Class Warfare

Quelle est la nature du travail ? Oui ou non est‐il le propre du phénomène humain ? Offre‐t‐il vraiment un sens à notre existence terrestre, voire à ce qui pourrait lui faire suite ? Seule une approche anthropologique articulant les éléments historiques et critiques appropriés permet de comprendre son rôle actuel, son histoire, et son futur. Une telle visée (certains parleraient de hauteur de vue) dévoile instantanément les enjeux et dessine l'horizon de l'action politique au XXI e siècle. Si cette visée était cultivée citoyennement, elle indiquerait comment et pourquoi créer les situations qui s'imposent pour tenir grand compte des nouvelles réalités de la guerre des classes. Lorsque Winston Churchill promet à ses concitoyens « du sang, du labeur, des larmes et de la sueur 2 », il ignore probablement qu'au même moment le gouvernement nazi prétend pour sa part que « le travail rend libre 3 ». Son ton oraculaire, quasiment biblique, donne à penser que la condition humaine ne peut s'envisager en dehors des catégories de châtiment et de pénitence. Nous allons le voir, il y a toujours une théologie du travail à l'oeuvre dans les errances historiques de l'homo sapiens. Afin de simplifier la discussion, il était inévitable de se concentrer sur une histoire et il était expédient de penser l'histoire européenne. Bien que cette double réduction apparaisse de plus en plus inacceptable aux chercheurs avertis de la richesse des cultures, elle est tout à fait expédiente dans le cadre d'une enquête portant sur les liens incestueux existant entre technique, technoscience, aliénation et impérialisme. 2 « I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. » (Winston Churchill, lors de son premier discours devant la Chambre des communes en tant que Premier ministre du Royaume‐Uni, le 13 mai 1940 ; voir http://www.winstonchurchill.org.) 3 Le bon mot « Arbeit macht frei » fut affiché à l'entrée de nombreux camps de concentration en juin 1940, à l'instigation du Général SS Theodor Eicke.

Théorie et pratique du collectivisme oligarchique. Le complot de la Grande Réinitialisation n’aura pas lieu, Louvain-la-Neuve, Éditions Chromatika, 2021. (978-2-930517-80-3)

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La crise covidienne se poursuit depuis plus d’un an, laissant un sentiment d’inquiétante étrangeté chez chacun. Que se passe- t-il lorsque nous reprenons confiance en nous-mêmes, en nos perceptions, et en notre capacité de raisonner clairement à par- tir des données empiriques disponibles ? Qu’advient-il du récit anxiogène qu’on nous perfuse depuis de longs mois lorsqu’on peut en débattre librement avec ses pairs ?

Huit questions permettent de revisiter l’événement Covid-19 et de lui donner un sens, voire une direction.
Sommes-nous en guerre, comme certains voudraient nous le faire croire?
Comment différencier caste, classe et élite ?
Le concept de lutte des classes est-il toujours éclairant ?
Quelles sont les options de gestion de la crise globale systémique attendue depuis 1972 et le complot en constitue-t-il une ?
Quel est le mécanisme général qui préside à l’instauration d’un totalitarisme ?
En quoi Orwell nous permet-il d’actualiser et de spécifier la manipulation à l’œuvre ?
Quels sont les vices apparents et les vertus supposées de la réinitialisation capitaliste qui nous guette ?
Le nazisme ne fournirait-il pas toutes les clefs nécessaires pour comprendre la crise ?

When one thinks of the archetypical hero versus villain in the world of comics, Batman and The Joker often come to mind. They connect to the concept of the eternal battle between oppositions. Choosing a side, however, is relative. Heroes can look like villains through the eyes of a hero’s villain. It is an argument that The Joker uses to challenge Batman, in Arkham Asylum. He is tricked into accepting The Joker’s invitation to the Feast of Fools, which was a theatrical event that dates as far back as the Middle Ages. Its contents usually revolved around social and moral criticisms of their time. The fact that an accusation full of reason comes from the mouth of a madman, is an attempt to obscure its contents through comical absurdity. According to Foucault, by the end of the Middle Ages, European literature had stigmatized the madman as a satirical figure by attributing to him the lack of reason to the rest of his repertoire, which consisted of poverty, crime, and ugliness. By reducing the rejects of society to the point of comical absurdity, it often helped reinforce the position of reason, but sometimes it backfires. The absurd claim of the insane is actually a useful tool in philosophical logic. A reductio ad absurdum is a process of refutation on grounds that an absurdity will follow the entailment if we were to accept a certain claim. Morrison claims that Batman would only be mentally unstable if he did not wear a costume and channeled his pain through violence, but so does The Joker, and he is labeled insane. The whole structure rests on the hidden premise that the rich are superior to the poor, who are monsterized like the fool is ridiculed. Nietzsche himself thought that if a person was ugly, they were automatically also criminals. What a reader is subjected to, in the Batverse, is a class warfare between the rich and the poor, authority and the whistleblower, or the wolves and the sheep. There is a tacit agreement at play, and it is The Joker who engages the reader to question that agreement.

The northwestern Roman provinces of Africa were a religious workshop and spiritual battlefield in the aftermath of the ‘great’ persecution. Cramped between desert and sea African Christianity was divided not on terms of doctrine, but of devotion and zeal during perilous times. The polarized debate which occurred between Christians who handed over their scriptures as a token repudiation of faith during the ‘great’ persecution (303-305) and those who actively resisted, divided the population in social and cultural terms. Donatists saw themselves as the ‘true’ Church with valid sacraments emphatically refusing communion to the traditores, their former fellow clerics who actively cooperated with the pagan authorities. What initially seemed to be an issue of succession gradually evolved into an open in the African countryside. The image, however, was far more complicated. Beyond the ‘Church of martyrs’ and the traditores of faith lays an antithesis between the classical heritage of a ‘world of cities’ and the cultural otherness of the  Phoenician/Berber countryside which gained a voice of its own through Donatism.

When the Paris-centered 18th-century intellectual revolution (Enlightenment) coincided with the London-centered First Industrial Revolution, the European intelligentsia demanded a political and constitutional system that closes the iniquitous gap between societal contributions of the forward-looking bourgeoisie and the reality of their inferior politically and legally mandated social status that precluded societal progress. Meritocracy needed to replace the old regime of privilege that allowed the nobility to rule on the basis of birth status, not only because the bourgeoisie wanted political and social recognition commensurate with their actual and potential contributions in all endeavors, as Sieyes wrote in the What is the Third Estate, but because they identified the national interest with their social order and regarded the backward-looking clergy and nobility (First and Second Estates) as more menacing enemies to the French nation than England. This was the birth of a new definition of progress, nationalism, and democracy, along with the nascent stage of bourgeois consciousness and value system.

Panel 30: Great Refusals: Refusing One Dimensionality Today

The Dialectics of Liberation in an Age of Neoliberal Capitalism

International Herbert Marcuse Society

Seventh Biennial Conference

26-28 October 2017

York University

https://marcuseconference.wordpress.com/

This review demonstrates the way that Khatibi’s poem configures the political in relation to his singular poetics.  In particular, it shows how the author’s idiosyncratic understanding of class, the “class warrior,” and the “class enemy” dramatize a combat that links language, thought, society, and the body in the creation of a permanent critique inspired by anticolonialism and Marxist thought, but also deforming Marx through the “Taoist Style” announced in the title.

This paper is about Marxist political economy and Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) as a field of inquiry. It begins with a discussion of the traditional role of Marxist political economy in CDS, arguing that for the most part it has been limited and partial. It then considers an example of a serious attempt to carry out a Marxist political economy analysis of discourse in society – Claudia Ortu’s [2008. The denial of class struggle by British Governments in their anti- union discourse (1978–2007). Critical Discourse Studies, 5, 289–301] analysis of the denial of class struggle and anti-union discourse in Britain in the period 1978–2007. This leads to a discussion of the author’s recent research on material and discursive class warfare in contemporary Spain, focussing specifically on conflicts arising between a right-wing government defending the interests of the banks and elites and a grass-roots organisation defending the interests of the popular classes, in particular those who either have lost, or are in danger of losing, their homes due to mortgage default. The paper ends with some thoughts on the future of CDS, with or without a clear Marxist political economy base.

Here are some notes for an intensive, seminar-style discussion of various strands of political theory (and political theology) drawn from sixteenth-century Europe. Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More, and Martin Luther certainly do not address questions of political theory in the same sorts of ways, but reading them alongside one another can afford us a glimpse into the diversity of "Reformation"-era debates about how best to relate one's social position to the dominant (yet dynamic) social order.

Discussed in some detail here are: Luther's "To the German Nobility," his treatise on "Temporal Authority," and the "Admonition to Peace;" Erasmus' pithy "Sileni of Alcibiades;" and More's seminal _Utopia_.

HOW SEPARATE are the public and private actions of politicians and their high-profile staffers? Is it “class war” when the Left exposes the hypocrisy of the conservatives, but not when the Right wants to attack workers and welfare recipients?

We have cause to consider these questions this week, because several examples are presented to us from the White House and from our own domestic politics.

Arbeiderpartiets fall er del av større internasjonal trend. De faller fordi de ikke vil innse at etterkrigstidens klassekompromiss er over. Før og etter andre verdenskrig skaptes og sementertes et klassekompromiss i mange europeiske land, og fra sosialdemokratiets perspektiv ble dette inngått fra en posisjon av styrke. Under nyliberalismen beholdt mange sosialdemokrater både makt og innflytelse gjennom å holde liv i klassekompromisset, men nå fra en posisjon av svakhet. I dag har klassekompromisset forvitret: sosialdemokrater forholder seg til dette fra en posisjon av rådløshet og desperasjon.