In response to my apathy.

This is a post my friend Jeff tried to leave in the comments section under my piece on voting. For some reason the comments section on this blog is not working, so I have re-posted this below: 

Well, now it has been a few months, and I am curious on how well your experiment has turned out. As Gillian Rose points out, “we need to take the risk of identity without the security of identity,” which is, I believe, what your existential protest was a form of. Yet what remains after the risk has been taken? Is there anything left after logic and argumentation - after theoretical abstraction? I would like to see a phenomenology of your abstinence. In return I offer one of my own:

I spent a week during my summer with some - albeit, a little queeny - Franciscans. After falling asleep reading Kierkegaard’s Work of Love, I was awoken to some yelling downstairs and a priest knocking at my door, inquiring if I knew any bee sting remedies. I came down to find one of the brothers had been stung after accidently disturbing a wasp nest next to a door. I suggested (rather ignorantly) that they should perhaps try to use some mud to cool the sting. I was somewhat surprised by the over-reaction of frantic Franciscan. He was very shrill and panicked, even for someone who had never been stung by a wasp before. However, amidst his cries, I discerned that the panic was not induce by the physical pain, but the mental: he had no health insurance, and he was afraid he might be allergic to bees. You see I was in the United States, where health care is not as universally offered as it is in Canada. Not having coverage, if the swelling on his arm didn’t stop, it would mean personal bankruptcy, or his death. Luckily it did. 

Perhaps it was the mud, or the mustard that the priest mixed into the mud (a home remedy I gathered). Either way I learned a fact that day which had never occurred to me before: how you react to a bee sting might depend on where you were born. Or, said differently, in what political community you find yourself in.

I tell this story to point to what I see as the limitations of your logic. You choose the passivity of not voting (or so I understood) because you wanted to express your discontent with a system you believe has failed, by refusing to recognize it. While I do not disagree with your concern about the limitations of parliamentary democracy, I cannot help but wonder if your alternative expression, your risk, might have been a right step in the wrong direction. 

It turns on the question of identity and law. The laws of the political community in which you find yourself have been structured in a way that results in injustice, and indeed, was structured by injustice. You feel alienated by the laws of the political community which you did not make and so you protest it by refusing to negotiate yourself with those laws, by withdrawing yourself from them, and refusing to recognize them. But as Socrates noted, the laws are what give you birth, what develop your agency. Your very ability to reject the laws is predicated upon the existence of the laws in the first place. In other words, and to invoke Rose again, I fail to see how your response is not a form of “despairing rationalism without reason.” 

Criticism of parliamentary democracy and its role in liberal capitalism is not a bad thing and is very much in need. But that criticism cannot be based out of a refusal to negotiate one’s identity with the law - that is just an attempt to grope towards a New Jerusalem which doesn’t actually exist and cannot be brought into being.

Its also one sided. As Hegel might have pointed out, the cornerstone of the social and economic laws which structure our society are founded not on parliamentary democracy, but bourgeois property ownership. A radical rejection of the liberal capitalist system would begin in renouncing one’s private property, not merely refusing to mark a ballot; that doesn’t actually cost you anything. However, as we both know, this requires a kind of political commitment which challenges most us far too deeply, so we leave that for the Franciscans.

And as that Franciscan, who had radically renounced his private property (including health insurance) might have realized, not being faced with a decision between bankruptcy and death because of a bee sting - a social, economic, and political luxury that only came about through the hard work of negotiating with the laws - is a reality we in Canada can take for granted. 

Just because change in which political party happens to be ruling will feel marginal at best, does not make it true.

Magical Voluntarism.

You can achieve anything if you try hard enough. Anything. 

- Capitalist platitude. 

I just came across a wonderful term on Jodi Dean's blog to describe the place of the individual from the perspective of capitalist realism. Magical voluntarism. Anything can be achieved by the Herculean effort of the individual will. Anything at all. This in contrast to the fatalist doctrine of a politics which will never change. Here is an excerpt of that post, which is in fact taken from another blogger. Recycle Recycle: 

What characterises capitalist realism is fatalism at the level of politics (where nothing much can ever change, except to move further in the direction of neoliberalisation) and magical voluntarism at the level of the individual: you can achieve anything, if you only you do more training courses, listen to Mary Portas or Kirsty Alsop, try harder. Magical voluntarism, naturally, also drives the tabloid culture of individual blame (resign, resign!) in which the tabloids themselves are now caught up, although, as Zone Styx noted, News International clearly expects far more from public service managers like Sharon Shoemith than it does from its own executives.) Individualise, individualise, insists capitalist ideology. Note the way in which the media sought to reduce the Lulsec story to Ryan Cleary, or the way in which the clueless Peter Preston finds the idea of a collective entity such as DSG unfathomable. - k-punk cited on

http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2011/07/k-punk-reality-management.html

Magical voluntarism. I think this really captures the spirit of our times, if it can be called a spirit. The global paralysis of politics and collective action coupled with an absurd pressure on the individual to perform, to succeed. Competition drags on, pressure builds and the world becomes more and more incoherent as humanity is shuffled into atomized parcels and pitted against itself.

One last note, as I read this I was reminded of a scene in China Mieville's Perdido Street Station where Yagharek the geruda explains the nature of a crime he has committed to the book's protagonist Isaac. Yagharek comes from a society which emphasizes individual choice as the highest good. The society is, therefore, a communist one because this allows for the greatest possibility of individual choice. Yagharek, whose crime is described as choice-theft has been cast out from the group as an abstract individual, as opposed to a concrete individual.
To be abstract is to ignore context, to ignore the reality of relationship as formative of individuality. Inseperable from it. Human reality, at base, is formed not by an aggregate of self-contained I's but is always embedded in an I-you relationship. To treat the individual as an abstract entity is, therefore, a violence upon reality a de-realization. There is no individual as such, only individuals who are in constant relationship with others. Who become individuals only in and through their particular relationships and responsibilities. I bring this up only to point out that one of the important failings of capitalism, and particulary of the neoliberal agenda, is not an overemphasis on individuality. It is actually a failure to coherently articulate a notion of the individual at all. 

War and Revolution

Neoliberalism is a war. A World War. It is, says Subcomandante Marcos of the Ejercito Zapatista Liberacion Nacional, the Fourth World War. The Third was the Cold War, a war fought in a global arena between two superpowers, but not directly by them. It was a war at the peripheries. We know it was a war because of the obsession with armaments, armaments for war. Speed is the essence of war said Sun Tzu, but he was wrong. To build for destruction is the essence of war, its only manifesto. We know it was a World War, also, because of the myriad satellite conflicts, destruction at the periphery. The destruction of those at the margins, power games in a new economic-global configuration. Still a war. A recognizable war whose shape is easily discernible as such.

The Fourth World War is different. The inauguration of this war, says Marcos, coincides with the victory of the US over the USSR. It is different because there is no immediate rival. There are no two superpowers apparently competing for dominion. There is only the monolith. The steamroller of a global techno-village. The homogenization of the world and the hegemony of the market. This is the new religion. This is neoliberalism. The erasure of difference. The trampling of ways of being. Destroying in order to rebuild.

Destroying. Throwing all into the melding pot to build a flash image. A shopping mall in the desert. Let them eat IPADs the financial wizards of the federal reserve seem to say in the face of rising food prices. Cake, at least, is edible. Financial wizardry, this occultation of the material, subservience to the abstractions of Capital. This is neoliberalism. This is the new religion. This is war.

Like other wars this is a war about territory. About redrawing the map. It is about slavery and subservience. It is a new colonialism, that seeks to expand not only its territory and its resources but also its market. It is about a conflagration of war and business. War and business have always gone hand in hand but now, it seems, they are inseparable. There is not, there cannot be, not any longer, a clear sense of victory, of winning the war. Even winning the local conflicts, the peripheral wars, that are a part of this global destruction seems to be an absurd notion of yesteryear. Conflict is interminable. Why? Because it is a part of the process. It is the manner of the world. Flaring up at any time, war is never gone. The interminable, inexorable destruction of the planet, its resources, its people, its cultures drives on. It is, says Marcos, a total war. A war in which the categories of civilian and neutral have become obsolete. Either we ally with the hegemony of Capital, the total war waged by neoliberalism on humanity, or we become its disparate enemies.

This is a much more stringent, more demanding Either/Or than the facile and stupid Jihad vs McWorld paradigm that has of late appealed to factions within the Western and the Islamic world. The Arab vs American religous contra secular ideologues who mockingly deride reality. Ignoring the destruction that their power games wreak on the world. On the poor and impoverished, the outcast.

It is not Jihad vs McWorld. Either we die, or we live. Either we kill all that we have known in our short existence on this world, or we learn to nurture life. We accept the absurd monstrosities of financial magicians who teach us the importance of banking, of credit, of gaudy deception or we turn to those who know how to nurture trees, which plants can be used for food and medicine. Turn to those who know how to listen to a suffering heart, how to find beauty in the world.
It is simple. It is hard. Could revolution be anything less?