What Does It Mean To Be A Revolutionary Today

What Does It Mean to Be a Revolutionary TodayThe topic of revolution has suddenly

become relevant again, primarily because of three recent developments: the worldwide economic crisis, the election of Barack Obama, and the uprising in Iran. Eric Alterman compares our current predicament to the one faced by Franklin Roosevelt and finds Obama insufficiently bold compared to FDR, perhaps, Alterman suggests, because FDR didn't have to contend with an army of lobbyists working on the inside against him and constant braying from right-wing demagogues working on the outside. Alterman says bolder action to combat the current economic crisis is hampered by "a political discourse that ranges 'from the moderate left tothe far right' with no room for the moncler for sale kind of bold 'persistentPutting aside the issue of exploiting an economic crisis to push through a radical agenda, which the left has long accused the right of doing, the question is this: Is communicative rationality Moncler Outlet Online enough to solve our collective problems?Arguably, communicative rationality is the source of Obama's revolutionary Moncler Jackets potential. Has Obama failed to take sufficiently bold action because he could only come up with $800 billion to rescue the economy, or because he hasn't led a purge of all conservatives from government and the public sphere?Last Monday Slavoj Moncler Vests Women iek gave a speech in which he dismisses liberal faith the incremental change brought about by communicative rationality. (Watch the speech on YouTube.) In "What Does It Mean to Be a Revolutionary Today?" iek calls for radical action against what he sees as the totality of the capitalist system. Ever the Lacanian, iek regards capitalism as a sort of obsessive neurotic giant desperately clinging to its problems--everything from ecological disaster to Islamic fundamentalism--just to reassure itself that nothing will change. He cites Walter Benjamin's dictum that every fascism is an index of a failed revolution to make the claim that right-wing demagoguery in the US and Islamic fundamentalism are both symptoms of a deeper problem within global capitalism. iek would argue, for instance, that Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation, which enlists starchitects to rescue the poor of New Orleans, is insufficiently bold because does nothing to address the underlying cause of substandard housing. Although iek doesn't explicitly make this claim, he suggests the Iranians are rebelling against their cultural and political mandarins so that we don't have to rebel against ours.As usual, iek veers between the sublime and the ridiculous in his talk. After telling a vulgar joke he http://www.monclerjacketssaletop.com/ abruptly calls for more modernity, more rationality, not less. To take Benjamin's remark about fascism one step further, we should look for the moment of truth buried within the shouting from the "proudly clueless but uneducable punditocracy." Sure Rush Limbaugh is a blight on the republic, but in his backhanded way he recognizes there's a madness in the system that's experience at an individual level as alienation from modernity itself.It would be gratifying if the president could smite Limbaugh and his fellow bloviators like Obama crushed that fly in the MSNBC studio, but simply dismissing them from the national dialogue would be irrational. It would be the difference between boldness for boldness's sake, and genuinely thoughtful action.What Is One-Way Street?One-Way Street [Einbahnstrasse, 1928] was Walter Benjamin's first effort to break out of the narrow confines of the academy and apply the techniques of literary studies to life as it is currently lived. For Benjamin criticism encompasses the ordinary objects of life, the literary texts of the time, films in current release, and the fleeting Moncler Sweaters Men concerns of the public sphere. Following Benjamin's lead, this blog is concerned with the political content of the aesthetic and representations of the political in the media. As Benjamin writes in One-Way Street, "He who cannot take sides should keep silent."

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