But it is a mistake to portray the state as a brake on the rampages of the rich and powerful. Monbiot is right to deplore the misuse of the idea of freedom by the rich and powerful to justify their greed and tyranny. But in positing the state as protector of the poor, he lets it off the hook, when it is in fact the principle enabler of their plunder. The state gives a few crumbs with one hand and with the other wields a cattle-prod to keep the hoi polloi away from the masters’ table.

There is much talk of China’s new hybrid form of statist capitalism. This ignores the statism in our own backyard: all capitalism is impossible without massive state intervention. One man owns a million square acres and has near-absolute control over what is done to it, while a million others do not even have one acre – or they must pay rent to loan a little scrap of land, or a small portion of a building to live in. If I try to start farming on one of those million acres, I’m a trespasser, and it is the state that will punish me. There’s nothing inherently legitimate about that state of affairs; it’s not a state of nature, or even an unjust form of freedom. It is not – as in the liberal formulation – a question of balancing freedoms. One man cannot possibly farm a million acres; it is a nonsense to say that in claiming ownership of them, he is exercising his freedom. All he is doing is denying others the use of the land, except on terms that extracts most of the profit from their work; and, crucially, he couldn’t do that without the sanction of the state. It’s a state-enforced denial of freedom.

The so-called libertarians whom Monbiot describes speak in such dense Orwellian double-speak that their words can’t be taken at face value. When they deplore state intervention, they aren’t talking about grotesque property laws that allow the ridiculous situation in which hundreds or thousands of workers at a fast-food chain have no ownership of the company for which they work, which is ‘owned’ by a few well-fed men who never set food on the shop floor. When they talk about freedom, they mean a state of varying degrees of desperation for the majority of humankind such that the only options are put their labour up for hire, so that they can make enough to get by – if they’re lucky; some freedom. And when they whine about big government, they’re not talking about the highly complex, state-dependent system of institutions, legislation and trade arrangements that ensures that capital flows unimpeded across borders while labour is at the mercy of local conditions, ensuring that products are made with the lowest possible labour costs, even if it means shipping them halfway around the world on fume-spewing jets.

Communist attempts to force people into positive freedom by subsuming the individual to the collective will were a tyrannical disaster, as Monbiot points out. But the fall of the Soviet bloc, little cause though we have to mourn its passing in its own right, has upset the balance that, for a while, forced some degree of social-democratic compromise on capitalism, with at least meagre gestures towards equality. The kind of well-intentioned liberalism that depends on the benevolence of the state can only tinker around the edges of the entrenched edifice of capitalist institutions.

Democracy in government is empty without democracy at the workplace. David Cameron’s flagship Big Society project was touted as a radical devolution of power, in which charities, workers coops and private companies would compete for provision of public services. No prizes for guessing which of the three has taken the lion’s share. His gutting of public funding for charities at the same time as asking them to step up and take over provision of public services expose the cynicism of the move, while his willingness to jettison the UK’s influence in Europe for the sake of the City bankers and traders have shown where his priorities are. In any case, so long as we have a legal framework that allows giant accumulations of wealth to be treated as private property, fine words about cooperatives and mutuals remain just that: words. In Australia, even the Labour government views public services through an ideological prism that favours the private sector.

The state does provide some safeguard against the Randian dystopia of totally unfettered dollar power dreamed of by capitalist libertarians. But the problems facing the 99% are fundamental ones that can’t be solved by regulatory band-aids. It isn’t a question of the state doling out a little less freedom to the few in order to protect the rights of the many. The state’s primary crime is not a sin of omission but of commission: legitimating, and enforcing, the tyranny of the 1%. Let’s reclaim the ideal from the ersatz libertarians. What we want is liberty – liberty for all.

Something is rotten at the heart of Sydney University. On the surface, it has never shown so attractive a face to the world. In the evening, walking back towards City Road, the glass and steel of the newly-finished law building frame the sloping green of Victoria Park, and beyond that, the lights of the city. The sight has the dimensions and composition of a picture-postcard: serene, iconic, a little too neat. Continue on, and you will find that the bridge to cross City Road, which is also brand-new. Which seems a little strange … wasn’t there a perfectly functional old bridge there a couple of years ago?

Sydney University’s profligate spending on preening architectural projects is cast into sharp relief by the recent furore over budget failures, and what university management intends to do about it. Despite notching up a budget surplus of 113 million dollars in 2010, Michael Spence, the vice-chancellor, recently circulated a video briefing in which he indicated that staff costs are to be cut by 7.5%, axing around 340 jobs, to make way for improvements in IT infrastructure and building maintenance. The criteria for this savage culling of heads are based on a crude quantitative measure of ‘outputs’, applied retrospectively to the number of papers published in the last two years.

I’m about to graduate from Sydney University. I’ve been privileged to learn from some outstanding individuals. I’ve also often found myself crammed into classes so over-subscribed that there aren’t enough chairs to go around. The idea that the way forward is to reduce the number of teaching staff is incredibly wrong-headed. As a piece signed by twenty-six academic staff points out, ‘no one wants better facilities for a job they no longer have’. The disingenuousness of management’s claim that the university would be happy, were it possible, to keep all their staff on, while simultaneously claiming that some are ‘not pulling their weight’, is a classic case of Freud’s joke about the borrowed kettle, in which mutually exclusive statements are offered in a way that undermines all of them, while the real reason is obfuscated. In fact, the desire to ‘downsize’ the staff has been on the agenda since long before the current budgetary crisis. Like that Machiavellian operator Rahm Emmanuel, it is clear that the university management believes in never ‘letting a series crisis go to waste.’

If only this were an isolated case of mismanagement; a blunder of judgement. Sadly, it is not. It’s part of a much bigger picture of managerialist philistinism infecting universities across the world. The use of quantitative measures – such as a crude numeric count on publications – on intellectual activities that must by their very nature be considered and judged qualitatively, is a symptom of a technocratic ideology of efficiency and an obsessive desire to measure and ration according to values entirely extrinsic from the value-systems of the activities themselves. Like Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic, those animated by this ideology of economic rationalism know ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing’. The university, Slavoj Zizek warns, is ‘no longer to be a space of freedom but a socially-useful factory for producing experts’. You can see this ideology at work even in the set of talking points put together by the ArtsEmergency organisation, which attempts to fight back against the cuts decimating faculties across the UK and sweeping away whole departments. The first item on its list of reasons ‘Why the arts and humanities matter’ is that they ‘are useful’, and the third item is that they ‘make money’.

‘The first task of the arts world,’ says John Tusa in a recent Guardian article, ‘is to refuse to be bullied into using words and concepts that belong to a different world; the world of bureaucratic and management speak.’ Necessary, certainly, but inadequate. This is not a problem of language but of conflicting interests. We are forced into playing defence, and we should certainly do so to the best of our abilities, using all the tools at our disposal; but that’s insufficient to turn the tide. The crisis sweeping through our universities is at its heart neither an institutional nor an academic one but one facet of a broader crisis of liberalism.

The postwar consensus, in its various liberal and social democratic incarnations, was a compromise granted not out of benevolence but reluctantly, from the fear of communism. Since the breakdown of the Soviet Union, the political balance has tilted drastically to the right; witness the rabid rhetoric of the Tea Party in America, in which even the most timid ameliorations of market fundamentalism in favour of people’s needs is portrayed as crypto-Marxism and a wanton disregard for individual freedom. The last major power to call itself communist is well on its way to becoming the largest capitalist economy in the world, retaining only the worst and most repressive aspects of twentieth-century communism. The third-way triangulation of Blair and Clinton, and the extraordinarily self-defeating bargaining positions of the Obama administration – in which concessions are granted preemptively in the expectation of goodwill that never materialises – only serve to compound the problem.
A rearguard action against the remorseless forces of economic rationalism is a necessary battle, and we should give our full support to those bodies, such as the NTEU, at the forefront of the struggle. But we must not lose sight of the bigger picture. Those nascent social movements (Occupy, the Arab Spring) that are beginning to carve out a space for an alternative to neoliberal hegemony should firmly resist the many attempts being made by the elite chattering classes to scale down their vision of a better future, and content themselves with a laundry list of timid, politically realist objectives, tacitly ‘naturalising the contingent organisation of the social order’.

Centrist liberals, as well as leftists, should recognise the importance of a radical alternative as a counter-weight to the rightward slippage of recent decades. The university, embodiment of the cherished liberal values of free thought and intellectual experimentation, is the canary in the political mineshaft. The erosion of academia demonstrates how illiberal the ideology of technocratic neoliberalism is. Ultimately, our institutions will not be sustained by a liberal or leftist version of William F Buckley’s ‘standing athwart history, yelling Stop!’. If the little islands of un-commodified intellectual space are not to be washed away – downsized, anaesthetised, demoralised and crushed beneath the boots of economic rationalism – we must project a political alternative radical enough to frighten the holders of the purse-strings into retreat and compromise.

But what if you live in a country with labor unions that are weak, and getting weaker? What if your country is the United States?

He goes on to list a set of strategies to deal with the problem (outreach, incrementalism, baby steps) all of which, it seems to me, are already being undertaken by the Democratic Party. I think it’s reasonable to take the Obama administration as Exhibit A in considering the effectiveness of Kenworthy’s prescription.

The weakness of this approach becomes clear when we consider two big issues: healthcare and climate change. On the first, despite intense opposition and some really poor tactical decisions by the administration, some kind of weak-tea solution was achieved, in not inconsiderable part due to the administration’s presentation of the plan as cost reduction. The second, far more important, problem was quickly thrown into the too-hard basket, because no coalition could be assembled with sufficient clout to counteract the interests of corporations dependant for their profits on the unabated use of fossil fuels.

To find an effective coalition of interested actors able to bring about social justice, environmental protection and some approximation of equality, we should look at the reason that a labour movement has historically been a crucial element. Labour movements represent the interests of the many against the elite. We hear a lot about the interconnectedness of our world; national governments’ scope to determine policy is circumscribed by the forces of globalisation, by corporations and capital flows that know no borders, and by transnational institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, or the EU.

If the world is becoming a village, then there is little point in trying to achieve equality only among all members of the household within the rich house on the hill, when the people in the shack by the river have nothing. Elites, of course, would prefer us to carry out our efforts separately, because they can then use the threat of national competition to drive down worker conditions and rights.

None of this is to say that internationalism is easy, given the lack of supra-national democratic institutions. But to confine our efforts to the nation, with or without a strong labour movement, is to concede defeat; capital, which has no such limitations, will easily nip any such efforts in the bud (Jane Hamsher’s post on Standard & Poor’s political interference highlights a particularly obvious intervention, but ‘the market’ is always there in the background ready to punish any efforts at democracy proper).

Cross-posted from j.m:thinks>.

As such, the diversity of our languages, literatures and the different ways they offer to see the world vastly enriches our cultural life. Communications technology and trade have brought the farthest places of the world within reach of each other, but in doing so, erode difference. Erich Auerbach, writing in 1952 (translated into English in 1969 by Edward Said), sees the writing on the wall:

Our earth, the domain of Weltliteratur [world literature], is growing smaller and losing diversity…. The process of imposed uniformity, which originally derived from Europe, continues its work, and hence serves to undermine all individual traditions…man will have to accustom himself to existence in a standardised world, to a single literary culture, only a few literary languages, and perhaps even a single literary language. And herewith the notion of Weltliteratur would be at once realized and destroyed.

As those globalising, centripetal forces subsume the variety of the periphery of the world in favour of the core – whether that is Washington or Beijing – the number of different ways we have to think, decreases. That may be of vital practical importance in the future. Much as the reduced biodiversity in crop production leaves our food supply vulnerable, rapidly and recklessly divesting ourselves of cultural diversity is reducing humanity’s ability to adapt to new circumstances. ‘Must that part of their cultural habit that internalises the techniques of ecological sanity,’ Gayatri Spivak asks, referring to certain Indian Aboriginals, ‘be irretrievably lost in the urgently needed process of integration, as a minority, into the nation state?’

Scarcity, or the prospect of scarcity, creates value (no-one was rhapsodising about the tactile pleasures of printed books fifty years ago), and as English spreads from one horizon to the other like a swarm of locusts, gobbling up minor languages in a few generations, we have begun to recognise that our linguistic ecosystem is a precious and vanishing resource. The international reach of today’s markets offer unprecedented access to the many literatures of the world, yet the choices we make as consumers of literature are dismally conservative. Native speakers of English are notorious monoglots; that’s almost inevitable, given the prestige and utility of the English language for business, trade and diplomacy – the pressure is on speakers of other languages to learn English, not the other way around. But we do have the advantage of being part of a vast readership, probably the most obvious one into which to translate. Even if we are reluctant to leave our linguistic comfort zone, at least we have the opportunity to sample a huge variety of literature, albeit in translation.

So do we read a lot of translated works? In 2007, PEN International commissioned a study among its local affiliates around the world to study the state of literary translation. The situation in the Anglophone world was abysmal:

The proportion of translated works as a percentage of the whole varies considerably among countries. As noted in the first chapter, there are very few translated works in the United States. In the UK, the most optimistic statistics indicate 6% of books are translations but this includes technical and non-fiction translations. Literary translation only makes up 2% of total output. In Australia, things are even worse. Barbara McGilvray and collaborators in Sydney indicate that fewer than half a dozen books are translated each year. The President of the New Zealand PEN Center noted that readers and even literary critics are often unaware that they are reading a translation, given that the fact is not highlighted.

In short, we Anglophone readers are a lazy and insular bunch. With an enormous range of literary variety at our fingertips, we opt in overwhelming numbers for the familiar – Jonathan Franzen, say, or Ian McEwan (that’s assuming we can be bothered to read anything more demanding than Stephen King or John Grisham, and that we are actually reading books, not just watching TV). The readership for translated fiction is tiny. Given the purview of this blog, it’s likely that you (Gentle Reader) are of a more cosmopolitan and adventurous inclination than the average reader. I will presume, then, that you can sympathise with my hunger to read literature from elsewhere: to get one’s teeth into something disconcertingly different, to encounter in the text resistance to one’s expectations, and by grappling with it, to expand as a reader. (Best of all, if you have recommendations, please get involved in the comments section and help me feed my hunger.)

Confronted with such abundance, the problem is, simply, how does one choose? Those translated books that are readily available and widely advertised have been pre-selected by the market on criteria that are tangential, if not opposed, to literary merit. Today publishers are risk-averse, and the books they push are likely to offer a tourist-friendly oeuvre that confirms, rather than challenges, our preconceived view of a given literature and the culture from which it arises. Sites like Words Without Borders help, but the range can be bewildering. Ultimately, since there are many times more books worthy of reading than a lifetime will permit, methodically working through national canons is impossible, and one’s own idiosyncratic path, criss-crossing centuries and continents, will have to do.

But an intelligent selection would help to kick things off, to give some bases from which to start foraging and rummaging. Three Percent, an international literature blog based in Rochester University (named, ruefully, after the proportion of literature sold in the US that has been translated), runs an annual award for the best translated novel of the year; this year I’m going to read my way through the shortlist (feel free to join me on the LibraryThing group I’ve set up for that purpose, if you have the time and inclination). There’s also the Book Trust’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, whose shortlist was recently also announced. While all prizes necessarily reflect agenda and ideologies, these ones at least seem to be making a serious effort at extending their range across the world. If anyone can suggest other or better paths through the vast body of the translated literature, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

The anthology The Speculative Turn (available in paperback or for free download) brings together essays from many different and sometimes opposing materialist and realist positions, that nonetheless reject what speculative realist Quentin Meillassoux has dubbed the dominant paradigm of the twentieth century, ‘correlationism’, in which reality appears, as the introduction puts it, ‘only as the correlate of human thought’. That such philosophy is ill-equipped to understand science may be a problem only for philosophers; that it enables the erosion of public confidence in the very real and dangerous facts that threaten our existence, and undermines the arguments for emancipatory politics and ecological sustainability, is a problem that affects us all:

In the face of the looming ecological catastrophe, and the increasing infiltration of technology into the everyday world (including our own bodies), it is not clear that the anti-realist position is equipped to face up to these developments. The danger is that the dominant anti-realist strain of continental philosophy has not only reached a point of decreasing returns, but that it now actively limits the capacities of philosophy in our time…. This general anti-realist trend has manifested itself in continental philosophy in a number of ways, but especially through preoccupation with such issues as death and finitude, an aversion to science, a focus on language, culture, and subjectivity to the detriment of material factors, an anthropocentric stance towards nature, a relinquishing of the search for absolutes, and an acquiescence to the specific conditions of our historical thrownness. We might also point to the lack of genuine and effective political action in continental philosophy—arguably a result of the ‘cultural’ turn taken by Marxism, and the increased focus on textual and ideological critique at the expense of the economic realm.

For a non-philosopher like myself, it is sometimes hard going to follow these fast-moving currents, but something new is opening up in the field of contemporary thought. After decades of critical engagement with sign, text, discourse and culture, the shift of focus to the real is like switching morphine for adrenaline.

One of the most important distinctions between the ‘correlationist’ mainstream standpoint and speculative realism is the restoration of ontology (the study of what is) to a central position, rather than privileging epistemology (the study of knowledge). Successive schools of thought have emphasised epistemology, while metaphysical speculation came to be seen as naive, confused and irrelevant (as in Wittgenstein’s dictum ‘About that which we cannot speak, we must be silent’). As epistemology came to be seen to have primacy over ontology, the distinction between things in themselves and things as they are for us is collapsed: a process that began with Kant but has become increasingly solipsistic over time. As the sciences opened our understanding to a universe whose vastness we struggle to comprehend, the humanities locked us back into the narrow confines of discourse, the subject, and the sign. Peter Hallward puts it in The Speculative Turn:

Correlationism figures here as a sort of counter-revolution that emerged in philosophy as it tried, with and after Kant, to come to terms with the uncomfortably disruptive implications of Galileo, Descartes and the scientific revolution. Post-Copernican science had opened the door to the ‘great outdoors’: Kant’s own so-called ‘Copernican turn’ should be best understood as a Ptolemaic attempt to slam this door shut.

The political consequences are enormous, and mostly bad. Thinking about the world as a consumer turns it into one huge repository of resources for us, and of significance only in terms of how best they can best be exploited, is what has sent us hurtling towards extinction. To change course, we need to think about the non-human world in a radically different way.

Prioritising knowledge over being has automatically inflated the importance of critique. Timothy Morton describes the syndrome in typically vivid style:

If you’ve ever been in this kind of argument, you’ll know how intense it can get. Going meta is a great way to sneer at someone. You remove the rug from underneath the other’s feet. Their mere immediacy is always false. It’s the deep structure, the numinous background, the possibility of the possibility of the horizon of the event of being, that is more real, or better, or just more rhetorically effective, than anything else. In this mode, the egg of potentiality comes before the chicken of the actual.

Restoring ontology to its proper place stops the game of ‘going meta’, of which ideology critique is a symptom, dead in its tracks. Speculative realism turns correlationist thought on its head, exposing the insistence that any discussion of territory is actually a discussion about a map of that territory, as an empty and indefensible game of words. As Meillassoux points out in After Finitude, if we interpret the activity of science as a discourse that is ultimately centred on the human subject, we miss the whole point (see also Ray Brassier’s essay in Collapse), and fall into the ‘epistemic fallacy’ that Roy Bhaskar describes in A Realist Theory of Science: ‘it is not the character of science that imposes a determinate pattern or order on the world; but the order of the world that … makes possible the cluster of activities we call “science”.’

The relevance of this move to political issues, we can see in a post like this from Larval Subjects, in which Levi Bryant (one of The Speculative Turn’s editors) draws the distinction between the actual state of things, and our experience of them, in relation to class:

The question, then, of how we experience or are conscious of class is distinct from the question of how class exists…. Class can exist and function just fine without anyone identifying with a class or being aware that they are caught up within the mechanisms of class. How else could so many act contrary to their class interests, going so far as to even deny that class exists, if this weren’t the case?… Here the issue is similar to the one Morton raises with respect to climate as a hyperobject. Part of the problem with climate is precisely because, as withdrawn, we aren’t even aware of its existence and therefore are unable to act on it. We are aware of weather without being aware of climate. Climate requires a sort of leap and a detective work that ferrets out all sorts of traces. So too in the case of class.

By now, I hope it is obvious that, while grounded in philosophy, the move away from correlationism has profound consequences for political thought. I’ll quote once more from The Speculative Turn, this time from the essay by Isabelle Stengers, writing about the imperialist implications of vulgar scientistic dogmatism à la Dawkins:

It would be a catastrophic mistake, I believe, to recognize the importance of Vandana Shiva’s struggle against capitalism while associating her protest against the paradigm of contemporary biology with words like holistic, traditional or romantic. Hers is a call not for ‘an other science’, but for a relevant science, a science that would actively take into account the knowledge associated with those agricultural practices that are in the process of being destroyed in the name of progress…. The thesis I am defending—that materialism should be divorced from (academic) eliminativism in order to connect with struggle—does not deny that elimination may have been utterly relevant, when it entailed struggling against the allied powers of state and church, for instance. Today, however, the situation has changed. Elimination has become the very tool of power. It is not only a tool for capitalism, but also for what I would call, together with Hilary Rose, ‘bad science’.

One does not have to subscribe to any particular school of realist or materialist thought to see that our current circumstances urgently call for new ways of thinking the real; to broaden the scope of analysis from discourse and ideology to the actors – human and non-human, individual and collective – in our world and its becoming; to go beyond critique, and begin to build. The Speculative Turn is an important step on that journey. It’s free: go download.

Bhaskar, Roy 2008, A Realist Theory of Science 3rd edn, Verso, London.
Brassier, Ray 2007, ‘The Enigma of Realism: On Quentin Meillassoux’s “After Finitude”’, Collapse II, pp. 15–45.
Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds 2011, The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, re:press, Melbourne.
Meillassoux, Quentin 2008, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, Continuum, London.

Sloterdijk proposes that ideology critique is the heir to a rich satirical tradition dating back to Diogenes, which he calls kynicism, to differentiate from modern cynicism. Kynicism is a form of critique that ‘goes beyond theoretical repudiation. It does not speak against idealism, it lives against it’. Rather than constructing counter-arguments to Platonic idealism, Diogenes would respond with lewd physicality, smearing faeces and masturbating in public. His answer to Socrates’ definition of humans as ‘featherless bipeds’ was to bring a plucked chicken to the academy and announce it as a man.

It is this ‘lost cheekiness’, Sloterdijk suggests, that is missing in today’s critique. Like kynicism and satire, ideology critique succeeds by unmasking, by stripping away illusions. But in its attempt to be serious, in dispensing with laughter, something vital was lost: ‘it has given up its life as satire, in order to win its position in books as “theory”.’

Perhaps, then, the rumbustious energy of satire can catch the popular imagination in ways that critique, that dry voice in the wilderness of academia, cannot? One cannot help thinking of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, a satirical cable TV news revue. Stewart skewers not only the obvious Republican targets, but also the craven Democrats and their habit of pre-emptively ceding ground to their opponents. Last year, after mounting a quasi-political rally that stretched the boundaries of satire, he gave an unusually serious interview on MSNBC, and discussed his attitude to the media’s role in political life:

Maybe there is a way to not engage in the idea—not to accept the premise…that we are all on the axis of left / right. Maybe there’s a different premise. And I don’t mean that in the way of partisanship, I mean it in the way of—they cover politics, politics is a Democratic and Republican and game. It is left / right. But then you begin to confuse everything [sic] through that same conflict. I think the conflict that would be more appropriate for a news channel, is corruption / non-corruption… [Anderson Cooper]’s got a bit on his show called ‘Keeping em honest’. Which is just so funny to me, because…it’d be like if I had a new segment called ‘Telling jokes to an audience.’ It just felt…like, isn’t that what this whole thing is?

For now, let’s bracket the obvious rejoinders (there is no leftwing party in the money-saturated American political system, the axis runs from centre-right to rabid; he conflates partisan conflict with ideological conflict; a proper critique of corruption is necessarily political). The most significant limitation to Stewart’s position is precisely what gives his show its impact: the act of unmasking. In this respect, it is no different from ideology critique – it’s just funnier.

This is a limitation in two ways. First, while such unmasking can damage the powerful by exposing their hypocrisy, it does not build anything up. In fact, it can itself act as a pressure valve that helps people’s frustrations dissipate. As satirical TV writer Armando Iannuchi put it in an interview on the BBC: ‘Because we have such a strong satirical tradition in the UK, we don’t have one of protest. Which is why, when we see students chucking fire extinguishers around, we’re quite shocked. We throw flour and water and eggs at politicians instead of bricks.’

Second, satire also has a more serious problem that makes it far less radical than critique: it focuses on the folly or knavery of individuals. While there is no shortage of malign and cretinous politicians, to frame the situation in terms of integrity or corruption, by its very apoliticality elides more serious and endemic problems at the level of economy, polity and social relations. But it is hard to imagine political satire that goes beyond sending up hypocrisy, stupidity or pomposity, and still manages to be funny. World-systems analysis doesn’t usually come with a good punchline.

So Sloterdijk’s critique of Critique is devastating, but the kynicism he advocates does not move us forward. Perhaps there is something common to both that is at fault. In a recent debate in Eurozine, Benedict Seymour makes a point about negation in Marxism that could be applied to Sloterdijk’s kynicism, but also (and more significantly) to critical theory in general:

I think one of the key things in Marxism is the emphasis on negativity. You can see how bogus the Stalinist-Communist model is in its tendency to fall back on the bourgeois habit of projecting utopias and then trying to approximate to them. Which, strangely enough, is parallel to the average working life of the exploited proletarian. You must meet the target, you must fulfil the five year plan—always a utopia. I think Marxism is anti-utopian in that respect; we start with what we’ve got and we negate it. Having said that, you can imagine a few basic negations: value, the market, exchange, production for exchange; all of these things are obsolete and a check on human social reproduction. That’s one way of putting it. The world just cannot take much more of this, the environment cannot take more of this; that is again the negative argument.

Seymour approves of this emphasis on negativity, but we need only consider Walter Benjamin’s maxim ‘every fascism is an index of a failed revolution’ to see the problem. Disaffection with the neoliberal mainstream need not draw people to the Left. To make a negative argument without positing a viable alternative is corrosive; just as likely to benefit the far Right, and make their latest venomous cocktail seem more palatable, whatever the toxicity of its ingredients: crude economic populism, scapegoating, conspiracy theory. The critical apparatus is of course vital, but on its own it constitutes a wilfully fractured reason, self-lobotomised and, in its unwillingness to put its own cards on the table, excessively cautious to the point of intellectual cowardice. In the shadow of history, especially after the stagnation and collapse of the Soviet Union, the retreat to critique and the shunning of so-called ‘master narratives’ as inherently oppressive are understandable. But we cannot go on breaking things down forever without building anything of our own. This is Latour’s point:

The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between antifetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution.

This emphasis on iconoclasm and critique makes sense only if we put the cart of ideas before the horse of reality. By insisting on the mutual dependence of perception and reality, we have neutered the radicalism of Marx’s ‘the point is not to describe the world, but to change it’. If the world is the way it is because of ideology, it makes sense to concentrate one’s efforts on dismantling the ideology that props the world up: one can change the world by changing the way we think about it. (Marx himself, a committed materialist, would have disapproved of such wishful thinking, unmoored from economics; but the way his and Engels’ The German Ideology demolished the naïve thinking of their peers has a relish and venom that prefigures the efforts of later critical theory; a neat separation of Marx from his followers is not entirely tenable here.) Decades of critical theory later, we have applied a plethora of critiques everywhere we look. We have problematised, subverted, deconstructed and deterritorialised the banal illusions of common sense until we no longer know which way is up; but the reality of power and capital grind on unabated.

One despondent reaction is that our mistake was to underestimate capitalism’s capacity to co-opt everything – to sell Che t-shirts and ‘green’ product lines, to mutate with the circumstances, to depend on the entrepreneurial self-interest of its human agents as an endless supply of ingenuity. But this is merely to buy into the hype. The economic crisis was a reminder that there is nothing infallible in the ‘invisible hand’ that economists like to misquote from Adam Smith. Infinite growth will come a cropper at some point on a finite planet. It is a matter of how, and when. It is hard to exaggerate the stakes of this question: whether the correction to our current ecologically suicidal course occurs by myopic selfishness and the resulting global disaster, or if by action based on collective self-interest, backed up by a healthy respect for facts, we can walk back from the brink.

Latour, Bruno 2004, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.’ Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2, pp. 225–248
Pehe, Jirí, and Benedict Seymour 2010, ‘The critical divide. Marxism: Radical alternative or totalitarian relic?’, Eurozine.
Sloterdijk, Peter 1987, Critique of Cynical Reason, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

While the politicisation of the ABC over the Iraq War, multiculturalism, Aboriginal policy and so on was lamentable, the ABCs’ contribution to the erosion of public confidence in climate science had another dimension, an epistemological one. It reflected a decision to relativise science itself.

Such decisions are dangerously radical. They reflect a disrespect for truth, not in some transcendent or ultimate sense, but the practical, workaday respect we have for reality that prevents us from embracing wishful thinking and fantasy as a guide to action. The direct cause – ‘strong pressure from senior management’, as Hamilton puts it – itself requires explanation in terms of both interests and the intellectual climate. Under what circumstances do we blind ourselves to inconvenient facts of the highest stakes possible: species survival?

As far as interests go, it’s a no-brainer: those of corporations dependent for their profits on the massive rate of carbon emissions continuing without restriction. But we on the Left should not get too comfortable pointing the finger. When we consider the epistemological conditions – the kinds of thoughts we have about knowledge itself, the way we discuss it, and our understanding of the bases on which we acquire and validate it – in which such a move is possible, we cannot entirely absolve ourselves from blame. It may be the Right carrying out the attack, but, as Bruno Latour wrote in 2004, ‘like weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party, these are our weapons nonetheless. In spite of all the deformations, it is easy to recognise, still burnt in the steel, our trademark: Made in Criticalland’. These weapons are ideology critique, anti-fetishism, theories of the social construction of knowledge, discourse analysis. It is only in retrospect, as the American Tea Party act out their miserable parody of protest, that we can see the tragic trajectory of the first iteration by the darkly farcical aspect of the second.

Again, we can attempt to disavow our implication in the slippery slope to relativism by finding easy targets: deconstruction, postmodernism, bourgeois degeneracy. But it was Marx who rehabilitated and legitimised the use of ad hominem arguments in theorising false consciousness, and the critique of bourgeois ideology; Adorno and Gramsci who turned the scorching flame of critique to the cultural sphere. Critical theory has challenged conventional thinking by hollowing out the ground from under it. But it has also eroded the common ground on which we all stand. In a case like ours today, Latour observes:

the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact—as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past—but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? And yet entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives.

Latour is not, of course, suggesting that the big bad world revealed by critical theory is too much for us, or that we should take comfort in the old illusions. He argues that, like generals fighting the last war instead of the one facing them, we have failed to evaluate, strategically, the efficacy and consequences of our modes of operation, our tactics, and our methods. Iconoclasm produces only Pyrrhic victory: ‘the Zeus of Critique rules absolutely, to be sure, but over a desert.’

How have we arrived, then, at this impasse? Peter Sloterdijk, in his book Critique of Cynical Reason, describes the route we have taken. It is almost three centuries since the Enlightenment began its assault on certainties of all kinds – theological, political, social, psychological – but its promise of emancipation has been realised only patchily. In different ways, liberalism, social democracy and communism have all disappointed. The disposition of the modern mind, if it does not retreat into wilful stupidity and reactionary conservatism, tends to melancholy and cynicism. Sloterdijk names this condition ‘enlightened false consciousness’; the name itself implies a certain cynicism in its self-contradiction.

Before the destructive machinations of power and capital, we find ourselves impotent, and compromised by our own complicity in the system. Our days are numbered, and we have lost our faith in medicine. Revolution, the most powerful remedy available, has been known to kill the patient altogether; reform is merely palliative care. It is hard not to feel trapped and helpless. In order to live our lives and feed ourselves we must buy goods whose production is contributing to environmental destruction, pay tax that goes towards buying bombs, and perform some kind of senseless job whose real function – whatever its ostensible one – is to generate surplus value for shareholders we’re never likely even to meet. The capitalo-parliamentary system precludes meaningful political diversity except at the margins, in minor parties with no power, an exercise in tokenism, a sideshow that allows the mainstream to claim that the full spectrum is present while ensuring that the parties representing different aspects of moneyed elite interest continue taking their turns at the levers of power.

So what are we left with? Critique is a way of retreating and retrenching, to maintain a degree of distance both from the world we inhabit and the life we lead. We are, each of us, so compromised by our involvement in a deeply cynical society, that critique becomes more a matter of psychic self-defence than an instrument of political change. One can pick over the old bones of ideology, pull apart this or that piece of discourse, and take a dismal pleasure in our own cleverness and freedom from illusion; but it is an empty cleverness and a bitter freedom without agency.

Practical critique is protest, dissent, resistance. Against injustice, and a trend across the industrialised world to roll back hard-won liberties, to dismantle and marketise public services, resistance is worthwhile and necessary. But it is also reactive, and as such, uninspiring: if people do not rally en masse to the cause of damage limitation, we cannot be entirely surprised. The global financial crisis has shown neoliberalism to be bankrupt morally, intellectually and economically. Yet there was no rush to the Left, just a cynical shrug of the shoulders. ‘Perhaps the most striking feature of the 2008 crisis so far,’ Susan Watkins wrote last year, ‘has been its combination of economic turmoil and political stasis’. This is what Sloterdijk means by ‘enlightened false consciousness’ – we know the system is breaking under its own contradictions, that it is driving us toward destruction, yet we act as if we do not know this, as if we are willing participants in the system: working and shopping, shopping and working. In a state of enlightened false consciousness, we need something other than critique to escape the duality of external bad faith (we live as if we are happy to be mere worker-consumers) and of inner detachment – because critique only deepens the ironic distance between our minds and our lives.

Latour, Bruno 2004, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2, pp. 225–248.
Sloterdijk, Peter 1987, Critique of Cynical Reason, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Watkins, Susan 2010, ‘Shifting Sands’, New Left Review 61, pp. 5–27.

No wonder Buddhism can function as the perfect ideological supplement to virtual capitalism: It allows us to participate in it with an inner distance, keeping our fingers crossed, and our hands clean, as it were. It is against such a temptation that we should remain faithful to the Christian legacy of separation, of elevating some principles above others.

This caricature of Buddhists’ unworldly distance from social and political struggle is hardly borne out by the facts – one need only think of monks slaughtered while protesting against the military dictatorship in Burma.

More curious are Zizek’s arguments in favour of ‘Christian materialism’. There are certainly figures, such as Jesus of Nazareth himself, or St Francis of Assisi, to whom the Left today owes a debt in one way or another. But the significance that he reads into certain events and doctrines are perverse precisely because they are not unique Christian innovations. Why tie oneself up in knots of sophistry trying to interpret Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani (‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’ – Matthew 27:48) as the death of God – and with it the birth of a human community whose obligations are to each other, with all the emancipatory potential that implies – when precisely such a rejection of divinity in favour of the principle of mutual obligation was achieved for real, explicitly, and in a way that was understood by the practitioners of the religion, 800 years earlier? Why extract a radical, disavowed ‘core’ of Christianity (that no actual Christian believes), hugging it tight, when its amputation costs the life of the host? One is tempted to affirm Timothy Morton’s recent mischievous suggestion that Zizek is in denial:

Zizek thus finds himself in the position of a closeted gay man. It would be so much easier for everyone concerned if he just came out and admitted that he was a Buddhist. To the extent that he doesn’t, he’s got a bad case of what I call Buddhaphobia.

Morton’s tongue is quite firmly in cheek, although the speculation is deserved, since it’s exactly the kind of ideology / false consciousness critique that Zizek indulges in so rampantly and spectacularly (and does so little to further discussion, since it acts as a meta-discourse in place of engagement with the arguments of one’s opponent). The double-standard is analysed more seriously, more sympathetically, and ultimately more devastatingly by Adrian J. Ivakhiv on his blog Immance; and Joe Clement’s thoughtful take on the subject, while allowing Zizek’s critique of Western Buddhism, teases out the confusion behind his conflation between Western and ‘otherwise’ Buddhism.

For me, though, there is a tangential question that is raised by Zizek’s comparison between the Christian and Buddhist traditions. To what extent is Christianity itself the original Western Buddhism?

I am not drawing attention here to the hypothesised historical influence of Buddhism on Christianity’s founders, John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth, or on the early church in Greece. It is between the early church and today’s Western Buddhism that I would draw a parallel, in two ways.

First, it is a commonplace that Western Buddhism, at least in its diluted and bastardised form as a form of therapy or self-improvement, is a grotesque parody of authentic Buddhist teaching and practise. As Zizek rightly says:

It is here that we should locate the difference between Zen proper and its Western version: the proper greatness of Zen is that it cannot be reduced to an ‘inner journey’ into one’s ‘true Self’: the aim of Zen meditation is, quite to the contrary, a total voiding of the Self, the acceptance that there is no Self, no ‘inner truth’ to be discovered.

Similarly, I would argue, many features of the history of the Christian church read like a parody of the history of Buddhism. While the outward features of the two religions – altruism, self-sacrifice, renunciation of worldly things, the establishment of monasteries and orders of monks – are similar, many of the motifs and figures in the early history of the church are like a darkly comedic retelling of Buddhist history. Siddhartha attained enlightenment beneath a tree; Jesus of Nazareth was nailed to one. The secular leader who converted to Buddhism and used his position to spread the religion across a vast area – Emperor Ashoka Maurya – was prompted by remorse at the bloodshed of war. Constantine saw the sign of the cross in the sky, along with the words Conquer by this, and thus the long and bloody process of the Christianisation of Europe began. In Buddhism, the cosmic order of gods, social caste, and human dependence on the divine was overturned. In the various strands of belief that emerged among the early Christians (including various gnostic heresies, such as that world’s creator is not a benign God, but an evil demiurge) the authoritarian ideology of monotheism (leavened with a little Indo-European tripartitism) was the one that won out.

It is, however, in the changing function of Christianity within the Roman Empire, and the European powers that supplanted it, in which the resemblance to today’s Western Buddhism is most striking.

At the beginning, a counter-cultural phenomenon, alien and insidious, begins to spread from the East (like a weed, as Morton puts it), considered thoroughly disreputable by respectable citizens: ‘a most mischievous superstition … again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.’ That was Tacitus, talking about the early Christians, but it could just as easily be a conservative American in the 1950s looking askance at the Zen-inspired notions of Ginsberg and Kerouac taking root in cosmopolitan San Francisco.

Fast-forward, and the erstwhile menace to civilisation has been neutered. Zizek insightfully points out that Western Buddhism – and more broadly the milieu of commodified, atomised, pick-and-mix, commitment-free spiritual experimentation in which it situates itself, between the New Age and the self-help sections at the bookshop – is a suitable facilitating ideology for global capitalism: ‘we need not fully engage ourselves in the capitalist game, but play it with an inner distance’. But the trajectory of the once radical early church was far more thoroughly co-opted by the hegemonic power of its time, the Roman Empire. The institutionalisation of the church at the Council of Nicaea established a definitive canon of scripture and embedded the religion within the structure of state power. The transformation had a terrible symmetry; once a fringe sect, its members persecuted and fed to the lions by Nero, Christianity became the sanction for the most horrific theocratic state terror: the Inquisition, witch-burning, the Crusades. If, as Zizek suggests in The Puppet and the Dwarf, St Paul played the part of Lenin, the great institutionaliser, to Jesus’ Marx, the Stalinist phase began with Constantine.

Again, none of this is to deny the radicalism and power of the message of Jesus of Nazareth, many individual Christians and certain praiseworthy tenets of Christianity: turn the other cheek; do as you would be done by; do good for its own sake rather than to be seen to be doing good; judge not lest ye may be judged. But if, with Zizek, we are to honour our ethical responsibility to elevate ‘some principles above others’, it is incumbent upon to recognise the outcomes, intended or otherwise, of the ideological trajectory entailed by a given religious fidelity. The chequered history of Christianity, and its institutionalised reversal of every one of those principles, is its own empirical refutation of his critique of Buddhism (even in its dilute, anaesthetised Western variety) vis-a-vis Christianity. As Jesus said: he that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.

Porter, A P, and E C Hobbs, ‘The Trinity and the Indo-European Tripartite Worldview.’ Budhi III: 2-3 (1999): 1-28.
Zizek, S, The Puppet and the Dwarf, The Perverse Core of Christianity, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003.

My usual response to this topic would be to discuss the ways in which, as the demands of capital and the relentless ideology of corporate media hem in the scope of democratically elected politicians to differ substantially from each other, personality and identity become the surrogates for real political debate. Celebrating Australia’s first woman prime minister is fine, but let’s not delude ourselves about how much difference it makes. For myself, growing up in the UK under a Thatcher government erased any illusions I may have had – as the anonymous writers of the The Coming Insurrection put it, ‘patriarchy survives by attributing to women all the worst attributes of men’. In the 2008 Democratic primaries in the US, Clinton’s tough talk of ‘obliterating’ Iran was an attempt to deflect sexist stereotypes and prove that she had – as her loyal follower James Carville put it – the ‘testicular fortitude’ to be an effective commander-in-chief.

As it happens, though, a policy decision of Gillard’s was brought to my attention, and it seems quite telling. So I can respond more directly to Jeff Sparrow’s appeal to ‘start talking about … not who she is, but what she does’.

My mother works at the TAFE in Blacktown. Much of her work there is with LLNP (language, literary and numeracy programmes). Many of her students are refugees; some arrive speaking only a few words of English. Some do not read and write their own languages, so literacy is entirely new territory. Needless to say, these people face enormous difficulties in the basics of daily life – catching the bus, going shopping, filling out a form – let alone in finding employment. Being able to understand, and be understood, and to read and write, is absolutely necessary for them to participate fully in society. Learning language is harder for adults than for children, and teaching them requires specialised training, skill and experience.

The education department contracts out the work in a competitive tendering process. Gillard was at the helm when the tenders were decided this year. TAFE NSW lost nearly all of its LLNP work to private companies and charities (the page on the government website is misleading here, since it does not provide any breakdown of the proportion of the work assigned to each provider). As John Kaye, NSW Greens MP, described the situation in a press release on 31 May:

TAFE NSW will lose $50m and 170 full-time equivelant teachers in a race-to-the-bottom in teacher wages and quality of services. This is a frightening glimpse of the future of skills training under Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard’s privatisation agenda.

‘Skills training’ is an inadequate term for teaching people the basics they need for life in Australia. The injection of the profit motive into public services is always egregious, but politics aside, on an empirical basis, the service the private providers give is transparently an inferior one. Before my mother began work at TAFE, she taught at a private college, and the difference in facilities, such as student access to computers, is striking. Eleni Prineas, an assessment verifier who visited private providers across NSW, wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald to express her dismay, in the light of her experience of the quality of teaching:

With few exceptions, the quality of teaching was abysmal. In some cases it was clear the ‘trainers’ (trainers were employed rather than teachers because a lesser qualification was required) should have been undertaking courses to improve their own written grammar rather than trying to teach it.

Politics is all about priorities. So what does this decision, to choose cheaper, inferior education for some of the most vulnerable members of our society, suggest about the priorities of our new Prime Minster, and how those priorities are likely to translate into policy? I’ll leave the last words to Gillard herself. As she told the ABC:

I do understand the anxiety and indeed fears that Australians have when they see boats intercepted. It does make people anxious. I can understand that, I really can.

The verb is misleading. It implies that whereas God works, Venter and his colleagues are merely playing; a blasphemous mockery, the trifling mimicry of a monkey, carrying out the form of creation while missing its content of the original – the ineffable master plan, the solemn and mysterious ways in which He moves. In fact, the comparison between this human achievement and the processes that led to the existence of the human species would be better understood in the reverse. Not just human evolution, but the series of events that led to the conditions in which the emergence of life was possible – the distance of the Earth from the sun, the gravitational pull of the moon steadying our orbit – are contingent on an interplay of factors of immense complexity. This cosmic dynamic, if we are to anthropomorphise it, would be more aptly described as whimsy than as work; or, the better to appreciate its radical difference from human activity, as the kind of explosive creativity we witness in storms and volcanoes. What we have done in synthesising life is to copy the effect of that play by means of diligent work.

The human creation of life reintroduces intention into being at a time when we have barely escaped a teleological view of the universe as the inexorable workings of divine progress. Let us suppose that in time, new forms of life are synthesised that are sufficiently complex to be conscious – that is the promise of achievement and threat animating critics. We used to believe that God ordained our purpose in life; for such a creature (it would be the first life-form to merit the term), this belief would be literally true. Unlike us, free to invest our deities with whatever attributes we please, this creature would not need to die to meet its maker; it could look us in the eye.

The sense of horror underlying this notion is different from that which animated Mary Shelley’s fable. Whereas Dr Frankenstein was only able to create an ugly composite of mismatched body parts, might not our creations supersede us – so that we become the monsters, spawn of random mutation, a necessary but shameful part of the history of the Ubermensch, without even the kinship we feel towards our primate ancestors? Conversely, the utopian promise is that, unencumbered by counterproductive evolutionary survival instincts, our creations would save us from ourselves. Our infinitely wise and patient guardians would be programmed to be full of humility, despite their superiority in every aspect. Both scenarios contain a kernel of their opposite. In the dystopia, a certain environmentalist misanthropy whispers that extermination at the hands of our own creation would at least have poetic justice, and may usher in a more harmonious world. The utopia has a heavy feel about it, the full stop on human progress, content but smothered by a permanent paternalism, in which rather than us playing benevolent gods, it is our creations that have taken on the role.

These visions of the future, as well as being somewhat overwrought, are flawed in that they posit humanity en masse, against which to counterpose a single ultimate new species, generated by a process that is purely scientific to an ahistorical degree. Science and technology do not operate in a vacuum, sealed off from socio-political motivations. Venter is not only one of the world’s most brilliant scientists, he has also been at the centre of the latest ideological battleground between private property and the commons: patents on generic information. He left the public sector in favour of privately funded research to speed up the process of mapping the human genome, scooping up millions of dollars for himself in the process. That was, until a statement from Bill Clinton emphasised the knowledge belonged not to a corporation but to the whole human race, causing the share prices of Celera Genomics to plummet in 2000 – ‘the first and only time that pronouncements about the social relations of science have moved the stock-market’.

The scope of this technology to effect change for the good (such as to combat climate change) or the bad, will be determined not by science but by politics and economics. The fact that money is being poured into Synthetic Genomics by Exxon Mobil does not mean that the notorious backer of climate change denial has had a conversion on the road to Damascus. It is simply capital hedging its bets. The only way to channel this technology into beneficent uses is the only way there has ever been: by mobilising whatever resources we can to apply political pressure. If this discovery has made us into gods, it is not of the omnipotent and omniscient variety, but a squabbling and fractious pantheon, no more or less benevolent than last week, when we were human.

It is not a happy state of affairs. And parenthood tends to make one resent this trend even more; if I am to escape Pokémon and Dinosaur King, the last thing I want to read or to watch is a rehashed ‘kidult’ coming-of-age story. There are some notable exceptions. Neil Gaiman is one, with his inexhaustible imaginative scope. For me, the standout is Philip Pullman, whose books manage to engage with big ideas in the midst of compelling, fast-paced stories. They are written for older children but they transcend age in a way that is claimed (rarely deservedly) of other books. I have tried several times to get my eldest daughter to read Northern Lights, but she wasn’t quite old enough, and I think the lumbering film adaptation of The Golden Compass might have put her off, understandably, so I’ve taken to leaving The Ruby in the Smoke lying around at strategic points where she might idly pick it up.

Tomorrow, Pullman’s latest book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, will be launched by Canongate. It’s an adult book this time, with the premise that Jesus of Nazareth had an evil twin named Christ. From the excerpts published in the Guardian last Saturday, it has some of the ring of the Gospels about it, but it’s also instantly recognisable as Pullman’s thoughtful, compassionate prose. Here’s Christ having a rather wistful post-coital chat with a prostitute about his twin, Jesus:

“Do you want to be like him?”

“More than anything. He does things out of passion, and I do them out of calculation. I can see further than he can; I can see the consequences of things he doesn’t think twice about. But he acts with the whole of himself at every moment, and I’m always holding something back out of caution, or prudence, or because I want to watch and record rather than participate.”

There will be the predictable howls of outrage from the religious right. More interesting will be the reaction from intelligent theologians such as Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury – according to Pullman, it was during a debate with Williams (transcript available on the Telegraph’s website, well worth reading in full) that he first came up with the idea for the book:

In the course of talking about His Dark Materials, he said that he was curious to know why, although the story was plainly about a form of the Christian church, there was nothing about Jesus in the book.

I said that he was right, there wasn’t, and that I’d deal with Jesus later in another book.

I will have to reserve judgement until the book is published, but if the excerpts are any guide, it will be a more nuanced contribution to the current debates over religion, humanism, the Christian faith and atheism than the vulgar broadsides of Dawkins et al. I wonder what Slavoj Žižek (who despite being a materialist philosopher and atheist, has theorised on the radical implications of Christian theology) would make of Pullman’s Jesus/Christ dualism?

A more serious problem for a politically motivated storyteller is the danger of being overtaken by events; as with fashion, twenty years distance is interesting, two years is merely outdated. Many things have changed. Most significant for the ‘war on terror’ was the regime change in Washington. Obama’s inauguration had a profound symbolic resonance beyond the borders of the USA, as eulogised by reggae singjay Sizzla in Black Man in the White House. Expectations were high around the world that a new, benign American foreign policy would replace the bloodshed and turmoil of the Bush years.

Some of us, disillusioned by other charismatic and supposedly transformational leaders (Tony Blair, in my case) or philosophically predisposed to see the changing of the guard at the top of the capitalo-parliamentarian state apparatus as a charade, did not expect much. But to the starving, a crust is a feast, and after eight years of intransigent climate denial, war crimes, atrocities, profiteering and the privatisation of war, Obama’s emollient rhetoric was music to the ears of many on the Left. Who can blame them? Once installed in office, however, as Guardian columnist Gary Younge noted at the time, ‘the issue is no longer what he is and means, but what he does’. Sarah Palin, of all people, posed the unavoidable question: ‘How’s that hopey, changey stuff working out for ya?’

For one thing, vested interests are alive and well, as shown by the vastly watered-down version of healthcare legislation. The institutions of American government and their arcane rules tend towards split-the-difference policymaking, and a certain level of entrenched conservatism. As liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias points out:

It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the fact that in a unicameral United States of America, we would now have passed both a comprehensive health care reform bill and also the most important piece of environmental legislation in the history of the world.

But the perception of the Obama administration struggling to break the mould is only half-true. In other ways, his rule has exceeded the aggression of the previous one. Unmanned Predator drones have struck rural areas of Pakistan, an American ally, more times in the first year of Obama than in the eight years of Bush (Sanger 2009). It’s worth a look at General Atomics website, which includes the Predator and the Predator B in its list of products – there’s even a brochure you can download. It sounds like dystopian science fiction, but it’s real. Try reading it from the perspective of someone unfortunate enough to happen to live in the Hindu Kush, in daily danger of becoming tomorrow’s next ‘collateral damage’ statistic.

As to Israel–Palestine, the current diplomatic row might seem like a promise of change from the usual fine words and massive military aid to empower the occupation and the apartheid-like treatment of the occupied. But as Tariq Ali (2010) points out:

Obama’s official line towards Israel would be manifest even before he took office. On December 27, 2008, the IDF launched an all-out air and ground assault on the population of Gaza. Bombing, burning, killing continued without interruption for twenty-two days, during which time the President-Elect uttered not a syllable of reproof.

If a restructuring of Middle East policy is in the works, it is not due to benevolence but pragmatism. General Petraeus is the one calling for a strategic adjustment, not on humanitarian grounds of course, but because the one-sided American approach to Israel–Palestine is creating massive bad press in the region that threatens to endanger American hegemony of power.

Ultimately, politicians are self-interested creatures; anyone who puts ethical principles above the search for power, rather than using them as a tool in its service, is weeded out long before a general election. The system of bourgeois democracy has two customers – party donors and voters – and no prizes for guessing which matter more. We should not look to politicians for salvation; they are obstacles to be overcome. As Obama put it (somewhat disingenuously, given that he was in the midst of building a presidential campaign with personality cult features): ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for’.

Ali, Tariq 2010 ‘President of Cant’, New Left Review 61.
Sanger, David 2009 ‘Obama Outlines a Vision of Might and Right’, New York Times.

What would a Fifth International look like? More of the same Trotskyist rhetoric, or something new and radical that, while rejecting the neoliberal consensus, does not tie itself up in dogma, recognising that all theory is contingent – that nineteenth-century critiques of capital, however brilliant for their time, are not the be-all and end-all?

Despite no mention of it on their website, it appears that Australia’s own Socialist Alliance were involved in the discussion: they pushed for the inclusion of climate change as one of the main issues of concern. Michael Albert – activist, co-founder of the ZNet radical media hub and proponent of participatory economics – has embraced the proposal, cautioning that it should be radically different from its predecessors.

Most politically sophisticated people of today’s movements would not sign up with an old-style International. Even considering the relatively few eager souls who would sign up, most would not remain inspired for long. Predictably, support would not grow strong enough to win major change. We can’t win a new world without attaining wide and deep support, and we can’t attract wide and deep support offering structures and methods embodying the core ills of the past.

The whole post is worth a read, as is the proposal following it, endorsed by a long list of people including Noam Chomsky and John Pilger. At points the proposal tends to the platitudinous – applying Simon Hoggart’s wry ‘law of the meaningless opposite’ to the statements of intent (solidarity, diversity, equity, peace, justice, sustainability, democracy), and it is hard to see who – right-wing nutters aside – would reject them (in favour of isolation, homogeneity, inequality, etc).

But perhaps this is the point: to achieve a broad base of support and escape death by obscurity, the fate of many left initiatives. Fair enough, but there is the sense that it is trying to be all things to too many different viewpoints, and, as such, suffers from a lack of clarity, especially about means (‘prepare materials, pursue actions, carry out endeavours’). Perhaps unfairly, I could not help but think of the whimsical Pugwash number ‘It’s Nice to be Nice’.

Browsing for some reaction, I was struck by the fact that Jacob Richter’s critique of Albert’s proposals were based on a perceived lack of theoretical rigour, and the subordination of class struggle to other concerns. I would have expected this from the orthodox Marxists at the League for the Fifth International – no relation to the current proposal – but there I found, along with predictable misgivings about ‘entrusting the initiative of the founding a new workers’ international to the head of a bourgeois state’, objections on a more empirical basis: what kind of a man has Chávez shown himself to be?

It should not be forgotten that Chávez recently supported and solidarised [sic] with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s brutal repression of the workers, women and youth of Iran who were fighting for democratic rights and with Robert Mugabe’s prolonged attempts to do the same in Zimbabwe.

ZNet has carried a lot of articles with a perspective on Venezuela that tends to the rose-tinted, perhaps encouraged by the receptiveness of the regime to sympathetic foreign groups. The picture of Venezuela we get in the west is also a distorted one (Chávez, democratically elected head of state, is routinely described as a ‘dictator’), but there are serious and continuing questions over its record on human rights and justice.

If Chávez is cynically using those elements of the Left that can be corralled into a bloc to consolidate his own power, it will not be the first time that good people’s sincere desire to improve the world has been channelled to ignoble ends. On the other hand, if grassroots organisations stay away, any governments and states involved will dominate the proposed International by the law of gravity. I hope the Socialist Alliance will look beyond their own membership, and sound out the broader Left within Australia before going to the inaugural conference at Caracas in April.