DSquared has a post on JEM launching an attack on Khartoum today. He thinks the various militias will resemble little more than criminal gangs in the near future, with a footnote warning against our own smugness as “the Free Companies went in for this sort of thing in the fourteenth century and made lots of Italy a purely horrible place to live in.” This is basically Tilly’s (now sadly departed) argument in his famous essay. But today could be seen as quite different to the C14 in the following ways:

1. There are ready made states with external legitimacy (in the international system of states), but lack internal legitimacy.
2. Easy access to a plethora of low-to-medium damage weapons. Weapon financing isn’t carried out by wholly separate competing organizations, but organizations fighting over parts of the state.
3. No access to the big weapons that could clearly differentiate the competing groups.
4. No wars of religion to homogenize ethnic identity.
5. The winning organizational forms today (OECD nation states) are too divergent, having followed long path dependencies for easy and stable isomorphism to occur.

From NotBBC forums, via Liberal Conspiracy, comes an eyewitness report on Johnny Vegas’ set as part of Stewart Lee’s “Ten Best Stand-Ups in the World Ever” series:

It was pretty contentious, so I’m slightly concerned about misrepresenting what happened if you didn’t see it with your own eyes. I can’t give you the complete context without recounting the whole set, and that would take forever and I’d probably get it wrong anyway. With that in mind, I’ll try to explain what happened, but please take what I say with a pinch of salt and bear in mind that it’s my intepretation.

Anyway, fairly early on in his set, he stated that he had no material, and that he was there mostly to get laid; it came across as quite possibly the truth spoken in jest. He started chatting up girls in the front row in an exaggerated, slightly cartoonish way, and quickly focused on a girl who was about 18 or 19 and was very obviously unnerved by it. To cut a long story short, he fairly insistently press-ganged her into getting carried onto stage by six members of the audience, while pretending to be dead. The premise was that they would then lay her down on the stage and he would bring her back to life with a kiss, and he warned her that there probably would be tongues. Honestly, you couldn’t have found a nervier or more passive girl if you’d scoured all of London - she was like a rabbit in the headlights, but she was giggling and clearly somewhat enjoying the attention, so it just sort of went ahead without so much as a yes or no from her.

Once she was on the stage with the 6 ‘bearers’ lined up at the back, he told her to lie very still and he turned back to the audience for a bit. She couldn’t stop her nervous giggling, so he told her to shut up and look more dead or he’d kick her in the ribs. There was a menacing tone to his whole set, so I have to admit it didn’t come across to me entirely as a joke. There wasn’t anything funny about it anyway, unless you find that funny in itself.

Eventually he got down next to her and started stroking her breasts. That hadn’t been mentioned before, and in the light of of the repeated refrain of “don’t fucking move” it seemed like an abuse of power. She could have got up and walked away, but it would have taken a lot of courage to do that in front of a large room full of people, against the explicit orders of the famous guy with the microphone. Then he started running his hand up her leg and pulling her skirt up. Every time he looked up to address the audience, she’d reach down and pull her skirt back down, but he kept pulling it back up and ended up fingering her through her clothes for a second or two. Then he straddled her, completely pinning her to the floor, and kissed her quite full-on for quite a while. Then he asked if they could bring the curtain down, which they couldn’t, so there was an awkward minute until Simon Munnery came out and brought down an improvised curtain consisting of his coat.

It was pretty hard to know what to make of the whole thing. I came away with the distinct impression that she was given very little chance to say no, if at all. The six ‘bearers’ made it even more grim, as it seemed their sole purpose was to make it look more acceptable - more endorsed, if you will. If it had just been him and her on the stage, I think it would have been rather harder for the half of the room who laughed through it to do so.

I say half, as my impression at the time was that people were going along with it and broadly enjoying the set, but on leaving, I heard nothing but “that was disgusting”, “that was practically assault”, and so on. My girlfriend was quite upset that she’d sat through it and not done anything, but I’m not sure what she could have done - walk out, I suppose. I was just fucking confused by trying to find a way in which it was acceptable. I don’t like to think that any area is out-of-bounds for comedy, even if the comedy is lazy nonsense (which on this occasion, I think it mostly was) - but that really only applies when you’re talking about words and ideas. Once you’ve got someone pinned down on the stage, it becomes a rather different matter.

If this account is accurate, then I’m appalled to have UCL associated with this performance (The Bloomsbury Theatre is a UCL subsidiary).

UPDATE: Johnny Vegas is suing The Guardian for Mary O’Hara’s reportage, and has had to take down the content. Here is Google Cache:

Since when is sexual assault funny?
This article appeared in the Guardian  on Thursday May 01 2008 on p12 of the Comment & features section.

I go to comedy gigs almost every week, but I’ve never seen anything quite like what I witnessed at the Bloomsbury theatre in London last Friday night. Like many people I’ve often left gigs offended. That’s stand-up. If you go regularly you need a thick hide - a good comedian will often say or do something that offends you and, if you’re in the front row, you may well be targeted for public ridicule. Until Friday, however, I had never left a gig feeling disgusted.

Along with hundreds of others I watched a set during which Johnny Vegas, without any discernible artistic or comedic merit, gratuitously groped a young woman on stage. Judging from some of the furious postings on the internet that followed the gig, I was not the only person asking if he had crossed a line.

Vegas stepped on stage to cheers and immediately announced that he had no material, and that he was there mostly to get laid. There

followed a short meandering ramble (mainly about lap dancers) before he turned his attention to the audience - and to one young woman in particular in the front row who, he announced, he wanted to be “inside”. Anyone who has seen Vegas live knows to expect the unexpected, and you take a front row seat at your peril. He can appear deliriously and uncontrollably drunk and casually offensive, and he isn’t afraid of injecting a dose of tension by involving members of the audience in his erratic act. But something backfired this time.

The woman he focused on was about 18 or 19 and was very obviously unnerved by his attention. I saw her expression clearly - I was in the front row too, just three seats along. Vegas insisted that she allow herself to be carried on to the stage by six members of the audience - he called them “pall bearers”. She must pretend to be dead, he said, and he would bring her back to life with an onstage kiss. He warned her that there probably would be tongues. As James Williams, writing on the NOTBBC forum after the gig, put it, “Honestly, you couldn’t have found a nervier or more passive girl if you’d scoured all of London - she was like a rabbit in the headlights, but she was giggling and clearly somewhat enjoying the attention, so it just sort of went ahead without so much as a yes or no from her.” As she was carried on stage, Vegas repeatedly goaded one of the pallbearers to “finger” the girl.

Once she was on stage, Vegas told her to lie very still. She couldn’t stop her nervous giggling; he threatened to kick her in the ribs. It didn’t come across to me as a joke - and near to where I was sitting, no one was laughing. Eventually Vegas crouched down beside the nervous girl and started stroking her breasts while repeatedly saying, “don’t fucking move”. Then he ran his hand up her leg and began pulling her skirt up. Every time he looked up to address the audience, she would reach down and pull her skirt back down, but he kept pulling it back up. According to Williams, who had a different view of the stage from me, Vegas ended up “fingering her through her clothes for a second or two”. What I heard was an audible sharp intake of breath from the audience as they realised that the woman was getting much more than the kiss Vegas had told her to expect.

There was an air of menace from the outset, made worse by the fact that Vegas clearly had no idea where he was going with his act. The more the young woman was groped, the more anxious one of the “pallbearers” looked. Then Vegas straddled the young woman, pinning her to the floor, and kissing her for quite a while. Most disturbing, perhaps was that around half the audience seemed to find this really funny. Vegas asked if the curtain could be brought down; when it wasn’t, Simon Munnery, the comedian who had been on stage before him, came on stage and used his coat to screen the pair from the audience.

Back before Vegas was famous, his act often involved him - the shambolic, hapless, self-loathing buffoonish bloke - persuading a woman in the audience to feel sorry for him by letting him give her a quick kiss. It was funny because he had no power. He wasn’t famous then. Being famous and the power that it brings changes the dynamic in such a scenario. This time, I could see nothing creative or subversive; just a powerful, famous man on a stage seedily touching up a young woman.

Soon after the gig, a furious exchange began on the internet. James Williams kicked off the debate on NOTBBC.co.uk: “I don’t like to think that any area is out of bounds for comedy, even if the comedy is lazy nonsense (which on this occasion, I think it mostly was) - but that really only applies when you’re talking about words and ideas. Once you’ve got someone pinned down on the stage, it becomes a rather different matter. I honestly don’t know what to think. Really, did no one else see it?”

Some leapt to Vegas’s defence. Others wondered if the issue was whether it was Vegas or his stage “persona” doing the groping, and, if so, what was the underlying point of it. The debate has since evolved to a broader exploration of the boundaries of acceptable behaviour in comedy. One poster (who wasn’t at the gig) encapsulates many of the views in a response to Williams: “It’s always hard to know with Vegas where the pathos starts and ends - aggression to the audience has always been part of his act.”

Others have no such qualms. “I have no problem with the view that comedy should be allowed to address any idea or subject it likes,” says Fiona Knight, who is Williams’s girlfriend, and was with him at the gig. “Ideas cannot hurt anyone until they are turned into actions. But any performer has a responsibility for what they (or their character/persona) does, just as the audience has a responsibility for its reaction to their actions. For me, at this gig, Johnny Vegas crossed the line from fantasy to reality when he translated his ideas into actions that I thought were unacceptable, and I only wish I had had the guts to say so at the time.”

Good comedy is frequently uncomfortable for those watching. Brendon Burns, last year’s If.comedy winner at the Edinburgh Fringe, is brilliant at making his audience feel so awkward they wish they were somew here else, and the previous year’s winner, Phil Nichol, spends a lot of his gigs naked for all but his guitar as some of the audience look on in horror. Sometimes, people vote with their feet. I’ve seen people walk out when the gay comedian, Scott Capurro, got a bit too graphic. Often, as happened at the end of Friday’s Vegas gig, some members of the audience withhold their applause.

But like Knight, I wonder if members of the audience - or Stewart Lee, the comedian who hosted the event - should have intervened. The young woman had seemed to go on stage of her on volition, but had no reason to suspect she would be pinned to the floor and groped. I did shout “get him fucking off you”, but obviously not loud enough.

Reviewers, who could have made an impact by registering concern, seemed largely unmoved by the groping. Steve Bennett, founder of the UK’s most popular comedy website, Chortle, alluded to what happened, and referred vaguely to Vegas’s “rather pervy” come-ons, but says he “wouldn’t go as far as condemning him”. Bruce Dessau, who, like Bennett, wrote a rather benign review of the gig for the London Evening Standard on Monday, had by Wednesday decided to blog about it, acknowledging that other people were bothered by what had transpired. In the blog he says: “I’ve often said that one’s response to a performance depends on where one is sitting … But from where I was sitting, my concern was more about his substantial bulk bearing down on her than where his wandering hands were … Our very own Richard Godwin was at the gig and he was closer to the action than me. He clearly felt Vegas went far too far. Others have also made similar allegations, that Vegas took advantage of an innocent woman.”

The Guardian asked Vegas for a response to the reaction to his performance, but he was unavailable for comment. Lee’s agent did not return our calls. That is a pity. Friday’s gig needs to be openly debated. One comment posted on Chortle, which appears to celebrate the sexual molestation of a woman in public, illustrates why. It reads: “This was the most enjoyable night of comedy I have ever experienced. The discomfort in the predominately middle-class section of the audience I was sitting in was palpable during Vegas’s set! During the bit where Vegas was sexually molesting a librarian whilst singing Shakespeare Sister’s Stay With Me Baby I overheard a lady behind mutter under her breath ‘this is hideous!’ The scene was horrifying yet hilarious and Vegas was relentless until Simon Munnery covered the spectacle with his jacket! I will be laughing about this evening for a very long time!”.

Here’s Infinite Thought:

As Don Letts put it: ‘They used to say don’t trust anyone over 30, but today I don’t trust anyone under 30 - let’s be blunt: today’s young are spoilt motherfuckers.’ Reared on warmed-over irony, children’s cartoons, cynicism and celebrity medja, those puffed up bastards who work in the city and offices all over London are exactly the kind of person who’d think: ‘wouldn’t it be hilarious if Boris Johnson was mayor, huh huh huh’. You fucking idiots! My generation can go to hell, spawn of Thatcher and Hobbes, with their fucking egotism and ‘what’s in it for me?’ attitude, trained like Pavlov’s puppies to respond only to money and to, like, stuff. Wankers, the lot of them.

Don’t take out your anger on us, at least not all of us. The views of people I know amongst the under thirties were (in descending order or popularity):

1. Why would anyone vote for Boris. Vote Ken. Tell everyone you know to vote for Ken. Shout it from the fucking rooftops.
2. We are libertarians. Johnson rox! Lolz. (approx 10%).
3. What election? (approx 20%).

That’s still 70% of us who are not wankers.

I think it was the bread and peace model that showed itself at work here. If economic growth falls below a certain point, then the incumbent loses. At the end of the day, it came down to issues. People want lower taxation and Boris will deliver it, at the risk of the collapse of public transport.

Voters are sooo predictable.

But perhaps Ken knew which group would destroy him:

… London’s financial centre was this small inward-looking club of old white men who’d all been to the same schools; [Thatcher] destroyed them, they were swept aside by international capital, which is much more dynamic, much more progressive, less racist and sexist (I mean, it’s not wonderful in there, but compared with the old lot …); and the new people were quite prepared to engage with me, whereas that lot would refuse to meet. Now they recognise that mayors can deliver things, and they rely on me to try and get the flow of office development and new housing.

And now the old club fought back.

And with that, I announce the launch of Boris Watch, keeping an eye on the mayoral trainwreck. I need co-authors for this to get off the ground. Anyone want to volunteer?

In my last post, I said that governments wont open up the free trade of food because domestic prices would increase, leading to discontent. But perhaps, I should make the point a bit stronger. Domestic consumers will starve.

Here’s Bryan Caplan, from his book The Myth of the Rational Voter:

“Maybe the rich are less protectionist because they are more rational; or perhaps income is a proxy for education or intelligence, and these make people more rational.”

Umm…maybe the rich are less protectionist because they’re the least likely to starve.

Final word from Daniel Davies (again), from the comments on Tyler’s response to Dani Rodrik:

[Just what is it that "we know reasonably well" that would indicate that a freer market in rice would raise its real price? Did you not agree in your own posting that freer trade would increase global supplies? How does this lead to a higher real price?]

Barkley, the World Bank estimates that Dani references are the best empirical work we have on this (rather important) question and they look pretty sound.

The global supply of rice is limited in the short term to the crop. Over the course of more than one growing season (a period of time during which it’s entirely possible to starve to death), freer trade in rice would tend to increase the supply. However, it is entirely possible for the following three states of affairs to hold simultaneously:

1) A larger global rice crop
2) A lower global price of rice in PPP terms.
3) In rice-producing countries, a higher relative cost of rice in terms of average wages.

(3) is clearly the problem, because it will lead to states of affairs where workers can’t afford to buy enough rice to eat. Which is what we call a “food crisis”, which was the whole motivating point.

Dani’s point is very clear here and quite obviously correct. An increase in the supply of rice doesn’t guarantee an increase in the ability of poor people to buy it. If rice is more expensive on the world market than it is in India, then if India opens up trade in rice, then the price of rice in India is going to go up. If Indonesia bans trade in rice, then the local price of rice is lower than it would be if Indonesian rice-growers were able to sell to Japanese rice-eaters instead of local peasants.

We might all, as Dani says, “want there to be free trade in rice”, but you pick your year for this sort of liberalisation, and you don’t pick a year in which the “adjustment issues” could involve hundreds of thousands of deaths from starvation.

Tyler Cowen writes in his latest column:

Lately, it’s become fashionable to assert that, in this time of financial market turmoil, the market-oriented teachings of Milton Friedman belong more to the past than to the future. The sadder truth is that when it comes to food production — arguably the most important of all human activities — Mr. Friedman’s free-trade ideas still haven’t seen the light of day.

…

The more telling figure is that over the next year, international trade in rice is expected to decline more than 3 percent, when it should be expanding. The decline is attributable mainly to recent restrictions on rice exports in rice-producing countries like India, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Egypt.

However, even if we were to free up trade, this would likely irritate urban domestic consumers. Governments that want to stay in power are not likely to annoy this demographic. This is the opposite problem to Europe, where democratic governments have had to rely on the rural vote to stay in power throughout the 20th Century, although we only refer to the former as populism, despite the justifiability of domestic consumers’ grievances. As Dani Rodrik points out:

Freer trade would reduce prices of food (relative to other prices) only in countries that are food importers.  Food exporters would experience a rise in the relative price of food, and there is simply no way of escaping that reality.

These dynamics played themselves out in the Pakistani elections. Shaukat Aziz paid off the trade deficits with agricultural primary commodity exports, the result of which was huge hikes in the price of rice (can’t find a reference for the moment).

Daniel Davies, forcefully makes the argument against Tyler’s:

As Raj Patel correctly notes on the Guardian blog, we are shaping up for a fairly substantial risk of a free market democide. . There was certainly no shortage of people pointing out at the time that removing fertiliser subsidies and dismantling strategic grain reserves was a hell of a risky thing to do, but the neoliberals pushed it anyway, under the assumption that deregulated food markets would encourage investment and improve productivity. Which, given a very long run of good weather indeed, might have worked, but that was hardly the way to bet, and it really does not appear to be the case that anyone did a huge amount of detailed research into how this green revolution might have been carried out and financed. Beware, always beware, of long term solutions to short term problems.

…

It really is hard to see what qualitative difference one might draw between the way in which the World Bank and IMF have fucked around with the food security systems of third world countries in the name of “free markets”, and the way in which Stalin and Mao did more or less the same thing in the name of “collectivisation”. Peter Griffiths’ article and book refer. The great thing about the market mechanism, of course, is that when it kills a million people, it doesn’t leave fingerprints.

It’s time we went back to studying political economy, and ask more questions rather than proposing ideological solutions. Here’s your starter for ten: As far as agriculture goes, democracy and free trade is not an easy fit. Does anyone have reasonable solutions to this, which aren’t of the “let’s remove economics from democratic participation” variety?

PS: I mentioned in the comments an article, which suggested that the end of EU subsidies on dairy exports played a role in Japan’s butter crisis. Aaron Schiff points out however that there’s a 802% import tariff on butter imports. However, I don’t think this completely undermines the major point, but adds yet another complexity.

Below is a talk I prepared for my Formations of Modern Societies class on whether or not we live in a post-industrial society. It’s deliberately one-sided, and contains poor attempts at humour. Squirm now…

The origins of computers and the Internet lie in military history. The first computer to be built was Bletchley Park’s Colosus , designed by mathematician, Alan Turing to break Axis secret codes.

Unfortunately, Churchill ordered the destruction of all the components and designs of Colossus shortly after the end of the war.[i] In the United States however, mathematicians Wiener, Von Neumann and Shannon were developing cybernetic theory within a military unit called “Command, Control, Communication and Intelligence” which looked after the atomic bomb project. Their theories on information as a form of entropy (from the physical laws of thermodynamics) left a lasting impression on the social sciences, from economists such as Kenneth Arrow and Milton Friedman to sociologist Talcott Parsons and anthropologist Margaret Mead. To some extent, this explains sociologist’s early love affair with technology. There’s another side to this though….

One of the first comprehensive theories of computers and societies was developed by the Polish-born Soviet economist, Oskar Lange in his 1965 publication “Introduction to Economic Cybernetics” and the 1967 publication “The Computer and the Market.” Lange believed that a distributed network of computers could optimally price consumer goods in the centrally planned economy and push the Soviet state towards the Marxist utopia.

The US response was two-fold: first it pursued technological expertise by funding research in telecommunications in universities.

Although the initial ideas of the Internet as a packet-switched (in which data is componentised into short bursts, rather than being transmitted on a circuit, like a phone line) were developed in the telecoms department of the UK Post Office in the 1950s, they were rejected on the grounds that it had no purpose. Work on these types of networks were continued within the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as the ARPANET – a distributed network that would be able to survive the destruction of individual nodes, in say a nuclear war. ARPANET was developed in conjunction with universities such as Berkeley, Stanford and European collaborators UCL and Twente in Holland.

The Internet was opened up to private firms in the late 1980s, and experienced a growth rate of 100% / year from 1990 onwards. The world-wide-web however, as a system for transmitting text and pictures over the Internet was developed at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva by Sir Tim Berners Lee, to aid the work of particle physicists.

The other side of the US cold war strategy was to fund academics to theorise about what a computerised society would look like. Receivers of funding included Daniel Bell, who’s in the reading, and James Burnham, the creator of “unmarxism” or, if you like, historical materialism for capitalists, which led to the idea of “The Managerial Revolution.” The theories of Bell and his colleagues, such as Nesbitt, Stonier and Masuda where highly utopian. Bell thought that the West was heading towards an interconnected “global village,” a network society which is flat, non-hierarchical, egalitarian and involving the free association of peoples. Even war would disappear as the need for physical resources is replaced by the network.

It is these types of ideas that Marxists rightly criticised, but their rejection of Information Society as whole means they have to fall back on terms such as imperialism or exploitation theories of labour to describe technological change. Neoliberalism is not a grand US imperial strategy. It is linked to ICT because it was people working in information technologies who were the carriers of neoliberalism.

Mathematicians, economists and computer scientists, especially on the Left Coast fell in love with the ideas of classical liberalism as they were expressed through a new wave of Libertarianism. Books such as Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged were, and still are, immensely popular in the Silicon Valley and amongst graduates who would found the global financial centres. The ideas in these books professed a future society where the state would wither away, and capitalism, unleashed from state control would create the perfect ideal world.

Rand’s idea of “man as a heroic being, with his own moral purpose and reason as the only absolute in life” would appeal to males engaged in mathematical disciplines by creating a feeling that they were these very heroes: bespeckled nerds.

In addition, the ideas of neoclassical economics and libertarianism could easily be developed in the context of an American society where economic inequality was largely diminished – the period from 1943-1977 known as “Middle Class America.”

The ideas of the libertarians embodied themselves in what Pekka Himanen calls “The hacker ethic.” By hacker, we do not mean someone who criminally breaks into systems, but a highly energetic ethic of free creation and destruction. Hacker groups could be found in almost every computer science department of the University of California system as well as MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. What was important about the hacker ethic was that it is completely valueless. The only thing to be prided are acts of creation and destruction itself. Although, hacker groups were based around an idea of “gift-exchange”, as opposed to “money-exchange,” they were only able to do so because of military funding. In addition, the more noticeable manifestations of hacking, Open Source Software like Linux is now dominated by commercial interests, such as IBM, Sun, Novell, Red Hat and Microsoft.

So, did ICTs change society? For sociologist Manuel Castells, we do, in fact, live in a Network Society. Networks are not new. They have always existed throughout history. But they were easily destroyed and relatively small scale. What we have now are ICTs as the foundation of economic networks, such as the global financial market; politics, where government departments are more in touch with their counterparts across the world than with the next level up or down; media networks, such as the AP & Reuters wire services, but also now, the blogosphere; social movements such as those organised around Tibet (pro-Tibetan and pro-China), antiglobalisation, antiwar and also the transnational terror networks.

These networks intersect groups across societies, leading to fragmentation, polarisation and individualisation. Mass national culture is replaced by various networks which condense and polarise: such as the anti-religious movement organised around Dawkins, intelligent design, and nets for and against the idea of climate change. Diaspora networks can increase the flow of cultural goods, or where they come from minority groups in their host countries they can increase the opportunities for rebellion and civil war.

The linking of corporations by telecommunications has allowed them to go multinational. This has adversely affected the working classes in the developed world who have experienced a catastrophic loss of job security and the end of full employment. Those who cannot keep up with technological change are simply “disconnected” from the network. Thus, the digital divide is a primary concern for many governments.

The application of ICTs to the organisation of markets means that the global market is becoming more efficient at the utilitarian allocation of goods and services, but is fragmenting society with large amounts of inequality. In effect, ICT enabled economic globalisation moves us back a hundred years to a “new gilded age,” through the economic effects of the “great divergence.”

This rise in inequality across developed and developing nations is not just caused by the replacement of jobs. Developed nations labour markets look increasingly like that of the Global South under a process that Michael Lind calls “Brazillianisation,” caused by the threat of multinationals leaving countries forcing governments to reduce social welfare and labour regulation.

In addition, migration patterns can enhance or disrupt economies. Economies that play host to migrants are able to grow their economy, especially where migrants are skilled. Where migrants have the opportunity to create businesses back in their home countries, economies can also grow there. However, migration can haemorrhage failing countries as their best and brightest take flight, again exacerbating inequalities. This view of the world sits in stark contrast to the hyper-globalist view, as espoused by authors such as Thomas Friedman who believe that competitive advantage has been all but eliminated thanks to ICT, and that all the world can now share in the wealth of the world. World Bank economist Paul Collier is far more sceptical. The income of the average Malawian is less than that of preindustrial Britain and welfare stands lower than that of hunter gatherer societies. It’s not at all clear how “bottom billion” countries can be integrated into the global economy given the trend towards high productivity, ICT-enabled labour.

This points to the role of institutions in shaping today’s world as much as the role of technology. There is a danger that in much of the network society theorising, there is an element of technological determinism. Again, Marxists have been right to call on this. Much of the inequality between high tech workers and manual workers began in the stagflation period of the seventies. Economists Levy and Temin suggest that political factors led to a collapse of institutions, such as Breton Woods that maintained middle class America. What followed in the Washington Consensus, were not just macroeconomic packages revolving around monetarism, but a microeconomic reorganisation around deregulation of labour, closing of unions, low taxes and low wages. Since then, those at the top of the income distribution have further shifted policy in their favour. In effect, those who accuse others of rent-seeking are themselves the worst perpetrators.

What of the argument that postindustrial societies are increasingly post-material as was claimed by some theorists in the 1970s? By treating CO₂ emissions as a dependent proxy variable for material production, we can see in the IPCC emissions profile that the carbon intensity of value production still is only at 80% of that of 1970. In addition, global CO₂ emissions show no sign of reduction in the short-term, and are still set to rise massively as India and China become more middle-class. I would suggest that post-materialism can only appear where material goods are abundant, and this is reliant on energy and food security – the latter disappearing as governments push bio fuels at the cost of human misery.

So our present situation marks a continuation of capitalist society. One could cite Weber and say that we have stuck ourselves more and more in the steel-hard casing of the rationality. This has only been done through the application of scientific knowledge in a diverse range of disciplines. Also, ICTs are devices that have provided a crucial fixity to the social structures that we inhibit. Although they were created by human s engaged in political and economic practices, they now constrain decision making, through the proliferation of uncertain side-effects such as global warming, security and financial crises which escape Weber’s notion of rational calculation.

So, do current sociologists have anything to say about the future? John Urry has recently proposed two visions for the world in 2050. The first is warlord localism, AKA the Children of Men scenario, where a world adversely affected by global warming and a lack of energy becomes fragmented, states lose their ability to govern, leading to local territories controlled by force by warlords. How likely is this to happen? Futurology is a hard game to play.

In We Have Never Been Modern Bruno Latour, suggests that we should engage in experimental metaphysics and treat humans and nonhumans as first class objects of sociological study. Latour recently suggested that new datascapes available through ICT allow a new type of sociology to take place, relying on massive data collection on multiple aspects of our lives. In this sociology of datascapes, it is possible to trace the individual as they flow through society, establishing and removing relations with other individuals and objects (or actants). This is all very nice, but sociology could end up as a complicit in Urry’s alternative scenario for the world: A digital panopticon.

In 2006, the UK’s data protection agency, the Information Commissioner produced a report in which it stated that Britain is now a Surveillance Society [ii]. Britain has the highest concentration of security cameras in the world, with 1 camera for every 12 people. Here is a quote:

“In 2016…The digital divide has grown ever deeper with some condemned to a purgatory of surveillance and an inability to access information…However the culture of peer-to-peer surveillance has also splintered and produced new variants. There is a great deal of vigiliante surveillance by hardliners who feel that the state is ‘not doing enough’ to control terrorism, crime and illegal immigration, and unofficial websites of the ‘suspect’ have proliferated, leading to all kinds of mistakes and misidentifications.”

Journalist Adam Curtis believes that technocratic management has engineered a society where, possibly within a few years, almost all of our actions could be predicted by computers. Sites such as Amazon and Last.fm have uncannily picked up on my tastes in books and music for example. The threat is that, to cite the name of a Japanese sci-fi of the same name, at the end of the day, we may not even be “ghosts in the shell.”[iii]

[ii] Possibly the best commentary on the surveillance society comes from the UK-based IT news site The Register.

[iii] Ghost in the Shell, at least the TV series is equal parts Deleuze, Weber and Jameson. Well worth catching.

Obama - The Sleeper Mao

Obama ‘08 Campaign Logo	Freedom Road Socialist Organization Logo
Che Guevara two-tone woodcut	Obama two-tone woodcut

Hat tip to Voyou Desoeuvre

n+1 has an essay by S. Abbas Raza defending Musharraf’s dictatorship of Pakistan (via 3 Quarks Daily).

A military dictatorship is a military dictatorship, and a democracy is a democracy. And the latter is always automatically better than the former. It is safer to agree with this statement and to look at every particular complex political situation through the lens of this cliché than to risk having one’s liberal-democratic credentials questioned. But as a friend of mine once remarked, “All arguments for democracy in Pakistan are theoretical. For dictatorships, the greatest argument is the actual experience of Pakistani democracies.” Very similarly, another friend recently commented that “There are of course no theoretical arguments for a dictatorship, only practical ones.” In the case of Pakistan, the last two civilian democratic governments were sham democracies, and while I by no means support everything Pervez Musharraf has done, especially recently, there are various things for which his government deserves praise. Moreover, while George W. Bush may have gotten almost everything else wrong, his Pakistan policy has been basically sound.

There is no doubt that Nawaz Sharif’s rule was corrupt to the core. The question is whether or not the military should turn the situation around by staying in power for 8 years. The National Accountability Board hasn’t done nearly enough, and Musharraf’s devolution plan has handed power into the landed elites.

One can’t but help that we’ve been here before with Ayub Khan, another military reformer that delivered a whole lot of growth to Pakistan without building the institutions to keep civilian rule.

There is an argument that Pinochet, for example, delivered so much economic growth as to make his dictatorship untenable-in a free market economy, no one needs a repressive army. Does that mean we should have more free market dictators elsewhere? Surely not…

In a recent essay I chose to write for my politics class on democracy in Pakistan I got incredibly stuck as I ran from the past to the present. My conclusion is that it’s too early to say if democracy will endure in Pakistan. What a cop out!

“Lehman, it was nice knowing you.”

I did not believe YouTube capable of producing constructive debate, but I’ve been proved wrong by vlogger GrandNarratives.

I’d like to draw some attention to the last part of Žižek’s recent class on the embedness of ideology, which was a response to another response by Sara Ahmed to his plenary talk on liberal multiculturalism that was given at the Critical Legal Conference last year.

Sara Ahmed took issue with Žižek’s claim that liberal multiculturalism as hegemony is an empirical fact. Here, she takes issue with what she claims is Žižek’s literal reading of multiculturalism. She utilises the concept of a non-performative, that is a performative that functions in its very opposite as a way of reading liberal multiculturalism. In this narrative, multiculturalism takes on a double bind: The racist reads multiculturalism to say that you can be racist, but that you assert your racism in the very way that you profess non-racism, and that this forms the basis of our late modern “civil racism.”

Žižek’s response is to re-describe liberal multiculturalism as fantasy. That is, racism is officially prohibited at the institutional level, but this prohibition becomes an ego-ideal, which must lead to outbursts against shamed racists, which takes on a class dimension. In the Shilpa Shetty Big Brother debacle, Jade Goody was villainised even though the majority of the racism came from Jo O’Meara. Jade Goody personified the working-class racist that liberals all like to dismiss. Another story comes from an incident involving the Roma in Slovenia. The travellers arrived at a small village, where the inhabitants turned to racist exclusionism. Liberals from around the country came to the Roma’s defence, but at no point did they say that the Roma could live next to them. When one looks at the content of the village racists arguments, one can discern real socioeconomic concerns tied in with class alienation.

When one looks over debates over Islam, liberals like to oppose an authentic religion against its bad fundamentalist counterpart. Here, Žižek rightly discerns that multiculturalism relies on the admission of Otherness, but the liberals are the masters who draw the line as to who the good Other is, therefore protecting “true diversity.”

Ahmed then claims that hidden behind liberal multiculturalism is an injunction to monoculturalism. Žižek counters by showing how things are really worse than this. The demand to become British is impossible. One cannot do it, and the liberals secretly enjoy it. This is experienced in conversations as “what about your own culture? I love your closeness to nature….etc…”

Therefore, multiculturalism outputs two different types of racism. A reflexive racism that allows us to discern ourselves from the racist Other on the basis of class or the “intolerant Muslim,” and it also falsely elevates the Other as authentic to a fragile absolute.

So, how do we move beyond the deadlock? Žižek takes on a critical reading of Rowan Williams suggestion that Britain adopts a variant of Islamic Shariah courts. Williams is careful to emphasise two limitations on the adoption of Shariah; both parties must consent to a hearing in front of a Shariah court, and that there should be no conflict with UK criminal law. Žižek argues that nothing really radical happens. If you secede rights to ethnic communities on the basis that they have to assent to the process, then to have a truly free choice, you would need to be educated in making a choice between the rules of the different ethnic and religious groupings. For example, the moment a woman wears a veil as a part of her free choice, it is no longer a sign of integration with her community but an expression of her own individualism. The choice here is always a metachoice.

Beck used the principle of a “double religion” to describe the same thing at his recent lecture on the cosmopolitanisation of religion. He utilises Lessing’s ring parable to call for an ironist position with regards to one own religion—no one is sure that their faith is the one true faith, and therefore cannot proceed on exclusionary grounds. Last year, Beck had no answer as to how cosmopolitan realism could be engendered at the level of public debate, and yet it happened in the unlikeliest quarter—the Anglican Church.

Žižek actually likes this idea of a metachoice. Here, a theological project that authors like Saba Mahmood has discerned in involvements with religious institutions seems near unavoidable. This is probably where research needs to be directed today.

For Žižek, tearing ourselves from all of our roots is the precondition of the rehabilitation of the Left. But I would argue that it can also lead to its opposite—neofundamentalism. Olivier Roy has already documented how fundamentalists do tear themselves from their ethnic roots. In fact, turns to neofundamentalism are often a sort of “protest conversion”:

“Blacks, Latinos and persons of mixed race who find in radical Islamic groups a rebuke to racism and a way to fight a system they reject,…many belong to the same milieu as their Muslim friends; they live in impoverished neighbourhoods and are working-class dropouts, for example, Jose Padilla, Richard Reid and the Frenchman Lionel Dumont - who converted to Islam because ‘the Muslims are the only ones to fight the system’. Many are from racial minorities (such as Blacks, specifically from the Caribbean) that find in radical Islam a truly non-racist environment. To convert to Islam today is a way for a European rebel to find a cause; it has little to do with theology.”

The neofundamentalists live similarly to the noveau rich. Both want gated communities, and travel the world to exploit new opportunities and use the lingua franca of English to communicate. The tearing of one’s self from the roots presents both an opportunity and a threat. I agree with Žižek that capitalism has achieved a global universality—that is why we call it globalisation. The struggle is to locate commonalities in the struggles and divisions for a new mass Left.

Cosmopolitanisation involves civil society as much as it involves the state. The new social movements need to find a message compatible and responsive to the needs of ethnic communities. Powerful states need to work with ethnic communities to bring about change in countries from which they’ve and create a level playing ground of substantive equality with regards to life chances.

Swearing an oath to Britain is code to give up the struggle of the Global South. The post-materialism of the new movements is meaningless for those where the very ground of their material life is being taken away from them.

Cosmopolitanism is not a pedagogical intervention. Nor does it mean sushi on every high street in Britain. It involves deep-level structural and cultural changes in the way societies are organised. It is both an ideal to strive towards, but also our only option to proceed during the 21^st century.