LENIN'S TOMB

Theorising race and anticommunism in the Cold War

2012-02-19T11:55:00.001Z

This is an old draft summary of some background material I collated on the subject of racism, anticommunism and the construction of hegemony in the Cold War. Still very much clarifying the protocols of the research, its specific conclusions, relations between concepts, theoretical language, etc. are all highly provisional, some of it sketchy indeed, and apt to have changed in light of more recent research. I just thought those of you who are interested in this kind of thing would find it useful.

Theorising Race and Anticommunism in the Cold War

Research Questions

What are the raciological dimensions of Cold War anticommunism in the US (1945-65)? How did anticommunist practices in the Deep South during the period of classical anticommunism advance, allow, or inhibit, the reproduction of the racial relations of production? In what way did the reproduction of races determine the forms of Southern anticommunism? What role did the Southern social formation play in the construction of the Cold War 'historical bloc'? How did Southern racial anticommunism impede, or assist, the pursuit of US global hegemony against the ‘communist’ antagonist?

General statement of the problem

In the residuum of World War II, the United States seized the leading position among an alliance of states in the struggle against communism, exporting its Fordist production methods and building the institutions of a liberal world system. This struggle interacted with racial forms in complex, varying ways. Globally, the US found itself needing to sustain a multiracial anticommunist coalition, while at the same time upholding white supremacy where it was efficiently anticommunist (and where the racist assumptions of policymakers feared the ‘premature independence’ of black populations (Schmitz, 2006)). Domestically, the US power bloc sought to assemble a similarly broad anticommunist coalition, with workers integrated on the basis of Fordist corporatism. Here too, the ambiguities of managing hegemony in a white supremacist system were felt. While the national liberal state practiced a ‘colour-blindness’ which tended to preserve the racial status quo, in the Deep South a virulent form of racial anticommunism emerged to defend the institutions of white supremacist capitalism. Indeed, Southern capital, representing a politically powerful section within the US power bloc, was also a bulwark of a hard-line anticommunism. Despite the problems that a one-party racial dictatorship in the South posed for the United States’ global projection of ‘soft power’, policymakers in Washington were extremely reluctant to chasten or roll back this system. For, with all these difficulties, the specific configuration of class and race relations, the conjunction of different modes of rule in north and south, served the purposes of hegemony well for a time.

Introduction: Theoretical Approach

This work, as befits a marxist research project, inhabits a tension between the nomothetic and idiographic. The epistemological commitments of historical materialism are not exhausted by its inventory of nomological concepts. Indeed, the historical determinacy of laws in Marx’s research project points to the need for concrete investigation to determine “the boundaries” of the articulation of “productive force and relation of production” at any given conjuncture. (Banaji, 2010, p. 47) When Marx turns his attention to concrete situations, for example in the Eighteenth Brumaire, his approach is far from the positivist attempt to validate laws already supposedly established by historical data. On the contrary, he sets out to discern the lineaments of class and political formations, the shifting valences of ideological cynosures, the class alliances and mutating allegiances: this highly conjunctural analysis pays off with the emergence of concepts such as ‘Bonapartism’, or the ‘praetorian state’. (On the text’s relevance for the analysis of political power and the state, see (Jessop, 2002)). As we will see, the practitioners of historical materialism – above all, Gramsci and Althusser, both in their different ways ‘Machiavellian’ marxists, and Poulantzas, whose research project articulated the former pair – have also developed a series of conceptual operations designed to capture the specificity of concrete situations. Gramsci insisted, against a certain ‘economist’ reductionism, on the analysis of the “conjuncture”, of “situations”, of the “socio-historical moment” which is never “homogenous”, but which is “rich with contradictions”. (Sassoon, 1981, pp. 180-193)

Althusser, the poetaster of ‘aleatory materialism’, likewise focused on conjunctural analysis, the multiple determinations and levels of determination in a given situation, the “accumulation of contradictions” within it, and ‘overdetermination’ - the condensation within each point of the structure of the effects of the whole situation. In keeping with this aleatory materialism is the distinction he made between the ‘mode of production’ (certain abstract combinations of forces and relations of production) and the ‘social formation’ (the concrete site on which these forces and relations of production are realised, a site of overdetermined complexity). In my research, it is the conjuncture, and within it the social formation, that is the object of analysis. (Althusser, 1999; Althusser, 2005; Lahtinen, 2009)

But the term ‘conjuncture’ can be used in a different way, to refer to precisely the tension described above: a conjunction of the general and the particular. This conjunction means that the general, referring to a set of constants which recur in different situations, varies in its precise content depending on its relation to the particulars of a situation. (Lahtinen, 2009, p. 9) A persistent topographical feature of marxist assay, then, is its descent from the abstract to the concrete[1], with each approach to the concrete characterised by the introduction of new theoretical determinations. Consistent with this, each section of this argument begins with the clarification of some general concepts, abstractions which address historical problems prompted by my research questions. As the discussion proceeds, however, the thesis descends from the abstract to the concrete, from structural to contingent, particular and sometimes subjective factors.

In section I, I begin with a discussion of anticommunist practices in general, before proceeding to a discussion of their operation during the Cold War, and their particular application in the Southern racial state. ‘Practices’ is used here in the sense intended by Althusser, viz.: “all the levels of social existence are the sites of distinct practices: economic practice, political practice, ideological practice, technical practice and scientific (or theoretical) practice. We think the content of these different practices by thinking their peculiar structure, which, in all these cases, is the structure of a production”. (Althusser & Balibar, 1997, p. 58) At the most general level, the structure of production has three stages: i) raw materials are brought into relation with one another; ii) a labour of transformation is performed using some means of production; and iii) an end-product results. The determinant moment in this process is the labour of transformation itself; it is this which decides the kind of practice involved. When investigating anticommunist practices, I will give due attention to the specific levels (economic, political, ideological) on which they take place - though I will treat these levels as distinct (and thus ‘relatively autonomous’) aspects of a unitary structure in difference, rather than as an articulation of different structures - as well as to production process they are involved in. The generic category ‘anticommunism’ is a convenience, but inhibitive if left undifferentiated.

For example, a mainstay of writing on anticommunism is the ‘network’. These networks triangulate around three basic coordinates: civil society organisations (‘patriotic’ vigilante, liberal, trade union), capital, and the state. Of these, the most potent constituent is the state, which is the unifying element, the weaponised cutting edge, producing the public inquiries, the executed traitors and the raids - capable of raising anticommunism to the level of a ‘national obsession’. (Schrecker, 2002, pp. 12-14 & 25) That is to say, the presence or absence of the state in the network makes the difference between it being ‘national’ or purely ‘sectional’. Yet, this poses questions which cannot be answered in terms of the ‘network’. Why, and under what circumstances, does the state become an anticommunist combatant? What does it contribute that the other elements cannot? Above all, how does the state relate to the field of class struggle, in which communist and anticommunist practices operate? As soon as these questions are posed, it is clear that is necessary to disperse the network into its elements to answer them; and moreover, that each element should be understood in terms of the practices they bring to bear and the levels at which these take place.

I proceed in section II by situating the Deep South in relation to the US capitalist system during the Cold War. This entails, to start with, a theoretical clarification of what is included in the capitalist ‘mode of production’. For example, is it merely a particular combination of forces and relations of production? If so, what manner of combination persisted in the US in the reference period? Or, need our account specify the mechanisms of the system’s reproduction? (Wolpe, 1980, pp. 6-19) We proceed to an examination of the southern social formation, the possible articulation of combined modes of production within it, and the extent to which capitalism ‘underdeveloped’ black America (Marable, 2000) and perhaps even the south itself.

I ask, for example, did the persistence of sharecropping within a large rural economy indicate the endurance of ‘feudal’ forms (Kayatekin, 2001), or was such sharecropping fully subordinated to the logic of capitalist relations (labour tenancy) by this point? (Post, 2011) Is it feasible to speak of feudal ‘remnants’ in the South? If feudal or non-capitalist forms persisted in the South, how did these relate to segregation, and how in turn did that determine the South’s contribution to the Cold War ‘historical bloc’? By contrast, if capitalist relations were already fully established in the South, what contribution did eclipsed precapitalist formations make to the specific form that southern capitalism took? How did this determine class formations, politics and ideology in the South, and its relations with the US as a whole? How did it shape Washington’s prospects for maintaining different kinds of hegemony, with different types of racial order, in different types of space (local, national and international)?

Having thus located the South, I turn to the question of the relationship between race and anticommunism in the hegemonic moment: that is, the period of classical anticommunism during which hegemony was consolidated and maintained. Using the concept of the Fordist ‘historical bloc’ to explain the relations of production and the specific form of productive forces which dominated the US in this period, I also avail myself of Gramsci’s analysis of ‘Americanism and Fordism’, to explain the relationship between Fordist production methods, ‘Americanist’ ideology and US global hegemony. (Rupert, 1995; Gramsci, 1971)

I examine the question of ‘hegemony’, and the exceptionally broad alliance of class forces that massed under the rubric of anticommunism. Here, the key problem is what combination of coercion and consent permitted the assembly such forces unified around a broad set of anticommunist objectives and thematics. It is clear that coercion played a significant role in the marginalisation of insurgent social forces excluded from the post-war class compromise. It is equally clear, however, that significant popular forces not only consented to the anticommunist vulgate, but actively participated in its promulgation. The reconciliation of antagonistic interests and subject-positions thus needs to be explained in terms primarily of persuasion and particularly the formulation of hegemonic languages through which these diverse agents are incorporated as a ‘chain of equivalences’. If, as Voloshinov argues, “the word is the most sensitive index of social changes”, the mutations in political discourse should provide a symptomatic insight into the changing lived relation of American subjects to their political environment. (Volosinov, 1986, p. 19) Importantly, we are speaking of languages in the plural, and specifically the decussation of the Southern lexis of ‘racial populism’ with ‘national liberal’ discourses.

Part I –Discovering the Network: Anticommunist Practices

“[T]he theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: "Socialism!" Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.

“This was not merely a figure of speech, fashion, or party tactics. The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods it had created had fallen away from it. It understood that all the so-called bourgeois liberties and organs of progress attacked and menaced its class rule at its social foundation and its political summit simultaneously, and had therefore become "socialistic."” – Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Anticommunism belongs to a family of ‘countersubversive’ practises, related to the narrower category of ‘counter-revolutionary’ practices. Countersubversion has an especially long pedigree in the United States, where the presumed conspiracies of Freemasons, Catholics, Mormons, African Americans, the ‘yellow peril’, and of course ‘Reds’ have serially aroused movements in defence of Americanism. In addition to its racial and national connotations, countersubversion is intimately bound up with patriarchal practices and the masculinist ‘regeneration through violence’. (Melley, 2001; Slotkin, 1973; Davis, 1960)

In the liberal tradition, countersubversion is treated as an aberration, a ‘paranoid style’ in politics birthed by the inability of certain marginal social groups to adapt to the pragmatic, compromise-based politics of the United States. (Hofstadter, 1972) As Corey Robin points out, (Robin, 2004, p. 15), this is rooted in an inadequate liberal analysis of the sources of political fear. While the Cold War state was repressive, it was not openly lawless, not flagrantly crushing civil liberty in the manner of the ‘totalitarian’ nemesis. Because of this, Cold War liberals were remarkably blasé about its abuses, reducing political fear to a psychopathology. However, this both underestimates the true level of state repression and misses the way in which political fear is distributed through the vectors of civil society which are supposed, in liberal theory, to be the bulwark against state terror.[2] It is therefore important to take countersubversion seriously, as a typology of repressive (but not merely repressive) practices aimed at conserving relations of domination.

Anticommunist countersubversion, specifically, is an ensemble of class practices whose product is the conservation of extant relations of dominance primarily, but not exclusively, on the axis of class. It is involved in the suppression of insurgent classes and fractions for this purpose. This specification immediately runs into the challenge posed by authors such as Richard Gid Power, or Markku Ruotsila, who point out that anticommunism does not speak in a single voice. While Power seeks to redeem traditions of anticommunism that were not marred by extra-legal assaults on civil liberties, Ruotsila is concerned to establish the diversity of anticommunist thought, ranging from conservative anti-collectivism to social democratic parliamentarism. (Power, 1998; Ruotsila, 2001)

Indeed, such diversity is an explanandum that this research will aim to address directly – or rather, it is the unity of such diverse practices and ideological positions, a unity in difference, that I will try to explain. In addition to the diversity of ideological positions and political practices seemingly covered by anticommunism, the range of antagonistic class interests that have been unified by anticommunism is very broad indeed. The simple expedient of explaining this in terms of classes and fractions adopting a ‘class position’ other than its own - for example, the petty bourgeoisie adopting bourgeois class positions - will not do, as it is both question-begging and is a purely formal solution to a problem that demands concrete analysis.

We will return to this question in more detail in section III, but for the moment the point can be made in this way: I am approaching anticommunism primarily as a set of political practices, not as ideology. In this sense, it is the ‘line of political demarcation’ that I am interested in. That line is principally between communists and their allies, who have at least a nominal commitment to the abolition of relations of exploitation and oppression, and their opponents who vouch the futility and utopianism of such commitments and work to undermine efforts made on their behalf.[3] The attribution of ‘class connotations’ to each of these poles need not be absolute. It is sufficient to say that the former will tend to be anchored in the most oppressed and exploited, while the latter will tend to be anchored in the bourgeoisie, the power bloc and sections of the middle class.

The distinction between the mode of production and the social formation is relevant here. For, while anticommunism seeks to defend and extend the capitalist mode of production as a model of development, struggles conducted in its name are carried out in concrete social formations, where the mode of production may be reproduced in and through modes of rule, political blocs, etc., that are not immediately reducible to capitalist imperatives. Thus, the defence of capitalism in the social formation is necessarily a contested, contextual affair, wherein certain policies or structures (such as white supremacy, ‘pragmatic’ segregation, ‘free unionism’, anti-unionism, and so on) may be seen as essential to capitalism’s successful reproduction, or as actively inhibitive to it. This permits a fairly wide range of strategic, moral and intellectual disagreements among anticommunists without undermining fundamental agreement over the need to defend capitalism in the social formation. This, at any rate, is what I take to be the articulating principle of anticommunist politics.

Yet the turn to anticommunist countersubversion itself demands further contextualisation. The fact of the rise of socialist movements as a concrete proposal culminating in the Russian Revolution is not sufficient to explain this recourse. Nor is the existence of an historical tradition of countersubversion, though this will be important to my explanation. I will say that in capitalist states undergoing a rapid process of development and industrialization, with rapidly expanding working classes, where state formations are still fragile (Southern state formations were emerging in violent struggles through the 19th century, reflecting profound divisions among elites, Blee & Billings, 1996), where bourgeois political traditions are relatively recent and industrial relations are relatively violent, the existing institutions of government, education, media, policing and the armed forces will have a limited ability to incorporate and neutralize the emerging labour and socialist movements. In a number of European states, a chief mechanism of incorporation was the displacement of domestic class antagonisms onto a global racial antagonism. Even if workers did not avail themselves directly of opportunities in the colonial frontiers, they could still be entranced by – in the plaintive phrase of Kautsky following the 1907 German federal elections - “the fascinating effect of the colonial state of the future”. (Schorske, 1983, p. 63) A similar aspiration fuelled the Progressive era racist militarism of Theodore Roosevelt, who looked forward to the creation of a “community of heroes” in which class distinctions would be eroded in the frontier. (Jenkins, 2002)

In cases where colonialism could not or would not solve the problem by alleviating domestic class antagonisms, a network of states, civil society (or vigilante) organisations and businesses turned to anticommunist ‘countersubversion’. In racial states, such as the United States, Australia and South Africa, this took intense forms, particularly following the Russian Revolution. Their class systems had been structured by ‘race’ in divergent ways, Anticommunism and racism were mutually reinforcing in these instances. Ruling classes threatened by insurgency will have the option of interpreting each localised challenge to their dominance as part of a wider problem of ‘Bolshevism’. Alternatively, they can seek to incorporate some popular demands, and seek to construct broad, hegemonic alliances to preserve their position. Simultaneously, they will be aware that black subjects are the least susceptible to anticommunist indoctrination and in fact most likely to be class conscious and sympathetic to the communist project. As such, to maintain the anticommunist front, and all other things being equal, it is advantageous to maintain strict racial divisions, to isolate and radically ‘Other’ challengers to white supremacy and thus inoculate the wider working class against their disintegrative influence.

Anticommunism and the political instance

The state, it is argued above, is central to the efficacy of the anticommunist network. This can perhaps be corroborated by a comparison with the ‘Tea Party’, whose anti-socialist agitation has enjoyed the support of some businesses and ‘patriotic’ organisations, but which has never been more than a ‘sectional’ movement. The ‘Tea Party’ movement has no equivalent to J. Edgar Hoover in the Justice Department, no Dies Committee, and no HUAC. It has no executed traitors, no public testimonials and no police forces and parapolitical mobs concretising its countersubversive intent with illegal raids. Failing thus far to colonise the state, denied the unifying properties of state power, it has remained the name for a disarticulated and ideologically unstable rightist rump. Yet, this raises the question: does the network move from ‘sectional’ to ‘national’ because of the state’s support, or does it capture the state because it has become ‘national’? What, or whom, does becoming ‘national’ involve? And what, or whom, does it exclude? To unpack these questions, it might be useful to unpack the network itself.

Anticommunism is organised principally at the level of the political, but in turn operates in all three ‘relatively autonomous’ instances of the capitalist mode of production: economic, political and ideological. That is to say, it organises the field of class struggle on all three levels of the mode of production. I have said that it is a form of ‘countersubversive’ politics. The precise meaning of this can only be understood by specifying the nature and role of the political. The capitalist mode of production is peculiar for its relative extrusion of the political from the economic. In contrast to the parcellised forms of sovereignty particular to feudalism, in which direct political power was wielded in the appropriation of surplus labour, under capitalism legitimate political authority (and not merely political violence) is monopolised by a state that is present in productive relations, constituting them, but is not usually the major factor in economic ownership, possession or exploitation.

If the ruling class are dominant in all levels of the mode of production, the ‘relative autonomy’ of the political instance in the capitalist mode of production means that the nature of that dominance politically, and the relation between political and class power needs to be specified. Here I will have recourse to the concept of the ‘power bloc’. While the historical bloc in Gramsci refers to a particular state of class dominance, Poulantzas’ idea of the power bloc refers to a form of political dominance appropriate to the capitalist mode of production. The power bloc arises because the ruling class and its allied classes are “constitutively divided into fractions” such as rentier, finance, commerce, industry, etc. A power bloc comprises the “coexistence of several classes, and most importantly of fractions of classes” in a “contradictory unity”.

But this unity cannot be achieved independently. This is because the capitalist state reconstitutes members of classes as ‘free and equal’ individuals integrated into a formally popular-democratic sovereignty, and thus imposes an ‘isolation effect’ that obstructs class-wide unity. While the working class can overcome this effect through ‘collective labour’, no such option avails itself to the bourgeoisie. As a result, it cannot through its own parties secure its own unity as well as that of class allies. No class or fraction can independently achieve hegemonic status within the power bloc since, left to their own devices, they would exhaust themselves in conflict.[4] The decisive role here falls to the capitalist state, which “is the factor of the political unity of the power bloc under the protection of the hegemonic class or fraction. In other words, it is the factor of hegemonic organisation of this class or fraction”. (Poulantzas, 1968, pp. 229-252, 296-306)[5] The power bloc is the form of political dominance practiced within the historical bloc.

In addition to organising the dominant classes and fractions (the power bloc), this theory endows the state with the role of disorganising the dominated classes. We will return to the role of ideology, but it is important to state that even at the level of politics, these practices are not purely repressive. Poulantzas argues that the political and ideological power of the ruling class requires a “material substratum”. That ‘substratum’ in the case of the Cold War was the incorporation of ‘free trade unions’ into a corporatist production system, and the distribution of a share of rising productivity to the working class. The widespread use of ‘productivity agreements’ in bargaining with organised labour ensured both an efficient extraction of surplus value and a secular tendency for wages to rise. It was this which made claims for the ‘free’ and ‘prosperous’ American worker, in contrast to the enslaved Russian worker, plausible ‘lived relation’ of U.S. workers to their situation. (Poulantzas, 2000, p. 31; Harvey, 2010, p. 96; Rupert, 1995, pp. 155-157)

In the Deep South, however, matters were different. The rate of unionisation, particularly in the core textile industry, was pitifully low. Instead of forging class compromise based on a relationship with ‘free trade unions’, employers and local authorities worked to isolate union activists as ‘communists’. Labour leaders were usually harassed by the law, and sometimes ‘disappeared’. (Honey, 1993, pp. 1-3)

This vigilante-like behaviour, the parapolitical aspect of countersubversion, is worth reflecting on. Local state formations in the South and the political organisations that operated through them had, as indicated previously, a history of involvement in guerrilla and vigilante violence in defence of class power. These states were created by plantation owners and white farm owners, and were impregnated by the imperatives governing their reproduction. As David James argues, this impregnation worked through four key mechanisms. First, the local state had to be responsive to local class formations in order to ensure growth and generate the revenue base for effective statehood. Second, local politicians were compelled to take account of the interests of the most powerful planter and farmer fractions, or risk an orchestrated backlash with the use of stolen votes, bribery or economic sanctions. Third, local officials such as justices of the peace were paid fees for their work - a certain sum per arrest, for example, leading to high rates of arrest of politically weak African Americans and thus the production of a cheap labour force through the prison system. (This practice continued well into the 1940s). Finally, and above all, planter and farmer elites used physical violence to take state power away from their political enemies: lynchings and terror aimed at blacks, Republicans or Populists. (James, 1988)

So, the dominant modes of political organisation were not conducted in the form of class compromises or bargaining, and the Southern ruling class had no interest in such a strategy. However, in the mill towns and energy frontiers of the southern United States, just as much as in the mineral economy of South Africa, there emerged a caste system which excluded black workers from ‘skilled’ occupations. Racialised pay differentials (sometimes formalised as ‘gold’ and ‘silver’ or ‘ABC’ payrolls, for example) were the norm. Patterns of workplace discipline were organised along colour lines. And the degree of paternalistic intrusion into workers’ lives also differed with race, as employers tended to intervene more in the private lives of white workers. (Davies, 1976; Honey, 1993, p. 151; Vitalis, 2000; Vitalis, 2000; Vitalis, 2007; Minchin, 1999; Minchin, 1997) What does this imply for the class relation between black and white labour in a segregated system? Do they, as some theorists suggest, form separate classes? Or different fractions of the working class? Is the ‘white working class’ in such systems a kind of ‘labour aristocracy’? Do white workers appropriate surplus value produced by black workers? Do they form a supervisory bloc with opposing class interests to black workers? (See Wolpe, 1976). I shall say that the segregated system produced a fractionalisation of the working class along racial lines – white workers were not overwhelmingly supervisorial, nor did they share in surplus value extracted from black workers – and that this fractionalisation in turn produced a racialised notion of ‘skilled labour’ as a ‘natural’ (racial) status rather than social attribute.

The “material substratum” in this case was the relative advantage that white workers obtained over black workers. If, historically, the race system worked to undermine the bargaining power of labour, it also ‘compensated’ white workers with access to certain products, services or rights of citizenship, which the racially oppressed were denied. The value of these goods being socially determined and relative, they were judged not primarily by the standard of progressive improvement, but by the fact that some could have them as a racial birth-right, and some could not. As (Honey, 1993, p. 29) puts it, segregation “did not improve the wages of unskilled white workers” but it did provide “a labour system segmented into superiors and subordinates, which placed them in a relatively better position than blacks”. Communists were thus belaboured for attempting to erode the position of white workers vis-à-vis their racial ‘inferiors’. It was “the racialism of communism” that alienated Southern white workers. (Boswell, et al., 2006, p. 155)

Anticommunism in the Racial State

Three social formations in the twentieth century arguably manifested a particular concern with anticommunism: the United States, Australia and South Africa. These were states that, despite significant differences in land mass, demographics, and international power, shared many similarities. These include an historical experience of capitalist development through the ‘frontier’ (‘primitive accumulation’) and white supremacy. In the cases of both South Africa and the US, says Anthony Marx, similar processes of capitalist development and state-building drove the creation of forms of legally reinforced racial discrimination prevalent for much of the 20th Century. (Marx, 1999) And if the ‘colour’ of one’s ‘race’ determined life chances for citizens of each of these states, where segregation had parallel but not symmetrical careers, so the ‘colour’ of one’s creed could have a related set of effects. (Kwon, 2010, pp. 37-8)

The proximity of these two racial powers – one a hegemonic global power, the other a regional sub-imperialism - in their anticommunism did not begin with the Cold War, but rather with the Russian revolution and the immediately ensuing class struggles. (On anticommunism in South Africa following the Bolshevik revolution, see Stolten, 2007). Indeed, it was during the Cold War that their paths began to diverge, despite their growing co-dependence following the entry of the People’s Republic of China into the Korean War. While the victory of the Afrikaner nationalists in the 1948 South African legislative elections represented a hardening of segregation - “as though the Dixiecrats had won in the United States” (Borstelmann, 2001, p. 72) - US politics was dominated by a Cold War centrism which defended the racial status quo in the name of ‘colour-blindness’. This is in part because the Deep South represented only one part of the US, whereas South Africa had no counterpart to the US North. But it is also because the US aspired to global hegemony, which of necessity involved assembling a multiracial coalition against communism: thus, ‘colour-blindness’ formed part of US global strategy. (Vitalis, 2000)

Nevertheless, anticommunism was peculiarly intense in these states characterised by racial systems, and it was imbricated in the defence of these systems in remarkably similar ways. For example, Southern US politicians held that civil rights organisations represented the cuspate end of a communist conspiracy intent on global dominion. South African leaders similarly argued that the ANC was the local auxiliary of a Moscow design to take over the region’s mineral treasures. (Adam, 1993; Lewis, 2004)

Also contiguous to the United States in the intensity of its anticommunism was Australia, another racial state. There, just as in the United States, anticommunism was aimed at “a vague conglomerate of hostile causes”, from labour unionism to reformist socialism. In both cases anticommunist governments “used political terror, enforced through physical violence, civil ordinance laws, incarceration, sackings and injunctions against strike action to retain their hold on political power during World War I, the 1920s and the 1930s.” (Fischer, 2005) To be depicted as a ‘Red’ was in each case to be externalised and ‘Othered’; by the same token, to be a ‘racial’ subject in revolt was to be depicted as a ‘Red’. (See Clark, 2008) And in both countries, anticommunism was entangled with an imperialist ‘civilizing mission’ – particularly, in the post-war world, with respect to Asia. (Kiernan, 2002) If the Australian Right did not enjoy the same success as US anticommunists in rolling back the power of labour and the Left, this was largely because of the weakness of Federal legal enforcement, the reluctance of anticommunists to turn to vigilantism, and the limited ability of anticommunists to muster business support. (Fischer, 2002)[6]

Southern anticommunism during the Cold War, similar in many respects to overseas analogues, also drew on both local and national traditions of ‘countersubversion’, rooted in intensely racialised struggles to conserve or restore relations of dominance. For example, the structures of segregation that one encounters under siege from the civil rights movement during the Cold War were facilitated by just this, as the Ku Klax Klan worked as the de facto paramilitary arm of a Democratic Party led effort to restore white supremacy and patriarchy, the material basis of both having been lost with the overthrow of slavery. Long after the Klan had been formally and effectively wound up, countersubversive violence aimed at black political and economic advances, as well as interracial relations, buttressed an emerging system of segregation. Following the historic ‘Compromise’ between North and South in 1877, which had been lubricated by alliances between Southern gentry and Northern capital, the pace of racist repression intensified. Significantly, a degree of unity among white Southerners, across classes, was forged through this terror. (Roediger, 2008, pp. 110-119)

Similarly, the rise of militant imperialist sentiment in the South under Woodrow Wilson, particularly during World War I, was coextensive with a countersubversive hysteria first about treasonous African Americans in sympathy with the Germans then about ‘Reds’ – the first wave of anticommunist repression from 1917-1919. The dominant key of this countersubversion was nativist, and racist. Robert Lansing, George Simons, and military intelligence credited the fraudulent thesis of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to explain the success of the Bolsheviks. The Sedition Act (1918) was used pointedly against ‘aliens’, while J Edgar Hoover used his position in the Bureau of Investigation to raise alarm over the alleged propensity of African American leaders toward communism. The Lusk Commission established in 1919 to look into radicalism “argued that there was ‘not a single system of Anglo-Saxon socialism, nor a single system of Latin race socialism’. The only scientific system of socialism was ‘of German-Jewish origin’.” This was a particularly portentous accusation after the feverish anti-German propaganda that shadowed US entry into the First World War. Civil society and vigilante organisations such as the American League, the Daughters of the American Revolution, war veterans groups, and bodies of Minute Men, often funded by business blocs led by local Chambers of Commerce, were organised around nativist thematics. (Gaughan, 1999; Foglesgong, 2007, p. 58; Heale, 1990, pp. 60-96; Kovel, 1997, pp. 14-22) This was, then, a form of political class practice in which the Southern power bloc had accumulated experience.

The implementation of racial anticommunism during the Cold War enjoyed measurable success in both of its objectives of conserving white supremacy and isolating radicals. The civil rights leadership was cowed by fear of association with “Communist-controlled organisations”, and thus isolated. It was also frightened to take the steps (such as freedom rides) that would later win the civil rights battle. The downfall of Jim Crow was delayed by approximately a decade. As Marable put it: “The democratic upsurge of black people which characterized the late 1950s could have happened a decade earlier … most of the important Supreme Court decisions that aided civil rights proponents had been passed some years before. … Yet the sit-ins, the non-violent street demonstrations, did not yet occur; the façade of white supremacy was crumbling, yet for almost ten years there was no overt and mass movement which challenged racism in the streets. … The impact of the Cold War, the anti-communist purges and near-totalitarian social environment, had a devastating impact upon the cause of blacks’ civil rights and civil liberties”. (Marable, 2007, pp. 17-27)

Part II – The Southern social formation

“If the Negro is permitted to engage in politics, his usefulness as a labourer is at an end.”[7]

“We can view the urban region as a kind of competitive collective unit within the global dynamics of capitalism. Like individual entrepreneurs, each urban region has the autonomy to pursue whatever course it will, but in the end each is disciplined by the external coercive laws of competition. Its industry has to compete within an international division of labour, and its competitive strength depends on the qualities of labour power; the efficiency and depth of social and physical infrastructures; the ‘rationality’ of lifestyles, cultures, and political processes; the state of class struggle and social tension; and geographical position and natural resources endowments.” – David Harvey[8]

The capitalist mode of production and race in the Deep South

David Harvey offers a strategic view of space in the field of capital accumulation and the division of labour. If we infer that the “external coercive laws of competition” have constantly buffeted the southern United States as they have every other region, what implications does this have for the development of the Deep South as a regional formation? In what way and to what extent did capitalist imperatives mould the emergence of southern markets in chattel and chattel-produced goods? Did capitalism underdevelop the South? Or, did capitalism underdevelop black America?

Manning Marable’s argument that it capitalism did underdevelop black America suggests that the system was able to develop “not in spite of the exclusion of Blacks, but because of the brutal exploitation of Blacks as workers and consumers”. The paradox of American history, in this view, is that each advance of white freedom, affluence and state power was accomplished alongside black unfreedom, poverty and powerlessness. Development, meaning “the institutionalization of the hegemony of capitalism as a world system”, relied on a non-white periphery characterised by “chattel slavery, sharecropping, peonage, industrial labour at low wages, and culture chaos” for black people. This allowed the accumulation of surplus value from black workers to take place at an escalated rate compared to the equivalent for white workers. It was insured by systems of white supremacy which commanded the dependency of black populations – notably, a majoritarian political system that ensured that black minorities could only successfully advance agendas acceptable to either of the two main white capitalist parties. “The constant expropriation of surplus value created by Black labour is the heart and soul of underdevelopment”. (Marable, 2000, p. 2 & 7) This analysis, drawing from dependency theory, but above all from the work of W E B Du Bois, suggests that the global ‘colour line’ is a precondition for capitalist development, and the knot in which the antagonisms of the capitalist mode of production – the exploitation of labour and colonial subjection, as much as the oppression of women – are condensed.

David Roediger, also informed by Du Bois, takes a substantially similar position, rebuking those Marxists who have classified antebellum slavery as a form of agrarian feudalism. While in the abstract, he maintains, capitalism is structured around the dual freedom of labour (from the means of production; to sell one’s labour power as property), unfree labour is historically perfectly compatible with capitalism provided slavers exist and compete within a world market based on free labour.[9] Further, while capitalism has certain homogenizing tendencies, it should not be expected to be ‘colour blind’ or to eventually level all national, religious and racial distinctions. The process of ‘race-making’ in capitalism is continuous, as profits are maximised through the social production of difference. (Roediger & Esch, 2009; Roediger, 2008, pp. 64-69; Lowe, 1999, pp. 28-29)

How one addresses this issue depends in part on how one understands the capitalist mode of production (CMP), and its relationship to precapitalist modes of production (PCMPs). In general, my position is that a mode of production consists of a specific conjunction of relations and forces of production. In this conjunction, productive relations have explanatory priority, as these determine the boundaries of productive forces (the form of surplus extraction determining the labour process). The capitalist mode of production is thus defined principally by the productive relations that are specific to it (the particular relationship of labour power to the means of production, the relations of effective possession of each, the form of surplus extraction), and secondly by the productive forces (the labour process and the relative quantity of surplus extracted). (Callinicos, 2004)

In this light, it would seem to be difficult to sustain the thesis that antebellum slavery itself was a CMP. For, the defining condition of antebellum slavery is the extra-economic bondage of the labourer to some means of production as a condition of her existence. This is quite at odds with the ‘dual freedom’ of the proletarian under capitalism; the worker who has been completely ‘freed’ from the means of production, but is also ‘free’ to sell her labour power. Charles Post thus argues that antebellum slavery was a decidedly non-capitalist form, and that the forging of American capitalism arose from the combined modes of production (slavery, petty commodity production, mercantile capital) in which capitalist imperatives exerted overall dominance. In this light, the dominant farmer republican ideology, as well as the political form of slaver dominance (Democratic Party hegemony), were pre-capitalist. This structure articulated modes of production motivated regional (north-south) competition and expansionism, which was eventually resolved by the Civil War and the victory of capitalism. (Post, 2011; Davidson, 2011; Ashworth, 1995; Ashworth, 2007)

Yet, intriguingly, Post’s argument focuses more on the productive forces (the labour process, the instruments of production) than on productive relations. And it is on the ground of productive relations, and specifically the position of the labourer with respect to the means of production, that Sidney Mintz broached the question of whether the plantation slave was a proletarian. Through an examination of Caribbean sugar plantations and the forms of labour relation (slave, indentured, free, etc.) prevalent in them, he discloses the co-existence and co-dependence of these forms in the same labour systems. Mintz shows: that slavery rarely exists in a pure form; that it is possible for elements of the slave labour form to overlap with the free labour form in concrete labour processes (the separation of the worker from the means of production); that elements of both were historically articulated within a capitalist labour process; that slaves themselves could adopt ‘free labour’ roles, for example in the production of food; and that it would be an error to become stuck in an ideal-typical abstraction in which the slave is the eternal other of the proletarian. (Mintz, 1978) Post allows for the articulation of different modes of production within distinct economies and regions, but Mintz’s argument suggests that in the concrete social formation, different modes of production may be articulated in the same labour process.

Indeed, Post himself has no difficulty with the argument that ‘free labour’ needn’t exist in a pure form in capitalism. It is his argument, for example, that following the Civil War non-capitalist forms persisted in the South in the form of household-based sharecropping, until the Jim Crow era. The imposition of segregation was coextensive with the planters’ transition to capitalist ‘labour tenancy’ as the dominant mode of extraction – indeed, in this view, segregation was a necessity for its effective reproduction given the inability of planters to subsume the labour process under their control. The disenfranchisement of blacks and many poor whites was necessary for agrarian capitalism due to a specific feature of its production cycle and the disjunction with labour-time. (There is a ‘slack season’ between planting and harvesting and, as a result, agrarian capital often requires the legal-juridical coercion of labour-power.) In this sense, Jim Crow was a pathology of racialised capitalism that, while functional in various ways, was no longer necessary for its successful reproduction once technological advances allowed for the effective subsumption of the labour process by the 1940s. (Mann, 1990; Post, 2011; Hahn, 2003)

This specification of the relationship between CMP and PCMP has consequences for how we situate the South within the US and the global division of labour during the classical phase of anticommunism. Pace Post, we can say that the juridical, extra-economic coercion of labour in Jim Crow in part reflects the formative influence of a PCMP, a feudal remnant on the development of Southern capitalism. (Kayatekin, 2001) This left the South in a certain place relative to the development of capitalism, predominantly in its industrial form, in the US as a whole. The South was, in effect, underdeveloped by capitalism, just as black America was, precisely because the dominant capitalist imperatives drove the extraction of surplus value in the slave South by means of regional competition, and then impelled the imposition of a segregated polity as part of the indispensable means through which the South would converge with the nation.

The place of the South in American nationhood

“Even its children know that the South is in trouble”. – Lillian Smith.

During the classical period of anticommunism, the South was beginning to make a transition to Fordist production methods: it was en route to ‘Americanisation’, in a sense that will be discussed later. Its largest economic sector, the textile industry, was concentrated in a cluster of small production units, in small towns, across four states. By far the major producer was North Carolina, followed by South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. North Carolina’s productive advantage derived from the fact that it enjoyed access to an army of cheap surplus labour that was poorly organised, lacked political clout and lacked the protection of the law from the most intensive forms of exploitation. (Minchin, 1997, p. 2; Wood, 1986, p. 68)

Industrialisation was taking place slowly, and industrial unionism fared poorly. Worse still, the civil unrest arising from the struggle to end segregation, deterred investors. The business advocates of the ‘new south’ were not as invested in white supremacy as the planters’ regime, and began to voice unease as the civil rights movement grew. This did not mean that they had a principled objection to Jim Crow; their objections were phrased purely in terms of ‘law and order’, and the dire consequences for any city or state that could not protect property from lawless mobs. Jim Crow, if no longer necessary for the reproduction of capitalist relations in the South, was certainly an economic advantage for business, not only maintaining pay differentials that undermined the bargaining power of labour – the strong empirical and historical evidence is that racism increases inequality in white income distribution - but also maintaining a folkish, cross-class solidarity among whites, which unions found it very difficult to break through. However, a segregated South, shaken by anti-racist struggles, would have difficulties restructuring its operations to become competitive on a national level. At the same time, however, the business sell for the South was still predicated, as it had been throughout the Depression, on the promise of a low-wage labour market guaranteed by a near union-free environment. Southern Democratic politicians forced through right-to-work laws, and collaborated with Republicans in Washington on labour issues, such as Taft-Hartley. The textile drive by the CIO and Textile Workers’ Organising Committee in the latter half of the 1930s had made some inroads into the industry, but these gains were least impressive in the South – by 1939, the union had managed to organise only 7% of the region’s mill hands. A subsequent drive by the Textile Workers’ Union of America, between 1945 and 1955, was an even more dismal failure, and pragmatic efforts to work around the failure by forging cooperative relationships with anti-union politicians ended up reinforcing the grip of forces that had defeated them: the Democratic Party and white supremacism. (Bernstein, 2010, pp. 616-623; Brattan, 1997) (Wilson, 2000, pp. 25 & 108-109; Reich, 1981)

The South was in a strange place. Southern capital enjoyed political power disproportionate to its class power. It strategically dominated a region that had a good claim to represent the historical core of the United States. (Macleod, 1974; Blumrosen & Blumrosen, 2007) Yet it also seemed to be in a spotlit enclave where its racial practices were the occasion for global censure (and thus reluctant intervention from Washington, Dudziak, 2000), and where its social problems and seeming underdevelopment relative to the national norm seemed to undermine the grandiose notions that the region’s defenders.

It is a commonplace of the American turn to overseas colonies in 1898 that it was coterminous with an extensive nationalisation, an anti-sectional impulse that saw north and south re-united. This displacement of domestic tensions in overseas expansion was anticipated and welcomed by statesmen. Woodrow Wilson, for example, held that sectionalism arose primarily over the matter of commercial interests, while the collective commitment to the higher purpose of colonialism would relieve the focus on “the money question” – a classic articulation of Kriegsideologie. (Thorsen, 1988; Losurdo, 2001) What was nationalised, arguably, was the renascence of white supremacy in the South, so that both press and politicians of the North would express support for the emerging forms of segregation known as Jim Crow, and lament the egalitarian impulses of Reconstruction and the Fifteenth Amendment. (Weston, 1972, pp. 1-15) Yet even at this moment, the fact is that in the geography of US imperialism, the South was assigned the status of a ‘tropic’ – in Nancy Leys Stephan’s words, “a place of radical otherness to the temperate world”. Its relative backwardness in terms of capitalist development, and its attendant forms of racialised capitalism, fuelled this perception. So while north and south were ostensibly reconciled on the axis of racial nationalism, the regionalisation of the United States, the otherness of the South and its urgent need of reform, was reinforced on the very same ground. (Ring, 2009)

Southern politicians, organic intellectuals and business lobbies responded to this denigration on the plane of culture, arguing for tolerance of their native customs and their rare and delicate cultural ecology. They linked the defence of free markets and cosmopolitanism to the southern ‘way of life’. This was, for example, the tactic of Anthony Hart Harrigan, the first executive director of the Southern States Industrial Council, writing in the National Review. More generally, for racial conservatives the South was a citadel of ordered liberty, of civilization and “aristocratic” virtue. (MacLean, 2010; Lowndes, 2008) Such declarations naturally arouse one’s hermeneutics of suspicion. The feudal order to which such categories adverted had long since been subsumed in the South, and they read like nothing so much as the signposted thematics of Dixieland.

If the South’s still rural economy, and supposed cultural staidness and traditionalism, contrasted it with the cultural celerity of the North, this trope adverted only to already racialised (and embourgeoised) assumptions about culture. It colludes with what W T Lahmon described as those “polite external forces” struggling to maintain sovereignty over insubordinate subaltern forms. (Lahmon, 1998, p. 152) Of course, the much vaunted traditionalism of the South, culturally enacted in a certain Hellenic formalism in architecture, design and music, was a style peculiar to Ulster Scot and English settlers, and was even there less evident in the working classes than among the Southern gentry. Certainly, such Hellenism was a polite external force relative to the open-ended, experimental and improvised character of much African American culture. (Bronner, 2009; Burrison, 2007, p. 103) The area in which the South was and remains most distinctive is language, with numerous surviving (or only recently extinct) colonial English dialects alongside Cajun French, Isleño Spanish, and indigenous languages. Southern English itself is a creolised product of “multiple lines of descent”, with a dominant English ‘core’, as well as Scotch-Irish and African grammar, syntax and phonology fusing into a single “speechway”. (Algeo, 2003)

This form of southern cultural particularism can be read through the homogenizing processes of capitalism, not merely as a defensive reaction but as a willing process of commodification. “Dixification”, in which the cultural specificities of the south are absorbed into a spectacular fable of diversity (Dixieland), was already inscribed into the defence of Jim Crow. (Romine, 2008, pp. 1-2) This Dixification-by-speech-act meant that at the precise moment when the apologists of white supremacy were flaunting their feudal sensibilities, they were bidding for incorporation in the American national imaginary on the terms of globalizing industrial capitalism. Anticommunism furnished the means to make this transition effective. A case, perhaps, where “the royalists are the true pillars of the constitutional republic”.[10]

Part III – Fordism, the ‘historical bloc’ and languages of hegemony

Americanism and Fordism: the ‘historical bloc’

I have suggested that the US was ruled by a Fordist ‘historical bloc’ in the period of classical anticommunism. According to Gramsci, an ‘historical bloc’ consists of an articulation of “structures and superstructures … That is to say the complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production.” Within the historical bloc, “material forces are the content and ideologies are the form”, though this distinction is “merely didactic”, because “material forces could not possibly be historically conceived without form, and ideologies would be individual whims without material forces”. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 471)

Gramsci here specified both a formal, conceptual relationship between “two areas of abstract reality”, and a concrete description of the relationship between these two areas in a social formation. The concrete relation is between different social forces, and perhaps different modes of production articulated in a single national economy (as in the Risorgimento). Within this historical bloc, it is possible to have numerous combinations of political alliances and differing distributions of power among dominant classes and fractions, without the basic unity of the bloc being disturbed. For a new historical bloc to come into existence requires a “political initiative” on the part of emerging class forces to shift “the dead weight of traditional policies”. (Sassoon, 1981, p. 121; Gramsci, 1971, p. 263) The historical bloc is above all, then, a conjunctural fact.

What is the relation between the ‘historical bloc’ and hegemony? Gramsci’s analysis of ‘Americanism and Fordism’ centred on the rationalisation of production techniques involved, suggesting that Fordism represented an historically progressive transition away from individualism and competition toward collectivism and planning, albeit one taking place within capitalist logic. It was a transition that was easier to accomplish in the United States owing to the psycho-physical acculturation of workers to industrial life, as well as to the rationalisation of America’s demographic composition, so that it lacked the "vast army of parasites", the classes with no economic function, the unproductive landed gentry, clerics and middle classes who still predominated in parts of Europe. Thus, the reactionary forms of resistance to Fordism in Europe, extolling idyllic patriarchy, ruralism, Catholicism and the artisanal life, were largely absent in the United States. (Gramsci, 1971)

Just as central to Fordism according to Gramsci was its moral and religious dimension, and particularly the regulation of the sexual instinct. While Gramsci saw a potentially progressive, rational development in this, it was dealt with in a despotic way by Henry Ford, reflecting his need to ensure that workers would be able to reproduce their labour power in its normal state, his wider concern with the sensualisation of culture (epitomised by ‘Jewish’ jazz), and his support for Prohibition. The living conditions imposed in ‘Fordlandia’, Ford’s failed attempt to create an enclave of Fordist America in Brazil producing rubber, included the regulation of workers’ diet and the export of Prohibition. These represent the most consistent attempt by Ford to impose these norms. For Ford, the corporation was a prototype of the nation, and the habits of its workforce should reflect those of a healthy, Christian society. Fordism was not, then, simply a method of production. It was also a productivist ideology tied to a narrative of civilizational advance, Americanism, and a Christian ethic of labour. (Rupert, 1995; Gramsci, 1971; Grandin, 2010; Beynon, 1984, pp. 40-41)

Yet, it would be erroneous to treat Fordism in itself as the means of labour’s incorporation into the post-war system. While Gramsci focuses on the famous ‘high wages’ of workers under the Fordist pattern, these production methods had consequences that Gramsci’s analysis did not envisage. A mainstay of industrial sociology on the subject is the fact that corporate planning removes skills and initiative from the ‘shop floor’. (Braverman, 1974; Pfeffer, 1979; Beynon & Nichols, 1977; Sennett, 1972) In the words of Ford’s ghost-writer, the “net result” of these methods was “the reduction of the necessity for thought on the part of the worker”. (Rupert, 1995, p. 63) This gave rise to a zombie-like existence for workers. Resistance to this tendency could take various forms. It could be passive. Workers, (Garson, 1994) explains, could develop games and objectives to make the work more interesting, or simply refuse to do a bad job by sticking strictly to procedure. Or it could take the form of industrial struggles over the control of the labour process, where it has been a central doctrine of Ford that this is one thing that is not up for negotiation. (Beynon, 1984) There was therefore no necessary reason, if the left in the labour movement was not cannibalised by anticommunism, why ‘high wages’ alone should deliver industrial peace, or why productivity agreements, often the cause of the intensification of labour and the risks attached to it, and a further shift in control over labour processes to managers, should be the basis for class compromise rather than class struggle.

Importantly, American labour was not merely incorporated into a domestic Fordist bloc, but also its globalization under the rubric of ‘free trade unionism’ and anticommunism. This was possible in part because US planners embraced ‘New Deal’ thinking in their construction of the global financial and economic architecture, repudiating the laissez-faire economic liberalism that, for example, Southern industrialists and policymakers still favoured. (Callinicos, 2009, pp. 165-187; Smith, 2003; Smith, 2005, pp. 82-121) Thus, a liberal world economic order, reinforced by reciprocal trade agreements and Marshall Plan aid, was one which labour could perceive that it had a stake in. It would allow America’s production machine to thrive, create jobs and growth within the US, improve the bargaining power of labour, and constitute the best response to “Soviet Communist imperialism”. (Rupert, 1995, pp. 44-46) While interwar Europe displayed forms of reactionary resistance to ‘Americanisation’, the Fordist model is what was successfully transfused into European productive centres under Washington’s post-WWII hegemony, with the guidance of sympathetic social democratic or Christian Democratic leaderships. (van der Pijl, 1984) Thus, in the post-war United States, at home and abroad, hegemony flowed from the factory.

Hegemonic languages and political identities

“Italy is a fact, now we need to make Italians.” - Massimo D’Azeglio on Italian unification

Hegemony is political class leadership, in two senses: 1) leadership within a class alliance, either bourgeois or proletarian; 2) dominance over other classes. Leadership within the “system of class alliances” entails the hegemonic class or fraction assimilating the interests and perspectives of allied classes and providing a moral and intellectual framework that accommodates them. Stuart Hall reminds us that hegemony is neither a normal nor a fixed state, but a condition of rule that must constantly be constructed: “‘hegemony’ is a very particular, historically specific, and temporary ‘moment’, in the life of a society. It is rare for this degree of unity to be achieved, enabling a society to set itself a quite new historical agenda, under the leadership of a specific formation or constellation of social forces. Such periods of ‘settlement’ are unlikely to persist forever. There is nothing automatic about them. They have to be actively constructed and positively maintained.” (Hall, 1986) Hegemony is that “homogeneous politico-economic historical bloc, without internal contradictions” – an overstatement – which must be consolidated through “conscious, planned struggle”. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 263)

In what manner is hegemony constructed? Coercion plays an important role, particularly with regard to those excluded from the hegemonic bloc. But while force “can be employed against enemies”, it is ineffective “against a part of one's own side which one wishes rapidly to assimilate, and whose ‘good will’ and enthusiasm one needs”. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 263) In a hegemonic moment, the dominant mode of rule is through ideology. The dominant ideology cements an array of contradictory subject-positions. In this respect, the dominant ideology must incorporate within its body elements of popular ideology, which are then represented as a set of differences, with their specifically antagonistic aspect neutralised. (Mouzelis, 1978) A hegemonic project must transform the terms of political discourse in this manner, creating a new definition of reality.

In this sense, then, we are speaking of hegemonic languages.[11] The dominant register of US anticommunism in the classical period was that of liberal nationalism, in which the United States was extolled as a unique bulwark of democratic freedoms, civil rights and individualism, against the collectivist, undemocratic tyranny of the USSR. While I have maintained that the ‘line of political demarcation’ in anticommunism is the defence of the capitalist social formation, the symbolic field of anticommunism was organised, quilted around the master-signifier of ‘freedom’. The master-signifier of ‘freedom’ organised a chain of cognate signifiers – ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, ‘choice’, ‘free markets’, ‘diversity’, ‘individualism’, and their negations – in a contested discursive field, in which the Southern white power bloc conducted its hegemonic practices.

This has important resonances in American politics, particularly when contrasted with ‘slavery’. Communists and their allies in the United States were frequently baited as agents, or at best apologists, of (in Norman Thomas’ phrase) “human slavery under Stalin”. (Yarnell, 1974, p. 87) The vernacular of abolitionism is being accessed here, but not only of abolitionism. The institutions of slavery in American history could be reproved as an abridgment of human rights, as in the radical tradition of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Marie Child, Benjamin Lundy or the Grimké sisters. But it was as likely to be reviled as a lowly social status that properly belonged only to the raced, as in the tradition of ‘white labour republicanism’. (Roediger, 2007)

More broadly, depending on one’s sociolect, freedom could mean the freedom to sell one’s labour power as one’s own property; the freedom to purchase that labour power and put it into circulation with means of production; the freedom to organise a union; the freedom from unionism; the freedom of African Americans as equal citizens in a capitalist democracy; the freedom of a racial caste to enjoy the privileges of segregation; etc. The ability of ‘freedom’ to occupy this role, then, unifying diverse subject-positions, arises because it is a relatively tendentially versatile signifier (rather than a “tendentially empty signifier”), one of several such, enabling “common nuclei of meaning” to be “connotatively linked to diverse ideological-articulatory domains”. (Laclau, 1977)[12]

The idioms of ‘antitotalitarianism’ played a similar role. Cold War ‘antitotalitarianism’ effectively merged all non-liberal sources of politics into the (curiously ductile, indefinite, polysemous) category of ‘totalitarianism’. (Losurdo, 2004) This was not merely a contrivance of Cold War political science, but reflected concrete experiences. In the workers’ movement, the locution ‘Red Fascism’ began to emerge as the Popular Front Left was strained by revelations concerning the scale of repression in the USSR and the sudden ‘anti-imperialist’ lurch of the CPUSA in response to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. In effect, what Koestler rendered in fiction, and what Brzezinski et al formalised as an anticommunist orthodoxy, had been anticipated in the organised labour movement. (Rupert, 1995, pp. 156-7) The uses of ‘antitotalitarianism’ were as diverse as those for ‘freedom’. If for the Southern States Industrial Council, civil rights legislation was a “blueprint for totalitarianism”, for a liberal Southern woman like Lillian Smith, it was the Southern white supremacist system that was ‘totalitarian’. (Sensing, 1964; Smith, 1993, p. 120).[13]

I will now turn to a different aspect of the unity of these subject-positions.

Racial populism and southern identity

For Gramsci, the ‘Southern Question’ was one of revolutionary praxis: how a revolutionary working class in the north of Italy could unite with southern peasants in a possible hegemonic formation capable of challenging capitalism. The northern bourgeoisie had united Italy’s territories in a formation dominated by capitalism, but where feudal relations remained prevalent in the south. Northern attitudes to the south reflected the quasi-colonial relationship between the two: southerners were lazy, backward and feckless. By an obverse logic, northern workers were seen in the south as privileged, overpaid ‘lords’ involved in a dissolute urban lifestyle whose values were at variance with those obtaining in the south. The problem, then, was that the unity of the popular classes could not be taken for granted, but had to be constructed. The disaggregation of the peasantry meant that there it could not provide the unifying instance, so the task fell to a centralised and collectivised proletariat. The northern working class, to become hegemonic within a ‘system of alliances’ capable of challenging capitalism, had to incorporate the interests and perspectives of other subaltern classes and fractions. It was no mere task of co-optation: the working class had to offer a programme that would be of real benefit to its potential class allies. It was also necessary to wage cultural struggles to overcome the prejudices that disorganise the popular classes to the advantage of the hegemonic bloc. (Gramsci & Verdicchio, 2005; Santucci, 2010, pp. 101-108)

However, the question that Gramsci studied, though it produced answers that resonate beyond its own subject, was historically determinate, concerned with historically produced systems of difference thrown up in the Italian social formation in the conjuncture following unification. In studying the Deep South, and its role in the anticommunist coalition, my problem is different. The issue raised is how the combatants of anticommunism successfully disorganise popular class opposition and incorporate elements of the popular classes. The traditions of Southern populism must be considered carefully. I have suggested that racial populism in the South worked as a similar factor in the incorporation of white workers as class compromise did in the North. In fact, Southern populism possessed almost the opposite valence before its defeat to capitalist class forces in the late 19th Century. Although the movement emerged over the defence of customary rights and traditions that were under attack from capitalist forces, it swiftly gave a new cultural and political form to the intensifying class antagonisms in the rural South, and also attempted to connect these to similar experiences in the North and West. The cooperation between the Southern Farmers’ Alliance and the Knights of Labor eventually produced a platform for a populist class alliance, a common political and economic endeavour in the short-lived People’s Party. The movement foundered on its own segregated structures, and on the unresolved tensions between the conservative and radical wings which expressed class divisions between propertied farmers and tenant farmers. It ran up against the limits of its political vision, rooted in the defence of small producers which had been central to Southern politics since the American Revolution, and finally it suffered from the co-optation of significant aspects of its agenda by the Democratic Party. (Hahn, 2006)

Southern ‘racial populism’ is, by contrast, that form of political practice elaborated by the Democratic Party through the defeat of Southern populism and the development of Jim Crow. In interpreting this, I find Laclau’s concept of populism as a form of popular-democratic interpellation, working on the antagonism between the 'people' and the 'power bloc', useful – with some caveats.[14] For Laclau, populism is a discursive, ideological phenomenon, since the ‘people’ do not exist in productive relations. Whereas class antagonisms operate at all levels of the mode of production, and relate to the fundamental conflict between the working class and the ruling class, populist interpellations work on the antagonism between the people and the power bloc. ‘Populism’ is a ‘tendentially empty signifier’, with no class connotations and thus a raw material in the waging of class struggles. In the hands of dominant classes and fractions, this permits "the presentation of popular-democratic interpellations as a synthetic-antagonistic complex with respect to the dominant ideology". This is to say, there is oppositional content to popular-democratic articulations which can be absorbed and neutralised, or the dominant classes and fractions can, when hegemony breaks down, organise the oppositional content in an antagonistic thrust to re-organise the power bloc rather than depose it. (One can think here of the New Right’s articulation of certain popular ideas in a reactionary discourse aimed at re-organising the Fordist-Keynesian bloc as a neoliberal bloc.) (Laclau, 1977; Mouzelis, 1978)

Racial populism is, for these purposes, a relatively tendentially versatile signifier in which class connotations have been displaced onto the terrain of race. But this does not merely mean the absorption of oppositional content: rather, in the Deep South, it was articulated in a “synthetic-antagonistic complex” regarding the dominant ideology of liberal nationalism. It set up white, Christian, Southern folk in counterposition to Jews, ‘Papists’, African Americans, the Federal government (at least, the institutions of the New Deal), and of course communists, whose insidious work could be located behind each of the former.

Racial populist interpellations thus produced a folkish, Southern political identity, one of the multiple identities articulated within the anticommunist carapace. Gramsci’s insight was to see in bourgeois hegemonic practices the elaboration of a unity in division: that is, Italian unity on capitalist terms meant the division of popular classes along cultural, ethnic lines. But identities do are not stable factors in politicisation. If identity is indeed a ‘politics of location’, then the political uses of a given identity are partially contingent on the location it inhabits. If the process of identification begins with the necessarily fictive narrativization of the self, this very fact that this process is fictive, that it is semi-arbitrarily sutured, means that an identity never has the unified, settled character that (some of) the advocates of ‘identity politics’ tend to claim for it, and is thus susceptible to contestation. (Hall, 2003)

The susceptibility of such identification to more or less universal, or particular, articulations has to do with its location in the social structure and the calculable interests of its bearers. Identification, after all, proceeds through the identification of others with similar values and interests. The closure of identity is, moreover, only semi-arbitrary, as it can take place along lines of real antagonism. As fields of politicisation, some identities are more potentially universal than others, to the extent that their relationship to the dominant relations of exploitation and oppression can open them to communist interpellation.

The dominant liberal nationalist register of Cold War anticommunism offers, of course, only that parochial form of universalism peculiar to empires, one which has limited appeal for the oppressed or most exploited, but which successfully interpellated the relatively better off sections of the working class. In the South, we find folkishness and particularism rather than universality on the anticommunist side. These identities, though perhaps inadequate for a would-be world hegemon, also made their claim on Americanism. Indeed, they claimed to represent the only true Americanism, the white, Christian, patriarchal America of free enterprise and Anglo-Saxon democracy which alone could withstand the solvent effects of communism. And the South was, without question, the sector of US society that favoured American expansionism more than any other, despite reservations about the incorporation of multiracial states like Hawaii into the union (which was as much anticommunist as racist, given employers’ express fears that the ILWU ran the island-state like a socialist dictatorship). (Gaughan, 1999; Ziker, 2007) The seeming paradox of Cold War hegemonic politics is that the unity and dominance of the US ruling class in the classical period of anticommunism rested on cleavages in the social formation in which it reproduced itself, while its universalism depended on its perpetuation of oppressive particularisms.

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[1] From the abstract to the concrete, rather than the reverse: “There are therefore two methods, one starting from the real itself, the other from abstractions. Which of these two methods is correct? 'It seems to be correct to start with the real and concrete . . . but on closer inspection it is clear that this is false.' The second method, which starts from simple abstractions in order to produce knowledge of the real in a 'thought-concrete' 'is manifestly the correct scientific method '”. (Althusser & Balibar, 1997, p. 88)

[2] It also obscures the reality of countersubversive politics in important ways. The concept of “black paranoia”, emerging in response to allegations of CIA involvement in drug trafficking as part of a counter-revolutionary war in Nicaragua, is in principle applicable to every accusation by black Americans of state repression, from the ‘We Charge Genocide’ petition onward. The response to ‘social hygeine’ programmes, of Tuskegee, of the racial component of COINTELPRO, and so on, is thereby reduced to a pathology of American democracy. On “black paranoia”, see (Cockburn & St Clair, 1998, pp. 63-94).

[3] Lest I seem to fall into an implicit apologia for Stalinism, I should make a number of things clear. First, I would include neither Trotskyist nor anarchist anti-Stalinism in the category of anticommunism, precisely because of their anticapitalist (in fact, communist) commitments. To take a more ambiguous example, Richard Wright’s repudiation of communism, culminating in a contribution to the ex-communist text The God That Failed in 1949, may be taken to identify him as an anticommunist. Yet, despite his scepticism, there continued to be a ‘residual’ communism in his approach (Gilroy, 1993, p. 148), and the nature of his political engagements (for example, his enthusiastic involvement in the Bandung Conference in 1955) continued to be determined in part by his critical approach to colonial and racial domination. Second, because I am interested in the ‘line of political demarcation’ does not mean that I am willing to efface or downgrade the importance of ideological divisions. How agents are situated by ideology has some important bearing on how they relate to the ‘line of political demarcation’. Third, of course the practical engagements of communists often fell short of any anticapitalist remit. Yet, just as for Sartre the French communist party (PCF) was the sole unifying instance capable of imparting "class-being" to French workers (Elliott, 2006, p. 9), so the US communist party (CPUSA) as the dominant force in the ‘Popular Front’ Left was plausibly perceived by its opponents as the major notable threat to American capitalism. Finally, it is of some significance that many people had excellent, plausible and pragmatic reasons to be anticommunist, if communism was taken to mean either the social relations prevalent in the USSR or the alarmingly zigzagging and secretive political strategy of the CPUSA.

[4] It may seem that the capitalist class has means of achieving class-wide unity outwith the state in the form of interlocking directorates and business lobbying (‘collective capital’), (Useem, 1984), but in fact such unity tends to be remarkably narrow, produced among fractions of class fractions, and as a result even this limited unity is realised through the state.

[5] As a definition of the capitalist state, this would certainly seem to collapse into structural-functionalism, as Poulantzas’ critics often suggest. As a specification of a particular role that the capitalist state must fulfil if there is to be a unified power bloc, however, and re-stated as an historical outcome rather than as a constitutive feature of statehood (as Poulantzas does in State, Power, Socialism), this argument is compatible with the ‘strategic-relational’ approach to the capitalist state which treats the state as a condensation of existing social relationships, a strategic field of contestation. However, it also involves re-phrasing the relationship between the economic, political and ideological as one of dimensions of a contradictory unity, rather than as one between distinct structures, a step which I agree with. (Poulantzas, 2000; Bretthauer, 2011, p. 77; Jessop, 2007; Jessop, 1985, p. 159)

[6] These thumbnail comparisons are intended to be informative. They provide points of contrast and convergence through which some of the dimensions of the problem can emerge, disclosing a possible relationship between a particular ensemble of factors: a racial caste system with origins in a colonial form of governance; a relatively advanced state of capitalist development; and anticommunism as a form of praxis for the management of turbulent labour systems, complementary to the caste system. As importantly, however, they should form a prophylaxis against the temptation toward ‘American exceptionalism’. (On the debates over ‘exceptionalism’, see Archer, 2007) The idea of a specific American sonderweg predicated on the absence of feudal remnants, relative prosperity and early suffrage (for white males) implies a set of international norms from which the US deviated. In fact, both South Africa and Australia shared many of the characteristics supposed to make the US ‘exceptional’.

[7] A Mississippian comments on the introduction of Jim Crow laws to the state. Quoted, (Wood, 1986, p. 118)

[8] Quoted in (Wilson, 2000, p. 108)

[9] Marx’s own approach would tend to reinforce this argument: “Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry.” Karl Marx, ‘Letter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov’,

[10] “All these factions of the party of Order, each of which has its own king and its own restoration in petto [secretly], mutually enforce, as against their rivals' hankering for usurpation and revolt, the common rule of the bourgeoisie, the form in which the special claims remain neutralized and reserved the republic. Just as Kant makes the republic, so these royalists make the monarchy the only rational form of state, a postulate of practical reason whose realization is never attained, but whose attainment must always be striven for and mentally adhered to as the goal. Thus the constitutional republic had gone forth from the hands of the bourgeois republicans as a hollow ideological formula to become a form full of content and life in the hands of the royalists in coalition. And Thiers spoke more truly than he suspects when he said: "We, the royalists, are the true pillars of the constitutional republic."” Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France.

[11] Gramsci’s concern with language arose from a concrete set of experiences – in particular, the standardization of the Italian language that was so fundamental to creation of an Italian nation-state. Gramsci spoke the Sardinian dialect as a first language. Those driving Italian unification were based in the relatively wealthy and powerful north, and sought to create a language based on the Tuscan dialect, spoken by educated members of the nation. The over-riding of local dialects was inextricable from the subordination of Sardinia and the south of Italy in general to the needs of northern industrial capital. This was what was meant by ‘making Italians’.

[12] The concept of the ‘tendentially empty signifier’ is conjoined with an argument that political signifiers have necessarily no ‘class connotation’, and presages the discursive turn taken by Laclau in later years. This rests, in my view, on an inappropriate extrapolation from the althusserian principle of the ‘relative autonomy’ of political and ideological instances from the economic. The tendency is for post-althusserians to make an implicit elision between no necessary correspondence between political alignments and class forces, and necessarily no correspondence between political alignments and class forces. Paul Hirst made this strange inference explicit: “the notion of relative autonomy is untenable. Once any degree of autonomous action is accorded to political forces as means of representation vis-à-vis classes of economic agents, then there is no necessary correspondence between the forces that appear in the political (and what they 'represent') and economic classes. It is not simply a question of discrepancy (the political means 'represent' the class more or less accurately) but of necessary non-correspondence.” (Quoted Wood, 1986, p. 81)

[13] There is also that lineage of antitotalitarians who claim to be unable to distinguish between fascism and communism, yet in practice tend to choose the former - which we can trace from, for example, John Spargo (who did not admire fascism, but preferred the victory of Franco in Spain to a success for the USSR in Europe) to Jeane Kirkpatrick, for whom authoritarian right-wing dictatorship was always preferable to democracy where communists might gain power.

[14] I have already explained my reservations about just how ‘empty’ a signifier is, and that I prefer to speak of the relative tendential versatility of signifiers (this seems to me an obviously advantageous approach when dealing with signifiers such as ‘race’, which of necessity are not neutral in class struggles). I will now also second Mouzelis’ criticism that Laclau’s approach acknowledges the role of political organisation in the actualisation of populist strategies without dealing with it in any concrete way, and without theorising it.

Finkelstein on BDS

2012-02-16T17:49:00.000Z

I suppose the least that could be said is that this wasn't a well thought out intervention by Norman Finkelstein. He knows this, which is why he asked for the original video of the interview to be taken down - a futile gesture on the internet, but a meaningful one inasmuch as he acknowledges the harm done, and also an important one inasmuch as Finkelstein will continue to be an asset to the pro-Palestine movement. However, as Finkelstein's position is inescapably 'out there', as it is already sending the pro-Israel commentariat into gyrations of pleasure, and as the air is already thick with the smell of burning bridges, I feel no compunction about adding to the blogorhoea generated by the interview. There are two basic points which I think are worth making. The first is that insofar as there is a substantive strategic argument, it is incoherent. And in saying so, I am not denying the presence of his usual strengths: forensic scholarship, moral commitment, and candour. The second is that insofar as it consists of invective, it is a hypertrophied manifestation of the worst aspects of Finkelstein's polemical style, and is a gift to the Zionists. These are not unrelated points, as will become clear as I unravel them.

Finkelstein's strategic posture is roughly as follows. If you are serious about engaging in politics, and building mass movements, you cannot go further in your demands than the public is willing to go. You have to calibrate your goals. You have to calculate what will be acceptable to a viable mass of public opinion. The public is presently willing to support a two-state settlement based on a rock solid international legal consensus. This would be a liveable settlement, acceptable to Israelis and Palestinians, and moreover is within reach because Israel's position makes it increasingly isolated in the international system. It would be possible to leverage the international legal consensus to force Israel to accomodate a Palestinian state based on the June 1967 borders. Any movement of solidarity which attempts to go beyond this isn't going anywhere, because the public is unwilling to accept a one-state solution. The BDS movement, despite having the correct tactics, leaves itself wide open to Israeli propaganda counter-offensives, because it has the wrong goal. Implicitly, it favours measures that in their totality would mean Israel would cease to exist (as a Zionist state): end the occupation, recognise full equality for Arab citizens of Israel, and respect and implement the 'right of return' for Palestinian refugees. By contrast with this 'leftist posturing', it should clearly and explicitly state that it favours a two-state settlement in accordance with international law. Otherwise it will be seen to be cherry-picking those parts of the law that it supports in order to smuggle in an agenda of destroying Israel, and as a consequence will squander an historic opportunity.

***

The first argument hits upon an important strategic consideration in any movement, which is how to pose demands that relate to the balance of opinion, forces etc. in wider society rather than to the minute doctrinal fissures among the movement's organised core. To this extent, Finkelstein is quite right. A participating group in such a movement can argue for their own position, but their orientation should be toward taking the movement forward, not simply taking themselves forward within the movement. So, I understand exactly what he means when he says that he evaluates his colleagues' positions not primarily in terms of their morality or accuracy, but above all in terms of whether they can be 'defended' in public. Having said that, this is exactly where Finkelstein's argument begins to collapse into messy self-contradiction.

First of all, it fails because Finkelstein is known to contribute ideas and polemical over-statements that neither could nor should be defended in public. He has been unfairly attacked, and just as vigorously defended by many of those now unfortunately labelled 'cult' members. His book The Holocaust Industry was mostly unfairly criticised in my opinion. But it is also true that he has sometimes said or done things that didn't help. So, if one is in this position, a little bit of humility - even for a thirty year veteran - is surely called for when strategy and tactics are under discussion. This is particularly so since the nature and tone of his intervention here is hardly calibrated to take the movement forward. It places his own sense of exasperation with the movement ahead of its success.

Secondly, and relatedly, it fails because of what it omits, or does not specify. It does not specify the relevant 'public'. In another discussion, he makes it clear that this public is construed either in terms of authority (human rights or legal bodies) or representation (the United Nations general assembly being esteemed the most representative political body in the world). I don't accept this way of construing 'the public'. The UN general assembly is not representative of anyone but national ruling classes. Pressed on this, I expect Finkelstein would grudgingly concede the point, but would insist that the isolation of Israel among global ruling classes is a strategic opportunity, particularly if Israel's traditional supporters are becoming uneasy. This may be true, but it doesn't follow that the 'publics' whom BDS activists want to reach are those represented at the UN general assembly, or in human rights bodies, or in the ICJ.

I would argue as a counterpoint that the relevant publics for the BDS activists he is addressing are those based in the states supporting Israel - the US, Canada, the EU, and so on. And in those societies, the public is not an undifferentiated, or unchanging mass. Those who are most inclined to be sympathetic to the Palestinians will have been relatively unaware of the situation some years ago, or perhaps indifferent or hostile. Public attitudes change, and sometimes you have to embark on an initiative without public support or legal backing, on the assumption that attitudes will begin to change in response to the struggle. This was as true if you were a civil rights advocate in the southern United States during the Jim Crow period, or a supporter of women's suffrage in 1920s Britain. Finkelstein has acknowledged this, but insists that they have changed 'within a framework', that of the two-state settlement, which legal framework has been static for decades. This is casuistry, as it illicitly shifts the terms of the argument from a problem of persuasion and mobilization within the field of 'public opinion' to one of intervention in an international legal system where the congealed 'interests' and perspectives of the world's ruling classes are at stake. There is no reason why the two-state idea has to be the final default of 'public opinion'.

Moreover, there's a conflict here between Finkelstein's insistence on reaching a public with a viable set of goals, and his insistence elsewhere on settling issues related to the conflict not by reference to the point of view of the oppressed, the Palestinians, but by reference to "justice and right". But he immediately qualifies this by saying that he means "justice and right", not "in the abstract", but in terms of how the conflict is concretely understood - ie by the international legal consensus. I'll return to this, but if you bear in mind that this - the final determination of justice and right by law - is the overriding political-strategic coordinate in Finkelstein's perspective, it helps to make sense of much else that he says.

Aside from attitudes changing, they have changed in an uneven fashion. The most pro-Palestinian sections of the public will also be the more politically conscious sections of the oppressed and the working class. Organising and educating those people is, I would suggest, the starting point for building any mass movement. It is therefore significant that Finkelstein also overlooks an important condition of building such a movement: unity among highly diverse political forces. There has to be some compromise within any movement. He notes that an explicit endorsement of a two-state settlement would split BDS down the middle. He is right. A large number of those who are most active in the pro-Palestinian movement, and most educated about the situation of the Palestinians, are in favour of a one-state solution and think it more viable than two-states. Not all of them are stupid, or less educated or insightful than Norman Finkelstein. Yet they have arrived at a fundamentally different strategic perspective. In this situation, suspending the question of whether the final settlement should be based on a one or two-state system is a compromise. Without such compromise, the movement, such as it is, disintegrates into rivalrous factions.

But this is exactly what Finkelstein has a problem with, because it is a compromise in favour of orienting toward a series of objectives that operate on and expose the antagonism between Zionism and liberal-democratic norms. He doesn't think that the movement should be focused on de-legitimising Zionism in this way, because a precondition for his strategic purview to be viable is that one must accept that Zionism - not merely a state called Israel in which some form of comity is achieved, but Zionism as such - will endure. He thinks that the language of the 'rule of law' is "the dominant language of our epoch"; coupled with the "language of human rights", it is the language which liberal American Jews, and other significant sections of the public, most understand. One has to work within the legal terrain, otherwise there is no possibility of advance. The law is 'unambiguous': a two-state settlement, an end to the occupation, and a just settlement of the refugee question. It means accepting Israel. If you use the law as a weapon, you are also bound by its restrictions, otherwise you are dishonest.

There is no need to get into hair-splitting arguments over whether the 'rule of law' is really as 'dominant' as Finkelstein suggests. Nor will I linger on the idea that liberal American Jews are the privileged demographic we need to be reaching. It suffices to say that Finkelstein's is partially a 'framing' argument, which works just as well against his position. After all, the implication of stressing a legalist framework is that the acceptability or otherwise of certain positions depends in part on how they are articulated. For example, the demand for the full equality of Palestinians in Israel with Israeli Jews may in the long-run not be consistent with Israel's 'right to exist' as a Zionist state - but then, as it happens, so much the worse for Zionism. Few people in the core pro-Israel societies are so committed to Zionist ideology that they are prepared to support an ongoing system of apartheid in its name. This is particularly true of those who are attracted by liberal-democratic and human rights arguments. Let's be honest: a large number of people, including even some antiwar activists and peaceniks supportive of the Palestinians, have not the first clue what Zionism is. This is a legacy of decades of disinformation, historical revisionism and the usual uneducating effects of the capitalist media. This is why it is important that BDS targets its specific injustices rather than simply targeting the label 'Zionism'.

***

But it is on the question of the law itself that I find Finkelstein's position most problematic. He insists that the law is not merely a terrain in which Israel is at a disadvantage, not merely one in which the public can be reached, but actually one in which there is no ambiguity. This is the real framework within which international politics is conducted, the 'real world of politics' as he puts it, and it is unambiguously in favour of a particular final status as regards Israel and Palestine. Accept it, or stop claiming to cite the law. He is extremely learned, versed in every relevant piece of legislation, a close reader of the UN resolutions, the ICJ judgments and so on. It is for this reason that he has annihilated Israel's vulgar apologists, time after time, making mince of the false controversies that they generate in the name of 'hasbara'. He is also wrong. First of all, as he himself acknowledges, several terms in the international 'consensus' are in fact highly ambiguous. For example, the 'thorny' question of the refugees, and what constitutes a just settlement of their situation, is not unambiguous. Second, ambiguity is not the same as dissensus. If 99% of the states in the UN general assembly support one particular interpretation of the law, that lends strong credence to that interpretation, but it does not resolve the fact of there being an ambiguity, of there being multiple possible interpretations, of there being indeterminacy. The only thing that does actually resolve this, is physical force: by this, I mean not merely violence, but all the material (economic, political, diplomatic etc) inducements or coercions that could be deployed.

I would like to return to this in a future post, but for now I would just ask the reader simply to be positively disposed toward the thesis that, in the last analysis, the law is congealed class power. In the international sphere, this is also imperialist class power, inasmuch as there is a chain of imperialist states and sub-imperialism whose ruling classes exploit a sequence of dominated formations. The juridical forms of equality between subjects of the law, and of enfranchisement through representation, are just the legal forms that this domination takes. I ask you to be positively disposed toward this thesis for now anyway, because it helps explain a set of concrete facts that are present in Finkelstein's case but nonetheless somewhat mystified. It explains, for example, the fact that the international legal consensus to which Finkelstein refers has never been efficacious in stopping Israel's expansion for a second. It explains why, contrary to all appearances, Israel is not remotely 'lost' when it comes to the law, and never has been. It explains why Israel does not simply reject the terrain of the law, but rather insists on forcefully prosecuting its case and remaining a member of the relevant bodies. It explains why the law can be made to ex post facto recognise, accept and protect a state of affairs that some years previously was considered legally dubious at best.

Or, perhaps more urgently, it explains why the legal consensus to which Finkelstein refers was actually built on a series of ambiguities. UN Resolution 242, in which the US and European powers were important negotiating parties, deliberately adopted a certain terminological inexactitude as regards what constituted occupied territory; as regards how and when occupation should end (negotiations and secure frontiers first, then withdrawal, is the usual formulation - which basically means that occupation can proceed indefinitely); and as regards the final status of the frontiers and particularly of Jerusalem. This was not because the drafters liked to tease, but because the resolution reflected the emergence of a broad 'line' from the jostling and mutual struggle of the powers involved and because the US, as the dominant party framing the legislation, wanted a very wide space for manouevre on Israel's part. Israel has had that space, and made ample use of it. This is what "justice and right" means, not "in the abstract", but concretely.

So, there are two problems here. First, that in accepting the law as the only proper terrain of activism, he moralises and exalts it in wholly inappropriate terms, and avoids the power relations concentrated within the law. This leads him to gloss over the problems with the 'international legal consensus' and the gargantuan obstacles (the size of the US military arsenal) to achieving anything on that terrain, and also allows him to gloss over certain inconsistencies in his own position: as in, 'I am not imposing my own morality, merely siding with justice and right as instantiated in multiple resolutions'. Above all, it leads to a profound strategic and tactical conservatism: because the law is in fact congealed power, it follows that any consensus which emerges within it will reflect the priorities of those exercising power, rather than resisting it. That is what entering 'the real world of politics' means. Second, that in giving the law a spurious consistency and determinacy in his rhetoric, he fails to recognise that it is both a strategic stake and a strategic field of contestation, and that to fight within it there is no neutral, non-selective, non-partial way to interpret and decide between the relevant provisions and resolutions. One can attempt to be more or less reasonable, more or less objective, more or less serious about the material: but any serious, reasonable and objective study will acknowledge that indeterminacy is structurally built into the field of international law, and deliberately inscribed in the relevant bases for the 'consensus'. But construing the law as a consistent body of doctrine allows Finkelstein to belabour BDS for choosing to cite international law in its propaganda without explicitly endorsing the ongoing existence of Israel.

Now, you may say that this sort of argument is all very well, but is conducted in a sort of arid, academicist, or even cult-like, sphere. It may persuade some educated leftists, but there's no way to translate these sorts of arguments into slogans and demands for public consumption. That is, it may be correct, but it is practically useless. In fact, there's no difficulty here. I am merely outlining a very rough theoretical basis for explaining certain observations, the veracity of which almost anyone can be persuaded of in short order: the law, however much you may wish it were otherwise, is completely hypocritical, riddled with ambiguities, and close to impotent unless the US authorises something (obviously that's putting it crudely). For Finkelstein to depict the law as the source of justice and right is simply at odds with the evidence of one's senses. For the UN to be seen as the motor of liberatory change in the Middle East, amid a series of revolutions, is equally counterintuitive. Inasmuch as there is a strategically crucial conjuncture forming which could fatally weaken Israel, which is already weakening Israel, it is being significantly driven by the tumult in Tunisia and Egypt, while the UN is playing its usual role of organising imperialist responses to the situation. It is not clear what agency or combination of agencies can be brought to bear to turn the 'international legal consensus' into an effective force other than those populations in the Middle East - and if they are already remaking the Middle East of their own accord, why on earth would they defer to this 'consensus' moulded by people who didn't have their interests in mind? In fact, the more you study this lynchpin of Finkelstein's strategic perspective, the less it looks like the solution, much less something we must defer to without qualification.

Some of Finkelstein's defenders say "well, he's just saying what he's been saying for a while, and behind the invective is a real argument which people need to take on board". In fact, it's true, he has been saying some of this for a while. And while it hasn't always been as pungently overdetermined as this intervention (rich with contempt for his maoist past), it has tended to display the same polemical weaknesses as are evident here: a tendency to moralise, to rhetorically over-reach, to hector a little bit, to caricature his opponents, and so on. It doesn't seem to be possible to disaggregate Finkelstein's position, and his arguments for it, from these tendencies. His arguments for a two-state strategy are moralistic and browbeating, if sometimes witty and insightful; yet they are not "serious about politics", because they omit sustained analysis of the field in which he proposes to conduct this strategy, or any but the most vague outlines of the agencies he thinks BDS activists should appeal to, or any critical reflection whatsoever on the concepts ('the public', 'justice', 'legal consensus', etc) that he is deploying so loosely.

Oh, Icarus

2012-02-13T10:19:00.000Z

The latest developments arising from the Leveson Inquiry and related police investigations could be enough to sink The Sun. That the arrest of several of its journalists has turned these thugs into champions of privacy, of civil liberties and of human rights, is no irony. It is just the usual vulgar hypocrisy, with a delicious voltage of despair and fright coursing through it.

Ostensibly, this is the paper's chief political correspondent 'going rogue', launching a 'fightback' in defiance of orders from the bosses at News Corp. In thinly veiled language, it rails against the executives for its strategic decision to grudgingly cooperate with the police (after all the obstruction and attempts to destroy evidence, and bribery, and spying on victims' lawyers, and smears upon smears, and lies, have failed). In typically hysterical Sun fashion, the editorial seeks to position the paper as a sort of Charter 77 or Solidarnosc, labouring under a Stalinist boot. "Who polices the police?" cries Trevor Kavanagh, as if his newspaper and industry were not fully in bed with every top cop in the land until recently. Everyone does it, he says of what is in fact bribery and corruption - it is "standard procedure ... nothing disreputable" - and it seems that a phalanx of Fleet Street hacks are lining up behind him to say, "yes, this is exactly true, we mustn't be punished for what is an industry standard, Kavanagh expresses how all of us hacks feel". They can have no idea that they are simply underlining why everyone despises them. Nothing like this has been done the bankers, he complains, as if his newspaper has not, in addition to being the favourite newspaper of traders and stockbrokers, been the greatest political alibi of those predators.

We laugh, of course. We'll be laughing like drains while they circle the drain, the chorus of mocking hilarity expanding in radiant waves of mirth over the flailing arms of hacks being sucked into the effluent, and thence into oblivion. That hackneyed, smug saying, "it couldn't have happened to nicer people", will gain a new currency. Yes, the Stars are not wanted now, put out every one; pack up the Express and dismantle The Sun. Put away the Daily Mail, and flush away The Times. Because I couldn't be happier if I'd just given birth to triplets.

In Athens, Tahrir

2012-02-13T00:40:00.000Z

It is estimated that one in six Athenians were protesting today, with the trade union march constituting the largest component of it. The police, notwithstanding their earlier warnings to the government, fulfilled their purpose well, pro-actively disrupting and blockading the union march by engineering conflicts along the main feeder routes. But even with superior organisation, weaponry and a politically organised will to engage in physical combat, they could only do so much. Greeks on Twitter almost uniformly report that people were thronging, out in their thousands, all over the city, not just in Syntagma Square and nearby routes.

The emblems of news coverage - burning buildings, tear gas, molotov cocktails exploding around the feet of riot police - are but the epiphenomena. Today represented another fatal breach in the state's civil society buttress. Once, the bedrock of the state was the petty bourgeoisie in alliance with shipping and banking capital. This was no small thing when the petty bourgeoisie constituted a vast social class. But since the fall of the junta, at least, waged labourers have been the majority, and have been among the more radical working classes in Europe. Now, both the Greek proletariat and petty bourgeoisie have overwhelmingly rejected the programme of austerity, and of the Frankfurt group pushing for its most extreme variant. The state has no popular base, and the apparatus is increasingly tested as it attempts to contain the anti-austerity struggles. The Greek ruling class is wholly dependent on, and subservient to, the EU leadership, the ECB and to a lesser extent the IMF. They rely on the blackmail that the EU's leaders and bankers and bond traders, with their immense material resources, can mobilise - this blackmail, in that supremely mendacious act of mystification, they call by the name of 'the market'.

Today also represents another phase in the disintegration of the bourgeois parties as 15% of MPs refused to vote in favour of the second memorandum outlining the latest wave of austerity measures. The 'national accord' government failed to hold the support of 65 out of 255 of its MPs. Expulsions are under way, to accompany the raft of resignations and defections. The BBC journalist Paul Mason reports a sense of ludicrous resignation among the Greek ruling class. They know very well that sado-monetarism will not save them - default is inevitable - but feel compelled to play the Euro game. Their desperate hope, one can only surmise, is that a prolonged and agonised death offers them a chance of redemption, where the instant death of withdrawal from the Eurozone and the radical reconstitution of national politics that this would entail, offers them no hope at all. If an election were held tomorrow, and one must be held quite soon, the parties currently straddling the parliamentary apparatus would be shown in their true, depleted form. PASOK's risible vote would make Nick Clegg piss himself.

But this is the least of it. What is driving these fractures, this sudden rushing of forces under new banners and away from their traditional banners, is the radicalisation of the workers' struggle. Two general strikes in one week, mass civil unrest, routine protests and riots... and underlying this ferment a series of ongoing industrial actions and occupations, forms of militancy which germinally - only germinally - pose the question of workers' power, of direct democracy. It is what happens on this account, this side of the balance, that will determine how permanent, how salvageable, the Greek bourgeoisie's crisis is.

Scenes from the class struggle in Greece

2012-02-10T19:07:00.001Z

This loan shark says, make them pay, beat them until they pay everything, but don't beat them so hard that they can't keep paying. That loan shark says, if you don't make an example of this one, the others won't respect you. Beat them to death. And it is between these two poles that the bankers, ratings agencies, and EU leaders oscillate.

Earlier this week, Greek workers walked out on an impromptu general strike. This was a moment of acute pressure applied to the 'technocratic' regime led by Lucas Papademos, as it struggled to agree austerity measures to satisfy Eurozone leaders, thus qualifying for bailouts that would satisfy the bankers and bond markets. For a moment, it looked as if the government wouldn't reach agreement. Eventually, the deputy minister for labour resigned in protest, and a package was agreed, in which the minimum wage was cut by 22% and a further 150,000 public sector jobs were cut. Achieving this was a fraught affair, but it hardly concluded the matter. Strikes and protests continued. The bond markets didn't relent for a second in their punishing assault on Greek government debt, and lenders instantly conveyed their doubts. More ministers resigned, this time from the extreme right LAOS. The PASOK deputy foreign minister also departed, along with the minister for labour. Papademos has been forced to announce a cabinet re-shuffle. But so far, he and his subordinates have stuck with the EU's austerity demands loyally and doggedly, regardless of the immediate consequences. And you would have thought that the EU's finance ministers would welcome this. You would be wrong.

The Eurozone leaders reacted to the deal, to this complete capitulation signed on behalf of Greece by its unelected government, by dismissing the agreement and demanding more. The actual amount of additional cuts they demanded is fairly piddling compared to the agreed total and, you would think, hardly worth scuppering an agreement for. But the contempt conveyed by this gesture is jaw-dropping. It goes without saying that they don't care if a fifth of Greek workers, and just under half of young Greek workers, are unemployed. Knowing that the government is widely seen as a slave of external powers, European bankers, EU leaders, the ECB, and the IMF, they demanded further prostration from the Greek government and ruling class. Knowing that the struggle against cuts in Greece is now suffused in the popular imagination with the national resistance to Mussolini's invading forces beginning in 1940, they opted to underline the sense of national humiliation. Knowing that the left-of-PASOK parties could win any election called in the near future, they demanded the bourgeois parties add petrol to their own immolation. Knowing that there is a volatile, violent mood, that the tempo of working class struggle is escalating, that strikes will continue over the weekend when the package is put to a vote, that more defections are on their way, and that the government may not survive for long, they smacked it down for following orders. Knowing, aside from anything else, that the police federation is angrily claiming that it is not willing to keep a lid on popular anger, and that the head of the civil servants union is predicting a "social uprising", they've raised their two fingers and said 'bring it on'.

Of course, as I said, this wasn't necessarily a good idea on their terms. The demand for more cuts has been like the proverbial straw, provoking aghast outrage from people who had otherwise signed up to the austerity agenda. The government is falling to pieces. The Torygraph thinks the EU is trying to drive Greece out of the Eurozone. No. The government will probably have enough supporters to force the deal through parliament, with the participation of the two major parties. What the EU leaders stated very clearly when they rebuffed Papademos was that they expected Greece to comply, that in the future its treasury and ministerial budgets would be overseen by the EU, that the sell-off of assets would be accelerated, and that there would be renewed drive to enforce tax collection from people who cannot afford to pay in order to facilitate the ongoing transfer of wealth to the bankers. What's happening, I suspect, is that the EU is keeping the screws turning until the very last minute, until they know that the Greek government will give just about anything to avoid a 'disorderly default'. Yes, they've just made things harder for the government, and the class, that they expect to impose this on Greece. But you have to understand it from their perspective. Greece, so they keep telling anyone who will listen, caused this crisis. It could bring down the Eurozone. They are very unhappy with the Greeks. And so, unsurprisingly, they want the Greek ruling class to suffer a bit for its continued membership of the EU. Meanwhile, Greece's neoliberal 'technocrats' insist on staying the course - yes, things are hard, says the arch-privatizer and former finance minister Stefanos Manos, but we need to do this, and in fact we need to do even more. People just don't get it, but they must be made to. This has been the dispensation in Greece, to greater or lesser degrees, since it belatedly embarked on its neoliberal turn in the 1990s.

Even so, the EU's rulers have probably over-played their hand by acting in such a provocative way. The disintegration of the government, the warning noises from the police, the further shift to the left, and the signs of industrial escalation, are indicative that they may have gone too far. Amid the second general strike in a single week, both called on very short notice and with considerable success, the chances of this government surviving to implement any package it can agree are shrinking fast.

We are all precarious: on the 'precariat' and its misuses

2012-02-10T10:08:00.000Z

"In this article, I will argue that it is mistaken to treat the precariat as a class. Attempts to make it into a class are theoretically incoherent, and the facts of precarious labour and social precarity are misunderstood if boxed into an ‘emerging class’ thesis. This is important because class analyses underpin political strategies. In the case of the concept’s chief populariser, Standing, the analysis is bound up with a particular set of political articulations and strategic orientations that are more ‘Big Society’ than ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’. I will argue that precarity exerts effects right up the chain of class strata, throughout the working class and into sections of the middle class, especially the petty bourgeoisie. The appellation ‘precariat’ thus works as a kind of populist interpellation, a claim I will explain in more detail in the conclusion. This interpellation, this ‘naming’, operates on a real antagonism. It is one that emerges between the ‘power bloc’ and the rest, particularly in the age of austerity. The precarity built into financialized accumulation was always pushed downward as far as possible. But it is affecting ever wider layers of people, such that only the capitalist class and a few sections of the middle class seem to be protected from it, their security purchased through our precarity. We should embrace the concept of the 'precariat' in this sense, and use it to help found a new, radical majoritarian politics with a distinctly anticapitalist core."

Gangs of London

2012-02-01T22:52:00.000Z

1. Chief Inspector Ian Kibblewhite of Enfield constabulary: "You might have 100 people in your gang - we have 32,000 people in our gang. It's called the Metropolitan Police."

2. "Entire crime squad is investigated for corruption ... All the officers are based on the Enfield borough crime squad which deals with local robberies and burglaries and the inquiry centres on the "mishandling of property" believed to be stolen electronic goods including televisions."

3. "Video footage shows the detective sergeant and five constables leaping from an unmarked car shouting "attack, attack", before smashing baseball bats and a pickaxe handle into the side windows and windscreen of a Mini stopped in traffic. The plainclothes officers – all members of the Enfield crime squad in north London – then pull out the driver, Jonathan Billinghurst, and push him to the floor, where he is arrested. ... Scotland Yard said on Wednesday that the six officers – who are the first to face disciplinary action as a result of the inquiry – had been found guilty of misconduct but would not be sacked."

Bad cops, bad cops

2012-01-31T16:57:00.000Z

What is policing? In a recent interview with the New Left Project, Robert Reiner argues that "in practice the police are primarily an instrument for regulating the lower orders". Historically, police forces emerge as "a more urban and industrial ruling class" arises and requires "a more predictable, bureaucratic, legal and apparently universal means of maintaining order" than traditional agents of monarchy, armed forces, etc. The "apparently universal" aspect of this has been reinforced by a misleading focus on the police's role in "routine crime prevention" which obscures its role in political policing, but the net effect is to protect a particular order, one based on inequality and hierarchy. This is all very useful, and I expect readers will benefit from reading Reiner's book, Law and Order. (For those looking for a marxist approach to the British police, the late Audrey Farrell's book Crime, Class and Corruption is a must read.)

But this is merely to set up the problem. In my opinion, it still doesn't satisfactorily answer the question as to what policing is. We can agree that in a manner of speaking the police are "an instrument for regulating the lower orders", which is a part of the state's overall regulatory function in daily life. Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer's classic historical monograph on the English/British state, The Great Arch, covering its transformation from the high middle ages until the late 19th century, argues that the state is fundamentally a cultural form involved in "moral regulation": a "project of normalizing, rendering natural, taken for granted, in a word 'obvious', what are in fact ontological and epistemological premises of a particular and historical form of social order ... Centrally, state agencies attempt to give unitary and unifying expression to what are in reality multifaceted and differential historical experiences of groups within society, denying their particularity." So, this supports two aspects of Reiner's analysis: the police in this perspective would have a regulatory function, and a unifying, apparently universalising function. Moreover, the emphasis on moral regulation specifies something particular about police conduct which is that, as repressive institutions, they are deeply involved in ideological work. The police have a role in maintaining a symbolic order, and deploy violence to that end. Still, we haven't really moved very far forward from the most general of generalities here.

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I think to take this analysis further it would help to outline what would seem to be a peculiar set of circumstances. The government is introducing a series of substantial changes to policing structures and tactics in England and Wales (devolution in Northern Ireland and Scotland exclude these constituents of the UK from the reforms). First, they are introducing a system of elected commissioners, drawing to some extent from the US model. I think most police officers hate this, and the 'witnesses' before the Home Affairs Committee rejecting the idea - such as Sir Hugh Orde, Sir Paul Stephenson and numerous others - seemed to represent a big chunk of the policing establishment. Coupled with this change is the abolition of the old police authorities in which the police were run by a selected committee made up of elected councillors and 'independent' appointees. There was initially to be an elected committee that would oversee policing, but that was abandoned under pressure from police and previous committees. Instead, the oversight of commissioners will be carried out by appointed panels, with appointees drawn from 'local communities'. The government has made it clear that the main aim of these reforms is to change the relationship of police to the 'local communities' in which they operate. This is a strategic rather than tactical reform: that is, it is less about operational issues than about organising the relationship of the police to society (or rather, to social classes) in such a way as to cultivate a basis for right-wing, populist 'law and order' politics.

Second, the Tories are cutting police budgets. Contrary to my own expectations, the cuts have not been substantially revised in response to the student protests, industrial militancy, or the riots. This is one of the reasons why you will sometimes encounter low ranking officers policing demos etc, moaning that they too are public sector workers and no one cares about them. (I've witnessed this sort of exchange numerous times, and I think it reflects a real anger being expressed in the rank and file.) And it is in stark contrast to Mrs Thatcher's qualitative expansion and upgrading of police budgets, numbers, technology and legal powers, or indeed to New Labour's policy along similar lines. I had thought this must reflect the degree of the Tories' complacency about the prospects for serious social conflict arising from their deep structural adjustment programme. That certainly can't be excluded as a factor - their handling of union negotiations shows how arrogant they are. It also probably manifests their belief that the technological and organisational re-tooling of the police can make up for the shortfall in central government spending. The rationalization of the police bureaucracy - usually understood in ideological language as making it 'more responsive', filling a 'democratic deficit', 'professionalizing' the force, and so on - is consistent with the neoliberal theory of organisational efficiency in the form of 'public choice theory'. The current Met Commissioner, to whom I'll return in a moment, makes the argument that the police are like every public monopoly in having no competition: they must therefore simulate the basic structures of competitive market efficiency within themselves. But above all, the fact that the Tories are prepared to take such political risks over this - damaging their own public support, as well as their long-standing close relationship with the police - indicates that something fundamental is at stake. That something is the budget, and reducing the burden of taxation on businesses, entrepreneurs, speculators and property owners over the long-term. This is supposed to create an extremely favourable climate for investors, enabling a leaner British capitalism to remain competitive. Rationalising the police force is part of the programme, like it or not.

Thirdly, the government went for the police following the riots, attacking their response as tactically timid. Since the Police Federation had been warning the government of the likelihood of serious social unrest since its election, and since the Home Secretary dismissed these warnings as scaremongering, this was waving a red rag. It was also politically weird when irrational police fetishism was the order of the day. Then, the government announced that it was pursuing further reform along US lines, that it was bringing US 'supercop' Bill Bratton in to advise the government on 'gangs', and that it would be open to an application from him to head up a revamped Metropolitan Police, whose leadership had been taken out by Hackgate. In the end, Bratton didn't work out for them - Cameron thought he was a tough guy advocate of 'zero tolerance' policing. He isn't. But the introduction of this worn out old nostrum pissed off UK police chiefs, who actually aren't very keen on the idea at all. In the end, Bernard Hogan-Howe, who has seemed to be a tacit supporter of the government's reforms and champions something called "total policing", was appointed Commissioner of the Met and given a remit to fundamentally reform the capital's police service.

So, in a very politicised way, policing in the capital is being re-organised in a way that will presumably exert effects right throughout the chain of police authorities in the UK. It is being done in a way that makes policing more confrontational, more explicitly political, and which alienates both the rank and file coppers and a great proportion of the police leadership. Inasmuch as there will be a critical response from social democracy to these developments, it will hinge on the cuts to 'a vital public service', on the inadequacy of the reforms, and on the need to bolster the crime prevention aspect of policing. The Labour right has been most vociferous on the need to protect constabulary independence from politics (meaning, from democratic oversight). Labour's left will have something to say about the politicization of policing, and the growth of authoritarianism alongside the reduction of necessary 'community policing', just as they did under Thatcher. The limits of such an approach, however, become evident when you look at what 'total policing' involves.

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"Total policing", as practiced by Hogan-Howe in Merseyside and now in London, is not necessarily "total policing" as advocated by some police experts. They argue that it entails breaking down specialization in the police force to allow a more flexible response to emergent problems, whereas Hogan-Howe is committed to retaining specialized units. But inasmuch as it does relate to that basic organizational motif, and Hogan-Howe is explicit in stating that it does, it seems to relate to a set of peculiar institutional and social problems created that arise in the context of austerity. That is, for as long as the political opposition to the Tories is so weak, they can expect the opposition to emerge in a localised, spontaneous, unpredictable manner. In this situation, having big battalions of police ready to fight on all fronts is less important than having a police force with the maximum adaptibility, able to suddenly surround an emerging confrontation and subdue it before it spreads. In practice, and this is where the experts have reservations, it also seems to mean literally having a 'total' architecture of police control in the context of protests and rallies. Rhetorically, Hogan-Howe sticks to the script about ensuring a 'balance' between rights and upholding the law, but even in his highly coded public discourse the emphasis is clearly on treating increased protest as a problem to be contained, demanding an escalated response. The TUC march on November 30th in London was subject to the most extraordinary police restrictions, including the walling off of Trafalgar Square and routes around it with steel - this on a trade union march, where it was highly unlikely that anything was going to 'kick off'.

'Total policing' also entails, of course, a 'total war' on crime, deploying a wide range of tactics - nothing illegal or aggressive, Hogan-Howe insists - to constantly frustrate criminals. Here, the new Met Commissioner's technophilia and fondness for militarised solutions comes through. Thus, instead of spending months surveilling drug gangs, just get a warrant and kick in the door, and reap some surprising rewards. Or, instead of simply going after criminals directly, impound uninsured cars on the premise that 80% of them are owned by people with a criminal conviction, thus impeding the mobility of burglars, robbers etc. (This sounds like something from a popular book expounding behavioural economics.) Technology, Hogan-Howe argues, should also be reconfigured away from 'bureaucratic' apparatuses, toward preventive technology. He contrasts computers which permit number-crunching and 'lists' - how many burglaries were committed in a given area last year - with numberplate-recognition technology which ostensibly allows one to stop crimes in progress, or before they happen.

This is a false dichotomy, since any technology could feasibly be used in the development of prevention tactics. But it illustrates the kind of thinking underpinning this 'total policing' approach. If policing as such reduces complex social phenomena to bureaucratic problems to be resolved through the targeted application of violence, 'total policing' tries to reiterate these bureaucratic problems in the language of technology. And as long as we understand 'technology' in its broad sense, as in a technical process, an ensemble of techniques related to governance, a technology of power, it makes complete sense. Contrary to what one may be tempted to assume, this is policing at its most ideological. For what has happened here is that the dominant ideology has already been materialized in the practices of the state. The dominant ideology, we may say for the sake of brevity, is that which normalizes "ontological and epistemological premises of a particular and historical form of social order". It is an ideology which arises directly from productive relations, from the division of labour and the labour process itself, and which constitutes a particular capitalist form of corporeality.

To elaborate. It is not that the existence of "biological individuals" necessarily generates the ideology of individualism: this is plainly not true, historically, and the concept of "biological individuals" is itself question-begging, avoiding or suppressing the matter of our natural biological dependence. It is that the capitalist mode of production presupposes the individualization of bodies. We are all, in this sense, self-sufficient units engaged in a competitive, self-interested struggle for utility maximization, which is ultimately the aggrandisement of the self. This is not simply a 'theoretical' proposition of capitalism, not a 'premise' in that sense, but a necessary material aspect of its development. We carry out labour processes in relative independence from one another - our cooperation is not enacted by prior engagement and planning, but in the context of market competition. We sell our labour power and purchase the means of its reproduction in this way. In this process, the political, ideological and juridical relations which constitute us as autonomous (rights-bearing, contract-bound, property-owning) subjects are always-already present. Every relation in the capitalist labour process presupposeses this possessive-individualism.

In the practices of the state, specifically for our purposes the legal/juridical practices of the state, these relations are materialised. In the discourses of crime, and law and order, certain social practices and the relations of dominance contained in these practices are normalized and legitimized, whereas practices which disrupt these relations of dominance are criminalized. But in materializing these relations, the state also represents itself as the unifying agent, fusing these individuals, these capitalist bodies, together in a collective national body, the popular-national state. And in so doing, it does not just normalize certain relations, but it universalises them. The ideology of crime already effects this universalisation - mark the point in Hogan-Howe's speech where he says no one benefits from ongoing crime, it is in everyone's interests to stop crime, etc. This 'naturally', in an entirely unforced way, obscures the existence of social interests seriously at odds with the dominant social order, at odds in such a way that they cannot be negotiated or resolved within the extant politico-legal framework.

It is mistaken to think that this is always necessarily effective. The whole field of social (class) relations is a field of struggle, and therefore the materialization of these relations will necessarily be riven with antagonisms. This is clear if you look at how, historically, the police have been rejected in many working class communities - a pattern that has persisted to this day, in a way never quite captured in The Bill, but obvious enough in the context of the riots. This is why the government feels the urgent need to re-organise the relationship between the police and 'local communities'. It may also be one reason why Hogan-Howe feels the need to change the police's approach to 'stop and search', about which more later.

Finally, in materializing the relations of dominance, the state also works to constitute them at every level, and this is where its practices form an ensemble of technologies of power. The technology that we are invited to focus on, to think fondly about, to imagine in thrilling action, is nothing other than the technology involved in the production of i) social relations themselves, and ii) the capitalist bodies in which those relations are inscribed.

***

This helps to explain why the social democratic response is necessarily limited at best. During the miners' strike, Paul Gilroy and Joe Simm published an article, brimming with embarrassing detail, which attacked certain Labour left mythologies on crime and punishment. These commonplace myths held that Thatcher's very real augmentation and militarisation of the state's repressive apparatuses was a fundamental departure from the practice of the welfare state 'golden era'. During the years of class compromise, it was held, policing was focused on clearing up crime in a civic fashion, while national bargaining institutions and parliamentary democracy resolved political differences. Gilroy and Simm demolished this fairly comprehensively, showing that from the first post-war Home Secretary, James Chuter Ede, up to Merlyn Rees, Callaghan's Home Secretary, Labour administrations had always dealt with class conflict, crime, and of course political struggle in Northern Ireland, in a militarized, politicized and authoritarian fashion. The 'golden age' never was.

We will similarly have no difficulty in recalling the extraordinary authoritarianism of New Labour, from ASBOs to the threatened use of troops to break a firefighters' strike. But the point of detailing all of this was and is to indicate the limits of an analysis of policing which treats it centrally as a 'public service' in which a municipal agency delivers 'law and order' to a tax-paying community. Such was a contention not just of Labourites but of marxists such as E P Thompson. That analysis is what led many on the left to blame Thatcher for police misconduct in the 1980s, and to demand more police on the beat. In fact, and this is something I assume Cameron's reformers are well aware of, more police officers on the beat makes practically zero difference to crime rates. This is something that Home Office figures, as well as academic research, constantly indicates. By demanding more police, the left just played into Thatcher's strategy of beefing up capacity in anticipation of major social conflicts.

Policing is about something other than crime. That something else is, to put it crudely, violence and coercion. To put it less crudely, the police force contains within itself both 'legal' and 'illegal' forms of behaviour. It's not just that there is well known corruption, the beating of suspects, harrassing activists, and so on. It is that the apparent "gap between the democratic rhetoric of law and the actual practice of justice", as Gilroy and Simm put it, is expressive of the process of legality in itself. This process supposedly involves the collection, presentation and assimilation of evidence, a set of procedures designed to evaluate the objective truth of a situation: a person broke the law, or they didn't. But the process itself is constituted by power: the power of the police to determine, within limits, the laws and restraints applicable to them and their immediate relations with their subjects, to reconstruct events in a self-justifying way, to frame suspects; the power of judges to act arbitrarily, to sermonise, to unduly restrain solicitors, to (mis)instruct the jury, to inflict harsh punishments and thereby 'send a message'; the power of the media to identify crime 'scandals' or determine a person's guilt or innocence in advance; and so on. The product, 'justice', is a resolution of antagonisms and conflicts in society, generally to the advantage of the dominant classes and to the particular disadvantage of the poorest sections of the working class.

To grasp the specific role of the police in this production process, let me just return to something Hogan-Howe said. He referred to the disproportionate use of 'stop and search' powers by police against black and ethnic minorities. This was a constant flash-point of struggle with the police in the twentieth century, more explicitly racialised in the post-war era. Reducing its use would seem to be a plausible goal. However, it is important not to get too swept up in the idea that there will be a reduction in racist harrassment by police. Hogan-Howe favours a more targeted, smarter 'stop and search' policy - the technological solution again - and a more 'professional' manner of interaction between police and the subject of 'stop and search'. Now, it is notable that this does not any specific legal or even necessarily administrative restraint. Hogan-Howe mentions none, at any rate. Rather, it involves discretion in the use of police powers. And this discretion, coming under the rubric of 'professionalism', is something that actively undermines accountability, because it renders their conduct dependent on the immediate calculable variables of a given situation, for which no one can legislate or even dictate guidelines. Gilroy and Simm point out that the logic of professionalization has always been to free the police from legal accountability.

Moreover, and this is very far from the commonplace idea that the beat copper is an authentic proletarian, this freedom is one enjoyed in relation not just to suspects and courts, but principally in relation to senior officers and managers. It doesn't matter what the official line is, the culture of rank and file policing, the officers' understanding of their role, based on training, ideology, the institutional matrix, the particular kinds of cop sociality, etc. determine far more than managerial edict how crimes are dealt with on a daily basis. This is not to say that managers do not ultimately manage, that legal and political power over the police isn't ultimately centralised through a fairly inflexible hierarchy up to the executive. It is not to say that the average police officer has complete freedom of action. But the information on which policing is based, court judgements processed, and political decisions made, flows to a considerable extent up the chain from the police, giving them a degree of relative autonomy as professional managers of the social body. In the context of techniques such as 'stop and search', this increases police freedoms to define situations as ones requiring intervention and coercion. It empowers them to harrass, to brutalise, to demean, or to abstain from these if they see fit. Reports, ethnographies, research, etc. all show where this leads. The police in reality don't spend much of their time carrying out investigative work. Most of the time, they do little. They walk around, or drive around, or sit around. But when active, they engage in routine confrontation with certain subaltern social groups, pursue vendettas or indeed criminal enterprises. They work up 'results' based on certain tried and tested techniques, which may or may not coincide with actual crimes (of which they deal with a vanishingly small proportion at any rate). And they do all this within their understanding of what their role is in relation to society, formed by racist and sexist occupational sub-cultures, hatred for the 'underclass', and so on. What they're doing is exerting violence and coercion not only in defence of the legal and juridical forms of capitalist social relations, but in the defence of a moral and symbolic order, which expresses their own relationships to the dominant ideology, to the institutions they work in, the (professional middle) class they belong to, and to the social world they police. And that is what policing is.

Syria's revolution, and imperialism

2012-01-30T14:58:00.001Z

The Syrian regime is fighting for its survival. I have no sympathy for it, and will welcome its consumption in a revolutionary overthrow. The struggle in Syria is fundamentally - not exclusively, and not in a crude, unmediated fashion - a class struggle. It is an open war of movement between, for the most part, the most advanced sections of the popular classes and a narrow state capitalist oligopoly which has always dealt with the surplus of political opposition by jailing it or killing it. In that struggle, inasmuch as it matters what I think, I situate myself on the side of the popular opposition. Not in an undifferentiated manner, and not without confronting the political problems (of eg sectarianism, pro-imperialism etc) that will tend to recur amid sections of the opposition to any of these regimes. But without conditions or prevarication.

Yet imperialism has its own reasons, of which reason knows a little, for seeking a different kind of ending to the regime: one which does not empower the currently mobilised masses. And I really think the chances of an armed 'intervention' in Syria under the rubric of the UN have noticeably increased. And how we orient ourselves to that situation politically is, I suspect, going to be an important problem in the coming months. The following pleonastic stream of head-scratching and arm-waving is my contribution to securing that orientation.

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For what it's worth, this is how I read the international situation with respect to Syria at present. The revolutionary wave that was unleashed over one year ago has reverberated through every major social formation in the Middle East. Because it broke the Mubarak regime, which was a regional lynchpin of a chain of pro-US dictatorships, its effects could not be localised. The response of the US was one of confusion and fright, followed by the bolstering of some of the ancient regimes and simultaneously a very cautious 'tilt' toward some mildly reformist forces (in general the most right-wing and pro-capitalist forces). The Saudi intervention in Bahrain was an instance of the former. The invasion of Libya was an improvised policy along the latter lines. And the position within Yemen has been somewhere between these two, with the US attempting to manage a replacement of the leadership without empowering the actual popular forces calling for its downfall, some of whom were conveniently vaporised by US bombing raids.

In general, I think the liberal imperialists have won the ideological argument that the US must be seen to be on the side of reform, because today's insurgent forces are potentially tomorrow's regimes, and the US will have to deal with them on oil, Israel, and so on. However, the political argument as to what concretely to do about it is much more in the balance. The realpolitikers have dominant positions in the Pentagon, while the lib imps seem to have a strong voice in the State Department. It's schematic, but nonetheless a reasonable approximation of the truth to say that the former are very cautious about any Middle East wars, especially wars fought on a liberal (rather than securitarian) basis, while the latter are much more bellicose. Obama's 'state of the union' address, which undoubtedly had its share of theatrical sabre-rattling, made it clear that he would see the overthrow of the Syrian regime as a logical corollary to the overthrow of Qadhafi, which he boasted was made possible by ending the occupation of Iraq. Moreover, his administration has continued to ratchet up pressure on Iran, through sanctions, and we are beginning to hear serious arguments in the bourgeois media in favour of a war. I am not saying that an attack on Iran is likely in the short or medium term. But any escalation regarding Syria could not but be linked to the escalation against Iran.

Obama and Clinton are also highly responsive to pressure from the European Union and particularly France. Sarkozy is naturally leading the EU's response to the Middle East crisis. He may not have a triple A credit rating, but he does have nuclear weapons, a large army with extensive imperialist experience, and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. (Merkel, who has none of these, is taking a much more passive role.) And since the Sarkozy administration has been embarrassed and damaged by the extent of its relations with dictatorships in the Middle East, its 'tilt' toward potentially pro-EU reformist forces has been all the more pronounced. Britain, consistent with its imperial past in the Middle East, its adjusted but continuing role as a subordinate partner of the US, and the warmed over 'liberal interventionism' embraced by Cameron and Hague, has tended to align with France over both Libya and Syria.

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Another important actor is the Arab League, and within it the prominent figure of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). In the latest Socialist Register, Adam Hanieh points out the strategic centrality of the GCC to the region as far as imperialism is concerned, due to its pivotal role in the region's capitalist development, its hold of enormous oil resources (a quarter of future production), and its articulation with the world economy. Three GCC states have experienced their own uprisings - Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman - all of which have been repressed with military force and marginalised in the ideological apparatuses. Even so, it is the GCC monarchies which have been most stable in the context of the global recession, and the most active in managing the fall-out. So, while the Arab League has not adopted a single, coherent policy response to the regional uprisings, GCC states have played a key role in manouevering the League to support selective interventions, monitoring missions, sanctions and so on against regionally awkward regimes. The League's support for the intervention in Libya was a decisive factor in enabling it to come about. Saudi Arabia, which has coordinated many policy initiatives to contain the region-wide uprisings, has involved itself deeply in the Syrian context. The involvement of Arab League monitors, received with some scepticism by the Syrian local co-ordination committees, was driven by Saudi Arabia; their recent withdrawal has also been triggered by Saudi Arabia. The subsequent lobbying for a UN resolution calling for the Assad regime to step down and supporting some form of UN intervention, has been led by Britain and France, but strongly supported by the Arab League. Russia is at present the only obstacle to the resolution, due to its long-standing relationship with Assad.

Finally, there is the Syrian opposition. The pro-imperialist bloc, the Syrian National Council (SNC), largely led by exiles based in France and Turkey, has not thus far been representative of the sentiment among the rank and file of Syrian opposition members. There is a left and nationalist contingent to the revolt, moreover, that complicates any attempt to simply annexe the revolt to the wider regional strategies of imperialism. Further, even in Libya, where no left or labour movement existed prior to the overthrow of Qadhafi, and where the revolt was quickly disfigured by a racist component, the opening of the political space subsequent to that overthrow has created a window in which germinal popular forces have been able to assert themselves. A political strike in the oil industry took out a pro-Qadhafi chairman, while unrest in Benghazi has resulted in a serious rift with the governing 'transitional council'. The ongoing struggles in Egypt, which is strategically central to the whole region, can also swiftly make calculations made on an ad hoc basis, moot. Nonetheless, complications and problems in a line of development do not necessarily mean that the line will be impeded. Were the Syrian opposition sufficiently crushed, I think it would be more likely that a pro-intervention 'line' could gain ground, and this would tend to divide the left-nationalist contingent. This has to be the assumption because, as Bassam Hassad has pointed out in his critique of the SNC and various pro-Assad types, the existing support for imperialist intervention is itself already the result of brutalisation, mediated by certain types of politics, (generally both liberal and Islamist).

There is also the problem of sectarianism. As far as I can tell, the majority reject any explicit political appeal along sectarian lines. The banners saying 'no to sectarianism' reflect a popular sentiment. The local co-ordination committees have explicitly opposed sectarianism in the movement. Every substantial report I have encountered indicates the strength of the determination to overcome sectarian politics. Nonetheless, the regime has a sectarian basis and has reinforced sectarian divisions as a technique of statecraft - not fundamentally dissimilar to a protection racket. Even though many of the Christians and Alawites supposedly protected by the regime are among the protesters, it would be astonishing if some sections of the opposition were not themselves driven by sectarian politics. It is noticeable that commentators dismissing the revolt as mere sectarian intrigue tend to focus on the role of the salafists. They exist as a subordinate stratum in the revolt, and they are among a number of forces which are against the regime on sectarian grounds. Far from constituting the main political current in the uprising, they nevertheless represent a problem and a weakness for the opposition. Such divisions are, moreover, always manipulated and amplified whenever imperialism is involved - Iraq, anyone?

Finally, there are divisions over the use of armed force against the regime. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) is a large army of defectors from the regime's armed forces, perhaps including tens of thousands of soldiers - at least 15,000 on recent estimates. This exists, to put it crudely, because the Israeli occupation exists. These soldiers, trained to defend Syria from Israeli aggression, are now defending Syrians from state aggression. But their remit has expanded. While their initial rationale was to defend communities against the security forces, they have consistently engaged in military attacks on the regime's infrastructure. The risk of doing so, of course, is that it brings down the regime's repressive apparatus. There is gossip and speculation to the effect that the FSA represents an imperialist conspiracy. I see little proof of this. Despite representing a layer of military defectors, it looks to have gained real support among the oppressed and exploited. The problem is that most of the movement's organised core has insisted on keeping it peaceful, on tactical grounds: the terrain of violent struggle is not where the regime is weakest. Yet, in some parts of the country, particularly the poorest, the regime is not leaving that option open. So, tactical divisions underpinned by geographical disparities and the regime's tactics of selectively striking out at opposition strongholds, are also a potential weakness. Now since the FSA is loyal to the Syrian National Council, which supports an imperialist intervention, there's an obvious dynamic that could come into play here. That is that in the event of the popular movement being crushed or at least severely set back, the armed component comes to the fore and substitutes for the masses; and in the event of a UN-sanctioned intervention, the FSA becomes an auxiliary of NATO, and alongside the SNC forms the nucleus of a post-Assad regime that is not representative of Syrians.

There is not an immediate move to bomb or invade Syria. There is, however, mounting external pressure to create the conditions that would allow this to happen fairly quickly and expediently. It would be a mistake to assume that because such a path would be riddled with problems, it would not be pursued.

***

With all that said, I intend to elaborate further in an abstract manner before coming up for air. From a marxist perspective, the most fundamental antagonism in the capitalist world system is class antagonism. These, of course, cut through the dominated regimes in the imperialist hierarchy just as much as they do in the dominant regimes. As such, in a popular struggle against these regimes, marxists start from the position of supporting those struggles. To be more specific, in various direct and indirect ways, these antagonisms are amplified by imperialism, inasmuch as the ruling classes of the imperialist chain benefit from the exploitation of workers and popular classes in the dominated societies. This is a fundamental cleavage which, arising from the outward extension of capitalist productive relations from the core, separates the dominant from the dominated formations. As a consequence, marxists also start from an axiomatic position of opposing imperialism. It is not simply that imperialism retards the social development of these societies, but that it constitutes an additional axis of exploitation and oppression.

Within the class and state structures of such societies, moreover, the domination of imperialism is reproduced in various ways, such that the modes of domination within those states cannot be extricated from the question of imperialism. As a consequence, popular movements arising against them will tend to have two targets: a domestic and international opponent. Their struggles will also have a tendency to be internationalized, and to have global effects. By the same token, where you have a national bourgeoisie that has developed in resistance to imperialism, that resistance will also be inscribed in its forms of class rule and in the state through which its political domination is secured. Its legitimacy will depend in part on the national bourgeoisie's promise to organise the society in its self-defence. It follows that where there is a break-up of the regime's social control, the issue of imperialism will be to the fore in its ideological and political strategies for retaining its dominant position. This isn't merely manipulation, nor can it be wished away. It poses a particular challenge to popular movements aiming to depose the regime, which is why the role of the anti-imperialist pole in the Syrian uprising is so critical.

But the reality is that these dying regimes can't effectively resist imperialism. The republics organised under the rubric of Arab nationalism have rarely, even in the rudest health, fared much better against Israeli aggression than the old monarchies, and have often been available for opportunistic or long-term alliances with imperialism. This is even true of partially resistant regimes. Hafez al-Assad's support for Falangists against the Palestinians provided the occasion for Syria's initial invasion of Lebanon. Assad senior was also a participant in the Gulf War alliance against Iraq. His son, Bashar al-Assad, has always notched up plaudits from Washington as a neoliberal reformer - the liberalisation of the economy along lines prescribed by the IMF has been one of the causes of the polarisation of Syrian society, and the narrowing of the regime's social base - and leased some of his jails to Washington during the 'war on terror' to facilitate the torture of suspects. The Islamic Republic has a similarly chequered record with regard to imperialism. So, if the regime's raison d'etre is partially that it is an anti-imperialist bulwark, the obvious answer is that it isn't even very good at this.

So how do we orient to this situation, politically? It seems obvious enough that the greatest bulwark against imperialist intervention in societies like Syria is the fullest and most active mobilisation of the masses themselves. Their defeat at the hands of their regime would represent a green light to those pressing for intervention. This is not the main reason why I think marxists should support these rebellions, but it is a very strong reason for doing so. Second, the organised opposition are for the most part, the most politically advanced sections of the popular classes in both Syria and Iran. They are the ones who, however they represent it, are responding to the class antagonism in a way that we would want the most radical workers in Europe, the United States and beyond to do. For this reason, arguments along the lines that both regimes continue to have a popular base and shouldn't be written off are fundamentally wrong. They do have a popular base, but it is not predominantly organised around any claims or values that the left, especially the revolutionary left, has a stake in. So, one must hope for that base to erode, and rapidly. Third, the same basic political grounds on which one opposes an undemocratic capitalist regime and supports its downfall are those on which one must oppose the regime of US imperialism, and work toward its downfall. Anti-imperialism is an indispensable and not merely occasional aspect of emancipatory politics.

These problems cannot, of course, be resolved with such abstract formulae: but such formulae have a role in reminding us of our political coordinates. In concrete struggles, socialists in the imperialist societies would be trying to maintain relations with the opposition to these regimes, linking with exile groups and supporting their protests. But at the same time, they would be the first to oppose military intervention, and would try to assemble the broadest coalition of forces to stop it. Even if the deep political logic of events suggests that there is a confluence of these positions, in the real time in which such practices are developed it means negotiating some potentially fraught alliances. Serious disagreements over the issue of imperialism are bound to emerge in any solidarity campaign; just as there will be sharp disagreements over the regime in any anti-imperialist campaign. Socialists would have to manage these tensions carefully, while being the ones to consistently argue that the two goals are mutually necessary, rather than opposed.

Salaried bourgeois on "revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie"

2012-01-29T21:51:00.002Z

Zizek's latest for the LRB is proof of that old adage that those who attack multiculturalism in the name of class instantly forfeit their probity on both subjects. Actually, that isn't an old adage. I just made it up. But it is nonetheless true. To explain: Zizek has expended a lot of polemical energy attacking a certain kind of poststructuralist and post-marxist politics for its abandonment of class. But this critique was bound up with a simultaneous attack on 'political correctness', 'multiculturalism', and so forth, in the name of a 'leftist plea for Eurocentrism'. Of course, it was possible to appreciate the former critique without subscribing to the latter. (And if you want a serious critique of post-marxist fashion, you must read Ellen Wood's The Retreat from Class.) But it was never very clear what Zizek understood by 'class', apart from a structuring discursive principle: it was always invoked somewhat dogmatically. If one doesn't expect from Zizek a scientific analysis of social classes, one would at least expect him to know what he thinks classes are. It's quite clear from his latest piece, which re-states some of the theses earlier expounded in Living in the End Times, that he either has no idea, or has a novel theory of classes that he has yet to explain.

Rent, surplus value and the "general intellect"

Zizek's main argument is that the current global upheavals comprise a "revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie" in danger of losing its privileges. He begins by making an argument about the source of ruling class wealth in advanced capitalist formations. Taking the example of Bill Gates, he asserts that the latter's wealth derives not from exploiting workers more successfully - "Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary" - but "because Microsoft has imposed itself as an almost universal standard, practically monopolising the field, as one embodiment of what Marx called the ‘general intellect’, by which he meant collective knowledge in all its forms". In other words, Microsoft doesn't extract surplus value but rent, through its monopolistic control of information. This is paradigmatic of "the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge". The influence of post-operaismo in all this is clear: Zizek accepts and expounds the idea that intellectual labour is "immaterial" labour, which he maintains has a predominant or "hegemonic" role in late capitalism. On this basis, he asserts that orthodox marxist value theory has become problematic, as "immaterial" labour simply cannot be appropriated in the way that "material" labour can.

Before going any further, just note that this whole line of argument is a red herring. Even accepting the narrow focus on Microsoft's "intellectual workers" as a paradigm of 21st century work, their "relatively high salary" has no direct bearing on whether they are efficiently exploited. Or rather, if it indicates anything, it would tend to be that they are likely to be far more efficiently exploited than other workers. Globally, this is the trend: the higher the wages, the higher the rate of exploitation. It is also the trend historically: the famous high wages offered by Ford were possible in part because the techniques of Taylorism allowed the more effective extraction of relative surplus value. (The distinction between relative and absolute surplus value would be a fairly basic one for anyone claiming to operate within a marxisant radius.) This is not to say that all of Microsoft's "intellectual workers" are therefore diamond proletarians. Classes are formed in the context of class struggle, and the extent to which these workers are 'proletarianised' or 'embourgeoised' will depend on how successfully managers have subordinated the labour process, etc. Nor does it strike me as a wholly unreasonable proposition that Gates' main source of added value is monopoly rent - it is arguable, at least. But Zizek's argument in support of this idea is simply a non-sequitur.

Marx, the sock puppet

Zizek goes on to explain how his approach differs from that of orthodox marxism, and much of his argument hinges on how he sets up Marx as a foil. Thus: "The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension)." Setting aside the curious claim that Marx "overlooked" the "social dimension" of capitalist productive relations, it is worth re-stating what Zizek undoubtedly already knows: the writings on the 'general intellect' are part of an exceptionally brief fragment in the Grundrisse, and would thus be hard pressed to 'envisage' anything; nonetheless, the description of the "general intellect" in the Grundrisse as a "direct force of production" manifest in the "development of fixed capital" assumes that the "general intellect" is already privatized.

What Zizek means, I assume, is that Marx did not anticipate the monopolization of "general social knowledge", and therefore did not anticipate that the major class struggles in an advanced capitalist formation might be over the share of rent rather than over the direct extraction of surplus value. This is clear in the way that he treats the example of oil. For, according to Zizek: "There is a permanent struggle over who gets this rent: citizens of the Third World or Western corporations. It’s ironic that in explaining the difference between labour (which in its use produces surplus value) and other commodities (which consume all their value in their use), Marx gives oil as an example of an ‘ordinary’ commodity. Any attempt now to link the rise and fall in the price of oil to the rise or fall in production costs or the price of exploited labour would be meaningless: production costs are negligible as a proportion of the price we pay for oil, a price which is really the rent the resource’s owners can command thanks to its limited supply." So, this raises two questions: i) did Marx really not anticipate in his theory the possibility that rent extraction would be a source of major class struggles?; and ii) as a corollary, does the example of oil and its absurdly high prices undermine the labour theory of value?

This is fairly straightforward to establish. First of all, the evidence of Marx's writings is that he understood that there could exist a class or fraction of people whose income depended on rent extraction. Marx discussed two main types of rent. These were, differential rent, and absolute ground rent. To explain the first type of rent, it is necessary to specify some implications of the labour theory of value, which Zizek maintains is outmoded. First of all, if the value of goods is determined by the socially necessary labour time invested in them, it would tend to follow that if less labour time is needed to make the goods then over time the exchange value of these goods would decline. But the fact is that producers are in competition with one another for market share, so will tend to invest in labour saving devices so as to reduce their labour costs. And even if, over time, the replication of this tendency throughout the economy - enforced by imperative of competition - the result is to reduce the total profit on the goods, the immediate effect is to enrich whoever temporarily has a more efficient firm as a result. They obtain a differential rent because their investment enables them to obtain a larger share of a diminishing pool of surplus value. The second type of rent, absolute rent, needs no lengthy exposition here, but can be said to be that type of rent that would most naturally arise in monopoly situations. At any rate, it's reasonable to suppose that Bill Gates' wealth must embody some of both types of rent, alongside an unknown quantity of direct surplus labour.

Secondly, Marx's labour theory of value is not rebutted by the fluctuations of oil prices. The theory is not supposed to explain price fluctuations, which respond to supply and demand. The exchange value is an average across the productive chain; there is no mathematically fixed relation between the price of one particular commodity and the exchange value that exists as an average over the whole class of commodities which changes over time. Nor is the theory endangered by the fact that the relation between supply and demand can be manipulated in monopoly situations to drastically increase the actual price of a good. I am well aware that there are valid controversies regarding the labour theory of value. Nor do I imagine that Kliman's heroic work will completely save the orthodox theory from its doubters, many of whom aren't even operating on the same theoretical terrain. But Zizek's challenge is, purely on theoretical grounds, ineffectual. It is a straw man that he dissects to such devastating rhetorical effect in this article. For the sake of concision, I omit other instances in which he travesties Marx, both in this and other articles - we'd be here for a long, tedious time.

The "salaried bourgeoisie"

Zizek uses terms extraordinarily loosely. Take the "salaried bourgeoisie", whose "revolt" apparently motivates this piece. They are said to be leading most of the strikes taking place. Zizek thus presumably includes in this groups like the public sector workers who have struck in most European countries. Yet, he doesn't say what makes them a "salaried bourgeoisie". His useage implies a novel class theory, but the closest he comes to defining this term is where he specifies that he means those who enjoy a 'privilege', being a surplus over the minimum wage. Now, it's not at first clear what he means by the minimum wage. There are, of course, legally enforced minimum wages in a number of advanced capitalist societies, but he doesn't mean that. That would be arbitrary and would tell us nothing directly about productive relations. But mark what he does mean by the 'minimum wage': "an often mythic point of reference whose only real example in today’s global economy is the wage of a sweatshop worker in China or Indonesia". This no less arbitrary, as Zizek himself acknowledges.

Now, while the manner of his exposition implies a critical distance from such concepts, he nonetheless deploys them, arguing that they are themselves constitutive of a politically and discursively constructed division of labour: "The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers, as managers who are qualified to earn more by virtue of their competence (which is why pseudo-scientific ‘evaluation’ is crucial: it legitimises disparities). Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for – some – intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc). The evaluative procedure used to decide which workers receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability."

In this sense, the "surplus wage" that characterises the exploitation of the proletariat by the "salaried bourgeoisie" is a discursive fiction, unanchored in real productive relations. Still, having thus qualified his terms, it is nonetheless clear that it corresponds to some material processes. After all, if the labour theory of value no longer adequately captures the workings of surplus extraction, and if the 'hegemonic' pattern of accumulation is the extraction of rent, then the 'surplus wage' has some material basis as that which is paid out of a share of the rent (largely extracted by Western corporations from the citizens of the Third World). Further, Zizek goes on to maintain that the efficacy of such 'classes' is not the less real for their being political and discursive. It explains current political behaviour, he says (and here I must quote at length):

"The notion of surplus wage also throws new light on the continuing ‘anti-capitalist’ protests. In times of crisis, the obvious candidates for ‘belt-tightening’ are the lower levels of the salaried bourgeoisie: political protest is their only recourse if they are to avoid joining the proletariat. Although their protests are nominally directed against the brutal logic of the market, they are in effect protesting about the gradual erosion of their (politically) privileged economic place. Ayn Rand has a fantasy in Atlas Shrugged of striking ‘creative’ capitalists, a fantasy that finds its perverted realisation in today’s strikes, most of which are held by a ‘salaried bourgeoisie’ driven by fear of losing their surplus wage. These are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians. Who dares strike today, when having a permanent job is itself a privilege? Not low-paid workers in (what remains of) the textile industry etc, but those privileged workers who have guaranteed jobs (teachers, public transport workers, police). This also accounts for the wave of student protests: their main motivation is arguably the fear that higher education will no longer guarantee them a surplus wage in later life."

Zizek goes on to qualify this observation - each protest must be taken on its own merits, we can't dismiss them all, etc. - but is clearly arguing that the general thrust of the strikes and protests is in defense of relative privilege. This is especially true of the "special case" of Greece, where "in the last decades, a new salaried bourgeoisie (especially in the over-extended state administration) was created thanks to EU financial help, and the protests were motivated in large part by the threat of an end to this". So far the only evidence offered for the existence of this 'salaried bourgeoisie' is in its ostensibly discernible, concrete effects in the political behaviour of social layers affected by crisis. Yet this behaviour can be explained far more efficiently by the class interests of fractions of the proletariat who, due in part to superior organisation vis-a-vis their employers, have obtained a degree of job security and in some cases relatively high wages. In which case, the concept is useless.

As is typical with Zizek, each step in his argument is characterised by an astonishing lack of precision, a slipshod and loose useage of terms, straw man attacks, sock puppetry and so on. There are lots of fireworks, but little real theoretical action: all show, no tell, an empty performance of emancipatory politics. And I just thought I'd spell that out because so many people messaged, prodded and otherwise cajoled me into criticising this latest from Zizek. I hope you're satisfied.

Terrifyingly real: Poulantzas and the capitalist state

2012-01-25T20:08:00.000Z

The theory of politics and the politics of theory

This is part II of the long delayed Poulantzas series, this time on the problem of the capitalist state. Poulantzas made several distinctive, ground-breaking contributions to state theory. Or, I should say, to capitalist state theory since in his view a generic theory of the state was impossible. One can derive some "general theoretical propositions" about the state from the study of its types, but they "can never be anything other than applied theoretical-strategic notions". The two major works of his dealing with the capitalist state are Political Power and Social Classes (1968 - hereafter PPSC), written within an althusserian problematic, and State, Power, Socialism (1978 - SPS), which advances a relational view of the state and dispenses with some of the earlier althusserian themes.

I will disappoint some people by not immediately treating in detail the politics of each theoretical phase, but I do intend to return to this in a later post. Suffice to say for now that the two major works cover a shift from 'Marxism-Leninism' of a more or less critical variety (PPSC, finished days before the occupation of the Sorbonne and the beginning of the May 1968 uprising in France) to a left variant of Eurocommunism (SPS, published during a crisis of marxism, especially of althusserian marxism, and containing passages aimed at the nouveau philosophes). Strategically, and with regard to the capitalist state, this involved a shift from a nominally revolutionary approach to a 'centrist' approach - centrism, in the terminology of the Third International, being a position suspended between reform and revolution.

In each case, Poulantzas was arguing for a strategy commensurate with the politics of the communist formation (the Greek Communist Party of the Interior - KKE-I) that he was a member of. This breakaway from the Greek Communist Party (KKE) was active in the resistance to the colonels from 1968-1974, and represented the non-Stalinist wing of the party. It was initially one of the more left-wing communist parties, but moved to the right throughout the 1970s. Confounding expectations, this did not improve its standing among Greek voters. In the 1977 elections, it was the party advocating hardline Stalinism (the KKE) that reaped the lion's share of the communist vote, while the KKE-I's modernising Eurocommunist position received a derisory vote. The KKE-I was famed among the intelligentsia, but never broke out of its ghetto of less than 3% of the vote, with membership in the region of 12-14,000 in contrast to the KKE's votes of 9-11%, and membership of between 100-120,000. The fact that Poulantzas' major Eurocommunist text followed the 1977 result suggests that even if he had been aware of the historic failure awaiting the Eurocommunist project, he would have continued in the same direction as he saw no future in orthodox alignments, and expected Stalinism be superseded by some form of 'democratic socialism'.

Before delving into Poulantzas' theoretical innovations, I must make a note on his method. As he said in his critique of Miliband, any historical materialist approach to the capitalist state must clearly state its epistemological criteria in order to properly situate the concrete historical data it works with. Absent this, it becomes an exercise in empiricism. His own works, particularly PPSC, are to a very large extent concerned with outlining these protocols. His approach, as such, has been taxed with the stigma of 'formalism' and (pace Miliband) 'hyper-abstractionism'. The burden of this criticism is that Poulantzas spent more time parsing texts from the marxist canon and arguing through their implications, than examining concrete state formations. This is not entirely unfair, and to the extent that it is true, Poulantzas was being typically althusserian: a close, symptomatic scrutiny of texts being the modus operandi of the Althusser Circle. But the point is overstated. The survey of the typologies of the capitalist state in PPSC, for instance, largely draws on current sociological and historical research. The argument about the ambiguous role of state personnel in SPS draws from the immediate experience of May 1968 in France. Moreover, there is something praiseworthy in Poulantzas' re-evaluation of first principles, the painstaking clarification of concepts. Though this responded to concrete political problems, usually crises - of Greek communism, of democracy, of marxism, etc - his response was far from intellectually defensive. He took theoretical risks in order to make marxism adequate to the present. Only by doing so is it possible to make any sort of progress.

'Relative Autonomy', the 'effect of isolation', and the regional theory of the capitalist state

In PPSC, Poulantzas' approach to the capitalist state was, as I have suggested, conducted within the problematic of althusserian marxism. That is, he sought to understand the state in terms of the specific role of the political 'instance' or level within the capitalist mode of production. Recall that for Althusser, the mode of production is a 'structure of structures', an articulation of political, ideological and economic levels in which the economic level indirectly determines the content of the political and ideological levels 'in the last instance'. At the same time, the political and ideological levels intervene in the economic in an 'overdetermining' fashion - that is, the effects and 'contradictions' that accumulate at one level of the structure are condensed in each point of the whole. (I hope this explanation makes some sense - a lot is being omitted here.) For Poulantzas, therefore, to understand the capitalist state was to understand: i) the role of the political instance in the capitalist mode of production; ii) the specific way in which the political intervenes in the economic, and is determined by the economic in the last instance, and iii) the relationship of the state to the field of class relations, and thus class practices.

Under capitalism, the political has a certain 'relative autonomy' from the economic and ideological levels. (Please bear in mind in what follows that the term 'relative' is as important as the term 'autonomy'.) One way of arguing this might be to claim that capitalism is distinguished by an extrusion of politics from direct relations of production and surplus extraction. Whereas under feudalism, the levels are 'mixed', with those appropriating surplus labour also wielding direct political power, they are separated out under capitalism. But Poulantzas rejects this. Rather, his analysis rests on the so-called 'effect of isolation'. That is, under capitalism the labour process is subject to both collectivization and separation. On the one hand, labour processes are carried out in a more dependent, cooperative manner than ever before; on the other hand, they are within certain limits carried out independently of one another, in a competitive fashion, "without the producers having to organize their cooperation to begin with". At the level of politics, this results in the setting up of agents in the productive process as 'individuals/subjects'. This is not merely an ideology but a real juridical relation, which intervenes in and structures the productive process so that agents actually experience socio-economic relations as fragmented and atomised processes. The 'effect of isolation' is thus "terrifyingly real". It "has a name: competition", and it affects not just direct productive relations but "the whole ensemble of socio-economic relations".

The capitalist state in this sense appears as the "strictly political unity" of these relations. "It presents itself as the representative of the 'general interest' of competing and divergent economic interests", whose class character is concealed precisely by the isolation effect. The state thus systematically conceals its own political class character, representing itself as a popular-national state, with "the people-nation" "institutionally fixed as the ensemble of 'citizens' or 'individuals' whose unity is represented by the capitalist state". The effect of isolation is the "real substratum" of this state. But it is precisely in "putting itself forward as the representative of the unity of the people-nation" that the state assumes this relative autonomy with respect to class relations.

Another way to put this is that if the effect of isolation on economic struggles tends to impede class unity, resulting in sectional struggles, it is at the level of political practice that this unity must be created. Thus, the political class struggle operates in a relatively autonomous fashion with respect to economic class struggles. The capitalist state has to be seen in light of the political practice of the dominant classes, whose purpose is to produce class unity out of the isolation of their economic struggles, and at the same time constitute their political interests as the "general interest of the people/nation". The relative autonomy of the capitalist state enables it to better organise the unity of the dominant classes, and to represent their interests as those of the society as a whole: this, the organisation of the dominant classes, and the disorganisation of the dominated classes, is the primary political function of the state. It is the indispensable 'factor in unity', without which the bourgeoisie's political dominance is unthinkable. This leads us to the question of hegemony, and the 'power bloc'.

The capitalist state, hegemony and the 'power bloc'

Alongside Althusser, Gramsci is one of the major influences in Poulantzas' thought. Even where Poulantzas felt compelled to upbraid Gramsci's 'historicism' in his earlier work, a tendency which Peter Thomas notes is "essentially discontinuous with or rhetorically external to his concrete analyses of Gramsci's theses", the trend is toward a growing articulation of his research project with that of Gramsci. Concessions to althusserian fashion obscured this. (In fairness to Althusser, his own later writing on Gramsci was far less schematic, and far less driven by the dismissive typologies of his earlier work.) In PPSC, he takes over the concept of 'hegemony' and seeks to develop it with specific reference to its role in the political dominance of the ruling classes.

In Gramsci, hegemony has several senses. In one sense, it refers to the hegemony of the proletariat within a wider anticapitalist class alliance incorporating peasants. To this extent, the concept is continuous with its useage in the Russian context. In another sense, it refers to a particular state of ruling class dominance. In this perspective, hegemony is a brief historical moment, which has to be constantly worked on and constructed, in which the ruling class does not merely rule, but actually leads politically and ideologically. In such moments, the bourgeoisie, or a fraction thereof, sets itself up as the leading class/fraction in a world-historic mission, and uses a combination of repressive, ideological and material means to incorporate subordinate classes and fractions into a system of class alliances supporting this mission. But aside from these exceptional moments, one can also speak of hegemonic political practices - practices through which a dominant class or fraction aspires to hegemony. This is the sense in which Stuart Hall argues that the coalition government is pursuing a hegemonic project, attempting to fundamentally alter the popular 'common sense' in a reactionary direction.

Poulantzas is at this stage solely interested in developing the concept of hegemony in so far as it accounts for "the political practices of dominant classes in developed capitalist formations". The concept of hegemony is thus used in two senses. First, it indicates the relation of the dominant classes of a capitalist formation to the state, and the constitution of their interests as the 'general interest'. This reinforces the concept of the state as the factor in unity, transposing struggles from a corporate to a universal plane. Second, it specifies the specific form in which the dominant classes unity is secured: through an alliance of classes and fractions, in which one class or fraction (usually a fraction) is dominant, or hegemonic. This alliance, Poulantzas calls the 'power bloc'.

The need for a power bloc derives from the nature of capitalist production relations, which ensures that the ruling class is "constitutively divided into fractions" (financial, commercial, industrial, rentier, and so on). The isolation effect, moreover, is not compensated for by any other factor - such as the factor of 'collective labour' in the working class. This means that the dominant fractions and classes are incapable of raising themselves to the hegemonic level through their own parties: they need some other basis for unity. The power bloc comprises a "contradictory unity of dominant classes or fractions" under the leadership of a hegemonic class or fraction. But the relation of this bloc to the state is not one of a 'sharing out' of power among the fractions. "In the last analysis," says Poulantzas, "it is always the hegemonic class or fraction which appears to hold state power in its unity". As such, it is the hegemonic class or fraction that assures the unity of the power bloc and acts as its protector.

Returning to the argument about the relative autonomy of the state ‘machine’ from class relations, it seems here that the 'Caesarist' tendencies discussed in Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire are immanent to the capitalist type of state. Far from the state being dependent on any one of the fractions of the dominant classes, far from it securing its unity from an already unified hegemonic class or fraction, it is "the factor of the political unity of the power bloc under the protection of the hegemonic class or fraction. In other words, it is the factor of hegemonic organisation of this class or fraction". The state does not arbitrate between already constituted social forces. Rather: "Everything happens precisely as if the state permanently played the role of political organizer of the power bloc".

Poulantzas goes on to argue that the play of institutions within the state apparatus is directly related to the relations of power within the power bloc. Though it functions as a "centralised unity", it has a set of formal separations - between legislative, judicial and executive power. Setting aside the judicial branch, the distinction between legislative and executive power is here treated as a power relation and not merely a juridical separation: "it corresponds both to the precise relations of political forces and to real differences in the functioning of state institutions". Depending on the state in question, one of the branches always dominates, usually either the executive or legislative branch, and thus constitutes the nodal point where unitary institutionalized power is concentrated within the state organization. The formal separation of powers reflects an internal index of subordination, inasmuch as the hegemonic class or fraction controls the dominant branch of the state. Here, Poulantzas is drawing on Althusser's reading of Montesquieu, who coined the doctrine of the separation of powers. In this reading, the relations between executive and legislative branch (separated into lower and upper chambers) of the French state immediately following the revolution, relates to a certain conception of the relations between social forces. The royalty controlled the executive, the nobility the upper legislature, and the ‘people’/bourgeoisie the lower legislature. The interplay between these institutions reflected a struggle for power among these dominant classes, with the less powerful branches playing the role of allowing certain resistances on the part of subordinate fractions within the power bloc: but the centralised unity of the state remains, and power, far from being actually separated out or distributed, continues to be concentrated in the dominant branch.*

The relational approach: the state traversed by class struggle from top to bottom

Thus far we have encountered the capitalist state as a relatively autonomous force; a class state in a 'popular-national' form, organising the hegemonic struggles of the dominant classes; and a centralised unity acting as the factor in the unity of the power bloc, and by extension the disunity of those excluded from power. This approach has been taxed with functionalism, and this is not the only place where a functionalist problematic can be detected in the formulations used by Poulantzas. To describe the state as the 'factor in unity' of the dominant classes implies a degree of internal unity and consistency that would make destabilisation and disintegration hard to imagine. But we don't have to read it in that way. It's possible to see this 'function' of the state as, if you like, a necessary condition for bourgeois rule, which may or may not be adequately fulfilled at any given moment. The only way to redeem the insight, though, would be to separate from the functionalist problematic and incorporate it into a new epistemological framework.

In his later work, SPS, Poulantzas made several adjustments along these lines. In place of the focus on the regional autonomy of the political, Poulantzas came to argue that "political-ideological relations are already present in the actual constitution of the relations of production". Therefore, the position of the capitalist state vis-a-vis the economy was not to be resolved by declaring its 'relative autonomy', but rather by showing that this position was just "the modality of the State's presence in the constitution and reproduction of the relations of production". Poulantzas did not deny the relative separation of economic and political regions, but rather laid a different emphasis, stressing their "mutual relation and articulation - a process that is effected in each mode of production through the determining role of the relations of production". This mutual relation and articulation, incidentally, explains why there can be no general theory of the state.

So, rather than start from a 'regional' analysis of different 'instances' in the capitalist mode of production, he re-energised his whole approach with a 'relational' analysis of the state as a strategic field brought into existence by the intersection of ruling class power networks. In breaking with Althusser's "legalist image" of the state as a sovereign legal subject guarding the perimeters of economic sphere that otherwise reproduced itself independently, he held that the state was a set of relations that actively constituted and reproduced the economic sphere. Far from being a juridico-political organisation standing over the economy, it concentrated within itself the political and ideological relations already present in the relations of production; it incarnated those relations, inscribing them (thus, the political and ideological dominance of the ruling class) in the "institutional materiality" of the state itself.

The "strategic field" of the state, in Poulantzas' terms, is defined quite broadly. While Foucault and Deleuze charged marxists with ignoring the political power relations in institutions beyond the state, such as asylums, hospitals, sporting apparatuses etc., for Poulantzas these were "included within the strategic field of the state". This is not to say that these were constituted as sites of power by the state: power in the marxist sense goes well beyond the state even in the broad sense understood here. It is to say that these sites of power "do not stand in an external relationship to the state", which increasingly penetrates every sphere of social reality, "dissolving thereby the traditionally 'private' texture". This understanding of the "strategic field" brings into focus one of the problems for the analysis of state forms, that of 'parapolitics'. Take, for example, the Ku Klux Klan organisations of the 1950s. These were not bodies with an explicit, codified relationship to any public authority. Yet, their illicit hierarchies and relations (with governors, police commissioners etc), their protection of explicit hierarchies through the administration of racial violence, and their relation to the political class struggles of the Southern ruling classes, all place them firmly in the "strategic field" of Southern state forms. They were partially, but not wholly, constituted as political powers by the state. They did not occupy privileged sites of political power, but power was delegated to them by those who did occupy them. This ambiguous position does not only manifest itself in the case of covert political violence. One of the ways in which neoliberal statecraft manifests itself, for example, is the proliferation of so-called 'quangos' which perform state-like functions within a remit defined by the state. There is a whole ensemble of institutions, stretching out well beyond the public kernel of policemen, bureaucrats, armies etc which are not understood to be part of the state but which nonetheless fall into its strategic field. And beyond that, there is no social reality that does not in some way constitute itself in relation to the state.

Without further spelling out what forces are at play in this "strategic field", however, the phrase risks becoming a mere incantation. The major forces at work in any society are class forces. The positioning of these forces in the strategic field of political power depends on the relations of production, and the social division of labour that emerges from it. For Poulantzas, the latter mainly manifests itself in the form of a division between mental and manual labour. The state constantly re-constitutes this division, through the education system and by other means, and is itself the distinctive embodiment of intellectual labour. By reproducing this division, moreover, it deprives the popular classes of the intellectual skills necessary to penetrate its bureaucratic discourses. This case is simply unconvincing in its original form, and leads to unsustainable conclusions about the formation of classes. (See the previous post on Poulantzas' thinking about the division of labour and classes in contemporary capitalism). Given the proletarianisation of occupations that involve intellectual labour, I would suggest that we might better think of the division as one between executive/managerial and menial/subordinate labour. With that adjustment, we can then return to the relationship between the state and the dominant classes.

In SPS, Poulantzas held to his previous argument regarding the primary political role of the state, viz. the organization of the dominant classes, and disorganization of the dominated classes. It does this by unifying a power bloc politically, while linking fractions of the dominated classes to the power bloc in various ways so that they are unavailable for counter-hegemonic struggles. But his new methodological approach required a different understanding of this role. For, if the power relations that were condensed in the state were primarily class relations, it followed that the strategic field of the state must be traversed by class struggles. Rather than merely allowing for resistances by fractions within the power bloc, he laid a great deal more emphasis on strategies pursued by dominated classes either within the state, or impacting on the state. He allowed for beach-heads of resistance on the part of popular classes within different layers of the state. These were by no means equivalent to the centres of power within the state occupied by the dominant classes: this would imply a permanent state of dual power within the capitalist state itself. But the strategic calculations of the latter could be modified by the struggle of popular classes. We might add that the divisions mentioned earlier, between menial and executive labour, are reproduced within the state apparatus. (It would be difficult to understand the public sector strikes otherwise - unless, like Zizek, you maintain that they represent the revolt of a salaried bourgeoisie struggling for privileges and a share of rent extracted from the proletariat. In which case, you're easily gulled.) So the state is riven with class struggles. But it is also exceeded by them. For though it attempts to incorporate class relations on terms favourable to the power bloc, because these relations are characterised by struggle they always exceed the capacity of apparatuses to incarnate them. This is certainly some distance from a 'functionalist' treatment of the state, and it helps us to understand more precisely certain aspects of our own situation. After all, one of the weaknesses (far from the major one) of the anti-cuts movement in the UK is the weakness of political representation of the working class, the absence of footholds in the state at most levels, including the lowest council chamber. We cannot be indifferent to the fact that only Caroline Lucas and a few Labour lefts even try to conduct such representation in the commons. We need only look at the Linke to see the difference that such representation, such footholds, can make to class struggles outside of parliament. At the same time, such an understanding does not, to my mind, lend itself to the substitution of parliamentary struggles for all others.

Poulantzas also refined his thinking on the state's role in the production of hegemony, arguing that the distinction between repressive and ideological state apparatuses in Althusser was misleading (we know from our own experience that repressive institutions such as the police and courts have a strong ideological role). In addition, I have said that the linking of different subaltern fractions to the power bloc is a role of the state, but in SPS Poulantzas clarifies that this is not only a political or ideological operation: the state must constantly produce a material substratum for mass consent: "even fascism was obliged to undertake a series of positive measures, such as absorption of unemployment, protection and sometimes improvement of the real purchasing power of certain sections of the popular masses, and the introduction of so-called social legislation. (Of course, this did not exclude increased exploitation through a rise in relative surplus-value - quite the contrary.)" Again, this is an advance on PPSC, and in those accounts which overestimate the power of the 'ideological state apparatuses'.

One of the problems that remains was hinted at by Goran Therborn. Therborn, writing before the publication of SPS, contended that for all of Poulantzas' innovations in state theory, he paid remarkably little heed to the internal organisation of the state, and specifically the state apparatus. But with SPS and its reflections on the "institutional materiality" of the state, its argument that the institutions-apparatuses of the state concretise the relations of political-ideological dominance in the wider society, we can no longer substantiate that claim. Yet there remains an aporia, as far as I can tell: that is, the implications of the state's internal organisation for political strategy are drawn out incorrectly. So, for example, when Poulantzas writes on the possibility of a transition to democratic socialism, he focuses on the differing class locations of state personnel. In normal situations, the state is so organised that a general 'line' will emerge from the interplay of strategies and tactics of the dominant classes with the institutions of the state itself, and that 'line' will successfully be imposed on dissident and antagonistic elements within the state. But during a crisis, he argues, of a scale like that which shook France in May 1968, the diverging class positions will result in a fracturing of the state personnel which, if sensitively handled, can help effect the transition. I think this places far too much weight on the strategic significance of such divisions, and doesn't follow through on the correct (to my mind) understanding that he has earlier developed, the implication of which is that the dominant classes would continue to command the most strategically important positions within the centralised unity that is the state.

Now, this doesn't result in a straightforwardly reformist position on Poulantzas' part. He still maintains that the working class must build structures of rank-and-file self-government to challenge liberal democratic forms of representation. But this is as much to apply pressure to the capitalist state as to develop alternative, socialist forms of democracy. The strategic perspective that follows from this mediates between reform and revolution. Perhaps it says something that the only place where something like this strategy has been implemented and yielded some gains - not socialism, of course - is the highly exceptional case of Venezuela where the struggle of the popular classes really has traversed the state right to the top with no serious reversal as yet in sight. (Poulantzas as a co-author of "21st Century socialism" - anyone?) But I think that if Poulantzas' superior insights are taken seriously, their logic is revolutionary.

*Analyses of this sort suggest themselves for the British state system, with its crown-in-parliament, its commons, its lords spiritual and temple, and its judiciary centralised in the executive. Alas, barring a few beach-heads of popular resistance in the commons, the whole thing is bourgeois all the way down.

The state of the 18th Brumaire

2012-01-20T00:27:00.000Z

You have been penned in, kettled, assaulted and arrested. You have had your protest broken up, your occupation invaded, your picket line disbanded. Now you're facing something called 'Total Policing'. Wherever you try to organise, you confront the state as the constant factor in your disorganisation. Whether 'personated', as Marx puts it, by the riot cop, the senior civil servant, or the coalition minister, you find it is always there, resourceful, organised, centralised, almost always one or two steps ahead, almost always with a monopoly on political initiative. Of course, the state represents itself as a popular, democratic institution, upholding the general will, maintaining law and order as the condition for the full participation of each in the political community. Yet your experience suggests that something else is at work, and you have to ask: what sort of thing is the state? Is it even a thing? Is it an autonomous power over and against society, or does it 'represent' sectional (class) interests within it? Is it an 'instrument' of the powerful or a venue of contestation? What are its boundaries? Where are its weaknesses? How does its power accumulate, and disintegrate?

***

I was talking to Dan Hind several years ago over a fried lunch, and he explained his interest in what he termed "the mystery of the state". I said, rather crudely, that I thought there was no mystery. I invoked Lenin's famous de-mystification: the state is special bodies of armed men, prisons, bureaucracy, and so on. He looked at me like I was a mad monk reciting arcane scripture. It was a fair cop. My answer was question-begging, rather like defining a football game as special bodies of uniformed men, balls, goalposts, etc. I hadn't resolved the mystery at all, merely listed the obvious clues. After all, football also consists of relations between its uniformed men, and between those and their managers, and in turn between those and their owners and shareholders, and between all of these and media companies, and shopping outlets, and paying fans. It consists of a social-structural 'script', a set of codified rules with definite social origins, class-based cultural forms, political antagonisms (Rangers v Celtic etc), mass spectacle, commodity production, and so much more. The "mystery of football", aside from its popularity, could only be resolved by disclosing the complex, mediated relations between all of these aspects. I returned to my fried egg, dejectedly poking holes in the disgustingly glutinous texture of the solidified white. In fairness, my summary of Lenin was rather... summary. The widely recited phrase from State and Revolution is an extremely bowdlerised version of the argument if left at that. Lenin was interested in the relationship between the state and social classes, its origin and development, its strategic role in class struggles, and so on. His engagement with the marxist tradition - in what is, after all, intended to be a rousing pamphlet, a guide to action rather than a monograph or treatise - is extraordinarily sharp, even if he ultimately cleaves to an instrumentalist account of the state, which I think marxists must reject. But enough about my namesake.

The mystery of the state would not go away, because the state would not go away. Far from retreating to the perimeters of the 'economic', guarding its boundaries but otherwise allowing 'civil society' to go about its business in laissez-faire fashion, it was everywhere, pro-actively formulating and implementing agendas and strategies, domestically and overseas. War, sanctions, special forces operations, internment, deportation and special rendition are only the most brute, mail-fisted manifestations of the state. What about the coordination of ideological agendas on 'Britishness', 'integration', 'culture' and so on? What about the coordination of bank bailouts, and subsequent austerity programmes? What about 'workfare' and privatization? In fact, it seemed increasingly apparent that whereas the capitalist class itself was constantly divided, constantly at its own throat, rarely capable of sustained class initiatives by itself, the state was always there doing something that in one way or another furthered the reproduction of capitalist relations in new ways. And insofar as it did this, it seemed to be not just a state but a capitalist state.

Part of the mystery dissolved there and then. It had been a mistake to try to penetrate the core of the state as a sui generis form. There can be no general theory of the state. The state is not an eternal form that recurs through successive ages, modes of production and social formations, and to read it as such tends to lead to a Hobbesian view of the state as an instrument for the suppression of 'anarchy' (social conflict). At most, one can have a general, descriptive outline of what distinguishes a state apparatus (special bodies of armed men, etc), or a genealogy of types of state, noting the factors that recur (though even these factors will have an entirely different content, and stand in different relations to one another, depending on the historical epoch in which they are embedded). But it is possible to have a theory of the capitalist state, and the best way to approach it seems to be confront the state in its setting, the social formation.

***

This is what the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte does, among other things. Its refined lapidary style and mordant ironising also make it a literary classic. This is a strange thing in a way, but what pomo theorists would call its 'mode of emplotment' is deployed with a deliberate pedagogical purpose. The satirical deflation is intended to show how potentially world-historical events were always doomed to be reduced to low farce, how the movement of forces under various banners constituted a hollow pantomime of revolution. The essay surveys the political circumstances of Louis Bonaparte's coup d'etat on 2nd December 1851. This is where the title comes from: because, for Marx, this coup is a farcical repetition of Napoleon Bonaparte's tragic putsch on the 18th Brumaire VIII (9th November 1799). From tragedy to farce - you see how literary parody is already inscribed in the first words of the text. In its parodic appropriation of French history and bourgeois literary traditions, the 18th Brumaire penetrates layers of appearance - not so as to dispose of these layers as so much subterfuge (aha, behind the iron mask of Napoleon lies the unheroic, icy calculation of the bourgeois!) but to show their necessity and efficacy; not to dismiss them but to enact them, to show them at work.

Now, the 18th Brumaire is an extended analysis of a political situation. But from that comes a subtle diagnosis of the French social formation, and particularly the French state, in its conjuncture. The text's elegant movements between different levels of analysis, mediating between the abstract and the concrete (or, if you will, the concrete-in-thought), shifting from the political to the ideological to productive relations, its extremely subtle and suggestive analysis of masks and decoys, and the movements between semiosis and performance, discourse theory avant la lettre and strategic class analysis, make it an exceptionally rich study. Though Marx was writing very shortly after the events, moreover, he did so in a determinedly historical, rather than journalistic, mode: the complex periodisation, the way Marx maps the temporal structure of events and charts the strategic possibilities in each phase, is indicative of how seriously he takes the historical aspect of his purpose. He is determined to relate these events to deep historical dynamics, even before the dust has fully settled, and moreover to do so in a way that grasps their singularity. That is why those marxist theorists most concerned with the idiographic, above all Gramsci, have continually returned to the 18th Brumaire. This lengthy preface is by way of explaining and justifying the focus on one text by Marx to examine the question of the state.

***

In assessing the grotesqueries of 1848-51, Marx developed the elements of a theory of the state for the first time, a project he intended to continue in a sequel to Capital. For while Louis Bonaparte would seem to have simply reversed the gains of the bourgeois revolution, reinstating the absolute monarchy and "the shamelessly simple domination of the sword and cross", Marx insisted that his regime was in fact something new. And to understand it, one had to understand the social interests that had driven the struggle between the political forces and their situation in relation to one another that made it possible for Napoleon le Petit to take power. There had been a failed revolution: somehow the French bourgeoisie and popular classes had been unable to repeat the monumental achievement of 1789. The first difference between the two situations was that the era in which the bourgeoisie played the progressive historical role was being superceded. The development of capitalist relations and the opposing interests of capital and labour meant that the bourgeoisie was becoming an increasingly conservative class. The second was the growing fractionalisation of the ruling class, the major fractions being finance-capital, industry and landlords. The latter were represented as rival monarchist factions in the Party of Order. The Legitimists were allied to the landlords, while the Orleanists were allied to high finance. In principle, these were supporters of different monarchic dynasties, but organised within this rivalry was the sectional struggle of competing class fractions for hegemony within the state. And in that struggle, they waged a war for the support of subordinate classes: for example, the Legitimists sometimes posed as defenders of the working class against the exploitative industrial and financial capitalists. Once again, the layers of appearance, the pageantry of ancient intrigue and birthright, codify and represent very modern conflicts. The question of political representation, in its many senses, is at the centre of Marx's analysis here. In this connection, note also that the landlords are included as a fraction of the capitalist class, because "large landed property, despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race, has been rendered thoroughly bourgeois by the developments of modern society".

At any rate, if the bourgeoisie was thus divided and weakened, the weakness of the proletariat, its youth and lack of development, meant that it was unable to take the leadership of national politics. Nor was it able to form the class alliances that would be necessary for the left of the revolution to prevail. Marx had written in 1848 of how it would be necessary for the urban workers to unite with rural proletarians and revolutionary peasants. But in the end the urban working class was isolated. So, there was a sort of stand-off between classes, a stasis that no one class is able to resolve. The resolution of the stand-off fell to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, a dim gaffeur who nonetheless managed to channel a multitude of social interests in his person. Napoleon le Petit, as Victor Hugo named him, had been the candidate of the monarchist right because he was seen as an exponent of order; of the industrialists, because of his liberal economic views; and of the passive majority of the rural classes, for whom the name of Bonaparte meant something (national greatness) as opposed to nothing. "The most simple-minded man in France," Marx said, "acquired the most multifarious significance." His main opponent, Cavaignac, was opposed by a similarly broad range of forces, including the socialists for whom he was tainted by his military career and his involvement in the massacre of workers. The 'democratic socialist' Ledru-Rollin was distrusted by the urban working class for the same reason. Bonaparte, meanwhile, also summoned the support of the so-called 'lumpenproletariat', consisting of declassed peasants and workers, soldiers, adventurers, crooks and so on. It was on this social basis that the Society of 10 December, a pro-Bonaparte faction, rested. But Bonaparte did not 'represent' all of these classes in the same way, an important point to which we'll return. He took the presidency in alliance with the party of Order, before eventually disposing of the latter and declaring himself Napoleon III, and Emperor of the French.

Before launching into the issue of 'Bonapartism' and its relation to state theory, though, it is important to see in motion: the jostling of massed forces; the shifting of masses under different political banners; the fractionalisation of the ruling class; the complex and sudden changes in representative techniques; and the way in which the state is contested and occupied. Using Marx's periodisation without attempting to imitate his style (which would be a severe discourtesy to the original), I will describe a loose schema of this process.

***

Marx begins with the First Period: "From 24 February to 4 May 1848. February period. Prologue. Universal brotherhood swindle." The February revolution of 1848 had disposed of the monarchy, and brought into being the Second Republic. The social forces united in the creation of this republic were, at first, bourgeois liberals and workers. The 'swindle' was the bourgeoisie's promise to defend the interests of workers, the struggling petty bourgeoisie (particularly the artisans whose way of life was in crisis), and the educated for whom there were few posts of status available. Thus bourgeois republicans promised to create a democratic and social republic. They extended the franchise to millions of male workers, and relaxing repression and censorship. Hundreds of newspapers flourished that spring. In principle, Marx argues, the democratic republic is an ideal form of class rule for capital - in a phrase, the democratic republic is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. But it also creates the political terrain in which the bourgeoisie's contest with the proletariat becomes open, and the 'swindle' of universal brotherhood melts into air. The bourgeoisie initially honoured its social commitments by adding a proto-welfare state to the democratic republic, with National Workshops (effectively nationalised businesses) giving work to the unemployed. 100,000 were thus employed by the end of May. All this, the better to consolidate their dictatorship under the banner of universal brotherhood: but this was where the 'swindle' began to break down.

The second period was that during which the republic and Constituent National Assembly are convoked, and is broken up into three sub-phases: "1. From 4 May to 25 June 1848. Struggle of all classes against the proletariat. Defeat of the proletariat in the June days." The bourgeoisie had already started to resent the taxes it had to pay to support the Workshops, and the growing pressure mounted by workers through the new democratic institutions. It led a generalised shift to the right among an alliance of classes against the proletariat, and the April elections were won by conservatives and moderates. By June, the workshops were being closed down. The barricades were once more erected in the capital, and the bourgeois republicans became outright reactionaries. Working class resistance in the capital was crushed by the National Guard, with 1500 killed during the suppression, 3000 murdered afterward, and 12000 deported to labour camps in colonial Algeria - or, in the familiar refrain of the bourgeoisie, order was restored.

The second sub-phase of the second period: "From 25 June to 10 December 1848. Dictatorship of the pure bourgeois-republicans. Drafting of the Constitution. Proclamation of a state of siege in Paris. The bourgeois dictatorship set aside on 10 December by the election of Bonaparte as President." The defeat of the left and the working class left the state apparatus under the leadership of a "pure" bourgeois-republican bloc that was still moving to the right, albeit with a small opposition from radicals and the social democratic Montagne. The constitution was revised in a highly conservative manner, striking out clauses supporting a 'right to work', and leaving education in the control of the Catholic church among other things. Sub-phase 3: "From 20 December 1848 to 28 May 1849. Struggle of the Constituent Assembly with Bonaparte and with the party of Order in alliance with him. Passing of the Constituent Assembly. Fall of the republican bourgeoisie." During this phase, the conservative Party of Order was increasingly dependent on Bonaparte, and increasingly at odds with the 'pure' bourgeois republicans. The rule of the latter came to an end in the legislative elections of 28 May 1849, when the Party of Order won a substantial victory. This reflected, as much as anything else, the continued right-ward swerve of the bourgeoisie, and its rejection of the republicans.

The third period is the most complex, punctuated by three sub-phases, the last of which is itself broken down into four parts. Sub-phase 1: "From 28 May 1849 to 13 June 1849. Struggle of the petty bourgeoisie with the bourgeoisie and with Bonaparte. Defeat of the petty-bourgeois democracy." While the right had won the elections, a radical minority of republicans and socialists, known as the Montagne, had been elected to the legislature with 25% of the vote. For Marx, they represented a kind of petty bourgeois socialism which consisted mainly of the reform and perfection of capitalism: the big bourgeoisie exploits us through finance, so we want credit institutions; it crushes us through competition, so we want protection from the state; etc. The Montagne continued to resist the Party of Order in parliament, and were expelled from the Assembly for their trouble. Sub-phase 2: "From 13 June 1849 to 31 May 1850. Parliamentary dictatorship of the party of Order. It completes its rule by abolishing universal suffrage, but loses the parliamentary ministry." The Party of Order held the ministry in alliance with Louis-Napoleon, and held together a more or less stable government until elections were held again in 1850. During these elections, the left swept the board in Paris. In response, the Party of Order decided to get rid of universal male suffrage and cut about 30% of voters off the rolls.

Sub-phase 3 contains the most complex and compressed sequence of movements. Marx begins: "From 31 May 1850 to 2 December 1851. Struggle between the parliamentary bourgeoisie and Bonaparte." This is the decisive movement that makes Louis-Napoleon's coup d'etat possible. Marx breaks down the period into four discrete steps. First, in the period until 12 January 1851, parliament lost "the supreme command of the army" to Louis-Napoleon. Second, in the time until 11 April 1851, the weakness of the Party of Order in the Legislative Assembly forced it to form a coalition with the radicals it had previously expelled. Third, in the period until 9 October 1851, the Party of Order "decomposes into its separate constitutents", with growing antagonism between the executive (Louis-Napoleon) and parliament, and a "breach between the bourgeois parliament and press and the mass of the bourgeoisie". Finally, in the period until the coup d'etat, the breach between parliament and executive power became more open. Parliament was abandoned "by its own class, by the army, and by all the remaining classes". Bourgeois rule passed away, with no resistance. Foreknowledge of the coup and the ineptitude of its leadership did not prevent its success. Thus: "Victory of Bonaparte. Parody of restoration of empire."

***

As mentioned, the "parody" of imperial restoration here is in fact a modern tale of a failure of class capacities, a collapse in bourgeois initiative and leadership, the bathos of slogans betrayed before the ink has dried. It is about a particular from of bourgeois state in which the bourgeoisie does not rule. Prior to the revolution, the bourgeoisie had not ruled, merely "one faction of it: bankers, stock-exchange kings, railway kings, owners of coal and iron mines and forests, a part of the landed proprietors associated with them—the so-called finance aristocracy." Also excluded were, of course, workers, the "petty bourgeoisie of all gradations" and the peasants. Even the industrialists were in opposition. "On the other hand, the smallest financial reform was wrecked due to the influence of the bankers." At the end of the farce of 1848-51, the bourgeoisie was once again out of power. In fact, no class had been able to take power: in power was the state apparatus itself, the increasingly powerful bureaucratic and military machinery, which had obtained a degree of autonomy from the contending social classes. It was powerful enough, independent enough, that a drunken adventurer supported by the lumpenproletariat and smallholding peasants could suffice for its head. This was, in a word, the 'Ceasarist', or the 'Bonapartist' regime.

There are three immediate elements to this kind of regime. The first is the autonomy of the state apparatus from the contending classes; the second is the existence of a passive popular base for the regime; the third is that the bourgeoisie, by surrendering its political dominance, has retained its dominance at the level of productive relations. The concept of Caesarism has since been developed in many directions. Gramsci notably used the concept as a basis for the analysis of fascism, though it has also been a habitual recourse wherever populist governments of one sort or another have appeared. Other theorists, often influenced by Althusser, have argued that the analysis confirms a more general 'relative autonomy' of the state apparatus. These are leads that I do not intend to pursue at the moment; I merely list them to indicate that the theoretical (and thus political) consequences of this study, the Eighteenth Brumaire, are profound and contested.

What I instead want to do is draw out some implications of Marx's survey. First is the extraordinary power of the state as an apparatus in itself, the sort of power that could enable it to act as a more or less autonomous force in society. This is far more evident today than in the period Marx was describing. Second is the relation to social classes. It is not merely the occupation of the state that determines its class role: the structure of the state itself is not class-neutral. This is not to say that the class basis of a particular state can be read off from its various features. After all, if a democratic republic is ideal for a bourgeoisie in rude health, a dictatorship of some sort (not necessarily a Caesarist dictatorship) may be its saviour in crisis. The question, as Goran Therborn suggests, is what role the state plays in advancing, allowing or inhibiting the further reproduction of capitalist social relations. Third is the relation between the state and civil society. Although the state is not class-neutral - and for this reason, Marx takes the view that it must be dismantled rather than perfected - it is nonetheless a terrain which is traversed by contesting classes in representational struggles. It is impossible to be indifferent to the forms of representation that take place. Not because these are 'reflections' of 'real' class struggles taking place outside of the political system, but because they are highly mediated forms of class struggle in themselves. And because the representation of classes within the state has a formative effect on the behaviour of classes within civil society. When representation breaks down, the political forces in parliament become useless, unmoored: but the class forces they have tried to represent are thereby also disenfranchised. Fourth, the state has a particular role in relation to the fractionalisation of the ruling class. Such fractionalisation is an inevitable aspect of capitalist development, and is merely one of the ways in which a 'general' bourgeois interest is only possible under the hegemony of one of its fractions. In addition to fractionalisation is the individuation of and competition between members of the capitalist class. The result is that were it not for the state's ability to act as a unifying factor, organising the power of social classes within the apparatus itself, the capitalist class might be constantly, as I suggested earlier, at its own throat. Poulantzas suggested that the separation of powers - executive, legislative and judicial - could be understood in terms of a distribution of power in which the hegemonic class or fraction controls the executive. Either way, the state must play a pro-active role in securing the unity of the dominant classes; and by extension the disunity of the dominated classes.

The case of the Nazi drinking game

2012-01-17T15:14:00.001Z

Why do the rich and right-wing in Britain so love their Nazi uniforms? Whether it is Tory students, royals, politicians, or upper class jocks, the naughty pleasures of pretending to be a fascist bomber or concentration camp guard are irresistible for some. Lately, some LSE students, most likely fitting into the category of the aforementioned upper class jocks, were discovered engaging in a drinking game called the 'Nazi Ring of Fire'. You can imagine the sorts of rituals involved - saluting the fuhrer, that sort of thing. A Jewish student who objected to this display was assaulted. Now, I'm sure the students involved don't quite get the furore that has resulted. Most likely, they think the affair was maybe a bit off-side, but otherwise bloody good sport. Too bad for them. Let them suck it up.

I'm rather more concerned about the way the political reaction has panned out. First of all, it's worth saying that there's a fairly sensible article by Jay Stoll, president of the LSESU's Jewish Society in the LSE newspaper, The Beaver. (I don't know why they called it that.) Stoll rejects the scapegoating of Muslims for antisemitism, and suggests that the usual culprit is actually the upper middle class boarding school type. That's probably true in the UK. Even here, though, there's already something odd going on. The newspaper calls the affair an 'antisemitic' drinking game. Now, I hope you understand what I mean when I say this is bordering on euphemistic. I just mean that there's a lot more involved in Nazism than antisemitism, and the decision to inhabit a Nazi persona for kicks signifies something more than judeophobia.

What more? Well, what more is involved in 'national socialist' politics? Nationalism, anticommunism, anti-liberalism, patriarchy, homophobia, strains of virulent biological racism other than antisemitism, social Darwinism, extreme political authoritarianism, class chauvinism, contempt for the poor and weak, etc. It is absolutely correct to identify and attack the vicious antisemitism involved in such Nazi performance, particularly as it was a Jewish student who was assaulted. But antisemitism won't stand in for every evil of Nazism. I think what's really going on with such people is not just antisemitism, but more fundamentally a certain admiration for supermen, hatred for the weak and vulnerable, enjoyment in the imperial bunting, the festivities and aesthetics of domination and hierarchy. It's not fascism, but the licensed pleasure of a class on the offensive, people who are intent on clinging on to everything they have and taking more, exhaling with gratification and relief as the opposition is violently policed, or bombed.

In this connection, a less sensible response to the affair came from Tanya Gold of The Guardian, who usually makes her wedge writing lighter fare. (I click on the links, sometimes). She proves the old adage that if antisemitism prompts you to defend Israel, you have already forfeited your probity on both subjects. Actually, that isn't an old adage, I just made it up: but it is nonetheless true. I suppose one could make the 'paradoxical' point that Israel is organised antisemitism, which is also true. Or, in a more elaborate version of the same basic idea: Israel is an apartheid state that can only exist through the expropriation and murder of Palestinians, and to identify its interests with those of Jewish people as such is to defile the latter, to defame them, to blood libel them. This, while correct, is utterly inadequate, because the perspective of Israel's victims is lost in this. What I really mean is that defending the state of Israel by reference to instances of antisemitism in modern day Europe is, wittingly or otherwise, another way of identifying with a would-be master race - with no sense of irony. Worse still when they rank instances of legitimate protest by pro-Palestinian groups as examples of mounting antisemitism, or worry about a "demand that Jews denounce Israel if they wish to be accepted in polite society", as if it wasn't the victims of Israeli oppression and their allies who are debarred from 'polite society'. Of course, Zionism is not fascism, but nor is it the eternal other of fascism. You can't have it both ways. Either racist, nationalist, imperialist ideology is objectionable, in which case its organisation in a state is calamitous, or you must count the thuggish Nazi impersonators as bedfellows. This is a choice that Israel's founders and planners have always faced, and they have always opted for the latter without embarrassment.

Austerity in Canada: Canadian Labour at the Crossroads

2012-01-16T21:01:00.000Z

Guest post by Doug Nesbitt:

A wage cut of fifty percent. An elimination of pensions. Cuts to benefits.

These demands have inevitably led to a major showdown at a locomotive factory in London, Ontario between the 700 unionized workers of Electro-Motive Diesel and Caterpillar, a massive US-based corporation. The workers, members of Canadian Auto Workers Local 27, responded to the employer’s demands with a positive strike vote of 97 percent. The employer, Progress Rail, a subsidiary of Caterpillar, locked the workers out on New Year’s Day.

In addition to facing down a notorious anti-union employer who hammered the American United Auto Workers in the 1990s, there are plenty of rumours about Caterpillar closing the London plant and moving operations to Muncie, Indiana. EMD workers in London make $CDN 36/hour while their counterparts in Muncie are paid only $CDN 12.50-14.50. Indiana is also on the cusp of becoming the first rust-belt state to introduce a "Right to Work" law, a notorious form of anti-union legislation made possible by the even more infamous Taft-Hartley law of 1947, the long-standing crown jewel of American anti-union legislation.

The response of organized labour to the lock out has been swift. The Ontario Federation of Labour is coordinating a mass rally in London on January 21 with buses coming in from numerous cities across the province and as far away as Sudbury and Ottawa. The OFL is anticipating at least ten thousand protesters.

Mainstream media coverage has also been extensive and the shocking nature of Caterpillar’s demands have so far ensured that coverage has been neutral and even supportive of the workers. The story is being covered by all major Canadian dailies, prime-time news hours on CBC and CTV, and has received coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and now the European and Australian press.

Not surprisingly, the federal government has stayed silent. Since they won their first majority government in May, the Tories have gone to war with organized labour. In June, postal workers were locked out by Canada Post, the state-owned crown corporation. The Tories responded with back-to-work legislation which called for pay increases lower than the employer’s last offer.

Federal Labour Minister Lisa Raitt went further, twice threatening to legislate Air Canada flight attendants back-to-work, even though Air Canada was privatized in 1988. From a party espousing government non-intervention in the economy, Raitt’s reasoning behind intervening in the private sector was that Air Canada was essential to the economy. This absurdity was repeated in October when Raitt floated the idea of defining the “economy” as an “essential service”, thus providing some pseudo-legal justification for further interventions.

The government’s hypocrisy goes further. In March 2008, on the very shop floor of EMD London, Prime Minister Harper announced a billion dollar tax break to industry in 2008, $5 million of which went to EMD London. Two years later, EMD London was purchased by Caterpillar.

Despite its record high revenue and profits in 2011, stemming from sales of its machinery to a booming resource sector (tar sands, mining), Caterpillar is attempting to destroy a union. In addition to their anti-union stance, the threat of roughly two thousand jobs being lost in London, and their profiting off environmental disasters like the tar sands and mining operations around the world, Caterpillar supplies Israel the bulldozers it uses to carry out house demolitions in occupied Palestine.

This leaves labour – and all the political allies of labour – at a crossroads in this high profile, high stakes clash between workers and state-blessed corporate power. The implications for other workers – such as Toronto municipal workers, the locked steelworkers of Alma, Quebec, the York Region Transit workers, and all other workers, union and non-union – couldn’t be greater. Since the Tory victory in May, employers, public and private, have received the message loud and clear: the federal government is siding with them in a sustained attempt to hold down wages and benefits, slash them where possible, and break the ability of workers to resist these moves by breaking their only means of defence: unions.

Is labour up to the challenge? The OFL has already moved the rally’s location from the picket lines outside the factory, to downtown London’s Victoria Park eight kilometres away. The move is explained by the OFL as ten thousand being too many for it to be “safe” on the picket line. What nonsense is this? Fifteen thousand pickets peacefully shut down the Port of Oakland last November in an Occupy-initiated general strike.

Holding the rally in Victoria Park will ensure that is a symbolic display of opposition and nothing more. Only a few hundred of the ten thousand will likely take up Local 27’s invite to the picket lines after the rally. Thousands of protesters will be boarding buses after the downtown rally to head back home and won’t have time to make it to the picket lines.

If you’re having deja vu, you’re not alone. Last year, ten thousand people from across Ontario attended the Hamilton Day of Action against US Steel held January 29, 2011. On the steps of Hamilton City Hall, union leaders and labour politicians denounced the lockout and backed the steelworkers refusing to see their pensions gutted by US Steel. A short march made it around a few cold and deserted downtown blocks before returning to City Hall. As one of the hundreds who lined up for union-sponsored buses back to their respective hometowns, I later that we had marched past the old Stelco building, US Steel’s Hamilton office, without even stopping to do anything.

The days of action in Hamilton and London may boost the spirits of locked out workers, but what will it accomplish beyond this? In the wake of Occupy as well as the Capitol Building occupation in Wisconsin last year against the stripping of public sector bargaining rights, the time seems ripe for bolder action. Bold action could galvanize thousands of Canadians angry at the Tories and the one percent, could overturn the limited range of Canada’s political debates, and maybe just put employers and the Tories on the back foot for once.

The battle at EMD might be lost, but it could still be a turning point for labour by showing a new determination to take more controversial but increasingly necessary actions to counter the “race to the bottom” overseen by an entrenched federal government keen on hammering workers and dismantling hard-won social programs.

Drawing on the Occupy movement, the Spanish Indignados, and the Republic Windows and Doors occupation in Chicago from late 2008, occupying EMD London should be on labour’s agenda. In this sense, moving ten thousand pickets away from the factory is a lost opportunity for initiating the occupation. If this sounds too radical, Egypt and Occupy have changed what’s possible – an occupation could be a galvanizing moment for Canadians and become a worldwide beacon of resistance. And the story of EMD London exposes so clearly the intertwined problems of corporate greed and tax breaks, the war against workers, failing democratic institutions, environmental destruction and imperialism. And what better union than the Canadian Auto Workers, founded on the plant occupations in Flint and Oshawa in 1936 and 1937, to carry this out?

Even if an occupation doesn’t happen but the demand is shouted loud enough – “Occupy EMD!” – it normalizes the idea among networks of workers and activists and lays the groundwork for occupations taking place in inevitable future labour disputes.

The decision to occupy will have to be taken by EMD London workers themselves. But solidarity actions can be carried out across Ontario and beyond. Caterpillar owns Battlefield Equipment Rentals with over 30 locations in Ontario, two in Manitoba and five in Newfoundland. The activist networks built up by the Occupy movement could link up even more with trade unionists to spread the resistance to Caterpillar far beyond London itself. This is what Americans did last August when dozens of Verizon Wireless stores across the country were picketed in solidarity with the communication workers strike against Verizon. The union, Communications Workers of America, even launched an “adopt-a-store” campaign for local activists to show their support, leading to many weekly pickets of Verizon Wireless stores.

Where Battlefield Equipment Rentals can’t be found, pressure can be put on the 166 Tory MPs riding offices in every province, highlighting government complicity with the corporate tax breaks to EMD London. Ottawa labour activists already showed this could be done when they occupied John Baird’s riding office during the postal worker lockout.

In short, the Canadian labour movement needs to reinvent itself and abandon the long-standing attitude towards conciliatory relations with employers, hopeless appeals for government intervention, and a general neglect of the wider, non-union working-class. The lockout in London makes this reinvention both necessary and possible. London could be the place where the labour movement – or at least a substantial minority of activists, union and non-union – recovers a tradition of militancy on behalf of the whole working class and sees itself as a collective force for economic and political justice and transformation.

About the Author

Doug Nesbitt is Co-Chief Steward of PSAC 901 representing Queen’s University Teaching Assistants and Fellows. He was born and raised in London, Ontario and now lives in Kingston pursuing a PhD in History at Queen’s. He also co-hosts Rank and File Radio, a weekly labour news program on CFRC 101.9FM.

Another humanitarian intervention.

2012-01-15T00:55:00.000Z

I mentioned the divisions in Syria's opposition a while ago, principally over the question of imperialist intervention and armed insurgency. These divisions have recently frustrated unity talks between the different opposition factions. The fact that Syria has an organised left, and a strong anti-imperialist pole in its opposition, makes intervention for the US (and EU) a much more difficult proposition than the light blitz of Libya. It turns out that this may not be sufficient to prevent an intervention, however. A recent Salon article describes how a coalition of lib imps and neocons is organising around the possibility of a quick, flighty regime-change in Syria - not just in the US, but in Europe.

As has become the pattern in the Obama executive, the main vector for this kind of 'humanitarian intervention' in the administration is Clinton's State Department. It was by persuading Clinton of the virtues of intervention in Libya that the lib imps - people like Samantha Power, Susan Rice and Anne-Marie Slaughter - won the case for war against its Realist opponents. Beyond the US, France is once again leading the drive for war within the EU. This may represent (the culmination of) a shift from the old Gaullist policy of independence from Washington, but it has a certain logic. France is the original home of the doctrine of droit de l'ingerence, a concept it put to use in interventions in Chad, the Ivory Coast, Yugoslavia and elsewhere. More generally, France's political dominance within an EU that has no centralised military authority would tend to give it a leading role where European interests in the Middle East are concerned. The more intriguing factor here is Turkey. Ankara's elites aren't too fond of the idea of releasing their grip on Cyprus to please the EU, and have in recent years slowed down a spate of reforms intended to ease membership of the Union. Nonetheless, their hostility to the Syrian regime is plain enough in their decision to allow exiles and the 'Free Syria Army' to operate from within Turkey. Could it be that the Turkish regime will this time allow itself to be used as a launch pad for an imperialist intervention?

That, of course, would still leave the question of how the Syrian terrain can be negotiated by any imperial coalition of the willing. This is critical both for the warmongers and for the antiwar-mongers. Those waging the intervention will need to be assured of having some sort of social base for a post-Assad regime once they've created it. As for the antiwar-mongers. Well, I don't wish to be rude, but I can already imagine the divisions and recriminations - some defending Assad, others plugging humanitarian intervention, the balkanization of opinion among anti-imperialists, the hair-splitting. All that, unless there was actually a powerful Syrian revolt against intervention. The pro-imperialist position within the Syrian opposition is occupied by the Syrian National Council (SNC), comprising liberals and conservative Islamists, mostly led by emigres with little basis in the domestic grassroots. The SNC is calling for the establishment of "safe zones" Predictably, but not accurately, pro-war politicians and diplomats deem the SNC a more representative organisation than its rivals. The National Committee for Democratic Change, as well as the local coordination bodies, have warned against seeking intervention. Despite vicious repression, they have also resisted moves toward an armed insurgency, perhaps fearing a repeat of the Libyan situation where early gains were quickly reversed by a far better organised state.

Perhaps the greatest problem for any intervention is the resilence of the opposition, despite the killing which the opposition estimates has claimed 5,000 people. The regime doesn't look as if it is about to collapse, but at the same time the opposition continues to draw enormous crowds and inflict damaging strikes. Libya was a veritable cakewalk for NATO because the opposition was being defeated rapidly, its emancipatory impulse was being snuffed out, and a leadership comprising dissident bourgeois factions had filled the vacuum left by the masses when the latter began to retreat under Qadhafi's assault. Syria's opposition has not experienced anything like this yet, and is thus no easy meat for co-optation.

White people need to shut up

2012-01-05T11:52:00.001Z

Not me, obviously. (Good luck with that.) And probably not you either. But, you know, those white people. The endless parade of white victims, the oppressed white, the white who can't say what they really think and yet endlessly say it at length, for a living. I fucking hate these people with every last residue of bile I can muster. Send them back, I say. These are the people now calling Diane Abbott a 'racist' for saying that 'white people' love to use 'divide and rule', it being an old colonial tactic. Abbott says she was trying to express a more complex idea, nuances of which were lost in Twitter's 140-character limit. But I don't really care. I'm not even going to waste time explaining what's wrong with the idea that white people are the victims of racism. You think your feelings have been hurt by Diane Abbott? Come talk to me for five minutes, and I'll fill your ear with some hisses you won't forget.

The counterpart to reactionary outrage-mongering, of course, is liberal condescension: in the vein of "oh, she's a very silly woman, saying these provocative things, giving the right a cause to change the subject". This is wrong in many ways. First of all, what Abbott said was, in a very loose sense, correct: 'white people' do indeed love to play divide and rule. Not all of them, good lord no. Not you or I. Not the good whites (there are some good whites). But I think we all know that there's a troublesome minority in our midst, the ones who give us all a bad name, whom we must root out and expose, and hand over to the authorities. That's all I'm saying. Second, I would rather have a politician who expresses things bluntly and occasionally blunders but is usually on the right side of the argument (Abbott, for all her flaws, is better than most Labour politicians in this respect), than a calculating mountebank who plays for position in the spectacle. The fact that this is the main line of criticism coming from liberals is indicative of the kind of domesticated, gentrified political game they're playing. Third, Abbott's comments may provide the occasion for the right to go on an offensive, but let's not pretend this wasn't inevitable. Following the verdict against the two Lawrence suspects, and the way in which this drew attention to the facts of institutional - no, structural - racism in British society, it was a dead cert that the media would search for a way to restore white victimhood.

The real problem is not that Diane Abbott says "silly" things. It is that public speech is regulated according to conventions largely dictated by the powerful; that the social ideas and images that govern what is acceptable in speech are produced by people with a definite interest in domesticating dissident perspectives. This is something to be opposed, not adjusted to. But first, before all that, white people need to shut up.

Labour's strategy of right-wing populism

2012-01-04T17:19:00.000Z

"...More specifically, the tenor of his latest intervention fits into a wider Labour strategy of articulating a politics of the "squeezed middle". In Miliband's bland cadences, this sounds anodyne. But, in fact, it is a strategy taken over directly from rightwing populism. To understand this, one need only revisit the rightist backlash against social democracy and New Deal liberalism. This had a racist component, visible in the seemingly evanescent campaigns of Enoch Powell and George Wallace. But race wasn't all there was to it, and the techniques of populist mobilisation continued to be deployed long after these two had passed into obscurity.
"Rightwing populism is not merely transparently "representative": rather it seeks to create the division that it articulates. Societies divided along multiple lines are simplified into a dichotomy between "the people" and its other. The working class is redivided into the hard-working taxpayer and the slothful undeserving poor, with the former subsumed into the "people", the latter into its other. The people are then construed as a "middle" whose sovereignty has been abused by bureaucrats, tax-avoiding plutocrats, criminals, protesters and clamourous minorities alike. Thus, Wallace complained that "middle America" was squeezed between the "silk-stocking crowd" and the poor and criminal.
"The "middle", thus defined, is a depthless discursive entity: "the people" supposedly bracketed by the term share little by way of work, culture, housing, education or daily experience. They are united only by what they oppose. Nonetheless, this type of appeal would underpin Ronald Reagan's attempt to forge a Republican majority. In the same way, Powellism would pass into mainstream politics in the form of Thatcherism, which championed a squeezed "middle England" of hard workers against a bossy state and the grasping poor: a form of politics characterised by Stuart Hall as "authoritarian populism". Since then, capturing the "centre ground" has often meant genuflecting to an incorrigibly reactionary "middle"..."

Slavery, capitalism and articulated modes of production

2012-01-03T23:40:00.000Z

The slave is not a proletarian; the proletarian is not a slave. For, under capitalism the dual freedom of the worker consists of her freedom from the means of production, and her freedom to sell her labour power to any buyer. The slave lacks both freedoms. It follows that slavery and capitalism are incompatible. What could be more straightforward than that? Daniel Gaido points out, in a marxist historiograpical treatise on American capitalism, that this focus on the mode of exploitation involved in any mode of production is one that distinguishes marxism from bourgeois political economy. For the latter, exchange relations are far more central. Slavery is thus often (not always) defined as capitalist on account of its integration into commodity exchange. For marxists, this is to focus on one small aspect of the totality of productive relations, which omits the social role of the worker and the relation of exploitation between owner and labourer. This latter, Marx sees as central:

The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers — a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity — which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis — the same from the standpoint of its main conditions — due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc. from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances.

So, to repeat: the mode of exploitation comprising the innermost secret of the whole social formation, slave labour would seem to be a form of surplus extraction that belongs solely and exclusively to pre-capitalist modes of production (PCMPs). Yet, of course, there is a tradition in marxist thought, which owes as much to W E B Du Bois as to Eric Williams, which sees plantation slavery as a capitalist form. Contemporary advocates of this view would include David Roediger, for example. In a classic essay, Sidney Mintz made what is in my view a compelling argument for not treating the issue of 'free labour' as decisive. Wage labour is, like exchange relations, only one element in the totality of capitalist social relations, and has precedents in PCMPs. I will return to Mintz's argument, but its polemical thrust is directed against the idea of slavery as the eternal other of capitalism. Naturally, I have my view on the debate over slavery and capitalism which will become obvious throughout the post. And for what it's worth, the latest issue of Historical Materialism carries a symposium on slavery, capitalism and the US Civil War, with contributions from Robin Blackburn, Eric Foner and others, which is mandatory reading on the subject. But what I'm most interested in is trying to clarify the ways in which one would approach the issue, and attempt to resolve it.

First of all, it seems to me that the subject is modes of production, and the relations between them. What does a 'mode of production' specify? The mode of production consists of a conjunction of relations of production and forces of production. This much at least is uncontroversial among marxists. But precisely what each element of this conjunction consists of is a matter of intense, complex argument. We have said that the mode of exploitation constitutes the inner secret of a social formation. But Jairus Banaji in his recent collection, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation, has a point when he complains of a tendency to conflate productive relations with modes of exploitation. So, for the purposes of this argument, he insists on the distinction between slavery as a mode of exploitation, and the slave mode of production. Not making this distinction, he argues, leads to the erroneous tendency to assume that wherever slavery exists there is a slave mode of production; and, as a corollary, it is assumed that wherever labour is 'unfree', there can be no capitalist mode of production (CMP).

In an enlightening essay, Banaji goes on to interrogate the notion of 'free labour'. The idea of 'free labour' rests on a certain legal formalism in which 'free will' is assumed in the absence of direct political coercion, it logically leads to absurdities such as the assertion by US courts that "a servitude which was knowingly and willingly entered into could not be termed involuntary". The point is not simply that behind formal legal freedom exists a realm of economic coercion; rather, it is that it is incoherent to speak of a free contract, particularly under capitalism where bargaining outcomes are determined by the wider politico-legal structure upheld through coercion. The line between free and unfree labour is impossible to draw without collapsing into liberal mystification. There are various kinds of labour which might be compatible with capitalism - debt-bound labour, hired labour, waged labour, etc - and in each case there are various mechanisms by which labour is subjected and unfree.

Just as much a source of controversy as the content of each element of the mode of production is the relation between the elements, eg whether the dynamic historical element in the mode of production is the forces or relations of production. I won't go into this controversy here, but I have some sympathy with the argument that prioritising productive forces tends to collapse into a kind of techno-determinism. Then there is the question of whether the concept of a mode of production needs to specify additional elements: should it, for example, specify the means of its own reproduction? I don't think it has to, necessarily, but for a rigorous discussion of this and related questions, you should read Harold Wolpe's introductory essay in The Articulation of Modes of Production.

With those questions still in mind, it becomes necessary to resolve exactly what the CMP is, and how does it relate to PCMPs? When capitalism emerges, does it instantaneously obliterate PCMPs, gradually subsume them, incorporate elements of the old into the new, remain constrained by them in various ways... or what? When we speak of "uneven and combined development" in relation to the development of capitalism, we mean that capitalism develops independently in a number of territories, but not in complete separation; and that it develops at a different pace in each zone. The concept helps explain certain concrete effects in terms of class formations, national politics and culture, but it also implies something else. It implies unevenness of development and a combination of different levels of development of capitalism in relation to PCMPs.

To put this in a more concrete way, how might we understand the position of slavery in a capitalist social formation? Must we see it as apart from capitalism, a PCMP in its midst? Alternatively is it possible to think of slavery as a remnant of a PCMP that has been annexed by the CMP? Or is slave labour simply one mode of exploitation that is perfectly compatible with capitalism? Not a remnant of a PCMP but simply one of the many ways in which the capital-labour relation can be expressed? Returning to Mintz's argument, what he shows in his detailed survey of plantation slavery is the co-existence of capitalist and pre-capitalist forms of labour not only in the same social formations, but often in the same sites of production; the same labourer could be both a slave and a proletarian. From a very different position, Charles Post has made a strong case for seeing the cotton plantations in antebellum slavery as non-capitalist on the grounds of their lack of development of the means of production, low productivity and tendency to expand surplus value by crude absolute means such as territorial expansion: this clearly showed that pre-capitalist rather than capitalist imperatives were operative in antebellum slavery. But as far as I can gather, the evidence on this is mixed depending on which sector of production you are looking at - for example, it depends on whether you are surveying evidence from cotton plantations, or from sugar plantations. This would imply, perhaps, that different imperatives operated within the same regional system, that different modes of production were articulated together under a wider capitalist dominance.

Much hinges here on the distinction (derided as positivist by Banaji for reasons I don't follow) between the mode of production, and the social formation. This is principally a distinction between different levels of abstraction. The mode of production is an abstract set of determinations, whereas the social formation is the concrete site on which the mode of production is realised. As such, or so Althusser and his followers would argue, one should expect to find an articulation of distinct 'pure' modes of production in any given formation. And if that is correct, then it would be sensible to expect both capitalist and non-capitalist forms to co-exist in various complex ways; to mutually determine and restrict one another's formation and development; and when capitalism eventually triumphs, it would tend to have incorporate elements, remnants of precapitalist modes that are perhaps useful to its reproduction either at a political, ideological or economic level.

This brings me back to another point made by Banaji, which is worth quoting at length:

For Marx himself, the task of scientific history consisted in the determination of the laws regulating the movement of different epochs of history, their ‘laws of motion’ as they were called after the example of the natural sciences. Vulgar Marxism abdicated this task for a less ambitious programme of verifying ‘laws’ already implicit, as it supposed, in the materialist conception of history. ... Marx had been emphatic that abstract laws do not exist in history, that the laws of motion which operate in history are historically determinate laws. He indicated thereby that the scientific conception of history could be concretised only through the process of establishing these laws, specific to each epoch, and their corresponding categories. In other terms, through a process of producing concepts on the same level of historical ‘concreteness’ as the concepts of ‘value’, ‘capital’ and ‘commodity-fetishism’.

My opinion is that there is no way to determine in advance whether a system of slave (or bonded, or impressed) labour is capitalist or non-capitalist, a remnant or a dynamic component of the dominant mode of production. Slavery cannot be interpreted as a transhistorical mode of exploitation whose substance remains unaltered through various historical epochs and social formations. While it is correct that the capitalist law of value requires the operation of imperatives through competition, and this requires the wider dominance of the form of waged labour, it doesn't exclude the persistence of slave labour as a capitalist form, or as a pre-capitalist form annexed to capitalism.

American Insurgents: A brief history of American anti-imperialism

2012-01-03T20:01:00.001Z

Coming soon:

American Insurgents is a revealing, often surprising history of anti-imperialism in the United States since the American Revolution. It charts the movements against empire from the Indian Wars and the expansionism of the slave South, to the Anti-Imperialist League of Mark Twain and Jane Addams; from the internationalists opposing World War I to the Vietnam War and beyond. It shows that there is a surprising, often ignored tradition of radical anti-imperialism in the US. Far from being ‘isolationist’ in the fashion of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, the book contends, these traditions were often the most internationalist and cosmopolitan currents in US political history. The most ambitious movements formed direct relationships with the victims of US expansionism, from the abolitionists uniting with Native Americans to stop colonial genocide to the solidarity movements in central America and the ‘human shields’ in Palestine and Iraq. Far from being the privilege of the rich and educated, antiwar activism has been most evident among the poor and oppressed. It has been most militant when visibly connected to domestic struggles and interests, such as slavery, civil rights, women’s oppression and class. Above all, the book contextualizes each anti-imperialist movement in the evolving structure of US expansionism and dominance, and explains how some movements succeeded while others failed. In so doing, it offers a vital perspective for those organizing antiwar resistance today.

The problem of racial populism in Cold War America

2011-12-29T14:49:00.001Z

In Southern US political traditions, populism has many valences. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, there was a brief moment where populist political forces throughout the South seemed to be converging into an anticapitalist coalition. Underlying this movement was the transition to capitalism in the Southern countryside. Charles Post argues in his prize-winning history of The American Road to Capitalism that the US economy prior to the Civil War was an articulation of three modes of production: mercantile capital, petty commodity production, and slavery. In this articulation, capitalism was the dominant mode of production, its imperatives shaping and determining the forms that the rival modes of production took; the relations between these modes of production also determined the forms of regional competition leading up to the Civil War. Following the success of northeastern and midwestern industrial interests in the Civil War, the political power of capital was such that no restoration of pre-capitalist modes was possible. Joseph Reidy's history of the cotton plantations describes how the Depression of the 1870s forced Southern planters to convert themselves into an agrarian capitalist class.

The populist movements arose when they did to a large extent over the defence of customary rights under assault from the capitalist transformation of the Southern countryside. Over time, they developed into something considerably more than a reflux against capitalist modernity, connecting the Southern Farmers' Alliance, the Colored Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor in a coordinated leftist upsurge. I will not go into detail as to the reasons for the failure of this populist moment. Judging from Steven Hahn's work on the subject, I gather that among the key reasons were the segregated nature of the movement, the conservative influence of white property owners, and the co-opting of many populist thematics by the losing Democratic presidential candidate in 1900. This is related to the story of the Anti-Imperialist League, by the way, a subject I'll come back to. At any rate, the defeat of Southern populism allowed the planters to force through the capitalist transformation of the countryside by means of terror, and to completely colonise the local state formations where they did not simply create them. As they were unable to wholly subsume the labour process under capitalist control, they resorted to extra-economic coercion - the Jim Crow system answered this requirement. This involved a dual movement of suppression and incorporation. On the one hand, the exclusion of African Americans and many poor whites from the polity permitted the introduction of segregated controls on their movements and conduct which limited their ability to organise in their own interests. As a contemporary protagonist put it: "If the Negro is permitted to engage in politics, his usefulness as a labourer is at an end." On the other hand, the obverse of such controls was the incorporation of white workers through paternalistic means, most evident in the plantations and the mill towns which emerged from the cotton industry. This involved more extensive intrusion into the daily life of white workers, despite their greater liberty and access to public goods. It involved white workers being addressed as part of a folkish Anglo-Saxon cultural and political community. So, racial populism could become a recurring form of Southern politics thanks in part to the defeat and co-optation of turn-of-the-century Southern multiracial populism.

Before turning to the specific period of the Cold War, 1945-65, what I consider the 'classical period' of US anticommunism, I will make some attempt to specify what I mean by populism. In a previous post, I gestured toward Ernesto Laclau's writing on populism in his pre-post-marxist writing. While acknowledging some problems with the argument, I thought that one advantage of his interpretation was that it was neither purely descriptive nor is simply historicist, confining the interpretation of populism to a certain conjuncture or political space, but rather specified a conceptual core that could help make sense of the variety of movements and ideologies deemed populist. I think this is a quality that any account of populism would need to make the concept workable. The gist of Laclau's account is that while class 'interpellations' (or, if you prefer, identifications) relate to the antagonism between the ruling class and the proletariat, populist 'interpellations' relate to the antagonism between the 'power bloc' and the 'people'.* Populism is thus an anti-status quo discourse that divides the political space into a simple dichotomy of 'the people' vs its other. The 'people' is defined as sovereign yet powerless; the true owners of a polity that has been appropriated by an other. The 'other' must in this sense be somehow an elite or bound up with elites. Thus, racial populism might 'other' a 'Jewish elite', or a 'liberal multicultural elite', or a 'Federal elite' that was seen as 'soft' on racial others, 'loving' the other (rather than the people), or bound up with one-world conspiracies etc. This step is decisive: the process of othering is what determines the positive content of 'the people'. It is what simplifies the political terrain, uniting an array of class actors in (Laclau-speak) a 'chain of equivalents'. Populism is not, then, a form of politics like socialism or liberalism, but rather a form of political identification which is tendentially versatile (Laclau would say 'tendentially empty'), and one which tends to arise when the social order and the system of identities that helps sustain it is in flux. (There is an argument for treating populism in an historicist manner, as a transitional form of politics rooted in the absorption of previously resistant regions and populaces into capitalist markets. We certainly see this with the populist movements in the South of the late 19th Century, where the strongest sources of populist support came from areas least integrated into the national or global markets. Nonetheless, its recurrence in a variety of circumstances seems to weigh against this treatment, and so I think it's most sensible to see it as a kind of crisis politics.)

Within the terms outlined above, Joseph Lowndes treats George Wallace as a pioneer of racial anti-statist populism, emerging in the crisis of the Sixties as the 'New Deal' coalition fragmented over the issue of civil rights. In fact, I think the crisis of the Southern system really began after World War II. Manning Marable's account of the era in Race, Reform and Rebellion demonstrates that by this time, the economic basis for the collapse of Jim Crow had arrived. He does not focus on the effective subsumption of labour in the South through new mechanisation processes, and the arrival of a 'New South' bourgeoisie for whom Jim Crow was desirable but not essential to their reproduction. Rather, he shows that the beginnings of African American empowerment were in place by the end of the war (evident in FDR's de-segregation of the military, which appalled Southern politicians because of the implicit threat to white supremacy posed by a seeming capitulation to threats of black civil disobedience). Politicians of neither party could afford to ignore black electors after the war, and many of the important Supreme Court decisions had been made by the early 1950s. In the south, black political participation was gradually increasing - this is what the wave of lynchings was intended to stop. Meanwhile, the colonial system was already disintegrating so that the 'colour line' was everywhere in peril. Only the political practices bracketed under Cold War anticommunism prevented the crisis of Jim Crow from becoming collapse much earlier than it did.

So, I want to suggest that it is in the years between 1948 and 1964, the peak years of the Cold War, that Southern racial populism was developed and refined. It began with the States Rights Party, which was the basis for the White Citizens' Council and the John Birch Society. These groups were organised around a southern tradition of countersubversion, which has precedent in the terrorist campaigns by Ku Klux Klan and associated organisations following the US Civil War aimed at restoring white supremacy under Democratic rule. Countersubversion is an ensemble of political practices, of which counterrevolution is a subset. It has an especially long pedigree in the United States, where the presumed conspiracies of Freemasons, Catholics, Mormons, African Americans, the ‘yellow peril’, and of course ‘Reds’ have serially aroused movements in defence of Americanism. In addition to its racial and national connotations, countersubversion is intimately bound up with patriarchal practices and the masculinist ‘regeneration through violence’. The dominant form of countersubversion in US politics at the time of Jim Crow's greatest peril, however, was anticommunism.

Anticommunist countersubversion, specifically, is an ensemble of class practices whose product is the conservation of extant relations of dominance primarily, but not exclusively, on the axis of class. It is involved in the suppression of insurgent classes and fractions for this purpose. In treating anticommunism primarily as a set of political practices rather than an ideology, what I am most interested in is the line of political demarcation rather than identifying a specific ideological operation shared by liberal anticommunists, white supremacist anticommunists, Fabian anticommunists, fascist anticommunists, and so on. This line of political demarcation is between those who have at least a nominal anticapitalist commitment (communists, their allies and their anticapitalist critics) and those who are committed to defending capitalism. But importantly, this line bissects a political scene unfolding within a concrete social formation, meaning that the defence of capitalism is not organised around a set of abstractions (the mode of production), but rather around concrete political blocs, local state forms, modes of rule, etc. which are not immediately reducible to capitalist imperatives. This means that such struggles are contextual, and contested: whether white supremacy, 'free unionism', 'pragmatic segregation', or other policies or structures are considered essential to capitalism's efficient reproduction will vary.

The regional variations in US capitalism at the time of Jim Crow's crisis are quite clear. In the north and west, Fordist production dominated, with workers incorporated by means of productivity agreements and wage rises (the material substratum of hegemony) and disciplined by anticommunism (loyalty oaths, the war against communism and the left in trade unions, etc). In the South, the planters and the textile industry dominated. The textile firms were small and poorly unionised. Employers and state officials worked to isolate union activists as 'communists', beating or 'disappearing' them rather than trying to incorporate them in a class compromise. Local state forces in the South had a long tradition of arresting large numbers of workers, especially African American workers, to bolster the cheap prison labour force for local employers - a practice which was incentivised by payments per arrest made, and which continued on a widespread basis well into the 1940s. All of this class repression had a parapolitical, vigilante aspect to it, not dissimilar to the way the Klan operated in alliance with police to terrorise blacks and civil rights workers, or to the way the FBI organised illegal raids on suspected radicals' premises. The murky boundaries of the capitalist state in this context should remind us that it is not an object, or an instrument, or an institution: rather, it is a set of strategic relations which facilitates the organisation of the dominant classes and fractions, and the disorganisation of the dominated classes and fractions.

At any rate, if rising wages and productivity agreements worked to incorporate labour in the north and west, as part of the wider offensive against communism and the radical left, the South depended on different mechanisms of incorporation. Here, the material substratum of hegemony was the relative advantage enjoyed by white labour over black labour: it was this which made white workers so resistant to unionisation, fearing that it would erode their racial position. I hesitate to call this 'white privilege', because the system did not improve the wages of white workers in aggregate. White workers had more access to skilled and supervisorial jobs as a result of segregation. Their wages tended to be better than those of black workers. However, the overall effect was actually to reduce the bargaining power of both black and white labour, and to magnify income inequalities among whites - or, to put it another way, to increase the rate of exploitation of white workers.

This is where racial populism comes in. From the late 1940s, as I say, the system of Jim Crow was endangered. Washington's global empire-building was partially responsible for this, as it entailed a set of strategic orientations at odds with those of the South. First of all, obviously, Washington needed to construct multi-racial alliances against communism - necessarily, given that most of the world was not white, and would no longer be ruled by whites. The US could deploy considerable violence against opponents, but could not have ruled through force alone. So, it was under constant pressure to address or mitigate white supremacy - a matter it took up reluctantly, because Washington politicians mostly believed in some form of white supremacy, and the South was a politically powerful and reliable component of the domestic anticommunist coalition. Nonetheless, segregationists would have cause to complain that troops were being used against white Americans in Little Rock rather than communists in Peking. Secondly, the international system that Washington set about creating was crafted under the influence of New Dealers, whereas the bulk of Southern capital was against the New Deal and particularly opposed to anything (Marshall Aid etc) that smacked of 'socialism'. They had come to terms with the New Deal in the first place largely by ensuring that its provisions were 'racially laden' - e.g., containing exclusion clauses that omitted most African Americans in the South from wage and employee protection. This dramatically accelerated the divergence in living standards between white and black workers. So, the further entrenchment and global expansion of New Deal ideas could not but be perceived as a threat in the South.

The states rights movement beginning in the 1940s founded its activities on the proposition that federal civil rights legislation was the culmination of global communist conspiracy. This grammar of anticommunist countersubversion was one advanced first in Washington DC, of course. The specific charges used by Southern bodies to attack human rights, civil rights and political organisations originated from HUAC, or the Justice Department, or the Senate Internal Security Sub-Committee (SISS). HUAC under the Texas senator Martin Dies had always protected the South as far as possible. But in the South, such countersubversion acquired a populist element during the Cold War in that this conspiracy was treated as one that involved elites - not just the federal government, but financiers, celebrities etc. - in a united effort with the riff-raff (criminals, protesters, blacks, militants) to undermine the people. Civil rights legislation would merely undermine a fragile concord between racial and minority groups, spread misunderstanding and distrust, and hand agitators a weapon to divide the American people and soften them up for tyranny. The States Rights Party warned of a "police state, in totalitarian, centralised, bureaucratic government" arising from Truman's civil rights legislation. In general, the view was that foreign-controlled conspirators had infiltrated the federal government to promote an egalitarian agenda at odds with the venerable 'way of life' of the South, which was itself the most pure version of the American 'way of life'. Strom Thurmond's major thematic in 1948 was the threat posed by "collectivism" to "economic opportunity" for Americans. Echoing claims that were current in Washington DC, he asserted that spies and infiltrators were at the top of major strategic industries, as well as the political establishment, and that the Fair Employment Practices Commission had been introduced to "sabotage America". Seeking the votes of a "racial minority", he said, the national parties had all adopted a programme that would "open the doors to eventual communistic control of this Republic".

Yet it was really following Brown vs the Board of Education and the censure of McCarthy that the articulation of racism and anticommunism in a populist inflection emerged in its most energetic form. McCarthy had never gained as much support in the South as his authoritarian anticommunist politics would lead one to expect. In fact, southerners were the least likely to back McCarthy despite their increasing propensity to back Republicans in national contexts. This was perhaps, as Wayne Addison Clark argues, because McCarthy's basic orientation was toward creating a local power base and maintaining conformity on issues relating to foreign policy rather than defending a racial caste system. Nonetheless, he used his power to disseminate ideas - communist infiltration of government, industry and Hollywood, a lack of sufficient vigilance against communism by American leaders - that the defenders of white supremacy would find very useful. He also had personal influence in a number of political fights against supposed crypto-communists in southern states such as Texas, where he forged alliances with oil plutocrats. Following his personal political demise, the ideas of McCarthyism took on a new life in the South, among the Southern rich as well as small businesses, journalists and 'patriotic' organisations such as the American Legion, Minute Men and so on. Senator James Eastland was the South's McCarthy in many respects, expressing a hatred for the New Deal, liberalism, and concessions to labour that southern Democrats shared with conservative Republicans, in a distinctly Southern idiom. Eastland worked through SISS to gather and disseminate (dis)information about civil rights organisations and to organise the harrassment of white supremacy's opponents, as well as organised labour and the left in general. Similarly, the publications of the White Citizens' Council were remarkably similar in tone and content to those of HUAC, albeit with the emphasis falling on race and identity.

Wallace represented a defiant last stand, as it were, in respect of this form of racial populism. His early background had marked him as a critic of the most egregious forms of white supremacy but, having lost the primary in the 1958 gubernatorial contest to a candidated backed by the KKK, he vowed not to be "out-n****red" again. By 1962, he had become and out-and-out Dixiecrat, using populist identifications to establish himself as a defender of the white southern people against the seemingly unstoppable egalitarian tyranny. "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth," he said on being sworn in as governor of Alabama, "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." This speech, written by a former Klan member, invoked the shades of the Confederacy. Though promising 'the greatest people' (the superior southern white) protection from the clanking chains of tyranny, from a regime that reviled them, despised them, and trod on them, he also staked the South's claim to true Americanism. "You are Southerners too", he told the whites of New England, the Mid-West and the far west. However, like many of his predecessors, Wallace preferred not to focus his discourse chiefly on race. And when he did address race, he often addressed it through codes and a richly symbolic language often tapping the region's strongly Protestant religious traditions. But it was through race that he could unite the suburban white middle classes with urban white workers: to the middle classes, he could arouse fear of the threat to property rights posed by civil rights legislation; to workers, he could cite a putative threat to job security. It was through the same language that he could speak to Polish northerners as much as 'Anglo-Saxon' southerners. It was a spurious white racial victimhood that could fuse these disparate class, religious and ethnic groups into a 'people' in opposition to an elitist tyranny.

Throughout the period from 1945-65, Southern elites sought to protect white supremacist capitalism by forging a populist alliance against communist conspiracy. Their efforts were not merely repressive, but actively sought to alert and mobilise popular forces to the threat to their racial advantages. They were not simply conservative, but actively sought to direct an oppositional force against the Washington power bloc - not to overthrow it but to recompose it in the interests of Southern white supremacy.

* The 'power bloc' is a concept from Poulantzas, who argues that such a bloc arises as a logical form of class dominance under capitalism because the ruling class and its allied classes are "constitutively divided into fractions" such as rentier, finance, commerce, industry, etc. A power bloc comprises the "coexistence of several classes, and most importantly of fractions of classes" in a "contradictory unity". The 'power bloc' is thus an alliance of dominant classes and fractions under the hegemonic direction of the leading class or fraction. It is not important for this argument, but it is worth saying, that the power bloc is unified by the capitalist state in this account, because the bourgeoisie and its fractions are held to be incapable of either unifying themselves or assembling a coherent system of class alliances - so wrapped up are they in competition.

Not mourning Vaclav Havel

2011-12-23T23:50:00.000Z

Dear Alex,
As a good and loyal friend, I can't overlook this chance to suggest to you a marvelous way to discredit yourself completely and lose the last minimal shreds of respectability that still raise lingering questions about your integrity. I have in mind what I think is one of the most illuminating examples of the total and complete intellectual and moral corruption of Western culture, namely, the awed response to Vaclav Havel's embarrassingly silly and morally repugnant Sunday School sermon in Congress the other day. We may put aside the intellectual level of the comments (and the response) -- for example, the profound and startlingly original idea that people should be moral agents. More interesting are the phrases that really captured the imagination and aroused the passions of Congress, editorial writers, and columnists -- and, doubtless, soon the commentators in the weeklies and monthlies: that we should assume responsibility not only for ourselves, our families, and our nations, but for others who are suffering and persecuted. This remarkable and novel insight was followed by the key phrase of the speech: the cold war, now thankfully put to rest, was a conflict between two superpowers: one, a nightmare, the other, the defender of freedom (great applause).
Reading it brought to mind a number of past experiences in Southeast Asia, Central America, the West Bank, and even a kibbutz in Israel where I lived in 1953 -- Mapam, super-Stalinist even to the extent of justifying the anti-Semitic doctor's plot, still under the impact of the image of the USSR as the leader of the anti-Nazi resistance struggle. I recall remarks by a Fatherland Front leader in a remote village in Vietnam, Palestinian organizers, etc., describing the USSR as the hope for the oppressed and the US government as the brutal oppressor of the human race. If these people had made it to the Supreme Soviet they doubtless would have been greeted with great applause as they delivered this message, and probably some hack in Pravda would have swallowed his disgust and written a ritual ode.
I don't mean to equate a Vietnamese villager to Vaclav Havel. For one thing, I doubt that the former would have had the supreme hypocrisy and audacity to clothe his praise for the defenders of freedom with gushing about responsibility for the human race. It's also unnecessary to point out to the half a dozen or so sane people who remain that in comparison to the conditions imposed by US tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise. Furthermore, one can easily understand why an oppressed Third World victim would have little access to any information (or would care little about anything) beyond the narrow struggle for survival against a terrorist superpower and its clients. And the Pravda hack, unlike his US clones, would have faced a harsh response if he told the obvious truths. So by every conceivable standard, the performance of Havel, Congress, the media, and (we may safely predict, without what will soon appear) the Western intellectual community at large are on a moral and intellectual level that is vastly below that of Third World peasants and Stalinist hacks -- not an unusual discovery.
Of course, it could be argued in Havel's defense that this shameful performance was all tongue in cheek, just a way to extort money from the American taxpayer for his (relatively rich) country. I doubt it, however; he doesn't look like that good an actor.
So, here's the perfect swan song. It's all absolutely true, even truistic. Writing something that true and significant would also have a predictable effect. The sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at the level of 'Fuck You', so they can then elicit a perfectly predictable torrent of abuse in response. We've long ago reached that level -- to take a personal example, consider the statement: 'We ought to tell the truth about Cambodia and Timor.' Or imagine a columnist writing: 'I think the Sandinistas ought to win.' I suspect that this case is even clearer. It's easy to predict the reaction to any truthful and honest comments about this episode, which is so revealing about the easy acceptance of (and even praise for) the most monstrous savagery, as long as it is perpetrated by Us against Them -- a stance adopted quite mindlessly by Havel, who plainly shares the utter contempt for the lower orders that is the hallmark of Western intellectuals, so at least he's 'one of us' in that respect.
Anyway, don't say I never gave you a useful suggestion.
Best,
Noam

Military Wives and the sickening sentimentality of the serial killer

2011-12-22T11:39:00.004Z

The Military Wives Choir is concentrated evil. It is vicious, stupid and banal. It is the worst form of sentimentality. Their husbands murder Afghans for queen and country, and they murder music for the same righteous cause. Wherever you are, soldier boy, know that the love of your counterpart is so strong, so thoroughly adequate, that it is apt to suddenly materialise into a substance able to "keep you safe" from the foreigners you are busy subduing in the rough hinterlands. Yet at the very same time, this love is so elevated, so ethereal, so much above the humdrum and quotidian, that it is almost as if her heart will, as it were, "build a bridge of light across both time and space". Oh, but there is more, cherished mercenary, much more to say on this love. For its cosmic ordering is capable of reducing the distance between Nottingham and Helmand by various simple expedients. Your hearts will "beat as one", for one. This while your amour holds you in her dreams each night "until your task is done", O "prince of peace".

Comrades and friends, you will forgive me if I end the assay there. There is only so much a man can wear his spleen on his sleeve. But lest I seem to fall into a crusty disdain for the cheesier tropes of the pop-tastic, and particularly the romantic ballad, allow me just to say that I have exactly the same weaknesses in this regard as every single one of you. For example, I cried when watching some piece of shit film whose name I forget. (Fuck you, that's what it was called.) And I emoted in a similar fashion over that song that everyone bought one Christmas, and I wasn't tipsy on mulled wine when I did. These cultural technologies produce many of the same reactions in all of us because they are intended to do just that, because they operate on basically identical raw material. But this imperial doggerel is a sick, chauvinist parody of love. If you like this song, you don't have love; you don't even have taste: what you have is a military-industrial infestation.

To illustrate. Jonathan Freedland's tribute notably fails to mention except obliquely the motivating context for this song, the "task" - of bombing, strafing, torturing, disappearing, poisoning, assassinating, subjugating - that is responsible for its sole element of genuine pathos. As such, he can't acknowledge the ethnocentric bases for his appreciation of the song, the mixture of patriotic and narcissistic affect that is mobilised within its construction of a community of harmonious vocalists. He is perhaps unwitting in his cliche when he describes the solidarity achieved through common struggle without the expense of losers, or of the sadism that usually comes with television pop spectaculars. But the idea that a national community forged in war suddenly discovers its manners, its civic virtues, its solidarity and mutualism, is a shopworn antique. And were Freedland aware of the pedigree of this old cynosure of reaction, he would also be aware that the cruelty and malice whose absence he celebrates is, in such cases, merely displaced. That is, the usual (class, racial, sexual) antagonisms that suppurate resentment and cruelty in the culture - which are so expertly manipulated by Endemol, Zodiak, RTL, the BBC and the producers of all that property porn and eugenic fetishism - have simply been externalised. They are still there, in the form of an absence. Behind the woefully lyricised sentiments of the gals in the 'queen and country' t-shirts, something is occluded. That is the emotional, intellectual, religious and social life of those designated by the euphemism, 'task'. Naturally, their love, their pathos, is a matter of indifference and barely submerged contempt, which one delicately builds bridges around and over.

I do not know what motivated BBC2 and Gareth Malone to turn The Choir into a special on 'Military Wives'. Possibly, it's an opaque satire intended to illustrate the Frankfurt school's analysis of popular culture, which in this day and age looks blithely over-optimistic. More plausibly, I suspect that the Ministry of Defence may have had a hand in this monster. Even if they did not, the aptitude of this sort of format for such appropriation and re-territorialisation is a reminder of an important aspect of our conjuncture. Ideologically, the ruling class is weak. Its legitimacy is fragile. Politically, it is disunited (though it doesn't do to underestimate what a cohering factor class struggle can be). Yet, its technologies of ideological rule are vastly more sophisticated than they have been in the past. The surprising 'visibility' of the military-industrial-entertainment complex during the 'war on terror' merely allowed us to see the tip of a cultural iceberg, one formed by the concentration and centralisation of cultural capital and its fusion with the state. The 'Military Wives' song that is presently #1 in the UK charts is a small tribute to its power, its ability to infantilise and temporarily stupefy audiences with artistic cliche and spectacle.

Far be it from me to suggest that a few more hit songs like this will have us marching cheerfully into Tehran - no such thing - but this does have long range effects, even if these aren't computable according to any simple calculus of stimulus-response. We cannot afford to be complacent about such ordure. We have to destroy it, instantly, utterly. It won't do to simply buy a few Nirvana singles to get them to the top of the charts instead of Military Wives. That won't even work at this point. We have to start confronting this military fetishism wherever it insinuates itself in daily life. The 'help for heroes' boondoggle should be noisily boycotted; anyone collecting money for military causes in a bear outfit should be mercilessly ridiculed; young air, navy and army cadets sent out to pack bags at Marks and Spencer should be told exactly how and where to get a life; the poppies should be burned - not just a few, in a symbolic Islam4UK-style action, but all of them in a mass cremation of postcolonial bunting; and any family members who actually sign up to wear a uniform of the armed forces in Afghanistan or anywhere else should be shunned, not loved. That's a map of our kulturkampf for 2012.

From the clutches of (partial) victory

2011-12-20T19:52:00.000Z

It can't be that often that a Tory minister, anxious to look smart, does something stupid. Can it? I have watched this government with some perplexity, wondering if I have underestimated its cunning, or if they really do think they can arouse the whole labour movement and organised left in unified opposition, and trounce them in a jiffy. Their complacency as they embarked on a structural adjustment programme more extreme in its intended effects than anything accomplished by Thatcher, whether the blowback comes in the form of student protests, riots or strikes, seems extraordinary. Seemingly convinced that they need not offer any material substratum to secure the consent of a viable social bloc for their agenda, they simply turn to harsher policing. Apparently unable to imagine the riff-raff posing a real threat to them and their superior class allies, they forget the old salami-slicing praxis and just revel in the reluctance of their opponents to fight, pushing them around, taking their provocations to indulgent, extravagant new levels.

And just when it seemed that the government had finally revisited the old techniques of divide-and-rule, offering just enough concessions to win tacit acquiescence from Unison and GMB leaders while attacking and isolating the PCS, Pickles goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid that destroys it. For sure, the deal announced between the government and (some) unions over pensions was awful, so awful that it was a real question whether rank and file workers could be made to swallow it. The government conceded nothing in terms of its bargaining totals, nor the principle issues over which the two sides were in negotiation. Even a moderate, media-friendly Labourite like Sally Bercow was denouncing the agreement as a sell out yesterday. The idea that those who hit the pickets and streets on 30th November were more likely to take such a deal is dubious. But evidently the union bureaucracies who have been most reluctant to fight are now the most eager to call of hostilities and negotiate the terms of surrender. Without the support of union leaders in the big Labour-affiliated unions, getting strike action back on the agenda for the New Year is that bit harder. So, it is only reasonable to infer that Pickles just blew a tactical victory for the government.

The problem now is that the government and the union leaders will be back around the table to patch this up quickly, rush the deal through and make it a fait accompli as soon as possible. Trade unionists are now planning an emergency lobby of the TUC over this, to go with the emergency meeting (you should go) and emergency statement (I invite you to sign). This is a pivotal moment in the struggle against austerity. So much hangs on whether the organised labour movement will even put up a fight. That will make all the different between the vindication of Tory arrogance, and its humiliating reproof.

The late Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-16T17:34:00.000Z

Don't take this the wrong way, but the glowing tributes to Christopher Hitchens are both tasteless and incorrect. Have some decency. The boring wisdom has it that Hitchens broke the mould intellectually. He did not. For all the unique saleability of the Hitchensian idiolect (or intertext), he was a very conventional thinker, in addition to being a provincial. He also had a reputation for being a fierce defender of universalism, but in fact his was the provincial universalism of empire. One might, in the same speech, catch him defending the right of others to disagree with him, then find him denying that right to Iraqis, insisting that they be coerced at gunpoint into vouchsafing his opinion. He had a reputation for possessing a powerful intellect. He was certainly an intellectual, and a powerful speaker and writer, a polemicist who out-classed many of his opponents. Yet, by insisting on the difference between being an intellectual and having an intellect, I don't merely mean to be scurrilous. His difficulty in handling complex ideas was as notorious among his peers as his facility with emotionally potent oversimplifications.

Hitchens was a sensitive literary critic, but in a way this underlines his tendency to think viscerally. He grasped instinctively the 'John Bullshit' that, for example, made Larkin tick. Indeed, he grasped it with precision because it was a part of his own political personality, manifest in his admiration for Margaret Thatcher, his support for the Falklands War, and the blimpish outbursts redolent of the character of the 'Commander' in his memoir, Hitch-22. Yet when he had to deal with literary theory or applications of it (see Orwell's Victory), I think he tended to flounder. It is for a similar reason that he wasn't especially good as an atheist. Convinced as he was that there was no intelligent way to be religious, and no need to grasp theology in any theoretical depth, he tended to rely on demotic arguments demonstrating the implausibility of religion along the lines of: "so God made the universe billions of years ago; created the life forms that would over millions of years give rise to the only species capable of worshipping him; allowed them to suffer for millenia; and only then decided to make himself known by means of human sacrifice (and at that in an illiterate society) banking on the certainty that Emperor Constantine would turn to Christianity as an official state ideology of the Roman Empire...". This is to say nothing of the vulgar anti-Muslim rants and ugly blood-lust that he ventilated without care, and which sentiments formed a transparent motive for his turn to hypertrophic theophobia after the occupation of Iraq began to fail badly. And what of the crude sociobiological reductionism that he pinned his mast to? At this point, it is arguably more pernicious in its effects than even the encyclicals of the Catholic Church, or the opinions of Muslim scholars.

What he lacked in theory, he could make up for in empirical work. Hitchens could write decent biographical and historical essays. Blood, Class and Nostaglia as well as Hostage to History form extended historical essays in their different ways on Anglophone imperial succession. Richly contemptuous of the abuses of empire's subjects, these books arguably expressed a liberal humanist critique of imperial malpractice rather than a marxist critique. Perhaps there is also evidence of a decline in his standards. His book on Thomas Paine's Rights of Man seems to have been plagiarised, riddled with factual errors and cliched to boot: what Hitchens might call a "triple crown howler". Yet it was in his favoured role as a polemicist, that his limits were most clearly visible. For all the efficiency with which he despatched opponents, tore up or mended reputations, exposed official crimes (or colluded in them), he was clearly obsessed with personnel. The structures of imperialism and capital accumulation were never objects of his inquiry, even at his best.

A final cliche which should at least be qualified is that Hitchens was a wit, and all round dissolute bad boy. Well, he could be witty, but he could also be extraordinarily priggish, crass, or just boorish. The effect of his little joke about child rape ('no child's behind left') was ruined by his later taking an extremely high-handed tone with a rabbi who joked about circumcision. The humour in his 'heartless' bon mot about Louis Althusser applying for the Electric Chair in Philosophy was really purchased at the expense of Helene Althusser. It was not funny when he called the Dixie Chicks 'fat sluts', no matter what the editor of his collected quotables believes. Consider these remarks in the context of Hitchens' mildly hedonistic lifestyle, and they become no more sparkling. Rather, they tend to communicate a meanness of spirit, a sniggering cruelty, that was increasingly evident in later years, and contrasted markedly with the personal warmth that many of his former colleagues describe.

Shut it down

2011-12-13T10:41:00.000Z

Obstructing the profit system:

Fear of a red planet

2011-12-12T19:22:00.000Z

“Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: "Socialism!" Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.

“This was not merely a figure of speech, fashion, or party tactics. The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods it had created had fallen away from it. It understood that all the so-called bourgeois liberties and organs of progress attacked and menaced its class rule at its social foundation and its political summit simultaneously, and had therefore become "socialistic."” – Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The Unilever strike, pensions and structural adjustment

2011-12-09T22:52:00.000Z

An article for The Guardian about the Unilever strike:

Unilever workers have embarked on the first national strike in the company's history, over the company's attempt to close the final salary pensions scheme, which will result in a 40% reduction in retirement income for many of its workers. The company, in a stunningly inept move, decided to punish the strike by cancelling Christmas parties and bonuses for the workers. Thus, Unilever, a blue chip company that takes pride in its philanthropic past and "responsible" industrial relations policy, found itself branded Scrooge.
Unilever is one of the companies to have weathered the global crisis in robust fashion. In February 2011, its profits were up 18% on the previous year, at some £5.2bn. Labour productivity has always been reasonably high, in part due to negotiated productivity deals with trade unions. Yet, the company is on the offensive against its workforce. Why is this?
Unilever will say that the current pension system is impossible to fund. This was the argument it used in 2008 for closing the scheme to all new entrants, only three years before closing it to existing members as well. The workers argue, though, that the pension fund is financially robust, and that the company itself admits there is no immediate financial imperative driving the cuts.
This is taking place in the context of a record number of firms shutting final salary schemes and replacing them with much less generous settlements. The GMB's negotiator argues that Unilever simply saw an opportunity to follow the trend. But there is probably more to it than that...