power

Gwynne Dyer – A review of a recent talk: a lot right, some not so much.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

Gwynne Dyer – A review of a recent talk: a lot right, some not so much.

 

Gwynne Dyer (http://gwynnedyer.com/) spoke recently at North Island College as part of the Institute of War & Peace being taught over the spring term by three faculty members from the English and Humanities and Social Sciences Department.  This is the third time I’ve heard Dyer speak and on every occasion he has demonstrated an uncanny ability to go on for an hour and a half without notes or even the benefit of a power point presentation.  Astounding!  But he is a compelling speaker.  When I was still teaching sociology at the college I often used Dyer’s films in my classes, one on the experience of Marine basic training on Parris Island, South Carolina and another great one on the ‘tribe’ as an organizing social and political force.  Dyer is an intelligent reporter and critic on world affairs, especially those with military dimensions.

 

In his recent talk at the college he covered three areas of ‘current unrest’ in the world, the Middle East, the Ukraine and the South China Sea.  His analyses often seem counterintuitive as one listens to them yet strangely plausible at the same time.

 

With reference to the Middle East, Dyer argues that there has been no major war to disrupt the area for quite some time.  He goes over the power and potential of the major states in the area, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iran and Iraq, but also of Egypt, to win a war with Israel.  He concludes that all out war between Israel and any one of those Arab states is highly unlikely.  Of course, the tension always seems to be there and there have been the odd military excursions here and there and punishing attacks by the Israelis in Gaza in ‘retaliation’ for Palestinian attacks like the wave of bus bombings in Jerusalem a few years ago.  The West Bank is slowly being overrun with Jewish settlements.  So what would be a viable solution to the ‘crisis’ if one were a Palestinian?  Well, the two state solution seems plausible with Israel taking the bulk of the territory but with the Palestinians at least holding on to some territory over which they would have sovereignty.  A better solution, still, Dyer proposes, might be a one state solution where Israel would cover the whole area from the Egypt to Lebanon and everyone would become a citizen of one country, Israel, whether Jewish or Palestinian.  Because of the demographics of the situation, and if the Palestinians had the vote which would be their right as citizens of Israel, power could realistically devolve to the Palestinians in a reasonable period of time.  Apparently, this scenario is gaining ground as a possibility among Palestinians but the impediments to such a solution are not easily discounted.  Plausible…as they would say on Mythbusters, but probably a long shot.

 

Dyer’s comments about the Ukraine are less optimistic than are his thoughts on the Middle East.  He sees a lot of outright stupidity and bravado there but he is cautiously optimistic that war will be averted as long as Western countries keep their noses out of it but that the tension could very well devolve into something more serious than a skirmish.  Dyer is much more knowledgeable about the situation than I am.  I freely admit that I know very little about the politics of that area of the world, but I still feel there is something lacking in Dyer’s analysis, a feeling I get from my general knowledge of the global political economy over the past few centuries, particularly since the first serious wave of the spread of European capital to other parts of the world in the 15th Century. (let’s not quibble about the Roman empire).  Back to that later.

 

Dyer ended his talk with a note on the South China Sea where China and Viet Nam are now in a dispute about the ownership of some islands that coincidentally are on top of substantial oil reserves.  We know from the news that Chinese nationals are being attacked by Vietnamese in Hanoi and other cities causing thousands of Chinese to return in haste to China. Dyer also talked about longstanding disputes between Japan and Korea over islands (of course).  His main point in his talk about the South China disputes is that China is headed into a deep recession.  Its in need of a diversion so that its citizens are focused on an external ‘threat’ thus inflaming an always present but sometimes dormant nationalism.  For the Chinese leaders this is a much better outcome than having China’s workers brooding on the fact that their jobs have disappeared and having them get revolting over that. There’s already enough unrest in Chinese factories with workers demanding pay increases and better working conditions.  Don’t need any more of that!   I don’t believe I’ve misinterpreted Dyer in any of this but I’m open to be corrected if need be.  That said, I left Dyer’s talk last week a little dissatisfied.

 

Dyer, being a specialist in military and political history, can be forgiven for not integrating political economy into his analysis more completely.  In reference to some situation in the Ukraine that I can’t recall at the moment, although it may have had something to do with the sad state of productive capacity and outmoded means of production and competition from other jurisdictions, he made an offhanded remark that ‘well, that’s just business.’  Well, business, especially at the scale we’re concerned with here, is never just business.  When Dyer mentions that a coming recession in China is driving foreign policy he’s getting it, sort of, but not essentially.

 

I want to step back here for a moment and consider why there has been no major military battles in the last 70 years on this favourite planet of ours.  It could be argued, I suppose, that assured mutual destruction may have something to do with it.  Launching nuclear weapons is a no-win game and everybody knows it.  That doesn’t mean that some nut job in the Pentagon or the Kremlin hasn’t thought about it.  So far more rational heads have prevailed.  Let’s hope it stays that way.

 

I believe, however, that the main reason for the fact that bombs aren’t flying between major powers in the world today is much more about the fact that countries are not really the drivers of economic activity, multinational corporations are.  I know not everyone agrees with me on this, but from my reading of European history, the driver of the formation, configuration and constitution of countries (states) from as far back as the 14th Century is capital expansion.  In the Middle Ages the acquisition of land, often violently but mainly by treaty and intermarriage, was the way wealth and power were accumulated.  After all, it was the prospect of new territory that prompted Queen Isabella of Spain to bankroll Christopher Columbus on his little jaunt into the Atlantic Ocean.  Columbus himself didn’t care a hoot about territory. He was interested in ‘stuff’ he could bring back from India or wherever he landed to sell on the European market to make himself rich.  For his class of people, the bourgeoisie, commodities, not the conquest of land were the source of wealth.  That’s still the way it is today although today we’ve come to a time when the world is becoming highly integrated in economic terms.  Companies with head offices the whereabouts of which matter very little anymore, produce (or contract other local businesses to produce) goods in export processing zones all over the world.  They then move them to ‘consumer’ markets mostly in Europe and North America, but increasingly to every corner of the planet by just-in-time processes of distribution.  In whatever country a corporation has a head office (usually just because it first saw the light of day there) it’s likely to lobby hard and get the support of the national government to champion its interests even though those interests may clash with those of the citizens of said country.  The larger the corporation the less likely the national government is to ignore it.  And if, as with the petrochemical or auto industries, a number of corporations lobby hard through their non-profit lobbying societies like the Canadian Petroleum Producers Association, then the government takes the call no matter what time of the day or night.

 

In fact, with a few exceptions, the governments of our world are all too eager to serve corporate interests to the detriment of those of its own citizens.  A recent article in The New Republic suggests that a number of ‘American’[1] corporations are already whining about how economic sanctions against Russia would be sanctions against them because they do billions of dollars of business a year in Russia and have high hopes for Russia as an emerging market for US goods (some produced, no doubt, in China). There are Pepsi and Coca-Cola signs all over Moscow. (Vinnik 2014)  Now this has a critical impact on the likelihood of open interstate warfare, especially where nuclear weapons are concerned.  It’s really not about territorial expansion anymore, anyway.  It’s about control of commodity markets, including those for cheap labour power.  Particularly strange would be for the US to decide to attack China with bombs.  It’s true that if Walmart were a country it would be China’s 8th most important trading partner.  I can’t imagine Washington attacking Walmart’s factories in China!

 

In fact, in a perverse kind of weird way, I think that the fact that corporations, in looking for the cheapest sources of labour and raw materials, spread themselves all over the globe is a deterrent to all-out war between states.  Of course the fear of war is important because that justifies feeding billions of dollars into arms producing businesses.  But skirmishes here and there use up some of that arms production as do military exercises like patrolling the South China Sea, something the American Navy has done since 1945.  Still, an American government aiming to protect ‘its’ corporations is not likely to send in the troops when that would lead to dropping corporate profits.  Nowadays, war is not always good for business and its clearer now than ever that corporate interests come first in our world.  I hate to admit it, but corporate global expansion may be a strong deterrent to interstate warfare. (Vinnik 2014)

Works Cited

Vinnik, Danny. These U.S. Corporations Are Probably Scared of Sanctions on Russia. March 4, 2014. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116853/economic-sanctions-would-hurt-american-companies-russia.

 

 

 

 

[1] Corporations are considered legal individuals in the US and in Canada but it’s a stretch to think of them as ‘national’ when capital supercedes state in the way the world is organized these days according to Thorstein Veblen and other commentators for whom I have a great deal of respect.  Although the relationships are complicated, it’s more accurate to say that capital created the modern nation-state than the other way around.

The Barbarian Status of Women

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 9 Comments

http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/veblen/women

Click on the above link to read an article published in Volume 4 of the American Journal of Sociology in 1898/9 by Thorstein Veblen who at the time was teaching at the University of Chicago where the Journal was created by Albion Small who was the first scholar to actually hold a chair in sociology in the US.  The article is entitled The Barbarian Status of Women.  It’s written in a typical ‘Veblenian’ style which for people now makes it almost unreadable.  Still the message is sharp and clear if you can decipher it.  if you read it you might want a dictionary handy.  Now, into the fray. 

So, in this day and age, we’re used to hearing about patriarchy, the oppression of women, feminism, the glass ceiling, the double ghetto, etc.  In other words we’re acquainted with the notion that women are not the equals of men.  Of course we know what the data say about women’s inferior rates of pay, high poverty rates, etc.  Well, when Veblen was writing this article probably 120 years ago, there were the beginnings of an organized women’s movement in the US expressed partly in the suffragette movement.  Women were yet to be ‘allowed’ to vote.  The suffragette’s demanded it. In a real way, I think that Veblen tacitly associated himself with this movement. I’m not going to go on about this here;  what I want to deal with here briefly is Veblen’s use of the term Barbarian Status of Women.  

For Veblen, the status of women in his day could easily be traced back to primitive times when men were hunters, developed hunting and exploitative skills whereby they got their status in the group.  Because women could not develop those skills being burdened down with pregnancy and domestic activities, etc., they were denigrated and considered ‘infirm.’  Soon enough that way of seeing things got pretty well entrenched in culture.  Marx had earlier suggested that there was a state in primitive society when there was equality between the sexes.  Men were in charge of the hunt, women were in charge of the home and nobody argued about it (too much).  Veblen didn’t buy that argument.  He found no evidence for it.  He saw the relations between the sexes as essentially predatory.  In fact he concludes that women were not only treated as inferior because they could not compete in the hunt, they were often the ‘prize’ gotten in raids on other groups.  Women ‘gotten’ in this way became the property of men and only the toughest, meanest men in the Valley actually had wives, many if they could sustain them.  This arrangement, Veblen argues came down in history and was the norm still in his day in his culture which he describes as predatory.  Eventually he argues, men had a harder and harder time finding women in their pillaging trips and so had to settle for incorporating predatory institutions in marriage with their ‘own’ women, women in their own tribe.  It wasn’t that long ago – actually it still happens everywhere – in marriage ceremonies and their aftermath that the groom was required to carry the bride to the bridal bedroom.  His property, his prize.  Marriage in our culture is still pretty much a patriarchal affair.  Men are still the ones expected to seek out a bride.  Men, to prove their manliness, must somehow control access to sex either through marriage or by buying it.  Prostitution is not about women selling their bodies for the pleasure of men.  It’s much more about men buying sex, going out and getting it, not unlike in earlier predatory times when ‘buying’ meant capturing in a raid.  Money is a symbol of power in our culture.  If a man has enough of it to buy women, then he can consider himself manly; he can consider himself successful in the raid.

That explains how women became the property of men and still are to a large extent in cultural terms, but it doesn’t really explain how women have come to be plagued with so many negative associations even today.  Veblen had something to say about this too and I’ll address his views on this in my next post but for now, you can think about all the things women are associated with and the things men are. Women are culturally associated with the body, men with the spirit.  Women with the moon, men with the sun.  Men with the right, women with the left. A woman who has sex is promiscuous, a ‘dirty’ whore.  A man who is promiscuous is a stud.  How did those associations come about?  That’s the subject of my next post.  

Escape 28: What is the heroic society?

~ Roger JG Albert

Escape 28: What is the heroic society?

 

So, I’ve come to the last chapter of Ernest Becker’s Escape from Evil in this series of posts I’ve come to refer to as my Becker marathon.  In this post and the last 2 to follow in the next couple of days, I work through this last chapter called Retrospect and Conclusion: What is the Heroic Society?  It’s divided into 4 sections, History, Psychology, The Science of Man and the Conclusion [to this last chapter] Today, I take on his section on History, tomorrow, the section on Psychology and on the last day, this Thursday, The Science of Man and the Conclusion. 

In this last chapter, it’s clear to me that Becker is grasping at straws.  He has produced this mind-boggling analysis of what drives us and has driven us throughout history, our fear of death and our fear of life.  Now what?  How are we to suddenly lose our fear of death and put down the weapons we’ve used in their increasingly terrifying effectiveness in our determination to eliminate evil on the planet in the form of the ‘other’?  We’ll get to his final thoughts on this in the last post in this series, but for now, History.

In the opening three paragraphs of this chapter Becker notes the emptiness of a classical Marxist analysis for the ‘liberation’ of humankind, which it claims will come after capitalism has run its course.  I don’t think Becker is correct in his analysis of Marx because the only foray into utopianism that Marx attempted was in his book The German Ideology and he regretted that for the rest of his life.  After he got over his youthful enthusiasm and humanism, he sat in the British Museum and studied until he got bum boils and concluded that the only thing he could say for sure about the fall of capitalism was that there would be no more exploitation of labour by capital because capital will have virtually eliminated labour in successive waves of overproduction.  Becker wants to see Marxism as a failed potential immortality ideology for the masses.  So, what is to be done? [Yes, that’s the title of one of Lenin’s books]

Well, we now know a lot more about the psychodynamics of history.  It’s…

From the outside a saga of tyranny, violence, coercion; from the inside, self-delusion and self-enslavement.

If we didn’t have transference, we wouldn’t be able to stand life. We localize our fear and terror, make it manageable all the while exchanging our freedom for life.  We are sorry creatures indeed, because unlike other animals we have ‘made death conscious.’ (p.148) Evil is in anything that makes us sick, wounds us or even ‘deprives us of pleasure.’ (p.148) 

The result is one of the great tragedies of human existence, what we might call the need to ‘fetishize evil,’ to locate the threat to life in some special places where it can be placated and controlled.  It is tragic precisely because it is sometimes very arbitrary; men make fantasies about evil, see it in the wrong places, and destroy themselves and others by uselessly thrashing about. 

We do this so much it’s quite pathetic, really.  Note what the Ugandan government has just done.  The Ministry of Ethics and Integrity there is charged with seeing gays and lesbians punished and outlawed.  Several US states would do the same and some are actively pursuing action against gays and lesbians.  They see gays and lesbians as threats to their values.  Wow, they obviously have very weak and precarious values to see gays and lesbians as a threat to them.  As Nietzsche concluded, ‘all moral categories are power categories; they are not about virtue in any abstract sense.’ (P. 149) 

Purity, goodness, rightness – these are ways of keeping power intact so as to cheat death; the striving for perfection is a way of qualifying for extraspecial immunity not only in this world but in others to come.  Hence all categories of dirt, filth, imperfection, and error are vulnerability categories, power problems.

You can see why Tea Party Republicans and their counterparts in Uganda are so intent on persecuting gays and lesbians.  They are vulnerability categories in their world!  They need to be eliminated.  Of course, we all need to individuate ourselves, to feel that our lives are meaningful.  What better way of showing that we are special and deserving of power and life is to dedicate ourselves to eliminating dirt, filth, imperfection and error?  Now that’s a heroic thing to do.

In other words, man is fated, as William James saw, to consider this earth as a theatre for heroism, and his life a vehicle for heroic acts which aim precisely to transcend evil…To be a true hero is to triumph over disease, want, death.

Even better sometimes, to be a true hero is to lay down one’s life to secure the lives of others.  Think here of Jesus and scores of other heroes in history who died to secure mankind…‘by their blood we are saved.’ (p.151) 

 

Freud was very pessimistic about the future of humankind.  For Freud we humans are doomed by our own instincts for evil.  Becker doesn’t buy that.  For him, we are born hunters so it may seem that we ‘enjoy the feeling of maximizing [our] organismic powers at the expense of the trapped and helpless prey.’ (p. 152)

The tragedy of evolution is that it created a limited animal with unlimited horizons. Many is the only animal that is not armed with the natural instinctive mechanisms of programming for shrinking his world down to a size that he can automatically act on…Men have to keep from going mad by biting off small pieces of reality which they can get some command over and some organismic satisfaction from.

 

The thing that feeds the great destructiveness of history is that men give their entire allegiance to their own group; and each group is a codified hero system.  Which is another way of saying that societies are standardized systems of death denial; they give structure to the formulas for heroic transcendence.  History can then be looked at as a succession of immortality ideologies, or as a mixture at any time of several of these ideologies.

And so it came to be that we could only become heroic by following orders.  Oh, I’m really summarizing Becker here and doing him an injustice in the process, no doubt.  He seems most comfortable when he is chastising our species in a sense for a history filled with greater and greater paradigms for death denial, ones that expect us to be heroes as individuals, all right, but by ‘following orders.’  This is as true for Christianity as it is for Capitalism.  Follow orders and you will be saved.  The word ‘orders’ here may seem a little harsh and arbitrary because this is not a military type order.  It’s a prescription for salvation that does not tolerate defiance.  In capitalist terms, the ‘order’ means to consume. 

Now a new type of productive and scientific hero came into prominence, and we are still living this today. More cars produced by Detroit, higher stock market prices, more profits, more goods moving – all this equals more heroism.  And with the French Revolution another type of modern hero was codified: the revolutionary hero who will bring an end to injustice and evil once and for all, by bringing into being a new utopian society perfect in its purity.