If by “hope” we mean a feeling of yearning and expectation for something to happen, and by “change” we mean an improvement of our present condition, then this is Greece’s moment of hope and change – and it is an overdue moment indeed. But, before this moment is lost in indiscernible patterns of technocratic parlance, financial speculation and micro-political concerns, we must grasp the true emancipatory potential it has – and act accordingly. more

Speakers:

• Stathis Kouvelakis, Kings College, London
• Kevin Featherstone, Director, Hellenic Observatory, LSE
• Costas Lapavitsas, Economics, SOAS
• Peter Bratsis, Politics, Salford University
• Costas Douzinas (Chair) Birkbeck

Introduction by speakers:

Open debate:

The commentary on the Greek crisis has predictably descended into a spectacle of cheap moralisation. Over the past months, we have been bombarded with accusatory tirades aimed against corrupt politicians, greedy bankers, depraved technocrats and more or less anyone who’s had a chance to use and abuse the system in order to advance their personal interests or those of their clique.

Short-sightedness, lack of elementary moral constraints, blatant lying, sheer gluttony, political and financial opportunism, imaginative accountancy, cover-ups; all these, we have been tirelessly told, have resulted in the incontrovertible economical, political and moral downfall of Greece. Downfall is, of course, used loosely here, for it is hard to articulate whence Greece fell. It is, indeed, mind-bogglingly difficult for any person of my generation to try and find a precise point in the past thirty years when the financial and political scene in Greece was, to say the least, in order. Surely, there have been periods of relative prosperity, inflated as the latter could have only been (and this is not only known in retrospect, at least amongst somewhat informed people) – but to act surprised at the present situation can only be one of two things: naïve or fraudulent. Naïve for thinking that the party could go on forever; fraudulent for deliberately advertising this belief.

It’s impossible to presently go into an in-depth analysis of the trajectory that led to the present situation. The inevitability of it (or a very close version of it) is, however, beyond doubt. In a country where notions of citizenship and collective responsibility are largely unknown if not frowned upon, for good historical reasons no less, such predicaments should not cause stupefaction. Corruption in Greece is not an endemic phenomenon and by no means a personality trait exclusive to the political elites. It is a widespread modus operandi stemming out of a well-rooted distrust to institutions. Greeks are accustomed to ‘bartering’ with the state and with each other and their transactions are not conducted in reference to collective institutions or laws. Instead of cemented social responsibilities, they perform out of feelings of camaraderie, friendship and personal association.

The politicians are no more corrupt than the average business person who openly and shamelessly tax-evades (justifying his actions on the premise that his taxes will be pocketed by politicians anyway – so why not outsmart them), the doctor at Greece’s NHS who is bribed to treat a patient promptly, the professor who never shows up for his class. They just have more to play with.

The most trying feature of the academic and journalistic response to the Greek crisis has been the tendency to translate those compulsions into matters of personal sin, private psychological propensities when, in fact, they are inscribed into the very way the society works. A fact that, by the way, accounts for the overall smoothness with which this system has been operating for years now meeting, virtually, no resistance.

The political and economic demise of Greece is not the work of a handful of corrupt politicians or greedy bankers. It is, in essence, the end result of a common manic race to catch up with the West. A race that began in the early 1980s and during which ready-made Western institutions were imported wholesale without the time needed for people to appropriate them and identify with them. Not surprisingly, the great leap forward that Greece appeared to be making was only in paper. Caught somewhere between a sense of pride about its glorious days of yore and the conspicuous flourishing of the West during the 1990s, Greece was intended to place itself amongst what it saw as its intellectual children – and reap the rewards. How could the birthplace of democracy not be in the European Union? How could it not host the Olympic Games? Such instances of arrogance (even when well-meant), amplified by a craving for enrichment and coupled with a state of political infancy of the citizenry was an explosive mixture. The result was compulsive consumption, overspending and a widespread bedazzlement with money which bestowed social recognition and inspired importance. Success became synonymous with monetary wealth and, a twisted version of it, social mobility was reduced to imaginative short-circuiting.

Under the pressure–though it’s an open question whether this pressure was external or self-imposed–to keep the machine running, Greece reached the state it finds itself in now. The merciless dynamics of capitalism and neoliberalism were applied to a country that lacked elementary structures of collective identity or mechanisms of regulation and self-protection, let alone restraint and discipline.

Greece’s present situation is the result of a combination of dynamics that were too forceful for a burgeoning state to control; even fathom. To which degree other, more mature in a number of ways countries such as its European neighbours should have foreseen this and been more responsible in their approach to Greece is an open question. This, admittedly, sounds patronising. But, one way or the other, Greece is now, after the IMF bailout has been activated, where it would have been from the beginning: under guardianship.

Speakers:

Constantinos Tsoukalas, Emeritus Professor, University of Athens
Kevin Featherstone, Director – Hellenic Observatory, LSE
Costas Lapavitsas, Professor of Economics, SOAS
Costas Douzinas, Birkbeck
Peter Bratsis, Salford University

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Dreyfus Affair – Jacqueline Rose(1)

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Obama’s War – Tariq Ali

How different does Europe look today from ten years ago. In 2000, influential commentators hailed the dawn of the ‘new European century’ to replace the atrocious ‘American’ 20th century. Europe was on the way to becoming the model polity for the new world. The re-unification of Germany, the successful introduction of the Euro and the expansion eastwards were ushering a new age of prosperity and freedom.

Jurgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck enthused about the European model and prophesized its exportation to the world. Many were the successes of the Union, they claimed.  Old nationalisms and xenophobias had been left behind, former enemies collaborated in peaceful competition creating the most successful economic region in the world. The Union’s principles of democracy, human rights and multiculturalism were a beacon of hope. Europe was the model for the future of humanity.

The reality is so different today. The Union is no longer a model but a dysfunctional organization that has betrayed its founding principles of economic stability and prosperity based on social solidarity and justice. As the Greek tragedy shows, it has turned into a bureaucratic placeman for market discipline and an economic enforcer of international capital. How did that happen?

The change started when the Maastricht treaty adopted the neo-liberal agenda pioneered by Thatcher in Britain. Deregulation of financial transactions, privatization of public assets and utilities at bargain prices and taxation regimes favouring transnational corporations were introduced throughout Europe. The commitments to full employment and the welfare state were dropped as the European states revised their re-distributive efforts to fit strict expenditure constraints and balanced budgets. Century-old gains of the trade union and radical movements were reversed. The new orthodoxy was that competitiveness and productivity would improve if the power of the Unions was seriously curtailed (something again pioneered by Thatcher in her attack on the Miners Union), labour law protections weakened and employment security abolished. Maastricht started one of the largest transfers of capital and power from labour to business, a process now reaching maturity.

The neo-liberal faith is that monetary stability, improved productivity and competitiveness lead to growth and translate into economic rewards for the employed part of the population. Increased consumption, rising property and equity values will make the masses adopt ‘popular capitalism’. The ‘seduced’ two thirds of the population will support an obscenely unfair economic system to the extent that it offers them improved standards of living, unless they become unemployed or ill. The unemployed and underemployed third of the population, on the other hand, is abandoned, opts out of the political system and is treated as a security threat and policing matter.

These changes were accompanied by extensive marketing campaigns, which promoted consumption and the stock market. Neo-liberalism is not just an economic faith. It is a global ideology telling people how to see themselves and others, what to value and how to relate to the world.  The introduction of the Euro accelerated the process. In theory, it would lower transaction costs, increase capital returns and lead to greater investment and productivity. But growth levels did not rise and when the world financial and economic crisis hit, Europe tumbled into deep recession.

The stability pact 3% deficit ceiling had been repeatedly breached by every state before the recent crisis but was covered through creative accountancy and political agreements. The neo-liberal argument to the apparent failure of the euro promises was that state action should be cut further and remaining labour market rigidities removed. This is what Greece is now asked to do in a way that puts her in the same position as developing countries under the IMF ‘Washington consensus’.

The uncertainties and unbalanced architecture of the euro were concealed from the public. The modernizing ‘public intellectuals’, the liberal economists and journalists, who enthused about the euro, ‘discovered’ suddenly in the last month that fiscal discipline without common economic policy means that the strong turn their interests into universal truths at the expense of the weak. The government ‘discovered’ suddenly that the financial markets can target the bonds of a weak states and make huge gains. But this has always been the function of the financial markets as we know from the attacks on the British pound in the 80s and on the banks in 2008. It takes naivete or bad faith on the part of the rulers to claim that this is something unprecedented while at the same time using the same mechanisms to raise loans.

One response to the structural problems of the monetary union is to propose greater economic integration, which necessarily leads to closer political union. For the Left too, democratic politics is the only way to resist the neo-liberal consensus of big capital, Eurocrats and political elites. But any closer European politics would have to address what EU propagandists call the ‘democratic deficit’. This is a euphemism however hiding the truth. The EU has no deficit but a total absence of democracy. Let me explain.

Every single principle of a democratic constitution from the separation of powers to democratic accountability and executive transparency are violently breached. The governments-appointed Commission exercises the exclusive power of legislative initiative, Parliament like, but also enforces the law, executive like. Government representatives and council of Ministers emissaries legislate in collaboration with government appointed commissioners. The Parliament is a talking shop with minimal powers something understood by the European citizens, which has turned its back to European elections, recently recording the highest levels of voter abstention ever. This combination of unaccountable eurocrats and national bureaucrats has led to a mountain of legislation amounting to more than 100,000 pages. These are imposed on states without even a minimum discussion by national Parliaments and amount to 70% of legislative production in Britain.

The European lack of democratic accountability has been welcome by national governments (which can agree unpopular measures in Brussels without having to get MPs to vote in Athens) and has infected national Parliaments. The only participation citizens are allowed in European affairs is through lawsuits, applications to the ombudsman and lobbying of ministers and commissioners. This is a sad remnant of the original vision of a democratic European integration.

On the few occasions the public was asked to vote on the European construction, it has decidedly rejected the proposals.  The referenda over the European ‘constitution’ in France, Holland and Ireland confirmed extensive popular distaste and the one in Britain had to be cancelled as a result. The typical and angry response of the frustrated elites was to re-package the ‘constitution’, offer bribes to the Irish and the Poles, and impose a President and Foreign Secretary, whose only quality is that they are universally unknown non-entities.

This European attitude to democracy shows postmodern cynicism at its worst. It combines Brecht’s dictum that if the people do not vote for the government, the government should dissolve the people and elect a new one with the principle of ‘as if’: the more you get your proposals rejected the more you should act as if they have been unanimously approved.

Based on these reversals, academic propagandists for the Union argue that popular participation is undesirable because it is ‘ignorant irrelevant and ideological’. Princeton Professor Andrew Moravcsik claims that ‘social Europe is a chimera’ and democratic participation should be discouraged because it ‘runs counter to our consensual social scientific understanding of now advanced democracies work.’
Economic and scientific expertise is not open to debate and voting. Indeed all democratic participation and mobilization is expensive, counter-productive and gives the impression that there may be more than one solution to problems that have objectively right answers. The great advantage of the Union is that it is so ‘boring’ that people do not care about it.

This complacency has been undermined by the Greek measures.  Europe can no longer be seen as a remote bunch of faceless bores dealing in esoteric rules of trade, competition and regulation of products. Its diktat, solicited and accepted by the obedient Greek government, now reaches the basics of popular well-being. To smooth its passage, Eurocrats and the Greek government followed identical ideological tactics. The politics of fear (bankruptcy, Titanic, non-payment of salaries) mimicked the exaggerated claims of the war on terror. The monotonously repeated claims about the ‘objective character’ and inescapability of the measures co-opts the trust generated by scientists. It is a typical case of ‘good cop, bad cop’: Germany and the markets are bad and speculators, we Greeks patriotic and victims. As in police movies, the positions can be easily reversed: we Greeks are lazy and cheats, Europe represents reason and modernity.

The dominant vision turns politics into a region of economics and morality. Why ask for social justice, if you can get a good ombudsman. But as similar measures are imposed across Europe, a process of de-legitimation of the neo-liberal model and even of the EU more generally has started kicking in. We may be at the real beginning of the 21st century as the legitimacy of the post-1989 system starts collapsing. This is the great opportunity of the left: it is perhaps the first time that the idea of ‘another Europe’ may take roots.

All great ideas in modernity, from human rights to popular sovereignty to the nation and socialism were advanced originally by intellectual and political elites but were able to inspire people and turn them to action. This has palpably failed in Europe. Elites have become European but the people have not followed. This loss of nerve of intellectuals is quite striking in Greece. The answers given recently to a newspaper asking why intellectuals do not participate in the crisis debate were revealing. Most intellectuals are now liberal modernizers, part of the elites that run the country according to European directives. The rule of law, public morality, and market integrity are the guiding principles, as packaged in Brussels. Social justice, the single issue that most consistently defined the public intellectual and brought together Sartre and Russell, Camus and Derrida, has been forgotten in the quest for the latest EU research grant. No wonder nationalism is on the rise: the liberal ‘constitutional patriotism’ may sound good in Berlin where nationalism has repeatedly turned genocidal but can create no affect or loyalty in Pattissia or Byronas.

No immediate prospect of a European demo-cracy exists because no European demos has been created. This liberal failure has boldened neo-liberal apologists to propose a new type of integration. Oxford academic Jan Zielonka announced in 2006 that Europe is becoming a benign Empire. Its complex governance, neo-medieval maze of jurisdictions and committees of experts which find their equilibrium through spontaneous market adjustments and is closer to the Holy Roman Empire than a modern democracy. Policy networks and lobbying are more effective for decision-making than popular sovereignty and elections. As Perry Anderson sarcastically comments, this is a ‘return to medieval petitions submitted to the prince’.

So is Europe moving towards cosmopolitanism or empire? Recent events show clearly that the current direction is imperial but not in Zielonka’s sense. A quasi-imperial metropolis (Germany) imposes on the provinces (Greece) measures that lead to large transfers of value to the local delegated elites and the centre while creating the stability necessary for neo-colonial enterprises. As Greece prepares fearfully to receive the various imperial inspectors from Europe and the IMF, it has accepted its status as a mandated territory of limited sovereignty, somewhat like Kosovo.

Historically all cosmopolitanisms ended up in empire. Stoic philosophy ended up in Rome, Christian spiritual universalism became conquest, genocide and conversion, modern reason and progress degenerated in colonialism and the ‘civilizing mission’. Similarly today the cosmopolitanism of European integration ends up in the imperialism of the market and the strong-arm tactics of the IMF.

But there is another tradition that belongs to the left. Liberal cosmopolitans forget that the first to call himself cosmopolites was Diogenes the Cynic. He was a fierce critic of institutions, conventions and the powerful unlike the Roman Stoics, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius who are presented as the founding fathers of cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitan tradition takes place in the streets of Athens and Paris more than in the backroom negotiations of bankers and elite politicians, in the parrhesia of the young rather than the monotony of TV commentators and the hospitality towards the excluded and persecuted.

This is today the responsibility of the Left: to save democracy from its gradual decay into the neo-imperialism of terminally boring experts and the neo-evangelism of neo-liberal dystopia.

In this month of the ‘Greek passion’ one thing is certain. The country will never be the same again. But while the commentators, academics and ‘experts’ discuss endlessly the economic crisis, the deep political malaise has gone unnoticed. The three ‘waves’ of ‘stability’ measures have befallen Greece like an evil tsunami which will turn the current recession into a depression with no clear end. But they also attack the foundations of democracy. The unfolding events offer a panorama of the symptoms of ‘the end of politics’.

In a first obvious way, the government’s astonishing volte-face is worthy of a gymnastics Olympic medal. PASOK’s manifesto attacked New Democracy’s neo-liberal policies and promised social justice, re-distribution in favour of the poor, strengthening the welfare state and job creation. Four months later every single promise and undertaking lies in tatters. Political scientists bemoaning the apathy, lack of interest and increasing voter abstention claim that the repeated breaking of manifesto promises is a major reason why citizens turn away from politics. On this basis, the Greek case will become a textbook example of political rather than statistical dissembling. It is morally unimaginable  how professional politicians can live with such a violent reversal of promises or hope to go to the polls again promising anything. But what does losing the trust of citizens mean when the country has lost the trust of the ‘markets’.

This unbelievable fraud is quickly passed over through the unconvincing excuse about the lies of the ‘others’ (the previous and alternating political elite, the lying statisticians, the ignorant and inefficient European inspectors etc). Still one would have expected at least an apology from the government and perhaps a Japanese style self-immolation. It was not to come, since this gargantuan lie is the symptom only of a much deeper problem.

Politics operates on two axes and forms of power: Auctoritas (legitimate authority) expresses the ‘common interest’ or the will of a people to live together. Potestas, on the other hand, is the force that keeps society together through the domination of the few over the many. The function of politics is to express, condense and provisionally mediate social and economic conflict, to build legitimate authority against the permanent background of insuperable antagonism.

This basic political fact has been occluded by the neo-liberal convergence of right wingers and social democrats. Neo-liberalism is not just a pernicious economic model. It is a global ideology and world view making people understand their lives and relate to others as infinite appropriators and desiring machines and turning politics into the administration of economics. While the economic catastrophe is now clear to all, its political repercussions have been largely ignored.

The politics of neo-liberalism takes economic and moralistic forms. In the former, politics becomes an activity resembling the market-place. Individuals, interests and classes accept the overall socio-economic balance and use politics to pursue marginal improvements of interest and profit. In the second, politics is presented as a process of argumentation where rational consensus about public goods can be reached.

Approached as a neo-liberal market-place or as a town-hall debate, neo-liberal politics pronounces conflict finished, passé, impossible, and, at the same time, tries to disavow and foreclose its appearance. Its replacement by a collaboration of ‘truth-telling’ economists, modernising bureaucrats and patriotic media turns the state into the muscleman for the market internally (exemplified by police brutality) and a superficially tolerant enforcer of humanitarianism externally (as seen in the recent ‘humanitarian wars’).  But conflict does not disappear – the neo-liberal recipes increase inequality, fuels antagonism and turns the anger against immigrants and the undeserving poor.

It is precisely this attitude to politics that recent events introduced to Greece. None of the unprecedented measures was discussed or approved beyond a small number of government insiders. Their imposition was presented as the inescapable result of greedy market action and perfidious European inaction (which lies behind the markets greed). They are presented like a humanitarian campaign to save the victims of a natural catastrophe. Neo-liberal economists, experts and the mainstream media pronounced that there is no alternative and then launched one of the most sustained campaigns to persuade the public. (By the way with a few exceptions, public intellectuals have been largely absent from this debate which will determine the future of the country. I will address the ‘silence of the shepherds’ in a future column.)

Austerity and honesty, salary cuts and moral righteousness is the universal neo-liberal recipe.  It will take a harsher form than Ireland or Iceland here because the (economic) punishment must match excessive moral laxity. This is a virulent type of postmodern cynicism. For real politics, on the other hand, the idea that ‘there is no alternative’ does not exist. Democracy is precisely the expression of disagreement and conflict, a form of life through which the most imponderable problems can be put to debate and testing, solutions can be found and then acted upon. This is precisely the reason why the experts and commentators had to pre-empt public opinion by announcing that the most controversial problem of our times belongs not to political judgement and normative evaluation but to the truth-telling discourse of experts.

Two strategies were used to present this most conflictual matter into a question of scientific objectivity. The first was to present the neo-liberal diagnosis and recipe as the only available ‘truth’.  Understanding the problem (its history, causes and context) and discussing alternatives was peremptorily dismissed as ignorant or naïve. But even in Britain, the cradle of neo-liberal idolatry, a large number of senior economists insisted recently that the worst thing to do in a recession is to cut public spending.  Greek economists know better.

The attempt to cow people before the mystical knowledge of experts and disqualify alternatives was followed by a strategy of the normalisation of the extreme. It was the poor man’s version of the politics of fear developed in the Anglo-American ‘war on terror’. As the prime minister said on Wednesday morning ‘Greece is at war’. But whom do we fight? The only conclusion is that Greece is fighting the Greeks. Fear is accompanied by a paroxysmal patriotism which rhetorically attacks the foreign ‘agents’ of our travails while adopting all their commands.  Greece, we heard, has lost its sovereignty, it is like the Titanic, a guinea pig, a proud country resisting the Germans etc. This was crowned by the ‘tragic kitsch’ of the anonymous wage earner (anonymos misthotos) who accosted the Prime Minister to offer his salary and the OAP Nana Mouscouri who gave her pension for the salvation of patrida. These are model cases where the Foucaultian technologies of self are fully adjusted with the biopolitical correction of the whole population. The homo sacer has mutated into the Hellene sacer, something that needs further comment.

If the political elite had adopted a political and not accountancy (logistiki) approach, it would have started a national debate. It would have called a referendum and built a hegemonic bloc behind the examined and adopted solution. It would have negotiated with those who represent the guiltless victims. But such a solution could not result in the most radical transfer of resources and power from the public to the private sector and the most extensive attack on the weakest on record. It would not prepare the ground for a further undermining of the role of trade unions and marginalisation of left wing ideas, or the destruction of labour law protections, or the further flexibilisation of employment and the lengthening of the unemployed queues.

It would be premature to assume that the government necessarily wants these results. But these measures are not just economic. Their consequences, intended or not, are inevitable and well-known from other parts of the world. Almounia and various ‘experts’ have insisted that improvement in productivity and labour market flexibility must follow. The economic measures are a part only of a wholesale radical restructuring of life. Democracy must be reformed first because its operation could offer the only effective resistance.

But this strategy carries risks for its inventors. The term ‘legitimation crisis’ describes the mass loss of trust in the (always fragile) social contract, which can no longer mobilise popular assent to a balance of power so palpably and unfairly stacked against the interests of the majority. Such crises arise when the omnipresent gap between rulers and ruled becomes an unbridgeable chasm and the claim of political elites to represent the public interest no longer convince.  The end (telos or purpose) of politics is social justice; when they lose that end politics comes to an end. This is where we stand today: the Greeks must fight for the survival of politics. In turning from guinea pigs into the vanguard of the counter attack, they will be offering a service to the world as important as that of the invention of democracy.

There wasn’t anything inevitable about David Cameron’s rise. If Kenneth Clarke had stirred himself into running something like a campaign when competing for the leadership with Iain Duncan Smith and been ready to appear more tractable on Europe; if David Davis had moved decisively in the immediate aftermath of Michael Howard’s resignation or been a more fluent speaker; if Howard had offered Cameron the shadow chancellorship or George Osborne had not accepted it – if these or any number of other contingencies had been otherwise, Cameron might not have become leader. Yet he has been perceived as an unstoppable force, the author of an irreversible transformation in his party that has set it firmly back on the road to power. Tim Bale’s exhaustive and authoritative account is hedged throughout with academic caution, but it concludes in terms that treat the Conservatives’ return to office as a foregone conclusion: ‘just as was the case for Margaret Thatcher, Cameron will ultimately be judged and defined by what he does.’ more

Google decided two weeks ago to shut down its hitherto self-censoring search service in China. This allegedly costly gesture, intended as a bold statement rather than a formal articulation of corporate “foreign policy”, is congruous with the company’s liberal philosophy and juxtaposed to the aged conformity of, say, Microsoft. But far from being seen merely as an act of adolescent bravado or tedious corporate management, it seems to have captured the imagination of intellectuals around the world. more

Haitian President Rene Preval said Sunday that the death toll from the earthquake could reach 300,000 once all the bodies are recovered from the rubble. We speak to Peter Hallward, professor of Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University. “Unless prevented by renewed popular mobilisation in both Haiti and beyond, the perverse international emphasis on security will continue to distort the reconstruction effort, and with it the configuration of Haitian politics for some time to come,” wrote Hallward recently. “What is already certain is that if further militarisation proceeds unchecked, the victims of the January earthquake won’t be the only avoidable casualties of 2010.”

Watch the video

Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti’s capital city on Tuesday afternoon, but it’s no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone. Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly manmade outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence.

The country has faced more than its fair share of catastrophes. Hundreds died in Port-au-Prince in an earthquake back in June 1770, and the huge earthquake of 7 May 1842 may have killed 10,000 in the northern city of Cap Haitien alone. Hurricanes batter the island on a regular basis, mostly recently in 2004 and again in 2008; the storms of September 2008 flooded the town of Gonaïves and swept away much of its flimsy infrastructure, killing more than a thousand people and destroying many thousands of homes. The full scale of the destruction resulting from this earthquake may not become clear for several weeks. Even minimal repairs will take years to complete, and the long-term impact is incalculable.

What is already all too clear, however, is the fact that this impact will be the result of an even longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment. Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest country in the western hemisphere”. This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression. more

Seidel’s initial argument supports the need for a comprehensive ethical theory, the success of which would parallel that of a large-scale scientific revolution, such as Newtonian mechanics. He elaborates the movement from the improved-but-still-human to the post-human, and philosophically examines speculated examples of post-human forms of life, including indefinitely extended life-span, parallel consciousness, altered perception, a-sociality, and a-sexuality.

Inhuman Thoughts is directed at those interested in philosophical questions on human nature and the best life given the possibilities of that nature. Seidel’s overall argument is that the most satisfactory answer to the latter question involves a transcendence of the present confines of human nature.

P.J.Tobia’s photographs of these monstrous buildings in Kabul convey only part of the horror. Their location is not too far from the slum dwellings that house the poor of the city, sans water, sans electricity, sans sewage, sans everything. A young photo-journalist from Philadelphia, Tobia supplied the captions and writes on True/Slant:
Here in Kabul, the poor live in unimaginably squalid conditions and the rich live like kings. Kings in very ugly castles.
We call them Poppy Palaces or Narcotecture, because much of the money that went into building them came from Afghanistan’s biggest crop. I also suspect that some UN/NGO/USAID dollars are paying for these insults to taste and design.
You can see these monstrosities all over town and I’ve photographed a few of the worst for your viewing pleasure. Note the really high walls and metal armor on some of them.
I apologize for the hurried nature of these photos—I took most of them from a moving car—but the AK-47 toting guards who stand watch at these palaces become a bit, um, grumpy when you take pictures around them.
Nice to actually see what Euro-American soldiers are killing and dying for. more

The devil you say

These days what the Epistle of James says about believing in God—that the devils believe in him too, ergo beware of taking too much credit for your credos—is often on my mind. God may or may not be in his heaven, but on any given week he is likely to be enthroned at the top of that great chain of being known as the New York Times Best Sellers List. Like James and the devil, I am not impressed.

By that I do not mean that I consider myself beyond the God debate or beyond those of my fellow mortals who find it compelling. In fact, if there is any unifying notion in what you are about to read, it is my deep distrust of any human being who fancies himself “beyond” just about anything, be it money, jealousy (of best-selling authors, for instance), using a turn signal, or putting on a tie. I would never buy a book whose title began with Beyond, though I have known a few beyond-good-and-evil types who weren’t beyond stealing one.

If I am unimpressed with the God debate it is less for wanting to seem aloof than for needing to start with easier questions. Lacking the credentials, say, that entitle any expert on a nanolayer of slime covering a pebble called earth to give us the complete skinny on absolute being, a hubris beside which the nitwit ruling of a Kansas school board seems cautiously understated, I want questions better suited to my pay grade. Never mind does God exist—does the God debate exist? more

Three mornings a week I drop off my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter at her daycare center. We have a routine. First we read a book, then we hug, kiss, high five, and wave before I leave. That’s how every drop-off goes. One recent morning she squirmed throughout the book, distractedly performed our separation ritual, then stopped me from departing by grabbing my wrist. She leaned sideways at the waist and with her other hand gripped the back of her knee. “Dad,” she said, “there’s something weird in my leggings.”

I turned her around and felt the back of her leg with the tips of my fingers. Sure enough, there was something weird in her leggings. The weird something was small and hard, seemingly unattached to her skin. It felt like a stone, a piece of gravel. In half a life how many rocks have I pulled from my socks? The adult mind settles quickly.

“What is it, Dad?” my daughter asked.

“I think it’s a rock,” I said. more

War is brutal and impersonal. It mocks the fantasy of individual heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals like democracy. In an instant, industrial warfare can kill dozens, even hundreds of people, who never see their attackers. The power of these industrial weapons is indiscriminate and staggering. They can take down apartment blocks in seconds, burying and crushing everyone inside. They can demolish villages and send tanks, planes and ships up in fiery blasts. The wounds, for those who survive, result in terrible burns, blindness, amputation and lifelong pain and trauma. No one returns the same from such warfare. And once these weapons are employed all talk of human rights is a farce.

In Peter van Agtmael’s “2nd Tour Hope I don’t Die” and Lori Grinker’s “Afterwar: Veterans From a World in Conflict,” two haunting books of war photographs, we see pictures of war which are almost always hidden from public view. These pictures are shadows, for only those who go to and suffer from war can fully confront the visceral horror of it, but they are at least an attempt to unmask war’s savagery. more

You call yourself a Leninist but the media in the West has called you a ‘rock star’ and the ‘Marx Brother’. How do you react to such labels?
With resigned melancholy. They try to say that this guy may be interesting and provocative but he is not serious. To them, I am like a fly that annoys you and provokes you but should not be taken seriously. Though, of late, they have been dubbing me as someone more threatening. In the last two years, the tone has changed. First, there were Marx Brothers’ jokes and now they say I am the most dangerous philosopher in the West. But I don’t care.

You also don’t care when they say that you glorify political violence.
For me, the 20th century communism is the biggest ethical-political catastrophe in history, greater catastrophe than fascism. But in the first years of the October Revolution, in spite of the so-called Red Terror, there was sexual liberation and literary explosion before it turned into a nightmare. I don’t accept the right-wing critique that says it was evil from the very beginning.

Read more of this insignificant interview here

On February 10, 2005, Lynne Stewart was convicted of providing material support for a terrorist conspiracy. She is the first lawyer to be convicted of aiding terrorism in the United States. Stewart faces thirty years of prison and will be sentenced in September 2006.

Untitled… is a video portrait of Stewart. The video focuses on the relationship between the language of poetry and the language of the law. Stewart speaks both languages, and employs poetry as a “knotting point” to connect ideas of beauty and justice for juries and judges alike. The film takes Stewart’s understanding of poetry and the law as a departure point to explore the possibilities of a poetics capable of articulating the pressures of terror and justice.

“Paul Chan’s portrait [is] of Lynne F. Stewart, the New York lawyer convicted last year of aiding Islamic terrorism by smuggling messages out of jail from a client she was defending, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. Now disbarred, Ms. Stewart faces a 30-year jail sentence.

The film, which Mr. Chan calls a work-in-progress, simply shows Ms Stewart talking; in a sense it is a self-portrait. She talks about her trial, about her career as an activist lawyer and about a personal politics that sounds instinctual rather than ideological. She also read poetry.

One of the poems she reads is William Blake’s “On Another’s Sorrow” from “Songs of Innocence”. It isn’t “political” in any overt way. It is filled with both questions and answers. While she reads, Mr. Chan turns the screen into a field of changing colors, so that we concentrate on the music of the words, the activism of the soul that poetry is, the power outlet that art can be. It’s a simple device, and like any effective political action, right or wrong, brilliant because it works.” –Holland-Cotter, New York Times, January 17th 2006

How different things looked in 1900 and 2000. The end of the 19th century was drowned in fin de siècle gloom. The end of the 20th century was, on the contrary, exuberant. President Bush Sr triumphantly announced in 1991 that a “new world order” was coming into view in which “the principles of justice and fair play will protect the weak against the strong [and] freedom and humanity will find a home among nations … Enduring peace must be our mission.” As the world was entering a new century of supposed peace and prosperity, I was hitting my half-century, a point of some pride and much foreboding. Melancholic retrospection and hopeful planning was the order of the day – for the world and me.

Globalisation, neoliberal economics and humanitarian cosmopolitanism were the contours of the new age. Economic interdependence, global communications, free trade, population and capital flows were bringing the world together, undermining the omnipotence of sovereignty and nation-state. A global civil society of multinational corporations, as well as international and non-governmental organisations, were to create the transnational solidarities necessary to protect against global risks. more

Watch here.

It has been history’s biggest birthday party. On or around 12 February 2009 alone – the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, ‘Darwin Day’ – there were more than 750 commemorative events in at least 45 countries, and, on or around 24 November, there was another spate of celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In Mysore, Darwin Day was observed by an exhibition ‘proclaiming the importance of the day and the greatness of the scientist’. In Charlotte, North Carolina, there were performances of a one-man musical, Charles Darwin: Live & in Concert (‘Twas adaptive radiation that produced the mighty whale;/His hands have grown to flippers/And he has a fishy tail’). At Harvard, the celebrations included ‘free drinks, science-themed rock bands, cake, decor and a dancing gorilla’ (stuffed with a relay of biology students). Circulating around the university, student and faculty volunteers declaimed the entire text of the Origin.

On the Galapagos Islands, tourists making scientific haj were treated to ‘an active, life-seeing account of the life of this magnificent scientist’, and a party of Stanford alumni retraced the circumnavigating voyage of HMS Beagle in a well-appointed private Boeing 757, intellectually chaperoned by Darwin’s most distinguished academic biographer. The Darwin anniversaries were celebrated round the world: in Bogotá, Mexico City, Montevideo, Toronto, Toulouse, Frankfurt, Barcelona, Bangalore, Singapore, Seoul, Osaka, Cape Town, Rome (where it was sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Culture, part of a Vatican hatchet-burying initiative), and in all the metropolitan and scientific settings you might expect. The English £10 note has borne Darwin’s picture on the back since 2000 (replacing Dickens), but special postage stamps and a new £2 coin honoured him in 2009, as did stamps or coins in at least ten other countries. more

Who could resist the charms, or doubt the importance, of a liberal, secular, Turkish Muslim writing formally adventurous, learned novels about the passionate collision of East and West? Orhan Pamuk is frequently described as a bridge between two great civilisations, and his major theme – the persistence of memory and tradition in Westernising, secular Turkey – is of a topicality, a significance, that it seems churlish to deny. His eight novels, the most recent of which, The Museum of Innocence, has just appeared in English, perform formal variations on that theme. Though his work fits into a Turkish tradition most closely associated with the mid-20th-century novelist Ahmet Tanpinar, one needn’t know anything about Tanpinar, or even about Turkish literature, to appreciate Pamuk, who writes in the Esperanto of international literary fiction, employing a playful postmodernism that freely mixes genres, from detective fiction to historical romance. Much of Pamuk’s fiction reads like a homage to his Western models: Mann, Faulkner, Borges, Joyce, Dostoevsky, Proust and – in The Museum of Innocence, the tale of a doomed, obsessional love affair between a man in his thirties and an 18-year-old shop girl – Nabokov. Indeed, his affection for the European tradition is as crucial to his appeal as his Turkishness, and his books pay tribute to values deeply embedded in the liberal imagination: romantic love freed from the fetters of tradition; individual creativity; freedom and tolerance; respect for difference. more