"On 9/11, I think they hit the wrong building" | Salon News
a piece from salon on the tea party thing that i bit from ms media (thanks)...
a side note:
since we're laying the cards on the table in terms of where we come from politically...i come out of a pretty hard marxist background analytically, but don't consider myself a marxist simply because on it's own grounds, analytically and politically, it's over. but i think the way i see things is influenced by this background. i tend to see capitalism in its various forms as a structurally problematic mode of production and often link situations i try to pull apart back to various structural features. i don't see revolution as an inevitable outcome--i see breakdown as more likely---this because the groundwork for a coherent revolutionary project have been pretty thoroughly shattered by the history of the marxist-inspired movements themselves. alot of the stuff i do outside of here is concerned with working out a conceptual basis for a different kind of radical politics, but it's a project that sometimes seems an end in itself. but it keeps the wheels turning.
i don't have much patience with american politics. i generally default into voting for democrats, but i see them as ineffectual, not even social democrats.
because despite my contempt for the dominant order i still live here, i hope that the obama administration figures out ways to pick through the wreckage neoliberalism has made and in the process put into motion a more equitable version of a fundamentally flawed system of systems (this is shorthand, nothing more).
example: in hayek, what folk tend to gloss over is the critique of bureaucracy, which is a critique of the fundamental division of intellectual labor particular to capitalism. it shapes his arguments for "free markets" because such conditions make of the history of price a device that an organization can use to get an idea of what it is doing--without that, a bureaucratic organization is blind to itself. this basic position is *not* restricted to critiques of the state---but the more conservative side of hayek routes it through a fear of "collectivism" such that it becomes a critique of state power. the interesting thing about his work lay in the fact that it points to a basic structural problem in the way capitalism operates--the interesting thing about how it's taken is that this basic problem is ignored, and the elements of his position, which logically fit together (like it or not) get mangled. that said, i'm not a fan of hayek--i just think he's alot more interesting than his fans make him out to be.
another aside:
the other main thing that i go back to and back to is how ideology operates, even though the term is problematic in many ways.
the american right is going through an accelerated version of the type of ideological crisis--i like the word pulverization because it seems more appropriate---that the older let tradition passed through after 1956. the left's version curious to think about, and only appears as a single phenomenon ex post facto--but you can trace how it worked, and it's possible to develop narratives that outline it, even as these narratives won't conform easily to the kind of thing you're used to reading. this because, for example, an ideology is not a thing but rather what enables linkages between phenomena, so it's kinda intangible even as it operates continually through statements and projections folk make about the world. how do you talk about this using a language that reduces what it stages to the status of objects? it's a curious problem. and resolving it ain't easy--trust me.
i see the tea parties as an expression of this pulverization, as a performance of it.
it doesn't surprise me at all that they're incoherent.
but the alarming thing within them--and you see it here too, particular through pan, who seems to think he's arguing for the opposite is the contempt for democracy, for democratic process. there's some remarkable quotes in the salon piece about this. how this tends to work is that the federal government, particularly the legislature, is subjected to a classically fascist critique--democracy is about the abstract, is about debate, is about blah blah blah: it cannot deal with a state of exception. a Leader, a Decider, is required in a state of exception. this was a basic element in the bush people's legal philosophy....the self-deception comes in the entire discourse of states as a viable alternative to the federal government, as if moving the process closer and multiplying its centers changes anything about the process itself. this is only appealing because at the moment it appears an alternative--but the fact is that you already know that it isn't the alternative you'd prefer to see because it already has a history and that history isn't much different from that of the federal government. no---the problem is debate itself, diversity of viewpoints itself. that tendency within the incoherence of the tea parties--and within what remains of the american right--is dangerous. it is classically petit-bourgeois fascist. that's why i am a cheerleader of conservative incoherence---if they gravitate toward something, looking at the options available right now, it'd be toward that. such is the danger of a ideological pulverization. it ain't pretty at all
anyway, enough of this self-indulgence.
i just thought i'd lay the cards down for a minute.