- Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism (via maozedongisnotcool)
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Slavoj Zizek (via sociopoliticaldribble)
RELEVANT TO MACLEANS MAGAZINE.
(via mirrortheories)
translatingtheprintempserable:
Gordon Lefebvre, retired instructor; Éric Martin, professor of philosophy at Collège Édouard-Montpetit 23 May 2012
French text:http://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/350622/l-acte-fondateur-de-l-age-barbare
For the first time, we are taking pen in hand in Quebec with the fear that this could bring reprisals against us. Despite that, there are things that must be said and written when significant crises burst out that threaten to shake the very foundations of democracy.
Since the beginning of the student conflict, the government has presented the tuition hikes as a purely budgetary decision based on good sense and proper administration. However, despite its initial appearance as an accounting measure, it is in fact a squarely political measure, part of a neoliberal project to transform the relationship between youth and knowledge, institutions, and society in general.Indeed, in his speech presenting the emergency law, Jean Charest described the reform of university funding as a “founding act”: “What the government has done is a founding act; it is a matter of the future of our universities and colleges, and therefore of our children; the funding of institutions that are pivotal for the future of our people.” This refounding must be understood as a break from the values cultivated in our society since the Quiet Revolution: universality, equality, and the public nature of education.
From now on, education will be understood as a good for individual consumption that competing clients grab for. This transformation pushes students to internalize, under duress, the ideas and behaviours that businesses and the capitalist economy expect of them. Students are not the only ones upon whom the culture of “user-payer” is being imposed. This vision is being spread throughout society and throughout all public services.
This is the meaning of the “cultural revolution” that Finance Minister Raymond Bachand is talking about. If the government wants so badly to break the young people’s resistance, it is because it wants the mass transition to go docilely.
Subterfuge
To avoid a thorough debate on the aims of its policies, the government has done everything to move the discussion on to real but secondary issues. For example, one can bring out plenty of skilful statistics on access to student loans, but this does nothing to resolve the fundamental debate on free education, a demand painted from the beginning as utopian and unrealistic.
Before getting to the stage of decreeing the special law, the government tried to wear out the student movement. Then it pretended to be open to negotiations even as it was in the midst of preparing bill 78.
This bill threatens fundamental freedoms and breaks away from the founding principles of democracy. For example, under section 9, “The Minister of Education[…] may take all necessary measures[…] including specifying certain legislative and regulatory provisions as not applicable and prescribing any other necessary modification to this Act and to any other Act…” These provisions open the door to subjecting all laws to the discretionary and arbitrary power of a single minister. Is the intent really to calm down the situation, as Mr. Charest claims? Must we go so far as to understand, as certain lawyers say, that we should be calling it a “constitutional coup d’état” that only lacks a “padlock law”?*
The Darkness ahead
For the baby boom generation, the Grande Noirceur [Great Darkness, trad. n.] may be behind them, with the memory of Duplessis. But for the youth, who are now in the streets and have been since 2001, 2005, and the Toronto G20, the Great Darkness is straight ahead: Charest in Quebec City, Harper in Ottawa. In both cases, the budget is a weapon of mass destruction of social policies.
Against this, for weeks, youth have persisted, to introduce into the public debate a concept of the relationship to knowledge and a worldview that are opposed to the current neoliberal policies. They are setting for us an example of resistance to the policies of Charest and Harper through their combativeness, tenacity, resilience, and solidarity. If we abandon the youth to police truncheons and “truncheon laws” [lois matraque, i.e. Bill 78, trad. n.], we will have let the story be that this was simply a corporatist struggle or a generational conflict.
In fact, this is a struggle that concerns all of society and its future. We are choosing today the face of tomorrow’s Quebec. Will it be a collection of individual entrepreneurs in a competition war, or a society built around humanist values of social justice and respect for ecology? To prevent neoliberal barbarism from taking root, we have to make firm commitments to our youth and join in their struggle.
The student movement in Quebec is about so much more than tuition — it’s about contesting the inevitability of the neoliberal approach to politics. What’s ins
Thank you!
What is the term “extremism” in the context of politics supposed to convey? Non-tepid? Non-mainstream? It’s a useless and harmful term and it needs to be ditched along with the left/right dichotomy, which ultimately grounds it, for the following reasons:
- The left/right dichotomy is supposed to denote an extension of the center, normalcy, of political life. Terms like “far-right” or “far-left” or “extremism,” are used to describe huge departures from political normalcy, while at the same time reinforcing the claim that this normalcy is what grounds them—hence the spectrum.
- However, political projects that are deemed “far-right” or “far-left” are actually questioning the legitimacy of that very center or alleged normalcy. So to categorize them as somehow branching out from a center they reject is inaccurate.
- Unless you’re from Fox or other mainstream news networks, blanket terms like “extremism” or “far-whatever” render opposing ideologies such as Marxism or different anarchist sects and fascism or nationalism COMMENSURABLE, in that they are comparable just by virtue of their departure from status quo realpolitik.
- Fascism and Marxism/anarchism are commensurable on NO SPECTRUM. They are not opposing ideologies because they are on opposite sides of a political spectrum (created by who, by the way?) but because the ideas are fundamentally at odds on their own grounds; e.g. in a Fascist society such as 70s Greece, anti-capitalist and even social democratic parties were ILLEGAL—completely erased from any relevant “spectrum,” and leftists were continually assassinated throughout the trajectory of this regime and others like it. Likewise no Marxist or anarchist society can tolerate platforms for fascistic ideas, regardless if how they go about preempting and fighting fascism methodologically differs.
Now, I’m very well aware that most people are going to continue using these harmful distinctions and awful terminology, but you should resist them anyway. This language is tacitly pejorative. If someone asks you if you’re far-left, say no. Unless you do acknowledge liberalism as the default way of arranging politics. Remember, just because it is the extant paradigm doesn’t mean it’s the default paradigm.
Agree with everything here. The rhetoric surrounding and including ‘extremism’ creates an environment where I am assumed to be an Obama supporter because of my supposedly ‘leftist’ ideals on this bullshit spectrum. It’s also the source of well-meaning, but realistically very stupid and naive, demands for ‘bi-partisan’ politics and ‘third’ or ‘middle’ way politics that try to find some happy medium between presupposed ‘extremes’.
If we’re going to have a political binary like left/right, I always like this opposition I found described in a book on Latin American politics (can’t remember the name right now): it claimed that the true opposition today wasn’t between left/right politics, but between neoliberal economic policies and social democratic values. That makes far more sense to me, personally.
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Caliban and the Witch, Sylvia Federici.
I know basically all I do is quote this book lately, but it’s with good reason. It’s astonishing; powerfully written, passionately argued, and remarkably researched. Most of all, it’s incredibly important when it comes to understanding the struggles of our own time; one in which capitalism, having entered a severe moment of crisis with the collapse of global finance, is attempting to reassert itself by imposing a strict social division of labour upon human communities. This division of labour demands radical modes of expropriation, exclusion, and devaluation capable of disciplining the production of value and surplus. Hence the renewed invectives and wars against racial and cultural others, the violent attacks on women’s bodies by patriarchal institutions, the renewed extension of servitude through the economic instruments of debt and austerity (and that smarmy, slimy, pathetic moral injunction to ‘live within your means’).
So important. So relevant.
(via mirrortheories)
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Tiger Beatdown › Dirty Girls and Bad Feminists: A Few Thoughts on “I Love Dick”
I am really into Sady Doyle being self-critical about her engagement with Internet Feminism. This is my favourite thing she’s ever written. Largely because something about her engagement with Internet Feminism has always bugged me, and now she herself has explained exactly why. Thank you Sady. If that sounds like a backhanded compliment I really don’t mean it that way?
(via becoming-wave)(via becoming-wave)
Are we done yet? Do we have to endure another full day of self-congratulation at Obama’s personal endorsement of same-sex marriage? His announcement was heralded with as much praise as last summer’s legalization of gay marriage in New York. And that was, you know, actual legislation.
This is hardly surprising given the fact that marriage equality is designed to distract liberal consciences and give Democrats political cover to gut social services. While the passage of gay marriage enjoyed the support of prominent campaign donors, it was directly preceded by cuts to homeless shelters for queer youth. It’s a campaign season bait-and-switch — winning votes without making real concessions.
Case in point: Bloomberg commended Obama for joining a legacy of “courageous stands that so many Americans have taken over the years on behalf of equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, stretching back to the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.” This days after slashing youth homeless shelter funding by $7 million, in a city where 40% of homeless youth are LGBT.
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Kate Redburn
Jacobin, as always, totally on point.
Žižek discusses atheism and Richard Dawkins, Norway and Breivik, Woody Allen’s “Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask”, the role of poetry in ethnic cleansing, his crush on Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, and so on and so on.
The austerity-stricken university is combustible, and knowledge is incandescent.
