{"id":18404,"date":"2015-10-31T22:52:29","date_gmt":"2015-11-01T06:52:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.richgibson.com\/blog\/?p=18404"},"modified":"2015-10-31T22:52:29","modified_gmt":"2015-11-01T06:52:29","slug":"rouge-forum-dispatch-update-from-the-consumerist-sparta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.richgibson.com\/blog\/rouge-forum-dispatch-update-from-the-consumerist-sparta\/","title":{"rendered":"Rouge Forum Dispatch: Update from the Consumerist Sparta"},"content":{"rendered":"

Americans Spent $7 Billion on Halloween. Scary!<\/strong><\/p>\n

We Say Fight Back!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism
\nby Ellen Meiksins Wood<\/h1>\n

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The intention of Marxism is to provide a theoretical foundation for interpreting the world in order to change it. This is not an empty slogan. It has\u2014or ought to have\u2014a very precise meaning. It means that Marxism seeks a particular kind of knowledge, one which is uniquely capable of illuminating the principles of historical movement and, at least implicitly, the points at which political action can most effectively intervene. This is not to say that the object of Marxist theory is to discover a \u2018scientific\u2019 programme or technique of political action. Rather, the purpose is to provide a mode of analysis especially well equipped to explore the terrain on which political action must take place. It can, however, be argued that Marxism since Marx has often lost sight of his theoretical project and its quintessentially political character. In particular, this is so to the extent that Marxists have, in various forms, perpetuated the rigid conceptual separation of the \u2018economic\u2019 and the \u2018political\u2019 which has served\u00a0bourgeois<\/em>\u00a0ideology so well ever since the classical economists discovered the \u2018economy\u2019 in the abstract and began emptying capitalism of its social and political content.<\/p>\n

Since, however, these conceptual devices do reflect\u2014albeit in a distorting mirror\u2014an historical reality specific to capitalism, a real differentiation of the \u2018economy\u2019, an attempt to rescue them from bourgeois ideology and make them illuminate more than they obscure might begin by reexamining the historical conditions that made such conceptions possible and plausible. The purpose of this reexamination would not be to explain away the \u2018fragmentation\u2019 of social life in capitalism, but to understand precisely what it is in the historical nature of capitalism that appears as a differentiation of \u2018spheres\u2019\u2014in particular, the \u2018economic\u2019 and the \u2018political\u2019. It may be possible to interpret this historical \u2018fragmentation\u2019 in such a way that the \u2018fetishism\u2019 of capitalist categories can be overcome, but without obscuring the historical realities they reflect.<\/p>\n

The differentiation of the \u2018economic\u2019 and the \u2018political\u2019 is, of course, not simply a theoretical but a practical problem. There is perhaps no greater obstacle to socialist practice than the separation of economic and political struggles which has typified modern working class movements. If this obstacle were, as many revolutionary socialists have contemptuously suggested, merely the product of a misguided, \u2018underdeveloped\u2019, or \u2018false\u2019 consciousness on the part of the working class, it might be easier to overcome. The tenacity of working class \u2018economism\u2019, however, derives precisely from its correspondence to the realities of capitalism and the ways in which capitalist appropriation and exploitation actually do divide the arenas of economic and political action, and actually do transform certain essential\u00a0political<\/em>\u00a0issues\u2014struggles over domination and exploitation that historically have been inextricably bound up with political power\u2014into distinctively \u2018economic\u2019 issues. This \u2018structural\u2019 separation may, indeed, be the most effective defense mechanism available to capital.<\/p>\n

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If, therefore, the object of Marxist theory is to shed light on the terrain of political action, it can neither ignore these historical realities nor ratify them by entrenching the separation of economics and politics that has served capitalism so well in theory and practice. Instead, it should explain precisely how and in what sense capitalism has driven a wedge between the economic and the political\u2014how and in what sense essentially political issues like the disposition of powers to control production and appropriation, or the allocation of social labour and resources, have been cut off from the political arena and displaced to a separate \u2018sphere\u2019.<\/p>\n

Karl Marx presented the world in its political aspect, not only in his explicitly political works but even in his most technical economic writings. His critique of political economy was, among other things, intended to reveal the political face of the economy which had been obscured by bourgeois political economists. The fundamental secret of capitalist production disclosed by Marx\u2014the secret that political economy systematically concealed, making it finally incapable of accounting for capitalist accumulation\u2014concerns the\u00a0social relation<\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0disposition of power<\/em>\u00a0that obtains between the worker and the capitalist to whom he sells his labour-power. This secret has a corollary: that the disposition of power between the individual capitalist and worker has as its condition the political configuration of society as a whole\u2014the balance of class forces and the powers of the state which permit the expropriation of the direct producer, the maintenance of absolute private property for the capitalist, and his control over production and appropriation. In volume 1 of\u00a0Capital<\/em>\u00a0Marx works his way from the commodity form through surplus value to the \u2018secret of primitive accumulation\u2019, disclosing at last that the \u2018starting point\u2019 of capitalist production \u2018. . . is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production\u2019,<\/a>\u00a0[1]\u00a0a process of class struggle and bloody intervention by the state on behalf of the expropriating class. The very structure of the argument suggests that, for Marx, the ultimate secret of capitalist production is…..www.versobooks.com\/blogs\/2302-ellen-meiksins-wood-the-separation-of-the-economic-and-the-political-in-capitalism<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Students<\/p>\n

SOAS, University of London has been shut down today. Hundreds of students and staff gathered outside the main building this morning demanding the reinstatement of Sandy Nicoll, Unison branch secretary, after he was suspended yesterday over allegations of gross misconduct.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The incident involves an accusation that Sandy had let several students and others through a security barrier in the main building yesterday, who then attempted to occupy the Director Valerie Amos\u2019 office.<\/p>\n

All of this is taking place in the context of a management document, leaked at the beginning of the academic term, which ranked all courses at SOAS according flawed methodology, and suggested that a third of these courses be cut.\u00a0 www.counterfire.org\/news\/18040-the-battle-over-the-future-of-soas<\/a><\/p>\n

Arundhati Roy: The NGO-ization of Resistance<\/a><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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A hazard facing mass movements is the NGO-ization of resistance. It will be easy to twist what I\u2019m about to say into an indictment of all NGOs. That would be a falsehood. In the murky waters of fake NGOs set up or to siphon off grant money or as tax dodges (in states like Bihar, they are given as dowry), of course, there are NGOs doing valuable work. But it\u2019s important to consider the NGO phenomenon in a broader political context.<\/p>\n

In India, for instance, the funded NGO boom began in the late 1980s and 1990s. It coincided with the opening of India\u2019s markets to neoliberalism. At the time, the Indian state, in keeping with the requirements of structural adjustment, was withdrawing funding from rural development, agriculture, energy, transport and public health. As the state abdicated its traditional role, NGOs moved in to work in these very areas. The difference, of course, is that the funds available to them are a minuscule fraction of the actual cut in public spending.<\/p>\n

Most large-funded NGOs are financed and patronized by aid and development agencies, which are, in turn, funded by Western governments, the World Bank, the UN and some multinational corporations. Though they may not be the very same agencies, they are certainly part of the same loose, political formation that oversees the neoliberal project and demands the slash in government spending in the first place.<\/p>\n

Why should these agencies fund NGOs? Could it be just old-fashioned missionary zeal? Guilt? It\u2019s a little more than that. NGOs give the impression that they are filling the vacuum created by a retreating state. And they are, but in a materially inconsequential way. Their real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right. They alter the public psyche. They turn people into dependent victims and blunt the edges of political resistance. NGOs form a sort of buffer between the sarkar and public. Between Empire and its subjects. They have become the arbitrators, the interpreters, the facilitators.\u00a0 www.towardfreedom.com\/33-archives\/globalism\/3660-arundhati-roy-the-ngo-ization-of-resistance<\/a><\/p>\n