From a friend in Bombay, via email:
Socialism: You have two cows. State nationalises one and gives it to your neighbour.
Communism: State takes both and gives you some milk.
Fascism: State takes both and sells you some milk.
Capitalism: You sell one of your cows and buy a bull; herd multiplies, economy grows. Sell them, and retire on income.
Lehman Brothers Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at Bear Stearns, execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with tax exemption for five. The milk rights of six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights of all seven cows to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option for one more. You sell one cow to buy the President of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the Press release. The public then buys your bull.
Full post...
Monday, January 5, 2009
Sunday, January 4, 2009
On the hollowness and limits of Liberalism
In the recently resurgent narratives of Liberalism-in-the-era-of-globalization, the military actions of Liberal states such as the US (in Iraq) have been justified as necessary on the grounds of having to defend Western 'values' or 'our way of life' or civilization itself. In the case of Israel, the right to self-defense has been invoked in its attack on Gaza. The right to self-defense is legitimate, as Michael Lerner argues, in ReligionDispatches but the overwhelming use of force by Israel is justified by the argument-- again, consistent with the tenets of Liberalism-- that a terrorist threat like Hamas should be completely exterminated.
But there are some obvious questions and issues that Liberalism is unwilling-- and unable-- to answer. One such question concerns the deaths of innocent civilians in military assaults undertaken by the Liberal state of the kind described above.
How are such deaths not murder?
(One does not have to invoke numbers, eg., 400 killed or 2000 injured, or specifically point to the deaths of women and children to make this point. Even the death of one innocent civilian brings this question to the fore.)
I pose this question not as a political claim but as an epistemological query to which I am interested in finding an answer. One can argue, invoking intentionality, that when the Liberal state kills innocent civilians it does not intend to. The notion of 'collateral damage,' with all the resplendent charm of that euphemistic phrase, is a variant of that argument. But that argument is spurious; it can, for instance, also be made for non-state actors that are variously designated militant, terrorist, etc.
But this question is never asked because, of course, Liberal states, by definition, do not commit murder. The edifice of Liberalism as a political philosophy stands on that myth. Dictators commit murder, socialist states commit murder, Islamic states commit murder, religious fundamentalists and terrorists commit murder, but in Liberal states, the argument goes, it is only a few bad apples that deviate from the norms of Liberal civility. The Liberal state itself is never culpable.
One finds such questions and examination conspicuously absent in the one-sided US-media coverage of the Israeli attacks on Gaza. (The Fox News model of propagating a biased view in the name of a "fair-and-balanced" position is only an extreme and naked version of what CNN and other mainstream news organizations also practice).
Such questions have also been missing in the recriminations and hand-wringing of all those professed Liberals who had supported the US invasion of Iraq and have since changed their views.
There are other forms that this tiptoeing around Liberalism takes, in public discourse in civil society. For instance, in any discussion of the war in Iraq, it is anathema to critique or question the very presence and functions of US troops in specific overseas contexts or global context. It is off-limits to point out that the actions undertaken in the security interests of Liberal states stand as a blatant contravention of their very identity as Liberal states. Even in protests against the war in Iraq in any avenue in America-- in public space, universities, media discussion-- it is heresy to question the US military or the notion of an American overseas interest or security interest. Think of Michael Moore's Fareheit 9/11 and you will get the picture
But what if someone were a pacifist who did not believe in armies and militaries per se and who held that military 'solutions' are, by definition, doomed to failure? No matter how supposedly naive, unrealistic, unaware-of-realpolitik, etc. this position might appear to be, surely it is a legitimate position that must be given its place in a society supposedly committed to freedom of expression?
(in any event, this position is not so difficult to imagine: think Gandhi or the Dalai Lama)
Why then, one might ask, is it impossible to hear this point of view amidst the rivers of words generated in liberal and conservative media alike about the war? Neither the Bill O' Reillys nor Keith Olbermans, neither the Rush Limbaughs nor Rachel Maddows will go here.
In the Indian context too, one finds --- unsurprisingly-- a conspicuous silence from those Liberals who are ever willing to excoriate the Left (in India or elsewhere) for its hypocrisy and who are constantly holding forth about the vices of socialist government. And the less said the better about those Indian jokers in the advertising, finance, and entertainment industries and all those Bombay celebrities with their shabby pretensions of being intellectuals, writers, and thinkers who have suddenly become chest-thumping hawks in the name of the "national interest."
Perhaps this is also why Liberal (and Neoliberal) projects, based on interventions and violence of one kind or another, are eventually doomed to fail. The subjects that they are meant to transform have an intuitive sense of their limits and the abuses to which, in the name of a spurious univeralism, they are vulnerable. This is arguably as true today as it was in the colonial context. The tragedy of course is that they leave a trail of destruction in their wake.
I also wonder if there is any political philosophy-- Marxism, Communism, Liberalism, the Islamic state, Hindu nationalism, Fascism, the varieties of religious extremism, etc.--that does not allow for and justify the death of innocents under one condition or another. If Liberalism, like these other theories, involves engaging in cost-benefit calculations that include the death of civilians as a legitimate, if unfortunate, cost, what is the basis of its claim to moral and ethical superiority over these other paradigms?
Full post...
But there are some obvious questions and issues that Liberalism is unwilling-- and unable-- to answer. One such question concerns the deaths of innocent civilians in military assaults undertaken by the Liberal state of the kind described above.
How are such deaths not murder?
(One does not have to invoke numbers, eg., 400 killed or 2000 injured, or specifically point to the deaths of women and children to make this point. Even the death of one innocent civilian brings this question to the fore.)
I pose this question not as a political claim but as an epistemological query to which I am interested in finding an answer. One can argue, invoking intentionality, that when the Liberal state kills innocent civilians it does not intend to. The notion of 'collateral damage,' with all the resplendent charm of that euphemistic phrase, is a variant of that argument. But that argument is spurious; it can, for instance, also be made for non-state actors that are variously designated militant, terrorist, etc.
But this question is never asked because, of course, Liberal states, by definition, do not commit murder. The edifice of Liberalism as a political philosophy stands on that myth. Dictators commit murder, socialist states commit murder, Islamic states commit murder, religious fundamentalists and terrorists commit murder, but in Liberal states, the argument goes, it is only a few bad apples that deviate from the norms of Liberal civility. The Liberal state itself is never culpable.
One finds such questions and examination conspicuously absent in the one-sided US-media coverage of the Israeli attacks on Gaza. (The Fox News model of propagating a biased view in the name of a "fair-and-balanced" position is only an extreme and naked version of what CNN and other mainstream news organizations also practice).
Such questions have also been missing in the recriminations and hand-wringing of all those professed Liberals who had supported the US invasion of Iraq and have since changed their views.
There are other forms that this tiptoeing around Liberalism takes, in public discourse in civil society. For instance, in any discussion of the war in Iraq, it is anathema to critique or question the very presence and functions of US troops in specific overseas contexts or global context. It is off-limits to point out that the actions undertaken in the security interests of Liberal states stand as a blatant contravention of their very identity as Liberal states. Even in protests against the war in Iraq in any avenue in America-- in public space, universities, media discussion-- it is heresy to question the US military or the notion of an American overseas interest or security interest. Think of Michael Moore's Fareheit 9/11 and you will get the picture
But what if someone were a pacifist who did not believe in armies and militaries per se and who held that military 'solutions' are, by definition, doomed to failure? No matter how supposedly naive, unrealistic, unaware-of-realpolitik, etc. this position might appear to be, surely it is a legitimate position that must be given its place in a society supposedly committed to freedom of expression?
(in any event, this position is not so difficult to imagine: think Gandhi or the Dalai Lama)
Why then, one might ask, is it impossible to hear this point of view amidst the rivers of words generated in liberal and conservative media alike about the war? Neither the Bill O' Reillys nor Keith Olbermans, neither the Rush Limbaughs nor Rachel Maddows will go here.
In the Indian context too, one finds --- unsurprisingly-- a conspicuous silence from those Liberals who are ever willing to excoriate the Left (in India or elsewhere) for its hypocrisy and who are constantly holding forth about the vices of socialist government. And the less said the better about those Indian jokers in the advertising, finance, and entertainment industries and all those Bombay celebrities with their shabby pretensions of being intellectuals, writers, and thinkers who have suddenly become chest-thumping hawks in the name of the "national interest."
Perhaps this is also why Liberal (and Neoliberal) projects, based on interventions and violence of one kind or another, are eventually doomed to fail. The subjects that they are meant to transform have an intuitive sense of their limits and the abuses to which, in the name of a spurious univeralism, they are vulnerable. This is arguably as true today as it was in the colonial context. The tragedy of course is that they leave a trail of destruction in their wake.
I also wonder if there is any political philosophy-- Marxism, Communism, Liberalism, the Islamic state, Hindu nationalism, Fascism, the varieties of religious extremism, etc.--that does not allow for and justify the death of innocents under one condition or another. If Liberalism, like these other theories, involves engaging in cost-benefit calculations that include the death of civilians as a legitimate, if unfortunate, cost, what is the basis of its claim to moral and ethical superiority over these other paradigms?
Full post...
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