A wholly splendid article by Raymond Geuss on Richard Rorty, including a defense of internationalism which culminates in:

The reason [for the fact that the Pope always turned out to be Italian] most commonly cited by these nuns was that, as Bishop of Rome, the Pope had to live in the “Eternal City,” but only an Italian could stand to live in Rome: it was hot, noisy, and overcrowded, and the people there ate spaghetti for dinner everyday rather than proper food, i.e., potatoes, so it would be too great a sacrifice to expect someone who had not grown up in Italy to tolerate life there. I clearly remember being unconvinced by this argument, thinking it set inappropriately low standards of self-sacrifice for the higher clergy; a genuinely saintly character should be able to put up even with pasta for lunch and dinner every day. I have since myself adopted this diet for long periods of time without thinking it gave me any claim on the Papacy (via).

I have very fond memories of Geuss’s lectures at Cambridge, particularly (and I think I’ve told this story to more-or-less everyone I’ve ever met),

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On the way out after a talk on Arendt last week, a friend turned to me and said, “so, I guess you’re pretty pissed off.” And indeed I was; I’m not especially knowledgeable or enthusiastic about Arendt, but she’s certainly more interesting than her American epigones (but I repeat myself; are there any Arendtians anywhere but America?). Arendt, with her anti-modern republicanism, was not in any straightforward sense a liberal; yet, with American Arendtians, the topic always comes back, sooner of later, to the special excellence of the American political community. Or, rather, the hypothetical excellence of the American political community because, of course, all Arendtians agree that politics is in grave danger: the social always lurks, waiting to swallow it up. In last week’s Arendtian extraveganza, this protectiveness towards the political took the form of enjoining people to forget the tartuffery of “social democracy” now that George Bush threatens something much more important: the Constitution!

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While infinite thought was in San Francisco recently, we talked a bit about Shulamith Firestone’s amazing concept of “cybernetic communism.” Regrettably, my mind has been warped by teaching introductory comparative politics classes, so that the term “cybernetics” now makes me think, not of our glorious robot future, but of systems theory, the impetus behind David Easton and Robert Dahl’s invention of political “science” in the 1950s. Not only is systems theory pseudo-scientific nonsense, it’s fundamentally reactionary, as it constructs society as an object to be manipulated by elites (I’ve been listening to Žižek’s “Embedded in Ideology” lectures recently, where he makes the point that American pluralism is a fundamentally elitist doctrine; Dahl particularly is one of the chief architects of this).

So given this, I was interested to discover that the USSR had its own analogous cybernetic moment. According to this review of the splendidly titled 1959 work, Cybernetics at Service of Communism (3 volumes, US Department of Commerce), cybernetics seems to have been adopted in the USSR as something like an extension of Taylorism to the whole of society. This brings up all kinds of Dialectic of Enlightenment-type questions about whether the rationalization of society doesn’t also always involve an objectification of society and hence unfreedom. Firestone is interesting here because she applies a Marxist method of a sort, without the productivist assumptions that made rationalization seem like a non-problem. Now, Firestone is certainly a rationalist of a sort (most obviously in her resolutely anti-psychoanalytical account of post-revolutionary sexuality); is this a rationalism which, enlightenment-style, transforms into its other? Or will the future cybernetic communism acheive what actually existing cybernetic communism only parodied?

The concept of the lumpenproletariat is generally used to support a workerist (in the bad sense) form of Marxism, in which the working class’s revolutionary activity comes from their role as producers, and hence the lumpenproletariat, the unproductive poor, have little or no part to play in revolution. The lumpenproletariat then are criminals, prostitutes, the homeless, written off by so-called Marxists along lines very similar to bourgeois discussions of the “underclass.” Aside from the reactionary political implications of this definition, it also seems wrong from a Marxological point of view. In the Manifesto, Marx’s discusses the lumpenproletariat in the context of reactionary groups that attempt to preserve their position within a pre-capitalist order, describing them as:

 The “dangerous classes,” the social scum, that passiveley rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society.

The last part of the definition seems interesting here: the lumpenproletariat are not those excluded from participation in capitalism, but remnants of “old society.” This doesn’t seem to include those included in capitalism in the most precarious or criminalized forms; indeed, I’m not sure who in contemporary society this definition of the lumpenproletariat would apply to. So, who are the lumpenproletariat?

In the wake of the discussion of Radical Orthodoxy some time ago, I’ve finally got round to listening to this CBS program about Milbank and Pickstock, two of the movement’s founders. It’s an extraordinarily good radio show - I can’t imagine the militantly middlebrow Radio 4, or it’s repetition-as-farce NPR, producing something half as intellectually serious. Great podcast though it is, it’s obviously not a complete account of Radical Orthodoxy; still, if it was accurate I can see where some of infinite thought’s concerns come from. Milbank and Pickstock put forward some interesting and persuasive criticisms of modernity; but there seemed to be an absence of the kind of thinking necessary to move forward from that critique, leaving Radical Orthodoxy in the end, as IT says, reactionary. Read more »

The Pacific Film Archive is currently running a series on Soviet science fiction, surely the genre than which nothing greater can be thought. Today’s entry was the amazing 1924 Bolsheviks on Mars masterpiece Аэлита. Read more »

Feminism thus stands in relation to marxism as marxism does to classical political economy: its final conclusion and ultimate critique.

I think this may be MacKinnon’s most exciting suggestion in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. The idea of a critique of politics which would also in part be a critique of marxism seems to be animating a lot of people right now: Žižek (so I hear); Wendy Brown’s work on sovereignty; or Enrique Dussell’s 20 Theses on Politics. Interesting, then, that MacKinnon was making the suggestion 20 years ago; unfortunately, though, this attempt to use feminism to move beyond marxism brings into particularly sharp relief the limitations of MacKinnon’s use of marxism. Read more »

Leanne Battersby’s recent storyline in Coronation Street has been excellent. It’s done a very good job of criticizing the material conditions of prostitution without basing that on a stigmatization of prostitutes. The economic criticism of prostitution is too often expressed as horror that economic conditions force women so low; but it’s hard to disentangle that from the marginalization of prostitutes which, as Coronation Street has been pointing out, is precisely part of the economic problem of prostitution. Read more »

Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.

The pious outrage Thursday over heiress Paris Hilton’s “early release” from jail in Los Angeles, accusations of “special treatment” and the vindictive demands that she receive “justice,” i.e., punishment, have nothing healthy or progressive about them.

Excellent article about Paris Hilton on the World Socialist Website. While k-punk’s criticisms of the musical defense of Paris Hilton are on target, that doesn’t rule out the value of a political defense. Or, not a defense of Paris Hilton herself (she hardly needs communists fighting her battles for her), but a defense of left-wing politics against the kind of thinking that goes into much of the hostility toward Hilton. An awful lot of the dislike of Paris Hilton really is misogynistic but that is, hopefully, easily identified and disposed of. But, as the WSWS argues, there’s a criticism of Paris Hilton that presents itself as left-wing but which is just as reactionary.

Hilton seems to get a lot of stick not just because she’s rich, but because she hasn’t either earned her wealth or used it in some kind of worthwhile way. To a communist, on the other hand, this is one of Hilton’s most positive qualities. Certainly, on any reasonably calibrated ethical scale, Paris Hilton is obviously superior to, say, Bill Gates or George Soros. Read more »