What does this tell us about the State?

The killing of Mark Duggan has been found legal. The anger around this case is legitimate as were the first sparks of protest and unrest in Tottenham (though what came later is another matter) in which locals mobilised around the police station. It is only middle-class white people who feel an instinctive sense of being on the side of the police. Ordinary people know what it is like to be stopped and searched by the police, especially if they're black or if they fit the profile of a 'terrorist'. It's not a testament to the character of individual officers - who may be awful or munificent - it's about the structural role of the police as a repressive institution with a dismal collective unconscious.

By the way I think the content of the ruling is not expressly problematic. What did we expect of the justice system? Even if the ruling had found that the killing was unlawful it would only serve to reaffirm the sovereignty of the state in its authoritative claims to legality and justice. For this reason I don't think there could by any just result as I question the authority of the state, and that is the fundamental question here. It's hypocritical to suggest that the jury finding the police killing illegal would serve anything other than reasserting the sovereignty. That may be understandable given the high emotions around the death of this man. But it is not the political issue at hand. Andrew Robinson produced an excellent couple of articles on Agamben's work on the area of exceptions in law:

“Homo” means human/man, and “sacer” has the double meaning of “sacred” and “taboo”. Homo sacer is defined as someone who can be killed, but not sacrificed. They can’t be sacrificed to the gods because they’re defined as outside the recognised terrain of valued life (there’s nothing left in them worth sacrificing; to sacrifice them would be sacrilege), but for the same reason, they can be killed with impunity.

I have deployed this concept before in the past with regard to the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of the US army. On that occasion I was prompted to write by the incessant gurgling of Douglas Murray, who took the predictable position that it was fine for the US to violate Pakistan's sovereignty and commit an assassination. I think it can be said that Mark Duggan is a 'homo sacer' in that he is excluded from the sphere of rights and liberties (because he's a violent gangster, to quote the BBC) who can be legitimately killed by the police. Not even in controlled circumstances, not a public execution that has been legally ratified. Instead the killing is legalised by the very system which excluded Duggan in the first place. Thus, the departed was included insofar as he was excluded. It is in this process that the sovereignty claims its basic authority, the authority to make 'exceptions'.

The coming demise of the NHS.

 

On May 13^th the BBC finally opened the floor to ‘discuss’ the health-care reforms that have been passed and are well under way. The section 75 regulations of the Health & Social Care act of 2012 was passed by the House of Lords on April 25^th this year. The mainstream media, whether right or left, failed to give any coverage to this bill passed and yet it concerns us all. Even still, it was nice to hear a bit of noise once the bill had been passed and, effectively, the public was powerless to do anything about legislation already passed. You would have been lucky to have uncovered these proposals via the splutters of outrage on Twitter, or on the blogosphere, or indeed at the outer-reaches of the liberal press. Instead of the crusading press we're told we have, we actually have a cowardly press that let these health reforms pass them by. The intelligentsia and commentariat, with its agenda-setter the BBC, might be best understood as a herd of ‘independent minds’.

Even when we hear talk of the plans there are only banal platitudes about ‘reform’. When at the best of times ‘reform’ is a word to be suspicious of, especially when it is deployed with ease by the incompetent and duplicitous political class of this country. The Health & Social Care act will radically transform the way the NHS works, in fact, it will open the floodgates to private companies and enforces competitive bidding for contracts. That's on top of the hundreds of contracts on health services already sold in 2012. The act will require that all sectors of the NHS which can't be provably delivered by one provider (the state) will be opened up to competition. From now on the only hope of the NHS will be the commissioners, for they are now on the frontline of decisions about privatisation. Yet only if the commissioners can be make the case that this or that service has to be provided by the state. That's assuming the case will even be accepted, your guess is as good as mine.

Once rejected the services will be opened up to the full brunt of market forces. There is also the possibility that the real decisions will not be made by commissioners but by the courts. As Lord Philip Hunt has acknowledged, the regulations will “promote and permit privatisation and extend competition into every quarter of the NHS regardless of patients interests. The Lords reported that many NHS professional institutions believe that the regulations make competition the default approach, whilst imposing a burden of proof on commissioners wishing to restrict competition.” So it's fair to say that the doctors won't have a say in these decisions for the most part. If the doctors don't have a say then the patients certainly have no say in the matter at all. The Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners has said “The new reforms of which these regulations are a key part remove the legal framework for a universal, publically provided, publically managed, publically planned, democratically accountable health service.”

The Conservatives can claim that this isn't privatisation because the NHS will still exist. Yes it will exist, but as a hollowed out shell where public money is funnelled into the private sector to raise the profits of private health-providers in this country. The truth is that if there are private companies eating away at the public sector then that is privatisation, it is just incremental as a means to the same end. The state bureaucracy will only be supplanted with a private bureaucracy, which will be run on the basis of profit at the expense of the tax-payer and almost certainly the quality of service. Decision-makers at the local level will be at the mercy of changes out of their control as funds are redirected from local services. The decline in services will be sped up, as it has already, to justify further ‘reform’. Gradually the whole edifice built in the aftermath of WWII will be reduced to a mere memory. A lot has already lost, as it was the Major government and its Blairite successors who introduced markets into the NHS by way of ‘performance targets’.

 

Unfortunately, none of this should be a surprise. The Coalition has cut NHS funding effectively by only increasing spending by 1% while health-costs soared at a rate far higher than inflation. The press would rather whinge about the coming collapse of A & Es. But not about the mass closures of these services and the cuts in funding for those not closed. There is plenty of angry talk to be heard about the European ‘super-state’ that has been imposed on us without referenda, yet how much talk has there been over these changes to the NHS? No one in the public space seems to care. On the horizon there is a free-trade deal with the US that will open the NHS to the full force of American multinationals. The phoney democrats in Parliament are adept at calling for referenda when it suits their purposes. There wasn't any talk of a referendum on the invasion of Iraq, only a couple of million people marched through London and Blair reacted with pieties: we live in a democracy so you can have your protest, but it means nothing.

It is the unfortunate combination of a constitutional monarchy with a flawed form of Parliamentary democracy that failed to stop these measures being passed. Why? Because there are systemic interests shaping the legislative process. As the Daily Mail reported in 2012 Lord Carter, the head of the NHS regulator, as well as the Cooperation and Competition panel, received almost £800,000 from just one of the health firms to which he is entangled. Andrew Robertson has compiled a list of 140 Lords and 65 MPs with what may be direct interests in private health-care. From the list Robertson gauged that this amounts to one out of every four Conservative peers, one in six Labour peers and one in ten Liberal Democratic peers. This is a problem across the board, endemic to the political class and system. According to Dr Eoin Clarke, since 2001 the Conservative Party has received over £8 million in donations from private health-care firms. We may not know the full extent of this until the political class opens itself up to a transparent accounting. But it should be obvious that this is only a part of the problem here.

 This article was later posted on the Third Estate on May 22nd 2013.

The need for Neoconservatism.

 

 

 

As an emanation of the social contours of capitalism the conservative disposition has long represented the tension between unconstrained endeavour in economics and constraint of the social to put the breaks on the market forces in their most individualist tendencies. It represents both the material base of capitalist society, as well as its ideological superstructure; but the way this contradiction is managed is not simply the purpose of conservatism. More so, it is the duty of conventional politics - so Conservatism, rather than conservatism - consequently Right and Left seem less and less dissimilar to a great many voters. The specific form of defence waged to secure the authority of the state, the loyalty of citizens to it, especially in its active capacity in the economy and the general disparity between rhetoric and reality (e.g. bank bailouts and free-markets). This is the banal role of the conventional business of politics. And the era of neoliberalism has merited a unique response from the Right to reaffirm the role of the state.

In the US neoconservatism has offered a uniquely American answer to the crises of the state under neoliberalism. Not least in the promise of turbo-charged growth through supply-side spending, the neoconservatives seek to unite the nation and strengthen it in war. Budget deficits are a necessary evil in boosting growth by way of military Keynesianism. No wonder then the neocons have found a particular base in the military-industrial complex that has a stake in perpetual warfare. It's the only antidote to the nihilism inflicted upon society as the markets dissolve all bonds of solidarity and fraternity as if doused in acid. The neoconservatives seek to reassert the role of the state by articulating powerful myths of America as a nation destined to defend freedom and democracy. This is the justification for America's imperial role, to guard all the 'normal states' in the world. To this end the neoconservatives have found allies in power, mainly in the form of ultra-nationalists like Dick Cheney and George Bush.

The only traditions to be preserved are those of classical liberalism and strong government is a necessary means to do so. For neocons foreign policy ought to reflect the internal conditions of a country, the numerous interventions over the past several decades certainly reflect the condition of American capitalism. It's a vision that has more of a chime with Alexis de Tocqueville than later libertarian writers. Like the neocons de Tocqueville looked to unite France in solidarity, national glory and self-confidence, through the conquest of Algeria. He did not pretend that the destruction of Kabyle and the slaughter of women and children in Arab villages was anything to do with Progress. In that instance, the neocons are far less honest in their appropriation of the rhetoric of left-wing internationalism - that was well demonstrated by the apostasy of Christopher Hitchens. Yet even with all the talk of 'liberal democratic internationalism' the position remains at its heart a flag-wagging approbation of Empire.

It is somewhat ironic that the neoconservative aim of instilling unity in order to maintain the state, through war requires a disunity in society. Since 9/11 the primary disunity has been between the Muslims and everyone else, the less clear the distinction between Islam and Islamism the better. The enemy without maybe bearded men in Afghanistan, but the enemy within could be anyone of a certain ethnic-religious background. This provides a dual enemy for a dual defence at home and abroad, by a crackdown on civil liberties in the first hand and war in the second. In this way the self-proclaimed 'democratic revolutionaries' of neoconservatism managed to undermine the state as a legitimate managerial authority, leaving the liberal traditions vandalised and society divided to an extent that can only benefit demagogues. This merely conceded greater ground to libertarians and, ultimately, the radical Left. Meanwhile military Keynesianism has stripped the welfare state almost to the bone, the impossibility of lower and lower taxes has meant a cut in the defence budget.

Sectarianism be Praised!

The Left has long been prone to sectarianism, and famously so, due to its fissiparous condition and natural inclination to the narcissism of fine distinctions - to borrow Freud's words. Socialism comes in about a thousand different shades of red. The same can be said of anarchism, communism and feminism. It's probable that the sectarian tendency will never be overcome, partly this is because there has to be disagreement and debate. Dissensus rather than consensus. It's clear that there is a need for discussion over serious issues in practice as well as theory. This is true of morality as well as the organisation of government. In such areas there is a need for a lot more dissensus and not less. The same can be said of the refinement of principle and development of theory itself. This isn't to endorse the destructive strain of sectarianism which tears apart groups and grinds away at mass-popular movements. It's this which has helped to further the Left's decline around the world since the end of the Cold War. We can't blame it all on the CIA, I must concede. But it's important to always insist on a subtle distinction.

It's the problem is the shift to an intolerant variety of sectarianism which is so troubling, and with good reason too. The point at which the disagreement becomes a hindrance to a social movement. To borrow the words of the late Alexander Cockburn "The Left's idea of a meeting is to form a circle, point the guns inward and then fire." This is exactly the kind of sectarianism that the majority of people find problematic. It can drive a wedge right into a movement, first causing friction and then leading to schismatic bursts that threaten the whole thrust of the organised efforts. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the successes of a movement in its commitment to a cause often in turn produce greater unity and solidarity. The sectarian elements are usually marginalised in this way, as it becomes more important to unify around a cause which is more important than our petty differences of theory. The victories of a movement are self-propelling in this way. This could go against Gramscian sequential schemas about the primacy of politics, in that the material conditions may come before the political - likewise, theory very often struggles to keep up with practice.

Sadly it's also true that the destructive sectarian streak of the Left is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Very often the Left is in a state of paralysis thanks to its own bitter squabbles and petty infighting, which would embarrass the Church of England - it truly does come down to a narcissism of fine distinctions! The inability of some to build alliances within the Left has even been matched by those who find it easier to coalesce with the Right. Alexander Cockburn received no end of criticism for consorting with Pat Buchanan over the Iraq war, yet it was a pragmatic move of a committed anti-imperialist. Though it's worth saying that the left-wing worry of a descent into a state of affairs where we take the side of anyone who is critical of US foreign policy is not an confused one. Many conservatives saw Fascism as a "lesser evil" to socialism, even libertarians thought Mussolini was a "moderate" who had saved private property from the red plague. No such calculation would go uncriticised on the Left. One of the reasons why the Right is not as sectarian, and not in the same way, as the Left is that leftists are better than rightists. It's about questions of action.

The rigorous assessment of principle and practice among leftists is not a reason for despair in every instance. The Left ought to be sectarian in this sense, in its commitment to outmatch liberals and conservatives when it comes to democracy, equality and liberty, as well as art, culture and even tradition. This requires a certain refinement and maintenance of principle. It is often overlooked that the conservative claim to a monopoly over culture and tradition is as ludicrous as the suggestion of a liberal monopoly over freedom. Notably it was Leon Trotsky who said "We Marxists have always lived in tradition." He wasn't speaking as a conservative, because there is an alternative conception of tradition to be found in radicalism. It is a cultural body which is constantly remade, as well as opening itself to the participation of ordinary people. At the same time it's not just conservatives who want to preserve the great canon of literature, whereas radicals are about accessibility and dissensus. But it's a fetishistic tendency of conservatives to take something as good just because it stood the test of time. Quality control is something the Left does better.