Ceasefire Magazine » Ideas

The End of the World As We Know It? The rise of the post-carbon era

hich — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 23:03:24 +0000

By Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

Only 500 generations ago, hunter-gatherers began cultivating crops and forming their tiny communities into social hierarchies. Around 15 to 20 generations ago, industrial capitalism erupted on a global scale.

In the last generation, the entire human species, along with virtually all other species and indeed the entire planet, have been thrown into a series of crises, which many believe threaten to converge in global catastrophe: global warming spiraling out of control; oil prices fluctuating wildly; food riots breaking out in the South; banks collapsing worldwide; the spectre of terror bombings in major cities; and the promise of ‘endless war’ to fight ‘violent extremists’ at home and abroad.

We are running out of time. Without urgent mitigating, preventive and transformative action, these global crises are likely to converge and mutually accelerate over the coming decades. By 2018, converging food, water and energy shortages could magnify the probability of conflict between major powers, civil wars, and cross-border conflicts. After 2020, this could result in political and economic catastrophes that would undermine state control and national infrastructures, potentially leading to social collapse.

Anthropogenic global warming alone illustrates the gravity of our predicament. Global average temperatures have already risen by 0.7C in the last 130 years. In 2007, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told the world that at current rates of increase of fossil fuel emissions, we were heading toward a rise in global average temperatures of around 6C by the end of this century, leading to mass extinctions on a virtually uninhabitable planet. The Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences has reported that current fossil fuel emissions are exceeding this worst-case scenario.

Many scientists concede that without drastic emissions reductions by 2020, we are on the path toward a 4C rise as early as mid-century, with catastrophic consequences, including the loss of the world’s coral reefs; the disappearance of major mountain glaciers; the total loss of the Arctic summer sea-ice, most of the Greenland ice-sheet and the break-up of West Antarctica; acidification and overheating of the oceans; the collapse of the Amazon rainforest; and the loss of Arctic permafrost; to name just a few. Each of these ecosystem collapses could trigger an out-of-control runaway warming process. Worse, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley now project that we are actually on course to reach global temperatures of up to 8C within 90 years.

But our over-dependence on fossil fuels is also counterproductive even on its own terms. Increasing evidence demonstrates that peak oil is at hand. This is when world oil production reaches its maximum level at the point when half the world’s reserves of cheap oil have been depleted, after which it becomes geophysically increasingly difficult to extract it. This means that passed the half-way point, world production can never reach its maximum level again, and thus continuously declines until reserves are depleted. Until 2004, world oil production had risen continuously but thereafter underwent a plateau all the way through to 2008. Then from July to August 2008, world oil production fell by almost one million barrels per day. It’s still decreasing, even according to BP’s Statistical Review 2010 (which every year pretends that peak oil won’t happen for another 40 years) – in 2009 world oil production was 2.6 percent below that in 2008, and is now below 2004 levels.

Oil price volatility due to peak oil was a major factor that induced the 2008 economic recession. The collapse of the mortgage house of cards was triggered by the post-peak oil price shocks, which escalated costs of living and led to a cascade of debt-defaults. A study by US economist James Hamilton confirmed there would have been no recession without the oil price shocks. While the recession slumped demand, allowing oil prices to reduce, experts now warn of a coming oil supply crunch by around 2014. As climate change intensifies natural disasters – such as droughts in food-basket regions, floods in South Asia and the heatwave in Russia – and as the full impact of peak oil eventually hits, costs to national economies will rocket, while world food production declines.

Already, global warming has exacerbated droughts and led to declines in agricultural productivity over the last decade, including a 10-20 per cent drop in rice yields. The percentage of land stricken by drought doubled from 15 to 30 per cent between 1975 and 2000. If trends continue, by 2025, 1.8 billion people would be living in regions of water-scarcity, and two-thirds of the world population could be subject to water stress. By 2050, scientists project that world crop yields could fall as much as 20-40 per cent.

Maps released by scientists at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE), University of Wisconsin-Madison, show that the earth is “rapidly running out of fertile land” for further agricultural development. No wonder, then, that world agricultural land productivity between 1990 and 2007 was 1.2 per cent per year, nearly half compared to 1950-90 levels of 2.1 per cent. Similarly, world grain consumption exceeded production for seven of eight years prior to 2008.

Apart from climate change, the ecological cost of industrial methods is fast eroding the soil – in the US, for instance, 30 times faster than the natural rate. Former prairie lands have lost one half of their top soil over about a 100 years of farming – but it takes 500 years to replace just one-inch. Erosion is now reducing productivity by up to 65 per cent a year. The dependence of industrial agriculture on hydrocarbon energy sources – with ten calories of fossil fuel energy needed to produce just one calorie of food – means that the impact of peak oil after 2014 will hugely constrain future world agricultural production.

But oil is not the only problem. Numerous studies show that hydrocarbon resources will become increasingly depleted by mid-century, and by the end of this century will be so scarce as to be useless – although we do have enough to potentially tip us over into irreversible runaway global warming.

Former TOTAL geologist Jean Laharrere projects that world natural gas production will peak by around 2025. New technologies mean that unconventional forms of natural gas in the US might prolong this some decades, but only if future demand doesn’t increase. The independent Energy Watch Group (EGW) in Berlin projects that world coal production will also peak in 2025, but the journal Science finds that this could occur “close to the year 2011.” EGW also argues that world production of uranium for nuclear energy will peak in 2035. According to the Hydrocarbon Depletion Study Group at Uppsala University, unconventional oil – such as oil shale and tar sands –will be incapable of averting peak oil. Greater attention has turned to thorium, which certainly holds greater promise than uranium, but as pointed out by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Washington DC, thorium still requires uranium to “kick-start” a nuclear chain reaction, and as yet no viable commercial reactors have been built despite decades of research.

The exponential expansion of modern industrial civilization over the last couple of centuries, and the liberal ideology of ‘unlimited growth’ that has accompanied it, has been tied indelibly to 1) the seemingly unlimited supply of energy provided by nature’s fossil fuel reserves and 2) humankind’s willingness to over-exploit our environment with no recognition of boundaries or constraints. But the 21st century is the age of irreversible hydrocarbon energy depletion – the implication being that industrial civilization, in its current form, cannot last beyond this century.

This means that this century signals not only the end of the carbon age, but the beginning of a new post-carbon era. Therefore, this century should be understood as an age of civilizational transition – the preceding crises are interlocking symptoms of a global political economy, ideology and value-system which is no longer sustainable, which is crumbling under its own weight, and which over the next few decades will be recognized as obsolete. The question that remains, of course, is what will take its place?

While we may not be able to stop various catastrophes and collapse-processes from occurring, we still retain an unprecedented opportunity to envisage an alternative vision for a new, sustainable and equitable form of post-carbon civilization.The imperative now is for communities, activists, scholars and policymakers to initiate dialogue on the contours of this vision, and pathways to it.

Any vision for ‘another world’, if it is to overcome the deep-rooted structural failures of our current business-as-usual model, will need to explore how we can develop new social, political and economic structures which encourage the following:

Widespread distribution of ownership of productive resources so that all members of society have a stake in agricultural, industrial and commercial productive enterprises, rather than a tiny minority monopolising resources for their own interests.
More decentralised politico-economic participation through self-managerial producer and consumer councils to facilitate participatory decision-making in economic enterprises.
Re-defining the meaning of economic growth to focus less on materially-focused GDP, and more on the capacity to deliver values such as health, education, well-being, longevity, political and cultural freedom.
Fostering a new, distributed renewable energy infrastructure based on successful models such as that of the borough of Woking in Surrey, UK.
Structural reform of the monetary, banking and financial system including abolition of interest, in particular the cessation of money-creation through government borrowing on compound interest.
Elimination of unrestricted lending system based on faulty quantitative risk-assessment models, with mechanisms to facilitate greater regulation of lending practices by bank depositors themselves.
Development of parallel grassroots participatory political structures that are both transnational and community-oriented, by which to facilitate community governance as well as greater popular involvement in mainstream political institutions.
Development of parallel grassroots participatory economic institutions that are both transnational and community-oriented, to facilitate emergence of alternative equitable media of exchange and loans between North and South.
Emergence of a ‘post-materialist’ scientific paradigm and worldview which recognizes that the cutting-edge insights of physics and biology undermine traditional, mechanistic conceptions of the natural order, pointing to a more holistic understanding of life and nature.
Emergence of a ‘post-materialist’ ethic recognizing that progressive values and ideals such as justice, compassion, and generosity are more conducive to the survival of the human species, and thus more in harmony with the natural order, than the conventional ‘materialistic’ behaviours associated with neoliberal consumerism.

Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development in London. His latest book is A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization (Pluto, 2010).

On Security: The imminent, and overdue, death of ‘Prevent’

hich — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:58:10 +0000

By Rizwaan Sabir

The post 7/7 “soft-approach” to challenging “extremism and terrorism within the Muslim community” became known as the ‘Prevent’ programme. I talk in the past tense because the policy, to all intents and purposes, is almost dead. The counter-terrorism review, which will disclose its findings at the start of 2011, will hopefully make this flawed and knee-jerk policy a thing of the past, and rightfully so.

The policy has been utterly counter-productive, awfully deceptive and has “securitised” the Muslims community unnecessarily.

When ‘Prevent’ was launched in 2006, it was heralded as a programme that would engage the Muslim community and work tirelessly, in conjunction with it, to counter the threat of terrorism; a phenomenon, it seems, that was understood by the New-Labour establishment to be a Muslim monopoly. However, rather than working with the Muslim community, the programme has been targeting all Muslims and doing what it was NOT meant to do – alienate and drive Muslims inward.

A leaked Association of Police Officers (ACPO) document quite categorically shows that the Prevent programme’s approach was not only targeted at those people that were “actively showing signs” of moving toward extremism or were extremists, as had been the stated intention under the programme, but was instead primarily used against young Muslims and the Muslim community as a whole. Claims by the government and the police that the programme was never about the Muslim community being spied upon is blatantly untrue. The document quite clearly states that the Muslim community needs to be targeted regardless of the political opinions or political beliefs of particular members happen to be, which is further evidence that the police, contrary to public claims, have been investigating and collating intelligence on Muslims that have done nothing illegal. In short, the police have been (and still are) involved in a witch-hunt against Muslims for no other reason than the fact that they are Muslim.

The justification for focusing the prevent programme on the Muslim community was best explained by the ACPO Coordinator of Prevent, Sir Norman Bettison, who explained to the 2010 ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ Select Committee that “[b]ecause young Muslims are vulnerable to al-Qaida propaganda, it made sense to focus Prevent activity on the Muslim community”. However, there is no evidence to suggest that Muslim youths are more vulnerable to radicalisation than, say, white-working class youths targeted by far-right propaganda. It is a myth to suggest that young Muslims are more likely to carry out acts of violence because they have been exposed to Al-Qaida propaganda. Often enough, it could be argued that the complete opposite that takes place: the exposure to propaganda is more likely to drive them further away.

Interestingly, the latest survey conducted by Communities and Local Government states that 80% of Muslim respondents believe that the use of violence is “always wrong” when making a political protest. Compare this to the Hindu respondents, of whom only 76% hold that same view, in other words, a higher proportion of Hindus believe that violence is acceptable “sometimes” or “at all times” than is the case with Muslims. By its own absurd logic, should the government and police not have been targeting the Hindu community under Prevent too?

The conclusion of the survey must be repeated: Muslims are no more likely of adopting violence or justifying terrorism than other communities (Hindus or others) are, and to somehow suggest that this is the case is not only evidentially flawed, but also, to put it bluntly, discriminatory and racist.

For anyone who argues that Muslims are a threat to UK national security and therefore need to be robustly challenged and be subjected to draconian programmes such as Prevent, I would say to them: have a look at the figures from the 2009 Terrorism report produced by Europol, which sets the record straight about the range of threats that not only Britain but the entire European Union faces. I assure you, Islamist terrorism does not even compare to the other, mostly nationalistic, ‘variants’.

Saying that, the general public cannot be blamed entirely for believing that the threat from “Muslims” or “Islamic terrorists” is higher than from other religious or political groups. After all, the media have been unabashedly and irresponsibly “reporting” on Islamic terrorism and Muslims before the dust of the World Trade Centre had even settled. It is thus hardly surprising that anti-Muslim crimes are on the rise and people are so quick to justify draconian anti-terror measures and policies against the Muslim community at large. The government claims its own policy is infomed not by media speculation but by “intelligence”. It seems that the intelligence which has been leading the Prevent programme is coming from the same ‘Scooby-Doo school of intelligence’ that gave us, to name a few choice examples, the 45 minute WMD claim, the report that a house in London was producing Ricin (it wasn’t) and about the alleged manufacturing of a ‘chemical weapon’ in Forest Gate (that never existed). Using the “intelligence tells us” pretext is hardly an intelligent move and is thus unlikely to gain any sympathy from those who are at the receiving end of those policies and actions that are based solely on it.

Despite the insistence of the government and the security-apparatus, Prevent was introduced solely as a Muslim-policy and has been focused on trying to utilise any avenue to acquire information and community intelligence on the Muslim community. The direct interventions that have taken place, which have sometimes affected non-Muslims too, have merely been token gestures rather than genuine attempts at preventing violent extremism.

Furthermore, the request for the disclosure of the number of Prevent interventions, broken down by religion and ethnicity, under the Freedom of Information Act have all been refused by every police force in England and Wales; fuelling the belief that interventions under Prevent are disproportionately targeting Muslims, hence the staunch resistance to making the information public. The recent case of ANPR cameras being installed in two predominantly Muslim areas of Birmingham under the pretext of combating drug-dealing and anti-social behaviour, is just one more example of the constant disproportionate attention that Muslims continue to receive under the Prevent banner.

Trust, transparency and honesty are three notions that should be at the forefront of trying to combat every threat, including the very small threat that issues from those who believe in using violence out of religous convictions. Sadly, though, it seems that the implementers of the Prevent programme had opted to put these principles aside and, instead, allowed ignorance and incompetence, coupled with pathetic attempts at “intelligence gathering”, to dictate matters.

The official verdict in 2011 is thus being eagerly awaited, and will undoubtedly be the final nail in the Prevent coffin. Once the programme has been rightly scrapped, the Muslim community can begin to think about how to “un-securitise” itself. In the meantime, the new government and the police should start to think seriously about how they intend to rebuild trust and transparency with the Muslim community, a trust that is currently at its lowest ever level. Whether they will have the vision and political will to act, is something only time will show.

Rizwaan Sabir is a human rights activist and doctoral researcher at the University of Strathclyde. He is researching the role of Islam in British and Scottish government policy, with a special focus on counter-terrorism. In May 2008 he was detained for six days as a suspected member of al-Qaida for being in possession of primary research literature. He was released without charge. His column on counter-terrorism and security appears every other Friday.

Formed a band? Made a record? Now what?

hich — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 22:54:32 +0000

By Alex Andrews

Every starting band knows the situation: you record something (major dollar, even with’ mates rates’), you get 300 professionally printed copies at large outlay. The vast majority of these will end up at the bottom of your wardrobe, or in a spare room in boxes, unsold for years, despite your best efforts. These unsold copies are plainly overstocking, which as any retailer will tell you, is one route to never making any money.

For those who want some useful guidance, these are my top 5 tips on how to get your record out there:

1. Give Your Music Away For Free

Let’s face it, splashing out on those CDs betrays a failure to understand the basic ideas of stock control and the disadvantages of too much stock. Overall, it is a huge outlay which confers, unlike spending money on a decent recording of your music which might lead to many opportunities (gigs, more records), no real benefit to your band other than the pleasing sensation of having a ‘real record’. If you are releasing something off your own back and get signed for it, the first thing the record company will likely do is get you back in the studio again to re-record everything (ultimately, at your own cost – again!), your self-released stuff going in the bin all the same.

The reason why these CDs don’t sell is simple: people have no idea what your band sound like and aren’t going to buy something they haven’t listened to. More accurately, they will rarely buy something without press coverage confirming it is worth buying – to state the obvious, big record companies don’t spend thousands on marketing their music because stuff sells on its merits, they do so because stuff doesn’t sell until people have been told it is worth buying.

With zero marketing budget and no access to the press, letting your free music market itself is your best option in reaching people. If you are already streaming most of your recorded material on, say, MySpace, is it really that much of a mental leap to allow, say, low quality downloads of your music gratis? Yes, this means whole tracks, or (remembering that you made this beautiful consistent record you wanted people to appreciate) whole records.

What seems like a loss is in fact of enormous benefit – both in getting people out to your gigs and making them aware of your work, with no additional cost added to that of recording. As far as my own label, Records on Ribs, goes, we would never have had the funds to make the 100,000+ records people have already downloaded for free from us (or, indeed, have sold this many). Yet, in terms of ‘reach’, our artists have now been listened to by many, many more ears than have listened to those CDs you are eventually going to be flogging for next to nothing in desperation. All The Empires of The World, our brilliant but largely unknown doom contingent, have had 17,571 downloads over two records. Even if they had invested hundreds of pounds on 600 CD versions, most of those would still be unsold today, cluttering the bottom of a wardrobe.

2. Go DIY With The Physical Releases

At the same time as offering downloads of your music, you probably want to offer a physical product as well, because people do still like this a lot. Rather than outlaying hundreds of pounds on boring jewel cases, go DIY and make a limited edition, made-to-order, run of your release. This is called, in business studies parlance, just in time production and by making sure your wardrobe is not burdened, it prevents overstocking. Set either an arbitrary or a costed definition of how ‘limited’ the edition is going to be. Then offer it for pre-order (probably with some incentives for early purchasers), then available for general sale. From that point on, simply make them after, not before, they are ordered, in a ‘one in, one out’ methodology.

If you have a band then you already have a ‘crew’ who can be used if orders become too overwhelming (a ’supply shock’). Personalisation, artistic flair and attention to detail can create things of real artistic value, but which entail little financial cost (though potentially time-consuming). Modern printers make this very easy. The release of Les Étoiles - To Leave A Markswiftly sold all of its 70-copies run, and those who bought it thought the packaging really improved the listening experience – it was a carefully wrapped package containing photographs, lyric sheets and a meditation on the album and its themes by author Dominic Fox. Many wrotebeautiful reviews of it as a result, scanning in the photos to illustrate their thoughts!

3. Use Free Online Tools And Use Them Well

We all know (probably) that bands should have an online presence in the shape of aFacebook page, MySpace and, these days, aTwitter feed and a Last.fm. The most important thing here is to actually be activeon them, responding to other people who are interested in your music and generally being personable. But there are even better tools out there for bands.

At the moment, bandcamp.com is by far and away the best outlet through which bands can allow downloads, allow purchases of their music (physical/digital) and do almost everything a band would require without the need for a record company at any stage. Amazon S3 alongside Cloudfront is a significantly better way of hosting your music, at low cost, than the mess of the likes of Mediafire. Soundcloud (whichDrowned in Sound uses) is excellent. Wordpress.com makes it easy to have a blog. For creating a database of contacts, an absolute must for any band, Highrise from 37Signals is invaluable (grab their free plan). Not only can it record the basic details of contact you have made, it can also record what you said to them last, and even do so by recording the e-mails you are sending by copying a certain e-mail address into the bcc line.

4. Contact The Right People To Get Reviews

Sending unsolicited copies of your music either to reviewers or record companies is a huge waste of time and money, and always has been. Only send out copies to reviewers you know, or who you have made contact with and have expressed a liking for your music or an interest in reviewing it.

Instead, contact the bloggers who might like your stuff and give them free copies of your music even, if you can afford it, ‘proper’ versions before general release, and ask them to review it (but don’t pester them like a rabid PR man).

In tracking down blogs, the usual suspects, HypeMachine, are useful, but do call in any favours from friends. Also, track down users who have been vocal about liking music, whether on last.fm or Facebook, anybody! Record all of this (in your brand new Highrise account) diligently and always (always!) follow up leads (but never pester!).

While the online platform is amazing, keep in mind that sometimes getting someone on the phone or seeing them face to face, though much more embarrassing than dropping an e-mail, might be the better way to getting things done.

5. Build Networks With Other Bands

When you are in a band you do this intuitively anyway – find bands from the same geographical area who are doing similar things to you (though maybe not the same genre) and set up your own support structures – club nights, gigs, events, record launches that mutually support one another.

When “offline”, be creative in using these structures – get a band to DJ at your gig, set up a collective gig-loyalty scheme, bake cakes, pool resources. Manage these kind of things online – for instance, by using a private forum for local bands to swap tips, link websites and MySpaces to one another, promote each others’ gigs, and share webhosting costs (Dreamhost allows unlimited hosting of domains for very little – split between four bands this would be trivial), not forgetting cross-promotion of records and events.

Also, it would be quite helpful if the music you make is any good.

Alex Andrews is a freelance journalist, academic and activist living in Canterbury, UK. His main interests are neoliberalism, economics and the interaction of politics and religion. He is also involved in a number of music projects and is a founding member of Records on Ribs

Records on Ribs is an independent record label which gives away all its music for free download under a Creative Commons license, as well a providing beautifully made and fairly priced physical releases. (http://recordsonribs.com)

In Theory – Karl Marx’s fetishisms

hich — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:57:33 +0000

By Andrew Robinson

We are surrounded by objects which have (at least potentially) the status of commodities, but what is this status and how does it relate to social life? This article will explore the most famous and influential response to this question: Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. This is not a theory which exists in a void. Commodity fetishism is central to Marx’s account of alienation and hence to his ethical critique of capitalist society, as well as to his structural theory of the functioning of capitalism. It is, according to Marx, the most universal expression of capitalism. Hence, in understanding capitalism, it is useful to look again at commodity fetishism.

To make a fetish of something is to treat it as if it has powers which, at least on its own merit, it lacks. As we shall see, this does not mean that a fetish is a simple illusion. Nevertheless, in commodity fetishism, commodities – physical objects which are bought and sold – are take to have a characteristic they do not in themselves have. As early as the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx argued that the products of labour tend to escape people’s control in capitalist society, leaving people estranged from the products of their own creative activity. In Capital, Marx takes this argument further, arguing that the ‘fantastic form’ of commodities is the basis for alienation. Commodities in capitalism take on a second, additional set of characteristics alongside their physical characteristics as items with certain properties and uses. While their ‘use-values’ and physical attributes are not mysterious, commodities also take on characteristics of inherent exchangeability which are quite alien to their physical nature. Furthermore, their values are not, according to Marx, set arbitrarily; they come about systematically, seeming to be natural attributes of commodities. Such values are real, but not inherent to commodities.

This equivalence is the trick of commodity fetishism, for the objects related as commodities are not inherently equivalent – they have different uses, different sizes, heights, masses and so on. Thus, commodity fetishism renders very different kinds of commodities equivalent. Commodities can be bought and sold for exchange-values which are quantifiable – they appear as numbers (prices). It is this equivalence which makes exchange possible. According to Marx, since their relations are not arbitrary, this means they must have an attribute in common through which they are compared. Capitalism is unusual among social systems: while all systems connect incommensurable activities, capitalism alone does so by rendering such activities equivalent. This primacy of equivalence is one of the reasons the currently fashionable view of capitalism as absolutely deterritorialised is flawed. For capitalism to function, the huge range of different objects which can exist as commodities must be reduced to a single, reductive scheme of equivalence, by means of command. Money, the universal equivalent, functions in this field as a master-signifier, as argued by Jean-Joseph Goux. In other words, money integrates the social field, rendering the other objects equivalent. Once established, it allows effective economic coordination without any kind of decision-making, either democratic or authoritarian, at the level of the entire system (as opposed to the specific company or enterprise). Commodities serve as the link between people and thus allow the allocation of people and things to social production without any kind of planning.

The attribute Marx thinks that commodities have in common, which allows them to systematically attain value, is that they express the ‘congealed’ labour of workers. Exchange-values ultimately follow from the amount and type of socially-defined labour that goes into making a commodity. Of course, this simply moves the problem, because labour, like produced goods, is actually diverse and not comparable. Labour is made comparable by reducing it to one and only one of its many characteristics: the characteristic of being abstract human labour-power. Once the value of labour has been imposed, it makes sense that it could be expressed in the value of commodities. Hence, commodity fetishism is only possible in a social system where labour is socialised. The treatment of all labour as socially equivalent rests on a process of abstraction which not only ignores differences among types of work, but also silences the life-experiences of workers. Workers are formally related through the commodity-form only indirectly, in their contracts with bosses and not their relations with other workers. In practice, of course, workers are engaged in socialised production. Capitalism is ultimately imposed on society only by means of violence – known as subsumption, or accumulation-by-dispossession. People are forced into wage-labour by the destruction of other social forms such as subsistence economies, and a continuing violence to prevent such alternatives from re-emerging. Some people constantly challenge this coercion into capitalist work by strategies such as ‘autoreduction’ and ‘dole autonomy’, and capitalism seeks to suppress such challenges by renewed violence. Also, there are constant struggles over the wage capitalists have to concede to workers in return for imposing the commodity-form, both directly as payments and as a social wage, such as the welfare state.

Capitalist society is simultaneously individualist at an ideological level, and coercively collectivist in its underlying functioning. In commodity fetishism, people appear independent, but in fact are highly dependent on the world of commodities, which for instance, can take away people’s jobs due to changing prices or demand. Hence, commodity fetishism masks what is in fact a social compulsion and a distribution of work. Indeed, it masks the fact that, far from being free producers selling their labour, people are subject to a kind of forced work. It conceals both the interdependence of people in capitalism and the coerced nature of their organisation. As a result, it integrates people both vertically – as workers subordinated to bosses – and horizontally – distributed among different work tasks – without creating direct horizontal relations among producers at the level of the system itself. Instead, each worker is subordinate to the world of things, which embodies the integrative force of the entire system. Furthermore, it is through the commodity-form that the illusion is created that capital can reproduce itself, that investing money in something can produce more money – a step which should be impossible in an equivalential system. This supposedly self-expanding money is only possible because the commodity-form disguises the exploitation of workers.

Commodity fetishism creates ideological boundaries between what can be seen and what cannot. Marx argues that commodity fetishism makes relations which actually occur between workers and capitalists, the producers of commodities, appear to be relations between the ‘things’ which are produced. Commodity fetishism is in particular the means by which the role of workers in production is disguised. Capitalist accounts don’t talk much about workers or producers as a distinct group, but producers are able to appear in capitalist accounts as owners of commodities, for instance, as people hired to sell their labour. The second set of characteristics of commodities arise from the fact that they portray characteristics of work as characteristics of the product of work. Through the movement of commodities, labour becomes invisible. For instance, products seem to appear in supermarkets as if my magic, put there by a process of labour and transport which remains invisible. Marx believes that this peculiar invisibility of labour only arises in capitalist society – it did not occur in earlier societies, however class-divided these may have been, and would disappear in any future alternative society. As Billig argues, this invisibility makes possible enjoyment of capitalist consumption by hiding exploitative conditions of production. Demystification of the ideological nature of commodities is necessary, but not sufficient, to destroy capitalism. Ultimately, commodity fetishism could be destroyed only if the entire form of society of which it is the integrative pole is transformed.

In commodity fetishism, people have an experience of being controlled by the activities and movements of inanimate objects. For instance, people are compelled or bribed to move between jobs by the changing relative values of different commodities. This is not simply false consciousness. We are in fact pressured from outside, people do in fact buy and sell commodities for money, and phenomena such as commodity exchange-value actually exist socially. This pressure does not actually come from commodities, but commodities act as the way in which the pressure appears. In capitalist society, the only way people can affect other people’s productive activity is indirectly, through changes in the relations among commodities. In Gerry Cohen’s account, the illusion is not in assuming that commodities have value, but in believing that this value is an attribute of commodities. Commodities do in fact have value, but only as a result of social relations; they do not have it in themselves. Hence, commodities are socially constructed: they have a status which is real in its effects, but which is a matter of status being assigned to them, much like putting someone in an official uniform. In many ways, people in capitalism are in the worst of both worlds: individualised enough to be denied social support, and yet vulnerable to external forces over which they have no individual control. This creates the ‘possessive individualist’ type of subjectivity – ostensibly free, yet also ‘responsible’ to imperatives derived from impersonal forces and relations among things (to be employable, wise with investments, credit-worthy and so on).

The status of commodities is rather mysterious, because they are at once real and fictional. A fetish is an ‘appearance’, but not an illusion. Unlike an illusion, it doesn’t vanish once someone realises it is an appearance. It does, however, conceal the underlying reality, which, once recognised, makes commodities cease to be mysterious. An appearance in this sense is distinct from the underlying essence or reality, which occurs at the level of the social relations which create the appearance. Through the appearance, certain things come not to be seen. Authors such as Bertell Ollman and Michael Billig argue that Marx’s account implies a kind of collective forgetfulness in capitalism: the system looks natural and unchangeable because the contestable social relations on which it is based are concealed. This concealment is sustained by habit. In many ways, however, fetishism is less an illusion than a founding belief which is necessary for an entire social order to function. It is something people have to believe, or act as if they believe, for the rest of the system to hold together. Commodities have value only because people (not just particular people, but all the people taking part in exchange) act as if they do. Nevertheless, people are forced to continue to act as if they do – even if they see through the mystification – for as long as they remain trapped in the system based on this assumption. Hence, fetishism is a way of organising social relations and not only an ideological perception of them.

The theory of commodity fetishism has been taken in a number of directions by other authors after Marx. According to Massimo di Angelis, whereas capitalists see fetishism as objectivity, workers experience fetishism directly, as a process whereby their activity is turned into objects. Di Angelis argues that commodity fetishism is basic to a ‘class understanding of economics’, providing the basis for understanding exploitation and capital. Only through the medium of commodity fetishism is labour rendered an activity for others, and hence exploited. More broadly, commodity fetishism can be seen as entailing ‘reification’, the misrepresentation of social relations and processes (becoming) as fixed things (being). The Hungarian Marxist George Lukacs argues the matrix or source of reification in general is commodity fetishism. From the initial reification stem a whole range of others, from misrecognising political relations of domination as laws and institutions, to imagining people’s situated social action to be the result of innate character-traits. This interpretation of Marx reaches its apex in the work of John Holloway, for whom the replacement of doing with being is the key dimension of capitalist oppression. For Holloway, every rejection of the separation of ourselves from our agency is a form of rebellion against capitalism, a rebellion which is, in the first instance, the negation of this separation.

There are also critiques which, while drawing on Marx, challenge his account of commodity fetishism, especially its applicability today. For instance, Jean Baudrillard argues that sign-value is now more important than use-value in creating commodities. Designer brands aren’t worth more because they’re more useful, but because of the social status they give or the impressions they convey. But they are given these status values in part because of their cost. This puts fetishism on a different level: the system ceases to attach additional elements to objects with independent uses, but rather, feeds back the fetish into the uses of the objects themselves. Another line of critique comes from Antonio Negri. In his 1970s work, Negri argued that the law of value has stopped working. The reason for this is that there is too much unpaid labour, as a lot of social activity outside the workplace is now productive – think for instance of housework and childcare, which are normally unpaid, but are vital to the reproduction of capitalism. Of course, commodities still have values, but Negri thinks they increasingly have values which are arbitrarily assigned to them, rather than derived systematically from similar characteristics of labour. As a result, value is imposed by command rather than exchange. This might not be a big change, since as we saw above, the value of labour from which commodity values derive was already imposed by command.

In my view, commodity fetishism is a useful concept in many ways. It depicts effectively the relationship between apparently mundane everyday practices and the forces of systemic integration in capitalism. It is extremely useful as a way of thinking about the internal logic of capitalism. But does it tell the whole story? While capitalism is ever more globalised and intrusive, I suspect that we do not – and cannot – live in an entirely ‘capitalised’ world. For one thing, the moment capitalism turns its back, other forms of life (both emancipatory and conservative) reappear – social networks, subsistence, local identities and so on. For another, capitalism depends on the state to keep it in existence, and the state, while also fetishised in its own way, has a distinct oppressive logic of its own, more about control and ’security’ than exchange. In addition, the theory of commodity fetishism is limited in its ability to deal with the primary alienation of humanity and nature which underpins capitalism. This said, it is not clear that a theory of commodities should explain all these other things as well. Commodity fetishism is conceptually valid if understood as one of a range of social logics operating in a conflictual and hybridised social field – indeed, as one of the most important today – but it becomes more problematic if it is taken as the last word on social life. Even within Marx’s theory, it is only when supplemented by ideas of class struggle and revolution that it becomes a transformative concept.

Andrew Robinson is a political theorist and activist based in the UK. His book Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies (co-authored with Athina Karatzogianni) was published in Sep 2009 by Routledge. His ‘In Theory’ column appears every other Friday.

We come in peace – shoot to kill: On the perils of peacekeeping

hich — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:30:28 +0000

By Andrew Robinson

Civil wars are not events which happen “out there”, in a mysterious other world, but are intimately connected to the forces dominating the lives of people around the world. Emerging in zones of exclusion and dispossession, civil war is a symptom of global neoliberalism, an effect of a particular constellation of forces which encourages violent resource-extraction and decomposes social integration. The sites of civil war, demonised as ‘black holes’ and ‘failed states’, are like the relative whose breakdown shows the abusive dynamics of the entire family; the violence of the ‘new world order’, while disavowed and condemned, is in fact predictably concentrated at these points. Peace interventions (peacekeeping, peacemaking, peacebuilding) often operate in this context as an attempt to square the circle, to have the rose without the thorns. They have increasingly occurred in a grey area between peacekeeping and military enforcement, in ways which border on colonialism. Advocates of peacekeeping tend to portray zones of conflict in Hobbesian terms, as an abyss of collapse in which not only peace but also social order collapses. They thus map real problems of warfare onto their own frames, substituting for the voices of agents or victims on the ground by reconceiving problems in terms of the lack of a modern state.

In liberal approaches, peacebuilding, statebuilding and state ’security’ are conflated. Liberals generally start from the premise that ethics is universal, but in practice derive their universalist positions from dominant western value-systems. Speaking from this western standpoint, they then speak on behalf of the victims of civil war, who are taken to be the ethical referent of action but whose voices are rarely heard. What victims are taken to need is not simply contingent peace but a particular kind of state as desired by the liberal observer. In general, these accounts ignore colonial histories and current dependent relations, portraying the victims as at once ‘like us’, people with the same implied values, and radically other, as ’strangers’ in Nicholas Wheeler’s phrase, with whom “we” have no prior contact. Liberals look to the state or the UN as the agent by which justice can be delivered on behalf of the victims (or those who speak for them). While the aim is to produce a liberal kind of state, draconian means are often countenanced in order to bring it about. There are then a number of approaches pioneered by authors such as Roland Paris and Michael Lund. These authors take the liberal view to account for its imperialistic assumptions, but retain a state-based focus. In fact, they revert to a narrow instrumentalism which justifies despotic measures as means to ensure ’security’.

Liberal interventions often fail because the regimes and norms they seek to ‘restore’ are alien to the contexts in which they are implanted. Often, liberals intervene while imagining themselves to be bearers of universal humanity, bringing civilisation to others. In practice, however, they intervene in complex fields of contending social forces, and are viewed locally as anything but neutral. Even when successful, intervention creates a field of exclusions from the global frame which persist as lingering resentments, and can explode in later conflicts. Such failures are blamed on ’spoilers’, hardcore groups with investments in the political economy of war, who need to be defeated militarily. Where injustice is not resolved in peace settlements, the persistence of conflict cannot be reduced to self-interested ’spoilers’, and the discourse of looking for ’spoilers’ becomes a way to silence grievances. In practice, the theory of ’spoilers’ has largely been falsified: security guarantees which should deter spoilers do not correlate with the success of peace processes. Nevertheless, it continues to underpin mainstream thinking.

Viewing the state as a prerequisite to peace is problematic because the state is by nature an armed, violent organisation. The state does not eliminate warlike power from social life, but rather, reconstructs it as the basis for social order. It also rests on concentrated power, which introduces dangerous imbalances in settings with strong intergroup rivalries: statebuilding acts as a trigger for groups to compete for control of the state. In societies where many people have a strong sense of honour and where power has traditionally been diffuse – such as Afghanistan and Somalia – there is a tendency for the centralisation of power to provoke rebellion, reproducing cycles of war as political exclusion creates symbolic insults. The danger is that people go into civil war situations imagining that there is no peace, no state and no society, and the aim is to build all three at once – after all, they are taken to imply one another. Peacekeepers who view themselves as lawgivers are prone to act in imperialistic ways, behaving like Judge Dredd or Mad Max, in line with how local contexts have been explained to them. So ineffective have resultant interventions been that some authors, such as Darby and MacGinty, have argued that peacekeeping has only been successful when it did not involve armed enforcement.

There is a need to reconceive civil wars as social situations involving participants and survivors with their own systems of meaning. Civil wars can cause immense suffering, but they do not typically involve the breakdown of all the structures of social life. People do not suddenly become atomised individuals caught in a Hobbesian struggle. Rather, the assumptions of combatants, the survival strategies of civilians and the processes whereby everyday life continues in spite of war reveal dense structures of meaning, interpretation and social composition every bit as rich as those occurring in apparently peaceful societies. The problem is therefore misconstrued in liberal and related theories. Firstly, where states have collapsed, building a state is not always a way to recompose social relations; it is often pitted against centrifugal forces in local societies. Secondly, building peace, in a field where diffuse social relations exist, does not necessarily imply building a state. On the contrary, statebuilding can interfere with peacebuilding by unleashing centralising and identity-fixing forces. Thirdly, where a (‘failed’) state still exists, it is typical for intervenors to pathologise every aspect of its functioning, ignoring the fact that the characteristics deemed to cause failure in one case are often part of normal state-society relations in another. As a result of these assumptions, a relatively simple task – turning a temporarily conflictual diffuse society into a peaceful diffuse society – is turned into a staggeringly immense one – turning a diffuse, poor, culturally incomprehensible society into a model liberal-democracy. Instead of working with social forces which could contribute to building peace, such an approach systematically works against them.

Militarised approaches often instead work with social forces which contribute to the continuation of cycles of violence. Jan Nederveen Pieterse has argued that rigid forms of identity, based on the ‘hard’ politics of power competition and militarism, produces the forms of reified ‘ethnicity’ which are the underpinnings of civil war. Rather than undermine such ‘hard politics’, peace operations tend to reinforce them in a number of ways (by practising hard politics themselves, by giving credibility to hard political actors, by concentrating on power issues and so on). From a different angle, Mark Duffield has argued that civil wars are often caught up in networks connecting global agencies and local actors, rendering the peacekeeping infrastructure a complicit part of the process of contemporary conflict.

So how might creative peacebuilding from the bottom-up operate? In terms of theory, the approach pioneered by Jean-Paul Lederach provides a possible way forward. This is an approach focused on ‘conflict transformation’ from below, based on the idea of linking peace to just relationships and establishing nonviolence and human rights as a way of life. Lederach argues that people respond most effectively when change seems to be felt and touched in their own lives. He calls for the transformation of reactive energies into creative energies, and for dialogue as the basis for peace. Peace requires a moral imagination which can step into the unknown and imagine a holistic web of relationships. Lasting transformation of conflicts can only occur when social structures and institutions are transformed to address underlying causes of conflict, distrust and resentment. For instance, land reform is often an underlying issue in rural rebellions. A change as fundamental as a transition from war to peace necessarily involves a deep reshaping of social relations, not simply gestures of crisis-management.

This approach fits with many of the conclusions emerging from empirical research. To effectively resolve conflicts, underlying injustices need to be rectified, power needs to be redistributed from warlord elites into everyday life, and former combatants need to be offered effective alternatives to militia life. Addressing aspects of conflicts related to identity and representation is particularly crucial. Conflict is often bound up with militarised forms of masculinity, with acquisitive forms of subjectivity imitated from the global media, and with exclusionary impulses in terms of identity which are a way of managing the destabilising psychological effects of globalisation. The problem is that such needs collide with a global system built on inequality and domination. As a result, interventions tend to take the form of crisis management rather than effective resolution.

In practice, matters are rarely as one-sided as a theoretical account suggests. Interventions often involve elements of both ‘hard’ peacebuilding, pursued at a state level, and ’soft’ peacebuilding or ‘track two’ or ‘citizens’ diplomacy, pursued at the local level in terms of underlying causes of conflict. The latter tend to be treated as poor relatives of the former, which get the bulk of donor funding and international attention. Non-governmental organisations often complain of difficulties obtaining funding for prolonged projects in fields such as human rights promotion and combating nationalism. It is, however, the failures in the latter field which often compromise peace operations. Persistent conflicts tend to remain insoluble because of vicious circles of hostility at the grassroots level. Top-down approaches act as if incorporating or eliminating the leadership of armed groups is sufficient to bring peace. This ignores the fact that leaders are able to form militias only because they provide some force of attraction to potential followers – they claim to redress injustice, channel hostilities between groups, provide an income for unemployed young men, provide emotive symbols and so on. Conflicts are often concentrated at certain sites which are often both the main sites of suffering due to war and the sources of new combatants and their support-base. ‘Beheading’ the conflict does not take away the forces which bring it into being.

When underlying causes, including the systematic deprivation of these core conflict areas, are not addressed, top-down peace approaches simply ‘behead’ a conflict, driving it underground. This may soften its most visible manifestations and produce an appearance of peace for awhile, but the conflict will often re-emerge later. Either new groups will emerge to carry the flag of the dispossessed groups, or conflicts will be displaced sideways, into forms of low-intensity warfare carried out in spite of social ‘peace’. The former problem is noticeable in Northern Ireland today, where the incorporation of Sinn Fein into dominant power-structures has not addressed the dispossession of impoverished Catholic communities, as a result of which, dissident Republicans are now gaining in strength; and in Palestine, where a peace process loaded towards continued Israeli dominance caused a mutation of social forces away from the now-complicit PLO towards Hamas and towards everyday forms of resistance. In neither case is a lasting peace possible without justice. The latter problem is noticeable in a case such as South Africa, where persistent conflicts drive anti-”crime” and anti-poor violence and the emergence of cityscapes dotted with fortified areas, and in Guatemala, where the lack of resolution has seen former combatants displaced into ‘criminal’ violence which claims more lives than the warfare from which it stemmed. In these cases, ‘peace’ without justice has simply displaced conflict. Feminist scholars have similarly shown how apparently ’successful’ peace operations have actually spread violence in the lives of women on the ground, for instance through sexual violence by peacekeepers. In looking at the ’success’ of interventions, we need to bear in mind the indirect effects which might not be classified as war, but which might be even more devastating in everyday life.

Hope for alternatives to the new colonialism also emerge from everyday practices of conflict resolution. Indigenous societies often have their own peacebuilding and conflict resolution approaches using local cultural idioms. Often these avoid the emergence of power-asymmetries, instead relying on something more akin to civil than criminal law, with disputes referred to a mutually accepted arbiter and resolved in terms of reparation payments and ritual peacemaking. Among the Nuer of Sudan, a person involved in a violent incident could claim sanctuary at the house of a ‘leopard-skin chief’, a local shamanic mediator who would then seek to broker a deal to head off intergroup feuding. Among the warlike Sambia in Papua, the frequent open-ended feuds between groups of male warriors are periodically constrained by the interventions of women, based on the impact of warfare on subsistence agriculture. In the Moluccas, warring villages would reach peace agreements by recognising each other as fictive kin with mutual obligations. There are also a range of cases where ritualised conflict serves as a substitute for lethal warfare.

Such practices can often be seen in successful bottom-up peace processes. In the Moluccas, ethnic and religious conflicts were stirred in the 1990s by military and political leaders hostile to democratisation in Indonesia. The eventual resolution came about when local communities, organised for years to fight resource extraction, initiated a local peacebuilding process based on customary laws and wisdom. This locally-based process, with little outside support, shows the power of bottom-up processes. Another unexpected success was the peace process in Somaliland, a northern breakaway region of Somalia which entered a prolonged peace at exactly the time the rest of the country was embroiled in civil war. This process was successful because it did the exact opposite of the peace process in the rest of Somalia: it started from the grassroots, sought to resolve local issues (such as land disputes) prior to those at the centre, and placed a large emphasis on providing alternatives for combatants, who were effectively bought off. La Ruta Pacifica provide another example of bottom-up peacebuilding. This women’s network has challenged the institutionalised violence of the Colombian civil war through practices referred to as ’social weaving’, including collective mourning rituals which convert fear into hope, and confronting the terror of armed groups through nonviolent occupation of militarised spaces. Ultimately, more can be achieved through encouraging these kinds of bottom-up peacebuilding processes than from the cynical or well-meaning attempts of powerful agents to fight fire with fire.

Think Big! In defence of ideology

hich — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 10:02:07 +0000

By Alex Andrews

In a recent Guardian ‘Comment is Free’ piece, Anthony Lerman laments the fact an anti-capitalist ideology has not emerged in the aftermath of the financial crisis, but wouldn’t really want to subscribe to one if it did. It’s difficult to believe that, as Lerman claims, no new ideas have emerged after the crisis or even the repetition of old ones. It is hard to see “the anti-globalisation movement directed at G8s and G20s” as having “run out of steam” when the City of Toronto just spent $1 billion protecting the leaders of the world from their citizens. When David Harvey can rustle up a Marxist analysis of the whole of the crisis which can be explained by a lovely animation, coherent analyses are not lacking and neither are alternatives.

Putting these issues aside, Lerman manages to obscure the influence of the most successful ideological movement of the 20th century – neoliberalism – unconsciously on his own thought. As the most successful form of capitalist ideology so far devised, neoliberalism has established far more than simply a ‘consensus’ among politicians, but the naturalised defaults of debate that Lerman too appears to subscribe to, likely against himself. Neoliberalism correctly understood as early as the late 1930s that it was not enough to simply explain the benefits of unfettered capitalism to national leaders but to neuter all opposing and alternative ideologies as being part of the same cloth, all steps on the “road to serfdom”. Lerman’s desire for “a fox-like, piecemeal, generalist approach” rather than “a hedgehog-like, all-encompassing ideology” sadly falls into this trap.

The desire for the piecemeal approach, where nips and tucks will somehow render the system fair, plays all too well into the idea that it was a few bad eggs that caused the crisis rather than a systematic question, as Lerman rightly notices. The prohibition against hedgehog thinking is a worse and particularly pernicious element of the ideology of capitalism. The taboo on any form of ideas opposed to capitalism, least they slip into ‘ideology’ is an example of what theorist Mark Fisher has termed capitalist realism: the end of capitalism, or even the modification of capitalism in its current form is not only impossible and dangerous, but quite unthinkable. At best, an attempt to move towards a more just and egalitarian society is naive adolescent idealism, cute, but disconnected from reality.

F. Hayek, one of the major architects of postwar neoliberalism

Even minor adjustments of the present in the name of mollifying some of the human consequences of cuts are foolish, since there is no alternative but to reduce deficits and please the rating agencies, despite reasonable Keynesians pointing out how this will force us into a double-dip recession. At worst, those thinkers hoping to move beyond capitalism are immediately complicit in the worst crimes of the 20th century, regardless of how often and how loudly they declaim them. Anti-capitalist thinkers simply subscribe to a form of fanaticism, an irrational inability to accept the world as it is, a position worthy of pathologisation, mockery and exclusion from popular debate. One only needs to read the hysterical reactions to a figure as mainstream as Noam Chomsky to recognise this is the case, or any Comment Is Free article mentioning the c- or s- word for that matter. Rather, what is required is hardheaded, practical politicians, who with no ideology but a grim determination to face economic realities, to busily implement market based solutions to the NHS and education as well as ensure that those responsible for the crisis itself are rapped lightly over the knuckles and the system that caused it, and will continue to cause future crises, is permitted to continue untouched while all others, particularly the poorest suffer the consequences. As Slavoj Žižek has pointed out, when politicians claim to lay aside their ideology they reveal their most ideological moment. Claims that ideology is absent should be taken as moments where it is likely that an ideology has become so naturalised and transparent that it no longer appears as such. Sadly its influence is clear on Lerman’s analysis, and the very division of the two types of thinking, as with many others. Such is the case with abandoning supposed hedgehog thinking, something Hayek’s motley band of economists, journalists and politicians at the Mont Pelerin Society never considered as they developed neoliberalism and planned to overturn the post-war settlement.

To abandon thinking big is to allow the unacknowledged lens to remain in place. The first step is to think boldly and to reject the terms of debate as they are presented to us. This includes sage warnings not to think big.

Alex Andrews is a freelance journalist, academic and activist living in Canterbury, UK. His main interests are neoliberalism, economics and the interaction of politics and religion

Anarchism, war and the state

hich — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:53:40 +0000

By Andrew Robinson

This article summarises how a number of anarchist and anarchistic authors view the relationship between the state and war. Some of the authors discussed below are self-identified anarchists, while others are libertarian or autonomist Marxists who adopt anarchistic ideas. Stereotypically, anarchists are associated with violence, corresponding to the view of states as guarantors of peace. The first stereotype follows from the second: while anarchists disagree on the use of force, they generally view states as highly warlike, and oppose state violence both internationally and against internal ‘enemies’. The Hobbesian view of the state as protector is based partly on an assessment of state behaviour comparable to IR Realism, and partly PM awareness of histories of state-formation and of stateless peoples and movements. In contrast to statists, anarchists generally view society or social relations as separate and distinct from the state (or the state as a special kind of social relation distinct from others).

Michael Bakunin, one of the earliest, and most celebrated proponents of Anarchism

In response to a common misconception, it is not true that anarchists oppose the state because they are naïve about human nature. Anarchist views about human nature are widely variant. Objections to the state can be convincing based on many different views, such as distrusting people to hold too much power without abusing it. Statists might be said to have a dual conception of human nature: the good people are trusted with excessive power so as to disempower the bad people. Statism is thus associated with hierarchical differentiations of people. Further, the objection is not simply to states as institutions but to state-like ways of relating and acting: in some accounts, the state is a social relation. In anarchist theory, states are viewed as expressions of hierarchical, oppressive social logics. They are forces of decomposition, which tend to attack or break down alternative, horizontal social relations. They are also based on ‘reactive’ emotional forces of suspicion, hatred and aggression which they channel to produce warlike relations among people. They also turn on one another, accumulating wealth by pillaging other states or societies. Against such state violence, anarchist strategies often seek to find or form focal-points for social power which can counterbalance or draw energies away from state power. These focal-points necessarily involve living and acting in non-militarist, non-authoritarian ways.

In Statism and Anarchy, Bakunin portrays the modern state as primarily military, and closely connected to the ruling class. As a military force, the state is necessarily aggressive, competing with other states for power. It produces moral and intellectual decay through its corrupting power. The extent of this decay depends on the extent to which the state’s way of thinking filters down through society, a process which is strongest in the most militaristic states. The ‘people’, primarily meaning the excluded and powerless, are for Bakunin a potential counterpoint to the state, and can destroy it in insurrection.

Kropotkin similarly argues that the state, or ‘political principle’ (vertical association or hierarchy), is counterposed to society, or the ’social principle’ (horizontal association or affinity). In The State: Its Historic Role, he argues that the state is ’synonymous with war’. The state brings peace, if at all, only as lifeless dominance in a ‘colourless, lifeless whole’. Social networks bring effervescent life, whereas states bring death through structural violence and pillage. Since the state cannot tolerate other sources of power, it wages constant war against social networks as they arise. There is thus a constant zero-sum struggle between the state as a force of control and impoverishment and social networks as spaces for freedom and creativity. Local communities have capabilities for self-defence and/or peacebuilding. Although wars can be fought outside or against states, they have a different significance, enlivening people in the defence of liberty rather than disempowering them through its destruction.

Stirner’s argument is rather different. In The Ego and its Own, he starts from a critique of social roles and categories, termed ’spooks’ in his work, to derive a critique of submission to overarching categories of all kinds. Stirner is what would today be called an ‘anti-essentialist’, an opponent of fixed labels and of the privileging of some aspects of a person over others. States are rejected as bearers of particular categories which are wrongly accorded a greater status than other categories. Further, sacrifices for the state are always matters of the state’s self-interest. By claiming a monopoly on violence, the state pursues self-interested violence at the expense of its subjects.

Tolstoy’s Christian Anarcho-Pacifism draws similar distinctions, but characterises the anti-state pole rather differently. For Tolstoy, the state’s ‘law of violence’ stands against a ‘law of love’, with each expressing a particular emotional climate and set of passions. States embody ‘low passions’ such as hatred (often channelled against outsiders using nationalism), against which love provides a basis for peace and happiness. Love is expressed in acts such as conscientious objection, withdrawing the social activity on which state violence is based.

Anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were central in anti-conscription activism in First World War America and were jailed as prisoners of conscience. Their anti-militarist critiques placed a strong emphasis on socialist criticisms of the capitalistic basis of war. Elites use irrational prejudices to manipulate people into fighting on their behalf. Rudolf Rocker wrote an influential anarchist critique of nationalism around the same time, portraying the state as distorting legitimate particularisms into hateful chauvinisms. Also in this period, Randolph Bourne popularised the phrase ‘war is the health of the state’. In an unfinished work titled The State, he argued that the state demands ‘mystic[al] devotion’, which war is a means to realise. In war, the permanent state machine displaces party competition and comes to monopolise public life. Its main aim is not victory, but the ’spiritual compulsion’ bound up with the ideal of the state, with the triumph of a ‘herd’ mentality over creativity and difference. The outpouring of irrational, reactive forces is managed by nationalistic elites for their own benefit.

With fascism overrunning Europe, the leftist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich pioneered a sexual-liberationist critique of militaristic states in his Mass Psychology of Fascism. Reich views repressive social systems as enabled by repressive biological and emotional structures through which people prevent themselves from feeling emotions. Fascism emerges from a complete identification with state power and the leader, a pattern derived from identification with the father in patriarchal, authoritarian families. Such families train people to channel attachments vertically rather than horizontally. More recently, Klaus Theweleit used this approach to interpret the masculine violence of proto-fascist groups as an attempt to seek existential security in categories of purity and displays of superiority over demonised others. On a similar line of thought, authors from the Frankfurt School have argued that industrialised war and genocide throw doubt on the benevolence of modernity. Adorno links war to the desire to dominate nature. Fromm argues that humanity’s survival is put at risk by a peculiarly human type of malevolent aggression arising from alienation. Marcuse critiques the discourse of war as a kind of doublespeak, and interprets modern war as a self-frustrating product of the frustration-aggression complex. Frustration arising from capitalist life is channelled and rendered socially functional through military aggression, but cannot be alleviated by such aggression because human means of war have been replaced with technological means. War thus tends towards repetition and escalation.

Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ distinguishes between three types of violence or effective action. States are founded in law-making violence which posits their own command as the law, are maintained by law-preserving violence which maintains a status-quo through small acts of enforcement, and can be shattered by law-destroying violence (such as a general strike). For Benjamin, the state is based on reactive attachments, here interpreted as power over life for the sake of power, and is fearful, becoming more authoritarian over time as it becomes afraid of the emergence of counter-powers. Law-making violence is instrumental, whereas law-destroying violence is expressive, directing itself against the capability to use law-making or preserving violence.

The theory of the state as a source of social decomposition by means of social war is extended by Antonio Negri in his 1970s-era works. Negri views state violence as a means to preserve capitalist domination as a kind of irrational social command over labour. The new form of the state, the ‘crisis-state’, is geared to a permanent state of exception which simultaneously causes and wards off extreme risks of destruction such as nuclear war. It also forms an internal warfare state directed at forces of life, autonomous social movements, with which it is in an irreducible antagonism. In this phase, Negri views such movements as tending to become an armed society counterposed to the state. This view of radical antagonism fades in Negri’s more recent work, but still in Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Multitude, the state is deemed to be waging an unwinnable, unlimited global war indistinguishable from policing. Also from an autonomist standpoint, the Midnight Notes Collective have argued that recent wars are means for preserving Northern monopolies on advanced technologies by playing on risks of weapons proliferation, or are resource wars focused on the enclosure and exploitation of resources. The idea of the ’state of exception’ has been expanded by Giorgio Agamben.

Looking at autonomy more broadly, alternatives to the state also emerge in studies of stateless indigenous social groups. There is substantial debate on whether such groups are warlike, with scholars arguing that certain groups are extremely peaceful or engage only in ritualised forms of combat. Clastres’ theory of indigenous warfare stands out in showing the difference between indigenous and statist types of war. In his theory, indigenous war is a way of asserting the difference and autonomy of each village or band, placing an obstacle in the way of state-formation by ensuring that power remains diffuse. Statist war, in contrast, causes ethnocide, which is inscribed in the nature of the state as the dissolution of the many into the one. Autonomous social movements such as La Ruta Pacifica also offer autonomous responses to war. In this group’s discourse, social weaving is theorised as a way of counterposing energies of hope to those which sustain the permanent state of war in Colombia. Their activities focus on morale-boosting, emotional repair, collective mourning and working through fear. They believe that violence decomposes social relations, so that power can be exercised by recomposing relations.

Noam Chomsky has been a vigorous champion of Anarcho-syndicalist ideals

Noam Chomsky is perhaps the best-known anarchist critic of imperialist wars. Chomsky’s work focuses on exposing the lies and distortions of political and media accounts of wars, focusing on the empirical rebuttal of false claims. Chomsky focused on economic self-interest as the main motive for warmongering, portraying the military-industrial complex as a financial racket. As well as direct resource grabs, the American war-machine is directed at making the current world-system seem inescapable by eliminating ‘the threat of a good example’, of a country which succeeds without playing America’s game. To allow such warmongering, illusions are systematically manufactured through distorted media coverage. Such ideologies can also be self-perpetuating, particularly among the foreign policy ‘backroom boys’, causing wars through their own dynamic even where there is little economic or geostrategic benefit.

The insurrectionist anarchist Alfredo Bonanno provides another contemporary theory of anarchism and war. In Bonanno’s theory, affirmation of life goes hand-in-hand with assaults on structures of power and alienation. Insurrection is viewed as the point of explosion of accumulated discontent. Struggle must not, however, reproduce militarist approaches which are ‘the dominion of death’. Bonanno also interprets ethno-religious civil wars in terms of the mistaken mapping of the desire for revolt onto misleading ethno-religious categories. Nationalist wars can be manufactured to defuse the ‘powder-keg’ of revolt, or can complicate rebellions against the powerful.

In poststructuralism, war is critiqued as part of a mechanism of logistical control through which diffuse hierarchical apparatuses reshape society. Deleuze and Guattari view states as counterposed to autonomous war-machines of the kind discussed by Clastres. The state also captures such war-machines, turning them into forces of reactive desire for its own projects of ‘antiproduction’ or decomposition. War-machines captured by states become agencies of “war for war’s sake”, tending towards total destruction. Virilio treats the military class as an important social force with its own logic or ‘essence’ which it seeks to impose on society. The method of the military class is not simply to defeat enemies but to control and rearrange space so as to disempower enemies in advance or corrode their affirmative energies. This is achieved, for instance, by creating ecologically inhospitable spaces subject to control, in place of dense ecosystems. The military is thus counterposed to popular defence, which has a different logic based on dense ecosystemic spaces giving strategic advantages over attackers. Today, popular defence has recomposed as insurrection, in cases such as Vietnam and Palestine, and has as its goal the destruction of military control over space. Baudrillard argues that states cause not ‘war’ (which implies an adversarial and symbolic element) but ‘non-war’, a kind of destructive violence in which the enemy is not recognised as an agent but instead, systematically disempowered by technological means. ‘Non-war’ is pursued as a means to systemic dominance, but is compromised by its incapacity for dialogue.

One can summarise these various views through a few leitmotifs they have in common. Firstly, anarchist views of war see the state as a force for repressive control, in the interests of the state itself or of a ruling class or elite. Such states find themselves in constant war with other kinds of social forces, and sometimes with other states too. They thus use war as a kind of crisis-management, to control societies and maintain an overall system of control. States are based on, or else produce for their own ends, reactive emotional dispositions of aggression, fear and ‘herd’ morality which find their apex in war. States, especially warfare-states, tend to disempower and sap energies from other social forces and to decompose social relations. Against such powers, people can activate counter-powers, either as forces in a relation of non-militarist war with the state, or as networks which withdraw the everyday power on which the state depends.

* This article is based on “The State as a Cause of War: Anarchist and Autonomist Critiques of War”, forthcoming in Hall Gardner (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to War: Origins and Prevention, Aldershot: Ashgate.

Andrew Robinson is a political theorist and activist based in the UK. His book Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies (co-authored with Athina Karatzogianni) was published in Sep 2009 by Routledge.

Devil’s Advocate: Is Democracy overrated?

hich — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:02:46 +0000

By Omer Ali

After the eruption of the wave of democratization that followed the end of the Cold War, and for the two decades since, the desirability of democracy as a political system has been universally undisputed. That ‘democracy is good’ seemed to be one of the few uncontroversial claims politicians from across the political spectrum could make. It has become a self-evident truth, a dogma.

When the Bush administration claimed to be promoting democracy in the lead up to its invasion of Iraq, critics attacked both its methods and its good faith in seeking that goal, they did not, however, challenge the goal itself. Democracy had achieved a sacred status and its promotion was seen as the most worthy of causes in the calculus of this new faith.

A romantic vision of ‘democracies’ has been emerging: idyllic places where citizens are unharassed, governments benevolent, and life unperturbed. In fact, the link, in public discourse, between democracy and societal success has become so cemented that democracy promotion became an ideologically neutral activity – something like giving food aid after a natural disaster. Societies yearned for democracy in the same way the body needed nourishment. Democracy-promotion activities were claiming larger and larger portions of the budgets of western foreign ministries and philanthropic foundations.

In the news media, democracy is always portrayed positively. The only criticism democracies received was that perhaps they were not democratic enough. A prime example of this unbalanced coverage is the narrative that emerged about India and China respectively. The latter regularly receives unfavourable coverage: the polluted rivers, the smog-covered cities, the internal east-west inequality, not to mention the regular pieces denouncing (as they should) human rights violations, censorship and local governments’ disrespect of citizens’ property rights. Yet the former, despite exhibiting similar levels of inequality, pollution and transgressions by both public and private entities, receives only the mildest of sparing rebukes.

This narrative, however, is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. While previously democracy-fetishists could ignore cases like Singapore where autocratic regimes reigned over “successful” societies, there is now a rather large elephant in the room.

At this point in the discussion, the question of how we define societal success comes up. Sure, China is experiencing runaway economic growth raising the incomes of its citizens, but can we really consider a society with such overt suppression of expression successful? This is a fair question and the issue of how we define success is one worthy of contemplation. For the purposes of this piece, however, I’ll evade it. Instead, I will define success by a measure that, I believe, is uncontroversial – namely an unambiguous amelioration of citizens’ standard of living. By this criterion China is very successful. The rampant economy has lifted more than 500 million Chinese citizens from extreme poverty over the last couple of decades (where extreme poverty is defined as an income below $1 a day). Regardless of one’s views of the good life, it is difficult to deny that at very low levels of income what is most valuable is more income.

The same is true of Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. The latter two experienced autocratic regimes that steered their economies through industrialization while Singapore is still under the control of a non-democratic regime with citizens enjoying high levels of income.

There is a famous statistical relationship between democracy and income levels. However, correlation need not necessarily imply causation. The link between democracy and economic performance has been studied furiously in the social science literature yet a consensus remains elusive. In a recent book entitled ‘Wars, Guns and Votes’, Oxford economist Paul Collier argues that the link between democracy and political violence is discontinuous. Above a per capita income level of $2,700, democracy made societies more peaceful, yet below that level of income, democracies were, in fact, more violent than autocracies.

The argument for democracy is a powerful one: if citizens wield control over those in power they cannot be subjected to arbitrary abuses of position. This logic is undeniable, however, the vote is a blunt instrument. When casting a vote, a citizen is at once deciding on tax policy, foreign policy and a myriad other portfolios as well as local issues. One could hypothetically vote for a candidate because of their performance on local issues or because of their party’s manifesto promises. However which way the voter is motivated to vote, the outcome is the same.

Citizens end up voting for a ‘bundle’ of policies that includes issues that are not only unrelated but also completely independent. What should one do, as happened in the US recently, if they happen to be a foreign policy dove yet be against gay marriage? who would that person opt for when faced with the traditional republican/democratic demarcation of candidates? It is clear now that the vote is an inadequate instrument to fully express one’s policy preferences.

Having stated my belief that votes communicate voters’ preferences inaccurately, I now ask: why it should be the case that voters should express their views on policies at all?

The equality of electoral systems, one citizen, one vote, is a means to avoid some citizens exerting disproportionate influence on policy. Although giving citizens equal weight in elections ensures that no particular citizen’s rights are more valuable than those of any other, this logically means no single citizen’s opinion is more important than that of others. But is this desirable? I think the answer is no.

Consider this: why should a doctor and someone untrained in the medical profession have the same opportunity to influence health policy? Why should non-economists be listened to as intently as economists when deciding on economic policy? This is exactly what an equal weight to everyone’s vote achieves and is clearly suboptimal.

These example are of cases where a voter’s wrong choice has a “negative externality” on others, but in ‘The Myth of the Rational Voter’, George Mason University’s Bryan Caplan shows that even in cases where the voter’s self interest is at stake, they could still choose incorrectly. An example is non-farmers voting to keep farm subsidies. Here the policy is not only harmful to the economy, its result is a direct redistribution of wealth from non-farmers to farmers, yet still enjoys widespread support.

Democracies then don’t necessarily implement the ‘right’ policies. What they do is find compromises. Taking the example of the United States, the final version of the Obama health care bill is considerably watered down, and the likely final version of the financial reform bill will also be a patchwork of ideas of varied origins. These compromises may be desirable once a society has achieved a certain level of affluence, before then, however, the ‘right’ policy may be the only viable option. Autocracies, mind you, can go very wrong.

The neat selection of ‘successful’ dictatorships I gave makes up a minute proportion of current and historic failed dictatorships with disastrous consequences for their citizens. Had someone other than Lee Kwan Yew come to power in Singapore, the country would have likely taken a very different path.

It is time for democracy, as an obviously desirable ideal, to be re-thought of as a means to an end rather than as a goal in itself. At the risk of giving autocratic regimes fodder for self-legitimization, ‘democracy’ may not be universally desirable.

Omer Ali is based at the University of Warwick and writes on economics, politics and world affairs. He is a former editor of the Voice Magazine. His “Devil’s Advocate” column appears every other Thursday.

Open Source: the future of science?

hich — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:28:46 +0000

Illustration by Xiang Zeng www.freerangedoodle.com

By Sebastian Meznaric

The recent scientific crisis around climate research data leaks has greatly damaged the credibility and respect usually accorded the scientific community. The collected global temperature data was the subject of statistical analysis where the scientists in question used a “trick” to conceal certain decreases in the temperatures measured. The “trick” apparently went unnoticed through the peer review process which ended up leading to the processed data being published in a high profile scientific journal. After failing to obtain the data by other means, the sceptics wishing to analyse the data for themselves were (as they saw it) forced to resort to using the Freedom of Information Act. Their efforts went unrewarded as the requests were routinely rejected and evaded by the researchers. This situation eventually exploded in dramatic style in November with startling news of the public data leaks conducted with the help of hackers based overseas. The damage that was caused to the image and reputation of the scientific community was grave and should lead us to ask: could there be an overarching solution to deal with such problems in the future?

Open source, whether in computing or in broader terms, is a principle advocating free access to the end product’s “source materials”. This may be the source code (in the case of computer software), it may also be the design specifications for a product or it could be the data used for a statistical analysis in a scientific project. The main guiding principle behind it is peer production by collaboration. The end product is made available to the general public at no cost at all.

The creative practice of sharing the source of one’s work is nowhere more appropriate than in science. The work is by its nature collaborative and very often publicly funded. As such, it should be freely available for public examination.

Other than raw data, there are numerous scientific projects where a computer programme is the key part of the project. The need for verification of the results by the scientific community would dictate that the code be made available for inspection and modification. Indeed, if in the climate scandal noted above, the raw collected data had been made available from the beginning, the errors in the analysis could have been noticed and corrected early, benefiting both the integrity of the scientific process and the search for truth. In today’s competitive research environment, however, the data and source code for computer programmes are not always freely available.

The competition among various research groups makes the idea of hiding one’s software code and/or data (we will henceforth simply use “source” for both terms) extremely attractive to most scientists. The implication is that sharing the source would make it easier for other groups to reap the benefits of one’s hard work. However, it would be very easy (and indeed necessary) to give credit to the principal author of the source by making them a co-author of the resulting publication. Indeed, the practice of making people who collected the data and/or wrote the code co-authors of journal articles is actually already well established. For large projects where co-authorship is impractical, like perhaps CERN-related findings, the name of the open source project can simply be referenced in the acknowledgements. Such practices would avoid having a very large number of authors while at the same time give credit where credit is due.

Another commonly used argument is that competition drives the scientific research better than openness. Different competing research groups in the same field might therefore use their own self-written versions of software designed to accomplish very similar tasks. Often, these groups would compete with one another in adding new functionalities and improving the performance of their code in order to publish new results before other competitors. However, as we see with Wikipedia, Linux and other greatly successful open source projects, more “eyes” see better and, more importantly, think better. Scientific collaboration among peers very often leads to ideas that one would not think of in a smaller group or on their own. Indeed, dramatically increasing the group of people working together on a scientific software project often quickly leads to a sky rocketing improvement in performance and applicability. Perhaps even more crucially, researchers would have more time to focus on science rather than coding or collecting data.

The open source concept has been successfully used in the commercial world, notably in the automobile industry, where the patent sharing started by Ford led to automobile design innovations moving faster than ever to the great benefit of the general public. The sharing of technology did not at all reduce the competition among the companies nor their innovative drive.

The adoption of open source models in science would not only foster greater creativity, but would also attract interest in science from programmers and other interested parties, further increasing our global productivity and efficiency.

For instance, the field of biotechnology is fast adapting to the drive for greater openness in the scientific process. Other disciplines will hopefully follow suit to harness the greater efficiency and openness offered by the open source development model. Whether the scientific community at large adopts the open source paradigm remains a matter of speculation but, considering the climate data leak fiasco, the potential benefits are surely beyond dispute.

Sebastian Meznaric is a theoretical physicist and doctoral reseracher at the University of Oxford. His areas of interests include the study of information theory in quantum mechanics. He is also a keen observer of politics and current affairs.

Radicalism for beginners

Musab — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 04:07:50 +0000

Dominic Fox

What is a radical? A radical is someone who is concerned with a problem, and who addresses himself to that problem with the aim of uncovering its roots. For the radical, there is a difference between appearance and reality, symptom and cause. The purpose of radical action is to break through the outward manifestations of the problem in order to access its inner or underlying reality. To act in this way is to intervene: to come between the cause and the symptom, interrupting the communication between them. The radical does not want only to treat the symptoms of the problem. He wants to do something about whatever is producing those symptoms, to affect them at their source. Unless this is done, there will always be more symptoms to treat. Sooner or later the “symptom load” will become unsupportable, and the decision must be taken to intervene. A radical is someone who has taken this decision.

Let us call the process which leads to the radical’s decision to intervene “radicalisation”. It is typically experienced as a growth of awareness, leading to a transformation. The radical begins by being made aware of a problem, being presented with its symptoms. Investigating further, he finds that these symptoms present themselves with some regularity: the same mishaps or abuses happen over and over again. There seems to be is something systematic about them. But their systematic character is not acknowledged: every time something goes wrong, it is treated as an unfortunate happenstance, just the sort of thing that happens from time to time. A subtle mechanism of explanation is brought into play: it was nothing really, the accusations of wrongdoing are malicious, it was an honest mistake, the injured parties deserved or solicited what happened to them, and in any case it is regrettably unavoidable that a few innocents should suffer for the greater good. The person in the process of radicalisation observes that these explanations are self-serving and mutually inconsistent. The mechanism of explanation first denies, then displaces and finally dissolves responsibility.

It is at this point that the separation occurs between appearance, which has a false consistency supported by an obscene underside, and reality, which is the domain of root causes which finally explain both “normal” experience and its apparent lapses into “abnormal” violence and disorder. While others are distracted by appearances, and led by them to believe that the world “just happens” to be a certain way, the radical begins to understand that there are real powers at work behind the forms of appearance, and that it is possible to identify and confront them. In this way, the radical is drawn into conflict with the real powers of the world. He becomes responsible for the world, the guarantor of its moral consistency, assuming the very responsibility that those in authority take such pains to deny.

There are two paths open to the radical, once this responsibility is assumed. One is to strike violently against the false consistency of the domain of appearance, in the hope of reviving the real conflicts it exists to disguise and suppress. For the terrorist radicals of the Red Army Fraction, it was a question of shattering the complacent self-satisfaction of the triumphant West, bringing the violence of anti-imperialist conflict in Latin America and Vietnam into the midst of West German society. For today’s Islamist radicals, it is a question of spiritual awakening, separating the true followers of Islam from the decadent tyranny of secular governments. Theirs is a familiar line of attack: grand public outrages, aimed at shaking the spectator’s faith in the solidity, the dependability, of the spectacle. What advertised itself as prosperity and social peace, a more or less livable arrangement, is shown to be susceptible to horrifying assaults, and to be incapable of responding to the threat of such assaults except through indiscriminate retaliatory excesses and a poignant attenuation of convivial sentiment.

The ultimate goal of this strategy is the “desertification” of reality: the undoing of social peace (which assuredly protects privilege and power) and the summoning of society to judgement through the tribulations of a final conflict. What began as a quest for reality must end with the furious annihilation of all that is unreal. But the real never appears, even as the world of appearances shudders. The terrorist radical, engineer of spectacular atrocity, does not succeed in dissolving the enchantment of the spectacle but rather in reinforcing it. The RAF’s political critique is all but forgotten: the names of Baader and Meinhof are sentimentally conjoined, like those of Bonnie and Clyde. And what can we say of the obscene, compulsive unreality of the so-called “war on terror”, if not that it is a war against a phantom, a war in which the helpless absurdities of “security theatre” go hand-in-hand with an indiscriminate and terrible violence? Truly this is the kind of war which the world of the spectacle wages against its own manifestations. Far from being an eschatological conflict in which the real stakes of existence are finally revealed and fought over, it has the interminable stupidity of a waking dream or a soap opera. Terrorist acts do not awaken populations, but knock them into a stupor.

What is the second path open to the radical? It is to recognise in the separation of “appearance” from “reality” not the final division of forces constituting the world, but the primary evidence of the contingency of any regime of appearance. Simply: what is made to appear is not everything that there is, or could be, and the “internal logic” of what appears is never wholly adequate to support its apparent consistency. The problem is not only that the “immoral logic” of imperial power is coupled with a “moral illogic”, in which the plausibility of “humanitarian” apologetics for projections of that power is established through the most cynical manipulation of opinion. It is also that, as much as it may depend on lucid calculations of material interest, the Realpolitik of the ruling classes does not place them in command of reality itself: their “immoral logic” is no less a logic of appearance, a logic organizing a world-view and fatally bound to the finite interests of those who uphold it.

In fact, it is up to the radical to identify that which eludes this logic, that which is subtracted from the world-view that it organises. To think towards the real, by way of entering the site of a subtraction, rather than seeking to denude the real by annihilating the merely apparent. The “immoral logic” of imperial power has the force of a rationalisation, a “making reasonable” of what is, at bottom, arbitrary privilege backed up by recourse to devastating force. One is compelled to accept the rationalisation because the person making it does not need to answer for its rationality, having recourse instead to violence as his final answer. But there is always some aspect of reality that such rationalisations cannot master, some point at which instead of continuing on a path towards the real they double back and attempt (and fail) to form a closed loop of self-justification. It is at such a point that reality falls outside the ambit of the rationalisation that attempts to capture it, such that it is subtracted from the “rational” account of reality. From the point of view of any self-interested instrumentalisation of reason, it is reality itself that is “unreasonable”.

The task of the radical is accordingly to take reason to unreasonable lengths, to resume the passage towards the real. And this means: making unreasonable demands, and not backing down when opponents protest at the incompatibility of these demands with the “reality” of imperial consensus. Refusing to “see reason” when threatened and coerced. Refusing to abide by what common sense declares is only a reasonable accommodation to the state of affairs. Refusing to be cowed by the apparent worldly mastery of those who promulgate the currently fashionable rationalisations of their own dominance. Above all, refusing to let the radical orientation of thought towards the real be dismissed as irresponsible and irrational, as lacking in civic piety or human sympathy. “To go to the root” is to be concerned with the only possible basis for a human sympathy not limited by communitarian interest or ethnic particularity, or a responsibility not finally answerable to the caprices of power.