This post is about socialism in one country. In a lengthy analysis of the 2010 Winter Olympic games in the neoliberalist haven of Western Canada, Carles attacks the myth of the so-called end of history on two fronts, analyzing both the shortcomings of neoliberalism since it achieved global hegemony in the aftermath of the dissolution of the socialist bloc and the limitations of bourgeois historiography that focuses on the achievements of individuals without accounting for the social milieu that permitted their actions and enabled them to be recognized as notable. Naturally, Carles synthesizes the critique into a ringing indictment of late capitalism as corrosive to the very possibility of freedom, detailing the ways in which even incontestable athletic achievement can be distorted in the lens of market-driven competition and individualistic ideology.
Walking the fine line of pregnant incoherency, Carles notes "how ‘important’ / ‘relevant’ / ‘irrelevant’ the Olympics are" since they have become "a month long branding experiment." But of course any branding experiment is inherently an exercise in contradiction -- a brand is at once a approximation of uniqueness and unequivocal sigh of conformity to the consumerist code that reduces all social appearances to the commercialized language of replicable and salable objects. Thus
athletic achievement -- a proxy for being-for-itself -- is translated into the dead form of capital and is made to appear as a kind of inferior being-in-itself, an instrumentalized activity that finds its telos not in its own nature, in the praxis itself, but in the way the results can be leveraged in a consumerist system of circulated and circulatable meanings attached to commodities. The underlying lesson is that a socialist vanguard may not emerge from a process of natural selection and gradual enlightenment, as any accomplishment is rigorously appropriated for oligarchic ends and various actors are co-opted into a system that serves them at the expense of the struggle. This then indoctrinates the rapt mass audience into a lachrymose passivity that mimes subjectivity but is denuded of authentic significance or substance: Instead of seizing upon the contradictions of the post-industrial age to foment revolution and secure autonomy and prosperity for a greater share of the world's people, "In the modern world, humans like to talk abt the TV that they are watching while they are chillin on their laptops [via twitter]." The Olympics is thereby revealed in its true nature, as a forum for uniting the world in spectatorship, watching the meaningless achievement of others while capital continues to centralize and accumulate in the hands of the lucky or egregious rapacious few.
Carles then taxonomizes the various forms of mystification exercised through the various broadcasting tropes used to disseminate the athletes as readily consumable "stories," noting the various ways injustice, prejudice and bigotry are reproduced as readily digestible memes. Adopting the persona that the coverage of the Olympics attempts to fashion us into , Carles says of ice dancing athletes Charlie White and Meryl Davis: "From what I understand, it will always be ‘funny’ to make fun of ‘flamers prancing around on ice.’" Of Shani Davis, Carles express the expectation that he be "a flamboyant African American diva bro ‘pissing off’ all of the other irrelevant countries." Of curling athlete Cheryl Bernard, he writes, "This female broad has been branded as the ‘cougar’ of the sport, since she is mad hot + looks like she is down 2 fuck after baking you and your bros some rice krispie treats." And on it goes, with Carles exorcising all the stereotypes reinscribed by the Olympic coverage.
But Carles warns that we should not be distracted by the callous and relentless parade of capitalist triumphalism and the collateral damage it causes to human rights and diversity. Instead, he wonders about ideological blowback: The key question, of course, is how to subvert the Olympic games and make it paradoxically live up to its own ideological alibi, names that it unite the people of the world in struggle and accomplishment and the highest expression of human species being. How does a commercial festival that parasitically sucks the life out of human action become the seedling for a great strong oak of renewed socialism in our time? As Mouffe and Laclau have noted, we must prepare to move "beyond the positivity of the social" and explore new articulations of the social that defy the class positions that were popularly extinguished with the end of the great ideological struggle between East and West. Carles dismisses as apologetic fatalism the notion that the struggle is over with this taunting challenge: "Do the Olympics not matter any more bc the Cold War is over?"
Yes, it is most definitively so that we can no longer look to the Olympics as a forum for the sublimated expression of the struggle between socialism and capitalism -- Carles points out that China's effort to maintain this structure ("China loves a winner even more than America loves a winner, since they utilize Olympic triumphs as propaganda 2 brainwash their citizens who are trapped in their communist society") is ultimately unconvincing because the class formations are no longer persuasive: Chinese athletes "look too much like ‘working class’ AZNs" and can't posit the triumph of the working class as its abolition.
Instead it is imperative for nascent Left movements to look for fissures within the hegemony, for counter discourses within the overdetermined structure of the competition. As Mouffe and Laclau warn, "The task of the Left ... cannot be to renounce liberal-democratic ideology, but on the contrary, to deepen and expand it in the direction ofd a radical and plural democracy." So in the context of the Olympics, as Carles notes, this is a matter not of critiqueing and denouncing the rampant branding of the athletes, but perhaps insisting that everyone be branded more thoroughly, that the rewards are more broadly dispersed among partcipating athletes: "Feel more confused than ever about the Olympics. It is like this celebration of cultures from all over the world, but also some sort of competition where we try to figure out whose brand will be the most valuable to a Fortune 500 / niche company." The solution is the fuse the competition he mentions with the celebration, to overturn the incipient and insistent individualism by perfecting it, by holding a competition where everyone wins merely by virtue of belonging to a culture, by espousing an ultimate irreducible otherness. If at first this otherness if reified and commercialized, that is to the detriment not of otherness but of reification. Carles radically proposes that the content can shatter the form of capitalist hegemony.
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