About some of the recent activities reports can be found here in Chinese langauge.
Categoria: general
Zsuzsa Ferge
I am glad that I could make a small contribution* to celebrate this great colleague – it is always a pleasure to meet a person that is ready to stand up, to move things – to sit down – to seriously discuss issues, and to be around – just to have a good time together. Zsuzsa, thank you!!
* I cannot set the link to the actual publication
US – “world leadership in the care sector”
Surprising? Yes, it is indeed the United States of Northern America who are playing a leading in the care sector — of course, one may have to look exactly at the definitions of “care” and “leadership”. Check yourself here for the
Black Alabama Inmates Strike Against Oppression and Slavery.
And do not forget to watch the embedded film.
Unveiling Lines Behind Dichotomies_Warsaw 4/2016
Presentation in Warsaw, April 6th 2016:
International Conference
Precarious Places:
Social, Cultural and Economic Aspects of Uncertainty and Anxiety in Everyday Life
The recording of the presentation can be found here
Abstract
A fundamental methodological problem is the specific relevance of one of the antagonisms of capitalism, though not replacing the meaning of class-conflict but redefining and classifying it in the light of the developmental stage of the means of production: Far too little attention is paid to the contradictory character of individualisation and socialisation as it is inherent in the political economic system.
Polányi’s main argument of disembedding is inherently linked to the somewhat contradicting tendency of colonialisation which can also be seen as specific form of embedding.
The juxtaposition or dichotomisation of individualisation-socialisation is a different presentation of control of the underlying process. The term inner colonialisation gains special meaning not least in the understanding of the land grab and its metaphoric use as matter of “commons”. As such it will be used in the presentation as means for investigating 5 major myth and 5 major tensions that allow us to go beyond considering the 5 giant evils (Beveridge) that guide the welfare state debate.
[The author gratefully acknowledges the generous financial support from Zhejiang University Fund, Hangzhou, PRC and Bangor College China, Changsha, PRC]
Security in insecure times
A short presentation, addressing the conference Edukacja Dla Bezpieczeństwa (Education for Security), April 6th, 2016, in Gdansk
Abstract:
Looking at the economic development of the recent years, the first that comes to mind is of course the crisis and its far-reaching impact on the living conditions and perspectives of many people – social security systems are threatened by austerity, and they often appear as at most shunting yard, without offering real and sustainable perspectives. This is obvious, and the need for immediate changes, securing basic human rights – for individuals and societies – is high on the agenda.
However, it is obvious that the crisis is more fundamental, reaching much beyond this and presenting itself as human crisis, crisis of humanity, crisis of agency and the like.
We best may refer to the antroponomic system crisis as outlined by Paul Boccara.
In other words, when we look at the current economic crisis we have to understand that we are confronted with the potentiality of a fundamental change of the entire mode of production. So, the old security of the Keynesian Welfare National State are failing and seem to be irretrievable, the transitory Schumpeterian Workfare Post-National Regime.
Can economics, and possibly social science in general, only bemoan the developments, leaving the search for security to religion and the violent reestablishment of the traditional systems of security? The question is not only one of social security, but even more so one of thoroughly analysing the burning global demand – and potential – for a new antroponomic balance.
See here for the recording.
Migration, German openness and … – the other side
Germany is frequently praised for the policies in connection with migration. And there is surely no reason for any kind of black and white paintings, nor for applying a too broad brush – we are currently elaborating in a small group from the scientific council of attac (Association pour la Taxation des Transactions financières et pour l’Action Citoyenne (Association for the Taxation of financial Transactions and Citizen’s Action) a positioning paper.
There is surely one thing that is frequently overlooked, and it is sufficiently shocking to have a look. It is the
Institutional racism and a lack of government action
Economics – beyond calculations
Nothing special though possibly a small contribution on matters of understanding economics as social science in its true sense. It is very basic – recordings from teaching students in China who are in their first year (second semester) learning about economics. The first lectures can be found here.
Dreams … I sogni ci aiutano a cambiare la realtà.
I sogni ci aiutano a cambiare la realtà.
Well, as much as this trip was about some work, it waS also about these things we usually call ‘pleasure’. So, in the meantime I went to the theatre, a play based on Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli. In my opinion the performance was not really great – btw, a problem I have more and more, be it in the theatre, the opera or in galleries: some ‘forced innovation’, some spasmodic efforts to be innovative, too often ending in just being ‘artificially loud’. Still, the play itself ended by rejecting this in some way …, being a kind of dramatic as well, basically suggesting:
Don’t have dreams, life is about ‘just getting along’, things being ‘OK’, not anything more, not anything special … having dreams is about moving towards failure. So, just accept, without dreams – Then things are ‘OK’.
Never heard the ‘OK-option’ in such a pejorative, negative, rejecting way. – Why I said it had been a confirmation of rejecting the spasmodic efforts to be innovative? Simply because any change, any innovation has to be sound, radical – as such it is in need of being genuine. In arts as much as in ‘real life’.
Mustang confirmed this – in such a frightening way confronting us with the difficulty we overlook too often. A simple plot:
And still, what we overlook is our own limitation, maintaining traditions, claiming the rights of self-determination, while forgetting that this can easily (surely not necessarily) result in oppression, localism and clientelism etc. Can we find a way that is really about moving forward and respecting the traditions? Or is it about two distinct, incompatible array, standing side by side?
You should sleep nine hours without dreams. Then you have the day for dreams. (Herbert Marcuse)
it seems like the wide spaces as we find them in so many paintings of Gauguin and the subdivision, the we know from the later paintings of van Gogh: two impressionists, two friends, and one misunderstanding ….
Apparently two sides, poles without connection. Standing against the alternative of a permanent struggle. The dreams we have – and should have beyond the brothers’ OK-option have to look for a sound foundation in the fact that
It is never possible to return to the point of departure – it does not exist anymore (Shumona Sinha).
And with this we have to acknowledge the most difficult point: we do not exist anymore, we also changed, and even if we think, we did not change: ultimately we did.
Morals and Standards
Another time we see the meaning of the words we find in the first volume of The Capital, chapter 31, dealing with the Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist
“Capital is said by a Quarterly Reviewer to fly turbulence and strife, and to be timid, which is very true; but this is very incompletely stating the question. Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated.” (T. J. Dunning, l. c., pp. 35, 36.)
It is not about the genesis though, it also and even more so about maintaining the role of capital in general, paradoxically pushing you to produce and tighten the rope that may one day be seen hanging down the gibbet, when walking up the last stairs. Or is there another way to interpret the following
Saudis Use European Arms for ‘Human Rights Violations’
Is it too cynical to demand that the profits should be at least used to accommodate the refugees?
It is just appalling to see that, what we sometimes hope to be exaggerations, is brute reality.
Values
Ah well, of course
But how obvious is it?
- We cannot change our core Roman, or were it Greek ? values, as we subdued them by European enlightenment,
- Smith and Bentham triumphing over Kant and the French tricolore,
- leveling the field for the yanks who returned with their reinterpretation to Europe and …
- … and allow today Merkel’s Schäuble to squeeze the Greek like lemons
- and “allow” Orban’s barbed wires to cut into the veins of migrants who leave war and starvation behind before they can enter Europe
The tricolore did not say that we share with everybody – it only said we have to share something with some — selected. Some – people and countries – have to pay, so said by the slogan of the time:
- the inner and outer periphery on which the centre can establish its affluence …. –
- reflecting these values of individual freedom = precarious jobs
- and equality = not allowing anybody to sleep under the bridges of Paris … – don’t we remember:
La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.Le Lys Rouge [The Red Lily] (1894)
- and fraternity = the soup kitchens that take the place of the rights that the universal declaration of human rights failed to guarantee ….; where fraternity means redefining sleeping rough by offering a “pillow” near to the churches, softening the hardship by the pretension of a better world, the other world – and for the time being through charity, still leaving space for the question: is there a link between the (name of) the train station Termini in Rome and “its offer of sleeping rough in its protection” – the termination of dignity?
Of course, it may be that these – few – examples also “tell of a political reality far removed from Mr Tao Zhang’s “Europe(an) Dream”, inspired by historical “visions” (let’s take Delors or let’s refer to the founding-FATHERS) and believing in claims that gain much of their positivity not from their inherent greatness but from the fact of a lack of today’s power holders that do not allow to even think outside the ideological and physical fortress of the single finance market.
And of course, all this is about the European Dream which people like Riffkin have, putting like Albert the “Rheinian Model” against the rest of the world – a world order that allows and evokes worries about possibilities to continue selling the same number of Lamborghinis, Porsches and Mercs to the empire of the middle.
Sure, when it comes to education then, we may have to deal with the
difficulty Chinese students face, particularly in the arts and social sciences, is in adopting the critical thinking that the Quality Assurance Agency insists master’s level courses must inculcate
this does, of course, not exist for European students (and lecturers alike) – used to the censorship of peer-reviewed publications and ranking systems that, to a large extent controlled by quasi-monopolist publishing houses, are very much algorithm-ised like google: write what we know, quote what we and our peers stated for many times, contend what is publicly accepted … and redefine harsh principles by using softened and softening frameworks like social investment, knowledge management and the failure of implementation of strategies … – you may easily make a rocketing career as long as you do not question the strategies themselves.
There is a wider perspective, looking at the secular issues and developments – or a perspective that is very narrow: lookig the current debates – you may take it as you like:
It surely opens a field for debate when people call for
indirectly suggesting the possibility of a national democracy which in actual fact is one of the core breaking points: the contention of the principle of nationality and externalisation – this is how the core value of European democracy worked since the ancient city states until the Fortress EUrope.
And this is the core European and EUropean value that asks if
without considering that we will not have a legitimate parliament – national or EUropean – as long as we have an economic system that leads to the permanent
Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disiganno – the Triumph of Time and Truth
The critical attitude …. – sure, there is some space, though we should not forget that when Baudelaire first presented Les Fleurs du mal, he was condemned to put them aside, allowed to present them later in a revised version, leaving critique to the space of sympbolism, providing there the framework for talking about the Island of the Death (Boecklin) to where Europe seems to be moving, after facing L’angelo ferito (Hugo Simberg) – the disappointed carriers make look grimly but are not allowed to revive the hope they once have had … – not so much changed perhaps, today’s critics turning away from reality and hoping for the savour from Rome who rightly criticises that this economy kills, a critique that is turned down if and when it comes from others who ask for material changes that allow and enforce liberty, equality and fraternity.
.. stating all this does not mean not acknowledging some of the problems mentioned – it means, however, to say that they are much deeper and profound, not least reflecting the need of confronting issues that emerge from the
centre on China’s Confucian cultural tradition
with the issues that are emerging from a limited understanding of rationality that systematically crucifies its own claims and pretensions and sacrifices “Moral Sentiments” on the altar of the “Wealth of the Nations” …
No, we surely cannot change the values for anybody – not for the Chinese, not for anybody … they will pay anyway …
As long as any nation or region claims today that the specifically national or regional core values cannot be changed for those of anybody else we may easily end up as An Idiot Abroad – abroad being everywhere and anywhere, and we being everybody who is still believing in the old answers suitable for dealing with the new questions, questions that are not yet correctly formulated.
COMMEDIA DELLA VITA OR PÁNTA RÊI'S FIRM GROUND 