In defence of Rafael Correa

President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, the leftist former economist whose popularity and rise to power emerged to coincide with a rapid change in the political landscape of Latin America, is currently under threat from protesting police on the streets of Quito.

Neighbouring ally Hugo Chavez, with characteristic bombast, reported to his followers on twitter that a coup is taking place, and that protestors are trying to kill him.

But Correa looks defiant. From the video of him addressing his supporters, praising them for coming out in the tense streets, and advancing democracy and socialism, to news agency clips of him being wheeled from the hospital, where he was trapped in by police, to a car ensuring his safety.

It is alien to viewers in the UK to see such passion in a politician. In 2007, his relationship with the media was put on rocky roads, to which he, during a press conference, paraphrased Tony Blair by calling them “a group of wild beasts”.

Though, as evidenced by Blair’s recent pullout from touring his autobiography, worried at the implications of rioting protestors, the similarities between them end there. Faced with angry dissenters, Correa is reported to have said “If you want to kill the president, here he is! Kill me!” – as if to anticipate his demise.

The protest is down to money disputes. As part of an austerity package, Correa has put stop to police celebratory functions paid from the public purse, and has extended their promotion period from five to seven years.

Others, such as President Evo Morales of Bolivia, have noted the similarities between this and the recent scare in Honduras. As scenes from inside the hospital show, likening the events to the coup d’état in Honduras is no exaggeration.

Since his re-election in 2009, some have accused Correa of going back on his promises, for the advancement of socialism. His popular revolution, which was helped by his fluency in Quechua, the majority language of indigenous tribes in Ecuador, through to Peru and Bolivia, had been kickstarted by his aim to redistribute Ecuador’s oil wealth to poorer communities. In 2009 he said:

Socialism will continue. The Ecuadorian people voted for that. We are going to emphasize this fight for social justice, for regional justice. We are going to continue the fight to eliminate all forms of workplace exploitation within our socialist conviction: the supremacy of human work over capital. Nobody is in any doubt that our preferential option is for the poorest people, we are here because of them. Hasta la victoria siempre!

Around the same time Correa’s economic minister Maria Elsa Viteri took a trip to Europe in order to re-purchase global bonds, successfully claiming back 91% of the bonds, in order to further commit to a social and economic revolution.

On the current issue, Correa claimed his administration has always been at the side of the police, and expressed outrage that protestors have gone to such lengths to endanger the President’s life.

It is not relativism, but when cuts are administered by the UK Tory government, we tend to look at them as ideological; because that is what they are. It is against received wisdom to draw the axe in the way which George Osborne has been doing so, and there is little or weak evidence to show vindication for his masochism. The quango cull, for example, is very telling; especially since it has been justified as waste cutting – something patently untrue in many cases.

When Correa takes measures to cull waste, to ensure not everyone takes a hit, particularly the most vulnerable in Ecuadorian society, we ought not to draw parallels.

Arguably, the limiting of police ceremonies is one way to ensure not everyone suffers disproportionately for the mistakes of the few, and so it appears as if the police have acted out of hand.

Correa’s “citizen revolution” will not please all the people, all the time, and sometimes protestors can be wrong. This, after all, appears to be a coup attempt.

But the main reason to defend Correa is his heroic fighting talk, almost inimitable in politics today. In the faces of the angered police, armed with flairs and tear gas, the premier said:

I will not take a single step back. I will not sign any agreement under pressure. I would die first. I thank my compatriots for their support and ask citizens to remain calm.

Update 02/10/10 (10.32)

The Guardian are now reporting what Correa, and the foreign minister Ricardo Patino, have been telling the media in Ecuador; that a coup is being organised from within the dissenting police protesters by former president Lucio Gutiérrez, of the centre right nationalist Patriotic Society Party.

The main police chief in Ecuador has stepped down from his position over the disarray.

TVE, the Spanish news agency, are reporting that neighbouring Peru and Columbia – both on the right politically – have closed their borders out of sympathy with Ecuador and Correa, so as to stop coup perpetrators from leaving the country.

Furthermore, the US and the UN have both condemned the coup attempt, while Brazil is the only country in South America which has not taken an official position against agitators.

Don’t blame Bevan

A substandard comment on the labour party would have slipped past my otherwise observant radar, were it not for the collation of good and bad blog entries by the super observant blog of Poumista.

Hywell Williams, in a piece entitled Nye Bevan: the Militant Godfather, states unapologetically that:

Bevan created a party within a party and together with his Bevanites he brought a Leninist skill to the business of organising internal dissent to Clement Attlee and Gaitskell.

All the typical stuff about Bevan being a Marxist and entryist to bring about his rancid communist beliefs in a normal decent party. Not true, but even so, the point about Bevan creating a party within a party (as though this had a direct effect on the militant tendancy of the eighties – can Bevan be blamed for this, yet referred to as its Godfather, if it is true that Hatton and the like looked to the Bevanites as inspiration) is a sin, a lie like no other.

But there is hope for Williams, and his nonsense, yet. He goes on to say:

He [Bevan] then justified his scheming as the only way to keep Labour a socialist party

Save for the “scheming”, precisely! Bevan wanted to keep the Labour party socialist, not create a (socialist) party within a party. A pity Williams had not realised his own perfect critique was contained within his own Kinnockite drivel.

Couldn’t help myself

The Cyborg Future of Enjoyment Part 4/5

(Written 2008)

The Body – A Private Satisfaction Machine

Sally Hacker in her 1989 paper The Eye of the Beholder: An Essay on Technology and Eroticism suggests the term ‘pornotechnics’ as a reference to perverse power relations in the artefactual body, as Donna Haraway notes in her The Promise of Monsters (fn. 2), at “the heart of pornotechnics is the military as an institution, with deep roots and wide reach into science, technology, and erotica.” A product of militarism, the cyborg, as Haraway points out, has an oppositional root and is imbued with the drive to deviate from its ontological foundations. As it is suggested in the cyborg manifesto the cyborg “is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries”, that is to say there is a satisfaction to be gained by de-ontologicizing. And is this not the very foundations of jouissance; the satisfaction or drive to enter out of the vicious realm decreed by the pleasure principle, or rather by phallocratic reality. To be sure the cyborg is founded on a level of erotica.

The notion of the struggle to define a cyborg amounting to a border war here needs its full ontological weight. At an elementary level we may understand this to mean the fragmentation of where organism ends and machine begins. But further to this, on advent of the cyborg, our ontology’s are not limited to our bodily capacities; our ontology’s can be driven further, qualifying Lacan’s own admission Encore!

To further my point I will use a filmic example; Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher: Erika, played by Isabelle Huppert is a piano teacher who becomes rather obsessed with a student of hers Walter (Benoît Magimel). Aside from her very astute professional manner, Erika participates in a whole manner of sexual plights which include sadomasochism, micturition, and the use of pornography booths. She goes to some lengths to keep her Mother innocent from her various exploits. A relationship is forged between her and Walter, during which a written document is produced by Erika detailing her innermost desires. Walter finds himself unable to satisfy Erika’s wildest fantasies that only serves to alienate Erika herself. At the end of the film this estrangement reaches such a stage that Erika stabs herself in the shoulder out of frustration. The importance of the character Erika is that it portrays the possibility of there being at the surface of every person – even one as conformist, middle-class, and stiff, one who appears to take heed of societal expectations of a “lady” – a deep longing for the underbelly of sexual activity, the need to get off, so to speak. Furthermore, Erika finds sexual activity with Walter ineffective, he cannot make her lose herself, or de-ontologicize, that is to say, experience jouissance. Erika realises enjoyment of this kind as self-enclosed, as those things that deviate from the “normal” phallocentric heterosexual union, in acts such as genital slicing (perceived perhaps as actually manipulating her own visual signification), orgasmic urination at an open-top cinema, and smelling used tissues whilst watching pornography.

On the one hand Erika is shown not to be comfortable with herself when she behaves as she is expected to be, when one considers her professional capacity and ontological constitution. On the other hand she is shown to be properly excited and blissful when engaging in activities that drive beyond these principles, when she is experiencing jouissance. Is this not the reality of the cyborg, not being ontologically defined by its visual signification and experiencing bliss as a by-product of this. Erika here is precisely a cyborg – positively because she is subverting the harsh guidelines by which the symbolic order is a by-product of (a curtailing of Woman’s blissful experience), and negatively because, as Robert W. Anderson puts it in his Butler-esque titled Body Parts that Matter: Frankenstein, or The Modern Cyborg, the cyborg is the place “on to which the anxieties of the “normal” are displaced.” (para. 42, my italics)

As The Piano Teacher aims to highlight it is not ‘normal’ in our harsh reality for Woman’s body to be a private satisfaction machine like Erika’s is. Donna Haraway herself expresses concern with the current sexual climate when saying

“the close ties of sexuality and instrumentality, of views of the body as a kind of private satisfaction – and utility-maximizing machine, are described nicely in sociobiological origin stories that stress a calculus and explain the inevitable dialectic of domination of male and female gender roles” (169).

The sociobiological accounts appear at first glance to be positive but insightful of the inevitable domination – we may view the symbolic order as such, as a guarantee of sanity but the key to the inevitability of inequality. The Piano Teacher summarizes Haraway’s own anxiety that Erika is able to experience satisfaction in the style of a cybernetic machine (again, in the words of Grosz, “the circuit of a perfectly self-enclosed auto-eroticism”) but that it eventually leads to dissatisfaction in the (hetero-)sexual domain that is not devious and thus explains the inevitable dialectic of (Man’s) domination.

Part 5 tomorrow

Don’t be fooled, the future is state regulation

In my opinion, that famous neo-Hegelian thinker Francis Fukuyama – the man responsible for the predication in the late eighties/early nineties that at the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end-of-history had loomed upon us, and it had shown free-market capitalism to be the victor over socialism – has gone from being a thinker of history, to an illustration of how exactly history has panned out. Allow me to explain.

In the work for which he is best known The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Fukuyama argued that the endpoint of man’s social and cultural evolution has been realised in liberal, free-market democracy, conflicting with other more popular Hegelian thinkers, most notably Karl Marx who asserted that ‘the end of pre-history’ would be the triumph of communism over capitalism.

Fukuyama was considered a key neoconservative thinker ever since the 1992 publication, and was often held by laissez-faire thinkers and businessmen as a source of justification for the pursuit of capital, as well as the primary reference for understanding why revolutionary fronts failed.

This was the opinion that Fukuyama held – in print – until 2003, when he released his book Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, in which he realised the potentially dangerous cost of allowing the pharmaceutical industry a totally free charter to operate, without regulation from either the state or a non-departmental public body (or quango, as they are known colloquially).

Fukuyama cites in the book examples including the issuing of psychotropic drugs to children with behavioural problems, concluding that often corporations have dubious motives in creating and selling them. Ritalin, Fukuyama opines, is one such drug, created in order to cap a child’s instincts, stating that it ‘‘is prescribed largely for young boys who do not want to sit still in class because nature never designed them to behave that way’’ (p. 52). The state, of course, is not devoid of blame here, but attention should be paid to the power of the drugs lobby, especially in the United States, where most of Fukuyama’s attention is focused on.

The future would look even bleaker were biotechnology to be unregulated. Fukuyama worries that Human Genetics has the potential to be used as a tool for misuse, especially in the field of genetic engineering, where opinions on what is considered ‘normal’ be saved, and what is considered ‘abnormal’ be destroyed at the genetic root. Destroying disease would be an obvious benefit, but opinions on so-called racial, sexual, and biological normality in general would cause real tension. Furthermore, genetic engineering, unless curbed and utilised in some way, could be the play thing of the rich, thereby creating the potential of a wealthy “superior breed” – or as one philosopher has stated, a master race with the capabilities of “instigating a new class warfare”.

It is for this reason that once hardcore free-marketer Fukuyama has become concerned with who be trusted to decide the utility value of biotechnological advancements.

More recently Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws QC, chair of the Human Genetics Commission, in her lecture at Gresham College, noted that the argument of the day is not whether genetics be regulated or not, but rather how genetics be regulated?

The same argument, I would argue, goes for the economy in general today. The question, since the crash, should not be whether or not regulation should be set up overseeing the banking system, but rather how this regulation should operate. The Tories’ argument against Alistair Darling’s new plans to give the Financial Services Authority (FSA) new powers ‘to tear up contracts that would result in payments being made that would cause instability’ is that the FSA already has these powers. But the Tories want to scrap the FSA. It doesn’t take a genius to spot the inharmonious position George Osborne has taken of both wanting to come down hard on the City, but opposing the existing regulatory body of the financial system. If he were genuine about his concern for big bonuses (which he obviously isn’t) he would want to expand the FSA, and ask questions as to why they haven’t done more to seek out capitalist greed.

The sixty-four-thousand-dollar-question on the economy is the same one as for genetics, how should regulation operate. Francis Fukuyama, having gone from stating unfettered capitalism as historical victor, to realising that the future is in regulation, is the embodiment of that very question. It is no longer necessary to bicker about whether the invisible hand is the attitude to have towards the functioning of society and economics, but, rather, how best the state, and those it represents, should take full control.

Cornel West: The Modern day Griot (Part 1)

2009 marked the 100^th year anniversary of the birth of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, and January the 18^th marked the date in which he was executed 14 years ago. Taha was a Sudanese liberal reform figure and believer in a version of progressive Islam. His vision of Islam – one in which maintained the equality of women and was dedicated to socialist republicanism – along with his protests regarding the imposition of sharia law stirred Sudan’s dictator Jaafer al-Nimeiri in the 1970’s and 80’s to the point that he, after efforts to curb his influence and ban his lectures, called for Taha’s blood.

Indeed this was to be the case, when on the 8^th of January 1985 Taha, and four other comrades were put on trial for apostasy under section 96 of the Sudanese penal code. The decision was confirmed on January the 17^th to execute Taha for his crimes, whereas Taha’s comrades were given the chance to appeal (provided they retracted their “apostasy”, which they promptly did). Taha was eventually put to death on January the 18^th by hanging, before his body was taken to a desert location by Helicopter to be buried, reportedly in the west of Omdurman, Sudan’s largest city.

Taha’s message, expressed in his book “The Second Message of Islam”, was that the Koran had been revealed in two locations, firstly in Mecca where Muhammad and his followers were minorities, and in Medina where the city was brimming with Jews and Pagans. During his verses in Mecca, Muhammad promulgated a “peaceful persuasion,” whereas in Medina the verses are filled with rules and intimidations. The Medinan verses, the first message(s) of Islam, were directed to a whole community of early believers and not Muhammad alone, according to Taha. These messages were a sort of ‘historical postponement’ as George Packer puts it in his New Yorker article on Taha. It was the Meccan verses, the second message of Islam that would represent, for Taha in his revisionism, the perfect religion, an acceptance of equality and freedom that, in seventh-century Arabia, Muslims were ready for. This provided his grounds for a progressive Islam that the likes of Nimeiri refused to even speculate on.

In January, a two-day conference celebrating the 100^th birth year of Taha at Baker University, in Kansas, USA, brought together a miscellany of important ideas that reflected the life and legacy of Taha. One of the speakers on the 18^th was Dr. Cornel West of Princeton University. He, during his keynote address, called upon the audience to adopt the traits of ‘humility and love’ that encapsulated the mind of Taha. West considered some of today’s existing problems with the same character as Taha. On the question of Israeli-Palestine conflict West observed that “the spirit of Taha leads me to say: Why the relative silence on Gaza” in reference to what West considered to be the US’s refusal to speak out about the Israeli slaughter of the strip, from both Democrat and Republican camps.

The stylistic similarities in West and Taha’s work are quite clear; both have a radical streak to them, challenging the dominant forces in their society and the orthodoxy of their own religions. West’s Christianity is fused with a healthy dose of radical socialism, as was Taha’s Islam. But more than that, both actively sought to show that the existing powers have got their religions wrong. West’s America, as was with Taha’s Sudan, both use religious sentiment – or as West himself referred to it regarding America in his 2004 book Democracy Matters an “imperial Christianity, market spirituality … let’s-make-a-deal with God” mentality – to justify their wars on what they perceive to be an unholy society. In Republican America (or “the age of Ronald Reagon”, as West proclaimed that Obama’s presidency initiated the end to), the efforts to limit time on abortion, cap stem-cell research, and wage wars on foreign countries by ‘God’s own decree’ were all so-called expressions of Christian ideals. But for West, this is a peculiar use of Christianity, which, for him, should explore the problems that sexism, racism and hegemony can bring about in order to remove them. West’s first book Prophecy Deliverance in 1982 advocates the benefits of an African-American Christianity that draws its ethical dimensions from socialism and Marxism.

(Part 2 tomorrow)

Change, can we believe in?

In Sweden its known as the “Toblerone affair“. In October 2005, the social-democrat Mona-Sahlin – the country’s youngest MP – was looking to replace Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson, who had announced his resignation. Only these hopes were dashed when it emerged that Sahlin had used her government credit card to purchase a delightful chocolate snack.

In Sweden tax returns are transparent, and due to Sahlin not paying the money back, her petit crime was revealed (not to mention the private cars, unpaid fines etc etc).

So when apologies are being thrown about left, right and centre – Gordon Brown’s cross-party apology, David Cameron’s umbrella apology, Richard Timney’s porn apology (that cringeworthy video again) – and calls for system change are a symbol of repent, what is it that can change the expenses system?

(I don’t suppose it matters that they may be released early, does it?)

Do we really have to have everything out in the open. Do politicians’ tax returns need to be published?

One thing is for sure, if the tories win the apology game (today the Royal College of Nursing, tomorrow youtube, Wednesday Eastenders – provided its shown on a Wednesday, I don’t know, who cares) and the next General Election, they are still not “pure“, as Michael White in his Guardian blog noted, and the expenses system will still have to change.

As Jeremy Seabrook noted in a recent article,”You don’t have to agree with the British National party to see the legitimacy of its claim to represent those written off by Labour”. Something that “those written off by Labour”, by whom he means the white working class, should not expect to draw great influence from is the class differences in those things MP’s have made expenses claims on. As good as fraudualent claims have been made by both Labour and tory. But if I could for a moment point out that the excessive uses of taxpayer money to pay mortgages on houses that would be sold months after was a tactic used more by tories than Labour MP’s. Some Labour MP’s expenses crimes were rather more trivial than offensive; tampons, porn and 2 toilet seats.

Not to mention that among the lowest claimants were both Labour MP’s and sons of leading socialists; Ed Miliband whose Father was the left wing academic Ralph Miliband, author of The State in a Capitalist Society, and Hilary Benn whose Father needs no introduction. Its class War!

But apologies aside, the situation has escalated calls by many for Brown to either start a new popular war or the more realistic call of leadership change if (or, again realistically, when) the European elections nosedive for Labour. Nowhere has this latter message been more cutting than in Polly Toynbee’s comment today in the Guardian calling for Alan Johnson to take leadership unopposed.

In her knife wielding diatribe she told the world;

“It’s all over for Brown and Labour. The abyss awaits.”

and that

“He may be the best-read prime minister in decades, but his learning seems to hamper instead of illuminate his path […] But then the decisions he takes are too often tactical, not purposeful or strategic. Trident, the third runway or post office privatisation are mere positioning in some illusory business-pleasing ploy, their long-term damage far outweighing one day’s headlines.”

But then there will be those faithful’s that come out in support of pre-election unity, and one of those voices will be the ever grateful Peter Mandelson, who in a recent article, also from the Guardian, asked the electorate to concentrate more on imaganing for a moment how a tory government would have handled the events of the last year.

He elaborates;

“Northern Rock would have been allowed to fail, regardless of the potential costs in lost deposits and financial panic.

There would have been no fiscal stimulus. No VAT cut to generate £8bn-£9bn in retail sales that would not otherwise have occurred. No frontloaded government capital spending to boost construction. No lift for hard-hit car manufacturers. And as for the G20, David Cameron can hardly bear to go near Europe, let alone find his way in the rest of the world.

Instead, a Tory government would have stood aside, seeing the recession, as some shadow ministers have admitted in unguarded moments, as something that must just be allowed to take its course.”

To add to the list of clear advantages Brown’s government has acheived is the new proposals of locally usable criminal assets, allowing local communities to use £4million of criminal assets to pay for local projects.

Also the new deal with China’s stock exchange will help secure some political weight on an international level, but this could all become deadweight if the 4th of June sends a scathing message.

Will Polly Tyonbee be proved right about leadership change on the 5th of June, who will come to Brown’s support and who will come out yelling. Watch this space.