The Spectre of Europe is Haunting Communism posted by Richard Seymour

For a glance at how much the shade of the former Yugoslavia haunts the present geopolitical terrain, you could do worse than looking at this uncannily tasteless article at The New Republic. Entitled 'Balkan Ghosts' (after Robert Kaplan's 1994 book, the precursor to his New Barbarism thesis which argued that the roots of the conflict were in historical cultural antagonisms released from their statist integument), the TNR piece entertains what looks at first sight like a rather trivial and boring parallel between Kosovo and Darfur. But since every sentence in the piece contains a lie - by omission, comission or distortion - it is obviously not intended as an essay in recent history. Rather, it is an intervention within a rather well-policed discursive regime. If we drop the idea that 'Kosovo' and 'Darfur' in this case refer to living places populated with real people struggling over material problems (property, patronage and - in the case of Darfur - land), it becomes much more comprehensible. In terms of the ideology of 'humanitarian intervention', therefore, the piece is a breezily efficient polemic. Kosovo, lorded over by an evil genocidal megalomaniac, had to be rescued at long last and with considerable restraint and reluctance, by an international coalition at whose heart was the American behemoth. Darfur, lorded over by an evil genocidal elite which doesn't even have the decency to be susceptible to intense personalisation, will also have to be liberated in the same fashion. In those terms, the structural isomorphism is exact, and the argument infallible. Who cares if it is an argument over cartoons rather than reality?

But why is the comparison so essential? As much noise was made of the fact that the Yugoslavia wars were happening in Europe rather than another continent, what was really significant for many interventionists was that it was perceived to be on a faultline between the Orient and the Occident. The ancient Balkan culture with its Oriental despotism, its propensity for command economics and its psychological value of repression was depicted as being in a collision with European civilization with its liberal anti-centralist traditions, its free trade, and its psychological value of truth and open inquiry. Those who resisted this quackery with materialist (marxist) analysis were told that they were themselves subject to a Victorian mytheme that was itself part of the root of the problem. By contrast, the Eurocentric and Orientalising habits of 19th Century imperialist thought were treated as if they were the newest and coolest thing, pomo to the max. Doctrines that emphasised universality were outmoded and intolerant forcing all of humanity into a one-size-fits-all mould, while doctrines that relentlessly polarised humanity and dehumanised most of its actual constituents were regarded as inclusive and open-minded.

'Humanitarian interventionism' saw its earliest beginnings in the continent of Africa, in Somalia. The narrative no longer works for Somalia, which is why it is depicted instead as a frontline (or frontier) in the 'war on terror'. But it is appropriate that the doctrine now returns its focus and emphasis to that continent, the topic of Robert Kaplan's eco-fascist musings on overpopulation, scarcity, social breakdown and state failure. In Kaplan's latest book, 'Imperial Grunts', which makes much use of the familiar 'Injun Country' motifs, the whole world has been re-mapped according to the spatial projections of US power (there are actually maps which celebrate the breakdown of the world into distinct zones of US dominance). This is for the better in a war against 'barbarians'. The ordinary business of commerce, arms deals, oil transactions, shipments of Gum Arabic, financial speculation, tilts in geopolitics, bribery, inter-state competition and so on has to be inhabited by the Spirit of Europe and its Oriental or barbarian opposites. Instead of treating Sudanese state personnel is typically cynical operators embedded in a ruling class with clear interests, it has to be inexplicable, inscrutible, instransigent, insusceptible to run of the mill calculations. Instead of treating the problems of land ownership, water shortage, famine, property rights, and so on, as part of a global, universal system of injustice with particularly acute and sometimes genocidal manifestations in zones where postcolonial manipulation and exclusion by external actors interacts with hegemonic strategies by local ruling classes, it is necessary to treat them as simply localised aspects of a genocidal juggernaut.

One is reminded of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin's essay on 'the spandrels of San Marco', in which they remark that the spandrels in St Mark's cathedral, the spaces created by the intersection of arcs at right angles, are so beautiful and such lavish use made of them by decorators, that given a sufficient set of intellectual biases one might almost be inclined to treat them as independent of the architecture, or as indeed commanding the architectural structure rather than the other way about. It requires a similarly far-fetched set of intellectual biases to treat a state's mode of repression and rule as independent of the social and economic architecture that actually co-produces it. Yet, this is what the Spectre of Europe is doing in Africa. It is expunging the territory, purging dissident thought, removing the traces of past crimes, concealing the mass graves of colonial and capitalist famines and massacres, committing a kind of ethical cleansing from which the carapace of capital emerges pristine. If Balkan Ghosts are touring Darfur, it is only because the frontiers have shifted. Capital relentlessly reterritorialises, demands a re-spatialisation of the global order, demands new and more intricate morality fables to enable its activities, and creates new frontiers that require taming. It demands the constant disarticulation of global problems as topics for analysis, and even where it permits their rearticulation for the purposes of dramaturgy, one of the functions of any efficient ideologist is to relentlessly particularise and localise. The spectre of Europe permits him to do so with a spurious consistency and even, should he require it, historical resonance.

Labels: barbarians, darfur, europe, kosovo, orientalism, sudan, the spectre of capital, yugoslavia

Kapitalist Reason posted by Richard Seymour

(Thanks to dizzy in the comments boxes for this). Enlightenment rationalism in the hands of Lawrence Summers, former chief economist of the World Bank:

DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers
Subject: GEP

'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.

Or, as Adorno & Horkheimer put it in a much-maligned book:

In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant. The program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy ... What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. That is the only aim. Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive. Power and knowledge are synonymous.

Labels: enlightenment, rationality, the spectre of capital

The Spectre of Yanqui Kapital posted by Richard Seymour

Well, alright, I admit that this is beautifully written and incisive and persuasive. I doff my cap. I disagree with its main appeal, however: it is reductionist and it puts the blame for the war on a caricatured crony capitalism and a right-wing assault on the treasury. In fact, that seems to be its goal. As a result, I don't see how it could explain the continued attachment of Democrat politicians to the war except through the ruses of timidity and voter reaction. And the continued support or acquiescence of big business, who on the whole probably like a fiduciarily reliable state with a balanced budget which is capable of bailing out hedge funds and savings and loans, and subsidising industry and keeping people in an employable condition etc, is a complete mystery. They do not particularly require a state with diminished capacity, so why on earth would the US ruling class partake of a scheme that threatened their interests? And why, despite strategic qualms, would European powers - who aren't stupid, or at least aren't that stupid - assist and cover for such an operation? Obviously, one could cite 'peak oil', but that could only be part of the answer as long as alternative strategies could have supplied long-term access to the oil (coopting a much-weakened Saddam and turning him into a junior partner to Bandar Bush was always a possibility).

Basically, I think Ellen Meiksins Wood is correct: an activist US state is required to maintain a global hierarchy of nation-states, with constant and open-ended forms of military intervention. This set-up, for from being obsolescent as Hardt & Negri claim, works very well, ensuring that the global appropriation of labour continues to be overwhelmingly for the benefit of a distinctly American ruling class. Obviously, the idea of a single coherent capitalist class ideology is a chimera - there will always be sectoral differences which are structured by ideology. However, if there could be a Spirit of Yankee Kapital - a spectral, unified, far-sighted capitalist class mind - it would surely pursue a geopolitical vision not at all dissimilar to that of PNAC: siezing the window of opportunity afforded by the lack of a rival superpower, trying to create a pro-US regime in the Middle East, demonstrating the ability to fight and win wars in multiple theatres, comprehensive military dominance in order to secure and sustain comprehensive political and economic dominance etc. If such a policy, broadly construed, could have been carried out successfully, then it would have been a master-stroke of strategy. If they can save the situation, and not lose either Baghdad or Kabul, and even claim Tehran or Damascus as part of an elevated war, then they will have carried off a real coup, and popular-democratic movements in the Middle East, as in Latin America, will be finished. And that, of course, would sustain the continued appropriation of global labour for the benefit of American capitalism. And as long as that situation redounds to the benefit of America's allies and cooptees, then they will support it too. (Is this why French capital, not only for domestic reasons, recently threw its weight behind possibly the most pro-US politician France has ever had?)

The current wave of military adventurism - threatening Iran, sending Israel into Lebanon - doesn't suggest a confident, assured elite, which can bide its time. It suggest purpose and ruthlessness, to be sure: but then Clinton wasn't purposeful and ruthless? Ricky Ray Rector's executioner, the man who insisted the poor weren't being fucked hard enough and so cut their welfare, the pitiless killer of Iraqis with a global blockade and a sustained bombing campaign, the bomber of Yugoslavia, the sponsor of Turkish and Colombian state murder? It seems clear that the Bush administration took over a broad policy that was already being crafted and nurtured, which was to replace Saddam Hussein, neoliberalise Iran, keep the Saudis and Mubarak happy, and contain popular uprisings in Latin America. However much the Bush administration has unquestionably manipulated those goals for the advantage of a narrow sector of energy and reconstruction capitalists, their decisions were only a more extreme variant of Clinton's programme. If you ask me, and you really shouldn't because I've about as much of a clue as you have, the driving force behind the administration's increasing bellicosity on Iran, and intransigence on Iraq and Afghanistan, is precisely an awareness that they could lose it all. Not due to internal factors, of course, or largely not at any rate. But they actually could lose Iraq - or, more accurately, they have already lost most of Iraq, and may not be able to regain it. And then, of course, if they did, Halliburton would still be rich, and so would various other companies close to the Bush administration - but the long term prospects for American profitability would be immeasurably harmed. You know what the sight of American nationals fleeing into helicopters on the roof can do to investor confidence? And this is how I think we should understand both the frantic aggression of the Bush administration and the complicity of its electorally compromised Democrat rivals. Neither 'liberal' nor 'conservative' US capital wants to cut Iraq loose yet, not without doubling the bet, and not unless they can do so in a way that leaves with them with a way back in and with substantial leverage over the regime. It isn't about raiding the US treasury or enriching a few multinationals: that is arguably a function of the 'war on terror', but it is a secondary one, and one even the Dems are willing to contest.

Labels: empire, iraq, the spectre of capital