Dangerous & Lazy

I’ve been meaning to scan and upload The Weather Underground’s Prairie Fire for some time. It’s a fascinating book, written in 1974, just as the transition from the crisis of Keynesianism to the ascent of neoliberalism was taking place, and it’s a fine attempt to understand this change and how economic change, alongside the dissolution of the movements of the sixties, would effect forthcoming political activity. Not that they got everything right; their prediction of a revolutionary upsurge was sadly inaccurate and, given that, it turns out that they overestimated the role that would be played by armed struggle in the rest of the decade. On a more theoretical, rather than strategic, level, they did much better, however; it’s particularly interesting to read their materialist sketch of the intersections between capitalism, race, and gender, although it is a little depressing to realize how little influence this kind of analysis has had since then, with so many accounts of intersectionality tending towards the idealist and post-Marxist.

When you compensate the banks without nationalization, I think that would be the opposite of socialism. One of the odd things at first about discussion of bailout plans was the lack of actual macro-economic suggestions: the plan in Congress is about giving money to the banks, left-wing critics have suggested giving money to home owners; individual solutions, nothing structural. But it can’t be that structural changes are unthinkable; indeed, they’re kind of obvious, given that, as far as I know, economics departments do still teach macro-economics. David Harvey:

Surely it cannot be lack of imagination. The academy, for example, is full of explorations of the imaginary. Read more↴

According to IMDB, Amnesty International was “highly critical” of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay; aside from being an amusing example of taking a film too literally, it’s an illustration of the way a certain sort of liberalism requires authoritarianism to define itself against. This is particularly a problem if you’re criticizing Harold and Kumar, as the film spends so much of its time exposing this idea of absolute authority as a fantasy, one held by liberals of the right wing (the neoconservatives) and the left wing (Amnesty). Who would have thought someone would make a film of Derrida’s Rogues in the form of a stoner comedy? Read more↴

But the reaction of the common man, woman, and child—”That? Why you can’t change that! You must be out of your mind!”—is closest to the truth (The Dialectic of Sex, 1).

I approve, of course, of Firestone’s call for the abolition of childhood. Her refusal to justify naturalized hierarchies is probably more intransigent, and more necessary, in this case even than in her anakysis of women’s oppression. But, as with her discussion of the biological roots of sexed oppression, there’s a frustrating gap in her account between the biological generalities and the historical specifics. Firestone of course recognizes that the particular forms taken by oppression are not fixed; but what remains unclear to me is where these particular forms of opression come from. If the biological is supposed to be determining, but the form taken by the biological is itself determined by something else, isn’t it the “something else” that is really determining (behind the curtain, pulling the strings, as it were)?

This problem is particularly apparent in the discussion of the oppression of children because, in Firestone’s account, the oppression of children seems to have only really got going relatively recently, some time in modernity. But surely the difference in strength between children and adults predated this; so what caused this continuum of capability to become interpreted as a difference between two kinds of people, children and adults? Firestone does suggest an intriguing reason for the rise of the ideology of childhood, although she doesn’t follow it up (and, indeed, it’s not obviously compatible with her overall analysis of children as an oppressed class).

The childmen and childwomen of medieval iconography are miniature adults, reflecting a wholly different social reality: children then were tiny adults, carriers of whatever class and name they had been born to, destined to rise into a clearly outlined social position (86).

The rise of the ideology of childhood, then, was also the rise of a group of people who were not (yet) carriers of a class and name, who were “innocent,” in the sense of unformed by a past or by connections with others. And when you start thinking of children like that, they start to seem a lot like the bourgeois subject.

A little while back, Warren Ellis wrote an appropriately sharp post describing the Technological Singularity as “the last trench of the religious impulse in the technocratic community.” The post is worth reading for its own sake, but it’s also fun to read the hilariously pissy trackbacks from members of the singularitarian community. Belief in the singularity, part of the belief system called extropianism and/or transhumanism, is a strange thing; it’s probably best to understand it as one of America’s quaint 19th century excentricities, like libertarianism or private health care. Read more↴

Dennis Kucinich on impeaching George Bush:

This isn’t a political question, by the way…this is a matter that’s beyond politics. This is a matter that relates to a democratic system of government…. We cannot let our political system trump the requirements of the law.