and other sub-proletarians who are by now a world majority. In the last two decades, capitalism has definitely forsaken its bourgeois industrial roots in favour of financial fantasies creating only shameful mass misery and shameless billionaires. What may be crucial: it has most efficiently used the degeneration of the communist idea in the USSR, and other States claiming to be such, to forestall any mass rethinking on a real Left—today almost nowhere visible on the political map, so that we have to enthuse over Chiapas and Bolivia. This was done by demoralizing, through a mixture of half-truths and lies repeated with Goebbelsian obsession, intellectuals as well as labour or proletarian movements (in the widest sense), cutting that link between them the presence of which makes for the success of every revolution at its beginning, and the absence for its failure due to ossification. The giant capitalist colonization of imagination has on the Left been recognized by isolated thinkers, who therefore tend to obscurity both in their writing and their success or impact outside a narrow academic group: the list of such lone intellectual giants goes from Walter Benjamin and Alfred Sohn-Rethel to the US rethinkers around Fredric Jameson, and the only non-obscure exception would be poets like Brecht and a few others. (If I have any valid insights, it would be from standing at their crossroads, while sharing the double obscurity.)
However, capitalism (and all of us in the Leviathan’s belly) stands today in the presence of Yeats’s rough beast advancing toward Bethlehem. Let me bracket his shambling, as in gunnery, by one very general and one very particular shot. General: in Braudel’s view, finance capitalism is not simply a stage but a recurrent “Autumn” signal of transition from one world regime of accumulation and domination (e.g. the Genoese, Dutch, British, and US ones) to another (246); it signals the destruction of the old regime and creation of a “new” one—a Winter which might be better or worse (cf. Arrighi ix-xiv). Particular: the Chicago “ghetto” in 1988 was found to harbour “silent riots of everyday life,” no less destructive if usually less than spectacular. Private capital had completely withdrawn, in the years 1950-80 manual jobs fell from 36 to 5 thousand and white collar jobs from 15 to less than 7.5 thousand. There was starkly insufficient welfare support, but lots of alcohol and gun-selling shops—since police was incapable to protect victims from gangs, families had to protect themselves; the school system served mainly for “parking” of children, and infant mortality was higher than in Chile or Turkey. The informal economy was mainly based on mass drug use, a veritable industry with sales in millions of $; drug pushing was also the main job readily accessible to ghetto youths from under 10 on. There was “organizational desertification”: no banks but only currency exchanges, no public schools, cinemas, skating rinks, bowling alleys, the last two clinics closed in 1989 (all in Wacquant). In short, we are here amid Weber’s “plunder capitalism” that leads to pandemics of violence; and while Chicago might (or might not) have improved in the meantime, the situation is still such in many other slums of capitalism, US or Latin American or otherwhere, where by now live 1,200 million people. Winter is arriving fast and it doesn’t look pretty. Particularly if one figures in all the wars from the First Gulf One through Serbia, Second Gulf, and Afghanistan plus Libya—with more certainly to come. By their fruits ye shall know them.
Gentle reader, you might wish to ask me: but what of a way out of our global trap? Of course I’d have many ideas, not invented by me, about components of a way out—beginning, say, with universal guaranteed income sufficient to modestly live on for all adults working 35 hours a week, and a stress on education and health (and don’t tell me there’s no way to pay for this: just pay trillions to people instead of banks and the military). Thus I honour the question as supremely important: we need to get into health, activity, and tenderness—Hays’s and Seeger’s “love of my brothers and my sisters.” But this book is primarily not about the way out (though that is its vanishing perspective point) but about the trap of hunger, despair, and violence. For truth shall maybe not make you free, but certainly enable you to become free.
2. Why the Essays in This Book
It is necessary to depict landscapes by images and remarks because of the nature of the investigation. For it compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction. The...remarks in the book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes made in the course of these long and involved journeyings....[A]lmost the same points were being approached from different directions, and new sketches made....Thus this book is really only an album.
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
This book has three essays explicitly on Bert Brecht, and implicitly he has been shaping my understanding for over half a century. Essay 1 (finished in 2000) deals with his concept and image of stance or bearing (Haltung) as fundamental for fixing the dynamics of a body—any body or all bodies—poised and enabled to intervene into matters that concern any and all. I use fixing in the sense of photography, where it means stabilizing and rendering visible, thus also sharable, a latent image potentially existing earlier. This Haltung is opposed to the concept and image of “world view,” which may be momentarily useful but does not wear well because it is not anchored in the ineluctably present labouring and enjoying (or exhausted and painful) body but reduced to a pseudo-scientific eye only, passively observing. To the contrary, as in Marx, people’s work and pleasure produce the world, meshing subject and object in a feedback: love is for Brecht a production, indeed, the supremely pleasurable production of an intimately complementary human relationship.
Such a stance is also the central link in a Brechtian chain of terms and images about personality, involving equally everyday “upright posture” (Bloch) and the furthest horizons of death—in our epoch much more urgently a societal rather than a biological decision, for example in wars or the readiness to die for a cause, matters Brecht dealt with in most of his great plays from Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses and the Lehrstücke to Mother Courage and Her Children and Life of Galileo. Further, it enables us to rethink with him the most muddy hollywoodian and TV reliance on emotion planned and deployed as an opposite of reason (see much more in Suvin, “Brecht and Subjectivity”). Contrariwise, their fusion in a Haltung enables a body to understand and withstand.
In a long-duration view, Brecht’s opus gives us the most persuasive example of how to sublate—redefine and yet preserve—the great Enlightenment discovery of reason, outside which there is no salvation for any or all. Not by “weak thought” or sickly emotion but by the loving union of clarified emotion and precise reason, itself embracing both concepts and topologies, that is configurations in empirical or imaginary spacetime such as metaphors.
The present volume fully participates in such an impossibility of keeping apart subject and object, in the sense that each essay has a defined object but was also felt and held by me to be most pertinent for myself and those who would be open to similar arguments, feelings, and stances. This is obvious in the case of war caused by capitalism (Essay 3) but in more mediated ways all essays have been enforced by its enraged and inflamed state in the last two decades. As for stance, it has led me to reflect on and attempt to perfect my own. Within it, the other most important opus to be constantly revisited, quarried, and updated has for me since my teens been that of Karl Marx.
Essay 2 (1993) reacts against Post-Modernist truly weak thought tabooing the central Marxian category of “totality.” It concedes that Hegel’s and the Positivists’ (in fact theological) use of it as the presupposition of a static and “natural” ontology out there, as a Stoic necessity providing a stable yardstick for everything (as in Lenin’s weakest book, Materialism and Empiriocriticism), is no longer tenable. But it then affirms that no useful epistemology—no way of understanding our societal and natural environment—is possible without using a provisional totality for well-defined purposes. This puts paid, as Walter Benjamin realised, to the bourgeois concept of automatic progress: any progress we might achieve will be contingent and threatened. History has proved that to the hilt.
Essay 3 is encapsulated in the two verbs of its title, “Capitalism Means/Needs War.” On the one hand, psychologically, war is more than a metaphor for capitalist human relationships, it is their essence: in them, man is wolf to man (with excuses to
