Bulletin N° 752
Subject
:
Psychoanalysis & Capitalist Power vs. schizo-analysis & 'democratic
socialist' desires . . .
May 17, 2017
Grenoble, France
Dear
Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
The old
adage, "war is the midwife of revolution",
circulated widely during the years of the Vietnam War. A generation of students
was steeped in this thinking, and for some it had a profound effect,
restructuring a good part of their entire character. The process was
dialectical, of course, and all of us remained ‘over-encoded’ by the
imperialist agenda under which we lived. There was no escaping this writing on
your souls; nevertheless we developed certain insights into our lives and our
habits of thought, thanks to many critical readings and collective discussions.
We were alerted that our would-be leaders could be co-opted or eliminated and
our ideas distorted or repressed by the powers that be, in an effort to delay
egalitarian changes in the political economy.
Meanwhile,
debates held in good faith continued to flourish on campuses and they often produced
deeper understandings. Félix Guatarri’s
essay, “Psychoanalysis
and the Struggle of Desire”, was one of the texts we read and
debated. Below is an excerpt from this text, first produced for a conference
in Milan, Italy on 7-9 May 1973:
The problem facing the workers’ revolutionary movement is that there is
a dislocation between the apparent relations of power at the level of the class
struggle and the real desire investment of the mass of the people.
Capitalism exploits the labour capacity of the working class and manipulates the
relations of production to its own advantage, but it also insinuates itself
into the desire system of those it exploits. The revolutionary struggle cannot
therefore be restricted simply to the level of the apparent state of power
relations. It must extend to every level of the desiring economy that is
contaminated by capitalism (the individual, the couple, the family, the school,
the militant group, madness, prisons, homosexuality or whatever).
The objects and methods of the
struggle will vary from one level to another. Such aims as ‘Freedom, Peace and
Plenty’ demand political organizations that can intervene in the power
struggle, that combine forces and constitute blocs. In the nature of things
these organizations must be representative, coordinating the struggle and
providing it with a strategy and tactics. On the other hand, the struggle
against what we may call ‘microscopic fascism’ – the fascism implanted within desiring
machines – cannot be carried on via delegates or representatives, by
identifiable and unchanging blocs. The face of the enemy is changing all the
time: it can be a friend, a colleague, a superior, even oneself. There is never
a time when you can be sure you are not going to fall for a politics supporting
bureaucracy or privilege, into a paranoiac view of the world, an unconscious
collusion with the establishment, an internalization of social repression.
These two struggles need not be
mutually exclusive:
-
The class struggle, the
revolutionary struggle for liberation, involves the existence of war machines
capable of standing up to the forces of oppression, which means operating with
a degree of centralism, with at least a minimum of coordination;
-
The struggle of relation to
desire requires collective agencies to produce a continually ongoing analysis,
the subversion of every form of power, at every level.
It is
surely absurd to hope to overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie by replacing it
with a structure that reconstitutes the form of that power. The class struggle
in Russia, China and elsewhere has demonstrated that, even after the power of
the bourgeoisie has been broken, the form of that power can be reproduced in
the State, in the family, even in the ranks of the revolution. How can we
prevent centralizing and bureaucratic authority from taking charge of the
coordination that is necessarily involved in organizing a revolutionary war?
The struggle as a whole must include stages and intermediaries. At the
‘microscopic’ level, what must happen, first of all, is a kind of direct
changeover to communism, the abolition of bourgeois power in the sense that the
power is embodied in the bureaucrat, the leader or the militant dedicated
revolutionary.
Bureaucratic centralism has been introduced permanently into the
workers’ movement in imitation of the centralist model of Capital. Capital
supervises and over-encodes production by controlling the flow of money and
wielding coercive power over production relations in State Monopoly capitalism.
There is a similar problem with bureaucratic socialism. But real production
does not need this kind of direction in the least – in fact is better without.
The major productive machines in industrial societies could manager very well
without such centralism. Clearly, a different concept of how production is
related both to distribution and consumption, and to training and research,
should shatter the hierarchical and despotic powers that prevail within present-day
production relations, and give free play to the workers’ capacity for
innovation. Evidently, then, the basis of centralism is not economic but
political, In the workers’ movement, too, centralism
leads to the same sort of sterility. It must be accepted that far more
effective and broader struggles could be coordinated away from bureaucratic
headquarters, but only if the desiring economy of the workers can be freed from
the contamination of the bourgeois subjectivity that makes them the unconscious
accomplices of the capitalist technocracy and the bureaucracy of the workers’
movement.
Here we
must be careful not to fall into the simplistic trap of saying either
‘democratic’ centralism, or anarchism and spontaneism.
Alternative marginal movements and communities have absolutely nothing
to gain by falling into the myth of a return to the pre-technological age, of
‘back to nature’; on the contrary, they have to cope with real society, real
sexual and family relationships, with what is happening now. On the other hand,
one must recognize that the official workers’ movement has up to now refused to
consider how far it may be contaminated by bourgeois power, to consider its own
internal corruption. Nor is there at present any scientific discipline that can
help it to do so. Neither sociology, or
psycho-sociology, not psychology – still less psychoanalysis – has extended
Marxism into this area. Freudianism, in the guise of a science sets up as its
unquestioned norms the very things that produce bourgeois subjectivation
– the myth of a necessary castration of desire, in terms of the Oedipal
triangle, a signifying interpretation which tends to isolate the analysis form
the realities of its social setting.
I allude
to the possibility of abolishing the technocratic centralism: of capitalist
production, which would be based on a different understanding of the
relationship between production, distribution and consumption on the one hand
and production, research and education on the other. This would obviously tend
to make a total change in attitudes to work, and especially the split between
work recognized as socially useful (recognized as socially useful by
capitalism, that is, by the ruling class) and the ‘useless’ work of desire. All
of production, whether of commercial value or use value, whether of individual
or collective bodies, is under the control of a form of social organization
that enforces a certain pattern of social division of labour.
The disappearance of capitalist centralism would therefore bring with it a
fundamental re-casting of production techniques. Even in a society with highly
developed industry and highly developed public information services etc., one
can conceive of different production relations that would not be antagonistic
to the production of desire, or art, of dreams. In other words, the question is
whether or not it is possible to stop seeing use value and exchange value as
mutually opposed. The alternative of rejecting all complex forms of production
and demanding a return to nature merely reproduces the split between the
different forms of production – desiring production and production of
recognized social utility.(from Molecular
Revolution, pp.62-64)
. . . .
From
intensities that might mean many things, we have thus come to invest punitive
social values with the promotion of the castration complex. In point of fact,
the closing-in of psychoanalysis upon the Oedipal
triangle represents a kind of attempt to escape from that drive to abolish
desire that leads it almost in spite of itself towards this binary, Manichean
perversion. The Oedipus schema was constructed as a barrier to narcissism, to
destructive identifications. It seemed to represent a necessary fate of the
instincts. But the death instinct comes into begin only at the point when one
leaves the sphere of desiring intensities for that of representation. The
Oedipal triangle is an attempt – always more or less unsuccessful – to stop the
descent into the death instinct. It never really works as a triangle because
death, symbolic abolition, libidinal collapse, threatens all three sides of it.
In the theatre of the psychoanalytic Grand Guignol,
there is always an unhappy ending. . . .
.
In short,
I should say that, unlike psychoanalysis, schizo-analytic
politics would be led to consider that the death instinct is not something that
exists in itself, but that it is linked with a certain way of posing the
problem of desire in a certain type of society. Desire is unaware of death, of
negation, and the tragedies of the familialist Grand
Guignol strike it as funny. Since negation is
always related to the position of a subject, an object and a reference point,
desire, being purely and intensively positive, changes round subjects and
objects; it is a flux and intensity. In so far as the subject is bound up with
a system of representation, the individual libido finds itself dependent on the
capitalist machine which forces it to function in terms of a communication
based on dualist systems. The social environment is not made up of objects
which pre-existed the individual. The person imprisoned in such bi-polar
systems as man/women, child/adult, genital/pre-genital, life/death, etc. has
already been subjected to an Oedipalizing reduction
of desire to representation. For desire to be expressed in individual terms
means that it is already condemned to castration. There exists a totally
different notion: the idea of a collective force, a collective direction of
libido to parts of the body, groups of individuals, constellations of objects
and intensities, machines of every kind – thus bringing desire out of that back-and-forth
between the Oedipal triangle and its dissolution in the death instinct, and
linking it up with ever-wider possibilities of many different kinds that become
ever more open to the social environment.(p.72)
For more on schizo-analysis,
see our January 15, 2009 CEIMSA Bulletin 386.
The 19 items below present descriptive
materials of the contemporary political-economic debacle of neo-liberalism, that fatally flawed capitalist ideology that
refuses to die.
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.
Why Did the FBI
Leak the Comey Memo?
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=19110
Prof.
Robert English, who worked for the U. S. Department of Defense, tells Paul Jay
that a deep Russophobia and the interests of the
military industrial complex are driving the permanent state to exaggerate the
significance of Trump's transgressions so they can torpedo a more rational
approach to U.S. Russia relations; that said, Trump and friends financial
corruption involving Russian oligarchs may emerge as the real story
===========
b.
Meet
your all-white, all-male Senate
Death
Panel
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/5/5/1659368/-Meet-your-very-white-very-male-Senate-death-panel
by Joan McCarter
All those white men in that picture are reportedly
going to be deciding the next round of Trumpcare.
While House Republicans were having their Bud Lite
and Trump party after the vote Thursday, enough Republican
senators were rejecting that bill, meaning this group is going to have
to pretty much start from scratch. They are left to right, top to bottom:
- John Thune (SD)
- Mike Enzi (WY)
- Pat Toomey (PA)
- Rob Portman (OH)
- Cory Gardner (CO)
- Ted Cruz (TX)
- Mitch McConnell (KY)
- Tom Cotton (AR)
- Mike Lee (UT)
- John Barrasso (WY)
- Lamar Alexander (TN)
- John Cornyn (TX)
- Orrin Hatch (UT)
A few glaring things, besides the lack of a
hue darker than pasty: Texas, Utah, and Wyoming are disproportionately
represented, as usual; none of the most vocal detractors of the House bill are
present; the only two senators who've put something forward this term—Susan
Collins and Bill Cassidy—are notably absent; several of them have said they're
not too comfortable with their state losing its Medicaid expansion. But
bomb-throwing Ted Cruz is there to represent his peeps, the House Freedom
Caucus maniacs who exhorted their wish list out of their spineless colleagues.
Also, what about Jeff Flake (AZ) and Dean
Heller (NV)? Those are the two who are genuinely vulnerable in 2018. Might
not they get to have a say in the biggest piece of legislation facing them this
cycle?
But the main thing? Where are the women? They actually do have six to choose
from, so even if they didn't pick those radicals Susan Collins and Lisa
Murkowski, who think Planned Parenthood is kind of important for women's
health, didn't it occur to them that having one woman might be smart? Since
they're deciding things like whether rape or domestic violence or having
ovaries are going to be pre-existing conditions?
===========
c.
Third
Mysterious Death of a Black Ferguson Activist
http://therealnews.com/t2/story:19046:Third-Mysterious-Death-of-a-Black-Ferguson-Activist
Edward Crawford is the third mysterious death of
a young Black activist man in Ferguson over the past three years. Glen Ford of
the Black Agenda Report argues that this cannot be a coincidence
===========
d.
5 Types of Bullsh*t Jobs with David Graeber
http://therealnews.com/t2/story:19054:5-Types-of-Bullsh%2At-Jobs-with-David-Graeber
===========
e.
BANNED INTERVIEW with George Bush Jr. US President
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ36HS8dRbY
===========
f.
Washington
is Leading the U.S. and its Vassal States to Total Destruction
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46999.htm
by Paul Craig Roberts
“The
problem is that the world has listened to Americans for far too bloody long.” —
Dr. Julian Osborne, from the 2000 film version of Nevil
Shute’s 1957 book, On the Beach
A
reader asked why neoconservatives push toward nuclear war when there can be no
winners. If all die, what is the point?
The
answer is that the neoconservatives believe that the US can win at minimum and
perhaps zero damage.
Their
insane plan is as follows: Washington will ring Russia and China with
anti-ballistic missile bases in order to provide a shield against a retaliatory
strike from Russia and China. Moreover, these US anti-ABM bases also can deploy
nuclear attack missiles unknown to Russia and China, thus reducing the warning
time to five minutes, leaving Washington’s victims little or no time in which
to make a decision.
===========
g.
Who Is Destroying Syria?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47009.htm
by
Philip Giraldi
The
Arab Gulf States, Israel, and Turkey all prefer anarchy to Assad.
The
United Nations Charter, to which all member states are signatories and which
prevails over all other treaties and agreements, states that the organization is obligated to
“determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or
act of aggression” and to take military and nonmilitary action to “restore
international peace and security.”
The
justices at the Nuremberg trials in 1946 concluded that “to initiate a war of aggression …
is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime
differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the
accumulated evil of the whole.”
The
U.S. Constitution’s Article I states that only Congress has the authority to
declare war, with the understanding that, per Article II, the president is
empowered to respond to a “sudden” or imminent threat only if there is no time
to pass such a declaration. An Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) amended in 2016 grants the president
blanket authority to respond militarily to threats against the United States,
but only if they originated with al-Qaeda and “associated forces.”
So
how is it that on April 6 the United States attacked a fellow member state in
the United Nations that has an internationally recognized sovereign government?
===========
h.
The Universal Lesson of East Timor
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47010.htm
by John Pilger
East
Timor was the greatest crime of the late 20th century.
Filming
undercover in East Timor in 1993 I followed a landscape of crosses: great black
crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses marching down the
hillsides, crosses beside the road. They littered the earth and crowded the
eye.
The
inscriptions on the crosses revealed the extinction of whole families, wiped
out in the space of a year, a month, a day. Village after village stood
as memorials.
Kraras is one such village. Known as
the "village of
the widows", the population of 287
people was murdered by Indonesian troops.
Using a typewriter with a faded ribbon, a local priest had
recorded the name, age, cause of death and date of the killing of every victim.
In the last column, he identified the Indonesian battalion responsible for each
murder. It was evidence of genocide.
I still have this document, which I find difficult to put
down, as if the blood of East Timor is fresh on its pages.
===========
i.
From: United for Peace & Justice
Sent: Saturday, 6 May, 2017
Subject: No to NATO, No to
War! RSVP for an Important Call w/ Int'l Allies
|
===========
j.
Emmanuel Clinton and the Revolt of the Elites
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47014.htm
by Pepe Escobar
So in the end the West was saved by the election of Emmanuel
Macron as President of France: relief in Brussels, a buoyant eurozone, rallies in Asian markets.
That was always a no-brainer. After all, Macron was endorsed by
the EU, Goddess of the Market, and Barack Obama. And he was fully backed by the
French ruling class.
This was a referendum on the EU – and the EU, in its current
set-up, won.
Cyberwar had to be part of the picture. No one knows where the MacronLeaks came from – a last minute, massive online dump
of Macron campaign hacked emails. WikiLeaks certified
the documents it had time to review as legitimate.
That did not stop the Macron galaxy from immediately
blaming it on Russia. Le Monde, a once-great paper now owned by three influential
Macron backers, faithfully mirrored his campaign’s denunciation of RT and
Sputnik, information technology attacks and, in general, the
interference of Russia in the elections.
The Macron Russophobia in the French
media-sphere also happens to include Liberation, once the paper of Jean-Paul
Sartre. Edouard de Rothschild, the previous head of
Rothschild & Cie Banque,
bought a 37% controlling stake in the paper in 2005. Three years later, an
unknown Emmanuel Macron started to rise in the mergers and acquisitions
department, soon acquiring a reputation as “the Mozart of
finance.”
===========
k.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/05/why-study-history/
by PAUL STREET
As
liberal Democrats for the most part, United States historians have no doubt been
having a field day with Donald Trump’s recently reported clueless comments on
United States history. The president’s moronic take on the nation’s past
was front-page news last Tuesday in liberals’ and academics’
favorite newspaper, The New York Times. Times reporters Peter Baker and Jonah
Engel Bromwich told readers about Trump’s historical idiocy,
seen in the president’s:
·
Suggestion
that Andrew Jackson had been “really angry”about the Civil
War, which did not break out until 16 years after his death.
·
Assertion
that the Civil War could have been prevented by smart policymakers who should
have just gotten together and cut a deal.
·
Apparent
belief that the great 19th century Black abolitionist Frederick
Douglass is still alive.
·
Apparent
surprise at learning that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.
· Putting up a golf course plaque marking a Civil War battle that never happened.
+
The
ahistorical discourse of delusion out of Washington,
D.C.
Francis,
I’ve sent this out before, but I’m insisting on it for those who haven’t had time, because it expresses so well the liberal mindset that prevails in Washington and beyond, relentlessly condemning Russia as “the enemy, trying to destroy our democracy, which protects the whole world", in order to impeach Trump. My opinion is that they will eventually succeed, because they are slick and Trump is bumpity, and they have big money, the media and the military industrial complex behind them, and they have sold their soul to the neocons. This exchange reveals the total moral and intellectual corruption of the liberal intelligentsia.
-Diana Johnstone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhLWkQ331og
===========
l.
Memory Loss in the Garden of Violence
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47008.htm
by John Dower
How
Americans Remember (and Forget) Their Wars
Some
years ago, a newspaper article credited a European visitor with the wry
observation that Americans are charming because they have such short memories.
When it comes to the nation’s wars, however, he was not entirely on target.
Americans embrace military histories of the heroic “band of [American]
brothers” sort, especially involving World War II. They possess a seemingly
boundless appetite for retellings of the Civil War, far and away the country’s
most devastating conflict where American war deaths are concerned.
===========
m.
How Information Is Controlled by
Washington, Israel, and Trolls, Leading to Our Destruction
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47012.htm
by Paul Craig Roberts
Will
Russia and China accept the hegemony of this evil or will they not? It is a
very serious matter that Washington
has convinced the Russian and Chinese
governments that Washington is preparing a preemptive nuclear strike against
them. This is extremely serious, not something for narcissists and trolls to
play with.
For
all who ask what to do, the answer is to speak out strongly against Washington
for risking all life by convincing Russia and China that Washington is
preparing to nuke them. To understand how dire the situation is, ask yourself
why you hear no protests against such provocation of Russia and China from the
West’s print and TV media, from the US Senate, from the House of
Representatives, from European political leaders, from hardly anyone.
The
absence of protest tells the Russians and Chinese that the American Empire is
OK with the preemptive attack. Where is Merkel’s voice? Where is May’s? Where
is any leader’s voice?
The
absence of protest voices tells Russia and China that the die is cast.
===========
n.
The Deep
State and the Boomerang Effect
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47013.htm
by Jerry Kroth,
Ph.D.
Academic psychology does not rank high on
solutions to international crises, but it does have a concept worthy of our
attention, “reactance” or the boomerang effect.
It means that the more you push in one
direction, the more the opposite result occurs as a powerful form blowback. The
greater the sanctions on North Korea to stop its nuclear program, for example,
the more rapidly it develops its weapons, and the
further grows the range of its ballistic missiles. The more the U.S. tries to
decapitate Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the more Al-Qaeda storefronts open in over
14 countries from Uganda to Uzbekistan.
The more you push forward, the greater the
pushback. It is curious how mainstream media wonks on Meet the Press or Face
The Nation rarely
venture into this terrain. For one thing, there is almost no discussion of
Israel’s nuclear cruise missiles on three submarines stationed off the coast of
Iran. They patrol 24-7, and they can reach any target in Iran in a matter of
minutes. Corporate media censorship on this issue is absolute and ironclad. How
can one talk about Iran’s development of nuclear weapons—as a boomerang
reaction to Israel’s constant nuclear threat—if there is no permissible
discussion of Israel’s nuclear threat in the first instance? And there isn’t.
So our punditocracy
obsessively blathers about the myriad dangers facing the United States with
little interest in how many of these external threats are actually boomerang
reactions to our own behavior.
===========
o.
MAY 9, 2017
Donald Trump’s
Firing of James Comey
===========
p.
Donald in Wonderland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZsx7q6YYDE
with Jeremy Scahill
THIS WEEK ON INTERCEPTED, an ex-CIA analyst and
a former FBI counterorism agent say they fear that a
terror attack against the U.S. could result in a coup for the radical
ideologues in the Trump White House. As Trump continues to promote his
alternative facts, Nada Bakos and Clint Watts explain
how Trump’s administration could use Dick Cheney’s model of “alternative
intelligence” to justify dangerous military actions. Immigrant communities
across the U.S. are facing a dramatic uptick in raids as part of Trump’s pledge
to deport millions while Attorney General Jeff Sessions cancels the Obama-era
order to end the use of private prisons. Shane Bauer of Mother Jones worked as
a private prison guard and breaks down the connections between the raids and
soaring private prison profits. Intercept reporter Ryan Devereaux
discusses his investigations into the Department of Homeland Security and the
White House plans for mass deportations. Trump’s insane adviser, Sebastian Gorka, hangs out with Alice in Wonderland. And an
Intercepted exclusive: the world premiere of the new song “Fake News” by the
acclaimed Iraqi-Canadian hip-hop artist, Narcy. We
bet you never thought you’d hear Steve Bannon’s name
rapped in auto-tune.
===========
q.
The U.S. Behavior That Concerns Russia
I
attended a meeting in Moscow on Friday with Vladimir Kozin,
longtime member of Russia’s foreign service, advisor
to the government, author, and advocate for arms reduction. He handed out the
list of 16 unresolved problems above. While he noted that the United States
funds NGOs in Russia, as well as Ukraine, to influence elections, and described
that as a reality in contrast to U.S. stories of Russia trying to influence a
U.S. election, which he called a fairy tale, the topic did not make the top-16
list.
===========
r.
Germany and NATO:
Preparing for a “Fascist Repression”
in Europe?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47063.htm
by
Peter Koenig
While
Washington is in turmoil, Trump’s firing of FBI’s Director Comey
being hailed by some, condemned by others and questioned with innuendo by yet
another group of critics, it looks like the U-turn The Donald has supposedly
made a few weeks ago, is fizzling out – into a cloud of confusion and chaos. And
who are the beneficiaries of this chaos? – The Neocon-Zion-Democrats,
who else?
===========
s.
From Bill Maher
to Sigmund Freud, a Very Unfunny Look at the Enduring Politics of Hate
by Bill
Blum