Showing posts with label European Project. Show all posts
Showing posts with label European Project. Show all posts

Friday 30 September 2016

Position Reversed ... The Labour Party Is Worth Backing ...

I do not have a tribal approach to politics. Parties like all other human institutions are tools and nothing more. Is a political Party more or less likely to express my core values and implement policies that accord with those values? If so, I can give my allegiance. If not, I must look elsewhere. Solidarity in a shared common cause is not the same thing as blind loyalty or faith. 

This leads me to the unconventional position that I might prefer the solid soft 'one nation' nationalism of Theresa May to the neo-liberal internationalism of the Blairite Right or of the pre-Brexit Tory Party and Liam Fox - and the inter-nationalism and socialism of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell to either. Few would follow me on that but it is my position and that is my right.

The Radical Centre was never what it claimed - that is, the squaring of differences in the common interest. Rather, it was a coup by a professional political, bureaucratic, media-based and quasi-academic elite. The recent reaction on both Right and Left and across the West to rule by provenly incompetent 'experts', technocrats and political professionals is nothing but good if you are a true democrat (which I am) and are prepared to work for your values once functional democracy has been restored.

Back in May, I said I would quit the Party though, of course, I had paid my dues to September and was not going to give up on my vote for its Leader, albeit somewhat pessimistic that the sheer dead weight of the professional elite's war on Jeremy Corbyn would eventually break him. I was wrong on that expectation - to my surprise.

The Alienating Old Labour Party

The reasons I gave then for walking away were real enough: a lack of respect for dissent within the Labour tradition (on the European issue); a lack of respect for evidence-based debate; and the infiltration of the party by identity-based politics, especially those with a gender angle. These were all real concerns and things appeared to get worse rapidly - there was the dirty campaigning against Party Brexiters (a campaign which was humiliated in the event as an estimated third of Labour voters voted for Brexit), the filthy campaigning to denigrate and humiliate Jeremy Corbyn by the Labour Right and in the mainstream media; and the increasingly ridiculous 'war on antisemitism' which showed just how degenerate the Party had become in its snowflake identity wars.

What became clear by the beginning of this month was that the Party was riven by two competing  'matrices' (to adopt a term from a popular Hollywood sci-fi film), that is, two ways of interpreting reality neither of which was entirely true to the life experience of most people. Both represented different sets of core values and class interests but those differing core values were material and important in their difference.

On the 'old' side was a professional party apparat and political class backed by a complex claque of special interest and metropolitan media networks who laughingly asumed that their path was 'electable' when there had been nothing but slow decline since the regime of Tony Blair. They appealed to the triumph of the Labour Right politician Sadiq Khan not understanding that the numbers who actually voted for him were actually less than the numbers who voted for Brexit in London. The Tories had had a weak campaigner in Goldsmith and Khan could role out the inner city identity vote and not frighten the horses. London is not simply a mini-version of England, let alone Britain.

Yes, much valuable reform was undertaken in the Blair-Brown years in a programme of amelioration to correct the worst excesses (or rather the sclerosis) of the Thatcher-Major years but this was offset by the embedding of our local elite into a much broader international elite, wholly detached from the population at large, engaging in war-mongering for which that elite should never be forgiven and committed to a failed economics of 'enrichissez-vous' and cheap labour that had failed to deal with the infrastructual consequences of mass migration and regional decline.

The New Labour Movement

On the 'new' side was a surging movement from below, still naive about international relations (which runs itself on the principles of the jungle) but actively questioning elite power and austerity-based neo-liberal economics and, in that process, beginning to question the international economic arrangements that had led to trading agreements and those institutions like the European Union that were increasingly placing capital ahead of the people. The very viciousness of the attacks on that new movement from the Right and the attempt to use 'spin' rather than political education to counter its admitted naivetes indicated just how decadent and even cruel the Labour Right had become.

Basically, those who wished to destroy Corbynism descended to black propaganda of the worst nature and yet their leading candidate - not necessarily himself implicated in the excesses of his side - ended up by adopting much of the Corbyn-McDonnell economic programme because, well, it was popular. Cynical Blairites stood aside during the attempt at counter-revolution confident they could reverse that platform later if the anti-Corbyn candidate won. Even now, they continue to plot regardless of two clear democratic mandates within what is now the largest membership party in Europe.

The Labour Right and Soft Left existed on fear and anxiety while the new movement lived on hope - neither was entirely right or wrong in some black and white way but one had failed and was unimaginative in its solutions to the real problems of the people eight years after the crash of 2008, while the other was opening doors to new ideas and the political education of the masses. One distrusted the people - the road that led to the referendum revolution of June 23rd - and the other trusted the people. One was led by middle class people who feared the mob as they have done since time immemorial and the other was the mob transforming itself into a movement.

In mid-July after the Referendum vote we saw Remainers become Remoaners, threatening to reverse the vote of the people by all means possible in a surge of underhand anti-democratic thinking that was clearly closely associated with the organisation of the Labour Right assault on Jeremy Corbyn in method and intent. I analysed what a Left Leaver could do next in July with not a little despair. I found no one to argue against me in my harsh analysis. I laid out a trajectory for Left Leavers in four stages over some six months:
  • that Corbyn might win and reaffirm national democracy so that the Labour Party could remain a vehicle for Left Leavers (which has happened); 
  • that Corbyn might lose and a new Party be created that was sensible and which reaffirmed national democracy so that this might be the vehicle of Left Leavers (which was always going to be difficult and proved not to be necessary); 
  • that UKIP would became sensible in its protection of national democracy so that, with no alternative, Left Leavers could cross the water to the populist right (which would be the triumph of hope over reason); or, last of all, 
  • that nothing sensible was left out there to protect the workers from international neo-liberalism and the wise Left Leaver would go into private life or support Mrs May, assuming she stayed firm on national sovereignty, as, at the least, a national neo-liberal. 

Resolving The Issues

This final phase was brutally presented to Left Leavers by me as a final existential choice between being Left or being a leaver. I (though I suspect not so many others) would have put national economic sovereignty and national democracy first only because these were preconditions for effective socialism and an informed and engaged population. Socialism could not be imposed through the barrel of a Commission Directive and the Varoufakis belief that the European Union could be democratised in any reasonable political time scale was frankly ridiculous.

Nothing could be done over the summer - until the political wheel had turned another quarter. Corbyn might be defeated. He might, if he won, adopt the hard-line Remainer position (outlined pre-emptively by Tim Farron of the Liberal Democrats) simply to ensure a peace deal with the Labour Right and preserve his anti-austerity economics. Most unlikely of all, UKIP might sudddenly become humane in its attitude to foreign nationals and adopt its own version of anti-austerity but geared to Labour voters.

And, of course, Theresa May might shift her position to a Brexit position so 'lite' that we may as well have not voted on June 23rd. As I write, we are in the midst of a PR war between the City and business Remainers (no doubt backed by the civil service) on the one side and sceptic Brexit Ministers (no doubt backed by the voters who voted for Brexit) for influence on the content of May's speech at her Party Conference. Nothing is certain in this soap opera until the thin lady sings. 

Meanwhile, Momentum is not a Party within the Party as the Labour Right claim but a parallel operation challenging and potentially renewing an undemocratic Party apparat against which I and others had fought and which we had failed to reform in the mid-1990s. It is not, despite claims, like Militant because it is not sectarian or restricted to one major locality for its effect. Momentum is nationwide and is drawing in many new people to politics. I am not a member and do not intend to become a member of Momentum but I respect its role as mobiliser of political engagement for people otherwise excluded by the system. It now needs sensible 'realist' challengers rather than the sinister and pig-headedly opportunistic Progress or the atavistic Labour First. Whatever it is, it needs to be respected as better organised, more directly connected to the population and more intelligent in its methodology than any of its rivals.

Half Way Between Old and New

Perhaps what the old guard cannot forgive is that Momentum helped massively increase party membership, despite the best efforts of party officials. A mass membership is not what the Right has ever wanted. Before 1996, Blair used to talk of the million member party but it was the last thing his lot wanted. The professional political class survived very well on moribund local parties, nerd-like rulebook activists, trades union fixing and deals, parachuted-in metropolitan dogsbodies as candidates in safe seats and little or no questioning of policies (except where the unions asked for their pound of flesh on employment rights which was often conceded with great reluctance).

The question then became whether, having now been fought twice and won against people desperate to keep their gravy train going and having been traduced repeatedly, Corbyn would be so exhausted and troubled that he would compromise on key policy areas. He had already done so on Trident. Why not on national sovereignty? The Right had already undermined the Labour Party by talking it down just as the Remainers had undermined the British economy in the run-up to June 23rd.

These counter-revolutionaries may have lost and now be surplus to historical requirements but they appeared not to understand their predicament. They had played to win with utter ruthlessness, uncaring of the damage they did to the institution they claimed to support. Existentially and professionally they had serious skin in the game of controlling the Party and in the pork barrel of the European Union. It is interesting that, to satisfy the soft left of this alleged centre ground, the first post-mandate announcement was, indeed, pure pork barrel - that the EU regional funding would continue after 2020 with a new Labour Government.

No analysis, no discussion. Just a political bid to win over the professionals at the centre of a patronage network involved in disbursing large amounts of funds in the depressed regions. The Party was making blanket commitments to the regions without asking questions or offering policies that would be geared to the efficacy of the spending, instead just offering what had simply been EU-directed money without new and clear socialist strings attached. This was how the SNP and European Socialists operated not a responsible British Socialist Party. This had been money that had been largely directed to EU ends or the ends of special interests linked to EU strategy. The expenditures need some analysis before depriving the poorest classes in the richest areas to feed the middle classes in the poorest areas.

To Renew or Not To Renew - That Is The Question?

In the meantime, a request for renewal of membership to the Labour Party arrived. A year ago, it would have been renewed automatically. In May, it would have been binned. When it arrived, it was put aside to see how things fared between its arrival and the Leader's speech at Conference. September 24th had offered hope - not just an increased mandate for Corbyn but signals being sent beyond the pork barrel message. The new Movement would persist in its radical democratisation of the Party. I have some confidence in this if it can be pushed through over the heads of a sclerotic and less than competent and defensive apparat. It will be a struggle.

To some extent, such policies will be the continuation of the work that my old crew started in the mid-1990s when we created Labour Reform and then co-ordinated the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance. It would mean a rolling back of the democratic centralist Partnership in Power model and create the opportunity for ordinary members to get control of their hired hands - the elected politicians - and (I hope) policy under sound technical advice in which the trades unions should have a role. In the process, a naive movement would turn into a politically educated movement based on core socialist values able to face a renewed and revived Tory Party which, in the meantime under Prime Minister May, also has returned to some its core values and ceased to be the creature solely of the City and business (much to the latter's clear frustration). The country cannot but benefit but through an existential struggle over values conducted within the democratic process and rule of law. The Left will make mistakes and sometimes behave ridiculously but it will learn by doing and create a better world in doing so.

Similarly Momentum has started to explain itself and to challenge the 'matrix of lies' against it from special interests. I draw attention to only one item - the fight-back over accusations of antisemitism, a vicious slur as dangerous as the cruel and cynical manipulation of the death of Jo Cox by Remainers. The Jewish Chair of Momentum pointed out that the Vice Chair was Jewish as well and that Jews were active at every level in the organisation. Ironically, this might simply create new conspiracy theory on the Far Right but I think the Left can live with that and counter it on first principles. The issue remains sensitive and Momentum seems to be trying to draw back a little. It is under constant pressure to concede to the totalitarian culture of the Right Zionist lobby but, from where I sit, Jackie Walker's head-on assault on the Right is spot-on and needed to be said. Questioning the conduct of Netanyahu's Israel is not antisemitism.

So, the Labour Right is in the same position as the Remoaners - engaged in noise and fury, with access to friends in the mainstream media, with the advantage of easy access to wine bars and dinner parties in the metropolis - but they lack any power now except to be destructive. If they have not shot all their bolts, they seem determined to unload them as quickly as possible, leaving themselves unarmed before too long. Instead of engaging in rational evidence-based questioning of some of the more naive positions of their opponents, they make hysterical claims that quickly prove to be unfounded, discrediting themselves in the process. They use propaganda techniques worthy of Goebbels and they come to look aggressive in ways that fuel engagement by people like myself who were otherwise happy to leave things to others. The Labour Party apparat has proved itself problematic as well - appearing untrustworthy probably more from lack of imagination than from outright malice, stuck in the old matrix. It too needs radical reform.

The McDonnell Speech and Its Virtues

Then came John McDonnell's avowedly neo-socialist speech on Monday. First the Referendum result was accepted (no hitching the Party to the wagon of a second referendum alongside the Liberal Democrats). Second, if the European Union is to be a neo-liberal project, Labour clearly won't play ball - the preconditions for re-engagement are that neo-liberal trade deals will not be signed and sovereign nations can implement interventionist socialist economics (in other words, the Tories and UKIP have opened the door to socialism in one country until collaborating socialists can create a socialist Europe). Third, Labour now wants to work with and not against the financial services sector but on its terms - meaning no more casino economy and the finance sector's participation in the neo-socialist investment programme: if it supports that programme, Labour will support it in Europe and elsewhere (subject elsewhere to the war on tax avoidance). 

Fourth, Labour will not be inactive on the Brexit negotiations - it is going to try and drive them further to the Left, not in order to scupper them but to scupper the Tories and their austerity economics. Fifth, Labour is not going to get sucked into the migration debate (though Corbyn two days later appeared to reverse that) but it will seek protection for workers whilst fighting xenophobia (the pitch to the Polish vote was all-too-obvious here) - in other words, Labour should speak for mildly conditional free movement of labour as a sovereign British decision (an international socialist decision). Herre, we saw a definite difference of emphasis from Corbyn two days later. In other words, taken all in all, Europe is positioned as 'second order' to the struggle over economics (in good Marxist fashion). 

Overall, this was a measured pro-European but not pro-EU speech (the difference is significant). It was far more pro-people internationalist socialist position than we have ever heard before from a Labour politician, one that accepted Brexit as a necessary possibly temporary pause before a Socialist Europe of internationally co-operating nation states is to hand. I can live with that ... I just needed to hear what Jeremy Corbyn had to say before renewing my membership ...and I let Emily Thornberry's somewhat waffley contribution to BBC World at One on Monday and her unsophisticated speech at Conference pass since it merely told me that she had not yet got all her marching orders and had yet to get her feet under her table. 

The game now was clearly one of being pro-European by being challenging to the neo-liberal European Union and that is all many of us Leavers wanted in the first place. The Yanis Varoufakis strategy of change from within was never going to work without a shock to the EU's system and Brexit was part of that shock treatment. A Socialist Europe is best achieved through ensuring that a major G7 country outside the European Union can prosper as a Neo-Socialist Economy in its own right - demonstrating neo-socialism by example. The alternative was simply accepting ameliorative but ineffective restraints on neo-liberalism through a flailing European Social Democracy run by less than effective men and women in grey suits, always looking over their shoulder at Goldman Sachs, J P Morgan and the IMF.

The Corbyn Speech and Its Faults

This brings me to the excellent (from a traditional socialist point of view) speech by Jeremy Corbyn on Wednesday. He captured the very soul of a movement when that soul desperately needed to be recovered. Of course, from the point of view of a cynical realist like myself, there was a bit of magical thinking here and there and an idealism that might have a bucket of cold water thrown over it by harsh economic and political reality further down the line but the speech was a starting point, the establishment of some core principles from which Labour Party socialists could draw heart and against which they could test their inevitable compromises. 

Perhaps I felt that both John McDonnell and Andy Burnham, much more to the Right, had a greater grasp of reality and that some of the relatively new Shadow Cabinet were lost and waffling in an idealistic day dream but Corbyn's aspirations were ultimately my aspirations and that of many Britons. One and only one set of policies made me pause before committing to renew - the excessively naive and counter-productive position on migration. 

In this area, as on Trident (where I agree with him) Corbyn was essentially being a faith-based politician, much like Tony Benn at his most narcissistic.  There are aspects of socialism that regrettably mimic religion - its Methodist aspect. I don't hold to it. I have no time for religion but I recognise that a 'broad church' (an interesting cliche in this context) has to hold many people who are predisposed to believe in magic to the Party because half of our species actually do 'need to believe' in ways that Fox Mulder would understand and they are voters too.

Corbyn's statement "But we will also be pressing our own Brexit agenda including the freedom to intervene in our own industries without the obligation to liberalise or privatise our public services and building a new relationship with Europe based on cooperation and internationalism." is precisely why Brexit is important. In effect, this is the quintessential Left Brexit position since the entire European Project is built on a neo-liberal commitment not to permit this degree of economic freedom, one that is not going to change because a couple of socialist governments in London and Athens ask it to change. This restoration of national sovereignty must, of course, be implemented responsibly and it is legitimate to ask whether the huge number of interventionist and spending promises actually do stack up but this was a first motivational speech after a gruelling period of division. There are four years now to refine the policies into workability.

Where Corbyn Gets It Wrong on Migration

On the other hand, Corbyn's strategic errors on migration must be exposed. First he does not get that cultural identity is as important to English workers as it is to Palestinians. Nor is it necessarily 'fascist. As others have pointed out to me "[an] emphasis on cultural identity is founded on a solid [Left] intellectual tradition: from Raymand Williams to Gramsci, from the work of Genovese to that of Charles von Onselen, and so on". From a practical perspective, being concerned about cultural identity should not be spun as being essentially 'rightist' - after all, Labour lost Scotland for a lot of reasons but one was a failure to understand cultural identity and respond to it instead of trying to accomodate it positively as an expression of discontent and then 'detourne' it into inter-national socialism. It is ironic that the Left accepts non-locality based identities like gender, race and sexual orientation so readily and yet turns its nose up at national and historical identities.

Second, the political economics of increasing taxes on the indigenous upper working and lower middle class to fund improved services for migrant areas is political suicide. It is these people who vote in Governments. We may not find that comfortable but it is a fact on the ground. Certainly the soft liberals and NGO snowflakes won't find this comfortable but failing to understand the economic pressures on the middling sort (which includes Labour's upper working class voters) is a serious block to power unless Corbyn has some damn fine arguments for more taxation that go beyond moral exhortation. With limited funds available (no matter the borrowing claims of the Shadow Chancellor) and with lots of perfectly reasonable promises being made to a variety of special interest groups (regions, NHS, public service workers, the low paid, students, the 'hardworking families' of political discourse and so on), taxing the anxious and struggling middling sort more highly in order (it would seem) to improve the infrastructure of migrant areas becomes a gift to the populist right wing media. You may as well send them membership cards to UKIP in the post.

Third, the sheer scale of incoming migration to Europe and thence to the UK is being treated as an inconvenience rather than a truth. It may well overwhelm the kindness to strangers offered by Corbyn - and we have a precedent in the chaos folowing Merkel's humanitarian gesture in Germany. To the economic migrant, even the slums of the West offer levels of wealth that to them are worth taking immense personal risks. To go on to promising a ready-made welfare infrastructure that will exceed the highest expectations of the middle classes of Addis Ababa and Khartoum is irresponsible to say the least. And be assured, we have scarcely understood the scale of economic migration to come - the next wave is from the Horn of Africa through Egypt. The international institutions that have just offered half a billion Euros for job creation in Ethiopia understand this only too well.

Although sentimental liberals may have no problem with any of this, many natural Labour voters will. Migration has become to many people who are natural Labour voters and who are neither cruel nor stupid an issue about respect for their own needs as citizens. It is not about the other, it is about themselves. Idealists may bemoan such selfishness but it is not for them to dictate terms to the electorate. We are a democracy and the people should dictate terms to politicians. It is certainly not about hating the foreigner - which is the malign myth peddled by Remain propagandists - but about voters being under severe social and economic pressure in their own right and wanting Government to relieve that pressure directly and even personally.

Treating Voters With Contempt?

The implicit characterisation in Corbyn's speech of Left Brexiters as stupid people who voted on peddled myths and did not have minds of their own is a little insulting and clumsy. The inclusion of the phrase "the referendum campaign a campaign that peddled myths and whipped up division" was foolish. It oversimplified matters and was deeply insulting to the third of Labour voters who voted Brexit in order to pander to Labour Remainers. We noticed. It dampened our enthusiasm. The campaign was being characterised by Corbyn in terms dictated by the mainstream media (an irony here) on the basis of campaigning by just one element in the campaign - UKIP. 

Left Brexiters in no way endorsed that position and were deeply active in campaigning for Brexit on socialist grounds. This unfortunate turn of phrase will be resented especially since the mainstream Remain campaign peddled fear through exaggerating economic threats, something (to his credit) Jeremy Corbyn did not do. Fanatics engaged in lies and half truths but most sensible people on both sides fought on issues of principle in good faith and that should be recognised.

The one third of Labour voters who voted Brexit should not be treated as deluded fools unable to make up their own minds without the help of North London intellectuals ... they voted rationally and in their own interest and they should be respected. All Emily's advisers on foreign policy (according to her speech) are from Inner London North of the Thames and East of Uxbridge which is not a healthy state of affairs.. If you do not respect people, all the people, you cannot expect to win their votes and those votes will be needed in 2020. Remain had depended on middle class votes in the South interested in their pockets and those voters are unlikely to be voting for John McDonnell's socialism come the day - so Labour needs that 30%.

The need to improve infrastructures (central to Corbyn's migration policy) is certainly vital but it should be person-blind and be geared to any community who needs it, not be presented as favouring incomers or special interests or being a cause to encourage more incomers before the infrastructure has been put in place. His policy is topsy-turvy. We should be assessing what this country needs and can take (not, by the way, unilaterally 'stealing' talent from countries that need nurses and teachers even more than we do), pre-building the necessary infrastructure and then welcoming migrants to join a safe and secure welfare economy where they either have a role to play in the greater good or because space has been made for people suffering exceptional risk to life and limb. We should not be sending a signal that this small island is a land of opportunity, like America in the nineteenth century. It is not and such an attitude could place our welfare economy under intolerable strain.

The Blunder on Migration & The Decision to Renew

Although a decent speech that touched every socialist button, Corbyn also failed to recognise the logic of May's position - that positive humanitarian intervention overseas might stop migration at source by improving conditions for the poorest in their own country (which should mean not gutting their health and social services to ensure the security of our own). 

Corbyn's position on migration represented a sentimental flaw in an otherwise good speech and one that UKIP and the right-wing media will seize on and exploit at every opportunity with a corresponding silence from Leftists like me that will become deafening. Nor will we allow ourselves to be characterised as callous or un-socialist - it is we who have the interests of the poor of the emerging world and the indigenous working class (and those from overseas already in our country) at heart. It is we who have an analysis that encompasses social and political sustainability. 

On this one, he is on his own. Was this blunder on migration, almost as daft as his blunder before Brexit in kow-towing opportunistically to the Remain machine on the Labour Right and Soft Left, sufficient to disengage me from the Labour Party and start moving through that trajectory outlined by me on July 16th? No, it was not, and I can give three reasons.

Let us get one out of the way quickly. Migration is potentially existential but it is not primarily existential like the Brexit vote. The voters still have the chance to teach the naive idealists inside and outside the Party. In the end, there will be a lesson taught Labour on the ground to which Corbyn and the idealists must adjust if they want to achieve the rest of the programme outlined in the McDonnell and Corbyn speches of September 26th and 28th. Anti-austerity outside London is one helluva a lot more important than pleasing the luvvy NGOs in London if the new team wants to prove that neo-socialism can work in one country and then export the model elsewhere by example.

Pragmatism is No Vice

Secondly, no political programme is ever going to be perfect. The core values underpinning Corbyn's programme are consistent. There is a means of openly arguing for alternatives where there are disagreements. By offering to smash Blairite democratic centralism, Corbyn permits me and others to challenge him on this and other policies without seeking to overturn the general commitment to democracy or necessarily being disloyal to the total programme or to him. The policy may be wrong-headed but it can be placed before the Party before it is placed before the electorate and people like me may have the chance to argue our case in a way not possible under the dictatorial rule of Blair, Brown and Milliband. Voices are already speaking out about the foolishness of the migration position without making this a leadership issue.

Thirdly, perhaps most important of all, critics can recognise that Corbyn's position arises from a sincere moral, perhaps faith-based, position that is in perfect accord with the values of socialism and which represents an ultimate position (the borderless world) that even his critics would like to reach. Just as Left-Brexiters did not object to a truly democratic socialist united Europe but only to the feasibility of one under neo-liberalism (and so can find themselves in agreement with John McDonnell's subtle economics) so critics of Corbyn's migration politics can critique the practical naivete of his approach on pragmatic grounds without in any way impugning his integrity, decency and, frankly, moral superiority all things being equal in a perfect world. But then you do not need socialist parties in a perfect world, do you?

And so the conclusion is simple - my negative position on renewal must be reversed. The Labour Party and Labour Movement are now in decent and moral hands. Corbyn is wrong on migration and may be naive in other areas but 'his heart is in the right place' as is that of the new movement. He stands for values that desperately need reviving and are being expressed in a political movement that challenges the reactionary essentialism of UKIP and its opportunistic and cynical equivalent in Scotland (SNP), the gross and equally cynical opportunism of the Radical Centre and Liberal Democracy and the special interests of the undeniably effective but class-based Tory Party. 

Therefore, with only a little hesitation, I shall renew my membership of the Labour Party.


Wednesday 22 June 2016

Final Thoughts on the Brexit Vote Tomorrow

The vote is now impossible to predict. For example, it is going to be extremely wet tomorrow and that will put off a lot of wobblers on both sides, Similarly, many perfectly decent but unsophisticated middle middle class people see a world of disorder and will conservatively vote for what they think will maintain order (Remain): such a desire for order amidst disorder led to the interwar errors.

On the other side, many working class people and entrepreneurial small business people may see this in cultural terms as the last stand of their culture not against immigrants but against the administrative middle classes and so be the more motivated to vote.

We could go on ... I doubt whether the rather depressing and slightly unpleasant appropriation of a dead person for political purposes will make much difference, irritating as many voters as it mobilises. The economic arguments have long since reached the limit of their power.

It is now down to instinct and sentiment and brute self-interest albeit with the so-called 'educated' middle class desperately trying to use a selection of pseudo-rational arguments to explain their choice to themselves.

If we were to characterise the underlying structure of the conflict, it would be that, although highly complex with many different strands, it is essentially the conflict between a conservative desire for an order to be supplied by an ostensibly liberal-minded administrative class in uncertain times (Remain) and a more radical instinct for change because the existing structures are no longer viable even if those who want change have different prescriptions about what to do next (Leave).

The Remainers constantly call for a 'plan' about 'what to do next' utterly missing the point that the various administrative classes of late liberal capitalist democracy have themselves failed to bring order under conditions of globalisation. Their plan is just 'more of the same' only more intensively applied.

This leaves the population with only two alternatives which the two sides now represent. The first choice is for an intensification of effort by the administrative classes to regulate disorder out of existence along a middling path (the 'plan') despite the constantly growing cracks in the paradigm.

The second choice is to step back and construct geographical and policy fire breaks against the gathering storm to protect the population and bring the administrative classes under control, either through markets or democracy or both. Either choice is broadly coherent but coherence is not necessarily the same as rational since national socialism had its coherence.

The question is whether the administrative classes have the authority and competence to manage vast numbers of humanity each with their own special interests and world views and whether the 'fire break' method can actually work against the sheer weight of forces emerging as a result of an over-rapid globalisation.

I take a Leave position because my analysis is that the administrative classes are faced with such an impossible task that they can only turn to increased surveillance, taxation (to support themselves) and even repression.

The 'fire break' approach gives nation states' and indeed communities at a lower level in the political food chain reserve powers to make decisions in their own interest, analogous to the personal autonomy necessary to make effective private and family decisions. It is really the last chance saloon, not only for stability but for the successful adaptation of populations to a more managed globalisation over a longer period of time.

The point, if one is concerned with stability, is that the system is paradoxically being destabilised by its own attempt to create a stable system. A new and more flexible and adaptable approach to the system is required. The stresses and strains within the current system are 'tectonic'. If they are not released gently, like economic crises, they will release themselves in a bigger explosion later.

What many Remainers are (I believe) not understanding is that the British Leave proposal is actually rather conservative. It detaches Britain from the system sufficiently to ensure adjustment but actually retains nearly all the existing links - unless the European Union itself seeks a confrontation (which is unlikely). It also permits re-engagement later on European reform by Europeans for Europeans.

Re-immersion in the European Union appears to solve the problem in one country but it has no effect (other than to delay the day of reckoning) on the total system, not even to improve its position. The total system continues its administrative-led trajectory towards increased disorder, made worse by the patching up being done to try to ensure the British do not leave.

So, a vote either way is problematic but a vote for Remain ironically increases the very disorder that its proponents most fear. The act of voting Remain merely pushes a 'crisis of order' forward by a few years (perhaps even months). The fundamentals say that the immersion of the nation must eventually be much deeper in an integrated European Union than many Remain voters actually want.

Perhaps Remainers will come to want an enhanced administrative authority over them as crises mount and economic prosperity fails to materialise but, if they do, then democracy will be little more than handing over power to the political wing of the administrative and managerial classes.

And when the immersion has finally taken place in full, they, as citizens, will either be part of the administrative and managerial class or subject to its desperate attempts to manage mounting entropy. Being a subject of the European administrative class is really not much better than being a subject of the pre-modern Crown.

Saturday 7 March 2015

The Challenges for Post-Christian Europe

Christianity in Europe is far from dead. It has split into many elements, liberal and conservative, communitarian and evangelical, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and free-thinking, with many offshoots including imported and indigenous 'new religions' derivative from it (often from America). Yet the cultural model of idealism towards and faith in the other ('God'), salvation and (to a greater or lesser extent) tradition and good works still makes up a considerable part of the European branch of Western culture. Into this complexity, the Judaic element is added with its own mix of liberal and conservative, comunitarian and free-thinking ideals and we have, more recently, the re-irruption of Islam with elements that are hyper-traditionalist as well as others seeking the path of assimilation and collaboration following the Jewish precedent.

The mix becomes ever more complex with time. The religious wars of the early modern period and the Enlightenment brought us not only the opening for Judaic thought and for both liberal Christianity and an evangelical and traditionalist reaction to it but an opportunity for atheism and 'ideology' which became the basis for secular faith systems - nationalism, both authoritarian and liberal, liberalism (the currently dominant ideology), various forms of socialism (as complex as Christianity and perhaps even to be considered a Judaeo-Christian heresy adapted to science and materialism) and, finally, anarchisms, existentialism and scientific atheism. We might add, more latterly, neo-paganism, whether innocent and associated with post-fascist traditionalism, and the so-called hyper-real religions developed out of popular culture and modern myths such as those surrounding UFOs.

Have I missed any? Theosophical movements may have declined but Buddhism has a position in European society and there is space for nearly all the non-tribal Eastern religions as exemplars or philosophies of life. You may add to taste what I have forgotten. Whichever way we look at it, the sheer scale of the variance of belief is staggering compared to the early modern and modern totalitarian attempts to impose monotheism or a single ideology on a population - let alone the 'tolerant' conformity of a hegemonic Christianity in the liberal world of the nineteenth century. This is the chaos of late paganism or of the East held together only by the monopoly of force that a secular authority can maintain. Historically, it has often been convenient for that force to take one religion and endorse it and crush others if that will bring victory or order - Constantine springs to mind.

If there are modern tendencies in that direction, they are not towards imposing a religion but uniting forces against a religion - radical Islam. Both traditionalists and liberals are conflicted even here, some choosing confrontation for the sake of 'purity' and the imagined past and others seeking accommodation with the majority of Muslims as shared peoples of the book or just as political realities in our inner cities who have to be taken account of. But, unless political order completely breaks down (if it does do so, it is at the crumbling far periphery of the European Project), the presumption of the authorities remains one of tolerance, secular order and allowing religious moderates to enter into policy-making within the framework of democratic persuasion and political organisation. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the indifferent and the agnostic - those who have no real interest in the myth of the spirit or invisible creatures - have votes and want to be consumers and producers first and rely on the movies not the churches for their access to the fantastic.

But underpinning this struggle within and between the myths and legends that came in with a desert wind between the first century BC and seventh century AD under the Pax Romana and then as a political tool for kings and emperors subsequently and then with the reaction to obscurantism (often creating new obscurantisms) that took place from the sixteenth century to the twentieth and with the arrival of spiritualities from below under American, Eastern and nationalist influence later still, there are ancient mental models that preceded these waves of external and democratic mental change. We should ask whether and where they shave life and potential today (or present dangers perhaps). I have identified six that still exist below the surface of or alongside the Christian sub-stratum in our cultural-archaeological dig. You may think of others but I suggest these are the six that make up our indigenous pre-modern European culture and act as 'to-hands' for political and cultural actors in our future.

Strand One - The Athenian Texts

In each of these cases, we are less concerned with what these traditions actually were or meant in the past and more concerned with what they have come to mean and what they could mean in the future. Nowhere is this more true than with the mythology surrounding Athenian democracy. Although it is now righly criticised as a flawed democracy with slaves and a subservient role for women as well as implicitly xenophobic, in its historic context it was a remarkably robust system for sovereign independence and then empire before being crushed by Alexandrine imperialism. The core of the ideology is of a closed democracy as necessarily the 'good society' and it stands as challenge to multicultural fluidity of the globalising West. Historically, it was influential on American democracy and on Jacobinical republicanism and so, by twists and turns, on both liberalism and fascism as well as on all forms of republicanism. It stands as an ideal with continued potential for misapplications of notions of purity and conformity on the one hand and self-determination and freedom on the other.

Strand Two - The Dialectic Between the Roman Republic and Empire

The Roman Republic and the subsequent Empire might appear to be opposites as models for the future. They could be contrasted in later generations as narratives of decadence or of failure but they also present a particularly strong narrative of increasing order undermined by internal dissent, over-accommodation of the barbarian (external ideologies and forces) and accommodation with the popular (the Roman mob and Christianity). They are an 'object lesson' - the story is one of an ideal perverted and one where the ideal could be restored. That ideal is universal law applied by force. It is an ideal of conservative perfection at heart and it became an influence on Napoleonic and British imperialism, a driver for American perfectionism and empire and for Italian fascism but is also an 'at hand' for the increasingly frustrated European Project, even the West (as self-conscious political cause,) by which they could create an 'ideal' from which order might be imposed on fractious populations, Political Islam and Russia be resisted in their feared incursions (although Russia might equally be cast as Eastern Empire and the US as Western Empire to taste) and some accommodation be made with the dominant faith groups (a resolution devoutly wished for by the Vatican).

Strand Three - The Romance of Arthur

This might be considered peculiar to the British and lost now to the nineteenth century but it stands for something else that is derivative from Christianity yet exists not to be Christian first and foremost. It is a redirection of the inherent potential for warlordism and piracy in elites into social responsibility - the imperial version of corporate social responsibility. It is ideal behaviour as an aristocracy presented as 'service' (even if it is pretty flexible as to the question 'to whom' is the service owed). Today, we see it as an ideology of technocracy and managerialism where managers seek to assert their authority over what they see as anarchic social forces - whether finance capital or the mob. The ideal is romantic and is an irruption of the Roman past into, first, the medieval and then the modern present, first as restraint of feudalism, then as restraint on imperialism and now as restraint on capitalism. This the Western equivalent of mandarin confucianism. The 'to whom' is key - the Crown, the State, the Empire or the People. The vision is a form of liberal conservatism, a top-down granting of boons to the commonwealth, that could be useful if universal law is applied by force in the European Project since force requires an accompanying ideology of restraint. Or it could be used for the reconstruction of the power of a service elite following scandal after scandal in political, financial and bureaucratic elites in particular nation-states.

Strand Four - The Volkisch

Volkisch ideology invented history by intellectuals with time on their hands for the petit-bourgeoisie. It might be thought to have crashed in flames in the cellars and bunkers of mid-twentieth century Europe. Its origins lies in pre-Christian barbarian cultures and is at the root not only of neo-nationalism but of northern democracy. It has potential resonance three generations on from Hitlerism for two reasons - revisionist history can provide more rationale than liberals may like for the rise of nationalism as response to disorder in the 150 years before the conflagration and current conditions of hyper-modernity and multiculturalism almost require the existence of something to which those whose identity is threatened or who are economically disadvantaged can rally. What will emerge is unlikely to be precisely what existed in the past. It does not appear to be a very pan-European identity but more a populist identity based on language and place. It is thus in a dialectic tension with the first three strands.

Strand Five - Political Neo-Paganism

Neo-paganism is very much a minority sport, a clubbable business of small very liberal or hyper-conservative sub-sets of the population. The instinctive preference of most Europeans is Abrahamanic or secular. Although there is an association of Germanic and Nordic paganism with the Radical Right (although we should note that the murderous Breivik cast his violence in terms of Christian retribution and righteousness), the real contribution of neo-paganism is a withdrawal from politics into self-reliance and a theory of the 'natural', not the naturally pre-defined person (neo-pagans are as likely to adopt very fluid notions of identity as to follow the norms of Assatru) but of a natural world which provides us humans with meaning and order. If anything, this is a mode of resistance to social order and can present itself in terms of either the Right or the Left as traditionally understood. It tends to be passive rather than active but will engage in the world to protect, conservatively, its own - generally a locus or an 'environment' - from intervention. It is a proto-barbarian element in dialectic with the proto-Rome of the European Project.

Strand Six - The Shamanic

Finally we find ourselves in the lowest stratum of all. There may be a rich Eurasian shamanic tradition - the manipulative magician as community catalyst through altered states - but this has been culturally pushed to the periphery of the Continent. What has happened instead is an importation of indigenous peoples' shamanic experience through anthropology and the revived interest in psychedelics via the United States and it is this that has tapped into the oldest strata of all within the European cultural tradition. This is a culture of potential resistance to excessive order and, if you spend time observing it, one of withdrawal from elites and also a determination to defend place and person against authority much like Strand Five. It is anarchic but not in the destructive meaning of the term. It sits waiting to undermine fixed identities and beliefs through instant personal revelation and a direct communion with other realities - delusory perhaps but not much more so than the hyper-reality of post-modernism.


If we go back to Breivik, he looks, in his Christian political eschatology, more like the last brutal gasp of a decaying unified vision of Europe as a Christian Continent than the precursor of meaningful revolt. The Far Right (or at least an important faction of it and its populist element) is clinging to the Christian myth as political tool and to create a bulwark against the most significant 'other' - Islam - but they have lost the plot under conditions where a majority of Christians think in more socially liberal terms and where the most recent Pope has had to re-fashion his rhetoric in this liberal direction in order to hold on to his base.

Our model of contemporary Europe is of a flailing empire trying to maintain order with no clear authoritarian ideology to support it - beyond a sort of vaguely Kantian ideology of liberal rights and a collapsing 'peace' ethos driven from above by the elites themselves. There is no Cult of the Emperor, no belief in King and Country, no belief in the Dictatorship of the Proletariat than can push all rival political ideologies to the margins or into private life and even silence. Tolerance means maximal variation (which is creative but chaotic). This is what most of us rather like because it gives us the freedom to have a private life and yet to try to drive our world view into the political process by stealth and in a free competition within shared rules. But it also means that the political elite becomes an alien bureaucracy that looks weak and ineffective when it can do nothing or little about those who break or do not share the rules - just as the rule breakers are increasing in number.

There is no stasis in culture and politics. All systems that degrade like this either collapse (the European Project is undergoing an economic, security and political crisis all at the same time) or a crisis transforms the system into a new system with new rules and new structures of power - much as the Roman Republic transformed itself into the Roman Empire or the British Empire into a multicultural airstrip and banking quarter. We might oversimplify the strands we have identified into 'Roman' (that is Empire and Order) or 'Barbarian' (that is Freedom and Self-Determination) models by suggesting that the first three strands (a closed civics, universalism backed by force and the ideal of a service elite) are being challenged and contested by the last three (the politics of language and place, the defence of the individual and the tribe from authority and the primacy of personal revelation). The challenge and the contest will be, eventually, political involving some form of armed force either as repression or rebellion.

Judaeo-Christianity remains a formidable force for Order (as we are seeing in the return of the conservative Right in Spain) and is even hegemonic in some parts of Europe, notably Poland, but its power should not be assumed to be hegemonic across Europe. Even active Judaeo-Christian political forces can speak in secularist terms - such as in terms of support for or migration to Israel or defensive demands for protection from criminal Islamists. The Charlie Hebdo revolt was, we must not forget, about the right to be blasphemous as much as a populist negative revolt against the claims of radical Islam. This gives the European Union the character of the Roman Empire before Constantine - a fracturing culture maintained by a fractured political authority with the old religions no longer able to provide the necessary cohesion. If a cultural revolution takes place it is unlikely to come from the Vatican,. We cannot know what such a revolution will be if it does come but either an assertion of a European ideology of order, a sort of fascism-lite with added Kant, or an accommodation with radical liberal, tribal and even libertarian populism seem to be the current probable trajectories. We'll see.

Tuesday 15 October 2013

'Zizek is to Hegel what Fichte was to Kant'. Discuss.

The occasion of the discussion was frustration with the desperate clinging of our left-wing political intelligentsia to the performance art of the celebrity philosopher.

Zizek is never less than confusing so it is always hard to pin down what he believes in precisely, except that he holds to a form of idealism derived from Hegel and appears to propose a revival of either some form of communism or of utopian socialism.

What I was interested in was not so much what he claimed to believe at any one time but what role he was functionally playing in contemporary philosophy. 

I suppose we might summarise my view as suspicion is that he is playing the role of High Priest to a self-defining barbarian tribe who are enemies of the people, the people meaning that population of persons grounded in the business of being in the world, reproducing, having intentions and seeking a better life for themselves rather than fulfilment of some world-historical mission.

We might say that contemporary European philosophy - with its exclusions and obfuscations - stands in relation to the people in much the same way that Grayson Perry (in his first Reith Lecture today) described the art world, in which he is embedded, as a tribe with its own obfuscatory language and exclusions

I posed the question in a Facebook Group and (edited so as not to be too rude about Zizek) this was my side of the exchange though I found no defenders of Zizek.

Proposition 

The implicit thesis is that Zizek is doing to Hegel what Fichte did to Kant. In essence, Fichte took a Kantian position and extended it to meet his own needs. What was a conservative philosophy of 'explanation' became a radical philosophy of 'implied action' for radical intellectuals. The exploitation of the 'master' was manipulative and might be regarded as cynical, in the earlier case, if only Fichte had been subject to a more demanding critique of his purpose. 

It strikes me that Zizek is making use of Hegel (and Marx as leading historic Hegelian) and playing the same game, seducing young radicals of the Left, as Fichte seduced young German nationalists, into what amounts, on closer inspection, to be well constructed sophistic nonsense. Just as young Germans failed to investigate Kant in order to tease out his flaws so young Europeans are failing to investigate Hegel and do the same. They are taking the grounding of Zizek's thought as a 'given'.

Fichte was the destructive force that laid the grounding for national socialism (far more than the oft-accused Nietzsche or Heidegger). My thesis continues that Zizek may now be laying the ground rules for a possible new European tyranny based on a pseudo-rationalism of devastating potential for harm. Both philosophers are providers of what their small markets want - a reason to believe in nonsense (in the sense that Wittgenstein and other analytic philosophers criticised the obfuscations of such grand idealistic concepts such as 'Geist') .

Response to First Two Responses

I could not agree more with my interlocutor on the need to restore the knowing - and perceiving and creating - subject at the core of things. Sartre, raised in the discussion, is a red herring because Sartre tried to do for Heidegger what Fichte did for Kant and Zizek does for Hegel.

These are all examples of quasi-narcissistic politicised intellectuals seeking to transform a system or position where seriously deep thought has been followed through to a conclusion but under conditions where others will want something that meets more immediately political needs in the next generation (whether liberal nationalism, anti-fascism or anti-capitalism). 

It is no accident that Kant, Hegel and Heidegger were conservatives nor that Fichte, Sartre and Zizek are radicals but we should not cut the latter more slack simply because they appear, sentimentally, to be on the side of the angels to many people at key points in history - against Napoleon, against Hitler and against bankers. 

We may have another example in Saul/Paul in relation to Christ. No doubt, even now, someone is preparing to transform Foucault's thought into a politically potent weapon against something to be hated after the current crisis. I thought I might try NGOs!

This process of appropriation requires a perversion of the central insights (right or wrong) of the initiating system. Sartre wanted Heidegger and Husserl's insights to mean something in terms of action, for example, although Heidegger's one early entry into action showed staggering naivete without making his insights into the human condition incorrect. 

The Buddha was lucky in not having such a person appear in his 'next generation' but the nature of 'initiation and succession' in Western culture makes it almost inevitable that this will happen frequently. 

Zizek uses Sartre and other secondary thinkers such as Fichte, but primarily Marx, as tools for his own intellectual ambitions but he does not really seem ever to engage with what it is to be human on the one hand and what is necessary to suppress as human to create a functioning society in any direct or systematic way. 

He quasi-endorses revolutionary violence without, for example, understanding its contingency, its body/mind basis or its social psychology (which is odd for a trained sociologist) - he is perhaps the tragic consequence of the reward given for intellectualism in Western culture.

Zizek is not so much the wisdom of the ourobouros as a Slavic dog chasing its own continental tail. An analogy of Zizekian philosophy with conceptual art and financial engineering springs to mind - a contingent response to highly contingent objective conditions in late capitalism.

Time is always central to understanding the human condition (this much we take from Heidegger) but Zizek seems to see time with no more sophistication than the aforesaid Paul as a form of providential dispensation via an implicit Absolute (somewhere along the line). 

This is as ethically dangerous, the old inevitability illusion of Hegelianism, as, in an entirely different direction, the position of radical utilitarians who would place the planet before humanity - in his case, humanity as an abstract is placed before the person.

Much of this is magical thinking by Zizek. His thinking on the Muslim veil, for example, is simply stupid - what he thinks is thought by people (if I understand those who have tried to explain it to me) is not what people think. 

It is dangerous because it invents, out of the claims about what we are said to think, a puritanical theory of capitalism that holds within it the seeds of a brutal misdirection of social energy towards the repression and suppression of what it is to be human in the world. 

He is, as I say, not so much a monster (he is not) as a breeder of monsters. He enters into a world where no intelligent criticism is made of such untested absurdities as objectification theory (as a point of value statement) or claims about commodification as a process in which persons have no agency. 

The denial of agency to working people in general seems to tell us more about the despair of the massive and potentially unemployable European graduate class than it does about the heroic struggle of ordinary 'folk' to 'be' and 'become' against often extremely difficult odds.

The negative response to the veil in Europe today is not sophisticated but simply represents belief in a direct challenge to an imagined and assumed ownership of a territory. Guests and implicit 'inferiors' are showing they do not care much about 'our' prior ownership of a territory with is organically grown culture.

Worse, those who insist on the veil or support he veil wearers are seen as intending, implicitly, not merely to take their place on 'our' territory but, and this really is galling to the mass, to show no gratitude for our largesse but to seek, as we have done, in their turn, to impose their culture on us by weight of arrogance, belief and numbers - all at some indeterminate time in the future. 

It is a fear of a past being lost in an observable present to a terrifying future. I believe it is explosive and nothing to do with philosophy. It may be a wrong belief and work should perhaps be done 'rationally' to engage with that belief without making prior ideological demands on the believer but it is not entirely irrational to hold it as a belief once you start understanding what it is to be a human in the world.

Zizek is misdirecting here and therefore assisting both in halting the process of rational investigation of a phenomenon and in storing up the tensions thereby an explosion. His acolytes (much as 1848 liberals became 1870 nationalists and then anti-semites), who still speak of liberty and freedom of a sort now, may slowly become monsters of radical centralisation of power, intellectual snobbery and moral censoriousness (in the case of feminist fellow travellers) in their misplaced concern to turn theory into practice. 

Contemporary left-liberalism has become infected with this thinking. Wise 'ordinary' people will watch and may have to remove these people from influence with more force than their nice liberal natures have allowed. 

One drastic solution might be to close down or sharply reduce the university departments that allow them safe haven and perhaps to create existential-national or regional schools of intellectual resistance to future tyrannies that are based on a re-evaluation of both personal agency and pragmatic analysis. 

Austerity perhaps provides us with the opportunity.

Response to two further responses

There is also a connection between individuation and economic prosperity. We should not, I think, underestimate the shift from industrial to post-industrial and then to the 'internet' society. 

We might characterise these developments in simplified terms as a shift from corporatist or progressive bourgeois to narcissistic bourgeois to anarcho-demotic. The narcissists find now that they have more in common with the old corporatists than they do with a population that has a simple enjoyment of Miley Cyrus' cavortings. 

The anarcho-demotic is precisely not New Age (which Zizek clearly loathes and we share this dislike) because it pleasures itself in experience knowing it is experience whereas New Age thought still denies pleasure at its heart by insisting that experience is truth rather than just, well, experience. 

In that sense, Zizek's criticism of New Age thinking is valid. What he cannot do is make the journey into a Nietzschean joy and even tolerance. He cannot just smile at a hippie. He must censure. He has to impose another meaning on the West because he is not alone in not being able to let go of grand meanings and simply live.  

He tries to do this (being Hegelian) through synthesis, attempting to resynthesise progressivism with narcissism in order to repeat the ultimately sterile sociological performance of the Frankfort School but with new clothes. 

Still it is good to see philosophy back in fashion though it is like giving guns to teenagers when the philosophy is the outpourings of slovenian performance art ... Laibach is for ironists and our university departments do not produce ironists.

Response to a response [how Zizek claims to restore thesubject]

Zizek does have a point in trying to restore the subject (philosophically speaking) and he is a corrective to the worst excesses of post-modernism. In that sense, although his is a wrong turning, at least he is trying to move forward but, if he removes the value of history except as that which has happened and is not to be changed, he is in danger of removing responsibility for the future (ethically speaking).

The future is the unknown consequence of blind histories unfolding - in other words, he is in danger of dealing with ethical consequences as no more than a standing away from the situation as an observer, without responsibility except to the latest iteration of 'Geist which is to be taken as read. 

So, crimes in the future are perhaps to be treated as inconsequentially as the crimes of the past. He may not intend this but it is in the logic of the position. I do not think we can simply dismiss the costs of belief and action in the past.

We may sorrowfully understand causes and not share the sentimental transcendental disapproval of American liberalism but there is more to the case than this. 

The appropriation of the murdered by (say) Zionism may leave a bad taste in the mouth but an equal bad taste is left by declining to consider that the deaths were not just the outcome of history and no longer to be considered.

They could have been prevented by any one of a number of events. Contingency returns responsibility to us and the study of history is the study of contingencies that might well have lead to different outcomes. Zizek's world still unfolds as as a 'given' history (giving us the lunacy of the inevitability of the European Project in the hands of other Hegelians or the even dafter inevitability of the spread of Western values). 

There are two responses to this - a pessimistic responsibility mindful of the weight of consequences (the existentialist position) or a simple cynical faux-optimism that all will unfold regardless in a progressive way and regardless of the casualties along the way. 

A responsible pessimism still seeks that margin of the good through wilful engagement and choice but sees the past dead as exemplars of why we must make choices.

They are irrecoverable and certainly must not be inappropriately sanctified as they might be by the sentimental or the political (as with the Shoah) but they are dead past 'persons' of remembered consequence. The Chinese would immediately comprehends this concept of the ancestor as having their due. They are 'hungry ghosts'.

It was persons who were victims of ignorant cruelties. Our remembrance may not help them but it might help ourselves and those who come after. Zizek's position may come to be of the essence of evil, potentially a profound evil infecting our species at its core, one of ignorance.

German Idealism represents the central tenets of evil conduct in successive iterations of ideology - whether communist, fascist and liberal internationalist.

Response to Four More Responses

It is this claimed 'stand for progress' that I find most objectionable ... does the man have a psychological unconscious pre-disposition to seeing the world burn out of narcissistic outrage at its ineluctable complexity and at an 'is-ness' that does not brook the thoughts of intellectuals such as himself as having relevant meaning. 

That may be unfair but reading him on Robespierre certainly gave me the creeps. His utilitarian equivalent may be that dangerous man who writes the justifications for a slaughter of the innocents through analytical reason in order to save 'Gaia' or other species. 

We are back to Nietzsche's awareness of the death instinct amongst intellectuals and 'thinkers'. It is as if a word is constructed as a value (whether it be justice or progress) and then all humanity must bend to the Logos - the originating crime of Christianity out of Platonism, the Form of Forms. 

This is why Nietzsche is heroic - his 'ubermensch' is not a monster but an 'overcoming' of the tyranny of language. 

This overcoming of the tyranny of the word, while permitting seduction by it, is expressed in Heidegger's later Socratic teasing out of the genealogy of particular words in the German, working remorselessly towards a proposal for the pre-linguistic sentiment that enabled the word. 

One may thus be a thinking brute but a brute with no desire to find reasons to murder once language is understood as to its genealogy. Thus, the only Christian worth knowing philosophically is the one who silently gets the 'mysterium tremendum' that is beyond words and which enables all testaments to be thrust aside before the Christ on the Cross. 

Our worst monsters are wordsmiths who drive language to become the aspic in which we are all to be set. This is the word-weaving terrorism of the career intellectual ... I prefer the madman who cried over the beating of a horse.