Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, October 15, 2007

Anti-Political Perspective Are Always Anti-Realist Perspectives

I disagree with those self-identified "realists" in yesterday's MundiMoot who would claim uniquely to focus on the "real" causes of war and suffering, and claim uniquely to offer up "real" solutions to these problems -- where these problems and their solutions are figured as matters primarily of "engineering," usually with the implication (it seems to me) that social, cultural, political analyses are typically a matter of mostly spinning one's wheels.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I would say that it is wrong to think that eliminating oil dependency would eliminate the cause of war. The same goes for comparably reductive proposals.

Every war is a kind of class war, or as Smedley Butler put the point more pithily (and more accurately), every war is a racket. That is to say, every war is perpetuated and propagandized by a few against majorities who (soon enough) always disapprove of it. These few make war precisely because war is expected to be profitable to that few (and they are almost always, in fact, right to expect this -- their monstrous assumption is correct).

Eliminate "The Prize" of Oil and "The Great Game" will continue over territory, over water, over attention, over longevity.

Where representatives are actually beholden to the people war is an incomparably more difficult pursuit. Where profiting from war is unlikely war is an incomparably less appealing pursuit to those few who engage in it.

If you want to stop war you must make the always mobilized corporate-militarist societies more genuinely democratic (steeply progressive taxes, free diverse press, truly free and fair elections, universal healthcare, education, basic income), and make genuine defensive and policing infrastructure a completely non-profit activity.

It is never a socially indifferent accumulation of technical capacities that is emancipatory, nor is the lack or lag of such an autonomously accumulating toy pile ever the cause of injustice or war.

These are social and political problems for which administration, education, agitation, organization, participation are the solutions. One grasps this in contemplating the actual political agitation and organizing, the actual social struggle and administration, the actual policy making and public deliberation that would have to drive the would-be realist "engineering" outcomes sensibly laundry listed by my cleareyed cockeyed critics: "make the switch to cleaner cars," "get rid of coal plants," eliminate "preventable environmental sources [of] disease," and so on.

Our instruments express and exacerbate our politics, they are not a substitute for them. To forget this (or fail to take it seriously) is never to become more realistic but always to stare into a mirage and lose oneself there.

1 comment:

VDT said...

Noam Chomsky once said: The Iranian issue I don't think has much to do with nuclear weapons frankly. Nobody is saying Iran should have nuclear weapons -- nor should anybody else. But the point in the Middle East, as distinct from North Korea, is that this is center of the world's energy resources. Originally the British and secondarily the French had dominated it, but after the Second World War, it's been a U.S. preserve. That's been an axiom of U.S. foreign policy, that it must control Middle East energy resources. It is not a matter of access as people often say. Once the oil is on the seas it goes anywhere. In fact if the United States used no Middle East oil, it'd have the same policies. If we went on solar energy tomorrow, it'd keep the same policies. Just look at the internal record, or the logic of it, the issue has always been control. Control is the source of strategic power.