The system we live in is insidiously violent at its very roots. It is based
on violence and backed by violence. We constantly deploy violent
technologies -- cars, factories, electricity plants, planes, rockets,
hydroelectric plants, urban organisation out of all proportion to human
scale, trains, buses, literally explosive and exploding technologies -- as
our mode of living together and relating.
Most of the people who propound the system's benign and banal nature
generally have little knowledge of the kinds of theories-become-policy that
have historically informed and legitimated systemic practice, and which
continue to inform policy throughout the contemporary world. They are also
generally desensitised to the violence of our social Being.
Those who celebrate the virtues of system without recognoising these facts
are really just letting us that they do quite nicely from it, thank you
very much.
The systemic problems are categorical in many respects. We lack the ability
to shake off the mercantilist categories of land, labour, capital etc. In
other respects, it is just pure viciousness and the unwillingness of people
in power to give it up. At another level, it's a matter of cyclical
paranoia engendered by trade dependency (i.e., the lack, perceived or
otherwise, of basic levels of self-sufficiency).
The consumption "footprint" of a US citizen is about 6 hectares. Australia
is about 80% of that.
Following are some examples of economically driven "foreign policy" theory
from the last 250 years of history which show how little things have really
changed:
In whatever form it is expressed or practiced, current foreign policy
theory and practice, as informed by mercantilist, classical, and neoliberal
economic theories, will invariably lead to a heavy dependency on -- indeed
an imperative for -- massive violence in direct proportion to surplus
population.
By the way, it may or may not surprise people to know that I am a lecturer
in a Business School. I'm not saying that to show my relative legitimacy in
respect of anybody else, but to position myself in relation to my own
discourse.
***
Late Mercantilist theory goes like this:
"[S]ince the introduction of the new artillery of powder guns, &c., and the
discovery of wealth in the Indies, &c. war is become rather an expense of
money than men, and success attends those that can most and longest spend
money: whence it is that prince's [sic] armies in Europe are become more
proportionable to their purses than to the number of their people; so that
it uncontrollably follows that a foreign trade managed to best advantage,
will make our country so strong and rich, that we may command the trade of
the world, the riches of it, and consequently the world itself." (Lord
Bolingbroke, 1752).
This statement overlaps historically with early Liberal theory
"Money is not, properly speaking, one of the subjects of commerce; but only
the instrument which men have agreed upon to facilitate the exchange of one
commodity for another. It is none of the wheels of trade: It is the oil
which renders the motion of the wheels more smooth and easy. If we consider
any one kingdom by itself, it is evident, that the greater or less plenty
of money is of no consequence...
[…]
It is indeed evident, that money is nothing but the representation of
labour and commodities, and serves only as a method of rating or estimating
them." (Hume 1752)
Hume's, apparently, is a diametrically opposed view of money to that of
late mercantilism. For Hume, money is not one of the subjects [active
agents PG] of commerce; it is merely oil for the wheels of trade; and the
greater or less plenty of money is of no consequence. Money, apparently,
does not matter to Hume. It is merely the representative of labour and
commodities, serving only to rate or estimate them. Hume undermines the
point he is trying to make. If money can represent, rate, and estimate - in
short, evaluate - labour and commodities, then Bolingbroke remains correct:
those who control the meaning of wealth, including its "officially"
recognised expression, and the production of such forms, actually command
labour - human life - because it is they who have the means of estimating
the worth of various forms of living activity (labour) and the products
thereof (commodities).
Adam Smith later attempts to redress Hume's theoretical oversight. But he
does so by merely inverting the relationship between money and labour,
thereby transforming human activity into a theoretic species of money:
"Labour was the first price, the original purchase money that was paid for
all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the
wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who
possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is
precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to
purchase or command.
Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power." (Smith WON 1776)
For Smith, labour is a price paid; it purchases all the wealth of the
world. That wealth, in turn, has only as much value as the quantity of
labour it can purchase or command. Thus, wealth is power. And, if the
social expression of wealth is money, then money, in whichever form, still
enjoys its mercantilist status as the master of humanity. We see here that
early Liberal critique fails precisely because it has difficulties casting
off the shackles imposed by the technical categories of mercantilism. It
remains a major fault in most economic theory today and accounts for the
easy and overt resurgence of mercantilist assumptions, especially in US
foreign policy.
Here is Thomas Friedman, best known as an NYT opinionist, but also
influential in foreign policy circles:
"The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -
McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnel Douglas, the builder of the
F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's
technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine
Corps. "Good ideas and technologies need a strong power that promotes those
ideas by example and protects those ideas by winning on the battlefield,"
says the foreign policy historian Robert Kagan. 'If a lesser power were
promoting our ideas and technologies, they would not have the global
currency that they have. And when a strong power, the Soviet Union,
promoted its bad ideas, they had a lot of currency for more than half a
century.'" (Friedman 1999)
Friedman was one of the first to assert the neoliberal, neo-eugenic ideal
that the shifting balance between superpower 'states and "super-empowered
individuals"' is a defining feature of the current era: 'We launched cruise
missiles at an individual [Usama Bin Laden] - as though he were another
nation-state' (1999).
Compare Friedman's statement about trade with the following:
"No economic policy is possible without a sword, no industrialization
without power. Today we have no longer any sword grasped in our fist, how
can we have a successful economic policy? England has fully recognized this
primary maxim in the healthy life of States; for centuries England has
acted on the principle of converting economic strength into political
power, while conversely political power in its turn must protect economic
life. The instinct of self preservation can build up economics, but we
sought to preserve World Peace instead of the interests of the nation,
instead of defending the economic life of the nation with the sword and of
ruthlessly championing those conditions which were essential for the life
of the people".
Guess who this last one is from ...
By the way, check out the press reports here
http://www.counterpunch.org/aftershocks.html, including more from Friedman
about the "super empowered" individual -- in Bolingbroke's time it was the
Princes of Europe; today it is the Captains of Commerce and the Tyrants of
Terror; e.g. Bill Gates vs Usama Bin Laden --- because of the money they
have, they can command massive amounts of human activity in many different
ways --- action at a distance across a "globalised world". And 'the medium
is the message' (M. McLuhan).
"It is at bottom false to say that living labour consumes capital; capital
... consumes the living in the production process.
The more production comes to rest on exchange value ... the more important
do the physical conditions of exchange -- the means of communication and
transport -- become for the costs of circulation. Capital by its nature
drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical
conditions of exchange -- of the means of communication and transport --
the annihilation of space by time -- becomes an extraordinary necessity for
it." (Marx - Grundrisse).
Best regards,
Phil
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