Gimme Culture

[rumagin]

“the political is a fraud: under the guise of the common interest, the state guarantees a political equality that leaves social inequality untouched

Peter Stallybrass (via rumagin)

[rumagin]

[rumagin]

[septictankie]

Veneration for the past has always seemed to me reactionary. The right chooses to talk about the past because it prefers dead people: a quiet world, a quiet time. The powerful who legitimize their privileges by heredity cultivate nostalgia. History is studied as if we were visiting a museum; but this collection of mummies is a swindle. They lie to us about the past as they lie to us about the present: they mask the face of reality. They force the oppressed victims to absorb an alien, dessicated, sterile memory fabricated by the oppressor, so that they will resign themselves to a life that isn’t theirs as if it were the only one possible.

Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (via chinesekleptocracy)

[rumagin]

I am now able to better distinguish between capitalist writing—which typically emerges from the liberal, mainstream media and is intended to produce commodities—and socialist writing—which is intended to produce a confident community of struggle.

Vijay Prashad http://bostonreview.net/global-justice/vijay-prashad-mark-nowak-writing-while-socialist

[rumagin]

First, we electrified the night. Light is a profound degrader of our sleep. Second, there is the issue of work: not only the porous borders between when you start and finish, but longer commuter times, too. No one wants to give up time with their family or entertainment, so they give up sleep instead. And anxiety plays a part. We’re a lonelier, more depressed society. Alcohol and caffeine are more widely available. All these are the enemies of sleep.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/24/why-lack-of-sleep-health-worst-enemy-matthew-walker-why-we-sleep?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

[rumagin]

What white people have to do is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a nigger in the first place. Because I am not a nigger. I’m a man…. If I’m not the nigger here, and if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that.

James Baldwin - I am not your Negro

[labourpress]

Diane Abbott speech to Labour Party Conference

Diane Abbott MP, Shadow Home Secretary, speaking at Labour Party Conference, said:

***CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY***

Good morning conference.

It is a pleasure, and a privilege to address this conference as Shadow Home Secretary.

But I would like to begin by thanking the members and supporters up and down the country, and those of you in this hall, who helped to deliver the stunning advance in this year’s General Election.

You were the architects of our success. And you were able to do it because: you believed in our values; you believed in our manifesto and, above all, you believed in the Labour party leadership.

Many commentators did not foresee the General Election result that we had.

Some even said that we would be annihilated. But today the Labour party is stronger than ever, we are still standing… I am still standing.

But there is much more to do. We have to get rid of this appalling FAILING Tory government. We have to win the next General Election. Whenever it comes. AND WE WILL.

The theme of this session is “Protecting Our Communities”.

And there is no greater responsibility for government than keeping the nation safe from the menace of TERRORISM.  Tragically last week we saw the fifth terror incident this year at Parsons Green tube station. This comes after the terrorist atrocities at: Westminster; the Manchester Arena; London Bridge; Borough Market and Finsbury Park.   Looking back we must pay tribute to: the brave police officers; firefighters; NHS workers and transport police who ran towards danger and rose to the challenge of keeping us safe.

The Tories have no respect for public sector workers as their unfair public sector pay cap shows. But in its moments of greatest peril the nation turns to its public sector workers. They should NOT be played off against each other and they should ALL be paid properly.

Because you cannot keep the nation secure on the cheap.

Yet only on Friday the Chair of the National Police Chiefs Council warned that that counter-terror funding to police forces was to be cut by seven-point-two per-cent over the next 3 years.

Yet, Home Office documents reveal that the budget for the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism will fall by more than fifty million pounds over the next two years.

We oppose these cuts and Labour will reverse them in Government.

And, as part of combatting terrorism effectively, Labour is committed to a thorough review of the “Prevent” strand of counter-terrorism policy. Increasingly there is a concern that Prevent is a tainted brand and not fit for purpose.

Trampling on our civil liberties will do the terrorists work for them.

What makes us free is what makes us safe.

And what makes us safe is what will make us free.

Another key aspect of protecting communities is POLICING. I have represented an inner city constituency for thirty years. I know it is the poor, women and minorities who suffer most from crime. I have always taken fighting crime very seriously, and will continue to do so as Labour Home Secretary.

And the reality of the Tory record on law and order is a long way from their rhetoric. Since 2010 Theresa May has been Home Secretary and now Prime Minister. But ON HER WATCH: the number of police officers has dropped by twenty thousand. Two-point-three-billion has been cut from police budgets.

The truth is austerity undermines policing in exactly the same way that it undermines our health service. We see the consequences of this around us, with rising levels of homicide, knife, and gun crime. And the police themselves are suffering from spiralling levels of overwork and stress.

Labour in government will work to make communities safe. And we will recruit ten thousand new police officers working in the community.

Another key aspect of protecting communities is keeping them safe from FIRE risk. Once again, this is something where this Tory government has let the people of this country down.

And the extent of their failure is symbolised by the Grenfell Fire.

Who can forget those images of Grenfell tower ablaze? And this did not happen in a slum in an impoverished country far away. It happened here in Britain, in one of the wealthiest areas of the country, in one of the richest countries in the world.

The Tory controlled Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea treated the residents of Grenfell like second class citizens.

And when the disaster struck the Royal Borough’s response was shameful. Even now, out of the all the families made homeless only a handful have been offered permanent homes. And this in a borough with over two thousand empty properties. Am I the only person wondering why Commissioners have not been sent into the FAILING Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea?

But Tory failure in relation to Grenfell goes further than the borough council. Events at Grenfell are also a direct consequence of: deregulation of fire standards and inspection; privatisation and outsourcing.

We demand justice for the Grenfell survivors. They will not be FORGOTTEN. We demand an immigration amnesty for former Grenfell residents so they ALL feel able to come forward for help.

Labour in government will recruit three thousand additional firefighters. We fully support the campaigning of the Fire Brigades Union, against the cuts. We all saw the photographs of the brave smoke blackened firefighters insisting on going back into the flames to save lives. We relied on our fire brigade at Grenfell. And the fire brigade must be the lead agency for assessing risk, fire inspections and proper sign-off for all major works and refurbishment.

No more outsourcing to the private sector.

And I cannot leave this subject without paying tribute to my colleague Emma Dent Coad, the MP for Kensington.

As a new MP, she found herself having to deal with a national tragedy on the scale of Grenfell. She has offered love and leadership to her community in full measure and conference should applaud her.

Emma has shown that Labour can make a difference EVERYWHERE. And that Labour can WIN anywhere.

We finally had an Inquiry into the Hillsborough tragedy, thanks to tireless campaigning of the people of Liverpool with the support of my colleagues Andy Burnham and Steve Rotherham. But as Labour Home secretary I promise: a full Inquiry into Orgreave; an inquiry into the trials of Shrewsbury twenty-four AND an inquiry into what happened to the thirty-seven Cammell Laird workers.

They ALL deserve justice

Another vital Home Affairs issue is IMMIGRATION.

Tory opportunism on immigration is a disgrace. They continue to talk about bogus immigration targets, which they have not met and will never meet.

The Tories have weaponised immigration.

They have pandered to anti-immigrant sentiment whatever the cost to the economy and communities.

Many of you will have seen the Panorama program which revealed the brutal regime at Brooke House detention centre.

Labour will put an end to indefinite immigration detention.

There ARE real labour market issues. But the Labour party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn will not scapegoat immigrants for these issues.

Labour in government will work across departments to counter the effects of deregulation, liberalisation and weakening of trade union rights and freedoms.

 Far from immigrants being a drain on the public sector the truth is that, without immigrants, and the children of immigrants we would not have a National Health Service we have today.

And of course EU citizens in this country also play a vital role in the economy.

The willingness of the Theresa May to use them as bargaining chips in the negotiations is shameful. We will guarantee the rights of EU nationals living in this country. It is both vital for our economy and it’s the right thing to do.

I have visited refugee encampments in Calais, Greece and Lebanon and seen the pitiful conditions that so many refugees live in.

And even in Britain the current arrangements for housing refugees are not fit for purpose. They are not fair to refugees and they are not fair to our communities. We will review these arrangements.

Labour under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn will fulfil its responsibilities to refugees, in particular child refugees.  Parliament passed the Dubs Amendment and we will implement it fully.

The watchword for our approach to immigration in government will be fairness and the reasonable management of migration.

But as the child of immigrants, Conference must believe me when I say that, under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, immigration policy will always be shaped by enduring Labour values.

Conclusion

Thank you again, Conference. For coming to Brighton, for listening to me, for participating in the debates to come and helping to formulate policy.

[rumagin]

Starting with a series of measures in the late 1970s, the leaders of this city-state effectively banned Chinese dialects, the mother tongues of about three-quarters of its citizens, in favor of Mandarin, China’s official language. A few years later, even Mandarin usage was cut back in favor of the global language of commerce, English. “Singapore used to be like a linguistic tropical rain forest — overgrown, and a bit chaotic but very vibrant and thriving,” said Tan Dan Feng, a language historian in Singapore. “Now, after decades of pruning and cutting, it’s a garden focused on cash crops: learn English or Mandarin to get ahead and the rest is useless, so we cut it down.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/26/world/asia/singapore-language-hokkien-mandarin.html

[rumagin]

“I prefer the term unsettling to decolonizing not only because it privileges the perspective of settler colonialism (which has often held a backseat within postcolonial studies) but also because I remain skeptical as to whether one could truly decolonize either sovereignty or anthropology, given that there is no precolonial status to which either could return. Unsettling avoids the telos of decolonization. What is unsettled is not necessarily removed, toppled, or returned to a previous order but is fundamentally brought into question.”

Yarimar Bonilla

[rumagin]

“Millar’s motivation to start his own company came from the man considered the godfather of comics, Stan Lee. Interviewing Lee for a feature in SFX magazine in 2003, when he was already a well-established writer for Marvel himself, Millar told Lee about his work with Marvel characters. “That’s great, but you should do your own characters instead of doing mine,” Lee said. “I didn’t do Superman and Batman and Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes. I went off and did the X-Men.”

[rumagin]

"What you just did was incredibly stupid and harmful. You just put out a manifesto inside the company arguing that some large fraction of your colleagues are at root not good enough to do their jobs, and that they’re only being kept in their jobs because of some political ideas. And worse than simply thinking these things or saying them in private, you’ve said them in a way that’s tried to legitimize this kind of thing across the company, causing other people to get up and say “wait, is that right?” I need to be very clear here: not only was nearly everything you said in that document wrong, the fact that you did that has caused significant harm to people across this company, and to the company’s entire ability to function. And being aware of that kind of consequence is also part of your job, as in fact it would be at pretty much any other job. I am no longer even at the company and I’ve had to spend half of the past day talking to people and cleaning up the mess you’ve made. I can’t even imagine how much time and emotional energy has been sunk into this, not to mention reputational harm more broadly. And as for its impact on you: Do you understand that at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you? I certainly couldn’t assign any women to deal with this, a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face, and even if there were a group of like-minded individuals I could put you with, nobody would be able to collaborate with them. You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment. If you hadn’t written this manifesto, then maybe we’d be having a conversation about the skills you need to learn to not be blocked in your career — which are precisely the ones you described as “female skills.” But we are having a totally different conversation now. It doesn’t matter how good you are at writing code; there are plenty of other people who can do that. The negative impact on your colleagues you have created by your actions outweighs that tremendously."

[rumagin]

Filming last year at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, I overheard a National Parks Service guide lecturing a school party of young teenagers. “Listen up,” he said. “We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom.” At a stroke, the truth was inverted. No freedom was defended. Freedom was destroyed. A peasant country was invaded and millions of its people were killed, maimed, dispossessed, poisoned; 60,000 of the invaders took their own lives. Listen up, indeed. A lobotomy is performed on each generation. Facts are removed. History is excised and replaced by what Time magazine calls “an eternal present.” Harold Pinter described this as “manipulation of power worldwide, while masquerading as a force for universal good, a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis [which meant] that it never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.” Those who call themselves liberals or tendentiously “the left” are eager participants in this manipulation, and its brainwashing, which today revert to one name: Trump. Trump is mad, a fascist, a dupe of Russia. He is also a gift for “liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics,” wrote Luciana Bohne memorably. The obsession with Trump the man – not Trump as a symptom and caricature of an enduring system – beckons great danger for all of us.

Very scary times according to John Pilger: ‘How the World May End’

[rumagin]

Gonzalez’s goal is to reveal Maduro’s “betrayal” of the Revolution, but this betrayal takes the form of a catch-22: the government is ineffective, but if it attempts to act, it is authoritarian; when it defends itself in a far less heavy-handed fashion than most governments would, it is repressive; it is fiscally irresponsible, but criticized for turning out of desperation to extractive projects like the Arco Minero; if it fails to fill the shelves, it is useless, but collaborating with private companies to do so is high treason; and when an admittedly problematic socialist party (the PSUV) acts in a partisan way — this being, after all, what revolutionary parties are meant to do — it becomes an “instrument of political repression.” Amid hyperbolic denunciations of the “systematic undermining of democracy, the demonization of dissent,” Gonzalez dismisses the Constituent Assembly in a paranoid fashion: “There will be no debate, no transparency,” he tells us, with no need to explain. And for a revolutionary socialist, the author seems to hold liberal democracy in high esteem, misleadingly decrying Chavismo’s “packed institutions” and deeming the government “increasingly antidemocratic” without specifying by what measure. Gonzalez claims that the government is “prevent[ing] the constitutionally protected right to protest” — this would come as a surprise to those whose neighborhoods have seen nothing but protest for months on end. With little more than a nod to imperialism, global capital, or the brutality of the Venezuelan opposition, Gonzalez heaps blame on Maduro’s shoulders. Corruption thus appears as state policy with no mention of the private “briefcase companies” that simply took billions in government funds before disappearing into thin air. Empty shelves are left to speak the truth of a failed political project, with no mention of capitalist sabotage of production. And Gonzalez points cryptically to the murder of indigenous cacique Sabino Romero, while failing to mention that he was killed by wealthy landowners. The “gains of Chavismo” are indeed slipping away, but this does not absolve us from the task of explaining why. Ultimately, for Gonzalez, Chavista elites and the bourgeoisie who have “happily colluded” with them are one and the same. But this leaves him unable to answer the most basic question of all: if they are the same, then why are they fighting a bloody battle in the streets? The answer is that, however imperfectly, the Maduro government still stands for the possibility of something radically different, as the many grassroots revolutionaries that continue to support the process can attest.

There is a lot of misinformation circulating about Venezuela. This article by Ciccariello-Maher adds some much needed balance to elite narratives that most people seem to swallow completely. Dont believe the main stream press about anything. Their job is to protect Capital and the Elites

Which Way Out of the Venezuelan Crisis?

This podcast on Democracy Now is good too. Both sides get a fair hearing rather than simply one side that then spreads its message via millions of twitter/FB bots and lots of gullible people

[rumagin]

David Graeber

[rumagin]

the store of social knowledge - what Michael Hardt and Toni Negri call the general intellect - is dynamic, ceaselessly enriched by experience and ideas, and is growing in density as the internet and social media technologies pull us all together into networks. As the general intellect grows, so capital tries to annex and appropriate more of it. It increasingly finds itself in a dependent position and one paradoxically expressed in an intensification and greater visibility of the power relations and exploitation at the heart of capitalist production. It is a lot of precarious working and few prospects, of precarity, misery, and debt. What's this got to do with anything? The development of the general intellect allows for circuits for the sharing of common experiences and new ways for politics to be done. Corbynism, in my view, is an expression of large numbers of socialised and networked workers coming into political consciousness. And, unsurprisingly, as these conditions have spent the last 40 years growing and informing the socialising and subjectivising processes, the younger you are the more likely you work in or have been prepped for life as an immaterial labourer, and the greater the chance you might find Corbynism appealing. The well observed age effect in the 2017 general election is a class effect marking the transition in the composition of the working class away from material and toward immaterial labour. This is why Corbynism is the wave of the future. The Conservative vote performance was based on status groups and class fractions in historic decline.

http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2017/07/jeremy-corbyn-and-working-class.html

[rumagin]

“The ‘rational actor’ theory, which seeks the ‘origin’ of acts, strictly economic or not, in an ‘intention’ of  ‘consciousness’, is often associated with a narrow conception of the ‘rationality’ of practices, an economism which regards as rational (or, which amounts to the same thing in this logic, as economic) those practices that are consciously oriented by the pursuit of maximum (economic) profit at minimum (economic) cost. Finalist economism explains practices by relating them directly and exclusively to economic interests, treated as consciously posited ends; mechanistic economism relates them no less directly and exclusively to economic interests, defined just as narrowly but treated as causes. Both are unaware that practices can have other principles than mechanical causes or conscious ends and can obey an economic logic without obeying narrowly economic interests. There is an economy of practices, a reason immanent in practices, whose ‘origin’ lies neither in the ‘decisions’ of reason understood as rational calculation nor in the determinations of mechanisms external to and superior to the agents. Being constitutive of the structure of rational practice, that is, the practice most appropriate to achieve the objectives inscribed in the logic of a particular field at the lowest cost, this economy can be defined in relation to all kinds of functions, one of which, among others, is the maximization of monetary profit, the only one recognized by economism. In other words, if one fails to recognize any form of action other than rational action or mechanical reaction, it is impossible to understand the logic of all the actions that are reasonable without being the product of a reasoned design, still less of rational calculation; informed by a kind of objective finality without being consciously organized in relation to an explicitly constituted end; intelligible and coherent without springing from an intention of coherence and a deliberate decision; adjusted to the future without being the product of a project or a plan. And, if one fails to see that the economy described by economic theory is a particular case of a whole universe of economies, that is, of fields of struggle differing both in the stakes and scarcities that are generated within them and in the forms of capital deployed in them, it is impossible to account for the specific forms, contents and leverage points thus imposed on the pursuit of maximum specific profits and on the very general optimizing strategies (of which economic strategies in the narrow sense are one form among others). (p. 50-51) Economism is a form of ethnocentrism. Treating pre-capitalist economies, in Marx’s phrase, ‘as the Fathers of the Church treated the religions which preceded Christianity’, it applies to them categories, methods (economic accountancy, for example) or concepts (such as the notions of interest, investment or capital) which are the historical product of capitalism and which induce a radical transformation of their object, similar to the historical transformation from which they arose. Economism recognizes no other form of interest than that which capitalism has produced, through a kind of real operation of abstraction, by setting up a universe of relations between man and man based, as Marx says, on ‘callous cash payment’ and more generally by favouring the creation of relatively autonomous fields, capable of establishing their own axiomatics (through the fundamental tautology ‘business is business’, on which ‘the economy’ is based). It can therefore find no place in its analyses, still less in its calculations, for any form of ‘non-economic’ interest. It is as if economic calculation had been able to appropriate the territory objectively assigned to the remorseless logic of what Marx calls ‘naked self-interest’, only by relinquishing an island of the ‘sacred’, miraculously spared by the ‘icy waters of egoistic calculation’, the refuge of what has no price because it has too much or too little. But, above all, it can make nothing of universes that have not performed such a dissociation and so have, as it were, an economy in itself and not for itself. Thus, any partial or total objectification of the archaic economy that does not include a theory of the subjective relation of misrecognition which agents adapted to this economy maintain with its ‘objective’ (that is, objectivist) truth, succumbs to the most subtle and most irreproachable form of ethnocentrism. […] By reducing this economy to its ‘objective’ reality, economism annihilates the specificity located precisely in the socially maintained discrepancy between the ‘objective’ reality and the social representation of production and exchange. It is no accident that the vocabulary of the archaic economy is entirely made up of double-sided notions that are condemned to disintegrate in the very history of the economy, because, owing to their duality, the social relations that they designate represent unstable structures which inevitably split in two as soon as the social mechanisms sustaining them are weakened.” (p. 112-3) Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press. (open access)

https://economicsociology.org/2017/07/19/pierre-bourdieu-economism-is-a-form-of-ethnocentrism/amp/