another default is possible

The general strike and demonstrations protesting the misery plan masquerading as “bail-out” yesterday were massive and robust. The several hundred thousand who impressively filled the streets and Syntagma Square are constituting a political force that today is the real locus of democracy in Greece. 

Protests like these helped to bring down the dictators in the early 1970s and more of them now can topple a pseudo-democracy that has failed the country. As PASOK leads the IMF Trojan horse through the gate of Parliament, the unions and groups are gathering for renewed protests this evening.

There are many possible resolutions to this crisis. By no means is the official immiseration plan a “done deal,” as the capitalist media now acknowledges. Even the Wall Street Journal recognizes that default could follow from determined resistance.

Greece faces hard times, but who will have to bear the brunt of the pain? This is a political question that will be decided by the struggle now unfolding.

Who should pay? Whose dignity is to be sacrificed? Why should the banks and creditors, the politicians and major tax-evaders escape the plight they have dumped on the country through corruption, negligence and opportunism?

These are questions of justice and community, and the usual glib mix of lies, platitudes and neoliberal clichés is not going to satisfy a people awakened and stirred.

A real political moment has been opened in Greece.

Default would mean renegotiating everything. But who can be trusted to negotiate for Greece? Certainly not PASOK or New Democracy.

So it’s also time to question the form of democracy, and, if necessary, to change it. Not just the ruling government, then, but government as such is at issue.

Whatever Greece gained under the sign of Europe now comes at the price of immiseration, and there are no guarantees that ostensible benefits will survive the bailout – as any honest analyst admits.

If the Euro founders and the project of “Europe” breaks up, as Merkel in Berlin is whining, then junk this neoliberal, technocratic Europe and let’s see what real democracy can put in its place from below.

These are days for solidarity and focus.

In the fog and tear gas of struggle, we hope comrades will act with all possible care and compassion. We understand the rage and frustration, and the economic terrorism behind it. And we can see the everyday context of state repression and provocation, falling hardest on immigrants and autonomist young people.

The deaths of three employees at Marfin bank is a shock that hits us, too. The loss of three lives is terrible, and a real disaster for their families and loved ones. While we doubt this was intended by any comrade, we’ll also refrain from shifting all blame onto the bank’s chairman, who insisted with threats that his employees stay at their desks on the path of a massive and angry protest. The bank’s negligence was in any case well summarized by an employee, in a letter that has circulated widely.

There is, always, an ethics of struggle, and we hope there will be searching reflections and discussions of appropriate tactics and strategy in this one. We also hope solidarity and realism will keep those debates, when they happen, from becoming divisive.

As far as we can see, this is above all a struggle for dignity and the meaning of democracy. Dignity and real democracy are worthy aims that are not beyond reach in Greece. In the context of Europe, no struggle now is more important, and the hype and spin of mediatized wedges driven from above should not be allowed to distract or divide it.

AP/GR 

Letter from a Marfin Bank employee, in Greek original on Indymedia Athens and translated on Occupied London.

watching greece

Watching, observing from abroad – these “posts” issue from the wordy distance of this position and have often underscored it – one is staggered by the crudity of European hypocrisy regarding Greece.

Greece: one in five Greeks already lives below the poverty line, and yet the Greeks as a whole work more and longer than their European neighbors, the fabled Germans included. Now these same people are routinely and thoughtlessly blamed for their collapsing economy – their plight attributed to, among other chauvinist clichés, a purely fictional laziness undeserving of European “rescue.”

What garbage! This national economy was ruined not by “the Greeks” – the men and women who live and work there – but by the corrupt political class that administrates it and the tax-evading Greek ruling class that, along with the raiders of international capital, have plundered it for decades.

In this tired trope of “blame the victim,” we should be scandalized by the two extra months per year that public sector workers earn, thanks to the struggles of their unions, etcetera, etcetera.

To save the Euro, if this grace in the end is extended, those lazy Greeks will have to break their unions and lower the cost of their labor-power – and should be grateful to their masters and administrators for the opportunity to do so. Tame and demoralize those working people! Austerity, and more of it, quickly!! 

Hearing and reading what, obviously and crudely, is being said and written between the lines, addressed to, directed at, “the Greeks” and their “self-made crisis,” by the amplified voices of “Europe,” by the very voice of arrogant administration, of managers, custodians and mouthpieces of exploitation, the neoliberal technocracy that deems itself qualified to issue directives from above and is shocked if obedience does not immediately follow – hearing and reading and watching, one knows whose side to take.

But where is the international solidarity with the Greek men and women on whom a fraudulent austerity is being foisted and forced, as if it were natural necessity?

What to say, what can be said, by an outsider, observing? I admire and am inspired by Greek resistance, by this determined, visible refusal to accept administered fiat. Too bad others elsewhere don’t follow their example; if more of us did, the rule of pseudo-democracy could begin to open up and change.

There is evidently no solution for Greece within the constraining logic of the EU and Euro, other than the neocolonial dependency of the IMF debtors prison. Such is the global power of capital, against which other logics are necessary.

It’s for the Greeks and no one else to decide if this “Europe” is worth the misery that is its price – or whether, relying on their own impressive inventive resources, they might not instead rethink and reorganize the bases of their collective autonomy. For the others, for the rest of us, isn’t it time to remake “Europe” and everything else, from below?

Another general strike and day of protest has been called for May 5...

Here's the EU’s own statistics on working hours and work intensification in Greece.

on enjoyment and enforcement

In the police states of “actually existing socialism,” security agencies infamously kept files on everyone, cradle to grave. Blackmail and banal corruption were systematically insinuated into everyday life by the state, in order to produce informers – compromised, pliable individuals caught in webs of dependency, suspicion and impotence. A particular form of prohibitive control: a specific social relation and its corresponding subjectivity.

In contemporary capitalism (Todd McGowan, Yannis Stavrakakis and others propose), such old-school prohibition societies have been transformed into societies of “commanded enjoyment.” Enjoy! is the new directive. Discover and express yourself, by freely spending your money! No money? No problem, buy on credit! This command seems to reverse the basic bourgeois values of personal self-discipline, of saving and delayed satisfaction, of not spending what you don't have.

But in fact, even in economies of relaxed credit, the imperatives of lifelong commodity consumption – of the restless exploration of identity through the purchase of products and the auratic fantasies that surround them – demand the internalization of work discipline and all the integrations it implies. Overall, avid consumers have to work longer to earn more, and the crisis that reasserts this rule only proves it. (Think Greece, right now.)

Accommodation and resignation are thus the price of interpellation into the commodity world. To enjoy what feels like freedom, we structure obligatory social constraints on the inside of our subjectivity, as the new forms of dependency, discipline and limit. It works, because our commodity fantasies do deliver a partial enjoyment that keeps us seeking and buying, and therefore accommodated. The given doesn’t give all it promises, but it apparently gives more than anything else on offer.

Yes, enjoyment seems to be one key to our social reality. But, as this singer of scurvy tunes keeps insisting, enforcement is its necessary shadow: state terror takes new forms today. Moreover, these forms are vastly more powerful than the crude forms of old.

Online social networking suffices to make the point. Through the games of self-display played on Facebook and blogs (this one not excluded), we compile archives that are probably more revealing than the Stasi files of the East German police state. We enthusiastically publish our desires and fantasies, in words and images that always say more than we intend.

We hardly think about this organized indiscretion, this voluntary abandonment of inhibitions, which we moreover perform for free. But in fact, our habitual self-exhibitions and our interactions with other self-exhibitors silently accumulate in digital form, on distant servers we are hardly aware of.

There, they merge with the other accumulated traces of our movements and purchases, now become objects of data miners and hackers, actual and potential. In the first instance, of course, we are induced to profile ourselves for the attentions of marketers. But the state – and let’s not forget that the Internet originated as a project of the US Department of Defense – has access to all of it, as the “war on terror” has taught us.

So, yes, enjoy! And in so doing, archive your history, memory, and fantasy life. It’s fun! This is the carrot of late capitalist governmentality and industrialized virtual culture, and Lacan and Foucault, as well as Adorno, can help us to grasp it.

But don’t forget the stick! Powers of terror and enforcement have not withdrawn from the scene – they have expanded in unprecedented and qualitative ways. In the nuclear global regime of national security-surveillance states, techno-power overwhelms politics and ethics through the fatal knotting of war machine, science and state.

For enjoyment and enforcement go together. Integration and administration are increasingly internalized into the forms and structures of contemporary subjectivity: by enjoying in the approved ways, we largely police ourselves.

But no system attains the totalization it aims for. At all the points where the repressed returns, where the real exposes the failure of systematic enjoyment to deliver what it promises, rebellious subjectivities and uprisings incessantly break out.

We’ve already imagined, in film and fiction, where these developments tend: our self-compiled archives will be linked to terminator robotics. Nano killer-drones will be dispatched to eliminate subjects in revolt – eventually, for this is the immanent logic of exceptional security, preemptively.

If we know this, and keep mouse-clicking anyway, is this form of disavowal an aspect of our enjoyment? Probably. The forms of our sociability expose us, and silence doesn’t get us out of this circle.

Enforcement, at bottom, is necessary because the current system of enjoyment is antagonistic in specific and unsustainable ways: socially and ecologically, the limits of capital accumulation loom.

The radical response, faithful to “what is still now and then called humanity,” is to politicize these erotics.

terror and nuclear politics

But wait, you’re always going on about nukes, and now Obama has made a commitment to reduce them, but you’re still complaining!

Any reductions of nuclear arsenals are welcome, that goes without saying. The problem is rather in what is not said and not done, what is done instead – what’s really going on by means of such “small steps” is the continuing refusal of the decisive and radical step of nuclear abolition.

In the case of certain problems, the strategy of small steps is an evasion. Any reduction of carbon emissions is also, on the face of it, a good thing. But reductions that are far below the rate needed to prevent catastrophic climate change are inadequate and cynical, since they deliberately avoid the essential problem. In that sense, they are politically bogus: they give us the false comfort and security that things are being done, that our smart masters are on it, taking steps in the right direction. Thus our protests and demands for change are emptied of urgency, rendered superfluous.

Moreover, carbon trading schemes reveal what’s behind this fraudulent refusal to change the status quo of unquestioned growth: the market invents ways to capitalize on the fear and real threat of global warming. Misery rendered profitable, disaster capitalism. 

As a technic of terror and genocide, nuclear WMDs have to be refused decisively and absolutely. In this they are like the historical problem of slavery: the liberation of any individual slave is to be celebrated, but only the radical move of abolishing slavery in toto, as an institutionalized social relation, is an adequate political solution.

In Obama’s nuclear posturing (the treaty with Russia in combination with the Washington summit), we have to recognize what he declines to do, refuses to refuse: instead of cutting the knot and pushing for abolition and a secure process of disarmamant (the real conditions for the “nuclear-free world” once lip-served), he opts to manage the status quo. He tries to preserve all existing power relations and asymmetries: a reduction of warheads, but business as usual.

Instead of a clear renunciation of the doctrine of nuclear first strike, he gives us a lawyer’s re-definiton that threatens Iran and North Korea (as signers of the NPT) with a first strike, while Israel (as a non-signer with an arsenal of some 200 nukes) gets yet another pass on its state of exception.

This confirms what Susan Watkins recently concluded in New Left Review: “The role of the [Nuclear Non-Proliferation] Treaty is to insure the nuclear privileges of the haves against the have-nots.” For NPT, read “Non-Protestation Treaty.”

The NPT is one process, among others, aiming to “lull protestation” and bring rebellious states to heel – meaning make them submit to the global order of managed imperialist rivalry, IMF and debtors prison. "Play by the rules" means the rules we dictate.

With regard to nuclear terror, the only real (as opposed to pseudo-) solution is to abolish this category of WMD without exception, a political goal that only the US could convincingly undertake to lead. In contrast, the nuclear club’s retention of member privileges against the excluded is the maintenance of a system of domination – the continuation of global class war by whatever means.

The reality, yet to be faced in political debates, is that the terror and anxiety generated by nuclear arsenals has specific enforcement functions: this terminal genocidal power of state violence, demonstrated on the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and by numerous tests in the decades following, is an ultimate deterrent to any substantive change in the given relations of domination. “If you push us too far, and really threaten our power, well, then...”

Moreover, these enforcement functions have transformed processes of "governance" in ways that further constrain and block movements for real democracy and change. These scurvy posts have often pointed to the historical mutations in the US state, which carry special weight given the role of the US war machine in enforcing the global order and insuring that changes develop along certain lines rather than others.

Let’s sum up these mutations: The security and command imperatives of the bomb, in combination with new sectors of profit, transformed a constitutional democracy (imperio-capitalist) into a pseudo-democratic national security regime (imperio-capitalist). The bomb, exerting its own needs and logics over the state as a constant pressure, generated powerful tendencies toward secrecy and increasing concentrations of executive power.

Since 1945 these tendencies transformed the constitutional balance among branches of government, creating a de facto extra-constitutional regime in which exceptional executive privileges and encroachments became normalized. This opened the way, in the Cold War conjuncture, to massive expansions of covert programs, with all the associated opportunities for abuses.

In this light, the restrictions temporarily placed on President and CIA (the prohibition on assassinations, for example) following revelations in the wake of Watergate were a brief pause, a momentary counter-tendency to bomb-generated pressures. The Reagan presidency and Iran-Contra represented the reassertion of these dominant tendencies within the US state. The Bush-Cheney neo-con regime confirmed the overall push toward increasing secrecy, surveillance and executive power, and the Obama administration now confirms its bipartisan character 

A major shift in the strategic logic of the bomb following the end of Cold War bipolarity has not greatly altered or derailed this trajectory of the US national security state initiated in 1945. Many things have changed, but this hasn't. The so-called war on terror provides the needed justifications to continue the normalization of exception, permanent state of emergency, and deepening merger of war machine, science and entertainment industry.

Thirty years ago, E.P. Thompson warned us that nuclear weapons have to be grasped not as things but as social processes. Since those important debates, this problem keeps slipping from conscious attention. While much more critical work in this direction needs to be done, it’s clear that WMDs function as factors of terror within a much vaster system of social control.

To challenge the war machine at the enforcing nexus of this system is to challenge the global rule of capital. These tendencies are far more powerful than any individual politician, and the interests entrenched therein have repeatedly shown their willingness to defend their power and privilege by all means.

Obama, alone, could not have challenged these tendencies and the power they have produced. At most, he could have moved strongly to place the real problem on the agenda for genuine public debate. He did not, but without pressure from below, why should he do so, to his own risk? (There's a dialectic here, and we are naive if we wait for an invitation from power to pay attention, speak out and organize our demands into political force.)

Only states are capable of making and deploying nuclear weapons. These are beyond the means of militant groups and networks, and claims otherwise, whoever makes them, are a lie intending to terrorize. Such is the politics of fear, and Obama has accepted its terms and obligations.

A world in which states are not permitted to make and accumulate WMDs would be a more democratic and transparent world – one of radically increased possibilities for reorganizing social relations.

But a world without WMDs would have to be struggled for, from below and outside, as well as inside the state, with patience, realism and radical aim. But only thus will the rule of terror be broken; it won't be a gift from above. Evading these realities does not escape their power; the repressed returns, and all movements of emancipation will sooner or later have to face this one.

Ecological sanity and the liberation of nature, the master logic of capital accumulation, the global enforcement regime and its fantasy forms of enjoyment: all these belong to a single problematic. They are inseparable; each opens up on the other.

  

Susan Watkins, "The Nuclear non-Protestation Treaty, NLR 54 (Nov/Dec 2008).

Edward Thompson, "Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization" NLR I/121 (May/June 1980)

Raymond Williams, "The Politics of Nuclear Disarmament," NLR I/124 (Nov/Dec 1980)

war machine spending

One more time, the glaring contradiction in the tea party: this anti-state, anti-tax agitation is at the same time militarist fan-club of the imperialist war machine.

Let’s see how much of a contradiction this is, for it also exposes the real social problem, one of the main threads of these posts.

In Washington the proposed 2011 budget is on the table. A tally put up on Counterpunch reckons that, leaving out Social Security (which returns to citizens money they’ve already paid into a dedicated fund), it will add up to about $3 trillion.

Of that, military spending will account for about $1.5 trillion – shockingly, a full half of real public spending, broken down thus:
    Pentagon spending                       $708 billion
    Extra allotment for overseas wars       $200 billion
    Surveillance and spy agency spending    $ 40 billion
    Other non-Pentagon military spending    $ 94 billion
    Interest on debts for wars              $400 billion
   
(I’ve left out veterans’ benefits and health costs, which no one should object to but add up to another $100 billion.)

Dave Lindorff comments: “The 2011 military budget is the largest in history, not just in actual dollars, but in inflation-adjusted dollars, exceeding even the spending in World War II, when the nation was on an all-out war footing.”

And this budget for the US state’s war machine, ostensibly "defending" 5% of the world’s population against the other 95%, will account, as it has for years, for about half of all global military spending.

So that's the picture, behind all the distracting garbage, there it is: permanent war, but no money for health care, education and culture, public transportation and basic services. Decided de facto: war machine rather than all that reduces misery and makes life better and more humane.

The spectacle of politics in the US remains a lethally childish cartoon until this reality is confronted.

The contradiction around which the tea party marches exposes that manipulated movement for what it is: a lynching machine aiming to lever Republicans back into power.

The larger contradiction, operating globally, continues to kill. It points to the real social function of the US war machine, which enforces not just US dominance but a whole system of rivalry-within-dominance, the rule of antagonism, a planetary order of exploitation and oppression.

Call that into question and you call everything into question. 

phantoms of liberty

on tea partiers

Dave Lindorff, “Where Your Taxes Go,” Counterpunch, 13 April 2010.
Running tally of the costs of the wars from National Priorities Project.

end this

Theodore A. Harris. End this War...(after Shirley Chisholm), 2008.

The imbrication of race, war and capital, perennial recruitments and occupations, perennial sacrifice of colonized minds and bodies. Dead center, tattooed on eagled seal of empire: the face of what is. Promises routinely deferred, dignities routinely shot down. And getting up, again, in resilience, because these are struggles, resurgent, in the embodied fist of no.

war porn (2): interpellation

An everyday massacre, the obscene reality of occupation.

In New Baghdad on the twelfth of July 2007, death rained down from the 30mm cannons of two Apache gunships. (And let us not miss the history of blood and original accumulation condensed in that linguistic expropriation: a name stolen from a people who symbolize indigenous resistance is now the trophy-scalp decorating a flying weapons platform of US Army Air Cavalry, successors of the horseback troopers who chased Geronimo.)

The problem of enjoyment – of “war porn” – in this video released through WikiLeaks is glaring: the images of a dozen people slaughtered from the air do not in themselves exclude fantasmatic identifications with the voices heard and, through them, with the power of these weapons and the war machine as such. Similar images, seen countless times in the entertaining fodder of the cinema of war, erode the power to hold apart fiction and real killing.

There is a habitual structure of projective identification activated here that holds out something like a spectatorial path of least resistance. It tends to suck us in and place us, so that we assume a certain position and point of view in the antagonistic scenario. And this of course is exactly how movies and video games work. The template of entertainment matches the actual massacre.

Watching this video aligns us, like it or not, with the occupier's gaze, the soldiers' gunsights - behind which, the god's eye vantage of fantasmatic power. (The cameras of the murdered journalists would give us a very different vantage and image: see the negative presentation below.)

The fantasy of omnipotence is of course only a fantasy: the murderous paranoia of the soldiers, seeing weapons and enemies everywhere, betrays this clearly. Such paranoia is structurally produced by the occupation itself: they are manifesting the survival imperatives of occupiers (which does damage to them as well). But the ethical lapse this entails is mirrored and encouraged by the structure and template of the video image. The fantasy of absolute power that activates these alignments sets up the possible enjoyment for spectators.

Even if - consciously, ethically, politically - we refuse with a fitting revulsion the point of view offered, the fantasy lure of power never ceases to call to us in ways we can't be certain we don't respond to unconsciously. Enjoyment, in this sense, doesn't exclude the displeasure of revulsion.

Ethical corruption and the attrition of outrage thus accompany such images, along with disgust and indignation. We're obligated to see and absorb this video, in order to witness what's being done. At the same time, we need to resist and palpate its insidious lures. Here as everywhere else, we have to struggle for our humanity.

WikiLeaks has undertaken with courage and diligence the tasks of decrypting exposure abandoned by a mainstream journalism castrated by its corporate owners. For that, it is under attack by numerous states and agencies, including the Pentagon – as even the New York Times acknowledged on 17 March.

In the struggles to resist neo-imperialism, the info wars remain a crucial battleground. Under conditions of integrated spectacle and stupefying concentrations of corporate power, access to truth and counter-images is fundamental. And we’re going to have to fight for it, as the blow US courts struck this week to the principle of net neutrality should alert us.

Photo is from Gardez, Afghanistan, on the wake of the 12 February killing of five people, including two pregnant women, by US Special Forces.

Glenn Greenwald reports on the campaign against WikiLeaks, the growing fury over the posted video of the 2007 massacre, and the politics of net neutrality in a series of articles for salon.com.

On Democracy Now! Amy Goodman goes over the video with WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange. Families of the victims respond.

A more rigorous analysis of the video in context with Assange on Al Jazeera, 19 April.

five years since

A counter-image from kennardphillipps. 

The circle of enforcement, circa 2005 (Geneagles G8): our masters’ proxies at table, pentagon embedded, with a hooded trophy. Flags, lies and a magic carpet riding the rim of night, the deciders, criminals all. Who will be targeted, rendered, rent, who will live and who will die? They make a hole, and call it democracy.

war porn (1): joysticks

When quantity passes into quality, the whole situational context is altered and a new situation emerges.

As demonstrations of new powers of genocidal violence and state terror, Auschwitz and Hiroshima were qualitative leaps of this kind. These new social facts entered history, objectively changing everything.

The scale of the Nazi genocide, meticulously planned and accounted for behind a veil of Nacht und Nebel, was only retrospectively exposed.

The vast Manhattan Project that developed the first nuclear weapons on secret presidential order was kept from the American public until the weapons were actually used; Truman triumphantly announced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a fait accompli.

Today, right now, we are living through another qualitative leap in the power of terror and death. But unlike these precedents, this leap has just begun and can still be stopped.

This one, if it is not stopped, will likely be the real legacy of the dirty so-called war on terror.

Without shame or apologies, Obama of the Nobel Peace Prize is presiding over a rapid escalation in the force of unmanned drones used by the US military and CIA for surveillance and assassination in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Yemen.

Introduced by Bush II in tiny numbers, there are now an estimated 7000 drones in operation – and the number is rising fast.

Bomb and missile-carrying drones such as the MQ-1 Predator (cost: $20 million per system) and MQ-9 Reaper ($53 million each) are flown by “joysticks” from air-conditioned rooms in Langley, Virginia, and Creech Air Force Base north of Las Vegas. “War porn,” the troops call it.

 A small number of defense contractors, including Boeing subsidiary Insitu and General Atomics, will split the $3.5 billion allotted for drones in the 2010 budget.

To assassinate Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud on 5 August 2009, it took the CIA sixteen drone attempts over fifteen months, killing between 207 and 321 people in the process. How many were civilians? “Disputed,” but the war wagers are sure it’s worth it.

Evidently, so are Israel, Germany and the UK, all of which fly their own fleet of combat drones. Every state that can, obviously, will follow.

Is Finnegan awake? No paranoia needed, to read the writing on this screen.


Already in development: insect-size “nano” drones, which, The New Yorker reports, “can fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window.”

Reflect on that, in the glare of the last decade. Reflect on the leap in objective power the state gains by this. Reflect on the state of “democracy” and the rule of exception. Can anyone doubt this will alter social reality and the possibilities for a future?

For now, it takes the appearance-form of assassination power (always with “collateral” killing) – but this obviously does not exhaust potential applications. (And again: where is the outrage and debate over this policy of assassination? Is it now already normalized?)

Reality: killer robotics will expand and combine with qualitative increases in powers of surveillance (think: merger of Google with the NSA) unless massive public outcry and determined protest prevent it.

For the moment, there’s still time to organize it.

Sources:
“Drones Are Lynchpin of Obama’s War on Terror,” dossier by Spiegel Online, 12 Mar 2010.

Interview with P.W. Singer (author of Wired for War), Democracy Now, 6 Feb 2009.

Jane Mayer, “The Predator War,” The New Yorker, 26 Oct 2009

general strike

In Greece on 11 March, hundreds of thousands of workers responded to Parliament’s passage of austerity measures with a 24-hour general strike – the third in a month – bringing airports and public transportation to a standstill.

The strike was called by the main unions, the GSEE and the public-sector ADEDY, which together represent half of Greece’s five million wage-workers.

In Athens and Thessaloniki, tens of thousands protested in union-organized demos.

In Athens as Parliament passed the austerity package on 5 March, employees of the National Printing House occupied and shut down the government presses in an attempt to block the measures from becoming law. (In order to become law, they must be formally published. The government ignored this law, of course.)

ADEDY has called for another general strike on 16 March.

genealogy of the current regime

“Le fer brûlé. Le fer brisé, le fer devenu vulnérable comme la chair.”

Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959/60

[Iron, material of vaunting structures, symbols of progress from an age of optimism. Ironies of history "made vulnerable as flesh."]

“On August 6, 1945 a New Age began: the age in which at any given moment we have the power to transform any given place on our planet, and even our planet itself, into a Hiroshima. On that day we became, at least modo negativo, omnipotent; but since, on the other hand, we can be wiped out at any given moment, we also became totally impotent. However long this age may last, even if it should last forever, it is the “Last Age”: for there is no possibility that its differentia specifica, the possibility of our self-extinction, can ever end – but by the end itself.”

Günther Anders, “Theses for the Atomic Age,” 1959

Collective denials and evasions still in force, blocking, freezing, blinding. Who wants to know, who has time to know, who has the luxury and attention needed to know – and what would anyone do with such knowledge anyway?

Hiroshima: regrettable necessity of the “Good War” against fascism? That lie was long ago exposed, but the exposure still goes unregistered in the place where it counts.

To think and grasp: the global imperialist context 1914-1945 as a single social process (WWI, Russian Revolution, rising US power, defeat of revolution in Germany, fascism in Italy, crisis and Depression, Stalinism, Nazism, crushing of Spanish Republic, WW2, Auschwitz, Hiroshima).

If Auschwitz and Hiroshima cannot be separated from the global process and master logic of capitalist modernity, as it actually unfolded, then what emerges as decisive is the course of class struggle over those three decades. Above all: the defeat of revolution in the capitalist core (Germany, Italy, Hungary) transforms the Russian Revolution into the state capitalism of “socialism in one country,” setting the stage for both Stalinism and Nazism.

Not to say it could not have happened otherwise. Not to deny that this historical period is complex and contradictory. But to acknowledge and to insist on the pressure of the master logic, behind and in the specific processes of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

This is what the linkage of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, still so controversial, still so resisted, expresses: not that these event-processes are identical or equivalent, but that they must be grasped and thought together, across their obvious differences. What this “and” says is that both are specific appearance-forms of a single social essence.

And that they in turn transform the way in which this essence will from then on unfold: changing the form of the capitalist state, initiating the normalization of exception. The post-1945, post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima global regime: our social reality.

“Crucially, these genocidal techno-administrative forces were developed in a specific global conjuncture of class struggle: they are products of defeats suffered by the exploited and from now on are aimed at the exploited, as the weapons of state terror. That is, they are aimed at humanity itself, at the potential humanity carries in itself to overcome its fears and collective self-oppressions and make the social passage from necessity to freedom.”

which terror trumps?

State terror: terminal powers of enforcement.

Auschwitz: objective demonstration of a new state power, administrative-industrial genocide.

Hiroshima: objective demonstration of another new state power, the Weapon of Mass Destruction that self-justifies the merger of science and war machine.

Political necessity of the new regime of exception: an absolute enemy, someone, somewhere, preferably a dark bearded face, an imago to be targeted with trembling and enjoyment, the terminating focus of all displacements in the politics of fear.

This is how the capitalist process reproduces and enforces its own conditions today. And new techno-powers now emerging may also prove qualitative: killer drones and terminator robotics combining with god’s eye satellite and internet surveillance.

Through the chains of mediation – administration, integration, culture industry, spectacle, biopower, “war on terror” – state terror points back to the valorization-accumulation process driving our commodity world, the master logic of capitalist modernity.

But now a new factor points more immediately to the same master logic: collapsing ecologies, degradation and depletion, species extinction and climate change.

In the form of looming planetary meltdown, the capital accumulation process itself becomes directly genocidal.

The more the economies grow, the warmer it gets perforce, sentencing more to misery and death, bringing us all closer to critical tipping point. But in a capitalist world, economies that don’t grow also mean unemployment, misery and death: neo-imperialist war machine.

The alternative to this viciously self-terminating “progress”: global reorganization, collective passage to non-domination, a sustainable social logic.

Formerly, in Marxist vision, this passage was the leap to freedom. Today, the urgency with which it begins to bear down makes it appear rather on the side of constraint: the rational self-constraint now demanded by the same instinct for self-preservation that long ago reversed into its irrational opposite.

Benjamin: revolution as the emergency brake on a runaway train.

The actual problem we face: how to organize the reorganization in a non-catastrophic way.

Eros, the liberation of nature, passes through the passage to classless society, but does not end there.

Ecological meltdown begins by impacting us differently but must end by imposing humanity on us indifferently. Could this constraining imperative then bypass the class struggle, realizing its aims more directly?

Maybe, but not likely, so long as the entrenched regime of class relations retrenches and enforces, as it now is doing.

Which terror trumps? Monstrous question for politicized erotics.

for the love

Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007. 27 human teeth and 8601 diamonds embedded in cast platinum. Reported cost of materials: £13 million. Price: £50 million.

“Visiting the skull is a very different experience from reading about it. One is led in a small group up a narrow staircase, and into a pitch black room. One stumbles toward the skull, the only visible object, sitting in the center (one presumes) of the room, under a vertical spotlight, behind the glass of one of Hirst’s trademark vitrines, on a plinth which raises it up to nearly head height. Under the single point of light in the room, it glitters, sparkles, shines – no burns – with a ravishingly beautiful light, the piercing beams of the fiery reds, earthy yellows and icy blues of its diamonds twinkling like – to coin a phrase – the stars brought down to earth.”

“As we shuffle around in the dark, the only things we can find to say, in hushed tones, are the various media clichés we have already read, but these don’t really help us make sense of what we are – or are not – experiencing; as litanies, they seem more a ritual defense than anything else. Our allotted two minutes with the skull is quickly up (for there is a strict time limit to the viewing), and we are ushered out of the room by security guards, blinking, dazzled, and bemused.”

Luke White, “Damien Hirst’s Diamond Skull and the Capitalist Sublime,” 2009

capitalist art

"Life transforms itself into the ideology of reification - actually the mask of death."
Adorno, 1951

In an essay that caps a long critical engagement with Hirst’s provocative art, Luke White argues that Hirst’s skull is an “art of the capitalist sublime: an art which presents capital as its unrepresentable object of desire.”

Hirst’s art, White acknowledges, “is, indeed, ‘capitalist art,’ produced within and entirely accommodated to capital: it is made for purchase by an elite class of global capitalists – advertising gurus such as Charles Saatchi and hedge-fund billionaires such as Steve Cohen, not to mention the oligarchs and tycoons from Russia and East Asia who have more recently risen as Hirst’s clients. Accommodated to their needs and interests, it provides a highly ideologized vision of the world. It is, furthermore, a work of the media ‘spectacle’ on which present-day capital relies, forming itself in response to the world of mass-cultural consumption of which art is increasingly a part.”

At its best, Hirst’s art captivates and speaks to us “through its staging (though not as such its critique) of the antagonisms of capital in highly condensed, multilayered images, embodied in sculptures with a haunting presence.”

It is our own ambivalence to these antagonisms, our own ambivalence to the capitalism that dominates us, White suggests, that constitutes our fascination with Hirst. The diamond skull, he concludes, “is haunted by the violence and exploitativeness of capital, at the same time as it embodies its ideological phantasies.”

missed tooth?

It’s too easy, White warns us, to simply dismiss Hirst, through an annihilating critique that fails to confront the real fascination operating in his art.

Point taken. And White’s discussion of the antagonisms staged in For the Love of God is strong and convincing. To make these antagonisms visible and available to reflection already pierces its glittering halo, without failing to give the devil his due.

My reservation: today the link between capital and death is even deeper than White registers. Capital has become in actual fact what it always was potentially: a techno-genocidal automaton busily destroying the very conditions of life. Or rather, and more horribly, compelling each of us to contribute to this process, and thus surrender, every day of our lives.

What speaks mutely in many of Hirst’s works is a coldness, an absence of life and warmth – the coldness of an objective process we have for decades been helpless to restrain or change.

There was a moment in postwar culture when this coldness was mirrored effectively as a critical artist means. That was the bite of dissonant modernism. But compared to Hirst, even Beckett’s stare is a warm and compassionate protest.

There is no protest to Hirst’s coldness. It mirrors, but without a trace of that passion or compassion that leads us back to each other in urgency. This lack of heart, this absent clenched fist of humane outrage at our present impotence, is the missed encounter at the heart of Hirst’s work. It marks not just Hirst’s failings as an individual artist, but the crystallized failure of a whole historical moment.

Needing heart, needing warmth, as well as honesty and truth, from anything that would call itself art, now more than ever, what shall we say to or about skulls that leave us “blinking, dazzled, and bemused” but not warmed or more human?

Speaking of Hirst, should we not ask this, as well?

“The yawning jaws, the wreathed lips, the enormous teeth, the bulging eyes, composed a striking death’s-head....The mule, in his opinion, had died of old age. He had bought it, two years before, on its way to the slaughterhouse. So he could not complain. After the transaction the owner of the mule predicted that it would drop down dead at the first ploughing. But Lambert was a connoisseur of mules. In the case of mules, it is the eye that counts, the rest is unimportant. So he looked the mule full in the eye, at the gates of the slaughterhouse, and saw that it could still be made to serve. And the mule returned his gaze, in the yard of the slaughterhouse....I thought I might screw six months out of him, said Lambert, and I screwed two years.”

Beckett, Malone Dies, 1952/56.

(Photo: Damien Hirst, A Thousand Years, 1990)

solidarity

Solidarity with student strikers and occupiers getting their struggle underway in California and across the US: For education as commons, as human right and public good – free, open and critical, tuned to the promise and aiming beyond the miserable given.

Outrage at hurtful and threatening racist idiocies at UC San Diego during Black History Month, solidarity with the UCSD Black Student Union. Dignity, power in dignity.

Struggles percolating, emerging, seeking their visions and means. Let loose the learning, the sharing, the discussing and deciding. From those campuses the whole monster comes into view:

From education to social priorities as such,
from priorities to the wars,
from the wars to the system,
from system to system change.

Needed counter-pressure from below.

crisis fallout

Not everyone will swallow the discourse of austerity, of “tighten your belt” and shit out your soul, delivered from on high (EU, etc.), with rude tonalities of necessity and no alternative.

It matters now, in the pitiless relation of forces, what kind of Left remains – if any remains. No one is fond of the parties and unions, and only fools give them blind trust. But those were the basis for organized self-defense. Where they have been crushed or corrupted into their unprincipled opposite, the working classes exist as object of exploitation but no longer as political force.

Of course movements can be organized again from scratch, outside the old structures – but then, where are they, and who, if not us, would need to do this work?

In Greece, where more than in most countries remnants of an organized Left persist, alongside a robust autonomist culture, resistance to austerity measures is also stronger and more explosive. (This is partly what is meant when Euro politicians talk condescendingly of Greek “backwardness.”)

The austerity package just passed by Parliament was the work of the ruling “socialist” PASOK party and supported only by the far-right LAOS. The rightwing party New Democracy and SYRIZA, the Radical Left Coalition, voted against it, while the Communist KKE boycotted the vote.

On the day the measures passed (5 March) the main unions went out on strike and rallied outside, the communist PAME in the morning and the GSEE and public-sector ADEDY in the afternoon.

In the demos, 87-year old Manolis Glezos was tear-gassed in the face by riot cops -- near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

In 1941, during the Nazi occupation, Glezos and Apostolos Santas climbed the Acropolis and tore down the swastika flying there. For that act of defiance, they tortured him. He was imprisoned again during the Civil War and again under Papadopoulos and the Colonels.

Glezos was hospitalized for respiratory problems.

allegory and automaton (3)

Having put these two images together, what have I done?

This conjunction becomes an argument. The collision it stages forces these two images to do polemical work.

The two very different charges of these loaded images are each underwritten by overwriting: each includes its own legend or caption.

The staged encounter, then, of two visual scriptings: one, arch irony of a gate to hell (“Work sets you free”), bears a charge of utter repulsion; the other, meager chalk-trace of a rebellious intention (“Never work”), is charged with attraction.

One synecdochically cites a historical fragment (part for whole, part for whole, unfolding out all the way to capitalist modernity as such: gate for Auschwitz, Auschwitz for Nazi genocide, etc.), or, if not that far, then still to the limit, the outer threshold of spectatorial-historical consciousness, before perhaps collapsing back, whole mountains of corpses recorded in other photos, seen and remembered, volumes of horror and terror documented and catalogued, generating something like aura-in-reverse.

The other invokes as it condenses a whole history of avant-garde provocation in one three-word graffito. Scrawled on a Parisian wall by Debord in 1953 or 54, the imperative détourns Rimbaud (Letter to Izambard, 13 May 1871: “Travailler maintenant, jamais, jamais; je suis en grève.”) while echoing the blustering taunts of Berlin Dada and reasserting the active linkage of poetry and revolution that drove Surrealist program and praxis (Manifesto of the Dadaist Central Revolutionary Council, 1919, demanding “progressive unemployment”; cover of La Révolution surréaliste, No. 4, 1925: “WAR ON WORK!”; Ralentir travaux, poems from 1930, etc.). And on to the Lettristes – all refracted through Marx (Capital, vol. 3, reduction of the workday as the “basic condition” of freedom), Lafargue’s Right To Be Lazy (1883) and perhaps Luxemburg’s Mass Strike (1906).

Holding a place within the legend, for years hardly more than a rumor, of the Situationist International, these words then reappeared a decade and half later during another May. Absorbed into the history of 68, they were transfigured into a cipher of freedom, winging, all eros.

If these two visually impoverished images together generate a certain force of seduction, then this rhetorical effect derives from the apparent adequacy of the visual argument.

The linking juxtaposition becomes an immediate refutation: genocidal modernity is followed directly, as the eyes slip unhindered over the marginal gap, by the call to general strike promising a radical new form of labor and life.

Revolution appears to answer, visually does answer, the brutal datum of the pendant, a global regime of forced labor that in itself routinely and necessarily “murders” the freedom and happiness of those it exploits – and which, under the rule of enforcing exception, repeatedly becomes literally murderous on a global scale.

But in the skip across the seam of the montage, the instantaneous passage from image to image, contracting time and space and excluding reflective mediations, what falls out?

The steps of struggle – difficult processes of pedagogy, organizing, strategy – are jammed and compressed impatiently into the brilliant gesture of spontaneity, the quick clandestine performance of a sole agent.

Were it that easy!

What Marx actually writes in volume 3 (Chapter 48):

“The realm of freedom really begins only where labor determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper.”

But he continues: “Freedom [in the realm of irreducible “natural necessity”] can only consist in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its base. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.”

This collective or socialized control (gemeinschaftliche Kontrolle), note, is over not nature but the metabolic interaction with nature. It is our relation to nature, Marx argues, that has to be mastered.

The lines bear an opening to a radically different relation with nature, internal and external. But the misrecognitions and false resolutions also latent in this promise helped to lead in twentieth-century practice to the reproduction of forced labor, a “socialist” extraction of surplus, episodic terror and the usual ecological abuse.

Everything at stake in processing the mirroring nightmares of “really existing socialism” unfolds from those lines – which should be read urgently together with Benjamin’s Thesis XI, along with all of Adorno’s and Marcuse’s glosses on it, already sampled in posts below.

Work to be reinvented, relations reorganized, so as to abolish structural domination between people and between people and nature: a potential social transformation the actualization of which remains a problematic in search of solutions.

If we are inclined to read this visual argument as a call to autonomist exodus à la Hardt, Negri and Virno, we would at least need to look the strategic problems of aim and agency in the eye: withholding labor-power from the wage relation is a means of struggle, not its end.

While it temporarily breaks the circuit of capital, the stoppage of production, even on a massive scale, does not necessarily break capitalist power. Persisted in, the general strike throws up new problems of scarcity. In itself it is not the needed reinvention of work and dissolvent of divisions of labor (not painters but people who sometimes paint, etc.).

Exemplary intransigence, as in Debord’s photo, promises happiness but doesn’t solve the problem. The solutions are yet to be found, although – of course – collective searching is the finest practice.

Clarified perhaps: Even when images appear to speak, they never say all that needs to be said. Images that “argue” by force can lose in reflective power what they gain by rhetorical assertion.

No image, any more than any concept, is identical to its referent. It takes the labor of critical interpretation and reflection to gauge the gaps between word, image and reality – and to draw (allegorically or in other words – and always in other words – by means of questions) the conclusions.

the debt to Benjamin
allegory and philosophy
allegory and automaton (1)
allegory and automaton (2)
dreaming naked
shudders of freedom?

phantoms of liberty

(addendum to on tea partiers)

The legions of Earl Gray (aka Fox, aka Beck) marching on Rome drag with them a pitiless engine of partisan siege. The aim of it: to pummel the first Black president.

In the tea bag, a heady mix of rage, myth and toxins. Venoms spurt in all directions. Within the simmering legions, ugly elements circulate: militiamen and border vigilantes, Patriots and John Birchers.

They speak of Tyrants and Liberty, wave The Constitution.

Rightward scurrying Obama they paint as Black Socialist Tyrant, conjuring old racist fears of slave risings and plantations up in flames - the ghosts of Toussaint L’Ouverture and Haiti’s Black Jacobins.

But palpably, in the fearing and seething: the deeper identification with power, impotence longing for a Tyrant – the still-shared fantasy of an invincible super sovereign bristling with nukes, dungeons and robotic terminators.

Proof: of the sacred war machine, that absolute black hole of “big government” expenditure, to which all common goods must be sacrificed, not one word. About that of which naught need be said, tea baggers are glad to be silent.

Obama’s person is despised but in the King’s true body, the executive function as such, the imago, dear to the heartland, of Avenging Protector persists.

Fear of the wretched and inscrutable enemy at large in the Global South feeds the wish for a grimacing strong man in the White House basement. Let him be more terrible than terror itself: ungloved, water-boarding, rampaging.

Hitting-out still underwriting war machine’s taking-out.

Tea machine as the “new American revolution,” from below? Unlaughably not. Restorationist reaction to merest whiff of change, more like it. Faux-radical, extreme only in its middling hatreds.

Its politics, translated into votes, prepares the return of Republican power and strengthens the Party’s right wing.

For the world, it means more killing, in waste and wrack. More war, more obstruction, more avoidance – of history, of planet in meltdown, the automaton of systematic antagonism, blind and miserable rule of domination.

refracting terror

“Somewhere in the heap, a wild equine eye, always open.”

Beckett, The Unnamable, 1953/58

As the wars went on, missiles and phosphorous pounding down on civilians across the Global South, computer animator Lena Gieseke mapped the space of Picasso’s great protest of the terror wreaked on Guernica.

Not unproblematic, her technical “exploration.” The last thing we need is another cartoon trivializing what weapons keep doing to bodies. (Nor does Picasso escape this old problem of the enjoyment factor intrinsic to aesthetic semblance, at work in all images, even painful representations of the worst.) 

But her risky estrangement convinces – and the more so by not reassuring. She fingers the questions raised, without pretending to fix the relation between her “three-dimensional reproduction” and Picasso’s painting. The haunting result disturbs on many levels, even as it activates the image shards of horror all of us are forced to carry in our heads.

exemplary delusion

“Bomb Power translates directly to information power. Secrecy emanated from the Manhattan Project like a giant radiation emission.”

“And the power of secrecy that enveloped the Bomb became a model for the planning or execution of Anything Important, as guarded by Important People. Because the government was the keeper of the great secret, it began to specialize in secret keeping.”

Garry Wills, Bomb Power, 2010


In the wake of Hiroshima, a new structural-strategic trend: the long-term concentration of executive power, mutating the US state. Wills traces, step by step, the formation of the new regime: a National Security State operating beyond and largely against the US Constitution.

Wills documents the crimes and abuses accumulated by every president from Truman to Bush II, shifting power steadily to the executive branch and there merging with the war machine.

To Wills’ conclusions, we would only need to add: this mutation of the US state unfolding from a new power of terror corresponds to its enforcing functions in the post-1945 global order.

In all of this Obama takes his place, here as elsewhere brings no change.

status quo autobellum

War machine: Pentagon and its global web of bases, but also the houses of mist, that vast, multi-agency spying and counterinsurgency apparatus netting planet and space; plus the industrial sector that supplies both; plus the scientific R&D apparatus installed in universities and corporate labs; plus the new mercenary assets operating outside military codes of engagement, discipline and accountability; plus the new bases in the culture and affect industries that sell and spin the wars to the public (what Der Derian calls the MIME-Net, the military-industrial-media-
entertainment network).

A dense concentrate of economic and political power, pulsing through sites in and out of the US state. Whole institutional continents veiled in secrecy become loci of quasi-autonomous interests and power, competing for funding and presidential ear, often at odds in aims and priorities, tactics and strategy, measures to be taken.

It’s a war in there, the war machine. Over it, fueling it: the valorization-accumulation process, master logic of capital, mediated through imperialist great gaming. Out there, in the wars, smart operators have never ceased to make a killing.

binding axes

In the war machine, unity appears as emergency projection - as wartime convergence of the king’s two bodies, the official function and actual person of Commander in Chief, enthroned in the Oval Office or touring the forts and estates in Air Force One.
 
Before the hated enemy, contradictions are deferred, internal rivalries managed: yessir, yessir, united we stand.

Imperfect, but still control, as real and terrible as it gets. US presidential elections – ultimate staging of sanctioned political struggle under the current global order. As we’ve seen, an election worth stealing.

War gives command over this machine its maximum unity; permanent emergency normalizes it. Repeat accumulation, with surplus: power mirrors capital’s spiral.

As in Benjamin’s thesis contra Schmitt, the state of exception suspending the rule proved to be part of it: the rule is, that the exception enforces the rule. What rules is the rule of exception and rule together: permanence in accumulating power and catastrophe.

A complexly commanded but precisely deployable power of terror – state terror, the terror of enforcement. And globally, the US role, capital guarantee.

Entrenched empire of functional death-power, deep wound and legacy of Hiroshima.