Capitalism and Definitions

We have argued that the essential element of capitalism as a system is not, as is often contended, proletarian wage labor or production for the market or factory production. For one thing, all of these phenomena have long historical roots and can be found in many different kinds of systems. In my view, the key element that defines a capitalist system is that it is built on the drive for the endless accumulation of capital. This is not merely a cultural value but a structural requirement, meaning that there exist mechanisms within the system to reward in the middle those who operate according to its logic and to punish (materially) those who insist on operating according to other logics.

We have argued that, in order to maintain such a system, several things are necessary. There has to be an axial division of labor, such that there are continuous exchanges of essential goods that are low-profit and highly competitive (i.e., peripheral) with high-profit and quasi-monopolized (i.e., core-like) products. In order to allow entrepreneurs to operate successfully in such a system, there needs in addition to be an interstate system composed of pseudosovereign states of differing degrees of efficacy (strength). And there also have to be cyclical mechanisms that permit the constant creation of new quasi-monopolistic profit-making enterprises. The consequence of this is that there is a quite slow but constant geographical relocation of the privileged centers of the system. (xiv)

These words are Immanuel Wallerstein's, from his new prologue to the 2011 edition of volume III of The Modern World-System: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s. I quote them here because definitions matter and we have too many of them for capitalism.

I have, in the last year or so, found myself embroiled in various online discussions here and there about capitalism and our current predicament, etc, in which the conversation can only go so far because we, the participants, are not operating under the same set of assumptions on what capitalism, in fact, is. I tend to avoid lengthy online back-and-forths, for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the inadequacy of my available devices (which means the mechanics of it are unpleasant). But also, where once I was quick to write lengthy responses to people, usually via email, now I shy away from them. In part, I don't want to lose a piece of writing in the bowels of another blog's comments, and I write too slow to effectively respond here. It's also true that I'm simply not read deeply enough in the Marxist or liberal economic literature to respond to certain kinds of pedantry. So if someone cites a particular of a given debate, I'm often at something of a loss. However, though I would like to deepen my reading of such literature, the truth is I'm only going to get to so much of it, and things are happening right now. My gut tells me that most of it is unnecessary.

A few years ago I read Ellen Meiksins Wood's Origins of Capitalism, and I found it very helpful. She is, of course, a Marxist, writing in the aftermath of the Brenner debates of the 1970s. She helped me to see a number of different things much more clearly than I had seen them before (for just one example, the state's role in enforcing propertylessness). I was further helped along by essays from the Midnight Notes Collective, and then David Harvey's book-length study of Marx's Capital, The Limits to Capital, as well as a couple of Harvey's other books. Then came the first volume of Capital itself, along with Harvey's online lectures, and the feminist approaches of Maria Mies (Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale) and Silvia Federici (Caliban and the Witch). The feminist works are crucial; they seem to take the analysis to its logical conclusions that too many Marxists seem unwilling to take it (so they said; but I had no trouble taking their word for it, given my own limited experience with the literature). Readers will notice that I've rehearsed this sequence before. All apologies. In any event, my point here is that something nagged at me. I was still having trouble understanding where it came from, and why, and it seemed really important that I do understand it, in order to wrap my head around the problems facing us today. Then I read Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century, my first exposure to world-system analysis, and many things began to fall into place in my mind. This led me to Wallerstein. First to his slim World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, then to his now four-volume study, The Modern World-System. (David Graeber's work plays a big role here, too; I'm thinking a few of the essays in Possibilities, as well as the more recent Debt.)

I realized that what had troubled me were questions of focus and certain sets of assumptions. I had difficulty with the idea of a particular capitalist "state" (or "states" competing with each other) (though, indeed, Wood, in her Empire of Capital, had helped clarify for me the necessity of the state apparatus for capitalism), with the very focus on "mode of production", with questions and apparently long-running debates about such topics as whether or not slavery was capitalist, which seemed silly on their face (of course it was capitalist; for just one point, the feminist focus on how unpaid labor underpins the wage system is important here). I desired, and insisted, without knowing it, a longer view (somewhat ironic, considering the subtitle of Wood's book is, in fact, "a longer view"; it's not quite long enough), and a more detailed view. Arrighi's and then especially Wallerstein's books have helped me enormously, providing a framework in which things fit together much better (not like a puzzle, but like life, if you'll pardon the expression). Anyway, I provide the passage at the top of this post as a placeholder and reference point: this is the definition of capitalism I'm working from, the one that makes the most sense to me. Recent claims that we've already moved away from capitalism into a feudalism-like "rentism" seem to me to misunderstand both feudal arrangements and capitalism itself, and especially miss the ease with which the former historically shaded into the latter. There's nothing un-capitalist about monopolies or rent. Misplaced emphasis on wage labor and modes of production are distracting. Here Wallerstein continues:

Capitalism is a system in which the endless accumulation of capital is the raison d'être. To accumulate capital, producers must obtain profits from their operations. However, truly significant profits are possible only if the producer can sell the product for considerably more than the cost of production. In a situation of perfect competition, it is absolutely impossible to make significant profit. Perfect competition is classically defined as a situation with three features—a multitude of sellers, a multitude of buyers, and universally available information about prices. If all three features were to prevail (which rarely occurs), any intelligent buyer will go from seller to seller until he finds one who will sell at a penny above the cost of production, if not indeed below the cost of production.

Obtaining significant profit requires a monopoly, or at least a quasi-monopoly, of world-economic power. If there is a monopoly, the seller can demand any price, as long as he does not go beyond what the elasticity of demand permits. Any time the world-economy is expanding significantly, one will find that there are some "leading" products, which are relatively monopolized. It is from these products that great profits are made and large amounts of capital are accumulated.

I could go on, but will not, not now. But consider this a re-beginning, of sorts, on this topic.

On technology and the classless society

Marx’s argument amounts to this: any project to deliver a classless society, with wealth distributed according to need, must be based on the most advanced technologies and organisational forms created by capitalism itself. It can’t be based on schemes originating in the heads of philanthropic bosses or philosophers. And you can’t return to the past.

This passage, I am told via Nick Srnicek's tumblr (by way of Mark Fisher's Twitter feed), comes from Paul Mason's book, Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (Verso, 2012; they appear to have been pushing this book rather hard). I find the formulation helpful, because it allows me to directly address something that's been nagging at me for a while now, making me feel alienated from most currents of the Left. I have no idea what Mason actually discusses in his book on this point, but it was excerpted as if it stands alone, and it is close enough to other leftist formulations that I feel justified in taking it as it is. Anyway, whenever I read something like this, I want to shout: The classless society of the future cannot "be based on the most advanced technologies and organisational forms created by capitalism itself"!

I see this as a massive problem, yet when I do want to shout, I instead hold back, not wanting to get into an internet battle I don't often have the patience for. Feeling insufficiently read up on this or that theoretical model, or otherwise under-informed, or wary of being accused of nostalgia, of Luddism, of Romanticism, or something like that. That said, here are just a few (very) preliminary points that occur to me:

1. Too often technology is taken for granted, in the sense that advances are taken as the natural order of things. This is fitting, I suppose, in that capitalism itself is experienced as simply the way things are and must be, as the air we breathe, as natural. I don't think that's the problem here, but it's common enough, even among leftists.

2. Just in general, theoretically, it seems to me that a classless society implies a situation in which the state no longer exists, and a situation in which, by definition, class inequalities, along with massively hierarchical institutions, also no longer exist. In which case, precisely how could such a society be based on the most advanced organizational forms created by capitalism? Or, perhaps the problem is, what is meant by "advanced"? Is "advanced" a value judgment? (If so, how is that judgment made, and by whom?) Otherwise, I fail to see how the massively hierarchical corporation, or government agency, or the like, can possibly be the model for, or basis of, a classless society of the future.

3. Politically, not enough attention is paid to the circumstances through which our advanced technology is produced and maintained. Questions need to be asked concerning the source of the energy needed to develop, produce, and maintain today's advanced technology. Who does that work? Would a classless society transfer, by force, the energy needed to fuel such a process? Or, how would a classless society justify the continuation of such transfers? How would it justify the kind of labor needed to make it happen? (Is the internet possible without cheap oil?)

4. Practically speaking, it seems obvious to me that our current ecological situation all but screams out that we need to come to terms with the idea that our advanced technology will not be available forever. While we have them, we should feel no compunction about using the various advanced tools currently at our disposal, but it seems to me we should not expect those tools to always be available.

5. Notice how the question is framed (and almost always seems to be framed): either you believe the classless society should be based on the most advanced technological and organization forms created by capitalism, or you're guilty of utopian dreaming ("schemes originating in the heads of philanthropic bosses or philosophers") or of romanticizing this or that pre-capitalist past. Often it's explicitly framed like this: either you're resolutely modern, or you're a dangerous dreamer who romanticizes the past. I maintain that this binary is unhelpful. The past has a lot to teach us, and we've forgotten much.

Ok, that's enough for now; more to come.

So it Begins

It figures that the last post, primarily about needing to be a more patient reader, would begin and end with notes about blogging frequency. Inevitable around here, I suppose. Anyway, there were other factors leading into the decision to finally just read those things I've wanted to, or felt the need to, read and to be patient about it. Regarding poetry, Jonathan Mayhew recently posted a brief entry about his ongoing engagement with canonical high modernist poetry:

Now the problem is that in the contemporary university, cultural studies has largely displaced that canon, especially in Latin American studies--but also to some degree in the peninsular (Iberian peninsular, that is) realm. The typical argument in Latin American studies would have a very clear political "take away." I heard a colleague of mine at a candidate's job talk the other day suggest that any emphasis on literature as an aesthetic phenomenon would automatically alienate students, have them view literature as something alien to their own lives--as though their own lives had no aesthetic component at all.

So yes, I work on the boring old canonical stuff, leaving me holding the conservative end of the stick. I believe, though, that reading this stuff--really difficult modernist poetry--makes you frightfully intelligent. It really just uses all of your brain at the highest level of literacy imaginable. To really get this kind of poetry, you have to have a highly developed cultural, musical, visual, verbal, problem-solving, connection-making intelligence. But the only way to get that is to read it. In other words, nobody has it before approaching this kind of poetry.

I quote the first paragraph because I want to note the assumption some people have that the lives of certain others apparently have little to no "aesthetic component". But it is the second paragraph that is relevant here, for various reasons, both negative and positive. I believe Mayhew's observation to be essentially true. This belief has unfortunately had the effect of leading me to the further self-defeating belief that it has always already been too late for me to read difficult poetry with any degree of competence. I have blogged numerous times about this kind of thing, and probably will again; it remains something that bothers me, not just on a personal level. On the other hand, why not simply read poetry? Why worry so much? The same goes, more or less, with philosophy—endless deferrals, endless fretting, and so on. But still, why not just get on with it?

So, ok, on with it then. Instead of trying to squeeze in a page or three of some novel before drifting off to sleep at night, I have been reading poetry at bedside—I tried some Rimbaud, with some success, more Stevens, Dickinson, Kay Ryan. (I've found I really like Kay Ryan's poetry. Another contemporary poet I have in mind to try is Geoffrey Hill, who I expect to be a thornier read. I may have more to say about how these two poets have come to my attention and why I am drawn to them as possibilities.) (By the way, this does not mean that I'm abandoning novels. Far from it. But I've read a lot of them, after all, and so don't feel the need to read as many just now, or to keep up with it for the moment. Even so, as of this writing, I am about 200 pages into Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children. Parts of it I love; others are actually rather annoying—frankly, just about any scene involving the titular father with his children is a serious chore to read.) As far as philosophy is concerned, I've written about my goals to read Plato and Aristotle, and I've written about Nietzsche, but possibly the philosopher I've mentioned most often here, again usually in a spirit of deferral, has been Heidegger. Perhaps one day I'll write something about why I'm drawn to Heidegger, but in any event, the actual reading has been rough-going, even as his philosophy remains somehow attractive. So I ordered History of the Concept of Time, recommended by Graham Harman as a good place to start with Heidegger, if Being and Time itself seems too opaque, as it has for me (and, indeed, leafing through it briefly upon delivery, the former does strike me as a more readable volume; for the record, I also ordered Harman's own Heidegger Explained). But I haven't dived into that just yet, because the real day-to-day project I've begun is Capital.

Capital, because of its hugeness and its incompleteness and the sheer massiveness of the commentary and other writing that draws from it and has been influenced by it, has, of course, loomed as a central text, but yet again always deferred. I've read several books that take Marxian approaches to capitalism, by David Harvey and by Ellen Meiksins Wood and by the Midnight Notes Collective, among others, some of which I have written about here; these books have been enormously helpful to me. But I have always known that in order to come to terms with Marx's own analysis, I needed to really be deliberate with the text itself, which, of course, requires time and patience. But it was a book I read earlier this year that really brought home to me my need to read Capital sooner rather than later and which reinforced the patience theme I've been talking about. I'm referring to Maria Mies' Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, which I have excerpted from and referred to a couple of times previously on the blog (it's also true that there are many discussions that seem to me to be lacking precisely because they don't sufficiently focus on the economic, but no doubt I can make that argument more directly if I myself am more familiar with the Marx in Capital, versus his other writing, or the legacy of cultural Marxism, which seems to have displaced his economic analysis in perceived importance to way too many). I think that Mies' book is an important book, so important that I decided I wanted to devote several blog posts to it. But when I sat down one evening to begin taking chapter-by-chapter notes I was confronted with my dual-problem. First, I had read the book too quickly. I had been so excited by it that I fairly tore through the text. I marked my copy in numerous places, of course, but I didn't take notes as I was reading. This has been a basic problem for me for years. I've never been a good note-taker, but it's even worse now, as my reading is largely done on my commuter train, where writing notes is physically difficult. And, on the patience theme, I've so protected this reading time and have had so many different books on my list, that I've simply read, over-relying on my memory and copious underlining to get me by and to retain what ought to be retained. My memory may be good, but it's not that good. And as I've explored with respect to writing, if you don't write an idea down, take note of it, odds are it will disappear. I discovered when I attempted to summarize the chapters in Mies' book that I would effectively have to read the book again in order to do so. (The same thing happened with a great David Graeber essay I have had in mind to use for another post I'm working on; I'll have to read it again too.) Since Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale is a feminist text, and as such is in part a feminist critique of Marx and Marxist analyses, I realized that the time had come to stop deferring and to just read Capital.

Here, then, is my plan: as I've been meaning to since first learning about it, I'm going to follow along with David Harvey's lecture series on Capital. So, I downloaded the first several lectures, and I began to read. I plan to read the chapter(s) under discussion, freely writing notes in the text itself, following up each chapter with some additional notes, then viewing the relevant lecture (these last two steps may be reversed as needed), not at all worrying if I have to re-read sections or re-view portions of lectures. I think it's gone fairly well so far. I'm through chapter 6, which means I've made it through the difficult first three chapters, the third being the one, Harvey says, where people often given up when they're going it alone. I was gratified to find I was able to read it without too much pain. (It may help, in this regard, that I read Harvey's Limits to Capital last year.) I'm not expecting to completely get Capital in this reading, or come through feeling like I've satisfied my need to understand capitalism or anything like that. I expect it to be a text I return to in the future as certain problems present themselves. In any event, Marx's own analysis aside, I'm interested in the ways in which we as readers are encouraged to treat everything as in flux, including understanding. In that way, also remembering Marshall Berman's argument that Capital is very much a modernist text, it is not unlike poetry and philosophy.

Deflationary Critique

Recently at Rough Theory:

I have tried to make an extended argument that Capital needs to be read as a deflationary text – meaning that, where other forms of theory tend to presuppose certain “givens”, on the basis of which they then conduct their analysis, Capital tries not to do this. It tries, instead, to show how the major tools in its analytical toolkit – including foundational categories like “society”, “history”, or “material life” – are actively produced by specific forms of human interactions, and therefore reflect the distinctive sensibilities that are primed by particular forms of collective practice.

[...]

The core of Marx’s deflationary critique of political economy is that, as soon as a theory starts presupposing or treating as given the constitutive moments of its subject matter, it has failed to examine how that subject matter itself came into being. When it loses the ability to examine how the subject matter came into being, it naturalises its subject matter – it becomes blind to the contingency of the subject matter itself, and therefore cannot conceptualise how the subject matter itself could be abolished or transformed.

Normally Marx keeps this squarely in view. Sometimes... not so much.

As David Harvey stresses, though many mischaracterize Marx as arguing such givens, his method is much more fluid. He is describing a process, the various aspects of which are themselves not fixed in place, so his method must remain in motion, and generally does. I admit that I am increasingly interested in what Marx may have missed, for example in the context of the all-important feminist critique of Marx's analysis (I hesitate to say "Marxism", though the critique is of that too); I tend to believe that Marx himself would have encouraged this. It is this very open-ness, this fluidity, which keeps me coming back to Marx himself and which means that a serious engagement with Capital especially is still very much in the works.

Structuring Metaphors

Last week Mark Thwaite had an excellent post touching on, among other things, David Shields' Reality Hunger (a book which sounds wildly unappealing to me; see also Stephen Mitchelmore's post on that book), Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (about which I still have a few things in the works), Derrida, Marx, Hamlet, etc. Mark writes:

We read Spectres of Marx and note that 'Hamlet' allows Derrida to think, and to think of Marx. 'Hamlet' supplies him with the metaphors that allow him to unpack Marx's own metaphors and allow us to see how these metaphors structure Marx, structure 'Hamlet' and could deconstruct (unstructure) our idea both of Marxism and the destructive reality of our capitalist present.

And in a recent post at American Leftist about the recent split in the British Socialist Workers Party, Richard Estes comments on the differences between anarchists and Marxist-Leninists, and says:

One anarchist novelist recently said, I distrust any activists who don't read fiction. The remark struck a nerve with me, because I have had a similar experience with political activists generally, that the ones who were disinterested in various forms of cultural expression, like theatre, film and literature, were the most rigid and intolerant. There is a relativism in such creations that enhances one's perception of the world and one's place in it.

Marrying these two paragraphs together, the experience of art reorients us towards the world, and one could say that imaginative literature, fiction, helps us to think about "the destructive reality of our capitalist present" whether or not it thinks it's explicitly about that, whether or not the writer is apparently on the "right" side. That, indeed, the relativism in such creations can help us to unpack and to structure reality, to work through the metaphors necessary to a political understanding of reality.

On modernization and its discontents

In one of my early posts engaging with Josipovici's On Trust, I opened with this passage, which actually is from his equally excellent study, The Book of God:

. . . once Luther stood up and asserted the need to speak the truth as he saw it and not pay lip-service to tradition, things could never be quite the same again. We tend to see Luther's break with the medieval church, like Spinoza's with Jewish tradition, as the triumph of light and integrity over the forces of obscurantism and hypocrisy; but this is to see it from their own point of view. It is important, however, to grasp what gets lost as well as what is won in such revolutions. . .

I'm interested here in this question of point of view. Because not only is it their own point of view, Luther's and Spinoza's, it is in fact our point of view. We have adopted wholesale this point of view; it would have been difficult for us not to have. Not only do we experience capitalism as natural—it's the air we breathe—but we experience progress as natural, technological progress in particular. We simply expect it to happen, as if it were causeless (though we may chalk it up unthinkingly to "innovation" or "human ingenuity", each only made possible by that natural market).

I find, in my intermittent attempts to take on Marx, that I am vastly more interested in his analysis of capital than I am his theories of history. The teleological view that history has certain necessary stages strikes me as deeply problematic, though not uniquely so. Marx and his successors were working within a widely shared set of beliefs, a set of beliefs that took such progress as both necessary and good. They have done great work to unpack the complicated workings of capital so that it can be seen to be historically contingent, but I'm less persuaded by the historical project itself.

But why am I talking about Marx here? I'm not sure I have, just yet, a satisfactory answer. I look on the history of modernization with unease and from a historically privileged standpoint. I want to ask questions about the overall justification of that modernization. We hold onto its inevitability and necessity as a matters of faith. We are conditioned to tacitly accept, if we don't always come right out and say it explicitly, Marx's characterization of the "idiocy of rural life". Modernization is seen as necessary in order for freedom to truly exist, in order, indeed, for us to be in a sense truly human.

And yet, I am not automatically given to anti-modernism. I wouldn't know what to do with myself in a rural, unlinked environment. I love big cities, I like basic dentistry, I like refrigerators, ice cubes, regular electricity, running water, rock music and jazz, movies, the telephone, email, etc and so on and on. I have a hard time conceiving of myself living in a different time, so used to the amenities of modern life am I. But with the real possibility of drastic climatic change as a result of global warming, such modern life may not be sustainable for long. And that's not the only reason to question the very lives we lead—that is, questions arise in the area of viability, yes, but also justification, moral and otherwise. Our lives, as we live them, are only possible as a function of massive global inequality and widespread privation, both of which appear to be necessary outputs of the capitalist system. We cannot all be modernized, even without the spectre of global warming. And, of course, now, as ever, there are those resisting attempts at modernization, just as their counterparts resist, as they always have, the wholesale theft necessary to keep the system running. Marx called this process "primitive accumulation"—the capital accumulation that was necessary for a capitalist system to get going in the first place. Capitalists needed to have stolen a whole bunch of shit in order to amass piles big enough to get the ball rolling. It was Rosa Luxembourg, I believe, who observed that this process must be ongoing—capital must continue to look "outside" itself to get what it needs—and feminist critics of Marx, for example Silvia Federici (I've just read her excellent Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, which has much bearing on these matters), have observed further that this process of accumulation amounts to a war against women.

This is not the first time I've touched on these topics, but I hope it will be the beginning of a more extended and fruitful exploration of the problems.

On Marx and foundering reading projects

Or, hey, how's that plan for reading Capital coming along?

Not so well. I read Harvey's The Limits to Capital earlier this year and had high hopes for moving on to Marx's great work. Attention spans and sleep patterns being what they are, these hopes have come so far to nothing. But I do take the book down at intervals, thinking maybe today? maybe tomorrow? No, I want to have my energies.

This post has been prompted by my reading of this entertaining post at Rough Theory, about Marx's dismissive handling of Malthus in chapter 25 of Capital (link via BLCKDGRD). A sample:

Marx goes on to “remark… in passing” that Eden “was the only disciple of Adam Smith to have achieved anything of importance during the eighteenth century” (766). The comment appears casual, trivial, and beside the point – a curiosity we could surely skip lightly past on the way to the substantive material in the next paragraph. Except that a massive multi-page footnote blocks our way and, when we decide that a footnote of such prodigious length might be important, finally locate the footnote marker at the end of the “passing remark” above, and cast our eyes down into the marginalia, we discover that special circle of textual hell into which Marx has decided he will deposit Malthus...

Malthus is therefore introduced into this chapter with an insult: Eden is the only disciple of Smith to amount to anything – making Malthus a disciple of Smith who... didn’t...

Heh: "special circle of textual hell". Note to self, when finally reading Capital, along with listening along to David Harvey's lectures, remember to go back through the archives at Rough Theory.

The Masters of Suspicion

Earlier this week I read Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, a book I was supposed to have read in college, but reading it now, it seems unlikely that I ever did. (I recall having used a lame version of one of his arguments in a paper I wrote. One wonders how I managed even that. I can only have been regurgitating the instructor's gloss.) Anyway, as with Nietzsche, I find reading Freud enjoyable, if frustrating. It's generally a real pleasure following his line of reasoning, but, also as with Nietzsche, I have a hard time taking seriously many of his specific conclusions. For one thing, of course, Freud's point of view was hopelessly male-centric, no minor detail; this stance probably led to many, if not most, of the arguments that I find problematic in what I've read. With both Nietzsche and Freud, it is especially their speculations on the "origins" of things that I find most difficult to take seriously, though they are often brilliantly argued.

In this focus on origins, I am reminded again of Gabriel Josipovici's great On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion. In the early pages of the book, Josipovici employs the language of Paul Ricoeur, who called Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx the "masters of suspicion", their work a "hermeneutics of suspicion". As Josipovici puts it, these writers

revealed that what we had taken to be natural, a 'given', was in fact man-made, the result of choices and decisions made by individuals and communities. Thus Marx laid bare the workings of capital, Nietzsche the workings of morality, Freud the workings of sexuality. Where the Enlightenment had seen all men as essentially one, and human nature as unchanging, the nineteenth-century masters of suspicion set about exploring the genealogies, the secret histories, of morals and social institutions, with the aim of freeing men from bonds to which they did not even know they were subject.

Nietzsche noted that, though men had (so it apparently seemed to him) largely abandoned Christianity, they "are a long way from being free spirits, because they still believe in truth" and "Any meaning is better than none". But for him, "inquiry [the search for truth] itself stands in need of justification". Josipovici uses these Nietzsche remarks as his springboard into his larger discussion, moving onto, first, Kierkegaard and, more generally, the problems for the writer posed by the crisis of modernity. Interestingly, of the three "masters of suspicion", it is Marx who emerges as the most accurate in his "laying bare" project. All three are still valuable thinkers, since the value of a thinker resides not completely in the accuracy of the conclusions reached, and, indeed, simply arguing persuasively that what had seemed natural was not has liberated other thinkers investigating the same areas. But Marx is the only one of the three whose particular conclusions remain relevant (I'm talking analysis here, not prognostication).

Returning to the matter of origins, an important factor in my having difficulty with the arguments on the origins of things made by Freud or Nietzsche has to do with my familiarity with the work of Chris Knight, which I have referred to several times on the blog, at some length here. One thing that Knight shows, in his application of feminist insights and "selfish gene" theory to the extensive anthropological record, is how right it appears that Marx and Engels were in their writings about the origins of things. Nietzsche and Freud seem to assume a Hobbesian state of nature when they consider such matters; thus, for example, Freud's focus on the so-called "aggressiveness" instinct, which must be repressed into aggression against one's own ego, against the instinct for primal freedom, itself necessarily suppressed by "civilization". Such accounts seem to bypass the emergence of language and culture, assuming that in our original human moment we would have necessarily been much like the other primates, when it's the very differences between humans and other primates that must be explained when one is attempting to explain human nature. Thus one must take into account language. Knight's theory of the sex strike, which puts female humans at the forefront of this process, would no doubt have been anathema to Freud, who, quite aside from his theories on women and sexuality, like Nietzsche, sees men at the origin, with women relegated to child-bearing and child-rearing. That these natural processes might be crucial to any understanding of human nature and origins is, for them, necessarily a priori out of the question.

Marx is Icky

As I've mentioned previously in discussing my recent forays into Marx and Marxian economics, I've found the work so helpful and to be of such great explanatory power that it seems to me that capitalists, simply in order to understand their own system better, would do well to be up on their Marx. But of course classical or neo-liberal economists are not capitalists, but apologists for capitalism, technicians who differ on only particulars, for all their claims to be scientific and empirical. For them as for so many of us, it seems clear, capitalism is simply the natural order of things. Though, as Harvey makes abundantly evident in his The Limits to Capital, there have been numerous bourgeois critiques of Marx and Marxian theory over the years, I get the sense that real liberal engagement with the work has long since dried up, as if merely touching Capital, let alone taking the ideas seriously enough to work through them, is tantamount to signing the forms for a re-education camp or personally approving of the evils of Stalin or Pol Pot.

Now via jane dark I learn of the news that Emmanuel Saez has been awarded the Clark medal, which apparently is of some importance in the world of economics. We are told by Economic Principals that "his most striking finding has been to confirm the widespread intuition that income inequality has been increasing". This is astonishing. That this is news, that is, worthy of an award in economics. As jane says, the rising inequality over the last 30+ years has been common knowledge for quite a long time. But of course, that it's common knowledge is not so damning on its own; after all, science is always somehow or finally validating what has been or ought to be (or once was) common knowledge, so nothing new there. However, as jane also points out, there have been numerous studies on this very topic over the last decade or so; it has been explored in incredible detail by researchers and economists on the left. But of course Marx is icky. What you have then is a purported science, which because of ideological blinders refuses to take notice of important work. Again, to close, jane puts it best:

The whole news event of this prize, then, is on par with granting the latest Fields medal for long division. What to make of this? Is the fact that the guild of professional economics doesn't know the extant scholarship relevant to their own field more shocking than the fact they are just reaching these easily reachable and socially fundamental conclusions out now? Or is the oddest element the hubris whereby knowledge can't be true — despite empirical evidence — until a guild member says it? In any case, welcome to reality, economists: you are making any attempt to take seriously your institutional field rather challenging.

Terminal Crisis?

Last week I wrote: "It appears that the capitalist system, which necessarily undergoes periodic crises, may have entered its terminal crisis." What could I mean by that? What would it mean for capitalism to be in terminal crisis? (And how equivocal can I be? Appears! May!) It sure sounds like the end of capitalism doesn't it? Does it seem like that's likely? In a comment to that post, Aaron Bady expressed his discomfort with this very rhetoric of "terminal crisis": "Capitalism is such a protean term", he reminds us, "that something capitalist will survive, even if it isn't anything recognizably similar to what we're blessed with now." True. Probably. For all my offline joking about collapse ("we're not even going to have cars in 16 years" being my stock response to the question of Mirah one day learning to drive. . .), I hardly think capitalism is simply going to end. And if it did, it's not as if we're ready for it.

So it's likely that we're going to be embroiled in some version of the capitalist system for the foreseeable future. What about it, then? The point is not to attempt to accurately forecast the demise of one system (as if such a thing were possible), an imaginary in which we end up scraping by in the rabble. The point is how to force a change in a time of possibility, or how to carve out viable, perhaps expandable, alternatives. This is just one reason why events such as the City from Below conference, which I belatedly advertized below, are so important. People coming together, developing ties, trying to figure out ways to, at least, force the hand of capital to resolve the current crisis in a way that doesn't utterly fuck those who are not super-rich.

We had hoped to learn a lot at the conference, meet new people, and so on; unfortunately, we were unable to attend much of it, for a variety of reasons (most of them having something to do with a certain little girl's sleep problems). I did, however, manage to catch the opening panel discussion on Friday night. Gratifyingly, the room (at 2640, of course; where else?) was diverse and packed (and there seemed to be plenty of people in attendance the one other time we made it down to check things out). To give you a little bit of a flavor, the participants in this opening panel were Max Rameau, from Take Back the Land in Miami; Shiri Pasternak, from Toronto; Esther Wang, from CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities in New York; and David Harvey. The first three were unfamiliar to me and all had interesting and inspiring things to say about work they've been doing. You may, for example, have heard about Take Back the Land's work in Florida, placing homeless people in abandoned houses or returning families to their foreclosed homes. Pasternak talked about continuing enclosure among Canada's indigenous communities, as well as abandoned properties more generally, and a proposed "use or lose it" bylaw. Wang reminded us that communities like that of Chinatown in New York--a poor island surrounded on all sides by wealth, Soho, Tribeca, etc--have been facing crisis for some time, which has only been intensified by the particular crisis of the last year. These were just some of the things touched upon; if I can get my act together, perhaps I'll assemble and post some more detailed notes I took during the discussion.

For now, I want to mention a couple of things Harvey said. His opening remarks were in essence a review of the thesis of his valuable book A Brief History of Neoliberalism. He reminded us that the nature of each successive crisis in capitalism depends on how the previous crisis was resolved. The solution to the crisis of the 1970s was the current neoliberal regime.

It so happens that in recent weeks I've been slowly making my way through Harvey's monumental book, The Limits to Capital. I've found it rough going in parts, primarily because, not unlike getting lost in all the Russian names in a Tolstoy novel, I tend to have difficulty keeping straight ideas that go by similar-sounding names (the obvious basic ones being "value", "use value", and "exchange value"), which is only exacerbated by not having time to sit and take detailed notes while reading. In short, Harvey's book is a sort of critical explication of Marx's Capital and his related economic writings, such as the Grundisse, along with critical surveys of the subsequent Marxian and bourgeois analyses of both Marx and various economic concepts in general. Let's face it: this stuff is enormously complicated. Marx defines capital as a process, and keeping track of all of the elements of the process--socially necessary labour time, class struggle, surplus value, accumulation, technological and organizational change, money, credit, finance, circulation, rent, mobility, etc.--and their inherent contradictions isn't easy. For all that, the book has been very helpful; though many of the technical details remain, for now, confusing, the argument as a whole is helping to illuminate much. It was especially interesting reading the chapters on money, credit, and finance in light of current events (and how, with each successive crisis, the financial system necessarily gets more and more rarefied, removed from the production economy, which only makes subsequent crises potentially more dangerous).

In addition, it strikes me as somewhat comical that the self-congratulatory so-called empiricism of Anglo-American intellectuals and bourgeois economists should have essentially dismissed Marx out of hand--after all, merely reading Capital is tantamount to being a communist, isn't it? it's the same as The Communist Manifesto, right? and Stalin was pretty bad, wasn't he?--when you'd think it would be important to try to actually understand how capitalism actually works. But ideology can be a bitch (speaking of which, free market libertarians and Friedmanites really need to read this stuff and stop talking blather about freedom and nature and other such ill-understood bullshit). For my part, I consider this only a first pass at really getting my head wrapped around the contradictory workings of capitalism (adding to what I have been able to glean from works by Ellen Meiksins Wood, other books by Harvey, etc). My plan is still to read Capital, while either watching or listening to Harvey's lecture series on it. Anyway, the point is that I find myself heavily immersed in working out the theoretical problems of capitalism, not so I can smugly tell myself, "well, I've tackled that! time to move on to Finnegans Wake. . .", the acquistion of knowledge for its own sake being perhaps of entertainment value, but little else. No, I want to better understand what it is we--I--could do under the circumstances, other than just sit around waiting for things to happen, in part by better understanding what those circumstances really are.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to the other remark made by David Harvey that I'd like to mention here before finishing up. He talked about "the myth of home ownership". This has been a rant-worthy topic of mine for several years ("home ownership is a scam", I'll tell anyone who will listen, which unfortunately for them is usually my wife or my co-workers), so naturally I was pleased to hear him say it. He said that capital started pushing home ownership among the working classes during the Great Depression, which was obviously a time of massive labor unrest. The idea is that "people with mortgages don't go on strike". Truer words have rarely been spoken. It's brilliant, really. More powerful than getting workers to invest in the stock market (how stupid is a 401k? why do I have one? I don't believe in the stock market!). I've been trying to come to some point of action in my own life--selling the house and not buying another is but one potential part of that. But it's not as if renters are secure. This is one reason why an important battle is for rights to the city, rights to the commons, reclaiming the commons, re-establishing the commons, recovering abandoned territory, and so on. In this context, Harvey also mentioned the need for a right to residency (you can't vote if you don't have an address). There is much to do.

Analysing Sentences

In The Limits to Capital, in a footnote addressing a book claiming to subject Marx's analysis of technological change to "the standards and rigor which distinguish twentieth century analytic philosophy", David Harvey says the following:

"Analytical philosophy may be good at analysing sentences but is not so good, apparently, at capturing the total flow of an argument."

Ha!

Basic Capitalist Principles

This interview with Noam Chomsky about the financial crisis is, as always, full of good points, interesting observations, and important reminders about recent history (link via Steve Mitchelmore). Much of it is familiar territory for him, adapted for the current situation, but like a favorite band's greatest hits, I love to hear the oldies again and again. For example, I've always been fond of how he emphasizes the role of the public sector in the economy, as he does here:

[T]he core of the economy relies very heavily on the state sector, and transparently so. So for example to take the last economic boom which was based on information technology — where did that come from? Computers and the Internet. Computers and the Internet were almost entirely within the state system for about 30 years — research, development, procurement, other devices — before they were finally handed over to private enterprise for profit-making. It wasn't an instantaneous switch, but that's roughly the picture. And that's the picture pretty much for the core of the economy.

The state sector is innovative and dynamic. It's true across the board from electronics to pharmaceuticals to the new biology-based industries. The idea is that the public is supposed to pay the costs and take the risks, and ultimately if there is any profit, you hand it over to private tyrannies, corporations. If you had to encapsulate the economy in one sentence, that would be the main theme.

There is, however, one aspect of this interview that troubles me. Talking about the IMF and how it operates as "the credit community's enforcer", Chomsky says the following:

If a loan or an investment from a rich country to a poor country goes bad, the IMF makes sure that the lenders will not suffer. If you had a capitalist system, which of course the wealthy and their protectors don't want, it wouldn't work like that.

For example, suppose I lend you money, and I know that you may not be able to pay it back. Therefore I impose very high interest rates, so that at least I'll get that in case you crash. Then suppose at some point you can't pay the debt. Well in a capitalist system it would be my problem. I made a risky loan, I made a lot of money from it by high interest rates and now you can't pay it back? Ok, tough for me. That's a capitalist system. But that's not the way our system works. If investors make risky loans to say Argentina and get high interest rates and then Argentina can't pay it back, well that's when the IMF steps in, the credit community's enforcer, and says that the people of Argentina, they have to pay it back. Now if you can't pay back a loan to me, I don't say that your neighbors have to pay it back. But that's what the IMF says. The IMF says the people of the country have to pay back the debt which they had nothing to do with, it was usually given to dictators, or rich elites, who sent it off to Switzerland or someplace, but you guys, the poor folks living in the country, you have to pay it back. And furthermore, if I lend money to you and you can't pay it back, in a capitalist system I can't ask my neighbors to pay me, but the IMF does, namely the US taxpayer. They help make sure that the lenders and investors are protected. So yes it's the credit community's enforcer. It's a radical attack on basic capitalist principles, just as the whole functioning of the economy based on the state sector is, but that doesn't change the rhetoric. It's kind of hidden in the woodwork.

My problem is the notion that this kind of activity is "a radical attack on basic capitalist principles". He notes that the rhetoric doesn't change, which no doubt refers to the rhetoric of the free market. Of course he's right about that. But I think it's incorrect to think that capitalism has anything to do with free markets. I know this seems counterintuitive, but that's only because we've had it hammered into our heads our entire lives that capitalism equals free markets equals freedom. So here, even Chomsky appears to have bought into that rhetoric to some extent. Capitalism is above all about forcing workers into the market. Where we should be able to have free access to food and shelter, as basic human rights, we are forced instead to contend with the housing and food markets; with both food and shelter subject to market forces, with once common land unavailable for use, enclosed, we are forced to sell our time, our lives, to others' in order to make the money necessary to afford food and shelter.

The state has always been necessary to protect the private ownership of productive property and to enforce the effective propertylessness of the rest of us. The dynamism of the public sector that he refers to above is simply another manifestation of this. He says you might instead call it "state capitalism" because of the massive state investment in the economy. This is fine, I suppose; some economists have called the old Soviet Union "state capitalist", too. It's all about control of productive capacity not being in the hands of those actually doing the work. It's about the removal of agency. In any event, to modify one of Chomsky's remarks, the last thing capitalists want is to truly compete in a free market. This is why, during the Progressive Era, leading figures like J.P. Morgan argued for and designed the regulatory apparatus. It was a disaster for them when they competed on the open market. Granted, there are numerous owners who do not understand this, and blather on and on about free markets, no doubt believing it, like lunatic Libertarians or something, but we needn't concern ourselves with them. (I hope it's obvious that none of this should imply that free markets are in any way desirable, anymore than capitalism is.)

I'm reminded, incidentally, of a passage from Marshall Berman's 1978 essay "All That is Solid Melts Into Air", collected in his Adventures in Marxism (I believe the essay was expanded into the later book by the same title). He is discussing Marx and bourgeois nihilism and Marx's apparent belief that the "bourgeois really believe . . . in an incessant, unrestricted flow of commodities in circulation, a continuous metamorphosis of market values." He continues:

If, as he believes, the members of the bourgeoisie really do want a free market, they will have to enforce the freedom of new products to enter the market. This in turn means that any full-fledged bourgeois society must be a genuinely open society, not only economically but politically and culturally as well, so that people will be free to shop around and seek the best deals, in ideas, associations, law and social policies, as well as in things.

This would hold true for communists and communist ideas, too. Marx further believes that thus people will choose revolutionary and communist ideas, because they are the best ideas, they will sell, and the revolution will be inevitable. My summary is simplistic, but still, it's evident that Marx, even as the great analyst of capitalism that he was, also bought into the free market rhetoric. Berman notes that:

In fact, in bourgeois history [the] principle [of unprincipled free trade] has generally been more honored in the breach than in the observance. The members of the bourgeoisie, especially the most powerful, have generally fought to restrict, manipulate and control their markets. Indeed, much of their creative energy over the centuries has gone into arrangements for doing this -- chartered monopolies, holding companies, trusts, cartels and conglomerates, protective tariffs, patents, price-fixing, open or hidden subsidies from the state -- all accompanied by paeans in praise of the free market. Moreover, even among the few who really do believe in free exchange, there are fewer still who would extend free competition to ideas as well as things.

A paragraph later, he says that "[a] more typical bourgeois pattern is to praise freedom when in opposition and to repress it when in power" and chides Marx for surprisingly "getting carried away by what bourgeois ideologues say, and losing touch with what the men with money and power actually do." Berman suggests that this is a dangerous problem, for if the bourgeoisie effectively closes off access to new ideas, then

it will be harder than ever for communism to take root. Marx would say that their need for progress and innovation will force them to open up their societies even to ideas they dread. Yet their ingenuity might avoid this through a truly insidious innovation: a consensus of mutually enforced mediocrity, designed to protect each individual bourgeois from the risks of competition, and bourgeois society as a whole from the risks of change.

In the climactic chapter of the first volume of Capital, "The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation," Marx says that when a system of social relations acts as a fetter on "the free development of productive forces," that social system has simply got to go: "It must be annihilated; it is annihilated." But what would happen if, somehow, it didn't get annihilated? Marx lets himself imagine this for barely an instant, only to dismiss the possibility. "To perpetuate" such a social system, he says, would be "to decree universal mediocrity". This is perhaps the one thing that Marx is utterly incapable of imagining.

I found myself, while dipping my toes last year in Marx, marveling at how prescient his analysis was. It seems even more relevant to current-day conditions than it did in his own day, and yet it seems he was unable to anticipate this key feature of our decrepit, collapsing system: its thoroughgoing mediocrity.

Political Economy links and quotes

Today seems the best possible day to post links about Marx and political economy. Last time I mentioned Reading Capital with David Harvey. I found the link to that marvelous resource at From Despair to Where?, a blog I re-discovered as I was cleaning out my bookmarks last week. That blogger also wrote this review of Marshall Berman's Adventures in Marxism, at the Socialist Standard@MySpace blog. I've been struggling, in my limited time, to articulate a connection between my reading of the literary Modernists and my left-wing political outlook. Here is a passage from Berman's book, quoted in the review:

Marx's point in presenting this immense and bizarre chorus is to show capitalism as a maelstrom that sweeps the whole world into its flood, past and present, reality and mythology, East and West: everything and everyone is caught up and whirled in the world market, nothing and no one has the power to hold back. We the readers – along, of course, with the writer – are part of it; we respond, our voices are incorporated into the chorus; the audience finds itself on stage. This may be one reason why, like many great modernist works, Capital never really comes to an end: it reaches out to us in the audience, and challenges us to give the work an ending, by bringing an end to capitalism itself […]

[Marx's] feeling for contradictions infuses the whole of Capital with vitality and adventure. An adventure is not an idyll: much of its excitement springs from its risks, from the chance that it could end horribly; but we go on, because we are moving in an ambience of life and hope. The ambience could be a great gift to us today. It is right there, in Capital: the book lies open and open-ended, waiting only for us to give ourselves.

We happen to have a copy Adventures in Marxism. I'll be reading it.

Last week at The Pinocchio Theory, Steven Shaviro wrote about an essay by Graham Harman which, he says, "draws surprising parallels between Husserl’s phenomenology and the 'weird fiction' of H. P. Lovecraft" and "argues that Lovecraft’s tales of unrepresentable monsters cannot be read in a Kantian register". My familiarity with Kant, Husserl, and even Lovecraft is precisely nil, but in his post, Shaviro takes the opportunity to bring in Ellen Meiksins Wood's thesis in The Origin of Capitalism, which he summarizes quite well. For example:

there are markets without capitalism, but there is no capitalism without the absolute reign of the market. As Wood puts it, “this unique system of market-dependence means that the dictates of the capitalist market – its imperatives of competition, accumulation, profit-maximization, and increasing labour-productivity – regulate not only all economic transactions but social relations in general” (2002, 7). And this is the key to what I have been calling the monstrosity of capital. It is utterly contingent in its origins; and yet, once it has arrived, it imposes itself universally. Capitalism might never have emerged out of the chaos of feudal, commercial, religious, and State institutions that preceded it, just as [Lovecraft's monster] Cthulhu might never have stumbled upon our planet. But in both cases, the unfortunate encounter did, in fact, take place. And it is only afterwards, in its subsequent effects, once it has in fact arrived on the scene and subjugated all its rivals, that capitalism is able – again, much like Cthulhu – to present itself retro spectively as an irresistible and all-embracing force. Capitalism arose “in a very specific place, and very late in human history” (2002, 95). But once it arose, it made market relations compulsory: as Wood says, the so-called “free market” became an imperative, a coerced activity, instead of an opportunity (6-7).

There is a great discussion in the comments. One commenter, JCD, provides a link to his own, more detailed discussion of Wood's book at his Fragments, or: blog, here. One of the posts there is specifically about the concept of "improvement"--which I found most fascinating in Wood's book, and which threw my lame Poli-Sci 101 understanding of John Locke into a whole new light (which is to say, no understanding at all). There's no good way for me to quote from it, without simply quoting the whole thing. But you should read it if you're curious, and unsure about whether to dive into Wood just yet. (This idea, incidentally, is directly linked with my problems with the notion of "progressivism". More on that in another post.)

I spent some time tooling around JCD's site and discovered that he and some others have embarked on a group blog called Final Cause, "dedicated to radical political economy". As it happens, in the comments to his post, Shaviro himself links to two posts there called "Capitalists not Burghers" (part one, part two), which also discuss Wood's arguments. Good stuff. I also appreciate the post "Capital currently has every disease known to man". Here's an excerpt from it:

It’s sort of crazy when you think about it. The capitalist steals what you make. That’s not crazy, that’s just violent. But then he tells you he’s giving you the privilege of getting back some of what he and the other capitalists have stolen with credits earned through the labor which the capitalist forced you to do in the first place. It’s like winning the right to buy back your stolen goods from the trunk of a car on the side of the street two weeks after your house was robbed. If that happened, you wouldn’t feel privileged to buy your stuff back. You’d be pissed and call the police. But no one polices the capitalists but themselves.

You might wonder why people would ever stand for something so simultaneously unnatural and idiotic. The truth is that they don’t, and they never have. In any social organism where one class pumps surplus out of another class (i.e., steals what they make), the overriding and perennial problem is to maintain control over the class from which the surplus labor is pumped. In a sense, that’s exactly what the history of any class society is about: the changes undergone so that one class can continue to pump surplus out of another class. But the history of all societies is equally the history of resistance to this imposition of work and the various measures the ruling classes take to adjust to that resistance and keep the extraction going. When the extracting class runs out of options to meet these challenges, or when the challenges become so formidable they overwhelm all attempts to contain the contradictions, the pump stops moving surplus from one side to the other, and the history of that social organism is at an end.

Returning to The Pinocchio Theory (which is a consistent combination of, or alternation between, fascinating and way over my head), Shaviro's three posts just prior to the one linked above were about Capital (in which he discusses the work of, among others, Hardt & Negri and Deleuze & Guattari, to name just four of the oft-referenced authors I haven't yet made my way to): "What is to be done?", "Monstrous Flesh", and "Body of Capital".

To wrap things up by bringing things a little closer to the present situation, some time ago there was a great article in CounterPunch by Stan Goff and De Clarke titled "Politics is Food is Politics". A small sample:

Though the brunt -- as always -- is now being borne by the most marginal and fragile, the over-developed industrial metropoles are not escaping the impact of this crisis. In the United States, the culmination of a decades-long crisis of capital accumulation -- which has heretofore been exported to the rest of the world -- is coming home to roost in the form of a severe "credit crisis" at the same time as the oil price spike. We are entering a protracted period of stagflation: economic stagnation (recession) combined with price inflation (due in part to the impact of oil prices on virtually all economic sectors). We in the US are more deeply in debt, personally and nationally, than at any time in our history. And the key products that are driving up our cost of living -- even as our net worths stagnate and fall back -- are basically gasoline and food.

We metropolitan Americans panic when we contemplate the possibility of becoming unable to afford our private automobiles. This is not just because of our legendary ego-attachment to the car. The primary reason we panic is because we need our cars to get to our jobs (at least one study has suggested that Americans spend 20 percent of their take-home pay on their cars, so we are working one day out of five to pay for the car so we can drive to the job). And we need our jobs.

It's a given: people need their jobs. But why? Because without the income from those jobs, we and our children don't eat. Our access to food is permitted only when it's mediated by money -- which we can only obtain by working (for the ruling class) or by becoming wards of the state (which, increasingly involves coerced labour).

Goff and Clarke are, of course, the proprietors of the essential Feral Scholar blog, where increasingly of late they have been discussing food and debt and what to do when the society we all depend on, however warped and unnatural it may be, is itself heading towards a major fall. I've been wanting to talk here more about what they've been getting up to over there (and, of course, at Insurgent American), but my own problems with work and life have sucked my time away. I hope to get into in later posts.

god is not Great, Christopher Hitchens

I've written here before about my own atheism and about how, in recent years, I've felt I've had to acknowledge a tone-deafness in my previous arguments against religion. Where previously I took an avowedly antagonistic attitude towards religion (though, in truth, this attitude was not terribly important to me; mostly I just wanted the topic to go away), sweeping all sorts of beliefs aside in my disdain, now I see this kind of antagonism as an unproductive distraction. In the last few years, there have been several books by writers urgently seeking to not only discredit religion, but also to advance the atheistic viewpoint and to defend "reason", or rationality, from the forces of darkness. Though I often agree with many of the basic points these authors tend to make, my essential position is that the focus on religion by these writers is misplaced. Indeed, if the elimination of religion or, more realistically, the lessening of its influence, especially the influence of its more extreme manifestations, is the goal, then they are taking exactly the wrong approach. But to these writers and others the matter is urgent: they are worried about the survival of the species. Well, let me tell you: in my view, there are numerous good reasons to be worried. But such concern, if genuine, should focus attention on our disastrous political and economic situation, yet it rarely does.

Everything else being equal, I’d like to have the time to read all of these recent books, pursuant to a lengthy essay on the topic. But everything else isn't equal, and I don't have that kind of time. Other, more intellectually substantial books are more important. However, against all expectations, I did recently read Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. My in-laws have a copy, so it was easily available, and I admit to having had a sort of mordant curiosity about it. I also admit I came into it not expecting much by way of argument, but in fact it's much worse than I imagined it would be. The book is quite terrible, for a variety of reasons. But the things that make it bad (and to my mind, virtually unpublishable) are not necessarily those elements that make up my main problems with it and with the popular so-called “atheist books” it exemplifies. It's bad not least because it's hard to figure what Hitchens really thinks he's doing with the book. He's said that, in effect, he's been writing the book his whole life (the link is to an interview, but he also says as much in the acknowledgments). You'd think he'd have taken more care with it. It's full of sloppy thinking, awkward writing, adolescent point-making, and of course, his stylistic trademarks: withering, sometimes glib scorn, and ostentatious displays of erudition (not to mention outright errors: he has Saddam Hussein invading Iran in 1979, rather than 1980). Occasionally he gets out of his own way long enough to tell us about an interesting historical event or figure, but these passages are the exception.

Who does Hitchens think his audience is? Through the first half of the book, I was inclined to think that his intended readership must be, aside from his fanboys and other rabid atheists, those secular people, such as perhaps myself, who he might view as apologists for religion (as with his familiar accusation that the Left is "soft on fascism"). This seems to be the only way to take the sneering tone of the first few chapters, including the silly repetition of the book's childish sub-title (in italics, naturally) and the overall sloppiness of the writing in those pages. And yet, in Chapter Eleven ("The Tawdriness of the Miraculous and the Decline of Hell"), he attempts to suggest that he might have some sense of what it might be like for one to "lose faith". He writes about how he'd once been a Marxist and now is not:

For a good part of my life, I had a share in this idea that I have not yet quite abandoned. But there came a time when I could not protect myself, and indeed did not wish to protect myself, from the onslaught of reality. Marxism, I conceded, had its intellectual and philosophical and ethical glories, but they were in the past. Something of the heroic period might be perhaps retained, but the fact had to be faced: there was no longer any guide to the future. In addition, the very concept of a total solution had led to the most appalling human sacrifices, and to the invention of excuses for them. Those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a terminus that was comparably dogmatic. What else was to be expected of something that was produced by the close cousins of chimpanzees? Infallibility? Thus, dear reader, if you have come this far and found your own faith undermined—as I hope—I am willing to say that to some extent I know what you are going through.

A few comments. First, it is not an original observation to make, that Marxism became something of its own religion, with warring sects and so on. Though, of course, not all Marxists had such religious fervor, or felt the need to see Marx's (or Lenin's, or whoever's) writings as gospel, foretelling history. I find it interesting that Hitchens essentially says he did. Second, the sentence about those "who had sought a rational alternative to religion" is a problem. It implies that it is primarily religion itself, rather than economic and political conditions, that those who followed Marx were trying to escape or change. Third, the reference to "close cousins of chimpanzees"--the book is packed full of phrases like this: asides, parenthetical or otherwise, in which Hitchens lamely drums home one of his favorite points. In this case, the point that humans are products of evolution and not godly design. I certainly do not object to this point; I agree with it. But this is rhetorical overkill and limp writing, and seems designed to provoke, not convince. (He does this constantly: I can't tell you the number of times he derisively uses the word "mammal" to refer to some King or religious figure.) He says, "if you have come this far and found your own faith undermined—as I hope. . .": Is there any chance he believes that such a "confession", with such a reference to "chimpanzees", will persuade anyone who is a believer? Finally, is there really any chance he believes that anyone's faith might be undermined by this book? I find it hard to credit. He can't be that delusional.

You may note that the passage I've excerpted has nothing to do with either "the miraculous" or "the decline of Hell". This is another, in this case relatively minor, problem with the book. It appears to be organized according to topics (like, "The Metaphysical Claims of Religion"), and he does address the ideas that seem advertised by the chapter headings within the relevant chapter. But many passages, such as the one featuring this confession, have little to do with the immediate subject and feel tacked on as a result, as if he had a body of anecdotes and points he felt he had to include, but couldn't fit anywhere else.

Turning to the book's main argument, on page four, he lists for us the "four irreducible objections to religious faith" (numerals are supplied by me):

1. that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos,
2. that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism,
3. that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and
4. that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.

This is sort of an odd list. It's weird, structurally, that he provides this list, but then rarely returns to it (I believe he only refers to it one other time), instead choosing to harp on the fact that religion is "man-made" (which, of course, it is). That is, he doesn't bother to make his book, the book he's been writing his whole life, achieve any sort of structural coherence. The four points themselves seem to simultaneously say too much and too little. For example, I have no trouble with the first point on the face of it, but Hitchens assumes that this surface meaning trumps everything else. He appears to imagine that religions are constructed from the origin myth on down, and that people who have faith, who choose faith, and who maintain their faith, have that faith based on how much they believe in the factual truth of their religion's origin myth and other claims. That is, Hitchens, just like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and so many others, is fixated on the factual truth-claims of religion, whereas it seems to me that faith resides elsewhere, outside of the realm of factual claims, and that religious practice has more to do with faith communities and tradition than with factual truth-claims. There is no denying that plenty of religious people and groups do try to make factual truth-claims, claims that often have no validity whatsoever. But the use of these claims is political. The people making them no doubt seriously believe in their content, but they are resorting to such arguments for political reasons.

Personally, I agree with plenty of Hitchens' local points, but many of these points are barely worth making, or are often quite beside the putative larger point. He pretends to be arguing against faith, when instead he spends the bulk of his book showing the crimes of the church, of organized religion. So, if we look at his second point, that the original errant origin myths have led to "the maximum of servility" and "the maximum of solipsism", we can see he overshoots his claim again. As if it's religion only that leads to the "maximum" of either servility or solipsism, and as if these in turn depend on the belief in inaccurate origin myths. He gives examples in the book of this servility and solipsism, but he seems to believe that simply making the observation and providing examples is enough. It's not. He is presumably trying to persuade people who do not see things his preferred way. His task, one would think, is to actually attempt to make an argument that could conceivably persuade. He does not undertake this task. The other two points are handled similarly.

Now I want to address, at length, my real problem with the book, over and above my assessment of its tone or its sloppiness, though, to be sure, they both come into play here. This problem is of course political. In chapter one, Hitchens quotes Marx against the idea that religion offers true "consolation" to those in need, and as a common example where believers have misunderstood or misrepresented what non-believers think (in this case, Marx's view of religion, which is often reduced to the dismissive "religion is the opium of the people", or "opiate of the masses" in the version I'm familiar with). Here is the quote, from Marx's Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, as supplied by Hitchens:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower.

If Hitchens wants to show that Marx took religion seriously, this is fine. However, the quote is interesting for another reason, one that I doubt is intended by Hitchens. It gets at part of what I think is misguided about his book and the entire project of his sort of anti-religion argument (and indeed his shrill warmongering in recent years). These are the two key sentences for me: "The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion." Hitchens wants Marx to be saying, simply, that the removal of the illusion of happiness provided by religion is necessary in order for real happiness to be attained. It seems clear to me that Marx here is saying that the conditions of existence ("the vale of woe") themselves prevent "real happiness"--which is why people resort to "illusory happiness", in this case religion (though one might include drugs, art, video games, etc). Thus, it is first the conditions that must be changed. As always, this points to solutions in the political-economic realm.

In fact, current politics is a major problem with this book, though Hitchens pretends that it's not. This becomes apparent as early as chapter two ("Religion Kills"). In this chapter, he tells us of a panel discussion he participated in, just before 9/11, during which Dennis Prager challenged him to "imagine [himself] in a strange city" near twilight, in which he sees coming toward him "a large group of men". Would he "feel safer, or less safe" if he learned "that they were just coming from a prayer meeting?" This is supposed to be a yes/no question, and I agree with Hitchens that it clearly isn't. The question is stupid. Hitchens' answer is that he doesn't need to be hypothetical, since he can draw from his personal experience in "Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad" and say why he "would feel immediately threatened" if a group of men so approached him, coming from some kind of religious meeting. And then he describes such an experience that he's had in each of these cities. (There is something about the manner in which Hitchens draws from his personal experience that has always irritated me--in a sense, it points to one of the things wrong with him as a public figure. Everything is personal, how ever much he rails against "personal politics".) After his Bethlehem anecdote, he squeezes in this paragraph:

I once heard the late Abba Eban, one of Israel's more polished and thoughtful diplomats and statesmen, give a talk in New York. The first thing to strike the eye about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, he said, was the ease of its solubility. From this arresting start he went on to say, with the authority of a former foreign minister and UN representative, that the essential point was a simple one. Two peoples of roughly equivalent size had a claim to the same land. The solution was, obviously, to create two states side by side. Surely something so self-evident was within the wit of man to encompass? And so it would have been, decades ago, if the messianic rabbis and mullahs and priests could have been kept out of it. But the exclusive claims to god-given authority, made by hysterical clerics on both sides and further stoked by Armageddon-minded Christians who hope to bring on the Apocalypse (preceded by the death or conversion of all Jews), have made the situation insufferable, and put the whole of humanity in the position of hostage to a quarrel that now features the threat of nuclear war. Religion poisons everything. As well as a menace to civilization, it had become a threat to human survival.

This paragraph is remarkably ignorant, or cynical, I can't decide which. I'm not going to try to tell you that religion plays no role whatsoever in the conflict over Palestine/Israel. It does play a role. But this conflict is fundamentally not about religion. It's about land, it's about water, it's about dispossession, it's about racism, it's about nationalism, it's about Zionism, it's about colonialism. It's about Israel as a U.S. client state and its regional role in the global maintenance of capitalism. It's about oil. In short, it's about politics. The idea that, if religion were removed from the occasion, all other considerations would magically cease to exist is absurd. (And if religion were no factor, and the political differences disappeared, how is it that the "two-state solution" is still the preferred one? Presumably without either religion or politics, everyone would be free to exist in one state, no?) It's disturbing that a figure in the position of Eban would say such thing, though I realize it's unfortunately a fairly commonplace view. It's more disturbing that Christopher Hitchens would buy into it, though I'm not sure why I continue to expect him to know better.

Then he comes to Baghdad. He tells us that he is not "going to elaborate a position on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in April 2003". And then proceeds to make a number of assertions (as usual, unsupported--Christopher Hitchens doesn't need to cite evidence for anything; he simply knows what's going on), assertions that depend on a certain ridiculous, long discredited position on what he benignly calls the "overthrow of Saddam Hussein" (some of us refer to this as the invasion of Iraq). Throughout the book, as noted, he conflates the uses of religion by the powerful, with the practices and beliefs of those who are religious. Here, he seeks to disabuse those who would refer to Hussein's regime as "secular" by listing the numerous ways in which the regime was religiously inclined. He writes: "at least since his calamitous invasion of Iran in 1979 [sic], which led to furious accusations from the Iranian theocracy that he was an 'infidel,' Saddam Hussein had decked out his whole rule [...] as one of piety and jihad." And so on. Does it really not occur to Hitchens that Hussein, one of the more cynical rulers in recent history, might have been using religion for his own powerful ends? I'm not a student of Hussein's regime, but Hitchens needs to make an argument, and, again, he simply doesn't bother. He doesn't notice this cynical possibility: he simply makes an assertion, one that is not backed up by anything other than a list of facts, which he assumes can have played no other role than the one he assigns them. No citations of any kind are offered.

From here, he moves on to the invasion of Iraq itself. The next few pages are simply astonishing displays of a writer framing a story to suit his own needs, the implications of actual facts notwithstanding. Here is an excerpt:

At a minimum, it can be agreed by all that the Iraqi people had endured much in the preceding thirty-five years of war and dictatorship, that the Saddam regime could not have gone on forever as an outlaw system within international law, and therefore that--whatever objections there might be to the actual means of "regime change"--the whole society deserved a breathing space in which to consider reconstruction and reconciliation. Not one single minute of breathing space was allowed.

Everybody knows the sequel. The supporters of al-Qaeda, led by a Jordanian jailbird named Abu Musub al-Zarqawi, launced a frenzied campaign of murder and sabotage. [...] They directed the most toxic part of their campaign of terror at fellow Muslims. The mosques and funeral processions of the long-oppressed Shiite majority were blown up. [...] Before long, Shia death squads, often garbed in police uniforms, were killing and torturing random members of the Sunni Arab faith. The surreptitious influence of the neighboring "Islamic Republic" of Iran was not difficult to detect, and in some Shia areas also it became dangerous to be an unveiled woman or a secular person. Iraq boasts quite a long history of intermarriage and intercommunal cooperation. But a few years of this hateful dialectic soon succeeded in creating an atmosphere of misery, distrust, hostility, and sect-based politics. Once again, religion had poisoned everything.

Note, again, that Hitchens is now employing "regime change" as the accepted reason for the invasion; apparently he is no longer interested in defending the many other rationales that were used at different times as justification, by himself included. He observes that Iraqis have "endured much"--something we can indeed all agree on--but he has no apparent interest in other facts, beyond the nature of Hussein's regime, which have some bearing on the matter. He calls the regime "an outlaw system within international law", with no apparent irony, given his embrace of his new American citizenship, but also with no acknowledgment of the shifting requirements Iraq was forced to meet during the 12 years of UN sanctions, murderously manipulated by the United States and Great Britain. Nowhere in his account of "the sequel" does he mention the U.S. attack, the subsequent occupation, or the continued presence of American soldiers, which presence has been consistently cited by a huge majority of Iraqis as the chief reason for the continuing violence. No, it was for Hitchens simply a matter of sectarian fanatics refusing to allow the proper period of breathing space necessary for other Iraqis to . . . to what? Build an independent, pluralistic, liberal democracy? Does Hitchens actually believe that the United States was going to let anything like this happen? Or does Hitchens think that the Iraqis should be thankful for the removal of Saddam Hussein and simply welcome their new U.S.-appointed, U.S.-subservient government? He doesn't say. Granted, his book is not about the War, but his overall claims depend to a large extent on the truth-value of what he says. If he is hung up on the truth-claims of religion, he cannot expect to get away with making such assertions as if they are facts that are self-evident. (Incidentally, in one of the passages I've elided above, Hitchens refers to a letter Zarqawi sent to Osama bin Laden. He gives a State Department url for this letter in the back of the book. This is the only citation supplied for his account of the war on Iraq.)

In the final chapter of the book ("The Need for a New Enlightenment"), we learn of the source of Hitchens' fear for the survival of the species and thus his sense of urgency in writing this book at this time. "[T]he confrontation between faith and civilization" is now "on a whole new footing", since "a version of the Inquisition is about to lay hands on a nuclear weapon". He is, of course, referring to Iran. It is perhaps appropriate that this book should end with such an assertion as part of its concluding remarks. Of Iran, he writes that with "the stultified rule of religion, the great and inventive and sophisticated civilization of Persia has been steadily losing its pulse". He recites a brief litany of ills: exiled and censored artists and intellectuals; sexual repression; poorly educated youth. "After a quarter century of theocracy . . . [m]odernity and technology have passed it by, save for the one achievement of nuclearization." Do I need to tell you that Hitchens provides no evidence for any of this? It used to be, writes Hitchens, that

those who adopted the clerical path had to pay a heavy price for it. Their societies would decay, their economies contract, their best minds would go to waste or take themselves elsewhere, and they would be consistently outdone by societies that had learned to tame and sequester the religious impulse. A country like Afghanistan would simply rot. . .

All that changed, of course, with 9/11, and now with Iran's alleged "nuclearization". As with his description of the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Hitchens displays no interest in, or even awareness of, the role of the West in any of this. Of course he knows about the U.S./British overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953 and the subsequent role of the Shah as regional enforcer; he knows about the U.S. funding and training of the mujahideen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and the subsequent blowback. He knows these facts, but he refuses to address them, or to even mention anything else that takes away from his grand narrative of theocratic evil, operating in irrational isolation, against the forces of light and reason. Though he is prepared to eagerly accept the existence of ancient hatreds (as between the Sunni and Shia), he consistently refuses to consider that the extensive activities, over at least 60 years, of the United States in Iran, in Afghanistan, in Iraq (and before them, the British, and other Western powers), have had any effect whatsoever on these places, have had any effect on the options that are available to the people living in them. With Iran and "nuclearization" he continues his embarrassing tendency in recent years to believe almost anything about his declared enemy. Of course, Hitchens' book was published before the NIE findings made public in December, which reported that Iran had "halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003". I'm skeptical about the existence of such a program even in 2003, but I certainly cannot hold Hitchens responsible for knowing about these findings. However, I can hold him responsible for his willingness to jump to conclusions and his credulity in the face of highly dubious official claims. Well before the NIE report, there were countless pieces of evidence that pointed to the fact that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapons program. But Hitchens, it seems, wants to believe that it is, wants to have justification for his hate. Do I need to point out the irony?

Towards the beginning of this post, I wrote that god is not Great is not just a bad book, but "virtually unpublishable". Why do I say this? Certainly I disagree with a large amount of the book, but my disagreement does not make a book bad or make it unpublishable. I've tried to show why I think that the arguments presented by Christopher Hitchens in god is Not Great are at best inadequate and where I think the book exemplifies many of the problems with the anti-religion argument. I hope I've been able to demonstrate the flaws in some of his arguments, such as they are. On the litblogs we see a lot of hand-wringing about the current state of publishing. And it's not uncommon to see laments about the quality of our public discourse; I've certainly made my share of such comments here. Books are published all the time that add nothing but fear and bile to this discourse (feel free to supply the title of your favorite right-wing screed). Hitchens' book is not quite as bad as all that. But what does the book add to any discussion? There is nothing in god is not Great that can't be found elsewhere, other than the ubiquitous presence of Christopher Hitchens himself, with his rhetorical winks and nudges. The book is poorly argued, tonally inconsistent, and frankly childish, from the title and sub-title on down. The inconsistency in tone--as if he intended to destroy religion once and for all with the power of his scorn, but then occasionally realized that he needed to make a feint in the direction of persuasion, with disingenuous displays of humility thrown in for good measure--is part of what I mean when I say the book is sloppily written. For me, these qualities ought to mean that the book should have been sent back for considerable re-tooling before it got anywhere near being published. And yet it was not only a best-seller, but was nominated for a National Book Award. The latter in particular is another tiny sign of an intellectual culture in poor health. Hitchens may say that he'd been effectively writing the book his whole life, but it has the feel of something slapped together quickly in order to cash in on a trend.