Capital's Decivilising Mission. posted by Richard Seymour

A certain tabloid journalist is given to using this oleaginous word, 'civilised'. The 'civilised' left. 'Civilised' politics. He uses it, in fact, so ubiquitously that it strikes one as symptomatic. Its utility as a regulator of discourse is obvious enough, inasmuch as 'civilised' is a synonym in this useage for 'domesticated' and 'bourgeois'. Perhaps it also arises from a repressed awareness that capital, which is what the 'civilised left' and 'civilised politics' ultimately defend, is in its frantic search for new avenues of profit, new market niches, new territory and so on, a brutal, callous, ruthless, motivated destroyer of civilisation.

Capital's destructiveness is remarkably creative, ingenious, and baroque. The perverse imperatives that it can introduce into human behaviour baffle and astonish. A soft drink that dehydrates you! Hospitals that make you sicker! Paradise communities where fires naturally occur! Food production that causes starvation! Sick children who make the pharmaceutical companies feel better! These were some time paradoxes, but now the time gives them proof. Marx's descriptions from the Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 of the alchemic power of money merely skated on the surface. Capital as social relation, as the imperative to accumulate in competition with others, to extract ever greater productivity from labour, to augument surplus-value - that is capable of perversity that far outstrips that of mere money.

Capital could only produce more food in Brazilian fruit farms by selling it to Europe and repatriating profits - so that those who had lived and worked on the now enclosed land, starved. Capital could only make Indonesia a fit place to invest in by ensuring that its opponents - nationalist or communist - were murdered in their hundreds of thousands, while a new junta entrenched a state of terror and repression at home and expanded its dominion through genocide in neighbouring territory. Indochina had to be brought to genocide and environmental ruin to make it safe for the sweat shops that now proliferate on it. Latin America was repeatedly made safe for capital through bombardment, mass murder, rape, mutilation, terror, torture.

Formally, while supporting capital, one also supports human rights. One is committed to equality, peace, freedom, security, justice and so on. One is against Bad Things. Why else would one support countless destructive wars, wars that strike most unequally, shatter peace, terminate such meagre freedoms as one has been able to find, introduce permanent insecurity, permanent emergency, impose rank injustice everywhere? Everyone from the UN to the European Union to The Guardian to well-meaning NGOs can be conscripted to the civilising mission - can even, mark you, be moved to beg for its expansion and extension. Civilise Haiti! Civilise Sudan! Civilise Iran! One doesn't want to use violence, of course, but they threaten chaos here, genocide there, nuclear war elsewhere. One doesn't want to - one is obliged to. It is an encumbrance, an albatross that one accepts because of one's overbearing superego ideals. Don't want to - have to. So much for this.

Anyway, I mention all this as a prefatory framing device to the news that Palestinians are untermenschen, skivvies, bare forked creatures, a demographic problem and much else besides. They are not, however, properly human. Hence: no rights as humans. They are to be allowed nothing: not land, not freedom, not water, not meaningful votes, not roads, not legitimacy. So much I infer from the latest insult, the latest interview with some UN humanitarian on Channel Four, in which we are told that the Palestinians are to be starved because they haven't chosen peace, because they are insufficiently obedient, insufficiently mastered.

How much does it take? Ehud Olmert openly professes that he must retreat from some despoiled occupation zones so that he may keep others, openly states that this is to ensure the dominative majority of Jews in Israel. Openly declares this racist imperative before the whole world, the racist imperative on which Israel was founded. Ehud Barak calls Arabs liars by dint of their provenance - no Judeo-Christian guilt about lying, you see. He who will arouse not the slightest arteriole in his cheeks with shame with fabrications about his 'generous offer' to the Palestinians. Benny Morris says that Israel committed ethnic cleansing in its creation, and should have done so more thoroughly. It was "necessary". Further, Muslims are "barbarians". They must be caged. "There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up." Arab "tribal culture" is filled with vengeful fury, which would, if so opportunely positioned, commit genocide. "when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide - the annihilation of your people - I prefer ethnic cleansing". Suicide or murder. Don't want to - have to.

Palestinians have arranged their own elections, under occupation, and their decision has so displeased their masters that the few paltry lifelines of aid that were supplied were immediately shut off. Banks in Palestine refuse to deal with the Palestinian government, afraid of running foul of US anti-terror laws, thus making it harder for the government to receive money from sympathetic Arab governments. The Israeli-led economic offensive was more successful than expected - it is now expected that poverty will increase more dramatically than before, that unemployment will be far worse than before. This in a situation that wasn't precisely ideal to begin with, you understand. What sort of supremacist does one have to be, not merely to tactfully not notice, but actually to enforce this kind of suffering? To, by act of policy, impose it? Oh, the usual kind: the concerned liberal supremacist, the nice humanitarian supremacist, the NGO-supremacist. One need only be Bernard Kouchner or Paddy Ashdown, or a UN bureacrat, or a WTO economist, or Alan Greenspan. One need only be an urbane intellectual, one of Chomsky's "backroom boys".