Vistas on Socialism

Critics of neoliberalism, from right and left, have often remarked on the nonsensical quality of Gross Domestic Product as a measure of societal wealth. Since GDP measures everything which is paid for on the market, it cannot distinguish between positive and negative forms of economic activity. A cure for cancer becomes equivalent to cleaning up an oil spill, so long as both cost money. On the other hand, helping your neighbor carry her groceries up the stairs has no economic value, while the production of cigarettes and the treatment of lung cancer become major sources of "wealth".

This critique is really two critiques, however, one of which has some radical implications. Merely pointing out that GDP valorizes things like environmental destruction and weaponry as forms of wealth leads to a tame (if salutary) reformism: such "public bads" should be taken off the books, or counted negatively against those good things which are produced for sale in the market. All this amounts only to a better accounting method, a better way of showing how much, and how efficiently, is being produced by the capitalist economy.

But the critique of GDP points to a deeper question: why should things be produced for money at all, regardless of whether they are good or bad? That is, do we really gain as a society when things which could be performed voluntarily and for free become paid jobs?

The standard response to this question is that, while it would certainly be nice if all production could be undertaken voluntarily rather than under the discipline of wage labor, such an anarchist utopia is totally impractical. And for many goods, this is a real and difficult problem. The same things that make production efficient--the division of labor, repetitive and tedious jobs--are the same things that make people not want to do them unless they get paid. To address this problem, we need some way of negotiating the trade-off between having more things and having more (and higher quality) free time. Of course, under the present fetishization of constant economic growth, it is impossible even to articulate such a trade-off, except in the language of consumer or worker "choice".

But let us set this set of problems aside for a moment. The tension described above is true primarily for physical goods, things like cars and shoes. But what is distinctive about the capitalism that has developed over the past few decades is the increasing preponderance, in the money economy, of commodities that are not physical objects, but intellectual property of one kind or another. Let us take a single example, from the computer software industry.

Microsoft is preparing to release the new version of Microsoft Windows, called "Vista". In the run-up to launch, the company is making every effort to persuade customers of the value of this new product. One of the most important targets of persuasian has been the European Union, which has been increasingly unhappy with Microsoft's monopoly business practices. To the end of persuading the EU to welcome Vista with open arms, Microsoft recently released this white paper. Its purpose is to outline the positive economic benefits which Microsoft Vista will supposedly bring to Europe. These, are, according to Microsoft:

• Within its first year of shipment, IDC expects Windows Vista to be installed onmmore than 100 million computers worldwide. More than 30 million computers inmthe region studied are expected to be running Windows Vista.
• In the six countries studied, Windows Vista-related employment will reach moremthan 20% of IT employment2 in its first year of shipment.
• While much of this employment will shift from Windows XP-related employment,mover 50% of the growth in IT employment will be driven by Windows Vista.
• For every euro of Microsoft revenue from Windows Vista in 2007 in the sixcountries studied, the ecosystem beyond Microsoft will reap almost 14 euro in revenues. In 2007 this ecosystem should sell over ?32 billion ($40 billion) in products and services revolving around Windows Vista.
• Within the six-country region, in 2007 over 150,000 IT companies that produce, sell, or distribute products or services running on Windows Vista will employ over 400,000 people; another 650,000 will be employed at IT using firms.

Billions of dollars in economic growth due to Vista! What wonderful news! But wait--what does this mean? One critic quickly saw through the gambit on offer:

The white paper may predict sales by the "Microsoft ecosystem" of over $40 billion in six of Europe's biggest economies, but what this figure hides is the fact that income for Microsoft and its chums is a cost for the rest of Europe. In other words, IDC's white paper is effectively touting an expense of over $40 billion as a reason why the European Commission should welcome Vista with open arms.

As the paper itself mentions, half of this cost is down to the hardware. Some of these purchases would have taken place anyway; the rest represent upgrades from older hardware that cannot meet Vista's requirements. But if Vista did not exist (or, for example, if the European Commission were to block its sale for whatever reason), the old systems would not suddenly stop working: they would tick along for a few more years, gradually being replaced. The only justification for this hefty expenditure is to be able to run Vista: no Vista, no need to rustle up many extra billions on hardware upgrades outside the usual replacement cycles.

It's the same on the software side. The case for Vista itself is hardly strong. As the product's ship date has slipped, so more of its new features have been ripped out. Now it is not entirely clear what the benefit of upgrading is (apart from the evergreen "better security", of course). And without the need for hardware and software upgrades, the associated consultancy and service costs disappear too: most of Vista's $40 billion "benefit" is not only a cost, but an unnecessary one at that.

A product which imposes heavy costs on users, including accelerated hardware obsolesence, without clear benefits? Who would want such a thing? The economic growth being cited by Microsoft is evidently the kind of phony "wealth creation" cited by critics of GDP in the first sense mentioned above. But we can also ask the second question. Suppose that Vista did have discernible benefits. Certainly operating systems, generally, are useful things, and have to be upgraded sometimes. Even if Vista was a better piece of software, we might still ask: why should such a thing be made by a private company and sold for a profit? Why couldn't people just make it for free in their spare time, and then give it away?

To which Microsoft might respond: without the possibility of profit, there would be no incentive to innovate, and hence no-one would write operating systems. As against the cases of shoes and cars, however, a clear counterexample exists that vitiates this argument. The existence of free and open-source software is an excellent example of a post-capitalist form of production, in which social wealth is produced outside the system of economic (monetary) value.

The fact that the things like software can be produced for free in the "social economy" does not mean that everything can be produced this way, as some of the more exuberant proponents of the "immaterial labor" thesis would have you believe. Yet by criticizing the facile equivalency between economic activity and wealth, we can begin to move toward a real critique of capitalism. This critique, if it is to reinvigorate socialism as an idea, has to take as its starting point this observation of Marx's, from volume 3 of Capital, one of the few places where he prefigures the communist future:

The actual wealth of society, and the possibility of constantly expanding its reproduction process, therefore, do not depend upon the duration of surplus-labour, but upon its productivity and the more or less copious conditions of production under which it is performed. In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.

Now the distinction between "freedom" and "necessity" is not as clear-cut as Marx seems to imply here, and it is not coextensive with "immaterial" and "material" goods. Fine wines and Sony Playstations are material goods, but are they necessary ones? This is, ultimately, a political question, but it is not one that can be resolved in capitalism. Defining the boundary between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom is, I would argue, the specific content of socialism as a form of society and a political process (rather than a telos, a utopia, or an end of all politics). Framing things this way explodes the false opposition between state planning and market anarchy. The aim of socialism is not to pull all economic activity under the control of the state. Rather, it is to push out as much as possible from commodity production in the market to socialized labor in the "free" sector.* Conversely, only where necessary, that is, where other ways of organizing production are not feasible, would production be pulled in to collective control by the state, workers collectives, or some other communal form.

This formulation opens a new horizon of possibility for the socialist project, a new vision of what society could be like. It also clearly rules out certain longtime "left" preoccupations as being basically anti-socialist. The Keynesian idea that we need more jobs and higher wages for everyone comes to seem dilatory, in this view: what we need instead are shorter hours and a lower cost of living. As a corollary, we need things like socialized health care and child care, which reduce individual dependence on wage-labor. Neither of these are anti-capitalist programs in themselves; yet they point away from capitalism rather, as with Keynesianism, toward an intensification of its logic.

Left untheorized, here, is imperialism, or more generally, uneven development (and by implication, racism). If too much wage-labor is the constitutive problem of European and North American societies, this cannot be said of much of the rest of the world--or even of the pockets of deprivation within the rich societies. Thus, the socialist project must entail a massive, internationalist, redistributive project along with the anti-capitalist project delineated here, if it is not to degenerate into the construction of elite islands of privilege in a global sea of misery. (In this, Hardt and Negri are right: a guaranteed income and global citizenship are the sine qua non of the left project today. Unfortunately, their naive postmodernism and reflexive anti-statism made them unable to connect this realization with a coherent political strategy.) Likewise, ecology and the reality of physical limits on human societies demand serious attention, if we are to give real content to Marx's comment about "the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature". And last but not least, what is described here is intrinsically also a feminist project: without a critique of unpaid women's labor, reduction of paid labor just reduces itself to a patriarchal ideology of the "family wage". But consideration of these dilemmas will have to wait for another time.

[* The free sector, or the realm of freedom, would be free in a double sense: its products would be available to everyone for free, like open source software; at the same time, the laborers themselves would be "free" in the sense that they work according to their own schedules and according to their own desires, rather than at the direction of a boss. The realm of freedom is thus, pace Stallman, free as in free spech, and free as in free beer.]

The fetishism of oil, and its secret

Capitalism gives rise to a unique and wonderful kind of nonfiction writing: the tale of the commodity. These are the accounts of how a product comes to be, illuminating the human stories behind an object's journey from raw materials to end consumer. The intent of the story is typically to shock the reader with the concealed suffering and drama that inhere in a previously context-less object. Commodity expose stories have a long history, and have produced some famous landmarks (Sinclair's The Jungle, for example), but globalization, outsourcing, and the growth of massive global commodity chains have enriched the genre tremendously.

As a Marxist, I would somewhat unfelicitously call these "defetishizing" stories. The term comes from Marx's famous comment on "the fetishism of commodities" in Capital:

Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves. The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.

The subjective effect of grasping the passage above is beautifully communicated by Wallace Shawn in The Fever:

People say about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things - one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money - as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? What is it that determines the price of a coat? The coat's price comes from its history, the history of all the people who were involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all of those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. "I like this coat," we say, "it's not expensive," as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, "I like the pictures in this magazine."

All of this is by way of lead-in to a wonderful piece of defetishizing journalism that just appeared in the Chicago Tribune. The PDF is here, and this is the lead-in:

What is the true cost of quenching America’s mighty thirst for gasoline? To answer that question, Pulitzer Prize-winning Tribune correspondent Paul Salopek did what has never been done: He traced the gas pumped at a single station to the fuel’s shadowy sources around the globe. The story begins at a glistening Marathon outlet on Chicago’s exurban edge and ranges from the fishless waters off the coast of Nigeria to the politically restless fields of Venezuela and beyond. Salopek’s journey, a travelogue of America’s addiction to oil, reveals how U.S. consumers are bound to some of the most violent, desperate corners of the planet-and to a petroleum economy so fragile that it may not last.

Oil is a particularly compelling subject for such treatment. Not merely because of the industry's global reach and sordid geopolitical entanglements, but because of oil's unique character as a commodity. It is an abstraction in a dual sense. Like any commodity, it takes on an abstract value, its price, which conceals the human relationships that go into its production. But it also embodies another abstraction, energy--the abstracted representation of our ability to shape the physical world to our human needs, the power and potentiality that grows our food, erects our houses, drives our cars, and animates our laptops. To grasp the social relationships behind oil, then, is to touch on a system of relationships that permeates the entire world economy.

The Imaginary Resolution of Real Contradictions

Across America, a movement is stirring. People from all walks of life are feeling a newly awakened sense of outrage, and demanding accountability from their public figures. No longer content to stand by as lies and illegal behavior become normalized as acceptable strategies, no longer able to turn a blind eye to the corruption of one of our most important national institutions, ordinary citizens are fighting back. Their message is clear. While the causes and the culprits may be many in our national crisis, there is one man who must ultimately bear responsibility for the shocking transgressions of recent years:

Barry Bonds.

Follow the link to get a glimpse of the fevered state of Bonds-hatred in the world of baseball fandom. The anti-Bonds mania transcends the normal boundaries of sports partisanship, and outstrips even the vitriolic and spiteful fan-player relationships pioneered by fans in New York and Philadelphia. For many, it seems, the theme of this season is not root, root, rooting for the home team, but rooting against Barry Bonds.

How does the role of sports fan curdle from love and loyalty into demonization and hatred? And how can we explain the intensity of emotion, the depths of outrage, that Bonds provokes? How does a baseball player's use of steroids--at a time when they were not even banned by the league--constitute an existential threat to our deeply held cultural values? And how has Bonds become the singular representative of baseball's steroid era, which taints everyone from Mark McGwire to Sammy Sosa to Brady Anderson, and which was abetted by Major League Baseball's unwillingness to tamper with a home run derby style of play that was filling ballparks?

It's always dangerous to make grand analogies between a cultural phenomenon and a political one. Pattern-finding creatures by nature, humans can find elective affinities in the most improbable places, and the result has been not a few mediocre dissertations in cultural studies. But when historians reflect on our time, the parallel will be hard to miss: at the same time that Americans were becoming increasingly disgusted with the incompetence and mendacity of their political leaders, they lashed out at the deceptions of a baseball player whose personality, in his arrogance, egotism, and sense of entitlement, is evocative in many ways of George W. Bush.

For many who placed their faith in Bush after 9/11, it is difficult to contemplate the possibility that he is both a liar and an idiot. And even for those who have always been confirmed Bush-haters, it sometimes seems hopeless to expect political improvement. With our tepid two party duopoly, gerrymandered congressional districts, and hack media, it may seem as though no outrage by the Bush administration will be sufficient to provoke an anti-Republican backlash. Destroying Barry Bonds, on the other hand, is both psychologically easy and politically feasible.

Of course, Barry Bonds is also black, and we shouldn't discount the alchemy of moral outrage and submerged racism in the way baseball fans respond to him. Race, too, explains why Bonds makes a better target than Bush: he shares all of the President's shortcomings, but he lacks the markers of racial privilege that shield Bush from the recriminations of his white base. Reading the coverage of young white men taunting Bonds wherever he goes, one wonders how many of them are disaffected Republican voters.

I will admit that I am that rarest of things in baseball--I am, in some twisted way, a Barry Bonds fan. I love him as a theatrical character, a villain so perfect that he seems to have walked out of a professional wrestling script. But I also sympathize with this most unsympathetic man, who has become the object of a nation's displaced rage--a rage that would be so much more fruitfully employed elsewhere.

AJ el Memorioso

Let me step back, for a moment, from the abstract contemplation of concrete phenomena in the world, to consider how it is that we think abstractly at all. I've been fascinated, for a few years now, by the possibility of historicizing epistemology by connecting abstract thinking with processes of abstraction that operate in everyday life in capitalism; the path-breaking work here is that of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and his theory of the "real abstraction".

I was provoked to return to this line of thought by a news story about a remarkable medical case, a woman with perfect memory:

James McGaugh is one of the world's leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he's stumped.

McGaugh's journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago.

Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date.

. . .

McGaugh has spent decades studying how such things as stress hormones and emotions affect memory, and at first he thought AJ's memories were of such emotional power that she couldn't forget them.

But that hypothesis fell short of the mark when it became obvious that "the woman who can't forget" remembers trivial details as clearly as major events. Asked what happened on Aug 16, 1977, she knew that Elvis Presley had died, but she also knew that a California tax initiative passed on June 6 of the following year, and a plane crashed in Chicago on May 25 of the next year, and so forth. Some may have had a personal meaning for her, but some did not.

This remarkable case, if it is indeed as described, is a real life version of Ireneo Funes, the protagonist of the Jorge Luis Borges story "Funes the Memorious" (or, in the 1998 Hurley translation, "Funes, His Memory"). Here is Borges' narrator describing Funes:

With one quick look, you and I perceive three wineglasses on a table; Funes perceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once, or with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho. Nor were those memories simple--every visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, and so on. He was able to reconstruct every dream, every daydream he had ever had. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day. "I, myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the world began," he said to me. And also: "My dreams are like other people's waking hours." And again, toward dawn: "My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap." A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a rhombus--all these are forms we can fully intuit; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a young colt, a small herd of cattle on a mountainside, a flickering fire and its uncountable ashes, and the many faces of a dead man at a wake. I had no idea how many stars he saw in the sky.

But for Funes, perfect memory is not an asset--it is a curse:

I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very good at thinking. To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes there was nothing but particulars--and they were virtually immediate particulars.

One wonders, then, what sort of thinker is AJ, our real life Funes? In the story, Funes is physically crippled; Borges implies that he is also intellectually crippled by his "gift". AJ is not, as one might expect, incapacitated by her prodigious memory--she has lived a fairly normal, functional life. Yet it does seem that she is subject to some of the same limitations as Funes, according to the original press release about her:

There are limits to AJ’s memory. While she has nearly perfect recall of what she was doing on any given date and instantly can identify the date and day of the week when an important historical event in her lifetime occurred, she has difficulty with rote memorization and did not always do well in school. She scored perfectly on a formal neuropsychological test to measure her autobiographical memory, but during the testing had difficulty organizing and categorizing information. She refers to her ongoing remembering of her life’s experiences as “a movie in her mind that never stops”.

So it is true, as Borges supposed, that perfect memory is at odds with the actual process of thinking. This has implications for social theory, for it demonstrates the complex relationship between empirical sense-data and conceptual abstraction--and it supports the type of dialectical thought recommended by Marxists like Bertell Ollman:

Dialectics restructures our thinking about reality by replacing the common sense notion of "thing" (as something that has a history and has external connections with other things) with notions of "process" (which contains its history and possible futures) and "relation" (which contains as part of what it is its ties with other relations). Nothing that didn't already exist has been added here. Rather, it is a matter of where and how one draws boundaries and establishes units (the dialectical term is "abstracts") in which to think about the world. The assumption is that while the qualities we perceive with our five senses actually exist as parts of nature, the conceptual distinctions that tell us where one thing ends and the next one begins both in space and across time are social and mental constructs. However great the influence of what the world is on how we draw these boundaries, it is ultimately we who draw the boundaries, and people coming from different cultures and from different philosophical traditions can and do draw them differently.

Ollman's methodology, Borges's narrative, and AJ's example all militate against the misconception that we can arrive at truth through a mere accumulation of information; to Ollman's principle of drawing boundaries between sensory qualities, we can add the importance of excluding some sense-data while retaining others. These examples are therefore a defense of the usefulness of social theory, both for understanding the world and for changing it. But I think the discussion of memory and abstraction also has something to say about a little discussion I had with Geoff recently, about the new types of subjectivity that are encouraged by the Internet. In a way, the Internet is a cyborg appendage which gives us all Funesian memory: a machine which preserves every random bit of information, and every comment on that information, eternally. The argument I have sketched so far suggests that this is as likely to impede our ability to think, as it is to facilitate it.

So perhaps the question facing us is: in an environment where every memory is preserved, how do we devise new principles for forgetting?

The Black Room

The sign at left was posted at Camp Nama, an Iraqi military installation which was commandeered by U.S. special forces. There they turned one interrogation room into a ghoulish torture chamber called the Black Room:

"In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations."

What is most disturbing about this episode of detainee abuse is, as with Abu Ghraib, its seeming pointlessness, relative to extracting any actual information, and its ostentatious sadism. Torture for any reason is horrifying; but torture for its own sake is the most chilling because it calls to mind the worst of the historical atrocities perpetrated by humans on their fellow humans.

But at least the "Black Room" of Camp Nama has been brought to light by the diligent work of the New York Times, and at least we still live in a society which retains enough humaneness and dignity to execrate such acts when they occur. Yet there are other "black rooms", whose existence cannot be revealed because they are not hidden--they are the "dark places" hidden in plain sight, from which we avert our eyes out of habit or despair.

In Florida, a young man was sent to boot camp for stealing his grandmother's car, then beaten to death for talking back to his jailers. The ensuing scandal has given everyone from Jeb Bush to the county medical examiner a stage on which to do their utmost to come across as depraved, racist monsters. Bush spoke against closing the boot camps since they have "yielded a good result". And Bay county medical examiner Charles Siebert, who initially found that the young man had died, not from being beaten and suffocated, but from sickle cell anemia, said he was "appalled". Not appalled, mind you, at the senseless death of a 14-year-old boy, but at the "baseless and mean-spirited accusations from special interest groups" who impugned and embarassed him by questioning his nonsensical medical verdict.

Young Martin Lee Anderson was evidently not the first person to be beaten at one of these boot camps. It was only his accidental death which forced the "black room" of the boot camps into the light; had he merely been maimed as intended, the routine physical brutalization of young black men by the state of Florida might have continued unchecked, indefinitely.

Meanwhile, something completely different, only not: the Indonesian army moved to quell riots by taking control of a provincial capital in Papua. The "riots" are in fact protests, directed against an American mining company, Freeport McMoran. In so many ways it is a typical story, of corrupt governments in the global South acting as enforcers for American capital. The sort of open class violence that is tolerated in the periphery would be outlandish and unacceptable in the core--except, as we saw in the previous case, when the violence is directed at the most oppressed "internal colonies" within the homeland.

Among the more despicable specifics of the situation in Indonesia is the following:

The senior Papuan at Freeport, Thom Beanal, who is a leader of one of Papua's biggest tribal groups, the Amungme, and a director of the Indonesian unit of Freeport, said the company was concerned about maintaining its daily operations in the current atmosphere.

Mr. Beanal said in a telephone interview from his home in Timika, near the mine, that he advised Freeport this week that to reduce hostilities, the company needed to deal more effectively with the more than 700,000 tons of mine waste that is generated every day.

Much of it hurtles directly down the Aghawagon River, and protests began last month when villagers were told by the security forces that they could no longer pan in the waste for scraps of gold. "I suggested they put the waste in a pipe and put it far away," Mr. Beanal said.

Environmentalists and some mining engineers have made similar suggestions, but the company has rejected them, saying they would be too expensive to carry out.

It is hard to know what is more appalling in these four paragraphs. Is it the abject figure of Mr. Beanal, attempting an impossible reconciliation between loyalty to his people, and loyalty to his company? Is it the casual reference to the company's profligate desecration of the local environment? Or is it that, after insisting that it has no choice but to deluge the local residents with toxic waste, Freeport McMoran now reproaches them for having the temerity to steal scraps of gold from the company's proprietary sludge?

Faced with such scenarios, those of political good will often throw our hands up in despair, helpless in the face of what seem to be horrors without end. And this is not only a reflex of rationalization and denial; our powerless to restrain our government or "our" capitalists is in many ways real. But I fear that those generations which follow us, if any, will not judge us kindly for our "black rooms".

Left Forum Notes

This weekend was the 2006 Left Forum, the conference of anti-capitalist academics and activists from around the world, held in NYC. The Left Forum is a successor to the Socialist Scholars Conference, which ended two years ago under acrimonious circumstances that are utterly not worth going into. The Left Forum is almost identical in structure to the SSC, although somewhat different in its political scope: it encompasses a wider array of anarchist and autonomist currents of the non-parliamentary left, while leaving out some of the social democratic and liberal currents on the "right" of the old SSC.

I was surprised to find myself somewhat dissatisfied with this political shift. While I have no particular use for the political positions of people like Michael Walzer and Ian Williams, they do represent a real segment of the left, and having them around led to some real sparks flying at past conferences. In contrast, the anarchoid left tends to uphold individualistic and disorganized kinds of activism; rather than criticizing the approach of more state-oriented leftists, their general attitude is something like: "hey man, do your own thing!" This tends to cut off debate rather than sharpen it, which can lead to an efflorescence of empty platitudes.

Still, there were good things happening at the forum. What follows is a recap of the panels I attended.

Imperialism and its Future
Chair: Jomo K.S.
Panelists: Eric Reinert, Anwar Shaikh, Vivek Chibber
I don't really know much about Jomo K.S., and I've never read his work--but his name is just amazing, and it always makes me want to go to his panels. How does one get a surname that is only initials? Can I have one? In any event, the panel was pretty good, if a bit unfocused--one of the problems with the Left Forum format is that you often get panels of people who know nothing except the title of the panel, and have to make their own guesses about what will be a relevant contribution. In this case, Professor Reinert (who teaches in Estonia) decided to use his time to criticize the left and right for basing their economic thought on David Ricardo. Huh? Fortunately, things improved rapidly, as Anwar Shaikh and Vivek Chibber gave solid takes on the meaning of imperialism. Shaikh's big take-away point was that international inequalities are not the result of monopoly or some other deformation of perfect competition--a view associated with both neoliberalism and with much Leninist anti-imperialism--but in fact a predictable result of even the most perfectly free market. Chibber, meanwhile, made many great points, but the big one was the claim that capitals are still regional in nature--almost all of the Fortune 500 companies make most of their sales within their own geographical region. Thus, the idea of inter-imperialist rivalry based on the rivalry of different regional capitals is still very much operative. (But for a contrary view, see below.)

Crisis in Auto or Crisis in Health? Crisis in Capital or Crisis in Labor?
Chair: Leo Panitch
Panel: Doug Henwood, Thomas Sablowski, Frances Fox Piven, Sam Gindin, Marsha Niemeijer
Sometimes, panels at this conference will just have too many people on them for a space of two hours. Other times, the panel will be made up of people who all seem to be friends, cronies, and co-thinkers. This panel managed to unite both tendencies, but was nevertheless pretty good. With the recent struggles over job, wage and benefit cuts at the major U.S. automakers as a starting point, the panelists debated the future of the auto industry, its role in the capitalist economy, and the strategic choices facing auto workers unions. Sablowski, a German researcher, and Gindin, a former research director of the Canadian Autoworkers, were probably the most interesting of the bunch. Gindin argued that auto unions had to get beyond fighting concessions and talk about three big issues: instituting national health care in the U.S., managing over-capacity by regulating investment in new auto plants, and reducing working hours in order to preserve jobs. Sablowski drew attention to the political difficulties inherent in reconciling the particular intersts of auto workers with the general needs of the working class and the environment. The other panelists all had something to contribute to these general themes, although Niemeijer, a writer for Labor Notes, mostly just gave that publication's typical answer to every problem in the labor movement: more militancy and more union democracy. She didn't really grapple with the arguments of the rest of the panel, which showed pretty effectively why that's not enough.

Marxist Views of China 's Contemporary Development
Chair/Panelist: David Kotz
Panelists: Cheng En Fu, Minqi Li, Richard Smith
I like to go to panels on China at the Left Forum, because they offer something you don't get many other places: analysis of China's political economy from a Marxist viewpoint, which is not sectarian or dogmatic in either a pro- or anti-China way. This panel had the added attraction of Mr. Cheng, from the "Marxism Research Institute" of the University of Shanghai. It so happened that the New York Times had just run a story that morning about Marxist factions in the Chinese Communist Party, which probably boosted turnout for the panel. Mainstream Chinese "Marxism", it turns out, amounts to introducing some tepid social democratic reforms to ameliorate the worst effects of marketizing and privatizing the Chinese "socialist market economy". Mr. Cheng did not criticize either markets or capital accumulation as a growth strategy. But the other panelists pointed out what's wrong with this approach: Kotz argued that markets inevitably give rise to a new wealthy class that pursues its own class interests; Minqi argued that the cycle of accumulation makes recession and crisis inevitable, and Richard Smith--in the most devastating of the presentations--made it clear that it will be ecologically impossible for the mass of Chinese to achieve Western levels of resource use. It was clear that capitalism is not sustainable for China even in the medium run--unfortunately, it was far from clear where an alternative to the present strategy of rapacious development is going to come from.

China, India and Capitalism in the Long Run
Chair: Vamsi Vakulabharanam
Panelists: Giovanni Arrighi, Beverly Silver, Leo Panitch, Gilbert Achcar
Since I'm a political masochist, the apocalyptic scenarios of the previous panel impelled me to attend another panel on China. This time, the general theme was one that is becoming a leftist perennial: is China in the process of displacing the United States as the hegemonic power in the world? Arrighi and Silver come from the World Systems Theory tradition, which has pioneered the sinocentric take on this question. So it was no surprise that Arrighi played up the significance of China in the world system, and Silver spent a lot of time talking about the political problem of make sure that the U.S. is "graceful" in its apparently inevitable decline from great power status. Leo Panitch then went to bat for his own trademark claim (with Sam Gindin) that "imperialism" is no longer a valid analysis of the relations between capitalist states. This is an intentionally provocative way of putting the issue, actually, since Panitch pretty clearly believes in something that you would have to call imperialism--that is, unequal and exploitative relations between core and peripheral countries. What he objects to is the idea of inter-imperialist rivalry; he claims that the interpenetration of first-world (North American, European and Japanese) capitals has made major schisms between those powers unlikely to impossible. Essentially, he's reviving Kautsky's theory of "ultra-imperialism". I didn't used to think much of this line of thinking, but as I listened to Panitch, I started to think he was on to something important. His insights have to be integrated with some of the facts about the dollar economy and the disarticulation of state and nation which I've addressed in earlier posts. But I'm not ready to make that synthesis yet. I do, however, hope Panitch gets on a panel with Vivek Chibber at a future Left Forum, since they are both very sharp and yet have apparently irreconcilable views about the nature of contemporary imperialism.

A Soldier's Movement Against the Iraq War: Prospects and Challenges
Chair: Tod Ensign
Panel: Aiden Delgado, Jose Vasquez, Geoffrey Millard
After all the high-falutin' theory, I needed some activist grit, and I was really curious to hear about Iraq veterans organizing against the war. This panel was sponsored by the amazing Citizen Soldier, and all of the panelists were Iraq vets. They were also, to a man, more organized and articulate than most of the academics; military discipline applied to public speaking, or something. There were some moving stories about the process by which these very different people came to their political radicalization; there was also some discussion of the culture class which prevents anti-war veterans from being incorporated into the peace movement. But perhaps the most interesting analysis came from Delgado, who broke down the process that a recruit goes through--from recruitment to training to deployment to homecoming to (maybe) radicalization. He identified the points of vulnerability where a soldier can be politically won over, and he noted that while a lot of energy is going into the small (2-300) core of actively anti-war veterans on one end, and counter-recruitment activism on the other end, there needs to be more attention paid to the training phase. That's the point where a recruit is first introduced to the realities of military life, before they have been fully socialized into the culture of the military; Delgado argues that this is where soldiers are most amenable to anti-war politics. The trick, of course, is reaching them. He noted that all soldiers have government-provided email accounts, which are one way to get at them. Jose Vasquez also drew our attention to a new film which needs to get into the hands of as many recruits and soldiers as possible.

Those were the only panels I saw--I've learned by now that it's best not to try to go to a panel in every session. I was also not that excited by most of the panels. Some of my favorite Socialist Scholars/Left Forum regulars, like Mahmood Mamdani and David Harvey, weren't on panels (or weren't on interesting ones). And there seemed to be a lot of panels that were kind of vague and pointless-sounding. But I was pleasantly surprised at the panels I saw. And of course, there's always the book shopping. I got this and this, plus I subscribed to New Left Review at their special conference rate, mostly on the strength of this guy's writing.

1961-2006

Kirby Puckett wasn't from Minnesota; he grew up in the projects on the south side of Chicago. I haven't lived in Minnesota since I was 18, and may never live there again. Yet I feel like I'm part of a tremendous collective grief at the death of this man, who is undoubtedly the most-loved figure in the history of Minnesota sports.

My love for the Minnesota Twins, and for Kirby Puckett in particular, were what finally allowed me to understand the emotional appeal of nationalism. In the symbol of that team, and in the image of this one man, there is a glorious imagined community that will follow me wherever I go. And through the adulation of a man like Puckett, through the communion with other Minnesotans--including many who are not even baseball fans--I can affirm and define a Minnesotanness that might otherwise slip away.

And in all of the tributes from Puckett's friends and teammates, we receive an image of a joyous, selfless, warmhearted man--yet one also troubled and ultimately destroyed by his personal demons. In that we find, not our Minnesotanness, but our humanity. Out of the particularism of baseball and baseball heroes, a universalism emerges.

Misadventures in Capitalism: Weekend Roundup

Like Tom Frank always says, it pays for leftists to read the business section. This week's business pages were such a gold mine of capitalist irrationality, I couldn't pick just one story. The lowlights:

The Threat to a Free (Business) Press. (Article is behind the stupid Times Select paywall.) The Bush administration's ongoing attempts to silence journalists are one thing; the bourgeoisie has always been ambivalent about allowing the rabble to speak its mind. But you would think that allowing business analysts to report honestly about a company's revenue and profitability is a basic prerequisite to rational capital allocation. Times columnist Joseph Nocera is up in arms about the antics of Patrick Byrne, CEO of the profit-challenged overstock.com, who is using the courts to silence journalists and research analysts who have written unfavorably about his company. The specifics of the case--including a demented speech in which Byrne refers to a nefarious conspiracy against his company, headed by a "sith lord"--are surreal and hilarious, but the underlying issue is a serious one. I mean, if the business press isn't immune to this kind of intimidation, then truly no one is safe.

The Blackberry vs. the Patent Trolls. This week saw another episode in the ongoing legal battle between Research in Motion, the Canadian company that makes the Blackberry handheld email device, and NTP, a company which is demanding money for what it says are patent infringments. Now, NTP is not a company which is protecting an investment in its technology--the sort of investment that patents are supposed to protect. In fact, NTP has never invested in or produced anything; it exists solely for the purpose of holding patents and suing people. RIM won a minor victory when a court refused to grant NTP an injunction; at the same time, the patent office has invalidated the NTP patents. Yet the Blackberry could still find itself shut down. Sadly, the judge seems ignorant of the real issues invovled, as he waxes bemused that the courts should be forced to decide on what ought to be purely a "business issue".

The Great Airline Ticket Swindle. When airlines advertise their ticket prices, there are required to list the full price--only certain government taxes and fees can be excluded. This makes price shopping with services like Orbitz and Travelocity easy for consumers. But now the Transportation Department looks set to allow all kinds of special surcharges to be tacked on to the listed price, from fuel surcharges to insurance. This despite the fact that virtually everyone--from individuals to travel agents to low-cost airlines--is opposed to the change. Only the big five, United, American, Northwest, Delta and Continental, are in favor. It's evident that this rule change serves no other purpose than to frustrate consumers and allow uncompetetive airlines to wrangle super-profits out of travellers. The situation that is being generated is what the economists call "imperfect information", and it's supposed to be a major hindrance to the functioning of a free market. But hey, who's keeping score anymore?

Selected Shorts. H&R Block saw its stock drop by two dollars when the tax preparation company announced that it had screwed up its own taxes. And no matter what Irwin Schiff tells you, if you don't pay taxes, you will go to jail.

Meanwhile, the housing bubble is still deflating. And don't let the hijinks of patent trolls and paranoid CEOs distract from the really imporant work that's taking place in the private sector: like the end of the living wage, and exciting new advances in spying-on-you technology.

David Horowitz, Defender of Civilization

The ever-insighful Scott McLemee takes on red-batiter extroardinaire David Horowitz in this week's column at Inside Higher Education. It's an unusually humorous romp through a subject which is, already, inherently hilarious.

D. Ho, as they're calling him these days, is out with his book on "America's 101 most dangerous professors", and naturally communist brainwashers everywhere are incensed at being left off the list. Now normally, it's my opinion that the left is best served by ignoring people who make their reputations off of baiting the left--characters like Christopher Hitchens, Marc Cooper, and to a certain degree Todd Gitlin (who scored a totally unearned spot on the Horowitz list). But in the case of D. Ho, we are dealing with a figure so ludicrous that I'm inclined to just enjoy the silliness. It's true that by talking about him, we raise his profile, promote his book sales, and thereby perpetuate the phenomenon. But I don't think this has very real political implications (in contrast to more measured and reasonable figures), so objecting in these grounds is sort of like observing a personal boycott of Coca-Cola out of concern for Columbian trade-unionists: it may promote feelings of virtuousness, but has few implications in the real world.

So instead, I say, go on and enjoy the Network(s)!

Humor Break

Sometimes, thinking about the origins of totalitarianism is just getting me down, and I need some comic relief. Fortunately, I recently discovered something that, for reasons I can't explain, is funnier to me than almost anything else on Earth:

Chris's Invincible Super-Blog.

I admit, this is probably a niche-product. It's a comic book blog, and if you never read comic books, the whole thing will probably seem baffling. Moreover, Chris Sims is my age, which means we both came of age during the insane speculative mania that gripped the comic-book industry in the late '80's and early '90's. Those were the days when a comic that had sold for $1.00 off the rack would inexplicably go for $80 a year after it came out. And while the comics bubble may have inflated a lot of subsequently-dashed hopes of retiring on a speculative comic book fortune, it also produced some of the most hilarious, ill-advised comics known to civilization. And since they're the comics of my childhood, I remember them fondly (or at least, bemusedly).

I don't know why, but something about the combination of bad comics, and Chris Sims' perfect authorial voice, gets me laughing uncontrollably more than anything else I read. If I've still got your attention, here are some teaser, lines that just made my lose it:

What better way to examine Black History in comics than a look back at the history of the character with the uncanny ability to embody a stereotype whenever he appears.

At one point in the story, the Punisher passes by a guy buying a boogie board. We get a closeup of him, along with a thought balloon that reads: "The Punisher does not know that my mission is to guide him--to show him that he must fulfull the grand-master's last wish and become the western world's greatest ninja!"

Just look at it. It's got the Incredible Hulk fighting a character from a classic of European literature.

So what makes me so sure that this time I really have struck gold? Oh, I don't know. How about the fact that it's called Giant Super-Heroes Battle Super-Gorillas?

This would be the point where I tell you why the ISB has deep cultural significance and serious political implications, and why you can therefore feel virtuous about reading it. Fortunately, it has neither, so you can just enjoy the ride.

The State and the Stateless

Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism is generally remembered for its analysis of the totalitarian state itself. But what struck me on reading it was the discussion of the European milieu from which the totalitarian states emerged. Europe in the interwar years was characterized, says Arendt, by a historically unprecedented conjunction of two factors:

1. Massive numbers of stateless people, who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state
2. The generalization of the nation-state form across the entire world

What this meant was that there was no "uncivilized" space on earth left for the stateless to resettle: "[w]hat is unprecedented is not the loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one" (p. 293). In this context, stateless people became an insoluble problem: permanently outside the law, shuttled back and forth between states which all denied responsibility for them, and subject to arbitrary police domination wherever they found themselves. Such a state of
affairs, says Arendt, led toward the concentration camp.

The crisis of the stateless people developed from what, in contemporary parlance, we might call a "bug" in the Enlightenment conception of rights. As set forth in the "Declaration of the rights of man," human rights were grounded in nature, in an abstract humanity outside of history and social institutions. But it turned out that such rights could only be defined if people were assumed to be members of some political community--a people, a nation. The existence of stateless people vitiated this assumption and led to a form of unfreedom described most chillingly by Arendt:

There is no question that those outside the pale of the law may have more freedom of movement than a lawfully imprisoned criminal or that they enjoy more freedom of opinion in the internment camps of democratic countries than they would in any ordinary despotism, not to mention in a totalitarian country. But neither physical safety--being fed by some state or private welfare agency--nor freedom of opinion changes in the least their fundamental situation of rightlessness. The prolongation of their lives is due to charity and not to right, for no law exists which could force the nations to feed them; their freedom of movement, if they have it at all, gives them no right to residence which even themjailed criminal enjoys as a matter of course; and their freedom of opinion is a fool's freedom for nothing they think matters anyhow. (p. 296)

Notice what this quote assumes about the state. It assumes that if one is a citizen of a state, "the prolongation of one's life" can be due to right and not to charity; that one can have a "right to residence" in accordance with one's right to movement, and that one's freedom of opinion matters and is politically operational. Yet the development of the state today has tended to erode all of these assumptions in one or another way.

In the dismantling of the welfare state and the imposition of neoliberalism, we find an attack on the notion that a state has any duty to provide for its citizens. In the creeping irrationalism of political discourse, combined with the cacophony of media voices, we see the meaninglessness of "free" opinion. And in the status of illegal immigrants, we see a people whose movement is tacitly
tolerated, but who lack all rights to residence.

Arendt says elsewhere that the stateless benefit from committing crimes, for then the state must at least recognize them as an exception to the social norms, rather than as a human being outside of norms altogether. An analogous thing has happened to illegal migrants; witness the following news item:

Immigrants toiling illegally in New York state can sue for lost wages if they are hurt on the job, the state's highest court ruled Tuesday...

The Court of Appeals reinstated the state Supreme Court ruling, saying there was nothing in U.S. immigration law that prevented the worker from receiving lost wages since there was no proof he used fraudulent documents to get the job. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 "does not make it a crime to work without documentation," Judge Victoria Graffeo said in the decision, the AP reported.

Here of course, the worker becomes a person in the eyes of the law not by committing a crime, but by having a crime committed against them. But it is the nature of the crime that is interesting. Within the employment contract, the worker is within the law--only by being economically exploited do illegal immigrants count as people. It really is true, as the Marxist economist Joan Robinson once said, that the only thing worse than being exploited under capitalism is not being exploited under capitalism.

So to return to the theme I raised above: what sort of state are we moving toward? Philip Bobbitt has theorized a transition from the "nation state" model which collapsed after 1991, and the new "market state". The former aimed to maximize the well-being of its citizens (however those were defined), while the latter aims only to ensure the market conditions under which people can compete for advancement.

Thus the state no longer grounds itself in a people--so what does define the boundaries of a state? One major role of states is to print and defend national currencies. This is of particular importance for the United States, which has the luxury of printing the currency which is used as the global standard of bank reserves and key commodity transactions. As a consequence of "dollar hegemony", there is now a global dollar economy which is quite distinct, both in its membership and its territorial boundaries, from the collectivity of American citizens. What are the implications of this?

In much commentary on the imbalances of the global currency regime, it is implicitly assumed that if there is a contradiction between the the state and the nation, it will ultimately be resolved in favor of the nation: thus there will ultimately be a devaluation of the dollar and a fall in American consumption which restores "balance" to the global economy. But what if the state instead manages to disentangle itself from the nation? That is, what happens if we all become a kind of "stateless" people?

This brings us back to where we started. Many of Arendt's comments on totalitarianism are disturbing in their contemporary resonance. Of those Boer war-era "camps [which] correspond in many respects to the concentration camps at the beginning of totalitarian rule," which "were used for 'suspects' whose offenses could not be proved and who could not be sentenced by ordinary process of law" (p. 440), I hardly need to elaborate. But what is most pernicious about the cavalier use of the word "fascism", in reference to the present state of affairs, is that it stops our thinking at precisely the place where it should start. Now, more than ever, we must dig into the diverse historical preconditions and political elements which led toward the fascist turn--the state-form first among them--in order to see how these apply in our conjuncture. The result will be an analysis which is more than facile phrase-mongering; yet I fear it will be no less chilling for its subtlety.

The Structures of Imperialism

The war in Iraq has led to a rehabilitation of "imperialism" as a description of the American role in the world--both from the left, and from conservative defenders of the empire like Niall Ferguson. From my perspective, this is all to the good, as it moves us away from the delusional idealism that informed so many of the debates over so-called "humanitarian intervention" in the 1990's.

But a lot of the debate smacks of economism. That is, people are not distinguishing between the theory of imperialism, and the belief that U.S. foreign policy is directly determined by the interests of specific private corporations and industries. The widespread use of the military- and prison-industrial complex as an analytical framework is indicative of this tendency. These ideas, which are really aspects of one idea, illuminate something important: the positive feedback loop between the expansion of the state's coercive apparatus at home and abroad, and the increasing size and power of private interests which materially benefit from that expansion. But they can lead us down the blind alley of looking for specific economic interests behind each and every military action of the state. In the case of Iraq, the relevant interest is easy to find, which is why "no war for oil" is such a tempting and plausible rallying cry. But the framework breaks down when it is applied to any wider set of historical examples. To use my favorite case: the nation of Grenada is economically notable primarily for being the world's second largest producer of nutmeg; yet the Reagan administration plainly did not go to war against Grenada in the 1980's for nutmeg.

We need to take more seriously Marx's remark, in the Communist Manifesto, that the state is "an executive committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie". This clause is usually taken as a statement of economic determinism: the actions of the state directly reflect the interests of capital. But we should pay less attention to the end of the phrase, and more to the beginning. As any student of bureaucracy and organizations knows, "executive committees for managing" are complex and contradictory entities with their own autonomous logics. It is certainly often true that the state rules in the interest of particular capitals; the economistic anti-war critique captures this. Yet just as often, the state must suppress particularist interests in order to ensure the orderly accumulation of capital in general.

What we need, then, is a theory of imperialism as a structure, and not as a set of interests. If imperialism signifies nothing more than a territorially defined hierarchy of wealth and power in the world system, we can ask what aspects of contemporary capitalism generate and reinforce such hierarchies. As a preliminary step, it occurs to me that we should differentiate some different levels at which the global economy is integrated.

1. Primitive Accumulation. Capitalism could not take off without the existence of massive, concentrated stores of wealth, which could then be thrown into circulation as capital. The primitive accumulation of capital refers to the violent and lawless process by which this concentration occurred. The process of primitive accumulation also destroys pre-capitalist social formations and allows capitalism to expand into new areas. This type of global integration is central to Rosa Luxemburg's theory of imperialism. It has been picked up of late by David Harvey, who uses the term "accumulation by disposession" to encompass not only the process traditionally included under the heading of "primitive accumulation", but also things like the commodification of traditional knowledges through the patent system, and the privatization of public institutions.
2. Export of Commodities. Capitalism has an innate tendency toward overproduction, because increases in productivity are not matched by equivalent rises in the wages of those who must buy the products. Capital thus always seeks new markets, and thus breaks down national barriers. Marx refers to this in the Manifesto: "[t]he cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate."
3. Export of Capital. Capital ultimately needs not only new markets, but new investment opportunties to dispose of all the capital that is accumulated through repeated cycles of production. This leads to the export not merely of commodities, but of capital, as investment is made abroad and capitalist production begins to be globalized. The export of capital was central to early 20th century theories of imperialism, most notably Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
   
4. Currency Regimes. The globalizing process which is inaugurated in primitive accumulation, and intensified by the export of commodities and capital, necessitates a means of payment in global trade--a way of mediating between the diverse national currencies. Up until the 1970's, gold served this function. Since the collapse of the gold standard, however, a peculiar new system has emerged. The U.S. dollar has become the global reserve currency: global commodities like oil are priced in dollars, and national central banks hold reserves of dollars in order to back up their own currencies. This gives the United States, the only state which can print dollars, a unique power on the global stage. Specifically, dollar hegemony allows the U.S. to maintain structural budget and trade deficits without triggering massive domestic inflation. In order to maintain their massive trade surpluses, China and other countries buy up massive amounts of U.S. Treasury bonds, thus underwriting U.S. government spending. This system means, in essence, that "world trade is now a game in which the US produces dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy." Yet no-one wants to upset this arrangement by selling their dollar reserves, since the resulting process of global rebalancing would destroy the production of our trading partners at the same time it demolished American consumption. The constitution of this regime of "dollar hegemony" or "super imperialism" has been documented in detail by Marxist-influenced economists Michael Hudson and Henry C.K. Liu. It is also a topic of concern among mainstream economists like Brad Setser and Nouriel Roubini.
   
5. Energy. It is not arbitrary that current events appear to swirl around oil, rather than any other commodity. The productivity of the economy is highly dependent on oil--to a large extent, the increased efficiency of human labor in production has been a function of the availability of cheap energy, in the form of petroleum. If oil becomes more scarce (and therefore more expensive), this has follow-through effects throughout every sector of the economy, from transportation costs to electricity to agriculture (which is sustained by nitrogen fertilizer, a petroleum product). There has been a lot of concern lately at the possibility that we are approaching the condition known as "peak oil": the point at which the absolute quantity of oil produced in the world will begin to decline. Note that this is not the same as saying that we are "running out" of oil. The important variable is not how much oil is in the ground, but how fast we can extract it. Capitalism can only exist if it constantly grows, and growth in the economy is tied to growth in oil production. If the peak oil theorists are right that we are approaching peak oil--or have already passed it--then the effects on the global economy will be severe. Moreover, geopolitical contests over oil will certainly intensify. Attempts to integrate energy into the theory of imperialism have so far been somewhat halting--but some important initial steps have been taken by Alf Hornborg, Stan Goff, and Mark Jones.

It is important, I think, to recognize that these five aspects of imperialism are not stages which follow each other in a temporal sequence. Rather, they are overlapping structures of international capital which co-exist and interact. A theory of imperialism has to attend to all of them; moreover, we need an empirical and historically specific account which shows which aspects are subordinate and which predominant in the current conjuncture.

As a start, we might think about the territoriality and directionality of these processes. Imperialist structures 1-3 (dispossession, commodities, capital) are increasingly deterritorialized, in that the capitalist class is becoming transnational, and accumulation by dispossession happens within countries as well as between them. At least in the case of (2) and (3), they are also bidirectional--the need to break down barriers to commodities and capital by now applies almost as much to the subordinate economies of the post-colonial world as it does to the old imperial center, and neoliberalism is breaking down many of the barriers which the first world used to protect its economies from the third world.

Dollar hegemony has the clearest directionality of any of these processes: it is the structure which allows the United States to consume more than it produces, and thereby to materially exploit the rest of the world. For that reason, I think dollar hegemony has to be central to any concept of imperialism which maintains the political and moral force of Lenin and Luxemburg. Yet this picture is complicated by a deterritorialization noted by Henry Liu: "Another unique distinction about dollar hegemongy is that it produced an incongruity between the dollar economy and the US economy." In other words, dollar hegemony benefits a class of finance capitalists that is not American, per se. I have not thought through the implications of this, but it might be a clue to resolving the paradox I discussed yesterday.

Then there is oil, the commodity which underpins so much of global finance, yet one which is by its nature territorial. It is the wild card here, and I think we need an account of oil's role in imperialism which gets past economism. If dollar hegemony is the structuring logic of contemporary imperialism, oil would seem to be its "determining last instance"--the commodity whose fate will ultimately determine the future shape of the system.

Stop the Global Cartoon Race!

First, it was the infamous Danish cartoons.

Then, the Iranians decided to prove that Muslims are the equals of the West in all matters of offensive cartoonery. An Iranian newspaper hit on the idea of a contest for cartoons about the Holocaust.

Not to be outdone, an Israeli citizen has attempted to outmaneuver the Iranians by proving that when it comes to anti-Semitic cartoons, no-one can outdo the Jewish people themselves.

This all puts me in mind of nothing so much as this old Monty Python sketch.

Clearly, we are in the midst of a great global cartoon race. If this pernicious competition is not stopped, the cartoon scientists of the great humor powers will soon devise a cartoon so offensive that it will instantly annihilate any civilization that comes in contact with it. People of Earth, I implore you: we must support global cartoon disarmament!

Chaotic Motion

Recently, I've been reading and rereading a fascinating essay by Gopal Balakrishnan in the New Left Review. It's a long review of a recent book, Afflicted Powers by the Retort collective in San Francisco. The book is an attempt to think through the meaning and logic of the contemporary period of warmaking, and to critique and update Marxist theories of imperialism in light of recent developments.

Balakrishnan enumerates several different themes in the book, many of which strike me as tangentially or episodically interesting at best. But I can't stop thinking about the last piece of Retort's analysis, on "the spectacular".

The concept comes, of course, from the situationist Guy Debord. In late modern capitalism, Debord argued, the manufacture of images and appearances--the spectacle--has taken precedence in all realms of social life. This is simply an extension of the logic of commodity production, as Debord explained:

This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by “intangible as well as tangible things,” which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.

As appropriated by Retort, the spectacle is the principal structuring logic of modern politics, and it intervenes between political actors and "facts on the ground" in such a way as to erode historical knowledge and make "strategic interests" indeterminate. This introduces a jarring reversal in the left's discourse about imperial power. It has always been the virtue of anti-imperialist analyses that they can break through liberal critiques which attribute wars to incompetence or individual evil; anti-imperialism achieves this by positing a rational logic of capital accumulation behind war's inhuman illogic. But Retort's analysis would suggest that today, our leaders are in fact confused, incompetent, impotent; it could not be otherwise. Balakrishnan:

A major, probably irreversible, sociological transformation of baby-boom capitalism is at work here. The plebeians refuse to die in wars, the rich refuse to pay for them. The spectacle has resulted not only in weak citizenship at the bottom, but also faulty intelligence at the top. With an eye on the mounting chaos in occupied Iraq, it is not difficult to conclude that the Republican administration’s attempt at grand strategy is now heading for the shoals. ‘The dimension of spectacle has never before interfered so palpably, so insistently, with the business of keeping one’s satrapies in order.’

This view is only confirmed the more one looks at the developments overseas. Christian Parenti's recent book, The Freedom, details the madness of an occupying army attempting to rebuild a country that does not want them, and that they do not understand. The army appears to be breaking under the strain, as recruitment falters. The debt burden continues to mount, and it is impossible to determine how long the Bank of China will continue to fund our adventures. Moreover, even Rumsfeld acknowledges, in a quote used by Balakrishnan, that "we lack metrics to know whether we are winning or losing the war".

All of this is perplexing and disturbing enough. But Balakrishnan goes on to add another layer of uncertainty. It is one thing to say that our leaders have lost the ability to connect military means with their ultimate, capitalist ends. But why, he asks, do we continue to act as though the role of military power in the constitution of interstate power dynamics were obvious and unchanging?

What role does military power play in determining a state’s position within international ranking systems; why and to what extent is it still a decisive dimension of state power? The inability of existing theories even to pose these problems speaks to a deeper crisis of the classical categories of geopolitical rationality.

This is certainly relevant to the various theories of imperialist succession, in which China eventually displaces the U.S. as the hegemonic power. It is generally assumed, in such accounts, that China will have to generate an autonomous military capability in order to accede to first status; the main danger in this transition comes from the potential irresponsibility of a declining U.S. which still has the capacity to start a global conflagration. But perhaps this perspective is too reliant on old schemas of interstate politics.

There is a paradox here. On the one hand, war is increasingly everywhere--the line between soldier and civilian, homeland and battlefield, is steadily being eroded. Yet the purpose and meaning of military power in late capitalist society has never been less clear. Where does that leave us?

A chaotic system is described deterministically by a mathematical equation. But tiny variations in the initial conditions can lead to tremendous nonlinear variation in the system's motion. This is the puzzle of our epoch: it appears that the transition from Clinton to Bush, along with the catalyst of 9/11, has utterly rearranged the logic of the international system. Thus, while a determinate logic must exist in principle, it is, in practice, unknowable.