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.
A certain brand of socialist is obsessed with refuting the purported right-wing claim that socialism would socialize your toiletries, forcing you to share your toothbrush. I’m not sure any opponent of socialism has ever actually made such a claim (from what I can find, it appears to originate with 19th-century socialists attempting to distance themselves from communism), but given the craziness of arguments advanced against socialism it’s not entirely implausible.
But the coincidence of the Twitter NHS love and the latest communique from the Socialist Lavatory League got me thinking. There’s an interesting similarity to the socialism of the public toilet and the NHS, in that both involve the coincidence of public provision and a very particular bodily intimacy. This is actually quite uncommon, though other examples might include soviet communal apartments, collective canteens, and Dominic’s proposed nationalized strip clubs. I wonder if this socialization of biological need isn’t a kind of zero-degree of socialism. The need to defend against imagined socialized toothbrushes would then be a sign of a deep anxiety about socialism itself.
I’d forgotten to include public nurseries and care homes as sites of a bodily socialism. I’ve long thought that the employees of the latter, in particular, are true heroes of socialist labor.
Matt Taibbi has a great article in Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs. The piece concerns the ways in which Goldman has profitted from various speculative bubbles that have wiped out other investors. What I particularly like is the way he brings out the intertwined influence of Goldman’s market power and its political power, the companies ability to set the rules both economically and politically.
Regrettably, though, Taibbi has followed up the article by endorsing a range of much less incisive criticisms of Goldman, from the silly claim that Goldman’s faster computers amount to illegal market manipulation, to some ludicrous bullshit from Zero Hedge, who see a totally standard disclaimer on Goldman’s website as evidence of a plan to defraud their customers. The problem with these supposed criticisms of Goldman is that they basically amount to apologetics for the company; in comparison to the vast systemic scale of Goldman’s actual crimes, such petty crimes can only appear as inoccence.
…and I’d like to take a minute just sit right there I’ll tell you how I came to advocate a liquidationist position in the Communist Party of Great Britain.
After I’d stopped laughing at Rowenna Davis’s description of Martin Jacques as a “credible leftist advocate,” I realized the story of the erstwhile Marxism Today section of the CPGB is not really very funny. When Tony Blair and people decided that an electable social democratic party would have to make some rapprochement with neoliberalism, they, eventually, ended up in government. Martin Jacques made the same ideological move, and ended up writing newspaper columns tailing whatever New Labour had just done. So little reward for such ideological upheaval.
The other interesting thing in that article is the way it depends on constructing two fantasy figures of “the left.” Read more↴
Describing Joan of Arc, Dworkin writes that her “story is not female until the end, when she died, like nine million other women, in flames.”1 To be female, that is, is to be subjected, indeed to be killed. For Dworkin, Joan of Arc is a hero because of her refusal to accept this subjection, a refusal to accept subjection that makes Joan a subject in her own right, autonomous and self-determining. But for Dworkin, these two sides, of subject and subjection, never seem to connect to one another. She endorses a particular conception of subjectivity, a form of subjectivity traditionally associated with men but denied to women, but does not consider that this model of subjectivity might depend on subjection (the subjection of somebody: in particular, women) for its coherence. “To want freedom is to want not only what men have, but what men are,”2 Dworkin writes, and I will contend that this is true in a more fundamental sense than Dworkin herself realizes: this construal of freedom is not something merely appropriated by men, but is fundamentally masculinist, implicated in systems of male dominance. Thus, “feminist revolution” requires a rethinking of the notion of subjectivity. Read more↴
Just take a look at the funding for his campaign. I mean, the final figures haven’t come out, but we have preliminary figures, and it seems to be mostly financial institutions. I mean, the financial institutions preferred him to McCain. They are the main funders for both—you know, I mean, core funders for both parties, but considerably more to Obama than McCain.
There are a couple of ways of taking this. Read more↴
