Philosophy.Com

Political liberalism

I watched Insight on SBS the other night.It was the first time for a while I'd seen the program and the one I watrched was called Aussie Rules. It was about immigration & Islam in the context of the war on terror. The core mesage from the conservatives (some understood themselves to be liberals) was the need for an affirmation of Australian values by Muslims immigrating to Australia. These needed to be accepted by all Muslim immigrants.

Its key reference point was a February speech by Peter Costello, the federal Treasurer. (My post on this speech is here). In the speech Costello said:

Before entering a mosque, visitors are asked to take off their shoes, this is a sign of respect. If you have strong objection to walking in your socks, don't enter a mosque. Before becoming an Australian, you will be asked to subscribe to certain values. If you have strong objection to those values, don't come to Australia.

Costello more or less outlined what he saw as some essential Australian values - they included things like democracy and personal freedom for men and women---and he fired a shot to those who might not want to embrace these Australian values.This forms the horizons of the public debate; a debate that is confused by a tacit liberal (subjectivist) conception of values that undercuts what is actually being argued--the objectivity of Aussie values.

An excerpt from Insight's Aussie Rules program:

JENNY BROCKIE: Brett Mason, why is the Government feeling the need to urge us all to embrace these Australian values now?

SENATOR BRETT MASON:

Well, I think Mr Costello in his speech to the Sydney Institute outlined that really rather well when he said that in Australia it's important [for three things to be accepted]... that when citizens come to Australia they swear an oath of allegiance and it's first of all to Australia and its people, secondly to democracy and its precepts and liberty, and finally, of course.... to the rule of law made by democratically elected parliaments, subject always to the Constitution. And that's the oath of allegiance and that is terribly important. And the point the Treasurer was making, and indeed the Prime Minister made, is that unless people accept, accept all those precepts, there's no glue that unifies the country.

Note the slide between 'citizens' 'immigrants' 'people. ' Though Senator Mason is talking about immigrants he also means citizens.The slide suggests that the glue that unifies the nation-state are particular values backed by the authority of the state.

The program continued:

JENNY BROCKIE: But that would have been the case at any time in our history. Why now are we having this discussion?

SENATOR BRETT MASON: Because it is a matter of concern in the community.

JENNY BROCKIE: Why?

SENATOR BRETT MASON: Because people feel that perhaps all Australians are not adopting democratic precepts, their principal of allegiance may not be to the rule of law, it may be elsewhere.

So we have the switch from immigrants to some Australians (ie., Muslims) living in Australia not accepting the rule of law. Note the slide from 'Aussie values' to the 'rule of law.'

The program then switches to a criticism of multiculturalism because it's conception of diversity and difference does not bind the nation together. The argument is that multiculturalism divides and segregates as it creates groups and pockets of people that of course then feel that there are certain elements of superiority and inferiority. The conservative response to that in the context of the war on terror we need to be united. The alternative to multiculturalism is integration to ensure that everyone feels Australian. It's what binds us together that is important--not differences---and that's why accceptance of Aussie values is important. What binds us together is a belief in Australia, its people, democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, and willing to speak English.

Aussie values are actually liberal values. But Muslims not accept Aussie values and the rule of law. That was the conservative argument on the program. So why was the debate confused by a tacit liberal conception of values?

One attempt to address this was by WASSIM DOUREIHI, HIZB UT-TAHRIR, who pointed out:

This is the problem with the current debate. There needs to be a very clear demarcation between what is value and what is law. When Peter Costello made the comment and made the reference to entering a mosque, yes, any Muslim will ask you to remove your shoes before entering a mosque but in no way does Islam say you must be a Muslim before you come to the mosque. So when we exist in this society - and any citizen within this country, they have to abide by a single set of laws and no-one is above that but to suggest that we must believe in a set of values because we live in a particular land, that is completely wrong.

He's right. There is a distinction between values and the law. To collapse the two is hold to a particular conception of the public law. That conception is not a liberal one, which works with a "positivist" conception of the law in which law and morally are separate.

This liberal distinction between value and law enables us to seen that instead of saying 'Muslim' we should say 'Islamist extremists'; ie., a violent minority, a very small, violent, bigoted minority within the Muslim community that breaks the law. on political grounds.. We need to clearly distinguish between Islamist jihadi extremism - which is basically a political ideology grounded in religion - and the moderate mainstream beliefs of most Muslims who live within the rule of law. Moderate Muslim-Austrlaians accept liberal values, even though they have different values to Christian-Australians. To say Muslim is to tar the Muslim community because those who break the law are an an extremely violent minority.

What sits in the background to this debate is political liberalism. Political liberalism is presently the dominant philosophical theory of liberalism. Its main features are the beliefs that the state should remain neutral between the various conceptions of the good existing in society, which requires that the state not intentionally seeks to advantage any particular ethical or religious doctrine, but rather protect individual citizens’ rights to freedom and equality in their choosing of their conceptions of the good.

Furthermore, it is an essential feature of political liberalism that it aspires to a justification of this order that itself does not rely on any controversial theory of truth or good. Ideally, political liberalism should only require citizens to affirm the reasonableness of liberal policies at the political level (hence, political liberalism) and not their truth at any metaphysical level. Theorists of political liberalism believe that citizens will be able to endorse such institutions regardless of their comprehensive ethical doctrine because they do not seek to unfairly disadvantage such doctrines.

This highlights the distinction betweeen conservatism and liberalsim. Many of those engaging in the debate who see themselves as liberals (eg., Costello and Mason) are tacitly arguing against the tenets of political liberalism. They are denying that the state should remain neutral between the various conceptions of the good existing in society, because they are arguing that the state should intentionally seek to advantage a particular ethical or religious doctrine .

Habermas & the force of reason

David McInerney, who runs Intervention has sent some interesting material. One article is Warren Montag's 'The Pressure of the Street: Habermas's Fear of the Masses'. He says that Habermas's texts, despite their "reasoned" air, their high serious refusal of the metaphor and the wordplay that characterizes so much writing across the genres, have their own silent spaces.These are gaps that do not interrupt the order of arguments but make that order possible and even believable. And no work exhibits such silences more exorbitantly than early text, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

Montag's point of departure is a single sentence: "Laws passed under the "pressure of the street" [dem Druck der Strasse] could hardly be understood any longer as embodying the reasonable consensus of publicly debating private persons" . He says that:

The proposition contained in this utterance is repeated throughout the Public Sphere: that if any force other than the mere force of reason is brought to bear in the public sphere, rational debate ceases, the universal is lost and the necessarily violent rule of the particular is established, with the certainty that one particularism will soon be replaced by others.

At the end of the Public Sphere Habermas describes the rise of particularism in late capitalism. His argument is that the degradation of the public sphere in the post-war period is the outcome of the conflict of two opposing forces: monopoly capital and the labor movement to which it inevitably gives rise and incessantly provokes.

Montag says that Habermas does not take these forces to be equivalent. He says that Habermas argues that:

if the irrational particularity of the monopolies could be curbed by a state itself heeding the directives that issued from rational critical debate and discussion, the rationality of the market could be restored and its wealth socially managed in such a way as to guarantee an "affluent society" in which the harmony of interests would permit the emergence of a genuine universality. The possibility of such a state, however, depends in turn on the existence of a genuine rational-critical public sphere which the monopolies have destroyed through mass media; thus, the impasse at which Habermas arrives at the end of his book, recognizing that of all the critics of the public sphere, it was the great "liberalists" of the nineteenth-century who accurately diagnosed its fatal malady.

The conception of the public sphere is an ideal one: it is understood by Kant in What is Enlightenment to be a realm free from all coercion or the intrusion of force, in which individuals would express their opinions about all things religious, political, economic and social solely in words, refraining from any action, content to submit their arguments to the adjudication of reason alone. Only in this way could a public achieve enlightenment, divesting itself of the dogmas and superstitions that are impediments to progress. The world's rulers would thus be well advised to grant the freedom to argue and to withdraw from the public sphere in the same way that they should allow the market to set wages and prices, no matter how temporarily inconvenient such developments might be.

So what does Habermas make of this contrast between the really existing public sphere and the ideal one?

The server went down from a DOS spam attack from Saudi Arabia.

Whilst I was offline I came down at Victor Harbor for the weekend but I forgot to foward the Montag article down. I'll pick the post up when I return to Adelaide on Monday or Tuesday.

national security state

Have a read this post about the developing characteristics of the national security state in the US controlled by the Republicans. In this post Glenn Greenwald says:

The excesses and extremist conduct in which our government [the Bush Adminsitration] now engages has become so commonplace as to be mind-numbing. We detain U.S. citizens and stick them in military prisons with no trial, charges or even access to lawyers. We use torture as an interrogation tool. We use secret, off-the-book Soviet-era gulags that are beyond the reach of the law. We send people to the most repugnant governments to be tortured. And the President has expressly embraced the theory that he has the power to break the law.

And:

There certainly appears to be no limits on what Bush followers will endorse in the name of fighting The Enemies, domestic ones included, sometimes most prominently. And what is so significant about this is that the institutions which previously existed as a safeguard against arbitrary punishment and abuse of power -- things like due process guarantees, Congressional oversight, an adversarial media, whistleblowers -- have all been steadily eroded. The administration has seized the power to arrest people without charges, hold them in secret prisons, use torture to interrogate them, etc. That is all out in the open and prompts defenses of these practices from its followers. That makes the attempt to equate political opposition with criminality and even treason -- one of the most common tactics of the administration and its followers -- all the more dangerous.

The Euston Manifesto: some queries

The Euston Manifesto. It is applauded by William Kristol at the Weekly Standard for its muscular liberalism that is characterised by strength and confidence in the defense of liberty, and drawing a line between a soft and relativist left and the strong and confident democratic left that the signers seek to invigorate. The Manifesto is being discussed over at Larvatus Prodeo in the context of Will Hutton's interpretation in The Observer that the Manifesto offers a new direction for the left.

It is hard to disagree with a lot of the Euston Manifesto's principles as they are solid liberal democratic ones in relation to democracy, human rights, equality and developments of freedom, internationalism, the free exchange of ideas. The Manifesto is in favour of a two state solution to the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, is opposed to racism and terrorism and stands strongly behind open source software and fair use. It opposes the way the social and economic foundations on which the liberal democracies have developed are marked by deep inequalities of wealth and income ---even if the word 'capitalism' is not mentioned.

Clearly the Manifesto expresses voices on the Left, as Kristol acknowledges when he says that we at The Weekly Standard heartily disagree with the Manifesto's commitment to domestic and economic policies.Where then is my hestiation? Or my reservation? Where are the points of disagreements? Can we draw Kristol's distinction between soft and relativist left and the strong and confident democratic left? Note the way that democratic has been left out of the soft and realtivist left, inplying that this left is anti-democratic or totalitarian.

Let me state my reservations with two passages. The first is about America. The Manifesto states:

We reject without qualification the anti-Americanism now infecting so much left-liberal (and some conservative) thinking. This is not a case of seeing the US as a model society. We are aware of its problems and failings. But these are shared in some degree with all of the developed world. The United States of America is a great country and nation. It is the home of a strong democracy with a noble tradition behind it and lasting constitutional and social achievements to its name. Its peoples have produced a vibrant culture that is the pleasure, the source-book and the envy of millions. That US foreign policy has often opposed progressive movements and governments and supported regressive and authoritarian ones does not justify generalized prejudice against either the country or its people.

The United States of America is not just a great country and nation. It is also an imperial power, the only one in the world of nations. There is no mention of the US as an imperial power, pre-emption or American exceptionalism in the Manifesto that led neo-con Americans to disregard international law and preach Hobbesian "realpolitik", in which right is defined by strength and authorizes preventive nuclear strikes.

Does seeing the US this way, and being critical of the Bush Administration's use of power to further imperial interests, mean that one is simply anti-American? Hardly, given Fukuyama's recent argument. Surely a good internationalist means that one must be opposed to the way the neo-cons in the Bush Administration routinely trash international law and institutions because these are seen as constraints on the use of US power.

The second passage is one about modernity:

We reject fear of modernity, fear of freedom, irrationalism, the subordination of women; and we reaffirm the ideas that inspired the great rallying calls of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century: liberty, equality and solidarity; human rights; the pursuit of happiness. These inspirational ideas were made the inheritance of us all by the social-democratic, egalitarian, feminist and anti-colonial transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — by the pursuit of social justice, the provision of welfare, the brotherhood and sisterhood of all men and women. None should be left out, none left behind. We are partisans of these values. But we are not zealots. For we embrace also the values of free enquiry, open dialogue and creative doubt, of care in judgement and a sense of the intractabilities of the world. We stand against all claims to a total -- unquestionable or unquestioning -- truth.

Do we not live in postmodernity? What is total -- unquestionable or unquestioning -- truth? The absolute truth of a fundamentalist physics? How does that square with, differing political perspectives and traditions, historical truth and competing historical narratives?

wealth of networks

Back to Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press), which I began to explore in this post. I note that John Quiggin is reading the book.

In the earlier post I had got as far as introducing the category of a non-market mode of production. Benkler says this results in a:

... flourishing nonmarket sector of information, knowledge, and cultural production, based in the networked environment, and applied to anything that the many individuals connected to it can imagine. Its outputs, in turn, are not treated as exclusive property. They are instead subject to an increasingly robust ethic of open sharing, open for all others to build on, extend, and make their own.

Benkler adds that, though the presence and importance of nonmarket production has become counterintuitive to people living in market-based economies at the end of the twentieth century, the emergence of precisely this possibility and practice lies at the very heart of my claims about the ways in which liberal commitments are translated into lived experiences in the networked environment and forms the factual foundation of the political-theoretical and the institutional-legal discussion that occupies the book.

I have no problems with a non-material mode of production as I accept that a social formation (Australia) can have diverse modes of production; and I can readily accept the existence of a networked information economy that shapes and organizes how we make information, how we get it, how we speak to others, and how others speak to us. Benkler says that his basic claim is that the diversity of ways of organizing information production and use opens a range of possibilities for pursuing the core political values of liberal societies---individual freedom, a more genuinely participatory political system, a critical culture, and social justice. Therein lies the wealth of networks.

How does this work?

Benkler's answer makes an appeal to individual autonomy. He says:

The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere. This enhanced autonomy is at the core of all the other improvements I describe. Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community.

That's pretty right about autonomy. Moreover, writing for the public by becoming part of the blogosphere helps us to connect and co-operate with others in the public sphere.

Fukuyama, modernity, struggle for recognition

Fukuyama's The End of History was not a simple reworking of Weber's theory of modernity as implied in my previous post did not argue that a desire for higher living standards--not liberty--was universal, and that these created a middle class that tended to seek political participation, with democracy eventually emerging as a byproduct of this process. Fukuyama's philosophy of history advanced a far more complex Hegelian argument than this kind of utilitarian liberalism, that is so deeply entrenched in Australia's public culture.

The text argued that the quest for recognition and the promptings of desire--driving respectively the struggle for equality and the advance of science--were the two motors of history. In the structure of the narrative as a whole, Fukuyama's assignment of their respective significance was unequivocal; the desire that lay behind the desire of economic man was a totally non-economic drive, the struggle for recognition. It was the political dialectic so unleashed that was the primary motor of human history. Hence the End of History text had a deeply agnostic conception of politics, and it this dialectic of recognition that gave the text its philosophical strength.

As Perry Anderson explains the philosophical basis of this construction came from the:

.... reworking of Hegel's dialectic of recognition by a Russian exile in France, Alexandre Kojeve, for whom centuries of struggles between masters and slaves--social classes--were on the brink of issuing into a definitive condition of equality, a "universal and homogeneous state" that would bring history to a halt: a conception he identified with socialism, and later with capitalism, if always with an inscrutable irony. Fukuyama adopted this narrative structure but grounded it in an ontology of human nature, quite alien to Kojeve, that was derived from Plato and came--along with a much more conservative outlook--from his Straussian formation. Kojeve and Strauss had valued each other as interlocutors and shared many intellectual reference points, but politically--as well as metaphysically--they were very distant. Strauss, an unyielding thinker of the right, had no time for Hegel, let alone Marx. In his eyes, Kojeve's deduction from their conceptions of liberty and equality could only presage a leveling, planetary tyranny. He believed in particular regimes and natural hierarchy.

The struggle for recogntion was a theory of mortal conflict. Hegel and Kojeve were, each in his own time (Jena, Stalingrad), philosophers of war.

What was being presented was not Hegel per se but in Hegel-as-interpreted-by-Kojeve, given Fukuyama's claim of an innate, ahistorical drive for recognition, built into "human nature". Hegel, in contrast, argued that recognition arises as a pressing need for the preservation of life; without recognition of one's property rights, your life is spent patrolling your boundaries, chasing away people encroaching on your property. It is no mysterious "drive for recognition", as it is a perfectly normal human need that arises from specific social condition and the necessity of the rule of law.

Fukuyama then explored the question whether or not the recognition available to citizens of contemporary liberal democracies is "completely satisfying?" He says that the long-term future of liberal democracy, and the alternatives to it that may one day arise, depend above all on the answer to this question.

He sketches two broad responses, from the Left and the Right to the question:

The Left would say that universal recognition in liberal democracy is necessarily incomplete because capitalism creates economic inequality and requires a division of labor that ipso facto implies unequal recognition. In this respect, a nation's absolute level of prosperity provides no solution, because there will continue to be those who are relatively poor and therefore invisible as human beings to their fellow citizens. Liberal democracy, in other words, continues to recognise equal people unequally.

Fukuyama says that the second, and in his view more powerful, criticism of universal recognition comes from the Right that was profoundly concerned with the leveling effects of the French Revolution's commitment to human equality:

This Right found its most brilliant spokesman in the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose views were in some respects anticipated by that great observer of democratic societies, Alexis de Tocqueville. Nietzsche believed that modern democracy represented not the self-mastery of former slaves, but the unconditional victory of the slave and a kind of slavish morality. The typical citizen of a liberal democracy was a "last man" who, schooled by the founders of modern liberalism, gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favour of comfortable self-preservation. Liberal democracy produced "men without chests," composed of desire and reason but lacking thymos, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. The last man had no desire to be recognised as greater than others, and without such desire no excellence or achievement was possible. Content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame for being unable to rise above those wants, the last man ceased to be human.

He's right about the signifiance of Nietzsche. Fukuyama, locating himeself on the Right rather than the Left, then asks a series of questions about the last man of utilitarianism. He says that:

Following Nietzsche's line of thought, we are compelled to ask the following questions: Is not the man who is completely satisfied by nothing more than universal and equal recognition something less than a full human being, indeed, an object of contempt, a "last man" with neither striving nor aspiration? Is there not a side of the human personality that deliberately seeks out struggle, danger, risk, and daring, and will this side not remain unfulfilled by the "peace and prosperity" of contemporary liberal democracy? Does not the satisfaction of certain human beings depend on recognition that is inherently unequal? Indeed, does not the desire for unequal recognition constitute the basis of a livable life, not just for bygone aristocratic societies, but also in modern liberal democracies? Will not their future survival depend, to some extent, on the degree to which their citizens seek to be recognised not just as equal, but as superior to others? And might not the fear of becoming contemptible "last men" not lead men to assert themselves in new and unforeseen ways, even to the point of becoming once again bestial "first men" engaged in bloody prestige battles, this time with modern weapons?

It is this agonistic conception of politics that is missing from the latter Fukuyama.

Fukuyama's 'After the Neocons'

An excerpt from Francis Fukuyama's After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads. Though Fukuyama continues to work in the horizons of his earlier The End of History and the Last Man, and remains fully committed to the American mission of spreading democracy round the world (including the use of all effective means at the disposal of Washington to do so), he now presents his position in the form of a "break" with neoconservatism.

If you recall, the argument of Fukuyama's End of History text was that with the defeat of Communism, following that of Fascism, no improvement on liberal capitalism as a form of society in modernity was any longer imaginable. The world was still full of conflicts, which would continue to generate unexpected events, but they would not alter the trajectory to a prosperous, peaceful democracy based on private property, free markets and regular elections. These institutions were the terminus of historical development in modernity as the whole world will modernize eventually.

A problem here is that after the Cold War democratic capitalism could no longer be simply identified with a Pax Americana and Americana, since a fault line between the two opens up, (eg., Japanese capitalism). However, for the neoconservative core, American power is the engine of the world's liberty, in the sense that there neither is, nor can be, any discrepancy between them. Modernize is more complex than being identified with the American version of liberal modernity.

Fukuyama understood modernity in a linear fashion along Weber lines. Weber held that modernity is the progressive disenchantment of the world. Superstitions disappear; cultures grow more homogeneous; life becomes increasingly rational, the trend is progressively in one direction. Consequently, Fukuyama, interpreted reactionary political movements and atavistic cultural differences, when they flare up, as irrational backlashes against modernization. He interpreted Fascism and Bolshevism: as backlashes against the general historical tendency. Jihadism is also a revolt, fomented among Muslim emigres in Western Europe, against the secularism and consumerism of liberal modernity. The "last man" was Nietzsche's term for the citizen of the completely modern society; "specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart" was Weber's description.

This is a limited understanding of modernity, since fascism and communism can be seen as deploying the instrumental rationality of an industrialized capitalist modernity, rather than being irrational backlashes against the liberal version of modernity.

If Fukuyama presents his position in the form of a "break" with neoconservatism in After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads, then he does so by considering the principles underpinning neo-conservatism in chapter one. Fukuyama says that:

....if ideas were drivers of policy, the ideas held by neoconservatives were themselves complex and subject to differing interpretations. The administration's foreign policy in particular did not flow ineluctably from the views of earlier generations of people who considered themselves neoconservatives. The neoconservative legacy is complex and diverse, tracing its roots back to the early 1940s. It has generated a coherent body of ideas that informed a wide range of domestic and foreign policy choices.

He adds that:

Four common principles or threads ran through much of this thought up through the end of the Cold War: a concern with democracy, human rights, and more generally the internal politics of states; a belief that U.S. power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and often undermines its own ends.

The Bush administration had a complex relationship to the neoconservative doctrine and agenda that dictated its foreign policy during the president's first term: a foreign policy involving regime change, benevolent hegemony, unipolarity, pre-emption and American exceptionalism.

In this first chapter Fukuyama argues that there were three main areas of biased judgement that lead to mistakes in the Bush Administration's stewardship of US foreign policy in its first term: it mischaracterised the threat to the US from Islam; failed to anticipate the negative reaction to benevolent hegemony; and failed to anticipate the requirements for pacifiying and reconstructing Iraq. I think that 'mistakes' here does not have enough bite. The Bush administration foreign policy is in jeopardy due to the the Iraqi insurgency. It is the will of the resistance to the US occupation that threatens the Bush Doctrine.

He argues that neo-conservatism has become identified with the Bush administration. He means those like Charles Krauthammer, are both the intellectual cheerleader of a politics of American supremacy that appears to recognize no limit to its exercise of power, and apologists for a Bush Administration that operates on the basis of the crudest form of American exceptionalism? My judgement is that neoconservative principles have turned into knee-jerk "American exceptionalism" based on the superiority of American values that authorizes the US to act toward the rest of the world as benevolent hegemons, and exempts the US from the considerations of deference and prudence by which we expect the behavior of other states to be constrained. Neoconservatism has merged with the politics of the jingoist and capitalist American right.

Fukuyama argues that there is a need for a new foreign policy position. He says there are four main approaches to US foreign policy today: neoconservativism that is opposed to international liberal wishfulness and the amorality of realpolitik; realism (in the Kissinger mould), a Wilsonian liberal internationalism (international law and institutions) and Jacksonian nationalists (nativist and isolationist). None are adequate for a post 9/11 world--what is needed he argues is a realistic Wilsonianism. Wilsonian because Fukuyama wants to retain the spirit of liberal internationalism that informs neoconservative critiques of foreign-policy realism; realistic because Fukuyama recognizes the limits of military power and the need for multilateral cooperation and engagement.

Let's continue to try to shape the world, but let's not be so jingoistic about it is the argument.

the networked information economy

Over at public opinion I've often deployed the duality of the old and new economy as a shorthand way of conceptualizing the structural changes that have been taking place in culture, society and the economy since the 1980s. I've argued that Australia seems to be stuck in the old industrial economy (agriculture, mining and manufacturing) and is lagging behind the shift to the new economy when compared to countries like India.

However, I've never really explored what is meant by the 'new economy.' Is it a new mode of production? Or is Iinformation technology and the internet layered onto an old industrial economy that is opened out to a global market? Something basic is shifting in the economy, but I've found it hard to put my finger on it.

I can begin to do that now as Brad Delong reports that Yochai Benkler, a professor of law at Yale Law School, has just published The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press). The book and individual chapters -- is available from Benkler under Creative Commons with an associated wiki so as to provide a real research tool, annotated bibliography, and platform for collaborative learning.

In Chapter One Benkler says that two main shifts can be discerned in advanced economies:

The first move, in the making for more than a century, is to an economy centered on information (financial services, accounting, software, science) and cultural (films, music) production, and the manipulation of symbols (from making sneakers to branding them and manufacturing the cultural significance of the Swoosh). The second is the move to a communications environment built on cheap processors with high computation capabilities, interconnected in a pervasive network---the phenomenon we associate with the Internet. It is this second shift that allows for an increasing role for nonmarket production in the information and cultural production sector, organized in a radically more decentralized pattern than was true of this sector in the twentieth century.

That's a description of the new economy. So what is Benkler argument about the significance of these shifts?

Benkler says that the basic argument in the first part of the book is that we are seeing the emergence of a new stage in the information economy, which I call the "networked information economy." This is displacing the industrial information economy that typified information production from about the second half of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century:

What characterizes the networked information economy is that decentralized individual action---specifically, new and important cooperative and coordinate action carried out through radically distributed, nonmarket mechanisms that do not depend on proprietary strategies---plays a much greater role than it did, or could have, in the industrial information economy. The catalyst for this change is the happenstance of the fabrication technology of computation, and its ripple effects throughout the technologies of communication and storage. The declining price of computation, communication, and storage have, as a practical matter, placed the material means of information and cultural production in the hands of a significant fraction of the world's population---on the order of a billion people around the globe.

The removal of the physical constraints on effective information production has made human creativity and the economics of information itself the core structuring facts in the new networked information economy.

What this means is that nonmarket production coupled with basic nonproprietary, motivations and organizational forms are becoming more important to the information production system; nonmarket production is very important as individuals can reach and inform or edify millions connected to the network around the world; and rise of effective, large-scale cooperative efforts---peer production of information, knowledge, and culture typified by the emergence of free and open-source software, Wikipedia, and the powerful supercomputer SETI@Home. The best way to view this in terms of 'a new mode of production emerging in the middle of the most advanced economies in the world---those that are the most fully computer networked and for which information goods and services have come to occupy the highest-valued roles.' The result is a flourishing nonmarket sector of information, knowledge, and cultural production, based in the networked environment.

John Quiggin has blogged on blogs and wiki, to Wikipedia; written an op.ed. on innovation and the internet; and given a lecture on the role of non-economic motives in Internet-based innovations, including open source software, blogs and wikis. But I'm not sure whether he has made the theoretical shift to a new (nonmarket) mode of production. Benkler's shift to this is a significant conceptual shift.

Beyond Workchoices

Mario Tronti's The Strategy of Refusal asks a key question: 'At what point does the political State come to manage at least some part of the economic mechanism?' His answer is along these lines:

When this economic mechanism can begin to use the political State itself as an instrument of production --- the State as we have come to understand it, that is, as a moment of the political reproduction of the working class. The "end of laissez-faire" means, fundamentally, that working class articulation of capitalist development can no longer function on the basis of spontaneous objective mechanisms: it must be subjectively imposed by political initiatives taken by the capitalists themselves, as a class. Leaving aside all the post- and neo-Keynesian ideologies, only Keynes has provided the capitalist point of view with a formidable subjective leap forward, perhaps comparable in historical importance with the leap whih Lenin made possible from the working class point of view.

Well times have moved on. It's no longer Keynes. It's Hayek and a neo-liberal mode of governance that shapes the political initiatives of business towards the working class.

As we know the Howard Government's 'WorkChoices' legislation, which took effect in March, was designed to undercut collective bargaining, and it signified a transfer of power from workers to corporations. WorkChoices would increase, not reduce, complexity; lower minimum standards; widen inequality in the labour market; and curtail internationally recognised employee rights.

Secondly, the arguments in favour of Workchoices failed to address, let alone account of, the large body of relevant empirical research and evidence that showed that individual contracts do not, necessarily produce higher productivity or higher wages than collective bargaining.

What's more, the WorkChoices legislation ensures that individuals and organisations who suggest including 'prohibited content' in agreements are to be fined tens of thousands of dollars. The Minister can decide what is 'prohibited content’. This interference in agreement-making runs completely counter to the rhetoric of ‘choice’ and removing 'third party' involvement from relations between employees and employers. Thsi is government that involves itself in relations between employers and employees.

What we also know is that the push for individual contracts for employees overturns a century of collective efforts to create basic rights and a 'fair go' in Australian workplaces. If this shift in power is what is really happening in relations between employers and employees, then the individual workplace contracts can be placed in a wider debate about a neo-liberal Australian moving away from collective values towards individualistic values.

This is highlighted by David Peetz, who says in this op. ed in the Courier-Mail that there is still more to come. First up is the Independent Contractors Bill. Its details are unknown and it is yet to be introduced into Parliament. But the philosophy behind the Independent Contractors Bill is why can't we all sell our services to those who wish to purchase them?The intention is for employees become "independent" contractors and the Bill will make it even harder for "independent" contractors to join a union or collectively bargain and ensure they are not subject to the minimum standards that protect ordinary employees.

Peetz says:
The recent sackings by Optus give us an idea of what may follow. Optus last week sacked 60 to 70 employees, citing what might translate as "operational reasons". The details are unclear, but there are reports that the retrenched workers were told at meetings they could attend a free seminar to find out how to become "independent" contractors, working for a company contracted to Optus, and that they could buy their Optus vans if they wished. As "independent" contractors, of course, they would have no entitlements to sick leave, holidays, penalty rates or the like, would be responsible for their own workers compensation, insurance, ABN, taxation and vehicle upkeep, and would of course have no protection against unfair dismissal.
There's the shift to away from collectivity to individuality of the market.

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Deirdre McCloskey: 2006 James Buchanan Lecture

An interesting lecture by Deidre McCloskey--the 2006 James Buchanan one. It starts by mentioning the classical republican virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and prudence, which are the political virtues that contribute to the ancient sense of contributing to the survival and flourishing of a polis, a small Greek city state. She then mentions the three so-called "theological" virtues of faith, hope, and love. Sounds so old fashioned doesn' t it, especially to those diehard positivists who reject ethical reasoning as "emotivism" ---- ie., good and evil are names that merely signify our desires and passions.

These seven virtues McCloskey claims, form a roughly adequate philosophical psychology, and adds that you 'can test their adequacy by imagining a person or a community that notably lacks one of them. A loveless life is terrible; a community without justice is, too.' That puts a question mark under the Hobbesian contractarian tradition and the utilitarian tradition of economists and calculators, as both traditions do not acknowledge the virtues in a flourishing being; preferring instead to assume prudence as an axiom, and then derives the other virtues, such as a just polity or happiness, from that axiom. Neither lead to the ethical world of citizenship.

The second part of the Buchanan lecture makes a theroetical turn. McCloskey says:

Martha Nussbaum's recent book, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006), attempts to add the love of others to the accepted axioms of political philosophy. It criticizes on this count the strictly Hobbesian/Gauthieresque contractarian's assumption of Prudence Only; or the Lockean/ Rawlsian contractarian's Prudence-With-A-Version-of-Justice. In a brief, bumper sticker version of a complicated project, Nussbaum's book is about love-adding: bringing our care for others in at the start. She says that such a supplement will preserve the contractarian program in political philosophy---the masculine "strength" and parsimony of which she sometimes admires---yet yield a civil society in which the severely handicapped, the old, the foreigners in poor countries, and the animals will be treated with appropriate dignity.

The strictly Hobbesian/Gauthieresque contractarian's assumption of Prudence Only is the instrumental reason of the self-seeking individual who plays the game of maximizing the rational interest of the individual within a given constitution.

McCloskey then quotes a passage from Nussbaum's text:

I think it implausible [she writes] to suppose that one can extract justice from a starting point that does not include it in some form,and I believe that the purely prudential starting point is likely to lead in a direction that is simply different from the direction we would take if we focused on ethical norms from the start (p. 57).

McCloskey adds that Nussbaum is right: you can't get virtue Y from a starting point consisting only of virtue X. Y has to be in from the start. You have to put the rabbits in the hat if you are going to pull them out.That is, in order to have a society that shows prudence, justice, love, faith, hope, courage, and temperance we need to arrange to have people who are . . . . prudent, just, loving, faithful, hopeful, courageous, and temperate "from the start."

McCloskey concludes the second section by affirming the insights of civic republican.She says that there is no point to the modern (post Machiavellian/Hobbesian) reduction of the theoretical project to a simple few of the virtues of Homo economicus. The simple few lead to societies in which free riding is rampant. If we want flourishing people we need to raise up virtuous people.

Australia: a utilitarian country

Guy Rundle writes in The Age that:

...for now, people would appear to be demanding identity. Where it came from and how is a question that demands deeper reflection, but there is no doubt that it is there. Across the western world it has arisen, in the wake of 9/11 of course, but not stemming only from that, an open demand for what was hitherto a niggling feeling, or altogether absent....Everywhere and unsurprisingly, this new-found nationalism goes hand-in-hand with a revived religiosity....Everything that many people thought was passing or had passed forever - the chauvinist belief in the inherent superiority of one's own national culture, and a similarly exclusive belief in the truth of one's own faith - is returning with a vengeance.

Rundle asks: Why would that be occurring? He answers thus:

...hidden within Australian contemplation of identity is a ticking time bomb of nothingness, futility.All national stories get to this in the end, but they have great narratives that obscure the essential sleight-of-hand that is national identity. In Australia it never really gets started. Almost before its begun, everyone has moved to the suburbs and history has stopped - the uninterrupted calm that many migrants see as essentially paradise (and others as a disaster, a void and a loss) is not the sort of thing that can be run up a flagpole with any great effect. In a supremely unphilosophical country, the existential question "what is it all for" is too close to the surface for comfort. One of the results of such a predicament is culture envy, a malaise that manifests itself here and across the world in diverse forms.

Note the slickness of ' everyone has moved to the suburbs and history has stopped', as if the suburbs do not have a history.

And that phrase 'in a supremely unphilosophical country, the existential question "what is it all for" is too close to the surface for comfort' just rolls on so easily.

Wait a mo. We cannot let that slip by. It's a sleight of hand. Australia is a deeply utilitarian country, economic utilitarianism is our public philosophy, most of our public policy debates are conducted within utilitarian terms of a Benthamite economic discourse, whilst the academics endlessly debate the merits of act and rule utilitarianism. A social democratic Australia is utilitarian through and through. Hence the purpose of the purpose of government in a liberal society is to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. As Keith Hancock, put it in 1930, 'Australian democracy has come to look upon the state as a vast public utility, whose duty it is to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number'. The answer to 'what's it all for' is utility, the content of which is filled differently by individuals.

Sure utilitarianism has little to say about identity, which is primarily given by nationality. But that is another story.

Rundle is expressing a common view that is voiced in this article, by Michael Evans namely:

Australian political debate, past and present, has been firmly centred on economics and the administration of prosperity for as many citizens as possible. For critics, materialism as reflected by the general anti-intellectualism of Australian public life and the alleged lack of ideas of a nation defined by suburbia is a matter of despair.

It was common perspective in the 1930s and 1950s during empire days. It suprises me that it is being recycled in 2006 from a left of centre perspective.

the transformation of marxism

Paul Edward Gottfried's book, The Strange Death of Marxism, describes how Marxism as an economic theory has lost its appeal, even among the Left, since the Second World War. It argues that today's leftists no longer advocate nationalization of the economy and anti-capitalist theories. In fact, they hardly care about economics at all, but focus on changing the moral and cultural foundations of Western society. This shift, Gottfried argues in this text, originated with the Frankfurt School, a group of originally German Marxist philosophers who settled in the United States in the 1930s, where they came to dominate liberal thinking, not so much by advocating anti-capitalist economic reform but rather by propagating social engineering.

The Frankfurt School propagated social engineering.? Surely they criticized it in the form of instrumental reason.

Gottfried's argument is that the multicultural orientation of the contemporary European Left has little to do with Marxism as an economic-historical theory.The inner city electorate of the multicultural orientation in Australia is hostile to the traditional moral and cultural values of the old Left's former electorate, with its conservative social attitudes that are marked by their opposition to multiculturalism and their defense of national cultural identity. The Old Left never really challenged the traditional, almost Victorian social and moral behaviour of their blue-collar voters and supporters.

Gottfried argues that the shift from economics to culture means the death of Marxism, because Marxism is an economic theory. Why so?

Surely Marxism, rather than dying because it focused on culture not economics, only shifted its emphasis. But we do need to talk in terms of a post-Marxist Left. The multicultural orientation of this Left and has little or nothing to do with Marxism as an economic-historical theory--and it was formed in oppsotion to the Althusserian conception of marxism as science.

Does a post--marxist left in Australia owe a great deal to American social engineering and pluralist ideology and to the spread of American thought and political culture to Australia?

critique of liberalism: Schmitt & Strauss

I've just noticed that my edition of Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political (The University of Chicago Press) contains Leo Strauss's 1932 review of that text entitled 'Notes of Carl Schmitt:The Concept of the Political'

In this review Strauss showed that the underlying basis of Schmitt's affirmation of the political was a profound dissatisfaction with liberalism----that is, with liberal universalism and its aspirations for boundless security and a life that seeks fulfillment in the "interesting and entertaining." Liberalism, according to Schmitt, was above all a rejection of the political, had become submerged in concepts such as "economics" and "culture". In essence, the political had
disappeared as a theme of social science.

As we know Schmitt held that the characteristic distinction of the political is held to be the division into "friends" and "enemies." Such a life--lacking the passion and commitment that would lead one to die for a cause--seemed to Schmitt a rejection of all that was high and vital in human beings. So, Schmitt preached commitment and enmity; in Strauss's words: "He who affirms the political as such respects all who want to fight." The affirmation of the political is Schmitt's negation of liberalism.

Strauss says that Schmitt undertakes the criticism of liberalism in a liberal world, his critique of liberalism occurs in the horizon of liberalism and the critique introduced by Schmitt against liberalism can therefore be completed only if one succeeds in gaining a horizon beyond liberalism.

So Strauss was no more attracted to a debased liberalism than was Schmitt, but he sought not to negate it but to ascend from it. Like Schmitt, he asked, "What is the right way of life?" Yet unlike Schmitt, Strauss was unwilling to rest satisfied simply with any form of political commitment. When he raised the Socratic question, he did so in a Socratic manner--with a view to discovering the true answer.

According to Strauss, this ordering of the human things in terms of the right way to live is equivalent to the the question regarding the best way of life. For Strauss, there are only two alternatives that represent the best way of life. These are the life dedicated to perfecting one’s reason, i.e. the philosophic life, and the life dedicated to biblical faith. These two fundamental alternatives can be reduced to "reason", represented by Athens and to "faith", represented by Jerusalem. Strauss sometimes used the expression "the theologico-political problem” to indicate the problem regarding who or what should rule a community. The ultimate theologico-political problem, for Strauss, is whether biblical faith (Jerusalem) or reason (Athens) should be the highest authority for human beings.

We are like travelers navigating an unknown terrain with the help of old maps

'We are like travelers navigating an unknown terrain with the help of old maps, drawn at a different time and in response to different needs,' Seyla Benhabib writes in her new book, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens So very apt isn't it.

This review of The Rights of Others by Nadia Urbinati in Dissent raises an interesting issue for liberal democratic states. Nadia says:

Transnational migrations and global interdependence are the unknown terrain, state sovereignty and patrolled frontiers the old maps. Contemporary migrations are not an isolated phenomenon explicable in terms of a free choice that immigrants make when they leave their countries of origin and host states make when they receive them. These are epochal transformations that are literally changing the face of entire continents, the social conventions of millions of people. The friction between this new terrain and the old conceptual maps has potentially explosive effects ..... The problem is that liberal democratic states do not regard economic destitution as a form of persecution, while their minimalist definition of democracy is blind to de facto undemocratic regimes. So transnational migration produces blatant contradictions between universal human rights and the extant set of naturalization, immigration, refugee, and asylum policies.

Benhabib holds that democracy is the key to issues of immigration. Her philosophical horizon is defined by what she calls "the paradox of democratic legitimacy," namely the tension between the Enlightenment principle that a universal right to hospitality is due to every human person with the republican (or democratic) principle that political membership (citizenship) is essential for human beings "to have rights." Democracy is the better way to deal with this paradox---if we mean by it not merely a form of government but a set of moral-political values and practices that make for democratic discourse.

Nadia says that Benhabib argues that:

Democratic institutions and practices of negotiation ought to be the source of political attachment for old and new citizens and integrated aliens alike, the means by which they understand how to involve themselves in representative institutions at all levels, from cities and community constituencies all the way up to the nation-state and international society. Democracy is a mode of dialogical interactions applicable at all levels: social and political, domestic and international.

And for migrants as aliens? The aliens outside the nation state trying to get inside? How do democratic negotiations occur between states and migrants?

Immigration, Tronti, refusal

Back to Mario Tronti's Strategy of Refusal that I considered in this post, and which was part of a successful symposiumat Long Sunday. In this post I want to connect some remarks Tronti makes about the working class and the people to transnational migration and the nation state.

The historical backdrop is the White Australia policy in 1900, but it has become a political issue in the US today as the United States is seen to "under siege" by "hordes of illegal aliens":

Jimmy Margulies

In his Strategy of Refusal text Tronti says:

Of course, the working class is not the people. But the working class comes from the people. And this is the elementary reason why anyone --- like ourselves ---who take up the working class viewpoint, no longer need to "go towards the people". We ourselves, in fact, come from the people. And just as the working class frees itself politically from the people at the moment when it is no longer posed as a subaltern class, so too working class science breaks with the heritage of bourgeois culture at the moment that it no longer takes the viewpoint of society as a whole, but of that part which wishes to overthrow society. Culture in fact, like the concept of Right, of which Marx speaks, is always bourgeois. In other words, it is always a relation between intellectuals and society, between intellectuals and the people, between intellectuals and class; in this way it is always a mediation of conflicts and Their resolution in something else. If culture is the reconstruction of the totality of man, the search for his humanity in the world, a vocation to keep united that which is divided ----then it is something which is by nature reactionary and should be treated as such. The concept of working class culture as revolutionary culture is as contradictory as the concept of bourgeois revolution. Furthermore, the idea implies that wretched Counter-revolutionary thesis whereby the working class is supposed to re-live the whole experience of the history of the bourgeoisie. The myth that the bourgeoisie had a "progressive" culture, which the working class movement is then supposed to pick up out of the dust where capital has thrown it (along with all its old banners), has carried Marxist theoretical research into the realm of fantasy.

The people imply a nation whilst class and capitalism implies state. So Tronti's assumes the nation-state as the boundary or horizon of his account, rather than the borderless world of the free trade cosmopolitans. For all hsi talk about being against economism, Tronti doesn't really explore the complexities marked by natonalism versus capitalism.

As the immigration issue in the US shows, the nation can be at odds with the economy, and this can lead to a contradiction in policy: closed border to protect the nation, open borders to allow low skilled Latin American labour to work for American companies. And you can have American workers patrolling the borders to keep out the illegal immigrations and prevent them from working in the low skilled jobs in the US for which there is a shortage of labour.

This citizen vigilantism, proudly protecting the "home front," is a different kind of refusal, is it not? It is in direct confrontation with a capitalist view of immigration flows of both cheap and skilled workers as being an unmitigated benefit for U.S. corporations and hence the U.S. economy.

Workers are not just workers. They are also Americans protecting America. This cultural nationalist perspective discloses the way the U.S. public generally views immigrants with more or less hostility according to the color of their skin, their English-speaking abilities, and the degree to which their religions and cultures depart from Judeo-Christianity. It is no longer the traditional working class antagonism that blames immigrants for job losses and declining wage levels.Today in the US, as Tom Barry points out:

Immigration restrictionism is increasingly framed as key to homeland and cultural protection. Most of the allied anti-immigrant forces argue that the War on Terror cannot be successfully fought without gaining total control of U.S. borders, downsizing the resident immigrant population, and severely restricting new immigration.

A cultural nationalism fused with securing borders and homeland security in the context of the free trade on North American continent is a very different world to that of Mario Tronti in Italy in the 1960s.

Does Tronti's text still speak to us in the present?

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seizing fortuna by the hair at the right moment

In this post I mentioned that I was puzzled by the late Althusser's way of doing philosophy that is precisely a non-philosophy - or, perhaps, even an anti-philosophy. We are given an insight into Althusser's aleatory materialism or the materialism of the encounter as a new kind of philosophy by Augusto Illuminati review of some Iralian texts on Althusser. Illuminati says:

According to Althusser there is a formidable yet misunderstood tradition of aleatory materialism - of rain, deviation, of encounter and capture: the Epicurean and Lucretian rain of atoms, where a small clinamen imprints a chance combination, the parallel flow and the Spinozian entanglement of the infinite series of modifications of the two attributes of thought and extension, the Machiavellian ability to seize fortuna by the hair at the right moment, realising in the moment all of its virtu-potenza. This is also helped by the virtu of the fox and the (Spinozian!) power of the individual or the Prince to succeed in transforming sad passions into joyous ones. Fortuna faces the void with no other guarantees, it seizes the opportunity in short-circuits that could also be missing, almost secularising the relation between the mystic and God in negative theology. A materialism of the encounter and of contingency poses as a totally alternative theory and opposes the various materialisms of necessity and teleology; these are in the last instance the forms of a masked idealism, variations on the great theme of Western metaphysics, of the logocentrism that postulates the priority of Meaning over everything real.

It sounds more like politics and tactics to me, as distinct from a philosophy. I guess the philosophy in the materialism of encounter is the bit that takes contingency to be the realm of human freedom rather than Hegel's freedom as self-realization.

Illuminati goes on to offer us an image of philsosphy of the enccounter. He says:

The secret philosophy of the encounter runs from Epicurus to Marx in contraposition to every philosophy of essence, logos, origin and telos, of the rational, whether moral-religious or aesthetic Order; it rejects the Whole in favour of dissemination and disorder, it thinks of origin as nothingness and shapeless, it "catches a moving train" (Althusser 2006c) and, with strong arms, jumps on the wagon that runs from eternity like Heraclitus' water, without knowing where it comes from and where it's going. Through Althusser's image we see in the materialist philosopher almost an IWW activist who travels through America to trigger off strikes, hiding from the cops and beating the industrial centres and mine pits along the railway...

The philosophy of the encounter is born of the occasional encounter of virtu and fortuna.

protecting borders v imigration

Immigration is one of the more controversial topics in American politics. Many Americans are in favour of free trade but not liberal immigration policies. Though significant parts of the U.S. economy depend on illegal workers crossing the border with Mexico, many argue that immigration flows of the less-skilled Hispanic workers should be stemmed. They say that there should be a free flow of goods and capital but not of people, especially low-skilled people.

This conflict between the economy and the nation can be illustrated thus:

Steve Breen

it's a hot button issue that has led to increase in enforcement and an unprecedented increase in illegal immigration. Though the US demand for low-skilled labor continues to grow the domestic supply of suitable workers declines -- hence the need for immigrant labour. Yet U.S. immigration law contains virtually no legal channel through which low-skilled immigrant workers can enter the country to fill that gap.

The issue divides the Republicans: we have the culturally conservative populists and traditional law-and-order types on one side and the pro-growth libertarians and pro-business conservatives on the other.

The US House of Representatives passed a measure last year that theoretically would big a big fence, deport the US's 11 million illegal immigrants and penalize their employers. The conservative tough-on-immigration crowd argue that the porous border to the south poses a series of interlocking threats to the United States ----a national-security threat, a threat to employment opportunities for struggling native-born Americans and a threat to the very definition of America itself---and they support of measures to seal the borders and crack down on illegal immigration

Apparently, the US Senate leaders reached a tentative agreement on a broad, bipartisan compromise that would put the vast majority of the nation's estimated 11 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship. The New York Times says that under the proposed Senate agreement:

illegal immigrants who have lived in the United States for five years or more, about seven million people, would eventually be granted citizenship if they remained employed, had background checks, paid fines and back taxes and learned English.Illegal immigrants who have lived here for two to five years, about three million people, would have to travel to a United States border crossing and apply for a temporary work visa. They would be eligible for permanent residency and citizenship over time, but they would have to wait several years longer for it.Illegal immigrants who have been here less than two years, about one million people, would be required to leave the country altogether. They could apply for spots in the temporary worker program, but they would not be guaranteed positions.

The tentative agreement has faltered ----as you would expect in an election year.

I see that Robert J Samuelson in the Washington Post is in favour of the big fence, as is Charles Krauthammer. The reality is that the US labor market demands roughly 500,000 low skilled workers a year, but its immigration laws supply just 5,000 such immigrant visas annually. And this tiny trickle is backlogged for 10 years. Hence the mismatch between labor-market realities and immigration policy.

Schmitt: the political, war, violence

In The Concept of the Political Schmitt links the conflict between enemies and friends to the ultimate conflict--- war is the most intense and extreme form of antagonism. This does not mean that the political signifies nothing but devastating war, or that every deed is a military deed, or that war is the very content of politics.

Schmitt says:

For to the enemy concept belongs the ever present possibility of combat. All peripherals must be left aside from this term, including military details and the development of weapons technology. War is armed combat between organized political entities; civil war is armed combat within an organized unit. A self-laceration endangers the survival of the latter. The essence of a weapon is that it is a means of physically killing human beings. Just as the term enemy, the word combat, too, is to be understood in its original existential sense. It does not mean competition, nor does it mean pure intellectual controversy nor symbolic wrestlings in which, after all, every human being is somehow involved, for it is a fact that the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being symbolically a combatant. The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy. It is the most extreme consequence of enmity. It does not have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid(pp.32-33).

War is the ever present possibility and this is what matters, for it is from this extreme moment that human life derives its specificially political tension. It discloses what underlies the political--namely the distinction of friend and enemy. This is the decisive grouping.

Schmitt on enemies and friends

Carl Schmitt, in The Concept of the Political, argues for a radical separation between the political sphere and other spheres of existence, and he argues that the political is not reducible to any of these domains. The political is about friends and enemies, life and death; it is not about morals, economics or aesthetics. Do we not understand this understanding of the political as the most intense and extreme antagonismfrom living in the so-called cultural wars? Is it not the case that this kind of politics requires you to treat your opposition as antagonistic to everything in which you believe?

In section 3 of the above text Schmitt says:

The friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense, not as metaphors or symbols, not mixed and weakened by economic, moral, and other conceptions, least of all in a private-individualistic sense as a psychological expression of private emotions and tendencies. They are neither normative nor pure spiritual antitheses. Liberalism in one of its typical dilemmas ....of intellect and economics has attempted to transform the enemy from the viewpoint of economics into a competitor and from the intellectual point into a debating adversary. In the domain of economics there are no enemies, only competitors, and in a thoroughly moral and ethical world perhaps only debating adversaries. .... The concern here is neither with abstractions nor with normative ideals, but with inherent reality and the real possibility of such a distinction.... The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship.(pp.27-28)

Schmitt goes on to say that:

The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping. In its entirety the state as an organized political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction.....But the fact that the substance of the political is contained in the context of a concrete antagonism is still expressed in everyday language, even where the awareness of the extreme case has been entirely lost. (p. p.29-30)

To determine the enemy is at the same time to determine who will kill and who will be killed. The political decision is a matter of life and death; that is to say, at its extreme, the political is the decision on who lives and dies.

Schmitt argues that the important thing is not just having friends in the political sense but also deciding upon who your friends are. The implication is one that leads to a moment of decision: "who are my friends and who are my enemies?" This establishes a relationship, not only between friends and enemies, and among friends as well.

re-reading Althusser

Yesterday morning I went to a seminar in the Hugh Stretton Room of the Politics Department at Adelaide University by David McInerney, who runs the Interventions weblog. Entitled, 'Althusser's Underground Railroad: From Dialectical Materialism to the Non-Philosophy of the Non-State', the seminar was a speaking to, and from, this introduction to the recent Althusser edition of Borderlands that used to come out of Adelaide.

David's performance and text reconnected me to my reading Althusser in the 1980s in a novel and interesting way. He says:

...we have chosen the title Althusser & Us, both to evoke Althusser's Machiavelli and Us (1999), and to suggest that it is not just a matter of who Althusser might be today but rather of 'who' Althusser is for us, how Althusser's text 'speaks' to us.... What is distinctive about the essays included here is their sustained attention to Althusser's self-criticism of For Marx and Reading Capital (both published in 1965) and the extent to which they think with that self-criticism, together with the continuities that they identify between those early publications and Althusser's last writings. This continuity [is based on] a materialist conception of reading and literary (re)production .... each of the contributors to this issue insists on a material difference within Althusser's work, a fissure that Althusser opens up within his own thought as he engages in theoretical and political struggle.

I ws quite comfortable with that reading --"how Althusser's text 'speaks' to us" now. One can re- read Althusser's texts in the light where I am in the present struggling with the effects of neo-liberal mode of governance, the impacts of globalization and social conservativism, the rise of the national security state and the decay of liberalism after 9/11. However, I had no desire to go back and re-read strong>For Marx and Reading Capital--not after reading Schmitt and Agamben. Should I read the text on Machiavelli?

I was more interested in the late texts--those of a more open and impressionistic Althusser in terms of politics and political philosophy, which could help us make sense of the world that is forming around, and shaping, us. Thsi kind of reading prompts the question: so how does Althusser speak to us today 40 years on? What did David say?

David turns to other texts. He says that in his introduction to Philosophy of the Encounter (Verso, 2006) G.M. Goshgarian argues that:

Althusser's "Theory of theoretical practice" in For Marx and Reading Capital represents the philosophy of the state, whereas his later definition of philosophy as a theoretical struggle between idealist and materialist tendencies (which represents, "in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory" - Althusser 1984: 69) constitutes "the non-philosophy of the non-state" ..... This second definition of philosophy thus constitutes the crucial moment in Althusser's self-criticism, and it is on the basis of this transformation in his understanding of philosophy itself that Althusser proceeds to intervene within his early work to draw out and amplify those tendencies that eventually formed the basis for his 'aleatory materialism' of the 1980s.

As I listened I recalled the old phrase 'philosophy as a theoretical struggle between idealist and materialist tendencies', and I'd remembered wondering a decade or more ago what it had meant given the reductionist physicalist materialism I was surrounded by at university, Marx's deep roots in Aristotle and Hegel and the physicalist Marxists reduction of historical materialism to a materialisml based on physicalist atomism.

Then I vaguely remembered that Althusser had once said that there is no history of philosophy and I kinda lost interest in him. Hegel was more interesting in his understanding of history. Hegel stood in opposition to Althusser's view that if philosophy has a history, then it has no concept of its history no understanding of its relation to the passage of time, the "progress" of perspectives, or of the regressions and returns that make old perspectives relevant. The 'progress of perspectives' is what Hegel traced.

What came through David's seminar clearly is what is rejected by the later Althusser. It is a legislative philosophy that stands above the sciences, displaced in favour of a new practice of philosophy that is adequate to Marxist revolutionary practice ----a way of doing philosophy that is precisely a non-philosophy - or, perhaps, even an anti-philosophy. That doesn't get us very far does it? What could a non-philosophy of the non-state' mean?

How about an aleatory materialism? Or a materialism of the encounter and of contingency? That left me puzzled. What would that be like?

what's happening to the middle class?

Remember the ALP promoting the idea that Australia should fully engage with the global economy and that while that might cause disruptions in the manufacturing sector, the way to deal with it was to raise skill levels and productivity through education and training.

That 'Knowledge Nation' approach was held to be the right answer for the early 1990s, whilst the human capital approach was deemed to be the right way to expand the economy, ensure the benefits of economic growth, and counter the economic inequality caused by the deregulated market open to the global economy.

That narrative still held with the loss of Australian manufacturing and service jobs to offshore sources--China and India, whether this was in-company (in-house) offshore or offshore outsource operations. Australians had to become cleverer, so they could do the design work in Australia whilst the manufacturing was done offshore using cheap labour. Globalization brings about both benefits and challenges.

It seems to me that this narrative needs to be revised. Why? It didn't make sense with PhD's in the humanities in the 1990s, many of whom ended up casual high school teaching or driving taxis rather than in cultural or intellectual production. And it appears that we need to accept that a lot of (middle class) people are going to be stuck in the lower part of the job market with the growing wage inequality. The middle class is being squeezed as the gap or polarization between higher and lower wage markets deepens. Computers, in complementing the non-routine (abstract) cognitive tasks of high-wage jobs, are also a direct substitute for the routine tasks found in many traditional middle-wage jobs.

The processes of globalization and computerization work to currently reinforce each other, in that they substitute for workers in middle class occupations.

getting tough on multiculturalism

This extract about demographic change and cultural difference is from an interview with Niall Ferguson on the Religion Report on the ABC's Radio National.

Niall Ferguson is arguing that most of the conflicts that have gone on in the past decade or so, have been internal ethnic conflicts within Huntington's civilisations rather than Huntington's thesis of conflicts between civilizations, and that there should be pressure on Muslim communities within liberal democracies into assimilate. Why not both? Or is he challenging the neo-con ciivlization view of 'us' and 'them.' Ferguson then says:

There's a sense that you just can't pretend any longer that there's been a successful integration and assimilation of immigrant communities. And I didn't even mention the bombings in the London Underground, did I? So ultimately any sensible liberal society removes the bans on topics of discussion when those topics of discussion are so obviously important. We have to be able to talk about processes of social integration and assimilation, we have to be able to talk about shifts in demographic balances openly, because if those things are made taboo, then the only people who are able to talk about them, end up being people on the political right. Now I don't regard this as something which is the exclusive monopoly of people on the right.

Do we have this problem---there hasn't been a successful integration and assimilation of immigrant communities(Muslim communities) --- in Australia? I don't see thast we have.

Stephen Crittenden asks:

But it's true, isn't it, that people on the left of the spectrum have been very reluctant to think in these terms, let alone speak in these terms?

Why should we when it is not really a problem in Australia. It's a few people on the fringes, isn't it? However, that opening by Crittenden gives Ferguson the opportunity to have a go at the left. Ferguson says:

Well I think this has marginally been out of cowardice really, or wishful thinking. There's been a wishful thought in Western society for some time, and that thought was that multiculturalism would be a stable entity, that if one allowed multiple religions and ethnicities to coexist, everything would be fine in a liberal society because free speech would be respected by all concerned. But unfortunately an intolerant minority, and I stress that it is a minority within Muslim communities, is determined not to respect the free speech and other liberal values that people in the West take for granted, and that's the big problem, that liberals have to grapple with as much as conservatives, and I really feel quite strongly.

But we have always had minorities who refuse to accept liberal values on the right and the left. That doesn't justify dumping multiculturalism and making the shift back to the old policy of integration and assimilation.