globalresearch--2019-10-31--Lebanon’s “Revolution” Is Without Revolutionary Ideology

There is a revolution in Lebanon without a revolutionary ideology. It is spontaneous, and if memory serves one well, spontaneous revolutions end up badly for the left. Although the left was at its peak in the less spontaneous German uprising of 1918-1919, the right-wing militias defended the state, won and murdered Rosa Luxemburg.  There is practically very little left left, and the slogans of the Lebanese spontaneous revolution are as shallow and insidious as any of its Arab Spring predecessors. Calling for the removal of the sectarian system without removing its associated capital will rotate the same class into power with another form of sectarianism.  Sectarianism is the form of working-class differentiation or the basis of capital, a social relationship rooted in history and incarnated by much of the working class. To misunderstand the impulsiveness of the uprising is suicidal for remnants of the socialist forces. People want bread and democracy, but it is geostrategic-rent bread, as opposed to homegrown bread, and Western-style democracy, or the rule of US-led capital delegated to its local proxies that they want. ‘Words mean so many different things’ and there is paucity of alternative revolutionary concepts.From the spectrum of democratic choices, only shades of selective democracy are being proposed.  These are democracies that alienate the masses. They are based on the central democratic model where most vote for an imperial government to bomb and invade a developing country because they share a vested interest in imperial rents. In a selective democracy there are natural underlings and theworking-class lets capital to do what is best for capital. The ideology of capital incarnate in the working class, now the thingified people who replicate the thingified capitalists, reflects the short-termism of profit making. In Lebanon much has been invested in the idea that what is good for business is good for me. In short, there is a crisis of revolutionary consciousness and alternatives as elsewhere.  The crisis in Lebanon however is severe. For thirty years, the private Lebanese banks owned by the comprador ruling class charged five to ten times the prevailing world interest rate on bonds of the Lebanese government. Today, the state’s debt to the national banking sector is close to twice the income of the country. After thirty years of borrowing to reconstruct, Lebanon has no potable water supply, public transport, electricity, and cannot even remove its trash. Its capital city and only freshwater lake are possibly the most polluted on earth. Jobs are scarce, and emigration is high. The neoliberal policy of fighting inflation under open capital account, dollarized the economy, usurped much of national wealth, and brought the share of the wage bill from national income from about 50 percent in the late nineties to twenty five percent in 2015. With so much rationing of credit to production and indirect taxes dragging down demand, most private-sector loans owed to the banking sector are non-performing or unlikely to be repaid. The state cannot service its debts without draconian tax and privatisation measures. After years of austerity to pay exorbitant interests on a self-fuelling debt, the public, business and household sectors are all effectively insolvent. If the US decided to delay disbursements to finance future spending with more debt, the house of cards could come tumbling down.  In development finance, this latter point of US-governed international financial institutions (IFIs) lending US dollars on time to pay for state spending or imports, lest otherwise the national currency tumble and inflation lead to hunger and riots, is called the short-leash policy. It is a textbook case. In Ghana for instance, President Kufuor had to abide by the conditionality of privatising the Ashanti gold mines as loan disbursement was postponed forcing the population onto the streets just before the 2001 elections. In Lebanon too, the newly proposed reform programme by the incumbent prime minister proposes a fire-sale bonanza of most public assets. Through resource divestiture, neoliberalism imparted inimical growth in the productive forces, including productive capital stock, employment and growth in the incomes of the poorest working strata. Capital-biased institutions blocked broader participation in the decision-making process as the state retreated and vacated the ground for the imperialistically-funded civil society. Neoliberalism, the reigning ideology, does not choose people who are corrupt and in the business of promoting their self-interests. It creates the historical context into which it is only possible for corruption to grow. Corruption defined not in terms of personal ethical considerations is integral to a market economy and gauged by the rate of transfer of public into private wealth. The open capital account, the peg to the dollar, the tax on the poor and the privatisation of public assets are examples of context/corruption.  The prevailing concepts with which the crisis is being tackled are the same ones that were used as weapons against people in the past. Tax workers and privatise public assets – that is Moses and the prophets. Clearly, such measures, or the demands to try the corrupt without eliminating the context of corruption, are not at all revolutionary. To be sure, there are no revolutions without revolutionising the concepts with which reform is carried out. In view of the socialist ideological disaster, the only concepts available for public consumption are the putative neoliberal ones. The working class asks how do we pay for a debt that has become the wealth of the comprador class, as opposed to how we get rid of the comprador and its neoliberal policies. The comprador, to be sure, is a class, a historical social relationship of power reproduced by ideology, by the idea that not only our bread is imported, but our conceptual framework as well. For now, the salient conceptual alternatives are all about increasing state revenues from bread and butter tax to service an odious debt. In the case of Lebanon, the leakages are so pronounced that no matter the earnings from privatisation, the remedy would still be short-term. No one is talking about debt cancelation or, lesser serious reforms, like standstill agreements whereby the banks take zero interests until the economy recovers.  In Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and to a lesser extent Tunisia, the spontaneity of the Arab Spring, the revolution in times of socialist ideological retreat, resulted in deeper crises. The revolutionary spontaneity in Lebanon appears to further destroy the national sources of people’s incomes, which are already quite low. However, the Lebanese banks also have put themselves at risk by lending at rates that brought the economy to a halt. Had they accepted lower rates of return over longer periods to allow the country’s productive capacity and demand to rise in order to earn more in the future, their business would be more secure; that is simple arithmetic. However, the chemistry of sectarianism, the political process by which capital fakes its differences to acquire more rents from the state, is quite complex. It is sort of like a Buick competing with a Chevrolet although both are General Motors. The banks do not truly belong to Lebanon. They are institutions of the international financial class, the social relation that has organised the resilience of capital for centuries. It is a class that personifies the reason of the commodity as self-expanding value. It is impersonal and objective, it is history and knows no right or wrong. It is a class neither obtuse nor short-sighted. It risks some funds for the bigger booty, prospects of control and the business of militarism.  The Middle East is a region of war and oil. Physicians for Social Responsibility noted that the global war on terror has killed 4 million or more.[1] The US has spent 32 Million per hour on war since 2001, which means some financial institution was absorbing the war debit as credit and billions were made in the spinoffs of the financial markets.[2] Now these numbers are gross underestimates, but they are indicative of how true, as Karl Liebknecht pointed out, that war is big business. Lebanon is at the heart of this region and it has almost always been in war whether with US-Israel or its Lebanese proxies. The now dormant inter-communal proxy war may awaken again. There is much more to be gained by the international financial class as it scapegoats its Lebanese compradors and immiserates Lebanon to the point of eroding the social basis by which Lebanon conducts people’s war in self-defence. The world ruling combination of finance and militarism could set Lebanon ablaze again. The evident objective of imperialism is to contain Hezbollah, but the not so obvious objective is the de-valorisation process, which reduces the costs of inputs for capital over its economic cycle. To shed light on the situation in deeply divided Lebanon, it is best to project the course of developments by moving from the broader political picture to the narrower one inside Lebanon.  Looking at Lebanon from the outside in  Had these been revolutionary times, or times in which radical concepts prevailed, nothing short of the expropriation of the robber baron class, the nationalisation of the banking sector, and the regulation of the capital account, could have been proposed as remedies. A revolution in revolutionary times and in this bloodied area may involve immediate violence against the ruling class. However, never in the past 200 years have the socialist alternatives available to humanity to organise its metabolic rate of reproduction been so absent. So far, the anarchy of production has overconsumed man and nature, yet economic planning, the historical priority by which to respond to the existentialist calamity, does not even figure on the spectrum of debate. The rich die earlier as a result of pollution related diseases, but not as early as the poor. The Veblenian consumption trap of recognition for status and power self-consumes the participants of all social classes. Impulsive uprisings are afoot across the planet, yet the people one sees on the streets are not the masses. They are not armed with progressive ideology, with ironclad modes of organisation, and a preparedness for peoples’ war. Capital is pure violence. People or working classes without revolutionary thought and the exercise of violence in self-defence are neither masses nor proletariat. They are appendages to capital, thingified people.  The business of imperialism in the Middle East is bigger than the business of Lebanese banks. Nearly nothing to do with Lebanon’s internal political landscape has to do with Lebanon. Lebanon’s development and politics are all about the US’s ambitions to control the region, especially to retain hegemony over the Persian Gulf. Reigning over the Gulf is the power that underwrites global dollarization and the imperial rents attendant thereupon. In fact, the United States is already on a low-key war-footing with Iran, a war whose boomerang effect is part of the effort to contain China. The deepening sanctions, the US armed proxies and Kurdish secession are but the tip of the US-offensive. Unmistakably, no matter the calculated costs, US-capital whose mind is the reason of the commodity is preparing to strike the Eastern flank of the Persian Gulf. For the commodity and its reason, war is a means but also end in itself. The Gulf happens to be a most strategic waterway from which thirty percent of seaborne world oil supply passes every day. Hegemony over the Gulf is priceless. True, the US exports oil, but hegemonising oil is a source of controlcumpower, and power, both military and ideological, is the primacy in the primacy of politics. Without that primacy, without arresting the development of others and regulating labour reproduction, there will be no profits. Power is what makes a subject of history; a subject who is capable of moulding social relations to accommodate low-cost production. The subject in value relationships also shapes how much of what is being produced goes to capital, and how much goes to labour, albeit over the lifecycle of society. A powerful subject implements the demands of possibly the most egregious of laws, the law of value. This is no simple double entry bookkeeping in dollars designed and printed by the US-treasury. Capital is not a person; it has real people working for it. It is a social being or a social relationship, which political economy names capital for brevity or coquetry.  The US is the operating structure of capital. It already controls the western shores of the Gulf and to control the eastern shores would undoubtedly strengthen its position at the helm in the international division of labour. If the US leaves things as they are and accepts Iranian partial control over Gulf waters, it would also have to accept a downgrading of its imperial stature, which would imply massive tectonic realignments of global powers, including perhaps an orderly workout of the US’s debt and its overstretched US dollar, among other losses de-structured around imperial rents. But the Gulf for US imperialism is an indispensable condition of empire. It epitomises an existential question for an empire whose crisis deepens with the ascent of China. Lebanon, bordering Israel to the North and in possession of effective weaponry, threatens the imperial security arrangement for the surrounding region.  That Lebanon is socially and constitutionally sectarian and geopolitically rent-based is no anomaly under the rule of capital. Working class division or sectarianism is the normal condition of the labour process under capital. Without labour differentiation, capital, the ruling social relation, will appear for the fiction that it really is and cease to be. The French, former colonial power in Lebanon, and their heirs invested heavily in Lebanon’s sectarianism. Lebanon is sort of a precursor in sectarianism or a first experiment in the process applied in distinct ways in Iraq. As a society disarticulated along sectarian lines, a country whose national productive capacity was destroyed by war, Lebanon survives by geostrategic rents. It imports nearly twenty billion US$ and exports around three billion US$. These imports require the county to raise its interest rate and set aside nearly the equivalent of its GDP in reserves to finance imports. And although the country almost always has a primary surplus, as it reduces spending on schools and health to service the debt, it runs a significant fiscal deficit as a result of servicing high interest-internal borrowing. The interest rate is kept too high to account for the risks and to draw in dollars to address balance of payments shortfalls.  Most of debt is internal, 80 or 90 percent. Such is an odd case for a small country recovering from years of war in the developing world. Lebanon’s debt to GDP is said to be at nearly150 percent, but it is in fact bigger (total income is about 50 billion US dollars). Only countries under the financial umbrella of US-led international finance can boast such an internal borrowing record while maintaining a currency peg and low inflation rates. A caveat is in order here: the debt to GDP ratio may be much higher because sometimes after 2005, the private bank responsible for issuing national statistics corrected the GDP figures upward to make the debt to GDP ratio look smaller. In December 2006, the debt to GDP ratio was 183 percent, and oddly enough, it went down to 151 percent in 2018. Lebanon did not have a national bureau of statistics then and most statistics were produced by one of its private banks. One must use the qualifying ‘nearly’ when speaking of figures, for although statistics everywhere are a point of view, they are even more so in Lebanon.  Lebanon’s Banks are family and political nomenklatura-owned. These financial institutions have drawn tremendous profits from holding high-interest state debt. They did so knowing that the faulty reconstruction efforts boosted by a constitution that denied the representation of labour in the state made sure that all funds destined for reconstruction went to banks and to the ruling comprador class. Without social reconstruction nothing constructs, and people build the sect leader not themselves. The post-war constitution reconfirmed sectarianism de jure, and the masses became many sects competing for rents from the state through their own sectarian leadership. Lebanon’s financial institutions are overstocked with cash because of banking privacy, and a considerable portion of their assets is of dubious origin. Their assets are about quarter of a trillion US$. They have an interest in putting the state into debt and buying the debt to launder much of their illegitimate cash. A former finance minister complained that the central bank overruled him and issued bonds at high interest rates even when the state did not need to borrow.  In 1990, the government issued reconstruction bonds at about forty percent yearly rates. The banks gladly obliged and doubled their initial loans in about two years. As noted above, the complex chemistry of baleful sectarianism is more complicated than the calculus of the debt. Banks earned tremendous rents on bonds and placed part of the capital abroad, while the remaining portions rolled over into additional debts. As time went by, new loans financed old and new debts, especially as internal and external deficits gaped wide. The debt grew as Lebanon’s tepid growth rates, powered by public and private borrowing to boost consumption, induced further austerity. Austerity compressed demand far below what was necessary to boost state revenues to settle new interest payments. As in typical Ponzi schemes, the debt grew at higher rates than the economy. If the scheme unfolds now, the earlier huge banking profits have been deposited abroad. The resulting runaway inflation would cripple the economy.  Non-oil exporting states in the Near East are traditionally geopolitical rent states. After the first Arab oil boom in the seventies, these countries became more dependent on rents. It was a combination of IFI supported structural adjustment and Gulf aid and remittances that gradually de-industrialised them. De-industrialisation deepened their dependence on handouts, or properly put, imperialist investments in social divisions and imperialist securitisation. It would be bizarre to believe that the US-Euro imperialism that has mown down nearly a billion people in its wars since 1500 A.D. benevolently delivers aid to humanity, or it would make efforts to arrest wars and the natural disaster. It is rather odder to entertain the thought that the Gulf states enjoy any significant autonomy to deliver aid without American consent.  As is typical of social processes under capitalism, which homogenise cultures and traditions and erase variety, Gulf aid to almost starving lower strata laced with Salafism homogenised the multifarious traditions of Islam. From dress codes to burial customs, the otherwise tolerant Islamic world was becoming more like a Xerox version of Saudi Islamism. To be sure, the Saudi version of Islam is a modern, colonially reared and concocted tradition meant to hold cultural and industrial development at bay while Arabian oil falls into the grip of empire. Gulf rents delivered to Lebanon and other states were plainly linked to the US’s political objectives to contain socialism and to create weak and internally divided states. US-sponsored rents from the Gulf not only eroded national production requiring indigenous knowhow, they reduced the state-distribution functions and the capacity of the state to deliver social welfare. Almost everywhere, the vacuum was filled by US-supported Islamists and liberals. During the Arab Spring, Islamists commandeered the revolts and with unconditional funding from the Gulf, they either attacked their states or were elected and introduced yet more neoliberal programmes than their predecessors. For post-war Lebanon things were no different. Rents bred either the liberal NGO’s or the Islamists. The former on paper declare women or any identity to be equal, but in actuality they do not deliver them from poverty. Liberalism is arguably more devastating than Islamism because it completely erases the social class or reality under the banner of freedom. It is indeed a freedom for humans to perish early from hunger while enjoying the liberty of fitting into an identity pre-selected for them by capital, the social power and the agent of history. Islamists, on the other hand justify the demobilisation of resources by divine fiat. Neither speaks of freedom from want.  Post-war Lebanon which had suffered the destruction of its infrastructure and industry depended more on external sources of funding to maintain consumption. As the state emerged weaker after the war and its social function was delegated to US-European sponsored civil society or to the parallel institutions of the sect. To rephrase an earlier point, what we see in the demos of Lebanon today is a thirty years investment in reactionary politics personified in people who suffer the same dire class conditions under phantasmagorical doses of intense neoliberalism. The social reaction could boil into a solid class position, but the left is weak in terms of organisation and resources, while the Gulf or European backed NGOs and sects have at their disposal extensive financial means.  In addressing the causes of lapses in development, mainstream social science falsely dichotomises constituents of the agency of history into internal and external. It blames the victimised classes for their self-inflicted misery. It does it so that history absolves the US-European structure of capital. But these Arab working classes are too weak and consistently under assault, often by the belligerence of war and poverty, and violently prohibited from organising into agents of history. The defeated are consistently stripped of agency. The truly powerful make historical choices. They truly vote in historical time. The colonials or later US imperialism lay down with the power of their bombs, starvations, invasions, and tailored constitutions the margins of actions available for subjugated people. These powers impose the historical imperatives. They empower and institutionalise sectarian and ethnic forms as purveyors of rent from the subjugated state such that the state is always in a state of low or high intensity civil war. They set the material foundations and impose a false scarcity to promote inter working-class war. And by doing this they make profits from the war and set the stage by the continual disempowerment of people to make future profits.  The Lebanese, for instance, can cast this or that vote for the sectarian lackey of imperialism who will do whatever to provide jobs for some of his sect members. However, his rent acquisition action always comes at the expense of other sect members and the working class as a whole. Incomes under capital are rents and if sects bid against each other they lower the share of social wage from the total income pie for the whole of the working class. The dividedness also weakens the state by the loss of sovereignty arising upon the living insecurity of the working class and holds it hostage to imperialist strategy. In the case of Lebanon, the short leash of finance, the few billion dollars needed to service the debt are currently being delayed and US imperialism is calling the shots. It has something up its sleeve and it has to do with Hezbollah. The US-led financial class through its control of the Lebanese finance casts the real vote in real historical time. It just sits back and watches, while the vote of the vanquished Lebanese population, rhetorically speaking, appears as a mere ornament of modern-day slavery.  The US spares no effort to destabilise the region. As should be obvious, it does so because by devastating and warring it empowers itself and reduces the reproduction costs of labour. This latter point is at the heart of higher profit rates not only because the pressure of refugees on wages, but also in terms of the real value, the real commodities and the hours of labour it takes to sustain the working class, much less is expended on labour. In political economy parlance, that is called a reduction of necessary labour, which is another way of saying if capital pays less than is necessary for people over their lifetime, it makes more profits. In-fighting lowers the cost of people and what they own in resources.  At this historical juncture, fomenting the Sunni-Shiite divide, the in-fighting at play in Iraq and elsewhere is both an end in itself and end to weaken Iran. Also, by raising tensions in the Gulf, and by virtue of its gigantic military presence there, US-led capital holds the world in suspense relative to the instability it injects in oil supply routes. Imperial ransom from the rest of the world tallies with protracted military tension or turmoil in the Gulf. The scurry to the safety of the dollar market alone resituates the US atop of the global pyramid. War or tension in the Gulf is a win-win situation for ‘US-led capital.’ The use of the term US-led capital is more appropriate than the use of the term US because the poor in the US are also subjected to the wrath of their home grown imperialism. The recent figures on poverty in the US indicate that half the population subsists at below the poverty line.[3]  Regionally, Israel, a state constructed around Jewish identity, has an innate aversion for Hezbollah and a less-sectarian Lebanon. Although Israel has no aversion to its adversaries wallowing in class conflict painted over by religion, Hezbollah is a successful paramilitary force and a model for people’s war. To be sure, Hezbollah’s power, its victory in liberating South Lebanon, had reconfirmed the effectiveness of people’s war. No weapon superiority bestows an occupier with the power to rule over a people against their will. Outright victory of an occupying force over an occupied people was and is no longer possible, short of complete annihilation – naturally under the rule of capital that means the continuation of wars. Hezbollah is stronger after its experience in the Syrian war and better armed. For that reason, Israel is keen to have Hezbollah consume itself in Lebanese misery or in an inter-communal war. Aware of Israel’s intentions, Hezbollah had solidified its ties to other progressive forces in Lebanon and the region.  As per the old lessons of national liberation wars, the premise of larger and deeper fronts, especially ones that involve grassroots support that combine security with development, better positions liberation struggles. Although anti-imperialism is not a class-inherent characteristic of the Iranian ruling classes, imperialism deprives peoples, peoples from all sort of classes and not only the working class in developing formations, not only of their control over resources, but also of their lives or longevity. Imperialism often consumes the peripheral comprador, the labour aristocrat and possibly the whole of social nature with its uranium-laced bombs. It depopulates to earn profits. The prematurely wasted life in wars or war related austerity is itself a product of militarism, just as a coke can is a product of the Coca-Cola corporation and industrialism. The more cokes and wasted-lives are consumed-realised, the more returns capital generates.  The Iranian ruling class is a rentier class. While some in Iran delude themselves with mini imperialist ambitions, the struggle of Iran’s people is a struggle to literally exist. Dreams of grandiosity related to past empire is delusional for Iran. The reality that Iran will meet the fate of Iraq or Afghanistan is demonstrably present. The barometer of the strength of its national front remains the extent to which it socialises, subsidises basic commodities, and creates social employment positions founded on a national money cycle – free from international finance, to cement the grounds for people’s war. Iran may have inroads in the Near East, but these were cavities purposefully carved by the US, not by some conspiracy, but by the reason of history abiding by the desires of the self-expanding commodity. Fetishism, the rule of commodities, through its ideology commands real processes and people believe that their imaginary relations to these real processes are real. Their relationship to the sect is not real because the only reality is that of the social class as it produces what people need to survive. Put differently, it is living labour deprived of better living conditions that produces and reproduces people and not identity. A reading of the historical moment, the balance of forces, would clearly show that Iran is in a position of self-defence. Its present government, however, is short on the delivery of jobs and welfare to solidify the social grounds for people’s war. Based on the premise that encroachment wars in this region are an industry of militarism and that imperialism reinforces waste accumulation through depopulation, the security of Iran through Hezbollah is a shared and co-dependent security with Lebanon.  Security in Lebanon is inversely related to sectarianism – here one has in mind the historically determined modern identity sect that acts a conveyor belt for rents. The sect imposed by imperialism as a form of social organisation vitiates class unity, consciousness and the solidarity required for anti-imperialist struggle. The degree to which sectarian divisions surface and security sinks principally corresponds to the retreat of socialist ideological crisis worldwide. In better times, before the Lebanese war, working class cohesion was in the process of formation diluting sectarian differences. Some indicate that inter-sectarian rapprochement under progressive parties and slogans was the reason for which imperialism unleashed its right-wing cronies against the masses igniting the Lebanese war of 1975-1989. After the war ended in 1989, the right learnt its lesson and rents were channelled to sects by degree of loyalty. Such was the effort to obviate the real social being of people, the working class and its institutions. The Lebanese revolution faces the weight of a history in which a cultural identity instrumentalised by capital has acquired a supernatural power. Received perception has it that against all odds such identity exists in the same shape and form it is across history.  The demos prove that class is the reality that resurfaces in times of crisis. Penuries of bread and democracy, poverty in Lebanon, are cross-sectarian. Bread and democracy are presupposed by social relationships before they become things or acts. They are historical and power relationships obtained from class struggle. These concepts, the bread and the democracy, even for the left they have become reified and ahistorical. They are simply the things and the boxes of the ballot boxes. They are maintained as such because Western Marxism peddles them as such. The Western left-intellectuals, with slightly more leisure than others in the developing world, churn out concepts that fit the R2P designs. Overlooking capital’s history and the current social and natural calamity, these pseudo-leftists harbour a deep fascination for the selective democratic model of Western capital and see its atrocities as prerequisites for progress.  Conceptualised differently, bread is the social wage share that requires delinking from the West, working class solidarity and, necessarily but not exclusively, armed struggle against imperialism. Development obtains from combining security with resistance. Poverty in Lebanon could have been worse than Egypt’s without Hezbollah and its resistance. Some sectarian leaders are using the poverty they inflicted upon people through their banks to negotiate a higher share of imperial rents as a price for handing over Hezbollah.  Democracy is an end to alienation. People no longer relinquish the popular will through the voting system. It is about the organs of labour consistently voting for labour in state policy with or without the ritual ballot box. Democracy is not labour as ‘an’ organic constituent of the state, it is ‘the’ organic constituent of the state. Yet, few understand the depth of the conceptual crisis and the idea that people’s representation in the state has to be organic. Demanding one-man one-vote realises democracy only when man is social man; the real man of society reproduced by the value of society, the socially necessary labour invested in him or her. Social man is a subcategory of the working class and, therefore, democracy is the rule of the working class.  Who is more democratic China whose revolution of 1949 heralded prosperity and eliminated poverty or the US which sinks half of its population and half the world into poverty? The working class is there, but it is not brought into focus because people have been taught to think in forms devoid of history, in the ‘now,’ while indeed the ‘now’ or the present do not exist in real time. Capital paid teachers, universities and media to distort people’s minds and erase the social alternatives. The cliché capitalism won against socialism has become truth as if history is a football game and not an ongoing process of massacres and environmental destruction. Without being democratically armed with weapons, without revolutionising concepts and ideology, the working class will always be a proletariat in waiting.  People negate the system, but adopt the conceptual alternatives of the system itself as their alternatives. As they uncritically assimilate the rule of capital, no matter what procedure of voting they choose, they will be electing capital’s authoritarianism. As capitalists and working people personify things or commodities, the development attendant upon the production-consumption of commodities by commodities will continue to end in the human and environmental waste visible all around.  The crisis in Lebanon was inevitable. Why the banks usurped so much so as to debilitate the state has to do with capital’s objectives to create a social crisis capable of weakening Hezbollah. As the currency falls and the cost of living rises, sectarians and their NGOs are at work to derail the uprising. History bereft of socialist ideology is on their side. The NGO’s will divert cries for justice into a cry against Hezbollah. The US’s conditionality here is being put as such: hand over the weapons of Hezbollah and get the funding needed to maintain the consumerist standard of living. But borrowing short term will only delay the onslaught of poverty for few months. For imperialism, the reason of the commodity adopted by history, the poverty of all sects is necessary because it cheapens inputs from humans and otherwise in production and profits.  To reiterate: the reason why the private banking sector has sucked the country dry with exorbitant interest rates for such a long time is because its patron the international financial class makes more money out of poverty and war in Lebanon and the region. The bigger world financial class and its militarism may sacrifice the smaller Lebanese banking class. However, no matter how sects are positioned on the inside, events in Lebanon will unfold in synch with how the US fares in its regional war offensive. A glimmer of hope exists here as the rise of China arrests the growth of European civilisation, a store of culture whose ethos is to waste or to accumulate by waste. The real world happens to be a planet plagued with overproduction crises, which necessitate that money should be made in wars and in socially imposed under-consumption. Waste produced under waste accumulation also produces a consumerist man indulged in an overly entropic mode of self-consumption. Scarcity constructed to differentiate labour or to pit the working class against each other by designating quaweaponizing identity as the vehicle for rent acquisition abounds. In terms of the real physical scarcity however, not even oil is scarce anymore.  Capital’s logic of cost minimisation, the production of waste for profit, becomes the repository of the system. In times of socialist ideological retreat, the absurd becomes real as reality conforms to the logical forms of mainstream economics. Value relations become waste relations, the ruling class becomes the wasting class and the working class becomes the wasted class. The formalism of capital’s mainstream logic, the two-dimensional diagrammatic in which prices clear excess commodities, becomes more and more a condition in which the excess commodity to be cleared is living labour. Arresting European civilisation, the body of knowledge and traditions of expansion by war, the structural embodiment of that wasting capital, is the historical necessity.  Subordinately, the flux of this spontaneous revolution in Lebanon is a test of the left’s resolve. The left is poised against imperialist NGOs with logistical support from the Gulf states destined to lure the support of despairing people with bribes needed for survival. As people lose income, the left has to provide the alternatives. For the working class to become a proletariat, it must broadly align against reactionary positions. So far, spontaneity mixed with liberal or Islamist NGOs has been a suicide-trap for socialism. The left can commit the anecdotal suicide, it could jump from the superstructure and hit the base, but it could also through struggle carry the day.  Renowned author and Middle East analyst, Professor Ali Kadri teaches Economics ath the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)  Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.  [3] Yes, Half of Americans Are In or Near Poverty: Here’s More Evidence https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/10/16/yes-half-americans-are-or-near-poverty-heres-more-evidence


hitandrun--2019-04-11--The Politics of Game of Thrones Revisited

The final season of the hit TV series Game of Thrones begins this weekend, on April 14, ending a long wait that began when Season 7 ended in 2017. One of the many interesting aspects of the series and the books by George R.R. Martin on which it is based, is the attempt to address a variety of political issues. While some might consider it frivolous to assess the political message of a fantasy show, it’s worth remembering that far more people consume science fiction and fantasy media than read serious nonfiction analyses of political issues. And social science research indicates that science fiction and fantasy, such as the Harry Potter series, can even have a significant influence on fans’ political views. At the very least, discussing the politics of Game of Thrones is less painful than analyzing the much grimmer politics of the real world! Valar morghulis – “all men must die” – is all too true. But at least we can have some fun with fictional political economy first!  Over the last several years, I have written a good deal about the politics of Game of Thrones. My most extensive analysis is a 2017 article focusing on what it might take to fulfill Daenerys Targaryen’s vow to “break the wheel” of Westeros’ awful political system:  In a famous scene in Season 5 of Game of Thrones, Daenerys Targaryen compares the struggle for power in Westeros to a spinning wheel that elevates one great noble house and then another. She vows that she does not merely intend to turn the wheel in her own favor: “I’m not going to stop the wheel. I’m going to break the wheel.” In the world of the show, Daenerys’s statement resonates because the rulers of Westeros have made a terrible mess of the continent… Daenerys’s desire to “break the wheel” suggests the possibility of a better approach. But, what exactly, does breaking the wheel entail?… Even in the late stages of… Season 7, Daenerys seems to have little notion of what it means beyond defeating her enemies and installing herself as Queen on Westeros’s Iron Throne…. Unlike most of the other rulers we see in the series, Daenerys has at least some genuine interest in improving the lot of ordinary people. Before coming to Westeros, she and her army freed tens of thousands of slaves on the continent of Essos. She delayed her departure from Essos long enough to try to establish a new government in the liberated areas that would — hopefully — prevent backsliding into slavery. Nonetheless, it is not clear whether Daenerys has any plan to prevent future oppression and injustice other than to replace the current set of evil rulers with a better one: herself. The idea of “breaking the wheel” implies systemic institutional reform, not just replacing the person who has the dubious honor of planting his or her rear end on the Iron Throne in King’s Landing. If Daenerys has any such reforms in mind, it is hard to say what they are…. Daenerys’s failure to give serious consideration to institutional problems is shared by the other great leader beloved by fans of the show: Jon Snow, the newly enthroned King in the North. Perhaps even more than Daenerys, Jon has a genuine concern for ordinary people…. Perhaps to an even greater extent than Daenerys, however, Jon does not have any real notion of institutional reform…. But in Medieval Europe, on which Westeros is roughly based, parliaments, merchants’ guilds, autonomous cities, and other institutions eventually emerged to challenge and curb the power of kings and nobles. These developments gradually helped lead to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the economic growth that led to modern liberal democracy. Few if any such developments are in evidence in Westeros, which seems to have had thousands of years of economic, technological, and intellectual stagnation. The characters in the books and the TV show are not the only ones who largely ignore the need for institutional change. We the fans are often guilty of the same sin….. Most of us read fantasy literature and watch TV shows to be entertained, not to get a lesson in political theory. And it is much easier to develop an entertaining show focused on the need to replace a villainous evil ruler with a good, heroic, and virtuous one, than to produce an exciting story focused on institutional questions….. Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire is comparatively unusual in even raising the possibility that institutional reform is the real solution to its fictional world’s problems, and in making this idea one of the central themes of the story. However understandable, the pop culture fixation on heroic leaders rather than institutions reinforces a dangerous tendency of real-world politics. The benighted people of Westeros are not the only ones who hope that their problems might go away if only we concentrate vast power in the hands of the right ruler. The same pathology has been exploited by dictators throughout history, both left and right. It is also evident, in less extreme form, in many democratic societies….. For all its serious flaws, our situation is not as bad as that of Westeros. But we too could benefit from more serious consideration of ways to break the wheel, as opposed to merely spin it in another direction. And our popular culture could benefit from having more stories that highlight the value of institutions, as well as heroic leaders. However much we love Daenerys and Jon, they and their real-world counterparts are unlikely to give us a better wheel on their own.  Back in 2016, I discussed Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire in an article on the politics of several science fiction and fantasy series where I highlighted the series’ skeptical view of political elites. In this 2013 post, I discussed the significance of the “Red Wedding,” one of the most shocking and controversial episodes in the history of the series. Back in 2011, when the series first began, I commented on some of the political issues raised by the struggle for the Iron Throne, building on an Atlantic symposium about the series.  In August 2017, I participated in a panel on the politics of Game of Thrones, sponsored by the R Street Institute and the Cato Institute, along with Alyssa Rosenberg (Washington Post), Peter Suderman (Reason), and Matthew Yglesias (Vox). We are hoping to reprise our discussion during the final season.  During the long interregnum between the end of Season 7 and the start of Season 8, George R.R. Martin published the first volume of Fire and Blood, the history of House Targaryen’s rule over the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. The book predictably divided fans, many of whom would have preferred that Martin finish the long-awaited Winds of Winter instead. But I thought it was fascinating. At the very least, it did provide a lot of information about Westeros’ political system. Here are a few examples (with spoilers largely avoided):  1. Even when the king is both competent and relatively well-intentioned, the political system doesn’t function all that well. When he is either malevolent or incompetent, all kinds of disasters happen. And badly flawed kings seem to be more common than good ones. The high frequency of bad kings and the inability of good ones to make much progress is a strong sign that the monarchy’s flaws are mostly systemic, rather than the fault of a few flawed individual rulers.  2. Like the Roman Empire, Westeros under the Targaryen kings never developed any generally accepted rules of succession. Thus, civil war breaks out over such issues as whether male relatives of the king take precedence over female ones who are older and/or more closely related. It is also not clear whether the king has the right to designate his own heir, or whether there are laws of succession that he cannot set aside (and if so, what they are).  3. Despite the above, Fire and Blood actually deepens the mystery of why Westeros has had so many centuries of economic stagnation. It shows that the kings invested in useful infrastructure (e.g. – ports and roads) and that there are many sources of investment capital other than the Iron Bank of Braavos. Plus, several of the great houses engage in extensive trade with other parts of the world. All of this should stimulate considerable innovation, growth, and technological progress. Yet very little seems to occur.  4. Fire and Blood makes clear that the stagnation probably is not caused by dragons, despite speculation to the contrary by commentators on the earlier books and TV show. There are never more than about 10-15 domesticated dragons in Westeros at any one time, and they don’t seem to be used for anything but warfare and transportation for their riders (mostly members of the royal family). They clearly do not substitute for labor-saving devices or provide transportation for trade. And, while they are powerful battlefield weapons, they are clearly not invincible and their presence should stimulate military innovation, not stifle it.  5. Based on what we see, it is far from clear that Targaryen blood is actually necessary to become a dragonrider. If it is, only a tiny bit seems to be enough. This suggests that the number of domesticated dragons and dragonriders could be greatly expanded. If so, dragons could actually help jumpstart the economy! There is a lot they could do to increase Westerosi productivity, if they started to take on jobs other than killing people and transporting VIPs.  6. Women are undeniably second-class citizens in Westeros. But they seem to have higher social status and more autonomy than their real-world medieval equivalents. We even see a number of cases of them entering male-dominated professions, including warfare. This further deepens the mystery of Westerosi stagnation, as relatively freer Westerosi women should be more productive than those of medieval Europe, yet this does not seem to result in much increased growth.  Perhaps we will get more insights on the politics of Westeros from Season 8, and George R.R. Martin’s long-awaited Winds of Winter. Until then, don’t forget that political chaos is a ladder!


Parenting Without Fear

You may have heard the story about the Minnesota mother who faced jail time after accidentally failing to properly strap in her child's car seat. Or the cops who arrived to question a mom who told her neighbors that her 9-year-old could help them do chores. Or the police officers who went door to door hunting for a man after he drove off from the mall with a toddler—who turned out to be his daughter. They'd been shopping. An onlooker had assumed he was a kidnapper and called the police.  We live in an age of fear, especially where children are concerned. Even as the world has become safer and richer, parenting has become a paranoid exercise in removing all possible risk from a child's life. This is exhausting for parents and even worse for children. Too many have been taught that they are fragile, weak, and in constant danger. Instead of getting experience problem-solving and bouncing back, they have grown up unable to rise to the challenges that life presents.  No journalist has more effectively chronicled the strange and dismal culture of contemporary child rearing than Reason contributor Lenore Skenazy, 59, who is not ashamed of being "America's Worst Mom." She got that nickname after she let her son, then age 9, ride the New York subway home by himself in 2008. "Half the people I've told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse," she wrote in a much-read piece for The New York Sun. "As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids."  Skenazy went on to found the Free-Range Kids movement, dedicating her career to investigating and explaining how today's parents became so afraid and what effects that fear is having on their children. In 2017, she co-founded the nonprofit Let Grow with a mission of encouraging schools and families to allow kids to "have some adventures" and therefore "grow resilient."  In January, Skenazy spoke with Frank Furedi, 71, a Budapest-born sociologist now based at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. When Furedi was 9, he had an adventure even more exciting than riding a subway by himself: His family got caught up in Hungary's anti-Stalinist revolution of 1956. "The thing that I remember about that moment," he told Spiked years later, "was the sheer optimism, the sense of power expressed by people who were normally extremely passive and fatalistic." After the Soviets crushed the revolt, the family fled to Canada, where Furedi was drawn into the student left. Anti-Soviet and anti-statist—but not delighted with the West's status quo either—he became a self-styled libertarian Marxist. He "saw the state not as a medium of liberation but as a medium of oppression, as something that limited the possibility for more radical change," he explained to Spiked.  Over the years Furedi has frequently taken stands on censorship, technology, environmentalism, identity politics, and other issues that set him apart from the rest of the left. He is also the author of many books about fear, parenting, and campus culture, including 2002's Paranoid Parenting, 2005's Politics of Fear, and 2016's What's Happened to the University. His latest, How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury Continuum), looks at how fear has become the driving factor behind much of contemporary Western culture and the ways that has changed society for the worse.  In a wide-ranging phone conversation, Skenazy and Furedi discussed the origins of today's fearful parenting, how schools and universities became incubators of scared kids, and why a refusal to tolerate risk has, paradoxically, led to a generation of children who are more fragile than ever before.  Skenazy: Tell me the basic idea of your book. How does fear work?  Furedi: What I'm trying to establish in the book is: What do we fear in the 21st century? There is a lot of material that is available on how people feared in the past, and it's very clear that there have been a number of very important changes in the way we talk about fear.  For a start, in the contemporary era we talk much more about it. Fear is an overused word. We talk about it in relation to a lot more experiences than we did before—things that in the past would have been fairly uncontroversial, seen as being normal, not seen as a threat. I try to understand, Why is that?  For example, something as ordinary and banal as children making a transition from primary school to secondary school is seen as a big deal. You need to bring in all kinds of experts to make sure that children are not threatened by going to the big school.  My thesis is that the main reason we fear the way we do is because we have become increasingly prone toward medicalizing the threats we face. We tend to use the language of psychology rather than the language of morality or of politics or of social science to analyze the human condition. We tend to interpret the problems we face in terms of illness categories.  I see this all the time too. Even some grandparents who let their children walk to school and play outside now think that letting the grandkids stand on the sidewalk in front of the house to wait for the bus is too dangerous. But I don't usually think of that as psychological or medicalized. I think of it as just fear inflation.  What you describe as fear inflation is absolutely right. But the reason fear is being inflated so much is because we have a different idea of what a child or human being is like. We now seem to think that children are defined by their powerlessness, their vulnerability. We believe that children haven't got the psychological and the moral and the physical resources to deal with the challenges of everyday life.  One of the most interesting developments is that in the past, adults used to understand that fearing is not a bad experience for children. If children fear the traffic, that's a good thing. In the last 50, 60 years, more and more, we're arguing that the very act of fearing is itself a psychologically dangerous kind of knowledge. It can damage a child. And parents are told almost to insulate children from any possible experience that might induce a sense of fear in their kids.  There was a poll done in your country, England, of the worst fairy tales to tell children. I think the top result was "Little Red Riding Hood," because it's too scary. There's a wolf. The grandma is gone. The child gets eaten. Parents were saying that they were changing the ending because it was too traumatic for kids to hear about Little Red Riding Hood encountering the big eyes, big claws, and big teeth of the Big Bad Wolf.  I think that's happening everywhere at the moment. Old wonderful fairy tales are being Disneyfied to the point at which anything that is remotely scary is immediately censored, and there's this really silly assumption that children are unable to deal with these kinds of stories.  Whereas I'm sure that when you were a kid, you remember, these were precious moments. We remembered those scary stories quite well. We might have been a little bit frightened, but they did teach us a thing or two.  At the moment, what we tend to do is seek refuge in the mundane: banal story lines where everybody's got big smiles on their faces. That seems to be the way we think that children should be socialized and brought up—all the while forgetting that it's totally impossible to shield young kids from the experience of fear. Whether you like it or not, things are going to frighten them. That's part and parcel of growing up.  I think it's a good part. Fairy tales exist to teach you what not to do, but also to inculcate a certain sense of, "Ooh, that was scary….Tell it again!" You get used to it. You get a little comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable.  Fairy tales communicated some very important moral messages about what is right and what is wrong, about good and evil. They really helped socialize young kids into a moral vision of the world.  We've become very estranged from using the language of right and wrong with kids. In fact, in America, teachers often tell children there is no right and wrong answer. Everything is possible. Instead of teaching young people what's good and bad and giving them very clear rules, we tend to rely on what I call the therapeutic technique of validating them—making them feel good. We seem to believe that the way to bring kids up is continually raising their self-esteem by smiling at them, by not criticizing them, by not using a red pen to correct their essays.  Children need to understand that failure is no big deal. They need to learn how to fail. They need to learn the difference between success and failure as early as possible, because that's what will give them strength later on.  How did we get to this point? You seem to suggest that something happened after the '70s. What was it?  At a certain point in Anglo-American culture, parents began to believe that they needed to be much more nurturing and caring [and] far less disciplinarian. Some of those beliefs were quite fine. But around the '60s and the '70s, these ideals mutated into ones that basically suggested it was really important that children were under adult protection as much as possible, because unless you were supervising them, they were likely to have very negative experiences.  It takes about two or three generations of parents before these ideals pervade the entire parenting culture. By the time the new parents that are bringing children up in the 1980s begin to become fathers and mothers, these kind of ideals have been totally internalized.  On both sides of the Atlantic, if you look at the elder generations of parents, people at my age or even older, they are far more permissive and far more chilled out than the youngest groups of parents. In fact, the younger generation of parents, the 26- and 27-year-olds, are more likely to be worried about virtually every dimension of a child's experience.  I still don't understand what happened in the '70s that made us start thinking we had to watch over them more closely. Was it a crime wave? Was it a certain movie that scared everyone?  The most important overall development that occurred in the 1970s was a shift in culture away from a confident, future-oriented belief in the capacity of society to do big things. You had President [Lyndon] Johnson talking about the Great Society in the 1960s. If you compare that to President [Jimmy] Carter's [1979] speech where he talks about the crisis of confidence in America, you can see a very big shift has occurred.  As you have this loss of confidence, and this happens all over the world, it's paralleled by an emotionalism becoming institutionalized, where psychology becomes the dominant medium through which we interpret everyday human experience, and where problems that used to be seen as normal are increasingly recast in medical terms, as medical issues that we need to have a diagnosis for.  It's in this context that you have a complete redefinition of what a child is, what they are capable of, what kind of risk and pressure they can handle. The whole therapeutic imagination that develops in North American societies fundamentally alters the way we view the child and the relationship of the child to the adults.  Yeah, the idea that fear damages them is really what we're talking about. I read articles that are so disheartening, because they teach parents who might not feel worried that their job is to be worried and their job is to be supervising their children every single second. I feel bad for them. I never put down helicopter parents, because they're being taught that only this kind of helicoptering is good parenting, is safe enough.  The key point for me is the underlying assumption that the real threat is not so much the physical injury that a child might have but the emotional one.  Let's talk about the word vulnerability. You did a study where you looked at how much it's being used today—and not with kids that are chained to the crib in an orphanage. How did we start seeing regular children as all vulnerable to depression and every other kind of trauma?  Mainstream psychology used to argue that children were much better at dealing with mental health issues than adults were, that when it came to trauma of all sorts, children could recover much faster than adults. That was the conventional wisdom. Then what happened was a number of studies were carried out in the late '70s and early '80s which began to suggest, bit by bit, that in fact we were wrong. Almost every dimension of childhood was reinterpreted as a potential threat to their mental health.  If you look at the way children then became educated, we became so focused on preventing them from having major mental health issues that, actually, we create problems that did not exist before. If you go to university in America or in England, you'll find that mental health issues are like the No. 1 priority that all the administrators are focused on.  Right. I've seen that at my own kids' universities. There are a lot of signs around: "Worried? Depressed? Don't hold it in. Come to the mental health center." On the one hand, it's nice. If a kid is having a tough time, I'm glad there's no stigma. But it does seem to assume that these problems are everywhere and that the university's job is to be proactive about noticing and having kids notice any time their emotional temperature is even a little out of whack.  It normalizes the conviction that sooner or later, if not in your first year then in your second or third year, you're going to have a mental health problem. When I go to my university and I'm going into the toilet, I look up and there's an ad for if you're thinking of suicide. If you're lonely and you haven't got friends, there's a clinic where they have therapy dogs so you can feel more relaxed. If you look around, there's about six or seven of these mental health adverts. That to me seems to be a very, very real problem. These days, almost the entire university is meant to be a safe space. The argument is, whenever you feel that you're under pressure, you're traumatized.  In your book you say, "powerlessness, fragility, and vulnerability are considered normal characteristics today." Do young people overcome these finally when they leave the university?  Well, not really. I think that unfortunately we now see the human condition—in other words, what it means to be a human—very much in these terms. So the idea of being vulnerable and being powerless is something we carry on with us, or we're meant to carry on with us, for the rest of our life. Even when we become adults, biologically mature individuals, we still are meant to have what they call "issues." We expect people to have a variety of problems dealing with uncertainty. As a result of that, there's a whole industry of professionals, from life coaches—I don't know if you've ever met a life coach?  I actually have a friend who was very much helped by her work coach. She was doing poorly, and somebody was advising her, like, "Don't say this to your boss" and "Don't do things that way." I don't think she knew how to succeed in the work world, so the coach really helped her.  I'm sure that a lot of coaches can help. But I think there is a problem. If we're now relying on people to tell us how to speak at work, what to say or not to say to our friends, how to bring up our children, how to make love to our partners, how to decorate our houses—so virtually every aspect of our life is subject to some kind of professional expertise—then it does have that effect of undermining our autonomy as individuals where we are, in a sense, making choices on the basis of our experience. [It diminishes] our own capacity for independent behavior and our ability to take responsibility for our action and to live with the consequences of the action that we've taken.  What interests me is that the fear is not just, like, "Oh, I might screw up and then I'll have to deal with the consequences." The fear is that if something bad happens, it's the end of the world and you will never recover. We go to the darkest possible place.  When my mom let me walk to school, I don't think her heart was in her throat every day, thinking, "I will feel so bad for the rest of my life if she's kidnapped, raped, and murdered." She didn't think that way. She might have thought that I would fall down and I would have to get up, but I don't even think she was worrying about that. So how come today we all go straight to "kidnapped, raped, and murdered" every time we let our kids out of our sight?  Worst-case thinking has become the norm in all institutions of society. That's been very much the dominant way that risk aversion—the fear of taking risks, the fear of experimenting, the fear of trying stuff out—takes. I think that "responsible parenting" these days is defined as a kind of child care that assumes the worst thing [that could possibly happen] and takes precautions to make sure that doesn't happen. Very often when you have discussions with intelligent people, they in their heart of hearts actually know that worst-case thinking is not very helpful.  My mom quit her job to stay at home with her kids. So obviously her first priority was us and our well-being. And yet she could let us go outside, ride our bikes, walk to school, go to the beach, even—the big bad beach. How did we get to "I could never forgive myself if…" being this line that all parents say and feel now?  Safety has acquired this enormous significance in our lives. It almost has a quasi-religious quality to it, where people regard everything that is safe as being, by definition, really, really good. And of course, the more we talk about safety and the more we focus on that, the more we become drawn to seeing a growing dimension of life and the world as unsafe.  Experiences that in the past we would have called a good risk are today seen in a very different way. Even that expression—"a good risk"—sounds irresponsible. Risk is by definition bad. It's not an opportunity to make things happen. Risk is entirely a negative phenomenon. So we have this very one-sided way of dealing with risk, where we want to shield ourselves from it.  Safety has become an obsession in a way that is quite unprecedented. I don't think there's ever been a time in human history where so many things were deemed problematic or unsafe.  How do we turn the ship around?  That's not an easy question to answer. It's something I struggle with. I think the way one does it is by personal example. You often get parents who demonstrate through their actions that having a robust orientation to their children's lives is going to make their kids stronger and more independent. I think that helps. The kind of work you guys [at Let Grow] are doing is really important in that respect, because it demystifies the reality that most parents live under.  In their heart of hearts, most parents know they need to give more space to their children, that they need more independence and more freedom to explore the world. I am quite optimistic that it's possible to make headway. Not overnight, but certainly possible.  The other thing that we need is to have more discussions on why taking risks can be an exhilarating and positive experience, not a road to disaster. I just think we need to challenge a lot of this stuff.  In many ways, I regard our safety culture as not unlike the story about the emperor having no clothes.  When the little boy says the emperor is naked. I think that if we basically ask some questions—some pointed questions, and point out the ridiculousness of all the stuff that's happening, maybe use a bit of humor alongside of it—I think we can make a positive impact.  This conversation has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.


hotair--2019-06-19--Will the radicalization of white liberals create the monster they fear most

Will the radicalization of white liberals create the monster they fear most?

I’ve written before about the “Great Awokening” of white liberals (or if you prefer Social Justice Warriors) who have made news in the past few years, often on college campuses. A couple of weeks ago, Zach Goldberg, a student pursuing his Ph.D. in political science, published a piece at Tablet offering a social science perspective on the phenomenon and his conclusions are interesting. Golberg argues that something quite dramatic has happened in the past few years among white liberals who are now the only group of Americans who express a preference for other racial groups over their own.  Over the past decade, the baseline attitudes expressed by white liberals on racial and social justice questions have become radically more liberal. In one especially telling example of the broader trend, white liberals recently became the only demographic group in America to display a pro-outgroup bias—meaning that among all the different groups surveyed white liberals were the only one that expressed a preference for other racial and ethnic communities above their own. As woke ideology has accelerated, a growing faction of white liberals have pulled away from the average opinions held by the rest of the coalition of Democratic voters—including minority groups in the party. The revolution in moral sentiment among this one segment of American voters has led to a cascade of consequences ranging from changes in the norms and attitudes expressed in media and popular culture, to the adoption of new political rhetoric and electoral strategies of the Democratic Party… For the woke and their allies, these rapid changes are heralded as signs of progress, leading at times to harsh criticism of anyone who would stand in their way. This ideological stridency and triumphalist attitude can be powerful weapons against political opponents but are alienating—perhaps deliberately so—to moderates and conservatives. But, in a sense, no one is put in a more strained and problematic position by the politics of white liberals than the white liberals themselves. The woke elite act like white saviors who must lead the rest of the country, including the racial minorities whose interests they claim to represent, to a vision of justice the less enlightened groups would not choose for themselves.  The jury is still out on what led to this sudden change but Goldberg points to the rise of woke media as playing a significant role. The reasons for this are interesting to tease out. There is a large amount of social science data based on the “big five” personality traits. One of those traits where liberals tend to score higher than conservatives is “agreeableness.” And a subset of that is “compassion.” Also important to liberals are issues of emotional harm and fairness.  Goldberg argues that when you pair already low thresholds for harm with the new social media landscape in which the message of harm is constantly reinforced through partisan media outlets, you get a kind of moral outrage feedback loop. This is aided by the fact that liberals spend more time on social media than conservatives. As a result, they have a disproportionate impact on the market for what gets reported and produced. And so, over a fairly short time, you see woke social justice terminology appearing on sites like the NY Times:  If you had to identify a reason why these terms became so common after 2014, a good guess would be the media dominance of Black Lives Matter, which succeeded in elevating several instances of police brutality into months-long national stories. But Golberg argues the prevalence of some of those stories may be misleading many online progressives about how common those incidents actually are in America:  One way that constant media exposure can warp people’s perception of reality is by leading them to overestimate the danger from certain threats. For instance, research shows that frequent and vivid exposure to crime-related media increases perceptions of the prevalence of crime and police racism. Other more limited work points to a relationship between Twitter use and the perceived prevalence of school shootings. This tendency to overestimate the prevalence and significance of things we are frequently exposed to and thus more easily able to recall is known as the availability heuristic. As a cognitive shortcut for quickly arriving at judgments the availability heuristic can be a useful adaptation in some circumstances but misleading in others. It means, for example, that if videos of white-on-black police shootings or other instances of discriminatory behavior are circulating on Twitter, people may perceive such incidents to be far more common than they actually are and, consequently, that white society is more prejudiced than it actually is.  And the misestimation of the moral climate creates activism that often seems detached from reality, i.e. the campus activism we’ve been seeing for the past few years:  When these moral emotions become hyperactive and detached from objective reality; when they motivate the division of society into ‘allies’ and enemies; and when they generate a level of sanctimonious outrage and judgment that places all political dissent beyond the pale. The advent of digital and social media has fomented just such a carnival of excesses. It cultivates an image of the world soaked in the very oppression and injustices to which the user is most sensitive and attuned—and thus one that frequently triggers liberal moral alarms. There is no shortage of oppression and injustice in America and the wider world. But things are not nearly as bad nor as uniformly black and white as they appear on Twitter and YouTube feeds.  In addition to the availability heuristic, i.e. overestimating how prevalent certain incidents are, liberals may also be underestimating the extent to which it is they who have become radicalized. Instead, they may assume it is conservatives who are suddenly becoming more extreme when in fact conservatives haven’t moved all that much:  Due at least in part to digital media, white liberal attitudes that more or less endured for decades have been drastically overturned in the space of months or single years. In contrast, the attitudes of white conservatives—and conservatives in general—have moved at a more glacial pace, if at all. For liberals, the lack of awareness of how fast and far their attitudes have shifted fosters an illusion of conservative extremism. In reality, the conservatives of today are not all that different from the conservatives of years past. And it’s the frustration with white conservatives’ inability or reluctance to keep pace with liberals on the path to enlightenment that is intensifying our political divide. But conservatives tend toward normative and structural stability. They don’t take well to rapid social change. The perceived imposition and spread of progressive norms naturally elicits psychological reactance—a visceral desire to resist and affirm one’s agency in the face of perceived social pressure. This is the very process that is at least partly responsible for the election of Trump.  We can argue over whether this helps explain the election of Trump but this leads me to another video making what I think is a related case about the danger of progressive activists becoming hyper-critical of conservatives with accusations of racism as their touchstone. As Bret Weinstein argues in this clip, the danger is that you wind up creating a cultural mindset that makes people on the receiving end feel threatened.  “People who are the object of ire from the intersectionalists are going to be backed against the wall together. Who are they going to be? Well primarily they are going to be straight and white and male,” Weinstein said. He predicts that if this happens those groups are then likely to fall into their own identity-based cooperation, i.e. something like white nationalism (which is obviously not a desirable outcome). So the progressive effort to aggressively attack “the enemy” winds up creating conditions that help foster the thing they oppose.  To be clear, Goldberg isn’t endorsing this view and, so far as I know, Weinstein hasn’t connected his thoughts here to Goldberg’s research. But I think you can see this as an additional danger that results from the moral outrage feedback loop that has been radicalizing white liberals for the past several years.


hotair--2019-09-09--UC Irvine professor End of democracy near because cultural elites no longer control the media

UC Irvine professor: End of democracy near because cultural elites no longer control the media

Politico Magazine published a piece Sunday about the work of a UC Irvine professor named Shawn Rosenberg. As described by author Rick Shenkman, Rosenberg is the elite equivalent of a guy marching around wearing a sandwich board that reads: The end is nigh! Professor Rosenberg believes Democracy is nearing its end in the modern world because elite voices don’t have power over the thoughts and opinions of the rabble that they used to have.  Rosenberg, who earned degrees at Yale, Oxford and Harvard, may be the social scientist for our time if events play out as he suggests they will. His theory is that over the next few decades, the number of large Western-style democracies around the globe will continue to shrink, and those that remain will become shells of themselves. Taking democracy’s place, Rosenberg says, will be right-wing populist governments that offer voters simple answers to complicated questions. And therein lies the core of his argument: Democracy is hard work and requires a lot from those who participate in it. It requires people to respect those with different views from theirs and people who don’t look like them. It asks citizens to be able to sift through large amounts of information and process the good from the bad, the true from the false. It requires thoughtfulness, discipline and logic. Unfortunately, evolution did not favor the exercise of these qualities in the context of a modern mass democracy. Citing reams of psychological research, findings that by now have become more or less familiar, Rosenberg makes his case that human beings don’t think straight. Biases of various kinds skew our brains at the most fundamental level. For example, racism is easily triggered unconsciously in whites by a picture of a black man wearing a hoodie. We discount evidence when it doesn’t square up with our goals while we embrace information that confirms our biases.  There are no footnotes in this piece so I don’t know which study of unconscious racism the author is referring to. I do know that one of the best-known tests to purportedly reveal unconscious bias, the IAT, is junk social science. If Rosenberg is relying on the IAT to inform his position then his position needs revision.  The author argues that democracy peaked in the 20th century and is slipping now but this seems counter-intuitive. Is there anyone who would argue racial bias is more prevalent now than in the 1950s when Jim Crow laws were still legal? Granted we may all have biases but hasn’t there been some social progress in the past 70 years? And if so, why is democracy struggling more now than it was then? It’s not clear if Rosenberg has addressed that question directly, but he does have an explanation for why things are worse now than in the past: elite control over the masses has waned.  When people are left to make political decisions on their own they drift toward the simple solutions right-wing populists worldwide offer: a deadly mix of xenophobia, racism and authoritarianism. The elites, as Rosenberg defines them, are the people holding power at the top of the economic, political and intellectual pyramid who have “the motivation to support democratic culture and institutions and the power to do so effectively.” In their roles as senators, journalists, professors, judges and government administrators, to name a few, the elites have traditionally held sway over public discourse and U.S. institutions—and have in that role helped the populace understand the importance democratic values. But today that is changing. Thanks to social media and new technologies, anyone with access to the Internet can publish a blog and garner attention for their cause—even if it’s rooted in conspiracy and is based on a false claim, like the lie that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring from the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor, which ended in a shooting. While the elites formerly might have successfully squashed conspiracy theories and called out populists for their inconsistencies, today fewer and fewer citizens take the elites seriously.  Don’t you feel terrible about the twilight of the elites who were so fragile they could be easily demolished by bloggers? You don’t? Me neither.  This whole tale strikes me as a very partisan reading of what is essentially a bipartisan issue. Professor Rosenberg apparently cites Pizza-gate (a stupid right-wing conspiracy theory) but doesn’t mention 9/11 Trutherism which at one point led 1/3rd of Democrats to answer that President Bush knew about the attack in advance.  In fact, there is evidence that both left and right are pulling away from each other, though the people doing the pulling on each side are a small but vocal minority. And neither side has a monopoly on authoritarianism. Reason reported on a study about left-wing authoritarianism last year:  Once all of the numbers were crunched, the researchers’ results were consistent with the authoritarianism symmetry hypothesis. In fact, after sorting participants into conservatives and liberals based on whether they scored in the top or bottom half of a 10-point conservatism scale, the researchers found that “the highest score for authoritarianism was for liberals on LWA.” “Our data suggest that average Americans on the political left are just as likely to be dogmatic authoritarians as those on the political right. And those left-wing authoritarians can be just as prejudiced, dogmatic, and extremist as right-wing authoritarians,” Conway tells PsyPost.  Anyone paying attention to college campuses in the past few years can see that left-wing authoritarians are alive and well. In those circumstances, it’s usually the conservatives upholding the traditional liberal values of logic and mutual respect while their progressive opponents seek to shout them down.  As for the self-appointed elites, if they aren’t as respected as they used to be that’s partly because we’ve learned that their pronouncements often carry a lot of partisan freight. Indeed it seems almost anything can win the approval of today’s academic elites so long as it appears to give voice to progressive views.


ipolitics--2019-08-13--18-year-old NDP candidate facing tough task in bid to become Baby of the House

Kevin Hua, the NDP candidate for Carleton, is looking to become the youngest-ever representative elected to the House of Commons. Photo by Charlie Pinkerton/iPolitics  It’s at almost the half-an-hour mark into an interview when Kevin Hua is posed with the question, “How did this government let you down?”  “How long do we have?” quips back the 18-year-old.  More pointedly, Hua says it’s the Trudeau government’s failure to live up to its promise to deliver electoral reform and do away with the first-past-the-post electoral system, as well as what he deems as the government’s failure to effectively address climate change in Canada. That’s part of what’ll drive him to vote for the first time ever in this election for his NDP candidate: himself.  As the NDP’s representative for Carleton, Hua will be (at least) one the youngest contestants’ whose name will be on a ballot in the federal election this fall (the NDP did not get back to an iPolitics request for a list of its similarly aged candidates). And to succeed in becoming the Baby of the House (a moniker unofficially given to the youngest MP in the Chamber), Hua will have to unseat Conservative mainstay and former cabinet minister Pierre Poilievre, who is in his 16th year of sitting in the House after he was elected for the first time at just 25 years old.  Though he only reached voting age in April, Hua’s not a rookie to the political arena.  An overachiever in school, specifically the social sciences, he points out, Hua’s interest in politics drew him online, which led him to connect with the NDP. He was led to the NDP by participating in House of Commons-styled simulations on social media site Reddit.  “The (simulations) tried to emulate Parliament as close as they possibly could – standing orders, everything; everything is emulated to be as close as possible, so people can create bills, they debate on the bills, there are political parties, there’s even elections to decide on who gets into parliament,” Hua told iPolitics in an interview in July.  From there, Hua became involved with Courtney Potter’s campaign in last year’s provincial election, volunteering by canvassing Carleton on her behalf.  Hua says he has a “professional relationship” with one-time baby of the House Pierre-Luc Dusseault, who was elected to the House of Commons as part of the NDP’s “Orange Wave” in Quebec in the 2011 federal election. Hua would take Dusseault’s record as the youngest MP ever if he could pull off an upset against Poilievre, which is a task that’s difficulty would be tough to overstate.  A representative of the NDP has never won the riding. The party’s candidate came in a distant third place to Poilievre and Liberal candidate Chris Rodgers in the 2015 election (Rodgers is again the Liberal candidate in the upcoming election). Poilievre had won the seat in each of the three previous elections with more than 50 per cent of the vote. In his first try at being elected in 2004, Poilievre unseated David Pratt, who had been a cabinet minister of the incumbent Liberals.  But winning, Hua says, isn’t his only reason for running.  “It’s about winning, if possible, but it’s also about that option – that option has to be available to the voters that if they want to choose, not the Liberals, not the Conservatives, not the Greens, or if they legitimately want to vote for policies that the NDP hold, they have that option,” Hua said.  In case that isn’t the result, Hua will have already begun his next politically-involved pursuit as a first year student in Carleton University’s bachelor of public affairs and policy management program. But if need be, he’d be happy to put those plans on hold.  And for what he wants voters to take of his claim as perhaps this election’s youngest candidate: “Don’t look at my age.”  “Listen to what I have to what I have to say,” Hua says, adding later, “and watch out for me in the riding.”


Toxic Masculinity

Attention boys: bullying, homophobia, sexual harassment and abuse are all your fault, according to new guidelines published by the world’s largest association of psychologists.  While traditional gender roles – under which men are stoic, competitive, dominant and aggressive – have existed for millennia, the rise of social justice culture has seen a new phrase popularized in recent years: toxic masculinity.  This idea, that traditional male traits are ‘toxic’ and dangerous, has largely remained confined to feminist blogs and social sciences faculties, but now the American Psychological Association (APA) has jumped on board.  In the APA’s “first ever” set of guidelines to help psychologists work with men and boys, the association states that “traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful,” and “causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly.”  But what is ‘traditional masculinity’ anyway? The APA says traditional masculinity is defined by “stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression.” It’s found in men’s resilience in the face of adversity and insistence on “looking tough” despite mental suffering, and in their tendency to handle emotional strain with anger. 12 Rules for Life: An ... Jordan B. Peterson Best Price: $11.40 Buy New $14.07 (as of 02:30 EST - Details)  According to the APA, “traditional masculinity ideology has been shown to limit males’ psychological development, constrain their behavior, result in gender role strain and gender role conflict and negatively influence mental health and physical health.”  The association blames this masculinity for the fact that 90 percent of homicides in the US are committed by men, and for the fact that men are over three times more likely to die from suicide than women. Boys are also far more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than girls, and suffer harsher punishments for misbehaving in school.  As such, the APA is instructing psychiatrists to change how they talk to their male patients. Clinicians, the association says, must be aware of and challenge “dominant masculine ideals,” and “combat these forces.”  Furthermore, in a nod to the social justice warrior (SJW) movement, they must “understand how power, privilege and sexism work” to both benefit and harm men.  “If we can change men,” Dr. Ryon McDermott, a psychologist who helped draft the guidelines wrote, “we can change the world.”  But do men need to be changed? Some psychologists think not.  Dr. Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist and professor who has emerged as a leading voice against the SJW movement, has said that the societal “backlash” against masculinity is a futile attempt to change inherent differences in the sexes.  While there are mountains of research for and against biological gender differences, the APA’s guidelines are noteworthy because the association is the largest psychiatric organization in the world and is often at the forefront of changing the worldwide psychological consensus. Amazon.com Gift Card i... Buy New $25.00 (as of 10:20 EST - Details)  The association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the go-to guide for clinicians, researchers and policymakers around the world.  The association was one of the first such groups to stop considering transgenderism as a mental illness, with the publication of its fifth DSM in 2013, clearing the way for a raft of pro-trans policies, like President Obama’s decision to open the military up to transgender recruits in 2016.  Shifts in society’s perception of gender have influenced the latest set of guidelines too. “What is gender in the 2010s,”McDermott wrote in the guidelines. “It’s no longer just this male-female binary.”  On Twitter, commentators disagree wholeheartedly. “They are taking the wrong stance on men, also due to politics,” one psychologist wrote.


lewrockwell--2019-01-21--Notre Dame Prof Offers 21 Reasons

Notre Dame Prof. Offers 21 Reasons

A professor at the University of Notre Dame is argued that higher education is drowning in “bullshit” in a recent column for the Chronicle.  Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Notre Dame Professor Christian Smith argued in a column last week that higher education has some serious issues. BS is universities hijacked by the relentless pursuit of money and prestige, including chasing rankings that they know are deeply flawed, at the expense of genuine educational excellence (to be distinguished from the vacuous “excellence” peddled by recruitment and “advancement” offices in every run-of-the-mill university),” one complaint read.  Amazon.com Gift Card i... Buy New $15.00 (as of 05:10 EST - Details) Smith bemoaned the lacked of intellectual diversity in many academic fields, specifically the humanities and social sciences. He argues that the academics in these fields are hypocrites because they fail to live up to the values of diversity and tolerance that they often preach.  “BS is the grossly lopsided political ideology of the faculty of many disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences, creating a homogeneity of worldview to which those faculties are themselves oblivious, despite claiming to champion difference, diversity, and tolerance,” Smith wrote.


lewrockwell--2019-02-08--Life in the Marxist Age

Life in the Marxist Age

Portland State University philosophy professor Peter Boghossian recently attempted to expose how ludicrous political correctness has become. Unfortunately for him, his attempt succeeded all too well—and now he may be out of a job.  Over the course of a few years, Boghossian and two academics produced 20 hoax essays, collectively called “the Grievance Studies” experiment, that were written to be as ridiculous as possible and designed to appeal to small special interest groups made up of mostly far-left scholars.  Seven of Boghossian’s bogus studies were accepted for publication by social science journals, including a feminist rewrite of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The journal Gender, Place, and Culture bit on a piece claiming to study “canine rape culture.”  In that study, Boghossian and his colleagues charged that, “dog parks are rape-condoning spaces and a place of rampant canine rape culture and systemic oppression against ‘the oppressed dog’ through which human attitudes to both problems can be measured.” Boghossian’s team even claimed to have “tactfully inspected the genitals of slightly fewer than 10,000 dogs whilst interrogating owners as to their sexuality.” Hidden History: An Exp... Donald Jeffries Best Price: $17.28 Buy New $18.76 (as of 07:35 EST - Details)  In another eagerly accepted article, the hoaxers demanded that the world of bodybuilding recognize “fat bodybuilding, as a fat-inclusive politicized performance.”  For his efforts, which once brought to light should have caused academia to engage in some self-analysis, Portland State University moved to fire Boghossian.  “I truly hope the administration puts its institutional weight behind the pursuit of truth, but I’ve been given no indication that’s what they intend to do,” Boghossian said.  All of the journals involved are part of the dubious field of “grievance studies.” Some in the mainstream media attempted to rationalize and defend academia’s attachment to the most extreme, and in these cases totally fabricated, areas of identity politics that focus on gender and race.  A group of 11 Portland State professors and one graduate student published an anonymous letter in the student newspaper Vanguard, which featured a menacing image of Boghossian equipped with a Pinocchio nose. They charged Boghossian’s team with repeated “fraudulent behavior violating acceptable norms of research in any discipline” and castigated the beleaguered professor for inviting James Damore, who was fired by Google for exercising his right to free speech, to an event at the university.  “Boghossian has not only indicated his less-than-collegial attitude through his hoaxes,” they charged, “but has actively targeted faculty at other institutions. None of us wish to contend with threats of death and assault from online trolls.”  Some in the academic world displayed a degree of rationality. Yascha Mounk, a Harvard lecturer in government, condemned what he viewed as unfair attempts to undermine the hoaxers.  “Even if all of the charges laid at the feet of Boghossian [and the two other authors] were true, they would have demonstrated a very worrying fact,” Mounk wrote. “Some of the leading journals in areas like gender studies have failed to distinguish between real scholarship and intellectually vacuous as well as morally troubling [expletive deleted].”  In a recent YouTube video, Boghossian read out an email from Portland State, which threatened an investigation and sanctions against him.  “I think that they will do everything and anything in their power to get me out,” he stated. “And I think this is the first shot in that.”  Boghossian’s case is merely the latest example of political correctness run amok on college campuses across the country. Earlier this month, it was widely reported that Washington, D.C.’s American University would be hosting a multisession seminar aimed at getting faculty to combat “white language supremacy.” The seminar will also propose “alternative” methods of assessing writing other than quality, such as “labor-based grading contracts.” Survival of the Riches... Donald Jeffries Best Price: $5.00 Buy New $6.35 (as of 07:40 EST - Details)  While even the most unthreatening and lukewarm “conservative” voices have been denied the opportunity to speak at various universities, some astonishingly anti-white figures have been welcomed.  Christian evangelical Wheaton College, not a typical leftist institution, permitted Emory University philosophy professor George Yancy to speak there in 2017, in the esteemed Billy Graham Center on campus. His speech was filled with expletives and hateful declarations like, “To be white is to be racist.” Stephens College, a women’s college in Columbia, Mo., recently announced that it will “admit and enroll students who were not born female, but who identify and live as women.” All-women Mount Holyoke College canceled plans to change its logo due to protests that it could be perceived as not being inclusive to transgender students.  Boghossian merely demonstrated what is obvious: In today’s America, satire is impossible while a frighteningly authoritarian political correctness rules the day.  The Best of Donald Jeffries