Grand Hotel Abyss

I must confess that there’s one inflammatory word that I would like to reclaim from the right-wing.

Ecofascism. No joke.

I saw in the library this book called Endgame, Volume I by an environmentalist named Derrick Jensen. Jensen was generous enough to include a list of premises at the front of his book. If only all writers were this considerate, one would have to read fewer books of opinion. For if the premises are foolish or false, why read the rest?

Anyway, Jensen is of the (old) opinion that “civilization” is to blame for all the ills of the world, and that it must go, and most of us with it. This, while a couple thousand people die each day not from an excess of civilization, but rather from a viciously unequal distribution of its fruits. Do you know why U.N. “peacekeeping” forces are murdering Haitians? Not because the Haitians—who voted in large majorities for the basically social democratic government of forcibly-exiled Jean-Bertrand Aristide—want to opt out of civilization, but because the Haitians want to participate in civilization on equal terms. And more power to them. When ecofascists like Jensen criticize “civilization,” they advertise for the world according to neoliberalism. Hospitals? Medicine? Universities? Water treatment plants? You don’t want them. Better off without them. It’s a more authentic life, you know!

Goes back to Rousseau, of course. Recently, I read Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise in the newest translation, a volume published by a university press and filled up with scholarly treats. The notes in the back of the book did us the favor of tracking Rousseau’s debates with Voltaire. I am not an uncritical admirer of Voltaire, and will say something about him in a future post, but in all of these debates, I was with Voltaire against Rousseau—even when Voltaire was taking what would look to us like a right-wing position.

Rousseau, it seems, thought it was morally improving to have beggars around, lest the rich get too full of themselves and disconnected from the charitable impulse. Voltaire balked at this. It’s quite disgusting, he said, to have beggars around, and he would like to see them banned from the city centers.

I grant that, at first glance, Rousseau’s position looks like the more humane one. However, can one not perceive in his view of the poor a disguised master-morality that has no trouble consigning people to poverty because poverty is picturesque and in the nature of things and edifying for the (obviously non-poor) spectator? Voltaire’s moral failing was to recoil from the poor, but he was in no way wrong to recoil from poverty. To find poverty a repugnant condition that must be eliminated—this is the beginning of a progressive politics.

Primitivists have nothing to do with progressive politics. They are reactionary absolutists who would return humanity to a condition in which people are eaten by bears and women regularly die in childbirth. Their dirty little secret is that they dislike their fellow human beings. Here is the ninth of Jensen’s hideous premises:

Although there will clearly some day be far fewer humans than there are at present, there are many ways this reduction in population could occur (or be achieved, depending on the passivity or activity with which we choose to approach this transformation). Some of these ways would be characterized by extreme violence and privation: nuclear armageddon, for example, would reduce both population and consumption, yet do so horrifically; the same would be true for a continuation of overshoot, followed by crash. Other ways could be characterized by less violence. Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it’s not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default. Yet some ways of reducing population and consumption, while still violent, would consist of decreasing the current levels of violence required, and caused by, the (often forced) movement of resources from the poor to the rich, and would of course be marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world. Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and perhaps longterm shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we do not approach it actively—if we do not talk about our predicament and what we are going to do about it—the violence will almost undoubtedly be far more severe, the privation more extreme.

All I can say to that is, “Come and get me, motherfucker.” Advertising for the grand die-off of surplus peoples—think he’s working for the World Bank? This is Jensen’s premise; maybe I should read the book, but I can see no conclusion for it to lead to other than Ayn Rand’s: the best thing we can do for a starving man is let him starve.

Right, I know he said that the problem is the movement of resources from rich to poor. But who does he think is going to die if we bring civilization down? That is, if we blow up the factories and the parliaments rather than putting the people in charge of them? No, Jensen won’t have that. Whenever he hears the word “civilization,” he reaches for his gun.

I think we’ve all read this book before.

Three quotations. The last two are journal articles only accessible online through academic servers. If you have no way of getting to them, leave a comment and I’ll pirate them for you—but you must never tell!

The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?

The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no other reason than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and so should feel directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics. Americans worry about what their government should do in Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as ‘Africans’.

A full-page advertisement has appeared several times a week in the New York Times calling for intervention in Darfur now. It wants the intervening forces to be placed under ‘a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel’. That intervention in Darfur should not be subject to ‘political or civilian’ considerations and that the intervening forces should have the right to shoot – to kill – without permission from distant places: these are said to be ‘humanitarian’ demands. In the same vein, a New Republic editorial on Darfur has called for ‘force as a first-resort response’. What makes the situation even more puzzling is that some of those who are calling for an end to intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur; as the slogan goes, ‘Out of Iraq and into Darfur.’

What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics – a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Why should an intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that escalates rather than reduces the level of violence as intervention in Iraq has done? Why might it not create the actual possibility of genocide, not just rhetorically but in reality?

—Mahmood Mamdami, “The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency”

I shall hazard a prognosis: why else should anyone be concerned with the reasons people have for getting involved with the most far-going criminality? The risk that this prediction might turn out to be wrong is not so high—in fact, not high at all. The NATO-West union will not cease its bombing until every last crucial godforsaken under- or anti-developed little corner of the rest of the world of human cockroaches has been tarred with democratization, human rights, and free-market ideology. Or, to make an additional prediction: one of these corners, an opposition fundamentalist one, will have gotten it together for a big-time response, such as the launching of an A-bomb or of one of its biotechnical supplements bought on the well-stocked global consumer supermarket, and thus finally will have extinguished something larger to an exponential degree than the real-symbolic twin democrats of Lower Manhattan’s grid.

Against all too many human rights imports only the God-link promises relief. This is no longer prognosis, but simply a description of the means for communication among the total idiots of all countries…Christians…Islamists…Human Rightists…all of them of the same gene pool, namely, the militarist-economist-masculinist- transcendental…who have not yet assimilated the most fundamental doctrine of civilization: that taking the life of others is simply not done…and furthermore that you don’t go for the other’s throat…or instigate such things…with anyone, anywhere.

—Klaus Theweleit, “Playstation Cordoba, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan”

What is occurring in Darfur may very well be initially indexed with Achille Mbembe’s neologism necropolitics, where the authority to kill is distributed throughout civil society and no longer the exclusive prerogative of the state. The advent of necropolitics may very well indicate a transformation in civil society itself that entails the wholesale abandoment of all modalities of persuasion (whether reasoned argument or political parties and their instruments for securing lasting majorities) in favor of brutal coercion. Some might even regard this situation to indicate the corruption of civil society, brought about by the preemption of any intellectual formation other than that of the state. Of course, it is not at all established that the absolute preemption of independent intellectual initiative among the masses has been accomplished yet. To the extent that the systematic analysis of situations as Darfur can somehow generate an adequate understanding of necropolitics, however what has been accomplished is the creation of a societal arrangement in which thinking divorced from corporate blocs is rendered extraordinarily rare. There are other relatively well-known situations akin to that of Darfur—Egypt and Algeria, for instance—where thinking in this way is fatal. In such situations of violence, that class of individuals whose formation and social function has been to perpetuate the inistitutions and modes of persuasion—and what this refers to are the intellectual traditions of modernity, particularly those of secular humanism—is among those populations that are constituted in disposal. In this context, the production, or facilitation, of the emergence of humans can no longer be seriously conceived of as the inevitable consequences of the forces of historical change—this was precisely the point behind the coining [in Argentina] of población chatarra, that neoliberalism has completely rendered the Hegelian account of human development, even in its Marxian adjustment, beside the point. Harir’s [a Sudanese intellectual who went on to advise the Sudan Liberation Army] eventual embrace, no matter how tentative, of the very racialism he set out to oppose is a cautionary tale. His formation as an intellectual, or rather a dominant tendency of that formation, tends toward a way of thinking about societal organization that presumes the agency of world making as an inalienable aspect of the species. In this way of thinking, the historical world is what humans make, and that capacity is absolutely universal in the species. This sense of species history is one of the essential steps toward a materialist account of historical general intelligence. What is learned from the Sudan crisis is that this consciousness is still quite vulnerable before the onslaught of the ancient force of ethnographic dogma, which presumes the only viable social function of the intellectual is either as an apologist for raciology or an advocate for some form of theodicy. In the face of what may very well be the extermination of the intellectual as the embodiment of humanism, the challenge is to try seriously and rigorously to take up the question, Who could act for the human in these circumstances and how?

—Ronald AT. Judy, “Provisional Note on Formations of Planetary Violence”

Oh good. Joe Klein of Time magazine has posted a handy list of the characteristics of what he calls a “left-wing extremist.” This being a new blog, I thought it might not be untoward for me to provide an interlinear commentary on Klein’s list so that we can determine whether I am or am not a left-wing extremist. Who knows, perhaps I will turn out to be one of these raving fanatical moderates responsible for such historical crimes as the pounding of tons of depleted uranium into places like Serbia and Iraq. Klein’s words are in italics.

A left-wing extremist exhibits many, but not necessarily all, of the following attributes:

–believes the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world.

Well, no, it’s only a fanatical moderate like Klein who would insist on putting the proposition this way. The fanatical moderate has swallowed hook-line-and-sinker the Romantic myth of the nation. I don’t even know what it would mean to believe that the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world. What, American waitresses? desk clerks? schoolteachers? engineers? adjunct professors? Nonsense. The fundamentally negative threat to the world is the American ruling class and its global collaborators.

–believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism.

This is simply true. Not a matter of belief, but a fact, a piece of reality. (I will not use scare-quotes around those words on this blog.) Okay, let me back down a bit and say that right-wing political Islam wasn’t invented in the United States; it’s an indigenous tradition in Muslim cultures. But that the U.S. supported the ISI-trained Afghan mujahadeen in the ’80s, that its support for the Shah after the overthrow of Mossadegh led to the Iranian revolution, that the U.S. sold arms to the Iranian regime in the ’80s, that the U.S. collaborated both with bin Laden’s terror networks and the Iranians in the Yugoslav wars, that the U.S. ruling class continues to support the Saudi regime, all goes to show that right-wing radicalism here and right-wing radicalism there have gone hand in hand for quite a long time.

–believes that the decision to go to war in Iraq was not an individual case of monumental stupidity, but a consequence of America’s fundamental imperialistic nature.

Iraq was a centralized economy sitting on an oil reserve in a strategically crucial region. There were profits to be made and an unregulated wasteland to be created. Only a really fanatical ideologue could believe that this was some kind of “mistake.” (Though there is room to think that things have not gone according to the Bush administration’s plans. In that sense, perhaps they have over-reached or made a mistake. That remains to be seen. But the entire project: no, it was classic imperialism.)

–tends to blame America for the failures of others—i.e. the failure of our NATO allies to fulfill their responsibilities in Afghanistan.

I think he means “e.g.” rather than “i.e.”. “I.e.” perhaps works in the context, but it seems he meant merely to provide an example rather than to clarify or to elaborate a point. I.e., he doesn’t seem to be too knowledgeable. E.g., his next item:

–doesn’t believe that capitalism, carefully regulated and progressively taxed, is the best liberal idea in human history.

To apply careful regulation and progressive taxation to a capitalist economy is not a classically liberal idea; rather, it comes from the socialist tradition and was applied to capitalist economies in the twentieth century mainly because their populations were inspired by socialist ideals. Capitalists, such as corporate shareholders, CEOs, etc., in the main dislike regulation and taxation. It prevents them from seeking the cheapest labor all over the globe, and deprives them of a reason to encourage governments to blow up countries and pocket their resources.

As far as I’m concerned, the greatest liberal idea in human (well, Euro-American) history, one which I perhaps unfashionably think would need to carry over even to a socialist society, is a relatively autonomous civil society (freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc.).

–believes American society is fundamentally unfair (as opposed to having unfair aspects that need improvement).

American society is fundamentally unfair insofar as it is sustained by a capitalist economy that is largely unregulated and without sufficiently progressive taxation.

–believes that eternal problems like crime and poverty are the primarily the fault of society.

Society is organized human life. Poverty—I mean, people starving, dying of thirst or common diseases—is the consequence of failures in human organization. Crime is a little more complex, as any given crime has multiple causes. (Klein, in the tradition of fanatical moderation, means only street-level crime, rather than such crimes committed by the corporate elite as toxic waste dumping, defrauding investors and/or the public, etc.) However, one would have to be deeply anti-social to think that our collective environment does not encourage or make inevitable such street-level crime as Klein has in mind. Well-fed, secure, hopeful people are not going to be tempted by a life of crime. Ditto people who do not grow up in cultures like ours, which aestheticize, eroticize and glamorize violence.

–believes that America isn’t really a democracy.

“Democracy” can sometimes be a hollow word, especially if it has no modifier. The United States is clearly a representative market democracy. Two things need to be said on this subject. First, representative market democracy is not the be-all and end-all of democratic theory. Some people, the present author, for instance, might think a democratic system that followed socialist principles might be more just and indeed more democratic. Representative democracy certainly beats many other options, but it can be embedded in a free market or it can function in a social democratic or an even more radically egalitarian system. The idea of participatory democracy too, which has no purchase on American public life, should not be discounted either. My second observation: even on the terms of civic republicanism itself, American representative democracy is in bad shape. The deleterious influence of private financing on elections, the consequent imbrication of government with big business, the utterly degraded public sphere all make for a “democracy” that is in fact in the grip of oligarchs. Which brings us to Klein’s next point:

–believes that corporations are fundamentally evil.

Good and evil are religious concepts which are here irrelevant. The relevant point is that, as Klein has implied above, this country is supposed to be a democracy. In a time when presidents and vice presidents of and major shareholders in multinational corporations easily enter political life and start wars which plainly enrich the corporations from whence they came, political commentators like Klein display a worrying (or is it only predictable?) obliviousness to the blatant threat they pose to democracy. The American public did not elect the CEO of Halliburton. Moreover, that CEO has no legal obligation to serve the American public or to make choices that reflect the needs of the commonweal; his only obligation is to the shareholders. Call it good or call it evil, the corporation is certainly not a democratic structure and it certainly has no business having so much influence over the public life of a democracy. Moreover, let us not forget what a corporation actually is: it is a clique of private property owners who have banded together to enjoy certain legal protections and rights. It is in their interest, then, to expand those rights and protections and to extend the domain of private property. When Joe Klein has to pay a couple bucks for every breath he draws of the common air, he will have only himself to blame.

–believes in a corporate conspiracy that controls the world.

A corporation is, as I’ve implied above, by definition a conspiracy. The increased influenced of corporations on global life, from the tin barracks in Indonesia where near-slaves make children’s toys to the war-zones of Central Africa from whence comes the constituent parts of this computer I’m typing on to the lawless violent streets of Iraq where rages a sectarian war fomented by the American state in league with the energy and arms companies, suggests to all but the fanatical moderate that the private property owners who run corporations have been pursuing their common interests ever more vigorously and successfully.

Klein needs to make this obvious observation unsayable by resorting to a word which has been taken out of polite circulation. He needs to call it a “conspiracy” to make you think that anyone who wants to see corporations strongly regulated or else dissolved because of the destruction they wreak is a “conspiracy theorist” who believes that the world is controlled by freemasons, Jews or alien lizards.

But no, like it or not, the world is increasingly controlled by small bands of private property owners. (As for the imputation of anti-Semitism that hangs about all uses of the word “conspiracy,” I should say that in the U.S., the property owners mostly seem to be WASPs!) I think—and many people think—that the world should be more democratic; that is, controlled by the people who live in it instead of those who only zip over it in private jets.

–is intolerant of good ideas when they come from conservative sources.

Strange phrase: “conservative sources.” Does he mean institutions, magazines, political parties or individuals? Well, anyway. Above, I have lamented the fact that our culture aestheticizes, eroticizes and glamorizes violence. Many conservatives would agree with me on that. We would probably disagree on what to do about it; then again, who knows, we might not!

–dismissively mocks people of faith, especially those who are opposed to abortion and gay marriage.

He might have a point here, especially when it comes to the liberal blogosphere. I have no problem with satire, I like to read Voltaire etc., but in the interests of realpolitik one might be better off trying to reach constituencies rather than going out of one’s way to alienate them. Especially since it’s not at all clear to me that people of faith would necessarily oppose some of the socialist ideals I’ve advocated above.

On the larger question, I am with old Karl Marx: we must pass from the critique of religion to the critique of politics. Change the circumstances first, and then people will change their beliefs.

–regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives.

Some do and some don’t. I think it’s largely counter-productive to do so. On the other hand, it really needs to be said that most of the harsh, vulgar, intolerant language that I hear these days is coming from the right. The other day, Ann Coulter called John Edwards a “faggot.” I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard people like Noam Chomsky or Naomi Klein or Amy Goodman or Katha Pollitt or Tariq Ali or even Michael Moore use anything like that kind of language.

Well, it looks like this blog is written by a left-wing extremist. But then, the name does come from something that the communist Georg Lukács once said, so this exercise was probably not necessary.

Finally, I have a correction to make. It turns out that the people pictured in the photo on my inaugural post are not callous members of an aloof ruling class, but rather beleagured members of the petit bourgeoisie, just like the present writer, though to be sure he enjoys his privileges without the threat of being murdered by American-made Israeli-fired missiles. Still and all, not quite “grand hotel abyss.”