Happy New Cataclysm! posted by lenin

"Listen, Cordelia. If a god had made the world, might would always be right, that would be so wise, we'd be spared so much suffering. But we made the world - out of our smallness and weakness. Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad." - Edward Bond, Lear.

Of course, Bond rewrote Shakespeare's play, itself concerned with the violence of enclosure and the accompanying riots, for an age in which species-death forms the horizon of human possibilities. The age of racially organised extinction has given way to the age of wholesale planetary obliteration. Apocalypse is the norm. The best news of last year, apparently, was that after an estimated 1.2 million deaths in Iraq, and a massive spike in aerial attacks, the rate of resistance attacks on US troops fell in the last four months of the year. This was, by the corrupted logic and morality of the 'war on terror', a feel-good story.

About Afghanistan we are told little. No surveys keep track of war-related deaths there, and it is almost impossible to do so. The rate of air assaults there was even greater, but journalists don't run around among the mud huts if they want to live, and the military only has to listen to the feedback when a local notable turns out to be not entirely in the occupiers' pockets. Somalia has been devastated, turned into a humanitarian crisis to rival Darfur by a US proxy war. Gaza was attacked again and again over Christmas, and the population there continues to starve, for the sake of what Professor Dugard, the UN's special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, rightly labels as racial supremacism. War with Iran drew close, and was then blown out of the water for the time being by the NIE - although insane calculations like this continue to be made. I can't tell if it's better or worse than the previous year's cost-benefit analysis: "Half of Lebanon is destroyed; is that a loss?" In Britain, the government re-committed itself to the possession of a nuclear arsenal, on the terms elaborated by the Bush administration - new mobile fleets of nukes and mini-nukes, capable of destroying population centres almost anywhere in the world, expanding their potential range to cover the whole planet.



The evolution of violence is telescopic: each step in its refinement and escalation takes less and less time. Structured by grievous social injustice, animated by irrationalist ideologies (Manifest Destiny, Clash of Civilizations, War on Terror etc), wielded by power structures that are impervious to the humanitarian lectures they themselves willingly dispense and insanely content with the colossal human cost of their policies, global violence reaches and breaches new threshholds in the space of months, not years. The potential for new peaks of depravity is almost as limitless as the capacity for allowing each new ongoing atrocity to slip tactfully into the background. Soon it becomes normal. 100,000 deaths is shocking until it becomes 650,000, which is in turn stunning until that again almost doubles. So, allow me to remind you of the exponential function: if the rate of death in Iraq doubles each year, as it has been doing consistently, then about 1.3m will have died between June 2007 and June 2008. Then a further 2.6m the next year, and so on. If the occupation were to end in the middle of 2010, which is extremely unlikely, total deaths on current trends would reach ten million. And if it did come to that, it would soon be forgotten about.

So, there's all that and the looming recession, which is certain to usher in further 'pay restraint'. Have a good one.

Labels: apocalypse, edward bond, enclosure, lear

The next Washington Consensus posted by lenin

Pakistan is axiomatically central to Washington's expansionist 'war on terror'. Musharraf, the military despot in charge of Islamabad's portion of that expansion, has disappointed his handlers. While his security services were good enough to instruct the bulk of Taliban fighters to withdraw from Afghanistan, thus giving Washington an easy early victory, he has not since been able to crackdown sufficiently on the various Islamist groups that support the insurgency in Afghanistan. Further, his policies - both his support for the 'war on terror' and those that have increased the immiseration of the people of Pakistan - seem to have galvanised precisely the sort of unrest that Washington doesn't need. The old hands spotted an opportunity. Nawaz Sharif, the crooked Prime Minister overthrown by Musharraf, attempted a glorious return and was ingloriously deported (although he now looks to be re-staging his glorious return). Benazir Bhutto, chairwoman of the Pakistan People's Party, daughter of the murdered former President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, daughter of the West and flawed and feudal princess had more luck. She had worked out a deal in advance to save Musharraf's regime and allow her re-admittance to Pakistani politics after a long self-imposed exile. Some of her frozen funds were released and Musharraf issued a pardon on 5th October last year, removing the possibility of Bhutto being prosecuted on outstanding corruption charges. In return, her Pakistan People's Party agreed not to boycott the parliamentary election for president, which Musharraf went on to win. On 18th October, therefore, Benazir Bhutto returned in triumph. Though publicly critical of Musharraf's party, the PMLQ, she continued to negotiate with them behind the scenes for a power-sharing arrangement. Favoured by Washington because of her vocal support for the 'war on terror' and her right-wing policies, she enjoyed considerable leverage, but was an immediate target of right-wing Islamist groups opposed to Washington's policies - and probably elements of the Pakistani secret police. Today, Bhutto's supporters largely attribute her murder to the Pakistani government, and insist that she was shot in the neck and chest before the suicide attacker struck.

All US presidential candidates are making much hay in this heat. Hillary Clinton refers to Musharraf's failure to tackle 'Al Qaeda', while Mitt Romney wonders if the general is capable of keeping a lid on the unrest in his country. Rudi Giuliani, the favoured horse of the neocons, demands more military funding, while Mike Huckabee simply reminds voters that American democracy may be flawed, but it stands as a shining beacon to the rest of the world etc.

So, what's new? Well, they're moving up and moving on, taking it to the next level: it's time for Special Forces to drop in and say hello. Moving troops to Pakistan and Afghanistan is a strategy particularly favoured by the Democrats. Such a move would be extremely risky - unlike, say, bombing Pakistani targets from afar and killing dozens of civilians - and would contain an inherent "quagmire" dynamic, catalysing the famous law of entropy. But, then, perhaps the alternative of waiting for this spoilt brat to finish his studies at Oxford and take over the dynasty is not too appealling either.

The current US relationship to Pakistan is, obviously, the culmination of some murky history. The Pakistani state was, after all, practically an auxiliary to the US government since 1951 until the election of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party in the 1970 elections, following the wave of revolt against the Ayub regime. When Bhutto pursued a classical nationalist set of policies, opting for non-alignment, nationalising many industries and - most importantly - developing his own nuclear capacity, the US helped destroy his government. Henry Kissinger had warned Bhutto that "we can destabilise your government and make a horrible example out of you" - a typical Kissingerian threat, and one that was carried to fruition. General Zia ul-Haq's coup, one effected in alliance with right-wing religious groups such as the Jamaat e-Islaami in 1978, saw a decade of the most brutal rule, with the military increasingly dominating civilian life. Under his rule, the Pakistani secret police (ISI) nurtured the most fanatical reactionary zealots whom we now refer to as the Taliban as part of the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and as a counterweight against the appeal of socialism in Pakistan. Negotiating with Brzezinski, Zia insisted that all aid, finance, training and so on would be channelled through Pakistan, thus turning the country into a throughfare for all of the intelligence bandits, reactionary warriors and mercenaries that are now operating across Pakistan and Afghanistan. With the Soviet Union effectively defeated, Zia was killed in an airplane crash in 1988 that was probably a professional assassination. Successive Prime Ministers tried to ram home Pakistan's successful war on behalf of the US in Afghanistan, and Benazir Bhutto would oversee the successful march of the Taliban across Afghanistan - the bleatings of the avaricious, upper crust Bhutto dynasty about democracy and terrorism are so much fodder for gullible Western liberals. The Pakistan People's Party has long since become the private property of a bourgeois Anglocentric dynasty, and any leadership it produces will hop in and out of bed with the military and the mullahs depending on what the US requires.

Times change, priorities change, but interests don't. Russia has extricated itself from the West's deadly embrace and is pursuing its own local hegemonic project with some limited success (notably, the embarrassment of the US in Uzbekistan). China is a potentially enormous power whose current friendly disposition toward Washington doesn't preclude competing for a cut of the action in Iran, Sudan, Venezuela, or any number of other geopolitically sensitive points for Washington. The Central Asian energy republics, held for a long while under pro-US dictatorships, are increasingly exposed to instability, rival wooing, and potential rebellion. As Iraq goes under and the US foreign policy establishment splits over the prospect of expanding the war to Iran, controlling Afghanistan and Pakistan become increasingly important. The American empire's overreach now demands new, more flexible tactics. Do more to win over rivals, bring allies further into the fold, induce greater troop commitments with financial bribery and threats, reduce any seriously draining commitments and turn the war over to proxies (as in the 'Sunni Triangle'). And while the Taliban are no longer 'our' friends, they are no longer quite 'our' enemies. Unable to hold Afghanistan, the occupying powers are negotiating vigorously with the Taliban fighters, hoping to break of a section of them to co-govern with the warlord kleptocracy. Soon, a war that was initially sold as a war to hunt down Al Qaeda, and then became a humanitarian deliverance from the Taliban, will be an expanding regional war against something as nebulous as "extremism". And then, if local Islamist insurgents can be coopted, they will become part of a war against 'Al Qaeda'. When neither Bhutto junior or Nawaz Sharif can deliver, they'll be back to relying on General Musharraf as one of 'our' guys, moving in the right direction and so on. The empire can shift between narratives with such dexterity that no one in the press corps notices or cares when it happens. The next Washington Consensus is emerging from the flux even as you read.

Labels: 'war on terror', bhutto, pakistan, US imperialism

No One Is Illegal posted by lenin

Even the libertarian Ron Paulista, Justin Raimondo, is disturbed by Ron Paul openly pandering to the racist vote. The usual spiel about immigrants having diminished in quality is inter-mingled with a licit appeal to commonplace Islamophobia. But Paul is only behaving as he might: he is a pro-gun, anti-abortion, Christian conservative who opposes stem cell research and he's one of the few who takes the John Birch Society seriously. The only source of slight amazement is the internet buzz around the kooky little reactionary, almost entirely borne out of his opposition to the war. The trouble is, as I noted, practically every other serious presidential candidate is talking about working for the clampdown. And in Iowa, the centre of attention for the time being, the arrival of Hispanic immigrants is seen as increasing crime and - so says the reporter - diluting the "Nordic" heritage of local towns. Of course, few would put the Aryanism as bluntly as that. Among the excuses one hears for this position is that "it's not racism, we simply want people to respect the law". Why, they wonder aloud, would any country accept people who break the law? Would you accept a burglar as a guest in your house?

But the laws are unjust, and a country ain't a fucking house. Immigration controls are unjust because they constitute a limitation on the right to work; because they penalise the poorest workers in the world; because they intensify the advantage that (increasingly mobile) capital already has over the labour it exploits; because they rely on the construction of tyrannical powers for the state (the only remaining state with truly effective border controls being North Korea); and because they rely on racist discursive practises with characteristically deadly effects. Immigration controls are not always good for specific sectors of capital - sometimes they face labour shortages because of specific caps on seasonal workers - but as a rule they maintain a flow of labour while keeping it under some level of control, keeping it domesticated and timid with the threat of imminent exposure and expulsion.

Mexican workers have catalysed economic growth in the US economy since 1848, and have been the targets of Jim Crow-style segregation for as long, particularly in California. After all, the annexation of Texas was in part an attempt by the southern states to expand the the scope of slavery and thus buttress their own power. Texan secession from Mexico had followed the ethnic cleansing of the area's Indian population, and the place was governed according to the principles of white supremacy. Despite the racist hysteria against them, Mexican workers have often been sufficiently useful to capitalists in the south-west to stymy long-term pogroms against them, even while Chinese workers were being subjected to terrorist purges across the West, and Asian workers in general falling foul of stern anti-immigration laws (esp. from 1924 to 1965). Yet, even their acceptance by US agricultural interests involved scientific claims for their docility, lack of intelligence and willingness to accept hard work. And when the shit hit the fan in the Great Depression, Mexicans were to feel the forceful brunt of a nativist reaction, when Congress approved driving Mexican workers out of the country, particularly out of Texas, with more than half a million people expelled. This kind of repression didn't have to be long-term: by enshrining the right to expel labour en masse, by organising repression along racial lines, such laws enabled employers enormous leverage over the labour market and worker mobility. And when you can simply cast a huge portion of the workforce out of the human race, declare them unfit for the considerations afforded everyone else, one has less work to do with welfare and employment programmes. Historically, such laws have been used to monitor the most militant, union-focused workers, and weed them out. Similarly, after the 2006 immigrant uprising in the US, the laws were used to intimidate and round up thousands of the most precariously placed workers in the country.

The drama in Ron Paul's latest advertisement revolves around people scrambling across borders, eluding the law and the militias, possibly bringing jihad to American towns and cities. This depiction of immigration with the thrill of border chases, brown-eyed elopers, cursing smugglers, vigilant lawmen and vigilante citizens, is the usual American schtick. However, the bulk of migrants classified as "illegals" are people who arrived in the country by lawful means and happen to have overstayed or are awaiting renewed visas. Incidentally, this is also true in Fortress Europe: many of those presently serving coffees or painting interiors across London are "illegal" by virtue of having outstayed permits. Their rights are therefore precarious and, though they frequently pay taxes, their access to social protection and welfare is severely curtailed. Let us not dwell on those who, though they are perfectly legal in seeking asylum in this country, are separated from their families and locked up in prisons that politicians call 'detention centres'. The conversion of labour segregation and repression into a form of entertainment, however, serves to awaken the fantasy of invasion. Well, what of 'invasion'? In the US, about 12.5% of the population (37.5m people) is foreign born. About half of these are classified as white, and that isn't the half that is getting the heat. A third of the total were born in Mexico, and in turn half of those arrived before 1990. The bulk of those who arrived recently are there for short-term employment contracts, and that is particularly true of those classified as "illegals". Far from "taking our jobs", one of the effects of "illegals" is to increase overall employment and sustain flagging businesses that provide work and services to nonimmigrants. The econometric evidence overwhelmingly sustains this argument (and, incidentally, it is equally true of Eastern European migration to the UK). So, the free movement of labour is not only a right that workers should claim - and one that could increasingly be fulfilled well given the reducing costs of transport - it is a positive boost to the strength of the working class. The criminalisation and segregation of workers is, by contrast, in no part of our interest.

Labels: 'globalisation', capitalism, immigration, us politics

Bhutto's assassination posted by bat020

Here's Socialist Worker on Benazir Bhutto's assassination:

Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan, was murdered today in a brutal suicide bomb attack that also claimed the lives of at least 20 of her supporters.

Her death is certain to further destabilise a country that is already being torn apart by the forces unleashed by George Bush's "war on terror".

Bhutto had recently returned to Pakistan as part of a US-sponsored plan to shore up the rule of Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president and former army chief – and a key regional ally of Bush.

Bush was swift to condemn Bhutto's assassination, but many in Pakistan are already pointing the finger of blame at him.

"The military and their American masters have to take some of the blame for this," said Munib Anwar from the Pakistan Lawyers Action Committee. "They brought these terrorists into Pakistan."

Benazir Bhutto is not the first in her family to die a violent death. Her father, former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged by a previous US-supported military dictatorship. Two of her brothers also died in mysterious circumstances.

But imperialism lies at the heart of the brutality of Pakistan's politics. The country has been bathed in blood ever since it was founded by the British partition of India in 1947.

And the tragic circumstances of Benazir Bhutto's death should not detract from the fact that she had made her peace with imperialism and was a loud supporter of Bush's murderous "war on terror".

Her radical days were long behind her and many ordinary people in Pakistan rightly saw her as corrupt and reliant on the support of Western powers.

As yet no organisation has claimed responsibility for Bhutto's murder. But suspicions are bound to fall on Islamist elements of Musharraf's administration who are sympathetic to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

These elements, clustered around Pakistan's military and security services, were once allies of the US but fell out with the White House during the prolonged occupation of Afghanistan after the US invasion in 2001.

The state of emergency declared at the beginning of November was a desperate attempt to head off opposition to Musharraf's rule. It was a move that embarrassed the US government – which had hoped for a compromise deal between Musharraf and Bhutto – without managing to pacify the elements sympathetic to the Taliban within the military's own ranks.

Whatever develops now, no political solution based on compromise with US imperialism and its regional allies can offer anything other than more bloodshed and misery.

The real opposition to Musharraf's dictatorship and Bush's war does not lie in these quarters. It is the civil rights movement that rose up across the country this year that offers the best political hope for the people of Pakistan.

That movement has been organised independently of all the corrupt and discredited political parties of Pakistan.

Also worth reading: Chris Harman on the crisis in Pakistan from back in September - and pretty prescient today.

Labels: bhutto, pakistan

"The One Stable State in the Middle East Is Iran" posted by Yoshie

"Bhutto Assassinated in Attack on Rally" (Salman Masood and Graham Bowley, New York Times, 28 November 2007). Tariq Ali sums up the endgame of military despotism on which the empire has bet in Pakistan: "In the past, military rule was designed to preserve order -- and did so for a few years. No longer. Today it creates disorder and promotes lawlessness" ("A Tragedy Born of Military Despotism and Anarchy," Guardian, 28 December 2007).

Everyone ought to keep in mind that, "at the moment, the one stable state in the Middle East is Iran," as Immanuel Wallerstein correctly observes.

The basic fact that we should always keep in mind is that the present U.S. administration has a full plate -- maintaining its presence in Iraq, maintaining its presence in Afghanistan, and worrying about the very real possibility of the breakdown of order in Pakistan. Even George W. Bush can appreciate that Iran's possible development of nuclear weapons a decade from now cannot displace these other concerns as a priority.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

In the meantime, every one else around the world is thinking of what they should be doing in the Middle East after 2009, with most probably a Democratic president in office in the United States. It should seem obvious to them all that, at the moment, the one stable state in the Middle East is Iran. Iran to be sure has its internal conflicts and the Ahmadinejad faction may well lose the next elections. But Iran -- an oil power, a Shia power, a military and demographic power in the region -- is a major actor that has to be taken into account. Countries will prefer to have Iran on their side than against them. Iran is not going to go away. (Immanuel Wallerstein, "A Major Reversal? The NIE Report on Iran," MRZine, 25 December 2007)

Among all the factors mentioned above, as well as the unwillingness of Russia, China, Germany, and others to go along with the USA, whose subprime state of economy has finally become exposed, it is "the very real possibility of the breakdown of order in Pakistan" that has most effectively put the brake on Washington's Iran campaign.

The stars are finally aligned all right for a détente with Iran . . . if liberals and leftists in the North push hard for it.

Can we give a détente with America to the Iranian people before contradictions of resource populism in Iran (as well as Venezuela -- watch the governments' responses to inflation in both) become more acute, exacerbate its internal conflicts, and once again raise the eternal hope of the American power elite?

Update

The Russians keep delivering -- the Caspian Summit, nuclear fuels, and now an anti-aircraft system "far superior to . . . the US Patriot system."

Russia is to supply Iran with a new and lethal anti-aircraft system capable of shooting down American or Israeli fighter jets in the event of any strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.

Iran yesterday confirmed that Russia had agreed to deliver the S-300 air defence system, a move that is likely to irk the Bush administration and gives further proof of Russia and Iran's deepening strategic partnership.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The S-300 had a range far superior to that of the US Patriot system, experts said. It could also shoot down cruise and ballistic missiles, they added.

"It's a formidable system. It really gives a new dimension to Iran's anti-aircraft defences," said one Russian defence expert, who declined to be named.

"It's purely a defensive system. But it's very effective. It's much better than the US system. It has good radar. It can shoot down low-flying cruise missiles, though with some difficulty." (Luke Harding, "Russia Will Supply New Anti-Aircraft Missiles for Iran," Guardian, 27 December 2007)

Update 2

Oh well, now "Russia Denies Talks with Iran on S-300 Deliveries" (RIA Novosti, 28 December 2007).

Labels: iran, pakistan, russia, US imperialism

Maradona Loves Iran posted by Yoshie

A gift of love from the god of football to the people of Iran: Diego Maradona says, "Estoy con los iraníes de todo corazón, de verdad lo digo, lo digo porque lo siento y estoy con el pueblo de Irán [I'm with the Iranians, with all my heart. I mean it. I say it because I feel it. I stand with the people of Iran]," presenting Iran's charge d'affaires in Argentina Mohsen Baharvand with his token of love for Iran, a shirt that he autographed "Con todo mi cariño para el pueblo de Irán [With all my love for the people of Iran]" ("Con todo cariño," Olé, 24 December 2007).

Maradona's Message to the People of Iran

El Diez's shirt will be on display in the museum of gifts at Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, no doubt to the delight of his fans in Iran.

Eduardo Galeano said of Maradona: for many years he committed "el pecado de ser el mejor, el delito de denunciar a viva voz las cosas que el poder manda callar y el crimen de jugar con la zurda, lo cual, según el Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado, significa 'con la izquierda' y también significa 'al contrario de cómo se debe hacer' [the sin of being the best, the offense of loudly condemning the things that the powerful ordered silenced, and the crime of playing left-handed, which, according to The Little Illustrated Larousse, means being 'with the Left' and also means being 'contrary to what we are supposed to do']" (El Fútbol a sol y sombra, 1995). The man-child is still playing left-handed, after all these years.

Labels: iran, stop the war

Evil Paradises posted by lenin

Around 1998, I was living in dismal North Woolwich on a student's lack of income. An impoverished, amenity-free colony on the north bank of the Thames, it is connected to its southern metropole by a foot tunnel and a free ferry, in whose freezing, windy chambers you can sit for fifteen minutes as more important (commercial) traffic is conveyed across the water. To the rest of East London, it is connected by an unreliable and dirty Silverlink railway line (recently closed to make way for new development) or, if you're prepared for a walk through a short stretch of desolation, you can take the DLR from Gallion's Reach. For entertainment, there is a sort of 'beach' that you can walk along - actually a pebbly mount that gradually becomes dark, toxic sludge. There, on the grey concrete wall facing the river, you will find out what lonely fascists are capable of doing with a spraycan and a bladder in the dead of night - they mark out their territory, one way or another, stealing tiny, subterranean dirt plots here and there, lurking and waiting. There is an ugly little park, some pubs promising raunch or sports, a sugar factory, and two newsagents, which seemed madly extravagant at the time - what to do with such choice?

The evil pole star of that East End was, and probably still is, the blinking light on top of One Canada Square, former residency of Lord Black. I worked in the 19th floor for about three months while Andrew Marr tried to turn The Independent into a Blairite fan magazine. Commuting daily from dirt cheap to filthy rich territory, I also had a clear view of work from my bedroom window. The utopian element to the construction of Canary Wharf, with its intricate system of waterways and chic shops, the buildings carefully calibrated to control not only the flows of people in and out (rent-a-cops by the thousands in that small area alone), but also every particle of air and moisture, the fountains, broad avenues and cultivated atmosphere of opulece, is in one respect a complete failure. It fails because of the wind. The whole place is an elaborate wind tunnel. Perhaps that is part of the point, however - nothing about the place is hospitable to anyone without cash or access. It's a thought that occurs if you're waiting in Richard Rogers' railway station for the next ride back to whereverthefuck - was this freezing, exposed, glacial structure really designed with people in mind? In fact, the hypertrophic architectural scale, the ludicrous gigantism of everything in the place, has the effect of reinforcing the comparative unimportance of anyone who happens to be passing through. The contrast with those who live within the gated luxury zones could not be more obvious. The plethora of high rise buildings and towers, concrete vertebrates, corporate dinosauria, Tyrannodomus Rex, suggests that the place has been mis-named. Not so much Canary Wharf as Jurassic fucking Park. It is a place, moreover, replete not only with idolatry, but also with the enlarged runic symbols of corporate presence: symbols that are opaque to ordinary interpretation, but which nevertheless mutually corroborate one another, sustaining the hyperstition of capital. And, far from interacting with local economies to generate employment, it seems to have insulated itself successfully, creating a sickly, enchanted working environment that is as psychically distant from the Millwall housing estates as Poplar is from Silicon Valley. Expanding perpetually into the formerly residential areas of the local working class, the parasitical alien compound now relies chiefly on suited labour imported from outlying suburbs, (as well as a few underpaid migrant workers who clean and dispense teas to the offices in absolute silence). This high-profile effort at reshaping the East End social space, coterminous with Thatcher's pitch battles to reform the ideological space, has produced something that is finally almost as surreal and exclusive and intrusive as the Green Zone.

About Green Zones, and their global proliferation, there is an excellent new volume edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism. Through a series of focused essays by people like Patrick Bond and China Mieville, it details both the devastation of vast global spaces - the 'Slum World' of Davis' previous book - and the bathetic utopias of the rich. In Afghanistan, the tiny allotments of paradise amid the devastation are given over to both the occupiers and their now massively wealthy warlord allies, who control territories on Nato's behalf, tax on their own behalf, exact punishments and blandishments as they see fit, accumulate mountains of cash from unofficial streams of US dollars and illicit flows of opium. Squatters living in mud huts are evicted so that the most powerful warlords and businessmen can construct fairytale havens on the expropriated plots. This "architectural Babylon", with its "sinister real-estate economy" flaunts the wealth of the new elite as crudely as it drives the poor into the margins. Military strategy, corruption, drug-money, laundering, land piracy and patrimony interact in the new geography of occupied Kabul to produce these little enclaves for the rich, for Western aid workers, for the occupiers. Surreal contrast with a country at large immiserated and strafed with hundreds of bombing raids, not to mention now under techno-toxin assault from Dyncorp. As refugees are forced back into cities and towns ill-equipped to meet their needs, the strategies of exclusion originating from Afghanistan's current, heteromorphic status, ossify into permanent structures of the social and geographic landscape.

Beyond this Babylon is Johannesburg, a city made rich by the trade of gold and diamonds, first under colonial rule, then under apartheid, and now under the neoliberal post-apartheid settlement. Of course, to describe a city as rich in itself is an abstraction - a gold-bricking white capitalist class was made rich, a class that today reluctantly accomodates a small layer of black South Africans. The ANC's rapid ditching of its reformist agenda has confirmed that the city's function is to have an appropriate image, a "world-class" image, rather than to support the livelihoods of its inhabitants. The ANC and their white capitalist allies have been busily encouraging a landscape of conspicuous consumption in order to attract investors, largely without success, cutting corporation taxes, selling off public properties, privatizing electricity so that millions of low-income workers are forced off the grid. The rich hide behind three metre high walls and razor-wire, as some of the dispossessed poor turn to entrepreneurial criminality. Horrified at the prospect of a DIY redistribution of their durables, they hire a low-waged class of security guards from the townships. Between and beyond this centre of financial skyscrapers and that gated suburb are the expanding slums, the urban corridors with diminishing employment prospects and conditions. Patrick Bond insists on the capacity for pressure from below to disrupt these processes. Tenacious traditions of social activism seek to counteract the worst of this and hold up the possibility of a militant resurgence, while working class movements resourcefully mobilise in their own defense.

In the rebooted, secured homeland of consumption, the mall is regnant. In the land of the indebted, subprimed, sold-out and disenfranchised, the man with the super-trolley and SUV is king. Marco d'Eramo writes of an "age of bourgeois consumption", inaugurated with the 19th Century Parisian arcades that so fascinated Walter Benjamin, culminating in the giga-marts, the mother-of-malls that today - under inauspicious grey canopies - offer commuting consumers low-cost goods to fill their car boots with. The modern French hypermarché simply isn't a patch on its American counterpart. Take the Mall of America, with its 525 shops, four department stores, a fourteen-screen multiplex, eighteen restaurants, a seven-acre centrepiece under a glass canopy with an aquarium, a legoland... a visit to such a place could last for weeks. No wonder the larger malls contain a few hotels. If the mall has well-documented deleterious effects on local towns, its principles - of destruction and artificial reconstruction; of infantilism; of the privatization of social life, in which most intercourse is through consumer response to signs and price tags - are operative in American life, particularly in suburbia, the terminus of the white flight. 'Private towns' are emerging, heavily controlled by the homeowners, in which the protections of political life do not apply: forget the First Amendment in rosy little 'Leisure World' of Arizona, whose board of directors censors material at will, precisely as one might in one's own household, or one's own company. In these zones, Mexicans and other people of colour may work, but in total silence. If they say anything to the whites who live there, they're out. The triumph of property rights over human rights is close enough to being complete that it permits forms of segregation and repression that would ordinarily be outlawed. And don't imagine these places are merely small communities of privileged white people living the dream as they see fit. There are 43 million Americans living in common-interest housing developments of this kind, with the main aim apparently being to secure property-holders against crime - a word whose raciological dimensions are apparent in its application. The satisfaction of individual needs, including the market-tested need to be free of the poor, especially the darker-skinned poor, or the need to be able to strongly regulate sexual habits, or whatever other 'need' might enter into one's dim-witted head, is the sustaining ideology here. The free market in the service of serfdom and the family values of Louis Quatorze.

And so on and on, the rich everywhere accumulating massively at the expense of the working class majority, and everywhere secreting themselves in surreal environments - bunkered but luxurious, deliberately attuned to satisfying every possible urge, the mall and the luxury pad converging into one. And the most absurd example of this is the Freedom Ship. More of an ideal than a ship - since construction hasn't even begun since it was first announced almost a decade ago - this voyager promises to deliver the world's wealthy to a life of carefree exuberance, travelling in luxury and style from location to location. The interesting thing about the Freedom Ship is that it is ugly even in conception. An ocean-bound city is the ideal, but it will look more like a multi-storey car park with a helicopter landing range on top. But it will also be, apparently, a floating tax haven. Imagine finally getting the government off your back by going on an extended cruise. As China Mieville writes, it is "banal avarice" offered as "a principled blow for political freedom". For the sake of contrast, one can think here of pirate utopias, the kind described by Marcus Rediker. As Rediker has written, these multiracial, multinational ships were surprisingly egalitarian sodalities, not at all the kinds of violent authoritarian enterprises that we have been accustomed to imagining. Men and women used to the despotic conditions of life on legal trading ships (and slave ships for that matter) found meaningful forms of social solidarity, escape from state control and the emerging forms of capitalist domination. It seems a bit paltry, in comparison, to launch yourself on a three-yearly cycle of seclusion from the rest of the world to escape paying one's taxes. Further, as Mieville rightly emphasises, the history of ship-bound escapes is typically a tragic tale: the "boat people" of Vietnam and Haiti, for example.

I would point out that Iain Sinclair's two brilliant psychogeographic accounts, Lights Out for The Territory and London Orbital are compulsory supplementary reading here, for they extend some of this analysis to this particular heart of neoliberal darkness: London, in which nostalgia is taken to the absurd length of allowing TB to flourish once again in the East End. Soon, rickets too. Sinclair doesn't deal in statistics, or policies as such, and nor does he footnote. Instead, he traverses (or circumnavigates) the city with a photographer and an eye for the substrata, the fossilised remnants of unofficial communications (from "hit and run calligraphers", as Sinclair dubs the graffiti artists), and a wearily satirical eye for bombast. Yet, his books are somehow about the same processes, the same dreamworlds and their inherent sordidness. In London Orbital, in particular, he sniffs out the dystopian reinvention of London's margins and suburbs, the studious re-branding of postindustrial dreck and waste, and the secrets behind the public facades of municipal neoliberalism. However, this new wave of literature in particular, including from David Harvey, Derek Gregory and Mike Davis - and especially the excellent study by Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization - is bringing new emphasis to the spatial dimensions of capital accumulation. In an era in which our space is colonised by, say, Starbucks, and sold back to us so we can consume an over-priced coffee for half an hour; when public space is increasingly privatized; when housing is increasingly a problem in so-called rich cities; when whole swathes of territory are effectively sealed off to the public; when the empire applies its extraordinarily broad geographical mastery to frustrate resistance to its rule; and when even left-wing theorists collude in the neoliberal utopian fantasy of a borderless world... Well, given all this, nothing could be more welcome than the attempt to understand the way power produces space, politically (absolute space, as per the idealised borders of the nation-state), economically (relational space, as per real-time transactions), and ideologically (utopian space, political economy haunted by fantasy).

Labels: neoliberalism, rich man's utopia, the geography of capitalism

George Carlin posted by lenin

You have to love this guy:

Labels: capitalism, george carlin, gulf war, media, obedience, wage labour

Latest Iraqi Resistance Stats posted by lenin

The December 2007 report to Congress is here [pdf]. I keep wondering when we'll see the same for Afghanistan, because the information is - however biased by selection and interpretation - a useful antidote to the corporate media. The emphasis is, unsurprisingly, on the (temporary) success of the vicious counterinsurgency strategy over the last year. I daresay the strategy will have produced even bloodier results than in previous years, particularly given the dramatic escalation in the air war over the last year that I discuss below. There has, according to these figures, been a dramatic reduction in all kinds of attack, whether sectarian or resistance, against civilians or troops.

This is the culmination of a number of factors, and these should be a cause for some pain and some triumph. The first is clearly the successful strategy of coopting tribal elements in the 'Sunni triangle', which would once have been the main source of resistance attacks - they are attacking 'Al Qaeda' more and the troops less. The second is the successful strategy of bombing the place to smithereens - it is a weakness of the antiwar movement that we couldn't see this coming and stop it, and we bear some responsibility for it. The defiling of Iraqi cities has undoubtedly destroyed the base and core of several resistance outfits. The geographical mastery of the US, emphasised in news reports during the early months of the occupation, has borne fruit. They have regained a certain intelligence footing and a measure of the enemy that has enabled them to hit hard against the resistance. There should be no euphemism about this: while it isn't a story of long-term defeat, it is a set-back for the resistance. However. The third factor, and very important, is the culmination of success on the part of the southern resistance: it is widely acknowledged that the withdrawal of the British troops dramatically reduced violence in the areas it controlled. Recent surveys from the south of Iraq show that its residents deeply regret the occupation, despite it having been one of the less violent areas of the occupation, and one of the areas least likely to have benefited in any sense by the rule of the Ba'ath party. The occupation could be, and proved to be, much worse than Saddam (how about that, by the way?). The final factor is the success of the strategy of disintegrating Iraq along ethnic lines. People feel far more secure in their own neighbourhood than in anywhere else in the country - what would once have been their own country, from top to bottom. Balkanisation is a disgusting strategy, but isn't always an unsuccessful one. I'm afraid that the reduction in 'ethno-sectarian' violence is actually a result of succesful ethnic cleansig (although, who knows, perhaps the occupiers' death squads have been asked to tone it down a bit). At any rate, here are the relevant tables (click to enlarge as always):








Some reports refer to the resistance holding back and bunkering down during America's recent infliction of airborne death on Iraqi cities, and so one would expect an upturn shortly. But never forget that, as with Vietnam, they can always win if we don't tie one hand behind their backs. They can always inflict genocide, destroy the country, turn Iraqi communities to pink mist and brick dust, disperse chemicals that burn their flesh and lungs and sizzle their bones, send death squads in to drill holes in bodies, shred working class housing blocks with bullets and shrapnel - oh wait... well, let's say they can do much, much more of that.

Labels: bring da ruckus, iraq, iraqi resistance, occupation, US imperialism

The reproduction of the class system in the United States posted by lenin

When the billionaire Warren Buffet worries about the prospect of a "dynastic plutocracy", it is as if the United States had hitherto been in a state of classless social flux; as if the liberal absolutists who founded the country were not also upper class landowning white supremacist slave-owners; as if the country's business and political classes had not been rife with overlapping mega-dynasties since its inception; as if the Gettys, DuPonts, and Rockefellers were mere characters from, er, Dynasty. In fact, it's quite difficult to pin down the precise contours of America's class system. When two sociologists, Lisa A. Keister and Stephanie Moller, tried to review the literature in 2000*, they had a few hoops to leap through. The literature is not slight, but it is unbalanced, and the statistical sources are full of holes. They were able to establish fairly easily that "since the early 1920s, the top 1% of wealth holders has consistently owned an average of 30% of total household sector wealth", declining to 19% between 1972 and 1976, before rising to 40 and 50% in the 1980s and 1990s. However, there is a huge blind-spot in research because most of those studying the area look at income flows, not structures of wealth ownership and the advantages that wealth confers for its owners. As they suggest "the correlation between income and wealth ownership is relatively weak". Such correlation as does exist is actually largely attributable to asset income - income generated by wealth. On the other hand, "many families, particularly nonwhite families, have zero or negative net worth regardless of income". So, leaving wealth out of the picture leaves most of the story untold.

One 1995 survey showed that the top quintile of wealth holders owned almost 85% of total household wealth, and Gini co-efficients tend to demonstrate much greater gaps in ownership than in income. Another set of statistics produces the following results for wealth distribution from 1962-1995 (click to enlarge):



Aside from the very broad continuity of these patterns, what is striking is that the long-term changes that have been effected have not merely been at the expense of the almost propertyless majority, but also the 2nd 20%, who I suppose in American parlance would be 'upper-middle-class'. The bottom 80% saw a 2% reduction in wealth from 1983 to 1989. Take another look at the chart - suppose a roughly socialist egalitarian society persisted in the United States. Each 20th percent would have roughly 20% of the wealth, with minor fluctuations here and there. On this criterion alone, a very crude one I admit, the so-called 'upper-middle-class' is ripped off along with everyone else. The vast majority of Americans, in short are close to propertyless, possessing only a few insecure items such as cars and houses (especially those on dodgy loans or subprime mortgages). Now, even that massive accumulation of wealth at the top 1% contains massive internal differentiation, as:

the share of the top 0.5% of wealth owners rose 5% during this period, from 26.2% of total household sector wealth in 1983 to 31.4% in 1989. The wealth of the next half percent remained relatively constant at about 7.5% of total household wealth, but the share of the next 9% decreased from 34.4% in 1983 to 33.4% in 1989.

Of course, even these statistics occlude much. The super-rich stay well out of sight, unlike the ostentatious celebs and public personalities - you don't see these guys queuing up to appear on The Simple Life; they successfully conceal much of their wealth and use loopholes to avoid paying taxes - especially the estate tax, records of which provide much of the source data for studies; they don't respond very well to surveys inquiring about their wealth; and they certainly tend not to participate in long-term studies of their social movements. That is, they are an extremely secretive bunch, and sociologists have been obliged to devise statistical innovations to compensate for this and produce adequate data, with only partial success. This is something of a problem, because the bulk of research that has been conducted on this matter find that inheritance (whether at death or, as in most cases, 'inter-vivo') accounts for between 50% and 80% of the net worth of US families. It is clearly an area that is crying out for further study and enlightenment, yet it is shrouded in a heart of darkess. "We know very little about how much wealth is actually inherited," Keister and Moller point out, "because data on inheritance is virtually nonexistent." I suspect that if the US government, for all of its informational prowess and its willingness to spy on your phone calls and e-mails, were to initiate any attempt to discover the full extent of concealed wealth, the hysterical cry of 'communism' would shortly be raised. The irony is that you might well have to raise the banner of communist revolution merely to find out exactly how much accumulated wealth there is.

*I'm relying on fairly old statistics for the purposes of making a broader point about the structure of wealth distribution and transmission. For what it's worth, the latest statistics on wealth, produced in the latest edition of a standard text-book on the matter by Charles Hurst in 2007, suggest that the top 10% of US possess 80% of all financial assets, while the bottom 90% hold 73% of all debt. And debt, as any fool knows, is negative net worth for everyone but the propertied minority.

Labels: america fuck yeah, american working class, ruling class

Mutiny posted by lenin

Democracy Now has the remarkable story of how a group of US troops in Iraq, having ust emerged from a powerful IED attack, rebelled agaist their military commanders and refused to go out on patrols on the grounds that their rage might end up producing a massacre. The unit in question is apparently that which has been hardest hit by the Iraqi resistance. The Army Times reporter interviewed by DN is full of sanctimonious crap about this sort of mutiny being encouraged by mental health professionals and the new ethical disposition of the US army, but it seems far more likely that these guys are sick to death of being put in dangerous and morally repugnant positions. It's happening with increasing frequency. There are two main factors bringing this about: the antiwar movement, and the Iraqi resistance. A stronger antiwar movement would weaken troop morale further, and strengthen the resistance. So there are no excuses: you know where to be.

Labels: iraq, iraqi resistance, occupation, US imperialism

Secret Air War Confirmed posted by lenin

A recent (typically apologetic) study by the CSIS of US bombing raids in Iraq and Afghanistan has produced figures that confirm what many of us have been arguing - that the US has drastically escalated its aerial assault on Iraq and Afghanistan, below the radar of the corporate media. You may not have realised by how much, though. These are the figures (click to enlarge):



Which statistics, fed into Excel, produce this (click to enlarge):



As you can see, both countries have taken a hammering, but Afghanistan in particular has taken the brunt of a massive series of air attacks in part due to the 'risk-transfer' conception of war, in which civilians are to bear the brunt of death and destruction rather than US combatants. The hostile terrain of Afghanistan, and the fact that few are actually covering it very extensively, makes it an ideal target for this kind of ferocious assault - with, as we saw last year, a rolling wave of massacres in the country. Inevitably, since the air war hasn't been covered much by the media, and given its insensitivity to 'enemy' casualties, those massacres reported are a tiny sample of the true total. Without a Lancet-style survey, we will remain very much in the dark about the true nature of this assault and its effects.

Labels: afghanistan, air war, iraq, massacre, secret air war

¿Socialismo Louis Vuitton en Venezuela? posted by Yoshie

"Contradictions of Resource Populism" is now in Spanish, courtesy of a friend of mine in Buenos Aires: Yoshie Furuhashi, "¿Socialismo Louis Vuitton en Venezuela?" Traducción de Julio Fernández Baraibar, Critical Montages, 19 December 2007.

Labels: capitalism, class, venezuela

BNP Split posted by left turn

So it seems there is a split in the British National Party after "senior members" have attacked Griffin's "leadership". Perhaps the pressure of being hounded at every step by Unite Against Fascism is taking its toll on the fascists. The following is from the BBC. The best bit is where Griffin is described by BNP dissidents as "behaving like a dictator". Clearly these admirers of Hitler and Mussolini have a pretty tenuous grasp on history.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7152657.stm

Labels: bnp, split

Shouting at the television posted by lenin

It's a hobby, isn't it? Via the excellent This Space, I found Charlie Brooker yelling them amusing swear-words at the television. As televisual autocritique goes, it's actually one of the more refined efforts. What do you usually get? Harry Hill's unfunny impersonations of Eastenders characters, at best. Clearly, this sort of rant only works if you've got some sort of emotional investment in the telly, and equally clearly it works to solidify that investment, to shore it up, to make sure you keep supplying eye-to-ad co-ordination. Even if you're yelling, "you fucking massive cock", you're still watching. In fact, it's worse, you're treating it as if it's real, you're expecting it to live up to your conception of how human beings should behave, you are participating. Like much of humanity, I do waste a lot of time on the idiot box, and it isn't always completely pointless. For example, if I really want to get motivated, I sit and watch one of those bear-baiting talk shows, each with a carefully arranged diorama of the emotionally incontinent, feckless and violent (all of them, needless to say, obviously broke), and I watch the manicured presenter patronise these people for about ten minutes. And then if I really need to get moving, or if I have an unusually combative day ahead, I sit through the advertisements for debt consolidation, car loans unsecured to mortgages, and so on. Then, supposing I have someone to kill that day, I'll kick it up a notch and watch Jeremy Kyle. I have, I am happy to brag, reduced this activity over the years, but imagine if all that time was replaced by was ranting at the various provocateurs on Comment is Free or in the blogosphere.

Labels: advertising, bloggers, television

The (increased) cost of living and dying posted by lenin

Food prices are at their highest level for fourteen years and a recent surge in wheat prices is going to drive up prices even further. Real-terms inflation for essential goods has been rising dramatically for a while, which means that the cost of living for the poorest is most dramatically affected. Rising global oil prices will compound this effect. Concurrent with this is the continuation a long-term decline in labour's share of income. Andrew Glyn's recent Capitalism Unleashed tells some of the sordid story behind this (although I find fault with his profit-squeeze theory of capitalist crisis), and of course it is a story of the successful temporary restoration of ruling class power following the years of insurgency that terrorised them in the 1960s and 1970s. So it is that in Britain labour has a lower share of national income, a de facto incomes policy designed to lower it even further, and savage attacks on welfare, specifically disability benefits at a time when our living conditions are already being squeezed. Meanwhile, taxes on corporations have been repeatedly cut. Two Labour MPs appeal in vain for the spurning of neoliberalism. There isn't much to be hoped for from the Labour left. Hope lies, as ever, with the proles.

Labels: inflation, neoliberalism, prices, profits, wages

Revolt in the ANC posted by lenin

Following on from the massive strikes in South Africa earlier this year and last week's miners' strike, the ANC is rocked by a political struggle which looks like it will result in the neoliberal wing of the party being defeated by the left. I feel like raising it, and putting it that way, because from news stories like this, you wouldn't have a clue what was going on. You would not, for example, gather that Jacob Zuma is leading the left-wing in the ANC and that Thabo Mbeki's embattled position has something to do with his reactionary pro-business policies. Hardening criticism from COSATU and the South African Communist Party membership has compounded a growing dissatisfaction in the Congress. Zuma is far from the ideal man to lead such a fight, burdened as he is with corruption charges over bribes from a French arms company, and he is actually doing his best to present his policies as pro-business. He is in all probability an opportunist who has harnessed a unique chance based on the unrest. However, the fact that he has successfully channelled the energy of this revolt into a leadership bid which may lead to him taking power in the ANC (but not the country) is itself significant. And however disappointing Zuma is likely to be (Chavez, he ain't - even Chavez isn't always Chavez), the very fact of ousting the wretched Mbeki may give further confidence to the already insurgent working class.

Labels: anc, economic apartheid, south africa, strikes

American nativism looms at the polls posted by lenin

The cracker asshole vote is probably not as large as many people outside America take it to be. For example, these cracker asshole minutemen seem to consist of a small number of Aryan supremacists and classic Western vigilantes - certainly of the variety that launched pogroms against the Irish, the Chinese, the poor from Oklahoma, labourers, communists, trade unionists etc, but much smaller than their forebears. They are capable of spotting a potential meat factory labourer or gardener with binoculars directed across cactus-strewn borderland, and such an unfortunately witnessed interloper might well end up being beaten or murdered. And the superpatriots have spread geographically from a base in conservative regions of California into Arizona and Texas, and have branches in several other states. Yet, as a movement they remain a narrow sect, eminently ignorable by national politicians. Yet, despite this, they have acquired some striking support not only from local radio 'hell-in-a-handbasket' hate programmes, but also from California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger back in 2005, when his attacks on public spending caused his poll numbers to slump. With characteristic McBain-like eloquence, he has showered praise on the efficacy of the Minutemen, depicting them as conscientious citizens looking out for fellow whiteys. They have made an impact on GOP politics as well. While Pat Robertson has offered a sizeable portion of the religious right vote to Rudi Giuliani, Jim Gilchrist, the former Marine and co-founder of the Minutemen movement, is wooing the racist right for Mick Huckabee. Huckabee was supposedly a centrist on immigration and had attacked racism and nativism during the migration debate in 2006, but he has now discovered the virtues of the Minutemen, and produced an authoritarian set of policies to woo this unpleasant substrate. Gilchrist's one-time colleague, Chris Simcox, has attacked him for this nomination, and it may be that the already schismatic movement splits over this as well. However, the vendetta merchants have an audience among comparatively privileged people, at least among a layer of middle class white Americans, whose intense boredom and alienation in an increasingly bizarre society seeks redress in resentful and violent attacks on the usual targets.

GOP candidates, such as Mitt Romney and Tom Tancredo preparing attacks on immigrants as key to their electoral strategy. However, alongside them are some opportunistic Democrats, who must vigilantly hold forth against the misunderstanding that they are soft on the dark-skinned. Democratic candidate John Edwards, who likes to present a left face, is promising a crack-down. Perhaps Edwards, addressing a mainly white audience in Iowa, is trying to appeal to a working population that has been destroyed by neoliberalism and by 'free trade' deals such as Nafta, which has cost 1 million American jobs according to the Economic Policy Institute (although Iowa was not one of the main states affected by Nafta). Since Edwards supports that particular agreement, planning merely to renegotiate it, and since he is one of those who supported giving Bush fast-track powers to negotiate further such trade agreements, it wouldn't be his style to point out that the problems for working class communities in Iowa do not originate with immigration. Barack Obama is cracking down on border controls as well, lest those illegal immigrants turn out to be terrorists - the Latino Catholic division of Al Qaeda is apparently sending shock troops across a poorly manned border day and night. Bill Richardson, the conservative Hispanic-American Democrat with 8% of the vote, also favours tougher border controls. The Democrats are not the aggressive attack dogs on immigration, but none of the main candidates appears all that interested in defending the communities who have suffered a wave of state repression and accompanying vilification since their mass protests in 2006. Groups like ANSWER and the ISO have done well to harrass the Minutemen and have also done what they can to support the immigrant labourers, but the order of the day among the political class is for a more intense crackdown (with tacit approval for heightened exploitation by employers, who have most to lose with a politically self-confident immigrant movement).

Much of the anti-immigrant racism currently informing presidential bids is regulated and sustained by the 'war on terror', which has cast an automatic pall of unacceptability and disloyalty on even legal migrants. Yet, lest we forget that bashing the poorest and most exploited is part of an American tradition that precedes even the conquest of the Philippines (a model for today's occupation of Iraq in so many ways), I suppose it's worth mentioning that the antiwar Republican candidate, Ron Paul (very much favoured by the libertarians at Antiwar.com) supports massive state investment in attacking immigrants. So much so that the far right Federation for American Immigration Reform gives the candidate a 100% score in supporting immigration restrictions. He blames the welfare state for having created immigration, on the grounds that you get more of what you 'subsidize'. Well, it seems to me that if you subsidize state repression, you get more of it, and have no business calling yourself a libertarian. It is a point usually ignored by the soi disant anti-statists of the American right - the history of immigration controls in the US shows that measures initially contrived to attack and restrict migration become the basis of domestic surveillance and repression. Worse, however: one or two liberals and even radicals who ought to know better are rocking to the Ron Paul Revolution, because of his stance on the war, on civil liberties, and his general aura of incorruptibility. The fact that his stance on practically everything else is indefensible and disgusting has passed by in silence from these people. A petty reactionary with a good stance on the war is still a petty reactionary.

Despite the appalling performance of the Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, the decisive issue at the 2008 presidential election will, I suspect, still be the 'war on terror' and the general disaffection with it. The GOP candidates are swinging to the hard right, partially in response to the growing right-ward lurch of Democrats, but mainly because they are desperate. Faced with insurmountable hostility to the Bush administration and the Republican Party, they are unwilling to abandon the 'war on terror', which adventurist strategy still broadly retains the support of their corporate sponsors. Hobbled by the NIE, to some extent (not, noticeably, by any Democratic attack), they have to stimulate the basest of bases, the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth who despise the wretched of the earth. The nativist reactionaries do not constitute most Americans, but then they don't have to. Their role is to prise apart the natural alliance between the disenfranchised white working class, African Americans whose ethnic cleansing from New Orleans is an accomplished fact, and hyper-exploited immigrants - all of whom lose out from the 'war on terror' and the current neoliberal orthodoxy. If, against the constant, oppressive reality of growing class domination, the culture warriors and rabid nationalists can harness the directionless, pre-political anger of many Americans, the ruling class may weather the oncoming recession without having to combat or accomodate any sustained movement for reforms and social change.

Labels: american nativism, elections, migrant workers, racism

Only giving the people what they want, part II posted by lenin

Homo economicus:

Breakthroughs in brain science have revealed that people are primarily emotional decision-makers. . . . Emotions are central, not peripheral, to both marketplace and workplace behavior. As a result, companies able to identify, quantify, and thereby act on achieving emotional buy-in or acceptance from consumers and employees alike will enjoy a tremendous competitive advantage.

Labels: 'totalitarianism', homo economicus, rationality

Contradictions of Resource Populism posted by Yoshie

Venezuela's Interior Minister Pedro Carreño got caught criticizing capitalism while sporting Gucci shoes and a Louis Vuitton tie:

Asked if it wasn't contradictory to criticize capitalism while personally preferring imported luxuries, the minister stammered a bit and finally said: "No es contradictorio, porque yo quisiera que Venezuela produjera todo eso y entonces yo comprar todo lo que se produzca aquí y no tener que importar el 95 por ciento de los rubros que consumimos [It's not contradictory, for I would prefer Venezuela to be producing all this, and then I could buy what's produced here instead of having to import 95% of what we consume]" (Enrique Andrés Pretel, "Ministro venezolano en apuros para defender socialismo de Chávez," Reuters, 13 December 2007).

Unlike right-wingers, who are having a field day with this video, the charge of hypocrisy does not interest me.¹ Who can blame the minister for wishing to wear nice clothes?

But a question may be still asked: does the minister know that his European brand fashion items may not have been made by high-wage European craftsmen but low-wage East Asian workers, the only thing "European" about them being their prices?

In fact, many luxury-brand items today are made on assembly lines in developing nations, where labor is vastly cheaper. I saw this firsthand when I visited a leather-goods factory in China, where women 18 to 26 years old earn $120 a month sewing and gluing together luxury-brand leather handbags, knapsacks, wallets and toiletry cases. One bag I watched them put together -- for a brand whose owners insist is manufactured only in Italy -- cost $120 apiece to produce. That evening, I saw the same bag at a Hong Kong department store with a price tag of $1,200 -- a typical markup. (Dana Thomas, "Made in China on the Sly," New York Times, 23 November 2007)

Then, there remains another question, suggested by the minister's reply itself: is Venezuela making progress in overcoming the Dutch disease (higher oil prices overvaluing the currency, making imports comparatively cheaper and underdeveloping the domestic non-oil production)? The import trends charted by Venezuela's National Statistics Institute are not exactly encouraging.

Productive investment in general is clearly lagging behind consumption, and manufacturing is among the most shortchanged sectors (Oil Wars' notes below are based on the Banco Central de Venezuela, "El PIB aumentó 8,7% durante el tercer trimestre de 2007," 15 November 2007):

The fastest growth was in communications at 24.3% followed by commerce at 18.4% and then transportation at 15.5%. The lagging sectors were manufacturing at 7.7% and construction at 4%. Note that both manufacturing and contruction were both slower than growth in the economy as a whole. Clearly the increasing overvaluation of the Venezuelan economy is stunting manufacturing growth and keeping it below what it should be.

Interstingly the bank noted that agricultural production as been increasing at an average of 15% since 2005. So what shortages there are clearly result from increased demand not falling output.

In more general numbers imports were up 30.9% (is this good or bad?), consumption by consumers is up 20.4% (I guess this makes for happy voters), and fixed capital investment is up 17.3% which the government attributes to increased imports of machinery. However, for some time now we have seen investment go way up while production seems to be increasing but at a much slower rate. ("Yawn," Oil Wars, 15 November 2007)

It looks like the day when the minister can buy at home everything he can possibly want is far from close, and he is not personally setting a great example of swadeshi for the rest of the nation to follow.

The unfortunate spectacle of Louis Vuitton socialism came at about the same time as the news of removal of the price controls on long-life milk and shortly after the defeat of the Constitutional Reform. The beginning of December 2007 may be remembered as the time when contradictions of resource populism in Venezuela became more visible than before. Chavistas will have to overcome them to stay in power and further transform the nation. But how?


1 Some Venezuelan leftists, however, may not let the minister off the hook so easily on the hypocrisy question:

Y con una corbata Louis Vuitton y unos zapatos Gucci tú no puedes venir a decirme que estás poniendo los intereses colectivos por encima de los individuales, mucho menos si tu respuesta a las críticas es que en Venezuela "no se fabrican" corbatas ni zapatos. . . no me jodas, que en estos momentos tengo puestos unos zapatos venezolanos Vic Matic bien bonitos, que cuestan 120 mil bolívares y me han durado 2 años ya. [And with a Louis Vuitton tie and Gucci shoes on, you can't come to tell me that you are putting collective interests above individual ones, much less if you respond to your critics by saying that ties and shoes are "not being manufactured" in Venezuela. . . . Don't kid me. At this very moment I am wearing very pretty Vic Matic Venezuelan shoes, which cost me 120,000 bolivars and have lasted for the last two years] (Luigino Bracci Roa, "Pedro Carreño y la corbata Louis Vuitton, o cuando la oposición tiene toda la razón. . . ," El espacio de Lubrio, 13 December 2007)

Is it time for Venezuelan officials to begin to emulate the sartorial rectitude of their Iranian counterparts who still frown upon the kravati?

But news from the department of government procurement is worse than news from the fashion department: the Venezuelan government just gave KBR a $57 million dollar contract to build an ammonia plant ("When Will They Put Their Money Where Their Mouths Are?" Oil Wars, 14 December 2007).

Update

Read it in Spanish: Yoshie Furuhashi, "¿Socialismo Louis Vuitton en Venezuela?" Traducción de Julio Fernández Baraibar, Critical Montages, 19 December 2007.

Labels: capitalism, class, venezuela

Gaia Capitalism in Bali posted by lenin

Guest post by Gareth Dale:

The "fervent hope" of the Financial Times
The Bali conference is ongoing. But Bali documents are being churned out thick and fast. One such is the Bali Communiqué, prepared by The Prince of Wales’s UK and EU Corporate Leaders Groups on Climate Change, and signed by the leaders of 150 global companies, including Shell, Virgin, British Airways, BAA, Pacific Gas and Electric, Anglo-American, Ferrovial, Rolls Royce, Volkswagen and News Corporation. The Communiqué – which was sent to the 130 Environment Ministers who are attending the Bali conference, and was handed personally to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon -- calls upon the negotiators to produce a “comprehensive, legally binding United Nations framework to tackle climate change.” In an article published in the Financial Times, The Prince of Wales congratulates the companies for showing “remarkable leadership” and expresses his “fervent hope” that the communiqué “will strengthen the resolve of those gathered in Bali to make the tough decisions the world so urgently needs”. Most significantly, the Communiqué argues that “the overall targets for emissions reduction must be guided primarily by science”. Its website boasts that “This is in contrast to the argument that has previously been made by some parts of the business community that it is concerns over competitiveness and cost that should set the limit of emission cuts.” One signatory, James Smith, Chair of Shell UK, gave voice to the sense of urgency, commenting: "The message from the international business community couldn't be clearer. A comprehensive, legally-binding United Nations agreement to tackle climate change will provide business with the certainty it needs to scale up global investment in low carbon technologies. The cost of inaction far out weighs the cost of taking action now. It is crucial that, at the Bali conference, countries agree a work plan of comprehensive negotiations to ensure a robust policy framework is in place, to guide us forward over the coming decades."

How encouraging that global business leaders have come to see that targets for emissions reduction should be guided by science. With this in mind they may care to consult another Bali document, the Bali Declaration. Prepared under the auspices of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, it has been signed by some 150 scientists. What targets do the scientists identify? The first is that global warming must be kept “to no more than 2 ºC above the pre-industrial temperature,” that this “requires that global greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by at least 50% below their 1990 levels by the year 2050,” and that, in the long run,”greenhouse gas concentrations need to be stabilised at a level well below 450 ppm (parts per million; measured in CO²-equivalent concentration).” In order to meet those targets, the Bali Declaration concludes, “global emissions must peak and decline in the next 10 to 15 years, so there is no time to lose.”

No Money in Solar
How encouraging, too, that the Chair of Shell singles out the need to scale up investment in low carbon technologies. Together with BP, Shell accounts for an astounding 40 per cent of the CO2 emissions of all FTSE100 companies. Mercifully, in recent years it has been investing an average of $200m per year in renewables – admittedly, that represents just one per cent of total capital investment -- in contrast to the 69 per cent it devotes to scouring the planet for new sources of fossil fuels – but a step in the right direction nonetheless. So it is with disbelief that we learn, from The Guardian’s Terry Macalister, that Shell “has quietly sold off most of its solar business.” This is poor timing; the news will hardly make the 130 Environment Ministers and Ban Ki-Moon believe that the signatories of the Communiqué they have just received mean business, so to speak. Shell’s move, writes Macalister, together with BP’s recent decision to invest in Canadian tar sands – as Shell has been doing for years, “indicates that Big Oil might be giving up its flirtation with renewables and going back to its roots.” Shell has pulled out of its solar energy operations in India and Sri Lanka, a sell-off that follows the hiving off of its solar module production business, and which is to be followed by sell-offs in the Philippines and Indonesia. Confirming its pull-out from solar, the Anglo-Dutch oil group said it was not making enough money. "It was not bringing in any profit for us there so we transferred it to another operator.” The pull-out, the same Guardian article continues, has annoyed business leaders with interests in solar energy, who fear the impact of a high-profile company selling off solar business. Jeremy Leggett, chief executive of Solar Century and a leading voice in renewable energy circles, said Shell was undermining the credibility of the business world in its fight against global warming: “Shell and Solar Century were among the 150 companies that recently signed up to the Bali Communiqué. It is vital that companies act consistently with the rhetoric in such declarations, and as I have told Shell senior management on several occasions, an all-out assault on the Canadian tar sands and extracting oil from coal is completely inconsistent with climate protection."

Green Revolution in the Blue-Chips
The Virgin Tycoon was given personal tuition on the matter of climate change by none other than Al Gore, the former Vice President of the United States and one-time shareholder in Occidental. Branson has reported: "Looking directly at me, he said, 'Richard, you and Virgin are icons of originality and innovation. You can help to lead the way in dealing with climate change. It has to be done from the top down, instead of from the bottom up on a grassroots level.'" Branson's proposed solution is technology rather than social or economic change. To lead the way toward what he has called "Gaia Capitalism", he offered a $25 million reward to anyone who devised a device capable of absorbing and storing CO2 (there are billions of such devices already on the planet, even if the supply is diminishing, which is why one of the proposed solutions is a "synthetic tree"). No one has as yet been considered for the prize for proposing any alteration to Branson's airline business. Soon, Virgin was joined by Barclaycard, BSkyB, even the CBI. Green capitalism was quick to spread - even Exxon reportedly found itself on the end of a drive by investors worth $700bn to oust a particular executive blamed for its aggressive policies. A profusion of institutions now seeks capital-friendly solutions to climate change, based on technology. However, whatever technological solutions make it to production will use an enormous amount of energy in their production, which alone may make them unviable according to MIT engineer Howard Herzog. The chances of a suitable technology being developed is minimal.

"Extraordinary Scenes"
An 'u-turn' by the United States, apparently based on the watering down of already inadequate targets, has produced "extraordinary scenes" of high emotion at the Bali conference. Little is to change, in fact. One concrete proposal accepted is for a more entrenched global carbon market, which tripled in value last year to reach $30bn. The proposals are backed by pro-market groups such as the Global Canopy Programme, as well as by oil and gas corporations. According to Gordon Brown, it is "the best way to protect the endangered environment while spurring economic growth". The market is a "business bonanza", potentially overtaking oil in the future. Though riddled with extortion and dodgy accounting, while fuelling new forms of exploitation of the Third World, the market has proven a complete failure in reducing pollution. The ideal capitalist solution - turning disaster into profit - has proved to be no solution at all. Allowing for a massive regressive transformation in global property rights (vast oil companies get to own the right to engage in polluting activity while depriving poorer countries of those rights), it does nothing to stymy the disaster. So, while reactionaries and paid-off commentators continue to deny the science behind 'climate change', far-sighted capitalists seek to adapt to and coopt the movements for change.

Labels: bali, capitalism, disaster politics, environment

An All-American Muslim Story posted by Yoshie

Here's an All-American Muslim story. A group of Christians yell "Merry Christmas" to everyone on subway. In return, two young Jewish couples wish them a "Happy Chanukah." The Christians, enraged by the existence of religious diversity, attack the Jews:

One of the young men, who at one point displayed a tattoo of Jesus, shouted "Happy Chanukah?! That's when the Jews killed Jesus," said [attack victim Walter] Adler, who also heard shouts of "dirty Jews," "you f---ing Jews" and other slurs. (Doug Chandler, "Victims of Subway Assault Push for Hate-Crime Charges," Jewish Week, 12 December 2007)

(The Christian thugs are not only bigoted but also chronologically challenged.)

Only a young Muslim immigrant intervenes to protect the Jews from the Christians -- no one else on the train does. The Christians beat up the Muslim guy, though his intervention allows one of the Jewish victims to pull the emergency brake and call the police.

The Muslim hero, however, is unable to "go to the doctor because he's too busy working two waiter jobs and doesn't have the money for medical care" (Melissa Grace, "Muslim Hero Breaks Up Train Beating," New York Daily News, 12 December 2007) -- that's what makes this not just any old Muslim story but an All-American Muslim story.

Labels: angels in america, feel the hate, islam

Lenin's Tomb Bans Christmas posted by lenin

I think I'll issue this is a press-release: In another gesture of Political Correctness Gone Mad, the trendy left-wing blog Lenin's Tomb this morning declared that it was unilaterally imposing a ban on Christmas. From 08:00 on 14th December 2007, all references to santy claus and decorations and gifts for distant relatives will be consigned to the historical dustheap. "I don't intend to replace it with 'Winterval'," the Huntington Life Sciences reject said, "or any other bollocks you've got in the pipeline. All efforts at 'cheer' and 'sharing' and 'bonhomie' and 'good-will', or any other seasonal affectation, will result in a blind date with a firing squad. You can forget it, and fuck off while you're at it." The move reflects a growing consensus in the author's head that life's good times rarely coincide with national holidays, permitted time away from work, family togetherness, ITV specials, council mandated carol singing, and lights on Oxford Street. "In fact," the grinch-like layabout added, "simulating coordinated happiness is the hallmark of 'totalitarian' regimes everywhere. Look at America, they're never done smiling, and everyone fucking hates them. No offense, obviously. I don't insist on misery, but I think an element of realism is called for. When people say, ''Tis the season to be jolly,', the least that could be expected is for someone to say, 'is it really? Have you seen the state of the economy? Do you know how many children died while you were saying that? Can I detain you with the latest news of what death squads have done in Iraq? Did you know that there's shit in your hamburgers? What possible grounds could there be for this snow-based jocundity? Happy fucking Xmas? I'll give you happy fucking Xmas you solipsistic toad. Take your pleasantries and your pieties back to the house and remember me when you're committing auto-erotic asphyxiation while pleasuring the dog. And don't forget the mistletoe parked above my arse.' That's all I would ask."

PS: A CD collection of Tomb rants will be on general release from next week, available in no good shops. And, with wearisome predictability, it will raise money for 'charity'.

Labels: lenin's tomb bans christmas

Muslims - not coming after all. posted by lenin

BBC Newsnight has taken a holiday and decided to investigate some news - credit where it's due, they've come up with the goods. The story in question is the revelation that this year's Policy Exchange report on Islam in the UK was a dangerous fraud (watch here). It transpires that one of the key elements of the report - an alarmist claim that a quarter of UK mosques sell 'hate literature' (which is still well below the 100% rate at which UK newsagents sell hate literature) - was backed up by a bunh of phoney receipts, suggesting that the researchers had confected evidence for a pre-conceived thesis.

Osama Saeed hints at further skullduggery:

Edinburgh Central Mosque was one of those fingered by the report. I said at the time that the mosque had no idea how this literature was supposed to be on their premises. A strange thing then happened a week or two later. A stash of the pamphlets in question were dropped just inside the doorway to the mosque. No one has any idea how they appeared there, as certainly none of the mosque authorities ordered them. Someone clearly outside dumped them, and they are currently investigating who that could be.

As I pointed out at the time, the report was written by a curious alliance of neoconservative reactionaries and Furedites. The latter, Trotskyists turned think-tankies (admittedly, always rather eccentric Trotskyists), now make their home at Spiked Online. They also host regular corporate-sponsored events attacking the scientific mainstream on 'climate change' and other ideas that may prove problematic for capital accumulation. The former are foils for the Conservative Party. Before neoconservative Michael Gove became a Tory MP, he was the Chair and co-founder of Policy Exchange. The current Chair is occupied by Charles Moore, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph and supporter of the Tories. Previous reports by the Exchange have been criticised for regurgitating a Tory agenda. One of the authors of the report who appeared on Newsnight is Dean Godson, a British neoconservative who fancies himself as a dispenser of wisdom on civilizational clashes. Of course, the Policy Exchange recognises allies when it sees them, and took the trouble to publish Martin Bright's Muslim-baiting report 'When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries' - which, summarising Observer wisdom on the question, was regarded by Britain's reactionaries as an instant classic.

Although this report and its producers have been comprehensively trashed, the ideological coordinates which produce this bilge are still being traversed daily. Hence, we are at war with Islam; Islam = 9/11; Muslim moderates aren't 'speaking out'; they must be punished; they're outbreeding us; their minarets are too bloody prominent, anyway. And so, the breathless anticipation of full-blooded cultural duel mounts daily in the neocon breast. If and when it finally comes to fruition, they will not forget the weaklings and capitulationists and fellow-travellers and fifth columnists on their own side.

Labels: belligerati, islam, islamophobia, neoconservatism, pro-war 'left'

Social Immobility: lockdown and spectacle. posted by lenin

Work makes you free. Work more to earn more. Embrace the liberating dynamism of capitalism, and you will soon find that all those old barriers to your innate gifts are removed (these barriers usually come in the form of other - feckless, incompetent - people, which tells you much about the anti-social attitude this doctrine inculcates). However, the empirical research suggests that we are in a prison, and one whose stern contours are barely altered from over a generation ago. A new study by the Sutton Trust suggests that social mobility has not improved for thirty years. In fact, on many indicators, it has actually become much worse. The key findings are as follows:

* Intergenerational income mobility for children born in the period 1970-2000 has stabilised, following the sharp decline that occurred for children born in 1970 compared with those born in 1958.
* However, the UK remains very low on the international rankings of social mobility when compared with other advanced nations.
* Parental background continues to exert a very powerful influence on the academic progress of children:
* Those from the poorest fifth of households but in the brightest group drop from the 88th percentile on cognitive tests at age three to the 65th percentile at age five. Those from the richest households who are least able at age three move up from the 15th percentile to the 45th percentile by age five. If this trend were to continue, the children from affluent backgrounds would be likely to overtake the poorer children in test scores by age seven.
* Inequalities in obtaining a degree persist across different income groups. While 44 per cent of young people from the richest 20 per cent of households acquired a degree in 2002, only 10 per cent from the poorest 20 per cent of households did so.

This follows repeated studies which confirm the pattern: born poor, stay poor. Actually, the Centre for Economic Performance linked above is unequivocal that social mobility has not merely frozen since the days of the hated cloth cap and winter of disco (it was disco, wasn't it?), but actually declined substantially. That this painfully obvious reality is reasonably well understood, despite a barrage of spectacular misdirection at least gives us the beginning of a means to address the problem. Obviously, social mobility is not a panacea: equality is the correct demand. Social mobility only bears on social justice to the extent that it reveals a hardening of class domination. There is nothing inherently just in the ascendacy of those whose talents avail them in this age, over those whose talents were made for another age, or those whose disabilities make them dependent on others: in fact, if social mobility isn't a foil for social justice, then it is the creed of the sociopath.

Obviously, we cannot expect much assistance from our friends in the media, because when they aren't obsessed with a fucking canoeist or a fucking teddy bear, they're giving us the ruling class point of view about every important story. So, it's Richard Branson's take on Northern Rock, the government's take on pay restraint (in which reporters acquire the unique ability to read the mind of the Prime Minister: "Gordon Brown is very worried about..."), Al Gore's take on the environment (offered as radical dissent, ha ha ha). Which raises the question of what role the media plays in the class structure that we are trapped in. What, do you suppose is the corporate advertiser's position on the class struggle? How do shareholders feel about it? How do megalomaniacal reactionary corporate despots like Rupert and Conrad feel about it? How does the board of the Washington Post (which reads like a list of the most successful companies in Fortune magazine) feel about it? Obviously, the answer is that they don't feel any way about it because it doesn't exist. Because we live in a meritocracy, a class act all the way to the bank, where talent is both its own reward and the source of all rewards. Precisely so.

Labels: gordon brown, neoliberalism, new labour, social mobility, socialism

Strange affliction posted by lenin

There's some weird malady going about, called a credit crunch, an exogenous threat to the system, caused by fuck-knows-what. You can be sure it has no structural roots, no history to speak of, no precedents, nothing to tell us about the underlying biology of the global system, the way it survives, and the way it dies. On the contrary, it seems entirely random, striking with ungovernable intensity here, suddenly reappearing half way around the world, radiating through the south, then the north. Virologists have their theories, but no one is listening. Crucial vectors have been sealed off and declared safe, only to come under its pall again. Brutal culls are enforced - employees are suspected to be the source of the disease - but to no avail. Tony Robbins offers the power of positive thinking, but he is no match for the needed phagocytes. Soon, boys and girls, ladies and germs, the Pentagon may have its own theory about the origins of the horror. And then, biowarfare units will be despatched to Tehran, or Damascus, or whatever God-forsaken hole of evil-doers is infecting our water supply with this menace. Don't you remember liquid terror on the planes? It is global decadence, courtesy of a local bearer of the Al Qaeda franchise. With unyielding eschatological certainty, with the spark of divine revelation, no less, the White House spokesman will hold terrorism responsible.

Labels: capitalism, global economy, recession, unholy terror

One for the UN-fetishists posted by lenin

Every time Bush wants to attack somebody, or wherever a crisis breaks out, there are still a chorus (diminishing, perhaps) of liberals who call for UN intervention in its place. Old Labour types call for the restoration of the UN's authority, believing it to be an authentic legal body (in the sense of one that treats all constituents as formally equal), despite its patently undemocratic and rigid hierarchical structures. Multilateral imperialism fronted by chaps in blue helmets, violent global maintenance of the world system converted into a function of global technocrats - such was an enduring fantasy of the Fabians, and probably is still so today. The arguments on its behalf are perfectly liberal and humanitarian, even vaguely pacifist. Perhaps at one time this seemed vaguely plausible as the ranks of recently liberated Third World countries gathered in the UN and started making American reactionaries nervous in the 1960s and 1970s. That, however, is a world long gone, and the UN's record of increasingly allowing itself to be a military auxiliary of the US has diminished ay credibility it may once have had. Thus, Adrian Hamilton of The Independent correctly avers that the UN is seen as a tool of the West:

The trouble with denying this and protesting the U.N.'s innocence is that the Third World perception of it as an instrument of the West has some basis to it. If you take the Middle East, the succession of resolutions on Palestine, never implemented and almost universally ignored, the relentless pinioning of Saddam Hussein through sanctions and then enforced regime-change, the current pursuit of Iran through sanctions and threat, are all seen expressions not of international concern but western self-interest. And the same is true of much of Africa, where the blue helmet has come to represent western ideas of order rather than local concerns for justice.

Well, duh. Is there anywhere that they have actually sent UN troops and not produced crimes, anywhere they have not taken up the old imperial standard (the double one, I mean)? Whether it is sending troops into Haiti, Yugoslavia or the Congo, or applying hypocritical sanctions to Iran, Iraq and Palestine, the body has hardly distinguished itself as anything but the bearer of American gospel, ex cathedra. How about in Lebanon, where: "the UN itself breached its most basic principles that prohibit the use of force except in cases of self-defense, by first allowing an Israeli war to continue for over a month in Lebanon, at huge expense, and then essentially rewarding it with UN Resolution 1701 ... which allowed Israel an extra 48 hours, after the resolution was negotiated, to continue its attacks in Lebanon ... That's when Israel dropped 1 million cluster bombs in Southern Lebanon and people are still suffering from that.". Well, we know how about that, because the Secretary-General's representative went on to add that the resolution offered "great hope". (Speaking of Israel, how about this?)

The UN's astonishingly wide array of activities is somewhat disarming. With a certain sanctimonious language that is its trade mark, you can find it negotiating deals to prolong the despoilment of the planet (marketed as deals to curtail the despoilment of the planet); prolong the drugs war (marketed as rolling back the drugs war); mandate and entrench occupying regimes (sold as the gradual alleviation of this state of affairs); prolong global poverty (anti-poverty initiatives); blockade independent states (defense of state sovereignty); attack democratically elected governments (democracy promotion), and so on and on. If you pay attention to the literature of the World Bank or the IMF or similar institutions, you find that they usually consider themselves to be goody-goody outfits, development agencies, treasurers for the poor. Their miasmic technocratic language, the clouds of clauses (must have environmental aspect, energy efficiency, good governance, etc), are hardly enough to conceal the pro-capitalist agenda of these institutions. Partly due to their obviously Washington-driven policies, and a sustained campaign against these institutions by the Left, by Third World movements, by NGOs, few would take the self-image of these institutions seriously. May it be so with the UN, whose invention by Washington liberals proved more serviceable and less troublesome than they can ever have expected.

Labels: colonialism, imperialism, UN

American Jews Oppose Military Action against Iran posted by Yoshie

This just in: American Jews are opposed to any military attack on Iran, by a large margin, according to the American Jewish Committee's 2007 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion (6-25 November 2007).

7. Would you support or oppose the United States taking military action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons?
Support	35
Oppose	57
Not Sure	8

The rest of the survey is just as good.

No, this doesn't surprise us: the fact obscured by both the Israel lobby and some of its most foolish critics is that, after all these years, Jewish Americans still largely lean to the Left, thinking more like oppressed Blacks than privileged whites, and adjusted for income differences (lower incomes tend to correlate with more progressive opinions on foreign policy as well as economics), Jewish Americans are probably the most progressive group in the USA; and that neo-conservatives are a tiny minority at odds with a great majority of Jewish Americans they claim to represent (Glenn Greenwald, "New Poll Reveals How Unrepresentative Neocon Jewish Groups Are," Salon.com, 12 December 2007). Now, isn't it great to have what we know confirmed by the American Jewish Committee again?

Update

"Two-Thirds of Israelis Oppose Attack on Iran: Poll" (Agence France Presse, 6 December 2007). (Thanks, Pauly!) Take that, neo-cons!

Labels: iran, Israel, stop the war, US imperialism, us politics

They call it "pay restraint". posted by lenin

The coverage of the government's pay cuts across the public sector has pretty uniformly accepted the neoliberal case that it is about controlling inflation. And while public sector workers are 'valued' in a sentimental fashion, the general implication is that union leaders should shut their mouths and accept a period of belt-tightening in order to keep Brown's 'Miracle Gro' economy afloat. The fact that the coppers are now receiving high-priority and largely sympathetic discussion in most of the UK media doesn't alter this general tendency, since the argument is simply reformulated - yes, we must tackle inflation, but the police are a 'special case'. So, there are grumblings about illegal strike action. Now, they're not everyone's cup of tea, but I think we can cut a deal with the coppers. Put it like this: you don't bust up our illegal picket lines, and we won't bust up yours.

Predictably, there is a sizeable hunk of hypocrisy in the arguments about pay cuts. For, average executive pay is roughly 714% of the average wage in the UK. Inflation busting pay rises are the norm for the ruling class (as are bounteous pension pots). It's what they expect after all the hard work we've put in on their behalf. The government has plenty of measures at its disposal for restraining income among the owners: higher-rate income taxes, corporation taxes, windfall taxes, inheritance taxes etc. Yet, these are exactly the taxes that the government either freezes or cuts to ribbons, while driving up taxes on purchases, whose burden is disproportionately borne by the lower income earners. However, Brown's growth-formula prohibits any messing with profits, and therefore he has successfully initiated a dramatic attack on wages across the economy. Neoliberalism is a ruling class solution to an increasingly crisis-ridden capitalist economy: socialise the costs, privatise the profits, reduce welfare provisions, and transfer the burden of any crisis to the working class. And when they get uppity, send the police out to contain them.

Interestingly, recent statistics on child poverty suggest that most children in poverty belong to families with parents in work. This implies that aside from the problem of low benefits (and this government has aggressively sought to reduce the welfare bill further), one of the causes of the problem is low pay. The government's definition of child poverty is based on a simple weekly income amount, and therefore doesn't necessarily take into account the disproportionate impact of inflation for essential goods. It is a definition chosen to make the target of cutting it in half (the 2010 goal) relatively easy, because it means a large number of people are living only somewhat below the designated line, and therefore one can theoretically solve the problem with small-scale redistributive measures - although in fact, the government is going to miss even this target, despite having benefited from relatively stable economic growth. That is simply one index of the failure of reformism in a neoliberal age, in which the government must constantly dilute and fail on even its most limited agenda for progressive change.

Labels: gordon brown, inflation, new labour, pay cuts, rozzers

UFPJ, Iran, and the Democratic Party posted by Yoshie

United for Peace and Justice, a US anti-war coalition, has finally come to realize that it can't just focus on Iraq, compartmentalizing it from the rest of US Middle East strategy: "We must develop new ways to express our outrage that this war continues to cause so much death and destruction both in Iraq and here at home. At the same time, we must be vigilant in preventing a new war on Iran" ("2008: Looking Forward to a Critical Year for Peace and Justice," A Message from the UFPJ National Steering Committee, 10 December 10 2007). The second part of its three-part campaign in 2008, says the coalition's steering committee in the same message, will be to "focus energies on preventing any attacks, including the use of sanctions, on Iran."

So far, so good. Washington's rationale for and strategy of the Iraq War has shifted to containing Iran, and it is crucial for US activists, like those involved in UFPJ, to recognize this fact: Liz Sly, "In Iraq, U.S. Base Eyes Iran Border: New Effort to Curb Tehran's Influence," Chicago Tribune, 10 December 2007.

The devilish problem, like God, is in the details. The UFPJ steering committee says: "We will use many different tactics, including activities and projects specifically related to the election-year cycle" (emphasis added). Uh-oh. Will political activism be once again taken hostage by electoral politics, support for the Democratic Party in particular?

Update

I just heard at the UFPJ Iran Working Group listserv that the coalition is working with Just Foreign Policy, the National Iranian American Council, and other groups to coordinate a nationwide speaking tour of Stephen Kinzer, the author of All the Shah's Men, in February. There will be a conference call about it on Tuesday, 18 December 2007, 9 PM EST. Very good.

Labels: elections, iran, iraq, US imperialism, us politics

Lol Lord posted by lenin

He R In Prison...



...For Six and a Haff Yearz.

Labels: fraudster, liar, lolcats, lord conrad black, prison

"¡Más Chavista que nunca!" (More Chavista than ever!) posted by lenin

Guest post by elpresidente

There follows a list of quotes translated from the original Spanish from Venezuelan politicians and activists discussing the recent referendum.

In 2006, President Chávez won the presidential elections with 62 per cent of the vote, obtaining the support of 7,309,000 people. A year later, the president’s Constitutional Reform only received 4,380,000 votes in favour, which allows the simple observation that some 3 million people who voted for President Chávez in 2006 decided not to vote for his Constitutional Reform proposal.

In contrast, in 2006, Chávez’s closest competitor, the opposition candidate Manuel Rosales, obtained 4,292,000 votes. In 2007, those who were opposed to the reform numbered 4,504,000 - two hundred thousand more people than had voted for the opposition in 2006.

En 2006, el Presidente Chávez ganó las elecciones presidenciales con un 62 por ciento de los votos, obteniendo el apoyo de 7.309.000 personas. Un año después, la Reforma Constitucional del Presidente Chávez sólo logró 4.380.000 votos a favor, lo que a simple vista denota que unas 3 millones de personas que habían votado por el Presidente Chávez en 2006 decidieron no votar por su propuesta de Reforma Constitucional.

En contraste, en 2006 el más cercano competidor de Chávez, el opositor Manuel Rosales, obtuvo 4.292.000 votos. En 2007, quienes se opusieron a su propuesta de Reforma fueron 4.504.000 personas, doscientas mil personas más que quienes votaron por la oposición en 2006.


What is to be done? To leave this situation and ensure that the revolutionary process overcomes this moment and can deepen, it is essential that all power should pass to the people and their organisations.

The Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV) congress should become a more democratic organisation where all could think, propose, criticise and decide the best course for the Bolivarian revolution, without the restrictions or bureaucratic interference that prevents free discussion.

We have immense confidence that hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans will continue advancing the socialist project, and will confront on this road any attacks the right may try to make. But this confidence must be accompanied by unity and organisation, and the construction of a space to debate all these themes.

¿Qué se va hacer? Para salir de esta situación y que el proceso revolucionario supere este momento y pueda profundizarse, verdaderamente todo el poder debe pasar al pueblo y a sus organizaciones.

El Congreso del Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV) debe transformarse en la más democrática instancia donde todos podamos opinar, proponer, criticar y decidir lo mejor para la revolución bolivariana, sin restricciones y sin injerencias burocráticas que impidan una libre discusión.

Tenemos inmensa confianza en que cientos de miles de compatriotas podemos seguir con el proyecto socialista y enfrentar en ese camino cualquier intento que la derecha pretenda realizar. Pero a la confianza hay que acompañarla de unidad y de organización, construyendo un espacio común para debatir todos estos temas.

Stalin Pérez, Vilma Vivas, Marco García e Ismael Hernández, Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT) sindicalistas, Caracas

For so long the President has been favouring people with scarce resources and proposing actions to continue helping the poorest such as through the Consejos Comunales, and I believe that the abstention was a result of complacency, a lack of political maturity, and ingratitude, but the real problem is the situation of criminality and gangsterism in the barrios.

(The campaign) failed to organize regular political debates to explain and compare the advantages and disadvantages between socialism and capitalism. Some just wanted to take from the revolution, and for these, it doesn’t matter whether they vote or not. As such, those who abstained have to accept their irresponsibility.

A estas alturas del tiempo que lleva el Presidente favoreciendo a la gente de menores recursos y proponiendo acciones para seguir ayudandolos como es el caso de los Consejos Comunales, creo que la abstención obedece a la comodidad, falta de madurez política e ingratitud de la gente, pero un problema real es la situación en los barrios con visos de criminalidad y pandillerismo.

Falta realizar, como rutina, talleres de ideología que explique y confronte ventajas y desventajas entre socialismo y capitalismo. Algunos sólo quieren vivir de la revolución y por ello les da lo mismo votar o no. Así que los abstencionistas asuman su irresponsabilidad.

Dalia Pérez, Barquisimeto


I hope the President counter attacks… it seems to me that the politicians were overconfident in the campaign, but now we should advance on the attack.

Aspiro que el presidente haga lo que más el contraataque… ahí se crece… me parece que en la campaña hubo exceso de confianza de parte del políticos, pero ahora debemos avanzar al ataque.

José Rojas, Barrio El Junquito, Caracas

We have to find out what happened with this Chavismo Lite that stayed at home, we have to see what is going on with the people.

Furthermore, we have to make sure that its not just politicians in the media influencing this mystical public opinion, but that all Venezuelans are involved in politics.

We have to organize ourselves, go into the streets, construct this community, these consejos… we have to respect our President and bring the confused abstainers to the polls.

The fight continues comrades - this hasn’t finished, and he who doesn’t believe that doesn’t deserve to be called a revolutionary.

Tenemos que ver que pasa con ese Chavismo Light que se quedo en su casa, tenemos que ver que esta pasando en el pueblo.

Además tenemos que demostrar que no es político solo el que habla en medios y crea esa mitificada opinión publica, sino todos y todas las venezolanas y venezolanos, todos tenemos que estar inmiscuidos en problemas políticos.

Tenemos que organizarnos, salir a las calles, construir esa comunidad, esos consejos… tenemos que velar por nuestro presidente y llevar a las urnas a esos abstinentes confundidos.

La lucha sigue camaradas - esto no ha terminado, y el que lo crea así, no merece ser llamado revolucionario.

Pablo Trinidad, Cua, Venezuela


This is a clear message that the Venezuelan opposition has nothing assured, that it wasn’t a convincing victory, and much less an end to the hope of a new, more just, economic and political future.

Nothing has been lost, we will continue and we will advance.

Este es un claro mensaje a la oposición venezolana, que indica que no tienen nada asegurado, que no fue una victoria contundente y mucho menos un final a la esperanza de un nuevo furturo económico y político más justo.

Nada se ha perdido, continuemos, avancemos.

Ángela, Barrio 23 de enero, Caracas

I think that one of the reasons (for the defeat) was the scattered efforts to organize the PSUV on one side, and on the other, the discussion about the reform.

Of six million members, only one million and a bit attend meetings… the PSUV has not been organized, and this confrontation especially found it poorly prepared.

I believe in the PSUV, I believe it is necessary, but also I think it was a mistake to leave the organisation of the party until after the referendum.

Creo que una de las razones fue la dispersion de esfuerzos por un lado con la corformacion del PSUV y por el otro la discusion de la reforma.

De seis millones de inscritos solo asistian a las reuniones un millon y piquito… el PSUV no estaba organizado, y especialmente para esta confrontacion no se encontraba debidamente preparado.

Creo en el PSUV, creo que es necesario, pero tambien creo que ha podido posponerse su conformacion hasta pasar el referendum.

Francisco Acuña, Valencia

Union leaders and workers have to take to the streets to mobilize and fight for the 6 hour work day and the inclusion of the workers in the informal sector.

Our revolutionary process requires and deserves a profound and urgent change. There is no time or possibility for superficial changes. A debate on the great political and economic decisions has to be started with the masses, with social, popular and political organisations, and we need a revolutionary newspaper.

There has to be no more appointed functionaries who are interested in their own personal gain. The role of the Ministers of Popular Power must be usurped, so that the decisions referred to them are debated and decided by those who will be affected by these decisions.

There must be no more salaries that allow (state) bureaucrats to live as though in Saudi Venezuela, buying properties and staying in luxurious hotels. This has nothing to do with socialism, and the workers demand that all those involved in this (corruption), all the inefficient and unscrupulous functionaries are fired.

Those who work for the process (the revolution) those that sacrifice each day, the true workers’ leaders and the social leaders in the barrios, that are part of, and reflect the people, have to be involved.

Los dirigentes sindicales y los trabajadores tenemos que salir a movilizarnos y a conquistar hoy las 6 horas de trabajo y la inclusión de los informales.

Nuestro proceso revolucionario necesita y se merece un cambio profundo y urgente. Ya no hay tiempo ni posibilidades de cambios superficiales. Hay que abrir el debate de las grandes decisiones políticas y económicas con las bases, con las organizaciones sociales, populares y políticas del proceso, y necesitamos un periódico revolucionario.

Hay que terminar con los funcionarios elegidos a dedo que no reflejan más que sus intereses personales. Replantearse el rol de los Ministros del Poder Popular, para que todas las decisiones referidas a cada uno sean debatidas y decididas por las bases involucradas.

Hay que terminar con los salarios de funcionarios que viven como en Venezuela Saudita, que compran propiedades y duermen en lujosos hoteles. Eso nada tiene que ver con un proyecto socialista, y las bases reclamamos la salida de todos los involucrados en este proceso, la renuncia de estos ineficientes e inescrupulosos funcionarios.

Hay que darle paso a los que trabajan por el proceso, a los que se sacrifican a diario desde las bases, a los verdaderos liderazgos obreros y los populares en los barrios, que son parte y reflejo directo de sus sectores sociales.

Union Nacional de Trabajadores sindicalistas, Venezuela


Democratisation of communication is the way that the people can participate in the production and distribution of information through the media, and undercut the 80 per cent of the media that reflects the priorities of capitalism.

This revolutionary form of communication should spread from the masses who support the government - from each battalion, in each consejo comunal, in every community.

La democratización de la comunicación es la vía para que el pueblo participe en la producción y distribución de los mensajes mediáticos, de darse esto no importará que más del 80 por ciento de los medios informativos respondan al modo de producción capitalista. Esta forma revolucionaria de comunicación debe desplegarse desde las bases de quienes apoyan al gobierno - en cada batallón, en cada consejo comunal, en cada pueblo.

María Rivas, Barrio Catia, Caracas

We are not going to hear those opinionated commentators who accused Chávez of being a dictator, an autocrat, a manipulator, gorilla or Castrocommunist - all the insults and lies of the politicians, café society, columnists and editorialists - apologise after the President immediately accepted without any objection the adverse result, but in 2 seconds - crash! - the entire media slander collapsed.

If only Colombia or México could show the same confidence and trust in their (electoral) institutions!

This is the moment to attend to the democratic capacity of the PSUV, changing a strategy that had prioritised quantity over quality, and that had hindered the activists from participating. This is the moment to make internal discussion - the multiplicity of dissident opinions - a democratic requisite.

No vamos a escuchar al grueso de los opinólogos que han acusado a Chávez de dictador, autócrata, manipulador, gorila o castrocomunista - todos los insultos y calumnias de políticos, tertulianos, columnistas y editorialistas - entonar un mea culpa después de que el Presidente aceptara de inmediato y sin ningún reparo el resultado adverso, pero en dos segundos - ¡derrumbó! - la calumnia mediática fracasó.

¡Ojala mostrara el ejército la misma fidelidad institucional en Colombia, en México!

Es el momento de mimar la capacidad democrática del PSUV, revirtiendo una estrategia que ha primado la cantidad a la calidad y que ha impedido que sea la base quien se encuentre con su verdadero instrumento de emancipación. Es el momento de hacer de la discusión interna un requisito democrático, de multiplicar las disidencias.

Juan Carlos Monedero, Madrid, España

What did the opposition win? Not much really. The opposition simply achieved to slow down a little the revolution’s advance that continues as before.

And what did the opposition lose? They lost the few cards they had left - the claims that elections can’t be trusted, that President Chávez wouldn’t recognize the result, that Chavistas are violent. And now, furthermore, they have now declared themselves fervent defenders of the Bolivarian Constitution, which is more a victory for us.


¿Qué ganó la oposición? No mucho, realmente. La oposición simplemente logró frenar un poco el avance de la revolución para quedar igual que antes.
¿Y qué perdieron? Perdieron algunas banderas de las muy pocas que disponían.
Que el árbitro no es confiable, que el presidente Chávez no reconocería su triunfo, que los chavistas son violentos. Y ahora, además, se han declarado fervientes defensores de la constitución Bolivariana, lo cual es más bien un triunfo para nosotros.

What did the revolutionaries lose? A tool to accelerate the advance of the revolution, that maybe wasn’t well explained or was proposed at the wrong moment.

And what did we gain? An increase in our international prestige as an eminently democratic people, with a great democratic leader, and the opportunity to reflect, improve and rectify our strategies before it becomes too late.


¿Qué perdimos los revolucionarios? Una herramienta para aligerar el avance de la revolución, que tal vez no fue bien sustentada o se propuso en el momento equivocado.
¿Y que ganamos? Aumento de nuestro prestigio internacional como pueblo eminentemente democrático, con un gran líder demócrata, y la oportunidad de reflexionar, pulir y rectificar las estrategias antes de que sea demasiado tarde.

What happened was the best thing that could have happened. Considering the adversary that we faced, it wouldn’t have suited us to win the referendum with a small margin. If we were not going to win with a sufficient margin, it was better to lose.

The rapid recognition of our adversary’s victory, without any scheming, was taken by our entire movement in a disciplined manner and saved the country from who knows how much unnecessary violence.

Lo que pasó fue lo mejor que pudo pasar. Ante un adversario como el que enfrentamos, de ninguna manera nos convenía ganar el referendo con un margen estrecho. Si no ganábamos con suficiente ventaja, era mejor perder.

El rápido reconocimiento del triunfo del adversario, sin ninguna mezquindad, fue asumido por todo nuestro movimiento de manera disciplinada y le ahorró al país no se sabe cuantos actos de violencia innecesarios.

Ramón Prada, Caracas


One learns more from defeats than from victories.

The victory of the No could be considered a triumph of fear, of manipulation, terror, ignorance and disinformation.

Now, we should do away with easy slogans and take the ideological battle to the heart of the people.

De las derrotas se aprende más que de las victorias.

El triunfo del No podría ser considerado un triunfo del miedo, de la manipulación, del terror, de la ignorancia y de la desinformación.

Ahora, debemos derribar el slogan fácil y debemos ir a la batalla ideológica profunda en el seno de nuestro pueblo.

Oscar Figuera, Partido Comunista de Venezuela (PCV), Caracas


The opposition still has no direction, coherence or respect as a political force.

Should the right retake the presidency someday, ensure that revolutionary organisation on the ground, in the barrios, in workplaces, remains strong and independent to protect the gains that have been made.

Colombians expected Chávez, on hearing that the vote was lost, to declare martial law, send tanks onto the streets and soldiers into the TV studios.

To see this guy talking without formalities, without notes, with humour and grace, telling the opposition to enjoy their evening, and even debating the impact of the result in interactions with the people in the audience, openly and honestly, left Colombians a little disorientated.

I think this defeat and the grace in which the Chávistas have taken it will actually go a long way towards undercutting the propaganda war against the revolution.

La oposición todavía no tiene ninguna dirección, coherencia o respeto como una fuerza política.

Los derechistas deben toma la presidencia algún día, asegurar que la organisación revolucionaria - en los barrios, en los lugares de trabajo - permanezca fuerte e independiente para proteger los logros que han hecho.

Los colombianos esperaron que Chávez, cuando el escuchó que el voto había sido perdido, declarara la ley martial, enviando tanques a las calles, y soldados a los estudios de televisión.

Para mirar este man hablando sin formalidades, sin notas, y con humor y gracia, diciéndole a la oposición que disfrutaran su tarde, y aún debatiendo el impacto de los resultados con la audencia, abierta y honestamente, dejando a los colombianos un poco desorientados.

Yo creo que esta derrota y la gracia con lo que los Chavistas han aceptado, realmente lo hará disminuir la guerra de propaganda contra la revolución.

Rocío Jiménez, Bogotá, Colombia


We have been unable to achieve a revolutionary process from below, with high levels of popular protagonism, and the Bolivarian revolution is still essentially led from the top.

Lots of people that are with the revolution, refrained this time from voting because they are being increasingly marginalized by a centralized State revolutionary process. They feel it is not their revolution.

It is a revolution that being handed down to them. They are not the subjects of the process, but its mere objects. And this is what disenfranchised and alienated 3 million potential supporters. This is the wrong path that led us into defeat.

Nosotros no hemos podido lograr un proceso revolucionario desde abajo, con altos niveles de protagonismo popular, y la revolución Bolivariana esta todavía dirigida desde la cima.

Mucha gente que está con la revolución se abstuvo, esta vez, de votar porque ellos están siendo aumentados marginalmente por un proceso revolucionario y centralizado del estado. Ellos sienten que no es su revolución.

Es una revolución que está dándoles a ellos. Ellos no son los sujetos del proceso, pero son los meros objectos. Y esto es lo que causado el disenfranchisimiento y la alienación de tres millones de partidarios. Este es el camino errado que ha dirigido a la derrota.

Teresa Arraíz, Ciudad Bolívar


How can the opposition move beyond its stupid, monotonous and shallow ‘anti-dictator’ mantra? They can't, because they have nothing of substance beyond it to offer.

The revolution has occupied, with its vast and deep program of social reforms, all possible political space.

Besides, as soon as the opposition tries to agree on a proposal that is not just tired propaganda, they will explode into a myriad of fragments.

Nothing truly strategic and positive holds together the opposition's fragile concoction of contradictory and petty motives.

¿Cómo puede la oposición moverse por encima de la mantra estúpida, monótona y superficial de ‘contra-dictador’? No pueden, porque no tienen nada de substancia para ofrecer.

La revolución ha ocupado, con su programa de inmensas y profundas reformas sociales, todo el espacio político posible..

Además, tan pronto como la opocisión intenta estar de acuerdo en un propuesta que no es propaganda cansada, ellos estallarán en una miríada de fragmentos.

Nada verdadamente estratégico y positivo sostiene juntos la mezcla frágil de los motivos contradictorios e insignificantes de la opocisión.

Augusto Piñango, Santa Rosalía, Portuguesa


We haven’t lost anything - just a possibility, but we are going to convince our compañeros, those who have doubts, those who have fears… raise the socialist standard, learn more, unite together, teach, and continue demonstrating through action - more than through theories - what socialism is.

No hemos perdido nada, en verdad perdimos sí una posibilidad, pero vamos a convencer a los compañeros, a los habitantes, a los que tienen dudas, a los que tienen temores… levanta la bandera del socialismo, estudiemos más, compactémonos mucho más, expliquemos más y sigamos ahora demostrando en los hechos en qué consiste, más allá de la teoría, la propuesta socialista.

President Hugo Chávez



Chavez's concession speech:

I prefer it like this. I prefer that it ends like this.

Lo prefiero así. Yo prefiero que haya terminado así.

I am calm, as I hope all Venezuelans are at this moment. Let us all be proud with what we have done, and continue to respect each other.
Now, we must all recognize the decision, the very tiny margin. I say this to emphasis all those who voted Sí and to say to the leaders of the opposition - I sincerely hope you know how to deal with this success.

Estoy tranquilo, como espero que los venezolanos, a partir de este momento, también lo hagan. Estemos todos orgullosos con lo que hemos hecho, cada quien en su ámbito, con sus posiciones, respetando al otro.
Ahora, todos debemos reconocer que es una decisión ahí, muy chiquitica. Digo esto para recordar a quienes votaron por el Sí y a los dirigentes de oposición, mi sincera recomendación de que sepan administrar esa victoria.

I will sleep tranquilly. Those who are going to celebrate should know how to manage their victory. You gained it, but I wouldn’t have wanted such a pyrrhic victory… the vote totals are irreversible, and I recognize that.

I congratulate my adversaries on this victory - it was a hard fight.

For now, we couldn’t… (but) the reform proposal is still alive, it hasn’t died.

Yo dormiré tranquilo. Los que vayan a celebrar que sepan administrar su victoria. Ustedes se la ganaron, pero yo esa victoria pírrica no la hubiera querido. Más bien prefiero que las cifras hayan llegado al nivel de irreversibilidad y sentarme delante de todos ustedes a reconocerlo.
Felicito a mis adversarios por esa victoria; nosotros estamos hechos para una batalla larga. Por ahora no pudimos… La propuesta de reforma está viva, no ha muerto.

I assume the responsibility for not achieving 50 per cent plus one for the proposal - but it nearly achieved it.

It has to be accepted: in Venezuela, despite all the scheming and lies, as President Castro described it a few days ago, a people under fire - under an intense artillery fire of lies and fears - still voted 49 per cent for the socialist project. Despite everything, this is a great political advance.

Yo asumo la responsabilidad de esta propuesta, que no logró el 50 por ciento más uno; pero casi lo logro.
Hay que aceptarlo: venimos de una situación donde en Venezuela no había rumbo político, a pesar de todas las artimañas y mentiras que circularon, como el Presidente Castro lo describió hace unos días, un pueblo bajo fuego - fue sometido a un intenso fuego de artillería de mentiras y temores - sin embargo, que haya votado 49 por ciento por el proyecto socialista, a pesar de todo es un gran paso político.

We continue the battle to construct socialism, within the Constitution. In the proposal there are very audacious ideas, without precedents.
I will not erase a single comma of this proposal. The proposal continues…

Nosotros seguimos en la batalla por la construcción del socialismo, en el marco de la Constitución. En la propuesta hay ideas muy audaces, sin precedentes.
Ni una sola coma de esta propuesta, yo la retiro. La propuesta la continúo haciendo…

We lost 3 million votes - for what reasons? It is necessary to evaluate, although I am completely confident that the immense majority of those people continue with us, those who did not vote Sí. They abstained; had doubts, fears, no time - there was no chance to explain….There are many political factors that we must take into account in this battle… we respected the rules of the game… (and) it is not the first time.

A nosotros nos faltaron 3 millones de votos de personas que no fueron a votar. ¿Por cuáles razones? Hay que evaluarlo, estoy completamente seguro que la inmensa mayoría de esas personas sigue con nosotros, que no votaron por el Sí; se abstuvieron: dudas, temores, faltó tiempo, capacidad para explicar….Hay bastantes elementos políticos que debemos tomar en cuenta en esta batalla… respetamos las reglas del juego… No es la primera vez.

The Chief of State invited the foreign journalists present to this concession, to observe how Venezuela continues speaking openly, with freedom of expression, criticism and demonstrations - as it has always done - and so to cause the accusations of a supposed dictatorship in Venezuela to crumble.

El Jefe de estado conminó a los periodistas extranjeros presentes en la alocución, a observar cómo en Venezuela se continuará hablando abiertamente, libertad de expresión, críticas y manifestaciones, como siempre ha sido, con lo que se desmoronan las acusaciones de una supuesta dictadura en Venezuela.

No more in Venezuela will there be elections as in the past… when the (workers’) Communist vote was torn between Acción Democrática and COPEI. This vote is a demonstration of the credibility and confidence that we have in our Constitution and in the institutions (misions and consejos comunales) that have been created as part of our Bolivarian democracy.

Ya nunca se verá en Venezuela lo que veíamos nosotros en las elecciones del pasado…cuando el Partido Comunista se lo repartían entre la Acción Democrática y el COPEI. Esta es una demostración de la credibilidad que debemos tener en nuestra Constitución y en las instituciones que ha creado, en nuestro sistema político de la democracia bolivariana.

I congratulate those who voted for the proposal and those who rejected it - to those who had doubts, this one (democracy) is the way… I hope they will now spurn, for ever, their nihilistic road to violence, destabilization and ignorance.
Venezuelan democracy is becoming mature and each process that we experience, each political moment, is allowing our country to continue advancing this new Bolivarian project that began in 1999.

Felicito a quienes votaron por la propuesta y quienes la rechazaron - a aquellos que tenían dudas, éste es el camino y ojalá se olviden, para siempre, de las trochas, los saltos al vacío, de los caminos de la violencia, de la desestabilización y el desconocimiento.
La democracia venezolano va madurando y cada proceso que vivimos, cada jornada política, va permitiendo que nuestro país continúe madurando, en este nuevo proyecto Bolivariano que comenzó en 1999.

To paraphrase the Liberator, Simón Bolivar, who, at the moment of presenting the text of Bolivia’s Constitution, said that if it was not accepted, he would bequeath it for the future, the reform proposal is entrusted to the immediate future.

(With this vote) our Bolivarian Constitution, so hard fought for, has finally been recognised by the opposition.

The opposition have to defend the Constitution… I hope (the opposition’s participation in the vote) hasn’t been a momentary political tactic. I want to have faith. We are going to construct the Venezuela that the Constitution reflects.

Parafrasear al Libertador Simón Bolívar, cuando en la oportunidad de entregar el texto de la Constitución de Bolivia, dicho que si no lo aceptaban lo legaría para el futuro, esta propuesta de Reforma la lega para un futuro inmediato.

Nuestra tan luchada constitución…que por cierto, uno de los grandes logros es que la oposición reconoció esta Constitución Bolivariana.
Han salido a defenderla. Espero que no haya sido un recurso momentáneo y manejo electorero. Quiero creer en la buena fe. Vamos a construir la Venezuela que aquí esta reflejada.

Labels: chavez, socialism, venezuela

Capitalism Orders You to Have Fun. posted by lenin

Today is dress-down Friday. Don't forget the funny tie or the outlandish hat. Don't forget the ribtickling Kermit the Frog shirt. Friday is funday. These employers really take the fucking piss, don't they? Not content with sucking the lifeblood out of you for the working day and tacitly getting free overtime out of you (they call it 'flexibility', almost as if your free labour was a fact about your personality, something you willingly and charitably part with because you aren't one of those inflexible assholes), they have the nerve to try and structure your fun. Office drinks with people you fucking hate, at which you can expect flirting from middle managers who would ordinarily be pushing you around, and fun-filled news items about other departments in the company that you didn't ask for and you don't need. Days out, where you are invited to humiliate yourself in some sporting event like bowling or baseball while getting slowly drunk. Team games, the weekly cake whip-round, the birthday cards. Your fun. Your affections. Often your time. On their orders. Apparently, this sort of thing boosts productivity and team cohesion, but it seems more likely that it reinforces an ideological norm of cheerful willingness to be fucked around, to participate in official lies, to tolerate hypocritical wall-to-wall grins and bonhomie with people who will tomorrow be undermining you or overworking you by any means possible. Hey - you don't want to be a bad sport do you?

In one of my previous jobs, shortly before a wave of redundancies that caught yours truly, the manager thought it was a good idea for an Easter fun stunt to travel round the country in a bunny outfit with a dull power-point presentation filled with apalling attempts at humour. He called it the 'Mad Hatters Tea Party' (there was cake and various beverages). I mean it. He really did that shit. If I'd had time to prepare for this absurdity, I'd have been waiting with a shotgun behind the door: "Hewwo wabbit!" As it is, the worst that happened to him was a ubiquitous blank non-committal stare that the British seem to have honed to perfection, and which disarms bogus humorists in seconds. I believe I did my part. Why do we put up with this? Why don't we reassert our right to be miserable bastards? Be a bad sport. Be uncooperative. Be inflexible. Be prepared to poop a party in an instant. Hey, if you want some real fun, unionise the place, strike and drive them out of business. It's the best years of your life they're sucking out of you, dammit.

Labels: capitalism, fun, zombie labour

Another way of destroying the evidence. posted by lenin

The torture tapes you won't get to see. Okay, so the CIA tortures. No surprise. The empire permits itself a wide range of disciplinary technologies, from drowning to rape to electrocution to burning to the use of incapacitating drugs. There is also the technique of "Palestinian hanging", the tearing off of skin, and the use of phobias and humiliation. This baroque assortment of bipolitical measures are known, in the pious language of American political culture, as "enhanced interrogation techniques". Furthermore, its allies, such as the risible "President for Life" Hosni Mubarak, are sold torture equipment to keep their own populations in line. It's a global management technique, the obscene obverse of its Disney-led seduction efforts. (Do you ever actually sit down and watch this Disney shit, by the way? Every one, every single production, is a charming retelling of 'the American story': variously, kings are bad; everyone can succeed if they apply their own unique talents; diversity is better than social justice; girls are feckless, and men are heroic; bad guys have British accents, and good guys - even Parisian rats - always have American ones; etc etc. What do you mean, 'its obvious'?) Since the term seduction has itself been pre-cooked and marinated in bullshit sauce, it's always worth remembering that seduction is a form of attack. In this case, it's a deadly inducement to forgetting, offered by the most determinedly forgetful culture industry on the planet. If you forget about the vast, unprecedented scale of the global application of violence and terror by the American empire since its inception, which you are always invited to do, it is no longer incongruent to hear of American troops "discovering" an "Al Qaeda torture chamber" (in Iraq of all places), and then to hear the most explicit advocate of torture in recent US presidential history moralise about it. You don't absolutely have to burn the tapes, although it helps if you know there are no spare copies knocking around: you simply have to erase its memory in public culture. Populate the terrain of idle thought with fantasies of slick violence, pornography, furry rabbits, car chases, technophilic bondage, evil dictators and heroic troops, talking tortoises, revisionist history, opulent glamour, etc etc. "Come on," the empire exhorts, "there must be something we have that you want. Forget about that guy getting whacked, he hates you anyway, doesn't like freedom. Actually he's a real misogynist, did you know that? Bad environmental politics too. And he's a torturer - some people are real bastards. Hey, go behind that velvet curtain over there and I guarantee you'll forget all about this messy business in five seconds."

Labels: biopolitics, empire, torture, US imperialism

Exuberant posted by lenin

Vice President Cheney today predicted Iraq will be a self-governing democracy by the time he leaves office, calling the current U.S. surge strategy “a remarkable success story” that will be studied for years to come.... The articles goes on:

Cheney, who has been widely criticized for overly optimistic — and sometime flat wrong — projections in the past, sounded as confident as ever that the Bush administration will achieve its objectives in Iraq.

That was always my criticism of Cheney - too optimistic, too hooked on the bright side of life, unwilling to stare difficulty in the face, too hubristic. Now, mystifyingly, he sounds confident, as if all his great plans for democracy and freedom for Iraqis haven't been ruined. Doesn't he realise?

Labels: cheney, iraq, violent psychotic

Hands on the People of Iran posted by Yoshie

There is an organization in the United Kingdom that calls itself "Hands Off the People of Iran," an organization created in sectarian competition with the larger, more established Stop the War Coalition and the UK branch of the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran.

HOPOI declares in its founding statement: "We want regime change -- both in Iran and in the imperialist countries."¹ But the means it advocates in its bombastic slogans show that it promotes "regime change" only in Iran.

Why do I know that? Because HOPOI, in the same statement, calls for "[s]upport to all working class and progressive struggles in Iran against poverty and repression" and "[s]upport for socialism, democracy and workers' control in Iran," but not in the imperialist countries.

Perhaps the organization ought to change its name to "Hands on the People of Iran." After all, its approach to the domestic politics of Iran is very hands-on.

1 BTW, I thought that communists, like most of HOPOI's main organizational backers, wanted social revolution, not mere "regime change." O Tempora! O Mores!

Labels: imperialism, iran, socialism, stop the war

Meanwhile, in an un-spotlit sideshow in the 'war on terror'... posted by lenin

1 million made homeless, tens of thousands fleeing in terror every day, a massive famine brewing, and the American-imposed government blocks food aid.

Labels: 'war on terror', somalia

Snap posted by lenin

The IAEA says that the findings of the US intelligence review on Iran's nuclear capacities are consistent with their own, adding to the propaganda woes for the Bush administration. Obviously, Bush is extremely pissed off. "Iran is still a threat", he hoots, refusing to rule out air strikes. The neocons are thunderous - another Munich, Podhoretz says. And look who else is floundering. "None of us is advocating a rush to war," a flustered Clinton says. Really?

Labels: air strikes, iran, nuclear energy, US imperialism

Scarface posted by lenin

He's back:

Labels: gangster chic, paul wolfowitz

Bear Bottom posted by lenin

So, is anyone else tired of hearing about that goddam teddy bear? You know the one I mean. If there's one thing the media loves more than trivial bullshit, it's trivial bullshit that's somehow 'about' Islam. As soon as the word 'Islam' enters a headline, the editor feels a stiffy in the breeze and pushes it to top of page one. They love nothing better than to howl at that crescent moon. And what a din! This unfortunate woman gets banged up for fifteen days and suddenly the scum British press thinks that's too long to be locked up on a bullshit charge, forgetting that they want people to be locked up for as much as ninety days on no charge. Usually when someone gets unfairly locked up in this country, the press are the ones demanding the restoration of the death penalty - asphyxiation on the end of a rope being their recommended procedure. Now they're all bleeding heart, card-carrying humanitarians. Not only the death penalty but prison has lost its charm for them. Sour grapes if you ask me.

Some people who don't want to get dragged along with the Islamophobia end up being coopted by the spectacle, dragged into iffy, Ciffy 'debates' about exactly what the protocols are for looking after Muslim children in a school in Sudan. As if there would be some uniformity or consensus on this question. As if the religious didn't come in all shapes and sizes (well, Catholic priests do). But why bother? There is nothing about this case that isn't immediately obvious. Obviously, no one has to go to prison for doing anything in particular to a teddy bear, since prisons are at the best of times unbearable and inhumane places where people are put through more or less subtle forms of torture. This is what prison is about. Equally obvious is that this particular imprisonment is important to the media only because of the Islamaturgy involved. So, instead of being lured into a sterile argument about how offensive the word 'Muhammad' can be, it's probably much more sensible to either ignore this horseshit entirely or diagnose the media obsession itself. But then there are other people, probably some of them sniffing around this blog, who want to do exactly what the news says, follow orders and belch out feckless denunciations every five seconds. I know some people imagine that they're seriously, unproblematically outraged at someone being locked up for something this ridiculous. Well, fine, but I don't believe you. I think you only care about this because the television said so, so you can take your fake 'concern' about this case and go fuck yourself with it. Here's a reminder: for every minute you've spent emoting about this case, you've ignored another dead Iraqi (approximately one a minute is the going rate). Not that this is the only thing worth focusing on, but let's not pretend that your apparent outrage is anything other than a disgusting display of narcissism.

Back to the media, for whom you can invent your own collective insults. The anecdotal is obviously a way to deter aggregate, structural analysis. It focuses you on the petty details of a petty case. Sure, we know the ins and outs of each ridiculous saga, enough to sustain a boring pub conversation about it. However, we also know that 91% of news stories about Muslims are negative, probably in most cases precisely because of an obsession with decontextualised fragments of news such as this one. The big picture is hinted at - as in the ridiculous efforts of Channel 4 News to connect this with the issue of Darfur. That big picture is when, where and how Western armies should be sent in to start killing more of these people. Cumulatively, the stories work to provide a superficial veneer of consistency for a set of stories about the 'war on terror' that are otherwise totally implausible and so dumb even a Kilroy fan would be hard-pressed to believe them. It's classic imperial projection: we want to kill them, but we have to pretend that they are the ones who are coming to kill us. And so we take a few measly instances like this preposterous bear story and convert them into struggles about 'values' or some cognate term. Not because the next time they invade Sudan they expect you'll still be stewing over that bear story. Not even because this sensationalist twaddle sells a few papers or supplies the meat for a reasonably market-sustaining drama. I suppose partly, it's because the evidence for their clash-of-civilizations is so thin on the ground that they will resourcefully appropriate any old detritus and turn it into a modern day allegory. The main reason, though, is that Islam now produces a sort of Pavlovian auto-response for news editors and the commentariat. They are simply that well trained.

Labels: teddy bear

US intelligence shafts neocons posted by lenin

This is good news: American intelligence admits that Iran isn't trying to build a nuclear weapon, and it doesn't even know if there are plans to start trying. I'm not sure exactly why intelligence would undermine Bush in this way, but that is certainly what has happened. Possibly, this reflects divisions in the American state over how to deal with Iran. Of course, the administration has the chutzpah to claim that the report shows they were right all along and must continue their current policies, but they know it's a harder propaganda battle now. It's also important to recognise that this specifically undermines the virulently hawkish propaganda put out by Hillary Clinton in her campaign, an issue that has been costing her votes. Bear in mind, this woman actually accused the Bush administration of playing down the threat from Iran. You have to be far to the right to outflank the psychotics in the current US government, but she fucking managed it. Even with a report like this, the Bush administration's so-what attitude and the fact that it's time is running out suggests that there may after all be an airstrike - don't forget that the big casus belli, the one that is being prepared far more assiduously than the noocular threat is the claim that Iran is helping kill US soldiers in Iraq. And you can expect some preemptive strikes on Iran's human rights record (from the Bush administration, of all people) in preparation for any attack - not because it would make any attack literally comprehensible, but as an attempt to confuse and to some extent defuse opposition. If I were an Iranian, I would keep watching those skies.

Labels: iran, nuclear energy, US imperialism

Chavez loses referendum posted by lenin

According to the Hands off Venezuela blog, the CNE has announced a narrow victory for NO. Chavez has accepted the result. HOV comments:

in relation to the 2006 presidential elections, the opposition has only increased less than 100,000 votes (thought this is not yet 100% count), while Chávez loses 2.8 million which go to abstention.

Independent polls suggested beforehand that among likely voters, Chavez would probably win it, and furthermore that Chavez's call for socialism to be made part of the constitution was broadly supported. Leaving aside the probably limited effect of 'Operation Pliers', the reality is probably that Chavez's supporters were simply unwilling to turn out to vote for a constitution among whose main priorities was to enhance executive power. This was always the most problematic aspect of Chavez's reforms. Unfortunately, this result will probably strengthen the rightist opposition, despite the continuing popularity of Chavez and his other reforms.

Labels: chavez, cia, socialism, venezuela

Another round of ethnic cleansing on the way, courtesy of NATO. posted by lenin

Every state that seceded from Yugoslavia ended up enforcing ethnic cleansing of some kind. Either the logic of one secession produced another smaller secession (with the hope of unification with the federal republic) or the new state simply proceeded to attack and eventually remove or kill legitimate residents, or both. Kosovo is expected to unilaterally declare independence in about a week's time. The current policy of NATO, which is to oversee Kosovan secession, is expected to produce a new wave of terror, and an attempt by the perpetually harrassed and abused Serbs to secede from the new 'free' Kosovo. The last wave of ethnic cleansing in mid-to-late 1999 drove 200,000 Serbs out of the province, and this one may get rid of the remaining 120,000. Now, the Kosovan leadership argues that the Serbian government will order Serbs to leave (I'm sure I've heard this line before?). It also argues that the result of the secession will be violent, crisis-ridden, punctuated by blockades and humanitarian disasters - but that Kosovo will win through the support of the "international community". To put it another way, you could be sure they wouldn't take a risk like this if the policy wasn't so clearly mandated, as it is, by Bush, Brown, Sarkozy, and the rest of that ilk. UNMIK, in case you have forgotten, still asserts sovereignty over the country. British troops are among those likely to be sent to back up those forces. So, what you may be about to see is a bloody conflagration with NATO troops effectively deployed to ensure the secession contain the violence a little, and effectively look on as ethnic cleansing takes place. It is the final step in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, and it promises to be as swell as every preceding step. And they're going to call this 'freedom', which - as we all know - is 'messy'.

Labels: kosovo, NATO, serbs, yugoslavia

Sartre's Godless Philosophy posted by lenin

The trouble with the professional atheists or anti-theists these days is, apart from everything else that is bad and reductionist and ridiculous in what they write, that their apparently passionate commitment comes too cheap. It doesn't require that they give anything up, change anything about themselves, or challenge anything fundamental about the society. They don't have to engage in any analysis deeper than that which finds religious doctrine to be literally false, philosophically shallow, socially repressive and politically dangerous. Big deal. It never seems to have occurred to them that there might be more radical consequences of the absence centre of ontology than that you should support the teaching of evolution, not kill people for God, and support the right of knocked up teenagers to have abortions. Actually, there is nothing there but the regurgitation of bourgeois wisdom and morality, both of which are pretty contemptible. You can have moralism without the Gods, proscription and prescription without the Mosaic tablets, universal virtues without the heavens. There are no radical consequences: all will be much as it was before, because God was never all that important except as an infantile effort at reflection on causality and the universe. In Hitchens' case, you not only get the bourgeois wisdom that capitalism is not responsible for any of its ills, or that the empire is virtuous and its failings forced upon it by an evil-minded class of religious "riff-raff" and wreckers, that all religions are equally bad, especially Islam (because, as Amis put it, "We are hearing from Islam") - you are particularly treated to the idea that the 'war on terror' and support thereof was a compulsory response to the attacks on New York and Washington. None of it was a choice. (To descend further into the territory of bad faith, Hitchens didn't simply disaffiliate from the Left; ruthlessly ingratiate himself with far right publications and institutions which came with a flood of cash, celebrity and upward class mobility; accept and espouse some of the most bigoted versions of American nationalism; engage in an outrageous campaign of lies and vilification on behalf of the American government, etc. No - he discovered that the Left was suddenly not what it once was. Once a principled position, socialist anti-imperialism had become an auxiliary to tyranny, an alibi to Slobo and Saddam and all of America's other enemies. Further, it had become historically obsolete, its most recent upsurge also its last. Hitchens, then, could do no other than wave a sad farewell and initiate nuptials with the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The Left had, in the old pathetic formula, abandoned him.)

These people may prosper among sadsack American liberals who think fundamentalism is their big enemy, but what can they offer people who have got beyond that fetish? Buttkiss. If you want atheism done properly, you have to consult a French communist philosopher. For here, there is no comfort to be had - in fact, God's absence is a rather embarrassing and difficult fact. It is problematic. The first consequence of the absence of God in Sartre's philosophy is the fact that there is no such thing as 'human nature' - I've seen some commentaries referring to Sartre's particular view of 'human nature', but it's quite clear that he didn't believe such a thing existed. There might, at most, be a human condition, which is somewhat different. In the religious view, there is a Creator, a sort of artisan who creates humankind according to a particular conception He has of them, a pre-existing essense. In the non-religious existentialist view, existence precedes essence. There is no Creator, no pre-existing blueprint. We only become what we are having willed it ourselves. Our 'essence' is the sum of our actions in the world. This is not to say that there is no facticity about yourself - it is not a fantasy of limitless protean capability. But you can always choose how to relate to this facticity. There is a transcendental capacity, in which one can conceive, theorize, plan etc. Which brings us to the second consequence: you always bear responsibility for your choices, even in the most restrictive and desperate circumstances. There is no case in which you do not have a choice unless you have ceased to exist. For example, if someone sticks an ice-pick in your head, you can either wilt and slump to the floor, or you can try to bite his hand off.

Against all philosophical determinisms, against religious resignation, against complacent assumptions about human nature, Sartre insists on responsibility. One cannot say "I was only following orders", or "they started it", or "everyone's doing it", or "it's only natural". There are no excuses: one has to fully accept responsibility for one's decisions, and every action is the consequence of a decision, including falling in love or exploding with rage. Further, since one acts in the world, one does not simply act in isolation, but implicitly as a model for others to follow - hence, of each action the question has to be asked "what if everyone did as I am doing?", even if it is a 'private' action. The third consequence is that one cannot proceed as if God's absence makes no difference. Existence is a very different state of affairs without the maker. There can no longer be any good a priori, since this is a metaphysical notion, and we lack a perfect and omnipresent consciousness to think it. You simply have to spend your money and make your choices, accepting fully the anguish that comes with choosing for the whole of humanity without guarantees. The fourth consequence is that, since you are condemned to liberty, whatever humankind may now be, the future is virgin territory: it has to be shaped, rather than stoically accepted. This flies against any crummy historical determinism or stageism. It isn't, again, that each historical terminus doesn't come with a set of structural capacities that we did not choose; it is that we can absolutely choose whether and how to exercise them.

Mauvaise foi, or 'bad faith' is a crucial part of Sartre's doctrine. There are two ways to act in bad faith: one is to pretend that one simply is what one is, the sum of one's facticity; the other is to avoid one's facticity altogether and disappear into transcendence, wishful thinking, plans without fruition, dreams without action. So, if I say "I haven't been as active in politics as I'd like to have been because of the pressures of work and other activities", there is an element of bad faith involved, because I have chosen to prioritise those activities. I ought to be able to say that this decision has been the right one and to justify it. If at some point I move to the right or abandon politics altogether for a career, I might say "well, all that was finished, everyone else had given up, and anyway what difference can an individual make?". That would be in bad faith, since I am denying my own choice and its consequences. If I go on to patronise my former self and denounce my own radicalism as an adolescent tantrum that should be recalled with tender contempt, I will deny that I was perfectly free to take a different orientation. Similarly, if I drift into total inactivity but continue to conceive of radical social change without lifting a finger to achieve it, it is bad faith of the latter kind, a resort to irresponsible dreaming. Of course there are pressures in each given situation (toward resignation, despair, passivity, careerism, rightward lurches etc), but I am at liberty to resist them.

There is more obviously in Sartre than in any other philosopher a direct political context to his argument. He wrote Of Being and Nothingness during the Nazi occupation of France, where it was not uncommon to hear the sort of bad faith arguments that we are all tempted by. What can I do, I am only a small businessman with a massive debt, the Nazis could crush me. Yes, I make money from extermination, but this is the way of the world. I am at the mercy of human nature or historical forces. I am a soldier, I am not employed to philosophise M Sartre, so get back in your cell and shut up. This situation, one of enormous pressure, illuminated fundamental human capacities in a way that 'ordinary life' cannot. Sartre's godless philosophy exhorts one to analyse, to carefully think through the consequences of one's decisions, to eschew resignation, and to assume full responsibility. It is never good enough to engage in cost-free, risk-free critique, to enjoy the privileges of one's role without ever having to consider its bases. It is never adequate to attack religion unless one is prepared to take the point to its logical conclusion and part with all forms of self-deception and illusion. It is, in short, the epitome of bad faith to indulge in the critique of the god delusion and its destructive aspects if one is busy dispensing Streicherisms for the Weekly Standard.

Labels: atheism, bad faith, existentialism, phenomenology, sartre

Zero Degree Turn posted by lenin

This Iranian drama about the Holocaust is a big hit:

Labels: holocaust, iran

World Against War - International Peace Conference posted by left turn

Watch all videos from the conference here.

Labels: afghanistan, anti-war, cairo, conference, hezbollah, iran, iraq, occupation, palestine, peace, turkey

On white plagues and black magic posted by lenin

Since it is World AIDS day. The old thesis that Haiti was responsible for bringing the dominant HIV strain to the United States and Europe has been resuscitated. The scientists behind it say that they may now be able to trace its origins back to the Congo, and find a cure. As these authors point out, the theory is dubious, and the last time this accusation was in vogue was when Haitians were labouring under a US-imposed dictatorship in the 1980s. The scientific work behind these claims, and the nature of their presentation, is questioned only in some of the mainstream coverage. In fact, as William Bowles points out, the study is months old and has been gravely criticised by leading scientists in the meantime, not least because some of the speculations offered as conclusion rest on the irrational and dangerous mythology of a single identifiable transmitter of the virus. Given the trends in sex tourism, AIDS might as easily have been transmitted from any part of the United States to any part of the Carribean (although, curiously, Cuba has largely averted the pandemic). However, part of the significance of these claims is in part the ideology they slot into, that being the Kaplanesque drama of decivilisation in which Africa is the source of disease, crime and political instability.

One of the most powerful challenges to this dogma is also one that has been attacked most vitriolically, though praised handsomely by some highly qualified peeps. Edward Hooper's work of reportage and detection, The River, traces the origins of AIDS to polio vaccinations in the Belgian-ruled Congo in the 1960s. The vaccinations were, in Hooper's view, probably contaminated with SIV from chimps livers harvested (often through live vivisection) by the medical centre in question and used to cultivate the vaccine. If Hooper is right, then AIDS is one further tragedy of colonialism. No wonder, then, that such invective has been poured on the book by some: it's sanctimonious, boring, doctrinaire, hysterical, etc (one of Hooper's hostile critics happens to be the lead author of the latest study). Hooper mildly terms this mixture of condescension and derision a "defensive response". Even if Hooper's basic thesis turns out to be wrong, which seems unlikely, there remain huge questions opened up by Hooper's reporting - strange gaps in the record, missing documents, the problems with the way in which science has been conducted, the narrow avoidance of transmission of other dangerous diseases through the same practises etc. That the alternative theory, that infected chimp meat was ingested by hunters, is widely believed among virologists tells us a great deal more about the status of science in the ideological field than it does about the status of the theory.

Even if Hooper was wrong, we would be left with the question of social justice. Capital's systemic opportunism is such that, while AIDS has killed tens of millions of people, most of whom are Africans, Western pharmaceutical capital has located unprecedented profit opportunities in the holocaust. Its most aggressive political auxiliaries now in command of the White House, relying on an opportunistic coalition between the Christian Right and Wall Street, are pushing policies designed to intensfy the problem with a sadistic insistence on 'abstinence education' which substantially blunts the effect of a victory won by activists in 2001, specifically in their demand that Third World countries should be permitted to break the intellectual property claims of medical giants. So AIDS, a holocaust inflicted by colonialism, is now one that is perpetuated by capitalism. Some people might ask, as a certain oleaginous American politician did on Question Time a few years back, if we will leave anything to be settled outside of politics. Isn't this one of those things that politics doesn't touch? Can't you leave well enough alone? Can't you resist dirtying everything (even fatal disease) with your politics? The question is analogous to the older one: is nothing sacred? The obvious answer is, of course not.

Labels: death squads, germ invasion, haiti, white plague

Arguments for slavery. posted by lenin

In light of the recent refulgence of arguments for white supremacy, it is worth taking a look at precedents. No sooner were the British ruling class strategically terminating their own colossal role in the enslavement of millions of Africans than they bitterly regretted it. Such is the contemporary understanding of historians of that institution, at any rate. In a somewhat analogous fashion, as soon as Southern white slaveholders were defeated, they started to experience a "Negro problem" that made them regret their defeat all the more. This "problem" was experienced variously as economic competition, displacement in political institutions, the spread of education among those who had previously been strictly banned from learning the first letter of the alphabet, the resistance to continued subordination - in short, a transformation in the status of African Americans so great as to constitute a state of emergency for white elites. Their response was to revisit the 'peculiar institution' and to give rise to a flood of historical revisionism about slavery whose core doctrines would impress themselves upon leading political figures of the Progressive era, up to and including Woodrow Wilson.

The cardinal belief among the pro-slavery revisionists was that the institution was a sort of school through which all 'races' had to proceed in order to attain civilization. For example, Matthew Este's post-bellum text 'A Defence of Slavery, as it is practised in the United States' made a very particular argument about slavery: it could be a barbarous practise, he admitted, when the overseer was a brute, but Americans stood in the Anglo-Saxon and Christian tradition and could be entrusted with the administering of such a sacred duty. Biblical references were crucial here: Abraham held slaves, Moses too, all the old Semites in fact, even the priests. The practise was an ancient passage of rites, as venerable as wife-beating and child-rape. Since many of the foremost opponents of slavery were Christians who believed fervently in the literal truth of the monogenism and - to purloin a prase - 'moral equivalence' established in the tale of man's descent from Eden, it was obviously important to pay particular attention to scriptural support. "No institution," Este writes, "clearly sanctioned by Divine authority, contains within itself the principles of its own destruction. Slavery is clearly established in the Old Testament - it met the Divine Sanction - we cannot therefore suppose it is wrong". At any rate, slavery is not the product or foe of Christianity, according to Este - the province of religion is to abolish evils arising out of social relations, not to create or abolish social relations (which advert to a 'human nature', an essence put into manufacture by the Creator in the same way that the blueprint for a watch is put to practise by the watchmaker).

The slave benefited, of course. This was the ultimate moral mandate for slavery. In a moral/religious sense, in that he gains systems of virtue that were otherwise denied him; in a political sense, supposing he gains a level of freedom hitherto denied him (yes, it may be tyranny, but the other kind of tyranny was worse); in the economic sense (the most important of all), since the slave has learned the customs of industry, the arts of civilization, the means of self-government. Self-government is the crucial point: Americans were constantly faced with the question of who was fit for self-government. Since their ruling elites were perpetually having to give way to unpropertied classes (extension of the franchise), to enslaved peoples (ending slavery), to women (letting them out of the house), it was a decisive question. In this sense, democracy and independence are not political-economic states, but cultural ones. Can you handle your money, can you save, are you morally virtuous, is your wife obedient, do your children maintain cleanliness, are you industrious? Etc etc. Este cites the example of Rome where, he maintains, at its most virtuous and vigorous it was ready for self-government - but then it degenerated and so, Providentially, the necessary despotism arrived to save its olive-toned skin. Similarly, the procession through historical examples yields an absence of deities among Africans (a lack of religious wisdom); only a brief acquaintance with reason among Indians and Chinese (a lack of secular wisdom); and of course a total lack of written history among the indigenous - they have only oral histories. Egypt had its heiroglyphs, true, but never the remainder of Africa. (Derrida's attack on logocentrism becomes more comprehensible when you study the history of racist doctrine).

At any rate, the whole system at the late 19th and early 20th Century seemed ripe for re-examination. It was bursting with potentia. Democracy would soon mean the rise of the labouring classes. Abolitionism would soon overthrow peonage and wage-slavery. The woman would soon be out on the streets, cavorting with men of all hues. Children would no longer learn to obey, or expect a harsh competition over resources ordered along lines of race, class and gender to be natural. It was predictable that white capitalist elites would seek to invent a history that would legitimise their violent restorationism. John David Smith has shown that African American historians challenged this - often in contradictory ways, ways that accepted some part of racist doctrine, or worried over how much to accept, but the challenge was usually radical. It attacked the foundations of racism, the implicit or explicit acceptance of the white purview as natural, the Providential arguments - many of these writers had enough experience of slavery themselves to know how to unsentimetally dispose of such trash. However, it bears reflecting on the fact that their outlook would almost certainly have been seen as 'biased' by their experiences, as immature, insufficiently appreciative of what the cold, unsentimental facts of the matter would tell them. That seems to me to be the automatic point of view of those considering southern or Third World writers today, however liberal or 'moderate' they in fact are.

The current breed of apologists for Ian Smith are disgusting, of course, not least because of their resemblance to their forebears. They are, however, a breed almost as extinct as Smith himself (one hopes). Far more insidious, perhaps, are those who repeat the gestures of pro-slavery doctrine in bad faith, who accept its basic contours without the discredited racial mythologies. They still hold that systems of white supremacy can be an education in democracy, that populations can be fit for self-government only when an Anglo-Saxon Christian man named George takes them through it step-by-step (with a limitless willingness to use violence, and be enthralled by violence). They still hold that tyranny is a benign 'civilization' academy. They maintain, in such a way that it does not seem fit to question on CNN, that capitalist habits of practise are the surest road to freedom (Arbeit Macht Frei, in other words). They cleave to the cultural supremacy of the West. The only doctrine that isn't completely fashionable in liberal imperialist circles is the doctrine of biological racial superiority. The meme of 'totalitarianism', really a prophylactic against communism in their hands, has the unintended consequence of prohibiting their natural racism, forcing them to find inventive ways of commuting it through new discourses. The neocons of the Cold War found that racism was okay if it was seen as a meritocratic reflection of cultural hard-headedness, a proportionate reward for the will or lack of will to pull oneself up by the boot-straps - what could be more democratic and all-American than that? In a similar sense, today's racists find themselves on good standing when they speak of cultural distinction rather than a biological one. The culturalist aspect of racism, which was actually prevalent during the post-bellum pro-slavery revision, has not been successfully assailed, so that it remains the last refuge of the vicious supremacist. And so the arguments for imperialism that we hear today are arguments for slavery - how unsurprising that each imperial adventure seems to end in the long-term violent bondage of a whole country.

Labels: america, rhodesia, slavery, white supremacy