Bulletin N° 755
Subject : The Need To Resist Pro-War
Marketing & Capitalist Control of the State.
Gulliver's
Travels
(from satire to farce!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6j0EbS7skc
June 2, 2017
Grenoble, France
Dear
Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
Writing
about Radio Alice, a free radio station in Bologna, Italy, which was banned in
March 1977, Félix Guatarri
critiqued the repressive role played by the corporate media :
They talk, oh yes indeed, they talk all the
time. They emit signs, words, fragments of signs, fragments of words, all
trying to make us accept our roles – son, wife, father, worker, student – to
get us to sit up and beg, to be disciplined, obedient, hard-working . . . .
Fear is deep-rooted in our daily lives – fear
of the prison and the looney-bin, of the army, of
unemployment, of the family, of sexism. Fear to ward off desires, so as to
reduce the daily round to the miserable state in which church, family and state
have always kept it.
But the class struggle is destroying
domination of the workplace, sharing things is destroying the domination of isolation, desire is transforming the daily round. And the
writing is moving from one order to another, rearranging them creatively and
cutting across barriers.
The guerrilla war of information, the
organized disruption of the circulation of news, the break in the relationship
between broadcasting and the making known of facts . . . is to be found within
the general struggle against the organization and domination of work. . . .
The interruption and subversion of the
fluxes of production and the transmission of the signs given by authority
represent a field of direct action.(The
Molecular Revolution, p.236)
He
suggests that the counter-revolutionary forces of repression cynically use the
old image of Fascism to obtain class collaboration in liberal society, while a
new form of fascism is emerging without being recognized.
We don’t
want to stop at questioning the relationship between exploiters and exploited –
we want to get at the root, the whole business of capitalist-bureaucratic
exploitation, of working for a wage, of passively accepting the discrepancy
between work and desire, of putting one’s energies into work as a drug to
abolish all desire that opens out onto the world.
. . .
[A] new repressive
alliance, with its tentacles spreading out in all directions, is trying by
every means it can to keep the economic and political struggles of the workers
separate from all the possible faces of autonomy. Its aim is to get the work of
controlling and subjugating the masses done by the masses themselves, and to
ensure that a majority conservative consensus is established among them against
all minorities of every kind – though in fact all those minorities together
would add up to far more than any such majority. This seems to be the direction
from which the danger of a mass reactionary movement will come. So don’t let
anyone use some imaginary anti-fascist crusade as an excuse to get us to ally
with these people who really represent the embryonic form of a new sort of
fascism.
. . .
Managers, policemen, politicians,
bureaucrats, professors, psychoanalysts – all will join forces in vain to stop
this revolution, to canalize it, to take it over; in vain will they
sophisticate, diversify, miniaturize their weapons to the nth degree: they will never regain control of
that massive movement of escape, the multitude of molecular mutations of desire
that have now been let loose.(pp.240-241)
Guatarri further develops this thesis in an article first published in Le Monde (9-11 July 1977) :
There are two series of factors that make this crisis different from
others. The first is to do with the changes in the relationship between State
power and economic structures, the second with the evolution of what we call
‘the mass of the people’, who have never in fact been as much of a mass as has
been claimed, but who are at present tending to become even more sharply
differentiated and producing a variety of struggles which the political and
trade-union bureaucrats are going to find it harder and harder to control.
. . .
In effect, the State will continue to come more and more under the
control of modern capitalism, and once again the left will have helped to speed
up the change. . . . Socialists never tire of repeating that they
intend to promote democratic nationalizations and not bureaucratic State
ownership. Yet it is very hard to see how an independent and self-managed
national sector can possibly develop under present conditions. Either all
enterprises will develop at an equal pace, or nothing will develop at all. The
capitalist economy is all of a piece. . . .(pp.243-244)
In a later article,
entitled “Capitalistic Systems, Structures and Processes, co-authored with Eric
Alliez, the Guatarri turns
to descriptions of different historic structures of ‘capitalistic
valorization’. Using the work of Fernand Braudel (Vol. 3), the
authors schematize six different ‘formula of structures’ that capitalist
expansion has produced, arguing that capitalism cannot be indentified with a
single formulation (for example, market economy) :
Priorities between
three components of capitalist activity are indicated by arrows (pp.280-287)
Order of priorities Examples
(a) State à production à market Asiatic mode of
production & Nazi-type war economy.
(b) Market à
production àstate Commercial
proto-capitalism & World economy centered on network of cities (like
Venice, Genoa,
Amsterdam in between the 13th and the 17th centuries).
(c) Market à
state àproduction Liberal capitalism.
(d) Production à
state à
market Colonial
monopoly economy.
(e) Production à market à state Integrated
world capitalism.
(f) State à market à production State capitalism.
Priority (b), the Market, relegated State intervention to the lowest priority,
behind production. For instance, no one was really shocked in the 17th
century when the merchants of the Dutch United Provinces provided arms for
their Portuguese and French enemies, since the market governed production and
the State complied fully to the demands of the market.(p.281)
Prority (c), the Market,
which placed the State as the second priority, above production, is represented
in 19th-century liberalism, when the theory of equilibrium assigned
the new importance to state intervention. The equilibrium of free competition
is more or less ‘power without authority’: the juridical bringing together
of over-exploitation of productive
potential, general mobilization of the labor force, the acceleration of the
speed of circulation of goods, men and capital constituted a self-regulation of
the system, with no interference from the State, other than economic.
Priority (a), the State above production, with the market relegated to third
place, is descriptive of a static command economy with forced labor, and a
relatively minor role of monetary incentive (such as existed in the all-powerful
state of the Egyptian Pharaoh or the German Führer).
Priority (f), the State in direct control of the market, is illustrated in the
planned economies of the Soviet Union and China, with its massive enslavement
of the collective labor force.
Priority (d), where the Production is
organized with the help of the state, and without much thought for the effects
on domestic markets, is typical of the classic form of imperialist
exploitation, for the almost exclusive benefit of the metropolis.
Priority (e), Production, with markets
as the second priority, is seen in the globalization fiasco of today, where the
entire society becomes productive at either the world level or at the molecular
level, and ‘the rhythm of production is the rhythm of life’.
When information
claims first place in the social machine, it would seen, in effect, that it
ceases to be linked to the simple organization of the sphere of circulation to
become, in its way, a factor of production. Information as a factor of
production . . . here is the latest
formula for decoding society through the formation of cybernetic capital. This
is no longer the age of transcendental schematism à
la Keynes (finding a new space and a new rhythm of production based on an
investment of statist mediation, as a function of the quest for equilibrium),
and circulation will no longer be just a vector of the social validation of the
profits of power; it becomes immediately production-re-territorialization-capitalization
of mechanical profits, taking the form of manipulation and control of the segmentarized reproduction of society. Henceforth capital
seems to operate on ‘a totality without organs, without contradictions, without
criticism. Analytic of the totality where the totality is taken for granted’
and is itself indissociable from a totalitarian
discourse which find its form of expression in the cynicism of the ‘new
economics’. It should also be said that neo-liberal theory has no content
outside this cynicism, which is all part of the will to affirm production for
production’s sake, finally and in its most classic form (it is in this context
that we should place the unbelievable increase of American spending on military
research).(p.285)
Throughout this book, Félix Guatarri remains true to
his basic premise, namely that no over-arching, universal theory can explain or
predict the future of capitalist society. Truth is found in the details of
specific moments of capitalist expansion; nevertheless, contradictions can be
identified and history helps us understand the probable consequences in this dialectical movement of molar and
molecular movements.
The power of the productive process of
Integrated World Capitalism seems inexorable, and its social effects incapable
of being turned back; but it overturns so many things, comes into conflict with
so many ways of life and social valorizations, that it does not seem at all
absurd to anticipate that the development of new collective responses – new
structures of declaration, evaluation and action – coming from the greatest
variety of horizons, might finally succeed in bringing it down. . .. As we see
it, it is only through this sort of hypothesis that the redefinition of the
objectives of the revolutionary transformation of society can be appreciated.(p.286)
The 14 items below should help
readers understand how they have become bogged down in the deceitful operations
of monopoly capitalism, in which market interests attempt to control virtually
every aspect of our lives (and our deaths).
Sincerely,
Francis Feeley
Professor emeritus of American Studies
University Grenoble-Alpes
Director of Research
University of Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced Study of American Institutions and
Social Movements
The University of California-San Diego
a.
The
Power Principle
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31417.htm
Video
Documentary
(3-Part
Series, 4h25 min.)
by Metanoia Films
"Simply
brilliant." -
"This is probably the best film ever made about American foreign
policy." - Spartacus - ICH Comment
A
gripping, deeply informative account of the plunder, hypocrisy, and mass
violence of plutocracy and empire; insightful, historically grounded and highly
relevant to the events of today.
This documentary
is about the foreign policy of the United States. It demonstrates the
importance of the political economy, the Mafia principle, propaganda, ideology, violence and force.
It documents and
explains how the policy is based on the interest of major corporations and a tiny elite to increase profits and the United
States governments own interests in maintaining and expanding it’s imperialistic influence.
Inside the United
States this has been made possible with a propaganda of fear for the horrible
enemies like the Soviet Union, Communists and so on and a love for “free markets”,
“democracy”, “freedom” and so on.
Externally (and
increasingly internally) this has caused massive poverty and suffering,
genocide, war, coups, crushed unions and popular movements and environmental
destruction.
===========
b.
The Coming War on China
https://fmovies.se/film/the-coming-war-on-china.80q03/59498q
(full movie, 1h50 min.)
by John Pilger
===========
c.
Let Us
Bomb Violence With Mercy
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47146.htm
Video
(3 min.)
“Lets Bomb Hatred With Love.”
===========
d.
===========
e.
The Israel Lobby
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20155.htm
Video Documentary - VPRO
For many
years now the American foreign policy has been characterized by the strong tie
between the United States and Israel. Does the United States in fact keep
Israel on its feet? And how long will it continue to do so?
In March 2006 the American political scientists John Mearsheimer
(University of Chicago) and Steve Walt (Harvard) published the controversial
article 'The Israel Lobby and US foreign policy'. In it they state that it is
not, or no longer, expedient for the US to support and protect present-day
Israel. The documentary sheds light on both parties involved in the discussion:
those who wish to maintain the strong tie between the US and Israel, and those
who were critical of it and not infrequently became 'victims' of the lobby.
The question arises to what extend the pro-Israel lobby ultimately determines
the military and political importance of Israel itself. Colonel Lawrence
Wilkerson (Colin Powell's former chief-of-staff) explains how the lobby's
influence affects the decision-making structure in the White House.
With political scientist John Mearsheimer, neocon Richard Perle, lobby
organization AIPAC, televangelist John Hagee,
historian Tony Judt, Human Rights Watch director
Kenneth Roth, colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Democrat Earl Hilliard, Israeli peace
negotiator Daniel Levy and investigative journalist Michael Massing.
Research: William de Bruijn
Director: Marije Meerman
===========
f.
Despotism & Democracy
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4971.htm
Producer:
Encyclopaedia Britannica Films - 1946
Measures how a society ranks on a spectrum stretching from democracy to
despotism. Explains how societies and nations can be measured by the degree
that power is concentrated and respect for the individual is restricted. Where does your community, state and nation stand on these scales?
===========
g.
President Emmanuel Macron:
Reversing Five Decades of Working-Class Power
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47149.htm
by James Petras
Whatever has been written about President Emmanuel
Macron by the yellow or the respectable press has been mere trivia or total
falsehood. Media lies have a purpose that goes beyond Macron’s election.
Throughout Europe and North America, bankers and manufacturers, NATO,
militarists and EU oligarchs, media moguls and verbal assassins, academics and
journalists, all characterized the election victory of Macron as a ‘defeat of
fascism’ and the ‘triumph of the French people’.
===========
h.
https://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2017/03/20/nine-eleven-a-marvelous-compilation/
&
(7-Part Documentary)
http://www.luogocomune.net/site/modules/sections/index.php?op=viewarticle&artid=167
===========
i.
JFK at 100
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47141.htm
by Paul Craig Roberts
This
Memorial Day, Monday, May 29, 2017, is the 100th birthday of John Fitzgerald
Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States.
JFK
was assassinated on November 22, 1963, as he approached the end of his third
year in office. Researchers who spent years studying the evidence have
concluded that President Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy between the
CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secret Service. (See, for example, JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglass)
===========
j.
On Tyranny: Yale
Historian Timothy Snyder on How the U.S. Can Avoid Sliding into
Authoritarianism
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/5/30/on_tyranny_yale_historian_timothy_snyder
===========
k.
From: Jim O'Brien
Sent: Tuesday, 30 May, 2017
Subject: HAW Notes 5/30/17: New HAW co-chairs; links to recent
articles of interest
http://stopthewars.org/mailman/listinfo/haw-info_stopthewars.org
Francis,
A note: The newly constituted HAW Steering Committee has enthusiastically
chosen Margaret Power and Van Gosse as the new co-chairs of
Historians Against the War. (Marc Becker and I, who have been co-chairs for the
past nine years, nominated them.) Van (who teaches at Franklin & Marshall
College) was a principal founder of HAW in 2003, and he and Margaret (Illinois
Institute of Technology) have both played leading roles in HAW for many
years. Jim O'Brien
Links to Recent Articles of Interest :
“Don’t Fall for the Washington War Hawks’ Iranophobia”
By Danny
Sjursen, The Nation, posted May
30
The author is a U.S. Army strategist and formerly taught history at West
Point.
“We Need Memorial Day to Obscure the Unbearable Truth about War”
By Jon Schwarz, The Intercept, posted May 29
By Tim
Naftali, Slate, posted May 27
By Andrew
J. Bacevich, The American
Conservative, May 26
The author is a professor emeritus of
history and international relations at Boston University.
By Peter Van Buren, History News Network,
posted May 21
“A Murderous History of Korea”
By Bruce Cumings, London
Review of Books, May 18 issue
The author teaches East Asian history at the University of
Chicago.
By Danny
Sjursen, TomDispatch.com, posted May 11,
2017
The
author is a U.S. Army strategist and formerly taught history at West Point.
“Behold: The Jirad of Freedom”
By Andrew
J. Bacevich, Commonweal, posted
May 10
Review
essay on the book America’s Dream Palace: Middle East
Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State by Osama F. Khalil
“Memory Loss in
the Garden of Violence: How Americans Remember (and Forget) Their Wars”
By John
W. Dower, TomDispatch.com, posted May 4
The
author is a professor emeritus of history at MIT.
“How Crossing the U.S.-Mexico Border Became a Crime”
By Kelly
Lytle Hernandez, The Conversation, posted April 30
The
author teaches history and African American studies at UCLA.
________________
Thanks
to Rusti Eisenberg and an anonymous reader (always
the same one - a retired doctor, as it happens) for suggesting articles that
are included in the above list.
===========
l.
Terror In Britain: What Did The Prime Minister
Know?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47153.htm
by
John Pilger
The
unsayable in Britain’s general election campaign is
this. The causes of the Manchester atrocity, in which 22 mostly young people
were murdered by a jihadist, are being suppressed to protect the secrets of
British foreign policy.
Critical questions – such as why the
security service MI5 maintained terrorist “assets” in Manchester and why the
government did not warn the public of the threat in their midst – remain
unanswered, deflected by the promise of an internal “review”.
The alleged suicide bomber, Salman Abedi , was part of an extremist group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, that
thrived in Manchester and was cultivated and used by MI5 for more than 20
years.
===========
m.
From: "The National Security Archive" <nsarchiv@gwu.edu>
Subject: How Do You Solve a Problem like (South) Korea?
How Do You Solve a Problem like (South) Korea?
U.S.-ROK Relations during the Carter Years Faltered over Troop
Withdrawals, Human Rights, an Assassination, and a Coup
Carter Faced Pushback from South Korean Leaders
and His Own Top Advisers
National
Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 595
===========
n.
How
Was A Climate Crisis Denier Elected President of The United States?
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3166