Big Pharma is out to get you

The Constant Gardener by John le Carré
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

John LeCarré here sets in motion a dozen or more morally and psychologically complex characters in many directions at once, leading into three major stories and at least a half a dozen lesser ones. The framing story is about Big Pharma, the enormously wealthy multinational pharmaceutical companies which can cure you or kill you to make a profit, and the people who try to be sure they do mostly good things and curb its corrupt tendencies. The second is an adventure story of a lone man, the "constant gardener"of the title, using his wits against an enormous conspiracy with deadly power — much like LeCarré's famous intelligence operative George Smiley, but here the enemy is not Iron Curtain spy rings but Big Pharma, which has killed his wife. Finally, and here the subtlety and complexity of LeCarré's imagination is best displayed, there is the story of divided loyalties, virtue and weakness and ultimately self-betrayal, exhibited to some degree by several characters but especially by the gifted, deeply religious and morally confused Markus Lorbeer.
LeCarré's fictional DKV, with enormous financial resources and political influence, hopes to make millions from an anti-TB drug created by a smaller partner based in Kenya, and is willing to bribe or otherwise pressure doctors, scientific journals, hospitals and regulators to get it approved and paid for with public money; meanwhile the operation in Kenya is testing the drug on Kenya's poor, not necessarily a bad thing if there are adequate safeguards. But there are not: with the complicity of government officials and common thugs, the companies suppress information about the drug's sometimes lethal side-effects and even go to the extreme of murdering those who are about to expose their practice.
Besides the psychologically complex characterizations, LeCarré offers vivid descriptions of both social and physical settings in Kenya, London, Elba and even Winnipeg. The book is seldom boring. But there are too many implied stories left unresolved, the "constant gardener" who occupies most of the story, Justin Quayle, seems far less interesting than many of the minor characters whom we glimpse too briefly (including Markus Lorbeer) or never see at all because they are dead before the story begins (Quayle's wife Tessa and the good doctor Arnold Bluhm), and the central story — the denunciation of bad practices of some pharmaceutical companies — is hardly news.

View all my reviews

Happy holidays!

With this holiday wish for your health.

 

 From Gef and a comrade

Rx : a big fist

Thanks to Dirk Van Nouhuys for forwarding - don't know the author

The pain in Spain

One of my politically astute American friends, journalist and photographer Don Monkerud, has asked how things are going for us in our little town of Carboneras (Andalucía, Spain). I'll share my reply.

Dibujo de Manel Fontdevila en Público

Thanks for asking, Don. Yes, things are going well for us personally, but it's hard not to share the anxiety of our neighbors. Spain has the highest unemployment in the European Union, and several of our friends have lost their jobs and others are naturally worried. The right-wing assault on public services is cutting deep into public health care (Americans don't even know what that is, but in most of Europe and especially in Spain standards have been high and people count on it), public education, research and other frivolities. The new "labor reform" makes it cheap and easy for employers to dismiss workers with very little compensation and for them to disregard contracts simply if their profits have declined over the past 9 months. Only the banks get backing. The attitude of the EU, the European Central Bank and the "Merkozy" team, backed by Spain's new president Rajoy, is: We've got to save the euro, who cares about the Europeans? Regional and municipal governments in Spain have fallen into such deep debt (income that used to come from the building boom, in the forms of licenses and taxes, having disappeared) that in some towns they haven't been able to keep the lights on. Our little town still has street lights, but there's no money for acquisition in the public library and there have been, and will be, other cuts.

I've just been reading Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (click link for NYRB article where he summarizes the argument). He explains what has been happening very clearly, though things have got even worse since his death (6 August 2010)— the lands are faring far more poorly. Spain however, as Manuel Fraga (Franco's minister of tourism) liked to say, is "different": out of phase with the general historical pattern. The "neo-conservative" or, as we would say in Europe, "neo-liberal" offensive against the welfare state in the UK, US and other advanced economies coincided with the late beginnings of public services here, under the Socialist Party governments led by Felipe González (1979-1996).

The dismanteling of the state apparatus that protected citizens began furiously, however, when the so-called "Popular Party" under Aznar came to power (1996-2004). And now, after an ambiguous and largely ineffective social democratic return (Zapatero, 2004-2012), with the return of the PP in the context of the huge European economic débâcle, the offensive had been renewed with greater vigor, meeting furious but so far unconcerted opposition. We've got to get our act together! (See Rx above.)

Say something 'Left'!

Chine Informations

Since you're reading this, you may share my perception: we desperately need to unite against the huge threats to our dignity, our social values and even our physical survival. Urgently. Israel seems about to ignite World War III by bombing Iran, with the backing of the world's greatest, and dumbest, military behemoth; the global environment is being laid waste so we won't even be able to breathe; capital is drained from production and  employment and funneled to bankers and speculators while Greece, Portugal and other countries are strangled; social guarantees (pensions, labor contracts, health care) are being dismanteled in the name of "austerity"; …  and so on.

Lots of people are outraged by one or all of these injustices, and many are taking great risks to confront them. But our actions are dispersed, sometimes mutually conflicting because of lack of commuication or of understanding, and at best have only puny, local effects. The so-called socialist parties have grown too timid and too compromised with the system to oppose it effectively — François Hollande is the only socialist leader with a chance of achieving state power who is even making left noises, but even if he means what he says and even if he wins, the whole political-economic system in which that institution is embedded (not just French vested interests but also the European Union) will make structural changes impossible without massive support from outside the system. As we've seen with Obama, once the great hope (and still the best of the bad alternatives) for the US.

We need some coordinating mechanism, and a widely-shared theory to give direction and define the priority objectives and better ways to mobilize our efforts to work together. We see signs of their emergence, of both organization and theory, but they haven't coalesced yet. And we may not have much time to create such a movement — hardly any at all, if nobody stops Netanyahu. What we need is something comparable to the international communism that gave energy and direction to so many struggles until its spectacular disintegration in 1989 and the years immediately following.

I don't mean to idealize international communism, or to minimize the cruel ways in which its tradition and doctrine were often  used — gulags, famine, massacres of supposed class enemies, mortal struggles among Stalinists, Trotskyists and other self-proclaimed communists, invasions of allies such as Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), China's "cultural revolution" and the other well-documented horrors. But it would be seriously self-defeating, and we would be missing an enormously instructive opportunity, if we did not study that movement to learn not only of its  errors (and its horrors, which were not the same thing) but also how and why it achieved its enormous successes.  For example, the great burst of activity and productivity in the first decades of the USSR, transforming the backward, semifeudal Russian Empire into a scientific, educational, artistic and industrial powerhouse, or the mobilizing of international brigades to fight fascism in Spain, the critical support for needed revolutions in Cuba, Vietnam and other places, and many less dramatic local efforts that widened freedom at least for a time. Those revolutions haven't always turned out as happily as we had expected, and that too we need to understand, but for a time they were all inspiring and gave hope and purpose to millions of lives and they did accomplish good and important things for the people — even when, as for example in Nicaragua under Ortega and his wife, or Guinée-Conakry after Sékou Touré's early heroic years, or Algeria after independence, much of the good work was destroyed by later and narrower ambitions.

So why have I thought it important to tell you all this? I guess it's just my way of explaining, to you and to myself, why we need to examine the history of such a powerful, worldwide movement, including the deeper, structural causes of its embarrassingly sudden collapse, which has left leftists confused and disorganized or even ashamed of themselves when we need all their energy. Given where I am (geographically, socially, temporally), such an examination may be the best way I can contribute to rebuilding our movement.

Grantham wonders if Marx was right after all - Al Lewis - MarketWatch

Grantham wonders if Marx was right after all - Al Lewis - MarketWatch

Thanks to Dirk Van Nouhuys for flagging this article.

Oh, go ahead and panic if you want to

A 6-ton satellite is about to crash to Earth in hours or maybe days, no one can say where, and our whole planet is about to be destroyed by some unstoppable force called "the markets," but hey! — don't panic. It's only the destruction of the world we're talking about, it's not like this was a matter of life or death. Except yours and mine, of course, but what does that matter on the scale of the Universe?

And, as the pilots of the demolition ships keep reminding us, we have had ample warning, at least 4 years' worth, enough time for our leaders first to deny that anything serious was happening, then to blame one another as things got worse, and now in the final stage to run around frantically waving their arms and doing things — like spending huge sums on failing systems — that negate what other leaders are doing — like cutting back on social investment to the point of strangling all economic life as we know it.

And I'll bet you thought A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was fiction. Now we see that all Douglas Adams did was to change the names to protect … well, himself, I suppose. In that radio and then book series, he called the pilots of the demolition ships "Vogons," the incredibly stupid but technologically empowered beings who believe they need to destroy the Earth to clear a path for a new interstellar highway. See? Just like what is really happening, except we call those incredibly stupid and technologically empowered beings that are destroying our world  "markets." And just as in the Guide, we eventually learn that the world destroyed was an artificial planet commissioned by super-intelligent mice as a highly complex computer to discover the meaning of life, the universe and everything — not the answer, but the question. Well, maybe they weren't really mice in our case. Super-intelligent cockroaches, could be. Or something. Or nothing. More likely, some not especially intelligent or foresighted humans thinking no farther than their immediate advantage.

Because yes, we can now see that what is threatened with imminent destruction — just ask Christine Lagarde if you doubt me — is an artificial planet, though only a few centuries, not tens of millions of years old. It is what we used to call the First World, until the other two self-destructed. (The Second, piloted from Moscow, by enormous internal tensions and its stubborn and futile battering of itself against the First World; the Third World by allowing itself to be absorbed into the fringes of the First one, where its denizens are still hoping to wriggle their way higher in the ranking.)

Yes, fellow First Wordlings about to be hit in the head by a failed 6-ton satellite, our world of self-feeding, self-destroying capitalist construction and consumption is fast coming apart and about to disintegrate entirely under the repeated and ever fiercer attacks of the markets that feed on it.

Of course, just as on the planet Magrathea, the infinite improbability drive may come into operation and something may save us. Let's hope so, because the European Union, the European Central Bank, the US Fed and the IMF haven't a clue, or else have clues leading them all in opposite directions. Or maybe that 6-ton satellite will hit one of us in the head and we won't need to worry about life, the universe, or anything.

America, a Spark Away From Riots of Its Own

Some readers of the blog may have got the impression that I'm a pretty smart guy; if so, I'm about to disabuse you, by talking about something I don't fully understand: the great economic collapse, how and why it is happening and what to do about it. Why? Because unless I spell out my tentative and possibly mistaken perceptions, I won't have a chance to correct or develop them.

Probably the most important post-World War II development has been the freeing of finance capital from its former bonds. As long as there have been markets, even before the birth of capitalism in England in the late middle ages (E.M. Wood, The Origin of Capitalism), there has been credit — "finance" —in some form.

But even as late as Marx (who died in 1883) or even Lenin (1924), there were some constraints on finance capital, national loyalty being one of them. Thus J. P. Morgan was hailed for his "civic responsibility," demonstrated most dramatically in the Panic of 1907.

But finance capital has broken free and now dictates to its former masters: trade, state, local authorities of all kinds, traditional loyalties.  It is a collective organism, like an anthill or a beehive or a city, e.g., London today, where the impulse toward mass action overcomes whatever rationality or notion of self-preservation its individual components may possess. Finance capital no longer recognizes any nation, but acts on its own only to aggrandize itself. And since it thinks of nothing but its own appetite, it does not hesitate to consume and destroy the industrial and commercial systems on which it feeds. If left entirely uncontrolled, the parasite will destroy its host — and then even bankers and security traders will despair.

Which is why things may not go quite to this extreme, that is, to the total self-destruction of the system. But we're getting close. Some financiers are able to raise their heads above the tumult (see links to Soros below) and see the dangers and may be willing to cede some control. But the forces of destruction are so strong and states (national governments) so timorous they (states and financiers) are acting too late to prevent great devastation — high unemployment in Europe, starvation in Africa, and turmoil everwhere.

And that of course is what is stimulating other and opposite movements of mass organisms, collective movements impelled more by rage than by sense, also overwhelming the rationality of individual participants and also possibly destroying the systems that sustain them. From Somalia to Athens to London and many other places. O, if we could just channel all that furious energy into a real revolution, establishing a truly sustainable system for reproducing social life! It will happen, surely, but  — if we continue to behave as our species has over the millennia — only at the last possible moment.

(See Ford Releases Report on German Subsidiary and WWII.) These days, such operations — financing all sides in a war, for example — seem to be simpler to execute. And with the ease of moving money instantly, globally, through the Internet, patriotic concerns and the powers of states to regulate transactions have all but evaporated.

Three steps to resolving the eurozone crisis | George Soros

Germany must defend the euro | George Soros

America, a Spark Away From Riots of Its Own

Empire’s Last Gasp — A Two-Act Scenario; Charles Degelman returns to classic texts by Marx and Lenin

It is probably true, as Charlie Degelman suggests, that Marx and Lenin provide pointers, but a lot has happened since them and so we're going to have to try to figure this out without them.

For my earlier comments on "good and bad capitalism" and related issues, click on keyword "capitalism" below.

And here's something to listen to while you ponder these problems: Ry Cooder: No Banker Left Behind - YouTube

Budget crisis, Tea Party, and the ignorance machine

For years (too many, perhaps) I taught sociology to college students, and had to help us all understand every great social issue that came up — why things are the way they are and what we might have to do to change them. Not that I think sociological reasoning can give us definitive answers, but it should help us frame the questions better by testing various hypotheses and eliminating all the false leads and continuing to test the more promising ones. Though I have no classroom before me now, I'll try again to exercise the sociological imagination for something useful.

So, today's big issue: The impasse in the US Congress (which may or may not be about to break — they've still got to vote) and its likely consequences. Why? And what next?

Everything is the way it is because it got that way, as biologist D'Arcy Thompson is said to have said. (D. C. Dennett, The Evolution of Culture). We start there, with the history. Here's my understanding (a metahypothesis containing several testable assumptions):

1. Since the beginning of the Republic there has always been a sizable stratum of change-resistant nuts ready to blame everything that makes them uncomfortable on some insidious conspiracy, regardless of any evidence to the contrary, and they're still among us. Foreigners or people with other religious beliefs have been the usual suspects. (Bibliography can be assembled if anybody is interested.) Why the US has so many and why these people insist on believing these things, what drives them and so on, are worthy questions but for now (just to explain the current crisis) we just have to recognize that they are there, almost always have been, and are likely to persist. 
2. The introduction of truly mass communications (when the telegraph enhanced newspaper reporting) enabled Pulitzer, Hearst and others in the 19th and early 20th centuries, motivated more by profit than by political conviction, to turn that stratum of mostly inchoate and locally harmful conspiracy-seekers into a nationwide mass market and mobilize them; regional media potentates did the same, for example in stimulating Klan outrages in the U.S. South. The Spanish-American War, the nearly genocidal U.S. military campaign in the Philippines, the anti-New Deal, anti-FDR movements in the 1930s are just a few examples of this activity.
3. Major business groups initially unrelated to media (banks, railroads, oil, steel and later big pharmacy, etc.) saw the advantages of mobilizing that populist anger against any reforms threatening their profits and used their immense resources to enhance enormously the reach of the mob-rallying media, until big media and other big capital actually fused in, among others, the big television broadcasting companies.
4. Murdoch, Fox News and the Tea Party are thus the predictable culmination of this process. Their main function is the production of ignorance. What I mean is that (at enormous expense and with huge resources) they work to convince people that what they should and could know simply by examining available evidence (assuming they have had a decent elementary education that enables them to read clearly) is untrue, and that the Real Truth includes such things as (for example) the foreign birth of Obama (despite all the evidence), the imminent danger of Islamization in the US, and so on.

I've spelled this out so that we can pick it apart and see how well those assumptions hold up. Until contrary evidence can be presented, that's my hypothesis of how things got this way. Next question: What next? If it's too late to prevent this crisis, what can be done to forestall the next one?

The first thing that suggests itself is disarming that media machine, somehow. Imposing rules as to how far beyond the evidence a broadcaster can go is one possibility, but tricky and dangerous (free speech). Limiting ownership of media outlets is more feasible, but of course will have to overcome the resistance of those big media. Reversing the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision that the Constitution permits corporations to secretly fund, in any amount, phony public interest group's campaigns seems like another important and probably effective check on that machine, but will require a huge amount of work.

In these and other ways, including using whatever resources we have including this little blog, we will need to to combat the production of ignorance by the defence and expansion of knowledge. And to keep asking better questions.

Becoming an elder

Sunday I turned 70. That means that I am now one of the elders. I do not take this responsibility lightly. You and all the other members of our tribe — the entire human race — have a right to expect more of me now, and I shall try to satisfy your expectations.

I am probably not any smarter than I was when I was 20 or 30 or 40. Maybe even less smart, in the sense of grasping new information, like, say, all the technological changes that come so fast these days. But — unless we have been really dumb all these years and actively resisting knowledge — we elders are bound to be wiser than we were. That's just the way the brain works, accumulating experience, transferring new knowledge grasped by our quick left-brain to our more meditative right brain. Elkhonon Goldberg has explained how all this happens, the physical changes in our brains that make us maybe a little less quick to grasp new information, but nevertheless able to react more quickly and surely (without all that youthful Hamlet-like doubting) because almost anything we encounter is somehow like something we have seen before.

The job of youth is to change the world. Then — in our 30s, 40s, 50s — to understand it. And now, as elders, to accept it.

But accepting — I mean seeing reality as it is, without the screen of wishful thinking — is not enough. That could just be depressing if we didn't also remember our younger selves. Our job as elders is to share what we've learned so that all of us, young, mature and elders, can change things better.

That's been my story, and the story of others I have known and admired, including some who reached elderhood long before me. Those who were in their 20s back in the 1930s, for example. We Americans who were in our 20s back in the '60s did change the world, very substantially. We broke down some fierce racial barriers in the US, we changed the gender rules, we forced our government to accelerate the end of its war in Southeast Asia, we created new art forms in all the arts. Some of the changes came so fast that we who had been pushing for them were perplexed and confused, because the terrain was changing. And some of the changes were unexpected, and not all of them were good.

I began to get an inkling that things were more complicated than I had first assumed when I was still in my 20s. Work as a community organizer in what for me was a foreign culture, the poor barrios of Caracas, Venezuela, was a bath in a different pond. When I got back to the States I started grad school in sociology, still focused on changing the world but also recognizing that I needed to work harder to understand it. I thought I could do the two things simultaneously, coupling my sociological research and courses and readings with very active participation in the antiwar and civil rights movements, trying to bring those things together.

The shift into a new phase of consciousness didn't happen all at once, but suffered some big jolts when I was in my 30s. First, the coup in Chile (September 11, 1973, when I was 32) made it clearer than ever how hard the democratic struggle was going to be. And then the rapid deflation of the anti-war movement in 1975 drove a lot of us activists back to the books and into ferocious debates over political and revolutionary theory. And a lot of it turned out to be wishful thinking. The proletariat that we had imagined didn't even exist, the capitalism we were confronting was not the caricature that had been drawn for us, the people we thought we were liberating didn't always (if ever) behave the way we had expected. 

Which didn't mean that we shouldn't try to change the world, to make it more just, to open more opportunities to more people. Just that it was going to be harder than we thought, and maybe there would never be a final, total victory, but rather the unceasing struggle to widen justice and keep injustice from encroaching.

I've learned some things, I think. And now that I am one of the elders of our tribe, it will be my honor and especially my duty not just to share knowledge already acquired, but to use my new elder skills to seek out reasonable strategies in the face of all our several crises of war, contamination, and continued injustices of all kinds.

By the way, the birthday party on Sunday was a blast. Thanks to all my good friends who participated, and all the others who couldn't be present but sent their good wishes.

(Check out my earlier blog comment on Eros and Thanatos for more about Goldberg's thesis.)

On not playing well with others: guest essay

Here's a contribution by fiction-writer and essayist Dirk van Nouhuys, a regular reader of the blog. He calls it

Cars & Freedom

Cars Mini by Stephen Bayley

The other day I was watching an American football game. A commercial came on showing a company of redcoats, that is British infantryman of the 18th century, assuming their positions to fire facing a charge. The camera shifted to the oncoming opponents. They were black pickup trucks, Dodge Rams, and driving the lead pickup truck was George Washington. Before the onslaught of streamlined and patriotic iron the redcoats fled. A resonate voiceover declared, “There are two things America has right: cars and freedom.”

A day or two later I found myself behind a Dodge Ram in traffic. It displayed three bumper stickers. One was for the NFL team I had been watching. One was an American flag in an extremely ornate setting, which suggested the label on a Budweiser bottle. The third read, “Doesn’t Play Well with Others.” For those who don’t know, this is a note stereotypically sent home from school with the report cards of surly and narcissistic children.

It seems to me that the voiceover was more wrong than right. These are two things America in important senses has wrong. First about cars: Americans have the idea that they should be an order of magnitude faster and more powerful than they need to be, and thus consume an order of magnitude more than necessary of the world’s resources and pollute the air proportionally. The American trucking industry, which after all does deliver the goods, figures 10-20 Horsepower per ton. That means that a reasonable horsepower for a private car is about 20. They run around 100 and more. Of course America is not alone in this self-destructive urge to build fast and powerful cars, it really originated in Europe, and is being embraced, sadly, all over the planet.

Freedom is a more complex issue, as we all know. What ‘freedom’ means ranges at least from childish anarchism to the idea in some theological contexts that true freedom is willing to do what God (or the state) has required one to do. But one thing that Americans consistently have wrong about freedom is that it is orthogonal to cooperation. In practice Americans often employ cooperation as a means to a sensation of freedom, for instance on the highway, where Americans report they often feel most free, yet observe an elaborate set of cooperative rules, written and unwritten, which allow them to survive in their powerful machines without killing themselves and others beyond reasonable measure. That important and self-defeating American ideal of freedom is perfectly summed up in the third bumper sticker, “Does not play well with others.”

— Dirk van Nouhuys

www.wandd.com

P. S.  Happy New Year

History, fiction and historical fiction

In my review agenda that I posted last month, I promised to write something about two closely related, big, important books on Brazil: Euclides Da Cunha, Backlands : the Canudos Campaign, trad. Elizabeth Lowe (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), and Mario Vargas Llosa, La guerra del fin del mundo (Madrid Spain: Punto de Lectura, 2008).  Vargas Llosa's recent and belated Nobel recognition may make readers especially interested in this and all of his fiction. 

But to my annoyance, my alter ego Baltasar Lotroyo has beaten me to the punch with his own blog entry: Lecturas y lectores: Ficción, historia, ficción histórica. As you see, if you read even a little Spanish, I've plagiarized his title. And for those who don't read Spanish easily, I'll sum up his main points.

Balta begins by quoting Vargas Llosa from a recent interview, “I have never written a historical novel.” And then goes on to mention three of Vargas Llosa's novels situated in and based on extensive investigation of historical events: his latest, El sueño del celta; his La fiesta del chivo, and the one that concerns us here, La guerra del fin del mundo.

This dense, long, and powerfully moving book (first published in 1981) is dedicated to Euclides da Cunha, “a tragic figure and one of the greatest of Latin American narrators,” known today almost exclusively for his great book Os sertões, which has been recently re-translated as Backlands: the Canudos campaign. (There is also an earlier translation, Rebellion in the backlands, 1957, by Samuel Putnam — but probably harder to find now.) So let's begin with Da Cunha and his story, considered by many Brazilians to be the greatest work of literature their country has produced.

In 1889, Brazilian military units backed by the urban elites of Rio de Janeiro and Salvador da Bahia, deposed the aging Emperor Dom Pedro II and declared the country a Republic, and the new republican rulers initiated a whole panoply of reforms meant to “modernize” the country, that is, to make it look more like the European countries they emulated. Just the year before, Dom Pedro had finally succeeded in pushing through the abolition of slavery, and for this and other reasons he was revered by many of the poor, non-urban, non-propertied, illiterate or barely literate majority of Brazilians. Nor did these poorer, non-elite groups understand or accept such changes as the introduction of the metric system, a census, increased taxes.

In the deep backwoods of the northeastern state of Bahia, with a mestizo population — whites, Amerindians, blacks and various combinations — and a primitive economy of hard-scrabble agriculture and cattle-raising, where the mounted police rarely entered the dense scrub, gulleys, canyons mountain peaks and bandits roamed at will, the people were especially suspicious. And when a tall, thin, ascetic preacher with penetrating gaze and a direct line to the will of the Good Jesus walked barefoot into their villages, telling them everything that was wrong with the republic and urging devotion to the Good Jesus and to the traditional ways, more and more of those villagers and wanderers followed him. His name was Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel, but he was known as Antônio Conselheiro ("the Counselor").  And this was the unlikely, and to city folks from Rio or Salvador incredible, beginning of what grew into a massive and extremely bloody revolt against the new state.

(To be continued)

Potosí and us

Now that global capitalism has crashed once again, it may help order the mind to look back on how it all began. This is one of the multiple agendas of the complex, exhausting, sometimes exhilarating exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía, Principio Potosí / ¿Cómo podemos cantar el canto del Señor en tierra ajena?

It is the premise of this multimedia, multinational, multiartist, intensively interactive show—it comes with a roadmap inviting the conscientious viewer to cross and recross the big exhibition space many times, to pause before videos or graphics or installations, and even to climb platforms and ladders to view everything in proper sequence—that it was the silver of the Cerro Rico ("Rich Mountain") of Potosí in the Bolivian Andes that made it all possible. That's the mountain, disguised as the Virgin Mary, or rather fused with her (silver made sacred) in an anonymous 1720 painting reproduced in the show. This high Andean mountain with its seam of silver (now in Bolivia) was sacred to the community there, but to the Spanish conquerors all that was sacred was the wealth they could extract from it, and raping and ravaging the mountain was of no concern.

The Reina Sofía show traces how the rich silver lodes of Potosí financed the global spread of the then new "system in which goods and services, down to the most basic necessities of life, are produced for profitable exchange, where even human labor power is a commodity for sale in the market, and where, because all economic actors are dependent on the market, the requirements of competition and profit maximization are the fundamental rules of life"—as Marxist scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood defines capitalism in her indispensable little book, The Origin of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999).

This was radical break from pre-capitalist market, trade or pillage economies, which were often brutal and violent but did not buy and sell human labor (there were lots of slaves, but not organized slave markets) nor regard profit as the highest goal. Those pre-capitalist exploiters were far more intent on glory and immortality (as a tour of the ruins of ancient Egypt recently reminded us).

For Wood, the shift began with the enclosures in England in the 15th century or earlier, and she doesn't mention Potosí. But what gave it a big boost, and expanded London's force as a market vortex, was the wealth sucked out of new colonies in América, especially Potosí.  As the curators of the Reina Sofía show (Alice Creisher, Max Jorge Hinderer, Andreas Siekmann) write in the exhibition guide, the king of Spain had so many debts that as soon as the treasure galleons reached the Port of Cádiz, bags of silver were transferred directly to the ships belonging to his creditors elsewhere in Europe—England chiefly.

But the museum show is not only about Bolivia and the careless, more or less accidental genocide in the Americas (the conquerors didn't set out deliberately to wipe out the native population, and sometimes even lamented the suffering they had caused, but they had to have that silver!). It also wants us to see the parallels to the grinding down of humans in other parts of the world to feed the insatiable monster of profit and luxury for the few. A group of Russian performing artists have contributed a powerful video of a theater piece, about the collusion of political bosses, the Orthodox church, the arts establishment, criminal gangs and a consortium from  the Arab emirates to build a huge Gazprom Tower in St. Petersburg (illustration), over the opposition of conservationists and others. The link takes you to the architects' page. But here you can see the theater piece itself without even traveling to Madrid; whatever the merits of the argument, we loved it as proof that there are still Marxists (and Brechtians) in Russia. Chto Delat: Songspiel (The Tower).

Another narrative strain is about the superexploitation of Chinese workers, and their communal resistance efforts, including songs and workshops with artifacts made by children. And there are videos of performance pieces by indigenous women in La Paz, subverting the whole colonial concept of Christian submission in a dance by a rebellious virgin and the stripping naked of the colonial rulers in familiar old portraits. And graphs and documents on workers in Dubai, along with a heavy critique of Seville's Dubai-financed art biennial.

And repeated denunciations of the Catholic Church's complicity in exploitation, not only in colonial America, but in the Spanish civil war and the Franco regime. And let's not forget The Karl Marx School of the English Language, another Chto Delat production from Russia, where you can hear Russians trying to enunciate in English Karl Marx's famous description of "the rosy dawn of capital"—the primitive accumulation from places like Potosí. It's a strange thing to hear in an art museum in Madrid, where you can't expect everyone to follow Russian-accented English, but in the complex context of the whole show, for those of us who can follow the text, it was a welcome reminder of a powerful and extremely relevant text.

Robber Barons of Social Change

Mark Engler's review of Michael Edwards new book, Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World gives a neat summary of the weaknesses of philanthropic capitalism -- which is always more about capitalism (the bottom line) than about people's needs.

Toward Freedom - The Robber Barons of Social Change

Fighting for a new America

My Zeitgenosse Charles Degelman has just posted a comment on why Obama is having such a hard time pushing health reform: Footprints. I think his main point is right and important:

So I try not to be surprised or disappointed or to blame Obama alone. No! A waste of time. Obama receives no marching orders from The Oligarchy. He is not a pawn in a grand plan or conspiracy. No. He and Congress are – as they have been for a long, long time – part of a desperate attempt by the oligarchies – riddled with greed and stupidity – to save a system that is sliding -- very slowly, inexorably, albeit cruelly -- into oblivion.

I also believe he's right that if the reform fails, the inevitable collapse of our system will likely come sooner than it would otherwise. Though -- after Lehman Bros. and all the rest of it -- essential parts of the structures designed to enrich finance capitalists at the expense of everybody else have already collapsed. In the long run and on the macro scale, what happens to this reform may make little difference -- we are going to have to reconstruct our society on different principles, regardless. On the micro scale and in the shorter run, what happens to millions of American families, it's tremendously important. It's also a tremendously important battleground for deciding the shape of a new system.

But I'm not so sure about some of what Charlie says here. For example, "Capitalism in its imperialist stage (here since WWI), said Marx in 1848, will eventually lead to socialization." I don't find that in the Manifesto. I don't remember Marx talking about "imperialism." I don't think the term was even used as an analytic category in political economics until Hobson (1902), from whom Lenin picked it up 14 years later. Maybe it's in some other text of Marx that I've forgotten?

Also, his description of "blocs" is maybe OK but just as a starting point, rough approximation. The problem I have with that language is that "bloc" implies too much conscious intentionality, even a desire to conspire. It also implies too much internal harmony -- as though the people in each grouping didn't include cutthroat competitors and slavish minions.

As for Lenin's "Imperialism" -- it was useful politically then (1916) and maybe even up to World War II. Thereafter it becomes impossible to explain international conflicts without introducing another, wholly different set of variables, derived mainly from anthropology and psychology (Fanon, for example). Lenin was never particularly sensitive to ethnic issues (Stalin was, of course, perhaps partly because of his own minority origin, and long before either of them, Engels was acutely interested in the subject). Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, southeastern China, Bolivia, Ecuador, Sudan, ex-Yugoslavia and other places have surely been battered by the forces Lenin described, but their responses have been conditioned by ethnic and religious rituals and rage against humiliations that can only be understood within each culture.

Anyway, thanks, Charlie, for provoking these reflections. It's a worthwhile debate. It's about our future. And everybody else: Check out Charles Degelman's story in Above Ground, about how the life of one little boy in a working-class family is touched by the macro politics of the 1950s anti-Communist hysteria and the Rosenbergs' execution.

(On Zeitgenossen, see my earlier note, or better yet, the stories of Heinrich Böll.)

The Job

Thanks to Dirk van Nouhuys for sending this commentary on the financial crisis, from the Festival international de très courts ("very short" videos):

The Job

Don't miss it!

Alternatives: Cuba tries to make a socialism that grows

But can it succeed? The Cubans have proven so resilient and Cuban institutions so resistant to joining the "There is no alternative" crowd, that they may just make this work. It's a small economy, but its methods may again -- as they have been repeatedly through the 1960s and 1970s -- be a model for other low-income countries. From the Financial Times: A revolution to repair: New friends come to the aid of Raúl’s Cuba By Richard Lapper

How to rule the world (and how not to)

Nicholas Sarkozy points the world's leaders to the right at the G8 summit conference in Hokkaido Toyako, Japan.

Engler, Mark. How to Rule the World. The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy. New York: Nation Books, 2008.

According to Mark Engler, the masters of wealth have split into two camps about how to rule the world, which leaves an opening for others of us to seize the terrain for a globalization that works for humanity.

In fact, as Engler is well aware and Marx pointed out long ago, the ruling groups have always been divided in many ways by their fierce competition for bigger slices of the wealth. But since World War II and Bretton Woods, they had come to accept a framework of cooperation, by which the elites of the most powerful industrialized economies protected one another from threats to their power from outsiders including any reform-minded elites in poorer nations, rebellious workers or underclass in their own countries, and of course revolutionary movements backed by the USSR or Communist China.

This cooperation was effected in large part by global institutions including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (using debt-pressure to keep poor nations' economies safe for transnational investors from the U.S., Western Europe or Japan), the World Trade Organization (to make sure the poor nations didn't protect their own industries from rich nations' exports), NATO (backing the economic rules by armed force), and other treaties and agreements. Since one country, the U.S., had the greatest wealth and greatest military force in all these institutions, it was able to assure that they and others (including the U.N.) generally acted in accord with the interests of its own national military-industrial complex. The arrangement did cause occasional inconvenience for big U.S. corporations, however, since it required them to abide by the same rules that they demanded of everyone else and for important international actions to be agreed upon by all the major players.

The Bush government team changed all that. They have acted repeatedly outside the international institutions to make separate trade deals outside the WTO and IMF, and defied international law, the World Court and the UN (demanding exemptions from international law for U.S. troops abroad, invading Iraq, Guantánamo, etc.). This has split the world's elites, who no longer had much of a say in the actions of the world's biggest power.

The two camps of the would-be rulers of the world are those who want to go back to something like the older international system, and the U.S. go-it-aloners and their (very few) allies abroad. But the Bush-Cheney offensive of the past 8 years has brought both systems to a crisis. The old mechanisms of global control are broken. For example, almost all of Latin America has now freed itself of the destructive control that the IMF had over their economies. And the attempted new style of control, an unabashed and undisguised Pax Americana, is proving unsustainable. The U.S. cannot fight all the wars its policies provoke, and can't even win in the big ones it has got into now, in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the country's economic might also looks precarious.

Engler points out the fallacy of the slogan, "There is no alternative" to globalized capitalism as we know it. There is always the alternative of saying, as Bolivia has recently to water and gas companies seeking monopolies, "No." And there are always many alternatives within the system. What there is not is a single, unified opposition movement with a clearly defined program -- and that, Engler thinks, is just fine. And I agree with him. Our last single, unified opposition movement, very tightly unified, its cadres firmly disciplined and marching on orders, the world Communist movement, turned out to be too disciplined and rigid to adapt to ever changing, many-faceted realities.

"Capitalism" is not united and never has been, that has been its strength, what has allowed aspects of it to thrive and grow even as other expressions of it became obsolete and died. Opposition to particular capitalist abuses has to be as flexible and creative as capitalism itself. "Capitalism" is not one thing but many different ways for people to seek private profit from public goods, and there are just as many ways to try to re-channel that private profit motive into public welfare.

Engler is particulary good, and amusing, in his critiques of Thomas Friedman's global enthusiasms and the limitations of Joseph Stieglitz's acute denunciations of current practices (though without proposing a radical alternative). Also valuable is his chapter on how countries of Latin America -- backed in different ways by Venezuela's oil wealth and Brazil's enormous agricultural and industrial potential -- are changing the ways the game has to be played.

He gives us no assurance that we can make a better world -- that wiser people with more generous, solidary motives can come to rule it -- but he shows that there is a chance. As for what we can do, I think he's pointing us in the same direction as two older researchers whose books I've mentioned here. See my notes on Alain Touraine, Penser autrement, and Ulrich Beck, Power in the Global Age.

Why Bush & Co. are bad for capitalism

And why a lot of the smart big money is now backing Obama. Check it out.

Globalizers, Neocons, or…?

The World After Bush
By Mark Engler

The next wave of the Left

“As a cohort, throughout the world, our generation didn't "solve it." We didn't solve the problems of health, education, food, and injustice in the world,” writes one of my oldest comrades in struggle, Daniel del Solar in some recent reflections. He and I are Zeitgenossen, to use Heinrich Böll's unimprovable term -- comrades of our era, in our case, those who reached voting age right around the time of the Cuban missile crisis (October 1962).

Danny's right. We didn't accomplish all the things we dreamed of, but he and I and tens or even hundreds of thousands of us sure made the effort. Not always wisely -- we were young and inexperienced, and for the most part without the benefit of counsel from older cohorts of struggle, for the reasons I noted in last Friday's note ("My '68"). And even if we had been wiser, we still would have made mistakes because the world is complicated, and one can never quite predict the consequences of any change we make. But those sit-ins, mass demonstrations, confrontations with police, leafletting and (Danny's specialty) radio and TV broadcasts to make more people aware and to mobilize them to demand civil rights for people of all races, an end to the war in Vietnam, and all the other issues we took on, all of that did make a difference. Even beyond the specific, usually small victories (securing the release of particular political prisoners, forcing the state to explain its actions, and so on), we helped save the dignity of the human race. We kept the ancestral tradition of protest against inequality alive, the tradition of the Left. And now, though some of us (including Danny) are still in the struggle, it's approaching time to hand over that tradition to the next generations.

The problems they face include some that we were only dimly aware of. Global warming and deterioration of the habitability of the planet are the biggest ones. Dangers of nuclear war, depredations of trans- and multinational enterprises in weaker countries, and racism -- such as the latest assaults on Rumanian gypsies in Italy -- are ones we are very familiar with.

The left that we, my Zeitgenossen, the generation of the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam and so on, knew came apart around the same time, and for the same reasons, as the Soviet Union and its bloc. Most of us had long since abandoned the illusion that the USSR could be the model for world revolution, but its sudden disappearance gave force to the new slogan, "There is no alternative" (TINA) -- that is, no alternative to capitalist domination.

There are and always will be alternatives. Capitalism, the reduction of all things and all humans to commodities and/or factors of production, runs counter to the inerradicable human drive of solidarity which has permitted our race to survive this long. So there will always be resistence, and there is right now, under a dozen different slogans. "Another world is possible," "Greenpeace," groups focusing on women's rights, others on "Third World," others on amnesty for prisoners of conscience, and more. The task now, as it was for us (combining civil rights and antiwar movements into one big movement) and for our immediate predecessors (the "Popular Front" of the 1930s) and for their predecessors, is to bring enough of these narrower causes together to make an impact.

And the task for us, my Zeitgenossen, is to offer what experience and energy we can to help the new guys and gals. They should be smart enough to ignore us when we're spouting irrelevancies, and to find in our successes and our mistakes lessons they can use. Some of them may even be curious enough to look at this and other blogs of us '60s people.

I'm enthusiastic about a lot of the newest Leftists. Here's just one I think we should be watching: Olivier Besancenot, who is only 34 and already a force in France. He is now seen by François Hollande and other leaders of the Parti socialiste as their biggest threat on the left, far more dangerous than the once-feared Parti communiste. His proposals make sense to me, and he makes sense to enough Frenchfolk that he got 4.25% of their votes in presidential elections in 2002 (when he was 28).