01-01-2025
There is a past dialogue between Bernie and Alexandria that I just found on YouTube!
She asserts that one of the reasons why she calls herself a democratic socialist lies in this warning: for America, the choice is between socialism and barbarism. Bernie asks her who said this and does not have to wait long for an answer. It is Rosa Luxemburg. Yes it is, he confirms. Good to know! Somewhere in this diary, I attributed it to Cornelius Castoriadis because this French political thinker, from whom I learned so much, started a militant group under this name in the late 1940’s! None other than Rosa Luxemburg then, is the source of such a simple phrase which, again today, could be seen as a warning or an injunction. Not an alternative. She paid with her life the principled defense of her values. An other one who paid with her life was Simone Weil, fo sure. She was not killed by any mob but she chose her death when she vowed to live poor and to die poor in a society which ignored its poor. A self-immolation by a young woman who, from very young, was troubled by the status disparity between her well-to-do parents and their house maid.
For the sake of truth, I must add that, if Simone Weil’s parent were well-to-do, they were not indifferent. In many instances they showed a great sense of integrity and generosity. To me though, what should give them a special place in history is the way they were remarkably attentive to and supportive of their two children, André and Simone. Both became masters of their trade. Simone as a major philosopher. André as a foundational, world-famous mathematician.
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I heard it while in Marseille this morning, from a 21 year old climate militant, at the Rencontres d’Avéroes. I heard it from AOC yesterday and from so many others sources. Once you have made your own, when you have internalized the reality that climate change affects the poor, the very poor first and foremost and fear that future climate-related policies risk perpetuating socio-economic discrimination, you have objectively intersected climate change with equity and therefore access … to healthcare, to food justice, education, habitat… You have acknowledged that all the issues which plague the world populations are everyone’s issues. The more universally understood this intersectional evidence, the closer the 1% will feel the burn. That is why they – the 1%, the 10%, maga or not, are so ferociously anti-climate, against all evidence. To the point of accepting to impose a censorship on books which cover climate change and all other ‘woke’ topics. Living proof, in turn, that the extreme right also does grasp the reality of intersectionality. Marxist, communist or woke, they know better and the act.
AGAINST EVIDENCE, REPRESSION.
We, at TINYisPOWERFUL, must make sure that there is no blind spot in our mission. Climate issues also influence our daily language.
01-09-2025
This morning, Jimmy Carter’s memory was celebrated in Washington, the capital city, in the presence of all the living former presidents who placed their right hand over their heart when the national anthem played and Jimmy Carter’s coffin went by their pews, as one does in America. Right next to Barack Obama, there was Donald Trump. I observed that the latter did not place his right hand over his heart when the national anthem played and Jimmy Carter’s coffin went by their pew. I think this indifference vis-a-vis decorum is revealing of the place he gives himself among other former presidents: above them. They are not part of his America. It also speaks to the point I want to make with the following two quotes from Jimmy Carter’s ‘Malaise Speech’, July 15, 1979:
…. < In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.> ….
…. < We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure …. >.
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Below, a short note on Jimmy Carter’s demise, for the upcoming TINYisPOWERFUL NewsLetter.
Today was the Jimmy Carter State Funeral at Washington National Cathedral.
A man close to the American people and often overlooked for it.
Here are two quotes from his Malaise Speech, on July 15 1979.
We let you, friends of TINYisPOWERFUL, contextualize and appreciate.
…. < In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.> ….
…. < We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.> ….
01-13-2025
The birth of a new meritocracy. That of influencers! They build up their CV, enhance their profile, not with academic diplomas, but with the number of followers they can count and count on, in the digital world. To count the extent of your regulars is one thing. To count ON them is totally different. It is a crapshoot where excess overcomes reason.
Reason, you said, sir? Wrong place, wrong time! Next …
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The reading of a literary article on Paul Lynch’s latest book – Prophet Song – inspired me to write a few sentences about the Tale. I don’t really have time to expand right now – I am getting ready to depart for Paris – but I took some notes on my sketchbook. I will try to transfer them here before I forget their origination!
(put in italics everything from the book)
01-14-2025
– Look at the monster fight the global right is engaged in to conquer the private space(s) which define our individual liberty(ies). With the GAFAM, the global right is taking over the administration of our individual time(s) and consequently, that of our collective time(s).
– consider what Trotsky writes about Simone Weil and the defense of her ‘personality’.
How he sees this as a bourgeois endeavor.
– Then consider how Simone Weil reacts, with phrases like “to perish with a clear vision of the world we shall be leaving behind”, “to work towards a clear comprehension of the object of our efforts, so that, if we cannot accomplish it, we may at least have willed it.” Doesn’t she, hereby – as Petrément asks in her biography of Simone Weil: “…show that she regarded the duty to oneself as one of her first duties, perhaps the very first…?”
– See how Alain, her mentor in philosophy, reminds us that “… in doing one’s duty to oneself, one [cannot] fail to do it to others … ” (Petrément). Simone is, indeed, a living proof of this. Her life is a demonstration of the economy of socialization. Such an indictment against GAFAM and others.
Of course, here is the crux of the matter: is the relationship between individuals and collectives inevitable, voluntary, or just a matter of self-interest?
This question is infected. It signals that one on the basics of being human has been eroded. Because being human is being in with other humans, want it or not. Hopefully in solidarity.
Surely, this is also true in the political realm. See Chantal Mouffe’s book ‘On the Political’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Political where she dwells on the meaning of ‘the political’. Where she shows that the antagonist is not an enemy but an adversary, with whom one dialogues and compromises in the democratic space.
All other modes of political exchange, based not on dialogue but on cohersive arguing, risk dehumanizing one of the parties. Actually, at the end, they dehumanize both parties.
The bully and the victim fall into a logic of unchecked psychological and/or physical violence, possibly war, the highest degree of unreasonable inhumanity.
01-21-2025
Of course, the day after the vengeful return of Trump to power, this is the hot topic.
Trump is the adversary of no one but the enemy of whoever antagonizes him, has antagonized or will antagonize him! He says it very clearly. He will be the best protector of women, as long as they do not cross him, one way or an other! This is actually the way a dictator lies to the face of the people, like a bad parent who loves her/his children … conditionally.
If I compare this with the humanity of Simone Weil, I can only thank her for having supported me with her vivid presence ( in Simone Pétrement’s biography), through the transition from the senility of Biden to the insanity of Trump!
This young woman kept me up until three o’clock one morning. I was reading about the time when she decided to leave teaching for a supposed sabbatical which, in fact, was her time to fulfill an urge to be a factory worker. Why? Because, in the development of her research on labor and liberty, she needed to explore the former to better appreciate the latter – the strain of daily labor and the ensuing loss of time, of liberty to ‘be human’.
To me, this is yet an other argument in the ‘Process-Product’ conversation with Rayn, which has been rekindled since some writing of mine will be in TINYisPOWERFUL’s NewsLetter this week.
I have such a hard time with this ‘writing of mine’ bit! I consider it to belong to the collective first. After all, it is surely the result of TINYisPOWERFUL’s circumstances.
1-22-2025
Quotes from some article I just read about Erdmute Scheufele, a Green candidate in the upcoming German elections. No wonder she is having a hard time! Her political foes, mostly on the extreme right, call her the following:
– a ‘child killer’, because of her stand in defense of vaccination
– a ‘war monger’ because she supports Ukraine
– a ‘grave digger of industry’, because clean energy costs more than coal
– a ‘ghost driver of immigration policies’, for refusing to lock down borders
Such manipulative rhetoric destabilizes the opponent who can only gasp for time and fresh air to recover from so much toxic gaslighting. Now habitual, although still unacceptable, it promotes only antagonism and insult instead of agonism and dialogue. In this kind of political speech, I insist, antagonism may seem to propose alternatives when, shaping issues into binaries which are but polarizing simplifications, makes enemies of potential partners, sparks social fear of the ‘other’ and ultimately promotes violence where the unscrupulous bully comes out on top. It is a tool for speech suppression.
01-24-2025
Last night, still immersed in the fascinating reading of Simone Pétrement’s biography of Simone Weil, I reached the part where Weil decides to take a year off teaching, officially a sabbatical. In fact she has decided it is time to act on a wish she has had for a while: to experience what factory work really does to the blue collar worker. !n solidarity, I would add.
One of her early discoveries concerns the time it takes her, and the conditions necessary for her to get into a thinking mode again, after hours, days, for some a lifetime, of constant pressure, imposed by machines on factory workers, for the sake of productivity.
“Simone Weil, in 1934, at the age of 25, decided to spend one year as a factory worker, to make sure of her acuity in the essay she was writing then: REFLEXIONS ON THE CAUSES OF FREEDOM AND SOCIAL OPPRESSION.
One of her observations is that the higher the pressure of time and the simpler the task at hand, the less intelligence is required for an answer. This, in turn, affects negatively the whole humanity of the working person.”
Capitalism or any condition where workers are haunted by productivity and offered but ‘shit jobs’, is an aggression, a wound against their humanity. This is the gravest danger of AI which is not debated enough: the dissociation of humans from the functions of intelligence.
I have not even found a copy of, much less started reading the essay noted above!
‘Reflexions on the causes of freedom and social oppression’. I was told it was out of print and being reprinted! What caught my attention and blew me away, just from reading the tittle, was that she was seeking the causes of freedom. Not the conditions of, not even the need or the reasons for freedom. Before taking off on premature assumptions, I believe that this young woman, Simone Weil at age 24, is the clearest critic of marxism, and of Marx himself, that I know. She slashes at him as she did at Trotsky earlier, with unusually pointed criticisms (which caught his -Trotsky’s own – attention and on which he commented, if I remember). It is a fact, in her search for the causes of freedom, Simone Weil encounters more than materialities, conditions, contexts. She encountered immaterial realities. Marx may have also. But he chose to ignore them and she did not.
From my end, I think Complexity – the basic complexity of things or of non-linear thinking – is an immaterial reality, to start with. I also think that, among other, art/the spirit of the arts is one active element of such complexity, which invites infinite arrays of connexions, intersections, between virtual and non virtual subjects and objects: the imaginaries!
I may not even possess the vocabulary needed to approach this realm but, for a long time – for sure since the day I began exploring the idea of the Irrational as a universal anti-conformity, function of intelligence – I have also tried to articulate that the human ability to think freely, to project, is a corollary of complexity, which evolves and expands as history develops! Do these ‘tools for a free mind’ relate to Simone Weil’s quest for the causes of freedom ? Possibly.
I admit, though, that all these mental contortions mostly grow from my refusal to believe in any omnipotent divinity which would mark out our human potentials. As for social oppression, which Simone Weil opposes to freedom, that is all it is. An opposition to freedom by whoever believes they can mark out human potentials with the approval of some omnipotent divinity.