From 2006: Simi Valley Spectators

VENDREDI, JUIN 02, 2006

Simi Valley Spectators

Watching the Rodney King video, there were no challenges for an interpreter. A gang of police are attempting to beat a man to death. The gang's defence turned the video into television. By cutting it up and inviting the jurors - already eager for an excuse to find mere 'misjudgement' as an explanation - to view each blow in isolation. Overview was forbidden, context erased, and the reality thus replaced by a spectacle of its absolute opposite - a gang of police defending themselves ('incompetently', perhaps 'excessively') from the threat posed to them by a prostrate and half conscious man transformed into a spectacular menace/problem.

This same technique is put into play by corporate media on behalf of the White House. So the television invites us to view the Bush gang's policies chopped up, with intersticials and varying musical themes, in order that each fragment of the reality in turn may be transformed into a spectacle of its opposite, and never reassembled. We are invited to view the Bush agenda in discrete segments, as different television programmes each with a discrete narrative and a new set of stock characters: the Iraq Show, the Katrina Show, the Haiti Show, the Enron Show. The key to propagating the fraudulent interpretation - 'failure' 'misjudgment' - in each case is their contrived and deceptive isolation from one another, the prohibition of context and connection and the designation of most of the facts of each falsely isolated storyline (the role in the financial and political policy of the Bush gang, which is not compartmentalized but synthetic, any action that cannot be construed as a 'mistake') as self-evidently meaningless and anecdotal.

Each episode, considered separately, and with the subject of the profit to the same enterprise in each case forbidden, can then be deformed enough and manipulated enough to appear slightly puzzling, although the whole story, seen together, is crystal clear. Each episode is declared a separate, isolated incidence of an unforeseen "problem" met with unpreparedness, stupidity, laziness, cocky carelessness, delusion, misinformation and incompetence, of greater or lesser magnitude. The theme is irresponsibility - the absence of/opposite of responsibility - on the part of the protagonists who appear as new characters without history in each episode. Isolating each segment is in itself guaranteed to allow only completely fatuous explanations. But if you ignore the television, and look at the policy of the enterprise as a whole, it is very clear, as it is on the Rodney King tape that a gang is beating a defenseless guy to death, what the Bush gang is doing. All four discrete episodes have the same m.o., the same fashion of propaganda cover, the same con and a consistent result - immense profit, immense transfer of wealth from populations to the clique. In each televised case there is a similar ruse: Enron advertises itself as offering energy solutions to California and profit to shareholders. "Bankruptcy" appears out of nowhere like weather. Behind this ruse, the management drains and deliberately bankrupts the company for its own profit. It keeps its profit and confesses its incompetence and pays a little ceremonial price. In Katrina, FEMA advertises itself as an organisation dedicated to rescue and disaster management. "Natural disaster" appears, an act of God. Like the Enron management, the FEMA management are portrayed as a new protagonist in a brand new television series, and they too are incompetent and fail in their advertised mission. Behind this ruse operates, deliberately and cunningly, the very same wealth transfer operation. The Iraq Show, The Haiti Show, the 9/11 Show are all in this same genre. To buy the keystone kapos plot each discretely televised special unwinds - in an amazingly repetitive fashion - we need only to accept the television's isolation of each plot fragment from the other, be accustomed as television has made us to viewing each television miniseries or programme as its own fictional world (Superman will not arrive at the Huxtable house, the Law and Order world will not have cases based on X-Files events, Jesus Christ will not be rushed into the ER for elaborate resuscitation attempts), and have the short, indeed the forbidden memory, of a television audience.

The Bush gang does not care about "their image" in the spectacle; they care about its efficacy for their enterprise. They are not fooled by the spectacle; they manipulate it. Not absolutely monolithically, but very skillfully and dominantly, with much witting and unwitting co-operation from competitors and 'opponents'. They do not see Iraq as belonging to a different reality from that to which the energy markets of the US belong, as "The Iraq Show" belongs to a different reality than "The Enron Show" in the spectacle - these are both seamless elements of their own enterprise and their own reality. They are finance capital, they know that oil, New Orleans real estate, anti-biological weapons drugs and Iraqi labour are money, money which can appear tomorrow in a Chinese or Haitian sweatshop, flooding into the Saudi stock market, or fleeing from Venezuela's. They do not especially care if "The US" eventually "loses" the war in Iraq; that is a possibility that is acceptable, just as the exposure of the October Surprise, Iran-Contra, the convictions, the condemnation by the World Court was an acceptable possibility and happened and was coped with without tears, anguish, or significant negative consequences. It didn't ruin the business; it didn't make the caper not worthwhile or regretted; the possibility was certainly foreseen and judged no discouragement to the enterprise. They are not career military men; they are not career intelligence bureaucrats; they are not patriotic or ethnic nationalists, they are very advanced finance capitalists. They don't think "the US" "failed" in Vietnam or in Afghanistan or Kosovo. The world does not appear to them in the guise of a boys' adventure novel from the Victorian era of Empah. A national entity 'winning a war' in the spectacle is a matter of indifference to them; a national entity 'winning a war' 'on the ground' is meaningless to them; they are beyond the fictions of nations and wars, they play with these abstractions with great deftness and flexibility, in narratives of the past and the spectacular narratives of the present equally. They stand in Auschwitz to ostensibly celebrate and indeed take credit for the set-back defeat of a capitalist empire by the USSR, they who took up the mantle, the money, the organisation and the personnel of the 'loser' and continued the war and won it in the second round. If "the US" is "humiliated", if "Enron" "disgraces" them are utterly inconsequential; that is all happening on television; that is nothing but the utterances of spokesgolems, circuses.

This series of specials, Whoopsie I, Whoopsie II, Whoopsie III etc, has resulted in the collection into the hands of the clique a massive sum of capital greater than many signifcant central banks, which together with their now despotic control of the US treasury has given this clique a capital dominance - not absolute control, but a dominance - unknown in history. The Iraq war has allowed huge sums to be shifted from that treasury to the clique's own hands, out of the range even of the Congress' greatly enfeedbled but nominal control. We are asked to believe this unprecedented accumulation was all an accident, a series of unlucky rolls of the dice which then were haphazardly found to be convenient after the fact, due to very quick reactions to the opportunities/problems created by their own incompetense+semite-horde-weather which they neither planned/assisted nor foresaw. Miraculous brinksmanship, skill and competence in the face of the disasters their unimaginable, chronic incompetence created: the most implausible combination of the extreme gift of infallibility triggered, serendipitously without fail, by 'problems' arising from their own indolence and incompetence in reaction to (completely imaginary or fabricated) exterior nemesis, enemies and the incomprehensible caprices of God and Nature.

It is futile to inquire into, to 'theorize', the leading capitalist clique's posture toward 'the State' conceived of as a fairy. For them, it is not a fairy, but a specific set of material realities which can be manipulated, used, abolished, transformed, and adjusted by human action. They do not worship or fetishize it; they do not believe in it as a truly independent force, shaping history. They care nothing for its reputation beyond the uses that reputation serves their enterprise. They don't mistake it for a beloved object and they don't identify with it. They may approve when spectacle calls them "the US" but they know its not their real name, but only their swoosh or swastika, a useful brand and mask. They are hostile to that aspect of the state through which their own actions are regulated and checked by competitors and populace, and they work - very successfully - to dismantle or neutralise-and-preserve-for-later this capacity; capital cliques do this in a variety of ways; in the US this involved drastic changes in the state itself, in its laws, institutions, resources, legitimacy; in the EU there are some changes in the individual states, accomplished with more difficulty, alongside an effort to create a supernational body, the EU, above the states so that this regulatory capacity and democratic aspect of each state can be merely superseded (since it is proving too difficult to abolish it as was done in the US, due to resistance). At the same time the leading capital clique work to enhance their own control over and capacity to use other aspects of the State, to put those aspects at the service of its enterprise of accumulation: above all, the State's ability to borrow money - from the clique among other sources - on behalf of the population, to transfer that money (back) to the clique as gifts, and spend it on extra-economic methods of controlling people and expropriating their assets. The leading capital clique seeks to instrumentalise the State with increasing efficiency for its enterprise and decreasing competition and obstacles; it has only an interest in propping up the independent power of the state when it requires the state's protection from competitors and public, not when it has achieved such dominance that the state's relative independence becomes a nuisance and it no longer requires compromises. The same is the case with international legal institutions - the UN for humanitarian law and the laws of war, the WTO and other trade treaty bodies for contract law; these are supported when required and weakened when they become checks on the increase of the clique's own power.

Over the past twenty-five years one can see its progress in this endeavor, achieved with planning, patience, ruthlessness and skill. This is not the result of some strange ideology but of the dynamics of class struggle in capitalism itself. It is the continued pursuit of accumulation, reacting to defeats and set backs and compromises, availing itself of opportunities, capitalizing on victories. The changes in foreign and domestic policy style tactics and rhetoric of the US is not the result of a back and forth between warring visions of capitalism but a progression in which change comes about historically, through a series of conflicts in which the leading capital clique is the strongest player and has become stronger over time and through the pursuit of its own successful strategy - not omnipotent, always contested - to increase its strength.