Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Is Resistance Surrender?

On Reading Resistance Is Surrender by Slavoj Žižek in the London Review of Books

I suspect the Orwellian title is intentional. He begins:

One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return.
Other than his metaphor being inapt he doesn't write that capitalism is a tough enemy, or that the struggle for socialism is taking longer than one might have anticipated; he simply claims that capitalism is eternal. The Soviet Union closed up shop and China changed horses; ergo, socialism is dead, even if not everyone has gotten the news. I also suspect, notwithstanding the author's identification as a dialectical materialist that he wasn't Marx's kind of dialectical materialist. In May 1940 the German Army swept to the coast where they chased out the British, while the French, Dutch and Belgian Armies and governments collapsed. The Nazis had a much easier time with their collaborationist regimes than Bush is having in Iraq. To some degree this was because of fascists who were present and prominent in those countries. Let's say there were some divided loyalties, and not all anti-capitalists' sympathies are entirely anti-capitalist.

In the physical sciences nothing is deemed eternal. The closest we have come to indestructibility -- in our understanding -- is that the proton has a life expectancy greater than 1080 years. And that belief is based upon a “notion” derived from both experience and probability that if something is thought to occur x times in y years then one merely has to watch that something for y/x years. And having “watched” a big tank of water containing 1080 protons with a detection monitor for a year and having detected no decays the assumption was that protons must live at least one year longer. There are many unstated premises encoded in this approach. The belief about the efficacy of probability is an heuristic ploy that seems sensible, at least until proved otherwise. In mathematics itself, not being confined to reality, beliefs and results are supposedly very tightly wrapped in rigorous logical deduction. Notwithstanding this, in University Mathematics Departments, in courses in mathematical probability, one meets Bayes' Theorem which deals with expectations. It's not really a theorem although textbooks containing it call it such: it has no proof. Bayes Theorem is more like a rule of thumb. Now, rules of thumb are very useful and often right: tomorrow's weather will probably be just like today's weather. Try it out; you'll be amazed how often it is correct. (Until a front moves through and the temp drops 20° and the snow falls.) The theorem has long held sway in the United States but only in the past two decades has it found root in Europe as the US developed not only financial hegemony but, it seems, mathematical hegemony as well. Now Bayes' Theorem affects the reliability one places in sampling results: calling elections when only a few per cent of the votes have been tabulated, something usually but not always correct. It was a response to the “frequentists” who rely on ever increasing sample size. But as time is money we need quick answers so capitalism enslaved mathematics! The use of Bayes' Theorem is especially perilous in very small samples where a glimpse of a few trees is supposed to represent the whole forest. In real life, sometimes yes, sometimes no. An example of error, and confusion (at least for mere mortals), is the health effects of coffee. Try to track down a meta-analysis of medical studies for the past four decades. You'll find results propounding coffee causes heart disease and cancer all the way to its being highly beneficial. In our bodies, where everything is connected to everything else, and some things take years or decades to manifest themselves, multivariate analysis is required, or as a doctor once put it to me: “Any drug strong enough to have therapeutic effects will have other effects as well.”

And so it is in the body politic. Now while our bodies contain more cells than the planet does people, human societies are also very complicated things. Karl Marx, a contemporary of both Dickens and Darwin, invented dialectical and historical materialism, a very profound approach to studying human societies with a richness that has not been fully explored. If one reads Mommsen's magisterial History of Rome (he also was Marx's contemporary) the good professor writes of capitalists in that ancient city and 20th century historians of the Middle Ages often write of capitalism existing in those days. Opinions being free and plentiful, one may call the economies of the ancients or the dark agers capitalistic if one wishes though doing so doesn't seem to advance understanding, being useful merely as a propaganda tool, as the preacher quoted in Marx's “On the Question of Free Trade” who claimed that “Free trade is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is free trade.” (And we have been arguing that same point in those same words for 150+ years! Them that's on top wish all below them to accept their rule as ordained by God from the beginning.) In Marxian analysis, capitalism is based upon wage labor and the earliest instance of wage labor being the leading, dominant, influence is considered to be mid-16th century England during the Tudor reign, and if one insists we could pick Henry VIII's death in 1547 as the birth year of a capitalist economy. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, 229 years later. And the Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, 301 years after capitalism had taken over! And 69 years after that the Bolsheviks took power.

For those fond of conspiracies –I love paranoid fantasies myself-- perhaps China is doing something similar to the Bolsheviks' New Economic Plan, using capitalism to develop the country, anticipating it will lead –as it seems to be doing-- to crisis and collapse of world capitalism and then they can institute a more egalitarian socialism. I don't want to get carried away and impute beliefs to this author without warrant but as a baby boomer I've lived a long life of reading and listening to comments bemoaning the failure of socialism. Now I never heard anyone moan about capitalism's eternal nature because of 2000 years of dominance or even the 301 years from Henry to Karl, nor the three quarters of a century from Karl to Vladimir. No, the triumph of capitalism and the death of socialism are tied to Stalin and the USSR's dissolution. Sort of like: "Sex: tried it; didn't like it."

Marx was a student of history who did the analysis that laid bare the workings of capitalism. He saw the contradictions and the trends and forecast the development of socialism through the class struggle, and for himself claimed his only originality was the dictatorship of the proletariat. One thing Marx did not do was write the rules of revolution nor create a blueprint for a socialist economy. When the Bolsheviks took over they had to make it up as they went along. This is not a bad thing, nor a criticism; this is real life. It's just that for most people in most situations revolutionary change is something to read about, not experience. Phrased differently, history moves at a glacial pace until one day a crisis occurs, something new appears on the horizon and surges into town, creating havoc, and that is when most people start to pay attention.

Stalin created socialism in the Soviet Union. His two great ideas were the Soviet Union (Stalin: membership mandatory; Lenin: voluntary) and collectivization of agriculture. From the beginning, the forces of reaction fought (and are still fighting) with any weapons they had to preserve their power. The US and Britain intervened militarily against the Bolsheviks, and red scares and red baiting date to those days of Woodrow Wilson. Propaganda to glorify capitalism and discredit communism along with the iron fist of ruthless violence has been with us for nearly a century (much longer really as organized Marxism in the US predates the Republican Party). In 1931 Stalin said that the USSR had ten years to catch up with the capitalist countries or be destroyed and in 1941 the Nazis invaded.

Mr. Žižek's article is about the Left and it's responses to the long, seemingly endless life of capitalism, and his theme seems to be futility against hegemony: there is little we can do except try to be moral, good, and self-satisfied in our tilting at windmills. He lays out some of the floundering to which late 20th century “leftism” has succumbed. In the analysis of what or who constitutes the "Left" there are many definitional difficulties. The range, at least in the US, might run from Hillary Clinton (to Mr. Žižek writing in Britain it is Tony Blair) to Noam Chomsky to unreconstructed Stalinists and finding common ground among them might be as vague as shared desires for a more peaceful egalitarian society. Beyond that the arguments start. In common with most social democrats Mr. Žižek equates "liberal democracy" with capitalism and while there is an historical connection and democracy, of a sort, was instrumental in capitalism's development it's not a necessary consequence that capitalism needs democracy to survive or thrive. The franchise is merely one tool. In Joyce Kolko's marvelously informative 1988 book, Restructuring the World Economy, she is insistent on the distinction between structural and systemic features. Capitalism and liberal democracy were built on private property and its preservation and if one doesn't tackle the issue of property then one can't attack capitalism, even theoretically, and therefore shouldn't be considered a leftist. In a very limited scope social democrats such as Blair or Clinton are called leftist as they might pass higher taxes on wealth to fund social programs but they never attack the basis of wealth. This is the history of social democracy, its collapse in post-WW I's Germany, the splits within Lenin's RSDLP and Stalin's CPSU as right deviations and the source of all those former “leftists” in the West who became neo-conservatives. It's amazing how many well-educated, well-intentioned people think they can decry the excesses of capitalism without a policy on private property. Even one man, one vote, without property restrictions, didn't hit the US until the mid-60s. And in the style of taking away with one hand what the other has given US Courts have ruled that money is speech. It makes sense that in the US speech would be commodified; thus, Bill Gates has about a billion times more free speech than most Americans. And when they vote Americans get to choose one of the two candidates of Gore Vidal's one political party with two right wings. Except in 2000 when they didn't!

After specifying the non-specifics (a rule of all true post-modernism) of these flounderings

  • accept the hegemony
  • accepts the futility of all struggle
  • recognises the temporary futility of the struggle
  • it takes the ‘postmodern’ route, shifting the accent
Mr. Žižek states:
These positions are not presented as a way of avoiding some ‘true’ radical Left politics – what they are trying to get around is, indeed, the lack of such a position. This defeat of the Left is not the whole story of the last thirty years, however. There is another, no less surprising, lesson to be learned from the Chinese Communists’ presiding over arguably the most explosive development of capitalism in history, and from the growth of West European Third Way social democracy. It is, in short: we can do it better.
Is this something like Clinton's out-Republicaning the Republicans? Sure let's have a war in the Balkans. Or since he says 30 years... let's see 2007-30=1977, aha! Jimmy Carter is President, the middle East is in turmoil and the Carter Doctrine has been introduced: the Arabs' oil is a strategic matter to the US, and 30 years later we have Iraq and Afghanistan. Boy, how much better can they get?

Most commentary in "respected" journals such as the London (or New York) Review of Books is written and read by petit bourgeois intellectuals. I know this being one myself. True bourgeois don't waste their time (eagles don't hunt flies) and most proletarians, even if they are sufficiently interested or well-read, are turned off by those "effete intellectual snobs" to use Spiro Agnew's phrase. Although with Spiro having been a crook, as was his boss Tricky, perhaps his analysis might have been biased. And to most petit bourgeois intellectuals what matters are free elections and free speech –and feeling good about themselves: never underestimate smugness. They can tolerate genocide, as in the Americas and the antipodes with European colonization or in Africa,– Hitler explicitly compared his lebensraum drive to the East with America's settlement of the frontier and the treatment of Indians -- as long as they themselves aren't targeted and they are free to talk about it. But with elections controlled by moneyed interests and sanctioned by the Courts, the Elect(ed) become paid spokesmen and spokeswomen of capital and passing laws to benefit capital is their job. Many voters like to think that they can elect true progressives but I personally haven't heard of it since John T. Bernard got elected in 1936 in Minnesota and became the only member of Congress to vote against the arms embargo to Republican Spain. He didn't get a second term. Play our game or you don't get in and should an error occur it will be immediately corrected. The 2006 US election is an example: once in office the new Democratic majority is toeing the line and Hillary has already promised to continue the Iraqi occupation through 2012. Unlike Supreme Court nominees the true litmus tests occur offstage and waffling answers are not accepted. In the real world representative democracy members tend to be more reactionary and repressive than the Executive. Being beholden to a more localized group of capitalists –farm subsidies, border controls, free trade or tariffs-- they can't argue the need to balance interests that often quiets the disgruntled of a larger audience.

In free speech, internet blogs have bred like mice such that they drown each other. Meanwhile, in the large media, consolidation continues apace. I know from experience that today's articles in the New York Times will be tomorrow's stories on National Public Radio. And if the NYT gives scant notice to a 20,000 person demonstration at Fort Benning in Georgia (where those Latin American death squads were trained) with hundreds of arrests then it won't be covered by NPR, though I was mesmerized by the continuing coverage (propaganda campaign) of Putin's “authoritarian” Russia where he democratically got 60%+ of the vote while Gary Kasparov's party got less than 1%. (Putin recently noted, in his Time interview, that Kasparov spoke to the media in English, not Russian, making him -Putin- wonder who was Kasparov's audience.) But that is par for the course. Give plenty of coverage to Solzhenitzyn (who wanted to bring back the Czars) or Natan Sharansky who moved to Israel and became one of the most regressive, reactionary rightists in a reactionary rightist country. For 30 years journalists have been patting themselves on their collective back about how great and necessary they are and how great a service they provide. One must wonder just how many among them are truly that stupid and how many know exactly what they are doing. Unlike the Manchurian Candidate the real brainwashed are not Korean implants. Thorstein Veblen in his 1904 Theory of the Business Enterprise noted that newspapers are capitalist businesses whose owners are interested in pecuniary gain (Veblen's pet term for profit) whose incomes are derived from advertisers who likewise are in business for pecuniary gain; thus, one cannot expect newspapers to publish articles criticizing advertisers or profits or capitalism itself. If you're not 'with the program' you don't get a byline. It's amazing that Marx supported himself (partially) as a journalist.

Near the end of his essay Mr. Žižek gets down to brass tacks to deal with some real issues such as the post-modern left working in the “interstices” and not seeking or challenging Power directly. Other than some complimentary comments about Hugo Chávez, the author has no remedy for how to achieve results except his concluding paragraph:

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfill. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’ The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.
Let's see, strategic, well-selected, precise (how many significant figures?), finite demands which can't.... How about capital export controls, laws requiring companies relocating jobs in the great international game of wage arbitrage to pay off the deserted community, sort of like divorce's alimony, changing the tax structure to benefit the masses at the cost of the wealthy, laws mandating that lower-taxed gains actually be reinvested in domestic jobs and not in offshore tax havens (or spent, say on Maseratis or yachts) or be penalized, investing in publicly-owned infrastructure and education, single-payer government run universal health care.... That would be a tasty morsel to start. The essay wasn't detailed enough to figure out what impossible, asking for the moon, “infinite” demands this post-Soviet left has been demanding nor whence the confidence that all demands couldn't “be met with the same excuse.” In real life the more demanding the demand the less likely that those in power will ever hear it; it certainly won't make headlines with the Propaganda Ministry, I mean, mainstream media. Capitalists, qua capitalists, are okay with integration or equal rights for women or even pollution controls (if they get tax incentives); just don't challenge property. Don't try to pass a law or alter the Constitution to guarantee everyone a job. The whole thrust of contemporary challenges to power is that they don't challenge power. There was a TV lawyers' show decades back where a firm's partner said to a non-partner: “No one gives you power. You have to grab it.”

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth some of us have noticed that utopian socialists and “Marxists” who have yet to pass their finals (would that be A levels in Britain?) have been in disarray since the 1930s. Whole bunches of them never got over the Moscow Trials. Or over collectivization. Or over “selling out” of post WWW II communist parties. Or the post-Stalin revisionists. Or dadgummitt! Gorby & Boris, the worst of the lot! A few of us have realized that life is complex and history is long and to have expected that after 1917 heaven on earth was around the corner or that now all the dominoes would fall or that with the Party in charge the class struggle was just a mop-up campaign, well just thank godlessness that we didn't have to design Nirvana in the largest country in the world.

When Gorbachev was in power he legalized private ownership of property. In fact, there were polls canvassing opinion and the "people" were against it. Gorby did it anyway. Capitalists certainly understood what the consequences would be. It strains credulity that the Soviet leader did not. There is a lot of evidence that dissent in the old Soviet Union was based in the petit bourgeoisie: intellectuals, artists, factory managers, etc. On the other hand there isn't much evidence of workers or school teachers marching or picketing. A Soviet citizen gets a piece of paper of ownership to an apartment -will wonders never cease- then loses her job, the economy tanks, hyperinflation occurs, a new ruble is issued but what had she done? She had sold her "deed" to a speculator whose ruble holdings were similarly wiped out but still found he owned an apartment building and when business picked up he was on easy street. During the 30s' Depression many businesses closed down but when things picked up they still owned that good ole machine shop and workers were desperate for jobs.

One of the changes over the centuries has been the growing complexity of industry. To quote from R.A.S. Macalister's Ireland in Pre-Celtic Times:

Civilization can be gauged by the degree of complexity in the specialization of trades and tools. Contrariwise, civilization can equally be gauged by the degree of simplification of the social order.
Reading Thompson's Making of the English Working Class is enough to warm the cockles of the heart of any 20th century union organizer. When farmers in earlier centuries found themselves squeezed by the miller or the baker or the tax collector they knew precisely whom to blame and they marched right down to the offender's place of business and set him straight. Life was simultaneously simpler and more complex. The 20th century was the age of bureaucratization. Historically the true petit bourgeoisie, or middle class, was comprised of small capitalists and professionals such as doctors and lawyers. Industrial growth created engineers and middle managers whose sympathies lay with ownership. That allegiance has become sorely tested in recent decades as managers have been cashiered wholesale, ie, proletarianized.

Marx in a letter dated December 28, 1846 to a friend (P.V. Annenkov) regarding Proudhon wrote:

From head to foot M. Proudhon is the philosopher and economist of the petty bourgeoisie. In an advanced society the petty bourgeois is necessarily from his very position a socialist on the one side and an economist on the other; that is to say, he is dazed by the magnificence of the big bourgeoisie and has sympathy for the sufferings of the people. He is at once both bourgeois and man of the people. Deep in his heart he flatters himself that he is impartial and has found the right equilibrium, which claims to be something different from mediocrity. A petty bourgeois of this type glorifies contradiction because contradiction is the basis of his existence. He is himself nothing but social contradiction in action. He must justify in theory what he is in practice....

A few decades ago a leftist social critic named Irving Howe compiled a book called Steady Work: Essays in the Politics of Democratic Radicalism, and the title says it all. Intellectuals enjoy being intellectuals. They enjoy sitting on the fence watching both sides fight it out and producing commentary and even tomes about these struggles. But given their heartfelt desires I suspect they want to join the rich on the right not the poor on the left.

Triumphalism might be premature. Our world remains dynamic. Earnings for the masses peaked more than 30 years ago. Unemployment figures are uninformative since one must be collecting unemployment payments to make the list. Some, such as Jack Rasmus, have figured out that if you look at the total picture including part-time and contingent workers that true un(der)employment is not 4 or 5 or 6% in the US but over 18%. During the 30s' Depression unemployment was calculated to be about 25%. And job figures don't even get to the housing or health care issue. Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren whose specialty is contract and bankruptcy law has found that what is driving people into heavy debt are housing, health care and transportation, not buying “things” or restaurant meals or vacations. Those who make their money in strictly financial instruments may not care where factories are located but workers do and a nation's economy does also. With the US having undergone significant deindustrialization it may be impossible to export our way out of foreign debt and if some disaster happened that cut off Chinese shoe factories Americans would be walking around barefoot or with shoes held together with duct tape (is that made in China too?). Financiers don't care about citizens, Chinese or American; they care about profits.

With America's shrinking middle class it means that the petit bourgeoisie is shrinking and since it is their role to be the aspirants in waiting –for some to rise while others fall-- it must be hard to keep up circulation figures in respectable journalism. It's said that Sears Roebuck's demise was caused by the disappearance of its customer base: the upper strata of blue collardom. Thirty years ago the largest UAW local in the US had more members unemployed than working. Sam Walton may or may not have been smart but he certainly jumped into a heavy growth segment: poor people. Since the late 60s unofficial US government policy has been permanent inflation. That way money is always available for investment and expansion, nominal wages can rise and downturns will be mild. But investors are never satisfied; they always want more. So in addition to the contradictions that they're making money through the impoverishment of their customer base and productivity has outstripped market growth they keep looking for new ways to make money and the wunderkinds with Nobels got roped into finance and LTCM was born, grew into a strapping lad then died spectacularly. They confused their elegant models with reality. Probably used Bayes' Theorem.

Today's worry is that no one really knows just how much debt overextension is out there nor even who or what will be left standing when the music stops. Crisis breeds unrest and unrest offers opportunities. In the large people don't rebel until their backs are against the wall; they certainly don't do it because someone tells them about Marx or even to hate Marx. The job of those who follow the windings of dialectical history is to have workable explanations and viable actions when the shit hits the fan. And if these dialecticians are smart enough and lucky enough to have found an audience beforehand the rebellion might find a path that's not a dead end. In Bush's America the mantra is “freedom” and Marx, in the aforementioned “On the Question of Free Trade” dealt with that too:

Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word freedom. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush labor.
Needing to find a sports metaphor to prove true Americanism I'd suggest life is like baseball where there is no clock and it ain't over till it's over.

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Is It Over?

So, the latest is that the Iran War may be off the table. That seems to be the proper inference from the latest NIE. Of course the hard right won't give it up and claims that even knowledge of nuclear weapons for Iran is intolerable. Such a claim is ridiculous as history teaches us that information spreads like wildfire. The key to the nuclear war dilemma is cooperation and control: treaties and inspections, including the United States. Not Iran but the 500 lb. gorilla of the west needs taming. The real peculiarity of the current situation is "What happened?". In the words of the immortal Nero Wolfe: In a world of cause and effect, coincidence is always suspect. The situation is reminiscent of the VietNam war. Widespread protests certainly played a role in ending that war but only after the general citizenry's dissatisfaction filtered up to the heavy hitters in business and politics. When the majority of our ruling class finally figures out that continuing a war is more costly than ending it then the denouement begins. In other words, the string pullers behind the throne, seeing the abyss into which the US and world economy is sinking, have decided that a pullback and realignment is in order. They haven't lost their greed for controlling the world; they just are swerving to avoid the cliff. All of which means that we have a coming respite, not a conclusion. After the VietNam war with all the dissension, even among the troops, the Military drew the obvious lesson that a professional, not a citizen army was needed, and the draft was ended. That was precisely the wrong conclusion. More properly, the proper understanding would have been that if the citizens won't support a war, including with their (children's) lives then that war should not be fought. This would mean that only the most extreme cases of self-defense would move people to taking up arms. And that is how the world should be. For more than half a century the US has been involved in imperialistic wars to control the world and many, many millions of people have died. Pollution, resource constraints, global warming, growing impoverishment, widespread deployment of very deadly weapons -- all these are telling us that the era of capitalistic greed needs to end before those insidious and invidious wackos kill us all. But even putting Iran's destruction on the shelf won't work long term. Capitalist hegemony will never surrender. They only intend to consolidate their position and bulk up their mideast and central Asian presence. And one day the violence will spread again. The people, not the "leaders" need to learn the proper lesson to take control over the country, the resources, the economy, and start to build a nation and world of peace and prosperity for all. The people need to reject the national, racial and religious chauvinism that produces death and destruction planet-wide. For the "seeming" deferral of the Iran War is only a short time to get our breath back and prepare for the bigger battles ahead, and we need to remember that with the "Decider" in office, and compliant, fully imperialistic Democrats waiting in the wings anything might happen.