100 ΧΡΟΝΙΑ ΝΙΚΟΣ ΚΑΡΟΥΖΟΣ
Karl Marx
Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie
The more production comes to rest on exchange value, hence on exchange, the more important do the physical conditions of exchange – the means of communication and transport – become for the costs of circulation. Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange – of the means of communication and transport – the annihilation of space by time – becomes an extraordinary necessity for it. Only in so far as the direct product can be realized in distant markets in mass quantities in proportion to reductions in the transport costs, and only in so far as at the same time the means of communication and transport themselves can yield spheres of realization for labour, driven by capital; only in so far as commercial traffic takes place in massive volume – in which more than necessary labour is replaced – only to that extent is the production of cheap means of communication and transport a condition for production based on capital, and promoted by it for that reason. All labour required in order to throw the finished product into circulation – it is in economic circulation only when it is present on the market – is from capital’s viewpoint a barrier to be overcome – as is all labour required as a condition for the production process (thus e.g. expenses for the security of exchange etc.).
The sea route, as the route which moves and is transformed under its own impetus, is that of trading peoples ϰατ᾽ ἐξοχήν. [24] On the other side, highways originally fall to the community, later for a long period to the governments, as pure deductions from production, deducted from the common surplus product of the country, but do not constitute a source of its wealth, i.e. do not cover their production costs. In the original, self-sustaining communes of Asia, on one side no need for roads; on the other side the lack of them locks them into their closed-off isolation and thus forms an essential moment of their survival without alteration (as in India). Road construction by means of the corvée, or through taxes, which is another form, is a forced transformation of a part of a country’s surplus labour or surplus product into roads. If an individual capital is to undertake this – i.e. if it is to create the conditions of the production process which are not included in the production process directly – then the work must provide a profit.
Translated by: Martin Nicolaus
Εκ των έσω από κάτι σαν Anti Trump
While formally a weak country can bring a case against a powerful country, the remedy available is limited to authorization to use self-help. But small countries cannot harm big countries by closing their markets to them; they can only hurt themselves by doing this. The remedy thus has value only for powerful countries, both with respect to their relations with each other and with small countries.
The Perils of Global Legalism, Eric A. Posner
University of Chicago Press
Benjamin R. Tucker / Individual Liberty
Methods - Passive Resistance
It is not wise warfare to throw your ammunition to the enemy unless you
throw it from the cannon's mouth.But if you can compel the enemy to waste
his ammunition' by drawing his fire on some thoroughly protected spot; if you
can, by annoying and goading and harassing him in all possible ways, drive him to the last resort of
stripping bare his tyrannous and invasive purposes and put him in the attitude of a
designing villain assailing honest men for purposes of plunder, -there is
no better strategy.
There is not a tyrant in the civilized world today who would not do anything in his power to precipitate a bloody revolution rather than see himself confronted by any large fraction of his subjects determined not to obey. An insurrection is easily quelled; but no army is willing or able to train its guns on inoffensive people who do not even gather in the streets but stay at home and stand back on their rights. Neither the ballot nor the bayonet is to play any great part in the coming struggle; passive resistance is the instrument by which the revolutionary force is destined to secure in the last great conflict the people's rights forever.
The idea that Anarchy
can be inaugurated by force is as fallacious as the idea that it can be sustained by force. Force cannot preserve
Anarchy; neither can it bring it. In fact, one of the inevitable influences of
the use of force is to postpone Anarchy. The only thing that force can ever do
for us is to save us from extinction, to give us a longer lease of life in which
to try to secure Anarchy by the only methods that can ever bring it. But this advantage
always purchased at immense cost, and its attainment is always attended
by frightful risk. The attempt should be made only when the risk of any
Passive resistance and boycotting are now
prominent features of every great national movement.
Οι τωρινές δηλώσεις των δυτικών εξουσιών, περί ειρήνης και δικαιοσύνης την ίδια στιγμή που εξοντώνουν χιλιάδες αμάχους, καταφέρνουν να στέκονται λογικά μέσα από την τεχνολογική ταχύτητα που εδώ και δεκαετίες δίνει ισορροπία σε οποιαδήποτε γλοιώδης αντίφαση.
Ο ψηφιακά σπινταρισμένος εγκέφαλος συνεχίζει την καθημερινότητα με το ελάχιστο ανθρώπινο νόημα.
Richard Rorty / Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
I shall define an
"ironist" as someone who fulfills three conditions: (1) She has
radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses,
because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as
final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument
phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these
doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not
think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch
with a power not herself. Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the
choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary
nor by an attempt to fight one's way past appearances to the real, but simply
by playing the new off against the old. I call people of this sort
"ironists" because their realization that anything can be made to look good or bad by being
redescribed, and their renunciation of the attempt to formulate criteria of
choice between final vocabularies, puts them in the position which Sartre
called "meta-stable": never quite able to take themselves seriously
because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are
subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final
vocabularies, and thus of their selves.
The metaphysician is still
attached to common sense, in that he does not question the platitudes which
encapsulate the use of a given final vocabulary, and in particular the
platitude which says there is a single permanent reality to be found behind the
many temporary appearances. He does not redescribe but, rather, analyzes old
descriptions with the help of other old descriptions. The ironist, by contrast,
is a nominalist and a historicist. She thinks nothing has an intrinsic nature,
a real essence. So she thinks that the occurrence of a term like "just"
or "scientific" or "rational" in the final vocabulary of
the day is no reason to think that Socratic inquiry into the essence of justice
or science or rationality will take one much beyond the Ianguage games of one's
time. The ironist spends her time worrying about the possibility that she has
been initiated into the wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong language game.
She worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human
being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so
turned her into the wrong kind of human being. But she cannot give a criterion
of wrongness. So, the more she is driven to articulate her situation in
philosophical terms, the more she reminds herself of her rootlessness by
constantly using terms like "Weltanschauung,"
"perspective," "dialectic," "conceptual framework"
"historical epoch," "language game," "redescription"
"vocabulary," and "irony."
Metaphysicians then go on to
embed this distinction within a network of associated distinctions - a
philosophical theory - which will take some of the strain off the initial
distinction. This sort of theory construction is the same method used by judges
to decide hard cases, and by theologians to interpret hard texts. That activity
is the metaphysician's paradigm of rationality. He sees philosophical theories
as converging - a series of discoveries about the nature of such things as
truth and personhood, which get closer and closer to the way they really are,
and carry the culture as a whole closer to an accurate representation of
reality. The ironist, however, views the sequence of such theories – such interlocked
patterns of novel distinctions - as gradual, tacit substitutions of a new
vocabulary for an old one. She calls "platitudes" what the metaphysician
calls "intuitions." She is inclined to say that when we surrender an
old platitude (e.g., "The number of biological species is fixed" or
"Human beings differ from animals because they have sparks of the divine
with them" or "Blacks have no rights which whites are bound to
respect"), we have made a change rather than discovered a fact.
The ironist's preferred form of
argument is dialectical in the sense that she takes the unit of persuasion to
be a vocabulary rather than a proposition. Her method is redescription rather
than inference. Ironists specialize in redescribing ranges of objects or events
in partially neologistic jargon, in the hope of inciting people to adopt and
extend that jargon. An ironist hopes that by the time she has finished using
old words in new senses, not to mention introducing brand-new words, people will
no longer ask questions phrased in the old words. So the ironist thinks of
logic as ancillary to dialectic, whereas the metaphysician thinks of dialectic
as a species of rhetoric, which in turn is a shoddy substitute for logic. I
have defined "dialectic" as the attempt to play off vocabularies against
one another, rather than merely to infer propositions from one another, and
thus as the partial substitution of redescription for inference.
For us ironists, nothing can
serve as a criticism of a final vocabulary save another such vocabulary; there
is no answer to a redescription save a re-re-redescription. Since there is
nothing beyond vocabularies which serves as a criterion of choice between them,
criticism is a matter of looking on this picture and on that, not of comparing
both pictures with the original. Nothing can serve as a criticism of a person
save another person, or of a culture save an alternative culture - for persons
and cultures are, for us, incarnated vocabularies. So our doubts about our own
characters or our own culture can be resolved or assuaged only by enlarging our
acquaintance.
The idea that liberal societies
are bound together by philosophical beliefs seems to me ludicrous. What binds
societies together are common vocabularies and common hopes. The vocabularies are,
typically, parasitic on the hopes - in the sense that the principal function of
the vocabularies is to tell stories about future outcomes which compensate for
present sacrifices.
To extend the actuarial analogy,
individuals can be thought of as life-insurance underwriters. An individual can
be expected to invest or risk a certain proportion of his own assets in the
life of another individual. He takes into account his relatedness to the other
individual, and also whether the individual is a 'good risk' in terms of his
life expectancy compared with the insurer's own. Strictly we should say 'reproduction
expectancy' rather than 'life expectancy', or to be even more strict, 'general
capacity to benefit own genes in the future expectancy'. Then in order for
altruistic behavior to evolve, the net risk to the altruist must be less than
the net benefit to the recipient multiplied by the relatedness.
Richard
Dawkins -The Selfish Gene.
Ο Δρόμος και ο νόμος
Τους δε νόμους τοις αραχνίοις ομοίους· και γαρ εκείνα, εάν μεν εμπέση τι κούφον και ασθενές, στέγειν· εάν δε μείζον, διακόψαν οίχεσθαι . -Σόλων
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τρακτέρ : 2.5 t
Σχεδόν ενενήντα χρόνια από την ιστορική, καταφανώς επίκαιρη μελέτη του Walter Benjamin.
Η μαζική «οπτική
κατανάλωση» ή το σταθερό συντηρητικό των ίδιων συστημάτων
(παραλείποντας την
όποια ιδεολογική καλοπιστία στον τεχνο – προοδευτισμό).
Walter Benjamin / The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
The concept of aura
which was proposed above with reference to historical
objects may usefully be illustrated
with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define the aura of
the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If,
while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range
on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the
aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend
the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two
circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the
masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring
things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent
toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its
reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at
very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably,
reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the
image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked
in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry
an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception
whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a
degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.
Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is
noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of
reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited
scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
Panel painting is a creation of the Middle Ages, and nothing guarantees
its uninterrupted existence. But the human need for shelter is lasting. Architecture
has never been idle. Its history is more ancient than that of any other art,
and its claim to being a living force has significance in every attempt to
comprehend the relationship of the masses to art. Buildings are appropriated in
a twofold manner: by use and by perception - or rather, by touch and sight.
Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration
of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no
counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is
accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture,
habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too,
occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental
fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with reference to architecture,
in certain circumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the
human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved
by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually
by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation. The distracted person,
too, can form habits. More, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of
distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit.
Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which
new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are
tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most
important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the
film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in
all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds
in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets
this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the
background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but
also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The
public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.
Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses
without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism
sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance
to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism
seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of
Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system.
This is the political formula for the situation.
The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible
to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property
system.
If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production—in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.
Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.
Kaisermarsch
Unwavering in their pursuit of a final result and honoringonly truth,
they proceeded from one understanding to the next, seeking to grasp each
historical phenomenon based on the sets of assumptions of its own time, thereby
justifying it in its historical necessity. This criticalhistorical method, in
principle common to the scientific community, is, as I claim, the exact
opposite of a dogmatic point of view which demands ongoing self-confirmation:
Mr. N could not overlook this either. His remedy is to revile the
historical-critical method denouncing any aesthetic view that deviates from his
own and blaming an age in which philology in Germany was raised to never before
imagined heights for “completely perverting the true purpose of antiquarian
studies ”
Future Philology! - Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff
ΠΡΙΝ ΤΟ ΣΦΥΡΟΚΟΠΗΜΑ :
Concerning talk about philologist, if it comes from philologists one learns nothing; it is purely chatter-for example Jahn. No feeling for what to defent, what to protect: thus speak people who still haven’t imagined that they can be attacked
Wir Philologen - Nietzsche
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