hegemony - Arabica Robusta on Diigo

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Quietly, Brazil eclipses an ally - International Herald Tribune

Tags: venezuela, brazil, lula, chavez, latin, america, us, intervention, hegemony, neoliberalism on 2008-07-07 -All Annotations (0) -About

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The biopolitics of Baghdad

Soon after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US military began to explore culture-centric warfare as a means of finding the terms for both occupation and counterinsurgency. The power of the new doctrine is supposed to have been proved by the success of the surge in US combat troops that started in February 2007, which incorporated the new emphases on protecting the civilian population and on ‘non-kinetic’ (non-violent operations), and which has been credited with bringing about a dramatic reduction in ethno-sectarian deaths in Baghdad. This argument ignores the intensification of kinetic operations in and around the capital and the consequent spike in deaths caused by military violence, and it minimizes the role of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in eventually reducing ethno-sectarian deaths as Baghdad rapidly turned from a predominantly Sunni to an overwhelmingly Shia city. These erasures are not accidental: they are directly connected to carefully calculated political effects that result from presenting culture-centric warfare in general and the Surge in particular as intrinsically therapeutic interventions.

Tags: culture, hegemony, us, intervention, iraq, biopolitics on 2008-06-29 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Pambazuka News

In even the most exploitative African sites of repression and capital accumulation, sometimes corporations take a hit, and victims sometimes unite on continental lines instead of being divided-and-conquered.

Tags: africa, multinational, corporations, niger, delta, mosop, shell, petroleum, industry, nigeria, hegemony, petro-capitalism, mend, pambazuka, codesria, european, union, EPAs on 2008-06-29 -All Annotations (0) -About

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In even the most exploitative African sites of repression and capital accumulation, sometimes corporations take a hit, and victims sometimes unite on continental lines instead of being divided-and-conquered.
In early June, the British-Dutch firm Shell Oil – one of Rodney’s targets - was instructed to depart from the Ogoniland region within the Niger Delta, where in 1995 Shell officials were responsible for the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa by Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. After decades of abuse, women protesters, local NGOs and the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) gave Shell the shove. France’s Total appears next in line, in part because of additional pressure from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta.
Although it was six months ago that the European Union’s ultramanipulative trade negotiator, Peter Mandelson, cajoled 18 weak African leaderships -- including crisis-ridden Cote d’Ivoire, neoliberal Ghana and numerous frightened agro-exporting countries -- into the trap of signing interim “Economic Partnership Agreements” (EPAs), a backlash is now growing.
“We can’t continue to deal with incompetent, weak, corrupt, supine governments,” explained Dot Keet of the Alternative Information and Development Centre in Cape Town. “But these are not factors of the same order of magnitude. The domination of African countries by neocolonialism and the subordinate stance by African governments are not the same. We must be clear where the main driving force comes from: outside Africa. We have to tackle the source.”
Since 2002, the EPAs have supplanted the agenda of the gridlocked World Trade Organisation, just as bilateral trade deals with the US, China and Brazil are also now commonplace.

A united Europe deals with individual African countries in an especially pernicious way, because aside from free trade in goods, Mandelson last October hinted at other invasive EPA conditions that will decimate national sovereignty: “Our objective remains to conclude comprehensive, full economic partnership agreements. These agreements have a WTO-compatible goods agreement at their core, but also cover other issues.”

Those other “Singapore” issues (named after the site of a 1996 WTO summit) include investment protection (so future policies don’t hamper corporate profits), competition policy (to break local large firms up) and government procurement (to end programmes like South Africa’s affirmative action).
As Walter Rodney observed, “It is typical of underdeveloped economies that they do not -- or are not allowed to -- concentrate on those sectors of the economy which in turn will generate growth and raise production to a new level altogether, and there are very few ties between one sector and another so that, say, agriculture and industry could react beneficially on each other.”
African countries face unreliable provision of public utilities (electricity and water); poor public infrastructure (run down roads and railways); rapidly fluctuating exchange rates and high inflation; labour productivity problems arising from poor education, health and housing provision; vulnerable market institutions (such as immature financial systems); and poorly-functioning legal frameworks. The EU has no interest in reversing such fundamental structural economic challenges.
From early on, African civil society movements – especially the African Trade Network - called on elites to halt the negotiations.

But it has not been easy to develop a strong coalition, as Third World Network director Yao Graham concedes: “Unions have been too syndicalist, while our justice movements have been exhausted fighting structural adjustment. The local private sector has been absent. But in some regions, like West Africa, agricultural producers have been well organised and opposed to EPAs. Links to the Caribbean are weak. But we are working behind enemy lines with progressive allies in Europe, including within the Brussels parliament.”
because Mandelson is squeezing so hard, he may be single-handedly breaking the links between elites. Led by Senegalese and Malian politicians, most of the African officials at the conference agreed with the left intelligentsia that dangers now arise of: - regional disintegration (due to EU bilateral negotiations and subregional blocs) and internecine race-to-the-bottom competition:

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Inverted Totalitarianism: A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled | Democracy and Elections | AlterNet

To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: "inverted totalitarianism," a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on "private media" than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events.

Tags: repression, us, political, democracy, wolin, totalitarianism, governmentality, hegemony, culture, media on 2008-05-25 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Given this historical backdrop, Wolin introduces three new concepts to help analyze what we have lost as a nation. His master idea is "inverted totalitarianism," which is reinforced by two subordinate notions that accompany and promote it -- "managed democracy" and "Superpower," the latter always capitalized and used without a direct article. Until the reader gets used to this particular literary tic, the term Superpower can be confusing. The author uses it as if it were an independent agent, comparable to Superman or Spiderman, and one that is inherently incompatible with constitutional government and democracy.
Wolin writes, "Our thesis is this: it is possible for a form of totalitarianism, different from the classical one, to evolve from a putatively 'strong democracy' instead of a 'failed' one." His understanding of democracy is classical but also populist, anti-elitist and only slightly represented in the Constitution of the United States. "Democracy," he writes, "is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs." It depends on the existence of a demos -- "a politically engaged and empowered citizenry, one that voted, deliberated, and occupied all branches of public office."
Wolin argues that to the extent the United States on occasion came close to genuine democracy, it was because its citizens struggled against and momentarily defeated the elitism that was written into the Constitution.
To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: "inverted totalitarianism," a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on "private media" than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events. It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions (although note that the United States has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison -- 751 per 100,000 people -- of any nation on Earth). According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism has "emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation's political traditions."
Among the factors that have promoted inverted totalitarianism are the practice and psychology of advertising and the rule of "market forces" in many other contexts than markets, continuous technological advances that encourage elaborate fantasies (computer games, virtual avatars, space travel), the penetration of mass media communication and propaganda into every household in the country, and the total co-optation of the universities. Among the commonplace fables of our society are hero worship and tales of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, action measured in nanoseconds, and a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose adepts are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge. Masters of this world are masters of images and their manipulation.
On inverted totalitarianism's "self-pacifying" university campuses compared with the usual intellectual turmoil surrounding independent centers of learning, Wolin writes, "Through a combination of governmental contracts, corporate and foundation funds, joint projects involving university and corporate researchers, and wealthy individual donors, universities (especially so-called research universities), intellectuals, scholars, and researchers have been seamlessly integrated into the system. No books burned, no refugee Einsteins. For the first time in the history of American higher education top professors are made wealthy by the system, commanding salaries and perks that a budding CEO might envy."
One other subordinate task of managed democracy is to keep the citizenry preoccupied with peripheral and/or private conditions of human life so that they fail to focus on the widespread corruption and betrayal of the public trust. In Wolin's words, "The point about disputes on such topics as the value of sexual abstinence, the role of religious charities in state-funded activities, the question of gay marriage, and the like, is that they are not framed to be resolved. Their political function is to divide the citizenry while obscuring class differences and diverting the voters' attention from the social and economic concerns of the general populace." Prominent examples of the elite use of such incidents to divide and inflame the public are the Terri Schiavo case of 2005, in which a brain-dead woman was kept artificially alive, and the 2008 case of women and children living in a polygamous commune in Texas who were allegedly sexually mistreated.
Superpower is the sponsor, defender and manager of American imperialism and militarism, aspects of American government that have always been dominated by elites, enveloped in executive-branch secrecy, and allegedly beyond the ken of ordinary citizens to understand or oversee. Superpower is preoccupied with weapons of mass destruction, clandestine manipulation of foreign policy (sometimes domestic policy, too), military operations, and the fantastic sums of money demanded from the public by the military-industrial complex. (The U.S. military spends more than all other militaries on Earth combined. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion; the next closest national military budget is China's at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.)
Many analysts, myself included, would conclude that Wolin has made a close to airtight case that the American republic's days are numbered, but Wolin himself does not agree. Toward the end of his study he produces a wish list of things that should be done to ward off the disaster of inverted totalitarianism: "rolling back the empire, rolling back the practices of managed democracy; returning to the idea and practices of international cooperation rather than the dogmas of globalization and preemptive strikes; restoring and strengthening environmental protections; reinvigorating populist politics; undoing the damage to our system of individual rights; restoring the institutions of an independent judiciary, separation of powers, and checks and balances; reinstating the integrity of the independent regulatory agencies and of scientific advisory processes; reviving representative systems responsive to popular needs for health care, education, guaranteed pensions, and an honorable minimum wage; restoring governmental regulatory authority over the economy; and rolling back the distortions of a tax code that toadies to the wealthy and corporate power."
Add Sticky Note
- What does Wolin mean by "populist"? Certainly not the populism of Dornbusch and National Endowment for Democracy theorists. See, for example, http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/7418.ctl.
  
  Certainly not the populism of an Obama or Lula, attempting to simultaneously echo the 'voice of the dispossessed' and Wall Street.
  posted by pickinjava on 2008-05-25
Unfortunately, this is more a guide to what has gone wrong than a statement of how to fix it, particularly since Wolin believes that our political system is "shot through with corruption and awash in contributions primarily from wealthy and corporate donors." It is extremely unlikely that our party apparatus will work to bring the military-industrial complex and the 16 secret intelligence agencies under democratic control. Nonetheless, once the United States has followed the classical totalitarianisms into the dustbin of history, Wolin's analysis will stand as one of the best discourses on where we went wrong.

Participatory development and empowerment: the dangers of localism - Third World Quarterly

Tags: participatory, development, international, local, hegemony, empowerment, social, capital on 2008-04-13 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Subjectivity And The Subjugated

“They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.” So said Karl Marx. Were that representation pictorial and cultural rather than political, the sentiment might well be characterized as the driving force behind The North American Indian pro

Tags: svarteper, identity, ethnography, hegemony on 2008-04-03 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Revolt Against an Age of Plenty

The totalitarian nature of modern capitalism is...a far more subtle regime...penetrating more and more into areas of life previously uncolonised and uncommodified...geographical, sensory, emotional, genetic, etc. It separates people like never before.

Tags: svarteper, capitalism, theory, geography, anthropology, hegemony, commodification, consumerism on 2008-03-13 -All Annotations (0) -About

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New Statesman - The life of Raymond Williams (5 February 1988)

For some, Raymond Williams’s writings represented a welcome ... break with more conventional approaches to English lit...;for others, they were too often opaque...in this article, published at the time of his death, Stuart Hall assesses his importance.

Tags: academia, culture, hegemony, raymondwilliams, stuarthall, socialism, language, critical, theory, criticalspatialpractice on 2008-03-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Practicing Militant Ethnography within Movements against Corporate Globalization

Militant ethnography is a politically engaged and collaborative form of participant observation carried out from within rather than outside of grassroots movements.

Tags: corporate, globalization, activism, hegemony, resistance, ethnography, participant, observation, social, movements on 2008-02-27 -All Annotations (0) -About

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BBC and Africa: presenting news or peddling stereotypes

Tags: racism, nigeria, imperialism, hegemony, media on 2008-02-03 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Scoop: The Inevitable Decline of the American Empire

In the course of his visit to the Southern Cone of South America, the American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein spoke on one of his favorite subjects: the end of the United States' hegemony—which, he believes, will be definitive within the next decade.

Tags: immanuel, wallerstein, latin, america, structuralist, hegemony, us, intervention, postcapitalist, for:criticalspatialpractice, for:mediamouse, for:habitus, for:jwisom, for:jdean on 2007-10-21 -All Annotations (0) -About

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TomPaine.com - What If Iran Had Invaded Mexico?

Tags: foreign, policy, iran, news, politics, war, us, intervention, terror, hegemony, media on 2007-04-07 -All Annotations (0) -About

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ZNet |Brazil | Time For Lula to Stop Doing Bush's Dirty Work in Haiti

When Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as "Lula", visits Washington on March 31, he will likely spend most of his time with President Bush discussing ethanol, a relatively safe subject for the two leaders. Earlier this month, Br

Tags: brazil, haiti, lula, us, intervention, human, rights, hegemony, united, nations on 2007-04-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

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LE REVUE GAUCHE - The real reason for the current conflict in Somalia

. . . buried in the news...... Interest in uranium fields behind events in Somalia - diplomat And its not just uranium, oil interests also have vested interests in a American proxy state. And the reason the Ethopians adopted the Pre-emptive Strike policy

Tags: us, intervention, hegemony, ethiopia, somalia, war, uic, africa, oil, industry, politics, on, terror, uranium, islamicdemocracy, islamiccourts, proxystate, for:larsj8, news on 2007-01-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromplawiuk.blogspot.com

Tags: blog, marxism, pc, anthropology, coldwar, left, marx, multiculturalism, politics, hegemony, gramsci, frontpagemagazine, politicalcorrectness, politicaltheory, culturewars, culture, conservative, movements on 2006-07-17 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Arabica Robusta's Bookmarks tagged hegemony → View Popular

Quietly, Brazil eclipses an ally - International Herald Tribune

The biopolitics of Baghdad

Pambazuka News

Inverted Totalitarianism: A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled | Democracy and Elections | AlterNet

Participatory development and empowerment: the dangers of localism - Third World Quarterly

Subjectivity And The Subjugated

Revolt Against an Age of Plenty

New Statesman - The life of Raymond Williams (5 February 1988)

Practicing Militant Ethnography within Movements against Corporate Globalization

BBC and Africa: presenting news or peddling stereotypes

Scoop: The Inevitable Decline of the American Empire

TomPaine.com - What If Iran Had Invaded Mexico?

ZNet |Brazil | Time For Lula to Stop Doing Bush's Dirty Work in Haiti

LE REVUE GAUCHE - The real reason for the current conflict in Somalia

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Piet's will to pow(D)er

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