Good Afternoon Comrades.
Today’s dispatch is a little later than usual only because I needed a breather after last weeks silly work schedule and secondly, because I have been struggling with what to say that is worthy of your and our time here. I’ll get into that after this brief community service:
A brand new playlist as always at the beginning of the week and you are all in for a treat this week. It’s a lot and I mean lot more mellow than usual but not in a “yawn, was Vogel on fucking valium all week or what?” way but in a subtle, beautiful soundscapey type of way. In between all the damn shifts last week I think the changing of seasons really hit me here, the light has changed and so has the smell of the air - it’s subtle but it definitely played a role last week. Here you are. Enjoy.
The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.
One could also read this as: How the fuck can philosophy and the subsequent understanding of the material and metaphysical world that we individually experience help you navigate the insanity that is, well, everything.
This is what I have been grappling with these last few days. I always aim to equally present the fuckery of the 1% and solutions on here. I don’t see the point of merely reacting with faux-outrage to their oppression without at least trying to offer solutions to not just protect us from them but also to build a better tomorrow without them. When Marx wrote: “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it.” I took that to heart. Understanding is a vital tool but in today’s world, without action that understanding becomes meaningless.
When looking at the world at large over the last few days I have been utterly overwhelmed at the sheer scale of the fuckery at hand. What we perceive as the “western world” is dismantling all pretence of morality and responsibility faster than anyone can scream “Sieg Heil!” and the 1% is ushering in a modern version of the 4th Reich resulting in planetary ecocide, ruled through a technocratic/corporate fascist theocracy. With that, I was sitting here asking myself, what do you have to offer Vogel, what can you say that you haven’t already and what can you offer in the shape of help, guidance, support etc?
For the longest time I had nothing. I dislike repeating myself, only because I feel like is disingenuous with you readers - similar to all the mostly US based “talking heads” yapping on about the same damn thing over and over until their masters tell them to usher in a news cycle for ad revenue - and as I was blankly staring into my empty fridge for the 10th time this morning, it came to me:
I have always loved Gramsci for this piece of brilliant thinking and before I get deep into this one, let’s be really fucking clear here: the current state of the world and the apparent direction we are being run towards to is scary, uncertain and will mean a lot of sacrifices, pain and discomfort for a lot of us, if we do not fight back. Even then, odds are 50/50 that we can pull through and offer respite for the generations after us, but those are odds I can work with. Secondly, the later part of this quote is what is the game changer here. “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” - Any analysis of your reality will leave you pessimistic, but, and this has been repeated numerous times by a wide variety of great minds, our reality ( and thus the future ) is nothing but a number of complex mutually agreed on narratives that WE decide on. Nothing is written, no matter how hard the capitalists try to convince you of the inevitability of their vision. As Ursula Le Guin said: “We live in Capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
Gramsci is saying that the dominant culture, political systems, education systems, religion, and media will work to maintain the economic system and blind the masses to the objective facts. This quote says that we must not give into these illusions but not lose our grasp of the real objective material conditions we face. I am going to get deeper into this below, but for anyone that wants a little uplift in the face of everything, this is it: Yes, see the world for what it is. Realize that us working people here in the “west” have utterly lied to about essentially everything, manipulated into an existence that serves no purpose other than consumption to profit the ruling classes BUT realize that nothing is written, that their power over us is nothing but an idea that can be challenged and changed at any time, given the fact that there are more of us than them. The outlook is bleak but it doesn’t have to and we all have the capacity to not only think of a better world but make it so. Be that spark for yourself today and then pass the torch.
Now, to get deeper into the philosophical discussion and subsequent actionable side of all this. Enjoy and if you have any questions on the below, please give a shout.
The above quote also means that people should analyse world order with a certain “pessimism of the intelligence” as well as an “optimism of the will”. It means taking into account the relations of force, including military force, and what Fernand Braudel in The Structures of Everyday Life called the broader “limits of the possible”, that is the “relations of force” in political, social and ecological terms. In Gramscian language, the problem is how to construct a counter-hegemonic transnational blocco storico - analogous to a transnational political party - a “we” that might comprise a new constellation of democratic and progressive social forces. The “how” needs to be both effective and open-ended, plural, inclusive and flexible, and it must be forged in terms of a realistic political optimism that is creative and forward-looking.
The idea of collective political will thus concerns the possibility of a world-wide political association or imagined community of the progressive counter-movements.
As noted, Polanyi’s concept of the “double movement” is useful here in thinking about this globally, since, as in the 1930s, some of today’s counter-movements involve attempts to reassert democratisation whereas others are highly reactionary: the neo-liberal globalisation tendency is being challenged politically in complex ways. Such an alternative community would not only seek to restrict the scope of commodification in the definition of social forms and institutions, but also develop real and concrete alternatives. Indeed it is important to investigate this potentiality in the form of social movements (for example certain types of feminism and ecological groups) as well as in the political parties and other institutions of civil society and in so doing, open up the question of what will be the key problems for the critical study of political economy and ecology in the foreseeable future.
One key constraint on this potential is perhaps that our political imaginations may still be trapped in an ontology of world order that equates political action with territorialism and the state - although the constraints and opportunities of a more economically globalised world order are increasingly palpable.
We need then to rethink the questions of politics in both global and local frames of reference. Indeed, we need to do so by developing a role for the imaginative intellect in reconstructing the normative basis for collective action. Would this require a galvanising myth or a quite different form of political innovation? If so, how would this global “imagined community” be created and by whom, and what might it consist of ? Finally, “we” need to ask ourselves the question posed by Enrico Augelli and Craig Murphy, “what is the best that can be achieved by collective action in the historical time in which we can imagine our actions making a difference?” We also need to have a clear view of what is “occasional” and what is “structural” in our assessment of the condition of capitalist and counter-hegemonic modernity as we move through the twenty-first century: what then are the big issues that “we” need to theorise and to articulate politically?
Perhaps the most general of these big issues concern the role of education and wider political practices to form an ethical counter-hegemony that is appropriate to the conditions of the late twentieth century. Part of this task involves the study of political economy so that, for example, we can better investigate and critique the form of transformations associated with the globalisation of unsustainable production and consumption patterns, and the intensification of what Walter Benjamin once called the “dream-world of mass culture”, that is the saturation of our symbolic world and forms of consciousness with the cornucopia of consumerism.
In this sense it is not just the social relations of production, but also the atomised forms of social imagination that are fetters on human emancipation in capitalism. “Left” thinkers need to develop a critique of what Raymond Williams once called the “magic system” of capitalist advertising and TV and those forms of cultural representation that produce a commodified dreamlike mental condition, that is they project a form of experience that is individualised and atomised.
In other words, and following the example of Gramsci, in order to promote the emergence of collective consciousness communists should seek to remobilise a critique of contemporary political and cultural institutions and re-establish the link in popular consciousness between the question of consumption and deepening exploitation, commodification and alienation in social relations, and the reshaping of the hierarchy and nature of state forms. We need to pose questions such as: What do these changes mean for the constitution of social life in lived communities? Put differently, what are the socio-ecological limits to existing patterns of power, production and consumption? In this regard, there is a need to show how far and in what ways there has been a depletion of the ethical dimension of political and economic life and to link this to the economism of prevailing perspectives and forces in the global political economy. We need to show how the social Darwinist tendencies are associated with growing social polarisation and widening inequality both within and across state forms, in an era of when financial power and Mammon seem to predominate in defining economic alternatives and systems of political accountability and representation.
There is also a need to continue to develop a critical ontology that builds on and if possible extends Gramscian concepts to help identify material and mental frameworks for understanding and action and some potential for change in the world order. Ontology is an aid to praxis and to critique, in so far as it helps to us explain how, in a given historical situation, dominant forces - for example the rising power of the industrial bourgeoisie in the creation of nineteenth century self-regulating market society under a strong state - premise their supremacy not simply on coercive capacities but also on the hegemony of a particular perspective and the political framework that this entails: for example a utilitarian and neo-classical form of political economy as contrasted with a moral economy form, or a political economy of utopian or Marxian socialism.
More broadly this involves a struggle over the politics of knowledge production and the institutionalisation of a certain pattern of possibility and potential within universities and other social entities. In other words, the historical process may prioritise certain modes of understanding or perspectives on the world, involving conceptions of society and representation that have significant - although uneven - implications for social change and ways that resistance to capitalist hegemony might be understood and mobilised.
The Future Is Ours Comrades.
Yours, eternally in hope with a willingness to fight for what’s right.
V.