I have joined the Bloggers Circle group, an initiative set up by Labour supporter Matthew Cain and aimed at getting somewhat more structured debate going between bloggers.
Imagine my dismay when one of the first pieces of work put round for possible comment was this one from Raincoat Optimism linking the musings of our old friend Slavoj Žižek to Conservative policy:
Early in 2008, philosopher Slavoj Žižek published a book entitled Violence: Six Sideways Reflections in which he aims to describe the differences between the violence we might see on the news in the form of thuggery and the violence incurred by the workings of the rogue bankers tweaking the economy.
The difference, for Žižek, is the difference between “subjective” and “objective” violence. That is to say, “subjective” violence is the perceptibly obvious violence seen on the streets in the form of “crime and terror, civil unrest, international conflict” whereas “objective” violence is the unseen form of violence that takes the form of either the “symbolic” (bound in language and its forms), or the “systemic” (the catastrophic consequences of our economy when it is functioning as normal). The very notion that this objective violence is unseen sustains the level with which we perceive something as subjectively violent.
Žižek readily points to the likes of Bill Gates and George Soros as figureheads of a new type of business ethic that implicitly incorporates objective violence. They create a philanthropic standard for themselves at which they desire to be perceived, when in fact the more appropriate standard to which one should perceive them is at the concealed level of their function in the economy, an economy that determines the fate of individuals and whole nations.
For instance when their philanthropy is contrasted to a street robber it might seem obvious who the violent criminal is, but when we start to analyse that which may not be readily perceptible – objective violence – , we start to understand their violence at another level, which the philanthropy has been used to camouflage.
If we change the word philanthropy with compassion we will have some idea of the tools the Tories are playing with at the moment...
Oh dear. That old PoMo Marxist playfulness returns.
Since Marxists can not show that capitalism is obviously more 'violent' than any other system, they make up a category of invisible violence which they alone see and which they can then ascribe to anyone they dislike.
A bit like 'false consciousness': those pesky workers just keep on looking at the world in their own way, not through the prism of Marxist analysis as defined by the self-appointed vanguard of the proletariat.
I mean, how banal is all this? Even if one wants to make the not very original point that 'ultimately' everything is based on violence (since back in the mists of time the strongest grabbed land for themselves and then set about defending it by creating laws which let them do it), you surely have to throw into the pot the subjective and objective benefits of this system too.
Then compare the whole lot with the sort of lumpen Stalinist and overtly violent politics Žižek supports to see which might, all things considered, be better.
As for the rest of the Raincoat piece, I just can not follow the point:
So the way in which Blond has supported his communitarianism is by utilising more of the same expressions of false hope provided by the dog-eat-dog world of the markets. But this standard has been obfuscated by a standard of compassionate camouflage. Exactly the sort of camouflage Zizek was talking about that Soros and Gates use.
So now is the chance for the left to pounce, to promote its own communitarianism based on dialogues between people and public services – like the type used by Ed Balls and his idea that education can get stronger through dialogue between parent, teachers and authority over the internet – and overcome the hidden motives by the Tories
Dialogues between people and public services?
Just how in practice might that work, please?
How might any Ministry or local authority in practice process the hundreds or thousands of points made by the public, or have any idea which might be genuine? This is not policy. It's a silly noise.
Now here's a serious Marxist philosopher who grew up: Leszek Kolakowski.
The Times:
Kolakowski’s criticism of the Left became increasingly trenchant as his career developed in the West. In 1978 he wrote three volumes called Main Currents in Marxism. It was a comprehensive overview of the movement and examined the origins and theory of dialectical materialism and his amazement at how communism had “become the rallying point for so many different and mutually hostile forces”.
His critique ran from the Classical philosopher Plotinus, whose work Kolakowski considered foundational, right through to Maoism.
At the end of the epilogue of the third volume, he concluded: “At present, Marxism neither interprets the world nor changes it: it is merely a repertoire of slogans serving to organise various interests, most of them completely remote from those with which Marxism originally identified itself.”
Indeed.
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