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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Few Against Few « Previous | |Next »
January 28, 2007

From the WaPo:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned that a proposed Senate resolution criticizing the deployment of additional troops would embolden the enemy. "Any indication of flagging will in the United States gives encouragement to those folks," Gates told reporters at the Pentagon. "I'm sure that that's not the intent behind the resolutions, but I think it may be the effect."

From Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political:

A people which exists in the sphere of the political cannot in case of need renounce the right to determine by itself the friend and enemy distinction. ... The solemn declaration of outlawing war does not abolish the friend-enemy distinction, but, on the contrary, opens new possibilities by giving an international hostis declaration new content and vigour.

Were this distinction to vanish then political life would vanish altogether. A people who exists in the political sphere cannot, despite entreating declarations to the contrary, escape from making this fateful distinction. If a part of the population declares that it no longer recognizes enemies, then, depending on the circumstance, it joins their side and aids them.

The last sentence is arguing similarly to Gates, those that do not recognize the enemy, and the imperative to unify against the enemy, are ultimately traitors. Liberalism seeks positive outcomes through equality, so hard antagonistic lines are replaced with debate and competition, not violence. In Schmitt's philosophy, those that advocate liberalism become traitors to the 'political'.

It is interesting to see Schmitt and Agamben's different definition of political. To Schmitt the political is the final, singular and absolute arena of authority. Law does not come into it. Agamben defines political action in State of Exception as:

The only truly political action, however, is that which severs the nexus between violence and law.

Schmitt has extended the Hobbesian all against all to be many against few in the friend-enemy distinction. But that is not true, it is the appearance of friend-enemy, as the friend and enemy is defined by the executive, especially in a state of exception. Consequently Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction, rather than being many against few, is really few against few where the first few is the executive, and the latter few is those that have been given the appearance of law but suffer at executive whim.

I still cannot disconnect the state of exception from executive tyranny. The exception exists as a political arena where there is the appearance of law but due to the executive adopting executive, legislative and judicial powers outside of the reach of constitutionalism, there is, as Agamben argues, no force of law. The executive chooses not to enforce the law, and the other branches are either willingly surrendered their responsibilities, or cannot reach into that area by constitutional restrictions.

This is executive tyranny. Tyranny does not have to be absolute to be destructive. It can be insidious such as in arbitrary government, or in the case of a state of exception, it can exist despite the restrictions on government action by a constitution.

So how to redress it?

One: Any individual under the jurisdiction of the government must be able to sue that government through the judicial for their full political rights. This means constitutions, and consequently the branches of government, must define the citizen as an individual under the jurisdiction of the government. No longer must citizen be defined by accidents of birth, or swearing to the tribe. Full political rights must be extended to any individual under the jurisdiction of any branch of government. This is completely consistent with liberalism and republicanism.

Two: There must be no action of the executive which is outside of legislative or judicial scrutiny. Australia is always going to suffer in this area as the political technologies it has chosen for government are not republican. The federal and state governments combine their executive and legislative into the one parliamentary body. Australia does also not have a history of rigourous political rights - our history has been full of government overreach and arbitrary action against the politically and electorally weak.

| Posted by cam at 9:49 AM | | Comments (10)
Comments

Comments

The Department of Defense, headquartered in the Pentagon, is one of the most massive organizations on the planet, with net annual operating costs of $635 billion, assets worth $1.3 trillion, liabilities of $1.9 trillion and more that 2.9 million military and civilian personnel as of fiscal year 2005.

I am a 2 tour Vietnam Veteran who recently retired after 36 years of working in the Defense Industrial Complex on many of the weapons systems being used by our forces as we speak.

It is difficult to convey the complexity of the way DOD works to someone who has not experienced it. This is a massive machine with so many departments and so much beaurocracy that no president, including Bush totally understands it.

Presidents, Congressmen, Cabinet Members and Appointees project a knowledgeable demeanor but they are spouting what they are told by career people who never go away and who train their replacements carefully. These are military and civil servants with enormous collective power, armed with the Federal Acquisition Regulation, Defense Industrial Security Manuals, compartmentalized classification structures and "Rice Bowls" which are never mixed.

Our society has slowly given this power structure its momentum which is constant and extraordinarily tough to bend. The cost to the average American is exhorbitant in terms of real dollars and bad decisions. Every major power structure member in the Pentagon's many Washington Offices and Field locations in the US and Overseas has a counterpart in Defense Industry Corporate America. That collective body has undergone major consolidation in the last 10 years.

What used to be a broad base of competitive firms is now a few huge monoliths, such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Boeing.

Government oversight committees are carefully stroked. Sam Nunn and others who were around for years in military and policy oversight roles have been cajoled, given into on occasion but kept in the dark about the real status of things until it is too late to do anything but what the establishment wants. This still continues - with increasing high technology and potential for abuse.

Please examine the following link to testimony given by Franklin C. Spinney before Congress in 2002. It provides very specific information from a whistle blower who is still blowing his whistle (Look him up in your browser and you get lots of feedback) Frank spent the same amount of time as I did in the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) but in government quarters. His job in government was a similar role to mine in defense companies. Frank's emphasis in this testimony is on the money the machine costs us. It is compelling and it is noteworthy that he was still a staff analyst at the Pentagon when he gave this speech. I still can't figure out how he got his superior's permission to say such blunt things. He was extremely highly respected and is now retired.

http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/spinney_testimony_060402.htm

The brick wall I often refer to is the Pentagon's own arrogance. It will implode by it's own volition, go broke, or so drastically let down the American people that it will fall in shambles. Rest assured the day of the implosion is coming. The machine is out of control.

If you are interested in a view of the inside of the Pentagon procurement process from Vietnam to Iraq please check the posting on this blog entitled, "Odyssey of Armaments"

http://rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com/2006/11/odyssey-of-armaments.html

On the same subject, you may also be interested in the following sites from the "Project On Government Oversight", observing it's 25th Anniversary and "Defense In the National Interest", insired by Franklin Spinney and contributed to by active/reserve, former, or retired military personnel.

http://pogo.org/

http://www.d-n-i.net/top_level/about_us.htm

Cam,
The term that connects Schmitt to Gates re the friend/enemy distinction is that it is a conflict about a way of life. The neo-cons have go this bit as well. You are right to say that the appearance of friend-enemy, as the friend and enemy is defined by the executive, especially in a state of exception. For Schmitt sovereign is he decides the exemption.

You say that I still cannot disconnect the state of exception from executive tyranny. Who decides the exemption need not be Bush. It could be Congress, in that Congress decides to go to war etc. What if Congress, representing the people, reasserts itself vis-a-vis the President or the executive? Is that still tyranny?

Cam,
Let us grant you your full liberal/political rights. How then do we understand the political, as distinct from the economic or th ethical? it seems to me that you are tacitly operating with Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction: in your case it is free individuals versus the government to defend a liberal way of life. You also make that disinction very existential.

Gary, I say executive because it is specifically the role of the executive to enforce the law. As Agamben described it an exception is where there is no force of law. The Executive chooses not to enforce the laws on the books. In a parliamentary system which mixes executive and legislative in the one body, it is no different as the responsibility for enforcement is supposed to be with the executive. So a hole in the force-of-law is an executive choice.

On the 'politicial'. I am probably with Deniehy and Harpur on that one, it is a human technology that is used to pursue grievance and recompense without arbitrary violence. Harpur reckoned in a utopian moral world all the technologies we use to mediate violence - war, politics, the state etc would be unnecessary as they would become morally impossible.

Deniehy and Harpur would argue that the political is an artefact of humanities incomplete process of moral improvement.

It is a good narrative that puts the boulder on the downhill side of the mountain.

Perhaps a comment from Hannah Arendt might be of some avail here, when she notes that tyranny, which need not be entirely oppressive and destructive, but can be well-intentioned and relatively benevolent, is always afflicted with political impotence, due to its destruction of "power", in the public-communicative sense that she understands that word/concept. The Busheviks' usurpations of legal "authority" are less a sign of implacable "strength" than a mark of the overweening, if catastrophic, impotence of their project. Their incompetence is not an accident, if not exactly a strategy.

Cam

If we accept Montesquieu's classification of governmental powers (into the categories, legislative, executive, and judicial) then the executive is that part of government explicitly possessing that property that distinguishes government from all other social organizations--coercive authority. The executive uses coercion to apply the rules made by the legislature.

The judiciary shares with the executive the task of applying the law, but it does not possess the tools of coercion itself. Nonetheless, its authorization is necessary before the executive may apply coercion to individuals.

The judiciary, in a way the weakest part of government, stands between the coercive authority of government and individuals. It guarantees that coercion is applied in accord with law and not arbitrarily.

That's the theory anyway.

John,
I puzzle about Cam's use of tyranny and I thought of Arendt and her argument that tyranny, as a form of government tyranny stands against the appearance in public of the plurality of the people. In a tyrannical political realm, which can hardly be called public, the tyrant exists in isolation from the people. As a form of rule it creates the seeds of its own destruction because the tyrant's fear of the people, on one side, and the people's fear of the tyrant, on the other.

This is not George Bush. The executive is not a despot. So I've turned to Montesquieu and Madison, as the latter is where Cam starts from.

Cam is what Madison calls a short-lease republican:his concern is the division between government and society, or between rulers and ruled. The danger he focuses on is oppression of the latter by the former; and the solution he favors is to keep rulers controlled by the ruled.

Montesquieu says that the three governmental functions of executive, legislative and judiciary are both conceptually distinguishable, and institutionally separate as well in order for the rule of law to prevail.

In The Federalist 47 Madison expresses the Montesquieuean idea very clearly:

The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

The combination of all three, or even of any two powers in the same set of hands endangers the rule of law and thus liberty.

The separation is particularly aimed at taming the executive. Montesquieu's constitutional theory states that the chief and proper aim of political life is the security of rights, best achieved through guaranteeing the rule of law.

Madison understood that government had to be strong enough and effective enough to protect rights, although not so strong and uncontrolled as to endanger rights itself. However, government needs to have:
(1) the capacity to act with decision and effectiveness --implies strong government;
(2) a high degree of stability or continuity of the laws governing behavior --implies consistency of policy and therefore long terms of office;
(3) safety or the ability of the people to keep government under control and checked--to prevent it from being a danger to them--implies weak government.
This creates incompatibilities among the various requirements.So things are more complex than the short-lease republicans make out.

Madison thought that the greatest danger of encroachment on the other branches derived from the legislature, which was the ultimate source of all power in a liberal democratic regime. He argued that the integrity of the free constitution depended on building in checks against the legislature above all.

He missed the encroachment of the executive on the legislature and the judicary, which is what we have experienced with a state of exception.

Gary, He missed the encroachment of the executive on the legislature and the judicary, which is what we have experienced with a state of exception.

I agree with that entirely. Modern republicanism has to focus on the executive, especially in limiting it with greater checks and balances or restrictions, it also has to focus on the weakness of the judicial and legislative.

Myself and adam (who put it in a constitution) in the past have proposed the GG being an active magistrate in a parliamentary system who is sworn to protect the bill of rights from executive encroachment (a kind of bicameral executive) and can pause legislation for judicial review.

Well, the primary "function" of politics is not the securement and protection of rights, but the enablement of (the capacity for) action all around, which is to say, the coordination of action and the establishment of the framework for its regulation. ("Rights" are more a legal institution than a moral foundation. In fact, an exclusive preoccupation with "human rights" is curiously de-politicizing, though perhaps with a different intention, and in a different way, than the neo-liberal streamlining of politics in the name of "efficiency").

Hence, the basic problem here is not how to perfect a mechanism of checks and balances that would guarantee rights over against the usurpations of power, however attractive such rhetoric may be, but rather how to render the "actions" and operations of the state responsive to its public, when the state might be subject to conflicting steering imperatives and the public might be conflicted amongst itself, which is to say, both limit excessive state power and balance public interests. This is a matter of the collective generation and distribution of the "power" that underlies both state and public, conserving and enhancing the capacity for "action", for initiative and response in the political society all round and as a whole, under ever changing historical circumstances and conditioning "forces".

Rights, which are always collective institutions, conventional and variable rather than intrinsic in "nature", are, after all, just as much capable of coming into conflict as agents, and no appeal to a "disinterested" juridical procedure can per se guarantee the preservation of a system of political rights, but, to the contrary, aside from threatening a disabling encumberance of action with over-juridification, judicial decisions can be quite simply politically disasterous, (e.g. the Dred Scott case). (To re-enforce this point, just consider the way in which right-libertarians absolutize "property rights", promoting legal doctrines such as "takings", which effectively destroy any collective right for deliberation over the common good).

But that's precisely the point that Schmitt was making, in however repugnant a fashion, with his definition of the sovereign as the one who has the capacity to decide the exception, which up to a point is purely formal, not specifying who or what that "one" is: no legal system is autonmously self-subsistent and self-regulating, but rather all legal systems will contain areas of indeterminacy, unpredictable and depending on historical circumstances and conditions, which must be "supplemented" by political decisions.

At this point it doesn't much matter whether the sovereign is declared rhetorically to be "the people" or an inbred idiot, what matters is that sovereignty is a political reality that lies at once within and outside of a legal-constitutional system, as the constituting power that decides the constituted power of legal and governmental "authority", that conserves the possibility of collective action. Only with this realization does the question of the "nature" of the sovereign, its who and what, come to the fore amidst political conflict and struggles for consensual "legitimation" under shifting historical conditions.

But the further point that Schmitt then makes, in his preoccupation with the predicament of the Weimar Republic, is that, under modern conditions, sovereignty itself becomes increasingly de-stabilized by the increasing interpenetration of national and international "politics", given rise to conditioning "forces" that are outside of any possible sovereign legal-constitutional order.

With that point, it's possible to see the Bushevik "unitary executive" not so much as a tyrannical usurpation of individual or societal rights on the part of a constituted executive power, but rather a a transmission point of "external" conditioning forces, namely the whole "machinery" of corporate globalization and geo-political militarism, whose requirements for streamlined "decisions" attempts to impose itself on "forces" it ultimately does not and can not control, in the process destroying rather than conserving public power, in the relevant sense.

"Tyranny" might, indeed, be an apt description of what has and is happening, but less as a violation of a constituted order of rights by an overweening constituted executive power than as an expression of organized forces of societal reification that have grown up within the constituted order, breeching its constitutive power. And that's a matter for political struggle within the gathering catastrophe, (since Bush's primary political talent is his ability to kick the can down the road), rather than simply a matter of remediation of legal controls.

John,

I've posted your comments as a new post as they are too good to be left here.

I agree with you that:

the primary "function" of politics is not the securement and protection of rights, but the enablement of (the capacity for) action all around, which is to say, the coordination of action and the establishment of the framework for its regulation.

Only I would introduce ethics here to add-'in order to ensure the good life'.