We need new money
An interesting piece by k-punk on France, and a return of the eternal question: what positive political economic model is the left now capable of putting forwards?
K-punk claims the following: "The problem is...[that]...the power of Capitalist Realism...make [s] any alternative political economic model literally unthinkable." As such, he thus suggests, our best hope - at least for nows - lies in the adoption of a program of rhetorical subversion. "If we are to think beyond capitalist realism," he writes, "and we can because we must - a starting point would be to hijack neo-liberal rhetoric."
No doubt, there is something to this strategy, and yet ultimately it seems to me to be insufficient. Ultimately, it is not mobile enough, and too dependent on that discourse which it is aligned against. To be clear: in my view, two further steps are needed also.
First: we need new values. By this, I do not mean that we all have to get together and decide upon a new constitution. Rather, what I mean instead is that we need values oriented towards the new, towards the emergence of the new. Values which are such that are able to recognize and affirm the new, as opposed to denegate and resist it, when it seizes us from the outside. As k-punk recognizes when he draws attention in his post to the Deleuzian trope of anti-production, and as the recent Long Sunday discussion on Mario Tronti demonstrated, all attempts towards the creation of such values necessarily begin with a refusal. A refusal of the dominant and existing values. And radically, of course, this point is the one first made by Nietzsche when he wrote in the Genealogy of Morals of the slave revolt in morals.
Second: we need new money. In Capital, Marx analysed money and discovered that all that it really radically amounted to was a value-form. In the Philosophy of Money, George Simmel further claims that money is the only thing that he would be universally willing to exchange with anyone, no matter who they were. And thus, the following might be said to be true: we need new values, we need value such that they can be contained in the form of money, a form analogous to the form of money, such that we would be willing ultimately to either recieve them or else pass them on to anyone, and anyone would accept them.
K-punk claims the following: "The problem is...[that]...the power of Capitalist Realism...make [s] any alternative political economic model literally unthinkable." As such, he thus suggests, our best hope - at least for nows - lies in the adoption of a program of rhetorical subversion. "If we are to think beyond capitalist realism," he writes, "and we can because we must - a starting point would be to hijack neo-liberal rhetoric."
No doubt, there is something to this strategy, and yet ultimately it seems to me to be insufficient. Ultimately, it is not mobile enough, and too dependent on that discourse which it is aligned against. To be clear: in my view, two further steps are needed also.
First: we need new values. By this, I do not mean that we all have to get together and decide upon a new constitution. Rather, what I mean instead is that we need values oriented towards the new, towards the emergence of the new. Values which are such that are able to recognize and affirm the new, as opposed to denegate and resist it, when it seizes us from the outside. As k-punk recognizes when he draws attention in his post to the Deleuzian trope of anti-production, and as the recent Long Sunday discussion on Mario Tronti demonstrated, all attempts towards the creation of such values necessarily begin with a refusal. A refusal of the dominant and existing values. And radically, of course, this point is the one first made by Nietzsche when he wrote in the Genealogy of Morals of the slave revolt in morals.
Second: we need new money. In Capital, Marx analysed money and discovered that all that it really radically amounted to was a value-form. In the Philosophy of Money, George Simmel further claims that money is the only thing that he would be universally willing to exchange with anyone, no matter who they were. And thus, the following might be said to be true: we need new values, we need value such that they can be contained in the form of money, a form analogous to the form of money, such that we would be willing ultimately to either recieve them or else pass them on to anyone, and anyone would accept them.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home