Political Views, Misc

This essay critically reconstructs the concept of ‘democratic dictatorship’ which Georg Lukács’s outlines in Blum Theses of 1928. The essay tackles the birth of the Communist Party of Hungary, particularly focusing on its factional struggles during the 1920s. Secondly, the main contents of the Blum Theses, compared with the debate on the ‘Republican Assembly’ in the Italian Communist Party will be discussed. Finally, the essay examines the two most rooted interpretive prejudices concerning the Blum Theses, i.e. their alleged forecasting character (...) towards ‘Popular Front’ strategy and their purported distance from ‘Socialfascism’. (shrink)

Caste : Groupe qui se distingue par ses privilèges et son esprit d’exclusive à l’égard de toute personne qui n’appartient pas au groupe. Larousse -/- La hausse des prix des carburants proposée pour lutter contre le changement climatique et mettre en œuvre les principes de la « transition écologique » adoptés par la France lors de la COP21, a fait naître le mouvement des gilets jaunes. Plus globalement c’est une bonne partie des français qui se trouve concernée, celle qui vit (...) dans des zones excentrées et qui ne bénéficie pas d'un réseau de transports très efficient tel celui qui émaille par exemple le territoire parisien. Ainsi, augmenter les prix des carburants, en particulier le diesel, a été perçu comme un contresens économique anti-populaire. Pendant des en, les producteurs d’automobiles, avec le support des politiques publiques, ont présenté le diesel comme le carburant le moins polluant. Mais aujourd’hui devenu le carburant « satanique », les consommateurs qui l’ont choisi, en toute bonne conscience, se sentent manipulés. La reconversion vers l’achat d’une voiture électrique est hors de la portée de la plupart de ceux qui aujourd’hui manifestent. Les aides du gouvernement ne changent pas cette réalité socioéconomique. Sous quel angle, les média ont-ils restitué le mouvement des gilets jaunes ? Alors qu’on voit émerger au sein de ce mouvement des revendications pour plus de justice sociale, qu’en est-il de la justice environnementale ? Peut-on dire qu’il s’agit d’une révolte sociale anti-écologique ? Ou autrement dit, les gilets jaunes sont-ils un mouvement anti-écologique ? (shrink)

Neoliberalism has installed an unending competitive struggle in the economy. Within this context activists have pushed for a reappraisal of laziness and inactivity as forms of resistance. This idea has been picked up by Maurizio Lazzarato and Giorgio Agamben in different ways. I start with explaining the former’s appraisal of laziness as a release of potentialities unrealizable under financial capitalism. Lazzarato’s appraisal of laziness however resembles neoliberal theories of innovation, because both share the conceptual persona of a subject whose potentialities (...) exceed the current status quo. Potentiality is thus not an unambiguous antagonist of capitalism, as Lazzarato suggests. In order to adequately oppose neoliberalism, Lazzarato should question the role of potentiality in capitalism. Agamben has undertaken such a project. In the second part of the essay I consequently argue that Agamben’s philosophy of inactivity as impotentiality is able to circumvent neoliberalism and the society of the spectacle. (shrink)

The article offers an analysis of Józef Bocheński's studies of the concept of nation. Bocheński acknowledges that there are difficulties in defining a nation. After that he claims that he will attempt to propose a definition of the Polish nation. Nation is a social group centered around some cultural ideal. The analysis shows that Bocheński did not avoid serious logical problems. First of all, he constantly falls into a circular reasoning. Furthermore, it is called into question if it makes sense (...) to refer to a cultural ideal or ideology while defining a nation. Is not such an attempt essentially bound to become circular? A doubt is also raised whether nowadays, in the face of constant migration of people and cultural ideals, one can continue to reasonably talk about nations. (shrink)

The article examines the negative impact of neoliberal policies upon the work of border intellectuals within the university, whose scholarship seeks to explicitly challenge longstanding structural inequalities and social exclusions. More specifically, the notion of neoliberal multiculturalism is defined and discussed with respect to the phenomenon of economic Darwinism and the whitewashing of contemporary academic labor, despite a tradition of progressive struggle within the academy. In response to the current counter-egalitarian climate of neoliberalism, a call is issued for a critical (...) pedagogy that supports a revolutionary vision of human rights and democratic life. (shrink)

This essay offers a detailed reconstruction of the thought of Inayatullah Khan al-Mashriqi, a camp-follower of fascism in inter-war India who sought to reformulate Islam as a according to the precepts of Darwinian evolutionism. Mashriqi has so far been neglected because his political impact was only short-term and did not contribute to the larger story of decolonization in India and Pakistan. But far from being marginal, Mashriqi's philosophical ruminations actually provide a window for a much-needed re-evaluation of the meaning of (...) colonial modernity. While there was much in Mashriqi's writing that conforms to the usual picture of anti-colonial nation-buildingthe by now standardized critique of such features in the literature no longer suffices. Behind a façade of continuities with nineteenth-century traditions stood a much darker vision of modernity that no longer had any recourse to the certainties of a grand narrative of modernization. Instead, it was a vision that fluctuated between mystical exuberance and deep pessimism. The only sense of certainty was provided by a radical notion of emotional authenticity and a related belief in quasi-religious leadership figures. The larger conclusion to be drawn from the dualistic and contradictory structure of Mashriqi's is that the intellectual history of inter-war South Asia needs to be given relative autonomy from the standard nationalism–modernization narrative, for rather than the continuation of an earlier modernity, it should be interpreted as the starting point of a new and much darker formation that arguably continues into the present. (shrink)

[Excerpted From Editor's Introduction] Matthew Crippen takes this up in a Marcusian critique of Wittgenstein that attends, among other things, to the place of silence in that discourse. Referring to Horkheimer’s citation of the Latin aphorism that silence is consent, Crippen is critical of Wittgenstein’s admonition that we must pass over in silence those matters of which we cannot speak. This raises fascinating questions for critical theory that Crippen explores particularly with reference to Marcuse’s concept of one-dimensionality. To the extent (...) that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is “therapeutic,” it may effectively contain dissent by “helping” dissenters become “well-adjusted.” Marcuse, of course, was particularly concerned with the power of Total States— and particularly those engendered by advanced industrial capitalism—to contain dissent precisely by using therapeutic techniques to maintain adjustment. Bringing Marcuse and Wittgenstein together here has particularly explosive possibilities. In the context of a Total State, transformation depends on the possibility of calling the State into question from the inside (since “total” States systematically eliminate “outsides”). This is the point at which Wittgenstein’s silence becomes most intriguing. What is it, we must ask, that we cannot say? Silence may be (as Martin Luther King, Jr. said) more than consent: there comes a time when silence is betrayal. But this is one of many places where it pays to look at what is done as much as what is said. What game, we might ask, is Wittgenstein playing? And, more to the point, what is the field of play that joins Wittgenstein and Marcuse? John Cage famously said “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it...” Crippen begins a process (via Wittgenstein) of putting poetry into play that has important implications for the public work of philosophers. (shrink)

R J W Evans: Political Chronology; IntroductionJan Rychlík: Czech-Slovak Relations in Czechoslovakia, 1918-39Eagle Glassheim: Ambivalent Capitalists: The Roots of Fascist Ideology among Bohemian Nobles, 1880-1938Melissa Feinberg: The New 'Woman Question': Gender, Nation, and Citizenship in the First Czechoslovak RepublicRobert B. Pynsent: The Literary Representation of the Czechoslovak 'Legions' in RussiaCatherine Albrecht: Economic Nationalism in the Sudetenland, 1918-38R.J.W. Evans: Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks: Some Mutual Perceptions, 1900-50Mark Cornwall: 'A Leap into Ice-Cold Water': the Manoeuvres of the Henlein Movement in Czechoslovakia, 1933-8Vít (...) Smetana: Old Wine in New Bottles? British Policy towards Czechoslovakia, 1938-9 and 1947-8Tatjana Tönsmeyer: The German Advisers in Slovakia, 1939-45: Conflict or Co-Operation?Mark Dimond: The Sokol and Czech Nationalism, 1918-48Jiri Kocian: The Czechs versus the Slovaks: Bilateral Relations, 1944-8Zdenk Radvanovský: The Transfer of Czechoslovakia's Germans and its Impact in the Border Region after the Second World WarKeith Robbins: Britain and Munich Reconsidered: A Personal Historical Journey. (shrink)

21st century India constructs itself as a neoliberal and consumerist superpower. In his cinematic career Shah Rukh Khan has become an icon of a rampant middle class, transforming himself from an antihero into a model story of Indian success. Focusing on identity politics, in this article his persona is utilized as a prism through which some representations of fears connected to 20th century India can be observed.

In _The Fragility of Things_, eminent theorist William E. Connolly focuses on several self-organizing ecologies that help to constitute our world. These interacting geological, biological, and climate systems, some of which harbor creative capacities, are depreciated by that brand of neoliberalism that confines self-organization to economic markets and equates the latter with impersonal rationality. Neoliberal practice thus fails to address the fragilities it exacerbates. Engaging a diverse range of thinkers, from Friedrich Hayek, Michel Foucault, Hesiod, and Immanuel Kant to Voltaire, (...) Terrence Deacon, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Alfred North Whitehead, Connolly brings the sense of fragility alive as he rethinks the idea of freedom. Urging the Left not to abandon the state but to reclaim it, he also explores scales of politics below and beyond the state. The contemporary response to fragility requires a militant pluralist assemblage composed of those sharing affinities of spirituality across differences of creed, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. (shrink)

Xi Chen explores the question of why there has been a dramatic rise in and routinization of social protests in China since the early 1990s. Drawing on case studies, in-depth interviews and a unique data set of about 1,000 government records of collective petitions, this book examines how the political structure in Reform China has encouraged Chinese farmers, workers, pensioners, disabled people and demobilized soldiers to pursue their interests and claim their rights by staging collective protests. Chen suggests that routinized (...) contentious bargaining between the government and ordinary people has remedied the weaknesses of the Chinese political system and contributed to the regime's resilience. Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China challenges the conventional wisdom that authoritarian regimes always repress popular collective protest and that popular collective action tends to destabilize authoritarian regimes. (shrink)

In the 1970s Australian New Left theorists used the Technocratic Labor thesis to criticize the ALP. This held that middle-class university educated people were taking over the ALP and moving it to the right. Thirty years later there appears to be much substance to their argument. The ALP has increasingly been led by middle-class people and has moved to the right. It has also narrowed the recruiting base for its national parliamentarians, most of who are now groomed within the party (...) and its affiliates rather than being drawn from the wider community. Nonetheless, the political utility of the argument may be questioned since most of the Australian workforce is now in the services sector and many are also middle class and university educated. (shrink)

The article explores the real aims of the so-called international community which is usually understood as the USA, as the only remaining super power and the European Union, particularly France. Great Britain and Germany. The author argues that the real and particularly long-term aims of these powers should be primarily inferred from their real deeds and only subsequently from public statements of their officials. By analyzing a number of examples in the Balkans and in other parts of the world the (...) author comes to unexpected conclusions. While in words big Western powers supported multi-ethnicity and preservation of multi-ethnic states, in deeds they not only instigated nationalism and separatism but also hastened and recognized the dissolution of three European federations into 22 more or less national states. And while in words they apparently supported so-called democratization, in practice they not only supported authoritarian regimes but also identified democracy with occupation in Republika Srpska. (shrink)

(1999). Ontological anarchy, the temporary autonomous zone, and the politics of cyberculture a critique of hakim bey. Angelaki: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 115-128.

The 18th-century French political theorist the Baron de Montesquieu described honour as the ‘principle’ – or animating force – of a well-functioning monarchy, which he thought the appropriate regime type for an economically unequal society extended over a broad territory. Existing literature often presents this honour in terms of lofty ambition, the desire for preference and distinction, a spring for political agency or a spur to the most admirable kind of conduct in public life and the performance of great deeds. (...) Perhaps so. But it also seems to involve quite a bit of what the contemporary philosopher Aaron James calls ‘being an asshole’, and the article will explore what happens to Montesquieu’s political theory of monarchy – which is foundational for an understanding of modern politics – when we reverse the usual perspective and consider it through the lens of the arsehole aristocracy. (shrink)

Voices on the political right have long claimed that the welfare state ought to be kept small, and that charities can take over many of the tasks involved in helping those at the bottom of society. The arguments in favor of this claim are controversial, but even if they are accepted at face value the policy proposal remains problematic. For the proposal presupposes that charities would, in fact, be able to raise enough money to provide adequate help to those in (...) need, and therefore assumes that charities are able to very significantly increase the number and/or size of donations they receive. We argue that there are good reasons for doubting that charities will be able to do this. Our argument turns on the fact that the most powerful strategy for eliciting donations—namely, allowing donors to use their donation to signal their pro-sociality—has an inbuilt upper limit. If too much emphasis is placed on the signaling opportunities donating to charity provides, donating no longer functions as an effective signal and the motivation to donate declines. (shrink)

Using a critical postmodern framework, this article analyzes the relationship of the decision-making processes of anarchism and neoliberalism to that of deep democracy. Anarchist processes are found to share common core principals with deep democracy; but neoliberal processes are found to be antithetical to deep democracy. To increase the joy in learning and teaching, based upon this analysis, practical anarchist guidelines for school decision-making are suggested.

This article unfolds in three stages. First, it locates the emergence of modern conceptions of social justice in industrializing Europe, and especially in the discovery of the “social,” which provided a particular idiom for the liberal democratic politics for most of the twentieth century. Second, the article links this particular conception of the social to the political rationalities of the postwar welfare state and the identity of the social citizen. Finally, the article discusses the myriad ways in which this legacy (...) of the social and social justice has been disrupted, although not yet fully displaced, by the economic orthodoxies and individualization that inform the contemporary neoliberal governing project in Canada. The result, the article concludes, has been the institutionalization of insecurity, which demands the renewal of a social way of seeing and a politics of social justice on local and global scales. (shrink)