k-punk
Spectres of Mark
(I thought politics MUST be worth a thread of its own.)
The Economist last week carried a post-US election article which said that the reason that the Democrats lost was not fear, not the rise of bigotry, but in effect the 'vision thing'. They simply do not have one.
While Bush and the Republicans have been able to sound confident about America (the fact that such confidence is totally unwarranted given that the US' imminent induction into the PRC), the Democrats have associated themselves with a carping and negative agenda. They won't be like the Republicans... err, that's it....
Their problem highlights a broader malaise within what is still called, unsatisfactorily for a number of reasons, the left.
The neo-cons in the US and the Thatcherites and Blairites in the UK have managed to colonize (the language and concept of) the future. The role of branding, hype and the other strategies Kapital employs to libidinize itself cannot of course be underestimated here. The SF Kapital/ gleamprog project finds it easy to make kapital's most banal products sexy.
Challenging this requires a position that is as ruthlessly erotic as that of its enemy. Socialism the concept and 'socialism' the word are irretrievably tainted by association with the dreariest, most compromised and delibidinizing Statist bureaucracy.
It seems to me, however, that communism - precisely because it is so off the map, so unthinkable - does not have these jaded and jading connotations to anything like the same degree. Communism, after all, is associated with a constructivist aesthetic: as inhumanly glamorous as anything Kapital has come up with.
For example, the Chinese pro-market anti-capitalist communism needs to be seen as more than a cynical gambit. It is clear, or ought to be, that Kapitalism is not working at any level - social, libidinal, psychic - except that of the symbolic structure itself, the big Other. Only it thinks that Kapital is efficient, only it thinks that Kapitalist parliamentarianism delivers freedom. The Chinese model is not simply a way of 'converting' the post-Maoist state into yet another haven for the Kapital-Thing to spread its idiot-mechanical virus through. It is, in principle at least, a genuinely new vision --- not the Third Way, the arrival of which, as Zizek rightly observes, was a sign that THERE WAS NO second way --- but precisely a reassertion of the second way, a challenge to the fake universality of Kapital.
Of course, it is only when communism is decoupled from the State, only when there is a genuine global proletariat, a radical autonomous bottom-up or bottom-bottom collectivity, that communism can be realised. And globalization provides exactly the conditions necessary for the production of such a proletariat.
The Economist last week carried a post-US election article which said that the reason that the Democrats lost was not fear, not the rise of bigotry, but in effect the 'vision thing'. They simply do not have one.
While Bush and the Republicans have been able to sound confident about America (the fact that such confidence is totally unwarranted given that the US' imminent induction into the PRC), the Democrats have associated themselves with a carping and negative agenda. They won't be like the Republicans... err, that's it....
Their problem highlights a broader malaise within what is still called, unsatisfactorily for a number of reasons, the left.
The neo-cons in the US and the Thatcherites and Blairites in the UK have managed to colonize (the language and concept of) the future. The role of branding, hype and the other strategies Kapital employs to libidinize itself cannot of course be underestimated here. The SF Kapital/ gleamprog project finds it easy to make kapital's most banal products sexy.
Challenging this requires a position that is as ruthlessly erotic as that of its enemy. Socialism the concept and 'socialism' the word are irretrievably tainted by association with the dreariest, most compromised and delibidinizing Statist bureaucracy.
It seems to me, however, that communism - precisely because it is so off the map, so unthinkable - does not have these jaded and jading connotations to anything like the same degree. Communism, after all, is associated with a constructivist aesthetic: as inhumanly glamorous as anything Kapital has come up with.
For example, the Chinese pro-market anti-capitalist communism needs to be seen as more than a cynical gambit. It is clear, or ought to be, that Kapitalism is not working at any level - social, libidinal, psychic - except that of the symbolic structure itself, the big Other. Only it thinks that Kapital is efficient, only it thinks that Kapitalist parliamentarianism delivers freedom. The Chinese model is not simply a way of 'converting' the post-Maoist state into yet another haven for the Kapital-Thing to spread its idiot-mechanical virus through. It is, in principle at least, a genuinely new vision --- not the Third Way, the arrival of which, as Zizek rightly observes, was a sign that THERE WAS NO second way --- but precisely a reassertion of the second way, a challenge to the fake universality of Kapital.
Of course, it is only when communism is decoupled from the State, only when there is a genuine global proletariat, a radical autonomous bottom-up or bottom-bottom collectivity, that communism can be realised. And globalization provides exactly the conditions necessary for the production of such a proletariat.