excerpts, "So what approach should we have to social democratic union and student government leaders in the meantime? I don’t think we should needlessly antagonize them or call them out just for the sake of calling them out even though we have obvious disagreements about whether change comes from above or from below. I think what we can do is push them as far as possible to implement their social democratic tendencies because doing this further exposes all of the contradictions I’ve laid out here. We can encourage them to keep mobilizing the rank and file to fight the cuts and can hold them to their word, trying to explain to them the limitations of trying to make the bureaucracy more progressive. Every action they call we can use as an opportunity to flyer, talk to workers and students, and to build up independent rank and file fighting organizations. At some point some of them will have to go back on their word and they’ll start opposing these actions and then we should call them out and continue to organize independently. If this happens, other social democrats will probably want to continue fighting and they will realize the need to rely on rank and file power as they start to clash with the bureaucratic higher ups… this could open up cracks in the bureaucracy and makes it easier for rank and file workers and students to seize the initiative. In any case, we need to maintain our organizational independence from progressive union officials while working in a friendly united front coalition with them against the cuts"
and later
"There are forms of spontaneity that fail to advance the struggle and forms we would oppose; in the case of March 4th Seattle though, the spontaneity we experienced helped bring new layers of students into the struggle. It is crucial to emphasize that spontaneous militancy and direct action here is coming from everyday students and workers, many of them women and people of color; it is NOT coming from the insurrectionist “occupy everything, demand nothing” tendency because that tendency is not very widespread in Seattle, at least not yet. I hope that as militancy increases we can start to cohere a different tendency, independent of the liberals and bureaucrats on the one hand and independent from the insurrectionists on the other hand. What happened on March 4th points in this direction.
The debate going on in California about whether or not the insurrectionists should have occupied the highway in Oakland is very different than the debate here about whether we should have blocked I-5. Here, the drive toward the highway was not the result of organized insurrectionists breaking off from a larger march. It was something that emerged from what was (at least at one point) a majority of the crowd. If anything, those who backed the idea of the freeway occupation are the student counterpart to the furstrated social democratic workers I mentioned earlier, folks who are tired of following labor laws that are stacked against them and are starting to consider wildcat (unauthorized) strikes as a viable option. So too are students open to taking risks to advance the struggle. Folks who would previously have been trying to push the Democrats to the left are getting fed up with how unresponsive the system has been do their efforts and now have only one place left to go: into the streets, where they are joining radicals and revolutionaries in mass, democratic direct action"
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."
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.
I wrote a draft of this in early December that had some limited circulation. This version moves the focus away from criticisms of the left responses to the Obama Afghanistan policy towards the policy itself. In some ways it’s a restatement of arguments I made about Iraq five years ago that tries to incorporate the impact of a global economic crisis and of a different political face for the ruling class. I hope to open up two discussions: the first concerns the origins, objectives, and implications of the policy - particularly with respect to the ruling class flexibility to reconsider and change it. The other concerns the development of a more useful conceptual framework for the left. - D.H.
Barack, Badiou, and Bilal al Hasan
Obama has made his speech on Afghanistan and we should think about what it entails and implies.
The majority of the U.S. left looks at these issues in the context of classical conceptions of imperialism, emphasizing the interests of U.S. capital in maintaining and extending its dominant position: in the first place against popular anti-imperialist movements; but with increasing frequency also against purported imperialist rivals.
Two examples:
“... this war is not about “defending the American people” — but establishing a stable U.S. domination over a highly strategic arc reaching from Iran...to Pakistan...It is a war for consolidating U.S. domination in large parts of the world.”Ely, Kasama (12/2)
“All this ... is about oil. But not just oil, but all other resources, and not just resources, but the control of those resources and the fear of a rising multi-polarity being led by the Chinese with accompaniment by a renewed belligerence of Russia and the rising economic power of Brazil and India among others (the BRIC nations).”Miles, Znet (12/4).
I realize these short excerpts don’t adequately express Ely and Miles’s complete positions. However, taking them as they stand, whatever their other merits, neither helps explain why Obama is implementing this particular policy and not another – potentially quite different - one.
“...Protecting the U.S.”; establishing an “...arc of domination” in SouthWest Asia; acting against a, “...rising multi-polarity” within the global capitalist system, may or may not point to some of the motivations that underlie U.S. policy in general, but they are hardly sufficient to explain this particular policy. Thegoal of “U.S. domination” could arguably be implemented through policies which were quite different. Non-military interventions could be pursued rather than costly and unpromising wars.A concentration on mounting problems closer to the “homeland” could be prioritized to ensure there there actually was a more “stable” base from which to expand “U.S. domination”.
The other day I ran across this in a column by Tom Friedman, perhaps the best known publicist for global capitalism. It illustrates my point:
“Frankly, if I had my wish we would be on our way out of Afghanistan not in, we would be letting Pakistan figure out which Taliban they want to conspire with and which one they want to fight, we would be letting Israelis and Palestinians figure out on their own how to make peace, we would be taking $100 billion out of the Pentagon budget to make us independent of imported oil...” Port Angeles Daily News.(In my local paper it appeared on Jan. 18. and Jan. 17 in the N.Y. Times.)
There is no question whether Friedman would prefer a stable U.S. domination over this section of the world - this “strategic arc - of course he would. There is no question that he is worried about the weakening of U.S. economic power relative to its capitalist competition and to the challenges it faces – he’s written a number of irritating books on the subject. But there is also no question that he doesn’t like the current Obama policy and supports a substantially different approach. This possibility for substantially different ruling class policies from sectors of the class that share a substantial agreements on assumptions and objectives, should motivate us to look beyond our own generic ‘explanations’ for what is happening. This is particularly true when, as is the case here, these explanations are firmly rooted in the political categories of a past where we didn’t do all that well.
So what “facts” support these postulated U.S. imperialist objectives in Afghanistan? Do the gas pipelines, the narcotics trade, the copper mining proposals and similar factors create a clear interest for U.S. capital that is appropriately pursued by this grotesquely asymetric use of military force? Which U.S. ruling class factions have organized to promote these interests? Where is the trail of influence from these alleged interests to the adopted policy?
Exactly how does a more consolidated domination emerge out of increasingly destabilized territories and regimes? If the goal in Afghanistan actually is that of “consolidating U.S. domination”, one obvious objective would be establishing a friendly and stable pro-capitalist regime. The institutionalized and protracted external domination suggested by the Obama policy will make Afghanistan and the region less friendly and a whole lot less stable, not more so. It is hard to see a, “stable consolidated U.S. domination” developing out of these policies under the best conditions. If it is assumed that U.S. policy will also confront a “rising multi-polarity”, based in rival centers of capitalist power looking to gain some relative advantage, it is impossible. This leaves us with a goal – stable consolidated domination – that would be completely at odds with the means – military conquest and occupation with limited forces. My firm belief is that the ruling class does not subject itself to stress tests that it has every reason to believe it cannot pass.
Let’s look a little closer at the “rising multi-polarity” interimperialist conflict, argument presented by Miles. There is no doubt that there are inter-imperialist conflicts and contradictions in the region, but what is their relationship to this Afghanistan policy? Does any potential inter-imperialist conflict over resources in Afghanistan (U.S/NATO. vs. BRIC is the one Miles proposes) outweigh the historic conflicts in the region - between Russia and China, between China and India, between India and Pakistan? Does it outweigh all three country’s counterparty status or the dependence of the BRIC states on inter-imperialist coordination to maintain stability in the international financial and commodities markets? Does it outweigh their common interests in managing internal populist unrest – perhaps with Chinese Uighers and Russian Chechens – or threats to Russia’s interests in the formerly soviet ‘stans’? Does it outweigh the common interests of these rivals in combatting “terrorism”, such as that flowing from Naxalite peasant insurgency, newly marginalized Chinese workers, or neo-fascist tendencies in the ruling Hindi elites and among the Russian National Bolsheviks. I’d say no, inter-imperialist contradictions don’t outweigh these factors, and if they did we wouldn’t be in Afghanistan in the way that we are – nor in Iraq, for that matter.
(Thomas Barnett’s essay of a few years ago, “Recasting the Long War as a Joint Sino-American Venture”, provides a good picture of ruling class approaches to such issues and makes it pretty clear that they are well integrated into the discussions of alternative policies in ruling class circles.)
In short, most left explanations of the underpinnings and objectives of Obama’s Afghanistan policy can’t provide an adequate explanation of the concrete policy: of the specific changes it involves; of the adaptations it might undergo in the future; of the policy alternatives to it that may or may not be viable – such as Friedman’s. Actually they are worse than inadequate because, sometimes explicitly and sometimes by default, they contribute to the widespread left common sense that it is not really important to look for coherent explanations of specific ruling class policy. Perhaps because, as Kolko has said, there are no such explanations because policies are just an incoherent resultant of the interplay of the most immediate and crass motives of economic and political self and sectoral interest. Other analyses come to similar results without utilizing this chaos theory. They see U.S. capitalism being pushed towards desperation making it prone to fundamentally illogical, even irrational, positions – to ‘mistakes’.
Such positions were more popular and more explicit during the previous administration – particularly with respect to Iraq policy. The Bush regime was easy to picture as ignorant and venal, mistake-prone and even incompetent from a ruling class perspective. It was easy but, I think, essentially wrong. This mindset contributes to a dumb left optimism in which analyses of ruling class motives and perspectives are regarded as unproductive and unnecessary. And in the process it typically muddies the distinctions between a radical and a liberal opposition to ruling class policies. For a case in point, it also was easy, but wrong, to overestimate the potential differences in the policies that a supposedly more clear-headed incoming Obama administration might pursue. Many on the left went this route and are still scrambling to catch up.
In fact, except for some unimportant, largely cosmetic, trappings, Obama is much the same as Bush. In Afghanistan, Obama hopes to apply some lessons and experiences learned from Iraq and in doing so is incurring very real domestic costs and taking significant risks just as Bush did, most notably in Iraq. These common priorities in both administrations can be explained as a rational pursuit of capitalist class interests, but only if these interests are seen as global, not national. That is, only if they are understood as capitalist interests in which the political, economic and social stability in the U.S. is not the primary point of reference. Therefore, despite much public rhetoric to the contrary (particularly from the remnants of the Bush camp now that it is removed from policy-making), the policy directions chosen by both administrations can quite possibly place the hegemony and domestic stability of the U.S., the “sole superpower”, at risk, but still be a rational attempt to defend and extend the hegemony of global capital.
How might global capitalist interests be operative in Obama’s Afghanistan policies? A full answer, including the structural elements of the current economic crisis is beyond this argument. However, clear hints of a partial answer are in the language that Obama used to present his policy at West Point - especially when it is augmented by the language he used a few days later in Oslo when he accepted his bizarre award of a “Peace Prize”.
Obama said that the policy towards Afghanistan was part of a strategic response to a “real danger” from; “...disorderly regions, diffuse enemies; and ‘failed states’.” In the Nobel speech he stressed in Bush-like phrases; “I deal with the world as it is...(and)...There is evil in the world”. I wrote down the former phrase at the time I heard it, but I’ve seen no reference to it in the commentary on that speech. Hopefully, at least some of the Fourth Generation War websites will eventually pick it up. I’m sure that the invocation of evil in the Oslo presentation was not missed, but without the earlier passage as a context, it becomes a rhetorical flourish and loses much of its practical significance. These phrases point towards a rationale for Afghanistan policy that makes some sense for a global ruling class facing a secular crisis, but not for a national U.S. ruling class, focused on its internal stability and economic health and on maintaining its relative position in a classically imperialist structure. Consequently, unlike Tom Engelhardt, I do not find Obama’s pursuit of a very expensive Afghan policy instead of a, “...reasonable jobs program at home...”, to be a “...strange wonder of the world..” ZNet 12/6.
This Obama statement opens some important questions: What is the danger in Afghanistan? Who is responding to this danger? What is the nature of the response? Focusing on these questions, not the logical errors and factual irrelevancies, and the bloated patriotic rhetoric which filled both the West Point and Oslo speeches, will open some possibilities to place what is happening within the context of global capital and international class struggle.
I’d suggest three working hypotheses, recognizing that their validity is provisional:
1.At the end of the last century, the global capitalist system rapidly extended the penetration of what used to be called the ‘second’ and ‘third’ worlds. It now faces an growing difficulty profitably utilizing the labor that it has ‘freed’ and endowed with new needs and demands. This increasingly marginalized labor force is also increasingly mobile. This is one underpinning of a general populist threat to global capital that has both liberatory and reactionary elements.The problems and conflicts, the social turmoil that this process entails, cannot be quarantined even under the best of circumstances and it now affects the entire system, including the capitalist core areas.
A variety of political projects with a diverse array of antagonisms and accomodations to the global capitalist system are attempting to organize this growing base of fundamental discontent. Global capital sees the populist threat as the major current challenge to its continued dominance and is focused on developing a response to its jihadist components. This is a real priority, acknowledged by and acted on by virtually all national segments of capital. It is not a pretext or a facade to provide space and resources to pursue other goals although it will certainly be used in these ways if and when the opportunities arise.
2.The collapse of the global financialization system and the serious cyclical crisis that is related to it have exposed structural limitations on capitalist accumulation. The growing problems maintaining profitability and cultural hegemony within the core areas of the capitalist system are compounded by the emergence of the issues of the gap in the core. This has increased the awareness within capitalist elites of the need for major structural adjustments, but this awareness is confronted with an increasingly limited flexibility for material and incorporative concessions to the working classes in the core as well as growing limitations on the tools, particularly the non-military tools, available to deal with political challenges in gap regions - such as Afghanistan.
These factors are combining to undercut the ruling class confidence that capitalist development has sufficient flexibility and momentum to deal with the complex of emerging threats and instabilities. Certainly it has eroded any confidence that these challenges can be dealt with simultaneously. In place of a generalized confidence that capitalism can incorporate all potential futures, there is a recognition that history may not have ended, and that securing the future prospects for capitalism requires a major restructuring of its disciplinary apparatus and a risky reordering of political and economic priorities.
3.There are major issues with the organization and the content of capitalist power. To efficiently advance the interests of capital, global political and economic considerations should determine the rational use of power, but this power is politically organized within, and limited by an increasingly dysfunctional nation state framework. This is a problem at the top when military capabilities become inflexible and unwieldy - not properly oriented to asymmetric non-state threats where specific and rapidly changing political factors must outweigh technical military considerations. At least potentially it is also a problem from below when the structures of privilege and subordinated participation through formal parliamentarism that have provided some stable national bases for capitalist power in the core don’t work in the ways that they have historically.
I intend to say a few things about how I see these three points in play in Afghanistan policy. First, although it may already be apparent, I should make it explicit that these points assume the essential validity of oneof Negri’s central arguments in ‘Empire’:
“The United States does not, and indeed, no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project.” (Empire, p. xiv)
A fundamental point. It will be less obvious, but they diverge significantly from another Negri position:
“The guarantee that Empire offers to globalized capital does not involve a micropolitical and/or microadministrative management of populations. The apparatus of command has no access to the local spaces and the determinate temporal sequences of life...” (Empire, p. 344) This is a mistaken and dangerous assumption, I think. In my opinion this is exactly what is being developed and with some success.
In distinction to Negri, who places minimal weight on any elements of consciousness and organization – obviously including those that relate to ruling class policies, I think there is an emerging global capitalist project – in this case a project lurking beneath the Obama pronouncements – and it is important that we understand it. I want to speculate about this in two areas: – one with implications for the gap, and particularly the “non-integrating” seams in the gap; and another with implications for the core. (I’m assuming some familiarity with these gap/core categories from Thomas Barnett, but in any case their meaning should be obvious from the context).
Remember a few short decades ago when Carter and Breszhenski schemed to bring down the Soviet union by giving it “its own Vietnam” in Afghanistan. I believe that one distinctive feature of the current situation is that no rival national centers of capitalist power are oriented towards entangling the U.S. in Afghanistan this way. This certainly cannot be explained by a fear of U.S. military and economic power which has demonstrated increasingly clear limits. I find the best explanation to be that, in contrast to the talk of “a rising multi-polarity”, the global ruling elites increasingly subordinate inter-imperialist rivalries to an appreciation of common enemies and common risks. This emergent sense of an over-riding common interest is reflected in the virtually universal support of every state for what is called a called a “war on terror”. It is reflected in the generalized cooperation to regain some equilibrium in global financial systems and commodities markets.
Afghanistan is both a specific problem and a manifestation of more general ones in an important regional zone of disorder. For global capital, Afghanistan is an opportunity to experiment with new ways to discipline increasingly unruly populations while maintaining and even extending capitalist control over global flows of capital and labor. It is an opportunity, as well, to develop better techniques to disorient and demobilize emerging challenges to capital’s global disciplinary regime. At its core I believe that the Obama “surge” is such a test of new methods and new tools. It is a concrete project in which most sections of global capital share definite common interests. Of course, it is not a project that represents an overt ruling class consensus. There are remaining conflicts and contradictions on important issues that are sometimes quite evident in policy differences – particularly on questions of tactics. But, I think, the underlying perception of a common interest is pretty clear.
I’d like to argue for and explain this view with a few specific points in two distinct areas – the gap (warzone) and the core (homeland).
(First, however, a parenthetical note of caution: It is hard to raise issues of ruling class policy without implying that it is more consciously calculated and coordinated than the available evidence shows. What I say here will be subject to this interpretation. So from the outset I want to be clear that I don’t mean to deny that there is, and will always be, a range of contradictory factors; elements of controversy and indeterminacy, not to mention incompetence, that go into the formation of ruling class policy. I hope what I say doesn’t lead to the substitution of assumed conspiracies for a concrete investigation of actual processes. This can lead to a host of political problems that frequently end in passivity and defeatism.
However, in this case I’m more worried about the opposite problem – the underestimation of the extent and impact of the organization and planning that goes into maintaining capitalist power. The fact is that any approach to radical political organizing will have to choose some operating assumptions on these questions when the investigations that could establish their respective validity have barely begun and the most pertinent results are still not generally available. I think that it is prudent to adopt the protective principle of ecological science in this situation and work from the assumption of the worst case. Considering the massive resources the capitalist state devotes to its defense, presumably producing some usable product, this is probably not only the prudent course, but the wise one as well. As Mao might have learned before leaving the scene, its very important to avoid any tendency to underestimate the enemy – and that means strategically, not just tactically.)
To me it seems that the Afghanistan surge is not premised on a victory over the Taliban, the eradication of Al Qaeda, or any type of nation building. The force structure focused on Afghanistan is clearly unable to achieve a traditional military victory and that should indicate to us that it is probably not meant to do so. I think that “winning” in Afghanistan is not about establishing a relatively stable pro-capitalist nation state that is a more docile part of a U.S. sphere of influence (a completely utopian objective under any scenario). Instead, consider Afghanistan as Obama described it; a “failed state”, in a “disorderly region” containing “diffuse enemies”. Afghanistan is the archetypical disorderly region, and it is not insignificant that it has many features placing it on the dark side of the establishment’s manichaean discourses on Evil.
A more likely goal of this policy is that it is a test, oriented towards developing and controlling balkanized enclaves through direct relations with empowered reactionary elements of civil society and bypassing centralized governmental structures, including compradorial ones. This involves an attempt to relate directly to all sides of all existing social divisions, hoping to gain effective control over the resources of the underground and illegal economy and to fragment any potential nationalist or internationalist resistence, particularly anything with an anti-capitalist aspect to it. And in doing this it tacitly assumes that the “disorderly region” will remain disorderly and that these methods of domination that are being worked out are for the long haul and will have more than a provisional and local significance.
Notably the surge discounts the significance of the imperialist initiated “national” borders – with Pakistan, with the ex-Soviet stans, with Iran – while building up centrifugal pressures towards micro states and ethnic fiefdoms with their accompanying internal borders – both geographic and social. In implementing this segmenting project the surge will utilize organizational forms and policies that are as transnational as those of the Jihadis, but that provide an effective deniability of the blood trail back to the actual originators of the policy.
This approach can be detected in what was said and what was not said in the speeches. Note the careful reference to direct contact with local officials and leaders bypassing the Kabul central authority; note the careful reference to the surge of “civilian” experts on agricultural (sic) policyand other sensitive issues; note the careful lack of reference to the surge of “civilian” and military contractors – which is equal or greater numerically and certainly in the breadth of function to that of the formal military forces - and to the ethnic limitations of the current central government that make further military training of its forces beside the point. Note the lack of mention of any public accountability, benchmarks or timetables for contractors, either military or “civilian”, or for the operation of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC, McChrystal’s last gig) which functions covertly throughout the region, well beyond the feeble political oversight that nominally constrains the CIA. Finally, note well the absense of any mention of who and what is involved in the expanding operations in Pakistan.
What is emerging out of this is a secret privatized intelligence gathering system and a privatized military capability – all of which is profit-making. This objective has been pursued actively by elements of the U.S; ruling elite (with clear international connections) since the mid-twentieth century, and the pursuit has intensified since the collapse ofthe Soviet Union and the emergence of new forms of Muslim insurgency.
DYNCORP, L-3, FLUOR, XE Systems, etc., all of whom are acknowledged players in Afghanistan, are such assets for capital; able to circumvent the limitations on state militaries and provide deniability to actual policy makers; sufficiently flexible and robust to respond quickly to shifting needs while bypassing the bureaucratic parliamentary filters.
This looks something like a rerun on a global scale of the Pinkertonized class warfare of the nineteenth century in this country. But it is more than that. There is a particularly modern character to these formations: they are operating within the context of a global capitalism, not a national state; and they are confronted with structural limits on capitalism that were not a factor in the period of Molly Maguires or the Moyer, Pettibone, Haywood trial.
The functions of this privatized force structure goes beyond repression and suppression of external (to the U.S.) populisms and their supporters. The capacities being developed will ultimately be used to influence and distort the character and objectives of all oppositions, internally as well as externally, class-based as well as populist. These emerging oppositions have become less susceptible to a gradual evolutionary political incorporation within the framework of capitalist expansion and there is a growing ruling class recognition that they are essentially impossible to eliminate by traditional military or police methods because their social preconditions are constantly regenerated by essential dynamics of capital accumulation. To repeat, such oppositions will not necessarily always be outside of the core – or even the homeland.
I think that we must assume that the privatized – multinationally staffed - contractors that are doing the targeting for the drones and the hit squads in Pakistan and elsewhere are also developing the networks of covert operatives and agents of influence that will enlarge their potential uses in the future, if they haven’t already – think Haiti. If these groupings can develop sufficient information to accurately target jihadist leaders, they can also affect the tactics of the resistance more fundamentally through systematic penetration and an increasingly tight encapsulization. One likely result will be more anomalies in the mold of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia - more of those “terrorists” most likely to demoralize a revolutionary population and expedite an expanded counter-insurgency. If capital develops these capacities with respect to jihadists, there will be ramifications shortly down the road for anti-capitalist movements with radically different agendas and perspectives.
These new tools do not and will not operate autonomously. Their oversight may be strategic rather than operational, but there is not much doubt who will ultimately provide the money and determine the jobs. It will not be any state apparatus that is remotely accountable, you can bet on that...but it will be elements and appendages of the global ruling class, you can bet on that as well.
To recap, capital currently faces a real danger from populism in the gap, and the gap is increasingly less defined and limited by geography because of the mobility of populations and the increasing access to information and new forms of communication. Moreover, the gap is not shrinking in any real sense, as the current crisis confounds the capitalist triumphalism of the Barnetts and the Friedmans (T. not M.). The challenges to global capital from this populism will become more, not less pressing.
Afghanistan is one of the regions of the world where for the historical moment global capital has some flexibility to respond to these dangers experimentally without worrying that much about issues of moral standing or legitimacy in the exercise of power. However, such operations would hardly aim to achieve a social equilibrium in Afghanistan in any meaningful time frame and they are even less likely to rapidly achieve successful results on a broader scale. The likelihood is that the more effective these new methods prove to be, the more they will make themselves needed - and the more expensive, economically and politically, they will become. This points to a major linkage between the issues in the gap and emerging questions of capitalist hegemony in the core. The economic and cultural cushions that have supported hegemony in the core are wearing thin even while the actual and prospective actions in the gap are becoming more costly, and now with significant elements of the costs in blood - that is the problem for capital. As more resources have to be directed at fundamental instabilities in the gap and their actual and potential spill overs into the core, it becomes more difficult to preserve an adequate reservoir of hegemonic flexibility at home.
The global dominance of capital rests on its hegemony in stable nation states in the core. For a variety of historical reasons, these are regions where the ruling class must be concerned with maintaining legitimacy in the exercise of power and avoiding the collateral damages from an excessive reliance on repression. This approach to both maintaining and disguising capitalist rule has been built on a network of incorporative privileges which are increasingly hard to sustain, politically or economically, under the existing circumstances – and it is impossible to expand them significantly except in the most localized conditions.
The functional needs of capitalism change as a range of tensions emerge between the globalized pursuit of surplus value and its nation - based system of rule. In the current crisis, the benefits and losses of one nation tend to find their zero sum reflection elsewhere, and increasingly elsewhere means other nations in the core. Certainly in this country it is almost hopelessly hard for capital to politically explain the rescue of multi-national and foreign financial institutions while sacrificing Detroit; the borrowing of billions to finance wars that make no sense while a pathetic health care “reform” must be deficit neutral. If it happens as it well may, it will be hard to explain bailing out Spain, Greece, and Austria rather than California.
To avoid a general spiral down towards the pit, capitalist priorities cannot be limited within national borders and overly influenced by nationalist sentiment. Increasingly they will be set by larger issues of global power and profit but there is no accepted procedure for adjudicating the resulting conflicts. There is no clear framework of legitimacy for a global capitalist perspective.
Any general resort to reliance on repressive methods has its own risks. The maintenance of political equilibrium in the core nations depends on an essential passivity which contains grievances within an official structure of legitimacy that undercuts the capacities for mass collective resistance. Many aspects of capitalist discipline and control are obscured by this accepted subordination, more accurately a repressive self-discipline that limits natural resistances to oppression and authority. This culture is a major part of capitalist strength and resiliency, it is not an advantage that will easily be surrendered. Consequently, major increases in repression, and, particularly, overtly imposing elements of a repressive authoritarian “world government” in the U.S. or elsewhere presents unacceptable risks – at least for now.
This leaves capital struggling to develop more effective methods to discipline new populations and regions, while facing increasing problems maintaining social cohesion and a non-police centered discipline in its traditional centers where material conditions are deteriorating. One possible general response of capital to this dilemma, the one that I believe will eventually predominate, is what has been called global social democracy. (Following Walden Bello, although he appears to have recently backed away from his conception.)
Since the vision of shared prosperity has become a pretty threadbare joke and significant improvements in material conditions are not a general possibility, the Fordist wage/consumption path to class collaboration must be replaced. And it is not hard to see what will be central to any such alternative. It will be fear:
“Fear is the ultimate guarantee of the new segmentations.”(Negri, Empire, p. 339).
The primary fear is of an enemy that might emerge from the populist reaction to capital. An enemy consisting of “fanatics who hate us and our freedom” to paraphrase from the house of George. An enemy pictured as anti-modern, anti-liberatory and neo-fascist – a picture that has plausibility because it does accurately describe significant elements of the existing mass populist movements. An enemy that is mainly in the gap, but that be expected to materialize in the core as well.
This fear will be generated from capital’s recognition and popularization of actual dangers from the right o its continued hegemony. It will also be generated by a ruling class appreciation of the utility of a new set of fabricated enemies for the reconstruction of a popular narrative to replace the “communist danger”. (It’s beyond the scope of this argument, but I think that another fabricated element of this popular “fear” will emerge through the manipulation of the ecological crisis to confine alternative responses within an essentially Malthusian assumptions. The ecological problem seen as too many “other people”.)
We had a major historical experience in WWII with a repressive right wing structure of authoritarian rule in this country. This was not just a manifestation of imperialism at war. It was part of a global response from capital to a perceived threat from a transcapitalist fascism and a potential threat from communism. It was a framework that incorporated the willing participation of the overwhelming bulk of the left and progressive forces under the rubric of a popular front against fascism. Despite its repressive content, the process presented itself and is still viewed as a continuation of the social democratic momentum of the New Deal.
Currently, big sections of the near left – at least in this country and probably throughout most of the other “developed” areas – are more than open to a refurbished variant of the same structure. The other side of this possibility, and, in a sense, the proof of its reality, lies in the lack of a militant anti-war movement after a decade of exquisitely rotten wars; in the lack of class conscious anti-capitalist militance, solidarity and internationalism at a time of capitalist crisis that is increasing exploitation, marginalization, and oppression around the world.
What I have argued above is sketchy and tentative, but I am relatively confident of some points. To think seriously about revolutionary politics we must challenge some left presuppositions and develop new categories of strategic analysis that fit the qualitatively changed circumstances of the present period.We are living inthe aftermath of an extended revolutionary process that had its debatable successes. But these were rapidly transformed into limits that now constitute obstacles to a more basic struggle against capital. While we cannot deal with new political questions, without a clearer understanding of the struggles of the past century, an understanding that avoids both nostalgia and meaningless recriminations, we are going to have to act, moving ahead with whatever intellectual, moral, and material resources are available to us even before we have an adequately grounded and workable political perspective.
I’d like to finish this piece with a more explicit treatment of attempts to refurbish one of the old categories – that of anti-imperialist national liberation. Given the emergence of important populist movements in the gap, it is logical that there would be a renewed interest in the revolutionary potentials of mass struggles of oppressed peoples against external political and economic domination.
A recent discussion on a more limited topic on the Gathering Forces website raised a point that I think is a good starting place:
“...we need to revisit the Third Worldist imagination – not the politics of the national bourgeoisie (radical or otherwise), but the masses who resisted and provided a potential alternative to capitalist Bandung modernization – the “third revolution”.”(mlove, comment on Economic Crisis in the Third World, 11/09)
I certainly agree that this “third revolution” should be revisited in light of the current conditions. But it should be clear from the outset that yesterday’s potentials are not easily resurrected. It is an illusion to think that the movement for national liberation can be rebuilt and produce different and better outcomes, if only some obvious mistakes are not made a second time. The weight of the past including its failures, combines with transformed present circumstances to qualitatively change what can and should be done in the future – closing some possibilities and opening others. I’m sure that mlove would agree that the revisiting of the “third revolution” should start from a critical reconsideration of whether it still might provide a “...potential alternative to capitalist Bandung modernization...” –or if it ever did.
Here again I want to begin with a passage from Negri; although with the usual ambivalence because he offers so much else with which to disagree.
“From India to Algeria and Cuba to Vietnam, the state is the poisoned gift of national liberation.”(Empire, p. 136, Negri emphasis)
Cross class coalitions in oppressed nations, challenging imperialist power and demanding national independence and socialism were the most important element of the international struggle against capital for much of the last century. But I agree with Negri that they will not play that role going ahead. We aren’t confronting Lenin’s Imperialism, which for the benefit of the censors he called capitalism’s highest stage while actually thinking it was its end point – just a step short of international working class revolution. This conception of imperialism is no longer strategically relevant, and neither is its antithesis, anti-imperialist national liberation. That set of possibilities is historically exhausted. It will not be revived by the new populisms which appropriate some of its characteristics, not even when this goes beyond rhetorical posturing to a rejection of some elements of global capital - as it does at times.
The historic national liberation struggle was indelibly marked and is increasingly limited by the specific context in which it developed – a context which has been decisively modified. This changed context has two important and related elements: First; classically, imperial domination was a relationship between a developed capitalism and an exploitable “outside” as Luxembourg conceptualized it. Imperialism was an external force over the “Third World”, and the class alignments and attitudes in both metropolis and periphery reflected this. The most powerful imperialist states essentially pillaged and destroyed non-capitalist societies by appropriating their surpluses and dumping their economic and social problems on them.
The economic side of this process and its essentially transitional character are forecast in the well known passages in the Grundrisse (p. 408-410) about the tendency of capital towards the creation of a world market. Now this transition is essentially complete and these ex-colonial societies for the most part have been thoroughly incorporated into global capitalist production and thoroughly penetrated by capitalist institutions and ideologies. While they have developed into capitalist societies that are very different than those in the core, they are still part of capitalism and no longer constitute an outside to its global system. Here it should also be noted that this capitalist system has now quite clearly also subsumed the “Second World” and is scavenging the carcasses of “actually existing socialism”.
The social classes of these post colonial regions have interfaced with globalized ruling and ruled class structures. Little remains to anchor a progressive multi-class front against a clearly defined imperialist oppressor nation. Instead, a progressive momentum requires coalitions of working classes and marginalized strata in the gap with a more concrete anti-capitalist and internationalist orientation; an orientation that that aims for solidarity with all similar forms of resistance, and that opposes all the forms in which domestic and foreign capital is manifested particularly those in which they are combined into unified ruling structures and policies - states and quasi-states.
Second, during the classic period of anti-imperialist struggle in the mid-twentieth century, it was widely accepted that “socialism”, as embodied the so-called socialist bloc, was a real alternative path to modernization and economic development. Despite its problems, it was held that socialism potentially challenged both capitalist markets and capitalist culture. The more progressive and radical anti-imperialist movements all specified that their political objectives included national independence and socialism. When this “actually existing socialism” proved illusory for the global working class struggle, it likewise disappointed the movements for national liberation. Any possible progressive trajectory for a cross-class anti-imperialist movement looking towards gaining state power in an independent nation and joining a socialist camp was rapidly eroded. No socialist camp; meant no sustainable alternative to the capitalist world market which translated to little genuine sovereignty and power from formal “national independence” and even less “liberation” from the “victories” of national liberation movements.
Again I will use a (heavily excised) passage from Negri to illustrate the point:
“It is strange now to have to recall this amalgam of ideological perversions that grew out of the ... democratic hopes of socialist representation... And while we say our farewells we cannot but remember how many ideological by-products, more or less fascist, the great historical experiences of socialism were condemned to drag in their wake, some merely useless sparks and others devastating infernos..” (Negri, Multitude, P. 255)
This dual historical failure of both ‘socialism’ and ‘anti-imperialism’ left more than political vacuums. They left a disillusionment and cynicism that provide a social base for the anti-capitalism of the right as well as for secessionist orientations that seek special solutions and unique benefits for some in the context of a general worsening of conditions for most.
In his late 2008 presentation; “Is the Word ‘Communism’ Forever Doomed?”(see Kasama, 9/30), Alain Badiou has presented a framework that I think is helpful in settling accounts with our collective past. I’m a newcomer to Badiou and certainly don’t have an adequate understanding of his recent positions, much less his earlier ones. However, what I do think I understand I like a great deal and it will be the basis of the rest of what I write here.
“Our problems are much more the problems of Marx than the problems of Lenin...” (Badiou, “Is the Word ‘Communism’ Forever Doomed”, p. 18, Kasama, 9/30)
The “problems of Lenin”, according to Badiou, fit within an extended phase of the revolutionary process; “...from 1917, the Russian Revolution, to 1976, the end of the Cultural Revolution in China... ” This is a phase that has ended with a generally acknowledged string of failures to achieve the fundamental stated objective – a rapid transition from local seizures of state power to an inclusive stateless communist society. As I have said above, I think that the massive upsurge of the national liberation struggle, the reason why it contained much greater revolutionary potential than the earlier nationalisms of the 19th century, is inextricably linked with this phase of the communist project and similarly tied to its failures.
We are left with the problem placed by Bilal al Hasan in a more limited context:
“...the question here is what comes after the end of a revolution and its failure.” Bilal al Hasan (this was part of a commentary on the Palestinian movement on the Gathering Forces website. G.F. 11/09).
Badiou argues for a conceptual return to the standpoints of the 19th century, but not on the premise that a simple class polarization can be resurrected through some act of political will. He is concerned with an issue of philosophical stance – with posing the idea of communism in terms of the “conditions of its identity” – a 19th century problem – and not as a question of “...the victory of the communist hypothesis” – the problem of Lenin and the party/state and of the revolutionary movement for most of the past century.
This line of argument is relevant to the revisiting of third world revolution. Badiou indicates the elements of the communist hypothesis in the nineteenth century as combining, “...the idea of communism as a popular mass movement with the notion of savior of all.” (P. 15). The original conception of communism was that of a multiform struggle that would embody and culminate in universal emancipation through, the “...process of the Decline of the State.” (P.14)
In my opinion the core element in this conception is the inseparable linkage of the notion of, “savior of all”, stressing the universality of the project, with the destruction of the state – a state that is sometimes defined inclusively by Badiou as; “...all that limits the possibility of collective creation” (P. 14). The vanguard parties and revolutionary blocs characteristic of the 20th century had a different orientation. In Badiou’s terms they were party/state formations which might seize and hold power locally but could not transform social relations because their essential character incorporated features of a state. Thus they inevitably became the antagonist of the mass “Communist movement” (Badiou’s term). But only through such a movement, that is necessarily, “beyond the state” (Badiou), can communism be achieved.
It is quite clear that even the best of the national liberation fronts were essentially party/state formations. They functioned even more as shadow governments than did the vanguard parties. The discipline they enforced was more overtly military and not subject to even the more or less hypothetical democratic forms of vanguard parties or to the objective limits that are inherent in a defined class base.
These movements were nationalist, (including some more hopeful pan-nationalist and ‘continental’ formations that were of limited temporal and geographic duration) and, at their best, treated liberation as more a matter of autonomy and expanded rights of self determination, than of internationalism and solidarity. This is demonstrated indirectly by the uniqueness of the Guevara experience, and was supported in an ultimately damaging way by the Maoist version of Marxism when it elevated the conception of self-reliance over that of internationalism.
These issues emerge currently around questions of the character of the populist resistance to global capital, particularly, but not exclusively, in the gap. To what extent do these developments project a fascist, rather than a liberatory, alternative to global capital? To what extent are they contained or containable within neo-colonial limits. I’ve written on these issues elsewhere and regard myself as within the Threeway Fight tendency. However, no general recognition of contradictory potentials should substitute for concrete evaluations of specific cases. And our goal in such evaluations should always go beyond clarity on the problems and limitations and also attempt to discover and build on the best possibilities.
That said, we should also be categorically clear that universal liberation is not to be achieved through structured movements that limit creative participation as an element of their ‘self determination’ and cultural autonomy. This is particularly relevant concerning the role and status of women and the attitudes towards the use of force and violence. I will leave these points as they stand for now, but feel obligated to confess that I’ve been around long enough to have made major mistakes on all conceivable sides of these questions.
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 ofparticipation 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 frompopulations 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 movementhas 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.
threewayfight is being revamped. nothing big or spectacular but trying to make it a little more usable.
over the last few years we have attempted with this site to add to, if not at times initiate, conversations around the character and content of the revolutionary struggle - and in particular the radical antifascist movements - and the opposition "our sides" face.
the site is not always consistent in its posts, but we hope to continue this small project as we see the ongoing and essential need for a liberatory - and libertarian - politic that can engage, question, and contribute to new understandings around movement building, capitalism/anti-capitalisms, and underlying assumptions of what constitutes "anti-imperialism".
Fighting Talk: News and Reporting on antifascist organizing
Posts
