Previously unreleased footage of Nina Simone put out today:
The End of Freedom
Lenin:
… This is what is important in Marx’s ‘ideology criticism’ - far from upholding a banal dichotomy between ‘essence’ and ‘appearance’, Marx collapsed the distance between the two. They are not identical, but nor are they autonomous. As he argued in the Grundrisse, against Proudhon and his followers, social equality is precisely not just a false claim made for markets. Rather, individuals are “stipulated for each other”, in the context of an exchange of equivalents, as free and equal agents. Market transactions do not express themselves as involuntary expropriation, even where that is in fact what is happening, but as voluntary engagements.
That explains the context in which the ideas of neoliberalism could even be comprehensible; the historic collapse of the postwar social democratic compromise provided the occasion for their aggressive relaunch; and the liberalisation of the stock exchange announced their hegemony. The true believers really do see the broad historical shift that is taking place…
Commemorating the Haitian Revolution
Interesting write-up on the Haitian Revolution, the construction of “blackness” and Haiti’s first independent ruler, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, over at Lenin’s Tomb.
Zizek on Haiti: Democracy versus the People
Slavoj Zizek reviews Peter Hallward’s book on Haiti in the New Statesman:
As Aristide himself puts it: “It is better to be wrong with the people than to be right against the people.” Despite some all-too-obvious mistakes, the Lavalas regime was in effect one of the figures of how “dictatorship of the proletariat” might look today: while pragmatically engaging in some externally imposed compromises, it always remained faithful to its “base”, to the crowd of ordinary dispossessed people, speaking on their behalf, not “representing” them but directly relying on their local self-organisations. Although respecting the democratic rules, Lavalas made it clear that the electoral struggle is not where things are decided: what is much more crucial is the effort to supplement democracy with the direct political self-organisation of the oppressed. Or, to put it in our “postmodern” terms: the struggle between Lavalas and the capitalist-military elite in Haiti is a case of genuine antagonism, an antagonism which cannot be contained within the frame of parliamentary-democratic “agonistic pluralism”.
This is why Hallward’s outstanding book is not just about Haiti, but about what it means to be a “leftist” today: ask a leftist how he stands towards Aristide, and it will be immediately clear if he is a partisan of radical emancipation or merely a humanitarian liberal who wants “globalisation with a human face”.
(Via I cite.)
The American Right and Freedom
The Nation:
In “Conservative Thought,” an unjustly neglected essay from 1927, Karl Mannheim argued that conservatives have never been wild about the idea of freedom. It threatens the submission of subordinate to superior. Because freedom is the lingua franca of modern politics, however, they have had “a sound enough instinct not to attack” it. Instead, they have made freedom the stalking horse of inequality, and inequality the stalking horse of submission. Men are naturally unequal, they argue. Freedom requires that they be allowed to develop their unequal gifts. A free society must be an unequal society, composed of radically distinct, and hierarchical, particulars.
Worth reading the entire article. (Via 3 Quarks Daily.)