What Does the Occupy Wall Street Movement Stand For?

There is this ridiculous chorus about how the Occupy Wall Street movement needs to define itself. For the sake of argument I'll define it right now. Know anyone out of work or underemployed? Know anyone that has lost a home or is struggling to pay their mortgage? Know anyone that is in debt over medical bills and college loans? Those of us lucky enough to still have work or a home may lose both soon. When we do, we know where to find our next residence. Some people talk about taking responsibility for our own actions. Translation: let everyone fend for themselves. Then fend we will! I think the reason some elites are lending public verbal sympathy to the protests is because they know the ironies that come with getting what you ask for.

Why aren't the Tea Party folks joining or lending support? They are the ones that claimed the bank bailouts were evil in songs and media clips early on. I challenge the Tea Party people to come join. If they don't like hippies and the smell of patchouli then let them set up separate camps with large flags and mediocre country musicians. While their at it they should ask the Koch brothers to fund rows of portable latrines. I also invite all the vets to come join. Bush and Obama ask/ed you to occupy other countries. It is time for you to occupy your own. After all you have been through (and I mean this sincerely with all my heart) I know it is wrong to ask you to mingle with not-so-talented musicians and rank patchouli smells, but your country needs you.

I am writing this while in a state of depression. So many things deep within my heart are burning inside me. I will admit that I have been staying at home and working. I have not went out in the streets yet. My own story is personal. The struggles of other individuals (especially in other countries) are worse. Some things are just subjective but others are not. The way our world "works" really does matter. I have a friend that has tried to kill himself twice due to what happened while he served in Afghanistan. He struggled to get health care and a steady job. The majority of people that will meet him will not know this part of his life. He knows many many comrades that also suffer in silence. The economic system and militaristic state of affairs is a state of international decay, spiritual decay. When I say "spiritual" I mean our sense of values about life.

So, what does the Occupy Wall Street movement stand for? The Occupy Wall Street movement stands for an elevated value of life.


:)

"All Arrighians Now"

The Los Angeles Review of Books has published a review essay by Joshua Clover, entitled "Autumn of Empire," which considers the relatively recent work of Giovanni Arrighi (Adam Smith in Beijing and the recent edition of The Long Twentieth Century), Robert Brenner (The Economics of Global Turbulence), and Richard Duncan (The Dollar Crisis). I must say, in the company of Arrighi and Brenner, it is difficult to see why Duncan's book is featured in the essay, aside from the way it functions within the rhetorical structure of Clover's essay (or, perhaps, it's there to balance the three books from Verso), but otherwise it's an interesting article that has the merit of dodging a lot of jargon.

Here's the general idea:

Like democracy itself, this official thought [within the predominant strains of economics] presents itself as having subtleties, wings, parties. But the oppositions on offer — NYT vs. WSJ, Krugman vs. Cochrane, saltwater vs. freshwater schools of economics — can’t begin to grasp the fullness of the situation. Whether discovering “green shoots” or hand-wringing over a “jobless recovery,” they think unquestioningly in terms of a return to normalcy, debating only the rate and method: the crisis a mere blink in the long stare of empire.

But the scandalous lesson we learn from heterodox thinkers like Brenner, Duncan, and Arrighi is quite a different one: that the American experience is grand, outsized, but not entirely novel. Industrial growth is bound to undo itself as a profit center, to be replaced by a regime of finance; this regime’s profit mechanism is always the bubble and its total crisis inescapable; and this is how empires end. Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s book on the delusions that accompany bubbles is called, with a wink, This Time It’s Different. Meaning, it never is. We must admit the same about the course of empire, and the current conjuncture. Empires rise and fall.

We live in an epoch in which the great question is how to bid farewell to the U.S.-centered empire, and what the transition to another global arrangement might look like. Whether we know it or not, we are all Arrighians now.

As the title Adam Smith in Beijing conveys, Arrighi paints a picture of a market alternative to capitalism that is too optimistic in its considerations of Adam Smith's work and the Chinese economy (we've talked about David Harvey's take on China here). He doesn't consider extensively (nor does Clover in this article) that alternatives to capitalism that could arise in a place other than the likely site of the next hegemonic power (although to be fair, Arrighi does mention India). This possibility of an alternative is why Latin America and more recently North Africa have received so much Left-leaning critical attention lately.

On Free Time

I am currently reading Michael Perelman's The Invention of Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2000). One of his central theses is that primitive accumulation is a technique of expropriation that continues during the historical development of capitalism, rather than a process that only occurred before, or during the formation of, capitalism.

Part of the process of primitive accumulation, or what, following David Harvey, I prefer to call accumulation by dispossession, requires curtailing free time. Perelman writes, in a striking passage on page 17:

Although their standard of living may not have been particularly lavish, the people of precapitalistic northern Europe, like most traditional people, enjoyed a great deal of free time. [...] Joan Thirsk estimated that in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, about one-third of the working days, including Sundays, were spent in leisure. Karl Kautsky offered a much more extravagant estimate that 204 annual holidays were celebrated in medieval Lower Bavaria. [...] Even as late as the 1830s, we hear the complaint [from the moralizing elite, no doubt] that the Irish working year contained only 200 days after all holidays had been subtracted.

Every Time the Left Sins God Sends Another Working-Class American to the Tea Party

The Left in the US must blame itself for its weakness and inability to draw in lager numbers of working-class Americans into its fold. Walter Benjamin wrote that, "behind every fascism is a failed revolution." The growing popularity of the Tea Party movement in the US is the resulting failure of Leftists to address righteous popular anger over corrupt politics. I think there are several reasons for this.

Many Leftists articulate American working-class needs by using overly intellectual rhetoric. The Left does not need to dumb down information, just break it down. Many Leftists use other countries' revolutionaries and revolutions as symbols of liberation and outright ignore American equivalents. What about heroes of struggle such as Thomas Paine,John Brown, and Mary Harris "Mother" Jones? What about celebrating movements such as the BOSTON TEA PARTY? What is so amusing about the right-wing using the Boston Tea party, as a symbol of their movement, is that its very history undermines much of their political positions. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 sabotaged commerce, destroyed private property, and broke the rule of law, for the greater moral value of actual justice, opposed to legal injustice. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 fits more into the tradition of progressives than so-called conservatives. On a more extreme level,one could argue that the Boston Tea Party has more similarities with the Earth Liberation Front than it does with the Republican Party or the twenty-first century Tea Party.

I argue that the Tea Party is not truly conservative anyway. Two of the most popular politicians in the Tea Party movement are Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. Both are women. Women being involved in politics and having the right to vote is not a conservative value, if "conservative" means going back to the proverbial good ol' days. The Founding Fathers, limited in their wisdom, would have told them to stay home, make babies, and cook for their husbands. It was liberal women and radical women that fought the law to get the right for women to become active members of politics. Liberals and leftists are accused of breaking with tradition: for picking and choosing ethics opportunistically. That is exactly what the right-wing does. When there was prayer in public schools there was legalized racial segregation and children working in sweat-shops: most right-wingers do not openly claim to want all of those things, hence they are not truly conservative, they are right-wing liberals.

A large portion of the Tea Party's constituency rightly are disgusted with the bank bailouts that Bush started and Obama continued. Somehow the Tea Party has convinced working Americans that this is socialism. Big finance manipulates the government to save capitalism at the American public's expense and this is socialism? No my fellow Americans, this is the natural outgrowth of Capitalism. The saddest naivety is the belief that big business is a better alternative to big government. The world is not marching into global one-world-order-socialism, it is crashing into disaster neo-liberal capitalism. Why is Republican Congressman Ron Paul viewed as a fringe politician and not fully endorsed by the financial sector? Because he has faith in the "free-market." Big capitalists do not want a free-market, they want Government to intervene on their behalf: in favor of capitalists and against the working-class or any other obstacle. Big business favors its international agenda at the expense of America or any other country, NAFTA is a good example. These are some of the points the Left in America should be exposing to the public at large. This great country is falling apart, is being ripped apart, and the actual creators of this destruction need to be stopped.

I picked two music videos. One is an official Tea Party Video and the other appears to be an average American musician. The lyrics in their songs demonstrate much of what this blog discussed.

Why a Man Robbed a Bank for One Dollar

This week a story about a man robbing a bank for one dollar became widely circulated. KTLA News reports:

A reportedly unemployed, uninsured man robbed a bank for $1 in order to get thrown in jail and receive medical attention.

Richard James Verone, a 59-year-old man who reportedly suffers from a growth on his chest, two ruptured disks, and a foot injury, walked into RBC bank unarmed earlier in June and handed the teller a note that read "This is a bank robbery. Please only give me one dollar." After handing over his note, the man said quietly on a couch while the teller called 911.

Verone, a man with no criminal history according to reports, figured that once he was thrown in jail he would receive the medical attention that he was unable to afford on his own.

The way right-wingers have been responding to this story is predictable.

Many commentators scoff at the man and claim that this story is liberal media ultra hyped-up sensationalism: After all, no one is denied healthcare in the US and the real problem is that medical costs are too high due to Medicare and other interfering government programs. This is a frequent argument by fiscal conservatives: The US should not provide universal healthcare and those that think we need it should stop complaining because we already have it. There is some truth in this argument. If a person calls 911 and gets sent to emergency that person will be cared for even if they are not covered by insurance. Although, can one say that that person will get the same quality healthcare as one with insurance? A few years ago my friend's young daughter broke her arm. She came home with it tied to a board. The the insurance my friend had would not cover giving her a cast until the doctor under his plan would be available. She had to wait to get it properly fixed. This was "healthcare" with insurance! Furthermore, this argument that the government needs to stop interfering with medical care is not honest. Does anyone really think the medical industry will go out of its way to provide cheap affordable healthcare inspired by ethics or the benevolent equalizing forces of the "free market"? I pose a question: Does anyone think an eighty year old grandma with no savings or insurance, who is soon to die anyway, be denied medical attention because she has no money? If you think she must be cared for you believe in universal healthcare. If you don't think she should be cared for you are,to put it in a vulgar term, a dick.

I know, I know, there is a financial crisis. Thomas Donnelly wrote in the Weekly Standard that perhaps even the US military getting socialized healthcare is too much of a social burden. He writes:

Well, if there is a lesson for society writ large, it’s that a universal, single-payer system is a bankrupting system, to the point where the killing-people part[of the military] is in danger of falling by the wayside. Over the past decade, the Defense Department’s spending on health care has tripled, approaching an estimated $51 billion per year. It continues to rise even faster than health care costs in the civilian world, and will push to about $65 billion by 2015 – probably more than 10 percent of the baseline (that is, excluding war costs) Pentagon budget.

He then points out some more "insight" by US officials:

Departing Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been trying to include defense health reforms in his money saving “efficiencies.” This week, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the defense health system is “not sustainable” without higher fees from troops, their families, and the retirees who benefit from very lost-cost programs like “TRICARE for Life.” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed that military health care costs are “eating us alive.”...Arnold Punaro, a retired Marine general and member of the Defense Business Board, a group that advises the Pentagon on its finances, recently summed the problem:

We in the Defense Department are on the same path that General Motors found itself on. General Motors did not start out to be a health care company that occasionally built an automobile. Today, we’re on the path in the Department of Defense to turn it into a benefits company that may occasionally kill a terrorist.

So, the practical thing to do is cut back or cut off medical care to US military. As Donnelly points out, healthcare for soldiers is not important, "The end, the larger purpose, is killing our enemies." Another question I ask is directed to our US military: Is Thomas Donnelly your friend or enemy? With the global class-war being waged from the top against the majority of humanity, there is one important question I direct to the majority of humanity: Who is our real enemies?

Notice these "wise" pundits:

Jason Read on Jameson's Representing Capital

We've all, I know, been waiting for the publication of Fredric Jameson's Representing Capital. Though I have not yet acquired a copy, I should be getting it soon, while reading his Hegel Variations is still on my mind. In the meantime, Jason Read has posted (on my birthday no less, not that he knew that...but I digress) some thoughts on a few of the central themes: separation, unemployment, alienation, and extinguishing (auslöchen). This passage caught my eye, though the whole post is worth reading:

The interest in this extinguishing of history can perhaps be read as an explanation of Jameson’s most often cited remark, the one about how it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. History is effaced not just in the commodity but also in the eternal present of the precarious employment situation, where all those years worked do not add up, or they do, but in the form of an increasingly alien capital, in machinery and the wealth of the company. Separation and extinguished are ultimately terms that make it possible to make sense of both Capital and capitalism.

What in the Hell is NATO? (It Will Even Take On Climate Change)

The US State Department's website explains the background and role of NATO(North Atlantic Treaty Organization). It states:

Formed in 1949 with the signing of the Washington Treaty, NATO is a security alliance of 28 countries from North America and Europe. NATO's fundamental goal is to safeguard the Allies' freedom and security by political and military means...Article 5 of the Washington Treaty -- that an attack against one Ally is an attack against all -- is at the core of the Alliance, a promise of collective defense. Article 4 of the treaty ensures consultations among Allies on security matters of common interest, which after 60 years have expanded from a narrowly defined Soviet threat to the critical mission in Afghanistan, as well as peacekeeping in Kosovo and new threats to security such as cyber attacks, and global threats such as terrorism and piracy that affect the Alliance and its global network of partners.

It is interesting how NATO has conveniently expanded its role over the last several decades. The raison d'etre of NATO is as stated in Article 5 "that an attack against one Ally is an attack against all -- is at the core of the Alliance." Currently,with the wave of a magic wand, NATO views Article 4's "security matters of common interest" to mean, literally,whatever it wants to make it mean. It echoes the essence of the statement by Former Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes that "the Constitution is what the judges say it is." In other words, NATO is what NATO says it is.

In 1999 NATO bombed Serbia due to the way it was dealing with it's internal conflict with Kosovo. A NATO member was not attacked. NATO decided it needed to intervene in the crisis regardless. Now, led by President Obama, NATO is involved in Libya's civil war (a significant distance away from the North Atlantic). What is the role of NATO?

I'm posting three short youtubes. One comes from a group promoting the "new" role of NATO. The two others are the opinions on the same topic by President Clinton's former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and President Obama's Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. What is noticeable is the blatant ambiguity of everything they are saying. There are no real concrete answers given.Madeleine Albright is even asked what role NATO has in dealing with climate change. NATO is now fighting wars dealing with environmental issues? The official NATO website has a most peculiar way of defining itself on the link "What is NATO?" It invites you to "Discover NATO." The viewer hears the sound of birds and forest water for a brief moment.There is a picture of teenagers jumping excitingly in the air. Juxtaposed to that picture is a couple laying down in the grass romantically. A computer animated flower is next to the guy. He stares at the girl while she is lazily reading. The definition reads:

We want to be sure that we can walk around freely in a safe and secure environment. Security in all areas of everyday life is key to our wellbeing, but it cannot be taken for granted.

Perhaps NATO will further expand by intervening in the global economic crisis? Would members be willing to bomb banks and send drones to assassinate corrupt CEOs? Even if such a surreal occurrence were to take place, in all likeliness, NATO would be on the other side of that war: "securing" markets. Or is that part of it's role already?

Immanuel Wallerstein on the End of Capitalism

Recently I have been re-reading Immanuel Wallertein's "World-Systems Analysis (2004)." He writes:

Note the hyphen in world-system and its two subcategories, world-economies and world-empires. Putting in the hyphen was intended to underline that we are not talking about systems, economies, empires of the (whole) world, but about systems, economies, empires that are a world (but quite possibly, and indeed usually, not encompassing the entire globe). This is the initial concept to grasp. It says that in "world-systems" we are dealing with with a spatial/temporal zone which cuts across many political and cultural units, one that represents an integrated zone of activity and institutions which obey certain systemic rules (16,17).

Wallerstein does not commit to a Marxist analysis of capitalism. In fact he contradicts many fundamental ideas of orthodox Marxism. He does not believe in the teleology of history. For him capitalism is not destined to bring about a socialist (and eventual communistic) system. Yet, capitalism, like other systems, is not destined to remain. He sees it as a system that is decaying and will eventually collapse. He, along with other world-systems analysts, does not claim to know the outcome of history nor see the inevitability of an improved one. What I find interesting about the book is the way in which he attempts to break down so many aspects of the historical development of capitalism and the way the world has evolved its various institutions over time operating within the world-system.

Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism

Capitalist Realism (Zero Books, 2009) opens with the observation attributed to both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zizek that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. The very term 'capitalist realism' designates a pervasive  and oppressive atmosphere in which all alternatives seem to be, as Mark Fisher has it, precorporated: preemptively formatted and shaped according to "the desires, aspirations, and hopes set by capitalist culture" (9).

This atmosphere might be omnipresent (might, because the book's intended audience is the more affluent parts of the globe), but it is not omnipotent. Fisher identifies three points of politicization to challenge capitalist realism: ecology, bureaucracy, and mental health. It is the latter that, for me, stood out. Fisher's forceful argument that mental health needs to be on the anti-capitalist agenda makes the lack of such a demand among the many authors he cites much more obvious than it was. How has mental health not already come to the forefront with so many prominent Lacanians in the field of critique? Is it a distaste for the anti-psychiatry movement in the 1970s? Is it to avoid Jacques-Alain Miller's pathetic turn to, as Zizek calls it, "psychoanalysis in the city"? How had we, while re-discovering Deleuze the metaphysician, forgotten Guattari, the 'mental ecologist'?

Perhaps I'm exaggerating. But very few of today's prominent figures have refined how to address the relationship between mental health and capitalism as Fisher has; on the most basic level, he argues, we have accepted "the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years" (19). Moreover,

Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital's drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation (37).

The causation, Fisher argues, is social organization in capitalism; the broad transformation of social life into either some form of work or consumption. Thus mental health, broadly speaking, needs to be politicized; the Left needs to show that, far from being an individual, private problem, mental health is a public cost of neoliberal capitalism that we're not willing to pay. We need, he argues, to take back the affective dimension(s) of social life.

Fisher (who also blogs) knows how to turn a phrase, coining incisive names for many of the tendencies that he identifies, such as business ontology, bureaucratic metastases, and the aforementioned precorporation. The only unfortunate turn is his use of the phrase "market Stalinism" which suggests  diffuse self-surveillance with an emphasis on the polished representation of bureaucratic services rather than a measure of the utility of actual services. While I certainly do not disagree that this tendency exists in capitalism, I think we ought to find a sharper phrase that captures it as endemic to neoliberalism rather than one that suggests an external ideological perversion. This is one of the crucial questions: how to capture the tendency of the diffuse irresponsibility common to bureaucracy, global capital, and parliamentarianism, without falling into traditional moralizing critique?

A Critique of Zizek on Charity

Hot on the heels of their animated David Harvey talk on capitalism, the RSA has animated a recent talk by Slavoj Zizek. They do quite a job of having some fun with controversial topics, this one being Zizek's critique of "the logic of charity."

Zizek, as one has come to expect, takes on the common sense (in the Gramscian sense) view of charity as obviously helpful by arguing that it perpetuates the system of inequality that it claims to transform. This 'simple' issue of charity that he discusses, in fact, blurs the distinction between two different activities. First, he's right to criticize the hypocrisy of 'charitable' capitalists who give to charity with one hand and perpetuate inequality with the other. As he says, drawing on Oscar Wilde, you can't solve the injustices of private property with private property.

However, he confounds this argument with another that isn't about charity, it's about conscientious consumerism. The idea is that the extent of activism of Western consumers is to purchase commodities that seem to make the world a better place. I don't have a problem with the critique that conscientious consumerism is not enough to change the world, and that it blocks a more radical, anti-capitalist response (this latter response requires not just a concept of the event, but also some degree of organization and class consciousness or, if you prefer, solidarity-consciousness...but we'll have to talk about this later).

My problem is that Zizek calls the egoism of conscientious consumerism a kind of charity. He's conflating marketing tactics, consumerism, and ideology with the reasons why capitalists as a class have had to switch to slightly less exploitative forms of capital accumulation. Let's follow his example of Starbucks and fair trade coffee for the sake of simplicity. Even the general framework of the movie Black Gold shows (if I remember right...my argument doesn't rise and fall on the movie itself) that it's neither capitalist nor consumerist philanthropy that generates what we might call 'slightly more equitable commodities,' it's  some degree of organized social struggle and political pressure. By subsuming these changes under the "logic of charity," with only Western dramatis personae, Zizek misrepresents the subjectivity and collective action of the activists and workers who fought to implement fair trade practices through social struggle as a kind of passive acceptance of better conditions.

I don't want to fetishize fair trade products as the solution to exploitation, because they aren't; Starbucks uses its fair trading as a kind of battering ram to hammer on its Western competitors (namely local cafes). Might I also add that they offer health insurance as part of their benefits package (I know because I worked there for several years)-- again, not out of the kindness of their hearts but to stave off attempts to unionize.

In any case, we know from Capital, we must leave the "noisy sphere" of the market, "where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone," and follow the owners of money and of labor-power "into the hidden abode of production." There we will find the relationship between uneven geographical development, exploitation, and, most importantly, social struggle. What I gather from Zizek, especially because he's pushing this critique of "cultural capitalism" rather than a critique of neoliberalism, is that he's not willing to make that dialectical leap.


(Hat tip to Santi for bringing the RSA video to my attention).

Slavoj Zizek Interview

It is about time that the great cultural critic Slavoj Zizek make an analysis of his own rising popularity. It seems his role as a popular thinker even baffles establishment media. I am posting an interview of Zizek from the BBC arts program The Culture Show. The interviewer, Paul Mason, points out that Zizek is known to discuss Marxism while incorporating concepts from the Matrix film. He asks if Zizek's use of Marxism can only be tolerated in this manner. Then Mason asks if it could be the global financial crisis that makes Marxism once again palatable. This is the interesting duality of Zizek. Zizek is a "marketable" thinker because he is a showman and a spectacle. At the same time he breaks down the harsh realities of capitalism and modern society. He is like a humorous court jester that operates simultaneously as a prophet bearing bad news. Zizek preforms his jokes that tell of ominous tidings: Everyone laughs and then realizes how serious things really are.

Russian Neo Nazis and Global Neoliberal Capitalism

The majority of the world lives in poverty. Parts of the world enjoy wealth that millions will never come close to experiencing. This disparity has created huge incentives for people from poorer regions to migrate into wealthier countries, legally or illegally. This is leading to race and ethnic conflict on a global scale: Germans against Turks in Germany, French against North Africans in France, whites against Mexicans in the US and so on. There are racists that truly believe in the supremacy of race and ethnicity, but these individuals are not the reason for increase in societal conflict. The rise of racial and ethnic tensions is due to economic catastrophe.

This video, made a few years back, revealed the emergence of violent Neo-Nazis in Russia. This video is disturbing and can make the viewer feel angry. It would be misleading to watch this and assume the root to this violence is Hitler and his contemporary followers. There will always be Nazis and other various forms of racists (all of which are not violent). However, their ideas only have mass influence in crisis.

Another hero to some in Russia is Stalin. Not because he was Communist, but a strong leader that brought order and international respect to Russia. In a world of uncertainty and turmoil "stabilizers" from the past will always seem like a panacea to current troubles. That is why it is important for the Left to not get caught up in obsession with "deviant" groups. It is understood, we must take on thugs as they come. Lest we forget, the greatest thugs are the architects of the neo-liberal capitalist world order. This video shows what comes about in countries under their control. The ruling class prefer violence to be horizontal, not vertical.

Not Every Human is Legal

Some immigrant rights activists in the US hold up signs that read "No Human is Illegal." The problem is that a human can be illegal. Slavery was once legal. Laws are simply laws. Many of us think that various laws are wrong. Recently in Arizona there is social outcry and support for the controversial enactment of SB 1070. The idea is to proactively crack down on illegal immigration. What is lost in this debate is the fact that the majority living in this hemisphere, as the rest of the world, are poor and illegal.

It is important to evaluate the supposed significance of law in this debate. I posted a clip from a documentary highlighting the ideas of Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto. He believes the poor of the world can be integrated into global capitalism. That argument brings up a whole different set of topics (Can and should Capitalism be saved?). Significant is his research that most poor people live extra-legally. Likely, many Mexican workers--as workers living in Mexico--were no more legally integrated as citizens there than they are as workers in the US. De Soto came up with his analysis to not just find a solution to poverty, but to also combat the appeal of Maoist revolutionaries in his country of Peru. This clip makes some interesting food for thought concerning the broader spectrum the discussion about illegal immigration lies within.

India and Maoism: To Be Expected

There is an increase in the activities and influence of India's Maoists known as Naxalites. The name Naxalite derives from the name of the Naxalbari village the movement originated in; located in West Bengal. According to the information in this youtube, they currently have influence over one-third of the Indian subcontinent. Indian activists Arundhati Roy and Ajai Sahni explain how the increasing class divide, and the falsity of Indian democracy, make up the driving force behind the conflict. It is interesting that Maoism (not just in the Indian subcontinent), parroted by many politcal analysts as discredited, is once again surging in popularity. Nepal, for example, is on the verge of total Maoist take over. The Nepalese Maoists also appear to be linked with the Naxalites (see here). The truth of this story is much larger than the topic of India or Maoism. The majority of the world is poor. The majority of the world is alienated from so-called democracies. Guerrilla wars and other forms of resistance to this poverty and alienation are inevitable.

A Short Critique of Benjamin's Fragment "Capitalism as Religion"

Walter Benjamin argues, in an early fragment entitled “Capitalism as Religion” (dated 1921), that capitalism serves a religious function insofar as it “allay[s] the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.” This short critique will ask if Benjamin’s thesis is adequate to a critique of capitalism, a question that is pertinent insofar as much of contemporary ‘continental’ political philosophy is undergoing a ‘post-secular’ turn.

Benjamin identifies three features of the religious structure of capitalism:

1. Capitalism is purely cultic, it lacks a theology or specific dogmas. All things take on meaning in relation to this cult.
2. This cult is permanent; every day demands that one participate in it. As Benjamin states, there are no “weekdays.”
3. The cult of capitalism is a system of guilt (Schuld, also ‘debt’) and despair rather than atonement.

It is notable that each of these features is structured as an exception to the rule, that each could be read as ‘Capitalism is a religion, except that…’. Beyond the emphasis on paradox in these formulations, Benjamin’s central thesis seems structured to fail. So why insist that capitalism should be understood in relation to religious structures?

The ‘exceptional’ status of capitalism serves a dual purpose in this short fragment. First, it defines what is unprecedented in capitalism vis-à-vis other religious forms: capitalism is a permanent cult that “offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction” rather than its salvation. Despite these differences with other religious forms, Benjamin’s thesis also establishes a sense of continuity, specifically the possibility of atonement, or as he later calls it, redemption. As is well-known, redemption is central to Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” but in the two texts, the concept named by atonement or redemption possesses different features.

In “Capitalism as Religion,” atonement is thought as a threshold (note how this will direct us, elsewhere, to a critique of Giorgio Agamben). The concept of atonement cannot arise from the cult, religious reformation, or even renunciation, rather “the religious movement which is capitalism entails endurance right to the end…the point where the universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope.” Only by completely following through with this movement, and traversing this threshold where the relations of capitalism become– as Marx would say– the fetters of the productive forms of society, is salvation possible.

In “On the Concept of History,” redemption is not thought as threshold; Benjamin now thinks it as intervention or event. Rather than pursue the destructive movement through which ‘all that is solid melts into air,’ the later Benjamin (in the “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’”) writes that “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train– namely, the human race– to activate the emergency break.” Or, as he also mentions, the task is to blast open the “continuum of history.” In both cases, redemption is not set off to the future as threshold; it is a subjective intervention in the present. Between the two texts, moreover, Benjamin relocates his analyses; no longer satisfied with a critique of sociological forms (note the references to Weber and Sorel in “Capitalism as Religion”), he now pursues an anti-Stalinist historical materialism (against, specifically, the idea that there are forces of objective necessity in history).

We will leave aside, for the time being, the question of whether the theory of intervention in Benjamin’s historical materialism ought to enlist “the services of theology.” For now, we will confine the critique to whether the thesis that “capitalism as religion” imparts any advantage to understanding either the ideology of, or the relations of production in, capitalism. I think it is self-evident that this kind of critique cannot advance an analysis of the productive forces of society as they are organized by society, so we are left with the question of ideology.

Hence the question: do any of the religious features of capitalism advance our critique? We will address them in the order that they are proposed by Benjamin.

1. Contrary to “Capitalism as Religion,” we know that capitalism possesses at least one dogma (although the religious metaphor does not advance our critique): the right of private property, i.e. the right of capital.
2. Here, Benjamin is right: one not need believe in capitalism to participate (even if by force). Because it is a system that structures social relationships, it has to be fought at the level of these same relationships. Thus:
3. Capitalism, at least in its contemporary form does not disseminate guilt. Instead, it is productive of desire, even to the degree that it can ‘accommodate’ many of the micro-resistances that so many critics of capitalism espouse. Hence the difficulty of struggle.

Finally, does capitalist ideology answer the same concerns that religion does? As Marx wrote, “Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering,” but the same– the simultaneous ‘expression of’ and ‘protest against’ real suffering– is not expected of capitalism, although religion and other ideological appartatuses do attempt to account for this suffering. Instead of proposing that capitalism should be understood as religion, we ought to separate the specific roles of, and contradictions between, various apparatuses.

In sum, the ‘capitalism as religion’ thesis cannot assist us in social struggle. Benjamin later recognizes that theology can be more pertinent to the oppressed than as a form of the critique of oppression. Nevertheless, we ought to be hesitant, today, with enlisting the services of theology. As Marx recognized, ideological struggles or contradictions are also lived as real struggles or contradictions. But when their concepts are no longer ‘descriptive’ or ‘instructive,’ they become impediments to social struggle. We will draw from “Capitalism as Religion” its implicit conclusion: capitalism is not like a religion; the critique of political economy requires altogether different concepts.