The Times They are a-Changing.
May 17, 2013 6:06 AM   Subscribe

Two days ago M15 the original Spanish "occupy" movement celebrated its second birthday. Earlier this year it publicised a campaign of civil disobediance. Now Catalunya has Teresa Forcades, a nun on a mission who opposes the excesses of capitalism. Here is a recent interview.
posted by adamvasco (39 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
I agree about not believing in a dream society without problems, but from there to accepting that we will always have poor people and that there will always be 30% who are left out, that's different.

I like this nun. I like her a lot.
posted by Mooski at 6:21 AM on May 17, 2013 [1 favorite]


I agree about not believing in a dream society without problems, but from there to accepting that we will always have poor people and that there will always be 30% who are left out, that's different.



At least in Thatcher's UK it was only 30% and temporary. I'm guessing the percentage in Chavez's Venezuela is a little higher and a little more permanent.
posted by otto42 at 7:09 AM on May 17, 2013 [2 favorites]


So what is her anti-vaccine position?
posted by Jahaza at 7:31 AM on May 17, 2013 [1 favorite]


At least in Thatcher's UK it was only 30% and temporary. I'm guessing the percentage in Chavez's Venezuela is a little higher and a little more permanent.

And our options are inherently constrained to those two magnetic poles: Thatcher or Chavez. Right-Wing Elitism or Right-Wing Populism with Leftist Economic pretensions. Every possible political orientation falls somewhere along that magical continuum and if you're not Team Thatcher you must be Team Chavez. Maybe even Team Stalin.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:46 AM on May 17, 2013 [4 favorites]


Every possible political orientation falls somewhere along that magical continuum and if you're not Team Thatcher you must be Team Chavez.

Except that she is on Team Chavez if you read the links. From the "recent interview" link
Known for her defense of Venezuelan Hugo Chavez, who died recently, she calls him "the leader who has gone through the most democratic validations" and confesses that she prays that "the achievements of the Bolivarian revolution aren't thrown away."
posted by Jahaza at 7:51 AM on May 17, 2013 [2 favorites]


(without taking a position on the unemployment numbers in Venezuala)
posted by Jahaza at 7:51 AM on May 17, 2013


Well, maybe that's a fair point of criticism then. Still, to the extent Chavez was authoritarian, he was a populist right-wing leader, regardless of how leftist his economics might have been. We've got to get over this weird idea that right-wing and left-wing political orientations are somehow mutually exclusive and all-encompassing. The terms used to be used with more nuance. It's possible to be a leftist on economic policy while being a right-wing authoritarian on matters of state power (as Chavez was).
posted by saulgoodman at 8:19 AM on May 17, 2013


"Well, maybe that's a fair point of criticism then. Still, to the extent Chavez was authoritarian, he was a populist right-wing leader, regardless of how leftist his economics might have been. We've got to get over this weird idea that right-wing and left-wing political orientations are somehow mutually exclusive and all-encompassing. The terms used to be used with more nuance. It's possible to be a leftist on economic policy while being a right-wing authoritarian on matters of state power (as Chavez was).
posted by saulgoodman at 8:19 AM on May 17 [+] [!]"


Extreme left wing economics and Chavez style thuggery are co-dependent and inseparable. It is therefore disingenuous to argue that Chavez's economics are sound and his thuggery is a product of right wing politics. Chavez was an extreme left wing thug politically and economically. The only reason to argue otherwise is out of concern Chavez's extreme left wing economics, which maybe you think are wonderful, is synonymous with thuggery in general.
posted by otto42 at 8:54 AM on May 17, 2013 [2 favorites]


Extreme left wing economics and Chavez style thuggery are co-dependent and inseparable.

Yeah I mean he was such a thug. He was totally assassinating fools and claiming the authority to kill any mofo he wanted anywhere in the world at anytime. That's how much of a bad ass thug he was.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 9:28 AM on May 17, 2013 [1 favorite]


Furthermore, she explicitly defends the democratic nature of Chavizmo, so she's not for the economics and against the thuggery she denies (rightly or wrongly) the thuggery.
posted by Jahaza at 9:29 AM on May 17, 2013


Furthermore, she explicitly defends the democratic nature of Chavizmo

As I'm guessing most Americans would defend the democratic nature of our current capitalist system...which is several orders of magnitude more thuggish than Chavez could ever have hoped to have been. But I guess you'd rather talk about the speck in our neighbors eye than examine the plank in our own.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 9:36 AM on May 17, 2013 [2 favorites]


Umm... but she's Catalan, not Venezualan.
posted by Jahaza at 9:40 AM on May 17, 2013


Umm... but she's Catalan, not Venezualan.

Yep, and you and I are American, which makes us look pretty silly (or at least hypocritical) when we try and paint others countries leaders as thuggish given our own nation's recent history.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 9:54 AM on May 17, 2013 [1 favorite]


"As I'm guessing most Americans would defend the democratic nature of our current capitalist system...which is several orders of magnitude more thuggish than Chavez could ever have hoped to have been. But I guess you'd rather talk about the speck in our neighbors eye than examine the plank in our own.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 9:36 AM on May 17 [+] [!]"


The democratic nature of our current capitalist system has provided all of us with enough of the basics to make obesity the number one nutritional problem in the US. Better yet, under the current system, toilet paper is virtually free and the supply is limitless. Not so much in Venezuela.

There is probably no better appreciation for western style capitalism anywhere in the world than in the bathrooms of Venezuela where thousands of people right now are cleaning up after themselves with a copy of Correo del Orinoco.
posted by otto42 at 10:00 AM on May 17, 2013 [2 favorites]


Hey Otto I don't know if you realize this but Catalonia is at the present part of Spain, in Europe.
So all this wankery about Venezuela is not really all that relevant to what Teresa Forcades is on about.
Socialism isn't a crime over here and we have toilet paper.
posted by adamvasco at 10:16 AM on May 17, 2013


The democratic nature of our current capitalist system has provided all of us with enough of the basics to make obesity the number one nutritional problem in the US. Better yet, under the current system, toilet paper is virtually free and the supply is limitless.

I don't think it's the democratic nature of our system that has provided us with that...it is the decidedly undemocratic American ability to "open markets."
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 10:19 AM on May 17, 2013


Hey Otto I don't know if you realize this but Catalonia is at the present part of Spain, in Europe.
So all this wankery about Venezuela is not really all that relevant to what Teresa Forcades is on about.
Socialism isn't a crime over here and we have toilet paper.
posted by adamvasco at 10:16 AM on May 17 [+] [!]



The "wankery" begins here...

"Known for her defense of Venezuelan Hugo Chavez, who died recently, she calls him "the leader who has gone through the most democratic validations" and confesses that she prays that "the achievements of the Bolivarian revolution aren't thrown away.""

...and seems relevant to me.

Socialism provides everyone with toilet paper, or at least it intends to, be sure to keep track of how much toilet paper you use though, one would not want to deny someone else their "fair share,"
posted by otto42 at 10:48 AM on May 17, 2013 [2 favorites]


What is the contention? That toilet paper availability is a good metric to judge the morality of a socioeconomic system? Either way, who cares if she has defended Hugo Chavez in the past. I am still laughing at the attempt by Americans to paint Chavez as a "thug". That is some rich shit right there. I mean I don't necessarily disagree that he, like every other human, was a flawed individual. But the idea that his actions somehow de-legitimize socialism while not applying the same standard to American presidents and capitalism is pretty untenable I would think. Unless, of course, one wants to be intellectually dishonest about it.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 11:01 AM on May 17, 2013 [1 favorite]


Toilet paper availability is a good metric to judge the morality of a socioeconomic system.

The system that provides the people with a basic human need, not just the elite (I'm sure the Chavez family is not using newspapers to wipe their asses, unlike the rest of the population), is the morally superior system.

If we could conduct a poll of Venezuelans right now with the question;

Do you want to live under a system where toilet paper is virtually free and unlimited or costly and measured?

What do you think most would pick?
posted by otto42 at 11:16 AM on May 17, 2013


If it helps, as a socialist I don't see Chavez as someone to emulate. I'm hardly alone. I'm not even sure why this is particularly relevant.
posted by spectrevsrector at 11:18 AM on May 17, 2013


If it helps, as a socialist I don't see Chavez as someone to emulate. I'm hardly alone. I'm not even sure why this is particularly relevant.

Because the subject of the post sees Chavez as someone to emulate.
posted by Jahaza at 11:32 AM on May 17, 2013 [2 favorites]


Which is a fair enough point to pick up on, but then that mutated into 'extreme left economics' = thuggery.
posted by spectrevsrector at 11:45 AM on May 17, 2013


Which is a fair enough point to pick up on, but then that mutated into 'extreme left economics' = thuggery.
posted by spectrevsrector at 11:45 AM on May 17 [+] [!]


...which started with the contention that the thuggery associated with the extreme left wing economics was due to right wing populism.
posted by otto42 at 11:57 AM on May 17, 2013


I'm sure the Chavez family is not using newspapers to wipe their asses, unlike the rest of the population

I wonder what kind of health care and education folks in inner city America receive compared to the American elite.

Toilet paper availability is a good metric to judge the morality of a socioeconomic system.

As opposed to access to quality education and healthcare.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 12:34 PM on May 17, 2013


I'm sure the Chavez family is not using newspapers to wipe their asses, unlike the rest of the population

I wonder what kind of health care and education folks in inner city America receive compared to the American elite.

Toilet paper availability is a good metric to judge the morality of a socioeconomic system.

As opposed to access to quality education and healthcare.

The folks in inner city America get their education and healthcare for free.

The American elite pay for the inner city folks and they also pay for themselves.

If the economic system can't supply something as basic and necessary as toilet paper, can it honestly be expected to supply something as complicated and desired as education and healthcare?

Maybe someone could tell me which way the flow of people seeking education and/or healthcare is going with respect to the United States and the rest of the world. Are proportionately more people coming into this county from abroad or are proportionately more Americans leaving this country to obtain these services abroad?
posted by otto42 at 12:55 PM on May 17, 2013 [1 favorite]


The folks in inner city America get their education and healthcare for free.

Hah!
posted by Jahaza at 1:07 PM on May 17, 2013 [1 favorite]


...which started with the contention that the thuggery associated with the extreme left wing economics was due to right wing populism.

No, I meant to say that state thuggery is by definition on the right-wing end of the continuum (unless it's carried out with overwhelming popular support), in the traditional sense of the terms Right and Left. It's a mistake to use "right-wing" and "left-wing" as anything more than relative terms that apply only in particular contexts to describe a specific set of power relations. Right-wing means pro-state/established political or economic powers; left wing means aligned with the non-ruling classes whoever they may be and in active opposition to the prevailing power establishment in a society. If everyone in the US really were the political elite and had equal levels of political influence and power (as we liked to kid ourselves in the early days) we'd be a country in which right-wing and left-wing designations don't apply at all--a country ruled by its people, where the masses are the elite. As it stands, many on the political Left don't even realize that's where they are, thinking that because they support policies favored by the Right that makes them de facto members of the Right. Being on the Right or Left isn't determined by what you believe politically, it's determined by where you stand in relation to the centers of social, political or economic power. If you're on the inside, you're on the Right (as that term has been understood for most of history); if you're not, you're on the Left.

If you're right-leaning in the way you govern (i.e., authoritarian and pro-establishment), you can still be left leaning on particular issues and vice versa. We often treat these terms as if they're fixed abstract ideological absolutes nowadays, but they're not--their meanings are context-dependent and relative and describe a set of power relations, not specific ideological beliefs. It's a misnomer to call modern US movement conservatives "right-wingers" because they're aggressively hostile to state power and opposed to much of the US's long-established political status quo (for example, when it comes to welfare systems and tax policy). As would-be reformers, they are leftists in that they're opposed to the political status quo. They are right-wing in their evident ideological preference for policies that favor economic elites over ordinary people. But in terms of political alignments, it's a huge mistake to understand right-wing and left-wing as synonymous with "capitalism" and "communism" or any other specific ideological commitments. Communism has traditionally been considered left-wing because it began popularly with populist ideas and at its start, at least superficially, emphasized the political interests of common people (the "Left") over those of the established power elite. Once state communism had been established and began looking out more for the interests of the state apparatus than for the masses of ordinary people, it wasn't left-wing in its view toward state authority anymore. It became a right-wing system in terms of its views on state power.

Communism was never viewed as left-wing merely because it opposed capitalism. There are many different forms of capitalism, some of them more right-leaning than others. The US has only recently begun to favor right-wing flavors of capitalism, but capitalism isn't inherently aligned with the Right (which just means the ruling elite in a society) or Left (which just means everyone else). Europe's social democracies, for example, are still considered capitalist nations, though they incorporate many ideas associated with leftist movements. And for most of the US's post-WWII history, it embraced a much more leftist form of capitalism than is currently in fashion, with an emphasis on regulating markets to ensure equal opportunity of access and to mitigate monopoly effects, as well as progressive taxation, institutions to promote the public welfare and other leftist policies. I wish we could use these terms more precisely again, so that they might be useful, instead of only using them to signal tribal affiliations and insult each other. In their original sense they provided a useful framework for thinking about politics and identifying one's common political interests with others. Now the terms are just insults whose meanings are largely incoherent BS.
posted by saulgoodman at 1:16 PM on May 17, 2013 [1 favorite]


The folks in inner city America get their education and healthcare for free.

What does this have to do with comparing the quality of an elite education vs. an inner city education in the U.S.?

The American elite pay for the inner city folks and they also pay for themselves.

Really? And this is where I stop taking you seriously.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 1:51 PM on May 17, 2013


No, I meant to say that state thuggery is by definition on the right-wing end of the continuum (unless it's carried out with overwhelming popular support), in the traditional sense of the terms Right and Left. It's a mistake to use "right-wing" and "left-wing" as anything more than relative terms that apply only in particular contexts to describe a specific set of power relations.....

Ugh, I'm so confused. So the state thuggery of the Nazi's is left wing because it had popular support but the state thuggery of the Soviets was right wing because it did not?
posted by otto42 at 2:38 PM on May 17, 2013


No--both were right-wing but only as far as those specific similarities went. The mistake is to treat either as right-wing or left-wing across all the different categories of evaluation on which they might be classified as relatively left-wing or right-wing. It's an oversimplification to call them either in a general sense, because both Soviet communism and German National Socialism were both right-wing in some respects and left-wing in others.
posted by saulgoodman at 2:49 PM on May 17, 2013


so, saulgoodman, your postion is that Chavez was *not* a true Scotsman.
posted by jpe at 3:20 PM on May 17, 2013 [1 favorite]


No--it's that being on the Right or Left is more traditionally a relative thing, a thing describing underlying power relations, not the political ideology of those nominally on the Right or the Left in a given specific sense.

If the prevailing political establishment is unopposed, the terms become irrelevant. The Left means only the opposition to the prevailing elite in a society or political system. The Right means only the power establishment. Today, the Republicans are the Left, in a certain strictly political sense, but their economic platforms are right-wing through and through, in the sense of favoring the economic elite.

It's not that there's no true Scotsman, but we're using the term 'Scotsman' wrong.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:12 PM on May 17, 2013


Yeah, I get it: the meanings of words evolve through cultural exchange, and that's fine. I don't mean to be prescriptive. But sometimes we just sort of forget what we're doing, culturally, and we lose the intended, useful meanings of words that represent abstractions accidentally, through missuse and forgetfulness.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:20 PM on May 17, 2013


state thuggery is by definition on the right-wing end of the continuum

wat
posted by gertzedek at 12:25 AM on May 18, 2013


Stalin and Pol Pot were right wingers. Brain explodes.
posted by gertzedek at 12:27 AM on May 18, 2013


The democratic nature of our current capitalist system has provided all of us with enough of the basics to make obesity the number one nutritional problem in the US.

And oh yes, cheap clothing, with only the occasional death toll over 1000. As long as we're engaging in cheap argument.
posted by dhartung at 3:58 AM on May 18, 2013


So the pro capitalist argument in this thread is: "but Chavez was a bad guy therefore this nun is full of shit."
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 10:52 AM on May 18, 2013


Stalin and Pol Pot were right wingers. Brain explodes.

No--they weren't "Right-Wingers," because there's no such thing as a categorical Right-Winger. Right-wing or left-wing aren't general ideological categories but labels for relative positions on a continuum that can apply across all kinds of different things. They took a right-wing view toward the legitimacy of the use of state authority to suppress dissent--that is, they sided with the power establishment in that particular way.

They were (at least in theory) left-wingers in terms of how they viewed economic policy (although, I'm not sure how leftist it really is to deprive everyone of economic opportunity, since the whole point is that left-wing policies are supposed to be meant to benefit the masses of non socially/economically elite people, and it's pretty doubtful the actual policies of the communists actually did).

The point is, it's the relationship to established power that defines where a particular set of actions fall on a scale of left to right. People are only on the Right or Left in the sense that some people are economically and socially more elite than others (the Right). It doesn't matter what they believe. A member of the Right can embrace Left-Wing economic policies, but that doesn't necessarily make them a Left-Winger in every other respect.

It's not about political or ideological identity, it's about the roles people play in political power relationships in different situations. There's never been any unified and coherent Right-Wing or Left-Wing political philosophy. That's the mistake.

See Stirring Times in Austria by Mark Twain for an example of the terms being used correctly:
These were all lawful weapons, and the men of the Opposition (technically called the Left) were within their rights in using them. They used them to such dire purpose that all parliamentary business was paralysed. The Right (the Government side) could accomplish nothing.
posted by saulgoodman at 9:52 AM on May 21, 2013




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