Moral Imperialism

From The United States and Mexico by Howard F Cline:

By early 1914 President Woodrow Wilson had lost his patience with Mexico, and an incident in Tampico on April 9 furnished an excuse to move against Huerta.Strung along the Panuco river were foreign-owned oil installations...chiefly British. From a dock that everyone had been forbidden by Huerta's Federalists to use,Americans had been loading gasoline into a whaleboat flying the American flag and were arrested. Admiral Mayo received an apology but demanded that the Mexicans "hoist the American flag and salute it with twenty one guns".

The Mexicans refused and on April 13 Wilson spent the whole day studying what he ought to do.He had convinced himself that Huerta was deliberately launching a campaign to lower the dignity of the U.S...The whole Atlantic fleet was then ordered to Tampico. Huertas Minister of Affairs informed the American Charge' de Affaires that Huerta would fire the salute if the U.S. would guarantee to return it immediately...Wilson brushed it aside and requested that Congress approve his use of armed force.At 11:30 am on April 21 the United States Navy took the principle port of Veracruz.

This was a lesson for the Iranians and Iraqis and Venezuelans and anybody else who thought that " the nations sub-soil wealth belongs to the state." This arcane provision only applies to the U.S.and client states.Nicaragua, the Philipines and other Central American and Caribbean nations got similar demonstrations.

So the logic of the capitalist state is pretty straightforward but what is surprising is some of the morons they get to run the ship itself.Bill Moyers played the recorded phone conversations of Lyndon Johnson as he was deciding how to prosecute the Vietnam War. He calls friends and advisors, even Bobby Kennedy, hoping somebody can tell him how to unravel himself from the "damn mess" he has been handed and what is most shocking is the level of discussion, it's banal, instrumental, pathetically shallow quality.

We all know the kinds of arguments Obama is hearing as he deliberates the same deathly question: How many more should be sacrificed? Strategic goals, political ramifications , moral questions and above all else , economic factors: how will it look to our competitors if we bail? What will we do with all these soldiers and "defence" industries if we don't have our war on?

Heighten The Contradictions?

If no change is possible until crisis forces it, should we encourage crisis? Could we actively work to heighten contradictions beyond even their current insane level? Embrace the Spectacle and campaign for Sarah? This is one line of inquiry I've heard lately, cynically pragmatic in a Maoist sort of way.

A more liberal approach, but also practical, is to sit down with working class conservatives on their turf and find out what makes them tick, to re-read Fountainhead and see what it is Yodood and millions of others (current bestseller) find of value. Find common ground, as Obama and Henry Louis Gates and the white cop did over some beers. ( George Bush was the guy you would like to have a beer with as well ). I have been seeing this sort of suggestion lately as an antidote to the "elitist, intellectual condescending" approach of the Left.

Questions abound: When is the next crisis? Reform or Revolution? What is to be Done? Right and Left agree the individual is being devalued, disenfranchised,and taken advantage of. Local conservatives aren't standing around, they want legislation that allows citizens to convene grand juries and are starting the ballot initiative process. They believe that through legal, constitutional process they can reclaim political power.Would the Left see value in this?
The Left I associate with wants to organize workers and gain economic power ( some want to change the world without taking power) and generally finds the whole constitutional route discouraging. Of course, Venezuelans re-wrote their constitution... and used elections and courts and such.

By avoiding extreme crisis fewer people get hurt but we all know millions die of starvation each year ( as hurt as it gets) and billions live in poverty (already extreme crisis) and lets face it , the working class will not be organized soon. But would Sarah Palin and her Tea Party actually ignore the Tim Geithners, the Larry Summers, the Ben Bernankes and let the "invisible hand" do it's thing while she went moose hunting?

I guess I'd better put down The Dialectics of Enlightenment and get a copy of Going Rogue and Atlas Shrugged and find out.Can I keep my beret?

The Communist Hypothesis

French President Sarkozy said, soon after his depressing election, that "The spirit of May 68 must be done away with once and for all". It was not just the "spectre" of empirical communism, but the very hypothesis (as Alain Badiou puts it) he wanted buried forever.His "renewal" meant to banish the logic of class and the idea that a different collective organization is possible (Thatchers TINA) ,that the existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society will wither away as a reorganization based on free association of producers replaces it.

On this blog we have Beakerkin to remind us of the disastrous results of one historical attempt at manifesting this hypothesis.His own "hypothesis", that 1 attempt + 1 failure = 0 remaining possibilities for infinity is simply the logic of the victor. Were capitalism to fail I would not say capitalism can THEREFORE never succeed.

Beak will never surrender his notion that The Left wilfully ignores "facts", that, like in the NFL, the "instant replay camera" removes all doubt about Marxism's evil nature. History as Championship Playoff!

Others see the "hypothesis" refusing to stay buried, reappearing with each new crisis, whether political (including geo-political), economic or social. Badiou argues that "we are closer to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary 20th". Vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the 'service of wealth', the nihilism of the young, the reactionary attitudes of the right,the servility of most intellectuals, the besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis are all too familiar. In this low period it is difficult to find the courage to keep possibility alive, to find the will and have the patience to maintain the grounds of its existence.

Harvey ends his book with a critique of "purely relational thinking" ( where transcendence trumps actual political engagement) as found in Holloway's Changing The World without Taking Power in which he treats "every completed thing as a reification from which we are by definition alienated and which therefore, should not even be considered as relevant to political struggle." He extends the critique to Bookchins dismissing "all forms of organization, institutionalization, and territorialization ( including the much maligned state as a specific but DISTINCTLY MALEABLE KIND OF GEOGRAPHIC CONSTRUCTION) as somehow either irrelevant or inherently repressive..."

By understanding "the dialectical movement across and through the different dimensionalities of space-time (absolute, relative AND relational) and the intersecting moments (of technologies, social relations, processes in nature, mental conceptions, production [labor] processes,and everyday life), we may "reaffirm the communist hypothesis" grounded in "historical geographical materialism." It is an admittedly complicated way of saying let's not undermine our quest for a cosmopolitan, egalitarian, universal justice at the very moment "spaces of hope" are opening all around us for the taking and the making. Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom by David Harvey is a worthwhile read and fills in a piece to the Marxist puzzle.

Nature

It is suggested that "pristine" nature or wilderness has curative, restorative powers that can serve to re-connect humans to a deep "rootedness" (possibly ecstatic, feral, harmonious etc..?) The word nature, like environment or place, is contested, controversial and full of multiple meanings, especially when you try to put the word "human" next to it. We confront terms like "natural laws" and a "state of nature" and all kinds of what Arthur Lovejoy calls "incompletely explicit assumptions , or more or less unconscious mental habits,operating in the thought of an individual or generation", but which define "the dominant intellectual tendencies of an age." In other words, meanings have power and Nature is a site of all kinds of struggle for dominance.

This reminded me of a crazy film I saw where Slajov Zizek tries to explain in his slushy accent why humans need to embrace refuse piles as "natural places".They are the "environment" and every bit as natural as a park, dairy farm or wilderness. Yet these sites of "creative destruction",which are the final point on the commodity circuit, end up categorized, separated and alienated from nature and from most people.( except the denizens of the trash world)

Last night I learned a great deal from a representative of the Beehive Collective about mountain- top-removal coal mining in particular and capitalist energy development more generally. What a fucked up mess. Environmental destruction on that scale is a horrendous new escalation in the history of mutilation, on biodiversity, on communities, on workers,the air we breath, the planets ecosystem and of course on justice. And guess where the worlds richest deposit lies? Under Montana. This is the new Saudi Arabia and our governor wants to be King Abdullah. Of course Wal Marts and slurry ponds are Nature too.

Speaking of workers and my disappointment? ( I could, like Obamas reaction to the Israelis, say I am "dismayed") in their passivity, it was reported that "in the third quarter, productivity rose at a 9.5% annual rate...businesspeople respond to rising demand by coaxing employees to work harder. At a certain point, people will start to collapse at work."

"coaxing"? There are lots of ways abusive husbands "coax" their wives to stay, sometimes at gun point but more often though pathological dependency, self-loathing, withdrawal into fantasy. As for "start to collapse" ,um..hate to be the one to break the news,but our society passed the dysfunctional stage a while back. Does the picture of Sarah Palin in shorts on the cover of Newsweek "sexualize" her? Welcome to Cartoonville.

How Long ?

I just read where the local "progressive" talk radio station folded after one year.They will now do conservative talk radio, but in the spirit of "centrism" is inviting liberals to call in. This is the second one to go down in five years. Good riddance.If I never have to listen to Ed Shultz or Thom Hartman or Rachael Maddow again it would be swell. My question is:

How long will "pro choice progressives" support Democratic Party Health Care Reform that restricts abortion rights? How long will "progressives" support reform that is nothing but a huge profit windfall for Insurance Corporations just so Obama can "pass a bill"? How long will union workers who got Obama and Democrats elected continue to watch their own health plans, which they spent decades negotiating for, attacked as "cadillac plans"? How long will labor watch the Employee free Choice Act be held hostage? How long will liberals watch Obama throw the Honduran leader Manuel Zelaya under the bus, or the Palestinian people (Goldstone report, settlement building etc..)? How long will progressive peace activists watch as Obama escalates in Afghanistan? How long will progressive environmentalists watch as the USA renegs at Copenhagen on CO2 reduction? How long will liberals keep hoping for change as Wall Street cleans up and unemployment keeps rising? Homes keep foreclosing? Schools keep crumbling? How long will liberals keep building prisons to put black and brown people in? How long will black and brown people support these liberals? How long will they keep building weapons systems or coal fired energy plants from their mountain top removal? How long will they support charter schools and corporate education?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.You say you want a revolution? Don't you know it's gonna be alright!

Another good reason to be a radical is the hate people like Richard Nixon and Roy Coen had for us.I saw the Frost-Nixon movie and re-watched Angels in America and both those filthy parasites had contempt for liberals but saved their true venom for socialists.Because we actually mean something.

Territory, Place ,Region

I may have already quoted from David Harvey's Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom but it is amazingly relevant to many of the topics I have been posting about lately and the position of my esteemed "commentors". I'm thinking of Kultur's emphasis on the paradigmatic shift from forage to farm and the relation of culture to land use. Yodood stresses a place-based ecological "awakening" as do various communalist theorists like Murray Bookchin and certain "deep ecologists".Some go so far as to say landscapes sculpt identity and "moral character". I believe it can be argued that the Celebrating Conservatives I wrote about have a regional, sentimental "rootedness" that motivates them ( for good or ill) and the Zapatistas who I learned about last night have a conception of place that is both anthropological in the indigenous sense and political in the "ejido" sense. I am writing a novel about Israel-Palestine in which territory is certainly central and it occurs to me the latest IWW " historical re-creation" we had a couple weeks ago was also about a certain claim to place, our Free Speech corner and the struggle over memory and record which all monuments embody.

Everyone is wedded to some notion of place, or home or dwelling (Heigegger). "From the Mountains , to the Prairies..."to the Fatherland and Homeland, there is tons of mythological baggage which goes along with a very real notion of "bounded togetherness" ( Burke). Kultur astutely links the spatial with the temporal, introducing the relation between a lost "ecstatic" way of living and the fear of death associated with linear time. Bookchin introduces relationality in the form of democratic politics to make his localism more dynamic. The Conservatives try to ignore away the dialectical tension ( mostly due to Christian dogma) and cling to static notions of time and space resulting in their incoherent critiques of globalization and the "New World Order". The Zapatistas are aware of romantic, commodified indigenous-ness exemplified by bright skirted women doing native dances for the tourists and selling "authentic" trinkets.They stress autonomy and dignity but remain surrounded by tanks, troops and an encroaching capitalist culture.

Advanced capitalism knows no boundaries, could care less about maps ( unless fighting a war) and moves vast quantities of money ( power) around at the speed of light. Time is literally money and visa versa! In this sense, as Hardt and Negri point out, it is cosmopolitan and affects the nature of the old nation/state. But as it globe trots it builds walls and fences and enclosures behind it and leaves in it's destructive wake a scorched earth and armies of dispossessed. As Harvey says " The final victory of capitalist modernity is not the disappearance of the nonmodern world , but it's artificial preservation and reconstruction..."

Ive got a ways to go but for now he leaves us with this: ...those who proclaim, with Aristotle, that there is some essentialist theory of place (genius loci), that "place is the first of all things" or who hold ,with Heidegger, that "place is the locale of the truth of being" (though not of becoming) are plainly mistaken." He says place is contingent and dynamic and a process that social movements must shape before it is to late.

Post Modern Entreprenuers

These ads were found scattered throughout the last Harpers and speak to our non-culture:

"Form a real relationship with someone in extreme poverty!"

Purveyor of the Worlds Finest Teas

Seasonal Cookbook by 13 year Ovarian Cancer Survivor

Date Smart / Party Smart! "Join the introduction network exclusively for graduates, students and faculty of the Ives, Seven Sisters, Stanford, U of Chicago and others."

"European Beret $14.00 plus shipping"

The Ultimate in Spanking Erotica

Academy of Remote Viewing : "Increases intuition 1000x! Forecast Future Events! Percieve any target in space/ time, Cooperative Remote Influencing taught by former operative!

This publication targets an academic, intellectual left/progressive that likes difficult crossword puzzles and occasional correctives to neoliberalism.

Following up on Celebrating Conservatism I found some UTubes of Martin "Red" Beckman,a libertarian C B should check out if he hasn't already.He spoke to this group a few weeks ago and has been on the right-wing Montana scene for a long time. I like this quote of his: "Knowledge is Truth stored in the Mind". One of their symbols for evil government is a black panther. The Wobblies have a black cat so felines seem well represented. I also picked up a copy of the John Birch Society zine, The New American,with a big piece on that sheriff I saw, Richard Mack.He and Sarah Palin would make a formidable ticket for a third party.

From the New York Review of Books:
"We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women's power as economic catalysts."
from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristoff and (his wife) Sheryl WuDunn

Here is a classic example of that well-intentioned liberal cosmopolitanism based on universal values of justice and liberty but manifested through markets, private property and individual rights.Reproducing exploitive systems as it seeks to end exploitation and thwarting human emancipation as it aims for individual emancipation. How many more decades will liberals cling to development and identity politics?

The next book reviewed is Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism by Muhammad Yanus. Basically, he believes women make kinder, gentler capitalists.
"The focus ,in development strategy, (is) on material accumulation and achievement. This focus needs to be shifted to human beings, their initiative and enterprise."

Capitalisms "focus" will "shift",all right. as it Spectacularly embraces, encloses and absorbs this new lexicon. Such naivete is touching.




Here is a