From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Wed Mar 15 2006 - 15:49:05 EST
Jerry, you wrote: In the epoch of capitalist decay, economic crises will become more frequent and intense. Then, comes the economic collapse. What happens after the collapse, after the economic breakdown? Why, the "revolutionary moment", of course. Quite. Point I wanted to make is, that although obviously a real crisis makes life more challenging and difficult, people have to make their lives anyway, crisis or no crisis. Being obsessively focused on a present or future crisis can get in the way of what a socialist or radical politics can achieve in the here and now, given the specific problems people are facing in the here and now. The classical Marxian schema of "reform versus revolution" is often unhelpful there - we simply do not know in advance, if or when people who struggle to make an independent life and emancipate themselves will decide to run through the reformist traffic lights when they turn red. A lot of the "crisis" talk was about being taken seriously, that people has to take these issues seriously, in the sense that there is a real problem there, that you cannot get away from. But these days with the modern means of communication, we are confronted with multiple crises all the time. People dying of hunger and disease in Africa. Israeli's and Palestinians blasting each other to the next world. Sunni's and Shiites at each other's throats. World poverty. All sorts of stuff. So as regards crises, you can more or less "pick and choose" these days, cynically putting it. The moral problem you get, is one of priorities - how do I evaluate why I should be concerned with this or that problem, and what, in truth, can I do about it anyway, while I have to cope with all sorts in my own life. You might even argue, the more we are peppered with new crises, the less people feel they can act or do something - they are liable to say, yeah, that's just TV, now let's get on with real life. And you get pop singers who argue, well, people want to feel good most of all, give them a pop concert highlighting an issue, that'll get through to them. Which leads me back to Mandel's observation - you cannot in truth take the all information in, you'd go crazy. One element which I did not mention in my crisis-typology is a sense of spiritual crisis, which is still controversial in Marxist theory, no doubt because also a lot of bullshit is talked about spiritual matters (the latest example, as Ha'aretz mentions, is evangelist Pat Robertson portraying Islam as a bid for "world domination" in the same way as communism was portrayed previously; you can just imagine Islamic evangelists converting e.g. Latin American catholics to the new faith!). I also did not mention the ecological crisis that is incrementally hitting the human race - I was merely focusing on the progression from economic troubles to moral-ideological troubles, in the way people experience life in society. Maybe in a sense the crisis discourse is an exhausted discourse, but I wouldn't give up on it totally, because this "narrative" (to use your postmodernist term) focuses certain questions such as "what is the problem" and "why is it a problem". And that can be important, at least if we want to get from superficialities to a more profound understanding. I think one reason why the crisis discourse really got going in the 1970s was, because up till that time leftists had been battling "against the stream" with a capitalism that seemed to be able to deliver, through the long post-war boom, more and more of the goods, with mass revolts a rather dim prospect, except in the third world. Even Paul Samuelson stated around 1970 that the mized economy had finally licked the problem of economic crises. Famous last words... These days, however, the ideology is different - you still can get the goodies of life, but you have to have the right style, you have to understand the semiotics of things. So then if there is a problem, it's more in the nature of a deficient semantics, and you need these people who make things more meaningful for you. People are "graded" on their observed ability to read the signs. In which case, the rulers rule, because they have more semantic wealth. But how do we know they really do? As soon as modern Prometheans stimulate the ability of ordinary folks to create their own meanings, the question is in doubt again. Indeed, the idea that you can enjoy life in spite of all crises often appears revolutionary. Kojčve's Platonic masterclass undoubtedly has its own semantic world, and portrays its political project to the public other than that it really is (e.g. the Iran nuclear scare), but the public credibility of all that is less and less. Which returns me to the fourth sociological "moment" of societal crises I mentioned - the ideological-cultural crisis, i.e. the crisis of legitimation and morality, of how to unite people, how to get them to co-operate when traditional systems of social solidarity have fractured, of finding the moral common denominator. Jurriaan
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