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Legitimating Torture: The American Political Science Association Gives Award to Condolezza Rice -- Political Scientists Push Back Letter

The American Political Science Association is providing cover and legitimacy for policies of torture, rendition, and aggressive war. Some of members of the association have drafted a letter opposing the award being given to Condolezza Rice. If you are an APSA member and would like to add your name, please let me know.

By giving the 2018 Hubert H. Humphrey Award to Condeleeza Rice the APSA has honored a person who actively participated in creating a rationale for the illegal invasion of Iraq, participated in and defended the creation of policies of rendition and torture against foreign nationals, supported the creation of a concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, and aided and abetted the deliberate and systematic lies that were told to the American public to encourage their support for the invasion of Iraq, which, from its inception and to this day, has had catastrophic consequences for the world.

The committee members who recommended Rice for the award have responded to our inquiry concerning their reasoning with a statement that argues that while Rice indeed participated in the disastrous foreign policy of the Bush years, her action and that of her fellow members of the administration was taken in the heat of war, with incomplete information, and with urgent responses needed. They also argue that this record is overmatched by her other services to the country, especially noting the reunification of Germany while serving in the first Bush administration and her promotion of policies of development aid under the second. Finally, they point to the person for whom the award is named, and in an act of “what-about-ism” so popular these days, suggest that politics at the highest levels involves inevitable decisions that can, in retrospect, be seen as mistaken.

As political scientists we will long argue about decisions concerning war and peace, power and its limits, and questions concerning the difficult questions of when to act and how. But we are protesting this award because we believe that no one who actively supported and defended policies of deception that led to the death of well over a million people, that created ecological danger still not fully assessed, and that resulted in the torture of other human beings should be given an award.

The committee decided to weigh Rice’s other services against this huge and disastrous failure. But it is not a matter of weight here. Given her record, she should not have been considered for an award. Participation in the governmental administration of torture should be disqualifying. For the APSA to provide cover for officials pursuing such actions violates our professional responsibilities regarding public service.

We urge the APSA to establish an oversight committee that reviews the credentials and records of those who are nominated for public service awards, so as to screen out those who have participated in policies that have had the consequence of the systematic violation of the human rights of others. We also ask that the council rescind this year’s Humphrey Award to Professor Rice, given her record of support for torture and rendition.

Drafted and organized by Thomas L. Dumm (Amherst College) and Jodi Dean (Hobart and William Smith Colleges).

Signed:

 

1. Asma Abbas
2. Tony Affigne
3. Elisabeth Anker
4. Katy Arnold
5. Phillip Ayoub
6. Banu Bargu
7. Alyssa Batistoni
8. Brad Bauerly
9. Jane Bennett
10. Jessica Blatt
11. Peter Bratsis
12. Susan Brewer-Osorio
13. Rachel Brown
14. Wendy Brown
15. Kevin Bruyneel
16. Susan Burgess
17. Sheila Carapico
18. Ajay Singh Chaudhary
19. George Ciccariello-Maher
20. Joan Cocks
21. Elizabeth Cohen
22. Rom Coles
23. William Connolly
24. Barbara Cruikshank
25. Jodi Dean
26. Shirin Deylami
27. Andrew Dilts
28. Lisa Disch
29. Stefan Dolgert
30. Thomas L. Dumm
31. John Ehrenberg
32. Kathy Ferguson
33. Kennan Ferguson
34. Michaele Ferguson
35. John Finn
36. David Forrest
37. Jason Frank
38. Jill Frank
39. Jennifer Gaboury
40. Richard Gilman-Opalsky
41. Jane Anna Gordon
42. Katherine Gordy
43. Alex Gourevitch
44. Judith Grant
45. Laura Grattan
46. Jarius Victor Grove
47. Ayten Gundogdu
48. Nina Hagel
49. Christine Harrington
50. Erin Heidt-Forsythe
51. Harry N. Hirsh
52. Bonnie Honig
53. Juliet Hooker
54. David Howarth
55. Chris Howell
56. Vicki Hsueh
57. Jennifer M. Hudson
58. Jeffrey C. Isaac
59. Jack Jackson
60. Jim Johnson
61. Steven Johnston
62. Rafael Khachaturian
63. Nicholas Kiersey
64. Elisabeth Koechlin
65. Alexander Livingston
66. Brian C. Lovato
67. Joe Lowndes
68. Samantha Majic
69. Mark Major
70. Robyn Marasco
71. Andrew March
72. Elizabeth Markovits
73. Lori Marso
74. James Martel
75. Lida Maxwell
76. Jamie Mayerfield
77. Keally McBride
78. Utz McKnight
79. Jeanne Morefield
80. Cas Mudde
81. Justin Mueller
82. Laurie Naranch
83. Anne Norton
84. Aletta Norval
85. Alix Olson
86. Gary Olson
87. David Ost
88. Sean Parson
89. Paul A. Passavant
90. Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton
91. Ricky Price
92. John Protevi
93. Babak Rahimi
94. Sahar Razavi
95. Thea Riofrancos
96. Will Roberts
97. Corey Robin
98. Melvin Lee Rogers
99. Sayres Rudy
100. Sara Rushing
101. Mildred Elizabeth Sanders
102. Matthew Scherer
103. Jade Schiff
104. Sanford Schram
105. Tyler Schuenemann
106. George Schulman
107. Melissa Schwartzberg
108. Jillian Schwedler
109. Bryant William Sculos
110. John Seery
111. Torrey Shanks
112. Jakeet Singh
113. Laura Sjoberg
114. Claire Snyder-Hall
115. Christian Sorace
116. Joe Soss
117. Lester Spence
118. Jacqueline Stevens
119. Peter Stone
120. Tracy Strong
121. Kirstine Taylor
122. David Temin
123. Lars Toender
124. Jack Turner
125. Camila Vergara
126. Jackie Vimo
127. Kathi Weeks
128. Meredith Weiss
129. Yves Winter
130. Jeffrey Winters
131. Jasmine Yarish
132. Karen Zivi

The poverty of the US working class

Excerpts from an important article in the Atlantic. Read the whole thing here.

For the last several months, social scientists have been debating the striking findings of a study by the economists Susan Case and Angus Deaton. Between 1998 and 2013, Case and Deaton argue, white Americans across multiple age groups experienced large spikes in suicide and fatalities related to alcohol and drug abuse—spikes that were so large that, for whites aged 45 to 54, they overwhelmed the dependable modern trend of steadily improving life expectancy. While critics have challenged the magnitude and timing of the rise in middle-age deaths (particularly for men), they and the study’s authors alike seem to agree on some basic points: Problems of mental health and addiction have taken a terrible toll on whites in America—though seemingly not in other wealthy nations—and the least educated among them have fared the worst.

Meanwhile, other recent research has piled on the bad news for those without college degrees. A Pew study released last month found that the size of the middle class—defined by a consistent income range across generations—has shrunk over the last several decades. In part, this is because high-paying jobs for the less educated are vanishing. The study builds on other recent research that finds that almost all the good jobs created since the recession have gone to college graduates.

...

As organized labor in this country has withered, an extreme individualism has stepped in as the alternative—a go-it-alone perspective narrowly focused on getting an education and becoming successful on one’s own merit. This works well for some, but for others—especially the two-thirds of Americans over the age of 25 who don’t have a bachelor’s degree—it often means getting mired in an economy of contract work, low pay, and few, if any, benefits. These prospects suggest that this is an age of diminished expectations for the working class.

...

Yet there is clearly more to the despair of the working class than empty wallets and purses. Patches of the social fabric that once supported them, in good times and bad, have frayed. When asked in national surveys about the people with whom they discussed “important matters” in the past six months, those with just a high-school education or less are likelier to say no one (this percentage has risen over the years for college graduates, too). This trend is troubling, given that social isolation is linked to depression and, in turn, suicide and substance abuse.

...

The religiously unaffiliated are not necessarily secular in their outlook. Many of them are spiritually inclined but skeptical of organized religion—especially its intrusion into politics. However, in the absence of any other source of social support and collective meaning (say, unions), there’s less in the way of psychological protection from the slings and arrows of American society.

This sort of isolation was common among the people I talked to. Many said their faith was helping them get through their ongoing troubles, yet they rarely or never went to church. Some felt ashamed to be around people because they were out of work. For others, their religious belief was somewhat a source of self-help, rather than a source of community. For example, one of the workers I interviewed said that being out of work for so long had filled him with a constant rage. To calm his mind, every night he would pick up his Bible and read a dozen verses. He had given up on the church and what he described as its superficial ways. “I want to go to hear the Word—I don’t want to go to see what you’re wearing,” says the man, 53 and from Flint, Michigan. The other way he copes is going outside for a smoke.

For this man and many like him, there is no one to talk to, no one to rely on. “Nowadays, you got people you really can’t trust, man,” he says. “You can’t call everybody your friend.” As the ties that bind them to others have unraveled, the working class has become an ever lonelier crowd.

...

The larger context of this isolation and alienation is America’s culture of individualism. It, too, can worsen the despair. Taken to an extreme, self-reliance becomes a cudgel: Those who falter and fail have only themselves to blame. They should have gotten more education. They should have been more prepared. On this score, too, the U.S. deviates from other wealthy nations. America’s frontier spirit of rugged individualism is strong, and it manifests itself differently by race and education level, too. White Americans, for instance, are more likely to see success as the result of individual effort than African Americans are (though not Hispanics). The less educated, particularly less-educated whites, also share this view to a disproportionate degree.

In Stayin’ Alive, his powerful history of the “last days” of the working class, the historian Jefferson Cowie describes how the proud blue-collar identity of previous generations disintegrated during the ’70s. “Liberty has largely been reduced to an ideology that promises economic and cultural refuge from the long arm of the state,” he writes, “while seemingly lost to history is the logic that culminated under the New Deal: that genuine freedom could only happen within a context of economic security.” As working-class solidarity receded, an identity built on racial tribalism often swept in.

Adolph Reed on Starbucks' campaign

From an interview here

I’m feeling more and more that people in this society are becoming less and less capable of recognizing the distinction between individuals and larger entities. If you have trouble recognizing a distinction between Self and a larger Other, the patter just seems to make sense … because the various words and phrases kind of strike affective chords in your head that make you feel good. But they don’t have to add up to anything. I often compare the inflation of the notion of politics to the inflation of the Deutschmark in the Weimar Republic. If it can be everything, it’s not anything, right? It doesn’t give you purchase on anything.

The notion of collective action has just vanished; the notion of politics as a strategic activity directed towards influencing power has vanished; the lines between self-expression and purposive action in and on the world has just vanished. I know this sounds like an old man’s rant — and I guess it is — but I think that’s where we are. I think that tension between individualized acts and the #RaceTogether tag don’t seem to trouble anybody because they just don’t notice the contradiction.

 

Comrades

In the contemporary US, capitalist ideology pushes non-stop on the throttle of individuality.

"Individuality," in the present context, is not the same as rugged individualism or personality, although it shares with these earlier formations an emphasis on the singularity of a self against others. Unlike rugged individualism, contemporary individuality doesn't emphasize strength as much as it does suffering. Unlike personality (appearing in a new form in the 19th century and well-described by Richard Sennett), contemporary individuality doesn't rely on an interiority that is both authentic and to be cultivated, expressed only with care and attention. Instead, individuality is uniqueness for its own sake, uniqueness as moment, quip, fashion statement, flare, comeback, quirk--the difference that registers as different before it is swept into communicative capitalism's flows.

Two elements that factor into the particularly US fetish for individuality are law and economics. Our legal system emphasizes individual rights. The peculiarity of US libertarianism is its inability to acknowledge that a right is only as a good as the force that backs it up, whether that force comes from the state or the community. Rather than part of a broader cultural appreciation for the imbrication of rights and responsibilities, duties, and obligations (part of the continental tradition), in the popular understanding of rights in the US, rights are individual claims to freedom. Rights are imagined in terms of the specific injury of a plaintiff, not the larger, structural, condition of a collectivity. Winning rights (ending segregation, workplace discrimination, marriage restrictions) has required not just legislative victories but judicial ones as well, which means finding individual plaintiffs.

The US capitalist economic system likewise insists on individuality. Particularly in the wake of the attack on unions, work is more and more figured as an individual matter. It's a choice, an option, a matter of one's own unique ability to work hard, play the game, think outside the box, be a team player, demonstrate leadership skills, give a 110 percent, seize the opportunity, and take risks. One has to be be unique, different from all the rest, so that one stands out from the crowd, shows that one has what it takes -- no wonder it's hard for some people to think of themselves as part of the 99%. The demands of so-called flexible employment (flexible for whom?) make the process of differentiation constant and inescapable: one is perpetually trying to show that one is the best for whatever job comes around. 

The best are hard to find. They are unique. This is the lesson of Wall Street, whose finance wizards are ostensibly rare and valuable enough to justify massive bonuses every year. It's the lesson of Silicon Valley: not everyone is Steve Jobs. It's the lesson of professional sports (one MVP), of Hollywood, of all of communicative capitalism's intensified networks as they activate the many in order to generate the one. 

How, then, does the left respond? 

There is the rejection of leaders. Already part of the legacy of '68, the current rejection of leaders rightly tries to immunize itself from celebrity seekers attempting to use radical politics for their own advancement. Some of the best versions of this have been the common names Zapatista (including Subcommandante Marcos) and Anonymous. They replace individual leaders with a common name and image. Occupy went far in this direction of a name in common as well. 

Yet it's also the case that people sometimes interpret the need to provide an alternative to capitalist individuality as an injunction to destroy any individual who emerges out of the left as someone exciting, someone to hear and read. Need passes through demand to the plane of unconditionality, to put it in the ever-popular Lacanian idiom. In this urge to destroy, we find the intensity, the excess, of desire. It's desire that is absolute, unconditioned, out of proportion, desire that abolishes the dimension of the other.

We learn from Lacan that this desire is incommensurate to any specific object. So, we would be wrong to think of it in terms of its object. I admit, this is a drag. It would be much easier to be able to point out that someone desires their own fame, their own power, their own glory, and then demolish them by demonstrating how this desire makes them hypocrites, failed and false leftists, even betrayers of the people or the revolution. This sort of cheap shot relies on a shift into the economy of the drive, into the loop of momentary satisfaction where one repeats the same gestures over and over, getting off a little bit, enjoying, but completely effacing the dimension of desire.

To think within desire we have to think of it in terms of its effects, its abolition of the dimension of the other. The question, then, would be who is the other who is abolished? Who is the other for us? 

For communists, the other is the capitalist other. In the demand to abolish private property (ownership and waged labor), basic needs pass "over to a state of being unconditioned, not because it is a question of something borrowed from a particular need, but of an absolute condition out of all proportion to the need for any object whatsoever, and in so far as this condition is perhaps called for precisely in this, that it abolishes here the dimension of the other, that it is a requirement in which the other does not have to reply yes or no." The capitalist cannot meet the demand. It cannot even reply "yes or no." Morphed through demands, basic needs are not enough. Their satisfaction is just a vehicle for a more profound, unconditional, restructuring of society.

An effect of communist desire, then, is the abolition of capitalist other, and hence an abolition of class itself, the very relation on which capitalism depends. 

It's no wonder that capitalism works incessantly at blocking this dimension of desire, at attempting to push it into the more present and frequent momentary satisfactions of drive. Capitalism wants to channel this desire into different languages and images, the ones that it provides -- that of individuality, specificity, uniqueness. For a left that has struggled for a voice in a place contorted by forty years of unfettered capitalism, this channeling is apparent in efforts to suppress emerging class solidarity. Even as a global proletariat -- textile workers in Bangladesh, technology workers in China, transport workers of multiple backgrounds, indeed, a mobile proletariat visible less in terms of national location, race, or sex than of interdependence along multiple vectors -- presses to build its collective power, the left finds itself attached to practices that undermine solidarity. Perpetually suspicious and mistrustful, it eats its own.

There are multiple versions of this mistrust. Sometimes it manifests as a preoccupation with process. Sometimes it manifests as critique and "problematization" before anything has even been carried out. For those who engage in social media, the left-liberal press, and left academia, it appears as a set of predictable responses and snarky one-liners, which then devolve into debates over tone, and various accusations, most of which are mean-spirited, many of which demolish rather than build. 

In the course of the demolition, the capitalist is displaced as the other. He is safe, protected, no longer the target. 

The only way to move through this is via an ethos of comradeship, a solidarity. We can't fight class war one person at a time. We have to be connected, solidary, and strong. Mark Fisher's recent essay in The North Star is a major contribution to such an ethos as it describes the practices that have prevented it from emerging as well as their destructive effects. Mark writes:

We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication. We need to think very strategically about how to use social media – always remembering that, despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers, that this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital.

As I see it, examples of destructive projects are criticisms that attack someone for sins of omission, as if one person could do, think, and write everything, as if one person had the capacity of a party to encompass a wide array of positions. Criticisms of blog posts as if they were academic articles or even books are similarly misplaced as are attacks that proceed as if one article were all that a person had ever written. 

What would the left mediapelago look like if we treated one another as comrades? Yes, there would be fights, splits, and purges. But they would grow out of and intensify opposition to capitalism. They would contribute to the maintenance of communist desire, not capitalist drive.

Read Coming Up Short by Jennifer Silva

Jennifer M. Silva's Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty (Oxford University Press, 2013) contributes to our understanding of the impact of forty years of neoliberalism on poor and working people in the US, the extreme perniciousness of the individual form, and the erosion of solidarity. Silva writes: "experiences of powerlessness, confusion, and betrayal within the labor market, institutions such as education and the government, and the family teach young working-class men and women that they are completely alone, responsible for their own fates and dependent on outside help at their peril. They are learning the hard way that being an adult means trusting no one by yourself."

Silva frames her book in terms of adulthood: what are the markers of adulthood for the post-industrial working class? This is an important question: since 2009, about half of people between the ages of 18-24 live with their parents. Ever-increasing numbers of working people are postponing or forgoing marriage. Ever-more are pushed into "flexibile" work-lives such that they move in and out of the paid work-force under conditions increasingly disadvantageous to labor. The markers of successful adulthood have thus changed since the 50s and 60s when adult life was characterized by a set of basic, achievable steps: finish high school, get a job, get married, get a house, have kids. Contemporary capitalism has pushed even these basic milestones out of the reach of most working-class people. So, how do they narrate their lives? Silva argues that they focus on themselves, telling a story of personal triumph over adversity. They position themselves as isolated and alone, betrayed and abandoned by all the institutions around them. Absorbing a narrative that integrates neoliberal individualism with therapeutic self-discovery and self-help ("no one can help me but me"), they make the self the primary locus of struggle and achievement. Failure is no one's fault but your own. Success is successful grappling with one's inner life, the trauma of neglect and abuse, and the ability to overcome that by working on oneself. The failure of others is thus their own fault. As one informant said, the biggest obstacle she faces is her own self.

The book comes from interviews with a hundred young working-class people in Massachusetts and Virginia from 2008-2010.  Silva's analysis is attentive to race, gender, and sexual orientation, astutely observing "that without a broad, shared vision of economic justic, race, class, and gender have become sites of resentment and division rather than a coalition among the working class." Interview subjects ("informants") were men and women between 24 and 34. Most work in the service sector. About a third live with their parents or other older family member. Not quite half have high school degrees; a little over a quarter have some college. Most have significant debt. Most have trouble locating or keeping a job capable of sustaining them (paying rent, expenses, debt). 

Silva outlines an emerging working-class adult self that has "low expectations of work, wariness toward romantic commitment, widespread distrust of social institutions, profound isolation from others, and an overriding focus on their emotions and psychic health." They don't think about their lives in collective terms. They think about them in terms of recovery from painful personal pasts. Absent work as a source of self-respect and self-worth, they "remake dignity and meaning out of emotional self-management and willful psychic transformation." 

The primary characteristics of the emerging working-class adult self are rugged individualism and distrust. People are reluctant to pour time, emotion, and energy into relationships that are risky. Although Silva emphasizes the impact on romantic relationships, we can extend this to a broader unwillingness to attach oneself to groups and causes. An inability to commit is an effect of economic insecurity that makes political organization as challenging and precarious as romantic association -- it's hard to know whether or not it's worth it; for many, past experience suggests that it won't be, that they most likely outcome is betrayal. Silva notes the foundational  belief in self-reliance among African Americans in her study as they narrate their experiences in terms of their own individual experiences rather than in terms of the structural impact of racism. Solidarity, social trust, and community engagment plumment as the primary worldview conceives rights in terms of "'I's' rather than 'we's', with economic justice dropped out of their collective vocabulary."

Neoliberalism configures the working class self. Oprah, self-help books, therapy world -- these provide tools for people faced with pressures of flexibilization to cope with frequent change. Silva effectively illuminates the material conditions underlying contemporary culture's preoccupation with making and remaking one's individual identity. She writes, "The need to continuously recreate one's identity--whether after a failed attempt at college or an unanticipated divorce or a sudden career change--can be an anxiety-producing endeavor." Therapy offers a culture resource for ascribinging meaning to one's life in a world in flux. The individual self is both constant and maleable, a site for both continuity and change, made possible through a therapy culture that locates problems in individual pathology, inserts these pathologies into a specific individual past, and makes bearing witness to one's own suffering into a ground for a transformation confined to the self. "The sources of meaning and dignity--hard work, social solidarity, family--found in previous studies of the industrial working class had been nearly eclipsed  by an all-encompassing culture of emotional self-management." The way working class people deal with upheaval, recession, and unemployment is by fostering flexibility within themselves, making themselves into adaptable beings detached from the outer world.

In a powerful and disturbing chapter on the hardening of working class individualism, Silva describes interview subjects' defense of big business and hostility toward affirmative action. The emotion underlying their neoliberal subjectivity is betrayal. These working class people feel the market to be impersonal, a matter of risk and chance. When government intervenes, it does so in ways that rig the game so that they can't compete. Furthermore, since so many have had to struggle on their own, by themselves, in contexts of poverty and diminishing opportunity, they take the fact of their survival as itself the morally significant fact: making it on one's own is what bestows dignity. Socialists like Obama thus take away their last best thing, the special something that is all they have left (this is my language), namely, the dignity they have precisely because they are completely self-reliant. Indeed, Silva's account suggests that solidarity is a problem because to embrace it would be to acknowledge one's insufficiency as an individual, one's inability to survive alone. Hence, working people are hostile to those below them on the food chain who need help from others because this hostility enables them to project neediness onto others thereby enabling themselves to shore up a fragile and impossible individuality.

Silva argues that young working-class people have learned that they can't rely on anyone. They try to numb their sense of betrayal by affirming the worst cultural scripts of individualism, personal responsibility, and self-reliance, hardening themselves to the world around them and thus becoming precisely the subjects neoliberalism needs insofar as they are hostile to various forms of government intervention, particularly affirmative action. It might be, then, that the sorts of critical exposes we on the left write and circulate, the stories of governmental corruption and the university failure, aren't helping our cause at all. Instead, they are affirming what the working class already knows to be true: they are being betrayed.

Silva's insight into the link between neoliberalism and individualism points to both the challenge for communist organizing and the possibility of a way forward:

autonomy should be understood a a by-product of an uncertain, competitive, and precarious labor market that forces individuals to navigate their life trajectories on their own in order to survive. That is, the more our futures seem uncertain and unknowable, and the more individualistic we are forced to become, the greater our need to find and express our authentic selves. Paradoxically, the more we are required to construct ourselves as individuals, to write our own biographies, the more we realize our utter inability to control the trajectories of our lives.

This 'utter inability' is a key locus of communist organizing. We have to realize together strength in numbers. And, we have to be able to be for each other not an audience for performances of authentic individuality but a solidary collective where meaning comes from common struggle. If people feel isolated, we have to build connections that prove they are not. 

Party in the USA: Optimism of the Will

One way to discern an "idea whose time has come" is by the strength of the urge to evict it.

A new rejection of calls for a Party of the left suggests that, finally, a sense of the need for something like a Party is so undeniable that opponents feel like they have to confront it directly. Instead of coughing up old criticisms from late nineteenth century agrarian anarchists or early twentieth century Dutch councilists, those who attempt to divert the energies building toward greater organization are now having to look at our current situation.  In related good news, the very weakness of "Party in the USA: the New Newest Left & the Organization of Sadness" signals the diminishing persuasiveness of those who want to prevent the left from coming together. 

Tiredly repeating the irony and innuendo of late nineties academic jargon, Party in the USA: The New Newest Left & the Organization of Sadness criticizes recent arguments for a Party, one from Jacobin, the other the #Accelerate Manifesto. The post begins by exploring the 'masturbatory metaphorics' of the essays, relying on word play that insinuates that calls for left unity are little more than masculine narcissistic fantasies. The intent is to make left organization seem silly, even embarassing: "can one think of something more auto-erotic, more narcissistically invested, than some dude offering up yet another contribution to the archive of revolutionary Party invitations?"  Well, sure. How about a rejection of the Party that trades on the playfulness of blogosphere psychoanalysis?

This kind of simple reversal, although adequate as a response to the post's wankery, only repeats the gesture animating the piece. What matters more than the author's indulgence is the position from which the author's critique is raised. What is at stake in ostensibly left positions that want to prevent the left from unifying? 

Why would someone on the left want the left to be weak, to remain where it is, to refuse to learn from the Occupy experience and take the next step? What accounts for this left particularism and for its insistence that what we have now--fragmented groups that affiliate from time to time while focusing on their own particular issues and agendas--is the best way to end capitalism and build a more egalitarian world? Is it the narcissism of small differences? the fear of change? the assumption that capitalism is here to stay? a failure to grasp our present situation? Is it an individualist conception of freedom? A hopelessness with regard to the capacities of organized political subjects?

As it rejects the Party, the post depicts the 'new, new left' as sad. This is a mistake. What the author calls the "new new left" isn't sad -- it's energized, vital, fully aware of the urgency of the present. That's why meetings like Historical Materialism and Left Forum have been getting bigger every year, why there are more seminars, reading groups, actions, discussions, symposia, journals, and events, why Jacobin is making a mark. 

I now take up some of the specific arguments offered against the Party.

1.    "Left unification is not an unqualified good."  Since these day everything is qualified--qualification being the quintessential gesture of the left--this point doesn't need to be made. So, what's at stake in stating the obvious? Opening the door to race and gender (has anyone else noticed that white male anarchists never talk about race and gender so much as when they are attacking communists, revolutionary socialists, and anyone else arguing for organizing the left?).

What's disingenuous about such appeals to race and gender is their obliteration of the history of the Communist Party in anti-racist struggle, the reality of Third World Communism (particularly in the seventies), and the fact that sexism and racism are not limited to the organized left but appear throughout society, including anarchist and insurrectionist settings. Perhaps the author is covertly urging a logic of separatism, of identity politics (the implication of the author's invocation of racism and sexism in Marxist groups being that criticism implies splitting rather than learning and change)? If so, then how far does it go? All the way to the individual (itself a false stopping point giving the imaginary character of identity). If not, then it is necessary to acknowledge that a left Party today, one with the capacities of the communist Party, wouldn't exist in the past but would incorporate and learn from the last sixty years of struggle and critique.

The author of the post, though, thinks that what we are doing now is the way we should continue to do things -- it's more flexible. It allows for more autonomy. But autonomy for whom and in what contexts? It seems to me that it's the autonomy of the ineffectual, one that continues to enable an economy that traps people in debt and furthers the intensification of inequality. The author, though, emphasizes "flexible forms of putting groups in contact" with no attention to what it might mean to create structures capable of enduring over time and space in the context of ever intensifying political struggle.

2.  Left organizing should not "step back to (pre-)Fordist modalities of political organization in a post-Fordist capitalist landscape. Even MBAs know that flexible decentralization—for them in terms of labor processes, not in terms of the channeling of profit, of course—unleashes greater productive potentials than hierarchical forms of centralization, and I like thinking that my comrades have at least achieved the level of savvy of a Wharton undergrad." This lets us know the author's primary commitments -- to a vision of society in neoliberal economic terms. In this vision, the political is completely absorbed in the economic: both seem to benefit from the productive potential that comes from decentralization.  Note as well the omission of the fact that there have been multiple models of the Party--not one "pre-Fordist" or Fordist model (a point which has to be occluded if the binary between bad centralization and good decentralization is to hold). 

More horrifying, though, is the repetition of a primary myth of the new economy, that of flexibility and decentralization. If that were true, then why has there been consolidation in the finance sector, in communications, and in oil and gas? Doug Henwood demolished this myth in his After the New Economy. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, shows the connections between ideas of flexibility and military research (Rand Corporation, defense contracting, advanced research programs). And hubs are an immanent property of complex networks -- growth and preferential attachment result in powerlaw distributions, fundamental features of the winner-take-all and winner-take-most characteristic of communicative capitalism (Barabasi, Taleb). This doesn't even scratch the surface of the effects of so-called flexibility on workers and communities. Flexible for whom? Certainly not for laid off workers.

The post, though, announces "horizontalism does in fact produces a robust economy of organizations." It's already a bad call to render left political groups as an economy, as if groups were competing with each other rather than engaged in struggle against a common enemy. But can we say that there is robustness here? And in what sense? The fragmentation of the energies and efforts produced during Occupy has cost us a lot of time and good will. Attachment to horizontalism has been one of the problems. Without clarity of membership, infilitration is easy. Without clarity of vision, constant fighting over goals is unavoidable. Without a shared sense of how we are going to work together, what sorts of decision rules will let us determine which projects to pursue and when, we fall into patterns that reinforce prior privileges. It's not for nothing that Jo Freeman's "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" became so prominent during Occupy. 

3.  We don't need small groups of militants, leaders, an orientation, or a plan. I will ask again: who does this benefit? Who would want to seduce the left into thinking that we can have a politics without plans, a disoriented politics? Who would want to eliminate or undermine left militants and leaders? It makes me wonder about COINTELPRO and disinformation operations.

Planning is only a problem if one thinks that all potentials emerge in ways that leftists support. Since this is obviously false, planning ways to move forward (as well as ways to respond) is crucial. The most significant recent tragedy on the left is our failure to use the financial crisis of 2008 to our benefit. Occupy was a much needed (although a little late) response. The post asserts: "The last cycle of rebellion closed because we couldn’t keep up the intensity, because our feedback loop of positive affect was shattered by the State and by our own failures to stay committed to the democracy that we were making." Maybe we couldn't keep up our intensity because we lacked organizational structures that would distribute tasks such that we knew that someone would take responsibility for them. Too few people felt like they had to do everything (because some would drop the ball, fail to show up, volunteer but then not carry out what they had agreed to do). And maybe planning, having a clear orientation, would enable us not to be "shattered by the State." If we collapse whenever the State intervenes, we have and will have no movement.  The one thing of which we can be absolutely certain is that the stronger we become the more repression we will encounter. 

4.  The turn to the Party is therapeutic, done in the "spirit of sadness." This doesn't ring true. In fact, it's so false as to invite diagnosis. Perhaps the sadness is over the failure of horizontalism. This would make sense. Many people are still grieving over the inability of horizontalism to last or scale. I think, though, that it has been an important experiment. We've learned from it. Indeed, as I argue in The Communist Horizon, this experiment should inform our thinking as we figure out the form of the Party that will work for us today.

The remainder of the blog post sets out what the author prefers to the Party. He advocates

a.  "the production of new political sensoriums, new sensoriums of the political, so that we can ironize the ontological density of the state and capital and not feel like we’re living defective half-lives if we’re barred from access to either." Given that irony is a primary marketing tool and content of pop culture, it's hard for me to see exactly what it contributes to a new political sensorium. It also seems to me that trying to feel better about being barred from the state and capital is exactly what capitalism wants of those it's immiserating. Unhappy about your 80 thousand dollars of student loan debt? Try yoga, a 12 step program, Zoloft, or ironizing ontological density!

b.  All of the social knowledges and powers we used to attribute to those terms are immanent to the social itself. We don’t need to organize, to treat ourselves or the social as a technical object. The terms to which the author is referring are "activists, militants, and Parties." I confess that at this point I wonder if the author is actually a Platypoid doing his best to kill the left. Dismissing the dedication of our activists, the courage of our militants, and the histories and organizational capacities of our parties, he evokes a social free from antagonism, inequality, oppression, and exploitation. How are knowledges and powers distributed? Who can access them and for what purpose? 

c.  Let’s disorganize.  Who benefits from a disorganized left? A prominent paper last year documented the rise in inequality and decline of labor unions. There is no reason to think that the immanent movement of capital will do anything but enrich the few and immiserate the many. 

Screwing working people

(now posted at Counterpunch)

A friend of mine dropped out of high school in the mid-70s. She went to work cleaning at a college in her town. She worked at this college for about 30 years.

Apparently, she didn't work for the college, though. She worked for three or four (it's hard to tell) different companies, companies contracted to do the cleaning. 

Now she is ready to get her pension. She went to human resources at the college. But they said she didn't work for them. They sent her to the company currently responsible for housekeeping. That company sent her to the company that manages the union's pension fund.

The union told her to fill out a form. It seemed to her like they wanted her to say that she worked at the college for fourteen years. That's all they had on record. Apparently, some time (when?) the union's pension fund was in trouble so it merged into another pension fund. All the records from the early time were transferred to the new fund managers.

The new fund managers seem to be saying that they have records for my friend's years of work and that they don't have records for her years of work. They also seem to be saying that she needs to go to the social security office to get a bunch of detailed records of her hours. This will cost $47.50. It's hard to know why this is necessary if they already have records of her work. But maybe they don't. 

Meanwhile, the office managing the fund changed addresses on August 1.

I can't quite get why they were telling my friend that she had to go get all these records. And this is after having spoken this morning to four people at three offices (college, current company, and union fund) two or three times each. 

After two hours, though, something else emerged. It now seems like there was no pension fund until 1991. That is, it appears like the local only established a pension fund for the workers in 1991. And it also looks like the employer's contribution during that period was only five cents an hour. It's strange that no one mentioned this to my friend when she was first attempting to get her pension. It is also strange that it took so many phone calls to establish this. Is it even true? That's not what my friend remembers. She remembers a union being there from the beginning, but it's been a long time and this stuff is complicated and confusing.

On the surface, my friend's experience is that of working in the same place, in the same union, in the same buildings, for nearly 30 years. Below the surface: three (or four) companies, only one of which currently exists and two (or three) pension funds, only one of which currently exists.

Because of capital, her world is not what it seems. Her basic experience of work (which also sucks) is fundamentally different from capital's managing of her remuneration for her work. The effect is that she worked for 30 years and her pension will only cover 14 years. And, it isn't clear why: no union contract? a mismanaged pension fund? a loss of records as ownership changed? The complications benefit capital and screw her. She's being exploited through the mechanisms of a process that was supposed to provide her with a benefit. She doesn't understand a lot of it (and neither do I). But she gets the basic point: "they expect me to die so that they won't have to give me my money."

But this story is incomplete because I've left out or underplayed another key aspect of the situation--how the people who work in offices treat my friend. She's in her sixties, black, and without a high school degree. When she got to my house this morning, she understood the primary issue to be that she needed to get information from social security that would tell the pension fund people how long she had worked for the college (which, technically, was zero years since she was employed by a private contractor). Her concern was with filling out a form properly and needing some white-out to fix some information that was misrepresented. When I made the phone calls, people talked to me, answered my questions, tranferred me to others higher on the food chain, and began doing the research on the employers and union contracts. I'm a 50 year old white woman, a full professor with a Ph.D. I found it all extraordinarily difficult to understand and only began getting things sorted by asking a lot of questions. The bureaucrats only divulged information when asked and spoke as if all of their terms were clear and obvious. They were brusk and confident, off-putting if you aren't privileged enough or socialized to question and push back. After I hung up from the last call, my friend looked at my across the table, shaking her head in a combination of disgust, fury, and resignation, "they wouldn't tell me none of that."

As it looks right now, she will get $70.70 a month. She worked as a cleaner for thirty years.

Yes we can

Lawrence O'Donnell featured this mash-up of Boehner and Will.i.am's "Yes we can" last night. I love it. Boeher is the Bull Connor of healthcare. He is so vicious, you can almost smell his desperation, a desperation that comes from being on the wrong side of history, from fighting a battle he is losing, and for fighting this battle without principle or cause. There is no defense for inequality. Boehner is so much the white man, a distinct embodiment of the privilege of not just ignoring but actively oppressing anyone not like him, and doing so out of an entitlement he does not question even as it crumbles around him.

The "Yes we can" is strong, strong and cool, relentless, disciplined. It's the alternative to Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" or a politics of a refusal. It suggests a forward thrust that cannot be stopped, one that when blocked grows stronger and more determined, but neither frantic nor desperate.The openness--yes we can what?--indicates a politics without limit, a politics that spreads with each expenditure, that exceeds any atttempt to bound it. This is not a politics of a part of no part (Ranciere) but rather one that says There is Nothing That We Are Not Already A Part Of (a version of the Lacanian feminine formula of sexuation). It's a politics that affirms the count and being counted, assured that this is a counting and an accounting that cannot stop, cannot be finished, cannot be closed off. It's a counting we want to join, adding to it as we include ourselves. Far from the objects of someone else's count, we count ourselves. Yes we can.

As I watched MSNBC last night, disgusted by the harassing phone messages and death threats and petty vandalism of the far right, thinking of the brown shirts (as we all have for over a decade now), I started to have a better sense of why Zizek sometimes speaks of violence as acting out, as a refusal (or inability) to go to the end. Were left wing violence to mimic the sleazy antics of these fascists, I could not admire it. It would seem an attempt to avoid or circumvent the forward march, the affirmation, the onward push of the people. It would short circuit the steady aggregation and discipline necessary to become a new people, a people who make sure everyone has enough before some have too much, a people who have stopped asking what's in it for me and instead ask does anyone need anything (the initial level of hospitality).

Paul Passavant: State of the Union or Civil War? The Current Conundrum Part 1

update: now published at Counterpunch

For all their bells and whistles, as far as I could tell, the mainstream media completely missed the significant symbolic politics of the Republican response to President Obama’s 2010 state of the union address (SOTU).  Instead, it was fake newscaster Stephen Colbert who identified its importance.  The Republican response was delivered by the newly inaugurated Republican governor for the state of Virginia, Bob McDonnell.  The commentators on Fox news walked their viewers through what they were about to see, explaining that last year, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal gave an unsuccessful response to an Obama speech.  Illustrating the superior Republican sensitivity to aesthetics, Fox blamed Jindal’s shortcomings not on the Republican message, but on the staging of his speech.  According to Fox, the problem with Jindal’s speech is that, from the viewer’s perspective, he looked like he had just walked out of a closet before speaking.  The staging for Bob McDonnell’s speech would be much improved, delivered from the Virginia state legislature.  Therefore, it would look almost exactly like an official SOTU, except it would not be delivered by the actual—Democratic—president, Barrack Obama.  Instead it would be delivered by McDonnell.

McDonnell delivered his response in the Virginia state legislature (isn’t this a misuse of government property?).  The hall was stocked with people serving as props, or background, for McDonnell, making it seem like this pretend SOTU was actually being delivered in front of legislators, like the real one.  President Obama delivered the SOTU standing behind a lectern.  McDonnell gave his fake SOTU standing behind a lectern.  On the front of President Obama’s lectern is the presidential seal.  On the front of McDonnell’s was also a seal, though it was the state of Virginia’s if you actually looked closely.  Otherwise, it just looked like a seal similar to Obama’s.  On “applause lines,” members of Congress would stand up and applaud.  Likewise, the people helping to stage the fake SOTU would applaud at McDonnell’s applause lines (and, Fox provided close-ups of appropriately photogenic members of the audience at key moments). 

Finally, and most disturbingly, is the significance of the venue for the Republican response to the SOTU—the legislature in Richmond, Virginia.  Richmond, of course, was the capitol of the confederacy.  Although the significance of the locale was apparently missed by the networks and the Democrats, it likely would not be missed by the core Republican constituency—southern whites.  For example, in 1980, Ronald Reagan chose to give his first major campaign speech as the Republican nominee in Philadelphia, Mississippi.  Philadelphia, Mississippi is where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964 (the inspiration for the movie “Mississippi Burning”).  In the speech, Reagan trumpeted his support for “states’ rights,” and advocated a return to “local control” in front of a cheering crowd that did not miss his message of support for the earlier—violent—efforts to fight integration and use any means—force, if necessary—to defend racial segregation.  This speech was in keeping with the Republican party’s “Southern Strategy,” devised by Nixon campaign strategist Kevin Phillips, to regain the White House by shifting the Republican base from the North to the South in order to capture whites disaffected from the Democratic party after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Likewise, the decision to stage the Republican response to President Obama’s SOTU in Richmond, Virginia’s state legislature—after months of tea-baggers openly carrying arms at rallies organized by Fox to oppose health care or to places where Obama was to deliver a speech—sends a message that core Republican constituencies will not mistake.  It is a message of Civil War.

This message of Civil War is in keeping with the current Republican refusal to recognize the legitimacy of a Democratic president, and, even more significantly, the first black president.  It is a refusal to recognize a right to rule, and the outcome of elections if the “winner” is not a Republican.  Political legitimacy in this world equals right wing Republican.  We saw this as Republicans and Fox’s right wing commentators described Bush opponents as terrorists who hate America—in other words, as the enemy.  We also saw this in the Republican decision to try to impeach President Clinton.  Impeachment is for a public wrong.  It is appropriate for the most exceptional circumstances—when the office holder presents such a threat to the state or public wellbeing that there is no time to wait for the next election.  The threat to the public welfare must be removed immediately because this person’s presence in public office constitutes an emergency justifying the most extreme response.  When the Republicans chose impeachment as their political weapon to be wielded against Clinton and the Democrats, it became clear that they no longer viewed the opposing party as the “loyal opposition.”  They viewed them as a threat to the state.  They had come to view the Democrats, and Clinton as the personification of the Democrats, as the enemy, and not as the opponent.

 Many say that Republicans live in an alternative, parallel universe.  While this joke is amusing, it does not quite capture reality.  Two parallel lines never meet.  Republican fantasies, broadcast by Fox news, are not out of relation with the rest of us.  They are not totally out of relation with the world that the rest of us inhabit.  They are at war with us.  They relate to democratic policies antagonistically. Tea baggers and the radical right say they are at war.  We should believe what they say.  They are telling the truth of their convictions.

The symbolic politics of the Republican SOTU response were likely missed by Obama’s base of support—the youngest voter demographic, which is also the most politically ignorant according to surveys.  Yet, it was also, apparently, missed by liberals, moderates, independents, and Democrats of all stripes.  Are Democrats so conflict averse—if not self deceived—that the symbolic politics of the Republican SOTU response was also lost on them?  After a summer and fall of arms-bearing zealots rallying to oppose even the mere symbolism of health care put forward by the Democrats?  It seems that they repress the emerging political reality.

The symbolic politics of the Republican party, however, were not missed by the native South Carolinian, Stephen Colbert.  In Colbert’s satire of the Republican response, he referred to the black president, and the white president. He noted that the Virginia state legislature had not been a forum for a fake white president since Jefferson Davis had spoken there. As we can see, the emerging political reality does disturb us, even if we try to keep our distance from it.  Instead, the emerging political reality manifests upon our collective consciousness in displaced form—in the forum of a comedy show by the fake newscaster Stephen Colbert.  It is funny there.  Otherwise, its significance is very scary indeed: it disturbs and disinters the deepest American political traumas.  Democrats think we are dealing with “Civil War.”  What if we are really faced with a return of the repressed?  What if, instead, in our contemporary politics, we are actually dealing with Civil War?

Feeling sick

From the WSWS:

The popular disaffection with the Obama healthcare plan goes much further, however, than the fanatical right-to-life constituency. The Obama administration has based its program for healthcare restructuring entirely on the argument that healthcare costs are bankrupting the US economy and that controlling and reducing these costs is essential.

The logical conclusion of this policy—even if officially denied by the White House—is that somebody’s healthcare is too expensive and must be cut back or eliminated. Millions of people fear that that somebody is likely to be them and their families. One opinion poll published last week showed that 53 percent believed they would be worse off or no better than before under the Obama plan.

People feel that they will be worse off, that something will be taken from them, that they won't be able to care for their families. They feel, in other words, that something will be stolen; they are worried about theft and about the theft of their life and livelihood.

Last night on Maddow, Oberman, and Stewart protesters were featured who were scared--of Obama, of the loss of their rights. They voiced anger and outrage. One of the most pronounced themes: we don't trust you, you are lying; even the smallest bit of respect or decorum (waiting one's turn, listening, raising one's hand) was gone. This strong current of mistrust, and of open statements of it, has less to do with Obama than with the larger collapse in confidence in governance--last year Congress's popularity was lower than Bush's. That collapse in symbolic efficiency is becoming more visible and pronounced.

I wonder if much of this outrage isn't displaced from the last couple of years of the recession as well as the last decade of escalating inequality. Yes, the outrage right now is taking, in some places, a racist form. The Daily Show was good on this point: yes, white people are losing. Admit it and get over it. It's kick off was a clip from the horrible Glen Beck: Obama's basic principle is reparations.

The racial politics at work might account in part for the failed outrage around the bailouts--bailouts meant that white people were still ahead, were winning, were on tops. Same with outrage fail over bonuses and the general Wall Street pillage: done by white people so still part of white hegemony (class struggle has always been ruptured by racism in the US). But, with health care, the basic affective dimension is that the white winners are having to pay for black and immigrant losers. This means that the worried whites are dealing with the barely repressed knowledge of their economic misery--their tax dollars paying out banks--and with seemingly undeserving black people, who are going to get something for nothing.

So from the perspective of middle whites, everyone enjoys--gets something for nothing, sets some kind of excessive jouissance--but them. This links to one of the biggest myths in the US: that people want everyone to succeed; the truth is that people don't want universal health care because they want some people to suffer, they want to have more than others, they are actually ok with folks dying for lack of health care. Positing death panels is a way of displacing the knowledge that we are the death panels.