I cite

Brother Cornel West: love, justice, and the public option

AMY GOODMAN: I just remember when you were told, talking about the difference between white men and black men’s survival.

CORNEL WEST: Yeah. That hit me so hard. He looked me in my face.

AMY GOODMAN: This was the doctor?

CORNEL WEST: This is the doctor. And he said, “If you were a white man, you have a chance, an 80 percent chance of living. A black man, a 20 percent.” I said, “Race matters at that level? You’ve got to be kidding.” Prostate cancer, yes. I said, “What about the research?” They don’t have too many research papers on this issue. And I said, “Well, wait a minute. Black brothers dying like this, and they don’t have major scholarly research to find out why the differential?” You know, this is a major problem, and this is part of the issue of healthcare again.

I mean, I’m dealing with the depression of this rejection of the public option. What a joke! You’re going to get a bill through with no substance and poor people left dangling, working people left dangling, and a bonanza for the companies again? If that doesn’t reinforce the levels of cynicism, when you and I give our lives trying to call into question to get people to become active, if that doesn’t reinforce cynicism, what does? When do elites finally have to give substantive concessions to poor people and working people? The history of the human drama, right? Trying to preserve the dignity and decency of poor and working people.

And you say to yourself, well, you know, we’ve got to keep—keep at it. I’m deeply inspired by your example also, Sister Amy, I tell you that. You landed a long time. And this book very much is an attempt to touch one life. I would not have labored in vain in this book, if I can touch one life to get somebody to say, “I want to deal with the funk in my life. I want to generate a capacity to love in such a way that I promote justice, and I’m willing to pay a cost for truth, not just become tied into the powers that be, and duplicitous the forms of injustice.”

via www.democracynow.org

Robocops Come to Pittsburgh

News from the G20 (coming up next, Terminators):

Nearly 200 arrests were made and civil liberties groups charged the many thousands of police (transported on Port Authority buses displaying "PITTSBURGH WELCOMES THE WORLD"), from as far away as Arizona and Florida with overreacting ... and they had plenty of weaponry with which to do it.

    Bean bags fired from shotguns, CS (tear) gas, OC (Oleoresin Capsicum) spray, flash-bang grenades, batons and, according to local news reports, for the first time on the streets of America, the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD).

    I saw the LRAD, mounted in the turret of an Armored Personnel Carrier (APC), in action twice in the area of 25th, Penn and Liberty Streets of Lawrenceville, an old Pittsburgh neighborhood. Blasting a shrill, piercing noise like a high-pitched police siren on steroids, it quickly swept streets and sidewalks of pedestrians, merchants and journalists, and drove residents into their homes, but in neither case were any demonstrators present. The APC, oversized and sinister for a city street, together with lines of police in full riot gear looking like darkly threatening Michelin Men, made for a scene out of a movie you didn't want to be in.

    As intimidating as this massive show of armed force and technology was, the good burghers of Pittsburgh and their fellow citizens in the Land of the Brave and Home of the Free ain't seen nothin' yet. Tear gas and pepper spray are nothing to sniff at and, indeed, have proven fatal a surprising number of times, but they have now become the old standbys compared to the list below that's already at or coming soon to a police station or National Guard headquarters near you. Proving that "what goes around, comes around," some of the new Property Protection Devices were developed by a network of federally funded, university-based research institutes like one in Pittsburgh itself, Penn State's Institute for Non-Lethal Defense Technologies.

    * Raytheon Corp.'s Active Denial System, designed for crowd control in combat zones, uses an energy beam to induce an intolerable heating sensation, like a hot iron placed on the skin. It is effective beyond the range of small arms, in excess of 400 meters (about one-quarter mile). Company officials have been advised they could expand the market by selling a smaller, tripod-mounted version for police forces.

    * M5 Modular Crowd Control Munition, with a range of 30 meters (about 98 feet) "is similar in operation to a claymore mine, but it delivers ... a strong, nonpenetrating blow to the body with multiple sub-munitions (600 rubber balls)."

    * Long Range Acoustic Device or "The Scream," is a powerful megaphone the size of a satellite dish that can emit sound "50 times greater than the human threshold for pain" at close range, causing permanent hearing damage. The Los Angeles Times wrote that US Marines in Iraq used it in 2004. It can deliver recorded warnings in Arabic and, on command, emit a piercing tone ..." [For] most people, even if they plug their ears, [the device] will produce the equivalent of an instant migraine," says Woody Norris, chairman of American Technology Corp., the San Diego firm that produces the weapon. "It will knock [some people] on their knees." CBS News reported in 2005 that the Israeli Army first used the device in the field to break up a protest against Israel's separation wall. "Protesters covered their ears and grabbed their heads, overcome by dizziness and nausea, after the vehicle-mounted device began sending out bursts of audible, but not loud, sound at intervals of about 10 seconds.... A military official said the device emits a special frequency that targets the inner ear."

Toward a Breakdown of the Capitalist Subject?

An excerpt from an article by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval

  By everywhere establishing competitive situations between subjects, by inciting them to become the winners of a universal competition, by imposing controls and surveillance and, above all, by pushing subjects to self-control by making performance the ruler of each person's life, this system has the impact of constructing a new subject, a "neo-subject," as some psychoanalysts call it.

    Such a normative logic, in fact, relates just as much to one's relationship with oneself as to one's relations with others. It is as subjective as it is political. That's what makes it so strong and difficult to erase. Whether one considers the department head who takes herself for a "modern manager," the employee subject to the guilt-inducing procedures of the "evaluation," the consumer whose desires are harnessed by the hope of ineffable joys acquired at a good price, the student invited to confuse the progress of knowledge with the individual growth of "human capital," it's every subjectivity that, from some specific angle, is led to conform to the imperative of no limitations. To exceed oneself, to go beyond one's bounds, such is the maxim of capitalist subjectivity.

    Capital accumulation has become the principle of individual operation, as though it were necessary for existence to be indexed to the life of finance, as though each individual must regard himself as a "self-company": the "always more" hoped for by consumers (enjoyment) answers the "always more" required of workers (performance). Still worse, enjoyment of the self is supposed to be experienced by smashing all limits. So, it is appropriate to speak of a performance-enjoyment apparatus.

    Three decades of capitalist government deliver this lesson: No extension of capital is possible without the transformation of man. Consequently, it's a matter not only of proletarianizing populations to the ends of the earth, of increasing the inequalities between rich and poor, but also of "dynamizing" subjects by making every employee a calculating, maximizing individual, an "entrepreneur of one's self." Mrs. Thatcher, faithful to the Puritan ethos, found the formula: "Economics are the method, the object is to change the soul."

    Changing the soul is a fine project that requires multiple disciplines to effect. The general diffusion of the techniques of individual quantitative evaluation, the boom in "personnel development" methods, the omnipresence of marketing in human relations, the promotion of competitive sports as a model for one's relationship to oneself, the submission of politics to the logic of management: these apparatuses make a system and tend to impose a certain form of existence.

via www.truthout.org

Badiou: Is the word communism forever doomed?

Excerpt from Badiou (Lacan.com)

The word Communism is today a completely forgotten word, only practically identified with a lost experience. It is why the political situation, and the ideological situation are so confusing. Because in fact, the Communist hypothesis, with or without the word Communism, which is only a word, you can speak, for example of the egalitarian hypothesis or the hypothesis of radical equality or whatever, but all that remains of the right hypothesis, the right to think an idea of new possibilities, and not only of realization of old possibilities inscribed in the state. I see no hope. If this hypothesis must be ours, once more we need new words. But we know better to do anything whatsoever as far as the collective action is concerned. Without the horizon of equality and Communism, without this idea, nothing in historical and political revolution is of the nature to interest the philosopher. Let everyone mind his own business and talk no more about it.

In fact, what has become of it, or we can even say our ‘philosophical duty’, is to contribute with finding a new mode of existence of the hypothesis we have, new kinds of political organization this hypothesis can give rise to. We have learned from the second sequence and its fateful failure, we must return to the conditions of existence of the Communist hypothesis, and not only to perfect the means of our struggle.

The lesson of the second sequence is that the question of victory cannot be the center of our sequence. We have, and we must, experience something new, and, there is, after the resistance, the question of the power. What is the politics which is not to be confused with the question of the power? That is, the real one. We cannot be satisfied with the dialectic situation between the state and the mass movement, with the preparation of the insurrection, with the construction of the power pool and dialectic organization, with the concept of revolution, which today is obscure. We must, in reality, reestablish first the hypothesis, communist or egalitarian, with the ideological or militant fit. And with respect to this, we are closer to the powers already in mind in the 19th century. There we are with the history of the revolution of the last century. We are much closer to the 19th century than to the last century. In the dialectical division of history we have, sometimes, to move ahead of time.

Just like maybe after 1840, we are now confronted with absolutely cynical capitalism, more and more inspired by the ideas that only work backwards: poor are justly poor, the Africans are underdeveloped, and that the future with no discernable limit belongs to the civilized bourgeoisie of the Western world. All kinds of phenomena from the 19th century reappear, extraordinarily extended forms of misery within these countries themselves. Forever growing in inequality, the radical cut between the people of the working classes, of the uninformed, and the middle class, the complete dissolution of political power in the service of property and capitalist profits. Several years of ratiocination, disorganization of revolutionaries, and the nihilist despair of large portions of the youth, the servility of the large majority of them, and the experience of the base obsequiousness of formal groups in the quest of the contemporary means to establish, re-establish, find new definitions for the Communist hypothesis.

All these characteristics are very close to the political situation which was dominant in Europe in the middle of the 19th century. Which is why the apparent victory of capitalism, occasion to the second sequence of the Communist hypothesis, had been, in fact, a very strong reaction, a very strong return to something very old. The politicization of contemporary capitalism is as you see the return to the cynical capitalism of the 19th century. And it is probably why after the 19th century the question is not for us the victory of the Communist hypothesis, but the conditions of its identity. Our problems are much more the problems of Marx than the problems of Lenin, and that was the great question of the revolutionaries of the 19th century.

First, did the historical existence of the hypothesis produce the conditions in a large nation of people and that we are not made prisoners by the very definition of the word uttered by our enemies? Even historical resistance to the hypothesis, where there is a lot of power, is that, sort of identified here, that is oppressing us. It is complex, but at the moment exciting too. By combining conflicts of thought because at the beginning we are dealing with a new form of an instance or idea, there is a weight to the constructions of thought, like the construction of a new form of dialectic by Marx. These constructions of thought are always normal and universal. But we are also with new political experimentations, which are local and singular, and the mixture of the two may constitute a thought at the universal level, with political experimentation at the local or singular level, which finally can produce the new form: the Communist hypothesis.

This existence must be, throughout history, in consciousness, by new forms of these organizations of what is the political event, and on the level by the result and by learning of local experimentation. So we can open the third sequence of this great time, we can. And if we can, we must.

via www.lacan.com

More comments on the communique

Another section of the communique:

We must begin by preventing the university from functioning.  We must interrupt the normal flow of bodies and things and bring work and class to a halt.  We will blockade, occupy, and take what’s ours.  Rather than viewing such disruptions as obstacles to dialogue and mutual understanding, we see them as what we have to say, as how we are to be understood.  This is the only meaningful position to take when crises lay bare the opposing interests at the foundation of society.  Calls for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common ground between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy it.

If the university is already dysfunctional, then preventing the university from functioning IS participation in the status quo. Indebted students, underpaid teaching-assistants, over-worked adjuncts, collapsing infrastructure, dissolving libraries--this is the current dysfunction. What about making the university serve another function? What about making it function for common ends, for common futures? This is the more vital task--and it is so much harder. It requires discipline and sacrifice, not the affective intensities of manifestoes and blockades.

Yes, calls for unity are empty. But working to forge a commonality, a solidarity, a collective is the only way that a taking that is not empty is possible. The university is more than a set of crumbling buildings. What if part of the real dysfunction of the university has been the way its capitalist subsumption has prevented students (and sometimes faculty) from valuing ideas, history, theory, thinking. What if part of the crisis is the crisis of imagination--students are captured because they don't read, don't think, and we (faculty) aren't teaching them to do so.

The real destruction of the status quo involves more than occupying buildings. It involves reclaiming the capacity to think critically and becoming disciplined enough to do so.

Comments on the communique

Here is a passage from the communique:

In the midst of the current crisis, which will be long and protracted, many on the left want to return to the golden age of public education.  They naïvely imagine that the crisis of the present is an opportunity to demand the return of the past.  But social programs that depended upon high profit rates and vigorous economic growth are gone.  We cannot be tempted to make futile grabs at the irretrievable while ignoring the obvious fact that there can be no autonomous “public university” in a capitalist society.   The university is subject to the real crisis of capitalism, and capital does not require liberal education programs. The function of the university has always been to reproduce the working class by training future workers according to the changing needs of capital. The crisis of the university today is the crisis of the reproduction of the working class, the crisis of a period in which capital no longer needs us as workers. We cannot free the university from the exigencies of the market by calling for the return of the public education system.  We live out the terminus of the very market logic upon which that system was founded.  The only autonomy we can hope to attain exists beyond capitalism.

There are problems with this argument. The first is the claim regarding social programs that depended on high profit rates and vigorous economic growth. The public university system in the US did not depend on high profit rates and economic growth. Rather, the system depended on high levels of taxation and limited expectations regarding growth. High taxes helped decrease short-term incentives for gain and helped equalize opportunity. They also funded those enterprises deemed publicly important. In fact, part of the economic crisis of the seventies was brought about by capitalist sectors tired of their declining rate of profit. Those capitalist sectors are the ones that have inculcated US society with suppositions regarding high profit and economic growth rates.

The second problem concerns the autonomy of the university under capitalism. Much rides on what autonomy means. If it means completely outside capitalism, then of course there is no autonomous university. If the lack of autonomy means that the completely dependent on capitalist economic incentives, then that is also false. One of the ways that capitalism insures its success is by allowing for areas of life that are not immediately subject to its logics and demands even as they support it--the family, religion, leisure time, art, and, yes, parts of the university.

Third, the function of the university has not 'always been to reproduce the working class.' In the US, only approximately a quarter to a third of high school graduates get a BA degree. The university here is supporting an elite, a managerial class, a technological class, a class of symbolic knowledge workers, medical scientists, legal experts to manage the affairs of the rich etc. The university, then, isn't reproducing the working class--it's reproducing the bourgeoisie. The crisis of the university is their crisis--they are the one's whose life and future is deeply threatened. Their fear is of becoming-worker, of the loss of what was supposed to be guarantees of quality of life and security. Workers in the US only briefly had these guarantees--from the forties through the seventies.

So, again, the students' fear is correct: that they are not needed or will not be needed--perhaps they should connect this with current and idiotic calls for Free (as in free labor and free consumer goods)--Free means no one gets paid, no one is needed on the job because of the reserve army of the unemployed. But this is not a crisis of the working class. It's the crisis of the middle class--and we do well to remember what happened in various "Third World" countries as structural adjustment policies wiped out their middle classes, sending millions into poverty--back to the working class and peasantry (itself actually becoming decimated through export oriented corporate agriculture) now configured as the un and underemployed--a tiny elite with everything and an enormous all with nearly nothing. That's the crisis of the US middle class, the crisis of the universities.

How to free the university? Fund it. Fund it with taxes. Fund it with the collectivization and nationalization of banks. Fund it with the end of insurance companies and the beginning of singular payer health care. Fund it by dissolving the debts of individuals and families. Fund it by ending financial support for militarism and weaponry. Fund it by defunding the prison-industrial complex. Fund it by letting people with skills in building and carpentry and electronics and plumbing teach students how to repair our collapsed cities and having students work and learn and help. Fund it by turning off so many screens and computers and energy sucking devices and sending students into archives and libraries.Fund it by capping senior faculty salaries, by paying everyone in the university within the same salary rather than letting markets drive up salaries.

The only autonomy lies in getting beyond capitalism--it doesn't exist yet.

Communiqué from an Absent Future « we want everything

From the UC strike:

Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt.  This bankruptcy is not only financial.  It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making.  No one knows what the university is for anymore.  We feel this intuitively.  Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market.  These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.

Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of a dead future: these are the remains of the university.  Among these remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous habits and duties.  We go through the motions of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up by subvocalized resentments.  Nothing is interesting, nothing can make itself felt.  The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe is no more real than the windows in which it appears.

For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do).  Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities.  Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords.  We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved.  We shepherd our emptiness from place to place.

But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a condition, not a project.  University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers.  Even leisure is a form of job training.  The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office.  Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work.  We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym.  We run tirelessly in elliptical circles.

It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle.  “Work hard, play hard” has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for…what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk.  A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.

We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow.  And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have.  Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation.  Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt.  We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around.  Average student loan debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century—80-100 percent for students of color.  Student loan volume—a figure inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003.  What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives.  What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest.  Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.

This is the prospect for which we have been preparing since grade-school.  Those of us who came here to have our privilege notarized surrendered our youth to a barrage of tutors, a battery of psychological tests, obligatory public service ops—the cynical compilation of half-truths toward a well-rounded application profile.  No wonder we set about destroying ourselves the second we escape the cattle prod of parental admonition.  On the other hand, those of us who came here to transcend the economic and social disadvantages of our families know that for every one of us who “makes it,” ten more take our place—that the logic here is zero-sum.  And anyway, socioeconomic status remains the best predictor of student achievement.  Those of us the demographics call “immigrants,” “minorities,” and “people of color” have been told to believe in the aristocracy of merit.  But we know we are hated not despite our achievements, but precisely because of them.  And we know that the circuits through which we might free ourselves from the violence of our origins only reproduce the misery of the past in the present for others, elsewhere.

If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers.  Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for.  It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things.  One’s future position in the system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience.  First we pay, then we “work hard.”  And there is the split: one is both the commander and the commanded, consumer and consumed.  It is the system itself which one obeys, the cold buildings that enforce subservience.  Those who teach are treated with all the respect of an automated messaging system.  Only the logic of customer satisfaction obtains here:  was the course easy?  Was the teacher hot?  Could any stupid asshole get an A?  What’s the point of acquiring knowledge when it can be called up with a few keystokes?  Who needs memory when we have the internet?  A training in thought?  You can’t be serious.  A moral preparation?  There are anti-depressants for that.

via wewanteverything.wordpress.com

Obscenity on stilts... or in dancing shoes

It's been nearly impossible to avoid confronting the hideous images of Tom DeLay on Dancing with the Stars--even if one has been able to escape prior contact with the show. What I can't quite fathom is the mentality that accepts, even celebrates, this sort of indignity.

The nomination of Palin, a clear incompetent, to the VP slot on the Republican ticket was perhaps a clear step in this direction. There was little no pretense of expertise, knowledge, experience, or talent. Using the Bush model wherein the capacity to use language to formulate ideas is treated as a liability, the people behind Palin seemed to revel in her inability to speak, in her un-language, in-expression, in her ability to push or incite feelings by escaping/disrupting the dimension of language altogether. Stumbling through and around words no longer limited by syntax and grammar, Palin evoked the inexpressibility of rage and indignation, perhaps even an embrace of the outside of language insofar as putting-into-words necessarily entraps one in responsibility and guilt.

Dancing DeLay confronts us with the obscene dimensions of the outside of language--repulsive enjoyment, a primal father, a figure so beyond language, norms, decency, that he is incapable of shame. It's an assault, ass and crotch, yes, but the worst shots are of the face, distorted and writhing in enjoyment, an enjoyment that is flaunted.

The Republicans as the party of enjoyment: they aren't cynical. They don't pretend that laws, decency, reason, respect, or consideration are any longer aspects of US society. Hatred of immigrants, of gays, of any one who thinks that unbridled self-assertion and survival of the fittest is a problem, are the tenets of this party. Rage is the (dis)order of the day and obscenity its carnivalesque accompaniment.

With Global Capitalism Exposed as a Sham, All the Global Elite Have Left Is Pure Force

Chris Hedges (read the whole thing here):

Our global economy, like our political system, has been hijacked by a tiny oligarchy, composed mostly of wealthy white men who serve corporations. They have pledged or raised a staggering $18 trillion, looted largely from state treasuries, to prop up banks and other financial institutions that engaged in suicidal acts of speculation and ruined the world economy. They have formulated trade deals so corporations can speculate across borders with currency, food and natural resources even as, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, 1.02 billion people on the planet struggle with hunger. Globalization has obliterated the ability of many poor countries to protect food staples such as corn, rice, beans and wheat with subsidies or taxes on imported staples. The abolishment of these protections has permitted the giant mechanized farms to wipe out tens of millions of small farmers-2 million in Mexico alone-bankrupting many and driving them off their land. Those who could once feed themselves can no longer find enough food, and the wealthiest governments use institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization like pit bulls to establish economic supremacy. There is little that most governments seem able to do to fight back.

But the game is up. The utopian dreams of globalization have been exposed as a sham. Force is all the elite have left. We are living through one of civilization's great seismic reversals. The ideology of globalization, like all utopias that are sold as inevitable and irreversible, has become a farce. The power elite, perplexed and confused, cling to the disastrous principles of globalization and its outdated language to mask the political and economic vacuum before us. The absurd idea that the marketplace alone should determine economic and political constructs caused the crisis. It led the G-20 to sacrifice other areas of human importance-from working conditions, to taxation, to child labor, to hunger, to health and pollution-on the altar of free trade. It left the world's poor worse off and the United States with the largest deficits in human history. Globalization has become an excuse to ignore the mess. It has left a mediocre elite desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved and, more important, trying to save itself. "Speculation," then-President Jacques Chirac of France once warned, "is the AIDS of our economies." We have reached the terminal stage. 

via www.alternet.org

Stage fright

Lenin describes democracy as a stage on the road from feudalism to capitalism and from capitalism to communism. At first glance, this is rather odd. How could a stage occur twice? Is one stage a regression? A kind of one step forward, two steps back?

The answer, it seems, is that there are two kinds of democracy: bourgeois and proletarian democracy. So, bourgeois democracy emerges first, with formal claims to and guarantees of equality. Proletarian democracy uses, mobilizes, deploys these formal guarantees, but in the interests of the people, not the rich. It uses democracy to suppress the exploiters, not to buttress them.

With regard to the question of stages this answer isn't convincing, however. Isn't bourgeois democracy precisely the form of the capitalist state, of capitalism organized as a state? If that's the case, then democracy isn't a stage prior to capitalism, but an excrescence of capitalism. Actually, excrescence makes more sense than stage--it can allow for the growth and change and development of capitalism, of capitalism's own transmogrifications.

Perhaps, though, this tells us that the economic stages and the political stages are not in sync; the political form of democracy would correspond, then, to the transition and initial realization of the economic stage. The political form, democracy, then would take on its own dynamics, empowering some entities and blocking others from power. It would be an instrument and organization that would lead to as well as block mobilized struggle.

But what if bourgeois democracy becomes so much the tool of the rich and powerful, so intertwined with capitalism (communicative capitalism) that it loses its capacity to function in such a way that furthers the development of the proletariat? Lenin writes:

at a certain stage in the development of democracy, it first weld together the class that wages a revolutionary struggle against capitalism--the proletariat, and enables it to crush, smash to atoms, wipe off the face of the earth, the bourgeois, even the republican-bourgeois, state machine.

Present political conditions suggest that in the US at least democracy is not welding together a class that wages a revolutionary struggle against capitalism (to put it mildly). Instead, democracy has transmogrified into communicative capitalism. So instead of a state that is alienated from society, a parasitic excresence, we have a political culture/process/spectacle/circuit that is embedded in society: some forms of this are public-private partnerships; other forms are the subordination of political logics to economic ones; still other forms are the revolving doors between corporations and public office. The merging of state and economy accompanies a co-optation or totalization of social energies (now individualized, medicalized, therapeutized, commodified, specularized, securitized).

This transmogrification is not without remainder: witness over 2 million people in the prison system; witness the abandoned cities, regions, neighborhoods, bodies; witness the bacteria growing on the beaches and the medical waste and pharmaceutical products in the water supply. The problem is that we can and do witness these horrors, yet the very instruments of witnessing reinforce the dynamics, circuits, and intensities of communicative capitalism.

Reading Lenin, I wonder about two aspects of revolutionary struggle that some of us have let lie fallow: armed workers as a militia of the population and iron discipline. Why exactly have these means of revolution come to be off limits? Whose interest does their foreclosure serve? The absence of discipline eases communicative capitalism's access to our desires, to our hopes for enjoyment, to our sense that we should enjoy, that we are entitled to, that we must enjoy, that anyone who steals or threatens our enjoyment must be the enemy. Perhaps this last twist can be amplified, extended, deployed: who indeed steals our enjoyment, our health, our produce, our climate, our future? Who promises it and manipulates us with promises not kept? Who installs the detours, who entraps us in endless circuits with their bits and fragments of mc-joyments? Perhaps amplification of this twist can incite discipline, a kind of bar that might bring together and strengthen the political demand.