Peacemakers also see the world as it is

by Colman McCarthy

As with a berg of ice in a shipping lane, Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech in Oslo, Norway, was a collision between peacemaking and war-making.

Several times he mentioned Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. “There’s nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naive in their creed or lives,” he said. But the praise was faint, the tone patronizing. “I face the world as it is,” said the nation’s latest war president, implying that Gandhi and King were dwellers in another world where they and the rest of dream-driven pacifists have their heads either in the clouds or in the sand. “There will be times,” Obama said, “when nations, acting individually or in concert, will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”

He meant violent force, the force of bombing, the force of the gun and grenade, the interrogator’s garrote -- not the kind of force in which King and Gandhi placed their faith: moral force, the force of noncooperation, the force of justice, the force of well-organized resistance and the force of fighting fire not with fire but with water.

Three years after King was in Oslo collecting his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, he said: “Here is the true meaning of compassion and nonviolence -- when it helps us see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. From his view we may indeed see the basic weakness of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.”

Those lines were from an antiwar speech in April 1967, when the Vietnam War was cresting. Editorials in both The Washington Post and The New York Times dismissed it as the ill-informed babble of a pacifist lightweight who should stick to civil rights and leave foreign policy issues to the enlightened ones who “face the world as it is.” Both newspapers, which endorse the Bush-Obama war in Afghanistan as strongly as they once did the war in Vietnam, would surely write off King’s antiwar views were he around to express them today.

In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize -- with a straight face as he defended his war policy -- Obama said that “compared to some of the giants of history who have received this prize,” his accomplishments “are slight.”

Did his giants include Desmond Tutu? The 1984 laureate said in 2002: “The war on terrorism will not be won as long as there are people desperate with disease and living in poverty and squalor. Sharing our prosperity is the best weapon against terrorism.”

Or perhaps Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, the 1980 recipient who wrote in Christ in a Poncho: In “nonviolent combat, what we do is just exactly what nice players aren’t supposed to do. We refuse to play by one of the rules of the system tries to foist on us: the rule that says you have to counter violence with violence. If your opponent can get you to swallow that idea, then they can unleash still greater violence upon you. The essential thing in nonviolent combat is for us to render those tactics inoperative by refusing to play by the rules and by imposing our own conditions instead.”

Or Oscar Arias Sánchez, the winner in 1987: “Three billion people live in tragic poverty, and 40,000 children die each day from diseases that could be prevented. War is a missed opportunity for humanitarian investment. It is a crime against every child who calls out for food rather than for guns.”

That, too, is the world as it is -- not the fantasy world of Obama and his war council, who believe that one more killing spree in Afghanistan will bring peace, one more surge and evil will be conquered, one more show of force and we’ll finally show ’em.

[Colman McCarthy directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington.]

Hegel on Force and Understanding and Self-Consciousness

Timothy Franz

What is the purpose of the “inverted world” argument?

The purpose of the “inverted world” argument is to show us that consciousness is self-consciousness, or that what is is a self relating to itself. Self-consciousness is present from the description of sense-certainty onwards, but we do not realize the necessity or the fact of consciousness as being always conscious of its self. Indeed, sense-certainty tries to escape from self-consciousness, while perception merely regards the action of self-consciousness as so much deception and obscuring of the object. While the inverted world argument shows self-consciousness in its operation, it is an altogether complicated argument with many implications. For example, it is tied up with “force” and “understanding” – or two concepts that necessarily evoke each other.

Force is a concept that scientific man develops, and to arrive at it we have used understanding – for force is what stands under the phenomena we observe. Understanding supersedes perception as a conceptual form of greater perspicuity. Perception involves the Lockean untangling of what is essential and unessential in objects; it attempts to specify what is primary or secondary in a thing – what is really real – and the resultant confusion between properties and things and how they relate gives way to the “scientific” positing of inner forces that bind objects in themselves and to others just as they appear to us.

The Hegelian presentation of the argument can at first lead to some confusion in readers whose perceptual common sense has become rather scientific (do we really look at things as possessing primary and accidental properties, or does that kind of perception now have its place in developmental psychology, in young children?). To the question regarding how a grain of salt can be one thing while having many properties, it is now common to say that Sodium Chloride is something that forms cube-like molecular structures that, through the media of atmosphere and our chemically evolved biological sensing structures are perceived as white and tart-tasting. But in unpacking this explanation, Hegel can explicate the operation of force, understanding, and self-consciousness – using the inverted world argument and showing how the explanation of force is at the same time (as an explanation) neither conceptually all-encompassing nor satisfactory to self-consciousness.

First, looking closer at Sodium Chloride (and we can now take photographs, dimly, of molecular structures and see lattice-works of atoms), we admit to ourselves that the holding-together of these atoms and molecules can only be explained by forces: electrical, gravitational, weak and strong atomic, subatomic, etc. In fact “substance really is a play of forces.”[1] Hegel describes how one force solicits another, and there is constant eliciting of forces. “The interplay of the two Forces… being determined as mutually opposed” becomes the “absolute flux” which expresses itself in differentiation.[2] Over these paragraphs, he mirrors our scientific practice that eventually realizes force as a field or flux of forces which is law-obeying. Hence, our understanding of the inner working of things interests itself in Law as truth.

Admittedly scientific practice likes to deal in theories. One theory stands until a more accurate tallying of the empirical data can be given by another theory. For example, scientists have tested theories of gravitation and found Einstein’s to give a more accurate account of the moon’s movement than Newton’s. Nevertheless, whether the word is theory or Hegel’s Law, the point is that we posit an “inner” or “beyond” to appearances. The beyond is the lawfulness of the field of force, and as we posit such a beyond, we understand a “supersensible world.”

As Hegel explains, the supersensible world is not empty. It is not a dimension devoid of substance. To the contrary, it actually is the phenomena, the appearances. What the supersensible explains is what we perceive. Yet over and above mere perception, when sensual things appear to us, we understand, perhaps immediately, the supersensuous as the explanation of those things via lawfulness of forces. We understand salt as molecules structured and measured by forces. And furthermore, our understanding via the supersensuous shows itself in our language; just as language betrayed sense-certainty, showing its contradiction by speaking the universal instead of the particular thing, it again speaks the universal here. By speaking of, say “the rose in my garden” the word is the “intellectual ‘Idea’” of a rose – the word is the genus no matter how one may point to this rose.[3]

But introducing language into the discussion complicates the issue. In the above paragraph, we saw that the supersensible world qualifies the sensual world of appearances. However, the sensual world also qualifies the supersensuous. This is a double movement. Hegel explains the double movement by giving us two supersensible worlds, and by finally explaining this double movement as both the inverted world and the proof and action of self-consciousness.

As we’ve seen, the first supersensible world explains appearances via laws. We understand with aid of explanation. But what is explanation? When we say that the supersensible world is its appearances, we really say that the laws merely are what they explain. A tautology is in play. Yet if we simplify and look closer, at the level of Hegelian logic, “[w]hen we say A=A, we both distinguish and identify. The equal to itself repels itself but also unites itself.”[4] The Hegelian “unity of unity and difference” which resolved the difficulties in the previous chapters acts here at a higher level of ascendancy towards truth. So the (first) supersensuous world is in a way identical and different from the sensual world.

And the identity of that identity and difference is the second supersensuous world – Gadamer says it is the proper supersensuous world – which inverts the first. It inverts because while the supersensuous explains the sensual, the sensual conditions and substantizes the supersensuous. In this, we see what the (first) supersensuous lacks: it entirely lacks the flux and movement and change of the sensual (as did the first words of sense-certainty, indeed any words). “[W]e detect the very thing that was missing in the law, viz. the absolute flux itself…”[5] But now the supersensible world contains, in a way, the sensuous, changing flux and its constant, unchanging law; “it is both: the law and the perversion (perversion is a translation of das Verkehrte which is valid here since the phenomenon will perniciously never be the same as or as pure as the law, and that is also what is meant by the supersensuous and the sensuous being identical and different).”[6]

The second or proper supersensuous world has the capability of showing self-consciousness to itself. It can do this, since in its “universal blood” the world relates to itself and is in that manner a self-consciousness. The action of the supersensuous and the sensuous, evoking and suppressing each other, being identical and different, reveals the relating of the world to itself. Hegel gives a description of the Whole, which for him is equal to self-consciousness: on the one side is the “inner world”, on the other the “inner being [the ‘I]” and in between the appearances, which vanish – this is the Whole of “the undifferentiated selfsame being, which repels itself from itself, posits itself as an inner being containing different moments, but for which equally these moments are immediately not different – self-consciousness.”[7]

So in this way “[t]his second supersensible world is… the inverted world.” But the inverted world is not just the second supersensible world. There is a “law of inversion” by which we as self-consciousness invert; inversion is our activity. Examples may be given: Hyppolite speaks of the gospels and Gadamer and Hegel both speak of crime and punishment. However, we may stick with the example given here of the inversion of the first supersensuous world into the second, for that takes places at a higher acendency to truth and aids us in becoming aware of self-consciousness. We understand then how self-consciousness took reality as sense-certainty, as perception, as an interpretation of forces, and will look to the rest of the book for its development.

---

[1] Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Hegel’s Dialectic, Five Hermeneutical Studies. Trans. P. C.

Smith. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976, pg. 38.

[2] Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1977, pg. 84-90.

[3] Rosen, Stanley. G.W.F. Hegel, An Introduction to the Science of Widsom. South Bend,

Indiana: St Augustine’s Press, 1977, pg. 146.

[4] Hyppolite, Jean. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974, pg. 135.

[5] Hegel, pg. 95.

[6] Gadamer pg. 46.

[7] Hegel pg. 103.

25 Years Ago: India erupts in anti-Sikh violence in wake of Gandhi assassination

In the wake of the assassination of Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards on October 31, 1974, pogroms targeting the religious minority kill 3,000 and leave tens of thousands more homeless. Most of the violence takes place in Delhi.

Leaders of India’s ruling Congress Party and the military stand by amidst the violence, and in some cases encourage it. Rajiv Gandhi, who became prime minister within hours of his mother’s assassination, comments in the midst of the pogroms that “when a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little.”

Indira Gandhi was assassinated in retaliation for Operation Bluestar, a military campaign against non-violent Sikh separatists in the Punjab that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians.

Interview with Slavoj Zizek

Jonathan Derbyshire

Published 29 October 2009

NS: What relationship, if any, do you think your work has to the mainstream, normative, liberal political philosophy done in English and American universities?

SZ: I noticed something -- maybe I'm just generalising this; I don't know to what extent this is a rule-- I noticed how many of the people who consider themselves to be more radical than the liberal standard, the left-liberal standard, most of them do not work in political philosophy properly but, as it were, hide themselves as literary critics or philosophers. It's as if it's an excess which requires you to change genre. Another tendency of these "radicals" is moralization connected with legalization. It's a certain pose in which they want to deliver the message that they are really more radical. But this excess of radicality only concretely articulates itself in some kind of a general moralistic outrage -- "what are we doing to immigrants?!" I think they often tend to be a little bit hypocritical. I always read the liberal anti-communists, liberal leftists - they're interesting, one can learn from them. I read a wonderful essay by Orwell from 1938. There he has a wonderful analysis of the typical leftist liberal. He says they ask for a change, but they do it in a hypocritical way: they ask for a change but it's almost as if to make sure that no real change will happen.

Don't you suspect a little bit that there's something of this in today's typical radical liberal - in today's anti-immigrant campaign for instance? The standard idea is to say, like my friend Alain Badiou in France, "those who are here are from here". That is to say, no check for roots, open to all of them. Legalize everything. The problem is that they know very well that this radical opening will never happen. So it's very easy to have a radical position which costs you nothing and for the price of nothing it gives you some kind of moral superiority. It also enables them to avoid the truly difficult questions. For example, my conflict with my radical leftist friends is when they want total openness and so on. I say to them, are you aware that anti-immigrant are mostly spontaneous, lower working-class attitudes? They talk as if some big imperialist power centre decides to be against immigrants. No! If anything, capital is more liberal about immigrants. So, I think this is not a good thing - I think of all these theorists, like Giddens and Held, who are left-wing, but left within the establishment ...

NS: Would you say that thinkers of that sort, establishment leftists if you like, are insufficiently materialist?

SZ: Exactly, exactly. Apart from their very general anti-capitalist thunder -this is my biggest reproach to them. Despite the financial crisis, we do not have a serious leftist attempt to deal with what, in old Marxist terms, we called the critique of political economy. It's obvious to me that Marx has to be repeated, but repeated not as he was. Isn't it clear today that with all the problems of natural resources, intellectual property and so on, that the whole notion of exploitation, if it has any meaning at all should be radically redefined? I don't see enough work of this sort. I think it's either some kind of an abstract, moralistic politics where you focus on groups which are obviously under-privileged -other races, gays and so on- and then you can explode in all your moralistic rage. Or, another thing that I really hate as a leftist who tries to be a communist - did you notice how the standard academic left likes nothing more than an attempted revolution going on, but far away from where you are? Today it's Venezuela, which is why I like to be critical from time to time of Chavez. It's a very comfortable position: you can do all the dirty work, you struggle for your career, compromises in your country in the west, but your heart is somewhere far away but it in no way affects what you are doing. This is another thing which I think is a fake.

So, if anything was proven by this financial crisis, it is that apart from left-radical Keynesians like Paul Krugman, with whom I'm sympathetic, I don't see any serious counter-proposal by the left.

NS: So we have lost the political economy in Marx?

SZ: There are some marginal good signs - Moishe Postone is one of the few people who really asks the question, what to do with Marx's political economy today? Then there are of course some economists and so on - David Harvey, for example, But the question is not properly addressed and that's very sad. If you read the predominant cultural left, you'd have thought that Marx's Capital is some kind of treatise on commodity fetishism and other cultural phenomena. Sorry, but Marx meant it as a critical theory of society, giving a diagnosis and so on. I think things today call for analysis. Let me give me your analysis - don't be afraid, I will be short.

I claim that we have two opponents: pro-capitalist liberals and old Marxists, as far as they still exist. They claim that it's the same capitalism going on. This is obviously not true - in China and other places, something new is emerging. Then you have all these, I call them, ironically, "post-theorists" - like Giddens, for example. I claim that their work is, unfortunately, a journalistic patchwork. Many leftists say: we know what is wrong - capitalism, imperialism. We just don't know how to mobilise people; the problem is political. But I think we don't know what's going on.

This is typical theoretical arrogance. We don't know what is going on. This is the point of my book: terrific new things are emerging. What's going on in China today is something very ominous. Here I disagree with liberals who say, wait for another ten years and we'll have another Tiananmen in China. I doubt it. Something genuinely new is emerging today in the guise of what are ridiculously called "Asian values", authoritarian capitalism. A capitalism which, we can see now, is doing better in the crisis than the west. A capitalism that is more dynamic and efficient than our Western, liberal capitalism, but precisely as such functions perfectly with an authoritarian state. My pessimism is that this is the future. This is what I think we should watch. This is why I wrote that piece about Berlusconi [in the LRB], which many people thought was crazy - Berlusconi's still democratically elected, after all. But I see signs of this new authoritarianism. There's a kind of total devaluation of politics. Of course, this new post-democratic capitalism will take different forms. There will be Asian values, more traditionally authoritarian; in Russia, it's emerging; in Italy, it's emerging in its own way. This is the fear. We who pretend in some way to be more radical, where we should make a pact with honest liberals is precisely along this axis: we should all be aware that what was precious in the liberal democratic legacy. What, for example, Hannah Arendt noticed in the US during the Vietnam War. What fascinated her was the level of public debate - people in town meetings debating. This is disappearing.

NS: Arendt thought political participation was an intrinsic good didn't she?

SZ: The problem I have with her is that she dismissed the economy as the space of truth, so to speak. For her, the economy was just utilitarian stuff. The authentic big politics doesn't happen there for her. But we need what Marx called a political economy. You know the basic Marxist insight that politics is not just politics - politics is in the economy. We should rehabilitate this. Isn't this becoming clear? And here's somewhere else where I don't agree with many leftists: you know this Toni Negri mantra - "Empire", nation states no longer matter and so on. It's crazy. If there is a lesson from so-called postmodern, post-68 capitalism, it's that the regulatory role of the state is getting stronger. So much for this stupid story, the state disappearing etc. Not true! More and more if you want to have a company today, you have to be so deeply entwined with the state apparatus.

This is was the point of my big fight with Simon Critchley. I think it's too easy to play this moralistic game - state power is corrupted, so let's withdraw into this role of ethical critic of power. Here, I'm an old Hegelian. I hate the position of "beautiful soul", which is: ""I remain outside, in a safe place; I don't want to dirty my hands." In this ironic sense, I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn't afraid to dirty his hands. That's what I miss in today's left. When you get power, if you can, grab it, even if it is a desperate situation. Do whatever is possible. This is why I supported - ok, my support doesn't mean anything, but as a public gesture- Obama. I think the battle that he is fighting now for healthcare is extremely important, because it concerns the very core of the ruling ideology. The real core of the anti-Obama campaign is freedom of choice. And the lesson, if he wins, is how freedom of choice is something beautiful, but works only against a very thick background of regulations, ethical presuppositions, economic conditions and so on. This is the problem. As I like to emphasise here in the States, there are freedoms of choice which I am glad to renounce. I like to do a parallel between healthcare and water and electricity. Yes, you can say I don't have a choice in choosing my water provider. It's imposed by where I live. But, my god, I gladly renounce this choice. I prefer to have some basic choices made by society - water, electricity, and some elementary healthcare. This precisely opens up the choice, opens up the freedom for other choices. Another important thing, and here I agree with that great British sceptic, John Gray (I don't agree with his conclusions), who says today we are forced to live "as if" we are free. We are all the time bombarded choices -and he's not making the old, boring Marxist point that these are inessential choices. No, the point is rather that you are obliged to choose without even having the background qualification to make the choice.

My position isn't that we should sit down and wait for some big revolution to come. We have to engage wherever we can. If Obama wins his battle over healthcare, if some kind of a blow will made against this freedom of choice ideology, it will be a great victory worth having fought for.

NS: Those short-term gains shouldn't be underestimated?

SZ: No. That was Critichley's misunderstanding of me: as if I wanted to sit down and dream of a big revolution. All I'm saying is that one should distinguish between short-term battles worth fighting and short-term battles where your protest is of the kind that those in power like. There was a little bit of that in the marches against the Iraq war. Everyone was satisfied. Those who organised the protests knew they wouldn't change anything. Blair like the protests - he or Bush said, you see, this is what we want in Iraq: a society in which people will be able to protest like we do. So, one should be very careful when doing something which appears as a protest measure. How does it really function? And it's not difficult. If you look closely, you always know what you are doing.

NS: You're talking about the ideological function of protest.

SZ: More than ever, the battle to be won is ideological. I don't mean in any obscure, pseudo-Marxist sense - it's a very spontaneous ideology. But isn't it interesting that the most influential public intellectual in political matters is Noam Chomsky, who knows practically nothing about political theory. I met a guy who recently had lunch with Chomsky and he told me that Chomsky said something very sad: Chomsky said that today we don't need theory. Power is cynical and all we need to to do is tell people, empirically, what is going on. Here, I violently disagree. I don't think you just have to tell the truth in this factual sense. Truth in the sense of facts - facts are facts and they are precious, but they can work this way or that. A nice example here: there is a new generation of Israeli historians who are much more open about Jewish violence against Arabs before independence. And people say, "my god, they are telling the truth!" But this truth was easily appropriated by zionists, who say, "you see, that's how you fight wars - we had to do it." If you don't change the ideological background, facts alone don't do the job.

NS: That's an argument for theory in the critical sense then?

SZ: Yes, sorry: I'm an old fashioned continental European! Theory is sacred, we need it more than ever.

NS: The first chapter of your new book is called "It's Ideology, Stupid!" And it strikes me that ideology is, for you, the most important conceptual tool bequeathed to us by Marx.

SZ: Yes, but if you read the concept of ideology the way I develop it in my other books, I'm critical of Marx. Ideology is not so-called "superstructure", a shadowy realm and real things are happening elsewhere. For me, the core of Marx's theory of ideology is not to be found in the German Ideology, and those stupid, simplistic, youthful works, which are totally outdated. But in Capital, when Marx speaks about commodity fetishism, he speaks about fetishism as some kind of ideology, even if he doesn't use the term ideology. Here Marx outgrew his early simplicities, the distinction between the economic base and the ideological superstructure. This is the lesson of this crisis. Even intelligent neo-conservatives recognise that we are in deadlock and there is no way out. Someone like Fukuyama asks to what extent the functioning of the economy rests on people's ideological attitudes - whether they trust each other, what they think and so on. One big false rumour can practically ruin a small country today. So, I'm not saying that everything dissolves into psychology or whatever. No, the trick is precisely to see what extent the economy itself, in order to function, has to rely on the fact of ideological attitudes. And this is what fascinates me.

I don't have answers. When people ask me what we should do about ecology, the financial crisis - my god, what do I know? What I can do, as a critical intellectual, is to ask the right questions. Sometimes the way you formulate or perceive a problem can be itself be part of the problem. The classical example is tolerance. Why is it that we today automatically translate or perceive problems of racism or sexism into problems of tolerance.

NS: It's the historical legacy of classical liberalism isn't it, going back to Locke?

SZ: Yes, but on the other hand, but look at the great anti-racist struggle of Martin Luther King. He never uses the word "tolerance". For him it would have been ridiculous to say that we blacks want more "tolerance" from the whites. I think it has something to do with what you might call our cultural, post-political capitalism, in which the most passionate struggles are cultural struggles. A large majority of the left doesn't question liberal democracy and capitalism as such. In the same way that when we were young we wanted socialism with a human face, for a large part of today's left, what they want is global capitalism with a human face. This is why the only way you can perceive problems is to transform or transpose them into cultural problems. I don't find this self-evident. Critical intellectuals today should be working to enable people to raise the right questions.

NS: Unlike mainstream political philosophers, you're not that interested in the question of legitimacy are you?

SZ: This focus on legitimate power is the topic on which I would definitely not focus. It's not the topic that I think is crucial. I don't despise democracy, but, for me, democracy, in the formal sense, is precious but it is not in itself a measure of any infinite truth, authenticity or whatever. It's something precious, I know, but we all know this. You can have elections where people get seduced by right-wing populists. And here I'm an unashamed anarchist. I'm ready to say here that the result in some way untrue or false. Even Karl Popper said this. All I'm saying is that we shouldn't fetishise democracy. I'm ready to claim that you can have democratic elections where the majority for a rightist populist and that you have the right to treat that government as illegitimate. I don't think that this formal democratic procedure as such should be taken as equalling legitimacy.

NS: Let's talk about the left's response to the financial crisis. The left has consoled itself with the idea that this crisis is some grand ideological opportunity. Whereas you write that the main victim of the crisis will not be capitalism but the left itself.

SZ: Yes. In the long term, it will work as yet another shock therapy, in the Naomi Klein sense. A kind of shattering of the system which, in the long run, will help make capitalism leaner and meaner. The battle is not lost in advance, however. In the US, for example, what is important is to make acceptable the idea of large, collective actions. We should make this idea acceptable. I'm not saying everything is lost. It's an open battle. Let's not be seduced by the simple idea that this is a crisis and we can use this opportunity to impose our agenda. When the economy is in crisis, the first reaction of the people is to cling to their fundamental principles. So you get this renewed social-demoractic welfarism in the US - Krugman, Stiglitz etc. But at the same time, there was an explosion of interest in Ayn Rand. So, it's a battle and we should be aware that battles are always difficult. The only serious true serious proposal that we know about is, on the one hand this Krugman-Stiglitz leftist Keynesianism, and on the other this idea, popularised in Europe and latin America, of basic income. I like it as an idea but I think it's too much of an ideological utopia. For structural reasons, it can't work. It's the last desperate attempt to make capitalism work for socialist ends. The guy who developed it, Robert Van Parijs, openly says that this is the only way to legitimise capitalism. Apart from these two, I don't see anything else.

NS: Van Parijs is associated, as you know, with analytical Marxism. And I was wondering what you make of that strain of Marxist theory?

SZ: I know some British guys and I had a debate with them. It's the same problem with John Rawls. Rawls himself, when he was confronted with his critics, admitted one thing: that his model of distributive justice, the difference principle etc, works on one fateful condition: that there is no resentment. That is to say, given the way we are libidinally structured in modern societies, envy and resentment are crucial. Rawls doesn't take into account the irrationality of envy. Capitalism takes much better of it. Although these analytical Marxists want to be "no-bullshit" analysts, the ultimate image of human being it is based on is way too naïve and utopian. I don't think the socialist project can be reduced to this. But nonetheless I claim that in capitalist relations today, envy is crucial. Never underestimate the power of envy. This is a psychoanalytic insight.

NS: I want to ask you finally about what you follow Alain Badiou in calling the "Communist Hypothesis". You say that the great barrier to the realisation of that hypothesis being the problem of agency. Do you see a new revolutionary agent actor on the horizon?

SZ: No, no. But let me clearly define to you the limits of my communism. My problem with Badious is that he totally dismisses the economy as a site of political struggle. The only real question for me is very simple: was Fukuyama right or not? That is to say, do we have today antagonisms which, in the long term, can be resolved or at least coped with within the liberal-democratic, capitalist frame. This is the question. The way I see it, unfortunately, is that all the problems that we have -ecological catastrophe, problems of intellectual property and so on- can be solved within the liberal-capitalist framework. This era is slowly coming to an end. The problem for me is that if we don't want to end up in some kind of neo-authoritarian society, in which we'll have all our private freedoms (you can have sex with animals and so on), but in which the social space will be depoliticized and much more authoritarian - here we should make a pact with liberals. Only a more fundamental questioning of our society can save us. It's clear that we are approaching some kind of apocalyptic zero-point. So, no, I don't see any immediate agent. I see tendencies of proletarianization. By proletarianization I mean people being reduced almost to a kind of Cartesian zero-level - you are a free agent but deprived of substance. Then it's a question of coalitions, how to do it. My unconditional insight is that we will be pushed into a situation where we will have to make a choice: either we do something or we are slowly approaching a society I'm not sure I'd like to live in.

BAE in talks with military on fatal MRAP rollovers

By BRENT BURKEY
Daily Record/Sunday News

Updated: 08/28/2008 12:23:27 PM EDT

U.S. soldiers secure the area next to a damaged U.S. mine resistant, ambush protected vehicle (MRAP), after a roadside bomb explosion during an operation in the area of Al-leg, some 40 miles south of Baghdad, Iraq. (Associated Press)

The military is warning that MRAP vehicles that were rapidly designed and deployed to protect troops from improvised explosive devices are at a risk for rollover.

At least five troop deaths have been blamed on the rollovers.

The military's MRAP vehicle fleet went from zero about a year and a half ago to more than 10,000 as of earlier this summer. At the time, about 1,135 had been produced at BAE Systems in West Manchester Township. More than 2,000 have been ordered from the facility.

Kelly Golden, spokeswoman for BAE Systems in West Manchester Township, said the RG-33 model of MRAP is manufactured at its local facility and she is unaware of major incidents with the model.

BAE manufactures elsewhere the Caiman model and has a part in the manufacturing of the RG-31, which has a lead producer of General Dynamics.

Both of those models have been involved in major rollover incidents, helping to prompt the warning.

Golden said the company is in conversations with the military about what can be done to minimize the risk of MRAP rollover, but could not comment further.

All MRAP models have risks of rolling over because of their design, which raises the vehicle's center of gravity high off the ground and lines the vehicle with armor plating, Golden said.The result is a V-shaped vehicle -- as viewed from the front and back -- that helps deflect roadside bomb blasts away from passenger compartments.

Because of the very designs that protect troops, it ends up top-heavy, Golden said.

Add that feature to poor roads and rollovers can result.

"The roads are not what we're used to in the U.S.," Golden said.

The message is especially relevant in Afghanistan, where a resurgent Taliban has boosted demand.

Because of the country's mountainous terrain and unpaved roads, officials will send nearly 800 more RG-31s, the smallest of several different MRAPs the

View a comparison and see how MRAPs are made in our special section

military now uses.

Yet even at a comparatively nimble nine tons, the RG-31 is not immune from tipping. On June 29, three Green Berets drowned when theirs rolled into a canal in southern Afghanistan. The accident is under investigation.

Close to 7,000 of the vehicles are already in use in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Pentagon will buy at least that many more.

And despite their bulk, the MRAPs have power steering, air brakes and quick acceleration. These features can lull drivers into thinking they're just handling a bigger version of the smaller and more agile Humvee.

Don't be fooled.

"This ain't your father's Oldsmobile," says the June edition of "Safety Corner," an internal newsletter published by the Marine Corps Center for Lessons Learned in Quantico, Va.

There have been at least 66 MRAP-related accidents between November and June, according to Defense Department statistics. Nearly 40 of those involved a rollover caused by bad roads, weak bridges or driver error.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

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