, engenders a novel situation and a novel State.

The Event then must be pure operation. The situation can be seen as a "subtraction" from the State. In the condition for the new is a "subtraction from the subtraction" - or a "plus-one", a novel situation and its truth. The Truth procedure inaugurated by the Event is an operation from the Void. This operation occurs in the experience of the Subject - the subtraction and the subtraction from subtraction are related to the two categories of human experience. The consistency of the situation and the State is one register of human experience, another register is inaugurated by the Event.

We are all individuals. As such we participate in a given State as an individual Subject in that State. A novel State then, would logically require a transformation of the situation of at least one individual. As Gillespie writes, it is from the ..

".. appearance of an event that something anterior to the presentative immediacy of the known or discerned [the epistemological paradigm I want to say] can appear.. events do not signal the advent of a truth; rather they inaugurate subjects who intervene in a situation to the extent that these unique individuals remain faithful to an event by seeing its consequences through to a restructuring of the situation.." (MON pg. 9)

Novelty then, is expressed in the anterior future tense as it is known to have taken place. In terms of this blog and its thesis, the process of allegiance to Truth is a revolution of the mind. This revolution, from its overarching register of Truth may also be taken to pertain to different types of situations while remaining inconsistent Void in being qua being:

".. there is the empty category of Truth (with a capital T), and there are local truths (plural, small t) produced in the situations that are unique to the conditions.. where these truths are effected. There are four such conditions for Badiou: art, science, politics and love.. No single condition can be determining for philosophical truth [Truth] in itself." (MON pg. 9)

Sam Gillespie's The Mathematics of Novelty develops its theses from this beginning. Much of what I read from and about Badiou concerns issues of art, science, politics and love; the energy from this attention derives from a revolutionary practice that confronts the coordinates of power in these four domains of human experience. It is a revolution of the mind as it gains insight inaugurated by Events that are to transform the coordinates of power in given situations. As Badiou writes in St.Paul: The Foundation of Universalism:

".. where the name of a truth procedure should obtain, another which represses it holds sway. The name 'culture' comes to obliterate that of 'art'. The word 'technology' obliterates the word 'science'. The word 'management' obliterates the word 'politics'. The word 'sexuality' obliterates 'love'. The 'culture-technology-management-sexuality' system, which has the emmense merit of being homogeneous to the market, and all of whose terms [elements of that situation's set] designate a category of commercial presentation, constitutes the modern nominal occlusion [occlusion by the existing coordinates of power] of the 'art-science-politics-love' system, which identifies [T]ruth procedures typologically." (SP pg. 12)

So as I say, this concerns revolutionary practice - and obviously from the above quote the questioning of capitalist power and its authority. It is enough in this beginning to have established Badiou's philosophy in the context of engendering zero. I think it is clear that this topic focus is on the nature of subjectivity, our personal relationship to the Void - which is also the focus in reading Lacan's engendering of zero in psychoanalysis, as we shall see in a later part of this discussion.

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Revolution of the Mind (Subject of Nothing)

2009-01-04T10:05:00.030+08:00

Reading and writing for the blog last month was characterized by rather divergent aspects. The writing aspect was focused on Alain Badiou's ideas on St. Paul as a revolutionary figure, an appropriation of his Christian radicalism as exemplary of Badiou's theory of the Event and the creation of new subjectivity, novelty that emerges in individuals acting in fidelity to the virtual Truth of the Event, verifying it, actualizing that Truth. This is expressed in the future anterior sense, the grammar of that tense. The commentary and poetry offered on the topic has been provided in the three part series beginning with The Stupid Christ (Part 1).

While the writing was going on about St. Paul, along with analysis of the articles from which I found segue, I started reading Sam Gillespie's book on Badiou's ontology=mathematics. One of the articles on Badiou's St. Paul made deep reference to Badiou's ideas on set-theory as was discussed. This exemplifies how Badiou uses set-theory to clarify, or at least to avoid verbal confusions about, his concept of the Event. From Gillespie's The Mathematics of Novelty I hope to get a much better grasp on the logic of set theory, founded in the axiom of the empty set, and the distinguishing unique qualities of Badiou's philosophical application of mathmatics. Here is an early exerpt from the book to illustrate what I want to get at:

".. Badiou will pose the mathematical empty set as the single term from which the most complex infinities are generated. Where we depart from then, is not an assumption that being exists as a creative power, but rather that to think being, we need nothing more than a formal assertion that nothing - that is, the empty set or zero - exists. If the empty set is a pure formalization of being - having in itself no descriptive properties or content of any kind - then the being it formalizes is simply nothing, void. As Badiou puts it.. 'the sole term from which ontology's compositions without concept are woven is inevitably the void'."

Perhaps it is clear why this month's recap of the blog state is subtitled "On the Subject of Nothing". Nor do I have a lot to say about it. The exposition of Badiou's philosophy in description of his minimalist mathematics by Sam Gillespie is 175 pages of dense and exacting reading. I find as I continue to read and re-read I hear what is said differently and my confusion evolves, not from incomprehension to understanding but from understanding to understanding that clearly subsumes the incomplete yet not wrong understanding of the earlier phase. Logically there is no right or wrong understanding of the void, as I get it, it is a matter of clearly resolving illogical comprehension of a formal description of being which is at stake.

To say anything clearly, I sense one may not speak really of the void, but only from the void. Formally, one can speak of the subject who speaks, but in regard to the Subject of Nothing, an individual could be said to know more than she knows - the unknown known. So this duel aspect of inquiry is where I find myself. The "Nothing" I am learning about in a formal sense by the discussion of the empty set and the subsequent axioms and mathematical concepts derived therefrom (the axiom of extension, the power set axiom, the axiom of choice - the mathematical concepts involved, such as the continuum hypothesis, the distinctions of membership vs inclusion, then the issue of decidability vs undecidable sets - infinity and the positing of zero as a number, etc.). This is the presented focus in Sam Gillespie's book. But of course, the "Subject" and the apprehension about that is also very much at stake.

I did last month also provide some commentary on Savoj Zizek as he his perceived and misperceived as a cultural theorist. In our daily life we are not (for the average normal person) at all concerned with ontology as mathematics. Our subjective life is in the cultural melieu, in our relationships wherein we see reflections of ourself. If we are proactive in cultural relationships we might therein be said to be participating politically, facing that way we are extending our experience of subjectivity to include others. Looking inwardly we may also understand something more of our subjectivity, perhaps this is the domain of psychoanalysis. For many of us, Zizek is a powerful resource for examining daily life, the predominating cultural and political events of our world today.

In the commentary I wrote, In Defense of the Deadly Jester, some speculation was provided concerning the nature of his close alignment yet difference with the philosophy of Badiou. Both Badiou and Zizek have deep association with Marxist-Leninist-Maoist lines; certain affinities also with Cantor, Frege, Godel mathematical thought; some affinities in their appreciations and interpretations of Plato, Decartes, Kant, Hegel and other major philiosphers; and perhaps most significantly they are both deeply influenced by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Now, it is from study of Lacan that one may begin to explore deeply inner subjectivity. Again, in this is another daunting but important personal goal - to begin to understand much more deeply what psychoanalysis is and isn't. Recently some study in this direction has also come to the fore.

Badiou and Zizek both make reference to Lacan often in their writings on political and social issues. Zizek has authored "How to Read Lacan" which I have been through a couple of times so far. Lacan himself it seems mainly wrote for psychoanalytic clinicians. He employed French in what is reputed to be at a very sophisticated level. Even in translation, what I have read of him is very interestingly and provocatively written, full of puns and allusions and of course rather obtuse to me having no training as a clinical analyst. I am not a scholar, an academic or a scientist - I stand guilty of getting my education as it is from secondary sources, like Zizek and Badiou. One thing is very clear about Lacan: truth is found in relationship to the Void. I think it is on this point that we see convergence of Zizek and Badiou - though of course we can find plenty of divergence from there. Another important secondary source on Lacan is Jacques-Alain Miller, a contemporary psychoanalyst - but also a very tough read. Miller is the son-in-law of Lacan and actually it was Miller who served as analyst to Zizek in Zizek's psychoanalytic training. Some taste on Lacan from Miller published in the major online organ Lacanian Ink - The Symptom:

"Relation of Subject and Signifier In effect, what in Lacanian algebra is called the relation of the subject to the field of the Other (as the locus of truth) can be identified with the relation which the zero entertains with the identity of the unique as the support of truth. This relation, in so far as it is matrical, cannot be integrated into any definition of objectivity - this being the doctrine of Lacan. The engendering of the zero, from this not-identical with itself under which no thing of the world falls, illustrates this to you."

I am writing here about Lacan, because it is at the first of the month I try to recap some of the themes of my own study and writing and what has been the nexus of this in the recent period. I can hardly hope to provide any more than some hint of the directions being explored. So I mentioned about Badiou and St. Paul, Gillespie and Badiou on the empty set, Zizek and cultural theory and finally Lacan because these have been recent things in the reading and writing. To close I just want to inform you that the quarterly edition of articles has not too long ago come online at The International Journal of Zizek Studies. The edition is comprised of six very interesting articles on the topic of Zizek and Lacan. I have made a first reading. Oh boy, more secondary sources on Lacan. Obviously there are a lot of different takes on Lacan and Lacan according to Zizek.

Perhaps someday soon I will venture trying to put some overview of what I have been learning about Badiou's mathematics of novelty and Lacanian psychoanalysis. These are difficult, but the theoretical struggle is part of what I need to engage with my practice - revolution of the mind as I engage the political and social/cultural world in which I function. This is foundational to analyzing and contributing to the exchange of ideas and actions in social revolutions ongoing in many domains - Nepal is a primary example.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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The Stupid Christ (Part 3)

2008-12-23T11:31:00.020+08:00

The poem "The Stupid Christ" has been a launching point for the previous two entries in this series, and like this entry, has been appropriated for segue to commentary on discussions by Marxists about religious faith. This discussion has specifically focused on what has been seen as the revolutionary message of St. Paul: on philosophical wagers on faith; not a theist faith, but an atheist faith. My investigations have been about Alain Badiou on this line in his very influential work St.Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Articles by a number of writers offering critique and review of this book are being quoted in these blog entries, using excerpts, and then extrapolations from the mind of the poet.

So far this has been speculation on the nature of the Christ Event itself, but the purpose today is to double down on the wager. This is what the Marxists are doing I think. The Christ Event is taken as a paradigm of what Badiou terms the Event, the genesis of a Truth Procedure that is proposed as the the essence of revolutionary practice. This atheism is not a betrayal of Christ, it is an expansion of His meaning for the subjectivity of humanity. To begin, from Savoj Zizek in his In Defense of Lost Causes (Pg 176):

“The first thing we must do is to fully endorse the displacement in the history of Marxism concentrated in two great passages (or, rather, violent cuts) : the passage from Marx to Lenin, as well as the passage from Lenin to Mao . In each case, there is a displacement of the original constellation: from the most advanced country (as Marx expected) to a relatively backward country—the revolution ‘took place in the wrong country’; from workers to (poor) peasants as the main revolutionary agent. In the same way as Christ needed Paul's ‘ betrayal ‘ in order for Christianity to emerge as a universal Church (recall that, amongst the twelve apostles, Paul occupies the place of Judas the traitor, replacing him!), Marx needed Lenin's ‘ betrayal ‘ in order to enact the first Marxist revolution: it is an inner necessity of the ‘original’ teaching to submit to and survive this ‘betrayal’; to survive this violent act of being torn out of one's original context and thrown into a foreign landscape where it has to reinvent itself—only in this way is universality born.”

Orienting Badiou’s interpretation of the text of St. Paul to Marxist revolutionary practice I will simply provide excerpts from two articles that most explicitly undertake this review and critique of Badiou’s book.

The first article is by the writer John Steele published at the blog Kasama:

Alain Badiou: Another Take on Revolutionary Theory

“.. Badiou’s background is within Marxism and Maoism. international communist movement as it had emerged that far), has reached a point of 'saturation' as he terms it, and that a new beginning – a new truth-process, as he calls it – is necessary..

.. Alain Badiou has developed a distinctive philosophical system His view of ethics revolves around understanding how to have 'fidelity' to powerful breaks with conventional thinking, and militantly pursue those breaks as far as they can go – in theory and practice.. such a rupture or Event is the start of a process which changes both the world and the people involved in it, and creates and synthesizes new truths. The Event is the starting point for both a Truth-Process and a Subject, in Badiou’s terminology. (The Subject is not the particular person, but all who participate in the Truth-Process.)..

.. Badiou is examining Paul as an archetype of militancy – as a person with ‘Fidelity’ to a world historic ‘Event’ and the ‘Truth-Process’ emerging from it (in this case, a resurrection [undocumented to be sure] and a certain universal set of messages that were unprecedented for their times.)..

Badiou says he wants to trace the connection, embodied in Paul,‘between the general idea of a rupture, an overturning, and that of a thought-process which is this rupture’s subjective materiality.’

.. It’s the connection, in other words, between an Event and the Truth-Process and the Subject which are both born out of it. The ‘militant figure’ is the militant of a truth-process and part of a new subjectivity. (Subjectivity in this philosophical sense does not mean, as in Maoist usage, being un-objective or anti-scientific. It means in this case, being a new subject (or part of a new social subject), a newly defined and awakened actor on the social stage and within the new process of truth-formation.)..

.. What Paul contributed, Badiou believes, is the insight and practice of separating truths (and truth-processes) from their particular historical context. Badiou opposes this to the contemporary practices of dissolving truths into forms of cultural, linguistic or historical relativisms.

..‘Capital demands a permanent creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenize its space of action’..

.. A new truth-procedure, Badiou believes, will on the one hand interrupt and disrupt the repetition of the same which is the logic imposed by capital. On the other hand: although the eruption of new truth is a singular process,‘its singularity is immediately universalizable.’..

.. In other words: a truth-process originates in a particular event, breaking out at a particular time and place; but the process is one which brings into being new truths which are universal, or which can be universalized. So the truth-process also breaks with particular identities and relativist logic..

'What are the conditions for a universal singularity?’It is precisely on this question that he thinks it’s helpful to look at Paul, because this is his (Paul’s) question. The question, rephrased in Badiou’s terms, is this:

'What is the relation between the supposed universality of the postevental truth (that is, what is inferred from Christ’s resurrection) and the evental site, which is, indubitably, the nation bound together by the Old Testament?’

This becomes for Badiou a general question about the relation between the old and the new, after the occurrence of an event.. event is singular and unique: it breaks with the boundaries and categories of the situation out of which it erupts. But the event marks the beginning of a truth-process, which is a process of creating universal truths.. But Badiou also wants to stress what is something like the reverse process: how the truth which is essentially universal, traverses the differences and particularities of the world:

'With regard to the world in which truth proceeds, universality must expose itself to all differences and show, through the ordeal of their division, that they are capable of welcoming the truth that traverses them.’

This becomes one of Badiou’s chief themes in this book: the way in which new universal truths ‘traverse’ or travel through and incorporate the differences and particularities of the world.

'It is in fact the search for new differences,’ he says,‘New particularities to which the universal might be exposed, that leads Paul beyond the evental site properly speaking (the Jewish site) and encourages him to displace the experience historically, geographically, ontologically. Whence a highly characteristic militant tonality, combining the appropriation of particularities with the immutability of principles, the empirical existence of differences with the essential nonexistence, according to a succession of problems requiring resolution, rather than through an amorphous synthesis.’

Badiou then quotes Paul from Corinthians I (First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, in the New Testament):

For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win the Jews; to those under the law, I became as one under the law—though not being myself under the law—that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law—not being without law toward God but under the law of Christ—that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men.’ (Cor. I.9.19-22)

Badiou says: This is not an opportunist text, but an instance of what Chinese communists will call the mass line, pushed to its ultimate expression in serving the people. It consists in supposing that, whatever people’s opinions and customs, once gripped by a truth’s postevental work, their thought becomes capable of traversing and transcending those opinions and customs without having to give up the differences that allow them to recognize themselves in the world.’

.. a revolutionary militant or cadre. You have been grasped in your life and activated by a great eruption in the world.. have entered into a process of synthesizing and recognizing and establishing new truths in the world, a process which is not just yours, but yours along with many others.. the truth has to be made real in the world, not by opposing itself abstractly to the differences and particularities of people and groups, but through them. This would be what the mass line is about, as Badiou is interpreting it here.

'From the masses, to the masses’ – taking ‘the ideas of the masses’, synthesizing them through the universal truth in a way that does not dissolve their particularity, and bringing them ‘back to the masses’.”

Orienting Badiou’s interpretation of the text of St. Paul to Marxist revolutionary practice I am providing excerpts from two articles that most explicitly undertake this review and critique of Badiou’s book. The first was John Steele’s article above. The second is an article written by Roger Whitson in the online publication Politics and Culture:

Alain Badiou's St. Paul - St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism

.. "Badiou's book forms a group with a number of critics, including Slavoj Zizek and Antonio Negri, who understand the use of religious language and religiosity in establishing a new type of revolutionary potential. For Badiou, Paul is not the father of Christianity as a metaphysical project. Rather, Paul is a revolutionary anti-philosopher of the event... Paul is a Christian insomuch as he participates in the Christ-event, insofar as he participates in the collective effort that politicizes the resurrection of Christ as something that can organize the multitude towards revolution. Baidou's book is a strange rethinking of collectivity.. a prophetic intratemporality that locates Paul as a contemporary figure currently helping us participate in resistance against oppression.. Badiou makes it clear early on that he cares little for the religious implications of his book..

.. 'Basically, I have never really connected Paul with religion. It is not according to this register, or to bear witness to any sort of faith, or even antifaith, that I have, for a long time, been interested in him’

For Badiou, the importance of Paul lies in how he makes us think about the event in general…

.. 'If today I wish to retrace in a few pages the singularity of this connection in Paul, it is probably because there is currently a widespread search for a new militant figure'..to use the past to produce a future against and ultimately beyond capital.. what Badiou would call a universal singularity with each believer participating in it.. believer forms a radical community that has no laws and is entirely subjective..

Towards metaphysics and capital, the truth procedure can only offer indifference… It is not as though Paul condemns Jewish Law, he just does not pay much attention to it. In this not-paying attention to, Badiou marks what could be the most potent revolutionary stance: an absolute exodus.. In-difference would not only mark a rejection of difference, but would also include a construction of being and the event focused around and inside of difference-in-itself. Difference would thus reject the static and standard identity networking of capitalism, and instead open itself up to fidelity as repetition, as a revolution that seeks a perpetuation of the event in its rejection of what Badiou calls the ‘automatism of desire'.. The static repetition of the law seeks an absolute harmony with earlier images of the event. This automatic repetition Baidou calls ‘sin'.. automatic desire can do nothing but prolong the reign of the law.. Autonomous desire is sinful, for Paul, not because it transgresses-but because its transgression is naïve, nostalgic, and impotent..

In-difference is needed for Badiou because it makes this non-contradictory difference possible in revolutionary thought. It is a non-dialectical movement that shatters any normalizing conception of difference as a networked reality under Jewish law. Fidelity to the event marks, thus, a constant moving away from the processes that would construct a singular truth or a singular law or even a singular difference. The event can only be called attention to in this moment of in-difference; and this in-difference, for Badiou, marks the only possibility for a revolutionary understanding of universalism..

The invocation of Paul by Badiou shows just how revolutionary this kind of thinking can be. Paul's image is already incorporated into an extremely complicated capitalistic apparatus, one that is becoming more and more global. Fundamentalisms--Jewish, Islamic, and Christian--all attempt to produce a radical alternative to global capital. By structuring their reaction so dialectially, though, fundamentalisms succeed only in reproducing the very structure they seek to disrupt… Love is the word Badiou uses to signify the opening of universalist revolutionary practice. This practice does not replace law with lawlessness, but sees itself beyond itself. The Law returns as a beyond of the law, the community returns as a beyond of the community, love returns time and time again--but beyond itself. Revolution, likewise, moves beyond itself in an act that serves to perpetuate what it is:

[T]he impetus of a truth, what makes it exist in the world, is identical to its universality, whose subjective form, under the Pauline name of love, consists in its tirelessly addressing itself to all the others, Greeks and Jews, men and women, free men and slaves’.. To be militant is to be universalist is to be a lover; it is to address oneself to all singularities in-differently. For it is within love, and it is here that we see yet a further affinity that Badiou might have with Che Guevarra and Paulo Freire, that the process of the truth event comes to be what it is: not in a static repetition, but in a absolutely dynamic mobility that revolutionizes itself in its perpetualizing existence.”

The Stupid Christ

when you felt forsaken
you knew us best..
it was after all then
you were a stupid christ

you were damned lucky son .
for that bit of the story
nailed that way . . .
complaining about it .

the guy next door knew more
you finally got it straight maybe
seeing him there .
hanging just like you .

dear sweet jesus .
you never left the cradle really
your ascension .
was barely an elevation

so when I used the mallet
saving an extra nail
pounding through . . .
both feet at once .

making sure to shatter
the joints in your wrists
to finish at last .
the manifest trinity .

not leaving one arm dangling
I was the worst of us
so my personal sorrow ended
thanks to you . . .

having finished .
what father wanted
completely . . .
for life eternal

for we the holy ghost

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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The Stupid Christ (Part 2)

2008-12-20T10:55:00.013+08:00

The title refers to the poem opening the first entry, a poem which is no way written in bad faith. We didn’t want to try to interpret it, but we did examine its mathematics. Still, it was hard to ignore it had something to do with religion. It ends up, though, that religion has had no small part in discussions by Marxists. This discussion has had a lot to do with St. Paul and philosophical wagers on faith; not a theist faith, but an atheist faith. My investigations have been about Alain Badiou on this line in his very influential work St.Paul: The Foundation of Universalism.

I provided, in the earlier piece, commentary on an excellent article by Adam S. Miller - An Interview with Alain Badiou : “Universal Truths & the Question of Religion”. It provides a detailed review of Badiou’s book and quotes from the text extensively. In breaching a concept of universalism, Badiou is actually leading to his special concept of the “Event” which is a central tenant of his philosophy. It’s far from a traditional concept of universalism; Badiou extends the meaning of universalism most pointedly in stipulating the role of indifference. However, in Badiou thought, this going beyond evident differences and separations does not mean the formation of a new separate particularity. His perspective is clear in his reading of the text of St. Paul:

“You have to understand that there is something in the becoming of a truth that exceeds the strict possibilities of the human mind. There is something in truth that is beyond our immediate capacities. In a new truth there is something that is beyond the established differences between languages and facts”

This is an astounding statement for me. There is the individual, as I understand it, which is subjectivity in the coordinates of the pre-evental situation (in the case of St. Paul, before the crucifixion and resurrection), the state of an individual’s mind. Not transcending this state, but within this state, is the potential of an expansion of the pre-evental situation by a process of faith; not in an external god, but in participation in the truth of a novel event in the universal field of subjectivity. As for Badiou, this is a vision of revolutionary praxis, action based on fidelity to the truth of an emancipating event. Badiou’s philosophy brought many questions to the mind of the poet:

Is the intuition operating in a poem universal subjectivity and does creativity in the poet exceeds the immediate capacity of his mind? Did Christ at last contract into the coordinates of humanity’s limits in his day, such that he and his Father were not one? In putting him to death did the protagonist of the poem initiate participation in the event of Christ’s resurrection? Was this an event for the eternal life of the Holy Ghost? How could the poet possibly know?

“The Stupid Christ”

when you felt forsaken
you knew us best . .
it was after all then
you were a stupid christ

you were damned lucky son .
for that bit of the story
nailed that way . . .
complaining about it .

the guy next door knew more
you finally got it straight maybe
seeing him there .
hanging just like you .

dear sweet jesus .
you never left the cradle really
your ascension .
was barely an elevation

so when I used the mallet
saving an extra nail
pounding through . . .
both feet at once .

making sure to shatter
the joints in your wrists
to finish at last .
the manifest trinity .

not leaving one arm dangling
I was the worst of us
so my personal sorrow ended
thanks to you . . .

having finished .
what father wanted
completely . . .
for life eternal

for we the holy ghost

Its no simple thing to understand the philosophy of Badiou, the treachery of language is indeed a barrier for accessibility to his ontology. He hopes to help us with mathematics: his well known aphorism “ontology=mathematics”. There is a lot of active commentary on Badiou at the blog The Parallel Campaign, this one from the contributor Brian proves very useful:

Badiou and Saint Paul

Ironically, here at this posting I am thinking about how to make Badiou’s engagement of St. Paul more accessible through his mathematics while Brian opens his entry with how he:

“..will attempt to make some of his more abstract and mathematical concepts more accessible through an engagement with Badiou’s own work on Saint Paul..”

Still, Brian’s objectives coincide with mine. What he chooses to call ”material faith” is the same dog in a different color, atheism. The truth procedure in fidelity to an event is inexplicable and free from the coordinates of current power, law, action based on faith in the truth of the event: an event which has happened, spoken of by Badiou in the unique grammar of the French language, in the future anterior, that the event will have been true. Brian explains as follows the two points he will examine:

“.. first, the initially strange sounding concept of the possibility of a material faith, and the consequences of such a faith, which is a truth procedure which founds a universal truth. Second, a truth procedure, which founds such a universal truth, is governed by a fidelity, or faith, to some event that has ‘happened’. The inexplicable nature of this event means that the procedure operates without reference to any rule, or law. These are two common themes within the letters of Saint Paul; the superiority of faith over works and that faith operates free from the law. In a sense, one of Badiou’s aims is to wrest religion’s final defense from it; the invocation of faith, and make it operate in a wholly material fashion, devoid of all theological reference..”

Brian continues with some discussion of Badiou’s anti-theological stance, but I already discussed that in the statement I quoted at the beginning of this post. What I want to focus on is the implications of “ontology = mathematics” as being all about the creation of novelty. So I continue with the excellent outline of Badiou’s application of set theory, what..

“.. Badiou succinctly calls his ‘wager’: that the One is not. Anything that counts for a One, or a unity is not, the correlate of this is that what is, is pure multiplicity, or pure difference. This is the root of Badiou’s anti-theological stance, which he equates [theology] with any system of thought that has as its fundamental ground of existence in some unity, be it a transcendent omnipotent entity, or the unity of some impersonal vital force that somehow permeates all reality..”

In the first posting on “The Stupid Christ”, we looked at a very careful distinction made between the “individual” and the “subject”. The unity is that of the subject that permeates the individual, or to look at it in reverse, the individual is superimposed on subjectivity. I am curious to know if this concept of superimposition doesn’t itself exceed the authority of Badiou! The individual in fidelity to an event is engaged in a truth process. The truth of the event is about subjectivity in excess of an individual human mind prior to the event. The process is an expansion of individuality in a situation that will have already been true. There is never anything impersonal involved.

Ours is a world of individual people, a multiplicity in the set of humanity. It is a unity in its superimposition on subjectivity. We experience we are individually different; I tend to believe in my own individuality as having a relationship with world unity different than that of Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ for couple of contrasting examples. What I think is that Badiou, in contrasting individuality with subjectivity, makes a wager not on reality as we experience it as being unity precluding any excess of subjectivity, but a wager that individuals experience only multiplicity in a field of subjectivity, subjectivity being a greater unity already true but exceeding the capacity of thought by individual minds at any point in time-space, in the coordinates of thought in other words. The Parallel Campaign article does not say what I am saying necessarily, or even what Badiou is saying, but that’s what I get in the passage quoted, saying Badiou uses..

“.. the very language of a wager on multiplicity, as opposed to unity.. this pure multiplicity is completely unordered and un-orderable, it cannot be taken as a unity or totality; it is therefore inconsistent multiplicity. That which can be unified, or counted as one, is consistent multiplicity.. Badiou states: ‘what must be said is that the one, which is not, exists solely as operation. Or; there is no one, there is only the count-for-one.’ This count for one presents what has been counted to consist as a unity, what has been gathered together to form a one, but this pure operation has, as yet nothing to operate on. It is the foundational step of applying this pure process of naming to inconsistent multiplicity that grounds all possible systems of related and consistent unities. This operation when applied to what is, inconsistent multiplicity, can present, as consistent, precisely nothing. All that appears, or is presented, is the pure operation of gathering..”

This above is the author’s very useful segue into discussion of Badiou’s application of set-theory, which continues on the one founding axiom that existentially asserts the existence of a set..

“.. the empty set axiom. All the other axioms state how to manipulate sets which have already been given. The empty set has its own special symbol Æ, but is in essence simply a pair of empty braces {}, nothing but the presentation of the operation of gathering, or drawing together as a one. It is also possible, within this theory, to show that all other sets can be generated from this one set through the application of the remaining axioms..”

What is said in the article after that suggests that Badiou uses “the Void” to mean inconsistent multiplicity. Consistent multiplicity is the illusion of unity in the “count-for-one”. Consistent multiplicity is what is presented to the mind. I read this meaning in that part of what is said:

“.. the Void as Badiou sometimes calls it, cannot be presented, but it founds all possible presentation. The empty set is therefore what Badiou calls a pure, or empty name, it is not the presentation of the Void but its name. Therefore inconsistent and consistent multiplicity are linked through this axiomatic naming through the application of the count for one, the empty set sutures the presentation of consistent multiplicities, which are not, to inconsistent multiplicity, which is: Æ, the empty set, is the proper name of being. It also has a strange universal property; it is included in every set but never belongs. Therefore every set represents the void, but it is never presented and its universal property does not amount to much, it is simply the representation of nothing..”

In the framework of my thesis, the relationship of the individual to subjectivity as I understand Badiou, the Void is the unknowable excess of subjectivity over the individual mind as yet not seized by the truth of an event or as yet still in the process of fidelity to the truth of that event which in resulting expansion of an individual mind is known as having been true. The Subject is the source of the “foundational naming” in the statement found in the article text:

“This foundational naming is a decision taken in the face of the void, an empty naming which makes consistent construction possible. All such foundational elements will always be essentially empty; therefore any regressive philosophy that attempts to understand itself through an ever more thorough examination of its foundations will fail.”

Another way I would state this: no matter how deeply we may analyze our individual self, my thoughts of myself, as distinct from the world I know, the thoughts of the world not myself, there is operation of the Subject in excess of my thought. Consider this in reading the text:

“.. In being capable of examining anything, one must have already understood the situation in order to orientate oneself towards what is being examined. The horizon of a situation cannot itself, as horizon, be bought into the foreground and examined: it is the condition of possibility for making things present.. “

This is where we get to the part of working from the foundational axiom of set theory, the empty set, to what can been known in its generation of additional axioms. In doing so it is very important to keep in mind what Badiou said about the empty set having a “strange universal property; it is included in every set but never belongs”. For example , continuing in the article, Brian offers us a very good illustration of the following additional axiom:

“.. although every element that belongs to a set is also included as a subset in it; it is not true that every subset is itself an element of the original set..”

The example given is a group of people in a room. Taken together they form a set, precisely of all the people in the room belong to the set, contributing a number “n” of elements that belong to the set. This set can, however, be divided into a number of parts such as the subset of men or women, etc.. Brian says correctly that the number of such sets computed from the elements that belong to it is precisely “2n”. Perhaps it would have been better to add that the number of subsets not only exceeds the number of elements, but always includes the empty set.

Badiou places key significance on subsets not belonging to sets but rather their being included in sets. I want to keep in front of us the fact that the empty set is also included as a subset of every set though of course it contributes no elements that belong to it. As one may suspect, I gather this excess relates to the excess of subjectivity over the thought elements belonging to an individual mind. We are examining not only the fact that not every subset is an element of the original set, but also what I see as Badiou’s assertion that the actually existing material elements of a set, its existing situation as he says, has inherent possibilities for novelty in the greater, but not transcendental, field of subjectivity.

Along with my caveat, the logic holds in the creation of a new term we will be employing “re-presentation” as discussed in the article we are reviewing:

“.. What a subset does, in relation to a situation, is to re-present a part of it, therefore the totality of such subsets is a re-presentation of the situation taking into account all the possible ways that it might appear..”

The set of all subsets, is called the power set of a set, the power set. Re-presentation of the elements in a set situation with their inclusion in subsets is strictly calculable as “2n”, but we need to consider that “n” may be a finite number or it may be infinite, such as in the set of all natural numbers. The finite is said to be determinable, it has an intuitively obvious meaning as to all possible arrangements of the elements in this situation. A set of infinite elements however is in-determinable. With Badiou, with his philosophical assertion of the possibility of the Event, situations that are in-determinable are potentially capable of novel re-presentation of the presented elements of the set.

Badiou considers any political situation as in-determinable, his is not a philosophy of determinism. I think this means the present coordinates of power, the law, may always be providing consistency, foreclosure against the Void, asserting measure to the un-decidable excess of the power set and establishing the political situation; but the elements of the political situation are always open to novel re-presentation. I am immediately reminded of Lenin’s distinction between formal and actual freedom. We may have formal freedom to act within the law, but actual freedom is a challenge to that authority. “For what?” will always be the question, but actual freedom, to be that, cannot be foreclosed.

How does all this operate in Badiou’s depiction of St. Paul? How does the text of St. Paul relate to Badiou’s Event? I return to the text of the article which leads into this discussion with yet another rendering of the mathematical concepts, the distinction between constructible and non-constructible sets:

“.. how can novelty be created, or generated? It is clear from the above model of how a consistent world operates that everything possible has already been accounted for. Badiou does not want to seek novelty in changing the situation.. Any such operation from ‘outside’ the current consistent world would be an unwarranted appeal to some transcendent factor.. One of the key ways of limiting the state of a situation is to only allow sets which have an intentional definition; they are sets which can be constructed according to some rule or law. The simple rules of construction which at a finite level can easily calculate all the possible permutations a finite set can be consistently modified to work on infinite sets, but it is no longer clear that this process of calculating permutations will actually exhaust all possible compositions of infinite sets. This difference is recognised by the two categories of constructible and non-constructible sets.. If a situation is governed by a state which only allows constructible sets, then a non-constructible set, although composed of the same material elements of the situation, will not be represented as a possibility of the situation, it will be invisible. The existence of such sets can only be asserted to exist; one must have a belief in them, and a faithful fidelity to the consequences that such a belief will deploy. This is what occurs in a truth procedure, stemming from the declaration of an event, which is simply the assertion that a number of non-constructible sets exist as possibilities of the situation. This fidelity to an event will force the language, or representation, of the situation to operate in a new way which will extend its usual functioning, such that it will begin to incorporate and make visible the consequences of holding such an event as true. The only way for this to happen is to investigate the situation element by element, and ask whether each element belongs to the non-constructible sets we are asserting exist. Every element must be investigated as the non-constructible set has no rule or condition that might include, or exclude any element in advance of an actual immanent investigation. The full sequence of these investigations constitutes an extension of the original representational range of the state of a situation; to such an extent that it can now consistently operate ‘as if’ the non-constructible set belonged to the representation of the situation.. By investigating an infinite set, element by element, it is clear that a truth procedure is an infinite affair; any finite portion of this procedure can constitute a subject. An individual will simply be the notion of someone defined entirely by the legalistic definitions deployed in the state of a situation, be it their physical materiality, their belonging to a certain community or country etc. In other words, an identity centred on some definable trait, what such an individual is capable of is to be traversed by a truth procedure; that is to be taken up by it, such that his identity is shifted away from a comfortable constructible identity and moves toward a faith in a non-constructible, unstructured event..”

Badiou depicts Paul’s fidelity to the event of Jesus Christ’s death resurrection as a Truth procedure. Brian’s article paraphrases Badiou’s book:

“Paul becomes a subject in his fidelity and faith to the event of Christ’s death and resurrection, and this is manifested in his wondering militant preaching of the Gospel, not only to fellow Jews but also to the Gentiles. The message must be truly universal, as the event held to introduces a number of non-constructible elements, which if adhered to as true requires that this ‘message’ must be taken to all elements of the situation. In this case the situation is that of social world of the Roman Empire, and the preaching of the Gospel must be carried out as a systematic militant investigation of every element of that situation. No group can be assumed to belong to this truth in advance, according to some condition such as the laws governing Judaism, nor can any group be excluded in advance due to any condition.. Paul’s relation to the law, and the message that Christ’s death and resurrection brings to the law. The discussion on law is taken up in Paul’s letter to the Romans, where the law is seen as death, and that which introduces the possibility of sin. This is the life of the flesh, and for Badiou is the simple animal life that we lead as mere individuals, living only according to specified rules and laws equates with the controlled representation, or state of a situation. Such laws can either be fulfilled or negated, and their very invention leads to a desire to violate and transgress them. Such transgressions do not challenge the law, but merely affirm their status and justify the need for their existence. Law and transgression form a neat binary relation. Both of which can be easily formulated in the language of the situation in terms of a condition, and the negation of that condition.. The event for Badiou, in this case the death and resurrection of Christ, is not illegal in this sense, the event’s non-constructible elements are invisible to the legal constraints of a situation, the law lacks the ability to be able to properly talk about an event; it can neither affirm nor condemn it. But also Christ’s resurrection is a resurrection into life. The death to sin and the life of the flesh does not mean an eradication of law and sin, but only that through a faith and fidelity to an event one operates according to faith and not according to law. One can only investigate a situation’s elements according to a non-constructible set if one holds that this set exists, as no proof as to its non-constructible nature can ever be given. What this new life according to faith does is to transform and extend the situation, to add something truly new, to create something new from the given material. There is no intervention, or addition of new material from outside, this novel transformation happens immanently through the faith in an event which disrupts the relation between the horizon of a situation and what can appear within that horizon. The resurrection and life according to faith is a true life, a life that is truly creative as it deploys the consequences of an event and transforms its situation. This life of faith proceeds in a lawless fashion, distributing its message in a universal way to the furthest reaches of a situation..”

It’s a poem, so its hard to say, I don’t know. Maybe the protagonist of our poem is one hell of a sinner, the worst of us, a responsible worker justified in the eyes of the law and completing what the Father, the Void, wanted completely. Maybe our sinner is a vehicle of the Holy Ghost, as we are in this situation, in our situation with death, with our exhausting the possibilities of sin. Maybe the ghost is the invisible element extending the situation, ending our personal sorrow. Maybe it’s a novel expansion to the subjectivity of Christ resurrected in eternal life as we act from faith in that truth, dying to the limits of our individual situation, its formal freedom. Maybe we are actually free not just clinging to our individual freedom alone, but deciding that we are the world, that that is how it is for us.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

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The Stupid Christ (Part 1)

2008-12-15T09:11:00.010+08:00

The Stupid Christ

when you felt forsaken
you knew us best . .
it was after all then
you were a stupid christ

you were damned lucky son .
for that bit of the story
nailed that way . . .
complaining about it .

the guy next door knew more
you finally got it straight maybe
seeing him there .
hanging just like you .

dear sweet jesus .
you never left the cradle really
your ascension .
was barely an elevation

so when I used the mallet
saving an extra nail
pounding through . . .
both feet at once .

making sure to shatter
the joints in your wrists
to finish at last .
the manifest trinity .

not leaving one arm dangling
I was the worst of us
so my personal sorrow ended
thanks to you . . .

having finished .
what father wanted
completely . . .
for life eternal

for we the holy ghost

One shouldn’t really comment on the intuitive realm of poetry, on what it means for example. Without interpreting one may simply observe a mathematical structure: 9 parts, 33 lines, 6 beats to a line, 198 beats, 1+9+8 = 18 = 1 + 8 = 9, the trinity remains in the trinity of the trinity. Boldly speaking though, this is a resurrection. The trinity is incorporated in the expansion. The law was three, six was a revolution, 33 another, 198 another for the complete situation of the poem.

Of course we are dealing with more than number. Some beats have syllables and these form words and words illicit memory associated with meanings, whatever meanings have been gathered by the reader, from experience with those words in our participation in humanity. Its not too great a leap to presuppose the topic of the poem has to do with religion. However, religion for the vast majority of us has been sutured to an ideology of transcendent operation on the human experience.. but that’s not what this poem is expressing, its not what was being expanded in my mind in its first manifestation some decade ago or in its various resurrections. The idea of a transcendent being, a god, is the theist wager, the theist faith. Rather, my wager is atheist.. but this does not preclude faith in the implications of the advent, or simply the event of Christ.

Presently the poem, at this the annual holy season, finds a mind engaged in political revolution and its really quite interesting to me how it plays. As will be discussed, the implications around the question of religion are of no small import to philosophy, the philosophical examination going on in Marxist revolutionary circles. This has found particular focus in consideration of the biblical text from St. Paul by a number of thinkers. I am reading Alain Badiou’s book “St.Paul: The Foundation of Universalism”. The present series of entries take up his ideas in some detail as discussed in several articles. We will be returning to the significance of mathematics as you will find, and probably I will venture unwisely into the meaning of that poem.

We will begin with an interview with Alain Badiou from which I have provided excerpts and commentary – of course I recommend the entire interview (which by the way has Badiou’s own opinion of the difference between his own project and that of Savoj Zizek, which I have not addressed here):

Interview with Alain Badiou: “Universal Truths & the Question of Religion”

Adam S. Miller, Journal of Philosophy and Scripture

Adam Miller has done such a praiseworthy job of analysis and review of the book. Early on he selects a number of statements from the first chapter, beginning with the way Badiou distances himself from theology (excerpts):

“My goal is only to read exactly what Paul has said. So my reading of Saint Paul is absolutely on the surface of the text.. does not involve faith or the church. It is, strictly speaking, a relation to the text of Paul and nothing else.. reading of Paul as something like a testimony about a new conception of truth. I read Paul not at all as a sacred text, as a revelation or something religious. Instead, I read Paul as a text about a new and provocative conception of truth and, more profoundly, about the general conditions for a new truth.”

The next part of Miller’s review begins to listen to what Badiou means by universalism:

“ ‘The Foundation of Universalism’ is a provocative subtitle.. to be more precise, the foundation of an explicit conception of universalism.. the formation of a new conception of what universalism is.. For me, something is universal if it is something that is beyond established differences. We have differences that seem absolutely natural to us. In the context of these differences, the sign of a new truth is that that these differences become indifferent. So we have an absorption of an evident natural difference into something that is beyond that difference.”

In breaching a concept of universalism, Badiou is actually leading to his special concept of the “Event” which is a central axiom of his philosophy. First of all, more from Miller’s review - quotes from the book about examples of the meaning of universalism and the role of indifference:

“A striking example.. the creation of a new physics by Galileo.. completely new conception of movement in which the difference between concrete, natural movement on the one side and mathematical analysis on the other side becomes indifferent. This happens because Galileo declares that the world itself is written in mathematical language. The old difference simply loses its pertinence.. Traditionally, universalism is conceived as the realization of a universal judgment about some real thing.. Universality as a judgment is something that you can find from Aristotle to Kant to analytic philosophy today.”

Badiou is not speaking, however, in the traditional way about universalism:

“My conception is, on the contrary, a creative one. Universalism is always the result of a great process that opens with an event. To create something universal is to go beyond evident differences and separations.. But the fact that with a new truth there is always something like the becoming indifferent of some evident differences is, in my opinion, very important. It is true in the example of Galileo. It is true in all the examples of a new truth.”

Applying this conception to a reading of St. Paul:

“Paul, of course, knows perfectly well that there are people who are Jews and people who are Greeks. But the new truth exceeds the evident difference between the Jew and the Greek. We can only completely receive a new truth by going beyond such differences. But this does not mean for Paul that they need to change their customs and practices. Instead, there is a becoming indifferent to this difference.. is certainly something like an anti-Semitism in primitive Christianity, but not in Paul. Paul is only saying that something that constitutes a difference in his world becomes indifferent in light of the new event”

This going beyond evident differences and separations in Badiou thought does not mean the formation of a new separate particularity, rather:

“the question of separation belongs to the question of universalism. There is not, in my view, necessarily a contradiction between the two.. The formation of a new particularity, a new closed group, leads exactly, for example, to anti-Semitism.. For Paul, there is certainly a kind of separation necessary for his universalism because we have separated ourselves from the old man. We have, out of this separation, a newness of life. But it remains a universalism because there is no limit to this separation, there is no closure.”

One sees in Badiou, his philosophy on universalism, this process generated by world revolutionary events a special conception of subjectivity – and he finds this as well in his reading of Paul :

“there is, for Paul, in the process of universalism, something like division but this is a division internal to the subject itself. It is not an external division between the subject and others, but a division within the subject. Every subject has to cross a sort of intimate division between the old man and the new man, between the power of death and the power of life”

Adam Miller in his review may not have entered into this concept in the way I have exactly – I mean the idea in Badiou that I have absorbed in reading him regarding the distinction of the individual and the subject of universalism. This has been intimated in the selections above and also in:

“.. there is also always a risk that this separation may become closed and turn universalism against itself. This is always a risk. This is true not only in the religious field but also in the revolutionary field.. But there is never the pure opposition of universalism and separation because there is something like the becoming separate of a universalism.”

There is the individual, as I understand it,that is subjectivity in the coordinates of the pre-evental situation, the state of an individual’s mind. Not transcending this state but within this state is the potential of an expansion of the pre-evental situation by a process of faith, not in an external god, but in participation in the truth of a novel event in the universal field of subjectivity. I think this what Badiou means when he says:

“You have to understand that there is something in the becoming of a truth that exceeds the strict possibilities of the human mind. There is something in truth that is beyond our immediate capacities. In a new truth there is something that is beyond the established differences between languages and facts”

I wonder if the intuition operating in a poem is universal subjectivity and if creativity in the poet exceeds the immediate capacity of his mind? Did Christ at last contract into the coordinates of humanity’s limits in his day, such that he and his Father were not one? In putting him to death did the protagonist of the poem initiate participation in the event of Christ’s resurrection? Was this an event for the eternal life of the Holy Ghost? How could the poet possibly know?

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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In Defense of the Deadly Jester

2008-12-07T15:59:00.004+08:00

Obviously I write a lot with reference to two Marxists: Alain Badiou, a much respected French thinker prolific over the last 40 years; and Savoj Zizek, who seems to be either loved or hated, a cultural phenomenon who has been described as "the 'Elvis' of Cultural Theory". I have alluded to but not addressed adequately as yet his last major work "In Defense of Lost Causes" and now already he has produced along with seemingly endless articles a new book "Violence" which takes up certain themes introduced in that prior work. Zizek's style is one laden with ironic humor. Just recently he was vehemently attacked by the left publication The New Republic where he was labeled "The Deadly Jester". The critical response to this attack from others the leftist community, Zizek's intellectual fans and those who may not consider him such a superstar, but nonetheless find him provocative and important, has been very interesting and fun to follow. I felt that some coverage of this debate would be informative and revealing as to why the "wild-eyed Slovanian" is such a draw.

Both Badiou and Zizek are of the Marxist school related to "structuralism" and the line of the political philosopher and Marxist Louis Althusser. Also they both are aligned with the extremely influential psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who made certain critical developments from Freud. Badiou doesn't seem to have much to say about Zizek, but Zizek more than infrequently launches his expositions from the ideas of Badiou, with his own inimitable twists. The relationship of Badiou and Zizek thought is very complex but over simply put: Badiou's revolutionary "Events" that occur historically, periodically, are vehicles of virtual "Truths" that in a creative process produce "Subjects" who in fidelity to that "Truth" engage in actions that give actuality to there having been the "Event"; while Badiou posits that such "Events" are not logically predictable nor can they be perpetrated by pre-evental subjects (since in his view such subjects do not yet exist), Zizek,as I understand him, engenders a concept of revolutionary practice by individuals engaging in recovery of as yet actualized truths that remain virtual following historical developments he considers lost causes worthy of re-invigoration. This is why, I argue, Zizek is experienced as so confrontational, why there is so much conflict around his work.

I think this is illustrated by the uproar around the article in The New Republic from which I provide some excerpts. Here Zizek's views on violence, though seen as cleverly clad in highly entertaining humor, are condemned as the guise of a "deadly jester":

The Deadly Jester - by Adam Kirsch

".. the only true solution to the 'Jewish question' is the 'final solution' (their annihilation), because Jews ... are the ultimate obstacle to the 'final solution'.. Zizek worried that the normalization of torture as an instrument of state was the first step in 'a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone.' This is a good description of Zizek's own work. Under the cover of comedy and hyperbole, in between allusions to movies and video games, he is engaged in the rehabilitation of many of the most evil ideas of the last century. He is trying to undo the achievement of all the postwar thinkers who taught us to regard totalitarianism, revolutionary terror, utopian violence, and anti-Semitism as inadmissible in serious political discourse. Is Zizek's audience too busy laughing at him to hear him? I hope so, because the idea that they can hear him without recoiling from him is too dismal, and frightening, to contemplate."

You should read the entire article first, but this excerpt gives you an idea of the author's position. We will get several more quotes from the article if you look at some of the replies in other publications by other authors taking issue with the allegations of Kirsch. Yes, Zizek is confrontational, some say obscenely so, find him "dirty" even. Zizek's "anti-Semitism" is but one of the Jester's deadly ideas according to Kirsch, but I thought it was a pretty good starting point. So it is apropos to start the counterarguments with the following from the progressive Jewish left publication, Jewcy (excerpts):

In Defense of Zizek

Nowhere is the problem with Kirsch's analysis more apparent than in his attacks on Zizek's recent book 'Violence'.. He tells his readers that Zizek means to tell us that "resistance to the liberal-democratic order is so urgent that it justifies any degree of violence." Not so. The author is very clear. He says that his intent is to expand our conceptual understanding of violence beyond it's more obvious eruptions. He wants to explain violence not as merely the act of violence with which we're most viscerally and morally aware (what he calls 'subjective' violence), but more thoroughly--as inclusive of the network of relations and circumstances that make that violence possible (he calls this 'objective' violence). Sure Zizek quotes Lenin's directive to "Learn, learn, learn." That doesn't make him a Bolshevik.. but the difference between an honest reader of Zizek and a detractor on a mission is that the reader would deal with what comes after.. that this point is raised primarily to discuss what's wrong with terrorism"

The article in Jewcy gives a very good overview of Zizek's ideas on the topic and at one point makes the definitive point:

"Through disparate and disjointed (often repetitive) volumes and lectures, the most unifying thread in Zizek's oeuvre is the fearlessness to say what dare not be said. To leave open the horizon for saying the unsayable and doing the unthinkable. It's inevitable that if you say that you have a fascination with the Jewish state as the living exemplar of the violence involved in all state creation, someone is going to call you a racist. So Zizek calls himself a racist first as a joke, much as a Jew who mocks himself by bestowing slurs upon himself before the anti-Semite does. Zizek and any serious reader knows the statement is anti-statist, not anti-Semitic."

By far the best analysis of the debate over the article by Kirsch is found at the blog Larval Subjects to which contribute a number of scholars. The text below links to one of the entries therein that in turn will lead you to several other pieces:

More Reflections on Zizek and the New Republic Article

"Žižek is a consummate ironist with all of the problems attendant to irony as a.. rhetorical maneuver Žižek strives to effect a sort of transcendence of reigning conditions and ideology, introducing new alternatives into the social system. In this respect, Žižek’s texts can be thought as not unlike Plato’s famous allegory of the cave (which Žižek often references), where the participants, the interlocutors, cease playing the ideological game (trying to name what image will appear on the wall next), and instead leap into an entirely different game.. I attempted to argue that where Badiou’s political strategy consists in the affirmation of an undemonstrable event and the truth-procedures that follow from that declaration, Žižek’s political strategy consists in trying to force the event, to produce the event, or in opening a void space within the hegemony of the ideological structure where new alternatives become available."

Another excellent blog I like to follow, Perverse Egalitarianism, has another view on the article, one by no admirer of Zizek, but nonetheless highly critical of the article:

The New Republic (Finally) Reveals What Zizek "Really Believes"

"An article from the next The New Republic on Zizek finally puts all things Zizek in their places and reveals the secret of “what Zizek really believes” - intrigued?.. He [Kirsh, the NR writer] was being dishonest. What Zizek really believes about America and torture can be seen in his new book, Violence Zizek does not have readers, like other writers, readers who might agree with one point and disagree with another, Zizek has admirers, we are told, who expect a certain type of Zizekian gesture every time they see his name in the print. I am not an admirer of Zizek, I can barely count myself as an attentive reader of Zizek, but certainly I don’t think that he is as useless and laughable (and dangerous) as Kirsch presents him to be. I am also pretty sure that this reaction to Zizek, however belated on Kirsch’s part, is exactly the calculated reaction Zizek expects and provokes. Why? How would I know? I’m not Adam Kirsch, I have no idea what Zizek 'really believes'.”

Well, that's a good one. But what about people like me, who do read and admire Zizek - despite my age I confess to be what somebody somewhere writing about Zizek's avid readers derisively calls a Zizek "fan-boy"? A really nice rejoinder from another blog, I Cite, in conclusion:

I Cite: Quick and Dirty: Zizek and NR

"So what, then, is worth considering in the NR piece? Our enjoyment of Zizek.. addresses a point readers of Zizek should acknowledge: our enjoyment. Do we make excuses for it? Or maybe do we acknowledgment as an element of all theoretical and philosophic work.. There is no such thing as pure reason; the very drive for purity produces a stain of enjoyment. To express this stain is not to excuse the obscenity but to acknowledge it, to grapple with it, to hear its call and feel its unbearable pressure.. We might laugh about it. This laughter expresses our unease and discomfort with those obscene dimensions of life we hate to acknowlege, cannot excuse, and must not avoid. The ostensibly pure condemn this expression, and use this condemnation as proof of their purity (a smugness long characteristic of the NR and its writers). But this does not mean that the rest of us can or should write off their remarks as not getting the joke. It's not a joke."

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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Revolution of the Mind (Pimping Transformation)

2008-12-06T09:08:00.012+08:00

The idea is at the beginning of each month I say something about what is going on with this blog. A few choice words will be followed by a convenient menu of the entries on the corners, the various accumulator sites displaying the goods, so the Johns cruising in their new Praxis (Janes too of course) can pull over for a look. Employing Madison Avenue - sex and money. Well, not the money part, but sex you can at least use words. Last month I used "Adults Only", this month "Pimping Transformation".

Transformation... "I can't give it away on 7th Avenue".. I'm shattered. I been talking Alain Badiou on the Communist Hypothesis:

"What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away."

All I wrote about, and most of what I read about in the last month was the Maoist debate in Nepal. Why? Will the Nepali Maoists manifest a novel form of communism in their vision of a people’s republic? There is nothing about this vision that a priori precludes the possibility of revolution against the logic of class despite the obvious dangers. We are in a completely different historical period calling not for a victory of the hypothesis as it existed and ultimately succumbed in prior phases, but as it calls for practice in the context of conflict between old and new theory in the modern context. I built up for three entries to making this statement. I made it in reference to a description of the historical development of the Communist hypothesis by Badiou.

What I am pimping here is something novel. Its a very strong argument, considering the evidence of history, that human nature exists such that it precludes the possibility of actualization of the Communist hypothesis. The only answer to this I see is that human nature is not in a finished condition, that it holds potential for transformation such that the hypothesis may be actualized in successive approximations. Nothing new in this idea itself - it may be the old saw "a better world is possible".

What is novel nonetheless is the nature of the new approximation. To be explicit, I am pimping a revolution that is something more than taking control of certain geographical regions through armed rebellion, though this may open an opportunity such as in Nepal, rather there needs to be a transformation of some critical mass in the minds of the people, a literal transformation of human nature. Given the current coordinates of global capitalist power it need be a global enterprise against imperialism. A taking of control to establish the opportunity by armed rebellion is obviously highly problematic. I am in fidelity to the revolution on an ideological basis.

"Revolution of the Mind" is about the task in the world today. A task Badiou asserts can occur "through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground." In an earlier entry on the reforms of the current Chinese regime the critical point was on Badiou's formulation for actualizing a novel direction for world communist activism: "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'..the proposition that the subordination of labour to the dominant class is not inevitable—within the ideological sphere."

At the beginning of last month I expressed some intentions regarding topics for future posts. Not knowing exactly, I projected it would surely include taking up themes in Alain Badiou's Logic of Worlds and Savoj Zizek's In Defense of Lost Causes and his recent extension of a certain line in the book Violence. Certainly the ideas of Badiou were deeply in play in the discussions on the Nepali Maoist debate. This was followed by participation in several of the commentary exchanges going on at various blog sites. At the same time I have been reading more but not writing as yet about Badiou on St. Paul as a revolutionary icon. Very recently I became involved in discussions started by a critical review of Zizek by the New Left Review. This has led me to the immediate intention of further introduction of Zizek, why he is an important cultural theorist and how his practice relates to that of Alain Badiou. Then also at some point it will be very useful for my own further understanding to go more deeply into Zizek on how to read the psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan.

Here is the history so far through last month:

▼ November (4)

▼ October (8)

▼ September (5)

The Maoist Debate in Nepal - Part 3

2008-11-30T12:22:00.011+08:00

Part 1 of this series of entries provided back ground on why there is fear the Maoists are merely engaging in a strategic process aimed at ending parliamentarian government and creating a communist party state. At the same time it was pointed out that in the ranks of the Maoists, is another fear of a reactionary or reformist “Maoist” controlled country that leaves Nepal subjected to an elite class within the coordinates of global capitalist power. The first aspect of my opinion was that those who are rebellious have already jumped to the conclusion that they have the right to rebel and it would be better to continue vigilance at this point about whether the path being proposed by Prachanda and Bhattarai is merely a quantitative accumulation based on the collaboration with existing parliamentary power or whether it engenders a qualitative leap in its application of Marxist theory (the theme of my analysis of current events in Nepal has been developed in the context of theoretical questions, specifically with reference to the ideas of Alain Badiou on Mao’s fidelity to the communist hypothesis).

Writing Part 2 coincided with a stunning development: announcement of a unified statement by the Maoist’s that, although they are participating in the institution of a democratic republic, the question of a single party people’s republic is to remain open. I went into some articles and opinion that were quite rancorous by those opposed to the Prachanda/Bhattarai line. The synthesis of the two sides of the debate, as I discussed, seemed a resounding defeat for these opponents. At the same time it was noted that the new position may prove problematic in garnering international support. As anticipated, the present entry is to take a closer look at the positions of those advocating an immediate move to a people’s republic, and also return to my thesis: the Nepal Maoist’s application of theory in contradiction with practice may prove to be an event ushering in a novel phase of Maoism, a new phase in evolution of the communist hypothesis that might be the kind of event anticipated by Badiou’s analysis of prior periods of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist history as indicative of needing a new manifestation of fidelity .

I will proceed in Part 3 by examining a series of articles by prominent Maoists who are to lesser or greater degree suggesting a theoretical argument counter to the new government’s performance, to the theory in practice as “Prachanda Path”. Most interestingly, we will see these propositions are not actually as “hardline” as they have been portrayed by many. In fact, it may become clearer why the recent synthesis has occurred. Finally, we may see the concept of “people’s republic” itself as subjected to a radical transformation.

The article below was written by Kul Prasad KC “Sonam”. He was one of 11 Maoists released from Indian prisons in 2006 during the negotiations of the ceasefire between the Royal Army and the Maoists insurgents at that time. Subsequently he has been the CPN (M) State Committee head for regional restructuring on the basis of ethnic autonomy for the Seti-Mahakali region. Excerpts are provided:

The CPN (M) Debate: Revolution or Reform

"Nepal is still in a semi-colonial and semi-feudal state. No drastic change has occurred; there can be no change in contradiction in the political situation until there is a fundamental change in the mode of production.. still the same solutions; national and sovereign independence against semi-colonial domination.. the feudalistic mechanism still exists.. everything is taking place under the global programme of imperialism.. we should.. build an anti-imperialist front.. strengthen the concept of Coordinating Committee of Maoist Parties and Organizations of South Asia (CCOMPOSA).. against Indian intervention and for a comprehensive front against American Imperialism.. develop the concept of struggle for national liberation.. not only.. point of view of building a united front, but also from the point of view of an ideological and political united front.. we have established the Federal Republic of Nepal. However, it is not clear whom the republic serves.. increasing role of foreign powers.. show that the contradictions are not being solved; rather they are sharpening.. have already reached the theoretical decision that the proletarian class cannot be victorious until and unless it develops the best military and ideological tactics.. debate is on ideology.. debate.. over Marxism or reformism.. forms of tactics because the previous movements of the proletarian class have.. collapsed.. when they have obtained power.. to analyze and synthesize it from the point of view of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.. does it fit with Marxism.. or has it served reformism.. continuation of the great debate between China and the USSR after the death of Stalin.. the dialectical process and method should be applied. ."

The analysis by “Sonam” is well balanced in my opinion because it does not condemn the prevailing Prachanda/Bhattarai line outright, yet it states clearly there has not as yet been a fundamental change in the mode of production. It is true, so far the contradiction is not being solved and the focus must be on this in the ideological debate and its dialectic with practice in the days to come. The first part of this series went into some detail on the nature of this dialectic according to Alain Badiou. Development of these ideas for the Nepal context is the objective of the present post. First, however, it is important to add to the context with some of the main concerns that have been voiced from among many text resources from those who, unlike “Sonam” have already concluded that the Prachanda/Bhattarai line is essentially corrupt – I summarize the points:

1. The policy of wooing support from the World Bank and other capitalist investors, including China, will ultimately go the way of many other neocolonial projects of the global elite class in many places in the rest of the world. Underdevelopment will be the result, not development: it will create the same result in Nepal – neoliberal colonization and preservation of semifeudal poverty.

2. Prachanda/Bhattarai practice is packaged as anti-feudal and in support of industrialization, but the real aim is to attract foreign investment in energy and other key sectors, only resulting in foreign, imperialist domination and exploitation rather than an anti-imperialist line.

3. Building infrastructure (roads, bridges, hydroelectric projects, etc.) will really be targeted to promote the colonial export of people, products and tourist services and to import foreign-made industrial goods to Nepal . Worse, better infrastructure will be employed militarily by imperialist powers to suppress the revolution.

4. The policies outlined in Bhattarai’s budget planning will result in the loss of revolutionary peasant advances in agrarian development initiated by their taking control of lands and property from comprador bourgeoisie and feudal landlords – a contradiction of the theory and practice demonstrated by Mao in China. Rather the new policy is about pooling domestic and foreign capital; about establishing credit-based capitalist debt and interest system that will serve instead institution of subjugated rural cooperatives.

5. These practices, Maoist in name only, will never lead to a people’s republic; they will entrench the democratic parliamentary republic of the reformist type with promotion of the purchase of foreign goods and consultancy – in short an elitist power system for the bourgeoisie class. This will be supplemented by an emphasis on technical education initiatives (though needed), but will neglect education of the proletariat about the imperialist roots of social problems.

Those points summarize pretty well I think the fears of the “hardliners”. Here is some of the kind of international press releases on which they base their condemnation:

Prachanda Seeks Mega Investment in Nepal

Prachanda: Public-Private partnership (PPP) Best Model for Economic Development

But wait. What is really interesting is if you look at what Mohan Baidya “Kiran” and Chandra Prakash Gajurel are actually saying in more detail. Kiran as you may recall is the prominent leader whose paper was synthesized with the position paper of Prachanda a few days ago – the result being a unified front which leaves open the question of an eventual people’s republic. Both Kiran and Gajurel had been pushing for an immediate move to the people’s republic rather than the continued collaboration in multi-party democratic republic development. Their leadership in this respect has fueled the “hardliner” perception and tagged them with this moniker. Further analysis shows that they do not consider themselves as “hardliners” in the sense they have been perceived. This may begin to make clear why the recent synthesis has been possible between sides of the debate.

First, consider the November 6 interview with Kiran I found published in Nepal Mountain News (excerpts provided):

Changing party tag an irrelevant issue: Mohan Baidya “Kiran”

"I feel that conspiracies are on to foil the Maoists’ established credentials.. specifically the revolutionary ideology of the Maoists is being targeted deliberately.. if one talks on ideological grounds he or she is labeled as a hardliner.. [There is a kind of competition among the Maoists and the UML in removing Maoist's name from the party tag].. As far as the UML is concerned, I personally feel that it is not even a Communist party.. However, in our case changing the party tag is irrelevant and illogical.. For us, Maoism is the party’s identity.. The political situation is such that it demands debates and discussions. That’s all.. we need to continuously rectify our mistakes as there is the concern among our supporters whether the party is deviating away from its prime ideological premises.. It is my belief that Democracy as such needs to be redefined in the Nepali context.. No compromise should be made on our ideology---this is what I believe.. [on his personal evaluation of the government performance].. It will only become a premature evaluation. We want to move ahead, yet we do not have the needed absolute majority. Old mindset prevails in the bureaucracy. Nevertheless we are determined in our set objectives."

Now consider what was said by Gajurel a week earlier. C.P. Gajurel, 59, is a politburo member and chief of the foreign affairs bureau of the CPN (Maoist) party. (excerpts):

Gajurel: on Multi-Party Democracy and Armies

"We feel that the performance of the government has not lived up to the party’s hopes. Because it is a coalition government, it hasn’t been able to work according to the policies of our party. . There is a mistaken belief that multi-party means parliament, the parliamentary system means democracy, and that no other form of democracy exists in the world.. But there are many political systems in the world that are not parliamentary but have multi-party competition.. In our multi-party system, there will be competition between parties.. It’s not necessary that, like in parliament, there has to be an opposition party and a ruling party. . In fact, there is no provision for an opposition in the interim constitution. Only after the Nepali Congress decided to stay in opposition did we decide to allow for it.. The state can’t just stop some parties from competing just because it wants to.. We haven’t deviated from our core ideology. . Our central committee took a decision to enter government.. it is true that this is a new exercise. Such an exercise hadn’t occurred in the world communist movement.. As communists, we define our party as one of unity in opposites. It is not monolithic. The different opinions in the party struggle against one another, and the party gains direction through this struggle.. The ‘Federal Democratic Republic’ line was definitely useful in bringing an end to the monarchy and establishing a republic. But do we now move forward or consolidate this form of republic?.. But has the Indian republic been able to solve its problems?.. We have to do better than that.. Now it is said that a ‘People’s Republic’ is a communist republic. But it is not communist. Neither is it socialist. It is basically a bourgeois republic, but it has many elements of socialism.. We want to move forward so that we don’t return to a feudal-type, capitalist-type of republic.. In that system not everything will be nationalized. Some elements will of course be nationalized, but private property and industry will exist.. bourgeoisie will be protected. The objective is to develop national capitalism. [on integration of the NPA and the PLA armies].. even though we had reached agreement in the past with the United Nations and other parties that integration would take place according to the Security Sector Reform (SSR) model, the Nepali Congress is bent on promoting the Disarmament, Demobilisation and Rehabilitation (DDR) model.. all verified Maoist combatants should be integrated into the Nepal Army (NA)."

Clearly, both Mohan Baidya “Kiran” and C.P. Gajurel in their recent statements demonstrate they are not Maoist “hardliners” in the sense they have been portrayed by those intent as Kiran says “to foil the Maoists’ established credentials.. specifically the revolutionary ideology of the Maoists”. Rather, as Gajurel says the Maoists lead by Prachanda “took a decision to enter government.. it is true that this is a new exercise. Such an exercise hadn’t occurred in the world communist movement.. ”. Yes, both Kirin and Gajurel are critical of the government’s performance so far, but Kirin has characterized this as nonetheless a “premature evaluation” – yet the “situation is such that it demands debates and discussions”. There is no dismissal of the fears of those who are indeed “hardliners” ready to revolt against Prachanda. As Kirin states “there is the concern among our supporters whether the party is deviating away from its prime ideological premises..”.; or Gajurel “different opinions in the party struggle against one another, and the party gains direction through this struggle..”. The real “hardliners” point to Kirin and Gajurel’s call for a “people’s republic” as soon as possible, to “move ahead” (Kirin), rather than “consolidate this [parliamentary]form of republic” (Gajurel). They are obviously thinking this call is a preservation of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line against Prachanda’s apparent reformism. How then are they to think of Gajurel saying the people’s republic called for “..is not communist. Neither is it socialist. It is basically a bourgeois republic, but it has many elements of socialism.. ”? Instead, this explains the capacity for the Maoist leadership to form a unified front.

The point needs to be made, I think, that as Kirin says “Maoism is the party’s identity..”, that when Gajurel says the Nepali people’s republic is not to be communist, this is a kind of hyperbole. It is not communist in the sense of communism’s prior history. It is better characterized as a novel form of communism in which as he says “there are many political systems in the world that are not parliamentary but have multi-party competition.. In our multi-party system, there will be competition between parties.. It’s not necessary that, like in parliament, there has to be an opposition party and a ruling party. .”. Is there not the idea that communism should be both egalitarian and inclusive of all people. Does it really necessarily call for the elimination of the functions of the bourgeoisie in a form that is not exploitive of others? Consider the definition of the communist hypothesis as defined by Alain Badiou that was taken up in some detail in a prior post:

"What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away."

The question remains. Will the Nepali Maoists manifest a novel form of communism in their vision of a people’s republic? There is nothing about this vision that a priori precludes the possibility of revolution against the logic of class despite the obvious dangers. We are in a completely different historical period calling not for a victory of the hypothesis as it existed and ultimately succumbed in prior phases, but as it calls for practice in the context of conflict between old and new theory in the modern context – Badiou:

"In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis . . . Which is no doubt why, as in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground."

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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The Maoist Debate in Nepal - Part 2

2008-11-28T10:53:00.017+08:00

This topic has opened with some background and opinion in the Part 1 entry: as for background, on the one hand are those who fear the Maoists are merely engaging in a strategic process aimed at ending parliamentarian government and creating a communist party state; while on the other hand, even in the ranks of the Maoists, is the fear of a reactionary or reformist “Maoist” controlled country that leaves Nepal subjected to an elite class within the coordinates of global capitalist power structures; as to opinion, the situation suggested by the current internal Marxist debate in Nepal, if my analysis is to be accepted, is that those who are rebellious have already jumped to the conclusion that they have the right to rebel, but wouldn’t it be better to continue vigilance at this point about whether the path being proposed by Prachanda and Bhattarai is merely a quantitative accumulation based on the collaboration with existing parliamentary power or whether it engenders a qualitative leap in its application of Marxist theory.

In just the last couple of days, the debate has to a great extent been resolved publicly:

Maoist Cadres' Conference Adopts New Strategy - November 26, 2008

"The six-day long national cadres' conference of the CPN (Maoist) ended Wednesday evening, adopting new strategy which.. is a 'synthesis' of separate policy documents presented by Prachanda and organisation department chief Mohan Baidya (Kiran).. party spokesperson Krishna Bahadur Mahara said the conference has adopted a slogan 'people's federal democratic national republic', which pretty much sums up the immediate strategy of the party. The national conference adopted the strategy after intense brainstorming over the documents of Prachanda and Baidya( Kiran), Mahara informed claiming that the decisions taken at the conference "have brought party unity to a new height". Leaders said the new strategy seeks to institutionalise democratic republican order while keeping the option of 'gradual advancement towards people's republic' open.. cadres gave a clear thumps-up to Prachanda's document, but suggested that leadership come up with a single document by merging the two."

This is really quite stunning – the actual announcement of a unified statement by the Maoist’s that, although they are participating in the institution of a democratic republic, the question of a single party people’s republic is to remain open. It is clearly a rebuttal of the position of some number of Maoist cadre, for example consider the article by CPM Maoist Central Committee member Nitra Bikram Chand “Biplap” on just November 24, 2008 (to which following I submitted a comment online):

Biplap on Differences Among Nepali Maoists

"The main bone of contention is whether the party should advance ahead for People’s Republic or stay in the stage of democratic republic.. Prachanda put forward a program to remain in the Democratic Republic.. the necessity of the tactics of democratic republic; there is no favorable situation to advance into the People’s Republic.. the need to synthesize the ideology.. Kiran disagreed.. proposal for a People’s Republic.. We must understand.. authentic political program of our party a new People’s Democracy. According to the validity of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the central question of the People’s War is to achieve people’s state power.. interesting aspect.. is Nepali Congress (NC) and the Unified Marxist and Leninist (UML) are more active in the operation of the state than during the period of the monarchy, when the PW began.. carried out barbaric repressions against us.. the People’s War was against even the multiparty parliamentary system."

Stefandav Comment: "Comrade Biplap has clearly stated the political differences and developed his argument on that basis. Essentially this argument is that the PW was and is contrary to parliamentarian theory. Obviously it is. How can we conclude however that Prachanda/Bhattarai have abandoned the goal of the People’s Republic simply because they are engaging a strategy of peaceful struggle vs insurrection and are presently using tactics that at this point involve multi-party negotiations. Sure, as such, these tactics are not strictly revolutionary in the historical sense, but if the goal is to thereby wither away parliamentary government and put an end to it this way, then it is also true that the tactics are not strictly speaking reformist. Has not history often shown us that it is problematic to retain the fruits of revolution without having really gained control of the socio-economic situation? Is it really not a leap of conclusion to think that Prachanda/Bhattarai, given their leadership roles from the beginning of the PW have suddenly forgotten or abandoned the goal because they want to drive a BMW and live in a palace? As we know, the NC etc. are highly suspicious they are simply engaging in a strategic process. Let’s hope so and be vigilant but not screw with that process too much. Also, let’s not forget that communism is not about division - the NC etc. has been and are mistaken but those people are still in our world and will be when stripped of their elitist class. Taking this into account is as I understand it the new phase of manifestation of the communist hypothesis as elucidated by Alain Badiou and introduced elsewhere in my blog in further detail, along with many links and references to this very important theoretical line. I don’t know, but I aim to find out if Prachanda/Bhattarai are indeed creating something novel - its important I think that the jury remain out at this point, and its certainly no time to be calling for the hangman."

So one might think I am very self-satisfied that the latest developments, wherein the Maoists have presented a united front in support of the Prachanda/Bhattarai line has occurred along with the explicit declaration that the people’s republic is still on the future agenda. Well, yes, but there remains some problematic aspects. These pertain mainly to the fact that some of the criticisms that have been levered against this development do, I think, bear consideration even though the united front was the best course of action. Additionally, the explicit retention of a vision for the people’s republic is likely to engender backlash among the other members of the multi-party coalition developing the democratic republic, as well as provide fodder to the international global capitalist power structure and related donor community for shifting support away from the Maoists.

First, on the latter problematic I have just mentioned: Prachanda has issued statements as recently as October 20 to the international community that seem obviously contradicted by the new united front of Maoist cadre:

Prachanda Advocates a New Type of People’s Republic

"Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal today repeated his party’s commitment to multi-party political system, saying that the ‘People’s Republic’ that the Maoist leaders are talking about is not similar to the system introduced by Chinese leader Mao about 70 years ago in China. Speaking to journalists at the tea reception organised by the CPN (UML) Wednesday, Dahal said his party is not against competitive politics, human rights and democracy. ‘Our effort is to ensure more active involvement of people in the state activities and empowering them to have their say in national agendas’, he added. He informed that a political committee would soon be formed to determine the future of Maoist combatants. Despite objections from other parties, including those within the coalition, Maoists have been insisting a group blanket merger between PLA and Nepal Army."

Also, Bhattarai earlier this month released a detailed budget plan. A review of the main stipulations is available from the link below point to an obvious need to integrate with and obtain international support if the plan is to be implemented. Not only is the stated vision of a people’s republic likely to hurt this process of cooperation, the fact that such close cooperation is planned gives argument for the Maoists who believe the democratic republic amounts to a sell out of the revolution:

Bhattarai: Speech on Nepal Government Planning

"The New Federal Budget from Baburam Bhatterai.. it’s a strange feeling reading the distinct analytical style of Baburam Bhattarai in an official government document, after becoming accustomed to it in underground sources. Memories from pouring over his PHD thesis in college come gushing back. Whatever ones opinion of his politics, this man is without a doubt the best intellect Nepal has to offer [included comment critical of the Prachanda/Bhattari line:] Like Prachanda, Bhattarai packages his policy as anti-feudal and in support of industrialization. But the real thrust of his and Prachanda’s policy is to attract foreign investment, such as into energy and other key sectors under the rubric of privatization labeled as “public-private partnership”. The practical consequence of this policy would be to strengthen the foreign, imperialist domination , plunder and exploitation of the Nepalese people and natural resources. It is clearly a comprador line rather than AN anti-imperialist line."

This rancor in South Asia Review begins to touch on the other problematic I mentioned above: some of the criticisms that have been levered against this development do, I think, bear consideration even though the united front was the best course of action. There are at least a couple of more articles I wish to review that give a more detailed argument from the Maoists who opposed the formation of a democratic republic. These I believe strike deeper into the theoretical differences. I will take them up in Part 3 of this series. There also I will return to the prescriptions of Alain Badiou regarding the new phase of Maoist evolution of the communist hypothesis he brings to light.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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The Maoist Debate in Nepal – Part 1

2008-11-24T10:28:00.012+08:00
The Maoist revolution in Nepal is perhaps the most “developed”, in a sense, of the number of Maoist revolutions currently underway on the planet. Unlike the various movements in India, the Philippines and elsewhere the period of armed conflict has come to an end, we hope. In 2005-6 when I first went to Nepal, having for some time been interested and writing about the revolution there, the Nepal Maoists finally succeeded in forming a coalition with several of the parliamentarian factions. The Royal forces, now the nationalist army, as well as the armed Maoists have stayed in cantonment, the Nepal monarchy has been dismantled and a new Nepal Federation has been established with the Maoists in majority control of the new government. A key issue remains regarding the integration of the army with the Maoists insurgents. The question in my mind then in 2005, as now, is if and whether the radical socialist policies envisioned at the onset of armed conflict can and will be implemented. On the one hand are those who fear the Maoists are merely engaging in a strategic process aimed at ending parliamentarian government and creating a communist party state; while on the other hand, even in the ranks of the Maoists, is the fear of a reactionary or reformist “Maoist” controlled country that leaves Nepal subjected to an elite class within the coordinates of global capitalist power structures.

My interest here is to give a snapshot of the current events in Nepal in the context of theoretical questions, specifically with reference to the ideas of Alain Badiou on Mao’s fidelity to the communist hypothesis. I was set in motion on this blog entry upon reading the Maoist Prime Minister and leader of the armed revolution Prachanda’s latest comments about his party’s commitment to multi-party political system. He says that the ‘People’s Republic’ that the Maoist leaders are talking about is not similar to the system introduced by Chinese leader Mao in China 70 years ago – he has consistently stated that Maoism in Nepal is a novel development in communist theory. Also, the Maoists leading intellectual and co-leader of the revolution, Baburam Bhattarai, now the Finance Minister, just published his budget proposal with his theoretical commentary. I will be going into these articles and providing links later. I will also be analyzing some commentary and opposition to the Prachanda/Bhattarai line by other prominent Nepalese Maoists. As stated, I am looking at the debate with reference to the thought of Alain Badiou.

As often happens, when one is thinking about a particular issue and spending a lot of time reading on the net what you have found before and what others are finding, something presents itself. One of the Facebook Marxists posted a translation from Badiou which I found right to the mark:

An Essential Philosophical Thesis: "It Is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries"

The first set of key concepts (I am providing excerpts from the article) proposed by Badiou concern the interpenetration of Marxist theory and practice, which I think go to the heart of the matter in the current debate within the school of Nepal’s Maoists:

“.. This phrase[Mao: ‘It is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries’], which appears so simple, is at the same time rather mysterious: how is it conceivable that Marx's enormous theoretical enterprise, with its ceaselessly and scrupulously reworked and recast analyses, can be concentrated in a single maxim.. And what is this maxim? Are we dealing with an observation, summarizing the Marxist analysis of objective contradictions, the ineluctable confrontation of revolution and counterrevolution? Is it a directive oriented toward the subjective mobilization of revolutionary forces? Is Marxist truth the following: one rebels, one is right? Or is it rather: one must rebel? The two, perhaps, and even more the spiraling movement from the one to the other, real rebellion (objective force) being enriched and returning on itself in the consciousness of its rightness or reason (subjective force).. every Marxist statement is—in a single, dividing movement—observation and directive. As a concentrate of real practice, it equals its movement in order to return to it. Since all that is draws its being only from its becoming, equally, theory as knowledge of what is has being only by moving toward that of which it is the theory.. Mao Zedong's sentence clearly situates rebellion as the originary place of correct ideas, and reactionaries as those whose destruction is legitimated by theory. Mao's sentence situates Marxist truth within the unity of theory and practice.."

Later, if you read the full articles I will briefly examine from the Maoist factions in Nepal, I think you will see that what is essentially at stake is the question of whether the line of “Prachanda Path” as it has come to be known is indeed an “objective force” interpenetrated with a novel theoretical development, a “subjective force” – or is the current course of action by the new government, as alleged by its internal critics, a revisionist or reformist infidelity to Maoist thought. Let’s continue with Badiou on the Marxist theory of knowledge in its historical development:

“.. There is hardly a truer and more profound statement in Hegel than the following: ‘The absolute Idea has turned out to be the identity of the theoretical Idea and the practical Idea. Each of these by itself is still one-sided’ It is the uninterrupted and divided process of being and the act. Lenin salutes this enthusiastically: ‘The unity of the theoretical idea (of knowledge) and of practice.. and this unity precisely in the theory of knowledge, for the resulting sum is the "absolute idea’ .. knowledge, as theory, is (dialectically) opposed to practice.. the inner nature of the process of knowledge is constituted by the theory/practice contradiction.. Consider Mao, ‘Where Do Correct Ideas Come From? Often, correct knowledge can be arrived at only after many repetitions of the process . . . leading from practice to knowledge and then back to practice. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge, the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge’ ..To stabilize our vocabulary, and remain within the tradition, we will call ‘theory’ the term in the theory/practice contradiction whose overall movement will be the process of ‘knowledge’.."

Again, I am trying to apply Badiou’s thesis "It Is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries" in examining what the theoretical debate in Nepal means. It must at least mean a process of determining whether or not the path of Prachanda is a revisionist or reformist deviation. Likewise it is a question of whether or not the critics of what they call the Prachanda-Bhattarai clique have the right to rebel. The situation suggested by the current internal Marxist debate in Nepal, if my analysis is to be accepted, is that those who are rebellious have already jumped to the conclusion that they have the right to rebel. I am asking, wouldn’t it be better to continue vigilance at this point about whether the path being proposed by Prachanda and Bhattarai is merely a quantitative accumulation based on the collaboration with existing parliamentary power or whether it engenders a qualitative leap in its application of Marxist theory. To understand what this suggestion means I conclude on Badiou:

“On this basis [Badiou’s definition of “theory” as the movement of theory/practice contradiction as a process of knowledge] we may expose the reactionary illusion entertained by those who imagine they can circumvent the strategic thesis of the primacy of practice. It is clear that whoever is not within the real revolutionary movement, whoever is not practically internal to the rebellion against the reactionaries, knows nothing, even if he theorizes.. Mao Zedong did indeed affirm that in the theory/practice contradiction—that is, in a phase of the real process—theory could temporarily play the main role: ‘The creation and advocacy of revolutionary theory plays the principal and decisive role in those times of which Lenin said, 'Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement' ‘ . Does this mean that, at that moment, theory amounts to an intrinsic revolutionary possibility, that pure "Marxist theoreticians" can and must emerge? Absolutely not. It means that, in the theory/practice contradiction that constitutes the process of knowledge, theory is the principal aspect of the contradiction; that the systematization of practical revolutionary experiences is what allows one to advance; that it is useless to continue quantitatively to accumulate these experiences, to repeat them, because what is on the agenda is the qualitative leap, the rational synthesis immediately followed by its application, that is, its verification..“

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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Revolution of the Mind (Adults Only)

2008-11-04T10:30:00.016+08:00
A few words here at the beginning of the third month of this blog: on the theoretical emphasis, text resources and the nature of its content. There has been a n "interesting" development. I find from my work station in Beijing I can no longer access my site because of censorship. As a result many of my links will come to you via a proxy server and anyone living in China must be referred to my blog by proxy such as here. I wish the regime could see I am actually working for Maoist China.

I just changed the title to "Stefandav - Revolution of the Mind". This is a reference to the idea from Alain Badiou that the next phase of fidelity to the communist hypothesis, a third stage in its historical development, is taking place - "it will involve a new relation between the political movement and the level of the ideological". The initial introduction to the idea and links to text resources was provided at the entry McBama? No, the Communist Hypothesis. As this suggests, the nature of the blog content includes the use of contemporary events references as a vehicle to introduce theoretical emphasis. Likewise, Badiou text quotes and links can be found in entries concerning the current financial crisis and various contemporary revolutionary movements (most notably Chinese People: The Regime is Corrupt) . Currently much discussion among Marxists continues about the ideas in his latest book Logics of Worlds.

The other contemporary Marxist thinker prevalently featured throughout the entries is Savoj Zizek. Badiou and Zizek are closely aligned in the line of Marxism through Louis Althusser (links to his Marxist archive)and the psychoanalytic school of Jacques Lacan. While Badiou provides a theory rooted in his notion of "Event" and the required subsequent allegiance to the "Truth" revealed therein whereby a new world becomes actual from its initial virtual state (also presented in his minimalist mathematics, ontology=mathematics); Zizek, in his own way emphasizes a direction in fidelity to the communist hypothesis which seeks to recover what should not be lost - as detailed in his latest major work In Defence of Lost Causes. Zizek is an inexhaustable source of analysis of contemporary events accross many disaplines within the arts as well as within political science and philosophy and, psychoanalysis. His inimitable speaking style may be viewed in several videos embedded in the Stefandav TV widget at the sidebar ( I just added a new video interview on his just published small book, Violence.

I don't know really what specific findings in ongoing review of contemporary events and writings will inspire posts in the coming days. Besides the themes recently introduced from Badiou, on my mind are certain themes in Zizek's "Lost Causes" I read for the first time about a month ago. This includes especially his projections regarding world antagonisms that are most likely to be sources of revolutionary praxis internal and external to both society and nature: internal to society is the complex legal problems of intellectual property; external to society is the events developing in the slums juxtaposed to gated communities; internal to nature are the profound ethical issues of genetic engineering; and external to nature from the register of ecology, the world-ending threat of sustainable development.

I have not even began to digest very fully the contents of Badiou's "Logics of Worlds, only in the last year translated from the French. Also there lurking is Sam Gillespie's book on Badiou's ontology=mathematics, The Mathematics of Novelty. I mention so briefly all these ideas from Badiou and Zizek I hope to understand, and can only direct you to the wealth of text resources available through my Delicious bookmarking system linked on the sidebar. There you will also find links to many primary and secondary site resources on revolutionary events underway as well as sources of academic writings on the theories being examined. Especially useful is the link to The International Journal of Zizek Studies.

Here is a listing of entries for the first two months of the blog for an easy overview and convenient access:
▼ October (8)
Chinese People: "The Regime is Corrupt"
McBama? No, the Communist Hypothesis
Alain Badiou Weighs In
Lenin and the October 2008 Bailout (3)
Zapatista! Mexican Army Attacks Civilians
Lenin and the October 2008 Bailout (2)
Living in China - Rediscovering Mao
Lenin and the October 2008 Bailout

▼ September (5)
Maoist Revolution in Nepal (Plus Preamble)
Alain Badiou - Allegiance to the Truth Event
Stefandav TV - Sidebar Widget Instructions
Zizek: "A Plea for Leninist Intolerance"
Blog Introduction

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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Chinese People: "The Regime is Corrupt"

2008-10-28T12:53:00.022+08:00
"Ordinary Chinese people ask: 'What good is the health care reform? Now we can no longer afford to see the doctors.' And: 'What good is the education reform? Now we can no longer afford sending our children to school?' Tens of millions of workers laid-off from former State enterprises say: 'You took the factories we built with our blood and sweat and sold them to new capitalists, or foreigners; destroying buildings and machinery and then taking the land; you squandered away our country’s wealth and left us nothing to survive on.' Peasants say, 'We worked so hard for 30 years to build socialist agriculture and overnight we are back to pre-liberation days.' Progressive intellectuals say, 'The Reform has cloaked itself in socialist clothes but in fact it is capitalism of the worst kind – turning an independent socialist China into one that is increasingly polarized between the rich and the poor, and one that is dependent economically and politically on Western powers.' With the exception of perhaps a very small minority, Chinese people agree that the current regime is corrupt to the core."

So states Economics Professor Pan yu Ching (now teaching in the U.S. of course) in her article, Thirty Years of Capitalist Reform published at Political Economy Research. She thoroughly documents how China is no longer a "socialist country, which supported oppressed people", but is now one aligned with international oppressors "to acquire resources and expand its economic and political influence". Nonetheless she shows that the Chinese people have understood from 30 years experience with Deng Xiao-ping's capitalist Reform "Mao’s warning of the return of the bourgeoisie".

I want to outline for you her argument because I see the activism Professor Pan yu Ching describes so vividly alive in China today exemplifies exactly a communist people's task "to bring the communist hypothesis into existence in another mode" (to quote from the article by Alain Badiou I introduced in the last post, and will continue to do so in what follows). Integral to that objective is to support the Professor's theme regarding the cultural identity of the Chinese people, that is, I would describe, as carrying forward the creative capacity of Maoism - a not extinguished excess yet vital despite the oppression of the regime's Reform.

Pan yu Ching's characterization of the Chinese economy as "out of balance with the rest of the world and as well as domestically":

Internationally trade surpluses she documents as "a 155% increase in only three years". China has "in fact loaned the US money in order for the US to buy their products". Obviously this is unsustainable, and more importantly "grossly unjust for the Chinese people". It is unjust, as she itemizes the unmet needs of China's poor, because China is now an exporter of the majority of its net capital to the world's richest country. In 2007, 11% of the GDP was simply changed for additional foreign exchange, which amounts to a stack of foreign IOU’s, sitting idly in China’s Central Bank". Now, in the last year, she references that the regime is rushing to correct this gross imbalance by rapidly slowing exports "from over 20% to 7% a year from June 2007 to June 2008"; and that has resulted in slowing "industrial production to the lowest point in.. six years", plus export prices have increased due to the RMB being "devalued by 18 percent since July 2005" along with a number of other international financial changes negatively affecting China.

The regimes strategy, combined with the effects of global financial crisis, by slowing demand for Chinese exports is generating serious domestic consequences, factories "are losing money and have to close their doors". The domestic imbalance stems from the original reasons for the tremendous GDP growth rates of the preceding period: Pan yu Ching quotes extensively from authoritative reports how the GDP's explosive growth was produced "on the one hand, by the fast growth in the export sector and, on the other hand, they have been the result of high growth rates in investment – especially the tremendous investments in infrastructure by different levels of government. The share of GDP that goes to domestic consumption is extremely low by any standard".

Professor Pan yu Ching's analysis of the economic situation in China concludes with a statement of its meaning highly germane to the stated purpose of this posting: "concretely it means that except for a rich minority, the majority of the working population cannot enjoy what their labor has produced due to low wages, lack of benefits, and low earnings from farming". I suggest the economic situation is ripe for the Chinese people to enact the next phase of Maoism, its unique contribution in fidelity to the communist hypothesis re-iterated by Badiou: "What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome". The professor pinpoints the crux of the matter in her conclusion about the economic situation and so...

From Pan yu Ching's piece on what the Reform meant for workers and other urban dwellers and farm workers:

It meant immediately an end to the communes to turn workers "into wage laborers and their labor power into a commodity". Despite resistance by the people, the Regime forced "large-scale privatization and restructuring of the former State enterprises". The result was a "great wave of lay-offs and/or forced retirements from factory closings and restructuring threw tens of millions of workers out on the street".

What happened to them? Many did not even get pensions that were in any event too meager to sustain their families, and most had lost medical benefits. This was quickly an area of exploitation as hospitals were "changed into profit making institutions.. unnecessary tests before dispensing expensive imported medicine, so that doctors can receive bonuses.." Then housing reform: sale of units "workers and families lived for decades, to the workers". Housing suddenly became a new expense, where was the money to come from? Even now, "workers are lucky if they still hold regular jobs, and their wages are often too low to afford rent.. [y]ounger workers either continue to live with their parents or..double up.. [t]hose who work outside the formal sector find whatever odd jobs they can to support themselves and many of them live on or below subsistence levels of income.." Agricultural jobs no longer provided a sustainable way of life for most, "more than 200 million migrant workers from the countryside have flooded into the cities looking for work". In short, the most dangerous and dirty work and the most exposed to mistreatment, exposed because they have no legal residence status. The "treatment they receive in their own country is not too different from the treatments that undocumented foreign migrants receive around the world". International corporations have rushed into China to take advantage of low wages and to avoid regulative costs associated with environmental and labor controls."The loss of lives and injuries caused by working in unsafe and contaminated environment are staggering."

The effect of the Reform has a terribly significant impact on the Chinese psyche, characterized by anger, resentment and fear. The situation: "workers in China have lost the dignity and respect they once had. Workers are constantly afraid of losing their jobs. Older unemployed workers are outraged when the former State enterprises that they built with many decades of hard work are squandered away by the privileged few, who have connections with the politically powerful".

Living in Beijing, I have seen the situation first hand. Ironically, I benefit from it - for example the medical and dental costs are for me very nice compared to the U.S.. From my 22nd story luxury apartment I look out my window to see the workers living in their tents on the site of the construction of yet another huge complex for the likes of me, the small minority of the rich and the upper-middle class. I utilize the cheap domestic help. I benefit from the low prices in the service sector - the hair salons, the inexpensive restaurants, the food and other vendors on the streets. I witness the street vendors of simple commodities around the subways, often fleeing suddenly at the approach of bribe seeking police. I often circumvent various bureaucratic hassles and costs from State employees willing to expedite my problem to gain a little bit more to supplement their meager wages - its common knowledge that nobody in the bureaucracy lives on their salary alone. Daily, I watch BMWs, Land Rovers, Mercedes, see shoppers in the luxury malls and the flaunting behavior of "a small minority of extremely rich people – corrupt bureaucrats and the new capitalists – who live extremely luxurious lives".

My day job is doing corporate training, rewarding and interesting work with professionals who work for large domestic and foreign businesses. These are included in "around 20% to 30% [of the urban population] who have also lived well in the past 30 years". These clients are the middle-aged management people who enjoy a "standard of living comparable to the so-called middle class in Western countries". Another part of this middle-class "are current or retired middle level government bureaucrats, including university professors. The government deliberately favored these intellectuals in order to buy their support". Most of these people "are very satisfied with their lives and support Reform policies". But not all of them.

I can add something to the observations of Pan yu Ching about the middle-class. At the lower end of this group are the many young people, the cream of the university graduates working in the large domestic and international corporations. They are the majority, actually, of my corporate training classes. Relatively speaking they make good money, but they are also subjected to very excessive hours of work and the requirement to attend my classes (which they gladly do), but its additional time they must devote above and beyond the work day and believe it or not they sometimes pay part of the costs out of their own pocket. More often than not they are also supporting their parents who have been abandoned by the regime. They are the hope of their families and they aspire to join the ranks of their elder cadre. Its about the money - not many are interested in political matters, they are generally cynical in private and focused on their opportunity rather than the general plight of the peoples of which they are not unaware. But not all of them.

Of the middle-class, Panyu Ching states: "they are not a homogeneous group; despite their rather comfortable living, a small but growing number are increasingly critical of the Reform and have recently become very vocal, voicing sharp attacks". I would not say myself its yet a matter of political activism exactly, "its the economy stupid" but "opinions of the well-to-do urban population are bound to change when they experience the increasingly worsening economic crisis.. the government’s lack of action when they lost their savings in the stock market, which fell about 60% in the past year. The impending bursting of the housing market bubble, the increasingly depressed economy and the ongoing higher cost of living.."

Pan yu Ching goes on to provide a highly detailed account, historical and statistical references on the catastrophic decline in the rural areas and the environmental impact of unbridled industrialization. These are the crimes on the ground and important as they are for understanding the stage of this theater, I want to focus on the political ramifications explicit and suggested by her essay. Returning to Alain Badiou's exposition earlier in the blog, the information above can be seen in a broader historical perspective. Popular uprisings up to the latter part of the 18th century failed, was followed by a period of uncontested imperialism, then successfully challenged beginning in 1917 by socialist regimes. This challenge continued to its latter period, including the Maoist revolution and communist form, the global uprising in 1968 and until the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It was then superseded by the beginning of the Reform. As Badiou puts it, the pre-reform stage of fidelity to the communist hypothesis "proved ill-adapted for the construction of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the sense that Marx had intended—that is, a temporary state, organizing the transition to the non-state.. the Cultural Revolution and May 68, in its broadest sense—can be understood as attempts to deal with the inadequacy of the party".

So now China has experienced 30 years of this Reform, and the results: what Badiou describes of the current global situation - "In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia". I said earlier, I think Pan yu Ching's essay suggests the people of China have the potential of carrying forward the creative capacity of Maoism - a not extinguished excess yet vital despite the oppression of the regime's Reform. On what do I base this?

Her essay concludes with The Chinese People Are Fighting Back. Supported by her forgoing analysis she posits that the Reform "is similar to the primitive accumulation phase of early capitalist development in European countries.. however, an important difference:.. workers and peasants have already gone through thirty years of socialist transformation, and they know what they can accomplish by working collectively under the leadership of the real Communist Party following the proletarian line of Mao Zedong". Pan yu Ching points out in specific instances: "laid-off workers take over their factories to protest against their sale and/or closing.. workers forced into retirement have protested against authorities for back wages and for better benefits.. Peasants protest against land confiscation without adequate compensation and against factories being built in their neighborhoods that cause serious pollution.. Many people both in urban and rural areas have protested against the brutality of police and local officials..official numbers of demonstrations.. reached [in 2006] over 90,000 [a day!]".

Also,the workers are not alone. There are ".. increasing numbers of intellectuals who have risen to challenge the many lies broadly spread by the Reformers..fooled in the early stages of the Reform, believing the line that the Reform was 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'.. who had.. believed that the free market approach would solve many of China’s problems. The progressive intellectuals have begun to systematically refute the lies of the regime: "there was little development during the socialist era.. development based on self-reliance during the socialist era was self-imposed isolation, which led to China’s backwardness". Refuting this operation of the Ideological State Apparatus (Althusser) the progressive intellectuals have produced volumes of contradictory evidence and have gone on the attack "accusing Reformers of being over-dependent on foreign capital, foreign technology, and foreign markets, handing the country over to the foreign monopolies, and causing China to lose its economic and political autonomy.." In September of 2007 a large contingent of progressive thinkers submitted a letter to the 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party charging "the Chinese Communist Party no longer represented the interests of China’s proletariat, and that they betrayed the principles of Marxism, Leninism, and Mao Zedong Thought".

I found myself a little short of climax at Pan yu Ching's last line: "China’s socialist legacy and the theory and practice Mao left behind will carry the struggle to triumph in the end". There is more in what she said than she said. I take recourse at last in Badiou. The critical question is to what modality China's socialist legacy will carry the struggle. I can't believe what was meant was a repetition of the earlier phase of Maoism that proved inadequate. Rather the stakes for the Chinese Maoist today in the chaos of the Reform depend on maintaining the conditions for Mao's creative and still existent vision of the communist hypothesis. A task Badiou asserts can occur "through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground."

But how, and how within the cultural context of China? Badiou formulates the general direction of world communist activism: "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'..the proposition that the subordination of labour to the dominant class is not inevitable—within the ideological sphere.". The movement against the corrupt regime of China, I think this means, is a revolt against the regime's Ideological State Apparatus. Is this not what was said by Pan yu Ching in reference to the progressive intellectuals?

Like all English speaking expats in China I just spent months with the regimes CCTV9 apparatus bombarding me with "One World, One Dream", the export of its domestic promulgation of nationalist fervor with its unfortunate patriotism. Obviously as any thinking person can see from the information above there is not even a unified world within China. Of course its not just China. The idea of globalization in the sense touted is also a sham of capitalist parliamentarians too. Badiou: "The simple phrase, ‘there is only one world’, is not an objective conclusion. It is performative: we are deciding that this is how it is for us. Faithful to this point, it is then a question of elucidating the consequences that follow from this simple declaration... A first consequence is the recognition that all belong to the same world as myself.. we can agree and disagree about things. But on the precondition that they and I exist in the same world." Now this is entirely different. This is not serving the purposes of a national regime, or any version of elitist oligarchy.

Now it gets tricky though. The performative aspect of creating "only one world" means no division established on the basis of any race or creed, or specific cultural group; or even an oppressed minority - political, sexual or whatever. Our topic is the people of China and their cultural identity bound to the communist hypothesis manifested in Maoism. This is an actuality not subject to dismissal, nor should it be. The real facts of the Chinese people's experience and enduring fidelity to Maoism has been clearly elucidated by Pan yu Ching. Culturally China carries the creative capacity of Maoism - a not extinguished excess yet vital despite the oppression of the regime's Reform. The emphasis of Badiou is not calling for the rejection of this core identity, but its expansion in a new phase of Maoism:

".. identity is the ensemble of properties that support an invariance.. Defined in this way, by invariants, identity is doubly related to difference: on the one hand, identity is that which is different from the rest; on the other, it is that which does not become different, which is invariant.. The affirmation of identity has two further aspects. The first form is negative. It consists of desperately maintaining that I am not the other.. The second involves the immanent development of identity within a new situation... not through any internal rupture, but by an expansion of identity."

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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McBama? No, the Communist Hypothesis

2008-10-26T20:19:00.024+08:00
I am a communist. We who assert this identity need to think what this means given the communist hypothesis. If we are a communist in today's world our context is the current coordinates of power - what Alain Badiou calls that of capitalo-parliamentarianism. If an "American" communist, the main story at the moment is the election: the formal choice between McCain and Obama. Lenin made the important distinction between a formal choice and an actual choice (see the quote at this blog's header). So the question is, McBama?

Stated, communists everywhere are situated legally someplace, experiencing the formal choices available. Still, we have actual choices based on the communist hypothesis. This is the idea I want to offer for your consideration. I have developed this blog posting using the key ideas of Alain Badiou as expressed in his article about the 2007 election of Sarkozy in France, The Communist Hypothesis, published in February by The New Left Review.

The analysis by Badiou does, I believe you will find, anticipate the truth revealed by the event of Sarkozy's election is being repeated in the election of McBama. But the article is only nominally about elections. What is being clearly signified is the communist hypothesis. This is by definition always global or universal, and what strikes me deepest is what Badiou says about the present task before communists: this I interpret as the allegiance or fidelity to the communist hypothesis now being a revolution of the mind, as such the emerging Neo-MLM.

I wish to introduce the key ideas of the article as they are developed by Badiou and reference them to the nominal topic of this post, the McBama election. But I will begin from quoting from his concluding paragraph, which says it all, before partially unpacking its squeezed content. Excerpts from the final paragraph:

"In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; the cramped, besieged experimentation of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis . . . Which is no doubt why, as in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground."

Nothing really need be said in comment about Badiou's concluding words, so let's move on to looking at the sequence of earlier development of the conclusions with selected excerpts; where we get at his precise ideas of the communist hypothesis and the present task of its renewal through the combination of thought processes. Excerpts from the body of the text:

In the McBama question as in the election of Sarkozy is evidenced the truth that the electoral system effectively excludes dissent:

"An initial factor was the way in which the outcome affirmed the manifest powerlessness of any genuinely emancipatory programme within the electoral system: preferences are duly recorded, in the passive manner of a seismograph, but the process is one that by its nature excludes any embodiments of dissenting political will."

At a subsequent point it seems transferable in the description of the initial fear of the privileged French, the fear mainly that of Republicans: we substitute the American counterparts - the "Mexicans", the "terrorists", the Iranians et al; and substitute for the description of the French socialist, the more "leftward" contingency, the Democrats, with their fear of the fear - the continuing of Bush-ness by McCain and even the frightening cop-ness of Ms. Palin:

"... the fear felt by the privileged, alarmed that their position may be assailable. In France this manifests itself as fear of foreigners, workers, youth from the banlieue, Muslims, black Africans. Essentially conservative, it creates a longing for a protective master, even one who oppresses and impoverishes you further.. the fear of this fear: a fear, too, of the cop figure, whom the petit-bourgeois socialist voter neither knows nor likes.."

I tend to think that in America there is less reading of the press going on, except by the net-savvy, rather there is more talk radio and the likes of Fox, CNN and major networks informing the bulk of the populace about their formal choice of McBama - but is there not the same weakening of the real?:

"We should not underestimate the role of what Althusser called the ‘ideological state apparatus’—increasingly through the media, with the press now playing a more sophisticated part than tv and radio—in formulating and mobilizing such collective sentiments. Within the electoral process there has, it seems, been a weakening of the real; a process even further advanced with regard to the secondary ‘fear of the fear’ than with the primitive, reactionary one. We react, after all, to a real situation, whereas the ‘fear of the fear’ merely takes fright at the scale of that reaction, and is thus at a still further remove from reality."

Should one think that somehow it is still of paramount importance to exercise ones formal choice in McBama, sadly it may be seen of more pathetic dimension if one seeks the much touted "change" being bandied if one considers if indeed any new possibility is on the table:

"If we posit a definition of politics as ‘collective action, organized by certain principles, that aims to unfold the consequences of a new possibility which is currently repressed by the dominant order’, then we would have to conclude that the electoral mechanism is an essentially apolitical procedure. This can be seen in the gulf between the massive formal imperative to vote and the free-floating, if not non-existent nature of political or ideological convictions."

Will you yet trudge to your voting station, hopeful or hopeless in your McBama determination when you consider that:

".. capitalo-parliamentarianism, [is] ..appropriate for the maintenance of the established order, and consequently serves a conservative function. This creates a further feeling of powerlessness: if ordinary citizens have no handle on state decision-making save the vote, it is hard to see what way forward there could be for an emancipatory politics."

Today in "America the Beautiful" the bailout of banks, rooted in the basic need for housing, is the focus ("its the economy stupid"). It vies even with security concerns at this point, though in fact the predominant use of tax dollars is the drain from war. Yet, despite the unpopularity of the war itself, bilaterally recognized by McBama, the threat of terrorism leaves unquestioned in the U.S. as in France that:

"the maintenance of the existing order with its gigantic disparities has an irreducible military component; the duality of the worlds of rich and poor can only be sustained by force."

What is signified by Badiou in his article is far more important than simply the truth revealed by the formal choices sustained bycapitalo-parliamentarianism described above with reference to Sarkozy's election, or what may be seen its likely repetition in the McBama election. We now come to the actual choices possible in fidelity to the communist hypothesis:

"What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away."

Badiou turns to what it means to be a communist in revolt, in rejection of its formal coordinates of freedom. This begins with analysis of communist history - the following are excerpts from this much longer discussion :

"What remains is to determine the point at which we now find ourselves in the history of the communist hypothesis... The first sequence runs from the French Revolution to the Paris Commune; let us say, 1792 to 1871. It links the popular mass movement to the seizure of power, through the insurrectional overthrow of the existing order... The second sequence of the communist hypothesis runs from 1917 to 1976: from the Bolshevik Revolution to the end of the Cultural Revolution and the militant upsurge throughout the world during the years 1966–75. It was dominated by the question: how to win? How to hold out—unlike the Paris Commune—against the armed reaction of the possessing classes... the revolution prevailed, either through insurrection or prolonged popular war.. but it proved ill-adapted for the construction of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the sense that Marx had intended—that is, a temporary state, organizing the transition to the non-state.. the Cultural Revolution and May 68, in its broadest sense—can be understood as attempts to deal with the inadequacy of the party... 1871 to 1914 saw imperialism triumphant across the globe. Since the second sequence came to an end in the 1970s we have been in another such interval, with the adversary in the ascendant once more.. The second sequence is over and it is pointless to try to restore it."

A new third sequence is at hand - Badiou appears to have defined for us both the existing coordinates of power as well as the exhausted history of two phases of fidelity to the communist hypothesis. Yet he affirms there remains an excess of creative power in that hypothesis available outside the coordinates of capitalo-parliamentarianism and all its particular manifestations such as the Sarkozy election or the formal choice in McBama:

"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’.. 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."

So Badiou has now introduced the general direction of the new task for communists. He then proposes a specific modality for the revolution of the mind, a performative requirement for, not merely an assertion of an objective conclusion, that "there is only one world" - again excerpts from his detailed proposal:

"What might this involve?... might be the declaration: ‘There is only one world’. What would this imply? Contemporary capitalism boasts, of course, that it has created a global order;.. The ‘one world’ of globalization is solely one of things—objects for sale—and monetary signs: the world market as foreseen by Marx. The overwhelming majority of the population have at best restricted access to this world. They are locked out, often literally so... The price of the supposedly unified world of capital is the brutal division of human existence into regions separated by police dogs, bureaucratic controls, naval patrols, barbed wire and expulsions. The ‘problem of immigration’ is, in reality, the fact that the conditions faced by workers from other countries provide living proof that—in human terms—the ‘unified world’ of globalization is a sham... The simple phrase, ‘there is only one world’, is not an objective conclusion. It is performative: we are deciding that this is how it is for us. Faithful to this point, it is then a question of elucidating the consequences that follow from this simple declaration... A first consequence is the recognition that all belong to the same world as myself.. we can agree and disagree about things. But on the precondition that they and I exist in the same world."

Badiou anticipates a problematic: yes, there may be "one world" but this cannot exclude personal identity, the fact that we are individually, locally, culturally different from other people too. How is it that this would not engender continued divisions and inevitable conflict? Excerpts from Badiou's answer:

"The question then arises whether anything governs.. unlimited differences.. identity is the ensemble of properties that support an invariance.. Defined in this way, by invariants, identity is doubly related to difference: on the one hand, identity is that which is different from the rest; on the other, it is that which does not become different, which is invariant...The affirmation of identity has two further aspects. The first form is negative. It consists of desperately maintaining that I am not the other... The second involves the immanent development of identity within a new situation... not through any internal rupture, but by an expansion of identity."

Badiou addresses the possibility of both maintaining personal identity while expanding from that core to an experience of human unity using a wide range of examples from invariant individuality - racial, religious, sexual, cultural and so forth. Also he provides living actual events that have and are demonstrating fidelity to the egalitarian maxim of the communist hypothesis. As I said in the beginning, the message also applies to those of us who assert our personal identity as communists - the new phase, the revolution of the mind means not a struggle against the world, but being open to the insight that we are the world.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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Alain Badiou Weighs In

2008-10-24T08:37:00.017+08:00
From the beginning this blog has placed strong emphasis on the thought of Alain Badiou. The theme in this blog has concerned his ideas on what he calls the "Event", briefly stated, an occurrence which, I venture a description, challenges the current set of humanity (and here is meant actually a reference to set-theory). As such it would display a novelty, a "Truth" - again in the briefest of descriptions will follow in which are confronted with Badiou's minimalist mathematics (ontology=mathematics). The meaning of a "Truth": that the "Event" presents a new element in one, or more likely many, sets of multiplicities which may lead to a radical transformation of the current coordinates of those sets.

The transformation is possible because the "Truth" is presented in any occurrence that is in fact an "Event". But important is that the new set remains only "virtual" so to speak until, and if, its actuality is manifest through the allegiance of people taking action on that "Truth", as a result of which the radical transformation becomes reality. My earlier entry, AlainBadiou - Allegiance to the Truth Event, makes reference to several articles by Badiou and others providing authoritative content. So don't listen too much to my poor attempts to explain his ideas - I can only hope serve to elicit your interest. We need to read and study Badiou's latest complete work, Logics of Worlds. Badiou is rooted in Marxism, as well as in psychoanalysis, the school of Jacques Lacan.

Getting to the topic of this post, let me first add Badiou that "applies", I'd guess to say, his mathematical thought, by identifying four modes, or sets, of multiplicities in which the Event and the subsequent Truth process occur: Art, Love, Politics and Science. Again, a tremendous amount of attention and study is actually required to better understand Badiou's thought. A longer "synopsis", so to speak, is found in the Wikipedia account from which I provide the following exerpt:

"Badiou's ultimate ethical maxim is therefore one of: 'decide upon the undecidable'. It is to name the indiscernible, the generic set, and thus name the event that re-casts ontology in a new light. He identifies four domains by which a subject (who, it is important to note, becomes a subject through this process) nominates and maintains fidelity to an event: love, science, politics and art. By enacting fidelity to the event within these four domains one performs a 'generic procedure', which in its undecideability is necessarily experimental, and one potentially recasts the situation in which being takes place.. In line with his concept of the event, Badiou maintains, politics is not about politicians, but activism based on the present situation and the 'evental' (his translators' neologism) rupture. So too does love have this characteristic of becoming anew. Even in science the guesswork that marks the event is prominent. He vigorously rejects the tag of 'decisionist' (the idea that once something is decided it 'becomes true'), but rather argues that the recasting of a truth comes prior to its veracity or verifiability.. Badiou, whilst keen to stress the non-equivalence between politics and philosophy, thus finds his political approach — one of activism, militancy, and scepticism of parliamentary-democratic process — backed up by his philosophy based around singular, situated truths, and potential revolutions.

With this bit of background we come to the specific topic: Alain Badiou weighs in on the current financial crisis. One cannot but see this event of the crisis and the bailout has stirred tremendous focused response in the activist community. Those in the Marxist line in particular are quickly responding, possibly because its about economics of capitalism. I give three good examples from the blogging community, two at least are Marxist and one of these provides the latest viewpoints of Badiou:

Radical Perspectives on the Crisis gives an ongoing analysis of the financial news by a number of qualified people. Its very useful and factual with references and a minimum of the theoretical bullshit some of us love. An excerpt:

"The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times are both predicting a growing role for the worlds rapidly developing nations in the new world financial order. This is significant. What is really impressive, however, is the fact that there is talk of a new financial order at all. More than anything else, the G20 conference (dubbed Bretton Woods ll) can be understood as the end of an epoch. Neoliberal capitalism, the ideology of the free and self-regulating market, is dead. Anti-globalization activists could not defeat it and neither could Hugo Chavez. The free market imploded under the weight of its own contradictions."

Marx and the Crisis of 2008 is another new focused response by a team of contributors with a more emphatic socialist message. I quote from the comments of the writer Andrew Kliman:

"As for the longer-term conditions that have given rise to the crisis, my view is basically this: The world economy has never fully recovered from the crisis of the 1970s – not in the way in which the destruction of capital in and through the Great Depression and WWII led to a post-war boom. That’s largely because of an understandable fear of having a repeat of the Great Depression. So there’s been a partial recovery only, brought about largely through: (1) declining real wages.. as well as exporting the crisis into the 3d world, and (2) a mountain of debt – mortgage, consumer, government, corporate – to.. mitigate the effects of the declining real wages. Thus there have been persistent debt crises, and these will continue until: (a) sufficient capital is destroyed.. to once again make investment truly profitable.. present crisis.. this moment, or (b) there’s such panic.. that lending stops and the economy crashes, ushering in chaos.. (c) capitalism is replaced by a.. socialist society."

From the blog Infinite Thought, the October 18 entry (their translation/interpretation of Badiou's submission in French to the paper Le Monde the previous day) comes the following sampler:

"We will have time later to wonder (the saga will surely continue) where these billions come from, given that for some years, at the least demand from the poor, the same characters responded by turning their pockets inside out, saying they hadn't a cent. For the time being, it doesn't matter. "Save the banks!" This noble, humanist and democratic cry surges forth from the mouths of every journalist and politician. Save them at any price! It's worth pointing this out, since the price is not insignificant... The collapse of capitalism? You must be kidding. Who wants it, after all? Who even knows what it would mean? Let's save the banks, I tell you, and the rest will follow. For the... immediate protagonists – the rich, their servants, their parasites, those who envy them and those who acclaim them – a happy ending, perhaps a slightly melancholy one, is inevitable, bearing in mind the current state of the world, and the kinds of politics that take place within it... Let us turn instead to the spectators of this show, the dumbstruck crowd who - vaguely unsettled, understanding little, totally disconnected from any active engagement in the situation... can only guess at the exhausting weekends of our heroic small team of heads of government. It sees, passing before it, numbers as enormous as they are obscure, automatically comparing them to its own resources, or even, for a very considerable part of humanity, to the pure and simple non-resource which is the bitter and courageous basis of its very life. That's where the real is... As we know, financial capitalism has always – which is to say for the past five centuries – been a major, central component of capitalism in general. As for the owners and managers of this system, by definition they are only "responsible" for profits, their "rationality" is to be measured by their earnings, and it is not just that they are predators, but that they have to be... The return to the real cannot be a movement leading from bad "irrational" speculation back to healthy production. It is the return to the immediate and reflective life of all those who inhabit this world. It is from that vantage-point that one can observe capitalism without flinching, including the disaster movie that it is currently inflicting upon us. The real is not this movie, but its audience... Faced with the life of the people watching it, do we still dare to pride ourselves in a system which delegates the organisation of collective life to the basest of drives – greed, rivalry, unthinking selfishness? Can we sing the praises of a "democracy" whose leaders do the bidding of private financial appropriation with such impunity that they would shock Marx himself, who nevertheless already defined governments, a hundred and sixty years ago, as "the agents of capital"? The ordinary citizen must ‘understand’ that it is impossible to make up the shortfall in social security, but that it is imperative to stuff untold billions into the banks’ financial hole?... this only seems to be a zero-sum game: the speculator loses his wager and the buyers their homes, from which they are politely evicted. But the real of this zero-sum game is as always on the side of the collective, of ordinary life: in the end, everything stems from the fact that there exist millions of people whose wages, or absence thereof, means that they are absolutely unable to house themselves. The real essence of the financial crisis is a housing crisis. And those who can’t find a home are by no means the bankers. It is always necessary to go back to ordinary existence."

So Badiou's poetic analogy of the existing coordinates of power is that of a film, an illusion perpetuated as real, now demonstrated as such in the "Event" of the financial crisis. A "Truth" emerges in the minds of the spectators who reside not in the gated communities of the elite protagonists of the film (the literal and class bound gated communities); in the minds of those who are the victims in the slums (the literal and figurative slums of the oppressed). And so now for the actions to follow the event in allegiance to the "Truth", the enactment within the virtual situation that will be the radical transformation of the world - Badiou concludes:

"We must overthrow the old verdict according to which ours would be the time of "the end of ideologies". Today we can clearly see that the only reality of this supposed end lies in the slogan "save the banks". Nothing is more important than recovering the passion of ideas and countering the world such as it is with a general hypothesis, the anticipated certainty of an entirely different state of affairs. To the nefarious spectacle of capitalism, we oppose the real of peoples, of the existence of all in the proper movement of ideas. The theme of an emancipation of humanity has lost none of its power. Undoubtedly, the word "communism", which for a long time served to name this power, has been debased and prostituted. But today, its disappearance only benefits the advocates of order, the feverish actors of the disaster movie. But we will resuscitate communism, in its new-found clarity. This clarity is also its oldest virtue, as when Marx said of communism that it 'breaks in the most radical fashion with traditional ideas' and that it will bring forth 'an association in which the free development of each is the precondition for the free development of all'. Total break with capitalist-parliamentarianism, the invention of a politics on a level with the popular real, sovereignty of the idea: it's all there, everything we need to turn away from the film of the crisis and to give ourselves over to the fusion between live thought and organised action (everything we need to turn away from the film of the crisis and rise up)."

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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Lenin and the October 2008 Bailout (3)

2008-10-17T03:18:00.039+08:00
I am continuing on this topic, perhaps for some time, but I think the last time under this title. The second entry, Lenin and the October 2008 Bailout (2), began with reference to the first entry,Lenin and the October 2008 Bailout and the three main elements of that entry. This included a segue to an entry earlier than that on Alain Badiou - Allegiance to the Truth Event. Therein is introduced several articles in making the point germane to the topic of the 2008 Bailout: that is, the advent of this "Event" challenges the existing coordinates of power - and of paramount importance is what action will constitute allegiance to the "Truth" the "Event" reveals. This discussion was preamble to discussing the views of the Bailout by recognized progressive activists (at that very time, I attended a forum presented in Manhattan) The fact that such a forum had spontaneously arisen at the event of the Bailout suggested many people are sensing this can be a time to intervene and seriously challenge the existing coordinates of power.

The way to intervene was the critical question. The progressive left viewpoints of William Greider, Doug Henwood, Naomi Klein, and Francis Fox Piven were given some air. Their ideas were appreciated in what demands and quality of demands they felt the circumstances called for. To this end, in the context of my stated purposes for the blog, it came to mind introducing a perhaps unheeded perception on the question of "demanding": what Sovoj Zizek writes about, what he characterizes as, the "symbiotic relationship between power and resistance". This the goal of the present entry.

Happily, while I was in the process of developing this entry series, Zizek himself published on the Bailout: Don't Just Do Something, Talk. Here the theoretical idea I want to discuss is rather posed for popular consumption. Zizek points out we live in a risky society, where the powerful do the choosing while the rest of us do the risking. We are forced to live as if we were free. The powerful have us duped that it is counterproductive to help the poor directly because the real dynamic productive element is the rich and the benefits will "trickle-down"- we must avoid simply giving to the "needy". Zizek agrees, however, that the problem is that there is a need to help Wall Street because its collapse really will hurt ordinary workers. So up to this point he doesn't say much more than the progressive left. But he then makes the point that one must take a political position outside the coordinates of existing power (his theme: don't just do something within these coordinates, talk about how they can really be challenged). This is what needs further discussion beyond his merely keeping the topic within the range of that suitable for popular consumption. Its not enough, I think, to simply conclude as he does with "we need not less politics, but more". Here are some snippets from his article I hope interests you in using the link:

"We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.. We are forced to make choices without having the knowledge that would enable us to make them; or, as John Gray has put it: ‘We are forced to live as if we were free.’The resistance was formulated in terms of ‘class warfare’, Wall Street against Main Street: why should we help those responsible (‘Wall Street’) and let ordinary borrowers (on ‘Main Street’) pay the price for it?.. So while it is true that we live in a society that demands risky choices, it is one in which the powerful do the choosing, while others do the risking.. although we all want the poor to get better, it is counter-productive [say the powerful] to help them directly, since they are not the dynamic and productive element; the only intervention needed [they say] is to help the rich get richer, and then the profits will automatically spread down to the poor. Throw enough money at Wall Street, and it will eventually trickle down to Main Street. If you want people to have money to build, don’t give it to them directly, help those who are lending it to them. This is the only way to create genuine prosperity – otherwise, the state is merely distributing money to the needy at the expense of those who create wealth.. It is all too easy to dismiss this line of reasoning as a hypocritical defense of the rich. The problem is that as long as we are stuck with capitalism, there is a truth in it: the collapse of Wall Street really will hit ordinary workers.. What all this indicates is that the market is never neutral: its operations are always regulated by political decisions. The real dilemma is not ‘state intervention or not?’ but ‘what kind of state intervention?’ And this is true politics: the struggle to define the conditions that govern our lives. The debate about the bailout deals with decisions about the fundamental features of our social and economic life, even mobilizing the ghost of class struggle.. As with many truly political issues, this one is non-partisan. There is no ‘objective’ expert position that should simply be applied: one has to take a political decision. The U.S.doesn't need less politics, it needs more."

Savoj Zizek makes a much more forceful argument in an article written much earlier. In Resistance is Surrender, he makes no bones about the need to focus on how to take power, avoiding accommodation of the existing coordinates of power (either by working within them or in various modes of opposition to power which amount to no more than a symbiotic relationship). He identifies the various modes of leftist or progressive resistance and defines what he sees as their critical deficiencies, lauding in contrast the take over in power by Chavez. Nonetheless, rather than a whole-hearted endorsement of Chavez, he is quick to say it is most important to ensure that such a power structure not be a repetition of a socialist state as seen before, but one which engenders subversive power of its people:

"One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death..Today’s Left.. accept the hegemony, but continue to fight for reform within its rules (Third Way Social Democracy).. or not accepting the hegemony, confronting those in power with demands we know they cannot fulfill .. or, not directly attacking, but refocusing the field of struggle on everyday practices, where one can ‘build a new world’ [so] the power of capital and the state will be gradually undermined.. or, ‘postmodern’ route, shifting the accent from anti-capitalist struggle to the multiple forms of politico-ideological struggle for hegemony.. These positions are not presented as a way of avoiding some ‘true’ radical Left politics – what they are trying to get around is, indeed, the lack of such a position.. The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left.. So what should, say, the US Democrats do? Stop competing for state power and withdraw to the interstices of the state, leaving state power to the Republicans and start a campaign of anarchic resistance to it?.. demonstrate that today’s liberal-democratic state and the dream of an ‘infinitely demanding’ anarchic politics exist in a relationship of mutual parasitism: anarchic agents do the ethical thinking, and the state does the work of running and regulating society.. It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chavez has embarked since 2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left: far from resisting state power, he grabbed it.. the task is to make the new party function not as a typical state socialist (or Peronist) party, but as a vehicle for the mobilization of new forms of politics (like the grass roots slum committees).. the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfill... 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'. 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."

In closing, I think Zizek's argument lumping anarchism with the rest of the progressive left needs comment. Yes, historically revolt without re-establishing a vanguard to protect the success of revolution has not survived - but equally true is that the new power has never failed to eliminate class struggle. Perhaps it is a matter of enough continued evolution of human nature, but egalitarian self-organization should remain the point of allegiance.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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Zapatista! Mexican Army Attacks Civilians (Article)

2008-10-16T16:42:00.006+08:00
And so this week's story: The Mexican Army Attacks Civilians in the Indigenous Town of Xoxocotla. Its a well developed, detailed and long article getting to the essence of the current situation, by Gregory Berger. Perhaps it is very clear what is at hand today, in light of the information above, with some excerpts from its concluding section..

"Helicopters flew overhead and shot tear gas into private homes, most of which were filled with small children... Houses were raided by police and soldiers, and men taken and beaten in front of their families. There are reports of at least 70 missing persons, of whom only 20 have been officially "arrested."

"Hundreds of scared and angry residents emerged from their homes to tell stories of their shock and rage. Many were shocked at the participation of army troops, tanks, and helicopters. 'Why are they sending the army out against us?' Cried one woman. 'We aren't criminals. The President says he is using the army to fight drug traffickers, but he is using it against poor indigenous people.'.. How is it that even as Mexico remembers the 40th anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre that the army has been allowed to turn its weapons against its own citizens once again?... Despite serious allegations of fraud, Felipe Calderon was sworn in as President of Mexico in December, 2006... Soon afterward Calderon increased the role of the Mexican Armed forces in Mexican society by announcing that the armed forces would be used to conduct a new heightened war against drug traffickers... From the outset, critics claimed that Calderon never intended the army's presence in the Mexican countryside to serve as an anti-narcotics force, and that his aims were in fact twofold: To leverage his ability to serve out his Presidential term in light of massive calls for his resignation before his inauguration, and to legitimize the use of the armed forces in domestic affairs as a means to repress Mexico's abundant social movements... The repression in Xoxocotla this week overwhelmingly supports this hypothesis... Recently, the U.S. Congress authorized 400 million dollars in funding to provide support for the Mexican military in its 'war on drugs' in a package known as 'Plan México' or 'The Merida Initiative.'.. Declassified documents from the U.S.' National Security Archive have established evidence of Washington's participation in the Tlatelolco massacre. In 2008, once more, the U.S. is helping to arm the Mexican military to attack its own citizens."

The whole incident emerged from a self-organized effort on the part of the indigenous people to protest on behalf of teachers and the townspeople of Xoxocotla united in a common struggle to stop the rapid privatization of public resources. They are trying to halt:

"... a new set of educational reforms they say would open the doors to the participation of private capital in the public education system ...desperately trying to save the aquifer which feeds its municipal water system from being sucked dry from private condominium developers who skirt local zoning laws."

We have to keep the international activist spotlight on the Mexican elite and their counterparts to the North so something truly new may survive, not allowing to happen what happened to the Mayans and then the greater population of Mexico since the 16th century.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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