The Christians In Iraq. Tough times, right now, to be in Iraq as any religion type of person. Tough to be Christian there, as well . .

http://www.aina.org/news/20110126203036.htm

I’ll say this now, because by gollllly, it is true.
Where’s the English-speaking reporter, JUST OnE Of THEM, people, just ONE, in Iraq today ? Where ? Which news-provider ?

Timothy R. Anderson

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-web-5-soldiers-killed,0,5055923.story

Among the mainstream American media ( oh-so-”patriotic” ), making
too much mention of Iraq is considered poor form. Bad manners. Not the thing to do. Stick out like a nail then you’ll be struck down.
There are those, however, including Iraq Veterans Against The War,
who have decided that, heck, the USA is MORE than the mainstream
American media AND if enough persons MAKE A BIG DEAL out of something then by golly it is a BIG DEAL. EVERY DAY it is a BIG DEAL .

That’s the thing, y’see……… Timothy R. Anderson

For more information please visit

http://www.ivaw.org

“Beatings will continue until morale improves”…?

random musings…

All authoritarian forces — tyrants, juntas, kings, domineering husbands — need to “set an example” by beating and/or torturing and killing now and then, just as men (as a class) “set an example” by the way they treat prostitutes (or dogs, or kids) and cops “set an example” by the way they treat people of colour and the capitalist system “sets an example” by keeping some people in brutal poverty. The message is clear: this is what will happen to you if you don’t obey, this is how we treat people who get out of line, who don’t conform. Fear of falling into the untermensch class: people obey because they are afraid, so they have to be kept afraid. There was a reason why the Romans lined the Appian Way with crucified rebels and dissidents.

Although it’s far from full-on fascism (so far) the Bush Regime has been busily setting examples with its arbitrary detention and torture of “suspects,” and its harassment and surveillance of dissidents. A very interesting direction for radical sociology research would be the “moment when the worm turns,” i.e. the point at which people learn a different lesson from the example — i.e. not to obey, but to rebel.

But the state/economy (is there any difference and has there ever been?) has a carrot to hold out as well as a stick: “a job” and money, meaning security, a roof over one’s head, something to lose. When people still have something to lose they tend to be more obedient. The genius of capitalism is that it ties survival and the feeding of one’s children not to one’s individual skill, ingenuity, patience or good standing in community, but to the whims of the employer class and the market. Essentially — in the absence of land reform and local food security, a “second economy” outside the speculative market — the barons of finance (and the forces of the State which serve them as rentacops) hold everyone’s kids hostage.

The art of authoritarian rule is to tax and grind the peasants to within one inch of the point of despair at which, having nothing to lose, they will rise up as an ungovernable mob and murder the overlord class. It is not a pleasant art, but it is a very old one and well-documented, -studied, and -developed. The obsession of the Bush Regime (and the previous Clinton regime to a lesser extent) with ‘crowd control’ and urban warfare, with detention centres and surveillance technology, reflects imho the awareness of the overlords that they have ground the peasants down pretty damn far, the global looting has circled around and come home to roost, and it’s time to start watching those worms very closely — both domestic and foreign ones — as they have less and less to lose.

Many schemae will describe an economic system with this litle political wart on top of it… okay that’s hyperbole, but you see my meaning. The old structure-superstructure notion that is designed to inevitably lead back to a particular description of the “structure’ and therefore “prove” the accuracy of the description.

The history I was taught in high school was primarily that of the history of a political system that “became economic” only when the state was obliged to respond to economic events, eg the Great Depression, or when its actions precipitated economic events, eg the Panic of 1837. Reading Michael Hudson, Robert Brenner, Naomi Klein, EP Thompson, Kees van der Pijl et al. was a refreshing departure from this mode of historical presentation.

The reason I have clung to this thread (and the one on finacialization) is that this is a very serious issue with regard to what some believe is a theoretical crisis on the left. I do.

By “left,” I am using shorthand for something inclusive that captures a political anti-establishment that might generally be called socialist. Beyond that I won’t presume to establish some authenticity test.

By theory, I mean something different than ideology… very different, in fact. Something far closer to the scientific definition for theory… a generally accepted account of some aspect of reality that is based on a preponderance of demonstrable evidence. One reason I have such an interest in non-normativity…

Theory is not advanced by developing the overarching framework, then plugging everything one observes into it somehow. It is the observation of phenomena, the identification of forms and functions and relationships, and the development of testable hypotheses. I don’t think the left does this very often.

When someone like Gowan does develop a hypothesis like his theses on the Dollar-Wall Street Regime, and supports it with hundreds of concrete examples, it is not sufficient to test it against pre-existing dogmas. The test of its viability is whether the evidence is true, whether there have been major exclusions to make the thoeretical framework stand, whether new developments and discoveries tend to disprove the theory, etc.

The war has been a kind of Rorschach test of the theoretical atomization of the left.

My own favored hypotheses have been (1) reffing Gowan and others, that “globalization” (financialization) is a reactive and not proactive exercise of US power in a capitalist world system that is itself approaching multiple and possibly simultaneous crises, (2) that US power in that system and at this conjuncture and as the basis of that reaction is fundamentally based on monetary hegemony backed up by military supremacy, (3) that the war is multiply-determined as (a) the logical redisposition of the post-Cold War US military, (b) the backstop for that monetary hegemony, (c) as a (failed) demonstration of US military invincibility, (d) as part of the strategic preparation for a global resource competiton in an era of approaching scarcity (with China and others), (e) that the objective of the war was to establish permament US military installations in Iraq, (f) and it is a strategic blunder in itys execution that was recognized early by certain elements within the dominant class inside the US, but that was carried forward by a particular government (the Bush government).

Corporate interests, even though some have profited by the war, do not explain the war itself. The Iraqis under Saddam would gladly have sold cheap oil to the US; just as Haiti represented neither a security threat to the US nor an economic interest.

The US state cannot function as a political godfather unless it demonstrates the willingness to enfrorce its political will, ie, a demand for perfect obedience. This is recognizable regardless of who fills the various positions in the government.

Yikes, gotta run again.

It’s important to distinguish between the state and the government. They are two different things, neither of them fictional. Refuse to pay your taxes and you’ll find out just how real.

Harvey makes the important distinction that overcomes the imho false dichotomy between transnational capital and the state. Again, this has become a more profound social contradiction with the financialization of the global economy, because financialization does not create surplus value; it uses the power of states (with one state dominant) to impose money as an empty entitlement… this creates “bubbles” out of fictional value, etc… but back to Harvey.

Harvey notes that each social phenom has its own “logic.” The state has a territorial logic that does not correspond well to the logic of global capital (esp financialized capital).

Within the territorial boundaries of the state, there is the more stable organizational network of the state (one that transcends changes in governments), with its legal and administrative apparatuses and its executive monopoly on coercive force; and there are successive governments… that is, the social network of people — often organized as political parties — who are currently in the driver’s seat, so to speak.

Then, as Gramsci and many many others have pointed out, there is an overlapping social network — also institutional (like the state) — that is civil society, which serves as a liason between the economic and political functions, as a unofficial patronage system (the other patronage system is the government itself, especially through the administrative apparatus of the state), as well as consolidating the legtimacy of the state among the general population.

This is very schematic, but as a thumbnail, it will do.

But the global system right now — the one in whose saddle ride the transnational capitalists — is inextricable from the state, especially the US state. It is a system that is simultaneously secured by monetary and military power… and money as well as militaries are products of the state. In this case, the US state.

If dollar hegemony and US military power were to disappear tomorrow, the world would look astonishingly different, and in short order.

Gotta run.

And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.

Thatcher was responding to a remark about “people constantly requiring government intervention,” but, generally speaking, this is the philosophy of the neoliberals. There’s no such thing as society, therefore there is no general social interest represented by “the US gov’t” or any other government for that matter. There are individuals and their families and their “neighbors.”

I do not intend to demonize this philosophy, here or anywhere else, nor do I wish to demonize Margaret Thatcher or the neoliberals. All I am really asking is that we look at who the “US state” is since, with triumphant neoliberalism, the facade of a general social (or national) interest is gone.

(The other main attempt to strip off the facade of national interests in this era is in the project of William I. Robinson, whose Theory of Global Capitalism was largely about a “transnational capitalist class” — I do not know elite sociology well enough to render a definitive opinion about it…)

I remain unconvinced that the US gov’t. cares more which oil giants end up with sweetheart deals in Iraq (should that ever come to pass) than with its own ability to decide who gets how much and when.

Have you examined the matter in my post, above, where I said:

but then we must ask ourselves, “who is the US government?”

This is the question that has to be answered BEFORE we can refer to the US government as an agent in its own right, and not merely as an agency through which elite factions press their agendas. In an era of neoliberal political economy, “the US gov’t. cares” about the controlling financial interests of whomever is in charge at any particular time. It has no autonomous interest of its own.

If the “US gov’t” itself (whoever that’s supposed to be) really cared about its “ability to decide who gets how much and when,” it would control Saudi Arabia, whereas the reality is that of the Saudi Arabian ruling family controlling a small chunk of US foreign policy through its enormous wealth and its hand-holding relationship with the Bush family.

It is a staple of statist propaganda to be continually invoking the “national interest,” wherein are commonly justified the authoritarian predations of the CIA, FBI, NSA, “Homeland Security,” and the behavior of the US Armed Forces in far-off countries. Elite rule is like that — you tell the thugs and the masses one story, and keep the truth for yourself. That’s the secret Leo Strauss discovered in Plato’s idea of the “noble lie.”

The fiction of a “US gov’t” with its own “interests” serves to keep the masses in their place. This fiction is intimately connected to that other great fiction, the “Washington consensus,” wherein the separate elites promote their group interest in exploiting the rest of us through corporate oligarchy (which interest is implicit in the day-to-day operations of capitalist exploitation). That’s where Klein is especially good.

Current events, however, reveal the “US gov’t” as an agency, not as an agent-in-itself. For instance, why do you think the bin Laden family was granted White House permission to leave the US on a day when every other airplane in the US was grounded just after 9/11/01, without so much as an FBI question? Didn’t the “US gov’t” itself have an interest in questioning the bin Ladens before granting them exclusive, special permission to leave? I could cite a dozen other examples of where the “US itself” is not there to decide matters as such, but that’s enough for starters.

Rather than mechanical metaphors, we need to try organic ones. Our skins are certaily superficial, but they are also the biggest organs in our bodies, and serve an essential purpose.

The State is a skin. The US state is a global systemic skin… that will save itself at all costs, and that means subordinating accumulation methods and-or weilding them as weapons.

Iraq is making money for war profiteers, but that is certinaly not its purpose.