unauthorized insomniac rant
padraig (u.s.) said:
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world.
I meant to respond to this weeks ago and I forgot.
This quote neatly sums up why, although I agree with many of the criticisms of globalized market-driven social organization that come from the crit theory perspective, I ultimately have a hard time with the idea that nu-Communism is the "answer" to all of the world's problems, so that if we only go back to a purer conception of communism and stick to it we'll create a "better world". Communism as a movement was very vital and produced all sorts of productive anti-State interventions in its early days, no doubt about that. But everything about it, from its ethos to its concepts of Capital and labor, are simply not as relevant to today's society as they were during and in the early years post-industrialization. The world was smaller then, more manageable, and easier to draw into focus as a "whole". Economic structures were simpler, more localized, and different in many key respects to ours today. The globe is huge now, and even in becoming more like "one" world it's become entirely too complex a network to theorize into political compliance. Learn from Marxism, take your inspiration, but move on, in other words.
If critical theorists would move away from reformulating the words and works of their Masters and spend a lot more time looking at concrete political situations (without the ironic shrug and eyebrow raise of mainstream outlets like The Daily Show), they may be able to build a new conceptual framework that would produce important interventions in whatever way would be most productive *now*, not a century ago. I'm not pretending I have a grand plan. But maybe that's the problem--the fact that too many people are obsessed with a "final solution" approach. Instead of one grand plan, how about a trillion small but manageable plans that eventually add up and form a network? If a very simple "nomadology" strategy can work for Al Qaeda, essentially a bunch of random nobodies from the middle of no-man's land with few resources fighting a world power--it can work for anyone. And I don't mean the violence and terrorism, I mean the type of organizational infastructure they rely on for their survival.
What bothers me most about the new Left is the crippling nostalgia they engage in and that most of their theory is steeped in. That used to be the Right's problem--idealizing the past and referring to some bygone era where everything was simpler and better--not ours. But now it seems to be an equal opportunity employer of everyone along the political spectrum. This is something K-punk is usually, and ironically, good at diagnosing, given his own rather hard to miss propensity toward idealizing-mythologizing the recent past.
Instead of trying to revive media that were popular and productive 150 years ago, why not cultivate whichever new ones are at your immediate disposal? Along these lines, blogs are a good start. But internet access is still (largely) the privilege of the middle class in developed countries. I am convinced that there are people all over the world who want to be truly informed of political events and situations, but there's just nowhere to go for reliable information that isn't actually infotainment sold and controlled by a venture capitalist.
I hope we can all agree that the younger generations suffer from a lack of awareness more than anything else. So that would be a good start: fix that. Make youtube channels full of free videos about what's going on in the world. Distribute free newsletters, emails, webzines, whatever. Show people the ways in which market-driven government and social organization are failing the entire world. Explain to them that there are things they could do in their own communities all the time--and I don't mean buying Fair Trade, but helping unionize, starting foodbanks, shelters, using grants and local municipal funds for social programs, etc.--and then lead by example and DO THEM YOURSELF. Don't just lament that grassroots efforts are dying off,
make them work, show young people that they CAN move past branding themselves through music taste/consumer goods and/or spending all day on Facebook into meaningful action. One step at a time, though. Drop the bogus "all or nothing" self-defeating circular logic and the macho bluster.
A recent study demonstrated that online interactions don't have the same effect on a person's behavior and choices as real-life social interactions. This confirmed what I'd always felt to be true: using the internet is fine, but the way you use it matters. It's an excellent tool for building real life interactions and networks, but if you don't take it to that next level, research shows that you really won't have "a social network" that affects peoples lives in the same sense as you would in real-life between friends and acquaintances. It seems that the Zero Books people are trying to do this, and that's something. They just seem to be woefully off-message to me. I haven't read but bits and pieces of them yet, so I can't say for sure, but the style of thinking in both seems very limited in reach and scope.
Classic Leftist problem: getting hung up on semantics and endless repetition of formulating the problem with respect to the Elderstatesmen of theory, while the Right continuously innovates and breaks barriers. Many many people know what the problems are, they just need something to latch onto. Sadly, the Right gets to sit and watch the Left implode due to internal strife and floundering logical inconsistency (the way many feminists promote a view that devalues female labor and minimizes the intellectual and sexual parity of women in the name of paternalistic tisk-tisking about sex and sex labor comes to mind...).
More than anything, the Left needs to learn to pick its battles. Does Al Qaeda sit around endlessly debating obscure quotes from dead Philosophers or discussing that really awesome record? Probably not. Another suggestion: spend less time complaining about inane and trivial things like vibrators and who is more authentic in their anti-the Man zeal, and more time doing anything,
anything in your community to make things better for people who have it worse off than you. Wavy Gravy said you'd passed the acid test when you finally realized this through your actions, how to make things better for people around you who have it worse off...(yes I just quoted Wavy Gravy in an online rant) The left needs to re-take the frikkin acid test already, metaphorically at least.
I already know what I want to do: make sure that I advocate against racism, sexism, classicism, anti-gay bigotry and other problems that exist in the biomedical sciences. I don't want to rail against some generalized Capitalism or World for the benefit of a Big Other that doesn't exist or care about me even if it does, but in one slice of the world that is manageable to me, in my everyday life, all day, all the time. That's going to take dedication, hardwork, and most of all patience. But I know that if I do the right thing for long enough, other people will follow. And if they don't, at least I'll have tried my best.
What I see when I look at the contemporary Left is a bunch of spoiled brats who think they should be able to chant down Babylon, or whine it away, or *suffer terribly* until God's Kingdom suddenly gets ushered in but without any skin off their backs. I've been guilty of it myself at times. But it's a fantasy. Grow up. Build something.