my apologies, in advance, for posting on this thread after the discussion has closed. i came across this note and the appended comments more-or-less randomly, and i know only a few of you. but what i've read has perturbed me enough to respond (briefly, i hope, and to only a few points). [i don't want to broach the zany contention that "war is socialism", and the associated claims--if you play games with definitions, you can of course "prove" anything]

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the question of terror and counter-terror.

emily argues that hamas has purposefully killed innocent civilians--these "thousands of innocent civilians killed in malls, restaurants, and night clubs"¹--whereas israel, presumably, is engaged only in precise, targeted, defensive and defensible killings. similarly, will repeats, as fact, the thesis that "hamas was targeting civilians and israel is not."

this is a tired argument--especially hackneyed in these days of occupations launched for liberation, and resistance branded, unequivocally, as terror. in the case of israel/palestine, this line of argument is particularly disingenuous. while it's of course true that hamas has carried out suicide bombings inside israel (a reprehensible tactic it stopped in 2004,² but has allegedly re-committed to in the aftermath of these barbarous bombings), the kind of distinction it seeks to establish between israeli and palestinian violence is simply inadmissable.

in the vain hope of keeping this brief, i want to make only two points: factual, and ethical

first, facts of violence:

CIVILIAN DEATHS

since the second intifada began, the statistics are as follows (from b'tselem)³:

• palestinians killed by israeli security forces: 4781 in OPT, 69 in israel

• (palestinian minors killed by israeli secruity forces: 952 in OPT, 3 in israel)

• israeli civilians killed by palestinians: 237 in OPT, 490 in israel

this is a pattern that has become awfully familiar to observers of today's war on terror. the civilized pursues the barbarian, screaming his devotion to “democracy, freedom, markets.” yet, when the dust settles, we wake to learn that, somehow, the civilized have conspired to demolish far more lives, economies, homes, cities than the barbarians—for an example closer to home, review the history of the US sieges of fallujah.⁴

as my man frantz fanon once put it (roughly), in reference to the crimes of european imperialism, the historical record relates an “avalanche of murders carried out by those who never stopped talking of man.” (matt mentioned the israeli invasion of lebanon in 2006, as well he should have: the numbers from that war were no less jarring—“more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians and a small but unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead, as well as 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians.”)⁵

ROCKET ATTACKS

all this hoopla about rocket attacks is astonishingly orwellian. they are continuously invoked as the pretext for this and similarly depraved methods of punishing gaza. yet, from 2001-2008, primitive homemade qassams have killed 15 israelis. (yes, 15!).⁶ and from when the cease fire began in june 2008 until the day that these bombings started, not one israeli had died because of rockets launched from gaza.

THE OCCUPATION AND THE EMBARGO

much more significantly, the daily lot of the average gazan exposes the limits of the all-too-common reflex to fetishize, in an ethical sense, forms of overt “violence.” we need to remember that the 1.5 million-strong population of gaza has been subjected to a crippling, inhuman embargo for the past 18 months. is this not “violence” of a staggeringly immoral, “targeted” sort? (it goes without saying that it's a war crime: quite aside from the illegality of israel's retaining control over a territory it acquired in war, it clearly constitutes collective punishment)

some numbers, excerpted from this devastating account by sara roy:⁷

“According to Oxfam only 137 trucks of food were allowed into Gaza in November. This means that an average of 4.6 trucks per day entered the strip compared to an average of 123 in October this year and 564 in December 2005. (...) Between 5 November and 30 November, only 23 trucks arrived, around 6 per cent of the total needed; during the week of 30 November it received 12 trucks, or 11 per cent of what was required. There were three days in November when UNRWA ran out of food, with the result that on each of these days 20,000 people were unable to receive their scheduled supply. According to John Ging, the director of UNRWA in Gaza, most of the people who get food aid are entirely dependent on it. “

palestinians, as abunimah wrote recently, have died “silent” deaths as a result of the embargo: “for want of basic medications: insulin, cancer treatment, products for dialysis prohibited from reaching them by Israel.“⁸

hamas was responding to the israelis' unwillingness to lift this blockade (which they quite rightly called a violation of the terms of the june agreement),⁹ when they elected not to renew this ceasefire.¹⁰ speaking in november, john ging, the head of the UN agency for palestinian refugees, had himself stated plainly that the “people of Gaza [had] not benefit[ed]” from the first five months of the truce.¹¹

second, ethics and analytics of violence:

at times, the people who have commented on this note have held fast to the aforementioned distinctions between the violence of the israeli state and the violence of the assorted palestinian groups (“israel doesn't target civilians deliberately, whereas the palestinian resistance does”). i want to suggest that this is a confused contention, both ethically and analytically.

ethically: it is misleading, at best, to make an ethical distinction between the kind of destruction that the israeli state is visiting upon the population of gaza, and a suicide bombing/rocket attack. the dropping of bombs in populated areas, in the knowledge that civilians will inevitably be killed, is no less reprehensible, morally, than blowing oneself up in a public, civilian place. the usual suggestion that there is no “intent” to kill in the former case masks a far more sinister willingness to sanction the deaths of innocents—as nir rosen writes, “when you drop bombs on populated areas knowing there will be some "collateral" civilian damage, but accepting it as worth it, then it is deliberate.”¹² (see ex-bombardier howard zinn's letter to the NYT, which makes the same argument)¹³

indeed, this is embedded in the genealogy of air bombing, as a tactic—which, in mamdani's words, “originated as a method of war considered fit for use only against uncivilized adversaries,”¹⁴ precisely because it was obvious that the victims would, overwhelmingly, be the populace being bombarded. something similar is at work when emily cites golda meir's golden racist moment (arabs don't care about their babies!). ”it's okay for bombs to drop on these hordes, they don't really “feel,” anyway.” (incidentally, matt cites a UN estimate that 1/5 of those killed have been civilians; the palestine center for human rights, which has an extensive chronicle of where and what has been bombed and when on its website, reports instead that the “vast majority” are civilians).¹⁵

analytically: if there is a moral equivalence between palestinian suicide bombing and israeli aerial bombing, there remains a monumental analytical distinction between palestinian and israeli violence, in general. this is where i disagree with the nonviolent spirit of bobo, seth, and matt's agreement to criticize, unequivocally and equally, all manifestations of violence in this conflict. not only does this fall prey to the early fetishization of “overt” violence (after all, matt was moved to write this note only after these latest massacres—not four days ago at the height of the no less “violent” israeli embargo of gaza), but it also tempts us into committing an analytical fallacy: namely, the suggestion that this is a conflict between equals. i hope no one needs reminding that this remains a confrontation between a hyper-modern military juggernaut (wielded by a settler state) and, more or less, the indigenous population it occupies. any analysis of the violence must take these historical, sociological facts as its premise.

in fact, not much was said about this, perhaps because it's taboo in the US (even if uncontroversial most elsewhere) to suggest that the zionist project is colonial, in form and inspiration. (remember theodore herzl, in his 1896 “the jewish state”, speaking about settling in palestine: ”we should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”¹⁶) seth said something about remaining a believer in the “israeli state”. but if that means a commitment to the project of israel as a “jewish” national home, at the price of forever dispossessing the original inhabitants of that land, i have to ask why. how does someone committed to the ideal of non-violence endorse a project founded on such an awfully “violent” history (on the question of the origins as ethnic cleansing, no serious historians can disagree—ilan pappe makes this case, for example, as i'm sure you know).¹⁷

moreover, as ali abunimah's most recent book argues, wouldn't it be preferable, certainly ethically and perhaps even practically, to agitate for a single, multicultural state as an alternative to confessional politics?

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a few, very quick points, which i couldn't work into the narrative above:

(1) matt--you speak of your own unwillingness to comment on what's happening in this "war", given that you're sitting in american suburbia. this, as i interpret it, is part of a commitment to the democratic process. in other words, you see something impositional in your dictating your interpretations of the conflict to those in israel and occupied palestine.

i think, though, that this reluctance to meddle in “their” affairs can beget a much more concrete appraisal of current events. the israeli operation in gaza, after all, is only the latest, most deadly phase of an almost three year-old plot to topple the democratically-elected hamas government.

the plans for this particular assault were hatched before the six-month-old ceasefire even began (read, for example, this piece by chris floyd, who labels the official narrative a “deliberate and damnable lie”)¹⁸ it was clearly always in the works—and had little to do with hamas' alleged violations of the terms of the agreement. indeed, as i hope is clear, they were compelled into not renewing it by the intensification of the israeli stranglehold on gaza. (and how this, and/or the pithy rocket attacks, justifies the vaporization of a university,¹⁹ police cadets, homes, workshops, and mosques²⁰ is, i hope, beyond all of us).

we all remember the "civil war" of last summer: as per the "Dayton Plan," "jointly coordinated by US Lieutenant-General Keith Dayton and long-time Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan,"²¹ the hopelessly-compromised abbas and company were supposed to be returned to power. but hamas (itself partly an israeli creation, of course--can you say blowback?)²² seized control of the gaza strip, defying these designs.

how scandalous, no, that your own gov't would organize a covert operation in order to oust a democratically-elected government?

(2) matt wrote somewhere that “Palestine supported Hitler”. what is this even supposed to mean? i looked long and hard for evidence of this, but there's really very little (apart from hackneyed accounts of the mufti's affinity for hitler's “final solution”—never much more than the enemy of my enemy is my friend, i assure you.²³ and besides, how do the politics of an aristocratic colonial lackey implicate Palestine, in toto?)

(3) matt and seth keep speaking of their hope that this impasse will be resolved by the arrival of a palestinian gandhi. this argument is misguided. first, it seems to shift blame for the status quo on the failure of the Palestinians to produce a gandhi (i really do not understand this talk of the “ball being in their court”). second, it neglects the existing role of non-violent resistance in palestine²⁴, as well as the israeli state's thoroughgoing repression of it.²⁵ third, it is historically problematic as an analysis of the indian resistance to british rule—gandhi was of course prominent in the independence movement, reviving it in the aftermath of the first world war, but that hardly proves that he and his non-violence “won” independence for india (we still celebrate bhagat singh, don't forget). there are certainly lessons to learn from gandhi, his movement, and his philosophy, but this overly romantic rendering of the freedom struggle is popular largely because it's far more palatable to the powerful (same goes for the US and civil rights: MLK needed his malcom X. not to mention that african-americans in the US have hardly been emancipated!).²⁶

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ok, i think i'll leave it at that. there are a few more things i planned on pointing out, but this is clearly too long already.

in peace,

adaner

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CITATIONS

1the numbers emily suggests are inflated [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hamas_suicide_attacks]

2 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20081230.GAZAHAMAS30/TPStory/International

3http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Casualties.asp

4http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=520770

5http://www.jkcook.net/Articles2/0305.htm

6http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Qassam_rocket_attacks

7http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/roy_01_.html

8http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10055.shtml

9http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7462554.stm

10http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1046923.html

11http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9992.shtml

12http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/29/gaza-hamas-israel

13http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/books/review/Letters-t-1.html?_r=2&oref=slogin

14Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004), page 7.

15http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/PressR/English/2008/121-2008.html

16http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Jewish_State/The_Jewish_Question

17http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/ref-nakba.html

18http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3/1666-shock-awe-and-lies-the-truth-behind-the-israeli-attack-on-gaza.html.

19http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/Israel-continues-bombing-of-.4826836.jp

20http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=263604&version=1&template_id=37&parent_id=17

21http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9434.shtml

22http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10456.htm

23http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1998/1948/362_mssr.htm

24http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article7005.shtml

25http://inpursuitofjustice.wordpress.com/2008/07/31/another-child-shot-dead-at-wall-protest/

26http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=811&Itemid=34

Israel blames Hamas for primitive homemade rocket attacks on the nearby Israeli city of Sederot. In 2001-2008, these rockets killed about 15 Israelis and injured 433, and they have damaged property. In the same period, Gazan mortar attacks on Israel have killed 8 Israelis. Since the Second Intifada broke out in 2000, Israelis have killed nearly 5000 Palestinians, nearly a thousand of them minors. Since fall of 2007, Israel has kept the 1.5 million Gazans under a blockade, interdicting food, fuel and medical supplies to one degree or another. Wreaking collective punishment on civilian populations such as hospital patients denied needed electricity is a crime of war.

The overwhelming majority of Gazans are impoverished and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed. In fact the prospect of steady employment is rapidly disappearing for the majority of the population.
(...) According to Oxfam only 137 trucks of food were allowed into Gaza in November. This means that an average of 4.6 trucks per day entered the strip compared to an average of 123 in October this year and 564 in December 2005.
(...) Between 5 November and 30 November, only 23 trucks arrived, around 6 per cent of the total needed; during the week of 30 November it received 12 trucks, or 11 per cent of what was required. There were three days in November when UNRWA ran out of food, with the result that on each of these days 20,000 people were unable to receive their scheduled supply. According to John Ging, the director of UNRWA in Gaza, most of the people who get food aid are entirely dependent on it. On 18 December UNRWA suspended all food distribution for both emergency and regular programmes because of the blockade.
(...) By April, according to the FAO, there will be no poultry there at all: 70 per cent of Gazans rely on chicken as a major source of protein.
(...) The breakdown of an entire society is happening in front of us, but there is little international response beyond UN warnings which are ignored. The European Union announced recently that it wanted to strengthen its relationship with Israel while the Israeli leadership openly calls for a large-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip and continues its economic stranglehold over the territory with, it appears, the not-so-tacit support of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah – which has been co-operating with Israel on a number of measures. On 19 December Hamas officially ended its truce with Israel, which Israel said it wanted to renew, because of Israel’s failure to ease the blockade. How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of Israel? How can the impoverishment and suffering of Gaza’s children – more than 50 per cent of the population – benefit anyone? International law as well as human decency demands their protection. If Gaza falls, the West Bank will be next.

This is a battle pitting the rural poor and their liberal allies against wealthy urban conservatives who now want to diminish the elected status of Thailand's parliament. It is fought on the streets between the left-wing red-shirts, whose power base is in the north-east, and the yellow-shirted royalists of Bangkok and the south. It is also a struggle for the soul of Thailand after Thaksin, the telecoms billionaire turned politician whose legacy has divided a country. The outcome will be studied with trepidation by a region with much to lose from the implosion of a former tiger economy.

The mass grave at Dasht-e-Leili in northern Afghanistan is thought to contain the remains of between 1,000 and 2,000 Taleban prisoners massacred by fighters loyal to the Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum in November 2001. The killings occurred in the remote Leili desert as General Dostum’s forces fought alongside US special forces. Prisoners were packed into sealed shipping containers and left to suffocate. Others are alleged to have died when fighters riddled other containers full of prisoners with bullets before burning and burying the bodies.
(...) General Dostum, the alleged perpetrator of the massacre, was chief of staff to the Afghan National Army until this year. He retains strong support among the Uzbek population in the north and won 10 per cent of the vote in the 2004 presidential elections.

But “genocides” aren’t what they used to be and the Russian government, which had previously claimed 2,100 civilians were killed in the war, lowered that number dramatically, concluding that the official civilian toll is 162. Also killed were 48 Russian soldiers and 215 Georgian soldiers. Georgia, as it has with previous allegations of war crimes, condemned their accusers, saying it was a “cynical lie” and part of a “Kremlin propaganda campaign.”

U.S. forces in Iraq have detained 10,000 prisoners without evidence of their wrongdoing, a U.S. detention centers in Iraq commander said on Monday.

Nigerian police and troops carried out more than 90 summary executions in suppressing violent religious and political rioting in the central city of Jos, Human Rights Watch alleged on Saturday.

POTA and its predecessor, Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA), were extensively abused. They typically targeted the religious minorities, specifically Muslims, and allowed for their harassment and persecution. The TADA story is especially horrifying. Some 67,000 people were arrested under it, but only 8,000 put on trial, and a mere 725 convicted. Official TADA Review Committees themselves found the law’s application untenable in all but 5,000 cases. In 1993, Gujarat witnessed no terrorism, but more than 19,000 people were still arrested under TADA. Religious minorities were selectively targeted under both Acts. For instance, in Rajasthan, of 115 TADA detainees, 112 were Muslims and three Sikhs. Gujarat had a worse pattern under POTA, when all but one of the 200-plus detainees were Muslims, the remaining one a Sikh.
(...) The passing of the two new laws is certain to increase the alienation of India's Muslims from the state. They have been the principal victims of India's anti-terrorism strategy and activities in recent years.

Operation Clean-Up

Strung to twin lampposts on the road running behind our house is a cloth advert announcing a new campaign to "Keep Karachi Clean." It was raised a week or two ago--on the orders of some unctuous MQM man in the city gov't, one imagines, though maybe not.

It's made to be more-or-less unmissable by the multitudes that trudge underneath. The street, after all, feeds into the frenzy of Saddar and Shahrah-e-Faisal (which was itself recently smothered in maddening PPP membership appeals--"Socialism Is Our Economy" plastered unapologetically above The Most Famous Grin in Pakistan).

I know that our area's denizens will applaud the idea. I can't count the number of times I've heard, in one bourgeois safehouse or another, theses on trash habits and Premodernity. It's as if, in the world of Pajeros and I-Phones, it's the juice-boxes and paan stains that stand between Pakistan and the promised land.

Whenever I pass by on my way home, though, my eyes invariably fix on a smaller, subtler sub-heading, printed in green letters that run along the top edge: "Operation Clean-Up." Even as the banner lolls about in the wind, these words seem to stay still with self-importance.

Ah yes, Operation Clean-Up. It's in that sense that the all-English sign serves its purpose--as a reminder to the settled residents of these parts of South-Central Karachi: We will keep your streets chaste, your trees green, and your gates secure. Worry not, you who wield foreign passports and English educations. Your city is safe with us.

Operation Clean-Up.

This is the civil society of Marx's early writings--an island of bourgeois civics in a sea of lumpen misery. This pampered noblesse, with their fashion extravaganzas and catered charity bashes, were the object of Fanon's undying dismay: mimicking the West while Karachi burns around them. I don't know if the Lawyers' movement ever understood?

------

I can't help but think of a grinning Syed Mustafa Kamal, patron-saint of this "world city" (who knew modernity meant Sofitels over hospitals? Let the sick soak in the spas, I suppose.)

Plant trees, save the planet, take pictures. Operation Clean-Up. Cast for your Dubai wet-dream: Sheikhs as investors, Dreamers as planners, Whites as residents--apartment buildings to scrape the sky; beaches to be deloused (Fisherfolk move aside!). Operation Clean-Up. Build flyovers, so that many a burgher bhaabi can be spared the indignity of driving through the lies, the grind, the grime. Operation Clean-Up.

Cobble together the deepest fears of our urban elite, invoke the Bogeyman (in fact, give him a beard, some bombs, and a pathological hatred for girls' schooling), buy some guns. Operation Clean-Up. Ring up some lackeys (bring your gun), burn some shops, purge some neighborhoods. Operation Clean-Up. Kick ass, take names, win votes. Operation Clean-Up.

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------

I write this, after all, because two weeks ago Karachi imploded. This city, saddled with a history of "ethnic strife," the media-men told us, had once more cracked under the weight of difference. Mohajirs shot Pashtuns, Pashtuns shot Mohajirs--throw in the specter of the "land mafia," mix well with some palace politicking, and you have the governing coalition's official explanation. No one remembered to tell the stocky Afghani man that darts up and down the right wing in our football scrimmages at the Polo Ground that "difference" was the sticking point, but so it goes (Gattuso's little brother they call him, for the hair and the red cards).

"Scores dead, hundreds wounded", ran the ticker-tape headlines. Karachi might just as well have been hit by a senseless epidemic. "X number of buses burned, Y number of shops closed, Z number of neighborhoods affected." No explanation, no context, just "the facts." Very few of our Satellite Jacobins seemed prepared to ask what was actually happening. Instead--invariably, I suppose--they ran the liberal line: on-the-hour updates, flashing photos of children in hospital wards, mothers in tears. "Hurricane Ethnic Violence has struck! Karachi in chaos!" The streets emptied, schools closed.

Of course, it's here at this moment of non-explanation, that the paradigm makes clear its conservative foundations. As all abnormal violence is denounced, however correctly, in the name of the peace that previously prevailed, what's really being pursued is the Restoration. One mustn't talk of the systemic violence that scarred the status quo--hunger, unemployment, thirst, patriarchy--everyone seeks chronology and the breaking news and "peace," not sociology and root causes and emancipation.

Granted, root causes don't quite fit here, though they have their place--we weren't dealing primarily with an outburst of the oppressed, after all, but with pogroms planned by Karachi's oppressors. Why else would "ethnic strife" stop for Eid, except if on cue? And let's not forget that Altaf Bhai, crackling in on the line from London, had been slowly setting the stage, for months. "Save us from Talibanization!," scream MQM's now-tattered, monochrome posters. What tripe!

Thus, in this case, what's more apparent is the myopia of the commonsense condemnation of "all" violence. As each outburst is inveighed against without distinction, they all threaten to become indistinguishable from one another. The paroxysms of Pashtun immigrants are equated to the expulsions of their families, the burning of their homes, their buses, their shops. Again, no background, no analysis, just the "numbers."

What's more, perhaps the entire tragedy of the liberal world-view is that one brand of violence, one kind of terror, remains basically unimpeachable. If, following Weber, polite politics begins where one accepts the authority of the State's coercive arms (their "monopoly over the legitimate use of violence"), a certain "right to violence" gets normalized by this knee-jerk call to peace. As society summons the State's proxies, it becomes terribly tempting to ignore the role of those same institutions, either generally (in securing the asymmetries and stoking the grievances that make conflagration inevitable), or specifically (in facilitating fascist violence). If the liberal, then, believes that the police intervene in order to save society from itself, others have always understood that this invariably happens at Power's behest.

------

Two days before I went to Landhi, to hear some of this for myself, I cycled through a Dawn.com slideshow of pictures from "The Violence." The cameraperson had obviously accompanied the police on a "Search and Destroy" mission through an "Afghan refugee camp"--image after image enacted the swift arrest of "suspected criminals" by smartly-dressed police and paramilitary men (the "Rangers"). Guns out (not just for the camera, one imagines), sunglasses on, uniforms ironed, these guardians of the peace were tossing bedraggled, bewildered Pashtun men into the back of their flatbeds as if it were hero meets hostage-taker.

I don't think that they--the Government, the Police, the Media--really believe that everyone has digested all this "score one for the good guys" bunkum. What's certain, though, is that they know they can rely on us, in our urge for regularity to resume, to excuse and to forget. And in order to sustain the myriad tyrannies lodged in the foundations of third-rate democracies, that's all that really matters.

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------

When I left, then, to meet the "bad guys," I fully expected stories of grief and rage. We had been told of their plight--about 330 Pasthun families, give or take, forced from their homes in Korangi by a coordinated MQM "purge." Their warehouses, stocked full of trash that they sorted in order to sell (Karachi's recyclers, they are), were burned. Two boys on watch were killed (one by a bullet to the head, the other by fire). Thousands-strong, they fled--most to Ilyas Goth, which is where we met them.

Yet I hadn't really prepared for the lack of hope, for the helplessness, for the despair.

December 6, 2008--we slowed to a stop in front of men crouched in the caked dirt, either side of the road on which we had parked. Probably a little under a hundred, in all. I remember thinking that they didn't seem angry enough--more bored, more lost, and more fatigued than anything else. As I walked by and bumbled my hellos, most smiled back--but always skeptically, as if they knew nothing would be decided by reactive, long-distance solidarity. And rightly so.

Almost immediately after being introduced to grieving relatives of the boy that had been shot in his temple (someone mimed his murder for me), I was hit with a barrage of testimony and names. Some remembered MQM cadres coming at 10pm on the 30th of November, others said that they had arrived, Police in tow and petrol in hand, early the next morning. Some said State proxies were actively involved--other said intentionally inactive. What difference did it really make, I thought. All agreed that it had been planned in advance: in one fell swoop, the boy was murdered and their warehouses burned (my translator insisted on asking them to quantify their losses: Muhammad Gul said 3 lakhs, Faiz Muhammad reported 6-7 lakhs. Lifetime savings, up in smoke).

What could they do but come here, they asked?

Everyone kept interrupting each other as I scribbled names, stories, dates ("facts"). Finally, an old man, hunched and wrinkled, grabbed me by my elbow and walked me toward where his family now found themselves. The crowd dissipated behind us. As we approached the roofless, doorless structure, I remember him turning to the translator, and then me: "We left everything behind--everything. I'd been living in Korangi for 23 years, and all of a sudden I've lost everything."

Later, a friend supplied some context: All of the houses in Ilyas Goth were still incomplete (there was no running water, no toilets, no gas, no electricity). The plots themselves were owned by wealthier Pashtuns, who retained them as secondary investments. Most of these refugees were squatting, though others said that at least one family had already arranged to rent. In all, I was ushered to and from ten houses--scores of people were sleeping in the nooks and crannies of spaces the size of my freshman cubicle at boarding school. Oh and how we had whined.

Everywhere we went, the kids followed. I thought, of course, of my relatives their age--shiny plastic pampers, fruit shakes, and picture books that make sounds. Divine justice in the Land of the Pure.

I asked the most talkative, Mohammad Islam, about the MQM. What was going to happen, why did they do this? He shrugged his shoulders. "Who knows? They call us terrorists--Taliban. Look around for yourself. We're using blankets as doors. Do you see guns? Do you see bombs? Meanwhile they bomb NWFP and FATA every day."

'"You tell me what we should do?" he continued. "I went to the police station after we were expelled, and they told me that they wouldn't do anything--that my place was in a Pashtun neighborhood."

But, as with the other men earlier, he didn't seem angry--almost as if it weren't worth the effort. Instead, he was despairing--and rather matter-of-factly, at that.

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-----

The two days that followed our visit saw some of the most determined rains in months. I thought fleetingly of these families--how they were coping without drains, without roofs, without hope. But not often enough, to be honest.

In general we've forgotten, I think. Even the well-intentioned among us. Eid happened, and the city seems to have returned, decisively, to normalcy. The roads are once again choked with smog and stress. Schools have re-scheduled postponed exams.

It's amidst this amnesia--certainly inevitable, perhaps even necessary--that I can't help but think of Mohammad Islam and that jarring absence of anger. On the way home, in my notes, I had amended a line from Walter Benjamin. "It's only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us." It seems more appropriate, I had written--especially in these days of Presidents as Commodities (I mean Brand Obama and "Change" and "Hope," of course)--to demand not hope, but anger. In a world as mad as it is, the task of sustaining false optimism for the sake of those who can't afford it seems all-too-forced; I'd prefer that we be angry, to be honest--furious, in fact--for those who've been robbed of their right to be enraged.

-----

It's the U.S, according to a new report from the New America Foundation, which "is the world's largest arms supplier". And with 23 billion dollars in receipts in 2007 and 32 billion dollars in 2008, including only foreign sales, the U.S. is also cashing in.
(...) The U.S. has signed more than twice as many arms transfer agreements over the past eight years (200-2007) than its nearest competition. In that time, the U.S. made nearly 124,000 deals, compared to the Russia, which has made just over 54,000. In the past two years for which figures are available, 2006 and 2007, three of the top four largest U.S. buyers in the developing world were Middle East allies. Saudi Arabia acquired 2.5 billion dollars worth of U.S. arms, with Israel dishing out just over 2.0 billion dollars. The post-invasion Iraqi government spent nearly 1.5 billion dollars on weapons. But the U.S. biggest arms client is turbulent Pakistan, which spent more than 3.5 billion dollars on U.S. weapons.

But November isn't September, 2008 isn't 2001, Pakistan isn't Afghanistan and India isn't America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.

"Karamanlis or tanks." That was the choice that Konstantinos Karamanlis posed to Greeks in 1974 upon his return from self-imposed exile in Paris after the overthrow of the country's military Junta. The popular former Prime Minister's triumphant return to Athens to lead the country's transition back to democracy was followed by his sweeping election victory, and a place in history as one of modern Greece's great statesmen.

According to the DoD Base Structure Report[1] the US Department of Defense remains one of the world’s largest “landlords” with a physical plant consisting of more than 545,714 facilities (buildings, structures and utilities) located on more than 5,429 sites on 29.8 million acres, valued at over $706 billion. (761 sites are located in 39 foreign countries, excluding Iraq, Afghanistan and many others).

Cargill Inc., Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Bunge Ltd. accounted for 47 percent of 2007 commodities spending for aid, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The program was created in the 1950s, partly to reduce domestic surpluses. The regulations require that almost all the peas, corn and other crops come from American sources, effectively steering the bulk of the business to the biggest food-trading companies. The rules also stipulate that 75 percent of the food must be transported on U.S.-flagged vessels, benefiting ship operators, including Liberty Maritime Corp., based in Lake Success, New York, and Sealift Inc., of Oyster Bay, New York. In 2007, the program’s shipping contracts were worth $385 million, according to the USDA.

It wasn't always this way. When U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban government in November 2001, Afghans celebrated the downfall of a reviled and discredited regime. "We felt like dancing in the streets," one Kabuli told me. As U.S.-backed forces marched into Kabul, the Afghan capital, remnants of the old Taliban regime split into three groups. The first, including many Kabul-based bureaucrats and functionaries, simply surrendered to the Americans; some even joined the Karzai government. The second, comprised of the movement's senior leadership, including its leader Mullah Omar, fled across the border into Pakistan, where they remain to this day. The third and largest group -- foot soldiers, local commanders, and provincial officials -- quietly melted into the landscape, returning to their farms and villages to wait and see which way the wind blew.

BAE develops technology in fields like electronic warfare and cybersecurity, sophisticated systems that are key to combating a new wave of threats around the globe. At a time when 1.7 million jobs have been lost in the United States this year, the company is hiring 200 engineers and manufacturing workers in Nashua, Hudson, and Merrimack, N.H., and Burlington, Lexington, and Marlborough, Mass.

They said that over 50 buses, mini buses and coaches were torched and damaged during days of violence.

There has already been an enormous destruction of capital. In the last number of months, more than $7 trillion has been wiped off the U.S. stock market. Indeed, $1.1 trillion was wiped out in a single day on October 15. As of mid-October, $27 trillion had been erased from stock markets worldwide. Housing values in this country have already declined by $5 trillion; pension funds by $2.5 trillion; and bank write-offs are now at $600 to $700 billion and expected to be $1.4 trillion. Large, conservative, seemingly stable companies have disappeared. Lehman Brothers, which had been capitalized at $30 to $40 billion, has gone bankrupt, and AIG, which until a few months ago was capitalized at between $150 and $200 billion, required a $123 billion lifeline from the government to survive. This has led to a massive credit crunch. Banks and other financial institutions now no longer trust each other not to totter and collapse underneath the weight of toxic debt, and refuse to lend to each other, producing a credit meltdown affecting the entire global financial system.
(...) The banks are also being de-leveraged, that is, they are being forced to pay off some of their debt and to cut back on the risky loans they’ve made over the past several years. Rather than loaning ten times more than their capital, they were loaning thirty and forty times their capital; and in Europe the banks were leveraged at an even greater rate.
(...) The current crisis is a product of the contradictions of the twenty-five-year-long neoliberal boom, which started in 1982. The postwar boom ended in 1973, and from 1973 to 1982 there were three recessions in the United States. The restructuring that went on in the United States, and to a lesser extent internationally, with the introduction of neoliberal, free-market measures, led to a twenty-five-year-long boom. It is the contradictions of those neoliberal measures that have produced this crisis.
(...) The first contradiction to note was the creation of a giant debt bubble. The increase in debt during the Clinton and Bush years was staggering. Over the two decades preceding 2007, credit market debt roughly quadrupled from nearly $11 trillion to $48 trillion, far exceeding growth rates. To put it in perspective: according to the Wall Street Journal, since 1983 debt expanded by 8.9 percent per year, while GDP expanded by only 5.9 percent.
(...) The second contradiction was that the United States became a buyer of last resort, establishing a trading system with Asia in which the Asian countries exported to the United States, which kept up spending through debt. The American balance of payments went from approximately $200 billion a year to $700 to $800 billion per year. All of this was borrowed. The U.S. government had a budget surplus under Clinton. But under Bush, with the tax cuts and war spending, the budgetary surplus disappeared, and the U.S. went from having a $250 billion government surplus in 2000–2001 to a $300 billion deficit in 2002. This stimulated the economy, but it meant that the United States became dependent on foreign capital, since the savings rate in this country had collapsed and was negative in the last years of this boom. Foreign capital, in particular from China, Japan, and the Middle East oil exporting countries, financed the American debt. When the dot-com bubble collapsed and recession came in 2001, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan lowered interest rates to between 1 and 2 percent for three years. This led to massive asset inflation, particularly in housing prices.
(...) The neoliberal boom was the result of a shift in the balance of class forces, in which the rate of exploitation was increased, real wages were depressed, and almost all wealth created went to capital. Some figures will indicate how dramatic the shift was. In 1973, GDP per person, in constant non-inflationary dollars, was $20,000 a year. By 2006, it was $38,000 a year—a more than 90 percent rise. Wages, however, in that same thirty-three-year period, declined. Real wages in 1973 were $330 per week; and in 2007, wages were $279—a decline of 15 percent.
(...) This shift of wealth from the working class to the capitalist class produced a tremendous amount of capital for potential investment. But in this last business cycle, that capital could not find all that many profitable outlets domestically. There was no expanded reproduction, no accumulation of capital in the U.S. during the 2000s. In this last business cycle, there were fewer factories at the beginning of the recession a year ago than there were in 1999. Instead of investing in new technologies, new plants and equipment, capitalists invested money overseas. Domestically, investments went to the most profitable industries—housing, construction, and finance. “In 1983, banks, brokerage houses and other financial businesses contributed 15.8 percent to domestic corporate profits,” writes James Grant in the October 18 Wall Street Journal. “It’s double that today.”
(...) These investments stimulated the housing and debt bubble. Between 2000 and 2005, housing prices increased by more than 50 percent, and there was a frenzy of housing construction. Banks and other financial institutions went on a mortgage-lending spree, creating a massive market in subprime mortgages—adjustable rate mortgages sold to borrowers with weak credit. There was also a big increase in housing speculation, with small investors buying second and third homes with the expectation that housing prices would keep rising and that these houses could be resold at a profit. Merrill Lynch estimated that in the first half of 2005, half of economic growth was related to the boom in the housing sector.
(...) Meanwhile, workers tried to maintain their standard of living despite the decline in real wages. In the 1980s and 1990s, they worked longer hours, took on more than one job, and increased the number of family members working. This could prop up household income to some extent. Yet even household income declined from 1998 through the boom of the 2000s. The only way to maintain living standards in the midst of declining wages was by borrowing against the rising value of their homes through home equity loans and mortgage refinancing. In the period of the last boom, homeowners took $5 trillion out of their home equity ($9 trillion since 1997), fueling an increasingly unsustainable debt structure that finally popped with the decline of inflated asset prices in housing.
(...) In this shadow system, banks did not have to put up adequate capital reserves. As a result, they were able, through this unregulated system, to borrow thirty, forty, or fifty times above the value of their capital in order to invest in the stock market and in various new exotic debt products, such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), credit-default swaps (CDSs—essentially a form of insurance against debt default), and various other financial swindles, many of which were based on the packaging and repackaging of housing mortgages. These were bundled and sliced up into investment vehicles that contained a good deal of potentially toxic debt—$900 billion worth of subprime loans, for example.
(...) Now that the world has entered recession, the U.S. is going to be running higher budgetary deficits. Those deficits will be increased also by the expansion of U.S. military spending, which has increased from $300 billion a year in 2000 to more than $800 billion a year now, if you include the supplemental costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On top of this spending, the U.S. has introduced a hugely expensive bailout plan. That means it will in all likelihood be running deficits of three-quarters of a trillion dollars, and possibly more, in the coming years. Where will the money for that come? At the moment there is no savings in this country, though that may change dramatically. But it is highly unlikely that China, Japan, and other countries are prepared to continue to finance an American trade deficit to the tune of $700 or $800 billion a year when the balance sheet of American finances, the huge national debt, has gone from $5 trillion when Bush came into office to $11 trillion today. It is unlikely that the Chinese and others are going to continue to finance this debt—although at this point in time U.S. treasuries are still a safe haven. This is particularly true because China’s trade surplus is going to contract considerably as a result of the world recession.
(...) The Chinese population only consumes 35 percent of what it produces. The rest goes for reinvestment and export. China’s economy has the highest rate of exploitation in the industrial world. But its export markets are going to constrict—they’ve already started to decline. As a result, China’s desire to lend greater amounts to the United States is problematic, particularly if interest rates in the United States are low. The United States therefore can no longer continue to run an enormous trade deficit while it is building an enormous budgetary deficit, and sustain both of them on the basis of foreign borrowing. There will have to be a restructuring and reordering of the system. At the same time, the U.S. may become more dependent on direct foreign investment from countries like Japan and China that, as we’ve mentioned, have developed large cash reserves. That is what we mean when we say that this is not just a typical cyclical crisis of capitalism. All of the contradictions of the neoliberal boom have burst asunder and now have to be addressed.
(...) In their ad-hoc attempts to solve the crisis, officials took this to be a liquidity rather than an insolvency problem—a problem simply of getting money into the banking system so that the banks would loan. But the banks refused to loan to each other because they knew that other banks had assets on their books that were as bad as their own—and which might lead to defaults. This is called counterparty risk: banks are afraid that the other banks are on the verge of bankruptcy and so won’t give them loans. This aversion to risk reached a crescendo when Lehman Brothers was allowed to go bankrupt in mid-September. This is what led to the credit meltdown of late September into mid-October that roiled markets all over the world.
(...) Estimates are that the U.S. has so far committed $4 to $6 trillion in tax dollars to bailout efforts, and Europe has committed $2.3 trillion. But this isn’t so much cooperation as it is an attempt by each state to keep pace with its national rivals. Everyone understands to some extent what happened in the 1930s—that the recession became a world depression when the international banking system collapsed and states imposed beggar-thy-neighbor policies that further contracted world trade and deepened the world depression. Yet at the same time there are limits to what states can do because they also compete with each other. Each one only controls a small patch of an integrated world economy. State intervention can therefore mitigate the effects of the crisis, but it cannot prevent the recession.
(...) The U.S. in the late 1980s and 1990s improved its competitive position in the world economy and attempted to assert its role as the sole superpower. Though it secured better rates of growth than its competitors in Japan and Europe over the past twenty-five years, it fell behind the growth rates of emerging nations like China, and in order to sustain its own economy it fell into debt. The result is that in the last decade, the United States has lost its competitive position on the world market. Now it will have to restructure, which will involve attempting to raise the rate of exploitation—increasing productivity while lowering wages and benefits even further. We’ve already seen it in the auto industry, where wages have already been cut in half in many cases. The United States will become a cheap labor country compared to its competitors. Auto wages in this country are probably about a third of what they are in Germany. The minimum wage is half of what it is in Britain, France, Germany, and Ireland. The contradictions of neoliberalism have increased the immiseration and the poverty of the American working class. And to get out of the crisis they are going to attack workers’ living standards even further.
(...) On the other hand, there’s an enormous opening for a Left that has been marginalized for decades. The disaster of the free market makes it easier for us to argue about the failure of capitalism and the need for an alternative based on human needs. The free market, which supposedly triumphed in 1989 and brought us the “end of history,” has led to nothing but misery and the ruin of millions of people, who are mired in poverty, hunger, unemployment, and ill health, but thanks to the free-market mania of the past decades, face a shredded safety net that doesn’t begin to address these problems.

President Obama and His People

From anti-politics, to politics.

The self-evidence which assimilates democracy to a representative form of government resulting from an election is quite recent in history. Originally representation was the exact contrary of democracy. None ignored this at the time of the French and American revolutions. The Founding Fathers and a number of their French emulators saw in it precisely the means for the elite to exercise power de facto, and to do so... in the name of the people that could not exercise power without ruining the very principle of government... 'Representative democracy' might appear today as a pleonasm. But it was initially an oxymoron.
--Jacques Rancière¹

As we approach the end of the inaugural month of Barack Obama's reign as president-elect, one can't help but recall the feel-good eulogizing that greeted the news of his election. The Kenyan president, for example, declared November 6th a public holiday in Obama's honor,² Magic Johnson told us he wept through the night,³ and Nicholas Kristof, that titan of the mainstream “Left,”⁴ relayed the widespread impression that America had “powerfully revitalized” the “idea[s] of equality and opportunity.” Even for those whose man lost, the historic consequences of Obama's victory were impossible to ignore: the “greatest democracy in the world,” it seemed, had proven the glory of its foundation by demonstrating the resilience of its ideals. As a black family arrived to claim an office once built by black slaves, America expiated its Original Sin.

To leftists, the colossal partiality of these and accompanying narratives, I think, has always been evident. Never was it true, for example, that only America could crown a son from the sea of those it systematically oppresses; after all, Evo Morales—who has told stories of, many years ago, savoring orange peels flung from the speeding cars of rich Bolivians—became his country's first indigenous president three years ago this month. Nor was Obama carried into the presidency by a tide of revolutionary agitation (as Morales was). Instead, as the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) recently celebrated, he was produced, by astute campaign-managers and sedulous staffers, as an ideological “place-holder” onto which millions of consumers projected their radical aspirations.⁵

It is a dynamic evident in these myriad forms of myth-making, I think, that speaks to the heart of what the Obama era threatens to represent. As Simon Critchley argued recently, “Obama’s politics is governed by an anti-political fantasy. It is the call to find common ground, to put aside our differences and achieve union.... It is a powerful moral strategy whose appeal to the common good attempts to draw a veil over the agonism and power relations constitutive of political life.”⁶ Though, of course, this tactic hardly has its origins in Obama's campaign, the fact of his election as an oppressed black man in particular, I think, threatens to re-brand the iniquities of an entire political system (and, particularly, the history of its formation) with this fantasy of perpetual union. This, again, is the negative significance of his blackness: his ascent to power, through the electoral system, has vindicated American democracy—when allied to the “anti-politics” at the heart of his campaign, then, it threatens a terminal form of forgetfulness. Far from encouraging us to reproduce the spirit of those masses who have struggled against the State that now readies itself to crown him, Obama instead comes to embody the cosmic judiciousness of that very State apparatus.

Against this, it is the Left's duty to, as Walter Benjamin wrote, “articulate what was past...” in the knowledge that “not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.”⁷ Much as we must, as Critchley argues, foreground the “agonism and power relations constitutive of political life” in the present, we must also, against Obama, decry the fatuous re-making of the history of American government into a celebration of the foresight of its forefathers. These days who takes time to remember, for example, that the contours of the American Constitution were determined by fifty-five white men anxious to establish a Federal Government strong enough to safeguard their fortunes?⁸ Or that throughout the history of bourgeois democracy, only pitched battles have forced the gradual extension of the franchise⁹—and this, too, as ruling elites adjusted to the arrival of the lower classes by concentrating instead on purchasing their hearts and minds?

Of course, in the heady bliss following Obama's victory, few wanted to be the grouchy dogmatists insisting that the arrival of this black man was far too contrived, aside from being too little, too late. Yet this is the price of responsible participation in today's political life: to re-introduce, partly by remembering, the fact of “agonisms.” When, at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Alexander Hamilton proposed that the President and Senate be appointed for life based on his estimation that “the people are turbulent and changing... they seldom judge or determine right,”¹⁰ his callous elitism expressed the timelessness of the wealthy man's desire, however sublimated, to sustain the class cleavages that make privilege possible. (Indeed, in James Madison's famous words, this brand of “peace” was to be the primary responsibility of government: “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”)¹¹

Similarly, when today, in Obama-land, the doctrine of “anti-politics” moves many an eager liberal to obviate past struggle in the name of “all-the-progress-we've-made,” it falls to the Left to recover histories of mass movements battling against State obstinacy. Indeed, the fantasy of agonism-free politics depends quite squarely on this notion that America has “arrived”—on the idea that the need for protracted struggle against entrenched interests is obsolete. Indeed, much like corollary talk of politicians' expertise serves to secure the distance between assemblies and the demos they discipline, the doctrine of anti-politics works to obscure the very immediate inequalities at the heart of modern American society.

In this sense, I suggest, the question on which many thoughtful Leftists have hung their hopes for Obama's presidency—namely, the dim prospects of the enraged electorate which voted for him transcending his candidacy and becoming a progressive social movement—really depends on the possibility of shattering the myths that furbished the “anti-political” pulse of his campaign. In other words, this distinction between anti-politics and politics really marks the difference between Obama's voters, as an electorate mobilizing around him as an empty signifier, and Obama's voters, as a mass movement prepared to stand, against power, for principles.

Only once America can be convinced, against Obama's best efforts, that the world we carry in our hearts will not be engineered by the men and women assembling on Capitol Hill, but won by the world-historical agitation of those these representatives exclude from politics proper, will the dream of the “Obama Left” be possible. It scarcely needs to be said that, for those establishment hacks invested in the permanence of anti-politics, the new First Man's baby steps have been win-win: not only did the success of his candidacy “restore” the reputation of a democratic system tarred by the iniquities of the Bush cabal, but his politicking has banished worries that he himself may have carried “Change” into the White House. For those of us, on the other hand, hoping for the restoration of a movement ethic to a civic life neutered by corporate electioneering, much seems to rest on the possibility that, in a time of crisis, Obama's unapologetic pragmatism will prove intolerable to the electorate he promised to empower.

-----------------------------------------

1Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, pg. 53

2http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7710394.stm

3http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/27565680/

4Nicholas Kristof, “The Obama Dividend”

5 http://adage.com/moy2008/article?article_id=131810

6Simon Critchley, “What's Left After Obama?”

7Thesis VI, http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/ThesesonHistory.html

8Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, pg. 90-91

9Chris Harman, A People's History of the World, pg. 390

10Zinn, A People's History of the United States, pg. 96

11Noam Chomsky, “Consent Without Consent,” http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ConsentPOP_Chom.html

notes on capital
chapter 25: the general law of capitalist accumulation

(763-764): a passage critically important to the question of marx's position on absolute immiseration. ceteris paribus, marx is suggesting that periods of buyoant capitalist growth will lead to increased wages, precisely because growth in capitalist demand for labor-power will outstrip the natural growth of its supply. KEY, again, to note that this explains the narrative of the apologists, without becoming it. for first, this eventuality is highly contingent, and can be combated by variegated tactics on the part of capital (in particular, agitating for artificial growth in labor supply through immigration). secondly, it is periodic--in other words, prone to the contradictions of capitalism, more generally. (note, it may make less sense to separate these two points theoretically, than it does in terms of the presentation. that question, perhaps, depends on how one wants to understand the relation of systemic ebbs and flows to class agency). perhaps most importantly, marx is also calling attention to the contradictions immanent in expansive capitalism--namely, that it cements more widely labor's "enslavement to capital... accumulation of capital is therefore multiplication of the proletariat" as oppressed soul.

(766): in passing, it needs to be made explicit that this discussion for the need of an ever-larger permanent "underclass" is a direct response to malthus' "principle of population." (see FN 6)

(769): on the golden chain in the golden age: "a rise in the price of labor, as a consequence of the accumulation of capital, only means in fact that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-laborer has already forged for himself [sic] is loosened somewhat."

(769): in essence, marx is demanding that we orient our analysis around "the absolute law" of capitalist production: the production of surplus-value. in this sense, the imperfections of the apologists' narrative can themselves be systematized and made coherent. the abiding question, of course, is how we retain this analysis in the face of the alleged success of Capital in the golden age. in other words, that question, again, of whether capitalism has proved more resilient than marx imagined. though i think 1968 often puts paid to those questions, no?

(770): constructing the rate of accumulation as always the independent variable--in this sense, while exploding malthus' principle, marx is, more generally, endeavoring to demonstrate the contingency of all dynamics putatively "natural."

(771): lambasting the currency school, but revealing, in the process, the contingency of his own analysis. for it is certain that monetary phenomenon have become more central to the dynamics of 21st century capitalism--how do we integrate that fact into his argument here? and still, i am tempted to suggest that his scorn here can show the way toward more holistic analyses of the monetary world.

(771-772): the critical passage: roughly, marx is suggesting that the process of capital accumulation, and the process of the growth of the working-class, cannot be theorized independently. rather, the latter follows the ebbs and flows of the former. in the sense that, if capital accumulation proceeds swimmingly, capital requires (by demanding) more laborers at factories (more hands needed to utilize additional capacity, to valorize the additional capital). if, however, profits are low and accumulation is stop-start or stagnant, capitalism corrects itself--a comparatively smaller amount of "paid" labor is needed as a consequence of the slow-down, and wages fall (because labor supply now exceeds demand). [reminder: this is all a "special case", in that marx has not introduced the notion of the decline in the composition of capital]

(772): "just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand."

(773): this commitment to complicate the relationship between the extent of the means of production and the increasing productivity of labor--this assertion that the decreasing organic composition of capital is both the cause of as well as the consequence of the increasing productivity of labor--affirms harvey's attempts to foreground marx' refusal to theorize these dynamics in strictly causal terms. the dynamism of a dialectical framework, if invigorated by history and science, refutes the tired positivism of the liberals.

(776): the endlessness, the limitlessness: "every accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation."

(776-777): here, an exposition of the contingent relationship between the proccesses of accumulation and concentration. concentration, marx is arguing, is not a necessary result of the process of accumulation; rather, it can be interrupted and repelled by the intervention of alternative dynamics. though he admits the tendency to concentration (in the sense that these increases in individual capitals are the very bases of the corresponding capitalist enterprises), they meet with limits. here he names two: (1) "the degree of increase of [presumambly others'] social wealth," which i interpret to refer to the competition of other capitalists as well as, perhaps, the increasing demands made by a progressively better-fed, clamoring under-class. and (2) "the part of the social capital domiciled in each particular sphere of production"--in other words, the impact of laws of inheritance and intra-familial competition on individual capitals. none of this, it must be said, contradicts the general readiness to associate accumulation with concentration (see the succeeding paragraph), but, again, it opens up the general theoretical framework to challenges by specific histories (and, in a sense, immunizes it from the entrepreneurial sorts who, while seizing on these various opportunities (or 'moments), inveigh against the "awful universalisms" of marx' analysis). NB: it would be important, i think, to assess all this with more recent theories of monopoly capitalism in mind.

(777): in fact, here marx seems to suggest an alternative term, centralization, in order to refer to the "transformation of many small into few large capitals." while i have always understood this as concentration, this passage defines concentration, instead, as something akin to the consolidation of capitalist relations--i.e., the concentration of the means of production, which begin as scattered in a medley of capitalist and pre-capitalist relations of production (the intermediate forms, let's say), in the hands of individual capitalists. centralization refers to "the next stage", in a very definite sense, where "capital grows to a huge mass in a single hand in one place, because it has been lost by many in another place." needless to say, this triplet of accumulation, concentration, and centralization is critical (but also confusing, given the tendency to use the second to signify the third). (see 779, where engels clarifies the definitions: centralization as concentration in fewer hands, concentration as "another name for reproduction on an extended scale")

(777): barriers to entry, economies of scale--it's all here.

(778-779): further discussion of the triplet. important to complicate my primitive observations above.

(780): centralization as pooling of capitals, not simply cannibalization: "the world would still be without railways if it had had to wait until accumulation had got a few individual capitals far enough to be adequate for the construction of a railway"

(781-782): the dynamics underlying the creation of a "relatively redundant working population"--have to better understand what is necessary and what is contingent in this process. but it is all here, of course.

(782-783): marx here highlights how the pejorative consequences of capitalism's dynamism--the "violent fluctuations"--conspire to produce, "temporarily", a surplus population. importantly, though each of these moments is individually fleeting, their systemic origins means that the assemblage of redundancies they represent is emphatically permanent. it is in the failure to substantively theorize the latter fact, i think, that lies the rub.

(783): the tragedy of simple reproduction: "the working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing"

(784): repudiating, again, malthusian attempts to pinpoint a 'natural' law of population increase. this is, of course, monumentally obvious--one cannot understand the relationship of man to nature (or, rather, humans to their reproduction) without history. but critical to re-assert against the population planners.

(784): the latent question, i suppose, remains: how does one understand the fact of this necessity of an industrial reserve army while also appreciating the fervent honesty of these ideologues fixated on population control? as always, i suspect this is not really a question for the economists, but rather a topic to be tackled by the theorists of conscoiusness. why do well-meaning people hold--really hold--patently mistaken beliefs?

(785-786): here marx mentions the relationship between the formation of this reserve army and the industrial cycle, but not in much detail. there is some confusion, i think, over what he identifies as the independent variable--though perhaps we're moving past causal-talk, in general? (there is much to close-read here, i think--especially in conjunction with volume III)

(786): clearly, these pages lay the groundwork for theorizing emigration in capitalism: while a source of bolstering this reserve army, of course, it interacts in complicated ways with the sanctitiy of identities which sustain capitalist hegemony by feeding forms of false-consciousness. indeed, in the latter dynamic, contradictory forces are at play: on the one hand, the immigration of non-nationals threatens the stability of that national identity (through diffusion, assimilation, cross-national solidarity)--this may be a boon for workers, in a long-term sense, but in the short-term it surely appears as any number of individual injustices ("they're stealing our jobs!"). in this way, it helps divide and rule. on the other hand, the restriction of immigration, marx is pointing out, threatens the very fabric of capitalist production--the existence of a reserve army is foundational to the healthy functioning of the system. this bewildering skein of competing considerations (along with whatever i have ommitted), of course, implies a masterful agency, the likes of which it would impossible to track, i suspect (this, in a sense, is the abiding impression of this section--there is an overriding logic to the system's operation which is at once rational and efficient yet also decidedly destructive and violent (NB: even the former is not at all the neoclassical narrative)).

(788): under capitalism's watch, the 'natural' limits to population growth are malleable, moulded to its aims.

(789-790): overwork and enforced idleness as twin symptoms of the same systemic patterns.

(791-792): an explicit critique of bourgeois analysis, arguing that the ideologues extrapolate from a local rise in wages to claim the infallibility of capitalist production, whereas the pattern really needs to be theorized and understood in the context of its place in the overall assemblage (i.e., its definitively local origins and ramifications--which sphere of production, etc.). in other words, "local oscillations" are mistaken for universal, timeless trends.

(793-794): there are here some interesting (though fragmentary) observations on the process of working-class 'awakening'--not chronologically, exactly, but more systemically. marx speaks also of the role that the iron, objective laws of capital play in stifling this tendency to subjective organization. and where these alliances can't be stifled objectively (and this industrial reserve army formed naturally), he alludes, Capital calls summons the Iron Fist ("forcible means"). (see also 808)

(796): Marx deploys these concepts in order to theorize the migration of masses from rural to urban areas, as "capitalist agriculture takes possession of agriculture." Needless to say, this is immensely relevant to the present plight of the Third World--in fact, the whole dialectics of technology (as presented in this and earlier chapters) presage the approach most suited to tackling the corporatization of rural areas today. We simply must be directly concerned with labor absorption.

(797): "along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth"--it is important to note here that Marx's theory of modern poverty (pauperism under capitalism) is inextricably linked to this fact of the necessity of a relative surplus population. Can our classless neoclassicals even compete?!

(798): a summary of "the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation"

(798): underlying all this is the uneasy question of what an "actually-existing" socialist society might do with the question of population.

(799): an explicit normative appraisal of the situation of the worker in capitalist society: "it follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse." the objections to this claim seem obvious. yet, in marx's defense, one has to (a) situate this in the context of the importance of dialectics to his general argument, and (b) clarify that he is here employing a much more holistic normative measures than GDP/capita allows. Yet perhaps it is important to complicate his observation, not simply empirically but also theoretically?

(799, FN 23): this prefigures the implications of development-of-underdevelopment analyses, insofar as Marx is here emphasizing the 'modernity' of misery and poverty--it is not that these are symptoms of backwardness waiting to be swept away, but rather that they are emphatically 'modern' phenomenon which are indelible features of a modern capitalist economy.

(800): some words from an apologist, who celebrates the parasitism of his ilk: "'it seems to be a law of Nature that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident... that there may always be some to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only relieved from drudgery... but are left at liberty without interruption to pursue those callings which are suited to their various dispositions" (Rev. J. Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws. By a Well-Wisher of Mankind).

(812): prefiguring, in fragmentary form, the relationship between capital accumulation and space--between development and slum-dwelling. the "developing" city has no place for its poor. (in the pages that follow, he explores this in depth--needless to say, on the "planet of slums," the underlying theoretical framework and consequent empirical investigation are both immensely relevant.)

(815): this continues, as Marx substantiates again the claim that the liberal doctrine of equal rights masks the deep asymmetries at the heart of capitalist society: while the rich displaced by railways and industry receive comfort and compensation, the poor working-classes are indicted for crowding in alternate locations as a result!

(822): lest anyone need be reminded, Marx is under no illusions that the industrial working-class is uniform; here he speaks explicitly of an "aristocracy" of the working-class. though this isn't exactly the michael albert objection, this observation suffices, i think, to show that albert battles a straw-man.

(827): whole working families live worse than sailors, soldiers, and even prisoners (this is Belgium, where the State has not yet interfered with the freedom of Capital).

(833): important section for exploring Marx and the agrarian question--other than the fact that he explicitly complicates the narrative of linear progress (not just by highlighting its non-linearity but also by demonstrating its space-less-ness), he here very directly excoriates the effects of 'labor-saving' technologies on the agricultural populations of 18th and 19th century England. (see particularly 848-849, where all this is tied directly to the concept of the relative surplus population--"there are always too many agricultural labourers for the ordinary needs of cultivation, and too few for exceptional and temporary requirements")

(840): reminder that the study of migration is not as simple as the study of the exodus from country to city, but also must theorize the changes occuring within rural areas (be it intra-rural migration or reconfiguration of rural areas)--again, this only re-emphasizes, against the lie of the modernists, the fact that everything is "modern" (backwardness, rurality, etc.).

(861-862): all this is applied specifically to Ireland and the mass emigrations of the mid-19th century--Marx is tracking the growth of the relative surplus population, and the consequences of this process for the average Irish laborer (much of this is the story of the transition, in Ireland, from arable to pasture land--to a less labor-intensive method of production. as Marx puts it, "the revolution in agriculture has kept pace with emigration").

(866): the comparative argument here (between the distinct roles of the surplus agricultural populations in industrial England and agricultural Ireland) begets a further comparison, for the contemporary third world. in Ireland, Marx argues, though the relative surplus population accumulates in the towns, it is constantly needed in the fields (at harvest time or boom time). crudely put, the story of the contemporary third world is not too distinct, with one exception--the agricultural revolution having proceeded farther (the corporatization of farming, etc.) in this day and age, we see instead a burgeoning informal sector (and mass under and un-employment). the similarities are striking, of course: as in 19th century ireland, the relative surplus population in towns across the third world plays a dual role, depresing urban wages while also filling shortages at harvest time (having said that, one needs to think about where, specifically, this labor comes from at harvest time--this can further complicate the schema, requiring a distinct appraisal of emigration to larger and smaller cities). in sum, i suppose, one again needs--as Marx has demonstrated throughout this chapter--a concrete assessment of hard data pertaining to a particular place and time.