Re: Re: Spinoza on international government

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi Chris,


> >Stuart Hampshire: Spinoza - An Introduction to his Philosophical
Thought:
> >
> >
> >The argument by which Spinoza justifies obedience to civil or state
> >authority as reasonable is essentially the same argument as that by
which
> >in this century obedience to international authority is generally
> >recommended; it is the familiar argument of 'collective security',
which
> >is an appeal to enlightened self-interest.
> >===========
> >
> >Hhhhmmmmmmm, how gender blind. Also, didn't Grotius hail from the
same
> >parts as Spinoza a generation or two b4 ?
> >
> >Ian

> I am not sure what you were referring to about gender blindness. I
could
> not see anything politically incorrect in what I quoted. But for
some
> reason the lines came out as ladders. I am not sure that was a
problem with
> how I sent them, how you copied them, or how I received them back,
but I
> could not spot what you meant.
========
Sorry. I'm kinda fascinated by the origins of such terms as
enlightened self interest and collective security out of the collapse
of feudalism and the extent to which the terms and their meaning[s]
have been proferred mostly by men over the course of the last few
centuries. That women have been excluded from participating and
theorizing international relations/diplomatic discourse is a great
tragedy. Fortunately women like Cynthia Enloe and Joni Seager and
others are stepping corageously into the 'minefield' and exposing a
lot of hidden assumptions.

What makes the Spinoza-Grotius link so interesting is that two women,
Margaret Levi and Janice Thomson, have done a lot interesting work on
the origins of capitalism and non-state violence from the late feudal
and manorial period to the late 19th century when nation-states
finally gained a monopoly over the creation, allocation and
distribution over coercive capacities and warmaking. Their
explorations of the history of piracy, privateering and mercanerism
and their relations to the emergence of the large mercantile companies
have a lot of lessons for understanding how corporations are engaging
in law/policy arbitrage by playing national governments against each
other today.

> We are now seeing possibly a very rapid fragmentation and opening up
of
> possible alliances among capitalist states that are by no means
totally
> inevitable. For their own economic interests they will mute the
gravity of
> the splits, (quite unlike the drive to military war that Lenin
identified
> in the imperialism of 100 years ago). But Europe is now starting to
> challenge the USA for leadership of the coalition of exploiting
states who
> run the world. No doubt about it.
>
> Finally the extreme pragmatic self-calculation of interest that
Spinoza
> invites us quietly to understand, may best also describe parallel
> developments towards global *economic* convergence. The paradox of
bourgois
> individualism, seen early in the prosperous Netherlands, is that it
invites
> you to calculate the probablilities of what your fellow individuals
may do.
> (Indeed Spinoza's political hero, de Witt, made his fortune by
devising
> actuarial tables.)
>
> This is even more the case in the era of global finance capitalism.
They
> are constantly calculating and recalculating the interaction of
their naked
> self interest, to reduce risk.
>
> That is why capitalism prepares the ground for socialism. Yes, on a
global
> scale, and sooner than we could have imagined.
>
> Chris Burford
>
> London
==========
Well, corporations are definitely trying to reshape as rapidly as
possible the prerogatives of the states system to their own ends, but
that's nothing new. What is interesting is the costs they're willing
to pay to achieve it. Price inflation for a politician these days,
especially in the US, has gone up remarkably since Nixon. I wonder if
anybody's done an inflation measure on the operating costs/revenues of
the Republicans and Democrats over the last, say, 30 years. The more
it costs for corps. to get the policies they need and the greater the
resources they demand of the states system in order to inoculate
themselves against the risks they themselves create, the more
governments will come to resemble the protection rackets from which
they emerged at the end of the Thirty Year's War. It's also costing
them a lot more in their attempts  to hide this process. At the same
time we see little pockets of privateering emerge, with the article
Michael Pugliese posted on Colombia giving a hint of something that
may gain momentum in the years ahead. The piracy in the straits of
Malacca is also very interesting. These issues go to the heart of how
stable our definitions of "national interest" and "common good" or
"public interest" really are, especially in an international context.
We must destabilize the way these terms have operated as an
ideological foil.

Folks on the left and right have been assaulting the definitions and
analyses of these terms over the years in a hopeless quest for
invariants in the defining of what the terms actually mean. To the
extent that "what's good for GM is good for the US" can become
problematized in new ways offers us opportunities to continue
challenge the terms on which power is discussed and exercised. Who
shall own the ability to make law is the central question of the 21st
century. Folks seem to be catching on to the relation of law making to
risk displacement and it's connection to the production and
reproduction of massive inequalities of life chances and this deeply
offends all those liberal pieties that are shared by citizens all
across the political spectrum, "the common sense of the age" as it
were. How we are to deal with the challenges and opportunities it
presents as we try to understand and reconfigure the structural
power[s] that are part and parcel of the differential creation,
allocation and distribution of credit, it's relation to political
violence and dissent and whether or not we can connect this in
people's minds with regards to the international legal regime that has
garnered so much power unto itself in the BW institutions is a story
we've got to be able to tell as lucidly as possible in the weeks and
months ahead. Linking it up to the way women like Levi and Thompson
and Enloe and Seager and many others have been telling the story
should help us in this enormous task.

Ian