Re: Europe's cheap US labor

[Jurriaan Bendien <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi ian,

> "Anti-globalization" rhetoric is the product of the media after Seattle.
> No one I know of organizing for that event thought of themselves or the
> issues in terms of globo/anti-globo. Why some insist on using labels that
> have been imposed on the 21st century social movements by people who
> pretend to think boggles my mind. The idioms/vocabularies/epitemes of 21st
> century social movements are not wholly reducible to 19th century
> categories and to insist that they must be intimates an authoritarianism
> which ought to be abandoned.

I basically agree with you, but let's call things by the correct names and
not adapt too much to management buzzwords. All social classes use the term
globalisation, and it covers a host of different sins, the moral
implications of which are quite different. I first recall hearing the term
globalisation around 1980, sociologists, development theorists and policy
makers started to use it. It only started to catch on in the late 1980s and
1990s.  There was never anything radical about it originally. Leftwing
intellectuals tried to endow the concept with a radical content, but if you
actually look at what happened is, that they were sucked into a bourgeois
discourse justifying the imperialist expansion of market relations. The
discourse is ideological, because what the explanans and what the explanadum
are, and what the real purpose of theorising is, is often not explicit at
all. Postmodernism promotes eclecticism, but the thing about eclecticism is
that it ends up explaining nothing by trying to explain everything. Then you
get somebody like Leo Panitch who knows an awful lot, but he cannot
formulate any good socialist strategy for Canada, i.e. I am suggesting this
is a product of a mode of analysis which goes nowhere. I suppose that from
an activist point of view, what matters primarily  is the action, and the
words are secondary. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as a coherent
protest, and the actions give meaning to the words, and if you use the wrong
words and concepts, then you are misrepresented to the population.
Frequently the corporate media depicted anti-globalists as a confused,
anarchic and marginalised rabble that doesn't know how to get life together
or where it's really at. As Lenin notes sometimes, from a bourgeois point of
view, a class struggle is regarded as a "disturbance" or a "riot". But the
terminology used isn't very useful, because it does not clarify what the
real political issues and economic interests are, it's just a label. You
have to be able to specify what the dynamics of world capitalism are and
what the tendencies or potentialities for socialism in that are, in terms of
a coherent theory. From what I have read about globalisation theories,
however, they signal mainly precisely the incapacity to theorise and thus
you obtain only an eclectic descriptivism. In a sense, if you accept
postmodernism, there can be no grand narrative of globalisation anyway, it
is impossible to understand globalisation within the framework of a coherent
totalising theory. That's what I am disputing. I think the problem is that
you need to know what to explain and how to explain it, and why you need to
explain it, and this cannot be seen separately from a specific political
project for social transformation that you have, and a research tradition
with its own standards and heuristics. Rootless theorising about
globalisation is merely confusing. People will talk about these concepts
like "paradigms" (even US soldiers in in Iraq) but they don't actually have
one.

This goes doubly for asserting that the new social movements think about
alternatives while also asserting that there
> can be no cookbooks for the future. Capitalism is too authoritarian as it
is, especially at the point[s] of production so why we would want to
substitute one form authoritarianism for another escapes me.

I think that thinking about alternatives is not enough, I think they have to
be effective, and I think anti-authoritarianism can also be a really neat
way to evade responsibilities, i.e. the specific morality which it involves
is crucial. I think the challenge is to devise effective alternatives which
people can take responsibility for, in a way that is in some sense
liberating or conducive to social progress. I see nothing particularly
"left" or socialist in anti-authoritarianism as such, since people revolt
for all sorts of reasons against constraints against their activity, but
that doesn't necessarily mean that I am going to support it or that it is
progressive. If it is true as I have argued that modern society is basically
unable to reconcile individual concerns and social concerns in a harmonious
or satisfying way, it does not follow from this, that the anti-authoritarian
revolts against this situation necessarily do imply a satisfactory
reconciliation of the two at all.
>
> In a sense, John Roemer is right; if one cannot think about just what
> kinds of institutions, socio-legal relations, technologies etc. would
> constitute a socialism that does not lead to totalitarianism, then it's
> time to hang up the phone. To assert that whatever ideas someone puts
> forward does not constitute socialism, without in turn making some
> significantly better specific proposals then one is simply caught in a cul
> de sac of negativism which is not creative thinking. On that score
> Einstein was right: "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

But this mystifies the source of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism isn't the
result of an idea, that would be idealist, but it represents a solution to
class conflict, to political conflict, to a clash of interests and power
which can be contained or neutralised only by totalitarian methods, and
totalitarianism is the outcome of an intense struggle between social
classes, which permits a specific form of regimenting people to be imposed.
This is what is so infantile about many academic discussions about fascism
and totalitarianism, because they imply a Hegelian logic according to which
an idea, once adopted, must necessarily and ineluctably lead to a specific
political conclusion and practice. In that case, Hitler would be the product
of a nefarious racial ideology. The conservative, totalitarian implication
of this species of idealism is that we must be very careful about "getting
ideas" or "developing ideas" because they could be "dangerous". Thus, the
neo-Hegelian interpretation of the totalitarianism-libertarianism duality in
fact bolsters the status quo, and it is not accidental that Hegel himself
sought to justify the existence of the Prussian State. The demonstration of
this idealist idiocy becomes apparent when we actually look at what people
do, when they have to implement policy directives about "the war against
terrorism" for instance.

In the fourth volume of his magnum opus, Hal Draper discusses Marx's
critique of other socialisms, and notes how all sorts of socialisms are
generated in response to the social question, but this doesn't necessarily
mean we should support them. The question is more whether you can raise the
level of discussion about the social question and what to do about it. John
Roemer doesn't really understand much about the economic significance of
fixed capital, so there we have a problem already for starters. I don't
quite agree with Einstein, because imagination is a stimulus for the growth
of knowledge, it cannot substitute for knowledge :-) And in addition,
imagination is in good part founded upon knowledge, i.e. the capacity to
conceive something new, presupposes prior knowledge (including the knowledge
of what it means to do something new). Therefore what Einstein says may be
wellintentioned but really misses the point, which is to understand how
knowledge and imagination are really related, so that more imagination and
more knowledge results.

So I guess that what I am saying here is, that most of the people getting
worked up about totalitarianism are themselves petty totalitarians and
power-hungry people in their method, and given the chance, their proclaimed
anti-authoritarianism could easily transmute into brutal authoritarianism.
If this isn't the case, you cannot explain e.g. the mentality of the
Bushites, which is based on a dualistic mode of idealist thinking. What
needs to be explained and understood is precisely the paradox of how the
commitment to freedom causes brutal authoritarianism. Zizek among others
frequently confuses the issue here, because pomo theory is essentially
idealist - it seeks a determinacy in ideas which isn't there. Even "love"
can be a brutally authoritarian weapon to bash people around with, under
certain circumstances. The weakness of the American Left asserts itself in
two ways here: (1) they are unable to correctly unmask and expose the
mentality of their own government functionaries, (2) they think that the
ideology of the functionaries is decisive in itself. The reason is obvious:
if you share the same idealist understanding as the people you criticise,
you aren't in a position to make a good job of it. To get out of the
totalitarianism-libertarianism dualisms you need to understand the real
relationship thaty exists behind the dualisms, and if you don't understand
it you remain caught in bourgeois ideology. Which leads me back to where I
started off from: the idea of ideological entrapment, the fact that
categories are perverted into a use opposite or different to what they were
intended for.

Jurriaan