INSURGENT ANTHROPOLOGIES:

CAST AWAY ILLUSIONS, PART ONE

By Christopher Carrico

http://ccarrico.wordpress.com

1. THE TEA PARTY AND OTHER PALEO-CONS

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Just as it is ironic for the name of the fight against Western cultural imperialism to be
invoked in defense of oppressive traditions and inherited privilege in the non-Western
world, it is also ironic for the protection of Western values to be invoked in defense of
the social exclusion of (and violence and warfare against) non-Western peoples.

There is no use in denying that for some Europeans (and their descendants in North
America, Australia, etc.) a racial worldview in its paleo-conservative form still animates
much popular xenophobia, the scapegoating of immigrants, and the justification of
military and political-economic imperialism.

There is only so much that progressives can do to dialogue with far right racists.
Progressives can continue to articulate the biological facts about race, and continue to
testify about the historical and contemporary reproduction of racism and imperialism in
Euro-American societies. Most importantly, progressives can form alliances in anti-
racist struggles.

With the rise to prominence of the Tea Party in the United States, and the resurgence of
far right nationalisms in Europe, the threat from paleo-conservatism has become far
more pressing than many had imagined with the triumph of liberalism in the late
twentieth century. Just like the racist populisms of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, the paleo-con agenda promotes a notion of democracy that is restricted in
national, racial, religious and class terms. Like the Democratic Party before and after
the American Civil War, the Tea Party claims to believe in Democracy. Democracy, that
is, for white, property-owning American citizens of European Judaeo-Christian descent.

Whatever fantasies an intellectual like Marcus Garvey may have had about finding
common ground with white racial separatists, this position is untenable in a world where
the defense of white privilege remains an important factor in the political economy of
many of the world’s advanced capitalist nations. By way of racially stratified labor
forces, for example, and by way of the relative ease by which wars of aggression
against non-white peoples are justified in comparison with wars against the nations of
Europe and its settler colonies.

Furthermore, whatever illusions that some American trade unionists might have once
had that they could hide behind nationalism (ally themselves with nativists in order to
restrict wage competition by restricting immigration, boost the American economy
through militarism, etc.) it now seems likely that the new immigrants are the only hope
that the American labor movement has of ever re-building a mass base, and that
militarism has helped to bleed the American economy dry of resources that could have
been put to far more productive use, and more equitably shared. The struggle of
American laborers (clearer today than ever) is to fight alongside the immigrant laborer
for better working conditions – against the same enemy, the transnational capitalist
class. The struggle to end the War Economy also needs to be seen as inseparable
from the struggle for economic justice. The old populist and nationalist illusions must
today be rejected in no uncertain terms.
 2. NEO-CONS AND CLASSICAL LIBERALS

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For much of the neo-conservative and center-right as well, the specter of race still
haunts its rhetoric. On the surface, and in its public discourse, neo-conservatism
concedes to liberal democratic theory most of its main tenets about equality and
tolerance. But racism haunts the neo-conservative discourse through the use of coded
language that white voters and citizens recognize as being statements about race, even
when race is not directly mentioned. This discourse has often very clearly shaped
policy, and in the America that I grew up in, we all knew that talk about crime, drugs,
welfare and poverty was talk about race: regardless of the “color-blind” language, and
regardless of the empirical realities of these social phenomena.

But let’s set the far right aside for a moment, and take the neo-conservative rhetoric at
face value. The Western values that neo-conservatives claim that they are protecting
are not the values of ethnocentrism, colonialism, racism and imperialism. Rather, the
values that the neo-cons claim that they are protecting are the values of democracy and
reason, whose lineage they trace back to the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, the
values of universalism, the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and the values of science,
progress, equality, liberty and individualism that emerged out of the Western
Enlightenment. All of these, they claim or imply, form the basis of the superiority of
American and Western European values over the backwardness of much of the rest of
the world. The values of the non-Western world, according to these views, are often
rooted in blind adherence to repressive traditions, obedience to undemocratic, arbitrary
authority and inherited privilege, resistance to scientific and political progress, tribalism,
communalism and conflict based on an attachment to primordial identities, and the
suppression of individualism by conformity to the collective. Samuel Huntington
articulated these claims by reference to differences in “civilizational” values. According
to Huntington, differences in civilizational values often emerged out of differences in
religious heritage: the values of Islamic civilization, Confucian civilization, etc., were said
to be unavoidably headed towards conflict with the above mentioned values of the
enlightened West.

For neo-cons, the West is modern in all of the positive senses of this world, and its duty
– its historical mission -- is to remake the rest of the world in its own image. In some
sense, the neo-con rhetoric is quite faithful to Liberalism as it was classically conceived.
David Harvey has made this quite clear in lectures and public talks where he has
offered a close analysis of the speeches of George W. Bush, where he has revealed the
Bush administration’s affinity to the ideas of classical liberalism.

3. NEOLIBERAL THEORY

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Anyone who was interested in serious political economic analysis during the years
immediately before and after the end of the Cold War, was aware that there was
considerable continuity between the policies of the Reagan and George H. W. Bush
presidencies, and the Clinton presidency. Many of us noted during the 1990s that Bill
Clinton seemed to have completed the Reagan revolution: instituting strict welfare
reform policies at home, disciplining the labor market through economic policies which
exponentially increased the wealth of Wall Street, while keeping Main Street relatively
secure by offsetting stagnating or declining hourly wages with an increase in working
hours, and an expansion of the availability of consumer credit.

The Clinton administration (albeit with a Republican controlled Congress) helped

government absolve itself of responsibility for the poor and working poor, and helped big
capital suppress wages, and use the mechanisms of debt to increase its absolute
exploitation of the majority of American workers. Meanwhile, internationally, the Clinton
administration aggressively pursued the interests of American capital, in the name of a
new model of globalization, where a rising tide would lift all boats, and the invisible hand
of the market would bring not only economic prosperity, but also, freedom, liberty, and
happiness to the world’s poor as well as to the world’s rich.

Unfortunately, the real situation internationally was much like the domestic scene writ
large. Big capital, particularly finance capital, experienced a rapid increase in its power
worldwide. In the developed world, finance capital often flourished at the expense of
industrial capital. In some parts of the developing world (in what dependency theorists
once called capitalism’s “semi-periphery”) finance capital leveraged the rapid
development of industrial capital, and the consolidation of regional economic blocs and
the regional centralization of capitalist class power. These processes could be seen in
East Asia, in India, in South Africa, and in Brazil, for instance. Other areas of the
developing world, however, became more truly peripheral to the world’s capitalist
markets, and whole economies were devastated with a stroke of the pen by the World
Bank and the IMF, coupled with the aggressive pursuit by core capitalist countries of the
agendas of their own capitalist classes at the expense all other considerations.

This era, which we have come to call neo-liberal (according to its supporters as well as
to many of its detractors) was said to be one in which the notion of the nation-state was
declining in significance, and state-based regulation and intervention in the economy
was said to be counter-productive and a barrier to economic growth. The example of
the triumph of Western capitalism over the Soviet Union, and the collapse of Soviet-
style centralized and bureaucratized state socialism was seen, in these years just after
the fall of the Soviet Bloc, to be all the empirical evidence that was necessary to prove
that only free markets, laissez-faire capitalism, and the removal of state regulations
could create the environment in which dynamic economic growth was possible.

In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey (2005: 64-67) characterizes the

neoliberal theory of the state, as pioneered by theorists such as Friedrich Hayek, and
Milton Friedman, as having the following characteristics:
 1. “According to theory, the neoliberal state should favour strong individual
property rights, the rule of law, and the institutions of freely functioning
markets and free trade.”

2. Also according to the theory, divestment of state ownership of assets,

and privatization of nearly all state-owned industries and resources was
considered imperative to the proper functioning of dynamic economies.

3. With the emphasis on free markets, also came an emphasis on

personal and individual responsibility, and the subsequent withdraw of the
state from concerns over “welfare, education, health care, and even
pensions”.

4. All barriers to the free movement of capital needed to be swept aside.

5. Finally, and some would argue most ominously, democracy was

viewed with some suspicion in countries that did not have developed
economies and a robust middle class. As in the case of some of the
classical theories of liberal democracy, neo-liberal theorists are concerned
that the free functioning of the liberal economy be protected from the
sometimes irrational influences of the democratic masses, whose
demands for equality, a social safety net, collective ownership, or national
protection could irrationally interfere with the smooth functioning of
otherwise ideal liberal capitalist economies.

While these theories, for the economists, formed an internally consistent whole, there
were a series of contradictions inherent in their effects in the real world that have
contributed to the economic crisis which the world has experienced from 2007 until the
present.

Of particular interest to me, is one contradiction of the neoliberal state that was
apparent prior to the presidency of George W. Bush, which events since 9/11 have
exacerbated. That is, while neo-liberal theory emphasizes that The State ought not to
interfere in the economic realm, this rule is unevenly and unequally applied, in
predictable ways, and with predictable consequences. Under neo-liberalism, states
have been perfectly willing to increasingly use their coercive powers, not to bring the
excesses of capitalism into check. Rather, under the neo-liberalism, the state has
increasingly used coercion and force to act on behalf of capital, in order to discipline
labor and agents of dissent in the capitalist metropole and peripheries, but also,
increasingly, to attempt to discipline any challenge to the continued dominance of world
capitalism under American hegemony in the 21 st century.
These contradictions, which so many progressives had hoped would be resolved under
the Obama administration, to more “moderate” capitalist policies such as those of
Keynesianism or of a return to the welfare state policies of the mid-20 th century.
Unfortunately, most of the tendencies towards the coercive use of the state on behalf of
capital have continued, and I would argue have even been expanded and deepened,
under the administration of Barack Obama. My next blog, Part Two of “Cast Away
Illusions” will further explore the contradictions which have led the state, under the
leadership of Obama, to behave as a bully on behalf of Big Capital, and to continue to
pursue, on the international stage, a doomed policy of American Full Spectrum
Dominance.