Skip to main content

Biden’s Great Moving Nowhere Show

In The Great Moving Nowhere Show, a text I thoroughly appreciated, Stuart Hall (10) writes: "It needs to be clearly said that a project to transform and modernise society in a radical direction, which does not disturb any existing interests and has no enemies, is not a serious political enterprise." 

This reminded me of Joe Biden’s pledge to wealthy donors that “nothing will fundamentally change '' when he became president. While he has shattered numerous campaign promises, this is one of the few that remains unbroken. 

My first question relates to this critique of insipid status-quo supporting centrism and asks: 

If dominant political parties such as The Democratic Party (U.S.) and Labour (U.K.) are beholden to corporate interests and actively oppose “fundamental change”, where is the energy of left wing activists best harnessed instead? (Rank-and-file labor unions and tenants unions, alongside abolitionist and mutual aid groups, spring to mind)

“The Great Moving Nowhere Show” is an apt description of the Biden administration, which has chosen to respond to devastating crises (COVID, cost of living increases, unaffordable rent, exploitative private healthcare) with typical Democratic apathy: “unfortunate 'facts of life' which folks must simply put up with,” to quote Hall (11). 

”Can’t the states fix COVID?” cry the party leadership, blaming groundhog day-esque legislative failures on the month’s flavor of rotating villain. “Just you wait till we primary Machin!” “We need to vote HARDER against Sinema in 2024!” 

As the government chooses to sacrifice lives “on the altar of jobs and growth” (Hall, 12) by coercing people back to working in person during a catastrophic pandemic, my second question asks: 

If, like now, institutions such as the federal government and UI’s Board of Regents want to pretend the pandemic is over, how can we organize ourselves to keep our own communities safe?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Journals and Prose

My two questions from this week have emerged from the Judith Butler piece, A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back , both centered around the journal, Philosophy and Literature —which Butler describes as the self-proclaimed “arbiter of good prose.”  I agree with Butler’s staunch defense of questioning common sense and provoking “new ways of looking at a familiar world”, and was reminded of David Harvey’s quote in the introduction to his Companion to Marx’s Capital : “Real learning always entails a struggle to understand the unknown.”   Butler describes Philosophy and Literature as a “culturally conservative academic journal” which naturally led me down a longer-than-anticipated visit to the journal's website . I was greeted with a video presented by the Philosophy and Literature’s editor Garry L. Hagberg, who rails against the “jargon infested” work that litters the journal’s field, locating Philosophy and Literature in clear opposition to such bothersome clutter.  However, Hagberg...
Post a Comment
Read more

Articulation_by_Abby Escatel

 In "Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance," Stuart Hall is concerned with complicating Marxist theory's tendency to overgeneralize and universalize its claims that are specifically located within a European history of labor. Questions concerning slavery, coloniality, unfree/forced labor come to the fore and force Marxist theorists to grapple with the need to be specific in their contextualization and historicization of particular moments, ruptures and conjunctures. My questions are as follows:  1. How do we move forward with Marxism while taking into account the component of "unfreedom" when conceptualizing class, labor, and labor power? How does the "proletariat" fail to account for the lived realities of racialized bodies?  2. It seems as though Hall is also saying that race is not all encompassing and also shouldn't be overgeneralized/universalized. In short, labor and race are both always already at work. As a scholar who ce...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 5

  What are the differences between Gramsci’s concept of the “organic intellectual” and Hall’s “public pedagogy?”   On the topic of the diasporic intellectual, Kuan-Hsing Chen mentions that “Some of the diasporic intellectuals I know of have exercised their power, for better or worse, back home, but you have not. And some of them are trying to move back, in whatever way. So, in that sense, you are very peculiar” (503). Although Hall felt some reconnection with the Carribean through the Black diasporic population in Britain, he insists that cultural identity is not fixed but “comes out of very specific historical formations, out of very specific histories and cultural repertoires of enunciation, that it can constitute a ‘positionality’, which we call, provisionally, identity” (503). Individuals can negotiate, rearticulate, recontextualize their different identities, but how does this rearticulation work at an institutional-level?   Thelma
Post a Comment
Read more