From: ".: s0metim3s :." <s0metim3s-AT-optusnet.com.au>
Subject: RE: AUT: Is A New Magna Carta Kautskyist?
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 15:02:31 +1000




Thomas:

: Isn't this article a reflection
: of a feeling of
: impotence vis a' vis the crisis?


No doubt about it: it is a reflection of what you
say. But surely Thomas there are questions to ask
here -- about 'crisis', 'impotency', writing and
whom one addresses -- before one assumes this
question as a self-evident one, as if there is
never an option to hold one's tongue.  Maybe if
they're feeling at a loss, then would it have been
wiser to not write?  Responsibility might be
infinite or not at all; but responsibility is not
the same thing as donning the robes of Courtly
Adviser -- this is a sense of impotence fuelling
fantasies of potency vis a vis anyone not of the
Court, actually.

I'm with Peter on this. Frustration at the
incapacity of (one's own or anyone else's) writing
to generate any "viable revolutionary solution" is
a symptom of the presumption that writing is
indeed ever capable of doing so or that 'potency'
is (or should be) the role of writing.  So writing
is impotent to remake the world.  So what?  It's a
fairly limited view of things to imagine that the
potency of writing is a condition of anything, let
alone and in particular the reasons one might have
to write.

If writing does have a potential in relation to
the world, it's as assemblage, which N&H squander
by addressing themselves to 'progressive
capitalists', as if the only actors around are
potentially competing sections of capital.

And what 'crisis' are we talking about exactly,
among people (on this list and for N&H) for whom
the concept of 'crisis' (however terrible) is not
relegated to some exceptional state of affairs in
capitalism?  Is it the bloodbath of the war per
se; or is it actually a sense that there are no
'revolutionary' openings that easily present
themselves?  Ok, so there are no obvious 'players'
in the escalating war in Iraq that we might cheer
on.  Either they aren't immediately visible (I'll
come back to this), or opposition is compelled to
take on reprehensible forms.

Still, this does not constitute an alibi for
assuming the role of adviser to capital, pleading
with it (as did the Pope yesterday might I add) to
usher in a new global order.  Because i'm pretty
sure that any global order of 'peace' requires
globally effective violence in order to be
constituted.

In any case, I'm not so shocked by this article.
They always said some really interesting things
alongside utter stupidities.  And the stupidities
all have the same cast.  The oblique calls for
global full employment are of a similar order to
their calls for global citizenship in _Empire_.

So (and in part as a response to Thiago), if they
were calling for a Universal Basic Income, this
would be reformist, of which there are good
criticisms, but none which would amount to an
incitement to oppose it, imo.  I think it's
unlikely as an option; but I wouldn't regard it as
nuts if someone went around proclaiming its
virtues.

Full employment, otoh, is nuts.  It makes
productivity into a virtue when what we require is
the opposite; it's implausible without the
generalisation of forced labour as a means to
deter unproductivity; and (basically) it's
unthinkable outside the existence of totalitarian
state forms.

Their calls for global citizenship have the same
problems: they took a reasonably reformist call
for 'papers for all' in France and turned it into
a call for global citizenship.  This, similarly,
is unthinkable without the existence of a global
state, the terror of which would make any current
war seem minor by comparison. Citizenship might be
globally-constituted but it will never be
universal; what will happen (a trajectory that is
already underway) is a segmentation of citizenship
into degrees of rights and non-rights/non-persons.
I don't doubt that the possibilities for a global
state are present (though who knows); but I'm
hardly going to cheer it on, if only because the
very prospect of taking flight from particular
nation-states is premised on their being more than
one nation-state on this planet.

Which brings me to the point I was going to return
to: I think N&H would do better to focus more on
their (actually others before them) regard for
Exodus: there are lines of flight and sometimes
its strategic for those lines to be invisible.  If
it seems that the visible terrain of conflict is
reducible to more or less ugly combatants, that's
because anyone else is either fleeing and/or in
hiding.  Is that so different than previous wars,
where war is a game of sovereign assertions?  I'm
not sure.  Sections of the new 'Iraqi' army are
abstaining, for instance -- this is not invisible;
but most other flights and abstentions probably
are, at least from this distance.  But I do know
that abstention and flight are tactics more worthy
of regard than playing geopolitical chess.

Angela
_______________

<end message>




     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---