James Scott: Adam Smith or Karl Marx?

I can't escape James Scott right now.  Jacob Levy has contributed his two cents to the discussion of Seeing Like a State over at Cato Unbound.  There's a lot to talk about in Jacob's contribution, but I just want to point to one thing for now.  Jacob writes:

I suspect that Scott has been mildly embarrassed by the libertarian enthusiasm for Seeing Like a State, and since its publication he’s been at pains to be clearer than he was in the book that the market can also be a force of high-modernist social flattening. But he has not (that I’m aware of) pushed the thought very far, or told his readers much about when the market is that kind of force on its own, and when it is so when joined to state power. 

My Marxist self jumps up and down and yells: when have there been extensive markets that were not joined to state power!?!?!?!?!?!

The Postmodern State

Israel's attack on the flotilla of Turkish boats headed for Gaza seems to me to be an object lesson in what various neo-Marxists have been calling the transition from the state to empire.

The IDF attacked the flotilla in international waters, [and there was no preliminary attempt to turn the boats back by other means -- commando raid was the tactic of first choice][Incorrect: see update]. When the soldiers boarded, they were met with stiff resistance -- the first ones were clubbed and and least one was thrown overboard. In response to this resistance, the IDF soldiers opened fire, and 10-19 activists from the flotilla were killed. No IDF commandos were killed.

The IDF maintains a blog, where you can see their portrayal of the event. It prominently features video of the raid, showing the first commandos aboard being beaten, and photos and video showing the assortment of kitchen knives, metal pipes, and sundry other weapons deployed by the activists in their attempt to ward off the raid. The blog refers to the activists' resistance this way: "the activists on board lynched the soldiers in a planned attack."

So, an army raids vessels flying the flag of an allied state, in international waters, [with no warning,][Incorrect. See update.] and those raided are supposed to meekly surrender. If they don't, then they are guilty of a planned attack on the soldiers raiding their boats.

There is a logic to this, but it is not the logic of the law, or the legal state. It is, in the Foucauldian idiom of neo-Marxism, the logic of the norm. Israel has a policy of containment regarding Gaza. The flotilla represented a risk to that policy. It broke no laws and posed no military threat, but, as a risk, it was the object of military intervention. As an identified risk, the burden was on the activists to prove, not their innocence, but their passivity. Since they actively resisted, they had to be pacified, and retroactively proved themselves to be the risk they had been identified as. The citizenship of the activists is of no import; they could have been Israeli, or Iranian, or American, or whatever -- there is no citizenship per se in relation to states acting as imperial agencies. The only question is whether you are passive with regard to empire or pose a risk.

This same logic pervades the quasi-militarized police operations that we call the war on drugs and the war on terror. What happened in the Mediterranean is of the same form as what happens in drug raids in Indiana, or in mobilizations against protesters in Minneapolis. As Foucault says near the end of his lectures on "The Birth of Biopolitics," the "law and order" mantra of conservatives has been revealed to be a contradiction in terms -- the question is: Law or order? The postmodern state -- empire -- chooses order.

UPDATE:

I don't know where I got the "no warning" tidbit, but that's not right. The IDF announced they were boarding to search the ships. For discussions of the legality of Israel's blockade and of this raid, see here, here, and here.

UPDATE II:

Well, maybe the "no warning" tidbit was right after all. As accounts from activists have started seeping out, the raid looks worse and worse -- see here and here, for example.

Also, regarding the new status accorded "citizens" of the postmodern state, see here.

Pessimism and Anti-State Politics

My comments for today's panel at CPSA:

My project is to try to flesh out a neo-Marxian politics using resources from institutional and new institutional economics. I begin from the hypothesis that human beings are evil. I try to be a little deflationary about this; when I say we are evil, I do not mean that we are malicious – though we can be – but only that we are not very good cooperators. This is because we are, at least potentially, a) prudentially rational agents, b) who act independently of one another, but c) who are dependent on one another for realizing our desired outcomes. In other words, we face the persistent threat of coordination problems.

This specter of coordination problems does not always arrive – collective action happens – but it is a real enough threat that we cannot, in principle, rule out the possibility of prudentially rational opportunism (free-riding, defection, rent-seeking, moral hazard, etc.) in our considerations of institutional design. The threat amounts to a divergence between the common good and the good achievable by the independent actions of prudentially rational agents. Any approach to collective action that does not take this threat into account in the structure and working rules it proposes for institutions seems, by that very fact, to convict itself of criminal naiveté by entrusting the entire existence of the proposed institutions to the care of good fortune alone. My essay tests various approaches to collective action by this criterion of naiveté.

The Left and Liberal Government (After Foucault)

Foucault's lectures on "The Birth of Biopolitics" have been rattling around in my head. I think they present a real challenge for the Left, in the sense that they articulate the lack of what Foucault refers to as a socialist governmentality. In fact, on might even say that, in the West, there is currently no governmental alternative to liberalism. What does this mean?

Well, first we should set aside the sense in which "liberalism" names a partisan position in North American electoral and cultural politics. Liberals in this sense tend to embrace liberal government for some issues (drugs, abortion, etc.) while rejecting it for others (minimum wage, environmental regulations, etc.). There is no neat fit between the mode of government and partisan identification, even if there are discernible patterns.

Likewise, I think it is necessary to set aside the sense in which "liberalism" names a theory of state legitimation. In this sense, liberalism asks the question: When is it obligatory that I obey a coercive power? To which liberalism answers: When that coercive power is necessary (and sufficient?) to secure a sphere of equal liberty for myself and my fellows, who are equally obligated thereby to obey. This morality of power and obedience -- basically, the social contract tradition -- has some relationship with liberal government, but is not identical to it. Hobbes offers a liberal legitimation of the state, but not a liberal theory of government. Smith proposes liberal government, but not a liberal legitimation of the state. (Foucault talks about this as the "strategic" difference between "revolutionary" (natural rights, social contract) and "radical" (utilitarian) strands within liberalism. The difference is strategic because the two strands can support one another in various ways, but are not reducible to moments in a dialectical unity.)

Liberalism as a mode of government names the technology of power that governs a natural-social phenomenon by establishing a normal range of incidence and keeping the phenomenon within this range by means of state action on the environmental variables that tend to affect incidence. In other words, liberal government accepts the thing to be governed as an ineliminable (natural) fact of the social world, and, rather than trying to forbid or otherwise abolish it, manages it indirectly by affecting those variables that encourage or discourage it by appealing to individuals' interests. In short, liberal government is economic government, government that understands and respects the economic incentives that produce harmful or unpleasant phenomena, and tries to manage problems by restructuring the incentives.

Now, when things are put in these terms, it seems, in fact, that liberalism is the only governmental game in town. The Right has a moral discourse and an effective political rhetoric, but no independent art of government. The Left has a critical discourse, but neither an effective political rhetoric nor an art of government. Mainstream liberalism has government all locked up -- but has neither a critical nor a moral discourse, and is largely lacking in the political rhetoric department, too! (Hence, the sorry state of the Democrats in the US and the Liberals in Canada, both of which must pin there hopes of electoral success almost entirely on the incompetence of their Rightist competition.)

This is a problem for the Left in that, aside from the momentous problem of, y'know, actually taking power, we have no independent practice of government by which we might wield the power of the state should it somehow fall into our hands. There are, of course, distinctive ends we would like to achieve, but when you ask: How would we go about, e.g., redistributing land, establishing a basic income, etc? the only answers that seem forthcoming are: a) a magical faith in the will of the people (a simple decree, anyone?) and b) ask the economists.

What are the technocrats supposed to be doing, again?

Dean Baker:

If Bernanke Did Not Know the Fed's Mission, Would That Be News?

Not at the WSJ, nor it seems anywhere else. Yesterday, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke referred to the "our dual mandate, which is growth and inflation." In fact, the dual mandate is full employment (defined as 4.0 percent unemployment) and price stability. Presumably Bernanke had unemployment in mind when he said "growth," but it striking that he would not use the right term. The two are of course not synonymous.

Here's a better explanation of the dual mandate than the Wikipedia entry Baker points to.

UPDATE: More grist for the mill here.

My Research

In a recent discussion with a colleague, I was asked to articulate my current research interests, and I thought it would be worthwhile to expand and write down what I said.

In the first place, I am motivated by a certain fidelity to particular figures in the history of political philosophy--Marx and Aristotle, primarily--to defend the honor and virtue of their thinking. I believe that most and the most readily accessible interpretations of these thinkers are quite strikingly bad. I find Capital and the Nicomachean Ethics to be incredibly compelling works, but when I turn to the characterizations of these works that are found in much of the secondary literature or that function as shorthand in general discussions of political and ethical philosophy, I find them to be unintelligible or incoherent or banal.

I take this mismatch to be at least in part the consequence of Marx and Aristotle standing not merely outside but in opposition to the main current of modern political philosophy that stretches from Hobbes and Locke to Rawls and Habermas. It is Aristotle and Marx above all others who have served that tradition as enemies the denial of whom defines and cements the community of interlocutors. The refusal of Aristotle's politcal naturalism was just as necessary for early modern theorists of sovereignty, contract, and civil society, as the refusal of Marx has been for 19th and 20th century thinkers of liberalism, proceduralism, and the legal codification of rights.

This refusal comes at a price, since the modern conceptual framework that has grown up around the artifactual state (sovereignty, general will, property, claim rights, mechanisms of enforcement, representation, personality, etc.) functions as a grid of intelligibility, a set of landmarks by which to recognize and respond to theoretical assertions, but it is a grid that is largely alien to the thought of those refused thinkers, Aristotle and Marx.

Therefore, the first aspect of my research is merely to attempt to read Aristotle and Marx on their own terms, and to develop, to the extent that I am capable, a compelling account of their political thought that begins from those points where the modern grid of intelligiblity fails to grasp them. To some extent, this involves a sort of artificial naivite, an approach to their texts that seeks to identify and begin from the phenomena they themselves begin from, instead of taking any contemporary question or recognized problem as a beginning point and then seeking an answer or resolution in Marx or Aristotle. The latter method risks importing precisely the mainstream conceptual framework that I claim makes Marx and Aristotle so difficult to understand. To this extent, then, my method of reading must owe something to a sort of Heideggerian phenomenology that seeks first the pragmata of the text being read, attempting to suspend or bracket the questions and claims of mainstream political theory (basically, contemporary liberalism).

On the other hand, however--and this leads me to the second aspect of my research--the political theories of Marx and Aristotle are not simply outside modern liberalism, they are opposed to it. Therefore, there must be points of critical contact between the mainstream discourse and the discourses produced by Marx and Aristotle. Thus, at some point, the naivite must be put aside and the project of rediscovery must become a project of critique. Once Marx and Aristotle have been rearticulated to a certain level of concreteness, I feel the need to intervene in the contemporary mainstream in order to press on certain perceived weak spots in that discourse: its lingering technocratic flavor, its reduction of politics to the state with its laws and administrative functions, its reduction of all ruling to domination or the right to coerce, its assumption that needs and desires are pre-politically and privately articulated, etc.

As a particularization of this critical project--and this is the third and final aspect of my research--I am especially interested in political violence, both as a phenomenon and as a problem for liberal/modern political theory. You could say that the whole problematic of the modern state has been organized around the hypothesis that violence could be minimized or even eliminated by being concentrated or monopolized. A daring and dubious hypothesis!

Built into the modern political problematic are a host of such daring and dubious hypotheses: that violence is identical with coercion; that violence is therefore fundamentally a problem of the will (rather than of the body, or of life, or of measure, or...); that violence is therefore essentially a problem of the borders between soverign wills; that violence can only be authorized by a prior (necessarily unauthorized) violence; that legitimate (authorized) violence is not really violence at all (so, for example, the criminal wills his or her own punishment); that, therefore, violence as such (the unauthorized--but this is redundant--violation of a will) is always wrong and is to be reduced to an absolute minimum; that the wrongness of violence consists in its injustice (rather than its immoderation, its ugliness, its...). There are surely more.

Even some of the most cogent critics of modern political philosophy--I'm thinking of Arendt here--subscribe to the identificcation of violence with coercion, which seems to me to be entirely without justification (that is, I've never found anyone who even attempts to justify this identification, which is not to say that such a justification could not be given, just that no one seems to feel the need).

I think both Aristotle and Marx (and sundry post-Marx Marxists) approach violence with very different basic assumptions, and that the perspective afforded by these different assumptions might go a long way towards rethinking the place or non-place of violence in politics. I'll try to lay out some of these differnet assumptions in future posts.

Anyway, there we are: my research interests. Any thoughts, questions, pointers, criticisms?

We've got your statism right here...

Senator Kit Bond (R-MO):

"I'm not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I'm sure you would all agree that, I think you all recognize that is something you need to do."

Tell me again how conservatives are for small government, government small enough to drown in a bathtub, government that won't interfere in your god-given right to live your life as you god-damned please, etc.

Freedom Isn't Free

Glenn Greenwald, responding to Megan McArdle and Dan Drezner's Alfred E. Newman impersonations:

It can never be the case that there is anything profoundly wrong -- fundamentally wrong -- with the American political establishment. Why not? Because the McArdles and Drezners both support it and are part of it, and they are Good and thus can't possibly be responsible for things like "war crimes" or "torture regimes" or illegal wars of aggression. That's why the political establishment is so desperate to stay in Iraq until we "win" and to convince everyone that the public supports them again. They are desperate to wash their hands of that which they enabled so they can pretend they never did.

One of the fundamental operations of the modern state is to effect a division of labor between those who kill and those who don't. I just taught Lucio Castellano's essay, "Living With Guerrilla Warfare." Castellano writes:

The arming of the state guarantees the disarming of society; the fact that one part of society--the repressive and military apparatus--erects itself as a separate body and functions according to the laws of 'war,' guarantees that the rest of society lives in 'peace.' 'Peace' means only that 'war' has become the private matter of a few men who thrive on it (the police and the military), or of those private men who take command over all others, demonstrating through fact that they--being the guarantors of the peace of all--also govern it by being a ruling part of it.

The peace we love is just the flip-side of the war machine, but we would rather not face that fact. The outbreak of a hot war--and a war of aggression, too, like our war in Iraq--unsettles our own denial, and precipitates three aggressively virulent attempts to shore up our clean conscience.

First, there is the classic chicken-hawk response: mental and emotional identification with the war machine, coupled with an absolute avoidance of all bodily danger.

Second, there is the dissociative disorder characteristic of Versailles. This seems to be McArdle and Drezner: Marie Antoinettes of the digital age. That's over there and I'm over here--and never the twain shall meet.

Finally, there is the beautiful soul of the pacifist, who reassures themselves that, if they had their way, none of this bad stuff would happen.

Greenwald's straight ahead rule-of-law liberalism tends towards the third response at times, but I am beginning to sense a process of radicalization. I don't expect him to start recommending "learning to use violence, so as not to have to delegate it, so as not to be blackmailed by it" (as Castellano does), but...

The Lamb-like Innocence of the State

According to the geniuses at Time magazine (via Glenn Greenwald):

In all the examples of diminished civil liberties, there are few, if any, where the motivating factor was something other than law and order or national security.

Well, duh!

Greenwald wants to dispute this characterization by asking for empirical evidence of the motives of those seeking to expand the surveillance state. I don't think any such evidence is necessary, or even relevant. The problem is not that the state has expanded its police powers for some nefarious purpose. The empirical consciousness of those pushing these changes is meaningless. Nonetheless, I think the real intention--i.e., the objective tendency, rather than the conscious aim--of these expansions of police power is precisely the law and order or national security Time cites. Law and order or national security are the only motives for police action ever. That's precisely the trouble with the police.