I woke this morning to the chords of Bruce Springsteen’s anthem Born To Run.  As you may know the song is a bitter-sweet salute to life-in-America.  Also, I am basking in the afterglow of viewing the film Ford vs Ferrari for the second time.  The cinematic story telling was superb, featuring Matt Damon as Carroll Shelby and Christian Bale as Ken Miles.  The tale was about the effort of the characters under the patronage of Ford Motor company to break Enzo Ferrari’s dominance of the 24 hours of Le Mans in 1966.  They mastered the laws of physics and their own inner demons to achieve victory.  The story is Iliad like in quality, a great quest achieved at great cost.  Such is life.

I finished reading The Courage of Hopelessness by Slavoj Zizek.  Zizek’s skill as a practitioner of dialectic and as a writer have been helpful to me.  Can not philosophy be understood as a exercise in learning new languages, which allow one to see features of life that were heretofore concealed?

I decided to leisurely review his treatment of our current economic and political situation and lift out some memorable lines and paragraphs.  Here are a few for your consideration.  Enough to be delightfully hair-raising.

Happy thanksgiving !

The world interior of capital is not an agora or a trade fair beneath the open sky, but rather a hothouse that has drawn inwards everything that was once outside.  The interior built upon capitalist excesses, determines everything. ‘The primary fact of the Modern Age is not that the earth goes around the sun, but that money goes around the earth.’  p. 11

The world interior of capital is now inhabited by one and a half billion ‘winners’ of globalization.  Three times this number are left standing outside the door.  p. 10

The line that separates legal from illegal transactions is getting more and more blurred, and is often reduced to a matter of interpretation.  Second, the owners of wealth who move it to offshore accounts and tax havens are not greedy monsters but individuals who simply act like rational subjects to safeguard their wealth.  In capitalism you cannot throw out the dirty water of financial speculation and keep the healthy baby of the real economy: the dirty water effectively is the blood of the healthy baby. 

To go to the end here: the global capitalist legal system itself is, in its most fundamental dimension, corruption legalized.  The question of where crime begins (which financial dealings are illegal) is thus not a legal question, but an eminently political question, a question of power.  P. 21

The defining feature of ‘postmodern’ capitalism is the direct commodification of our experience itself: what we are buying on the market are less and less products (material objects) that we want to own, and more and more ‘life-experiences’ – experiences of sex, eating, communicating, cultural consumption, participating in a lifestyle – or as Mark Slouka put succinctly ‘we become the consumers of our own lives.’ We no longer buy objects; we ultimately buy the time of our own life.  Michel Foucault’s notion of turning one’s self into a work of art gets an unexpected confirmation.  

I buy my bodily fitness by visiting fitness clubs; my spiritual enlightenment by enrolling in courses on meditation; the satisfaction of myself as ecologically aware by purchasing only organic fruit.  p. 27

Capitalism is definitely not in crisis – it is just the people caught in this explosive development are caught in crisis.  This tension between overall rapid growth and local crisis and misery is part of capitalism’s normal functioning: capitalism renews itself through such crisis.  p. 29

Marx’s key insight remains valid, perhaps more than ever.  The questions of freedom should not be located primarily in the political sphere proper (Does a country have free elections? Are the judges independent?  Is its press free from hidden pressures?  Does it respect human rights?)  Rather, the key to actual freedom resides in the ‘apolitical’ network of social relations, from the market to the family.  The change required is not political reform but a transformation of the social relations of production – which entails revolutionary class struggle rather than democratic elections…

‘Today, the enemy is not called Empire or Capital.  It’s called Democracy.  When Badiou furthermore claimed that democracy is our fetish, this statement is to be taken literally, in the precise Freudian sense.

….It is the acceptance of the ‘democratic illusion’, the acceptance of democratic mechanisms as providing the only framework for any possible change, that prevents the radical transformation of society.  p.  36

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