Memet Çagatay

jesus raises this obelisk from neurosis

2011-12-31T00:29:00.003+02:00

dear lord,
rich men built a highway through the eye of the needle
and put a sign that says "camels are not allowed"

dear lord,
gaddafi was the best anti-imperialist pound for pound
yet obama's army did not get drowned

dear lord,
who needs lenin, I have no brain
when some pissed off camels occupy sultanahmet square
let me cast the first theoretical bomb

Rattlebite

2010-06-20T08:46:00.003+03:00

now my heart rattles like an old computer fan
too big to be bailed out
yet it weights 64 kilobyte

Well Played

2010-03-05T16:35:00.002+02:00

WSJ: Ankara Recalls Ambassador After U.S. Panel Condemns 1915 Slaughter of Armenians

Congratulations to both Turks and Armenians for their great enthusiasm and tireless dedication that brought us entertainment and joy during the annual Genocide Games in Washington. After decades of frustration and apathy which they were subjected to, Armenians deserved the long awaited victory all the way. And there is no room for hard feelings for Turks. They may do better in the next genocide.

"My History is Biased"

2010-01-31T08:30:00.004+02:00

Howard Zinn's last interview just a couple of days before his death:

Turkish Workers vs Thatcher and NACODS

2010-01-24T01:37:00.005+02:00

Sungur Savran: Finally, a unionist from the Türk-Is leadership promised to take the demand for a general strike to leadership bodies, to which the crowd duly replied by another slogan: “Kumlu has to come and promise us a general strike!” This paralysed the bureaucrats. But in the end, a clever bureaucrat had the idea of threatening the workers with a police attack – after all, the “official” demonstration was over and the police disposed of the legal right to disperse the crowd. Thus came to an end this unusual public revolt of the workers against the union bureaucracy. Whatever the outcome in the coming days, this single episode has placed the Tekel fight in the annals of class struggle in Turkey. This was the first time when workers openly revolted against the bureaucracy during mass action, which of course will send shivers through every bureaucrat in future actions of a similar dimension.

Whenever I come across yet another attempt of compromising achievement by Turk-is (which has de facto functioned as a yellow union so far), I indulge in the temptation to think that maybe Hayek and British neo-liberals were right and supposedly coercive nature of trade union bureaucracy is one of the major obstacles for working class movement.

Aside from the peculiarity of inter-class war among the bourgeois, Turkish state is an ordinary state striving to accomplish what Thatcher and Reagan did a couple of decades ago: creating an ideological consensus on approval of capitalist injustice with Muslim tints. Being against an ordinary state in an embryonic form, the success of Turkish workers directly depends on the success of their struggle against the past of full-fledged modern states, as Marx said for Germany long time ago. See:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/07/arthur-scargill-miners-strike

If Tekel workers fail against the coalition of Teatcher and flag waving trade union bureaucracy once again, the most possible outcome will be exactly what D. Harvey described in his "A Brief History of Neoliberalism":

"Alan Budd, an economic adviser to Thatcher, later suggested that ‘the 1980s policies of attacking inflation by squeezing the economy and public spending were a cover to bash the workers’. Britain created what Marx called ‘an industrial reserve army’, he went on to observe, the effect of which was to undermine the power of labour and permit capitalists to make easy profits thereafter. And in an action that paralleled Reagan’s provocation of PATCO in 1981, Thatcher provoked a miners’ strike in 1984 by announcing a wave of redundancies and pit closures (imported coal was cheaper). The strike lasted for almost a year, and, in spite of a great deal of public sympathy and support, the miners lost. The back of a core element of the British labour movement had been broken. Thatcher further reduced union power by opening up the UK to foreign competition and foreign investment. Foreign competition demolished much of traditional British industry in the 1980s––the steel industry (Sheffield) and shipbuilding (Glasgow) more or less totally disappeared within a few years, and with them a good deal of trade union power. Thatcher effectively destroyed the indigenous nationalized UK automobile industry, with its strong unions and militant labour traditions, instead offering the UK as an offshore platform for Japanese automobile companies seeking access to Europe. These built on greenfield sites and recruited non-union workers who would submit to Japanese-style labour relations. The overall effect was to transform the UK into a country of relatively low wages and a largely compliant labour force (relative to the rest of Europe) within ten years. By the time Thatcher left office, strike activity had fallen to one-tenth of its former levels. She had eradicated inflation, curbed union power, tamed the labour force, and built middle-class consent for her policies in the process."

Do Rabbis Dream of Holy Sheep?

2009-12-20T11:38:00.004+02:00

Haaretz: Rabbis and teachers from Hesder yeshivas, which offer Torah studies alongside military service, released a letter to students in which they reiterated their assertion that soldiers must refuse orders if they are commanded to evacuate settlements, arguing that Torah law is above the Israel Defense Forces.

The letter emphasizes the importance of enlisting to the military, but instructs soldiers to adhere to Jewish law when it conflicts with orders handed down from superiors.

This letter comes as yeshiva heads closed ranks around Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, whose declarations in support of soldier insubordination caused Defense Minister Ehud Barak to oust his Har Bracha yeshiva from its hesder arrangement with the IDF.

"Unfortunately, the IDF has been used for purposes unrelated to Israel's defense and directly opposed to God's wishes for quite some time," the rabbis wrote in the letter. "This situation faces IDF soldiers with a contradiction between Jewish commandments and commanders' orders

...

Alain Badiou: What the patricians and bishops want is no doubt the pure and simple conservation of the previous order. In this sense, the past is illuminated for them by the night of the present. But, on the other hand, this night must be produced under the entirely new conditions which are displayed in the world by the rebel body and its emblem. The obscurity into which the newly produced present must be enclosed is engineered by an obscurantism of a new type. For example, it is futile to try to genealogically elucidate contemporary political Islamism. This is particularly true of its ultrareactionary variants, which rival Westerners for the fruits of the oil map through unprecedented criminal means. This political Islamism represents a new instrumentalization of religion—from which it does not derive by any natural (or ‘rational’) lineage—with the purpose of occulting the postsocialist present and countering the fragmentary attempts through which emancipation is being reinvented by means of a full Tradition or Law. From this point of view, political Islamism is absolutely contemporary, both to the faithful subjects that produce the present of political experimentation and to the reactive subjects that busy themselves with denying that ruptures are necessary in order to invent a humanity worthy of the name— reactive subjects that parade the established order as the miraculous bearer of an uninterrupted emancipation. Political Islamism is simply one of the subjectivated names of today’s obscurantism.

That is why, besides the form of the faithful subject and that of the reactive subject, we must give the obscure subject its rightful place.

In the panic sown by Spartacus and his troops, the patrician—and the Vendean bishop, and the Islamist conspirator, and the fascist of the thirties—systematically resorts to the invocation of a full and pure transcendent Body, an ahistorical or anti-evental body (City, God, Race. . .) from which it follows that the trace will be denied (here, the labour of the reactive subject is useful to the obscure subject) and, as a consequence, the real body, the divided body, will also be suppressed. Invoked by the priests (the imams, the leaders. . .), the essential Body has the power to reduce to silence that which affirms the event, thus forbidding the real body from existing.

Transcendent power tries to produce a double effect, which can be given a fictional expression in the figure of a Roman notable. First of all, he will say, it is entirely false that the slaves want to and can return home. Furthermore, there is no legitimate body that can be the bearer of this false statement. The army of Spartacus must therefore be annihilated, the City will see to it. This double annihilation, both spiritual and material—which explains why so many priests have blessed so many troops of butchers—is itself exposed within appearing, above that which is occulted, namely the present as such.

Mao on Complacency and Conceit:

2009-11-19T22:30:00.004+02:00

9. Conceited people cannot forget their merits. They hide their own shortcomings and disregard other people’s strong points. They often compare their own merits with other people’s demerits, thereby drawing satisfaction. When they see the strong points of others, they say ‘Not much,’ or ‘Nothing to make a song and dance about.’

10. In fact, the more one overrates oneself, the worse the result is likely to be. Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian writer, put it humorously:

‘A man is like a mathematical fraction, whose actual talent can be compared to a numerator and his own estimate of it to a denominator. The bigger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.’

11. Modesty is a necessary virtue for every revolutionary. It benefits the people’s cause whereas conceit leads the people’s cause to defeat. Therefore modesty is an expression of one’s responsibility to the people’s cause.

12. A revolutionary in name and practice must be able to: First, respect the creativeness of the masses, listen to their views, and regard himself as one of the masses. He must not have a single grain of selfishness or exaggerate his own role and must work honestly for the masses. This is the spirit which Lu Hsun describes as ‘Hanging my head low, I willingly serve as the young people’s ox.’ This is modesty.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_09.htm

Badiou at the Gates of Dawn

2009-11-18T16:31:00.004+02:00

Standard Turkish response to Chico Marx’s famous line “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” goes like this: “I neither believe you, nor my eyes, I believe in commonplaces and stereotypes.” It does not denote a normal functioning big Other which guarantees the stability of belief underlying the effectiveness of symbolic exchange. At the same time, it defies Zizek’s well known diagnosis of “the demise of symbolic efficiency” in the late capitalist society which, paraphrasing Lacan, enables everyone to acknowledge that the emperor is naked whereas he really is naked but the reality of his nudity resides in the fictional cloths pertain to his symbolic identity: In these times, it does not matter whether the emperor is naked or not, since we have lost the obligatory belief in symbolic mandate that assigns certain cloths to different identities and thereby provides the fundamental ground for communication. However, modern Turkish version of Sufi mysticism, to be precise, Sufi mysticism with bourgeois twist sublated in the prevailing ideological conviction what Badiou calls as “democratic materialism” mobilizes a perverse conception of world through a double disavowal. It does not only struggle to negate the determinative authority of social register with regard to mutual recognition among subjects, but also disavows the distance between imaginary and symbolic identities, confers the authority upon the former and thus, submerges the social reality into stream of fantasy. Let me give you a couple of examples to clarify this completely perplexing procedure. In the regular mechanism of democracy, if not a rule, it is without doubt being a typical politician entails maintaining a double life between a corrupt and cruel businessmen or a mediator on the private level and being a reliable moralist in front of public. But, in the inverted world of democratic materialist mysticism peculiar to Turks, it is completely acceptable to be affected by all the conceivable temptations of market as long as one manages to enjoy the possession of certain imaginary identities (Muslim, Kemalist, Nationalist, etc) promising that its holder walks on the pathway to unification with a certain ideal (god, republic, national identity, etc). Therefore, it does not matter what you say or what they see, what only counts is your imaginary insignia in the social fantasy. But one thing we have to notice is, far from being a sign of dominance of spiritual idealism counter to the heartless reality of commodity exchange, mystical element serves as the ideological pillar that supports the very brutality of social relations. It may surprise you how racism is prevalent in both official state discourse and practice, in political and everyday language, but yet it is impossible to find a single racist since in the spiritual level the word “racism” does not signify any form of discrimination. Thus, its practice in reality is unfettered from unpleasant criticisms.

Alain Badiou quotes Mao’s objection concerning one of the elementary Stalinist distortions of communism, namely depoliticization of the will aspiring after equality:

“All of this relates to the superstructure, that is, to ideology. Stalin speaks only of the economy; he does not deal with politics.”

So far, Turkish politicians, our leaders and their spokesmen have neither dealt with economy, nor politics. Or more precisely, they deal both with economy and politics as if they are insignificant topics in great spiritual debate, as inevitable conspiracy against people in the long path to ideals. Their axiom is:

“There are only bodies and languages, except that there are spiritual truths”

We screw the former with the latter. This is our version of “democratic materialism”

La Voie en Rose

2009-11-18T01:06:00.008+02:00

She said "Frankly, my dear, follow the pink brick road"

Roll me up tight, kick me fast
I'm the hardest woolen ball you'll ever cast
Into this la voie en rose

When you dismiss me lolcats sigh
And tho I can't believe your eyes
I see la voie en rose

And when you chide.. an angel bows
Ordinary paws seem... to wear valvet gloves
Suddenly a child castratingly grows:
I hide away if you shout Heiddeger!
and appear when you say Simone de Beauvoir
halfway through la voie en rose

Logics of Worlds

2009-11-16T02:45:00.007+02:00

Download: Logics of Worlds

While I was seriously thinking to squander the rest of my bankroll in Forex and eventually try kill myself in which I would probably fail just to add an insult to the existential injury, I just discovered that, after nine months of waiting, a perfect pdf copy of Alain Badiou's "Logics of Worlds" has made it to the Internet. I will spend the next week by reading the Master, taking notes, worshiping his genius, praying to him for redemption and striving to figure out how I can fabricate a modest subject out of the defected shell and rotten kernel of this human animal. I intend to publish my misunderstandings in the upcoming days.

Revolutionary Twist of a Collage

2009-11-15T00:16:00.006+02:00

It takes two songs from the Great Depression era two forge a revolutionary song which alludes to the reign of terror, the essential phantasmatic supplement of emancipatory politics: "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime" and "We're in the Money". The result is impressive:

We never see a headline about breadlines today
Half a million boots went slogging through Hell
And when we see the landlord we can look that guy right in the eye
Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time

Plastic Jesus and The Saint of Steel

2009-08-12T23:27:00.006+03:00

(In Stuart Rosenberg's 1967 classic "Cool Hand Luke", Paul Newman plays a modern saint)

"In 1956, Lacan proposed a short and clear definition of the Holy Spirit: “The Holy Spirit is the entry of the signifier into the world. This is certainly what Freud brought us under the title of death drive.” What Lacan means, at this moment of his thought, is that the Holy Spirit stands for the symbolic order as that which cancels (or, rather, suspends) the entire domain of “life”—lived experience, the libidinal flux, the wealth of emotions, or, to put it in Kant’s terms, the “pathological.” When we locate ourselves within the Holy Spirit, we are transubstantiated, we enter another life beyond the biological one." (Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf)

***

"Christianity follows the Jewish religion in occluding the dimension of the Holy. What we do find in Christianity is something of quite another order: the idea of the saint, which is the exact opposite of the priest in service of the Holy. The priest is a 'functionary of the Holy'; there is no Holy without its officials, without the bureaucratic machinery supporting it, organizing its ritual, from the Aztecs' official of human sacrifice to the modern sacred state or army rituals. The saint, on the contrary, occupies the place of objet petit a, of pure object, of somebody undergoing radical subjective destitution. He enacts no ritual, he conjures nothing, he just persists in his inert presence.

We can now understand why Lacan saw in Antigone a forerunner of Christ's sacrifice: in her persistence, Antigone is a saint, definitely not priestess. This is why we must oppose all attempts to domesticate her, to tame her by concealing the frightening strangeness, 'inhumanity', apathetic character of her figure, making of her a gentle protectress of family and household who evokes our compassion and offers herself as a point of identification. In Sophocles' Antigone, the figure with which we can identify is her sister Ismene - kind, considerate, sensitive, prepared to give way and compromise, pathetic, 'human', in contrast to Antigone, who goes to the limit, who ' doesn't give way on her desire' (Lacan) and becomes, in this persistence in the 'death drive', in the being-towards-death, frighteningly ruthless, exempted from the circle of everyday feelings and considerations, passions and fears. In other words, it is Antigone herself who necessarily evokes in us, pathetic everyday compassionate creatures, the question 'What does she really want?', the question which precludes any identification with her." (Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology)

Impartial Butterflies

2009-07-31T16:22:00.005+03:00

I was studying the literature on Moon Landing Hoax a while ago, not because I’m concerned whether it is a hoax or not but just for its entertainment value. After a rigorous examination of arguments from both opponents and proponents, I felt obliged to admit that it is really a hoax, to the extent that everyone believes in the last analysis his dissidents are part of a hoax, if not just a foolish victim of ideological manipulation at best. This peculiar situation resembles Lacan’s reference to the famous dream of Zhuangzi. Lacan revises the dream which in his account situates Zhuangzi in position of the butterfly who knows he is only dreaming and asks this crucial question: “Is it not here that the: I am only dreaming, is only precisely what masks the reality of the look?” In the both controversial cases of Moon landing and Obama’s birth certificate, seriously engaged subject is a hoaxter, who is rightfully aware that it is just a dream. But it is his very consciousness which masks the reality of situation, the Real, does not resides in validity of certificates or “R” marks on allegedly prop moon rocks. It inhabits the look which investigates reality in differences and irregularities of a situation.

The loss of the real in the decline of symbolic marks the consciousness of hoaxters, paraphrasing Hegel’s allusion in “Phenomenology of Spirit”, that a plant is a suspicious creature on which “bursting-forth of the blossom” negates the bud, and subsequently the fruit refutes the blossoming and the winter postpones the question just to be re-emerged in the next spring. Alain Badiou’s one of the four affirmations against ordinary philosophy is “Situations are nothing more, in their being, than pure indifferent multiplicities. Consequently it is pointless to search amongst differences for anything that might play a normative role. If truths exist, they are certainly indifferent to differences.” Doesn’t his assertion resemble Lenin’s refusal that there is no neutral political non-engagement in a society brutally divided by class antagonisms. The reality is there is no choice except we are either socialists or the proponents of bourgeois ideology. One might be a self-conscious butterfly, who knows he is a man, but as long as “I” remains as a stain on the scene that distorts the reality that he is a part of this dream composition, he completely misses the Real of what he sees.

I'm Only Dreaming

2009-07-29T16:26:00.003+03:00

"But, I am going to allow myself to suppose that this dream was incorrectly reported. Choang-tsu, when he dreamt he was a butterfly, said to himself: "it is only a dream" - which is, I assure you, in complete conformity with his mentality. He does not doubt for an instant being able to overcome this tiny problem of his identity of being Choang-tsu. He says to himself: "it is only a dream" and it is precisely in this that it lacks reality. For, in so far as the I of Choang-tsu depends on the following - which is essential for any condition of the subject - namely, that the object is seen, there is nothing which better allows there to be surmounted the traitorous aspect of this world of vision, in so far as it is supposed to support this sort of collection (however we may call it: world or extension), of which the subject is supposed to be the only support and the only mode of existence. What gives the con-sistency of this subject in so far as he sees, namely, in so far as he only has the geometry of his vision, in so far as he can say to the other: "this is on the right" and "this is on the left" and "this is inside" and "this is outside" what allows him to be situated as I, if not the following - which I already underlined for you at one time - that he is himself a picture in this visible world, that the butterfly is here nothing other than what designates him for his part as stain and as what is original in the stain in the emergence, at the level of the organism, of something which will become vision.

It is indeed in so far as the I itself is a stain on a ground and that what he is going to question about what he sees, is very precisely what he cannot rediscover and what slips away, this origin of the look - how much more tangible and manifest by being articulated for us than the light of the sun - to inaugurate what is of the order of I in the scoptophilic relation.

Is it not here that the : I am only dreaming, is only precisely what masks the reality of the look, in so far as it is to be discovered?" (Jacques Lacan, Seminar 14: The Logic of Fantasy)

Enjoy Your Zelig! Part One

2009-07-27T16:25:00.007+03:00

Like most of us, I prefer Woody Allen’s early movies but not for the fact that, as he also assumes (Stardust Memories), they are funnier than his later works, but because they reflect the authentic core of our subjectivity, i.e. we are helpless victims and anonymous puppets of the spontaneous ideology and we are nobody in the social game unless we cannot strive hard to attach ourselves to a Truth. Just as in the case of Chaplin (with the exception of The Great Dictator, where he acquires a proper subjectivity through fidelity to the French revolution), in the end it is usually the Truth of Love what provides subjective consciousness to that humble and neurotic New Yorker.

I was pondering over his “Zelig” in the last couple of days, probably the only movie that I’ve so strongly identified with its main character. However, every time I attempted to write on it, I found myself rambling through various texts from the obvious “Being and Event” to the unimaginable (in the sense of its loose connection with the subject) “What is to be Done.” Finally, I’ve arrived to the conclusion that “Zelig” is not simply a movie about a human chameleon who eventually constructs a consistent personal identity through unconditional love and positive transference of a well intentioned psychoanalyst. But, Leonard Zelig himself is the symptom of the world where we love or hate the other only in the condition that he or she complements the image of our own and fits in our fantasy scene. Thus, it is actually the psychoanalyst (Farrow) who is redeemed from her fantasy of attaining recognition and fame by curing a helpless patient who has a unique disorder. She escapes from her narcissistic illusions and realizes her own nakedness in the symbolic order not by the recognition of many but by the recognition and love of one peculiar man.

Here lies the essential perversion of aggressive Kantian ontology which is clearly discernible in Sasha Baron Cohen’s latest movie Brüno. It is not a movie about a homosexual man who exposures the prejudices ossified in the symbolic order with hostile and obscene jokes, rather, it is about the anxiety of society in front of the evil neighbor, a sociopath who metaphysically assumes subjectivity out of thin air, who duplicates the objective violence regulating the symbolic order with his or her pseudo-antagonist subjectivity (whether he is an intrusive homosexual or a vulgar immigrant) which has already been conditioned by the spontaneous ideology. Therefore, for the very reason that his character supplements our own image, fits in our fantasy, Mr. Cohen leaves no room that enables us to escape from the fantasy scene where we are horrified against the evil neighbor "who exploits our work without compensation, to use us sexually without our consent, to appropriate our goods, to humiliate us, to inflict suffering on us, to torture and kill us." Far from exposing our homophobic prejudices, Sasha Baron Cohen’s character Brüno is a proper pervert not because of his sexual position, but because he offers his homosexuality for the enjoyment of the dominant ideologies, and as a result, he actually supplements our narrow-mindedness and thwarts any possible attempt to overcome narcissism from the beginning.

Lenin’s critique of the Economism that cherishes spontaneity of the working class movement was: “...that all worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belittling of the role of “the conscious element”, of the role of Social-Democracy, means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers.”

Petite Bourgeoisie Hysteria in Honduras

2009-07-24T10:42:00.007+03:00

Socialist Unity: "Eight thousand mainly upper and middle class Hondurans, dressed in the blue and white colours of the national flag, yesterday marched through the capital, Tegucigalpa, in support of the country´s newly installed military dictatorship.

“We are here to support peace and democracy”, retired Colonel Wilfredo Sanchez told supporters at a half filled baseball stadium in the city´s downtown area.
...
Lorena Facusse, president of a logistal company, told the Morning Star that she “didn't like CNN”, describing the US-based news channel as the “Communist News Network”.

“Chavez has been pitting rich people against poor people”, she said. “Manuel Zelaya wants to destroy the middle class”

“The military are the heroes” she insisted."

***

"Everybody, of course, has seen the small owner bend every effort and strain every nerve to "get on in the world", to become a real master, to rise to the position of a “strong” employer, to the position of a bourgeois. As long as capitalism rules the roost, there is no alternative for the small owner other than becoming a capitalist (and that is possible at best in the case of one small owner out of a hundred), or becoming a ruined man, a semi-proletarian, and ultimately a proletarian. The same is true in politics: the petty-bourgeois democrats, especially their leaders, tend to trail after the bourgeoisie. The leaders of the petty-bourgeois democrats console their people with promises and assurances about the possibility of reaching agreement with the big capitalists; at best, and for a very brief period, they obtain certain minor concessions from the capitalists for a small upper section of the working people; but on every decisive issue, on every important matter, the petty-bourgeois democrats have always tailed after the bourgeoisie as a feeble appendage to them, as an obedient tool in the hands of he financial mangates" (Lenin, Lessons of the Revolution)

"The structure of desire, as desire of the Other, is shown more clearly in hysteria than in any other clinical structure; the hysteric is precisely someone who appropriates another’s desire by identifying with them. For example Dora identifies with Herr K, taking as her own the desire which she perceives him to have for Frau K. However, as the case of Dora also shows, the hysteric only sustains the desire of the Other on condition that she is not the object of that desire; she cannot bear to be taken as the object of desire because that would revive the wound of privation." (Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis)

The Carnival of Socialism

2009-07-21T13:15:00.002+03:00

(The latest Carnival of Socialism is hosted by Renegade Eye. He is kind enough to mention my pseudo-Lacanian piece of humor. I strongly recommend Mao Zedong's conversation with his niece Wang Hai-Jung and Madam Miaow's analysis on Uighur uprising)

***

The Carnival of Socialism # 40 is here. At it's description profile it says, "The Carnival of Socialism attempts to bring a fortnightly round up of everything that's going on in the global socialist blogosphere." Hopfully this carnival, will introduce a few new blogs for your consideration, at other carnivals as well.

Kasama caught my interest with a post entitled Mao Zedong: Should Reactionaries Have Free Speech?.

American Left History should be a regular stop on your blog reading. This blog centers on American history and culture, from a socialist view. Markin's love of history and art shine through.

The Third Estate managed to interview political icon in the UK Tony Benn.

Left in East Dakota notes Obama's base being disillusioned with him.

Worker's Press criritiques Obama on healthcare.

River's Edge notes that the UK anti-terror units, only find rightist plots, "it is invariably more by luck than by design".

Vengeance and Fashion has an interesting post about a schoolteacher who was abused by his students and snapped. There are Facebook groups supporting both sides. It is unusual for socialists to write about such a subject so close to home.

The Trotsky Museum has a blog of its own.

Querida Celia Hart Is a Spanish blog that honors Celia Hart Santamaria, the Cuban revolutionary who died last year in an auto accident related to the Cuban Hurricane. Celia opened doors for socialist democracy in Cuba.

From Turkey Mehmet Çagatay writes about Michael Jackson.

The Red Mantis tackles Iranian unrest, and asks who leads and where is it going?

Histomat replies to a BBC documentary about Leon Trotsky, based on the book The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky. Histomat writes, "Just as Stalin smeared the Jewish Trotsky as an agent of Hitler, so Richard Overy describes Trotsky's supporters as a 'motley crew', while Trotsky himself suffered from a 'blindness to any sense of humanity' and apparently 'never had any scruples about killing those in the way of the Marxist utopia'. It is a pity that Overy has seemingly not made time to read Trotsky's Their Morals and Ours where he answered exactly Overy's critique about 'moral scruple' over seventy years ago:"

Socialism or Barbarism reviews the Irish economy, in a two part series.

Celticfire writes about a Portland transit riders union.

The Daily Maybe discovered the Trotskyist soft drink Red Kola.

Untouchable Earth writes from India about the will of the Iranian people. This blog is oriented to socialism, art and astronomy.

Madam Miaow gives us good analysis of the Uighur uprising in China. At my local coffeeshop Madam Miaow's blog is blocked by the computer's filtering software. What's wrong with Anna Mae Wong?

A Reader's Word from India, takes on the myth of micro finance.

The next Carnival will be August 02, 2009 at Red Wombat

Renegade Eye

Possible Consequences of Mutual Goodwill

2009-07-16T08:01:00.005+03:00

NYTIMES: "The first batch of Uighurs, 40 young men and women from the far western region of Xinjiang, arrived at the Early Light Toy Factory here in May, bringing their buoyant music and speaking a language that was incomprehensible to their fellow Han Chinese workers.

After the melee, the 800 Uighur workers were moved to an industrial park not far from the factory, guarded by the police.

“We exchanged cigarettes and smiled at one another, but we couldn’t really communicate,” said Gu Yunku, a 29-year-old Han assembly line worker who had come to this southeastern city from northern China. “Still, they seemed shy and kind. There was something romantic about them.”

The mutual good will was fleeting.

By June, as the Uighur contingent rose to 800, all recruited from an impoverished rural county not far from China’s border with Tajikistan, disparaging chatter began to circulate. Taxi drivers traded stories about the wild gazes and gruff manners of the Uighurs. Store owners claimed that Uighur women were prone to shoplifting. More ominously, tales of sexually aggressive Uighur men began to spread among the factory’s 16,000 Han workers."

...

"I began my lectures this year with the onerous topic of the utilitarians, but the utilitarians are quite right. They are countered with something that, in effect, only makes the task of countering them much more difficult, with a sentence such as "But, Mr. Bentham, my good is not the same as another's good, and your principle of the greatest good for the greatest number comes up against the demands of my egoism." But it's not true. My egoism is quite content with a certain altruism, altruism of the kind that is situated on the level of the useful. And it even becomes the pretext by means of which I can avoid taking up the problem of the evil I desire, and that my neighbor desires also. That is how I spend my life, by cashing in my time in a dollar zone, ruble zone or any other zone, in my neighbor's time, where all the neighbors are maintained equally at the marginal level of reality of my own existence. Under these conditions it is hardly surprising that everyone is sick, that civilization has its discontents.

It is a fact of experience that what I want is the good of others in the image of my own. That doesn't cost so much. What I want is the good of others provided that it remain in the image of my own. I would even say that the whole tiling deteriorates so rapidly that it becomes: provided that it depend on my efforts. I don't even need to ask you to go very far into your patients' experience: if I wish for my spouse's happiness, I no doubt sacrifice my own, but who knows if her happiness isn't totally dissipated, too?" (Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)

Uighur Terrorism

2009-07-10T04:46:00.004+03:00

Indiatimes: China said Thursday that those involved in Sunday's killing and mayhem in the northwestern city of Urumqi were members of terrorists groups with links with al-Qaida. It was seeking the cooperation of foreign governments to track down links and people involved in supporting the rioters from overseas locations.

***

It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word 'terrorist' is an intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, of their causes and consequences.

In fact, it is a term that has become essentially formal. 'Terrorist' no longer designates a political orientation or the possibilities of such and such a situation, but rather, and exclusively, the form of action. And it does so according to three criteria. It is first and foremost - for public opinion and those who attempt to shape it- a spectacular, non-State action, which emerges - reality or myth - from clandestine networks. Second, it is a violent action aiming to kill or destroy. Lastly, it is an action which makes no distinction between civilians and non-civilians.

This formalism approaches Kant's moral formalism. This is why a 'moral philosophy' specialist like Monique Canto believed she could declare that the absolute condemnation of 'terrorist' actions and the symmetrical approval of reprisals, including those of Sharon in Palestine, could and should precede any examination of the situation, and be abstracted from any concrete political considerations. When it is a matter of 'terrorism', according to this Iron lady of a new breed, to explain is already to justify. It is thus appropriate to punish without delay and without further examination. Henceforth, 'terrorism' qualifies an action as the formal figure of Evil. Moreover, this is exactly how Bush from the very beginning conceived of the deployment of vengeance: Good (in concrete, State terrorism directed against peasant villages and the ancient cities of Central Asia) against Evil (non-State terrorism directed at Western buildings) . (Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought)

David Harvey on Overdetermination of the Way Towards Socialism

2009-07-09T06:09:00.004+03:00

Creative Destruction of Monstrous Dream Machines

2009-07-04T03:54:00.004+03:00

I first learned about MJ's death from a post on Marxmail. My first reaction was to arrange a personal commemoration ceremony on YouTube, of course, starting with "The Way You Make Me Feel", one of first the two songs in English that I memorized its lyrics (The other one was "It's A Sin" from Pet Shop Boys). After an hour or two, my short attention span turned towards to another musician, who in a way has nurtured a comparable image with MJ's. I'm talking about David Bowie, the man of thousand looks. Then in a moment of poetic intuition, I discovered that, MJ is David Bowie who was permanently caught in the video of the song "Life on Mars". I think his tragedy was not being a sort of a nonfunctional signifier which had been trapped in repetition, but, it resides in his stubborn but at the same time affirmative (in the sense of negating while preserving the form) resistance to the elasticity of free-floating signifiers. Therefore, his artistic transgression was that he debased the essential necessity of empty formalism, i.e. obsession with new forms which also dictates to maintain the possibility of demolition and reconstruction of its objects in an endless repetition. He debased it by transforming his body always for good, therefore confined the desire of infinitude to the finitude of his body. MJ, as being both an artist and a commodity, embodied the destructive ambition of formalism and commodity production in his exhausted and synthetic face. He was a tragic hero who snatched the nightmare from the jaws of Other's dream.

...

MJ exposes the fake novelties of formalism insofar as The Luddites had attested to the ultimate boundary of the revolutionary character of capitalist production, i.e. perpetual revolution intended to keep the Capital intact.

Whereas he was supposed to preserve the capacity of his body as an image placeholder for endless bodies deprived of any representation, he denied the very material of this formalism by gradually transforming his body to a complete mask, in Lacanian terms, to an idol of the absence of bodies. He changed for good since at every stage he destroyed the preceding body with no return.

...

UPDATE:

it seems that I forgot to add my fundamental critique about MJ. I doubt this malevolent guy ruined my sexual development on adolescence with his video that I mentioned above. I was sort of a sheepish and suffering boy like the one in Traveling Wilburys’ song “Handle with Care”, but his video encouraged me to act like an verbally insistent man who knows what he wants, which usually ended up with an emotional disaster. When it worked though for a couple of times, it didn’t take long for girls to realize actually what a pathetic creature I am, just to make me act again but this time as a Woody Allen in famous break up scene from Bananas. As now the King is dead, I feel I finally have the courage to embrace the male lesbian inside me.

A Leftist Fantasy

2009-06-25T23:14:00.002+03:00

"The doubts that drove us through the night as we two talked amain,
And day had broken on the streets e'er it broke upon the brain."

Typical accusation by the decent left about the Marxist supporters of Iranian insurgents argues that they are projecting their imaginary formula of social change to the current political situation in Iran. The critique is often accompanied with an emphasis on supposedly overlooked complexity of international politics: How could you fail to notice that imperialist puppeteers are pulling the strings just like in the case of Venezuela and in contrast to the collaborator pawns that speaks English, likes to mess around with Twitter and MTV, the majority of population is pleased with their despotic masters (I don’t endorse the regime in Iran however it is the materialization of Iranian subjectivity and it plays a progressive role by counteracting US-Israel imperialism in the Middle East).

Quite the opposite, I think that these noble and untainted critics of recent uprisings stick to their fantasy scene in which they unyieldingly go up against their native bourgeois even in a situation where their bourgeois too is unaware of what is really going on. Although the authentic political category of “imperialist conspiracy” seems indisputable, in the last analysis it is still a conspiracy theory which has been employed for avoiding to get tangled with the material conditions of a situation. In the case of Venezuela, the propelling motive behind the revolution was socialism, which was considered by the working class as the proper way to counter offense the American imperialism and the local politico-economical order that enables global capital to maintain its hegemony in Venezuela. Even the Venezuelan revolution has not being realized against some credulous students duped by American imperialism, it is against the seemingly invincible network of global economic system. But in Iran, the situation is different, if not completely irrelevant. The current Iranian regime does not only adhere to the fundamental economic premises of imperialism, but at the same time constitutes various pretexts that pave the way for continuation of imperialist aggression. In this sense, far from being an astute analysis, contemptuous & indulgent description of Twitter & MTV revolutionaries against uncompromising anti-imperialist posture of the Iranian Establishment is itself a compromising product of hygienic leftist fantasy.

Little Boxes

2009-06-14T05:50:00.003+03:00

"...they all were put in boxes, little boxes all the same"

Yesterday, Maryam Namazie posted an interview with Hamid Taqvaee, leader of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran:

http://maryamnamazie.blogspot.com/2009/06/on-todays-presidential-election-in-iran.html

Although I find his opinion about the widespread opposition against the regime is slightly exaggerated, I agree with his conviction that it is inaccurate to call the elections in Iran as a farce whilst in actuality there has not been any elections whatsoever. It differs from elections in standard capitalist-democracy both formally and functionally. In the formal sense, participation in elections is strictly restricted by the Guardian Council of the Constitution to prevent any possible discrepancy within the current political arrangement from the start. Functionally, since an "apathetic public consensus" (Badiou) has already been established in Western democracies as a result of numerous years of practice and capital-labor friction has been comparably softened with some grease acquired through the imperialist plunder, a typical elections in Western democracy functions as a sham, but a sincere sham in which every four of five years people come together in a carnivalesque fashion and pit their insignificant differences against another just to confirm the comfortable delusion that they possess democracy which guarantees difference of opinion among people. Eventually the triumphant side seals the victory with a blissful musical gathering. (For instance, I'm very disappointed with the outcome of the latest elections in the U.S for the sole reason that they seized our modest enjoyment of listening Pete Seeger. That is all). But because democracy itself is a shameless sham in Iran, as Hamid Taqvaee puts it, elections functions to ensure the continuity of the regime, not as a celebratory ritual about public consensus but as a disturbing symptom which compensates and masks the absence of it.

Shut the Other's Gaze Down

2009-02-26T05:41:00.001+02:00

This is my response to Louis Proyect's review of the Academy Award Winning "Slumdog Millionaire":

I didn’t watch the movie and probably I will not as its “realism” seems too much for my tastes. Concerning realism, the movie’s realistic representation of the Mumbai slums, I think we shouldn’t confuse “Dickensian” plain realism with magical realism of, for instance, Garcia Marquez, whose works would offer a better comparison to “Slumdog Millionaire”.

A couple of years ago, in his reality news show, a prominent Turkish journalist disclosed a despicable scandal involving the roofing-tile factories of the developed Marmara region which employ the forced labor of Kurdish children hired out from their patents residing in the eastern countryside of the country. This was the most distressing TV show I had ever watched, the living conditions of those slave-children was the perfect modern day resuscitation of the stories quoted by Marx in Capital. But, surprisingly for the readers here who expect me to state that this scandal has changed a lot of things, through the courage and the fidelity of the journalist to the reality of Western Turkey’s industrial development, Kurdish children have now freed from slave labor, I can only admit with grief: Nothing has changed, the reality failed, or more properly, fantasy about the inevitable spontaneity of poverty and destiny prevailed over the reality. This is the dead end of “Dickensian” plain realism. Marx’s Capital would be consisting of only one chapter, the chapter called “Machinery and Modern Industry” if he was a realist preoccupied with appearances.

If we go through magical realism the distinction is striking, as Marquez once pointed out, its central concern is to abolish the border line between reality and fantasy. The defense function of fantasy that enables us to avoid the traumatic scene is here introduced as the determinant which structures the very traumatic content of reality. Fantasy prevails again but in a reversed extreme form by totally subjecting reality to its authority. The central question of the neurotic fantasy, “what the Other wants from me?” turns into the inverted question of perversion as “how can I satisfy the Other?” as for Lacan, “…intersubjective relation is lost its place to sustain the perverse fantasy of serving the Other’s jouissance”. Doesn’t the protagonist of “Slumdog Millionaire” satisfy the Other in his own peculiar way by transforming his coincidental knowledge piled up in his experience of poverty and desolation into an instrument to escape from the Mumbai slums? Is not the reality of the global capitalism’s objective violence which is particularly materialized in the slums of Mumbai presented as immersed in the perverse fantasy of the protagonist?

I certainly agree with Louis that it is proper to a documentary to reflect the dialectical complexity of the conditions of slums, the involvement of IMF’s destructive monetary policies, etc. and my objection is not to “Dickensian” realism or to genuine fantastic artwork, such as Woody Allen’s brilliant movie Sleeper (which I watched recently), they both reflect the dominant ideologies of the world which they originated respectively from Victorian England and the USA of the Cold War period as “the lived experience of individuals”. But the question is, as Alain Badiou puts it, how not to be a formalist-Romantic, contrary to the dominant current of contemporary art i.e. the mixture of modernism’s infinite desire of new forms and obsession of finitude, body, suffering and death, the reactionary combination which aspires not to reflect the reality of the ideology in the form of subjective experience but aims to reproduce the ideology itself. In “Slumdog Millionaire”, as I understand from the reviews, this artistic tendency reveals itself as the reproduction of the gaze of Western capitalist democracy proud of its tolerance and formal freedoms and thus posits itself as the ultimate alternative of the authoritarian corruption of Eastern capitalism.

Why We Should Love Israel?

2009-01-31T15:34:00.008+02:00

There must be something about Israel that might motivate us, all the patriots of the world like me, to bestow our cordial love upon it. So, why we should love Israel?

Attentive followers of the debates in Davos certainly watched the footage of the incident where our brave leader Turkish Prime Minister Mr. Erdogan heroically gives a lesson of humanity to Shimon Peres with his typical childish noisiness notable for rattling off the empty rhetoric of ignorance. In the most feverish moment of the squabble Mr. Erdogan uttered maybe the most ridiculous words that have ever been exchanged between two imperialist leaders: "You are killing people." I wonder what he would say if Mr. Peres suddenly asked this awkward question: Ok, Mr. President, we are killing people but where were you when the Turkish F16s were bombing the villages in the Northern Iraq?

It seems that we are way too sensitive in respect to the traumatic experience that our unconscious patriotic (I’m deliberately employing this term as it is now the name that masks racism in particular segments of the Turkish left) desire is now being materialized by the Israeli Zionism.

Without displaying any sign of leniency on his initial determination to put the Israeli Zionists in their place, Mr. Erdogan carried on his unyielding support to Palestinians in an interview with the Washington Post. When he was asked about his close relationship with Hamas, rightfully he stated:

"Hamas entered the elections as a political party. If the whole world had given them the chance of becoming a political player, maybe they would not be in a situation like this after the elections that they won."

Since we don’t have the luxury of playing the idiot like the Post interviewer let's ask the proper question which is absent in the interview:

Then tell me Mr. President, if so, why the Turkish state always seeks new excuses to shut down every political party founded by the Kurdish people?

The best thing about Israel is with its demonstration of the symptoms of nation-states in the most vulgar way, it enables us to cover up our more refined forms of ethnic discrimination. Since now racism means besieging an ethnic group to hunger and death and bombing them with the most sophisticated weapons, we can contently keep up or our own moderate practice of institutional ethnic discrimination without being caught by the trap of vulgar anti-democratic racism. Besides, there is always a way to dodge the accusations of the emergent racist sentiments among our people by declaring that these are individual attempts. In this sense, we should be grateful to Israel for giving us an ethical license to liberally and democratically hate Jews, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, etc, etc.

Communism Kills Eternal Truths

2009-01-28T00:17:00.008+02:00

In a recent post on her blog, I Cite, Jodi Dean brings forward her doubt about the potential of the death drive to make way for radical politics. She states:

"...I would think that there is no political valence to drive; it is as likely to have politically conservative effects as it is radical ones. In fact, to me it seems more likely to have politically conservative effects, particularly under conditions of communicative capitalism."

After reading her post I leafed through Lacan’s 'The Ethics of Psychoanalysis' for if I could find something that supports her pessimism (which I also share). It is remarkable that at the beginning of the chapter called 'The Death Drive' Lacan raises the question what would Marx think about progressivism, the ideology which is widespread in modern bourgeoisie.

As I understand or misunderstand, for Lacan, there are two aspects of the death drive and they are connected with the historicity of the subject. The first one is its destructive feature, tendency to return to a state of universal equilibrium. The other is the "will to create from zero, a will to begin again." The former is subjected to our experience, registered to the path that we fallowed to arrive to the existing state of affairs. Lacan states in Seminar 17 that, "life only ever returns there via paths that are always the same, ones it has previously traced." I think this is where the deception of death drive resides. I once run across an anarcho-capitalist cab driver, while we were passing in front of the president's residence he suddenly told me that we must privatize everything even including the state. It is no surprise that the radical political destination of death drive operating in the subject who is cursed by the free-market ideology is anarcho-capitalism. In this vein, the death drive generally operates as the radical confirmation of the existing order.

The other dimension, the will to create from ex nihilo becomes accessible only through the isolation of the historical sequence, by which our experiences and our memories are recognized as they are conditioned by the symbolic order. Lacan here astonishingly speaks in favor of the creationist theory insofar as it ascribes the origin of the symbolic order to an external entity. With this externalization the death drive becomes capable of overcoming the second barrier and reaching beyond what Lacan called “the cycle of generation-corruption”. Thus, Marx’s defiant declaration in the Manifesto, "There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience," designates the TRUE aim of radical politics, not directed to backwards on the determined route by annihilating and reinstalling contingent institutions of the capitalist society but radically focused to eradicate supposedly eternal truths that determine the contingent elements of our history.

Lacan's answer to the question what would Marx think about progressivism is, "they are a good, healthy standard of a certain kind of intellectual honesty." But radical politics in no way coincides with progressivism, Marx disavows the Hegelian conception of the State as the actualization of freedom based on the power of reason and regards it as an instrument of class struggle determined by the capitalist production, and only by this process of isolation he enables himself to conceive a new beginning beyond the second destruction, beyond the negation of the private property:

"Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation? Answer: In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong but wrong generally is perpetrated against it; which can no longer invoke a historical but only a human title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in an all-round antithesis to the premises of the German state; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete rewinning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat."

If there is a slightest capacity of the death-drive to open up a field for radical emancipatory politics, I think, it is the will to begin again by setting off from the assertion that our subjective history is a byproduct of the symbolic order.

Wink of an Eye

2009-01-23T14:40:00.007+02:00

Perhaps the most recurring arrangement in the TV series “Malcolm in the Middle” was while Louis delivers one of her standard tirades to discipline the boys Hal usually repeats her but nevertheless undermines the authoritarian massage whether intentionally with a mischievous wink or unintentionally due to his naturally eccentric attitudes. The presence of Hal adds the dimension of real to the scene and provides access to the jouissance which is thwarted by the pleasure principle, i.e. the principle of sticking to the level of minimum enjoyment to prevent the slightest unpleasant possibility.

The appearance of George Bush, a white American heir of an upper-class family from Texas who carries on his father’s occupation, a devoted conservative cowboy who rides on religious moralism and unbridled American patriotism, as the president of the U.S fits in symbolic order such perfectly that although his message indicates the imperative to enjoy everything that is American, a particular way of life, freedom, democracy, etc. etc. yet only functions as a barrier that frustrates any seduction of access to the enjoyment from the content of the message. What is missing is the real element, the wink of an eye or something peculiar that resists to the hypothetical regularity of the symbolic.

On the other hand, the appearance of Barack Hussein Obama from top to toe is almost impossible to fit in the standard image of the leader of a country by anyone who has studied a little bit on American history. Everything about Obama is real that intrudes the symbolic reality. A black man from a Muslim background now delivers a speech by ranting and raving nearly the same the ideological message of his predecessor but there is a big difference: The whole scene is a giant wink of an eye that opens up the access to the full enjoyment of ruling ideology of the ruling class. This is why while words coming from Bush’s mouth are perceived as a terrible pain in the ass, they are now accepted as the sweet melodies complementing the long awaited mass political jamboree.

Crazy Little Thing Called Change

2009-01-21T03:06:00.009+02:00

The new U.S. president Barack Obama finally gave the inauguration speech awaited in anticipation by billions of people all along the world. I have to admit that I’m fully satisfied with his speech, I think he perfectly demonstrated that why people have voted for him and also why he is the embodiment of the ruling class consensus on the urgent need for reconstruction of the collective consciousness.

My early assessment of Obama was he is just another American politician who has his share of inevitable subjective commitment to the capitalist parliamentary democracy and thus his rhetoric about change and the constituents’ passionate yearning for a sort of unidentified justice which is also mobilized around this little object “change” is merely the setting that frames the existing political reality. This little object “change” frames the reality merely by its extraction from the setting and in this vein forming a window by its absence on the middle. This was my alleged Lacanian interpretation: The object called change frames the political reality only with its absence, when really there is no change. Here, Badiouean interpretation has already been given: You cannot participate in a system without a subjective commitment to it. “We must keep our distance from this subjective figure of politics”.

But after his nominations and this inaugural jamboree and the speech that he gave, now, I’m convinced that he is really after some substantial chance. In the Marxist perspective, the change is obvious: In the minds of the crises, the common affairs of bourgeoisie are now much more complicated that the executives of the state must find a way to restore the previous contradictions among the ruling class and remind them their common interests. I think Mr. Obama is more than capable to accomplish this restorative function.

Don't Give Up Your Anxiety

2009-01-10T22:21:00.001+02:00

A recent article in Wall Street Journal reports that some Israeli Jews are now dispelling the anxiety due to experiencing years of constant violence with the most effortless way. This is exactly what Badiou calls subjective corruption. Like a crowd cheering to an ordinary NHL brawl, it seems that they have finally found the shortest but certainly the scandalous way to break away from anxiety by gazing at the effects of the “operation” from the top of the hills near the Gaza border:

“On another hilltop overlooking Gaza, Sandra Koubi, a 43-year-old philosophy student, says seeing the violence up close "is a kind of catharsis for me, to get rid of all the anxiety we have inside us after years of rocket fire" from Hamas.”

This disavowal of traumatic perception of reality might be formulated as: I normally don’t take obscene pleasure in watching other people suffering but violent deeds of the other are so suffocating that they left me no escape other than succumbing to this innocent pleasure.

I was once on the top of the imaginary hill near the ethnical borders in Turkey. If I remember correctly, I was eight or nine when PKK initiated guerrilla warfare against the Turkish Army. From childhood to adolescence my greatest fear was Kurdish terrorism, probably incited by the propagandist images of the bodies of innocent babies supposedly killed in terrorist attacks. I remember how I got relief by reading the count of terrorists killed each day in newspapers. But later in the university years I realized that the authentic menace comes from those in a way or other connected with the state or with the state ideology. I hope I’ve realized that my anxiety is a way too much valuable to exchange with the deceptive purely ideological desire of the other.

The problem with mirror in front of which the nations construct the image for self-recognition by telling stories and creating myths about themselves is not that it simply transforms the narratives to an ideological formula and thus reflects the reality in a distorted form. But it precisely replicates the particularity of the reality to distort the very perception of reality. Ideology here, as we are witnessing in operation, is offering the narrative of the clear-cut reality of the Israeli Jews, they are living in the state unending state of emergency by the treat of Kassam rockets, they are afraid of sending their children to schools, they are doomed to the inexpressible level of anxiety and so on… Their story is real. I mean, it is not deceptive. As a man who also suffers from anxiety disorder I think they should be really anxious about the every day violence that encircles them. But then comes the typical ideological question which demands sympathy to horrible crimes initiated and operated by the ruling classes of those nations: Imagine how do you feel if you were an Israeli Jew living in the same conditions? In this sense, however touching it may sounds; one should show zero sympathy to narratives. And if we are discontented with our anxiety, we should find a more radical way to cure it rather than exchanging our anxiety with the Zionist desire or hostile Turkish nationalism by passively watching the relaxing bomb clouds, etc. Here I propose them or myself too active solidarity with the reality unreflected by ideological mirror.

A Typical Bourgeois Political Debate

2009-01-07T22:59:00.004+02:00

Here is the rare footage from Obama - McCain debate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2mjU-_PnEE

Heroes

2008-12-25T17:05:00.005+02:00

"And the shame was on the other side
Oh we can beat them-forever and ever"

According to a CNN article, “The U.S. Army says it will honor the "heroism and sacrifice" of 350 U.S. soldiers who were held as slaves by Nazi Germany during World War II.”

When I first watched the movie ‘Stalag 17’ on television long time ago my biggest surprise was contrary to what we had been told about the suffering in the concentration camps, being a captive American soldier in a Nazi camp is not horrific as what had happened to the Jews. (Think about William Holden who playfully trades with his German colleagues). In this type of movies (Stalag 17, The Great Escape or more recently as in Hart's War) the American soldier do not only manage to preserve their physical dignity but boldly confront their guardians both ideologically and psychologically. On the other hand, the hideous Nazi officers who do not refrain from ruthlessly torturing and liquidating Jews in various techniques are reluctant to disregard the provisions of Geneva Conventions in respect of American soldier, possibly by the reason of their hesitation against the capability of American individual to improvise cunning ploys when the things get complicated. It is not an unfounded delusion though since all these movies end up with practical American civility outsmarting, outplaying the collective stupidity of German idealism.

I think the reason why American army had covered the actual conditions of its soldiers in the Nazi camps in all these years is to prevent the damage to the eternal dignity and courage of the soldier who is the embodiment of the collective universal American. But unfortunately as the American soldier has traversed to the other side of the shame finally, the only way to save his appearance is to reverse the image and reflect his humane-mortal face. This is way the U.S army suddenly decided to disclose the outworn secrets.

As I understand, in the WW2 era, one of the prominent images in the U.S was the monstrous Japanese rapist targeting white American female:

It is no surprise that Turks have been told once in a while that how treacherous Armenians raped and brutally butchered pregnant Turkish women in the unguarded villages of Anatolia. But it is all right as it and the illustrations above demonstrates our humane individual vulnerability against the strictly organized brutality of the enemy. But what happens if the enemy rape or transform our soldier to their slave? Total humiliation: It would be like to rape a nation all together. The tolerable fate of the soldier is heroic martyrdom and immorality but not to be enslaved by the enemy, this is why the Turkish state welcomed the freed soldiers as if they are disgraceful traitors and shameless cowards. Later it was revealed that some of them are people of Kurdish ethnic background, i.e. they don’t deserve to be a Turkish soldier in the first place.

The Radical Conformist Humor

2008-08-18T11:20:00.004+03:00

There was a post on The Unrepentant Marxist on Robert Greenwald’s documentary “The Real McCain”. Here is my comment:

I think people watch these allegedly political videos for the same reason they are fascinated by lolcat humor. It is the obscene pleasure of witnessing the triumph of life, of its overwhelming flow that tears down all the barriers. In one of them, common human stupidity prevails over the nature by zealously reflecting its symptoms to another living thing. In the other, disturbing contradictions of human dimension invades the social order: people sometimes get confused, yes, although McCain is a politician, he can get confused too. Terry Eagleton is right to say that in satire and irony the hero is inferior to the rest of us, but I think, we should add that, in comedy the hero is inferior to each of us individually, but replicates our common weakness and confusion against our environment. I think this is the elemental trap of comedy: We typically get the inferior impersonal frame without the individual picture. Here what we got, I mean, with the sarcastic McClain movies, jokes, etc. is an empty frame of standard human stupidity, without the original, individual political picture of McCain. This is why, although it seems extremely critical to the state of affairs, comedy, parody, etc. in fact, often radically reproduces the conditions of the unpleasant individual situation.

It is amazing even if the sense of humor is one of the most exceptional qualities among humanity, modern dominance of white collar narcissism and the Internet machine remarkably decreases the expenses of its reproduction and increases the productivity of banality. At first it seems contradictory to spot pathological narcissism in conjunction with the sense of humor, but, considering the performative capability of narcissism to observe and act according to what people laugh at, along with the fact that comedy is the shortest way to objectify people, to reduce individuals to empty frames, it is understandable that the widespread shortage of creative humor itself produces infinite amount of homogeneous jokes. Now, we have countless Holden Caulfields everywhere supposedly surrounded by numerous stereotypes, stupid girls, perverts, Yale-looking guys, lazy bastards, dirty bastards, nosy bastards, phony bastard, etc. etc. they obsessively point out each other, seemingly expose their bullshit, but for what motivation? To demonstrate that I’m the the only NORMAL bastard: “I was probably the only normal bastard in the whole place--and that isn't saying much. I damn near sent a telegram to old Stradlater telling him to take the first train to New York. He'd have been the king of the hotel.” (The Catcher in the Rye). In a paradoxical fashion, the misleading element in the pretentious sense of humor of modern narcissism is its illusory radical aggressivity. As Zizek puts, the pathological narcissist “is a radical conformist who paradoxically experiences himself as an outlaw”.

I’m too fed up with this tedious lolcat style political humor.

The Imaginary Berlin Wall

2008-05-14T10:15:00.008+03:00

The text below is my response to a post appeared in Louis Proyect's The Unrepentant Marxist:

Hello Louis,

Although I haven’t written you in a while, I am keeping the track of the updates of your blog. Your reference to the “post-modernist sensibility” gave me a pause to question one of the distinctive patterns of postmodern narrative: the unfulfilling culmination with an ambiguous escape from the fiction. It is the inevitable finale of a fiction suffering from the Tristram Shandy Syndrome.

Here we are introduced with an East German ghost is desperately dreaming that she has survived from her unavoidable destiny and eventually merged herself with modern West German post-industrial society. The Freudian innovation in interpretation of dreams fundamentally centered on the rupture from the previous theory in which the dream was treated simply as the imaginary showcase of the arbitrary remainders of the daily reality, however, in Freudian sense, the dream is not the imaginary illustration of our reality but it essentially displays how we relate ourselves with the reality. At this juncture Louis Althusser integrates ideology with the Freudian conception of the dream:

“Now I can return to a thesis which I have already advanced: it is not their real conditions of existence, their real world, that 'men' 'represent to themselves' in ideology, but above all it is their relation to those conditions of existence which is represented to them there. It is this relation which is at the centre of every ideological, i.e. imaginary, representation of the real world. It is this relation that contains the 'cause' which has to explain the imaginary distortion of the ideological representation of the real world. Or rather, to leave aside the language of causality it is necessary to advance the thesis that it is the imaginary nature of this relation which underlies all the imaginary distortion that we can observe (if we do not live in its truth) in all ideology.”

The central allegation of postmodern narrative is the decisive disavowal of the modern conception that reality is represented in fiction albeit in a ciphered form. Since everything is a part of the complete signifying system, there is no possibility of reality outside of the language. Just like one of Auster’s ordinary hackneyed characters, Quinn from "City of Glass" summarizes the postmodern cliché of metafiction, i.e. the primary and probably the only remarkable narrative trick of his author: the postmodern author is not interested in how his stories related with the world, but how they are relate with other stories. The postmodern distortion here resides in its initial identification that the signifying system is the ultimate determination of the representation of reality. But language, in its imaginary aspect, naturally excludes the real and demonstrates no more than how we relate ourselves with our real conditions. The same goes for literature. Even though it is a waste of time to investigate a shred of Turkish reality through the lyric verses of an ordinary petite bourgeoisie Turkish poet who in general used to extensively chant about the skies, birds, flora, bugs and insects and love, (which is the sum total of all these arbitrary images plucked from the purity of rural life… and which is contrary to the Socialist Realists of 70’s who employ love as the complementary drive-object of revolution) this imaginary arrangement of items apparently unconnected with the prevailing and pervasive indignity of the urban working class perfectly represents how the rumbles and grumbles of the stomach of our modern artists are related with the reality.

Although no more than little of my concerns still remains, for me the keystone for critic of art is to crack code of its representation that how the imaginary and the real is related. With regard to Christian Petzold’s movie that you reviewed, sticking to my standard procedure to evaluate the meaning in the artistic creation, it is required to invert and fix his depiction what his movie is about:

“…Someone who has come from a ghost town like this and who wants to enter into life, but carries around the ghostly with them, that is what Yella is all about.”

Based on your quite short synopsis, Yella is not about what Mr. Petzold ostensibly disclosed. There is a stunning irony in the act of confession or disclosing a concealed meaning: In effect, which is more bluntly revealed is the presence of a disturbing connection between the subject and the truth which is supposedly disclosed. It is not the infection of the ghostly melancholy of East German countrymen that is haunting the German financial capital personified as Philip, the rapacious private investor. But it is the German neo-liberalism (Here I used term the Real like Lacan and Badiou employed: something outside of the borders of the mighty signifying system persistently pressures the symbolic order to take precautions to interrupt its eruption with a traumatic Event which would disintegrate the coordinates of the system.. More explicitly, it’s a reminiscent of the neurotic vibration inside my left ear) which summons the East-German ghost to exorcise its evil spirit, a vibration of reality that patiently lies to wait to explode out with an unexpected Event. I think this is also the reason of your recent discontent on how contemporary fiction ends without a fulfilling culmination. Whereas the narrative is all about to suppress the reality, it is compulsory to prohibit any Event only which has the supremacy to represent the Real.

Anyway, the concealed meaning in Yella connotes that an ordinary German needs to resurrect the soul of GDR to persuade him/herself that the Berlin Wall still remains, everything is in order, signifying system still functions, words like democracy, freedom, equality, egalitarian justice, communism, totalitarianism, etc still signifies the same fixed meaning as before 1989. Even in the sexual attraction, the aluminum phallus of the private investment could be desirable with the spurring of the obsessive-compulsive East German hick fettering the social unification quest of her ex-wife. This might be elementary lesson of this story.

My critical concern here is not the problem with the emblematic construction of the postmodern fiction. I can’t give a meaningful shit about a nonsensical fart (I only care about music). Like Badiou, my concern is the birth of a new subject which rises above the wreck of previous symbolic order. Unlike Badiou, I think Subject is not the completed creation of the Event. There the new subject exists only in a potential form, in-itself. It was our desire for social unity that prompted us to tear down the Berlin Wall, freedom and democracy were its objects… Eventually we secured a valuable trophy from the ruins just to realize that the bourgeois democracy and freedom have tiny, only descriptive connection. This is the crucial point whether the birth certificate of a new subject would be stamped. The potentiality of new subject surfaces at the moment when one gets what one wants with a little malformation. Like in Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil, the main protagonist Sam Lowry unexpectedly encounters the woman of his dreams without the little detail of long curly blonde hair and eventually we see at the end of the movie that this time he dreams about Jill as she is. This is the excellent expression of true love. It is not true for the reason that from now on Sam Lowry loves Jill as the real Jill, as who she is. It is impossible anyway. But his encounter with a woman utterly dismantled the mechanism of his desire towards women: There is no need for a supplementary long blonde wig and dreams of heroism in which Lowry crosses swords with his own superego to save the dreamgirl, etc. Contrary, at the end of the movie, in Lowry’s final dream, we see that Jill the Real saves him from the torturers. This is the valid final scene of the movie for me. The actual last scene is an insult to this reality.

A new subject emerges at the decisive point that Badiou names as the “Fidelity to the Event”. Here we have extra options: We can get rid of the tomboyish shorthaired Jill or we can expel the generic “communist hypothesis” that once propelled us to demolish the walls, which would again enables us to circle around the little object of bourgeois democracy, formal freedoms of the market, more modest contentions of identity politics, etc. The science of necromancy to resurrect the deceased East German subject is for the most part represents the guilty conscience of German intellectuals that urges them to re-erect an imaginary Berlin Wall.

In an interview about his 2005 movie Gespenster (Ghosts), Christian Petzold, the director of Yella, yet again apparently discloses the recurring ghost theme in his movies:

“One has the feeling that there is something ‘ghostlike’ about all the characters in your film.…

It’s an interesting effect ... When a film starts with two girls coming home from school, throwing their schoolbags in the corner and going off for ice cream, then they have an immediate social definition. But the girls played by Sabine Timoteo and Julia Hammer are different; they don’t have homes or a place to define them; no social definition. They are, as I explained to them, in a sort of bubble. They want to go to a casting call because they want to be seen. They want to have an identity, and they can’t identify with doing an apprenticeship or anything like that ... This ‘living in a bubble’, the effort of trying to establish contact with so-called ‘life’, that’s what this film is about. And the effect is that the other characters who come into contact with the girls suddenly don’t seem to have terrific, normal lives either – suddenly it’s not only the two girls who are unable to be part of normal life. The girls reveal the rest of the world as also being a bubble; they take it apart. You get the feeling that wherever they are, just a metre beside them ... it’s not normality, but rather the beginning of the next ‘ghost (twilight) zone’. I don’t know whether that will be the effect film will have, but considering what I’ve seen so far, I think we’re on the right track.”

Apparently, Mr. Petzold is still on the right track and this is what I called as the Tristram Shandy Syndrome at beginning. Laurence Sterne’s colossal, never-ending novel is ultimate logical form that exemplifies the ideal postmodern narrative is composed of the permanent postponement of any event that has the power to castrate the story from the infinity of metafiction. Here we have two girls or Yella or whatever, but there must always be an imaginary Berlin Wall that they eventually bump their heads to just to bounce back and run against another. The perfect postmodern narrative might be achieved by an adult movie that in front of a screen which displays their former appearances, porn stars debate forever about the myth of simultaneous orgasm.

Fidelity to Truth

2008-04-15T17:05:00.008+03:00

This is my comment to Jodi Dean's post, "No Time for Politics":

Hello Ms Dean,

It is a little bit late, but Happy Birthday!

My birthday was April 2nd. As an ordinary celebration I spent my 32nd birthday by contemplating on the path my life, on how the forms of social relations ironically consumes the content of proper communication, our capacity for full speech, the field of political interaction (Here I mean something very fundamental other than real politics. Political in the sense of a praxis that interferes in the connection of two people), namely, I dwell on how this non-stop bombardment of “empty gestures”, ear-splitting prattle of “empty speech”, all those hysterical exchange of links, You-Tube videos, SMS massages, etc. etc. leads to an all-embracing isolation.

I think there are two connected features of the contemporary excessive communication or the “communicative capitalism”: The first one is the hyperactive exchange of “empty gestures”, images, jokes, slogans and the most stereotyped expression of language, etc. to prevent something that will probably disintegrate our dispassionate purity in this sheltered space. As Zizek describes as, “people not only act in order to change something, they can also act in order to prevent something from happening”. And the second one is this obsessive exchange of “empty speech” does not only provide an escape from “full speech” which verbalizes a truth about our desires in the boundaries of present, but also provides a blockade that prevent us to lie about ourselves since lies generally disclose the depth of truth more explicitly than sincere and straightforward statements. Thus the concealed silence beneath this communicative uproar signifies our or their anxiety to accidentally reveal an unbearable truth of ourselves. She or he consistently avoids proper communication to prevent the outbreak of any evidence that would possibly expose a disturbing truth: I have the right to remain silent. Here we need Hillary and Barak to sustain our counter-revolutionary hyperactivity by handing over the entertaining demonstration of the leakage of truth from the crack of “empty speech”.

“The Soviets--they had stamina, the stamina for politics”. I agree. The Soviets had stamina for politics in the conditions of specific political dimensions. In the present, I think we must attach another quality to this essential precondition to deal with politics. As Badiou pointed out, no matter how unbearable and impossible they seem, we also need a decisive fidelity to political truths: Fidelity to disclose them with every possible manner.

I will publish this comment on my blog.

Best,

An Imperialist Poll

2008-04-14T16:18:00.005+03:00

A recent article in MRZINE about a public opinion poll that was carried out by WorldPublicOpinion.org introduces how Iranians are satisfied with their goverment.

There is a profound ideological implication in the form of these questions.

First of all by querying an affirmative statement abstractly (Do you TRUST the national government in Iran to do WHAT IS RIGHT? etc.) the interviewers direct the subjects to shy away from negative answers. Together with this crafty manipulation and Iranians' well-founded suspicion that there could be covert government investigation beneath this sudden interest about their opinions, it is not surprising that this pseudo-poll has reached its original goal. The deduction here is not a critique of Western imperialism in the sense that how it misleadingly depicts Iran that fits their imperialist intentions. Surprisingly, this scientific pool perfects the imperialist propositions: The danger with Iran is not merely about its undemocratic, antiquated, oppressive and unpredictable regime like our politicians used to represent. But there is also an ossified trauma, an internal evil haunting the mentality of this monster: Although the Iranian regime is an utter outrage, the citizens are somewhat contended to be a part of it.

As I said, the questions are arranged to repress the negative responses. Let us apply something else that entirely removes the possibility of a negative response and completes the perfection of ideological manipulation. Let us compel Iranians to give concrete affirmative answers. For instance, instead of asking whether they are satisfied of Iran’s economy, let’s ask them to enumerate the positive developments in economy in recent years, or ask them to give tangible examples of the improvements in the social life, etc. Only by this way, only through forcing the subjects to neglect the negative option which is already repressed in social life, it is possible to reveal the ironical humiliation in the Iranian regime. Let Iranian people creatively fabricate lies about their reality. Their answers might reflect the immensity of the oppression that they are dealing with.

There is a wonderful passage in “Bob Dylan's 115th Dream” that perfectly depicts how people creatively lie about an unpleasant reality. (The caps are mine):

"Well, by this time I was fed up
At tryin' to make a stab
At bringin' back any help
For my friends and Captain Arab
I decided to flip a coin
Like either heads or TAILS
Would let me know if I should go
Back to ship or back to JAIL
So I hocked my sailor suit
And I got a coin to flip
It came up TAILS
It rhymed with SAILS
So I made it back to the ship"

We Need a First Life

2008-04-13T17:19:00.003+03:00

On Marxmail, David Picón Álvarez inquired the opinions of the comrades on whether The Ultimatum Game has potential to represent “the capitalist assumptions about rational agent behavior”. This is my response:

If we apply to Hegel, rationality is not a set of fixed formulas that serve to calculate the existing order of things, but an equation contains some variables and expresses the proportion between rationality and actuality. I think this experiment indicates one thing at best: People have a propensity to adjust their rationality to the texture of actuality. Once an equation that provides a hinge for interaction has been established, some people attempt to revolutionize the actuality, some try to prevent it, some neglect to interfere in, etc. Also, these entire scuffle structures the rationality. If we force the subjects of this experiment to play this game 10.000 times, but not for a once and anonymously, we certainly reach very different conclusions.

Two weeks ago I read an article about “Second Life”, the renowned virtual 3D world. Then I installed the game client to figure out and experience the enjoyment of virtual reality. I spent the first hour by struggling to create an avatar which exactly looks like me, a bald guy wearing t-shirt and black jeans. And after studying the basic movements I was ready to vanish in the mist of virtual reality. Unfortunately, it didn’t took me long realize that I was doing the exact same things that I would do in real life if I suddenly plunge into an unfamiliar environment. I was stone broke and glazed the showcases of shops, wandered around without any effort to meet and interact with new people, watched the sunset in an exotic island, etc. After couple of hours, it dawned on me that I need a First Life in the first place. Then I quitted the game with the taste of dissatisfaction.

I am not eager to buy any of two common explanations of how people act in virtual reality: People tend realize their fantasies or reveal their true characteristics repressed in the real world by the restrictions of social order. Both of these are too simplistic and overlook the reciprocal manipulation processing between the subject and reality. Therefore, my own experimental fiasco in “Second Life” is largely because of my stubbornness to adjust my reality to the arrangement and procedure of virtual reality but not as a result of a lack of any fantasies and unrecognized desires repressed by social order. For instance, two weeks ago a bizarre scandal was disclosed about Max Mosley, the president of FIA, who was caught in the act of sado-masochistic sex orgy with some girls dressed as Nazi officers. The common diagnosis is he is a regular pervert racist who likes to get his ass whipped and can only get pleasure from sexual intercourse with the mediation of fetish objects. But there is another fascinating feature in this scandal: He knows the mechanism and the order of the sado-masochistic virtual reality so that he is able to realize his darkest fantasies in the regulations of sexual role playing game. He precisely knows the laws and principles of the game; therefore he is capable to manipulate the virtual reality: “Oh Mistress! Please spank me, I am a traitor”

When I started to play poker, I was ashamed to bet and raise or check-raise since my personality obliged me to regard this sort of moves as an insult to other players. I was a usual tight-passive donkey constantly losing money for the sake of preserving my dignity. Then I decided to read the most important books dealing with the game, from Sklansky, Harrington to Brunson. After I have acquired a fundamental understanding about the reality within the game, I started to manipulate and exploit its very reality. I had become a downright hypocrite, cunning, provocative player making the sneakiest moves comfortably. As long as I could adjust myself with the rationality of a given table, I secured permission to act like a complete lunatic, betting with nothing, folding with something and calling with the nuts, etc. to manipulate the dynamics of the game. It is not because of the possibility that perhaps I possess a swindler in me repressed by social reality. But the deceptiveness enveloping the order of the game had compelled me to adjust my naivety according to its regulation. After this continuous process of alteration has become intolerable, I quitted this game as well.

In “18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” Marx said:

And as in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.

The Genius of Soros

2008-04-12T00:28:00.002+03:00

After reading Louis’s post (I will give the link later on) I searched the Internet to find out what the heck Soros means by “reflexivity”. Then I found the text of speech that elucidates his notion of “reflexivity”:

http://www.geocities.com/ecocorner/intelarea/gs1.html

As I understand, he indicates that “the participants’ bias” in market transactions triggers the disequilibrium of markets and consequently changes the reality of economy. He ridiculously assumes that he has discovered an innovative theory about the connection between the reality and thinking. He is way too materialist in the matter of understanding that the reality is constituted by human activity but a total idiot in the sense of regarding this activity as the product of individual bias, the unreasoned judgment about the existing reality.

I know I have already overstepped the mark today by relating the concept of price by psychoanalytic definition of the symptom but I feel obliged to apply another extraneous metaphor, since George Soros’s filthy speculations in financial markets is commonly designated as “BETS”. I am not familiar with financial markets, but I have considerable amount of experience about the theory and practice of betting. Therefore, this time I will give an example in connection with the game of poker:

Let us consider that in the very beginning of a tournament; I was dealt a pair of jacks, a premium hand, but just to run against an imbecile sitting on the button who raises all-in with Ace-King suited. Suppose that I can see his or her hand. The reality of mathematics and the theory of poker advise me that I must call his bet immediately since I am nearly 54% favorite to win the hand and I have to prefer the actions that are profitable in the long run. But there is no such a thing as long run in a poker tournament. Therefore, the reasonable action here is to fold my beautiful jacks. At the moment I don’t have enough chips to prove the rightfulness of probability.

For that reason, what Soros regards as a bias against the existing reality does not imply an unreasonable preference disregarding the elementary science of probability and the art of evaluating the worth of correct information in the financial markets. But unlike Soros most of the gamblers in the grand financial casino haven’t got enough chips to consistently warrant the science of probability by making mathematically and informatively the correct decisions. His genius in financial markets sarcastically originates from the merciless reality that he has a lot of chips that provides resilience against the distasteful variance and teasing jokes of probability.

Once Marx said:

“In reality and for the practical materialist, i.e. the communist, it is a question of revolutionising the existing world, of practically attacking and changing existing things.”

The Symptom of Value

2008-04-11T15:32:00.008+03:00

A comrade suggested on Marxmail that we Marxists should focus on money to save Marx's theory of value. This is my response:

Although in an inverted fashion, the questions that have been raised by Rakesh Bhandari imply the fundamental methodological difference between Marx and the classical political economy.

On couple of occasions Marx mentioned how preceding economists incorrectly began with analyzing “the real and the concrete” outcomes of the historical development of capitalist production, for Marx, “which have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning”. Out of the sphere of classical political economy this critique might be regarded as relevant about the economics after Marx, just think about Keynes’ theory of prices which is focused on the connection of the quantity of money and the changes in the price-level.

With running the risk of antagonizing comrades here, let me define price as the symptom of value. Although it is the final and the actual manifestation of value, in a repetitive fashion, it speaks about a fixed, concealed meaning that underlies the value. But just as Marx has revealed perplexingly that instead of disclosing a hidden meaning, what if it is the immediate, concrete form of value that conceals its authentic nature, the mechanism of social relations that produce value? If we return to the metaphor above, and remember Lacan’s statement that the real excludes meaning, there is a remarkable resemblance between Marx’s never-ending critiques of political economy and his decisive break with the its methodology and Lacan’s famous declaration that “psychoanalysis is a scam”. It is a scam as long as it supposes there is a direct, unambiguous connection between the meaning of the symptom and the real. Similarly, bourgeois economics is a scam as long as it presupposes that the meaning of immediate forms of capitalist production could be deciphered by investigating the real. As Marx said:

“The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.”

Therefore, it is not a wise idea to focus on money-form to save Marx’s theory of value. This approach would be exact opposite of his methodology.

On Marxmail, Angelus Novus wrote:

"Mehmet, by any chance have you read the first chapter of Slavoj Zizek's The Sublime Object of Ideology? :-)

I am somewhat skeptical of Zizek, due to his reputation as being an academic comedian, but I was very pleased to see that he heavily leans upon Alfred Sohn-Rethel in his discussion of Marx's analysis of the commodity. Anyone who uses Sohn-Rethel as areference for these discussions is fine with me. "

Mehmet Çagatay:

Hello Angelus,

No, I didn't read Zizek's book. Two years ago I tried to read it while I was staying at the house of a friend but because that I was so desperately in love with my host, I couldn't manage to focus and didn't understand anything. I didn't read it afterwards as well since that book reminds me her.

To be honest, a while ago I read Jacques Alain Miller's essay on symptom.My references to Lacan generally orginates from Miller.

On Fetishism

2008-04-08T12:29:00.004+03:00

There was a post on Jodi Dean's I Cite blog recently about the relation of religion and sexual fetishism. Here is the comment that I posted to I Cite blog:

Hello Ms. Dean,

This is my first comment on your blog thus I will try to minimize the subsequent trivialities. All right, unlike a fantasy that enables love to pass through the real to field the imaginary, an object of fetishism operates as “the return of the repressed”, the substitute material filling the cavity which originates from the act of denial of the symbolic castration. Therefore, the pervert subject of fetishism could cross the boundary of the symbolic only by use of the object of fetishism as the authorization certificate, i.e. the transit visa for the passage from the symbolic to the real. Let me give a considerably free flowing illustration by employing our Marxist concept of “the fetishism of commodities”:

Although we have been castrated from the means of production and from our own labor power, etc. in the symbolic order, due to still being an individual who is obliged to satisfy our needs to survive in society, to obtain a ground to ensure the real conditions of our existence, we need a substitute that enables us to disavow the repressed trauma of symbolic castration. I need something that makes me to fallaciously perceive that there is nothing derogatory in the capitalist production. There “the fetishism of commodities” comes into the picture. For instance, in the feudal production God itself functions as the object of fetishism.

As regards to the Catholicism that you mention as the only fetishized religion that you come up with, for my part, I don’t see an exceptionally distinctive characteristic in the Catholic practice of Christianity that reinforces nunsploitation and nun fetishism. I think any particular outfit, especially uniforms, (the uniform of the women of God in the naughty nun case) that relates the human body with Lacanian big Other has the potential to serve as an object of fetishism that substitute the missing symbolic phallus and make the sexual intercourse possible while the complication of the denial of symbolic castration is still in the view.

The Dhamma Brothers

2008-04-05T16:37:00.008+03:00

There was a review by Louis Proyect in his The Unrepentant Marxist blog about the documentary “The Dhamma Brothers” which depicts the experience of some prisoners with Buddhist meditation techniques in a high security prison. I decided to copy my comments in Louis's blog and the exchange of my thoughts with Peter Byrne and Greg McDonald. I will keep on duplicating here if the discussion proceeds:

Mehmet Çagatay:

Hello Louis,

Your post is thought provoking as usual. At first I thought that a high security prison that restricts all forms of physical freedom is an ideal place for Buddhism to sprout since it only tolerates the freedom of mind. Then I realized that there is a flaw in this logic given that Buddhism is not a path to liberation at all. Like other forms of religion, Buddhism is a form of “desire” for freedom, which operates for not materializing its goal, but to reproduce and regulate its form as a desire. Therefore, a prison is a perfect place for Buddhism not by reason of that it promises the liberation of mind where the freedom of body is completely prevented, rather, a prison renders the desire for spiritual development possible. If we consider the reason of Jack Kerouac’s fiasco to traverse his ego with meditation, we can straightforwardly conclude that because of his American practicality he didn’t comprehend the exact mechanism of meditation: It has nothing to do with weakening the ego. Rather, it validates the excess of ego by regarding it as an inner process of the isolated mind and the measurement of truth as if the true nature of life is only accessible by overcoming the ego. As a result, rather than undermining it, mediation ossifies the ego by obsessively circling around it.

The same thing goes for the soothing effect of religion (a protest against real suffering) too. God is the object cause of the desire for a soul in a soulless world. God is the object that regulates the human desire for attaining harmony with external reality. As I said above, the function of religious desire is not to materialize its goal but to circle around it. I think this is where the answer of the question of does religion and Marxism compatible could be properly answered: Marxism strives to change the external reality, not to circle around it.

.....

Peter Byrne:

“Rather than undermining it, meditation ossifies the ego by obsessively circling around it.” Exactly. But to remain in the vein of “American practicality”, why did meditation serve the Dhamma Brothers any better than the Black Muslim program, bible thumping or even the discipline of push-ups and weight lifting? Their problem was to keep their personality together in inhuman conditions. I.R.A. prisoners in Longkesh pored over Marxist classics.When they finally got out, their comrades told them they were old hat. But that’s another story."

.....

Greg McDonald:

I’m glad to see Mehmet weighing in on the subject of meditation. I understand the critique on the basis of unfulfilled desire, (is that Lacanian)? but I submit that argumentation without a real basis for understanding the subject at hand lends just as much to obfuscation as did Kerouac’s original misunderstanding of the same topic. Your argument is apriori and based on western critique of “religion”. You have no experience of meditation, so that makes it difficult for you to actually understand what is involved here. If you really want an informed opinion from a psychoanalytic perspective, I suggest checking out some psychoanalysts who are indeed experienced meditators within this tradition, such as the work of Paul Fleischman M.D. To quote:

“Meditators must “have the seed”. Like the life of any seed, the seed of meditation eludes the microscope of words: is it basic good faith; or a sense of determination; or enough miseries and losses to have to keep going; or an unfathomable curiosity about their own true nature; or an intuition of values that transcend immediate life; or a yearning for peace; or a recognition of the limitations of mundane routines? It was said by the Buddha that at the heart of the path lies ahimsa, non-harmfulness. Is it an inkling of the infinite curative value that this most treasured and elusive cumulative virtue provides, that constitutes the seed? In any case, a life of meditation ia a path for those who hear the call, seek it out, and sit down to observe. Some may not seek it, some may not value it, some may not tolerate it, some may have other valuable paths to take.

“
The French psychoanalyst, Jaques Lacan, wrote, “Psychoanalysis may accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the ‘thou art that,’ in which is revealed to him the cipher of his moral destiny, but it is not in our mere power as practitioners to bring him to that point where the real journey begins.” Vipassana meditation is based on one thing; “This is suffering; this is the way out of suffering.” It is the path where the real journey begins. It is a healing by observation of and participation in the laws of nature. Even the stars are born and die, but beyond the transiency of the world there is an eternal that each of us can travel towards.

The potential therapeutic actions of Vipassana include increased self-knowledge, deepened human trust and participation, integration with and acceptance of one’s past, deepened activation of one’s will, an increased sense of responsibility for one’s own fate; greater concentration, deepened ethical commitments, firm yet flexible life structures and disciplines, fluid access to deeper streams of feeling and imagery, expanded historical and contemporary community; prepared confrontation with core realities such as time, change, death, loss, pain leading to an eventual dimunition of dread, anxiety, and delusion; fuller body-mind integration, decreased narcissism, and a fuller panorama of character strengths such as generosity, compassion, and human love. Each student starts at a different place and progresses individually; there is no magic and no guarantee.”

excerpt from “Karma and Chaos”

....

Mehmet Çagatay:

Hello Peter,

Since I don’t have adequate information about the Black Muslim Brotherhood, I can’t explain its particular failure in the prison system of the US. But as I grew up in a society that the influence of Islamic beliefs is palpable in every pore of daily life, I can clarify why Islam is incompatible with the environment of prison. To begin with, we should modify Marx’s famous statement regarding religion for Islam: Islam is the BDSM fantasy of the oppressed creature. The daily activity of a believer is entirely dictated by celestial law while this artificial world is a preparation ground for the real afterlife. The Islamic disavowal of the existence of any external reality as such could be traced in Qur’an which is infested with the statements about dualist opposition linking the imaginary and the real world. Such as, “the life of this world is nothing but an enjoyment of self-delusion. (3:185)” or “and nothing is the life of this world but a play and a passing delight (6:32)”, etc. As a result, Islam functions like the Ego of the believer that suppresses one’s needs, wishes and desires as long as they are conflicting with delusive external reality. Here, one might probably ask: Then, how could you give explanation about the aggressive posture of Islamic fundamentalism towards western imperialism? If we completely abstract the fact that it has been molded by the immediate interests of its opponents to some extent, there is a significant paradox here: Muslim subject does not conflict with his own imaginary external world or with a world imagined by the Muslim subject. To be more precise, the controversy is between Muslim subject and the world imagined by the other and therefore which is exempt of Islamic suppression. I think for that reason Islam and environment of a prison is a downright mishmash because both of their purpose of existence is to control the freedom of human body.

.....

Mehmet Çagatay:

Hello Greg,

As I told you before in a private correspondence, my recent interest on psychoanalysis was incited when a neurologist diagnosed that I was displaying some symptoms of General Anxiety Disorder. After that, I have decided to figure out the source of my anxiety rather than taking the pills that he prescribed since it is a minor disease. Lust like reading Marx has led me to question my illusions of social relations, mechanism of market and capital, their interaction with working class, false idealist conception of history, etc. psychoanalysis has gave me a ground to deal with my the illusions about myself and my subjectivity. Actually it is exactly what Jack Kerouac’s character in “On the Road” naively expects from Buddhist practices. On the contrary, the genuine path to deal with ego is to get the picture of how it is structured as an illusion about our subjectivity. There are two subtle encounters of Alice respectively with the Caterpillar and the Pigeon:

`What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly. `Explain yourself!'

`I can't explain MYSELF, I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, `because I'm not myself, you see.'

And,

Well! WHAT are you?' said the Pigeon. `I can see you're trying to invent something!'

`I--I'm a little girl,' said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day.

In fact, the Pigeon is right. My subjectivity is something that I invented along my adventure in the symbolic order. And my ego is a product of my fantasy about this order, which directly resists the restrictions of the internal reality of socio-symbolic order.

Here I fancied whether the famous quote from Sun Tzu, "Know thy self, know thy enemy" might be applicable to the game of poker. In my opinion, this would be a perfect advice for how to lose everything immediately in poker and in the battleground as well. We must undertake a necessary adjustment: Know thy table-image, know the table-image thy enemy. We should assign this statement to meditation too: Do not strive to know yourself in vein; there is no such a thing other than in the field of imagination.

There is a particular chapter in The German Ideology in which Marx accuses Young Hegelians for assigning self-determining existence to consciousness and thus ascribing the social relations and limitations of humankind as products of consciousness. However, the accurate pathway to understand the function of human consciousness is to decipher its relation with material reality of humankind.

As an obligatory confession, I have difficulties to understand Lacan. First of all, unlike Freud’s relatively direct and vivid narrative style, Lacan leaves readers in a jam of unintelligible expressions time and again. Secondly, I am deprived of the full access to his works as they are not available online thanks to copyright laws. I have no idea if they were translated in Turkish since making an effort to read Lacan in Turkish would be a waste of time anyway. I don’t even understand the Turkish translations of Marx, I have deserted this absurdity when I found myself in situations that I was continuously checking the English version to make sense of what our Turkish translator intended to say.

In spite of my semi-ignorance, there is an entertaining dimension in grappling with the ideas of Lacan. For instance, couple of days ago, in the farewell letter to a former intimate friend of mine (now she declines to respond my usual sterile and sensible letters), in a little bit sarcastic fashion, I declared that masturbation is the only authentic sexual activity since it is the only unmediated contact with our fantasies that renders the physical sexual intercourse possible. Then I concluded that, the genuine manifestation of sexual desire is not to make love with the person that we desire. Contrary, it is the act of masturbation while fantasizing the person with whom we made love just now.

.....

Peter Byrne:

Mehmet, I appreciate your philosophical precision. My point was more prosaic. People in the unnatural situation of prison have to fight against being crushed as acting subjects. Any discipline they commit to personally can help them. I admire the Black Muslims for their effort to bring a community in disarray out of self-destructiveness. But they are as far from Islamic social, religious and psychological realities as other Americans. Your explanation of the Islamic doctrinal denial of a real world is telling and lucid. To the less theologically inclined, however, it has a downside. It makes the Muslim world seem arid. In fact it can be a very pleasant place and demonstrate more humanity than ours.

.....

Mehmet Çagatay:

Peter, I am sure that if I were a dweller in that prison I would be the first person who registers the meditation course. Specifically I am not disagreeing with there is a tranquilizing effect of spiritual readjustments that provides a flexibility to endure the antagonism of reality, like I never question whether god exists or not. The proper materialist question here is why does god exist or why religion renders the social scandal of the external reality bearable. You are right that in some ways a Muslim community occasionally displays superior qualities of humanity. In consequence of my last poetry attempts published in an Islamist magazine whose editor was an honest admirer of my poetry thus ignored their content (Ironically, I was free to make downright insult to God), I spent some time with their poetry clan. I observed a continuous solidarity, a candid bosom of modesty, a never-ending salvo of goodwill that provokes me to act like Maldoror, etc. But like sci-fi movies, there was something strange, a movement of an eyebrow, a transition in the tone of voice, a sudden change of the color of skin that reveals there is something lame about this pretentious normality. One day a known Turkish-Islamist-Poet told me his darkest fantasy: “I always imagine myself observing the world behind a rifle scope”.

It's not Chicken

2008-03-14T00:15:00.013+02:00

A thread on Marxmail reminded me Freud’s definition of myths as "distorted vestiges of the wishful fantasies of whole nations, the secular dreams of youthful humanity". Like Marx criticizes the German idealist for not grasping the "connection of German philosophy with German reality", Freud criticizes previous approaches to dream interpretation for not recognizing dream as a psychic activity and not comprehending its relation with material physical life.

A hilarious thing occurred today when I suddenly entered the next room where my brother and his friend were watching TV. At the moment of my entrance, glancing at me with an expression of uneasiness my brother said: "Let's switch the channel, he could make comment!" Presumably they were watching a political debate ridden with myths of Turkish nationalism about the recent incursion to Northern Iraq. And I felt myself like commercials disturbing the enjoyment to participate the ideological sleep:

"Sleep is a condition in which I wish to have nothing to do with the external world, and have withdrawn my interest from it. I put myself to sleep by withdrawing myself from the external world and by holding off its stimuli. I also go to sleep when I am fatigued by the external world. Thus, by going to sleep, I say to the external world, "Leave me in peace, for I wish to sleep." Conversely, the child says, "I won't go to bed yet, I am not tired, I want to have some more fun." The biological intention of sleep thus seems to be recuperation; its psychological character, the suspension of interest in the external world. Our relation to the world into which we came so unwillingly, seems to include the fact that we cannot endure it without interruption." (Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis)

I was the objective external stimuli that incites the dream, "the guardian of sleep". Then I quickly left the room.

Lately, I assumed that I am going mad since I've begun to detect a continuous ideological message in the regular language of mainstream Turkish media. It is extremely annoying to the extent that it is unbearable for me to watch TV or read newspapers except sports news. I was undergoing an ideological abuse looking for an excuse to state that "The sun is not yellow it's chicken". But I realized that my madness is not because I do perceive a thing that doesn't exist. I am accurately detecting the occurrences of the coarse ideological massages. But I am not capable to internalize it, or recognize it as a routine expression of everyday language, or receive the message in its original form, or entrench the massage in my perception without turning it inside out. When I run across the ideological message, I typically point out the sun and cry out: "Here! It is yellow and it is not chicken". Therefore I am mad.

We can combine Freud’ two definitions: Myths are the disguised fulfillments of the social wishes that serve individual to preserve his or her sanity by participating in social insanity. I can't conserve my sanity as long as I am not capable to participate:

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

What if I've come here accidentally?

.....

Comrade Renegade Eye wrote:

“If the masses wake up, you'll have a different outlook.

At least when you go into a dream state, you do it armed with probably more insight than you desire.”

.....

Hello Ren,

I don’t think masses are in a state of continuous ideological sleep. The paradoxical absurdity in Alice’s situation is she is unaware of the actuality that she is dreaming. But other characters of the Wonderland are conscious that they are the ingredients of a dream. Actually, Cheshire Cat says Alice: “If you are not mad, why are you dreaming about me?

Marx elucidates his thoughts on mythology at the end of the first chapter of Grundrisse:

“From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?”

There is a significant similarity in both Freud’s and Marx’s approaches to Mythology. They both regard it as wishful fantasies that rise above the infantile stage of development of societies.

We are aspiring after a world, a higher stage in the development of society, in which humankind are able to endure the external life without interruption.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t manage to sleep nowadays (literally). It is not for that I’ve overcome the alienation from external life, but the stimuli of external life are so powerful that it doesn’t allow me to sleep. This the perfect condition of a revolution.

Images of Women

2008-03-10T07:12:00.023+02:00

While I was thinking on the question of women, suddenly a strange idea came to my mind. I decided to match some images of contemporary women with Baudrillard's last three phases of the image:

1) "It masks and perverts a basic reality" (a poster designed by Turkish Army to celebrate International Women's Day):

While I was in preparation class for high school, we were studying English for 25 hours a week. I was eleven and it was the most fascinating experience that I had ever had. As my imagination was pulsated with fantasies prepossessed by Jules Verne, Gulliver, Ivanhoe, etc I remember that I was spending some of my time by burying my head into a worn-out atlas and daydreaming about the exotic people that speak with mysterious words. There came an English lady teaching us a new, unthinkable words with stories. We were reading Longman Target English books and every word that we learned was associated with an anecdote about Adams family. “Lilly is a gossip, Molly is a gossip too” was a legendary maxim of that fictional and imaginary revolution etched in my mind. Unfortunately, we had spent the subsequent six years by studying the freakin’ English grammar. Of course we read some samples from English literature but everything about the English language turned into perfunctory wanderings of the arrested development of this revolution. Then I had lost all my interest and passed the examinations by cheating in all the possible techniques that you can imagine. As the English courses were not innovative enough to stimulate my imagination, I invested my creativity for the novelty in the art of cheating.

The image above is the poster designed by Turkish Army to celebrate International Women's Day. At the left side there is a quote form Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the chief of Kemalist revolution: “Our women ought to be much more enlightened, much more productive, much more knowledgeable then men”. This poster is signifying the utopic juggle of semi-capitalist Turkish Army (Turkish Army possesses one of the biggest holding companies in Turkey, OYAK, mostly associated with French capital) as a counter demonstration against the recent disgraceful quarrel on headscarf. There is a herd of five petit-bourgeois women here, representing a military officer, a doctor, a lawyer and presumably a bank manager and a girl who seems like an accountant. As you may noticed, there is no place for underpaid working-class women, unpaid farm women, typically headscarfed scrubwomen, usually uneducated baby sitter women who look after the kids of those petit-bourgeois women, girls that subjected by honor-killings, women yoked with prostitution who ruin the “blessed” marriages of those women in the image, illiterate Kurdish women and girls deprived of access even to the rubbish Turkish wisdom awashed with nationalist agitation, and numerous class of women despised and oppressed that I forgot to enumerate. The deplorable conditions of the Turkish women who were not represented in the image are the symptom of Turkish bourgeois.

After the War of Independence, and ensuring some formal political rights for women by the goodwill of Kemalist Enlightenment, subsequently Kemalist revolution recalled its authentic roots composed of merchandise capitalists, local landlords, insignificant number of industrial capitalists and mandatory assistance of foreign capital. This is where the development of condition of Turkish women has been arrested. The question of Turkish women has been reduced to a robotic discursive illusion abstracted from the factual disgrace towards working-class women. It is now functioning as competiton of novelity in the kitschart of cheating. As Baudrillard said, the image above “is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice”. Meanwhile, in fact, I am seduced by the image of sterile petit-bourgeois women. It made me itching to write a novel like Marquis de Sade.

2) "It masks the absence of a basic reality":

When I defined the image of veiled Iranian women as “It masks the absence of a basic reality.” there are two mysterious (at least for me) Lacanian ideas in my mind: The curtain is the idol of absence. and the reality is the lack of intersubjectivity. Therefore, I don’t consider veil and the Sharia dress codes as tools to make women invisible or hide them from the public gaze. For instance, the reality of capitalist exploitation is the lack of intersubjectivity between capitalist and labourer that manifests itself as the twofold meaning of surplus value. And the reality of the oppression of Muslim women is the lack of consensus on the classification of women’s role in the society, originates from the ideological exertion to subjugate the secular world to the spirituality of Islam. But, after 1500 years, this perverted “REALITY” has no factual foundation in secular-material world. Thus, instead of being an instrument of the concealment of a basic reality, the Shaira dress code functions as a mask to conceal the absence of the reality. Because, there is no scientific and convincing evidence to justify the antiquated gaze that perceives woman “as the source of ‘corruption’ and ‘chaos’.” Then, the only choice for Muslim rulers is to exhibit the veiled women body as the idol of deception and seduction which does not fit the reality.

3) It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum:

Council of Ex-Muslims

2008-03-09T03:53:00.002+02:00

I wrote the letter below to salute Ms. Namazie's “Council of Ex-Muslims:

Dear Maryam,

To begin, I would like to congratulate you on your courageous endeavor to establish an organization that will hopefully fill the absence of virtual fraternity of Islam with secular solidarity. If the “Council of Ex-Muslims” will give hope someone, it is primarily as a result of the organizational power that overcomes the limitations of individual struggles.

In his "Philosophy of History” Hegel properly defines the distinctive feature of Islam: “The worship of the One is the only final aim of Mahometanism, and subjectivity has this worship for the sole occupation of its activity, combined with the design to subjugate secular existence to the One.” This is where the stubborn resistance of Islam outbreaks as a misleading symptom in the body of bourgeois modernism: The spiritual vapor that claims dominance on behalf of its supreme universality in the material world now finds itself squashed in the universal engine that melts all that is solid in the air. Unfortunately, this engine is not capable to vaporize the absolute vapor. What renders Islam and its universal spirituality political, as related with the power struggle for decision making on this-worldly affairs is exactly this incompetence of liberal world order. Just like the protagonist of Terry Gilliam’s magnificent movie “Brazil”, who suddenly finds himself as an enemy of the state on the course of his quest to find the girl of his dreams in the depths of bureaucracy, Islam has detected its imaginary political expression in the midst of liberal capitalism where the politics is relentlessly being vaporized.

This is the reason why I previously proposed Atheism within the shortcomings of neo-liberal order as a genuine solution to retard the rise of the fundamentalist enthusiasm among working-class Muslims. Demands for a more strict practice of secularism is like my bizarre habit that I carry out when I have to get up early and have little time to sleep: I always set up my environment and sleeping position as uncomfortable as possible to discourage the enjoyment of sleeping. But as the verification of Lacanian interpretation of the act of awakening, I always end up inventing the most horrifying nightmares to repress the disturbance of the external effects and enable myself to sleep for a little more.

Therefore, rigorously secularist projects are doomed to seduce the fundamentalism in the consciousness of working class Muslims. Secularism is the archenemy of the religion that hunts for the total domination of its spirituality (which knows no social bond other than the worship to God) over material world. I find it very remarkable how intellectuals often miss the connotation of the Islamic concept of “jihad”: It is not simply warfare against infidels but at the same time the struggle to expand the spiritual battlefield on which believers and infidels will exchange blows till the Judgment Day. Even the concept of sin is not exempt from the will of God: “If Allah so willed, He could make you all one people: But He leaves straying whom He pleases, and He guides whom He pleases” (16:93). Its symptomatic intolerance is more vindictive towards everything that ridicules its spiritual universality: especially towards bourgeois modernism which has compelled man “to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

I think secularism is a "passage to the act” for the fundamentalism of Islam. It resolves the anxiety among working class Muslims and provokes courage for act of militant Islamism. For instance, prohibition of religious symbols from public sphere invites Muslims to attach themselves with closed circuit of fundamentalist communities.

On the other hand, in an incredibly ironical fashion Atheism is almost complementary with Islam: Atheism as an inverted spirituality due to its intact form that is still mediated with the absence of God is the perfect adversary of Islam. (No regrets! I frequently rant and rave about my indomitable Atheism as a reflective political stance). Spiritual battlefield is only maintainable with the existence of identically devout foes eager to clash their ideas. Maybe, in this vein, we might persuade some of the Muslims of working class oppressed both by Muslim leaders and bourgeois modernism:

“Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,

And you think you're so clever and classless and free,

But you're still fucking peasents as far as I can see,

A working class hero is something to be”

I think genuine remedy of religious fanaticism and the ground for an authentic and unmediated solidarity is socialism: the real political emancipation which has the capacity to dispel the battleground of abstract ideas… I hope you would not take offense to my well-intentioned criticism. My criticism also comprises my affirmation. I always have doubts about agreements without contradictions.

Tendency to Fall

2008-02-25T23:06:00.004+02:00

Last night I read the related chapter of Capital to find out why some authors apply term "tendency" between quotation marks. Is it something like the tendency of a clumsy man to trash his surroundings or like the tendency of Dwight Howard to dunk the ball? Obviously, in the same way as Jim Devine, "a Marxist economist", they use the quotation marks to imply a faint potential that somehow has no expression in the actual functioning of capitalist production: All right, Marx once propounded a highly speculative hypothesis but it was just a "tendency", but in reality, speaking of "inherent tendency" how about an inherent tendency for the relentless accumulation of capital? It is all nonsense. You don't have to be an economist to figure out that Marx merely indicates a GRADUAL progress with term "tendency", by which rate of profit gradually falls according to the growth of constant capital relatively to the variable capital.

Apparently, Marx didn't think it is necessary to explain the implication of the word "tendency" except than emphasizing the gradual process numerous times:

"This gradual change in the composition of capital... then the gradual growth of constant capital... lead to a gradual fall… ever-increasing quantity of means of production through a constantly decreasing quantity of labour… each particular lot of commodities in the total mass of products, absorbs less living labour… Alongside the development of productivity there develops a higher composition of capital, i.e., the relative decrease of the ratio of variable to constant capital… The increase in labour productivity consists precisely in that the share of living labour is reduced while that of past labour is increased, but in such a way that the total quantity of labour incorporated in that commodity declines; in such a way, therefore, that living labour decreases more than past labour increases… therefore the absolute mass of the profit produced by it, can, consequently, increase, and increase progressively, in spite of the PROGRASSIVELY drop in the rate of profit. etc. etc."

The law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, is not a negligible, non-inherent, phenomena of capitalist production. It is the "logical necessity" of the DEVELOPMENT of capitalist production. It is how the development of capitalist production (i.e. growth of constant capital relatively to variable capital, growth of productivity of labor) works. I suggest Jim Miller's article:

http://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/miller/frop.htm

Desire for Amnesia

2008-01-26T03:43:00.000+02:00

From childhood to early youth, I develop a fantasy of amnesia which was most likely inspired by a particular movie that I saw on video. Many years later, I learned that it is actually a TV movie adapted from Robert Ludlum’s bestseller: “The Bourne Identity”. As a dreamer youngster growing up with the vivid images from the simplified versions of Western literature and tales from Arabian Nights as well, I was fancying to find myself in one day, like Alice, in the midst of an astonishing story that I am the protagonist. “The Bourne Identity” provided me an outlet to break the chain of the dull reality: only amnesia could offer a GENIUNE ground for self-exploration and discovery of the hero within me.

In 2002, I rushed to the movie theatre to regenerate my fantasies with the Hollywood version of the story featuring Matt Damon. But my excitement ended up with frustration by the reason of its hastiness to transform a fascinating mystery into a loutish thriller. In its TV series version, the audience was not introduced with more information about the real identity of Bourne than the clues gained by Bourne among the plot. Is he really Carlos the Jackal? But Hollywood version immediately adopts third person narrative and we are admitted to CIA headquarters.

There is fallacy coined by the immanent critique by Hollywood on the excessive deeds of US imperialism conducted by the perverted individuals from officially armed organizations. This so-called critique extracts the lame limb from the well-functioning organism: The well intentioned organization of CIA that provides useful information to ensure free-market democracy and its philanthropist assassination program to liberate third world from despotism is now went off the rails and became dangerous, thus there comes a renegade without a memory (completely ignorant to how the game is played) and somehow equipped with a native morality that prevent him taking other’s money. But in the real life, like in stud poker, most of the cards dealt face-up. For instance, CIA does not function independent from the social organism, from the regulations of international market, approval of the Congress, etc. Assassination and torture could become instruments of the official foreign policy, like once torture was a spectacle in Roman Empire. But in the psyche of our idiotic protagonist, the spy on the run, negative quantity of information turns into a plus quantity of moralism like Marx once identified in the ideas of Heinzen.

Social perversion has been confronted with the individualistic moralism without any insight that criterion of this moralism is the product of the whole organism. This is the point where Karl Marx classified moralism as “ideological rubbish”. Ideology is the conformist hallucinogen that prevents one to evaluate the real value of truth, political truths of market and inequality, to establish an accurate concept in connection with the given object. Spiritual and memorial awakening of a discarded CIA agent is ideological as long as it doesn’t provoke him to confront the whole organism. But, he recites particular truisms continuously. Once, a woman that I loved accused me of parroting about the honesty of my love again and again: I have realized now that my discourse on love was purely ideological.

The truth process in Badiouian terminology begins with an Event that disrupts sequence of traditional relations and legitimate ideas. This event introduces its own value of measurement, its objective morality at the end. It rips off the conformist morality from the Ideology. The genuine morality presents in the potentiality of a revolutionary event which has the accurate measurement to judge our past and present. But immanent critique invokes the ideological morality that stems from traditional relations of our past and present to foreclose our future.

As years go by, my desire for amnesia has reversed with the ordinary disappointments and regrets of reaching the period of middle age. Now I am fancying that I will awake some day with an empty memory and start to investigate what kind of an incredible conspiracy, a multifaceted plot or a chivalrous tale that I am the protagonist. But just to figure out whom really I was, a perfect personification of the Beatles song “Nowhere Man”: I had nothing worth to remember, had no friend worth to be concerned about, no love worth to all of those heartbreaks, no taste of a tongue that worth to be remained in my mouth… I was the man who buys four cans of Miller and two packs of Winston in almost every single evening from the same shopping mall. I was the man whose most exciting moments are limited with qualifying to the final table of the $10 buy-in holdem tourneys in PokerStars. That is all. And I will realize suddenly that, the amnesia itself is the most fascinating thing that ever happened to me. End of the illusions of the moralism of my old habits. Now, it is the perfect time to discover the potential hero within me.

With the most famous phrase of the history of human thinking Karl Marx designated to the revolutionary form of the amnesia: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win”.

Atheism vs. Secularism

2008-01-23T17:00:00.001+02:00

This is a copy of my comment to a post on Maryam Namazie's blog:

Hello,

I agree with your views in general but I would like to make a contribution with overstepping the mark. You implied that you are not completely content with conventional secularism (separation of church and state) by positing it as the minimum solution. Then you put forward direct intervention of state as the “real secularism”: “state cannot be natural to religion… it needs to be regulated… it needs to be controlled… it needs to be taxed”.

I think the major paradox of secularism is that it demands from the religious society to give up their illusions about the world in the political field. This is a very feasible solution as long as the society is free of contradictions… i.e. only if there was no other religion, gays, women, laborers, etc, etc. Even it was a “real secularism”, regulation of religious field by state, the subjectivity of statesmen overrides the quality of secularism to be promoted as real. So, even the “real secularism” is a derivative of minimum solution.

In the sense of state neutrality to religion the real solution is, I am very serious, Atheism. I know it sounds strange (and there is a misunderstanding that Marx criticized both religion and Atheism at the same degree) but only Atheism could ensure the neutrality of “state”. So let me set up a dialectical formula (!): secularism is the abstract negation of Christianity in political field, Atheism is the concrete negation of both religion and secularism, socialism is the complete establishment of social objectivity as there is no need for Atheism to solve the contradictions.

Best Regards,

--------

A little discussion rised on Marxmail about my assessments above, I decided to copy comrade Mark Lause's well-founded objections and my replies:

Mark Lause:

I read "secularism is the abstract negation of Christianity in political field, Atheism is the concrete negation of both religion and secularism." Isn't anything in the political field (the real world) concrete and anything having to do with the existence or non-existence of God necessarily abstract?

Mehmet Çagatay:

What I mean by neutrality of state towards religion is an official approach to transform theology to anthropology. I was not proposing that religion must be prohibited, rather a scientific confrontation with
religion until religion descents to its essential meaning, becomes more religious by losing its political connotation. This is just a political emancipation in the boundaries of bourgeois state. Secularism approaches the question abstractly since it misses the reality that state is regulated by religious society. Atheism is concrate in the sense of its political indifference to religious contradictions. I wasn't
implying any more than this.

Mehmet Çagatay:

As a simple example to clarify my stance: There is a fierce argument is underway in Turkey about the ban on wearing religious symbols in public schools. Muslims say that it is a question of the human rights, secularists say it is against the secularism, Kemalist social contract, etc. I think the proper Atheist approach should be like this: You are free to wear anything that you want or nothing as well, but in today's lesson we are going to work on Feuerbach, or Turan Dursun, etc.

Mark Lause:

In the Anglo-American tradition, these distinctions seem to be historically reversed Secularism (Bradlaugh, Ingersoll, etc.) has been about the removal of religious tests, getting the bibles out of the schools, etc. All sorts of rreligious groups, especially minority ones, are happy to accept secularist assumptions in the civic culture.
On the other hand, atheism is a private matter that seems to me to besocially and politically meaningless.
Best,

Mehmet Çagatay:

In Marx's words, "Hence, man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property, he received freedom to own property. He was not freed from the egoism of business, he received freedom to engage in business." I think, secularism is the establishment of religious freedom, to ensure the imperative freedom to believe any god, or at least one god without running the risk of antagonizing the other world. If religious minorities or majorities are content with the removal of the bible from schools, now, they must give their consent to the "theoretical" critique of religion as well (the practical critique is
socialism). I demand from bourgeois state to be consistent with itself. That is all. Then let the Anglo-American tradition be reversed.

Mark Lause:

The record is absolutely clear. Historically, Charles Bradlaugh, Robert Ingersoll, and other prominent ATHEISTS fought to establish a SECULARIST civic culture. It was clearly their understanding that
secularism does not merely establish one's right to believe in any deity or deities but to disbelieve the lot of them. I'd add that this was also the position of the contemporary socialist movement.

You're reading Marx way too literally if you're understanding his position as one that secularism implies that you must make a choice of gods, goddesses, or whatnot.

Mehmet Çagatay:

Mark,

In my last post, I lost my grip by inflaming myself. A particular expression from the Manifesto was resonating in my mind when I wrote, "Then let the Anglo-American tradition be reversed": "Let the ruling
classes tremble at a Communistic revolution". I have no objection to the fact that ortodox atheists put forward
secularism. It is the dead end of atheism on its own merit. Marx criticises Feuerbach for his deficiency to reach communism from atheism. And a paradox comes into view as long as atheism propounds secularism to
establish one's right to believe or disbelieve in gods: As if communism were striving to ensure the freedom to go on strike, it leaves the religious emancipation to the mercy of theology. My assertion of militant atheism for bourgeois state as a genuine approach to separate church and state was an example of suggesting the extreme to display the irrationality of the average or minimum solution (Maryam Namazie mentioned the "minimum solution"). I decided to read "On the Jewish Question" more literally once again tomorrow:

"Therefore, we explain the religious limitations of the free citizen by
their secular limitations. We do not assert that they must overcome their
religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular restrictions, we
assert that they will overcome their religious narrowness once they get
rid of their secular restrictions. We do not turn secular questions into
theological ones. History has long enough been merged in superstition, we
now merge superstition in history. The question of the relation of
political emancipation to religion becomes for us the question of the
relation of political emancipation to human emancipation. We criticize the
religious weakness of the political state by criticizing the political
state in its secular form, apart from its weaknesses as regards religion."
----------
"Now Ophelia, she's 'neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness"

Comradely,

The Right to Blasphemy

2008-01-14T05:22:00.001+02:00

This is a copy of the comment that I posted to Maryam Namazie's blog:

Hi,

The cure of racist consciousness does not begin with recognition of the other’s legitimacy or removing our prejudices towards the identity of the other. Rather, these are the potential consequences of a self-examination protect: eliminating your prejudices towards your own identity, identifying the relation between your own traits and the “social character” and their function in a given social system, i.e. deconstructing your identity and yourself. For instance, dealing with sexual discrimination begins with renouncing our heterosexuality or masculinity as means of male chauvinism, etc.

Today, while I was meandering among various texts like a hobo sailor (I learnt this phrase from Dylan’s 115th Dream) I came across an article written by Raya Dunayevskaya.

At the end of her article she introduces a mixture of speeches from a discussion on the women question. There are remarkably interesting views as regards the development of children in society. I think one of them is also related with the question of the right of blasphemy:

“The child realizes only too well the difference between fantasy and reality. He can not lose himself completely in his imaginary world.”

I think becoming an adult, integrating to society, involves the elimination of difference between the fantasy and reality. I mean the seven year olds who name a teddy bear "Mohammed" have more accurate perception of reality than the enraged adults who are charging their teacher to countenance of blasphemy. Eric Fromm explains this maturity that mishmashing fantasy and reality as: “they must wish to do what they must do”:

“In order to function well, every society must have as its members, individuals who will act, almost automatically, in the way that particular society requires; in other words, they must wish to do what they must do. If any of them had to decide, on a day by day basis if they want to be punctual or not, orderly or not, etc. they would probably decide, just as often as not, against the social demands, thus threatening the good functioning of their society. The individual must act almost automatically in keeping with the norms of his society; this means, that a social behavior trait must become a character trait.”

As regards the question of the right to Blasphemy, I think it is a practical tool to decompose some part of our identity related with religion. It derides the perception of history as a fantasy and it is the proper awareness of history: Mohammed is the name of a man who lived a thousand and a couple of hundred years ago, so what? What kind of a sensible human being really cares about the selection of seven year olds naming a teddy bear?

Transformation of the subject begins with profanity towards its own history encased in clouds of holiness. Thus profanity is the real process of maturity as Freud said: “from the time of puberty onward the human individual must devote himself to the great task of freeing himself from the parents”, or as in Marx’s observation that the traditions of old generations haunts the brains of the living, in other words, the fantastic perception of history dominates the reality of present, or like Bob Dylan did once by refusing to work on Maggie’s farm anymore:

“I got a head full of ideas

That are drivin' me insane.

It's a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor.

I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more…"

Best Regards,

Çagatay

Renegade Eye said:

"I thought your response to Maryam, compliments her views."

Hello Ren,

I am symphetic towards most of the views of Namazie. The experiences of Maryam Namazie and other ex-Muslims are crucial to understand the reactionary character of societies stand on the verses of the Quran. I just realized that, I sarcastically criticized their idealistic representation of Islam here. Although my stance has not changed in general, now I am regretful with derogatory tone of my remarks. At that time I had no idea who Maryam Namazie is and I was unaware of their suffering. This is my usual idiotic idealism anyway. In time while I was racking my brain with racism, development of identity (Besides being a Marxist, unfortunately I am a freakin’ Hegelian too), I have reached other conclusions: Deconstruction of Identity requires the elimination of its essential difference. For instance, what is the ESSENTIAL DIFFRENCE between men and women in society? Albeit even it is the biological difference that seems essential naturally, it is a vulgar difference in society. The essential difference between men and women in society is politico-historical. From where originates this difference? It is from the arbitrary legislation based on the verses of the Quran. So how can we eliminate this essential difference? By pulling out the holly verses from the foundation of the society. So, how could we realize this treatment? Bourgeoisie secularism might be a useful Placebo. At least it is more preferable than this complete insanity. But the real solution is socialism, an unmediated society as Marx said:

“…but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion; just as real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the abolition of private property, through communism.

Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society.”

Note: I just realized that I wrote as "Holly Verses" in somewhere above. There is some possiblity that it was not by mistake.

Immaterial Labor

2007-12-19T16:13:00.000+02:00

Posted to Marxmail on Tue, 18 Dec 2007

Some time ago I noticed a strange jam of a certain creature when I was rambling on the side streets around my house. They were everywhere, even on the sidewalks and it was impossible to walk without some ability of acrobatics. One has less chance to perceive this farce on main streets since we have the presupposition that it is their habitat. I fancied myself like Ford Perfect, an alien adventurer in the movie "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". Who was mistaken about the major life form in earth and is almost run over when he tries to greet a car.

So, what is the illusion behind overlooking the process of production while the commodities are consistently accumulating here and there? We all know the "fetishism of commodities" and "the world of commodities with the products of men's hands", etc, etc… There is no time for truisms.

Comrade Ben advocates concept "immaterial labor" one of the keystone concepts of the Negri & Hardt’s Empire :

----------------------------------------------
"The central role previously occupied by the labor power of mass factory workers in the production of surplus value is today increasingly filled by intellectual, immaterial, and communicative labor power. It is thus necessary to develop a new political theory of value that can pose the problem of this new capitalist accumulation of value at the center of the mechanism of exploitation (and thus, perhaps, at the center of potential revolt)."
…
"We will elaborate the three primary aspects of immaterial labor in the contemporary economy: the communicative labor of industrial production that has newly become linked in informational networks, the interactive labor of symbolic analysis and problem solving, and the labor of the production and manipulation of affects"
…
"We will argue that among the various figures of production active today, the figure of immaterial labor power (involved in communication, cooperation, and the production and reproduction of affects) occupies an increasingly central position in both the schema of capitalist production and the composition of the proletariat."
…
"The passage toward an informational economy necessarily involves a change in the quality and nature of labor. This is the most immediate sociological and anthropological implication of the passage of economic paradigms. Today information and communication have come to play a foundational role in production processes."
…
"With the computerization of production today, however, the heterogeneity of concrete labor has tended to be reduced, and the worker is increasingly further removed from the object of his or her labor."
…
"The service sectors of the economy present a richer model of productive communication. Most services indeed are based on the continual exchange of information and knowledges. Since the production of services results in no material and durable good, we define the labor involved in this production as immaterial labor-that is, labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication."
…
"The other face of immaterial labor is the affective labor of human contact and interaction. Health services, for example, rely centrally on caring and affective labor, and the entertainment industry is likewise focused on the creation and manipulation of affect… This second face of immaterial labor, its affective face, extends well beyond the model of intelligence and communication defined by the computer. Affective labor is better understood by beginning from what feminist analyses of "women's work" have called "labor in the bodily mode." Caring labor is certainly entirely immersed in the corporeal, the somatic, but the affects it produces are nonetheless immaterial."
…
"Finally, a third type of immaterial labor involves the production and manipulation of affect and requires (virtual or actual) human contact, labor in the bodily mode. These are the three types of labor that drive the postmodernization of the global economy."
------------------------------------------------

And finally, after undergoing sarcastic and decisive critics, Negri & Hartd were obliged to make a contradictory clarification:

"a)When we claim that immaterial labour is tending towards the hegemonic position we are not saying that most of the workers in the world today are producing primarily immaterial goods;
b) The labour involved in all immaterial production, we should emphasise, remains material – it involves our bodies and brains as all labour does. What is immaterial is its product."
------------------------------------------------

In other words, most of the workers of the "world" are producing material goods but there is a current under the surface towards hegemony immaterial production. (What a fantastic talent of farsightedness) Although the product is immaterial, labor remains material since production consumes our labor power.

One must explain me clearly that how could my labor power, life energy, remains material if it was consumed by an immaterial product. Probably as a image of a ghost haunting the paper money. And how can I change my own nature without changing the external world, i.e. nature? And how can I change the existing forms of the relations of production without changing my own nature and the external world?

Actually this new theories of labour reflects the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisation of working class in imperialist countries. Lenin writes:

"Imperialism has the tendency to create privileged sections also among the workers, and to detach them from the broad masses of the proletariat."

The theories like "immaterial labor", "new proletariat", etc. are the immaterial products of the hitherto overlooked masses of the "upper stratum" of the workers raised above woldscale division of labor.

According to the CIA factbook, the main area of the Empire's occupation, services, covers 64% of the GDP of the World. First of all, the concept of services does not completely indicate "immaterial production". This misunderstanding is adequately explained here, probably written by Andy Blunden.

Secondly, the sectorial composition of GDP doesn't represents the sectoral division of labor since in the sector of services the price of labor power shows a constant tendency of rise according to the accumulation of commodities which requires more expenditure of repair and maintenance, monopolization which boosts advertisement wars and its costs, new contradictions causing new judiciary expenses, etc. etc.

Anyhow I made list of countries where the proportion of services is under 50% based on CIA factbook, excluding some of the tiny ones:

Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bhutan, Botswan, Brunei, Burma, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, China, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, North Korea, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Syria, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Togo, Turkmenistan, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam.

As regards to "affective labor" and the place of women in capitalist production, this theorists might be more affected if they mind to take the trouble of exploring the army of unpaid or underpaid females in the sweetshops Asia, rather than lighten with the outgoing welcome of McDonalds girls.

Furthermore, as represented by Woods and Grant, if there is more poker chips than the value of actual goods, this mirrors the speculative character of the economy. In "Reason in Revolt" they quote from Akio Morita, former chairman of Sony Corporation:

"It is a heady game, full of excitement, but wins and losses at the poker table don’t obscure the frightening fact that the ship is sinking and no one realizes it."

In his recent posts, Comrade Ben duplicated the ideas of Negri and Hardt word by word. None of our comrades felt a necessity for reply since we think that these jokes have already lost their artistic value of humor. But, they tend to reappear on the sidewalks here and there.

The difference between Ford Perfect and postmodern theorist is they are trying to greet automobiles, commodities, as though they came up against an alien life form: "Hello aliens, we are human". I hope that this time automobiles will not miss the target.

(Note: Comrade Jeffrey Thomas Piercy corrected me here that the true name of the character is Ford Prefect).

Chavez and the Referendum Results

2007-12-19T15:52:00.001+02:00

Posted to Marxmail on Sun, 16 Dec 2007

Fred Feldman wrote:

"And note the coup-hopeful lie about Chavez accepting the referendum results only under military pressure."

There is no wonder Chavez calmly accepted the results. As he implied by stating that winning with a tiny margin could be more unwelcome result, a photo-finish victory was the second worst outcome for both sides. He just let the counter-revolutionaries take the worst of it which requires further struggle for realization. Tiny margins reveals the incompetence of potential to turn into the actual. Revolution is already the actual.

Chavez just made a probe bet and it disclosed the potential of the opponents in the most suitable conditions and trew off the mask of hypocrites within the movement. (In his article Alan Woods explains the reasons of referandum results). I think, which he didn't touch upon was a major leak of proper reasoning behind putting all sixty articles in a package to people's vote. Then one has sixty possible reasons to vote for "no". I think this is the main reason of vast number of abstention. The majority of people who has one or two of this reasons just refused to vote against Chavez.

China's New Labor Law

2007-12-15T07:40:00.001+02:00

I just read a detailed report on China's new labor law on The Red Wombat Hole blog:

Although there are galore of articles on the Internet that warn dear capitalists how to ward of distasteful situations, some regulations stirred up my suspicion as their contents still seem unclear.

For instance, a blog which informs foreign investors about China Law, states:

"It is also going to require all employers maintain a written employee handbook setting out the basic rules and regulations of employment. Without an employee handbook, employers will be essentially unable to fire anyone; "the failure to maintain an employee handbook means that an employer will effectively be unable to discharge employees for cause, since "cause" must be determined with reference to the employee handbook."Do it."

My question is, according to which superior regulations must a handbook be written that regulates employment? Without apropriate superior laws, a handbook serves more to penalize workers. I recalled a passage from Capital:

"The factory code in which capital formulates, like a private legislator, and at his own good will, his autocracy over his workpeople, unaccompanied by that division of responsibility, in other matters so much approved of by the bourgeoisie, and unaccompanied by the still more approved representative system, this code is but the capitalistic caricature of that social regulation of the labour-process which becomes requisite in co-operation on a great scale, and in the employment in common, of instruments of labour and especially of machinery. The place of the slave-driver’s lash is taken by the overlooker’s book of penalties. All punishments naturally resolve themselves into fines and deductions from wages, and the law-giving talent of the factory Lycurgus so arranges matters, that a violation of his laws is, if possible, more profitable to him than the keeping of them."

When I was an undergraduate student and living in one of the most unrestrained student dormitory that you can imagine, I had a conversation with the principal who suddenly showed off a long list of rules and regulations consists of nearly 150 articles, and said: "As you see, although it seems that there is not a single rule in this dormitory, actually every step you take is a transgression of the rulebook. But with our goodwill, we use it in certain situations".

We've cut the the prices on salvation and sin, but I am scared of the dusty day when the preachers cannot read a word from the handbook:

"The telephone rang and it jumped off the wall,

That was the preacher paying his call.

He said, look at the shape that world is in,

I've gotta cut price on salvation and sin.

The church houses were jammed and packed

People was strengthened from front to the back

It was so dusty the preacher couldn't read his text

So he folded his text and he took up collections.

Note: It is quite possible that I mistook the verses:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqiblXFlZuk

The Ultimate Religion

2007-12-13T05:24:00.000+02:00

Samir Amin’s article is one of the most informative texts on its subject that I have ever read for a while.

In one of his works (Marx’s Theory of Alienation) István Mészáros writes, “Judaism and Christianity are complementary aspects of society's efforts to cope with its internal contradictions.”

Judaism solves the contradiction with “crude partiality”, adopting the inequity between “our people” and “strangers”. Christianity negates the partiality with abstract universality, i.e. “universal brotherhood of mankind”.

Therefore, Judaism partially denies humankind as strangers and Christianity universally denies humanity as an abstraction.

In my humble opinion, Islam completes the missing part. Islam solves the contradictions of society with subjective individuality: brotherhood of Muslim individual. See: http://www.isesco.org.ma/Islam.Today/Eng/24/p3.htm

Islam is the ultimate religion since it denies the humankind concretely by replacing them with a subjective individual who is absolutely tied to God. As a result, Islam is the absolute checkmate, bad-beat, our beautiful aces cracked by a donk holding the bottom pair, etc. of humankind against God.

Islam solves the riddle of society by renouncing there is any contradiction in society. Islam acknowledges only one contradiction and that is between God and humankind. The challenge of God objectified in the body of Muslim individual versus ordinary human disparaged as an infidel.

In a ardent conversation with an Islamist friend of mine (couple of years ago who had published some of my most sarcastic poetries in his literature magazine disregarding his furious comrades), he told me in a moment of desperation that perhaps the theories of Karl Marx is relevant regarding the class nature of Western societies but since there is no such a thing as class in Muslim world, the verses of Quran is sufficient to eliminate the prospect of any injustice.

Expect its compatibility with the premises of capitalism, the danger of political Islam resides in that it is not political enough as assumed by some of us. While communism strives to render politics prevalent in society, Islam struggles to levitate the political terrain above the society, to the presence of Allah.

Finally, Anti-imperialism of political Islam is only comparable with an executioner purportedly advocating anti-death penalty legislation.

As a cordial ritual, I want to quote from a song at the end. Cohen’s Hallelujah (I prefer Buckley version):

“Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?”

Communism cares about music not the Lord.

Endless Rain into a Paper Cup

2007-12-11T22:32:00.001+02:00

The text below is my response to a thread in Marxmail where one of our comrades suggested that we leftists should appear in the forums of conservatives to take on their political discourse rather than carrying on an inconclusive dialogue between ourselves:

If the politics was a field of quest for truths it could be reasonable for us to come forward in right-wing forums to reveal the contradictions of their discourse and the limits of their reasoning. Remember G. W. Bush’s recent statement regarding the National Intelligence Estimate report which brings forward the reality that Iran has no program to acquire nuclear weapons: "The NIE doesn't do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world.” Politics is the battleground of power where the measure of truth is the struggle itself. For instance, Democrats of US had not lost the 2004 election through their lack of skills for delicate political debates. Contrary, they were so skillful in the art of disclosing absurdities of the Bush administration, they eschewed the drudgery of physical labor to transform the political debate to ad hominem. As Marx asserted once, “Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical.”

When I first began to read the works of Karl Marx (my adventure has started with the 1844 Manuscripts), I got so excided that whipped me to run amok for spreading the ideas of the most well-known thinker whose theories are living in the shadow of his commonly distorted reputation. I delivered never-ending monologues (!) to every single person that I met from diverse backgrounds of society in cafés, beer pubs, billiard halls, family meetings and friendly parties and even to the taxi drivers (I gave up the latest practice when I came across the most strange taxi driver, an anarcho-capitalist who suggested that we must privatize everything when we were passing in front of the residence of Prime Minister of Turkey). Although I attracted a decent attention among the people who have leftist credentials, I didn’t manage to persuade single conservative whether he or she is an islamist or a nationalist to the theory of Marxism. Moreover, I didn’t manage to convince even my intimates to read the Manuscripts at least. I tried everything just to run against the tough walls of indifference. It is not for the reason that I wasn’t capable of overcoming the sloppiness of their political discourse. Rather, I was skilled enough to analyze their contradictions effortlessly which led me to miss their truths. The most recent instance took place while I was conversing about the Kurdish question of Turkey with my brother who has apparent nationalistic tendencies. In the most fervent moment of our quarrel, he blared, “Why are you always taking the side of our enemies?” I told him that I am not prone to taking sides, just investigating the truths. Then he clearly reminded me the genuine political struggle: “To hell with the truths. I want to talk about our truths”.

In the moderation principles of Marxmail it says that, “We also welcome non-Marxists who come to the list in a respectful attitude, desiring to learn more. However, if you have decided for yourself that Marxism is wrong and that your purpose on the list is to struggle to convince others of that, you should not subscribe.” What an intolerant forewarning which exposes the hegemonic attitude of Marxists to prohibit inconvenient critiques. Like high-school debate teams, wouldn’t it be entertaining to wrangle with the absurdities of rightists to demonstrate the world that we Marxists have unshakable tools for evaluating incidents of politics. But the problem is too much political discussion alone results in a power failure of theory to become a material force. So what was the effect that converted John Lennon from writing songs like “Across the Universe” inspired with Transcendental Meditation? How could the indifference of a man to the words that “are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup” so nothing’s gonna change his world was transformed to an iconoclastic voice in the song of “God”? The key line is “The dream is over” which implies a state of flux in the truths of Lennon incited by the consequences of the Vietnam War, etc.

If we really believe that we can sell the truthful words of class struggle without an inclination towards ad hominem, for instance, to an ordinary manager of Fortis Bank, a creative director of an advertising company, a nationalist undergraduate student who is only capable of rationalizing his limitations via alien conspiracy, etc. we should revise our well-intentioned rational idealism which fails to notice that how a theory becomes a material force. Karl Marx strived not only for introducing the hypocrisy of political economy but also materializing the truth of working class as a subject of the communist revolution: proletariat.

In my opinion, rather than desperately striving to prevail over our dissidents with endless rain of words we should keep the track of social incidents that probably have the propulsive energy to beget ruptures in the hegemonic truths and look for ways to organize people whose truths are naturally contradictory with the ruling class. I am not referring here to new forms of vanguard parties since vanguardism neglects the spontaneity of truth process by adopting a lengthy string of predetermined missions that are more than capable of resulting unexpected interruptions in actual improvements.

The announcement of “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims” is besides an appeal for voicing our truths explicitly. I think it is more important for us to concentrate our energy to publish our aims rather than rehearsing the myth of Sisyphus by pushing the rock of criticism up to the mountain of the online forums of conservatives.

IMF says: "Good Luck"

2007-11-19T19:38:00.001+02:00

I just came across a particular paragraph in IMF’s “Financial System Stability Assessment” (Country Report No. 07/361) on Turkey:

•
Macroeconomic volatility, especially because of the large current account deficit. Turkey remains dependent on capital inflows and thus on international investor sentiment. Moreover, continued efforts are still needed to anchor inflation at low levels, and the stock of government debt remains relatively high, albeit declining.
http://www.imf.org/external/country/TUR/index.htm

I thought that someone should translate these statements that bear some concealed contradictions:

It is distressing that macroeconomic stability of Turkey is at the mercy of the rationality of international investors. But, since the continuity of current inflation rates are directly subjected to the decline of exchange rates via capital inflows, intensification of this volatility is inevitable… Good Luck!

All the arguments of economists to maintain the macroeconomic stability are directed towards the question of ensuring the mental steadiness of international investors. The major fear is “what if they suddenly go insane one day?”

They like self-proclaimed “good” poker players, who believe that it is impossible to win at a table full of loose-aggressive maniacs, because there is always couple of players who are denying the odds and will outdraw you in later betting rounds. Their motto is: “Aces never hold up”

But the real danger lies in the presence of players who play rationally and who are counting the odds. They call when the odds are in their favor and fold when they are against them. This is where you’re really in need of the interference of good luck.

If Democracy Exists

2007-11-11T19:31:00.001+02:00

When I read the news about Chavez’s cross swords with the Spanish King, I recall Zizek’s counter argument to Ivan Karamazov’s assertion on the absence of an ethical ground if god doesn't exists with his “If God exists, everything is permitted”.

It was reported that, the Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero warned Chavez to respect the democratic debate, "I want to express to you President Hugo Chavez that in a forum where there are democratic governments ... one of the essential principles is respect,"

Zizek’s argument might simply be applied to politics: If democracy exists, everything is permitted. All our privileges have been limited by mutual respect which could be translated as to avoid touching the heart of the matter that may be antagonize the opposition. The problem with “democratic” governments is their comfort that is feigning as an obligation to rationalize the use of excessive power. The real dictators are not dangerous as such since they are bereft of the shiftiest tools for justification. To be exact, while it is a lot easier “historically” to condemn Nazism for its crimes against humanity, the historical imperialism of the UK could well be tolerated by the invention of new political concepts such as “democratic realism” to validate the modern expansion strategies of the United States which has triggered enough blood bath comparable with the most brutal experiences of the human history. It is very fascinating to keep the track of Hitler’s relatively sloppy arguments to rationalize his position, which are narrowed with denunciation of the “Bolshevik Imperialism” bolstered by the Jewish conspiracy and the betrayal to the pact of peaceful colonialism. Some examples could be:

“Russia planned a world revolution and German workmen would be used but as cannon-fodder for bolshevist imperialism”

“Bolshevism has attacked the foundations of our whole human order, alike in State and society, the foundations of our conception of civilization, of our faith and of our morals: all alike are at stake.”

“If Europe does not awaken to the danger of bolshevist infection, commerce will decrease in spite of all the good will of individual statesmen.”

“Jewry, with its bolshevist onslaught, might smash the Aryan States and destroy those native strata of the people whose blood destined them for leadership, and in that case the culture which had hitherto sprung from these roots would be brought to the same destruction....”

“We know further that now, as before, there is lurking threateningly that Jewish-international world enemy who has found a living expression in bolshevism.”

"I do not know whether the world will become fascist! But I am deeply convinced that this world in the end will defend itself against the most severe bolshevistic threat that exists."

"Germany has no colonial claims on countries which have taken no colonies away from her."

“The German people once built up a Colonial Empire, without robbing anyone and without any war. This was taken away from us. It was said that the natives did not want to belong to Germany, that the colonies were not adminis-tered properly by the Germans, and that these colonies had no true value. If this is true, this valuelessness would also apply to the other nations, and there is no reason why they should wish to keep them from us. Germany has never demanded colonies for military purposes, but exclusively for economic ones”.

What impotent arguments are these that even make us to think once on the historical justness of Hitler’s “preemptive strike” against the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy? But at the same time he was well aware in relation to the tricky power of democracies that licenses variety of actions free from ethical ground:

“There has been formed in the world the curious custom of dividing peoples into so-called 'authoritarian' States, that is disciplined States, and democratic States. In the authoritarian, that is, the disciplined States, it goes without saying that one does not abuse foreign peoples, does not lie about them, does not incite to war. But the democratic States are precisely 'democratic,' that is, that all this can happen there In the authoritarian States a war - agitation is of course impossible, for their Governments are under an obligation to see to it that there is no such thing. In the democracies, on the other hand, the Governments have only one duty: to maintain democracy, and that means the liberty, if necessary, to incite to war...”

To emphasize the mutual connection, I think it could be useful to copy&paste my observation which was posted to Marxmail regarding the relation between Ann Coulter and more sensible neocons:

"I read some of the articles on her website:

http://www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/archives.cgi

The danger behind her ludicrous political propositions is not that they are admissible, but they render the logical premises possible to be perceived as rational. The proposal of "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" is much lessthreatening than the official doctrines as "bringing democracy", "preemptive strikes", "struggle against Muslim fundamentalism", etc. While, the assertion to convert whole infidels to sensible believers is acomplete exaggeration, destroying the secular nationalist Iraq to erect an Islamist but more tractable regime is the logical premise of convertingmischievous subjects to the believers of global order.

This is the duplication of good cop/bad cop craftiness. One of the components of a political discourse portrays the villain, who is symbolising the aftermath of avoiding cooperation, or of the terrifying outcomes of being shy away to interfere in current situation, the other one represents the bearable penalties of being included in the discourse and inevitable sacrifice of the compromise. (If you are eager to live in amore safety world you have to drop some of your old democratic rights, e.g.) Real interrogator is the one, who disguised himself as a good cop but the ultimate misfortune of the suspect.

Ann Coulter gives examples of pathological contradictions of an authentic racist mind like one of her associates: http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp10022007.html . But these statements arenot truly dangerous isolated from their original political discourse andhow it works in reality. The danger lies in the blindness that they beget which does not allow us to identify the new forms of fascism."

And here is the comment that a left as regards to the article on Renegade Eye dealing with the "democratic" activism of the opposition in Venezuela:

"It is not surprising that, with a sleight of hand a question of social justice is being converted to a discussion of universal premises of civil society, human rights, law of self-defense (yes, it is extremely impolitic to take up a handgun when the aggressors are modest enough to make do with slingshots), right to assemble, freedom of speech, etc. It is gibberish to accuse Chavez for his furtive attempts to undermine the “democracy” by extending the length of presidency when the opposition is genuinely against the economic reforms. But our democrats and humanists in the shallowest sense, all the wise people who are keen on the superiority of freedom and democracy have no intention to debate about the social consequences of constitutional reforms except the one targeting the article 230. So what about the “social stability fund”, limitation of working hours, autonomy of the Central Bank, agrarian reforms preventing the large estates, etc? Are you promoting the freedom of speech enough to apply your own freedom appropriately?"

So, the vital question rises here: What should we rely on other than justice if the democracy eradicates any ethical ground?

Anti-Imperialism

2007-11-05T21:26:00.001+02:00

I want to presume to make a contribution to the discussion on imperialism since there is a particular confusion has been going on that gives me a pause about the anti-imperialist movements in Turkey.

First of all, the classification of “the highest stage of capitalism” does not indicate a simple formula as modern capitalism is equal to imperialism. This is a misconception just as equalizing capitalism with commodity production. Imperialism is the “modern” concrete form of capitalism and capitalism is the “modern” concrete form of commodity production. In my opinion, translation of this connection to Hegelian dialectics could be like this: commodity production=universal, capitalism=particular, imperialism=individual (negation of the negation). Therefore, Capital starts with the analyses of commodity.

Imperialism is a particular existence form of a socio-economic system but its existence does not resolve the contradictions or the existence of other forms. I mean, if one day, imperialism or capitalism disappears from existence, commodity production could preserve its existence in different forms. For instance, while I was recently proposing the liberal democratic solution for the Kurdish question to be activated urgently, I was well aware that those improvements will not remove the conflicts of other forms of the question. To quote Hegel, “…each of these moments is no less the whole Notion than it is a determinate Notion and a determination of the Notion.”

The problem with blindered anti-imperialist movements is while they are purporting to criticize the whole Notion, in fact they are tackling a single movement of the Notion. But the proper approach is to strive to understand the Notion along its whole process.

Let’s take the example of Worker’s Party (Turkey). After their perfunctory tone of voice has decreased regarding with class struggle, they have directed all their rhetorical appetite towards the most feverish form of Turkish Nationalism and sometimes joined forces with the Nationalist Movement Party which has been obviously pursuing fascist strategies for couple of decades. Their babblings are limited with constant swearing at American Imperialism, and unyielding provocations of nationalism. They are embracing different classes without a doubt but there is nothing progressive about appealing the suppressed desires of the people or opposing to Imperialism alone. I think that these sort of anti-imperialist movements have been forged to mislead the people.

I will write more about the issue, this is all for the present...

Demons of Separatism

2007-11-03T22:50:00.001+02:00

“Does the "left" in Turkey support, self determination for the Kurds? The PKK supporters seem to not differentiate Turkish workers from bosses. Why expect different of Maoists and nationalists."

Renegade Eye

Hello Ren,

In the wake of PKK’s renunciation of its former objectives for political separation, self-determination, in other words, “political separation of these nations from alien national bodies, and the formation of an independent national state”, is now an orphan desire in Turkey. However, its ghost is still haunting the psyche of the warmongers, who are vigilant enough (!) to perceive that political and cultural demands are simply an obfuscation of the intention of separation. Thus, the question of “self-determination” is being introduced generally by dull nationalists for the purpose of escaping from the responsibility to intervene in the causes of the miseries of Kurdish minority. The separation-phobia engendered by Kemalism is a scarecrow in Turkey to ward of the dreadful realities about the Kurdish question. Nowadays, no one is raising publicly the idea of self-determination, separatism, except the adherents of the long-standing state tradition for rationalizing the status-quo. Hence, in the current political encyclopedia of Turkey, the entry of “the self-determination of nations” is not being defined as political separation, but a menace which makes even the bourgeois-democratic revisions impossible.

However, if we recall Lenin’s pamphlet, we should identify a particular contradiction of the Kurdish nationalism. The longing for the formation of national states has habitually been initiated by indigenous bourgeois class to capture the home market. But on the occasion of the natural deficiencies of the region, the Kurdish bourgeois class has integrated with Turkish economy so exceedingly that they defend the political unity or their fidelity to the Turkish identity more viciously than their Turkish colleagues. For instance, Aziz Yildirim, the Kurdish chairman of Turkey’s one of the prominent soccer clubs, recently uttered the famous slogan on the television: “Martyrs do not die; the country can not be divided”. There is an article in yesterday’s Economist exposing the approach of Kurdish bourgeois class on Kurdish nationalism:

"Despite Mr Barzani's popularity, the Turks can take heart from the millions of Kurds who have no desire to break away. That was the message of the July 22nd election, says Sehmus Akbas, a Kurdish businessman in Diyarbakir. He is thinking of the big gains made by the Justice and Development (AK) party in Kurdish areas, at the expense of the pro-Kurdish Democratic People's Party (DTP). Such is the appeal of AK's mix of liberalism and Islamic piety that it might even wrest Diyarbakir, the Kurds' unofficial capital, from the DTP in local elections next March"…
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10064699

In sum, self determination for the Kurds is the subject non grata in Turkey even the Marxists (including me) are shy away from. The most well-intentioned expressions are restricted with the presentation of the Kurdish question as a by-product of capitalism and unassuring appeal to overthrow the capitalist states for absolute resolution. Personally, I prefer to stay aphetic concerning a separate national state option, which is a part of renunciation to identify myself with the national identity which is stamped with diversity of political manipulations and deceptions. So, this is not an off-limits area for me hedged with the nightmares of the others. To reiterate, one of the old interpretations of demons in dreams that, people who have a tendency to abuse others have overwhelming fears that outbreak as demons just to ease the burden of guilty conscience. The Kemalist nightmare about separatist demons must be diagnosed in the context that a demon occasionally represents the payoff to sustain one’s own deeds.

"I like how you used quotation marks around the word "left."
At a meeting of the local antiwar group, I reported from your posts, about the situation with Kurdistan.
Considering the Stalinist history of the PKK, if they say they are for or against seperatism, you never know. Not the most honest brokers to say the least."

I did not use them in this post, but I usually use quotation marks along with the term “left” to signify when it includes also the groups that classify themselves as leftists but do not support the distinctive characteristics such as involving in class struggle. Like everywhere, there are so many of them in Turkey that quotation marks are practical tools to point out the ambiguity of the term.

The skeptical expression of “you never know” called to my mind Daniel Negreanu’s article where he dealt with the myth of poker tells. He depicts one of his experiences at a table full of “aspiring pros” paranoiacally struggling to decipher the body language of other players but neglecting the fundamentals of the game: “They were so obsessed with trying to figure out what people's tells were that they completely neglected what was actually going on in the hands - who bet, who raised, and so on.”

It might be noticed that I have been wittingly sidestepping the critique of PKK. It is not by the reason of that I have sympathy for their pragmatic strategies, their desertion of the Marxist roots, adoptions of a Stalinist mind, reactionary collaboration with feudal remnants, etc. In truth, it is not my dilemma. The critique of PKK is the responsibility of Kurds. I have no idea about their “real” intentions and neither have the enthusiasm to crack the code of their political body language. I am more concerned with the truth that PKK is the objectification of the Kurdish question which has been ramified by years of assimilation, oppression, and overlooking policies. We should not judge form of the objectification of the question at first, when the question is still on the table.

Rather than wrestling with the consequences, I want the political demands of the Kurdish citizens of Turkey, like a new Constitution acknowledging the existence of Kurdish people, a general amnesty, an economic plan to improve the daily life in the region, etc. to be accepted immediately. We might have the luxury to be involved in the question of PKK then.

"Greetings:

I don't let anyone call me "leftist," if it includes Stalinists, nationalists etc.
Regards,

Marvin"

Dear Marvin,

I’m really very sorry about the misunderstanding which is due to my careless statements. I didn’t ever attempt to criticize you; Actually, I was criticizing my previous standpoint about the Kurdish question which can be traced back in my older posts. While I was contemplating on this issue recently, I have realized that by introducing the long-term possibilities like workers state and self-determination, we are overlooking the immediate demands of Kurdish people to be treated as equal citizens. I believe that the solidarity of working classes of all nations is the ultimate solution but this should not constrain us from landing an ear to the immediate demands. Please inform me about your further anxieties regarding my assertions.

Sorry again,

Comradely,

mc.

"Greetings:

I didn't notice anything in personal.
The democratic demands, are not in contradiction to Marxism. Ultimately in the era of imperialism, they can only be won with socialism.

Regards,

Marvin"

Dear Marvin,

I am tirelessly trying to indicate that democracy of capitalism is an illusion and true democracy is only possible with socialism (For instance, my post titled with Dylan’s song). But I realized that sometimes my appetite for true democracy makes me to overlook the possible gains even in the illusionary one. This is for the first and the last time that I have ever proposed liberal-democratic reconciliations to be activated urgently regarding a particular question, and for me this was not the absolute idea or a dead end of the debate. It was just a plea to draw the question to a more tangible ground. Anyway, I decided to cease this short adventure of mine with liberalism hereafter.

A Query

2007-10-30T11:35:00.000+02:00

This is the copy of the comment that I made about an article on Renegade
Eye:
http://advant.blogspot.com/2007/10/kurds-of-northern-iraq-another-betrayal.html

Hello,

Thank you for presenting us with an article detailed enough to cover the historical, economical and social extents of the multifaceted situation of the region.

I want to raise a very speculative question, which I have neither investigated by any means of statistical data nor carefully contemplated on:

Following the recent debate in Marxmail about the question of contemporary imperialism, I have developed a strange PARANOIA concerning the immediate role of the Turkish Army in the imperialistic expansion. As I stated before, Turkish bourgeoisie has been bolstered heavily by European finance capital. I can’t IMAGINE a notable Turkish company issuing an annual report that does not include liabilities to European creditors. We should also take direct investments and joint partnerships into the account. In other sense, one should reevaluate the gradually rising influence of European Union in the Turkish economy. I’m SUSPECTING the good old days that one could unhesitatingly count Turkey simply as a satellite of the U.S have remained in the past. Now the pie is bigger and prospects are more alluring.

Another thing to bear in mind is the up to date consequences of the power struggle in Turkey. The Turkish Army (i.e. its appendages in the political racetrack) waterlooed heavily by bourgeoisie in the recent election. But, this rivalry has to be maintained friendly as both teams need each other for the sake future organizations. Now it is time to regenerate the relations and establish brand new table-images which were spoiled by busted bluff attempts. A couple of showpiece triumphs against PKK might save reliability of the Army and suspicions about the the devotion of bourgeoisie to the political heritage.

The existence of PKK is a practical tool for Turkish ruling classes to prolong nationalistic sensibility. After the dissolution of Soviet Union and extermination of socialist movements, Turkey has been deprived of a “real enemy” excluding PKK, religious fundamentalism and those noisy Armenians and their persistent claims. Nationalistic consciousness is not a gift from god; you must strive relentlessly to constitute it by every tool. On the other hand, uncontrollable forces always represent a threat to “free trade”, which is an enormous risk to take for the small-minded justification of keeping the enemy in view. The one who jeopardize business affairs is a threat not only for Turkey also for all the participants.

We endeavored to a large extent to analyze the interests of American imperialism in the region. But we are bereft of a careful research about the position of Europe in the picture. How about an investigation to reveal the possible cooperation between Turkey and the usual suspects of European imperialism? Who knows what bargains are in process behind the curtains? Maybe accession of Turkey to the European Union will be a shorter process than predictions.

This is not an attempt to mystify the current debate with conspiracy theories. I just tried to throw out the question that is rambling in my mind. And I have no idea about the validity of my thoughts. Voicing it in front of the public was the only way to test it.

Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

2007-10-27T19:32:00.000+03:00

I wrote the text below regarding Dbachmozart’s post, http://www.marxmail.org/msg32639.html

But then I changed the title with Dylan’s song.

This month a Turkish nationwide news channel, NTV, broadcasted BBC’s dramatized documentary “Ancient Rome, the Rise and Fall of an Empire”. A particular episode depicting the land crisis of the 2nd century led me to think on the mechanism of democracy today and the infamous flaws of representative democracy.

In that episode, the misadventure of a politician is introduced, Tiberius Gracchus who inspired François-Noël "Gracchus" Babeuf. Briefly, he was a heroic figure for lower classes and caused an interruption of the Republic’s ordinary executive process by his insistent attempts to legislate agrarian reforms. His reforms were targeted to recapture the land that had been occupied by wealthy class and transformed to latifundias. In the dramatized version, we see Tiberius Gracchus while he is giving a zealous speech in the “tribune of the people”. But when the time to decide whether to put the proposed laws to people’s vote comes, one of the members immediately uses his veto power. In a nonchalant manner, Gracchus says, “Let us discuss the other matters then”. Afterwards, Gracchus starts to veto every single proposal to discuss irrelevant agendas decisively. He suddenly puts the Republic out of commission, which provokes an ultimate turmoil. His motto is: “You can not discuss the budget while people have no place to live”.

Shortly after watching this documentary, I read an interesting article in Card Player magazine which should be regarded as irrelevant to the question by any rational mind, but obviously not by a lunatic like me:

http://www.cardplayer.com/magazine/article/15295

The author argues that, even though analyzing close decisions enables us to see the big picture; close decisions have lesser effect on the outcomes. In other words, for instance, contemplating on the question of what portion of the state budget should be reserved for educational expenses facilitates to comprehend the system of civil society. But solutions of the most devastating structural dilemmas of this society do not dwell on close decisions; they are the matter of life and death, i.e. fundamental questions like provision of subsistence, deciding to what will be produced and how it will be distributed, etc. etc.

It is apparent that modern democracy has been reduced to a quest for the conclusion of endless chain of close decisions. The refrains of we should content with the representative democracy in spite of its all deficiencies is a piece of pure nonsense since it is not the characteristics of representation where the limitation lies. The shortcomings of democracy originates from the expulsion of fundamental questions from political field, which could probably change the big picture. The trick in here is to heighten the close decisions to the abstract universal, the field of immediate knowledge. But a proper democracy should be all about cognition.

Think about the recent mass demonstrations against terror in Turkey and pro-war parades which go far to devastation of the properties of Kurdish citizens. We had been asked whether we want that the terror to be stopped before every election. People natively voted for so-called social contractors just to witness their persistence to exercise the same policies which have been proved to be disastrous for couple of decades.

Responding positively to the calls like “Say No to the Terror!” is a close decision as long as they are voiced abstractly. In truth, it is not really significant if you have no intention to ensure the related question will be descended from the field of universal. I don’t really care about it on the condition that my cognition is forced out the debate. But, making a decision between practicing a tedious nationalist violence, discrimination of ethnic minorities, being an everlasting subject of militarism; and responding positively to the political demands for general amnesty, constitutional guarantee to preserve their cultural heritage, etc. is not even close.

Unfortunately, what we are ordered now is to participate to a debate about the universal abstractions, battle of semantics for definitions like “local insurgents” or “terrorists” (One can easily be branded as a terrorist, if he hesitates to utter PKK and terrorism in the same sentence), and tricky competitions to prove who is the most patriotic, etc. etc. Sorry, I am not eager to buy this garbage. I just want a proper democracy addressing my cognition. I don’t want to fiddle around grappling with close decisions.

Mehmet Çagatay

In Debt to Islam

2006-03-21T16:30:00.001+02:00

Couple of years ago, British newspapers disclosed the legal but 'unethical' schemes of the famous soccer clubs, which enable some players to avoid paying nearly half of the Inland Revenue. Among the various methods of dodge, one of them was distinguished by its speculative approach to the problem: Through employee benefit trusts clubs lend money to the players, in a weak currency such as Turkish Lira and when the repayment day arrives, the profit due to lira’s steady loss of value against sterling remains at players.

We are now witnessing a similar speculative transaction on behalf of the continuity of the historical forms of fundamentalist consciousness. The absence of self-critique in fundamentalisms is being ensured by putting the diverse modes of universal individual into debt on the cultural float field of universal values. On the one hand we have the superior ideals of the neo-liberal social contract (democracy, freedom of speech, social security, human rights, equality of men and women, sexual freedom, etc), on the other, we have the witch kettle of the evil in which our present is dissolving in the archaic mixture consisted of totalitarianisms, mind-control, terrorism, restriction of criticism, mass surveillance, patriarchy, subordination of women, and so on. Since the promises of the social contract had unveiled its dependence on class division and lose its material relevancy to the day-to-day struggles of the working class, those ideals have been re-established as a series of moral principles which could attract the ordinary consumers only by fluctuations in their values in comparison with the exchange value of the counter-moralism of transcendental irrationality. And the shares of the outcasts of neo-liberalism are intentionally being stabilized at over-price to aggravate the debt burden of working class in the divine circle of the moral “relativism” of the modernity.

Opposing the procedure applied by Arsenal to praise its star players with deceiving the Treasury, this cultural chicanery tracks the way of swindling the working class for the benefit of the common treasury case of global capitalism. For instance, since democracy (the abstract guaranty for the individual to partake in the process of resolving social questions) have been substituted by supra-political officialdoms which put only frivolous issues to the vote of majority, the neo-tyranism could maintain the commitment to the imaginary democracy (the moral image of earthly democracy) via the fear of totalitarianisms originating from celestial devotions but which also have a serious tangibility of “barbarous” violence. Then the working class debtor thinks that he should be glad for being offered with the potential advantages of the democratic risk society, for being shepherded by the notion of national security to assure his individual security to the cost of the “security” promise of the bourgeois social contract. Shortly, the imaginary virtue-value of democracy is determined by the actual unsanitary-value of oppressive paradigms. But as Marx disclosed, “it is evident that by making the value of one commodity, say labour, corn, or any other commodity, the general measure and regulator of value, we only shift the difficulty, since we determine one value by another, which on its side wants to be determined”. After this difficulty has been shifted, there show up the debt collectors to materialise the cultural debt burden on the back of working class. As we saw in the case of the proposed First Job Contract in France, or in the never-ending assaults against the social security system of Turkey, those cultural debts are paid typically with the real money, with the genuine vital energy of the nameless players who have the maximum work-rate attribute just as in the soccer management simulations.

But who are those debt collectors? They are the self-enlightened apostles of free market fundamentalism, of cultural individualism, of quasi-universal values which could not be determined without the mediation of their supplementary angles on the horizontal lines of global moralistic space, etc. Last month, amongst those distinguished debt collectors twelve of them issued a hot-tempered Manifesto against the resurrection of classical totalitarianisms (Nazism and Stalinism) in the guise of Islam. Those unblushing creditor’s lawyers were merely carrying out the legal responsibility of reminding the cultural debtor that what criminal codes will be applied if he dodge from compensating the particular Dominion Theology of New “Enlightenment: Universal values (such as indisputable merits of capital, freedom of monopolising the instruments of speech, defunctionalized suffrage, notion of “equal opportunity” which postulates that markets and social structures are exterminated and regenerated with the entrance of every single individual, etc) grant the Universal capitalists and their bootlickers dominion over the Universe.

In the celebrated Manifesto, we are being threatened with an infantile narrative analogous to a fairy tale classic, Sleeping Beauty: There was infertile king (inferior individuals of the History) who could not impregnate his wife (Mother Nature). Then his wife cheats him with a productive young man (bourgeois) to gave birth to a gorgeous princess (democracy) who would be gifted to perfection by the right-minded fairies (intellectuals of Enlightenment) of the Empire. But some envious fairies (Nazism and Stalinism) cursed this little princess with a terrible gift: On reaching maturity, she would wound his finger with a spindle (Totalitarianism) and die. Then comes those analgesic fairies (the authors of the Manifesto), assuring the king by a spell that she would not die but fall into a sleep until a prince (Universal Values) would condescend to kiss her. The whole story in their minds is as pathetic as this and all their claims about the alleged cultural superiority rely on enchanted narratives and historically conditioned inferiority of their comrades in the global brotherhood of fundamentalisms.

They are arguing that, Islamism is pursuing to establish “man's domination of woman, the Islamists' domination of all the others”. In respect of women question, they are right. Islamism contemplates to relocate the dignity of woman in the divine hierarchical order. It is a method of ensuring the celestial dignity by secular degradation. All right, but there is something mysterious in this assessment: How could a heavenly currency conserve its liquidity in the global economy of scientific reason? Because your quasi-secular evaluation system is still mediated perception of the links among humankind, therefore it is just another stage of human alienation. For instance, last year a rape scandal broke out in Turkey, involving a young television star and a former basketball player. The raper had recorded all the action with his cell-phone while the young girl (who was his girlfriend on that occasion) was lying unconsciously by the affect of an unknown soporific. After the images from the action began to circulate on the Internet and in media, Turkish people found themselves in the midst of a zealous debate concerning the ethical values. Religious men contributed the discussion by recalling that adultery is forbidden in Islam. Liberals responded that she had made her bed and now lying on it. And the wisest social democrats eventually set up the precise solution: It is because of that we have not yet established a system of secular ethics. In a letter to a friend of mine, I had asked this crucial question as a rejoinder to the desire of crude-secular ethics: “What if those images were broadcasted as an amateur porn movie and we had no idea about that they were from a real rape?” Any approach to this enquiry reflects the stage of development of your secular-ethics, and none of those quasi-seculars could give a negative response to this paradox. And they could not logically go beyond this vicious circle: If the exchange value is the determinant of your moral values, there is nothing to condemn in the act of one’s exchanging his or her body with other commodities to sustain his or her life. Thus, while the half-time secularisms seem to equate men and women on a higher stage, they actually function as a worldly ground for juridical degradation of humankind.

So, in the language of celestial moralist the semi-secular emancipation of women is translated as constitutional promiscuity, institutional pornography, encouragement of nudity, etc. Sexual freedom exposes itself as sexualization of freedom and therefore outdated symbols of patriarchal chain of Islamic collaboration maintain their relative value. For that reason, the Europeans are mistaken in accusing Muslim immigrants for their resistance against cultural assimilation. The actual defect stems from the deficiency of theirs own culture, which was petrified and left the human emancipation half-finished. This state of affairs interrupts every challenge for a voluntary assimilation. The riddle of history has been renounced unsolved and powerless men are clinging to an archaic resolution. As a result, the priests of archaic solutions do not strain to persuade their followers to the validity of the promise of resurrection of deceased social unity forms where there is no sign of concrete unity. And since the every social question been extirpated from material ground and converted as a theme of cultural fieldwork and ethics, the last thing that the both sides of dispute are in need for is scientific knowledge. Just as some canny scholars easily take care of Marxism after presenting it as a sort of religion, both sides of the global fundamentalism seem that they are determined to herd common men according as the invaluable advise of Sun Tzu: The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger.

Marx once said that, “Communism is the riddle of history solved”. But nor Marx neither Hegel suggested an End of History as a “final form of human government” or “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” as Fukuyama fancied. In Marx case, communism is not the end of history as history-in-itself, but it is the negation of history as history-for-other. Therefore, although communism is the solution of history as history of alienated men, it is essentially the genesis of the real history as history of the objectivity of men.

Present form of democracy, neo-liberalism, longing for the restoration of values of the Enlightenment, existing appearances of various grounds for freedom, etc. are the interruption instruments of this objectivity, and “backward movements” as in the Hegelian terminology. Just as the clownish authors of the neo-Enlightenment Manifesto are producing a new form of cultural relativism while negating the older, we have no need to surprise that labour is producing scientific knowledge on one hand and superstition on the other.

New fundamentalists are singing a love song to Islamist fundamentalism and modern voice of Paul is overriding the deceased voice of John which was taped long ago:

“Whatever happened to,
The life that we once knew?

Can we really live without each other?”

Mehmet Çagatay

March, 2006

The Essence of Kurdishness

2006-03-16T17:05:00.003+02:00

In his Science of Logic and then in Shorter Logic, Hegel designates the distinction and connection between the analytical and the synthetic methods. While the analytical cognition is the apprehension of what it is in the simple, unmediated condition of something, synthetic cognition is the comprehension of things in “the multiplicity of determinations in their unity”. As a repetition of Hegel’s illustration, after decomposing a piece of meat with chemical operations, a chemist is right to arrive to a conclusion of that it is composed of nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, etc. But these elements have ceased to be mediated within the notion of flesh, so the investigation of our chemist had arrived to the abstraction of periodic table but not the concreteness of flesh. In this manner, if the objective is to handle phenomenon as it is, empiricism contradicts with itself at the beginning. On the contrary, synthetic method is the examination of that in which conditions these elements which are at once posited at the periodic table turn into a piece of flesh and it is to keep the track of the movement and development of the notion of flesh in the object matter. Briefly, the synthetic method progress from abstract to concrete which is completely reversed course of analysis. However, as Hegel emphasizes, the method which is to be applied must not be determined according to our subjective preferences but through the dimensions of our acquaintance with the object. As a plain example, even though they were forged, the pictures of white aproned scientists in the mysterious labs of Hangar 18 who are analyzing the dead bodies of the bulge-eyed aliens reflect the practicing of a suitable scientific method. Yet, although they seem real, the Turkish scientists standing over university seats, surgery tables of newspapers, etc. who are flinging analytical scalpel blows to the symbolic body of Kurds are far more fantastic and unreal than those alien models.

Similarly, in the section called “The Method of Political Economy” of Grundrisse, just before criticizing the metaphysical character of Hegelian dialectics, Karl Marx compares the analytic method of political economists of 17th century (probably William Petty) with the synthetic method of their successors such as Smith, Ricardo, etc. He sets us right that, “It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole…” [1]

After the prototypes of economists had discovered the abstract determinants such as labour, money, value, etc. by peeling the layers of living unities like state, nation, population, etc. namely, since the famous top-hat that Marx once mentioned in Poverty of Philosophy [2] (and which was imported by Turks through the revolutions of the republic) [3] had been brought out of the chest, there comes the real masters, Smith and Ricardo who would transform men into hats. They set forth from simple social relations such as labour, division of labour, exchange value and arrive to macroeconomic categories of state, foreign exchange, world market, however this time not as a chaotic individuality [4] but as the loaded unity of the hat through the various determinations and social relations. To comprehend the real process of that how men have been transformed to hats, we have to invoke the last part of the first volume of Marx’s Capital which is called Primitive Accumulation. Here, while Marx was pointing out that “primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race” [5] he also implies that the masters of political economy, ‘Adam’ Smith e.g. reduced not only the “previous accumulation” but individual relations of the bourgeois mode of production to unhistorical categories. Hence in the Wealth of Nations, the previous accumulation which causally appears on the stage by holding the identity card issued in the name of John Doe, confronts us in Capital as an historical protagonist as vivid as Julius Caesar. And akin to his appearance which was implanted by Shakespeare, the poet quoted many times by Marx, into the ominous dream of his wife, Calphurnia: “like a fountain with an hundred spouts / Did run pure blood: and many lusty Romans / Came smiling, and did bathe their hands in it” [6]

The wise intellectuals who analysed the question of Kurdism – Kurdishness – Kurd had started out of their appearances in material world and arrived to ludicrous conclusions by isolating their object from its differences and clothing it with costume of abstract universality. Wherefore, they are both the internal reflections of the same essence that to demand the dignification of the Kurdish identity against the sublimation of Turkish subject by elites and which has partially adopted by Turkish working class. Similarly, the narrow-minded solution of that the universal Kurd which in appearance is an absolute separatist, a terrorist and devoted instinctively to violence could be emancipated from political illusion bolstered by the enemies of the republic through the recognition of Kurdish identity and philanthropically transforming them to equal citizens are nothing more than wishful thinking within the essence. What is this essence? It is the painful process of development of the ideal individual of the bourgeois – civil society. Consequently, the essence of immediate Turk or Kurd does not reflect the human essence but the essential dialectic of the protagonist which appears in the history in different shapes. Just like the insomniac, nameless man suffering from multiple personality disorder who is assaulting to his own body by posing as Tyler Durden, our protagonist, sometimes as an English gentleman against an Irish, sometimes as a noble French philosopher against immigrants or sometimes as a Turkish upstart against the wretched Kurds, delivers cruel blows to his body for reaching to the fantastic tranquillity of national synthesis.

If I begin with the population of Kurds, its proportion to Turkish population, with the organisation structures of young Kurds throwing stones and molotovcocktails to police forces in the metropolises, or with PKK, etc. and I conclude with simple social relations such as conspiracies of intelligence agencies of hypocritical nations, drug trade, inconvenient geographical conditions, paternal apathy in king-sized families, philistinism, etc. I do not disclose any secret about Kurds thus they had disappeared among this analytical abstraction. Nevertheless, we have no change to comprehend the concrete Kurd by grounding our investigation to these sloppy premises above. By this way, I fall into the trap of mechanical – metaphysical dialectics which is discernable with its most vulgar form in Proudhon and criticised sardonically by Marx. Because, these are the particles that have been introduced through an analysis which is practiced half-heartedly and this is partially by the reason of the allegiance to official ideology and partially of slow-wittedness. It is not a scientific approach to transmute every living thing to a puppet of our method by imposing the products of our imagination as thesis – antithesis –synthesis. If the Turkish intellectuals devoted to liberalism are keen to make the synthsis of Turk and Kurd by the romanticized notions like equality, freedom, justice, human rights, which they barely filled up with a sanctified profane ethic, we Marxist should fill them up with human practice, the real individual, the real essence of human, i.e. the process of labour in which human transform their essence by transforming the material world. Thus, we could explain that how a nation produces molotovcocktails, guerrillas, counter-guerrillas, terrorists, a rotten justice system, a president metamorphosed from the distributor of gaseous drinks, etc. while producing iron and steel, hazelnut, various textile products, a cut-rate literature, unskilled philosophers, etc.

As usual, the whole story begins with the discovery of something. Firstly, there was the discovery of the New World which had transformed the Kurdish population dwelling upon the old trade routes, into the ranks of bandits. Up to 1891, Kurds had been employed as a mutable minefield in the conflict between Ottomans and Persians. This was the multi-centennial process of transformation of Kurds into guns and the ultimate executor was Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who had established a special warrior force in the Ottoman army consisted of Kurdish tribes. While the main reason of the militarization of Kurds was to keep their hazardous vagabondness under the supervision of the Empire, the others were to infuse them into the false nationalism of the Christian minorities in the region and to concoct a stable position in response to Russian and Persian threats.

With the discovery of oil in the middle-east at the beginning of the 20th century has paved the way to new ideas. Among the imperialistic quarrel for the new resource, aboriginals of the rough lands leaking oil had found themselves as the “Mountain Turks” in the ideological economy of “Young Turks”. Contrary to the Bolsheviks, they were not the rebellious seeds arising from the unburied corpse of an irrational regime, but the naughty children of the Empire and a bunch of revisionists who absorbed from West the idea of “cultural-national autonomy” which was criticized by Lenin as, “precisely the most refined and, therefore, the most harmful nationalism, it implies the corruption of the workers by means of the slogan of national culture and the propaganda of the profoundly harmful and even anti-democratic segregating of schools according to nationality. In short, this programme undoubtedly contradicts the internationalism of the proletariat and is in accordance only with the ideals of the nationalist petty bourgeoisie” [7]. Clearly, they were the class of modernistic priests who had no knowledge of psychiatry to exorcise the demonic spirits of imperialism without the aid of a holy cross and their cross was nationalism. Just like the other representatives of modernism, Young Turks were instinctively beliving that thoughts that did not fit their ideal subject were the products of “false consciousness” [8]. This predisposition is straightforwardly observable through the pages of Mustafa Kemal’s Nutuk, his 36 hours long speech given at the first general meeting of the Republican People's Party. There he quotes from the telegrams that he had sent to the officers in the region, stimulating them to take steps for restraining the chiefs of the Kurdish tribes from spawning a current of Kurdism. But as if one can eliminate the profit motive without smearing one’s clean hands with the capital, the Turkish nationalism was the dialectical negation of the imperialistic nationalisms and which was supposedly eradicate oppressive the sides of them. As this eradication was possible only through the ideas of a conscious brain, the ultimate synthesis has been implemented as “everyone who feels himself as a Turk is a Turk. This axiom could probably remind our readers of the painstaking education process of the young Jedi’s, in which the mysterious masters are frequently urging them to feel the force. Thanks to the history, we have witnessed that how the force is objectifying itself and how triumphant the Turkish synthesis is. That was the transformation of Kurds into ideas.

By the courtesy of American’s infamous “Project Democracy” which had managed to purge the Turkish communists by arranging a military coup, Turkish elites gained knowledge of transforming these abstract ideas into profits. While the former leftists who had started behaving sensibly were welcomed to the bodies of media and universities for researching the wonders of the civil society, the actual society was rapidly being militarized. Terror and ‘counter’offensive measures circulated the scared Kurds cutting and running from their lands, to assemblage them as variable capital in the ghettos of metropolises in where they would serve as an appendage of the constant capital which was ensured by colossal foreign debt distributed as a sort of primitive accumulation among the close circle of prominent Turkish executives. A little difference from the imperialistic primitive accumulation was that the exploited man would pay for it not only with the mechanical energy of his muscles but also later on with the kinetic energy of his pocket through the unbearable tax burden and ‘uncontrollable’ inflation which was helpful to enable a steady decrease in real wages. Fallowing process was reproducing the basic manifestations of capitalist accumulation: After the expedition of obligatory conscription of workers when the demand for working power was more than the supply in the sweet-smelling days of competition, the filthy smell of monopoly has begun to arose from the suburbs, just as the veteran soldiers of the army of Caesar meandering on the streets of Rome with the confusion of their function, the discharged soldiers of the working class was deserted to hunger, burglary, vandalism, etc.

Of course, the surplus population would have to die. But what if they are resisting to their destiny? The descendants of immigrant stereotype banished from the social production in France are now burning the cars in which they have saw the dead labour of their ancestors. Ironically, young Kurds are desperately perceiving it in the body of police force, frigidly dressed like a creature rushed out of movies like Universal Soldier. In other words, we are still producing the archetypes of commodities rather than the real commodities itself.

The Kurdish question is a political question as long as surplus Kurds resist their practical needlessness with respect to the organic composition of Turkish capital. Namely, it is not question of politics as the art of mutual reconciliation of diverse identities but is the question of politics as the concentrated economics in which the identities in the gaseous state are continuously solidifying. One could argue that the Kurdish question might be solved by encouraging quixotic capitalists to make more investment in the region. Probably, by increasing the division of labour, this chivalrous charity would disrupt the semi-feudal social network in the southeast of Turkey. But in reality, this structure owes its stubborn existence against the modern world directly to the investment which had torn off the ancient bounds of the society in the west of Turkey. Moreover, if it is supposed that the unemployment is the cause of the ultimate evil (The Kurdish Question) of Turkey, one should admit that investment is not the solution but precondition of unemployment.

One might argue that Kurds should hang on to their identity. But one should recall that what happened to “black power” when it has been converted to the disinfected slogan of “Black is beautiful”. After the political emancipation of the beauty of Afro-American is granted in the bourgeois sense, the disturbing lyrics of rap music soaring from slums has been tamed as a demonstration of excess in which the black man can only achieve to survive by testing their beauty with expensive cars, precious jewelleries, dancing bombshells, etc. In this way, black men whose humanity was once theoretically questioned have practically been regulated as the accessories of entertainment devices to depict the travesty of nouveau richness. So, if you are keen to claim abstractly that Kurdish language is as substantial as Turkish language, you have to venture to take a step on the cultural competition field of the universal bourgeois in which the representatives from countless nations are competing with each other to fabricate no more than bizarre forms of literature, eccentric philosophical mixtures to interpret the eccentric word, advertisement texts of an utopia in which the ordinary man could feel the confidence of the social unity only in the act of consumption, etc. The answer of capitalism to the question of reconciliation of identities is just to transform the surplus identities into a sort of documentary ethnic dance in which the modern man could prove his development himself by gazing at the childish congeniality of the other. But the “other” is a supernatural notion to conceal the reality that there is labour of this other even in your postmodernity.

One might claim the emancipation of Kurds from Turks with regard to the right of self-determination of oppressed nations. My understanding of Marxism urges me to recognize not only this theoretical right, but also the self-determination of an oppressed individual. But I have strange feeling that woman could not emancipate from washing the dishes with hands without the aid of dishwasher. So, my humble recognition solves nothing without the practice of human. If man must prove the truth, fortunately we will not wait too long to observe how he proves the Kurdish emancipation. The de-facto Kurdish state that is being constructed vigilantly at the northern Iraq with all the devices of an average bourgeois state will manifest that how the conventional political emancipation corresponds with the human emancipation. Let us see how the basic rights of an individual in the civil society will comfort ordinary Kurds when the filthy question of who must sweat and who should take it easy arrives? Maybe, in the future, young Kurds will discover from the history books that the Turkmen of Kurdistan are actually “mountain Kurds” and their penury is originating from deficiency of technical intellect for producing oil.

These ironies are far from mirroring the calamitous history of Kurds. But we should retain that Kurds can not emancipate from the humiliation of the notion of “mountain Turks” by simply emancipating from Turks. They have to emancipate from those mountains too.

In Turkey, the Turkish army is resisting against the role that they deserved in the characteristic bourgeois state. Kurdish nationalism and fundamental Islamism are the very last weapons remaining in their hands. They cling on every opportunity to trigger them for providing evidence of their existence, although a certificate of death has been presented to their close relatives from modern world.

These assertions above could bring in mind the old idea that primitive structures of society could only be overthrown with the revolutionary character of bourgeois. But in Turkey, the bourgeois is the premise of primitivism. Should we wait for the educators to complete their education?

How could you solve the essential problems of the civil society by acknowledging it as the only ground on which the specific subject is erecting himself, folding itself, repulsing and attracting the other, and again banishing the other after absorbing its biological energy? Just as the magical formula of bourgeois economics, by delaying the problems, by leaving your psychotic inheritance to following generations.

In his “Mythologies”, Barthes describes the professional wrestling as a circus where the spectators satisfy their hunger for the image of passion, but not the passion itself. Unfortunately, Bathes did not live long enough to observe the reality shows, by which the spectators have found the fever of the real passion without undertaking the challenge to grasp the glowing coal. But now, the spectators of the sterile world who had once served to modern world as the image of real passion are expressing their hunger for passion in different ways. What is that passion? The passion for the basic premise of humanity, of the property of their labour, which will serve as a proper ground to pursue the pleasures the upper passions of humanity as philosophy, science, art, etc. The question is should we watch the shows of passion from our disinfected environment? If you are not intent on running the risk of broken feelings and not willing to lose yourself to find yourself again in the other, just as the unmediated freedoms of civil society, your love is nothing more than a scholastic question.

Mehmet Çagatay
March, 2006

1) Marx, Grundrisse

2) Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy

3) In 1925, as an indicator of modernity Turkish citizens has been obliged to wear hats outside of their house. This code has been known as “Hat Revolution”

4) See Hegel’s Shorter Logic

5) Marx, Capital, Vol. I

6) William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene II

7) Lenin, The National Programme of the R.S.D.L.P

8) This phrase actually which does not appear in any of his writings has frequently been attributed to Karl Marx, There is a fine essay of Joseph McCarney hunting this myth on Marx Myths and Legends web site.

The Promise of the Truth and A Turkish Anti-American Film

2006-03-09T15:16:00.001+02:00

This article was orginally published by sendika.org

The promise of the truth is a profitable mediator in a society where the "mutual relations of the producers take the form of a social relation between the products". Thus, from TV commercials to popular novels, countless O'Briens who had jumped out of Orwell's 1984 whisper paternally to our ears: "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness". As in the novel, this meeting becomes reality mostly under the spotlights of the chamber of torture in the depths of the Ministry of Truth, which is always kept luminous.

Conspiracy theories function similarly with that spotlights, supposedly arranged to illuminate the truth hiding behind the reality, and the "truth", as Badiou once said, "is first of all something new. What transmits, what repeats, we shall call knowledge". So, the constant promises of the truth on TV screens, on the bookshelves of well decorated stores, on the columns of newspapers signify the transformation of the 'unknown' to a knowledge, unknown as a knowledge. Just as formulated by Donald Rumsfeld as known unknowns. It presents us the most shallow appearance of the reality as the truth. It is the persecution of mind.

The disgusting Turkish political-action, repeating the primitive past of Hollywood's political pictures as a farce, "The Valley of the Wolves" is striving to cut our eyes out with an informative light-sabre. It promises its spectators to display the lowdown of the American politics in the Middle East, but it ends with the conclusion of that all Americans are vulgar materialists, intractable infidels, well-educated torturers, self-seekers, egocentrics, i.e the incarnate Evils, the concentration of our innumerable internal and external enemies who have been depicted in the official discourse of the Turkish elites as they are in everywhere outside the clever and hardworking body of the Turk. By the virtue of its impossibility for an abstract human infant to identify himself with the deliriums of its ancestors, a strict set of non-historical premises is implemented to arrive a educational syllogisms. Throughout the education of my generation, we had been taught that approximately every single nation in the world is our natural enemy, or the enemy by nature (As in the Artistotelian concepts of 'slavery by nature' and 'freedom by nature', attributing the ephemeral outcomes of human deeds to a transcendental being conceals their historycity) and their bloodthirsty jealousy stems from the geopolitical position of our heavenly country which has the richest resources of the world. We are one of the seven the nations managing to survive by leaning on only her resourses (we are never informed about the other six) and these acquisitive evils had sworn to death to take them away from us. They had sworn to disintegrate our country, to defile our purity, to degenerate our substantial language, to trample on our values, to rip off our family bounds, to prevent our soccer teams from reaching further rounds, etc. We are living in a world where Turk was the object of the evil. i.e, Turk is a holly figure suffering in the hands of pure evil. So we have told that our nationalism is just a defensive one, but we have never enlightened about the modern motto: "Offense sells the tickets, Defense wins the game"

In retrospect, by recalling that after the Turkish war of salvation, in his speeches related with the subject Mustafa Kemal had stated that our aims of acquiring the sources of petroleum and getting rid of a possible formation of a Kurdish state as the foundations of our claims on Musul and Kerkuk, i.e almost with the same logic of the imperialist states that we had fought against, we should ask to ourselves, were our bygone purposes stemming from more sublime values from the immediate pragmatic reason of Americans? The historical reality of that you had once confronted a definite stage of capitalist accumulation does not signify that you are truly an anti-imperialist. And after your political emancipation, if your first deed was laying the foundations to build a nation state, a civil society, etc. which was qualitatively identical with the explicit projects of the imperialists but only recognizable by the amount of nation states that it had proposed, it means that you had merely shot at your future. In this way, Marx's famous phrase, The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living", acquires an other dimension. The backward forms of the capitalist production insisting on their relative irrationality, i.e the spectral ancestors of the modern civil society crumbled hither and thither, weights like a nightmare on the utmost social form of capital, in the guise of Turkish nationalism, fundamental Islamism, etc. Anti-Americanism is the crude socialism, the mediated being of the exploited man who has not comprehended himself as a subject of a transitory form of division of labour. Thus what he understands from the emancipation is a progress of himself as an object towards the subject (the god, the prosperous nations, etc) in the given laws of grammar. That could be depicted as the hopeless struggle of the apes against more powerful animals for the sources of nourishment, as long as they share the common denominator of being an animal. However, they have to break loose from the denominator to emancipate from the struggle for throne of the animal kingdom and thus posit themselves as the real masters of nature. In this manner, the emancipation of Turk reveals itself as the emancipation from the common denominator, from the restrictions of bourgeois society. It is the struggle of the Turk in the guise of subjective living labour which has not yet objectified in commodities but which should be materialized properly as an organized movement against the aggregate capital of his own masters, the restrictions of the afficted Turkishness begotten by Turkish elits and then adopted by native capitalists. Namely it is the struggle of the living labour lurking in the muscles of the Turkish working class against their dead labour buried in the inventory books of their capitalist masters, in the walls of the summer villas of politicians, in the gilding epaulets of army officials and in the stylish suits of bureaucrats. In other words, socialism for Turks is not a struggle for future mediated through Americans. It is the complete negation of this mediation which will enable us to a direct confrontation with our past. By only this way, we can truly overcome the actual Americans because Turkey is the anchor of the U.S, immersed to the economical history of mankind. Or, for a while, we can be proud of our artistic taste which does not confuse the art of torture with performance arts.

I have to admit that I am not impressed with the rubbish The Valley of the Wolves phenomenon but with the revealing confession U.S Army. They avow their manipulation of the nervous system of Americans through movies by warning their soldiers in Turkey not to draw close to Turks who are stimulated with a duplicate of Hollywood political-actions.

In its version of TV series, the mafiatic organization which rules the world was once depicted as a sect of Illuminati and in the rite, mafia barons were dressed up just like in Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT. There has been going various discussions about the meaning of Kubrick's title since it was released, I hope that my contribution will make sense.

They have expelled the darkness, I have been illuminated and I saved my soul. Amen!!!

Mehmet Çagatay

The Subjectivity of Hamas

2006-01-31T20:56:00.000+02:00

After the recent democratic victory of Hamas, the familiar refrains of 'liberal' democratic songs have been ejaculated. The initial reaction was a firm denouncement of violence which was revamping its face as an armed government. As this organism is an anachronic tumor in the modern world where politics and armed forces have long since been separated, George Bush forewarned them to relocate themselves to the right section of time: "And I know you can't be a partner in peace if your party has got an armed wing". This could be a well-intentioned invitation, an invitation to the real, if the bourgeois society had really materialized its grand project, its empiricist utopia: the separation of ideas and actuality. If the rationality is a serial number scraped on the actual, it could be adequate to check the accounting records or the inventory books to identify the legitimacy of an armed organization, whether it is a recognized state or a bunch of deer hunters.

In the modern bourgeois discourse, a hero is often identified with the rational actuality while an anti-hero or a madman is deemed suitable of ideas in general and a specific ideology in particular. Supposedly, a hero has internalized the rationality so that he is able to overcome most complicated questions by his instincts, without being lost in thought. (For instance, in the Die Hard series, Bruce Willis' instinctive method was sufficient to upset the painstaking plans of the bad guys). For an ordinary official of U.S Army, an Iraqian suicide bomber who is making a list of his relatives and close friends to guide them to heaven on the Judgment Day when he will use his martyrial right, is an ancient subject anesthetized by religious illusion. Identically, a Kurdish guerrilla lurking on the bare mountains of Southern Eastern of Anatolia is usually depicted as a drug addict baited with real drugs when ideological drugs are not sufficient to conceal the reality. The trick here is, establishing a Hegelian Ground with the Spinozan meaning of 'Subject' and demonstrate Evil as the extended Subjectivity. Namely, between the most subordinate minion of El-Kaide and the uppermost evil, dwells a series of semi-zombies who have lost their consciousness in the 'imaginative ideas' of their superiors. It is the most specific quality of modern sagas to present the Evil as a rigidly hierarchic organization, while it is the warmth of intimacy which bands the good guys together. (Remember the photographs from George Bush's visit to USS Abraham Lincoln, in which he is dishing out sweet potatoes and joking with privates).

The outbreak of Hamas in the parliamentarian system has been belied as a corruption within the universality of civil society, as if an armed organization independent from Palestine society, is misusing the innocent flaws of the system. Thus, they have to harmonize with the division of labor and leave their activity of critique by weapon to the official Army of Palestine (a non-existent army of a spectral state inside the imaginary borders), if they are really intending to mutate to a political animal. At the moment, they are barbarian dreamers who are trying to dress the theory and practice with the same uniform; they are straight thinkers blindered with the idea that political struggle is a moment of other struggles. That bigotry revealed itself in the words of Sheikh Mohammed Abu Tir: “In the past, it was said that we don't understand politics, only force, but we are a broad, well-grounded movement that is active in all areas of life. Now we are proving that we also understand politics better than the others".

According to a rumor, a prominent American officer had asked an Indian chief to prevent young Indians from their arbitrary attacks and the chief strained to explain that it was impossible due to the structure of their society, in which everyone had the right to pick off a branch from a tree, shape it and use it as an arrow. George Bush's proposal to Hamas that they should make a selection out of arms or politics, resembles this example of contradiction between different stages of division of labor. Thus, demanding from Hamas to leave its weapons is a cryptic demand from Palestinians to leave their windows open against the burglary. Because, what indicated by the expression “armed wing” were directly the Palestinian people, insofar as there is no definite distinction between a civil Palestinian and a Hamas militant.

What is the real meaning of the fashionable invitation to politics? If it seems that constituents of the modern-universal state are functioning independently but collaborating as the moments of one logic, if it seems that, for instance, army is acting like an appendage of ephemeral governments, it is because the distribution of surplus value, division of labour, conditions of domestic production, etc. have been fixed to the center of the twister of global capital where the strong centrifugal force at margins is the source of the perfect balance at the center. Thus, nor Conservatives neither Democrats want for a armed wing, because the U.S Army is at the disposition of any 'political' enterprise that governs with a respect to the universal law of gravity.

The hyper-democracy of the 'modern nations' presupposes the transformation of politics into the art of rationalization of which is “exists but not real”1, a martial art to combat dialectic. Because of the politics have been reduced to sustenance of the existence which has no justification other than its former possibility, the immediate possibilities is banished to realm of digitality (a mailing list, eg), to secret chambers of conspirators, to tipsy guerillas on the misty hills, etc. and the basic objection to their ideas, whether they are true or not, ascends from their discord with the expensive reality whose maintenance is dictating more and more social labor time day by day. As Marx once stated, “Steam, electricity, and the self-acting mule were revolutionists of a rather more dangerous character than even citizens Barbés, Raspail and Blanqui”2. Today, for the starvation virus, hydroponics could be a furious foe more than Bob Geldof. But the mystical idea of eradicating the viruses spreading from the third world by the torture with third-rate rock music, reflects the mechanism of the Objective Logic of modern bourgeois society, which is resisting to its own dialectical movement. Hence, escaping from politics, (as Palestinians did by electing Hamas or as the new generations have began to exercise by disregarding elections), signifies the boredom with the politics concerned with the abstract arguments like abortion against anti-abortion, which obfuscates the concrete problems of the conditions of a human infant, which is about to be born.

Seeing a new 'political' baby has born in the guise of Hamas, we should hark back to the time where it was sowed.

If it is the worst thing for a Palestinian to live under the dominance of the racist Israel, the second thing is to be enslaved by the outcomes of his social practice, in other words, to be a citizen in a nation state, governed by a movement whose cause of existence is merely the collective reaction against racism. This was the road to hell paved with good intentions between Auschwitz and West Bank. Just as the emancipation of workers is not merely a the struggle to overthrow the capitalist class, but at the same time it is the negation of their own being as the subject of alienated labor, the object of capital etc, the emancipation of a Palestinian can not be completed only by negation of his being as the object of racists, he must also negate the vicious circle which is reproducing itself by dividing consistently to inferiors and superiors.

If we examine the manifesto of Hamas (The Charter of Allah: The Platform of the Islamic Resistance Movement) which was written in 1988, we can clearly perceive that it is completely a reactionary text which is devoid of any adequate radicalism to “grasp the root of the matter”3. But it is one of the myriad citations which digs the immediate society to pull out the deceased historical subjects which vanished with the advent of real masters. (All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them. What becomes of Fama alongside Printing House Square?)4. So, when the manifesto declares that the Palestinian problem is a religious one and it is goal is Allah, it does not only turn its face to the ages where the world was a playground of the insolent gods, it also fixes a religious men against a religious man. It reduces its struggle to the internal quarrel of the world “whose spiritual aroma is religion”5. It turns the biblical cross-eye which masquerades as brothers and strangers to a voluntary bifocality as believers and unbelievers. And this outlook is insufficient to reflect the class division in the Jewish society or the discrimination among the Ashkenazi Jews and the Sephardic Jews. I know that it is a downright insult to propose a Palestinian to rack his brain with the exploitation of Jew for-itself. But he have to understand the objectified forms of socialized production. It is the only way for him to transform the subjective form of labor within himself, his present possibility in his body, to a affirmative mediation of his humanity.

Let me simplify these obscure expressions: If we were living in a world which was turning on the simple exchange nourished by slave labor, it would be logical for us to refer the holy texts which were the witness of a specific stage of social development. Then, we could win the approval of the gods by doing justice to our slaves, by aiding our needy brothers, by trading with a just price (Thanks to Dr. Marx, we know that profit is acquired by selling products on their exact value), etc. If the Palestinian is preferring to travel with an automobile rather than a camel, and at the same time willing to win the approval of his humanity, he have to comprehend the social process which transforms the physical energy of men to a complicated product. He can observe the future of the social limits of his relation to his physical energy, his political limits of his relation to society, etc by observing directly the societies which are more developed. By accepting the class division in the society as a premise (granted by holy texts), he automatically limits himself with the most developed form of this society i.e even if he busts his ass and all the material conditions is provided, he could interfere the administrative decisions utmost limited with the political restriction of a U.S citizen. In other words, if you do not find an other way to produce an automobile without the circulation of capital, it may help you to escape from the biblical prophecy but it always leaves you in the desert of the prophecy of capital.

Hamas is the Palestinian living in space, in other words, the transitory material form of the Palestinian who is still alive as a subject. Hence, behind the subjectivity of Hamas, there is not a terrorist god who is insistently whispering the word of Jihad, but there are real subjects trying to find a way to emancipation through the endless forms of oppression. Along the history, men had produced and have interpreted their products by the tongue of gods. Just as Virgin Marry always weeps the symbolic blood pouring from the religious man's immediate wound, the voice of god which calls for Jihad is the voice of men subjected to a constant violence.

The electoral victory of Hamas was a step forward for Palestinians as long as the premises of the past meet the necessities of the present. They have acclaimed that they do not need the hypocritical policies of the PA (Palestinian Authority). They have disclosed that what they understand by 'politics' is the reflection of their everyday struggle. They have revealed that what they want is to see some concrete and positive changes in their life which was getting worse day by day. And as long as it preserves its progressive qualities, Hamas is not only as actual as Israel, besides it is the rational one too.

But likewise the “objectified labor”6, i.e labor in the guise of a commodity is the parasite of the the labor which is alive in the living subject, If one day Hamas confronts its living subject as an enemy, for instance, if it presumes to establish a society divided between capitalist Mollas and working disciples (Iran e.g). Or it takes this old slip of the tonque “Hamas regards Nationalism (Wataniyya) as part and parcel of the religious faith” seriously, it loses its rationality.

Marxism has nothing to do with the irrational.

Mehmet Çagatay

1) Hegel, Shorter Logic

2) Karl Marx, Speech at anniversary of the People’s Paper

3) Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction

4) Karl Marx. Grundrisse

5) Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction

6) “The only thing distinct from objectified labour is non-objectified labour, labour which is still objectifying itself, labour as subjectivity. Or, objectified labour, i.e. labour which is present in space, can also be opposed, as past labour, to labour which is present in time. If it is to be present in time, alive, then it can be present only as the living subject, in which it exists as capacity, as possibility; hence as worker. The only use value, therefore, which can form the opposite pole to capital is labour” (Karl Marx, Grundrisse)

The Destroyed Army of Truck Drivers

2005-09-02T16:57:00.000+03:00

When the Turkish Grand National Assembly didn’t allow the U.S to use military bases to strike Iraq, we didn’t predict that Turkish truck drivers would be the third army in the death toll listings of occupying forces soon.

“Bids are being accepted for the first slice of the 18.6 billion dollars worth of contract pie. 55 Turkish firms have bid for contracts. Turkish firms are expecting a portion of 6 billion dollars from the pie (2004/01/09, Milliyet).

After U.S has completed occupation of Iraq, a part of the re-construction and transportation contracts have been awarded to Turkish firms. This was a huge opportunity for Turkish capital which was jammed within the national borders.

Certainly, there was no room for confusion when Turkish capitalists used truck drivers to cross the southern borders.

At 1 August 2004, The organization of Abu Musab el Zerkavi stated that they were holding two Turkish truck drivers and they will be executed if their employer company, which was transporting supplies to occupation forces, doesn’t cease its activities in Iraq.

As usual, prorities of capital weren’t defeated by the urgent necessities of humanity. Two days later, one of the truck drivers executed by head-choppers.

The first reaction of Turkish government and media was fearsome as usual. They swore for vengeance with one voice. Prime Minister Erdogan commented that the heartless murderers would be punished as soon as possible.

At 29 August 2004, he changed his tune while the Turkish capitalists were demanding state’s security help for Turkish citizens (actually for their capital) on foreign lands: “The Turkish firms which are working in Iraq have to be built up their own security systems”. This was the confession of Turkey’s insufficiency to operate “the iron fist” alongside the “invisible hand” on the free market in comparison with the U.S.

While the total of victims were increasing day to day, the news from new executions were taking up lesser space in the media. Eventually, risk of being chopped off became an ordinary thing for truck driver’s heads. The promises given to the orphan families of martyrs have blew over. And reporters are not intrested in interviewing with children and wives weeping in front of the cameras. And no one really knows the real number of killed truck drivers anymore.

The “tragedy” of a truck driver (In Turkish we have brilliant phrase to describe tragedy: the stick soiled with shit at both ends) is that he have to make selection between his family’s death from hunger by staying unemployed at home, and earning his cost of living by gambling with his head against the anger of local resisters in Iraq. The “freedom of choice” promoted by liberalism is nothing more than what was donated to Turkish truck drivers. The enormity of their tragedy is equal to the magnificence of capitalists' non-contradictory joissance.

Mehmet Çagatay
September, 2005

On Private Property

2005-08-12T19:02:00.001+03:00

“Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private property, of which one rests on the producers' own labor, the other on the employment of the labor of others. It forgets that the latter not only is the direct antithesis of the former, but absolutely grows on its tomb only.” (Karl Marx, Capital I, Chp 33)

***

Before dealing with the main issue, I'd like to touch on more particular one as a contribution to the recent discussions on Islamism, not from the European perspective where Muslims are one of the poorest sections of society and suffering from Islamaphobia (a branch of capitalist fascism), but from the geopolitical perspective where Islam is becoming the religion of capitalist class. In countries like Turkey and Malaysia, where majority of the populace are Muslims and economy is dominated by the forces of the “free” market, a free-style interpretation of Islam functions as a useful tool for establishing an alternative “Spirit of Capitalism”.

The most troubling question for contemporary Islamists is how to reconcile the Quran's persistent emphasizing on the sacredness of property rights and the property relations of a specific mode of production, whose ethos and tyrannical master (United States) are regarded as the Big Devil by them. Although they tend to dodge from this kind of insignificant mundane discussions, any evasive answer of this question will give us a clue about the coherence of Islamist claim for a fair world. Islamism's main assertion is that Islam provides a complete world outlook which embraces the every aspect of life. So, Islamism should not only a struggle about spiritual values and ways of life, but also a struggle for a different production relations which will underlie these spiritual values. (Naturally, I don't think that any value can exist isolated from the material life). I would like to quote from Ayatullah Baqir As-Sadr to reflect the general attitude of Islamists:

"Anyhow Islam does not allow the capitalist to charge interest, but allows the mill-owner to let his mill, because this policy is consistent with its theory of distribution. As such is there any valid reason why capitalism and communism are called schools of economics and Islam is quite different from the theories of capitalism and Marxism, and as such should be regarded as a third school of economics along with them." (http://www.angelfire.com/al/gardez/e5.html)

I appreciate As-Sadr's desperate attempt to introduce Islam as “third school of economics” and his success in distinguishing this “school” from which he arbitrary called socialism, communism or Marxism (by the way, is Marxism really a school of economics?). But I have to admit that he has not convince me about fundamental difference between capitalism and Islam as a school of economics invented to pamper the new social class springing up from the bosom of capitalism: GOD-FEARING CAPITALIST MUSLIMS.

As in the passage that I quoted, As-Sadr and other foxy Islamist intellectuals tend to sperate the capitalist who charges interest from the capitalist who employs the labour of others (mill-owner eg.) and thus, who grows on the tomb of the private property which “rests on the producers' own labor”. So, according to the tenets of this school, Islam does not allow the exploitation of loaned money by interests, but allows the exploitation of worker by allowing the mill-owner's appetite for absorbing unpaid labour, surplus-product and surplus-value. At this point we have to ask: “What is interest?” or “Is there any relation between interest and surplus value?”

Interest is one of the means of distribution of surplus-value like profit, rent, taxation, etc. In Theories of Surplus Value, Marx indicates the crucial fault of economists: “All economists share the error of examining surplus-value not as such, in its pure form, but in the particular forms of profit and rent”. On the one hand, the free-style interpretation of Islam as a “school of economics” forbids a particular form of surplus-value (interest), but on the other hand, encourages the process of development of its pure form. So, the greatest theoretical achievement of Islam as a guide for God-fearing Capitalist Muslims is the most sensitive surgical operation that removes only a form of the exploitation without hurting the pure form of the exploitation.

The chief misapprehension grows out of a reversed chronological process of production in which the human seems to produce goods while producing social relations. This is a sort of philosophy claiming that categories precede things. But, these forms of thought are only valid in historically determined forms of material life. For instance, Quran, inspired in a society which was founded upon slavery, neither condemns slavery nor encourages masters to set free their slaves as asserted by Muslim theologians who stay in offside in the penalty area of a definite mode of production which does not regard slavery as a profitable tactical formation anymore. Quran confirms the right of owning a slave as an economic need, which must be abandoned as a penance to purify from some transgressions (killing a brother by accident e.g) like abandoning physical needs by fast: “It is not for a believer to kill a believer unless (it be) by mistake. He who hath killed a believer by mistake must set free a believing slave, and pay the blood-money to the family of the slain, unless they remit it as a charity... And whoso hath not the wherewithal must fast two consecutive months” (Quran, Women, 92; Translated by Pickthal). But, In the age of Liberalism, none of Muslims demand a right of private property over slave labour by leaning on verses which were valid only in an ancient mode of production. So, If we were living in an socialist society where “interest” does not exist as well as “slave labour”, it would be pointless to discuss what Quran says about interest or a definite form of private property. (“If I abolish wage labor, then naturally I abolish its laws also, whether they are of "iron" or sponge”; Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme). If you want to abolish the iron laws of interest (!) to avoid ill-gotten profits, you have to abolish the source of profit: The private property which rests on the employment of the labor of others. And if you want to criticize the imperialism of U.S properly, you have to begin with criticizing CAPITAL whose existence would have similar effects in the hands of Muslims: necessity of realization of surplus-value by finding overseas markets since the native workers cannot buy back all the value that they produce, the capitalists in overseas countries who naturally want the same thing and the usage of the means of military or cultural intervention to solve this contradiction as U.S have put into practice successfully. So, there is no meaning in criticizing imperialistic cruelty of U.S if you are allowing the mill owner to let his mill.

Muslims have to find a way to a socialist interpretation of Quran if they really want to remove the halter on our neck. Other attempts (like As-Sadr's) will serve to replace the hand which holds the halter.

***

In the spring of 2004, liberal democrats of the world (like the mill owners of the North who united against the slave owners of the South) united to celebrate the final salvation of Chinese workers from the grasp of the red torment: National People's Congress has put clauses concerning private property rights into the constitution (Remember Jean Baptiste Say's claim about the necessary contribution of laws to legitimate the inheritance of capital, even if it is not thought as a fruit of theft). We have been told that China has abandoned one of key pillars of communism (monopoly of state owned property) and alternated it with “a citizen's lawful private property is inviolable” or non-state owned property, supposedly which broadens the horizon of dispossessed workers and landless peasants. We rejoiced in the name of this ill-starred mass about qualifying to own private houses, wide-screen televisions, home theaters, bluetoothed cell-phones, computerized cars or wives (maybe they were sharing wives as they were sharing these useful stuff) etc... We should aware that “a citizen's lawful private property” has no concern for the right to own furnishings or belongings if we are not illiterate on economic theories. This phrase points out the lawful employment of one's labour (which should be taken as one of the most unlawful or harmful action of human) by lawful entrepreneurs and prominent members of The Communist Party who have managed to accumulate financial capital or bribe incomes provided by multinationals to serve as a premise of accumulation of capital throughout privatization or a kind of market socialism process in last two decades.

For some reason or other, when I coincide with pragmatic amendments on texts, I always remember the piggish transformation of Animal Farm's The Seven Commandments which practiced by playing on words. One night a hidden pig hand adds two words to the command “No animal shall drink alcohol” and the new command appears in the morning as: “No animal shall drink alcohol to excess”. This is exactly what National People's Congress has done in China. They have added a pragmatic meaning in old-fashioned communist command: “No human shall own another human's labour to excess”... In 1988, constitution was amended to allow private property formally as a supplement to the public sector. In 1993, the concept of “socialist market economy” was introduced to pave the way for capitalist exploitation. In 1999, private sector has been declared as an essential part of socialist market economy (See; CHINA: Constitution Change to Promote Private Property, Green Left Weekly, March 10, 2004, Eva Chang)... One night Beijing declared that only the “small and medium-sized state firms” would be privatized. At the morning its decided that it would be more beneficial to privatize everything except firms of “strategic importance”. And tomorrow they will probably wake up under the dawn on which the fallowing inference is written: THERE IS NO STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE.

There is no strategic importance. Everything seems rolling in Wittgensteinian world limited with the boundaries of language. A strange feeling reveals as the social transformations or revolutions can only be executed in textual world. But as we have seen in the appearance process of wholesale Chinese labour in the global market or the appearance of human objects in animal farm, new concepts penetrate the human brain when the human body begins to promenade among new things. So, the hypocritical permutations or brand new concepts in Beijing’s political discourse are not indicate which ought to be realized in social life. Basically, this is the struggle of political thought (or the ideas of ruling class) which strives to regulate its discourse according to the transformation in the non-textual world, has been undertaken by its actors. Thus, our main concern should not be investigating possible aftermaths of textual changes in social life. Because in the one dimensional textual space, inferences predate premises.

The question is neither whether China has became the world's workshop nor whether China is becoming a competitive and quality manufacturer. Maybe James A. Dorn can give us a valuable hint by his shameless testimony: “As long as China controls the ownership of capital, including foreign exchange, people will be subject to exploitation” (Capital Freedom for China, Asian Wall Street Journal, Sept. 9, 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc). Mr. Dorn seems oversensitive to the exploitation of Chinese working class. I wish he was able to bear the same sympathy for their American or Turkish colleagues. Anyway, he is obviously aware of something which has been haunting the labour power of Chinese people for a long time: CAPITAL. Even if it is shepherd by state, private sector or caliphs of god, the exploitative and inhuman character of capital remains same. And contradictions of capital persistently reveals itself without respecting to socio-political qualities of its master. Accumulation of capital is possible by only metamorphosing its products to the form of commodities on the market and adding some of the surplus value (which is realized in exchange value) to capital which enables the circle of accumulation. Consequently, whether it is owned by the state or private guardians of vampires (Marx describes the dead labour within the components of capital as a vampire only lives by sucking the blood from living labor), whether it is exchanged on national market or foreign market or whether its masters are calling themselves as communists or liberals or nationalists or Muslims, capital continues to absorb humanity from our bodies.

It is obvious that, in the guise of market socialism, China's tremendous army of dirty cheap workers and more modest reserve of unemployed or underemployed army of workers are being plundered (probably the greatest barbarian rush in human history) by the privileged members of The Party, native capitalists and foreign capitalists by means of direct or financial investments. Following triumphs or defeats in the quarrels on the “freedom of capital” will be determined by the tug of war between these greedy competitors. So, when the yell of “FREEDOM TO CAPITAL!” is heard on the field (Remember Mel Gibson's heartbreaking yell in the final scene of Braveheart), one should pay attention to which side is raising up its voice. In the example of merciful Mr. Dorn, he is straightforwardly demanding the FASIONABLE liberation of Chinese people from the exploitation of state agents to redress them with the tighter jersey of his WST (Wall Street Tyrants) team. It is the single style voice of barbarians who has stepped up on the prolific soils of former state-centered economies. Ironically, residents of these lands were all wet when they were assuming private ownership of the means of production and human labour by employment is the antithesis of state owned property (Like Balkan peasants or Greek islanders of 15th and 16th century who supposed that the token compassion of Ottomans was the antithesis of the cruel exploitation of Western Europeans and local landlords... “The worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, The Soul of Man, Oscar Wilde). They were demanding a solution for the alienation which they experienced in (so-called) communism. They were demanding the removing of the distance between their labour and themselves. They have tried to cure the tiresome symptoms of state-driven uniformatization by capitalist individualism. They couldn't understand that the capitalist emphasize on the “free-market” is more related with standing an waiting on the labour market than the freedom to cruise in mega shopping centers. They have fancied about a peaceful life in the global marketplace (Desmond and Molly in the global marketplace, ob-la-di ob-la-da). But, they confused the capitalist's privileged freedom to exchange in labour market with their compulsory salesmanship. Their demands were completely contrary to the principles of capitalism. And suddenly, countless of well-educated Russian women have found themselves selling their bodies as sexual commodities willingly (under the menace of unsatisfied basic human needs) or unwillingly (under the menace of mafiatic organizations of human-body traders) to the ignorant Turkish Mr. Moneybags. Suddenly, countless of Chinese peasants have found themselves selling their blood and blood plasma (willingly or unwillingly) to the blood heads (a term which refers the free entrepreneurs of blood trade). They are now witnessing the concentration of capital: “Accumulation, where private property prevails, is the concentration of capital in the hands of a few, it is in general an inevitable consequence if capital is left to follow its natural course, and it is precisely through competition that the way is cleared for this natural disposition of capital” (Karl Marx, 1844 Manuscripts). Wicked nature of this accumulation reveals as an accumulation of “stored-up labour” to point where the connection between labour and human become invisible. At this point we can not talk about ethical principles of capitalist accumulation or well-intentioned utilization of capital because existence of ethics or intentions is affiliated with the existence of human. In a sense, “freedom to capital” is a proposal which intends to legitimate the accumulation of the thing unique to humankind or transmitting human energy to the most inhuman thing till it fattens enough to negate humanity and humankind weaken too much to recognize their essence.

Although unemployment (dismissal of human from the production process of himself or herself as social entity) is an imperative and consequence of the accumulation of capital, its essential contradiction resides at the starting point of the capitalist production process. A capitalist has to exchange a part of his primitive capital with labour power to begin production. This situation necessitates the existence of human who is wanting in private property over his own labour. In Turkey, we plainly witnessed this forced encounter of labour power with the “freedom of capital” at the beginning of 80's when multitude of Kurds (willingly or unwillingly) abandoned their lands for the fear of the gunfight between Turkish Army and PKK. So, for a “worker” and a capitalist, there is a formal freedom (if we don't count worker's obligation to exchange his labour power to maintain his life) of exchange at labour market. But, in the discussion of whole working and capitalist classes, it is not a matter of freedom anymore, it is a matter of life and death.

Mehmet Çagatay
August, 2005

Materialism vs Hyperreality

2005-08-05T22:50:00.000+03:00

If the oppressed masses in hyperreality were rebellious, could we convince them that we were all innocent victims of the same simulation which had no origin?

In Paul Auster's book The Music Of Chance, there is a scene in which a character of the novel expresses his intention to built a very detailed model of his house. What interesting is, he also considers to built smaller models in the biggest one in an infinite row, which will accommodate his own models as constructor at the same time... For Baudrillard, hyperreality indicates the daily life in these model houses where there is no coexistensivity between the telescoped houses: “No more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models - and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times.”(*) Consequently, hyperrealism explores historical subjects from inside to outside and pretends not the see the reverse row in which men build not only the houses but even cities or countries. This approach could be caricaturized as: simulation does not make man, man does not make simulation but simulation makes simulation. Let us investigate how Baudrillard caricaturizes it too. Firstly, he quotes from Émile Littré to clarify the distinction between feigning and simulating: “Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms”. Then he adapts this unobstructed determination to his philosophy with a cunning innovation: “Since the simulator produces "true" symptoms, is he or she ill or not? The simulator cannot be treated objectively either as ill, or as not ill”. I hope you have noticed the trick that metamorphoses the pronoun (someone) to a nonhuman noun (simulator). I have not chanced upon a dictionary which alludes the pronounish qualities of “simulation” for signing a human subject. Generally it is explained as a machine that simulates an environment. In other words, the eye-catching magic of Baudrillard's philosophy grounds on its quick alternation between regarding human as a rabbit and a hat. Men as prisoner in hyperreality are as lusty as Baudrillard himself. But when “he or she” takes charge of simulation machine, the sound of “his or her” pulses suddenly become inaudible through the uproar of machine.

I'd like to ask a very postmodern question: is simulation flat or round? If it is round that means one has access to reality or whatever exists out of its limits by INSISTENTLY moving ahead due one direction. Remember what happened when Truman Burbank sailed to the artificial horizon of the hypothetical world. If it is round, for example, we might reach New York-New York by moving persistently to east from Paris Las Vegas without violating the frontiers of Las Vegas. If it is round, no need to ask, “Am I there, when i here?” as regards the motto of Las Vegas: “When you're here, you're there”. Simulators provide sensational coordinate systems which work as tools for users to create their own sensational experiment map within the limits of a given system. So, asking whether your sensational coordinates are inside the coordinate system is an attack on possibilities of simulator. When a child who injured in a roller coaster accident in Disneyland asks, “Am I there, when i here?” from his bed in hospital, he or she begins to sail to the horizon of simulation. When a man (Karl Marx) asks the same question to the theories of political economy from the sensational coordinates of labour, he begins to circumvent the perceptions proceeded from the theoretical simulation machine.

Simulation, Platon's Cave, culture industry, consumption society, post-capitalism, mass society, turbo-capitalism, age of communication or whatever you call it, the only worthwhile way for criticizing a misperception is interrogation from outside to inside, contrary to the outdated concept of “immanent critique” (see Frankfurt School). The basic fault of the self-enlightened man's approach in Platon's Cave was his return to the cave after witnessing to material owners of interior shadows and his mislaid critique not from the material world but from the cave of shadows in order to replace the shadows with material realities within the Cave. In opposition to the widespread belief, Marx's critique of utopia is irrelevant with the stance of utopic glance which is accused for being beyond the present network of social relations. The real problem resides in its deprivation of connection with the strings of this network. Namely, the error of utopia is not associated with standing inside or outside. Its geopolitical absurdity is its critical approach from nowhere. Under the light of these identifications, I can claim without hesitation that Marx's critique of bourgeoisie society progresses clearly from outside to inside or from the material world to the cave of shadows (ideas) in order to pull out the shadows (ideas) to the material world. Remember Marx's and Engel's keen statement, "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas" (German Ideology). They confront this ideas with the material realities of another class. This identification is just one of the starting points of their critique while Adorno's or Baudrillard's critique of capitalism tails off through the concepts of Culture Industry or Hyperreality. Their failure resides in their limited motion area in a sort of Platon's Cave and their satisfaction with the range of immanent critique.

Let's give a really simple example to illustrate the motion of effective critique. In the first volume of Capital, at the start of Chapter 10 (Working Day), Karl Marx suddenly proceeds to speak with the mouth of the labourer: “Suddenly the voice of the labourer, which had been stifled in the storm and stress of the process of production, rises”. I think this is one of the most seductive, the most touching as well as one of the most threatening monologues ever written. Firstly, he designates his location: He clearly stands outside of the realities of a specific production process because THE VOICE OF THE LABOURER is an alien tone in the stormy, noisy musical scale of capital. And the adverb “suddenly” hints its breaking in normative discourse of the voice of the capitalist. Then he demands the exact value of his commodity (labour-power) like every other seller, which suits the divine laws of exchange: “I demand, therefore, a working-day of normal length, and I demand it without any appeal to your heart, for in money matters sentiment is out of place. You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and in the odour of sanctity to boot; but the thing that you represent face to face with me has no heart in its breast. That which seems to throb there is my own heart-beating. I demand the normal working-day because I, like every other seller, demand the value of my commodity”. Marx's innocentlike demand is so exceedingly impossible or unreal or beyond the coordinate system of capitalistic mode of production that it necessitates a revolution which will dismantle all the historical private property relations by precluding the unpaid labour power of slavery, the drudgery of feudalism and the surplus-value production of capitalism. Actually, he puts into practice what he promised as a young man in the 11th Thesis: changing the world, penetrating the artificial horizon. (At least, the mentioned monologue has had a big impact on the unreturnable transformation of my ethos). When Marx admits that it is impossible for the worker to negate the whole bourgeoisie without negating himself, he does not wail after the irremediable parasitic disease of the labourer but invites him to a metamorphosis from the object of parasites to the subject of revolution which enables him to negate the whole bourgeoisie. So, effective critique is not series of interpretations trying to catch its own tail. It provides the coordinate system of a different map instantly when one pricks up his or her ears towards the hardly visible voices of different sensational experiments through the totalitarianism of misperception. Marx leaves the Cave exactly at the moment when he discerns the voice the of labourer. After that, the aim of his critique has nothing to do with enabling this voice more audible inside the Cave. The thought of revolution already wanders around in his head to be realized in Hegelian sense, before his innocent demand, which is not a cause but a tool for revolution. His effective critique is an attack from outside to inside to materialize the collapse of the Cave... What a shame for the herd of philosophers to expect the collapse of the Cave by critique from inside which will probably conclude with their critical crush under the rocks of shadows.

Inside the Platon's cave, everyone seems on par with each other under the oppression of shadows: “But we are still in the same boat: none of our societies know how to manage their mourning for the real, for power, for the social itself, which is implicated in this same breakdown” (Baudrillard). Is our noble philosopher really in the same boat with the man who wallows in sea of poverty along the suburbs of Algiers? Or, I have to ask a painful question as a man who grown up in a petite bourgeoisie family in Turkey: Am I on the same boat with the bareheaded and barefoot Kurdish children? Our problem is not being in the same boat as Baudrillard claimed. We have to ask, “Why aren't we in the same boat sailing towards the artificial horizon?” Or, Are some of us actors of the show?

(*) All the quotes are from Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulations.

Mehmet Çagatay

August, 2005

Under the Cloack of Supercommodity

2005-07-24T11:24:00.000+03:00

According to The Old Testament, humankind have condemned to eat the sour fruits of the tree of toil in the earth because they dared to eat the sweet fruits of the tree of knowledge in Heaven: “With labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life.”(1) But if we follow the verses of postmodern thinkers, we seem to escaped from the grasp of this curse by converting knowledge into the principal force of production. Thus, while we are behind the bars of toil by virtue of tasting knowledge in the first story, some of us are helpless jailbirds through failing to perch on a branch of this ominous tree in the immediate one: Ignorance is Poverty. As a good many thinkers inspired from the “fetishism of commodities” have formulated, there must be religious or sur(plus)religious conjunction between inside and outside of the production cage for the sake of this cursed continuity. At least, there must be a idealistic kernel in the materialistic shell of capitalist production for gloss over knowledge as a force of production. So we must be sorry for Nike because of their lack of knowledge and their primitive methods of production while Ford are wise enough to produce far more complicated commodities with ingenious robots. We have to submit our obeisance in the presence of Ford's magical logic of production in which robots are producing robots in an eternal row. If we venture to retrace the genesis of this row I have a sinking feeling that we will encounter nothing but the specter of absolute knowledge. What a miraculous discovery for the intellectuals cruising a subject for revolution in the era in which the working class has taken off the stage. Whereas knowledge or robots or mass media instruments are not only middle terms or pretexts but the subjects of surplus value production, we can rest our buttocks in front of “telescreens” to be witness to the revolution of exploited robots or comrade cell-phones. But there is no need to reproach this inevitable historical moment if it fails to realize itself in a short time. We can make do with democracy of knowledge and we can vote in the elections of administrative softwares by then: Conservative v2.01 vs. Labour v2.03

I beg your pardon. I am well aware that the process of knowledge is far from being humorous outside of this text. Analogous with the non textual process of production, it is a sweaty and bloody movement in general. Properly, it is a struggle between materialistic tendency of thought in pursuit of its own identity and idealistic twilight of the material world which is lurking on this way. It is the resistance of the concrete to the repressive abstractions, slavering to think it in an abstract way. For instance, it is the battle royal for truth between the awareness of “process of objectification appears in fact as a process of alienation from the standpoint of labour” and the sneaky “appropriation of alien labour from the standpoint of capital.”(2) It is the persistence in the concrete appearance of the surplus-value production ideology against the abstractions conjuring forgeries out of “the ideology of communicational transparency.”(3) In other words, it is the intractable movement of thinking. Let us recall Ludwig Feuerbach's crucial remark: “What is separate in reality should not be identical in thought.”(4) And let us remember the desolate insistence of Lenin while European Social Democrat parties slipping to official patriotic positions in the World War. He was trying to interrupt the movement of false thought pushing to combine things which are separated in reality: socialism and nationalism. At the same time, proper knowledge opposes to the separation of things which are interconnected in reality: Nike and Ford etc.

Recently, a sports page columnist of a Turkish newspaper wrote an article about a soccer player and expressed the creed of a weird sect unconsciously: “He has no superstitions but prays before the match and firstly steps on the pitch with his right foot.” Similarly, what is the wisdom of the commodity production process which has no superstitions in locker room but suddenly doll itself up with supernatural hardwares on the pitch? As Marx portrayed, the relationship between subject and object is plain and simple in the island of Robinson (If we don't count the nonsensical theory of “productive capital” and the famous “fishnet” metaphor). But when the object turns into social object by organization of daily Robinsonian activities and the addition of exchange process, it begins to press in upon its own qualitative borders. “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.”(5) There begins the tug of war between subject (men) and object (commodity) on the social field: One's loss is the other's gain. Hence, last week in Istanbul, the condition of “poor” man who refused by seven hospitals without inspiring any mercy despite his heart-attack, signifies us that if we want to express ourselves, we have to own some modified objects which will do this in our place since we are not capable to express ourselves as we are deformed subjects. The objectification process designated by Marx has mutated in the current development stage: objectification-subjectification-objectification. The objectification of human labour in the commodity form, the subjectification of commodity as an social entity and the social objectification of human by its loss of area on the social scope. If you take a close look to this process you will notice the strange absence of something: At the end, there is no concept of commodity in the conventional sense. Here come some of the most crucial questions of today: What if the commodity was the victim of a conceptual murder? What if we were carried away by the current of perversion and we have lost the track of the commodity form? And what if the wealth of the capitalist mode of production ain't an "an immense accumulation of commodities"(6) in the conceptual world anymore?

The abolition of intermediary object in a contradiction erases the borderline between the opposites. For example, if you extract humankind from the religious discourse, God and Satan get along quite well. In fact, they vanish immediately without finding enough time to make another bet. So, If you accomplish to extract the private property from the society in the material world or from the society in the intellectual kingdom, you get the abolition of the bourgeoisie and the working class in the material world or in the the intellect. By emphasizing the corporate property relations in the modern society and insisting on the conclusion which indicates the disintegration of private property, you can easily wound the meaning of any effort which seeks the possibilities for abolition of private property in the material world, since there is no concept of private property at all. The abolition of object is the invitation to a shadow fight. If you are in a dominant role or if you have a profitable position inside the hierarchy of a contradiction, all you have to do is to conceal the intermediary object from the inquisitive eyes of the other side of the contradiction. Afterwards begins the dance of your bewildered opposition with the scepters, with the spirit of nonexisting victims, with the the ancient disapprovals has no validity in the intellect anymore and with the dreams of revolution where there is nothing to revolt against. “The Communist Manifesto” of 19th century leaves its readers in front of the palpable enemies. But “Empire”(7) proposes us to see the invisible, to touch the monster sphere (turbocapitalism) which has no surface in the intellectual dimension. (This was the main reason of the selection of “The Manifesto” at the top of the “most harmful books” list by conservatives while “Empire” was absolutely kicked out of the subject). But the “turbocapitalism” (or whatever you call it) has a strange revolutionary aspect. It strives to abolish the private property like Marxism. But It strives to abolish the private property from the intellect or from the language to prevent the abolition of private property from the material life while Marxism points out the activity in the material life for intellectual revolution.

The disappearance of the conventional meaning of commodity is one of the means of this reactionary revolution process. For example, the commodities produced by Nestle or Starbucks generally signify their brand without arousing any image of the women and children from Brazil or Indonesia. At the same time, Ford or Nike produces some kind of culture forms and driving or dressing experiences whose use value is exactly equal to their exchange value. In a recent essay, Alain Badiou sarcastically proposes to ban the religious symbols of Capital: “Isn't the conspicuous symbol of this degrading religion what we can read on pants, sneakers and t-shirts: Nike, Chevignon, Lacoste... Get to work, Chirac. Let's ban the conspicuous symbols of Capital, with no compromises.”(8) Badiou is right about the hyper-symbolist character of the modern religion. But this symbols are also the air holes for escaping from the comprehension of intelligence. Hence, brandisation has explained as decommodification in the sacred texts of business life. This concept manifests the extraction of essential qualities from the commodity. Once a commodity has branded it levitates from the ground of its modest being as a good or service produced for getting profit by the generosity of the market to a being which can be as generous as a profiteer or a market. Contrary to the disclosures of sacred texts, brandisation is not simply an act of distinguishing similar products from different producers. If you regard the subject (men) as an object of God, subjectification of the object (commodity) means that the newborn subject will be regarded as an object of God. So, as long as the object (commodity) between the bourgeoisie and the working class is a divine object, complaints can only be made in the presence of God.

Decommodification signifies the disappearance of ancient and colorless qualities of commodity. The new creature exhibits every entertaining, educational, energizing, illuminating, fiery or beneficial tricks but its essential ones. It is like a bear which can perform every style of dance but forbidden to hibernate in front of the audience. Every package of something consumed by us is demonstrated as a contribution to the cutthroat fight against enormity. It is a kind of lunacy which has crystallized in a speech of a president of the Republic of Turkey, who was the heroic leader of liberalization process in the eighties. He stated that we could prepare a healthy future for younger generations by the income of indirect taxes from consumption of cigarettes and alcohols. So, we could be healthy according as the amount of cigarettes and alcohols that we consumed. This is the basic behavior of supercommodities. We can rescue the princess by only cooperating with the dragon. If we want to lose weight we should fill our stomach with light products as full as possible. If we want to keep a thick distance between AIDS and ourselves we should make love as frequently as we can with ultra-thin condoms. And we can rest peacefully under the statue of liberty as long as someone sweats under the cracking whips.

As I mentioned before, decommodification seeks to fill the cavity among the exchange value and use value. According to Slavoj Zizek, “The logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own mad dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people.” And reality chases this illusion: “Reality is catching up in the guise of ecological catastrophes, poverty, Third World diseases in collapse of social life, mad cow disease.”(9) But in the decommodification process this pursuit is reversed. Exchange value tries to catch use-value to the zero point, where the utility of an object can only be measured by its price. This conclusion is far beyond the surreal imaginations of Marginalist economists who sought the roots of value beneath the consumption activity. It is a semantic zone beyond the reach of consumption where our old “Dr. Jeykill and Mr. Hyde” can fly hand in hand in the guise of a superman because of the zero gravity. So, what happens in that zone? Every thing flies hither and thither like (but not as masterful as) commodities. In the chaotic emptiness, everyone clashes with the concepts of disorder irregularly. The only things regularly rising and descending are the prices of supercommodities. That is the promised land of Capital where illusion have caught the reality (your real needs etc). Following the movement of prices is the only way to contact with reality because Price is the only reliable tool for mapping our semantic constellation, as it is written on the most stable object (supercommodity) in the sky. But once its price is paid (or when you collide with it inevitably), it begins to scatter endless possibilities. You can not even guess the use-value of a supercommodity because human brain is too inadequate to estimate its functions before they go into action. In a sense, you could have consumed an experience, something attracts men or women, something saves the future of generations, something sets you free, something walks around the blank spaces of your mind, something dives to the subconscious more deeper than psychoanalysts, something halts the pangs of your conscience or actually something which prevents you from contacting to your real needs. The only criterion is left over to judge the utility of a product is its Price.

Karl Marx has clarified vividly how a table “stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas.”(10) But he did not live long enough to witness their intensified collaboration with the men who already have a wooden brain. He has showed us how the premises and categories of political economy turn inside out by a glance from the standpoint of labour. Then a new generation of philosophy has came with a proposal of a new stance which was neither at the side of labour nor capital. This was an inexcusable mistake. Because capital and labour (the smaller one) are concentric circles which covers the whole social field. So, every single standpoint which is not inside the circle of labour is the standpoint of capital. They have tried to portray the world by standing clear of the ideological traps. But they were like confused Tarzans striving to swing on philosophical vines from one tree to another in a forest where trees are playing puss in the corner. They have witnessed the scrambling pieces of a puzzle that they solved yesterday. The priorities of capital were altering their appearance day by day and they were standing on pitch of capital. For instance, they have not decided the nation state is whether or not good for humanity yet (but work in process). In the evening they claimed that the nation state will be seen as a hobble by the multinationals. In the morning, they gawped at the tango of these two lovers. They have embraced every single fragment they encountered in the unstable space which aforementioned in the preceding paragraph. They have supposed that they could digest reality by swallowing the illusion which has swallowed reality.

The wealth of our society can be seen as an immense accumulation of knowledge from the standpoint of capital. Or you can daydream about a society of information. Or you can be ill-willed enough to regard knowledge as the principal force of production without acknowledging what kind of knowledge you are talking about. (Did not the mathematical knowledge about pyramids kill countless of slaves in ancient Egypt?) But the shell of things becomes transparent when you step inside the circle of labour. CIRCLE OF LABOUR IS THE FIELD WHERE REALITY GOES AFTER THE ILLUSIONARY. Inside the circle, the mask of commodity is ripped off from its face. So, supercommodity (a boloney concept that I fabricated for this article) is conceivable only outside of this circle. It nose-dives if it dares to enter the inside circle as well as other miracles. So, our basic problem is a matter of selection: Should we try to stand on a virtual field where everything seems flying freely in its atmosphere and should we contend with the freedom to fly which likes the freedom of an astronaut who lost his connection with the ship in his space walk? Or should we stand on a field where the reality conquers illusion and accordingly which can be easily accused for being faithful to the laws of nature and should we climb the tree of Marx to eat the fruits of knowledge which can provide us a route for an escape from spurious heaven of capital?

Do we have to be happy with the appearance of Marxism as a corpse from the standpoint of capital? From there, the dead man seems living... the living man seems dead.

MEHMET ÇAGATAY
July, 2005

FOOTNOTES:

(1) The Old Testament-Book of Genesis

(2) Karl Marx-Grundrisse

(3) Lyotard-The Postmodern Condition

(4) Feuerbach-Principles of the Philosophy of the Future

(5) Karl Marx-Capital I

(6) Karl Marx-Capital I

(7) Michael Hardt&Antonio Negri-Empire

(8) Alain Badiou-Behind the Scarfed Law, There is Fear

(9) Slavoj Zizek-Rethinking Marxism

(10) Karl Marx-Capital I

Memet Çagatay

jesus raises this obelisk from neurosis

Rattlebite

now my heart rattles like an old computer fantoo big to be bailed outyet it weights 64 kilobyte

Well Played

"My History is Biased"

Turkish Workers vs Thatcher and NACODS

Do Rabbis Dream of Holy Sheep?

Mao on Complacency and Conceit:

Badiou at the Gates of Dawn

La Voie en Rose

Logics of Worlds

Revolutionary Twist of a Collage

Plastic Jesus and The Saint of Steel

Impartial Butterflies

I'm Only Dreaming

Enjoy Your Zelig! Part One

Petite Bourgeoisie Hysteria in Honduras

The Carnival of Socialism

Possible Consequences of Mutual Goodwill

Uighur Terrorism

David Harvey on Overdetermination of the Way Towards Socialism

Creative Destruction of Monstrous Dream Machines

A Leftist Fantasy

Little Boxes

Shut the Other's Gaze Down

Why We Should Love Israel?

Communism Kills Eternal Truths

Wink of an Eye

Crazy Little Thing Called Change

Don't Give Up Your Anxiety

A Typical Bourgeois Political Debate

Heroes

The Radical Conformist Humor

The Imaginary Berlin Wall

Fidelity to Truth

An Imperialist Poll

We Need a First Life

The Genius of Soros

The Symptom of Value

On Fetishism

The Dhamma Brothers

It's not Chicken

Images of Women

Council of Ex-Muslims

Tendency to Fall

Desire for Amnesia

Atheism vs. Secularism

The Right to Blasphemy

Immaterial Labor

Chavez and the Referendum Results

China's New Labor Law

The Ultimate Religion

Endless Rain into a Paper Cup

IMF says: "Good Luck"

If Democracy Exists

Anti-Imperialism

Demons of Separatism

A Query

Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

In Debt to Islam

The Essence of Kurdishness

The Promise of the Truth and A Turkish Anti-American Film

The Subjectivity of Hamas

The Destroyed Army of Truck Drivers

On Private Property

Materialism vs Hyperreality

Under the Cloack of Supercommodity

now my heart rattles like an old computer fan
too big to be bailed out
yet it weights 64 kilobyte