Norbert Trenkle in a interview with Salih Selcuk for the magazine YARIN (February 2005)
1. Although culturalistic ideologies still have strong appeal (Huntington, Bin Laden, micronationalists, neo-antiSemites, etc.), the call for political-economic explanations of the present world situation becomes ever louder. Has culturalism had its day?
published in: junge Welt, 2/3/2005
Franz Schandl
We live in times of a double trivialization. One is well known; the other will be discussed here. That Auschwitz is relativized in other atrocities is annoying. That Auschwitz relativizes everything else is also unbearable. No conflict will be seen any more as a particular atrocity (in which its special characteristics are analyzed) but will be projected somehow on the Shoah and thus made small. Auschwitz itself is no longer explained from the historical development. Conversely, every current event is immediately connected with Auschwitz.
Source: Principia Dialectica, Nr. 2/2006 (London) www.principiadialectica.co.uk
Original: Die metaphysischen Mucken des Klassenkampfs, krisis 29, Münster 2005
Norbert Trenkle
Dez. 2004
Neil Larsen
A history without violence would, for us at least, be unrecognizable as history. Yet, paradoxically, violence as phenomenon appears to exist apart from the history in which it is omnipresent. Violence seems, almost unconsciously, to found the historical imagination itself and at the same time to exist apart from it, as a moral or metaphysical absolute. In the final analysis this no doubt has to do with the impossibility of disassociating the idea of violence from that of death as physical annihilation. Taken to its extreme, violence could end history by destroying virtually all historical agents. Indeed, it must rank as one of the great historical feats of modernity that is has actualized what was before this merely theoretical possibility and even learned to make us accommodate ourselves to it in our daily lives. Alongside the abstract repugnance it universally merits in the language of official ‘values,’ violence as means and as sheer adaptation advances at a sure and accelerating pace. Whatever they may convey on the level of official historical sanctions, the stories and images of catastrophic violence–whether of Auschwitz or Hiroshima, of the Escuela de Mecánica or El Mozote, or for that matter of Columbine High, 9/11, Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib–inform us just as predictably of the adaptive cost that lived history can be relied upon to exact from its subjects: it is this bad, it will continue, and it will get worse. The real likelihood of violent annihilation becomes for many something to be factored into the equations of contemporary life, as one would a marriage or a retirement, while for the rest its specter becomes a permanent part of the domestic landscape.
Neil Larsen
University of California, Davis
During the final months of 2001, when I first conceived the idea for this essay, Argentina had become the sudden focus of world attention. The International Monetary Fund, in what seemed at the time an unprecedented move, had refused to continue loaning money to the De la Rúa government, and, in the course of the following weeks, and the effective economic collapse of the country, a quasi-revolutionary situation appeared to prevail. On December 20, 2001 there occurred the now near-legendary uprising of the people of Buenos Aires that succeeded in forcing the resignation of De la Rúa. Though upwards of forty people were killed by police in the course of the uprising, the Argentine armed forces refused De la Rúa’s plea for intervention, thus marking what seemed, indeed, a revolutionary new phase in Argentine political and social history.
Neil Larsen nalarsen@ucdavis.edu
With the bloody debacle in Iraq driving the Bush regime to levels of imperial ruthlessness and corruption worthy of the emperor Nero, the combined sense of outrage, despair, and unreality evoked by political life in the US seems to have reached its limit. But now California takes us well past even this point by electing Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor. The political post-mortems –assuming, that is, we aren’t all already dead or have had our bodies snatched by some cyber-pod electro-genetically hatched in Hollywood or Silicon Valley–continue to toll forth, but this much is known: ‘Arnold’ vanquished his nearest competitor by more than a million votes, and the vote to recall standing governor Gray Davis triumphed by a margin of 10.6%. Voter turnout was high. This means that registered Democrats (a sizeable majority in the state), as well as a traditionally pro-Democratic voting block comprised by women and gays and lesbians, as well as Blacks and Latinos, ‘crossed over’ to vote for Schwarzenegger in huge numbers. Even unionized labor, probably the most organized, traditionally Democratic voting bloc in the state, spurned the instructions of its union bosses and offered up 51% of its votes to Republican gubernatiorial candidates Schwarzenegger and McClintock, who made no secret of their anti-union views.
This article originally published in: junge Welt, 12/30/2004
Self-determination means market determination. Flexibility has nothing to do with individual sovereignty. Rather it means being completely delivered up to external demands. The flexibility of the person is nothing but dictation of the market.
Franz Schandl
Total flexibility is on the agenda. This proclamation in the Vienna standard is also proclaimed elsewhere. Total flexibility is expected from the employee, from working hours and work place to form of employment. In the traditional labor contract of industrial society, the employee offered his labor power to the business and the business paid him a secure earned income and took away his risk of marketing the results of his production. That is now over. The social breach with the collective contract reads as follows: Labor contracts are increasingly individualized in the form of work contracts or free contracts of employment geared strongly to the output achieved by individuals. Labor is no longer a spatially or temporally pre-defined gainful employment.
Jungle World 28/2004
Karl-Heinz Lewed
The ideologists of the modern service society do not paint the future this way: work pressure without security, exploitation in niche enterprises, contract work with obscure mediation agencies, low wages for service workers and personal agencies as a forced instrument of work administration. After the fall of the New Economy, flexibility, individualization and outsourcing are obviously threats, not promises and mean nothing for the majority but poverty and precarious working conditions. Employees in the poverty-service area are not the only ones affected by the massive lowering of social standards. As everybody knows, this tendency extends to the whole society in western metropolises. No one speaks any more of the periphery. In some employment segments, deregulation, low wages and precarization dominate as in the cleaning and catering trades, domestic servants or caring for seniors. Employing migrants in these areas under the most miserable conditions without any legal or contract security is not an accident.
Interviewers and translators: Timo Ahonen and Markus Termonen. Originally made for the Finnish Magazine Megafoni (http://megafoni.kulma.net).
How can the postindustrialized situation be reacted to, which is represented as a phase of rupture, and in which some present solutions solely inside the current model of wage work and others support a fixed citizen’s income as the central form of social security? In other words, how can the mechanisms disintegrating solidarity and the capitalist relations of production be critized without stagnating into the defense of welfare state or taking on the form of past industrial classes? These questions and others are discussed in this interview with Norbert Trenkle from the German Krisis-collective. The group, concentrating on theoretical productivity, aims to criticize the capitalist society in a constitutive way by focusing on e.g. work, capital and commodity production. As topics in this interview we also have the current meaning of “leftism” and some questions concerning action methods.
Ernst Lohoff
The anti-globalization protest has formed as a movement against neoliberalism. Across the spectrum of protest, certainly the ideas on how the ruling order is to be critiqued differ widely. There is also not exactly consensus on how the path to a more humane society could look. But all realize that the neoliberal dream of a total market is a nightmare.
