| POSSIBILITARIAN PUPPET THEATER PRESENTS Thursday the 31st of December, Coventry Village, starting at the U.U. Society of Cleveland 2728 Lancashire Rd. Cleveland Hts. Free show, donations only. Schedule: Insurrection Mass at 3pm Followed by: the New Years Eve Insurrection Mass with a Funeral March for the Rotten Ideas of 2009 and then the Possibilitarian New YEARS RESOLUTION PARADE. Bread and Aioli will be served afterwards upon return to the U.U. Society. A New Years Eve Insurrection mass to celebrate another year gone by. Culminating in the third annual Funeral March for the Rotten Ideas of the Year (2009 now), which will be a spectacle and procession through coventry village, rain shine or Blizzard, (it has happened in the presence of high winds and snow.) AND THEN, the Possibilitarian NEW YEARS RESOLUTION PARADE. The Insurrection Mass is a non-religious Puppet Service in the presence of the paper-mache gods of the day, with a Fiddle Sermon inspired by the Rotten Idea of the day. Funeral March Parade will happen around 3:45 pm. The show is slightly more kid friendly than a catholic Mass, but is certainly open to kids of all ages. Why Is this mass an Insurrection mass? What exactly inspires insurrection? And what makes insurrectionists celebrate mass? The celebration of an Insurrection mass has several functions:
Insurrection means: life is possible! |
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
POSSIBILITARIAN PUPPET THEATER Insurrection Mass
Monday, December 28, 2009
Taking issue with "common sense"
[Contributed by Cleveland LWC Study Group]
The following was sent by the Cleveland Low Wage Capitalism Study Group, and relates to a example proposed by Товарищ Х for one of their recent sessions. It links to an exchange on marginalrevolution.com. That link and the excerpted exchange are reproduced here. This is all followed by a comment from Fred Goldstein, the author of Low Wage Capitalism.
__________
The following brief exchange, that I engaged in just now, may perhaps be of interest for your study notes for Low Wage Capitalism:
ref: this link to the source: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/12/what-does-programmer-productivity-look-like.html
Their Post:
This is perhaps instructive as an example just because the original argument is based in "common sense" (as Gramsci, and now David Harvey, explain this usage). As is always true with this sense that is held in common, it masks real relations and squirrels them away in a place where good sense can not touch them-- but we can always attempt the unmasking.
The argument, it seems to me, proceeds from the commonly held neoliberal view that the "free market" best serves the interests of all individuals. Surely then a savy business man would not knowingly subvert the natural justice of the reward system. The poor misguided fellow must be rewarding the wrong people by accident. Insofar as it seeks to repair this ignorance with a common sense exchange, in this process the post we contend with concerns itself with the exercise of the free exchange of information between an individual worker and another very special kind of "individual," the corporation he works for.
In the primary interest of any capitalist, greater profit, it pays to seek higher productivity and pay lower wages. This is a truth hidden in plain sight. Objective data supports this analysis. Graphs of that data picture it clearly. However much this may be good sense, in common sense neoliberal terms it is outside the universe of discourse.
Comrade Goldstein comments:
You have nailed it in my opinion. In addition to the ideological straight jacket of neoliberalism from which this "common sense" argument flows, there is the utter naivete of the writer with regard to the profit system.
The only factor that would correlate with increasing wages based upon increased productivity would be a strong union contract and a strong union to back it up. Otherwise the boss would keep all the increase in the relative surplus value arising from an increase in the productivity of labor. The necessary labor time would remain the same and the boss would have more unpaid labor time to sell on the market.
The LWC Study Group recommends, I concur, and we feel confident that Товарищ Х would agree-- there is no substitute for reading the original. Follow the link to Low Wage Capitalism, buy the book and read it. For those of you who are so marginalized by the current crisis that you have no money to buy anything-- Fred Goldstein, in solidarity with the workers he addresses, also makes a free PDF copy of the full text available (follow the same link, above).
tovX responds:
Yes! I do agree. Read, think, organize and fight back.
The following was sent by the Cleveland Low Wage Capitalism Study Group, and relates to a example proposed by Товарищ Х for one of their recent sessions. It links to an exchange on marginalrevolution.com. That link and the excerpted exchange are reproduced here. This is all followed by a comment from Fred Goldstein, the author of Low Wage Capitalism.
__________
The following brief exchange, that I engaged in just now, may perhaps be of interest for your study notes for Low Wage Capitalism:
ref: this link to the source: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/12/what-does-programmer-productivity-look-like.html
Their Post:
What does programmer productivity look like?
I am unable to judge the details of its contents, but this article intrigued me. The key question is why pay across highly-talented and lesser-talented programmers isn't more unequal. (That's a question I'd like economists to study more generally, given the disparities in productivity across individuals within a firm.) Here is an excerpt:
Software output cannot be measured as easily as dollars or bricks. The best programmers do not write 10x as many lines of code and they certainly do not work 10x longer hours.
Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code. They may realize the problem they’re being asked to solve doesn’t need to be solved, that the client doesn’t actually want what they’re asking for. They may know where to find reusable or re-editable code that solves their problem. They may cheat. But just when they are being their most productive, nobody says “Wow! You were just 100x more productive than if you’d done this the hard way. You deserve a raise.” At best they say “Good idea!” and go on. It may take a while to realize that someone routinely comes up with such time-saving insights. Or to put it negatively, it may take a long time to realize that others are programming with sound and fury but producing nothing.
For the pointer I thank Hamilton Ulmer.
My Comment:Increased productivity correlates positively with a decrease in wages or with maintaining wages at the same level. There is nothing special in the work of programmers that makes this so. It is a global trend in capitalist production relations.
This is perhaps instructive as an example just because the original argument is based in "common sense" (as Gramsci, and now David Harvey, explain this usage). As is always true with this sense that is held in common, it masks real relations and squirrels them away in a place where good sense can not touch them-- but we can always attempt the unmasking.
The argument, it seems to me, proceeds from the commonly held neoliberal view that the "free market" best serves the interests of all individuals. Surely then a savy business man would not knowingly subvert the natural justice of the reward system. The poor misguided fellow must be rewarding the wrong people by accident. Insofar as it seeks to repair this ignorance with a common sense exchange, in this process the post we contend with concerns itself with the exercise of the free exchange of information between an individual worker and another very special kind of "individual," the corporation he works for.
In the primary interest of any capitalist, greater profit, it pays to seek higher productivity and pay lower wages. This is a truth hidden in plain sight. Objective data supports this analysis. Graphs of that data picture it clearly. However much this may be good sense, in common sense neoliberal terms it is outside the universe of discourse.
Comrade Goldstein comments:
You have nailed it in my opinion. In addition to the ideological straight jacket of neoliberalism from which this "common sense" argument flows, there is the utter naivete of the writer with regard to the profit system.
The only factor that would correlate with increasing wages based upon increased productivity would be a strong union contract and a strong union to back it up. Otherwise the boss would keep all the increase in the relative surplus value arising from an increase in the productivity of labor. The necessary labor time would remain the same and the boss would have more unpaid labor time to sell on the market.
The LWC Study Group recommends, I concur, and we feel confident that Товарищ Х would agree-- there is no substitute for reading the original. Follow the link to Low Wage Capitalism, buy the book and read it. For those of you who are so marginalized by the current crisis that you have no money to buy anything-- Fred Goldstein, in solidarity with the workers he addresses, also makes a free PDF copy of the full text available (follow the same link, above).
tovX responds:
Yes! I do agree. Read, think, organize and fight back.
Idiots in the News
It was Mark Twain who said, "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." Today Rep. Peter King (R-NY) proved that this was no mere jest when he made the following statement:
"100 percent of the Islamic terrorists are Muslim..."
Thanks for clearing that up Pete. I would have guessed 80... 90 percent, tops.
The reader can be forgiven for thinking that I fabricated this to prove some point-- but no, really! Here is a video recording that shows lips moving...
"100 percent of the Islamic terrorists are Muslim..."
Thanks for clearing that up Pete. I would have guessed 80... 90 percent, tops.
The reader can be forgiven for thinking that I fabricated this to prove some point-- but no, really! Here is a video recording that shows lips moving...
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Climate change: "the real enemy is at home"
Pentagon’s role in global catastrophe
By Sara Flounders
Published Dec 16, 2009 6:17 PM
In evaluating the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen — with more than 15,000 participants from 192 countries, including more than 100 heads of state, as well as 100,000 demonstrators in the streets — it is important to ask: How is it possible that the worst polluter of carbon dioxide and other toxic emissions on the planet is not a focus of any conference discussion or proposed restrictions?
By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.
The Pentagon wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; its secret operations in Pakistan; its equipment on more than 1,000 U.S. bases around the world; its 6,000 facilities in the U.S.; all NATO operations; its aircraft carriers, jet aircraft, weapons testing, training and sales will not be counted against U.S. greenhouse gas limits or included in any count.
The Feb. 17, 2007, Energy Bulletin detailed the oil consumption just for the Pentagon’s aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities that made it the single-largest oil consumer in the world. At the time, the U.S. Navy had 285 combat and support ships and around 4,000 operational aircraft. The U.S. Army had 28,000 armored vehicles, 140,000 High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles, more than 4,000 combat helicopters, several hundred fixed-wing aircraft and 187,493 fleet vehicles. Except for 80 nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, which spread radioactive pollution, all their other vehicles run on oil.
Even according to rankings in the 2006 CIA World Factbook, only 35 countries (out of 210 in the world) consume more oil per day than the Pentagon.
The U.S. military officially uses 320,000 barrels of oil a day. However, this total does not include fuel consumed by contractors or fuel consumed in leased and privatized facilities. Nor does it include the enormous energy and resources used to produce and maintain their death-dealing equipment or the bombs, grenades or missiles they fire.
Steve Kretzmann, director of Oil Change International, reports: “The Iraq war was responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) from March 2003 through December 2007. ... The war emits more than 60 percent of all countries. ... This information is not readily available ... because military emissions abroad are exempt from national reporting requirements under U.S. law and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.” (www.naomiklein.org, Dec. 10) Most scientists blame carbon dioxide emissions for greenhouse gases and climate change.
Bryan Farrell in his new book, “The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism,” says that “the greatest single assault on the environment, on all of us around the globe, comes from one agency ... the Armed Forces of the United States.”
Just how did the Pentagon come to be exempt from climate agreements? At the time of the Kyoto Accords negotiations, the U.S. demanded as a provision of signing that all of its military operations worldwide and all operations it participates in with the U.N. and/or NATO be completely exempted from measurement or reductions.
After securing this gigantic concession, the Bush administration then refused to sign the accords.
In a May 18, 1998, article entitled “National security and military policy issues involved in the Kyoto treaty,” Dr. Jeffrey Salmon described the Pentagon’s position. He quotes then-Secretary of Defense William Cohen’s 1997 annual report to Congress: “DoD strongly recommends that the United States insist on a national security provision in the climate change Protocol now being negotiated.” (www.marshall.org)
According to Salmon, this national security provision was put forth in a draft calling for “complete military exemption from greenhouse gas emissions limits. The draft includes multilateral operations such as NATO- and U.N.-sanctioned activities, but it also includes actions related very broadly to national security, which would appear to comprehend all forms of unilateral military actions and training for such actions.”
Salmon also quoted Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat, who headed the U.S. delegation in Kyoto. Eizenstat reported that “every requirement the Defense Department and uniformed military who were at Kyoto by my side said they wanted, they got. This is self-defense, peacekeeping, humanitarian relief.”
Although the U.S. had already received these assurances in the negotiations, the U.S. Congress passed an explicit provision guaranteeing U.S. military exemption. Inter Press Service reported on May 21, 1998: “U.S. law makers, in the latest blow to international efforts to halt global warming, today exempted U.S. military operations from the Kyoto agreement which lays out binding commitments to reduce ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions. The House of Representatives passed an amendment to next year’s military authorization bill that ‘prohibits the restriction of armed forces under the Kyoto Protocol.’”
Today in Copenhagen the same agreements and guidelines on greenhouse gases still hold. Yet it is extremely difficult to find even a mention of this glaring omission.
According to environmental journalist Johanna Peace, military activities will continue to be exempt from an executive order signed by President Barack Obama that calls for federal agencies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Peace states, “The military accounts for a full 80 percent of the federal government’s energy demand.” (solveclimate.com, Sept. 1)
The blanket exclusion of the Pentagon’s global operations makes U.S. carbon dioxide emissions appear far less than they in fact are. Yet even without counting the Pentagon, the U.S. still has the world’s largest carbon dioxide emissions.
More than emissions
Besides emitting carbon dioxide, U.S. military operations release other highly toxic and radioactive materials into the air, water and soil.
U.S. weapons made with depleted uranium have spread tens of thousands of pounds of microparticles of radioactive and highly toxic waste throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and the Balkans.
The U.S. sells land mines and cluster bombs that are a major cause of delayed explosions, maiming and disabling especially peasant farmers and rural peoples in Africa, Asia and Latin America. For example, Israel dropped more than 1 million U.S.-provided cluster bombs on Lebanon during its 2006 invasion.
The U.S. war in Vietnam left large areas so contaminated with the Agent Orange herbicide that today, more than 35 years later, dioxin contamination is 300 to 400 times higher than “safe” levels. Severe birth defects and high rates of cancer resulting from environmental contamination are continuing into a third generation.
The 1991 U.S. war in Iraq, followed by 13 years of starvation sanctions, the 2003 U.S. invasion and continuing occupation, has transformed the region — which has a 5,000-year history as a Middle East breadbasket — into an environmental catastrophe. Iraq’s arable and fertile land has become a desert wasteland where the slightest wind whips up a dust storm. A former food exporter, Iraq now imports 80 percent of its food. The Iraqi Agriculture Ministry estimates that 90 percent of the land has severe desertification.
Environmental war at home
Moreover, the Defense Department has routinely resisted orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up contaminated U.S. bases. (Washington Post, June 30, 2008) Pentagon military bases top the Superfund list of the most polluted places, as contaminants seep into drinking water aquifers and soil.
The Pentagon has also fought EPA efforts to set new pollution standards on two toxic chemicals widely found on military sites: perchlorate, found in propellant for rockets and missiles; and trichloroethylene, a degreaser for metal parts.
Trichloroethylene is the most widespread water contaminant in the country, seeping into aquifers across California, New York, Texas, Florida and elsewhere. More than 1,000 military sites in the U.S. are contaminated with the chemical. The poorest communities, especially communities of color, are the most severely impacted by this poisoning.
U.S. testing of nuclear weapons in the U.S. Southwest and on South Pacific islands has contaminated millions of areas of land and water with radiation. Mountains of radioactive and toxic uranium tailings have been left on Indigenous land in the Southwest. More than 1,000 uranium mines have been abandoned on Navajo reservations in Arizona and New Mexico.
Around the world, on past and still operating bases in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Japan, Nicaragua, Panama and the former Yugoslavia, rusting barrels of chemicals and solvents and millions of rounds of ammunition are criminally abandoned by the Pentagon.
The best way to dramatically clean up the environment is to shut down the Pentagon. What is needed to combat climate change is a thoroughgoing system change.
Articles copyright 1995-2009 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
By Sara Flounders
Published Dec 16, 2009 6:17 PM
In evaluating the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen — with more than 15,000 participants from 192 countries, including more than 100 heads of state, as well as 100,000 demonstrators in the streets — it is important to ask: How is it possible that the worst polluter of carbon dioxide and other toxic emissions on the planet is not a focus of any conference discussion or proposed restrictions?
By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.
The Pentagon wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; its secret operations in Pakistan; its equipment on more than 1,000 U.S. bases around the world; its 6,000 facilities in the U.S.; all NATO operations; its aircraft carriers, jet aircraft, weapons testing, training and sales will not be counted against U.S. greenhouse gas limits or included in any count.
The Feb. 17, 2007, Energy Bulletin detailed the oil consumption just for the Pentagon’s aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities that made it the single-largest oil consumer in the world. At the time, the U.S. Navy had 285 combat and support ships and around 4,000 operational aircraft. The U.S. Army had 28,000 armored vehicles, 140,000 High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles, more than 4,000 combat helicopters, several hundred fixed-wing aircraft and 187,493 fleet vehicles. Except for 80 nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, which spread radioactive pollution, all their other vehicles run on oil.
Even according to rankings in the 2006 CIA World Factbook, only 35 countries (out of 210 in the world) consume more oil per day than the Pentagon.
The U.S. military officially uses 320,000 barrels of oil a day. However, this total does not include fuel consumed by contractors or fuel consumed in leased and privatized facilities. Nor does it include the enormous energy and resources used to produce and maintain their death-dealing equipment or the bombs, grenades or missiles they fire.
Steve Kretzmann, director of Oil Change International, reports: “The Iraq war was responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) from March 2003 through December 2007. ... The war emits more than 60 percent of all countries. ... This information is not readily available ... because military emissions abroad are exempt from national reporting requirements under U.S. law and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.” (www.naomiklein.org, Dec. 10) Most scientists blame carbon dioxide emissions for greenhouse gases and climate change.
Bryan Farrell in his new book, “The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism,” says that “the greatest single assault on the environment, on all of us around the globe, comes from one agency ... the Armed Forces of the United States.”
Just how did the Pentagon come to be exempt from climate agreements? At the time of the Kyoto Accords negotiations, the U.S. demanded as a provision of signing that all of its military operations worldwide and all operations it participates in with the U.N. and/or NATO be completely exempted from measurement or reductions.
After securing this gigantic concession, the Bush administration then refused to sign the accords.
In a May 18, 1998, article entitled “National security and military policy issues involved in the Kyoto treaty,” Dr. Jeffrey Salmon described the Pentagon’s position. He quotes then-Secretary of Defense William Cohen’s 1997 annual report to Congress: “DoD strongly recommends that the United States insist on a national security provision in the climate change Protocol now being negotiated.” (www.marshall.org)
According to Salmon, this national security provision was put forth in a draft calling for “complete military exemption from greenhouse gas emissions limits. The draft includes multilateral operations such as NATO- and U.N.-sanctioned activities, but it also includes actions related very broadly to national security, which would appear to comprehend all forms of unilateral military actions and training for such actions.”
Salmon also quoted Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat, who headed the U.S. delegation in Kyoto. Eizenstat reported that “every requirement the Defense Department and uniformed military who were at Kyoto by my side said they wanted, they got. This is self-defense, peacekeeping, humanitarian relief.”
Although the U.S. had already received these assurances in the negotiations, the U.S. Congress passed an explicit provision guaranteeing U.S. military exemption. Inter Press Service reported on May 21, 1998: “U.S. law makers, in the latest blow to international efforts to halt global warming, today exempted U.S. military operations from the Kyoto agreement which lays out binding commitments to reduce ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions. The House of Representatives passed an amendment to next year’s military authorization bill that ‘prohibits the restriction of armed forces under the Kyoto Protocol.’”
Today in Copenhagen the same agreements and guidelines on greenhouse gases still hold. Yet it is extremely difficult to find even a mention of this glaring omission.
According to environmental journalist Johanna Peace, military activities will continue to be exempt from an executive order signed by President Barack Obama that calls for federal agencies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Peace states, “The military accounts for a full 80 percent of the federal government’s energy demand.” (solveclimate.com, Sept. 1)
The blanket exclusion of the Pentagon’s global operations makes U.S. carbon dioxide emissions appear far less than they in fact are. Yet even without counting the Pentagon, the U.S. still has the world’s largest carbon dioxide emissions.
More than emissions
Besides emitting carbon dioxide, U.S. military operations release other highly toxic and radioactive materials into the air, water and soil.
U.S. weapons made with depleted uranium have spread tens of thousands of pounds of microparticles of radioactive and highly toxic waste throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and the Balkans.
The U.S. sells land mines and cluster bombs that are a major cause of delayed explosions, maiming and disabling especially peasant farmers and rural peoples in Africa, Asia and Latin America. For example, Israel dropped more than 1 million U.S.-provided cluster bombs on Lebanon during its 2006 invasion.
The U.S. war in Vietnam left large areas so contaminated with the Agent Orange herbicide that today, more than 35 years later, dioxin contamination is 300 to 400 times higher than “safe” levels. Severe birth defects and high rates of cancer resulting from environmental contamination are continuing into a third generation.
The 1991 U.S. war in Iraq, followed by 13 years of starvation sanctions, the 2003 U.S. invasion and continuing occupation, has transformed the region — which has a 5,000-year history as a Middle East breadbasket — into an environmental catastrophe. Iraq’s arable and fertile land has become a desert wasteland where the slightest wind whips up a dust storm. A former food exporter, Iraq now imports 80 percent of its food. The Iraqi Agriculture Ministry estimates that 90 percent of the land has severe desertification.
Environmental war at home
Moreover, the Defense Department has routinely resisted orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up contaminated U.S. bases. (Washington Post, June 30, 2008) Pentagon military bases top the Superfund list of the most polluted places, as contaminants seep into drinking water aquifers and soil.
The Pentagon has also fought EPA efforts to set new pollution standards on two toxic chemicals widely found on military sites: perchlorate, found in propellant for rockets and missiles; and trichloroethylene, a degreaser for metal parts.
Trichloroethylene is the most widespread water contaminant in the country, seeping into aquifers across California, New York, Texas, Florida and elsewhere. More than 1,000 military sites in the U.S. are contaminated with the chemical. The poorest communities, especially communities of color, are the most severely impacted by this poisoning.
U.S. testing of nuclear weapons in the U.S. Southwest and on South Pacific islands has contaminated millions of areas of land and water with radiation. Mountains of radioactive and toxic uranium tailings have been left on Indigenous land in the Southwest. More than 1,000 uranium mines have been abandoned on Navajo reservations in Arizona and New Mexico.
Around the world, on past and still operating bases in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Japan, Nicaragua, Panama and the former Yugoslavia, rusting barrels of chemicals and solvents and millions of rounds of ammunition are criminally abandoned by the Pentagon.
The best way to dramatically clean up the environment is to shut down the Pentagon. What is needed to combat climate change is a thoroughgoing system change.
Articles copyright 1995-2009 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Copenhagen: A summit of civilized hyenas
‘Climate’ talks marked by capitalist rivalries
BY BEN JOYCE
Representatives from underdeveloped nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America staged a walkout for several hours December 14 at the UN-sponsored summit talks on climate. The action by the nations, known as the Group of 77, highlights the real purpose of the meeting in Copenhagen—rivalry between the imperialist powers and their economic dominance of the so-called developing nations.
The stated aim of the talks is to adopt an international treaty that would mandate countries to reduce levels of greenhouse gas emissions, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal.
Europe vs. America
Some capitalist rulers, in the United States in particular, have opposed such regulations, saying the added costs of investment in technology and equipment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would cut into their profits. They also argue that they would be at an unfair disadvantage without imposition of stringent regulations on the industries of semicolonial nations.
Western European delegations, on the other hand, are pushing for the most restrictive emissions guidelines. Capitalist industries in Europe are less dependent on fossil fuels since they have turned substantially to nuclear power as a source of energy. Nuclear power accounts for 76 percent of the energy needs of French industries, 53 percent in Belgium, 42 percent in Sweden, and 28 percent in Germany.
The European Union will likely commit to a 30 percent reduction in emissions, according to the London Guardian. The New York Times reports that many European governments support an enforcement mechanism in the treaty that penalizes countries that fail to comply.
One draft document calls for “developing” countries to reduce their emissions by 15 to 30 percent by 2020.
Semicolonial countries are home to 76 percent of the world’s population, while they account for only 42 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and 19 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. The group of most developed countries makes up 19 percent of the population, while producing 51 percent of emissions and holding 75 percent of the GDP. The United States has 5 percent of the population with 20 percent of emissions and 30 percent of the GDP.
A major component of the conference has been a U.S.-led campaign against China and its ability to compete in international trade. The delegation from Washington said December 14 that it would not support any deal that did not include a verification mechanism for China’s emissions levels, which Beijing has rejected. Being able to compete with Chinese industry is a major concern for the U.S. rulers and the so-called climate debate is one place this becomes sharpest.
In June the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill on climate and energy policy that “allows for the imposition of tariffs on goods from countries that do not constrain their carbon output,” according to the New York Times. A group of 10 senators wrote to President Barack Obama warning that the Senate would not ratify any treaty that did not “protect American industry from foreign competitors who do not have to meet global warming emissions limits,” said the Times.
Washington’s actions are similar to the stance it took around the 1997 Kyoto treaty. That treaty imposed goals for emissions reductions for the developed countries but was optional for underdeveloped nations. The U.S. government refused to sign because the added costs to accommodate these changes by U.S. companies, they argued, would make underdeveloped countries more competitive in the world market.
During the Copenhagen conference several protest actions have taken place, the largest drawing tens of thousands of activists. Some of the actions have been organized to press for strong regulations, while others have sought to prevent the conference from taking place as planned. A rally held December 12 attracted 40,000 according to police accounts, or nearly 100,000 according to organizers.
Police told the Associated Press that they had arrested 968 people in a “preventive action” at the demonstration. Leading up to the conference, the Danish government passed a law granting police sweeping powers to make “preemptive” arrests. According to the Guardian, “the new powers of ‘pre-emptive’ detention would increase from 6 to 12 hours and apply to international activists. If protesters are charged with hindering the police, the penalty will increase from a fine to 40 days in prison. Protesters can also be fined an increased amount of 5,000 krona (US$978) for breach of the peace, disorderly behaviour, and remaining after the police have broken up a demonstration.”
BY BEN JOYCE
Representatives from underdeveloped nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America staged a walkout for several hours December 14 at the UN-sponsored summit talks on climate. The action by the nations, known as the Group of 77, highlights the real purpose of the meeting in Copenhagen—rivalry between the imperialist powers and their economic dominance of the so-called developing nations.
The stated aim of the talks is to adopt an international treaty that would mandate countries to reduce levels of greenhouse gas emissions, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal.
Europe vs. America
Some capitalist rulers, in the United States in particular, have opposed such regulations, saying the added costs of investment in technology and equipment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would cut into their profits. They also argue that they would be at an unfair disadvantage without imposition of stringent regulations on the industries of semicolonial nations.
Western European delegations, on the other hand, are pushing for the most restrictive emissions guidelines. Capitalist industries in Europe are less dependent on fossil fuels since they have turned substantially to nuclear power as a source of energy. Nuclear power accounts for 76 percent of the energy needs of French industries, 53 percent in Belgium, 42 percent in Sweden, and 28 percent in Germany.
The European Union will likely commit to a 30 percent reduction in emissions, according to the London Guardian. The New York Times reports that many European governments support an enforcement mechanism in the treaty that penalizes countries that fail to comply.
One draft document calls for “developing” countries to reduce their emissions by 15 to 30 percent by 2020.
Semicolonial countries are home to 76 percent of the world’s population, while they account for only 42 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and 19 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. The group of most developed countries makes up 19 percent of the population, while producing 51 percent of emissions and holding 75 percent of the GDP. The United States has 5 percent of the population with 20 percent of emissions and 30 percent of the GDP.
A major component of the conference has been a U.S.-led campaign against China and its ability to compete in international trade. The delegation from Washington said December 14 that it would not support any deal that did not include a verification mechanism for China’s emissions levels, which Beijing has rejected. Being able to compete with Chinese industry is a major concern for the U.S. rulers and the so-called climate debate is one place this becomes sharpest.
In June the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill on climate and energy policy that “allows for the imposition of tariffs on goods from countries that do not constrain their carbon output,” according to the New York Times. A group of 10 senators wrote to President Barack Obama warning that the Senate would not ratify any treaty that did not “protect American industry from foreign competitors who do not have to meet global warming emissions limits,” said the Times.
Washington’s actions are similar to the stance it took around the 1997 Kyoto treaty. That treaty imposed goals for emissions reductions for the developed countries but was optional for underdeveloped nations. The U.S. government refused to sign because the added costs to accommodate these changes by U.S. companies, they argued, would make underdeveloped countries more competitive in the world market.
During the Copenhagen conference several protest actions have taken place, the largest drawing tens of thousands of activists. Some of the actions have been organized to press for strong regulations, while others have sought to prevent the conference from taking place as planned. A rally held December 12 attracted 40,000 according to police accounts, or nearly 100,000 according to organizers.
Police told the Associated Press that they had arrested 968 people in a “preventive action” at the demonstration. Leading up to the conference, the Danish government passed a law granting police sweeping powers to make “preemptive” arrests. According to the Guardian, “the new powers of ‘pre-emptive’ detention would increase from 6 to 12 hours and apply to international activists. If protesters are charged with hindering the police, the penalty will increase from a fine to 40 days in prison. Protesters can also be fined an increased amount of 5,000 krona (US$978) for breach of the peace, disorderly behaviour, and remaining after the police have broken up a demonstration.”
The Bernanke Hosannas Begin (can chairmanship of the World Bank be far behind?)
Time names Gravy Train Conductor Person of the Year -- ALL ABOARD!http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/12/16/time.bernanke/index.html?eref=edition
from
Товарищ Х
from
Товарищ Х
Fault lines of struggle in India explored
Sandwich Theory and Operation Green Hunt
December 15, 2009
By Radha D’Souza. Guest Contributor, Sahati.
The ‘Sandwich Theory’
I was piqued by the phrase ‘sandwich theory’ when I first heard it from Delhi students. They were referring to the views of a section of articulate, influential, middle India in the wake of the controversies over Sadwa Judum in Chattisgarh and now Operation Green Hunt. The ‘theory’, if we may call it that, holds that the Adivasis and rural poor are caught in the crossfire between armed Maoist ‘terrorists’ on the one side and a militarised Indian state on the other (see Report of the Independent Citizen’s Initiative on Chattisgarh for example). It is the duty of middle India, according to the ‘sandwich theory’, to ‘rescue’ the hapless Adivasis and rural poor from the armed combatants. Both combatants have ulterior motives: the Maoists wish to take political power through the barrel of their guns, and the India state wishes to grab Adivasi lands and natural resources and hand them over to corporations, foreign and domestic. Thus, the ‘sandwich theory’ sees middle India as the saviour of the nation as envisioned in the Indian Constitution. The apparent neutrality of the theory is appealing to many. Equally, many are uneasy about ‘sandwich theory’ not least because it frames the question as one of ‘violence versus non-violence’ and forces them to given a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer with little room for debate (e.g. NDTV, ‘The Buck Stops Here’ 23/09/09, 07/10/09, 20/10/09). The privileged statuses of the proponents of this theory, the positions they occupy in academia, media, institutions of governance, and such adds to the scepticism of privilege that many even in middle India have developed over the years since Independence. Although there is widespread opposition to Sadwa Judum and Operation Green Hunt, their understanding of it divides middle India. The ‘sandwich theory’ merits reflection, therefore.
Democratic Values and ‘Sandwich Theory’
Middle India values democracy, and most will agree that, in principle, democracy demands respect for every man, woman, and child, rich or poor, urban or rural, of any caste or nationality. Respect for all entails crediting all human beings with basic intelligence by virtue of being human. Democracy is based on the belief that all people possess the capacities to determine their destinies. If this is true, then the ‘sandwich theory’ is fundamentally undemocratic.
Most people in middle India today agree that the Adivasis and rural poor have real and legitimate grievances against the economic policies of successive governments. According to the ‘sandwich theorists’ the Maoists exploit their grievances to further their own ends. This precludes the possibility that at least a section of the Adivasis and rural poor may have chosen to go with the Maoists. The argument denies the Adivasis and the rural poor their agency, their capacities to determine what is and is not good for them, and basic intelligence to decide who they wish to support and why. The attitude implicit in the ‘sandwich theory’ masks the latent authoritarianism that lurks beneath the facade of compassion for the poor. Of course, the Adivasis and the rural poor do not articulate their political choices in the language of scholars from Harvard and Oxford, IIT and JNU, or theories of democratic development, civil society, post-communism or post Marxism, but that is not to say they are passive victims without self-determination. By portraying them as hapless victims of Maoists and the State alike, middle India can avoid engaging with the Adivasis and rural poor as political equals.
The representation of Adivasis and rural poor as voiceless victims is not new, however. It is an idea that has been developed and refined in India at least since independence. The development discourse at the end of the World Wars was about ‘poverty’. It was a crude concept, a rough and ready term. Soon it became apparent that like ‘the invisible hand of the market’, the mysterious ways of development rewarded the few and impoverished the many. As disenchantment with development grew, the ‘poor’ was replaced by a more nuanced, exotic sounding term: the subaltern. The subaltern are untouched by modernity, outside the pale of civil society, innocent, an idea perilously close to the ‘noble savages’ of colonial thinkers. The subalterns are people whose aspirations cannot be understood without being interpreted and represented by middle India. From subaltern to victim is a quick and easy step. As long as the Adivasis and rural poor remain victims, middle India is not required to speak in its own name, about its own interests and aspirations; it is enough to interpret for “them”. How true is the picture that the Adivasis and rural poor are victims caught between the combatants in Operation Green Hunt?
Who Exactly Is ‘Sandwiched’ Here?
Throughout India’s modern history, since the advent of colonisation, two adversaries have remained steadfast and undeterred in their opposition to each other. During the colonial era and in the post-Independence era, ‘tribal rebellions’ and ‘peasant uprisings’ were the volcanoes that erupted from time to time and rocked the edifice of state power. When the rebellions and uprisings subsided they continued to bubble away beneath the surface, forming the volcanic fault-line upon which Indian society is founded. On their part, the Adivasis have shown remarkable consistency. Their demands have never wavered from: ‘jal, jangal, jameen’ (water, forest, land). The rural poor have echoed their demands with as much consistency. Indeed, it may be noted in the passing, that indigenous people the world over have never wavered from that singular demand of ‘jal, jangal, jameen’.
Against this, the state, colonial or post-Independence, has shown remarkable consistency in its responses to the demands of the Adivasi and the rural poor. They have responded with guns and bayonets, mobilised the full might of the state, imprisoned, tortured, raped, and plundered the Adivasis and rural poor, and sentenced many to death. Remember Kista Gowd and Bhoomiah within living memories of many of us? The state has been equally consistent in its demands for more land, more resources, and more cheap labour. This extraordinary consistency of the two combatants has thrown everyone in between, middle India, into turmoil from time to time. Some have sided unequivocally with the Adivasis and the rural poor. They have been branded variously as extremists, insurgents and terrorists and met the same fate as the Adivasis. Others have sided unequivocally with the state, colonial or otherwise, and proactively participated in mobilising the state machinery against extremists, insurgents, terrorists, whatever. Yet others have felt hemmed in and ‘sandwiched’ between the two adversaries. Thus, it is middle India that is ‘sandwiched’ and feels beleaguered by the combatants.
In substance what happened in Kalinganagar, or Singur, or Nandigram or Lalgarh, or now in Narayanpatna, follow in the same traditions, but middle India dithers to call them tribal rebellions or peasant uprisings. The current debates echo similar debates during the freedom struggle: M.N Roy’s spat with Lenin on the ‘agrarian question’, Aurobindo’s conversion from violence to non-violence, debates over Bhagat Singh and Chauri Chaura, to name a few. The ‘sandwich theorists’ are surprisingly ahistorical in their approach to the current stand off. Many go along with the state’s representation that the Maoist movement began as recent as 2004, a representation based on realignments within the movement. Everyone knows notwithstanding the peaks and troughs, the Maoist movements, whether we like them or not, have a longer history than 2004. There is a significant difference however, between the situation that confronts middle India today compared to the situation it had to face during the freedom struggle and post independence period. That difference has to do with ‘globalisation’.
Middle India And The Freedom Struggle
The Boer Wars, the Scramble for Africa, and other colonial conflagrations culminated in the World Wars between imperialist nations with Britain at the helm. The freedom struggle was directed against British imperialism, at a time when Britain was militarily strong but a declining economic power. A wide cross section of classes, communities, nationalities, castes in Indian society between the Adivasis and the State, joined the freedom struggle, each with their own demands and their own aspirations. Industrial expansion occurred during that interim period of the World Wars. An emergent industrial class that profited from the World Wars also aspired for political power, and joined the freedom struggle. The debates about violence and non-violence, extremism and liberal democracy, social justice and rule of law, and other such questions were part of a wider process of forging a social contract between the multifarious classes, communities, castes, tribes, nationalities, religions, linguistic groups. The social contract was later embodied in the Constitution when India became a republic.
The social contract was based on a vision of the Indian nation. It was a vision that included all and opened with the words ‘we the people’. It promised to all ‘justice: social, economic and political’; it promised the Adivasis protection of their water, forests and lands, land reforms to the rural poor, offered special status to different nationalities, Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Kashmir, jobs and collective bargaining rights to urban workers, linguistic reorganisation of states, rule of law and constitutional democracy, and most importantly adopted as its motto: ‘satyam eva jayate’ (truth alone prevails). That vision of a nation is at the heart of the dilemma that confronts middle India today.
Independence of India was inaugurated with partition at two ends of the nation and the Telangana uprising in its belly. The Telangana uprising, like other Adivasi and peasant struggles, was put down by the Indian army, and many were tortured, imprisoned and executed. Middle India was confident that with a new Constitution in place, the causes of tribal rebellions and peasant uprisings would be consigned to history. The imprint of the Communist Party of India, the largest opposition party in India’s Constituent Assembly that drafted India’s Constitution, was writ large in the social contract. Middle India believed in their vision of the nation. Given the time, India would be a nation founded on social justice, equality and non-discrimination.
When the Naxalbari and Srikakulam uprisings erupted two decades later, it was clear that something had gone terribly wrong with that vision; that the social contract on which modern India was founded was wilfully broken. When the police and army cracked down on Naxalbari and Srikakulam tribals and peasants, as they always did, the state justified its actions in the same vein as today. The fight was not against tribals and peasants, but against armed Maoist insurgents, it was about violence and non-violence, the state argued. But middle India refused to be ‘sandwiched’. Thousands of students and youth joined the Naxalbari and Srikakulam tribals and peasants. They were abducted, imprisoned, tortured, killed and Indian English added a new meaning to the verb ‘encountered’ after the faked ‘encounter’ killings. Even those opposed to the Maoists’ ideologies and methods refused to be ‘sandwiched’. People of the stature of Jayaprakash Narayan, V. M Tarkunde, Sathyaranjan Sathe, Samar Sen, to name just a few, insisted that the Maoists were idealists, impatient, ideologically misguided - they were anything but criminals and terrorists. Above all the ‘rule of law’ applied to Maoist as much as anyone else, they insisted. No one accused them of being terrorist sympathisers for that reason, not even the state. Post Naxalbari, middle India was dismayed, frustrated, angry, and disappointed with the state for breaking the social contract. They still held on to the vision of the nation that was forged during the freedom struggle, even when the vision was slipping away. ‘This is not the India our parents and grandparents fought for’ the post Independence generation seemed to say.
Many social justice movements emerged. The democratic rights movement in modern India grew and expanded as more people were ‘encountered’. They insisted that the Courts, as guardians of the Constitution, had a duty to ensure it was enforced against all the parties to the social contract. ‘Law is on trial’ Justice Bhagwati, the former Chief Justice of India, warned in his Law Day speeches. A novel jurisprudential theory called the ‘episolatory jurisdiction’ was innovated. Any one without means could drop a post card to the Supreme Court complaining of violation of her Constitutional rights and they would be heard. Paradoxically these interventions had the effect of entrenching systemic discrimination and exclusion of the Adivasis and rural poor in the heart of constitutional democracy: the judicial system.
The interventions of middle India were based on a view that denied Adivasis and the rural poor their agency. They were hapless victims, the voiceless subalterns, so “we” the saviours of the nation had to do something, and of course “we”, middle India, would prove that rule of law and the constitution could be made to work for “them”. Take Public Interest Litigation (PIL). Writ after writ was issued by courts for implementing regular laws. The petitions called upon the state to implement minimum wage laws, health and safety laws, laws against bonded and child labour, resettlement and rehabilitation of displaced people. The Courts became involved in administration and law enforcement but rarely punished any state official for failing in their statutory and constitutional duties. As the boundaries between the executive and the judiciary became murky PILs send a clear message that state officials could get away with violations of constitutional and statutory duties.
PIL did not work for the ‘subalterns’ whose jal, jangal and jameen were acquired for building modern India, whether they be public sector companies like the National Thermal Power Corporation, the Narmada dam, or Konkan railway. Simultaneously PILs set the precedent for unilateral judicial interventions. It was clear that the Courts, at least, would not be an impediment to the state’s vision of development even if excluded half the population.
Take Lok Adalats, an idea canvassed by middle India and later legislated into the statute books. Lok Adalats dispensed with procedural rules of evidence, civil and criminal procedures in cases involving the poor, ostensibly to cut down backlog of cases and expedite justice to the poor. In effect, it entrenched a system different procedures would be followed for the rich and for the poor. The rich would get a proper judicial hearing following rules of evidence and civil and criminal procedures; and procedural laws would be dispensed with for the poor. After all, cases of the poor were for paltry sums anyway. Never mind that to the poor the paltry sums meant a great deal. Equality in the eyes of the law?
The post-Naxalbari, post-Emergency period saw a ballooning of NGOs, voluntary organisations, and ‘civil society’ organisations accompanied by criminalisation of politics. Nearly forty percent of Indian MPs and MLAs are supposed to have criminal records involving serious crimes like murder, extortion, abduction and rape according to citizens groups like National Election Watch and Association of Democratic Reforms. Satyam eva jayate? The political spaces of the Adivasis and rural poor usurped by criminalisation, was contested by the NGOs and voluntary organisations. Middle India came up with an amazing proposition: all politics was anti-poor, corrupt and criminalised, therefore, we can be a democracy without politics. Of course, as the Adivasis and rural poor, being subalterns, could not speak, it fell on the NGOs or voluntary groups to interpret for them.
As middle India tried desperately to salvage the vision of a nation forged during the freedom struggle, the Berlin Wall collapsed, the Time magazine announced ‘Communism was dead’ on its cover pages, and Fukuyama declared history itself had ended.
Envisioning The Nation Under ‘Globalisation’
Once again, India is in a situation comparable to the early twentieth century. Like Britain in the early twentieth century, the United States which assumed the leadership of imperialist nations after World War II, is economically weak and reliant on militarism it can ill afford. Once again, the loosening grip of imperialist reins offers Indian industrialists and financiers an opportunity to expand their operations. The lure of ten percent growth based on many more nuclear plants, mining corporations, industries, special economic zones, and speculative investments promises them a whole new world, if only they would dare to conquer it. The new world of their dreams requires conquering the Adivasis and the rural poor. Where will they go? What of the social contract? This much is clear even to middle India.
‘Globalisation’ erodes the idea of a nation, however. Indeed it is premised on the idea that nations no longer matter, and if they matter at all, they do so only on the condition that they are homogenised and adapted to the global marketplace. There is no longer an industrial, propertied, elite in India, therefore, that is interested in joining ranks with middle India to renegotiate power with imperialists. Instead all negotiations on power have shifted to the international arena; they will happen henceforth in the UN, the WTO, the G8 summits, and the World Economic Forums. The pesky Adivasis persist with their jal, jangal and jameen. Having accepted the ‘inevitability’ of ‘globalisation’ middle India is left without the conceptual tools to envision a nation, to flesh out self-determination. How should the India of their dreams look like? And what is the ‘down payment’ they are willing to put down (to use the language of WTO trade negotiators) to secure their vision of an India of their dreams?
The UN’s World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen in 1995 was a turning point. Al Gore the then Vice President of the United States declared at the Summit that aid and development assistance to the Third World would from then on would be channelled through NGOs, and aimed at ‘good governance’. ‘Good governance’ resonanted with ‘responsible government’ of the colonial era. What did Al Gore and the Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development ramify for the Adivasis and the rural poor?
The language of discourse changed in India. Indian NGOs and voluntary organisations were awash with funds. More importantly, they were armed with new ideological and conceptual resources developed by international organisations: ideas of ‘empowerment’, ‘democratic development’, ‘good governance’, ‘civil society participation’ and such. In fairness many applied the funds to save the social contract. But the social contract was never about ‘democratic development’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘good governance’. The social contract was about self-determination, equality, redistributive justice, power-sharing and equity, about satyam eva jayate, not transparency.
More NGOs and voluntary organisations, more funding for the non-governmental sector, more ‘empowerment’ and ‘good governance’ programmes did not equate to more representation of the Adivasis and rural poor. If anything it was the opposite. The more funding became available for NGOs and voluntary groups, the more the Maoist influence increased. Yet, there are no social theories, no quantitative or qualitative research methods that can establish any correlation between the two.
The NGOs and voluntary groups took up all the issues that the Adivasis and the rural poor raised: the model of development, traditional water systems, land management, forest conservation, corruption, criminalisation of politics. They balked at one central question: the question of political power. This was the only question that the Maoists took up. Middle India wants the Adivasis and the rural poor to trust their word when they say middle India is with the Adivasis and rural poor. How should the Adivasis and rural poor do this when they are reduced to voiceless subalterns, when they are no longer political subjects with agency? Moreover without a vision of a nation, even many in middle India are not forthcoming with that implicit trust.
Middle India Caught In The Crossfire?
The Indian state has once again framed the issue, as it has always done, as one of violence versus non-violence. In a ‘globalised’, privatised world, populated with NGOs, the Indian state does not have to resort to state propaganda via Doordarshan to make its claims. In a privatised, ‘globalised’ world state claims are made through private agents committed to ‘globalisation’. For example consider the ‘sandwich theory’. Numerous NGOs and private organisations have promoted the theory. For example in January 2005 the Observer Research Foundation under its International Terrorism Watch Programme held a two day workshop on ‘the Naxal challenge’. The trustees of this foundation are eminent journalists who have been part of Congress and BJP governments at various times. They published a book from the workshop proceedings titled ‘The Naxal Challenge: Causes, Linkages and Policy Options.’ The editor of the volume, at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, specialises on Naxalism which falls under the research cluster ‘Terrorism and internal security’. The blurb for the book is written by the former governor of Jharkhand, and a chief of army staff. The question of whether the Maoists should be seen as terrorists at all is foreclosed in the way the debate is framed.
Well resourced organisations set out the assumptions underpinning the debate, the terms of the discourse which middle India must follow, not least because they are bombarded with research, publications, high profile media coverage, all based on the assumptions presented by think-tank organisations. The Independent Citizens’ Initiative report on Sadwa Judum by influential citizens, some of them close to the powers that be, echoes a similar ‘sandwich theory’ position. Their position is nowhere comparable to that of Jayaprakash Narayan or V.M Tarkunde. For the latter, their positions against non-violence stemmed from a vision of the nation based on the social contract of the freedom struggle; it included the Maoists as much as the Adivasis. Today, the positions against non-violence are based on a conception of India as an emergent global power that needs to put a human face on ‘globalisation’.
Add to this the terms for the numerous research grants, project funding, and overseas assistance given to NGOs requiring them to conform to liberal democracy, parliamentary processes, and judicial norms. Where is the room to say these processes were tried, tried over and over again for at least six decades, they have failed, and that the parliament, the judiciary and the executive have thrown the social contract to the winds of ‘globalisation’? What new vision of the nation can middle India forge?
The Adivasis and rural poor insist it is a matter of jal, jangal and jameen as they always have. The Maoists, their ideological, political and military shortcomings not withstanding, and there are many of those (see exchanges between Sumanta Banerjee and CPI Maoist EPWs 02/09/09, 19/09/09, 14/11/09), stand unequivocally on the side of the Adivaisis and rural poor, whatever their motives. Middle India insists it is possible to put a human face on ‘globalisation’. To the contrary, the new wave of struggles in Kalinganagar, Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh challenges them to renegotiate the social contract, a challenge that requires a renewed freedom struggle, forging new alliances, and new conceptions of development and decolonisation. ‘We too fought for freedom’, a Santhal says in a recent film on Lalgarh. Indeed they did. How do we answer that question? By saying the Maoists are bad boys? By saying the Santhals are subalterns that need middle India as their interpreters?
India’s Foundations On A Fault-line?
The social contract forged during the freedom struggle was premised on a false assumption. It was based on the assumption that it was possible to build a modern liberal democratic, capitalist nation without colonisation. There has never been, and can never be, capitalism without colonies, though its forms can change, and has changed since that fateful day when Columbus set sail looking for the ‘riches of the Indies’. ‘Globalisation’ is forcing middle India to colonise her own people. This is nothing new. It happened under British Rule too. Since the days of Siraj-ud-daula, the various Nawabs and Rajas, a section of the Indian elite has steadfastly stood by imperialists, helped them run Empires, and made a buck for themselves. J.S Mill observed that India was the great experimental laboratory for the Empire. When the fortunes of Empires fluctuate, it forces middle India to take a stand. It is happening today. The nation-state structure and constitutionalism makes it difficult for middle India to rationalise colonisation of her own people. What should middle India do? Launch a new freedom struggle? Forge a new social contract? These are difficult questions by any measure. How much easier to flog the Maoists using imperialist labels like ‘war on terror’ to mask their own inability to re-envision the nation? How much easier to ride the ‘globalisation’ wave on the moral high tides of non-violence? Middle India is wistful. If only the volcanic fault-line on which modern India is founded will go away; if only the Adivasis will put on hold their insistence on jal, jangal, jameen.
P.S
It is to the credit of Indian people that all the bombardments: physical, moral and intellectual, notwithstanding, large sections of middle India remain deeply sceptical about ‘sandwich theories’
December 15, 2009
By Radha D’Souza. Guest Contributor, Sahati.
The ‘Sandwich Theory’
I was piqued by the phrase ‘sandwich theory’ when I first heard it from Delhi students. They were referring to the views of a section of articulate, influential, middle India in the wake of the controversies over Sadwa Judum in Chattisgarh and now Operation Green Hunt. The ‘theory’, if we may call it that, holds that the Adivasis and rural poor are caught in the crossfire between armed Maoist ‘terrorists’ on the one side and a militarised Indian state on the other (see Report of the Independent Citizen’s Initiative on Chattisgarh for example). It is the duty of middle India, according to the ‘sandwich theory’, to ‘rescue’ the hapless Adivasis and rural poor from the armed combatants. Both combatants have ulterior motives: the Maoists wish to take political power through the barrel of their guns, and the India state wishes to grab Adivasi lands and natural resources and hand them over to corporations, foreign and domestic. Thus, the ‘sandwich theory’ sees middle India as the saviour of the nation as envisioned in the Indian Constitution. The apparent neutrality of the theory is appealing to many. Equally, many are uneasy about ‘sandwich theory’ not least because it frames the question as one of ‘violence versus non-violence’ and forces them to given a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer with little room for debate (e.g. NDTV, ‘The Buck Stops Here’ 23/09/09, 07/10/09, 20/10/09). The privileged statuses of the proponents of this theory, the positions they occupy in academia, media, institutions of governance, and such adds to the scepticism of privilege that many even in middle India have developed over the years since Independence. Although there is widespread opposition to Sadwa Judum and Operation Green Hunt, their understanding of it divides middle India. The ‘sandwich theory’ merits reflection, therefore.
Democratic Values and ‘Sandwich Theory’
Middle India values democracy, and most will agree that, in principle, democracy demands respect for every man, woman, and child, rich or poor, urban or rural, of any caste or nationality. Respect for all entails crediting all human beings with basic intelligence by virtue of being human. Democracy is based on the belief that all people possess the capacities to determine their destinies. If this is true, then the ‘sandwich theory’ is fundamentally undemocratic.
Most people in middle India today agree that the Adivasis and rural poor have real and legitimate grievances against the economic policies of successive governments. According to the ‘sandwich theorists’ the Maoists exploit their grievances to further their own ends. This precludes the possibility that at least a section of the Adivasis and rural poor may have chosen to go with the Maoists. The argument denies the Adivasis and the rural poor their agency, their capacities to determine what is and is not good for them, and basic intelligence to decide who they wish to support and why. The attitude implicit in the ‘sandwich theory’ masks the latent authoritarianism that lurks beneath the facade of compassion for the poor. Of course, the Adivasis and the rural poor do not articulate their political choices in the language of scholars from Harvard and Oxford, IIT and JNU, or theories of democratic development, civil society, post-communism or post Marxism, but that is not to say they are passive victims without self-determination. By portraying them as hapless victims of Maoists and the State alike, middle India can avoid engaging with the Adivasis and rural poor as political equals.
The representation of Adivasis and rural poor as voiceless victims is not new, however. It is an idea that has been developed and refined in India at least since independence. The development discourse at the end of the World Wars was about ‘poverty’. It was a crude concept, a rough and ready term. Soon it became apparent that like ‘the invisible hand of the market’, the mysterious ways of development rewarded the few and impoverished the many. As disenchantment with development grew, the ‘poor’ was replaced by a more nuanced, exotic sounding term: the subaltern. The subaltern are untouched by modernity, outside the pale of civil society, innocent, an idea perilously close to the ‘noble savages’ of colonial thinkers. The subalterns are people whose aspirations cannot be understood without being interpreted and represented by middle India. From subaltern to victim is a quick and easy step. As long as the Adivasis and rural poor remain victims, middle India is not required to speak in its own name, about its own interests and aspirations; it is enough to interpret for “them”. How true is the picture that the Adivasis and rural poor are victims caught between the combatants in Operation Green Hunt?
Who Exactly Is ‘Sandwiched’ Here?
Throughout India’s modern history, since the advent of colonisation, two adversaries have remained steadfast and undeterred in their opposition to each other. During the colonial era and in the post-Independence era, ‘tribal rebellions’ and ‘peasant uprisings’ were the volcanoes that erupted from time to time and rocked the edifice of state power. When the rebellions and uprisings subsided they continued to bubble away beneath the surface, forming the volcanic fault-line upon which Indian society is founded. On their part, the Adivasis have shown remarkable consistency. Their demands have never wavered from: ‘jal, jangal, jameen’ (water, forest, land). The rural poor have echoed their demands with as much consistency. Indeed, it may be noted in the passing, that indigenous people the world over have never wavered from that singular demand of ‘jal, jangal, jameen’.
Against this, the state, colonial or post-Independence, has shown remarkable consistency in its responses to the demands of the Adivasi and the rural poor. They have responded with guns and bayonets, mobilised the full might of the state, imprisoned, tortured, raped, and plundered the Adivasis and rural poor, and sentenced many to death. Remember Kista Gowd and Bhoomiah within living memories of many of us? The state has been equally consistent in its demands for more land, more resources, and more cheap labour. This extraordinary consistency of the two combatants has thrown everyone in between, middle India, into turmoil from time to time. Some have sided unequivocally with the Adivasis and the rural poor. They have been branded variously as extremists, insurgents and terrorists and met the same fate as the Adivasis. Others have sided unequivocally with the state, colonial or otherwise, and proactively participated in mobilising the state machinery against extremists, insurgents, terrorists, whatever. Yet others have felt hemmed in and ‘sandwiched’ between the two adversaries. Thus, it is middle India that is ‘sandwiched’ and feels beleaguered by the combatants.
In substance what happened in Kalinganagar, or Singur, or Nandigram or Lalgarh, or now in Narayanpatna, follow in the same traditions, but middle India dithers to call them tribal rebellions or peasant uprisings. The current debates echo similar debates during the freedom struggle: M.N Roy’s spat with Lenin on the ‘agrarian question’, Aurobindo’s conversion from violence to non-violence, debates over Bhagat Singh and Chauri Chaura, to name a few. The ‘sandwich theorists’ are surprisingly ahistorical in their approach to the current stand off. Many go along with the state’s representation that the Maoist movement began as recent as 2004, a representation based on realignments within the movement. Everyone knows notwithstanding the peaks and troughs, the Maoist movements, whether we like them or not, have a longer history than 2004. There is a significant difference however, between the situation that confronts middle India today compared to the situation it had to face during the freedom struggle and post independence period. That difference has to do with ‘globalisation’.
Middle India And The Freedom Struggle
The Boer Wars, the Scramble for Africa, and other colonial conflagrations culminated in the World Wars between imperialist nations with Britain at the helm. The freedom struggle was directed against British imperialism, at a time when Britain was militarily strong but a declining economic power. A wide cross section of classes, communities, nationalities, castes in Indian society between the Adivasis and the State, joined the freedom struggle, each with their own demands and their own aspirations. Industrial expansion occurred during that interim period of the World Wars. An emergent industrial class that profited from the World Wars also aspired for political power, and joined the freedom struggle. The debates about violence and non-violence, extremism and liberal democracy, social justice and rule of law, and other such questions were part of a wider process of forging a social contract between the multifarious classes, communities, castes, tribes, nationalities, religions, linguistic groups. The social contract was later embodied in the Constitution when India became a republic.
The social contract was based on a vision of the Indian nation. It was a vision that included all and opened with the words ‘we the people’. It promised to all ‘justice: social, economic and political’; it promised the Adivasis protection of their water, forests and lands, land reforms to the rural poor, offered special status to different nationalities, Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Kashmir, jobs and collective bargaining rights to urban workers, linguistic reorganisation of states, rule of law and constitutional democracy, and most importantly adopted as its motto: ‘satyam eva jayate’ (truth alone prevails). That vision of a nation is at the heart of the dilemma that confronts middle India today.
Independence of India was inaugurated with partition at two ends of the nation and the Telangana uprising in its belly. The Telangana uprising, like other Adivasi and peasant struggles, was put down by the Indian army, and many were tortured, imprisoned and executed. Middle India was confident that with a new Constitution in place, the causes of tribal rebellions and peasant uprisings would be consigned to history. The imprint of the Communist Party of India, the largest opposition party in India’s Constituent Assembly that drafted India’s Constitution, was writ large in the social contract. Middle India believed in their vision of the nation. Given the time, India would be a nation founded on social justice, equality and non-discrimination.
When the Naxalbari and Srikakulam uprisings erupted two decades later, it was clear that something had gone terribly wrong with that vision; that the social contract on which modern India was founded was wilfully broken. When the police and army cracked down on Naxalbari and Srikakulam tribals and peasants, as they always did, the state justified its actions in the same vein as today. The fight was not against tribals and peasants, but against armed Maoist insurgents, it was about violence and non-violence, the state argued. But middle India refused to be ‘sandwiched’. Thousands of students and youth joined the Naxalbari and Srikakulam tribals and peasants. They were abducted, imprisoned, tortured, killed and Indian English added a new meaning to the verb ‘encountered’ after the faked ‘encounter’ killings. Even those opposed to the Maoists’ ideologies and methods refused to be ‘sandwiched’. People of the stature of Jayaprakash Narayan, V. M Tarkunde, Sathyaranjan Sathe, Samar Sen, to name just a few, insisted that the Maoists were idealists, impatient, ideologically misguided - they were anything but criminals and terrorists. Above all the ‘rule of law’ applied to Maoist as much as anyone else, they insisted. No one accused them of being terrorist sympathisers for that reason, not even the state. Post Naxalbari, middle India was dismayed, frustrated, angry, and disappointed with the state for breaking the social contract. They still held on to the vision of the nation that was forged during the freedom struggle, even when the vision was slipping away. ‘This is not the India our parents and grandparents fought for’ the post Independence generation seemed to say.
Many social justice movements emerged. The democratic rights movement in modern India grew and expanded as more people were ‘encountered’. They insisted that the Courts, as guardians of the Constitution, had a duty to ensure it was enforced against all the parties to the social contract. ‘Law is on trial’ Justice Bhagwati, the former Chief Justice of India, warned in his Law Day speeches. A novel jurisprudential theory called the ‘episolatory jurisdiction’ was innovated. Any one without means could drop a post card to the Supreme Court complaining of violation of her Constitutional rights and they would be heard. Paradoxically these interventions had the effect of entrenching systemic discrimination and exclusion of the Adivasis and rural poor in the heart of constitutional democracy: the judicial system.
The interventions of middle India were based on a view that denied Adivasis and the rural poor their agency. They were hapless victims, the voiceless subalterns, so “we” the saviours of the nation had to do something, and of course “we”, middle India, would prove that rule of law and the constitution could be made to work for “them”. Take Public Interest Litigation (PIL). Writ after writ was issued by courts for implementing regular laws. The petitions called upon the state to implement minimum wage laws, health and safety laws, laws against bonded and child labour, resettlement and rehabilitation of displaced people. The Courts became involved in administration and law enforcement but rarely punished any state official for failing in their statutory and constitutional duties. As the boundaries between the executive and the judiciary became murky PILs send a clear message that state officials could get away with violations of constitutional and statutory duties.
PIL did not work for the ‘subalterns’ whose jal, jangal and jameen were acquired for building modern India, whether they be public sector companies like the National Thermal Power Corporation, the Narmada dam, or Konkan railway. Simultaneously PILs set the precedent for unilateral judicial interventions. It was clear that the Courts, at least, would not be an impediment to the state’s vision of development even if excluded half the population.
Take Lok Adalats, an idea canvassed by middle India and later legislated into the statute books. Lok Adalats dispensed with procedural rules of evidence, civil and criminal procedures in cases involving the poor, ostensibly to cut down backlog of cases and expedite justice to the poor. In effect, it entrenched a system different procedures would be followed for the rich and for the poor. The rich would get a proper judicial hearing following rules of evidence and civil and criminal procedures; and procedural laws would be dispensed with for the poor. After all, cases of the poor were for paltry sums anyway. Never mind that to the poor the paltry sums meant a great deal. Equality in the eyes of the law?
The post-Naxalbari, post-Emergency period saw a ballooning of NGOs, voluntary organisations, and ‘civil society’ organisations accompanied by criminalisation of politics. Nearly forty percent of Indian MPs and MLAs are supposed to have criminal records involving serious crimes like murder, extortion, abduction and rape according to citizens groups like National Election Watch and Association of Democratic Reforms. Satyam eva jayate? The political spaces of the Adivasis and rural poor usurped by criminalisation, was contested by the NGOs and voluntary organisations. Middle India came up with an amazing proposition: all politics was anti-poor, corrupt and criminalised, therefore, we can be a democracy without politics. Of course, as the Adivasis and rural poor, being subalterns, could not speak, it fell on the NGOs or voluntary groups to interpret for them.
As middle India tried desperately to salvage the vision of a nation forged during the freedom struggle, the Berlin Wall collapsed, the Time magazine announced ‘Communism was dead’ on its cover pages, and Fukuyama declared history itself had ended.
Envisioning The Nation Under ‘Globalisation’
Once again, India is in a situation comparable to the early twentieth century. Like Britain in the early twentieth century, the United States which assumed the leadership of imperialist nations after World War II, is economically weak and reliant on militarism it can ill afford. Once again, the loosening grip of imperialist reins offers Indian industrialists and financiers an opportunity to expand their operations. The lure of ten percent growth based on many more nuclear plants, mining corporations, industries, special economic zones, and speculative investments promises them a whole new world, if only they would dare to conquer it. The new world of their dreams requires conquering the Adivasis and the rural poor. Where will they go? What of the social contract? This much is clear even to middle India.
‘Globalisation’ erodes the idea of a nation, however. Indeed it is premised on the idea that nations no longer matter, and if they matter at all, they do so only on the condition that they are homogenised and adapted to the global marketplace. There is no longer an industrial, propertied, elite in India, therefore, that is interested in joining ranks with middle India to renegotiate power with imperialists. Instead all negotiations on power have shifted to the international arena; they will happen henceforth in the UN, the WTO, the G8 summits, and the World Economic Forums. The pesky Adivasis persist with their jal, jangal and jameen. Having accepted the ‘inevitability’ of ‘globalisation’ middle India is left without the conceptual tools to envision a nation, to flesh out self-determination. How should the India of their dreams look like? And what is the ‘down payment’ they are willing to put down (to use the language of WTO trade negotiators) to secure their vision of an India of their dreams?
The UN’s World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen in 1995 was a turning point. Al Gore the then Vice President of the United States declared at the Summit that aid and development assistance to the Third World would from then on would be channelled through NGOs, and aimed at ‘good governance’. ‘Good governance’ resonanted with ‘responsible government’ of the colonial era. What did Al Gore and the Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development ramify for the Adivasis and the rural poor?
The language of discourse changed in India. Indian NGOs and voluntary organisations were awash with funds. More importantly, they were armed with new ideological and conceptual resources developed by international organisations: ideas of ‘empowerment’, ‘democratic development’, ‘good governance’, ‘civil society participation’ and such. In fairness many applied the funds to save the social contract. But the social contract was never about ‘democratic development’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘good governance’. The social contract was about self-determination, equality, redistributive justice, power-sharing and equity, about satyam eva jayate, not transparency.
More NGOs and voluntary organisations, more funding for the non-governmental sector, more ‘empowerment’ and ‘good governance’ programmes did not equate to more representation of the Adivasis and rural poor. If anything it was the opposite. The more funding became available for NGOs and voluntary groups, the more the Maoist influence increased. Yet, there are no social theories, no quantitative or qualitative research methods that can establish any correlation between the two.
The NGOs and voluntary groups took up all the issues that the Adivasis and the rural poor raised: the model of development, traditional water systems, land management, forest conservation, corruption, criminalisation of politics. They balked at one central question: the question of political power. This was the only question that the Maoists took up. Middle India wants the Adivasis and the rural poor to trust their word when they say middle India is with the Adivasis and rural poor. How should the Adivasis and rural poor do this when they are reduced to voiceless subalterns, when they are no longer political subjects with agency? Moreover without a vision of a nation, even many in middle India are not forthcoming with that implicit trust.
Middle India Caught In The Crossfire?
The Indian state has once again framed the issue, as it has always done, as one of violence versus non-violence. In a ‘globalised’, privatised world, populated with NGOs, the Indian state does not have to resort to state propaganda via Doordarshan to make its claims. In a privatised, ‘globalised’ world state claims are made through private agents committed to ‘globalisation’. For example consider the ‘sandwich theory’. Numerous NGOs and private organisations have promoted the theory. For example in January 2005 the Observer Research Foundation under its International Terrorism Watch Programme held a two day workshop on ‘the Naxal challenge’. The trustees of this foundation are eminent journalists who have been part of Congress and BJP governments at various times. They published a book from the workshop proceedings titled ‘The Naxal Challenge: Causes, Linkages and Policy Options.’ The editor of the volume, at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, specialises on Naxalism which falls under the research cluster ‘Terrorism and internal security’. The blurb for the book is written by the former governor of Jharkhand, and a chief of army staff. The question of whether the Maoists should be seen as terrorists at all is foreclosed in the way the debate is framed.
Well resourced organisations set out the assumptions underpinning the debate, the terms of the discourse which middle India must follow, not least because they are bombarded with research, publications, high profile media coverage, all based on the assumptions presented by think-tank organisations. The Independent Citizens’ Initiative report on Sadwa Judum by influential citizens, some of them close to the powers that be, echoes a similar ‘sandwich theory’ position. Their position is nowhere comparable to that of Jayaprakash Narayan or V.M Tarkunde. For the latter, their positions against non-violence stemmed from a vision of the nation based on the social contract of the freedom struggle; it included the Maoists as much as the Adivasis. Today, the positions against non-violence are based on a conception of India as an emergent global power that needs to put a human face on ‘globalisation’.
Add to this the terms for the numerous research grants, project funding, and overseas assistance given to NGOs requiring them to conform to liberal democracy, parliamentary processes, and judicial norms. Where is the room to say these processes were tried, tried over and over again for at least six decades, they have failed, and that the parliament, the judiciary and the executive have thrown the social contract to the winds of ‘globalisation’? What new vision of the nation can middle India forge?
The Adivasis and rural poor insist it is a matter of jal, jangal and jameen as they always have. The Maoists, their ideological, political and military shortcomings not withstanding, and there are many of those (see exchanges between Sumanta Banerjee and CPI Maoist EPWs 02/09/09, 19/09/09, 14/11/09), stand unequivocally on the side of the Adivaisis and rural poor, whatever their motives. Middle India insists it is possible to put a human face on ‘globalisation’. To the contrary, the new wave of struggles in Kalinganagar, Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh challenges them to renegotiate the social contract, a challenge that requires a renewed freedom struggle, forging new alliances, and new conceptions of development and decolonisation. ‘We too fought for freedom’, a Santhal says in a recent film on Lalgarh. Indeed they did. How do we answer that question? By saying the Maoists are bad boys? By saying the Santhals are subalterns that need middle India as their interpreters?
India’s Foundations On A Fault-line?
The social contract forged during the freedom struggle was premised on a false assumption. It was based on the assumption that it was possible to build a modern liberal democratic, capitalist nation without colonisation. There has never been, and can never be, capitalism without colonies, though its forms can change, and has changed since that fateful day when Columbus set sail looking for the ‘riches of the Indies’. ‘Globalisation’ is forcing middle India to colonise her own people. This is nothing new. It happened under British Rule too. Since the days of Siraj-ud-daula, the various Nawabs and Rajas, a section of the Indian elite has steadfastly stood by imperialists, helped them run Empires, and made a buck for themselves. J.S Mill observed that India was the great experimental laboratory for the Empire. When the fortunes of Empires fluctuate, it forces middle India to take a stand. It is happening today. The nation-state structure and constitutionalism makes it difficult for middle India to rationalise colonisation of her own people. What should middle India do? Launch a new freedom struggle? Forge a new social contract? These are difficult questions by any measure. How much easier to flog the Maoists using imperialist labels like ‘war on terror’ to mask their own inability to re-envision the nation? How much easier to ride the ‘globalisation’ wave on the moral high tides of non-violence? Middle India is wistful. If only the volcanic fault-line on which modern India is founded will go away; if only the Adivasis will put on hold their insistence on jal, jangal, jameen.
P.S
It is to the credit of Indian people that all the bombardments: physical, moral and intellectual, notwithstanding, large sections of middle India remain deeply sceptical about ‘sandwich theories’
Taft-Hartley slave labor act recalled
Liberty for Some, Slavery for Others: Libertarians and the Taft-Hartley Act
by Caleb T. Maupin
Deceased Senator Robert Taft from Ohio, the Republican who opposed the Vietnam War is a libertarian icon. Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, Thomas Woods, and all the other “revolutionary” right-wingers who love “liberty” seem foam at the mouth with love at the face of this man. He is a “champion of libery” in their eyes. He is the idol of their obscure brand of far right-wing ideology.
The most famous piece of legislation Robert Taft played a role in establishing was the “Taft-Hartley Act.” The “Taft-Hartley” law is in no conceivable way a “libertarian” law. It greatly restricts the freedom of individuals, and strengthens the involvement of the government into economics and finance of individuals. It involves a large amount of economic and physical coercion, as well as countless additional bureaucratic limits on personal free association.
Where are the libertarians on “Taft-Hartley?” Does this not say something about the class base of their ideology?
“Freedom of Contract”
One of the major provisions of the Taft-Hartley Law is the requirement of union elections to be monitored and administered by the National Labor Relations Board, a wing of the federal government.
Prior to the passage of the law, as long as 60% of workers, knowing full well what they were doing and in no being coerced, signed a contract agreeing that they wished for the union to represent them, and a judge made sure that the signatures were legitimate and not coercive, the workers could be represented by the union as they had agreed when signing the legal contract.
It seems very simple. If a workers wants to join an association and let it represent them they can sign a contract, and it is settled. This seems as “libertarian” and as “liaise faire” as ever.
But this was altered by the Taft-Hartley Law. The Taft-Hartley Law contrarily requires a government agency to administer and oversee the signing of this contract between workers and an association that wishes to represent them. A government bureaucracy is then required to set up exactly the manner in which a contract is to be signed. This can take up to two years, and allows numerous acts of government intervention usually on the part of the employer to prevent the workers from signing a contract.
Where is the freedom of contract?
If the government were to have a two year investigation before one bought a house, a car, hired an employee, or other things, the libertarians would scream about “statism” and “collectivism” and roar in defense of “individual rights.” Yet, on Taft-Hartley they are silent, despite that it single out a specific form of contract and requires a government stamp of approval on it before it can be legally recognized.
“Forced Labor”
Libertarian propagandists like Glenn Beck are currently screaming in outrage at Obama’s possible plans to create a jobs program or to encourage young people to volunteer. Images of Soviet Work Camps and Hitler Youth Camp-outs are projected on their screens when they discuss his plans to expand the peace corps and provide economic incentives to volunteer one’s labor. “Forced Labor” is the Libertarian rant against these programs that attempt to lower unemployment and solve economic woes.
Interestingly though, the Taft-Hartley Law has a special provision in it called a “cooling off period.” This allows the government to order striking workers back to work for a six month “cooling off period.”
What is a strike? It is refusal to work for an employer until terms are met.
So, by instituting a “cooling off period”, the government is forcing workers who do not wish to come to work, to work against their will. How can this be anything other than “forced labor?”
The theory of the “free market” means that if I do not wish to show up for work, the state will not force me, however my employer has the right to fire me for it. The employer is one “agent” and the worker another in a contract of employment. The state has no role. You do the work, you get paid. You don’t, you get fired. No government involvement, right?
Yet, Taft-Hartley allows the Federal Government to come to your home and force you to come to work for six-months against your will. Is this not a violation of “civil liberties?” Is this not “state intervention” in horrific ways?
Taft-Hartley allows for jackbooted thugs to bust your door open, and drag you from your home to work because the President, not even a majority of congress, wills it. Taft-Hartley allows you to be jailed because you did not go work for a private employer, and the President alone, thinks you should. Is this not a violation of civil liberties? Is this in any way compatible with Libertarian ideology?
“Freedom of Association”
Following “Taft-Hartley” were a whole slew of other anti-labor laws, one of which made it illegal for Communists and felons to hold office in trade unions. These laws were not only supported, by championed by the “defender of freedom” Senator Robert Taft.
Trade Unions, a non-governmental association of workers, is regulated by the state and told it cannot elect leaders it wishes. The government has the right to tell trade unions that they are not allowed to elect leaders because they have a criminal record, or are members of a certain political party.
Is this “Freedom of Association”? What if the government passed a law requiring the John Birch Society to get government approval of those who hold office within its ranks? What if the government required the Constitution Party to follow a set of limits as to who could be its state organizers?
This, of course, would be denounced by these “advocates of liberty” as a violation of their “free association” rights. Ironically though, Libertarians do not oppose Taft-Hartley and idealize the man who championed other right-wing legislation specifically infringing on the “freedom of association” rights of industrial workers.
Libertarian Hypocrisy – It’s About Class!
Senator Taft is upheld as a hero of the right-wing. Never has Ron Paul raised the overturning of Taft-Hartley in his program for “revolution.” Never has Thomas Woods devoted a chapter in his revisionist history textbooks to exposing the “totalitarianism” of his favorite Senator, Robert Taft.
Contrarily, Libertarians love Taft-Hartley because it weakens the strength of workers to resist corporate power. Libertarianism, specifically the Paleo-conservative branch thereof is in total support of total corporate freedom. Their platforms include the abolition of income based taxation, the workplace health and safety legislation, minimum wages, Civil Rights Legislation, financial aid to college students, and every other program to help workers.
To the Libertarian, any assistance to workers is a violation of the “rights” of the capitalists to suck as much profit from the workers as possible. Libertarianism is the naked ideology of profit worship. They are not concerned with the rights of workers, they are concerned with the rights of the rich. Taft-Hartley is a clear example of this.
If Libertarian really cared about individual rights for “Free Association”, “Freedom of Contract” and prevention of “Forced Labor” they would be leading the demand for the Employee Free Choice Act to pass. Contrarily, they are opposing it. The movement to pass EFCA is based not among Libertarian demagogues, but among Communists and Socialists, those who care for individual human rights, not the rights of “callous cash payment” so sacred to those who reign atop the prison planet of imperialist capitalism.
--
Caleb T. Maupin
Fight Imperialism - Stand Together (Cleveland)
Workers World Party
http://www.calebmaupin.blogspot.com/
by Caleb T. Maupin
Deceased Senator Robert Taft from Ohio, the Republican who opposed the Vietnam War is a libertarian icon. Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, Thomas Woods, and all the other “revolutionary” right-wingers who love “liberty” seem foam at the mouth with love at the face of this man. He is a “champion of libery” in their eyes. He is the idol of their obscure brand of far right-wing ideology.
The most famous piece of legislation Robert Taft played a role in establishing was the “Taft-Hartley Act.” The “Taft-Hartley” law is in no conceivable way a “libertarian” law. It greatly restricts the freedom of individuals, and strengthens the involvement of the government into economics and finance of individuals. It involves a large amount of economic and physical coercion, as well as countless additional bureaucratic limits on personal free association.
Where are the libertarians on “Taft-Hartley?” Does this not say something about the class base of their ideology?
“Freedom of Contract”
One of the major provisions of the Taft-Hartley Law is the requirement of union elections to be monitored and administered by the National Labor Relations Board, a wing of the federal government.
Prior to the passage of the law, as long as 60% of workers, knowing full well what they were doing and in no being coerced, signed a contract agreeing that they wished for the union to represent them, and a judge made sure that the signatures were legitimate and not coercive, the workers could be represented by the union as they had agreed when signing the legal contract.
It seems very simple. If a workers wants to join an association and let it represent them they can sign a contract, and it is settled. This seems as “libertarian” and as “liaise faire” as ever.
But this was altered by the Taft-Hartley Law. The Taft-Hartley Law contrarily requires a government agency to administer and oversee the signing of this contract between workers and an association that wishes to represent them. A government bureaucracy is then required to set up exactly the manner in which a contract is to be signed. This can take up to two years, and allows numerous acts of government intervention usually on the part of the employer to prevent the workers from signing a contract.
Where is the freedom of contract?
If the government were to have a two year investigation before one bought a house, a car, hired an employee, or other things, the libertarians would scream about “statism” and “collectivism” and roar in defense of “individual rights.” Yet, on Taft-Hartley they are silent, despite that it single out a specific form of contract and requires a government stamp of approval on it before it can be legally recognized.
“Forced Labor”
Libertarian propagandists like Glenn Beck are currently screaming in outrage at Obama’s possible plans to create a jobs program or to encourage young people to volunteer. Images of Soviet Work Camps and Hitler Youth Camp-outs are projected on their screens when they discuss his plans to expand the peace corps and provide economic incentives to volunteer one’s labor. “Forced Labor” is the Libertarian rant against these programs that attempt to lower unemployment and solve economic woes.
Interestingly though, the Taft-Hartley Law has a special provision in it called a “cooling off period.” This allows the government to order striking workers back to work for a six month “cooling off period.”
What is a strike? It is refusal to work for an employer until terms are met.
So, by instituting a “cooling off period”, the government is forcing workers who do not wish to come to work, to work against their will. How can this be anything other than “forced labor?”
The theory of the “free market” means that if I do not wish to show up for work, the state will not force me, however my employer has the right to fire me for it. The employer is one “agent” and the worker another in a contract of employment. The state has no role. You do the work, you get paid. You don’t, you get fired. No government involvement, right?
Yet, Taft-Hartley allows the Federal Government to come to your home and force you to come to work for six-months against your will. Is this not a violation of “civil liberties?” Is this not “state intervention” in horrific ways?
Taft-Hartley allows for jackbooted thugs to bust your door open, and drag you from your home to work because the President, not even a majority of congress, wills it. Taft-Hartley allows you to be jailed because you did not go work for a private employer, and the President alone, thinks you should. Is this not a violation of civil liberties? Is this in any way compatible with Libertarian ideology?
“Freedom of Association”
Following “Taft-Hartley” were a whole slew of other anti-labor laws, one of which made it illegal for Communists and felons to hold office in trade unions. These laws were not only supported, by championed by the “defender of freedom” Senator Robert Taft.
Trade Unions, a non-governmental association of workers, is regulated by the state and told it cannot elect leaders it wishes. The government has the right to tell trade unions that they are not allowed to elect leaders because they have a criminal record, or are members of a certain political party.
Is this “Freedom of Association”? What if the government passed a law requiring the John Birch Society to get government approval of those who hold office within its ranks? What if the government required the Constitution Party to follow a set of limits as to who could be its state organizers?
This, of course, would be denounced by these “advocates of liberty” as a violation of their “free association” rights. Ironically though, Libertarians do not oppose Taft-Hartley and idealize the man who championed other right-wing legislation specifically infringing on the “freedom of association” rights of industrial workers.
Libertarian Hypocrisy – It’s About Class!
Senator Taft is upheld as a hero of the right-wing. Never has Ron Paul raised the overturning of Taft-Hartley in his program for “revolution.” Never has Thomas Woods devoted a chapter in his revisionist history textbooks to exposing the “totalitarianism” of his favorite Senator, Robert Taft.
Contrarily, Libertarians love Taft-Hartley because it weakens the strength of workers to resist corporate power. Libertarianism, specifically the Paleo-conservative branch thereof is in total support of total corporate freedom. Their platforms include the abolition of income based taxation, the workplace health and safety legislation, minimum wages, Civil Rights Legislation, financial aid to college students, and every other program to help workers.
To the Libertarian, any assistance to workers is a violation of the “rights” of the capitalists to suck as much profit from the workers as possible. Libertarianism is the naked ideology of profit worship. They are not concerned with the rights of workers, they are concerned with the rights of the rich. Taft-Hartley is a clear example of this.
If Libertarian really cared about individual rights for “Free Association”, “Freedom of Contract” and prevention of “Forced Labor” they would be leading the demand for the Employee Free Choice Act to pass. Contrarily, they are opposing it. The movement to pass EFCA is based not among Libertarian demagogues, but among Communists and Socialists, those who care for individual human rights, not the rights of “callous cash payment” so sacred to those who reign atop the prison planet of imperialist capitalism.
--
Caleb T. Maupin
Fight Imperialism - Stand Together (Cleveland)
Workers World Party
http://www.calebmaupin.blogspot.com/
The Real War on Christmas
Words by Товарищ X and original art by Tim Hosler
Rudolph's Revenge Hits Merchant of Misery
The Real War on Christmas
The real "War on Christmas" is waged by capitalist forces gathering on the right, and our Santa is not going to take it lying down. This year, packing his dependable Golden Shovel, he is wreaking Rudolph's Revenge on a notorious merchant of misery, several times distinguished as Grinch of the Year, Wal-mart.
"This is not a war of ideas," says Santa, "this is class warfare." He explained that forces on the right are using a time worn tactic against workers and the oppressed by casting the War on Christmas in religious terms. "Religion", he continued, "is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." He furthermore called on those engaged in the struggle to give up illusions about their conditions, to organize , to fight back, and to continue the fight until a better world is won for all.
"This is not a snow shovel that I'm packing here," he said. "It is an emblem of our role in this historic struggle. We are, together, the gravediggers of capitalism. So, don't just stand there counting your change-- get to digging!"
He cautioned us to arm ourselves against the seasonal onslaught of "free market" propaganda. "Freedom," said Santa, "is a good reindeer to ride. But to ride where?" The Wal-marts and their apologists,as he explained, seek "market freedom," the freedom to make huge profits while pursuing the freedom to pauperize workers, the freedom to bust unions, the freedom to leech off of community resources, etc. "The world can not any longer afford to grant such freedoms," said Santa. "Don't be suckered in by the unremitting din of the season's buy-my-crap music. I release you from the seasonal obligation to buy stuff for each other, package it in over-priced paper, label it with a lame-o card and give it away on the 25th of December."
"Give the gift of solidarity this year," he said with a wink. "Let another worker know that their injury is your injury, and that together you can stand against it. Stand with the oppressed so that they can rise from their knees. I like where this is going. Let's take that sweet freedom ride together...."
His voice faded as his sleigh streaked to it's next target, and the workers, inspired now, were heard to chant, "Ho, ho, damned ho, capitalism's got to go!"
The Real War on Christmas
The real "War on Christmas" is waged by capitalist forces gathering on the right, and our Santa is not going to take it lying down. This year, packing his dependable Golden Shovel, he is wreaking Rudolph's Revenge on a notorious merchant of misery, several times distinguished as Grinch of the Year, Wal-mart.
"This is not a war of ideas," says Santa, "this is class warfare." He explained that forces on the right are using a time worn tactic against workers and the oppressed by casting the War on Christmas in religious terms. "Religion", he continued, "is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." He furthermore called on those engaged in the struggle to give up illusions about their conditions, to organize , to fight back, and to continue the fight until a better world is won for all.
"This is not a snow shovel that I'm packing here," he said. "It is an emblem of our role in this historic struggle. We are, together, the gravediggers of capitalism. So, don't just stand there counting your change-- get to digging!"
He cautioned us to arm ourselves against the seasonal onslaught of "free market" propaganda. "Freedom," said Santa, "is a good reindeer to ride. But to ride where?" The Wal-marts and their apologists,as he explained, seek "market freedom," the freedom to make huge profits while pursuing the freedom to pauperize workers, the freedom to bust unions, the freedom to leech off of community resources, etc. "The world can not any longer afford to grant such freedoms," said Santa. "Don't be suckered in by the unremitting din of the season's buy-my-crap music. I release you from the seasonal obligation to buy stuff for each other, package it in over-priced paper, label it with a lame-o card and give it away on the 25th of December."
"Give the gift of solidarity this year," he said with a wink. "Let another worker know that their injury is your injury, and that together you can stand against it. Stand with the oppressed so that they can rise from their knees. I like where this is going. Let's take that sweet freedom ride together...."
His voice faded as his sleigh streaked to it's next target, and the workers, inspired now, were heard to chant, "Ho, ho, damned ho, capitalism's got to go!"
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
5.9 million unemployed
Obama at ‘job summit’: gov’t can’t do anything about jobs
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
According to the government unemployment figures for November nearly 18 million people are out of work.
While the jobless rate dropped from 10.2 percent in October to 10 percent in November, the number of those on the unemployment rolls without work for more than six months rose by nearly 300,000 to 5.9 million. That’s the highest for that category since records began being kept in 1948. Thirty-eight percent of those receiving unemployment benefits have been out of work for at least 28 weeks.
At a one-day “jobs summit” December 3, initiated by the White House, President Barack Obama said there’s little the government can do to resolve the mounting unemployment crisis.
Attending the summit were some 130 corporate executives—including from American Airlines, Nucor Corp., Google Inc., Walt Disney Co., and Fed-Ex—as well as small business owners and some union officials.
Obama said he had called business executives together to hear some “good ideas on how to create jobs.” He said that many businesses remain skittish about hiring and that many “have figured out how to squeeze more productivity out of fewer workers.” This is “not translating into hiring,” he said.
The president insisted that there’s not very much that the government is going to do. “Our resources are limited,” he stated. “So we can’t make any ill-considered decisions right now.” He added, “We don’t have enough public dollars to fill the hole of private dollars that was created as a consequence of the crisis.”
Obama said he would announce some of his own “new ideas” shortly. Among them is a “cash for caulkers” program to weatherize houses and businesses, according to the New York Times. It would be modeled after the July-August “cash for clunkers” initiative that was supposed to boost automobile sales and production, but had very little impact on putting back to work the tens of thousands of laid-off auto workers.
Long-term unemployed
The total number of those without work in November was 15.4 million, according to the Labor Department. Another 2.3 million unemployed workers “marginally attached to the workforce” are not counted, as the government claims they are “discouraged” or haven’t looked for work in the past four weeks. With 9.2 million others having to accept only part-time work, the combined unemployed and underemployed rate is actually 17.2 percent, or nearly 27 million workers.
The Labor Department numbers continue to show a disproportionate impact on Blacks, other oppressed nationalities, and youth. The unemployment rate for African Americans in November was 15.6 percent; for Latinos, 12.7 percent; and for teenagers, 26.7 percent. One-third of 16-24-year-old Black men are out of work.
Attacks on workers continue both through layoffs and through “productivity” speedup by the bosses. Labor “productivity” in manufacturing rose by 13.4 percent in the third quarter of 2009, with fewer workers producing more. On December 3 Harley-Davidson announced the layoff of 950 union workers at its largest plant in York, Pennsylvania.
Unless Congress renews federal jobless benefits, more than 1 million workers will lose benefits in January. Even though Congress recently approved a 14-week federal extension, it’s based on previous extensions that are slated to end December 31, reported the New York Times. Without an extension of the entire federal benefits program, those who started getting state benefits after July 1, 2009, won’t be able to get any federal benefits after state payments end in six months.
The day after the “jobs summit,” Obama took this discussion on the road, visiting Allentown, Pennsylvania. At a town hall meeting at Lehigh Carbon Community College, he said he planned to summon top bankers to the White House later this month to urge them to make more credit available and tell them “the taxpayers were there for you to clean up your mistakes. You now have a responsibility to be there for the community now that we’re bearing the brunt of a lot of these problems that you caused,” reported the Washington Post.
The crisis, however, is rooted in the contraction of capitalist production worldwide. In the United States, employers over the past 23 months have slashed 7.2 million jobs.
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
According to the government unemployment figures for November nearly 18 million people are out of work.
While the jobless rate dropped from 10.2 percent in October to 10 percent in November, the number of those on the unemployment rolls without work for more than six months rose by nearly 300,000 to 5.9 million. That’s the highest for that category since records began being kept in 1948. Thirty-eight percent of those receiving unemployment benefits have been out of work for at least 28 weeks.
At a one-day “jobs summit” December 3, initiated by the White House, President Barack Obama said there’s little the government can do to resolve the mounting unemployment crisis.
Attending the summit were some 130 corporate executives—including from American Airlines, Nucor Corp., Google Inc., Walt Disney Co., and Fed-Ex—as well as small business owners and some union officials.
Obama said he had called business executives together to hear some “good ideas on how to create jobs.” He said that many businesses remain skittish about hiring and that many “have figured out how to squeeze more productivity out of fewer workers.” This is “not translating into hiring,” he said.
The president insisted that there’s not very much that the government is going to do. “Our resources are limited,” he stated. “So we can’t make any ill-considered decisions right now.” He added, “We don’t have enough public dollars to fill the hole of private dollars that was created as a consequence of the crisis.”
Obama said he would announce some of his own “new ideas” shortly. Among them is a “cash for caulkers” program to weatherize houses and businesses, according to the New York Times. It would be modeled after the July-August “cash for clunkers” initiative that was supposed to boost automobile sales and production, but had very little impact on putting back to work the tens of thousands of laid-off auto workers.
Long-term unemployed
The total number of those without work in November was 15.4 million, according to the Labor Department. Another 2.3 million unemployed workers “marginally attached to the workforce” are not counted, as the government claims they are “discouraged” or haven’t looked for work in the past four weeks. With 9.2 million others having to accept only part-time work, the combined unemployed and underemployed rate is actually 17.2 percent, or nearly 27 million workers.
The Labor Department numbers continue to show a disproportionate impact on Blacks, other oppressed nationalities, and youth. The unemployment rate for African Americans in November was 15.6 percent; for Latinos, 12.7 percent; and for teenagers, 26.7 percent. One-third of 16-24-year-old Black men are out of work.
Attacks on workers continue both through layoffs and through “productivity” speedup by the bosses. Labor “productivity” in manufacturing rose by 13.4 percent in the third quarter of 2009, with fewer workers producing more. On December 3 Harley-Davidson announced the layoff of 950 union workers at its largest plant in York, Pennsylvania.
Unless Congress renews federal jobless benefits, more than 1 million workers will lose benefits in January. Even though Congress recently approved a 14-week federal extension, it’s based on previous extensions that are slated to end December 31, reported the New York Times. Without an extension of the entire federal benefits program, those who started getting state benefits after July 1, 2009, won’t be able to get any federal benefits after state payments end in six months.
The day after the “jobs summit,” Obama took this discussion on the road, visiting Allentown, Pennsylvania. At a town hall meeting at Lehigh Carbon Community College, he said he planned to summon top bankers to the White House later this month to urge them to make more credit available and tell them “the taxpayers were there for you to clean up your mistakes. You now have a responsibility to be there for the community now that we’re bearing the brunt of a lot of these problems that you caused,” reported the Washington Post.
The crisis, however, is rooted in the contraction of capitalist production worldwide. In the United States, employers over the past 23 months have slashed 7.2 million jobs.
David Harvey's transitional program
Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition
by David Harvey
(excerpt)
The historical geography of capitalist development is at a key inflexion point in which the geographical configurations of power are rapidly shifting at the very moment when the temporal dynamic is facing very serious constraints. Three-percent compound annual growth (generally considered the minimum satisfactory growth rate for a healthy capitalist economy) is becoming less and less feasible to sustain without resort to all manner of fictions (such as those that have characterized asset markets and financial affairs over the last two decades). There are good reasons to believe that there is no alternative to a new global order of governance that will eventually have to manage the transition to a zero growth economy. If that is to be done in an equitable way, then there is no alternative to socialism or communism. Since the late 1990s, the World Social Forum became the center for articulating the theme "another world is possible." It must now take up the task of defining how another socialism or communism is possible and how the transition to these alternatives is to be accomplished. The current crisis offers a window of opportunity to reflect on what might be involved.
The current crisis originated in the steps taken to resolve the crisis of the1970s. These steps included:
(a) The successful assault upon organized labor and its political institutions while mobilizing global labor surpluses, instituting labor-saving technological changes, and heightening competition. The result has been global wage repressions (a declining share of wages in total GDP almost everywhere) and the creation of an even vaster disposable labor reserve living under marginal conditions.
(b) Undermining previous structures of monopoly power and displacing the previous stage of (nation-state) monopoly capitalism by opening up capitalism to far fiercer international competition. Intensifying global competition translated into lower non-financial corporate profits. Uneven geographical development and inter-territorial competition became key features in capitalist development, opening the way towards the beginnings of a hegemonic shift of power particularly but not exclusively towards East Asia.
(c) Utilizing and empowering the most fluid and highly mobile form of capital -- money capital -- to reallocate capital resources globally (eventually through electronic markets) thus sparking deindustrialization in traditional core regions and new forms of (ultra-oppressive) industrialization and natural resource and agricultural raw material extractions in emergent markets. The corollary was to enhance the profitability of financial corporations and to find new ways to globalize and supposedly absorb risks through the creation of fictitious capital markets.
(d) At the other end of the social scale, this meant heightened reliance on "accumulation by dispossession" as a means to augment capitalist class power. The new rounds of primitive accumulation against indigenous and peasant populations were augmented by asset losses of the lower classes in the core economies (as witnessed by the sub-prime housing market in the US which foisted a huge asset loss particularly upon African American populations).
(e) The augmentation of otherwise sagging effective demand by pushing the debt economy (governmental, corporate, and household) to its limits (particularly in the USA and the UK but also in many other countries from Latvia to Dubai).
(f) Compensating for anemic rates of return in production by the construction of a whole series of asset market bubbles, all of which had a Ponzi character, culminating in the property bubble that burst in 2007-8. These asset bubbles drew upon finance capital and were facilitated by extensive financial innovations such as derivatives and collateralized debt obligations.
The political forces that coalesced and mobilized behind these transitions had a distinctive class character and clothed themselves in the vestments of a distinctive ideology called neoliberal. The ideology rested upon the idea that free markets, free trade, personal initiative, and entrepreneurialism were the best guarantors of individual liberty and freedom and that the "nanny state" should be dismantled for the benefit of all. But the practice entailed that the state must stand behind the integrity of financial institutions, thus introducing (beginning with the Mexican and developing countries debt crisis of 1982) "moral hazard" big time into the financial system. The state (local and national) also became increasingly committed to providing a "good business climate" to attract investments in a highly competitive environment. The interests of the people were secondary to the interests of capital, and in the event of a conflict between them, the interests of the people had to be sacrificed (as became standard practice in IMF structural adjustments programs from the early 1980s onwards). The system that has been created amounts to a veritable form of communism for the capitalist class.
(clip)
Can capitalism survive the present trauma? Yes. But at what cost? This question masks another. Can the capitalist class reproduce its power in the face of the raft of economic, social, political, geopolitical, and environmental difficulties? Again, the answer is a resounding "yes." But the mass of the people will have to surrender the fruits of their labor to those in power, to surrender many of their rights and their hard-won asset values (in everything from housing to pension rights), and to suffer environmental degradations galore, to say nothing of serial reductions in their living standards, which means starvation for many of those already struggling to survive at rock bottom. Class inequalities will increase (as we already see happening). All of that may require more than a little political repression, police violence, and militarized state control to stifle unrest.
Since much of this is unpredictable and since the spaces of the global economy are so variable, then uncertainties as to outcomes are heightened at times of crisis. All manner of localized possibilities arise for either nascent capitalists in some new space to seize opportunities to challenge older class and territorial hegemonies (as when Silicon Valley replaced Detroit from the mid-1970s onwards in the United States) or for radical movements to challenge the reproduction of an already destabilized class power. To say that the capitalist class and capitalism can survive is not to say that they are predestined to do so nor does it say that their future character is given. Crises are moments of paradox and possibilities
by David Harvey
(excerpt)
The historical geography of capitalist development is at a key inflexion point in which the geographical configurations of power are rapidly shifting at the very moment when the temporal dynamic is facing very serious constraints. Three-percent compound annual growth (generally considered the minimum satisfactory growth rate for a healthy capitalist economy) is becoming less and less feasible to sustain without resort to all manner of fictions (such as those that have characterized asset markets and financial affairs over the last two decades). There are good reasons to believe that there is no alternative to a new global order of governance that will eventually have to manage the transition to a zero growth economy. If that is to be done in an equitable way, then there is no alternative to socialism or communism. Since the late 1990s, the World Social Forum became the center for articulating the theme "another world is possible." It must now take up the task of defining how another socialism or communism is possible and how the transition to these alternatives is to be accomplished. The current crisis offers a window of opportunity to reflect on what might be involved.
The current crisis originated in the steps taken to resolve the crisis of the1970s. These steps included:
(a) The successful assault upon organized labor and its political institutions while mobilizing global labor surpluses, instituting labor-saving technological changes, and heightening competition. The result has been global wage repressions (a declining share of wages in total GDP almost everywhere) and the creation of an even vaster disposable labor reserve living under marginal conditions.
(b) Undermining previous structures of monopoly power and displacing the previous stage of (nation-state) monopoly capitalism by opening up capitalism to far fiercer international competition. Intensifying global competition translated into lower non-financial corporate profits. Uneven geographical development and inter-territorial competition became key features in capitalist development, opening the way towards the beginnings of a hegemonic shift of power particularly but not exclusively towards East Asia.
(c) Utilizing and empowering the most fluid and highly mobile form of capital -- money capital -- to reallocate capital resources globally (eventually through electronic markets) thus sparking deindustrialization in traditional core regions and new forms of (ultra-oppressive) industrialization and natural resource and agricultural raw material extractions in emergent markets. The corollary was to enhance the profitability of financial corporations and to find new ways to globalize and supposedly absorb risks through the creation of fictitious capital markets.
(d) At the other end of the social scale, this meant heightened reliance on "accumulation by dispossession" as a means to augment capitalist class power. The new rounds of primitive accumulation against indigenous and peasant populations were augmented by asset losses of the lower classes in the core economies (as witnessed by the sub-prime housing market in the US which foisted a huge asset loss particularly upon African American populations).
(e) The augmentation of otherwise sagging effective demand by pushing the debt economy (governmental, corporate, and household) to its limits (particularly in the USA and the UK but also in many other countries from Latvia to Dubai).
(f) Compensating for anemic rates of return in production by the construction of a whole series of asset market bubbles, all of which had a Ponzi character, culminating in the property bubble that burst in 2007-8. These asset bubbles drew upon finance capital and were facilitated by extensive financial innovations such as derivatives and collateralized debt obligations.
The political forces that coalesced and mobilized behind these transitions had a distinctive class character and clothed themselves in the vestments of a distinctive ideology called neoliberal. The ideology rested upon the idea that free markets, free trade, personal initiative, and entrepreneurialism were the best guarantors of individual liberty and freedom and that the "nanny state" should be dismantled for the benefit of all. But the practice entailed that the state must stand behind the integrity of financial institutions, thus introducing (beginning with the Mexican and developing countries debt crisis of 1982) "moral hazard" big time into the financial system. The state (local and national) also became increasingly committed to providing a "good business climate" to attract investments in a highly competitive environment. The interests of the people were secondary to the interests of capital, and in the event of a conflict between them, the interests of the people had to be sacrificed (as became standard practice in IMF structural adjustments programs from the early 1980s onwards). The system that has been created amounts to a veritable form of communism for the capitalist class.
(clip)
Can capitalism survive the present trauma? Yes. But at what cost? This question masks another. Can the capitalist class reproduce its power in the face of the raft of economic, social, political, geopolitical, and environmental difficulties? Again, the answer is a resounding "yes." But the mass of the people will have to surrender the fruits of their labor to those in power, to surrender many of their rights and their hard-won asset values (in everything from housing to pension rights), and to suffer environmental degradations galore, to say nothing of serial reductions in their living standards, which means starvation for many of those already struggling to survive at rock bottom. Class inequalities will increase (as we already see happening). All of that may require more than a little political repression, police violence, and militarized state control to stifle unrest.
Since much of this is unpredictable and since the spaces of the global economy are so variable, then uncertainties as to outcomes are heightened at times of crisis. All manner of localized possibilities arise for either nascent capitalists in some new space to seize opportunities to challenge older class and territorial hegemonies (as when Silicon Valley replaced Detroit from the mid-1970s onwards in the United States) or for radical movements to challenge the reproduction of an already destabilized class power. To say that the capitalist class and capitalism can survive is not to say that they are predestined to do so nor does it say that their future character is given. Crises are moments of paradox and possibilities
Rulers still fear Trotsky's example
Historians in the Service of the “Big Lie”: An Examination of Professor Robert Service’s Biography of Trotsky
By David North
15 December 2009
(excerpt)
By David North
15 December 2009
(excerpt)
It has been reported in the Evening Standard that at the public launching of his new biography of Leon Trotsky at Daunt Books in London’s Holland Park, on October 22, Professor Robert Service declared: “There’s life in the old boy Trotsky yet—but if the ice pick didn’t quite do its job killing him off, I hope I’ve managed it.”
One might reasonably wonder what type of historian—indeed, what type of man—would describe his own work, and with evident satisfaction, in such a manner. Is it really the aim of a serious biographer to carry out the literary equivalent of an assassination? Every possible interpretation of this statement speaks against Mr. Service. Leon Trotsky was murdered, and in a particularly gruesome and horrible manner. The blunt side of an alpenstock was driven by the assassin into Trotsky’s cranium. His wife, Natalia, was nearby when it happened. She heard the scream of her companion of 38 years and, when she ran into his study, saw blood streaming down over his forehead and eyes. “Look what they have done to me,” Trotsky cried out to Natalia.
The death of Trotsky was felt by many as an almost unendurable loss. In Mexico City, 300,000 people paid tribute to him as his funeral cortège made its way through the streets of the capital. A private letter written by the American novelist, James T. Farrell, provides a sense of the traumatic impact of Trotsky’s assassination. “The crime is unspeakable. There are no words to describe it. I feel stunned, hurt, bitter, impotently in a rage. He was the greatest living man, and they murdered him, and the government of the United States is even afraid of his ashes. God!”[1]
A serious biographer of Trotsky would not joke about the “ice pick.” It is a despicable icon of political reaction. Mr. Service would, perhaps, protest that his biography has “assassinated” Trotsky only in the sense of bringing an end to all interest in and discussion of this particular individual. But is this a legitimate ambition? A genuine scholar hopes that his work contributes to, rather than stifles, the development of the historical discussion. But this was clearly not the intention of Mr. Service. As he told the Evening Standard, he hopes that he will achieve with his biography what Stalin failed to accomplish through murder—that is, to “kill off” Trotsky as a significant historical figure. With this aim in mind, one can only imagine how Service approached the writing of this biography.
Service’s remark at his book launch seems to reflect a state of mind that is fairly widespread in the reactionary milieu within which he circulates. A review of the biography written by the right-wing British historian Norman Stone, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet, is entitled “The Ice Pick Cometh.” Another glowing review, written by the writer Robert Harris and published in the London Sunday Times, congratulates Service for having “effectively, assassinated Trotsky all over again.”
This is the language of people who are very troubled—both personally and politically. Seventy years after Trotsky’s death, they are still terrified by the spectre of the great revolutionary. The very thought of the man evokes homicidal images. But do they really believe that Mr. Service’s book can accomplish what was beyond the power of Stalin’s totalitarian police state? That Mr. Service and his admirers can even entertain such a thought exposes how little they understand of Trotsky and the ideas to which he devoted his life.
One might reasonably wonder what type of historian—indeed, what type of man—would describe his own work, and with evident satisfaction, in such a manner. Is it really the aim of a serious biographer to carry out the literary equivalent of an assassination? Every possible interpretation of this statement speaks against Mr. Service. Leon Trotsky was murdered, and in a particularly gruesome and horrible manner. The blunt side of an alpenstock was driven by the assassin into Trotsky’s cranium. His wife, Natalia, was nearby when it happened. She heard the scream of her companion of 38 years and, when she ran into his study, saw blood streaming down over his forehead and eyes. “Look what they have done to me,” Trotsky cried out to Natalia.
The death of Trotsky was felt by many as an almost unendurable loss. In Mexico City, 300,000 people paid tribute to him as his funeral cortège made its way through the streets of the capital. A private letter written by the American novelist, James T. Farrell, provides a sense of the traumatic impact of Trotsky’s assassination. “The crime is unspeakable. There are no words to describe it. I feel stunned, hurt, bitter, impotently in a rage. He was the greatest living man, and they murdered him, and the government of the United States is even afraid of his ashes. God!”[1]
A serious biographer of Trotsky would not joke about the “ice pick.” It is a despicable icon of political reaction. Mr. Service would, perhaps, protest that his biography has “assassinated” Trotsky only in the sense of bringing an end to all interest in and discussion of this particular individual. But is this a legitimate ambition? A genuine scholar hopes that his work contributes to, rather than stifles, the development of the historical discussion. But this was clearly not the intention of Mr. Service. As he told the Evening Standard, he hopes that he will achieve with his biography what Stalin failed to accomplish through murder—that is, to “kill off” Trotsky as a significant historical figure. With this aim in mind, one can only imagine how Service approached the writing of this biography.
Service’s remark at his book launch seems to reflect a state of mind that is fairly widespread in the reactionary milieu within which he circulates. A review of the biography written by the right-wing British historian Norman Stone, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet, is entitled “The Ice Pick Cometh.” Another glowing review, written by the writer Robert Harris and published in the London Sunday Times, congratulates Service for having “effectively, assassinated Trotsky all over again.”
This is the language of people who are very troubled—both personally and politically. Seventy years after Trotsky’s death, they are still terrified by the spectre of the great revolutionary. The very thought of the man evokes homicidal images. But do they really believe that Mr. Service’s book can accomplish what was beyond the power of Stalin’s totalitarian police state? That Mr. Service and his admirers can even entertain such a thought exposes how little they understand of Trotsky and the ideas to which he devoted his life.
Character of the bond rating agencies and the financial sector of the ruling class
Municipal bonds and urban crisis
Finance capital’s role in the destruction of U.S. cities
By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
Detroit
Published Dec 2, 2009 2:51 PM
Two significant events have occurred in Detroit, a majority African-American city, that warrant the attention of people concerned about the plight and future of U.S. urban centers. Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s appointment of an emergency financial manager to oversee the affairs of the public school system represents a direct attack on the people of Detroit’s right to self-determination.
The other was the re-election of Mayor Dave Bing, who ran on a theme of reducing the budget deficit through cutting jobs, salaries and city services. He proposed to drastically reduce the city’s ailing transportation system, directed intimidation attacks against the city unions and imposed a mandatory 10-percent wage cut on all nonunion employees.
The rationale behind the emergency financial manager appointment purportedly stemmed from the school system’s rising budget deficit and repeated claims of corruption and fund mismanagement. The Detroit school system has a deficit of approximately $300 million, along with a decreasing student enrollment that results in less funding every year from the state government.
The city is reported to have a budget deficit of $250-300 million and its population will probably show a significant decline in the 2010 census.
Despite these dire economic circumstances, new bond proposals have recently been introduced. The newly appointed emergency financial manager, Robert Bobb, initiated a bond scheme that was put before the voters in the November elections.
Voters were told that federal stimulus money would be available if they voted in favor of issuing $500 million in bonds to build new schools and refurbish existing ones. Proposal S was trumpeted by most of the corporate media as a means of rebuilding the school district.
Although there was opposition to Proposal S, the initiative passed by a substantial margin as a result of the overwhelming media campaign and the relatively low turnout in the elections.
After Bing’s re-election, it was announced that the mayor would seek City Council approval to issue $250 million in new municipal bonds to meet the current financial crisis.
Historically people in Detroit have voted to tax themselves in order to maintain city services and public employment. Since the tenure of Detroit’s first African-American mayor, Coleman A. Young, residents have repeatedly approved bond proposals under the notion that the city’s declining economic status would require sacrifice.
According to the Detroit Free Press, “Municipal bonds are typically issued to allow local governments to borrow money for large capital improvements to bridges, roads, power plants or sewer systems. In Detroit’s case, the money would be used to chip away at the city’s debt, which is forecast to grow to $480 million by the end of the next fiscal year and to $750 million in fiscal year 2011-12.” (Nov. 20)
The role of bond rating agencies
Detroit’s bond rating has been reduced to junk status and as a result, the cost of borrowing by the city government has increased.
The determination of the value of municipal bonds lies with three major bond rating agencies: Standard & Poor’s, Fitch Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service. Although the issuing of these bonds comes at a financially critical time, it is important to note that Detroit residents will ultimately be responsible for securing the returns on these investments.
Municipal bonds are rated to supposedly indicate to potential investors the probability that these bonds will default. Such an evaluation can drastically alter the cost of the maintenance and use of public infrastructure. The evaluations can determine whether a city can keep its existing workforce or whether it has to lay off thousands of public employees and reduce services.
The discrimination inherent in the entire rating process is often overlooked in corporate media accounts of bond values. Cities that are predominantly African American and working class tend to have lower bond ratings.
John Yinger, trustee professor of Public Administration and Economics at Syracuse University, drew an analogy between the redlining used to charge African Americans higher interest and insurance premium rates, and the discriminatory methodology in bond rating: “Thanks to municipal bonds ratings, citizens must pay more for infrastructure in some jurisdictions than in others. The question is whether this variation is entirely ‘legitimate,’ in the sense that it is based solely on factors that society deems acceptable, or is to some degree ‘unfair,’ in the sense that it is based on factors such as the racial and ethnic composition of a jurisdiction, that businesses should not consider.” (“Municipal Bond Ratings and Citizen’s Rights,” December 2006)
The bond ratings agencies are largely unregulated. They are not required to provide objective evaluations of the cities or the reasons why they are suffering economically.
Fightback program needed
It is important that workers and community organizations focus on the role of municipal bonds and bond rating agencies in the current economic crisis. The payment of interest on debt is a major factor in the decline of the cities.
If demands were made to impose a moratorium on debt payments, it would expose the inherently racist character of the bond rating agencies and the financial sector of the ruling class. The interest charged on these funds is based on discriminatory practices that unfairly punish urban areas where people of color reside.
The cuts in Detroit, which are mandated through the banks and bond rating agencies, are not enough to satisfy the profit-making requirements of the banks that have already been bailed out by the Federal Reserve Bank.
The credit burden imposed on the people in Detroit has not made the surrounding predominantly white and middle-class suburbs immune from the economic crisis. Overall, the state of Michigan’s tax revenue has dropped drastically. Earlier this year it was reported that the decline in sales and income tax revenue was costing the state government $500 million per month.
Recently in West Bloomfield, an affluent suburb outside Detroit, 2,000 people protested the more than $200 million in cutbacks in education funding. Suburban school districts are laying off teachers and eliminating programs. Suburban cities are laying off public employees.
Workers and the oppressed must stand up and demand that their city governments refuse to pay the interests on bank loans as well as the excessive costs of municipal bonds.
These demands can be raised in conjunction with the need for a moratorium on foreclosures, evictions and utility shutoffs, and an effective jobs program. The use of bond ratings to further squeeze the residents of urban areas must also be halted.
Articles copyright 1995-2009 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Finance capital’s role in the destruction of U.S. cities
By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
Detroit
Published Dec 2, 2009 2:51 PM
Two significant events have occurred in Detroit, a majority African-American city, that warrant the attention of people concerned about the plight and future of U.S. urban centers. Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s appointment of an emergency financial manager to oversee the affairs of the public school system represents a direct attack on the people of Detroit’s right to self-determination.
The other was the re-election of Mayor Dave Bing, who ran on a theme of reducing the budget deficit through cutting jobs, salaries and city services. He proposed to drastically reduce the city’s ailing transportation system, directed intimidation attacks against the city unions and imposed a mandatory 10-percent wage cut on all nonunion employees.
The rationale behind the emergency financial manager appointment purportedly stemmed from the school system’s rising budget deficit and repeated claims of corruption and fund mismanagement. The Detroit school system has a deficit of approximately $300 million, along with a decreasing student enrollment that results in less funding every year from the state government.
The city is reported to have a budget deficit of $250-300 million and its population will probably show a significant decline in the 2010 census.
Despite these dire economic circumstances, new bond proposals have recently been introduced. The newly appointed emergency financial manager, Robert Bobb, initiated a bond scheme that was put before the voters in the November elections.
Voters were told that federal stimulus money would be available if they voted in favor of issuing $500 million in bonds to build new schools and refurbish existing ones. Proposal S was trumpeted by most of the corporate media as a means of rebuilding the school district.
Although there was opposition to Proposal S, the initiative passed by a substantial margin as a result of the overwhelming media campaign and the relatively low turnout in the elections.
After Bing’s re-election, it was announced that the mayor would seek City Council approval to issue $250 million in new municipal bonds to meet the current financial crisis.
Historically people in Detroit have voted to tax themselves in order to maintain city services and public employment. Since the tenure of Detroit’s first African-American mayor, Coleman A. Young, residents have repeatedly approved bond proposals under the notion that the city’s declining economic status would require sacrifice.
According to the Detroit Free Press, “Municipal bonds are typically issued to allow local governments to borrow money for large capital improvements to bridges, roads, power plants or sewer systems. In Detroit’s case, the money would be used to chip away at the city’s debt, which is forecast to grow to $480 million by the end of the next fiscal year and to $750 million in fiscal year 2011-12.” (Nov. 20)
The role of bond rating agencies
Detroit’s bond rating has been reduced to junk status and as a result, the cost of borrowing by the city government has increased.
The determination of the value of municipal bonds lies with three major bond rating agencies: Standard & Poor’s, Fitch Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service. Although the issuing of these bonds comes at a financially critical time, it is important to note that Detroit residents will ultimately be responsible for securing the returns on these investments.
Municipal bonds are rated to supposedly indicate to potential investors the probability that these bonds will default. Such an evaluation can drastically alter the cost of the maintenance and use of public infrastructure. The evaluations can determine whether a city can keep its existing workforce or whether it has to lay off thousands of public employees and reduce services.
The discrimination inherent in the entire rating process is often overlooked in corporate media accounts of bond values. Cities that are predominantly African American and working class tend to have lower bond ratings.
John Yinger, trustee professor of Public Administration and Economics at Syracuse University, drew an analogy between the redlining used to charge African Americans higher interest and insurance premium rates, and the discriminatory methodology in bond rating: “Thanks to municipal bonds ratings, citizens must pay more for infrastructure in some jurisdictions than in others. The question is whether this variation is entirely ‘legitimate,’ in the sense that it is based solely on factors that society deems acceptable, or is to some degree ‘unfair,’ in the sense that it is based on factors such as the racial and ethnic composition of a jurisdiction, that businesses should not consider.” (“Municipal Bond Ratings and Citizen’s Rights,” December 2006)
The bond ratings agencies are largely unregulated. They are not required to provide objective evaluations of the cities or the reasons why they are suffering economically.
Fightback program needed
It is important that workers and community organizations focus on the role of municipal bonds and bond rating agencies in the current economic crisis. The payment of interest on debt is a major factor in the decline of the cities.
If demands were made to impose a moratorium on debt payments, it would expose the inherently racist character of the bond rating agencies and the financial sector of the ruling class. The interest charged on these funds is based on discriminatory practices that unfairly punish urban areas where people of color reside.
The cuts in Detroit, which are mandated through the banks and bond rating agencies, are not enough to satisfy the profit-making requirements of the banks that have already been bailed out by the Federal Reserve Bank.
The credit burden imposed on the people in Detroit has not made the surrounding predominantly white and middle-class suburbs immune from the economic crisis. Overall, the state of Michigan’s tax revenue has dropped drastically. Earlier this year it was reported that the decline in sales and income tax revenue was costing the state government $500 million per month.
Recently in West Bloomfield, an affluent suburb outside Detroit, 2,000 people protested the more than $200 million in cutbacks in education funding. Suburban school districts are laying off teachers and eliminating programs. Suburban cities are laying off public employees.
Workers and the oppressed must stand up and demand that their city governments refuse to pay the interests on bank loans as well as the excessive costs of municipal bonds.
These demands can be raised in conjunction with the need for a moratorium on foreclosures, evictions and utility shutoffs, and an effective jobs program. The use of bond ratings to further squeeze the residents of urban areas must also be halted.
Articles copyright 1995-2009 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Melodramas of rationality and conspiracism
Agatha Christie - radical conservative thinker
by Johann Hari
It is only here, in her homeland, that Agatha Christie has not been given the respect she deserves. Europeans as eminent as Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco describe her as "brilliant" and "extraordinary" without a blush; Americans as distinguished as Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder viewed her as one of the most exciting novelists of her time. The King of the self-consciously highbrow French literary scene, Michel Houllebecq, write a hymn of praise to her in his latest novel, ‘Platform’. He lauds in particular her 1946 work ‘The Hollow’ as "a strange, poignant book; these are deep waters [she writes about], with powerful undercurrents." Yet the English insist on seeing her as fodder for the tourists and perhaps the regions; a writer of elaborate crossword puzzles, not literature.
The verdict of the late novelist Anthony Burgess
accurately summarises the English intelligentsia’s
view of Christie. "She put people off reading the
higher art of detection – from the Moonstone to Gaudy
Night – by setting a lower standard and making it
somehow canonical," he wrote in the 1980s. "If she was
the queen of the whodunit, she used her royal rank to
condone flimsy characterisation, plentiful cliché,
implausibility, and verbal vacuity… All we have [in
her novels] is an abstract puzzle minimally clothed in
the garments of upper middle-class morality."
The literary critic Edmund Wilson once famously
sniffed, "Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?" (The
obvious retort to this is – err, about a billion
people, which is rather more than will ever care about
your writings, Mr Wilson.) One small fact reveals the
nature of much of the Christie-bashing lit-crit pack:
Wilson had not even read the famous 1926 novel when he
wrote his essay. Indeed, he only ever looked at one of
her works, the rather atypical ‘Death Comes As The
End’, a strange, not entirely effective story set
entirely in Pre-Dynastic Egypt.
There seems to be no limit to English academic’s
haughty contempt for Christie. Critic Peter Lennon
claimed that "her dialogue is tinnitus to the ear",
and that her dénouements were ineffective because "you
are not shocked that one of the pieces of cardboard
has committed a felony nor do you rejoice that a brown
paper bag with a perm has not."
It would be easy to join in this sneering – but for
one problem. How, if Christie wrote such rubbish, can
we explain the fact that her works have resonated even
at the farthest extremes of geography and history? In
Buchenwald concentration camp, Jewish inmates acted
out an amateur production of ‘Ten Little Niggers’, and
several later claimed that this helped them retain
their will to live. The Tupamaros guerrillas, who
kidnapped the British ambassador to Uruguay Sir
Geoffrey Jackson in 1970, adopted Miss Marple as their
honorary leader. They believed that she embodied
justice. Christie’s works sold over ten million copies
in the Arab world alone in the 1990s. Something
interesting is going on here, and it is not a
universal taste for rubbish.
The answer cannot be found in Christie’s
straightforward biography. She was born into an
uber-Victorian family in the uber-Victorian coastal
town of Torquay in 1890, as the triumphant Victorian
era was sailing peacefully towards the Somme. Other
than her famous disappearance – which has been
analysed to death elsewhere – and her extensive world
travel, Christie’s life was rather uneventful. She
loathed and avoided publicity in a way that would be
unimaginable to contemporary populist authors. She was
so cripplingly shy that when she arrived at the
Mousetrap’s tenth anniversary party at the Savoy, she
uncomplainingly allowed a doorman who didn’t recognise
her to turn her away. She returned home, downcast, and
cried. In her twenties, she was once returned to her
mother at a dance by a gentleman who explained, "Here
is your daughter. She has learned to dance. You had
better teach her to talk now."
Her famously timid nature has, however, left a false
impression of Christie as a woman who retreated from
the world and then made up stories based on a
constricted, upper-middle class world view. Far from
it: this is a woman who, after she was dumped by her
husband, took her daughter on a world tour where she
taught herself how to surf and bagged herself a
notoriously dishy man 15 years her junior. When she
became engaged to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, he
asked her if she minded marrying a man whose
profession was "digging up the dead." She placed her
hand on his and replied, "Darling, I adore corpses and
stiffs."
The Christie recorded by history seems likeable, dry
and clever: but this cannot account for the fact that
she is the best-selling author in human history after
the team who complied the Bible. The obvious
explanation is her capacity for finding every possible
permutation of the conventional detective story twist:
indeed, she was so successful in this pursuit that
almost nobody tries in the genre any more. To give
just a few examples: she created mysteries where the
narrator was the murderer (Roger Ackroyd), the entire
cast were the murderers (Murder on the Orient
Express), nobody was the murderer (it was suicide in
Elephants Never Forget), and even where Poirot was the
murderer (the extraordinary Curtain, Poirot’s final
appearance). If you are ever tempted to imagine that
writing plots like Christie’s is an easy activity, try
adapting one of her novels for the stage, as I did a
few years ago with my colleague Sarah Punshon. If we
tampered with one plot device in ‘The Secret
Adversary’, all the others untangled: her works are a
delicate ecology where every line feeds off every
other. We soon realised we needed some kind of visual
chart showing the progress and location of the main
characters. Three days later, the walls of my kitchen
were literally hidden behind a massive chart worthy of
Steven Hawking’s physics equations. I received rather
strange looks when a plumber arrived and had to peel
back large pages marked ‘Plan now to kill Jane! Take
her to house in Soho and drug her.’
But the plots alone do not explain Christie. No: I
believe that the great unappreciated aspect of her
work is that she was an intensely and relentlessly
political thinker. No, don’t throw your copy of
Prospect to one side in derision.
The first non-family member to read Christie’s fiction
was the novelist Eden Phillpotts. He told her to "try
and cut all moralisations out of your novels; you are
much too fond of them." He missed the point. Christie
– a genius when it came to narrative – did not write,
as is so often supposed, solely to tell fabulously
intricate stories. Moral and political instruction is
at the core of every Christie novel. In the Middle
East at the height of the Second World War, Graham
Greene approached her to ask if she would be prepared
to write pro-Allied propaganda. She declined – at
least in part because she was already propagandising
expertly for her own causes.
Hmmm, you may be wondering – I missed the novel where
Miss Marple offers her interpretation of ‘Das
Capital’. You can’t quite recall the book where Poirot
leads a revolution in a South American country. This
is fair enough, but there is a sustained political
analysis in Agatha’s novels, and it is explicitly
discussed in almost every text. To some extent, the
genre itself is conservative. The film critic Peter
Canby has argued that "whodunnits are politically
conservative, being artefacts of a well-ordered world
where all questions have answers, all debts are paid
and all crises rise and fall with tidal
predictability… [it] soothes the readers and helps to
put him to sleep at the end of a day spent in a very
different world." But Christie took this further: she
had, as Houllebeq argues, "a radical theoretical
engagement" with Burkean conservatism. At a time of
massive social transformations in areas as fundamental
to individual identity as gender, family and class,
Agatha offered the soothing balm of Burkean
conservatism. She offers an eternal England, a natural
order that will always act spontaneously against evil
to restore its own rural sense of calm. There is a
clear natural order to Christie’s world, and – in true
Burkean style - it is only disrupted by greed,
wickedness or misguided political ambition. The world
is not – as it seems so often – chaotic and
terrifying. No, as Poirot explains in ‘Appointment
with Death’, "the absolute logic of events is
fascinating and orderly."
Her work conforms to Burkean conservatism in every
respect: justice rarely comes from the state. Rather,
it arises from within civil society – a private
detective, a clever old spinster. Indeed, what is Miss
Marple but the perfect embodiment of Burke’s thought?
She has almost infinite wisdom because she has lived
so very long (by the later novels, she is barely able
to move and, by some calculations, over 100). She has
slowly – like parliament and all traditional bodies,
according to Burke – accrued "the wisdom of the ages",
and this is the key to her success. From her solitary
spot in a small English village, she has learned
everything about human nature. Wisdom resides, in
Christie and Burke’s worlds, in the very old and the
very ordinary.
The novels are shot through with a Burkean fear of
enlightenment rationalism. There is a persistent fear
of the young and those with grand Archimedean social
projects. Christie’s greatest anxiety, she once
explained, was of "idealists who want to make us happy
by force." The minute a character is described as an
idealist in one of her novels, you’ve found your
murderer. Any rational attempt to supersede the
‘natural’ order is terrifying for her: she could have
scripted Stanley baldwin’s comment about David Lloyd
George that he "is a dynamic force, and a dynamic
force is a very dangerous thing." In ‘They Came to
Baghdad’, a rational plan for a New World Order is
revealed to be a veil for absolutist fascism. In ‘They
Do It With Mirrors’, a plan to establish an island
which would be administered by (and eventually
rehabilitate) young offenders degenerates into
psychosis. In ‘Destination Unknown’, a communistic
scientific community turns out to be a veil for a
crazed megalomaniac. This list could go on for a very
long time.
Her protagonists stand, novel after novel, against
those who seek to disrupt the natural order and
interpret the world with a misleading ‘rationalism’.
As one of her heroes explains, "We’re humble-minded
men. We don’t expect to save the world, only pick up
one or two broken pieces and remove a spanner or two
when it’s jamming up the works." Or, as another
heroine asks, "Isn’t muddle a better breeding ground
for kindliness and individuality than a world order
that’s imposed?"
In its ugliest moments, Christie’s conservatism
crossed over into a contempt for Jews, who are so
often associated with rationalist political
philosophies and a ‘cosmopolitanism’ that is
antithetical to the Burkean paradigm of the English
village. There is a streak of anti-Semitism running
through the pre-1950s novels which cannot be denied
even by her admirers. ‘The Mysterious Mr Quinn’ has an
ugly passage about "men of Hebraic extraction, sallow
men with hooked noses, wearing flamboyant jewellery."
‘Peril At End House’ has a character referred to as
"the long-nosed Mr Lazarus", of whom somebody says,
"he’s a Jew, of course, but a frightfully decent one."
Against this, it is worth pointing out that her novel
‘Giant’s Bread’ (written under the pseudonym of Mary
Westmacott) features an extremely sympathetic portrait
of the Levinnes, a Jewish family who suffer from
anti-Semitism in England. Christie’s hostility to Jews
was, I suspect, more political than personal (and no
less reprehensible for that).
The other aspect of her conservatism which seems most
unsavoury today is her hostility to feminism. She
believed that Victorian women had a privileged place
which women’s liberation – another rationalist
movement tampering with the natural order – threatened
to undermine. In the 1960s, she was sent a
questionnaire by an Italian magazine investigating the
attitudes of prominent women towards feminism. In
response to a question about the cause of women’s
increasingly active role in the workplace, Agatha
attributed it to "the foolishness of women in
relinquishing their position of privilege obtained
after many centuries of civilisation. Primitive women
toil incessantly. We seem determined to return to that
state voluntarily."
Christie’s ouevre up until, say, ‘Cat Amongst the
Pigeons’ in the late 1950s is an intriguing – if
conventional - study in Burkean philosophy. What makes
her more than that – what pushes her work into a
higher realm – is that she was a clever enough woman
to realise that the Burkean order she loved was
becoming less and less tenable as social change
accelerated. Often, the novels she wrote as an old
woman from the 1960s until her death in 1974 are
dismissed as inferior to the more famous early works,
and it is undoubtedly the case that the plots are less
sharp and imaginative. But I have always believed that
they are the most intriguing: they chart the nervous
breakdown of Burke’s England, and the intellectual
bankruptcy of a conservatism derived from Disraeli and
Baldwin, better than any other writer I know.
The best way to illustrate this is to look at two
novels which almost book-end her oeuvre: her second
novel, ‘The Secret Adversary’, written in 1921, and
her penultimate work, ‘Passenger to Frankfurt’,
written in 1970. Both are explicitly political works,
yet the calm, certain conservatism of Adversary has,
by 1970, disintegrated into a chaotic, trembling fear
of change.
‘The Secret Adversary’ is an irresistible, bizarre
reactionary fable written at the height of public
anxieties about a general strike and the possibility
of a British revolution. Tommy and Tuppence –
Christie’s most under-rated recurring characters – are
a sprightly young couple recently demobbed from the
First World War forces and in search of a distraction
from their tedious new lives. Gradually, they begin to
investigate a powerful man "who lives in the shadows"
known only as ‘Mr Brown’. He is a figure at the heart
of the English establishment who is seeking to
destabilise the nation and forment anarchy so that he
can seize absolute power for himself. Gradually – in a
politically outrageous development – it emerges that
Brown is secretly controlling almost every progressive
force in Britain: the trade unions, Irish nationalism,
the Labour Party and others. It is even implied that
he was behind the Russian Revolution.
In several brief, lucid passages, Christie dramatises
the bourgeois fears of social disorder in a way that
has yet to be bettered. One young thug fantasises
about "diamonds and pearls rolling in the gutter," an
image which is central to the novel as the ultimate
signifier of the breakdown of all that is decent. Mr
Brown is, of course, apprehended and English order
restored by the last page. What is striking in
relation to the later works is the confidence with
which Christie imagines social order can be restored:
Britain is brought to the brink of revolution, but the
apprehension of one man (who turns out to be a King’s
Counsel and close friend of the Prime Minister) puts
all those social anxieties back in the box. It is not
hard to see why this would have been reassuring to a
1920s middle class readership: it applies the same
model for extirpating evil to the political sphere as
Christie applies to the world of the English village.
Miss Marple catches the murderer and the world goes
back to the way it was before the awful act took
place; Tommy and Tuppence catch the revolutionary, and
the world goes back to the way it was before the
political troubles began. Burke’s principles are again
central: the natural order is only disrupted by
malice; society tends towards a benevolent stasis
which is only interfered with by the wicked.
Skip, then, to ‘Passenger to Frankfurt’. Again, a
normal person (this time an English civil servant, Sir
Stafford Nye) is slightly bored and begins to stumble
upon an occluded, ideologically-driven political force
that seeks to destabilise the world and seize control
(in this novel, they are a strange cult who worship
the bastard son of Adolf Hitler). But even before the
chaos begins, there is a sense that we are no longer
in Miss Marple’s England. Sir Stafford notes to
himself as he reads his newspaper, "No child has been
kidnapped or raped this morning. That was a nice
surprise."
The simple binary division of the world in ‘Adversary’
– you are either with Mr Brown or with us – is gone
too. There were the political idealists – power hungry
and wrong-headed – and then there was the great mass
of humanity, who sought clam and order. Yet in
Frankfurt, the characters themselves see that the
world has become so complex that Manichean simplicity
is no longer possible. Of a secret agent, one
character asks, "Is she ours or is she theirs, if you
know who ‘theirs’ is?… What with the Chinese and the
Ruskies and the rather queer crowd that’s behind all
the student troubles and the New Mafia and the rather
odd lot on South America." The conservative stability
of the earlier novels has collapsed; Christie herself
saw that, the further her stories travelled from the
English villages of the 1930s, the less credible the
belief system of that world became. Forced out into a
complex urban environment – or, increasingly, an
international one – she saw that Burke’s thought had
no real application any longer.
Yet she obviously misses it like a lost limb. She
cannot quite accept that bad things can happen without
a malicious human agent standing somewhere behind
them. Social change is still regarded as the result of
a bad person: she seriously suggests repeatedly in the
novel that drug use is being promoted among the young
to make them unthinking and therefore susceptible to
the charms of a new fascistic leader. Whereas in
‘Adversary’ she ties up all the loose ends neatly, she
feels unable to in ‘Passenger’ – the world she has
created or, as she saw it, reflected is so inherently
unstable that the old conservative resolution is no
longer possible. The novel’s narrative simply peters
out, and her readers are left simply with a pervasive
fear and the suggestion that Christie’s – and their –
nexus for understanding the world, small-c
conservatism, is not longer tenable.
The journey from Adversary to Passenger was a gradual
one. The rural England she loved slowly dies in the
novels as the years pass. In ‘Nemesis’, written in the
late 1960s, Miss Marple laments that her natural
habitat is vanishing when she says of St Mary Mead,
"It used to be a very pretty old-world village but of
course, like everything else it’s becoming what they
call ‘developed’ these days." Another character adds,
"Nothing is like it used to be – it’s all spoilt –
everywhere."
The death of the old conservatism has been confusing
for the right across the world. Stanley Baldwin took
it for granted that his conservatism would rule his
party forever, but now the Tory party advocate the
rationalist politics he loathed: in her recent book,
‘Statecraft’, Margaret Thatcher explicitly endorses
the US constitutional model over the evolutionary
Burkean constitution of Britain. She sees that her old
conservative world is dying, and so is the way she
understood it, and she would, I suspect, have recoiled
from the neocons.
The Burkean conservatism that Christie loved is now
officially dead. Nobody seriously espouses it any
longer, and when John Major tried to play some of its
tunes a decade ago he sounded ridiculous. There are a
few isolated people – Roger Scruton, the Salisbury
Review and Prince Charles spring to mind – who try to
revive it, but they are an eccentric fringe. I am not
a conservative, or anything like it, but the closest I
have ever come to seeing its appeal was when I read
Christie. She is a political propagandist and literary
figure of remarkable power.
The philosophy she espouses – of a world stable and
ordered if only these pesky progressives wouldn’t make
such an unseemly fuss – remains across the world a far
more powerful force than many of us on the left admit.
Some people will always resist the appeal of
Enlightenment optimism in favour of a mythical Burkean
natural order that they believe we tamper with at our
peril. If the neoconservatives and Wilsonians (I bunch
myself in the latter category) who today are trying to
restructure the Middle East want to understand why
this is, then the novels of Agatha Christie are a very
good place to start.
by Johann Hari
It is only here, in her homeland, that Agatha Christie has not been given the respect she deserves. Europeans as eminent as Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco describe her as "brilliant" and "extraordinary" without a blush; Americans as distinguished as Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder viewed her as one of the most exciting novelists of her time. The King of the self-consciously highbrow French literary scene, Michel Houllebecq, write a hymn of praise to her in his latest novel, ‘Platform’. He lauds in particular her 1946 work ‘The Hollow’ as "a strange, poignant book; these are deep waters [she writes about], with powerful undercurrents." Yet the English insist on seeing her as fodder for the tourists and perhaps the regions; a writer of elaborate crossword puzzles, not literature.
The verdict of the late novelist Anthony Burgess
accurately summarises the English intelligentsia’s
view of Christie. "She put people off reading the
higher art of detection – from the Moonstone to Gaudy
Night – by setting a lower standard and making it
somehow canonical," he wrote in the 1980s. "If she was
the queen of the whodunit, she used her royal rank to
condone flimsy characterisation, plentiful cliché,
implausibility, and verbal vacuity… All we have [in
her novels] is an abstract puzzle minimally clothed in
the garments of upper middle-class morality."
The literary critic Edmund Wilson once famously
sniffed, "Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?" (The
obvious retort to this is – err, about a billion
people, which is rather more than will ever care about
your writings, Mr Wilson.) One small fact reveals the
nature of much of the Christie-bashing lit-crit pack:
Wilson had not even read the famous 1926 novel when he
wrote his essay. Indeed, he only ever looked at one of
her works, the rather atypical ‘Death Comes As The
End’, a strange, not entirely effective story set
entirely in Pre-Dynastic Egypt.
There seems to be no limit to English academic’s
haughty contempt for Christie. Critic Peter Lennon
claimed that "her dialogue is tinnitus to the ear",
and that her dénouements were ineffective because "you
are not shocked that one of the pieces of cardboard
has committed a felony nor do you rejoice that a brown
paper bag with a perm has not."
It would be easy to join in this sneering – but for
one problem. How, if Christie wrote such rubbish, can
we explain the fact that her works have resonated even
at the farthest extremes of geography and history? In
Buchenwald concentration camp, Jewish inmates acted
out an amateur production of ‘Ten Little Niggers’, and
several later claimed that this helped them retain
their will to live. The Tupamaros guerrillas, who
kidnapped the British ambassador to Uruguay Sir
Geoffrey Jackson in 1970, adopted Miss Marple as their
honorary leader. They believed that she embodied
justice. Christie’s works sold over ten million copies
in the Arab world alone in the 1990s. Something
interesting is going on here, and it is not a
universal taste for rubbish.
The answer cannot be found in Christie’s
straightforward biography. She was born into an
uber-Victorian family in the uber-Victorian coastal
town of Torquay in 1890, as the triumphant Victorian
era was sailing peacefully towards the Somme. Other
than her famous disappearance – which has been
analysed to death elsewhere – and her extensive world
travel, Christie’s life was rather uneventful. She
loathed and avoided publicity in a way that would be
unimaginable to contemporary populist authors. She was
so cripplingly shy that when she arrived at the
Mousetrap’s tenth anniversary party at the Savoy, she
uncomplainingly allowed a doorman who didn’t recognise
her to turn her away. She returned home, downcast, and
cried. In her twenties, she was once returned to her
mother at a dance by a gentleman who explained, "Here
is your daughter. She has learned to dance. You had
better teach her to talk now."
Her famously timid nature has, however, left a false
impression of Christie as a woman who retreated from
the world and then made up stories based on a
constricted, upper-middle class world view. Far from
it: this is a woman who, after she was dumped by her
husband, took her daughter on a world tour where she
taught herself how to surf and bagged herself a
notoriously dishy man 15 years her junior. When she
became engaged to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, he
asked her if she minded marrying a man whose
profession was "digging up the dead." She placed her
hand on his and replied, "Darling, I adore corpses and
stiffs."
The Christie recorded by history seems likeable, dry
and clever: but this cannot account for the fact that
she is the best-selling author in human history after
the team who complied the Bible. The obvious
explanation is her capacity for finding every possible
permutation of the conventional detective story twist:
indeed, she was so successful in this pursuit that
almost nobody tries in the genre any more. To give
just a few examples: she created mysteries where the
narrator was the murderer (Roger Ackroyd), the entire
cast were the murderers (Murder on the Orient
Express), nobody was the murderer (it was suicide in
Elephants Never Forget), and even where Poirot was the
murderer (the extraordinary Curtain, Poirot’s final
appearance). If you are ever tempted to imagine that
writing plots like Christie’s is an easy activity, try
adapting one of her novels for the stage, as I did a
few years ago with my colleague Sarah Punshon. If we
tampered with one plot device in ‘The Secret
Adversary’, all the others untangled: her works are a
delicate ecology where every line feeds off every
other. We soon realised we needed some kind of visual
chart showing the progress and location of the main
characters. Three days later, the walls of my kitchen
were literally hidden behind a massive chart worthy of
Steven Hawking’s physics equations. I received rather
strange looks when a plumber arrived and had to peel
back large pages marked ‘Plan now to kill Jane! Take
her to house in Soho and drug her.’
But the plots alone do not explain Christie. No: I
believe that the great unappreciated aspect of her
work is that she was an intensely and relentlessly
political thinker. No, don’t throw your copy of
Prospect to one side in derision.
The first non-family member to read Christie’s fiction
was the novelist Eden Phillpotts. He told her to "try
and cut all moralisations out of your novels; you are
much too fond of them." He missed the point. Christie
– a genius when it came to narrative – did not write,
as is so often supposed, solely to tell fabulously
intricate stories. Moral and political instruction is
at the core of every Christie novel. In the Middle
East at the height of the Second World War, Graham
Greene approached her to ask if she would be prepared
to write pro-Allied propaganda. She declined – at
least in part because she was already propagandising
expertly for her own causes.
Hmmm, you may be wondering – I missed the novel where
Miss Marple offers her interpretation of ‘Das
Capital’. You can’t quite recall the book where Poirot
leads a revolution in a South American country. This
is fair enough, but there is a sustained political
analysis in Agatha’s novels, and it is explicitly
discussed in almost every text. To some extent, the
genre itself is conservative. The film critic Peter
Canby has argued that "whodunnits are politically
conservative, being artefacts of a well-ordered world
where all questions have answers, all debts are paid
and all crises rise and fall with tidal
predictability… [it] soothes the readers and helps to
put him to sleep at the end of a day spent in a very
different world." But Christie took this further: she
had, as Houllebeq argues, "a radical theoretical
engagement" with Burkean conservatism. At a time of
massive social transformations in areas as fundamental
to individual identity as gender, family and class,
Agatha offered the soothing balm of Burkean
conservatism. She offers an eternal England, a natural
order that will always act spontaneously against evil
to restore its own rural sense of calm. There is a
clear natural order to Christie’s world, and – in true
Burkean style - it is only disrupted by greed,
wickedness or misguided political ambition. The world
is not – as it seems so often – chaotic and
terrifying. No, as Poirot explains in ‘Appointment
with Death’, "the absolute logic of events is
fascinating and orderly."
Her work conforms to Burkean conservatism in every
respect: justice rarely comes from the state. Rather,
it arises from within civil society – a private
detective, a clever old spinster. Indeed, what is Miss
Marple but the perfect embodiment of Burke’s thought?
She has almost infinite wisdom because she has lived
so very long (by the later novels, she is barely able
to move and, by some calculations, over 100). She has
slowly – like parliament and all traditional bodies,
according to Burke – accrued "the wisdom of the ages",
and this is the key to her success. From her solitary
spot in a small English village, she has learned
everything about human nature. Wisdom resides, in
Christie and Burke’s worlds, in the very old and the
very ordinary.
The novels are shot through with a Burkean fear of
enlightenment rationalism. There is a persistent fear
of the young and those with grand Archimedean social
projects. Christie’s greatest anxiety, she once
explained, was of "idealists who want to make us happy
by force." The minute a character is described as an
idealist in one of her novels, you’ve found your
murderer. Any rational attempt to supersede the
‘natural’ order is terrifying for her: she could have
scripted Stanley baldwin’s comment about David Lloyd
George that he "is a dynamic force, and a dynamic
force is a very dangerous thing." In ‘They Came to
Baghdad’, a rational plan for a New World Order is
revealed to be a veil for absolutist fascism. In ‘They
Do It With Mirrors’, a plan to establish an island
which would be administered by (and eventually
rehabilitate) young offenders degenerates into
psychosis. In ‘Destination Unknown’, a communistic
scientific community turns out to be a veil for a
crazed megalomaniac. This list could go on for a very
long time.
Her protagonists stand, novel after novel, against
those who seek to disrupt the natural order and
interpret the world with a misleading ‘rationalism’.
As one of her heroes explains, "We’re humble-minded
men. We don’t expect to save the world, only pick up
one or two broken pieces and remove a spanner or two
when it’s jamming up the works." Or, as another
heroine asks, "Isn’t muddle a better breeding ground
for kindliness and individuality than a world order
that’s imposed?"
In its ugliest moments, Christie’s conservatism
crossed over into a contempt for Jews, who are so
often associated with rationalist political
philosophies and a ‘cosmopolitanism’ that is
antithetical to the Burkean paradigm of the English
village. There is a streak of anti-Semitism running
through the pre-1950s novels which cannot be denied
even by her admirers. ‘The Mysterious Mr Quinn’ has an
ugly passage about "men of Hebraic extraction, sallow
men with hooked noses, wearing flamboyant jewellery."
‘Peril At End House’ has a character referred to as
"the long-nosed Mr Lazarus", of whom somebody says,
"he’s a Jew, of course, but a frightfully decent one."
Against this, it is worth pointing out that her novel
‘Giant’s Bread’ (written under the pseudonym of Mary
Westmacott) features an extremely sympathetic portrait
of the Levinnes, a Jewish family who suffer from
anti-Semitism in England. Christie’s hostility to Jews
was, I suspect, more political than personal (and no
less reprehensible for that).
The other aspect of her conservatism which seems most
unsavoury today is her hostility to feminism. She
believed that Victorian women had a privileged place
which women’s liberation – another rationalist
movement tampering with the natural order – threatened
to undermine. In the 1960s, she was sent a
questionnaire by an Italian magazine investigating the
attitudes of prominent women towards feminism. In
response to a question about the cause of women’s
increasingly active role in the workplace, Agatha
attributed it to "the foolishness of women in
relinquishing their position of privilege obtained
after many centuries of civilisation. Primitive women
toil incessantly. We seem determined to return to that
state voluntarily."
Christie’s ouevre up until, say, ‘Cat Amongst the
Pigeons’ in the late 1950s is an intriguing – if
conventional - study in Burkean philosophy. What makes
her more than that – what pushes her work into a
higher realm – is that she was a clever enough woman
to realise that the Burkean order she loved was
becoming less and less tenable as social change
accelerated. Often, the novels she wrote as an old
woman from the 1960s until her death in 1974 are
dismissed as inferior to the more famous early works,
and it is undoubtedly the case that the plots are less
sharp and imaginative. But I have always believed that
they are the most intriguing: they chart the nervous
breakdown of Burke’s England, and the intellectual
bankruptcy of a conservatism derived from Disraeli and
Baldwin, better than any other writer I know.
The best way to illustrate this is to look at two
novels which almost book-end her oeuvre: her second
novel, ‘The Secret Adversary’, written in 1921, and
her penultimate work, ‘Passenger to Frankfurt’,
written in 1970. Both are explicitly political works,
yet the calm, certain conservatism of Adversary has,
by 1970, disintegrated into a chaotic, trembling fear
of change.
‘The Secret Adversary’ is an irresistible, bizarre
reactionary fable written at the height of public
anxieties about a general strike and the possibility
of a British revolution. Tommy and Tuppence –
Christie’s most under-rated recurring characters – are
a sprightly young couple recently demobbed from the
First World War forces and in search of a distraction
from their tedious new lives. Gradually, they begin to
investigate a powerful man "who lives in the shadows"
known only as ‘Mr Brown’. He is a figure at the heart
of the English establishment who is seeking to
destabilise the nation and forment anarchy so that he
can seize absolute power for himself. Gradually – in a
politically outrageous development – it emerges that
Brown is secretly controlling almost every progressive
force in Britain: the trade unions, Irish nationalism,
the Labour Party and others. It is even implied that
he was behind the Russian Revolution.
In several brief, lucid passages, Christie dramatises
the bourgeois fears of social disorder in a way that
has yet to be bettered. One young thug fantasises
about "diamonds and pearls rolling in the gutter," an
image which is central to the novel as the ultimate
signifier of the breakdown of all that is decent. Mr
Brown is, of course, apprehended and English order
restored by the last page. What is striking in
relation to the later works is the confidence with
which Christie imagines social order can be restored:
Britain is brought to the brink of revolution, but the
apprehension of one man (who turns out to be a King’s
Counsel and close friend of the Prime Minister) puts
all those social anxieties back in the box. It is not
hard to see why this would have been reassuring to a
1920s middle class readership: it applies the same
model for extirpating evil to the political sphere as
Christie applies to the world of the English village.
Miss Marple catches the murderer and the world goes
back to the way it was before the awful act took
place; Tommy and Tuppence catch the revolutionary, and
the world goes back to the way it was before the
political troubles began. Burke’s principles are again
central: the natural order is only disrupted by
malice; society tends towards a benevolent stasis
which is only interfered with by the wicked.
Skip, then, to ‘Passenger to Frankfurt’. Again, a
normal person (this time an English civil servant, Sir
Stafford Nye) is slightly bored and begins to stumble
upon an occluded, ideologically-driven political force
that seeks to destabilise the world and seize control
(in this novel, they are a strange cult who worship
the bastard son of Adolf Hitler). But even before the
chaos begins, there is a sense that we are no longer
in Miss Marple’s England. Sir Stafford notes to
himself as he reads his newspaper, "No child has been
kidnapped or raped this morning. That was a nice
surprise."
The simple binary division of the world in ‘Adversary’
– you are either with Mr Brown or with us – is gone
too. There were the political idealists – power hungry
and wrong-headed – and then there was the great mass
of humanity, who sought clam and order. Yet in
Frankfurt, the characters themselves see that the
world has become so complex that Manichean simplicity
is no longer possible. Of a secret agent, one
character asks, "Is she ours or is she theirs, if you
know who ‘theirs’ is?… What with the Chinese and the
Ruskies and the rather queer crowd that’s behind all
the student troubles and the New Mafia and the rather
odd lot on South America." The conservative stability
of the earlier novels has collapsed; Christie herself
saw that, the further her stories travelled from the
English villages of the 1930s, the less credible the
belief system of that world became. Forced out into a
complex urban environment – or, increasingly, an
international one – she saw that Burke’s thought had
no real application any longer.
Yet she obviously misses it like a lost limb. She
cannot quite accept that bad things can happen without
a malicious human agent standing somewhere behind
them. Social change is still regarded as the result of
a bad person: she seriously suggests repeatedly in the
novel that drug use is being promoted among the young
to make them unthinking and therefore susceptible to
the charms of a new fascistic leader. Whereas in
‘Adversary’ she ties up all the loose ends neatly, she
feels unable to in ‘Passenger’ – the world she has
created or, as she saw it, reflected is so inherently
unstable that the old conservative resolution is no
longer possible. The novel’s narrative simply peters
out, and her readers are left simply with a pervasive
fear and the suggestion that Christie’s – and their –
nexus for understanding the world, small-c
conservatism, is not longer tenable.
The journey from Adversary to Passenger was a gradual
one. The rural England she loved slowly dies in the
novels as the years pass. In ‘Nemesis’, written in the
late 1960s, Miss Marple laments that her natural
habitat is vanishing when she says of St Mary Mead,
"It used to be a very pretty old-world village but of
course, like everything else it’s becoming what they
call ‘developed’ these days." Another character adds,
"Nothing is like it used to be – it’s all spoilt –
everywhere."
The death of the old conservatism has been confusing
for the right across the world. Stanley Baldwin took
it for granted that his conservatism would rule his
party forever, but now the Tory party advocate the
rationalist politics he loathed: in her recent book,
‘Statecraft’, Margaret Thatcher explicitly endorses
the US constitutional model over the evolutionary
Burkean constitution of Britain. She sees that her old
conservative world is dying, and so is the way she
understood it, and she would, I suspect, have recoiled
from the neocons.
The Burkean conservatism that Christie loved is now
officially dead. Nobody seriously espouses it any
longer, and when John Major tried to play some of its
tunes a decade ago he sounded ridiculous. There are a
few isolated people – Roger Scruton, the Salisbury
Review and Prince Charles spring to mind – who try to
revive it, but they are an eccentric fringe. I am not
a conservative, or anything like it, but the closest I
have ever come to seeing its appeal was when I read
Christie. She is a political propagandist and literary
figure of remarkable power.
The philosophy she espouses – of a world stable and
ordered if only these pesky progressives wouldn’t make
such an unseemly fuss – remains across the world a far
more powerful force than many of us on the left admit.
Some people will always resist the appeal of
Enlightenment optimism in favour of a mythical Burkean
natural order that they believe we tamper with at our
peril. If the neoconservatives and Wilsonians (I bunch
myself in the latter category) who today are trying to
restructure the Middle East want to understand why
this is, then the novels of Agatha Christie are a very
good place to start.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)