Apart from the dire socio-economic consequences of the ongoing crisis
the endemic contradictions of capitalism has led to a crisis of the
prevailing ideology and the dust has yet to settle. As Terry Eagleton notes
the tendency of market rationality runs towards the rationalist and
materialist, as well as secular plurality, relativism and pragmatism.
Naturally the forces of the market exert a subversive force on the
metaphysical and ideological superstructure. Rather than question
whether or not what we're saying meshes with what we're doing we might
have to invoke the Virgin Mary at the World Bank. In the same way that
Alan Greenspan took refuge as the crisis hit in the claim that it all
down to human frailty, predatory instincts and so on. It is true that it
was human behaviour which led to the crisis, but Greenspan resorted to
this explanation only to protect the immaculate conception of
free-market capitalism. The irony being that Alan Greenspan is an
Objectivist dinosaur - a devotee of Ayn Rand - who buys into the virtues
of selfishness.
The
criminal assault on Vietnam and Indochina was a case in which there was
an enormous gulf between the political justifications of the war and
the grotesque details of the actions undertaken to devastate a country.
It was claimed that the war was to combat and contain the spread of
Communism, as the red flag was flying in North Vietnam and so the US
embarked on a noble mission to fend off the tentacles of
Communism - it then began bombing South Vietnam. The US had blocked
every attempt at a peaceful settlement in the 1950s and installed the
Diem regime in South Vietnam. As the Diem regime aroused resistance to
it as it slaughtered around 70,000 people and in reaction to the
resistance the Kennedy administration invaded South Vietnam. Even though
he knew better Lyndon B Johnson continued with the line that "We
have to stop the Communists over there [Vietnam] or we'll soon be
fighting them in California." This was not enough after so many years
spent bombing the country the ideological fissure was torn open with the
wave of student activism.
A ideological crisis can emerge in the midst of a performative contradiction between what you're doing and how you explain those actions to yourself. To account for the gap there is a need for a new discourse complete with a theoretical understanding of the situation and the potential to establish a new orthodoxy. As the system requires new theories to justify itself and strengthen the ideological apparatus it seems to be struggling in it's desperate search for any such means of defence. The media has yet to find a narrative which could fill the void which has been opened up as political power came to the rescue of the financial colossus to which David Cameron and Barack Obama are bound almost as slaves. It was unthinkable that the banks should be allowed to collapse, it was a forced decision which no one can rightly oppose. But it seems that the system has lost it's sheath of market fundamentalism out of its own pragmatism. The utopia of the market has been stripped down for all to see, it is difficult to see how the system could ever double back on itself.
A ideological crisis can emerge in the midst of a performative contradiction between what you're doing and how you explain those actions to yourself. To account for the gap there is a need for a new discourse complete with a theoretical understanding of the situation and the potential to establish a new orthodoxy. As the system requires new theories to justify itself and strengthen the ideological apparatus it seems to be struggling in it's desperate search for any such means of defence. The media has yet to find a narrative which could fill the void which has been opened up as political power came to the rescue of the financial colossus to which David Cameron and Barack Obama are bound almost as slaves. It was unthinkable that the banks should be allowed to collapse, it was a forced decision which no one can rightly oppose. But it seems that the system has lost it's sheath of market fundamentalism out of its own pragmatism. The utopia of the market has been stripped down for all to see, it is difficult to see how the system could ever double back on itself.
Today it is still rare to hear of the horrific details of the Vietnam War in spite of the memory of the demonstrations against it lives on. The objectives of the war will never be acknowledged in the media. The virus of independence and development in Vietnam had to be killed, and the region had to be inoculated, in order to preserve the accomplishments of the US in the Second World War. The virus might have spread to Thailand and Indonesia, then Japan might have to accommodate to an independent East Asian bloc and would no doubt become it's industrial heartland. The US aimed to maintain the Japanese empire under American control, the rise of Communism in China and Korea undermined these aims. The wars in Vietnam and Korea were fought for the same reason that the US installed Suharto in Indonesia. There are no apologies for the crimes, certainly no reparations and not even any recognition of the barbarism unleashed upon Indochina. Rather it has been swept under the rug as a noble quest which went awry and possibly an atrocity necessary in the Cold War which we will not repeat in this post-political world.
The system has lost the automatic claim to legitimacy, as Slavoj Žižek points out, the field is open in this time of crisis as the prevailing ideology has been disturbed. The limitations and perversions of the system can be seen publicly, we can see the desperate need for an alternative and we know not of an alternative. But this is not the basis for the system's legitimacy as the Thatcherites claimed. The greatest utopian belief is that the system of capitalism can go on indefinitely. Infinite growth in a world of finite resources is a fantasy even if you believe global warming is a liberal hoax cooked up to sell carbon credits to corporations and make you pay the congestion charge. There is a need for another kind of utopianism, not in the sense of the ideal society which ca never be realised but as a new space created out of the innermost urgency for survival. It is the way out we are forced to imagine by the impossibility of circumstances, which cannot be resolved within the coordinates of the possible. As Lenin said "There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." Right now, we need to make decades to happen!
4 comments:
love this: "The media has yet to find a narrative which could fill the void which has been opened up as political power came to the rescue of the financial colossus to which David Cameron and Barack Obama are bound almost as slaves. It was unthinkable that the banks should be allowed to collapse, it was a forced decision which no one can rightly oppose. "
I love this: "The media has yet to find a narrative which could fill the void which has been opened up as political power came to the rescue of the financial colossus to which David Cameron and Barack Obama are bound almost as slaves. It was unthinkable that the banks should be allowed to collapse, it was a forced decision which no one can rightly oppose."
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