Bollettino

The principal objections to democratical or popular
government, are taken from the inequalities which arise among men
in the result of commercial arts. And it must be confessed, that
popular assemblies, when composed of men whose dispositions are
sordid, and whose ordinary applications are illiberal, however
they may be intrusted with the choice of their masters and
leaders, are certainly, in their own persons, unfit to command.
How can he who has confined his views to his own subsistence or
preservation, be intrusted with the conduct of nations? Such men,
when admitted to deliberate on matters of state, bring to its
councils confusion and tumult, or servility and corruption; and
seldom suffer it to repose from ruinous factions, or the effect
of resolutions ill formed or ill conducted. – Adam Ferguson

Ill formed resolutions, and ill conduct in carrying them out, were at the heart of the Clarke controversies this week. LI watched with our most jaundiced eye as the Bush administration tried out a defense compounded of contradiction, denigration, and denial. None of them have worked very well, because they rebound against a solid fact: before 9/11, the mind of the Bush administration gave less thought to Al Qaeda then they did to raising the acceptable level of arsenic in drinking water. It was a non-agenda item.

However, the real question is whether the Bush mindset has changed in such a way as to secure us against terrorist attack. Us, in the narrow continental sense, and us, in the sense of the U.S. and its allies.

Although we generally avoid the vaguely repulsive experience of reading the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer – he is one of those columnists who seems to spit as he writes – his column about Clarke made the one sensible case against him, even as it buried the case in the usual Right Wing rolodex calumny. Clarke, in fact, should have apologized to the families of the WCT, because he, more than anyone else, was the architect of Clinton’s failed anti-terrorism initiatives.

“It is only March, but the 2004 Chutzpah of the Year Award can be safely given out. It goes to Richard Clarke, now making himself famous by blaming the Bush administration for Sept. 11 -- after Clarke had spent eight years in charge of counterterrorism for a Clinton administration that did nothing.”

Unfortunately, Krauthammer undermines his own point by exaggerating it to the point of caricature. Still, the Clinton administration did not do enough. And what it did do should have been done differently. There, we would have to agree. The problem is, what Clinton did wrong – responding with military force to Al Qaeda without jacketing that force in the full panoply of political pressures on those states in which Al Qaeda operats -- has been taken up by the Bush administration as a strategic panacea. The result of taking the Clinton doctrine to absurd extremes is shown in the overthrow of the one country in the Middle East that we know was not, in any major way, connected with the jihadists in Afgahanistan. All the eagerness that Bush’s apologists have shown in trying to pin some connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein stands in almost comical contrast with what we know about the connections between Al Qaeda and two of our allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. We know, and the whole Arab world knows, that if we are really trying to justify a war with a country on the basis of known, prolonged and sustaining relationships between that country and Al Qaeda, our soldiers would be in Riyadh and Islamabad.

Clarke’s failure, we think, comes from his obsession that Al Qaeda could only be dealt with by military force. We think that the Clinton administration should have been out there shaking its finger at the Saudis, at Pakistan, at Malaysia, at Indonesia, at Egypt – at every country where the terrorists have comfortably found niches.

Clinton didn’t do it. Bush, with the evidence before his eyes that something had to change, decided to relapse into the old groove. Clarke has surprised LI by showing that Bush shared the Iraq obsessions of his Defense Department subordinates. We assumed that Bush was more, well, sane than the Rumsfeld crew. We are still not sure we buy Clarke’s evaluation of Bush’s motives. But post 9/11, we have watched as the Bush administration, behind its rhetoric about a new kind of warfare, are engaging in just the kind of mistaken strategy that shows they have learned nothing from the past. The justification of this is comic: the war on terrorism, we are told, is going to last thirty years, fifty years, a century. Actually, it should have lasted precisely two years. By this time, Al Qaeda networks should really have been rolled back. Instead, they have further embedded themselves in the Mediterranean periphery.

Clarke’s claims about the Bush policy were being tested out even as he spoke last week. Unfortunately, the press was only interested in the sensational side of it, and soon let it sink to page B-12 or whatever. Two things happened in Pakistan. They are summarized by a Week in Review piece in the NYT:“On March 18, Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, gave a television interview in which he described a pitched battle between Pakistani soldiers and 400 to 500 militants and set off expectations that Al Qaeda's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been surrounded.
Two days later, military officials were playing down talk of Mr. Zawahiri's encirclement as "conjecture." And by the end of this week, a fresh audiotape message purportedly from Dr. Zawahiri emerged - taunting the government with a defiant call for General Musharraf's overthrow.”
The October surprise in the current election was supposed to be the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden. But it looks increasingly like another surprise, one not so pleasant for Bush, might occur – the toppling of the Mussharef regime. In fact, Pakistan is the one country in which stateless terrorism could actually metastasize to encompass the organs of the state. If this happened, or even if there is a bloody revolt, the Bush doctrine would not only take a fatal hit – it would open up a threat both to this country and to India that is a level larger than any terrorist threat ever before.
So, next week, we will do another post on Pakistan -- October Surprise II

  ¶ 10:04 AM

  Bollettino

“The most remarkable letter came from a woman who signed herself Thérèse M***, who asked the Courrier des spectacles to call on women to join together to "unveil this madness and force her to appear for what she is, so that visible beauty no longer be humiliated by hidden ugliness." It seems that Thérèse's husband was so taken by this "spectacle held up as the triumph of [the female] sex" that he demanded that she make herself invisible, having no further communication with him except through acoustic horns protruding from a globe of glass. "You can easily imagine that a woman of 23, not badly treated by nature, would not accommodate herself with facility to such a condition," wrote the disconcerted wife. Nevertheless, she explained, she would give anything in the world to know this secret, for, she realized, "it is enough to be invisible, however ugly one is, to receive the most flattering compliments." – Jann Matlock, The Invisible Woman and her secrets unveiled.

We can’t do it. We can’t leave the discussion so up in the air.

Jann Matlock, like any good cultural studies theorist, has read her Benjamin, and her Ginzberg, and her Foucault. She is fortunate enough to work on French culture, especially the roots of modernity – which, for French scholars, are easy to trace. You go to the French Revolution, you go to Paris, and you read the papers. Perhaps this is how she found the marvelous Invisible Woman.

This is the layout of the Invisible Woman exhibit of 1800. Spectators file into a room in which a glass ball hangs from the ceiling. Four acoustic horns jut out of the ball pretty far. The spectators can listen, if they wish, to the voice that speaks through these horns. It is the voice of a woman. And the woman’s implicit and explicit claim is to be in the room.

In other words, an invisible woman.

The contrivance is as rich in dialectical possibilities as the Turkish chessplayer to which Walter Benjamin refers in the Theses on history. That chessplayer enters the canon of modernity via Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote a detecting essay about it. Benjamin, no doubt, found the essay through Baudelaire’s translation of Poe.

Just as that chessplaying automaton possessed a solution, so, too, the Invisible woman possesses a solution. Matlock quotes an anonymous demystifier:

“We know today how the show worked thanks to a number of texts published to capitalize on the popularity of this and similar shows. The most remarkable of these, a pseudonymous pamphlet of 1800, entitled "The Invisible Woman and her Secrets Unveiled," was most likely published by Robertson himself and sold to viewers of the rival show at Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois (fig. 5). Decrying the miracle of the Invisible Woman as deriving from "a puerility," the pamphlet proclaimed that its author had no scruples about dissipating "the marvel that fascinates the eyes of the blind multitude": "we believe rather that we should get credit and glory for giving the following recipe for effecting the false miracle that enraptures every day." 48 Anyone wishing to replicate this magic was directed to build an acoustic contraption in a room below another room connected only by a slit in the floor, explained the author of the pamphlet. One should then hang a glass box above the hole in the ceiling of the lower room to distract the public from the point through which they might be seen. "Place in the above room on cushions, so her movements make no noise, a girl who puts her eye to this oblong opening in the floor of her room so she can see the objects presented to her . . . and then name them by applying her lips to the opening in the hidden tube." From her hidden room, the girl would regale the crowd with what she saw in a room where she was supposed to be residing, invisibly, amidst the acoustic paraphernalia that conducted her voice. "You will thus have the magic," declared the pamphlet, "of the Invisible Woman." “

How can LI resist this image, since it lays out so exactly, so suggestively, the situation of the beautiful woman in the novel? Indeed, one feels – or at least the writer fields, with his irritable, extended sensibility, his ludicrous antennae -- the woman on her cushions in the chamber below her description. The words come out, the crowd is, as it wants to be, mystified, and no woman appears in the glass ball, which sways slightly. No one notices the slit in the floor.

As Mattlock remarks, invisibility – from invisible rays to invisible powers – was a popular topic of the late Enlightenment. Remember, this is the period both of Mesmer and Mozart’s Magic Flute. The naturalization of what, in a previous epoch, would have been considered the work of demons or angels, did not so much destroy the power of the invisible as transfer it to another field, and another regime of legimation.

We loved the instruction in sleight of hand that Mattlock finds:

For Robertson [the exhibitor of the IW], the Invisible Woman Show was not an "experiment" of invisibility but rather a demonstration of acoustics like those displayed in Fitz-James's ventriloquism act. 53 Indeed, the Invisible Woman managed to hold the attention of audiences through several decades of the nineteenth century in shows throughout Europe and the United States because the illusionists in whose cabinets she appeared increasingly made claims about the scientific significance of the acoustic system on which the show was based. As Jacques Lacombe remarked in his Dictionnaire des amusemens of 1792, in order to dupe the public one had not only to have several ways to do the same trick but a way of turning arguments about one's tricks to one's advantage. Lacombe particularly cited illusionist Henri Decremps's advice that, when performing tricks before an audience of enlightened individuals, one should always avoid claiming one's powers magic or supernatural, but rather should suggest that they came from "an uncommon source that was extraordinary although natural."

This image and its semantic field, all of which Mattlock so expertly discloses, seems to LI to give us a sense of why it is so difficult to create a beautiful woman in a story. And why, perhaps, it wasn’t so difficult in an epoch that bore the painful detachment from magical beliefs in its recent collective memory. As Mattlock puts it, “As one newspaper article noted, spectators may well have left the show aggravated by its failure to satisfy their curiosity, but they nevertheless repeatedly told others that "in your life you have never been shown anything so beautiful as the woman that one does not see.”

Holly, je pense a vous!
  ¶ 8:47 PM

  Bollettino

Two announcements:

One is that LI will be coming out much more erratically in the upcoming weeks, if at all. We talked to a man about a job today -- he actually had one. Seven bucks an hour, telemarketing. If you told LI when he was twenty that he'd be working for seven bucks an hour when he was forty seven, well, perhaps we would have opened the vein right there and then. But so it goes in this ruin of an economy.

Second is that LI has a small piece coming out in the New Yorker. Small as in Books in Brief small. A review of Marilyn Yalom's book. It should be published in the next couple of weeks. These guys have such class -- they are eager to pay me. Unlike some places that I can't name, that have floated me for two months and caused my ability to eat, turn on lights, and talk on phones serious damage.

Alas, we won't have time to examine the conceptual strain in the use of the word 'object' in feminism. Throw it on the fire, boys.   ¶ 11:12 AM

  Bollettino

Beautiful women

We’ve reached the fourteenth chapter of our novel. At this point, we have to describe Holly Sterling. Holly’s death is the event that sets in motion the whole plot, and her corpse has been drained and buried since at least the third chapter. Eventually, we knew that we would have to show her in life – we would have to go backwards. And we knew that we had a problem. Holly Sterling is beautiful. Her reputation is held in that adjective. Beauty is one of her assets.

But between the saying of the thing and its credibility lies the whole sad mechanism of art. A mechanism that is as prone to breakdowns as one of those early versions of the horseless carriage. The ones with the engines you had to crank.

The figure of the beautiful woman lies at the very limit of the descriptive powers of the novel. At that limit, it defines the describable. What can be described is everything up to the beautiful woman. She, however, by being so purely descriptive, escapes description. This has been so for a long time. In the Iliad, the events are set in motion by a beauty contest and the seizure of a beautiful woman, Helen. In other words, from the very beginning of Western literature, the beautiful woman has been that figure from which the action flows. If Helen had been another smudged helot, and Paris had been a horny shepherd, who would have cared? In fact, we would have cared -- this question inaugurates another tradition – comedy – and is explored by, among others, Moliere in Amphytiron, as well as Shakespeare in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Class – status – is, in other words, written into the contract between reader and writer that sets the terms of the beautiful woman, and in its clauses we shift from comedy to tragedy and back.

But this is the theoretical fog that hovers over the facts in the case. In fact, how is Helen beautiful?

In that paleo age of the mirror, Homer’s answer is surprisingly modern. Or perhaps I should say that the answer is caught in a mode of representation that operates as a sort of invariant throughout Western literature. He constructs a negative space around Helen – that is, he shows her effect upon her beholders. It is not Helen who is beautiful – or at least, her beauty requires a mirror. It is a relation, not a Platonic form. Her most famous entrance is in the third book, where the elders behold “white armed Helen” at the gates, while the troops assemble below to battle:

Forthwith she veiled her face in shining linen, and hastened from her
chamber, letting fall a round tear; not unattended, for there followed
with her two handmaidens, Aithre daughter of Pittheus and ox-eyed
Klymene. Then came she straightway to the place of the Skaian gates. And they that were with Priam and Panthoos and Thymoites and Lampos and
Klytios and Hiketaon of the stock of Ares, Oukalegon withal and Antenor, twain sages, being elders of the people, sat at the Skaian gates. These had now ceased from battle for old age, yet were they right good orators, like grasshoppers that in a forest sit upon a tree and utter their lily-like [supposed to mean "delicate" or "tender"] voice; even so sat the elders of the Trojans upon the tower. Now when they saw Helen coming to the tower they softly spake winged words one to the other: "Small blame is it that Trojans and well-greaved Achaians should for such a woman long time suffer hardships; marvellously like is she to the immortal goddesses to look upon.”

Notice how beauty is not only in the eyes of the beholders, here, but is described almost entirely with reference to those eyes, and that effect. The woman herself – white armed, shedding some tears, covered with a cloak – has no real descriptive distinction to set her looks apart from ox eyed Kymene and Aithre. She is filled in, so to speak, by being filled in.

Every writer feels that something is surrendered here. But the defeat is obscure. The stakes of the battle are the writer’s own powers, but what are the means by which one recovers from the certain defeat that ensues from testing those powers on beauty?

That’s a very material question for LI.

However, contrast Homer with Balzac’s managing of the first encounter of Mademoiselle Marnaffe and Baron Hulot in Cousine Bette (note: most early translations of Balzac are bowdlerized. Better to read him in a good Penguin translation, if you don't read French):

Au moment où le baron Hulot mit la cousine de sa femme [poor cousin Bette] à la porte de cette maison, en lui disant: "Adieu, cousine!" une jeune femme, petite, svelte, jolie, mise avec une grande élégance, exhalant un parfum choisi, passait entre la voiture et la muraille pour entrer aussi dans la maison. Cette dame échangea, sans aucune espèce de préméditation, un regard avec le baron, uniquement pour voir le cousin de la locataire; mais le libertin ressentit cette vive impression qu'éprouvent tous les Parisiens quand ils rencontrent une jolie femme qui réalise, comme disent les entomologistes, leurs desiderata, et il mit avec une sage lenteur un de ses gants avant de remonter en voiture, pour se donner une contenance et pouvoir suivre de l'oeil la jeune femme, dont la robe était agréablement balancée par autre chose que ces affreuses et frauduleuses sous-jupes en crinoline.
- Voilà, se disait-il, une gentille petite femme de qui je ferais volontiers le bonheur, car elle ferait le mien.
Quand l'inconnue eut atteint le palier de l'escalier qui desservait le corps de logis situé sur la rue, elle regarda la porte cochère du coin de l'oeil, sans se retourner positivement, et vit le baron cloué sur place par l'admiration, dévoré de désir et de curiosité. C'est comme une fleur que toutes les Parisiennes respirent avec plaisir, en la trouvant sur leur passage. Certaines femmes attachées à leurs devoirs, vertueuses et jolies, reviennent au logis assez maussades, lorsqu'elles n'ont pas fait leur petit bouquet pendant la promenade.
La jeune femme monta rapidement l'escalier. Bientôt une fenêtre de l'appartement du deuxième étage s'ouvrit, et elle s'y montra, mais en compagnie d'un monsieur dont le crâne pelé, dont l'oeil peu courroucé, révélaient un mari.
Sont-elles fines et spirituelles, ces créatures-là!... se dit le baron, elle m'indique ainsi sa demeure. C'est un peu trop vif, surtout dans ce quartier-ci. Prenons garde.

Surely it is the dress, that robe which shows an agreeable motion produced by something other than those “affreuses et frauduleuses” crinoline slips – caused, in other words, by the motion of the thing itself, Marnaffe’s ass – which anchors our sense, from the very beginning, of Marnaffe as a woman who has a carnality that makes Helen’s white arms seem very pale, indeed. Cousine Bette is a novel of vengeance. The vengeance is effected by a very plain woman – Cousine Bette – on a beautiful woman – her cousin, Baronne Hulot – by means of a ‘jolie” woman – Marnaffe. It, too, is about an abduction of a sort, except this time it is a man, Baron Hulot, who is abducted. His abduction is in exchange for the abduction of Cousine Bette’s love, the sculptor Wenceslas Steinbock, who is stolen by the Hulot family for the daughter, Hortense. So we are not, after all, so far from the Illiad. But the emotional values in this story all emerge out of Hulot’s descent into the very delirium of pussy and ass – a delirium measured by the expenditure of money – for banquets, dresses, apartments, jewelry, the draining away the Hulot family fortune. Hulot’s taste for lying between Marnaffe’s cheeks is a ruinous passion, and in its ruin, a perversely heroic one. For all of Henry Miller’s poetic of the Land of Fuck, Hulot seems the truer inhabitant of the flesh. Balzac’s concept of the flesh is to oppose it radically to thought – this is the flesh you find around the bone. This is the pure flesh of the dick: unthinking, its will all rushes and retreats of blood.

But one could well ask: haven’t we slipped off the rails? Is Marnaffe more than “jolie”? For Balzac, beauté is ascribed to Baronne Hulot – Hulot’s wife. Her beauty is made up of the fact that she is a great soul. Her great soul is proven by the enormity of her sacrifices – in effect, she sacrifices the family estate to her husband’s appetite for Marnaffe. This sacrifice entails ruining her children, so that Marnaffe can devour the family fortune. Balzac precedes Zola in Nana in making the voracity of the whore – eating and sex, that everlasting duo -- play into a metaphor of money being spent. Nana eats, at a certain delirious point, whole railroad companies. Marnaffe mearly gulps down the Hulot real estate.

Helen, of course, cries and smiles – but does she eat? Does Baronne Hulot?

Baronne Hulot is nearing fifty. Balzac had a rather charming obsession, even when he was twenty, with forty to fifty year old women. He compares Adeline to her daughter, at the beginning of the novel, and tells us that 'amateurs of sunsets" would prefer the mother. But he fails to make the contract with the reader stick. Baronne Hulot’s beauty is affirmed at the limit of our imagination – we can believe in it, as we can believe in God, through a labyrinth of metaphors. But the thing itself – as a good thing, something as palpable as Marnaffe’s ass – always escapes us.

Next post I’m going to use Jann Matlock’s essay on The Invisible Woman and her Secrets Unveiled, and an ethnographic study of cocktail waitresses by Lorraine Bayard de Volo, to go a little further with this.
  ¶ 10:40 AM

  Bollettino
Our far flung correspondents

The following is from Paul Craddick, who runs a weblog that we strongly recommend, Fragmenta Philosophica. We want to thank him for letting us publish this letter.

Roger,

You're beginning to strike me a bit like Hegel - the architectonic is in need of serious repair, but that doesn't prevent you from unearthing shining gems of insight.

I thoroughly enjoyed your latest "Bollettino" - it had real historical sweep, was superbly written, and provocatively argued.

I think you're definitely on to something with your notion that the "bourgeoisification" or the "proletariat" has been helped along rather well by the easy availability of consumer credit, and I can't recall any other writer coming at it from quite the same angle as you. There's definitely food for thought there.

But - surprise! - I do think you omitted something essential in your analysis.

The fountainhead of (economic) social mobility is none other than the market's wealth-creating dynamo: investment for profit. Thereby the productive process is "refined" such that now the same product can be offered at a lower price than before, or a "better" (= more variegated, complex, featureful, etc.) product can now be offered at the same price as was an inferior one previously. Hence even if nominal wages remain static, over the longer term those wages "appreciate" and thus go further and further: purchasing power is extended. My own favored definition of "economize" - informed by the "praxeological" postulates of the Austrians - is "choice reducing its own costs." The market, as the most economical of economies, inherently reduces costs, the corollary of which is that it enriches (economic) choice. Ergo the lot of the worker will tend to improve of the longer haul. (Please don't misunderstand me as an unabashed "supply-sider," but the role of entrepreneurial investment is fundamental no matter what stand one takes on that question).

Though I won't be holding my breath, one could imagine a state of affairs in which instead of issuing ever larger standard notes ($20's, $50's, $100's) a central bank actually divided the smaller units - imagine "deci-pennies."

This puts an interesting gloss on "soak the rich" schemes - and, generally, those interventions into the market order which encourage aversion to risk: the shorter term is purchased at the cost of the longer term. That's my take on the dialectical interplay between socialism and capitalism - infusions of the former's ethos cause the latter to feed off of its own reserves, vitiating self-sufficiency in numerous respects.

The remarkable thing - detailed, for example, in one of my favorite books, Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy - is the resilience of the "capitalist" engine in the face of punitive taxation, wage and price controls, and other interventions that are difficult to metabolize (one of my heroes, Wilhelm Roepke, distinguishes between "assimilable" and "unassimilable" interventions, but that's another matter). The price we've paid for the "mixed economy" is the further encouragement or "evocation" of Big Business - the large-scale concerns can better weather the storms/tolerate the most parasites - and further ourselves down the lamentable road of the "cult of the colossal"; not to mention further disturb economic equilibrium, and risk exemplifying Mises' dictum ("Middle of the road policy leads [logically, though not necessarily existentially] to socialism"). Our impending health care crisis is surely an illustration of the latter.

So there!

On another note, a while back I posted about the political designations "Left" and "Right" in a rather halting and "dialectical" - vs. didactic - manner. I'm sure you'd have some very valuable things to say about this, so if the spirit moves you please have a look and comment (I'd be glad to know your thoughts).

Best,

Paul


  ¶ 5:37 PM

  Bollettino

The alterations of general economic perspectives must lead to alterations of the relationship between the workers and their employers. The suddenly change of circumstances coincided with many strikes that had already begun, and with many more, that were being prepared. Doubtless, they will be proceed in spite of the Depression and will lead to even higher wages. The factory owners will argue that they are not in the position to pay higher wages, to which the workers will respond that the cost of living has become higher, and so the two arguments will equally weigh against each other. In case of the Depression lengthening, which is what I assume will happen, the workers will soon receive the whole brunt of it, and they will – without intending it – have to struggle against the fall of wages. Then their activity will flow into the political plane, whereby the new economic organizations created by the strike will be of invaluable worth to them. – Marx, the New York Tribune, 27. September 1853


Marx was writing at the time of the Crimean War. The railroad frenzy in England had collapsed (as has been often remarked, the political and economic consequences of the oversupply of rail and of the oversupply of optic fiber cable, one hundred forty some years later, display remarkably similar trajectories). Britain’s war was being fought for cloudy reasons, and had no visible exit to it. The economy was in Depression – a term that has been daintily replaced, in the modern lexicon, by recession, euphemism being the last resort of economists when all else fails. Marx, at this time, was stuffing himself with despair, beer, lust for house maids, and blue-books. As James Buchan, I believe, has noted, with the job for the Tribune, and his other writings, Marx wasn’t making bad money – yet his household was always near the very end of its financial tether.



Here’s what he says in a letter to Engels written about the same date:



Above all I want to slay the fellows with my pen, the moment being propitious, and if at the same time you keep me supplied with material, I can spin out the various themes over longer periods.

Why the quotes from Marx? Well, we’ve been pondering an article in Slate by Chris Suellentrop about the Spanish socialists. No, it isn’t about whether they have definitively leaped off the Good Ship Lollipop and joined the Barbary Corsairs (leave that to the ever ignorant Christopher Hitchens). It is about the hollowed out status of European Socialism:

“Despite what you may have heard, socialism isn't dead. It's undead, a zombie that still roams the earth uncertain what to do with itself since its demise. It was sighted again this week, somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula, though some observers dismissed the reports. Sure, a group named the Socialist Workers Party won the elections in Spain, and a Socialist named José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is slated to become the country's next prime minister. But it says something about the state of small-"s" socialism—in addition to the state of the world—that conservatives are attacking Zapatero for his response to terrorism, not his attitude toward capitalism.”

That is fair enough play with the specter that haunted Europe. And it is certainly true that Zapatero’s ministers assured the financial markets that the election of socialists does not entail the implementation of socialism – which is what socialists have been doing since Ramsay McDonald assured the City that he had no intention of producing policies that would actually benefit the working class, or chip even the slightest percent from the Bank’s bonds. Suellentrop is right to say that the neo-liberal agenda, in Europe, almost always advances in the Trojan horse of socialist parties.

“In One Hundred Years of Socialism, the historian Donald Sassoon notes that over the course of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, European socialists went from wanting to get rid of capitalism to declaring "that they were the ideal managers of it."

But Zapatero, Blair, and Schröder are taking this a step further: They're dropping much of the socialist project of economic interventionism. The vestige of socialism they cling to is the commitment to a strong social safety net that can balance the inequities of unbridled capitalism. Schröder may be going the furthest: He's trying to cut Germany's welfare state in order to save it. (Americans might be amused that some Germans are outraged because they now pay $12.40 each time they visit the doctor.) Zapatero's shift toward market economics is understandable: He has to live up to the stellar performance of his predecessor. As the Wall Street Journal Europe noted this week, during José Maria Aznar's eight years as Spain's prime minister, unemployment dropped from 20 percent to 11 percent, and the country created 40 percent of the European Union's new jobs, 4.2 million of them. During the Socialists' 20-year reign from 1976 to 1996, the country's job growth netted out at zero.”

However, the crowing tone is rather odd, given that in the current Depression, the U.S. economy is being supported by a mortgage market that is, in effect, guaranteed by the government and financed through huge public/private corporations; that the record trade and spending deficits are being underwritten by Asian central banks – not least the central China bank, which is controlled by the Communist party of China; and that the most conservative president we have ever seen is running partly on a record that includes running up Medicare entitlements some five hundred billion dollars.

As for job growth – well, perhaps U.S. job growth shouldn’t exactly be bragged about right now. During Bush’s three year reign, the country’s job growth netted out as a loss of 3 million jobs, and that is probably a conservative estimate.


On the first point – as Hamish McDonald put it in the Sydney Morning Herald:

“Asia's depressed currencies and massive US dollar reserves are a recipe for an American recession...

Despite some evident misgivings about his rising level of indebtedness, US President George Bush's bankers of last resort are continuing to lend him the funds to pay for vital necessities like tax cuts, the war in Iraq and missile defence.

Toshihiko Fukui and Zhou Xiaochuan no doubt have their disagreements about Mr Bush's priorities, but as governors of the central banks of Japan and China, respectively, they are continuing to build up already massive holdings of US Treasury securities.”

Thus Lenin’s supposed dictum is neatly inversed. The capitalists, you remember, were supposed to sell the communists the rope with which they were to be hung. It appears that the communists are now doing the rope selling, and the capitalists are busy weaving it into nets to engage in hugely expensive adventures in neo-colonialism. Nowadays, you can’t tell the weaver from the weave.

But it is the trade deficit that points to an underlying story about the end of socialism as a “new economic arrangement that emerges on the political plane.” We have always thought that the decline in socialism, including the decline in labor unions, worked in tandem with the invention of the expanded consumer credit market. In short, the Bank America card was the potent weapon that destroyed Das Kapital.

This is a thesis that we have never seen pursued. This is odd. It is only by retaining that penumbra of credit that American families, in the early 80s, were able to initiate their middle class lifestyle survival technique, which consisted of pouring women into the marketplace. It is only by retaining their ability to take out mortgages on ever easier terms that the American consumer has floated even the weak American economy we see at present. In the meantime, what would appear to be the best opening for union activity in the past fifty years – the revelation after revelation of the gouging of corporations by top management – has resulted in nothing. If anything, a shift towards a lower and lower union membership.

We wonder whether the strains in this system are going to continue to deliver the benefits of social welfare under the aegis of New Economy capitalism, or not. The system itself has retained a stubborn invisibility – it does not seem to have occurred to any economic historian to inquire about the macroscopic effects of expanded consumer credit on the cultures of the Western countries even as economists push for policies that require an ever greater credit market to finance an ever greater level of demand.

There’s a nice moment in the French Lieutenant’s Woman (LI is reading John Fowles at the moment, since we’ve been hired to write a review of a John Fowles biography). The time is 1865. Sam, a valet, tells his employer, Charles, a fairly well to do scion of an aristocratic house, that he wants to get married and set up a shop. Sam claims that he has saved up 30 pounds – an incredibly good sum, over two years, considering that it is more than a fourth of his pay. To set up a shop, he needs 200 pounds. Where is he going to get it? He applies to Charles, naturally.



Today, Sam would probably apply to a bank. More than that, however: Sam would have been able to live above the immediate purchase power of his salary because he is surrounded by the invisible, omnipresent means to do so. In 1865, or 1853, banks would simply not loan money to the likes of Sam. In order to borrow money, Sam has to turn to his very human network – his family, his employer, his friends.



We underestimate the massiveness of these exchanges. It was in getting credit, as well as higher wages, that the working class came to know the bourgeoisie. It was face to face knowledge, it was indelible, and the hostility it created ensured the creation of further hostilities all over the West for two hundred years. The collapse of this face to face encounter erased a factor that played a huge role in the creation of class consciousness. In its place has come a form of mimetism – the imitation of the wealthier by the less wealthy. This is the prevailing mode in our everyday symbolic interactions.



The long implementation of the new form of capitalism, in the sixties and seventies, provoked a crisis of authenticity among the left’s intellectuals of the period. It is this that partly explains the popularity of total systems of control – whether it is Foucault’s regime of surveillance, or Galbraith’s technostructure. By removing the traditional modes of hostility from the relationship between the working class and the management class -- by removing, in effect, the theater of the negotiation -- the system, in effect, paralyzed the working class, and put its intellectuals into an untenable position. The smartest of them, like Foucault, realized that the dialectical truth of the moment was not simply that control had achieved a greater level of penetration and invisibility, but that it had suddenly created both the means and the necessity of producing pleasure.



Well, we will see if this system can overcome its contradictions. One thing is for sure: the death of socialism was not a victory for capitalism. Both were utterly transformed in that struggle. To tell you the truth, the struggle still goes on. In spite of Suellentrop’s crowing.
  ¶ 2:50 PM

  Bollettino

Shell Comes clean
By THE ASSOCIATED NEWS

Published: March 18, 2004


LONDON (AN) -- In a surprise step, the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Cos. said Thursday that it hadn’t been in the oil business for twenty years. “All our profit comes from selling clothes to second hand clothes stores,” new CEO “Crazy” Jan van Alpers admitted. “Jeans and sh*t like that. Also, we are into selling returnable bottles. My vice president just made like 10 Euros this morning, man. We slapped that right in the profit column. It is like these bottle are just sitting out there. People put ‘em in their trash cans, can you believe that sh*t?” As to the reasons for the announcement, van Alpers claims “we used to go out and look for oil and that kind of sh*t, but it was so expensive, dude.” Reducing its estimated reserves of oil by an additional 250 billion barrels, van Alpers added, “the only oil left in this company is olive oil. We mix it with a little feta cheese, a little vinegar, briskly shake it up, and pour it over our salads at the board meets before we light up a blunt. Do you want some?”
  ¶ 10:16 AM

  Bollettino

LI is writing a review of Niall Ferguson’s new book for the National Post. And so we’ve been thinking about vedette English historians. And that got us thinking about AJP Taylor. We are shamefully ill versed in Taylor, and so we’ve been eagerly making up for our ignorance. He is a famously wonderful writer, who favors a crisp military organization of the sentences in his paragraphs. They have that imperative ring, like Napoleon’s dispatches to his troops. Except the imperatives, here, are about sorting through the on-coming mass of historical detail to charge through the progress of characters and their downfalls in endless traps of irony, accident and misunderstanding. Taylor is Rorty’s kind of historian – he has a weather eye for contingency. For him, the story of what caused WWI has to take into account that, on a simple level, it was caused by the assassination of a non-descript archduke and his frowsy wife in a peripheral town. The great structure of underlying causes remains, in Taylor’s view, petrified if the contingent act – and its prolongation in other contingent acts – does not come to free them. An essay on Taylor by John Boyer puts it well: Namier [ Taylor’s mentor] enabled Taylor to use the ‘great men and nation state” model of Central European political history in a way which revolutionized it twice over, once by the idea of catastrophe rather than progress as the principle mode of continuity and evolution in Central Europe, and again by contingency and accident as a new kind of individualism in political history. For what Taylor did to central European history of he neo-Rankean mode was to stand it on its head. He retained the idea of evolution but converted it into a catastrophic pattern for Germany rather than an optimistic providential one…”

Taylor begins one of his essays with a parable/joke that explains a little bit how a catastrophe can be a mode of continuity. A man is asking his parish priest about miracles, and he says, well, if I fell off the cathedral to the ground and was unhurt, what would that be? The priest replies, an accident. Well, says the man, what if I did it a second time. It would still be an accident, the priest replied. Okay, said the man, what if I did it a third time. Then it would be a habit, says the priest.

Such a view, at the moment, is in heavy disfavor. We live in a moment in which all the lumbering, bogus historical models that had their great moments in the 19th century, and after WWI, have been dusted off. Representative of this: a few years ago, Paul Kennedy wrote an essay in the Atlantic about Taylor that was an assault on the anti-generalist history he represented. The causes, in this return to a romantic historical philosophy, discover their moments, lurking underneath, as Intentional as the Furies, and only the shallow mind claims it is all accident or habit.

Well, too much looking for what is underneath or above does tend to distract one from what is right before one’s eyes. When Spain, this week, pretty much signaled that it is an unwilling member of the coalition of the willing, much rightwing indignation was spilled about appeasement. We thought the appeasement charge was bogus, but we also thought of Taylor’s description of a proposed alliance between Germany and England in 1905: ‘What the British wanted was an ally against Russia in the Far East. They would provide a navy, and the ally would provide the men. Very nice for the British. But from the German point of view it was an insane proposition… to commit themselves to a largescale war, a war of life and death, for the sake of British investments in Shanghai and the Yangtse valley.”

Exactly. Only a nation that mistakes the interests of its policy elite for morality itself would ask such a thing. We won’t draw the parallels any further.
  ¶ 7:09 PM