Category: Violence

Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century

I am about 2/3rds of the way through The Long Twentieth Century, which has been a slog, but also worth the effort. I will get back to the “life” stuff in subsequent posts, but want to pick up on three points from Arrighi today.

One: Arrighi is a fairly orthodox Marxist in that he firmly believes that economics drives history and, in particular, offers the explanatory causes for all armed conflicts. Even more fundamentally, he believes that the exigencies of profit are the main drivers of all economic activity. There is a logic to how and where profit can be made, as well as cycles that move capital from seeking profit through trade to seeking it through financial transactions. Individual actors in capitalism have few, if any, options. They must do what profit demands in any particular situation. The iron laws of capitalism rule.

Interestingly, however, Arrighi recognizes that no profit could even be made if all actors only pursued profit. Thus, he must posit that some people are otherwise motivated. If everyone were motivated by profit, trade would come to a standstill because no one would make trades unless able to make a profit—and profit, finally, is a zero-sum game. It is zero-sum because, unlike the fantasized barter exchange that is equally advantageous because I need eggs and your need clothes, the introduction of money translates all exchanges into the same currency. I only make a profit if the eggs I exchange for clothes are worth less in monetary terms than the sum you give me, part of which I expend on clothes, the rest of which I pocket as profit. (Kiernan had a friend once who refused to sell any properties in Monopoly because his older sister had so consistently taken advantage of him in the past. The result was an endless game, because no one could ever go bankrupt if not monopolies ever got formed. That might prove a functioning economy, but it certainly isn’t a capitalist one.)

So what motivates people besides profit? Arrighi answer (which, unfortunately, he doesn’t develop at all) is “power and prestige.” War provides a consistent boon for those seeking profit—and most wars, he seems to think, are actually motivated by the need to protect or to expand sources of profit. But he does seem to admit that aggrandizement, the quest for power and status apart from profit, can also motivate conflict, competition, and war. And the profit seekers are more than glad to, in Country Joe’s words, “supply the army with the tools of the trade.” War is not only a great consumer of merchandise (manufactured goods) but also a major source of debt (i.e. of profits for financial capital). The potlatch that is war serves profit precisely because it does not seek profit itself, representing a different desire instead, one that cold-eyed profit seekers can exploit.

There are, of course, other ways to seek status besides war—and that leads us to topic number two.

Two: We are familiar with “crises of overproduction,” the paradoxical creation of poverty during economic downturns where the problem is not a scarcity of goods, but a surfeit of them. Less often noted is the problem of a surfeit of capital, a crisis of “over-accumulation.” Arrighi is particularly good on this species of crisis, one that seems particularly acute in our day and age. For starters, the two types of crises can be (although they need not be) related. When markets are saturated, when there is not sufficient demand to meet supply and hence production is slowed because there is too much stuff around and no place to sell it, then capital might also begin to accumulate for lack of any place to invest it. You can’t put the capital to work because there is no need for increased production.

In this situation, capital will move from production to financial markets. Arrighi, in fact, believes that this movement from relying on commodities for profits to relying on selling money to make profits is the grand cycle of capitalism, with the movement to finance capital in the world’s dominant economy—first the Italian city-states, then the Dutch, then the British, then the US—marking the moment of transition from one site of dominance to the next. The newcomer begins by taking over production from its predecessor until it, too, exhausts the profit capacities of production and moves into finance. In this vision, the US, having moved from production to finance somewhere in the 1970s is in decline, with Asia bidding to become the next hegemonic capitalist site.

One possibility, then, is for capital to move from the former hegemonic site of production (the US) to the new one (China). But, for fairly obvious reasons, capital is not entirely mobile. For one thing, nationalist sentiments weigh against allowing the importation of too much “foreign capital.” There are also risk factors: the worry that foreign lands might not be stable. And there are transaction costs of moving into a different legal/banking regime and working in a different currency.

For various reasons, then, some (at least) excess capital will desire to stay home. And that leads to bubbles and to creative “financial instruments” and to Ponzi schemes and other forms of fraud. The bubbles, I would argue, are always often tied to status. The inflated value of the “bubbled thing” (if I can invent a term) relies not simply on its supposed ability to be cashed in for a certain sum, but also for the prestige of owning such an expensive, highly valued commodity. Currently, real estate and art works clearly play this role. They are great places to park excess money, because they can be rationalized as investments, not just frivolous spending. But owning a New York apartment or a painting by Monet is also conspicuous consumption. More bang for the buck: prestige plus a profit to be made.

Another factor drives bubbles, I think. The search for safety. That seems paradoxical since bubbles contain enormous risks—if we believe that value must, in the final instance, be tied back to something “real.” A very different dynamic is at work, I think. The world is a dangerous, unstable place—and seems more dangerous every day. (That fear of its dangerousness is, most likely, pretty constant across time. There are always ample reasons for fear.) The money being parked in New York and London and Vancouver real estate and in paintings by the masters is money being siphoned out of risky environments and salted away in places perceived as safe. The American who buys a high-end New York apartment can’t find a better place to invest his excess capital. The Chinese citizen who does the same is squirreling away his excess capital in a safe place. Both acquire the prestige of having a place in New York.

The quest for status does lend itself to expenditures that are pretty much complete financial losses: high-end clothes and accessories, fancy vacations. There is money to be made in the luxury trades and never more so than in times of slack production and excess capital. Education is a funny hybrid in such times. It is clearly a prestige item—the fancy prep schools, the elite colleges—but can also be rationalized as an investment. It is hard to know if the return on investment (given the differential in initial outlay) for going to Harvard exceeds that of going to Grand Rapid State—mostly because the place from which the respective students start is so vastly different that the assessment of eventual outcomes (in terms of income or of other measures of economic well-being) cannot isolate the specific contribution of the degree. But people love to spend money on things they think can also be justified as “investments.” One need only look at the immense sums American parents are spending on sports training/competition for their children, justified as possibly leading to that child getting a scholarship to college.

In sum, profit depends on their being other powerful motives that overrule profit for some people. As Marx put it on the more basic level of the material needs for subsistence, capitalism is in the business of turning your needs into weaknesses that it can exploit. The whole thing doesn’t work if there aren’t some people who do not pursue profit relentlessly and to the exclusion of all else.

Three: Arrighi argues that a major innovation of the American century, the time of its economic hegemony which encompasses the “long twentieth century” of his title, is the modern corporation. In particular, the modern corporation—think Ford, Exxon, Kodak, Ma Bell—combined mass production with mass marketing. These companies used the fact of being first in producing some product to gain massive market share by aggressively organizing its distribution and advertising operations. Newcomers (i.e. potential competitors), Arrighi argues, did not face overwhelming technical obstacles to produce products with the same efficiency as the first-comers. What the newcomers lacked was a way to crack into the market in sufficient volume to underwrite the capital costs of mass production. Organizing the market in ways that orient it toward one’s firm is equally as necessary as establishing an efficient mode of production. Where the two do not co-exist, the firm will not thrive.

On the one hand, this assertion still seems true. Apple and Google and Amazon are prime examples. They were, in some ways, technical innovators, although there were certainly personal computer makers in the 1980s who were Apple’s equals, and Amazon never did anything all that innovative technically. In Arrighi’s words, “the transnational corporations that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . . . were strictly business organizations [i.e. were not state/business hybrids like the East India Company and South Africa Company of the British hegemonic period] specialized functionally in a particular line of business across multiple territories and jurisdictions” (250-51). They integrated “the process of mass production with those of mass distribution within a single organization” (248).

It occurs to me that a similar “crowding out” operates in politics. The difficulties of forming a “third part” or a new lobbying firm or a new social movement are enhanced by the presence of highly organized players already on the field. Thus, for example, there is no strong anti-NRA group. MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) might be a counter-example—and provide a model for those in favor of gun control to follow. Of course, there was hardly a strong lobby for drunk driving, the way that the NRA is a strong lobby against gun control. In any case, the advantages of being there first are only secured by also being organized. An organized player in the field only attracts more resources by virtue of their power and visibility. And, for that reason, I think (as has been a theme of so many of my musings) that the anarchist love of leaderless, horizontal, non-organized action so prevalent in many radical circles today is a losing strategy. Organization (money, boots on the ground, a well-articulated set of objectives, and a coherent strategy for advancing toward those objectives, a strategy followed consistently by the organization’s members) will defeat an amorphous protest group every time.

And yet, on the other hand, the whole point of Boltanksi and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism is that the monster corporations of the middle twentieth century are dinosaurs, too cumbersome to respond quickly and adroitly to rapidly changing conditions on the ground. IBM is just one poster child (GM and GE are others) for the supposed liabilities of the big firm. Paired down, focused firms like Toyota, Southwest Airlines, and Dell computers can take on the big boys—and win—because they can keep costs down and quality high. It is hardly that these successful new firms are unorganized. But the organization is highly decentralized; responsibility for different aspects of the operation are widely dispersed—including, in many cases, to other firms who, by way of contract, provide key support services or even key component parts. Such “outsourcing,” whether overseas or domestic, drives down costs, even as it increases accountability.

In politics, then, aspirant newcomers might want to consider how to play the disadvantages of size against the established players, the existing parties. I must admit I am not sure how that would work. For all the supposed “down-sizing” of the big dinosaurs in order to become leaner (and definitely meaner), it is not as if market share has changed all that drastically. Coke and Pepsi still dominate the soft drink business; the big breweries buy up craft breweries almost as quickly as Apple and Google buy out any possible competitors. I guess I would say that today’s firms are less uptight than the GM of 1950 about the need to do everything in-house, the need to be the employer of record of everyone whose work was needed to make the company function. But today’s firms are even more obsessed with controlling the market. Hence the endless customer satisfaction research.

Enough for now. The big question still looms—as it always does for me. What causes (there were obviously several) explain the “return of ruthless capitalism.” Why were labor costs and profit levels that were deemed satisfactory in 1960 were no longer acceptable to capitalists in 1980?

Biopolitics and Racism

One quick note as an addendum to the first entry on Biopower/Biopolitics. If we think of the diet and exercise industries, we can identify a non-state source of pressure on selves to toe the line as regards health, longevity etc. And that pressure feeds fairly directly into the creation of markets to be exploited by commercial interests. So biopower is hardly confined to states.

The racism argument, made briefly by Foucault and treated at greater length by Esposito in Bios, is a fairly straightforward version of the claim that an attention to preserving life leads to the infliction of death. (We can see here a version of the “perversity” style of argument that Hirschman sees as dear to conservatives: namely the claim that efforts to do A—in this case to preserve life—in fact lead directly to an outcome that is not-A—the exact opposite of A—an increase in deaths.)

Basically, the claim is that efforts to preserve life will, inevitably, lead to identifying various threats to life, various agents that will cause life to cease. Those agents are, then, slated for preventive destruction. A simple case would be pesticides. In order the insure the health and life of my crops I must kill the pests (insects/molds/funghi/weeds etc.) that threaten the crops. Esposito shows how this logic feeds directly into Nazi thinking. The Jews were pests that threatened the health of the German people—and hence had to be exterminated. The killing of Jews was persistently justified in the name of health. Similarly, Nazi eugenics and euthanasia were understood in relation to a notion of “lives not worth living,” i.e. life itself was judged according to criteria that designated some lives as not up to the mark. (I will devote a future post to this conundrum since it brings up the issue of old age so directly).

Judith Butler’s recent work has focused just here: how is it that some lives are deemed more valuable than others? Or, as she puts it, whose life is grievable? We could translate from there over to Martha Nussbaum: how come only some get to have a flourishing life? What are the criteria by which some are denied access to the necessaries that sustain life? One criteria can be racist—whole categories of people are outside the circle of the worthy.

One question then: is it “inevitable” (a word Esposito loves) that protecting life requires designating enemies to life that must be eliminated. This might be called the negative path. There is also a positive path (the one I always associate with Dickens’s Great Expectations.) Here the realization is that the sustaining of life can only come at the expense of other lives. We all must eat—and so some living things must be eaten. At that basic level, as Dickens sees it, we are all criminals. Being alive is just proof that you have participated in the killing of something. Life is paired inextricably with death—and the only two alternatives are self-sacrifice or the sacrifice of the not-self. No innocent life.

The problem with a claim that large is that it seems universal—an absolute condition of life everywhere and everywhen. But Arendt, Taylor, Foucualt and the rest are trying to make a claim specific to modernity, a claim that there was some kind of fundamental shift, characterized as the moment that the polity took the preservation of life as its chief focus and justification. And if racism is a modern phenomenon (as many historians and theorists have argued), then there would have to be a connection of that racism with the new prioritization of life. I don’t see the connection, or at least am not convinced that is the connection at work here. Racism, certainly as it pertains to both Jews and Africans, is economically convenient in the European exploitation of the non-European world. So I don’t see that we need biopower to explain racism. What seems qualitatively different about Nazi racism is its roots in a discourse of health and its economic non-rationality. The wholesale killing of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade was a cost of doing business, but killing Africans was not the direct purpose. There was no economic gain to be had from a dead African. But the Nazis (beyond stealing the resources of the Jews) had little to gain economically from genocide. Their logic (if we can even use that term) does seem to refer to some kind of notion of disease, infection, immunization etc. They were not about sustaining life economically, but about protecting life against dire external threats.

What gets left out, it seems to me, of Esposito’s mostly convincing account of the Nazis is hatred. To focus on the “logic” that underlines their genocidal program is to miss the hatred that animates it, that renders killing a positive pleasure, an act in which one self-righteously indulges a most satisfying sense of vindication, of revenge, of seeing justice done. Can those feelings really be traced back to a desire to preserve life? Seems more the idea that these others (the Jews for Nazis, the blacks for the white Trump supporters that Arlie Hochshild describes in her book) have stolen something that is rightfully mine? And it isn’t life they have stolen: it is dignity, recognition, legitimacy, status. They seem to be thought of as more “worthy” (along some dimension) than me in the current social milieu. They get all the favors. More in the “Mom always loved you best” mode than in terms of direct threats to my life. Injustice, not fear for one’s vey life, is the motor, I would say. A mixture of envy and indignation.

So I am not yet ready to buy that a focus on life as the highest good necessarily has the perverse outcome of increasing violence, of increasing the state’s proclivity to inflict death.

Another problem is Thucydides, or Steven Pinker. It is just not obvious that modern states inflict death at any higher rate than premodern ones. Pinker, of course, argues that violence is on the decline, that the obvious result of the Enlightenment movement toward notions of equality is exactly the result we have gotten: less wholesale killing. In other words, the new valuation of life, which includes extending the right to life to the lowest born, did not have a perverse effect but had, in fact, the effects that we would predict to most directly follow. Valuing life leads to a better deal for more people. Placing power at the service of life leads to longer lives and fewer violent (human-inflicted) deaths.

The deep resistance of the left to all narratives of progress, to any suggestion that modernity is (at least in some ways) better than what preceded it, has (I would venture to guess) multiple causes. A hatred of complacency mixes with a fear that we will settle for a half loaf where we should be striving for a full one. But there is a deep incoherence in rejecting all ideas of progress in the name of a standard—the full loaf—yet to be reached. A standard gives you something to measure by. And once you are in the realm of measurement, then you have established a line along which progress can be tracked. I guess Foucault could retreat to saying that all societies are unfree; they are just unfree is different ways. But, even then, we would be tempted to judge some variants of unfreedom as more onerous than others. Make the struggle against unfreedom as local and specific as you like; the struggle is still going to be toward something—either toward the removal of some form of oppression or the installation of some less onerous way of doing/arranging things. We know better and worse in many circumstances—and all we need to some idea of progress is some notion of better and worse.

In short, I am hardly going to deny the violence of modern states. But I am not convinced that that violence is generated or augmented by a devotion to the value of life. I am much more inclined to say that the value placed on life is a brake (yes, a mostly, although not entirely, ineffective one) on even more violence. Mass anti-war movements, large-scale dissent from a state’s war-making, is a modern phenomenon. That we are even having this conversation seems to testimony to a transvaluation of values that can, conveniently, be described in terms of a heightened reverence for life.

Similarly, racism still seems to me best combatted by a generalized valuation of life. Two things seem involved here: one, identifying something we value that is shared across whatever boundaries our categories can fabricate or our cultures erect, and two, identifying that shared thing’s vulnerability in relation to the fact that it can quite easily be lost. Life’s value is established vis a vis the death we aim to delay, especially in relation to keeping humans from inflicting death upon one another. I just don’t see how that worthy goal somehow (perversely) ends up causing more deaths than would have occurred if we didn’t set life at such a high value.

More thoughts about all this to come, including looking at Arendt and Taylor more specifically, trying to think about the logic of sacrifice, and questions about whether some lives are not worth living.

Offered without Comment

“The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all that they have. That is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may be coerced) by the population-control programs of the civilized. . . . The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their ‘vital interests’ are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the ‘sanctity’ of human life, or the ‘conscience’ of the civilized world. There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer is not to prevent the child’s arrival, but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the ‘vital interest’ of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child” (James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, 16-17).

“The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic–a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall. The question can scarcely be said to exist among the wretched, who know, merely, that they are wretched and who bear it day by day–it is a mistake to suppose that the wretched do not know that they are wretched; nor does this question exist among the splendid, who know, merely, that they are splendid, and who flaunt it, day by day; it is a mistake to suppose that the splendid have any intention of surrendering their splendor. An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger: the stranger’s presence making you the stranger, less to the stranger than to yourself. Identity seems to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self; in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes” (The Devil Finds Work, 79-80).

“last night I had a recurrence of that dream which, as I told Mother Sugar [the protagonist’s analyst], was the most frightening of all . . . When she asked me to ‘give a name to it’ (to give it form), I said it was a nightmare about destruction. Later, when I dreamed it again, and she said: Give it a name, I was able to go further: I said it was a nightmare about the principle of spite, or malice–joy in spite. . . . [T]he principle or element took shape in an old man, almost dwarf-like . . . . This old man smiled and giggled and snickered, was ugly, vital and powerful, and again, what he represented was pure spite, malice, joy in a destructive impulse. . . . And the creature was always powerful, with an inner vitality which I knew was caused by a purposeless, undirected, causeless spite. It mocked and jibed and hurt, wished murder, wished death. And yet it was always vibrant with joy” (Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, 456-457).

Dilemmas of Violence

Reading Jane Addams’ essays in my on-going exploration of reflections on violence and non-violence. Two (fairly) quick observations.

First, Addams writes that “an ideal government is merely an adjustment between men concerning their mutual relations toward those general matters which concern them all” (3). To that end, “organization is [our] only hope, but it must be kept distinct from militarism, which can never be made a democratic instrument” (3).

Politics, in short, is a consequence of humans being social animals. We must find modus vivendi, ways of managing to live together that foster, at the minimum, survival of the species and, at the maximum, the flourishing of members of the species. Ideally, flourishing will be available to all—but that can only be achieved through collective action, through cooperation.

Thus, politics requires organization, making arrangements and then striving to maintain them. In the usual formulation, it is assumed that there will always be outliers who threaten any particular arrangement, people against whom that arrangement will have to be defended. There is also the problem of blood feuds. Classically, the origin of the state is attributed to one of these two motives: protection of social arrangements (particularly property) against threats internal and external—or the establishment of a legal system that takes vengeance out of the hands of private citizens. The argument then goes that the establishment of the state leads to a reduction in violence because the state acts to suppress violent actions through deterrence and punishment. Certainly, Steven Pinker takes this view in his book on violence.

The nay-sayers to that view, however, point out that organization as represented by the state greatly increases the scope and effectiveness of violence perpetuated by state actors as contrasted to isolated individuals. Armies are far more violent than criminals; wars far more devastating than family feuds. “War is the health of the state,” writes Randolph Bourne. Even if there is pre-state violence, the formation of states to restrain it introduces a cure that is worse than the disease. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Violence is just baked in. And we don’t even get to pick our poison since the state has become (just about everywhere) triumphant.

Back to Addams then: one way to express the problem is to say: how do we get the benefits of organization and cooperation without the militarism?

Worth mentioning, I guess, that there is a school of anthropologists and primatologists (I am just beginning to read their work) who say violence isn’t baked in and that the archaeological record does not indicate much violence among humans prior to the Neolithic Age (about 10,000 years ago, a mere blip in the evolutionary time scale), while studies of our primate cousins also suggest violence is rare. For these writers, the state is the culprit, not human nature. But not clear how that helps, since it is hard to imagine a return to a pre-state human condition.

Second thing in Addams. In her attempts to broker a peace during the First World War, she advocated the charming idea of convening an international tribunal that would hear the claims of each nation in the conflict. In other words, each nation would come to the table and say (for example): that we, the British, are at war with Germany because we need this or we object to the Germans doing that. And then the tribunal would judge which claims were legitimate needs or grievances, and which were not. There would follow an international effort to satisfy the legitimate claims.

What is so charming about the idea is that it slyly (I don’t in fact think this was Addams’ intent) reveals how many “war aims” cannot stand the Kantian publicity test, that is could not be acknowledged openly with any faith that others would admit their justice.

But, less charming, is the fact that, by the end of 1915, few of the nations involved in the war would have even been able to articulate what the war was about. As Addams discovered in her many conversations with belligerents on both sides of the contest, the war continued because to end it would be to admit or accept defeat—which was unacceptable not because of any dire consequences that would follow from defeat, but simply because of the humiliation of defeat. In short, the tribunal idea, precisely because it is so irrelevant to the actual causes of the conflict’s perpetuation, indicates just how irrational violence is. The violence is not the means to some end. It does not partake of means/ends rationality at all. It exists in some entirely different register, which we can conveniently call “madness.” But that designation gets us nowhere in trying to explain what is going on.

So my other dilemma concerning violence (in addition to how states both prevent and cause violence) is how to “think” violence when it seems essentially irrational. I want some satisfactory account of the dynamics, motives, and trajectories of that irrationalism.