Learning & unlearning Spivak

 Professor Oscar Guardiola Rivera who teaches Law at Birkbeck, writes

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was born on 24th of February 1942 in Ballygunge, Calcutta. Her parents, Pares Chandra Chakravorty and Sivani Chakravorty were simple-living, high-thinking nationalist intellectuals.

No. They were upper middle class professionals. Her father and grandfather had gained medical qualifications in England and had lucrative medical practices. Her mother came from a well established landowning family and had an MA in literature. They were devout Hindus but not particularly 'nationalist' for the simple reason that the departure of the Brits would leave them at the mercy of the Muslim majority. 

They were also anti-castists and anti-communists.

Communism was late in gaining a foothold in West Bengal. Why? Because of the Muslim threat. The Bengalis were only 'anti-casteist' in the sense that all theistic Hindus are anti-casteist.  

As a result, out of many lullabies that Spivak and her elder brother slept to, one went on roughly like this:

This is not a lullaby. It is a hymn.  

“all bodies are made of bone, flesh, lard, and blood, the same soul finds its dwelling there…How can you tell a Hindu from a Muslim?”

You can tell a Muslim from his beard, cap, circumcision scar, dress and the fact that he will tell you he is Muslim. The meaning of the verse is that there is only one Soul which pervades the entire Universe. It is delusive to believe you have a soul separate from the 'Param-atma'- i.e. supreme soul.

While reading Gayatri Spivak we must keep in mind that she has been familiar with conflictual coexistence and diversity since her very formative years.

Nonsense! The Brits had fucked off as had a lot of Muslims. There was hardly any conflict while she was growing up because Congress ruled the State and killed or incarcerated Commie nutters. Muslims had already been ethnically cleansed save if they were poor and did the shitty jobs.  

She was born in 1942, which was just a year before the Great Bengal Famine,

where excess mortality was caused by a corrupt Muslim League Government which diverted food for the public distribution system to the black market

and her early childhood days witnessed the Indian Independence as well as the Partition.

She was five years old back then. She didn't witness shit. 

Spivak completed her schooling from St. John’s Diocesan School for Girls and her intermediate from Lady Brabourne.

Two of the best schools in Calcutta. This was because she was from an upper middle class family which was well connected.  

Most of Spivak’s teachers were converted christians who had been oppressed under the Hindu caste system.

No. Most of them were Brahmin or Kayastha converts. There were also some 'tribal' people who had embraced the Gospel thanks to devout Missionaries but they were never oppressed by the Hindu caste system precisely because they kicked ass- i.e. they could kill those who tried to fuck with them.  

They came from a section where the people were treated like animals by higher castes

Only if they had to migrate and work as agricultural labourers. But only guys who can kill you can treat you like an animal. People of Spivak's caste weren't killers and tended to be very polite unless backed up by hefty musclemen.  

and were not even allowed to be near Sanskrit.

Nobody wanted to be 'near Sanskrit'. It is a dead language. Indians were perfectly happy to leave it to German pedants. They wanted English education and the still want English education. Not education in English literature- because that is shit. They just want 'Globish' English so as to do well in the Professions or in Commerce.  

Teachers like Miss Charubala Das (principal at Diocesan),

who was a high caste Christian from a prosperous family 

Miss Nilima Pyne who taught Sanskrit (teacher-in-charge at Diocesan),

she gained that appointment in 1983. Since she did not know Sanskrit, she couldn't have taught it particularly well. Nobody cared. You go to 'Convent School' to get 'pukka' English accent only. 

and Sukumari Bhattacharji who taught English (at Lady Brabourne

She studied Sanskrit after being appointed an English teacher and left so as to teach it at Jadavpur when Spivak was about 12. She became a Marxist and published silly books after doing a post-Doc at Cambridge. Teaching English is no fun. Even Sanskrit is less boring.

are the ones who laid the foundation of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as the academic giant who we know today.

Sadly, her English was poor though her accent was good. Her school had had an Indian headmistress since 1944. Standards had fallen in English because the Brits had left. Still, at least she wasn't forced to learn Sanskrit or Mathematics or anything else that might be academically taxing. 

In 1959, Spivak graduated from Presidency College as a gold medalist in both English and Bengali literature.

In other words, she was a parrot. 

About her days at Presidency College, Spivak tells Swapan Chakravorty–

“I feel that I was made by Presidency in a certain way. My teachers Tarak Nath Sen,

very good on Yeats- on whom Spivak wrote her dissertation. He was rather a blunt man who told his MA English students that the academic credential they would receive wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. The English and the Americans might care about English literature. Indians didn't. 

Subodh Chandra Sengupta,

a sound enough Shakespeare scholar 

Amal Bhattacharjee,

husband of Sukumari, the virulent Marxist 

Tarapada Mukherjee

who taught at SOAS and is fondly remembered 

–these four I think were the ones who actually taught me how to read.

They failed.  

Tarak-babu, in fact, the way he taught us to read, a sort of an inspired and dogged literalism – its the way I still read.”

No. What he did was to ask for 'apoorvata'- i.e. finding something new rather just repeating what previous commentators had said.  That was a generation which saw with dismay that, in independent India, the Humanities were turning into sub-Humanities. 

Did you know? – Spivak initially wanted to become a physicist but couldn't because she was unable to clear the Maths entrance test.

She was stupid. We know that. Still, she was a good enough parrot.  

For her it was Presidency or nothing, and that is why she eventually took up English at the University.

If you are stupid, you may as well teach stupid shit. The trick is not to read the stuff you are supposed to teach. That's where Derrida comes in useful. You can say the same thing about Jane Austen as you say about P.G Woodhouse- viz. it's totes unfair they were White. Whitey be debil.  

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak recalls that she had left India because she

didn't want to teach English to girls of her own class.  

was critical of Presidency University and had even jeopardized her first rank due to this. In 1959, Spivak borrowed $5200 and went to the U.S. to pursue her Masters’ degree at Cornell University.

Kamala Harris's mum was doing the same thing. Had either got into Medical Skool, they wouldn't have done so.  

After completing her Masters’, she completed a fellowship at Girton College in Cambridge, England, after which she worked as an instructor at the University of Iowa. While serving as an instructor, Spivak continued her doctoral dissertation at Cornell University, on W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) titled - ‘Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry’ under the literary critic Paul de Man.

Who had initially faked his academic credentials.  

About working with Paul de Man Spivak recalls:

“I have lived long enough and been on enough sexual harassment cases and I’ve seen how the academy takes care of senior men. The more I look back, the more astounded I am at how impeccable he was in his attitude towards me.

Spivak was a hottie But she looked haughty. Predators on campus went after impressionable co-eds from cow towns. 

There weren't many foreign students in English at US universities then… I was a young good-looking person, clearly smart but nonetheless very exotic. It would have been easy for De Man not to have taken me seriously intellectually.

But he wasn't actually an intellectual. He was a fraud though at a later point he did manage to get a PhD in America.

So it wasn’t so much that he didn’t think me exotic but that he placed me in the cleanliness of intellectual recognition.

One charlatan recognized another.  

I really was extremely fortunate in this.”

Spivak's own entrepreneurial elan- her taking on the job of translating Derrida's nonsense- was the foundation of her good fortune. She is an immigrant who made good by faking it till she made it after which she played the Race and Gender card and secured intellectual affirmative action.  

Intrestingly, Gayatri Spivak remembers the prevalance of harmful gendering that led her to feel that people found her to be brilliantly intellectual because she was beautiful, resulting in intellectual insecurity.

I had the same problem. Indeed, I had to quit Accountancy because the photocopier kept undressing me with its eyes. 

Paul de Man was an exception in this case.

He had his own problems with the threat of deportation as a bigamist, a Nazi collaborator, and financial fraudster hanging over him.  

In the year 1977, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for the English translation of Mahasweta Devi's short stories titled 'Imaginary Maps'.

It was published in 1995. Devi did get a prize in 1979 for a different novel. Spivak got the translation prize in 1997. 

The majority of the Indian population consists of working-class poor people. During the struggle for Indian independence, rural peasants and women were led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and significantly contributed to the passive resistance against the British.

Such people supported the British, as police men, soldiers, jailors etc., if paid to do so 

There was significant subaltern resistance against colonial rule during the 18th century.

Which is why the Brits became paramount.  

However, their sacrifices and struggles have remained undocumented in official historic records.

Nonsense! The Brits documented revolts by tribals, Muslim tenants etc. They quickly redressed their grievances which is why upper class Hindus came to hate the Brits.  

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak highlights and questions why nationalism has been unable to represent the majority of the Indian population -- the working-class peasants and women.

Spivak is a fool. The fact is, the President of India is a tribal woman who once worked as a school teacher before joining politics. She belongs to the nationalistic ruling party in India. Incidentally, not only did India have a female Prime Minister, the current Chief Minister of Bengal is a woman.  I may mention that Mayawati, who was Chief Minister of the largest Indian State, was an 'untouchable'.

She is part of the Subaltern Studies group that was initiated by Ranajit Guha (1923-2023).

Like Guha, she knew nothing about Indian or any other type of history.  

The Subaltern Studies attempts to re-write history that is inclusive of the experiences of subalterns who have been neglected on the basis of their ethnicity, class, gender, religion or sexual orientation.

Then they realized that the 'subalterns' were becoming Chief Ministers of States. Thankfully, most were able to emigrate to the West where nobody knew or cared about Ind's revolting masses. 

In order to perpetuate and strengthen their dominance and for administrative convenience, the British educated upper-middle class Indians in English.

No. They promoted vernacular languages. Only after the Brits slyly fucked off did you have a generation of people who could not read any Indian language. Rajiv Gandhi had his speeches in Hindi written out for him in Roman script.  

This eventually created a distinct class of English educated Indians that was considered as superior to the rest of the population.

No. The Princes and big landlords were considered superior to all but the Viceroy who was the representative of the King-Emperor. Even the 'country bottled' (i.e. Indian born and bred) Englishman was second class. Princes had sovereign immunity. No White person or Cambridge educated tycoon or barrister had anything similar. Nehru did not become PM because his English was good. It was because his mother tongue was the khadi boli of Mughal era Delhi.  

The national independence movement of India, although successful in gaining freedom from British rule, maintained the class system of colonial rule.

No. Indira Gandhi got rid of the Princes. Most big landlords had either lost their land or were only retaining it fraudulently. The decline in the status of the English speaking professional class was steep. The new bosses wore dhoti, spoke rustic dialects, and spat paan-juice all over the place. You had to be very obsequious to them.  

Even till today, a relatively small group of middle-class men, educated in English hold majority of political and economic power. 

No. Those who hold power do so because they speak Marwari or Gujarati or whatever. Middle class men may do well if they are educated in computer languages. Shashi Tharoor's English is very good but it is his command of Malayalam and Hindi which kept him in Parliament. Sadly, his excellent English also meant he couldn't be President of Congress. At the very least he should have spat a lot of paan-juice all over the place. 

The larger section of the Indian population still has little or no access to the benefits of Indian independence.

Unless they got elected or got a government job under 'affirmative action' and could loot the country more effectively than any Pindari or Thug. 

This is persistently highlighted by Spivak.

Maybe to stupid White peeps. She doesn't say, in Bengali, that Mamta actually has a PhD from 'East Georgia University' and speaks the Queen's English to her chums. Her enemies, she scolds in Parisian French. 

Additionally, Spivak states that the Western Marxism employed by the historians of the Subaltern Studies Group does not do justice to the more complicated and dense histories of subaltern resistance that they aim to recover.

When Guha, who had become a British citizen a dozen years previously, briefly returned to India, he became fascinated with the 'Naxals' (Maoists) and thus thought that 'tribals' would overthrow the Indian State. Sadly, tribals preferred to put their own people in power and the BJP carved out States which they could dominate for them. I suppose President Murmu will ensure that her people get their own state by carving a chunk out of Orissa and some contiguous districts. That way, the Oriya people can concentrate on developing their littoral. It is a win win. 

She challenges the notion that the Western theories of political resistance and social change are universal and all inclusive.

But she knows shit about Political Science.  

She emphasizes that the history of India is different and complex and the Western theoretical models cannot represent it adequately.

If the Brits could rule it for a long time, then, clearly, their 'model' was more than adequate.  

We cannot depend on them. Moreover, daily lives of Indian women

like Mamta and President Murmu 

are so haphazard and unsystematic that the technical vocabulary of the Western critical theory fails to represent them.

But 'critical theory' just means illiterate, imbecilic, shite. Nobody gives a fart about it save peeps who don't want to have to teach Yeats or Shakespeare.  

This is a crisis in knowledge.

Ignorance. The crisis is that if you have to teach nonsense to imbeciles, you go potty.  

The crisis in knowledge indicates the presence of ethical risks when privileged intellectuals make political claims on behalf of the oppressed or marginalized people.

Privileged intellectuals are as rich as Elon Musk. People who teach shite to shitheads aren't privileged. They are glorified child-minders.  

This leads to the silencing of their voices and omission of their lived experiences.

By whom? Professors of stupid shit? In India, the poor have votes. They can vote for their own people who don't speak English and have never heard of 'critical theory'.  

Additionally, it also implies that the lives and struggles of these women will only continue to be misunderstood and misrepresented with respect to the western critical theory.

Who cares what stupid nonentities understand or fail to understand? All we ask is that they don't masturbate in public.  

While Spivak highlights the inadequacies of Western critical theories, she does not abandon them.

You can't abandon stuff you never had in the first place.  

According to the postcolonial literary critic Bart Moore Gilbert, she, along with Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, is among the first to accept and use ideas from Western critical theory in postcolonial studies.

Said had some political importance back when Arafat's star was rising. Bhabha is a Parsi from Bombay whom no other Parsi reads or rates. Spivak, as a Bengali, can rely on upper-caste Buddhijivi boosterism.  

This, however is not always well received by all theorists. For instance, Aijaz Ahmad and Arif Dirlik criticise the use of western theory in the field of post-colonial studies because this inclusion indicates a new kind of intellectual colonialism complicit with global capitalism.

In other words, they are saying 'why let White peeps teach worthless shite? Give us their jobs. We are even more worthless and stupid but, at least, we are dark skinned'. 

What is Literary Theory?

Literary theory refers to the various schools of thoughts that shape and affect our interpretations of a literary work.

That is literary criticism- i.e. guys giving likes or 5 stars to a new book. Literary theory was a way not to read books but to gas on as if you were a cross between Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Greta Thurnberg.  

It is literary theory that facilitates impactful and effective criticism of literature.

Name one book of undoubted literary value which 'literary theory' has promoted or helped create a market for. I can only think of  the Nouveau Roman fad of the 1960s, featuring Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon. Apart from Marguerite Duras, they were more talked about than read. Meanwhile the Great, and greatly turgid, American Novel continued to rise and rise. 

If we go by the dictionary, the term ‘Subaltern’ is a junior ranking officer in the British Army.

In Italy, it means an NCO.  

However, the intellectual source for Spivak’s meaning of Subaltern comes from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Gramsci used the term ‘subaltern’ to represent to unorganised groups or rural peasants.

i.e. not the industrial proletariat of conventional Marxism. 

These peasants had no social or political consiciousness as a group. This made it easier for the ruling classes to lead and exploit them.

Mussolini, a Socialist, did get to lead them. Gramsci failed. Why? Workers don't want to control the factories where they work. This is because, if they do, they won't get paid. Everything will be stolen.

Gramsci’s use and idea of the ‘subalterns’ was further developed by the Subaltern Studies Collective.

Who emigrated to the West if the opportunity presented itself.  

The Subaltern Study Group or SSG was initiated by Ranajit Guha, and consists of South Asian scholars such as Shahid Amin

a Muslim. He didn't understand that being a Marxist is only cool if you can get to sleep with hot grad students on an Ivy League campus.  

, David Arnold, Partha Chatterjee, David Hardiman, and Gyanendra Pandey, who aimed to trace the histories and experiences of marginal social groups and individuals who were excluded in Indian history.

They did this in America because, obviously, there are plenty of starving Dalits and Adivasis to be found there.  

According to Guha, subalterns referred to peasants who were ignored in the dominant post-independent historical narratives.

Nobody gave a shit about 'historical narratives'. The fact is farmer's leaders like Charan Singh were becoming Chief Ministers by the late Fifties and Sixties. Tikait organized a big rally of peasant farmers in the late Eighties. His son helped organize the recent rally which gained international attention. Power had shifted from 'Educationally Forward Castes' to farming and 'Backward Castes' from the Sixties onward. Come to think of it, Kamraj Nadar- who had to drop out of school aged 12- became Chief Minister of Madras in 1954.

It is true that India attained political freedom from the British colonial rule.

The British were committed to 'responsible' and then 'representative' government from 1917 onward. The age of multi-ethnic Empires was coming to a close.  

However, this freedom did not correspond with the promised social revolution in the class system.

Which was occurring from the Thirties onward though Brits had been constantly making concessions to peasants from the 1860s onward. In Bengal, the leader of the Peasant's Party, Fazl ul Haq, became premier of autonomous, undivided, Bengal in 1937-  i.e. 5 years before Spivak was born. 

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak agrees that the peasants, untouchables, and the working class have been excluded from history.

She is ignorant. Charan Singh was a peasant. He became Prime Minister in 1979. But Indira could have made a Dalit the Premier in 1974.  

However, she also points out that the Subaltern Study Group (SSG) privileges male subaltern subjects, ignoring the marginalized women.

many of whom have to sit down to pee. How is that fair? Incidentally, did you know Shakespeare had a penis? Yet the University demands we teach Omelette, Prince of Dutcthmark! That's totes fucked up!

She provides a post-marxist definition of subalterns

those excluded from the narratives of stupid shitheads.  

that is more flexible, informed by deconstruction, and accommodates the histories, lives, and experiences of women.

Spivak thinks that women are utterly shit.  

Spivak’s deconstructive reading of the works of Subaltern Studies Group is criticised on the grounds of employing a western elite academic language to the history of subaltern revolutions.

The Marxists criticize her because she isn't a Marxist. The proper position for women in the revolutionary struggle is 'prone'- i.e. flat on their backs and with their legs in the air. 

There are individuals and social groups who are perpetually and historically ignored and exploited by colonialism.

You aren't ignored if you are being exploited. It is only when you have nothing of value- not even labour power- that people ignore you.  

These people are further disempowered and misrepresented by master words like ‘the woman’, the worker’, the colonized’, used in the context of political struggles of Indian independence.

What's more people are beaten, sodomized, and subjected to fellatio, cunnilingus, slut shaming, decapitation and having their tits shat upon by 'master words' like 'silly moo' and 'dumb bint.'  

One of the most significant contributions by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is her attempt to find a critical vocabulary that is appropriate to represent, and effectively describes the lived experiences and histories of misrepresented, ignored and oppressed social groups and individuals.

Because what poor peeps really want is a 'critical vocabulary' developed by cretins teaching useless shit.  

In an interview published in Polygraph, Spivak explains:

“I like the word ‘subaltern’ for one reason.

Churchill was a subaltern in India.  

It is truly situational.

Just like 'Colonel'.  

‘Subaltern’ began as a description of a certain rank in the military.

It was a rank, not the description of the rank. 

The word was used under censorship by Gramsci: he called Marxism ‘monism,’ and was obliged to call the proletarian ‘subaltern.’ That word, used under duress, has been transformed into the description of everything that doesn’t fall under strict class analysis.

by high caste Hindu men who were looking for a way to emigrate from India without actually having to clean toilets in the West.  

I like that, because it has no theoretical rigor.”

West Bengal was ruled by Communists for thirty years. They did lots of class analysis- some of which paid off. Spivak doesn't know Marxist theory or 'praxis' because she wasn't a Marxist. She was getting by on affirmative action due to her by reason of being a darkie and lacking a dick.  

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a public intellectual for whom the overlooked exploitation and oppression of the subalterns in the postcolonial world is not only an ethical dilemma,

should I send some of my pay packet to poor women in shithole countries? Fuck that!  

but also a methodological challenge.

To a professor of literature. How do I give a lecture on Virginia Woolf without having read her dreary shite? I know, I will point out she was white. White women are the worst. Fuck you Karen! Fuck you very much! 

In the Indian postcolonial society, political and social oppression is prevalent throughout class, religion, language, ethnicity, religion, generation, citizenship, and gender.

I suppose this nutter is referring to the fact that Mamta's goons will beat the shit out of you if you support the BJP. Still, the whole point about nutters like Spivak is that they reckon the US is even worse. White and Black peeps must evacuate 'Turtle Island'.  

Thus, oppression is different in different cases. Hence, the moment educated and metropolitan intellectuals begin to make theoretical claims on behalf of the subalterns,

they are laughed at, more particularly if they are living in New York 

they tend to overlook significant social differences among the subaltern groups.

Which Indian politicians don't if they want to get elected.  

Additionally, in Western academia, there always exists a possibility that Spivak will be recognized as an intellectual who is speaking on behalf of the subalterns.

Nonsense! She was clearly an ignorant nutter. We were pleased that some rich white kids were being brainwashed by a Bengali cretin.  

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak strongly criticizes any attempt by privileged intellectuals to explain or claim to know the experiences of the subalterns.

Only underprivileged imbeciles should explain or claim to know how poor peeps feel.  

This strong criticism stems from her acute awareness of representative errors committed exploitatively against the disempowered groups.

Your MP is your representative. His errors can cause harm to you. But some Professor of a shite subject in some far off campus can neither help nor harm you.  

The histories of the rural peasantry and the urban working class has been recorded by privileged social groups.

No. Bureaucrats and Government commissions have kept some records. But privileged social groups focus on living large rather than recording the miserable lives of starving rent-boys.  

Initially, history was documented by the British colonial administrators. Eventually, it was re-written by the educated, middle-class elite or the bourgeoisie.

No. Some people paid a little money to teach shite published a book or two. Nobody cared.  

It is interesting to note that both the Indian English educated bourgeoisie, as well as the British administrators are the ideological products of British rule.

How is that interesting? Why not say 'German peeps are the product of German rule. French peeps are different. They are the product of the rule of Patagonian penguins'?  

Thus, the histories and the experiences of the marginalized working class was narrated and controlled in the interest of the ruling power or the dominant social class even after the Indian independence.

Nonsense! There were plenty of Trade Union leaders, peasant leaders, Dalit leaders etc. who were publishing accounts of the problems of various groups. But the 'dominant social class' didn't give a fuck about such shite.  

The task of retrieving and re-writing the histories and experiences of the disenfranchised social groups is extremely challenging.

Only if you are not a historian.  

There are no reliable historical sources or documents that narrate the experiences, lives and practices of the subaltern groups in their own terms, and from their perspectives.

There are plenty if you know where to look. Professional historians have this knowledge but so do some lawyers specializing in Trade Union law or Tenancy law or the law re. the rights of forest dwellers.  

The subalterns have had no agency and no political voice.

But gained this through the political process from the Twenties onward.  

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, along with the other historians

she isn't a historian 

in the Subaltern Study Group, underlines how the histories of peasant uprisings highlight a significant gap in the historical narrative of Indian Independence.

But those narratives didn't matter in the slightest. Nobody really believed that Gandhi's fasting or Nehru's sulking in jail had any effect whatsoever.  Still, at one time, you had to write shite of that sort to pass the Civil Service exam. 

In the early 1980s, Spivak was focused on the critique of this privileged historical documentation and representation, and saw it as a political agenda.

Why? The Communists had come to power in her State. They identified a method of getting the share-cropper to support them and thus were able to rule for 30 years. It wasn't a 'privilege' to teach History or Literature. It was a privilege to get to be a Minister or a lawyer gaining victories through Public Interest Litigation.  

According to her, if the political voice and agency of the subalterns could be retrieved, it could then gradually and eventually be re-written.

Very true. If only we could figure out what Mamta is saying, we could gradually write her biography. Oh. There are plenty of such biographies because she is the most important person in West Bengal. Also, anyone who knows Bengali can easily find out what she has said in the past.  

We must remember that Spivak’s thought about Subalterns is not in a historic or intellectual vacuum.

Ignorance isn't a vacuum. The silly lady thought Professors of History must know some History. But she was a Professor of Literature who knew nothing about Literature.  

Marxism had played a crucial role in the development of Indian political thought during the early 20th century.

No. Politicians have played that role. Ideologues or Academics have not.  

The works of the Subaltern Study Group employed classic Marxist methodology in their works.

No. It was Hegelian shite. Marxism is an economic theory.  

For Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, classic Marxism was too rigid to accommodate the diverse and complex social history of India.

Yet Communists ruled her state for 30 years. A theory doesn't have to accommodate shit. If the rulers subscribe to that theory, it has succeeded. 

Although Spivak critiques the methodology of the group, she does not reject Marxist thought altogether. Instead, she adapts the methodology beyond the restrictive class politics and includes liberation struggles such as peasant’s struggles, rights of indigenous minorities, and women’s movements.

No. Mamta may do so. President Murmu may do so. A professor of literature in America isn't doing so.  

Spivak also criticizes the early research by the Subaltern Studies Group because of their idea that the subalterns are sovereign political subjects who are in control of their destiny.

 Nonsense! By definition, subalterns are subject to the authority of the dominant group even if it lacks 'hegemony'. 

Spivak completely rejects this idea. She states that the concept of a sovereign subaltern is just a concept in the dominant discourse by the privileged.

Both the Indian and the American constitution state that the people are sovereign.  

Gayatri Spivak also asserts that the notion that subalterns possess a political will is constructed by elite nationalism.

Why the fuck would they construct any such thing?  

The dominant bourgeoisie narratives completely neglects the individual struggles of the subalterns. For example, the Awadh peasant rebellion of 1920,

which Nehru said was led by a Hindu preacher who wanted to take land from Muslim landlords 

the strikes by the Jute workers in Calcutta,

which were about getting higher pay 

during the 20th century, and the significant contribution of the muslim weavers of Northern Indian during the 1857 Indian mutiny.

It was so significant that the Brits and their Indian allies put down the mutiny with insulting ease.  

Spivak also highlights that during the historical transition in India, from feudalism to capitalism, there was a historical account of how the bourgeoisie colonised subject transitioned into the national subject after independence.

Before independence. Blame a Scotsman named A.O Hume for this horrible outcome. Annie Beasant and Margaret Noble, too, must take some of the blame.  

However, there is no reliable historical account of the struggles of disenfranchised groups such as peasants, women, and other indigenous social groups.

There are plenty.  

Ranajit Guha in his ‘Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency’ (1983) attempts to recover subaltern subconsciousness according to Marx’s notion of class consciousness.

Thanks to Vietnam, some American military officers  knew more about such insurgencies than a stupid Bengali who had emigrated and taken British nationality in 1959.

In this process, Guha also gives a false coherence to the subaltern groups that are much more complex and varied. This puts the Subaltern historian at risk of objectifying the subaltern and eventually controlling them through knowledge.

Voodoo, maybe. You can't control anybody through knowledge.  

This is how the methodology falls prey to the dominant structures of knowledge and representation.

The dominant structure of knowledge and representation is empirical and based on scientifically verifiable facts though the underlying Structural Causal Model may have a mathematical representation. 

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out that this risk is inevitable and at the same time necessary to address the voices and histories of subalterns.

The people addressing those voices and histories are politicians in India, not academics teaching worthless shite in America or Europe.  

Spivak recalls Derrida’s statement that ‘the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work’.

It bites and eats itself.  

This emphasizes how closely the practice and methodology of Subaltern Studies is associated with deconstruction.

i.e. telling stupid lies.  

If you are a reader seeking a clear political solution to the condition of the marginalized and oppressed groups,

listen to President Murmu not some shithead who teaches literature to morons.  

Spivak’s readings might frustrate you.

This is also true of her writing about her own subject. 

Professor and postcolonial literary critic Niel Lazarus even points out that Spivak is not really concerned about native agency.

'Native' isn't a widely used word nowadays.  

She is instead focused on a theory about how the social practices of the oppressed are represented or not represented in privileged academic discourse.

Privileged academics are smart academics. In India, they can end up as President, like Radhakrishnan, or Prime Minister, like Manmohan.

However, Lazarus ignores that Spivak’s focus on the misrepresentation of the subalterns is just an initial step in her deconstructive reading of Indian society.

Since India has a different philosophical tradition to Europe, deconstruction could be of no use there. Did Macron ask Derrida for a deconstructive reading of French Society? No. He wasn't that stupid. 

She points out that contradictory to the dominant notion of India as a coherent, unified structure, the Indian society is a network of traces.

Just like America or Russia or China. But, India is more unitary than America which has dual sovereignty. 

Trace is a concept from deconstruction in which the meaning of a word or sign also contains concepts that it does not mean or represent. For instance,

trace also means treacle as well as testicle. 

the word ‘day’ also evokes the concept of night, the word ‘woman’ might also evoke the concept of man, etc. This deconstructive vocabulary used by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak provides her with a flexible methodology to most effectively describe and accommodate the varied struggles, experiences, and histories of the disenfranchised groups like tribals, women, and peasants that are left unaccounted for in the classical Marxist methodology employed by the Subaltern Studies Group.

She says she works with Santhali speaking girls in some schools in Birbhum. But she hasn't learned their language.  

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak demonstrates engagement with Third World subaltern women’s resistance in her dealings with literary texts.

Which is like engaging with the Ukrainian Resistance to Putin by saying 'Tolstoy wrote like shit'. 

In her ‘A Literary Representation of the Subaltern’, she proposes that literary texts can be effective rhetorical sites for articulating the complex, and varied histories and narratives of subaltern women.

e.g. saying 'Jane Austen was very evil. Did you know that in 'Pride & Prejudice' she totally failed to condemn penises?'  

Spivak emphasizes how fiction by Mahasweta Devi is based on 20th century Indian history. For example, Devi’s Draupadi narrates the struggles, capture, and brutal rape of a female revolutionary called Dopdi Mejhen.

Droupadi Murmu is now the President of India. The plain fact is plenty of Devi's own people had been raped and killed in her ancestral East Bengal. This did not happen to tribal women because their people had martial qualities.  

Dopti was captured because of her involvement in the Naxalite rebellion against the bourgeois, the landowners, and the nationalist government during the 1960s and 1970s.

   She didn't exist. Devi made her up so as to pretend the vast majority of rape victims at that time weren't Bengali speakers like herself. The Pakistan Army was very insistent on 'changing the DNA of the East Bengali'. 

Gayatri Spivak’s analysis of Dropdi Mejhen (a subaltern character), is an antithesis to the erasure of women in the dominant British colonial archives,

when Kipling writes of a tribal woman, he shows her as smart, courageous and good at kicking ass. But that was also the ancient Sanskrit literary tradition. Stupid Bengali women like Spivak and Devi pretended that tribal women, not their own kith and kin, were being raped and ethnically cleansed. 

as well as in the historical documentation by the privileged middle-class nationalists.

So privileged they wanted to run away to Amrika/US so as teach morons while earning less than a good plumber.  

Official historic discourse has been known to focus on men as the main driving force of revolutionary politics in India.

Because men were the main driving force. My own deconstruction of Indian historiography focuses on the vanguard role played by pussy cats. I like pussy cats. They are so nice.  

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is extremely significant because she points out that literature can provide a space to effectively demonstrate subaltern women’s revolutions in postcolonial India.

Whereas Mathematics refuses to provide such a space. Fuck you Mathematics! Fuck you very much! 

Spivak resists the desire to articulate a subaltern consciousness in a definite, pure and positive state.

So does Donald Trump. Macron asked him to stop resisting this but Trump hinted that Macron's wife was an elderly man. Macron cried and cried.  

As discussed earlier, such a construct, although prevalent in the Marxist vocabulary, ends up objectifying the subalterns and controls them through knowledge.

Voodoo.  

At the same time, Spivak does not overlook the fact that this attempt to retrieve subaltern consciousness restores causality and self-determination to them.

Fuck that! Becoming Chief Minister or Governor or President of the Republic is what they increasingly aim for.  

Among the most popular, significant and equally controversial works of Spivak is her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ In this seminal essay, Spivak reveals that historic conditions of political representation cannot and do not guarantee that the interests of disempowered subaltern groups will be recognized, or that their voices will be heard.

This was not the case in India. Subaltern groups gained increasing representation including reserved seats, from the Nineteen Twenties onward.  

This essay is extremely important because it is here that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak further develops her own position as a postcolonial intellectual who is determined to retrieve the neglected and silenced voices in the past from the political context of the present.

This had already been done by people from 'neglected' communities who had risen to Ministerial rank.  

In ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Spivak politically re-formulates and alters the conventional western poststructuralist methodologies through the careful re-reading of the 19th century Indian colonial archives.

No. She had no access to or interest in any such thing though she did pretend to have researched a particular Queen- the Guleri Rani. But that lady's history was already documented- e.g. in the Golden Book of the Indian Princely Houses.  

The essay also marks Gayatri Spivak’s departure from the work of the Subaltern Studies Group, and her focus on the historical experiences and struggles of the subaltern women- a social group that is not only neglected by the dominant elite academia, but also by the Subaltern Studies.

This is nonsense. First she gassed on about what Foucault said to Deleuze and then she told a fairy story about some Great Aunt of hers who had hanged herself while on the rag (in the Hindu context, this is a reproach to the father for not having arranged the girl's marriage when she arrived at puberty). Spivak pretends this poor woman was actually a secret assassin or Revolutionary.  

Spivak asserts that the history of anti-British-colonial revolution in India excludes the involvement and contribution of women from the official historic narrative of national independence.

Nonsense! Female revolutionaries were celebrated. Some became members of parliament or occupied other such posts.  

By accommodating the experiences and struggles of disempowered women, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak expands the narrow definition of the term subaltern, initially developed by Ranajit Guha and other historians. However, since Spivak includes upper-middle class women as subalterns,

Indira Gandhi is subaltern. So is Margaret Thatcher.  

she also ends up complicating the term that only represented lower-class social groups of the world. At the same time it also removes the term from class orientation. We must keep in mind that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is not substituting class based notion with the gendered notion of subaltern.

She is talking nonsense.  

Instead, she is further expanding its scope.

by talking nonsense. 

She highlights how complete focus on class and economics neglects the significant historical contribution of women in Indian Independence.

There was no such neglect. After independence, some female freedom fighters became Governors or Chief Ministers- e.g. Sarojini Naidu & Sucheta Kripalani.  

The inclusion of women, irrespective of their class, also highlights how the term and concept of subaltern was focused on a rigid class-system as well as on patriarchal religion, family and state.

It was shit. Who cares what it focused on?  

Finally, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak concludes that ‘the subaltern cannot speak’.

To her. What would be the point? Why not raise your voice in the street to get into Parliament and then raise your voice in Parliament so as to become PM or CM?  

This is because the agency and voice of the subaltern women are so entrenched in the Hindu patriarchal codes of morality

that Indira Gandhi was its strongest leader 

and the British colonial representation of women as victims of ruthless and barbaric Hindu culture,

No. That was a story Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore paid the Brits to publicize.  

they become impossible to recover. When Spivak says that the Subaltern cannot speak, it means that even when the subaltern attempts to speak, she is never heard.

When Spivak speaks, Indians laugh their heads off. She thinks Haitians pronounce 'Du Bois' as 'Du Boys' because they are still angry with the French.  

Jacques Derrida by Arturo Espinosa Seguir

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was a French philosopher born in Algeria whose theory on deconstruction had a significant impact on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Before we explore how deconstruction impacted Spivak and how she shaped and expanded the theory, let us examine the major points of the theory

As clearly stated in his popular essay ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the discourse of the Human Sciences’, Derrida states that all meaning and coherence depends on a system of differences and binary oppositions.

He was wrong. All meaning is economic or utilitarian. A structural representation of a thing- be it a language or a species or the Cosmos- will have binary oppositions or a more or less ramified type theory.  

For example, we understand the concept of speech because it is

useful to do so. We also understand the concept of fart and must learn not to do so in polite company.  

different from writing,

No. The law may make no such distinction in some cases but not in others.  

we understand ‘good’ because it is different from ‘bad’, and so on.

No. We classify them as antonyms. But pragmatics (i.e. how words are used) may change. Bad or 'wicked' may mean 'cool'. 

Hence, in this way, all meaning is continuously deferred. Thus we never arrive at a final, stable meaning

Because you are babbling useless nonsense. 

The truth and meaning in Western philosophy is based on this omission and erasure of the concepts of différance from history.

But Western philosophy was shit. Only STEM subjects are useful.  

For Spivak, Derrida is important and interesting because he attempts to challenge and dismantle the philosophical system from within.

India did not have that system.  

During a conversation with the theorist Oscar Guardiola Rivera, she very clearly states that the way Derrida writes is not meant for popular reading.

It is stupid and useless. 

Instead it requires some preparation on the part of the readers.

Prepare to either laugh your head off, if you know philosophy, or be bored shitless.  

She insightfully points out that the West perceives Derrida as a “dead, white, male”.

He really is dead.  

Instead, we must remember that Derrida was a Jew in France who was writing from within the traditional framework of French philosophy and theory, and criticizing that very framework.

Apparently, you have to study Philosophy at High School in France. Teaching is a shitty enough job without having to teach utter shit.  

For Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jacques Derrida is someone who dismantles traditional theory from within, rather than from outside, and this is significant.

It really isn't. The plain fact is, the Madam Wu experiment in the mid Fifties showed that phenomenology was stooooopid. Husserl had barked up the wrong tree. Derrida was a fool to have wasted time on that shite.  

Finally, she declares, we will never be able to understand Derrida, if we are threatened by his history.

There is no point understanding a shithead.  

Just like Spivak, Homi Bhabha too uses concept of différance from deconstruction in his postcolonial theory.

So what? He is a cretin. 

For postcolonial theorists like Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Robert Young, deconstruction is specifically useful because it provides to them a theoretical vocabulary to question and challenge the very established and conventional theoretical concepts that have justified exploitation and colonization of the non-western societies.

What justifies exploitation is making lots of money. What challenges it, is kicking it in the balls or else not producing anything so no exploitation can occur.  

For Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Derrida’s thoughts are significant to make impactful intervention in the fields of colonialism, the international division of labor between the First and the Third World, and the global economy of today.

Trump is making such impactful interventions. But he went to Wharton and studied finance.  

One of the most important works by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in the field of deconstruction is her translation and preface to Derrida’s ‘Of Grammatology’. She translated Derrida’s work at a time when he was not as well known to the English speaking audience in the field of criticism, theory and philosophy.

Derrida was appreciated by low IQ people who wanted to get a PhD without ever having used a single brain cell.  

In her preface:

this is the updated preface 

Spivak gives a significant account of all the philosophical debates that had shaped and impacted the thought and works of Jacques Derrida.

No. She didn't understand the Husserl v Heidegger debate and did not, at that time know about Kojeve.  

She also refers to critical debates  and questions about Derrida by Geoffrey Bennington, Simon Critchley, Rodolphe Gasché, Marian Hobson, and Christopher Norris.

None of whom have any importance.  

Her preface also provided insightful context about Derrida’s philosophy on deconstruction. Additionally, Spivak also offered intellectual commentaries on Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of truth, Edmund Husserl’s concept of phenomenology, Sigmund Freud’s views on memory and the unconscious, Martin Heidegger’s involvement with the question of being, and Emmanuel Levinas concepts of ethics. She also comments on Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi Strauss, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. This detailed and insightful commentary by Spivak produces a very important and scholarly introduction to the deconstructive philosophy of Derrida. Her preface goes beyond the conventional translator’s preface and instead becomes an extremely significant and must-read scholarly work on Derrida’s thought and philosophy.

But the thing is shit as are all those referred to above. Husserl started off as a mathsy guy but went down a rabbit hole.  

The way Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak engages with Derrida’s thought and philosophy is different from the conventional way Derrida is read.

Derrida had a sliver of political importance back when France had a big Communist party. Perhaps, if the Left revives there, people may find something useful in him. But he has no relevance for India or Africa or people whose main problem in life is that they have to sit down to pee.  

We must keep in mind that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak completely refuses to attempt to represent non-western subjects.

Nor does she represent western subjects.  

Spivak is not cynical about the possibility of political agency and the history of subaltern resistance. Instead, she is extremely aware of how the dominant systems of knowledge and representation have already damaged and misrepresented the lives of many marginalized and disenfranchised sections.

There was no damage. When Katherine Mayo wrote a nasty book about India, Indians did not die of grief. 

She emphasizes how the western intellectuals are completely complicit in taking away the voice of the oppressed by trying to speak for them, and represent them.

Why stop there? Why not say they are complicit in aggravated acts of fellatio by which trillions of gallons of Third World jizz is drained by Wall Street plutocrats? 

Deconstruction is significant and useful because it provides Gyatri Spivak a critical strategy to recognise the oppressed without damaging them. In her portrayal of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri in her seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Spivak very impactfully highlights how Derrida’s deconstruction enables and equips her to be more conscious and ethically responsible while she talks about Bhaduri’s singular, lived experience.

The girl hanged herself because she wanted to get married rather than have to go to school. Spivak pretends she was a Ninja assassin.  

Vocabularies of political movements have a tendency to define experiences, history, and struggle of minorities in abstract terms such as workers, women, colonized, etc. Spivak argues that such words are ‘catachresis’.

They aren't. A worker really is a worker. Catachresis is where you say 'wanker' when you meant to say 'worker'. 

Catachresis is the misuse or abuse of a term that is used to represent (rather misrepresent) multiple and varied experiences and environments under singular signs.

Nope. It just means 'misuse'.  

However, in Derrida’s concept of deconstruction, catachresis doesn't just mean misusing a word. It also means the incompleteness inherent in all the systems of meaning.

Peano Arithmetic is a system of meaning. We know it is 'incomplete'. Using it as a dildo would be misuse. Using it to do sums is not.  

For example, let us consider the term ‘tree’ in the English language. This word must represent a particular real tree,

Nonsense! In math, it means a particular type of graph.  

but we do not know exactly which tree does the word refer to.

The context will clarify this.  

There exists a certain perceptual ambiguity and a crisis of meaning.

If you are as stupid as shit- sure.  

At the same time the moment we think of a specific particular “tree” we also repress the possibility of any other tree.

No we don't.  

This is true for all systems of meaning.

Only in the sense that all systems of meaning can be used as dildo. 

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak highlights that the vocabulary used by political movements are catachresis because they claim to represent all women, workers and proletariat.

A political movement may indeed represent all women, workers and wankers if its manifesto includes items which greatly advance the interests of such people.  

However, this becomes problematic as there does not exist a “true worker”, or “true woman” or “true proletariat”.

Everybody may agree that some person fits that precise description.  

For Gayatri Spivak, deconstruction is politically indispensable because it guards against the claims of Marxism, Western Feminism, and national liberation movements to represent and speak on the behalf of all the oppressed.

Tibet only fell to the Communist Chinese because the Dalai Lama had foolishly dispensed with Deconstruction.  

In the case of political mobilization, using master words such as anti-colonial national liberation, feminism, socialism etc is catachresis not just because they are inappropriate but also because they end up abusing the people whose lives and experiences they define.

This may happen but then again the reverse may be the case.  

The voice of a woman or a worker is given by a political proxy, or an elected representative who speaks on behalf of constituencies.

So what? This is just the theory of comparative advantage in action.  

As these representatives speak on the behalf of the minorities and the oppressed, they disastrously refer to them as a unified political subject.

Which they may in fact be. If they aren't, other would be representatives can garner support from sections of the 'oppressed' and win elections.  

This coherent and collective political identity is not a transparent portrait of the true worker or a woman.

It may be useful enough. Language is utilitarian. Why get your knickers into a twist just because what people say does not magically correspond to how things are?  

These identities are just a consequence of the dominant discourse that represents these groups.

Nope. Discourses don't matter. Economics does.  

By utilizing deconstruction, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak demonstrates how language of political struggle damages the workers, women, and the colonized.

Nope. She just tells stupid lies.  

Through the example of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri in 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', Spivak shows how individual, complex, lived experiences, lives, struggles, and histories are erased by the unifying radical vocabulary of political discourses that is used to represent them.

She pretended her great aunt was a Revolutionary Assassin. Indians thought this very funny. Why not suggest that your granny's puppy dog was actually Leon Trotsky?  

Deconstruction becomes important because it is a more flexible and responsible way of reading that accommodates singular lived experiences, lives, struggles and histories.

But it has produced no such history book.  

Derrida’s rethinking of Ethics and responsibility to the Other.

Sarah Kofman

In the year 1980,

Mitterrand, in alliance with the Communists, would take power the very next year. His Leftist policies failed and he shifted to the Right. 

a conference called ‘The Ends of Man’ was held in France, at the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-La-Salle, which was eventually published in French as ‘Les fins de l’homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida’ (1981). It was attended by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jean Luc Nancy, Phillipe Lacoue Labarthe and Sarah Kofman, and they discussed how politics was situated in Derrida’s thought. This conference eventually was discussed by Spivak in her essay ‘Limits and Openings of Marx in Derrida’ published in ‘Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993)”.

By which time Marxism was as dead as a dodo save in West Bengal.  

In the essay, Spivak points out how the initial discussions of the conference were focused on the binary opposition between the philosophical concept of political, and politics as the real concrete event.

This is merely the difference between concept and percept.  

This binary opposition was initiated by Jean-Luc Nancy and Phillipe Lacoue Labarthe. However, Spivak in her essay states that this binary of politics as an abstract philosophical concept and politics as real event is problematic.

Following Kant, we say a judgment is “problematic” if it represents a predication as “merely possible” (or “arbitrary”). I suppose it is possible that some abstract concept matches reality exactly. It is fine to say it is possible that such is not the case in politics.

This is because this segregation reduces and restraints deconstruction as just an abstract philosophical practice that is disconnected from the actual political events.

Which was true. There were Liberal parties which drew on Liberal political philosophy and Islamic parties which drew on Islamic political philosophy and Marxist parties which drew on Marxist political philosophy. No party drew on Derrida's shite.  

Spivak avoids this and rather focuses on careful readings of Derrida’s early and later works.

But this does not alter the fact that there was no political movement associated with his stupid shite.  

She asserts that in his works there is a movement from philosophical questions about being (ontology), knowing (epistemology) and truth, towards the ethical and social aspects of violence, justice, friendship, and hospitality.

Such was the Greek philosophical tradition which Derrida drew upon.  

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak emphasizes that deconstruction of the conventional Western philosophy has an ethical aspect to it that questions all rational programmes that make up political decision making.

But all political decision making is questioned for ethical, economic and other reasons. It's just that Derrida's shite had never been used in that fashion because it was silly.  

Derrida’s concept of ethics is based on the thoughts of Emmanuel Levinas stated in his work ‘Totality and Infinity’.

This was the Jewish 'Mussar' (ethical) tradition of saying that the material needs of the other should be taken as one's own spiritual needs. This is 'diakonia' or the mission to the poor and vulnerable which all Religions claim to have.  

According to Levinas, “ethics is nothing more than the singular event in which the Self encounters itself in an ethical relation to the face of the Other.”

Levinas was wrong. Even Robinson Crusoe faces ethical and moral questions. Still, this was orthodox Hegelian shite and Kojeve had popularized it in France.  

It is the moment the Self comes face to face with the Other, when the question of ethics is initiated.

Because if I can't see your face I naturally conclude you don't exist. A ghost must be kicking me in the bum. 

Derrida did not completely dismiss Levinas’s philosophy. Instead he emphasized how there was absolutely no guarantee that the singular event of face to face encounter between the Self and the Other will be ethical.

D'uh! 

He states that there is nothing to prevent the Self to harm or even kill the Other.

Derrida's colleagues gave him a wide berth. He was notorious for suddenly stabbing people as their faces came closer to him.  

Simon Critchley in his ‘The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas’ states that the “attempt to articulate conceptually an experience that has been forgotten or exiled from philosophy

e.g. the fact that Kant was notoriously flatulent. 

can only be stated within philosophical conceptuality,

the synthetic a priori nature of the fart must be conceived apodictically 

which entails that the experience succumbs to and is destroyed by philosophy’.

Flatulence has been destroyed by philosophy. That's why it is impossible that my fart just stank up the room.  

The moment we attempt to ethically and responsibly respond to the Other,

by farting 

we risk destroying their voice.

you can almost taste my farts.  

At the same time, this attempt to responsibly acknowledge and interact with the Other might also transform the Self-centered philosophical discourse such that it begins to recognise the Otherness.

A guy says 'help me. I've just been hit by a bus'. Ignore the cunt. Otherwise you might destroy his voice. As for what 'philosophical discourse' recognises, who gives an actual fuck?  

Deconstruction takes this chance. It questions the principal conditions of possibility that make western philosophy and theory comprehensible, and attempts to trace the ‘Other’ people, experiences, histories, or cultures that are excluded, destroyed or silenced.

If philosophy had this magical power, we wouldn't need armies or prisons or executioners.  Also, nightclubs wouldn't need bouncers to keep people like me out. 

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak employs Derrida’s method of reading with literary and historical discourses in order to trace the omissions that are inherent in Marxism, decolonisation and feminism.

They totally ignore penguins- more particularly lesbian penguins.  

For Spivak, the greatest gift of Deconstruction was that it emphasizes and recognizes the complicity of theory with the object of its critique.

Fair point. If you gas on about how such and such a philosopher was totally evil, you are complicit in promoting his oeuvre. Best just ignore him same as everybody else. 

In her ‘A Literary Representation of the Subaltern’ (1988), Spivak challenges the socialist and democratic false promises made to people by the representatives and leaders of the anti-colonial resistance movement during India’s struggle for freedom.

Those promises were true enough. What was missing was an account of how general purpose productivity was to be raised and how the nation planned to feed and defend itself. You can't eat democracy or socialism which is why you are welcome to tell them to fuck the fuck off.  

She states that these promises completely ignore and omit the lower-caste workers and women.

Nope. They got the vote and Hindu Dalits and Adivasis got affirmative action and reserved seats.  

These people find no place in the new Independent India.

Save as Chief Ministers- like Mayawati- or as President- like Smt. Murmu.  

According to Spivak, the mythology of 'Mother India' that was concocted during and after India’s struggle for freedom only perpetuated the class system that was established during the British rule.

Which is why she fucked off to Jim Crow America.  

Indian Independence did little to nothing for lower-castes, subaltern women. She challenges this class-based structure of nationalist mythology in her analysis of ‘Breast Giver’, a short story by Mahasweta Devi.

Ritwik Ghatak's idiot niece.  

Through the deconstructive reading, Gayatri Spivak emphasizes how decolonisation ends up perpetuating the colonial structures of class and gender that it claims to oppose and get rid of.

It claimed to get rid of Colonists and actually did so. However, it is true that Nehru failed to abolish gender. That is why Spivak has to sit down to pee. Fuck you Chacha Nehru! Fuck you very much! 

‘Imperialism and Sexual Difference’ is another essay where Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak uses deconstructive approach to assess political programmes. In the essay, she highlights how western feminism and feminists are unable to incorporate the experiences of Third World women, during the construction of the universal feminist subject.

She was objecting to some Sudanese Professor in Saudi Arabia who had dared to question the practice of female genital mutilation.  

All women throughout the world do not suffer the same kind of oppression. Moreover, the western feminist criticism focuses entirely on how women are excluded from the ‘masculinist truth-claim to universality or academic objectivity’. As a result, this focus perpetuates the universalist errors by suggesting that all women tolerate the same oppression just because they are women.

Did you know many women are actually penguins? Why does nobody talk about that?  

Spivak critiques Western feminism for ignoring the experiences of Arab, African, and Asian women through the lie of ‘global sisterhood’.

Also, how come White women are so freakin' white? Could they not paint stripes on themselves like zebras? Would that really be too much to ask? 

This critique of feminism clearly illustrates the importance of the practice of deconstructive reading.

Telling Sudanese women not to protest at female genital mutilation is a great service to them. 

Deconstruction underlines how almost all intellectual practices are politically complicit and involved with political and social structures.

Also they are politically complicit in sucking off trillions of Turd World hobos.  

Spivak’s deconstructive reading is often criticized on the grounds that it leads to nothing more than a critical paralysis rather than amount to any effective political intervention. For example, Asha Varadharajan states that Spivak’s exposure of complicity ends up preventing her from articulating the specific moments of political resistance.

Asha used to beat up 'Proud Boys'.  

However, for Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the deconstructive acknowledgement and affirmation of complicity does not paralyze critical or political thinking. Instead, it becomes the starting point from where we can develop a more responsible and aware intellectual practice.

i.e. telling stupid lies about your Great Aunt who was actually Leon Trotsky.  

Spivak employs deconstruction beyond its narrow disciplinary framework and engages it with political concerns. For example, in ‘Responsibility’ (1994) published in Boundary, she interrupts Derrida’s analysis of Heideggar’s philosophy and discusses political issues such as the limitations of the World Bank’s 1993 Flood Action Plan in Bangladesh.

She has the mind of a magpie. With hindsight, attacks by libtards on the World Bank were counterproductive. Power passed to billionaire company promoters like Ambani, Adani etc. 

Similarly, in ‘The Setting to Work of Deconstruction’ (1999), she interrupts a summary of Derrida’s thoughts to analyze counter-globalist development activism.

i.e. the sort of stupid shit which the Chinese did not tolerate.  

In this way, works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak deviate from the conventional disciplinary codes of western critical theory.

There is no such code. The thing is garbage.  

She attempts to rework the ethical dimensions of critical theory and assumptions that shape political practices.

Why bother? If nutters can prevent the World Bank doing infrastructure investment, Billionaires, using money from public sector banks, will step in and do the job for a much higher price.  

Gayatri Chakravorty Spiva

Spivak’s works like ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’,

where she lied about her great aunt 

‘The Rani of Sirmur’,

 where she said history had erased a Queen who was famous and celebrated. 

and her commentaries on the works of Mahasweta Devi, have significantly impacted the Western feminist thought.

Because women like reading about how all women everywhere have always been utterly shit.  

One of Spivak’s most significant contribution is the demand that Western feminism must accomodate and acknowledge the material histories, experiences, and lives of the ‘Third World’ women in its narrative of women’s struggles against oppression.

She wants them to believe her stupid lies. 

Spivak also wrote about French feminist theory, 19th century English women’s writing, and Marxist feminism. In her works like ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’ (1981), ‘Feminism and Critical Theory’ (1986), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak provides us with insightful commentaries on French feminist thinkers like Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous.

Who were stupid and useless.  

One of the main contributions of Spivak in feminism is that she challenges the universal, dominant, and conventional assumptions of feminism that they speak for all women.

This was certainly untrue of 'first wave' Feminism.  

She collaborated with prominent postcolonial feminist thinkers such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Nawal El Saadawi, and Kumari Jayawardena and emphasised that feminism must respect and recognise different races, religions, class, cultures, and citizenship among women.

In other words, white feminists must shut the fuck up.  

We must be mindful that Spivak is not an anti-feminist. Instead, she rigorously attempts through her critique, to strengthen the arguments and political claims of feminist thought.

Provided those arguments aren't listened to- because women can't speak- and those claims are disregarded- because women are utterly useless.  

The early feminist social and political struggles during and after the 1950s had successfully facilitated democratic rights and freedoms of women in North America and Europe.

No. All women in the West, save in some Swiss Cantons, had got the vote by 1945. 

This feminist struggle was based on liberal humanism according to which all humans were equal and must have equal rights. At the same time, European feminist Simone de Beauvoir pointed out that liberal humanism traditionally perceived women as ‘other’ or as ‘inferioir’ to Man who was the universal humanis subject.

She was certainly inferior to Sartre.  

The difference between men and women was based on biological foundation that was absolute and unaffected by social or cultural influence. However, Beauvior rejected this universal humanist notion. She asserted in her seminal work ‘The Second Sex’ that ‘one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman’.

Some Feminists weren't too happy when some men became women and won all the gold medals in athletics.  

She asserts that gender identity is always informed by social construct and can be resisted through political as well as social resistance and struggle.

If so why not 'socially construct' women as having super-powers?  

French feminist thinkers like Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva concur with Beauvoir that gender identity is socially constructed. However, at the same time, it is not something that can be ignored or avoided at will. This is because gender identity is entrenched and regularly enforced by powerful patriarchal institutions like Family, Education, Media, Law and the State.

Not to mention Mind-Control rays broadcast by my neighbour's cat. Why is the fashion industry not supplying women with tasteful tin-foil hats?  

For Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have been extremely influential in redefining the Western feminist thought.

They had zero influence because they were crazy.  

Spivak suggests in ‘This Sex Which is Not One’ , that the attempt to independently define a woman risks ‘falling prey to the very binary oppositions that perpetuate women’s subordination in culture and society’.

Also, if we 'independently define' death as ceasing to be alive, we perpetuate death. 

Against this binary system of men and women, she proposes a critical strategy called strategic essentialism.

E.g. saying 'I'm a woman' because you want to go to a woman's prison where you can beat and rape the inmates rather than get beaten and raped by male convicts. 

Spivak’s contibution to feminism is immensely influenced by Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous.

Which is why it is shit. 

However, she shifts the focus of feminist concern about the difference between men and women to the cultural differences between the women of the First World and those in the First World.

Turd World. Spivak was playing the race card.  

One of the main loopholes of French Feminism is that it tends to narrate the experiences of Third World women in terms of west female subject.

rather than the Lesbian penguin subject. Sad.  

This approach overlooks major crucial differences in culture, language, history, and social class. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak further develops this idea in her analysis of Mahasweta Devi’s short story ‘Breast Giver’. In the story, Jashodha, a subaltern female protagonist, works as a professional mother

Nanny? 

and wet nurse for an upper-class Brahmin inorder to support her crippled husband. Spivak highlights how the Jashodha challenges the conventional western feminist assumption that childbirth is unwaged domestic labour.

Surrogate mothers may be paid quite handsomely.  

Her reproductive body and breast milk are a valuable asset and a source of income for her and her crippled husband.

If you employ a maid servant, you generally have to pay her a wage. Western women know this.  

Unfortunately, the continuous exploitation of Jashodha’s reproductive body results in her painful death from breast cancer.

But breast feeding reduces the risk of such cancer! 

Through her analysis of this short story, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out how Western Marxist feminism neglects and underplays the theory of value and ignores the mother as a subject.

It also ignores Lesbian penguins.  

This is how Jashodha challenges the universal assumption of western feminism to speak on behalf of all women.

in the same manner that my farts challenge Donald Trump to a game of strip poker. Frankly, its not a challenge that is difficult to overcome.  

The struggles and lives of subaltern women like Jashodha are far removed from the experiences and practices of feminism in a university classroom.

As are penguins- even of the Lesbian variety.  

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out that this privileged distance from the Third World women must not cause us to forget the perpetual oppression suffered by them.

Also, please don't forget the perpetual oppression of Lesbian penguins. Did you know they aren't allowed to qualify as actuarial scientists even in supposedly progressive Denmark?  

She asserts that careful reading, specially in a university classroom has potential political and social consequences.

The kids in the class start thinking they are wasting their money and their time. They end up voting for Donald Trump.  

Gayatri Spivak also points out how the world portrayed in literature, history, and media motivate people to ignore and forget about the struggles, lives, and experiences of subaltern social groups.

This is also true of Pornhub.  

She challenges this academic and popular ignorance towards Third World women through her project of ‘un-learning our privilege as our loss’. This project of un-learning has been impactful on feminist theory and criticism.

If you teach shite, helping students unlearn that shite is a good thing.  

In the old days, Indians were welcome to tell stupid lies about India to gullible Americans. It is a mark of Calcutta's intellectual decline, that Spivak can tell even more ignorant and stupid lies to a Bengali audience of the 'great and the good'. 

Thus, Spivak writes in 'acting bits'- 

In the field of rational analysis, a feeling of recognized kinship is more desirable than nationalism.

Kinship does not matter to 'rational analysis'. The baby is our kin but not much help in proving a mathematical theorem. Moreover, a person of our own nationality is more likely to be our kin and recognizing that kinship is rational. 

Therefore I have started with the family resemblances between deconstruction and Bhartrhari-Nagarjuna.

There can be a family resemblance only if there is a genealogical relationship. Since there is no such thing between Bharthari, who has a theory explaining why Vedic utterances are uncreated, and Nagarjuna, who denies, the uncreated nature of Veda, there can be no school which descends from both nor could it have any relationship with a theory grounded in supposed ontological error made only in Greek, and hence Western, philosophy.  

So that I can tangle deconstruction with our own idamvada.

Idam means this thing here or near at hand. There is no 'idamvada' in Indian philosophy. I suppose it could be a translation of 'haecceity'. 

Idamvada is a weird translation of the word identity.

It is wrong. Abhigyaan is identity. 

Usually we translate identity as vyaktisatva,

vyaktitatva? It means personality 

svarupa,

true nature. My passport identifies me as an elderly Tamil man. My true nature is that of a Californian cheerleader who slays Vampires.  

ekarupata,

homogeneity 

and the like. The other day in the United  States I saw in a students' English dictionary that the source of the word was given as Latin idem or Sanskrit idam and both were cited as meaning "same."

Idam means this thing near me. Idem means 'same' like ibid.  

Now the meaning of the Latin word idem is not exactly "same" in the sense of one, but rather "same" in the sense of multitudes or repetitions.

No 'idem' or 'ibid' means that the same source is being referred to. There is no multitude or repetition. 

That is to say, that which is primordial [anadi]

without beginning. The primordial may have a beginning.  

and unique [ekamevadvitiam]

'one without a second'. Many unique things don't have this quality save in the sense that, it may be, nothing does not.  

is not idem, but rather that which can be cited through many re-citations, that is idem.

A citation cites. A thing which can be cited by one person at one time can be cited by the same person at different times or different people at the same time. To say 'idem' or 'ibid' just means that you are referring to the same thing you previously cited.  

To make these two meanings one is

ignorant. 

that clandestine patching up of a loose part of the fabric of which I have already spoken.

Lawyers use words like 'idem' or 'ibid'. They aren't patching anything up.  

At least from the outside it seems that in our solemn reci- tation of Hindutva [Hindu-ness, a key word of Hindu fundamentalism]

coined by a Bengali. It just means ecumenical Hinduism without distinctions of caste, sect or region.  

this clan-destiny or ruse is at work.

It really isn't. The essence of a religion (tattva means essence) is what remains true of it in all possible worlds. Since Bali has Brahmins but no untouchability, the latter phenomenon is not part of the essence of Hinduism though some Hindus may practice it. 

The little Sanskrit

very little 

that I learnt under the able guidance of Miss Nilima Pyne at the Diocesan School in Calcutta

you didn't go to that school to learn Sanskrit. You went there to learn good English 

[I beg the U.S. reader not to lose sight of the social textile here]

there was no 'social textile'. There was cramming and regurgitation- nothing more.  

allowed me to suspect that the Sanskrit idam

which just means 'this thing here'  

is also not the undiminishing singly manifest [akshaya ekaritpa].

Akshaya means imperishable. Ekaripta is not a word. Maybe ekarupta is meant. But the imperishable is, generally not manifest at all save to the spiritually advanced. 

Then I looked at the dictionary.

Few Hindus would need to. The word idam occurs often enough in our prayers.  

Idam is not only not the undiminishing selfsame,

it could designate God. Any word could or even just the mystic syllable 'Om'.  

as a pronoun it does not even have the dignity of a noun, and it is always enclitic or inclined towards the noun,

It can stand alone. The noun can be read in.  

always dependent on the proximity of a particular self,

the thing referred to may be inanimate or include a host of selves 

for idam must remain monstrative, indexed.

Nope. You can use words, or syllables, or farts, anyway you like. 

All over the world today identity politics (that is to say, a separation in the name of the undifferentiated identity of religion, nation, or subnation)

Nonsense! Identity politics can be based on classes which are highly differentiated or provided with a rigid internal hierarchy.

is big news and almost everywhere bad news.

Unless it isn't. I suppose the American Left did shoot itself in the foot with identity politics but, it must be remembered, it had already failed because it was shit.  

The unremarkable and unremarked ruse in the United States students' dictionary [Merriam-Webster's college edition, I think] makes visible the fraud at the heart of identity politics.

There was no ruse and no fraud. Some identity politics is about claiming to represent some group and seeking to extract a rent for yourself on that basis. But you can also try to advance by yourself by claiming to be a unique genius who is completely different from all the other cretins making similar claims.  

As a memorial to that publication I submit this outlandish

ignorant 

deconstructed translation of identity, only for this occasion-not ahamvada [ego-ism as ipse-ism] but idamvada.

Idamvada would be fine as 'haecceity'. It isn't identity because we can't be sure that the thing's 'individuating principle' is knowable.  

Deconstruction-work shakes the stakes of the spirit's ahamvada to show idamvaida,

It hasn't shaken this silly lady's egotism. Egotism can celebrate its own haecceity. I'm super special. I have a magical mutation and will soon turn into the Celestial Spaghetti monster.  

and therefore we protect ourselves in the name of a specific national identity;

or a Green Card. Preferably a Green Card. The Muslim percentage of West Bengal's population is rising.  

we do not want to know it, we dis-pose of it rather than pro-pose it.

We ignore shite we don't want to know about. We don't have to flush Spivak down the toilet. We can just give her a wide berth. 

It seems Spivak attended a Conference on the 

cognitive mapping of unisex cultures.

which had been accomplished before she was born when women started to become Professors of every type of subject and rise in every profession or field of artistic or sporting endeavour.  

But institutions in culture must precomprehend an institution or instituting of culture,

No. They need to find ways to get money for their staff. Pretending to do something useful is the way to go. You don't need to comprehend shit.  

not simply as a chronologically prior event but as a philosophically subtending layer.

Why stop there? Why not say there must be pre-pre-comprehension and pre-pre-pre comprehension? That way you can waste an infinite amount of time.  

In fact at this level, continuous with the possibility of being in the world, "culture" is one of the many names that one bestows upon the trace of being othered from nature,

i.e. not being a rock or a plant. Fuck you culture! Fuck you very much! 

and by so naming, effaces the trace.

Farting works just as well.  

This intimate proximate level is already sexed and ready for the supplement of gender, like that other most intimately distanced text of culture, the so-called experience of the inside of the body.

Sodomy? No thank you! I'm not letting any one experience the inside of my body.  

However we narrativize the difference-deferment of cultural identity

We can do no such thing. Cultural identity is formed too quickly. It is a fact about the world like what language you speak or whether or not you have a dick.  

or the subjectship of culture, in this place culture is a word like value in Marx, simple and contentless, immediately codable as ground of difference.

Marx had a labour theory of value. Since workers must eat and reproduce, the irreducible content had to do with 'subsistence' or 'the iron law of wages'.  

What I have liked about Derrida over the years is the obstinate naivete

stupidity and laziness 

that makes him repeat the necessary but impossible questions beginning with "What is ... ."

He was paid to do so and he did so.  

The one that has engaged me most for the last couple of years is: What is it to learn?

It is to regurgitate shite you were taught. To teach is to add the special sauce of your own stupidity and deep sense of grievance.  

Particularly because the subject- ship of ethics and the subjectship of culture, past the threshold of naming, in and out of claims to alterity, is in the hands of only

people who make a lot of money out of the entertainment industry- including the writing of novels about Wizards or Werewolves or whatever.  

those who can enter or counter globality.

like JK Rowling or the guy who writes 'Game of Thrones'.  

I am frustrated that I cannot hear the subaltern, if that is a name of culturing apart.

She can hear President Murmu.  

"What is it to learn, these lessons, other- wise?" I am not interested, in other words, in legitimizing the global by reversing it into the local.

Spivak can't 'legitimize' shit. But she does trot around the globe talking bollocks and that's actually kind of cool.  

I am interested in tracking the exorbitant as it institutes its culture.

I suppose she is thinking of what the French call the exorbitant privilege of the almighty Dollar. Guys who can track that make a lot of money on global financial markets.  

Spivak however has a bee in her bonnet about the 1991 US task force which provided aid to a Bangladesh which had been hit by devastating cyclones. I should explain, those ships were on their way back from the First Gulf War and were diverted to provide humanitarian assistance to a Muslim country. Sadly, the Americans wanted their pound of flesh on the Chakma issue (they think Buddhists are easier to convert to Christianity than Muslims) and so the bonhomie didn't last very long. 

It seems Spivak visited Cox's bazaar. 

When I returned to the capital city of Dhaka, Farhad Mazhar, a male activist, a pharmacist-poet who knows his Marx and Hegel, asked me: "What did you see?"

Some aid and rehabilitation work and infrastructure upgrading- e.g. the building of cyclone shelters and so forth. 

I had not thought of this yet. But, since a question generates an answer, I scrambled to legitimize myself with this man of work.

i.e. she struggled to say something Lefty. This was easy enough. Bang on about how the Jamaat was mobilizing the petit bourgeoisie and the kulaks and raping all the kaffir women because of gender discrimination which is totes evil.  

Beside me were sitting a woman, a high school graduate from a country town who is a teacher at a barefoot school (not a player in the culture of the coastal islands), and a woman law graduate, considerably more articulate but less of a worker, just beginning to worry about the problems of Bangladeshi rape law.

Could she say something stupider than these ladies? Let us see.  

I knew that what I was saying was over the women's heads,

which is why she said it 

and it was my problem, not theirs. But the case got made nonetheless. I had seen, I said, that life and death are in the rhythm of water and land for these coastal peoples

but this simply isn't true. Life and death were in a Malthusian rhythm precisely because big big ships can bring food from far far away. This was also the case of much of inland Bangladesh.  

-I implore the U.S. reader not to confuse this with an identikit for all Bangladeshis-and not only for the very poor among them. They build in the expectation of obliteration,

not if they are building 'pukka' buildings of concrete.  

planned obsolescence at the other end. Everyone, including the health and relief workers from other parts of Bangladesh, half a notch above the lowest of them in class, remarks on the fact that loss of land and kin seems to leave a noticeably impermanent mark on the inhabitants of this area.

Because food was being brought in from other lands.  

Yet they are not "fatalists," they grieve and want relief, to rebuild in the face of certain loss, yet again.

Loss wasn't certain. America has flood prone areas and has had devastating hurricanes.  

This is an eco-logical sense of being-in-the-world.

Which everyone has. If you live in a flood plain, you will be affected by floods whether you are British or Bangladeshi. What was unusual was the rainfall based flooding in Pakistan a few years back. 

The way I found myself putting the case was in terms of the young Marx's perception of species-life rather than species-being ,

He only mentioned species-being or human nature (Gattungswesen). Young Hegelians thought man was a unique super-duper species. Sadly, Darwin proved them wrong. 

where human life and death is no more than Nature breathing in and out.

No. Marx says man is a natural being but is shaped by social relations which in turn change the external or natural world. He wasn't a pantheist or a mystic.  

Marx was obliged to narrativize the case in both a logical and a historical way: for him, both logically and historically, this space was a determination where revolution or planning would not take.

No. The dude had read Goethe. He knew that Dr. Faust ends his days reclaiming land from the sea. A revolution- e.g. cutting the heads off lazy aristocrats or clergymen who think it impious to interfere with Nature- may precede the planning and commencement of public works.  

And in the understanding of history as sequence,

as opposed to a cat named Mittens 

knowing how to help presumed knowing what should be wanted, easier within a mere scientific vision of the formation of class, but not possible on this coastline.

Easily possible. Get the landless to kill the priests and landowners and then proclaim a Soviet Republic.  

Here the cultural rather than the class subject was repeatedly being instituted, or instituting itself in an eco-logy, a logic of a greater household or oikos, where the subject of the logic is not necessarily "worlded" as human in the common individualist sense.

Nonsense! These were people no different from people in America. The Chakmas may have had a different culture as may the Rohingyas. But they all needed food and help to repair the damage done by the cyclone. There are experts on this type of relief operation. Spivak is not one of them.  

For my interlocutor, Mazhar, this was proof that, after the critique of consciousness as appropriation, Marx had not theorized property adequately, and that the task of alternative strategies of development that respected subaltern agencies of the institution of culture is to learn to rethink property.

Clearly, Mazhar had shit for brains. Marxists want common ownership of the means of production. You can keep your hut or cottage and maybe a couple of chickens. Everything else should be collective property. The Pakistanis had made a film based on a story by a Hindu Communist in West Bengal. The script was by Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the cinematographer was a guy who won the Oscar for 'Zorba'. Essentially, the film could be interpreted as underlining the need for a fishermen's collective which could do a deal with a boat-builders' collective and, on that basis, do a joint deal with the paddy farmer's collective while the kulaks and the mullahs were having their throats slit.  

I had no such confidence; I was stalled at "what is it to learn" and offered a contradiction that I had also seen. 

If this was an eco-logic where the unlikely material subject was the pulse of the tide and the rhythm of the waterlogging of wind,

it wasn't. Also the wind doesn't get 'waterlogged'.  

I was in no way ready, daily encountering these very people's savvy discussion of the U.S. task force-that had taken its helicopters back home,

US helicopters belong to Bangladeshi people! So does Mickey Mouse. Kindly send Mickey to us immediately. I have a cat who is very interested in him.  

that had dropped supplies already available

Bangladesh very rich. White peeps lie when they say it is poor.  

and moving "in much larger quantities" in the slow-moving trawlers, that had created more trouble in their medical facilities because they could not communicate,

Why Amrikans not spick Bangla? Is it due to they iz RACIST? 

that had been contemptuous to the locals, all comments heard from these very people- simply to narrativize them as

ingrates. The Americans would send no more such task forces.  

an earlier pre-scientific stage where the proper help was to control nature so that these people could

set up factories and get rural girls into them thus lowering the fertility rate while earning lots of lovely foreign exchange. Once Bangladesh took this course, its per capita income, once half that of Pakistan, overtook it.  

be redefined as passive and graduate to a more or less remote commitment to, or critique of, capitalism.

Getting rich tends to mute your criticisms of rich peeps.  

What would it be to learn otherwise, here?

It would be to gain a capacity to do something useful for the local people.  

Better offer the contradiction: they will not move except as unwilling refugees.

Where? Nobody wants them. Thus they will stay and rise by their own efforts.  

It is commonplace now to say that the expansion of colonialism transformed habitation or land from its status as reference for the dominant subject, so that space could become a signifier for the colonizer: and through "nation" into empire.

This is not commonplace. It is crazy. People from one place may establish a colony- i.e. a settlement- somewhere else because they have run out of land or because there are better prospects elsewhere. Habitation changes the status of land from 'unoccupied' to 'occupied' or 'settled'. Anyone can refer to any piece of real estate in any way they please. Some empires we know about pre-existed any nation known to us. In some case tribes coalesced into nations as a consequence or a reaction to the actions of empires. Space can't be a 'signifier'- it isn't a word or sound or diagram. It is a 'signified'. The word 'Sahara desert' is a signifier. The vast stretch of desert located in North Africa is the space thus signified. 

It is becoming commonplace to say that, for the migrant or nomad or yet hybrid, land or space is now being transformed into a script or graph, not a containing system of signs.

This is impossible. That's why when the migrant leaves India, he can't turn India into a script or graph and take it with him to America. People who say otherwise are insane. Incidentally, no system of signs contains a space. Also Felix the Cat doesn't really have a magical bag into which he can put anything and from which he can take anything out. Still, it would be cool if there were some bunch of hieroglyphics which contained a pocket universe where I'm the Galactic overlord and thus get 15 percent off on my dry-cleaning.  

Smadar Lavie

aka 'sucks-to-be-Mizrahi-especially-if-don't-got-a-dick Smadar'  

has written on Israeli holding action, in the face of this script, energetically defining an "identity" for the Bedouin, that master nomad, since the late sixties.'

Both the Jordanian Crown and the Israelis have got the Bedouins onside. Bedouins don't necessarily get on very well with Palestinians or, after the first Gulf War, the Kuwaitis. 

But this tenacious clinging to land

as opposed to deciding to become birds or fish 

seemed something else: a postponement of the eco-logic that otherwise instituted the cultural moment for these people. What was it to learn to help, here?

Doing stuff they found useful, not babbling nonsense. 

  I could respect the relief workers' bemused on-the-spot decision that this other kind of resistance to rehabilitation must not be allowed to develop into an aporia.

They may have feared Spivak's verbal diarrhoea. Nobody cared if she was puzzled as fuck.  

The work of rehab must continue.

This was relief work, not 'rehab'. The locals weren't drug addicts.  

But with the vestiges of intellectual sophistication I possessed, I saw through with distaste the long- distance theorist's dismissal of the aporia as anachrony

anachrony merely means a flash-back or flash forward in a movie. It has nothing to do with philosophical aporia which, in any case, doesn't matter in the slightest.  

or his embracing of it as the saving grace of a-chrony.

What about his getting it pregnant? 

I was adrift.

She was having a stroke 

I knew the ways of cutting the drift or derive, of course. Silence the subaltern by talking too much. Describe, account, print.

Why not just tell those aid workers they were stupid and smelled bad and had probably gotten their PhD from a State school?

I cannot close this case.

Poor Bangladeshis got a bit of help after a cyclone. Some White dudes were involved. That's why Spivak can't close the case. The catachresis of the aporia of the dick of the whiteness is totes triggering.  

I will go back, asking again: "What is it to learn?" In a minute I will make an enormous leap into the much more comfortable and recognizably political arena of the institution of culture in hyphenated art in the First World: Lebanese-Canadian.

That's not culture. It is shit.  

But I cannot leave this case without reminding myself that even in this liminal culture,

It is poor but not liminal- i.e. a threshold to anything very different.  

by religious naming, Muslim-Hindu and Buddhist, women have an ironic relationship to both eco-logic and the positing of land as its postponement.

Nonsense! They don't have relationships. They are just beaten to death, raped, body shamed and subjected to derisive comments by homosexual hairdressers.  

In exogamy,

which does not exist in the area. People marry within their own communities. That is called 'endogamy'.  

these women shift their loyalty from father's land to husband's,

that is 'patrilocality'. In Bangladesh, Garos are matrilineal but are not found in the Chittagong region.  

quite as our female colleagues do. In reproductive culture, these girls' knees scissor in at adolescence and slowly open wider and wider as the rhythm of childbearing in the rhythm of tide and wind is seen as the definitive predication of gendering.

Nonsense! Most do marry and raise families and live pious, productive, lives. Some may chose not to marry and follow a vocation or profession. It simply isn't the case that women in Bangladesh are totes into scissoring. I'm not saying they don't know how to have a good time but, the fact is, that country has risen because of rising productivity and participation rate of women. 

Perhaps deconstruction rewrites Marxism for me by the fearful sense that even species-life, the Realm of Freedom, Stoffwechsel

which means metabolism- i.e. how a society converts natural resources into energy and sustenance. Once scarcity ends, then there is the realm of freedom.  

as Marx called it, or material alteration of nature, cannot be without gendering if

we continue to reproduce like other creatures of our sort.  

disclosed in the institution of culture.

Culture doesn't matter. Gender is biology- at least for the moment. Hopefully, I'll be able to transition to a cute teenage girl by the end of the decade.  

The move into globality here is

to make and sell stuff. It's what other countries did to get rich.  

either the utter dehumanizing of reproductive engineering

giving birth is dehumanizing. Only robots should do it. Teaching nonsense to imbeciles isn't boring at all.  

or the processing zones of post-Fordist export.

Spivak spins cotton and weaves her own clothes. That's why she looks down on women who work in factories producing the stuff you buy in Costco. 

Suppose Spivak had become a Doctor like her Dad and Grandad, she might have done some good and acquired some knowledge of the condition of poorer women in Bengal. I suppose she might have written some books. Being a Hindu, she wouldn't have suffered the fate of Dr. Taslima Nasrin. Perhaps, the Communist Party would have found it worthwhile to recruit her. She may have gained some influence in the Left Front administration. But, by about 1990, her star would have faded. Perhaps she would be given a post-retirement sinecure. Perhaps not. Still, for perhaps twenty or thirty years, she would have learned something useful and imparted some useful information. Then she would have been forgotten. 

It is a sobering reflection that those capable of gaining and disseminating knowledge can gain no kindlier guerdon than that oblivion overtake their works and days before aught they think or say works greater mischief than good. 

This has not been the fate of Spivak and Sen. It is by their unrelenting ignorance and stupidity that they have risen as Continent bestriding Colossoi of intellectual coprophagy. We look on their works and despair of the Bengali buddhijivi. Unlike Niradh Chaudhuri, we can't put our faith in some future Clive whose conquering sword will give the pen of the Babu some more utile employment than that of incessantly dipping itself in its own bile so as to purvey a but bogus erudition. 

Is Wealth inequality repugnant?

Different societies, at different times, have found different things repugnant. One widely prevalent view was that piety- or at least the appearance of it- should be equally distributed. Those who had too little of it should be coerced into orthopraxy while those who were unabashed atheists should be killed.

Gold has been called the devil's dung. Great wealth is likely to make a man forgetful of God and impious in his conduct. Perhaps it is best for Society if any surplus possessions are confiscated from those who are more able or enterprising or thrifty so that they retain a proper sense of humility and sense of tribal solidarity or 'oikeiosis'. 

The reason this viewpoint has tended to die out is because Societies where it was prevalent fell behind and got conquered by more mercantile races. Sadly, there are some safe spaces in the Academy where it can continue to flourish.  

What happens when a philosopher writes about an Economic issue? Nothing good. Martin Butler is a philosopher. This is what he has to say in the pages of 3Quarks.

Does Wealth Inequality Matter?

Wealth is the stock of assets used to generate income. Control rights over wealth are optimal if the smartest investors have an incentive to ensure such assets are used optimally. This is less a matter of beneficial ownership than 'mechanism design' so capital is allocated properly.  Wealth inequality is like age inequality or height inequality. Provided there are enough young people to support the old, it does not matter if age inequality is rising because people are living longer. If professions requiring very tall or very short people get enough of them, increased height inequality does not matter. 

During a period of great technological change, it is probably a good thing if control rights are more narrowly concentrated and if this means beneficial rights too get concentrated- well and good. This is because there is greater Knightian uncertainty and those with broad financial shoulders should bear more of the risk. Equally, agile expert investors need to be in the driving seat. The very rich can afford to hire the smartest people to manage their 'family offices'. Markets become more liquid as a result and volatility becomes 'a feature, not a bug' which drives liquidity. 

In the UK and USA the gap between the richest and poorest ten percent continues to grow.

As does immigration and the incentive for poorer people to have more kids while the middling sort have fewer. In other words, the supply of poor people is rising. True, foreign billionaires too may be making their home in Manhattan or Mayfair because they enjoy rubbing shoulders with people as rich as themselves. 

Few would argue that inequality resulting from racism, sexism, disablism or any other sort of prejudice is morally acceptable.

All would agree that it is inevitable. I may feel it unfair that I don't have a womb while my wife may find it unfair that she has to sit down to pee, but it would be silly to say 'boo to evolution! Fuck you Darwin! Fuck you very much!' As for racism- sadly, affluent countries will want to keep out people from very poor parts of the world even if this correlates with certain racial characteristics. This is good for the indigenous working class. Disability can be compensated for by collective insurance schemes though, sadly, because of 'moral hazard' (i.e. the risk of people pretending to be disabled to get benefits) compensation can never be 100 percent.  

Wealth inequality, however, being a matter of degree, is far less straightforward.

It is more straightforward. That is why half the world, at one time or another, was ruled by parties which aimed to redistribute wealth. You can't redistribute height or IQ but money and property can be seized from the rich and given to the poor. Sadly, this may make them poorer yet while the smart and capable run away to places where they are better rewarded.  

The familiar nightmare vision of totalitarian ‘communism’ hangs over the idea that everyone should have exactly the same level of wealth.

and the same sexual opportunities. Attractive people should be 'collectivized' and redistributed on a weekly basis.  The same could be urged regarding cute babies. 

Most accept that some level of wealth inequality is a positive good, in that it incentivises effort and excellence.

That's the argument for income inequality. Wealth is a stock not a flow. People who excel can afford to spend more than they earn because their earnings will continue to rise. Look at Johnny Depp.  

But if we agree that wealth inequality pe se is not necessarily wrong, at what point does it become unacceptable?

I suppose different jurisdictions could impose ceilings on wealth just as some have imposed ceilings on land ownership.

And why would going beyond this point be unacceptable?

The law governing wealth ceilings could spell this out. As a matter of fact, Competition policy can force disinvestment if concentration of market power becomes too high. Long before I was born, there were efficiency arguments, equity arguments, political arguments, moral or theological arguments for this. I am not aware that any new ones have been added during my lifetime. 

Many would argue that equal opportunities are what matter.

Sadly, 'opportunities' are epistemic and thus can't be represented by a set. No one knows what they truly are and whether one is equal to another. I suppose one might say that the more people believe opportunities are equal, the more effort they will make with the result that outcomes become more equal. This is an argument against redistribution because it does not cause people who are poor to think this is because the game has been rigged against them and no effort of their own can help them rise up. Only a Revolution and a redistribution of property can alter their fate.  

We can imagine a society with excellent equal opportunities that nevertheless has significant levels of wealth inequality.

This is likely if the population is heterogenous. Some have traits which make for success. Others have traits which make for abject failure.  

And we assume here that all wealth is acquired legally though legitimate means.

Sadly, what is legal or legitimate can change quite drastically over a short time horizon.  

A society with excellent equal opportunities would be one where

high infant mortality killed off those with lower robustness while low IQ people starved to death before they could pass on their genes.  

the basics – education, healthcare, housing, a living wage and so on – were readily available right across the board

arguably, this was achieved well enough in welfare states by the time I was born. Sadly, having the luxury of a social safety net may mean lower work effort, thrift, enterprise etc. Young people may prefer to spend their twenties strumming a guitar or writing songs just in case they make it big as pop-stars. Moreover, even if they don't, they'll have enjoyed themselves and can enjoy a good enough material standard of living as they age.   

so that the young of the poorest in society would start life not necessarily on a level playing field, but at least on one that was not hopelessly skewed against them.

They may have lower expectations or lower drive precisely because they know that life at the bottom is comfortable enough.  

Of course family influences are crucial but these are always going to vary, so perfect equal opportunities – like perfect anything – is for the birds. Once off the starting blocks, those from the poorest background in such a society would have a similar (or at least not too dissimilar) chance to succeed as those from higher wealth groups.

The problem is that nobody knows in advance what their 'chance to succeed is'. I suppose the son of a Doctor may think he has a high chance to qualify as an MD, than the son of the docker. But both may be wrong. Sadly, the Doctor's kid may end up with better qualifications because he thought he could get into Med School while the Docker's son played truant thinking this would not alter the outcome of his exam results. 

No matter what their background, those who failed to take the opportunities on offer, or chose not to take them, would be likely to fall into the lower wealth brackets. There would still be significant wealth inequality

Income inequality. Wealth inequality may cause greater income equality if the rich decide not to work coz a true gentleman doesn't demean himself by taking a job or practicing a profession.  

but this would result from individual effort and talent or the lack of it, which would mean high levels of upward and downward social mobility.

I don't understand this. Surely, there would be less social mobility?  

Implicit in the vision of modern liberal democracies is the ideal of meritocracy, allowing for wealth inequality due to differences in talent and effort but finding inequality based on prejudice and discrimination morally abhorrent.

I think bigotry is considered abhorrent. It is equated with ignorance. But it can obtain even if there is no discrimination. Where prejudice does result in discrimination, the market has an incentive to 'arbitrage' away the difference.  

What’s wrong with this vision? One problem is the fact that in most liberal democracies, though upward mobility is not unusual – despite the fact that in recent years it has declined considerably – downward mobility is far less common.

It is common enough. It's just that people who have come down in the world don't gas on about it.  

This is in terms of wealth rather than income,

plenty of people have seen a decline in their real wage.  

and the reason for this is inheritance.

For most people, this is the family house which may have greatly appreciated in value. Thus those whose parents rented lose out while those whose parents bought their home in the right area get a windfall.  

Societies, despite the move towards individualism, are in the main composed of families. Every individual has a mother and a father who will usually pass on any accumulated wealth to their offspring.

Unless your Mum was a ho-bag and your dad a hobo. Poor people have kids who are more likely to be poor. The rich can set up a 'spendthrift trust' so even their most drug-addled progeny is well taken care off. Perhaps the grandkids will do well. 

This exposes one of the contradictions in the values of the liberal world view.

Liberalism comes in many forms.  

On the one hand we fully endorse equal opportunities,

Unless we prefer affirmative action

but on the other we regard it as natural that we have a right to hand on accumulated wealth to our offspring.

Sadly, many will have to pay inheritance tax. One workaround is to create an offshore discretionary trust such that your descendants have no wealth but receive significant benefits from the trust.   

Inheritance taxes are unpopular because they seem to undermine this right.

The truly rich can evade them. It is the middling sort who get caught. Currently, British farmers are up in arms because they will have to pay a twenty percent tax on agricultural assets worth more than a million. The Dukes and Earls who own vast estates won't pay a penny while working farmers earning 30,000 in a good year will have to sell land to pay this tax.  

But a society where inherited wealth plays an increasing role in wealth inequality is a society where opportunities are less equal.

Not necessarily. Opportunities may becoming more equal but the proportion of spendthrifts may be rising.  

Inherited wealth

like biologically desirable traits which are inherited or religious or moral values which are inherited

– or simply having well-off parents – increases an individual’s opportunities in all sorts of obvious ways that are unrelated to the merits of the offspring who receive these benefits.

No. Heritable traits, like cultural, religious and financial legacies are biologically related to the offspring of the people who have those traits. That's also why human Mummies don't give birth to baby rabbits. 

Inheritance works directly against meritocracy.

Only in the sense that it works directly against theocracy and democracy and kleptocracy. What is unfair is that few human Mummies give birth to baby rabbits.  

Another problem is that, in modern societies at least, wealth inequality is not static.

Sadly, we have no way of telling if a thing is wealth rather than worthless tinsel and vice versa.  

Even if we accept that some level (perhaps even a high level) of wealth inequality is acceptable, there will still be a natural tendency for this inequality to go on increasing.

Provided there is growth rather than secular stagnation or decline.  

And it’s not clear where this ends.

When an asteroid destroys all life on earth. Then there will only be a problem for Martians not descended from Elon Musk who will complain that they are as poor as shit. If only Granny had put out to Elon!  

There are at least two mechanisms whereby this occurs, both centring on the fact that wealth in modern societies is about the ownership of assets (property, shares, precious metals etc) rather than money in the bank.

This has always been the case. Money is an asset whether it is in the bank or hidden under your mattress.  

First, if asset prices increase at a faster pace than wages, which has been the case over the last decade at least, owning becomes a better bet than working.

Not if a lot of those assets represent 'sweat equity'.  

The more assets you own the greater your increase in wealth relative to those who own few or no assets.

Unless you are a spendthrift.  

Second, those who own many assets earn large passive incomes in the form of dividends, rents, or profits, much of which may well be above what is required for ordinary living, or even for a luxurious life style. What happens to this passive income? It is used to buy further assets which will increase the passive income of the wealthy still further.

In other words, there will be more investment. This means government's can borrow to finance roads, schools, hospitals etc.  

 This in turn buys more assets and on and on, the knock-on effect of which increases the price of these assets, effectively putting them well out of the reach of so many. This is what’s happened with housing, certainly in the UK. If you’re on the property ladder you will inevitably pull ahead.

Sadly, many homeowners are worse off than they would have been if they had rented and put their savings into equities.  

If not, good luck even getting your toe on the bottom rung.

Though that may turn out to be very bad luck indeed.  

Perhaps we can still accept the consequences of inheritance and the mechanisms whereby wealth inequality continues to widen, provided we stick to the key premise of our hypothetical meritocratic equal opportunities society.

Sadly, in Business, sticking to key premises leads to bankruptcy. You have to change your assumptions and expectations as circumstances change. 

That is, that those at the bottom have ‘the basics’ and can still live a minimally acceptable life according to the norms of society.

Till, the country goes off a fiscal cliff and there is entitlement collapse.  

Does it then really matter if some eat caviar and spend their time on expensive yachts? Poverty in any useful sense of the word must be understood in relation to the culture of a society. A rich person in medieval England lacked running water, a flushing toilet, etc., any meaningful notion of poverty is necessarily relative. So provided those at the bottom are not in poverty in terms of their own cultural expectations, what’s the problem?

Even if this is not the case, there is no problem, only a nuisance, if people who claim it is a problem can ruin the country by applying the remedy they think most suitable.  

There’s a political problem here that cannot be ignored.

Sadly, the reverse seems to be the case since about 1970. Voters don't want redistribution, they want cheap foreign holidays and lots of electronic tat.  

The continual accumulation of assets brings power, which can take control of large portfolios of property, shares, or the ownership of media interests – a particular problem we face today.

Do we though? Yes. 90 percent of all muggings are done by hedge fund managers.  

Widely distributed ownership seems in keeping with the values that liberal democracies at least purport to espouse – the Adam Smith vision of small capitalists trading with each other to their mutual advantage.

Or Jeffersonian small land-holders, not to mention Joseph Chamberlains adoption of the slogan 'three acres and a cow.' Earlier, '40 acres and a mule' had been promised to African-American ex-slaves. The problem here is making a living out of the land is back-breaking. Also, the pigs tend to look down on you because you smell so bad. 

Anti-democratic monopoly power, however, seems to develop quickly, and governments struggle to keep this tendency at bay, particularly when ownership brings political influence.

Elon Musk, we're looking at you. Scratch that. Poor people like Musk. We hope he can colonize Mars. That would be cool. Also, please stop bureaucrats pissing away tax dollars.  

Unrestricted wealth inequality presents an almost irresistible tendency towards oligarchy.

Sadly, oligarchs all hate each other. Look at Ukraine. There's a reason a comedian is now in charge.  

Another major problem stems from the number of ways in which extreme wealth inequality can threaten the coherence of society. Without mechanisms to counter the continually widening gap (such as a serious wealth tax), a number of negative consequences follow, the most obvious one being that the rest of society becomes poorer.

High taxes seem to have had the effect of slowing growth and causing higher incidence of poverty.  

You might argue against this that wealth is not a zero-sum concept.

It is a positive-sum concept. If it isn't contributing to Income creation, it isn't wealth. It is a white elephant.  

In other words, just because one group is getting richer its doesn’t necessarily mean that the rest of society is getting poorer.

Butler confuses Income and Wealth.  

If the size of the cake increases it may well be the case that everyone gets a larger slice. Economic growth is the perennial solution that governments obsessively adopt to solve the problem of wealth flowing upwards.

No. It is what people hope for because more money is better than less money.  

Continual economic growth, however, is not a given (or even desirable), and when it stalls or is weak, as has recently been the case in the UK, it’s those at the bottom who suffer.

It is when those who are in the middle who suffer that you might have a revolution- or the election of a Trump.  

This point connects to a more general one. As their affluence continues to increase, those at the top of the tree become more disconnected from the rest of society.

If you tax them too much they leave the society altogether.  

Even though wealth can only be produced within a society, with its laws, institutions, education system and so on, enormous quantities of wealth accumulated at the top float free from the jurisdiction of any particular society, often avoiding any serious taxation – through tax heavens for example – which in turn impoverishes governments.

No. You can tax economic activity in your own country. You can also tax those domiciled and (in the case of the US) expat citizens on global earnings. 

This in turn means that the basics can no longer be adequately provided.

That happens if average productivity is low. The solution is to increase it. Taxing the rich or saying 'boo to Capitalism!' won't change anything. 

Those at the bottom find it more of a struggle to maintain the minimally acceptable norm,

because the productivity of their class is too low. This limits 'transfers'.  

particularly if governments do nothing to counteract the upward flow of wealth.

No. This happens when the government does a a lot to counteract the upward flow of wealth- i.e. guys with assets getting rewarded for using them productively rather than selling them and spending the money on cocaine and strippers.  

There’s a social dimension to this disconnect too. It’s not enough for members of a society to formally belong in the sense that they have the appropriate passport. There has to be a deeper sense of belonging, otherwise

people may not conduct pogroms or kill kaffirs or roast and eat the bourgeoisie.  

society is simply a collection of individuals who happen to live on the same patch of land. This belonging is enhanced by day-to-day connection with other members of society.

Nobody, where I live, wants day-to-day connection with me. Snobbish bastards!  

If the super-rich go to different schools, use different healthcare facilities, shop in different shops and so on, they become a group apart.

They are a group apart. There's a good reason I don't go for a meal with my old pals from the City. They are ordering bottles of wine costing thousands of pounds. I am terrified they might forget I'm poor as shit and decide to split the bill.  

The idea that they ought to contribute to the society from which their wealth emanates begins to dissolve,

No it doesn't. The companies they own pay their workers and suppliers and so forth.  

and the rest of us, including governments, can easily go along with this illusion.

Whereas what we should be doing is ensuring the super-rich do my washing up at least once a week. Also a bit of light hoovering.  

We come to think of the wealthy and their wealth as having no ties or obligations to any particular society.

Very true. The last time I demanded the Duke of Westminster come and do my household chores was when Callaghan was Prime Minister.  Mummy slapped the black off me. 

Part of the problem here is the pre-eminence of the concept of ‘rights’ within our moral vocabulary.

Legal vocabulary. Moral vocabularies feature words like 'good' and 'evil'. 

Ownership rights come to be seen as unconditional and quite separate from the social group from which they originate.

Because they don't originate in any particular social group.  

The very notion of tax assumes a sense of belonging to a society to which obligations are owed, but if ownership rights are seen as unconditional

No legal system takes that view.  

paying tax becomes almost optional, as in fact is often the case.

No. The expense entailed by tax avoidance means it is an option out of the reach of the middling sort.  

But this is misguided. As Simone Weil

who was as crazy as a bed bug 

points out: “The notion of obligations comes before that of rights,

She meant that the word 'deon' comes before 'politeia' because deon was known to less developed Greek who hadn't yet created City-States of their own. What she forgets is that fathers and chieftains had certain rights and prerogatives even at that time.  

which is subordinate and relative to the former.” The tendency towards cultural atomism that has developed in many areas of modern life, facilitated by the language of rights, leads to the illusion that belonging to society is an option we can choose to forgo.

There have always been vagrants and vagabonds who have dropped out of society.  

This very much plays into the hands of the super-rich.

which are busy fisting trillions of starving people 

Far too often success is measured in terms of wealth acquisition. Even when we think of equal opportunities, we have in the back of our mind the opportunity to acquire wealth. Indeed, this can become almost an addiction – the wealthy don’t seem to lose the desire to acquire even more.

by providing useful goods and services. They should get addicted to scolding everybody instead.  

We shouldn’t be too judgmental about this, since in a society where wealth means security and a degree of freedom it’s completely understandable. That’s why I think the way out of this is to de-commodify at least those aspects of life that allow for a basic but secure existence.

Instead of buying stuff you like, the Government should send you a bag of health foods every week. You will kill yourself. 

A life that meets at least ‘minimally acceptable’ standards

i.e. one where one isn't obliged to work for a living doing boring shite 

should not be such a financial struggle to maintain, particularly in supposedly rich industrial countries.

By providing everybody a decent basic standard of living supposedly rich industrial countries will become starving shitholes.  

To ‘de-commodify’ something does not necessarily mean removing effort and commitment, it just means removing it from the realm of money and exchange, allowing a culture to develop where wealth acquisition is not central to everything we do.

Everyone should write unreadable books the way I do. Sadly, JK Rowling writes so well, there is no way to de-commodify her books the way mine have been de-commodified.  

It would produce a stronger sense of belonging, essential to any sustainable society.

A strong sense of oikeiosis is essential to a society sustained by head-hunting.  

Such a society cannot realistically be one where wealth inequality is completely unchecked.

Why do some head hunters have more trophies than others? The problem with asking head hunters this question you quickly become part of their collection. 

Still, it is good to know that Butler has emigrated from the UK to Borneo or the Amazon jungle. I hope he makes a nice head-hunter very happy.  

Will an European army be created?

 

The idea of a European army is not new. Eisenhower pushed for it but the French parliament shot down the proposal. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, some Europeans raised the issue, but the US was not keen. Later, after an agreement between Blair & Chirac in 1998, a 'rapid reaction force' (at least on paper) has existed since 2007. In more recent years, little has been heard of it. Why? Europe has given up on 'convergence' to US per capita income. It has been growing at 1 percent whereas the Indo-Pacific has been growing at 5 to 10 percent. Europe has become less important. One might say, the need to create a big European army may cause Brussels to do a 180 degree turn. It may scrap the regulatory and compliance and accountability burden and order member States to do the same. Efficiency will take priority. Euro-sclerosis will disappear. Growth will average 5 percent and thus even if defence spending triples and quadruples, it will take no more than the existing share of the GDP (over a wide enough time horizon). Sadly, we have heard this story before at the time of the introduction of the euro. Currently Europe spends about 450 billion dollars on its armies which, in purchasing power parity terms is less than Russia. America spends almost 900 billion and has much less capital (as opposed to recurring) costs. But Europe's defence needs are much greater- more particularly if it wants to do force projection. Thus it may need to spend 1.2 trillion to get into the game. That's about 4 to 5 percent of GDP. The problem is 'crowding out' as opposed to a multiplier and accelerator effect. If infrastructure spending is crowded out, the burden increases. Moreover, if a lot has to be imported (over 70 percent currently), the exchange rate and hence the terms of trade fall. Less of the gains of trade are captured. True, this may be offset by higher exports. But will they materialize? Surely, lower wage economies will enter this crowded marketplace? There is another argument against going down this road. Technology is very much in flux. We may invest in obsolete platforms. One reason the Brits in the Thirties, despite their belief in air power, didn't actually build a lot of planes was because the technology was evolving rapidly. Perhaps, that is even more true today. 

Anyway, most of us now think, boosting manufacturing doesn't mean more jobs for our yobs. Immigrants will be required but, sadly, the locals don't seem too keen on them anymore. 

Some 6 years ago the head of NATO, a Norwegian, said

'What ...is important is that we need to avoid any perception that Europe can manage without NATO,

i.e. Europe can't defend itself. Why? Europeans hate and fear each other more than any bogeyman who, it is alleged, will invade and enslave them.  Put simply, if there is a European army, then there is no separate national sovereignty. There is only 'dual sovereignty' like that of the US. But that dual sovereignty didn't prevent a horrific Civil War over the right of secession. 

because two World Wars and the Cold War taught us that

we need outsiders to defend us and get us to play nice with each other and also to wipe our bums 

we need a strong transatlantic bond to preserve peace and stability in Europe,” he said. “Especially after Brexit, it’s obvious that EU efforts cannot replace NATO, because after Brexit, 80 percent of NATO’s defense expenditure will come from non-EU members.”

He who pays the piper calls the tune. If America pays most, then it decides when and where to fight. Obama had previously said that Ukraine was vital to Russia but not America. He wouldn't fight there. He also said that Cameron & Sarkozy had tricked him into involvement in Libya. Never again would the US do 'stupid shit' because silly Europeans thought it a swell idea. Sadly, Obama hadn't bargained on his senile blockhead of a Veep becoming President. Biden, last year, promised to open NATOs door to Ukraine after the war ended- i.e. when NATO membership stopped mattering. But Biden was writing too many blank checks and promising too much to all and sundry. This was inflationary and Kamala paid the price of his profligacy. Europe understood that it needed to curry favour with Trump. Zelensky was supposed to go and sign a deal with Trump and the hope was this would cause him to back Biden era policies. Sadly, Zelensky blew up that deal with the result that Trump has paused assistance and is now looking at lifting some Russian sanctions. Europe could be left out in the cold as 'the big three'- Russia, China and the US get cosy at their expense. This means even if Europe gets an army equal to what US has now by 2035, the world would have changed so much that Europe would rank fourth and have little force projection capacity outside its borders. In other words, it would have spent a lot to be only as secure as it was when under American tutelage. But, it would have less 'voice' in global affairs. 

The question is whether Ukraine is now so vital an interest for Europe that it spends 5 percent of GNP so as to have its own Army? After all, Ukraine does have a battle hardened army- the largest in Europe- and thus is bringing something to the table. Moreover the Baltic countries, and maybe Norway itself, do feel threatened. Poland is putting its money where its mouth is and buying a lot of weapons. But nobody really thinks Putin is Hitler. Russia's vital interests in Ukraine were threatened and it wants to redraw borders taking in Russian speakers who, it appears, aren't too keen on being reunited to Mother Russia. American policy has been pretty consistent save in that Biden liked spending money like a drunken sailor and had no problem squandering billions in a place where his son had business dealings of a questionable type. But, sooner or later, the US was bound to stop pissing money against a wall of no intrinsic interest to them.

The question now is whether Europe will piss money in that direction. It may do so, for a bit. But voters will rebel. What now seems possible is that a 'coalition of the willing' led by 'the big 4'- Starmer (whose army is considered strongest in Europe) Macron (France comes third because Italy is in second place), Merz & Meloni- will revive the proposal to create a European Army except it won't be called that. If this happens, Macron may hope to get his legacy as the second De Gaulle. For the moment, Starmer's people may think they are scoring off Farage but the truth is UK taxpayers don't care about Ukraine. Merz may find it difficult to form a government and coalition partners may make big financial demands to help their own constituencies thus restricting fiscal headroom. One big problem with a European army is that there would be demands that it be used to remove people like Orban or to protect national minorities. Meloni may be aware of the pushback against this possibility from the Right. Furthermore, Mediterranean countries have different interests from Nordic or Baltic countries. Does Ukraine matter to Italy or Greece? Not very much. Money spent in the Baltic or Black sea is money which would have gone to the Mediterranean. 

Some two weeks ago, Zelenskyy at the Munich Security Conference called for the creation of a European Army. Why? He  said, I've talked to Trump. The plain fact is, US wants to end the Ukraine war through bilateral negotiations with Russia leaving Europe out in the cold. Somewhat foolishly, he added that Russia was assembling a new force of 150,000 men and asked the question 'if Putin comes for you, can your army fight him off the way Ukraine has done?' The answer was obvious. NATO members were safe- till the Joker's antics caused doubts to be sown about Article 5. Ukraine wasn't in NATO and should never have put its faith in Biden, whose doctrine was 'when the going gets tough, run the fuck away' . America didn't give a fart about the place though maybe they would buy its 'raw earth' and keep it safe for that reason. 

Be that as it may, it appears, it was the spectre of a European Army suddenly springing into existence which motivated Zelenskyy's fait accompli (though maybe Macron had primed him to do it) 

 If Ukraine really is a vital interest of Europe's, then the moment Zelenskyy blew up the deal offered by Trump, Europe had no choice but to create a European army. Sadly, even if Europeans really lurve Ukrainians, this will take time and 'moral hazard' is triggered in that the senior partner may abandon the junior partner who has decided to take an independent line. In other words, in the short to medium term, Europe's security position worsens while the financial burden rises rapidly. This is great news from Lockheed Martin. (Most EU defence purchases are from the US).

Economically, the question of protection for indigenous military production puts a big strain on relations with America and disrupts long range planning. That's why the existing position is that Europe will only do 'complementary' not 'competing' military production. But this leaves Europe tied to America's apron strings. Even Israel can't do what it likes because of this dependence. But, unlike Israel, Europe has a vast population and can certainly sustain very high levels of military production as well as R&D. 

Will there be a European army? Probably not. If a thing doesn't exist, there's a good reason why people think the thing would be highly mischievous. Armies are good things if you habitually do smart things. If you do stupid shit, powerful Armies are the last thing you should have. Europe's record in this respect has been bad. Moreover, it does not really face an existential threat. Putin isn't Hitler. But if you throw European troops into the Ukrainian meat grinder, Russia may retaliate across other borders. The US may decide that article 5 support is best supplied by sending thoughts and prayers. 

It appears that Trump has got Putin to agree to European peacekeepers. So the 'coalition of the willing' can save face by paying for a rag-tag bunch of squaddies standing around freezing their tits off. Meanwhile defence budgets rise and American military suppliers laugh all the way to the Bank. I suppose Hungary and Slovakia, who are holding out against aid for Ukraine, will have to be bought off. The question then becomes whether it is the powers that be, in Europe, or their insurgent challengers on the Right who benefit. This depends on whether voters think Euro money to Ukraine is well spent. Stories of Ukrainian corruption could alter the outcome. 

Zelenskyy is a comedian. Like little children, comedians find it odd (or pretend to find it odd) that people say one thing and do another. But the reason for this is economic. Fine words cost nothing but, sadly, butter no parsnips. Do a deal and the guy you are doing the deal with finds it in his interest to provide you with security. Blowing up a deal because you think this will cause an imaginary army to come fight for you is the act of an infantile, imbecilic, Joker. 

Obviously, there is another, more cynical explanation for Zelenskyy's clownish behaviour. He knows Ukraine is screwed. If he does a deal with the US, the Alien Torts Act will apply. Every contract could come under scrutiny. Convictions for corruption and extradition demands will follow. You will have to take refuge in Israel if you want to keep your freedom. On the other hand, European countries are more understanding in this respect. You can keep your ill gotten wealth though maybe, from time to time, your have to get a journalist killed or an EU auditor transferred by paying a little money. 

Zelensky- the Joker who thinks he is Batman.

 Almost exactly three years ago, I wrote a post asking if Zelenskyy would go the way of Sakashvilli- a former Georgian President now in jail. I got a lot wrong in that post. In subsequent posts I saw Zelenskyy as a heroic, even Churchillian, figure. But Churchill was a professional soldier turned statesman. He wooed FDR. He did not try to bully him or show him up in front of his own people. Because of his American mother, Churchill- more than any of his contemporaries in England-  understood that the American Civil War was the first truly modern war. It was then that the US showed its extraordinary capacity to very quickly train and equip vast armies. Thus, Churchill was properly humble to what he knew must be senior partner in the Union of English speaking people in which he believed so firmly. This is not to say that things never got heated between him and FDR. Relations were greatly strained at the Casablanca conference. But then FDR unilaterally announced the war objective was 'unconditional surrender' which took Churchill by surprise but which was greatly in the interest of the Empire. Where there is great asymmetry of power, the smart move is to let the big guy commit on his own to going whole hog. FDR did so not because Churchill was at the Conference but because Stalin wasn't. The lesson here is that the guy not in the room is the one who matters. In this case, for Trump it was China- the rising power par excellence because it is growing at five percent. For Zelenskyy it was Europe- which was only worth protecting for the US when its growth was 5 % back in the Sixties- whose leaders he will meet tomorrow. They already hate Trump or have a political reason to wish to back Zelenskyy. Britain's Starmer is attacking the rising power of the Reform party by saying Farage is Putin's poodle. Germany's new Chancellor is angry about Musk's support for AfD. Macron too can gain some political capital against his rivals. Which way will Meloni jump? Not with fug ugly Orban. That's for sure. Still, my point is Zelenskyy will receive a hero's welcome from these leaders. Since he doesn't have to hold elections while there is martial law, he is in no hurry to make peace. Thus from his own point of view, he has scored a blinder. But then Sakashvilli too was once considered a great hero by European leaders who promised EU integration and NATO membership. 

What should China- which as I said is the rising power- do in this situation? If Zelenskyy is a nutter who will go the way of a Sakashvilli, it should stick to Putin and watch Europe back down. If Zelenskyy hadn't been a nutter, he would have said little at the Press Conference but maybe cried while handing round pictures of murdered babies. In broken English, he should have expressed his nation's gratitude to Uncle Sam and said, when a reporter asked him why he wasn't wearing a suit, that he does not have the height and shoulder width and commanding presence of Donald Trump. 'I seeemple man. I iz no have gud clothes. But Ukraine rich. I dig dig dig raw earth for you earn mucho dollar. Maybe buy nice suit for my daughter's bat mitzvah- how you say... quinceañera?'. At this point Trump might have made a grand gesture. Why? What a smart POTUS wants is to drive a wedge between Russia and China. Currently Putin looks like the weak sister which is why it is worth wooing him. But maybe not all that much. If Trump had chosen to put the screws to Putin it would means having to give China a better deal. That's what really matters. For the moment, assuming Europe backs down and the Ukrainians dump the joker, China can carry on with its current strategy while considering what global trade patterns will look like eighteen months from now. That suits Trump too. Much of what will unfold is 'discovery' about elasticities, robustness etc. Once that picture has clarified- i.e. the deals are made- then 'security' can be easily settled. At any rate, that's what Trump is saying loud and clear to China precisely because the name of that country never passed anyone's lips. 

Zelenskyy, in his joint press conference with Trump, took the opposite tack to Churchill with FDR. He repeatedly contradicted his host and made an unseemly jibe- 'you have nice ocean and don't feel now, but you will feel it in the future'- in other words, Americans are pussies. You can say this in a pub towards closing time and, if you are a big guy who served in the Stepsnaz, the weedy little Yank you are talking to may swallow the insult. But, Zelenskyy was in the White House not some low dive. Moreover, he was the little guy and Trump was the big beast with the swinging dick. Trump shot him down but did not lose his own cool. After all, Trump had achieved all his aims in the interview. 

By contrast, Zelenskyy- though gaining the favour of European lightweights who face internal problems from the Right-  hasn't just blown himself up- Ukraine will have to dump him if Trump forces the issue- he has blown up the credibility of Article 5 of NATO. This is the requirement to aid a member who has been attacked. It has only been used once- after 9/11- and was an occasion for ex-Warsaw pact countries to show their loyalty. Once Trump mentioned World War III, it became clear that 'support' doesn't mean a nuclear umbrella. Even otherwise, what Article 5 does not cover is support for a country which initiates hostilities. Arguably, NATO countries which sends troops into the Ukrainian meat grinder have initiated hostilities. If Russia retaliates along their border with such countries, America could refuse support. Just a day or two ago, some Europeans were hailing Trump's support for Article 5 in a Press Conference he gave. Now the joker has blown it up.

Europe triggered World Wars twice in the first half of the twentieth century. Sadly, American spoilsports put boots on the ground to prevent Europe from going for Round Three. Now, in 2025, Europe is welcome to destroy itself without the rest of the world getting involved. After all, it is China which is the rising power.

 I suppose Zelenskyy's game plan was

1) get a security guarantee even though guarantees mean shit just as assurances do (the US had assured its territorial integrity back in the Nineties when it gave up nukes)

2) get European troops into the meat grinder and hope for an escalation of hostilities across their borders so that Article 5 is triggered and a united NATO defeats Russia and gets it to pay massive reparations to Ukraine.

A smart guy who wants a security guarantee says 'look, there is no security problem. Putin is a lovely guy. The whole thing was a misunderstanding. What's the harm in giving a guarantee to a pal who will never ask you to honor it? Don't forget we've lots of lovely 'raw earth' (as Trump puts it) which you are welcome to have as a present from us. 

It is now evident that Zelenskyy is not a smart guy. He said Putin is now using ballistic missiles against Ukraine because Putin thinks Ukraine is part of Russia. The problem here is that ICBMs are ballistic missiles. They can cross 'nice oceans' and flatten multiple cities. Putin has no beef with America or Poland because only Ukrainians and maybe Byelorussians speak Russian (Zelensky is a Russian speaker by birth). Why get involved in a fratricidal war? It is clear Zelenskyy will never make peace. He is like Saakashvili who led his country to defeat in a war in which Russia supported the other side. After his own people had enough of his misrule he fled to Ukraine where he was made a governor of a Province by Poroshenko. Then the crazy fellow turned against his patron and created his own political party. Poroshenko stripped him of citizenship. Zelensky, once elected, restored it and gave the nutter some high sounding job. Then the silly man made the mistake of returning to Georgia where he is rotting in jail. 

Perhaps this will be Zelenskyy's own future trajectory. I suppose there has been corruption and beating and killing of opponents under his regime. There must be a good reason he hasn't held elections. It is easy enough to do so by Presidential ordinance without lifting martial law.  Sadly, he may have to flee to some other country once he gets the order of the boot. Perhaps that is his true motivation. He just wants to survive even if every last drop of valorous Ukrainian blood has to be shed to keep him in power. 

There was no great harm in Zelensky dressing like a soldier during the conflict. The mistake was to think he was actually Batman. He forgot that Batman's super-power is that he is as rich as fuck. European leaders need to put some distance between themselves and this child. A joker can be a winning card in some card games. But, this joker can't trump Trump.