Force Decides

Israel is currently killing hundreds of people in Gaza.  As they do from time to time.  To make something Abba Eban once said true by simply inverting his meaning: the Israelis never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace.  Though even that is too kind to them.  As even White House senior staff acknowledge, the Israelis don't want peace.  Give them everything they've ever wanted, and it still isn't enough - because what they say they want isn't what they want.  What they really want is to continue the war until they have finally completed the work that David Ben-Gurion left unfinished, and eradicated the Palestinians.  The mindset of Israel is genocidal, and becoming more openly so by the day.

It is now clear to a great many people that what happened to the Native Americans as a result of the institution and independence of the United States of America was a scandal, a holocaust and a tragedy.  The idea is so commonplace it's become a sentimental truism in pop-culture.  Well, Israel had not done very much that America didn't do in the process of getting where it is today.  Israel has shaken off its origin as a colonial possession of the British Empire.  Israel has ethnically cleansed huge swathes of land of the original inhabitants, and then claimed this land for itself.  Israel has repeatedly started wars for territory.  Israel has herded the original inhabitants of its land mass into tiny, racially-segregated reservations.  And so on.  And yet the obvious - that 'what happened' to the Native Americans was terrible - doesn't seem anything like so obvious to a great many people when you're talking about the Palestinians.  People seem able to get past the fact that Native Americans did some godawful things to Americans, putting it - rightly - in the context of the Native American's fight against territorial displacement and dispossession.  Yet Hamas is said to be responsible for the rampage of destruction and slaughter Israel is currently visiting upon the civilians of Gaza, because some people in Gaza have a few relatively meagre weapons which they occasionally have the temerity to use against the nation holding them in a massive concentration camp.  Context be damned.

Clearly, we are more than capable of holding nuanced attitudes to the question of killing people - the problem is that the proper nuances are usually provided for us by people in power.  The nuance allows us to see the sad necessity of killing that is accepted - with a sigh and a tear - by the official goodies, and the utter incommensurable evil of the official baddies.  Sometimes 'we' are even allowed to be the baddies - as long as it was a long time ago, and we're all very sorry now, and nobody defends it (though we all still continue to benefit from it, and do the same things to other people now), and as long as no comparisons are drawn with anything happening today.  We can see that the Native Americans had a context for scalping people, as long as nobody is loopy enough to dare suggesting that perhaps Palestinians have a context for rockets.

Generally speaking, I'm very much against killing people.  Why?  Well, aside from the fact that it simply doesn't appeal to me, I'd be tempted to invoke a somewhat traditional ethical idea going back to Aristotle, which is that morality is about the good and enjoyable and fulfilling life... with the added Socialist wrinkle that everyone should have such a life, and no good life that is dependant upon the curtailment of the lives of others is ultimately justifiable, because the fundamentally social nature of humanity means that the more socially involved we are, the better.  Killing someone is pretty much the ultimate way of curtailing their potential for development, self-creation, enjoyment, and the leading of a good life... which is, by definition, a social life, in society, in which one's contact with others helps them to also lead such a 'good life'.  We end up at the basic question: why is 'good' good?  And we might get somewhere by re-framing the question slightly, making it: why do we want 'happiness'?  And, while I don't pretend that it's a perfect answer, we can probably fall back on a tautology (sometimes tautologies are allowed, via a materialist version of the ontological argument): 'happiness' is what we call that state of being that humans seek.

However, occupied and tyrannised people - like people who are refugees inside the tiny bits of their own country left to them, held under constant siege inside a massive concentration camp, subject to racist laws and persecutions, economically subjugated and constantly harassed, and periodically massacred - have the right to organise their own defence.  Not that many of the rockets do much damage in Israel, certainly when compared to the wholesale slaughter and destruction rained down on Gaza.  Israel, you see, has some pretty effective warning and defence systems against the rockets (unlike people in Gaza), partly owing to that pesky $3 Billion of 'aid' the Americans send them every year, despite the fact that they are an Apartheid state in clear breach of international law.

Ah yes, international law.

Bourgeois morality rests upon the polar twins of consequentialism and universalism, waxing and waning, and combining.  At the crudest level, consequentialism is invoked when we need to justify something horrible; universalism when we want to condemn the evil of those we are attacking.  China Mieville, in his work of theory Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, has adapted the ideas of the Bolshevik legal theorist Pashukanis and various postmodern writers.  For Mieville, international law is a never-ending oscillation between consequentialist and universalist arguments (Mieville adapts the categories of 'Apology' and 'Utopia' developed by Koskenniemi), with imperial force always lurking in the background as a way of enforcing whichever kind of politico-legal-ethical argument is currently being employed.  This gets at something built-in to bourgeois morality, in all its legalistic nebulousness.  Such principles - consequentialist or universalist - tend to get cloaked either in mystical obscurantism, or somewhat impoverished (i.e. market-based) notions of 'rights', or universal 'maxims' (whether encoded as 'categorical imperatives' or whatnot) that are not really all that universal.  The bourgeois revolutions undoubtedly had their virtues (or should that be 'Virtue'?), but their ethics tended to be universal in letter rather than in spirit, and consequentialist to the extent of considering the consequences for national bourgeois class formations.

Even so, bourgeois civilisation has offered some laudable moral insights and principles, and certainly improved - if only at a rhetorical level - upon the morality of, say, the Roman Empire, or the automatically inherited dictatorship of certain inbred families.  As Terry Eagleton has observed (following Benjamin), the task of the historical materialist is always to ask, again and again, "with a kind of faux naïveté" why such laudable bourgeois ethical ideals must seemingly always be deferred, compromised and betrayed, why bourgeois civilisation can never make good on them in practice.  Bourgeois morality, we might puckishly suggest, is always very nice in theory but can't work in practice because of... well, we wouldn't want to say (following the high-handed transhistoricalism of the parrot-talking anti-communist) because of 'human nature'.  We'd want to suggest that there is something in the very structure of bourgeois civilisation that generates universalising ethical ideals that can never be met, precisely because of that same structure.

As Marx pointed out, it is the nature of the bourgeois mode of production that it must always be based upon exploitation (directly or indirectly coerced wage labour, extraction of surplus value... and he's clear that this is wrong, even if - as Norman Geras observed - he doesn't always know that he is), and thus the curtailment of freedom for the many.

But, as an initially revolutionary movement overthrowing older forms of class society, the bourgeois revolutions depend upon offering freedom as an achievable goal, and even - so to speak - believing this promise itself.  This is a perennial feature, but we see it begun and demonstrated perhaps most dramatically at those moments of bourgeois revolution, when the rising middle class enlists the much-needed numbers, sinew, passion, energy, grievance and courage of the poor and the peasantry, and does this by espousing the great universalising bourgeois promises of Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité.  (As I say, we might puckishly want to add Naïveté to that list.)  Or when they declare "all men are created equal", very much meaning the 'men' and very much not meaning the 'all'.

This is an interesting issue in itself.  The contradictions - and the attempts to resolve the contradictions - give rise, dialectically, to new material and ideological forces.  Modern biological racism, for example, is partly a response to the fact that the bourgeois revolution in America rested upon both universalising promises (i.e. the Declaration of Independence, etc) and upon slavery.  The inescapable, in-born, auto-segregating factor of skin colour can be used - when integrated into a new theory: modern racism - as a 'get out clause', a codicil of the promises of the new society.  Pre-bourgeois societies in which slavery obtains - pre-C20th Tsarist Russia, for instance - don't need to explain why some are serfs and some are not.  That's just the way it is.  There's no document, signed by people who extol 'Liberty', which says "all men are created equal".  So there is no need to wriggle off that hook.  The hook simply isn't there.

And here we see the fundamental nature of bourgeois morality.  It is self-righteous and self-exclupatory.  And it is based on the assertion of power and, ultimately, force.  This is the wider meaning of Marx's comment (adapted for the title of Mieville's book) that "between equal rights, force decides".  Marx isn't offering that as a 'maxim', but as a critique.

Marx saw - even if he never developed this in a book of his own called Ethics, the way proper philosophers are supposed to do - that the constant oscillation in bourgeois morality between universal mysticism and pragmatic consequentialism is directly bound up with the nature of the system.  It relies upon relative freedom for the majority, because the freedom of the boss to hire and fire is the flip side of the worker's relative freedom to buy, move, pursue a career, seek higher wages elsewhere, etc...  so a universal declaration of rights is always useful.  At the start, it helps to define emergent bourgeois culture in opposition to feudalism, to rally the support of the masses to the libertarian cause of the new middle classes, to open society for job markets and commodity markets, etc.  At the same time, real human freedom is limited by the bourgeois conception of liberty as being the liberty to enjoy ones 'rights' in the market of life, by the conjuring trick that allows bourgeois culture to pretend that it has few enforced relations between people by relying upon the enforced relations between people and property (which is actually a social relation between people).  This is why the whole idea of 'universal human rights', while undoubtedly a great improvement on previous ways of looking at life and worth defending on its own terms, nevertheless seems designed to limit the idea of freedom.  Similarly, the corrective consequentialism comes in to limit the scope of such universal principles within the bounds of brutal pragmatism and 'realpolitik'.  It must happen that way, because the actual consequences of the bourgeois ideas of inborn freedom (and natural rights and universal liberty, etc...) would, if actually and sincerely pursued to their logical conclusions, make the oppression built into capitalism untenable.  If you really believe the declarations of universal liberty, it becomes hard not only to justify owning people with different coloured skin and using them as farm machinery, but also to justify forcing huge numbers of people to work for the profit of others, or to justify the unpaid domestic labour of women, the nature of education as preparation for the job market, the exploitation of less-developed economies for the benefit of imperialist powers, homelessness, unemployment, and sundry other moral obscenities that bourgeois civilisation rests upon as normal, everyday practice.

The oscillating employment of universal and consequentialist justifications is not rigid, even or schematic.  The forms of argumentation (or should I say, of ideology) are not mutually exclusive.  Ideology simply doesn't need to make sense, as long as it seems to be sense.  You get the two styles blended, or employed simultaneously by the same - or different - people, ignoring the fact that they clash.  Or you will get one bourgeois employing a universalist argument against another bourgeois who wields a consequentialist one, or vice versa.  Or one issue gets argued about, or agreed upon, using different versions of one type of argument, or two types, or whatever.  An Abolitionist might condemn slavery on the universal grounds that the slave "is a man and a brother" (negating the existence of the female slaves, by the way) against an upholder of slavery who offers a consequentialist argument, i.e. "if we free them, the slaves will slaughter us in our beds".  Or an Abolitionist might employ a consequentialist argument - "if we don't free them, they will slaughter us in our beds" - against a proponent who offers the universal word of the Bible, in which God explicitly tolerates the keeping of slaves.  The rise of biological racism offers a fusion of the two styles.  The idea that black people are inherently 'inferior' can be seen as universalist, because it is ostensibly based on eternal and fixed patterns of human nature.  But it can be developed in a consequentialist way, via the claim that because the black people are incapable of anything much besides labouring for their white superiors, to free them would thus be to condemn them to useless starvation... which would, of course, be terribly wrong.  This is an argument still to be occasionally heard today in new inflections (c.f. Fox News' hero Cliven Bundy and his views on "the negro" having been ruined by being taken out of the cotton fields and given welfare dependency as a substitute).  

The same argument was the ideological basis for colonialism because it supplied a rationale that was brutally pragmatic and realistic, while also seeming to be attenuatedly altruistic.  We all know the contours of the argument.  "Give them independence and they'll starve out of sheer stupidity," says the Marshal of Solos.  It's basically a rearguard re-tooling of the argument from the start of the colonial project, that the 'natives' are not entitled to their own lands and resources because they're not able to make proper use of them.  You can give this a universalist spin in various ways - i.e. "they're inherently inferior" and the related claim that "the superior have the right to dominate the inferior" - alongside the basically consequentialist argument - i.e. "if we don't step in, loads of land and resources will go to waste".  (You can "make the desert bloom" for instance.)  Or you can modify the basis of the argument using a consequentialist logic of stages, development and progress.  "We happen to be more advanced than them..." (whatever that means coming from colonialists and conquerors) "...so it's our duty to teach them and help them, and bring them civilisation".  The boons you supposedly bring can be consequentialist - i.e. "trade, technology, a better life" etc - or universalist - i.e. Christianity, or whatever.  Pretty much all these arguments have been used against the Palestinians at one time or another, by the way.

You see the point?  The merry-go-round goes on and on, with infinitely possible permutations.  Every developing need of bourgeois civilisation can be met by some ingenious fusion or opposition of these two obliging moral styles.  That's the whole point: that the merry-go-round need never end.  There will always be a moral point to debate, a moral claim to evaluate, a justification to ponder.  Debate can be eternally contained and assimilated.  Meanwhile, nobody ever has to admit that they're doing anything wrong.  There is always a point-of-view.  It works like international law - or like bourgeois law in general - in Mieville's conception.  The debate never ends.  It isn't supposed to.  The process of constant interpretation and reinterpretation of the law is an industry in itself.  And the basis of legality is the idea of the market actors debating their competing 'rights'... until, of course, between equal rights, force decides.

We're often told that terrorism is a weapon of the powerless.  Actually, as Chomsky has said, most terrorism is perpetrated by the powerful, as long as we don't two-facedly redefine terrorism to mean something other than 'violence against civilians in the pursuit of a political objective'.  By that definition, Israel's actions in Gaza are clearly terrorism, which makes the United States into the aiders and abetters of a 'rogue state'... if not a 'rogue state' itself... though I dislike the term 'rogue state' because it implies an otherwise hunkydory international order from which a state deviates.  But that old oscillation of universalist and consequentialist moralising can be brought into play.  Israel (an explicitly racist state) is "the only democracy in the Middle East" (never mind the Apartheid).  Israel must defend itself.  In Gaza, civilians supposedly have rockets in their bomb shelters.  And so on.  

The problem isn't that there are no universally applicable moral principles.  I think there probably are, as long as we limit 'universal' to mean something like 'transhistorical to human cultures'.  I'm not personally one to discount that, though we have to be very careful about what we identify as transhistorical or universal.  Neither is the problem that there are no good arguments to be made about morality based on consequences.  Of course there are.  Trotsky said "the ends can justify the means as long as something justifies the ends".  Nor is the problem even that you can't mix the two.  You can.  The universal right to resist occupation (formally recognised by the UN) presumably entails consequentialist justifications for violent acts in the cause of liberation.  And the idea that liberation is an inherently good thing may trace back to one of those permissible transhistorical principles.  Freedom from exterior domination is a pre-requisite for any society to allow all its citizens to achieve the 'good life'... even if that doesn't always follow from such freedom.  The problem is that bourgeois civilisation rests upon either mystical ideas of the universal or employs the most cynical form of brutally pragmatic consequentialism.  Universal arguments become so decoupled from society that they can be mustered for either side by appeal to mystical entities.  Consequentialist arguments can be mustered by either side too, with 'good' defined by the needs of whichever powerful person is currently speaking, and with the violent force of nation states always lurking in the background, ready to decide the issue.  The UN recognises the universal right to resistance, and the impermissability of acquiring territory by war, and then permits Israel to go about its nasty business for decades, while states such as Iraq or Iran get held to more urgent account because of the priorities of the United States.  The problem crystallises in that phrase: 'humanitarian intervention'.  A perfect illustration of the cynical, opportunistic marrying of spurious universal and consequentialist arguments, ultimately nullified by the priorities of Empire, and the brute reality of imperial force

The moral question of intervention in Iraq was 'settled' by force.  The universalists on both sides squabbled back and forth - "we have a moral duty to help the Iraqis!" vs. "it's wrong and illegal to invade without provocation!" - and the consequentialists on both sides squabbled back and forth - "it'll be good for the Middle East!" vs. "it'll be bad for the Middle East... and for us!".  Pretty much the only people saying anything like "Iraqis should be given the chance to free themselves and create their own new society!" were the far Left.  Of course, the turn of history made mincemeat of such hopes, though the Arab Spring showed the essential correctness of the argument...  But, of course, as we know, that all went wrong too.  But why?  Because imperial force was allowed to decide.  In Egypt, a popular rebellion ended the decade-long tyranny of a US-backed dictator... until a US-backed coup overthrew the resulting new government, instituted a junta, and started executing people wholesale.  A familiar story to anyone who knows the history of American foreign policy.

This is an important issue because the key to the fate of Palestine lies in the working class of Egypt, the largest (and most recently radicalised) working class in the Middle East.  The military junta in Egypt has redoubled the siege of Gaza by re-tightening the border - a border the Egyptian revolution threatened to weaken, thus weakening Israeli control over the besieged Palestinians, and thus also American-imposed 'stability' in the whole Middle East.  As I write this it is being reported that Egypt is trying to broker a peace deal or ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.  Hamas has supposedly 'rejected' the deal.  As usual, the media reports within the ideologically-policed parameters of the thinkable.  Apparently you can have a 'truce' or 'ceasefire' or 'deal' between a massively powerful military power and the hostages they're dropping bombs on.  Quite apart from anything else, the 'deal' being offered will inevitably mean nothing to the Palestinians beyond 'more of the same'.  The deal will allow the Israelis to step back a bit (thus hopefully allowing the protests - which make them look bad - to die down).  Hideous normality will resume.  They can carry on attacking the Palestinians a bit, keep on holding the population of Gaza hostage and under siege, keep on with the Apartheid, keep on with the blockade, keep on with the economic subjugation, keep on with the relentless theft of land for new Jewish 'settlers', keep on with the control of water, keep on with the relentless and humiliating inspections at checkpoints, keep on arresting people for protest... etc etc etc.  The 'deal', as far as the Palestinians are concerned, will just mean 'more of the same'.  It always does.  It will mean ' back to how things were last week... apart from the hundreds of us that are now dead, or bereaved, or maimed'.  It always does.

And the consequentialists and universalists on both sides can go back to the debate.

Meanwhile, the only thing that will ever break this endless, genocidal situation will be the resistance that the Palestinians are condemned and demonised for ever daring to show... joined by the organised, militant resistance of millions of workers all across the Middle East.  We saw it start in Egypt, and get suppressed.  We saw it start in Libya, and the 'humanitarian interventionists' of NATO jumped in to co-opt and control it (odd how we never hear the humanitarians advocating NATO airstrikes on Tel Aviv on the grounds that "we've got to do something!!!").  

It will, ultimately, come down to force.  The force of resistance.  We in the imperialist countries need to actively work to prevent our rulers from intervening.  A decade of protest, activism and agitation led to widespread public anti-war sentiment that finally penetrated the Commons to the point where that vote about intervening in Syria was defeated.  We forced them to back down.  (This, incidentally, is why we have to fight through these centenary years to stop the Tories rewriting the history of World War I until it becomes a narrative of patriotic glory and heroism in the name of a noble cause.  If many of us have failed to see the ideological utility of such a rewrite, the staunchly neo-con Tories certainly haven't.  The connection is more then just general.  WWI was partly an imperialist scramble for the Middle East.)  One of the reasons Israel wants to descale its most recent murderous attack is probably the worldwide protests, part of the growing public revulsion at their antics, visible despite the near-blackout in the mainstream (corporate) media. Combined with popular resistance in the Middle East, popular resistance in the West to empire and 'humanitarian intervention' will be key.

Force will decide, one way or another.  But not, in the end, between equal rights.  Because the desire of the many to lead good lives, uncurtailed, self-creating, happy, with the free development of each being a prerequisite for the free development of all (and vice versa) should trump the desire of the few to rule, plunder and kill.


ADDENDUM, 20/07/14: Far from backing down, Israel has since launched a ground assault on Gaza.  

Othering Thursday

Someone called 'Bright Coat and Bravado' (you can guess their favourite Doctor), posted this on tumblr.  Here's a snippet:

I have a serious problem with  the “Cartmel Masterplan”. It’s not really about Looms, if you’ll believe that. It’s about The Other.

I can’t fucking stand the idea that the Doctor - or anyone - is “destined for greatness”. 

I posted the following off-the-cuff response (which I reproduce here, opportunistically, because I quite liked it when I read it back):

On the whole, I love the Cartmel era, and have a lot of affection for the Virgin New Adventures… but I don’t like the idea of the Doctor as the recycled ‘Other’.

I don’t like the idea of him being ‘exceptional’ for his society.  Much as he is bound to be exceptional from a human standpoint, I think that should always be because of what he does rather than what he is.  I like the idea of him as someone who failed in his home context - “…scraping through with 51% at the second attempt” - and being a bit rubbish, a bit of a dilettante, a bit of a second-rater, a bit of a fartaround.  Probably because I feel like one of those myself.  But that’s okay.  I hate the winners vs losers view of life.  I hate the idea that one’s worth is determined by one’s ‘success’ in the competition of life, in carving a niche for oneself in a hierarchy.  I still more hate the idea of those kinds of judgements being made without taking into account the fact that some people start off at higher rungs and with greater advantages.  The Doctor should be someone who started off at such a high rung but who proved unsuited for it because of his infinite distractability, his vagueness and his inability to ‘play the game’… and also because of the moral sense - and the imperative to be a social actor - that he acquires from his involvement, from his breaching of the walls of the enclosed and reactionary envelope of Gallifrey, from his adventures and researches and friendships ‘out there’ in the muck and strife and pain of the universe.

The transformation of him into the reincarnation of a godlike founder figure from mythological pre-history injects a 80s/90s ‘epic’ sensibility into a 60s/70s ‘rebel’ storyline.  It is a post-defeat rationalisation overwriting an artefact that originated at a time of struggle.  The Doctor-as-drop-out-from-the-ruling-class is an (admittedly imperfect) artefact of 1969.  It gets renewed - even intensified - in 1976.  And then it gets downplayed and downplayed until - interestingly enough - Holmes gets his hands on it again at the end of the Trial in 1986.  But in the run up to the ‘long-90s’, Cartmel et al lay the groundwork for a potential vitiation of it.  Even as that crew take the show to angrier and bolshier territory than its has visited for quite some time, they’re also utiling an affect from various cultural strands that bigs the Doctor up and fetishizes him, and his ‘power’.  I criticise Moffat (and RTD) for this… but the truth is that Cartmel & Co. started it, or almost started it.  Thankfully it only partially and intermittently materialises on TV.  They took out the “more than just a Time Lord” line, and the “brief glimpse of his birth” line makes its way into the novelisation of ‘Curse of Fenric’ but not the broadcast show.  The NAs, being purely made of words, can allow these tendencies to come out to play in a way that the TV show itself seemed to reject.

Fair disclosure: I loved the Cartmel masterplan at the time (and all the stuff that goes with that term… i.e. the manipulative, amoral, chessmaster Doctor, and his grimdark adventures, and his mythological origins, and his power, and his way of saying things that Merlin said in Excalibur, etc, etc, etc)

Déjà bloody vu

I was going to do this post all over again... (this is what we do with Palestine: say the same bloody things over and over again, because the same bloody things keep happening over and over again)... but Richard Seymour has already done it for me, very succintly.


(EDIT: I originally posted a screencap of Seymour's tweet of a screencap.  But Seymour has now posted the original screencap itself on his blog.  So it seems only fair to remove my screencap of his tweet and just link to him.  Not that he needs hits from me.)

A Presumptious Dilettante's Five Belated Eggs

The more I think about it, the more I think a humble, sympathetic, non-domineering, non-entryist engagement with the anti-oppression movements springing up around issues of gender identity (i.e. Trans issues) is going to be absolutely crucial for the Left in the coming years. 

This isn't just a moral imperative.  Sure, the Left must stand with the oppressed.  Always.  By definition.  Otherwise why bother being on the Left?  Otherwise, what does 'The Left' mean?  But it's also a tactical imperative.  The system must be attacked at its weakest points.  The righteous and rightful rage felt by many on the axis of Trans oppression is absolutely one of the system's weakest points.  It hits people where they live: in their bodies.  Bodies are oppressed, disciplined, punished, curtailed, invaded, wounded and even dissected by capitalism... and it behoves the Left to realise that this happens in arenas outside the sites of direct capitalist production.  This is one of those things that everyone formally 'gets' and then puts to one side.  That's not good enough.  Capitalist oppression is total, hegemonic, far-reaching and omnipresent.  It is intimately and demonstrably bound up with oppression along lines of personal identity, bodily autonomy, bodily identity, sexual identity, gender, sexuality, and race.  This is why intersectionality is a crucial concept that's only going to get more crucial.  The task will be to relate all these issues to class.  Not so that they can be subsumed, assimilated and/or digested, but so the analysis wielded by the Left can be enlarged, educated, made stronger and more inclusive.  That is an end in itself - if we know what our ultimate goal really is.

The good news is that class is as intimately bound up with these things as the Left thinks it is.  The bad news is that we have to stress the importance of class without playing 'issue trumps' (i.e. our preferred axis of oppression is more crucial or 'primary' or 'causal' than yours... and, by the way, how dare you stress the issues that hit you where you live before the issues that we think of as theoretically more important???). 

But there is more good news.  We can stress how capitalism, and thus class exploitation along lines of work and wage exploitation (which is basically just another way of saying 'capitalism'), generates and exacerbates such oppression... for the simple reason that it bloody does; it's the currently regnant form of class society, and we can adduce powerful facts to show how the structure of class society generates sexism, female oppression, gender essentialism, the reduction of people to categories, the reification of socially constructed categories into hegemonic 'facts of life', etc. 

That's why this is so good.  There isn't anything in there that constitutes new and startling revelation, but it's a great little summary/primer/starting-point, from the perspective of a totally 'on-side' Marxism.  I found it so anyway - speaking as someone who personally embraces the elderly Goya's maxim "I'm still learning".

One (related) crucial issue to remember... and here I'd proffer the great work of Silvia Federici... is that the oppression of women is not an optional extra with capitalism, nor is it a by-product of capitalism.  It is certainly generated and exacerbated by capitalism (part of the argument the Left needs to make) but is also a precondition of capitalism, intimately bound up with the creation of capitalism, and partly capitalism's parent. 

The oppression of women existed before capitalism, because capitalism is a form of class society built on top of previous forms of class society (in Europe, feudalism)... just as the capitalist states are forms adapted from pre-capitalist states.  And the rise of capitalism in Europe was absolutely and fundamentally bound up with the further domestication, persecution and economic subjugation of women (see Federici, among others).  There really is very little wiggle room here to say that one caused the other.  They are two sides of the same coin.  And 'causality' or 'primary position' loses its meaning in a truly dialectical (i.e. a truly Marxist) analysis.  Besides, its an academic question.

LGBTQIA+ oppression is, once again, related.  (BTW: please forgive my using the long acronym as shorthand if you don't like the 'lumping together' effect, or if you're on the other side and worry that trying to be that inclusive accidentally implies that anything not covered is, by definition, not included... and also, please don't construe my raising of LGBTQIA+ oppression as an afterthought.)  LGBTQIA+ oppression is intimately connected with the issue of women's oppression, and not in the sense of being a 'product' or 'by-product' or 'side effect' of it, but rather as another aspect of the suffocating enforcement and reification of gender that class society entails, relies upon, and by which it is partly produced.

Victory of the Icon 4

At the time, the liberals and the left thought of World War II as a battle between civilisation and barbarism, between progress and reaction.  This is still the mainstream view today.  But the leaders of the Allies did not think this way, if they were honest.  For instance...

The Churchill who demanded a no-holds-barred prosecution of the war was the same Churchill who had been present during the butchery at Omdurman, sent troops to shoot down striking miners in 1910 [this is probably not true], ordered the RAF to use poison gas against Kurdish rebels in British-ruled Iraq [this is arguable], and praised Mussolini. He had attacked a Conservative government in the 1930s for granting a minimal amount of local self government to India, and throughout the war he remained adamant that no concessions could be made to anti-colonial movements in Britain’s colonies, although this could have helped the war effort. ‘I have not become the king’s first minister’, he declared, ‘to oversee the dismemberment of the British Empire.’ He told Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, ‘While there is life in my body, no transfer of British sovereignty will be permitted’.

In the Second World War, many - probably most - ordinary people thought of themselves as fighting the evil of fascism, but

the motives of the rulers remained very different from those of their peoples. This was shown in the conduct of the war.  Between the fall of France in the spring of 1940 and the Allied landings in southern Italy in 1943 most of the fighting by British armies was in northern Africa. Why? Because Churchill was determined to hang on to the area with the Suez Canal and the oilfields. His worries were not just about Germany but also the US, as was shown by a bitter diplomatic tussle between him and Roosevelt over Saudi Arabia. 

The invasion of Italy was itself a consequence of Churchill’s obsession with re-establishing British hegemony in the Mediterranean.  He refused pleas from both Russia and the US to open a second front in France at the time when the most vital battles of the war were being fought in western Russia. Instead he claimed that Italy and the Balkans constituted ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’—despite mountainous terrain which was bound to mean bloody battles and a very slow pace of advance.

Churchill’s refusal to concede the principle of independence for India meant that in 1942, while the decisive Battle of Stalingrad was taking place, thousands of British-led troops were brutally crushing demonstrations in India instead of fighting the Nazis, and that an Indian ‘liberation army’ was formed to fight on the side of Japan. It also led to a famine which killed three million people in Bengal.

The quotes are from Chris Harman's, A People's History of the World.

Apropos of Nothing

Bourgeois law sets up a system which seems, superficially, to draw its moral force from the common sense morality of ordinary people (in the West this is filtered through the formal Christian ethics internalised by our civilisation).  Its actual function, of course, is to promote and enforce a social orderliness which allows the relatively untrammelled existence of social hierarchy.

(This isn't a conspiratorial view, by the way.  Conspiracies undoubtedly happen - the ruling class, and their adjutants, are as capable of getting together and discretely working towards their own agendas and advantages as anyone else - but conspiracy is not the basis of the system.  Conspiracies are often criminal and, though frequently winked at by The Law, they are theoretically punishable.  They are, in a very real sense, an aberration.  An endemic aberration certainly - and more endemic the more confident the ruling classes get - but an aberration nonetheless.  It's important not to be too cynical about the concept of law, to imagine that it is just a sham, and that everyone at the top knows it to be.  That isn't how systems of control endure.  Systems of control endure by being extremely plausible both to those who are screwed by them and those who benefit from them.  Corruption is real.  It is a by-product of a system that generates unaccountable and hierarchical structures.  Corruption is also an important psychological category for making the system seem plausible, for making it seem to have validity and integrity.  Everyone - the corrupt and the non-corrupt - partly derives their idea of what constitutes legitimacy from their idea of what constitutes illegitimacy.)

Part of how bourgeois law manages to be an effective and enduring system of control is by appearing to be impartial in its normal operation, to be aimed at securing justice except in aberrant circumstances, and to be based on moral categories... and one way in which it manages this is by, to some degree, some of the time, actually bothering to be all those things.  You can get good results from the bourgeois justice system.  It has to be capable of working properly in order to look like what it claims to be.  You can trace the influence of popular ideas of morality in its structure and strictures.  This is, to the greatest extent, the accreted result of popular pressure to reform the system.  But then the absorbtion and adaptation of popular demands, the rationed distribution of progressive gains, the assimilation of democratic ideas, is another part of how systems of control survive.  Ultimately, all worthwhile conceptions of 'justice' come from the democratic impulse from below.  This isn't to say that they come from the innate goodness of people, or the nobility of the oppressed, or the spirit of mankind, or anything like that.  Rather, the oppressed - always the more universal class because they are the most widespread and the most thwarted - develop the democratic impulse towards justice precisely because they are denied it.  Injustice breeds the idea of justice in people.  Inequality creates the aspiration towards equality.  Justice isn't a thing that exists in the world a priori, it is a human idea.  That makes it no less real, but it does mean that it bear the marks of its social origin.

Voluminous Description

Finally finished Kershaw's biography of Hitler.  I've been working on it - both volumes, unabridged - for years, picking it up for a bit, putting it down for a bit, etc.  (This is how I usually tackle mammoth reading projects.)

Can't help feeling underwhelmed.  I mean, I'm in absolute awe of the scholarship and knowledge and patience and effort involved in such a massive and detailed project... but it fails to live up to the hype from the middle-brow and/or reactionary reviewers - Paxman, Sereny, Hastings, Burleigh, etc - that is splashed so proudly all over the back covers.

Kershaw has produced something that is, at least for long stretches, narrative history.  The narrative history of one protagonist.  This would be fine if the protagonist possessed fascinating and complex (if vile) interiority.  Hitler, however, did not have anything of the kind.  He appears to have been a nonentity, a psychological nullity, a hazy cloud of pedestrian neuroses, a reflex machine made of clockwork prejudices, a lazy fool, a windbag, a crashing bore, a plodder, a cold and self-involved man, a man with little capacity for any passion other than fury, and little in the way of emotional complexity.  His reactions are utterly predictable once you've spent any time (so to speak) in his company.  This leads to endless paragraphs which begin with Kershaw saying something like "Hitler's reaction was predictable", followed by a re-run of something you've already read a hundred times.  Kerhsaw isn't to be blamed for Hitler's personality, but he is - perhaps - to be blamed for taking so much space repeatedly describing it in detail, despite the worthlessness and tedium of such a project.  Kershaw doesn't really have much to add when it comes to explaining how such a man could so entrance so many people.  He makes glancing references to national pride, demagoguery, etc - all the usual explanations - and then seems to get back to the recitation of events.

Kershaw almost apologizes in the preface to Volume One: Hubris, talking about how he has knowingly strayed from his background in social history.  He'd been plugging away at the social history of the Third Reich for years before writing this biography - a more 'popular' type of book - and often brings insights from social history to bear... especially in Vol.1 (which is by far the better book)... but it can sometimes feel like a series of asides in the dull story of a dull narcissist.  The asides can be genuinely fascinating.  Kershaw is good on the mechanics of how the Nazis were levered into power by cynical bourgeois politicians, for example.  The repeated motif of 'working towards the Fuhrer' is cleverly seized-upon by Kershaw to show how much Nazi policy originated at lower levels with ambitious lickspittles and careerists pandering to Hitler, and his perennial attraction to the most radical 'solution' to any problem.  In the second volume, the best bits are about how the haphazardly evolved structure of the Nazi state meant that, with more and more power invested in a man pathologically incapable of countenancing retreat under any circumstances, almost everyone except Hitler knew that the war was lost, yet were unable - often unwilling - to do anything about it.  Kershaw also takes pains to trash any suggestion that Hitler was ignorant of the fate of the Jews.  Hitler was plainly in that swamp of horror right up to his floppy fringe, even if he kept himself out of the detailed running of it (as he tended to keep himself out of the detailed running of anything).

But Kershaw never really connects any of this to an over-arching analysis.  He describes the composite parts of Nazi ideology, yet never explains why a reactionary - yet radical-sounding - scavenger ideology appeared in Germany in the post-WWI era.  He describes the garbled jargon of Nazism - which mixed anti-Semitism and ultra-Nationalism with apparent anti-capitalist rhetoric - but never gets into the fully capitalist nature of the regime, or the reasons why a movement with populist left-wing-sounding slogans could be so essential to saving German capitalism from revolution.  He details cynical bourgeois political manouvering, yet never goes into the ways Nazism formed a continuity - as well as a rupture - with both pre-war German imperialism and modern capitalism.  Imperialism itself appears as a pathological emanation rather than as a world system driven by economic competition; Germany becomes the site of a peculiarly destructive form of this pathology, with no deeper analysis offered.  Etc.

Of course, one risks falling into the trap of criticising an author for not sharing one's own ideological viewpoint... as though that's a flaw or fault, rather than a point of difference... but reading Kershaw is often - all too often - like reading a summary description (albeit a fantastically detailed one) rather than an analysis.  You need Walter Benjamin and Trotsky and Daniel Guerin and maybe even bits and bobs from Wilhelm Reich in your head as you read Kershaw.

Kershaw would doubtless disagree, but then part of the problem with him - in my opinion - is that his view is evidently that of the liberal who sees ideology itself as a primal evil, leading to extremism, leading to utopianism, leading to revolution, leading to disaster (though I should stress, one of the virtues of Vol.1 is Kershaw's detailed fact-based rejection of the idea that Hitler was voted in, or that he staged a popular revolution).  Such normative assumptions are the foundation of the entire book.  Ideology is something that extremists or revolutionaries have, not bourgeois states, mainstream 'democrats' or liberals.  Civilisation and barbarism are opposites (rather than, as a Marxist might say, different sides of the same coin) and the descent of Germany from the latter into the former is a unique puzzle.  If the respectable bourgeois politicians - and other such civilised people - helped or capitulated to Hitler, the answer to this apparent paradox must lie in 'opportunism', 'militarism', and other such extraneous pathologies... and, in this way, like so many liberal historians before him, he always circles back round to find a terrible conundrum that can only be described in detail and bewailed.

Also, he's not much of a prose stylist.  He's okay when he's not trying, but when he gets ambitious he also gets clunky.

I feel rather mean-spirited now, because Kershaw has assembled an amazing description, parts of which are genuinely insightful and useful, and all of which is based on sincere (and appealing) revulsion...

But it is, ultimately, only a very long description.