Poulantzas on the “Petty Bourgeoisie”

“Petty bourgeois” is a confusing term that comes up a lot, both because it’s a good insult and because it’s important to any class-based understanding of capitalism, more so the closer one gets to the present. In Fascism and Dictatorship (1970), Nicos Poulantzas defines the petty bourgeoisie as an intermediate “subclass” wedged between the bourgeoisie and the working class, the only two real classes in capitalism. The point of the analysis is to understand the rise of fascism (synthesizing his understanding of German and Italian history), a regime the petty bourgeoisie is often accused of bringing about. In the interests of length and time, I’m only going to excerpt and summarize, censoring my objections. With one exception, the ugliness of the language, which really is exhausting and demoralizing in the manner of all the best/worst Althusserian Marxist theory and makes politics seem unthinkable on that basis alone. Sorry. But I do think it’s worth slogging through.

“Marx and Engels emphasized the tendency for the petty bourgeoisie to be undermined and eleiminated in a capitalist formation: Lenin described it as a ‘transitional class’. When the capitalist mode of production becomes dominant and generalized, a minority of its members are integrated into the bourgeoisie, in a variety of ways, while the great mass are ‘proletarianized.’” (238)

This description of the subclass’s basic fears and motivations most directly applies to the “traditional” petty bourgeoisie, which is composed out of small-scale production and small-scale ownership. Today its members are called ‘small business owners,’ although in Poulantzas’s formulation they by definition employ few or no wage workers.

He then adds another type: the ‘new’ petty bourgeoise, a.k.a. “non-productive salaried employees” whose tasks are supplementary to the circulation and realization of surplus value: “salaried employees in commerce, banking, insurance, sales departments, advertising, etc., as well as ‘service’ employees,” along with “civil servants.” Traditional and salaried petty bourgeois occupy different economic positions. However:

“What makes it possible for the two groups to be considered as part of the same class, the ‘petty bourgeoisie’, is that their different economic positions generally have the same effects at the political and ideological level. The relevant criteria for explaining this identity of effects at these levels are, in the first case, small-scale production and above all the small-scale ownership involved in it, and in the second case, exploitation experienced in the ‘juridical’ form of ‘salary’, and not directly in production.” (239-40).

Petty bourgeois ideology constantly shifts due to the ungroundedness of the class itself. There are, however, a few recurring elements, common to both the ‘new’ salaried petty bourgeoisie and the more traditional kind. Most are pretty obvious and revolve around ‘meritocratic’ themes. Less intuitively, Poulantzas argues the petty bourgeoisie share a kind of naive anticapitalism:

Status-quo anti-capitalism. Effective exploitation is hidden here, because it is experienced mainly in the form of the salary. This group therefore aspires to ‘social justice’, through State redistribution of income. They make declarations against ‘big money’, mainly in the form of demands about taxation. There is an ‘egalitarian’ aspect to the demand for equalization of ‘income’, and often parliamentary cretinism comes in too. They fear proletarianization, but above all they fear a revolutionary transformation of society, because of the insecurity they experience through their salaried position. They fear an upheaval which could affect the earnings of non-productive employees, and they often fail to take into account the mechanisms of production, and the exploitative role of ownership of the means of production. One expression of this is the particular corporatist forms assumed by the trade-union struggle of this group (242)

Some conclusions vis-à-vis political organization and electoral politics:

…they are neither part of the bourgeosie nor of the working class, the two basic classes whose political interests are totally irreconcilable. This means that in the field of class struggle, the different groups making up the petty bourgeoisie can have no long-term political interests ‘of their own’. This criterion, together with their isolation and their ideological similarity, generally produces the following common effects at the political level:

(a) It is very difficult for them to organize politically into a specific party of their own.

(b) They are often organized politically directly through other apparatuses of the State, which these groups see as their own political representative. The petty bourgeoisie often constitutes a supporting class for the State. Its alliance with the bourgeoisie is not direct, but mediated through support for the State forms which the petty bourgeoisie sees as opposed to the bourgeoisie’s interests and in agreement with its own.

(c) These common ideological and political effects apply primarily in what we may call ‘normal’ circumstances. Because of their electoralist illusions, the two component petty-bourgeois groups are often in effect the ‘peaceful’ pillars of the ‘democratic republican order’. But the community of effects also functions in the case of crises, as the two groups revolt in quite similar ways against the existing order.

(d) Both groups share a politically unstable nature. It is they who ‘swing’ most often, either to the side of the bourgeoisie or to that of the working class, according to the conjuncture, since they are polarized around these two classes.

Dangerously for Poulantzas, the petty bourgeoisie as an intermediate class can strongly influence working class ideology, and in periods of crisis (pre-fascist Italy and Germany), its penetration supersedes that of the bourgeoisie:

The most revealing phenomenon is not so much the direct influence of bourgeois ideology on the working class, expressed in trade unionism and reformism, as the influence of petty-bourgeois ideology.

In fact, bourgeois ideology was itself in crisis during the rise of fascism. This was what allowed petty-bourgeois ideology to spread in the social formation, and to penetrate the working class much more thoroughly than could an uncontested dominant ideology. The petty bourgeoisie was itself going through a deep crisis. In this context, the ideology of the ‘enraged petty bourgeoisie,’ as Engels put it, took quite specific forms: forms in which it penetrated into the working class more easily than before, as the working class was itself in ideological crisis. To clarify these ideas, I would suggest that the ‘anti-capitalist’ aspect always inherent in petty-bourgeois ideology is strengthened and becomes relatively more important in this situation where the petty bourgeoisie is in revolt. This is how such ideology gains entry into the working class.

The influence of petty-bourgeois ideology on the working class takes specific forms, adapted to the ‘actual conditions,’ that is the ‘lived experience’ (le vécu), of the working class. Certain of these forms were particularly strong in the working class during the rise of fascism:

(a) Anarchism, in the form specific to the working class: especially as anarcho-syndicalism (akin to revolutionary syndicalism), which combines contempt for organization and political objectives with ignorance, under the pretext of the ‘lived experience’ of factory life, of the role of the mechanisms of political oppression, of the State, in the maintenance of the capitalist system;

(b) Spontaneism, i.e. contempt for organization, and the abstract cult of direct and ‘spontaneous’ action, no matter where or how — the expression par excellence of petty-bourgeois ‘individualism’;

(c) ‘Putschist jacquerie’, which rejects Marxist-Leninist ideology and mass political struggle: together with spontaneism and anarchism, it is based on a totally abstract cult of the exemplary ‘violence’ of ‘active minorities’, which is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the rebel petty bourgeoisie, and of ‘petty-bourgeois jacquerie’ (145).

And finally, the role played by the petty bourgeoisie in the rise of fascism, in rough sequence:

The petty bourgeoisie, the ‘intermediate’ class, is always affected by a major crisis involving the basic forces of the capitalist social formation. As a general rule, the crisis of the ruling classes affects the petty bourgeoisie directly. Before stabilization and during the first period of open crisis between the bourgeoisie and the working class, a large part of the petty bourgeoisie clearly swings over to the side of the working class. Without being able to trace a clear line of demarcation between the two fractions of the petty bourgeoisie, we can say that this is mainly the case with the salaried employees. In the face of working-class defeat, and the lack of a specific communist policy of alliance with the petty bourgeoisie, this situation changes, but only by steps. After its open swing to the working-class side, this part of the petty bourgeoisie seems to stick to social democracy during the stabilization step. Subsequently it becomes disillusioned with social democracy, which fails to defend its interests. Turning away from social democracy, the petty bourgeoisie as a whole finds itself faced, at the beginning of the rise of fascism, with that instability and lack of hegemony among the dominant classes and fractions which characterizes the bourgeois parties’ crisis of representation. These parties, while they are directly tied to the class interests of the power bloc, are at the same time the ‘representatives’ of the petty bourgeoisie, because of its inability to form its own party.

The bourgeois parties split away from their own classes and fractions in the power bloc. This directly affects their representational tie to the petty bourgeoisie itself, which understands that from now on such parties are no more than parliamentary cliques. The loss of these parties’ real influence on the political scene, which they obtained as a result of their ties with fractions and classes other than the petty bourgeoisie, leads the petty bourgeoisie for its part to turn away from them. The way is therefore open to the fascist parties. (248-9)

Outside(s)

The Populist revolt — the most elaborate example of mass insurgency we have in American history — provides an abundance of evidence that can be applied in answering this question. The sequential process of democratic movement-building will be seen to involve four stages: (1) the creation of an autonomous institution where new interpretations can materialize that run counter to those of prevailing authority — a development which, for the sake of simplicity, we may describe as “the movement forming”; (2) the creation of a tactical means to attract masses of people — “the movement recruiting”; (3) the achievement of a heretofore culturally unsanctioned level of social analysis — “the movement educating”; and (4) the creation of an institutional means whereby the new ideas, shared now by the rank and file of the mass movement, can be expressed in an autonomous political way — “the movement politicized.”

…

Within this broad framework, it seems helpful to specify certain subsidiary components. Democratic movements are initiated by people who have individually managed to attain a high level of personal political self-respect. They are not resigned; they are not intimidated. To put it another way, they are not culturally organized to conform to established hierarchical forms. Their sense of autonomy permits them to dare to try to change things by seeking to influence others. The subsequent stages of recruitment and of internal economic and political education (steps two, three, and four) turn on the ability of the democratic organizers to develop widespread methods of internal communication within the mass movement. Such democratic facilities provide the only way the movement can defend itself to its own adherents in the face of the adverse interpretations certain to emanate from the received culture. If the movement is able to achieve this level of internal communication and democracy, and the ranks accordingly grow in numbers and in political consciousness, a new plateau of social possibility comes within reach of all participants. In intellectual terms, the generating force of this new mass mode of behavior may be rather simply described as “a new way of looking at things.” It constitutes a new and heretofore unsanctioned mass folkway of autonomy. In psychological terms, its appearance reflects the development within the movement of a new kind of collective self-confidence. “Individual self-respect” and “collective self-confidence” constitute, then, the cultural building blocks of mass democratic politics. Their development permits people to conceive of the idea of acting in self-generated democratic ways — as distinct from passively participating in various hierarchical modes bequeathed by the received culture. In this study of Populism, I have given a name to this plateau of cooperative and democratic conduct. I have called it “the movement culture.” Once attained, it opens up new vistas of social possibility, vistas that are less clouded by inherited assumptions. I suggest that all significant mass democratic movements in human history have generated this autonomous capacity. Indeed, had they not done so, one cannot visualize how they could have developed into significant mass democratic movements.

— Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (1978)

Just a bit of common sense, perhaps, and from a historian whose views on the present are not the most clear-eyed, but worth remembering when considering political ‘alternatives’ at a time when the mainstream seems to have no other content than denying their existence.

Countless alternatives have been offered, of course, to the USA’s long string of disasters over the past decade — from Afghanistan to Katrina to TARP right down to this debt ceiling farce. In spite of the seriousness of their content — plans for bank nationalization, single-payer health care, economic stimulus, green infrastructure development plans, financial reform, demilitarized borders, troop drawdown, torture bans, etc. — they’re almost never discussed on their practical merits. Instead they’re dismissed for being ‘not politically possible,’ ‘unrealistic,’ and for that reason, ‘unserious.’ That’s because the apologists, and let’s just concentrate on the outwardly sympathetic ones for now, aren’t asking for alternatives, exactly. They want An Alternative. That is, they want an alternative center of power, something that could force Real Change through our Broken Institutions. This center doesn’t already exist, so with a few little noises of protest, the critics submit to what they say they hate, over and over again, until they learn to take pride in their prostration, otherwise known as ‘professionalism.’ When a careerist like Yglesias says he wants An Alternative to save him from his bean counting ways, he is smirkingly asking for someone else to pay his bills and invite him to Washington dinners. No offers are forthcoming, so back to exegesis.

This is the time to cite Chris Hedges’s “phantom left,” his observation, not made often enough, that the fantasy of a communist shadow nation just waiting to take power is as useful for liberals as it is for conservatives. Its degree of actual existence depends on its intended use — even the ‘desire’ for a Global Communist Superstate can serve as an alibi in the right hands. At its worst, ‘calling for’ a united left can be a way of undermining actual attempts to build one — pitting class politics against identity politics is a case in point. At another extreme it can lead to messianism.

This specious desire is for an already-constructed Outside of political conflict, equally present in Obama’s fantasy of reasoned, “bipartisan” centrism and Badiou-via-Zizek’s calls for revolutionary terror mathematically derived from the prophetic lineage of Robespierre and Mao. A secular outside is just the acknowledgement of many outsides, gaps in structure to be more precise, which are simultaneously points of agency. Refusing to realize this and assuming politicians are ‘forced’ to do the things they do is part of the same logic that absolves us from responsibility – we too start to think of ourselves as ‘forced’ to ‘be realistic’ about what we’re willing to demand from them, as if we were literal rather than metaphorical cogs in a machine. I hate to call what I’m trying to outline here ‘micropolitics’ because of all the baggage, but since we aren’t in a moment of powerful oppositional parties, what ‘the left’ means depends a great deal on what individuals who identify as ‘left’ do. There’s no need to be ‘against’ potential third parties, but the movement’s strength is not currently centralized enough to insist on them. There are, however, many autonomous institutions, many struggles, that need stronger connections (a piece of evidence often cited to justify this claim is the attendance of the last U.S. Social Forum and the relative lack of media attention) . The condition for realizing them is not a super-state or the dream of one, but commitment to politics outside the veal pen, outside mainstream terms of debate and independent of official power.

It hasn’t proved very reliable, but sometimes ‘serious people’ choose to risk their careers and official legitimacy by taking the many alternative ideas and organizations more seriously. For whom would it be a victory if Elizabeth Warren became a Senator? Should it be considered a loss for the left that Cenk Uygur was pushed out of MSNBC? These aren’t particularly consequential examples, but that’s the point: the political, media, corporate, and financial classes are not going to be the basis of anyone’s revolution. There are many theoretical and historical arguments for why, but a good shorthand is simply that the desire of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois — aka the “middle class” and “business class” — to retain and reproduce their privileges, while often sympathetic and sometimes linked to working class struggles (in, for example, the politics of access to higher education), is just not fundamental enough in a world system flimsily upheld by deep, multiple layers of oppression, violence, and ecological devastation. All that said, the halls of official power are open to (occasional, local, partial) dissent, and the most important rule for initiating it can perhaps be put like this: changing things from inside a system only works if non-rhetorical ties to its outside are maintained. As the state, the corporate media, even the university become more insular, as they isolate themselves ever further from their constituents, they may simply have to be abandoned — not as targets, of public pressure, criticism, and demands, but as subjects of identification and of investment of time and energy. Some are closer to this point than others.

[Note: this is a good documentary on the current sorry state of institutional left-liberal politics, and this on Gramsci (which I linked to in the comments to the last post) is some good forward thinking.]

So I end up with my own defense of “opting out.” Enough evaluating the appropriate distribution of praise and blame to Democrats, enough treating them like protagonists. Enough hoping for transcendence.

Somewhat whimsically, I’ll end with this piece of historical reflection from professional weirdo Alan Moore. Not very ambitious, but it almost seems that way in the political dark age we’re living through:

This is why I split from the comics industry. The way it had handled The Black Dossier certainly propelled me into other directions away from comics, to the point where the League is my only expression in the comics field and is likely to remain to so for the foreseeable future. When that happened, the nearest we got to supportive comments from the rest of the industry was along the lines of useful advice like, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.” I’m not expecting the writers and artists of the industry to go out and struggle with Galactus, should he turn up suddenly and threaten to eat the world. Of course I’m not. I’m just asking them to show a little bit of ordinary human courage. I think that if they had done that, then the industry would probably not be in the state that it is.

Getting out the game…

The mood of despair among left-liberals has proceeded in a nearly unbroken stretch since Obama’s election. I’m not going to get into why — external reasons are easily found, and anyone reading this probably has their favorites. Instead, I’m going to address liberal disgust. which prompted some reflection on political engagement in our moment.

A Swarthmore history professor speaks out in favor of gardening:

In short, my political aspirations at this point could be summed up pretty well by Jon Stewart’s plea to just chill the fuck out, America, take the temperature down. Do reasonable things. Appreciate the genuinely tough questions in life and politics for what they are, and appreciate the different answers that people come up with to those questions. I think there is, if not a “moral majority”, a decent majority, a mellowable majority, who pretty much also just want life to be good enough.

I haven’t read this person’s scholarship, but it looks valuable and interesting. That doesn’t make this sort of thing any easier to stomach. As I see it, there are three ways to read (let’s call it) “Stewartism.” One is as a mainstream politics of civility, in which case it assumes a false equivalence between left and right, as if they were partners in a refereed debate. In reality, the American right makes ridiculous, extreme demands, which the White House and senior Democrats use to shift the center rightward, while progressives sort of mill about on the outskirts, wondering how many more surrenders will earn them the right to participate as equals in this stimulating legislative process. Stewartism could also be an activism in favor of universalizing the balanced life. The author says as much in a comment:

1) an extremely active ethos, not a passive one, because it comprehensively disagrees with extremely powerful and prevalent frameworks present in consumer capitalism, social hierarchy, and the American political system. If you insist that you don’t need to be top dog, that having a basic level of comfort is sufficient, that a vision of social relations that is exclusively built around competition is unnecessary, and so on, you’re very much dissenting from dominant ideology.

As other commenters point out, this version ends up self-refuting. Be as Zen as you want; dissent is not chill, even if it advocates for Chill Utopia. Otherwise one may as well be actively sitting on your couch reading blogs while keeping your thoughts to yourself, and calling that a break with the capitalist system. When defending left-wing ideas from dominant institutions, trying less hard is a funny way of fighting back, however beneficial it might be for personal wellbeing. I’ve made comments on this blog in favor of a greater sense of reciprocity and self-awareness when leftists criticize each other, or when not facing comprehensive disagreement. But against serious, ruthless, organized opposition, there’s no space for playing nice. The third way of reading Stewartism is as the exact liberal counterpart to the Tea Party, reactionary in the classical sense:  a defense of a state of affairs that is no longer tenable and was always unjust. Basically back when being born into the middle class meant you were entitled to a professional career without ruining your life. Far from the self-evident, commonsensical maturity he imagines, mellow decency presupposes that your life already is ”good enough” in material terms, your dissatisfaction all in your head. It shouldn’t take a huge feat of self-awareness to realize that the “insane levels of meritocratic pressure” in the “sociocultural world of professionals” exists because it’s necessary to get and (unless you have tenure) stay there.

Counterpoint:

2) I think this is not just a kind of bourgeois “I got mine, fuck the workers”: I think satisficing is a concept that can be a powerful way to think about self and community all the way up and down the social hierarchy, and create social connections across class and hierarchical boundaries.

Where I see this as an opt-out is at two points: first, in terms of a kind of sociocultural libertarianism (something that Russell knows is a pretty consistent vision of mine) in which I’d suggest that satisficing requires a much broader range of accepting divergent individual, familial and community preferences in cultural and social practice than many on the left seem prepared to accept and second, that many of the long-standing details and particulars that fuel left-liberal conflicts are themselves fueled by maximizing, that various political fractions don’t set goals like, “less discrimination” or “more income equality” but instead have extremely specific political objectives that become fetishistic over time and make everything less or different seem horribly insufficient. This is just an extension of seeing satisficing as an active political project: applying it TO politics means that you’ve got to learn to embrace a much broader range of outcomes as basically ok, and be much more general about drawing the line between basically ok and basically not at all acceptable.

“Satisficing” is borrowed from decision theory, specifically the work of Herbert Simon, who also came up with the idea of the “attention economy.” Both are mechanistic theories that quantify the scarcity of some vital resource — effort and attention, respectively — by associating it with time, so that it can be understood and managed rationally to better achieve an organization’s goals. They’re aids to production, of commodities, policy, or whatever. The self-helpy appropriation of “satisficing” used above means nearly the opposite: it is based on optimizing consumption as the metaphysical relation between human and world (or man as consumer of experiences), for which it assumes the ideal end is “happiness,” a kind of etherized contentment. Always looking for the best toothpaste results in less happiness, working long hours while neglecting your family results in less happiness, so these things are bad. And thus an efficiency maximization strategy is converted into a moral homily.

I get the sense that what looks like a political application is actually just the author’s attempt to deal with emotional fatigue caused by his Twitter and RSS feeds. That is, if your relation to politics is mostly one of consumption — as it is for most functional citizens in advanced capitalist democracies — you have no direct experience to convince yourself that politics, regardless of class position, is anything more than an endless barrage of trivialities dressed up as significant events. If you’re in the professional, ‘media-savvy’ class, you might think they all require your immediate response to avert disaster. Every meme is an opportunity for self-branding, where your status as a liberal, closet Marxist, ironic Marxist, feminist, libertarian socialist, or what have you hangs in the balance (if you’re lucky enough to have any sort of white collar profession, especially if it’s in media, then your work life probably reflects this as well). Mainstream politics looks the same way on this side of the computer screen, and that’s how it’s usually interpreted. That’s why no matter what Glenn Greenwald says, no matter what he actually does with his power, Obama will always read as liberal or ‘supposed-to-be-liberal’ because that’s his brand (and you voted for it). If you deny his right to his identity then you forfeit your own, and whatever scraps of ‘insider’ status you think you possess.

The desire to abstain from all this bullshit is perfectly understandable. But it comes from a weak understanding of praxis. No need for anything grandiose, simply a grasp of actually existing politics as fundamentally practical, for that reason open to agency. The theatrical ‘dysfunction’ over the budget is undoubtedly ‘real’ — Democrats and Republicans really don’t agree  – but their conflict, especially as mediated by Obama, is the product of a coherent class politics. It can’t be reduced to a procedural or psychological failing, Keynesians are not going to win, and if the Republican far right does manage to default the economy, that will be the result of a calculated risk on the part of their designated opposition ( discussions of the ‘policy-politics divide’ going on in some circles betray how remedial the understanding of these facts are).

Despairing rather than resigned, Stewartians follow neoliberal ‘realists’ in excusing themselves based on the lack of an outside. An outside to ‘capitalism,’ ‘corrupt institutions,’ or just ‘political reality,’ with the assumption that freedom from these constraints is the precondition for any transformative politics — for Real Change. But such radically external realms are nowhere to be found, so, no politics. The Stewartians seem to feel forced into the compromises they say they hate so much, rather than just encouraged and rewarded for conformity. They respond with irony and “satisficing.” Because after all, no one will pay Matthew Yglesias or his readers to quit their jobs (or just change their minds) and take the risk of building an independent left bloc, therefore their personal preference for the left does not present a ‘serious alternative.’ It’s either technocratic nitpicking or throwing up one’s hands and writing monographs on liberation theology. Consensus!

The obvious question, then: is there a secular, non-identitarian outside?

To be continued.

Hollycaust Now

…in two recent films: Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Shutter Island (2010). Tons of spoilers follow.

Tarantino’s Basterds fantasizes a revenge movie solution to the Holocaust and to the war itself (or the European Front at least), carried out by Jews and led by Americans, in particular a hillbilly with Apache ancestry who keeps reminding everyone of that ancestry, such as by teaching his team of Jewish-American terrorist/guerillas bits of ‘Apache’ warrior culture, like scalping. It acknowledges a certain relativizing argument that would make Americans/Jews ‘just as bad’ or at least complicit with Nazi violence (by superimposing the extreme violence of modern U.S.-backed Zionism on the relative paucity of organized Jewish resistance to the Holocaust, highlighting the role of Nazi collaborators with the Allies and resulting dirty deals ‘we’ were forced to make with Absolute Evil, showing Americans doing bad things to people – though nothing as bad as what we do now) only to refute them. Not with historical fact, but by erasing or foreclosing those facts with a myth. A specifically American myth of retributive violence in its most ‘populist,’ gender- and race- libertarian narrative form – ’70s ‘exploitation’ cinema. Tarantino transplants that aesthetic from the civil rights, black power, and 2nd wave feminist milieu from which it grew (and which it often opposed in complicated ways) to a struggle it never directly addressed – the Nazi genocide of European Jews (‘Nazisploitation’ focuses on torture, rape, and kinky sadism rather than revenge). Set in 1941, the story – the assassination of the German High Command in a movie theater – is timed to head off the most deadly period of the Holocaust and most acknowledged Allied atrocities. it also re-emphasizes American victory in the propaganda war between Goebbels’s Ufa and ‘Jewish’ Hollywood. It’s a revenge fantasy directed at rehabilitating the historical memory of today’s oppressors (the U.S. and Israel) instead of empowering today’s oppressed (as left-ish ’70s exploitation film was). More on IB as meta-propaganda at my old blog. A well-made opposing argument that takes the film’s moral relativism between Nazi, American G.I., Jew, and audience to be its final word is here.

Shutter Island draws on older, ’50s pulp genre (Lewton and Hitchcock, and their ’70s paranoid revival in films like The Wicker Man), filtered through some combination of Lynchian unease and videogame-like narrative pacing, to frame a look back at the Holocaust that fixates on a little-known atrocity on the American side – the Dachau massacre. Leonardo DiCaprio’s ambiguous protagonist is obsessed with guilt for his participation in this ambiguous crime, repeated on the personal, domestic level in his murder of his mentally unstable wife for drowning their children. The guilt for both is over excessive vengeance inflicted on the victimizer, which is itself a response to guilt for failing to save the victim. This dual sense of moral transgression and unheroic failure haunts the postwar American dream, which the film suggests is a product of its repression. Family life, which was supposed to reward The Greatest Generation for its participation in The Good War is rendered impossible, a site for the repetition of battlefield trauma (DiCaprio’s comeback career seems to be based on playing America’s lost innocence – see Catch Me If You Can, Revolutionary Road, The Aviator, Blood Diamond, Body of Lies). That much is also in the novel. More intriguingly, Scorsese’s Shutter Island reinterprets genre-inflected paranoia in film of the ’50s-’70s as the result of whitewashing WWII, what became America’s Heroic Age, fountainhead of the 20th century American Dream. Postwar horror, SF, and thriller traditions start to read as so many allegories dramatizing the struggle to remember this painful truth — that American innocence was not simply ‘lost’ in Vietnam, but was illegitimately extracted from the wreckage of postwar Europe. At the same time, the liberalism of that era, represented by Ben Kingsley’s tough-love psychotherapist, is itself refuted – Kingsley leads DiCaprio to remember the truth about himself and give up his film noir delusions in order to save him from being lobotomized, only to have the latter fake insanity, effectively choosing brain death over forgiveness. “Is it better to live as a monster or die a good man?” he asks, having already chosen his answer: when it comes to real American history, judgment precludes rehabilitation.

These films represent two ways of making contemporary, disillusioned America responsible for the Holocaust, and by extension, responsible for its (beleaguered) status as world superpower. We can restate the comparison in the form of a question: does Gothic/psychological horror or ’70s exploitation provide the most convincing narrative means for rewriting history as the domain of American agency? SI depicts psychological repression resulting from the impossible desire to take responsibility for events that undermine agency (neither Leo’s killing of Nazi prisoners nor his murder of his wife are strictly his fault, but for him they have to be, and that’s why he goes crazy). IB rejoices in the movies’ power to heal historical wounds by creating an alternate myth-history more appropriate to current propaganda needs (America/Israel are righteous because they’re willing to be bad for obvious reasons). But for both, guilt and the transmutation of guilt into potency, the Holocaust is a tragedy too significant to have had nothing to do with the U.S.A. — it is no less than the source of America(and Israel)’s moral authority, one of the most hilariously flimsy arguments in human history.

It should be mentioned that IB is vastly more exciting as a film than SI. The latter’s attempts to emulate Lynch are about as effective as Spielberg’s attempt to channel Kubrick in AI, and its frequent ridiculousness isn’t leavened by the thrill of affirmation. Its denouement is instead enervating (to an extent only achievable by disillusioned liberalism + Scorsese’s Catholic guilt), and we then have to call the film hard to take seriously instead of praising it for its daring. Tarantino, on the other hand, hasn’t made a better film. IB is just as ridiculous, but is able to make regression look and feel revolutionary, perhaps the special genius of these remedial times.

Endnote to ‘Privileged Guilt’

This seems to be the conclusion to the last post:

Privilege cannot be shed, and therefore guilt is an incoherent response. I mean the kind of privilege that’s actually pernicious from a left perspective, which is not simply superiority or advantage, as it tends to be caricatured. Intelligent, cultured, upper-middle-class white men are not being called out for being intelligent, cultured, or even upper-middle-class — dull-witted, undereducated, working class white men still benefit from being white and male. If they get called out, it is (or should be) because their words and actions deny or ignore the role that their whiteness, maleness, and middle-classness have played in the acquisition of material advantages that may or may not result in intelligence, competence, good looks, or any other ideal quality. That is, when they actively justify their privilege with what is unjustifiable. So it is a critique of behavior. And yet the critique is still unavoidably directed at who they are, because the value of existence is not distinct from the position one occupies in the world and what one does with it, neither of which are wholly subject to individual will. Privilege tends to conceal from its beneficiaries an existential truth that everyone else is forced to recognize over and over again. Shame at being white, male, or bourgeois isn’t any more justified than shame at being black, female, or working class, the latter three of course having their own troubled histories.

(as an aside, the corollary to this point is that identity-based pride is no less compensatory than guilt — everything depends on what they transition to; I would argue they aren’t necessary conditions for anything)

What I’m calling ‘privileged guilt’ is not only ethically incoherent, it is central to a practice, the establishment of hierarchical distinctions within privileged identities: the ‘enlightened liberal,’ the ‘radical leftist,’ the ‘race traitor,’ in contrast to the ‘ignorant racist,’ ‘falsely conscious liberal imperialist,’ ‘consumer whore,’ ‘animalistic frat boy,’ etc. All of which reaffirm the idealist distinctions leftists should be trying to undo, and narrow the scope of political importance to (surprise!) the privileged group. In this context, guilt, along with its compulsive displays of ‘awareness’ and ‘sympathy,’ is just another form of conspicuous consumption.

Sara Ahmed’s “Declarations of Whiteness” is a good place to start thinking more about this:

“…whiteness studies should involve at least a double turn: to turn towards whiteness is to turn towards and away from those bodies who have been afforded agency and mobility by such privilege. In other words, the task for white subjects would be to stay implicated in what they critique, but in turning towards their role and responsibility in these histories of racism, as histories of this present, to turn away from themselves, and towards others.”

A turn to historical responsibility that doesn’t culminate in the self is as good a definition of activism and a repudiation of privileged guilt as I’ve seen.

And this at guerilla mama medicine, an example of what I like to think of as “left anti-political correctness”: (sent to me by Avanworden):

i guess what i am saying is that in my experience if white folks want to be respectful of poc or understand where they are coming from–they dont need a workshop.  there are centuries of writing from poc that they can dive into.  there are plenty of poc in their neighborhoods and community organizations.  when white folks are ready to be anti-racist, when they are ready to turn from facing the center, to facing the margins, and stand with us.  we will be here.

they dont need to be converted or preached to.

they dont need to learn the right words to use.  or the right theory.

we dont need more of that.

and it is harmful to them to give them a bunch of new theory and rhetoric while they are still angling to get as close to the center as possible.  to get to the top of the caterpillar pile.

and antiracism theory will just be used as another means, another tactic for them to reach their goal.

This argument implies something that can serve as an example of how whiteness is not only complicated for white people. If the turn away from superficial ‘correctness’ is to be taken seriously, it would require a reciprocal effort from nonwhites, not only to move away from ‘education’ as a solution, but also critical attitudes that assume educated speech as a norm. And that is not in the power of anti-racist whites to ask. Whites can’t honestly be expected to move on from a constant fear of ‘saying the wrong thing’ if the ‘right thing’ retains normative force, that is, if privileged guilt is the dominant form of white antiracism. ‘Suck it up’ or ‘deal with it’ just encourage martyrdom, claiming that forceful ‘calling out’ of either aspirational or experienced white allies is done out of ‘love’ (a defense I read somewhere) is condescending. Of course words matter — outside narrow liberal and activist circles racist rhetoric is all too common and operates precisely by disavowal. But that is also why the demands of solidarity are sometimes in conflict with the demands of critique.

Privileged Guilt

Or, the shame of having what everyone else is supposed to want.

A while ago, Student Activism, along with others, highlighted the problems white people trying to be good creates for activism:

Jill hit the nail on the head when she said that the struggle to be — and to be seen as — “one of the good ones” can be a distraction from the real work of the activist. When you find stuff that needs doing, figure out how to help, and get to work on helping, that’s activism. Checking your privilege isn’t activism. It’s a part (and an ongoing part) of the process, but it’s not an end in itself.

The idea that identity should be entirely determined by the exercise of individual liberty is a product of liberalism, which is raced white, gendered male, classed in the middle, and is probably straight. A person who benefits from a privileged, flexible identity (whiteness, maleness, bourgeoisness, heterosexuality) is more free to think and act independently of obligation to any collective identity, whether that be out of ignorance or antagonism. Liberty in this sense is a form of power over others who are so obliged. Since these identities are the means of securing that freedom/power, when they lose their ‘symbolic efficacy’ they cultivate reaction in the subjects ‘supposed to be.’ Those who are ‘objectively’ white, men, bourgeois, are forced to see the collective nature of their identities (the ‘culture(s)’ through which one can ‘transcend’ ordinary social life) and to try to define them, to justify their ‘right’ to realize their privilege, and can eventually become a sort of semi- or full-on- fascist mishmash (the belated invention of ‘white culture’ by white supremacist groups; the tea party, etc.). They are forced to actively identify with privileges that they used to simply assume.

Enter the ‘good ones’: by engaging in self-criticism, some identified as privileged try to distinguish themselves from their various fascistic mirrors, which translates into either a) a spurious sense of even greater autonomy and freedom than all the ‘successful’ white/bourgeois/male/heterosexual/able-bodied/etc. unaware of their critical intellects. They see their own privilege as a form of constraint or compulsion from which they want to escape. This is the post-68 form of the “beautiful soul.” Or, b) involvement in struggles for equality on behalf of those whose identities are used to oppress them. That is, they identify through critique with non-whites, non-males, etc.

Pretty much everyone is skeptical of attempts to identify with the non-privileged. Sometimes they take extraordinarily crass and self-defeating forms. Other times they’re just condescending or ridiculous. Or at least they’re usually seen that way. Linda Martín Alcoff criticizes the ideal put forward for antiracist whites in the book/journal Race Traitor here:

“The major problem with Race Traitor‘s proposal, however, is that, in one important sense, whites cannot disavow whiteness. One’s appearance of being white will still operate to confer privilege in numerous and significant ways, and to avow treason does not render whites ineligible for these privileges, even if they work hard to avoid them.”

As has long been obvious to anti-assimilationists, all attempts at re-identification are doomed to failure: a white man can’t become a black woman; a straight woman can have sex with women but can’t have grown up gay, just like a black man can’t become a white man; in short the outsider can’t ever become an insider, not because the identity is formally exclusive but because the situation the identity defines is really different and inaccessible. The problem with seeing identity politics in purely discursive terms is that every identity political act is then reducible to either reclamation (black pride) or calling-out (white guilt); feminism and SlutWalk become interchangeable.

As Alcoff defines it, identity is an existential fact, “a site from which one must engage in the process of meaning-making and thus from which one is open to the world.” For a white person to take an oppositional stance to their whiteness is a real (albeit always incomplete) loss of privilege and a real sacrifice of any hope that one’s political and moral convictions and desires can someday coincide with that given identity. A white man can exoticize himself as a ‘race traitor’ or ‘gender traitor’ but this kind of quixotic heroism is always unconvincing and carries the risk of avant-gardism, where the white man who has supposedly divorced himself from his privileged identity has a more holistic perspective on the problems of others than they themselves do. ‘Hybridity’ as a counter-ideal to whiteness doesn’t work either, since no one is better at incorporating difference than white men. Nor does trying to distinguish between who a person is and what they do. To call someone out for ignoring their privilege (because that’s how you take advantage of it) can’t not be a personal attack, no matter how many times one says “there are no racist people, only racist actions.” A person just is a collection of actions, performances, and physical characteristics over which no individual can have complete control. After declaring war on all privileged forms of universalism, the most pride one can take in a privileged identity is moral superiority over his/her false consciousness-ridden counterparts (white people critiquing whiteness, men disowning masculinity, etc.), which is just one more thing to feel guilty about. Self-flagellating martyrdom seems to be the only publicly appropriate response to one’s privilege. Not the best cure for delusions of grandeur.

No one really has a solution to this problem, the only one white men suffer from the most. I’ve tried to figure out why for a long time, and the best I can come up with is that anti-privilege is almost always defined to imply hope for an ideal world in which everyone becomes white. White guilt is basically feeling bad because white people exclude everyone else from being white, just like male guilt is feeling bad because men exclude everyone else from being a man. By ‘white man’ I’m referring to the liberal ideal of self-determination, the freedom (and responsibility) to determine who one is in the world without being reducible to any collectively determined identity. In The Racial Contract, Charles Mills argues that the social contract foundational to classical liberal theory is predicated on a society of white men, and therefore their superiority and dominance over nonwhites (and women, as usual): “The terms of the Racial Contract mean that nonwhite subpersonhood is enshrined simultaneously with white personhood.” He nevertheless thinks it’s possible to separate the ideal from its history of oppression. He just assumes this can be done, which isn’t so bad in itself — most things worth doing involve a voluntarist leap of faith — but it depends on the liberal individual not being racist or patriarchal in formal terms. That is, Mills accepts the ideal’s basic assertion about itself even as he subjects it to historical critique. Even collective self-determination, the project of a universalist community of difference, at some point or other depends on erasing history (a.k.a. ‘revolution’). Though of course Mills does not, one can then justify criticisms of feminism, anti-racism, and working-class politics for being too particularist, not universal, positive, queer, or hybridized enough to found a true left-wing mass movement. In the context of liberal ideology, Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations were quite truthful: “It is possible to live almost without memory, indeed to live happily, as the animals show us; but without forgetting, it is utterly impossible to live at all.”

What if we assume instead that identity is a basic fact of social existence, and that the freedom of self-determination is an essentially oppressive form of privilege? Under Alcoff’s definition of identity as a collective response to a real situation, the only way to be really free in liberal terms is to be Superman — to fall out of the sky, the last member of an alien race with godlike powers. And even he, to some extent at least, is American.

This would not mean acquiescing to racial, gender, class, or other forms of hierarchy. It would, however, mean not treating them as commensurable. Fighting them shouldn’t require the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity as either rhetorical justification or theoretical framework: they are distinct problems with different, finite limits. The concept ‘privilege’ without precise contextualization is too broad to be very useful for much more than guilt-mongering ressentiment (tallness, intelligence, gregariousness, or being really good at soccer aren’t things anyone should want to dismantle, despite the inequality they breed). The value of a person to these struggles should simply be their participation, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or class — discussion of whether a white person can ever ‘really’ be anti-racist should be considered academic in the pejorative sense. In practice, however, benefitting from racism through being white or capitalism through being bourgeois indeed do constitute barriers to joining in their overthrow, not least in the form of interested ignorance. And at the same time, assuming self-worth is a basic human need like food or pleasure, it seems near-impossible for anyone to base theirs entirely on (what their peer groups arbitrarily define as) ‘actions’ in place of identity, if only because the worth of most actions is less stable than that of most identities. Even heterosexual white cis-male currency speculators with Men’s Health physiques need to feel morally good about who they are, and who they are includes the groups they identify with. And yet the whole idea that a sanitized revision of whiteness or maleness or capitalism (or anything) could just somehow be invented seems insulting to everyone, like old people diapers, ‘smart’ superhero movies, or Will Smith. Most anti-capitalists accept that dismantling capitalism is impossible without expropriating the expropriators — there’s no reason to think getting rid of racism and patriarchy should be painless, either.

As I’ve said, there is no solution to this dilemma. Just three things I think are worth remembering. One is that a problem without a solution is a tragedy, even (especially) if one’s position in the world makes it hard to be sympathetic. White people can’t magically fix themselves. Two, despite all the annoying baggage, white dissident subversion of white supremacy is just as necessary as black, brown, yellow, or red resistance. Finally, it is both vital and difficult to counter this society’s dominant ideals without restating them in a different language. And all that means the tragic, guilty side of whiteness, along with its cousins lurking inside the other major forms of oppressive, institutionalized privilege, belongs to everyone.

What Is The Middlebrow

Thinking a bit about the hype/backlash cycle, attributed by Benjamin Kunkel to the ambivalences of “mass affluence.” Essentially, the complaint goes, under consumerism, culture is reduced to participation in status markets. Not only does this degradation of art teach us ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing,’ but it renders us unable to comprehend the very concept of non-market value, a disability that extends to politics. “The extent of the hype cycle’s corruption of our minds,” he writes, “can be measured by the frequency with which you hear people complaining that environmentalism has grown so fashionable, so chic, so trendy. Try to imagine a similar complaint from another political era: “I was totally into democracy—before they extended the franchise. I was all about socialism—but it became so working class.” The loss of aesthetic discernment deadens us even to the value of the authentically popular.

There’s an apparent fact that seems to follow from this observation that undermines it at the same time. The ‘hype system,’ inseparable from angst about said system, is driven by the greatest fear of any self-respecting petit-bourgeois — to be caught being ‘bourgeois.’ To be truly cultured, ‘cool,’ etc., is to exist beyond categories. But with a few exceptions that prove the rule, one can’t even be in the running unless one is (gross!) in the running to become bourgeois. To specify by focusing on literature: from Lukàcs through Jameson and on to Kunkel (!), a novel written today that reminds the critic of 19th-century realism  is considered both less decadent and less ‘contemporary’ than one that takes its cues from the modernist demand for the transcendence of form over content, and is a clue that the writer is not, through no fault of their own, white, first-world, or (80% of the time) male. Whether that’s good or bad is up to the individual critic, but in either case the Euro, the American, the late capitalist, whiteness, and maleness just happen to converge on the center of historical progress. An interesting piece reflects on this bias here.

There is a handy classification scheme to mark those who don’t agree with the position one takes in cultural debate. I’m talking about the ‘brow system,’ developed by a Sun journalist’s use of phrenology as not-quite-just-a-metaphor for taste, opposing a “highbrow” elite to “lowbrow” plebes, marking them both as slightly freakish. The system was completed in the British comedy magazine Punch (the ancestor of MAD and National Lampoon as much as The Onion) with a flourish of self-reflexive irony — the “middlebrow…consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff they ought to like.” Virginia Woolf, the middlebrow’s favorite modernist, famously later used it to insult the BBC, the middlebrow’s favorite news source.

Of course, the entire ‘brow system’ is itself middlebrow, and that is because it locks every object formally eligible as ‘art’ within the market of formally eligible opinions of what ‘art’ is. Like the petit-bourgeois/middlebrow assessment of global warming, the problem is always that there are too many people involved: quality sinks, authenticity is forgotten, all is replaced by competitive self-interest and banality. The important thing to keep in mind is that not everyone can be judged in this way — it would be the height of poor taste to call the proverbial starving child in Africa (or New Orleans, for that matter) ‘lowbrow’; one only attacks those who should know better. The whole racket evidently exists for people who think of themselves as ‘middle class’ to police each other.

This great debate perpetuates an unspoken assumption that participating in it is an inevitable result of coming into wealth, or simply living in proximity to wealth (“under the conditions of late capitalism”). It’s all about making bourgeois culture seem normative rather than particular, and the world divisible into three categories in which highbrow and lowbrow are complementary Others (which is not to say that no one ever tries to embody them) with middlebrow an equally self-confirming form of autocritique; the system is only transcended when those who should be middlebrow are mysteriously not.

The fear of a world constantly in danger of being consumed by kitsch is a bit like the colonialist assumption that your slaves would do the same to you if given half a chance. ‘Middle class’ identity  assumes it has proved what the ‘average person’ will be like given the resources necessary for a certain level of comfort. Leaving out an explicit class dynamic means one can’t see how that class identity is formed by more and less stable systems of exclusion, not just the consumption and appropriation of resources by homo economicus. The bourgeois class and its petit-bourgeois support staff see themselves as utopian, and that (for them) dissolves the possibility of a real utopia.

Plausible Deniability

Being somewhat confused about the precise meaning of “capture/kill” in reference to military operations, I checked out the latest professional commentary for clues. But they seemed just as confused as me — here a congressional aide calling Operation Neptune Spear a “kill” mission, there a White House media liaison discussing the priority (when possible of course, and who are we to second-guess) of “capture.” When both terms were used together, the order seemed to depend on the writer’s intentions. “Capture/kill” to preserve objectivity; to express (rare) skepticism, “kill/capture.” I started to see the Schrödinger’s Cat logic behind this ambiguous nomenclature. Aufgehebt by the ersatz clarity with which the word is used is the question of whether the target was ‘intentionally’ assassinated or merely dispatched in the line of duty.

Or perhaps he was never killed at all!

It’s such a neat little box, this codified non-question, that it’s more poetic, and certainly more politic, not to try to answer it. Still, I kept looking. And found that it was easier to get clear answers if I checked before its recent smashing success. Nine months was about enough:

“Capture/kill” is a key part of a new military “doctrine” developed by the Special Forces Command established after the failure of Operation Eagle Claw. Under the leadership of General Bryan D. Brown, who took over the Special Forces Command in September 2003, the doctrine came to be known as F4, which stood for “find, fix, finish, and follow-up” — a slightly euphemistic but not hard to understand message about how alleged terrorists and insurgents were to be dealt with.

Under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the Bush years, Brown began setting up “joint Special Forces” teams to conduct F4 missions outside war zones.  These were given the anodyne name “Military Liaison Elements.” At least one killing by such a team in Paraguay (of an armed robber not on any targeting list) was written up by New York Times reporters Scott Shane and Thom Shanker. The team, whose presence had not been made known to the U.S. ambassador there, was ordered to leave the country.

“The number-one requirement is to defend the homeland. And so sometimes that requires that you find and capture or kill terrorist targets around the world that are trying to do harm to this nation,” Brown told the House Committee on Armed Services in March 2006. “Our foreign partners… are willing but incapable nations that want help in building their own capability to defend their borders and eliminate terrorism in their countries or in their regions.” In April 2007, President Bush rewarded Brown’s planning by creating a special high-level office at the Pentagon for an assistant secretary of defense for special operations/low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities.

Michael G. Vickers, made famous in the book and film Charlie Wilson’s War as the architect of the covert arms-and-money supply chain to the mujaheedin in the CIA’s anti-Soviet Afghan campaign of the 1980s, was nominated to fill the position. Under his leadership, a new directive was issued in December 2008 to “develop capabilities for extending U.S. reach into denied areas and uncertain environments by operating with and through indigenous foreign forces or by conducting low visibility operations.”  In this way, the “capture/kill” program was institutionalized in Washington.

“The war on terror is fundamentally an indirect war… It’s a war of partners… but it also is a bit of the war in the shadows, either because of political sensitivity or the problem of finding terrorists,” Vickerstold the Washington Post as 2007 ended. “That’s why the Central Intelligence Agency is so important… and our Special Operations forces play a large role.”

George W. Bush’s departure from the White House did not dampen the enthusiasm for F4.  Quite the contrary: even though the F4 formula has recently been tinkered with, in typical military fashion, and has now become “find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze,” or F3EA, President Obama has, by all accounts, expanded military intelligence gathering and “capture/kill” programs globally in tandem with an escalation of drone-strike operations by the CIA.

There are quite a few outspoken supporters of the “capture/kill” doctrine. Columbia University Professor Austin Long is one academic who has jumped on the F3EA bandwagon. Noting its similarity to the Phoenix assassination program, responsible for tens of thousands of deaths during the U.S. war in Vietnam (which he defends), he has called for a shrinking of the U.S. military “footprint” in Afghanistan to 13,000 Special Forces troops who would focus exclusively on counter-terrorism, particularly assassination operations. “Phoenix suggests that intelligence coordination and the integration of intelligence with an action arm can have a powerful effect on even extremely large and capable armed groups,” he and his co-author William Rosenau wrote in a July 2009 Rand Institute monograph entitled” “The Phoenix Program and Contemporary Counterinsurgency.”

Others are even more aggressively inclined. Lieutenant George Crawford, who retired from the position of “lead strategist” for the Special Forces Command to go work for Archimedes Global, Inc., a Washington consulting firm, has suggested that F3EA be replaced by one term: “Manhunting.” In a monograph published by the Joint Special Operations University in September 2009, “Manhunting: Counter-Network Organization for Irregular Warfare,” Crawford spells out “how to best address the responsibility to develop manhunting as a capability for American national security.”

One sees the compromise — “Manhunting” is thrilling but a tad direct; “F3EA” is appropriately neutral, but undermines lingering conversational norms of the English language. The point is that at a certain level of abstraction inhabited by military bureaucrats, there’s really not much difference between “capture” and “kill.”

Anyway, it seems the U.S. is moving further toward fulfilling its role as global enforcer through a network of secret military police, the ‘police’ function serving largely as an alibi. Like the original and more conventional invasion force, there is a clear division of labor between Americans (and their NATO allies) and the locals, who have yet to demonstrate their capacity for self-government. For example, ambiguity is for white people — the straight-up “kill” teams are conveniently composed of Afghans:

Woodward’s…Obama’s Wars, excerpted today in the Washington Post and the New York Times, unveils a CIA initiative called the Counterterrorist Pursuit Teams, a posse of anti-Taliban and al-Qaeda locals who don’t respect the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The teams are practically brigade-sized: a “paramilitary army” of 3000 Afghans, said to be “elite, well-trained” and capable of quietly crossing over in the Pakistani extremist safe havens where U.S. troops aren’t allowed to operate. The CIA directs and funds the teams.

Administration officials didn’t just confirm the existence of the teams — they bragged about them. “This is one of the best Afghan fighting forces and it’s made major contributions to stability and security,” says one U.S. official who would only talk on condition of anonymity — and who wouldn’t elaborate.

Yes, a minority of Americans also participate in unambiguous slaughter. But they’re crazy.

In this war that is also supposed to be a rebuilding, we call our soldiers police to legitimate them, and military to absolve them. It’s a neat trick: when one word can’t do everything that needs to be done, bring two.

This Machine Kills Terror

I got into a long and annoying ’epic’ blog debate with a friend over Chomsky’s piece on the killing of Osama bin Laden here. Having spent way too many words on it to let them all go to waste, I decided to republish some…on this blog. Below are my key points:

what we have, in essence, an ambiguously defined attack on ‘the homeland’ (9/11), a hastily cobbled together accusation of (formally indicted) 1998 bombing suspect osm used as specious justification for the long-desired military invasion and occupation of afghanistan and then (to a lesser extent) iraq. then, in the background, a serious investigation with necessarily provisional results that the u.s. gov cherry picks from time to time to justify this or that military action. chomsky is pointing out the discrepancy between the results of that investigation and the ideological uses to which it was put. in this case that use is the targeted killing of someone the u.s. had basically already given itself permission to kill at will prior to any investigation, by cobbling together its own legal process after 9/11 largely in defiance of international law. so, leftists can critique the u.s. gov for breaking laws they no longer respect, or they can critique the u.s. for starting wars for reasons that were, as everyone agrees but is not allowed to say in public, bullshit anyway. either one makes us look like we have our heads up our asses. but that kind of goes with the territory. maybe you could call it ‘utopian.’

i’ll admit it’s easy to misread chomsky’s “Nothing serious has been provided since.” but if we’re going to be precise, that refers to his responsibility for 9/11, which the u.s. initially considered ‘full’ (so as to invade faster) but was very quickly dialed down to something more vague in favor of ksm and his team, who did the real work themselves.

…

i don’t think what obama actually did should be considered acceptable or defended because it’s ‘closer’ to the ideal [an internationalist version of this, basically] than full-scale military invasion, both of which were launched for different reasons. the targeted killings are in fact being carried out under presidential authority, with no oversight from anyone, no recourse if there are ‘mistakes’ (obama said himself they were only ’55-45′ on whether bin laden was even there), and under a vague interpretation of international law. there are probably significantly fewer civilian casualties in commando operations than drone strikes but we don’t hear about them (they’re secret) and they operate on the same principles (the decision over which to use is tactical). the fact that they killed a celebrity overrides all of that for most commentators (including the u.n.), but it is still an example of the quasi to extra legal way this war has always been carried out. defending it defends u.s. policy and creates a precedent that may well become accepted as legal.

i guess this isn’t obvious, but i agree it would be ideal for terrorists to be treated more like international criminals than vague non-state military threats (‘terrorist’) that we can do anything to. i maintain the point of the chomsky piece was to rhetorically emphasize that difference. this is necessary because even defenders of assassination, torture, extraordinary renditions, and offshore prisons (actual anti-terrorist praxis) sometimes seem compelled to use criminal justice arguments, even though they don’t apply. that inconsistency is what drives of most of the public debate about this and keeps it in a state of perpetual cluelessness. leading to bizarre situations in which an assertion from an unreliable, secondhand source that says osama was ‘reaching for his gun’ or ‘maybe doing something else threatening’ can singlehandedly repress not only the competing accounts from u.s. officials and others (a few of which i cited at the top of the thread though what the hey,here’s another) but the simple commonsense acknowledgement that the operation was on military/CIA/Team America rules, therefore existing on a higher ontological plane than our mere legal formalisms can hope to reach.

Three Types of Universal Ideas

“The real principle underlying the phenomena” = Idealist

“That upon which designated individuals happen to agree” = Liberal

“That which everyone can in principle understand” = Communist