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Whither Modern Life?
June 27, 2025
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June 18, 2025
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Forgotten Futures in Seattle
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Autocracy Defeats Neoliberalism
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History… We’re Soaking in It!
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A Numbing Spectacle
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War Is the Air We Breathe
July 15, 2024
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Friends, a quick suggestion: If you haven’t heard, or haven’t had an opportunity to notice, the Zapatistas and Subcomandante Marcos have embarked on a 6-month “Other Campaign” in Mexico. This campaign is not an electoral campaign, though Marcos (“Delegate Zero”) is travelling around the country at the same time that the 3-way presidential campaign is heating up down there. He is ultimately intending to visit all the states of Mexico and to contact directly as many communities and organizations and individuals as feasible, who are working in practical and local ways against the status quo.
Marcos: “The Other Campaign is showing that there are those who will not sell themselves. I’m also talking about those fighters, like those that were talking here about ’68, who went through all the experiments in political participation, who were offered a way to give in to the system, that old trick of telling them that they could do more from the inside. There were people who said no, who could have gone over to the other side but stayed. The Other Campaign is a space for those people.When the Other Campaign defines itself as anticapitalist, it says: “˜we fight for our survival by bringing about the death of what is in front of us.’ Not the death of a person, but of a system.
People say, said Marcos, that he “is promoting abstention in the elections. No, compañeros, what has happened is that we have found an abstentionist movement that identifies with us, because it is sickened by the political class. And if in the past abstention was seen as apathy, the Other Campaign is discovering that it really comes from a lack of alternatives.”
“We are seeing effervescence below that doesn’t put its faith in anything from above. There is a great social effervescence that is not looking toward electoral politics and that is making the political campaigns look innocuous. Neither Madrazo, nor Calderón, nor López Obrador is rising, and it is not our fault, it is because of what they have managed to build in all these years. That is not apathy. We are looking at an effervescent movement, one that could explode at anytime with no coordination, no support.”
in response to one young man who said that “we need to break down the walls because we are all human beings.” Marcos replied: “No. We are all human beings, but some are sons of bitches and some aren’t. That is the truth. They built up their wealth on the misery, death and exploitation of others. What we want is to organize, speak and raise the consciousness of that sector in order to fight together. Because if we don’t, if we leave them alone, they are going to end up destroying everything. They have already demonstrated that. If we don’t do something now there won’t be anything left to struggle for,” Marcos concluded.
I recommend the brilliant Mexican journalist Hermann Bellinghausen’s report over at Narco News from which I’ve grabbed these quotes to catch a whiff of what’s happening invisibly just next door.
Thanks to another smart post over at Long Sunday called “Learning to Love Again“, I followed the link to a fascinating collective interview (pdf) under the same title with Wendy Brown in Contretemps.
Emotional pain and grief impede creativity and political thinking (even if there are countless brilliant artists and writers who have been driven by their grief to do great work). Paralysis and catatonia are common enough reactions to sadness, loss of love, etc. I’ve been resisting that kind of response pretty well, and this blog is part of my answer to the cavernous futility that sweeps out of the hole left behind. Seeing this title, “Learning to Love Again,” didn’t grab me right away, since I don’t really feel like I ever forgot how to love… au contraire! It’s a deep and richly flowing vein that I actually wish would subside and nap for a while, since it has no outlet for now.
But the title is derived from a question posed to Wendy Brown regarding her work on “left melancholia” and how, broadly speaking, we ‘of the left’ (a label I don’t wear comfortably) have lost our sense of the future AND one of the key historical ideologies (liberalism) towards which we have been opposed. The twin collapses of ‘really existing socialism’ and liberalism (which Wallerstein’s After Liberalism does a great job of linking over a 200-year history) has caused disorientation and even depression among various old and new left thinkers and activists.
Brown has written about this melancholia and describes the missing act of mourning as a key piece of it. In the interview John Dalton accepts that history has deposited us in a new and unknowable place, and states “Nothing is stable. A ‘left melacholia’ can then be thought without negativity, as the natality of a politics to-come.” He goes on to point to the horizon of globalization as a key arena for a left politics to renew itself, not by memorializing the past but by seeking new norms beyond the nation-state. This leads Wendy Brown to emphasize how big the future mourning will be when we have really moved beyond the nation-state as our frame of reference, since people of all political inclinations to a great extent still frame their political thinking and action in terms of a national stage. She qualifies her point by acknowledging that we are still quite bound up in both national and post-national politics, but she’s trying to get at the experience of loss that besets an agenda of human liberation.
“It would be a fabulous left project to develop a productive way of coming to terms with what we are all losing, and with what must be put into play as the affirmative prospects of those losses, or the affirmation that comes from that loss. What is allowed to live when something else dies? What is opened as a possibiliity when something that has claimed us is finally put to rest?”
This language is eerily apt for personal loss too. How does one hold and honor the anguish and grief that accompanies lost love, but let it pass, let it die, and then see what is newly opened? Wish I knew! I know I’m open and looking, but of course, this isn’t just about my personal drama. Because even though I see and feel it quite profoundly in terms of my personal life, I also live it every day in terms of the broader political culture.
Continue reading The Heart of Politics
Just finished reading Giovanni Arrighi’s two-part essay in last year’s New Left Reviews called “Hegemony Unravelling”. I like Arrighi’s essay, especially at this weirdly insular moment in U.S. history, where an inarticulate fool like Bush makes a speech that focuses SO much attention and discussion among the chattering classes. (I couldn’t even bring myself to join the demo in downtown SF to “drown out” the Bush regime… more cannon fodder duty, no thanks!) Arrighi’s essays argue for a long view of world capitalism, building on the work of David Harvey, Ferdinand Braudel, and his own collaboration with Beverly Silver (I briefly reviewed her important book, Forces of Labor, in Processed World 2.005).
When the ebb and flow of scandal and appointment and war news grips political imagination, it’s terribly difficult to get an overview, to appreciate our moment in history, to think beyond the personal and political dramas that will soon be utterly forgotten as the trivia they are. In “Hegemony Unravelling” it is argued that there have been distinct periods of capitalist development in which specific constellations of government and business institutions “fixed spatially” regimes of profitability. He identifies various periods starting with the city-states of Venice and Genoa and the latter’s relationship with Portugal and Spain, through Amsterdam and the Dutch control of world markets (all of these are transitional city-states depending more on control of instruments of finance than actual territorial domination), and then the British empire’s rise and displacement of the Dutch financiers. In the 20th century, the U.S. ‘wins’ WWI and WWII and finally takes over the central role in managing and designing world accumulation from England, only to founder on its overreach at the current moment. Arrighi is arguing that we are at the terminal point of the U.S. empire, and shows how the period from the signal crisis of U.S. hegemony (the Vietnam war and the ’60s) was overcome by a belle epoque (the 1980s and 1990s ‘prosperity’) similar to ones enjoyed by previous hegemons between their signal crises and terminal crises.
The Neo-conservative attempt to use the military to extend U.S. power and control for another 50 years, destroying in the process the international mechanisms painstakingly created by FDR, Truman and the rest of the U.S. rulers since WWII, is already clearly an abject failure. While they’re bombing the middle east back to premodern conditions, and subverting any popular movements they can (from Haiti and Venezuela to Bolivia, west Africa, etc.), the Chinese are gaining enormous financial leverage over the U.S. government. This doesn’t predict a specific endpoint, or describe how the U.S. hegemony will actually come completely undone, but it underscores the deeper historical processes we’re living through. These processes are far more important historically than the breathless fear and hysteria that accompanies every twist and turn of Washingtonian politics.
And then there is food.
Continue reading The Time it Takes
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Hidden San Francisco 2nd EDITION!
NEW 2nd EDITION NOW AVAILABLE!
Buy one here
(Pluto Press, Spring 2025)
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