IMPORTANT UPDATE

IMPORTANT UPDATE

Considering this blog is relatively unknown and my older blog is semi-well known I will be transferring everything to that blog. 

That blog is called Peter Says Stuff. You should all go read that blog instead, it will contain the same content plus more!! 

The American War Machine

Abstract

There are a ton of articles written that purport to explain why the United States and subsequently NATO got involved in specific quagmires around the world. While these articles are wonderful in explaining the United State's posture on specific countries such as Iraq or Afghanistan, they fail to weave these discrete events into the overall fabric of the United State's hegemonic role in the world. During the course of this paper I will argue that following World War II the United States' active role in the world-which manifests itself in the toppling of regimes and the support of apartheid-is not out of a love of "democracy" or "freedom", but rather is part of the ungodly melding of neo-liberalism and neo-conservationism's goal for United States hegemonic domination. Throughout this paper I will argue that the major wars of the second half of the 20th century fought by the United States, from the Cold War proxy wars to the Iraq war to the proposed war on Iran to name a few, are not discrete pieces of data. Nay, they are points on a continuous line drawn by the United States government which ends with the permanent imperialistic, hegemonic status of the American empire.

I believe - though I may be wrong, because I'm no expert - that this war is about what most wars are about: hegemony, money, power and oil.                                                                                                      -Dustin Hoffman[1]

Part 1 

The first question one would ask, (and rightfully so), would be: "What do you mean by neo-liberalism, neo-conservativism, and hegemony?" In part one I shall define them and explain how they all tie together.

Neo-liberalism is, on it's surface, is the support for free trade, massive privatization, and deregulation.[2] 

Neo-conservativism is a doctrine which endorses socially conservative living, a support for nationalism, and an appreciation for the free market.[3]

Hegemony is, in the original sense, leadership by one country over another country.[4] Hegemony encompasses many things including, but not limited to, the ability to deter aggressors, promote one's own ideals or even in the Gramscian sense, to subvert opposition.

Henceforth, the aforementioned three will be lumped together under the title of neo-colonialism which is defined as "domination of a small or weak country by a large or strong one without the assumption of direct government".[5]

However, I argue that neo-colonialism is more than just that. Neo-colonialism is one of the biggest tools the bourgeoisie uses to subjugate the rest of the world. Neo-colonialism is merely the highest stages of neo-liberalism and neo-conservativism. Allow me to explain; neo-liberalism's unquenchable thirst for new markets, what Peter Dickens calls "outsides" to capitalism, combined with neo-conservativism's appetite for destruction and militarism necessitate the direct or, in most cases today, indirect control of another nation. In order to guarantee access to raw materials, get cheap labor, and have people to sell the goods to, the United States must enforce "regime change" and install a pro-US government that grants us those things...regardless of the cost.

Part 2

Following World War II and the subsequent division of Germany's land and the destruction of Great Britain, two world powers remained. The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Not only was this unfavorable for the United States but it also did the Soviet Union a disservice because there could be no lasting peace between the two. Then, following in the footsteps of manifest destiny and the drive to maintain an American empire we began a systematic plot to demonize the Soviet Union and test the boundaries of American power. 

In 1947 the British Government under economic pressures decided to stop funding the Greek and Turkish governments in their fight against communist rebels. The American government, seeing this as a subtle attack by the reds to undermine western governments and destabilize Europe and by the urging of statesman Dean Acheson, began adopting plans that fit under a broader policy called "containment".[6] (As the name implies, containing communism)

On March 12, 1947, Harry S. Truman petitioned congress for what was later called "The Truman Doctrine". This policy was to give about $400 million to the governments of Greece and Turkey in lieu of Britain's aid to help fight the rebels.[7] This doctrine within the framework of containment was the first major attempt by the United States to demonize a critique of the American model. Truman said of the doctrine "It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."[8]

Following that, in April 1947, the so called "Marshall Plan" was implemented. The Marshall Plan was a plan to give economic aid to the war ravaged countries of Europe to "...prevent the spread of international communism".[9]



Here one might say, "the Soviet Union was a threat to United States hegemony" however, up until June of 1948 the Soviet Union had not done any, tangible attack on Western society. The Soviet Unions actions before the Berlin Blockade where merely attempts to rebuild it's own war torn nation.  The actions of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan within the framework of containment were attempts to do a few things. First, they were attempts to demonize the communist critique of Western society by making them out to be the "bad guys". This was done masterfully through the convincing of the American populace that Communists would try to take them over and that they were "evil" creatures. Second, they were attempts to discredit the Soviet model by making it seem like they weren't good enough to be taken seriously on the international stage formally and thus had to have underhanded tactics used to deal with the likes of them. Finally, they were responses to a created threat. The threat of a Communist take over, at least in the 40's, was a threat that we constructed. The United States government built a threat, the threat of a communistic take over, and reacted to that threat by asserting its dominance in the international sphere. This aggressive force posture towards the Soviet Union prior to 1948 served only to hinder the ability to rebuild as well as disgrace them in the international sphere. The Soviet Union's actions following the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were responses to the United States making them out to be an enemy, not preemptive actions like the United States was doing.


This assertion of dominance was a force posture adopted by the neo-colonialists in response to the critique of the American model. The denouncing of the Soviet Union, the funding of foreign governments and the out worldly hostile stance of the United States towards the Soviets constitutes a form of neo-colonialism. We funded foreign governments to help fight off a perceived threat and in turn controlled the governments themselves by convincing them that without our aid they would fall into the anarchy thus they came back to us and hid behind the American nuclear umbrella. 

This force posture adopted by the United States was not a happenstance, rather, the United States chose this. We decided to fund foreign governments for the sole purpose of preventing the spread of communism. We decided to militarize throughout Europe and extend our nuclear umbrella over most western nations. We decided to denounce the Soviet Union on the international scale and the threat that we made, the threat of global communist take over, was made a reality by our militaristic, anti-communist discourse and our actions in the international sphere. 

However, let's talk some more about threat construction (albeit in the context of China) and the later years of the Soviet Union. 

The way threat construction works is thusly: we see another nation as a threat to our way of life (or it's the market forces implanting a form of false consciousness into the people that leads them to fear the other*), we begin a campaign of demonization and fear that in turn leads to the militarization of allied countries and ourselves in response to this "threat". That militarization is seen as a direct (rather than constructed) threat on the "demon" nations sovereignty and they militarize making the original "threat" a reality! Dr. Chengxin Pan of the Deakin University in Australia writes about threat construction in the context of China. He says:

For instance, as the United States presses ahead with a missile-defence shield to "guarantee" its invulnerability from rather unlikely sources of missile attacks, it would be almost certain to intensify China's sense of vulnerability and compel it to expand its current small nuclear arsenal so as to maintain the efficiency of its limited deterrence. In consequence, it is not impossible that the two countries, and possibly the whole region, might be dragged into an escalating arms race that would eventually make war more likely.[10]

This mentality of militarization and demonization of the other leads to actual threats that increase the risk of a conflict. The Cuban Missile Crisis is a prime example of this fact. The United States was militarizing at a rapid pace and we had missiles stationed throughout Europe and this in turn seemed like a threat to the sovereignty of the Soviet Union. That feeling led them to attempt to place missiles in Cuba causing the event that was probably the closest we've ever come to a nuclear war - the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

Part 3

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the destruction of the original Maoist party in China leading them to state capitalism the stage was set for total United States hegemony. 

At the end of the Cold War the United States had stockpiled roughly 8,000 ICBMs[12] and countless more bombs themselves. Not only that but had a financial-military-industrial complex capable of winning us any war. But we were not content with that alone. We armed Saddam Husein with the "weapons of mass destruction" that were a pretext for the United State's invasion[13] in order to gain another ally and foothold in the Middle East as well as us training Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban in order to fight off the Soviets in a proxy war[14] and to maintain another foothold. 

The invasion of Grenada, the "interventions" in Iraq and Afghanistan, the toppling of a regime in Libya, the smuggling of missiles in for the Syrian "rebels" all the way up to the proposed Israeli war on Iran are not discrete events. They are not individual military actions. No no, they are points on the continuous line of American neo-colonialism where we fund oppressive regimes and are fine with it until they make the mistake of criticizing the United States or until they step out of line or we realize that we need just one more ally in the Middle East. Once that point is reached we invade or support a "multilateral" operation designed to overthrow the governments we funded under the auspices of "preserving freedom" or "bringing democracy" to the people of far away lands. The United States is an imperial power and the wars we wage are never fought for "freedom" or "democracy", they are fought to preserve US business interests and to extend American Hegemony into the future. 

The wars of the past 20 years are individual interventions, they are attempts by the United States to extend its global dominance well into the future even in the face of a "rising" China. We realize that we are losing a foothold somewhere, or that our "strategic interests" are at risk and thus, with no regard for the ramifications, we instill a regime change that only serves to destabilize the region and cause further bloodshed. 

Part 4

In September of 2000 a group called The Project for a New American Century released a report called Rebuilding America's Defenses. On page 51 of the report in a section entitled Creating Tomorrow's Dominant Force the authors write:

Further, the process of transformation,
even if it brings revolutionary change, is
likely to be a long one, absent some
catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a
new Pearl Harbor.[15]

The transformation the authors talk about is the extending and ramping up of America's foreign military power.


18 of the groups members held positions in the Bush administration.[16]


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*I would argue that the market and the neo-liberal lobbies realize that communism is a threat to their agenda of exploitation and monopoly and they realize that they need a way to get rid of it thus they create a form of false consciousness** that drives the people to want to get rid of it too. An enemy to the elites and the oppressors, communism, is then espoused as an enemy to the common man which fuels the fire and causes average men and women to die for the bourgeoisie in the name of "freedom" and "democracy". 

**false consciousness, in the strict Marxist sense, is defined as "any belief or view that prevents a person from being able to understand the true nature of a situation."[11]

1: "Dustin Hoffman." BrainyQuote.com. Xplore Inc, 2012. 28 August. 2012. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/d/dustinhoff143653.html

2: Martinez, Elizabeth, and Arnoldo Garcia. "CorpWatch : What is Neoliberalism?." CorpWatch. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Aug. 2012. <http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=376>.

3: "neoconservatism". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 28 Aug. 2012
<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1075556/neoconservatism>.

4: "Hegemony." Dictionary.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Aug. 2012. <dictionary.reference.com/browse/hegemony>.

5: "neocolonialism - definition of neocolonialism by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.." Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Thesaurus - The Free Dictionary. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Aug. 2012. <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/neocolonialism>.

6: "Our Documents - Truman Doctrine (1947)." Welcome to OurDocuments.gov. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Sept. 2012. <http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=81>.

7: "Our Documents - Truman Doctrine (1947)." Welcome to OurDocuments.gov. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Sept. 2012. <http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=81>.


8: "Our Documents - Truman Doctrine (1947)." Welcome to OurDocuments.gov. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Sept. 2012. <http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=81>.

9: "Marshall Plan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p., nmsuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/wtc/oblnus091401.html.d. Web. 4 Sept. 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan#cite_note-0>.

10: Pan, Chengxin 2004, The "China Threat" in American self-imagination: the discursive construction of other as power politics, Alternatives:global, local, political, vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 305-331. <http://dro.deakin.edu.au/view/DU:30009469>


11: "false consciousness." Dictionary.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Sept. 2012. <dictionary.reference.com/browse/false+consciousness>.

12: "The Nuclear Arms Race." History Learning Site. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Sept. 2012. <http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/nuclear_arms_race.htm>.

13: Adams, Mike. "Don't tell anyone, but Saddam Hussein was funded, trained and put into power by the United States ." Natural health news. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Sept. 2012. <http://www.naturalnews.com/000771_Saddam_Hussein_CIA.html>

14: "Osama Bin Laden Created by the US." MSUWeb. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Sept. 2012. <msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/wtc/oblnus091401.html>.

15: "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century." The Project for a New American Century. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Sept. 2012. <www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf>.

16: Project for the New American Century - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Sept. 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century#Associations_with_Bush_administration>

Extra thing: http://theintelhub.com/2011/03/21/the-surprising-pnac-connection-to-libya/

Image Credit: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/American_progress.JPG

"Capitalism and Genocide"

so there is this amazing article that was published by the internationalist perspective in 2000 and was hosted on geocities until it was shut down. post geocities shut down i spent a solid 2 days trying to find the article and randomly i stumbled upon it here. this is (to the best of my knowledge) the only copy still hosted and for fear that the aforementioned site will be shut down, i have decided to host the article here. i take no credit for what is written below and all credit is due to the internationalist perspective. so without further ado, "Capitalism and Genocide":

CAPITALISM AND GENOCIDE

            Mass death, and genocide, the deliberate and systematic extermination of whole groups of human beings, have become an integral part of the social landscape of capitalism in its phase of decadence. Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima are not merely the names of discrete sites where human beings have been subjected to forms of industrialized mass death, but synecdoches for the death-world that is a component of the capitalist mode of production in this epoch. In that sense, I want to argue that the Holocaust, for example, was not a Jewish catastrophe, nor an atavistic reversion to the barbarism of a past epoch, but rather an event produced by the unfolding of the logic of capitalism itself. Moreover, Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima are not "past", but rather futural events, objective-real possibilities on the Front of history, to use concepts first articulated by the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. The ethnic cleansing which has been unleashed in Bosnia and Kosovo, the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, the mass death to which Chechnya has been subjected, the prospect for a nuclear war on the Indian sub-continent, are so many examples of the future which awaits the human species as the capitalist mode of production enters a new millenium. Indeed, it is just such a death-world that constitutes the meaning of one pole of the historic alternative which Rosa Luxemburg first posed in the midst of the slaughter inflicted on masses of conscripts during World War I: socialism or barbarism!

            Yet, confronted by the horror of Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima, Marxist theory has been silent or uncomprehending. While I am convinced that there can be no adequate theory of mass death and genocide which does not link these phenomena to the unfolding of the logic of capital, revolutionary Marxists have so far failed to offer one. Worse, the few efforts of revolutionary Marxists to grapple with the Holocaust, for example, as I will briefly explain, have either degenerated into a crude economism, which is one of the hallmarks of so-called orthodox Marxism, or led to a fatal embrace of Holocaust denial; the former being an expression of theoretical bankruptcy, and the latter a quite literal crossing of the class line into the camp of capital itself. Economism, which is based on a crude base-superstructure model (or travesty) of Marxist theory, in which politics, for example, can only be conceived as a direct and immediate reflection of the economic base, in which events can only be conceived as a manifestation of the direct economic needs of a social class, and in the case of the capitalist class, the immediate need to extract a profit, shaped Amadeo Bordiga's attempt to "explain" the Holocaust. Thus, in his "Auschwitz ou le Grand Alibi"  Bordiga explained the extermination of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis, as the reaction of one part of the petty bourgeoisie to its historical demise at the hands of capital by "sacrificing" its other -- Jewish -- part so as to save the rest, an undertaking welcomed by big capital, which could thereby liquidate a part of the petty bourgeoisie with the support of the rest of that same class. Quite apart from an economism which simply ignores the dialectic between the economy on the one hand, and the political and ideological on the other (about which more later), such an "explanation" asks us to conceive of genocide not as the complex outcome of the unfolding of the operation of the law of value in the diverse spheres of social life, but as the direct outcome of the utilitarian calculation of segments of the petty bourgeoisie and big capital. Auschwitz, the veritable hallmark of the fundamental irrationality of late capital, is transformed by Bordiga into a rational calculation of its direct profit interests on the part of the capitalists. However, an undertaking which fatally diverted the scarce resources (material and financial) of Nazi Germany from the battlefields of the imperialist world war, simply cannot, in my view, be comprehended on the basis of a purely economic calculus of profit and loss on the part of "big capital."

            While Bordiga's reaction to Auschwitz fails to provide even the minimal bases for its adequate theorization, the reaction of the militants of La Vieille Taupe, such as Pierre Guillaume, constitutes a political betrayal of the struggle for communist revolution by its incorporation into the politics of Holocaust denial. For Guillaume, Auschwitz can only be a myth, a fabrication of the allies, that is, of one of the imperialist blocs in the inter-imperialist world war, because it so clearly serves their interests in mobilizing the working class to die in the service of democracy; on the alter of anti-fascism. Hence, La Vieille Taupe's "fervor to contest the evidence of its [the Holocaust's] reality by every means possible, including the most fraudulent. For the evidence of genocide is just so many deceptions, so many traps laid for anticapitalist radicality, designed to force it into dishonest compromise and eventual loss of resolve."  It is quite true that capital has utilized antifascism to assure its ideological hegemony over the working class, and that the Holocaust has been routinely wielded for more than a generation by the organs of mass manipulation in the service of the myth of  "democracy" in the West (and by the state of Israel on behalf of its own imperialist aims in the Middle-East). And just as surely the ideology of antifascism and its functionality for capital must be exposed by revolutionaries. Nonetheless, this does not justify the claims of Holocaust denial, which not only cannot be dissociated from anti-Semitism, but which constitutes a denial of the most lethal  tendencies inherent in the capitalist mode of production, of the very barbarism of capitalism, and thereby serves as a screen behind which the death-world wrought by capital can be safely hidden from its potential victims. This latter, in its own small way, is the despicable contribution of La Vieille Taupe, and the basis for my conviction that it must be politically located in the camp of capital.

            Marxism is in need of a theory of mass death and genocide as immanent tendencies of capital, a way of comprehending the link (still obsure) between the death-world symbolized by the smokestacks of Auschwitz or the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and the unfolding of the logic of a mode of production based on the capitalist law of value. I want to argue that we can best grasp the link between capitalism and genocide by focusing on two dialectically inter-related strands in the social fabric of late capitalism: first, are a series of phenomena linked to the actual  unfolding of the law of value, and more specifically to the completion of the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital; second, are a series of phenomena linked to the political and ideological (this latter understood in a non-reductionist sense, as having a material existence) moments of the rule of capital, specifically to the forms of capitalist hegemony. It is through an analysis of the coalescence of vital elements of these two strands in the development of capital, that I hope to expose the bases for the death-world and genocide as integral features of capitalism in the present epoch.

            The real domination of capital is characterized by the penetration of the law of value into every segment of social existence. As Georg Lukács put it in his History and Class Consciousness, this means that the commodity ceases to be "one form among many regulating the metabolism of human society," to become its "universal structuring principle."  From its original locus at the point of production, in the capitalist factory, which is the hallmark of the formal domination of capital, the law of value has systematically spread its tentacles to incorporate not just the production of commodities, but their circulation and consumption. Moreover, the law of value also penetrates and then comes to preside over the spheres of the political and ideological, including science and technology themselves. This latter occurs not just through the transformation of the fruits of technology and science into commodities, not just through the transformation of technological and scientific research itself (and the institutions in which it takes place) into commodities, but also, and especially, through what Lukács designates as the infiltration of thought itself by the purely technical, the very quantification of rationality, the instrumentalization of reason; and, I would argue, the reduction of all beings (including human beings) to mere objects of manipulation and control. As Lukács could clearly see even in the age of Taylorism, "this rational mechanisation extends right into the worker's `soul'." In short, it affects not only his outward behavior, but her very internal, psychological, makeup.

            The phenomenon of reification, inherent in the commodity-form, and its tendential penetration into the whole of social existence, which Lukács was one of the first to analyze, is a hallmark of the real domination of capital: "Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a `phantom objectivity', an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people." Reification, the seeming transformation of social relations into relations between things, has as one of its outcomes what the German-Jewish thinker H.G.Adler designated as "the administered man" [Der verwaltete Mensch]. For Adler, when human beings are administered, they are treated as things, thereby clearing the way for their removal or elimination by genocide. The outcome of  such a process can be seen in the bureaucractic administration of the Final Solution, in which the organization of genocide was the responsibility of desk killers like Adolf Eichmann who could zealously administer a system of mass murder while displaying no particular hatred for his victims, no great ideological passion for his project, and no sense that those who went to the gas chambers were human beings and not things. The features of the desk killer, in the person of Eichmann, have been clearly delineated by Hannah Arendt.  He is the high-level functionary in a vast bureaucratic organization who does his killing from behind a desk, from which he rationally plans and organizes mass murder; treating it as simply a technical task, no different than the problem of transporting scrap metal. The desk killer is the quintessential bureaucrat functioning according to the imperatives of the death-world. As a human type, the desk killer, that embodiment of the triumph of instrumental reason, has become a vital part of the state apparatus of late capitalism. 

            Here, the Lukácsian concept of reification, the Adlerian concept of the administered man, and the Arendtian portrait of the desk killer, can be joined to Martin Heidegger's concept of das Gestell, enframing, in which everything real, all beings, including humans, are treated as so much Bestand, standing-reserve or raw material, to be manipulated at will. This reduction of humans to a raw material is the antechamber to a world in which they can become so many waste products to be discarded or turned into ashes in the gas chambers of Auschwitz or at ground zero at Hiroshima.

While the reification which attains its culminating point in the real domination of capital may contain within itself the possibility of mass murder and its death-world, it does not in and of itself explain the actual unleashing of the genocidal potential which, because of it, is now firmly ensconced within the interstices of the capitalist mode of production. To confront that issue, I want to elucidate two concepts which, while not directly linked by their authors to the unfolding of the capitalist law of value, can be refunctioned to forge such a link, and have already been effectively wielded in the effort to explain genocide: the concept of the obsolescence of man [Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen], articulated by the German-Jewish philosopher Günther Anders, and the concept of bio-politics, articulated by Michel Foucault.

            For Anders, the first industrial revolution introduced the machine with its own source of power as a means of production,  while the second industrial revolution saw the extension of commodity production to the whole of society, and the subordination of man to the machine. According to Anders, the third industrial revolution, in the epoch of which humanity now lives, has made humans obsolete, preparing the way for their replacement by machines, and the end of history (Endzeit). For Anders, the Holocaust marked the first attempt at the systematic extermination of a whole group of people by industrial means, opening the way for the extension of the process of extermination to virtually the whole of the human species; a stage which he designates as "post-civilized cannibalism" [postzivilisatorischen Kannibalismus], in which the world is "overmanned", and in which Hiroshima marks the point at which "humanity as a whole is eliminatable"[tötbar].  Anders's philosophy of technology is unabashedly pessimistic, leaving virtually no room for Marxist hope (communist revolution). Nonetheless, his vision of a totally reified world, and technology as the subject of history, culminating in an Endzeit, corresponds to one side of the dialectic of socialism or barbarism which presides over the present epoch. Moreover, Anders's concept of an overmanned world can be fruitfully linked to the immanent tendency of the law of value to generate an ever higher organic composition of capital, culminating in the present stage of automation, robotics, computers, and information technology, on the bases of which ever larger masses of living labor are ejected from the process of production, and, indeed, from the cycle of accumulation as a whole, ceasing to be -- even potentially -- a productive force, a source of exchange-value, in order to become an insuperable burden for capital, a dead weight, which, so long as it lives and breathes, threatens its profitability. This "obsolescence of man" can at the level of total capital thereby create the necessity for mass murder; inserting the industrial extermination of whole groups of people into the very logic of capital: genocide as the apotheosis of instrumental reason! Reason transmogrified into the nihilistic engine of destruction which shapes the late capitalist world. 

            Michel Foucault's concept of bio-power can also be refunctioned to explicitly link it to the basic tendencies of the development of capitalism, in which case it provides a point of intersection between the triumph of the real domination of capital economically, and the political and ideological transformation of capitalist rule, while at the same time making it possible to grasp those features of capital which propel it in the direction of genocide. The extension of the law of value into every sphere of human existence, the culminating point of the real domination of capital, is marked by the subordination of the biological realm itself to the logic of capital. This stage corresponds to what Foucault designates as bio-politics, which encapsulates both the "statification of the biological", and the "birth of state racism".  Bio-politics entails the positive power to administer, manage, and regulate the intimate details of the life -- and death -- of whole populations in the form of technologies of domination: "In concrete terms ... this power over life evolved in two basic forms ... they constituted ... two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of these poles ... centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second ... focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population."  Such a bio-politics represents the subjugation of biological life in its diverse human forms to the imperatives of the law of value. It allows capital to mobilize all the human resources of the nation in the service of its expansion and aggrandizement, economic and military.

            The other side of bio-politics, of this power over life, for Foucault, is what he terms "thanatopolitics," entailing an awesome power to inflict mass death, both on the population of one's enemy, and on one's own population: "the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. .... If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers ... it is because power is situated at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population."  Nuclear, chemical, and biological, weapons make it possible to wield this power to condemn whole populations to death. Bio-politics, for Foucault, also necessarily entails racism, by which he means making a cut in the biological continuum of human life, designating the very existence of a determinate group as a danger to the population, to its health and well-being, and even to its very life. Such a group, I would argue, then, becomes a biological (in the case of Nazism) or class enemy (in the case of Stalinism, though the latter also claimed that biological and hereditary characteristics were linked to one's class origins). And the danger represented by such an enemy race can necessitate its elimination through physical removal (ethnic cleansing) or extermination (genocide).

            The Foucauldian concept of bio-politics allows us to see how, on the basis of technologies of domination, it is possible to subject biological life itself to a formidable degree of control, and to be able to inflict mass death on populations or races designated as a biological threat. Moreover, by linking this concept to the real domination of capital, we are able to see how the value-form invades even the biological realm in the phase of the real domination of capital. However, while bio-power entails the horrific possibility of genocide, it is Foucault's ruminations on the binary division of a population into a "pure community" and its Other, which allows us to better grasp its necessity.  Such a perspective, however, intersects with the transformations at the level of the political and ideological moment of capital, and it is to these, and what I see as vital contributions to their theorization by Antonio Gramsci and Ernst Bloch, that I now want to turn in an effort to better elucidate the factors that propel capital in the direction of mass death and genocide.

            What is at issue here is not Gramsci's politics, his political practice, his interventions in the debates on strategy and tactics within the Italian Communist Party, where he followed the counter-revolutionary line of the Stalinist Comintern, but rather his theorization of the political and ideological moment of capital, and in particular his concept of the "integral state", his understanding of the state as incorporating both political and civil society, his concept of hegemony, and his understanding of ideology as inscribed in practices and materialized in institutions, which exploded the crude base-superstructure model of orthodox Marxism and its vision of ideology as simply false consciousness, all of which have enriched Marxist theory, and which revolutionaries ignore at their peril.   

            In contrast to orthodox Marxism which has equated the state with coercion, Gramsci's insistence that the state incorporates both political and civil society, and that class rule is instanciated both by domination (coercion) and hegemony (leadership) allows us to better grasp the complex and crisscrossing strands that coalesce in capitalist class rule, especially in the phase of the real domination of capital and the epoch of state capitalism. For Gramsci, hegemony is the way in which a dominant class installs its rule over society through the intermediary of ideology, establishing its intellectual and cultural leadership over other classes, and thereby reducing its dependence on coercion. Ideology, for Gramsci, is not mere false consciousness, but rather is the form in which humans acquire consciousness, become subjects and act, constituting what he terms a "collective will". Moreover, for him, ideology is no mere superstructure, but has a material existence, is materialized in praxis. The state which rests on a combination of coercion and hegemony is what Gramsci designates as an integral state.  It seems to me, that one major weakness of the Gramscian concept of hegemony is that he does not seem to apply it to the control exercised over an antagonistic class. Thus, Gramsci asserts that one dominates, coerces, antagonistic classes, but leads only allied classes.  Gramsci's seeming exclusion of antagonistic classes from the ideological hegemony of the dominant class seems to me to be misplaced, especially in the epoch of state capitalism, when the capitalist class, the functionaries of capital, acquire hegemony, cultural and intellectual leadership and control, not just of allied classes and strata (e.g. the middle classes, petty bourgeoisie, etc.), but also over broad strata of the antagonistic class, the working class itself. Indeed, such hegemony, though never total, and always subject to reversal (revolution), is the veritable key to  capitalist class rule in this epoch.

            One way in which this ideological hegemony of capital is established over broad strata of the population, including sectors of the working class, is by channeling the disatisfaction and discontent of the mass of the population with the monstrous impact of capitalism upon their lives (subjection to the machine, reduction to the status of a "thing",  at the point of production, insecurity and poverty as features of daily life, the overall social process of atomization and massification, etc.), away from any struggle to establish a human Gemeinwesen, communism. Capitalist hegemony entails the ability to divert that very disatisfaction into the quest for a "pure community", based on hatred and rage directed not at capital, but at the Other, at alterity itself, at those marginal social groups which are designated a danger to the life of the nation, and its population.

            One of the most dramatic effects of the inexorable penetration of the law of value into every pore of social life, and geographically across the face of the whole planet, has been the destruction of all primitive, organic, and pre-capitalist communities. Capitalism, as Marx and Engels pointed out in the Communist Manifesto, shatters the bonds of immemorial custom and tradition, replacing them with its exchange mechanism and contract. While Marx and Engels stressed the positive features of this development in the Manifesto, we cannot ignore its negative side, particularly in light of the fact that the path to a human Gemeinwesen has so far been successfully blocked by capital, with disastrous consequences for the human species. The negative side of that development includes the relentless process of atomization, leaving in its wake an ever growing mass of rootless individuals, for whom the only human contact is by way of the cash nexus. Those who have been uprooted geographically, economically, politically, and culturally, are frequently left with a powerful longing for their lost communities (even where those communities were hierarchically organized and based on inequality), for the certainties and "truths" of the past, which are idealized the more frustrating, unsatisfying, and insecure, the world of capital becomes. Such longings are most powerfully felt within what Ernst Bloch has termed non-synchronous strata and classes.  These are stata and classes whose material or mental conditions of life are linked to a past mode of production, who exist economically or culturally in the past, even as they chronologically dwell in the present. In contrast to the two historic classes in the capitalist mode of production, the bourgeoisie and proletariat, which are synchronous, the products of the capitalist present, these non-synchronous strata include the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, and -- by virtue of their mental or cultural state -- youth and white-collar workers. In my view, Bloch's understanding of non-synchronicity needs to be extended to segments of the working class, in particular those strata of the blue-collar proletariat which are no longer materially synchronous with the high-tech production process upon which late capitalism rests, and the mass of workers ejected from the production process by the rising organic composition of capital and its comcomitant down-sizing. In addition, the even greater mass of peasants streaming into the shanty towns around the great commercial and industrial metropolitan centers of the world, are also characterized by their non-synchronicity, their inability to be incorporated into the hyper-modern cycle of capital accumulation. Moreover, all of these strata too are subject to a growing nostalgia for the past, a longing for community, including the blue-collar communities and their institutional networks which were one of the features of the social landscape of capitalism earlier in the twentieth century.

            However, no matter how powerful this nostalgia for past community becomes, it cannot be satisfied. The organic communities of the past cannot be recreated; their destruction by capital is irreversible. At the same time, the path to a future Gemeinwesen, to which the cultural material and longings embodied in the non-synchronous classes and strata can make a signal contribution, according to Bloch, remains obstructed by the power of capital. So long as this is the case, the genuine longing for community of masses of people, and especially the nostalgia for past communities especially felt by the non-synchronous strata and classes, including the newly non-synchronous elements which I have just argued must be added to them, leaves them exposed to the lure of a "pure community" ideologically constructed by capital itself. In place of real organic and communal bonds, in such an ideologically constructed pure community, a racial, ethnic, or religious identification is merely superimposed on the existing condition of atomization in which the mass of the population finds itself. In addition to providing some gratification for the longing for community animating broad strata of the population, such a pure community can also provide an ideological bond which ties the bulk of the population to the capitalist state on the basis of a race, ethnicity, or religion which it shares with the ruling class. This latter is extremely important to capital, because the atomization which it has brought about not only leaves the mass of humanity bereft, but also leaves the ruling class itself vulnerable because it lacks any basis upon which it can mobilize the population, physically or ideologically.

            The basis upon which such a pure community is constituted, race, nationality, religion, even a categorization by "class" in the Stalinist world, necessarily means the exclusion of those categories of the population which do not conform to the criteria for inclusion, the embodiments of alterity, even while they inhabit the same geographical space as the members of the pure community. Those excluded, the "races" on the other side of the biological continuum, to use Foucauldian terminology, the Other, become alien elements within an otherwise homogeneous world of the pure community. As a threat to its very existence, the role of this Other is to become the scapegoat for the inability of the pure community to provide authentic communal bonds between people, for its abject failure to overcome the alienation that is a hallmark of a reified world. The Jew in Nazi Germany, the Kulak in Stalinist Russia, the Tutsi in Rwanda, Muslims in Bosnia, blacks in the US, the Albanian or the Serb in Kosovo, the Arab in France, the Turk in contemporary Germany, the Bahai in Iran, for example, become the embodiment of alterity, and the target against which the hatred of the members of the pure community is directed. The more crisis ridden a society becomes, the greater the need to find an appropriate scapegoat; the more urgent the need for mass mobilization behind the integral state, the more imperious the need to focus rage against the Other. In an extreme situation of social crisis and political turmoil, the demonization and victimization of the Other can lead to his (mass) murder. In the absence of a working class conscious of its historic task and possibilities, this hatred of alterity which permits capital to mobilize the population in defense of the pure community, can become its own impetus to genocide.

            The immanent tendencies of the capitalist mode of production which propel it towards a catastrophic economic crisis, also drive it towards mass murder and genocide. In that sense, the death-world, and the prospect of an Endzeit cannot be separated from the continued existence of humanity's subordination to the law of value. Reification, the overmanned world, bio-politics, state racism, the constitution of a pure community directed against alterity, each of them features of the economic and ideological topography of the real domination of capital, create the possibility and the need for genocide. We should have no doubt that the survival of capitalism into this new millenium will entail more and more frequent recourse to mass murder.

MAC INTOSH

[from Internationalist Perspective #36, spring 2000]

REFERENCES

--Alain Finkielkraut, The Future of a Negation: Reflections on the Question of Genocide (Lincoln &amp; London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), p.28.

-- Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971), p.85.

                                         --See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1977).

--Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Band II, Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution (München: Verlag C.H.Beck, 1986), p.26, and Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der Zweiten industriellen Revolution (München: Verlag C.H.Beck, 1961), p.243.

--Michel Foucault, "Faire vivre et laisser mourir: la naissance du racisme," Les Temps Modernes, 535 (Février 1991), pp.37-38.

-- Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol.I, An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p.139.

--Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971) passim.

the fed's considering another stimulus?

so recently the new york times published an article called "fed is torn on tipping point for action" in which they talk about how the fed (the federal reserve) met in june and said "...that unemployment would remain elevated for another five to six years..." but it was still contemplating the course of action it should take. obviously, the keynesians among them advocate another stimulus akin to the one passed in 2008 which only saw marginal success. the issue that the bankers of the fed and the members of the mises institute miss is that whether you pump money into the economy or whether you deregulate the result is the same (admittedly, one is more successful than the other[1]), a thwarted crisis for a while and then inflation and high unemployment come roaring back.

to fully understand this effect we will look to prof. dr. dr. h.c. wolfgang streeck's paper entitled "the crisis in context: democratic capitalism and its contradictions". as a preface, this paper sets to argue that that recessions can be, and have been, warded off but the mechanisms which produce them and are used to "stop" them are fundamentally the same and thus the crisis still comes rearing back. streeck also argues that the way these crises come about originally are from the conflict between democracy and capitalism.

what streeck argues, and is summarized nicely here, is that post world war ii when more countries were becoming democratic and we see an increase in federal income, citizens wanted a transition more towards a welfare state. with the post war money the state facilitated this transition and increase spending on public projects and entitlement programs. however, since these were still fundamentally based on the system of capital accumulation they were doomed to fail. later in the century trade unions were pushing on the government for less regulation and more economic freedom and this combined with increasing public debts brought down the keynesian system. then the oil shock came. following the oil shock we entered a period of stagflation. here, streeck says:

Today’s calamities were preceded by high inflation in the late 1960s and 1970s, rising public deficits in the 1980s, and growing private indebtedness in the 1990s and 2000s. In each case, governments were faced with popular demands for prosperity and security that were incompatible with market allocation. (streeck, 3)

during each of these areas of public indebtedness, the people demanded help and businesses demanded freedom. the issue was that the two were fundamentally incompatible and so a solution had to be found. the "solution" was found in an increasing of interest rates. this only temporarily solved the problem and thus, the fiscal legacy of the united states was a main talking point during the 1992 election. post election the government decided there was a new way to "solve" the problem: to shift the debt from the public sector to the private sector. this shift in debt was characterized by lower taxes for the wealthy and an increase in the poor's income. the problem was that the government then used it's freed up public monies to bail out banks. this, combined with financial deregulation of the banking sector led to risky investments and loans to people who couldn't pay them back. all of this culminated in 2008 with the crash of the housing market and the dumping of america into a recession.

now how does this tie into the fed's proposal to spend more public funds? well, assuming the fed does go along with this we will see increased job growth for a period, however, the u.s. government will slip more into debt and we will see the cycle again, a shifting of public debt over to private and nothing will get solved. this is the name of the game and until we rethink or notions of capital, economic growth, and goods and services, this pattern will continue.

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1: admittedly, keynesian principles are much better at holding off the oncoming onslaught yet they still fail in time. deregulation has empirically led to failures in banks and the crashing of economies. but that will be a post for another time.

my expansion on 'internationalist perspective's' "capitalism and genocide"

hello all! first let me preface this by asking you to ignore any "rambly-ness", it is late and i'm exhausted (this will probably go through many edits). now to the point, back in 2000 a modern marxist "think tank" called the internationalist perspective published a paper entitled capitalism and genocide. the paper attempts (and succeeds) to explain the genocides of the late 20th century (namely the extermination of the jews) in the context of class struggle and the law of value permeating all sectors of human existence. not only is this paper amazingly compelling but it simplifies some complex ideas down to the layman's level thus before proceeding i highly suggest you read it. 

in case you did not follow my advice allow me to summarize it and then state what i think it lacks. to begin with, the paper starts by extrapolating on georg lukacs' idea of the "reification" (basically the spreading of the law of value into all sectors of life) by saying that now not only have science and technology become quantifiable instruments of control and power, but human existence is subjected to the whims of capital and is used to further the cause of big capital. the author(s) then bring up h.g. adler's concept of an "administered man", a man that is treated solely as a thing to be used towards and end. the outcome of the aforementioned is what hannah arendt calls "a desk killer", a killer who works within the bureaucratic system "...who could zealously administer a system of mass murder while displaying no particular hatred for his victims, no great ideological passion for his project..."

these three things "...can be joined to Martin Heidegger's concept of das Gestell, enframing, in which everything real, all beings, including humans, are treated as so much Bestand, standing-reserve or raw material, to be manipulated at will. This reduction of humans to a raw material is the antechamber to a world in which they can become so many waste products to be discarded or turned into ashes in the gas chambers of Auschwitz or at ground zero at Hiroshima."

then, the concept of bio power and the obsolescence of man are added. these two respectively basically mean that one part of a society is considered a threat to the whole and therefore must be alienated (more on this later) and that man is being overcome by machines, being a dead weigh of sorts to big capital.

now, while this paper is great at explaining the possibility and ultimately fundamental necessity of mass murder (read the paper to fully see why), it speaks about real events in the abstract. the problem with this is that it never shows how all this unfolded within the context of nazi germany and that is what i will attempt to do. 

by this point i'm assuming you've read the paper but if not, just go read from "While the reification..." onward, i'll try to explain this the best i can but some foreknowledge is needed. in the wake of world war 1 the allies coerced germany into signing what is called "the treaty of versailles". this treaty, among other things, forced germany to pay massive amounts of money to the allied forces which in turn plunged the german economy into a depression. during this time inflation ran rampant, people were living in extreme poverty, it is the marxist class struggle at it's finest. then...wham! a bright faced, brilliant speaker named adolf hitler comes along. he, to use language from capitalism and genocide, pointed out the cause of these woes as being "the other", the outside group, the jewish people. during times of extreme crises leaders will resort to maintaining control over the masses that if assembled could overthrow them by means of what antonio gramsci terms as hegemony, the leadership of the people mobilized for a goal. what leaders do during times like this is subvert the masses and cause them to focus their energy's away from the root cause of the problem (capitalism) and towards a biological instinct, a fear of the other. then, the leaders, namely hitler, convince the majority to strive for a "pure community", a world free from the other. by the state cooping any hope of change and focusing the negative energies of the people away from the root and towards the other, big capital successfully maintains its survival which is contingent on domination and hegemony. in the words of the internationalist perspective:

One way in which this ideological hegemony of capital is established over broad strata of the population, including sectors of the working class, is by channeling the disatisfaction and discontent of the mass of the population with the monstrous impact of capitalism upon their lives (subjection to the machine, reduction to the status of a "thing",  at the point of production, insecurity and poverty as features of daily life, the overall social process of atomization and massification, etc.), away from any struggle to establish a human Gemeinwesen, communism. Capitalist hegemony entails the ability to divert that very disatisfaction into the quest for a "pure community", based on hatred and rage directed not at capital, but at the Other, at alterity itself, at those marginal social groups which are designated a danger to the life of the nation, and its population.

thus it goes, the tale of big capital redirecting the people's attention away from the root of the problem towards what is deemed "the other".

"How to Get FREE LAND in 5 easy steps: A handy guide for imperialists and other reasonable individuals"

1. Eliminate Native People.
Choose the most appropriate strategies: disease, criminalization/incarceration, blood quantum, cultural genocide/forced assimilation, forced out-migration, cultivate poverty, just kill them.

2. Replace All Aspects of Native Society with Your Own.
Examples: Government & Law, Economy, Religion, Culture.
Useful code-words: Progress, Modernization, Development, Inevitable.

3. Invent Legal Instruments That Allow You to Claim Ownership of Native Lands.
Examples: Treaties (you don’t have to honor them), Annexation (doesn’t have to be legal), Referendum (rig the vote).

4. Control History
Write history the way you want people to believe it and teach it in all the schools (misinformation OK; eventually people forget what really happened).  Commemorate official history with celebrations, statues and honorific naming.  Call the whole process ‘democracy’.  Call opposing viewpoints lies and revisionism.

5. Done!  Enjoy Your New Land!^*
Remember: You’ve worked hard; you deserve everything you’ve taken.  “To the victors, the spoils!”
*  Empire requires constant maintenance (repeat steps 1-4).  Failure to do so may lead to loss of control.

originally from the pinky show (comic no longer hosted), accessed at mrzine.

thoughts on the fourth

so last night i was at my towns fireworks and as i was looking at all the people there, be they rich or poor, being so happy and (to be very cliche and reference my own blog's title) it made me think of this quotation by žižek:

Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are [the occupy wall street protestors]  giving all of us red ink. -slavoj žižek

this quotation i thought accurately represented what i saw, blissful ignorance. now, i don't mean ignorance in a derogatory way at all, all i mean is that most of those people (i would assume) can't imagine a true alternative to our current system. sure you can imagine a huge, controlling government or a stateless society but one can't easily imagine a society free from the limitations of capital. and since people cannot imagine a true alternative to capital they lack "the language to articulate...[their] non-freedom" since to understand the woes of something, you must also understand the lack of those very woes. and it is for this reason that those people still support the system that causes the aforementioned woes. maybe next fourth things will be different.