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The justification of liberal communists is that in order to really help people, you must have the means to do it, and as experience of the dismal failure of all centralised
collectivist approaches teaches, private initiative is the efficient way. So
Liberal communists do not want to be just machines for generating profits. They want their lives to have a deeper meaning. They are against old-lashioned religion, but for spirituality, for
non-confessional meditation. Everybody knows that Buddhism foreshadows the brain sciences, that the power of meditation can be measured scientifically! Their preferred motto is social responsibility and gratitude: they are the first to admit that society was incredibly good to them by allowing them to deploy their talents and amass wealth, so it is their duty to give something back to society and help people. After all, what is the point of their success, if not to help people? It is only this caring that makes business
success worth...
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same structure-the thing itself is the remedy against the threat it poses-is
Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation.
a sad predicament of ours: today’s capitalism cannot reproduce itself on its own. It needs extra-economic charity to sustain the cycle of social reproduction.
a return to an authentic community in which speech still directly expresses true emotions-the village of the socialist utopia-is a fake which can only be staged as a spectacle for the very rich?
Isn’t this the antagonism between what Nietzsche called “passive” and “active” nihilism? We in the West are the Last Men, immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while the Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything, engaged in the nihilist struggle up to the point of self-destruction.
The ideological stance underlying the notion of the masturbate-a-thon is marked by a conflict between its form and content: it builds a collective out of individuals who are ready to share with others the solipsistic egotism of their stupid pleasure.
A minimally refined sensitivity tells us that it is more difficult to masturbate in front of an other than to be engaged in a sexual interaction with him or her: the very fact that the other is reduced to an observer, not participating in my activity, makes my act much more “shameful.”
If there ever was an ideological choice, this is it: the message-a new cyber-democracy in which millions can directly communicate and self-organise, by-passing centralised state control-covers up a series of disturbing gaps and tensions.
Hegelian speculative identity of opposites exists. Certain features, attitudes, and norms of life are no longer perceived as ideologically marked. They appear to be neutral, non-ideological, natural, commonsensical.
the neutralisation of some features into a spontaneously accepted background that marks out ideology at its purest and at its most effective.
Precisely because they want to resolve all the secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system as such.
presumed, an object of belief-how can I ever be sure that what I see in front of me is another subject, not a flat biological machine lacking depth?
The experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie-the truth lies outside, in what we do.8
Walter Benjamin from 1938, Theodor Adorno reports a conversation he had with the left-leaning composer Hans Eisler in New York:
gives their inner conviction a fragile beauty. This leads us to a radical and unexpected conclusion: it is not enough to say that we are dealing here with a tragically misplaced
ethical conviction, with a blind trust that avoids confronting the miserable, terrifying reality of its ethical point of reference. What if, on the contrary, such a blindness, such a violent exclusionary gesture of refusing to see, such a disavowal of reality, such a fetishist attitude of “I know very well that things are horrible in the Soviet Union, but I believe none the less in Soviet socialism” is the innermost constituent of every ethical stance?
Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2006.
