#and basically using that to develop a more leveled perspective on politics in imperialist countries.

[bastardwhoisnamedrat]

this shit sounds hilarious when i verbalize it so i might as well see if it transfers to text: i have TERRIBLE anxiety in relation to most interpersonal relationships, even longstanding ones like family. i can't text i can't call i can't talk first. this extends to a desire for what i'd like to call "socio-political overawareness" wherein instead of actually synthesizing information into anything even moderately important with my fucking needle head's worth of free time, i just. keep reading shit.

paper after pdf after paper and i can recite the information, yeah, but i can't DO shit with it. so i just get kicked into this gear of anxiety (that truly is my own fault) where i think i'll never know anything, i'll hover in this state of non-awareness and i'll never be able to help anyone like that.

it comes from an internal responsibility to take advantage of how much informaition is avaliable, but sadly i just lack the time to really dive into print resources in depth and this is SUCH a first-world problem, so to speak, so know it's really a non-issue like "ohh i can't understand world politcs fast enough oughh i don't understand historical tragedy :(" but also it just. upsets me.

[bimboficationblues]

I'm technically new to all this political stuff, so I hope you can help me out! - How would you briefly explain to someone why capitalism is bad? Why is the US also bad, and how would you respond to someone who claims that it is a "free country" and that we "at least have the freedom of speech and the freedom to protest", etc. I'm very bad with words, I'm just a dumb kid. Sorry for bothering, and thank you. (:

I will answer these questions, but first off, I would say - read, listen, think. Ultimately it’s better if you can develop your own conclusions through a mutual dialogue and learning process with others rather than getting your talking points entirely from others, especially on a social media platform. But if you want resources or recommendations from others, Tumblr can be useful, and I’m happy to provide if you want.

As for answering your questions, it really depends: who is the person you’re talking to, and what do you want out of the conversation? Not everybody has the same interests or concerns or values, and sometimes they’re intractable for whatever reason. So there are other factors that should be taken into account. If you’re just trying to “win” a discussion, I don’t personally think that’s a worthwhile use of time - but if you are trying to convince someone interpersonally or just get better at clarifying your own perspective for the future, that could be valuable.

So, answering your questions under the cut:

How would you briefly explain to someone why capitalism is bad?

A) Capitalism stifles human freedom, and does so in both passive and active forms. This seems counterintuitive because capitalism is peddled as the fulfillment of human freedom (by way of innovation and freedom of choice - Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman have claimed that so-called “economic freedom” is a necessary condition for political freedoms), so bear with me.

Passive forms: In order to live under capitalism, most people have to work - and for that matter, they have to tailor skills and interests to be rewarded on the labor-market. Furthermore, since capitalism is predicated on the principle of private property, some kind of state is necessary to enforce that principle through the law, and the state and law are blatantly forms of social control (see David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism for more info on this). As a Christian myself, this is the essence of idolatry. The capitalist world-system was made by humans, ostensibly to serve human needs, but is both bad at serving those needs in many ways (for reasons to be explained below) and uses us as the fodder for its self-perpetuation! 

And this generates alienation. There is nothing necessarily “wrong” with depending on other people - humans are social creatures and are themselves influenced by the conditions under which they live no matter what those conditions are. But when your labor and the product of your labor benefits others far better than it sustains you, when you are pushed to view all other people as competitors, when you are subjected to various forms of interpersonal and structural domination (detailed below), this produces quite a bit of psychological distress. (Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and Deleuze & Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia touch on these in different ways.)

Active forms: Historically, in order to get people to be wage laborers, they had to be forced to do so - in England, which is generally regarded as the birthplace of capitalist modernity, laws were established to oblige people to work for a certain period and punish them if they didn’t. Similar legislation cropped up in Germany and France. And, of course, there was also the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the abuse and exploitation of indigenous populations throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, the confinement of women to the household for free labor. Though not all contemporary evils are the result of capitalism, they have all been shaped by capitalism. Primordial prejudices and mistreatment of “aliens” has been around for a long time, but anti-black racism and “scientific” racism developed out of the economic functions of slavery and capitalist development; though patriarchy predates capitalism considerably, it has been absorbed and reproduced by capitalism’s dynamics. 

One of the common selling points for capitalism is the voluntary character of the contracts, but again, I don’t think it’s a meaningful choice when your other options are “starve” and “beg.” But let’s grant that people enter into voluntary employment contracts to sustain themselves. Within those contracts, bosses behave like dictators, and this is a pattern of both small businesses and large corporations precisely because they want to get as much work and value out of you as they can in order to make a profit. (Vivek Chibber’s book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, while not about interpersonal domination by capitalists and employers, has a great chapter on the subject - “Capital’s Universalizing Tendency.”)

Now, although the standard of living and wages for American workers has been rising for a long time (only recently stagnating despite the growth in productivity, again the result of the neoliberal turn in the 70s and 80s), we have seen the most brutal forms of exploitation and domination displaced to other places - Southeast Asia, China, India, and Latin America being the most prominent cases. And still, as the article linked above demonstrates, there are lots of forms of interpersonal domination still going on in an American context.

B) Capitalism is anti-democratic. The concentration of wealth into a select few hands, and the associated political and social power that has become attached to greater social wealth, means that wealthier people have greater access to political power and influence. The Koch Brothers are probably the best example of this, though lobbying in general is an expression of this function. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this one because I think it’s the least compelling argument personally even though I agree with it, but it is a popular and common one!

C) Capitalism is also fundamentally irrational. I think this is true in the way that we think about value and the way capitalism generates regular crises, but I’ll just use one example.

The convenient thing about money, as both Locke and Marx point out, is that it is potentially infinite unlike other resources. There is the possibility of limitless growth, of maximum expansion - which is why the capitalist mode of production began in Western Europe and the United States and has since spread around the world. (There is, of course, no such thing as limitless growth for anything, except perhaps cancer.) But capitalism takes this possibility as gospel and as a result, will do anything to maximize growth. 

Sometimes those things are good for working people (farm subsidies enabling cheap food - though without those subsidies there would probably be a famine from capitalists not investing capital in food production). More often they aren’t, whether that’s mistreatment of workers, lowering or stagnating wages, destruction of the environment, or outright warfare. Plus, because there is a limit to natural desires or even luxury desires, capitalists have to constantly concoct new desires for us to latch onto, which is why so much money is sunk into advertising.And this is not merely the result of the ethical whims or personal behaviors of individual capitalists (though those do factor in), but the necessary and logical result of a mode of production that has an internal logic of constant, endless reproduction.

Why is the US also bad? how would you respond to someone who claims that it is a “free country” and that we “at least have the freedom of speech and the freedom to protest”, etc.

This is, paradoxically, an easier argument to make empirically but a harder case to sell because American nationalism and American exceptionalism are pretty ubiquitous, and they’ve only gotten more intractable in the past four or five decades. It really depends on what you mean by “bad,” anyway. On one level, the United States is not that different from any other state historically (since they are usually founded through violence and domination) or contemporarily (since they all act in their own geopolitical interests, and that often means fucking other people over undeservedly).

But, on another level: The United States- were built on indigenous and later African slavery- regularly violated treaties or used duplicitous means to gain access to Native American land for investment and expansion purposes- deployed genocidal tactics and sexual violence against Native Americans throughout the expansion process (especially in California and the Southeast)- fabricated a reason to wage war on Mexico to seize territory from it- botched Reconstruction after the end of formal slavery while still allowing black Americans to be abused and exploited and criminalized en masse- had racial policies that the Nazis found inspirational- engaged in imperialist warfare in the Caribbean at the turn of the century- overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii for economic reasons- nuked a Japanese civilian target (TWICE) when their surrender was already in the cards- used its new hegemony to start launching coups against (mostly democratically elected and socialist-leaning) governments (Iran, Guatemala, Chile)- held the rest of the world in a hostage situation alongside the Soviet Union by threatening nuclear annihilation- waged war on Vietnam after violating the agreement to allow democratic elections and unification to take place- illegally bombed Cambodia and enabled the Khmer Rouge to gain traction- financed Islamist fighters against the Soviet Union that were the precursors of al-Qaeda- engaged in Iran-Contra, basically the shadiest thing in existence, and failed to deliver any real consequences to the people involved - supported and continues to support dictators (Batista, Saddam Hussein, etc.) as well as death squads (right-wing paramilitaries in Latin America)- has the highest incarceration rate in the world- has massively expanded the surveillance and police apparatuses since 9/11- invaded Iraq under false pretenses and let Islamic State develop out of the chaos

This is just a minor selection. And to top it all off, the Constitution of the United States is designed to make government as dysfunctional and anti-democratic as possible. The powers of the President have been perpetually expanding for a long time, and the Supreme Court is such a shamelessly broken, unaccountable institution that I cannot believe we take it seriously. The Supreme Court’s rulings on free speech have been up-and-down, often determined by war and nationalism, and the social backlash and hostility to political protest every time the United States goes to war suggests that even with the freedom of assembly granted by the Constitution, nationalism takes priority over freedoms.

This post is long enough, but if you (or anyone else) want me to elaborate on anything I’ve said here, feel free to ask.

[infochores]

Leftism, the DPRK and the Nuclear crisis

I thought id write a thing on this because most of the current far left talking points on this issue are terribly poorly informed. There’s a tendency amongst leftists online, particularly notable on twitter, but also here to conflate two kinds of commentary on contentious geopolitical issues into being one form of sin. Obviously the most current example is regarding the Singapore summit. The way its currently playing out in a lot of cases is basically as follows (I’m being a little snarky here but this is a fairly accurate play by play for a lot of the stupider stuff):

Prominent analyst, journalist, politician or Liberal pundit makes a statement criticizing the deal for a given reason. It might either be ordinary partisanship, or a genuine technical criticism of the content of the circumstances. 

It gets retweeted

People comment on  it in the retweets, claiming that the given person is in favour of  Koreans getting exterminated, because all objections to the circumstances must be borne of a desire for war or something.

The difference between multiple forms of criticism gets totally ignored by the left, we dont learn anything and we continue patting ourselves on the back.

Obviously this is fairly normal for online stuff but even so i think we need to start paying much closer attention to these issues and at the same time, stop being so parochial in our thinking about issues such as these. Therefore I’m minded to make a few points here about why its  short sighted to interpret this via the lens of western domestic political leftist rhetoric, the problem being that there’s severe limitations on that lens. 

Firstly its primarily based on established rhetorical forms that are largely out of date or constrained by a lack of room for outside information. This prevents us from usefully adopting lines of analyses from schools of thought not traditionally connected to existing normal stances within leftism. On the occasions where this does occur, we co-opt it for our own benefit. Essentially, If there’s a form of analysis, or an area of academic or technical expertise where the information and commentary is not directly subordinate to a conservative, US-centric interpretation of anti-imperialism then it tends to get completely discounted. The main example of this type of thing i wish to talk about is an area of interest of mine, namely arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation, as well as the place of nuclear weapons within a fairly basic Marxist influenced viewpoint on nuclear politics. 

Secondly, this stance is limited by the dynamics of online sectarian politics and the desire to produce content. Everyones familiar with this and knows how it works so im not going to bother going into this in any great detail. Essentially its providing a great addition to our respective mutual firing squads.

A third issue is the presumption of knowledge, and of moral or intellectual high ground on a combination of ideological bases. This latter point ties into an ongoing dynamic of orientalist thinking and presumptions that tend to seep into leftist rhetoric on subjects surrounding the Korean Peninsula. This is notable particularly within Marxist-Leninist  self styled “anti-imperialist” discourses, which are the main area of failure on all three of the issues ive listed, though there has been cross-pollination with other leftist sects. This behavior is reliant on making the nuclear crisis All About Us, unconsciously sliding over the human and political realities in order to establish credentials, ignoring regional factors beyond what is read about in a few articles and a surface level adherence to popular conceptions of anti imperialist praxis. Its essentially a highly banal form of watered down orientalism mixed with a vague presumption of superior politics. The reality is that we havent really learned anything from the crisis, because we’ve refused to. Arms Control, Non-proliferation and a lack of far-left institutional knowledge: I’m mainly going to address the first issue, that of a general lack of understanding of evolving dynamics in nuclear proliferation issues and arms control within the far left because its where i have the strongest base of knowledge relating to this matter. Functionally, nearly no-one in the circles of the online left I’m in actually knows how arms control is meant to work either in its form as a policy enacted between countries on a mutual basis, or in its form as a system in the world of geopolitics within which countries formulate policies. Im not trying to grandstand here as this circumstance is totally understandable: its a very niche topic and its not as if I’m particularly special for having made it something I’m interested in, but regardless there is a knowledge gap in leftist discussions on this issue and it seems important to highlight it. If there are any leftist arms control nerds that happen to see this assuming it gets more than a handful of notes by all means let me know. Anyway, I think its wise at this point to make the following statement and to explain it:

In the particular example at hand, namely this weeks Singapore summit and the deal made there, what has just happened is very likely a disaster in the long term, and should be absolutely regarded as such by the left. This is due to a combination of technical and political factors relating to the context and structure of the agreement. I am saying this as a Marxist and as someone in favour of internationalism and popular movements directed towards nuclear disarmament. Leftist institutional knowledge and the general knowledge in the community of how arms control works isn't really that great. During the cold war it was ok, due to the size and importance of the disarmament movement, but in the modern era its essentially non-existent. Anyway, the summit was a disaster for arms control and very few of us seem to get why. This is for a few reasons, but the main one is that it has established a precedent for successful, aggressive  strategies of proliferation under extreme duress. Arms control as a concept has taken a serious beating since 2003 and the Iraq war, with other major points of inflection since. The most significant of these have been the collapse of the JCPOA agreement with Iran  and the various chemical warfare atrocities in the Syrian civil war. The collapse of the Libyan state stands as its own special case as well for its own reasons. In the case of the recent summit the precedent set has been one of the solidification of certain dynamics, of the transition undertaken by nuclear weapons from being articles characterized by their technical use into being primarily characterized by a capacity for abstract political use in a way that had not yet been achieved, and of the deliberate manipulation and degradation of existing institutions in order to facilitate proliferation. I am not merely talking about Nuclear weapons being used for political purposes. I am talking about a very specific type of political use. This dynamic is extremely bad and provides a model for action to accompany the diminishing difficulty in producing nuclear weapons, which will provide a great incentive to states seeking to proliferate nuclear weapons. The only outcome possible here is the furthering of the development of weaponry to be used against populations and in so doing, the armory of empire. This is not a victory for Anti-Imperialism, despite its surface appearance having had great propaganda value.

The deal has essentially entrenched both the (many) negative and the (few) positive aspects of the present crisis, essentially providing cover for the ROK to continue a gradualist approach toward achieving a sustainable end result at the same time as providing a model of success for proliferation as a state policy. In fact i would argue that one of the main contributions that this will all make to geopolitical history will be the establishment, testing, and success of a new model of proliferation, one with profoundly negative though interesting consequences from a leftist perspective. Essentially, by forcing the nuclear issue, by making all of the political capital centered upon repeated escalating crises, comprising a protracted greater crisis, the DPRK strategy meant that all political questions were to be decided according to a single signifier of value: the technical usability and validity of its nuclear weapons, demonstrable to all onlookers from the outside. A value which the DPRK leadership were able to be the controlling agents of, determining its magnitude, qualities and effects. In doing so it has essentially managed to manipulate the existing notions of arms control agreements and non-proliferation principles in order to turn those structures to its advantage: to turn them from being systems which constrained nuclear proliferation, to using them as a basis for updating the nuclear weapon into taking on a modern form of its already infamous role as the ultimate political commodity. It was essentially a strategy of folding up all issues into one and forcing everyone's decisions to rest upon that single focused issue. It is now far easier to proliferate nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles in terms of technical restrictions than it was 30, 40, 50 years ago. The designs are no-longer unknown and the required production technology is no longer as challenging as it once was. Provided with this, directed efforts towards various kinds of proliferation now have new potentials: the end state no longer has to be one option from a three way fork between a failed program, a successful program and being attacked/sanctioned. Obviously nuclear weapons have always been used as chips to bet on and trade between states, but for the most part those items, in the historical contexts of the cold war, the India/Pakistan standoff, and in the cases of Israel, Iran and the DPRK prior to recent developments, were developed for strict military terms, as items of deterrence, as physical items for physical use as instruments of policy in the most literal sense. In other words, they have been pursued by states for their use either as weapons, articles of deterrence or as a combination of being usable weapons and articles of abstract political power realized. This has now changed, likely irreversibly, and the summit has been a notable moment in the change.

The realization of abstract powers, and the risks of a new Nuclear credit:

What the new development has done is to introduce the potential for the transformation from nuclear weapons as weapons into a sort of proto-commodity form, whereby proliferation, as a behavior that states may engage in and as a form of production existing in a political sphere, has been brought to a such point of technical and political development that it may now be used not merely as an action engaged in to achieve a physical end, a productive approach to achieving a state policy, but takes on a new meaning, as a form of bargaining chip in itself. Elements of this have been present with nuclear weapons since the cold war in  relatively isolated minor forms but never reached the stage of proliferating for the sake of trading against that proliferation.

I believe that the summit has laid the groundwork for the establishment of such a dynamic  and I suspect that the fallout from the summit and the ongoing crisis ( which is not at all over) will now exacerbate this tendency in future cases. It is as if they have succeeded in laying the groundwork for making nuclear weapons not merely commodity items between a state and its industrial complex, but have extended their existence as commodities right into the geopolitical sphere. The truly perverse thing about this is that this change has been achieved without the DPRK even having to actually physically trade any of them: it has merely made a vapor-deal based on vague promises to limit the most obvious cases of its potential power.  In this manner another well established dynamic has been reinforced: The confrontational relationship between the instability of deterrence and the long term tendency evolving from it for states to engage in proliferation. The repeated historical cases of the seeming success of deterrence, (a false semblance) have created a climate of encouragement for proliferation: existing nuclear weapons states are encouraged to expand and proliferate new powers to counter their antagonists advances, whilst non-nuclear weapons states begin to seek the weapons to achieve parity on various fronts. Against this backdrop, both the repeated crises in deterrence, the breakdowns of its various forms, political crises between states etc, and the longer periods of time between them, the long moments of false security, serve to enhance the fetishized value of deterrence. The illusory success of deterrent strategies encourage the proliferation dynamic. Deterrence will therefore, if i am correct, become a contributing factor in commodity-led proliferation. But now a new aspect of this dynamic has appeared: the change in nature of arms control into also becoming a contributing feature. Prior to this arms control was a diplomatic, technical activity, with strict technical aims. It may still take on that characteristic but is at severe risk of being held, in measure of value, against the new measuring standard that i fear is being established.  This situation is profoundly negative for leftist political positions: the brief lull in tensions may be whisked away by a new return to sabre rattling at any point if political capital is to be made, ushering in more risks of accident miscalculation or catalytic war and further it is a massive blow to the disarmament movement. It will certainly serve to entrench national military industrial complexes in nuclear states, as well as further contributing to regional problems in areas where proliferating states are players. Holding all this to be down to the blunderings of one leader and the energy of another is a useless way to think about this issue. This is to the detriment of internationalism.