Excess of Faith

Responding to k-punk's response to Barbara Ehrenreich's piece on "How positive thinking wrecked the economy", Mark Thwaite writes:

A considered and detailed debunking of the term "confidence" really needs to take place. That the global economy is in such tatters because of a lack of "confidence", a lack of faith in other words, is astonishing proof of the validity of Marx's theory of reification, but beyond that it shows that a profound irrationality sits at the heart of the global social system. A social system that claims it can never be bettered or changed or destroyed is, it clearly turns out, based almost entirely on our faith in it! The astonishing amount of energy -- and money -- being mobilised by governments, politicians and journalists to try to keep us keeping the faith shows clearly that it is time for us all to dream again of better worlds.

I would say, rather, that the economy is in tatters not because of a lack of faith, but because of an excess of faith, a misplaced faith in capitalism. This faith isn't limited to those traders who, in fits of panic or elation, cause the stock market to bounce up and down in such dramatic ways as we've seen so much of in the last two weeks. This faith is just as much in evidence in those of us who invest in the market in our own, perhaps small, ways. We have "confidence" that the market will recover, sure, but we have, ironically, ultimate faith in the rationality of capitalism. We're sold a bill of goods about freedom, about the naturalness of the capitalist economy (economic Darwinism, you know: competition is only natural, etc.), and we buy into it wholesale. How many of us who would call ourselves resolutely anti-capitalist nevertheless have bought into the chimera of the 401(k)? We can all retire rich, is that it? All of us? We'll all draw out at the height of the market? How do we think it's possible? How did we ever think there was ever going to be enough money to cover us all in our dotage, with the fantasy of compound interest? This is misplaced faith, potentially far more damaging than what most religions cook up.

Disintegration of the Illusion

I've been meaning to write something about this long-coming economic crisis we find ourselves in, but things have moved too quickly for your slow-writing, time-crunched blogger. But I like what k-punk says here:

"What we're seeing is not the collapse of capitalism, but the disintegration of the illusion that capitalism is about the untrammeled free market."

Yeah.

And, regarding the $700 billion figure, this quote was priceless:

"It’s not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

See also, among many other worthy items, the following: Michael Hudson at CounterPunch (on the insanity of the giveaway plan), Richard Estes at American Leftist, Naomi Klein at The Nation (article is from July, about "Obama's Chicago Boys"; link via Matt Christie), Cassiodorus' Daily Kos diary suggesting "Maybe we can call it 'late late capitalism' now?". . . . so many others, too numerous to collate or summarize, etc. . .

Meanwhile, Lenin reminds us not to forget about recent American strikes in Pakistan, expanding the illegal, immoral, ineffective, total bullshit war of terror.

The End of Suburbia

Crucial video about a crushingly huge problem--the decline of cheap oil, and the attendant impossibility of maintaining the American way of life, the suburbs in particular. I've been meaning to spend more time about this kind of thing, but haven't been able to organize my thoughts. I hope to rectify that in the future. (Also, I hope to link more to Feral Scholar, where they spend pretty much all their time talking about this kind of thing, and what might be done about it.) In the meantime, be sure to watch this documentary. (Via Jacob Russell, via here)

Dangerous Tendencies

Here's another passage from Terry Bouton's Taming Democracy, on the topic of public attitudes towards corporations in the 1780s (with the Bank of North America as the particular case in point):

. . . people worried that the bank would eventually destroy democracy. Thousands of Pennsylvanians complained in their petitions that bankers [...] had begun "to acquire influence in our public councils, and an ascendancy in the government, subversive of the dearest rights of the people." They were worried that "a small number" of "monied men" and "perhaps a single stockholder" could eventually use the bank's growing economic might to begin "actually governing" the state as a shadow government. Others spoke of how it was "highly dangerous" and "Contrary to [the] spirit of a republican government" to have an "institution" that was "placed out of the reach of the legislature," noting that not even "the former government" had been willing to create a private "influence" so "powerful and alarming."

It was not that these people thought bankers were somehow innately sinister; instead, they worried about [...] the "nature of the institution." As a profit-driven company, the bank operated under "natural principles" of doing whatever it took to make money. [...]

The belief that profit-driven corporations pose a grave threat to democracy led many people to declare that they should all be made illegal. Echoing the phrases in popular petitions, some state legislatures said for-profit corporations were "totally destructive of that equality which ought to prevail in a republic." "The accumulation of enormous wealth in the hands of" a company with corporate status, they declared, "will necessarily produce a degree of influence and power which cannot be entrusted in the hands of any set of men whatsoever without endangering the public safety." Others spoke of the "dangerous tendencies" of for-profit corporations or talked about corporate power as "an engine of destruction" that enabled "a few men to take advantage of their wealth." Even one of the state's leading writers on economics argued that any institution chartered for "its own immediate profit [was] incompatible with the interest of the State." "So powerful and uncontroulable a combination of property in private hands," this economist declared, could only lead to "an undue exercise of influence" over economic and political life--just as private corporations like the Bank of England had an "injurious" hold over the British Parliament.

This anti-corporate belief was so strong that, during the postwar decades, few government actions prompted the kind of swift, widespread, and visceral public condemnation as did the attempts of state leaders to grant corporate status. (pp. 111-112) (Elisions are mine; bracketed words are Bouton's.)

Too many people to buy off

In my last post, I wrote the following incomplete passage:

In the popular conception, independence meant owning property; most people were farmers. Economic independence meant political independence. It was widely felt that one could not be "free" if one was economically dependent. For most people, this meant owning land.

There was a lot I left unsaid here, and I fear that the effect is misleading and undermines the overall point of the piece. I should have taken more time to expand on it. If people, ordinary people, believed that one could not be truly independent if one did not own property, where does that leave us? How is their conception one that should inspire us? When we learn rules that require the ownership of property, don't we instinctively think they are wrong? I know I do. I can remember in my youth being indignant upon first learning that the true beneficiaries of the American Revolution, of the new "democracy", were the propertied classes, that the system was never meant to be broadly democratic, etc.

In any event, Terry Bouton's Taming Democracy helped me to understand better why people would link economic independence with political independence in the first place, but it also discusses their movement beyond the notion that only property owners should be able to vote or take part in the political process. I should have noted that, though many colonial Americans were indeed farmers (and could be said to "own" land), many were not. There were numerous artisans and laborers and apprentices (not to mention slaves, of course). It was felt that these sorts of people would be pressured by their employers or landlords to vote a certain way. It is in this way that they would have been said to not be "politically independent". Even so, with the more radical 1776 Pennsylvania constitution nearly all adult men could vote (including free black men), with the removal of all property requirements. Here is Bouton:

This opening represented a dramatically new way of thinking about voting and citizenship. In the past, governments had focused on limiting the franchise to adult men who own sufficient property because it was thought that only those with property could be truly “independent” citizens. Governments had disenfranchised propertyless “dependents,” whom it was thought would vote as their landlord, employers, or creditors directed. It was said that preventing dependents from voting would keep wealthy men from corrupting the political system. As Pennsylvanians broke from Britain, they also abandoned this old way of thinking about voting. The new focus was to protect against corruption by giving the vote to men who held little or no property. The idea was that an expanded electorate would protect against corruption better because, with so many voters, there would be too many people to buy off. At the same time, it was thought that allowing ordinary folk to vote would give them the power they needed to get access to money, credit, and land and become independent. And with property in many hands, it would be even harder for the affluent to control political life. There were remnants of the old thinking in this new ideal: Pennsylvania’s revolutionaries still considered the propertyless a possible threat. But they now believed that giving the vote to ordinary folk was the only way to keep the wealthy in check. (pp. 53-54)

I think that fleshes things out a little better, so I'll leave the topic for now. . . (Though I hope to return to the idea that "one could not be 'free' if one was economically dependent".)

Debtor Nation

Michael Hudson is a name I've been seeing a lot of lately, particularly through the recommendations of Stan Goff. Hudson is a Wall Street financial analyst, and author of the book Super-Imperialism (which I really need to read). Today, I read this interview (pdf) with Hudson, conducted by Acres USA (link again found via Stan Goff, in a comment he posted to this post--"Bubble Bubble"--at Feral Scholar). The interview is titled "Debtor Nation: The Hijacking of America's Economy" and is well worth reading. It begins with a discussion of the sub-prime crisis, covers the Chicago Boys in Chile, the looting of Russia, the "anti-country" of Panama (including its purposes for the trade in oil), and hits on Thorstein Veblen, Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, and the Democratic candidates for president. Here is a fascinating passage in which Hudson talks about the Unites States' balance of payments deficit:

HUDSON. [...] The United States became a true deficit country after August 1971, when President Nixon took the country off gold. Once European and Asian countries and their central banks could no longer turn in their surplus dollars for gold, they had only one choice, and that was to invest their international monetary reserves in the form of U.S. Treasury bonds. Central banks don't invest in the stock market, they don't buy real estate, and they don't buy companies — at least not until recently. They buy government securities because those are the most secure. So the United States found that the larger the balance of payments deficit became, the more dollars it would pump into foreign economies. The recipients of these dollars, either exporters or sellers of companies, would turn the surplus dollars over to their central banks in exchange for domestic currency, and then the central banks had a problem — what do they do with these dollars? The only thing they could do was to buy U.S. Treasury bonds.

ACRES U.S.A. That would add up to a lot of bonds.

HUDSON. Yes, the balance of payments was so large and pumped so many dollars bonds, or they wouldn't buy these dollars — they would let them be sold on the market, and their currency would appreciate against the dollar. This would have raised the price of their exports to foreign countries, causing unemployment in their export industries. When they complained about the U.S. payments deficit, the U.S. government said "That's your problem, not ours." The United States found that it could run a balance of payments deficit without ever having to pay for it — and today, the U.S. Treasury owes $2.5 trillion to foreign central banks.

ACRES U.S.A. That's an astronomical debt!

HUDSON. There is no way in which the U.S. economy can repay $2.5 trillion. Of this amount, about half is owed to China, and all the while dollars continue to be pumped into the global economy. In effect, the United States is exporting paper dollars, or paper bonds, and other countries are exporting goods and services and selling their corporate stocks and natural resources in exchange. The dollar is getting a free ride from this. As far as it is concerned, the debts owed to foreign central banks are never going to be repaid.

ACRES U.S.A. Don't these nations know this?

HUDSON. Yes, but as yet they have no political response. That would require changing how the overall international payments system works and also break the U.S. economy out of the global orbit, isolating it until it can give a quid pro quo for what it buys. A change would also require restructuring European and Asian domestic economies to replace dollar-export markets with their own domestic market. So foreign countries could indeed refuse to accept more excess dollars, refusing to sell out to Americans, and try to develop their internal market. But the German government is so anti-labor that it refuses to build the internal market, and the Chinese — like the Germans — continue to produce chiefly for export.

ACRES U.S.A. Why did they do this? Why does Germany with its high unemployment rely on this world trade, and the same with China, when they have their own internal economies they might service?

HUDSON. Because they don't seem to care about their internal economies, except to go on waging the old class war. That is how mainstream economics is taught these days — and why I stopped teaching academic economics for many years. Many people have tried to explain why European central bankers are so idiotic when it comes to this system. One suggestion is the "Stockholm Syndrome": When somebody is kidnapped, the victim tends to identify with the kidnapper, the victimizer — and there is an idea in Germany, in England, and other countries that no matter what, they have to do whatever the U.S. government recommends. It's a passive mentality. But for Europe and Asia to behave in this way violates every theory of how international relations are supposed to work. In theory, every nation is supposed to act in its own self-interest. But in today's world it seems that only the U.S. government is acting in this way. It is understandable why the United States would love to pay paper dollars and get foreign resources for nothing. It's not understandable why foreign countries go along.

Mid-Atlantic Radical Book Fair

This past weekend we went to the Mid-Atlantic Radical Book Fair, hosted by Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse at 2640. The event is pretty much what it sounds like: radical publishers and book shops and activists getting together to sell books and meet and greet and talk politics and activism. AK Press, Haymarket Books, and Autonomedia were among the publishers in attendance. As always, it was an entertaining and informative event.

There were various events throughout the weekend: films, readings, discussions, workshops. I attended three discussions. The first was on Saturday, a rather tepid session called "Anarchism and Marxism". A bunch of young people and me sitting around a circle listening to an older activist talk about his group's take on Anarchism and where it overlaps with liberatory Marxism. I mostly agreed with his perspective (more Murray Bookchin than Hakim Bey, if I understood him correctly), but it was necessarily brief. The discussion never really got going, and then it was over. Feeling enervated by the workshop and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of interesting books on display (we're trying not to buy much in the way of new books), I was having a hard time getting into the spirit of the thing. Aimée showed up, and we walked around some more (she bought some children's books, including one about Woodie Guthrie). She had some things she was interested in doing there, while I was already feeling sleepy and out of it. But then we attended an excellent session called "Rethinking War and the Struggle Against it in the Neoliberal Era", led by George Caffentzis and Sylvia Federici. I thought I knew a lot about neoliberalism and the reasons behind the war, but my understanding was considerably deepened by what they had to say and the ensuing discussion.

Caffentzis and Federici are members of the Midnight Notes Collective [the website is pretty rudimentary, though there are plenty of links to interesting articles], a collective which since the 1970s has "directed its political intervention and theoretical work to the anti-nuclear, anti-war, and anti-capitalist movements." The latter quote comes from the back of the book Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973-1992 (published by Autonomedia), which I bought at the Fair. I'm a little less than halfway through this book, and I already think it's a must-read. In my "Disaster Capitalism" post I suggested that David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism and Ellen Meiksins Wood's Empire of Capital were crucial books for anyone hoping to understand the world today. Let me add Midnight Oil to that short list. The authors' analysis of the reasons behind the 1991 Gulf War (including why Saddam Hussein decided to invade Kuwait), the background of the imposition of neoliberalism, the internationalization of class war, etc--all of this is brilliant and fascinating. It will figure in future posts about capitalism

I also walked out with a copy of Federici's book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Described as "a history of the body in the transition to capitalism", this book fits right into my growing interest in the origins of and resistances to capitalism. Peter Linebaugh is the author of another such book that I need to read, The London Hanged (about which, see Resolute Reader), and is also a member of Midnight Notes. From Linebaugh's blurb to Caliban and the Witch:

Federici shows that the birth of the proletariat required a war against women, inaugurating a new sexual pact and a new patriarchal era: the patriarchy of the wage. Firmly rooted in the history of the persecution of the witches and the disciplining of the body, her arguments explain why the subjugation of women was as crucial for the formation of the world proletariat as the enclosures of the land, the conquest and colonization of the 'New World,' and the slave trade.

On Sunday, we returned to the Book Fair to hear Dahr Jamail talk about his experiences as an independent journalist in Iraq (including readings from his book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Iraq), along with members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, who talked about their own experiences in the war, as well as their efforts to organize active duty service members against it. As you might expect, this talk was moving and informative. And . . . and I wish i had more to say about it, but I'm tired and this meandering post is long enough. I may say more later on. But for now check out Jamail's website and his blog and the IVAW site for more information.

Disaster Capitalism

Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, has been getting a lot of attention lately. I’m interested in reading it. I liked what I read of her earlier book, No Logo (I read about 3/4 of it), and have appreciated her work in recent years.

At ads without products, I came across the following short advertising film for the book, directed by Alfonso Cuarón of Children of Men fame:


In the film, and it appears the book, Klein draws comparisons between the use of torture in U.S. interrogation techniques (laid out in the CIA manuals) and the methods of “crisis capitalism”, or what she calls the economic “shock doctrine”: each is intended to soften up the victim so that they are more likely to bend, less likely to resist.

In a respectful review in the Guardian (link via The Reading Experience), John Gray puts Klein's thesis like this:

As Klein sees it, the social breakdowns that have accompanied neo-liberal economic policies are not the result of incompetence or mismanagement. They are integral to the free-market project, which can only advance against a background of disasters.

[. . .]

Klein uses torture as a metaphor, and does not claim any cause-and-effect link between its re-emergence and the rise of neo-liberal shock therapy; but she does point to some disquieting similarities. Individuals and societies have been "de-patterned" with the aim of remaking them on a better, more rational model. In each case, the experiments have failed, while inflicting lasting and often irreparable damage on those who were subjected to them.

In his penultimate paragraph, he writes:

There can be no doubt that fortunes have been reaped from the Iraq war as they have been from other experiments in disaster capitalism. Yet I remain unconvinced that the corporations Klein berates throughout the book understand, let alone control, the anarchic global capitalism that has been allowed to develop over the past couple of decades - any more than the neo-liberal ideologues who helped create it foresaw where it would lead. Rightly, Klein insists that free market ideology must bear responsibility for the crimes committed on its behalf - just as Marxist ideology must be held to account for the crimes of communism. But she says remarkably little about the illusions by which neo-liberal ideologues were themselves blinded. Milton Friedman and his disciples believed a western-style free market would spring up spontaneously in post-communist Russia. They were left gawping when central planning was followed by the criminalised free-for-all of the 90s, and were unprepared for the rise of Putin's resource-based state capitalism. These ideologues were not the sinister, Dr Strangelove-like figures of the anti-capitalist imagination. They were comically deluded bien-pensants, who promoted their utopian schemes with messianic fervour and have been left stranded by history, as the radiant future they confidently predicted has failed to arrive.

I disagree with most of this paragraph, which is packed with a lot of questionable assumptions. I won't attempt a point-by-point response, but let me try to address some of them.

In an earlier post in which I briefly asserted that capitalism needs states, I quoted a passage from a Noam Chomsky essay from 1977 ("American Foreign Policy in the Middle East", collected in Towards a New Cold War). As the titles makes plain, the essay was specifically about American policy in the Middle East and, in part, about the role of the oil companies in the region. Here is how the passage began:

The oil companies face local problems as a result of continued American barriers to a political settlement of the Arab-Israeli crisis in the only possible manner, that is, with a two-state settlement along roughly the 1967 borders. But the basic long-term interests of American capitalism have, so far, been adequately served by this policy. As noted before, this is not the first time that the oil companies, despite their power, have been subordinated to more general interests.

And what are these more general interests? They are the maintenance of the capitalist system as a whole. This is where the idea that capitalism needs states comes in. In his review, Gray says: "There are very few books that really help us understand the present." I agree. Gray suggests that Klein's is just such a book. Here are two more: A Brief History of Neoliberalism, by David Harvey, and Empire of Capital, by Ellen Meiksins Wood.

In his book, Harvey traces the development of, experimentation with, and eventual widespread political accommodation to neoliberal ideas and policies. The bankruptcy of New York City in the 1970s; the assassination of Allende of Chile in 1973, followed by the first imposition of Milton Friedman's neoliberal ideas on a nationwide scale by Pinochet, guided by Chicago-trained economists; Thatcherite England; Carter and Reagan; the capitalization of China: Harvey discusses all of this and more, along the way comparing the rhetoric of neoliberalism with the practice. Where Gray paints Friedman and his followers as deluded "utopians" (not unlike popular conceptions of communist revolutionaries), Harvey shows that "the theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has . . . primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve" the goal of "restoring, or some instances (as in Russia and China) creating, the power of an economic elite". In short, class war, justified by the attractive but ultimately empty rhetoric of freedom. That is, they knew what they were doing, even if Gray is right (and I think he probably is) that "disaster capitalism is now creating disasters larger than [the system] can handle". (For more on what happened to New York City in the 1970s, see "Neoliberalism and the City" from Studies in Social Justice (the link is to a pdf); for an even briefer history of neoliberalism than offered by Harvey's book, see this excellent interview with Harvey at The Monthly Review's MRZine.)

"They knew what they were doing." Who is "they" in this case? If Gray's review is any indication, it sounds as if Naomi Klein focuses on the depredations of "disaster capitalism" through the prism of large corporations. If so, this isn't surprising, given the balance of her work in the past, including No Logo. It's not unimportant, of course. We need to know what those corporations are up to. But, as suggested by the Chomsky passage, there are general systemic interests over and above the short-term needs of even the most powerful corporations. Who attends to the system? Whereas many have observed the existence of hugely powerful multinational corporations and organizations such as the WTO and concluded that we are living in a period of the declining importance of states, in Empire of Capital Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that

. . . for all the globalizing tendencies of capitalism, the world has become more, not less, a world of nation states, not only as a result of national liberation struggles, but also under pressure from imperial powers.

These powers have found the nation state the most reliable guarantor of the conditions necessary for accumulation, and the only means by which capital can freely expand beyond the boundaries of direct political domination. As market imperatives have become a means of manipulating local elites, local states have proved to be far more useful transmission belts for capitalist imperatives than were the old colonial agents and settlers who originally carried the capitalist market throughout the world.

Where formerly it was the British who enforced the nascent global system (Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts, which I am currently reading, is proving invaluably instructive on this score), with the end of World War II (and adverserial inter-ally politics during the war) the United States emerged as its guarantor. Wood spends some time discussing the differences between various empires throughout history (Roman, Chinese, Spanish, Arab Muslim, Dutch, Venetian, British) in order to show how the empire presided over by the United States is different: the first truly capitalist empire. If capitalist imperatives are self-replicating and "purely economic", and neoliberalism promises freedom for all, where is the problem? The problem is

this mode of imperialism, like capitalism itself, has contradictions at its very core. One the one hand, it depends on the separation of the ‘economic’ and ‘political’, which makes possible the unbounded expansion of capitalist appropriation by purely economic means and the extension of the capitalist economy far beyond the limits of the nation state. Capitalism has a unique drive for self-expansion. Capital cannot survive without constant accumulation, and its requirements relentlessly drive it to expand its geographic scope beyond national boundaries too. Yet, on the other hand, capital has always needed the support of territorial states; and while the wide-ranging expansion of capitalist appropriation has moved far beyond national borders, the national organization of capitalist economies has remained stubbornly persistent. At the same time, the nation state has remained an indispensable instrument – perhaps the only indispensable ‘extra-economic’ instrument – of global capital.

'Extra-economic' means politics; 'extra-economic' instrument means the political state, usually in the form of a monopoly on violence. Within countries, the process is more straightforward: "capital appropriates, while the 'neutral' state enforces the system of property, and propertylessness." It's a lot more complicated in the global system, but I think the actions taken by the United States since the end of World War II--from containment policy, including the wars in Korea and Vietnam, to "support" for not only Israel and, earlier, South Africa, but countless Third World despots--make a whole lot more sense when viewed within the conceptual framework of the United States as enforcer and guarantor of the capitalist world system (which is not to say that individual personalities don't impact the political situation in their own ways). Now, as American economic hegemony has all but collapsed, American attempts to throw its weight around militarily seem increasingly desperate.

There is a lot more that can be said about Wood's book (I found the idea of the state as the enforcer of not only the system of property but also "propertylessness" extremely important, and now that she's brought it to my attention, obvious), but I'll leave with one more thing before finishing up here. She points out that the idea that states are declining in importance, the premise that "the nation state is giving way to a new form of stateless 'sovereignty' that is everywhere and nowhere" (as argued by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their popular book Empire, which I have not read)--"such views", she says, "not only miss something truly essential in today's global order but also leave us powerless to resist the empire of capital." Recognizing the remaining importance of states means that there can be--and are--centers of power, potential loci of resistance. Many of us feel powerless enough as it is, but without political entities (in this case states) to resist against, without a place to act politically, that sense of powerlessness can only increase.

I like what I've heard about Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, and I look forward to learning a lot from it. For those interested in understanding the present world, I highly recommend also reading A Brief History of Neoliberalism and Empire of Capital.

Forced Scarcity and Catastrophism

At CounterPunch, see "Specters of Malthus", a fascinating interview with Iain Boal ("an Irish social historian of science and technics") about "scarcity" and "catastrophe". Some samples:

So there's no denying that capitalism is now threatening the basis of life on earth. Certainly that's true. But I refuse to cave in to Malthusian assumptions. Why is it not possible to imagine a reorganization of agriculture, and I don’t mean some new technofix from Monsanto. It will surely mean agrarian revolutions, though the content of those revolutions would be contested, to say the least. Marxists have always thrilled to the sight of really big tractors. They don't much like to hear about watersheds and foodmiles and small Kropotkinian communes.

[. . .]

. . . it's important to notice the ideological move that naturalizes events which are the result of human decisions. It turns disasters that have as much to do with human agency and decision into natural and inevitable events.

[. . .]

What is so poignant is that things could be otherwise. We don't in fact live in a world of Malthusian scarcity. Far from it. Even Malthus himself acknowledged this when he spoke of "nature's mighty feast". And yet the history of modernity is the history of enclosure, of the cutting off of people from access to land, to the common treasury and to the fruits of our own labour. Excluded by fire and sword and now "structural adjustment". Everywhere you look, there [is] nothing much natural about it, this kind of scarcity. It's a story of artifice and force. No wonder the fables offered us by modernity's clerisy are the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons. The premises of the science of economics are a disgrace, and so are all the proliferating offspring of Malthus. Our first task is to kill these sacred cows of capitalist modernity.

Not a Recipe for Universal Love

Not to worry, The Existence Machine has not died (thank God, right?). July was a very slow month. For a variety of reasons, time has been hard to come by. There are several things I’ve been thinking about, things that have been occupying my mind for some time, some of which I hope to write about here, when things loosen up a bit.

In the meantime, I urge you to go over to Insurgent American and take a look at Stan Goff’s excellent series on “Homeland Security: what we need to know that politicians and pundits will never say”. As of now, he’s posted three parts (one, two, three), and, as usual, he's well worth paying attention to. A teaser from the second part:

By dint of the United States’ size, its financial dominance, and its ability to project military might – especially nuclear weapons anywhere in the world – every other nation in the world finds itself obliged to relate its policies and strategies to the United States as a primary matter. This is not a recipe for universal love.

I haven't spent as much time poking through the site as I'd like, but I've always admired Goff's writing and clarity of vision, since first noticing his articles over at CounterPunch several years ago.

On a related note, at American Leftist Richard Estes has posted two very good posts (one, two) featuring "Random Observations on the Piercing of the Real Estate Bubble", and as with Goff's pieces, there are links aplenty.

Pre-Honeymoon Non-Fiction Round-Up

I've read two important non-fiction books in recent months:

The Origin of Capitalism: a longer view by Ellen Meiksins Wood. In this excellent book, Wood locates the origins of capitalism in the changing social and property relations in England in the 1600s. In doing so, she points out where even Marxist historians and economists have assumed the naturalness of capitalism and in looking for its origins merely explained certain historical phenomena (e.g., feudalism, etc) as necessarily leading to capitalism. To Wood, this misses something essential and basically ignores what was quite different about various pre-capitalist economies. This book was fascinating (if occasionally repetitive), and fired my imagination. Aside from needing to read E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, which was already on my list, and several other items cited by Wood, I am now immensely interested in the question of potential alternative routes to modernity. Her distinction between various characteristics of English and French feudal relations, for example, made my head spin, given how difficult it is to imagine life without capitalism. There is much food for thought here. I plan to explore these issues in much greater detail in my reading, some of which may find its way here.

The Case Against Israel by Michael Neumann. In this book, Neumann effortlessly handles the various arguments made in Israel's favor. He establishes with ease the illegitimacy of the Zionist project in the first place, and how it's only natural that the Palestinians would have responded in the manner in which they historically have:

The ugliness of mob violence should not deceive us into supposing that more socially acceptable responses actually do less harm. We find its low-techs attacks on individuals more distasteful than high-tech attacks, even if they are sure to harm individuals just as much. A beheading disgusts us; not so a massive air assault which will have the side effect of blowing the heads off a few children. That both the attackers and we ourselves fully expect such "collateral damage" doesn't seem to matter. This indeed is why we witness the spectacular exercise in obliviousness that sees the apostles of Western civilization berating "the Arabs" or Islam for its brutality. That Western civilization recently produced King Leopold's Congo genocide, Hiroshima, the concentration camps, and two catastrophic world wars should make us think twice before we see any particular evil in the Palestinian response. (63-64)

It's not perfect (I have minor quibbles on some points of his interpretation of certain historical questions, but I do not feel that they negatively impact the power of Neumann's arguments), but this book should be required reading for anyone concerned with the issues surrounding Israel and Palestine, which should be anyone, period. I could quote from it at excessive length, but I will not. I will, however, leave you with some passages from the section addressing Palestinian terrorism (remember that his argument is in the context of generally accepted moral principles):

...the crucial point about collateral damage is not that it mutilates children and is therefore wrong; it's that it mutilates children and may at times be right. There really isn't any question about this. Even if every war the U.S. has fought since 1945 has been wrong, we can easily conceive of wars that are right, or at least in which we were right to participate. Most of us think such wars have actually occurred. And such wars involve just the sort of collateral damage we're talking about.

This is why there can't be any serious issue about justifying terrorism. Yes, it sometimes mutilates children for political purposes. This is clearly wrong if done in an obviously bad cause, or for very stupid reasons. But--I am not in a position to change or judge almost universally accepted moral principles--otherwise it can certainly be ok. That's why we so often cause it to happen.

Why then, would any of us feel entitled to find terrorism morally repugnant?

[...]

Whether to engage in terrorism--like whether to start a war--is a very serious strategic issue, fraught with uncertainty. But it is no more than that. I would not pronounce judgment on Palestinian terrorism because I do not, God-like, have all the facts on the ground at my disposal. I do not know if some other tactic would work as well, with less cost. I do know, and have argued here, that the Palestinians don't have any obviously viable nonviolent alternatives. It is also apparent that Palestinian terrorism has done great damage to the Israeli economy and that, for all the brutal retaliation it understandably provokes, from the Palestinian standpoint these very high costs may still be worth bearing, because the alternative seems to be total dispossession and very likely death in the thousands. I also know that the Palestinians have very substantial rights of self-defense that do apply to their present circumstances. Anyone who believes the Palestinians should renounce terror ought at least to provide a plausible argument that some other strategy will be more effective--and I do not see such an argument on the horizon.

The Palestinians have often said that, given an army like Israel's, they would never engage in terror. Perhaps they would be as scrupulous as we are, or ten times more so. One thing is certain: could the Palestinians trade terrorism for conventional, legal, approved warfare, thousands more innocent humans beings would be reduced to bloody lumps of flesh. Why this would be morally preferable is not entirely clear to me. (168-170)