Bulletin N° 751
Subject
:
THE PAST IS PROLOGUE : IMPERIALIST WARS - WARS OF NATIONAL DEFENSE - WARS OF NATIONAL
INDEPENDENCE - CIVIL WARS & CULTURE WARS !
May 6, 2017
Grenoble, France
Dear
Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
We have
all read the obituary:
SOCIALISM IS DEAD!
While
the King Kong international capitalists celebrate their “victory” with long
eulogies over the corpse, they speak the language of neo-liberalism:
This body
was bound to die, it had no future! Marx was wrong! 'Class collaboration' has
replaced 'class struggle',
and ‘anti-capitalist’ skepticism
(with consumer protection ethics) has been displaced by ‘consumerism’ (with
‘buyer-beware’ slogans).
Why
it's true, isn’t it ?!! The American multimillionaire robber baron, Henry Clay Frick,
explained the relationship quite clearly in the 19th-century
when he told reporters during the
famous Homestead Steel Strike (1892) in Pennsylvania:
‘Class warfare, my ass! I could
pay half of my employees to kill the other half!'
But
perhaps socialism is like sex: the more you talk about it, the less you do it.
To test
this thesis, we must abandon the formal neo-liberal rhetoric of the mortuary
and look behind the bushes and on the byways, where there is a non-verbal
activity going on, accompanied by occasional inarticulate murmurs . . . . It is
not with words, but rather it is through actions that we can see the emergence of a post-capitalist
society. Will the phrase-mongers and hypocrites soon be out of business?
Let
Félix Guattari be our guide : Long live the socialists!
His
book, Molecular Revolution,
Psychiatry and Politics, is a remarkably candid collection of
essays translated in the early 1980s, but originally written in the 1960s and early
70s, at the height of the anti-Vietnam war movement in Europe and America.
This anthology, written by a militant psychoanalyst in the heat of action,
offers a radical critique of the pervasive imposition of the imperialist imagination which oppresses
all of us, and the governing power its collectively held
fantasies wield over our daily lives. Guattari’s
entire life (which ended unexpectedly with a heart
attack at the age of 62, in August 1992, while he was investigating the use of psychoanalytic techniques in the
Yugoslav wars) was part of a collective search for radical understanding of
capitalist culture, and the role played by various collaborators in the
corporate milieu, at the casino table of the MONOPOLY (REALITY) GAME OF
ENSLAVEMENT. With Gilles Deleuze, the younger Guattari had researched the various operations lying at the
origins of the crushing, historic ‘molar movement’ of Capitalist Growth, and as
well the interstitial molecular
movements of desires which are necessarily contrary to those forces of that
dominant culture which serves to support the ruling corporate classes today. The
above mentioned book by Guattari was published in
England by Penguin Books in 1984, with an introduction written by the famous British anti-psychiatrist
David Cooper, M.D. The essays in this collection are derived from articles and
speeches that were published in Psychanalyse et transversalité
(Maspero, 1972) and La Révolution
moléculaire (Editions Recherches, Séries ‘Encre’, 1977). [Other books co-authored by Deleuze and Guattari include: Qu'est-ce que la philosophie ? (1995), L'anti-OEdipe
: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (1972), and Mille plateaux :
Capitalisme et schizophrénie tome 2 (1980).]
In his introduction to Molecular Revolution, Dr. Cooper concludes that, “as with Deleuze, [Guattari’s] totally
explicit aim is to destructure a consciousness and a
rationality over-sure of itself and thus too easy prey to subtle, and not so
subtle, dogmatism.” Cooper goes on to testify that:
The boundaries between the forms of human and
non-human matter that we encounter in the world are never that clear-cut. If we
choose to follow Félix Guattari
in his nomadism through regions of ambiguity it is
because we glimpsed from very early on an eminently rewarding clarity that
emerges through this highly original writing.(p.4)
As a
psychoanalyst and a former student of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), whom he successfully challenged and whose dominating
presence he eventually was able to escape, Félix Guattari’s writings focus on ideology/culture and the grip
it has on the collective imagination; but, most importantly, he maps out the
cracks and crannies, the crevices in the edifice, where the survivors of
capitalist domination and collaboration are actively producing new
relationships.
It is always the mass of people who have
created new forms of struggle: it was they who ‘invented’ soviets, they
who set up ad hoc strike committees, they who first thought of occupations
in 1936. The Party and the unions have systematically retreated from the
creativity of the people; indeed, since the Stalin period, they have not merely
retreated but have positively opposed innovation of any kind. One has only to
recall the part played by Communists in France at the Liberation, when they
used force as well as persuasion to reintegrate into the framework of the State
all the new forms of struggle and organization that had emerged. This resulted
in works committees without power, and a Social Security that is merely a form
of delayed wages to be manipulated by management and the State so as to control
the working class and so on. . . .
I would say that the revolutionary
organization has become separated from the signifier of the working class’s
discourse, and become instead closed in upon itself and antagonistic to any
expression of subjectivity on the part of the various sub-wholes and groups,
the subject groups spoken of by Marx. Group subjectivity can then express
itself only by way of phantasy-making, which
channels it off into the sphere of the imaginary. To be a worker, to be a young
person, automatically means sharing a particular kind of (most inadequate)
group phantasy. To be a militant worker, a militant
revolutionary, means escaping from that imaginary world and becoming connected
to the real texture of an organization, part of the prolongation of an open
formalization of the historical process. In effect, the same
text for analysis of society and its class contradictions extends
into both the text of a theoretical/political system and the texture of the
organization. There is thus a double articulation at three levels: that
of the spontaneous, creative processes of the masses; that of their
organizational expression; and that of the theoretical formulation of their
historical and strategic aims.
Not having grasped this double articulation,
the workers’ movement unknowingly falls into a bourgeois individualist
ideology. In reality, a group is not just the sum of a number of individuals:
the group does not move immediately from ‘I’ to ‘you’, from the leader to the
rank and file, from the party to the masses. A subject group is not embodied in
a delegated individual who can claim to speak on its behalf: it is primarily an
intention to act, based on a provisional totalization and producing something
true in the development of action. Unlike Althusser,
the subject group is not a theoretician producing concepts; it produces
signifiers, not signification; it produces the institution and
institutionalization, not a party or line; it modifies the general direction of
history, but does not claim to write it; it interprets the situation, and with
its truth illuminates all the formulations coexisting simultaneously in the
workers’ movement. . . .
This brings us to a more general problem:
does ‘saying’ mean anything more than the production of its own sense? Surely,
what the whole analysis of Capital makes clear is precisely that behind
every process of production, circulation and consumption there is an order of
symbolic production that constitutes the very fabric of every relationship
of production, circulation and consumption, and of all the structural orders.
It is impossible to separate the production of any consumer commodity form the
institution that supports that production. The same can be said of teaching,
training, research, etc. The state machine and the machine of repression
produce anti-production, that is to say signifiers that exist to block and
prevent the emergence of any subjective process on the part of the group. I
believe we should think of repression, or the existence of the State, or
bureaucratization, not as passive or inert, but as dynamic. Just as Freud could
talk of the dynamic processes underlying psychic repression, so it must be
understood that, like the odyssey of things returning to their ‘rightful
place’, bureaucracies, churches, universities and other such bodies develop an
entire ideology and set of phantasies of repression
in order to counter the processes of social creation in every sphere.
The incapacity of the workers’ movement to
analyze such institutions’ conditions of production, and their function of
anti-production, dooms it to remain passive in the face of capitalist
initiatives in that sphere. Consider, for instance, the university and the
army. It may appear that all that is happening in a university is the
transmission of messages, of bourgeois knowledge; but we know that in reality a
lot else is also happening, including a whole operation of molding people to
fit the key functions of bourgeois society and its regulatory images. In the
army, at least the traditional army, not a great deal of what happens is put
into words. But the State would hardly spend so much, year after year, on teaching
young men just to march up and down; that is only a pretext: the real purpose
is to train people and make them relate to one another, with a view to the
clearly stated objective of discipline. Their training is not merely an
apprenticeship in military techniques, but the establishment of a mechanism of
subordination in their imaginations.
Similar examples can be found in so-called primitive societies. . .
. [And] phantasy
mechanisms of this nature are still at work in capitalist society.
The workers’ movement seems to be peculiarly
unfitted to recognize those mechanisms; it relates subjective processes to
individual phenomena, and fails to recognize the series of phantasies
which actually make up the real fabric of the whole organization and solidity
of the masses. To achieve any understanding of social groups, one must get rid
of one kind of rationalist-positivist vision of the individual (and of
history). One must be capable of grasping the unities underlying historical
phenomena, the modes of symbolic communication proper to groups (where there is
often no mode of spoken contract), the systems that
enable individuals not to lose themselves in interpersonal relationships, and
so on. To me it is all reminiscent of a flock of migrating birds: it has its
own structure, the shape it makes in the air, its function, its direction – and
all determined without benefit of a single central committee meeting, or
elaboration of a correct line. Generally speaking, our understanding of group
phenomena is very inadequate. Primitive societies are collectively far better
ethnologists than the scholars sent out to study them. . . . I do not think one can fully grasp the
acts, attitudes or inner life of any group without grasping the thematic and
functions of its ‘acting out’ phantasies. Hitherto
the workers’ movement has functioned only by way of an idealist approach to
these problems. There is, for instance, no description of the special
characteristics of the working class that established the Paris Commune, no
description of its creative imagination. Bourgeois historians offer such
meaningless comments as that ‘the Hungarian workers were courageous’, and then
pass on to a formal, self-enclosed analysis of the various elements if social
groups as though they had no bearing on the problems of the class struggle or
organizational strategy, and without reference to the fact that the laws
governing the group’s formations of images are different in kind form
contractual laws – like those relative to setting up a limited company, for
instance, or the French Association Law of 1901. You cannot relate the sum of a
group’s phansasy phenomena to any system of
deductions working only with motivations made fully explicit at the rational
level. There are some moments in history when repressed motives emerge, a whole
phantasy order, that can be translated, among other
things, into phenomena of collective identification with a leader – for
instance Nazism. . . . [T]he great
leaders of history were people who served as something on which to hand
society’s phantasies. When Jojo,
or Hitler, tells people to ‘be Jojos’ or ‘be Hitlers’, they are not speaking so much as circulating a
particular kind of image to be used in the group: ‘Through that particular Jojo we shall find ourselves.’ But who actually says this?
The whole point is that no one says it, because if one were to say it to
oneself, it would become something different. At the level of the group’s phantasy structure, we no longer find language operating in
this way, setting up an ‘I’ and an ‘Other’ through words and a system of
significations. There is, to start with, a kind of solidification, a setting
into a mass; this is us, and other people are different, and usually not
worth bothering with – there is no communication possible. There is a territorialization of phantasy,
an imagining of the group as a body, that absorbs subjectivity into itself.
From this there flow all the phenomena of misunderstanding, racism,
regionalism, nationalism, and other archaisms that have utterly defeated the
understanding of social theorists.
. . .
[T]here
is an every-increasing universality of scientific signifier’s; production
becomes more worldwide every day; every advance in scholarship is taken up by
researchers everywhere; it is conceivable that there might one day be a single
upper-information-machine that could be used for hundreds of thousands of
different researchers. In the scientific field, everything today is shared; the
same is true of literature, art and so on. However, this does not mean that we
are not witnessing a general drawing inwards in the field, not of the real, but
the imaginary, and the imaginary at its most regressive. In fact, the two
phenomena are complementary: it is just when there is most universality that we
feel the need to return as far as possible to national and regional
distinctness. The more capitalism follows its tendency to ‘de-code’ and
‘de-territorialize’, the more does it seek to awaken or re-awaken artificial
territorialities and residual encodings, thus moving to counteract its own
tendency.
How can we understand these group functions
of the imaginary, and all their variations? How can we get away from that
persistent couple: machinic universality
and archaic particularity? . .
. I say that the ‘subject group’ is
articulated like a language and links itself to the sum of historical
discourse, whereas the ‘dependent group’ is structured according to a spatial
mode, and has a specifically imaginary mode of representation, that it is the
medium of the group phantasies; in reality, however,
we are dealing not so much with two sorts of group, but two functions, and the
two may even coincide. A passive group can suddenly throw up a mode of
subjectivity that develops a whole system of tensions, a whole internal
dynamic. On the other hand, any subject group will have phases when it gets
bogged down at the level of the imaginary: then, if it is to avoid becoming the
prisoner of its own phantasies, its active principle
must be recovered by way of a system of analytic interpretation. One might
perhaps say that the ‘dependent group’ permanently represents a potential
sub-whole of the ‘subject group’, and, as a counterpoint to the formulations of
Lacan, one might add that only a partial, detached
institutional object can provide it with a basis.
[Take,
for example,] the Communist Party. Like its mass organization (trade unions,
youth organizations, women’s organizations, etc.) the Party can be wholly
manipulated by all the structures of a bourgeois State, and can work as a
factor for integration. In a sense one can even say that the development of a
modern, capitalist State needs such organizations of workers by workers in
order to regulate the relations of production. The crushing of workers’
organizations in Spain after 1936 caused a considerable delay to the progress
of Spanish capitalism, whereas the various ways of integrating the working
class promoted in those countries that had popular fronts in 1936, or national
fronts in 1945, enabled the State and the various social organizations
introduced by the bourgeoisie to readjust, to produce new structures and new
relations of production favouring the development of
the capitalist economy as a whole (salary differentials, wages; bargaining over
conditions, etc.).Thus one can see how, in a sense, the subordinate
institutional object that the Party or the CGT (the Communist Trade Union
Federation) represents as far as the working class are concerned helps to keep
the capitalist structure in good repair.
On the other hand – and to explain this
calls for a topological example of some complexity – that same passive
institutional object, indirectly controlled by the bourgeoisie, may give rise
within itself to the development of new processes of subjectivation.
This is undoubtedly the case on the smallest scale, in the Party cell and the
union chapel. The fact that the working class, once its revolutionary instincts
have been aroused, persists in studying and getting to know itself through this
development within a
dependent group creates tensions and contradictions which, though not
immediately visible to outsiders (not quoted in the press or the official
statements of the leaders), still produce a whole range of fragmented but real subjectivation.
A group phantasy is
not the same as an individual phantasy, or any sum of
individual phantasies, or the phantasy
of a particular group. Every individual phansasy
leads back to the individual in his desiring solitude. But it can happen that a
particular phantasy, originating within an individual
or a particular group, becomes a kind of collective currency, put into
circulation and providing a basis for group phantasizing.
Similarly, as Freud pointed out, we pass from the order of neurotic structure
to the stage of group formation. The group may, for instance, organize its phantasies around a leader, a successful figure, a doctor,
or some such. That chosen individual plays the role of a kind of signifying
mirror, upon which the collective phantasy-making is
refracted. It may appear that a particular bureaucratic or maladjusted
personality is working against the interests of the group, when in fact both
his personality and his actions are interpreted only in terms of the group.
This dialectic cannot be confined to the plane of the imaginary. Indeed, the
split between the totalitarian ideal of the group and its various partial phantasy processes produces cleavages that may put the
group in a position to escape from its ‘corporized’ and ‘spatializing’
phantasy representations. If the process that seems,
at the level of the individual authority, to be over-determined and hedged in
by the Oedipus complex is transposed to the level of group phantasizing,
it actually introduces the possibility of a revolutionary re-ordering. In
effect, identification with the prevailing images of the group is by no means
always static . . . . (pp.32-38)
Most of
us have been more or less forced to see today that bourgeois democracy and
logical positivism are relics of a past era. If we continue to misidentify
these fossils as contemporary life forms, it is at our own peril. Creative
thinking has never been more important for our survival, nor has the combined
application of scientific knowledge, philosophy and art in the hands of ordinary people
been more essential. Developing skills of communication at a time when we have
been ‘dumbed down’ by media and consumerism - while
threatened with pandemic fear and alienation - is today a priority. Contradictions
abound in the daily lives of all of us, and the voice of Guattari
challenges us to grab the bull by the horns, so to speak; to overcome this passive state
which is orchestrated by our would-be masters through their technology and
controle of our imaginations.
At the
end of this first essay, Guattari issues the
following warning (The year is 1966 !) :
Either
the revolutionary workers’ movement and the masses will recover their speech
via collective agents of utterance that will guarantee that they are not caught
up again in anti-production relations (as far as a work of analysis can be a guarantee),
or matters will go from bad to worse. It is obvious that the bourgeoisie of
present-day neo-capitalism are not a neo-bourgeoisie and are not going to
become one: they are undoubtedly the stupidest that history has ever produced.
They will not find an effective way out. They will keep trying to cobble things
together, but always too late and irrelevantly, as with all their great
projects to help what their experts coyly describe as the ‘developing
countries’.
It is quite simple, then. Unless there is
some drastic change, things are undoubtedly going to go very badly indeed, and
in proportion as the cracks are a thousand times deeper than those that riddled
the structure before 1939, we shall have to undergo fascisms a thousand times
more frightful.(pp.43-44)
The 12
items below represent a fast-forward to the present, forty years and more
after the Vietnam War debacle. Some of us might ask: What has been the logical
progression of capitalist expansion since the 1970s? While others ask: What went wrong?
Most of us by now understand only too well, that we are part of the system that
we oppose –we are in this system and this system exists within us . . . . The
ultimate question which all of us must learn to ask in these somber times is: What
historic contradictions exist today that can serve to guide us in our
emancipation from corporate domination?
Sincerely,
Francis Feeley
Professor emeritus of American Studies
University Grenoble-Alpes
Director of Research
University of Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced Study of American Institutions and
Social Movements
The University of California-San Diego
a.
Whistleblower Advocates:
Stop Targeting the Messenger
http://therealnews.com/t2/story:18983:Whistleblower-Advocates%3A-Stop-Targeting-the-Messenger
In recent weeks, the Trump
administration has taken on a much more aggressive tone towards whistleblowers
and groups like Wikileaks, calling them 'hostile
intelligence services' and saying that Julian Assange's
arrest is a 'priority'
===========
b.
Steve Bannon on the Crisis of Capitalism and the Divine Right of
Billionaires
Mathew Fox and Paul Jay discuss Bannon's alliance with the far-right Catholic Opus Dei, and
his vision of the Judeo-Christian West.
===========
c.
Trump's Fascist Administration
In Case You Missed It
(Jan. 24, 2017)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46968.htm
Video
by Jeremy Scahill
Jeremy Scahill speaks at the Anti-Inauguration
event sponsored by Jacobin, Haymarket Books, and Verso Books. Recorded from The Lincoln Theatre in Washington, DC.
Featuring Naomi Klein, Anand Gopal,
Jeremy Scahill, Owen Jones, Keeanga-Yamahtta
Taylor. 01.24.2017
===========
d.
===========
e.
How Our Worlds Are Decided for Us
From Behind the Computational Curtain
by John Cheney-Lippold
On websites like Facebook,
our selves are not more free; they are more owned. And
they are owned because we are now made of data.
===========
f.
NYT Cheers the Rise of Censorship Algorithms
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/05/02/nyt-cheers-the-rise-of-censorship-algorithms/
by
Robert Parry
The New York Times is
cheering on the Orwellian future for Western “democracy” in which algorithms
quickly hunt down and eliminate information that the Times and other mainstream
outlets don’t like, reports Robert Parry.
===========
g.
Run for Your Life: The American Police State
Is Coming to Get You
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46895.htm
by John W. Whitehead
Ø “We’ve
reached the point where state actors can penetrate rectums and vaginas, where
judges can order forced catheterizations, and where police and medical
personnel can perform scans, enemas and colonoscopies without the suspect’s
consent. And these procedures aren’t to nab kingpins or cartels, but people who
at worst are hiding an amount of drugs that can fit into a body cavity. In most
of these cases, they were suspected only of possession or ingestion. Many of
them were innocent... But these tactics aren’t about getting drugs off the
street... These tactics
are instead about degrading and humiliating a class of people that politicians
and law enforcement have deemed the enemy.” - Radley Balko, The Washington Post
Ø Daily, all across America,
individuals who dare to resist—or even question—a police order are being
subjected to all sorts of government-sanctioned abuse ranging from forced
catheterization, forced blood draws, roadside strip searches and cavity
searches, and other foul and debasing acts that degrade their bodily integrity
and leave them bloodied and bruised.
Ø Americans as young as 4 years old are being leg shackled, handcuffed, tasered
and held at gun point for not being quiet, not being orderly and just being
childlike—i.e., not being compliant enough.
===========
We Should Fear Trump More Than Ever
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46970.htm
by Patrick Cockburn
Politicians and
establishment media have greeted what they see as President Trump’s return to
the norms of American foreign policy. They welcome the actual or threatened use
of military force in Syria, Afghanistan and North Korea, and praise his
appointment of a bevy of generals to senior security posts. A striking feature
of Trump’s first 100 days was the way in which the campaign to demonize him and
his entourage as creatures of the Kremlin was suddenly switched off like a
light as soon as he retreated from his earlier radicalism.
In reality, the
Trump administration should be more feared as a danger to world peace at the
end of his first 100 days in office than it was at the beginning. This is
because Trump in the White House empowers many of those who, so far from being
“a safe pair of hands”, have led the US into a series of disastrous wars in the
Middle East in the post 9/11 era. There is no reason to think that they have
changed their ways or learned from past mistakes.
This point is
understood better in the Middle East than in it is in the US and Europe. In
Baghdad, for instance, people are worried because they see the US building
towards a renewed confrontation with Iran, possibly reneging on the nuclear
agreement with Tehran and trying to curtail or eliminate Iranian influence in
Iraq. Jim Mattis, the Secretary for Defence and former Marine general, and HR McMaster, the
National Security Adviser and a general with combat experience in Iraq, are
both volubly anti-Iranian. For soldiers like McMaster, the US failure in Iraq
was unnecessary and self-inflicted and they intend to reverse it.
===========
i.
US, Europe
Unleashing Lawlessness and War
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46977.htm
by Finian Cunningham
This week the
Kiev regime went into rogue overdrive when it cut off electricity supplies to
some three million people in the self-declared Lugansk
republic of eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian energy ministry under the control of
the Kiev regime said it was because the breakaway province was in arrears over
bill payments. That’s rich coming from a cabal that has continually dragged its
feet over unpaid bills for billions of dollars-worth in gas supplies from
Russia.
From where
does Kiev learn its rogue conduct? From its masters, of
course, in Washington and the European Union. The present unravelling of international law and order is their
lamentable legacy.
j.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/02/the-economics-of-the-future/
Explaining why
today’s debt residue has turned the United States, Britain and southern Europe
into zombie economies, Steve Keen’s new book, “Can We Avoid Another Financial
Crisis?”, shows how ignoring debt - the blind spot of
neoliberal economics – is basically the old neoclassic ‘just-pretend’ view of
the world, whose glib ‘mathiness’ is a gloss for its
unscientific ‘don’t worry about debt’ message. Blame for today’s U.S., British
and southern European inability to achieve economic recovery thus rests on the
economic mainstream and its refusal to recognize that debt matters.
===========
k.
Slavehood 2017
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46995.htm
by Peter Koenig
===========
l.
Deux Candidats et
la Recomposition Politique
http://ceimsa.org/publications/Scholars/2017.1.htm
by Diana Johnstone
On
vit dans un monde de plus en plus fictif, où l’imaginaire collectif est
soigneusement guidé vers le rappel constant des « heures les plus sombres
de notre histoire ». On exhorte les électeurs à voter pour « faire
barrage » à un fantasme du passé en s’imaginant être des
« résistants ». En réalité, en « résistant » aux
menaces du passé on se livre allègrement aux pires dangers du présent.
Entre
les cris d’orfraie et les larmes hypocrites, un peu d’analyse serait
rafraichissant. Examinons à tête froide les différences entre les
deux candidats en lice.