The aesthetics of the communist space program as an anticedent to crisis of meaning on the left.

"What post-capitalism needs is an imaginary that intersects the above justifications with a positive vision of the future that capitalism has failed to deliver. And part of this means rescuing the most lasting merits of the Soviet experiment. For while everyone can agree that the USSR had many failings, it remains the case that the artistic, architectural and technological development it stood for was in many cases a widely recognized concrete achievement. No one can deny the quality of their space programme. Even recently in London there has been two major exhibitions showcasing some of futurist ambitions of Soviet communism: Building the Revolution at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Red Skies season of Soviet science fiction at the British Film institute.  There is an element of aesthetics here as well as actual ambitions."

Economics is performative. Economics doesn’t just describe the world; it is the basis of policy and action and is instrumental in shaping society and producing aspects of its reality. This is why he is ambivalent about just claiming establishment economics is wrong. It is certainly demonstrably wrong in some of its assumptions about society, human nature and so on. But there is some sense in which it is correct simply because the world it describes has been partly produced according to its theories and models. It studies and describes phenomenon that to some extent have been produced and made real according to its dictates and templates.

"The massive centralization of a managerial bureaucracy, especially in the name of a secular millennialist vision has led all too quickly to ideological purges and to all the other horrors of totalitarianism. Seen in this light, the hesitation of at least some on the US Left to embrace grand utopian schemes is not something to be scorned but rather may be a sign of welcome skepticism about the busybody notion that one can impose utopia upon others by force… Investigating a theme like the death of the Left rapidly leads to fundamental questions about the very nature of political categories themselves. Such questioning is essential, from time to time, and if it disturbs some, perhaps they should take the opportunity to stop and consider exactly what they stand for and why. For inevitably, consideration of what has happened to the Left forces one to confront what it means to belong to the Right in the first place." Despite its smug tone I often find myself in agreement. Fragmentation ftw!

"No one, with the exception of a few allegedly archaic Marxists, refers to "capitalism" any longer. The term was simply struck from the vocabulary of politicians, trade unionists, writers and journalists - even of social scientists... But what about the upsurge of the anti-globalization movement in the last years? Does it not clearly contradict this diagnostic? No: a close look quickly shows how this movement also succumbs to "the temptation to transform a critique of capitalism itself (centered on economic mechanisms, forms of work organization, and profit extraction) into a critique of 'imperialism'... What we have here is thus another version of the ill-famed notion of "alternate modernity": instead of the critique of capitalism as such, of confronting its basic mechanism, we get the critique of the imperialist "excess," with the (silent) notion of mobilizing capitalist mechanisms within another, more "progressive," frame." — Slavoj Zizek

"If only there were fewer children to suffer our torments and hard toil, our poverty and our humiliation - such is the cry of the petty bourgeois. The class-conscious worker is far from holding this point of view. He will not allow his consciousness to be dulled by such cries no matter how sincere and heartfelt they may be. Yes, we workers and the mass of small proprietors lead a life that is filled with unbearable oppression and suffering... We have begun to learn and are rapidly learning to fight - and to fight not as individuals, as the best of our fathers fought, not for the slogans of bourgeois speechifiers that are alien to us in spirit, but for our slogans, the slogans of our class... We are pessimists as far as serfdom, capitalism and petty production are concerned, but we are ardent optimists in what concerns the working-class movement and its aims. We are already laying the foundation of a new edifice and our children will complete its construction." - V.I. Lenin, 1913

"What is driving climate change is a particular kind of economic activity, not population growth. Lifestyles are important. Those sported by the richest tend to exploit and run down our environmental life support systems the hardest. The carbon footprint of a multi-billionaire philanthropist is certain to be dozens of times higher than that of an African labourer. To put it one way, Bill Gates will emit more CO2 jetting to conferences on population growth than a coltan miner in the DRC will in is entire lifespan. So maybe Bill and Melinda shouldn't have any fucking kids. And, by the way, Bill needs that coltan miner, and the genocidal armies who ensure that the ore is delivered to western corporations... Why are we still stuck with these kooky theories?... There is such a blind-spot about any issue that has systemic implications that it can only be approached through such contrived controversies, which are then furiously argued over for 5 minutes before the adds for cheap airlines."

I wonder in what way DIY activism addresses these problems. "Activism, like all expert roles, has its basis in the division of labour - it is a specialised separate task. The division of labour is the foundation of class society, the fundamental division being that between mental and manual labour. The division of labour operates, for example, in medicine or education experts that we must rely on to do these things for us. Experts jealously guard and mystify the skills they have. This keeps people separated and disempowered and reinforces hierarchical class society... Historically, those movements that have come the closest to de-stabilising or removing or going beyond capitalism have not at all taken the form of activism. Activism is essentially a political form and a method of operating suited to liberal reformism that is being pushed beyond its own limits and used for revolutionary purposes. The activist role in itself must be problematic for those who desire social revolution."

On Ayn Rand's legacy and the American right: "Ayn Rand's novels tend to strike their readers with the power of revelation, and they are read less like fiction and more like self-help literature, like spiritual guidance. Again and again, readers would write Rand to tell her that their encounter with her work felt like having their eyes open for the first time in their lives... The likes of Gale Norton, George Gilder, Charles Murray, and many others have cited Rand as an influence. Rand acolytes such as Alan Greenspan and Martin Anderson have held important positions in Republican politics. "What she did--through long discussions and lots of arguments into the night--was to make me think why capitalism is not only efficient and practical, but also moral," attested Greenspan. In 1987, The New York Times called Rand the "novelist laureate" of the Reagan administration. Reagan's nominee for commerce secretary, C. William Verity Jr., kept a passage from Atlas Shrugged on his desk."

A nice little piece on Karl Marx's patron and collaborator, Friedrich Engels. "Engels was an enigma. Gifted, energetic and fascinated by political ideas, he was nevertheless ready to play second fiddle to Marx. “Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented,” he declared after his friend’s death... Tall and handsome, Engels had a taste not just for ideas but for the good life—wine, women, riding with the Cheshire hunt—and seems to have felt little sense of irony that all these things were paid for by the proletariat’s back-breaking labour. His domestic life was much more unconventional than Marx’s. He lived, on and off, with a semi-literate Irish working-class girl, Mary Burns; then, when she died, with her sister, Lizzy, whom he married only on her deathbed. He had no children, though he chivalrously took responsibility for a boy whom Marx had fathered with a housekeeper. Engels’s sacrifices continued after Marx’s death."

"The impulse to the fantastic is central to human consciousness, in that we can and constantly do imagine things that aren’t really there. More than that (and what distinguishes us from tool-using animals), we can imagine things that can’t possibly be there. We can imagine the impossible. Now, within that you have to distinguish the “never-possible” and the “might-be-possible-sometime.”... I maintain that there’s no such hard distinction and that the differences between the “never-” and the “not-yet-possible” are less important than their shared “impossibleness.” That’s not to say in some dippy hippy way that everything is possible, but that there’s no obvious line between what is and what isn’t. In fact, that underlines many of the most tenacious political fights around us—the neo-liberal claim that There is No Alternative is all about trying to draw the line of the “never-possible” at a place which strips humans of any meaningful transformative agency." This. Guy. Fuck!

"Ironically, one of the most radical proposals making the rounds today has come from an economist at the London School of Economics, Willem Buiter, a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee and certainly no Marxist. Buiter has proposed that the whole financial sector be turned into a public utility. Because banks in the contemporary world cannot exist without public deposit insurance and public central banks that act as lenders of last resort, there is no case, he argues, for their continuing existence as privately owned, profit-seeking institutions. Instead they should be publicly owned and run as public services. This proposal echoes the demand for “centralization of credit in the banks of the state” that Marx himself made in the Manifesto. To him, a financial-system overhaul would reinforce the importance of the working classes’ winning “the battle of democracy” to radically change the state from an organ imposed upon society to one that responds to it."

On GTA IV: "The final decision of the game underlines the intractable tension between Old and New World. Niko must choose to break his vow never to trust Dimitri again, to hang up his vendetta, and make a large sum of money, or to use his knowledge of Dimitri’s location to hunt his enemy down and avenge his treachery. The choice is, in fact, depicted as such: money or revenge... This choice alone would be interesting, but GTA IV does not stop there. The consequences of the decision further enrich the game’s exploration. If Niko decides to embrace the Old World code of honor and revenge, his love interest, Kate McReary, is gunned down. If Niko turns his back on vengeance and adopts New World capitalism, Roman is killed instead. Kate, as Niko’s future for a new life, is the cost of holding on to his old values, while Roman, Niko’s beloved family and best living link to his old life, is the price paid for assuming the new mode. There is no middle path, no “best of both worlds.”"