Yes, it is war

The headline of Le parisien saddens me: cette fois, c’est la guerre. It saddens me because it implies that France has not been at war. While, in fact, you cannot bomb territories and your foreign minister cannot keep saying we are at war with DAECH or ISIS without being at war. This is what war looks like.

You can be for the war or against the war, but it has been war for a while, indisputably. As so often , the wars have been  fought according to the old presumption of colonial war: the front is over there in the distance. But this simply isn’t true any more.   Drone some Yemen wedding, bomb Isis, but don’t think that the forces who’ve been armed to the max by the worldwide flow of arms – none of which are of Middle eastern manufacture - are powerless to respond on your home territory.  This isn’t about moral equivalency, it is simply about the way wars are fought.  The irresponsibility of populations who finance huge war machines and let their presidents play with them, play with military forces that are not longer even drafted, leads to an indifference that will blow up in our faces as we dine at a café

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I truly, naively believe that if populations connected to the elites that have monopolized and made foreign policy irresponsive to the popular will – if, in fact, the popular will was sending its sons and daughters into the military, and sacrificing their lifestyles to war – there would be less hobby wars. Wars that are the hobby of this or that engaged group.

This time is, really, only the successor of a long time in which war has been going on. So wealthy is France, or any of the developed countries, that wars have become things waged in the peripheral vision. But this is the path that leads to an uncontrollable influx of armed men from those distant theaters, or trained there, into the major metropoles to kill as many people as possible.

the myths of the labor "market"

 John Quiggin, the Australian economist, haswritten a post about the business cycle over at Crooked Timber, and in it herings my chimes – or he makes me mount on my hobbyhorse, to use an older cliché.Specifically, he defines recessions in terms of unemployment, mostly, which I think is a good thing – but he defines employment, implicitly, in terms of a labour market analysis, which is a normal thing, but I think is fundamentally misleading. In a footnote, this is how he defines full employment:

“Full employment doesn’t mean zero unemployment, since some people are always changing jobs, or are in the process of leaving the labor market. Roughly speaking, the employment is at full employment in the sense required here when any additional job creation in one sector of the economy is feasible only by attracting workers away from other sectors.”

Implicitly, what is happening here is a vision of laborers as sovereign consumers in a market place, chosing this or that place to work. Or, in times of lesser employment, consumers without the full freedoms that endow the sovereign consumer. Of course, at the same time, these choosers are also vendors. The neo-classical model allows for this double aspect, but doesn’t ask any questions about it that would lead to some nasty dialectical thinking. That way lies madness and Marxism!

Myself, though, I think that this is a way of looking at the labor force that dissolves extremely pertinent sociological and economic distinctions. For instance, we know that around 30 percent of American workers – to stick with America – work in credentialed, or guild like, professions. Not just doctors and lawyers, but accountants, nurses, plumbers and air conditioning men – given this fact, it does seem like the definition of full employment here is, to say the least, not comprehensive.

Interestingly, when the “market” was first being conceptualized, in the 18^th century, it was conceptualized as a ‘natural’ phenomenon against an artificial phenomenon – state sponsored or regulated activity. There is a famous and defining text, Turgot’s entry in the Encyclopedie on the Foire, or fair, that provides an exemplary instance of a discourse we have all become familiar with, in which the workings of the market are ‘distorted’ or “interfered with” by non-market, and hence, vicious, factors. Turgot used this distinction to analyse fairs as opposed to markets:

“Fair and a marketare therefore both a gathering of merchants and customers at a set time andplace. But in the case of markets the merchants and buyers are brought together by the mutual interest they have in seeking each other, while in the case of fairs it is the desire to enjoy certain privileges — from which it follows that this gathering is inevitably much more numerous and solemn at fairs. Although the natural course of commerce is sufficient to establish markets, as a result of the unfortunate principle which in nearly all governments has infected the administration of commerce — I mean, the mania of directing all, regulating all, and of never relying on the self-interest of man — it has happened, in order to establish markets, that the police1 has been made to interfere; that the number of markets has been limited on the pretext of preventing them from becoming harmful to each other; that the sale of certain goods has been prohibited except at certain appointed places, either for the convenience of the clerks charged with receiving the duty with which they are burdened, or because the goods were required to be subjected to the formalities of testing and marking…”

Given Turgot’s definition, one should speak, then, of the labor “market” as, actually, a hybrid of a market and a fair, for certainly many, if not most of those jobs we associate with the upper middle class are fair-like in their composition.

But there is more to the picture than that. I think Quiggens might be more aware than most economists that governments also employ people. But still, it seems to me that he underestimates  employment by the state. In other words, full employment is supposed to be something sustained by private enterprise in which the state plays only a marketmaker role, by using its powers to tax, borrow, and raise and lower interest rates to create optimum conditions of demand in the private sector.. But – to use the US as an example – full employment in the sense of the private sector absorbing all but a small portion of the working population has never been the case since the great depression. Since WWII, the government has gone from employing about 13 percent of the workforce to close to 17 percent. In 2009, for instance, according to the Bureau of Labor, there are around 22 million Americans employed by local, state and federal governments.

This means, at first glance, that the private sector employs on average about 82-84 percent of the work force. In actuality, given a very rough average of unemployment of 5 percent, which is really generous, the private sector ends up employing closer to 78 to 80 percent of the work force.

You can look elsewhere in the developed world and find similar statistics. The OECD has published a comparison across countries of the percentage of the work force employed in the public sector. The scandinavian countries rank high – in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, over 30 percent of the workforce works in the public sector. The UK is 21.5 percent in 2015. In Australia, the public sector grew in the past four years – an exception to the OECD norm – to 18.9 percent of the employed population.

So the first thing one can safely say about full employment, even before brandishing the market metaphor,  is that under modern capitalism, it doesn’t ever happen if we rely solely on the private sector. In a sense, the unemployed mass of the Great Depression was dissolved into the state, and has remained there ever since.

sick humor, State department style

I think Americans who have some moral sense should be outraged at the American foreign policy that has supported a civil war in Syria based on the premise that Assad is a dictator who slaughters civilians while providing logistical support for Saudi Arabia as it bombs and starves civilians in Yemen. As this article shows, it is a joke, officially supported by the Obama State department, that the Saudis are fighting for democracy in Yemen. Although this is a joke that is so sickening that even the State Department doesn't push too hard on this line. They did, of course, congratulate the Saudis when they were elevated, in another of those sick jokes, to the head of the UN Human Rights commission. An endless line of sick humor, death and destruction - there you have the Clinton-Bush-Obama Middle Eastern policy in a nutshell.

the view from 1968: the moral and practical problem of encouraging police to shoot to kill

In 1968, Ramsey Clark, at that time the Attorney General, made a speech in response to Mayor Daley’s remark, about rioters in Chicago, that the police should shoot to kill looters. The speech is relevant now, when the head of the FBI and the DEA have expressed support for police responding immediately and lethally in situations that would formerly have been handled with the finesse police should be trained in. Oh, they didn’t express that support directly – the FBI head and the DEA head were sneakier than that, saying that the emphasis on police killings was contributing to a rise in crime.

Here’s a graf from Clark’s speech.

“A reverence for life is the sure way of reducing violent death. There are few acts more likely to cause guerilla warfare in our cities and division and hatred among our people than to encourage police to shoot looters or other persons caught committing property crimes. How many dead twelve year old boys will it take for us to learn this simple lesson?”

Thousands, it turns out, and we still haven’t learned it. The police poobahs think they are making their case by showing how shooting at the police has increased dramatically; what they are really showing is that police methods which visit lethal injuries on numbers of people who have done little or nothing more than crossed a lane without turning on a signal or the like produce an atmosphere where the cops become the target themselves. 

the mythological struggle between the hard and the soft

Ideology deals with concepts like power and order. Mythology deals with percepts, like the hard and the soft. Of course, the story is more complicated than that.  They are a duality, and like many dualities, they love to dress up in each other’s clothes. Ideological concepts disguise themselves in percepts, and mythology’s percepts disguise themselves as arguments.

I’ve just read a fantastically detailed biography of Wyndham Lewis. By the end of it, the reader will have a good sense of Lewis’s bank account balance, year by year. And yet, the reader won’t know why Lewis painted the way he did, thought the way he did, or wrote the way he did.

After Lewis’s death, many critics, following Hugh Kenner’s lead, swallowed Lewis’s version of modernism. It was a modernism that kicked out the Bloomsbury group, and in particular Virginia Woolf. It is as if they caught Lewis’s allergy to Woolf . Now, Woolf, it seems to me, was a much greater artist than Lewis, and her novels can’t be kicked to the curve as somehow not in the modernist spirit – on the contrary, they are modernist in the most cosmopolitan sense. They link up to Bely, to Joyce, and to Faulkner in the genius with which they slant plot, character, description, and the event of reading itself.

Nevertheless, Lewis is a fascinating writer. I’ve never been able to finish Apes of God, with its impossible mannerism, or Self Condemned, with its rather mysterious gloom, So I’ve decided to repair this by reading Tarr. Tarr is the essential Lewis book, where the material that became The Art of Being Ruled or Time and the Western Man is put to the test of being lived – that is, of being contested. Walter Allen, in an essay on Lewis, made the suggestion that Lewis wrote in the tradition of the Victorian sage – Carlyle, Ruskin, etc. What distinguishes the sage, Allen says, quoting  John Holloway on Carlyle, is a rather disquieting feature:

“One of the things that most disturbs a modern reader of his work is constant dogmatism. Through Carlyle’s work the nerve of proof – in the redily understood and familiar sense of straightforward argument – simply cannot be traced; and the sucession of arbitrary and unproved assertions tends to forfeit our attention. Yet this is only a subordinate difficulty, because although proof is clearly missing it is by no means clear  what would supply this lack, as it is by no means clear what needs proof. The general principles which would summarize Carlyle’s ‘system’ are broad and sweeping gestures, hints thrown out, suggestions which leave us quite uncertain about their detailed import. And what is clearly true of his work is also true of the others. “

It is the lack of proof – which I would interpret as an indissoluble overlapping of the mythological and ideological levels of the text - that makes Lewis’s politics difficult. He obviously flirts with fascism, but he is not a party member like Pound. Rather, I feel his fascism is expressed in his mythology, in which the hard struggles against the soft. The soft, for Lewis, is always disgusting, whereas the hard is always an admirable achievement. In a way, this mirrors the way, in the 21^st century, the American establishment mythologizes. Toughness is always good, weakness is always bad. America’s horrendous foreign policy is based on this seemingly infantile binary – in fact, one could say that the foreign policy, tout court, is a case of homosexual panic. Uncle Sam must always present his butch side to the world.

In artistic terms, Lewis’s flight from the soft is what connects his entire career as a polemicist, satirist, painter, and novelist.  He associated the hard with vision. In a sort of primitive physicalism, the eye becomes a projector of rays – not the soft receiver that it actually is and has to be. What is truly seen is truly seen in hard lines.  The fetish of the hard is the fetish of the machine, which, in Lewis’s mythology, is never oiled, never uses weakness, the spring, the buffer, the tampon, but is always in a maximum state of hardness.  Such machinery is so strong, in fact, that it is always in peril of crashing. It can’t last. It is a machine that is built not to function, but to express the mythological state  of hardness.

to the GOP candidates: let's show some love to Carson today!

I don't see what is wrong with this. Carson is no different from all the rest of the GOP candidates. He turned down a scholarship to west point in his head. Rubio was a poor boy who climbed the social ladder through entrepreneurship and pluck in his head. Fiorina, in her head, saw bodysnatchers using their alien vehicle, Planned Parenthood, to make soup out of fetuses, And Trump has dreamt up a whole country named the USA which ranks, militarily and economically, with Albania, but, after a quick fixer upper, will rank with alexander the great's empire, and the Roman one too, In the most classical sense, the Republicans are running as idealists. I'm hoping they will show some love to Carson, who is just being attacked by the liberal press, After all. It isn't a lie if you can believe it just before going to sleep!

Dexter Filkens very poor, sham defense of Chalabi.

In the New Yorker, the old interventionist fellow traveler, Dexter Filkins, performs a pretty worn out magic trick, exonerating Chalabi for the lies and propaganda he spread in Iraq, and leaving the man's career at that. 

Of course, Chalabi was no seducer of innocents. The Bush administration was crowded with chickenhawks, anxious to "liberate" Iraq, reap a bountiful political score in the US, and Chili-ize the occupied country in the best shock doctrine fashion. Of course, they were afraid to risk the political capital that would come from really occupying the country, and they could hide behind Rumsfeld's screwy military science which told him that you could pacify Iraq with about five hundred thousand less soldiers than it would actually take to even begin. No Vietnams please, we are chickenhawks was the motto.
However, by trotting out the usual I interviewed Chalabi nonsense, and focusing all attention on the run up to the war, Filkins conveniently forgets Chalabis role in the occupation in 2003. Here, Chalabi was key. Because he was one of the main players to press for de-Baathification, which was realized by Paul Bremer's decision to unilaterally disband the army and ban Ba'athists from state positions. In one stroke, Iraq lost its governance. Imagine having half a million too few soldiers to actually continue the civic and social life of a territory and then stripping out the government that had served that territory for the last thirty years.
Sadly, Filkins, a terrible war correspondent, was chosen by the New Yorker as their man in the Middle East. This isn't surprising - Remnick, after all, published the wild tales of the 9.11 - Saddam Hussein connection, as designed by Jeffrey Goldberg, to turn up the pro-war heat back in the day. But I think that the readership of the New Yorker is probably much out of synch with the pap being fed it by such as Filkins.
For the story of Chalabi and the occupiers, a much better source is Aram Rosten's biography of Chalabi. Here, I'll quote from the pages devoted to Bremer's de-Ba'athification edicts.

As much as L. Paul Bremer and Ahmad Chalabi would come to
hate and despise each other, Bremer, who replaced Jay Garner as
America’s overseer in Iraq, danced unwittingly to Chalabi’s tune when
he issued the de-Baathification order on May 16, 2003. He carried out
Chalabi’s policy, although, he explained later, it was merely adapted
from a law handed to him directly by Doug Feith.

And then Bremer quickly installed Ahmad Chalabi as the head of
the commission to “de-Baathify” Iraq. On the top floor of the Iraqi
government building, in the Green Zone, Chalabi entrenched his De-
Baathification Commission, which assumed the aura and reputation
of an Inquisition. “They had tons of money,” explained one Iraqi involved
with the commission. “Their fortunes have risen and fallen
many times, but when they were first created, they were a much-feared
organization that occupied one of the floors of the building the government
used.And I know people quaked even going there. If your file
entered there, God knows what they would do to you.”

Chalabi had the extraordinary power now to end anyone’s employment,
strip away his pension even, leave him destitute. If Chalabi chose
to paint someone as a leading Baathist, that would mean his prospects of
government employment were over.And of course it left him open to arrest
by the Americans, who barely monitored the committee’s methods.

It was immediately clear to anyone who cared to know that not all
Baathists had blood on their hands and that patriotic Iraqis were being
pushed out of their jobs and turned into beggars because of the
process led by Chalabi. “It was like ‘de-Sunnification,’” said one diplomat.
The most competent administrators, who had been forced to be
Baath Party members, were banned from working in government
jobs. “De-Baathification appears to have gone some way toward dismantling
a state that had been left largely intact by the unexpectedly
swift war,” as The Economist put it."

As I wrote constantly at the time, you cannot separate the run up to the war and the occupation. To do so gives one an absurd picture of what went on - a picture that gives cover to incompetents, criminals, and, by no accident, their abettors in the press.
So why does Dexter Filkins still have a career explaining Iraq?