Scroll.in has an excerpt from a new book by the cretins Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan.
We are apparently resisting right now, in India against citizenship laws and procedures,
These two Hindus don't want people fleeing Islamic persecution to get Indian citizenship.
in Hong Kong against the fugitive offender’s amendment bill,
Divya challenged Xi to a Kung Fu fight
and across the world against border controls. But is it enough?
No. They should go fight Putin.
In political theories, resistance came to be the most popular concept since the passive resistance model of MK Gandhi showed success and the romance of the European resistance to Nazi occupation became well-known through literature.
Both failed. Big big armies defeated Hitler and Tojo.
Today we use “resistance” to designate nearly every political activity, or activism, with an ethical claim.
No we don't. Robbers resist arrest. They aren't making an ethical claim. They just don't want to go to jail.
In fact, we assume that all the good people are resisters.
Mummy and Daddy are not good people. They are not challenging Putin to a Judo match.
In a metaphysical sense, resistance is at least as fundamental as existence.
No. Things which don't exist can't resist shit.
These two terms came from the same etymological root “sistere”, meaning “to take a stand”.
Which is तिष्ठति in Sanskrit.
Interpretation of things on the basis of “existence” would imply that all things stand indifferently “out there”.
Nonsense! An interpretation is an assignment of meaning. If a thing is seen as existing a particular meaning has been assigned to it. It has been differentiated. Indifference has ceased.
But when we interpret the world through resistance, it shows that all things stand against each other, or resist each other, in being.
We may say x exists because it has a 'conatus' which resists everything which seeks to extinguish it. But that conatus remains even if nothing opposes it.
When something slows another thing down, or at the limit, halts the progress of another thing we say that there is resistance.
We do speak of 'wind resistance' but otherwise we speak of obstacles or impediments or the operation of dissipative or counter-inertial forces. We don't say that a car which comes to a halt because it has run out of gas has met resistance. We say it has reached the limit of the distance it could travel with a certain quantity of petrol.
This kind of resistance is very useful, for it performs a work or a function. When the flow of electricity is resisted by the filament of a light bulb it creates heat and light. Or when the tires of an automobile enjoy friction with the road we can manoeuvre it, accelerate it, and apply the brakes effectively. Now we can see that resistance is found within a system – electric or mechanical – and performs various functions in it.
Conatus is like inertia and is a property. That is what is doing the work. We don't want heat from our lightbulbs. We just want light. That is why the old type of bulb is being replaced. This saves us money on our electricity bill. We want less friction for vehicles for the same reason. Consider Musk's 'hyperloop'.
In politics, we should investigate if our resistance is performing a work for someone else, a work that we did not intend, and is thus going well against our ethical claim.
No. In politics, as in everything else, we should avoid doing stupid shit.
In the familiar example of factory workers resisting,
by refusing to work
we can see the way resistance often plays out. The factory management increases work hours and reduces wages as a part of cost reduction measures. The workers go on strike, resisting the factory management. Eventually, there are negotiations, at the end of which the workers settle for a marginal increase in wage without any change in the increased work hours.
In which case, 'resistance' failed. If this keeps happening the workers need to think about gaining skills in some other field. The solution is to make labor supply more elastic by raising transfer earnings. But this means raising your productivity by learning to do smarter things which are in high demand.
As we know, inflation eats into the value of currencies every day which means that the factory would not lose much by way of increased wages. But the increase in work hours surely adds to the profit for the management.
It may do or it may not.
That is, economism as resistance leaves that system qualitatively unchanged, and at best functions as a regulator slowing and hastening the innate tendencies of the system.
No. Economism is about opportunity cost which is about productivity and elasticities of supply and demand. It isn't about resisting shit.
In the above example, resistance appears analogous to the militaristic notion of defending a terrain. That is, when something that we perceive as malicious approaches the objects, institutions, and terrain we created, we resist it.
What the people of Ukraine are doing is resistance. These nutters are just having a wank.
To give a contemporary example, we are today talking about resistance on behalf of the values of the constitution of India,
e.g cow protection
which we must note is conceptually different from the Republic of India.
Nope. The Constitution was the legal instrument by which the Republic of India was created.
The republic is a promise we make to each other that we will strive together to realise certain values – socialism, egalitarianism, secularism, climate security, destruction of the caste system, intolerance to racism and patriarchy.
No. The Republic is a sovereign state. It is not a promise or a threat or a birthday card we send each other.
In world politics as well as in India, the reality of all political systems might be that they are tending towards the critical limits of their innate possibilities – through dismantling of the universities; leaving workers without pensions; reducing the health care benefits to the people; privatisation of the police and the military; and corporate surveillance displacing “intelligence gathering”.
also everybody will be raped by evil robots.
We should take note of a certain fact of the last few decades: Politics has been played on the basis of the coordinates of “left” and “right”, where the line between the two has been drawn invariably by the “right”
No. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, politics has been played on the basis of who provides better governance. This in turn can be a function of leadership, party cohesiveness, and a capacity to address issues which have become salient for the public.
The notion of “centrism” then implies that a resister takes the space previously occupied by the right, which has now shifted to a position farther rightward.
No. 'Centrism' means appealing to the median voter. It doesn't matter if the right or the left has moved to a more extreme position.
In India in recent years, we have started resisting the Hindu right’s version of fascism with a “resistant nationalism” – by waving the national flag at all times, ensuring that Muslim protesters sing “Vande Mataram” despite its obvious religious imagery, and politicians of the opposition visiting temples and reciting religious prayers at press conferences.
Divya is making Muslims sing Vande Mataram. Mohan is constantly visiting temples. Even when taking a dump, they are constantly waving the national flag.
Resistance often results in the resisters resembling the opponent –
Nonsense! Mahatma Gandhi looked nothing like the Viceroy.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which”.
But the pigs in that story weren't resisting the humans. They were hand in glove with them.
The romance of resistance lies in the social illusion it provides with the noise of action, which is never political action, nor transformative participation.
There may be some romantic leftists who dream of storming the Bastille or its current equivalent. But there are equally romantic rightists who dream of storming the tony campuses where those leftists are employed.
Instead, resistance often lets political systems reach the limits of their innate tendencies to the point of death while regulating their decay.
Resistance is itself a 'political system'. If it involves doing stupid shit, it will fail in its objective.
Therefore, resistance creates heroes who knowingly regulate the innate tendencies of the system while seeming to be opposed to it.
Nope. We can create heroes or super-heroes till we are blue in the face. They can't regulate shit. It is a different matter that a particular leader can become a hero because of his achievements or the inspiring example he set.
The classic example is the union leader who takes a cut from the workers and the factory owners. Resistance can be good business.
This is corruption, or extortion, not resistance. It is likely that this union leader is a gangster. Going up against him could get you killed.
The most popular interpretation of resistance is “civil disobedience” which presumes that the natural duty of a human being is to obey.
No. It presumes that politicians will take note of the strength of feeling of those participating in such protests and that this will lead to a better outcome.
When the circumstances are not ideal we are supposed to make the exception and disobey under the condition that everything is “civil”. In this case, “civil” refers to the kind of relation between the agents of the state – the ministers, judges, and the police – and those who disobey; that is, the agents of the state remain obedient to the law and human rights conventions, and the protestors obey all laws except the one they choose to disobey.
No. Civil disobedience means breaking the law with the intention of paying the penalty for so doing and with a political purpose in mind- e.g. to get the Government to change a particular law or else so as to sow sedition and discontent with the current regime.
For example, a crowd seeking to disobey the law against “freedom of organisation” is expected to obey all laws except that one.
There is no such requirement.
The difficulty today with this notion of “civil disobedience” lies entirely in its premise of universal obedience.
There is no such premise.
As we have argued, even the struggle against the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) requires disobedience of not just the unjust law and its associated processes such as the NRC (National Register of Citizens) and NPR (National Population Register) but also disobedience of the rules of caste oppression.
Why stop there? Why not mention the need for disobedience of the cruel patriarchal custom of forcing women to insert the entire Qutub Minar into their rectums? I need hardly say, this practice is highly offensive to Muslims.
Unless it tends towards universal disobedience
not just women, even giraffes and elephants must refuse to insert Qutub Minar into their rectums.
– of all norms, codes, rules, constructs that keep the oppressive system intact – “civil disobedience” will eventually dissipate.
and trillions of bahrishkrit giraffes will continue to suffer discomfort caused by insertion of Qutub Minar up their rectums.
The liberal superstition
Concepts like “civil disobedience” and even “non-violence”, which we recognise under resistance, work well in an idealised liberal state in which persuasion on the basis of moral hegemony changes the course of history for “the good”.
No. 'Passive resistance' failed in the UK. People went to jail or had their goods sold at auction because they refused to pay their rates on the grounds that some of that money might go to fund Anglican or Catholic schools. However, this campaign did harm the Tory party which lost the subsequent election. But since the cause was silly- Anglican schools aren't actually instruments of the Devil- the thing collapsed. Protesting against India's settled policy of giving citizenship to those fleeing Islamic persecution is foolish. It has been happening since 1948.
The trouble is that liberalism is founded on the superstition that all possibilities are equal in value and that they can co-exist in politics.
Liberalism has no such belief.
As Martin Buber tried to explain to Gandhi, we know that the Jewish people and the Nazi state could not co-exist.
Actually, Buber himself did not realize that Hitler would seek to physically exterminate all those of Jewish ancestry. Still, we also know that Gandhi was a crackpot.
The difference between resistance and what we can call “revolution” for the time being can be explained through the encounter between MK Gandhi and PC Joshi in 1944. Joshi was the first general secretary of the Communist Party of India.
He was expelled in 1949. Then the Commies realized that they would be slaughtered if they took on the Indian Army. They became sweet and peaceful. What they called 'revolution' was just careerism and talking bollocks.
Gandhi the resister feared the approach of “Western civilisation” through colonial rule, which for him, reached the ultimate limit at the point when it began to transform the “eternal” caste order of Indian society, which he called “Hindu”.
No. He was simply a crackpot. Still, some of those who paid to keep him in business were smart enough to personally profit by that connection.
Gandhi spoke of the feared ultimate event during a conversation with Sardar Patel at Yervada jail in 1932 – “the untouchable hooligans will make common cause with Muslim hooligans and kill caste Hindus”.
Sadly, the untouchable hooligans had greater reason to fear the Muslim hooligans than they did the peaceful bania. Ambedkar and JN Mandal didn't understand this. The latter had to run away from Pakistan where Jinnah had made him Law Minister.
In this case, Gandhi was being a “bourgeois thinker” in the sense in which Wittgenstein used the term – “he thought with the aim of clearing up the affairs of some particular community”. Wittgenstein had opposed the “bourgeois thinker” with the philosopher who must be indifferent to the interests of communities, because the philosopher is concerned with the very meaning of “interest” and “commo”.
Nonsense! Wittgenstein didn't understand either Godel or Ramsey- both of whom were first class mathematicians. Ramsey, it is true, initially thought that genuine propositions are truth functionally built out of elementary propositions (which, sadly, don't exist). He thought the manner in which Witless had defined the predicative (but gotten rid of identity) might be useful in ridding PM of the need for the axiom of reducibility which, as Skolem put it, arbitrarily decrees that the nonpredicative stipulations will be satisfied. But, the problem was, as Russell, Hilbert, Von Neumann etc. saw, that whatever 'fix' you applied you'd still lose important chunks of math. Ramsey, in going down the rabbit hole of the Tractatus, realized that without identity available, there could be classes of objects given extensionally with no corresponding propositional function as their intension. However, Witless thought there was a difference between 'saying' and 'showing' though both are an interpretation. In a sense, Ramsey was looking, or like Hilbert, should have been looking for something like recursive denumerability to defeat impredicativity so that there would be a way, in PM, to refer to propositions without asserting them. Eventually, of course, Godel took this road and a little later Church-Turing settled the hash of the Entscheidungsproblem.
We can only speculate on what Ramsey would have contributed had he lived. Perhaps he would have turned on its head the notion that logic is tautological but math isn't, or inverted 'reducibility' and 'restricted comprehension'. Like Von Neumann, who qualified as a chemical engineer at the same time as he got a PhD in Math, Ramsey was a polymath. Both made important contributions to Economics because, unlike the pre-War generation, they had a 'can-do' attitude.
Ramsey thought he had found a function which was not a definition of identity but which would achieve the same result in terms of saving Russell & Whitehead's Principia from the fatal flaw mentioned by the Germans. Ramsey at that time was a logicist. I think, had he lived, he would have evolved into a pragmatist. That is the background to Witlesstein dismissing Ramsey as a 'bourgeois thinker'- …
'he thought with the aim of clearing up the affairs of some particular community.
In other words, he was doing math not philosophy of math
He did not reflect on the essence of the state – or at least he did not like doing so – but on how this state might reasonably be organized.
An essence is a thing true in all possible worlds. Speaking generally, it isn't very interesting.
The idea that this state might not be the only possible one in part disquieted him and in part bored him.
Because actual states exist and making them better- for e.g. through this work in Econ- was worthwhile whereas saying 'the essence of the state is sovereignty' or 'the essence of sovereignty is the cuddling of the death wish by the puppy dog of fraternity' or other such verbal diarrhea.
He wanted to get down as quickly as possible to reflecting on the foundations – of this state.
Nope. He just wanted stuff to work better. As I say, he was headed towards Pragmatism.
This was what he was good at and what really interested him; whereas real philosophical reflection disturbed him until he put its result (if it had one) to one side and declared it trivial.
Because it was stupid shit. As with his objection to Godel, Witless had got it into his head that because there could be a 'non-standard model', therefore everything was 'interpretation' and the best 'interpretation' must be 'philosophical'- i.e. unconcerned with actual logic or actual math even if it was supposed to be 'Philosophy of Math'. In other words, the foundations of a thing aren't in that thing. They are in whatever arbitrary shite Witless pulled out of his arse.
It is pure comedy for Dwivedi and Mohan, who don't know any Math, to pretend that Witlesstein was a Commie nutter.PC Joshi was involved in the project of “people’s struggle” to bring an egalitarian society, to create something new rather than resisting changes to the old.
He was a useless nutter. But then his Party, after realizing that 'resisting' could get them killed, readmitted him so he could carry on being a useless.
Gandhi, who had a limited conception of the people as ‘caste Hindus’, found it curious and asked Joshi who these people were. Joshi responded: “People in people’s war means all peoples the world over without exception”.
Joshi was supporting the war effort and thus enjoying life thanks to British patronage. Hilariously, this shitty little coward busy writing shitty little pamphlets like 'Congress and the Communists' thought he was part of a 'people's war'!
This “without exception” implies that “people” is not just the sum of all men and women but the sum of all the possible inclinations and all the impossible desires of humankind.
Not to mention all the giraffes up whose rectums Qutub Minars have been inserted.
This drive for the infinite which we find in Joshi is something that confounded Gandhi but which is essential for change.
Gandhi understood Joshi- who had done two or three years in the Andaman jail- very well. Being pally with the Brits, or only pretending to fight them, ensured you had a far more comfortable life than joining the Army and doing some actual fighting for your country.
For this moment, then, revolution implies this: We must go beyond “resistance” to struggle for people, without exception.
Not just people. Trillions of giraffes have had Qutub Minars inserted into the rectums by evil Capitalists. PC Joshi would not have approved. Wittgenstein would have written a stern letter to Martin Buber about this. Frank Ramsey, however, would have probably compounded the sufferings of giraffes by shoving Taj Mahal up their bums. What to do? Bourgeoisie is like that only. Mind it!
No comments:
Post a Comment