Capitalism and Human Rights

Everything changes and changes rapidly within capitalism except the bourgeoisie's accumulation that is constant in its growth, which is the heart of the "status quo" which guides such change often in conflicting directions, confusing the mass society who think that there is a genuine "balance of power." Sometimes in maintaining that wealth growth (in undoing competitors) human rights talk and action are opportunistically deployed by the capitalist elite, at other times when human rights become a problem to that end, they get sidetracked. Human rights within capitalism are, like everything else, secondary to and in service of capital accumulation.

The long term consequence of such use and misuse of human rights by the capitalist system, results in a qualitative degradation of human rights as a framework for organizing social activity. The bourgeoisie's framework of "human rights" is designed to keep structural oppressions in tact. All of those "rights" are framed in terms of the liberal-bourgeoisie order, the "law" before which everyone is supposedly equal is bourgeoisie law that is inherently unequal. The protection against discrimination overlooks the fact of a discriminatory system based on a control of the means of life by a privileged minority that stratifies people based on class, race and gender.

-Asadi

The Structure of Social Distance

Overt racism can never disappear without institutional racism disappearing- the kind of racism that is actively maintained by both democrats and republicans, liberals and conservatives. The interpretive schema that manifest themselves in terms of "old fashioned" overt racism merely become dormant in specific structural contexts where there is no danger of the structure of social distance getting undone. In those situations overt racism is superfluous and therefore easily recognized by the superordinate group members themselves (as a result of which they feel that the race problem has been fixed). However, in situations that might challenge the structure of social distance, the implicit assumptions of superior and subordinate, overt racism reemerges in terms of charges of reverse discrimination and exclusion of subordinate groups from equal participation (what leads to double consciousness among the subordinate groups), but in such cases, while easily recognized as overt racism by the subordinate group members, the superordinate group members are socially incapable of understanding or recognizing it as such. This is the process behind the "doing" of racism through which a racist structure reproduces itself.

In other words, within a racist structure, for the superordinate group members (or countries) interaction is problem-less as long as the subordinate group members (or countries) "stay in their place." If the subordinate breaches the taken for granted hierarchy and tries to interact "on equal terms" with the superordinate, all hell breaks loose. It is in these breachings by subordinates (more so than academic arguments), that are in effect Rosa Parks moments, that opportunities exist for undoing what is, in effect, a reconstituted and structurally enforced Jim Crow in the current era.

-Asadi

Capitalism's "conveniences" need to be contextualized within a social structure which makes them "convenient" for ulterior motive. By monopolizing functional utility based on structurally inconveniencing alternatives, reducing them to novelties and luxuries, the bourgeoisie have constructed a life-style dependent on "doing" capitalism. In its zero sum equation, all conveniences are structured arou...nd maximizing the bourgeoisie's accumulation. The car that takes us to work (to maximize the bourgeoisie's surplus) is the same car that uses the type of fuel that is "convenient" because alternatives are not profitable unless subsidized by the consumer, it is the same car that takes us places that somebody else has determined in terms of where paved roads go, in effect reducing people's access to large areas of the earth (that are in effect stolen from them because going there is "inconvenient"). What made the car convenient for a few is the same system that causes the many to perish through need, it is the same system that reduced physical distance between places (shrunk travel time) but enhanced social distance between people, more so than ever in the past.

Life, the best parts of it, have been spatially reduced to the dimensions of a cubicle (not much bigger than a prison cell, slightly bigger than a grave) or the office and the world reduced to a computer screen where the quality of interaction in terms of complexity does not even match that of an ordinary street corner conversation, the quality of sociation and culture, as C. Wright Mills proclaimed correctly (1954, Letter to Tovarich) has reached a level of “mediocrity” that can be sensed “all around us and in us.”

According to the admission of capitalism's own flag bearers (the World Bank/UN/IMF) half of the world lives on less than $2 a day, which is below subsistence, in terms of poverty such deprivation is of a scale unforeseen in human history, in real terms over 75% of the world’s population lives in conditions of extreme deprivation. The quantity of life has increased in terms of synthetically enhanced life expectancy but its quality has gone down tremendously in comparable terms (material and relational), not only compared to the distant past, images from which are often culturally misused to frighten people in order to bind them to a tyrannous system, but even in the past twenty to thirty years all over the world, even as the bourgeoisie have accumulated more than they ever have in the past. All economic downturns have been accumulation opportunities for them.

The system as a whole needs to go, there is no incremental solution, living within it we have to play by its rules, we are forced to "do capitalism" or we lose even those tiny spaces, where the greatly diminished agency/voice of the weak can still be heard, allowed (albeit grudgingly) by the bourgeoisie due to their accumulation desires. Where they have found it convenient to deny people even this little space, they have destroyed whole countries and laid to waste entire cities and communities by stripping people of their livelihood, on scales, and this is certainly no exaggeration, never before seen in human history.

-Asadi

This study (linked below) substantiates my claim that not only is capitalism incapable of producing equality in the real sense, no matter how you try to "reform" it, it will reconstitute the class structure, close the class structure (i.e. reduce income mobility) and figure out means to maximize bourgeoisie accumulation with limited redistribution financed through the working classes themselves. The Scandinavian countries long considered the paragons of the "good" capitalism, social democracy and welfare, have a class mobility structure that is similar to the most unequal (and wealthiest) of the industrialized countries, the U.S. The study's results are also implicit evidence of my claim that this redistribution does not come out of bourgeoisie profits but is redistributed out of the working class 'pie' itself in a "zero-sum" manner. If the feudal history of Northern/Western European nations, which (historically) necessitated greater compromise and manipulation of the subordinated classes (by the bourgeoisie) for the bourgeoisie revolution to succeed was missing (as in the U.S.) even the levels of inequality in those countries would mimic that in the U.S.

On p.18, the authors state that higher inequality does not lead to higher mobility as commonly envisioned, implying that regardless of the levels of inequality within capitalism, mobility is reduced to the point of elimination- the class structure successively closes through political manipulation as in a caste system, much like Lenski (1966) had theorized.

Abstract: This paper compares income inequality and income mobility in the Scandinavian countries and the United States during the 1980s. The results demonstrate that inequality is greater in the United states than in the Scandinavian countries and that the ranking of countries with respect to inequality remains unchanged when the accounting period of income is extended from one to 11 years. The pattern of mobility turns out to be remarkably similar despite major differences in labor market and social policies between the Scandinavian countries and the United States.

[Income Inequality and Income Mobility in the Scandinavian Countries Compared to the United States

Rolf Aaberge (rolf.aaberge@ssb.no), Anders Bjorklund (anders.bjorklund@sofi.su.se), Markus Jantti, Mårten Palme (marten.palme@ne.su.se), Peder Pedersen, Nina Smith (nsmith@econ.au.dk) and Tom Wennemo

http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/hhshastef/0098.htm]

Within a capitalist social system choosing independence over control leads to dire (material and social) consequences for those categorized as workers because their total subservience is required for bourgeoisie accumulation. The system of social control deployed by the bourgeoisie involves either systemic slaughter through wars, scientifically perfected (fully 1/3rd of all ‘scientists’ work to perfect these means of destruction, and research and development funding is concentrated in this sector as well) or structural “identity” control, the displacement of a sovereign identity by a robotized subservient identity through necessity of existence within a controlled and controlling social environment (Note 1). In other words, the scheme of social control within capitalism aims to reduce humanity to either the dead or the living-dead, which brings us to the final monologue of the movie, Shutter Island, “Would you rather live a monster, or die a good man?”

In order to make this “scheme” work however a residual (third) category is also required, the category that Veblen defined as “master-less men (women),” those who, according to his description, don’t fit into the “use and wont” of capitalist society. In order to establish the structural normality or the "sanity" of the “living dead,” a steady supply of (those considered) the insane is required as contrast. Their numbers are few, they exist as exceptions when the system is operational and bourgeoisie accumulation is proceeding according to plan, it is in these times that the “insane” are most isolated. In crisis times however, their numbers swell as the “living dead” become aware of their human (not racial or national) identity and attain consciousness, they are in effect “brought back to life.” Karl Mannheim, considered by many to be the founder of the sociology of knowledge, described this reawakening in these words, “In an ‘adequately’ functioning (i.e. functionally rational) society the neurotic is only the borderline case. In a state of “general disorganization,” it is he who sets the pattern.” (1940/1960: 514).

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Note 1: “The average person surrenders part of his own cultural individuality with every new act of integration into a functionally rationalized complex of activities. He becomes increasingly accustomed to being led by others and gradually gives up his own interpretation of events for those which others give him. When this rationalized mechanism of social life collapses in times of crisis, the individual cannot repair it by his own insight. Instead his own impotence reduces him to a state of terrified helplessness.” (Karl Mannheim, 1940/1960:513, “Man & Society in an Age of Reconstruction”)

"It is not the number of victims or the degree of cruelty that is distinctive; it is the fact that the acts committed and the acts that nobody protests are split from the consciousness of men in an uncanny even a schizophrenic manner." (C. Wright Mills, Causes of World War III, 1960:88)

-Asadi

Now in print

Asadi, Muhammed. 2011.“Constructing Global Wars without End: Vocabularies of Motive and the Structure of Permanent War.” Qualitative Sociology Review, Vol. VII:3, pp 44-71.

http://www.qualitativesociologyreview.org/ENG/volume20.php

The Politics of Consumption

The bourgeoisie's game of managing relative deprivation for the purpose of framing its "privilege" propaganda, with “privilege” allocated through divisive status markers, is to extend the duration of its (crisis prone) accumulation regime by vesting a segment of the proletariat in the system as vanguard and separating them from the rest through extrinsically projected ‘styles of life’ that lead to a preplanned perpetual aspiration gap. The ascension of the middle class and its (perpetual) chasing of the ‘dream’ reflects that contrived ‘reality’. The middle class as house-slaves of the present, born through capitalist manipulation (and subsidy) and raised on the blood of the working class (at whose expense that subsidy was provided), protect their master’s system from its imminent collapse, promoting “values” that ensure the capitalist system’s long term perpetuation, in effect, normalizing the worker-owner dichotomy through a bourgeoisie directed “politics of consumption.”

The worker-owner distinction in bourgeoisie society however is not about consumption even though it is framed as such, in fact the bourgeoisie consume very little themselves (as a percentage of their income and wealth) and their status is not linked to either consumption or styles of life. The distinction between worker and owner is about socio-structural power, the power to determine who lives and who dies, how long people live and how they live and who succeeds and who fails and the very criteria of success and failure. That people have been stripped of that power to determine their own life-fate is no exaggeration: Forced to live in ‘abnormal’ worlds where their every activity, from family to religion to work is geared towards maximizing the bourgeoisie’s accumulation, where literally a handful of the major corporations dominate all work activity, determine the size and shape of the economy and through that influence all home activity as well, including people’s leisure “choices” . The best, most productive years of one’s life are spent either producing or consuming for these corporations, that is for their explicitly stated purpose of maximizing profits- everything else in such a society is superfluous compared to this primary motive whose projection among the mass society takes the shape of consumption aspirations as prime purpose of life.

-Asadi

The U.S, less than 5% of global population accounts for over 33% of global consumption. This is not possible without wholesale looting from the rest of the world.

Talk Ain't Cheap: Consciousness 'Capital' and the Role of the Sociologist

 

Between structural coercion and individual social action is the process that defines identity formation and (the resulting quality of) consciousness. As a precursor to all social action, consciousness ensures whether inequality will be "done" (reconstituted) or undone. The making of arguments through the cultural apparatus is the pathway through which the elite's ideology of perpetuating inequality attains hegemony and translates into the tyranny that defines the current status quo. The role of the intellectual within such a scheme, particularly the sociologist, is critical to both causing social change or through official default, causing the status quo. The official default of the establishment intellectual, feigned through a value indifference (presented as "objectivity" that in reality helps reproduce the status quo behind which are specific values) amounts to a crime against humanity given the war based system's continuous carnage on a global level. On the other hand "resource" support by the intellectual of truth (i.e. demystifying actual structural reality), what C. Wright Mills referred to as the "politics of truth" (1959:178), amounts to consciousness ‘capital’ which can help the oppressed challenge and overcome their oppressor's worldview, the first step towards eventual social change.

Muhammed Asadi

The Higher Corruption

Letter sent to the Director of Transparency International, the organization that publishes the Corruption Percpections Index, which (quite dishonestly) lists the advanced capitalist countries as the least corrupt...

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...
Dear ____,

You site is spreading misinformation through its Corruption Perceptions Index. The standard of corruption is actually set by the advanced capitalist nations (of the "West"). They have profaned, as Marx stated,all that was holy and made holy all that was profane (like Greed) for the sake of accumulation, causing a global meltdown recently. Can any "Third World" nation match that level of corruption? Can any “Third World” nation match the corruption of starting wars against weaker
foes based on lies and killing millions? Which "Third World" nation has dropped the atomic bomb on civilian towns and firebombed civilian cities completely wiping out not only their infrastructure but the means of existence of the civilian population? If you want to control or “fix” corruption or as your site states, to form "a global coalition against corruption," you need to locate the source of that corruption, which is to be found in the advanced capitalist nations of the "West" - their warfare, both actual and economic on the majority world and within their own borders (basic needs provision within the rich industrialized countries is much worse compared to the poorest of the poor "Third World" nations were we to control for the size of the economy) represents a much higher form of corruption, in terms of magnitude and global effect.

I urge you to correct the misinformation you are spreading through your site which not only is dishonest but which also enables the Higher Corruption by ensuring its systemic roots are obfuscated and the nations that are responsible for that system of corruption are held up globally as paragon of virtue instead.

Sincerely,

Muhammed Asadi

Thomas theorem: A half-truth

The Thomas theorem (W.I Thomas, 1928, cited by Merton 1995) states, "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences." This assertion is true only to the extent that those defining “situations” have power to ensure diffusion of their definition as well as the power to create structural space for their incorporation. If a stigmatized individual or... group (Goffman 1963) were to define any situation as real, it would be immediately discredited in the wider society and would therefore produce no real (structural) consequences. It is for this reason that the stigmatized, who are on perpetual trial within a normalized status quo exist in a state of either being “discredited or discreditable” and always eventually lose their battle to maintain or feign normality (Goffman 1963). Cultural hegemony similarly operates through the monopolization of definitions of reality by the elite.

Without creating structural space, no ideas or definitions of reality can have real consequences, otherwise the widespread belief that there is "equality of opportunity" (as in the U.S.) would have created structural equality of opportunity just through the belief that it is “real.” The prime mechanism, besides objectively produced culture through the media of mass communication (Simmel (1900) 2004:389) that defines the process behind what Marx called false consciousness, is the circulation of ‘ideas’ of the bourgeoisie, taken as real in the wider society but having no structural consequences in the circuits of people’s existence, as they facilitate the reproduction of an unequal class order that is often defined as "unreal" within capitalist propaganda.

The capitalist social structure is sustained and reproduced through self-deception, facilitated by mass mediated constructions. Cultural sensitivities from a bygone era are deployed objectively for manipulation and do not define the material conditions of existence and are therefore subject to repeated failure ("no good deed goes unpunished"...). Being unsustainable in the long term due to structural mismatch, these "sensitivities" are not only unsustainable in the long term, they are also subject to rapid redefinition and alteration, inevitably leading to emotional instability (emotions being mediators between environmental consciousness and social action) similar to the built-in obsolescence that defines the capitalist economy. The effects of such instability and the psychological "confusion" that arises as a result of it seldom affects the bourgeoisie who have instituted such instability for the purpose of prolonging their accumulations regime.

Capitalism's human "graveyard," constructed on the foundations of an economy with built in crises and obsolescence, leads to biographical effects, which are indicated by the preponderance of the 'plasticity of smiles and soul.' The only long term, sustainable identity relationship that is possible within advanced capitalism is the one you have with your tv set.

-Asadi

Social power, according to Marx and Engels, is based on 'class situation' that manifests itself through private ownership of the means of production or capital leading to individual power, a macro to micro socio-structural translation. Since capital needs the united action of the many in order to be “set in motion,” it represents not personal but social power, which is linked to the relationships of production within capitalism. Through private ownership of the means of production, power has been expropriated by the bourgeoisie in a capitalistic setup (Marx and Engels (1872)1906:35).

Communism, through abolition of the private ownership of the means of production, the private ownership of capital (and not all private property), will democratize power, and a democratization of power will lead to the state dying out or as more famously stated “withering away” (Engels 1880). True democracy and the state cannot coexist. The existence of the state, whether a capitalist or a socialist state indicates the existence of class conflict and a desire to manage the status quo by monopolizing the legitimate use of force and the selling of protection, in other words, an organized crime racket (Tilly 1985).

According to Engels (1880) the necessity of the state as political organization is a consequence of the “anarchy of production” based on private ownership of the means of production. With the abolition of private ownership of capital there will be no need for the state. The state is "not abolished but dies out” (Engels 1880). Within this scheme, socialism would be an intermediary stage marking the end of capitalism and the beginning of the period that leads to communism, yet the stages of the success or failure of this intermediary phase are indicated through state strength which can be empirically measured. Socialism by itself, where the state becomes the owner of capital and hence the arbiter of social power represents capitalism's higher tyranny in a reduced but not abolished form. To end capitalist tyranny and the human stratification (the modern day caste system) that is inscribed in its very nature, the atrophy of the state and the emergence of classless, stateless communism- humanity's 'natural way' given its very early history, before surplus-led casti-fication (Lenski 1966) is an absolute necessity.

Asadi

Lost in Time

When capitalism was in the process of "becomming," its relationship to previously existing institutional forms was different to what it is now that it has "become." Some people stuck in the pre-Victorian capitalism era attribute agency to subordinated institutions like religion already brought under administrative control and transformed in the process (implying that capitalism has lesser control over culture compared to past societies, which is absurd), as they generalize (quite unscientifically) across historical eras and societies that occupy different positions within global capitalism.

Within advanced capitalism, old time divisions like race and gender are retained and re-formed in tune with its accumulation ends and old time protest is institutionalized and made politically benign, making oppositional instituted forms redundant or discrediting them through marginalization. That is how a social system assimilates earlier forms through time, or there would be no "society." In advanced capitalism such assimilation occurs much more rapidly because of bureaucratization.

M. Asadi

Structure and Agency: A non-existent dichotomy

The implied structure-agency dichotomy that some sociologists talk about is similar to the culturally perceived dichotomy between personal troubles and public issues, based on capitalism's cult of the individual. It is in general an erroneous dichotomy. Such a projected "rugged individualism" ensures the fragmentation of group consciousness among people through an ideology that benefits a very class conscious and globally cohesive bourgeoisie. Agency can only be (sociologically) understood with reference to a social structure and the space it allows for individual action based on social location. The "more or less" agency can be understood based on the varying size of that space due to social change or social crises.

The agency that capitalism's global structure allows individuals and nation states ensures the reproduction of the status quo and the reconstitution of an unjust order through a concentration of privilege. The fact that people perceive "agency" while reproducing their own oppression implies that this agency-consciousness is a mediator between the oppressors and the oppressed, making oppression tolerable. Interfering with such consciousness through the development of the sociological imagination implies an incremental "undoing" of capitalism and the development of human consciousness. Consciousness development is a necessary prerequisite for all social change and in such development the (unofficial) sociologist has a unique role based on his/her work.

At peace with the status quo: Cultural determinists and their confused standards

After having attained power and monopolized privilege, the privileged few often talk about harmony and peace, "getting along" and "playing by the rules," this is because they know, given their already established control that such a co-optation of conflict will ensure that their privilege remains intact while the people are fed this 'opium' of getting along to promote an unjust status quo . It is important to remember that these same groups that now talk peace and democracy, the bourgeoisie and their collaborators, when they did not have control over all that privilege, they embarked on a most bloody and barbarous rampage across the world that was colonization and set up a structure of colonial dependency which exists till today.

Global economic divergence on a large scale, divergence which cannot be specified based on culture or religion, since it affects most around the globe, started in the past 200 years, when colonization was well ingrained in world processes. Cultural determinists that seek to situate the rise of the Western bourgeoisie within an implied superior religio-cultural tradition, fail to realize that the old order (of feudalism) within this cultural tradition collapsed before other feudal traditions around the world precisely because of the level of conflict that indicates that it was a much more intolerable/unequal/inhumane feudalism and not in any way an "enlightened" feudalism. The capitalist system that it gave rise to, often presented as comparison standard by these culturists (working in Max Weber's confused ethnocentric tradition- (bureaucracy is primarily a structure not a culture or religion!)), in humanitarian terms, has been the worst disaster faced by people in the short history of humanity. It is not something to either aspire towards or feel proud about. 

Living through your work (emphasis on YOUR work, not the "job") is to live in a 'world' you make for yourself. That world might not be well populated but it certainly is free (as in freedom) compared to the second-hand world the bourgeoisie imagination has crafted from bits and pieces of earlier worlds it destroyed, for the purpose of manipulation. Living in a self-made world (as opposed to the second-hand world) is a protest all its own against the capitalist order and represents in its inception the eventual attainment of what Marx defined as species-being.

M. Asadi

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[Man (woman) is a species-being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species as his object, but – and this is only another way of expressing it – also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal (i.e. as 'world') and therefore a free being (Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Estranged Labor).]

"In so far as war is inherent in the nation-state system and in the uneven industrialization of the world, the ordinary individual in his restricted milieu will be powerless-with or without psychiatric aid- to solve the troubles this system -or lack of system imposes upon him. (C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination 1959:10)

A socio-structural explanation of war, given its frequency and the "total" nature it has assumed post WW2, implies understanding it as something other than an aberration or mere adjustment response to feed the particular instrumental needs of various capitalist nations. War is no longer about oil or control of natural resources (the micro, pseudo-psychological explanations of war of a bygone era), which have already been expropriated by the system through densely mapped political dependencies.

War as system generality, a general feature of a reconstituted capitalism, ingrained in its processes, can only be understood based on its function for ensuring systemic survival of the system, i.e. perpetuating capitalism's accumulations regime. War is systematically linked to militarization of nation states and only certain countries- the militarized states- are generally affected by it, with militarization encouraged in the system through its link to economic growth and accumulation for the developing countries, as part of instituted system stabilization, that ensures that the spiral of militarization for the militarizing states among the developing nation states ends with their total destruction.

Middle Class: The Bourgeoisie's Pseudo Social Movement

Social movement formation represents consciousness beyond the individual level and involves recognition of personal troubles as public issues (Mills 1959). A prerequisite for any social movement's formation is the common recognition by large groups of people that what they value is threatened and that it is worth their while to do something t...o change the status quo and have their grievances addressed, and the belief that their involvement will make a difference, the political efficacy of participation (Sherkat and Blocker 1994).

However, the “threat” (or grievance) and the resulting motivation are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the formation of social movements, which also require resources, material and organizational, in order to attain a viable structure of opposition (McCarthy and Zald 1977). Those who want to maintain the status quo have at least four options to challenge oppositional movements once they evolve and they deploy all of those to various degrees, given the specific characteristics of the movement they seek to challenge:

i) Their superior ability to mobilize resources to form pseudo social movements to counter oppositional movements.

ii) Their domination of the (objective) culture production apparatus, the mass media and formalized education, which gives them an effective monopoly over the mainstream images of "reality," which they use in order to counter the threat oppositional movement members present. At times the grievance of the opposition is symbolically incorporated in official discourse, resulting in the cooptation of social movements, and a fracturing of the oppositional consciousness, as in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

iii) Culturally deriding the values of the opposition as “uncivilized” or “extremist” or “criminal” (McPhail 1989) and thereby shocking the mass society, once again through the cultural apparatus that they dominate and using explicit force in order to decimate the now weakened social movement.

iv) Promoting value neutrality as “scientific,” once again through the formalized educational apparatus that they dominate, knowing that value neutrality in actuality signifies promoting the status quo (Mills 1959), which espouses definite values in opposition to the values espoused by the social movements they seek to counter.

Given the structural (resource based) and cultural (trend setting) advantage of the elite, the best oppositional social movements can achieve in the short term are incremental benefits due to such cooptation. However every time a social movement is co-opted, its initial formation proves to be costly to the status quo in that the powers that be make an effort in terms of expense and symbolism to counter it, raising the bar for the next similar cycle of movements, since the political structures that gave rise to them are “sustained in the schematic orientation of former (movement) participants” (Sherkat and Blocker 1997:1063) and, every successive movement alters the “political opportunity structure” (Buechler 1993:226), raising the demand for social change incrementally.

In effect, the entire middle class is a consequence of such alteration of the political opportunity structure and raising of demands, the middle class in its current form is a pseudo social movement organized and funded by the bourgeoisie to counter the worker's social movement and we know that funding such a movement has not been cheap for them, but we also know that the raising of such a class within the capitalist order has effectively neutralized both through the objective production of “values” as well as organization, the socialist revolution, at least in the short term. Such was the logic behind the welfare state with the “liberals” acting as vanguards of the capitalist order and the “conservatives” ensuring that the costs of cooptation are kept at the minimum required level .

M. Asadi

Global segregation, much like residential segregation defined in racial terms ensures that boundaries get defined and thickened together with socio-structural exclusion from the world outside through strict immigration controls, it also ensures that poverty gets concentrated (Massey and Fischer 1998) giving structural reinforcement to a oppositional culture that arises as a response (Anderson 1999) . The process that defines the lead up to command state (imperialist) wars goes through just such an exclusionary pathway (currently being set in place for designated “rogue states” like Iran and Pakistan). It also involves militarization of the ghetto where most of the casualties of violence due to such militarization are racial minorities themselves, much like most of the casualties of war are the “Third World” nation states, that form the vast majority of the active theaters of war.

Such reinforcement of exclusion that successively amplifies itself, supplemented through stereotypical coverage by the mainstream corporate media leads to intensification of definition by those that have power of ascription and adoption by those towards whom these definitions are directed. They become self-fulfilling prophecies of initially caricatured behavior that defines the “other” (Becker 1966) and determines, in the case of the international system, based upon nation state position, the adoption of a global hierarchy of national identities in which the racially exclusive (whites-only) command states occupy the top tier and set the emulation agenda for the rest of the world, while their demonized enemies become paragons of evil and disgust.

When subordination is institutionalized in the workings of a social structure and its acceptance becomes a “taken for granted” view of the world (Berger and Luckman 1967:19) so that the subordinate is powerless to challenge it due to “sedimentation of racial inequality” (Oliver and Shapiro1995:5), formal reminders (the explicit racism) of the old colonization sort becomes superfluous and new justification for what is totally unjustified coercion becomes unnecessary. Similarly, there is no formal (explicit) control by the colonizer of the so-called “independent” countries that comprise the “Third World” today , however the power differences between nation states can be formally discerned in the decisions they make vis-à-vis the major power (witnessed in the UN through bullying and threats by the major powers), and the restricted choices they are allowed, even when setting an internal agenda for themselves, that often puts their own people in harm’s way through militarization and partnership in imperialist wars.

Synthetic ‘structural’ retardation of minorities and underdeveloped nation states, through poverty and violence is an actively maintained process within advanced capitalism and links back to a militarized otherization that defines global racism and enhances the accumulation of the racially exclusive command states.

Militarization, Modernization and Misogyny

The confluence of militarization, modernization, and misogyny is rooted in a war based global (social) structure. It is a consequence of such a militarized structure that the highest level of impersonality (Simmel’s blasé attitude (1903) as psychic adaptation) takes root, an impersonality which dehumanizes designated ‘enemies’ and considers their total d...estruction morally inconsequential. In its instituted form, such impersonality represents global racism that facilitates the “doing” of the war machine and the tolerance of mass deaths of people considered different.

The abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison by U.S. soldiers was a physical portrayal of the same impersonality, which true to the military spirit represented an attempted denigration in terms of the feminine (military vocabulary is laden with denigration of feminine traits). If we replaced the photographs of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib with those of female models routinely depicted by the advertising industry, we see a similar portrayal of people, and also notice a discursive similarity in the rationalizations for such actions. Much like the atrocities against the Iraqis were justified as “Iraqi liberation,” those against women by the advertising industry are often packaged as “women’s liberation.”

The fact that this impersonality is structural and not “isolated incidents” as the media often portrays them to be, is proven not only in the conduct of U.S. wars abroad, as in the killing of civilians through remote, drone based warfare or the destruction of the life lines of entire populations through “shock and awe” campaigns, but also in the violence that disproportionately affects women and minorities within the United States. Global sexism and racism are projections of the sexism and racism that originates with and is actively maintained by the dominant nation states and the war based system that they structured post World War II, contextualized (historically) in the explicitly race based structuring of the colonial world.





Citizenship, the Military and the Feminization of Poverty

Citizenship is structured in a hierarchical fashion based on sacrifice to the nation with sacrifice being measured in terms of actual combat roles that then get linked to men because they monopolize such roles in the military (Elshtain and Tobias 1990) and in capitalist societies to economic independence (Arnold 2004) that interacts with a... militarized definition of masculinity.

The poor are not only feminized symbolically as dependents, but literally as indicated through the phenomenon of the ‘feminization of poverty,’ the spatial concentration of which coincides, particularly in the north east and north central regions of the United States (Jones and Kodras1990), with the spatial concentration of the militarized ‘Gunbelt’ (Markusen, Hall, Campbell and Dietrick 1991) and also with the spatial concentration of military bases within the United States, which “inflict asymmetrical race and gender relations” (Gusterson 2007:163) in the communities in which they are located.

Henderson (1998) examined the relationship between poverty and militarization and found that military spending during peace time results in higher poverty levels because the enhanced spending flows to procurement in the form of contracts and not to military personnel. The link between spending on procurement, military contractors and the feminization of poverty can be found in the hiring practices of military contractors that have a labor force that over represents men in its composition compared to its civilian counterpart (Abell 1994).

M. Asadi


Measuring Hegemony

The hegemon among the dominant nation states, the one that possesses structural power in the World System is, in my formulation, expected to be the most militarily developed on all indicators of militarization as well as one most active in limited war theaters and the one that possesses a strong state that maintains a high level of legitimacy as measured through its ability to extract resources fr...om the population, as well as the most economically developed (hegemony cannot simply be measured in economic terms).

Among NATO and OECD founding members, the U.S has the highest military expenditure as percentage of GDP (4.06%, 2009 estimate), the highest military expenditure as a percentage of tax revenue (14.4%, 2009 estimate), the highest military expenditure as percentage of government expenditure (19.5 %, 2006 estimate), the highest aggregate GDP ($13.2 trillion, 2009 estimate), the highest inbound Foreign Direct Investment Stock ($3.121 trillion, 2009 estimate) and the highest aggregate tax revenue collected ($3.723 trillion, 2009 estimate). In most of these cases it exceeds the second highest by almost 300% on average.

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World War II and the Permanent War Economy

The social construction of "enemies" (in the image of Hitler) and the implied necessity of war against an unreasonable foe and for the "liberation" of the enemy's population and its projected positive consequences (German "democracy" and Japanese "development") are often presented as justifications for war by the power elite based on a caricatured image ...of World War II. This allows us to historically situate the permanent war economy’s defining event and to socially situate the motives of an elite that sought and achieved hegemony over its capitalist rivals in World War II and thereafter through global militarization was successful in "saving capitalism from itself." The difference now is that the process of structural reproduction of the permanent war economy does not require the reorganization of workplace, class, gender and race that these elite were forced to undertake through necessity during “the good war” (that killed 70 million, over 60% of whom were civilians) in mobilizing the masses for their cause.

Soon after their cause was achieved however, they abandoned this social reorganization by removing women from the workplace and denying blacks a path to their subsidized middle class. What they didn't abandon was the permanent war economy and the consequences of war based mobilization and production, which served not only to justify a military definition of reality or what C. Wright Mills (1956) referred to as the military metaphysic, it ensured an unquestioned subordination of the individual to the state in the name of "national security", as it reinforced class, race and gender based divisions. Based on a military division of labor, internal divisions are glossed over "in the name of the nation" while confronting a foreign foe. This means that a synthetic cultural homogenization is attempted by the elite through use of the cultural apparatus (the mass media and formal education) even though the stratification structure remains intact (the notion of "The American Dream"). Alienation is the end result of such a culture-structure mismatch that itself has become a systemic generality within a permanent war economy, which means that peace in the shadow of a war based system is always uneasy, both internally and externally.

The Capitalist Social System


“…The key to understanding capitalism as a historical social system is in accounting for its repeated reconstitution under new social, political, economic and ecological arrangement in successive cycles of world scale accumulation.” (Brewer 2011:324)

... Rapid social change, that occurs for the purpose of maintenance of the accumulation status quo in advanced capitalism (indicated through technological and status obsolescence), together with an “end of history” in that value ambivalence and identity transience become a perpetual condition of existence due to such rapid change, because of a lack of history of uniform interaction, are the distinguishing (signature) features of a capitalist social system.

When some sociologists account for such rapid social change, change that is made possible through the control of the productive and cultural apparatus by the very few (elite) that dominate the production and consumption circuits of accumulation, the reaction they get from fellow sociologists is “conspiracy theory.” Given the fact that “repeated reconstitution” (Arrighi 1997; Brewer 2011) i.e. structural and cultural engineering the is the hallmark character of the capitalist social system, involves "conspiracy," i.e. coordinated social interventions that seek structural adjustment, “adjustments that have not yet been institutionalized and made automatic, and which involve a coordinated intervention for structure maintenance” (Asadi 2010:74),is no "conspiracy theory."

Generalizing from social systems of the past, that described pre-modernity, in trying to understand the social system of capitalism, not only leads to erroneous results, it produces sociological work that gets outdated upon production (including works based on classical Marxism like World-Systems Analysis). In other words, such work becomes part of the cultural obfuscation of the present that describes the selective dipping into the past by cultural technicians to legitimize and prolong the current status quo.

M. Asadi

The Militarized International System (MIS)

Systemic stabilization within a crisis prone system implies that when capitalism faces systemic crises, the conduct of war within the militarized states by the dominant command states, via military Keynesianism, stabilizes the system. In other words, when the accumulation track that defines economic interaction within a capitalist world system is threatened by disruption due to crises, militarized interaction within a stabilization regime restores the levels of profit accumulation through subsidizing the accumulations track and latently, culturally shocking the global population through disaster and war.

Such stabilization, I argue, requires a “permanent defense network” of countries as a counterpart to the permanent defense industry that defines the military industrial complex within the United States. This “permanent defense network” of countries serves as a lucrative arms market for the command states, channeling a good part of the economic growth of the militarized states towards them and thereby feeding the defense dependency of their urban areas (Gauchat, Wallace, Borch and Lowe 2011). These militarized countries, through war related activity and “reconstruction” post destruction by the command states, mitigate the economic growth crises in those states. This occurs through reversal of the diminishing returns to capital investment encountered by the advanced capitalist economies, through such reconstruction and the “importation” of the economic growth of entire countries that they purposefully destroy. Together with a symbiotic relationship between the buyers and sellers of arms in the form of “offset regimes” (Markusen 2004) that link industrial development and technological transfer to these militarized countries with arms sales, granting both higher economic growth and political legitimacy to them, supported explicitly or implicitly by the command states. This in short is the foundation of my alternative model of a militarized international system

he Cultural Trap of Developmentalism

Neo-liberalism’s ‘Global Dream’ (of deregulation and privatization of public enterprise) of top down development is offered to the majority world as fashion to emulate the higher status industrially developed countries, while separating themselves from the more “backward” ones (that might rely on socialism and state nationalization of industry). This emulativ...e “development” like status-based consumption highlighted by Veblen, puts power on “display” (Veblen (1899) 2008:23) and has involved due to the militarization pushed by the "developed" countries, an active participation in their many global wars and a subordination of all domestic agendas towards that end.

The modernization explanation of development as the official development ethos pushed on the “Third World” by global institutions is similar to the projection of the American Dream (and its associated middle class ethos) pushed on African Americans in the U.S, which is totally detached from their structural economic reality (of capital flight from the inner cities and skill mismatch, or the “janitor-ification” of the workforce related to deindustrialization) faced by the ghetto poor . The ‘American Dream’ as part of the perpetual mythology of the individualized workman ethic for the purpose of motivation is pushed from on high to the U.S. working class promising them a lifestyle that most cannot attain because it is a moving target in the images that are presented. Its successful attainment always remains an elusive dream for the vast majority, otherwise the motivation to keep at ritualized wage-labor would diminish, which the capitalist system cannot tolerate for its successful perpetuation.

This also involves justifying for the sake of maintaining the status quo the disparities people see in wealth, lifestyle and power among racial, gender, national and class groups. In other words rather than provoke revolutions or anti-systemic social movements (contrary to Karl Polanyi’s claim), relative deprivation is systematically generated by the elite in order to bind certain groups to their system while “otherizing” the relatively deprived. The system manages absolute deprivation but generates relative deprivation because it is functional in dividing the working class against itself. Political scientist, Clarence Stone (1993) calls this type of power to institutionalize a group’s advantages “ecological power,” a kind of power that mutes opposition by legitimizing inequality through normalizing some groups and particular behaviors and devaluaing, medicalizing or criminalizing all others.

Muhammed Asadi

Welfare and Warfare: Historically and Structurally Linked

Welfare states had their origin in “war and mass national armies” (Gifford 2006:473). The massive bureaucracy that the welfare state necessitates for the distribution of basic necessities, also had its origin in military bureaucracies (Weber, Gerth and Mills 1958). A contemporary example of this is the emergency response of the new nations... whenever they face natural disasters. In order to manage the provision of basic goods and services, the military, as a superior bureaucratic organization, is indispensable to such “welfare” activity.

In the advanced capitalist nations, in apparent detachment from the history of welfare through warfare, welfare and warfare now compete with each other for governmental resources (Fontanel 1990), and it often seems on the surface that the liberal welfare state is diametrically opposed to the warfare state. This however is not the case, not only are welfare and warfare historically intertwined, the warfare priorities of the state led to the manipulations that defined both citizenship and through that the provision of welfare. The emergence of mass standing armies, to whom the benefits of citizenship were first extended (Tilly, ed 1996), before they accrued to the rest of society, had their origin in the desires of the rulers to conscript the ruled for war and to monopolize coercive force and sell protection (Tilly 1985). Welfare was necessary in order to justify extraction (taxation) from civil society even as it laid the foundations of a warfare (based) state.

In the U.S. post World War II, the welfare bureaucracy that centralized the state and enormously expanded the powers of the executive was transformed into a permanent war establishment, here again welfare and warfare, even though framed as competitors complemented each other (Mills 1956; Hooks 1991). The military however, cannot be taken as a welfare institution, even though it conditions “the development and maintenance” of a welfare state (Gifford 2006:502). This conditioning occurs through the necessity of requiring the mobilization and extraction (taxation) efforts of the masses and the resulting cultural framing of warfare discourse in terms of “civic virtue and social obligation” (Gifford 2006:501), which also requires the institutionalization of limited welfare activity for the purpose of legitimacy and the institutionalization of war. Consistent with this ‘latent function’ of solidarity in this warfare-welfare manipulation is the finding by Jencks (1985) that public opinion in the U.S. is highly positively correlated with military spending.

The manipulation that defines the (modern) welfare state, which serves to strengthen state apparatus to manage class conflict through the extension and over development of the coercive arm of the nation state, the military, can never alter the status-reality of the proletariat within a capitalist mode of production. Within such manipulation, conflict discourse internally becomes a discourse about limited redistribution (the political default of labor unions in capitalist nations) and welfare and externally a discourse about war and enemies. Welfare, that makes the condition of the proletariat temporarily tolerable is itself a zero sum game within a bourgeoisie dominated society, where the prime purpose is to maintain or enhance the level of capital accumulation. Welfare for some, within such a setup always means warfare for others.

M. Asadi