Reform vs revolution: visions of social change

There is a dispute or tension at the heart of most attempts at addressing injustice: should we seek achievable incremental change to make a broken system slightly less damaging to those who are victims of its injustice or risk more ambitious change that attempts to shift some of the fundamental reasons for that injustice?

For instance, the recent Paris Agreement, viewed through the incrementalist model was an outstanding semi-miraculous success, yet viewed through the lens of justice, was a further entrenching of the power of the systems that have caused the problem and which show little inclination of doing anything like what is necessary to avoid suffering on a grand scale.

Expressing the latter perspective, Slavoj Zizek says (and I've never managed to discover if he is quoting someone else at this point), "the worst slave owners were those who were kind to their slaves", that is, some attempts at incremental improvements to the worst aspects of an unjust system can simply be part of maintaining that system by making it more palatable to the consciences of those who are the system's beneficiaries.

Yet a similar charge gets levelled against the idealists: by demanding more, the possibility of making real tangible improvements to the lives of suffering people is sometimes lost. Oliver O'Donovan praises the virtue of compromise, which means being willing to do "the best that it is actually possible to do", that is, to avoid making the best the enemy of the good.

But the tension here is not always destructive. We are not always necessarily faced with a choice between token improvements that inoculate against further change or demands for impossible systemic change that suck the energy from incremental reforms. Sometimes, strategic piecemeal reforms can help to express, build and solidify public opinion regarding values that ultimately lead to more ambitious changes. And sometimes, demands based directly in ideals reveal the truth of an injustice with a clarity that enables much-needed reforms to occur.

But the reason that this tension is perennial in all movements for change is that this dispute between reformers and revolutionaries cannot be decided a priori. In O'Donovan's language, "what is possible" is itself highly contested. Who is to say that what currently seems impossible might not become thinkable under the pressure of a sustained radical social movement?

Such judgements about what is indeed possible must be made according to close attention to the particulars of the situation, while also being informed by a vision of divine providence being capable of doing more than we ask or imagine; hard-nosed assessments of political openings must be combined with a strong sense of historical contingency, cultural malleability and the omnipresent possibility of repentance.

Put another way, reformers ought to be strategic in seeking reforms that will heighten rather than lessen the visible tension between reality and justice. Where there is a choice between improvements that tend to make the powerful feel more comfortable and improvements that help to further reveal the injustice of the present order, then pick the latter. And revolutionaries ought to articulate visions and select strategies based on a credible (if ambitious) path towards change, where the next step is comprehensible as movement on a journey towards justice.

Of course, this doesn't mean antagonism between reformers and revolutionaries will cease, or that all will agree on where the convergence between competing strategies might lie, but hopefully it can help in avoiding some of the more egregious dead ends.

So was the Paris Agreement a miraculous unprecedented step towards international cooperation or a woefully inadequate further betrayal of future generations and vulnerable lives everywhere that further reinforces the power of the perpetrators?

Your perspective probably reveals where you lie on the spectrum between reformer or revolutionary. For me: it is both.
Image credit unknown.

When history was made and other stories

The Economist: When history of made, a graph in which the historical novelty of the last six decades or so is made breathtakingly clear. H/T Michael Tobis, who offers his own reflections upon it.

SMH: Bob Brown, the most ______ man in Australia. Fill in your own adjective to complete the title of an interesting profile of a fascinating man.

Naomi Klein: Climate change, capitalism and the transformation of cultural values. Klein suggests that perhaps the insistence of the deniers that climate change implies the necessity of a left-wing cultural transformation ought to be taken with more seriousness.

Slavoj Žižek: Occupy First. Demands come later. Žižek answers the critics of the movement who claim it is a gathering of un-American violent dreamers. Speaking of Occupy (which surely deserves its own post or three at some stage), I found this summary (from a NZ perspective) useful, these images illuminating of protesters' motives and this warning (from an American in London) quite salient.

ABC: Anti-consumerism is the new democracy.

John Dickson: Art of persuasion not so simple. Dickson turns to Aristotle to gain some basic insights into how to be convincing: logos, pathos and, crucially, ethos.

Orion: The Consolations of Extinction. A reflection on how deep time affects our perception of the ongoing sixth extinction event and of our own mortality as a species.

Is catastrophe inevitable?

"[I]f we are to confront adequately the threat of (social or environmental) catastrophe, we need to break out of this "historical" notion of temporality: we have to introduce a new notion of time. Dupuy calls this the "time of a project", of a closed circuit between the past and the future: the future is causally produced by our acts in the past, while the way we act is determined by our anticipation of the future and our reaction to this anticipation:

The catastrophic event is inscribed into the future as destiny, for sure, but also as a contingent accident: it could not have taken place, even if, in futur antérieur [looking back from the future], it appears as necessary. ... if an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe, for example, it could not not have taken place; nonetheless, insofar as it did not take place, it is not inevitable. It is thus the event's actualization - the fact that it takes place - which retroactively creates its necessity."

"If - accidentally - an event takes place, it creates the preceding chain which makes it appear inevitable: this, and not commonplaces on how underlying necessity expresses itself in and through the accidental play of appearances, is in nuce the Hegelian dialectic of contingency and necessity. In this sense, although we are determined by destiny, we are nonetheless free to choose our destiny. According to Dupuy, this is also how we should approach the ecological crisis: not to appraise "realistically" the possibilities of catastrophe, but to accept it as Destiny in the precise Hegelian sense - if the catastrophe happens, one can say that its occurrence was decided even before it took place. Destiny and free action (to block the "if") thus go hand in hand: at its most radical, freedom is the freedom to change one's Destiny.

"This, then, is how Dupuy proposes to confront the disaster: we should first perceive it as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourselves into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert into its past (the past of the future) counterfactual possibilities ("If we had done this and that, the calamity we are now experiencing would not have occurred!") upon which we then act today. We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny - and then, against the background of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past. Paradoxically, the only way to prevent the disaster is to accept it as inevitable. For Badiou too, the time of the fidelity to an event is the futur antérieur: overtaking oneself vis-à-vis the future, one acts now as if the future one wants to bring about were already here.

"What this means is that one should fearlessly rehabilitate the idea of preventative action (the "pre-emptive strike"), much abused in the "war on terror": if we postpone our action until we have full knowledge of the catastrophe, we will have acquired that knowledge only when it is too late. That is to say, the certainty on which an act relies is not a matter of knowledge, but a matter of belief: a true act is never a strategic intervention in a transparent situation of which we have full knowledge; on the contrary, the true act fills in the gap in our knowledge."

- Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 150-52.
Internal quote from Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Petite metaphysique des tsunami (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 19.

This somewhat dense passage is either nonsense, or very profound. It can be difficult to tell, and perhaps only hindsight will let us know for sure. But this is precisely Žižek's point: that we act (largely) in the dark, and certainly in the dark about whether future events are inevitable or not. A terminal diagnosis could prove to be wrong. But this doesn't mean we just write off such a diagnosis, no, we embrace it and feel the full weight of living under a death sentence, and then live as those who will be resurrected.
Images by HCS. The eagle-eyed may have notice that the young man attempting to prevent the apparently inevitable collapse in the second image is your truly, age 11.

Žižek: cheat notes

For those who are struggling with the video posted yesterday, it is important to note that Žižek is addressing an audience that he assumes will be familiar with may of the ideas he is discussing and so he doesn't always explain everything. He's quite content to say "And so on" rather than join all the dots. This means that if this is your first introduction to Žižek, it may not be the most accessible piece of communication.

The bottom line of what he's trying to say is that the system is so broken that tinkering around the edges is a distraction from the more radical task at hand. Light green consumerism is still consumerism, ethical consumerism is still consumerism. As such, they are largely a waste of time, since they make us feel like we're doing something while we're still mainly on the problem side of the equation.

Does he have an alternative? Yes, though he doesn't really discuss it in this video. It is hinted at where he says, "It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property." That is, the problem is much deeper than one or two bad apples in the barrel, a few CEOs being too greedy or some missing government regulation. It is knottier than any given new piece of technology, no matter how shiny, can untie. The problem for Žižek is with our economic system as a whole. Does this make him a dangerous radical, a subversive Marxist with an anti-capitalist agenda for world government? Yes, actually it does. And he has no problem with that (having called himself "a communist in a qualified sense").

Charity is cruelty. And so on.

Why we will never consume our way out of our problems

Slavoj Žižek discusses Starbucks and the limitations of ethical capitalism. And so on.
UPDATE: See also some further thoughts I posted the next day.