[Hope the CR formatting doesn't get too hosed] With his clown suit off. It is an appropriate warning about the political direction taken by disillusion with capitalism and "democracy" in E. Europe. The excerpt below raises the most interesting questions:
"This is why today’s China is so unsettling: capitalism has always seemed inextricably linked to democracy, and faced with the explosion of capitalism in the People’s Republic, many analysts still assume that political democracy will inevitably assert itself." "But what if this strain of authoritarian capitalism proves itself to be more efficient, more profitable, than our liberal capitalism? What if democracy is no longer the necessary and natural accompaniment of economic development, but its impediment?" Actually there has never been any "natural" connection between modern democracy and capitalism. That illusion comes from 19th century Britain, where it was the capitalist, free trade Liberals, the lineal descendants of the 18th century Whig Dissident tradition, excluded from the spoils of Empire on religious grounds, crowded into the purely "Little England" capitalist industrial enterprises in order to make their way in the world, who also led the drive for extension of the suffrage. The great counter-example is none other than the "homeland of democracy", itself, the United States before the Civil War, where the "democracy" under the figurehead of Andrew Jackson possessed a distinctly anticapitalist edge - and not uncoincidentially, in a seemingly curious role reversal, an anti-New England Yankee edge as well - the cousins of those same English Dissidents. In those days, to be called a "capitalist" was to have an insult hurled at one, to be considered someone who fed at the public trough for private gain. Hence the present case of the PRC is not really mysterious at all, if we hold to the perspective established after the Russian Revolution that we still very much live in the transition from capitalism to - well, it used to be called "socialism", but by any other name it will still be the same rose in my eyes if we succeed in avoiding a civilizational catastrophe and build on relatively intact forces of production. In this context the PRC remains a transitional state and social formation even as the mode of production becomes more coherently capitalist (of a rather odd developmental type, if you compare it to the U.S. from the Civil War to the 1920's). It is this that Putin thinks of when he regrets the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.: that a Soviet Union intact would have been a far better environment for the restoration of the capitalist mode of production, than the farcical "Made in U.S.A." mess he inherited - really, a shift from the incoherent forms of production, with elements part capitalist, part socialist without either being dominant, that characterized the U.S.S.R. in the past - no wonder "it didn't work". In short, PRC type formations ARE the optimal way forward for the capitalist mode of production today and in the future - not uncoicidentially the leading imperialist countries, especially the U.S.A. and Britain, are trodding down the PRC path in their own way in a kind of "bureaucratic" state monopoly capitalism with "Anglo characteristics" (as the CCP leadership would tutor to them), including an evacuation of the real effectivity of the private property form otherwise misnomered "neoliberal privitization" - the present "health care" process in the U.S.A. being an excellent example. And in the case of the U.S.A. there is a hoary old tradition of "state intervention" to fall back on, dating back to the very foundation of the Federal Republic, with its now antediluvian, transitional (unbeknown to its founders) project for the creation of a synthetic "state bourgeoisie" out of the swarming, relatively undifferentiated mass of petit bourgeois dirt farmers, barter merchants, small proprietor shop manufacturers, land speculators, swindler - and huckster - settlers of every stripe - a "sack of potatoes" of truly continental scale. The lives of Jackson, Henry Clay, Martin Van Buren, and John C. Calhoun (before this latter shifted to being the mouthpiece of the Slaveocracy in the 1830's) were the leading avatars of this process, and the Democratic Party they founded the chosen vehicle. A state and social formation that turned out to be transitional _to_ capitalism - the highest, final and 'most perfected' of all from the early modern epoch that opened with the triumph of the Dutch Revolt and the English Revolution in the 1640's - somehow managed to survive into the new transitional epoch. How these arbitrary juxtaposed strata, as if suddenly thrown together by an earthquake from sedimentary layers formed in distinctly different historical conditions, will interact will be very interesting to watch and, should there be some significant slippage, to hopefully act in as well. In this historical context the radical right reaction makes perfect sense, just as that of classical fascism did at the beginning of the transitional era. And as Zizek correctly points out, it is hardly limited to Eastern Europe, as the present cases of Italy, France Britain and of course the recent hysterical antics here in the U.S. as well as recent stirrings in parts of Central and South America attest to - they represent an international danger. But they do seem to have more state sanction in Eastern Europe - I'd like to try walking past a police station wearing a big red Che Guevara shirt in Warsaw sometime to test this. -Matt Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:37:53 -0500 From: Louis Proyect <[email protected]> Subject: [Marxism] Zizek on the Berlin Wall To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition <[email protected]> Message-ID: <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed NY Times, November 9, 2009 Op-Ed Contributor 20 Years of Collapse By SLAVOJ ZIZEK ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. 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