"Last week, John Boehner found himself in the position of having to defend tax subsidies to oil companies; he agreed that subsidizing the massive, and massively profitable, oil companies was perverse but, he pleaded, what about all the small, struggling oil companies? This is a particularly amusing instance of the appeal to an imaginary petit bourgeoisie, which you also see in claims that people getting paid half a million dollars are “small business owners.” This is, perhaps, a central feature of bourgeois ideology, which imagines that capitalism is based on individual “property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence” (Marx), rather than being a whole system of social production. This particular aspect of bourgeois ideology does seem to be undergoing a resurgence of popularity at the moment, perhaps as a kind of protective reaction to the increasing visibility of the structures of capitalism in the wake of the financial crisis."
--Voyou Desoeuvre
"It boils down to this: Berlusconi wants to reduce democracy not to a plebiscite but to an opinion poll, where every citizen is isolated and deprived of any cultural and social instrument for his or her effective independence, defenceless before a structure of power based on the mass media and patronage. For Berlusconi, public life is nothing but a grand arena for ad-men and touts, a gigantic souk. Or if you prefer, Berlusconi conceives of the country as a firm (belonging to him, naturally), where instead of citizens there are employees and/or consumers, a principal shareholder and a few minority shareholders, and where the decisions of the Managing Director cannot be countermanded or delayed. This is why for his tycoon mentality—and he became a tycoon, lest it be forgotten, thanks to the political support of Bettino Craxi—such things as the separation of powers, limited government and constitutional constraints are truly incomprehensible and unreasonable. The Berlusconi regime is not fascist; what it is actually creating is a postmodern version of the ancien régime patrimonial state."
-- PAOLO FLORES D’ARCAIS
No comments:
Post a Comment