"The locus of ownership having nothing to do with it"

In his book, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, first published in 1982 (original subtitle: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property), Lewis Hyde tucks away in a passing footnote the following:

Capitalism is the ideology that asks that we remove surplus wealth from circulation and lay it aside to produce more wealth. To move away from capitalism is not to change the form of ownership from the few to the many, but to cease turning so much surplus into capital, that is, to treat most increase as gift. It is quite possible to have the state own everything and still convert all gifts to capital, as Stalin demonstrated. When he decided in favor of the "production mode"—an intensive investment in capital goods—he acted as a capitalist, the locus of ownership having nothing to do with it.

I absolutely love that Hyde manages in a throwaway line to offer a better definition of capitalism than appears most anywhere else.

The book overall is an interesting read, part anthropological survey, part philosophical investigation of art, among other things. The passage quoted above comes from chapter two (“"The Bones of the Dead"), in which he discusses the circulation of gifts in certain cultures, and comes after his re-capitulation of one of the points from the first chapter ("one man’s gift must not be another man’s capital") and a corollary:

the increase that comes of gift exchange must remain a gift and not be kept as if it were the return on private capital. Saint Ambrose of Milan states it directly in a commentary on Deuteronomy: "God has excluded in general all increase of capital." Such is the ethic of a gift society.

Anyway, returning to the definition of capitalism. The focus on surplus value as opposed to who owns the means of production is, to me, crucial. I've been reading lately some of the essays/rants by the blogger Jehu at Re: The People. Admittedly, I haven't read all that many of them (there's a lot there), my attention span being rather limited of late, but I've especially appreciated his insistence on the importance of surplus value, and by necessary extension, the length of the working day (this leads him to be incredibly harsh on academic Marxists, including David Harvey, who readers will know that I admire; on this point, at least, Jehu seems to me to have an excellent point), and his focus on the "fascist State" as capitalist. But as capitalist in the sense described by Hyde: the state is a capitalist. Not the spurious focus on Capitalism in this or that country, which drives me nuts, and, as mentioned, leads to stupid questions about whether slavery is or isn't capitalist, which is but one reason I've been driven somewhat away from Marxism (though not Marx), and towards world-systems analysis, a la Wallerstein.

Notes on feminism and reproductive power

In part addressing my recent entry on technology and the classless society, Peter Frase (previously unknown to me) has written a post called "The Dialectic of Technology" (which also appears at the Jacobin site, here). Frase writes from a very Marxist perspective, which is helpful. I find much to disagree with, but it's useful to find such a perspective so clearly laid out. He begins by invoking Shulamith Firestone, author of the feminist classic, The Dialectic of Sex. I'm going to use this post to riff on the Firestone reference (which is really only in the first paragraph); I hope to have time to write about the rest of Frase's thoughtful post at another time.

Firestone first came to my attention via Nina Power, through both her blogging (from which she seems to have retired and deleted most of the archives) and her book, One Dimensional Woman. Readers will recall that I wrote about Power's book just over two years ago, including Power's use of Firestone. I don't intend to repeat what I said in that post about Firestone. I will say that Power's use of Firestone did not make me inclined to read Firestone's book. The ideas about biology and technology as presented by Power strike me, still, as altogether unappealing and, oddly, retrograde. I do, however, now plan to read The Dialectic of Sex, primarily because of what Adrienne Rich says about Firestone in her classic, Of Woman Born. In her chapter "Alienated Labor", amidst a discussion of "natural childbirth", Rich writes this:

Shulamith Firestone, as an early theorist of the contemporary women's movement, was understandably skeptical of "natural" childbirth as part of a reactionary counterculture having little to do with the liberation of women as a whole.

Firestone sees childbearing, however, as purely and simply the victimizing experience it has often been under patriarchy. "Pregnancy is barbaric," she declares; "Childbirth hurts." She discards biological motherhood from this shallow and unexamined point of view, without taking full account of what the experience of biological pregnancy and birth might be in a wholly different political and emotional context. Her attitudes toward pregnancy ("the husband's guilty waning of sexual desire; the woman's tears in front of the mirror at eight months") are male-derived. Finally, Firestone is so eager to move on to technology that she fails to explore the relationship between maternity and sensuality, pain and female alienation.

Ideally, of course, women would choose not only whether, when, and where to bear children, and the circumstances of labor, but also between biological and artificial reproduction. Ideally, the process of creating another life would be freely and intelligently undertaken, much as a woman might prepare herself physically and mentally for a trip across country by jeep, or an archeological "dig"; or might choose to do something else altogether. But I do not think we can project any such idea onto the future—and hope to realize it—without examining the shadow-images we carry out of the magical thinking of Eve's curse and the social victimization of women-as-mothers. To do so is to deny aspects of ourselves which will rise up sooner later to claim recognition. (pp. 174-175)

This still wouldn't be getting me any closer to reading Firestone, except that earlier in the book, Rich had allowed that Firestone has, with respect to advances in birth-related technology, "observed that the possibilities are terrifying if we envision the choice of human types, gender, and capacities being controlled by patriarchy." This, and Rich's claim that Firestone's work includes, among other things, "powerful analysis of the nature and extent of patriarchy", have moved me closer to wanting to read her for myself.

Anyway, it's the stuff I don't like that is relevant here. Frase calls The Dialectic of Sex one of his favorite Marxist-feminist writings because of two things it does "exceptionally well":

The first is to extend Marxist analysis into the realm of sex and gender by simply taking Marx and Engels’ own framework to its logical conclusion, which they themselves were too blinded by the patriarchal assumptions of their time to recognize. The second is to see modern technology as an indispensable element of women’s liberation, going so far as to argue that “Until a certain level of evolution had been reached and technology had achieved its present sophistication, to question fundamental biological conditions was insanity.”

It should be clear that I think it's bonkers to "see modern technology as an indispensable element of women's liberation". This is in part because I see "modern technology" as inseparable from the society that produced it, and I have seen how the "advances" in modern birth-related technology have eroded both the choices available to women and the health of babies and children, our reliance on medical doctors and technology eroding the very ability for women to make informed decisions. Women are all too often pushed into interventions that are convenient for their doctors, and lucrative for insurance companies, rather than in the mother's or child's best interests. The decisions available to women and families are unavoidably "controlled by patriarchy". Introducing further and further interventions, and even removing birth from women altogether into the realm of machines and other advanced technologies is, first, not good for the well-being of children (so often an afterthought in the radical imagination, when it is, of course, the most important subject there is), and, second, not going to do anything to effect the liberation of women. What I see as indispensable to women's liberation is the retaking of reproductive power by women, organizing society around that power, that labor, rather than around production.

In another article at Jacobin (the back page article here), Frase writes about "working time and feminism", correctly focusing on time and unpaid labor, in the reproductive arena, paying much-needed attention to the problem of men being willing (or, rather, unwilling) to do a larger share of unpaid, reproductive labor (noting that, in countries which offer substantial family leave for male and female employees, males are considerably less likely to take the time off). Interestingly, in a separate post at his blog, Frase admits that he wished he'd spent more time discussing the nuclear family in that article, and by excerpting a paragraph from an LRB essay by Jenny Turner, ends up quoting some of the same Toni Morrison (again, by way of Nina Power) lines that I do in my review of One Dimensional Woman (note, also, that in this post, I take issue with Power's version of the Marxist assumption that "entering the workforce" was somehow "liberating" for the mass of women; here I'm grateful for bell hooks and other feminists of color who have continually reminded us that black women, and poor women, always worked outside the home, along with their unpaid work inside the home: it only came to be seen as liberating when middle/upper middle class white women did so). Morrison says, "Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community—everybody—to raise a child." The thing about capitalism is not only are we alienated from our labor, we are alienated from each other. Community is difficult to build or sustain, so the prospects of a community raising a child is daunting. As Morrison says, the nuclear family "isolates people into little units—people need a larger unit." And they need time to attend to those things that matter most, which are reproductive in nature. Without time, without larger units, one or two people are forced to try to do everything themselves and to make compromises in the areas of food, health, shelter, compromises which we ought to be working towards making unnecessary, or even unthinkable.

Let me return to Frase's praise of The Dialectic of Sex. He says that Firestone "extend[s] Marxist analysis into the realm of sex and gender by simply taking Marx and Engels’ own framework to its logical conclusion, which they themselves were too blinded by the patriarchal assumptions of their time to recognize". I find this interesting, because I've long felt that the feminist critique of Marxism, taking the critique of capitalism to its logical conclusions, is not only utterly necessary, but foundational. But my key figures are feminists such as Maria Mies and Sylvia Federici, authors of, respectively, Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour and Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. I wish I had written here more systematically about these books, since they couldn't be more important. I had intended to blog Mies' book, chapter-by-chapter, but failed to do so; the best I did was to offer a brief excerpt (here; that excerpt I had intended to in part comment on the discussion that resulted from my review of One Dimensional Woman) and to use part of her argument in my review of Roberto Bolaño's novel, 2666 (here). In Federici's case, I still intend to transcribe my notes from the Federici-led workshop I attended last Spring, and I did fairly effectively deploy her arguments from Caliban and the Witch in my review of Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? (here, see also a follow-up to that review here, also heavily relying on Federici's book; incidentally, I think the points raised in that Josipovici review are essential to this conversation, though all too often they are isolated from it). Anyway, Mies follows the logic to the very end and concludes that subsistence should be our focus (indeed, most of her subsequent work has been on "the subsistence perspective"). It's frankly difficult to argue with her. Federici, among many other things, brings our attention to the many powers women had in the pre-capitalist world, powers which were systematically stripped in the development of capitalism, and which had to be so stripped, in order for capitalism to unfold. Though I now fully intend to read The Dialectic of Sex, I believe Marxists, indeed all of us, would be much better off pursuing the arguments of Mies and Federici and the like, rather than in engaging in fantasies of technological liberation.

Noted: David Graeber

Also from "Turning Modes of Production Inside-Out":

What has passed for "materialism" in traditional Marxism—the division between material "infrastructure" and ideal "superstructure," is itself a perverse form of idealism. Granted, those who practice law, or music, or religion, or finance, or social theory, always do tend to claim that they are dealing with something higher and more abstract than those who plant onions, blow glass, or operate sewing machines. But it's not really true. The actions involved in the production of law, poetry, etc., are just as material as any other. Once you acknowledge the simple dialectical point that what we take to be self-identical objects are really processes of action, then it becomes pretty obvious that such actions are (a) always motivated by meanings (ideas); and (b) always proceed through a concrete medium (material). Further, that while all systems of domination seem to propose that "no, this is not true, really there is some pure domain of law, or truth, or grace, or theory, or finance capital, that floats above it all," such claims are, to use an appropriately earthy metaphor, bullshit. As John Holloway (2003) has recently reminded us, it is in the nature of systems of domination to take what are really complex interwoven process of action and chop them up and redefine them as discrete, self-identical objects—a song, a school, a meal, etc. There's a simple reason for it. It's only by chopping and freezing them in this way that one can reduce them to property and be able to say one owns them.

A genuine materialism then would not simply privilege a "material" sphere over an ideal one. It would begin by acknowledging that no such ideal sphere actually exists. This, in turn, would make it possible to stop focusing so obsessively on the production of material objects—discrete, self-identical things that one can own—and start the more difficult work of trying to understand the (equally material) processes by which people create and shape one another.

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.

Containing Autarky

As I was working on completing my second post on Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke, I came across this highly relevant passage in David Harvey's The Limits to Capital:

The insatiable thirst of capitalism for fresh supplies of labour accounts for the vigour with which it has pursued primitive accumulation, destroying, transforming and absorbing pre-capitalist populations wherever it finds them. [...] The real troubles begin when capitalists, facing shortages of labour supply and as ever urged on by competition, induce unemployment through technological innovations which disturb the equilibrium between production and realization, between the productive forces and their accompanying social relations. The closing of the frontiers to primitive accumulation, through sheer exhaustion of possibilities, increasing resistance on the part of pre-capitalist populations, or monopolization by some dominant power, has, therefore, a tremendous significance for the long-run stability of capitalism. This was the sea-change that began to be felt increasingly as capitalism moved into the twentieth century. It was the sea-change that, far more than the rise of monopoly or finance forms of capitalism, played the crucial role in pushing capitalism deeper into the mire of global crises and led, inexorably, to the kinds of primitive accumulation and devaluation jointly wrought through inter-capitalist wars.

[...] Any regional alliance, if it is to continue the process of accumulation, must maintain access to reserves of labour as well as to those 'forces of nature' (such as key mineral resources) that are otherwise capable of monopolization. Few problems arise if reserves of both exist in the region wherein most local capital circulates. When internal frontiers close, capital has to look elsewhere or risk devaluation. The regional alliance feels the stress between capital embedded in place and capital that moves to create new and permanent centres of accumulation elsewhere. Conflict between different regional and national capitals over access to labour reserves and natural resources begin to be felt. The themes of internationalism and multinationalism run hard up against the desire for autarky as the means to preserve the position of some particular region in the face of internal contradictions and external pressures—autarky of the sort that prevailed in the 1930s, as Britain sealed in its Commonwealth trade and Japan expanded into Manchuria and mainland Asia, Germany into eastern Europe and Italy into Africa, pitting different regions against each other, each pursuing its own 'spatial fix'. Only the United States found it appropriate to pursue an 'open door' policy founded on internationalism and multilateral trading. In the end the war was fought to contain autarky and to open up the whole world to the potentialities of geographical expansion and unlimited uneven development. That solution, pursued single-mindedly under United State's hegemony after 1945, had the advantage of being super-imposed upon one of the most savage bouts of devaluation and destruction ever recorded in capitalism's violent history. And signal benefits accrued not simply from the immense destruction of capital, but also from the uneven geographical distribution of that destruction. The world was saved from the terrors of the great depression not by some glorious 'new deal' or the magic touch of Keynesian economics in the treasuries of the world, but by the destruction and death of global war.

And later, in examining the ongoing, ever-increasing military budgets, he concludes that the cycle of capital accumulation and devaluation suggests a

terrifying interpretation of military expenditures: not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labour, but they must also be put to use. For this is the only means that capitalism has at its disposal to achieve the levels of devaluation now required.

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.

Scattered thoughts on the election

I've spent months deferring writing anything about Barack Obama and the presidential campaigns. I've been short of time, yes, but the truth is that it would be all too easy to write a long post detailing all the problems with Barack Obama and why I'm wary of the excitement others have for him and why I don't think he offers what this country needs at this time (which, frankly, is drastic change, decades late, in the form of some kind of bottom-up non-capitalist socialism or communism; see, incidentally, this mostly excellent video lecture explaining the economic crisis, from Professor Richard Wolff of Amherst, in which he proposes just that. Link via the new blog Marx and the Financial Crisis of 2008 (thanks to Infinite Thought for pointing to this blog), video first seen at Lenin's Tomb).

But, sadly, it's pretty clear that Obama is just about the best that the two-party system can plausibly come up with for a Presidential nomination. He's a vastly better candidate than either Gore or Kerry were (which is not to say that he is substantially different from them). And people are genuinely excited about him, which is something. Excitement is not something to be dismissed lightly, though, again, I'm wary that people expect things of him that he's not prepared to even attempt to deliver. (I remember being excited about Bill Clinton, it saddens me to admit.) Regardless, it remains mind-boggling that, for example, anyone could view any of the debates between Obama and McCain and conclude that McCain is worth supporting or voting for.

(By the way, the morning after the final debate, I was making just this observation to one of my bus-riding companions--that I have numerous problems with Obama, but find McCain repellent in every way, utterly and always devoid of integrity, incoherent, and so on, and inconceivable that anyone could have watched the debate and decided that McCain was their man--when another rider interrupted and wanted to know what I didn't like about Obama. I started off with his odious foreign policy, that he's a serious hawk whose version of "leaving Iraq" doesn't look much like leaving, etc . . .I didn't get very far, because he interrupted again and asked if I thought the United States should just pull its troops out of Iraq. Yes, in fact, I said. No, he countered, and said further that the United States must stay in Iraq because the major conflict in the world today is between the Christian world and the Muslim world and the U.S. is needed to stop terrorism and has been spreading democracy in the region, witness this or that election, etc. etc., blah blah blah . . . I didn't know what to say. I could have had a conversation with someone arguing that U.S. troops should stay in Iraq, as wrong as they'd be, but I wasn't expecting this kind of argument--I didn't know that normal people spouted reductive versions of Samuel Huntington's stupid, racist, discredited "clash of civilizations" thesis. What can you say to that? I can talk to people with whom I disagree, but some positions are so wrong that I often simply don't know where to begin and I either say nothing or try to say too much in too short a period of time, which only contributes to the trivialization of discourse. Is it my job, on a ten-minute bus-ride, to hold court on recent geo-political history? It is not. I held my own as best I could, but have to admit that I did indeed sputter incoherence at least once.)

(Regarding that last debate, I will say that I learned one good thing from McCain. It was news to me that Joe Biden had voted against the first Gulf War. Good for him! For McCain this was just one time among many when Biden was wrong about foreign policy, it being naturally one of the few times he was actually right.)

Anyway, though Obama is the best the two parties can come up with, he remains a center-right figure of limited vision. But he nevertheless pays lip service to worthy values, and it is these values that matter to his supporters. And it is this, along with the ongoing lunacy of the Republican Party, that makes his candidacy worth supporting. Steven Shaviro made an excellent argument along these lines in two posts from September. In the first one, he writes:

no matter how hypocritical the Democrats are [...] — nonetheless, the fact that they pay lip service to human rights, human dignity, and freedom from unnecessary suffering makes them morally superior to the Republicans, who are so crassly cynical that they overtly and positively revel in the prospects of torture, bigotry, destroying the environment for quick corporate profits, and enriching the already-rich at the expense of everyone else.

Thus, the Democrats’ hypocrisy is to be preferred to the Republicans’ cynicism, for good Kantian reasons [...]. As Kant famously said about the French Revolution, no matter how much this uprising might have “miscarried” or been “filled with misery and atrocities,” nonetheless any decent human being, observing the events of the Revolution from afar, would have to be caught up in “a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm”; the sheer fact of this “sympathy,” despite everything that goes wrong in actuality, itself testifies to “a moral predisposition in the human race.” In other words, the sheer fact that something like the French Revolution could occur, no matter how badly it went wrong subsequently, gives us a legitimate ground for hoping that human beings are not forever subject to the Hobbesian alternative of either continual war of all against all, or severe and violent repression.

In the present circumstances, this means that Obama’s rhetoric of hope, no matter how vapid and empty it may actually be, still matters. Anyone who thinks that Obama will actually change things is in for severe disappointment if he wins. It’s pretty clear that Obama will do no more than restore Clintonian neoliberalism, in place of the revanchist militarism and rampant looting and pillaging that characterizes the current Bush-Cheney regime (and that McCain, for all his promises of “change”, will do nothing to alter). In other words, Obama may well rescue us somewhat from the nightmare of the last eight years, but only to the extent of restoring the status quo ante, with its foreign bombings and domestic “rationalizations” of the economy, that we rightly objected to in the 1990s. Nonetheless, the fact that Obama, Biden, and company pay lip service to humane values that they will not actually uphold is in itself a cause for hope, for maintaining a “hope we can believe in,” or (to quote a past Presidential candidate whom it is now taboo to mention) for “keep[ing] hope alive.”

We should vote for Obama because

we should make it clear that even the most minimal sense of human dignity requires us to throw the Republicans out of power. It is not stupid to vote for McCain/Palin; rather, it is evil. Republicans are intrinsically, and necessarily, morally depraved. Anyone who votes for McCain/Palin, or supports them, by that very fact demonstrates that he or she is a person utterly devoid of basic morality, and lacking in any respect for others. To vote for McCain is to shit on human civilization, and show utter contempt for human values and human hopes.

Shaviro's second post is a discussion of the idea of evil, in the wake of the discussions that took place in the comments at his blog, and also in response to two posts by Jodi Dean and subsequent discussions at her blog.

(For the record, I voted for Ralph Nader in each of the last two presidential elections. I have no trouble with either vote, nor do I have a problem with people voting for Nader again this time, or for that matter for Cynthia McKinney. I've considered writing a lengthy defense of both those votes and of Nader himself and his candidacies, in part because it keeps coming up: Liberals keep dragging Nader and Nader-voters through the mud; each time something awful happens, be it a terrible Supreme Court decision or a certain military action, you can still see blog comments blaming Nader for it. An argument that Nader and those who voted for him are somehow responsible for the Bush presidency is not one that can be fruitfully defended if one is interested in the facts. I intended to explain why, at interminable length, and also why I still believe the 2000 vote in particular was the right thing to do at the time, but I don't have the heart for such an endeavor anymore--or possibly I'm just tired of being accused of "not getting it", or worse, of being a racist by tiresome, over-indulged commenters at other people's blogs.)

(Before concluding, let me offer yet another parenthetical and say that there have been some things I've liked about Obama. I was very impressed by this speech about religion, for example. I was less impressed by the much-ballyhooed speech on race, though he did say many important things worth saying in it, dragged down as it was by the awful boilterplate about Israel and fact-challenged distancing from Rev. Jeremiah Wright. On the latter, I'd meant to point to a few analyses I found of value way back in March, but I got bogged down and distracted. Here are two: Tim Wise, in CounterPunch, typically excellent on Obama, Wright, and "the Unacceptability of Truth" to white America; and I Hear a New World's brilliant post linking Wright's oratory to African American popular music, including linking the now-infamous "God damn America" phrase to Nina Simone's classic "Mississippi Goddamn".)

On Saturday, we attended another Iraq Veterans Against the War/Winter Soldier event, at 2640, followed by a not well-attended anti-war march. One of the panel members at the event was Michael Schwartz, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University who's written articles appearing at TomDispatch, Z, Asia Times, and others, and has written a book titled War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (which I'm currently reading; it's not perfect, but it's pretty damn good). Towards the end of the Q&A session, the panel was asked whether there was any glimmer of hope with the upcoming election; that is, would there be any substantive change in policy, in terms of the continuation of the war and occupation? Schwartz replied that the only glimmer of hope he could discern was that the economic crisis would get so bad that the United States could literally not afford to keep troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, whether combat or occupation, and be forced to withdraw. I think it's fairly clear that he's correct. Now, Obama is invested in the American imperial project--he merely believes he can manage it better--and he is a proponent of neo-liberalism (with figures like Robert Rubin and Paul Volcker as close advisers, why would we think anything different?), and so on. But the truth is that, with Obama, under such circumstances one can at least imagine him being able to modify his policies and move toward more genuinely populist positions, however difficult they might be to implement. One can imagine no such thing with John McCain.