ENDGAME

Joseph W.H. Lough, Ph.D.Filosofski fakultet Tuzla

Blog: http://www.newconsensus.org/blogTwitter: @jwhlough

email: joseph.lough@gmail.comphone: +387 603375497

Office Hours: 10-Noon, MW, Urban

Review•Winston’s Problem and Our Own

– why might we be eager to identify the agent of social and historical emancipation?

– in what world would that agent have been formed?

– in what world would we (who recognize that agent) have been formed?

Review

•The Subject-Object of History

– Aristotle (Hegel/Marx): free thought and action are predicated on substantive freedom

– I Kant (Lenin/Lukács): freedom is transcendental and needs to be objectified/historicised

Review

•Winston’s Problem and Our Own

– What is the cause for Winston’s despair?

– How does Winston solve the subject-object problem?

– How might Winston have solved the subject-object problem?

Review•Enron: The Smartest Guys in

the Room

– What is Mark-to-Market Accounting?

– What mechanisms mediate social relations in Enron’s world?

– What mechanisms mediate social relations following the largest bankruptcy in world history?

Preview

•Directional Dynamism in History

– Long-Term Cycles

– Short-Term Cycles

– The Post-War Epoch and Our Pessimism

Preview

•Endgame

– The characters

– The story

– What does it mean?

– What might it mean?

Preview

•Walmart: the high cost of low prices

Directional Dynamism

•Long-Term Cycles

Directional Dynamism

•Short-Term Cycles

Directional Dynamism

•What happens when the piston in a combustion engine seizes?

•What happens in history when the tension between forces and relations of production disappears?

Directional Dynamism

•Resistence or opposition does not give rise to determinate directional movement

Directional Dynamism

Endgame

•Who are the characters?

- Ham

- Clov

- Nagg

- Nell

Endgame

•What happens in the story?

Endgame

•What does it mean?

Endgame•Let us say that victory in WWII was

purchased at an inconceivably high price in personnel, material, and surviving infrastructure

•But let us say that one power emerges almost unscathed, enjoying unprecedented wealth and productive capacity

•But let us say that there is no one left to benefit from this wealth and productivity

Endgame•If WWI and WWII were products of

shifts in cycles of capital accumulation

•What might have been “the solution” to these cycles and the resulting wars?

•Were these solutions anywhere on the horizon in the 1960s?

Endgame•Did the “failure of reason” to address

the causes for mass death prevent these causes from expanding?

•Did either our pessimism or continuing war and conflict cause the “engine of history” to “seize”?

•Did it bring the dialectical dynamic of history to a stop?

Endgame•Even in the absence of a subject-object,

an Agent, to drive history, history is nevertheless unfolding

•Even in the absence of an emancipatory agent or subject, history continues to proceed forward

•Where is it going?

•Who is driving it?

•To what end?

Endgame•Let us say that we can recognize

the pattern of history

•Let us say that we can also recognize the limited character of this pattern

•And let us say that we can therefore appreciate why our “endgame” is not THE ENDGAME

Endgame

•Is there a way out?

•Is there a way through?

Endgame•If value is structured in our society

by the self-domination of labor . . .

•If freedom would entail the conditions that make for freedom . . .

•And if freedom would entail the end of labor . . .

•Is there a way through?

Endgame

•What kind of “freedom” did Cold War artists, writers, and intellectuals foreground?

•In what ways did this foregrounding of “empty” or “negative” freedom promote repression in the “West”?

Endgame• If freedom entails the reduction of labor and the

conditions that make for freedom, what does this make of . . . ?- race- ethnicity- nationality- religion- gender- gender preference

Preview•Walmart: the high cost of low

prices

•Office Hours: MW, 10-Noon, Urban

•Open University, M 1-4, American Corner: Karl Marx in America