Partial Readings: Emancipation
Partial Readings: Emancipation
Partial Readings: Emancipation
Murmurs of a ?Twitter revolution? in Iran vanished during the crackdown on the Green Movement in 2009, when the government turned the very internet tools used by protestors against them. With the rebellions that have swept North Africa and the Middle East in 2011, talk of internet-fueled revolution sprung forth once again. The Egyptian government?s decision temporarily to shut off internet access betrayed the regime?s fear of social media, just as the prominence of Google executive Wael Ghonim in the Egyptian youth movement and Facebook?s efforts to keep access open to protestors suggest an affinity between anti-authoritarian politics and the openness of internet culture.
Coincidentally, Evgeny Morozov?s The Net Delusion, a book critical of ?cyber-utopians? who praise the web?s emancipatory power without qualification, hit bookshelves just as the protests movements began to gain ground. To Roger Cohen, recent events prove Morozov?s arguments to be ?dead wrong.? ?Organization, networking, exposure to suppressed ideas and information, the habits of debate and self-empowerment in a culture of humiliation and conspiracy: These are some of the gifts social media is bestowing on overwhelmingly young populations across the Arab world.? Morozov, for his part, believes that the protests have borne out his thesis: ?The events in these two countries provide grounds for optimism about the power of the Internet, but the biggest problem with studying the impact of the Internet on authoritarianism is that most often it benefits both the oppressor and the oppressed (albeit to different degrees).?
Nancy Skola, at the American Prospect, argues that these arguments about the internet and revolution miss the point.
?Would this revolution have happened if there were no Facebook and Twitter?? Foreign Policy?s Evgeny Morozov blogged. ?I think this is the key question to ask. If the answer is ?yes,? then the contribution that the Internet has made was minor; there is no way around it.? But that question seems off the mark. Clearly, the Internet doesn’t make the dissident. Rather, the dissident makes use of the Internet. What?s happening in Tunisia isn?t a Twitter or a WikiLeaks revolution. It’s just what revolution looks like these days.
Benjamin Kunkel?s review of two recent books by David Harvey sheds light on the Marx-sized blindspot in most analyses of capitalism?s latest crisis. ?To date, a revived Keynesianism has formed a left boundary of economic debate in the press at large. Only specialised socialist journals have undertaken to diagnose capitalism?s latest distemper in explicitly or implicitly Marxian terms.? Kunkel outlines Harvey?s theories in considerable detail in his review, claiming that they offer real, ignored insight into our economic condition.
On the score of comprehensiveness there can be little doubt that Harvey?s work and that of other Marxists goes beyond the alternatives. ?The idea that the crisis had systemic origins is scarcely mooted in the mainstream media,? Harvey writes, and that might be extended to include even the trenchant work of the neo-Keynesians. The crisis, after all, is that of a capitalist system, and no account of it, however searching, can be truly systematic if it neglects to consider property relations: that is, the preponderant ownership of capital by one class, and of little or nothing but its labour power by another.
Readers of Kunkel’s review and Harvey’s books can decide whether Marxian theory adequately addresses shortcomings in Keynesian analysis. For now, the consequences of that decision remain politically irrelevant. Writes Kunkel, ?At the moment Marxism seems better prepared to interpret the world than to change it. But the first achievement is at least due wider recognition, which with the next crisis, or subsequent spasm of the present one, it may begin to receive.?
Rush Limbaugh?s Democratic Eloquence
In the February issue of Commentary, Wilfred M. McClay defends Rush Limbaugh against those who would dismiss him ?either as a comic buffoon, a passing phenomenon in the hit parade of American pop culture, or as a mean-spirited apostle of hate who appeals to a tiny lunatic fringe.? Given that Limbaugh has made his career by saying outrageous and provocative things, it?s telling that McClay?s apologetics avoid quoting more than four consecutive words spoken by Limbaugh. Instead, McClay offers high-minded conceptualizations of Limbaugh?s art.
He is equipped with a resonant and instantly recognizable baritone voice and an unusually quick and creative mind, a keen and independent grasp of political issues and political personalities, and?what is perhaps his greatest talent?an astonishing ability to reformulate complex ideas in direct, vivid, and often eloquent ways, always delivering his thoughts live and unscripted, out there on the high wire. He conducts his show in an air of high-spiritedness and relaxed good humor, clearly enjoying himself, always willing to be spontaneous and unpredictable, even though he is aware that every word he utters on the air is being recorded and tracked by his political enemies in the hope that he will slip up and say something career-destroying. Limbaugh the judo master is delighted to make note of this surveillance, with the same delight he expresses when one of his ?outrageous? sound bites makes the rounds of the mainstream media, and he can then play back all the sputtering but eerily uniform reactions from the mainstream commentators, turning it back on them with a well-placed witticism.
There are many witticisms McClay might have quoted, but such decontextualized sound bites would inevitably do a disservice to Limbaugh?s deft reformulations of complex ideas (like, for example, his restatement of remarks made by Hu Jintao).
Pace McClay, there are writers who take Limbaugh quite seriously and, precisely because they?ve taken him seriously, remain worried about his appeal. See David Bromwich?s excellent analysis, ?The Rebel Germ,? from the November 25, 2010 issue of New York Review of Books.
