From the Vietnam War to Iraq

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Transcript From the Vietnam War to Iraq

Stephen Gill
York University, Toronto, Canada
Visiting Jane and Aatos Erkko Professor in Studies
on Contemporary Society, University of Helsinki
Lecture to University of Tampere
16/10/09
Lecture will be posted on:
http://www.stephengill.com
GLOBAL ORGANIC CRISIS
& THE POST-MODERN
PRINCE
Outline
Part 1: Two Concepts
Part 2: The Crisis of Accumulation &
The Global Organic Crisis
Part 3: Political Alternatives & the
Post-Modern Prince
Part 1
Organic Crisis & Post-modern
Prince
“The old is dying and the new is
being born, and in the
interregnum there are many
morbid symptoms”
Global organic crisis
1. A wide-ranging combination of economic,
social and ecological crises characterizes
the present global conjuncture
2. Present crisis is more deep-seated than an
economic depression or a cyclical crisis of
capitalist accumulation or economic growth.
3. It involves emerging challenges to the
dominance of neo-liberal market civilization
& capitalist globalization.
The Post-modern Prince as
collective political agency
1. This concept is grounded in a reading
of Machiavelli’s & Gramsci’s concepts
of political agency.
2. It seeks to conceptualize some of the
real and imagined aspects of
progressive politics in the 21st century.
The Prince (1513)
1.
2.
3.
Machiavelli sought to analyze the
national & global power relations
of his time & place -- weakness of
a divided Renaissance Italy vis à
vis the geopolitical power of
France & Spain
Spoke not to those in the palazzo
but in the piazza – to those “not
in the know”; he demystifies
power
Political power – the centaur –
was based on force and
persuasion. The Prince as a new
type of sovereign would found a
new and united Italian state.
The Modern Prince (1927-36)
1.
Workers should create a new
hegemony, an ethical & democratic
form of state & culture with the
revolutionary party as a solution to
Fascism & the 1930s organic crisis.
2. “The modern prince, the mythprince, cannot be a real person, a
concrete individual”.
3. “It can only be an organism, a
complex element of society in which
a collective will, which has already
been recognized and has to some
extent asserted itself in action,
begins to take concrete form”
(Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, 1971
ed Q Hoare; my emphasis).
The Post-modern Prince
1. Combines the old and the radically new in a search for
a new global progressive hegemony
2. Still in development yet part of global progressive
movements that have emerged over centuries.
3. Responds to global organic crisis in “concrete form”
e.g. World Social Forum/ Left Forums
4. Goes beyond traditional left politics &
internationalism of elite vanguards or the primacy of
industrial working classes
5. Non-hierarchical -- multiple organizations &
processes, leadership is diverse & not easily
incarcerated or decapitated.
6. Embodies new universal political myth of social &
ecological sustainability: diversity, democracy and
equality of peoples as a “universal project”.
Part 2:
Beyond The Crisis of
Accumulation
Elements of Global Organic Crisis
Today
Crisis of Accumulation: the
orthodox view


Source: Barry Eichengreen & Kevin H. O’Rourke 4 June 2009
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3421
1. The slump of 2008-09 matches the severity of
1930s collapse & in some respects it is worse
2. World industrial production tracks closely
the 1930s fall, with no clear signs of “green
shoots”. Unemployment rising.
3. World stock markets and world trade initially
follow paths far below those followed in
Great Depression
4. Dow 10,000 & the Obama “rally” – is it a
“double dip” recession?.
Global priorities: capital comes first
18
16
14
Total Committed to Bailout &
Stimulus in the EU, Britain and
US
US$ 17 trillion
12
10
8
6
Cost of Millennium
Development Goals
US$ 750 billion
4
2
0
By Way of Comparison
1
Political Ethics & Global Priorities:
capital comes first
1. EU + US + UK bailouts & macroeconomic
stimulus = US$17 trillion (figures drawn from
The Economist, IMF & other sources).
2. This is over 22 times the total planned funds
for UN’s Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs).
3. MDGs seek to provide minimum & basic
health & education for billions of the world’s
poorest between now and 2020.
4. “Billions for the banks, pennies for the
people” (Juan Somavia ILO Director in
Financial Times April 2009).
Morbid symptoms: global crisis &
rising hunger
 “Almost unnoticed behind the economic crisis, a
combination of lower growth, rising
unemployment and falling remittances together
with persistently high food prices has pushed the
number of chronically hungry above 1bn for the
first time”. Financial Times April 6 2009.
 In fact we live in a world where half the world’s
population suffers from malnutrition – 25% are
over-fed, many of whom over-weight and obese,
with 25% underfed or starving
 So what are the causes & some of the other
consequences of the spike in food prices?
Example: world capitalist markets
increasingly determine food prices & level
of starvation
Broader consequences include:
1. Increased corporate control of
global agriculture + more rapid
turnover time of capital
2. Energy & fertilizer intensive
production
3. Export-orientation creates crop
monocultures & damages the
biosphere
4. Decline of local self-sufficiency
means world market
determines “food security”
Proximate causal factors?
1.
2.
a)
b)
US production of subsidized grain export floods
the world market in the 1990s & wipes out many
small Third world producers – e.g. Mexico after
NAFTA (1994) 1.17 million Mexicans are displaced
from agriculture following trade liberalization.
A “perfect storm”? No -- recent price spike is
mainly caused by man-made factors including:
Shift of US grain production to bio-fuels creates
global supply shortages.
Global futures trading e.g. in Chicago & New York
markets, linked to speculation & rising food
prices
Global prices & food sovereignty
1. 1 in 7 people in the world is starving. 2005-8,
2.
3.
food prices rise 83%; are still 60% higher than in
2006. 37 nations experience intense food crises
2008; world-wide riots break out.
Via Campesina, Landless Workers’ Movement in
Brazil (MST) & other grassroots peoples’
organizations continue to press for food
sovereignty, organic production & a new society.
April 2009, 58 Third World governments agree to
redirect agriculture to support small scale farmers,
women, to support local knowledge; to counter
global warming – G20 & Gates Foundation respond
to preserve world market in food & alleviate
hunger.
Rethinking the concept of organic
crisis today
What are some differences between 1930s & today?
1. Crisis of accumulation is truly global – a second
Great Depression on a wider scale – USSR was
outside world capitalism in 1930s.
2. G8 responses reveal that macroeconomic
interventions are one-sidedly favourable to big
capital and the plutocracy, especially to Wall Street.
3. There are no obvious communist alternatives to the
dominance of global capitalism by neo-liberal forces
since the fall of the USSR in 1989.
4. However some new forms of left-wing political
agency are emerging in the longer context of
national & global struggles, e.g. the Post-Modern
Prince
Global organic crisis today – some
further defining elements: 1-5
1. Turnover time of capital accelerates, profits boom &
rates of exploitation of people & nature increase.
2. Growing subordination of states to capital (following
some socialization and nationalization of the means of
production 1917-1989).
3. Privatization of profits and socialization of the risks for
corporations & the strong (e.g. huge bail outs).
Increased privatization of risk for the weak & the
majority (small firms, workers), especially as social
provisions for social reproduction (provisions for
families, education).
4. Political power of free enterprise & the propertied fully
restored, unprecedented growth of a global
plutocracy.
5. Acceleration of extreme inequality of income, wealth &
life chances.
Distribution of world GDP 1990
 UN Human
Development
Report 1992
 Richest 20%
had 82.7% of
world income;
poorest 20%
had 1.4%
Global inequality & global power
 December 28, 2006: Financial Times asks how,
without reading Marx’s Capital, could one
possibly explain how the world’s richest 2% of
people now owned more than 50% of the
world's global assets.
 In fact the top 1% owned 40% of total global
assets – 37 million wealthy people.
 The bottom 50% (approx 3.3 billion people)
collectively owned less than 1% of total wealth
 The World Distribution of Household Wealth,
by James B. Davies et al (UNU-WIDER
December 2006)
Further elements of global organic
crisis: 6-9
6.
7.
8.
9.
Expropriation or dispossession of producers of their
means to subsistence – parallels early capitalist
enclosures and colonization (ongoing primitive
accumulation). Enlarges the size of the global
proletariat “free” to sell its labour to capital.
The coercive, arbitrary use of coercion & military
force (& torture) – and its use with impunity –
becomes a regulative principle in world affairs,
especially during Bush II administration.
Growing contradictions between legality and
legitimacy provoke challenges to global governance
& international organizations & the search for new
and more democratic political and social forums
All of this is occurring as market civilization is
spreading and as threats to the biosphere & the
ecology of livelihoods are increasing
Part 3:
Political Alternatives & the PostModern Prince
After the emergency: return to a
reformulated neo-liberal
orthodoxy?
1.
2.
3.
4.
Some limited progressive initiatives incorporated,
e.g. by Obama. Yet his program one-sidedly
favours Wall Street.
“Exit strategies” -- after the bail-outs:
reintroduction of mechanisms to justify & lock in a
return of fiscal discipline, austerity, privatization,
cuts in provisions for social reproduction.
Reinforcement of market discipline on individuals,
workers and families e.g. through growing debts
(personal loss of wealth, lower incomes, reduced
pensions).
IMF grows & resumes debt imperialism via donor
country conditionality and stabilization programs.
Authoritarian tendencies in the
emergency? The Global North
1. Bailouts & stimulus may not work, e.g. in
Japan US & UK interest rates now effectively
zero; huge deficits and even more government
debt on the way -- who will pay the costs?
2. Efforts to manage the crisis – particularly if
they fail – may reinforce tendencies towards a
more reactionary & authoritarian capitalism as
in the 1930s.
3. Note the effects on state apparatuses
associated with the “war on terror” (the option
to suspend civil liberties, impose martial law
etc.) might be used against “revolts” from
below & crush protests.
The Global South
1. The organic crisis in the South is a continuing
crisis, mediated by external (imperialist)
institutions and political forces e.g. continues
1980s debt crises.
2. Riots & protests not simply over free elections
but over neo-liberal policies. end of food
sovereignty; repression of trade unions.
3. Western media seems to give these little
coverage.
4. Countries driven to IMF & EBRD may be
subjected to a new round of externally
imposed conditionality & austerity, further
undermining their sovereignty
State capitalist responses to the
organic crisis in the Global South
1. Rising Third World powers such as China, Brazil
& India seek to create alternative geopolitical and
economic links & more multi-polar world order,
e.g. use aid & economic leverage to challenge
dominance of the US dollar & the G8 consensus.
2. Yet much of this is aimed at reforms within global
governance & within the dominant frameworks of
action configured by global capitalism.
3. Nevertheless some new state actors in Third
World, e.g. Venezuela & Bolivia, are seeking to
produce socially progressive systems &
livelihoods, so far on a regional basis.
The Post-Modern Prince and the
Global Organic Crisis - 1
1.
2.
3.
4.
The present crisis is more than a crisis of capitalist
accumulation or a necessary self-correction aided
by macroeconomic intervention and bailouts.
It involves a state of global economic emergency –
political discourse opens up but if the crisis
worsens it may lead to reactionary outcomes.
Crisis reflects intensifying contradictions of
market civilization – a consumerist, privatized,
energy-intensive & ecologically myopic pattern of
social development: crisis is social and ecological.
New progressive forces – the “global lefts” (in the
plural) are combining and must combine further to
address the global organic crisis.
The Post-Modern Prince and the
Global Organic Crisis - 2
4.
5.
6.
Progressive organic intellectuals – numbering in the
millions – seek to develop a new hegemony in
national and global civil society.
Many organic intellectuals are developing a new
language of politics – in ways that go beyond
orthodox left-wing politics & policy agendas -- E.g.
they are rethinking social and ecological
sustainability and the meaning of civilization.
Therefore to pose the global political question today
we might say: “Old forces are dying (but are not yet
dead) & new forms of political agency are still being
born – but in the interregnum, the organic crisis with
its morbid symptoms is intensifying”.