ilmdge posted:

Man is a bubble and all the world a storm

ilmdge posted:

this is good, you're right that we can't divine the complex reasonings or happenstances that led to every invasion/occupation/etc but don't get it twisted, it's not as if these wree natural catastrophes free from human control, like an earthquake, or like a great wind blew a bunch of planes into libya to bomb qadaffi's artillery lines. western interventions are the product of human action, and throwing up your hands saying we can't figure out why, while it may be true to some degree, is defeatist, nihilistic... you said nixon went against most of his advisors to ram through an attempt to unseat allende, because he thought he was a communist; that's a reason and knowing that helps us understand what hppaned in chile. maybe that's the same reason iraq happened, w just hated saddam; more likely there's some unifying thread weaving through most modern interventions: imperialism. because if the interventions are orchestrated by the united states, or even if the intervention is not orchestrated but simply opportunistic, it's still correct to assume the US is attempting to act in its own interest. maybe the US miscalculates the outcomes, maybe the US is incompetent, maybe we can't nail down the precise reason. but closing your eyes to the intentions isn't helpful, and absolute clarity isn't required to know the general malice involved

I think there is a lot of evidence that the U.S. is not acting in it's own best interest, but that doesn't mean I believe western foreign policy is totally unpredictable or chaotic. The mistake I believe is in using the realist concept of rational state actors to describe international conflict. The United States sacrificed trillions on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but has done very little to secure control of the resources in those states or control wages in Yemen or whatever, certainly not enough to justify the expenditures.

If we use class analysis however, it actually begins to make some sense. Even though U.S. interventions have generally failed to benefit the U.S., they have generally advanced bourgeois ends, if perhaps fitfully.

Edited by Squalid (May 7, 2013 05:22:05)

mustang, you seem to have a poor understanding of marxism.

This would be true, I always thought the Soviet Union collapsed because the declining rate of profit in socialism made people want to exploit themselves so they didn't have to wait in queues for hours for basic necessities. I have a poor understanding of marxism.

profit has to do with the accumulation of surplus value, not money. the wars in the middle east have more to do with future resource control, displacing the crisis of capitalism geographically, depressing the working class (especially with the rise of latin america since 2000), and a million other factors which have been well studied.

I'm sure those factors have been well studied, but I don't think they've been rigorously studied.

For example there's no consistency in US foreign policy. Algeria in the 1990s was in an analogous situation to Libya or Syria today, yet the US supported the government side. Same for the Islamist rebellions in Central Asia. If there is some grand plan behind what the US is doing, it's a very "flexible" plan.

And the US isn't the sole capitalist country. There are several blocs of capitalist countries, each competing with each other. France, China and Russia have proxies that come into conflict with the US all the time.

Edited by mustang19 (May 6, 2013 08:00:56)

NoFreeWill posted:

i agree with thuglessons, why construct the US as all-powerful puppetmaster when stuff like Iraq and Afghanistan have been disasters. Certainly people have profited, but that's more the vultures and vampires riding the corpse of US power into its grave.

Gee, I wonder why they have been disasters. Its not like it was and is an ongoing process of primitive accumulation. Its just a simple story of one mistake made by Great Men in 2003! Ima marxist :p

libelous_slander posted:

ilmdge posted:

this is good, you're right that we can't divine the complex reasonings or happenstances that led to every invasion/occupation/etc but don't get it twisted, it's not as if these wree natural catastrophes free from human control, like an earthquake, or like a great wind blew a bunch of planes into libya to bomb qadaffi's artillery lines. western interventions are the product of human action, and throwing up your hands saying we can't figure out why, while it may be true to some degree, is defeatist, nihilistic... you said nixon went against most of his advisors to ram through an attempt to unseat allende, because he thought he was a communist; that's a reason and knowing that helps us understand what hppaned in chile. maybe that's the same reason iraq happened, w just hated saddam; more likely there's some unifying thread weaving through most modern interventions: imperialism. because if the interventions are orchestrated by the united states, or even if the intervention is not orchestrated but simply opportunistic, it's still correct to assume the US is attempting to act in its own interest. maybe the US miscalculates the outcomes, maybe the US is incompetent, maybe we can't nail down the precise reason. but closing your eyes to the intentions isn't helpful, and absolute clarity isn't required to know the general malice involved

i'm not saying we should refuse to analyze intentions or claiming that they're innately unknowable. it's more that the explanations of US foreign policy i see coming from some quarters of the left, (the sort of things you'd read in Monthly Review would be a good example, though certainly not the only one), are more like a stereotype of psychoanalysis than a concrete analysis of politics and the world. for the stereotypical Freudian everything, from smoking a cigar to pointing your finger to firing a gun, can be explained in terms of sexual desire. many leftists make the same move in regards to US policy, explaining all US actions in terms of, uhh, take your pick between: oil, destroying independent nations, economic hegemony, defending Israel, and so on. it's quite possible to construct any number of plausible (though often mutually exclusive) narratives about why the US takes this action or another, but it's not clear how much connection, if any, these have to reality. it's more like punditry than analysis. of course it's critical to emphasize that the US is an imperialist nation and that its foreign policy reflects its own economic and military interests, but it's neither necessary nor useful to construct grand narratives based on speculation to do this. if anything that's a distraction, because it usually detracts from what i see as the most critical lessons of these wars: that the West is no longer capable of enforcing its will on the world in the way 19th and 20th century colonialism could.

of course for propaganda purposes it's perfectly fine to chant, "No blood for oil!" or whatever, but if this is just propaganda rather than a systematic explanation of the world, people should be up front about that.

AmericanNazbro posted:

THomas "Thug Lessons" Friedman

Krug Lessons

Crow posted:

start at 1:25:06


woot (secret CIA actions @ 1:27:43)

time to make it overt so we can better understand their satanic greed.

NoFreeWill posted:

Crow posted:

Gee, I wonder why they have been disasters. Its not like it was and is an ongoing process of primitive accumulation. Its just a simple story of one mistake made by Great Men in 2003! Ima marxist :p

if it was all about primitive accumulation we certainly could have done better on that front as well. unless you mean bombing stuff so that rebuilding contracts would be more lucrative?

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England's Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China, &c. The different moments of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.

Does this mother fuckin seem peaceful to you? Collapse of socialism in Europe in the 90s much? arguably the first instance primitive accumulation, the transition of feudalism to capitalism in Europe was a damn bloodbath, ie. the hundreds of thousands of women burned at the stake in front of their children and the whole town in order to quell resistance to the seizure of the commons by replacing it with the reproductive commons of women. this is a very violent, chaotic process. there is nothing peaceful and little organized about it

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

Crow how exactly is the current situation in the middle east relatable to primitive accumulation? These aren’t feudal societies.

well, there are some people that say that primitive accumulation only occurred with the advent of capitalism as an early enclosure of the commons and colonial project (being translated as 'original accumulation') but i think the argument that primitive accumulation is an ongoing process in capitalism is much more explanatory, not just in the sense of 'accumulation by dispossession' that David Harvey identifies, but in the sense that capitalism is always coming into being in new instances, and this first instance of 'original accumulation' is always being repeated. like, for example, peasants are still being driven off the land, the commons of water are in the extended process of privatization, labor markets formerly off limits to capitalists are being opened, 'original accumulation' has never ended, there are some interesting debates on enclosure of 'intellectual commons'.

the important thing, to me, is to underline the violent resubsumption of labor and struggles to overcome capitalism back into its logic by linking it to the original violent establishment of capitalism, as a process intrinsic to capitalism itself (thus properly dispelling accelerationist myths)

cleanhands posted:

if the WoT wasnt some spur of the moment personal project by a few guys at the top then why does tony blair still defend it and offer advice on the current situation even though theres no money in it and everyone hates him

also why do i post even though same

reptilianS