Book review: of capital and car bombs
Posted on Sunday 31 October, 2010
Filed Under Book review, Economics, War on terror
AS A non-technical explanation of how the processes outlined in Marx’s ‘Capital’ pan out in today’s world, David Harvey’s ‘The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism’ will prove pretty hard to beat.
According to the jacket blurb, Harvey is now the world’s most cited academic geographer. I’m not sure how stiff the competition is – to be frank, I could not so much as name anyone else in the field – but this background gives him a distinctive take that makes reading him a different proposition to ploughing through Mandel/Harman/insert leftist economist hero of choice.
The tone is deliberately reasonable, aimed at convincing non-Marxists that Marxists are not space cadets, and that can only be a good thing.
Harvey’s underlying contention is that capital, as self-expanding value growing by a compound 3% per annum, must always secure new outlet for revalorisation. Crises stem from its periodic inability to achieve that.
Distinguishing his analysis from other Marxist positions – such as profit squeeze, TRPF and underconsumptionist schools – he offers this as the real ‘limit to capital’.
I was particularly taken with Harvey’s periodisation of the crisis, which of course commenced not in 2007 but in 1997-98, with the Asia collapse, the Long Term Capital Management bailout and the Russian default.
I also agreed with his stress on the role of credit in overcoming capitalism’s effective demand problem, a process described by other writers as ‘privatised Keynesianism’.
Less convincing was Harvey’s attempt to stitch together a geography-based seven-part notion he calls ‘co-evolution’ and to pass it off as Marx’s own work. Most of us will need more detail if he truly wants to sell his case.
Sadly, his conclusions – which even he describes as utopian- are astonishingly naive coming from a Marxist of Harvey’s obvious calibre. ‘Class is a role, not a label that attaches to persons. We play multiple roles all the time,’ he writes.
‘Why can’t we all just work alongside each other without any class distinction?’ That seems tantamount to asking why we can’t just all share the love.
A quick footnote on Mike Davis’s ‘Buda’s Wagon: a Brief History of the Car Bomb’. I’d almost say this book was a lot of fun, if that were not singularly inappropriate to the subject matter. It reads like a thriller, but the problem is, it is all true.
Davis – a US-based British Cliffite, I understand – romps through the full 90 years of the vehicle-borne improvised explosive device saga at breakneck pace, and in rapidly read journolese to boot, leaving little time for theorising the whys and wherefores. But who cares about boring stuff like the ethics of blowing kiddies to smithereens?
While he does his best to be neutral, Davis is clearly more sympathetic to some car bombers than others.
But then, all politically engaged readers will be; as the author makes plain, everybody from Al Qa’eda to the CIA to the Stern Gang to white supremacists has had a bash at this deadly tactic.
Definitive on the topic.
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20 Responses to “Book review: of capital and car bombs”
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“We play multiple roles all the time”
There-in, I think, lies a great truth usually ignored by single-minded political fanatics, or, politicians, as they are called. Thus, Marxists will automatically place individuals (but not neccesarily themselves!) into specific classes, whilst, say, marketing people will box us all up in to specific income groups. It is only in our private lives that we see what nonsense this is and recognise that within our own individual hinterland there are, so to speak, ‘many mansions’.
But if we want to change the world for the better we the workers need to see ourselves as part of a class, that way we can once and for all end class relations that have plagued humanity.
David Duff,
If Marxists and marketing people do place people in boxes for the purpose of making them objects of study, then that is because a degree of reductionism is always going to be required by any attempt to study social processes.
People don’t need to employ reductionism when thinking about themselves as private individuals. In fact, to do so would probably invite a diagnosis of psychosis.
I cannot help but reproduce ‘Deviation’s’ comment in full:
“But if we want to change the world for the better we the workers need to see ourselves as part of a class, that way we can once and for all end class relations that have plagued humanity.”
Isn’t that just, too, too, delicious for words?
‘CGW’, I am all for it as a theoretical exercise provided you remember why you *invented* these categories in the first place and do not ever forget that they are composed of individuals, because it can lead to this sort of thing so, so, easily:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/worst-madness/?pagination=false
Wow David, you really are insightful. So a class is composed of individuals? I would never have guessed. What exactly else would they be composed of?
The fact that a class is composed of individuals does not mean that classes were “invented” (though I guess you were channeling Thatcher here). A “family” is composed of individuals. There are also such things as families.
But I guess that, despite having absolutely nothing to say, you just needed to throw out another reminder to us all that Stalin killed a lot of people and it’s all our fault. Fuck off.
The description here of David Harvey’s position on class seems so removed from my reading of this book (and his other work such as A Brief History of Neoliberalism), that I have to wonder if you read it or just skimmed it?
Harvey certainly has a very pessimistic view of the current scope for organised labour to oppose or challenge capital (especially where neo-liberalism has become strongly entrenched like Britain and the US). Considering how weak the left has become here, and with the Labour Party now firmly in the neo-liberal camp, I can’t see much to argue with on that. In Red Pepper (http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Their-crisis-our-challenge) he said:
“Whether we can get out of this crisis in a different way depends very much upon the balance of class forces. It depends upon the degree to which the entire population says ‘enough is enough, let’s change this system’. Right now, when you look at what’s been happening to workers over the last 50 years, they have got almost nothing out of this system. But they haven’t risen up in revolt. In the US over the last seven or eight years, the condition of the working classes in general has deteriorated, but there has been no mass movement against this. Finance capitalism could survive the crisis, but whether it does depends entirely upon the degree to which there is going to be popular revolt against what is happening, and a real push to try to reconfigure how the economy works… labour, and particularly organised labour, is only one small piece of this whole problem, and it’s only going to have a partial role in what is going on. And this is for a very simple reason, which goes back to the failure of Marx and how he set up the problem. If you say to yourself the formation of the state-finance complex is absolutely crucial to the dynamics of capitalism, and you ask yourself what social forces are at work in contesting that or setting it up, labour has never been at the forefront. Labour has been at the forefront of the labour market and the labour process, which are important moments in the circulation process, but most of the struggles that have gone on over the state-finance nexus are populist struggles.”
I think his ‘co-evolution’ model to describe how change occurs dialectically is an attempt to break away from the static ‘base-superstructure’ view that has dominated certain marxist approaches while avoiding the John Holloway trap of retreating to the ‘cracks’ in capitalism. I’m not sure how useful Harvey’s model is but I think you do him a disservice by being so dismissive.
If you have a look at some of his talks that have been posted on Youtube (or on his own site http://davidharvey.org/) you will find that he is arguing for the hard, long-term, work of building alliances between the dispossessed and the dissatisfied to halt capital’s ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and the creation of popular support for an alternative to ‘disaster capitalism’. As he says, anyone with any sense ought to be an anti-capitalist.
@Duff: Read some Lukács, or anyone really. This is ‘Baby’s First Introduction to Socialism’ stuff.
Also, picking out on what I imagine is the intentional implication of DD’s reference to marketers, grouping people by income is of course necessary if you want to do redistribution – David presumably would have us believe that subjecting the rich to a high rate of tax fails to appreciate them as individuals, and after all if we don’t do that then we’re bound for totalitarianism.
I don’t mind doing 80′s left-wing politics all over again, just so long as we don’t have stereotypical 80′s right-wingers like David turning up to recite the platitudes.
David Duff -
Why “invent” these categories in the first place? Because what else are you going to think with, other than categories? This isn’t even ‘Baby’s First Introduction to Socialism’ – it’s the basis of not just the scientific method, but the very concept of the Enlightenment project itself (hence your clunking and clumsy reference to 20th Century totalitarianism). Incidentally, your reference to “individuals”, who apparently don’t belong to any categories, is truly bizarre in its defiance of mathematical set-theory. Maths, Enlightenment, science… These are your enemies. Trust me, they are a great deal more credible than you.
But keep posting your gibberish, Duffer – you’re doing a good job of giving counter-revolutionaries a bad name.
Hmmn! I seem to have touched an exposed nerve here, perhaps it was my link that proved a tad too close to home for some of you, er, revolutionaries! Not comfortable, is it, reading about what happens when you categorise people to the exclusion of all else.
I do not deny the existence of invented social categories, nor even their limited usefulness, I only warn against over-reliance on them. For example, I never stop asking for a definition of ‘the working class’ but answer comes there none, or at least, an answer that isn’t utterly peurile.
And on the subject of peurile, ‘CGW’ calls me by inference a “counter-revolutionary”! As far as I recall the last revolution in this country was in the 17th century, but perhaps I missed something. The only ‘revolutions’ to be seen amongst you lot are your eye-balls spinning in unison!
Hmm. I sat through two or three of Harvey’s video lectures on Capital (all credit to him for putting it free on iTunes, by the way). Perhaps I was tired, but it seemed to me that, for someone who claims to have read it 40 times, he wasn’t really able to explain its main concepts very well.
My real criticism, however, was that he didn’t seem to get the crucial point that Marx is an “organic” social analyst and critic, and that his terms grow out of and are implied by his presentation of the more concrete material. (For example, from the description of the way that capitalist manufacture develops into machine industry, we see the transition from formal to real subordination in the production process, each “stage” corresponding to two different mechanisms of extracting surplus value—ie absolute and relative surplus value [longer working hours vs a proportional reduction in labour costs through productivity gains].) Perhaps he makes that vital methodological link later on, but from what I saw, I’m not hopeful.
This made his presentation seem both needlessly abstract and inchoate, and his interspersed pronouncements on current events and personalities seemed embarrassingly modish—eg handing back the conventional wisdom of his social group (say, about the alleged intellectual limitations of Bush or the naughty greed of financial personnel). Pretty superficial, I thought, and misleading. I still intend to compare his Guide to Capital with the old one of Brewer, time allowing (and perhaps he’s better on paper than as a lecturer), but I got a strong sense from my first two of three encounters that the anti-emperor has raggedy clothes. 3/10. Must try harder.
“I seem to have touched an exposed nerve here, perhaps it was my link”
No David, I’ve been telling you to fuck off in pretty much every reply I’ve made to you. It’s because you’re a boor and a troll.
“I’ve been telling you to fuck off in pretty much every reply I’ve made to you.”
Yes, well, conversing is obviously not one of your strong points, JG, but given your self-confessed weakness for repeating yourself perhaps that’s just as well!
“given your self-confessed weakness for repeating yourself perhaps that’s just as well!”
Rich. I don’t remember any of your multiple comments saying anything more than “class, eh! what’s that all about!” and then ignoring the answers you get.
I see my comment from 11:25 is still “awaiting moderation”. Is there anything I can do to make amends?
Gordon
I’ve tried to approve it and the software won’t do it, for some reason. I cut and paste your contribution below. And BTW, I have read both books you mention all the way through!
The description here of David Harvey’s position on class seems so removed from my reading of this book (and his other work such as A Brief History of Neoliberalism), that I have to wonder if you read it or just skimmed it?
Harvey certainly has a very pessimistic view of the current scope for organised labour to oppose or challenge capital (especially where neo-liberalism has become strongly entrenched like Britain and the US). Considering how weak the left has become here, and with the Labour Party now firmly in the neo-liberal camp, I can’t see much to argue with on that. In Red Pepper (http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Their-crisis-our-challenge) he said:
“Whether we can get out of this crisis in a different way depends very much upon the balance of class forces. It depends upon the degree to which the entire population says ‘enough is enough, let’s change this system’. Right now, when you look at what’s been happening to workers over the last 50 years, they have got almost nothing out of this system. But they haven’t risen up in revolt. In the US over the last seven or eight years, the condition of the working classes in general has deteriorated, but there has been no mass movement against this. Finance capitalism could survive the crisis, but whether it does depends entirely upon the degree to which there is going to be popular revolt against what is happening, and a real push to try to reconfigure how the economy works… labour, and particularly organised labour, is only one small piece of this whole problem, and it’s only going to have a partial role in what is going on. And this is for a very simple reason, which goes back to the failure of Marx and how he set up the problem. If you say to yourself the formation of the state-finance complex is absolutely crucial to the dynamics of capitalism, and you ask yourself what social forces are at work in contesting that or setting it up, labour has never been at the forefront. Labour has been at the forefront of the labour market and the labour process, which are important moments in the circulation process, but most of the struggles that have gone on over the state-finance nexus are populist struggles.”
I think his ‘co-evolution’ model to describe how change occurs dialectically is an attempt to break away from the static ‘base-superstructure’ view that has dominated certain marxist approaches while avoiding the John Holloway trap of retreating to the ‘cracks’ in capitalism. I’m not sure how useful Harvey’s model is but I think you do him a disservice by being so dismissive.
If you have a look at some of his talks that have been posted on Youtube (or on his own site http://davidharvey.org/) you will find that he is arguing for the hard, long-term, work of building alliances between the dispossessed and the dissatisfied to halt capital’s ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and the creation of popular support for an alternative to ‘disaster capitalism’. As he says, anyone with any sense ought to be an anti-capitalist.
Here’s my review of Davis’ book.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
CAR bombs have become so much a feature of world events that unless one takes place close to home, or has particularly gruesome features or global political consequences, it is often but a fleeting item in the daily media in Britain. But as I reviewed this book, a car bomb in Lebanon killed General François El-Hajj, the chief of the Lebanese general army staff, an act which Robert Fisk, an authority on Middle East affairs, feared would raise serious questions for the future of that country. Moreover, he wrote: ‘Almost every other week we are faced with an assassination. And, much worse, we are supposed to expect it.’
Mike Davis, the well-known expert on urbanisation, has produced a concise history of this lethal device, from its prototype in the form of a bomb on a horse and cart detonated in New York’s financial district by the Italian immigrant anarchist Mario Buda in 1920 (or the bomb-laden cart intended to assassinate Napoleon Bonaparte in Paris in 1800), through its first widespread use in Palestine in the late 1940s, to its almost weekly or even daily deployment after 1970. He looks at the use of car bombs not only by political organisations and covert state operatives, but also by the Mafia in Italy and major drug-runners in Colombia.
Davis outlines seven ‘salient characteristics’ of car bombs. They are ‘stealth weapons of surprising power and destructive efficiency’, with lorries and vans able to carry several tons of explosives; they are effective advertisements for a cause, and ‘their occurrence is almost impossible to deny or censor’; they are very cheap; they are easy to organise; they are ‘inherently indiscriminate’ in their effect; they are ‘highly anonymous’, and this can benefit those — mainly covert state forces — who wish to conceal their involvement; and most importantly they give ‘extraordinary socio-political leverage’ to small and insignificant groups, and give more potency to otherwise weak organisations. In respect of the fifth factor, their indiscriminate nature, Davis makes the significant point that this renders the car bomb ‘an inherently fascist weapon guaranteed to leave its perpetrators awash in the blood of innocents’; indeed, its use can undermine the moral credibility of a cause, such as in the cases of the IRA and the Basque nationalists ETA in Spain.
The first widespread use of motor-borne bombs was by the Zionist extremists of the Irgun and Stern Gang in their fight for a Jewish state in Palestine. Several indiscriminate attacks in Arab areas led to equally vicious reprisals from Arab nationalists, who used exactly the same methods. Graham Greene’s estimation that the CIA was behind a series of car bombs in Vietnam in the early 1950s seems convincing. The OAS, the underground militia of the French colonists in Algeria, waged a wholly indiscriminate war in the early 1960s, particularly against Algerian citizens, to try to provoke a race war in France. A widespread and devastatingly effective campaign of vehicle-borne bombs was run against US personnel in Vietnam during 1963-66, the lessons of which the US authorities seemed to forget in their later overseas ventures. The IRA discovered the advantages of fertiliser-based bombs, and in its biggest operation planted 22 car bombs in Belfast on 21 July 1972, exploding in rapid succession. Loyalist paramilitaries, perhaps with the help of British undercover soldiers, exploded car bombs in Dublin. Three hefty IRA bombs in London in the mid-1990s caused extensive and costly damage (although, contrary to Davis’ statement, Liverpool Street station was not ‘wrecked’). Other frequent deployers of car bombs are ETA, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and the Chechen militants, whose actions are described in detail.
The Middle East is the central focus of much of this book, and for good reason. In the early 1980s, Lebanon was the scene of a bewildering constellation of guerrilla groups and shadowy state operators, often involving foreign countries, many of whom used motor-borne bombs as a means of terror and/or assassination. This conflict introduced the new concept of the suicide motor-bomber, and Hezbollah’s use of this would ‘transform the balance of power in the Middle East’, not least with the demolition of the US Embassy and a US marines’ barracks in Beirut, the latter killing 241 US servicemen. The CIA and Israel’s Mossad were busy arranging car bombs in Lebanon, and the former had another area of operation in Afghanistan training Islamicist guerrillas, as was Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence. This, of course, would come back to haunt the USA some years later, both at home and abroad. The Middle East conflict impacted on the other side of the world when in 1994 a car bomb probably planted by Hezbollah destroyed a Jewish community centre in Argentina, killing 85 people.
To bring the book up to (nearly) the present, Davis in-vestigates the situation following the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, with the disintegration of those two countries, and the rise of extreme Islamicist groups, some under the aegis of al Qaeda. This combination, along with the easy availability of explosives, has resulted in a frightful campaign of sectarian killings in Iraq, as extremist Sunni groups use car bombs in indiscriminate attacks upon Shia citizens (Shia militias tend to use other means of murder). It is true that since Davis completed this book, the Sunni extremists’ sectarian campaign against Shias has been slowed by large-scale mutual expulsions and the partitioning of Baghdad with Berlin-style walls (thus institutionalising sectarian divisions, and storing resentments for later), but it has by no means stopped.
There are a few matters raised in this book that might have benefited from some further investigation. Davis states that several bomb-layers for the Arabs in Palestine in 1947 were deserters from the British forces. Deserters usually wish to get away from military service, not get themselves in even more risky concerns. Were they more politically driven? An account of Oswald Mosley’s postwar activities informing us that British fascists contacted the Arab Office in London in order to join the Arab Legion ‘with the express intention of “killing Jews”’ (Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, Tauris, 2007, pp46-47) could be relevant. The Real IRA car bomb that killed 29 people in August 1998 in Omagh is mentioned in a chart, but is not investigated in the text. The outcry provoked by this bomb, the work of an Irish Republican splinter group which rejected the IRA’s cease-fire and Sinn Féin’s political trajectory, was enormous, and the atrocity sealed the fate of physical-force Republicanism, probably for ever. There have been persistent allegations that the British security services knew of the impending operation, but did not prevent it as they wanted to conceal the identity of an agent, whose cover would have been stripped if the motor containing the bomb had been intercepted; and that the spooks felt that one final atrocity — and one in a predominantly Catholic town at that — might (as indeed it did) spell the end of physical-force Republicanism, so they allowed the bombing to go ahead.
This book is related to Davis’ work in the study of urbanisation, as the car bomb is only effective in an urban setting, where motor vehicles are an accepted and unnoticed feature of everyday life, and in which ever larger numbers of people are gathered in confined spaces, making them increasingly vulnerable to death and injury should a bombing take place. The staggering rate of urbanisation, especially in the Third World, over the last half-century that Davis graphically illustrates in his World of Slums (Verso, 2007) does not of course merely mean more people living and working in towns, but more buildings, more roads, more motor vehicles, more anonymity — in short, all the requisite factors for the use of motor-borne bombs. Davis notes how globalisation has led to large resorts for Western holiday-makers being constructed in the Third World, and which have been targeted by, amongst others, al Qaeda; he notes the increased use of ‘rings of steel’ and other methods of deterrence in cities against car bombs, and how the threat is ‘producing the most significant mutations in city form and urban lifestyle’; and he notes how the huge numbers of commercial vehicles in the USA (and by implication elsewhere) make the detection of vehicle-borne bombs very difficult:
‘In truth, cities as large as Baghdad, London or Los Angeles, with their vast seas of cars, trucks and buses, and their thousands of vulnerable institutions and infrastructural nodes, will never enjoy universal security. Like drug dealers, car bombers will always find a place to do business.’
And, as Davis states, because current socio-economic reforms and national concessions seem unlikely to assuage popular discontent, ‘the car bomb probably has a brilliant future’. We have been warned.
Liek Dave, I agree witha lot of Havery’s political economy (though it’s often so multi-causal you can find something new on each reading).
But it’s not just Harvey’s co-evolution theories which are doubtful, but his political strategy which is incoherent.
I concentrate on his ‘alliance’ in this:
That is,
http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/david-harvey%e2%80%99s-the-enigma-of-capital-and-the-politics-and-the-crisis/
Dr Paul. I enjoyed reading your re-car bombs. Your conclusion is absolutely spot on. The car is a great conveyor of death for the human race. Those with a gripe against society will continue to use it and those with a gripe may be killed by a car bomb used by others with a gripe. Most people with a gripe carry on in life doing good. And we should all be thankful for that or we would just blow each other up.