In ‘Make sure you say that you were treated properly’ in the London Review of Books Gareth Peirce, begins his article on torture, secrecy and the British state with the images of human beings in rows in aircraft, hooded and shackled for transportation across the Atlantic, much as other human beings had been carried in slave ships four hundred years earlier. They are images of anonymous beings crouched in open cages in orange jumpsuits being unloaded at Guantánamo Bay, where it was intended that they remain for ever outside the reach of the law.
Some light has been thrown on these anonymous beings hidden behind the curtain of ‘national security’ --eg. the case of Binyam Mohamed, which begins to uncover part of the truth about the relationship between British intelligence and the Americans and Moroccans, who for 18 months slashed the most intimate parts of his body with razors, burned him with boiling liquids, stretched his limbs causing unimaginable agony, and bombarded him with ferocious sound. In short, they tortured him. Binyam was seized in Pakistan in April 2002, rendered to Morocco three months later, and tortured there on behalf of the US for 18 months. was then held for nine months in Afghanistan, first at the “Dark Prison,” a secret prison run by the CIA, where he was also tortured, and then at Bagram airbase. He has been held at Guantánamo since September 2004. Britain, it is claimed was complicit in his extraordinary rendition and his torture.
Pierce says that:
The opportunity for concealing the extent of our country’s collusion with those who have carried out the actual torture is increased by three factors: first, the nature of most of the techniques used (‘stealth methods’, so called); second, the choking powers of secrecy available to our government; and third, the haphazard way in which information about these matters emerges, when it emerges at all, which hampers our ability to ask the most basic questions.
Pierce says:
Once we have arrived at a position where acquiescence in crimes against humanity by our government may well have occurred, the state can no longer demand that we acknowledge it as our protector and assert that in consequence the nation’s security is at stake if secrets are revealed. This after all is the thesis on which the claim for secrecy is built.
Where we have got to is this: we have a state whose devices for maintaining secrecy are probably more deeply entrenched than in any other comparable democracy. We are condemned for what is already known internationally by the most authoritative of bodies about our activities in the past seven years, activities that are at the very least indicative of criminality, but we appear to be paying little or no heed. Our government’s lawyers are fighting as hard as they can to preserve the secrets of the secret state, however disgraceful; to preserve them in large part because they would occasion disgust in the country, and not for the endlessly repeated claim that they will affect the safety of the realm or paralyse our legitimate democratic allies.
In this review of Robert B. Pippin's Hegel's Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life Timothy Brownlee says that Pippin's claim is that, for Hegel, certain institutional and social conditions must be in place in order for an agent's will -- not only her acts -- to count as free. On Pippin's reading, Hegel holds a "relational state" theory of freedom, with two essential components, one psychological or subjective, and one social or objective. On the subjective side Brownless says that:
in order for an agent to be free, she must be able reflectively and deliberatively to identify as her own both (a) the purposes that her actions are to accomplish, and (b) the inclinations and incentives that motivate those actions. Pippin stresses that this subjective self-relation appeals to an experiential criterion to distinguish free from unfree acts. Because Hegel understands the will to be a form of thinking and not primarily a causal power, in order for the act to count as free, the agent must be able to experience and understand her own relation to the purposes her act promotes, as well as the act's motivating inclinations, in a non-alienated way. On Pippin's interpretation, this "is a matter primarily of comprehension or experiential understanding, and not at all the experience of a power successfully executed."
On Pippin's reading, an agent can establish the relevant kind of subjective self-relation only if she already stands within institutional, norm-governed relations of reciprocal recognition to others. This objective element of free actions stems from the fact that Hegel understands justification to be a fundamentally social practice -- "the giving of and asking for reasons" by participants in a set of shared institutions. Since it is the character of the agent's justifying reasons for her deeds that distinguish free actions from unfree ones, such justifying reasons will be simply those that are accepted by like-minded others.
If the global financial crisis has dealt a blow to the neoliberal faith in laissez-faire economics as the dominant guiding principle for the organisation of markets, then the crisis has also exposed the fragility of globalisation. As sources of financing dry up, we are witnessing a dramatic collapse in world trade, shrinking capital flows and a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment. The “end of neo-liberal hegemony” is interpreted differently by people in different societies, depending on their prior conceptions and experiences of markets. The result is vastly different views on the needed reforms, including the viability and effects of global stimulus plans, the benefits and scope of increased financial regulation, or the measures needed to correct global economic imbalances.
This impacts on social democracy. What options does a progressive politics have? What are the issues and options available for reform? In his An agenda for social democracy John Quiggin argues that the global financial crisis provides an opportunity for the world to rethink its economic and political structures. The crisis is not a temporary aberration, to be followed by a return to the 'normality' of the late 20th century, dominated by the ideology of economic liberalism.
Rather the economic and social system that emerges from the global financial crisis will be radically reformed, he writes. The inevitable contraction of the financial sector creates both the need and the opportunity for an expansion in the provision of non-financial human services, such as health and education. Quiggin says that the failure of economic liberalism means that:
The resilience of social democratic institutions and values in the face of a concerted attack from advocates of free-marketreform has been striking. The time is now ripe for a shift from the defensive position of the last thirty years, in which social democrats struggled mainly to protect the achievements of the past. In the circumstances of the global financial crisis, the most natural way to restate the case for social democracy is in terms of risk and insecurity...... The necessity of public financing may be traced to the risks associated with health in both the short term and long term. In the short term, we can’t know for sure if or when we will get sick.In the long term, markets cannot manage the risk associated with the fact that some people will have chronically worse health than others....The problems with market provision of health care are well known. In the absence of public intervention or insurance, health care expenses for even moderately serious illnesses and injuries are so large and uncertain as to be beyond the capacity of most individuals and households to manage through ordinary methods such as drawing on savings.
Quiggin goes onto say:
The theoretical program of economic liberalism is based on a claim (made in stronger or weaker forms as the rhetorical and political demands of the occasion demanded) that markets outperform governments in all but a handful of economic activities, and that the reduction of the public sector to a ‘minimal state’ is economically desirable. The resulting policy program for the last thirty years has been an attempt to roll back the growth of the state, both in terms of the range of activities undertaken and of the share in national income of taxation and government expenditure.The drive to contract the range of activities undertaken by the state has had some limited successes, notably in relation to the privatisation of public enterprises, but has generally failed with respect to core welfare state activities such as health and education.... The resilience of these and other components of the social-democratic welfare state was the main reason for the failure of free-market ‘reforms’ to reverse the growth in the share of national income allocated to public expenditure.
However, this does not imply a wholesale return to the ideas and policies of the postwar social democratic era since social democrats must learn from the mistakes of that era and retain what was valuable in economic liberalism, including a commitment to sound fiscal policy and a rejection of protectionist restrictions on trade in goods and services.
Norman Abjorensen in Theirs or Ours on Inside Story says that though the Rudd Government's decision to defer its emissions trading scheme- ---delayed by twelve months to July 2011 and the big-polluting exporters receiving more compensation to help them adjust--- is probably good pragmatic politics on the part of the prime minister, it it is clear that the government has buckled to some powerful lobbying and some employment pressure that might be construed as blackmail. He adds:
The real losers, however, are the environment and the people. A less obvious, but equally important, loser in all of this is our increasingly enfeebled democracy – once again trashed by the corporate juggernaut.
This just one more example of what the American political scientist, Carl Boggs, has called the corporate colonisation of society. A deal has been struck between self-interested business elites and a supposedly representative government that has effectively capitulated: the public – and the public interest – have simply been excluded from the equation.
By the late 1990s, verifiable and reputable scientific research had demonstrated the clear and present danger of global warming. The response from business was first to seek to obfuscate with a manufactured scepticism, disputing even the existence of the problem, and then to hijack governments and seek to discredit, marginalise and silence public interest advocates for urgent and drastic action....It is part, in a far broader sense, of capitalism’s greatest triumph, which is not the generation of abundance so much as its effective depoliticisation – and with that its removal from any form of public accountability or influence.
Perry Anderson in Jottings on the Conjecture in New Left Review states that the twin objectives of American foreign policy since World War Two have been to extend capitalism to the ends of the earth, and uphold the primacy of the US within the international state system—the second viewed as a condition for realizing the first. He says that capitalism has extended with a steady increase in the interlocking of all the major capitalist economies in a common dependence on each other. He states that politically what we see is the emergence, still in its early stages, of a modern equivalent of the Concert of Powers after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.
That is: increasing levels of formal and informal coordination to maintain the stability of the established order, accompanied by traditional jockeying for advantage within its parameters, from which there is no radical discord .... This time a single superordinate power, occupying a position unlike any other, holds the system together. In the days of Metternich and Castlereagh, there was no hegemon comparable to America. With still the world’s largest economy, financial markets, reserve currency, armed forces, global bases, culture industry and international language, the US combines assets that no other state can begin to match. The other powers accept its asymmetrical position among them, and take care not to thwart it on any matter to which it attaches strategic importance.
just because there is no automatic coincidence between the particular interests of the US and the general interests of the system, a consciously managed Concert of Powers is required for the adjustment of tensions between them. That adjustment will never be perfect, and the mechanisms for achieving it have yet to be fully formalized: pressure and counter-pressure intertwine within a bargaining process that is unequal but not insubstantial. To date, however, the gaps and rough edges in the system have not seriously threatened the emergent legitimacy of the ‘international community’ as a symphony of the global capitalist order, even with a somewhat erratic conductor.