Peter Frase

Michael Moore's “SiCKO” is, in certain respects, a perfect political movie. One film isn't going give us single-payer universal health care in this country, but this one might just move us a little closer to it. In its portrayal of a perverse health care system that places profits before patients, “SiCKO” manages to do the two things that any effective piece of agitprop must.

The first, of course, is to inspire outrage. And there is plenty of outrage to be had. The guy who had to decide which finger he could afford to get reattached; the old folks living in their daughter's storage room because they sold the house to pay medical bills; the woman whose daughter died because the hospital refused to treat her. At various points in the movie, I was teary-eyed with rage.

But it's not enough to just upset people. This is a common mistake made by leftists—middle class white ones especially. They think that people will rise up if they find out how much they are being screwed. But it turns out that many people are perfectly aware that they are being screwed; they just don't think there's anything they can do about it. So after you get people riled up, it's vitally important that you show them how things could be different.

And that's where SiCKO really shines. Health care was really a brilliant choice of subject. Not just because, as many reviewers have pointed out, insurance companies make an excellent villain. The genius of it is that when it comes to our awful health care system, things not only can be better, they are better in every other rich country in the world. The strongest part of the movie was the parts talking about the Canadian, British, and French systems, which guarantee free health care to everyone. It really is that simple—just rip off the French!

Maybe that's why Moore's message is finding such a receptive audience. Even Oprah waxed social democratic after seeing it. Boing Boing (via TPM Café) reports that even in Texas, the movie can inspire spontaneous organizing. Meanwhile, the movie has apparently scared the crap out of the health insurance industry. And on right-wing TV, they’re reduced to arguing that universal healthcare causes terrorism. Unfortunately, SiCKO has not yet inspired any of the leading Democratic candidates to come out in favor of true single-payer universal coverage instead of some partial compromise position (Dennis Kucinich does support single payer Medicare-for-all, however).

It's also worth noting that this movie is about a lot more than health care. Some of the more perceptive critics have noticed that Moore is just using health care as an entry point to a much broader social democratic vision. He wants to promote a vision of the country in which people look out for each other—and the government looks out for them—rather than our current ethos of ultra-individualism. That's why Matt Yglesias—who is no socialist—suggests that the reaction to the movie is a sign of the “anti-capitalist folk instincts” of many Americans. “The crux of the matter”, he argues, “is that ordinary people think that if there's a sick person, and you're in a position to help the sick person, that you ought to help the sick person. This is what us socialists might call the principle of solidarity.

Is this right? Do Americans have “anti-capitalist folk instincts”? And if so, how do we tap into them and direct them toward political action?

We live at a time when advances in technology make possible an easing of the burden of work by a reduction in working hours, and a tremendous expansion of human freedom. A moribund capitalism prevents us from realizing this potential, by turning productivity into profit instead of free time, and by trapping the creative potential of human knowledge in the form of private monopolies enforced by the state. Two pieces of data illustrate this point.

The first is this graph, which comes from a report of the President's Council of Economic Advisors (PDF):

Forget what you heard about outsourcing. The manufacturing sector in the U.S. produces eleven times as much as it did in the 1940's, but employs a far lower percentage of the population than it once did. All that increased productivity could be turned into reduced hours for all; instead it is turned into profits for a few, unemployment and uncertainty for many.

The second datum comes from a remarkable study that was reported today. An analyst at a private firm looked at American companies in order to determine where their value came from:

Cardoza said his research showed that tangible assets, like plants, equipment and inventory, represented four-fifths of the market value of U.S. companies 30 years ago. The other fifth came from intangible assets like brand name, reputation and other factors. Now, he said, the ratio has flipped, and intangibles, which he valued by subtracting tangible assets from a company's total market value, make up four-fifths of the pie, with the largest slice made up of patents, copyrighted material and other forms of intellectual property.

In other words, state-granted monopolies over knowledge, rather than the production of commodities, are now the basis of American capitalism. The money that accrues to the holders of these monopolies is what, in the economic tradition, is known as a rent. Unproductive extraction of rent was something that was associated with the landowning nobility during the transition to capitalism, and bourgeois thinkers raged against it. Now the capitalist class is the unproductive, rentier class. But who will overthrow them?

To get a sense of the case against patent and copyright law--from both a left and right perspective--see this fascinating blog, where I first spotted the link to this article.

A few prominent bloggers have taken to calling themselves the "netroots", and imagining themselves to be a prominent force in shaping national politics. Leaving aside an horrible neologism and some delusions of grandeur, what is the political content of this Internet "left"? Economist Max Sawicky gets off a great polemic, calling them "a mostly brainless vacuum cleaner of donations for the Democratic Party".

This hits the mark I think. And the infantile response to Sawicky's intervention certainly suggests he hit a nerve. The depressing thing about MoveOn.org, the Howard Dean campaign, and so much besides, has been the lack of coherent political analysis or principles. For all the talk of imitating the right's tactical acumen, there's too little on the Democrat side to compare to the ideological rigor of the more devout neoconservatives, libertarians, or evangelicals. All too often, it just seems to be about winning elections and raising money.

A number of dangers arise from this. One is that with Democrats in power, a politically rudderless constituency will allow them to get away with backsliding into Clintonian centrism. Another, specific problem that Sawicky raised is: if we don't have firm anti-imperialist principles, what's to stop us from falling for the next insane war proposed by the Democrats?

And finally, there's Barack Obama. Sheesh. I volunteered on his senate campaign in 2004, and at the time I was optimistic that he could become a genuine progressive leader like Paul Wellstone or Jesse Jackson Jr. Boy, was I wrong. Turns out, he's a middle-of-the-road, vague-principles, Clintonian pain-feeling kind of guy. The media and the netroots have latched onto this guy the same way they glommed onto Howard Dean--because he looks like a winner, not for any substantive political reason. And frankly, I wouldn't mind if Obama's campaign came to the same ignominious end as Dean's. Much as the guy personally rubs me the wrong way, John Edwards looks like the best of the presidential pack at this point. His domestic policy talking points are pleasingly social democratic, and he's the only one with the guts to call for a withdrawal from Iraq. Obama may have had the better position on the war back in 2002, but Edwards is out in front in 2007.

Don't let your left hand know
what your right hand is doing
Don't let your right hand know
what your left hand is going through
-Lungfish, "8.14.2116"

The Los Angeles Times recently ran a two-part expose (1,2) on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest charitable foundation in the world. Like all foundations, the Gates foundation (founded by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates) invests its assets in stocks and bonds in order to generate the income it uses to fund its projects. These two tasks are intentionally kept apart, so that the investment arm can concentrate on making money and the charity arm can worry about doing good works. But the LAT found that even while the Gates Foundation is fighting AIDS or predatory lending with its public programs, the investment wing of its operation is investing in the very same companies that cause these problems. Millions of dollars of the foundation's money are tied up in companies like Ameriquest, which is implicated in predatory lending, and Eni, an oil company which is a major polluter in Nigeria. In the latter case, the Times profiled a child who had received a polio vaccination because of the Gates foundation, but had developed respiratory problems because of a nearby Eni operation.

This kind of hypocrisy leads many people to support the concept of "socially responsible investing", or SRI. The idea behind SRI is that foundations (and other large investors like state pension funds) should invest only in companies that have good records on issues such as environmentalism or labor rights. But there are a number of problems with SRI. Bradford Plumer in the New Republic gets at some of these in his commentary on the LA Times article. For one thing, no one agrees on just what constitutes "social responsibility"--so, for example, Coca-Cola ends up on some SRI indexes for its charitable works, which apparently make up for its support of union-busting Colombian death squads. For another thing, there's no clear evidence that SRI actually changes corporate behavior. The movement to divest from South African companies during the anti-apartheid struggle is often cited as the exemplary case, yet Plumer cites a study which suggests that the divestment campaign had little effect. In the cases where SRI has been successful, companies have concluded that they can comply with the demands of activists without too much harm to the bottom line. But it seems that when social responsibility and profits come into conflict, profit still wins out.

Plumer's conclusion is that "government action is often the only thing that can dramatically alter corporate behavior". And this is surely correct. But there is a deeper lesson here as well. The Gates foundation is the ludicrous extreme, but it demonstrates the limitation of all private charity. Since most private charities are dependent on foundation funding, they are ultimately dependent on private investments. And the goal of private investment has to be the maximization of profit. This leads to the specific problem of companies which do evil, as the LA Times showed. But even when the worst companies are screened out, it also leads the more general problem of encouraging the push to turn everything into a commodity and a for-profit business, even things that shouldn't be. This is related to the basic capitalist fallacy that if people have more money and have to spend more money, they are better off than they would be if they had less money but got more things for free (or cheap).

For example, the Times uses prescription drugs as one of its case studies. The Gates foundation subsidizes AIDS drugs in Africa, even as it invests in pharmaceutical companies that restrict access to those drugs with their monopoly pricing schemes. It would be in the interest of humanity for drugs to be developed by publicly funded laboratories (as many useful drugs already are) and then made available as cheaply as possible. This would entail the decommodification of pharmaceuticals, the elimination of many useless copycat drugs, a reduction of drug company profits, and therefore a reduction of the income stream that is available to private foundations. It would also look like a reduction in the Gross National Product, and would therefore be a Bad Thing from the perspective of bourgeois economics. But from a socialist perspective it is an advance in human freedom. Not more charity, but less need for charity, is what we demand...

So as Plumer's article asks, is SRI a sham? Well, it may be a useful tactic in some circumstances, but in general the time of activists is probably better spent building political power.

Critics of neoliberalism, from right and left, have often remarked on the nonsensical quality of Gross Domestic Product as a measure of societal wealth. Since GDP measures everything which is paid for on the market, it cannot distinguish between positive and negative forms of economic activity. A cure for cancer becomes equivalent to cleaning up an oil spill, so long as both cost money. On the other hand, helping your neighbor carry her groceries up the stairs has no economic value, while the production of cigarettes and the treatment of lung cancer become major sources of "wealth".

This critique is really two critiques, however, one of which has some radical implications. Merely pointing out that GDP valorizes things like environmental destruction and weaponry as forms of wealth leads to a tame (if salutary) reformism: such "public bads" should be taken off the books, or counted negatively against those good things which are produced for sale in the market. All this amounts only to a better accounting method, a better way of showing how much, and how efficiently, is being produced by the capitalist economy.

But the critique of GDP points to a deeper question: why should things be produced for money at all, regardless of whether they are good or bad? That is, do we really gain as a society when things which could be performed voluntarily and for free become paid jobs?

The standard response to this question is that, while it would certainly be nice if all production could be undertaken voluntarily rather than under the discipline of wage labor, such an anarchist utopia is totally impractical. And for many goods, this is a real and difficult problem. The same things that make production efficient--the division of labor, repetitive and tedious jobs--are the same things that make people not want to do them unless they get paid. To address this problem, we need some way of negotiating the trade-off between having more things and having more (and higher quality) free time. Of course, under the present fetishization of constant economic growth, it is impossible even to articulate such a trade-off, except in the language of consumer or worker "choice".

But let us set this set of problems aside for a moment. The tension described above is true primarily for physical goods, things like cars and shoes. But what is distinctive about the capitalism that has developed over the past few decades is the increasing preponderance, in the money economy, of commodities that are not physical objects, but intellectual property of one kind or another. Let us take a single example, from the computer software industry.

Microsoft is preparing to release the new version of Microsoft Windows, called "Vista". In the run-up to launch, the company is making every effort to persuade customers of the value of this new product. One of the most important targets of persuasian has been the European Union, which has been increasingly unhappy with Microsoft's monopoly business practices. To the end of persuading the EU to welcome Vista with open arms, Microsoft recently released this white paper. Its purpose is to outline the positive economic benefits which Microsoft Vista will supposedly bring to Europe. These, are, according to Microsoft:

• Within its first year of shipment, IDC expects Windows Vista to be installed onmmore than 100 million computers worldwide. More than 30 million computers inmthe region studied are expected to be running Windows Vista.
• In the six countries studied, Windows Vista-related employment will reach moremthan 20% of IT employment2 in its first year of shipment.
• While much of this employment will shift from Windows XP-related employment,mover 50% of the growth in IT employment will be driven by Windows Vista.
• For every euro of Microsoft revenue from Windows Vista in 2007 in the sixcountries studied, the ecosystem beyond Microsoft will reap almost 14 euro in revenues. In 2007 this ecosystem should sell over ?32 billion ($40 billion) in products and services revolving around Windows Vista.
• Within the six-country region, in 2007 over 150,000 IT companies that produce, sell, or distribute products or services running on Windows Vista will employ over 400,000 people; another 650,000 will be employed at IT using firms.

Billions of dollars in economic growth due to Vista! What wonderful news! But wait--what does this mean? One critic quickly saw through the gambit on offer:

The white paper may predict sales by the "Microsoft ecosystem" of over $40 billion in six of Europe's biggest economies, but what this figure hides is the fact that income for Microsoft and its chums is a cost for the rest of Europe. In other words, IDC's white paper is effectively touting an expense of over $40 billion as a reason why the European Commission should welcome Vista with open arms.As the paper itself mentions, half of this cost is down to the hardware. Some of these purchases would have taken place anyway; the rest represent upgrades from older hardware that cannot meet Vista's requirements. But if Vista did not exist (or, for example, if the European Commission were to block its sale for whatever reason), the old systems would not suddenly stop working: they would tick along for a few more years, gradually being replaced. The only justification for this hefty expenditure is to be able to run Vista: no Vista, no need to rustle up many extra billions on hardware upgrades outside the usual replacement cycles.

It's the same on the software side. The case for Vista itself is hardly strong. As the product's ship date has slipped, so more of its new features have been ripped out. Now it is not entirely clear what the benefit of upgrading is (apart from the evergreen "better security", of course). And without the need for hardware and software upgrades, the associated consultancy and service costs disappear too: most of Vista's $40 billion "benefit" is not only a cost, but an unnecessary one at that.

A product which imposes heavy costs on users, including accelerated hardware obsolesence, without clear benefits? Who would want such a thing? The economic growth being cited by Microsoft is evidently the kind of phony "wealth creation" cited by critics of GDP in the first sense mentioned above. But we can also ask the second question. Suppose that Vista did have discernible benefits. Certainly operating systems, generally, are useful things, and have to be upgraded sometimes. Even if Vista was a better piece of software, we might still ask: why should such a thing be made by a private company and sold for a profit? Why couldn't people just make it for free in their spare time, and then give it away?

To which Microsoft might respond: without the possibility of profit, there would be no incentive to innovate, and hence no-one would write operating systems. As against the cases of shoes and cars, however, a clear counterexample exists that vitiates this argument. The existence of free and open-source software is an excellent example of a post-capitalist form of production, in which social wealth is produced outside the system of economic (monetary) value.

The fact that the things like software can
be produced for free in the "social economy" does not mean that everything can be produced this way, as some of the more exuberant proponents of the "immaterial labor" thesis would have you believe. Yet by criticizing the facile equivalency between economic activity and wealth, we can begin to move toward a real critique of capitalism. This critique, if it is to reinvigorate socialism as an idea, has to take as its starting point this observation of Marx's, from volume 3 of Capital, one of the few places where he prefigures the communist future:

The actual wealth of society, and the possibility of constantly expanding its reproduction process, therefore, do not depend upon the duration of surplus-labour, but upon its productivity and the more or less copious conditions of production under which it is performed. In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.

Now the distinction between "freedom" and "necessity" is not as clear-cut as Marx seems to imply here, and it is not coextensive with "immaterial" and "material" goods. Fine wines and Sony Playstations are material goods, but are they necessary ones? This is, ultimately, a political question, but it is not one that can be resolved in capitalism. Defining the boundary between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom is, I would argue, the specific content of socialism as a form of society and a political process (rather than a telos, a utopia, or an end of all politics). Framing things this way explodes the false opposition between state planning and market anarchy. The aim of socialism is not to pull all economic activity under the control of the state. Rather, it is to push out as much as possible from commodity production in the market to socialized labor in the "free" sector.* Conversely, only where necessary, that is, where other ways of organizing production are not feasible, would production be pulled in to collective control by the state, workers collectives, or some other communal form.

This formulation opens a new horizon of possibility for the socialist project, a new vision of what society could be like. It also clearly rules out certain longtime "left" preoccupations as being basically anti-socialist. The Keynesian idea that we need more jobs and higher wages for everyone comes to seem dilatory, in this view: what we need instead are shorter hours and a lower cost of living. As a corollary, we need things like socialized health care and child care, which reduce individual dependence on wage-labor. Neither of these are anti-capitalist programs in themselves; yet they point away from capitalism rather, as with Keynesianism, toward an intensification of its logic.

Left untheorized, here, is imperialism, or more generally, uneven development (and by implication, racism). If too much wage-labor is the constitutive problem of European and North American societies, this cannot be said of much of the rest of the world--or even of the pockets of deprivation within the rich societies. Thus, the socialist project must entail a massive, internationalist, redistributive project along with the anti-capitalist project delineated here, if it is not to degenerate into the construction of elite islands of privilege in a global sea of misery. (In this, Hardt and Negri are right: a guaranteed income and global citizenship are the sine qua non of the left project today. Unfortunately, their naive postmodernism and reflexive anti-statism made them unable to connect this realization with a coherent political strategy.) Likewise, ecology and the reality of physical limits on human societies demand serious attention, if we are to give real content to Marx's comment about "the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature". And last but not least, what is described here is intrinsically also a feminist project: without a critique of unpaid women's labor, reduction of paid labor just reduces itself to a patriarchal ideology of the "family wage". But consideration of these dilemmas will have to wait for another time.

[* The free sector, or the realm of freedom, would be free in a double sense: its products would be available to everyone for free, like open source software; at the same time, the laborers themselves would be "free" in the sense that they work according to their own schedules and according to their own desires, rather than at the direction of a boss. The realm of freedom is thus, pace Stallman, free as in free spech, and free as in free beer.]

Capitalism gives rise to a unique and wonderful kind of nonfiction writing: the tale of the commodity. These are the accounts of how a product comes to be, illuminating the human stories behind an object's journey from raw materials to end consumer. The intent of the story is typically to shock the reader with the concealed suffering and drama that inhere in a previously context-less object. Commodity expose stories have a long history, and have produced some famous landmarks (Sinclair's The Jungle, for example), but globalization, outsourcing, and the growth of massive global commodity chains have enriched the genre tremendously.

As a Marxist, I would somewhat unfelicitously call these "defetishizing" stories. The term comes from Marx's famous comment on "the fetishism of commodities" in Capital:

Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves. The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.

The subjective effect of grasping the passage above is beautifully communicated by Wallace Shawn in The Fever:

People say about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things - one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money - as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? What is it that determines the price of a coat? The coat's price comes from its history, the history of all the people who were involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all of those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. "I like this coat," we say, "it's not expensive," as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, "I like the pictures in this magazine."

All of this is by way of lead-in to a wonderful piece of defetishizing journalism that just appeared in the Chicago Tribune. The PDF is here, and this is the lead-in:

What is the true cost of quenching America’s mighty thirst for gasoline? To answer that question, Pulitzer Prize-winning Tribune correspondent Paul Salopek did what has never been done: He traced the gas pumped at a single station to the fuel’s shadowy sources around the globe. The story begins at a glistening Marathon outlet on Chicago’s exurban edge and ranges from the fishless waters off the coast of Nigeria to the politically restless fields of Venezuela and beyond. Salopek’s journey, a travelogue of America’s addiction to oil, reveals how U.S. consumers are bound to some of the most violent, desperate corners of the planet-and to a petroleum economy so fragile that it may not last.

Oil is a particularly compelling subject for such treatment. Not merely because of the industry's global reach and sordid geopolitical entanglements, but because of oil's unique character as a commodity. It is an abstraction in a dual sense. Like any commodity, it takes on an abstract value, its price, which conceals the human relationships that go into its production. But it also embodies another abstraction, energy--the abstracted representation of our ability to shape the physical world to our human needs, the power and potentiality that grows our food, erects our houses, drives our cars, and animates our laptops. To grasp the social relationships behind oil, then, is to touch on a system of relationships that permeates the entire world economy.

Across America, a movement is stirring. People from all walks of life are feeling a newly awakened sense of outrage, and demanding accountability from their public figures. No longer content to stand by as lies and illegal behavior become normalized as acceptable strategies, no longer able to turn a blind eye to the corruption of one of our most important national institutions, ordinary citizens are fighting back. Their message is clear. While the causes and the culprits may be many in our national crisis, there is one man who must ultimately bear responsibility for the shocking transgressions of recent years:

Barry Bonds.

Follow the link to get a glimpse of the fevered state of Bonds-hatred in the world of baseball fandom. The anti-Bonds mania transcends the normal boundaries of sports partisanship, and outstrips even the vitriolic and spiteful fan-player relationships pioneered by fans in New York and Philadelphia. For many, it seems, the theme of this season is not root, root, rooting for the home team, but rooting against Barry Bonds.

How does the role of sports fan curdle from love and loyalty into demonization and hatred? And how can we explain the intensity of emotion, the depths of outrage, that Bonds provokes? How does a baseball player's use of steroids--at a time when they were not even banned by the league--constitute an existential threat to our deeply held cultural values? And how has Bonds become the singular representative of baseball's steroid era, which taints everyone from Mark McGwire to Sammy Sosa to Brady Anderson, and which was abetted by Major League Baseball's unwillingness to tamper with a home run derby style of play that was filling ballparks?

It's always dangerous to make grand analogies between a cultural phenomenon and a political one. Pattern-finding creatures by nature, humans can find elective affinities in the most improbable places, and the result has been not a few mediocre dissertations in cultural studies. But when historians reflect on our time, the parallel will be hard to miss: at the same time that Americans were becoming increasingly disgusted with the incompetence and mendacity of their political leaders, they lashed out at the deceptions of a baseball player whose personality, in his arrogance, egotism, and sense of entitlement, is evocative in many ways of George W. Bush.

For many who placed their faith in Bush after 9/11, it is difficult to contemplate the possibility that he is both a liar and an idiot. And even for those who have always been confirmed Bush-haters, it sometimes seems hopeless to expect political improvement. With our tepid two party duopoly, gerrymandered congressional districts, and hack media, it may seem as though no outrage by the Bush administration will be sufficient to provoke an anti-Republican backlash. Destroying Barry Bonds, on the other hand, is both psychologically easy and politically feasible.

Of course, Barry Bonds is also black, and we shouldn't discount the alchemy of moral outrage and submerged racism in the way baseball fans respond to him. Race, too, explains why Bonds makes a better target than Bush: he shares all of the President's shortcomings, but he lacks the markers of racial privilege that shield Bush from the recriminations of his white base. Reading the coverage of young white men taunting Bonds wherever he goes, one wonders how many of them are disaffected Republican voters.

I will admit that I am that rarest of things in baseball--I am, in some twisted way, a Barry Bonds fan. I love him as a theatrical character, a villain so perfect that he seems to have walked out of a professional wrestling script. But I also sympathize with this most unsympathetic man, who has become the object of a nation's displaced rage--a rage that would be so much more fruitfully employed elsewhere.

The sign at left was posted at Camp Nama, an Iraqi military installation which was commandeered by U.S. special forces. There they turned one interrogation room into a ghoulish torture chamber called the Black Room:

"In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations."

What is most disturbing about this episode of detainee abuse is, as with Abu Ghraib, its seeming pointlessness, relative to extracting any actual information, and its ostentatious sadism. Torture for any reason is horrifying; but torture for its own sake is the most chilling because it calls to mind the worst of the historical atrocities perpetrated by humans on their fellow humans.

But at least the "Black Room" of Camp Nama has been brought to light by the diligent work of the New York Times, and at least we still live in a society which retains enough humaneness and dignity to execrate such acts when they occur. Yet there are other "black rooms", whose existence cannot be revealed because they are not hidden--they are the "dark places" hidden in plain sight, from which we avert our eyes out of habit or despair.

In Florida, a young man was sent to boot camp for stealing his grandmother's car, then beaten to death for talking back to his jailers. The ensuing scandal has given everyone from Jeb Bush to the county medical examiner a stage on which to do their utmost to come across as depraved, racist monsters. Bush spoke against closing the boot camps since they have "yielded a good result". And Bay county medical examiner Charles Siebert, who initially found that the young man had died, not from being beaten and suffocated, but from sickle cell anemia, said he was "appalled". Not appalled, mind you, at the senseless death of a 14-year-old boy, but at the "baseless and mean-spirited accusations from special interest groups" who impugned and embarassed him by questioning his nonsensical medical verdict.

Young Martin Lee Anderson was evidently not the first person to be beaten at one of these boot camps. It was only his accidental death which forced the "black room" of the boot camps into the light; had he merely been maimed as intended, the routine physical brutalization of young black men by the state of Florida might have continued unchecked, indefinitely.

Meanwhile, something completely different, only not: the Indonesian army moved to quell riots by taking control of a provincial capital in Papua. The "riots" are in fact protests, directed against an American mining company, Freeport McMoran. In so many ways it is a typical story, of corrupt governments in the global South acting as enforcers for American capital. The sort of open class violence that is tolerated in the periphery would be outlandish and unacceptable in the core--except, as we saw in the previous case, when the violence is directed at the most oppressed "internal colonies" within the homeland.

Among the more despicable specifics of the situation in Indonesia is the following:

The senior Papuan at Freeport, Thom Beanal, who is a leader of one of Papua's biggest tribal groups, the Amungme, and a director of the Indonesian unit of Freeport, said the company was concerned about maintaining its daily operations in the current atmosphere.

Mr. Beanal said in a telephone interview from his home in Timika, near the mine, that he advised Freeport this week that to reduce hostilities, the company needed to deal more effectively with the more than 700,000 tons of mine waste that is generated every day.

Much of it hurtles directly down the Aghawagon River, and protests began last month when villagers were told by the security forces that they could no longer pan in the waste for scraps of gold. "I suggested they put the waste in a pipe and put it far away," Mr. Beanal said.

Environmentalists and some mining engineers have made similar suggestions, but the company has rejected them, saying they would be too expensive to carry out.

It is hard to know what is more appalling in these four paragraphs. Is it the abject figure of Mr. Beanal, attempting an impossible reconciliation between loyalty to his people, and loyalty to his company? Is it the casual reference to the company's profligate desecration of the local environment? Or is it that, after insisting that it has no choice but to deluge the local residents with toxic waste, Freeport McMoran now reproaches them for having the temerity to steal scraps of gold from the company's proprietary sludge?

Faced with such scenarios, those of political good will often throw our hands up in despair, helpless in the face of what seem to be horrors without end. And this is not only a reflex of rationalization and denial; our powerless to restrain our government or "our" capitalists is in many ways real. But I fear that those generations which follow us, if any, will not judge us kindly for our "black rooms".

Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism is generally remembered for its analysis of the totalitarian state itself. But what struck me on reading it was the discussion of the European milieu from which the totalitarian states emerged. Europe in the interwar years was characterized, says Arendt, by a historically unprecedented conjunction of two factors:

1. Massive numbers of stateless people, who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state
2. The generalization of the nation-state form across the entire world

What this meant was that there was no "uncivilized" space on earth left for the stateless to resettle: "[w]hat is unprecedented is not the loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one" (p. 293). In this context, stateless people became an insoluble problem: permanently outside the law, shuttled back and forth between states which all denied responsibility for them, and subject to arbitrary police domination wherever they found themselves. Such a state of
affairs, says Arendt, led toward the concentration camp.

The crisis of the stateless people developed from what, in contemporary parlance, we might call a "bug" in the Enlightenment conception of rights. As set forth in the "Declaration of the rights of man," human rights were grounded in nature, in an abstract humanity outside of history and social institutions. But it turned out that such rights could only be defined if people were assumed to be members of some political community--a people, a nation. The existence of stateless people vitiated this assumption and led to a form of unfreedom described most chillingly by Arendt:

There is no question that those outside the pale of the law may have more freedom of movement than a lawfully imprisoned criminal or that they enjoy more freedom of opinion in the internment camps of democratic countries than they would in any ordinary despotism, not to mention in a totalitarian country. But neither physical safety--being fed by some state or private welfare agency--nor freedom of opinion changes in the least their fundamental situation of rightlessness. The prolongation of their lives is due to charity and not to right, for no law exists which could force the nations to feed them; their freedom of movement, if they have it at all, gives them no right to residence which even themjailed criminal enjoys as a matter of course; and their freedom of opinion is a fool's freedom for nothing they think matters anyhow. (p. 296)

Notice what this quote assumes about the state. It assumes that if one is a citizen of a state, "the prolongation of one's life" can be due to right and not to charity; that one can have a "right to residence" in accordance with one's right to movement, and that one's freedom of opinion matters and is politically operational. Yet the development of the state today has tended to erode all of these assumptions in one or another way.

In the dismantling of the welfare state and the imposition of neoliberalism, we find an attack on the notion that a state has any duty to provide for its citizens. In the creeping irrationalism of political discourse, combined with the cacophony of media voices, we see the meaninglessness of "free" opinion. And in the status of illegal immigrants, we see a people whose movement is tacitly
tolerated, but who lack all rights to residence.

Arendt says elsewhere that the stateless benefit from committing crimes, for then the state must at least recognize them as an exception to the social norms, rather than as a human being outside of norms altogether. An analogous thing has happened to illegal migrants; witness the following news item:

Immigrants toiling illegally in New York state can sue for lost wages if they are hurt on the job, the state's highest court ruled Tuesday...

The Court of Appeals reinstated the state Supreme Court ruling, saying there was nothing in U.S. immigration law that prevented the worker from receiving lost wages since there was no proof he used fraudulent documents to get the job. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 "does not make it a crime to work without documentation," Judge Victoria Graffeo said in the decision, the AP reported.

Here of course, the worker becomes a person in the eyes of the law not by committing a crime, but by having a crime committed against them. But it is the nature of the crime that is interesting. Within the employment contract, the worker is within the law--only by being economically exploited do illegal immigrants count as people. It really is true, as the Marxist economist Joan Robinson once said, that the only thing worse than being exploited under capitalism is not being exploited under capitalism.

So to return to the theme I raised above: what sort of state are we moving toward? Philip Bobbitt has theorized a transition from the "nation state" model which collapsed after 1991, and the new "market state". The former aimed to maximize the well-being of its citizens (however those were defined), while the latter aims only to ensure the market conditions under which people can compete for advancement.

Thus the state no longer grounds itself in a people--so what does define the boundaries of a state? One major role of states is to print and defend national currencies. This is of particular importance for the United States, which has the luxury of printing the currency which is used as the global standard of bank reserves and key commodity transactions. As a consequence of "dollar hegemony", there is now a global dollar economy which is quite distinct, both in its membership and its territorial boundaries, from the collectivity of American citizens. What are the implications of this?

In much commentary on the imbalances of the global currency regime, it is implicitly assumed that if there is a contradiction between the the state and the nation, it will ultimately be resolved in favor of the nation: thus there will ultimately be a devaluation of the dollar and a fall in American consumption which restores "balance" to the global economy. But what if the state instead manages to disentangle itself from the nation? That is, what happens if we all become a kind of "stateless" people?

This brings us back to where we started. Many of Arendt's comments on totalitarianism are disturbing in their contemporary resonance. Of those Boer war-era "camps [which] correspond in many respects to the concentration camps at the beginning of totalitarian rule," which "were used for 'suspects' whose offenses could not be proved and who could not be sentenced by ordinary process of law" (p. 440), I hardly need to elaborate. But what is most pernicious about the cavalier use of the word "fascism", in reference to the present state of affairs, is that it stops our thinking at precisely the place where it should start. Now, more than ever, we must dig into the diverse historical preconditions and political elements which led toward the fascist turn--the state-form first among them--in order to see how these apply in our conjuncture. The result will be an analysis which is more than facile phrase-mongering; yet I fear it will be no less chilling for its subtlety.

The war in Iraq has led to a rehabilitation of "imperialism" as a description of the American role in the world--both from the left, and from conservative defenders of the empire like Niall Ferguson. From my perspective, this is all to the good, as it moves us away from the delusional idealism that informed so many of the debates over so-called "humanitarian intervention" in the 1990's.

But a lot of the debate smacks of economism. That is, people are not distinguishing between the theory of imperialism, and the belief that U.S. foreign policy is directly determined by the interests of specific private corporations and industries. The widespread use of the military- and prison-industrial complex as an analytical framework is indicative of this tendency. These ideas, which are really aspects of one idea, illuminate something important: the positive feedback loop between the expansion of the state's coercive apparatus at home and abroad, and the increasing size and power of private interests which materially benefit from that expansion. But they can lead us down the blind alley of looking for specific economic interests behind each and every military action of the state. In the case of Iraq, the relevant interest is easy to find, which is why "no war for oil" is such a tempting and plausible rallying cry. But the framework breaks down when it is applied to any wider set of historical examples. To use my favorite case: the nation of Grenada is economically notable primarily for being the world's second largest producer of nutmeg; yet the Reagan administration plainly did not go to war against Grenada in the 1980's for nutmeg.

We need to take more seriously Marx's remark, in the Communist Manifesto, that the state is "an executive committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie". This clause is usually taken as a statement of economic determinism: the actions of the state directly reflect the interests of capital. But we should pay less attention to the end of the phrase, and more to the beginning. As any student of bureaucracy and organizations knows, "executive committees for managing" are complex and contradictory entities with their own autonomous logics. It is certainly often true that the state rules in the interest of particular capitals; the economistic anti-war critique captures this. Yet just as often, the state must suppress particularist interests in order to ensure the orderly accumulation of capital in general.

What we need, then, is a theory of imperialism as a structure, and not as a set of interests. If imperialism signifies nothing more than a territorially defined hierarchy of wealth and power in the world system, we can ask what aspects of contemporary capitalism generate and reinforce such hierarchies. As a preliminary step, it occurs to me that we should differentiate some different levels at which the global economy is integrated.

1. Primitive Accumulation. Capitalism could not take off without the existence of massive, concentrated stores of wealth, which could then be thrown into circulation as capital. The primitive accumulation of capital refers to the violent and lawless process by which this concentration occurred. The process of primitive accumulation also destroys pre-capitalist social formations and allows capitalism to expand into new areas. This type of global integration is central to Rosa Luxemburg's theory of imperialism. It has been picked up of late by David Harvey, who uses the term "accumulation by disposession" to encompass not only the process traditionally included under the heading of "primitive accumulation", but also things like the commodification of traditional knowledges through the patent system, and the privatization of public institutions.
2. Export of Commodities. Capitalism has an innate tendency toward overproduction, because increases in productivity are not matched by equivalent rises in the wages of those who must buy the products. Capital thus always seeks new markets, and thus breaks down national barriers. Marx refers to this in the Manifesto: "[t]he cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate."
3. Export of Capital. Capital ultimately needs not only new markets, but new investment opportunties to dispose of all the capital that is accumulated through repeated cycles of production. This leads to the export not merely of commodities, but of capital, as investment is made abroad and capitalist production begins to be globalized. The export of capital was central to early 20th century theories of imperialism, most notably Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
4. Currency Regimes. The globalizing process which is inaugurated in primitive accumulation, and intensified by the export of commodities and capital, necessitates a means of payment in global trade--a way of mediating between the diverse national currencies. Up until the 1970's, gold served this function. Since the collapse of the gold standard, however, a peculiar new system has emerged. The U.S. dollar has become the global reserve currency: global commodities like oil are priced in dollars, and national central banks hold reserves of dollars in order to back up their own currencies. This gives the United States, the only state which can print dollars, a unique power on the global stage. Specifically, dollar hegemony allows the U.S. to maintain structural budget and trade deficits without triggering massive domestic inflation. In order to maintain their massive trade surpluses, China and other countries buy up massive amounts of U.S. Treasury bonds, thus underwriting U.S. government spending. This system means, in essence, that "world trade is now a game in which the US produces dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy." Yet no-one wants to upset this arrangement by selling their dollar reserves, since the resulting process of global rebalancing would destroy the production of our trading partners at the same time it demolished American consumption. The constitution of this regime of "dollar hegemony" or "super imperialism" has been documented in detail by Marxist-influenced economists Michael Hudson and Henry C.K. Liu. It is also a topic of concern among mainstream economists like Brad Setser and Nouriel Roubini.
5. Energy. It is not arbitrary that current events appear to swirl around oil, rather than any other commodity. The productivity of the economy is highly dependent on oil--to a large extent, the increased efficiency of human labor in production has been a function of the availability of cheap energy, in the form of petroleum. If oil becomes more scarce (and therefore more expensive), this has follow-through effects throughout every sector of the economy, from transportation costs to electricity to agriculture (which is sustained by
   nitrogen fertilizer, a petroleum product). There has been a lot of concern lately at the possibility that we are approaching the condition known as "peak oil": the point at which the absolute quantity of oil produced in the world will begin to decline. Note that this is not the same as saying that we are "running out" of oil. The important variable is not how much oil is in the ground, but how fast we can extract it. Capitalism can only exist if it constantly grows, and growth in the economy is tied to growth in oil production. If the peak oil theorists are right that we are approaching peak oil--or have already passed it--then the effects on the global economy will be severe. Moreover, geopolitical contests over oil will certainly intensify. Attempts to integrate energy into the theory of imperialism have so far been somewhat halting--but some important initial steps have been taken by Alf Hornborg, Stan Goff, and Mark Jones.

It is important, I think, to recognize that these five aspects of imperialism are not stages which follow each other in a temporal sequence. Rather, they are overlapping structures of international capital which co-exist and interact. A theory of imperialism has to attend to all of them; moreover, we need an empirical and historically specific account which shows which aspects are subordinate and which predominant in the current conjuncture.

As a start, we might think about the territoriality and directionality of these processes. Imperialist structures 1-3 (dispossession, commodities, capital) are increasingly deterritorialized, in that the capitalist class is becoming transnational, and accumulation by dispossession happens within countries as well as between them. At least in the case of (2) and (3), they are also bidirectional--the need to break down barriers to commodities and capital by now applies almost as much to the subordinate economies of the post-colonial world as it does to the old imperial center, and neoliberalism is breaking down many of the barriers which the first world used to protect its economies from the third world.

Dollar hegemony has the clearest directionality of any of these processes: it is the structure which allows the United States to consume more than it produces, and thereby to materially exploit the rest of the world. For that reason, I think dollar hegemony has to be central to any concept of imperialism which maintains the political and moral force of Lenin and Luxemburg. Yet this picture is complicated by a deterritorialization noted by Henry Liu: "Another unique distinction about dollar hegemongy is that it produced an incongruity between the dollar economy and the US economy." In other words, dollar hegemony benefits a class of finance capitalists that is not American, per se. I have not thought through the implications of this, but it might be a clue to resolving the paradox I discussed yesterday.

Then there is oil, the commodity which underpins so much of global finance, yet one which is by its nature territorial. It is the wild card here, and I think we need an account of oil's role in imperialism which gets past economism. If dollar hegemony is the structuring logic of contemporary imperialism, oil would seem to be its "determining last instance"--the commodity whose fate will ultimately determine the future shape of the system.