Here‘s Nir Rosen interviewed on Democracy Now! about the allover situation in Iraq today. Also his Rolling Stone article, “The Myth of the Surge.”
Rahul Mahajan’s blog has a good one on the surge as well. (No permalink so scroll down to the April 7 entry.)
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So Some Communists Do Naughty Things
Apologists for capitalism—I’m thinking of the authors of The Black Book of Communism—like to advertise the superior human rights records of capitalist countries over those of the “really existing” socialisms.1 The idea is that this says something bad about socialism (relative to capitalism, at least).
But the record by itself cannot do this. One must go on to specify the mechanism inherent within socialism which discourages concern for human rights, or fosters abuses. Only this could tell us that the poor moral performance of these countries has something to do with the character of their economic systems, and not some other, “incidental” factor(s). For, yes, these countries were, at least on someone’s definition, “socialist”; but they were other things as well: scarce in material resources, victims of the active hostility of major powers, and lacking in a long tradition of political liberalism. Above all, they bore the memory and habits of a history of political despotism long, long predating socialism.
In this way, every entity, including “communist countries,” is a tangle of various properties. Any observer can go about, hirdy-girdy, pointing these features out; this does not amount to a causal explanation of the entity’s behavior. It does not tell us, that is, just which of these properties is “at fault.”
In other words, saying that communists hurt people is not to say that “communism” hurts people—any more than that some cooks or Methodists hurt people shows that “cookery” or “Methodism” is the culprit.
An Open Question
Strictly speaking, an economic system is one thing, and a political system, another. There is no reason why deprivatizing control of production should magically generate a benign politics. In theory capitalism and socialism are each compatible with a whole range of political colorations—from despotism to a very direct democracy. These characters are determined, in the end, by the will and ability of citizens to work for them, and to resist their opposites. They don’t flow automatically from some socialist or capitalist “essence.”
A Twist On the Argument: Individual Rights and the Development of Capitalism
But if communism is not predisposed to disregard rights, then perhaps capitalism is predisposed to respect them. Indeed, the English Civil Wars marked the beginning of talk of and care for what we might call “individual rights,” as well as a fair starting point for the emergence of capitalist production. Certainly, capitalism and the conceptual architecture of rights spread apace throughout Western Europe and North America, the former probably the vehicle for the latter.
So there is clearly a correlation, and perhaps even a natural enough “fit,” between the two. But this cannot substitute for an argument showing that capitalism needed the concept of individual rights, or that rights could never have developed in the absence of capitalism. But let us assume this (generously) for the sake of argument.
If capitalism somehow “selected for” or otherwise caused the development of concern for rights, it would be poor logic to conclude much in capitalism’s favor from this fact alone. For if capitalism needs rights, it hardly follows that rights need capitalism. It doesn’t even follow that capitalism is the system most effective at meeting or securing the things people have a right to. It is quite possible that concern for rights cannot be fully met under the very capitalism that created it—even that it can be met only some type of socialism.
Capitalism and Rights: Intimately Connected, But Not In A Way Pro-Capitalists Should Like To Admit
But things may be worse for capitalism still. Consider first all the examples of “good” things that are nonetheless indices of very “bad” ones: A father’s tenderness toward his children may spring from the death of their mother–perhaps it would never have developed otherwise. Lauding the newfound tenderness does not oblige us to celebrate its tragic cause. Second, consider those items that gain all of their value from being stopgaps against, or remedies for, otherwise “bad” ones: One might treasure a favorite bar as a “haven” away from loneliness and meaningless toil; more concretely, one is glad to have a strong metal door when it is all that separates her from a violent and uncertain outside. We can celebrate security doors and havens, sure enough. And certainly, havens and security measures would not have developed apart from those threats we need haven and security against. But those threats are not made good simply for causing their remedies.
To complete the analogy: It is difficult for we contemporary persons, trained to “naturally” see human labor as a commodity, like bricks or tea, to appreciate how alien this notion appeared at the dawn of capitalist social relations. This was compounded by a related idea: Under capitalism, there is a domain of human activity over which the State does not exercise very direct power—what Hegel called “civil society.” This domain includes family life, the arts, and work. It is the place where the most fundamental human desires and aspirations are dispatched and, hopefully, fulfilled. At the same time, where the dictates of the State leave off, the dictates of capital accumulation take over. This is the fundamental organizing principle of civil society to the extent that no activity or interest is permitted which does not facilitate (or at least permit) the imperative of capitalist growth. Human needs and aspirations are subordinate to this overarching imperative. (If humans stopped needing and aspiring to things, or needed things contrary to the interests of capital, capital would still need to expand itself—lest the whole system, civil society in tow, collapse into crisis.)
The new idea that human persons, as bearers of labor power, are fundamentally mere means to an end outside themselves, versus (in Kant’s terms) “ends-unto-themselves,” further blurred the line between people and objects; the threat to human dignity was evident. A philosophical justification was required, and the concept of rights provided it: The most fundamental rights—the “inalienable” ones of which our Constitution speaks—carve off an area of human activity into which the mandates of capital accumulation may not encroach.
(That there should be rights was not merely a conclusion from theoretical principles. They were inspired by the more egregious acts of violence and dislocation attending the birth of capitalism—which came, in Marx’s words, “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” It wasn’t a smooth and pretty process, for example, to separate self-sufficient peasants from the lands on which they long lived and farmed, and implore them to work in someone else’s factory, built on the site.)
Conclusion
Rights provide checks against the nasty consequences of capitalism. They correct what results when an organizing principle is made of of the view that humans are chiefly valuable for what can be got out of them. Rights are premised on the expectation that the system in its “natural” state ever-threatens to produce these. It is precisely because capitalism will not generate these protections on its own that they must be stuck on from outside.
In this way, capitalism enhances rights to just the extent that cancer “enhances” chemotherapy. The connection is real, but scores no “moral points” for the pro-capitalist.
* * *
Notes
1 I’m using the terms “socialism” and “communism” interchangeably here.
Appendix
(1) It is far from clear that capitalism has a better human rights record than “actual socialism” anyhow. For example, millions of deaths from the AIDS epidemic in South Africa—where maybe a quarter of the population is infected—are directly attributable to capitalist competition: In 1997 the South African government passed a law permitting compulsory licensing of the AIDS cocktail produced by American pharmaceutical companies. (Compulsory licensing is a legal, commonly used practice allowing local companies to produce medications under patent by a foreign company. It is “compulsory” because the patent-holder does not have to consent, but they must be compensated with a licensing fee.) The law also allowed South Africa to purchase the drugs second-hand from countries who have already obtained them from the patent-holder at a lower-than-market cost.
These measures were the only way to make the pricey cocktail available to poor “third-worlders.” 39 pharmaceutical companies sued South Africa via TRIPS to force a repeal of the law. Then-VP Al Gore (yeah, fuck ‘im), pressured by the pharm lobby, threatened international sanctions if they didn’t comply. Eventually, world outcry forced Gore and the pharmaceuticals to renege, but not until a four-year holdup in the courts. (This speaks nothing of the deaths that came before 1997 all over Africa due to the high prices.)
In any case, there is a French-language Black Book of Capitalism in which the authors, using a methodology parallel to that of their “…Communism” counterparts, gauge the deaths of capitalism (due to imperial conquest, counter-socialist-revolutionary war, colonial repression, etc.) at 157 million—60 million more than those alleged by the authors of “….Communism.” (Again, nothing important follows from this comparison, but if it did….)
(2) Nor is it clear that “really existing socialist” countries, however they performed, were socialist. ‘A’ socialism requires a more-or-less socialist world: If we define socialism by the presence of socialist property relations, then a “socialist” country enmeshed in an international network of capitalist property relations in a sense still “has” capitalist property relations, thus is capitalist. These relations are “theirs” to the extent they must negotiate with them and are internally affected by them.
(3) Rights themselves are a specious concept. There is, frankly, no good theory yet adduced grounding the existence of “natural” rights. We can write laws that say you may not kill somebody, but this does not reflect any “right not to be killed” predating and standing apart from this. But this just furthers our point: If we like “rights,” we can artificially graft them onto socialism just as well as they were, in fact, artificially grafted onto capitalism. And while we’re at it, we are free to graft some rights that capitalism hasn’t seen fit to generate—like, as in Cuba, a right to a home, and the arts.
From the April 1 democracynow.org headlines:
“Wired.com has uncovered a 2006 study written for the US Special Operations Command that suggests the military should clandestinely recruit or hire prominent bloggers. The report stated, ‘Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering.’ The report also suggested the Pentagon hack blogs that promote messages that are antithetical to US interests. The report went on to say, ‘Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience.’”
(Wired article here.)
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I’ve always felt that “cool”—as an antonym of “square”—has an ethical dimension. Being square has moral implications; sometimes being square is a way of being wrong. This forms part of my growing opposition to DUI laws. Left types not only support these laws, in the sense of hardly ever including them in civil libertarian talk, but many oppose “driving drunk” on principle, legal or not.
Until recently my own view has been the following: Drunk (or rather “impaired”—as nobody is really “drunk” with .08 blood alcohol) driving marginally increases the likelihood of an accident when measured against some ideal “driving state of mind.” One problem with this is that the marginal increase in risk is, to me, trumped by the negative consequences of DUI legislation: the associated fines, jail time, and social stigmatization, and the decrease in quality of life for the many that depend socially on “impaired” driving.
Another problem is that no ideal “driving state of mind” is quite definable. For example, the presence of trees along a highway poses some degree of distraction from the road and thus “impairment.” All instances of driving are constantly fraught with various, crisscrossing “impairments.” Of course, impairments like distraction, fatigue, preoccupation, etc., are not measurable in the way blood alcohol content (BAC) is. But this compares apples to oranges, as the (alleged) impairment associated with BAC (or with certain BAC counts) is not measurable either.
These considerations led me to an argument; in brief:
(1) We can’t measure the state of mind, “alcohol-related impairment,” but rather only the damage to property or persons caused by impaired drivers. (Or better, we can’t measure the impairment but we can prosecute the damages perfectly well without needing them to be measured.)
(2) However, we can’t effectively “read back” the impairment from the damages: A drunk driver could still get into an accident due to slick roads, or mulling over a bad day at work, or any other reason aside from the alcohol. That is, we can’t really determine whether the accident is the effect of alcohol or of some other kind of impairment—or something else altogether. We cannot use the accident to infer alcohol-related impairment causally.
(3) If we can never assume that alcohol-related impairment had something to do with an accident, it would be unfair to prosecute drunk drivers based on this assumption. Far less could we use the experience of drunk drivers we have already prosecuted on this basis to prosecute other drunk drivers on the assumption that this impairment lends significant risk of their future accidents. (That is, if we can’t infer the impairment from an accident, we sure as hell can’t infer it apart from any accident.)
(4) Even if we could prosecute alcohol-related impairment based on its “effects,” consistency would demand that we prosecute all types of impairment based on their (supposed) effects. (Again, supposing we could actually read these impairments off of the damages caused by persons under their influence—which we can’t). All things being equal, criminalizing one type of impairment requires we criminalize them all.
(5) The only (consistent) alternative is to decriminalize all of these impairments, including alcohol-related impairment; also, to decriminalize—that is, to prosecute no more than civilly1—all driving-related damages.
This is a very preliminary argument—an argument sketch, really. It maintains “all things being equal,” and things may not be equal. (One qualification is added in the Appendix below.)
But thankfully, you don’t have to accept this analysis to oppose DUI legislation. For, like laws associated with the “War on Drugs,” DUI laws don’t actually do anything to measurably hinder drunk driving. If that is the goal, then, all of those prosecutions and all of the considerable pain and hassle associated with them are for nothing. Since it is wrong to cause pain for no reason, it follows that we should abolish DUI legislation. This should be argument enough for good, thinking people.
Notes
1 Exempting cases where the damage is clearly deliberate (e.g., a road-rager uses his car as a battering ram), or the product of gross negligence (e.g., the high rate of speed amounts to, or implies, recklessness).
Appendix
We shouldn’t push too strongly the “you can’t punish a mind-state” aspect of the argument. A strict refusal to punish mind-states would knock the bottom out of the criminal law corpus. Intentionality is a legally-relevant factor and happens to be a state of mind. This mind-state is what makes the difference between a trip and fall which happens to knock over a bystander, and a malicious lunge. Similarly, in the case of hate-crimes, the mind-state attending acts which would be otherwise criminal makes them even more so.
But these mind-states should be distinguished that of drunkenness. For one, “hate” is evidenced by a hate crime much more clearly than alcohol-related impairment is evidenced by an accident-caused-by-a-drunken-person. Again, an accident by somebody who has been drinking might still have been caused by tiredness, or distraction from billboard “white noise.” These impairments are competitors to the hypothesis that drunkenness caused the accident. By comparison, when a Nazi skinhead beats a person of color while yelling racial slurs, there is, reasonably speaking, no similar “mushiness” in our reconstruction of the causality of the beating: Clearly, the “hate” has contributed to the crime, or to its intensity (or something). But just as recognizing the causal relevance of “hate” to some crimes does not require us to prosecute the hate independently of any crime, admitting that alcoholic impairment has contributed to a specific accident—if we could prove that—would not require us to prosecute drunken driving independently of an accident.
(Also, the “hate” bears legally-relevant effects not matched by the impairment: “Adding” hate to some crime makes it a different kind of crime—a much “bigger” one. Hate crimes induce in people of color (for example) the fearful recognition that they could have been targeted, and may be next. An entire community of persons is thereby victimized. However, when a drunk has an accident—again, if we could prove the drunkenness caused it—it is unclear that the “driving community” is similarly, specially terrorized—that is, beyond the degree already induced by ordinary, non-impaired, accidents.)
We might say, then: It is not so much that we not should criminalize mind-states, but that we not criminalize mere mind-states. (Better: Mind-states can be legally relevant, but not a mere mind-state.)
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So Weird
The classical liberal tradition sees elections as an article of almost indispensable social value—the first and best indication of a politically empowered (democratic, free, or whatever) society. I have tried here to suggest how strange, and ultimately self-defeating, this conviction is.
The point is underscored when we dig deeper, asking: Just what about elections warrants this privileged place? How do elections secure this “value,” however we define it? Just where is the empowering, freeing (etc.) effect “located”?
It is tempting to answer that elections are a means for people to get things they want. They are a tool for generating desired outcomes: legislation, officeholders, tax breaks/hikes, municipal lotteries—in principle, anything we like. And satisfying desires can indeed enhance freedom, empowerment and other values of the liberal tradition.
But this function—“delivering the goods”—can’t be what all of the election-hype is about: First, elections nearly always have winners and losers—not everyone gets what they want. (This is true almost by definition; hence, an electoral “contest.”) But the same political tradition speaks as though elections empower the whole society; they are a generic value for all of its (voting) members at once. Indeed, this “universality” is part of what the tradition so values about elections in the first place: It is what allows us to say that, when x-nation holds elections, it is “the citizens” there who are empowered—not just the winning side in the last vote. When in 2005 some Iraqis celebrated the parliamentary vote (say, posing for pictures with a purple “thumbs-up” and proud smile) nobody assumed, nor demanded, that all were part of the majority-winning contingent who got the “outcome” they wanted from the vote. Whatever value the voters, and Western onlookers, were celebrating, was secured by their participation alone.
Any theory of elections that makes its chief, defining value dependent on who or what wins deprives it of this (alleged) universality.
Second, other expressions of the tradition suggest that the core value of an election rests entirely apart from its outcome: Serious-minded non-profit election-time ads urge “Exercise your right to choose” without bothering to press any particular ballot-option over another. Nobody doubts that the concerned producers of these statements have their preferences, but this takes a backseat in importance to “the vote” itself. By analogy, even though we believe some foods to be healthier than others, we might put aside these preferences to urge a sickly-thin person to “just eat something.” The simple fact that they eat is so important that what they eat pales in relative urgency. Likewise here, the simple fact that one votes is distinctly more important that who/what they vote for.
(Nor, apparently, is the point that it is important to vote for the ‘right thing,’ win or lose—as we might urge children to value good behavior even when it does not “materially” benefit them. As captured in a more vulgar election-time sentiment: “It doesn’t matter (or, I don’t care) who you vote for—its just important that you let your voice be heard.” That is, even when you vote for the other side—from the speaker’s perspective, the wrong, even seriously harmful, side—it is critically important to do so, much more important than the actual content of what is chosen. A bad vote is effectively encouraged, while just staying home risks penalty of four years’ loss of “bitching rights.”)
So the value that voting provides—at least, the one most lauded in the dominant political tradition—does not depend on which option wins, or even which options people choose when they don’t win.
Again, the sheer strangeness of such an implication: For how can this be? What is actually left of the voting exercise apart from the content—the rightness or wrongness—of its choices, and which of these wins and loses? Abstracting from these features, there is only the bare act of choosing. But—to expand a previous point—how can choosing in and of itself be empowering?—Or at least, how can it be all that empowering; empowering enough to justify the puff and bluster and poetry (and nation-building violence) of “free and fair elections”?
If choosing isn’t itself much of an outcome, then, neither does it lend much to the value of another outcome: How, again, can a thing become much better than itself just by being chosen rather than the product of another’s imposition, or of accident?: Plagued by a critical dry spell, does a farmer reject a deluge of water if it drops from the sky, or from the surreptitious garden hose of a charitable neighbor, rather than from the farmer’s own—conscious, self-chosen—efforts to artificially irrigate? Is the deluge less empowering because it is chosen by another, or altogether unchosen? (Or, when the farmer irrigates himself, does the harvest become more—nobly, almost poetically, more—empowering to him for being chosen?)
The point is only compounded in the electoral arena, given its competitive character. Unlike most other choosing behavior, getting what one wants in an election nearly always means another’s wants being frustrated. We have already shown how this violates the “universalist” spirit of the liberal tradition. Indeed, if it is dreadfully, contemptibly disempowering for an entire electorate to have representatives or legislation imposed upon it, rather than chosen by them, it must be nearly as dreadful that a large segment of it—the losing side in any vote—should have this outcome imposed upon them. (This effect has been called the “tyranny of the majority.”) It is a strange condition indeed, this “being imposed upon,” which is always tragic when it happens to 100% percent of people (say, an “election-less” populus which never chooses), but sometimes noble, wonderful, and momentous, when it happens to just 49%.
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I wrote about the Iraq troop surge just as its proponents were starting to allege its “success.” My analysis remains, I think, intact: The surge “success” is either (a) overblown, especially when net gains for the country as a whole are considered; and where violence has decreased locally, the gains are (b) unsustainable or (c) have nothing to do with anything the U.S. military has done. I could add to this that the surge (d) has not met its own purported goals and (e) is probably counterproductive to them, and to the security situation overall, in the longer term.
In view of Bush’s triumphal State of the Union address, it pays to revisit the issue. This, as the “success” view has come to dominate mainstream discussion of the war (even if implicitly, in the absolute decline of media focus on Iraq).
So what makes the campaign “success[ful]”? Going by sheer numbers—or at least, by official accounts of sheer numbers, which have up to now been consistent underestimates—it does little to simply say that violence is down from previous levels. For the initial baseline was very, very high to begin with. Indeed, any amount of violence is low relative to some conceivable baseline. Citing relative progress is only to say “things could be worse”; and indeed, things could always be worse, even when they are horrible. So we have to talk about how Iraq is, not just how it is not. And it is at least as violent as it was in 2005, when nobody anywhere was talking about “success” there. Baghdad remains, by the numbers, the most violent city in the world. Nor are the numbers “getting better”—violence is actually increasing with the new year. (If a downturn in the violence means success, ergo, the upturn must mean failure.)
In qualitative terms, the surge fares no better. Certainly, its express goal—to permit a parliamentary reconciliation among the sects—remains starkly unmet, the political situation being probably worse than before. (Surge proponents don’t deny this, they just don’t talk about the initial surge goals, much as proponents of the original invasion have long given up talking about its premises.)
Context remains all-important in assessing such numbers as we have: Any decrease in violence in the capital represents a completion, more or less, of the process of ethnic cleansing begun before the surge. 100,000 refugees have fled Baghdad during each surge month (that’s one in four residents), turning a mostly Sunni city with mixed neighborhoods into a mostly Shiite one with small Sunni enclaves carved off from the rest with concrete blast walls topped with razor wire and patrolled by militias. Ethnic violence in these neighborhoods has decreased to the extent that that there is simply nobody left in them to kill. Also, predictably, much of the “decreased” violence has simply been displaced to the provinces.
80,000 Iraqi militiamen who formerly fought the Americans are now “allies” against al-Quaeda—meaning they do everything they did before the surge except, ostensibly, kill U.S. troops—precisely because the Americans pay them to be. Their leaders promise “allegiance” as long as the money keeps coming, or as long as they feel like it. Since these militias now represent every ethnic sect and include both violently pro- and anti-government groups, rendering them more efficient only complicates the security and political situations. Also, the largest and most serious American enemy in Iraq—the armed wing of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army—has been under a military stand-down since last August while the leadership roots out infiltrators. Of course their removal from the equation has ensured a relative peace. (The Pentagon has called them “the most dangerous accelerant” of sectarian violence in Iraq, worse than al-Quaeda.) The stand-down is set to expire in February, which could, at the least, change everything.
To the extent, then, that this “success” depends on continued U.S. military presence and funding, it is either unsustainable or could hardly be, as claimed, any step toward American withdrawal. (By the same calculus, extending the alleged gains of the increased American presence to the rest of Iraq would require a surge 25 times size of the present one.) But in the final analysis, Iraq is a country in shambles, insofar as it can be said to remain a country at all, and its major problems are not afforded solutions of a military type.
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[Response to reader.]
Kevin Baker writes:
How anyone can still support Marxism is beyond me. For Marxism to work, 95% or more of the population must be exceptionally altruistic – and the Bell curve simply doesn’t support that.
Assuming by “Marxism” Baker means some variety of socialism, the claim can be considered on two levels:
(a) Certainly, socialism should require no special degrees of “altruis[m]” to get going. This system will come into birth, if it does, for the same reason every other economic system has already come into birth—because people (in this case, workers) want stuff they don’t have.[1] Qualitatively speaking, nothing apart from the same basic parcel of incentives and emotions that impel workers to make labor strikes now will, nor need, come into play.
(b) Nor should people be required to be especially “nice” or charitable to one another in order to maintain a socialist distribution of wealth, once it is put into place. This, again, no more than our capitalist distribution of wealth rests primarily on the selfless generosity of people who would otherwise upset it: I might be a sweet and generous guy, but those qualities aren’t the reason I don’t take over the shop in which I work. Rather, it is because someone else has a title to it—a broadly recognized, binding, enforceable interest in it—which makes such behavior unfeasible under normal conditions.
To elaborate: Under socialism, workers will retain a real title to the big means of production—factories, productive land—that is every bit as solid as the title capitalists have to theirs now. (It will still be property, it just won’t be private property.¹) On the surface, this title, like all titles, amounts to a legal relationship, something I can point to when I call the cops on a usurper. But it is bound up with far more: Wealth distributions of any systemic “type” are maintained because they are also associated with distributions of real power which make alternatives—again, normally—impracticable. (The legal or quasi-legal framework—the “broadly recognized” aspect of the title—largely emerges to ratify these “deeper” realities.)
It would be just as impracticable under socialism as capitalism for one worker overtake his factory, cut the labor payroll, and start ordering around his former coworkers. Think about it. The workers are simply in a position to stop such a move which would be clearly not in their interest. (They could invoke the law and call the cops if they like, but if they chuckled and ignored the guy instead, he’s still not getting the factory.) Any feasible effort of this kind would require a grand counter-revolution on a scale that would be long seen coming and marshaled against. (A counter-revolution is a genuine possibility, of course, but again, this is a problem for any economic system, not somehow special to socialism. And none of it has a damned thing to do with “altruism.”)
In brief, the system is of a kind which just doesn’t facilitate such actions. But the constraints go deeper still: We might say: Not only is it hard to upset the egalitarian distribution of wealth, but the system is set up in such a way that makes it likely that there is such a thing to be upset in the first place. That is, once in place, socialism will bear its own new, real economic structures which in the normal, unreflective unfolding of economic life prejudice certain kinds of distributions over others, every bit as much as capitalist structures prejudice capitalist distributions and feudal structures prejudice feudal ones. (In an obvious sense, an economic system just is a network of constraints on alternatives to itself.) As “structural,” these tendencies maintain entirely apart from the personal desires (or, Mr. Baker, the moral inclinations) of individuals acting within these structures, or the legal framework set up to constrain these desires.
Like many of its critics, Mr. Baker seems of the view that socialism (“Marxism”) is fundamentally about equality in levels of personal consumption. While socialist views do tend to be highly correlated with concern for this kind of equality, that concern isn’t essential to socialism itself. We can readily imagine a socialism which generated differential wealth among its citizens just as well as capitalism, with a socialist citizenry lacking in political will to redistribute it equally, or perhaps even welcoming the discrepancies as part of a work-leisure tradeoff. (Conversely, we can conceive of a capitalism which massively—in theory, even perfectly—redistributes income in an egalitarian way.)
Granted, too, socialism would remove the most significant mechanism driving very severe and problematic inequality in the present system—namely, privatization of the returns on social investment; and so a more egalitarian distribution is probably inevitable under socialism. (That is, there will be less to redistribute in the first place, if that is the concern.) But socialists as socialists are not overly concerned with economic “equality” per se.
Rather, socialism is concerned with gross inequalities in one specific type of wealth: those factories, productive land, and other “big” means of producing consumer goods. This is more a matter of “what kind” of thing rather than “how much” of it. It is this privatized quality of production that allows capitalists—a minority social group—to direct social investment for everyone, and which makes the economy operate “naturally” in their basic favor no matter how they “direct” things. (These two factors are what Marx probably means when he speaks of a “ruling class” of capitalists.) The fact that there are a global multiplicity of private producers mandates that they compete with one another, and it is this dynamic which ultimately renders the rest of social reality subject to the imperatives of capital accumulation—something socialists see as having a deleterious effect on society. (This is not the place to argue the validity of these socialist concerns, but that, right or wrong, these concerns have, contra Baker, little to do with some people having more “stuff” than others.)
In any case, it is unclear how, under socialism (as under capitalism in its normal, working order), very obscene, problematic inequalities in any kind of wealth could occur in the absence of private ownership (or otherwise effective control) of the means of production. It is not even clear what, under socialism, one would do with great differential wealth if he had it: Very few people want, for example, 10,000 toothbrushes or pairs of shoes; and no market would exist for dreamy luxury items such as only grossly differential wealth can attain. Factories and large landholdings simply aren’t for sale, nor the raw materials to construct them from the ground up. (Nor are there financial markets in which to speculate about others’ property.) One couldn’t maintain a payroll of workers if labor isn’t a commodity, and private factories are of no use anyway when no market (as we know it) exists to profitably unload whatever is produced in it. Workers would have no interest in selling their means of production—assuming this were legal—as no individual or sub-group could accumulate enough wealth (at least matching the salaries of all the workers calculated through retirement) to make them a desirable offer. Even if the means of production were for sale, banks wouldn’t loan the sums of money needed to invest in or build them, nor loans of any amount for that purpose.
Not only, then, does a socialist organization of production soften the blow of inequality—assuming socialists should give a damn—but it makes it so that only distributions which are relatively egalitarian in the first place will be allowed to emerge. The system is inherently prejudiced toward these distributions in just the way that the capitalist system is prejudiced against them. Contra Baker, this tendency doesn’t depend on folksy generosity or massive and constant redistributive state interference in economic life. So something like the opposite of his conjecture is the case: It is not that socialism doesn’t “work” because people aren’t good; rather, its is that people need socialism—its structural constraints—because they are, indeed, capable of being so bad.
[1] Though not every title amounts to property; property is only one example of the general type.
[2] I mean “want stuff” in the broadest sense. My point is that such struggles are not fundamentally about ‘self-denial’ of anything. They are actions in the (perceived) interest of the actors themselves.
Appendix: On Altruism in General
Genuine altruism is inescapably immoral. There is no reason why discounting my own interests should be more morally wholesome than discounting someone else’s interests. For I am somebody, no less than they. Of course, there may be good reasons for self-denial in the service of others: I might be stronger and more capable of doing without or bearing the harder load. But “being me” is not the justification for this behavior; rather, it is “being the stronger person, who happens to be me.” This does not amount to genuine altruism, but rather economic use of resources. (If I am twice as strong as you, and carry twice as much, we just break even. Things “balance.”) And this decision would come after fair consideration of all interests affected—counting one’s own interests alongside those of the others, even if, precisely because of the consideration, it comes to be determined that it should be subordinated to some greater interest whose fulfillment is incompatible with that of our own.
Posted in conceptual analysis, socialism, Uncategorized
Tagged altruism, care ethic, historical materialism, Marxism
[A grown-folks analysis. Better late than never.]
Initial Considerations
So the constitutional reforms proposed by President Chavez and the Venezuelan National Assembly failed to pass by referendum on Dec. 2. It is widely understood that the outcome was secured by widespread abstention by those who voted for Chavez in the last referendum. About as many detractors, for intents and purposes, voted “No” this time around, while Chavez supporters dropped out by nearly a few million.
This being said, nobody seriously denies that Chavez retains the basic support of a basic majority of Venezuelans, even beyond the abstaining contingent—or that a “No” vote means anything to the contrary. Presidential approval percentages far outstrip the razorslim margin of “Yes” over “No” voters. On the probabilistic assumption that the pro and anti-reformers will draw roughly equal percentages of their supporters to rallies, the Chavista base is many times greater than that of the opposition. Indeed, the CIA’s “Hayden memo”—more on this below—shows that the opposition assumed the reforms would pass and concentrated their efforts on post-vote destabilization, to discredit these and prime the ground for their reversal. (To minimize the “Yes” vote, they actually tagged their literature with the slogan, “Chavez, Yes, Reform, No!,” pretending to endorse the president they had ousted by coup, and the original constitution they suspended, back in 2002.) The same memo cites polls taken by US intelligence which indicate high majorities favoring the reforms.
In this light, the failure of the reforms is puzzling on its face. It is not what was expected by anyone. Thus, it stands as in need of special explanation as any other puzzling phenomenon. And like all hypotheses invoked to explain puzzling phenomena, the explanation is to a degree speculative.
The reform items have been at least hinted at by Chavez for many years, and are, arguably, logically continuous with those features of the Bolivarian revolution already enacted. They don’t represent some sharp, unpredictable character turn in “Chavismo,” nor is there evidence of wide disenchantment with the elements Chavismo has already yielded—quite the contrary. Pre-vote polling suggest the abstainers would have voted “No” had they been, say, forced to choose.
A Template for Analysis
But if (a) Venezuelans are mostly Chavistas, and (b) the ballot represents no serious break with (this) Chavismo, then: The respective “links” between these elements and the outcome they would be prima facie expected to yield have, in a sense, “artificially” broken down. That is, either the basic support of the majority failed to register “through” the forms of bourgeois procedural democratic forms, or the understanding by this “basic majority” of the balloted items—that is, of their own real, if implicit, support of these—failed to so register. (Or possibly both.) We can explore these aspects in turn.
(a) Limitations of the Electoral Form
It is possible that the extent to which Chavez “overplayed his hand” politically with the vote reflects his opting for the referendum format rather than any specific measures on it. Had the reform measures been left to the National Assembly—which is, in a real sense, forced to show up while “the people” aren’t; and which has, again, voted for measures of a spirit with those on the referendum; and which has itself been voted in by the same “contingent” to decide upon just such measures—they would pass nearly unanimously, and we would hear no howls of opposition to this outcome apart from the Americans and the domestic ruling-class mass media (who is always howling anyway).
Having voted Chavez in on a particular platform, and his having enacted prior reforms through avenues other than popular referendum, it is plausible voters were confused or unconvinced as to why they had to vote again for the balloted measures. In 2000, Chavez was extended “rule by decree” powers through an enabling act of the National Assembly; this he used to enact significant reforms. He still very much controls this body and could use it so again. Thus, it is plausible that voters were unclear as to why they had to vote again for the same sort of thing.
Relatedly, it may be that a significant number of Chavistas are not especially driven to turn out for votes in which Chavez’ presidential position is not immediately in question. By analogy, I might be very pressed to vote to continue my marriage, if the alternative is its dissolution, yet not so pressed to vote in favor of any particular action affecting our lives together—if the alternative is just that my wife and I will proceed to act upon the matter later, in some (possibly that same particular) way. I would trust we would decide the matter in a way consonant with the values “embodied” in the initial decision to marry; the condition of being married in the first place preempts the need to “pin down” the decision formally, in advance, along a timetable imposed from outside. Likewise, Chavistas may just expect Chavez to act in a way consonant with values already “embodied” in his election and past record. (Indeed, low voter turnout is historically the norm for all Venezuelan elections except for those deciding the president.)
I dare say it is easier to accept that these considerations were decisive than that millions of Venezuelans are happy with Chavist reforms but don’t want any more of them. But as yet, it remains (very) speculative and in any case insufficient to explain all of the abstention numbers.
(b) Referendum? What Referendum?
Exploring the second “link”—between the voters and their comprehension of the specific reforms—a fuller picture is yielded:
It is unclear, to paraphrase Chomsky in the wake of Bush’s reelection, that Chavez lost the referendum because it is not clear that any referendum actually took place—that is, if by “referendum“ is meant a forum in which people choose between options they grasp clearly, in concert with their own interests and values.¹
This was made possible by the sheer number of reforms on the ballot—33 at first, quickly ballooning to 69—and the typical dense legalese in which they were drafted. Voters had only a short time—a month—to digest and debate these. This was especially problematic as certain items were complicated and unfamiliar. For example, the “new geometry of power” named a plan to redistrict municipalities to decentralize power. These would have various, new and interrelated functions, including the right to create, by vote, still other various, new political entities—councils, communes, unions—and the right to join these with others of the same and different type. These reforms can be quite in the interests of the voting majority without being intuitively or readily apparent as such. Finally, the presentation of the reforms in two large “up or down” blocks meant that one had only to disagree with any single item to reject the whole thing.
Beyond its brevity, limitations in the “Yes” campaign compounded matters. The reform side—perhaps overconfident in light of their twelve straight electoral wins since 1998—failed to adequately articulate the content of the reforms to social layers beyond its Chavista core. To a degree this was unavoidable: A key role was naturally delegated to the PSUV, the new merger party formed out of all the old Bolivarian groups. The party is young and its organizational network, disunified and underdeveloped. The job of education and the inspirational “whip” fell largely to the president himself—who was either abroad or distracted with matters (such as the abortive negotiations for FARC hostages) not directly related to the vote.
Effectiveness in this arena was needed to counteract the disinformation campaign by the reform opposition. Virtually every private mass media organ set its considerable resources to this project, around the clock. Normally for-purchase airtime was made free to the opposition. It was widely “reported” that the reforms would allow the state to seize virtually anything as its own property—small businesses, houses, cars, animals, clock radios. A twin-page spread in Ultimas Noticias, contender for the biggest newspaper in Venezuela, added children to the list, charging the state would remove these from the home at two years of age to be raised in state boarding schools. As in the States, the proposal to remove term limits from the presidency—bringing Venezuela in line with most of the world’s formal democracies—was presented as a vote to crown Chavez “president for life.” Major newspapers ran falsified copies of the proposed reforms. The state neither received nor—for good or ill—demanded, “equal time” in these venues.
Unsurprisingly, the same US agencies that helped organize the failed presidential coup in 2002—the CIA, USAID, and the American embassy in Venezuela—had hand in all of this. (NED is not mentioned in the memo but has been funneling money to opposition groups throughout Chavez’ administration and remains in the mix.) Nor was this role limited to “information.” The aforementioned memo was addressed to CIA Director Michael Hayden by embassy leader Michael Steele. It describes a multi-faceted anti-reform campaign implicating these groups. Tactics range in varying levels from the deceitful to the illegal and—though mostly “outsourced”—violent. The memo comes in the middle of the plan’s implementation and recommends its final phase, called “Operation Pincer” (or “Pliers”). The program allots millions of American tax dollars to fund false reporting, attack ads and bogus polls to discredit the reforms and notably, the credibility of the election process itself. It cites success in organizing affluent and ultraleft-sectarian college students to physically attack government offices, election officials and pro-Chavez demonstrators—actions which in fact led to the deaths of a handful of reform supporters. “Pliers” culminates in plans for a second coup against Chavez, originating in the National Guard; this is presented as a contingency for “Yes” vote they were sure would (still) come, but remains on the table.
Note also the role of Fifth Column sabotage: The “new geometry” shifted various powers from regional ministers, mayors and governors, to unprofessional communal groups; this has inspired some of the former to defect, not wanted to cede or share authority. Likewise, sections of the “Chavist” federal bureaucracy, seeing their interests as tied to a “stable” state, have no interest in supporting anything perceived as too radical and resisted organizing.
(c) Economic Concerns: Decisive, As Always
Of course, the outcome we would “prima facie expect” in light of what we know of our voters’ politics, and the soundness of electoral forms to translate this into policy, is not the whole story. It is possible that the limitations described by (a) and (b) were “overwhelmed” by considerations entirely beside those matters.
Venezuelans in Chavez’ “natural base”—wage workers and peasants—are plagued by a serious shortage of staple foods, including milk and meat, and other commonplace consumer goods. They also suffer under high inflation, nearly 18% in so many months. This didn’t come from nowhere, but as a result of rising earnings for all classes of Venezuelans, which increased effective demand—in itself a key gain of previous Bolivarian reforms which could have stayed that way. While the state attempted to tame this dynamic with price controls, the response of large sections of the capitalist state—partly to lessen the impact of decreased profits, partly as a protest against the controls—has been to restrict supply: Producers of scarce goods tamped down on production while large retailers hoarded the stocks they already held. Venezuelan finance capitalists withheld investment or relocated it to foreign enterprises, or turned to “nonproductive” enterprises altogether like real estate or bond speculation. Large distributors—wholesale “middlemen” and direct retailers—bypassed the price controls by funneling to the burgeoning black market. (Chavez has thought that flooding the country with imports would help also—but imports, it appears, can be hoarded and funneled underground just as well as domestics.)
These strategies were not just the initiatives of individual capitalists but a very open, deliberate and key plank in the reform opposition strategy as organized by (among others) FEDECAMARAS, the Venezuelan Chamber(s) of Commerce. (This is essentially a union for big capitalists, and fiercely anti-Chavez—their own then-president replaced him as interim president during the ‘02 coup.) This has succeeded in demoralizing the populace—the goal of the opposition leaders who called for it—even while growing consumption levels maintain: It is not that so many Chavez sympathizers have grown hostile to Bolivarian reforms, but rather tend toward apathy and disillusionment as very real, admitted gains are (subsequently) neutralized by higher prices and scarcity. This is precisely the mood, historically speaking, that engenders electoral abstention rather than the outright rebellion of voting-against or -out.
Conclusions
Were economic considerations decisive to the vote? Certainly, all “sides” in the reform issue—Chavistas, the opposition, and the abstainers—credit it as such, whether they agree on (or admit) the root causes of the economic troubles. In brief, we have only to assume that this discontent has cut into the numbers of less “fired up” Chavistas in the miniscule proportion needed to account for “No’s” over “Yes’s”—a reasonable (if strictly unprovable) assumption. (The reforms missed because just 1.4% more voters negated than affirmed.)
To the extent that economic factors were decisive, the idea that the reforms failed because Chavez politically “overreached” or “moved too fast” in a revolutionary direction is backward. It is precisely because the expropriations [of capitalist land and factories] have been so halting and partial, and that Chavez has been content—or felt forced—to trust the good will of the capitalist class to maintain supply, that the shortage-inflation dynamic has been permitted. The ballot failure should not be interpreted as a call for braking, or deferring, the revolution, but for pressing it much further—immediately. This entails, minimally, large-scale expropriation in local agribusiness, as well as heavy state investment therein, to ensure supply, as well as state administration of food distribution to prevent hoarding, enforce price controls and close back-doors to the black market (which would itself probably require expropriations).
There is nothing here that hasn’t been done before under worse circumstances, and nothing which can’t be ultimately placed under popular oversight and direction. But it has to be done quickly, for all of the reasons, by analogy, that you cannot “skin a tiger paw by paw”: You have to “totalize” the project to overwhelm the possibility of a counter-productive reaction. Finally, it is in the sense that such a programme can be said to logically “fulfill” the reforms—or their “spirit,” as it were—that one can call the latest failure of partial reforms an ironic mandate for the same—or much, much more.
Notes
¹ I’m assuming here that the reforms were “in concert with the interests and values of the voting majority, or at least addressed their major stated concerns.” That universal free education, expansion of social security benefits, and reduction of the workweek to 36 hours (for same pay), are not a good bet makes sense only on neoclassical economic theories that no regular Venezuelans buy into, or the view that the other items on the ballot are such a bad bet that their negative prospects outweigh the benefits of the others. Again, this isn’t the main point, but an argument of the second type would probably cite the right of the executive to suspend elements of the constitution in times of national emergency. In brief, if the former reforms—or any other significant achievement—are worth making, they are worth defending, and such “national emergencies” have occurred in recent history and are brewing now, as the opposition runs calls for a new coup on national TV and sends cash to Colombian death squads to kidnap and murder union leaders.
Posted in feminism, socialism, Uncategorized, Venezuela
Tagged constitutional reforms, CTV, FEDECAMARAS, Hugo Chavez, opposition, PSUV, referendum
[I haven't been posting much lately, what with workplace stressors (requiring alcoholic and forensic-televisual detox), the birthday of my wife, and (sort of) studying the GRE. In the meantime, read a phenomenal study on the wars in/breakup of the Yugoslav federation. Ed Herman is always great on this issue. See also Diana Johnstone, or more briefly, Lou Proyect's review of her "Fool's Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions."]
Ed Herman: Knows a thing or two about a thing or two
Posted in Uncategorized
[Nice brief response to Keith Olbermann’s suggestion that the Venezuelan leader is “peeing on” his constituency. Also known as Why you can’t trust a liberal when poking yields to shoving. The best part deals with economic gains under Chavez.]
Clifton Ross writes at CounterPunch:
“To what is Mr. Olbermann referring when he states that Chávez is “peeing on” the laws and citizens of Venezuela? Is he referring to Chávez’s dozen or so electoral victories, all declared clean and fair by international observers (including ex-President Carter)? Is it Chávez’s stand for the dignity and independence of Latin America? Is it Chávez’s internationalism which has not only taken him to Cuba and Iran but also caused him to discount heating oil for the poor in the U.S.? Could it be the clinics Chávez has set up around the country, Barrio Adentro, guaranteeing Venezuelans free health care? Or the Bolivarian Universities he’s funding to enable three million people, without means, resources, hope or future, to study and win degrees and new possibilities? Was Chávez “pissing on the laws” when he allowed a referendum on his presidency to go through and which he won handily in 2004?
Mr. Olbermann needs to get his facts straight and he could start off by reading Mark Weisbrot and Luis Sandoval’s study published in July of this year by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, entitled, “The Venezuelan Economy in the Chávez Years” wherein they show that “Real (inflation-adjusted) GDP has grown by 76 percent since the bottom of the recession in 2003.” Indeed, once the pressures of a U.S. inspired coup, U.S.-backed oil strike and Referendum (all funded by Olbermann’s and our local nemesis, Bush) were soundly defeated by Chávez and his supporters, Weisbrot and Sandoval agree that “it appears that the Venezuelan economy was hit hard by political instability prior to 2003, but has grown steadily and quite rapidly since political stability began improving in that year.”
The economy has grown, but that new wealth has not merely trickled, or gushed, upwards into the pockets of the rich, as it always seems to do in the U.S. In Venezuela the poverty rate has dropped 31% under Chávez, (extreme poverty from 53% to 9.1 percent) but the authors acknowledge that this current poverty rate “does not take into account the increased access to health care or education that poor people have experienced. The situation of the poor has therefore improved significantly beyond even the substantial poverty reduction that is visible in the official poverty rate, which measures only cash income.” This is not to mention, as the authors also point out, the “increased health care benefits to the poor, since in the absence of these benefits, most poor people would simply have gone without health care, and therefore suffer from worse health, lower income, and lower life expectancy.” And those health benefits are substantial: “In 1998 there were 1,628 primary care physicians for a population of 23.4 million. Today, there are 19,571 for a population of 27 million.”
Given these facts, and your absence of them, Mr. Olbermann, could you explain exactly on whom Chávez has been pissing? If not, perhaps in the future you could drop the subject or deal with something a bit more substantial when talking about Chávez than urine.”
