Derrida’s Spectres of Marx is a frustrating book. For someone capable of such careful readings, Derrida’s references to Marx are remarkably sloppy, and, as with a lot of his later work, the obsessively spiraling style appears hollow rather than beguiling (it’s not as bad as The Politics of Friendship, but what is). But the central theme of the text is undeniably interesting. Derrida identifies in Marx an uneasiness with his (Marx’s) own analysis, with Marx constantly discovering the spectral nature of capitalism, which he continuously seeks to deny or deflect with a focus on life as a material positivity.
It would be pointless to deny that Marx is sometimes vitalist, although this is not a simple organicist praise of life as vital spirit. Rather, Marx connects life with productive potential, first of all in the figure of “living labor,” but in more depth in Marx’s description of the fundamentally excessive nature of the proletariat, the surplus population necessarily produced by capitalism. In Capital, the descriptions of overpopulation evoke compression and pressure, a pressure that the capitalist authorities quoted inevitably figure in terms of a danger that is equally biological, moral, and political.
However, although Marx does, as Derrida writes, sometimes oppose and seek to exorcise the spectral, he doesn’t do so in the name of this vitalism. Read more↴
Walter Benn Michaels has recently been partying like it’s 1988 and engaging in a critique of identity politics. Lenin has already done a good job dismantling Michaels’s simplistic view of race, but what’s so frustrating about Michaels is that the economically-focused politics he prescribes is as deeply embedded in neoliberalism as the politics of diversity he rejects. Michaels criticizes a certain employment of “diversity” to promote an image of equality that does not challenge the fundamentals of economic inequality. This is true, although hardly new, and Michaels’s presentation is particularly simplistic. What he fails to realize, moreover, is that the sort of economic equality he champions is just as neoliberal.
Michaels puts forward a common but quite false presentation of neoliberalism as being unconcerned by economic inequality. Read more↴
Some of the things that made ABC’s new show V terrible can doubtless be attributed to the constraints of making a pilot: the rushed pace, the thin characterization, the complete lack of any visual design sense, perhaps even the terrible dialogue. But the main problem is the show’s politics, which are so stupid as to become offensive. The problem derives in part from the original miniseries, a well-meaning anti-fascist allegory (which opens with a scene of heroic Sandinistas), in which the fascists are reptilian aliens from outer space; the difficulty, of course, being that the idea of an insidious alien threat is itself an uncomfortably fascist one. Still, the original miniseries skirts over this problem, and focuses on collaborators with and resistors to this rising fascism.
The remake, on the other hand, takes this potentially fascist starting point and really fucking runs with it. The new aliens aren’t just lizards, they’re secret lizards who have infiltrated the government and the media, and now they are offering universal healthcare as an attempt to poison humanity’s precious bodily fluids. They are, in other words, an anti-semitic stereotype. Now, I’m not saying that ABC and the makers of V are actually anti-semites. Rather, by making vague and deeply stupid gestures towards contemporary politics (ooh, universal healthcare, how topical), the show accidentally exposes underlying anti-semitism in contemporary political discourse: it’s the teabaggers and birthers as sci-fi (and it’s surely no accident that the one significant black character in the pilot has a secret radical past, and the same beard as ex-Maoist Van Jones).
I’ve long been suspicious of anyone who attempts to give some kind of theoretical significance to a supposed distinction between “politics” and “the political.” Partly this is just linguistic; if you use “politics” as a noun you’re going want to use its adjectival form, “political,” at some point, and pretending that there’s a distinction between the two is just going to confuse you. But there is a more important problem with the purported distinction, which is that it obscures a genuine difficulty in the conception of politics. Drawing a distinction between, say, “politics” as a good practice and “the political” as a bad reification (or “politics” as a bad institutionalization and “the political” as a good ontological condition, or whatever other distinction you want to make; no-one agrees on what the actual distinction between the two terms is) is an attempt to fence-off some aspect of politics as unproblematic, to declare, by linguistic fiat, that the complexities in the concept of politics have been resolved.
In fact, however, the concept of politics is essentially problematic, and there is no aspect of it that can be protected from this difficulty. Read more↴
Saul Alinsky apparently used to ask new recruits to his organizing efforts, “what are you organizing for?” And they would respond by saying that their goal was to help the poor, or get housing for the homeless, or whatever it might be. Alinsky would shoot down all these concrete goals, insisting that “you are organizing for power.” I like that; but Alinsky wasn’t terribly clear about what power actually meant, and this failure to think about power has had some pretty terrible consequences for the American left, especially in the very particular way they’ve adopted or adapted Alinsky’s methods.
This confused me when I first moved to the US; looking for the left in the Bay Area it seems at first like there’s no there there. The general left-wing sentiment in the area doesn’t seem to be matched by the existence of left-wing organizations. It turns out that that’s not quite right; it’s just that these organizations aren’t political organizations but are, rather, community organizations and non-profits. Some of these have radical rhetoric and a revolutionary pedigree, but they all share the weakness of the Alinskian (non-)understanding of power, where power is not conceived of as something that could be appropriated collectively and used creatively to common ends, but where power is something someone else (the state) has, and the limit of collective action is to force concessions from those who do hold power.
The limitations of this lack of understanding of power were starkly illustrated in an event in last week’s walkout at Berkeley. Read more↴
As the University of California gears up for tomorrow’s day of action, I’ve been hearing one argument against the walkout that deserves a little further attention. This argument proposes that there is a contradiction in a protest in favor of education that proceeds by students and academics halting education for a day. This argument is, of course, deeply moronic; it’s not, I suppose, entirely surprising to hear it from students, but it’s extraordinarily depressing to hear it from some of my colleagues in, of all places, a political science department, or from an actual politician, Robert Reich, who admonished us, at a teach-in this evening, to address our efforts to persuasion.
The problem with this argument is the incredible poverty of its understanding of politics. The suggestion seems to be that the only possible meaning of an action can be purely symbolic, an entry in a process of debate. The horizon of any conceivable action is “awaring” people. What this misses is that the staff, student, and faculty walkout might be a political action, an attempt to exercise power, or at least make a threat of exercising power. The very idea of politics has gone missing.