Dialectical Confusions

Saying "yes" to Hiroshima

2007-09-26T01:53:00.000+01:00

The contemporary West is built, not on Auschwitz and Treblinka to which we have said 'No’, but on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to which we have said 'Yes.’

- Desmond Fennell, The Postwestern Condition: Between Chaos and Civilisation

What will you do?

2007-09-11T23:16:00.000+01:00

You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of art or life as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile and cunning.

- from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Responsibility

2007-08-26T02:57:00.000+01:00

I came across this article by Edward Said in Al-Ahram Weekly, written shortly after the September 11th attacks. At the end of the article, most of which is fairly unsurprising stuff, after referring to the beginnings of the development of a constituency of Americans willing to take a more reflective and critical look at US policies in the Middle East, Said says this:

Perhaps this constituency may grow in the United States, but speaking as a Palestinian, I must also hope that a similar constituency should be emerging in the Arab and Muslim world. We must start thinking about ourselves as responsible for the poverty, ignorance, illiteracy, and repression that have come to dominate our societies, evils that we have allowed to grow despite our complaints about Zionism and imperialism. How many of us, for example, have openly and honestly stood up for secular politics and have condemned the use of religion in the Islamic world as roundly and as earnestly as we have denounced the manipulation of Judaism and Christianity in Israel and the West? How many of us have denounced all suicidal missions as immoral and wrong, even though we have suffered the ravages of colonial settlers and inhuman collective punishment? We can no longer hide behind the injustices done to us, anymore than we can passively bewail the American support for our unpopular leaders. A new secular Arab politics must now make itself known, without for a moment condoning or supporting the militancy (it is madness) of people willing to kill indiscriminately. There can be no more ambiguity on that score.
I have been arguing for years that our main weapons as Arabs today are not military but moral, and that one reason why, unlike the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the Palestinian struggle for self- determination against Israeli oppression has not caught the world's imagination is that we cannot seem to be clear about our goals and our methods, and we have not stated unambiguously enough that our purpose is coexistence and inclusion, not exclusivism and a return to some idyllic and mythical past. The time has come for us to be forthright and to start immediately to examine, re-examine and reflect on our own policies as so many Americans and Europeans are now doing. We should expect no less of ourselves than we should of others. Would that all people took the time to try to see where our leaders seem to be taking us, and for what reason. Scepticism and re- evaluation are necessities, not luxuries.

Noble sentiments, and a corrective, perhaps, to any perception that Said was one-dimensional in his political outlook when it came to the Middle East.

"Tax and spend"

2007-08-24T23:51:00.000+01:00

I know political slogans and attack-phrases are supposed to be meaningless and idiotic, but I've never really understood why "tax and spend" is supposed to carry such pejorative charge. Clearly taxing and spending is the very essence of government, and in so far as politics is a contest for control of the state all politicians, regardless of the level and types of taxing and spending they favour, are going to be intimately involved in the whole activity of forcibly extracting financial resources from people and allocating them to some end or another.

As I say, I'm aware it's naive of me to be puzzled when a widely-used slogan turns out to be intellectually incoherent, but this one has always seemed especially meaningless (and possibly ineffective) when compared even with other examples, such as "soft on crime", that could plausibly be thrown at left-liberal types like myself.

Growing up out of religion

2007-08-24T20:23:00.000+01:00

Norm recently quoted Christopher Hitchens' claim that "Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud...looked upon religion as virtually ineradicable..." and rejected it with respect to Marx, on the grounds that he did in fact envisage the "abolition" of religion. The following, from the same lecture quoted in the previous post, would seem to indicate Hitchens was wrong about Freud too:

If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilised individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.

Mind you I haven't finished reading the lecture yet so I'll let you know if he changes his mind before the end.

UPDATE: Nope, he stuck to his guns and Hitchens was doubly wrong.

Of truth and tolerance

2007-08-23T23:34:00.000+01:00

It is inadmissible to declare that science is one field of human intellectual activity, and that religion and philosophy are others, at least as valuable, and that science has no business to interfere with the other two, that they all have an equal claim to truth, and that everyone is free to choose whence he shall draw his convictions and in what he shall place his belief. Such an attitude is considered particularly respectable, tolerant, broad-minded and free from narrow prejudices. Unfortunately it is not tenable; it shares all the pernicious qualities of an entirely unscientific Weltanschauung and in practice comes to much the same thing. The bare fact is that truth cannot be tolerant and cannot admit compromise or limitations, that scientific research looks on the whole field of human activity as its own, and must adopt an uncompromisingly critical attitude towards any other power that seeks to usurp any part of its province.

- from Freud's "Philosophy of Life" lecture.

The fruits of self-restraint

2007-08-23T19:58:00.000+01:00

I think this, from Henry Farrell, succintly expresses a key point in favour of international law:

Actors that are completely unconstrained are ipso facto not able to give credible commitments to others. This actually limits their effective ability to get things done in a world where there are other important players....This doesn’t mean that states such as the US are always going to obey international law, but it does mean that their compliance or non-compliance doesn’t flow in any simple or obvious way from their narrow self-interest.

On the other hand, while I tend to think the EU has played (and continues to play) a huge part in making war between its member-states "inconceivable" - this by normalising an enforced regime of law among nation-states - an international law-skeptic would nevertheless be justified in countering that war between, say, the US and Canada (or even Mexico) appears not much more conceivable than one between Germany and France.

Things banned by authoritarian regimes down the years - Greek edition

2007-08-18T01:13:00.000+01:00

Although one shouldn't really be surprised at the things banned by authoritarian regimes down the years, and certainly not at the banning of works of literature, it is nevertheless somewhat, well, surprising to discover that the Greek military junta banned...Sophocles.

Also banned, and to varying degrees of surprise: Euripides, Aristophanes, short skirts, long hair, Russian, Bulgarian and sociology.

This is learned from Tony Judt's Postwar, which doesn't mention Anthony Summers' claim that the Greek generals won support from the US admninistration by funding the Nixon-Agnew re-election campaign to the tune of something like a million 1972 dollars (one possible motiavation behind the Watergate break-in). You can read a succinct review of Summers' The Arrogance of Power; The Secret World of Richard Nixon by Christopher Hitchens here.

Ne me quitte pas

2007-08-13T23:36:00.001+01:00

In Stahlgewittern

2007-08-13T22:12:00.000+01:00

...I felt a piercing jolt in the chest - as though I had been hit like a gamebird. With a sharp cry that seemed to cost me all the air I had, I spun on my axis and crashed to the ground.

It had got me at last. At the same time as feeling I had been hit, I felt the bullet taking away my life. I had felt Death's hand once before, on the road at Mory - but this time his grip was firmer and more determined. As I came down heavily on the bottom of the trench, I was convinced it was all over. Strangely that moment is one of the very few in my life of which I am able to say they were utterly happy. I understood, as in a flash of lightening, the true inner purpose and form of my life. I felt surprise and disbelief that it was to end there and then, but this surprise had something untroubled and almost merry about it. Then I heard the firing grow less, as if I were a stone sinking under the surface of some turbulent water. Where I was going, there was neither war nor enmity.

- from Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel (trans. Michael Hoffman), pp. 281 - 282.

Working against the clampdown

2007-08-09T22:14:00.000+01:00

A propos of which (and via) is another piece in the theme of work: Bob Black's Abolition of Work (1985).

This is a solid point:

Let's pretend for a moment that work doesn't turn people into stultified submissives. Let's pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And let's pretend that work isn't as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would still make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time.... Because of work, no matter what we do we keep looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work.

I also like this passing comment:

Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.

This one, referring to the serious question of work-related death but, for me, cringe-makingly insensitive, I like less:

People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of any egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors.*

But the next quote touches on a thought I've had before - to what extent is there a systemic need or tendency to create purposeless work - work that only functions as a Sisyphean burden to keep us busy and cut subversion of power hierarchies off at the pass? Black:

Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the "tertiary sector," the service sector, is growing while the "secondary sector" (industry) stagnates and the "primary sector" (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order.

And finally, one has to admire this (half-serious?) proposition:

Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organized in "Little Hordes" to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding.

*Likewise a further reference by Black to schools as "concentration camps" is, at the risk of bourgois conformism, less than satisfactory...

Feed the beast

2007-08-09T17:08:00.001+01:00

So I've done one of these things now.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DialecticalConfusions

Work

2007-08-06T23:38:00.000+01:00

Leaving aside gratuitous antisemitism, Paul Lafargue's The Right to be Lazy is an enjoyable polemic ("a masterpiece of studied contempt" in the apt words of Dave Renton) which advocated, in 1880, a three-hour day, with the rest of our time to be spent "resting and banqueting" (although there would presumably be some time for hunting, fishing and criticism as well).

It is brought to mind by Anders Hayden's interesting account (PDF) of the 35-hour week introduced in France nearly ten years ago. Hayden suggests that, contrary to what Anglo-Saxon and French neo-liberals alike (not to mention less ideological but amply lazy media observers) would have you believe, the timidly implemented Working Time Reduction probably created about 350,000 jobs over a three or four year period, besides bringing significant "quality of life" improvements to a majority of workers, in particular mothers of young children.

Hayden's analysis does, on the other hand, support a point made here by Yglesias, which is that the better-off are of course in a better position to enjoy time-off than poorer workers - not just in terms of having money to spend on foreign trips etc., but also in having greater leverage to negotiate the structure of their time-off (it makes a big difference if your reduced working time comes in the form of a last-minute phone-call from the boss saying "we don't need you next week", just as likely to become a last-minute call the following week saying "we need you to work double shifts next week"). The innumerable variety of non-financial resources accumulated over a life of relative advantage also increase the relative value of time-off for the better-off.

Thus the 35-hour week, and the implicit value-choice it made, prioritising increased free time over increased income, is clearly likely to please post-materialist types like me more than low-income workers - but only in so far as it is implemented in the manner of a transfer of wage-income from the already employed (through wage-moderation) to those who get jobs because of it and not in the manner of a transfer from capital to labour. If the latter approach were taken (as it wasn't in France) there's no reason why working time reduction couldn't be a straightforward distributive and quality-of-life gain all round (for workers at least). All the more so given the dynamic fiscal, labour market and consumption effects of increased employment and decreased unemployment.

Coincidentally, although it was Hayden's article that reminded me of Lafargue's, Dave Renton's commentary on the latter brought me full circle:

Among Paul Lafargue's surprising admirers can be counted the [then, i.e. Socialist] current French government. In 1999 Lionel Jospin's socialists passed a new law introducing the 35-hour week. French workers already benefit from five week's paid holiday, two month's summer vacation, and a range of public holidays to make their confreres in Britain and America weep. Indeed Jospin has dropped his own hints suggesting the influence of Paul Lafargue on the new law.

And then:

it seems to me that Paul Lafargue's notion of a work-less future provides a compelling vision of the alternative society that most labour movement activists would actually like to bring about. Indeed I suspect that his utopia would be compelling to much wider layers of people, even than that.

Me too. And one last quote:

Each year seems to bring new advances in labour-saving technology, but the working week never shortens - not for Spanish-speaking workers who are now challenging African-Americans to take on the roles of labourer, driver and cleaner for white urban America; not in Russia, where life expectancy has fallen over the past fifteen years; not in France where unemployment remains at 10 per cent; and not in Britain where the gap between rich and poor has hardly narrowed in the 100 years since statistics were first collected.

It's quite a mystery really when you think about it, isn't it? Anyway read Hayden if you're interested in the details of France's 35-hour week

Auto-critique*

2007-07-24T00:11:00.000+01:00

As Chris Brooke says, this is quite a good piece. I particularly liked:

There is a more resonant parallel between Thomas Paine and the pro-war left that Hitchens mentions only briefly. For a brief period, Paine supported Napoleon and his acts of aggression, believing they were expressions of revolutionary Enlightenment values when, in reality, they were squalid expressions of realpolitik. Hitchens notes wistfully that Paine "had fallen victim to a gigantic counter-revolution in revolutionary guise, which had succeeded in entrenching rather than undermining his original foes."

It is a moment of horrible clarity....

Also:

the only extended passage in which he engages with the disaster in Iraq is where he blames it, bizarrely, on the left: "The liberals gave aid and comfort [the definition of treason in the US Constitution] to the Islamists and the Baathists. The 'insurgents' were able to use the liberals' slogans - 'It's all about oil!' 'It's illegal!' - and to taunt their opponents with the indisputauble fact that even their supposed liberal allies in New York, London, Berlin and Paris didn't support them."

Cohen seems, by the time he writes passages like this, to have lost touch with reality....

Indeed. I wonder, on the other hand, whether Norm would so readily describe himself as having "recant[ed]"?

*Well, OK, not really, since I believe Hari has long since recanted and handed in his pro-war left badge and pistol, and he doesn't go much into his own history in the article, but that's the general background.

Postscript

2007-07-21T20:17:00.000+01:00

It strikes me, on reflection, that the poll question I gave out about in the previous post actually reflects the situation of the isolated consumer in the private economy - in that sphere the individual really is faced with the choice between expending more of their own money on such and such a commodity (which may well indeed be a "public service", such as a health service, transport, education etc. in commodity form).

But the beauty of the political sphere is that acting as a thinking, communicating (and wanting!) citizen, the individual can get their hands on money that the egotism of wealth would have you believe "belongs" in some moral sense to others (i.e. the rich) in order to get more commodities and/or better publicly-provided services.

What annoys me

2007-07-20T21:57:00.000+01:00

What annoys me is when journalists and pollsters analyse the response of survey respondants to the question:

Would you be willing to pay higher taxes in order to fund better public services?

as though it had something to do with the way politics works. Which of course it doesn't. A question that would better reflect the way politics works would be:

Would you be willing for other people to pay higher taxes in order to fund better public services?

There's no reason for a left-wing political party seeking improved funding of public services etc. to appeal to altruism, or even public-spiritedness and egalitarianism on the part of those it seeks to represent. It could, after all, come up with some scheme likely to benefit, say, the bottom 60% of society against the top 40% (or whatever it may be).

In Ireland, where the main left-wing party would dissolve into paroxysms of heavenly delight if were to break the 15% mark, these reflections seem particularly apt.

(OK achieving support for left-wing politics maybe isn't as easy as I make it sound, but I think there's a legitimate point somewhere here. If you find it let me know!)

Bauman's left

2007-07-20T21:11:00.000+01:00

This piece by Zygmunt Bauman is food for thought. He refers to:

two assumptions essential for a specifically left perception of the human condition and its prospects and untapped possibilities. These assumptions are the basis for a self-assertive left, which, instead of apologising for its opposition to the mainstream, strives to create, protect, and be tested against values which it regards as non-negotiable. This way of grasping the defining features of the left is one that realises the left's ubiquitous and steadfast presence in modern forms of life, and understands that its frequently alleged demise always turns out to be no more than a relatively brief period of hibernation and/or recuperation.
The first assumption is that it is the duty of the community to insure its individual members against individual misfortune. And the second is that, just as the carrying capacity of a bridge is measured by the strength of its weakest support, so the quality of a society should be measured by the quality of life of its weakest members. These two constant and non-negotiable assumptions set the left on a perpetual collision course with the realities of the human condition under the rule of capitalism; they necessarily lead to charges against the capitalist order, with its twin sins of wastefulness and immorality, manifested in social injustice. [My emphasis - DC]

Via Norm, some weeks back.

Pulverise the nation

2007-07-20T21:06:00.000+01:00

Gosh I'm surprised never to have read this quote before:

Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set back your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.

That's Thomas Friedman, liberal interventionist, 1999 vintage.

What a scumbag.

(Via)

Therborn on social theory

2007-04-25T18:39:00.000+01:00

Just a note to recommend this impressive survey of contemporary left social theory by Goran Therborn in the NLR. (Sub required).

That is all. Oh and I've responded to a comment in the last post, which may or may not interest you, whoever you are.

Global warming and Habermas

2007-03-25T23:14:00.000+01:00

This is an article on the global warming crisis worth reading. It deals briefly with the history of the idea, the contours of the problem, the urgency of action. It suggests that nuclear power is necessary in the short term (the next two decades) since we can't wait for alternatives to step into the fossil-fuel gap.

On the history:

The basic science of [global warming] was not in dispute, but the area was also not one of much scientific interest except to one or two mavericks.//One of them was a young American physicist called James Hansen, whose 1967 PhD thesis studied Venus and came to the conclusion that it was the greenhouse effect which made the planet so warm...

I find it impressive how ahead of the game Jurgen Habermas was in Legitimation Crisis:

Even on optimistic assumptions, however, one absolute limitation on growth can be stated...namely, the limit of the environment's ability to absorb heat from energy consumption. (p. 41)

He went on to point out that while this ecological limit upon economic growth applied to "all complex social systems" (i.e. regardless of their economic organisation), the principles of capitalist organisation severely constrained the possible means of dealing with the problem. This was written in 1973, and since it now appears to be in some ways "too late" it's a pity more people didn't listen to him then.

Fransisco Franco re-elected mayor of Salamanca

2007-02-27T21:31:00.000Z

Well that's interesting.

Mandelay

2007-02-25T17:36:00.000Z

I read somewhere a while back that the greatest opening line of a novel was

Last night I went to Mandelay again.

And I have to say that while I don't know why, what book it's from or where Mandelay is, it's a pretty great opening line.

Seeking salvation

2007-02-25T00:41:00.000Z

What's interesting is that while many people will have heard of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in Algeria, and more of the Committee of Public Safety in revolutionary France, less will be aware that in the French titles the same word ("salut") is used for salvation as for safety.

Id and ego

2007-02-24T11:19:00.000Z

So far today I have been mostly examining my soul. Results so far: mostly absence. On the one hand I ponder our radical aloneness within our consciousness*, what Sartre called "abandonment" - the absence of God. Yet while accepting the impossibility of any conception of the soul as "God's presence in man" (or something of the sort), I also am keenly aware of the turmoil possible within one consciousness, seemingly originating in a kind of conflict-like relationship between, on the one side, a longing that demands to be expressed in the soul-metaphor and, on the other, the intellect, the conscious consciousness, the consciousness of which we are conscious.

Well, it is a Saturday!

*See how I have to say "our" here rather than the surely more accurate "my"? In any case this post should clearly be written in German. Anybody understanding it in English is invited to share their enlightenment in the comments section.

Remarks in response to Norman Geras and Jeff Weintraub

2007-02-22T21:56:00.000Z

Norm and Jeff Weintraub have responded to my last post.

Norm says that whatever about "the precise terms on which negotiations are to be entered by either side," his "main point was to draw attention to the imbalance in how the Guardian presented the situation, as if Israel were the sole offender."

The point I would make is that the Israeli government is in fact the sole offender, in the relevant sense - it refuses to enter substantial negotiations with its Palestinian counterpart. If I'm not mistaken the new Palestinian government is seeking substantial negotiations, but is being "boycotted" by the Israeli government (with the support of the EU and US - so I suppose it's wrong to say Israel is the sole offender after all). It was this boycott that the Guardian editorial Norm criticized referred to.

Now maybe Norm would say that this is a difference without a distinction - OK, Israel boycotts Hamas, but then Hamas doesn't recognise Israel, so there's two of them at it. And so the Guardian fails to be even-handed when it calls on Israel to end its boycott without making a similar call upon Hamas to end its non-recognition.

But as I see it this objection doesn't work, because if we take it to be the case that calling on Israel to end its Hamas boycott is the same as calling on Israel to recognize Hamas (and should therefore be matched with a call for Hamas to reciprocate) then it must be the case that in not boycotting Israel, in seeking negotiations with it, Hamas is already implicitly recognizing Israel.

In fact this view is not without merit. Ultimately Hamas will have to recognise Israel if peace and justice are to come about, but it is wrong to demand that they do so as a precondition for substantial negotiations, especially when there are signs that this is a position they may be moving towards - by entering into a coalition with Israel-recognizing Fatah in a government that has said it will respect previous (Israel-recognizing) agreements and also by observing an incomplete but nevertheless significant ceasefire. And it is reasonable to criticize the Israeli government (and its international supporters in this respect) for refusing seriously to negotiate, particularly when there is reason to doubt the sincerity of its public reasons for doing so.

To breifly address Jeff's points now:

As noted above, the new government's position seems to be that it will in practice respect agreements previously entered into by the PA. So long as the official negotiating position of the Palestinian government is that it seeks sovereignty only within the pre-1967 borders I wouldn't make it my priority to have Hamas publicly humiliate itself by very explicitly jumping through Israel-recognizing hoops - and I would suspect the motives of those who would. I would also note that it is hardly unprecedented that a change in government would see one side seek to redefine the political reality formed by the Oslo process - Sharon was elected against, so to speak, that process and proceeded unilaterally to declare the other party to the agreement (Arafat) an unfit partner for negotiations.

On the Irish analogy (which was made by Norm of course) - it can be dismissed in the same way as all analogies by pointing to relevant differences. It's true that there was far less at stake for Britain than for Israel. But I think Jeff might get more analogical joy from the comparison if he thinks about the decision of the Northern Ireland Protestants (led by David Trimble), rather than that of the UK government, to negotiate with the IRA at a time when the latter, while on ceasefire, continued formally to deny their right to self-determination.

Israel, Ireland

2007-02-20T22:18:00.000Z

What Norm misses here is that the question is not really whether Hamas (or the new Palestinian Authority cabinet) should recognise the "right to exist" of the Israeli state, or whether the Israeli government should "recognise" Hamas or the Hamas-led cabinet. Indeed the Guardian, contrary to what Norm says, makes no call for Israel to "recognise" anybody - but rather to end the boycott of Hamas.

In other words it's a matter of whether explicit recognition of Israel's right to exist should be made a precondition, rather than an outcome, or indeed an implication, of negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian representatives. Obviously there are all sorts of things both sides would like to have the other side unconditonally agree to, but I would suggest that that's an argument for, not against, negotiations; and that refusing to negotiate until those things that are important to you are guarenteed by the other side is a formula for not having negotiations.

Which might be the point of course.

I would also point out that the IRA (or Sinn Fein) didn't, strictly speaking, negotiate with the British government but with the government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and that SF/the IRA did indeed seek the abolition of the Northern Irish state (i.e. it's integration with the Republic of Ireland). More to the point, unionist leaders in Northern Ireland (whose position can be seen as analogous with that of the Israeli government, since it was essentially "their" state whose existence was challenged) also entered into negotiations with Sinn Fein.

And, indeed, both negotiated with the government of the Republic of Ireland, whose constitution claimed sovereignty over Northern Ireland.

And it was only at the end of the process of negotiation, with the endorsement, in 1998, of the Good Friday Agreement by Sinn Fein and the government of the Republic, that SF officially "recognised" Northern Ireland (whose police force it has only just agreed to support) and that the Republic changed its constitution.

I suggest that had the British government refused to enter negotiations until these steps were taken, we'd still be waiting for the "peace process" to start. It is foolish or worse to make recognition of Israel a precondition of talks with Palestinian representatives.

Social socialism

2007-02-11T02:28:00.000Z

I'm re-reading this (PDF) Erik Olin Wright paper, because it was very good indeed the first time I read it. Whence:

...capitalism imposes eliminable harms on many people; it limits individual autonomy; it is unjust; in crucial respects it is inefficient; and it constrains democracy. None of these criticisms implies, necessarily, that the only effective remedy is the wholesale destruction of capitalism and its replacement by a comprehensive alternative. It is possible that institutional devices could be constructed within capitalist societies to neutralize these problems to a significant degree. This has certainly been the traditional belief of social democrats. But whether the solution is ruptural anticapitalism or reformist anticapitalism, the effect of institutions which neutralize these negative effects of capitalism is to introduce counter-capitalist mechanisms into the operation of capitalist societies.

What's crass?

2007-02-11T02:23:00.000Z

In case you followed the link and are perplexed, the last post referred to the fact that the LSE had placed side-by-side the announcement of the tragic and premature death of a lecturer in economic history and a notice of a vacancy for a lecturing position in, yes, economic history. They've changed it since.

Into his grave as quick?

2007-02-05T20:21:00.000Z

Is it me or does this seem somewhat crass?

Rogue States

2007-01-18T22:18:00.000Z

In the 1990s, foreign policy experts, eager to identify a new enemy, hit upon the concept of a "rogue state." A rogue state operated outside the bounds of international norms and had to be restrained. The obvious candidates at the time were Libya, Iraq, and North Korea. But the Bush administration has turned the United States itself into a rogue state.

Via Yglesias, it's amazing the places you'll find Chomsky-like views nowadays.

Thing

2006-11-29T23:05:00.000Z

Not sure I quite get the point of this but OK.

In Memory of my Mother

2006-11-26T13:34:00.000Z

I do not think of you lying in the wet clay
Of a Monaghan graveyard; I see
You walking down a lane among the poplars
On your way to the station, or happily

Going to second Mass on a summer Sunday -
You meet me and you say:
'Don't forget to see about the cattle - '
Among your earthiest words the angels stray.

And I think of you walking along a headland
Of green oats in June,
So full of repose, so rich with life -
And I see us meeting at the end of a town

On a fair day by accident, after
The bargains are all made and we can walk
Together through the shops and stalls and markets
Free in the oriental streets of thought.

O you are not lying in the wet clay,
For it is a harvest evening now and we
Are piling up the ricks against the moonlight
And you smile up at us - eternally.

Epic

2006-11-24T21:16:00.000Z

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided; who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting 'Damn your soul'
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
'Here is the march along these iron stones'
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

On Raglan Road

2006-11-22T23:24:00.000Z

On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.

On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion's pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay -
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.

I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that's known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay -
When the angel woos the clay he'd lose his wings at the dawn of day.

Poems

2006-11-22T23:12:00.000Z

As it turns out, it's Patrick Kavanagh Weekend up in Iniskeen, Co Monaghan this weekend! And since Kavangh is my favourite poetry-man I may as well share a few of his verses with anyone out there who hasn't had the pleasure. Coming up.

Reading material

2006-11-19T23:31:00.000Z

This Harpers article in the right-wing "back-stab" myth in American politics has been on my "to read" list for some time. Well, I read it and it's...very good. Very, very good.

The following passage;

Vietnam, for the right, would come to be defined mainly through a series of closely related, culturally explosive totems. The protesters and the counterculture would be reduced to the single person of Jane Fonda, embalmed forever on a clip of film, traipsing around a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun.

reminded me of another Very Good article with similar themes. As someone who thought he had no interest at all in Jane Fonda I was rather surprised to be so intrigued by a review of her biography. Rick Perlstein starts off by claming that "You don’t know America if you don’t know the Jane Fonda cult. Or rather, the anti-Fonda cult. "

Well, now you're not at a loss for things to read anyway.

Yglesias on democracy

2006-11-13T01:05:00.000Z

Having embarked upon Aristotle's Politics, these remarks seem relevant to the critique of representative democracy in general, and not just to its American variety:

the striking thing about American democracy is how little impact public sentiment actually has on the course of things. The way democracy works, in essence, is that the voters get to choose between two teams of competing elites. Thus, public opinion serves as a tie-breaker on issues where the elite is seriously divided.

Rhetoric

2006-11-13T00:07:00.000Z

There's a huge amount of great stuff at this site. In particular, although it's pretty well known, Martin Luther King's "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech on the eve of his death is astonishing. So also, in a different way, is his 1967 speech, "A Time to Break Silence", which comes with a strangely subdued delivery but amounts to an impressively radical and, as I see it, remarkably accurate historical and moral analysis of the Vietnam war.

Here's Eisenhower's farewell address containing his warning about the military-industrial complex. And check out the eery atmosphere of MacArthur's "Duty, Honour, Country" speech at West Point.

On a lighter note, there's Nixon's hilarious "Checkers" speech.

Orwell blah blah blah

2006-11-05T13:46:00.000Z

Oh me oh my but this is a good one.

Brits

2006-11-03T20:21:00.000Z

I wouldn't be as keen about either of them as Norm is, but via him this CNN bit with Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens is enjoyable.

Update: Woops, links. Here and there.

Episodes in the strange attitude of the Irish Republic to its official first language

2006-11-02T23:13:00.000Z

On December 14th 1921 the underground revolutionary Parliament of the Irish Republic (Dáil Éireann, phonetically Dawl Air-in) met to debate the Anglo-Irish Treaty that was, with its ratification, to become the founding document of the independent Irish state. It was also the basis of the division that led, by the middle of 1922, to a relatively brief and small-scale, but, unsurprisingly, bitter and consequential, civil war.

Opening the debate, then President of the Dail government and an iconic figure in Irish politics from 1916 until his retirement as head of state in 1973, Eamon de Valera started off in Irish:

Tá fhios againn go léir cad é an fáth go bhfuilimíd anso iniu agus an cheist mhór atá againn le socrú. Níl mo chuid Gaedhilge chó maith agus ba mhaith liom í bheith. Is fearr is féidir liom mo smaointe do nochtadh as Beurla, agus dá bhrí sin is dóich liom gurbh fhearra dhom labhairt as Beurla ar fad.

But then switched to English:

Some of the members do not know Irish, I think, and consequently what I shall say will be in English.

My Irish is poor enough, but I can translate the first bit roughly:

We all know why we're here today and the great question that is before us. My Irish is not as good as I would like it to be. I would prefer it if I could put across my thoughts in English and I hope for the same reason that everyone will speak in English throughout the debate. [italics added]

So in Irish it's "I'll speak English because I can't Irish well enough", in English it's "I'll speak English because these fools won't understand me in Irish". You chancer Dev!

Another story, heard on the radio this evening: Dev is conducting a cabinet meeting some time in the thirties or forties - in Irish. In Irish, that is, until near the end when de Valera breaks into English and says: "Given its importance, we shall discuss the next item in English."

It's doubtful whether Dev's reputation will ever recover from Alan Rickman's brilliant rendition in the film Michael Collins. The first incident doesn't exactly disabuse one of the notion that there was indeed something rather slippery, a touch of the cute hoor about "The Long Fellow" - the joke about whom apparently went that, unlike many other independence leaders, there had never been a street named after him because "they couldn't find a street long enough, narrow enough and crooked enough to fit de Valera".

Yglesias on "growth" and GDP

2006-10-30T00:33:00.000Z

A longish post but one that people should probably be made to read before being allowed to read or hear anything relating to "the economy" in the mainstream mass media.

Post Castro

2006-10-29T23:56:00.000Z

Certainly, one is by convinced by this footage that Castro isn't actually dead, but he looks so shockingly bad that I find it impossible to believe that the (Fidel) Castro era is anything other than over. Which is interesting.

Again, from Plato's Republic

2006-10-24T23:40:00.000+01:00

we should prefer [as our rulers] the steadiest and bravest and, so far as possible, the best-looking.

But how insane to prioritise good looks (albeit subordinated to steadiness and bravery) as a criterion of fitness to rule! I'd like to have heard Socrates up against some real opposition, rather that the flimsy resistance put up by pushovers like Glaucon. This guy for example, knows how to argue:

King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king.
Dennis: [interrupting] Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Besides Python, I'm reminded of the joke title for a Bernard-Henri Levi book,

God Is Dead But My Hair Is Perfect

Quote, and misquote, of the day

2006-10-21T18:23:00.000+01:00

It's a pity, because it was a great quote to be able to refer to, but according to Richard J. Evans' The Coming of the Third ReichHermann Goring never did actually say that "every time I hear the word culture I reach for my gun". The origins of the quote are in a play written for Hitler where one of the characters says:

When I hear "culture", I release the safety catch of my Browning!

On the up side there is this remark from 86-year-old impressionist painter Max Liebermann when, having been deposed by the Nazis from the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1933, was asked how he felt at such an age:

One can't gobble as much up as one would like to puke.

Lost in translation?

2006-10-19T22:52:00.000+01:00

Paul Lafargue's 1880 essay The Right to be Lazy, rejecting the notion, promoted in 1848 by Louis Blanc, of a "right to work", is a bit of a gem. Arguably, in fact, the notion could be due for a bit of a revival, at least if some advocates of an unconditional and universal basic income are to be believed, as I hope they are. They question whether, given certain economic, sociological and ecological realities, "full employment" is a plausible, let alone desirable, resolution of the social ills found in the advanced capitalist societies.

But I've noticed an interesting little discrepancy between the English and French versions found at the Marxist Internet Archive. In section two ("Blessings of Work") of the English version, Lafargue (son-in-law of Marx) scorns the tortured factory workers who won't:

...besiege the warehouse of [the manufacturer - DC] Bonnet...and cry out: “M. Bonnet, here are your working women, silk workers, spinners, weavers; they are shivering pitifully under their patched cotton dresses, yet it is they who have spun and woven the silk robes of the fashionable women of all Christendom.

And then describes the situation of the capitalist threatened with bankruptcy due to crises of industrial overproduction:

At his wits' end, he implores the banker; he throws himself at his feet, offering his blood, his honor. “A little gold will do my business better”, answers the Rothschild. “You have 20,000 pairs of [tights - DC] in your warehouse; they are worth 20c. I will take them at 4c.” The banker gets possession of the goods...

(See where this is going?)

In the French - original - version, however, these passages appear as folows:

...assiéger les magasins de M. Bonnet, de Jujurieux, l'inventeur des couvents industriels, et de clamer: "Monsieur Bonnet, voici vos ouvrières ovalistes, moulineuses, fileuses, tisseuses, elles grelottent sous leurs cotonnades rapetassées à chagriner l'oeil d'un juif et, cependant, ce sont elles qui ont filé et tissé les robes de soie des cocottes de toute la chrétienté.

...

Acculé, il va implorer le juif, il se jette à ses pieds, lui offre son sang, son honneur. "Un petit peu d'or ferait mieux mon affaire, répond le Rothschild, vous avez 20 000 paires de bas en magasin, ils valent vingt sous, je les prends à quatre sous." Les bas obtenus, le juif les vend six et huit sous...

You may have noticed the appearance of the word "juif" - Jew, translated in the second paragraph as "banker". Also, the English translation fails to register the fact that the sight of the workers "shivering pitifully under their patched cotton dresses" would apparently be enough "to sadden the heart of a Jew" (or, literally, "the eye of a Jew").

I wonder did someone at the MIA tidy this up, or what? In any case I would hope that the demonisation of Jews or other isolated groups is not to be one of the aspects of the essay to gain the renewed relevance I have referred to.

Iraq

2006-10-17T21:53:00.000+01:00

I was - slightly, weakly, on balance etc. - in favour of the Iraq war (on regime change/humanitarian intervention grounds) when it began in March 2003. For me it was always an extremely difficult, almost incalcuable dilemma. I was never able to understand those who seemed to see either no good arguments for or no good arguments against the war.

I haven't really posted anything here relating to my own views on Iraq. This is partly because I felt the blogosphere (or at least that part of it I follow) could do with a bit less on war, terrorism etc. and a bit more on, well, other important stuff. But it's also because any thoughts I might have had about the situation now or since 2003 have just been overwhelmed by my sense of horror at how things have turned out. Truth be told, this horror, and an associated sense of disgust, have led me to follow the news from Iraq in less and less detail. Of course, events in Iraq have come to be reported in less and less detail too, simply because there are so many bloodsoaked details to choose between. I remember already being horrified in April 2003 when 15 demonstrators were shot dead by the US Army in Fallujah. I remember being disturbed at how little attention the incident recieved. I remember thinking about how important a role the shooting dead in Derry of 14 unarmed demonstrators by the British Army had been in propelling the IRA to 25-odd years of "resistance" in Northern Ireland.

I can't say with any confidence that I will long remember the deatils of any incident in which so few as 15 people die in Iraq this week, or that I will even read about it.

I have long since ceased to identify with the "liberal hawk" or "pro-war-left" side regarding Iraq, but it is only relatively recently that I have resolved in my own head that the invasion has been a disaster which cannot be redeemed. By this I do not mean that all hope for anything but a bloody abyss of Yugoslavia-style civil war and break up, or regional conflagration, or genocidal massacre is over in Iraq. Rather I mean that I see no plausible outcome that could possibly lead anyone reasonably to say that the decision to invade had - despite it all (and those two little words, "it all" don't really signify the signified very adequately) - been vindicated.

The only thing that held me precariously back from this conclusiion was the thought that - almost unbelievably, though one should not, I suppose, ignore the terrible psychological cost for those who thought they had seen and lived the bottom of the abyss under Saddam to say now that it is worse without him, the darkness of the vision of their future this requires them to accept, to enunciate - some polls do seem to have indicated that many Iraqis, perhaps a majority, were still glad of the invasion for it's having brought down Saddam's regime, for all that has followed.

Well, even if that were true, even if that were still true, and even if one disregarded the impact of the war on non-Iraqi interests (for, while I would maintain that the interests of Iraqis ought to have been overwhelmingly the most morally decisive factor regarding the war, other factors - the death and injuries to non-Iraqis, including coalition troops, the damage to American and British democracy and security, the general filip to Bin Ladenist ideology and any number of other such matters - must also carry some weight), even then - we cannot anoint those Iraqis who have survived the murder-wave that has swept their country with the right to deem the deaths of those who have died to have been an acceptable price. For they have not paid that price, though there can be few who have not now paid something, even if it is only the fear of losing everything. Somone might point out that if the price had been lower and the reward greater this seeming anti-utilitarian/consquentialist principle would have seemed more doubtful. Well, yes, indeed it would have.

Marc Mulholland's repeated focus on this anti-consequentialist point (or perhaps he was focusing more on the illegitimacy of excessively long-term, or wide-lens, framing of the relevant consequential calculus) helped me focus my thought slightly on this. Like me, Marc seems almost relieved that Norman Geras has acknowledged what seems clear enough - i.e. nobody, but nobody, would have supported the war if they had known how it would turn out, or at least that anybody who did propose such a course of action while promising such an outcome would have been considered rather odd.

Yet Marc also comments:

I think that Norm was unwise to (a) recognise a catastrophe and then (b) say that his hatred of [S]addam was such that he would have stood aside had he anticipated.

This refers to Norm's saying that

...nothing on earth could have induced me to march or otherwise campaign for a course of action that would have saved the Baathist regime.

and that he would therefore

have withheld support for the war without giving my voice to the opposition to it.

if he had anticipated a failure on the scale of that which the invasion and occupation of Iraq has become.

Marc compares this to

...those who refused to defend Austria or Poland against Hitler because they were bloody dictatorships.

I have always approved of Norm's highlighting of the possibility of some kind of neutrality as to the decision to invade Iraq, since despite the fact that I did just about come down on the pro-war side I didn't do so with great weight, so to speak. For most of the pre-war period I, cowardly perhaps, classified myself as neither pro-war nor anti-war. Nevertheless I don't, as Norm appears to, think it was in any way illegitmate or morally suspect for those who did decide that the war was wrong to actively campaign against it (though of course there were many shameful ways of opposing it, involving betrayal of victims of oppression). After all, this was a high stakes decision. Even people who acknowledged the terrible evil that led people, inside and outside Iraq, to favour regime change by force might have feared catastrophic results of one kind or another and felt a duty to do what they could to prevent evils that might outweigh whatever good would reliably be achieved with Saddam's overthrow.

While I think it is possible that, given what we knew (or should have judged to be the case) at the time, some kind of critical neutrality was the appropriate stance, I think it is odd to say that even knowing the evils that would descend upon Iraq due (in some admittedly restrictive or indirect sense of "due") to the invasion, knowing that these evils were such as to prohibit support for a war that would topple even so heinous a regime as Saddam's, that one would not deem it appropriate, so to speak, to lift a finger to prevent these evils because this would be in some sense to help perpetuate other lesser (by definition in the hypothesis) evils.

Nor do I believe this is a coherent stance given that Norm also tells us that

Had I been of mature years during that time, I hope I would have supported the war against Nazism come what may, and not been one of the others, the nay-sayers.

To adopt what I think is a better analogy than Marc's: support - support come what may and with no nay-saying - for the war against Nazism, surely constituted, among other more worthy things, support for a course of action that would help save - that did in fact save - the Stalinist regime in Moscow.

So also, by the way, would have support for any campaign opposing, say, a nuclear first strike during the Cold War. Will anybody say it would have been wrong, in that circumstance, "to march or otherwise campaign for a course of action that would have saved the [Stalinist] regime"? Me, well, funnily enough it would be precisely the prospect of "nothing on earth" that would have induced me to do just that.

From Ayn Rand's testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee, 1947

2006-10-15T02:52:00.000+01:00

Rep. John R. McDowell : You paint a very dismal picture of Russia. You made a great point about the number of children who were unhappy. Doesn't anybody smile in Russia any more?

Rand: Well, if you ask me literally, pretty much no.

McDowell: They don't smile?

Rand: Not quite that way; no. If they do, it is privately and accidentally. Certainly, it is not social. They don't smile in approval of their system.

I don't remember the last time I smiled in approval of my system.

Love and war in Plato's Republic, Book V

2006-10-12T22:29:00.000+01:00

'Then what about anyone who has distinguished himself for bravery? Do you agree that he should first be duly crowned, while the army is still in the field, by his fellow-campaigners, by young men and children in turn?'

'Yes'

'And that they should shake his hand?'

'I agree again.'

'But I'm afraid you won't agree to what I'm going to say next.'

'What is it?'

'That he should exchange kisses with them.'

'I think it's the best idea of all,' said Glaucon. 'And what is more, I should add to your law a clause that would forbid anyone to refuse his kisses for the rest of the campaign, as an encouragement to those in love with a boy or girl to be all the keener to win an award for bravery.'

Marvelous.

Definite hint of Monty Python, methinks.

Primo

2006-10-10T23:15:00.000+01:00

I saw, on television, Primo - a staged version of Levi's Auschwitz memoir If This Is A Man and it reminded me of what an extraordinary document it is. I sensed that someone else in the room was a bit put off at having their cosy newspaper-strewn Sunday living room invaded by such matters, and I didn't blame them. Normally I might cave in and turn off the television rather than feel guilty at making someone who didn't, at that moment, want to deal with anything "heavy" feel guilty about ignoring it. But when you hear or read that righteous sentance: "If I were God I would spit on Kuhn's prayer", well, there's no turning back. Actually, I had long since been gripped - "gripped", that dimly epiphanic experience of clenched jaw, fixed gaze and, yes, almost a slight queaziness in the pit of the stomach - by that stage, following a tentative ten opening minutes when I wasn't sure if the adaptation worked.

Is it trite - Oprah-like? - to say of a Holocaust memoir that you will feel a richer human being for having read it? Richer if only because you achieve a greater consciousness of the catastrophic evil contrived by men, of the stain of shame that the just man, as Levi says, must feel that such things can have happened, can go on happening. (And perhaps a greater consciousness of the abyss that threatens when we cease to care whether we live like just men.)

Anyway. Read it if you haven't. I can't find my copy so maybe I'll get some more Levi.

Money and democracy

2006-10-10T22:16:00.000+01:00

So a first step - but only a first step - in limiting the corrosive effect of socio-economic inequalities on the content of democracy is to abolish private funding of election campaigns. Instead, all candidates for election (who might, to qualify, have to prove some threshold of minimum support through the gathering of signatures) would receive equal funding from the state.

The problem that arises here, however, is that the concentration of power in the central state could also pose a threat to democracy. The only (partial) safeguard against this that I have come up with is for whatever particular regime of equal political funding is established to be enshrined in constitutional law. This might reduce the risk of manipulation. (Another interesting idea is that, instead of banning private funding, the state would offer to fund any candidate forgoing private funding to the same tune as any privately-funded candidates.)

There are also questions as to the funding of non-party political activities, including those that don't necessarily relate directly to any election or referendum. But the principle is clear enough.

Symbolism

2006-09-28T16:59:00.000+01:00

A light snuffed out by "urine and fecal matter", the very structures of the edifice threatened by the overflow of shit.

Yes, how not to see this as some extraordinary Kafkaesque metaphor for the Bush administration or the "reconstruction" of Iraq or American society itself or perhaps just hyper-decadent, bullshit-saturated, advanced-capitalist western civilisation generally?

Inequality and Democracy

2006-09-15T19:11:00.000+01:00

One of the reasons - only one, but for me a central one - why economic inequality matters is that it translates into political inequality. Many people like to argue that economic inequality is unimportant of itself. What matter if the gap between the rich and the (relatively) poor gets wider so long as those at the bottom are themselves getting richer? Fewer would defend a situation where, say, some people were, by virtue of their wealth, entitled to more votes than other people. (As was the case, indeed, in local elections in some places until not too long ago.)

But, of course, in practice economic inequality is not insulated from political equality - in fact the former fatally undermines the latter. Basically, the laws of the land and policies of the government apply equally to all (except where they don't of course, which tends to reinforce my point...), yet a rich person enjoys a far greater input into the process that leads to the formation of those laws and those policies.

Bradford Plumer mentions various ways this comes about:

1) "elected officials tend to hail from the upper classes". This is spectacularly true in the US where, Plumer informs us, "[i]n 2003, financial records revealed that 40 senators [out of 100] and 123 representatives [out of 435] were millionaires." My calculator makes that 40% of the Senate and 28% of the House of Representatives (sic). Although I hear they pave all sorts of shit with gold over there, I presume that the proportion of the American population who are millionaires falls significantly below these figures. I don't have figures for any other countries, but I think it's safe to say that the situation is likely to be similar (though less extreme in most, or at least most non-Third World, cases) in every country. Certainly, in Ireland, while our politicians are rarely super-rich, they are comfortably better off than the median citizen.

With the best will in the world (and there's no reason in the world to suppose this is present too often) how likely are such people to identify with the poor as much as they do with, well, people like them?

2) The better-off are more likely to vote, to understand the political system (and thus to know how to interact strategically with the system in pursuit of their interests), to be politically engaged. Their wealth gives them greater access to education, to culture, to leisure (which, for present purposes includes politcal activity), to energy, to confidence and eloquence. In all these ways they tend, by virtue of their wealth, to be better equiped to state their case, and indeed to understand their own case in the first place. (One is reminded of the old quip that "speaking truth to power" is a waste of time since the powerful usually have a decent idea of what's going on, at least compared to the more-likely-to-be-deluded powerless...)

3) The rich have more money than the poor, and thus politicians and parties dependent on private donations have a greater interest in taking their views into account than those of the poor.

These are all deeply, deeply important points to make about the practice of bourgeois democracy, if I may so call it. They are probably especially important if one is looking for explanations as to why inequality in America is so much greater than in other countries, and, particularly, why it is so much more flagrantly promoted by its government - its politicians are richer, the gap between the political participation of rich and poor wider and money plays a more important part in the political-electoral process.

But I think these points somewhat miss a more fundamental point, which is this: not only does the political process tend to be corrupted by the fact that it exists within the wider socio-economic system (with all its inequalities); so too does the state itself - control of, or influence over, which is the "prize" of the political process - exist within the context of that system. That is to say, the state is itself dependent on the smooth running of the capitalist economy for its own revenues.

But of course, the "smooth running of the capitalist economy" is to a large degree in the hands of the capitalists. Private, profit-driven control of investment decisions means the state has a structural interest in maintaining general conditions of profitibility - or face the fiscal (and political) consequences of capital strike and flight. Thus even if:

1) policymakers were universally from the lower classes,
2) political participation was equally accessible to and equally accessed by every social class,
and 3) private funding of political parties was abolished

the political system's formal equality would still be drastically undermined by the ability of capital to determine the range of economically plausible policies.

Whether this constitutes a "threat to democracy" or not I'm not sure. If that phrase connotes an explicitly authoritarian regime (via military coup for example) it would really depend on the state of opinion among the economic elite - the willingness, in 1973 and after, of the Chilean elite to countenance authoritarian means to protect its interests certainly meant that its disproportionate power was a threat to democracy. If it connotes a threat to the normative content of democracy I wholeheartedly agree, but it kind of makes the question less important, since I think that egalitarianism is probably itself (one of the things) at the heart of "the normative content of democracy" anyway.

That Arab would eat you and everyone you care about

2006-09-15T18:07:00.000+01:00

Troy: Don't kid yourself, Jimmy! If a cow ever got the chance, he would eat you and everyone you cared about! [Dramatic zoom onto a cow.]

Jimmy: Wow, Mr. McClure. I was a Grade A moron to ever question eating meat.

Troy: You sure were, Jimmy. You sure were.

- Troy McClure: pro-meat propaganda film.

His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant.

- Martin Amis: journalism.

On the other hand...

2006-09-13T19:11:00.000+01:00

...I don't want to give the impression - which would be wholly erroneous - that it's going to be something worth waiting for. But it is coming. In fact at least two of them are.

Hold on, it's coming

2006-09-13T00:37:00.000+01:00

I'm working on a post - don't worry! Always with the worrying...

But then they do say Mein Kampf is hilarious once you realise he's being sarcastic...

2006-09-01T20:46:00.000+01:00

In his 1981 Philosophy and Public Affairs article "A Critique and Reinterpretation of Marx's Labour Theory of Value", Robert Paul Wolf makes the following parenthetical remark:

the ironic structure of Capital is, in my judgement, indispensable to its theoretical purposes, and not merely a literary grace or an expression of Marx's personal anger. However, that is a dimension of the correct interpretation of Marx's theory which cannot be dealt within this paper.

I wonder did he go on to deal with it elsewhere? That "indispensable to its theoretical purposes" is quite a strong claim, and it sounds like the kind of thing that'd be interesting to see defended. I'm reminded of Francis Wheen's books');" onmouseout="window.status='';" href="http://books">books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1814909,00.html">line on Capital, of which Marc Mulholland was rather sceptical.

Keane - didn't think his teamates were crap after all

2006-09-01T18:11:00.000+01:00

Obviously it was pretty shocking to hear that Roy Keane was going to come and work for "cowardly muppet" Niall Quinn at Sunderland. But I'm also surprised to see that Keane has "swooped" for three of his erstwhile colleagues in the Irish squad - and not even three of the better ones.

I'd assumed he thought they were all crap.

No more free ride

2006-08-31T18:18:00.000+01:00

I think this is quite encouraging. Note that the Bush Administration spokeswoman made the point that "a [greenhouse gas] cap imposed in one state or country simply causes industry to move to another location."

Indeed. If only there was some kind of agreement whereby all states and countries would agree to such a cap, thus eliminating or lessening that problem.

Saying you want a revolution

2006-08-20T21:50:00.000+01:00

Lenin was once said to have remarked, in a rare flash of humour, that the German Social Democrats would never launch a successful revolution in Germany because when they came to storm the railway stations they would line up in an orderly queue to buy platform tickets first.

- p. 15, Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich

I'd not heard that before, though what I had heard was a similar remark attributed, I think, to Karl Marx to the effect that there would never be a revolution in Germany because people would always keep off the grass. I wonder which - if not both, or neither - is true?

Grass: 60 years a-Crabwalking?

2006-08-17T17:20:00.000+01:00

Perhaps it isn't the kind of thing that's going to light up the blogosphere, but it's still pretty shocking to hear that Gunter Grass was in the SS (or rather that he has hidden that fact all these years).

Jews for Justice - sycophants and collaborators, polluting European Jewry?

2006-08-16T15:35:00.000+01:00

I've alluded before to Marxism's tradition of vigorous - at times venemous - polemic, starting with Marx himself, who was no shrinking violet. Norman Geras, however, is very much of a current of Marxism of a more humble kind, if I can put it that way. Usually his argumentative style is characterised by restraint and sweet reason, if not denying itself - or the reader - all the pleasures of polemical bite.

So like one commenter at Katheder blog I was taken aback in a small way by the raw resentment I sensed in this letter Norm co-signed with Shalom Lappin and Eve Garrard. This paragraph above all reminded me of a kind of Marxist (or Marxist-Leninist) rhetoric I would never have associated with Norm:

We are confident that when the history of this period is written and the widespread loss of political reason that characterizes our age is finally recognized, your group will be properly consigned to a footnote in the long and dishonourable tradition of Jewish sycophancy and collaboration with hostility that has polluted the margins of European Jewry over the generations.

Clearly I'm not, so far, making any substantial criticism of the piece, rather than expressing surprise at its tone (in large part given by the accusatory use of "you..." at the start of each sentence). But to make one substantial point, this seems a strange criticism to me:

Your deep concern for Jewish principles of justice and compassion do not lead you to step forward as Jews in order to condemn the genocide in Darfur, the blood-letting in the Congo, the massacres in Chechnya or any other cases of massive human rights violation far surpassing the brutality of Israel's occupation of the Palestinians.

At the risk of getting snarky here myself, what part of "Jews for Justice for Palestinians" doesn't make it clear that the particular concern - the raison d'etre one might say - of this organisation is to work against injustices imposed upon Palestinians by the Israeli state? In that context, whataboutery seems as ill-judged as if I were to ask, say, the Red Cross why they didn't seem to care about cancer victims.

(Admittedly the organisation is also condemning Israel's policies against Lebenese, but, firstly, this is hardly unrelated to Palestinians and, secondly, we can take it that JJP is animated not by a strange and arbitrary affection for Palestinians as above Chechnyans etc., but rather by a special concern with Israel qua the Jewish state.)

Just saying

2006-08-15T22:00:00.000+01:00

I suppose it's worth pointing out that more Palestinians than Israelis have died in the hostilities of the last six weeks or so (nearly 200 since June 28 - via Lenin). Not that it's a contest (at least from my point of view), or that I passionately wish more Israelis had died to balance things out, but at this stage it looks likely that this summer is going to go down as having seen a war between Israelis and Lebanese, which it has of course, except that there's a third party there.

I would have guessed he was more of a Telegraph man...

2006-08-15T13:25:00.000+01:00

Oh Almighty God, please, we beg you to send us our Guardian- who You have promised us- soon and appoint us as His close companions
...
Written by Mahmood Ahmadinejad at 04:12

Not sure what the last bit means - "appoint us as His close companions". Is he looking for a job or what? Either way, he's going to need patience if he's expecting the paper edition to be sent out to Tehran.

Levy again

2006-08-14T19:01:00.000+01:00

Another piece worth reading (even after a week) from Gideon Levy in Ha'aretz. I hadn't heard this quote before:

Israel once again is not distinguishing between a justified war against Hezbollah and an unjust and unwise war against the Lebanese nation. The camouflage concealing the war's real goals was ripped off by this defense minister, who says what he means: "Nasrallah is going to get it so bad that he will never forget the name Amir Peretz," he bragged, like a typical bully. Now at least we know that Israel went to war so that the name Amir Peretz is never forgotten. It's the war for the perpetuation of the name Peretz and the blurring of Dan Halutz's failures. And to hell with the cost.

I remember feeling a certain tentative hope when Peretz defeated Shimon Peres for the Israeli Labor Party leadership.

Of the social and the material

2006-08-14T13:20:00.000+01:00

One of the most useful distinctions made by Marx is, I think, that between the social and the material. (This is emphasised in one of the early chapters of GA Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence, from which I derive much of what follows).

The social: historically situated, specific to a particular time, place and social formation, contingent. The material: permanent, inherent to human nature or to nature itself, present in any and every place, time and social formation.

This conceptual distinction is particularly useful in thinking about "necessity". Our material needs exist always, are an inherent part of what it is to be human. Other needs are social. For example, it might be true to say that people genuinely need their car to get to work; but, not only is it obviously the case that people have not always needed cars, it's also true to say that people need not always need them in the future (if, say, society managed to rejig the organisation of work so that everyone worked from, or at least within walking distance of, their homes).

"Socially constructed needs", as I think Claus Offe has called them, can be said to be things you need, but that you don't need to need. (Note that this is quite distinct from a distinction between "objective" and "subjectively perceived" needs - the "socially constructed needs" I refer to aren't the result of any particular value orientation or state of consciousness of the people concerned - rather they are genuinely "objective" needs, but not necessary in the sense of inevitable or material.)

Thinking about the material and the social in this sense is a way of setting about identifying those aspects of social reality that are truly inevitable, in the sense that they will still be features of any future social (including socialist) formation, just as they were in previous ones. But it also helps one to identify other aspects which, though they do, in present circumstances, seem inevitable, and are experienced by individuals as objective necessities, are actually social/historical rather than material/permanent. Death, grief, disease, unhappiness, fear, confusion - these shall always be with us. The poor, to take but one example, need not be.

Trains, planes and automobiles

2006-08-11T14:58:00.000+01:00

This is a very good point. Plus, like Marc Mulholland, I really have no desire at all not to be allowed to read on planes.

I mean, and a propos of my last post, we could eliminate deaths on the road at the stroke of a parliamentary pen if we just banned cars, but nobody seems to favour that, even though people here in Ireland have been getting angrier and angrier at the failure of the authorities that be to reduce death on the roads.

Yet, aware of the huge inconvenience that banning cars would cause to millions of people (including, of course, the enormous economic damage it would do), people seem perfectly happy to accept some hundreds of people dying on the roads each year, as much as they would like it to be, say, 200 instead of 400 per year.

So in practice people are willing to be sensible and weigh up the slightly reduced risk of dying that would be the upside of a particular measure against the inconvenience that would be its downside, and decide accordingly.

But it's still not really the done thing to point out that we can't - and shouldn't - actually do everything we can to minimise such risks.

How lightly clad?

2006-08-10T23:45:00.000+01:00

A propos of Norm's radical proposal:

1) You have to have the money to buy/hire/send your things. (But then in the long run "you" pay for all that security too.)

2) All this luggage being sent forward - how's it getting there? Wouldn't it still need to be checked for bombs? (Admittedly luggage planes would presumably have a lot less people on them.)

3) Just how lightly clad? And does it apply to air-hostesses (or stewards, depending on your tastes)?

And while we're on this sort of thing: I can't remember who I read some years ago suggesting this, but wouldn't it be a good idea to invent some kind of inbuilt mechanism in cars that disabled the engine unless a breathalyser had been passed? And then make it legally mandatory?

Also, why is it legal to build cars that go faster than the maximum speed limit?

Question

2006-08-10T15:17:00.000+01:00

Has it ever struck you that the process whereby your opinion of what ought to happen in the world gets implemented, or translated into reality, in the world itself is badly, profoundly and perhaps irredeemably dysfunctional?

300 years

2006-08-09T01:15:00.000+01:00

Faute de mieux - and I'm having trouble coming up with mieux at the moment - I think it's worth recalling, as Israel appears to want to re-occupy southern Lebanon, that the supposedly intolerable status quo ante bellum, from the Israeli withdrawal in 2000 up until June of this year, seems pretty good compared with the last four weeks or so, and probably compared to any likely post bellum situation. At any rate, it would have taken about thirty years of that "intolerable" situation for Israel to suffer the casualties it has in this - tolerable? - escalation. By the same calculation, it would have taken Israel approximately 300 - that's three hundred - years before it would seen as many of its citizens die as Lebanon has in slightly less than a month.

It's entirely possible, of course, that things might have gotten somewhat worse even if Israel hadn't chosen so to escalate, but this is all worth bearing in mind. Also, in terms of violations of the Blue Line since 2000, Israel appears to be the more guilty party.

Both those links via "Lenin" by the way, whose leap onto the Hezbollah bandwagon one would have to wonder about. I mean, while it does appear that Hezbollah's combatant/civillian kill ratio is way, way better than the IDF's, that doesn't seem to be for want of trying on its part. And I have to say that this line of argument by the SWP's Lindsey German:

I don't agree with the politics of the Iranian regime, or the Syrian regime or Hamas or Hezbollah - but when I see what's happening, and who they're up against, I know whose side I'm on. People say to me 'well, there are two sides to this'. Yes, there are. On one side, there is a country being invaded and bombed, and its people are being killed. On the other side is the country doing the invading and bombing and killing.

strikes me as eerily similar to some things said once upon a time by patriotic American liberals about George Bush, Bin Laden, and "knowing what side" to take.

Now I happen to think it can be OK to lend a certain support to unpleasant political forces, or political forces with very unpleasant streaks, when they're doing some "objectively" desirable thing - overthrowing the Taliban, say, or Idi Amin, or Hitler, or US imperialism in Indochina, or the French variety in Algeria etc. - according to whatever political and moral analysis one makes of what the other Lenin might have called a concrete situation.

But I don't see why one ought to do so uncritically.

Oh, and while I'm doing the balance thing, I should say that I don't like this picture too much. I know the US would like Chavez to be so isolated that he could only make pragmatic alliances with pricks, but I'm not so sure that he actually is that isolated. Yet, while my casual-enough following of Venezuala makes me think he's done much more good than bad there (and in Latin America generally), and makes me very sympathetic to him, I am a little unnerved that he appears to go out of his way to pick out the Saddams, the Ahmadinejads, and, yes, even the Castros as especial friends.

The dogs that don't bark

2006-08-03T18:20:00.000+01:00

If one a) remembers that voting and non-voting in the US is pretty significantly class-correlated and b) considers it likely that the rightward drift of US politics in the last thirty or forty years has had something to do with the failure of the Democrats to mobilise the relatively poor in that society, it appears that Mat Yglesias misses something in this post - namely, about half the American population.

If Darth Vader had a brother...

2006-07-29T17:05:00.000+01:00

Aye, 'tis funny.

Of the "necessary conditions" for an enduring ceasefire

2006-07-29T17:02:00.000+01:00

The logic, such as it is, employed by Bush and Condi is that since cease-fires have been broken in the past, it is the cease-fires themselves that are the impediment to peace. No cease-fires ergo no broken cease-fires. It's sort of like saying that red lights are the reason drivers run red lights. Remove the traffic lights and, presto, drivers aren't running red lights anymore. Just ignore the carnage at intersections.

Funny

2006-07-28T13:49:00.000+01:00

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > God. A very dark, cynical sense of humour, leavened by a penchant for slapstick.

Ooh, that guy's funny. Via whom, I feel this might well be it in terms of "decline of Western civilisation" tipping points.

The CAP - not so bad after all?

2006-07-27T16:41:00.000+01:00

Yep, this is an interesting counterintuitive piece claiming that the CAP, or Western food subsidies in general, are actually beneficial to African countries.

Not totally convinced, but interesting.

Distinctions, abstractions, justice, war

2006-07-27T00:47:00.000+01:00

As I've said in comments, I think Marc Mulholland makes some good points in response to Norman Geras' challenge to those condemning Israel's ongoing assault.

I think there's another problem with what Norm says though. The problem is this: he not only abstracts the question of whether Israel's cause is just from Israel's conduct of its war (i.e. jus ad bellum from jus in bello) - an abstraction I agree needs to be made in any given war, though it is, forgive the expression, a moral and conceptual minefield - but he also seperates the question of whether there is, in the abstract, a "just cause" from whether that cause is what the war is actually "about" - whether those prosecuting the war are motivated in their decidion to wage war exclusively, or nearly exclusively, by that cause.

Now, I think there's a case for making that abstraction as well, since any just war will probably be fought with some mixed motives on the part of those who decide to fight it. One of Churchill's (and others') reasons for fighting Nazi Germany was the defence of the British Empire. For a war to be just it is not necessary that all the intentions and motivations of those who decide to fight it be just.

Norm says that "Israel does have just cause" - objectively, as it were. No examination, then, of whether the war is being fought (even in part) because an inexperienced Israeli prime minister with no military background wants to prove his tough-guy credentials, or because the Israeli government wants to assert its regional dominance, or because it wants to pre-emptively intimidate anyone out of resisting the imposition of an unjust "solution" in the West Bank, or because it generally wants free reign in its dealings there and in Gaza.

No examination either as to whether official statements to the effect that Israel's goal was to inflict pain, to "set Lebanon back twenty years" might lend weight to the judgment of some observers that "the Israeli strategy at first hand appears to be...: to impose an abysmally high blood tax on the Lebanese in general, and Shiites in particular, so Hezbollah will not again think of kidnapping its soldiers or bombarding its territory"; and whether such a strategy, to the extent it exists, might be made possible by currents of opinion or emotion that exist in Israeli society (such as prejudice against, hatred of or contempt for Arabs, or desire for vengeance) which exist independently of the objectively just cause (which I agree exists).

As I say, I think this is fair enough, at least potentially. But it strikes me that one can make a case that Hizbullah also had just cause - that is to say, there existed good reason to wage war against Israel - namely its continued occupation of the West Bank and the violence it was committing in Gaza before (and after) Hizbullah first attacked. (I don't see that it would be a priori illegitimate for Lebanese groups to help Palestinians in this regard.)

Remember - we are maintaining a conceptual seperation between jus ad bellum and jus in bello so Hezbollah's methods are irrelevant in deciding whether it had just cause. Similarly, we are only talking about whether there exists, objectively or abstractly, a just cause for attacking Israel, not whether that just cause is really why Hizbullah attacked - which may also have to do with, say, hatred of Israelis, or Jews in general, a desire to destroy the Israeli state, a desire to influence Lebanese politics (all on the part of both Hizbullah and its non-Lebanese backers).

But while making no comment either way about what Israeli intentions and motivations might be - only stating that there is a just cause (which, again, I do agree with) - Norm not only ignores the question as to whether there was a jus ad bellum case to be made for Hizbullah's attack, he also seems to claim that the political context of the attack on Israel - to wit, Hizbullah and Iran's declared desire to see the destruction of Israel - makes Israel's cause "especially" just. But if we are to rule out the question as to what Israel's war in Lebanon is "really about" - as opposed to what can justify it in jus ad bellum terms - then surely Hizbullah's attack on Israel deserves the same treatment.

There is a confusion here. At least part of it might well reside in my own thinking. Perhaps it can only be dissipated by turning to Michael Walzer's "four wars" idea).

Tab-Talk

2006-07-26T15:47:00.000+01:00

Like several commenters, on reading this Kevin Drum post I immediately thought of the New York Post's classic headline: "Headless Body Found in Topless Bar". There's some other great ones in comments, but I particularly like this story:

A Miami Herald editor lost his job over a hed he wrote for a story about Pope John Paul II getting a colostomy after being shot. It ran in just one edition:

Il Papa's Got A Brand New Bag

I came across that NY Post headline in this terrific Christopher Hitchens piece on fictional portrayals of journalists.

From which:

In [Michael Frayn's] The Tin Men, published in 1965, there are some boozers and louts and misfits, to be sure. But the brilliance of the thing lay in its attempt to reduce the business of hackery to an exact formula. At a demented research institute named for William Morris, eager eyes gaze at a computer that can handle UHL, or "Unit Headline Language". A survey is conducted, in which people are shown the random headlines:

ROW HOPE MOVE FLOP

LEAK DASH SHOCK

HATE BAN BID PROBE

A total of 86.4 % of those responding say that they understand the headlines, though of this total a depressing number cannot quite say why. Thus the search must go on. Would people like to read about air-crashes with children's toys in the wreckage, or without children's toys in the wreckage? In the case of a murder of a woman, should the victim be naked or partially clad? Frayn re-summons the tones of old Fleet Street into this laboratory of shame, when the questing researcher Goldwasser is brusquely accosted by his vile assistant Nobbs: " 'Do you prefer a female corpse to be naked, or to be clad in underclothes?' he repeated to Goldwasser. 'That's what I call a good question, mate. That's what I call a good question.' "

Cuba bombs Washington?

2006-07-25T21:01:00.000+01:00

This post at TPM Cafe made me clearer on some facts I was only vaguely aware of, perhaps because I tend to discount the bad behaviour of the US towards Cuba on the grounds that it has been so disgraceful since, well, forever, and never really looks like changing.

Oh, it's a fucked up world alright...

Against (the rejection of the concept of) war crimes

2006-07-25T17:11:00.000+01:00

Via Lenin, I see that Ken MacLeod has made some (hardly unprecedented, but forcefully expressed) criticims of the whole field of "just war theory" and "the attempt to civilise warfare" or, as he also puts it, "to make war an accepted part of civilised life, which is to institutionalise war and thus to perpetuate it". He also says that if he "were to criticise Hizbollah's rocketing of Israel...it would only be on the grounds of its futility, if that could be shown."

Well, I don't agree: I'm pretty keen on the rigorous application of (non-utilitarian/consequentialist) moral and legal standards (jus in bello) to all participants in warfare, and I don't think discarding all criteria but victory is a good idea. But since I don't think I have very much to say that isn't well expressed in Michael Walzer's book, I'll restrict myself to pointing out that MacLeod's claim that just war theory

tells us that to aim a bomb at an enemy soldier and kill a hundred civilians is - if the necessity is there - legitimate collateral damage...

isn't actually true. Certainly the principle of "double effect" can be formulated in very dubious ways, and applied in disgusting ways by apologists for all sorts of crimes and criminals. But it can also be formulated in a way compatible with our being "responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our wilful acts." I doubt, for example, that an action aimed at very few combattants that (predictably) killed very many civilians could be justified according to the much maligned categories of "military necessity" or "proportionality", nor the requirement that combatants take risks and accept costs in order to avoid doing harm to non-combatants.

I wonder what Ken's attitude towards the atomic massacres at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is - for that matter the non-nuclear firebombing of Tokyo, or of the German cities? I see them as abominable war crimes which have never been officially acknowledged - but if I read him correctly he is in no position to think that, unless he sees them as either "futile", or part of wars that were themselves unjust, criminal etc.

(See also this Jonathan Edelstein post on the utility of legal restrictions on the methods of warfare.)

Andre Gorz' critique

2006-07-25T01:45:00.000+01:00

It's easy to mock Andre Gorz' Reform and Revolution, (PDF) for starting out as follows:

THE working class will neither unite politically, nor man the barricades, for a 10 per cent rise in wages or 50,000 more council flats. In the foreseeable future there will be no crisis of European capitalism so dramatic as to drive the mass of workers to revolutionary general strikes or armed insurrection in defence of their vital interests.

coming, as it did, on the eve of perhaps the most dramatic (if not the most revolutionary) general strikes ever to hit European capitalism - the evenements of May '68. (And according to this, most workers didn't even get that 10%, let alone the 50,000 flats.)

But he says some worthwhile things in it all the same:

It becomes necessary to show that the oppression and alienation of labour accepted for the sake of liberation in non-labour can only result in alienation of consumption and leisure; that to acquire the goods for the consumption and leisure which "liberate" him from the oppression of work, the worker is led by an infernal logic to work longer and longer hours and faster and faster, to take on overtime and bonus rates to the extent that he loses all possibility, material or psychological, of any liberation whatsoever; that the man at work is the same man as the man not at work, and that the one cannot be liberated without the other; that the basic class interest of all workers is to put an end to their subordination in labour and in consumption, and to take over control of the organization and purposes of social production; that a rise in direct wages is a priority demand for an important mass of workers, but that satisfying it is insufficient to put an end to capitalist exploitation...

As long as production decisions are dominated by capital, as long as consumption, culture and life styles are dominated by bourgeois values, the only way to live better is to earn more. But if capitalist relations of production are abolished, living better will also mean working less and less intensely, adapting work to the requirements of the workers' biological and psychological equilibrium, disposing of better collective services, greater possibilities of direct communication and culture, in and out of work, for oneself and for one's children, etc.

On the other hand, the checks and limitations imposed on scientific technical and cultural development by the capitalist criterion of profitability; the sterilization of economic resources and human energies implied by the process of financial and geographical concentration; the under-utilization of human capacities and the waste of energy necessitated by the authoritarian organization of labour; the contradiction between the law of maximum returns which dominates production on the one hand, and on the other the waste constituted by a marketing policy based on continual innovations with no use value and costly "sales promotion" campaigns, etc., all these contradictions of developed capitalism are as important if the system is to be challenged as the subjects of immediately conscious discontent: they imply a critique of the capitalist life-style, of capitalist values and rationality.

...

The mass revolutionary party exercises its directive and educational functions without pretending to know in advance the answers to the questions it will raise. Not only because these answers cannot be found within the framework of the existing system, but because their research and elaboration by permanent confrontations and debates among the rank and file is par excellence the way to provoke the participation, the prise de conscience and the self-education of the workers, to give them a direct hand in the party and the society to be constructed, and to let them grasp, through their exercise of party democracy, the profoundly authoritarian and anti-democratic character of the society in which they live.

Then there's this passage, which made me think about the kind of role that could be played by the internet, and blogging in particular, in the construction of participatory, rather than merely representative, democracy:

Therefore, the destruction of the cultural monopoly of the bourgeoisie will not take place by the mass diffusion of previous cultural production. The mass diffusion of "culture" is merely the diffusion of one kind of consumption goods amongst others. Its various forms-television, cinema, paperbacks, press - are based on the centralization of communication inherent in the "mass media". In other words, the "means of mass communication" do not allow the mass of individuals to communicate one with another; on the contrary, they allow the central communication of information and cultural products to a mass of individuals which is maintained in the state of a silent, atomized mass, destined for passive consumption by the very unilateral character of this form of "communication".

The internet seems, at least potentially, a pretty decentralised mode of mass communication.

Similar, but different

2006-07-24T22:00:00.000+01:00

It's been nagging me that people passing by here might not have realised that my post on Israel as genocidal state vs Israel as politicidal state (posing some questions about this post by Norman Geras) was not the same item as the similarly entitled post that immediately preceded it, Israel as genocidal state vs The role of racism in Israeli policy (inspired by a different post by Normas Geras).

Because they're not.

Gideon Levy in Ha'aretz

2006-07-24T13:11:00.000+01:00

Worth reading in full (as, most definitely, was this), but here's some extracts:

Israel went into the campaign on justified grounds and with foul means. It claims it has declared war on Hezbollah but, in practice, it is destroying Lebanon...

Every day increases international criticism of Israel and hatred of it. That is also an element in "national security." As opposed to the choir in Israel that makes a false presentation as if the world is cheering Israel, the images from Beirut are causing Israel enormous damage, and rightly so...

The fact that George Bush and Tony Blair are cheering Israel might be consolation for Ehud Olmert and the media in Israel, but it is not enough to persuade millions of TV viewers who see the images of destruction and devastation, most of which are not shown to Israeli audiences. The world sees entire neighborhoods that have been destroyed, hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing in panic, homeless, and hundreds of civilians dead and wounded...

Ceasing it now guarantees a limited achievement at a limited price. Continuing it guarantees a heavy price without any guarantee of a suitable reward. Therefore, Israel must cease and desist. The president of the United States can push us to continue the war all he wants, the prime minister of Britain can cheer us in parliament, but in Israel and Lebanon, the blood is being spilled, the horror is intensifying, the price is rising and it is all for naught.

On a lighter note...

2006-07-23T16:30:00.000+01:00

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
Fuck you, clown.

(Via, and with apologies to.)

A new vocabulary

2006-07-23T16:23:00.000+01:00

We need a new vocabulary to reflect the realities of modern warfare.
...

The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit.

Another classic from Alan Dershowitz. At the risk of insulting your intelligence, I'd be interested to know what how he'd classify the citizens of, say, Tel Aviv or New York should they refuse to obey a "well-publicized notice" to leave from Al Qaida or Hizbullah or whoever.

Israel as genocidal state vs Israel as politicidal state

2006-07-22T13:44:00.000+01:00

I said I was "somewhat puzzled" by Norman Geras' post yesterday, in which he described this:

Each provocation and counter-provocation is contested and preached over. But the subsequent arguments, accusations and vows, all serve as a distraction in order to divert world attention from a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation. [Norm's italics.]

as a libel, a disgusting lie and its authors as being at the worst end of a sector of world opinion that is worthy of nothing but contempt.

It's a short post, but they're strong words, which I'm sure weren't written without some reflection, so I think it's fair enough to examine them in detail.

Now: "the liquidation of the Palestinian nation" is actually an ambiguous phrase. "Nation" can be taken as synonomous with "people", and to liquidate a people is what we call genocide. And as indicated yesterday, I, like Norm, disdain the discourse that portrays Israel as guilty of genocide, or of harbouring aspirations in that direction. And so I think it unfortunate that the authors allowed such ambiguity to appear in their letter.

But "the liquidation of the Palestinian nation" might also - or rather instead - mean the liquidation of the Palestinian nation as a nation - the permanent denial of the aspiration of the Palestinian people to nationhood in its generally accepted form i.e. a nation-state, national self-determination.

Given the prominence of the concept of "politicide" (coined apparently by Baruch Kimmerling*) among more radical critics of Israeli policy, it would seem uncharitable (and I think probably inaccurate) to assume that the authors meant the first, rather than the second of the two meanings I have suggested.

But then I'm not sure that that is what Norm has done. His only mention of genocide is in linking the post to a previous one (commented upon here yestereday) pertaining to the "[t]he discourse of Israel as a genocidal state". He opposes the "lie" (that a long-term Israeli aim has been "the liquidation of the Palestinian nation") to the truth that Israel's enemies have sought, and seek still, "the liquidation of Israel". This leaves us no wiser as to what Norm means by "the liquidation of Israel", or what he takes to be meant by "the liquidation of the Palestinian nation" - genocide or "politicide".

In so far as there are any hints in this regard, Norm's reference to "the existential threat stalking the Jewish state" might indicate that, for Norm, "liquidation" is (presumably in both cases - both "the liquidation of Israel" and "the liquidation of the Palestinian nation") taken to mean not necessarily genocide, but also the lesser crime of "politicide". Otherwise he might have made a stronger claim by referring to "the existential threat stalking the Jewish (or Israeli) people".

But cutting through all this semantic speculation let me say this: I certainly don't feel the same way about the discourse of "Israel as guilty of politicide" as I do about the discourse of "Israel as guilty of genocide". I think it would require a good argument to discredit the former - not so much the latter.

Perhaps I am vulnerable to the charge of "permit[ting] [my]self mentally to block out the existential threat stalking the Jewish state" (and thus "worthy of nothing but contempt") due to a couple of things I've written recently, specifically that "Hamas and Hezbollah say they want to destroy the Israeli state, something they have no prospect at all of achieving", and that "'the destruction of the state of Israel' remains (thankfully) a very abstract threat".**

But it has always seemed to me downright insensitive to make so much of the threat to Israel's existence without at least explicitly acknowledging that, when it comes to the denial of a "right to exist" to other nations, Israel is more sinner than sinned against, since the threat to the existence of the State of Israel, being a threat, remains in the realm of the potential, whereas the non-existence of the State of Palestine is very real indeed, and that is (not entirely, but) decidedly the responsibility of Israeli policy.

So: I'm somewhat puzzled that Norm either a) assumes the meaning of "the liquidation the Palestinian nation" is genocide, or b) considers the existential threat posed to the Israeli state by its enemies to be more significant than the existential threat posed to the Palestinian state by its enemies, which he surely must if he considers the accusation of politicide, when leveled against Israel, to be "[r]eversing the truth".

*Kimmerling's 2002 article linked to above describes the Sharon government's policy as "the politicide of the Palestinian people, a gradual but systematic attempt to cause their annihilation as an independent political and social entity." I should note that, whatever the truth or otherwise of that charge, his subsequent claim that "politicide is a crime against humanity that is very close in its severity to genocide" seems to me to radically understate the importance, in his definition of politicide, of the qualification "as an independent political and social entity". I do not think that this undermines my point that one has to distinguish between the accusation of genocide and the accusation of politicide.

**It has not always been so abstract or hypothetical, and nor can we be sure it will remain so if Iran gets a nuclear weapon. But Israel has been the regional military superpower for some time now. That it cannot expect always to be that, and that it cannot expect always to have the uncritical support of the world's most powerful state, are good reasons for it to seek peace by doing justice.

Israel as genocidal state vs The role of racism in Israeli policy

2006-07-21T15:14:00.000+01:00

I hope I'm not being facetious , or even condescending if I say that I'm somewhat puzzled by this post.

But before addressing it in a later post, let me first say something about this one, or perhaps just inspired by it. I can agree with Norm that "[t]he discourse of Israel as a genocidal state" is foolish, foolish rhetoric - at best. Israel has never committed genocide, there is no obvious prospect of Israel ever committing genocide. Israel knows better than most societies what genocide is, and if the lesson many Israelis have drawn from the Holocaust is that Jews must never allow themselves to be the victims of genocide again (whatever it takes), many others have drawn the conclusion that noone should ever be the victims of such a crime - precisely because they are crimes against humanity, not just against Jews.

And when Yasmin Alibhai-Brown says, by way of contributing to that sorry discourse, that "the [Israeli] politicians, generals and soldiers on this mission, and their supporters, are consumed with burning revulsion for all their non-Jewish Semite neighbours", I think that's a truly remarkable generalisation. I think of the Israeli soldiers I have met and count as my friends, and, although we didn't talk politics too much, I struggle to see them in that picture.

On the other hand one doesn't need to know a lot about Israel (and I don't claim to know a lot about Israel) to think it plausible that racism, in all its shades and manifestations, plays some significant role in bringing about, in making possible, the policies it pursues, the action it takes. From the (relatively marginal) voices on the right of the Israeli political spectrum calling for expulsion ("transfer") of the Palestinians, to ex-Labor PM Ehud Barak's remark to the effect that Palestinians, or perhaps Arabs in general

are products of a culture in which to tell a lie...creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category

and stretching to include non-Israeli supporters, including progressives and liberals such as Maureen Lipman, whom I was appalled to see making this defence of Israel's actions in Lebanon:

human life is not cheap to the Israelis and human life on the other side is quite cheap actually, because they strap bombs to people and send them to blow themselves up.

it seems to me that Israeli racism has a legitimate and significant part to play in an analysis of the Arab/Muslim-Israeli conflict. (Anti-semitism playing an obvious, and more regularly highlighted, role on the other side).

(I should say that I don't think there's anything I've said here that Norm would necessarily disagree with, at least on the basis of what he's posted at Normblog. I started this post intending to write about Norm's later post but got carried off in this direction. In any case it's not a bad amuse-bouche before I set about disagreeing with him more explicitly.)

Walzer on Israel, Lebanon, Palestine

2006-07-20T15:26:00.000+01:00

Via Norm I came across Michael Walzer's piece in The New Republic. I wasn't too surprised to find that it was rather soft on Israel and its assaults upon Lebanon and Gaza. Still, having recently read and enjoyed Just and Unjust Wars, I think Walzer deserves to get a hearing. And he does describe the attacks on power stations in Gaza and Lebanon as "an attack on civilian society".

Nonetheless, though I dislike both the title and practice of "fisking" (the former is too dismissive of Robert Fisk and the latter is usually fairly small-minded, not-as-clever-as-it-thinks-it-is stuff), I've given Walzer's article a bit of a going over, while trying to avoid excessive sarcasm, context shaving, unfairness etc.

Indented bits are Walzer, the rest isn't:

since Hamas and Hezbollah describe the captures as legitimate military operations--acts of war--they can hardly claim that further acts of war, in response, are illegitimate.

True enough - but nor can attacks on the Israeli military be seen as illegitimate, or terrorist. Yet the capture of an Israeli soldier is described as such by the IDF, and the UN proposes a solution based on the release of captured Israeli soldiers without any equivalent move (unless you count giving the Palestinians back the kidnapped quarter of their legislature) on the part of the Israelis.

The further acts have to be proportional, but Israel's goal is to prevent future raids, as well as to rescue the soldiers, so proportionality must be measured not only against what Hamas and Hezbollah have already done, but also against what they are (and what they say they are) trying to do.

Really? So Israel's inflicting of hundreds of civilian casualties on Lebanon is proportionate "collateral damage" for an operation in response to a tiny fraction of that figure (counting civilian and military victims) being inflicted upon Israel because, for example, Hamas and Hezbollah say they want to destroy the Israeli state, something they have no prospect at all of achieving?

no state can tolerate random rocket attacks on its cities and towns. Some 700 rockets have been fired from northern Gaza since the Israeli withdrawal a year ago...It doesn't matter that, so far, the Gazan rockets have done minimal damage

A UN report issued yesterday said the Israeli Army has carried out 168 airstrikes and fired more than 600 shells into Gaza, while Palestinian militants have fired 177 rockets toward Israel.
The report said 100 Palestinians have been killed since the Gaza offensive began, not counting the 13 yesterday. (Via Lenin).

Israel has waited a long time for the Palestinian Authority...to deal with the rocket fire from Gaza

Walzer might have mentioned that Sharon's government gutted the capacity of the PA to do very much at all.

In the past, I am sure, some Palestinian attacks were motivated by the experience of occupation.

How very generous!

But that isn't true today. Hamas is attacking after the Israelis departed Gaza and after the formation of a government that is (or was until the attacks) committed to a large withdrawal from the West Bank.

As I understand it, Hamas, was not behind the rocket attacks from Gaza after the Israeli withdrawal, so Walzer must be referring to the tunnel attack that killed several Israeli soldiers and captured another, Gilad Shalit. Israel, Walzer says, had "departed Gaza" - hence this attack can't possibly have had anything to do with "the experience of occupation". Well, as Gideon Levy wrote in this bracing howl of righteousness in Ha'aretz: "It's no accident that nobody mentions the day before the attack on the Kerem Shalom fort, when the IDF kidnapped two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from their home in Gaza." (See reports by Reuters, carried at the Turkish Daily News, and the BBC.) *

In any case, if the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are part of one nation ("Palestine") then it can hardly be said that Gazans are unaffected by the ongoing occupation of the West Bank. They are Palestinians, and part of their country is still occupied.

Similarly, Hezbollah's attacks came after the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon. The aim of these militants is not to create a Palestinian state alongside Israel; it is to destroy Israel.

Here Walzer claims to know more than he possibly can. We don't know to what extent Hezbollah's attack was inspired by solidarity with the besieged and terrorised Gazans, and to what extent it was a (Syrian?) power-play in Lebanese and regional politics. Given both these possibilities (and the possibility of mixed motives), it seems very, very badly reductive to just arbitrarily attribute it to a presumably permanent and total desire to "destroy Israel".

Admittedly, that is a long-term aim that derives from a religious view of history. Secularists and pragmatists have a lot of trouble acknowledging such a view, let alone understanding it.

And some apologists for Israel have a lot of trouble acknowledging that "the destruction of the state of Israel" remains (thankfully) a very abstract threat, certainly compared to the destruction of (as in, "denial of existence to") the Palestinian state, not to mention of Lebanon.

the Israeli response has only a short-term aim: to stop the attacks across its borders.

Only a short term aim - to inflict a "very, very, very painful" toll, "setting Lebanon back 20 years", and thus to "change the rules of the game". Here, Walzer again claims to know rather more than he can, and possibly less than he should. Again, his epistemological extravagance cuts Israel's way.

(See also Chris Bertram's criticism.)

*This underreported story was mentioned by Noam Chomsky in that same interview. Knowing Chomsky was very good about responding to emails, I asked him for sources, which he duly gave. He didn't mention the BBC report though, which I got from the comments at that Chris Bertram post.)

More Adventures with Chomsky!

2006-07-19T00:52:00.000+01:00

While I'm at it, at the end of the same Chomsky interview mentioned in the comments here, he gives a quote from Moshe Dayan, adressing the Palestinians: "we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave".

(Actually that's the wording he quoted in a Guardian article from 2002, which is presumably more authoritative than his quote from memory in the interview. This 1991 article gives the the quote slightly differently and places it in the context of "a Rafi meeting of September 1967, [at which] there was a dispute between [Shimon] Peres and Dayan").

But various Google searches gave me nothing at all except references to Chomsky himself using the quote. That's hardly strong evidence that it's made up or something, but has anyone else ever heard that quote?

Pre-emptive Update!: Right. After a lot (for a blogpost) of complicated google-research I tracked down the sourcing of the quote to this section of Deterring Democracy (avilable online in its entirety) - where the relevant reference is, I think, "Beilin op. cit., 42-3". Op fucking cit, great. Tracking back to here - "Yossi Beilin, Mehiro shel Ihud (Revivim, 1985)".

Yip, it's in fucking Hebrew. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)

The first thing I got on googling that, was this post. This worried me, since once you end up at dedicated anti-Chomsky sites featuring the phrase "self-hating Jew", well, that smell is the swamp. However, without relying on the mercifully defunct blogger "dhimmi" (beyond - is this too much? - trusting that Chomsky's quoted reply is authentic) I did learn that Chomsky wrote this:

"During the 1948 war, he [Ben Gurion] held that "To the Arabs of the Land of Israel only one function remains -- to run away."

without mentioning that these were not actually Ben Gurion's own words, just his sentiments, and seems to imply this would mislead only "people who are really desperate to defend their own crimes".

Make of it what you will.

(Christ, but that was the most annoying - and least lazy - thing I've ever put on this fooking blog-thing.)

More law

2006-07-18T23:05:00.000+01:00

I've been meaning for some time to acknowledge Jeff Weintraub's response to my response to his post (at Normblog) on the Genocide Convention.

Firstly I want to thank Jeff for taking the time to reply. I was glad (and somewhat relieved) to see that my thoughts didn't come across as too superficial.

I don't have too much to say in re-response.

The first thing I will say is that it's true that Jeff did not (as I said he did) say that the Iraq war was legal because of the Genocide Convention. Actually all he pointed out was that it was illegal to do nothing to punish and/or prevent genocide in Iraq, and that this was rarely if ever mentioned by those who opposed the invasion because of its purported illegality. Both these points are true (though I'm unsure of what the legal or practical implications ought to have been in 2003).

In fact, it did occur to me, while I was arguing against the idea that the terms of the genocide convention could vindicate the invasion legally, that there was a better (though not necessarily convincing) argument that they did make illegal the actions of those countries that opposed the invasion at the UN (while doing nothing else to punish/prevent genocide in Iraq.)

On the question of whether the Iraqi regime was in fact guilty of genocide: I think Jeff makes a good argument that my interpretation of the Genocide Convention (specifically of its stipulation that the ethnic, religious, national or racial groups targeted by violence must be targeted "as such" for it to amount to genocide) would unreasonably restrict the category of genocide, ruling out any genocide with any kind of instrumental purpose. In response I would say that without this "as such" the Convention's definition of genocide is unreasonably wide. This has arguably already happened with Srebrenica, but a literal reading of the Convention (less "as such") could include all and any types of hostile acts towards human beings. Even with the "as such" qualification it could be seen to include every racist/xenophobic/sectarian killing.

I reckon a better definition of genocide can be produced, one that better captures the specificity of the crime of genocide. Of course, that will probably have to happen via judicial review, since the Convention's wording is unlikely to be appropriately amended.

(Oh yes, one other thing: I think that the idea that "one side-effect of [the Iraq war] was to prevent what would almost certainly have been another genocidal bloodbath in Iraqi Kurdistan after the 'containment' of Saddam Hussein's Iraq had collapsed" is far too breezy to play a major role in any cassus belli. Firstly, I don't see that the no-fly zones were in such bad shape - morally as well as in terms of implementation and sustainability - as the sanctions regime was. But more importantly it was too much of a long term consideration to justify a war in 2003.)

Chomsky interview with New Statesman

2006-07-18T22:57:00.000+01:00

"I think Afghanistan, if we look at it, is one of the most grotesque acts of modern history."

Quite honestly, apart from syntactical clumsiness, that seems rather disproportionate, given how filthy the modern tide has been and all. We all say silly things from time to time I know, and I doubt Chomsky would have written that sentence. But I'm not entirely sure he'd retract it either.

Skies of Lebanon

2006-07-16T17:51:00.000+01:00

I think these two posts by Matthew Yglesias on the present crisis say some things worth saying.

At least they can safely pass a law to throw Enda Kenny in jail now

2006-07-16T16:52:00.000+01:00

(For the blissfully uninformed: Enda Kenny).

There's very little public discussion and debate, outside the legal columns, of Supreme Court judgements in Ireland, certainly compared to in the US. Vincent Browne, one of the few prominent columnists (not surprisingly, he's also a barrister) to discuss such matters regularly, makes a fair point today.

Non-Irish readers (and Irish readers can safely skip this paragraph) may not know that there was a splendid panic here recently when the Court found that a 1935 law describing the offence of statutory rape was unconstitutional since it didn't allow for the possibility that someone could make an honest mistake about what age their sexual partner was. This led to the brief release of one statutory rapist (only about 6 months before he was due to be released, but that didn't make the headlines) and others seemed set to be freed as well. But then, hey presto, the Supreme Court decided that their finding of unconstitutionality was not to be retroactively implemented, thus returning "Mr A" (hint to Mr A - change that name, man, it gives a sinister impression, which is definitely not what you need in your situation!) to prison (hurrah!) for an offence that no longer exists.

Now (and welcome back my fellow Irishmen and women!), obviously enough, sympathy is rather thin on the ground for this "A" fellow, who had sex with the twelve year old daughter of a friend (hence no question of an honest mistake) after getting her drunk. And it would indeed be unreasonable to apply all court judgements retroactively, ruat coelum and all that.

But the Court now appears to have decided that retroactivity should almost never apply - it should be a rare exception. So the state can now, in theory, throw people in jail on the basis of unconstitutional laws - already existing, or yet to be made - and expect the Supreme Court to back them up. Presumably such people need not all be as repulsive as "Mr A".

Browne concludes:

There is something very serious here, if my contention is correct. It would mean that the Supreme Court was playing around with the law to fit the circumstances.And one of the safeguards we supposedly have of our liberties is that the Supreme Court will always stand by the law, at all times, irrespective of how unpopular or how difficult.

This seems like the kind of thing that deserves more discussion. There'd more fuss about it if it happened in America, that's for sure.

Debate

2006-07-15T20:58:00.000+01:00

I'm still waffling away over here. Latest comment:

Sorry about the misnomer Frank, if it's any consolation I did the same thing to myself when I said that I was an ex- libertarian - I too thought of myself as a "a liberal (in the unbastardised sense)".

Empirically, your claim that wealth "always [goes down] when governments start fiddling around with its distribution" is unsustainable - all governments of advanced industrial countries do so, and GDP continues to rise. Even a weaker version of that claim is discredited by the fact that the post-war economic miracle coincided with the expansion of the Keynesian/welfare state. Granted most of state spending was not oriented towards distribution per se, but much was, and much more (educational spending for example) had an egalitarian distributive effect. Theoretically, it's also wrong, because the defence of property rights (i.e. state enforcement of particular property relations) is precisely a massive "fiddling around" with the distribution of wealth, in the sense that it is not somehow natural or neutral - it is a definite decision to coercively enforce a certain distribution of property (and hence wealth), and not other possible distributions.

I also think your belief that economic inequality is unimportant is unsustainable, but that argument can wait.

Going back to the point about apathy and dominance, to put it fairly simply and abstractly: presuming that the state does indeed affect the interests of different people, and groups of people, differentially - i.e. some for good, some for bad, some better than others, some worse than others - it is in everybody's interest to be able to defend/assert their interests vis-a-vis the actions (and non-actions) of the state.

If liberals/libertarians had their right to vote taken away, we could expect their interests and aspirations not to taken into account by the state. Similarly, those who are apathetic are less likely to have their interests taken into account, i.e. to be treated fairly, by the state. They will have no say in the state's actions/non-actions but will still be affected by these. In this sense they will be subject to domination - not total domination, not slavery, but a relationship of domination with those who disproportionately influence the state.

These are all things that could probably be better expressed - and of course have been by others - outside the confines of a comment box back-and-forth, but there you go.

The banality of evil?

2006-07-15T01:15:00.000+01:00

Destruction of locks and dams, however--if handled right--might (perhaps after the next Pause) offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided--which we could offer to do "at the conference table."

That's from a memo written by John McNaughton in 1966, when he was US Assistant Secretary of Defense - Robert McNamara's right-hand man. In it, you'll have noticed, he contemplates (as to "be studied") a military-diplomatic tactic of placing "more than a million?" (North) Vietnamese civilians at risk of starvation.

Now, the "whizz-kid" bureaucrats and "Kennedy liberals" who prosecuted the American war in Vietnam from (say) 1963-69 certainly haven't "gone down in history" - if that phrase has any meaning - as heros. But nor have they been universally seen as evil men. But this document (which was first revealed, along with a shitload of other shit, in the Pentagon Papers) really does seem to show someone - not some outsider demagogue, whipped by a tidal wave of history from the margins of society onto its peak (à la Hitler and other Nazis) - who is so thoroughly and seamlessly integrated into his society's structures of power that he doesn't even realise the evil inherent in what he is doing.

Is this something like what Arendt meant?

(I came across this some months ago via this essay by Chomsky. I'm certainly not Chomsky's biggest fan - nor his biggest detractor - but it is, I think, an excellent piece of work, as are other pieces by Chomsky from the period. Christopher Hitchens has, once or twice, floated a theory that Chomsky once upon a time fought the good fight very well, but lost the head a bit, so to speak, at one stage or another. Without associating myself with Hitchens, I'd be interested to hear if anybody else thinks there's anything in this. Though of course cool-headed and reasonable discussion of Chomsky, critical without functioning as apology for power, can be very hard to find.)

The ideological content of antipolitics

2006-07-15T00:10:00.000+01:00

In response to this:

Older commentators bemoan any "apathy" detected in younger generations about politics and ask what can be done to rectify this "defect". Some find themselves cheering on deluded fantasists, millenial extremists, righteous moralists and all sorts of extremists and busybodies merely because they display "passion" about politics. But a passion for politics translates into a fervent and irrational desire to change the world for the "better", (usually at the expense of a lot of broken eggs). The politically apathetic, by contrast, have no desire to interfere and intervene in the lives of others. This ought to be cheered.

Political power is an extremely blunt instrument which can do a lot of harm...

I've posted this comment:

"Political power is an extremely blunt instrument which can do a lot of harm."

Best, then, to have it wielded by the rational elite, insulated from popular scrutiny by the healthy apathy of the masses.

Leave power to the experts, they'll look after things. Your interests will not be negatively affected. Go back to Big Brother, or whatever amuses you.

Lithely

2006-07-14T14:36:00.000+01:00

I slithered lithely from my stool. This deed somehow necessitated a second manoeuvre, that of picking myself up off the floor.

From Money, by Martin Amis.

Pain

2006-07-14T02:58:00.000+01:00

"Our response will be very restrained," Olmert promised. "But very, very, very painful."

That was on Wednesday. On Thursday:

More than 50 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the attacks.

A man of his word, then, the prime minister.

Torturous Trend

2006-07-14T01:25:00.000+01:00

Because the Irish Times insists on having at least one poisonous, right-wing, neo-imperialist, war crimes-apologist, North American syndicated columnist to balance the banal, moderate-liberal orthodoxy that generally prevails in its pages, and because Mark Steyn did the job a little too well, we now have the great pleasure of reading one Charles Krauthammer's weekly musings in Ireland's declining paper of record.

So it was that I noticed, in Monday's column, the tender care with which he too chooses his verbs:

The court tortures the reading of Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Convention]...

To "torture the reading" of something - that itself seems like rather a clumsy syntax. If not out and out torture, "aggressive interrogation" of the English language at least. But really, to choose that particular verb - you've got to admire the sheer balls of these guys.

Either admire, or apply electric shocks to, I suppose.

Immigration in Ireland

2006-07-12T17:26:00.000+01:00

Maria Farrell and Jonathan Edelstein both post on immigration in Ireland.

The past decade or so of immigration in Ireland has been fairly extraordinary, following, as it does, pretty much a century and a half of mass emigration. According to The Irish Times Book of the Century (Fintan O'Toole, 1999):

By the early [nineteen] twenties, 43% of Irish-born men and women were living abroad...

That too is pretty extraordinary, and so is the rapidity with which the phenomonen has been inverted.

There's one thing Maria wrote that ticks me off though, one of the great cliches in pro-immigration discourse:

we’ve seen a great influx of people from central and eastern Europe and the Baltic states, much to the benefit of our economy and our society as a whole.

I think the word for this is reification. "Good for the economy", "good for society": here I stand with Thatcher, against treating abstractions as though they were concrete. Immigration may indeed bring net benefits to the recieving society and its economy. But net benefits means good for some, not so good for others.

It's hardly surprising that business interests, glad to have the domestic labour market "rebalanced" in their favour, and middle-class liberals, insulated from labour market competition with the newcomers and benefiting from cheap service labour (classically maids, cleaners, gardners etc.), are happy to welcome immigration, and bemused at the ignorant fears and prejudices of the lower classes.The latter, of course, are far more likely to be the losers in the whole net benefit gig.

This is not to reject immigration. As an internationalist I don't confine my sympathies to Irish workers - and constraining the free movement of workers (and others) does not come high on my list of ways to combat inequality, injustice, exploitation etc. in Ireland. What it does mean is that (short of a democratic economy, wherein workers would no longer have to compete with each other to be employed by capitalists) measures to combat inequality & co. in Ireland become all the more imperative - for pragmatic reasons relating to the danger of a racist/far-right "backlash" - as the immigrant, and soon immigrant-origin, population grows.

Matthew Yglesias has argued to similar effect:

...immigration, on the whole, has a positive impact on the American economy. It makes the pie bigger, as the case goes. But while doing so, it winds up disadvantaging an already disadvantaged group, which is bad. That sounds to me, however, like a situation that calls for a combination of higher levels of immigration (more pie) combined with more robust social insurance and social welfare spending (make sure the poor get enough pie) which ought to create a win-win situation for the broad mass of America's workers and consumers.

But also: the role of the trade union movement in fighting exploitation, in integrating immigrants into social life, in promoting solidarity amongst workers, quite simply in organising, becomes more important than ever, and for society as a whole.

Point of law

2006-07-11T01:33:00.000+01:00

The following relates to international law, a matter I have no expertise at all in. Nor do I believe that the legality of an action, whether under national or international law, is anything like decisive in regard to its morality. I'd be interested to get an idea of the general state of scholarship on the relevant questions touched on here, in particular the interpretation of the Genocide Convention. This post represents no more than an amateur dipping of the toe into international legal waters. I hope nobody will misinterpret it as legal fetishism, nor, above all, as an attempt to in some way downplay the crimes of the Baathists in Iraq.

Jeff Weintraub says not only that the invasion of Iraq was legal, but that it was legally mandatory - that it was illegal not to overthrow the Baathist regime. This is because it was, says Weintraub, guilty of genocide at least once (against the Kurds during the Anfal campaign of the late eighties) and possibly twice (against the Marsh Arabs). This, so the argument continues, meant that all signatories of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide were legally (as well as morally) obliged to act.

There are problems with this.

Firstly, I'm not sure that Saddam is in fact guilty of genocide (as opposed to mere mass murder), even according to the fairly broad definition of the Genocide Convention. Broad as that definition seems to be, the Convention nevertheless stipulates that for the various specified acts to be genocidal they must be "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such".

That "as such" seems to me to be important. Does it not imply that the victims must be targeted because of their nationality, ethnicity etc.? If so, must not one ask: in unleashing terror upon the Kurds, was Saddam attempting "to destroy, in whole or in part" the Iraqi Kurds "as such" i.e. as Kurds - or because Kurdistan and the Kurds were seen as a centre of opposition to the regime? (The same question applies to the Marsh Arabs).

Secondly, does the Convention really give the right to, indeed place an obligation upon, every signatory to prevent and punish genocide in whatever manner they see fit? Wouldn't that conflict with another piece of international law, the UN Charter, which outlaws all military action (at least against UN members) except in self-defence and/or with the assent of the Security Council? Perhaps this might be seen as a development of international law, rather than a contradiction of it, but I have my doubts, given article 8:

Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide...

This seems to indicate that the Genocide Convention is not supposed to overrule or amend the Charter's restrictions of warfare. One might point out that this article only says what signatoires "may" do, not that they cannot act unilaterally to enforce the convention as they see fit.

Perhaps. But as with the above expressed doubts regarding the guilt of Saddam Hussein and his regime (on the specific charge of genocide) this question, and any other, would, according to the terms of the Convention, surely have to be settled by the International Court of Justice. Article 9 seems fairly clear on this:

Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfilment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.

I think it's fair to say that any attempt to defend (legally) the invasion of Iraq as an "application" of the Genocide Convention would have been subject to such a dispute, not least because the Iraqi government was itself a party to it. Has the ICJ made any judgements that may be seen as pertaining to the Iraqi case in 2003?