News On the March! posted by Richard Seymour

Eat snacky smores...

Following today's antiwar demo, which had a couple of thousand on it by my estimation (the BBC merely says "hundreds" ), I was accosted by a member of Fight Racism Fight Imperialism who spent the whole time trying to persuade me that the Labour Party was a racist imperialist institution and that Cuba was a haven of socialism. He was perfectly adamant on both counts, as he was on every other theme he touched. (Incidentally, he thought Tony Benn was shit, the march was "opportunist", the anti-war movement was being diverted, the anti-apartheid movement was unwilling to challenge racism, and it was all the fault of the SWP for not allowing forces to the left of them have a say in the running of things). Moreover, touring their website today (I'm not giving them a link), I discovered them referring to the immense poverty of ordinary Cubans, as well as the vast child prostitution industry that pertains in its shadowy hotel-beach complexes as "challenges"... I'm not slagging them off for their views. Noone is ideologically pure, and noone has absolutely everything right. But there is something vaguely terrifying to me about the fact that they are nevertheless assured of their correctness in absolutely everything. This attitude is probably the result of weakness and isolation - greater potency would entrain more openness. Unfortunately, the other clause in this Catch 22 is that in order to gain more influence, such organisations would have to abandon the "beautiful soul" purism that makes them so marginal in the first place.

"Electricity Abuse"

A very interesting story comes from the San Diego Tribune . According to this dazzling star in the media firmament:

While world attention was focused on the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison, two Marines were court-martialed May 14 for abusing an Iraqi prisoner with electricity, it was disclosed yesterday.

Five more Marines have been implicated in the same early April incident at a Marine-run detention facility and might face charges, according to Marine officials in Iraq.

...

Sting, Trefney and three other Marines concocted a plan to shock a detainee with 110-volt electricity as he returned to his cell from the bathroom. The prisoner was targeted for punishment because he was loud and had thrown trash out of his cell.

"The Marines attached wires to a power converter and pressed the live wires against the body of the detainee to create a shock," according to the Marine statement.

Excuse me, but when you attach live wires to someone's body, isn't that torture? I don't mean to split hairs or anything, but if a certain Arab leader with a big bushy moustache and dead onyx eyes did that sort of shit, we wouldn't be fucking around with coy expressions like "abuse".

Moving On Up

Richard Reeves has an admirable article in this week's New Statesman about the decline of the meritocracy. His conclusions conduce to a certain amount of complacency, however. For example, he argues that we should be happy if absolute social mobility increases, since in such circumstances you can improve someone's lot without worsening that of others. This would seem to me to miss the point about social justice. If we are against poverty, it isn't simply because some at the bottom layer of society are "excluded" and we feel a pious inclination to help them out of their rut - it is because there is something unjust about inequality, about one person's deprivation being contiguous with another's luxury.

Additionally, he seems to believe that there is a version of meritocracy which would be commensurable with egalitarian ideals. I don't think so. As Reeves notes, it is practically impossible (in capitalist society) to attach reward to desert without some severely authoritarian measures on the part of the state. Aside from that, there is a deeper philosophical problem with the whole idea that Reeves does not specifically grapple with. Namely, what exactly is desert? How does one account for it? You do not "earn" the physical and mental attributes with which you are born any more than you "earn" your early childhood experiences, and yet these can place enormous limits on a human being's potential in the world. Reeve, in fact, renders this point absolutely eloquent with a quote from Michael Young:

"If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get . . . So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves."

And Reeve nails the problem with market-led concepts of desert only to adumbrate an alternative that is equally infelicitous:

The fourth and final challenge is to rescue the concept of "merit" from the market. When meritocrats talk about rewards flowing from merit, the rewarding mechanism is typically assumed to be the market, especially the market for labour. But the market can reward only certain kinds of narrowly defined merit, and in particular, what economists and business people increasingly call "human capital". (The language itself betrays the prevalence of market-generated versions of value: we now also have "social", "intellectual", and even "gender" capital.)

...

But merit of all kinds - artistic, intellectual, social - exists entirely outside of the pricing mechanisms of the market.

There may be "merit" in having artisitic talent, intellectual stringency, or the ability to chat up co-workers, but it is hard to see how these are in any sense "deserved". I adhere firmly to the view that a) meritocracy would be too radical for New Labour to pursue in any serious sense and b) it would be an unattractive state of affairs if actually attained.


Finally, Michael Moore has won the Palme D'Or for his film Fahrenheit 911. Kill 'em, Mikey!