cast away illusions, part one

8/8/2019 Cast Away Illusions, Part One

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INSURGENT ANTHROPOLOGIES:

CAST AWAY ILLUSIONS, PART ONE

By Christopher Carrico

http://ccarrico.wordpress.com

1. THE TEA PARTY AND OTHER PALEO-CONS

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Just as it is ironic for the name of the fight against Western cultural imperialism to beinvoked in defense of oppressive traditions and inherited privilege in the non-Westernworld, it is also ironic for the protection of Western values to be invoked in defense of the social exclusion of (and violence and warfare against) non-Western peoples.

There is no use in denying that for some Europeans (and their descendants in North America, Australia, etc.) a racial worldview in its paleo-conservative form still animatesmuch popular xenophobia, the scapegoating of immigrants, and the justification of military and political-economic imperialism.

There is only so much that progressives can do to dialogue with far right racists.Progressives can continue to articulate the biological facts about race, and continue totestify about the historical and contemporary reproduction of racism and imperialism in



Euro-American societies. Most importantly, progressives can form alliances in anti-racist struggles.

With the rise to prominence of the Tea Party in the United States, and the resurgence of far right nationalisms in Europe, the threat from paleo-conservatism has become far

more pressing than many had imagined with the triumph of liberalism in the latetwentieth century. Just like the racist populisms of the nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies, the paleo-con agenda promotes a notion of democracy that is restricted innational, racial, religious and class terms. Like the Democratic Party before and after the American Civil War, the Tea Party claims to believe in Democracy. Democracy, thatis, for white, property-owning American citizens of European Judaeo-Christian descent.

Whatever fantasies an intellectual like Marcus Garvey may have had about findingcommon ground with white racial separatists, this position is untenable in a world wherethe defense of white privilege remains an important factor in the political economy of

many of the world¶s advanced capitalist nations. By way of racially stratified labor forces, for example, and by way of the relative ease by which wars of aggressionagainst non-white peoples are justified in comparison with wars against the nations of Europe and its settler colonies.

Furthermore, whatever illusions that some American trade unionists might have oncehad that they could hide behind nationalism (ally themselves with nativists in order torestrict wage competition by restricting immigration, boost the American economythrough militarism, etc.) it now seems likely that the new immigrants are the only hopethat the American labor movement has of ever re-building a mass base, and that

militarism has helped to bleed the American economy dry of resources that could havebeen put to far more productive use, and more equitably shared. The struggle of

American laborers (clearer today than ever) is to fight alongside the immigrant laborer for better working conditions ± against the same enemy, the transnational capitalistclass. The struggle to end the War Economy also needs to be seen as inseparablefrom the struggle for economic justice. The old populist and nationalist illusions musttoday be rejected in no uncertain terms.



2 . NEO-CONS AND CLASSICAL LIBERALS

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For much of the neo-conservative and center-right as well, the specter of race stillhaunts its rhetoric. On the surface, and in its public discourse, neo-conservatismconcedes to liberal democratic theory most of its main tenets about equality and

tolerance. But racism haunts the neo-conservative discourse through the use of codedlanguage that white voters and citizens recognize as being statements about race, evenwhen race is not directly mentioned. This discourse has often very clearly shapedpolicy, and in the America that I grew up in, we all knew that talk about crime, drugs,welfare and poverty was talk about race: regardless of the ³color-blind´ language, andregardless of the empirical realities of these social phenomena.

But let¶s set the far right aside for a moment, and take the neo-conservative rhetoric atface value. The Western values that neo-conservatives claim that they are protectingare not the values of ethnocentrism, colonialism, racism and imperialism. Rather, the

values that the neo-cons claim that they are protecting are the values of democracy andreason, whose lineage they trace back to the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, thevalues of universalism, the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and the values of science,progress, equality, liberty and individualism that emerged out of the WesternEnlightenment. All of these, they claim or imply, form the basis of the superiority of

American and Western European values over the backwardness of much of the rest of the world. The values of the non-Western world, according to these views, are often



rooted in blind adherence to repressive traditions, obedience to undemocratic, arbitraryauthority and inherited privilege, resistance to scientific and political progress, tribalism,communalism and conflict based on an attachment to primordial identities, and thesuppression of individualism by conformity to the collective. Samuel Huntingtonarticulated these claims by reference to differences in ³civilizational´ values. Accordingto Huntington, differences in civilizational values often emerged out of differences inreligious heritage: the values of Islamic civilization, Confucian civilization, etc., were saidto be unavoidably headed towards conflict with the above mentioned values of theenlightened West.

For neo-cons, the West is modern in all of the positive senses of this world, and its duty ± its historical mission -- is to remake the rest of the world in its own image. In somesense, the neo-con rhetoric is quite faithful to Liberalism as it was classically conceived.David Harvey has made this quite clear in lectures and public talks where he hasoffered a close analysis of the speeches of George W. Bush, where he has revealed theBush administration¶s affinity to the ideas of classical liberalism.

3 . NEOLIBERAL THEORY

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Anyone who was interested in serious political economic analysis during the yearsimmediately before and after the end of the Cold War, was aware that there wasconsiderable continuity between the policies of the Reagan and George H. W. Bushpresidencies, and the Clinton presidency. Many of us noted during the 1990s that Bill



Clinton seemed to have completed the Reagan revolution: instituting strict welfarereform policies at home, disciplining the labor market through economic policies whichexponentially increased the wealth of Wall Street, while keeping Main Street relativelysecure by offsetting stagnating or declining hourly wages with an increase in workinghours, and an expansion of the availability of consumer credit.

The Clinton administration (albeit with a Republican controlled Congress) helpedgovernment absolve itself of responsibility for the poor and working poor, and helped bigcapital suppress wages, and use the mechanisms of debt to increase its absoluteexploitation of the majority of American workers. Meanwhile, internationally, the Clintonadministration aggressively pursued the interests of American capital, in the name of anew model of globalization, where a rising tide would lift all boats, and the invisible handof the market would bring not only economic prosperity, but also, freedom, liberty, andhappiness to the world¶s poor as well as to the world¶s rich.

Unfortunately, the real situation internationally was much like the domestic scene writlarge. Big capital, particularly finance capital, experienced a rapid increase in its power worldwide. In the developed world, finance capital often flourished at the expense of industrial capital. In some parts of the developing world (in what dependency theoristsonce called capitalism¶s ³semi-periphery´) finance capital leveraged the rapiddevelopment of industrial capital, and the consolidation of regional economic blocs andthe regional centralization of capitalist class power. These processes could be seen inEast Asia, in India, in South Africa, and in Brazil, for instance. Other areas of thedeveloping world, however, became more truly peripheral to the world¶s capitalistmarkets, and whole economies were devastated with a stroke of the pen by the WorldBank and the IMF, coupled with the aggressive pursuit by core capitalist countries of theagendas of their own capitalist classes at the expense all other considerations.

This era, which we have come to call neo-liberal (according to its supporters as well asto many of its detractors) was said to be one in which the notion of the nation-state wasdeclining in significance, and state-based regulation and intervention in the economywas said to be counter-productive and a barrier to economic growth. The example of the triumph of Western capitalism over the Soviet Union, and the collapse of Soviet-style centralized and bureaucratized state socialism was seen, in these years just after the fall of the Soviet Bloc, to be all the empirical evidence that was necessary to provethat only free markets, laissez-faire capitalism, and the removal of state regulationscould create the environment in which dynamic economic growth was possible.

In A Brief History of Neoliberalism , David Harvey (2005: 64-67) characterizes theneoliberal theory of the state, as pioneered by theorists such as Friedrich Hayek, andMilton Friedman, as having the following characteristics:



1. ³ Acc ordi ng to theory, the neoliberal state should favour stro ng i ndividual property ri g hts, the rule of law, a nd the i nstitutio ns of freely fu nc tion i ng markets a nd free trade .´

2. Also according to the theory, divestment of state ownership of assets,

and privatization of nearly all state-owned industries and resources wasconsidered imperative to the proper functioning of dynamic economies.

3. With the emphasis on free markets, also came an emphasis onpersonal and individual responsibility, and the subsequent withdraw of thestate from concerns over ³ welfare, edu c atio n , health c are, a nd eve n

pe nsio ns ´.

4. All barriers to the free movement of capital needed to be swept aside.

5. Finally, and some would argue most ominously, democracy wasviewed with some suspicion in countries that did not have developedeconomies and a robust middle class. As in the case of some of theclassical theories of liberal democracy, neo-liberal theorists are concernedthat the free functioning of the liberal economy be protected from thesometimes irrational influences of the democratic masses, whosedemands for equality, a social safety net, collective ownership, or nationalprotection could irrationally interfere with the smooth functioning of otherwise ideal liberal capitalist economies.

While these theories, for the economists, formed an internally consistent whole, therewere a series of contradictions inherent in their effects in the real world that havecontributed to the economic crisis which the world has experienced from 2007 until thepresent.

Of particular interest to me, is one contradiction of the neoliberal state that wasapparent prior to the presidency of George W. Bush, which events since 9/11 haveexacerbated. That is, while neo-liberal theory emphasizes that The State ought not tointerfere in the economic realm, this rule is unevenly and unequally applied, inpredictable ways, and with predictable consequences. Under neo-liberalism, stateshave been perfectly willing to increasingly use their coercive powers, not to bring theexcesses of capitalism into check. Rather, under the neo-liberalism, the state hasincreasingly used coercion and force to act on behalf of c apital , in order to disciplinelabor and agents of dissent in the capitalist metropole a nd peripheries, but also,increasingly, to attempt to discipline any challenge to the continued dominance of worldcapitalism under American hegemony in the 21 st century.



These contradictions, which so many progressives had hoped would be resolved under the Obama administration, to more ³moderate´ capitalist policies such as those of Keynesianism or of a return to the welfare state policies of the mid-20 th century.Unfortunately, most of the tendencies towards the coercive use of the state on behalf of capital have continued, and I would argue have even been expanded and deepened,under the administration of Barack Obama. My next blog, Part Two of ³Cast AwayIllusions´ will further explore the contradictions which have led the state, under theleadership of Obama, to behave as a bully on behalf of Big Capital, and to continue topursue, on the international stage, a doomed policy of American Full SpectrumDominance.

cast away illusions, part one

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