Z Magazine Online, May 2004 Table of Contents

ashlee says she's reading z-mag. haven't been follownig the pub, but it is interesting enough to keep attention. Hopefully we can tweak that attention so that it is a little more academic of an enthusiasm, but at this point I'm just glad to know that someone in Texas has a conscience and a consciousness of how it should be used. She's also reading Chomsky, who is also a good starting point though often a sort of cartoon version of himself. I would like him more if he admitted the long line of people who have been doing what he is doing in an academic sense, but he is nonetheless useful in blowing the minds of young people who are hungry for that interaction and experience. It would be even more useful if he didn't make most of his arguments on the basis of flimsy moralisms and focused more on the way that, for instance, neo-liberalism undermines itself. However, it is incomparably important to instill a popular understanding of the moral compass of a system in which every socially positive aspect of economic development is basically an externality--i.e. the main goal of all exchange is simply between those two "individuals" (be they corporate or otherwise) and if it results in other more public consequences like quality education, a healthy environment, strong families, modern medical care, or their polar opposites, well then that is just "external" to the exchange. We shouldn't expect any of this from the exchange and neither does capitalism; all of this, if it happens, comprises a vast realm of externalities which the market is almost totally unconcerned with except in so far as they begin to affect the market itself by making more or less educated, healthy workers, etc. Even then, the market isn't concerned with making more or less of them--or with having a more or less clean environment: it is only concerned with the price of those resources as commodities (i.e. people, land, resources.) That these are, as Polanyi calls them, false commodities, is beside the point. Once capital has created the instruments to make them so, everything is for sale. Therefore, to compain about "Profits over people" is in some ways irrelevant and fanciful. However, it certainly flies in the face of all the rhetoric which claims that this system inherently functions to "raise all boats." And, perhaps this is the most useful thing about these popular leftist diatribes: they provide a striking dissonance to the accepted order which generates a critical distance from the status quo and an alternative subject position. If this position can then be developed more fully into a reflexivly nuanced understanding of the ideas being contested, seeing the problems and possibilities of both, understanding the "other side" is equally convinced of their morality and thus unable to be contested on those grounds except in all out ideological warfare (or direct action) in which the goal is basically to have "our side" win. This I see as equally dangerous for democratic participation in the long run, but as the hegemonic forces seem to gather all the cards for themselves, as Paul Smith quotes Baudrillard on 9/11: "It was the system itself which created the objective conditions for this retaliation. By seizing all the cards for itself, it forced the Other to change the rules" (p.9). Or, in another context, a more popular voice once claimed:

Those who make peacful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. - John F. Kennedy