View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
In response I told Wieser that unless we received a sign from the creditors
that they were serious about a compromise on the reform agenda and a
sensible fiscal policy made possible by meaningful debt restructuring, we
would not reach 30 April without a default to the IMF. ‘Independently of our
preferences and political will,’ I said, ‘our liquidity will run out well before
then.’
He replied that we could last much longer by plundering the reserves of
non-governmental but publicly owned institutions such as pension funds,
universities, utility companies and local authorities.
‘And why would we want to do that?’ I asked. If the creditors showed no
interest in negotiating in good faith, why should we continue to extract yet
more flesh from the scrawny body of our society in order to service a debt to
the IMF that even it considered to be ultimately unpayable?
hell yeah let all those old people die, they're not contributing to the economy anyway
‘Why not?’ she replied. ‘I find it just amazing that in the Wall Street Journal
you defended the pharmacists. I thought, Not Yanis! I found it amazing that you
support their monopoly of baby foods and cosmetics – which I know causes
problems, from when I was finance minister. And I had my fights.’
I knew of the IMF’s obsession with Greek pharmacies. These invariably
small family-owned businesses were protected by a law that permitted only
pharmacy school graduates to own one and prohibited the sale of nonprescription drugs by supermarkets. But that, of all possible subjects that
needed tackling, the managing director of the IMF, faced with a European
country on the brink of default, wanted to discuss this one? I had to pinch
myself. I explained that the pharmacies’ monopoly over the sale of baby foods
and cosmetics had already ended, and that what I opposed was not the end of
their monopoly over certain other commodities but the proletarianization of
thousands of owner-pharmacists via the takeover of the pharmacy sector by
one or two multinational chains.
hmmm interesting, never considered this before. useful illustration that sometimes consumers' interests and workers' interests are sometimes at cross-purposes (and that workers' interests are more important sometimes, in the absence of enough resources to find a better compromise)
A few months later, at a conference in Italy, Jens Spahn, Wolfgang Schäuble’s deputy, reprimanded me for saying that the third bailout was an example of latter-day gunboat diplomacy. ‘But your parliament voted in favour of it with a large majority, didn’t it?’ he pointed out. Sure it did, I replied. Except that consent without the freedom to say no is a form of slavery, as feminists and civil right campaigners taught us long ago.
The victim was being forced to pretend that it had requested its punishment and that the creditors were only responding generously to that request. Just as an unnamed US officer in the Vietnam War had claimed that a particular town had to be destroyed in order to be saved from the Vietcong, our country’s fiscal waterboarding was celebrated as a sensible way of bringing a lost people back into the fold. In a sense, Greece experienced collectively the same treatment that Britain’s poor receive when they go to claim their benefits at Jobcentres, where they must consent to their humiliation by espousing ‘affirmation’ phrases such as ‘My only limitations are the ones I set for myself.’
holy shit is this real
There is another striking way in which young Marx worries about sex and conceives it as a symbol of something bigger. When workers are alienated from their own activity in their work, their sexual lives become an obsessive form of compensation. They then try to realize themselves through desperate "eating, drinking, procreating" along with "dwelling and dressing up." But desperation makes carnal pleasures less joyful than they could be, because it places more psychic weight on them than they can bear (74).
from the 1844 manuscripts
[...] The idea implicit in Working, as a kind of subtext, is something like this: the workers know they are being screwed, but they do not revolt, because what they do instead is to use all their brains and all their sensitivity to give their work meaning, to drench it with beauty and excitement, to make it their own.
on Working by Studs Terkel
[...] Marx's point in presenting this immense and bizarre chorus is to show capitalism as a maelstrom that sweeps the whole world into its flood, past and present, reality and mythology, East and West: everything and everyone is caught up and whirled in the world market, nothing and no one has the power to hold back. We the readers - along, of course, with the writer - are part of it; as we respond, our voices are incorporated into the chorus; the audience finds itself onstage. This may be one reason why, like many great modernist works, Capital never really comes to an end: it reaches out to us in the audience, and challenges us to give the work an ending, by bringing an end to capitalism itself.
I like this kind of lit crit take
I have been arguing that those of us who are most critical of modern life need modernism most, to show us where we are and where we can begin to change our circumstances and ourselves. In search of a place to begin, I have gone back to one of the first and greatest of modernists, Karl Marx. I have gone to him not so much for his answers as for his questions. The great gift he can give us today, it seems to me, is not a way out of the contradictions of modern life but a surer and deeper way into these contradictions. He knew that the way beyond the contradictions would have to lead through modernity, not out of it. He knew we must start where we are: psychically naked, stripped of all religious, aesthetic, moral halos and sentimental veils, thrown back on our individual will and energy, forced to exploit each other and ourselves in order to survive; and yet, in spite of all, thrown together by the same forces that pull us apart, dimly aware of all we might be together, ready to stretch ourselves to grasp new human possibilities, to develop identities and mutual bonds that can help us hold together as the fierce modern air blows hot and cold through us all.
this is pretty and kinda accelerationist, weirdly
[...] Capitalists are rewarded for their inner passivity and lack of integration; but it is urgent to see the human costs of this system, even to its ruling class. Lukacs deepens the case against capitalism by showing us how, even in its mansions on the hill, no one is at home.
[...] Something is fundamentally wrong with modes of thought (whether they are called philosophy, history or science) whose main force is to convince people that there is no alternative to the way they live now. One of the most insidious powers of modern capitalism, Lukacs believes, is its capacity to mobilize the energy of our intellects - and of our intellectuals - to blur our minds and paralyze our will, to reduce us to passive spectators of whatever fate the market inflicts on us.
There is a profound problem with much of the literature on Benjamin, and on Central European culture as a whole. The young men and women who came of age in that culture - from the Age of Goethe way up to the 1930s - grew up on German romanticism, with its cosmic nostalgia, its soulful, heavy-laden yearning for dark forests, its willful isolation from the modern world, its suicide pacts and Liebestod. This is Brodersen's culture; his heart leaps up when he hears those tragic chords. For Parini, it is the heart of Benjamin's story. I would never deny that it is part of Benjamin's story. But in the culture of Central Europe's Jews, from Mahler to Freud to Kafka to Benjamin himself to Lubitsch, Ophuls, Sternberg, Stroheim, Billy Wilder, romantic doom always coexists with a comic and ironic spirit, cosmopolitan and urbane, seeking light on the modern city's boulevards and in its arcades and music halls and cafes, and in its displays of fashion and advertising and its endless proliferation of new media. Benjamin thrived on the contradiction between the doom in his soul and his joy on the streets. [...]
weirdly beautiful