"damming the flood: haiti, aristide, and the politics of containment," peter hallward


take-home: primarily, the book is a thoroughly convincing chronicle of the savage, imperial war waged by haiti's comprador elites (and their foreign backers in the US, France, Canada, and the UN) against the haitian people. much of the narrative centers on the person of jean-bertrand aristide--but as aristide himself insists in the interview first published in the LRB and reproduced in the back of the book, this framing of the destabilization campaign(s)--the marketing of the interventions as "humanitarian" and "popular" and directed surgically against only his person--serve to deflect attention from the real issues at-hand: namely, the indisputable fact that this campaign sought to protect, primarily, the thoroughly corrupt morphology of haitian society. it was an expression of the tragic power wielded by the landed elite and their bourgeois comrades-in-arms, arrayed as it was against the simple popularity and resounding base of lavalas ("the flood").

naturally, for a narrative as unfamiliar to the mainstream as this one, much of what hallward writes is deconstructive--his primary task is to expose the well-worn narratives of the coup-makers, according to which aristide embodies exactly what he and his movement have spent their political lives fighting (illegitimate authority, unjustifiable violence, and so on). here, i suppose, it is appropriate to note the critical reviews of hallward's book, which argue he has been too kind to aristide. but his critic (i speak here of the deibert review), let's be honest, has missed the point: hallward's book is not a "defense" of the aristide regime, insofar as defense requires deification (as deibert seems to believe--hence his logic that the several crimes committed by pro-aristide groups put aristide beyond redemption) . rather, it is an attempt to understand the ways in which this indisputably popular movement (was) collapsed. this is where hallward is triumphant, in my estimation.

his argument, approximately, is that we cannot make sense of the scandalous history told here unless we appreciate these few facts: (a) aristide and lavalas were overhwelmingly popular, as proved by the results of the 1990, 1996, 2000 (2x), and 2006 elections; (b) aristide and lavalas were constrained by the political and economic exigencies of the age (haiti's dependence on foreign aid for its budget, the 1994 compromise with clinton, the "impossibility" of fighting the elite on their own terms (i.e., violently and with weapons); (c) aristide, though linked to the violence in slums (which hallward rightly, against deibert's myopia, insists on contextualizing and politicizing), was far, far, far less repressive/violent than the regimes that preceded or succeeded him, or the "opposition" that "resisted" him; (d) aristide, qua radical theologian of liberation and leader of lavalas, was an uncompromising threat to the privileges of the haitian and international elite.

all of this, it needs repeating, is backed by copious statistics, research, and analysis. it is somewhat ironic that deibert's review targets precisely this element of hallward's book, given that deibert's central rebuttal, weak as it is (in the review, at least; i have not read the book), is backed first and foremost by information gleaned from interviews he himself conducted. in general, deibert's principal charge that a voyeuristic and naive hallward interviewed only aristide partisans is patently false. they inform the narrative of the book, of course, but this only complements the research. after all, hallward's insistence on remaining political is critical, i would say; it is precisely his insistence on understanding aristide as an activist--with the critical sympathy borne of solidarity--that makes this book. deibert, it seems, instead takes refuge under the (surreptitiously political) umbrella of a-politics: at best, "they're all bad, everyone's violent, it's all a mess." at its worst, of course, this conscience is activated inconsistently (or, rather, when the Empire comes calling), thereby never becoming more than a hackneyed cover for reactionary politics.

in other words, hallward's insistence on foregrounding structural violence, the changing contours of this violence owing to the elite and imperial insistence on neo-liberal compromises and state under-funding, the political history of haiti's repressive arms--all this informs the discussion of aristide's relationship to the "chimeres", as it must. without it, one will invariably lose themselves in deibert's journalistic moralizing.

that is the crux, and it is highly invigorating reading. a few points of interest, beyond this, though:

(1) exculpation--as already alluded to, hallward tries to balance, in his book, the rightly political nature of his work (qua defense of aristide against Empire and Reaction) with the equally appropriate (and tactical) character of his disagreements with some of aristide's individual decisions. the fact that these criticisms are generally articulated through his interviews with lavalas' activists adds a commendable layer of authenticity and honesty to his critique (though, against deibert, we have to insist that this is not, nor should it be, necessary). in particular, i think, aristide's 1994 decision to grant bill clinton his post-somalia "foreign policy victory" and return to haiti in a neoliberal straightjacket must be scrutinized--not, again, as a decision made by a power-hungry despot deserves to be decried, but rather as the tortured calculus of a comrade might be criticized. (in some sense, in the difference between these two attitudes, i think, lies everything worth fighting for--as soon as we abandon all attempts at making this distinction, it is over.) at some point in the book hallward mentions, through a FL activist, that it may have been better to prolong the democratic struggle than to return with clinton. this is important--though, again, simultaneously a decision that ought not to be pretentiously made by us, as readers, external to the struggle (again: hallward balances these twin necessities--of critique and of hostility to pretense--very, very well in the book).

(2) foreign conniving (USAID, UN, NGOs)--hallward, too, is tireless in his attempt to expose today's civilizing mission ("democracy promotion"). we are obligated, as everyone but the fools these days understands, to reject a priori the Empire and its military tentacles--to remain forever opposed to "hard power." but the theoretically-sophisticated and empirically-rich rebuttal of "soft power", here, is very valuable for reasons sometimes (though not very often, i guess) forgotten. it was, in haiti, this that stands out: (a) the all-too-obvious ways in which the ambitions and agenda of "soft power" are always constituted by "hard power"--it was the agenda and priorities of the US government that USAID and these NGOs towed; (b) the theoretical bankruptcy of "soft power," itself, when counterposed to the overwhelmingly popular force being deemed anti-democratic (here, again, we have the people--in whose name this treachery is being conducted--stripped of their subjectivity in order to be cast as objects fit for intervention and re-education).

as a critique reproduced by hallward emphasized, the bourgeois civil society "trained" and "constituted" by this bevy of NGOs is aristocratic, in form and inspiration. this comprador elite mobilize to tame politics precisely when their world is called into question. they then discover "democracy" and "human rights" and "student movements." "democracy promotion," as hallward argues, therefore represents the calling card of those who can afford to have discovered politics only once they're challenged by the consequences of its genuine flourishing. and the democracy promoters they enlist, of course, are precisely those who live off of politics, without living in it.

(3) reparations--the stunningly bankrupt story behind aristide's failed call for reparations needs to be made more widely known. in 1825, in order to lift the crippling blockade imposed on the newly free colony, haiti paid france 150 million francs (equivalent to france's annual revenue at the time; later the indemnity was reduced, generously, to 90 million ) as punishment for having freed itself. aristide, once it was clear that the international community was intent on suffocating his government by denying him aid, made this the rallying point of the bicentennial celebrations in 2004. haiti calculated that it was owed $21 billion dollars, give or take (at 5% interest). regis debray(!) headed the "commission on reflection" that recommended, to chirac, that they were NOT obligated to pay haiti back. hasta la victoria siempre, regis? (credit where credit is due: paul farmer delivered a brilliant speech to this committee, urging them to fork it out)

(4) populism, popularity, and the Party--hallward's correct insistence on the unremitting popularity of aristide does raise the spectre of populism. but perhaps it's sufficient to defer to his parallel observations about the strength of the people's self-organization, which is perhaps what defines the distinction between genuine and false popularity. after all, as laclau probably suggested in that book i never read, invoking the label of populism is as good (or rather, as bad) as calling the people stupid--and invariably tells us more about the sectarian doing the labeling, than the people. (the next step, of course, is to run off and become a hitchens or horowitz.)

more importantly, i'd argue, aristide raises some critical points about the party and "discipline," in the concluding interview. it is striking, in particular, to note the way in which he insists on the spontaneous, decentralized origins without presenting them as antithetical to the goal of "internal discipline" that he later introduces. it was refreshing to hear this--namely, that someone with years of experience with a genuinely popular politics understands, still, that we need not counterpose self-emancipation to discipline. in this fine balance, i think, lies our salvation.

(5) hope--only a direct quote will do:

[ARISTIDE:] No, I'm not discouraged. You teach philosophy, so let me couch my answer in philosophical terms. You know that we can think the category of being either in terms of potential or act, en puissance or en acte. This is a familiar Aristotelian distinction: being can be potential or actual. So long as it remains potential, you cannot touch it or confirm it. But it is, nonetheless, it exists. The collective consciousness of the Haitian people, their mobilization for democracy, these things may not have been fully actualized but they exist, they are real. This is what sustains me. I am sustained by this collective potential, the power of this collective potential being. This power has not yet been actualized, it has not yet been enacted in the building of enough schools, of more hospitals, more opportunities, but these things will come. The power is real and it is what animates the way forward.

for future reference, an abridged timeline (see page 155 for statistics on violence):

1915-1934: US invasion and occupation of Haiti; moulding of the army to serve imperial and elite interests.

1957-1971: Papa Doc / 1971-1986: Baby Doc (--> together, an estimated 50,000 Haitians were killed by the Duvaliers.)

1986-1990: Baby Doc deposed, Haiti ruled by the ruthless General Henry Namphy and then Prosper Avril. Elections postponed, but finally happen in 1990. (an estimated 700 to 1,000 were killed dead under Namphy/Avril).

December 1990-September 1991: Aristide elected with 67% of the vote. Rules till coup.

September 1991-September/October 1994: Brutal rule of Cedras and soon the infamous FRAPH (4,000 killed under Cedras).

October 1994-February 1996: Aristide finishes term. In December 1995, Rene Preval is elected with 88% of the vote (with Aristide's blessing).

February 1996-May/November 2000: Preval in power; Aristide, meanwhile, has formed Fanmi Lavalas, which wins landslide victories in the legislative/local elections in May (disputed, but Hallward exposes this propaganda) and then the presidential elections in November (92%).

February 2001-February 2004: Aristide rules in the face of mounting opposition from elite opposition groups (G184 and Convergence Democratique) and an "insurgency" of ex-army officers (begins in February 2004 in Gonaives). Destablization hurts, but doesn't do the trick. In sweep the US and French usurpers. (at most, Hallward says, human rights organizatons have pinned 30 political killings on the PNH and/or pro-Lavalas groups; he writes in great detail, also, about the individual massacres they have (mis)reported. as always, the devil is in the context).

March 2004-February 2006: Gerard Latortue appointed prime minister (in absurd move demonstrating the "democracy" being promoted, US ambassador stands in for the non-existent legislative branch and approves his appointment.) Thoroughly brutal rule, complemented by roving, vengeful paramilitaries (in the form of police and ex-army) and an unforgiving, corrupted occupation by the UN. (at least 3,000 killed under Latortue and the UN mission)

February 2006-: The people will not be vanquished. Preval wins an overwhelming majority, reduced to 51% by widespread, acknowledged voter fraud. But Aristide still in exile.

I practiced liberalism as an ideological method that respects private property, private investment, and respects public freedoms. I turned—I went to a social liberalism, a pro-socialist liberalism, so that the economy benefits the people and not just the economic elites. And this irritated the economic elites. They thought it was dangerous for me to organize the social sectors, and they planned the coup d’état.

marxism/resistance mp3's, part II

middle east through a marxist mirror, gilbert achcar (2003): very interesting talk, though makes arguments that can only be fully developed in the book of the same name. the underlying thread is that Marxism is going to be tested when applied to a region like the middle east (yet, of course, gilbert is also suggesting that it's important to make that "extra" effort--i would argue that, in truth, marxism always needs to be re-applied, rather than mechanically imputed). the issues he raises: (1) combined and uneven development--trotsky's methodology is critical, as you see the co-existence of the very modern with the very backward (and, indeed, the very point is that you can't make sense of the assemblage of structures without this framework to orient your analysis). but, and this is a point that is undoubtedly better developed in the book, the actually existing conditions in the middle east are very different from tsarist russia. whereas in the latter trotsky read the urgency of permanent revolution into the conjuncture of a weak bourgeoisie and urban petty bourgeoisie counterposed to a concentrated (if small) working-class, in the middle east, achcar's argument is that the urban petty bourgeoisie is much, much stronger (and that the working-class less so). it is the urban petty bourgeoisie that led the national democratic revolution (here he discusses them as an example of bonapartism, which again could not be fully developed in this talk--what he mentions is that, in the form of Nasser, they even went as far as expropriation of the national bourgeoisise--state capitalism), before it collapsed at the end of the 60's. what we are seeing now is what Marx argued--most of the urban petty bourgeoisie will not play a progressive role, but will want to turn back the clock of the history that is crushing them (hence islamic fundamentalism--and this is certainly a major part of the story, as many others have written). (2) achcar also argues that classical marxism needs to re-calibrated if we're to understand rentier states run by individuals or families--the heavy dependence on oil renders them, as those who control the oil rent, autonomous from the prevailing balance of class forces. this, achcar continues, means that the individual psychology of the leaders can play an important role in the policy that the state enacts--in other words, the paramount importance of oil enables erratic behavior (behavior that is not rational from the perspective of bourgeois economic development--i.e., Gaddafi. the state doesn't have to "deliver" to its bourgeoisie). (3) he makes some auxiliary observations about Islam, arguing that it has calcified into something less moldable than Christianity (he makes a strange claim about how christianity was born as a religion of the oppressed, which makes it amenable to theologies of liberation, whereas Islam and Judiasm do not have that character--the trouble is that this seems to neglect the very quick co-option of Christianity (and Islam, of course) as a ruling ideology (i mean that both (a) the imprint of the early years, in other words, would fade; and (b) thus, if christianity can make room for theologies of liberation, so can islam, surely (what about ali shariati?).

emiliano zapata, mike gonzalez (1993): more of an excellent history of the mexican revolution than a summary of zapata's life--gonzalez' narrative centers on the "lost possibility" of the winter of 1914, when zapata and villa found themselves in possession of mexico city for almost two months. after the defeat of general huerta (who had united the forces of reaction to topple madero)--a defeat which owed principally to the stregnth of the peasant armies, gonzalez argues--there was an opening for villa and zapata to cease power; the bourgeoisie was weak, disorganized, and plagued by in-fighting. but--and this is the point that gonzalez stresses--they failed to make common cause with the working-class (and two points are key, which make this "lost possibility" all the more lamentable: (1) the urban working-class existed, and was militant, as evidenced by a strike in 1908 and general activism; (2) the peasantry themselves was comprised of a significant number who worked for a wage, thereby offering a more potent basis for this possible alliance). the bourgeoisie, under the leadership of carranza and others, united to push zapata and villa back to the south and north respectively--they pursued, then, to besiege them for the next few years. these campaigns were a priority for the government, and demonstrated its commitment to a decisively bourgeois economic and political framework--as they encroached upon zapata's domain, they picked off the land he had reclaimed for the peasantry in order to hand it back to the landed elites that had fled the fighting. of course, it goes without saying that whatever was relatviely progressive in the constitution that was eventually consolidated in 1917--owed everything to the activism of zapata and villa.

john rees, the politics and economics of modern imperialism (2007): not unlike david harvey's "the new imperialism," john enumerates a dialectical schema for thinking about imperialism in capitalism. he argues that there are two "threads" to its DNA--two distinct logics: (1) an economic logic--capitalism invariably involves competition amongst different economic units for resources, labor and markets--conflicts which can hardly be limited by geographic boundaries; (2) a political logic--insofar as the modern era is defined by the existence of the nation-state, we contend also with a territorial logic of power, in which administrators are driven by geo-strategic compulsions to exercise control over regions beyond the borders of their own nation-states. while rees contends that these two dynamics have been in operation since the birth of modernity, imperialism has nonetheless developed in the hundreds of years since modernity was born (in other words, victorian imperialism is distinct from today's imperialism--it would be useful to enumerate how, which this talk doesn't do). the modern character of today's imperialism rests on two turning points, the first economic and the second political: (1) 1979, which represents the birth of neoliberal capitalism--the context of course is the petering out of the tremendous growth of the "golden age," in which capitalism both needed and was able to afford the welfare state. to revive profitability, capital sought the famous "three fixes"--neoliberalism, globalization, and financializaiton (he doesn't go into this in much detail, but this argument is there); (2) 1989, which represents the ascent of the neo-conservative vision in the united states--the nutters that advocate imperial expansion. he ends with the critical observation that, while the united states' military might is still unparalleled, its economic power has faded dramatically since the zenith of WWII--where once the dollar's stregnth was unquestionable and america's manufacturing base very impressive, america today is a de-industrializing debtor nation which depends on the oil states and e. asia to hold its dollars (in a sense we are seeing the interdependence and independence of the economic and political in this very fact--capital is fleeing the US, even as the nation-state desperately needs it to stay). the uneasy alliance rumsfeld brokered between the neo-cons and the fiscal republicans led the US into an iraq "invasion-lite" (half the number troops they used in the first gulf war)--but it was, as a result, rees argues, trapped in a unplanned, underfunded invasion of a population deeply hostile to its presence. the iraq invasion, of course, has worsened the fiscal deficit of the US considerably, making its economic position only more insecure (much like vietnam hit the american state in the early 70s). reed concludes by arguing that we are heading towards the definitive end to the american empire--what awaits us, though, we know not.

None of these are particularly radical moves, but it was nevertheless disturbing to the country's wealthy economic and military elites. More frightening was that Zelaya had sought to organize an assembly to replace the 1982 constitution written during the waning days of the U.S.-backed military dictator Policarpo Paz. A non-binding referendum on whether such a constitutional assembly should take place was scheduled the day of the coup, but was cancelled when the military seized power and named Congressional Speaker Roberto Micheletti as president.

"che guevara and the cuban revolution," mike gonzalez

take-home: it's impossible, of course, to disagree with the bulk of the author's critique of Che's sense of "revolutionary impatience." he was beholden to a kind of military vanguardism, no doubt.

at the same time, however, there is a way in which this critique is too easy--for by presenting the entire history of guerrilla warfare through the prism of this commitment to a misguided heroism, mike gonzalez is able to recover a "lost possibility:" "if only they'd remembered to make links to the working-class," one thinks. a more responsible book about che would begin with the premise that it is never this easy--does it not make more sense to think of "military vanguardism" as the recognized worst of all possible options? could it not be that, amidst a workers' movement that is uninviting and co-opted, che took refuge in sheer voluntarism. not because he was self-involved, but because he couldn't stomach "patience" or failure? rather than allow us to wrap ourselves in the wonderful gifts of hindsight and orthodoxy, that would permit us to ask the really important questions: "they were aware of what they were doing, of their departures from the orthodoxy, and they still failed. now what?"

there is a way in which this line of defense, of course, is itself "too easy." nonetheless, the author can't be allowed to get off so easily--he often elides the question of "leadership" and "vanguardism" by supplying this trite rendering of revolutionary theory as dedicated entirely to "self-emancipation" (it seems like everyone's read a different translation of "What is to be done?" than I have, to be honest). but--again-- what do you do when self-emancipation doesn't present itself? perhaps one ought to ignore the feeling of urgency that motivated che (and the book makes a strong case for the futility and analytical fallacies of that impatience), but the author doesn't do his thesis any favors by implying that the alternative is more-or-less as simple as "making links with the workers" and snapping your fingers.

none of that is to deny the points of value in the book, just to object at the simplicity of its pedagogy. the author makes important points about the way in which the pathetic state of Communist politics in pre-WWII (owing in large part to the diktats of the Stalinists) turned an entire generation off of Marxist politics, and--he seems to suggest--towards this path of "revolutionary impatience." (at the same time, he doesn't answer the question this begs--if these were the only two alternatives, was Che preferable to the "bureaucratic patience" of the orthodox Marxists of the time?)

--- important quotes/excerpts ---

(7-18): Che's upbringing in the context of the history of Argentina

1880s: President Hipolito Yrigoyen in power; Argentina becomes a meat-exporting economy, exchanging foodstuffs for goods from Europe (lots of Italian, Spanish and German immigrants drawn to the country at this time)

1916, 1918: full male suffrage introduced, as well as social security. author gives this as time of increasing militancy of this immigrant working-class, which complemented the "rising discontent of an urban middle and lower middle class largely excluded from political life." a university reform movement which demandeda "democratic higher education."

1930: the "old interests" respond--a military coup, and in 1933 the new gov't signed a trade agreement with Britain, a defeat for the working-class. this military harbored sympathies for the Axis powers; Che's father was active in anti-fascist circles.

1940: military gov't of Castillo, though, locked into dependence with Britain, of course; and "there were also ideological reasons why an authoritarian nationalist government would feel neutral towards the old imperial power, Britain." regardless, "war, for a country whose main exports--meat and wheat--drove the competing armies, was a commercial opportunity."

1943: because of Castillo's suspected sympathies for the Allies, the GOU--a group of army officers--launched a coup; state of emergency was declared. nonetheless, by 1945 the army had declared with the allies, even though the fact that many Nazis fled to the country indicates that this was more opportunism than anything else. Juan Domingo Peron was among the officers now leading--he becomes Secretary of Labor, a position which gives him a pulpit for his populism. "Peron's base of support was a layer of newly arrived workers, recent immigrants from the countryside or the smaller provincial towns, who had gravitated towards the capital in search of work in its expanding industries... Evita came from the same world as they... They were Peron's mass base..."

1946: elections pitting Peron (who enjoyed support from business groups and right wing nationalists, as well) against the Democratic Union (which enjoyed support from other business interests as well as socialists and Communists). the Communists' base had been eaten into by Peron, and they also saw his support for the German-Italian axis through the eyes of the Soviet Union. Guevara's parents' sympathies were similar, resoundingly anti-fascist. all this spelled disaster for the Communists, insofar as they were "siding with imperialism, with the US government which was relentless in attacking Peron, and with the old landowning and industrial class against the man who claimed to speaking for all Argentines..."

(17-18): "Peronism had mobilised masses of working-class people, but in support of an authoritarian figure whose devotion to the people's cause seemed shallow and temporary. In any case, the people with whom the young Ernesto talked politics were unlikely to offer any kind of defense of Peron--they shared his distrust. On the other hand, authentic revolutionary tradition--the Communists and the socialists--were a poor lot in the Argentina in which he was growing up. They were rigid, corrupt, and manipulative, and unprincipled in their willingness to form alliances with people who should logically have been the enemies of the class they claimed to represent."

(20): "In many ways, the history of modern Argentina is a struggle between the city on the banks of the River Plante, whose connections were always with Europe, and an interior--a vast expanse of varied landscapes--whose natural links are with Latin America"

(24): in 1952, revolution (at the forefront of which were miners) and co-option in Bolivia

(29-30): history of Guatemala:

1900s: coffee and later banana economy, oriented towards the US market--"for the first forty years of the 20th century is the history of one major North American company, United Fruit, and its founder and owner, Sam Zemurray... By the early 1940s, some 40 percent of Guatemala's land was under the control of the company known throughout Central America as La Yunai.

1944: Rafael Arevalo annuonces a reform program--key to which was land reform and trade union rights

1951: Jacob Arbenz, a young military officer who had served under Arevalo, comes to power, intending to carry the program through to completion. "It is important to emphasize that Arbenz was no revolutionary. In a sense, his project was the modernization of the economy under a Guatemalan state able to control and determine the allocation of its own resources. But the process of fairly moderate reform that he set in motion unleashed other forces which he could not easily control... The process, therefore, was announced from above but driven from below."

1954: "...several key figures in the Washington government were intimately involveed with the United Fruit Company--among them John Foster Dulles, Secretary of Staet, and his brother Allen Dulles, head of the CIA... Together they organized the overthrow of Arbenz, which was to led by a financed military force under Carlos Castillo Armas."

(31-32): "At a fairly basic level, the intransigence of the North Americans encouraged Che's instinctive feeling that there was no alternative to armed resistance. When the coup came, and Guatemala City was bombarded from the air for weeks, there was very little armed resistance. The reasons why are still a matter of debate..."

(34): what Che would learn from the Arbenz coup:

He could have given arms to the people, but he did not want to... Now we see the result.

(39-40): Cuban history:

1898: Cuban "independence"

1901: Platt Amendment, which gave US right to intervene to defend its interests. Guantanamo Bay ceded on a 99-year lease--"Washington nominated the head of the national bank, the customs service, and the police. It was an early step in the incorporation of Cuba into the US economy--as a supplier of the sugar that was becoming so important a component of the new urban diet, and as a market for US goods [raw materials and captive market, check] "Within the first three years of indepdence... speculators from US... bought up an estimated 60 percent of the land."

1921: by this date, US owned bulk of large sugar plantations.

1929: Depression hit Cuba hard--popular resentment against then-in-power Machado grew.

1933: protests toppled the government--the leader of the non-commissioned officers in the army, Batista, called upon the students to name the new president. He was a professor named Grau San Martin. He "introduced the eight-hour day, rescinded the Platt Amendment, and announced the coming nationalisation of the electric industry."

1934: Sergeants' revolt led by Batista takes power, though, with tacit backing of US--Batista in effective control from this point on, though he takes presidency in 1940. Communist Party supports him, owing to the "popular front policy"--"this strategy was not a consequence of the particular conditions in any one country, but the result of the Soviet Union's concern to build a wide international coalition against Nazism... its political cost was enormous... In Spain for example, the consequence was that the Communist Party opposed the development of a revolutionary response to the fascist uprising of 1936 and instead threw in its lot with a coalition of centre and right wing parties whose one unifying feature was their fear of a workers' revolution."

1944: Grau San Martin becomes president. by 1947, after the end of the peace of the "popular front" era, he has turned on the Communists.

1948: "the slippery and corrupt" Prio Socarras takes his place.

1951: Chibas kills himself on air in the run-up into the 1952 Congress elections. soon after Batista takes power in a coup that was to last till the revolution. "His immediate actions once in power were a sign of things to come: he banned political parties, filled the state with his cronies, and launched a campaign of repression."

(44): "Like many middle-class student nationailsts, [Castro] was suspicious of the Communists... In Cuba, as elsewhere, they had colluded with governments that were corrupt and authoritarian in exchange for support for the Soviet Union. Communism was a discredited and corrupted notion by the time Castro's generation encountered it."

(46-47): Raul was the link between the July 26 Movement, and the Communists. Nonetheless: "For Raul and Fidel, change could be the result of armed actions of a minotirity. They, and not the working class, would be the subjects of this process of change. This way of understanding what it means to be a revolutionary reflected the group's middle-class background, but much more importantly it betrayed the political distance between them and workers. Their project saw an independent state which could decree change in society from above. In this process, the main instrument was not mass organization or the power of workers, but the arms held by the revolutionaries."

(58): December 1956--Celia Sanchez was to meet them; but waited two days and left. There was also an abortive urban uprising, led by Frank Pais. "Of the 82 men who had boarded the Granma, just 19 had survived. Another eight would join them later... The 26 July Movement had supporters and sympathisers scattered across the island, but they were not connected with the trade unions or any other organizations outside their own circle... "

(59): "No guerrilla group (or foco, as Che would later describe it) could survive without the support of an urban movement. The relationship between mountain (sierra) and plain (llano) was at the heart of the political debates in the years that followed--above all, in the argument about which section should lead the movement."

(62): "The reality is that in [Che's] vision of the revolutionary war--a war conducted by revolutionaries on behalf of the masses--the staet of the workers' movement or the mass urban resistance was not an essential issue. In Che's view, the heart of the struggle was in the guerilla struggle in the mountains--la sierra."

(66): Frank Pais making the right noises about building support in the urban areas, maybe opening another front; Fidel, though, "imposed his political vision. The building of the rebel army was to be the absolute priority, and a call was to be issued for the organization of a 'civic resistance' whose essential function was to support the guerrilla fighters..." Author attributes this to increasing authoritarianism on Fidel's part.

(70): [crux of author's critique]"[Che] identified urban politics (the llano) with reformism and the politics of the guerrillas in the hills (the sierra) with revolution. Che spoke about the city as an undifferentiated place. In fact, his dismissal of the urban struggle effectively marginalised trade unions and workers too. Yet the sierra was not rural Cuba, where a class of peasant farmers and agricultural workers might have been seen as an alternative base for a revolutionary movement. These sections of Cuban society lived on the 'plains' too. Che (and Fidel) meant the more remote and difficult terrain of the Sierra Maestra--ideal for a cat-and-mouse military strategy, but not a region whose sparse and scattered population could build a social movement. The strategy that Che and Fidel had in common envisaged a guerrilla war conducted by small groups of revolutionary fighters rather than by the masses in whose name they claimed to be waging the struggle."

(72): failure of the Cienfuegos attack in 1957--300 tortured and killed by Batista. US increasing fed-up of Batista, it seems, rumors of possible contacts through Frank Pais?

(73): Che on discipline: "Che was extremely harsh with his own men and with anyone who endangered the cause, deliberately or otherwise. He readily executed informers and deserters, yet was magnanimous with enemy soldiers. This was a response that could only have arisen out of military code of honour."

(73): "He described himslf as a Marxist now. Yet for Marx, a revolution was the moment when the working class achieved its own liberation through collective action. This does not appear in Che's worldview."

(78): failure of the general strike called by 26 July Movement in 1958 (Batista had postponed elections). "In the aftermath, the 26 July Movement made a decisive turn..." towards the guerrilla struggle. Fidel's authority confirmed.

(78): "Che had reached the conclusions that he would later develop in Guerrilla Warfare.First, that a popular army can win a military struggle against a regular army. Second, that in the particular conditions of Latin America it is the poor peasants who are the most revolutionary class-rather than organized workers in industry or agriculture. Third, that the conditions for revolution do not need to exist before the struggle begins--the revolutionary foco can create them."


(79): Key page of author's critique [not very satisfying, i must say, particularly this strange fealty to the orthodox prescription in demonstrably heterodox circumstances]: "Che was reacting against a certain pessimist gradualism that he had heard from other socialists--the notion that 'objective conditions' had to exist before change was possible... Yet in identifying the poor peasantry as the key social group in the revolution, Che was specifically rejecting Marxistm's central idea--that it is the power of the organized working class alone that can bring about a social revolution. Some countries in Latin America were still dominated by small-scale agricultural production--and the argument that the peasantry was a revolutionary class still had some weight in those circumstances. But like his own country, Argentina... Cuba was integrated into an international economy as a mono-producer of sugar and was already highly urbanized... Che's conception of revolution only acknowledged the role of those who carried the arms and did the fighting. They alone were the revolutionary actors. What of the uban workers, the students, the people in the small towns? Their task was to supply the fighters... In a military structure there could be neither democracy nor transparency--both could spell disaster in a military context. But in a society, their absence would be a disaster."

(83): Fidel towards the Communists was at this stage, pragmatic--didn't want to give the US an opportunity, in particular. "Che, on the other hand, while fiercely critical of the Cuban Communists in many respects, described himself as a Communist. He supported the Soviet Union... Yet as the revolution evolved, Che would become increasingly critical of the Soviet model while Fidel would become the leader and symbol of Cuban communism."

(89): the tide turned mainly due to objective factors: "The failure of the elections, the sucess of small-scale but well publicized guerrilla actions in the area, the increasing brutality of Batista and the growing alienation of the population that it produced, had accelerated the collapse of the regime--particularly as increasing numbers of conscript soldiers gave up the fight."

(92-93): argument here that though Fidel was eager to take full credit on behalf of the 26 July Movement, there were many other factors that led to Batista's downfall, notably the ending of support by the US (an arms embargo was in place), as well as agitation by other political organizations.

(95): dispensing "revolutionary justice:" about 55 executed in Havana in the first few days (70 executed by Raul, in Oriente). By May the number had risen to around 550. "These were the torturers, the police spies, the most zealous servants of Batista's police state."

(102): again, the critique re-phrased: "The notion that revolution comprises the self-emancipation of the working class is absolutely central to Marx's thought. From being the objects of the interests of others, the majority become the governors of their own lives by transforming society through their own actions. It is a core principle in revolutionary Marxism. Yet the guerrilla war theory replaces this idea with another--that the revolutionaries will make the revolution on behalf of the wider class."


(105-106): "Who were these young revolutionaries? ...they came largely from the middle class and were driven above all by a hatred of imperialism. They were largely nationalists for whom national independence and self-determination was the most important issue. For the most part they did not come from a Communist tradition... When Che insisted that revolutionaries need not wait for the objective conditions for revolution to exist, he was obliquely referring to the Communist parties..."

(106-108): three concerns in the early months--(!) how to ensure defence of the revolution; (2) an economic program, and what kind of land reform (class of peasants, or collectivization); (3) what would the political direction of the revolution be?

(108): "How could a small economy, dependent for more than 80 percent of its export earnings on one product--sugar--break its dependency? One answer was to diversify the economy--the other was to develop industrially."

(123-124): The beginnings of revolutionary terror--Che making illegal any offense to "revolutionary morality," founding a "labor camp," etc.

(125): "At first, the response of the Cuban population was extremely positive. Yet there was a missing element in Che's argument. Involvement and participation could be ends in themselves, provided they were real. Endless declarations of loyalty by the leaders to the led, however, were no substitute for a genuine workers' democracy in which it was the popular organizations which made the decisions and the government which carried them out."

(127): on eve of Bay of Pigs, Cuban state rounds up 35,000 people!

(129): by 1962, 500,000 people, bulk of Cuba's professional class, had fled to the US

(131): "Che's impatience with material realities was at the heart of his political theory. If the revolutionaries could substitute for the masses in making the revolution, the revolutionary state could overcome the material limitations it faced, he argued."

(140-141): "Che emphasises over and over again in his essay that the guerrilla army must be located in the countryside, and recruit above all among the peasantry, because it is they who have suffered the most brutal exploitation. But suffering, of course, does not create revolutionaries. On the contrary, without collective organisation and the confidence that comes from the experience of struggle, and without the power to strike at the very heart of capitalism--the machinery of production--suffering can produce despair and a sense of impotence." This impatience, the author argues, came into conflict more and more with the USSR's commitment to "peaceful coexistence."

(148): Che's critique of the USSR in Algiers, declaring in favor of Third World solidarity--decrying the USSR for their failure to support liberation movements, calling them 'accomplices of imperialism.'

(149): on Man and Socialism: "Why did he lay such emphasis on the question of a new consciousness? It was certainly not for economic reasons, or because committed people are more efficient producers... It went to the very heart of Che's political ideas, for it emphasized the subjective over the objective, the effort of will that could overcome uncompromising material conditions. This was a central notion in his Guerrilla Warfare... It flew in the face of a revolutionary tradition which recognized the dialectical relationship between the individual and his or her circumstances...

(149-154): misadventure in Congo, where the "disorganization was total." Nasser had warned him that he would become 'Another Tarzan, a white man among black men, leading and protecting them... It can't be done.'


(160): most salient critique of Che's strategy in Bolivia--he set up shop in the Eastern region, which was home to the peasantry that the 1964-coup leader, Rene Barrientos, had wooed. much more suited would have been the mining areas of the West that Barrientos had repressed and home to a "glorious revolutionary tradition."

(164): "This was not an ideal moment for a major offensive, but it would have been a perfect time for the patient rebuilding of political organization, especially with the enormous moral authority of Che behind it. Guevara, however was wedded to the idea of guerilla warfare, and did not see the organized working class as a central actor in his vision of revolution."

(168): in the words of one Richard Harris:

The defeat of Che's guerrilla operation and the main flaw in Che's strategy--as well as Debray's theorising about revolutionary guerrilla warfare... might be called a kind of military vanguardism. By reducing popular revolution to a special form of guerrilla warfare, Che's strategy and Debray's early writings overemphasized the military aspects of initating a revolutionary struggle against an unjust regime. And they underemphasized the political dimension of organizing the base of popular support needed for a successful revolutionary struggle.

(168): "It does Che's memory no credit to refuse to acknowledge the brutal truth that this was a terrible and costly failure born of Che's insistence that the will of the revolutionar can overcome objective conditions and substitute the individual for the movement of an entire class. That way lies martyrdom, not social revolution."

notes on capital
part five: the production of absolute and relative surplus-value
chapter 16: absolute and relative surplus-value
chapter 17: changes of magnitude in the price of labor-power and in surplus-value
chapter 18: different formulae for the rate of surplus-value
part six: wages
chapter 19: the transformation of the value (and respectively the price) of labor-power into wages
chapter 20: time-wages
chapter 21: piece-wages
chapter 22: national differences in wages
part seven: the process of accumulation of capital
chapter 23: simple reproduction
chapter 24: the transformation of surplus-value into capital

(643): marx is tracking the "hostile antagonism" between mental and manual labor, which he suggests arises as the individual labor becomes replaced by the "collective"--in other words, the many become appendages, the few remain the brains. the question, of course, is simple (quite aside from raymond williams' attempts to complicate the binaries): how does a socialist society manage the collective divison of labor, such that the sovereignty of each individual's mental expression becomes a reality once more?

(647): here he clarifies that the productive base of human society has little to do with "nature," at least in the ahistorical sense (e.g., geoffery sachs, jared diamond). rather, it is again a question of interrogating (from the theses) "sensuous, real-practical life" as it unfolds through history; "the existing productivity of labour...is a gift, not of nature, but of a history embracing thousands of centuries." again, a welcome rebuke to non-radical social science, which sees the barriers of nature where marxists recognize, instead, the relativity (and contingency) of limits. (and then, on 648, he immediately contradicts this with apparent nonsense on 'natural' impediments to advance--on england and india, of course; see though, FN 7 on 666, where marx addresses malthus and attempts to explain 'over-population' by recourse to the eternal laws of nature).

(651): i suppose the above can be reconciled, dialectically, through committing to incorporate 'natural' explanations into the dynamics of marxist explanations. in that sense, the putative invariance of 'nature' is impermissible, forcing a return to history of nature as a source of explanation. marx is doing this here, as he discusses the role of social compulsion in accounting for the division of working lives into necessary and surplus labor (i.e., he's clarifying that this disjuncture has its roots not in nature).

(659): "class struggle" over the spoils of productivity

(659): increasing productivity, marx seems to be suggesting, facilitates greater concentrations of wealth--as the value of labor-power falls, more time can be devoted to the production of surplus-value, all of which makes its way into the hands of capitalists. (imagine their glee at the last 30 years: rising productivity, static wages, cheap imports from china, and easy credit for workers!). there is room, in his analysis, for the place of class struggle in stemming this advance (and it's necessary, given observed patterns in the golden age. yet the fact of this "abyss" is indisputable to observers of the developed economies in the last thirty years.

(664): this attentiveness to time is critical, as it foregrounds an aspect of class conflict long since under-emphasized in analysis of american capitalism: namely, that, as workers are compelled to work longer and longer hours (with less vacation time, more intense work-days), the cost of reproducing them increases (i.e., the value of their labor-power goes up). in this sense, the flattening of the real wage is only part of the story of the assault on living standards in the US. (see also 683)

(667): here, in prefiguring what stands to follow the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, marx notes that not even socialism will limit the working day to necessary labor. the reasoning, i suggest, contains the seeds of the perversion that separates socialism, as aspiration, from socialism as it actually existed. on the one hand, he proceeds from the workers' aspirations to speak of an improvement in his conditions of life--in other words, an extension of what is considered necesary labor. and, on the other hand (and this is, of course, not any less desirable, but nonetheless telling), he speaks of the socialization of appropriation; in other words, surplus labor will exist insofar as some labor will be "necessary for the formation of a social fund." here, of course, we might remember the indignities of bureaucrats gleefully bleeding labor in the name of bold slogans of workers' liberation. again, none of this is intrinsic to the idea of taxation and government; it is simply to make, with hindsight, a point about the need to guard against co-option.

(667): more prefiguring, and no less interesting. capitalism, if defined by the ability of one social stratum to reproduce itself on the basis of another's labor, will only be eclipsed when labor--as in work itself--is universalized. if we accept this, we must confront also the fact of our own parasitism. the life of the university, as it exists under capitalism, could not be a better example of how one social stratum reserves, for itself, all possibilities for "free intellectual and social activity," while another squanders itself to reproduce these kings and queens. the anatomy of the university, in other words, is indistinguishable from the anatomy of the capitalist society which creates and sustains it. this is why, i suggest, battles over the living-wage (and, more ambitiously, visions of re-structuring the university, as workplace) have symbolic importance. until socialism demands that professors clean up their own shit (or, even better, others' shit), and janitors lead classes, we need to remember that we remain far from the world that we hold in our hearts.

(680): capitalism obscuring its mechanism of exploitation in the alleged "equality" of the wage-form; a perversion feudalism could not accomplish, as there surplus labor was "demarcated very clearly both in space and time." this suppression of the awareness of exploitation by folding both the spatial and temporal dimensions of surplus-value production into the factory (and into necessary labor)--the site where has interesting implications, again, for questions of the utility of bourgeois legality (and wars over it).

(680): this anger over bourgeois mystification via the notion of the value of labor (as against value of labor-power) is understandable; think of the behavior of the neoclassicals in living-wage debates, which seeks to naturalize (and de-historicize) a "fair" level of remuneration for labor--an endeavor which obfuscates the fundamental fact of surplus-value creation as a necessary feature of capitalist production. (there is, still, an uneasy question about how this plays out in the service sector--but i need to keep remembering that surplus-value has naught to do with the content of the labor process under consideration, but rather with the anatomy of the production process that mediates it).

(682): there is a latent question about what exactly "science" means for marx, especially as it corresponds to what it has meant for marxists. might we suggest that a critical genealogy of the word could help recover the marx of dynamism and dialectics, as against the vulgarization of his work by the positivists?

(703): this methodical investigation of differences in wages (in addition to the careful attempt to track the development of the "value of labor" in its various wage-forms) gives the lies to attempt to read, from the communist manifesto, a marxist position on "absolute immiseration." it is quite clear that marx was fully aware that this entire question is highly complicated, contingent, and impossible to resolve outside of history.

(709): in this introduction to the process of capital accumulation, two points stand out. first, marx seems to define the act of accumulation as something relentlessly productive--that is, as soon as a capitalist opts to take the fruits of accumulation outside of the cycle of capital circulation, he/she no longer "accumulates." in this sense, accumulation seems tied to the commitment to productively re-invest surplus. second, the fragmentation of the fruits of accumulation (into profit, interest, rent, etc.)--all this offers, perhaps, a good way to theorize the parasitic origins of financial capital. of course, there is more to the story, in the sense that finance, especially when disciplined, opens the circulation of capital, rather than just emerging as a consequence (in that sense, the temporality is reversed, perhaps). even still, at the most fundamental level, the fact of dependence on the real economy can hardly be disputed--ultimately, the accumulation of capital requires the production process.

(712): marx here, in his "accounting," lays the foundation for worker-control, insofar as it clarifies the contradiction immanent in the asymmetries of capitalist production--the worker is at once free from the capitalist (in that he is responsible for his own reproduction), and at once subordinate (in the morphologies of the factory floor). this surely qualifies as one of these "legendary" contradictions, whose resolution presents itself in the dreams of laborers everywhere: collective ownership of the means of production.

(713): here, i think, there's room to explore (or, rather, to clarify) marx's admittedly complicated thoughts on the relationship between material relationships and the ideal forms that interpret the former. the argument is simple: in arguing that the "transaction is veiled by the commodity-form of the product and the money-form of the commmodity," he's quite clearly claiming that certain concepts serve to legitimize actually-existing social relations (in this case, the commodity-form, which prioritizes the process of selling over and above production, and the money-form, which empowers those seeking to transform M into C into M', the capitalist, at the expense of those who earn money only in order to consume). in sum, the heavenly, bourgeois mist that coheres around dirty earthy realities obfuscates the nature of capitalist exploitation. to extend his argument, we might add that his earlier stress on the incessant character of this process is critical, as it speaks to what barbara fields highlights, namely the importance of living and re-living these facts-of-life to the formation of ideal apparatuses that rationalize them. taken even further, against the dogmatists, i think we can recover an almost gramscian notion of hegemony in this presentation of "legitimation"--it is the fact that the laborer receives a wage, week-in, week-out (with which he purchases a "basket of goods"), that cements, ideally, his subjugation to capital, which appears here as his provider. (the abiding question, still, is whether emancipation from this subjugation is primarily ideal--as in, does the worker learn "marxist economic theory" in order to be free--or, primarily material--as in, it requires the overthrow of said material relationships). as with most questions, i think the anticipated answer is likely too simplistic. fields' argument lends itself to a more pessimistic reading (as in one needs to reject the source at which these ideas are reproduced), whereas the dogmatists and parties, of course, invest their faith in the notion of emancipation through "scientific education." we need not review the absurdities of the latter, though we might want to interrogate the limitations of the latter (particularly, in the diagnosis of "hegemony"--is anything so clean, after all? at the very least, we need to re-introduce fanon's notion of hegemony-never-consolidated)

(716): a mutual dependence between capitalist and wage-laborer (insofar as the worker constantly produces "objective wealth," in the form of capital; and insofar as the capitalist "just as constantly produces labour-power...produces the worker as a wage-laborer") obscures the sovereignty of labor (insofar as labor-power is the incessant (though not necessarily original) source of capital's valorization), even while the actual dynamics are inverted in order to crown the capitalist (insofar as the capitalist buys labor-power, and thus reserves the right to dispose of it as he will).

(718): this claim, that the individual consumption of the worker forms an indispensable part of the process of production, is critical, for at least two reasons: (1) it further highlights the myriad ways in which, even in those spheres which he/she might be considered "free" and "autonomous," capital seeps into the non-working life of the worker. in the fact that this "maintenance and reproduction of the working-class remains a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital," we again see the dialectics of mutual dependence and subjugation. (2) it is within this capillary form of domination, i think, that one must situate analysis of the more overt forms of capital's intrusions (advertising, the company store, credit cards, etc.).

(718-719): implicit in marx's unveiling of the notions of "productive" and "unproductive" consumption is the same claim about the "irrational character of capitalist rationality"--namely, the notion that productivity, efficiency, output, etc., all are measured in relation to the process of valorization. once we break with these limited metrics, however, the massive irrationalities become clearer. to put it more succinctly, the rhetoric of rationality is tied to class. none of this is very distinct from what weber, foucault, or the frankfurt schoool wanted to emphasize--the notion that a prodigiously productive, efficient apparatus was deployed to deplorable, irrational ends.

(720-721): the british cotton industry, calling for a bailout in the aftermath of the blockade of the american south--some things never change! (here, more importantly, marx is relating capital's awareness of its (and society's) dependence on labor.

(722): the desire to restrict freedom of movement of labor reveals, again, the sinister asymmetry at the heart of the dual freedom of the wage-laborer: 'free' to dispose of himself as he will (i.e., not work and starve), but simultaneously 'free' to be disposed of as the capitalist would like. here, as always, "between equal rights, force [is deciding]."

(725-726): i take this opportunity to stress what is argued throughout these sections on accumulation, namely that capital accumulation proceeds only insofar as capital is incessantly deployed and re-deployed--insofar as the cycle of capital's circulation is unbroken. in that sense, latin american elites buying second homes in the US represent the failure of that indigenous bourgeoisie to fulfill its historical vocation. in other words, the unproductive consumption of the capitalist class, though significant, in a historical sense, when assessing third world development, is not marx's concern. again, he takes bourgeois intellectual's at their word when critiquing their "creation." (to review: failed capital accumulation, in marx's terms, is described as "simple reproduction"). (see also 738-739).

(727): in tracing how simple reproduction becomes "a spiral," marx makes room for, within his analysis, the fact of the rising standard of living of the working-class. as he has established, capitalist's are invariably critically dependent on the existence of a laboring population--indeed, the "autonomous" reproduction of wage-labor is part of the cycle of capital's circulation. in this sense, quite apart from that theory of crisis which identifies the contradiction latent in capital's dual relationship to labor (as its workers, but also as its consumers), marx is suggesting that capital cannot avoid the imperative to provide an increasingly larger absolute social product to workers in order that they may reproduce themselves in ever greater numbers. note, he has dwelt carefully on the imperfections, and further contradictions in this process--how this is unsteady, unwilling, and often untrue. and that holistic analysis is really the lesson of this book.

(729-730): an excellent passage, requiring little explication: bourgeois legality mystifies the content of the capitalist's appropriation by presenting in the form of the equal exchange. in other words, the legal framework that regulates exchange enshrines a principle utterly hostile to the equality it purports--namely, the parasitism of capital and the subjugation of labor that ensues. (an interesting additional issue, which is evident from marx's presentation, is the fleeting legality of this relationship. rather than understanding bourgeois legality as incomplete, ideally, in other words, he seems to be presenting it as partial because it is temporary. when we confine ourselves to the act of exchange (the interaction between capital as buyer and wage-laborer as seller), all is well. it is when we move beyond this that we must also move beyond the mist of bourgeois social science).

(731): something also needs to be said about the curious character of labour-power as commodity. as marx notes, while the wage-laborer alienates it in his contract with the capitalist, this alienation is temporary (after the act of exchange, he's free(/condemned) to do this again). in a sense, the entire tragedy of the proletarian resides in his inability to detach himself from what he sells--he must follow his commodity to work, as that commodity is his body, his-self. with this in mind, one can even begin to argue that drugs, religion, whatever else, represent an alienation in response to this fundamental alienation--as he is alienated in following his body to work (ah, the dualists return!), he responds by leaving the factory in order to find god, football, or everything in between. "apathy," then, is only a feature of this underlying injustice.

(733): a need to think this through--"to the extent that commodity production, in accordance with its own immanent laws, undergoes a further development into capitalist production, the property laws of commodity production must undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become laws of capitalist appropriation."

(740-741): here, marx is telling a story about the capitalist class becoming progressively less "capitalist" (as vocation), as capitalism advances, insofar as they "accumulate" less and "splurge" more. this chronology of increasnig 'lax-ness', i think, seems resoundingly true--though what is needed to make the narrative more robust is specifics rooted in history (note, marx also complicates this significantly--speaking, for example, of the occasional necessity of capital representing itself through luxury). for example, in the US the recent story is well-known, hinging on the neoliberal revolution (de-industrialization, financialization, and macro- and micro-economic indebtedness).

(742): in this brief allusion to the notion that the capitalist, too, is merely a 'machine' means to the end of valorization, there's room to assert, with marcuse and the others, the more total undesirability of modern industrial society. indeed, it is precisely this process of means incessantly and permanently becoming ends-in-themselves that those thinkers foreground as the madness of modernity. of course, no one needs the zerzanite reaction.

(747): "in the chapters on the production of surplus-value we constantly assumed that wages were at least equal to the value of labor-power. but the forcible reduction of the wage of labor beneath its value plays too important a role in the practical movement of affairs for us not to stay with this phenomenon for a moment."

(748): again, in this essay on the english worker of the 18th century lamenting the cheapness of french labor, we confront again the morphological timelessness of the capitalist economy.

(756): here, the fetishism of the commodity re-appears in the fetishism of capital: "all the powers of labor project themselves as powers of capital, just as the value-forms of the commodity do as forms of money." to review, the productive forces of labor--both as it preserves the value of dead labor, and also adds new value to the product--appear as the features of capital's ability to self-valorize. in the case of money, though i need to clarify the argument, money (as universal equivalent) expresses individual properties of specific commodities as general qualities of itself (appropriating, in a sense, their functions to itself).

(758-759, fn 51): marx on bentham, that "soberly pedantic and heavy-footed oracle..."--priceless!

neoliberalism in latin america:
A precondition for the privatization programmes imposed across successive Latin American countries in the 1980s and 90s was the defeat and disarming of earlier movements of the left and organized labour. During the decades of development the emphasis was on import-substitute industrialization—in particular in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, but also to a lesser extent in Colombia, Peru, Chile, Uruguay and Costa Rica. These developments were underwritten by broad politico-ideological projects that encouraged the strengthening of the working class and its trade unions, backed by local party formations and democratic-national blocs, in a context of nationalistic ideologies and identities. The potential this built up burst onto the political scene in the 1960s as a radical force, when the long cycle of growth petered out in conflicts over workers’ rights, at a time when the Cuban example was pointing towards alternatives that transcended the limits of capitalism and us imperial domination. The response to these struggles was an era of military coups, first in Brazil and Bolivia in 1964, in Argentina in 1966 and 1976, and finally in Uruguay and Chile in 1973.
(...) The first cycle, from 1959 to 1967, saw the triumph of the Cuban revolution and the spread of the rural guerrilla movement to Venezuela, Guatemala and Peru, in emulation of those of Colombia and Nicaragua. The period saw mass mobilizations in several countries, including Brazil during Goulart’s 1961–64 government and broad resistance to the dictatorship that followed the military coup there in 1964. For the Latin American left this was a period of upswing, directly influenced by the success of Cuba, but cut short by the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. The second cycle runs from 1967 to 1973. It saw the decline of the rural guerrilla movements and the rise of new urban guerrillas in Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. Allende was elected president in Chile (1970–73); the same years saw the government of Juan José Torres (1971) in Bolivia, and nationalist governments under Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru (1967) and Omar Torrijos in Panama (1968). In summary, this was a mixed period inaugurating an era of reverses, marked by military coups and dictatorships.
(...) The years 1973 to 1979 saw the consolidation of military dictatorships across the Southern Cone. As in Brazil, juntas came to power in Bolivia in 1971, Chile and Uruguay in 1973 and Argentina in 1976. Velasco Alvarado was overthrown in Peru. The neoliberal model was rolled out in Pinochet’s Chile. This was a period of unmitigated downturn. By contrast, the long decade of 1979 to 1990 brought Sandinista victory in Nicaragua, revolution in Grenada and a nationalist government in Surinam. Castro was elected president of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries, and guerrilla forces expanded in El Salvador and Guatemala. The 1980s were a period of overall progress.
(...) In another switch, the years from 1990 to 1998 saw the Sandinista defeat, the start of the ‘special period’ in Cuba, and the entrenchment of neoliberal hegemony across the continent, with the collaboration of the pri in Mexico, Menem in Argentina, Pérez in Venezuela, Cardoso in Brazil, Fujimori in Peru and the continuation of Pinochetist economic neoliberalism in Chile under the Concertación coalition of Socialists and Christian Democrats. This was definitively a period of net regression. Yet from 1998 onwards, the wind turned in the other direction with the election of Chávez in Venezuela, followed by the launch of the World Social Forums in Porto Alegre in 2001, Lula’s election victory in 2002, and further gains for the left and centre-left in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador and finally Paraguay. Mercosur was expanded to incorporate Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador while the Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas—or alba, ‘dawn’—brought together a new left grouping of the Andean–Caribbean axis. So far, this has been a period of appreciable progress.
(...) Cross-cutting these political cycles, three overall strategies of the Latin American left can be discerned. The first sequence, dating back to the 1940s, was one of major structural reforms contemporaneous with the hegemony of the import-substitution model. The left opted for an alliance with sectors of the national business elite in the name of economic modernization, agrarian reform and a certain autonomy with respect to Northern imperialism. This strategy was implemented by legendary nationalist leaders such as Getúlio Vargas of Brazil, Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico and Juan Perón of Argentina, in concert with parties of the left or centre-left. In Chile, textbook cases of this approach were the Popular Front of 1938 and the Allende administration in 1970–73. But the programme failed at the same time as the industrialization effort, when the internationalization of economies pushed the corporate elites into solid alliance with international capital, laying the groundwork for the eventual neoliberal model. These same entrepreneurs also supported the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone, making no secret of their readiness to liquidate the popular movement for the sake of an export-centred economy geared to luxury domestic consumption by way of intense labour exploitation.
(...) A second great strategy emerged with the Cuban revolution. Any revolutionary victory—above all when it is the first of its kind in a whole region—carries charismatic persuasive force, as we know from the Russian and Chinese experiences in 1917 and 1949. The Cuban triumph coincided with the end of the cycle of Latin American economic expansion under the popular governments and democratic regimes that had prevailed over much of the continent during the 1940s and 50s. The first Argentine coup was carried out in 1955, the second in 1966; the Brazilian and Bolivian coups took place in 1964, and already by 1954 Guatemala was in the throes of counter-revolution. It seemed that the cycle of democratic governments had run its course, in parallel with the economic crises. It was then that Cuba unexpectedly presented an alternative route, in contrast to the impasse that popular struggles in other countries had reached under their traditional leaderships. Latin America was no stranger to guerrilla movements; it had known rural insurgencies such as those of Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1930s, as well as the national-revolutionary struggles in Mexico in the 1910s, or in Bolivia in 1952. Yet events in Cuba radiated a special appeal, pointing the way to a new epoch for the left. Due to the similarity of levels of development reached at that period by most of the countries of Latin America, the Cuban revolution was immediately more influential in the region than the Russian revolution had been in Europe in its day. All the more so, thanks to the way it was presented by such—attractive, if misguided—codifications as Régis Debray’s account of the Cuban experience and how it might be replicated in other countries and continents.
(...) The abandonment of popular forces by former nationalist or social-democratic allies, together with the harsh social consequences of free-market economics, have propelled social movements into the forefront of the resistance to neoliberalism—the third and latest strategy from below. The Zapatistas, the landless peasant movement (MST) in Brazil, the indigenist movements of Bolivia and Ecuador, the piqueteros or unemployed workers’ activists in Argentina—these are just some of the groups that have pioneered the new militancy.
(...) There are two main problems with this position. Firstly, it blurs the boundaries with neoliberal discourse, since as we pointed out above, the latter likewise regards the state and party politics as its great enemies. Secondly, given that neoliberalism is characterized by the wholesale expropriation of rights, it can only be overcome in the political sphere: through the universalization of rights enacted by the governing authority of the state. Otherwise, the struggle against neoliberalism would remain perpetually on the defensive, having discarded the political instruments necessary for its own realization. Some movements have remained trapped in this paradox, ostensibly embodying hubs of resistance yet unable to move forward into challenging neoliberal hegemony, via a fresh articulation of the social with the political. Their critique of the state is subordinated to the terms of the theoretical discourse of neoliberalism, structured around the polarization of state versus private. This polarity is designed to demonize the state, take control of the private sphere (in which market relations are embedded) and abolish the indispensable framework for the democratization and defeat of neoliberalism: the public sphere.
(...) Faced with this crisis of hegemony for the traditional political parties—the Partido Radical in disarray after De la Rúa’s resignation, the Peronists bitterly divided—the social movements coined the famous slogan, ¡Que se vayan todos!: Out with the lot of them! This amounted to a refusal to take part in the electoral process, yet without suggesting any way in which power might be rethought or reorganized. It was a quintessential expression of the ‘autonomy of social movements’, disdainful of politics but lacking any alternatives. From a position of strength, one can indeed get rid of ‘the lot of them’. Without organized political forces, the slogan is merely a way to bow out from the fight for an alternative hegemony... In all these instances, the notion of the autonomy of the social served not to help the regrouping of mass forces intent on organizing new forms of political action, nor as a way to construct alternative forms of power, but rather as a refusal to confront the issue of power. The clearest theoretical expositions of such tendencies are to be found in the works of Toni Negri and John Holloway. They argue explicitly for the abandonment of power, of the political sphere, on grounds that power corrupts everything since its forms of representing the popular will are intrinsically tainted and distorting; the will of the people can only be legitimately represented within the social sphere. Furthermore, Negri portrays the state as a conservative brake on globalization. Yet neither makes any attempt to construct concrete anti-neoliberal strategies; their prescriptions lead only to the inertia of the social movements. The wsf, for its part, made the need to regulate flows of finance capital one of its founding theses; yet this can only take place—as, for example, in the case of Venezuela—through state action.
(...) Why has a full-fledged challenge to capitalism not emerged? The answer must be sought in the global balance of forces following the victory of the West in the Cold War. The extensive processes of deregulation and marketization that this unleashed did not produce an era of sustained economic growth; instead, productive investment was in large part transferred to the speculative financial sphere. The social and geographical concentration of wealth has intensified. The limits and contradictions of the capitalist system are revealed on a greater scale than ever before. Yet the subjective factors—forms of collective organization and of consciousness, politics and the state—necessary for the construction of alternatives have been disequipped by these same processes. The state and the public domain have withered under the onslaught of rent-seeking capital, backed by international agencies that relentlessly preach the doctrine of free trade. Ideologically, the triumph of liberalism has imposed its own interpretation of the world as a hegemonic monopoly: democracy could only mean representative parliamentarism; the economy could only mean the capitalist market economy; the client and the consumer occluded the citizen and the worker; competition replaced rights and the market subsumed the public sphere. This is why the successive crises of the neoliberal economic model have not prompted an overt challenge to capitalism as such. In Latin America, the countries that have gone furthest in combating neoliberalism are those in which it was least entrenched. In Venezuela the advance of free-market policies was halted by the failure of the Carlos Andrés Pérez and Rafael Caldera administrations; in Ecuador, by the fall of three governments in a row. In Bolivia, indigenous communities managed to preserve their identities not only in the countryside, but also in the urban districts where they are most highly concentrated, cities like La Paz, El Alto and Cochabamba. Ideologically, neoliberalism has put down deeper roots in the relatively more developed countries: Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina. Brazil was ruled by an unbroken sequence of neoliberal governments for ten years; in Argentina, Menem also ruled for ten years; and neoliberal orthodoxy was fully implemented in Mexico as much under the pri as under the pan. In Brazil and Argentina the neoliberal model continues to hold sway, despite certain areas of flexibility.
(...) On the ideological plane, Latin America is better placed to table issues for debate: the pluri-national, pluri-ethnic state; the notion of 21st-century socialism; alternative formulas for regional integration such as alba. But there are few platforms for disseminating the new ideas, raising them against the pensée unique and its theories, incessantly propounded by the mass media. Latin American critical thought, which can boast a long tradition of far-sighted interpretations and theoretical innovations, is faced with fresh challenges in response to issues such as the new nationalism, indigenous peoples, the new model of accumulation, processes of socialization and de-marketization, and the historical and political future of the continent. In some countries—most importantly Bolivia—the experiments under way are accompanied by a rich process of reflection and theoretical elaboration. In others, there is a considerable dissociation, not to say contradiction, between much of the intelligentsia and the process the rest of the country is embarked on: the most striking example is Venezuela. In countries with a strong university-based intelligentsia such as Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, a significant part of the educated elite will not commit itself to participating in the principal areas of social and political struggle, even if it maintains a high standard of intellectual elaboration. The existing theoretical potential may play an important role in the construction of post-neoliberal models.
(...) In retrospect, the international rise, consolidation and jeopardization of neoliberalism falls into three distinct phases. The first was marked by the Thatcher-Reagan tandem, corresponding to the strongest and most openly reactionary ideological expressions, with Pinochet in Chile and Jeffrey Sachs in Bolivia as its most authentic regional equivalents. The second phase corresponded to the governments of the so-called Third Way, represented by Clinton and Blair, which pursued a supposedly ‘light’ version, a consolidation of the model, given that the heavy lifting—privatizations, unlimited predominance of the market, opening-up of the economy—had already been carried out. Now it was as if the green light had been given for governments of similar tendency in Latin America—social-democrat and nationalist—to set out on the same path: from Buenos Aires to Mexico City, the Washington Consensus swept the board. The third phase was inaugurated with the Mexican peso crisis and the onset of turbulence in the globalized economy, while the Bush-Cheney White House imposed a harsher, more conservative tone in response to the attacks of 2001; aggressive policies from Washington combining with an economy in stagnation.

the pope and genocide:
Benedict, of course, is the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Throughout the 1980s, he was Pope John Paul II's enforcer in the campaign to expunge the dangerously progressive ideals of Catholic "liberation theology" from Latin American soil. What could not be accomplished by state terrorists, who killed thousands of members of Christian "base communities" in the 1970s and '80s, Ratzinger and John Paul sought to engineer by installing conservative bishops who would stem the progressive tide. Fortunately, they seem to have failed. An account by Larry Rohter in the New York Times (May 7) notes that the movement which Ratzinger "once called 'a fundamental threat to the faith of the church' ... persists as an active, even defiant force in Latin America," with some 80,000 base communities operating in Brazil alone. It is fuelled, as it always has been, by the "social and economic ills" that pervade the region, and that have only "worsened" under the neoliberal prescriptions of the past two decades.
(...) Ratzinger/Benedict's bile was directed not at liberation theology, but squarely at the historical memory of the serial genocides -- probably the most destructive in human history -- inflicted upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas. On the last day of his visit, in the city of Aparecida, the Pope "touch[ed] on a sensitive historical episode," in the blandly understated language of an Associated Press dispatch (May 13). In other words, he ripped the bandages off a still-suppurating wound. According to the official text of Benedict's comments on the Vatican website, the Pope declared that "the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean" were "silently longing" to receive Christ as their savior. He was "the unknown God whom their ancestors were seeking, without realizing it ..." Colonization by Spain and Portugal was not a conquest, but rather an "adoption" of the Indians through baptism, making their cultures "fruitful" and "purifying" them. Accordingly, "the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbian cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture."
(...) The invasion and conquest of the Americas, which caused the deaths of upwards of 90 percent of the indigenous population, was something the Indians had been pining for all along. They weren't just "asking for it," as sexist cranks depict women as complicit in their own rapes. They were actually "longing" for it, since salvation and "purification" came with it.
(...) He defined genocide as "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups." His framing became the foundation of the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948, and of the academic field of comparative genocide studies. Lemkin himself was keenly aware of the devastation of the indigenous people of the Americas, and considered it basic to his understanding of genocide, though most of his writings on the theme remain unpublished. (See the text of John Docker's excellent February 2004 talk at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Raphael Lemkin's History of Genocide and Colonialism".)
(...) A May 13 Reuters dispatch noted blithely that, contrary to Benedict's claims, "many Indian groups believe the conquest brought them enslavement and genocide." This is rather like writing that "many Jewish groups believe that the Nazi Holocaust brought Jews enslavement and genocide."