Attention Span: The Philippines

I know that the modern attention span can be short. I seem to need a constant stream of new and unrelated trivialities to satisfy my synapses. A disease of modernity? Blame it on TV or MTV in particular? I don’t know, probably. I doubt that my peasant ancestors had the same problem watching the root vegetables grow and preparing for the seasonal changes.

Still, it is remarkable that Iraq has fallen off the pages and screens of the major news outlets as quickly and determined as it has. Conspiracy? The immediacy of the recent election reality show? The creeping “oh shit” realization of many on the economy has finally hit home?

Patrick Cockburn reports that the US is holding a $50 billion dollar extortion brief over the heads of the Iraqi “government” and they still won’t bite on the deal to allow 50 permanent military bases, no control over their own borders or air space, etc. The deal would codify a colonial relationship with Iraq as real in its own way as the one the US had with the Philippines.

Stretching our attention span all the way back to 1898 and the Philippines may be asking a lot, but it’s a pretty good place to start for the story of US imperialism. Back then even the Philippine bank notes had an American stamped on them. These days tact requires a little more subtlety although I have a feeling the American dollar goes further than the new dinar in Iraq (which is not even exchanged by Iraqi banks). The US only paid about $20 million (payable to Spain) for those unfortunate islands. A big mark up on property in the last century, who knows what the total cost of the attempted Iraq colony will be but with the cost of oil these days….

A huge swath of US public opinion and discourse can’t remember last week let alone the last century but we have been here before, in different ways for sure, but with certain economic truths remaining constant in the story. Just about the first time was in the Philippines and we are lucky that Mark Twain was alive to see it and comment on it. Twain’s anti-imperialist writings continue to be some of the most powerful written. A certain, modern hypocrisy is necessary for the imperial projects of “democracies”. Read Twain and turn on NPR; he would have nailed them.  Oh, and the US is, of course, still in the Philippines.

“We have bought some islands from a party who did not own them; with real smartness and a good counterfeit of disinterested friendliness we coaxed a confiding weak nation into a trap and closed it upon them; we went back on an honored guest of the Stars and Stripes when we had no further use for him and chased him to the mountains; we are as indisputably in possession of a wide-spreading archipelago as if it were our property; we have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag

“And so, by these Providences of God—the phrase is the government’s, not mine—we are a World Power; and are glad and proud, and have a back seat in the family. With tacks in it. At least we are letting on to be glad and proud; it is the best way. Indeed, it is the only way. We must maintain our dignity, for people are looking. We are a World Power; we cannot get out of it now, and we must make the best of it.”

Mandel, Wheen, Lenin, Marx

Crisis, over production and credit

I am currently reading Francis Wheen’s Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography. It has strengths and weaknesses.  It is rich in character and sense of time and place.  Some of the books’ weaknesses are pretty profound. There are plenty of good Marxist reviews out there. Google them.

I would like to propose, for future reference, that you cannot write about Lenin unless you have actually read Lenin…and in context.  Lenin’s politics were the opposite of haughty elitism; one can not say that of most of his detractors.  I have a feeling that people will turn once again to Lenin as they seem to have started towards Marx as the workers’ movement finds its feet and reorients itself to power and its consequences.  The vistas opened up by State and Revolution, for example, are as emancipatory as any in Marx and Engels.  We will come to need our Lenin again; the experience of him and his generation is too rich in lessons, both negative and positive, for us to ignore.   Why would we wish too?

Still, this thin, welcome, volume is a nice introduction to the character and formation of Marx’s masterpiece. For an introduction into what Das Kapital actually says I recommend Mandel’s Introduction to Volume I in the Penguin Edition.

One of the finest Marxist economists of the 20th Century was Ernest Mandel. His studies and work rightly gained him enormous influence in the New Left and beyond. He never lost sight of certain central propositions of Marx that others, including accomplished Marxists, did. This anchor allowed him to go further than many in developing new ideas in the materialist approach to economy. He is miles ahead of Wheen in getting this stuff because, unlike Wheen, Mandel was a revolutionary. As such he understood the dialectic of learning includes action.

Here Mandel comments on the origins of capitalism’s routine and violent crises. It is entirely relevant, even necessary, for us to absorb and educate ourselves anew on these issues. I have been trying over the last years to make a determined study of Marx’s economic writings. It’s my conviction that the revolutionary left ought to spend a good deal more time than it does explaining just how capitalism works. To paraphrase the increasingly whacked, formerly Maoist now strictly cult of Avakian: “Marx Now, More than Ever”

So a little Ernest on this rainy Tuesday morning….

“The ups and downs of the rate of profit during the business cycle do not reflect only the gyrations of the output/disposable income relation; or of the ‘organic composition of capital’. They also express the varying correlation of forces between the major contending classes of bourgeois society, in the first place the short-term fluctuations of the rate of surplus-value reflecting major victories or defeats of the working class in trying to uplift or defend its standard of living and its working conditions. Technological progress and labour organisation ‘rationalisations’ are capital’s weapons for neutralizing the effects of these fluctuations on the average rate of profit and on the rate of capital accumulation.

“In general, Marx rejected any idea that the working class (or the unions) ‘cause’ the crisis by ‘excessive wage demands’. He would recognise that under conditions of overheating and ‘full employment’, real wages generally increase, but the rate of surplus-value can simultaneously increase too. It can, however, not increase in the same proportion as the organic composition of capital. Hence the decline of the average rate of profit. Hence the crisis.

“But if real wages do not increase in times of boom, and as they unavoidably decrease in times of depression, the average level of wages during the cycle in its totality would be such as to cause even larger overproduction of wage goods, which would induce an even stronger collapse of investment at the height of the cycle, and in no way help to avoid the crisis.

“Marx energetically rejected any idea that capitalist production, while it appears as ‘production for production’s sake’, can really emancipate itself from dependence on ‘final consumption’ …. While capitalist technology implies indeed a more and more ‘roundabout-way-of-production’, and a relative shift of resources from department II to department I (that is what the ‘growing organic composition of capital’ really means, after all), it can never develop the productive capacity of department I without developing in the medium and long-term the productive capacity of department II too, admittedly at a slower pace and in a lesser proportion. So any medium or long-term contraction of final consumption, or final consumers’ purchasing power, increases instead of eliminates the causes of the crisis….

“Marx visualised the business cycle as intimately intertwined with a credit cycle, which can acquire a relative autonomy in relation to what occurs in production properly speaking. An (over) expansion of credit can enable the capitalist system to sell temporarily more goods that the sum of real incomes created in current production plus past savings could buy. Likewise, credit (over) expansion can enable them to invest temporarily more capital than really accumulated surplus-value … would have enabled them to invest (the first part of the formula refers to net investments; the second to gross investment).

“But all this is only true temporarily. In the longer run, debts must be paid; and they are not automatically paid through the results of expanded output and income made possible by credit expansion. Hence the risk of a Krach, of a credit or banking crisis, adding fuel to the mass of explosives which cause the crisis of overproduction.”

A relatively recent DVD has been released of and about the late Mandel. I recommend it highly. It can be ordered from the States and our colder (and warmer) neighbors to the North at:

Ernest Mandel DVD

P.O. Box 85, Station E,

Toronto, Ontario M6H 4E1 Canada

e-mail: mandeldvd@gmail.com

phone: (416) 537-8925

It’s Obama and it’s all bullshit

Having to think and talk and work around bourgeois elections is the least appetizing job of a leftist. The institutionalized Party duopoly in the US makes it down-right sickening. I already pay way too close attention to the vagaries of US politics. I even watch C-SPAN to make sure that I am right. Here’s the secret to the US political system; it’s all bullshit. Piles of it. So here goes only a thought or two.

The primaries are finally over. Now we have to endure 5 months of the Presidential elections. I haven’t even wrapped my head around what the possibility of a black President means for the US. It sure means something. While the election is the Democrat’s to lose they might just do it. Obama hasn’t won many States lately and that’s IN the Democrat Party.

He doesn’t seem nearly as strong a candidate as he did to me some months ago. His performance at the AIPAC conference right after his victory was nauseating. His new flag lapel pin, etc. And as unpolitical as US politicians are Barak is still surprisingly light on any discernible platform or ideology. It’s all bullshit.

Hillary will try to save her legacy and position in spite of the considerable damage Club Clinton did to themselves. I, for one, am all for Hillary as Veep. It would put Bill back in Washington with nothing to do and load the administration with the heaviest egos in America. For laughs sake I hope he picks Hillary. It will not happen. He’ll probably pick Larry the Cable Guy to prove his redneck bona fides.

I promised myself I would say something about the morbid McCain. His recent trip to Louisiana to open the campaign wasn’t an accident. He may well pick the new Governor there Bobby Jindal; a pretty hard right Indian American. He’s young, almost half as young as McCain (37) and though he was born into a Hindu family converted to Catholicism. That may be a strike against him with the crazy evangelical set, but he has navigated Biblical waters before in the Louisiana race and did just fine with the local snake handlers. The First Person of Color award on a major party ticket could then be split for posterity’s sake between the two parties.

McCain will play the Iran card as often as he can. Bush and the feeble Olmert are going to assist by upping the rhetoric as well. I wouldn’t count the old buzzard out. He would be just about the most unhinged President we’ve had in a while. John McCain in some sort of rage as Commander in Chief isn’t pleasant to think about. What strange psychological things await a McCain Presidency is any body’s guess.

What a bleak picture for the next 4 years. Obama would be like having Bono for President. Which is more than I can take. McCain’s mad, mad, mad and, at 71, he might survive a whole term though probably not two. Plenty of time to heap more bodies on Bush’s pile.

The crises facing us all are so severe they cannot be solved within the capitalist framework; their origins lie in capitalism’s dynamic.  These candidates don’t propose to treat the symptoms, reforms, of the disease, that is killing us and our planet of residence let alone the disease.  “Change” is not even reform when Obama says it. He lives in a post-reform world. It’s all bullshit.

Notes

Good riddance to the Nepalese monarchy. While the guillotine may have gone out of style a century ago there are occasions where it ought, in the right hands, to be wheeled back out for an encore performance. In fact I have a few names to add to the set list…

Olmert is trying to stave off the inevitable by making it seem that he is leading the country to “peace”. It wont work. There are too many petty ambitions at play in the small world of the Israeli political elite to allow Olmert to continue. Livni, Barak and Netanyahu all have their eyes on the prize and will twist the knife at the first opportune moment…

Dien Bien Phu; the words conjure up a whole set of thoughts in my mind.  A man who left an indelible mark on his country and the world in the 20th century turns a hearty 97. He led armies that defeated several imperial legions and toppled the American Empire in Southeast Asia. Vo Nguyen Giap, a son of landless peasants, saw a good deal of his family executed by the French (his sister-in-law by guillotine). He joined the Communist Party in 1939, became Defense Minister in liberated North Vietnam and organized the military defense of Vietnam from US aggression.  For this he has our sincerest gratitude…

The fall of the House of Clinton continues unabated. I have to admit that I am at a loss as to the internal motivations for the Clinton camp to keep going. If they care about the politics they profess, rather than about their “legacy” which is as far as I can tell their one true motivation, they would be over the moon with Obama. Obama has absorbed all of the key elements of the neo-liberal Clinton years and then some. He is the new-New Democrat.

If the empire were smart they would gladly put him forward as the new, post-Bush face. Of course, a Judean peasant would be hard pressed to say that Hadrian was a better emperor than Caligula. And the US empire holds more Judean peasants than the Romans could ever dream of…

Harvey Korman has died at 81. His Hedley Lamarr in Brook’s Blazing Saddles was almost perfect. Call me a little stodgy for 36 but The Carol Burnett show is still one of the best comedy skit shows of all time. Korman and Tim Conway’s constant struggle to keep it together during the more ridiculous moments on the show were golden. I smile thinking about it now. Thanks for the smiles Harvey. Here’s the classic dentist scene between the two…

Topper Headon at 53; This Long Holiday Weekend’s Musical Birthdays

No I don’t have bloggers bloc (well maybe) - I am just finding the political developments of the last week too depressing to write about- so thought I’d use the long holiday weekend to give birthday salutations to certain musicians who’ve made some of the music that kept me going in one way or another. I never thought Topper would outlast Joe. We all throw a dart when we’re born. Some write like Joe and some have small physical defects in their hearts. Some live like Keith Moon…and live. Topper is still with us and the Clash will never not be. Topper’s drums are often, in this totally lay opinion, way overlooked as a source of the Clash’s power. A nimble Buddy Miles he pounds it out. There’s not enough to say of the Clash so I wont. Here’s Topper slamming into the beginning of Tommy Gun from 1978.

John Fogerty at 63

CCR- The greatest American rock band. Fogerty’s singular voice, songcraft and vivid proletarian imagination defined a mythical American South that feels as real and speaks more truthfully than any number of attempts at telling the American story could ever hope to. If songwriting worked like baseball Fogerty hit an unbeatable .900 between 1968 and 70. The list of home runs dominated most of CCR’s catalog with more than a few triples, solid doubles a single or two and never once did they strike out looking. One listen to Effigy (beautifully covered later by Uncle Tupelo) from Willy and the Poor Boys will stand your hair on end as Fogerty takes you on a road trip through an insurrectionary, apocalyptic south. Plantations burning, majorities no longer silent; heavy. CCR with Fortunate Son in 1970. Note to Bruce; class anger isn’t always turned inward or left to fester.

Some folks are born silver spoon in hand,
Lord, dont they help themselves, oh.
It aint me, it aint me, I aint no millionaires son, no.
It aint me, it aint me; I aint no fortunate one, no.