Chomsky on Pornography.

This is one of the more maligned of Chomsky's interviews on YouTube. My own view is that we need a more sophisticated debate on pornography, as an industry, and economic model, rather than falling into the dichotomy between free-choice liberalism and moralistic calls for censorship. I don't think Chomsky's perspective falls into either of the above, but I think it falls short of acknowledging the complexity of the issue at hand. Even if we eliminated conditions of degradation and humiliation it wouldn't rule out the possibility of pornographic production beyond such conditions.

"If you believe in free-speech, you believe in free-speech for people you dislike."

I've been thinking about the limits of free-speech for quite some time. The case of Robert Faurisson and the position taken by Noam Chomsky is instructive. I suspect the only clear limits on speech are where such speech could encourage violence, and that in itself is still an area of debate, it is at least closer to a clear line. Under this measure statements which call for people to be killed may be restricted, but not statements which are merely offensive.

Thoughts on Adam Smith.

Capitalism and the Illth of Nations.

You may recognise this fella from the £20 note in your pocket, that's if you're British and you often carry such notes around with you, his name was Adam Smith. I recall when his mug was first put on the £20 note in 2006 there were not that many people who knew who he was. There were even some who thought he might have had something to do with John Smith, which may say something about the drinking culture of Great Britain. Adam Smith was a figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, a philosopher and an economist. The people who know him or his work are typically in the area of economics for the reason that Adam Smith is the founding father of classical economics. For some Wealth of Nations is the Bible of economic science. But Adam Smith was not just the father of economics he was also a political and moral philosopher, he worked hard to construct the Philosophy of Society, which can be divided into politics, ethics and economics.

We have The Theory of Moral Sentiments to go along with the Bible of economics, as well as lecture notes and notebooks, though he never completed his work on politics and had the incomplete drafts of it burned before he died. When it came to morality Smith is of the Aristotelian tradition, he thought that the moral judgements we make can be at harmony with our natural inclination to self-interest and the key is sympathy for others. As he was an Aristotelian the marketplace was a means to ends, the realisation of human capacities in conditions of which perfect liberty tends towards perfect equality. The work he did in economics was only a small part of his academic life and yet it is Smith's economic theories which have had the most impact on society. Almost half of his writings, especially his lectures and notebooks, were not discovered until the 1970s in a second-hand bookshop and were edited in the 1980s. So we have only recently developed an all encompassing understanding of the thought of Adam Smith.

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all." — Adam Smith

Adam Smith was a proponent of the free-market because he thought it would lead to conditions of perfect liberty and perfect equality. Smith was an advocate of capitalism in a humane, polite and decent conception. For him capitalism is the best system to generate growth in a country, but to accumulate wealth in general and once it has been accumulated it can spread around. Wealth is to be understood as well-being, it is not just money and this is where the Adam Smith Institute goes so wrong. Wealth is the opposite of Ruskin's idea of 'Illth' which is everything that detracts from life, it is the persecution of minorities, warfare and social stratification etc, by wealth Smith meant everything that contributes to life - equality, poetry, music and satisfaction etc. For Smith charity is an insufficient means for resolving poverty and for providing the essentials for living, here he thought self-interest was better. But he never said that the free-market should operate without state-intervention or supervision. These aspects of Smith's thought are all too often overlooked.

This might be the reason that the Founding Fathers of the US never took on board the theories of Adam Smith as compiled in Wealth of Nations even after he had written to them. The economic theories of Alexander Hamilton were a lot more popular with the Founding Fathers as embodied in his Report on Manufactures which called for: tariffs, prevention of monopolies, subsidy of important industries, among other federal regulation of commerce. In those days the aim of a prosperous and independent country like America was to maintain it's autonomy, free trade would have led to the US becoming an economic appendage of Britain. By 1791 Congress had formally endorsed Hamilton's theory, it was the basis of the economic platforms of Henry Clay, the Whig Party, and later the Republican Party under Abraham Lincoln. Incidentally, the Republicans were not only abolitionists when it came to chattel slavery but also wage slavery.


For Milton Friedman, the principles of Adam Smith of every bit as valid today as they were in 1776 and we know a lot more today than Adam Smith about economics. Interestingly, Milton Friedman once said that Adam Smith was "wrong" in many details of his vision but overall he was right. Where Adam Smith was "right", according to Friedman, was in his conception of how millions of people can coordinate their activities in a way which is mutually beneficial for all of them and without a large intrusive state. Notice how this conveniently removes all of the aspects of Adam Smith which would be problematic for a right-wing libertarian. No doubt Friedman would dismiss Smith when he says "The rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion." Smith supported the division of labour early in Wealth of Nations but later explained that it would lead to misery, stupidity and ignorance on a huge scale.

The Progress of History.

Adam Smith was a believer in history as progress, particularly in economic terms, that we are on the right track and human society will develop towards wealth. The trick is to be able to move all obstacles out of the way as we move forward. This is the view of history held commonly by Enlightenment thinkers. There are specific conditions that are conducive to economic progress: peace, easy taxes and tolerable administration of justice. The rest would be brought about by the natural courses of things. In other words, political stability is the key to bringing a society from the lowest barbarism to the highest opulence. Through commerce we can achieve civility and attain the bourgeois values of shopkeepers. Prosperity for Adam Smith can be measured by the standard of living enjoyed or endured by the working-class, who have a right to creative work in Smith's mind.

The Enlightenment view of history is conservative, in the same way that Richard Dawkins is conservative, as the implications are that there is no need for a radical intervention except only to secure the progress of historical change. At the same time, there is a pessimism in the work of Adam Smith as he felt the agrarian civilisation was inescapable and we would be trapped at a high-level equilibrium. In his day, China and Holland had hit it because of the fall in the rate of profit and the law of diminishing returns. Smith anticipated that every growth in prosperity and technology would feed into a growth in population. But the world could only sustain around 500 million through agriculture, which utilises a certain amount of the energy from the sun as part of production. With the development of capitalism, we have seen the population explode to 6.5 billion, we have become embedded in a system which requires 3% compound growth to perpetuate itself every year.

Capitalism, Regular not Diet.

There is a sense in which capitalism is a utopian ideal, particularly in it's untrammeled free-market conception, ironically this is quite like the communist ideal of a classless society and in both cases it appears that the idea itself seems to have a power of its own. Not only is the notion of the free-market essentially a tool to argue for greater deregulation, mass-privatisation and large tax-cuts, the features of the concept itself are ideals: perfect competition, no barriers to entry and the absolute transparency necessary for perfect information - which would require a world without advertising. Theoretically these features are what is needed for market efficiency and the kind of equilibrium dreamt up by free-market fundamentalists everywhere. But supply and demand are not static, market forces are in a constant state of change and as a result we are always in disequilibrium - e.g. there will always be some unemployment in a market system.

Not only is the vision utopian, the necessary conditions are impossible to construct without massive state-intervention in the economy, a "Big Government" is the nightmare of the average free-marketeer, and that still assumes the conditions can be achieved and maintained. A limited state is desirable because state-interference in the economy, whether it be in the form of regulation or subsidy, can constrain and influence market forces. This is why it has been argued that neoliberalism is most compatible with a liberal domestic programme. Although it can be argued that capitalism does not tend towards racism, misogyny and homophobia, the system requires racism to defend itself and it's flaws. Populist rebellions are led against positive discrimination, abortion, political correctness, unions, multiculturalism and welfare to push through a right-wing economic programme. The people are deprived of organisation while the business community is left intact and fully organised.


However, it is reductive to merely focus on free-market capitalism, as this ideal does not exist, especially in the developed world where a pure capitalist system has never existed. The systematic violation of free-market principles has been the key to economic growth and development for centuries. Today it is the "secret" of the economic dynamism we can all see in China, capitalism with Asian values which is essentially capitalism without any semblance of democracy. The fundamentalists typically deride any statist deviation from laissez-faire theory as "socialist" or "social democratic". But that would presuppose a level of welfarism and nationalisation as part of the deviation. In the 19th Century it was common for the state to exert power for the benefit of business, while it did not provide welfare for the poor. In the US there is plenty of tax-dollars to provide welfare for rich white men, but not for the poor and the vulnerable. It might be more accurate to label this kind of economic system as state-capitalist or even corporatist. We ought to look at liberalism more closely at this point.

In economic liberalism social constraints are predicated on economic freedom, whereas in political liberalism individual freedom is derived from economic constraints. But the basic assumption of capitalism, whether social democratic or neoliberal, is that there can be endless economic growth in a world of limited resources. This is precisely the reason that the Right have been in denial about climate change. Not only does this secure the world-view, holds that infinite growth and finite resources are compatible, it appeals to the elites who believe that there could be greater oil reserves under the polar ice-caps and to get to it we should let the ice-caps melt. A suicidal logic of socialised costs and privatised profits, let the world slide towards oblivion for the sake of short-term profits and short-term tax breaks. The environmental costs of capitalism are huge and it may take another energy crisis for the governments around the world to take these costs seriously and move away from fossil fuels altogether. But I won't be holding my breathe, change comes from the grass-roots.

The same distinction between really existing capitalism and the "unknown ideal" of capitalism is often drawn by right-wing intellectuals who are on the defensive. This posits the failed system, really existing capitalism, as social democratic or even socialist in order to justify a call to return to free-market principles and ultimately the rejuvenation of the system as it is. When the Crash of 2008 came around, a result of a debt-driven boom, the recession that followed led to a shift to Keynesian economic policies, e.g. bailouts, as a way of resolving the crises. But this was just an transitional phase from the recession back to market liberalism is in the works in the form of a harsh austerity on an international scale. After landing in the safety-net, provided by the tax-payer, the banks will resume lending practices and further intensify such practices whilst delving into new areas. The opening up and exploitation of new markets also "opens up" new possibilities for future crises, that could be potentially more extensive and destructive than the last. At the same time the means by which another crisis could be averted are being undermined. Predictably the end result will be another crash.

Over the platform, of tax-cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor, the Right will often hoist up a banner of "freedom". Along with words like "justice" and "democracy", "freedom" is a hurray word which can easily be emptied of all meaning and used as a cover for policies that are practically the opposite. Freedom is a slogan that appeals to everyone, no one could oppose freedom and it appeals to the rugged individualist in all of us. In other words it's a public relations wet-dream of a slogan, the kind that can rally support for any policy no matter the content. Note the Conservative Party in the UK proposed "free schools" which would be schools set up by middle-class families and private companies at the expense of state-schools and free lunches for pupils. Free for the middle-classes and the ultra-rich. Similarly the free-market and free-enterprise are often used as banners for economic policy in the US. Newt Gingrich proudly cuts spending on welfare and public education in the name of the free-market, whilst funneling the billions saved into high-tech industry.

Capitalism is not only an economic system it is ideological and its politics are an extension of its economics. The rising standards of living and significant development of the last century are often posited as a defence of capitalism. For economists, theory is supported by the fact that it works and meets particular standards, e.g. it leads to greater economic growth, but this seems insufficient upon closer inspection.  It is joined at the hip with the falsity that the system is justified by the "failure" of all other alternatives. This is the rationale behind Thatcher's famous motto "There is no alternative." This is the pragmatic tendency which runs through economics and beneath the surface lurks utilitarianism. The pursuit of the greatest aggregate happiness enters as a justification for the vast inequalities produced by the system. Along these lines the justification for capitalism is the greatest happiness overall, which will be tipped by the ecstasy of the opulent minority against the class interests of the majority. The people are best off (e.g. happy) with as much individual freedom as possible and untrammeled capitalism leads to prosperity - "private vices reap public benefits".


We could go down this road to justify Fascism, as there was a great deal of economic growth and development in Nazi Germany. Hitler was the most popular leader in German history in the 1930s because the Nazi Party carried out a social revolution, the lives of working-people improved significantly. In fact the economic miracle under Hitler was driven by state-intervention in the economy on a huge scale. The major accomplishment of the Fascists was to play to the interests of the workers and the bosses, it was effectively done by buying-off socialism and liberal capitalism. This came in the form of social services, job creation, subsidies and protection for industry. It was also done through anti-Semitism, for the rich the Jew was a communist and for the poor the Jew was a banker. The concentration camps provided a slave labour force for manufacturing companies, as well as a traffic management system which could be designed by private companies like IBM. It worked and it could have lasted if Hitler had waited until 1942 to invade Poland. Do these facts justify Fascism?

Notice the defence of capitalism on pragmatic grounds also starts to fall apart once you take into account the fact that the system requires 3% compound growth, in order to avoid collapse, every year forever. We live in a world of finite resources and the system is a infinite growth paradigm. Even without taking into account environmental degradation, which also threatens delusions of growth ad infinitum. Today the economy needs new investment opportunities for over $1.5 trillion and in 20 years it will be for over $3 trillion. Not only do the opportunities for investment need to be there, the investments need to be profitable. The lack of profitable investments in industry for the last 30 years is partly what has led to the financialisation of the economy. Money is not poured into production anymore, instead capitalists invest in assets, stock and other ways in which they can make money out of money. It is not enough to tame the system with social democratic reforms, the time has come for something a lot more radical.

"Socialism is Theft!"

When will the Libertarians learn?

At the national demonstration on Saturday I encountered a man wearing a V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes mask and was on a one-man counter-march, who was carrying a sign that read "Socialism is Theft". At first we thought it was a joke, or some kind of ingenious troll, it turned out the slogan was intended in the same sense as "Tax is Theft". In reference to himself as a libertarian, though he soon informed us that all forms of government are "socialist" because a state taxes and the tax on the income earned by free individuals is theft. The definitive means of socialism are forceful. So we might describe him as a right-wing anarchist, who are opposed to the existence of the state but not capitalism and would like to see everything privatised. After we had our talk, a member of the Socialist Workers' Party confronted this proponent of the free-market. The sign and the mask soon disappeared, and the little Rothbard moved on claiming to have been spat on. I doubt he was among the "black bloc" who passed through Trafalgar and onwards to Oxford Street for a spot of anti-establishment vandalism.

The view of the world held by the little Rothbard entails a particular interpretation of history, into which a tacit consent remains and onto which all assumptions about the actions of individuals can be made. Each individual is responsible for their own lot in life and must act accordingly, by working the individual earns a living and can become prosperous. So taxation is just a form of theft, which deprives people of a chunk of what they have earned. This sees the individual as living on an island and the tax-collector as a force from another world looking to rob him. It is absurd. Not even Bill Gates is a self-made man. At the same time, the debt of liberalism is quietly kicked under the rug. I refer to the debt owed to slavery and feudalism, without which there would be no material pre-conditions on which liberalism could be built. Prosperity under capitalism would not be possible without slavery, this is the reason that reparations are overdue. Without capitalism there could not be socialism, but the historic break with exploitation is not theft and no reparation is owed to the beneficiaries of slavery.

Rothbardian anarchism could be best summed up as a radical interpretation of classical liberal ideas going back to John Locke. The origins of this form of anarchism are pre-capitalist, which might explain why it is ignorant of authoritarianism in the marketplace whilst also opposing any form of government. The anarcho-capitalists of this world want to see all forms of government and public property torn down and handed over the market. In a essence to replace all forms of state-power with private-power and unaccountable tyrannies which are not democratic in any sense. Though to the libertarians and anarchists, of the free-market persuasion, the democratic process is flawed compared to the forces of the market, according to which the strong will rise and the weak will fall. In that sense we vote whenever we buy a product and a successful business will be elevated over failing competitors. Of course it fails to provide an account of how a business leader can be held to account and forced to give up his position in the same way that an elected official can be.

For the right-wing anarchists and libertarians the state seems more tyrannical and oppressive than businesses, big or small. Not only is this overlooked, the efficiency of markets is a major assumption. Theoretically, a park would be better run if it was privatised because there would be invested interests in it remaining clean and safe. Of course in reality it might be more profitable to tear up the park and build a shopping centre over it. Not that the little Rothbard would disapprove of this, he might even cheer it on as providing opportunities for jobseekers and small-business owners. The market is not efficient, as supply and demand are in near constant change there can never be an equilibrium. This is the fallacious assumption underpinning the utopian idea of laissez-faire capitalism, which holds that there can be endless economic growth. It also adheres to a negative conception of freedom so limited that it is realised in the free choice of 285 varieties of cookies at a supermarket. As bourgeois democracy leaves the citizen with a limited range of political choices, bourgeois anarchism leaves the citizen with no political choices at all.

In selling off a state-owned industry, the inefficiencies and bureaucratic systems in place are merely dismantled to be replaced by a private-sector bureaucracy with it's own array of inefficiencies. The difference is a state-managed system can be changed via public policy, which can be influenced by the people, a private company can't be influenced as easily and can lie about it's inefficiencies. To end the state's monopoly over economic planning through such means would leave planning to the decentralised forces of the market. There is a great deal of planning that goes on internal to business. In both instances this transference of power, not the abolition of power, it can't be influenced by the population. A society without a government in which the capitalist system remains intact would quickly become an extreme tyranny. It would be a society in which corporations have the power to crush trade unions and eliminate unruly citizens with a privately owned police force. Effectively the government would still exist in the form of various private companies and the problems of government would be exacerbated in a world without any kind of democracy and accountability.

The argument that an enlightened self-interest among business leaders would prevent such a thing from happening. We should separate a person from the institutional role they role in society, which could range from a missionary to a slave-owner and is distinct from what makes them human. A business is not a moral agent, in that it has no consciousness or rationality, it has no long-term goal and in the short-term only profit matters. The energy industry has consistently supported candidates in US elections who are sceptical about climate change and suspicious of "Big Government". A perfect instance being George W Bush who opposed the Kyoto Protocol and then later came out as a "believer" in global warming. The rationale here is that once the ice-caps melt oil companies can have easy access to the enormous oil fields, which may or may not exist, beneath the seabed. The pursuit of short-term profit is actively opposed to the common good of the environment and humanity, though it's easier to swallow if you tell yourself climate change is just a liberal hoax.

Liberalism with "Muscles".

 The Multicultural Dream?

In Britain the debate over multiculturalism has once again been jump-started by David Cameron, while the EDL protested against Islamism in Luton and just after the Oldham by-election was secured through flat out race-baiting on the part of Jack Straw. Notably Jack Straw was on Question Time, alongside Sayeeda Warsi, the same night as Nick Griffin and the programme quickly degenerated into a hour of narcissistic anti-fascism on the part of the establishment which gave Griffin a soap box to stand on and rail against the elites. No mention of the glass ceiling in the Lib-Lab-Con establishment which maintains it as a predominantly white, male and wealthy Parliament. It was Jack Straw who began the debate over "Britishness" and has since brought other xenophobic worries into the mainstream media. Warsi was also given a pass for her homophobia. The political class ought to ask itself why the BNP exists in the first place, for it is in part a creature of social deprivation which has been spawned by the economy and raised by a debauched political discourse.


David Cameron has called, presumably in the place of multiculturalism, for a "muscular liberalism" which does not tolerate extremism but has room for the Other. This comes from the neoconservative wing of government embodied in the presence of Michael Gove and Liam Fox. The intolerant brand of liberal values peddled by this wing is similar to the platform of the UKIP, which might be best summed up as a right-wing fruitcake of conservatives and ultra-nationalists brought together by Euroscepticism. Individual freedom is important to this kind of liberalism but with strict limits, which come in the form of bans on specific clothing in the case of UKIP. As for Cameron's "muscular liberalism", we have seen it has room for control orders in all but name which would make it no different to the supposedly "state-imposed multiculturalism" of New Labour. In this sense liberalism is being put on a pedestal as a neutral framework for all other cultures, but in order for this to work we must all be liberal and not impose our values on others.

The Conservative Party have long stood for a kind of liberalism that adheres to an idea of freedom which is tied to free-market principles. For the Tories, freedom is to be guaranteed by stripping away all constraints on the individual - but only in economic terms. So away with regulations and taxes for the sake of individual freedom. In the Thatcher years we saw the rise of unconstrained freedom in the market place along with Victorian moralising about permissive society.  We might describe this as a division between the private vices and the public benefits reaped through such vices, private meaning the market place and public meaning society as a whole. Freedom is acceptable so long as it is an economic doctrine, but in society as a whole it can be curtailed for the sake of "nationhood", "security" etc. So there are calls to "Ban the Burka" for the sake of "English values". The Tory rhetoric against multiculturalism should be understood in this context. A nationally defined leitkultur, as the Germans would say, which would constrain the multiple cultures in Britain whilst individuals are granted greater freedom in the market place.

In the 1970s the Tory alternative to the post-war settlement could be summarised as a restoration of national competitiveness through liberal economic reform, defence of British sovereignty in Europe; maintenance of national identity and the national state through a rigid public order. The Atlantic alliance with America was justified as a way of maintaining the standing of Britain in the world, though the alliance is certainly contradictory as the position is supposedly nationalistic whilst also a liberal hack for the Washington Consensus. Instead of providing a welfare state the Party would provide a nationhood for the masses. This is the tradition of which David Cameron is a representative and that would put his beliefs at odds with the consistently illiberal conservatism of Phillip Blond, the origins of the "Big Society" idea. As that vision adheres to a view of Britain as an organic society, in which socio-economic change ought to be slow for the sake of cohesion, held together by community and cooperation as opposed to the state or the market. Cameron has opted for a "muscular liberalism" as an alternative to multiculturalism because it doesn't exclude the economics of dispossession.

Relativism versus Chauvinism.

The right-wing commentariat have been cheering on Cameron for his critique of "state-sponsored multiculturalism". Multiculturalism, like political correctness, has been abandoned the established Left formerly known as the Labour Party and now it is openly attacked by one and all. The hard Right defining the rules of the game and positing the Left as a spectral source of a "cultural Marxism" determined to erode our freedoms. Now we hear David Cameron talking of "British values" as he invokes the failures of multiculturalism. This is nothing unusual and we have heard the same from the Blairites about tackling "militant Islam". The debate over "Britishness" and the veil are symptomatic of this type of discourse. The reactionary press have an agenda and there's plenty of room to pander to it in Cameron's hollow pragmatism. New Labour pandered to the 'little Eichmanns' in a similarly shameless display of opportunism and a deep contempt for the public.


It is no coincidence that the most dedicated exponents of US-led globalisation, from the Blairites to UKIP, have also been critical of multiculturalism along chauvinist lines, which might be summed up as a covert form of racism, positions itself as the working-mans' voice against the Establishment. It is a liberal elite posited as the engineers of multiculturalism out of a destructive experiment with cultural relativism. This elite of "do-gooders", often conjured up by the chauvinists, as the enemy of the working-man is an invention of the right-wing media. Supposedly there is an elite who want to see Shariah courts in Britain and halal meat in the supermarket, when in actuality the elites of this country are deeply critical of multiculturalism. The Conservatives and New Labour have both criticised multiculturalism over the years. Immigration has always gone on, there have been openings but always with enormous opposition along racist lines. There was even opposition to letting Jews come to Britain as the Nazis came to power, our reason was that Jews are too "left-wing". After the Jews and the Irish it was black people from the West Indies and then it was Asians.

It was only last year that the conservative German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Man-Woman of Hamburg, declared that multiculturalism had "utterly failed". Months before the Rat Man banned the veil in France in a disgraceful display of poujadism and went on to expell the Roma from the country. Even before that a state of emergency was established in Italy in 2008, partly to defend the country from illegal immigration as well as sexual deviancy and organised crime. Before that a spate of racist attacks against the Roma in Northern Ireland shocked the public. These are not the cure to a state-sanctioned disease, multiculturalism was never been implemented as an official state doctrine in Britain and in a sense we have merely flirted with a particular kind of multiculturalism in Europe. In Eastern Europe we can see the Roma are still waiting for equal standards of education and remain the subject of frequent abuse. The liberals condemn this as racism, and rightly so, whilst the nationalists reflexively play the freedom card.


In the postmodern nationalism of today there is a "You may!" quality which presents itself as permissive in the sense of "You may use the n-word because they use it!" Freedom of speech and expression become umbrellas for racism, misogyny and homophobia. Meanwhile the liberals who actually defend multiculturalism are found "guilty" of trampling on such freedoms for the sake of "anti-British" agenda. The origins of this permissiveness can be seen clearly in history as the "Know Nothing" movement of the US campaigned against Catholic immigration, particularly from Ireland, on the grounds that it could undermine American democracy and lead to the rise of a Catholic state run by the Pope. This nativist movement called for severe limits on immigration from Catholic countries and restrictions on languages other than English. This is not so far away from what the EDL are doing to "defend" the country from Islamisation. Though the EDL, like the Tea Party and UKIP, are all effectively hacks for neoliberalism and globalisation led by the US through war. All under the guise of defending the values and sovereignty of Britain.

We are One!

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not so much a name for a country as indicative of an expired compromise. There is no such thing as a "British nation", the tribes of the United Kingdom are English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh. So we should know what to think of the talk of "Britishness" and we should not be surprised we have no idea what it means to be "British". We know that "Britishness" is the sense of nationhood and culture shared by all. But the best we can do to define British identity is to make a risible list of football teams, brands of tea and take note of widespread binge-drinking. The words "Britishness" and "anti-British", or even "anti-English", are in the "blut und boden" lexicon of totalitarianism. Only in states like the Soviet Union were such concepts, e.g. anti-Soviet, used to stifle debate and clamp down on dissent. Only demagogues with a quasi-fascist agenda speak in such terms to divide and conquer the white working-class by pitting it against the minorities, who are in the same boat as white working-people. 

The real danger of multiculturalism is that it is a "benign" form of apartheid in itself. The official ideological justification of apartheid in South Africa was that it was necessary to put the African tribes into bantustans in order to prevent them from being "drowned" in the white civilisation. Of course the racism of the regime was barely concealed by the "official reason" for this separation of the African tribes, Indians and "coloureds" from the white Afrikaner. This is the logical conclusion of multiculturalism in it's liberal form, it is hegemonic as liberalism is itself and it clouds a whole array of inequality and prejudice. So the claims by nationalists that multiculturalism is racist to white people are utterly absurd. For the liberal defenders of multiculturalism the Other should be included, but only so long as the Otherness is strictly non-invasive and can be easily contained into a community. Note that the cultural chauvinists make a similar point, that the immigrants who integrate into our society are not the problem and it is just radical Islamism which is the "problem".

It is not that the EDL only targets Islam in it's most reactionary and violent manifestation, it is simply the old school rejection of the Other on the behalf of Western values. This is the reason that the EDL oppose Islam, which they constantly remind us is not racial, but actually only target Asian Muslims and chant things like "We love the floods!" in reference to the recent floods in Pakistan. The likes of Stephen Lennon, Nick Griffin and Nigel Farage latch onto the failure of the Left to adequately condemn homophobia and misogyny in the Muslim community to strengthen a reactionary platform. In the Netherlands nationalists have tapped into the anger of the gay community against homophobia among Muslims. In defence of freedom, women's rights and gay rights etc. the EDL calls for bans on veils, halal meat and mosques all the while chanting "We've fucked all of Allah's wives!" While it is true that homophobia is prevalent within the Muslim community, the EDL are not giving the answers and the Left must step in to take the side of the victim. 

For the alternative to cultural relativism, as manifested in multicultural rhetoric, which is actively opposed to racist populism we should turn to the recent events in Egypt. We have seen mass protests across the Middle East and the fall of Mubarak in Egypt where hundreds of thousands poured into Tahrir Square. Not only was the movement secular and democratic, it was grass-roots based and called for social justice. The most sublime moment of the protests in Tahrir Square were when Muslims and Coptic Christians were brought together in prayer and chanted "We are one!" In a common struggle against tyranny the oppressed came together regardless of religious and ethnic "divisions" to fight together. The "muscular" liberality offered by Cameron would have been insufficent, as would the liberal variety of multiculturalism. A common project is what is needed to bring us together, it ought to be constructed along the lines of universalism and militant egalitarianism. Of which the liberals and the fascists are both ideological enemies.

Free the Weed!

For most people maintaining a prohibition on certain undesirable substances (e.g. cocaine, ecstasy and cannabis etc) just seems common sense. Even though after 40 years of a "War on Drugs" such illegal substances are now cheaper and stronger than before this so-called "war" was declared. In the early 70s the shift from the hippie pseudo-spiritualism to a strenuous hedonism was emerging. A bi-product of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which is often looked back on as a spontaneous explosion of civil disobedience and sexual liberation that eviscerated the rigid traditions that had lingered on from the Victorian era for too long. This aspect of the 60s counter-culture has been assimilated into the dominant ideology, which might explain why drugs are cheaper and more potent today than they were 40 years ago. But this is also why today we have access to legal highs and cyber sex, only a step away from pornography and illicit drugs, the successes of the "War on Drugs" are easy to see.


The availability of drugs has increased, along with the potency of the substances, it's commonly accepted in nightclubs and at parties. Not to mention the black market that has been built by the criminalisation of such substances, the only forms of regulation and intervention in these markets are the police and in some parts of the world the drug trade has become a substitute for a welfare state. Still we hear the drug warriors argue against decriminalisation, usually with the help of tall straw-men and very slippery slopes. Take the common defence of marijuana illegality, that it's a "gateway drug". Ironically the criminalisation of cannabis has driven people from mild drugs to hard drugs. As cannabis is bulky and smelly, it is easier for the authorities to intercept which has inflated the price of cannabis along with the "risk factor" for criminals. Drugs like cocaine is worth more per ounce than cannabis and is easier to smuggle. Raids on dealers create "marijuana droughts" which can drive people onto harder and more addictive substances. Cannabis was not a "gateway drug" originally, but has become a gateway through criminalisation.

The impact on the developing world can be seen in that the drug trade alone accounts for 25% of the Mexican economy and over 50% of the Afghan economy, a lot of the revenue made from heroin trafficking undermines and corrodes civil society and the state itself. In such narco-states, the drug trade exists as an underground capitalist economy and partly serves as a substitute for welfare measures which are often lacking in such countries. The way drugs have been criminalised in these countries contain the drug trade as a black market monopolised by cartels who compete for control of the market. This leads to violence, which in turn leads to tighter policing of the lives of the poor and in turn generates extreme violence - as seen in Mexico where the bloodshed has been reaching new heights in recent years. The criminalisation of drugs in this way provides a "justification" for an interventionist police state, rigged with pretexts to detain and imprison unruly members of the superfluous population. A situation which has given the Colombian government "justification" to send death squads into slums as part of social cleansing.

The answer to the problems of narco-states are more complex than calls to simply legalise drugs, but we in the developed world do not face the same problems. For instance, it would be preferable to use the opium crops in Afghanistan to develop the pharmaceutical industry as opposed to the doomed policy of trying to eliminate the crop. The same argument can be made in regard to Mexico, where the "War on Drugs" has done nothing but penalise farmers. In a country like Britain it would preferable to decriminalise heroin as part of a rehabilitation programme, whereby heroin is prescribed to addicts who are then weaned off the drug gradually. The result of this would be to kill off the black market for heroin, as addicts would have access to a better quality of heroin for free and a route to a better life. No doubt the reactionary press would start foaming at the mouth "Why should I pay for their addiction?!" These hypocrites would try to engineer a moral panic whilst standing by a solution to drug addiction reminiscent of the gulag, at a huge cost to society.

The class aspect of banning a substance is too often overlooked. In 18th Century England there was a ban on gin, in those times it was cheaper than water and was drunk compulsively by working-class people. Whiskey was a rich-man's vice in those days and so gin was banned while whiskey was not. In the 20th Century racism came into play in drug laws, marijuana became a target in the US as it was smoked by Mexican and African-Americans.  In the US if you are convicted of possession of cocaine you will mostly spend a year in prison. But if you were convicted of possession of crack cocaine you could spend 10 years inside. There is a correlation between class and race, but the principle difference is that cocaine is snorted by rich whites and crack is smoked by poor blacks. As a result of the financialisation of the economy, not to mention lousy schools and a racist criminal justice system, African-Americans fall into the superfluous population of the US. The "rolling back" of welfare provisions has forced many impoverished black people onto crime, particularly drug crime, as a substitute for the loss in welfare as well as work.

Drug consumption does transcend class boundaries, it's usage among working-people is part of the reason for it's illegal status. Furthermore the illegal status of cannabis goes a long way to protecting the business interests of drug lords and cartels, just like the bootleggers and rum-runners of the Prohibition era, who make billions a year tax free from trafficking in cocaine and heroin. The legalisation of cannabis has progressive potential as the conditions for it's production can be created anywhere, it would be difficult to monopolise, low prices could be maintained and that would provide jobs for people. It's even possible to structure production and distribution along cooperative lines, without bosses and space for workers' democracy. It could be taxed and regulated, which could constrain the use of certain chemicals, restrict it's consumption to adults as well as to provide consumers with objective information on the effects of the drug.

The US government banned marijuana in 1937, after Congress declared that there is a link between marijuana use and mental illness. The declaration was based on the testimony of Dr James Munch, a pharmacologist working at Temple University, who testified that when he gave marijuana to dogs they went "insane". This was after a representative of the American Medical Association who claimed that there is no evidence that cannabis is harmful to the health of humans. Naturally it was the testimony of Dr Munch that was taken on board by policy-makers. Today the debate on cannabis legalisation has been thoroughly obfuscated to the point where many people believe that there is a clear link between cannabis use and schizophrenia. Firstly, schizophrenia is a rare condition so it is difficult to determine its causes. What we do know is that if you smoke cannabis excessively you are 2.6 times more likely to suffer from psychotic experiences than a non-smoker. Whereas, if you smoke tobacco you are 20 times more likely to develop lung-cancer than the average Cheech and Chong.

As for the claim that cannabis use would increase if it were legalised, and the problems it "causes" now would be exacerbated, during the Prohibition era in the United States there were higher levels of alcoholism than there was prior to the Volstead act. The flirtation with prohibition was a disaster in the US. It led to an unprecedented crime wave, thousands were left dead from gangs or from rotgut alcohol and nurtured a contempt for law among the population. Back then it was the divine mission of saving the people from "Demon Rum" that the Congress was embarking upon. Now the classification of cannabis is supposed to protect us from ourselves, to stop us from descending into a load of Zombies - to paraphrase Gore Vidal - and in our endless search of Doritos whilst constantly murmuring "groovie". Decriminalisation and legalisation of drugs, even as soft as cannabis, seems to be the last taboo, as gambling, alcohol, tobacco and pornography are readily available for every citizen - all of which can be addictive and destructive. For we are still deeply puritanical in some respects, though not puritan enough to be enraged at the depiction of women found on Page 3.

Related Links:

Estimating Drug Harms: A Risky Business?

Evidence Not Exaggeration
The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937
Gore Vidal - Drugs: Case for Legalizing Marijuana
Milton Friedman - Why Drugs Should be Legalised?
The Six Groups who Benefit from Drug Prohibition

Generation GTA?

The Grand Theft Auto is by far one of the most popular, if not the most popular, series of video games produced over the last 15 years. The games typically follow a male anti-hero on his journey through the underworld of an American city. Character motivation varies from revenge to greed. Common motifs include narcotics, prostitution, murder and car theft. The setting is usually a satire of a major American city like Miami, New York or Los Angeles. Of course, the games are a conservative's wet dream as the player is placed in a semi-autonomous environment where they can indulge indulge in various acts of crime, ultra-violence and general depravity. Though conservatives focus in on the violence as training children to be cold-hearted murderers. Despite the fact that 500 million copies of GTA 4 were sold in the first week of it's release and very few violent incidents have been linked to the game since it's release 2 years ago.

The self-proclaimed "culture warriors" of the United States are ignoring the exploitative aspect of the character's criminal career in relation to capitalism. This should be expected from modern conservatives in a way, as they are typically conservative on social issues. So economic exploitation and devastation would not interest the majority of them. The fact that the player takes on the role of the Randian hero, an exceptional and creative individual who will rise above the passive conformist masses. This is so because the player is more intelligent than the game and can pass the missions using their capacity to thrive in a predictable and controlled world. The player-character has an advantage over the "herds" around him, as he is not held back by simulated emotions and can plan how to dispatch pedestrians at random. This is even more true if the player has access to cheat codes, in which case not even the game's police can interfere.

The game play is characterised by a degree of "freedom" not available in most games. But this should not be mistaken for true liberty, as the freedom accessible to players is merely the ability to act autonomously in constructed environments and situations. Like with the freedom to choose, the options have already been made for you and all you have to do is take your pick. So the universe of Grand Theft Auto is one in which you can act in ways which you cannot in reality, but only as far as the game allows as part of a constructed scenario. It should be noted out that games are an unusual medium of entertainment as they actually deprive the consumer of content. This functions to keep the consumer playing for longer, in order to complete the game and acquire the desired abilities. Though once the consumer has completed they often don't want to play the game any more, as it was the competitiveness built into the game that was truly thrilling and not the "carrot" they were chasing.

After all, once the game is completed the character has gained millions of dollars, and participated in a few thousand murders, but has nothing much to spend it on except guns, prostitutes, alcohol, food etc. In a sense, the game play reveals the limits of negative liberty - the freedom from constraint - by leaving a player with meaningless choices. The consumer choices a player is confronted with are even more meaningless in a gaming environment, where one is engaging in a simulation of consumption. In many ways the games are libertarian, you are free to make choices and indulge. Ultimately, the games do not judge the player in a strictly neutral and permissive manner. But if you violate the Harm Principle - you can do what you want, so long as you harm no one - the police might come after you. In some of the later games, like GTA 4, the police even go after pedestrians and petty criminals who have attacked you. This notable advance in technology is only the step forward made by classical liberal thinkers in the 19th Century.

Despite the barrage of satirical messages in the games, the specifically political messages are often ignored by critics and reviewers. Even the "culture warriors" of America have failed to notice the "anti-American" sentiments embedded in the games. Because it is easier to accuse a game of "corrupting" the youth and instigating violence than it is to analyse its political idiosyncrasies. That takes work and may not be easily "linked" to extreme violence. It could also easily turn into a debate on American politics with liberals and conservatives engaging in the acceptable dialogue over whether or not the game is "anti-American". A debate which would not amount to much even in the likely outcome of a victory for conservatives. It would be difficult to ban a game on the grounds that it is "anti-American", whereas if the game is overly violent and sexually deviant a case can be made. The video games are works of satire in a way.

In the games American politicians are presented as sleazy, corrupt, opportunistic and cynical figures. Like all satire it carries a greater truth about politics than we can see in our day-to-day lives. It highlights what we see in politicians at the most basic level, they are all the same, liars, thieves and murderers etc. There are references to a "Jingoism act" being rammed through Congress by the government, which is an obvious allusion to the USA Patriot act. Early on in GTA 4 the bridges of Liberty City are closed off to combat terrorism. Passing pedestrians can be heard calling the government "fascist". The games even include parodies of it's critics, in GTA 4 the "culture warriors" are amalgamated into an extreme right-wing radio-show host named Richard Bastion while Jack Thompson is turned into a do-gooder lawyer who expresses a disdain for computer games claiming that "Guns don't kill people, video games do" - before being murdered by the protagonist.

The criminal world is not so far from capitalism in its most unconstrained version, there are no regulations and no taxation of illicit profits. In the underworld there are merely costs and revenue, supply and demand - the "invisible hand" - with the state looming over them seeking to deprive the people of their freedoms. The gangs are competing firms in a dog-eat-dog world where the most brutal and ruthless thrive. These organisations are hierarchical and tyrannical as the individuals belonging to them have no say in the decisions made, they are there to follow orders. Of course, this generalises to the real world and not just virtual reality. Organised crime is not that far from the functions of the market, it differs in that it is illegal and viewed as immoral. In the Grand Theft Auto series, the player is selling his labour to various bosses in completing missions for pay which is far less than he could be paid. Eventually the player ascends the ladder, usually by killing a boss and usurping his position. This is the brutal underbelly of meritocracy.

In real life meritocracy is a farce, people do not rise according to merit and nor should they as it is the hierarchy which is fundamentally wrong. We should not seek to rise to the top of the pyramid but seek to level that structure. So the vehement attacks of the games on the American establishment are irrelevant as the games celebrate the essence of what they are mocking. It's as ironic as it is almost self-parodic.

Red Liberty - A Freedom for All.

"A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both." - Milton Friedman
 

It is commonly believed that libertarianism and socialism are totally incompatible as the former is ideologically disposition to individualism clashes with the collectivism of the latter. The philosophy of libertarians is dedicated to small government and the freedom of the individual, whereas socialism is devoted to the democratic control of the means of production and distribution. Democracy was feared by classical liberals, and many modern day libertarians, as potentially tyrannical to the freedom of the individual - the tyranny of the majority. The democratic control, or state control, of the means of production have typically troubled libertarians who take the view of taxation as theft and the state as the enemy of freedom. Many libertarians regard freedom and equality as being in opposition, it's one or the other being a pragmatic defence of the free-market. But it could be argued that equality is not opposed to freedom and a radically egalitarian approach to freedom is possible. A major issue in relation to this is distributive justice, as it is where major differences between libertarians and socialists are drawn.


Distributive justice, as a political goal, could be described as a way of resolving political and economic injustices. However, there are competing views as to how the distribution should be accomplished along the lines of desert, merit, human rights, needs and utility. For instance, the provision of health-care by the state paid for with public money could improve the standard of living for millions of people, who may not have been able to afford sufficient health treatment in the past. But this is one view of the issue of health-care, the principle being applied in relation to distributive justice is that of needs. People need health-care and therefore it should be a priority to have universal health-care funded by taxes. Another view, is that the distribution of wealth and property should be determined according to the merit of individuals. Thus, health-care should be distributed according to the merit of individuals and not on the basis of need. This is the view typically taken by free-market libertarians.

Free-market libertarians, the ilk of Robert Nozick and Ayn Rand, might argue that taxing the income of individuals to fund such a public service diminishes the freedom of the individual. As the income and wealth of most people is derived from the individual's merit and is indicative of their character and talents. Therefore, taxing the income and wealth of individuals is in effect depriving them of their desert, which they earned through sheer hard-work. This undermines the freedom of the individual as it diminishes the ability of the individual to enjoy and to flourish to the extent that their hard-work allows them to do so. Thus, some libertarians have gone as far as to claim that taxation is a form of theft. But in regards to individual rights they might argue that the version of justice, which is preoccupied with needs, is contrary to the right to private property. Because the private ownership of property could be seen as an inalienable right, libertarians have argued that distributing land and wealth is against the rights of individuals to accumulate private property.

From this point-of-view, it could be argued that the inequality that might arise in a  libertarian society would be natural as it would reflect the natural talents of individuals and the level of self-determination there is in that society. Conservatives might argue that distributive justice, of a needs-based variety, could lead to a culture of dependency amongst the lower classes which could undermine the natural hierarchy and threaten the "fabric" of communities that make up society as a whole. Whereas, socialists are focused on the idea of distributive justice as centred around needs as a way of distributing wealth and property in the long-term pursuit of an egalitarian society. It is not that libertarians and conservatives do not adhere to a kind of distributive justice, it is that their view of justice differs greatly from the needs-based formula of socialism. The idea that wealth and property should be allocated according to merit is the kind of distributive justice that libertarians and conservatives tend to believe in. In a sense, one man's justice is another woman's oppression.


 

The view that individual rights and a needs-based idea of distributive justice are incompatible seems to have some ground. Though it could be argued that this kind of distributive justice diminishes individual freedom is too simplistic. The view could be overly simplistic as it depends on the conception of freedom that we're talking about. In regards to the freedom of the individual from constraint, also known as negative liberty, taxation is an infringement on freedom as it functions as a constraint on the individual by decreasing their disposable income. But in relation to positive liberty, which is not just about the freedom from constraint and is more about enabling individuals with the capacity to act freely, it could be that individual freedom is enhanced by a needs-focused distributive justice. This is because the state provision of education and health-care empower individuals to flourish, as the obstacles of insurance payments and tuition fees are removed at the expense of a wealthy few.


The view that wealth and property should be distributed according to the merit of individuals assumes that the gap between rich and poor is a result of a natural difference between individuals. This fails to take into account the way wealth and property is often handed down from one generation to the next further perpetuating privilege and power. The ignorance of free-marketeers to inheritance and the ways wealth can be concentrated in a minority goes beyond innocent naivity. As Rand acknowledged by revelling in inequality, she viewed the poor as "mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned." To Rand it was deeply immoral to show these "lice" compassion, who are feeding off of the success of the "Masters of the Universe", as selfishness is the only virtue. Inequality is justice. This merit-based variety of distributive justice that free-market libertarians adhere to is a narrow and simplistic kind of justice. The conception of liberty that they so adore and actively promote is equally narrow, as it abandons the individual with a set of choices to make and nothing but autonomy as a means to flourish.


It could be said that the free-market brand of libertarianism is liberalism for the ultra-rich, as in that kind of society they would have the greatest freedom and the least amount of "constraints" on that freedom. But for the rest of society, the "maximised" freedom for the individual would mean a life of total subservience to the most tyrannical. This is an absolute truism in regard to the "Greed is Good" variant that Ayn Rand espoused. Whereas, at the limitation of the disposable income and economic freedom of a small few, the rest of society could derive a far greater freedom that enables choices and not just permits them. The kind of individual freedom that right-wing libertarians are pursuing is only for the opulent few and is derived at the expense of the many. And the liberty which socialists and anarchists are pursuing is for all, not only as individuals but as communities as well.


Significant Links:
Two Biographies of Ayn Rand
Responsibility to the Poor
Ayn Rand Interview
Milton Friedman on Libertarianism
Ron Paul on the American power structure
Noam Chomsky on libertarian socialism

Faces of Liberty.

Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo, the President of Honduras.

"I believe freedom is the future of all humanity." - George W Bush

The ideological trajectory in the US could be characterised as leaning towards negative liberty, specifically the freedom from constraint, and individualism. For this reason it makes sense that the US government led the "war" against communism since the end of the war against fascism and up until the fall of the Berlin Wall. As there are aspects of communism are in direct opposition to the ideological ideals of the United States. The methods of which the US government utilised to contain communism abroad included the backing of extreme right-wing dictatorships, that would prevent the spread of communism through repression and violence, like that of Suharto in Indonesia and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. In doing so, the US government infringed upon individual freedom on a massive scale to stamp out the "threat" of communism and spread freedom around the world. What should be noted is that the military budget of the US has increased considerably and consistently since the Truman administration. At first, politicians sought justification for the rampant military expenditure in anti-communism and then counter-terrorism.

Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the spending on the military continued to increase which may indicate that "fighting" communism was just an excuse to increase spending. Today the excuse is the "War on Terrorism". The American government spent over $700 billion in 2008 on the military, making up almost 50% of all military spending in the world. Since the level of military spending seems to be unrelated to any threats of communism or terrorism, it seems rational to assume that realpolitik was not merely about securing freedom and the containment of communism. Interestingly, the kind of economic policies pursued by US-backed dictators, like Suharto and Ferdinand Marcos, consisted of mass-privatisation, deregulation and the repression of unions. These policies may have generated a great deal of economic growth in some countries, but they were largely destructive of the societies in which they were implemented. The World Bank and the IMF were instrumental in economic policy in Indonesia and the Philippines, but it was multinational corporations that benefited most from these policies.

It was in 2009, only months into Obama's first term in office, that the President of Honduras Manuel Zelaya was overthrown by members of the Honduran military, who had been trained at the School of the Americas, and was succeeded briefly by Roberto Micheletti. In January of 2010, Pepe Lobo was elected the President of Honduras and Micheletti has since been made a congressman for life. Lobo is a wealthy land owner and is a member of the National Party, a thoroughly conservative political party, he had lost the 2005 election to Manuel Zelaya. Though, Lobo is now has the Presidency due to a questionable election, it has been said that 60% of the votes were "inaccurate". At the time of the coup in 2009, President Zelaya was unpopular with the Honduran upper class, who feared he may be attempting to impose the kind of left-wing reforms on a populist platform as Chavez had done in Venezuela. Within the Liberal Party, Zelaya also became increasingly unpopular in the run up to the coup d'état. Though, at the same time Manuel Zelaya was popular among the poor and the labour movement.

If we look at the history of Latin America coup d'états are nothing new to the region sometimes referred to as the "back yard" in the US. So it is vital that we place the recent events in Honduras in a historical context. Notably, it was when Manuel Zelaya attempted, as he put it, "modernise" the Honduran Constitution through the use of a referendum that he was overthrown and exiled. The opponents to these constitutional amendments argued that Zelaya was attempting to remove the limits on presidential terms, as Chavez had done in Venezuela. In Chile, it was during a constitutional crisis, that Salvador Allende and his left-wing regime were overthrown by the military. Allende's political rivals in the National Party and the Christian Democrats, as well as on the Supreme Court, accused him of attempting to create a totalitarian state, in which political and economic freedom are not respected. Allende refused to leave the Presidential Palace as it was surrounded by the military, as they began bombing Allende delivered his final speech to the nation in the moments before his death.

 "America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling." - George W Bush

The regime that seized power following the fall of Allende was a barbaric military junta led by Augusto Pinochet, the labour movement that had flourished under Allende was viciously repressed. Over 130,000 people were imprisoned without charge, thousands were systematically tortured and killed - a favourite method being throwing people into the Atlantic from helicopters. It is ironic that the Supreme Court, that accused Allende of authoritarianism, called on the military to "restore" order to Chile, which led to the rise of the junta. Pinochet was supported by Nixon, under Pinochet the economy followed plans laid out by neoliberal economists from the University of Chicago. These economic reforms reversed the work of Allende, privatising the national industries and removing the regulations which hindered the market. It was not long until public spending in Chile was cut by 50%. This led to the now famous economic miracle in Chile, while Pinochet kept thousands of people incarcerated in concentration camps and may have slaughtered over 80,000 people. Pinochet was no different than Suharto and Marcos, his regime was also highly beneficial to multinationals.

Since Pepe Lobo was inaugurated on January 27th 2010 the US government has been a vocal supporter of the Honduran government and have been urging other countries of that region to restore relations with Honduras. Hillary Clinton said on March 4th "We think that Honduras has taken important and necessary steps that deserve the recognition and normalisation of relations. Other countries in the region say that they want to wait a while, I don't know what they're waiting for, but that's their right to wait." In the month of February alone, the inter-American Commission on Human Rights documented over 50 illegal detentions, eight cases of torture, two kidnappings and two rapes committed against dissidents involved in resistance to the coup. Since Lobo came to power over 10 people have been killed, including children. Sadly, it would appear that "change" has not come from the Obama administration. For the people of Latin America, the events in Honduras and Haiti, are a sad reminder that they are not yet free from the hegemon of the North. The IMF and the World Bank have also been quick to normalise relations with Honduras, which may be a sign of the kind of economic reforms soon to hit Honduras.


The last 35 years have been marked by neoliberal economic reforms across Latin America. Reforms which have led to a sharp decline in the rate of growth and productivity. The policies themselves were so unpopular in most Latin American countries that they had to be imposed by dictatorial regimes. The US government has a history of backing such regimes across the region, the IMF and the World Bank have been instrumental in spreading neoliberalism throughout the developing world through "structural adjustments" in many of these states. The kind of countries that have been subjected to these kinds of regimes and economic restructuring are typically rich in resources and desperately poor. The mass-privatisation of industry can allow corporations to seize up entire sectors of society, while the deregulation of the markets and repression of unions allows these corporations to drive down wages and increase work hours. This is merely one aspect of the kind of exploitation that has resulted in many countries from the kind of policies advocated by the Washington consensus.


We'd all like to believe that the wars fought in the name of liberty and democracy against communism and terrorism were noble causes. In the 1990s military spending increased long after the fall of Soviet communism in the East. So it seems feasible that defeating communism was not the goal of the US government, that increasing the size of the military budget is of primary importance. The ideological reasons for promoting democracy and spreading freedom abroad amounted to the rise of neoliberalism in countries like Honduras, Chile, Indonesia and the Philippines. But this rise could be seen, as something far more insidious, the continuation of imperialism in the world. As the economic interests of the state converge with the profit-motive of corporations, and the "conditions" prescribed by the IMF, the bloated military budget may be about defending and maintaining an empire. In this sense, the role of ideology plays in America is to enable these forces to act in the never ending "fight" against tyranny and evil in the world.

Significant Links:
US covering up reality in Honduras
Solutions for Latin America
Noam Chomsky CBC Interview
The War on Democracy