RE: [A-List] Iraq: "we seem to be able to live with it"

["Craven, Jim" <JCraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

You put your finger on a lot here Michael.  Just having re-read Lasch's
The Culture of Narcissism, it was then topical and has since become
prescient.

Your point about this being a fundamentally metropolitan phenomenon is
well taken... and extremely important.  One of the interesting things
about this increasingly shallow, image-managed, coliseum Darwinism that
has politically debilitated the metropolitan working class is that it
seems to have equally debilitated the metropolitan ruling class in its
ability to manage an empire.  They truly have come to believe a lot of
their own bullshit, "Bring 'em on" and such, because they no longer even
realize that many of their key actions, as Lasch put it, are "so
mediated by electronic images that [they] cannot help responding to
others as if their actions... were being recorded and simultaneously
transmitted to an unseen audience... The proliferation of recorded
images undermines [their] own sense of reality."  Suddenly a handful of
unmediated images penetrate the veil, a la Abu Ghraib, and an
uncontrollable political crisis threatens.

As Mark said, and I think as Mike Davis has implied in City of Quartz
and Ecology of Fear, if the left is to gauge these developments
accurately in order to "predicate our operations on good intelligence"
in the military idiom, it is urgent that we understand how the semiotics
of all this interfuses with demographics, oil, water, food, money, etc.
Both the history and the anthropology seem critical to this project.
Dealing seriously with the question of gender is also in the middle of
this.  I don't remember whether it was Polanyi or Gramsci who said that
Marxism can't march into the future facing backwards.

Stan

Response (Jim C): So beautifully articulated and argued. The reality of
the concept of Social Structures of Accumulation, developed by David
Gordon and others, but certainly present in the works of Marx, Engels,
Lenin, Mao and others, which the bourgeois economists are now trying to
nibble around and co-opt with the concept of "social capital", is a
powerful heuristic. What is also becoming very evident, is the
contradictory dimensions--and impacts--of the overall SSA due to
contradictory imperatives of accumulation and expanded reproduction of
monopoly capitalism at different stages of development under differing
global and domestic conditions and survival imperatives. On the one
hand, from the perspective of mass markets,
surplus-value-for-power-power-for-surplus-value, and
realization-of-surplus-value crises, the type of individual and
personality type celebrated, conditioned and reinforced by the likes of
so-called "reality TV" is an imperative: self-centered/absorbed,
narcissistic, "I want it all and I want it now", unable to delay
gratification, operates only in the present moment and unable to plan or
think in the future, egoistic/egotistical, materialistic, acquisitive,
predatory calculator of profit/utility potential, super-competitive,
manipulative, fad-obsessed, easily subject to peer pressure, willing to
run unproductive debt for immediate conspicuous consumption, driven by
immediate needs and pleasures and unable/unwilling to be driven by some
transcendent cause beyond himself, narrowly "rational" (able to roughly
calculate narrow wants and needs and costs and benefits) etc.

On the other hand, this personality type, the Ayn Randist's "Homo
Oeconomicus" and wet dream, is the kind that often does not bother to
particpate in the fraud of voting from the rigged menus of "choice"; he
she is the kind that turns sour on war when more and more body bags come
home; he/she is not the kind you would want in a military unit where
cohesion, discipline and sacrifice are routinely required; he/she is not
the kind one would want as a next door neighbor during a natural
disaster; he/she is not the kind that puts a lot of effort or sacrifice
into child rearing; he or she will turn against their patrons and
leaders when forced to compromise on their single-issues; he or she will
resent being taxed no matter the cause or revenue imperatives; he or she
will drift easily from task to task, goal to goal when immediate returns
do not come in; he or she will resent being drafted and will turn from
pro-war to "anti-war" when his or her own ass is the one to go...

The reality is that certain dimensions, imperatives and  configurations
of the core themes, institutions, power relations/structures, "values",
traditions, myths, popular prejudices, etc of the SSA not only change
(some are constants) with differing conditions and constraints of
expanded reproduction of monopoly capitalism, they are also inherently
contradictory and wind up negating each other to a certain extent. The
SSA of monopoly capitalism is also predatory and unable/unwilling to
tolerate free and open competitions of contending and antagonistic ideas
and values. The neocons have already noted their belief that World War
III (the global war between contending and fundamentally anatagonistic
ideologies/paradigms as products and manifestations of war between
contending social formations and systems) has been underway for some
time and they will tolerate no "coexistence" of differing systems and
paradigms.

Jim C.