The War based system: fear, consumption, debt, and recession
M. Asadi


Those who have negative utility in present consumption (because they have so much to begin with that further consumption will not add to their well being rather it will take away from it), the ultra rich, if they can create desires in the average person for consumption through lending their surplus funds i.e. generate positive utility of consuming now by converting people's wants into needs through massive indoctrination involving media advertising, they can gather profits for themselves not only based on present but future consumption, today. This results in a massive transfer of wealth from the people towards the ultra rich, the poor get even poorer and the rich richer.

So what happens when the real "future" arrives and those people who pre-consumed for it are deep in debt as most are in the U.S., (84% of African American households and 54% of white households hold credit card debt not including other debt, with penalty fees for non payment or late payment amounting to $21 billion a year) and cannot pay their bills, they lose their houses and cars, their education enrollment and marriages and also their jobs. When there is no one buying, there are no jobs.

The rich when they get all that surplus profit through debt led consumption, since they have so much of wealth to begin with, of course do not spend it, they accumulate, much like they have refrained from spending the stimulus money given by Obama leading to a sluggish recovery followed by a further economic downturn due to massive leaks from the circular flow of income.

People consume for tomorrow as if it would never come, as part of the fear generated by a war based system that ensures people consume as if there were no tomorrow. This leads to a higher level of economic activity and job growth in the short term for sure but also to a long term collapse. Were we to have a different system, it can be theoretically speculated that people would be in a better state today. Instead of wasteful consumption they would concentrate on needful consumption. The high that results from wasteful consumption is very short lived (the built in obsolescence in the useless products that are designed for profitable consumption lead to a very short lived positive utility and also lead to status instability because of rapid shift in ideal products). In the long term, the economy would not collapse as it does periodically under the current system. People would not lose their houses, jobs and families through economic strain and self fulfillment/ identity verification would not be described through constantly shifting standards linked to product consumption.

Stephen Hawking to Diane Sawyer (reported June 7, 2010): "There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."


The ideas expressed by Stephen Hawking in the above quote from his interview with ABC News's Diane Sawyer are age old platitudes against religion emanating from classical scientists and their rediscovery of nature in the modern era. Repeating those platitudes, using (rather misusing) his authority as a physicist, Stephen Hawking pronounces on religion in a most "religious" manner of dogmatic exclusivity, where a battle has to be won or lost. Even though Hawking proclaims science’s victory, science has already lost this battle in the major part due to establishment scientists. This is because scientism knows nothing of either "observation or inquiry" but perverts knowledge for turf protection in the same vein as religious dogmatism. It is for this reason that new discoveries are frowned upon, rejected in offhandish ways and everything even remotely questioning the "sacred", i.e. Darwinian evolution leads to forced exile from the community and results in professional suicide by such "heretics" who dare to question it thereby precluding research into alternative theories.

Hawking's pronouncement on religion also reveals a basic ignorance of the socio-historical processes that have ingrained a religio-cultural potential in all human societies. By this I mean religion’s association with culture which was its exclusive domain in antiquity and only got separated from it through institutional differentiation relatively recently. Human societies cannot function based on pure science. Purposeful observation, experimentation and skepticism are simply too cumbersome, divisive and impractical to implement as practice in basic human sociation. The proclamation that "science works" therefore simply isn't true as far as social integration and human sociation is concerned.

Science has also not “worked” in more general terms. Ever since modernity and the so called conquest of nature, science has been promoted as being a technological “Second Coming” (of Christ) (Mills 1959), that will result in the elimination of all human misery. That it has failed in this regard is quite evident. Today, more people die of lack of basic necessities than in any previous time in human history. Science has not worked for the very vast majority of humankind, half of whom live in debilitating poverty all over the world and a large percentage of the rest are not much better off. As the use of science is based on socio-structural constraints, about which Stephen Hawking seems oblivious, the militarization of social structures post World War 2, has meant that science has worked for the very few (elite) in helping them maintain their militaristic dominance over much of the globe as they perfect the means of global annihilation, a perverse form of the survival of the most destructive.

There is a basic misunderstanding among scientistic “scientists” about authority and religion. Authority in the standard Weberian (from Max Weber) definition is power that is considered legitimate. Authority cannot be established coercively except in the short term. Overuse of explicit coercion delegitimizes power and hence authority. Religion is not a short term affair. For any authority to be effective, regardless of whether it is religious or not, it has to have some material rooting in the reality of people's existence, in order to succeed in the long term. Authority by itself therefore need not be against "observation and reason". Misuse of authority, on the other hand, as in the case of using coercion or Hawking’s misuse of his authority as a physicist to pronounce on religion is delegitimizing. Both have nothing to do with “observation and reason”.

Religion is here to stay and it can never be defeated because of socio-historical precedent. Its association with culture ensures that the culture potential without which no human society is possible will create a religious outlook (regardless of the details of the dogma) in even the most “secular” of people. It is impossible that this “religious outlook” be based on purely scientific principles given the very definition of science but it is possible that it be based on humanitarian, universalistic principles. Therein is the hope for the future of "decent" (non-militaristic) human societies and it is a purely “religious” hope.

Some References

ABC News' report on Stephen Hawking's interview with Diane Sawyer:
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Technology/stephen-hawking-religion-science-wi n/story?id=10830164 , retrieved 6/8/2010

Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press

Reproduced under is an excerpt from the book, “Third World: New Directions” (1976) by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was Pakistan’s socialist Prime Minister from 1973-1977. He was removed from office through a U.S. backed military coup by Gen. Zia-ul-Haq in 1977, and later executed on trumped up murder charges in 1979. In partnership with Gen. Zia ul Haq, the US- CIA set up camp in Peshawar, Pakistan to train, indoctrinate, fund and arm the Mujahedeen (the spiritual “fathers” of the Taliban) and Bin Laden’s “Arab Afghans” (Al-Qaeda was a CIA/Saudi joint venture) to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (who was the father of Benazir Bhutto), before his execution in 1979 termed what was going on in the country and his own predicament as being, “An international conspiracy”, involving “those who lost the war in Vietnam”. The first US-CIA/Pakistan Army joint venture in Afghanistan through the Mujaheddin brought weapons, violence and drugs to Pakistani cities and towns besides completely destroying Afghanistan, and the second CIA/Pakistan Army joint venture in the Global War on Terrorism has brought suicide bombings (never before seen in the history of the country) and , ethnic/religious violence which has become an almost daily occurrence in the major cities with dozens of casualties recorded every week, most going unreported in the US media.

From “Third World: New Directions”:

"We in the Third World are united by our common suffering and our common struggle against exploitation. Regardless of our political systems or our external outlook, we have the common mandate to extricate the world’s majority from a throttling economic order. We need to develop a personality of our own. Let not this personality be torn by the schizophrenia, which is caused by the failure to reconcile short-term interests with long-term goals.

Let it not be confused by our inability to review the scope and area of mutual cooperation for our economic and social development. Let it not be enfeebled by the lack of the political will to exert our combined strength for changing a system that patently discriminates against the developing countries...

There exists a growing awareness in the Third World of its latent strength. The consciousness is unmistakable that the most significant issue of our times is the opening of opportunity to the majority of the human race. On this issue there is no division between the so-called aligned and the so-called non-aligned; there exists only the difference between the developed and the underdeveloped. To underline this difference is not to call for a global class war. It is to call for that redistribution of economic power, which alone can prevent unceasing strife and recurrent upheavals. It is to plead for the survival of the global community...

The appropriate time has therefore arrived for Pakistan to set forth the basic considerations behind the call for the Third World Summit which will decisively consolidate the unit of the under privileged majority of mankind...The impoverished masses of the Third World are yearning for a new focal point of their collective will. They are seeking a new bastion of power to wage the crusade for man’s final victory against inhumanity.This is the need of the hour; the priority of the poor. The conference that I envisage will have one and only one iron-clad criterion for inclusion: the non-developed and oppressed community of the Third World. Whether aligned or non-aligned, communist or non communist, white or yellow or black or brown, the nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America will join in this mission and become the harbinger of one world under one law for all humanity." (Bhutto 1976:5-11)

References:

Z. Ali Bhutto. 1976. Third World: New Directions.

“The accumulation of advantages at the very top parallels the vicious cycle of poverty at the very bottom. For the cycle of advantages includes psychological readiness as well as objective opportunities: just as the limitations of lower class and status positions produce a lack of interest and self-confidence...” (Mills1956:111)

In the status hierarchy that exists within an ownership based society, chances for identity verification are greater for those higher in status positions, given their possession of what sociologists term “social capital”. Status loss by the poor and the resulting lack of identity verification in a society where purchasing power determines status and the ethos of individuality and self reliance is in vogue, means that people on public assistance are stigmatized and their personal troubles, even though related to the workings of social institutions (as public issues) are translated into character flaws.

Not only do they lose status within their own personal orbits of family and neighborhood, they eventually come to believe in their own socially defined “inadequacy”, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy of behavior that sets a cycle in motion. Their previously formed identity is thereby displaced and replaced with a new damaged identity that ensures perpetual failure. These mechanisms of cultural adaptation to structural constraints are then picked up as value or culture based social "scripts" detached from their structural roots by the authorities in order to design “solutions” that ensure the maintenance of the status quo and to preserve the status hierarchy. The human dimension of extreme cultural and physical deprivation of those controlled in this perverse manner is of no consequence to the elite that manage this unjust system.

On a larger scale the status hierarchy among nation states in the current world system is reproduced through similar mechanisms using “Aid for Trade” programs (causing tens of billions in lost trade revenue to the poor nations) and structural adjustment loans through the IMF and World Bank that ensure perpetual (structured) failure of Third World nations. This failure is then blamed on lack of modernization, an argument that labels the nation state involved as culturally inferior.

In both cases the cultural argument that stigmatizes the victims and imputes inferiority on them is de-contextualized because it manipulatively ignores the structural roots of the cultural response to  purposefully manufactured failures.

References:

Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.

"We must remember that these men of the Power Elite now occupy the strategic places in the structure of American society; that they command the dominant institutions of the dominant nation; that as a set of men, they are in a position to make decisions with terrible consequences for the underlying populations of the world." (Mills 1956:286)

The Power Elite does not refer to people conspiring together in a coordinated manner, it is not about conspiracy theory; rather it is about the dominant positions in the dominant institutional order (military, political and economic) of the dominant country (DDD).

These dominant positions within a bureaucratically set up hierarchy and their interchangeability among the three domains (military, economic and political) is based on rational requirements that define a bureaucracy. This includes choosing a certain type of person, how status is allocated through his (the very vast majority are men) career, how promotions are given and how members are socialized in these positions. Such a controlled biographical "history" results in similarity of worldview and class consciousness among the power elite despite varying interests and policy disagreements. This means that no drastic change of worldview is probable during the careers of such men at the top, in that their integrity and identity i.e. their sense of self depends on their doing what is required to maintain the structural integrity of the hierarchical system that has pushed them to the top. The effects of peer pressure on the 'deviants' among such a powerful group should also not be underestimated.

"The interesting point is how impossible it is for such men to divest themselves of their engagement with the corporate world in general and with their own corporations in particular. Not only their money, but their friends, their interests, their training — their lives in short — are deeply involved in this world...To ask a man suddenly to divest himself of these interests and sensibilities is almost like asking a man to become a woman." (Mills 1956:285)

These elite prefer to use the existing institutions for their ends but when they feel their new demands will not be met with existing organizations, during times of crisis, they construct new ones, through state sponsored structural adjustment, made possible through the unprecedented power that concentration of ownership, information and culture production has given them, unequaled in human history (Mills 1956:361). Examples of such structures are the Department of Homeland Security post 9/11 or on a larger scale, the state sponsored nuclear family and white pan-ethnic identity post World War 2. Through global institutions like the IMF/World Bank they structurally adjust entire nation states as well, which has <b>“terrible consequences for the underlying populations of the world” (Mills 1956:286)

“Far from being dependent on the structure of institutions, modern elites may smash one structure and set up another in which they enact quite different roles. In fact such destruction and creation of institutional structures, with all their means of power, when events seem to turn out well is just what is involved in ‘great leadership’ (in our era), or when they seem to turn out badly, great tyranny.” (Mills 1956:25)

References:

Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.

"The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces,...Punctuality, calculability, exactness are forced upon life by the complexity and extension of metropolitan existence …These traits must also color the contents of life and favor the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign traits and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within, instead of receiving the general and precisely schematized form of life from without...” (Georg Simmel, The Metropolis & Mental Life , 1903)

Georg Simmel outlines what he sees as the ‘deepest problems of modern life’. On the one hand the individual has been freed from traditional bonds and has discovered himself/herself for the first time, a revelation that is both liberating and frustrating. Liberating because the old shackles which held him/her as an inseparable part of the totality are broken, frustrating because broken from the group he/she has been let loose in a sea of confusion, with no defined boundaries.

With his/her psyche overwhelmed through stimuli and objects external to him, pulled in every direction due to external demands (the demands of 'objective culture’ in a functionally rationalized society), he is overwhelmed. The psychic response short of nervous breakdown is desensitization: other than a few stimuli that are useful for daily negotiations of the life circuit, all others are blocked out , homogenized and made to appear meaningless. To these other stimuli the person’s reaction becomes no reaction, in other words, the person becomes blasé’.

Impersonality of this sort is characteristic of metropolitan people, there is no more human shock, neither is there much thought about the pain of others, there is not so much moral ambivalence as there is moral neutrality, where everything that does not threaten the routinized ‘way of life’ is not worthy of moral evaluation.

The very exactness and calculability of metropolitan life therefore has reduced human subjective, sovereign, value laden reactions to mechanical, robotic responses that are predictable, synthetic and standardized. In these set responses, value orientation is for the purpose of manipulation for self preservation alone. This disconnect between self preservation and self determination is what is significantly pronounced in modern metropolitan existence, and gets carried over from secondary (market or labor based) relationships to all primary (family based) relationships as well.

In order to preserve the self, the person objectifies himself/herself, thereby destroying the real “self” and in its place installing a nominal system generated self. Impersonality towards others results in impersonality towards oneself. Subjective culture, what is sovereign and intrinsic to the individual has been effectively controlled and destroyed or at best relegated to the realm of the psychotic, replaced by objectively produced culture, the techniques of life in a rationalized society.

All freedom is therefore lost in the name of ‘individualism', the kind that reproduces the system's totality and benefits the few at the expense of the many. A massified collectivity is produced as individual response through implicitly coerced psychic adaptation. When the modern massified person with a rationalized (tribal/nationalized) identity "feels" as if he/she is an individual with free will, there is no longer any need felt for rebellion to regain what was lost . All sovereignty is willingly and quite cheerfully squandered.

In the post-modern era the metropolis is not merely a geographic location, it has been brought into everyone’s living room, with its saturating stimuli, in the form of the media of mass communication, television. Through this medium a factory for producing human robots with a blasé component has been setup. The overwhelming abundance of 'facts' and 'events' that ensure the blasé attitude gets crystallized in the citizenry, regarding war and peace, poverty and abundance, disease and health, education and illiteracy and other public issues is projected daily into everyone’s living room.The message where positive is collective, attributing success to the system’s ‘grace’ (binding the person to it) while where negative it is individualistic, attributing failure to personal misgivings, thereby reinforcing the self-centeredness of the blasé person (and reproducing their disadvantage through lowered self-esteem), resulting in a real life tragedy: 'self' mutilation through entertainment.

Psychology's System Friendliness
M. Asadi

Structural oppression gets reproduced through people participating (be it unknowingly) in their own oppression. That is how oppression is "done", the micro's link to the macro, mediated through emotional response linked to identity verification. As part of bureaucratized control, 'doing' oppression entails identity verification through enacting oppressive roles, whose 'positions', i.e. statuses, people merely fit into, which are predetermined based on their functional expediency to those privileged within a society.

When the self gets hooked to the system in this manner, establishing self worth entails defending the system that due to its invisibility gets merged with the individual. The system through such manipulation becomes benign and the individual all ‘powerful’. When the sociologist tries to make visible the invisible structural hooks that in cage like manner restrict people's human potential and keep the vast majority of them busy with mere subsistence they are accused of being oppressive and not caring about individuals, being more concerned about ‘society’ (in pure Orwellian doublespeak). This of course is also part of the system's functional rationality, for if everyone became conscious of external constraints and thereby rejected the system's 'rationality', i.e. if everyone became 'deviant and pathological' in its logic, the entire system would collapse.

This conclusion leads us to assess the usefulness of psychology to the elite as a (pseudo) 'science' of individual pathology as they try to discredit sociology and obfuscate the structural roots of social problems. Through such manipulation, liberation gets equated with oppression and efforts to free the individual from supra-individual structures is taken as ‘devaluing the individual’. There can be little argument over the fact that psychology is more ‘system friendly’ than sociology and the ‘system’ that it is friendly towards is extremely oppressive.

upcoming

The International System: Globalization’s Sociological Context
M. Asadi

“The need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, and establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country…The bourgeoisie… by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization.” (The Manifesto of the Communist Party. Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, 1848)

The importance of a world market to the bourgeoisie in its foreign adventures, and the process of globalization, the corporations standardization that gives a ‘cosmopolitan character’ to consumption all over the globe and leads to cultural convergence was clearly stated by Marx and Engels back in 1848, long before those who today are reinventing the wheel came to the fore. Having intimate knowledge of the nature of the bourgeoisie, Marx realized that communication was central to its desire to eventually “establishing connections everywhere”. These words penned long before the age of the internet and cell phones seem quite prophetic but given the structural trends of advanced capitalism’s top down driven technological innovations, they are hardly surprising.

C. Wright Mills, who described himself as a ‘plain’ Marxist (in the tradition of Thorstein Veblen, without the ideological baggage of the ‘vulgar’ Marxists), combined Marx’s historicism with Weber’s bureaucracy and status group analysis, Karl Mannheim’s ideology, Mead’s micro interactional analysis and Freudian psychoanalysis (Mills and Gerth 1954) among other classical theorists whose concepts he used, to develop his Power Elite explanation. Mills was one of the first sociologists to use the term Post-Modern in his 1959 book, The Sociological Imagination to describe the altered state of the world compared to the modernity that the classical sociologists studied. In studying this ‘post-modernity’ he used the ideas of the classical sociologists taken to their “logical” conclusion, together with an eclectic mixing of their work (and methodology), this led to a new theory, greater than the sum of its parts. Mills suggested that the three dominant institutions of post-modern American society (post World War 2), the political, the military and the economic come together as massive bureaucratic structures with interconnected networks between themselves, acting as one due to the altered nature of capitalism. Those at the top of such structures have a greater power of decision compared to those at the bottom and as such form a ‘power elite’. Concentration of wealth and production of objective culture offers them unprecedented access to structurally altering the U.S and the world, which they have in all the nation states and global institutions they have either created or whose creation or destruction they have facilitated post World War 2.

The connection of these bureaucratic structures with corresponding structures in other nations determines the altered role of the US power elite (whose ascension Mills located in the events of World War 2). Rather than limiting our ‘unit of analysis’ to nation states or to “society”, which would be sociologically myopic given these global interconnections, an integrated model that is comparative and inclusive of the entire world as ‘structure’ is necessary for proper sociological analysis. The location of ‘public issues’ as Mills talked about in his Sociological Imagination (1959), therefore requires a wider sociological understanding of ‘global issues.’ Global institutions that produce and reproduce systems of global stratification (including gender and race based stratification) have to be located within a global system and only then can connections made to country specific ‘public issues’ and biographical ‘personal troubles’ of individuals living within those countries. Any deviation from this pathway renders the overall analysis non-sociological. The ‘deciders’ in today’s world form a global power elite something Marx hinted at in his generalization for they recognize neither national boundaries nor constitutions. By their decisions they create, divide or break up nation states. Nationalism, which is their invention is a convenient tool, a carry over from an old order, part of the cultural lag that is given added life through (structural) warfare induced binding. Nationalism merely helps divide those the elite desire to control through emotionally binding people to an artificial entity.

The micro interactional behavior of these elite, their many visits around the globe as they manage the many nation states is not based on some conspiracy, it is a product of the institutional structure that emerged in the U.S. post World War 2, that pushed up through the power corridors certain personality types which makes the reproduction of this ‘structure’ more probable and ensures that the interests of some groups are met at the expense of the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants. However, the system is marred by internal crises that require constant adjustments leading to many side effects that inevitably alter modes of production and when that happens the relationships that exist within and between societies change as well, a point that is lost on the ‘vulgar’ Marxists but explicitly stated by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto:

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production and with them the whole relations of society...” (Marx and Engels, 1848)

Thus far the project of a sociological understanding of the International System that is a methodological necessity given the focus of the field has not been realized. Wallerstein and his group by canonizing Marx’s understanding of Victorian capitalism and generalizing it deterministically into the future, borrowing heavily from the Dependency school’s theories of development, merely present a façade of a globalized structural analysis. Wallerstein uses, in trying to reinvent the Marxist wheel, what C. Wright Mills would describe as the ‘labor metaphysic’ of classical Marxism, where class struggles make the Core (or bourgeoisie) hegemony a temporary phenomenon. This has not borne out in empirical reality, neither on the nation-state level or on the level of the World System, because both revolutions and the “World System” can be managed in times of crises through interrelated economic, military and political institutions and the diffusion of a legitimating culture and its individualized and individuating standards that pit people against each other.

Core hegemony in the World System, appears to be a continuous and an ever concentrating phenomenon that relies not only on expansion but artificially produced and induced contraction to facilitate creative destruction. The use of relative deprivation to bind certain groups (and nations) to the system while alienating others is itself a tactic that at best results in redistributive grievances and movements rather than enhancing any ‘class consciousness’ leading to structural transformation. The evolved nature of capitalism altered from the Victorian (lassiez faire) type towards a bureaucratized/advanced/st