Interview

So the question as far as I'm concerned is that lots of people have now in a sense rejected that older type of social organisation, the social contract that you were talking about based on debt and consumption. And the reason I think a widespread demand for different ways of relating to others, relating to the community and dealing with power. So I'm optimistic about that. It seems to me you’d expect that whether or not the left in other parts of the world win elections, I think we've moved perhaps away from the model of the 1990s and the 2000s and a greater sense of community, of going back to certain common values and virtues and idea of the good, the public good, of the Commons, has returned. This is extremely hopeful. 

The question of organising reproduction in a cooperative way is especially important, because we cannot industrialise reproductive work, not at least the most laborious aspects of it, those related to childcare.  This is my critiques of Marx and the Left when they dream of a society where the machines will do all the work. Machines cannot do child-care. Thus, there is a huge amount of work that cannot be technologised. The only way to organise it, then, is to make it more cooperative. The individualized, isolated way in which much reproductive work is organised is killing us. So the idea of care-communities has many dimensions. There is the dimension of survival, but there is also the prefiguration of a new society. There is also a dimension of resistance and there is the reconstruction of the social fabric. 

‘Why did they mobilise?’- a panel discussion on Social Struggles in Ex-Yugoslavia, a new book that explores the diverse forms of activist citizenship that have swept the region over the last few years. The discussion took place between contributors Boris Kanzleiter, the head of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Belgrade office, Andrea Milat, an activist and journalist from Croatia, Primož Krašovec, a Slovenian activist and theorist and its editor Michael G. Kraft. The discussion was chaired by Stipe Ćurković, the editor of the Croatian edition of Le Monde diplomatique, at the Subversive Forum in Zagreb in May 2013.

I think the European Union promised a great deal and delivered very little.  Voting rights seem to have become totally irrelevant because whoever you elected, it didn’t matter which party, they were carrying out the same elite policies. Greece has made a difference and this will inspire people.  But in order for that to happen you do need to have political instruments and political parties.  It can’t just happen by occupying public spaces.  You know, you need politics for that. And so what we are witnessing in Greece is, in a way, the reassertion of the political and I think that will be extremely important in saying ‘yes, we are citizens; we don’t just have, you know, basic rights.  We have political rights and we want to exercise these political rights and link them to social and economic rights.'

Peter Vermeersch talks with Weschler about his new collection, Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative (Counterpoint Press 2011). In this book Weschler writes about digital animation, human rights, paintings, writer’s block, stories and their political importance, and, above all, faces.