The "Oppressed" Rich

Don't you feel bad for them? I mean they worked so hard for their bonuses on top of bonuses didn't they? They selflessly work for the benefit of others, so it's only fair that they should be rewarded by the rest of us, right? It's clearly worth the price (see below), isn't it?

Extending the tax cuts for all Americans with taxable income over $250,000 for joint filers ($200,000 for single filers) would cost the country about $40 billion next year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, and it would cost $700 billion over the next decade.

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Žižek on Al Jazeera

I think Zizek does reasonably well in this venue. He sets himself apart from facile crisis-mongering, and he handles the questions about greed and tolerance very well. Al Jazeera, as far as I can tell, seems to be the best mass TV station on the planet. Their programming has more substance and, unheard of in the West, a certain amount of sympathy for oppressed and exploited peoples, particularly in the global South. I'm not saying their politics are perfect, but, as I say, for mass commercial TV, they are reasonably good.

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On the Allegations Against Assange

Julian Assange, the spokesman for Wikileaks, stands accused of sexual assault in Sweden. It is well-known that U.S. officials have been scrambling to find something, anything to charge him for in order to try to stop him from doing what he does.

The mere existence of Wikileaks is a threat to the integrity and continued dominance of the U.S. military-industrial complex. To be sure, the whistle-blower website hardly has the power to topple this punishing machine on its own -for that we'd need a mass movement in the belly of the beast. But it is still a serious threat- a threat to the smooth functioning of the U.S. military machine. It is not for nothing, then, that elites are livid. If I were Assange, I would fear for my life- the U.S. government has a long tradition of carrying out political assassinations.

So in this context, it is a bit unsettling that Interpol has issued an international warrant for Assange based on the allegations he faces in Sweden. Whatever it is that is alleged to have occurred in Sweden, and I'll get to that in a moment, you can bet that Interpol and international power brokers don't really give a shit. They just want to bring Assange down by any possible means, solely because of his political role in Wikileaks.

But it is a separate question whether Assange committed rape. I myself have no idea whether he did or not- but I will tell you that much of the response to the question has been dismissive and sexist. For example, from Counterpunch:

"Ardin has written and published on her blog a “revenge instruction”, describing how to commit a complete character assassination to legally destroy a person who “should be punished for what he did”. If the offence was of a sexual nature, the revenge also must also be sex-related, she wrote. Ardin was involved in Gender Studies in Uppsala University, in charge of gender equality in the Students’ Union, a junior inquisitor of sorts.

In other words, she was perfect for the job."

Perfect for the job, huh? Because she worked in a Gender Studies department and was involved in work enforcing gender equality? That sounds to me like feminist-baiting. The caricature is well-known enough: feminists are always women, they are always "man haters" and they are just out for "revenge". They might as well have just called her a "bitch".

Now, I'm not really interested in Ardin the person, what her politics really are, etc. I'm just noting that she's been impugned for allegedly being a feminist, etc. as in the above quote from Counterpunch. It might turn out that she is a CIA agent, and it would hardly matter for the point I'm making here: there should be nothing illicit or suspicious about being a feminist, fighting for gender equality, and so on.

The other layer of the sexism here has to do with the talk about the legal dimensions of rape. It seems to be a favorite line of many sexists that, somehow, all cases of rape are the fault of the woman, on the one hand, or simply malicious acts of "defamation" waged by bitter women that "hate men" on the other. I've read bits about this issue on several websites that more or less invoked these very tropes.

I've also seen character defenses of Assange to the effect that "he simply couldn't have committed rape... he's a great guy who does a lot of good political work!". That's non-sense. As I note above, he is a great guy who does a lot of good political work, to be sure. But that is not a defense in a court of law for a good reason: it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether he did, or did not, sexually assault someone. They don't call it the ad hominem fallacy for nothing.

I've also seen complaints about the allegations that are so general in their attacks that, if generalized, they would to rule out the possibility of conviction in any rape case whatsoever. That's clearly reactionary. As is well-known, the U.S. legal system is woefully unable to address the problem of rape. It's not surprising, then, that a very small percentage of rapes are even reported, and a far small number ever conclude in a conviction. The system is set up against the interests of women.

As far as I can tell, none of this has anything to do with imperialism, the politics of whistle-blowing, hacktivism or global power plays. That is, none of the business in Sweden, whatever the facts are, has anything whatsoever to do with the politics of Wikileaks.

Now, the powers that be want us to think that it does. They want us to think that the allegations in Sweden are a knock against Wikileaks itself. They want us to, irrationally, let the U.S. war machine off the hook because of something Assange, the man, did or didn't do in his personal life. That's clearly bullshit.

So let's not buy into the imperialist narrative. Whatever did or did not happen in Sweden is a separate issue- let's not shit on feminism because the U.S. war machine sucks. And let's not use this as an excuse to further the oppressive myth that rape accusations are always about some "vindictive" feminist scholar looking to castrate some innocent, angelic man.

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On the closing of the Cabrini-Green highrises

Cabrini-Green occupies a strange place in the public imagination of many (especially white) Americans. The mere existence of the 1992 horror film Candyman, most of which was actually shot on location at Cabrini, is a nice metaphor for this phenomenon. On the one hand, it is the object of scorn. But on the other, one finds a persistent, voyeuristic fascination with the Cabrini phenomenon that seems aptly filed away in the same genre as detached-observer crime porn TV-shows like Gangland.

Lately we've seen quite a bit of coverage of the fact that the last Cabrini-Green high-rise is slated to be demolished soon. Since the implementation of the CHA's "Plan for Transformation" in 2000, more than 1,700 residents have displaced as the high rises have been torn down one by one. This is a nation-wide phenomenon that began in the 90s, which, I think it's fair to say, is part of a larger neoliberal trend to privatize, cut public services, and so forth.

As I've written elsewhere on this blog, US public housing is shot through with contradictions of various sorts. In order to be able to say anything illuminating about the present situation concerning the demolition of the Cabrini-Green high-rises, we need to say a bit about their history.

The first major piece of public housing legislation in the US was the 1937 Housing Act, which ostensibly aimed to respond to serious scarcity problems in housing during the Great Depression. But due to "the successful lobbying of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Savings and Loan Association, the act was kept from being a central part of FDR's New Deal agenda". Moreover:

"Roosevelt was persuaded that public housing was "too socialist" a remedy to the existing scarcity of homes, and kept it out of the Administration's legislative agenda until the mid-1930s. After a bitter ideological debate in Congress, the act was finally passed in 1937, but not without significant concessions to the private sector. Among the most significant were requirements that public housing schemes include "equivalent demolition" of housing in the surrounding community (and compensation to the owner) so that no new units were added to the overall stock". (see J. Hackworth's excellent book, The Neoliberal City)

Of course, the reason for this was that property-owning classes and real estate capital did not want public housing to compete with them (a development which would have forced them to lower rent prices to remain competitive in a market with more housing supply). It has been the same story with every subsequent housing bill passed after 1937: every measure would include provisions designed to prevent a serious public challenge to real-estate capital.

After WWII, the mass influx of soldiers returning to major cities led to a severe housing shortage. Landlords began installing "crash panels", illegally, to turn a two-unit building into an overcrowded 8 or 10-unit cash cow. This severe shortage gave landlords a substantial amount of economic bargaining power and led to a great deal of dirty dealings and exploitation. This vulnerability and exploitation was particularly acute in the case of black people, who, in Chicago for instance, were confined to small ghettos whose borders were strictly enforced by white violence (see Beryl Satter's excellent Family Properties for an in-depth analysis of how racism and exploitation shaped the housing scene for black Chicagoans 1945-the present.)

It was in this context of severe shortage that the 1949 Federal Housing Act was passed. Like the 1937 bill, landlords and real estate capital fought hard to make sure that the Act wouldn't endanger their economic power. They succeeded marvelously. Again, the letter of the law would require that public housing be prevented from ever competing with private landlords. The bill required that:

"(a) rent ceilings were to be set at a maximum of 20% lower than the lowest nearby private housing, (b) structures were to be stigmatizing and aesthetically austere in order to make public housing stand out from average housing stock; and (c) there would be low operating budgets for the Public Housing Authorities charged with managing the facilities."

There's a bit more context to put in place here. The idea of building large high-rises in the manner of the Cabrini towers was part of an international trend. After the Great Depression, a new configuration of capitalism emerged under the influence of Keynesian ideas about fiscal policy. The old ideas of "laissez-faire" were almost universally discredited by the Great Depression. Understandably, it was pretty difficult to buy the old myth that the "free" market would solve all problems after the devastation caused by the Depression. It was clear to everyone that, left to its own devices, capitalism was prone to serious, recurring crises and instability. Thus, a consensus formed at the top of society to the effect that much larger measures of state regulation and intervention would be required to sustain steady profits and economic growth. This postwar "managed" capitalism came to define the era from 1945-1973.

Though many reforms came about through this change of orthodoxy which benefited ordinary people (vastly increased public spending on infrastructure, education, health care and housing), we should not be mistaken about the power dynamics involved. Capitalist social relations were hardly up for reform, and most of the beneficial policies of the era were implemented in a technocratic, top-down manner. This was social-engineering from above, not a serious reform program from below.

Public housing policy between 1945-1973 exemplified these trends. Some of the ideas that would influence US public housing, to be sure, had predated the Second World War (e.g. the top-down, technocratic ideas of Le Corbusier which were implemented to clear slums in Paris). In either case, however, the basic forces driving public housing were all coming from above rather than below.

This is, then, the context in which the high-rise towers at Cabrini-Green were built. They were, from the very beginning, part of a top-down plan that sought more to deal with a "problem population" than to empower those on the bottom of society. The structures were built to facilitate social control, not community or the satisfaction of human need. This is evident in the aesthetic properties of the buildings.

They created intentionally austere, bare-bones and basically anti-social built environments. The community and solidarity that did arise in Cabrini did so in spite of the built structures themselves. The buildings were spaced out, far away from one another, and all of the towers prioritized automobile-scale development over human-scale development. They were all single-use and included no mixed-use development at all. Rather than looking like inviting places conducive to community interaction, the high-rises were in many ways uninviting and unsettling to they eye. I don't say this because of the building materials themselves- I actually think very highly of reinforced concrete as a building material (aesthetically, environmentally, etc.) Moreover, I don't entirely endorse the Jane Jacobs-style critique of Brutalism and other Modern experiments in reconfiguring space- there was some, albeit often botched, progressive content to movements like the Bauhaus. Still, to be sure, much of what Jacobs had to say about "deductive" urban renewal (what black activists described as "negro removal") is absolutely right on. This inhuman, technocratic nearly destroyed urban life as we know it. I just wouldn't take the conservative view that everything about the Modernist experiment was misguided, adventurist elitism.

This is all a way of saying that I agree that the high-rises were basically a failed model from the very beginning. So what light does this shed on the demolition of Cabrini today?

So far I've mostly spoken of buildings, structural considerations, and macro-level policy. But the question of Cabrini has to do with real, living human beings. What will become of the former residents who will be displaced and what other options will be made available to them?

The residents themselves appear to be under no illusions about the way the system works. They understand that it does not work to serve their interests. Thus, they are entirely justified in being skeptical about whether there is a viable alternative waiting for them when the high rises are all torn down. They are rightly suspicious of neoliberal Section 8 policies as an alternative to real public housing. They are, for good reason, angry that they are being displaced not "for their own good", but because of the potential profits to be made by dispossessing them and gentrifying the area. They are aware that they are being forced to choose between a turd and a shit sandwich, and they justifiably want a more desirable alternative. And they deserve a better alternative. If mainstream America looked at the residents of public housing as fully equal citizens worthy of respect, rather than deviant subhumans who are more "problems" than fellow comrades, then perhaps it would be more obvious than it is that society owes them a better alternative. This isn't a matter of "charity", but of justice.

To be sure, some news reports will see this as a human interest story (rather than political) and will express some sympathy for the displaced residents. However, many news reports will try to cast the resident activism and opposition as irrational. Why, the news reports will ask, would a rational human being want to continue living in such squalid conditions? But that's the "nice" way of putting their point. Underneath that "innocent" head-scratching attitude is often a kind of anti-"welfare mother" racism that abhors the alleged slothfulness and deviance of those who reside in public housing.

But the only thing that is irrational in this situation is the false choice forced upon us: either choose the failed top-down public housing model of the 50s/60s, or have no public housing at all. In effect, we're told that we have to accept under-maintained, under-funded, crime-infested structures like Cabrini, or we have to accept that public housing itself is a rotten idea. This makes no sense.

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Voices of Cabrini

Voices of Cabrini: Remaking Chicago's Public Housing from Ronit Bezalel on Vimeo.

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Two phenomena that aren't unrelated

Here and here.

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Seymour on Day X 3

Here.

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GRITtv: Laurie Penny: Politics Don't Do Young People

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Obama's Austerity Commission Releases Plan

Details here. Nothing in it is surprising. Basically they want to slash taxes for the richest Americans while forcing the rest of us to work longer, retire later, and accept other punishing cuts to social services. This is the same kind of top-down garbage that has incited mass protests all over Europe.

Those fuckers want to lower the top marginal tax rate even lower than Bush did. In other words, they want it lower than it has been in more than a 100 years:

The top tax rate is currently 35 percent and is scheduled to rise to 39.6 percent in 2011. The commission would cut that rate to between 23 and 28 percent, while shaving between seven and nine points off the corporate rate.

You've got to be fucking kidding me. How, in the midst of the worst recession and budget crisis since the Great Depression, can it really be a serious proposal to reduce the already criminally low tax rates for the very richest?

Increasing the top marginal rate is the easiest way to bring in more revenue to offset the shortfalls caused by the crisis. It's money that is sitting idle in massive surpluses hoarded by individuals who, all by themselves, possess more than millions of Americans grouped together. It is obvious that the top marginal rate should be increased substantially, the only question is how much. But that's not even on the table: now the discussion is going to center on how much extra money to throw at the rich while we slash services for the vast majority.

For the rich and powerful, it is nothing but gifts, free credit, bonuses, and increased "swagger".

For the rest of us, it is layoffs, cuts in transportation, school closings, increased retirement ages, pay cuts, foreclosures and evictions.

The stupid report is titled "The Moment of Truth". Moment of truth my ass. We have the resources to expand services radically... there is no reason that anything needs to be cut, unless we play by the lopsided ruling-class logic that animates Republicans and Democrats alike. This is a lopsided class war against the majority of us.

As a slogan on a placard (being held up in the struggle in the UK) put it: Fight for Every Job! Resist Every Cut! Put People Before Profit!

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Diane Ravitch Responds to Bill Gates

Here. Ravitch is awesome. It's good that there's a voice out there in the mainstream press coming from someone who cares about the right things.

Bill Gates is an arrogant prick. The idea that he deserves to have a massive role in shaping the basic structure of education in this country, solely because he happens to have shit loads of money, is preposterous. How different is this from a powerful monarch, ruling by divine right, demanding to have a say in the way that education is structured?

It's as if he's saying: "Hey, I've got a ton of money. Listen to me and do what I say!" And, unsurprisingly, his "recommendations" are firmly in step with the right-wing views that have been coming from the business community for decades: privatize, bust unions, blame teachers, etc. etc.

People spend a lot of time learning to become teachers, studying pedagogy, working with students face-to-face. The practical know-how that teachers acquire through doing, rather than sitting in a thrown above the fray, is a billion times more valuable than the neoliberal dictates of a powerful businessman who has taken it upon himself to "fix" something that big business had a hand in destroying. The new orthodoxy is that the "brilliant" "free"-market ideas, which brought us global recession and social misery, are the magic answer to education.

Let's tax the rich and bring education under the democratic control of teachers and parents. We can decide ourselves how to best structure our own education system- we don't need unqualified dictates coming from on high. No rich wankers required, thank you.

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Richard Seymour on the eruption of struggle in the UK

Here, here and here.

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Does Socialism Exist in the World Today?

MORE THAN a third of Americans have a positive image of "socialism," according to recent Gallup and Rasmussen polls, but I think it's safe to say that most Americans, even those who feel socialism would make a big improvement in their lives, have only a vague idea of what socialism might look like.

As a socialist, therefore, people often ask me, "So what's your model for socialism?" And more often than not, they want to know what "socialist country" I would point to as coming the closest to embodying what I'm for.

People often find my answer to this question puzzling, at least at first. When I explain that there is no country in the world today that I would describe as socialist, it seems confusing. What about Sweden or France? What about Cuba or, before 1989, the former Soviet Union and East Germany?

[...]

Read the rest of Eric Ruder's answer to this question here.

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Obama's Priorities on Display

Compare and Contrast. Add in the fact that Obama and the Dems will extend Bush's tax gifts to the ultra-rich and it becomes even more lopsided. The Democrats and Republicans are clear about which side of the class struggle they're on. What about you?

A 2% windfall tax on the massive profits raked in last quarter would obviate the need for such austerity measures. Obama-led Washington would rather push down federal workers' pay, axe medicare and allow bridges to collapse before daring to tax the criminal profits being earned by the rich in midst of widespread social misery due to the recession. What does that say about their priorities?

Just keep in mind- in less than 2 years we will be in the midst of a media frenzy over PR tactics, "enthusiasm" levels, and so forth. That is to say, we'll be in the midst of a presidential election, which, we'll be told over and over, is "the most important election of our lifetimes". Let me preempt some of that myopic, insipid inanity and ask that you keep the above "compare and contrast" clearly in view. Is choosing between a turd and a shit-sandwich the best we can do?

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Don't you hate it when...

(Via Feministe) Read this, and then this. Zing! What is it with this stupid genre of quasi-confessional male whining about the "conquest" of women that has generally been confined to college newspapers, but is now breaking into such "reputable" periodicals as the Chicago Trib?

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North Korea and Confusion

I'm on a bunch of different Left-wing listservs of various sorts, so I've seen a handful of discussions/debates about the saber-rattling standoffs between North Korea and the US/South Korea. Now, I have no wish to see the provocations escalate into a full-fledged war. I don't support the US imperialism in any form, and the recent provocations of North Korea are no exception.

But I am incensed by the confusion that some on the not-so-critical Left sometimes bring to issues of this sort. I observed a couple of stand-offs on message boards where one person was simply claiming that "everything the West says about North Korea is a lie", following every criticism of North Korea with a jab at George Bush and the U.S. This is pure confusion. This is complete non-sense. Luckily, people with views of this sort are a small fringe on the Left and are dwindling in numbers with the (welcomed!) demise of the legacy of Stalinism.

No sane person could say that North Korea has anything whatsoever to do with socialism. Even the North Korean government doesn't bother to claim such things! The official state ideology is far more akin to a religious founding myth --Kim Il Sung is treated like a God. His son, Kim Jong Il is merely the "de facto" leader because, officially speaking, the "Eternal President" (his father, deceased) is still the de jure leader. I'm not making this shit up. On the face of it, North Korea has more to do with feudalism than any other kind of social formation. I would claim, with little hesitation, that it is probably the most repressive country on the whole planet. The majority of the population is held in contempt by a strata of military elites, led by a quasi-monarch who rules by "birthright".

This is all a way of saying the obvious: there is nothing Left-wing whatsoever about the regime in North Korea, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with socialism. Socialists must support struggles from below within North Korea to try to bring down their own government. The government itself, however, deserves nothing but scorn from the Left.

But, and this is the crucial point, none of this commits us to saying anything positive about U.S. imperialism. On the contrary, the only progressive stance here is to unequivocally condemn both U.S. imperialism, on the one hand, and the repressive regime in Pyongyang on the other. I don't think the U.S. military can play a progressive role anywhere on earth- so my stance on intervention or provocation of any sort is resolutely negative. But condemning U.S. imperialism doesn't commit us to giving one ounce of support to North Korea. As far as I'm concerned, the quasi-feudal North Korean government is the most repressive and controlling on the planet. As such, it deserves nothing but harsh critique from the Left. But criticizing a repressive government hardly means that you therefore support a U.S.-led bombing raid against it.

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Against Idealism

It is now quite fashionable to speak of the "linguistic constitution" of politics, to speak in terms of various "discourses" and their genealogies. For some on the academic Left, it is self-evident that it's all "discourse" all the way down.

In extreme versions, the view is taken to imply that "there is nothing outside the text". One exegesis of this remark could even claim that viruses are simply discursive all the way down. The painfully obvious fact that HIV, say, can kill us regardless of what our conceptual or discursive repertoire consists in seems utterly lost on these folks.

Strangely, many of the basic theses of this new orthodoxy are structurally similar to 19th century idealism. Idealism is just the view that the world, and, hence, reality itself is the mere product of our concepts, ideas or, in the presently fashionable parlance, discourses or "signifying practices". In other words, there is a one way street and it proceeds from a set of discursive practice to the world, which is itself nothing but a collection of significations.

Perry Anderson has rightly rebuked this turn for worshiping the "megalomania of the signifier" in such a way that there cease to be extra-linguistic referents at all.

This becomes extremely problematic once we start thinking about what's wrong with the world and how to change it. If you think that discursive problems are the only problems there are, naturally you're not going to worry much about collective struggle, revolutionary demands for justice, or radical reconfiguration of basic social institutions. You're not going to have much to say about the structure of social relations, economic systems, material conditions, productive forces and technology, etc. Instead, you'll emphasize certain kinds of oppositional discursive practices that aim to unseat or disrupt other discursive practices. Perhaps you'll emphasize performances of various kinds that take up and redeploy oppressive signifying practices.

Now, I don't want to suggest that such oppositional practices are pointless or apolitical. On the contrary, I am convinced of their critical potential and I support struggle at all levels of contemporary life. But let's not kid ourselves that this is all we can do. And let's not kid ourselves that such practices have the capacity, all by themselves, to spontaneously shake the foundations of the status quo.

To be sure, idealism gets something importantly right. We wouldn't want a crude, "vulgar" materialism that simply reduced ideas, concepts, practices, etc. to the configuration of say, the productive forces, or, worse, to the biological constitution of social agents. We don't want to be stuck with positivism. If it were a choice between such reductionism and idealism, I'd take idealism any day of the week (for at least there is a recognizable human element in the idealist story, as opposed to the mechanistic determinism of reductionism).

I agree that such reductionist, positivist views miss the point, correctly identified by idealists, that we always already find ourselves in some network of intersubjectively shared meanings which forms the horizon within which we act and make sense of ourselves and the world. Marx's statement at the beginning of the Eighteenth Brumaire says as much: we make our history, to be sure, but not in conditions of our own choosing, but in conditions transmitted from the past. The traditions of past generations, he argues, weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

As Alasdair MacIntyre has put the point, "to posses a concept involves believing or being able to act in certain ways in certain circumstances, to alter concepts, whether by modifying existing concepts or by making new concepts available or by destroying old ones, is to alter behavior." That is, "if the limits of action are the limits of description, then to analyse the ideas current in a society is also to discern the limits within which action necessarily moves in that society...to identify the limits of social action in a given period is to identify the limits of descriptions current in that age". MacIntyre's view is that this is just what the Marxist critique of ideology is all about. But, and this is crucial, the Marxist view, though it gives the importance of conceptual schemes and sets of beliefs their due, does not collapse into a static idealism. How is that?

What Marxism gives us, which classic and contemporary forms of idealism do not, is a way of seeing how our conceptual repertoire is impacted by, and in turn impacts, the structural configuration of society as a whole. That is, systematic mechanisms in contemporary societies impact our conceptual "lifeworld" from "the outside". By "outside" I mean that such mechanisms aren't just another set of linguistic processes. Any approach which does not recognize this threatens to become structurally blind to the material conditions that partially constitute, and enable the reproduction of the lifeworld itself.

Succinctly put, our reproach to linguistic idealism in contemporary societies could just be: "what happened to capitalism?".

Let me drive the point home. Idealism is most implausible when looking at social change throughout history. If we're idealists, we'd have to say that even the history of conceptual change is simply "a linguistic process largely independent of political change" (see Farr (1989) in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change). As Gustav Stern put it, "the development of language largely follows its own laws". This suggests that the history of our concepts has nothing to do with political struggles, the system in which such concepts emerge, the basic structure of society, the material conditions in which social formations reproduce themselves over time, social relations, the level of the development of the productive forces, technological and mechanical capacities, the structure of the built environment, etc. etc.

Why exclude all of that from critical theory? Why think that we could use the idealist model to understand why concepts change, why people are led to innovate and create new concepts, etc.? I'm not sure. It is obviously false that we should think that structural transformations in the basic structure of societies might impact the set of concepts dominant in that society? I would have thought the negation of such a claim was obviously false, but many contemporary idealists take it as self-evident that such materialist concerns are misguided.

My guess is that such idealists, wrongly, suppose that we really are forced to choose between reductionist materialism on the one hand, and idealism on the other. In one sense, there are enough bad versions of Marxism to lend some creedence to such a mistake (e.g. Cohen's technological determinism, 2nd International determinism, Stalinist mechanistic reductionism, etc.) But the beauty of Marxism, or at least of critical, dialectical (I would say "genuine") Marxism, is that we see that such a choice is a false one. As Lukacs puts it: "Fatalism and voluntarism are only mutually contradictory to an undialectical and unhistorical mind. In the dialectical view of history they prove to be necessarily complementary opposites, intellectual reflexes clearly expressing the antagonisms of capitalists society and the intractability of its problems when conceived on its own terms".

All of this should make clear why there has been a legitimation crisis facing various idealist approaches in the wake of the global economic meltdown. What could they say about what happened? What would be their story about how to make sense of such events? Would we just track rhetoric and chains of signification? Should we simply analyze various self-standing discourses and linguistic practices? I'm not sure what it would mean to do this.

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