Just come across this quote from Hayek:
The proletariat which capitalism can be said to have ‘created’ was thus not a proportion of the population which would have existed without it and which it had degraded to a lower level; it was an additional population which was enabled to grow up by the new opportunities for employment which capitalism provided. (The Constitution of Liberty)
There you go, proletarians: be grateful to capitalism for even allowing you to exist.
California is, politically, an odd place. It has a reputation as one of the “bluest” states (which, in America’s curious chromo-semantics means “left wing”); but it’s also a home of libertarianism, which coexists with the left in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. This combination makes California an interesting testing-ground for neo-liberalism, a form of right-wing politics adapted to post-New Deal (or post-Fordist) politics. One of the first moves here was Proposition 13, which capped tax rates, with predictable disasterous consequences not just for particular public services in California, but for the ability of the state to function as a political agent at all. We now face a new neo-liberal experiment, Proposition 90, which, in the guise of a “progressive” reform of eminent domain, would require any administration within the state to compensate property owners if their property lost value as a result of legislative measures. This is a staggering attack on the very idea of politics: the community will now have to pay in order to enage in collective decision making. In this, it is neo-liberalism in its purest form. Read more↴
I’ve been thinking a bit about what I want to end up writing about; I’m having difficulty not scoring potential topics on the basis of how many Maoist poster titles I could work into the chapter titles. My current not-actually-going-to-use title is Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy: Action and Utopia in Post-enlightenment Political Thought. I’m trying to figure out how to work the utopian socialists, Marx, Agamben on dynamis, Butler and Mahmood on agency, maybe Lenin, maybe Spinoza, maybe Kant, into some kind of critical take on the centrality of action to most (particularly radical) political theory. I think it’s fair to say I need to figure out a way to restrict the range of my interests here.
Well, one thing at least about the controversy that followed Jack Straws remarks about women wearing veils can be disposed of pretty quickly: the argument that veils impede communication is entirely spurious. Of course covering ones face removes some of the cues that are used in understanding, but so what? Human communication is massively redundant, precisely so that we can continue to communicate even when elements are screened out for whatever reason. Accents and dialects, tongue studs, brightly colored clothes, terrible haircuts – all these things impede communication, and all of them are accepted as a matter of course. Read more↴
I’m writing a presentation on neo-liberalism for a class on development economics tomorrow, and I have just inserted a quote from Lacan. Is this wise, I wonder?
It’s probably unneccessary to end a four-page paper, in which you describe the “political” features of your shared house, by saying that “a deeper understanding of these complex systems will require further research.”
It’s also, particularly if you know your paper is going to be marked by a graduate student, quite possibly late at night when they’re not in such a great mood, probably unwise to claim that the extra-curricular activity you’ve chosen to write about requires “more work than a graduate student’s whole thesis.”