Jajuna

Blame the All powerful Left!

Whatever problems the Democratic Party has, kowtowing to the left is not one of them

Glenn Greenwald

Jan. 20, 2010 |

(updated below - Update II)

I have a contribution this morning to the New York Times examining the Scott Brown victory, and I’ll post the link to it once it’s up.  But for the moment, I want to address two equally moronic themes emerging over the last couple of days which seek to blame the omnipotent, dominant, super-human “Left” for the Democrats’ woes — one coming from right-wing Democrats and the other from hard-core Obama loyalists (those two categories are not mutually exclusive but, rather, often overlap).

Last night, Evan Bayh blamed the Democrats’ problems on “the furthest left elements,” which he claims dominates the Democratic Party — seriously.  And in one of the dumbest and most dishonest Op-Eds ever written, Lanny Davis echoes that claim in The Wall St. Journal:  ”Blame the Left for Massachusetts” (Davis attributes the unpopularity of health care reform to the “liberal” public option and mandate; he apparently doesn’t know that the health care bill has no public option [someone should tell him], that the public option was one of the most popular provisions in the various proposals, and the “mandate” is there to please the insurance industry, not “the Left,” which, in the absence of a public option, hates the mandate; Davis’ claim that “candidate Obama’s health-care proposal did not include a public option” is nothing short of an outright lie).

In what universe must someone be living to believe that the Democratic Party is controlled by “the Left,” let alone “the furthest left elements” of the Party?  As Ezra Klein says, the Left “ha[s] gotten exactly nothing they wanted in recent months.”  The Left wanted a single-payer system, then settled for a public option, then an opt-out public option, then Medicare expansion — only to get none of it, instead being handed a bill that forces every American to buy health insurance from the private insurance industry.  Nor was it “the Left” — but rather corporatist Democrats like Evan Bayh and Lanny Davis — who cheered for the hated Wall Street bailout; blocked drug re-importation; are stopping genuine reform of the financial industry; prevented a larger stimulus package to lower unemployment; refuse to allow programs to help Americans with foreclosures; supported escalation in Afghanistan (twice); and favor the same Bush/Cheney terrorism policies of indefinite detention, military commissions, and state secrets.

The very idea that an administration run by Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel and staffed with centrists, Wall Street mavens, and former Bush officials — and a Congress beholden to Blue Dogs and Lieberdems — has been captive “to the Left” is so patently false that everyone should be too embarrassed to utter it.  For better or worse, the Democratic strategy has long been and still is to steer clear of their leftist base and instead govern as “pragmatists” and centrists — which means keeping the permanent Washington factions pleased.  That strategy may or not be politically shrewd, but it is just a fact that the dreaded ”Left” has gotten very little of what it wanted the entire year.  Is there anyone who actually believes that “The Left” is in control of anything, let alone the Democratic Party?  The fact that Lanny Davis — to prove the Left’s dominance — has to cite one provision that was jettisoned (the public option) and another which the Left hates (the mandate) reflects how false that claim is.  What are all of the Far Left policies the Democrats have been enacting and Obama has been advocating?  I’d honestly love to know.

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As if we needed any more evidence of the mounting failure of American politics, the five right-wing justices on the supreme court have decided to open the political process to even more corporate influence.

From the New York Times:

January 22, 2010

Justices Overturn Key Campaign Limits

By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace will corrupt democracy.

The 5-to-4 decision was a doctrinal earthquake but also a political and practical one. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision, which also applies to labor unions and other organizations, to reshape the way elections are conducted.

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of its conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

Justice John Paul Stevens read a long dissent from the bench. He said the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings. His decision was joined by the other three members of the court’s liberal wing.

The case had unlikely origins. It involved a documentary called “Hillary: The Movie,” a 90-minute stew of caustic political commentary and advocacy journalism. It was produced by Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit corporation, and was released during the Democratic presidential primaries in 2008.

Citizens United lost a suit that year against the Federal Election Commission, and scuttled plans to show the film on a cable video-on-demand service and to broadcast television advertisements for it. But the film was shown in theaters in six cities, and it remains available on DVD and the Internet.

The lower court said the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, usually called the McCain-Feingold law, prohibited the planned broadcasts. The law bans the broadcast, cable or satellite transmission of “electioneering communications” paid for by corporations in the 30 days before a presidential primary and in the 60 days before the general election. That leaves out old technologies, like newspapers, and new ones, like YouTube.

The law, as narrowed by a 2007 Supreme Court decision, applies to communications “susceptible to no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate.” It also requires spoken and written disclaimers in the film and advertisements for it, along with the disclosure of contributors’ names.

The lower court said the film was a prohibited electioneering communication with one purpose: “to inform the electorate that Senator Clinton is unfit for office, that the United States would be a dangerous place in a President Hillary Clinton world and that viewers should vote against her.”

The McCain-Feingold law does contain an exception for broadcast news reports, commentaries and editorials.

When the case was first argued last March, it seemed a curiosity likely to be decided on narrow grounds. The court could have ruled that Citizens United was not the sort of group to which the McCain-Feingold law was meant to apply, or that the law did not mean to address 90-minute documentaries, or that video-on-demand technologies were not regulated by the law. Thursday’s decision rejected those alternatives.

Instead of deciding the case in June, the court set down the case for a rare re-argument in September. It now asked the parties to address the much more consequential question of whether the court should overrule a 1990 decision, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which upheld restrictions on corporate spending to support or oppose political candidates, along with part of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, the 2003 decision that upheld the central provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

On Thursday, the court answered its own questions with a resounding yes.

There are some interesting parallels in this section of Commonwealth to points raised by Zizek in his recent book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce particularly concerning the Haitian revolution. I don’t have the Zizek book in front of me at the moment but if memory serves, he also observes that the Haitian revolution revealed the centrality of resistance in the formation of European modernity. For Zizek, the Haitian uprising marks all the ambivalences and paradoxes of modernity, both its legacy of domination and hierarchy as well as it’s liberatory tradition. The Haitian revolutionaries rooted their project within the emancipatory register of the enlightenment and the French revolution and through their revolt embodied the principles of freedom and equality more purely than the French themselves who sought to deny the Haitian slaves their humanity. Zizek claims that the lesson here is that postcolonial resistance to global capitalism should continue to take a critical de-colonizing stance toward the specters of domination handed down from modernity, while recognizing that this stance is firmly within the modern tradition of human emancipation. According to Zizek, the truly revolutionary event, as demonstrated by the Haitian revolution, is not only to appropriate the democratic tradition in political struggle but to radically realign and alter that tradition in the process.

In some ways this is what the concept of altermodernity is getting at in Commonwealth. For Hardt and Nergi it is not enough to recognize the contradiction within the power relation between modernity and antimodernity. It is not enough to resist. The goal, rather, is to generate new relations and social democratic forms (parallel and intersectional class based, gender, ethnic/indigenous struggles) that cut diagonally across the modern-antimodern threshold. Ultimately, in their chapter on altermodernity and throughout Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri offer a far more dynamic analysis than Zizek, who, whenever confronted with a tight spot often just simply reverts to some sort of grand negative reversal. This brings up a crucial point for me in terms of the broader importance of Commonwealth and the Empire series in general. As Zizek has stated on numerous occasions, himself borrowing from Fredrick Jameson, it is far easier today to imagine the end of human life do to environmental holocaust than even basic transformation of the global capitalist system. This is usually offered within the context of a more general lamentation about how the neoliberal moment exerts tremendous downward pressure on our ability to imagine collective paradigms of social transformation. The precise aim of Commonwealth is to offer a creative design for a new ontology of democratic possibility (a performance of imaginative possibility). This does not mean, of course, that Hardt and Negri should not be subject to critique. In fact as we will see in further posts, critiques of their project were incredibly productive in the formation of this project. It is, however, necessary to consider the dynamic in which critique is offered.

Recently, I have found myself defending Deleuze against people that I think fundamentally misunderstand the nature or point of his project. In my view, Hardt and Negri’s project embodies Deleuze’s insistence that the value of criticism lies in its ability to transform and affect. In each of his books on Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and Spinoza, Deleuze offers plenty of criticism, particularly of Kant, however, these projects are all undertaken in the spirit of pushing the philosophical systems of these thinkers into new territory and in the process simultaneously transforming their projects into something new and dynamic (isn’t this Zizek’s point regarding the Haitian revolution?). Everywhere one peers within Commonwealth, one can locate the stamp of this Deleuzian legacy from their treatment of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, to their deployment of the concepts of love, poverty, and altermodernity. The emphasis is not only to unravel faulty assumptions and open up blockages, but to pave the way for new possibilities for thought and being. My comments here are not in any way to suggest that these concepts along with Hardt and Nergi’s theoretical treatment of the multitude are not without their limitations. It is essential that these limitations be made visible and struggled over. However, if we are to adopt Hardt and Negri’s ethico-political co-ordinates, this process would orient itself toward making these limitations useful in the sense of expanding and sharpening our analytical, ethical, and political attunements. Such an approach seems to me to point toward a way out of the de-politicizing neoliberal deadlock. However, this is precisely what Zizek and others have disingenuously failed to do in their efforts to expel Deleuze from contemporary social and political thought (check out this brilliant analysis by Steven Shaviro of Peter Hallward’s recent assassination attempt)

With all this being said, what are the limitations and possibilities of altermodernity as a conceptual figure of revolutionary praxis? In a sense, it is not possible to fully answer this question from this chapter alone. Many of the points raised in Part 2 are developed in much more theoretical detail in later chapters, and not before running the ideas through their critique of political economy in Part 3. Here, as a preliminary matter, I would like to address three interrelated critiques. First, critics allege that Hardt and Negri inadvertently reproduce a kind of Marxian developmentalist teleology through their claim that global capitalism produces both the “objective” and “subjective” conditions of its own demise. Submerged within this critique is a second one that refers to Hardt and Negri’s apparent messianic tendencies, connected to their supposed “faith” in the affirmative power of the multitude to govern itself in horizontal co-operative networks. Third, there is also a great deal of contempt for the notion of affirmation itself as a critical basis of praxis. Doesn’t such emphasis on creativity and affirmation reproduce neoliberal desiring subjects of capital? How can we effectively combat capital without directly negating it? And on and on….Hardt and Negri directly address the first criticism in Part 2 by engaging historical determinism as a misguided vestige of Marxism’s relationship to modernity (which does not in any way negate validity of Marxism as analysis or basis for political struggle!). In relation, they obliquely address both the first and second criticisms by insisting that the move into altermodernity does not share any determined relationship to the present, however, in those moments where it has emerged (Bolivia, Chiapas, etc) it has already embodied many of the characteristics of the multitude that they describe: horizontal organizational forms and intersectional alliances coupled with various dynamics of social production (i.e. new strategies of collective action, imagination, and political creation). Rather than emerging as historical necessity or existing simply as a utopian revolutionary fantasy, these movements embody concrete manifestations of the multitude as it engages in transforming the political relations in which it is immersed and in the process transforms itself through the generation of new forms of social life. As for the last point, Hardt and Negri take great pains to insist (particularly through their mobilization of singularity and multiplicity which we will take up later in further posts) that political articulations contain potential for furthering either reactionary or liberatory aims. The point of altermodernity is to recognize that the existence of the former need not negate the possibility of the latter as it strives to inaugurate potentials for as yet unimagined ways of thinking and acting with others.

What I would like to say in closing out these scattered remarks is that I am interested in continuing to think about criticism in a way that is generative, that opens up rather than closes down productive possibilities for thinking through new intellectual and ethico-political connections. In further posts this will have to mean bringing our notes of Commonwealth into more of a direct conversation with our own interests and projects.

Paul has posted his summary of Part 2 of Commonwealth at Critical Stew:

Part 2: Modernity (and the Landscapes of Altermodernity)

2.1 Antimodernity as Resistance

Power and Resistance Within Modernity

In this section Hardt and Negri problematise the traditional dialectic opposition of modernity/antimodernity. This opposition, they argue, is what gives rise to problematic notions of modernity as an “unfinished project,” inherently good, and simply in need of further advance. They counter the traditional view of modernity as a process of a benign, universalised enlightened European sensibility that civilises an oppositional savage external world, by proposing that modernity itself is dualistic, characterised by the immanent coupling of domination and resistance. The forces of antimodernity, they argue, cannot be seen as being outside modernity but rather internal to it. This means that modernity, for Hardt and Negri, should be seen first and foremost as a power relation. In order to facilitate this ontological shift they first draw on contemporary characterisations of coloniality as a series of “encounters.” Encounters, as opposed to conquests, acknowledge the mutual mixtures and transformations experienced by the coloniser and colonised. Examples given include the adaptation by colonialists to pre-existing spatial layouts of Aztec city states and the influence of Iroquois Federalism on the political history of the United States. The language of encounter misses the violence of coloniality and thus Hardt and Negri continue with a psychoanalytic metaphor: European modernity is “psychotic” because it forecloses the possibility of alternative existences and the influence of the subjugated on the dominant. This is evident in attempts to erase alternate or antimodern histories, which are seen as a threat from the outside, as opposed to being constitutive of modernity itself. Finally, though centre/periphery models come closest to Hardt and Negri’s proposed duality, they run the risk of homogenising both the coloniser and colonised. “The West” is seen as the only “pole of domination,” without internal struggles and resistances, while “the rest” is seen as uniformly subordinate, without it’s own axes of domination. When modernity is understood as a power relation then seeing modernity as an unfinished project is much less benign than is suggested by Habermas and other theorists of social democracy. “More modernity,” Hardt and Negri argue, “is not an answer to our problems.” (71)

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I just finished reading Loic Wacquant’s new book Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. The book accompanies two other recent books by Wacquant (professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley) that explore similar themes: Urban Outcasts and Prisons of Poverty. Punishing the Poor is a detailed sociological analysis of the material and symbolic mechanisms and historical coordinates intertwining the simultaneous retreat of social welfarism and the advancement of new modes of social inequality, the precaritization of labor, and mass incarceration. While these trends have been shared in varying degrees across Western democratic states, Wacquant roots much of his analysis in the “penalization of poverty” in the United States, making the claim that U.S. post-welfare logics have provided the dominant frames guiding contemporary realignments of European governance and social policy restructuring.

There isn’t much here not already widely accepted by social scientists. Wacquant’s primary argument, echoing his mentor Pierre Bourdieu, is that “the downsizing of the social welfare sector of the state and concurrent upsizing of its penal arm are functionally linked, forming, as it were, two sides of the same coin of state restructuring in the nether regions of urban space in the age of ascending neoliberalism” (43). In other words, as the conjoined narratives and structural practices of deregulation and moral responsibility have produced new forms of social insecurity, cultural approbation, and punitive “workfarist” policies for low-income and racialized populations—i.e. those populations left most precarious in the hyper-mobile and flexible circuits of the global economy—the state has expanded its control, surveillance, and punishment functions. Wacquant thus describes the neoliberal state as a “centaur state, guided by a liberal head mounted on an authoritarian body, that applies the doctrine of “laissez-faire” upstream, when it comes to social inequalities and the mechanisms that generate them (the free play of capital, deregulation of labor law and deregulation of employment, retraction or removal of collective protections), but it turns out to be brutally paternalistic and punitive downstream, when it comes to coping with their consequences on a daily level” (43).

A central point in Wacquant’s analysis is that the rise in the penal arm of the neoliberal state serves a variety of key political functions in the government of social insecurity:

The renewed utility of the penal apparatus in the post-Keynesian era of insecure employment is threefold: (1) it works to bend the fractions of the working class recalcitrant to the discipline of the new fragmented service wage-labor by increasing the cost of strategies of exit into the informal economy of the street; (2) it neutralizes and warehouses its most disruptive elements, or those rendered wholly superfluous by the recomposition of the demand for labor; and (3) it reaffirms the authority of the state in daily life within the restrictive domain henceforth assigned to it. The canonization of “the right to security,” correlative to the dereliction of the “right to employment” in its old form (that is, full-time and with full benefits, for an indefinite period, and for a living wage enabling one to reproduce oneself socially and to project oneself into the future), and the increased interest in, and resources granted to the enforcement of order as just the right time to shore up the deficit of legitimacy suffered by political-decision makers, owing to the very fact that they have abjured the established missions of the state of the social and economic front” (7).

Like his other books, Punishing the Poor assembles an incredibly rich and rigorous collection of data to back up its major claims. Armed with a mountain of statistical evidence and acute attention to historical detail, the book pulls no punches as it surveys the intersection of social insecurity and punishment within the neoliberal state across the vectors of political economy and culture. For those interested in the politics of poverty and the law under neoliberalism the book is definitely worth checking out. In particular, Wacquant is very adept at approaching these issues from a variety of different theoretical standpoints while distilling his prose into clever, punchy, and insightful polemical figures. What I see as the fundamental weakness of Wacquant’s work is that it doesn’t delve deeply into questions of agency, resistance, and/or democratic alternatives to the neoliberal juggernaut. Perhaps no other contemporary sociologist has more advanced our understanding of the relations between the post-industrial prison and inner-city poverty, spatial stigmatization, and enclosure. However, Wacquant doesn’t give us much to work with in terms of thinking beyond these relations. Admittedly, in Urban Outcasts he does do an excellent job of dispelling the myths of the contemporary ghetto as a site of total dysfunction, highlighting how such narratives serve to reproduce in both popular and scholarly discourses racist stereotypes while missing the objective conditions of the highly complex social systems and norms that structure daily life in the most dispossessed and disenfranchised spaces of the urban. In my view, however, this doesn’t go far enough in thinking about alternative democratic movements.

While I think Wacquant could do more on this front, he nonetheless does conclude with a brief section on “how to escape the law and order state”. “To avoid getting locked into a penal escalation without end or exit, it is indispensable to renconnect the debate on crime with the paramount social question of the new century, which it now screens from view: the advent of desocialized wage labor, vector of social insecurity, and of increasing material, familial, educational, health, and even mental precariousness. For one can no longer order one’s perception of the social world and conceive of the future when the present is obstructed and turns into a struggle for day to day survival” (281). Wacquant proceeds to offer a series of brief suggestions for re-thinking the economic and cultural valences of insecurity and crime. Unfortunately, these recommendations including “defending the left arm of the state” (a valid and important task to be sure!) are not offered with nearly the depth or theoretical precision as the critique, and can be seen as offering not much more than social democratic reformism as opposed to a more forward looking project of fundamental transformation.

Since my first post on Commonwealth, my friend Paul and I have decided to launch a small intra-blog project. We will first continue to write up a set of notes for the book and to cross-post them on our blogs as well as to another public theory blog belonging to a friend of ours. This is in the interest and spirit of generating critical conversation. Next, we are going to co-write a book review. Unlike, these basic notes we hope to accomplish two things in the review (1) excavate some productive criticisms/limitations of Hardt and Negri’s project (2) create something new by thinking with and against Hardt and Negri in the context of our respective intellectual interests. For me, this means thinking about what productive insights Commonwealth might contribute to discussions of educational policy, security, and insecurity, and for Paul, it means thinking about online communities, internet surveillance, and theories of gifting and exchange. Of course, we hope to also think critically about how these fields speak to one another, the common, and possibilities for social transformation. This underscores a larger project we are working on that seeks to problematize issues of internet surveillance within the neoliberal University by looking at issues of campus-based corporate anti-piracy campaigns and questions of security and governmentality.

As the second decade of the twenty-first century begins, we find ourselves at one of those relatively rare moments in history when major power shifts become visible to all.  If the first decade of the century witnessed profound changes, the world of 2009 nonetheless looked at least somewhat like the world of 1999 in certain fundamental respects:  the United States remained the world’s paramount military power, the dollar remained the world’s dominant currency, and NATO remained its foremost military alliance, to name just three.

By the end of the second decade of this century, however, our world is likely to have a genuinely different look to it.  Momentous shifts in global power relations and a changing of the imperial guard, just now becoming apparent, will be far more pronounced by 2020 as new actors, new trends, new concerns, and new institutions dominate the global space.  Nonetheless, all of this is the norm of history, no matter how dramatic it may seem to us.

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Preface

In the opening pages of Commonwealth Hardt and Negri claim that the book represents an attempt to “articulate an ethical project, an ethics of democratic political action within and against Empire” (vii). Reiterating their position in Empire and Multitude, they argue that despite the insecurities, conflicts, and contradictions wrought by globalization there is no longer any space “outside” the new global capitalist order. For better or worse, globalization has created a common world. Because there is no longer an outside, creating more sustainable and democratic futures requires acting in this world through new collective projects of self-rule and political invention. CW thus represents Hardt and Negri’s attempt to fully articulate the conditions of possibility for a global democracy of the multitude. Central to CW is the conceptual deployment of the common. By the common Hardt and Nergi refer to the material world as well as to the results of social production—ideas, knowledge, images, and affects. While neoliberal forms of rule have led to the further enclosure of the commons through new strategies of capital accumulation and privatization, Hardt and Negri assert that globalization has also created common spaces and modes of knowledge particularly in the realm of digital communication and cultural production. According to Hardt and Negri, these articulations of the common—while still captured within empire’s distinct alignments of biopolitical production—represent an immanent potentiality for realizing an alternative democratic project: the “becoming-Prince of the multitude”.

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Public schooling is now so thoroughly stratified that parents are searching for any available edge in gaining admission to their “school of choice”. I saw this article today in the New York Times. Essentially, test prep companies are capitalizing on parental anxiety by offering test prep courses for 3 and 4 year olds designed to help them boost their cache for prospective kindergarten admissions committees.

Test preparation has long been a big business catering to students taking SATs and admissions exams for law, medical and other graduate schools. But the new clientele is quite a bit younger: 3- and 4-year-olds whose parents hope that a little assistance — costing upward of $1,000 for several sessions — will help them win coveted spots in the city’s gifted and talented public kindergarten classes.

Motivated by a recession putting private schools out of reach and concern about the state of regular public education, parents — some wealthy, some not — are signing up at companies like Bright Kids NYC. Bright Kids, which opened this spring in the financial district, has some 200 students receiving tutoring, most of them for the gifted exams, for up to $145 a session and 80 children on a waiting list for a weekend “boot camp” program.

These types of businesses have popped up around the country, but took off in New York City when it made the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, or Olsat, a reasoning exam, and the Bracken School Readiness Assessment, a knowledge test, the universal tests for gifted admissions beginning in 2008.

From the New York Times:

A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.