A New Fascism? A Dead Imperialism?

Below are reposts from an older exchange between Stan Goff and Don Hamerquist. The original discussion was posted on a version of the Bring The Ruckus!(BtR) website that is no longer in use. For reasons of extending the discussion, or at least some concepts within, we are now putting the exchange up on 3WF. We have attempted to date the posts as they became public. These discussions predate the launch of this blog by just a few months and helped shape the basis for what we were aiming for in terms of movement debate and anlysis.

Below is the introduction from BtR, Goff's original article with subsequent exchange. We then include some related comments.

A New Fascism? A Dead Imperialism? An Exchange between Stan Goff and Don Hammerquist

...debate between veteran revolutionaries Stan Goff and Don Hammerquist on fascism and global capitalism is now available on the Bring the Ruckus web site. In it, Hammerquist more fully develops his definition of fascism and his argument for why Al Qaeda and other movements should be understood as posing a revolutionary fascist challenge to global capital. He also argues that the present capitalist system should not be considered "imperialist."

"The fact is that [American] neoconservative policies may well jeopardize economic and political stability in the metropolis. They are willing to risk, not only popular living and working conditions in the imperial center, but also the relative power and influence of the specifically U.S. sections of capitalism. This is why it is so problematic to identify neocon strategy with a resurgence of U.S. imperialism. They would risk the very basis of American global power to protect and advance what they call freedom.?

"Contemporary neo-fascism involves two elements. First there is a rapidly expanding social base. This base is composed of the declassed and marginalized, a huge population that has been permanently defined as non-productive and redundant by capitalist development... The second element is the assortment of reactionary groups, with no necessary connection to each other, that more or less consciously try to organize this social base against the established structure of power, a structure which they see as corrupt, decadent and fundamentally wrong."

Nov 10, 2004
There's No There There: Debating a Neocon

Dec 15, 2004
Responding to Stan Goff's, Debating a NeoCon

Jan 13, 2005
Continued discourse on article, Debating a NeoCon. Goff responds to Hamerquist

Feb 15, 2005
Hamerquist on dilemmas for Capital and further outlines of the content of the resistance movements.

March 1, 2005
Matthew Lyons comments on Hamerquist Goff exchange

March 31, 2005
Hamerquist Responds to Matthew Lyons

Michael Novick responds to Thinking and Acting in Real Time and a Real World

Comments to Thinking and Acting in Real Time and A Real World

Thanks, Don and TWF for this, and for the link to Kali Akuno's piece. I do know Kali and value his work and am surprised that I wasn't aware of this; we have printed others of his pieces in "Turning the Tide: Journal of Anti-Racist Action, Research & Education," (available in pdf format on-line at www.antiracistaction.org, click on 'publication'). Kali has done some important work around Katrina, the election campaign of Chokwe Lumumba in Mississippi, and many other causes. Although I have had a lot of unity with him in the past, and had many disagreements with Don in the past, I find myself agreeing with Don's assessment that his general strategic line formulation towards a popular front with liberal and progressive forces "against fascism" is really inadequate (even though his general political orientation is strong enough that much of predictive material he penned in November 2008 has come to fruition, such as the inability of Obama and the Democrats to deal with the crisis, and the resurgence of the Republican right).

However, both Kali's piece, and Don's (which has some great strengths, including its insistence on the explosive potential in human consciousness of the current and enduring crisis of the empire) have a couple of critical weaknesses regarding both war and fascism. The insurmountable internal contradictions of capitalism and colonialism, as well as the irreconcilable contradiction between capitalism/colonialism and the people it exploits and oppresses mean that war -- international, intra-capitalist war -- is inevitable. The culmination of the current imperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the military activity and threats against Iran, Venezuela and in Africa, are part of a strategic campaign of encirclement being carried out against China by US-led imperialism. The war on terror, which the other comment, citing Mike Davis, correctly relates to long term counter-insurgency warfare in global and internal slums, is also a prelude to a military conflict with China (notwithstanding, or perhaps more properly, exactly because of) US dependence on China. The US and China are already engaged in vigorous cyber-war.

The citation of the Trilateral Commission, particularly the 'excess of democracy' elements, in the other note is also welcome. The US is still extremely actively engaged in the process of "spatial deconcentration" (removal of the Black, indigenous/Mexicano and other poor people from the urban core) that is necessary for such urban slum warfare to be tactically possible in the US (where, unlike the Third World or global south, the poor to a certain degree still occupy the city center rather than the outskirts). The gentrification of New York, where Harlem has become a predominantly European-descent area, the depopulation of New orleans, and the eradication of Detroit are part of this ongoing process since the Empire was forced to battle in the cities of the US.

Regarding fascism, as I have struggled with Don and others on TWF in the past, the colonial and settler colonial nature of the US state and society means that elements of "fascism" have always been part of the social and political fabric. This doesn't mean it's a "tactic" of the bourgeoisie, it means that (settler) colonialism has always been a cross-class project, with independent (armed) action by various classes and strata, and that the very concept of a "working class" as envisioned by Marx and Marxists (or anarchists) needs to be modified by an understanding of the importance of land, particularly private property in land, to the nature of Capital and its social relations. One of the things that the current crisis of capitalism should have made manifest, but apparently still hasn't, is that the capital 'market' in 'real estate (land, housing, etc) far exceeds industrial, or even financial capital. The bursting of the housing bubble should have helped identify to all one of the irreconcilable and unresolvable contradictions of capitalism -- that whether or not a particular house is "under water," the totality of mortgage debt, principal and interest, far exceeds the value of the property which "secures" it. The ballooning of such debt into "securities" only served to magnify the overhang. At the same time, the value of energy, water, and agricultural productivity (and the costs of waste disposal and/or decontamination) absorbed into capital by the private expropriation of land, nature and the commons of water and air, have helped to precipitate an enormous and catastrophically expensive (in life and dollars) environmental crisis which, like the economic crisis, manifests the not merely moribund or parasitic but necrotic nature of the Empire. The intersecting economic and environmental crises will not be solved by cap and trade, 'green jobs,' or health care reform, let alone the stimulus; but they may serve to provoke the kind of insurrectionary transformation of consciousness that Don is musing about. In that regard, both Don and the commentator miss the point about the struggles developing in "Latin" America -- the indigenous movements are not the resurrection of "national liberation" but its supercession by people standing on its shoulders and capable of overcoming its Euro-centric limits and definitions.

--Michael Novick
antiracistaction_la@yahoo.com

Response to Paretsky (2/19/09

I want to comment on a few of the issues raised in Nick Paretsky’s February post reacting to the piece I wrote earlier this year. I apologize for the delay in my response.

I intend to loosely follow three of Nick’s categories: the “Negri framework”, “authoritarian capitalism”, and “Global Social Democracy”. I don’t see many differences and think that most of what I say will parallel Nick’s positions, but his questions involve serious issues for the continuing discussion.

Negri framework

Before considering some implications of Negri’s positions, I’d like to make a few general observations on his two recent books, “Empire” and “Multitude”. I should note that my tendency –which could be completely wrong - is to view these books as essentially Negri, limiting Hardt’s credits to the overtly liberal elements that are particularly important in “Multitude”.

Nick says, “Negri lost me after Domination and Sabotage”. He also lost us at the same time. While “Domination and Sabotage” was not without its internal problems, more important for our attitude towards Negri was the collapse of the Italian workerist new left and the loosely related armed groups at the end of the seventies. The self serving mea culpas of the recanting penitenti left us with a very bad taste from things Italian. I know that Negri took a more principled stand during these events and was still serving time when Empire was written. However, in his period in France, he wrote some overheated stuff on the French student movement that looked a lot like indirect self promotion – ‘where I am, so is the revolution’. Maybe this impression also was wrong, but it was our reaction at the time. In any case, when Empire appeared at the end of the Clinton years, we were not highly motivated to read the latest from Negri.

I assumed from the title that “Empire” was just another variation on the theme of ‘people of the world against U.S. imperialist hegemony’, a position promoted by an array of people with generally rotten politics and, in my opinion, a big step backwards from the politics of the Italian workerists. I remember being specifically turned off by two points that were presented to me as Negri’s essential arguments. The first presented the existence of an “unmediated antagonism” between the people of the world, (“multitude”), and “empire” - an antagonism that incorporated and superceded the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class. (See Empire, p. 237 for Negri’s actual, somewhat different, position). The second point postulated an underlying structural dynamic in capitalism that allowed the “multitude” to determine the direction of history, more or less irrespective of its consciousness and organization.

A couple of years ago, Ferd Egan, a good friend with good politics, told us that Negri’s current positions should be considered seriously and that my impressions of them were at best, incomplete, and more likely, wrong. He gave us copies of both Empire and Multitude. Since then I’ve read both books quite carefully and have come to the conclusion that Ferd was basically right. Most embarrassing, I discovered that I had the main thesis proposed by Empire exactly backward. Rather than an updating and liberalizing of the classic theory of imperialism, it is a persuasive critique of its current applicability:

“In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers.” (Empire, p. xii)

Further: “The United States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project. Imperialism is over.” (Empire p. xiv)

Finally: “Empire is not a weak echo of modern imperialisms but a fundamentally new form of rule.” (Empire, p. 146)

A significant related observation from Negri, particularly relevant to some participants in this discussion:

“The state is the poisoned gift of national liberation.” (Empire, p. 134, Negri’s emphasis)

These important and, I think, essentially valid propositions tend to be overwhelmed by the unnecessary and pretentious intellectualism of the opening sections of the book, marked by many pompous passages that bring to mind the kneecapping endorsed so casually by some compatriots in Negri’s earlier life. I can’t resist including one of my favorites although it has nothing much to do with anything under consideration:

“The logic that characterizes this neo-Weberian perspective would be functional rather than mathematical, and rhizomatic and undulatory rather than inductive or deductive. It would deal with management of linguistic sequences as sets of machinic sequences of denotation and at the same time of creative, colloquial and irreducible innovation.” (Empire, p. 41)

Think about that.

Eventually I took Negri’s own suggestion in the Preface to Empire and read the book in chunks. Looking back I can see where I fell into a workable pattern: first the preface; then chapter 1.3; then chapters 2.6 – 4.0, particularly 3.1. This done, going back through the rest of the material was of some value despite many seemingly redundant displays of erudition and the irritating (to me) preoccupation with post modernism.

What I find very good in Empire is its presentation of a basic transformation in the structure of contemporary capitalism and in the concepts in which this transformation can be thought and through which it can be acted on. It appears to me that Negri’s argument emerges as an extension of Luxemburg’s theory of accumulation.

“Rosa Luxemburg was essentially right: imperialism would have been the death of capital had it not been overcome. The full realization of the world market is necessarily the end of imperialism.

“The decline of the power of nation-states and the dissolution of the international order bring with them the definitive end of the effectiveness of the term “Third World”. (Empire, p. 333).

The “Negri Framework” approaches the qualitative change in late capitalism by applying Luxemburg’s analysis to conditions where capitalism has become a genuinely world system with no significant ‘outside’ - where capitalist appropriation through “formal subsumption” has been almost entirely replaced by capitalist appropriation through “real subsumption”. This transition, according to Negri, changes the relationship of periphery to center from one of differences in kind to one of differences in degree. Among other things, this approach is refreshingly distinct from various post-Maoist stage theory approaches to the current conjuncture.

What I don’t like about Empire, or more accurately, what I find exceptionally unconvincing, are the implications Negri draws for revolutionary strategy and specifically the way he approaches the issues of consciousness and organization. These problems predominate in the second book, “Multitude”, a much inferior offering in my opinion. This gets to one point where my second ignorance-based reason for dismissing Negri without reading his books had some purely accidental merit. Negri does seem to assume an underlying objective movement towards revolution that is inherent in the productive process of capitalism, a ‘law of motion’ that continues within this new form of capitalist rule, ‘Empire’. This underlying dynamic provides an evolving structural basis for the decisive role he accords to the multitude – insuring both its current and its ultimate historical efficacy, independently – more or less – of the current political and economic reality.

Negri’s position is shared with some Marxists such as the Johnson-Forest position which I paraphrased from M. Glaberman above, and still is a major element in the Italian workerist tendencies from which Negri emerged in the sixties (See Sergio Bologna). Also I think it is an element in Staughton Lynd’s “Wobblies & Zapatistas”, despite that book’s obvious antipathy towards Negri.

Negri’s positions were, and still are at odds with the French left structuralists, with classical Leninism, and with most conceptions that emphasize superstructural autonomy. There are a couple of interesting current criticisms of his approach. Alain Badiou, the important French communist theorist, appears to challenge its determinist and evolutionary implications for revolutionary strategy with his conception of the ‘event’ (see Seattle interview on Kasamasite). Alonzo Alcanzar (“On Radical-Leftist Strategy”, Linksnet) disagrees from an activist communist perspective that is more appealing to me. However, Negri has some ties to all of these camps, adding still more contradictions and ambiguities to his treatment of the revolutionary process.

For myself, the fatal flaw with Negri’s approach is a practical one. It fails to properly relate fascism to capitalist crisis or to comprehend the neofascist potentials contained in contradictory aspects of the ‘multitude’.

I hope this makes the relationship of my conception of the “Negri framework” to the points I made in the recent piece a little clearer. Let me draw out the issues somewhat with respect to a question that you raise:

“I’m not sure what is meant by the ‘potential and actual political relationships’ (dh) affected by this ‘compacting’. (Paretsky, p. 1)

I had in mind the new possibilities for developing an internationalist movement as a consequence of the emergence of Empire. The combination of the internationalization of capitalist labor discipline and the increasing international mobility of labor creates situations where the potential for internationalist solidarity extends beyond (largely) external support. The increasingly obvious shared enemy will clarify more substantive approaches to points of conflict, because people one lives and works with here are organically connected to those fighting elsewhere. I could give an extended example of how a range of attitudes in a conservative (reactionary might be more accurate) logging community have polarized and changed because people are living and working with a rapidly growing population of Guatemalans and Mexicans.

Notwithstanding the significance of Negri’s appreciation of these changing realities, I remain very skeptical of the spontaneity involved in his treatment of their potentials. In the first place, this refers to Negri’s notion of the multitude as an aggregation of “irreducable singularities”. When Alonzo Alcanzar says; “...we who in our suspicion of representation virtually forbid ourselves to use this word “we”.” (“Radical-Leftist Strategy, point 2.), his reference is to Negri, although the thought also applies to some more explicitly anarchist trends. Of course, Negri, can rely on the inexorable unorganized forward pressure of the ‘multitude’ to enforce its own priorities, but those of us who don’t see spontaneous revolutionary potential working in such a helpful linear way cannot. For us, the conception of “irreducable singularities” contradicts the importance, the necessity I think, of prioritizing certain constituencies, certain demands and certain struggles over others and places crippling limits on the flexibility of a revolutionary strategy that operates out of limited resources.

This is closely related to the differences in perspective that allow Negri to ignore the extent of the contradictions within the patterns of mass resistance and refusal of capitalist discipline, and thus the extent to which the dominant resistances he looks toward, i.e.; ‘exodus’ and ‘flight’ - are imposed rather than chosen. When these factors are considered, I think that the problems with basing a revolutionary strategy on this side of Negri’s analysis are pretty obvious.

Core/gap (and the ‘scrambling’ of same)

I should probably exercise more care to explain these terms and why I invoke them from time to time. The “core-gap/rule set/system perturbation” terminology comes from a particular ruling class perspective developed by Thomas PM Barnett, author of the “Pentagon’s New Map” and a number of related writings. I haven’t read through all of Barnett’s material, but the general content is clear enough from his extensive website. I think there is little real difference in stance between Barnett and Thomas Friedman although they appear to actively dislike each other. Both have been liberal globalization supporters. They share a strong commitment to an activist confrontation of obstacles to capitalist development through a combination of economic leverage and military force that is “smarter” (their common self-estimates of their respective positions) than the official policies of the recent past. Both can be expected to promote variants of strong state/global social democracy perspectives – more relative to this later.

The categories in Barnett’s terminology derive from his notion of global capitalism as a system. He presents a bourgeois ‘theory of the productive forces’, a mystified market-centric conception that drank from the kool-ade of capitalist triumphalism and the ‘end of history’. In a sense, Barnett presents the active entrepreneurial role of global capitalism as the mirror image of Negri’s notion of the historical efficacy of the multitude, although as a ruling class ‘consultant’ looking to make money from selling advice, he clearly is atune to those elements of capitalist organization and conscious policy that Negri glosses over with respect to the multitude.

Barnett opposes the recently dominant U.S. ruling class - ‘unipolar’ - strategic plan that aimed to disrupt the potential for any nationally-based challenge to U.S. hegemony within the global capitalist system - a plan that focused on the increasing political, economic, and military power of China. Barnett regularly counsels segments of the U.S. ruling class to adapt to the notion that they are not threatened if China and/or India gain increasing importance in the global political economy. He bases this apparently on a perception of the limitations of the nation state as an adequate political/cultural and economic framework for capitalist hegemony and power.

There is some superficial similarity here with the aspect of Negri’s notion of Empire that accords all national forms a secondary importance, but the differences are more important than the similarities. As contrasted with Negri, Barnett would not see the ‘gap’ as presenting a developing challenge to capital growing from crisis phenomenon of late capitalism and potentially infecting the core. Instead, for him the gap is a shrinking atavistic domain of pre-capitalist conditions that the expansion of the capitalist market and its accompanying “rule sets” will eventually surmount, if differing tendencies in the core don’t disintegrate into a self destructive ultra-nationalist competition. This has more in common with some Maoist analyses that look at the gap in terms of non-capitalist social formations – although those analyses are looking for revolutionary potentials that are of no interest to Barnett – than it does with Negri.

In any case, though it is important to understand these terminologies and, particularly, the assumptions and perspectives that underlay them, there is no way that they present a conceptual framework that we can use. Nor does Negri adopt any aspect of Barnett’s position despite their shared skepticism about old priorities on national political and economic power. For example, if Negri were to utilize the Barnett category of the ‘gap’, his conception of the “Poors” (see Multitude, p. 129-137) as a leading element of the multitude should provide its social content. However, Negri presents the Poors, not as a dumb and irrational backward-looking resistance to capital, but as a major element of refusal of its modern disciplinary regime that foreshadow possibilities of a post capitalist future throughout the system.

So the point you make about the interpenetration of the core by the gap and the modern contradictory tendencies that this entails would not make political sense for Barnett, but are understandable and important in my view – and, I would think, in Negri’s. However, with Negri there still is a major problem since his spontaneism stands in the way of the development of strategic priorities based on concrete evaluations of these contradictions. And, as I have said often, the specific contradictions that create the potential for mass fascist movements are not even a part of Negri’s vision of the multitude.

(I initially hoped to find some opening in this direction from Negri in the strange passage titled, “Demonic Multitudes”. (Multitude, p. 138-140). However, after a promising first sentence - “The multitude has a dark side.”- it quickly became evident that this “dark” side was only an incremental addition to a general threat to the “political order” of empire, not a unique and different threat as per the Three Way Fight conception of fascism.)

Marginalization & Disarticulation

I have always liked the conceptions of the ‘development of underdevelopment’ and of the ‘disarticulation’ of economic development in the global South that I associate with Samir Amin. (I haven’t read Gunder Frank.) This is the case despite the frequent combination of such ideas with illusions about the viability of non-capitalist models of development; illusions which frequently are/were encrusted with sanguine views of the ‘socialist camp’.

I agree with you that this ‘disarticulation’ is becoming a much bigger factor in the current crisis situation and that it is intertwined with the spatial scrambling of the ‘First’, ‘Second’, and ‘Third’ ‘Worlds noted in the Negri passages that I’ve cited. (Empire, p. xii, and p. 253-254).

You point out that one current feature of working class recomposition that demonstrates the secular character of the crisis is the accelerated marginalization of labor increasing the pool of workers with “...no prospect of their being reincorporated into capitalist relations down the road.” (Paretsky, p. 3). On a global level, many such workers have barely been ‘freed’ from the land by the first steps of primitive accumulation before finding themselves ‘freed’ again by the diminishing opportunities for wage slavery in the official economy of capitalism.

I think you are also right to emphasize that an increasingly important aspect of the current process is that its impact is to declass growing segments of “...an established modern working class...” – and, I might add, not only the segments that have been on the bottom socio-economic tiers of this working class. It is in this second area where the shrinking potentials for “reincorporation” and the changes in status and prospects that are entailed by it are likely to have the most radically disruptive impacts, because here capitalist discipline can no longer be stabilized through cultural hegemony and its related mythologies of cross-class community of interests. This, not the question of who would ‘suffer’ the most, is what I was trying to get at with Hanieh and Midnight Notes on the issue of whether the most important features of the crisis would be those that were ‘exported’ or those that would ‘come home’.

You raise New Orleans as an almost cliched example of internal ‘disarticulation’. I agree both to the example and to its emerging cliche status. However, although some argue that New Orleans was a unique situation, an externally determined accident, there are other examples that cannot be explained and minimized in such a fashion. Consider Detroit: Look at the rips in the fabric of capitalist legitimacy from the rapidly changing circumstances of the union-organized industrial workers in what has been their Sierra Madre for the past three quarters of a century. Say goodbye to the Fordist mass consumption model in its heartland – and maybe to Chrysler and GM in the process. Consider the ramifications for the conditions of immigrant labor, for the merging of the criminal economy with the ‘legal’ economy, for the viability of local government and the continued internalization of a capitalist ‘rule set’. This is ‘disarticulation’ that might have past parallels in a Gary or a Newark, but in Detroit, Cleveland, Akron/Canton/Youngstown, St. Louis it achieves a critical magnitude that makes it much less digestible for capital – and, by the way, I’m not so sure that I accept the logic of your denial of any possible emerging parallel to “....the mega slums of Bombay (etc)...” (Paretsky, p.2)

Then look at China, a society moving from the ‘gap’ to the ‘new core’ and wrecking the elements of stability of the rural society in the process. Although this process has happened before, it has not previously been a second ‘primitive accumulation’, accompanied by the deliberate demolition of a social safety net developed to mitigate the social costs of the earlier ‘socialist’ primitive accumulation. This stark and brutal combined process provides a major acceleration of ‘disarticulation’... and not only in China. The ramifications extend throughout the system and will be particularly jarring in the old core...here...when the current symbiotic structures that underlie international capital and commodity exchanges implode.

“Substantive economic citizenship”

I was struck by the term you cited from the old piece by Mike Davis; “...substantive economic citizenship for Black and Hispanic Americans...”. The phrase could benefit from a critical appraisal. At one time a movement for substantive economic demands, rooted in actual conditions and real needs of Black and Hispanic people, might have been a real possibility. Such a movement would necessarily involve spelling out the content of ‘substantive economic citizenship’ to facilitate a reasonable discussion of the terms and conditions for its attainment. The best outcome of such an exercise would have been the development of an organizing effort around a ‘transitional program’ – a focused mass movement for popularly ‘legitimate’ basic reforms unattainable within the capitalist conjuncture of the moment that could open a pathway to: “...the threshold of socialist transformation”. (Davis). As late as the eighties in this country, a formation like the Rainbow Coalition might have played this role and this is likely what Davis had in mind. This, of course, did not happen, but if it had, it would have been a case of bringing the national liberation movement home to the metropolis and any successes attained would provide strong arguments against Negri’s current analysis.

The transitional program is a common Trotskyist approach to revolutionary strategy, one that was also evident in the Akuno paper, and it has been thoroughly criticized in various other manifestations by myself and many others. Rather than repeat those arguments, I would only say that the moment the transitional program moves beyond tactical considerations it begins to pay a price for failing to confront the qualitative issues of revolutionary consciousness and failing to take adequate account of the capacity for capitalist rule to keep oppositional movements internally divided through a process of selective concession and repression within the framework of its cultural/ideological domination.

Under current conditions there are additional obstacles to this perspective. The extent of ‘disarticulation’ affecting the privileged and previoously incorporated (white) sectors of the working class makes it virtually impossible to define the elements of national ‘economic citizenship’ as a coherent set of liberatory political objectives. Most likely, the very use of the term ‘citizenship’ would direct whatever unity is obtained towards nationalist exceptionalism and a reactionary focus on American Jobs for American Workers, i.e.- the poison in the “poisoned fruit” of national liberation. Under such conditions, transitional programs are not likely to see the light of day and their strategic weaknesses will never run the risk of exposure in political practice.

‘Agency’

You raise the implications of marginalization for the development of a revolutionary agency in the context of Davis’s dismissal of Negri’s notion of ‘multitude’. As I have said and as I’m sure that Davis recognizes, since Negri can always invoke the underlying dynamic of social production as a functional substitute for the organization of a conscious revolutionary social bloc, his approach is less dependent on specifying a revolutionary agency. That won’t work for those of us who are not enamored of swarms and rhizomes, and it is certainly to the good if this grouping includes Davis.

I did want to make a few comments on your general point about the eroding social basis for the traditional Marxist view of the unique revolutionary role and potential of the working class. We refer to the contradiction between ‘social production’ and ‘private appropriation’ as a pivotal point for anti-capitalist struggle. The significance of social production is that this is where working people can gain an appreciation of their collective capacities as ‘producers without whom there is no production’. This is typically related to the issue of revolutionary agency by the argument that elements of the experience of ‘social production’ are essential to developing a revolutionary class bloc that can appreciate the necessity and possibility of anti-capitalist revolution. (STO also used to regard the collective experience of social production as the material basis for successfully challenging white privileges.)

This argument emphasizes two points: the characteristics of large scale cooperation, both in producing and in resisting the pressure to produce, provides the collective experience equivalent to the ‘shaping of the thing’ in the Phenomenology. The experience of solidarity, of collective resistance against a common class enemy in which different individual subjects risk more than they can afford to lose for gains that don’t always translate into individual benefits, provides the equivalent factor to ‘risking one’s life’ in the Phenomenology.

Insofar as these lessons are uniquely provided by participation in the capitalist productive process, the growing marginalized sectors of the class will not share in them and will not learn any lessons about the necessity and possibility of social revolution that might be gained from them, This makes it increasingly important that we look critically at the changes in working class composition which make social production more atomized and less social and make this source of the consciousness of being the ‘collective producers’ a lived experience that is shared by smaller and smaller segments of the class. This is an important issue and one that has bothered me for a while in terms of past debates about the potential to develop ‘socialisms’ out of mass revolutionary movements lacking significant working class participation and leadership.

What is it about social production, if anything, that uniquely creates these mass counter hegemonic potentials? (I read Staughton Lynd’s recent book and thought it explicitly argued that the entire conception is mistaken, although, in looking back, I can’t find the relevant passage.) In retrospect I think that our attempts to do production organizing tended to idealize and exaggerate the positive educative role of participation in social production, and didn’t take full account of the alienating and dehumanizing aspects of the same experience – the various “appendage of a machine”, “fragment of a man” issues. But the fact remains that there was some reality to the notion. Even if it was a reality that only emerged episodically, that was more evident at moments of sharp change – like these moments perhaps.

We need to explore the possibilities of functional equivalents for these disappearing elements of class experience. It seems to me that this entails two things. First, the ‘productivist’ illusions associated with the notion must be abandoned. Capitalist industrial management theories have gone a long ways towards reducing and redirecting the radical potentials in large scale production in the interests of maintaining labor peace and advancing productivity. There are far better ways to develop the experience of social cooperation than in the typical large scale capitalist enterprise which is rife with mind-numbing stupidities interlaced with the worst careerist individualism, and where the estrangement from the product and the productive process is almost complete.

Where initial experiences of ‘break’ with this routine occur, e.g. aspects of the Republic Windows occupation, they have to be generalized so that the important elements of preparation for other such events can be put into place and the ability to precipitate a rapidly spreading social infection maximized. Second, there has to be a much more conscious organizing approach to general cultural issues, focusing on the development of a counter-hegemonic bloc that can provide an alternative arena for generalizing the lessons of mass solidarity and popular creative potentials, at times even making some sacrifices in terms of efficiency, tactical flexibility, and militance. I know this runs counter to some points I’ve made in other arguments, so I’ll move on before exposing myself as a complete fraud.

Strong state: trilateralism: global social democracy: fascism:

My approach presumes that the movement towards globalization will overcome nationally based political resistances – unless these assume a mass revolutionary anti-capitalist dimension. This provides an integral relationship between the first three of the factors listed in the section heading, recognizing that many others may see them as distinct or even mutually exclusive. I advance this position as a quite tentative hypothesis that remains to be demonstrated and certainly welcome discussion and debate about it. In this general context, the fourth term above, the postulated emergence of a modern neofascism, is the precipitating factor that I see as both providing coherence and plausibility for the hypothesis and as increasing the momentum of the process.

There are a lot of different issues located here and there are a variety of different ways to discuss them. I see the three terms as related elements in an emerging model of capitalist class dictatorship that is transitioning from nation-state based structures to forms better suited to the long term interests of an increasingly globalised capitalist ruling class and productive process. These changes, all of which involve a strengthened state, are part of the movement from imperialism to empire, but they are also important elements of the nation state arenas where the resistances to this movement are manifested. This contradiction results in frequent tensions between the economic and the political sides of the process.

Since the major features of this expansion and redirection of capitalist discipline are evident in changes in U.S. state capitalism, I will limit my discussion pretty much to developments in this country. Despite the mystificatory cult of the autonomous capitalist market, U.S. capitalism has not been innoculated against the secular tendencies towards increased bureaucratization and statification that are normal features of the concentration and centralization of capital. Layered on top of this in this country, the areas of individual choice and autonomy are further narrowed by the increasing atomization and commodification of civil society and the privatization of much of what had been considered to be common. As the state merged with the economy, the entire society was militarized and the working class was atomized, destroying its political and social cohesion. All of this facilitated-and was facilitated by - an internal Fordist social peace that supported and promoted hot and cold wars.

These processes have substantially eroded the content of freedom and democracy, including many of its specifically bourgeois aspects. They combined with capitalism’s more or less organized responses to the traumas of depression, fascism, and war - with social revolution always within the realm of possibility – to project increasingly authoritarian ruling class policies, partly as a response to real dangers, or at least ones that were widely perceived as real; and partly as a manipulation of manufactured external threats designed to discourage the emergence of more substantive internal ones. This entire process has overwhelmed some episodic counter trends, notably the brief period in the late sixties and early seventies which might be seen as a more comprehensive, though ultimately failed, reversal. The rest of my argument will involve some questions which have roots in the secular tendencies mentioned above, but, for the most part, I’m focusing on ruling class policies and their intended or accidental results.

At least since the Soviet revolution, ruling class ideology has contained two poles. One presents capitalism as the only possible modern form of social organization and defines any radical challenge to it as intrinsically reactionary, if not irrational. The other presents capitalism as the most desirable of possible forms of society, but emphasizes its vulnerability to a range of centrifugal pressures and ideological opponents and views its survival as dependent on developing the proper responses to these threats. At different moments these opposed tendencies exist in various uneasy combinations but over the six plus decades since the military defeat of state fascism they have jointly explained and justified a cumulative expansion of repressive and authoritarian forms and methods of capitalist discipline, in this country if not uniformly throughout the entire capitalist system – sometimes by providing its rationale and sometimes by promoting the actual systemic changes.

There has always been a tendency for the left to look at all of this as leading inexorably towards a 1984 state, a fascism from above without any necessity for the confusions provided by messy mass fascist movements. I have argued against such positions elsewhere, noting that they frequently legitimate a ‘good’ capitalism by focusing on contingent ruling class policies and trends which can and are easily modified without changing anything serious. However, there is a more substantial difficulty with this perspective than its tendency towards parliamentary reformism. It obscures the fact that, notwithstanding increasing authoritarianism, the ultimate stability of capitalism still depends on its ability to develop and maintain support or at least acquiescence from populations whose needs and interests are not served by it.

Until the Bandung Conference period, the prevailing ruling class conception was that the external anti-imperialist and socialist camp challenges to capitalism could be contained with military force until they collapsed and were incorporated, while the derivative internal risks could be treated as matters for the police and the ‘law’. However, at some point after the mid-fifties, faced with the Chinese revolution and an eruption of left-led national liberation struggles, sectors of the global ruling class were afflicted by a renewed pessimism about the essential viability of imperialism/capitalism and began a significant modification of their approach to social control.

The new premises were clearly outlined in the Trilateralist Commission documents, particularly ‘Crisis of Democracy’ essay and, less overtly, in the emerging conceptions of low intensity conflict and counterinsurgency strategy and in the policies associated with neo-colonialism. Nick rightly draws attention to these factors and to their approach to disorganizing and deflecting popular insurgent potentials and disrupting dangerous radical groups.

More than a decade after the “Crisis of Democracy”, the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’ provided a few years of renewed capitalist triumphalism and resurrected the “End of History” argument that capitalism was the essential form of ‘modern society’ and that attempts to overthrow or transcend it were basically irrational. These illusions were quickly and conclusively shaken, first by 9/11, and more seriously over the past few months by, as Warren Buffett said, “...capitalism falling off a cliff...”. In any case, even this relatively brief period of ‘irrational exuberance’ didn’t significantly impede the overall capitalist trend of increasing social control and the further limitations on freedom and ‘rights’. With the decisive end of that period and the official assertion that we have entered the new era of ‘long’, perhaps ‘permanent war’, the movement towards authoritarianism has more than resumed its previous rapid pace.

In the mid seventies STO began to argue that capitalist rule was increasingly reliant on modern and self conscious policies of repression that we titled the “new” state repression. These policies were ‘new’ at the time in the sense that they explicitly discounted the traditional notion that that capital was eternal, a necessary order, and that rebellion amounted to a social pathology. Instead the presumption was that capitalism would be permanently under threat, generating and regenerating potentially insurgent oppositions that were not inevitably doomed to failure. The practical conclusion that was drawn was that an organized and strategic quasi-military ruling class response was needed.

This response was developed as the doctrine of low intensity conflict. It took both popular insurgency and political dissent out of the realm of human rights and civil law and put them in the realm of covert war. The development of this doctrine was paralleled by complementary trends and policies which increasingly removed all transparency and accountability – actually any pretense of commitment to majority rule - from the already compromised processes of parliamentary democracy. This is evident in the Trilateral Commission’s fears of ‘excess of democracy’ – where indeed, the real fear is of democracy itself and not any ‘excesses’. The career of Samuel Huntington, major author of the Trilateral ‘Crisis of Democracy’; from the Vietnam war ‘strategic hamlets’ right through his authorship of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’, is an example of the continuity between that period and the present. However the political and economic changes since the mid seventies are far more important than the similarities and I will get into them in a moment.

Even now these changing methods of class rule are not adequately comprehended by the left although their implications are widespread. There is an extreme reluctance to recognize that the dominant form of repression in the core is aimed at disrupting and redirecting movements of protest, not at suppressing them – at shaping dissent, not at ‘illegalizing’ it. Thus we are regularly caught asleep by domestic ‘pseudo-gang’ developments even though these have been explicit parts of repressive strategies for more than half a century. It is even more difficult to understand why so few questions were raised about more blatant foreign operations of this kind, e.g.; al Qaida in Iraq, which was a replica of Kitson’s Kenyan prototypes that has been a matter of public information for longer than my political life – which is saying something.

Additionally, until very recently there has been little appreciation of the widespread privatizing of police and military functions resulting in the internationalization of Pinkertonized repression – a reprise on steroids of what this country experienced more than a century ago that has been only thinly disguised and justified by various failed state features in the gap. This has been quite evident since the Contra funding scandals of the Reagan Administration.

However, when we consider what has happened since the mid-seventies, it’s clear that there have been some very important changes. Trilateralism was a multilateral, nation state-based capitalist approach to the Soviet Bloc and to radical national liberation. Neither of these targets are currently with us despite some illusions about S. America. Trilateralism does not fit the current post Cold War conditions. In the first place these are conditions in which, as previously noted, “...spatial divisions of the three Worlds have been scrambled...so that we find the First Worlds in the Third, the Third in the First, and (most relevant to this point d.h.), the Second almost nowhere at all.” (Empire, p. xiii). The Soviet Union and Communist China were definitely ‘somewhere’ for Trilateralism.

On the most basic level, the current capitalist world cannot achieve stability based on the tripolar constellation of nations and alliances that were intended to control anti-imperialism and cordon the Soviet Bloc. Now we have a globalized capitalist world and among its most important segments are areas that were the targets of Trilateralism, for example, the so-called BRIC bloc. The political and economic requirements for economic growth, profit maximization, and political stability in the global system are no longer necessarily congruent with those same requirements for the governing components of the Trilateralist system.

The disappearance of a spatially defined and militarily threatening ‘outside’ with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the incorporation/marginalization of the national liberation movement has helped to develop a situation where economic relations have decisively outgrown the national state structure. I would argue that the current processes of production and appropriation cannot be properly understood as essentially based within nations at all...and that all the tendencies are to move further away from such a base.

So there is pressure towards a strong state in the current situation but the strong state is quite different from the what the modern Metternichian underpinnings of Trilateralism would have produced. Capitalism needs to develop transnational institutions that can exercise directive power without being limited by the national state forms which have been central to its history and which continue to possess fiscal and monetary authority, not to mention the bulk of the military resources. This growing need for state forms that can operate as the ‘collective capitalist’, disciplining global labor and segments of capital outside of the framework of any given nation state, cannot be solved within Trilateralism. Nevertheless, it remains a need that is not being adequately fulfilled and this results in major disruptions throughout the global system.

The neo-liberal premise until the recent crisis was that, if the dominant national economies were prosperous and thus stable, the economic side of the global capitalist system would be basically self-regulating and this would keep political tensions in check and eventually resolve them. Any problems with unruly elements in the gap and new core that could not be resolved through exercising market leverage and other applications of economic power would be remnant political and military issues that could be handled with a measured and limited dosage of military power. This is the view that underlies Tom Friedman’s famous MacDonald’s/McDonald Douglas formula, blurted out in a simpler time a decade ago before Seattle. That Friedman approach clearly isn’t adequate in circumstances where crisis phenomena are universal.

The development of transnational strong state institutions is required by capital’s dilemmas, and this in turn requires a certain unity and coherence of capitalist power that is difficult to develop when the economic relations have substantially outstripped the national framework and when different national frameworks may have distinctly different national interests and priorities. I’ve raised this issue in other writing, but it’s more evident now in the problems with developing a coherent capitalist discipline over the process of financialization. I notice that Panitch (see 4/10 ZNet article) indicates that such a class discipline was not considered desirable. Perhaps that was true in the flush of massive profits at an earlier moment, but it is not true now. The emerging debate between the Franco-German and the Anglo approach to financial regulation will sooner or later require the adoption of a transnational disciplinary structure – particularly since even Greenspan’s confidence in the rationality and morality of the bankers and hedge fund operators has been so deliciously shaken.

This is where Global Social Democracy enters the scene. The general capitalist class interest in stability and order is undermined by competing requirements for achieving it in certain national economies. This cannot be resolved by some laissez faire process any more than any other of the current issues of political economy can. It requires a state intervention, but one that will incorporate concession as well as repression. Who will decide which squeaky wheels are to get the grease? Will it be the Greek students threatening to ignite the spirit of ’68, or the bedraggled autoworkers of Michigan? An EU response will go in one direction, an U.S response will go in another direction, but ultimately there is far too little flexibility to grease everything.

This is going to be approached by some kind of global social democracy designed to materially buttress capitalist hegemony at points of stress. The material side is quite straightforward, even if it is currently difficult to see what instrumentalities will make it work. There is a less obvious ideological side that I can see working, not by distributing benefits, but by presenting a posture of willingness to do so that is being obstructed by social forces operating out of narrow self interest. This, then, will constitute the mythical ‘good’ capitalism which the metropolitan left has traditionally supported in its benighted way as an alternative to presenting its own plan of revolutionary reconstruction.

Nick points to a major problem:

“I’m having trouble understanding how social democratic governments can reconcile their legitimating ideologies and promises to their mass base with authoritarianism and repression, at least for very long...” (Paretsky, p. 4)

Quite right this will be difficult, but there is a way to mollify the mass base, particularly before these GSD tendencies reach governmental power. The fear of fascism will become the functional substitute for improved terms in the sale of labor power. And the liklihood is, I think, that there will be a fascism to fear. So long as the fascist threat is real, a relatively stable social democratic class peace compact is possible. And under that cover, the economic and political adaptations necessary to revitalize capitalist production will also be possible - although perhaps in a form much closer to ‘barbarism’ and the ‘common ruin of the contending classes’. We could be left to contemplate again Mao’s dictum about the broom.

This is why, to reemphasize a point I made in the earlier piece, we can’t wait for things to happen, but must do whatever is possible to precipitate and deepen the elements of crisis, expecting to develop opportunities that will be real, but not real long lasting.

dh

Nick Paretsky responds

from the comments section of, Capitalism in Crisis?
Holy cow. Just read the post about the redeployment of troops inside the U.S. for domestic counterinsurgency.

Well, anyway: Long-term ruling class strategies in wake of the financial meltdown

The immediate ruling class response is the bailout. There’s been talk in the business press about how the bailout signals the end of the neo-liberal, “free market” policy regime of the last 30 years or so. So far, it just looks like a huge, lumbering state capitalism, without any clear underlying paradigm shift in ruling class policy. But if the bailout is not successful at preventing implosion of the financial system, or even makes the crisis worse, as the Hudson piece argues, major ruling class debates may be in the offing over long-range strategies for managing the system, one issue being the role of the state in economic policy. As has been said many times before by others, their strategies have implications for what leftists do. And divisions within the ruling class can be an opportunity for a mass, radical left movement. (Hamerquist has written in the past about capitalist policy alternatives for dealing the crisis, such as a traditional reformist, social democratic approach vs a conservative “strong state” which intervenes in the economy without a popular, working class base, in the context of his theory of the secular crisis of capitalism.)

It might be useful to map out different positions emerging within the rc on dealing with the crisis, in event the financial meltdown really does require the ruling class to make a break with past policies. Among other things, this means looking at discussions taking place within the ruling class network of policy planning organizations, think tanks, research institutes, foundations, etc, which has played an important role in the past in the formation of state policy. These are organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, American Enterprise Institute, Business Roundtable, Institute for International Economics, and so on.

For example: Is this another “New Deal moment”? K. Phillips doubts it is, in the American Prospect article cited in the Bill Moyers interview. If this is true, reformist left politics will have tough sledding. But I think some sort of state interventionism is on the rc agenda.

Some rc ideologues are in fact talking in a “New Deal,” “social democratic” vein. They see this as chance to reassert the power of productive capital (industrial capitalists) with respect to the financial sector. NYT columnist Thomas Friedman is a visible spokespersons for this camp. His writings have been cited by some contributors to this forum as important rc statements on globalization. In recent columns he has been advocating the rebuilding of the U.S. manufacturing base using energy conservation and “green technologies.” For example, his Sept 28 op ed, “Green the Bailout.” His proposals are reminiscent of the reindustrialization” idea debated within rc circles during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, in which the state would channel capital into the retooling of industry and rebuilding infrastructure; this time it is a “green” reindustrialization. I believe Friedman is involved with a number of policy formation organizations representing the internationalist wing of the rc, such as the Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, and Bilderberg. So his utterances may reflect the views of a larger grouping within the ruling class, composed of real capitalists with power, and not just newspaper reporters. These would also be capitalists which have ties to specific geographic places, at the same time that they are at the helm of large multinational corporations with operations spanning the globe. This “green” reform program may go nowhere. Reformist policy options may face objective limits in the nature of contemporary capitalism. A “unitary executive” which uses force to restructure capital and society, without reformist “class compromise” politics, may be more likely. But the Friedman program is an example of a ruling class analysis of the crisis which revolutionary leftists should pay attention to.

Having just read the Army News article about a permanent domestic military presence being established under the authority of NorthCom for purposes of controlling “civil unrest,” I am reminded that a lot of ruling class strategizing for general management of the system is now taking place within the Pentagon and the other organs of the National Security State, alongside the older network of “civil society,” “private” capitalist think tanks which formulated and transmitted policy to the State. Mike Davis has said something similar in his writings on “the planet of slums.” I’m also further jolted into realizing that things are heating up and getting closer.

Nick Paretsky

a System in flux: trying to get our brains wrapped around the crisis in capitalism

central ideas growing from this "threewayfight" discussion board is that the System - capitalism and the administrative States - represent dynamic sets of entities in a constant flux of shaping and reshaping themselves. beyond the Systems own internal dialectic this motion and how the System manifests itself weighs heavily on the trajectory - the politics and focus - of the opposition movements. anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, fascism, popular reactionary movements, radical expressions of liberation, all are impacted by the System and vice versa. simple, right?

at times we can have a developed and fairly sophisticated praxis, at other moments our understanding is still waiting outside the door fumbling for the keys.

for several of us that contribute to threewayfight - or those who use the sites information to help draw out and develop ideas - the economic aspect of the System is paid little attention. seemingly strange considering that a total critique of these societies demands us having a grasp on how the capitalist society we are looking to uproot and overturn actually functions. but i said seemingly because we acknowledge a lack of full knowledge. its from here that we are trying to talk about and understand what is happening.

the housing crisis, the bailouts or liquidation of financial institutions, and now the $700B bailout of the market, is forcing a new discussion that many of us have only just thought over in rudimentary terms. the Democrats want us to see their party as the saviors of the common people. some Republicans are "outraged" by the Bush/Paulson bailout plan because it has government tinkering with the economy. by and large the boss class - both parties - would like for us to keep sleepwalking as they construct our futures; a future that every economist is saying is completely uncertain.

we are going to try to point "our side" in the direction of news, analysis, and overviews that deal with this future.

we cant afford to sleepwalk through the nightmares the masters create.
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1) Capitalism in Crisis? by D. Hamerquist

"There is no evidence of capitalist complacency in the current situation – but there is a good possibility that many left radicals will relax and snooze their way through it. I recommend that those who see the current situation as just “capitalists just being capitalist” make sure they understand the concept and the function of “leverage” and then google - ‘collateralized debt obligation’ and ‘credit default swap’. This should provide some recovery therapy for business as usual disorders on the left."

2) Paul Bowman writes for the Workers Solidarity Movement, Fiancial Weapons of Mass Destruction

"as a system of social relations, capitalism is also a system with internal mechanics. Those mechanics evolve in response to the historical development of struggles over exploitation, but what new directions the new mechanics make possible in terms of capitalist strategies, in turn, shape the new struggles of today and tomorrow."

3) Kevin Phillips interviewed on the Bill Moyers Journal

"KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, just to give you an example of how many there are… I sometimes use the description 'seven sharks.' There are seven sharks in the tank with the economy… Now, whenever you get this sort of package in one decade, you got a big one. And when Greenspan says it's a once a century, I think it's another variation but on a par with the Thirties.”

4) Michael Hudson writes for Counterpunch, The Paulson-Bernake bank Bailout Plan: Will the Cure be worse than the Crisis?

"The question to be asked is just how much will the economy’s debt overhead grow, and what will it cost debtors (a.k.a. “taxpayers”)? And how will the economy look when the dust settles?"

5) from the Maoist Kasama site, Overview of the Financial Crisis.

Capitalism in Crisis?

the following is from a larger discussion between different individuals and organizations on the nature of fascism and the potentials and limitations of anti-fascist organizing. that discussion will be published in the near future, however, with the last few days events we wanted to put up this piece from D. Hamerquist.
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M. included this observation in his remarks on the current fascism discussion:

“The history of the left is littered with groups that have ended up in the metaphorical ditch after having hitched their ride to a supposedly impending crisis in the functioning of capitalism. It’s true that the past is often no guide to the future, but I’m highly skeptical of claims that capitalism is currently headed toward a major crisis.”

Despite M.s “highly skeptical” view, the events of recent days certainly look like a capitalist crisis and spokespeople for the system are commonly describing the situation in apocalyptic terms. Perhaps he thinks that it is just not a “major” crisis – only a slight “downward economic adjustment” in our corner of the global capitalist system, a momentary hiccup that we should look beyond. However this doesn’t explain why the major spokespeople for capital, accompanied by the flock of professional commentators on its workings, are uniformly describing the situation as a looming disaster for the entire global capitalist financial system and are bitterly debating the proposed remedies. Should they all relax? Has M. found some underlying limits on the problems that all of them have overlooked? Is this emerging bailout remedy that will cost a minimum of half a trillion dollars of public funds a stupid over reaction to some minor glitches? Is the palpable panic part of a massive attempt to confuse the more gullible sections of the people, including the small circles of revolutionaries and cover up some “adjustment”(s)? If so, what adjustments…and why cover them up?

There is no evidence of capitalist complacency in the current situation – but there is a good possibility that many left radicals will relax and snooze their way through it. I recommend that those who see the current situation as just “capitalists just being capitalist” make sure they understand the concept and the function of “leverage” and then google - ‘collateralized debt obligation’ and ‘credit default swap’. This should provide some recovery therapy for business as usual disorders on the left.

The essential problem is not that M.’s view has been overtaken by events - although it has. In my opinion his position was wrong when he wrote it some months ago as the current situation was just developing. Similar positions have resulted in similar mistakes since this type of argument became fashionable on the left some decades ago. I’m not arguing that an objective analysis of capitalism is unnecessary, but that analysis must look for the breaks and transformations in the structure of capital that will determine the environment for radical political work and set the potential for insurgencies. By emphasizing the elements of stability and continuity in capital and discounting the current financial panic as a planned manipulation, M. removes the imperative to develop a popular radical position for the issues of the day and tends towards confining strategic options to that long march through the institutions which has destroyed so much radical footware – perhaps he would spice it up with a little parecon.

This is not to deny there are some elements of validity in M.’s position. I assume it is a reaction against the strand of economic/historical determinism in the left tradition, particularly the self designated Marxist component, that ‘scientifically’ predicted the dual inevitabilities of the fall of capitalism and the success of communism. The mechanism to expedite the inevitable transition from capitalism to socialism was commonly located in the “boom/bust” capitalist business cycle. This supposedly would result in increasingly serious crises culminating in THE CRISIS where capitalism essentially collapsed. (I realize there are some more sophisticated expressions of the process, but this is its essence.)

Gramsci dealt with this issue in his criticism of Bukharin’s popularized ABCs of Communism, describing it as marginally useful as a morale booster for a working class movement that has experienced the class struggle as a string of defeats, but as“imbecilic optimism” for a revolutionary project that must create a future through organized and conscious struggle. (I love that term and will never miss an opportunity to use it.)

This crude economist notion of crisis was incorporated into the stage theory which defined imperialism as the final phase of capitalism, and saw WWI and the Bolshevik revolution as demarcating the “General Crisis of Capitalism”, the immediate prelude to international revolution. History developed differently. Official communist doctrine struggled with its crisis theory for a time, creating various subdivisions of the general crisis to explain the delay in its appearance. Following a brief resurgence during the 30s depression, the grand crisis theory faded into obscurity and was supplanted by the simple notion that capitalism would eventually succumb to an increasingly appealing “socialist” alternative. Of course we know what has happened to this pile of crap.

Crude determinist views of this sort reappear from time to time and present easy targets for ridicule by more sophisticated leftists. I’ve taken some shots myself. However, there is a potential for large mistakes in this reflexive criticism. Paradoxically, it can lead to a similar political posture to the one it criticizes, complacent reformist gradualism. The “imbecilic optimism” that treats eventual victory as guaranteed because time is on our side finds a functional equivalent in incremental reformism that hopes to hold on until capitalism bores itself into senility.

In its last years, STO attempted to develop an understanding of the restructuring of the capitalist labor process that was becoming evident in the U.S. and Europe. This involved taking another look at the issue of capitalist crisis. We began to draw a distinction between two notions of crisis, both of which can be located in Marx. The first was the cyclical boom/bust character of capitalist development. This has traditionally been the focus of the left which treated it in ways that parallel the treatment of the business cycle in official economics. The second notion of crisis, infinitely more important in my opinion and not included in official economic curricula, is the conception of crisis as a secular consequence of capitalist production approaching the limits of the law of value. It is important to recognize that neither of these notions equated crisis with collapse. The former notion was cyclical and to some extent self correcting. The secular crisis creates the conditions for development of countervailing forces on the left and the right, but does not ensure their success. Nor does it contradict the potential for various types of capitalist recovery. Following the Chairman, unless it is pushed, capital will not fall – where the broom does not reach the dust will remain. So let’s push a bit – and stay alert for other broom wielders.

At the time, Marx’s Grundrisse had only recently become available in English. Its extended “Chapter on Capital”– specifically pages 699-712 – was our primary reference point. I’ve referred to this material elsewhere, for example in the section on crisis in my piece of fascism – page 22-28 - and don’t want to repeat it here. Perhaps I should say that of the very few comments on that piece, a number singled out this passage as being rather useless. Nevertheless, I still think it is helpful to check out the Grundrisse passages, keeping in mind that they were written about capitalist limits as a global system at a point in time when capitalism was hardly even regional, barely developed in most areas and only clearly hegemonic in a few European countries.


I’d like to approach the problems with a quote that is very different from the one of M.’s that topped this piece. After citing the Grundrisse, Negri argues:

“This restive character of capital constitutes an ever-present point of crisis that pertains to the essence of capital itself; constant expansion is its always inadequate but nonetheless necessary attempt to quench an insatiable thirst. We do not mean to suggest that this crisis and these barriers will necessarily lead capital to collapse. On the contrary, as it is for modernity as a whole, crisis is for capital a normal condition that indicates not its end but its tendency and mode of operation.” (Negri & Hardt, Empire, p. 222).

In this view, as in mine, “crisis” should not be reduced to capitalist collapse, it is the new normality when capitalism has become global and no longer effectively has an “outside”. Of course, saying crisis is a “normal condition” is hardly sufficient, but Negri improves on M.’s position by focusing our attention on contradictions, paradigm shifts, disequilibriums, and transformations as the “normal condition” of the political terrain. This sets a much more productive framework for further analysis.

Let me make a brief excursion. Martin Nicolaus now is probably best known as the translator of the Grundrisse into English. Before this he had a brief flame out career in the New Left, starting with Weather and working through the BARU; RCP, CPML and some more exotic Maoists. (You can detect the Maoism in his introductory material for the Grundrisse.) I have no idea where he’s been for over a quarter of a century – probably some type of liberal like so many others. In any case, in the late sixties he had a widely read debate with Ernest Mandel, the Trotskyist economist and head of the 4th International. The topic was one of the ‘Where is X Going’ sort that Trotskyists favored. Nicolaus argued that colonial conditions were being imported into the metropolis and that the proper strategy was to bring the national liberation movement along with it. It fit with his thirdworldist Weather position of the period. We frequently used his essay in educationals as an illustration of a political mistake for not dealing with the contradictions within the U.S. working class, specifically the white skin privilege, and for essentially denying that the working class was a potential revolutionary agent in advanced capitalism. Of course, we regarded Mandel’s Eurocentric and economist trade unionist perspective as pure crap.

I’ve frequently thought since that there was more substance to the Nicolaus argument than we realized – possibly more than he realized. It fits very closely with the argument in Negri’s Empire”

“The Third World does not really disappear in the process of unification of the world market but enters into the First, establishes itself at the heart as ghetto, shantytown, favela, always again produced and reproduced. In turn, the First World is transferred to the Third in the form of stock exchanges and banks, transnational corporations and icy skyscrapers of money and command.” (Negri, Empire, 253-254.)

I think this notion of capital globalizing as both a cause of, and a response to the incorporation of the periphery is useful. In the first place it points to the mobility of capital, its increasing lack of ties to a definite place. In the second place it points to the exacerbation of political fractures that previously could be exported - remember the Cecil Rhodes comment that imperialism was essential to prevent 40,000,000 Englishmen falling into “bloody civil war” – it points to the import of populations and problems that previously could be externally quarantined.

Ultimately, I think, that the tremendous international mobility of labor will become the crucial element in the political conjuncture. This is where the working class is potentially on the offensive and where the ingredients of an internationalist perspective can find a social base. This is also one of the fault areas where fascist movements will emerge. Again, not conflating crisis with collapse, it is apparent that this labor mobility provides an element of the capitalist crisis. It challenges traditional methods of governing and labor discipline and any attempt to deal with it will necessarily undermine some aspect of capitalist hegemony or profitability.

However, the immediate manifestation of crisis is on the other side of the process, the internationalization of capital. There is a contradiction between the growing elimination of obstacles to the free movement of capital and the national state framework which still must mediate and arbitrate differences within capital to advance its overall class interests. Somehow this contradiction must be negotiated without undermining capital’s ability to respond to potential class challenges emerging from the mobility of labor and without providing too much fuel for an already existing challenge from the political right.

In the current case, global capital has created mammoth financial processes – consider the market in credit derivatives – that are largely opaque, immensely profitable, and also very risky. They are also outside the range of any national regulatory structure. Yet when they overreach, as they have, the problems must be confronted through fiscal (taxes) and monetary (credit expansion) policies through the existing state structures. When and if, as is certainly not unlikely, the problems and their solutions result in mass protests, the police and military response to them will also be administered through nations. (I’ve made this point elsewhere concerning the “War against terror”.) There is a tension between the political and economic interests of global capital and the national frameworks that field armies, raise taxes, and print money. This will result in recurring crises that must be countered by a radical left, not because capital will be collapsing into a revolutionary situation, but because it quite conceivably might be strengthened by dealing with its dilemmas and/or because a radical challenge from the right might preempt the historical stage.

I was going to write a bit more but I want to catch the Bill Marr show to see how Naomi Klein forces a situation that refutes her book into a substantiation of it.

D. H.

For further discussion of this piece on Three Way Fight, see the "Comments" below and also separately posted replies by Dave Ranney (posted October 2, 2008) and Juan de la O (posted December 27, 2008).

Hamerquist Responds to Matthew Lyons

Hamerquist Responds to Matthew Lyons (3/31/05)

Matthew,

Sorry for the delay. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Let me start with the easiest point: I like the Juan Cole blog for Middle East information. I’m also taken with Thomas Barnett’s blog. If you can tolerate massive displays of ego, check it out. It illustrates what the leading edge of the ruling class should be thinking. How’s that for alternative ego. You can see the trouble with my analytic framework…shopping around for a favorite capitalist ideologue.

I’m going to go through your points in more or less the order they were raised but first I want to say that I appreciate your demand for evidence, however inconvenient, and recognize that my stuff is notable for its absence. However, I would point out that evidence is a slippery thing in political discussions. It is usually the case that a position is developed and then the proponents start looking for supporting evidence. That’s certainly how I do it…maybe it’s what Marx (and Hegel) meant by rising from the abstract to appropriate the concrete…maybe not. I also appreciate your reluctance to accept sloppy and inconsistent definitions and formulations and have no similarly pat way to minimize this criticism’s applicability to what I wrote.

As opposed to Goff, who says he believes the war in Iraq was “probably inevitable”, I initially saw it as an accident, a tactical mistake that would be reversed as the costs mounted. I admit it, I was sure Bush would lose well before he did the aircraft carrier victory routine. (It’s still hard to comprehend how the Dems. managed to blow it.)
I don’t know if I sent you what I was writing at the time, but the main point was that the likely reversal of this ruling class tactical error should not be interpreted as a big popular victory since it was likely to disguise a strategic shift in global capitalism, a shift embodied in the “war on terror”, that we were not at all prepared to counter.

The fact that the Iraq War continues and Bush carries on in a second term can only be testimony to the fact that the involvement in Iraq has more than tactical significance for capital and that a significant sector of the ruling class, here and abroad, recognize this. There is certainly no popular sentiment for it, here or elsewhere in the world. Nor is there any shortage of potential grounds for the development of a tame reformist opposition of an overwhelming magnitude… but it doesn’t happen and I know this cannot be accidental.

This gets to the neocons who argued for targeting Iraq before 9/11 and during the PNAC period well before the Bush election. Why did they argue this way and what, if not ‘oil’, made them persuasive, despite facts on the ground that didn’t support their position? Facts that made it clear, even to many in this country, that the “Iraq threat” was bogus.

First, I think it’s important to see that the Iraq focus evolved. While it was an element in the PNAC, it was contained within a larger perspective…the prevention of the emergence of any potential rival to U.S. power. There is no way that the Iraq War can be seen as a means to that end. In fact, there is a substantial body of evidence that this strategic goal is no longer the paramount concern of the neocons. I know that there is contrary evidence as well, but my argument is that this is one of the things that are “no longer the same after 9/11”.

On a narrower level, there was a substantial neocon sentiment to “reorganize the Middle East” beginning with Saudi Arabia, not Iraq, … see the Dore Gold book, and I think that Perle was also involved here. It’s clear that S.A. was a better fit for the Straussian ‘Wilsonian’ ideological arguments. After Khobar Towers and certainly after 9/11, it was also a much more plausible anti-terrorist anti salafist target. Also, any considerations that focused on oil would prioritize Saudi Arabia over Iraq. Not only does it have by far the most, but Saudi Arabia, in contrast to Iraq, had a domestic opposition that could conceivably break with the international oil cartel, if the regime collapsed. So Iraq was not the only target at the end of this particular vision tunnel.

Second, some major proponents of the invasion and the occupation were converts who had been initially opposed to it. The most notable is Cheney who was on record with a categorical and quite clear sighted opposition to the exact Iraq policy with which he is currently identified. (I think that I sent you a citation in this regard.) I would place him as someone that shifted emphasis from the single superpower framework towards a focus on non state threats. You might also say that Kerry went through a similar transformation, but it is likely that a poorly thought out opportunism was more of an operative factor in that case.

I’m searching for the specific reference, but I think it was Admiral Inman, the NSA guy, who advised the first Bush in 1988 that the country would not tolerate military actions that involved substantial costs. Thus following the Lebanon incident, a series of antisceptic wars - military engagements; that were more or less casualty free for ‘our side’: Grenada, Libya, Panama, Persian Gulf, Iraq I, Somalia (oops, bit of a glitch here), Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo. Not to mention the various cruise missiles here and there. A lot of neocon ideologues objected to this approach. They believed that what was needed was a ‘real’ war that would toughen up the populace for the impending challenges of the post coldwar period. A war where this country would shed some blood… No more paper tiger, no more Vietnam syndrome. “Globalization needs a Policeman (Barnett)”, and the “policeman” needs a gun that can and will be used.

There was also an obvious internal military impetus to check out new doctrines, techniques and equipment, but the political, as always, is the most important. The political necessity, according to the neocons was the development of the organized will to intervene forcefully and globally with no squeamishness about costs; political, economic, or human. The well-known pragmatic Wolfowitz explanation for the emphasis on WMD in the build up to the Iraq war – it was the easiest selling point - demonstrates this mindset: To extend the parallel, active military intervention to reconstruct the Middle East was needed and Iraq was the easiest sell of the potential places where it could be initiated.

Finally on this point: Beyond fabricated and puffed up enemies that might be used to secure various advantages, there is the growing perception of a real danger from “fascism” in the salafi jihadist form, dictating that the military focus should be on the Arab Middle East, the area where the danger is most developed. You’re clearly right that Iraq was far from being the center of this danger in the Middle East, but the jihadists are a transnational movement with significant mobility. Mobility across national borders is central to the takfiri conception of the struggle. It may be a stretch, but isn’t it possible that some ruling class types might have had the resources to be able to predict…and to welcome…the lightning rod effect of this particular war?

When all of this is combined, I can’t agree with you that many other countries “would have made better targets.” In the short run at least, this was not true. In sum, I can see a range of factors that combined to result in this war, not as a necessity, but not as an arbitrary and wrongheaded mistake either.

I don’t think that the neocon perspective in Iraq is tightly tied to traditional conceptions of national success or failure. This situation is more than likely to lead to a relatively rapid disentanglement, notwithstanding all of the “we can’t afford to lose” rhetoric. A chaotic “failed state” situation in Iraq, and/or its Balkanization, wouldn’t be the neocon’s favored outcome, but neither would it be an intolerable outcome. It would be well within spin capacity, and could become a case study for the intractability and the seriousness of the problems in the ‘gap’. To say it another way, Iraq is not Vietnam. A defeat of capital here does not translate into a popular victory for anti-capital in the same ways as it did then. It will not unleash a similar wave of popular democratic struggle. “One, two, three, many Iraq’s will not have the same resonance when it can be embraced more fully by the fascist right than the radical left. This, I think, is understood by the neocons, but not by the left.

On the reading of the neocon’s strategy…I don’t quite understand where you see the contradiction on the main danger issue. I think the ruling class consensus is that the salafist danger is real and is different from the normal types of challenges and oppositions that it faces. The immediate differences within this consensus concern the proper response to the danger. There are other differences growing from alternative estimates of what it involves. You ask, “How exactly would neocons characterize the main danger…?” In the first place, the characterization wouldn’t be ‘exact’, but that is evasive. I think that the characterization increasingly will be that it is a fascist danger. Of course, this is a prediction, not evidence. We’ll see.

I know that you are also questioning my conception of fascism, so I hope you will let me slide close to tautology on this point for a while. Despite wide variations within the group, neocons are more likely than other ruling class factions to define the danger as something more than and different from religious fundamentalism, including Islamic fundamentalism. They are less likely to regard the danger as pre-modern; more likely to view the cultural challenge as directed at the capitalist “rule set” in general and not just particular features of it.

This leads to the issue of ‘unilateralism’. Part of my argument is that the neocon project is an attempt to develop functional political structures that better correspond to the needs of global capital. I think that this involves a frontal opposition to the international state structures and multi-state undertakings that developed in an earlier era. It involves paradoxes, Wolfowitz in the WTO and Bolton at the U.N. It involves private militaries rather than international peacekeepers. It involves an evasion of the strictures of domestic parliamentary democracy at home in the supposed interests of establishing them elsewhere in the world. So the apparent unilateralism is not so much a manifestation of nationalism, but is a reassertion of the ultimate dominance of the global economic over the political through a process in which economic determinism initially appears as that which is transcended. How’s that for a thought that begs to be rewritten.

My position on the social base for fascism comes from Marx’s arguments about the “crisis in the law of value” in the Grundrisse passages that I referenced in the earlier piece and from notions of the ‘common ruin of the contending classes” and “socialism or barbarism”, that show up in various places in the literature. A number of people have told me that this section of the fascism piece pushes them towards the persistent vegetative state, and suggested it for Goff’s “Dead Sea of meanings”. Nevertheless, I think that rather than a changed estimate of fascism, I’m guilty of a lousy writing style. I’ve been attempting to present the concept of a social base for fascism that is a consequence of late capitalism all along, just not doing it very well.

Your last points on the conception of neo-fascism, ‘explicit’ or not, get to where my position is particularly shaky. First, let me back away from the absurd: the conception of an ‘explicitly neo-fascist group that consciously and explicitly rejects fascism, does violence to language and meaning. I see that I said something close to that…please ignore it.

You are certainly right that my laundry list of characteristics is both too broad and too shallow to define neo-fascism as a definite political phenomenon. Even considering these characteristics as part of a totalitarian self sufficiency doesn’t make the divisions with other types of reaction clear cut and evident. Some sects do this as well.

However, although nationalism is bound to be a common form for the rejection of universalism, I don’t see “some kind of nationalism” as the missing essential ingredient in the conception of fascism, as you suggest. What I think is crucial to separate facist from reactionary is the element of radical rejection of the universalist pretensions of modern capitalism by a social strata that has an awareness that it is a product of modern capitalism. What’s difficult is that this feature of fascist differentiation from reaction blurs the line between neofascism and what passes for revolutionary anti capitalism (imperialism).

This gets to the point of whether we are actually dealing with a phenomenon that should be identified as fascism, given all the baggage that that entails, when what is really distinctive is how this phenomenon is impelled by the failures of our struggles as much or more than by the failures of capitalism, how much it is the repository for the warts on the revolutionary movement.