TARBKK

[TARBKK @Todd2049]

@brivael Brilliant 👏 👏.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

L’autre jour j’ai fait un thread sur Sartre et Mai 68.

Aujourd’hui je vais vous parler du penseur le plus important de la French Theory.

Pas le plus mondain. Le plus important. Celui dont le logiciel tourne encore dans les universités, les DRH, les rédactions, les ministères.

Michel Foucault.

1926. Poitiers. Fils et petit-fils de chirurgien. Bourgeoisie médicale. Le père veut un médecin. Le fils refuse.

ENS, rue d’Ulm. 1948 : une tentative de suicide. Sainte-Anne. Il étudie la folie de l’intérieur avant de l’écrire.

Bref passage au PCF. Il en sort. Puis l’exil : Uppsala, Varsovie, Hambourg. Loin de Paris. Loin du père.

1961. Histoire de la folie. La thèse tient en une phrase : la raison n’a pas découvert la folie. Elle l’a inventée pour s’en séparer. L’asile n’est pas un hôpital. C’est une frontière.

1966. Les Mots et les Choses. Best-seller improbable. Dernière phrase : l’homme s’effacera « comme à la limite de la mer un visage de sable ».

Mai 68, il n’est pas à Paris. Il est à Tunis. Il le dira plus tard : sans Mai 68, je n’aurais jamais fait ce que j’ai fait sur la prison, la délinquance, la sexualité.

1969. Vincennes. Il dirige la philosophie. L’anti-Sorbonne. On n’y cherche plus ce qui est vrai. On y cherche qui domine.

1970. Collège de France. Chaire : Histoire des systèmes de pensée. Le plus prestigieux poste de France. Il a 43 ans.

1975. Surveiller et punir. Le panoptique. L’école, l’usine, l’hôpital, la prison : même architecture. Même regard.

1976. La Volonté de savoir. La sexualité n’est pas réprimée. Elle est produite. Confessée. Gérée.

1977. Il signe. Le droit des enfants et des adolescents « à avoir des relations avec qui ils choisissent ».

1978. Téhéran. Il voit dans Khomeini une « spiritualité politique ». Une volonté collective. Il se trompe. Il ne se rétracte pas vraiment.

1984. Il meurt du sida. 57 ans.

Maintenant le fond.

Foucault n’était pas un philosophe qui s’est trompé sur un détail.

C’était un homme qui a débranché le rapport à la vérité.

Il n’a pas dit : « 2+2 font parfois 5. »

Il a fait plus radical. Il a enseigné que la question intéressante n’est pas « est-ce vrai ? ». C’est « qui a le pouvoir de dire que c’est vrai ? »

La vérité, dans son système, n’est pas une cible. C’est un costume. Un effet. Un produit des institutions qui parlent au nom du savoir.

Une fois que tu acceptes ça, tout bascule.

La science n’est plus une enquête. C’est une police du réel.
Le médecin n’est plus un soignant. C’est un agent de normalisation.
Le professeur n’est plus un transmetteur. C’est un surveillant.
La justice n’est plus un jugement. C’est une mise en scène.
Une femme n’est plus une femme. C’est une assignation.

Judith Butler lit ça et invente le genre performatif.
Edward Said lit ça et invente l’orientalisme académique.
Une génération entière apprend que « mon vécu » pèse plus que la preuve.

Et c’est là que ça devient vertigineux.

Foucault écrivait pour des séminaires. Pour Gallimard. Pour une salle du Collège de France.

Il n’aurait pas pu imaginer la suite.

Il n’a pas imaginé la DRH d’une multinationale qui traite un fait comme une violence.
Il n’a pas imaginé l’élève à qui l’on enseigne que la science occidentale est une domination.
Il n’a pas imaginé qu’on ne puisse plus dire, dans une université, qu’un homme ne peut pas accoucher.
Il n’a pas imaginé le mot « wokisme ».
Il n’a pas imaginé qu’un article de revue, lu par trois cents personnes en 1976, deviendrait le système d’exploitation d’un continent.

Un homme de Poitiers, brillant, tourmenté, qui voulait desserrer l’étau des institutions, a fourni le mode d’emploi pour les capturer toutes.

C’est ça, l’ironie. Il croyait dénoncer le pouvoir. Il a donné au pouvoir son nouvel habit : se faire passer pour la victime, et traiter toute vérité contraire comme une agression.

Il n’a pas cassé les fenêtres. Il a changé le compilateur.

Désormais chaque fait est d’abord un rapport de force. Le programme tourne. On ne discute plus le réel. On négocie le récit.

Voilà comment on a obtenu le monde que l’on a.

Une école qui soupçonne au lieu de transmettre.
Une médecine qui hésite à nommer un corps.
Une presse qui confond le vrai et le camp.
Une génération qui voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part.

Ce n’est pas une dérive. C’est la thèse, poussée jusqu’au bout.

Si la vérité n’existe pas, il ne reste que le rapport de force. Et le rapport de force, une fois habillé en vertu, n’a plus de limite.

Les gens qui ont hérité de ça ne sont pas des monstres. Ils ont reçu un logiciel. Les mauvaises idées tuent d’abord ceux qui y croient.

La reconversion est possible.

Mais une civilisation qui ne sait plus distinguer un fait d’un rapport de pouvoir ne peut ni soigner, ni enseigner, ni construire.

Le réel n’est pas une oppression.
C’est le seul terrain où les bâtisseurs peuvent travailler.

Pardon.
Et au travail.

[TARBKK @Todd2049]

@GabrieleGuzzi Perfect summary!

[TARBKK @Todd2049]

@Dendrobium0700 @BenjaminNorton Are they all Gordon Chang's "China collapse cult" disciples?

[TARBKK @Todd2049]

@aporia_apoha @joequant @Brad_sester @Brad_Setser 💯 agree

[TARBKK @Todd2049]

@qin210dynasty @joequant @Brad_sester @Brad_Setser 💯 agree

[Angelo Giuliano 🇨🇭🇮🇹 @angeloinchina]

Stop worshipping this fraud > fake professor Jiang
Makes alternative media look stupid.

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

The Wall Street Journal and US government officials want to set the same economic trap for China that they set for Japan.

The US was very concerned about Japan's industrial might and technological progress in the late 1970s and '80s. Ezra Vogel's book "Japan as Number One" was a best-seller at the time.

So Washington used the 1985 Plaza Accord to significantly overvalue the Japanese yen, drastically hurting the competitiveness of Japanese exports and fueling a huge asset-price bubble in Japan that popped in 1992 and led to a "lost decade" (or two) of stagnation. Japan was never again a challenge to US economic and technological hegemony.

Fortunately, Chinese officials have extensively studied this period, and they will not allow the US to repeat it with them. Especially because they know very well that US intentions are nefarious.

[Nel B. @noirnen]

Structure as Crystallization

This is an excellent historical synthesis by Jeff Rich, and I am honored to see my work on NATO 3.0 and the Bunker State woven into this timeline. Jeff rightly warns against reducing the messy, violent reality of empire into “mechanical schemas” or abstract models.

However, I would argue and add a caveat about the usefulness of structural analysis like World-Systems Theory. Contrary to what it may seem, it is not the enemy of historical contingency. Trying to understand and observe structure is about identifying a crystallized contingency. Over the longue durée, the messy accidents of history harden into logistical, financial, and institutional cages (at least for this long historical period). Therefore, we do need historical narrative to understand how the “individual” cage was built, but we equally need structural frameworks to understand how the locks currently operate and developed the way they did.

In other words, the fall of the Spanish Empire, the Dutch Empire, the British Empire, and now the potential decline of the US Empire- these are all different individual stories (so to speak). Each one is contingent, particular, full of accidents and specific personalities. But they all produced the same outcome: the persistence of a transnational ruling class, the inheritance of financial and legal infrastructure, the continuation of core-periphery extraction (among other things, like the underlying meta-ideology, a dichotomous one that is). That persistence is the structure. And it is a process of historical accumulation. It is contingency over the long term.

(In fact, I’m the last person to argue against contingency; contingency actually shapes the outcomes of different social phenomena and how they need to be understood and acted upon, e.g., the phenomenon of inequality, of migration, etc., in a particular historical and geographical context. At the same time, this doesn’t erase structures that have built up over a long time, which can be changed and transformed, too.)

A brilliant read that sets the stage perfectly for our ongoing conversations! Link below and to our recent youtube conversation:

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

Neoconservative propagandist Gordon G. Chang has been wrong about China for his entire career, but he always fails up and is published in the corporate media because he's a loyal imperialist.

Chang is now calling for the US to prevent Cuba from importing food and solar panels -- in addition to cutting off its oil supply, as Washington has already been doing.

This is sociopathic sadism. US imperialists are trying to kill as many Cubans as possible, to cause societal collapse, so they can recolonize the country and make it into a new Epstein island.

[Nel B. @noirnen]

Relational Power and the Death of Decisive Victory

I had a wide-ranging conversation with Jeff Rich on the Burning Archives, and it is now available. We covered a lot of ground: NATO 3.0, the Bunker State, empire, class analysis, and the question of what it would take to break the imperial cage we live in.

What I think is the thread that runs through the entire conversation is that power is a relational category.

We are accustomed to measuring power the way we measure a country's GDP or the size of its military. We count missiles, barrels of oil, trade surpluses. And of course these things matter. They are real, and they can tip the scale here and there. But they are not the whole story. If they were, the United States would have been invincible in Vietnam, and Iran—far weaker in every material measure—would have collapsed long ago. Neither happened. Indeed, US strategists and planners have understood that there is no decisive victory, and instead an attempt at shallow hegemony.

In other words, what matters and might be decisive here is whether its ruling classes and popular forces have consolidated those assets into a coherent, autonomous political project. Do they have a shared horizon? Do they have institutions that can convert material capacity into actual power? Or are they fragmented, hedged, and hoping for reintegration into the very system they claim to oppose? (Or are they already fully integrated and rather don’t want to lose that access?)

This is why I keep insisting that a shifting balance of power is not the same as dismantling the imperial cage. The cage is not made of things. It is made of relations: financial relations, technological relations, security relations, ideological relations. The dollar system, the London insurance market, the credit rating agencies, the integrated command structures are relationships an empire maintains. (Actually, those are historically formed structures from empire to empire.) And a relationship cannot be broken by building a better missile or a cheaper solar panel. It can only be broken by building a different relationship. A different relational system.

This is also why the absence of class analysis in so much geopolitical commentary is notable. If power is relational, then the most important relations are between those who own, those who work, those who extract, and those who are extracted from. To speak only of "great powers" is then to erase the very terrain on which power is exercised.

The conversation with Jeff was a genuine dialogue, and I hope it contributes something useful. As always, I am grateful for the opportunity to think out loud.

You can listen to the full interview at the link below. And thank you, as always, for reading and for thinking alongside me:

https://t.co/QFzjzuC6nJ

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

He is actually a pure creature of U.S. media. He is a Canadian citizen who is a Yale English Literature graduate. He broadcasts exclusively in English, on YouTube. And he is pretty much exclusively interviewed by U.S. media, who made him famous.

He is a crackpot but if you want to understand why people are listening to him, look inward - he is your creation.

[VD Andre @ABerliano69578]

@mhar4 It is important to remember that Australia officially recognizes Taiwan as a province of China.

[TARBKK @Todd2049]

@commiepommie He strongly supports AUKUS. All you need to know.

[tim anderson @timand2037]

Green ambition. Annalena Baerbock, the former German Foreign Minister and leader of Germany's Green Party who was recently paraded as the country's "star diplomat," might not be the sharpest blade in the drawer, but her trajectory is a textbook example of a highly privileged career advanced without any discernible ability.

As her brief tenure as President of the UN General Assembly comes to an end, it is glaringly obvious that she did not earn this prestigious role through diplomatic merit. Instead, she secured it through backroom manoeuvring and allegedly bullying a highly respected, actually qualified German career diplomat, Helga Schmid, out of the running.

Recently, Baerbock demonstrated a striking lack of self-awareness and diplomatic nous by attempting to interfere in the election of the UN Secretary-General—a tier of global diplomacy well above her head. Hypocritically demanding "transparency" in a process she herself hijacked through undemocratic, opaque dealings, she even had the German government embarrassingly flex its financial status as the UN's "biggest contributor" to justify her meddling.

The result of her ineptitude was almost impressive: she managed to unite the United States and Russia in a rare moment of total agreement over their shared aversion to her. Both global powers publicly mocked her as "overreaching" and "hypocritical," essentially telling the "Instagram diplomat" to stay in her lane. Now, as rumours swirl that she is in line for a plush professorship at Columbia University, her time at the UN stands as a perfect testament to a glossy, privileged career that has flourished entirely without any hint of genuine competence.
Source: https://t.co/kHI6bRmDnK

[TARBKK @Todd2049]

@OopsGuess 😆 🤣 "colonial parrot and lackey"

[TARBKK @Todd2049]

@BarrettYouTube It's not 1899 anymore. The US can no longer dictate to China. The current joke is that only the Americans fail to understand their irrelevance.

[TARBKK @Todd2049]

@AngelicaOung You are right. Go 🇨🇳.

[TARBKK @Todd2049]

@DavidLe76335983