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For each of these three ideal types one can imagine an extreme form, in which only one sort of power is involved in controlling economic resources. In these terms, totalitarianism can be viewed as a form of hyper-statism in which state power is not simply the primary form of power over economic processes, but in which economic power and associational power largely disappear. In a pure libertarian capitalism the state atrophies to a mere ‘night watchman’, serving only to enforce property rights, and commercial activities penetrate into all areas of civil society, commodifying everything. The exercise of economic power would almost fully explain the allocation and use of resources; citizens are atomized consumers who make individual choices in a market but exercise no collective power over the economy through association in civil society. Communism, as classically understood in Marxism, is a form of society in which the state has withered away and the economy is absorbed into civil society as the free, cooperative activity of associated individuals.
None of these extreme forms could exist as a stable, reproducible form of social organization. Totalitarianism never completely eliminated informal social networks as a basis for cooperative social interaction beyond the direct control of the state, and the practical functioning of economic institutions was never fully subordinated to centralized command-and-control planning. Capitalism would be an unreproducible and chaotic social order if the state played the minimalist role specified in the libertarian fantasy, but it would also, as Polanyi argued, function much more erratically if civil society was absorbed into the economy as a fully commodified and atomized arena of social life. Pure communism is also a utopian fantasy, since it is hard to imagine a complex society without some sort of authoritative means of making and enforcing rules (a ‘state’). Feasible, sustainable forms of large-scale social organization, therefore, always involve some kind of reciprocal relations among these three forms of power.
Within this general conceptualization, capitalism, statism and socialism should be thought of not simply as discrete ideal types but also as variables. The more the decisions made by actors exercising economic power based on private ownership determine the allocation and use of productive resources, the more capitalist the economic structure. The more that power exercised through the state determines the allocation and use of resources, the more the society is statist. And the more power rooted in civil society determines such allocations and use, the more the society is socialist. There are thus all sorts of complex mixed cases and hybrids—in which, for example, a society is capitalist in certain respects and statist or socialist in others.
These three modes of transformation suggest very different postures towards the politics of transformation. Ruptural transformation, at least in its more radical forms (‘Smash the state’), assumes that the core institutions of social reproduction cannot be effectively used for emancipatory purposes; they must be destroyed and replaced with something qualitatively new and different. Interstitial transformation (‘Ignore the state’) aims to get on with the business of building an alternative world inside the old from the bottom up. Perhaps there are moments when established institutions can be harnessed to facilitate this process, but interstitial transformation mostly sidesteps centres of power. Symbiotic transformation (‘Use the state’) looks for ways in which emancipatory changes can be embodied in the core institutions of social reproduction, especially the state. The hope is to forge new hybrid forms which have a ratchet-like character, moving us in the direction of enlarged scope for emancipatory social empowerment.
None of these strategies is unproblematic. None of them guarantees success. All of them contain risks and dilemmas. In different times and places, one or another may be the most effective, but typically none of them is sufficient by itself. It often happens that activists become deeply committed to one or another of these strategic visions, seeing them as universally valid. As a result, considerable energy is expended fighting against the rejected models. A long-term project with any prospects for success must grapple with the messy problem of combining these strategies, even if the combination inevitably means that struggles often operate at cross-purposes.
[...] Think about daily life in Congo, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon ... where are the outpourings of international solidarity in the face of constant atrocities perpetrated there? We should remember now that we live in a kind of glasshouse, in which terrorist violence for the most part exists in the public imagination as a threat, which explodes intermittently, in contrast to countries where--usually with the participation or complicity of the West--daily life consists of more or less uninterrupted terror and brutality.
after the outpouring of support re: Paris terror attacks, which he characterises as a "momentary brutal disruption of normal everyday life"
With regard to the refugees, our proper aim should be to try and reconstruct global society on such a basis that desperate refugees will no be forced to wander around. Utopian as it my appear, this large-scale solution is the only realist one, and the display of altruistic virtues ultimately prevents the carrying out of this aim. The more we treat refugees as objects of humanitarian help, and allow the situation which compelled them to leave their countries to prevail, the more they come to Europe, until tensions reach boiling point, not only in the refugees' countries of origin but here as well. [...]
reminds me of note 1952
[...] The usual Left-liberal critique of the EU--it's basically OK, just with something of a 'democratic deficit'--betrays the same naivety as the critics of ex-Communist countries who basically supported them while complaining about the lack of democracy. In both cases, however, these friendly critics failed to realize that the 'democratic deficit' was a necessary, inbuilt part of the structure.
[...] what happens to democracy when the majority is inclined to vote for, say, racist and sexist laws? I am not afraid to draw the conclusion that emancipatory politics should not be bound a priori by formal-democratic procedures of legitimization. No, people quite often do not know what they want, or do not want what they know, or they simply want the wrong thing. There is no short-cut here.
[...] culture is no longer just an exception, a kind of fragile superstructure rising above the 'real' economic infrastructure, but, more and more, a central ingredient of our mainstream 'real' economy. More than a decade ago, Jeremy Rifkin designated this new stage in our economy 'cultural capitalism'. The defining feature of 'postmodern' capitalism is the direct commodification of our experience itself. Less and less are we buying products (material objects) that we want to own; increasingly, we buy life experiences, experiences of sex, eating, communicating, cultural consumption. In doing so, we are participating in a lifestyle--or, as Mark Slouka puts it succinctly, 'we become the consumers of our own lives'. [...]
[...] the cruel irony of anti-Eurocentrism is that, on behalf of anti-colonialism, one criticizes the West at the very historical moment when global capitalism no longer needs Western cultural values in order to function smoothly, and is doing quite well with the 'alternative modernity'--the non-democratic form of capitalist modernization--to be found in Asian capitalism. In short, critics of Eurocentrism are rejecting Western cultural values at the very moment when, critically reinterpreted, many of them--egalitarianism, fundamental human rights, the welfare state, to name a few--can serve as a weapon against capitalist globalisation. Have we already forgotten, in fact, that the entire idea of Communist emancipation as envisaged by Marx is a thoroughly 'Eurocentric' one?
[...] there is nothing noble or sublime about what Benjamin called divine violence--it is 'divine' precisely on account of its excessively destructive character. Second, we have to abandon the idea that there is something emancipatory in extreme experiences, that they enable us to open our eyes to the ultimate truth of a situation. There is a memorable passage in Ruth Klüger's Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, in which she describes a conversation with some advanced PhD candidates in Germany:
Auschwitz was no instructional institution ... You learned nothing there, and least of all humanity and tolerance. Absolutely nothing good came out of the concentration camps, I hear myself saying, with my voice rising, and he expects catharsis, purgation, the sort of thing you go to the theatre for? They were the most useless, pointless establishments imaginable.
This, perhaps, is the most depressing lesson of horror and suffering: there is nothing to be learned from it. The only way out of the vicious circle of this depression is to change the terrain toward concrete social and economic analysis.
[...] the hard lesson for the refugees is that 'there is no Norway', even in Norway. They will have to learn to censor their dreams: instead of chasing them in reality, they should focus on changing reality.
I love that sort of conclusion but I also feel like this sentiment is kinda hopeless ... how are the refugees supposed to do that