Juliette, the debauched sister of Justine, is traveling in Italy with Clairwil, her monstrous male counterpart. It is the usual Sadean tour, orgies in churches and castles, delicious tortures on technologically superior racks, etc., etc. Coming into Naples, Juliette falls in with the court of the Bourbon king there, Ferdinand. Of course, the hot chocolate and the fucking flows easily. But, this being Sade, the crowded intervals of passing bodily fluids back and forth are interspersed with philosophic dialogues. At a country retreat, the King, Juliette, and the Prince Francaville are stirred by a question not posed in Plato’s Symposium: “In a word,” Juliette asks her companions, has the Supreme Being put you on earth to be fucked?”

The response to this question from Prince Francaville is quoted by A. and H. in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well it should be. We’ve already seen Francaville, in his temple to Priapus, abundantly sodomized with that strange ritual choreography that Adorno was right to compare to organized sports: there was the usual cohort of victims to participate in what ends up being, after all, nothing more than a minor orgasm, in the same way that, for all the strenuous efforts of the athletes on the football team, for all the money spent on the stadium, for all the emotion generated by the game, the goal is the strangely abject one of putting a ball over one particular chalky line. The mechanics dwarf the goal. Festivities like this have backgrounded Juliette’s question. Francaville begins by explaining that he is “at such a point of impiety and the abandonment of all religious sentiments” that he can’t hear, coldly, the invocation of that “deific phantom.” His Voltarian tirade against God draws the measured rebuke of Ferdinand, who reminds him that monarchs defend deities. Which draws this further outburst of impiety from Juliette:

“If you wish to judge these matters as a philosopher and not a despot, you will agree that the universe would only be happier if there were neither tyrants nor priests.”

As so often in De Sade’s dialogues, the positions taken by the speakers can suffer sudden and improbable shifts that reflect not so much the logic of an argument but induction from an existential position. Juliette’s former invocation of God becomes, now, an invocation of happiness. From Christianity, or at least deism, to liberalism – our Juliette is a regular Hegelian figure.

Prince Francaville, however, has his doubts: “… I adopt part of your reasoning, Juliette – no God – assuredly she is right; but this brake destroyed, we must find another for the people: the philosopher has no need of one, I know, but the mob definitely does. It is on the mob alone that I would wish to have royal power keenly felt.”

In De Sade, it is always a question of exploring the gap between pleasure and happiness. This is the curdled remnant of that stoicism that formed the everyday piety of the humanists and the philosophes in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

Francaville follows this salutary warning about extending the enlightenment project among the vulgar with the utopian speech Adorno and Horkheimer noticed:


- Thus, said Francaville, taking up the thread, we must replace religious illusions by the most extreme terror; if you deliver the people from the fear of a hell in the next life, they will yield themselves to everything; but replace this fear with penal laws of a prodigious severity, which, moreover, strike at nobody except them – for they alone trouble the State: all the discontents are nourished in this single class. What does the idea of a brake matter to the rich, for whom it is never a weight when he buys his vain status by the right to vigorously vex in his turn all those who live under his yoke?You will never discover a single one of those who will not permit the thickest shadow of tyranny when he has his own right to exercise it over others. These bases established, it is thus necessary that a king rule with the most extreme severity, and that in order that the people understand that he has the right to do anything he wishs to them, he permits those who sustain him with their daggers to do all that it pleases them to undertake. He should actually wrap about them his credit, his power, his consideration. He should tell them:… in order that my blows be solid and my throne unshakeable, support my power with that portion of power I’ve permitted you, and enjoy it in peace.”

From one angle, this is exactly what the capitalist system is all about, of course. Thus, the freedom from the state claimed by the libertarian is sacrificed by the masses in ‘contracting’ with other organs of governance – the corporation, in which all positive freedoms (of speech, of assembly, etc.) are distributed solely on the basis of economic position – the regression to a caste system of money becoming the great fact of daily life for most people in most liberal bourgeois countries. Meanwhile, to get back to Sade’s historical place, the catastrophe that had befallen the Indians of the New World in the name of the Christian God was being prepared for the rest of the globe in the name of 'free enterprise." In India (the Utilitarians), in China (the great white whale of 19th century capitalism, with its vast potential market in opium), in the liberalism of Latin American and Central American regimes (the rounding up of Indian land for coffee plantations and the enrollment of the remant masses in wage slavery), and. finally, in the technology of war – to the art of which liberal democracies have devoted their best libidinous energies. The welfare state, after all, was legitimized only by pledging itself unconditionally to the unlimited production of weaponry of every kind – congratulating itself, along the way, that it never released the missiles, while of course profiting enormously from the small arms, heatseaking missiles, aircraft and other forms of burning the skin off the human body or poking holes in it that have flooded the globe and produced their thousands of little Hiroshimas. Meanwhile, the system of excuses reaches its exhaustion point in Bush’s clichés, who rules the country much like Jim Thompson’s cliché wielding sheriff in The Killer Inside Me.

To end on A and H:

The totalitarian state manipulates the nations. “That’s it!’ replied the Prince,” Sade writes, governments must even regulate the populations, they must have in their hands all the means to cull them when it is time to inculcate fear and to increase them when the State deems it necessary, and their must never be another counter-weight to their justice than interest or passion, bound up, individually, with the passions and interests of those who, as we’ve said, have, from the rulers, so much as they find necessary in order to increase their own property. [un die eigene zu vervielfachen.]” The Prince shows the way to imperialism as the most fearful shape of ratio that has ever been taken. “… take their gods from the people that you wish to put under the yoke and demoralize them; as long as they pray to no other god than you, have no other morals than yours, you will always remain their master… and then leave them the most extensive faculties for crime; never punish them unless they direct the needle at you.”

A rule faithfully followed by neo-liberal regime after regime, as any survey of the bidonvilles of Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Nairobi, or Bombay can affirm.

LI has fallen into the habit of quoting ourselves. Such are the ignoble patterns that mark the shut in and the braggart. We are going to do it again As the NYT’s John Burns writes:


“A second round of preliminary election returns released today by Iraqi authorities showed that 67 percent of the 3.3 million votes counted so far from Sunday's election went to an alliance of Shiite parties dominated by religious groups with strong links to Iran. Only 18 percent went to a group led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite who favors strong ties to the United States. Few votes went to Sunni candidates.

Although the early votes were drawn primarily from Baghdad and from southern provinces where the Shiite parties were expected to score strongly, and from only 35 percent of the 5,216 polling stations, the scale of the vote for both religious and secular Shiites underscored the probability of a crushing triumph and a historic shift from decades of Sunni minority rule in Iraq.”

The Financial Times reports this:

According to the Financial Times, the United Iraqi Alliance is starting to feel a lot more confident:

“Mr Hakim, [Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the UIA] apparently confident of a sweep, announced on Wednesday that the Alliance could put forward a "group of suitable candidates" for prime minister, ruling out previous speculation that Mr Allawi might be chosen as a widely acceptable compromise leader.

If the Alliance, through its own seats as well as alliances with smaller parties, can put together a two-thirds majority in the national assembly, it should be able to dictate the choice of prime minister through horse-trading for the posts on the presidential council. “

The election result is going to travel down the cobra-like gorge of the American media like an port-a-let. No, it won't be a pleasant sight. The narrative was all set up: another statue crashing moment, another tearful hug from our good Iraqi friends, secret Christians all. But now it looks like they are hard hearts after all. Is this gratitude? Allawi looked so nice, mouthing neo-con platitudes, before Congress last year -- a real freedom lovin Iraqi. You could look into his eyes and see into his heart (an outstanding remodeling job had transformed that vault, in which various anti-Ba'ath activists had been tortured over the years, into a beautiful self-service gas station to fill all your SUV needs).

Our original analysis of Allawi and the American terror and awe strategy was on November 25th. Golem like, we are going to gloat in our prescience. Although Cassandra like, our curses and prognostications vanish, unheard, in the cruel air. Such is fate:

“LI has been pondering the strategy in Iraq the last couple of days. Blowing up Fallujah, breaking into Baghdad’s most famous mosque and shooting randomly, clamping down in Mosul – what this amounts to, we think, is the American response to the dilemma it faces in the elections.

The dilemma is this: given the state of opinion imperfectly revealed by even those polls conducted by biased American agencies, Allawi is not the most popular Iraqi politician. In fact, Sadr could easily give him a run for his money. Other Iraqi figures who have no fame in the U.S., but who register positively with the Iraqi public, are more popular than Allawi. Having failed to create a united confederacy of parties to present to the voters at election time (peculiarly, the U.S., in its role as occupier-democratizer, wanted to make sure that the elections were pre-rigged, and offered no choice whatsoever to the voter), the U.S. does face the slight problem that an unacceptable choice might actually take the prize in the election. That is, some party or personage representing a slightly anti-occupation bent might displace Allawi. Although it is unclear whether that is possible – this is an election for a transitional congress, not for the executive branch of the government. Still, that is the kind of embarrassment that the Americans would prefer to avoid.

So the task is: make Allawi popular in the next two months. How to do this? Taking a page from Milosevic’s book, the U.S. has evidently decided to take a wager on stirring up such ethnic/religious hatred as would inflate Allawi’s support. In the early stages of the occupation, there was a struggle in the Bush administration between those, mainly at the State department, who distrusted the Shi’ites, fearing Iraq’s becoming an Iran style theocracy, and those, mainly among the Pentagon Pump House gang, who urged the desuetude of this fear. The reality of the war against the occupiers has shifted the terms of the struggle, adjusting U.S. strategy not only to a pro-Shi’ite stance, but one that uses the revanchist tendency among the Shi’a, who have vivid memories of past oppression, to invigorate the flagging popularity of the American puppet government. They are doing this by associating Allawi with gross and powerful violence against the Sunnis. It was notable that Sadr himself did not protest, with his usual spirit, the razing of Fallujah. The Americans are favored here by the jihadist element in the war, with its face of comic book evil, Zarqawi. Zarqawi, from all that one gathers about him, is a trailer trash version of Osama bin. Al Qaeda has operated in Pakistan as, among other things, an on call death squad to effect anti-Shi’ite pograms. Zarqawi’s associates have the same program. Thus, there is a perfect demonic synergy between the horrors dreamt of by Zarqawi’s people and the horrors perpetrated by the Americans.

Still, it is not even the silence that greeted the displacement of 200,000 Iraqis by the Americans that is the strangest part of the recent episodes in the war. That honor goes to the raid on the Abu Hanifa Mosque in Baghdad. While the Mosque had been raided before, to raid it while Fallujah was being destroyed and to raid it in the manner reported could only amount to a provocation intended to send people out into the street. The better to shoot them down, my dear. These tactics have been so refined during the twentieth century among innumerable petty authoritarian states unti they have a dreary predictability. Resistance is many things -- a romance, a neurosis, a political program, a desperation -- but it is, under certain specific circumstances, a real opportunity for an uncertain governing power. The sudden crackdown on Sunni imams for committing “treason” by urging resistance to the Allawi government that is the real sign of the times in Iraq.

Allawi, with American assistance, is creating the usual authoritarian matrix: singling out some minority enemy, using that enemy to enforce censorship, using the recess from scrutiny produced by that censorship to imprison, torture and kill, and, finally, using the fear that emanates from that to reinforce his image as an impenetrable force. Also sprach Saddam, of whom Allawi is a dutiful pupil. As the election approaches, the conditions in which a free election has meaning are nullified one by one, ultimately to the gain of the current leadership. This, we think, is the ultimate meaning of the sudden American appetite for largescale violence in Iraq. It is a strategy that has worked in the past. We will see if it erodes the support of anti-occupation forces in Iraq in the next two months. We think Sadr, for one, definitely miscalculated by maintaining an unwonted silence in the midst of the latest round of violence. He, of all political figures, has the most to lose if Allawi identifies himself with a revanchist Shi’ite politics.”
There are good things and bad things about the defeat of Allawi. The great good thing is that this is a victory for a time table out of Iraq. We would be surprised if Sistani’s coalition insists on this first thing, but we expect that the population has spoken loud enough that the government will lose all credibility if it continues to comply with American pressure in this regard. In order to forestall this, the Americans will doubtless be looking to stir up military action – perhaps flattening half of Mosul and kicking out another 200,000 inhabitants will do the trick, or maybe another run at Samarra.

“The emperor was devoted to the worship of the gods, to the study of magic, and to the belief of oracles. The prophets or philosophers, whom he revered as the favorites of Heaven, were frequently raised to the government of provinces, and admitted into his most secret councils.”

Bush’s Social Security plan, the NYT intones with all the solemnity of a eunuch’s mass, will establish his place in history. This is rich – the issue isn’t, as you might have thought, the wholesale robbery of your social security, already borrowed against to provide tax breaks for the investor class, but whether, in the future, some school textbook will mention Bush II. The paragraph devoted to him composes itself, no? “Lucky pinhead, elevated by corrupt court, takes vacation and allows U.S. buildings to be blown up, blows up wrong Middle Eastern country in retaliation, blows up national pensions, blows up U.S. economy at large, ascends to heaven from banks of Potomac in the midst of angelic choirs, de-Christianizing disgusted country, Beginning of great U.S. conversion to Islam.” Or something like that.

More interesting than the predator’s ball is this report from a blog we were not aware of, run by Tim Horrocks. In a conference at the Washington University Law School, there was give and take between the head of the odious private military company, Blackwater, and a National Defense University professor:

"They made enemies everywhere," Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, an expert on guerrilla warfare and a senior fellow at the National Defense University told a conference on military contracting last week. He was referring to the tactics used by Blackwater USA, the North Carolina company that was hired by the Coalition Provisional Authority to provide security for L. Paul Bremer, the US administrator who was dispatched by the Bush administration to run Iraq in 2003.

A few minutes earlier, Chris Taylor, Blackwater's vice president for strategic initiatives, had boasted about the protective cordon his company provided to Bremer. Under a "turnkey security package" with the CPA, Bremer was accompanied by 36 "personnel protection specialists," two K-9 dog teams and three MD-530 helicopters built by Boeing Corporation.”

Bremer’s court reminds us irresistibly of Gibbon’s description of the Eastern Court as Julian found it:

“He questioned the man concerning the profits of his employment and was informed, that besides a large salary, and some valuable perquisites, he enjoyed a daily allowance for twenty servants, and as many horses. A thousand barbers, a thousand cup-bearers, a thousand cooks, were distributed in the several offices of luxury; and the number of eunuchs could be compared only with the insects of a summer's day. The monarch who resigned to his subjects the superiority of merit and virtue, was distinguished by the oppressive magnificence of his dress, his table, his buildings, and his train.”
...

This is a post of random thoughts today. Let's end it with a little idea about pensions. We've debated these things with the excellent, libertarian inclined Paul Craddick on his weblog. Paul claims that left bloggers are sticking their heads in the ground and acting like ostriches if they don't see the crisis looming in Social Security. An aging population, a benefits package that has to be supported with funding that gradually runs short. Sounds, actually, just like GM's pension problems. The real key to the 'social security crisis' is that it is the sum of the crisis in American pay, starting about 1980. As the country's economic policies tilted towards banana republic rewards for the rich, those same policies pegged wages at a level that has risen remarkably little, given inflation, over the past twenty five years. The solution Middle Class America found was sending both parents into the market place, and taking advantage of the end of the Usury laws. But, of course, if your economy is going to massively chisel the producers of wealth and reward the parasitic upper management class, and if you are going to base your social security on the wages of the producers, you do get a variety of crises. Solution: redress the balance. Distribute money back to the producers. Double the minimum wage, encourage unions, tax the wealthy at a pre-Reagan rate, and keep the Polizei (on all levels) from interfering with the massive strikes necessary to redo our business organizations. Pretty simple. Capitalism isn't going to be, and we'd say shouldn't be, overthrown by these simple measures -- it will simply work more efficiently on the distribution end than on the production end for a while. If wages stagnate, we get funding shortfalls for everything. There is, indeed, something bold and brassy about a President who has presided over the various audacious raids on the American economy to reward the wealthiest, while watching unemployment reach irrational levels and wages, in real terms, diminish, then throw up his hands in horror at a pension crisis. This is high comedy, fit for an administration that has the intellectual punch of a cancelled sit com.

Well, we bet the call for diminishing inequality of wealth to solve the so called Social Security crisis isn't going to get a hearing anytime soon, but someday, yes, the NYT will be wondering if this was LI's ploy to go down in the history books.

Computer melt downs, sex manuals

My computer did the old Microsoft Dive last night, so I was up to four putting it back together again. Thus, the excruciating thought of gluing together my “thoughts” on any topic has the allure, for me, that getting engaged had for Bertie Wooster.

Luckily, I’ve had some letters about my Adorno and Horkheimer posts. My friend H. wrote me to say that he liked the posts; however, he did ask why, in that the link I gave to the post on Philosophy.com, my comments on said post were so ‘mean to that old fellow you linked to.’ Mean? The cause is in that graphomania, that intoxication with words, that has carried me to many a nadir. What can I say? Some are alcoholics out of a bottle, and some get drunk on their own verbosity. I try to combine the two vices. Mr. H. also wrote: “you can't close these set of posts without also treating us to K.Korsh's critique of the Frankfurt school. Especially since yours truly has been dreaming of reading it one more time.” We’ve found a surprising amount of Korsch on the web, especially in French, and we will someday please all you Marxists and ex-Marxists – actually, hasn’t Marxism merged with ex-Marxism? – by linking and commenting. There is one scoriating essay by Korsch about the Lenin’s rather miserable attempt, in his criticism of Mach, to create a philosophy of dialectical materialism. Lenin was many things, in Korsch’s opinion, but not a philosopher – that’s when the Russian hayseed came out in him, the eager beaver student.

Then my friend, T., well known to this site as our foreign correspondant (he lives in NYC) came back at me with a few lapsed lascivious thoughts re Zizek’s essay on Lacan’s Kant avec Sade. I believe his first quote is from the Lacan essay.

‘For LI readers (if there are any left in the room) this might be interesting:

"Today, when Kant's antinomies of pure reason enjoy the status of a philosophical commonplace which long ago ceased to be perceived as a threat to the entire philosophical edifice, it requires a considerable effort to imagine them 'in their becoming,' as Kierkegaard would put it, and to resuscitate their original scandalous impact. One way to achieve this goal is to concentrate on how the antinomies differ from the logic of big cosmic oppositions: yin/yang, masculine/feminine, light/darkness, repulsion/attraction, etc. There is nothing subversive about such a notion of the universe as an organism whose life force hinges on the tension of two polar principles; what Kant had in mind, however, was something quite different and incomparably more unsettling: there is no way for us to imagine in a consistent way the universe as a Whole; that is, as soon as we do it, we obtain tow antinimocal, mutually exclusive versions of the universe as a Whole. And...it is here, in this antinomy, that sexual difference is at work: the antagonistic tension which defines sexuality is not the polar opposition of two cosmic forces (yin/yang, etc.), but a certain crack which prevents us from even consistently imagining the universe as a Whole. Sexuality points towards the supreme ontological scandal of teh nonexistence of the universe."

An amazing footnote to a statement on Radical Evil as an ethical attitude: "This notion of the Sublime provides a new approach to Lacan's 'Kant avec Sade,' i.e., his thesis on Sade as the truth in Kant. Let us begin with an everyday question: what accounts for the (alleged) charm of sexual manuals? That is to say, it is clear that we don not really browse them to learn things; what attracts us is that the activity which epitomizes the transgression of every rule (when we are engaged in 'it,' we are not supposed to think, but just to yield to passions...) assumes the form of its opposite and becomes an object of school-like drill. (A common piece of advice actually concerns acheiving sexual excitement by imitating - during the foreplay, at least - the procedure of cold, asexual instrumental activity: I discuss with my partner in detail the steps of what we will do, we ponder the pros and cons of different possibilities - shall we begin with cunnilingus or not? - assessing every point as if we are dealing with an elaborate technical operation. Sometimes, this 'turns us on.') What we encounter here is a kind of paradoxically inverted sublime: in the Kantanian Sublime, the boundless chaos of sensible experience (raging storm, breathtaking abysses) renders forth the presentiment of the pure Idea of Reason whose Measure is so large that no object of experience, not even nature in the wildest and mightiest display of its forces, can come close to it (i.e., here, the Measure, the ideal Order, is on the side of the side of the unattainable Idea, and the formless chaos on the side of sensible experience); whereas in the case of 'bureaucratized sexuality,' the relationship is reversed: sexual arousal, as the exemplary case of the state which eludes instrumental regimentation, is evoked by way of its opposite, by way of being treated as bureaucratic duty. Perhaps, it is (also) in this sense that Sade is the truth of Kant: the sadist who enjoys performing sex as an instrumentalized bureaucratic duty reverses and therby brings its truth to the Kantian Sublime in which we become aware of the suprasensible Measure through the chaotic, boundless character of our experience."

Ignorance

Mais depuis qu’on entrevoit la nature, que les anciens ne voyaient point du tout; depuis qu’on s’est aperçu que tout est organisé, que tout a son germe; depuis qu’on a bien su qu’un champignon est l’ouvrage d’une sagesse infinie aussi bien que tous les mondes; alors ceux qui pensent ont adoré, là où leurs devanciers avaient blasphémé. Les physiciens sont devenus les hérauts de la Providence: un catéchiste annonce Dieu à des enfants, et un Newton le démontre aux sages. – Voltaire

“Since we have examined nature, which the ancients didn’t see at all; since we have perceived that everything is organized, that everything has its seed; since we have discovered that the mushroom is as much the work of an infinite intelligence as worlds are; since then those who think have adored, there where their predecessors blasphemed. The physicians have become the messengers of providence; while it is the catechist who tells children about God, it is a Newton who demonstrates him to the wise.”

Two stories in the NYT today demonstrate both the civilized delights of the wise who, as Voltaire says, see that Nature to which the ancients were blind, and the return to barbarism so characteristic of Bush America.

The delightful story is about birds. As a part time birder, I’ve always found the very fact that there are these creatures flying around, uttering their incomprehensible notes on parking lot mornings while humans flow unheeding around them, to be fascinating. I have a friend who finds birds frankly sinister, and can’t understand the fascinations of bird watching. There are birds that I intensely dislike – in particular, I have a small horror of the boat-tail grackle (Cassidix mexicanus) which fills the trees on the U.T. campus and leaves a lovely swampy smell around those areas where they are encamped, the rich miasma arising from their copious collective excreta. It is a pushy bird, and its harsh call does emphatically not recall the notes of the skylark:

“That from heaven or near it/
Pourest thy full heart/
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.”

Researchers are putting in question just the assumption that that art is unpremeditated.

“The clash of simple brain and complex behavior has led some neuroscientists to create a new map of the avian brain.

Today, in the journal Nature Neuroscience Reviews, an international group of avian experts is issuing what amounts to a manifesto. Nearly everything written in anatomy textbooks about the brains of birds is wrong, they say. The avian brain is as complex, flexible and inventive as any mammalian brain, they argue, and it is time to adopt a more accurate nomenclature that reflects a new understanding of the anatomies of bird and mammal brains.

"Names have a powerful influence on the experiments we do and the way we think," said Dr. Erich D. Jarvis, a neuroscientist at Duke University and a leader of the Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium. "Old terminology has hindered scientific progress."

The consortium of 29 scientists from six countries met for seven years to develop new, more accurate names for structures in both avian and mammalian brains. For example, the bird's seat of intelligence or its higher brain is now termed the pallium.”

LI, taking a break from Adorno, Iraq, Iran and politics, urges our readers to check out the article.

And then read the article about the leaving all children behind act – not enacted by Congress, but encouraged by the party of bigotry (in the Voltarian sense – the willful adherence to ignorance) and tenderly nursed by the equally ignorant symbol mongers in the press and the think tanks. I’m talking about the lack of education in science – and, specifically, the lack of education about evolution.

“In districts around the country, even when evolution is in the curriculum it may not be in the classroom, according to researchers who follow the issue.

Teaching guides and textbooks may meet the approval of biologists, but superintendents or principals discourage teachers from discussing it. Or teachers themselves avoid the topic, fearing protests from fundamentalists in their communities.

"The most common remark I've heard from teachers was that the chapter on evolution was assigned as reading but that virtually no discussion in class was taken," said Dr. John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, an evangelical Christian and a member of Alabama's curriculum review board who advocates the teaching of evolution. Teachers are afraid to raise the issue, he said in an e-mail message, and they are afraid to discuss the issue in public.

Dr. Frandsen, former chairman of the committee on science and public policy of the Alabama Academy of Science, said in an interview that this fear made it impossible to say precisely how many teachers avoid the topic.”

Of course, Alabama has always been a pit of ignorance. Scientists may have found the seat of intelligence in birds, but they are still looking for it in the average Alabaman. However, there is no reason that the curse of the parents should be borne by the child. I wonder if those studies that Bush touted in his press conference a week ago that showed how important it is for children to be raised by “normal” couples – not those nasty ‘same sex’ types – I wonder if they questioned the kids on what they learn in school? And whether they are spoon fed superstitious nonsense by their lovin’ parents? In Alabama, at least, there is prima facie evidence that heterosexual parents are actively cretinizing their offspring. Where’s the outrage? Where are the courts? Surely we need to get these poor kids into good homes, same sex homes, where they can be encouraged to read a little Darwin every once in a while?

The U.S. has so successfully projected an image of its power that even its critics, even its enemies, unconsciously accept it. In Robin Wright’s book, the Last Great Revolution, about post Khomenei Iran, she reports that certain Iranians assured her that Khomenei was set up by the U.S. That he was a CIA asset.

This kind of thinking has leaked into the anti-war perspective. When the U.S. first occupied Iraq, LI issued vitriolic post after vitriolic post mocking the very premise that a bunch of outside know nothings could take over Iraq and transform it to their liking. We were especially amused by the idea that Field Commander Bremer would huff and puff and infuse an everlasting, privatized ally of the U.S. into Mesopotamia. In the event, Bremer couldn’t even keep his accounts straight, much less create neo-con heaven on earth.

As we put it on April 3, 2004:

“From the beginning, we have maintained that the top down implementation of civil change, such as was envisioned by all the Defense Department planners, goes against everything we know about the failures of central planning. That is hard earned knowledge for the left. Lately, we’ve been wondering what it means to combine the benefit of a welfare state with bottom up self organization – the kind of foreign policy that the left should be vigorously exploring.”

However, just as the right had a screwy image of unlimited American power to do good, so, too, some parts of the left have a screwy image of unlimited American power to do evil. This comes out most strongly in the metaphor of the “puppet.”

A puppet has no more life than is put into it by a hand. Take the hand away, and Punch no longer has the vigor to pummel Judy. Punch and Judy lie down together in the peace of all inorganic things.

When one talks about American puppets, one means that the power – the hand – is the American hand. But the limits to the metaphor are also the limits to American power. The hand, taken away, doesn’t restore an inorganic peace to the thing, who eats, desires and schemes for his own advancement. And so the off-hours can be productive of nasty surprises for the puppet’s case officers.

The American puppets in Iraq – the crew of exiles, from Allawi to Chalabi, that have become the provisional governing faction in Iraq – shouldn’t be thought of simply in terms of the American hand. Small deviations from that hand’s desire can create large perturbations down the line – especially in a “turbulent” moment like the present. Everything that one expected about this election – from the sixty percent turnout to the Sunni boycott – happened. But the expected event, when it happens, carries a charge that doesn’t come from the past. This is the great left heresy,and count LI amamong the black mass of believers: a moment arrives, and it is the moment of logos, of the gnostical infusion of novelty into the expected, of revolution in the everyday life. The combinations and probabilities tell us that the government of Iraq, so severely limited that it can’t even control its finances, will fall apart in squabbles and robberies, and allow the American overseers to continue their Behemoth work. On the other hand, the Shiite majority, which is mostly working class, has achieved stage one: in defiance of every power, American and Insurgent, they have created a nationwide fact. The American press will read this fact only in terms of their infantile obsession with the minor screwup who happens to be president in D.C. at the moment. We think that is precisely the wrong reading.

PS -- the orthodox message in the American press is well summed up in this pre-rotten bit of conventional wisdom by Slate's Fred Kaplan. Expect to see variations on this repeated ad nauseum in the coming week:

"A sure consequence of the election's success will be the derailing of any movement in the U.S. Congress to push for a swift troop withdrawal. In his State of the Union Address this week, President Bush will probably say that we cannot desert the Iraqis after their brave display of commitment to freedom. And he will be right. If the new Iraqi government wants the U.S. troops to leave, then they will. But in the past couple of weeks, all the major Iraqi political parties removed from their platforms any endorsement of a withdrawal. They realize that they still need foreign troops both for internal security and for the defense of their borders."

Sixty percent of the eligible electorate in Iraq voted, according to the report in Liberation. Meanwhile, according to an article in the Washington Post, the administration is signaling: no timetable, no withdrawal.

“The Bush administration has for now ruled out creating a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq after today's elections, but military commanders have charted a plan to have Iraqi security forces begin taking the lead in combat operations in certain parts of the country as early as spring.”

Such blind and expected venting of Bush imperialism goes well with the Bush version of democracy, on display in this article about the way the Bush people are pressuring Qatar to cripple Al Jazeera. And it should lead us directly to Fiske’s pessimistic take on the whole thing, as a vast farce:

“The media boys and girls will be expected to play along with this. "Transition of power", says the hourly logo on CNN's live coverage of the election, though the poll is for a parliament to write a constitution, and the men who will form a majority within it will have no power.

They have no control over their own oil, no authority over the streets of Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country, no workable army or loyal police force. Their only power is that of the American military and its 150 000 soldiers whom we could all see on the main intersections of Baghdad yesterday.”

Fiske is right about the military, but wrong, we think, not to see the vote in any but an instrumental light. Ourselves, we see the vote much more as an expression of popular power – like the retaking of Najaf by the train of people that marched in Sistani’s wake. As an election, this was a terribly flawed one, of course: the CPA rule that made it a one time, nation wide venture, were peculiarly ill suited to the nature of Iraq – no surprise there, since the CPA’s ideas in toto were more suited to Mississippi than Mesopotamia. And to hold an election which will elect people with the shocking lack of power Fiske enumerates does lend the business the air of a Potemkin village. Plus, of course, the lack of information, due mostly to U.S. generated censorship -- Allawi's arrests of newsmen and his closing down of Al Jazeera's operation in Iraq follows the expected tyrannical pattern that the U.S. likes to inculcate in its factotums.

But political pundits have a tendency to take the mechanical output of politics – who is in and who is out – as the whole of politics. It isn’t. Politics is also a cultural performance, an allegory of multiple desires. As a cultural act, the voting, and even the boycott of the voting, shows that the Iraqis can take their lives into their own hands. It shows the majority will stand up to armed threat. And it shows that the minority, the Sunnis, are well aware of the crimes that are being committed against them by the sinister Americans. So the question is:

Is this a situation in which 150,000 American troops, then, are needed? And if so, what are they needed to do?

Well, obviously, the need to keep them there is generated solely in D.C. imperialist megalomania and the interests of those Iraqi politicos with homes in London or the U.S. If the vote generates that realization among the Iraqi population, here’s one possibility: the amplification of Iraqi sensitivity, so that every American outrage will be resented even more, as an imposition upon a proven sovereign body. A tacit timetable of withdrawal, ticking in the nervous systems of Iraqis, will start regardless of the fantasists in D.C.

This is our hope. However, we should hedge this with another scenario. In this one, the amplified sensitivity will become a form of Shi’ite triumphalism, thus making the Sunni/Shi’ite cleavage even more lethal. The Americans will continue being used as an instrument, on the part of some Shi’a faction, of ethnic cleansing, and will take the opportunity to exact their conditions, particularly as the Saudis have finally realized two things in the last year: you have more money come in from forty dollars per barrel than you do from twenty, and the Bush people don’t care if the dollar plummets to 50 cents to the Euro. This makes Iraq much more valuable territory. It will be interesting to see whether Chavez, who is trying to create an international bloc of state run oil organizations, will start pinging on the American radar screen, given these circs.

Post two

This post follows up on yesterday’s.

There is another fold in A and H’s interpretation of Kant. As we’ve been emphasizing, the system of the Enlightenment sacrifices what we want to be true to what is true. The oddity of this transaction is that the truth of psychology, with its dense casuistry of material motives, leaves little place for the unmotivated desire for truth. How, THEN, does the discovery of the truth account for itself within the Kantian system?

Interestingly enough, there is a space in the Kantian system for this apparent contradiction. It is a moment of abasement and glory, a moment of reflection on wanting what we don’t want. This crops up in a sort of Kantian baroque – self annihilating phrases, like purposive non-puposiveness [in the Critique of Judgment]. In the Critique of Practical Reason, this is sussed out by elevating one feeling, and one only, to a primary moral status: humility.

But Kant’s interpretation of the background sacrifice that makes the organization of science, and thus Enlightenment, possible, even if it rises to the surface in humiliation or the notion of the sublime, is never explicitly laid out in sacrificial terms. Sade, on the other hand, magnifies the sacrifice, until the enormous details are burned into his pornographic universe. This will form the substance of our last post about the Dialectic of the Enlightenment. Although we don’t promise not to continue writing about this subject from other angles: in particular, the difference between the Enlightenment as Kant saw it and the Enlightenment as Smith and Hume saw it. Hey, and we have comparisons between Hayek and A & H... Life is long, writing is short.

First part

Enlightenment does not begin with the question, “what is the truth?” It begins with a consideration of the interplay between two questions:

a. what is the truth?
b. and: what do we want the truth to be?

To understand the Dialectic of the Enlightenment, it is crucially important to keep this in mind.

LI’s experience of doing posts on philosophical topics is that it creates the sounds of people leaving the room. So we will not dwell on this too long. Don’t worry. We are going to confine ourselves to three or four more posts on Sade, Kant, and atrocity in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Tops. Promise.

Okay.

The ‘excursus’ entitled “Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality” forged a conjunction between Sade and Kant that, while unheard of when the Dialectic was published in 1947, has become a standard trope in cultural studies. Partly it owes this fame to its shock value. While A and H diagnosed the fascist politics of shock, they were not immune to its allure. This is confusing for those who believe that distance and distinction is the hallmark of the relationship between criticism and its object. A and H, however, question the cost of maintaining that distance – a cost that is paid in granting to the object the seriousness of the untouchable. For A and H, the satyr play is part of the whole cycle – parody, mockery, quotation, and other forms of secret sharing can not only not be excluded from the philosopher’s repertoire, but gauge the philosopher’s willingness to confront the history of his categories.

So, in this chapter we have a seemingly puzzling reading of Kant. If we remember the interplay between the questions we began with – and if we don’t, peremptorily, treat them as opposites – we have a Leitfaden – a guiding thread – to what A and H are doing here.

Kant, for A and H, is the most systematically intelligent Enlightenment philosopher, which is why they take the critical philosophy to be a sort of canon of Enlightenment. For Kant, the scientific use of understanding – the posing of the question, what is true, without regard with what we want to be true – finds a systematic object: what Newton called “the system of the world.’ And what is the system of the world? Cause and effect, as far as the eye can see. Yet there is a problem. Insofar as the object of understanding is a total and materially determined system, the understanding itself, if part of this system, is itself determined. But insofar as the true is different from what we want to be true – insofar as that is the boast of the Enlightenment – we seem to be denying the understanding that freedom among alternatives that would make for a disinterested choice. If understanding does not have the freedom to choose its version of its object, the truth value of that object becomes suspect. Such is the systematic place of freedom in Kant’s metaphysical project. Notice what we require here: a primary instance of freedom to found a deterministic system. For Kant, this instance of freedom does find an embodiment in the “I” – but an I that has sacrificed all its object-hood. The transcendental I, as Kant says, is an accompanying “x” – a variable. In terms of Kant’s system, the transcendental I is coherent with the ethical instance of freedom, which also requires a sacrifice of object-hood. A and H point to this sacrifice, and point to the fact that it is elided – that its mediate nature, to use Hegelian terminology, remains hidden. The ethic of freedom demands, in fact, all of the personal characteristics of the I, for those characteristics hopelessly cling to object-hood.

So, in both the metaphysical and ethical realms, we establish what is true only by such a total sacrifice of what we want to be true that we expel want itself – desire – from the system of human knowledge and morality.

To put it in terms of the Freudian return of the repressed – when human desire is expelled from the social, it returns as inhuman desire.

At which point we might ask: isn’t this a little facile? There are those who feel that Adorno and the whole of Critical theory relies on a sort of scam. On the one hand, Kant is a philosopher, and we use his corpus of works to talk about “Kant.” On the other hand, he seems to be one of the emanations of history, a sort of representative in some unarticulated Phenomenology of the Spirit. How, one might ask, is Kant ‘representative’ of the society of Enlightenment – which includes Ben Franklin and his neighbor and the members of Parliament and all of these figures. Can we do intellectual history by sampling without having some justification for our samples?

Fist

The Dialectic of the Enlightenment is a notoriously knotty text. LI would recommend this article: Language, Mythology, and Enlightenment: Historical Notes on Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment by James Schmidt, in the 1996 Social Research. Schmidt isn’t a particularly nimble thinker or writer, but he does present a nice reconstruction of the writing of the text.

We like the fact that, in spite of Adorno’s contemptuous and semi-racist view of jazz, not to speak of pop music, A and H’s book started out in garage rock style:
“What eventually would become the Dialectic of Enlightenment first entered the world in December 1944 as a mimeographed typescript of over three hundred pages distributed to friends and associates of the Institute for Social Research. Printed on the brown pasteboard cover was the original rifle: Philosophische Fragmente. Theodor Adorno provided an explanation of sorts for the work's peculiar mode of dissemination in one of the aphorisms he presented to his coauthor Max Horkheimer the next February on the occasion of Horkheimer's fiftieth birthday:
In a world where books have long lost all likeness to books, the real book can no longer be one. If the invention of the printing press inaugurated the bourgeois era, the rime is at hand for its repeal by the mimeograph, the only fitting, the unobtrusive means of dissemination.”

As a blogger (that hideous word, seemingly composed of blotch, bugger and booger – all the grossness in the child’s garden of verse to which LI seems condemned, a lifer, to wander ), I can’t but clutch that aphorism to my measly little heart.

A & H passed the manuscript around to friends, who turned their thumbs down. Marcuse, the sweetest, but let’s face it, the least swift of the Frankfurt School crew, wrote:

Even their colleagues were not quite sure what to make of it. After struggling with the manuscript for a few months, a bewildered Herbert Marcuse wrote to Horkheimer,
“I have gone through the Fragmente twice, and I have reread many sections more than twice. However my reading was not continuous and concentrated enough .... The result: there are too many passages which I don't understand, and too many ideas which I cannot follow up beyond the condensed and abbreviated form in which you give them.”
Condensation was, however, with A & H., as with the Ramones, the whole point. And as with any garage rock band, there was always the tension between the Work and Work – as in finding work. And staying out of prison. A & H had not fled to America merely to end up as canned soup before the House Unamerican Committee. So before the book was published, Adorno did a little re-dubbing:
Martin Jay once characterized the Dialectic of Enlightenment as the "last leg" in the Frankfurt School's "long march away from orthodox Marxism" (Jay, 1973, p. 256). But a comparison of the changes made between the 1944 Philosophische Fragmente and 1947 Dialektik der Aufklarung makes this "last leg" look more like a quick step. The overwhelming majority of the revisions Adorno made in the work involved a purging of Marxian terminology. Thus, to take a few examples from the first chapter, "exploitation" becomes "enslavement" (5,p. 26), "capitalism" becomes "the economic system" (p. 26), "disposition over alien labor" becomes "utilization of the work of another" (p. 26), "monopoly technique" becomes "industrial technique" (p. 33), "object of exploitation" becomes "subject" (p. 36), "class domination" becomes "consolidated domination by the privileged" (p. 44), "exchange value" becomes simply "value" (p. 51)… Etc., etc.
So why did the duo decide to push upon the world a book that was, at least to their closest associates, incomprehensible? Schmidt does a nice job of tracking through H.’s correspondence for the genesis of the moments of uncanniness in which H. heard the prose of the world – in all its 30s incarnations, capitalist, communist and fascist. But LI likes this quote from Adorno’s correspondence most of all:
“The prohibitive difficulty of theory is today manifested in language. It permits nothing more to be said as it is experienced. Either it is reified, commodity-speech, banal and halfway to falsifying thought. Or it is in flight from the banal, ceremonial without ceremony, empowered without power, confirmed by its own fist of everyday discourse.”

In our next post, or one soon, we will discuss the chapter on Sade. And that is it, since we don’t want to sink Limited Inc utterly into the swamps of obscurity.. Looking around the ‘sphere, we noticed that the philosophy.com blog has been intermittently reflecting on the Dialectic of the Enlightenment. We contributed a long, outraged message to one of their posts. It’s a good blog. /

When George Bush declared war on Iraq in 2003, the Stop the War movement was, de facto, defeated. It was no longer a question of stopping the war from happening; and so, logically, a whole field of new questions were posed.

Unfortunately, since then, the international movements that have coalesced in the stop the war movement have clung to the idea that the War in Iraq has two sides: the Americans, and the insurgents. In this, they have, unconsciously, collaborated with the Americans. Thus, progressives have continually foreclosed on doing what Marx did, surveying the ruins of the revolutionary movements in 1850: creating a side. Instead, they have been all too satisfied with the one they have been given.

Consequently, I have never seen a progressive movement wielding such popular support secure so little power to shape events as has happened with the relation between opponents of the war in Iraq and the war itself. Besides acres of trees and thousands of manhours of downloadable criticism – of which LI has contributed its fair share – the stop the war movement has had no influence whatsoever with the insurgents, nor have they stopped the Americans from commencing a single plan, bombing into ruins a single city, torturing a single prisoner, or selecting a single seedy CIA contracted exile to rubber stamp American made decisions. What has stopped the American juggernaut, so far, has been the harsh fact of armed resistance. In fact, that resistance has been enough to reverse or drastically modify almost every American plan, and looks like they will continue to do that for the foreseeable future.

Looking at this record, one would think that progressive would reconsider their tactics. They might even reconsider their tacit agreement with Americans about the definition of sides in Iraq. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. Thus the utter sterility of the debate over the elections outside of Iraq, endlessly recycling the two side refrain, with the addition of the worry about the disaffected Sunnis ( a worry completely detached from any consideration of the American Groznyfication of Fallujah). If, as seems likely, Sistani’s coalition and Allawi’s party are the big winners, the progressive community internationally, in spite of the reams of journalism and criticism with which they have gifted Iraq, will not have made a single concrete suggestion or made a single connection. Our virtuousness will be perfectly unpolluted by our power, since we have none.

We imagine that the post election situation in Iraq (in spite of what we will read in the inevitable monthlong orgy of heralding whatever candidates win that will ensue in the U.S. press) is going to be extremely fluid. In a previous post, we called Sistani a good chess player. The post election situation is going to show how good a games player Muqtada al- Sadr is. Sadr has staked out a position that is both anti-exile (meaning Iranian exiles, as well as American ones) and anti-occupation. If, as seems likely, the crew that comes into power after the election is distinguished by the amount of real estate they own in Southern France or the United States, and if those politicians continue to follow a compliant line with the Americans, we expect that Sadr will have a great window of opportunity. What he does with it is the question. The appeal to poor Shi’ites would seem to be the right appeal in a country with a forty to sixty percent unemployment rate.

That window is open for others as well. LI thinks that it is time to think across the frozen surface of appearance and ask; from a progressive perspective, what should be done in Iraq? Obviously, the lacing and inner texture of the answer to that question can only be worked out iby the Iraqis themselves. However, the idea that the Iraqis can work out there politics in isolation from the rest of the world has been tested by reality, and by reality bombed. The world is in Iraq.

Here are some programmatic pointers for another side in Iraq.

1. The government must make a timetable for the departure of foreign troops. It must not be fuzzy. It must also be timely: a matter of months rather than of years. Soldiers of the former army should be called upon by the government to join up.. Soldiers should not be trained by foreign troops, for the most part.

2. The Iraqi government should no longer cooperate with either the U.N. or the U.S.A. in paying either reparations or debt. Last week, the U.N., from its fund, and with American approval, paid Kuwait 143 million dollars as another in the series of reparation payments for the invasion of 1991. There is no justification for this. In the package of payments managed by the U.N., Iraq even paid U.S. companies reparations and/or Saddam era debts, in effect paying the collaborators of Saddam Hussein. Not a dollar more.

3. The government must defend the natural resources of Iraq. The control of Iraq’s oil field production should be left entirely in the hands of the state corporation that has run it, and least until there is a real elected body to make democratic changes.

4. The government should demand the reduction of the personnel structure of the U.S. embassy and all U.S. government agencies working in Iraq.

5. The government should negotiate for a non-aggression pact with all of its neighbors, agreeing not to allow any troops based on its soil of whatever nationality to incurs into any neighboring country.

6. The government should commit to the immediate repair of the infrastructure by, among other things, reviewing the timeliness and efficiency of the work of all contractors, and putting up for renewed bid all those that have unjustified cost overruns or unsatisfactory performance schedules. The government should combine this with a massive employment effort.

The insurgents have no interest in seeing the Americans leave at the moment, and we know that Allawi’s party, already deeply corrupt (as is the way of client parties in colonial states) depends on the Americans too. This means that the goal of getting the foreign troops out of Iraq isn’t going to come easy, after the election. But we think that it would be nice if the progressive punditry started pressing a broader agenda that refuses the static and ultimately sterile categories pressed upon them by the occupation powers.

The radio, right now, is talking about the crimes happening in Darfur. We are very used to hearing about genocide or mass murder in terms of crime. This has been the consensus since the human rights movements of the seventies. It is a comfortable and pragmatic perspective, but from the point of view of critical philosophy, it is a huge lie. Philosophy that is critical does not abolish particular and contingent structures under the principle of sub species eternatatis, but, like a detective pondering the dog that didn’t bark in the night, inquires into the very possibility of the historic fact. A crime, then, requires not only a perpetrator and a victim, but a third power – embodied in the state – that judges what is and what is not a crime. How that power gains obedience – how a crime becomes a non-crime, and a non-crime a crime – is the really important categorical question posed by philosophy outside of the Enlightenment.

Take, for example, what happened on June 11th, 1942. Victor Klemperer, a Jew married to an Aryan in Dresden, is living in the apartment house the authorities have designated as the Jew House. Klemperer is a philologist, and he is keeping a secret diary. His project is to study the Nazi idiolect. He is, I believe, in his late fifties. Here he records a visit from the police:

“Upstairs everything seemed at first to be vented on Kaetchen, who was sitting in the bath… and appeared in her bathrobe. In the morning she had received a long, typewritten report from her brother-in-law about the air raid on Cologne, and about the great destruction. In itself nothing punishable, since the raid had been described in all the newspapers and since Ludwig Voss’s letters are patriotic. But to a Jewess! ‘That makes you Jews happy! You use it to make mischief!’ The envelope lay on Kaetchen’s table besides a postcard from her mother, who promised her cooking oil from her ration card (that, too, is a crime). The letter was found crumbled up in a leather armchair (“hidden”). Everything was ransacked, Kaetchen had to roll up the carpet, was kicked as she did so, wailed, was threatened, had to write down her brother-in-law’s address. Her rooms were in as great a chaos as on the first attack. The range of nasty words of abuse was rather narrow. Again and again ‘pig”, “Jewish pig,” “sow,” “piece of dung” – nothing else occurs to them. I was forced onto a chair in the lobby, was forced to take down the heavy paintings…I thought I was out of danger when The Myth of the Twentieth Century [the canonical Nazi philosophy book by Alfred Rosenberg] and my sheet of notes beside it led to a catastrophe. The time before, with an officer who was evidently more senior, book and notes had hardly aroused any objection. Now this reading matter was held against me as a terrible crime. The book was thumped down on my skull, my ears were boxed, a ridiculous straw hat of Kaetchen’s was pressed down onto my head. “Now you look pretty.” When I replied to questioning, that I had held my post until 1935, two fellows, with whom I was already acquainted, spat between my eyes.”

Klemperer’s sanity as a social being depends, crucially, on that distinction between what is punishable and what isn’t punishable – as is ours. That Klemperer’s privilege of checking books out of the public library falls, after this visit, into the punishable category almost crushes him.
…

The Nazi regime developed a sort of great encyclopedia of punishable types, and its fragments travel about today – lesbians in Florida, gypsies in Romania, Jews in Russia, etc. If the Enlightenment is represented by any one thing, it is the Encyclopedia, so one way of grasping the Dialectic of the Enlightenment is to suppose that it is confronted with just some such Nazi Encyclopedia, the mirror image of Diderot’s Encyclopedia, where the entries all seemed to be subtly distorted by some great malign force.

Interestingly, the issue of how a crime becomes a crime lept from philosophy to the courts in the West German prosecution of Nazi personnel. Adenauer made sure that the West German constitution contained a clause forbidding retroactive prosecutions – one could only be prosecuted for crimes that were crimes when one committed them. The point, here, was to create a legal equivalent for Adenauer's larger goal of encouraging Germans to forget about their recent past.

In a book we recently reviewed about the largest trial of Auschwitz guards and officers held by the West Germans in 1963, the author, Rebecca Wittmann, shows that the prosecution was hindered by the fact that it could only accuse Nazi guards of violating Nazi law. Since the state countenanced the extermination camp, the prosecution was forced to find and prove extraordinary acts of cruelty in the processing of prisoners for extermination. Hence, the upper tier of the camp management, who simply organized the selections and the functioning of the gas chamber, received lesser sentences than guards who were witnessed to kill, with "excessive cruelty" (for instance, putting a board across the throat of a prone prisoer and standing on it).

The Dialectic of the Enlightenment was the first in a series of post-war books that variously attacked the Cold War consensus on both sides. I’d include, in that list, Galbraith’s Affluent Society and New Industrial State, Djilas’s New Class, Medvedev’s Let History Judge, and Foucault’s The Words and the Things (translated as The Order of Things) and Discipline and Punish. Intellectual history went into the streets for a historical moment in 1968, a moment that is preserved with marmoreal heaviness by many a museum hearted lefty prof. However, beyond the nostalgia of the ex hippies, there was a real core to that moment – which extended, actually, to the end of the Bretton Woods agreement and the first oil embargo. It created a cultural prototype that has gradually immersed in its presuppositions, for good and ill, a capitalist system that has ground the bones of proletarian culture into the service economy and removed all trace of the protest of labor from its 24 hour cultural industry. Now, the protest of labor is, of course, simply the exhibition of labor itself – a thing so devotedly to be avoided that its very appearance has the air of accusation – but at the same time, that culture has so maniacally and singlemindedly developed the libido of purchase that it has created something new and daring: the fetish has replaced the norm. Demand, now, is oriented to a great variable x – to the inconnu, the great white whale, the diabetic ghost of all the sugarplum fairies you ever cannibalistically devoured, to chewing anything and everything all day long (Black milk of daybreak/we drink it at evening/ we drink
it at midday and morning we drink it at night/ we drink and we drink), to filling the houses we can’t afford on the mortgages we can’t turn down with the finest high resolution tv screens ever to watch actors who portray people who never watch television – the dream being that life goes on somewhere, and that somebody will be arrested for it.

Well. To get on with this – the genre of books we have listed above differs, in tone and purpose, from the pamphlets and bagatelles of the pre-war period – one has only to compare Wyndham Lewis’ The Art of Being Ruled, or Bataille’s writing for Acephale, with any of those books to mark the difference. The obvious difference is in the irony and distance that distinguish the authorial presence – even in Medvedev’s book, that carries a load of furious indignation from page to page. What made The Gulag Archipelago so interesting in purely literary terms was that it was a throwback to the pre-war style – Solzhenitsyn hated the cool affluent ironies with which the critics of the consensus dissolved, with experimental despair, the monster-system inside books, only to achieve status within the system outside the books, as much as any Stalinist. Adorno and Horkheimer understood before anybody that the conditions that had once made it possible to regard sincerity as a virtue had utterly vanished, up the chimneys of the crematoria: which is one way of interpreting Adorno's famous remark that after Auschwitz, poetry was impossible. What holds all of the critics of the consensus together was a curious loathing of paradise -- and an instinctive sense that the unmediated conjunction of paradise and hell in the twentieth century was no accident.

Next post, we will examine a nice little essay on the making of the D. of E.

Actually time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am comingto feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. – Martin Luther King, Letter from the Birmingham Jail


Sixty years ago, the Soviets were overrunning the concentration and extermination camps. Majdenek was reached in July, 1944 by the Soviet Army, which then overran the remains of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Auschwitz was reached on January 27, 1945. Seven thousand prisoners were still there, awaiting the action of the SS, which was evacuating prisoners to other concentration camps throughout the Nazi empire.


This makes a good point from which to survey the last sixty years, a surveyor’s point from which we can string the lines and site the plat. Our contemporaneity stems from World War Two still – wars define us, not states. And since then, since then… the dialectic between heaven and hell has been pursued not in daydreams, but on the killing fields of Cambodia and in the back seats of Cadillacs. The NYT Magazine’s articles about fundie-thugs beating to death Bengali Communists with crow bars is laced about with everything you could want to order, ever. This is not to throw some ancient blame on that abundance – we are firmly for the land of Cockayne, for diamonds and cocktails. But we are puzzled as to that system that depends, for its diamonds, on armies of drugged little boys hacking off the arms of their parents in Liberia. Wear your diamonds with the appropriate blood might be one response, but the symbols simply add one more childishness to an atrocity committed against childishness. The simplest philosophical question of our time is: with the overcoming of the conditions of poverty, why hasn’t poverty been overcome? with the overcoming of the vile slave morality that stems from scarcity, why has that vile morality remained dominant?

Answers to which questions, or at least dancing around them, we are going to explore in our next post, about the Dialectic of the Enlightenment.

Idiot wind

There’s no better time to float a war scare than during inauguration week. Thus, the stories in the papers about stopping cold the Iranian ambition to weld nuclear weapons. This gallant devotion to non-proliferation synthesized well with the Presidential challenge to spread freedom anywhere except in those places specified in the small print (Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Venezuala, Liberia, Angola, All Arab peninsula states, all former Central Asian Soviet Republics, and any other recipients of American military aid hereinafter to be known as de facto democracies). Yes, the heady ozone of freedom coming out of Bush’s mouth does have a few holes in it – but this is an administration that rather likes holes in the ozone, so it all makes sense.

Meanwhile, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a nice little historical piece on the (apparently aborted) South Korean effort to manufacture atomic weaponry. The article’s authors (Kang, Jungmin; Hayes, Peter; Bin, Li; Suzuki, Tatsujiro; Tanter, Richard) even advance the speculation that the nuclear ambition of the South (which has resulted, outside of the military sphere, in “19 power reactors generating 16.7 gigawatts of electricity--one of the biggest nuclear programs in the world” may have triggered the North’s own ambition:

“If North Korea was aware of the South's uranium enrichment research activities in the 1990s (and its intelligence capacities in the South should not be underestimated) then the South's activities may have helped motivate the North to acquire enrichment capacities of its own; in 2002, the United States alleged that the North began an enrichment effort in about 1998.”

We find the article interesting for two reasons. One is, the U.S. pursuit of an asymmetrical enforcement of non-proliferation ignores the fact that nuclear material, at this stage, is relatively easy for a determined state to acquire, along with the technological know how to make the bomb. Every time the U.S. ignores an ally’s nuclear build-up, it will reliably trigger, at some point, an enemy’s countering build up. Not that the U.S. countenanced South Korea’s nuclear ambitions. According to the article, presidents from Nixon to Carter scolded and threatened South Korea about secret nuclear programs. Furthermore, the Americans kept the Koreans from having a reliable supply of plutonium.

The second ponderable point is that the politics of nuclear weaponry and the politics of democratization are entangled to an extent that seems to have escaped both Western liberal international theorists as well as their cousins, the international interventionists. In Crooked Timber this week, there was a post about the Iranian nuclear program that made the point that the same protesting students who have become the mascots of various right wing groups in this country are the same people who strongly want a nuclear Iran. The blog quoted a talk by Ray Takeyh, from the Council on Foreign Relations :

“He had some interesting thoughts about how nuclear weapons are quickly becoming enmeshed in Iranian nationalism and identity. They quickly become too popular to give up. When he was teaching in Pakistan, he had students give him keychains shaped like nuclear missiles as token gifts. He saw clock radios shaped like nuclear missiles in Pakistani stores.

Furthermore, like any big program, it attracts a constituency of scientists, contractors, and so on, who have a direct interest in its continuation. He noted that Candidate Clinton campaigned against SDI, but President Clinton funded it every year. He thinks that, if Iran hasn’t already hit the political point of no return, they will very soon.

Someone asked if the liberal Iranian student movement might lead to disarmament. Just the opposite; the dissident students are big proponents of nuclear arms. They’ve conducted multiple demonstrations in support of the nuclear programs. He mentioned a conversation with one of the student leaders, who said that he hated the mullahs, he hated their character and their rules, and he was afraid that they were going to trade their nuclear program away.”

Which corresponds, approximately, to some parts of the South Korean case:
“And from the mid-1980s on some maverick intellectuals associated with the security (but not the nuclear) establishment in the South argued openly that it should obtain its own nuclear weapons, especially after the South Korean military dictatorship was overthrown in 1987. One even stood for parliament on a "nuclear nationalist" platform.”

Obviously, if the U.S. had operated with the same regard for regional balance in the Middle East as it did in the Korean peninsula, punishing those in the U.S. who supplied Israel with nuclear materials (probably the most criminal act ever committed by that Ur-monster, the CIA’s James Angleton) and cajoling Israel into giving up its nuclear commitment, we would have a much stronger hand to play in the Middle East today. To say nothing of Reagan’s tolerance of the Pakistani nuclear program.

The end result of this history is that the U.S., whatever its policy towards Iran, is burdened from the beginning by a lack of credibility that does not leak through the U.S. press at all.
…

Some blog notes. You’ll notice, we changed our motto. Yes, we are quoting ourselves – something we came across due to a google searcher who came to our site looking for “midget” +president. And as to those of you wondering when the interminable preparations for the great LI donation-a-thon will start, well, materializing – our sense is that most charitable contributions in January are naturally heading tsunami-relief-ward. The truth is, LI would rather you did contribute your pence, at the moment, to the tsunami relief charities. But we promise, like a mosquito, we will soon be coming back to beg for tiny bits of your blood.

"At some point, men's breasts became liberated and women's didn't," Johnsson said Friday. "This is the only thing left that men are legally allowed to do and, for women, they have to register as a sex offender. The real issue is there should be equal protection under the law."

In California, a judge ruled that women caught sunbathing topless – a “crime” against the crime against nature which constitutes the indecency law – can be put on a public sexual offender list. The LA Times story centers on public defender Liana Johnsson, who has taken on the lonely task of representing common sense, beleaguered on one side by the overwhelming chorus of male giggles, drugged into the usual gap mouthed silliness by the very thought of tits, and on the other side by fundie repression, still witchhunting Eve – or Lilith. Johnsson is, of course, right to campaign for breast equality, as she calls it. Americans, who can see the prison in the burqua, have a hard time seeing the prison in the blouse. However, the shades of are only milder as the laws change from Afghanistan to California. In the spirit of our President, who wants to spread freedom everywhere, here’s a chance to put freedom into action.

The article ends like this:

“The legislation probably faces a fight. Lawmakers in California have been eager to expand Megan's Law, not carve out exemptions.

Randy Thomasson, president of Campaign for Children and Families, called it a "loopy idea" at a time when California needs to strengthen laws against public nudity.

"We already have too many sexual assaults in society. This will fuel that fire, and if the women don't understand, that's because they don't think like a man," Thomasson said.”

Q.E.D.

God, entrails, immorality and mermaids

In Alberto Manguel’s small study of Bride of Frankenstein there is an account of the amusing impositions upon the drafts of the screenplay made by the then Hollywood capo of the Catholic League of Decency, Joseph Breen. The first Frankenstein had been directed by James Wale in 1931, before the Catholic League of Decency had gotten fairly started. The silent movie, the depression, and the era of the gangster hero closely overlapped. Hollywood had already been pressing against the various taboos against sneaking in shots of those sublimely dangerous portions of the woman’s body – and when it added to the mix a disrespect for authority and the thinly disguised joys of taking a tommy gun to the gendarmerie, the Catholic and Protestant hierarchy pitched up more than their usual pious stink. So by 1934, Hollywood honchos had agreed to let Joseph Breen judge if any release undermined the foundations of civilization, or showed too much tit. Various censorship boards had already been taking whacks at the re-release of Frankenstein, with the Quebec board particularly worried about the Faustian theme, with its blasphemous suggestion that man could become God. The next step is outright Marxism, of course. So Whale decided to pass everything through the Breen mill. Manguel quotes a letter Whale wrote to Breen at one point in the process in which Whale goes to great lengths to satisfy even those of Breen’s objections he’d dropped “…as in your letter of December 5th there are several points about God, entrails, immorality and mermaids which you did not bring up again…”

As Manguel sanguinely notes, “whatever other changes there may have been, God, entrails, immorality and mermaids remained in the final cut of Bride of Frankenstein…”

Making the art of the picture depend on the slips of the censor is a poor way of doing business. But it is an even poorer way of doing education.

Much to LI’s shock and surprise, the liberal end of the blogosphere, this week, was in a conceding mood about ID. In a long post that seemed to bore our readers – and which we might inflict on them again in a eat your spinach kind of mood – we went over the absolute vacuum of scientific claims that is at the heart of ID. We didn’t defend evolutionary theory – the criticisms made by ID of aspects of evolutionary theory are paltry compared to the jostling it has gotten, internally, for one hundred fifty years, and none of the criticisms is theoretically interesting. ID has never gotten over the watch, nor ever explained where the watch factory is – and that is about all you can say for it, from Paley to Behe.

However, as Christian Conservatives scheme to stunt their children’s growth by teaching this fraud in schools, there’s been a liberal retreat from protecting kids from the fraud for ‘political’ reasons. This meme was started over at Nathan Newman’s blog. The cry was taking up by Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum, the Washington Monthly blogger, who wrote:

“If a school district decides not to teach biology at all, that's fine. But if they do teach it, they aren't allowed to include religious proselytizing in the curriculum.”

Ah, the iron pyrite glitters through a crack in the gold brick! The class bias here is as loud and ugly as managerial drunk at a company picnic. One doesn’t believe that Drum, or Yglesias, or Newman, will subject their own kids, when they have them, to the incompetence of ID science teaching, or the downright elimination of biology from the school curriculum. But of course, for the downtrodden, for poor yokels in Dover, PA, why bother? After all, their natural and appointed place is to act as the service class to an elite that did get educated. And isn’t liberalism wonderful?

We prefer the rancid and open bigotries of Joseph Breen to the supposed ‘tolerance’ of this bunch of dealers in the doped consciousness. We were happy to see a libertarian inclined economist, Steven Verdon, take this group to task.

In an experiment that would have certainly raised a hearty cheer on the Island of Laputa, a group of neuro-scientists took ten Republicans and ten Democrats and played them clips of Bush and Kerry last year. In the Independent, yesterday, one of the scientists, Joshua Freedman, summarized the results:

“In the eight months before the election, I was part of a group of political professionals and scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, who used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to scan the brains of 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats. We measured brain activity while subjects looked at political ads and the candidates' images. While viewing their own candidate, both Democrats and Republicans showed activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area associated with strong instinctive feelings of emotional connection. Viewing the opposing candidate, however, activated the anterior cingulate cortex, which indicates cognitive and emotional conflict. It also lighted up the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area that acts to suppress or shape emotional reactions. These patterns of brain activity, made visible on the fMRIs, suggest that both Bush and Kerry voters were mentally battling their attraction to the other side.”

For Freedman, this means that there is really a suppressed but real political middle ground. LI’s group of Nietzschian scientists, however, detect in this evidence for the deep servility of the American booboisie – the inability to resist any call to follow any leader seems to almost overwhelm the chemistry of the brains of those who’ve received a more thorough training in ‘doing it on the paper’ – signing contracts, signing the backs of credit cards, putting their little fingerprints down in utmost docility for driver’s licences, never questioning a best seller, a block buster, a top ten hit, a holy text, a slogan, a talk radio host, a speech, a banker, a boss, the structure of their language, a first impression, a dollar bill, or their own motives since that first cute little toilet seat they sat on and went bomb’s away to Mommy’s approval. A nation of swaddled infants with nuclear weapons, always ready for another children’s crusade -- as long as the children who are going to die have dark skin and live somewhere far away on the tv set.

Well, we did expect at least one inauguration story focusing on the one man who put Bush firmly on his throne in the last election – Osama Bin. However, there was no interview in the NYT. Odd, that. Being the head of a terrorist group that has, on occasion, acted as an impromptu Einsatzgruppe in the killing of Shi’ites (down memory hole is the pre-9/11 story of how Iran, a Shiite nation, fought against the Taleban and its ally Osama – now of course the news has to be about the unlikely alliance of the two, a disinformation meme which has had a much more successful launch than any of the U.S.’s other anti-Osama projects since Tora Bora). Osama must be pleased that the man who failed to dent his power (what other power has ever forced an American ally to back down – as, according to the Right, al qaeda did to Spain?) or fulfill his promise about killing or capturing him, the man whose outstanding inability to comprehend terrorism moved him to vacation heartily when the topic of Al Qaeda attack was gingerly broached in the merrie old tax cuttin’ days of 2001, is back for a second shot – aiming for those Iranian nuclear facilities while piously ignoring our ally Israel’s illegal nuclear build up. Another Shiite power targeted, and of course scored to the approving bandmusic of such notorious ‘liberal’ hawks as Tom Friedman, whose op ed piece on this inauguration day informs us, absurdly, of Bush’s popularity in Iran – flowers and sweets, anyone?

So, here is our suggestion for Bush’s inaugural speech theme: “Onward, children of the night.” It would underscore his administration’s one outstanding success in the past four years: hiring the undead. Descrimination against whom has been dealt a solid blow by the hiring and support given to Donald Rumsfeld and his Pentagon crew. Never let it be said that the GOP is against every minority!

I believe that economics is indeed essential for the study of a market system, but that it is a snare and a delusion for the study of the social order that this system serves. – Robert Heilbroner

When LI was in Malinalco, my friend, M., wanted to get some tomatoes and some underpants for her little boy. We walked around the cobbled streets. It was late afternoon. M. wanted to complete our task before the sun went down, because after dark, the pedestrian in Malinalco is prone to attack from the packs of dogs that suddenly seem to materialize out of the shadows. Residents have gates to shut after dark, so they can avoid unwanted canine intrusion.

To get the underwear, we went to a few shops. None of them had the kind M. was looking for. To get the tomatoes, we didn’t go to a shop. We went to the market.

Like every Mexican village, there are some streets in the center of town upon which, every day, venders pitch their stands. Some markets are elaborate, with vendors of Barbie dolls, sunglasses, hats, and computer games pitched next to vendors of cucumbers, watermelons, corn, and tacos. Some are less elaborate. An economist, looking at these structures, might well see materialization of the purest form of market – the one to one relationship between vendor and consumer is such that prices actually reflect real dickering, supply and demand in action.

However, since Karl Polyani’s day, economists have seen something else. A recent issue of Social Research was dedicated to Robert Heilbroner, the economist who died last week. There is a nice article by Robert Dimand that compares Heilbroner’s conviction that the key to economic history is not the neo-classical market with Karl Polyani’s notion that capitalism can only be understood in the context of its managed overthrow of pre-capitalist exchange systems.

Here are the opening grafs of Dimand’s article:

IN THE OPENING PARAGRAPH OF HIS INTRODUCTION TO A COLLECTION OF debates among Marxist historians and economists over The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism that were initiated by Dobb (1946), Rodney Hilton (1976: 9) recalled that Karl Polanyi (1948) "thought that Dobb had retained from Marx what was bad (the labour theory of value) whilst discarding what he, Polanyi, thought was Marx's "fundamental insight into the historically limited nature of market organisation.'" Beyond condescending praise of Polanyi's review for "a serious attitude to the problems of a Marxist analysis" and passing mention in the next paragraph that R. H. Tawney's review of Dobb "did not raise any of the general theoretical problems which Polanyi hinted at," Hilton (and the other contributors reprinted in the volume) proceeded to ignore Polanyi's challenge as thoroughly as any mainstream neoclassical economist could have done.

In contrast, Robert Heilbroner shared the fundamental insight that Polanyi derived from Marx, and brought it to the attention of millions of readers. Over four decades and in 11 editions of The Making of Economic Society, Heilbroner examined the replacement of socially embedded provisioning by the market as a means of organizing society and production during the Industrial Revolution, while in seven editions of The World Philosophers that spanned nearly half a century he explored the accompanying changes in how economists thought about the economy. In his vision both of how the economy had changed and how economic thought had interacted with these changes, Heilbroner stood shoulder to shoulder with Polanyi.”

One of the things philosophers have learned from Freud and Heidegger is that forgetting is a manufactured act. It is one the things that liberal philosophers can’t forgive in Freud and Heidegger. There were two, overlapping forgettings that constituted the ideological foundation of the Cold War in the American sphere. One was the forgetting of how this “replacement of socially embedded provisioning by the market as a means of organizing society and production during the Industrial Revolution” took place. This forgetting foreclosed on both the ravages of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America, and the cost of producing free market economies in the colonial sphere. The terror famines that occurred in Ireland and India under British rule, for instance, were dropped as a subject of discussion, or – in the case of Ireland – sentimentalized. It took Mike Davis’ book, The Victorian Holocaust, to revive interest in a series of famines that, at the turn of the century (circa 1900) in England, were well known to any educated English socialist.

The other great forgetting was about the wars that bubbled up in the capitalist world, finally ending in World War I. In fact, the whole history of the Russian Revolution was systematically distorted by cutting out the crucial facts of the war on the Eastern front – the senseless slaughter of up to two million Russians. Given the shadow of that fact, the bitter Civil War between the Red and White forces could no longer be told as a morality tale in which bad Reds killed wonderfully royalist Whites. Nor could one construct the nice myth of Lenin as the father of the Gulag with quite the straightforward indignation required, if one asks about the capitalist forces in Britain and Germany and France that authored a war that decimated 8 million people. That this slaughter was crowned, in hindsight, as a war in defense of democracy -- when, of course, it was a war in defense of a particular power arrangement among capitalist states, the governing classes of which were agreed on the necessity of perpetuating white power -- was a grim joke.

Polyani and Heilbroner, however, were exceptions to the Cold War rule. They would notice, about those markets, the use of public space – and often the use of ‘borrowed’ electricity. They would notice that the margins of profit were not derived from the rational bickering between seller and consumer – but often on quite seemingly irrational prejudices on both sides that indicate different regimes of values. They would note the tie between adults and children as laborers, and they would not homogenize them indiscriminately into a quantifiable labor unit – because this quantification would lead to predictive distortions when trying to analyze the reproduction of the labor system embodied in these markets. They would question the gauge of efficiency in the role of these markets – something M. and I discovered in our odyssey in search of underwear, here.

These issues were Heilbroner’s specialty. In the same issue of Social Research there is an exemplary Heilbroner piece, Economics as Universal Science, which quietly mocks those who, like Gary Becker or certain members of the Chicago School, claim that economics can act as the master-science for studying human behavior (plus, of course, a thrilling dose of sociobiology).

Heilbroner starts off by asking where we locate economies, if they have such modeling force in telling us about human behavior. His own premise goes like this:

“I shall undertake this task by starting from the premise that the continuity of society requires structured ways of assuring social order. These ways range from the routines and habits of daily life to formal institutions of law and order. In referring to this spectrum I shall use the term "sociological" as a portmanteau term that covers the order-bestowing influences of private life, of which incomparably the most important are the pressures of socialization exerted by parents on their offspring--pressures that teach children how to fulfill the roles expected of them in adult life. The second term, "political," I use in the conventional sense of the institutional means by which some group or class within society can enforce its will over other groups or classes. The definition of these terms is less important than my intention to describe a protective canopy of behavior-shaping arrangements, part informal and private, part formal and public, that protects the community from actions that would threaten its continued existence.

“Both the sociological and political elements in this canopy are fundamentally concerned with an aspect of social order and coherence that is usually referred to only obliquely. This aspect is the general state of obedience or acquiescence without which the armature of rights and privileges that defines any social order could be retained only by force and overt repression. With his customary candor, Adam Smith called this necessary aspect of society "subordination": "Civil government," he wrote, "suppose[s] a certain subordination." We shall return many times to this theme, but the challenge it raises should now be clear. It is the disconcerting idea that economics is socialization or
subordination in disguise.”

Heilbroner sees, however, that the ‘imperial” economist, as he calls him, can give two responses to the placement of the socius at the center of society. One is that the socius is actually a network of decisions, and hence of choices. Economics is the science that is going to rationalize that hodge-podge of choices by gauging it according to an optimal model that follows a simple rule: all choices are motivated by the perception of an advantage. It doesn’t matter if the perception is wrong, or distorted, or ignores long term advantages, etc. What matters is the logic of advantage.

The other answer, Heilbroner thinks, is to make economics the study of the division of labor that lies at the heart of the social order. Thus, subordination can again be wrapped into economics.

Heilbroner’s consideration of these options in the light of what Polyani calls the Great Transformation – the emergence of an international, hegemonic capitalist system in the last two hundred some years – is more insightful than the guff one usually gets from economists. Here are two more grafs to chew on:

"Economics thereby takes the economic system to be the living model of capitalism, containing within its categories and conceptions everything that is essential for its comprehension. It is here that economics betrays its fatal limitations as a universal science, and its knavish consequences as an imperial doctrine.

"The first such consequence is that economics itself appears as a neutral rather than a charged explanation system for capitalism. This becomes apparent in many ways. A term of great importance such as "efficiency," for example, is regarded as a quasi-engineering criterion, rather than one whose unspoken purpose is to maximize production as a profit-making--not a purely engineering--endeavor. Similar unnoticed sociopolitical meanings cling to other such terms, including "production" itself, which is counted in the national income accounts only insofar as it results in commodities, not use-values. In much the same fashion, the fundamental unit of the economic system is taken to be the rational maximizing "individual." The economic system is thus conceived as a society of hermits, not as an order of groups and classes.

"This concealment of a social order is most clearly evidenced when we notice the manner in which economics rationalizes functional income distribution. Marx wrote scathingly of Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, each entitled to receive a reward for the contributions each has made to the social product, but modern economics has forgotten the fetishisms that Marx exposed. Of even greater importance, it has no explanation for, or interest in, the curious fact that the reward paid as net profit, which goes only to owners of capital, gives them only a "residual" claim on output, after all factors, including capital, have been paid their marginal products. In view of the repeated demonstrations of economics that the tendency of the market system is to eliminate such residuals as mere transient imperfections of the system, one must be a sociologist or political theorist to explain why owners of capital seem so eager to protect these dubious claims. Thus the manner in which the market supports the class structure of capitalism is a matter before which economics is silent--indeed, a matter of which it is, in some sense, unaware."

LI is feeling a little under the weather today. We do recommend the interview with Anatol Lieven over at Asiasource today. It seems to have occured while LI was in Mexico, but it is still strongly pertinent, especially given the news the Hersh article is making.

Lieven has a theory about the crosscurrents of American nationalism which he unfolds in his recent book, and reproduces in the interview. The theory isn’t complicated – in American nationalism, the messianic democratizing gene is at odds with the messianic xenophobic gene – and he doesn’t question enough what ‘democratizing’ means – thus letting a word that, properly, should refer to a form of governance continue to hold its fatal submeaning, given to it through the cold war and into the Bush era, of a ‘free enterprise’ form of political economy.

Here’s a coupla grafs:

“But one of the striking and tragic things about the debate leading up to the Iraq war - although one can hardly call it a "debate" - was that the vast majority of it, outside certain relatively small left-wing journals, was conducted with almost no reference to the genesis of the Vietnam war, the debates which took place then, and the insights which were generated about aspects of the American tradition. Instead of analyzing what it was about their own system which was pulling them in the direction of war with Iraq, too many members of the American elite, including leading Democrats as well as Republicans, talked only about the Iraqi side.
Even that, of course, they got completely wrong, but they did not even once ask the obvious question: "What is it about our system that may make this a disaster?" After all is this not a general pattern of American behavior in the whole world by now? This business of a Green Zone in Baghdad, American officials bunkered down behind high-protective walls, with no contact with Iraqis, is this not part of a larger trend? Yet somehow it was assumed that in the case of Iraq it would be different, that America would go in, be welcomed with open arms, quickly reshape Iraq in accordance with American norms, and then quickly leave again. “
And – to give Lieven his due – he does criticize Bush’s ‘democracy” slogan somewhat:
“When they [19th century imperialists] did talk of bringing democracy, they only did in the context of the far future, something that might come about after several generations; in Africa, they talked about a thousand years of British or French rule eventually leading to self-government and democracy. In other words, they were absolutely clear and logical. These countries would need a long period, centuries literally, of Western authoritarian, imperial rule before they would be capable of self-government, constitutional rule, democracy and so forth. Indeed to an extent this was the way that it actually worked out: the British had ruled India or parts of India for 150 years before they introduced the first very limited local, district elections with fairly circumscribed powers and a franchise of less than 0.5 per cent of the population. They started doing that only from the 1880s on. They and the other liberal imperialists had a policy of what one might call authoritarian progress, not of democratization.

“Now, of course, it is completely different. The liberal imperialists of today, because of the completely different ideological era in which we are living, have to say that what they are bringing is democracy. So they conquer a place and then within a year or two, they have to hold elections, they have to claim to be introducing free government and so forth. That is just, once again, absolutely, manifestly contradictory. There would have been nothing contradictory in the 19th century about imposing Ahmed Chalabi on Iraq; the British and French did that kind of thing again and again. They had some client ruler, some dissident prince or whatever, whom they wanted to make emir of Afghanistan or of somewhere in Africa, and they just marched in and imposed him. People may have criticized it, but there was no suggestion that this was incompatible with what they were setting out to do. Of course, if you say that you are bringing democracy, if you preach about democracy, if you say your whole moral position is based on democracy, and then you impose a puppet leader, then frankly you look not just hypocritical but ridiculous, which is essentially how the US appears in much of the Muslim world.”