Chinese People: "The Regime is Corrupt"

"Ordinary Chinese people ask: 'What good is the health care reform? Now we can no longer afford to see the doctors.' And: 'What good is the education reform? Now we can no longer afford sending our children to school?' Tens of millions of workers laid-off from former State enterprises say: 'You took the factories we built with our blood and sweat and sold them to new capitalists, or foreigners; destroying buildings and machinery and then taking the land; you squandered away our country’s wealth and left us nothing to survive on.' Peasants say, 'We worked so hard for 30 years to build socialist agriculture and overnight we are back to pre-liberation days.' Progressive intellectuals say, 'The Reform has cloaked itself in socialist clothes but in fact it is capitalism of the worst kind – turning an independent socialist China into one that is increasingly polarized between the rich and the poor, and one that is dependent economically and politically on Western powers.' With the exception of perhaps a very small minority, Chinese people agree that the current regime is corrupt to the core."

So states Economics Professor Pan yu Ching (now teaching in the U.S. of course) in her article, Thirty Years of Capitalist Reform published at Political Economy Research. She thoroughly documents how China is no longer a "socialist country, which supported oppressed people", but is now one aligned with international oppressors "to acquire resources and expand its economic and political influence". Nonetheless she shows that the Chinese people have understood from 30 years experience with Deng Xiao-ping's capitalist Reform "Mao’s warning of the return of the bourgeoisie".

I want to outline for you her argument because I see the activism Professor Pan yu Ching describes so vividly alive in China today exemplifies exactly a communist people's task "to bring the communist hypothesis into existence in another mode" (to quote from the article by Alain Badiou I introduced in the last post, and will continue to do so in what follows). Integral to that objective is to support the Professor's theme regarding the cultural identity of the Chinese people, that is, I would describe, as carrying forward the creative capacity of Maoism - a not extinguished excess yet vital despite the oppression of the regime's Reform.

Pan yu Ching's characterization of the Chinese economy as "out of balance with the rest of the world and as well as domestically":

Internationally trade surpluses she documents as "a 155% increase in only three years". China has "in fact loaned the US money in order for the US to buy their products". Obviously this is unsustainable, and more importantly "grossly unjust for the Chinese people". It is unjust, as she itemizes the unmet needs of China's poor, because China is now an exporter of the majority of its net capital to the world's richest country. In 2007, 11% of the GDP was simply changed for additional foreign exchange, which amounts to a stack of foreign IOU’s, sitting idly in China’s Central Bank". Now, in the last year, she references that the regime is rushing to correct this gross imbalance by rapidly slowing exports "from over 20% to 7% a year from June 2007 to June 2008"; and that has resulted in slowing "industrial production to the lowest point in.. six years", plus export prices have increased due to the RMB being "devalued by 18 percent since July 2005" along with a number of other international financial changes negatively affecting China.

The regimes strategy, combined with the effects of global financial crisis, by slowing demand for Chinese exports is generating serious domestic consequences, factories "are losing money and have to close their doors". The domestic imbalance stems from the original reasons for the tremendous GDP growth rates of the preceding period: Pan yu Ching quotes extensively from authoritative reports how the GDP's explosive growth was produced "on the one hand, by the fast growth in the export sector and, on the other hand, they have been the result of high growth rates in investment – especially the tremendous investments in infrastructure by different levels of government. The share of GDP that goes to domestic consumption is extremely low by any standard".

Professor Pan yu Ching's analysis of the economic situation in China concludes with a statement of its meaning highly germane to the stated purpose of this posting: "concretely it means that except for a rich minority, the majority of the working population cannot enjoy what their labor has produced due to low wages, lack of benefits, and low earnings from farming". I suggest the economic situation is ripe for the Chinese people to enact the next phase of Maoism, its unique contribution in fidelity to the communist hypothesis re-iterated by Badiou: "What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome". The professor pinpoints the crux of the matter in her conclusion about the economic situation and so...

From Pan yu Ching's piece on what the Reform meant for workers and other urban dwellers and farm workers:

It meant immediately an end to the communes to turn workers "into wage laborers and their labor power into a commodity". Despite resistance by the people, the Regime forced "large-scale privatization and restructuring of the former State enterprises". The result was a "great wave of lay-offs and/or forced retirements from factory closings and restructuring threw tens of millions of workers out on the street".

What happened to them? Many did not even get pensions that were in any event too meager to sustain their families, and most had lost medical benefits. This was quickly an area of exploitation as hospitals were "changed into profit making institutions.. unnecessary tests before dispensing expensive imported medicine, so that doctors can receive bonuses.." Then housing reform: sale of units "workers and families lived for decades, to the workers". Housing suddenly became a new expense, where was the money to come from? Even now, "workers are lucky if they still hold regular jobs, and their wages are often too low to afford rent.. [y]ounger workers either continue to live with their parents or..double up.. [t]hose who work outside the formal sector find whatever odd jobs they can to support themselves and many of them live on or below subsistence levels of income.." Agricultural jobs no longer provided a sustainable way of life for most, "more than 200 million migrant workers from the countryside have flooded into the cities looking for work". In short, the most dangerous and dirty work and the most exposed to mistreatment, exposed because they have no legal residence status. The "treatment they receive in their own country is not too different from the treatments that undocumented foreign migrants receive around the world". International corporations have rushed into China to take advantage of low wages and to avoid regulative costs associated with environmental and labor controls."The loss of lives and injuries caused by working in unsafe and contaminated environment are staggering."

The effect of the Reform has a terribly significant impact on the Chinese psyche, characterized by anger, resentment and fear. The situation: "workers in China have lost the dignity and respect they once had. Workers are constantly afraid of losing their jobs. Older unemployed workers are outraged when the former State enterprises that they built with many decades of hard work are squandered away by the privileged few, who have connections with the politically powerful".

Living in Beijing, I have seen the situation first hand. Ironically, I benefit from it - for example the medical and dental costs are for me very nice compared to the U.S.. From my 22nd story luxury apartment I look out my window to see the workers living in their tents on the site of the construction of yet another huge complex for the likes of me, the small minority of the rich and the upper-middle class. I utilize the cheap domestic help. I benefit from the low prices in the service sector - the hair salons, the inexpensive restaurants, the food and other vendors on the streets. I witness the street vendors of simple commodities around the subways, often fleeing suddenly at the approach of bribe seeking police. I often circumvent various bureaucratic hassles and costs from State employees willing to expedite my problem to gain a little bit more to supplement their meager wages - its common knowledge that nobody in the bureaucracy lives on their salary alone. Daily, I watch BMWs, Land Rovers, Mercedes, see shoppers in the luxury malls and the flaunting behavior of "a small minority of extremely rich people – corrupt bureaucrats and the new capitalists – who live extremely luxurious lives".

My day job is doing corporate training, rewarding and interesting work with professionals who work for large domestic and foreign businesses. These are included in "around 20% to 30% [of the urban population] who have also lived well in the past 30 years". These clients are the middle-aged management people who enjoy a "standard of living comparable to the so-called middle class in Western countries". Another part of this middle-class "are current or retired middle level government bureaucrats, including university professors. The government deliberately favored these intellectuals in order to buy their support". Most of these people "are very satisfied with their lives and support Reform policies". But not all of them.

I can add something to the observations of Pan yu Ching about the middle-class. At the lower end of this group are the many young people, the cream of the university graduates working in the large domestic and international corporations. They are the majority, actually, of my corporate training classes. Relatively speaking they make good money, but they are also subjected to very excessive hours of work and the requirement to attend my classes (which they gladly do), but its additional time they must devote above and beyond the work day and believe it or not they sometimes pay part of the costs out of their own pocket. More often than not they are also supporting their parents who have been abandoned by the regime. They are the hope of their families and they aspire to join the ranks of their elder cadre. Its about the money - not many are interested in political matters, they are generally cynical in private and focused on their opportunity rather than the general plight of the peoples of which they are not unaware. But not all of them.

Of the middle-class, Panyu Ching states: "they are not a homogeneous group; despite their rather comfortable living, a small but growing number are increasingly critical of the Reform and have recently become very vocal, voicing sharp attacks". I would not say myself its yet a matter of political activism exactly, "its the economy stupid" but "opinions of the well-to-do urban population are bound to change when they experience the increasingly worsening economic crisis.. the government’s lack of action when they lost their savings in the stock market, which fell about 60% in the past year. The impending bursting of the housing market bubble, the increasingly depressed economy and the ongoing higher cost of living.."

Pan yu Ching goes on to provide a highly detailed account, historical and statistical references on the catastrophic decline in the rural areas and the environmental impact of unbridled industrialization. These are the crimes on the ground and important as they are for understanding the stage of this theater, I want to focus on the political ramifications explicit and suggested by her essay. Returning to Alain Badiou's exposition earlier in the blog, the information above can be seen in a broader historical perspective. Popular uprisings up to the latter part of the 18th century failed, was followed by a period of uncontested imperialism, then successfully challenged beginning in 1917 by socialist regimes. This challenge continued to its latter period, including the Maoist revolution and communist form, the global uprising in 1968 and until the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It was then superseded by the beginning of the Reform. As Badiou puts it, the pre-reform stage of fidelity to the communist hypothesis "proved ill-adapted for the construction of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the sense that Marx had intended—that is, a temporary state, organizing the transition to the non-state.. the Cultural Revolution and May 68, in its broadest sense—can be understood as attempts to deal with the inadequacy of the party".

So now China has experienced 30 years of this Reform, and the results: what Badiou describes of the current global situation - "In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia". I said earlier, I think Pan yu Ching's essay suggests the people of China have the potential of carrying forward the creative capacity of Maoism - a not extinguished excess yet vital despite the oppression of the regime's Reform. On what do I base this?

Her essay concludes with The Chinese People Are Fighting Back. Supported by her forgoing analysis she posits that the Reform "is similar to the primitive accumulation phase of early capitalist development in European countries.. however, an important difference:.. workers and peasants have already gone through thirty years of socialist transformation, and they know what they can accomplish by working collectively under the leadership of the real Communist Party following the proletarian line of Mao Zedong". Pan yu Ching points out in specific instances: "laid-off workers take over their factories to protest against their sale and/or closing.. workers forced into retirement have protested against authorities for back wages and for better benefits.. Peasants protest against land confiscation without adequate compensation and against factories being built in their neighborhoods that cause serious pollution.. Many people both in urban and rural areas have protested against the brutality of police and local officials..official numbers of demonstrations.. reached [in 2006] over 90,000 [a day!]".

Also,the workers are not alone. There are ".. increasing numbers of intellectuals who have risen to challenge the many lies broadly spread by the Reformers..fooled in the early stages of the Reform, believing the line that the Reform was 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'.. who had.. believed that the free market approach would solve many of China’s problems. The progressive intellectuals have begun to systematically refute the lies of the regime: "there was little development during the socialist era.. development based on self-reliance during the socialist era was self-imposed isolation, which led to China’s backwardness". Refuting this operation of the Ideological State Apparatus (Althusser) the progressive intellectuals have produced volumes of contradictory evidence and have gone on the attack "accusing Reformers of being over-dependent on foreign capital, foreign technology, and foreign markets, handing the country over to the foreign monopolies, and causing China to lose its economic and political autonomy.." In September of 2007 a large contingent of progressive thinkers submitted a letter to the 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party charging "the Chinese Communist Party no longer represented the interests of China’s proletariat, and that they betrayed the principles of Marxism, Leninism, and Mao Zedong Thought".

I found myself a little short of climax at Pan yu Ching's last line: "China’s socialist legacy and the theory and practice Mao left behind will carry the struggle to triumph in the end". There is more in what she said than she said. I take recourse at last in Badiou. The critical question is to what modality China's socialist legacy will carry the struggle. I can't believe what was meant was a repetition of the earlier phase of Maoism that proved inadequate. Rather the stakes for the Chinese Maoist today in the chaos of the Reform depend on maintaining the conditions for Mao's creative and still existent vision of the communist hypothesis. A task Badiou asserts can occur "through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground."

But how, and how within the cultural context of China? Badiou formulates the general direction of world communist activism: "it will involve a new relation between the political movement and the level of the ideological—one that was prefigured in the expression ‘cultural revolution'..the proposition that the subordination of labour to the dominant class is not inevitable—within the ideological sphere.". The movement against the corrupt regime of China, I think this means, is a revolt against the regime's Ideological State Apparatus. Is this not what was said by Pan yu Ching in reference to the progressive intellectuals?

Like all English speaking expats in China I just spent months with the regimes CCTV9 apparatus bombarding me with "One World, One Dream", the export of its domestic promulgation of nationalist fervor with its unfortunate patriotism. Obviously as any thinking person can see from the information above there is not even a unified world within China. Of course its not just China. The idea of globalization in the sense touted is also a sham of capitalist parliamentarians too. Badiou: "The simple phrase, ‘there is only one world’, is not an objective conclusion. It is performative: we are deciding that this is how it is for us. Faithful to this point, it is then a question of elucidating the consequences that follow from this simple declaration... A first consequence is the recognition that all belong to the same world as myself.. we can agree and disagree about things. But on the precondition that they and I exist in the same world." Now this is entirely different. This is not serving the purposes of a national regime, or any version of elitist oligarchy.

Now it gets tricky though. The performative aspect of creating "only one world" means no division established on the basis of any race or creed, or specific cultural group; or even an oppressed minority - political, sexual or whatever. Our topic is the people of China and their cultural identity bound to the communist hypothesis manifested in Maoism. This is an actuality not subject to dismissal, nor should it be. The real facts of the Chinese people's experience and enduring fidelity to Maoism has been clearly elucidated by Pan yu Ching. Culturally China carries the creative capacity of Maoism - a not extinguished excess yet vital despite the oppression of the regime's Reform. The emphasis of Badiou is not calling for the rejection of this core identity, but its expansion in a new phase of Maoism:

".. identity is the ensemble of properties that support an invariance.. Defined in this way, by invariants, identity is doubly related to difference: on the one hand, identity is that which is different from the rest; on the other, it is that which does not become different, which is invariant.. The affirmation of identity has two further aspects. The first form is negative. It consists of desperately maintaining that I am not the other.. The second involves the immanent development of identity within a new situation... not through any internal rupture, but by an expansion of identity."

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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McBama? No, the Communist Hypothesis

I am a communist. We who assert this identity need to think what this means given the communist hypothesis. If we are a communist in today's world our context is the current coordinates of power - what Alain Badiou calls that of capitalo-parliamentarianism. If an "American" communist, the main story at the moment is the election: the formal choice between McCain and Obama. Lenin made the important distinction between a formal choice and an actual choice (see the quote at this blog's header). So the question is, McBama?

Stated, communists everywhere are situated legally someplace, experiencing the formal choices available. Still, we have actual choices based on the communist hypothesis. This is the idea I want to offer for your consideration. I have developed this blog posting using the key ideas of Alain Badiou as expressed in his article about the 2007 election of Sarkozy in France, The Communist Hypothesis, published in February by The New Left Review.

The analysis by Badiou does, I believe you will find, anticipate the truth revealed by the event of Sarkozy's election is being repeated in the election of McBama. But the article is only nominally about elections. What is being clearly signified is the communist hypothesis. This is by definition always global or universal, and what strikes me deepest is what Badiou says about the present task before communists: this I interpret as the allegiance or fidelity to the communist hypothesis now being a revolution of the mind, as such the emerging Neo-MLM.

I wish to introduce the key ideas of the article as they are developed by Badiou and reference them to the nominal topic of this post, the McBama election. But I will begin from quoting from his concluding paragraph, which says it all, before partially unpacking its squeezed content. Excerpts from the final paragraph:

"In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; the cramped, besieged experimentation of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis . . . Which is no doubt why, as in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground."

Nothing really need be said in comment about Badiou's concluding words, so let's move on to looking at the sequence of earlier development of the conclusions with selected excerpts; where we get at his precise ideas of the communist hypothesis and the present task of its renewal through the combination of thought processes. Excerpts from the body of the text:

In the McBama question as in the election of Sarkozy is evidenced the truth that the electoral system effectively excludes dissent:

"An initial factor was the way in which the outcome affirmed the manifest powerlessness of any genuinely emancipatory programme within the electoral system: preferences are duly recorded, in the passive manner of a seismograph, but the process is one that by its nature excludes any embodiments of dissenting political will."

At a subsequent point it seems transferable in the description of the initial fear of the privileged French, the fear mainly that of Republicans: we substitute the American counterparts - the "Mexicans", the "terrorists", the Iranians et al; and substitute for the description of the French socialist, the more "leftward" contingency, the Democrats, with their fear of the fear - the continuing of Bush-ness by McCain and even the frightening cop-ness of Ms. Palin:

"... the fear felt by the privileged, alarmed that their position may be assailable. In France this manifests itself as fear of foreigners, workers, youth from the banlieue, Muslims, black Africans. Essentially conservative, it creates a longing for a protective master, even one who oppresses and impoverishes you further.. the fear of this fear: a fear, too, of the cop figure, whom the petit-bourgeois socialist voter neither knows nor likes.."

I tend to think that in America there is less reading of the press going on, except by the net-savvy, rather there is more talk radio and the likes of Fox, CNN and major networks informing the bulk of the populace about their formal choice of McBama - but is there not the same weakening of the real?:

"We should not underestimate the role of what Althusser called the ‘ideological state apparatus’—increasingly through the media, with the press now playing a more sophisticated part than tv and radio—in formulating and mobilizing such collective sentiments. Within the electoral process there has, it seems, been a weakening of the real; a process even further advanced with regard to the secondary ‘fear of the fear’ than with the primitive, reactionary one. We react, after all, to a real situation, whereas the ‘fear of the fear’ merely takes fright at the scale of that reaction, and is thus at a still further remove from reality."

Should one think that somehow it is still of paramount importance to exercise ones formal choice in McBama, sadly it may be seen of more pathetic dimension if one seeks the much touted "change" being bandied if one considers if indeed any new possibility is on the table:

"If we posit a definition of politics as ‘collective action, organized by certain principles, that aims to unfold the consequences of a new possibility which is currently repressed by the dominant order’, then we would have to conclude that the electoral mechanism is an essentially apolitical procedure. This can be seen in the gulf between the massive formal imperative to vote and the free-floating, if not non-existent nature of political or ideological convictions."

Will you yet trudge to your voting station, hopeful or hopeless in your McBama determination when you consider that:

".. capitalo-parliamentarianism, [is] ..appropriate for the maintenance of the established order, and consequently serves a conservative function. This creates a further feeling of powerlessness: if ordinary citizens have no handle on state decision-making save the vote, it is hard to see what way forward there could be for an emancipatory politics."

Today in "America the Beautiful" the bailout of banks, rooted in the basic need for housing, is the focus ("its the economy stupid"). It vies even with security concerns at this point, though in fact the predominant use of tax dollars is the drain from war. Yet, despite the unpopularity of the war itself, bilaterally recognized by McBama, the threat of terrorism leaves unquestioned in the U.S. as in France that:

"the maintenance of the existing order with its gigantic disparities has an irreducible military component; the duality of the worlds of rich and poor can only be sustained by force."

What is signified by Badiou in his article is far more important than simply the truth revealed by the formal choices sustained bycapitalo-parliamentarianism described above with reference to Sarkozy's election, or what may be seen its likely repetition in the McBama election. We now come to the actual choices possible in fidelity to the communist hypothesis:

"What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away."

Badiou turns to what it means to be a communist in revolt, in rejection of its formal coordinates of freedom. This begins with analysis of communist history - the following are excerpts from this much longer discussion :

"What remains is to determine the point at which we now find ourselves in the history of the communist hypothesis... The first sequence runs from the French Revolution to the Paris Commune; let us say, 1792 to 1871. It links the popular mass movement to the seizure of power, through the insurrectional overthrow of the existing order... The second sequence of the communist hypothesis runs from 1917 to 1976: from the Bolshevik Revolution to the end of the Cultural Revolution and the militant upsurge throughout the world during the years 1966–75. It was dominated by the question: how to win? How to hold out—unlike the Paris Commune—against the armed reaction of the possessing classes... the revolution prevailed, either through insurrection or prolonged popular war.. but it proved ill-adapted for the construction of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the sense that Marx had intended—that is, a temporary state, organizing the transition to the non-state.. the Cultural Revolution and May 68, in its broadest sense—can be understood as attempts to deal with the inadequacy of the party... 1871 to 1914 saw imperialism triumphant across the globe. Since the second sequence came to an end in the 1970s we have been in another such interval, with the adversary in the ascendant once more.. The second sequence is over and it is pointless to try to restore it."

A new third sequence is at hand - Badiou appears to have defined for us both the existing coordinates of power as well as the exhausted history of two phases of fidelity to the communist hypothesis. Yet he affirms there remains an excess of creative power in that hypothesis available outside the coordinates of capitalo-parliamentarianism and all its particular manifestations such as the Sarkozy election or the formal choice in McBama:

"it is not possible to say with certainty what the character of the third sequence will be. But the general direction seems discernible: it will involve a new relation between the political movement and the level of the ideological—one that was prefigured in the expression ‘cultural revolution’ or in the May 68 notion of a ‘revolution of the mind’.. our task is to bring the communist hypothesis into existence in another mode, to help it emerge within new forms of political experience. This is why our work is so complicated, so experimental. We must focus on its conditions of existence, rather than just improving its methods. We need to re-install the communist hypothesis—the proposition that the subordination of labour to the dominant class is not inevitable—within the ideological sphere."

So Badiou has now introduced the general direction of the new task for communists. He then proposes a specific modality for the revolution of the mind, a performative requirement for, not merely an assertion of an objective conclusion, that "there is only one world" - again excerpts from his detailed proposal:

"What might this involve?... might be the declaration: ‘There is only one world’. What would this imply? Contemporary capitalism boasts, of course, that it has created a global order;.. The ‘one world’ of globalization is solely one of things—objects for sale—and monetary signs: the world market as foreseen by Marx. The overwhelming majority of the population have at best restricted access to this world. They are locked out, often literally so... The price of the supposedly unified world of capital is the brutal division of human existence into regions separated by police dogs, bureaucratic controls, naval patrols, barbed wire and expulsions. The ‘problem of immigration’ is, in reality, the fact that the conditions faced by workers from other countries provide living proof that—in human terms—the ‘unified world’ of globalization is a sham... The simple phrase, ‘there is only one world’, is not an objective conclusion. It is performative: we are deciding that this is how it is for us. Faithful to this point, it is then a question of elucidating the consequences that follow from this simple declaration... A first consequence is the recognition that all belong to the same world as myself.. we can agree and disagree about things. But on the precondition that they and I exist in the same world."

Badiou anticipates a problematic: yes, there may be "one world" but this cannot exclude personal identity, the fact that we are individually, locally, culturally different from other people too. How is it that this would not engender continued divisions and inevitable conflict? Excerpts from Badiou's answer:

"The question then arises whether anything governs.. unlimited differences.. identity is the ensemble of properties that support an invariance.. Defined in this way, by invariants, identity is doubly related to difference: on the one hand, identity is that which is different from the rest; on the other, it is that which does not become different, which is invariant...The affirmation of identity has two further aspects. The first form is negative. It consists of desperately maintaining that I am not the other... The second involves the immanent development of identity within a new situation... not through any internal rupture, but by an expansion of identity."

Badiou addresses the possibility of both maintaining personal identity while expanding from that core to an experience of human unity using a wide range of examples from invariant individuality - racial, religious, sexual, cultural and so forth. Also he provides living actual events that have and are demonstrating fidelity to the egalitarian maxim of the communist hypothesis. As I said in the beginning, the message also applies to those of us who assert our personal identity as communists - the new phase, the revolution of the mind means not a struggle against the world, but being open to the insight that we are the world.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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Alain Badiou Weighs In

From the beginning this blog has placed strong emphasis on the thought of Alain Badiou. The theme in this blog has concerned his ideas on what he calls the "Event", briefly stated, an occurrence which, I venture a description, challenges the current set of humanity (and here is meant actually a reference to set-theory). As such it would display a novelty, a "Truth" - again in the briefest of descriptions will follow in which are confronted with Badiou's minimalist mathematics (ontology=mathematics). The meaning of a "Truth": that the "Event" presents a new element in one, or more likely many, sets of multiplicities which may lead to a radical transformation of the current coordinates of those sets.

The transformation is possible because the "Truth" is presented in any occurrence that is in fact an "Event". But important is that the new set remains only "virtual" so to speak until, and if, its actuality is manifest through the allegiance of people taking action on that "Truth", as a result of which the radical transformation becomes reality. My earlier entry, AlainBadiou - Allegiance to the Truth Event, makes reference to several articles by Badiou and others providing authoritative content. So don't listen too much to my poor attempts to explain his ideas - I can only hope serve to elicit your interest. We need to read and study Badiou's latest complete work, Logics of Worlds. Badiou is rooted in Marxism, as well as in psychoanalysis, the school of Jacques Lacan.

Getting to the topic of this post, let me first add Badiou that "applies", I'd guess to say, his mathematical thought, by identifying four modes, or sets, of multiplicities in which the Event and the subsequent Truth process occur: Art, Love, Politics and Science. Again, a tremendous amount of attention and study is actually required to better understand Badiou's thought. A longer "synopsis", so to speak, is found in the Wikipedia account from which I provide the following exerpt:

"Badiou's ultimate ethical maxim is therefore one of: 'decide upon the undecidable'. It is to name the indiscernible, the generic set, and thus name the event that re-casts ontology in a new light. He identifies four domains by which a subject (who, it is important to note, becomes a subject through this process) nominates and maintains fidelity to an event: love, science, politics and art. By enacting fidelity to the event within these four domains one performs a 'generic procedure', which in its undecideability is necessarily experimental, and one potentially recasts the situation in which being takes place.. In line with his concept of the event, Badiou maintains, politics is not about politicians, but activism based on the present situation and the 'evental' (his translators' neologism) rupture. So too does love have this characteristic of becoming anew. Even in science the guesswork that marks the event is prominent. He vigorously rejects the tag of 'decisionist' (the idea that once something is decided it 'becomes true'), but rather argues that the recasting of a truth comes prior to its veracity or verifiability.. Badiou, whilst keen to stress the non-equivalence between politics and philosophy, thus finds his political approach — one of activism, militancy, and scepticism of parliamentary-democratic process — backed up by his philosophy based around singular, situated truths, and potential revolutions.

With this bit of background we come to the specific topic: Alain Badiou weighs in on the current financial crisis. One cannot but see this event of the crisis and the bailout has stirred tremendous focused response in the activist community. Those in the Marxist line in particular are quickly responding, possibly because its about economics of capitalism. I give three good examples from the blogging community, two at least are Marxist and one of these provides the latest viewpoints of Badiou:

Radical Perspectives on the Crisis gives an ongoing analysis of the financial news by a number of qualified people. Its very useful and factual with references and a minimum of the theoretical bullshit some of us love. An excerpt:

"The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times are both predicting a growing role for the worlds rapidly developing nations in the new world financial order. This is significant. What is really impressive, however, is the fact that there is talk of a new financial order at all. More than anything else, the G20 conference (dubbed Bretton Woods ll) can be understood as the end of an epoch. Neoliberal capitalism, the ideology of the free and self-regulating market, is dead. Anti-globalization activists could not defeat it and neither could Hugo Chavez. The free market imploded under the weight of its own contradictions."


Marx and the Crisis of 2008 is another new focused response by a team of contributors with a more emphatic socialist message. I quote from the comments of the writer Andrew Kliman:

"As for the longer-term conditions that have given rise to the crisis, my view is basically this: The world economy has never fully recovered from the crisis of the 1970s – not in the way in which the destruction of capital in and through the Great Depression and WWII led to a post-war boom. That’s largely because of an understandable fear of having a repeat of the Great Depression. So there’s been a partial recovery only, brought about largely through: (1) declining real wages.. as well as exporting the crisis into the 3d world, and (2) a mountain of debt – mortgage, consumer, government, corporate – to.. mitigate the effects of the declining real wages. Thus there have been persistent debt crises, and these will continue until: (a) sufficient capital is destroyed.. to once again make investment truly profitable.. present crisis.. this moment, or (b) there’s such panic.. that lending stops and the economy crashes, ushering in chaos.. (c) capitalism is replaced by a.. socialist society."

From the blog Infinite Thought, the October 18 entry (their translation/interpretation of Badiou's submission in French to the paper Le Monde the previous day) comes the following sampler:

"We will have time later to wonder (the saga will surely continue) where these billions come from, given that for some years, at the least demand from the poor, the same characters responded by turning their pockets inside out, saying they hadn't a cent. For the time being, it doesn't matter. "Save the banks!" This noble, humanist and democratic cry surges forth from the mouths of every journalist and politician. Save them at any price! It's worth pointing this out, since the price is not insignificant... The collapse of capitalism? You must be kidding. Who wants it, after all? Who even knows what it would mean? Let's save the banks, I tell you, and the rest will follow. For the... immediate protagonists – the rich, their servants, their parasites, those who envy them and those who acclaim them – a happy ending, perhaps a slightly melancholy one, is inevitable, bearing in mind the current state of the world, and the kinds of politics that take place within it... Let us turn instead to the spectators of this show, the dumbstruck crowd who - vaguely unsettled, understanding little, totally disconnected from any active engagement in the situation... can only guess at the exhausting weekends of our heroic small team of heads of government. It sees, passing before it, numbers as enormous as they are obscure, automatically comparing them to its own resources, or even, for a very considerable part of humanity, to the pure and simple non-resource which is the bitter and courageous basis of its very life. That's where the real is... As we know, financial capitalism has always – which is to say for the past five centuries – been a major, central component of capitalism in general. As for the owners and managers of this system, by definition they are only "responsible" for profits, their "rationality" is to be measured by their earnings, and it is not just that they are predators, but that they have to be... The return to the real cannot be a movement leading from bad "irrational" speculation back to healthy production. It is the return to the immediate and reflective life of all those who inhabit this world. It is from that vantage-point that one can observe capitalism without flinching, including the disaster movie that it is currently inflicting upon us. The real is not this movie, but its audience... Faced with the life of the people watching it, do we still dare to pride ourselves in a system which delegates the organisation of collective life to the basest of drives – greed, rivalry, unthinking selfishness? Can we sing the praises of a "democracy" whose leaders do the bidding of private financial appropriation with such impunity that they would shock Marx himself, who nevertheless already defined governments, a hundred and sixty years ago, as "the agents of capital"? The ordinary citizen must ‘understand’ that it is impossible to make up the shortfall in social security, but that it is imperative to stuff untold billions into the banks’ financial hole?... this only seems to be a zero-sum game: the speculator loses his wager and the buyers their homes, from which they are politely evicted. But the real of this zero-sum game is as always on the side of the collective, of ordinary life: in the end, everything stems from the fact that there exist millions of people whose wages, or absence thereof, means that they are absolutely unable to house themselves. The real essence of the financial crisis is a housing crisis. And those who can’t find a home are by no means the bankers. It is always necessary to go back to ordinary existence."

So Badiou's poetic analogy of the existing coordinates of power is that of a film, an illusion perpetuated as real, now demonstrated as such in the "Event" of the financial crisis. A "Truth" emerges in the minds of the spectators who reside not in the gated communities of the elite protagonists of the film (the literal and class bound gated communities); in the minds of those who are the victims in the slums (the literal and figurative slums of the oppressed). And so now for the actions to follow the event in allegiance to the "Truth", the enactment within the virtual situation that will be the radical transformation of the world - Badiou concludes:

"We must overthrow the old verdict according to which ours would be the time of "the end of ideologies". Today we can clearly see that the only reality of this supposed end lies in the slogan "save the banks". Nothing is more important than recovering the passion of ideas and countering the world such as it is with a general hypothesis, the anticipated certainty of an entirely different state of affairs. To the nefarious spectacle of capitalism, we oppose the real of peoples, of the existence of all in the proper movement of ideas. The theme of an emancipation of humanity has lost none of its power. Undoubtedly, the word "communism", which for a long time served to name this power, has been debased and prostituted. But today, its disappearance only benefits the advocates of order, the feverish actors of the disaster movie. But we will resuscitate communism, in its new-found clarity. This clarity is also its oldest virtue, as when Marx said of communism that it 'breaks in the most radical fashion with traditional ideas' and that it will bring forth 'an association in which the free development of each is the precondition for the free development of all'. Total break with capitalist-parliamentarianism, the invention of a politics on a level with the popular real, sovereignty of the idea: it's all there, everything we need to turn away from the film of the crisis and to give ourselves over to the fusion between live thought and organised action (everything we need to turn away from the film of the crisis and rise up)."

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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Lenin and the October 2008 Bailout (3)

I am continuing on this topic, perhaps for some time, but I think the last time under this title. The second entry, Lenin and the October 2008 Bailout (2), began with reference to the first entry,Lenin and the October 2008 Bailout and the three main elements of that entry. This included a segue to an entry earlier than that on Alain Badiou - Allegiance to the Truth Event. Therein is introduced several articles in making the point germane to the topic of the 2008 Bailout: that is, the advent of this "Event" challenges the existing coordinates of power - and of paramount importance is what action will constitute allegiance to the "Truth" the "Event" reveals. This discussion was preamble to discussing the views of the Bailout by recognized progressive activists (at that very time, I attended a forum presented in Manhattan) The fact that such a forum had spontaneously arisen at the event of the Bailout suggested many people are sensing this can be a time to intervene and seriously challenge the existing coordinates of power.

The way to intervene was the critical question. The progressive left viewpoints of William Greider, Doug Henwood, Naomi Klein, and Francis Fox Piven were given some air. Their ideas were appreciated in what demands and quality of demands they felt the circumstances called for. To this end, in the context of my stated purposes for the blog, it came to mind introducing a perhaps unheeded perception on the question of "demanding": what Sovoj Zizek writes about, what he characterizes as, the "symbiotic relationship between power and resistance". This the goal of the present entry.

Happily, while I was in the process of developing this entry series, Zizek himself published on the Bailout: Don't Just Do Something, Talk. Here the theoretical idea I want to discuss is rather posed for popular consumption. Zizek points out we live in a risky society, where the powerful do the choosing while the rest of us do the risking. We are forced to live as if we were free. The powerful have us duped that it is counterproductive to help the poor directly because the real dynamic productive element is the rich and the benefits will "trickle-down"- we must avoid simply giving to the "needy". Zizek agrees, however, that the problem is that there is a need to help Wall Street because its collapse really will hurt ordinary workers. So up to this point he doesn't say much more than the progressive left. But he then makes the point that one must take a political position outside the coordinates of existing power (his theme: don't just do something within these coordinates, talk about how they can really be challenged). This is what needs further discussion beyond his merely keeping the topic within the range of that suitable for popular consumption. Its not enough, I think, to simply conclude as he does with "we need not less politics, but more". Here are some snippets from his article I hope interests you in using the link:

"We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.. We are forced to make choices without having the knowledge that would enable us to make them; or, as John Gray has put it: ‘We are forced to live as if we were free.’The resistance was formulated in terms of ‘class warfare’, Wall Street against Main Street: why should we help those responsible (‘Wall Street’) and let ordinary borrowers (on ‘Main Street’) pay the price for it?.. So while it is true that we live in a society that demands risky choices, it is one in which the powerful do the choosing, while others do the risking.. although we all want the poor to get better, it is counter-productive [say the powerful] to help them directly, since they are not the dynamic and productive element; the only intervention needed [they say] is to help the rich get richer, and then the profits will automatically spread down to the poor. Throw enough money at Wall Street, and it will eventually trickle down to Main Street. If you want people to have money to build, don’t give it to them directly, help those who are lending it to them. This is the only way to create genuine prosperity – otherwise, the state is merely distributing money to the needy at the expense of those who create wealth.. It is all too easy to dismiss this line of reasoning as a hypocritical defense of the rich. The problem is that as long as we are stuck with capitalism, there is a truth in it: the collapse of Wall Street really will hit ordinary workers.. What all this indicates is that the market is never neutral: its operations are always regulated by political decisions. The real dilemma is not ‘state intervention or not?’ but ‘what kind of state intervention?’ And this is true politics: the struggle to define the conditions that govern our lives. The debate about the bailout deals with decisions about the fundamental features of our social and economic life, even mobilizing the ghost of class struggle.. As with many truly political issues, this one is non-partisan. There is no ‘objective’ expert position that should simply be applied: one has to take a political decision. The U.S.doesn't need less politics, it needs more."

Savoj Zizek makes a much more forceful argument in an article written much earlier. In Resistance is Surrender, he makes no bones about the need to focus on how to take power, avoiding accommodation of the existing coordinates of power (either by working within them or in various modes of opposition to power which amount to no more than a symbiotic relationship). He identifies the various modes of leftist or progressive resistance and defines what he sees as their critical deficiencies, lauding in contrast the take over in power by Chavez. Nonetheless, rather than a whole-hearted endorsement of Chavez, he is quick to say it is most important to ensure that such a power structure not be a repetition of a socialist state as seen before, but one which engenders subversive power of its people:

"One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death..Today’s Left.. accept the hegemony, but continue to fight for reform within its rules (Third Way Social Democracy).. or not accepting the hegemony, confronting those in power with demands we know they cannot fulfill .. or, not directly attacking, but refocusing the field of struggle on everyday practices, where one can ‘build a new world’ [so] the power of capital and the state will be gradually undermined.. or, ‘postmodern’ route, shifting the accent from anti-capitalist struggle to the multiple forms of politico-ideological struggle for hegemony.. These positions are not presented as a way of avoiding some ‘true’ radical Left politics – what they are trying to get around is, indeed, the lack of such a position.. The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left.. So what should, say, the US Democrats do? Stop competing for state power and withdraw to the interstices of the state, leaving state power to the Republicans and start a campaign of anarchic resistance to it?.. demonstrate that today’s liberal-democratic state and the dream of an ‘infinitely demanding’ anarchic politics exist in a relationship of mutual parasitism: anarchic agents do the ethical thinking, and the state does the work of running and regulating society.. It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chavez has embarked since 2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left: far from resisting state power, he grabbed it.. the task is to make the new party function not as a typical state socialist (or Peronist) party, but as a vehicle for the mobilization of new forms of politics (like the grass roots slum committees).. the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfill... presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in'. The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse."

In closing, I think Zizek's argument lumping anarchism with the rest of the progressive left needs comment. Yes, historically revolt without re-establishing a vanguard to protect the success of revolution has not survived - but equally true is that the new power has never failed to eliminate class struggle. Perhaps it is a matter of enough continued evolution of human nature, but egalitarian self-organization should remain the point of allegiance.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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