Commodification: the essence of our time

by Colin Leys and Barbara Harriss-White:
The dominant process underlying the transformation of life in all societies, since at least the mid-nineteenth century, is the conversion of things and activities into commodities, or commodification. In advanced capitalist countries this process is now outstripping our political and social capacity to adjust to it...


Even the functions of the state are being commodified: not just the provision of public goods and services, such as electricity and airport operations, but activities hitherto seen as quintessentially public, such as prisons and policing, and even including core responsibilities like policy. Policy-formulation is contracted out to think tanks, foundations and management consultancies; publicly-collected data is entrusted to private companies to keep and sell...


When the commodification of all of nature (including human nature – our dreams and fears, as well as our genes) becomes so familiar as to be seen as normal, few effective limits to commodification will remain. The process has already gone very far. Most of the world’s agriculture and food production has already been commodified... Not only have farmland and fresh water supplies been commodified, but also parts of the oceans (through the creation and sale of exclusive fishing and drilling rights), and even air itself (carbon trading is - in theory - a market for fresher air)...


The outsourcing of major sectors of policy development to management consultancy firms leads to the loss of public scrutiny and accountability, and drains democracy of its meaning. Expertise oriented towards the public interest disappears along with what was once considered indispensable institutional memory. Joined-up policy goes too – if it was ever there.


The notion that there is a conflict between public and private interests disappears in the blur of the revolving door between business and government. The logical end of neo-liberalism is the commodification of everything – everything from speculating on the future prices of staple foods and housing to making profits from prisons. As capital is pushed to extremes, pathological effects become painfully clear.


The political agenda comes to exclude  all possible futures that would be incompatible with commodification. The loss of a brake on the process delivers irrational and self-defeating consequences. When the state has relinquished the capacity to regulate capital, capital itself starts to suffer from the lack of stable long-term frameworks needed for investment. The contemporary incoherence of energy, transport and climate change policy in the UK has become a notorious obstacle to investment. When society’s capacity to define and plan for its collective interests has been surrendered to the pursuit of the private interests of a few hundred global companies, then its – our – very future is at risk..

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/colin-leys-barbara-harriss-white/commodification-essence-of-our-time

A Crisis of Money: the demise of national capitalism

The crisis of the world economy is not merely financial, a moment in the historical cycle of credit and debt. In what follows I approach the crisis more generally as a moment in the history of money. The removal of political controls over money in recent decades has led to a situation where politics is still mainly national, but the money circuit is global and lawless. The crisis should be seen as the collapse of the money system that the world lived by in the twentieth century. This has been unravelling since the US dollar went off gold in 1971 ^↑ , a new regime of floating currencies emerged and money derivatives were invented in 1972. As the need for international cooperation intensifies, the disconnect between economy and political institutions undermines effective solutions.

2011/12 is the political consequence of the financial crisis of 2007/8. There is still a tendency to see the potential disaster we are living through in economic rather than political terms. In this respect, neoliberalism’s detractors often reproduce the free market ideology they claim to oppose. The euro is by no means the only symptom of this crisis, but it may well be seen in retrospect as the decisive nail in the coffin of the world economy today. One way of approaching our moment in history is to ask not what is beginning, but what is ending. This is not straightforward.

What is ending is “national capitalism”, the synthesis of nation-states and industrial capitalism. Its main symbol has been national monopoly currency (legal tender or central bank money). It was the institutional attempt to manage money, markets and accumulation through central bureaucracy within a cultural community of national citizens. National capitalism was never the only active principle in world political economy: regional federations, empires and globalization are at least as old or much older...

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/keith-hart/crisis-of-money-demise-of-national-capitalism

Girish Mishra on Jose Saramago’s Candid Comments

It is quite often said in India that a person loses his enthusiasm and vigour and the capacity to struggle against odds and acts of injustice as he becomes older. This, however, never applied to the Portuguese literary giant, Jose Saramago. Born in a poor landless family on November 16, 1922, he actively participated in struggles against dictatorship and oppression in his own country and lent his voice to resistance against injustice wherever he saw it. He never, for once, wavered till his death on June 18, 2010.


At a very early age, he joined the Portuguese Communist Party and remained with it till his last breath. He suffered all kinds of difficulties and odds during the Salazar regime but never wavered. With great determination and perse-verance he educated himself while earning his livelihood. He established himself as a great literary figure, not only in Portugal, but also at the international level. In 1998, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his novel Blindness. His other novels such as Seeing, Cave, Death with Interruptions, etc., too, were acclaimed internationally. His books have been translated into more than 25 foreign languages. One of his novels has been rendered into Hindi also. In his own country alone, more than two million copies of his books have been sold.


In 1992, he left Portugal to make Spanish island of Lanzarote as his abode in protest against the Portuguese Government’s ban on the submission of his novel, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, for the European Literature Prize on the pretext that it was offensive to the Catholics. In September 2008, he began writing blogs at the instance of his wife, Pilar, that continued till November 2009. In the process, he commented on various topics. These comments in their English translation were published as The Notebook by Verso in 2010. It carried a Foreword by the Italian writer, Umberto Eco. In Eco’s words, “An odd character, this Saramago. He’s eightyseven…. He’s won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a distinction that would allow him to stop producing anything at all, because he’s entering the pantheon anyway.” He went on to term him as “the most gifted writer alive today” and “one of the last titans of an expiring literary gene”.


Coming to The Notebook, without mincing words Saramago asks: “Why it is that the United States, a country so great in all things, has so often had such small Presidents. George W. Bush is perhaps the smallest of them all. This man, with his mediocre intelligence, abysmal ignorance, confused communication skills, and constant succumbing to the irresistible temp-tation of pure nonsense, has presented himself to humanity in the grotesque pose of a cowboy who has inherited the world and mistaken it for a herd of cattle. We don’t know what he really thinks, we don’t even know if he does think (in the noble sense of the word), we don’t know whether he might not be just a badly programmed robot that constantly confuses and switches around the messages it carries around inside it. But to give the man some credit for once in his life, there is one programme in the robot George Bush, President of the United States, that works to perfection: lying. He knows he’s lying, he knows we know he’s lying, but seeing a compulsive liar, he will keep on lying even when he has the most naked truth right there before his eyes—he will keep on lying even after the truth has exploded in his face. He lied to justify waging war in Iraq just as he lied about the stormy and questionable past, and with just the same shamelessness. With Bush, the lies come from very deep down; they are in his blood. A liar emeritus, he is the high priest of all the other liars who have surrounded him, applauded him, and served him over the past few years.


“George Bush expelled truth from the world, establishing the age of lies that now flourishes in its place. Human society today is contaminated by lies, the worst sort of moral contamination, and he is among those chiefly responsible. The lie circulates everywhere with impunity, and has turned into a kind of other truth… a few years ago, a Portuguese Prime Minister… stated that ‘politics is the art of not telling the truth’, …. For Bush, politics is simply one of the levers of business, and perhaps the best one of all—the lie as a weapon, the lie as the advance guard of tanks and cannons, the lie told over the ruins, over the corpses, over humanity’s wretched and perpetually frustrated hopes….”


He does not take kindly even to the Left, especially the Communists with whom he has been associated all his life. He refers to an interview to a newspaper from Argentina, sometime in 2004 or 2005, wherein he had stated: “The Left has no fucking idea of the world it’s living in.” He had expected that the Left would be provoked to respond, but “The Left responded to my deliberate challenge with the iciest of silences. No Communist Party, for instance, beginning with the one of which I’m a member, emerged from its stockade to refute what I had said or simply to argue about the propriety or the lack of propriety of my language. Even more to the point, nor did any of the Socialist Parties then in government in their respective countries… consider it necessary to demand a clarification from the impudent writer who had dared to throw a stone into a fetid swamp of indifference. Nothing of anything at all, absolute silence, as if there were nothing but dust and spiders in the ideological tombs where they had taken refuge, or nothing more than an ancient bone that was no longer solid enough for a relic…. It was clear that they didn’t think my opinions worthy of their consideration... Read more:
http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article3284.html

Book Review - David Kennedy’s Of War and Law

David Kennedy, Of War and Law (2006)
In an age when global conflicts have evolved into low intensity asymmetric affairs and taken center stage, modern conceptions of both law and war are of paramount importance to our ability to make informed decisions regarding our role in these conflicts. David Kennedy’s assertions in Of War and Law are a clear description of what occurs at the modern nexus of law and war. However, in the midst of a culture awash in images of casualties piped directly into modern living rooms (something he calls the “CNN effect”) Kennedy takes on the task of providing the realignment that seems all the more vital for the reeducation of both professionals and the wider public audience alike.

Of War and Law, starts out assaulting the traditional definition of war with the various phenomena upon which the label has been bestowed. Traditional wars of combat are contrasted with metaphorical wars, the cold war, international interventions, the 9/11 attacks, and even the notion that security is more a state of mind then a set of factual circumstances. While law is often seen as a means to avoid and constrain war, Of War and Law extirpates this notion from our minds refocusing our conception of both modern war and law. In the epilogue to Of War and Law David Kennedy states, “The hand of force animates the world of law.” It is this ultimate underpinning of law that reminds us of the intimate connection the law has with the use of force and its ultimate expression through the violence and chaos that fills our popular notion of war. It is with these thoughts that Kennedy prepares our conception of war before forging ahead to explore the relationship between war and law.


A Legal Context For War? Before launching into any detailed retelling of the historical relationship between law and war Kennedy clarifies the concept of war as a legal institution, providing us with a starting point by going back almost 200 years and paraphrasing Clausewitz, “war is still the continuation of politics by other means.” The reader is made aware of how an elite class of international professionals drawn from the ranks of military personnel and humanitarians with their respective skill sets and imperatives, participate in the discourse upon which the political and legal context for war is constructed. It becomes clear that this modern context has arisen through technological improvements in communication and the adoption of a common language based on law between and among the professionals. A seriously disconcerting assertion arising out of Kennedy’s context for war, at least for the general public, is that knowledge of the politics of these professions is required to understand the politics of war and peace...


Download the review: http://www.germanlawjournal.com/pdfs/Vol08No05/PDF_Vol_08_555-562_No_05_Developments_Wall.pdf

Workers, Unions and the Left: Responding to the Global Crisis by Rohini Hensman

Defining globalisation

1. Anti-globalisation activists often called themselves anti-capitalist, and used the terms interchangeably. But if globalisation is capitalism by another name, why not simply call it capitalism? Substituting ‘globalisation’ for ‘capitalism’ implies that the real enemy is international capital: and that is dangerous. Opposition to global capital has been a defining feature of fascism since Hitler wrote, in Mein Kampf, ‘that the hardest battle would have to be fought not against hostile nations but against international capital’. At best, selective opposition to international capital propagates the illusion that capitalism can solve problems of poverty and unemployment so long as it remains national. At worst, it condones barbaric oppression and exploitation by indigenous capitalists, and encourages racism and xenophobia. Globalisation may be a phase of capitalism, but anti-globalisation can never be anti-capitalist, because genuine opposition to capitalism doesn’t distinguish between ‘national’ and ‘international’ capital, or support the former against the latter.

2. A large section of the Left identifies globalisation with imperialism, and opposes it from this point of view. I won’t go into all the debates around imperialism that I have covered in my book, but just refer to one aspect: the relationship between imperialism, especially from the mid-19th century onwards, and the nation-state. Colonialism required the imperialist power to set up an administrative apparatus in the colony and to maintain a substantial military presence to deal with uprisings, but less traditional forms of imperialism have also relied heavily on extensions of state power outside the imperialist country: for example, the ubiquitous CIA, and US military bases around the world. Moreover, imperialist bourgeoisies demanded protectionism from the state, which benefited the working class in those countries too. As a result of nationalist ideology in the imperialist countries, ‘there arose a sudden community of interest between capital and the proletariat, which finds expression in an identical inclination of both classes to imperialism,’ as Max Adler put it. Lenin was even harsher, denouncing sections of the labour movement that supported their own bourgeoisie in World War I (which he saw an as inter-imperialist war) as a ‘labour aristocracy’ who had betrayed their own class.

Thus nationalism and the dependence of capitalists on the military power of their own nation-state are central to imperialism. What is called globalisation, on the contrary, is marked by the emergence of advanced sectors of capital that rely on porous rather than protected national borders, and do not need military backing from a nation-state. It is very different from imperialism.

3. Equally common on the Left is the use of the terms ‘globalisation’ and ‘neoliberalism’ as being more or less synonymous. Neoliberalism is identified as what came to be known as the Washington Consensus: the policies enforced by the IMF and World Bank... Read more: http://www.sacw.net/article2530.html

Is there such a thing as ethical capitalism?by Kerry-anne Mendoza

..It is interesting that this question – 'is there such a thing as ethical capitalism?' – is asked in binary terms, yet often answered in spectrum.  Notice the question is not ‘what is the most ethical economic system?’ or ‘which economic model promotes the most ethical economy?

Furthermore, the very question itself acts as a ring fence around the resulting debate, concentrating the imagination within the boundaries of just this one system – capitalism. The reason it is answered in spectrum might well be that the unethical behaviour associated with capitalism is so overwhelming and unignorable, that even the most ardent defence relies on relativity arguments – ‘given human nature’, ‘compared with communism’, ‘would you rather live here or North Korea?’.

Therefore I consider the question itself to be unethical.  It is either insincere or ignorant...

Our understanding of capitalism is incredibly limited.  Despite this being the prevailing world economic system, it is not taught until University in the United Kingdom.  This means the vast majority of the population have never even had a structured, informed conversation around the mechanics and iterations of capitalism, let alone whether it is ethical or not.  People, on the whole, don’t know what it is, what it does, what it means, where it came from or what it replaced.

As a snapshot, capitalism is a socio-economic ideology, a theory and the current global economic paradigm.  It originated in the West, gained a foothold in the 1700s and 1800s and ultimately replaced feudalism. It has gone through various incarnations, or developments, from Mercantilism, Industrialism, Keynesianism, and the latest, Neo-Liberalism.  It exists in established democracies and totalitarian dictatorships. 

Yet I have had conversations on the topic of a world without capitalism with intelligent people who, without irony, have stated that capitalism has always existed and will always exist because people will always want to exchange things with each other. To be clear, you can have an economy without it being capitalist.  You can have trade of ideas, labour, skills and products without capitalism. Capitalism is not synonymous with any of these things. 

I mention this not to belittle, but to demonstrate how successfully and misleadingly capitalism has been branded as natural, inevitable, permanent and, arguably the most intriguing, ‘post-ideological’.  It is none of these things. But consider for a moment: if most people believe it is, then does it matter whether it is ethical at all?  If something is natural, inevitable, permanent & not based in ideology, isn’t even entering a conversation about the ethics of it somewhat irrelevant outside of the curiosities of academia?...

...technological and scientific progress rely on the broadest population of educated, innovative, critical thinkers with access to means of contributing ideas, skills and capabilities to achieve breakthrough results.  Yet in order to safeguard the profit from any venture, it makes economic sense to have the smallest group of people involved as possible, operate secretively, and use patents and licenses to prevent others from ‘stealing your idea’ and making the profit from it that you yourself seek.  In order to progress more quickly, one would need to over-ride or compromise this economic imperative.  There has been fascinating work recently covered in TED talks on this matter and I’ll use one example: cancer research.

Jay Bradner, a researcher at Harvard University, and his lab discovered a molecule JQ1 which they thought might explain how cancer cells know they are cancer cells – and wanted to explore if this finding could be used to outfox cancer.   He expounds on the success of the decision of his microbiology lab to refuse to patent JQ1, and instead to publish their findings, post them out to 40 other labs, and open source the development of their work. The work is truly inspiring.  This case demonstrates two things.  Firstly, that scientific progress does not rely on competition, but collaboration. Secondly, people are driven as much by purpose and passion, as they are by financial gain, or put another way – actual success and economic success not synonymous.

Even in this case, participation is still limited by the need to make money from it at all, and no doubt Jay Bradner and his team made less money than they ultimately could have if they had chosen to stay in the secretive, closed, patent model.  This is important as it is exactly what has the majority of people remain in the model which Bradner and his team have demonstrated is a de facto slow lane for research and development.

Supporters of capitalism might ask ‘why should people not benefit financially from their skills and capabilities?’, yet it could equally be asked of capitalism, ‘why would you penalise people for collaboration?’, or ‘why would you incentivise behaviour which holds us back?’...

The people today refusing to entertain even the conversation, or imagining of a post-capitalist economy, are no different to the feudal barons and peasants who could not foresee or were hostile to the dynamic newcomer capitalism in centuries past.  For them, humanity has reached the apex of its ability to generate economic and political ideas.

To hold a view of humankind as static, or finite in our ability to innovate and create is, in my opinion, to fundamentally close one’s mind to the facts, as demonstrated by human history.  It has been said before, that the economy is a great servant but a terrible master.  This is demonstrated perfectly by a glance at the current state of our world.  It seems we have forgotten that we, human beings, invented this economy. If it has ceased to serve us then our best efforts should - and in the tent cities, repossessed public buildings and occupied homes across the world are -being made to design another...

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/kerry-anne-mendoza/is-there-such-thing-as-ethical-capitalism

Nice Nihilism

The Atheist’s Guide To Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions,
Alex Rosenberg, W.W. Norton & Co, 201


‘This is a book for atheists’. Rosenberg makes this explicit in the preface. Atheism requires a whole view of the world based on science that is ‘demanding, rigorous, breathtaking.’ There’s a feeling you get when reading Rosenberg that he’s fed up with atheists who avoid facing up to the big persistent questions such as: ‘what is the nature of reality, the purpose of the universe, and the meaning of life? Is there any rhyme or reason to the course of human history? Why am I here? Do I have a soul, and if so, how long will it last? What happens when we die? Do we have free will? Why should I be moral? What is love, and why is it usually inconvenient?’ 


Rosenberg demands that atheists just stop arguing with theists, for one because ‘contemporary religious belief is immune to rational objection’ but also because it eats into the time atheists should be taking to work through the implications of their own worldview. Atheists need to spend more time getting to grips with what they should know about the reality we inhabit because science reveals it is ‘stranger than even many atheists recognise.’


So he’s just not all that interested in going over the old arguments that keep getting reheated by lazy atheists who haven’t any news but do have a publishing deal. The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, Letter To A Christian Nation and so on are dull books that probably make more sense in the USA than from where I am but they bring nothing new to the table, play to a home crowd and change no one’s mind. Rosenberg is doing something different from being a cheerleader. He’s bringing a few home truths to the table. I suspect some atheists will not be able to swallow them whole and that just like the theists will also find ways of ducking the question.


So what are his answers to the persistent questions, as he calls them, the ones at the head of this article and his book, the ones we have that begin early in life, get crowded out by thoughts of sex in adolescence and then come steaming back afterwards? There is no God. Reality is what physics says (and evolutionary biology). There is no purpose to anything, anywhere. Never was, never will be. There is therefore no meaning to life. I’m here because of dumb luck. Prayer doesn’t work. There is no such thing as a soul. There is no freewill. When we die, everything stays the same except without us. There is no moral difference between good and bad, right and wrong. You should be good because it makes you feel better than being bad. Anything goes. Love is a solution to a strategic coordination problem. It’s automatic, programmed so there’s no need to go out looking for it. History has no purpose (see above) because the future is less and less like the past. Ditto economics. Technology makes predicting the future a guessing game and their rational choice theories are outrageously bad psychology.


Rosenberg argues that belief in free will and purpose and all that (see above) is belief in hokum of the same order as belief in God. The atheists’ self-image as the hero nihilist choosing her fate is condemned as being just as hopeless as the religious self image. This is why this is a book with some tough and strange lessons for the atheist. His book is a genuine guide, giving the reader a thorough reading list of the key texts that everyone should read, summarising the main points quickly, smartly and expecting you to go away and do further work. He’s a teacher after all, a very, very smart professor who assumes you too can be even smarter if you sweat a little more and put in the hours. So he’s a good teacher with high aspirations for us all. 


But what reason does he have for his worldview? He argues for a naturalism that results in what he calls a ‘nice nihilism’. By this he means that atheists are not nihilists (although their scientific world view is) and that for good evolutionary reasons everyone tends to be nice. Nietzsche was probably the best philosopher who guessed this naturalist worldview without knowing the science (Hume did pretty well too)...

Rosenberg talks about having fun. Nice nihilism implies that attributing meaning to our lives is just an introspective illusion selected by blind evolutionary processes, caused by photons and fermions blindly operating, working in real time in our brains, that has helped us survive. We attach meaning by these determined operations in our brain which give the illusion that there are actual purposes. But there are no such things. As I said, the illusion is explained by natural selection: it has been heavily selected for so that everyone is within two standard deviations of the mean of a happy normal life – the fun life – in the biosphere we find ourselves in. We flourish, or rather, have fun, because we are naturally selected to do so. We trick out statements of purpose but they are illusions. Naturalism cannot solve the problem of philosophy in ways that satisfy those seeking confirmation of a reality that gives purpose because there is no purpose.

At this point it might seem that Rosenberg is being inconsistent. He accepts that tables exist because they are real patterns of fermions and bosons in local equilibria, so why doesn’t he accept purposes as existing as similar patterns in local equilibria? But Rosenberg argues that nothing in science underwrites the value of any categorical imperative such as thou shalt not steal or kill or you ought to look after your neighbour, the frail, weak and so on.

But then, if there are no categorical imperatives (except linguistically) don’t abhorrent values become equal with decent ones? If there’s nothing in the naturalistic worldview to underwrite goodness then Hitler is equal to Gandhi. Rosenberg accepts this but says we shouldn’t worry. Rosenberg says we are all just hard-wired to be nice. Morals are for him a type of norm expressivism...  <http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/nice-nihilism/>
------
NB: as a counter to this naturalistic worldview, Interested readers may refer to the philosopher Stanley Rosen's book, Nihilism. Also this sentence from one of his essays: "The connection between reason and the good is established by the structure of human experience as choosing between better and worse. It is a false description of human nature and therefore bad science, to say that we make these choices on a narrowly utilitarian basis; and it is simply unintelligible to be told that we are not making these choices at all but that they are being made for us by our blood sugar level or the firing of cells in our brains. There is no ghost in the machine, not merely because there are no ghosts, but because we are not machines.." 

Sartre and Terror

by Ian Birchall

It is one of Sartre’s greatest strengths that his declared aim was ’to write for his own time’. From the 1940s onward he became ever less interested in ’timeless’ questions, and ever more concerned to explore the concrete realities of his own age. Yet paradoxically this engagement with the contemporary makes it particularly tempting to speculate about what would have been Sartre’s response to the events of our own age. Ever since his death in 1980 those of us who have drawn insight and inspiration from Sartre’s works have tended to ask how Sartre might have judged particular political developments. And because of the central place given to violence in Sartre’s thought, as well as his detailed reflections on the Second World War and the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, it is only too natural to ask how Sartre would have responded to the appalling events of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent ’war on terror’.

a) Sartre and the Twenty-First Century

To raise the question of what Sartre might have thought of the events of 11 September provokes the response that, if he had been able to comment on them, he would have been ninety-six years old. I was present in 1966 at the meeting where the 94-year-old Bertrand Russell launched the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and I have no ageist prejudice against nonagenarian philosophers. But the point is not a flippant one. Sartre was deeply rooted in the history of his own age, and to apply Sartre to a later period necessarily implies an appreciation of how Sartre’s thought was formed in the context of his own age. The period 1939-1962, in which most of Sartre’s major work was produced, was a period of almost uninterrupted violent conflict for his native land. The German Occupation gave way almost immediately to national liberation struggles, first in Indochina, then in Algeria. The centrality of violence in Sartre’s work cannot be detached from this context.

Sartre reacted to and learnt from the events of his own age; his was a mind in constant evolution, perpetually trying to make more concrete his central notion of freedom, permanently negating and transcending his own earlier positions. It is unwise to seek total consistency in an intellectual figure from the past. [As one who has admired and defended Sartre over nearly fifty years, I feel very uncomfortable with the label ’Sartrean’; it implies taking on rather more baggage than I am prepared to accept responsibility for.] The tangled and self contradictory narrative of Sartre’s various stances on the Middle East should be a clear warning that, while there are important insights and contentions that can be explained by Sartre’s own experience, there is no coherent Sartrean position.

This does not mean that there is no consistency at all. Sartre’s whole adult development involves a dialogue with various currents of the French left. And it is certainly no coincidence that the vast majority of those devoted to the study of Sartre whom I encounter are in one way or another are actively opposed to the current Bush Blair ’war on terror’.

b) The French Revolution

What did the term ’Terror’ mean to Sartre? There can be little doubt that for the schoolchild his first acquaintance with the term (other than in the primary sense of ’fear’) would have been in the context of the French Revolution... Read more at

http://www.sacw.net/article2457.html

The Future of History: By Francis Fukuyama

Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class?  

Something strange is going on in the world today. The global financial crisis that began in 2008 and the ongoing crisis of the euro are both products of the model of lightly regulated financial capitalism that emerged over the past three decades. Yet despite widespread anger at Wall Street bailouts, there has been no great upsurge of left-wing American populism in response. It is conceivable that the Occupy Wall Street movement will gain traction, but the most dynamic recent populist movement to date has been the right-wing Tea Party, whose main target is the regulatory state that seeks to protect ordinary people from financial speculators. Something similar is true in Europe as well, where the left is anemic and right-wing populist parties are on the move.

There are several reasons for this lack of left-wing mobilization, but chief among them is a failure in the realm of ideas. For the past generation, the ideological high ground on economic issues has been held by a libertarian right. The left has not been able to make a plausible case for an agenda other than a return to an unaffordable form of old-fashioned social democracy. This absence of a plausible progressive counter narrative is unhealthy, because competition is good for intellectual debate just as it is for economic activity. And serious intellectual debate is urgently needed, since the current form of globalized capitalism is eroding the middle-class social base on which liberal democracy rests.

THE DEMOCRATIC WAVE:  Social forces and conditions do not simply “determine” ideologies, as Karl Marx once maintained, but ideas do not become powerful unless they speak to the concerns of large numbers of ordinary people. Liberal democracy is the default ideology around much of the world today in part because it responds to and is facilitated by certain socioeconomic structures. Changes in those structures may have ideological consequences, just as ideological changes may have socioeconomic consequences.

Almost all the powerful ideas that shaped human societies up until the past 300 years were religious in nature, with the important exception of Confucianism in China. The first major secular ideology to have a lasting worldwide effect was liberalism, a doctrine associated with the rise of first a commercial and then an industrial middle class in certain parts of Europe in the seventeenth century. (By “middle class,” I mean people who are neither at the top nor at the bottom of their societies in terms of income, who have received at least a secondary education, and who own either real property, durable goods, or their own businesses.)

As enunciated by classic thinkers such as Locke, Montesquieu, and Mill, liberalism holds that the legitimacy of state authority derives from the state’s ability to protect the individual rights of its citizens and that state power needs to be limited by the adherence to law. One of the fundamental rights to be protected is that of private property; England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 was critical to the development of modern liberalism because it first established the constitutional principle that the state could not legitimately tax its citizens without their consent.

At first, liberalism did not necessarily imply democracy. ..
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136782/francis-fukuyama/the-future-of-history#


A related, but differently oriented article by me on the idea of history's end:
http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.com/2011/11/twenty-first-century-end-of-history.html
The End of History or the beginning of transformation?
The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War are events of great magnitude. Because we are living through them, many of us do not appreciate fully the significance of what has happened - but as the new century unfolds it will become clearer. For certain liberal intellectuals these events signify the end of history itself - that is, history interpreted as the realisation of the idea of progress. Thus, Hegel’s celebration of the Prussian absolutist state is replicated in Fukuyama’s understanding of liberal capitalism as the final point of arrival of historical evolution. This ideologically coloured concept of history carries the implication that the future can unfold only as an endless vista of capitalist accumulation, and that there is a logical and natural connection between capitalism and democracy. Such theories are linked to classical political-economic notions of capital as a ‘natural’ phenomenon, or an ahistoric “factor of production”. 

The same presumptions underlie the view that capitalism is an economic system which mysteriously combines greed and profiteering with the fulfilment of human interests through what Adam Smith named “the hidden hand” of the market. Contemporary history has also been witness to the ideological rise of monetarist triumphalism, and neo-liberalism, the politically inspired dismantlement of the gains of social-democracy, and an all-round crisis of vision that affects both left and right-wing political forces. It has heralded an era of identity politics and fragmentation, creating more and more barriers between ordinary people on the one hand, coupled with structural adjustments geared toward maximum freedom for MNC’s and speculative capital, on the other. After 9/11, it been engulfed in the first overt phase of an emergent world order, one of whose characteristics is a global assault on civil liberties and long-standing legal conventions on human rights in wartime. It is now a matter of intense debate whether this phase is the last gasp of American imperialism, or the first expression of a more global and esoteric empire, the Empire of Capital.

The idea that capitalism is a permanent arrangement is an assumption that we must challenge. But there is a problem here. Right-wing triumphalism may indeed be challenged when placed in historical perspective. However, radical theory cannot approach the gigantic historical events of the century gone by without performing a thoroughgoing critique of its own past. Is it capable of doing this?.. http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.com/2011/11/twenty-first-century-end-of-history.html

Awakening the Giant: Is the long night of the left drawing to a close?

Is communism not the name for an enormous crime, for the Gulag Archipelago and for totalitarian states? Did it not fail, both economically and politically? Didn't people risk their lives to escape communism? Is "communist" not, moreover, the name for the party that still rules over the world's most populous country – a country that is both markedly authoritarian and profoundly subject to the dictates of neoliberal capitalism? Such has been the hegemonic view for the past three decades.

What Badiou terms the period of "restoration" began in the mid-1970s with the decline of national liberation struggles, youth movements and factory revolts. The ebbing of these struggles, he argues, ushered in a "bitter period of betrayal" in which former activists rallied to parliamentary politics and submitted to global capitalism. It was an era characterized by critiques of totalitarianism, praise for human rights and apparently humanitarian (but in reality, imperialist) "interventions" and capitulations to the power of the United States.

For three decades, Badiou wrote, the word "communism" was either forgotten or taken to signify a criminal enterprise. In contrast, he describes his own trajectory as a refusal to yield to this counterrevolutionary betrayal. For Badiou, who constantly affirms his own fidelity to the events of May '68 and the revolutionary Marxist heritage, the very impetus for philosophy comes from the attempt to understand "how and why many of his generational peers could betray their revolutionary convictions."

In his short book The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou argues that today all that remains of the ideological machinery of freedom, human rights and Western values is a simple, negative statement: communism failed. The labors of the capitalist philosophers, he says, amount to little more than the assertion that there is no choice but to consent to the capitalist, parliamentary present. But what "exactly do we mean by 'failure' when we refer to a historical sequence that experimented with one or another form of the communist hypothesis?" he asks. When we say that the socialist experiments failed – and Badiou does not dispute this proposition – do we mean that the communist hypothesis and the horizon of emancipation to which it gestured should be abandoned? Or do we mean that they failed because they took a wrong path, because they failed to respond to the initial problem in the right way?

The failures of previous attempts to realize communism, Badiou suggests, must be treated as stages in the realization of the idea. For him, as for the other philosophers at the communism conferences, the problems that gave rise to this idea have, if anything, become more acute. Here Badiou compares the history of attempts to realize the idea of communism with the history of efforts to resolve a mathematical problem. Fermat's theorem, for instance, was solved only recently after 300 years of failed attempts. Referring to those New Philosophers who authorise their condemnations of communism through reference to the brief and loose communist affiliations of their youth, he notes that no one would take very seriously a mathematician who failed to solve a problem in his early twenties and used that as evidence that the problem itself no longer exists...

In The Communist Hypothesis, which was published in 2010, Badiou argued that a key source of the crisis of Western democracy is that "it is less and less capable of corrupting its local clientele and buying off the ferocious regimes of the Mubaraks and Musharrafs who are responsible for keeping watch on the flocks of the poor." Within a year, Mubarak was gone and uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa had profoundly transformed the face of global political possibility. For Badiou, echoing Marx's much-cited definition of communism as the "real movement that abolishes the present state of things," these movements reveal, in its purest form since the Paris Commune, "a communism of movement." But in what sense is it meaningful to speak of the Arab Spring as communist?

Badiou's point is not that the participants in these uprisings are subjectively communists – indeed, after decades of successful annihilation of the left across the Middle East, this would hardly be expected. Rather the point is that a successful popular uprising points toward the horizon designated by Marx as the withering of the state, opening up a realm of non-state political action in which that elusive figure "the people" comes into being.

"Communism", Badiou writes, "here means: a common creation of a collective destiny." Such a common, he argues, is generic, representing humanity as a whole, and capable of overcoming statist contradictions between substantive identities. When female doctors from the provinces sleep peacefully in the middle of a circle of young men, when a row of Christians keeps watch over Muslims at prayer, when a group of engineers entreats young suburbanites to hold firm, these situations and inventions, he suggests, constitute the communism of movement.

The events in the Middle East, for Badiou, have created not a new reality, but myriad possibilities for the world as a whole, and refuted the belief that all that is possible in politics is to choose between parliamentary representatives. Rather than lecturing the movements about democracy, he argues, we should be their students, heeding their lesson that a genuine politics of emancipation is possible. The uprisings, he argues, give life to the principles the dominant powers have tried to convince us are obsolete – in particular, "the principle that Marat never stopped recalling: when it is a matter of liberty, equality, emancipation, we all have to join the popular upheavals."

But would it not be better to give up on the name, to find another name less compromised, one with a less tragic history? .. Read on:

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/99/long-night-left.html

A Finer Balance - An Essay on the Possibility of Reconciliation

Text of an address delivered at the Documenta Symposium on Truth, Justice and Reconciliation, New Delhi, May 9, 2001.

Introduction

I begin this address by a simple reflection on the key words in the title of this symposium - truth, justice, reconciliation. They mean a great deal to me intellectually and emotionally, and they are always accompanied by a question mark - is there any such thing as truth, will there ever be a just society, may we dare hope for reconciliation? Like all great concepts they are too full of meaning to admit of any certitude. The title goes further - it speaks of experiments with truth, transitional justice, and processes of reconciliation. These phrases in turn, contain much food for thought, especially for Indians. It was an Indian, one of the greatest figures of the past century, who coined that germ of a Brahmasutra, “experiments with truth”, as his unique contribution to ethical philosophy. In its own way, this concept challenges the epistemological authoritarianism of market-liberalism, Leninism, and the monoliths of identity, while (in conjunction with the concept of ahimsa), suggesting an alternative to the nihilist ethics of post-modernity.

The concept of transitional justice is also one to which Indian experience speaks in a special way. Our transitions are different from the stark changes in South Africa and Germany yet they remain as painful. We are in perpetual states of temperamental, cultural, geo political and economic transition. Our social space is suspended between tradition and modernity, we exist as a people comprised of communities and also as a democratic nation state of individual citizens, our economy lies poised between regulation and the lack of it, our cultural and religious psyche does not know what to preserve and what to forget. Our notions of justice veer between a hierarchical sensibility that calibrates punishment according to the status of wrongdoers, and a jurisprudence that theoretically considers all citizens equal before the law. We know we are in transition. The only problem is that we don’t know where the transition is headed.

Again, the practice of reconciliation is something we desperately need to learn. Vast areas in the sub-continent have remained under martial law for decades. The number of orphans in the Kashmir valley run into the tens of thousands. Violence and terror have acquired a seamless trajectory. Communal and ethnic hatreds lurk beneath the surface of everyday life. The glorification of “masculine” virtue is a national pastime. And yet we Indians prefer to cling to our favourite symbolised grievances than to take the smallest steps towards comprehension and resolution.

The Threads of an Argument

The logic of my arguments will take the following trajectory, and base itself on the recognition that:

truth, justice and reconciliation are sorely needed;

that because they mean so many things to so many people, we must adopt certain rules of restraint and non-violence while we live and discover what they are,

that a society whose proclaimed leaders do not adhere to such rules, or have an equivocal stance towards political violence, is headed for self-destruction,

that democracy and human equality are relatively youthful concepts in the Asian polity - and even globally; that the extension of these principles to the world economy is still not acceptable to those who occupy its commanding heights,

that destitution and oppression are still the common experience of millions of people and while this lasts, the preservation of democracy is crucial to the fulfilment of modest aspirations

that reconciliation is only possible between equals, and cannot even be attempted when various conflicting parties humiliate and stifle one another

that a properly functional judicial system is crucial to social stability; and,

that judges, like the rest of us are mere mortals, and that therefore the sense of justice and fair play has to be sustained by a social ethos and enlightened public opinion.

Read the full text at: http://www.sacw.net/article2430.html

See also:

The Twenty-First Century - the End of History?

Closing the Circle: Article on Revolution in Frontier, August 2012

The New Spirit of Economics

John Maynard Keynes, the architect of America’s recovery from the Great Depression and champion of the welfare state, believed that at its core, economics is ruled by “animal spirits.” That is to say that the free, equal and rational mind of consumers in the Locke/Smith economic paradigm does not sufficiently explain human action in the market place; that economies operate more according to Freudian animal heritage, or esoteric and emotional impulses, than reason. Other thinkers from this formative economic era, like Joseph Schumpeter, sensed that a violent, warlike impulse of “creative destruction” lurked at the heart of capitalism. And Karl Marx, the great dreamer, proposed that economic theory, rather than empowering and rewarding the selfish gene, could instead create a better social realm in which every person gave according to his abilities and received according to his needs..

...Today, as Gregory Mankiw’s widely used first year university economics textbook, Principles of Economics, shows, the “common weal” discipline has been reduced to a dry, boring, amoral and inhuman study full of pseudo formulas and cumbersome equations with little connection to ethical questions or social desirability. Graph upon graph on page after page of Principles of Economics reveal just how far economics has drifted from the poetry and prose of its roots – that often misread bible of global finance, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations – to the purposely obtuse and elite math of today.

Along the way, a host of radical (though not really radical – just traditional) thinkers tried to warn the logic freaks of economics that their profession was heading into a dead end. Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontief said: “Departments of economics are graduating a generation of idiot savants, brilliant at esoteric mathematics yet innocent of actual economic life.” Author of The Origin of Economic Ideas, Guy Routh wrote: “The standard economic texts are powerful instruments of disorientation; for confusing the mind and preparing it for the acceptance of myths of growing complexity and unreality.” And the great American economist and historian Robert Heilbroner, famously warned: “Before economics can progress it must abandon its suicidal formalism.”


But to no avail… for half a century, these warnings have fallen on deaf ears.

So here we are. Great Depression 2.0 and finally the mystery of economics is again awakening from its long logical slumber. In the panic of escalating financial and ecological meltdown, the old certitudes are crumbling and the logic freaks are everywhere in retreat. In 2008 Bush-era Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, the man who oversaw much of America’s financial nose dive, told the public “those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect share-holders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.” That’s putting it mildly.. 


Read more: http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/98/new-spirit-economics.html