MANIFIESTO FOR A SOCIETY OF UNEASINESS
Aug 4, 2010 Politics
Václav Bělohradský
Umělec 1/2010 / cz en de. Ilustrated by Daniel G. Andújar. Umelec magazine. p 76-109
MECHANISMS
There are no facts in front of which we would be silenced in the same way as in front of a reality that appeared on its own, such that „there is nothing to talk about“. Builders of universal empires require an agreement between them to be announced as an agreement with reality itself. If they succeed, there will be a worldwide universal empire, which won‘t stand anything but „willing helpers“. …
The greatest contradiction of industrial society is the rational nature of its irrationality, its rational foolishness. The system’s ever-increasing level of productivity is accompanied by the ever more rapid destruction of ancient worlds; sovereign political power rests on the threat of nuclear holocaust; our thoughts and emotions are subjugated to the power strategies of large corporations; the helplessness of the majority increases in direct proportion to the enormous and unprecedented power of the privileged minority. A society filled with such contradictions can survive only because of the immense effectiveness of its controlling mechanisms, which rob us of the ability to perceive the system’s objectives and our role within it as an offense to human reason and feeling. “The mechanism by which the individual is bound to his society has itself been altered. Social control is grounded in the new needs which it has created.” We become the chief editor of a newspaper, we have a high salary, a person with a high salary must live in a house outside of Prague, we take out a loan on our high salary, Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: 2010, Daniel G. Andújar, english, umelec
RSA Animate – Crisis of Capitalism
Jul 3, 2010 Politics
Today’s Must-See Animated Capitalist Takedown from RSA and David Harvey
thanks to Shuddhabrata Sengupta
By Max Abelson
June 29, 2010 | 6:24 p.m
If you watch just one funny and handsome Marxist critique of the financial crisis, make it the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce’s animated version of David Harvey’s RSA speech “Crises of Capitalism.” It’s been making the rounds this afternoon, and for good reason: Mr. Harvey, a Marxist scholar who heads CUNY’s Center for Place, Culture & Politics, describes not just the failures that caused the ongoing fiasco, but the failure of how we’ve explained it.
“It’s crap,” he says. “You should know it’s crap, and say it is. And we have a duty, it seems to me, those of us who are academics, and seriously involved in the world, to actually change our mode of thinking.”
Listening to Mr. Harvey would be one thing, but the one-hand work from RSA Animate — who has given the same treatment to Barbara Ehrenreich, Dan Pink, Jeremy Pifkin, Philip Zumbardo — does wonders.
Tags: Capitalist, Crisis, David Harvey, Marxist
TIQQUN !!!
TIQQUN 1
[pdf] Tiqqun 1 – Intégralité scannée
[doc] Tiqqun 1 – Intégralité document word
Eh bien, la guerre !
Qu’est-ce que la Métaphysique Critique ?
Théorie du Bloom
[pdf] version augmentée, La Fabrique.[de] [es] [it]
The Contemporary Misadventures of Critical Thinking
May 28, 2010 Politics
Jacques Rancière
March 7, 2008 CCFI Noted Scholars Lecture Series
Jacques Rancière is the Emeritus Professor of Aesthetics and Politics at the University of Paris VIII where he taught from 1969 to 2000. He continues to teach, as a visiting professor, in a number of Universities, including Rutgers, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Berkeley. His work has been translated into 14 languages, and has been subject to numerous special issues, symposia and critical commentaries. His latest titles to appear in English translation are: Disagreement, Politics, and Philosophy (1998), Short Voyages to the Land of the People (2003), The Philosopher and his Poor (2004), The Flesh of Words (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics (2005), Film Fables (2006), and The Hatred of Democracy (2007).
The Contemporary Misadventures of Critical Thinking Introduction 1
The Contemporary Misadventures of Critical Thinking Introduction 2
The Contemporary Misadventures of Critical Thinking Video
The Contemporary Misadventures of Critical Thinking Podcast
Tags: 2008, Critical Thinking, Jacques Rancière
Dilemma ’89: My father was a communist
May 24, 2010 Politics
The Slovak author and journalist Martin M. Simecka and Hungarian architect and former samizdat publisher László Rajk are not only former dissidents of the younger generation, but also the sons of well-known persecuted communists. László Rajk sr. was the most prominent victim of the Rákosi show trials of 1949; the writer Milan Simecka sr. began his career in the Czechoslovak Communist Party and became a dissident after 1968. In the first debate in the Eurozine series “Europe talks to Europe”, held in Budapest, they discussed the still unanswered questions surrounding the involvement of their father’s generation in post-war communism, and the failings of today’s debate about the past in the former communist countries. Moderated by Eva Karadi, editor of Magyar Lettre Internationale.
Eva Karadi: There is an interesting common feature in both your biographies that has provided us with the title of our conversation: “Dilemma ’89: My father was a communist”. Martin Simecka, how well do you know the circumstances in which your father became a communist?
Martin Simecka: I know them very well because I spoke to him about it all. After my father was expelled from the party in ’68 he became a dissident, and so he had time to reflect on his past. He became a member of the party as early as ’48, as an eighteen-year-old. His personal motivation was very typical for the younger generation in Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s. The Czechoslovak First Republic was extremely leftwing: there was a strong social-democratic party, a communist party and powerful leftwing intellectual movements. Many members of the intellectual elite – the writers and artists – were either communist or very leftist; it wasn’t unusual to be intellectual and leftist, or even communist. In this respect, Czechoslovakia was different to Hungary or Poland. In the ’48 elections the communist party won about 60 per cent in the Czech Republic and about 30 per cent in Slovakia, which was still a lot.
There were two profound reasons behind being a communist. One was the very common feeling that the Red Army had liberated Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War, and that it was the Russians who had brought liberty. The second was that Edvard Benes, who was president from late ’38 and then in exile in London, himself supported the idea that the Soviet Union is our friend, after Great Britain and others had betrayed Czechoslovakia with the Munich Agreement in ’38.
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Tags: 1989, Communism, Europe, László Rajk, Martin M. Simecka
Marx contre-attaque
Dec 18, 2009 Politics
Created 16/03/2009 -Published on Bibliobs (http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com)
«L’idée de communisme» retrouverait-elle, par temps de crise, une vigueur inattendue? Alain Badiou [1], Slavoj Zizek [2], Toni Negri [3], Michael Hardt [4], Jacques Rancière [5] et plusieurs autres grands noms de la philosophie politique radicale mondiale étaient réunis, ce week-end, à Londres, pour un colloque sur cette notion. Aude Lancelin a suivi les débats
On ignore si la tombe de Marx [6], située au cimetière de Highgate à Londres, a été spécialement fleurie durant ce week-end. Il est certain en revanche qu’un hommage autrement plus stimulant vient d’être rendu au penseur au cœur même de la capitale britannique. Trois journées durant, du vendredi 13 au dimanche 15 mars 2009, les plus prestigieux noms de la philosophie politique radicale mondiale, de Slavoj Zizek à Alain Badiou, Toni Negri, Michael Hardt, Jacques Rancière et bien d’autres, se sont succédé à la tribune de la «Birkbeck university of London» [7] pour réfléchir ensemble à l’avenir de l’idée communiste. Un amphithéâtre de neuf cent places avait été mis à disposition pour ce colloque à tous égards exceptionnel, sobrement intitulé «On the idea of Communism». Il aura à peine suffi à contenir une foule spectaculairement jeune, attentive et rieuse, venue de l’Europe entière avec carnets de notes, canettes de Coca light et caméscopes high-tech pour entendre les grandes figures d’un concept politique qu’on disait salutairement mort.
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Tags: 2009, Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri, français, Jacques Rancière, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Žižek
20 Years of Collapse
Nov 10, 2009 Politics
November 9, 2009
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html
TODAY is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Duringthis time of reflection, it is common to emphasize the miraculousnature of the events that began that day: a dream seemed to come true,the Communist regimes collapsed like a house of cards, and the worldsuddenly changed in ways that had been inconceivable only a few monthsearlier. Who in Poland could ever have imagined free elections withLech Walesa as president?
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Tags: 2009, Berlin Wall, Cold War Era, english, Slavoj Žižek
Alain Badiou: La actualización del comunismo
Jul 11, 2009 Politics
Filósofo, dramaturgo y novelista, es uno de los nombres más destacados del pensamiento contemporáneo. En esta charla, hace un repaso por los sucesos del Mayo del ’68, advierte que la idea del comunismo no ha podido ser superada hasta hoy y ataca al presidente de Francia, Nicolas Sarkozy, a quien define como “el último bastión del conservadurismo francés”. Un diálogo sobre la política de la emancipación, el amor como categoría de verdad y la relación entre poesía y filosofía.
Por ANALIA HOUNIE
“El capitalismo global es una abstracción que excluye a buena parte de la humanidad”, sostiene.
—A cuarenta años del Mayo Francés, ¿cuál es, según usted, su legado?
—La complejidad de la pregunta consiste en que no hubo un Mayo del ’68 sino cuatro. Mayo del ’68 fue un acontecimiento, precisamente, porque estuvo compuesto por elementos diferentes. Cuando hablamos entonces de este acontecimiento, debemos precisar siempre de qué Mayo del ’68 estamos hablando. Para decirlo brevemente, hay un primer Mayo del ’68 que es la rebelión de la juventud; de hecho, no de toda la juventud sino de los estudiantes: es la revuelta de una minoría. Es la parte más visible del Mayo del ’68. Debemos decir también que esta parte no fue completamente original porque hacia fin de los sesenta hubo revueltas de los estudiantes prácticamente en todo el mundo: en México, Alemania, Estados Unidos, China… El segundo Mayo del ’68 es la huelga más importante de toda la historia de Francia. Es muy diferente del primero pues concierne a los trabajadores, millones de ellos, y no a los estudiantes. El tercer Mayo del ’68 es algo así como una revolución cultural. Tiene que ver con la agitación de los teatros y de los cineastas, también con la transformación de las reglas sexuales y con la revuelta feminista. El cuarto Mayo del ’68 es, finalmente, el más interesante. Consiste en la búsqueda de una nueva concepción de la política –la búsqueda por crear, por ejemplo, una colectividad entre trabajadores, estudiantes, extranjeros, etcétera–. Creo que aquí yace el legado del Mayo del ’68. Porque la revuelta de los estudiantes en sí misma no es una cuestión universal, concierne a las universidades, a la relación entre la educación institucional y la educación pública. La huelga de trabajadores en sí misma es ampliamente controlada por el Partido Comunista y por los sindicatos tradicionales, no es un fenómeno nuevo. La transformación de las modalidades sexuales y la revolución cultural crean una modernidad, pero esta modernidad es compatible con el capitalismo. Hoy somos contemporáneos del Mayo del ’68 en la búsqueda de una nueva definición de la política. El problema clave es encontrar una forma de organización política que no se halla en la forma del viejo Partido Comunista (organización jerárquica, participación en las elecciones clásicas, etc). Este problema aún no esta resuelto.
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Tags: after 1968, Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri, Communism, español, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, Judith Butler, Nicolas Sarkozy, Slavoj Žižek
The place of the Communist Manifesto in the elaboration of the Marxian idea of the post-Capital
Jun 27, 2009 Politics
In the text that follows we argue that the basic Marxian ideas concerning the type of society supposed to follow the demise of capitalism are contained in the Manifesto in a condensed form.
Accordingly, the first section offers an outline of what type of society the Manifesto envisages for the future as well as the conditions necessary for its appearance while the second section relates these ideas to Marx’s other texts.
In this paper post-capitalist society signifies what Marx calls a “Society of free and associated producers” “” also, indifferently, “communism” or “socialism”[1] “” based on the “associated mode of production.” This “union of free individuals,” the crowning point of the self-emancipation of the immediate producers, where individuals are subject neither to personal dependence, as in pre-capitalism, nor to material dependence, as in commodity-capitalist society, excludes, by definition, state, private ownership of the conditions of production, commodity production and wage labour. The Manifesto indicates, in a condensed and concise fashion, the essential elements of the envisaged new society as well as the objective and the subjective conditions of its realization.
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Tags: Marx, Marxist, Paresh Chattopadhyay, Rethinking Marxism
