Bull running for San Fermín

Bull running is a traditional practice in Spain. After having been popularised abroad by Hemingway, it is also a magnet for tourism. So you may be surprised to read that I am completely unacquainted with it, have never been around it being done, etc. This is not just a consequence–perhaps it even is the cause!–of me thinking that running before bulls that weigh more than 500kg is, putting it euphemisticly, less than the best idea humanity has ever come up with.

The bull runnings started out from the custom of moving the bulls from the place where they were kept to the place where bullfights occurred. Youths decided that while the bulls were being conducted it would be cool to prove their courage by exposing themselves to them. Eventually this, instead of being stopped on the grounds of being very dangerous and a public order programme, became a hallowed custom. This is why you know we’re talking about Spain

Bulls during the bull-runnings in Pamplona, for the feast of San Fermín, go at an average of 24km/h–6.6…m/s. They weigh upwards of 500kg, for instance the one which recently killed a runner last week weighed 575kg. So they embody a kinetic energy of about 12500 joules. If you think exposing yourself to 12500j directed over a surface of only a few squared mm–the tips of two horns, at most–is a fun idea, then you, too, can become a bull runner!

Before you make your mind, though, I would advice you to watch the following. Or you could simply take my word for it: being gored by bulls is not fun.

Another matter is bullfighting, something with which I’m not well acquainted either. For whatever reason, Galicia is not a region given to these passtimes. Nonetheless, while bull-running is plainly stupid–res ipsa loquitur–I’m not quite so sure about bullfights. There is a point to be made that they are a cruel and anachronistic celebration, a festival of death and torture, but I think that may well be selling them short. I think there may well be a non-trivial artistic component in them, something that has cultural value even today. Much of the opposition against them comes from a sensibility towards animal rights that is foreign to us and, why not say it, seems like Anglo-Saxon prejudice to a great extent. I’m unconvinced we should import this way of thinking about animals, sentimentalised and certainly divorced from the cycle of life and death on which we all, with or without our will, depend. It is the same way of thinking that recoils from considering the slaughtering of animals for food, or their presentation in recognisably animal forms, yet does not recoil from eating the same animals if they have been chopped and disguised so that they do not remind of a living being anymore. Given that, I prefer a conscious understanding that our life requires other living beings–animals, plants, fungi, bacteria–to die. At least, on this understanding respect and insight can grow when regarding that sacrifice. So I suppose my conclusion is that, being completely ignorant of what cultural value bullfighting has, I am, nonetheless, unsympathetic to similarly ignorant attempts to forbid it, on the basis of foreign and particularist values of dubious worth.

State of the holy war for commodified ideas: the Spanish front

Quite often my attitude in regards the judiciary of Spain should be described as showing an intellectual debt to the school of Diogenes: cynicism is a common appropriate reaction to much of the state of “justice” in this Iberian kingdom. However, and why not say it, let this be precedent, there are times when the third power of the state does something that surprises me and delights me–I suppose an outcome of my low expectations.

In the US, the European Union, the WTO, and other national, supranational and international organisations, a holy war is being waged, which like all holy wars contains the appearance of an essential ideological clash, a veritable stand on principles, the regard for rights, and so on, while, underlying it all, there is cold hard cash. Of course this cold hard cash is a bit more nebulous and hypothetical than a note lying on a wallet or some coins plunked down on a table, but capitalism has over time shown its ability to securitize and build over the most abstract and symbolic manifestations of wealth or the mere potential for wealth. I speak here of wealth in an ordinary sense, which is to say, in terms of exchange value. There are entire international bureaucracies–WIPO springs to mind–attempting to ensure that these dreams and hopes get cashed into concrete, current legal tender.

On the one hand, we have the knights of “intellectual property”, who tend to think of themselves as rights-holders, content owners, and, when issuing PR material, content creators, much of a fiction as this may be. On the other hand, the arrayed armed forces of copying: within this side, which is not always quite as unified as the other, different ranks and forces mingle with a common cause. The knights of consumer electronics, the armoured brigades of the computer hardware industries, and a daring yeomanry–longbow in hand–of pirates. Needless to say, although the material support of knights and armour is a necessary condition for this side to continue the struggle, it is the yeomans that have changed the balance of the war, making people on the other side incredibly nervous, and, why not say it, making their own allies wonder: will this one day happen to us?

In this,as in many occasions, it is necessary to take sides, but we must do so with no illusions. It’s not that makers of consumer electronics and computer hardware are our friends, it is simply that this part of capital has revolutionised the sphere of distribution, undercutting other sectors. As to people who wonder whether we should support copying, I remind them that the word copy comes from the Latin copia, a word that means abundance. If anyone asks why we shouldn’t support copying, ask them why we shouldn’t support abundance: in this case it is not a mere rhetorical trick, the etymology contains an important truth.

This phase of the confrontation involves what amounts to acts of desperation from the side of intellectual monopolies. Having observed that their property does not ground itself in the objective conditions of production and distribution as they have come to evolve over time, their only out is to engage in the other way to establish monopolies: demand state protection and legislated privilege. As Eben moglen–an exceedingly shrewd legal mind and political thinker–has said:

The technology of the late 20th century reversed the conditions of power that made it. This is not the first time that that system of social production called capitalism has had that effect. When I wrote a little thing called “The dotCommunist Manifesto” some while ago, I was doing it in order to show that a form of social analysis characteristic of those searching for freedom in the 19th century might bear some recognition in the 21st. Not as a matter of normative political analysis but as a comment on the actualities of the day. The struggle of bourgeois technology towards ever greater functioning such that it undermines its own conditions of existence was an observation made by shrewd onlookers a hundred and fourty years ago, and we live in the fulfillment of its truth. Ownership struggled to reduce its costs, to hold down the costs of making the commodity, in order to free itself to greater profit. And in the end, as was so shrewdly noted in the 1860s: “All that was solid melted into air, and air was something that we all knew we could freely breathe.” … And so we found ourselves confronting a system of power based upon ideas of property relations that the technology of the owners was already making obsolete. It is not possible for industrial organizations to do a better job of distributing music than 12 year-olds can do. Hence the world in which the music industry confronts the children on the barricades, attempts to jail them, fine them, control them, and loses. The same is true for all the other forms of art given to us by the 20th century and being freed by the very technology that the controllers of artists hoped would control art even further. This, like the adoption of movable type printing at the end of the 15th century, constitutes a moment at which the powers of control have adopted technology which transforms their conditions of existence, will they, nil they. They do not will it but it happens to them anyway. And the technology that they have freed, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, finds itself overwhelmed by its own implications.

The problem with these manoeuvres is that at this stage of the development of capital it is difficult to square such privileges with the necessary ideology of free agency and decisions by the market. However, in order to override these ideological considerations, our enemies have something that has always worked pretty well in that regard: lots of money.

So what has come to pass over the last 15 years or so is a progressive tightening of copyright law–patents are beyond the scope of this essay. The fundamental commonalities involved are the progressive decrease in the use of defences such as fair use or fair dealing, the weakening of the doctrine of first sale through provisions of contract law analogical to renting, and the attempt to privatise the whole matter of contract and licences through the mechanism of drm–digital restrictions management.

DRM is the dream of every capitalist, a sort of equivalent of the economic perpetual motion machine: zero marginal production costs–digital copies are essentially free–yet the eternal opportunity to monetise those goods and a monopoly of their production. I say eternal mindfully, given that although copyright expires, DRM emphatically does not. So think of DRM as the great swindle, selling people the air they breathe. The fundamental problem of DRM is that, as it is the case with all perpetual motion machines, it happens to be impossible. Of course, what happens when a perpetual motion machine is impossible is that all serious research moves away from making them, but a good number of swindlers and con men try to sell the appearance of the miracle. This is a strange curlicue in the story, because software companies, the ones best positioned to know that DRM is a pipe dream, are the ones trying to sell this magic to the other “creative” industries, and doing an admirable hope of confusion. Again, if you can’t get a perpetual motion machine, a good substitute is a machine with very little friction which bystanders are obliged by law to push whenever it runs out of energy: this is the physical equivalent of the anticircumvention provisions instituted in modern copyright statutes, such as the DMCA, EUCD and transposing laws, etc.

In most jurisdictions, there have been significant successes in fighting the spread of copying. People who shared a handful of songs have been fined unspeakable amounts of money, people selling CDs in the streets have been jailed, and so on. Even in Sweden, home of the Pirate Bay, the legal terrain of the battle appears to be strongly on the side of the enemies of abundance. However, and for now, Spain resists this tendency, not, in the main, thanks to its legislators, as fascinated by shiny objects as any, nor its executive power, neither better nor worse than most social democracies, but, weird as this may be, by the consistent and persistent response of its judiciary.

The fundamental distinctive factor in Spain in terms of legislative content is the right–contained in law–of private copying without profit motive. Contrary to many instances of the concept of profit motive in Spanish law, this is being integrated and interpreted in a mercantile sense: profit motive is understood as the intention to resell to seek surplus value. In other instances, profit motive is integrated and interpreted much more broadly, for instance when speaking of theft, in any utility derived from the act, whether the increase of the assets or the reduction of the liabilities, or even not having to realize a purchase. From this standpoint, though, private copying without profit motive would be entirely useless. When it comes down to it, even a backup has profit in the penal sense of the word–not the mercantile sense. So the Spanish judiciary have, probably on application of the doctrine of useful effect, utilized this narrower meaning of profit when reading the laws. This is why they have stated, several times, that copying content subject to author’s rights when done by individuals for private use and without any commercial intent is legal.

This has enraged the music and film factories, to the point that they have called Spain bad names–bad names that many, including myself, take pride on. What’s so wrong with being a land of pirates anyway, once you have defined piracy as any opposition to the outdated and moribund monopoly over copying which primary use is the increase of capital gains? They have tried to introduce their so-called three strikes legislation, without any success. They have tried to introduce throttling and filtering provisions in the laws, with identical results. they have, in desperation, tried to weaken Spain’s excellent protections of privacy. At last, they have tried to take to court those people they could identify as linking–giving sign posts, essentially–to their content. All for naught. The men and women in black have given them no ear, have sent their pretentions to Sheol. so we can celebrate this front in our global battle: while our justice remains at all justice, no pasarán! Fiat iustitia, ruat coelum!

On bribery

Recently the president of one of the Spanish autonomous communities–essentially regions–has been indicted on a count of what we could call, trying to be precise, a form of improper bribing. The story has its amusing details, given how the person in question has been denying having anything to do with the people who allegedly bribed him, then went onto denying having received gifts. Now that the indictment has been processed, and given he belongs to the partido popular–essentially a right-wing coalition of conservatives and neoliberals–the segment of the media who has supported the PP and will do so to the end has started changing tack. Since the evidence seems to be undeniable, and the calls from the president–by name Francisco Camps, incidentally–to wait yet a bit more for the next procedural step so that his innocence would at last be demonstrated beyond all doubt seem not to be believable anymore even by the base of the party, something new has had to be concocted, lest someone may get the completely incorrect idea that there was some sort of wrongdoing going on.

On this line there have been a handful of competing strategies, floated more or less simultaneously, while the relevant advisers do the necessary market research: On the one hand, the everyone does it strategy, which is not likely to function too well to mobilise a people tired of the same dirty politics, and may actually work against the PP, which has tried to create an image of being the exception, the only clean player in a pigsty; on the other hand, the everyone does it worse strategy, inaugurated by PP-friendly media, which may have a chance to fly if not for the fact that it has not been possible to point at worse in recent history, notwithstanding certain probably baseless allegations about subsidies in Andalucía which have not given rise to any indictments, and is actually undermined by the examples given by such PP notables as Rita Barberá, comparing the reception of gifts from private enterprises that got public contracts with the institutional gifts–canns of anchovies–bestowed by the president of Cantabria; but surely the boldest, and apparently the chosen strategy, is one we could baptise as it wasn’t wrong and the law should be changed accordingly strategy.

This assertion that receiving gifts as a public servant is normal, and not only is but should be, flies against a lot of the rhetoric that has been coming from the PP in recent years, as well as being clearly self-interested, and contrary to the stance of a party that claims to support, alone and surrounded by knaves, the elusive rule of law: the suggestion that the Penal Code should be changed right after one of their first swords got speared by it, is so obviously partial and disingenuous that I must confess a certain admiration for the boldness and shamelessness of the gesture.

The article involved is article 426 of the Penal Code, which reads thus:

The authority or public functionary that shall accept a gift or present that would be offered in consideration to their function or in order to obtain an action that is not forbidden by law, shall incur the penalty of a fine of 3 to 6 months.

It is possible to claim that this article is excessively rigorous with public servants, and that it should be relaxed. It is possible to claim that it should only be applied in cases in which the magnitude, or the involvement of the giver with the public functionary in question, are sufficient to justify the play of penal law. What’s not reasonable, nor credible, is that such an article should be derogated from the code.

There are other articles in the code which refer to bribes in the context of quid pro quo: a gift in exchange for an illegal act, a gift in exchange for an unjust act, a gift in exchange for an act that is due and must be done by the functionary, and a gift that is given in exchange for the omission of an act that is legally due by the functionary. These 4 instances of bribery are clearly graver than that typified by article 426. Is the bribery of article 426 so minor that it should be ignored by the law, as the PP apologists wish us to believe? Well, put simply, no.

The fundamental reason why article 426 exists and should exist–and I would like to bring your attention to the fact that although PP reformed the Penal Code several times it never decided to change or anull article 426–is because this type of crime is by necessity committed by people who know reasonably well what they are doing, have means to hide it, and advisers to help them do so. It is therefore extremely difficult to prove one of the more qualified types: who in their right mind would leave incriminating written records of the promises made for which gifts were offered? This is the reason why this article should continue to be applied: it would be otherwise all too easy to hide the other types under the legal hole left by its anullment. In addition, let’s be real here: why would public functionaries receive gifts from those who contract with the state in consideration of their function? Seriously, if not anything else a case must be made that such gifts distort the unconscious impressions of the functionary and will lead them to award contracts under preferential conditions, but we don’t need to be so subtle to believe that when a profit-seeking agent gives something to a public functionary they are expecting something in return.

It may never be possible to prove that Camps was the author of one of the qualified types of bribery, although the business which allegedly bought him the gifts has been involved in exceedingly irregular actions with other public functionaries–what a coincidence, from the PP also. This in itself would, in my mind, create a pretty strong presumption. However, Camps’ innocence, as everyone else’s, is presumed in law, and it is the prosecution’s job to destroy this presumption at trial if the evidence exists and can be obtained. What’s not at all credible, on the light of already existing evidence, is to hold that Camps had nothing to do with this, that he paid for the gifts, that he didn’t know these people–a conversation has been recorded in which he told the generous patron something to the effect of “my friend, I love you to bits”–and similar lines of bullshit that are being peddled by the rightwing press.

On political stances

It is difficult being a Marxist in a capitalist world. Sometimes this makes one think that maybe there is something wrong with the whole enterprise of scientific socialism, that perhaps there is a way to realize the promises of markets with just enough, or just the right kind of, regulatory apparatus. Admittedly this state of mind doesn’t usually last too long, as the state of the world leaves little room for such illusions. However, there’s something perverse in how difficult it is to understand Marxism, explain it to others, and with some luck get them to accept it.

before I started writing, I was thinking of other scientific disciplines, like physics or chemistry. Although political economy is in some respects a difficult discipline in comparison, due to the human factor and the difficulty in isolating confounding variables, it seems strange that Marxism is so difficult to defend as a viable model of the economy. However, thinking longer on it, I suppose it is not more difficult than being a heliocentrist was in its day, or an atomist.

There is a position, that is more closely associated with anarchist groups, that all one needs to do to fight the existing system is denounce it as immoral. These people believe that the immorality of the system can be easily demonstrated and that moral appeals will convince a good amount of the population to support a change. Marxism, in contrast, has a more sophisticated view, based on the idea that the ideological positions people take are largely superstructural, and that they derive from practical experience and, in sum, from the economic realities. I used to think this position was evidently true: without undergoing certain experiences, it will be difficult to embrace a certain position, no matter its logic. So the working class cannot arrive to Marxism by mere pamphleteering, although those pamphlets are key whenever the objective conditions become propitious, and the experiences of the class crystallize in a qualitative change. But to what extent is this true?

I don’t have much of a background in psychology. However, as a rule, people find it easier to believe those things which would be more convenient. So why does Marxism get such a sceptic reception from its natural audience–the working classes–and not quite as much scepticism from what we could call the intelligentsia?

I’m sure I’m not the first person to notice this. In fact, I’ve often read commentary to this effect on Marxmail. However I haven’t found any explanations that were convincing on the reason for this state of affairs. In addition, if the working class must undergo certain experiences in order to be able to comprehend Marxism as a practical direction, and not simply by rote and indoctrination, is there any thing that can be done by Marxists to hasten this day, or is our function simply to keep Marxism alive while the conditions mature for its uptake? In fact, one could think that, if the question is objective and experiential, keeping Marxism alive is of little value, as the class itself will be able to develop an equivalent analysis when it comes to need it. Of course having one ready to be processed might make things go more smoothly, but it is hard to believe that Marx’s genius–great as it may be–would be so unique that the world’s working class could not develop something like it in due course.

In the meantime, while we think on theory and denounce injustice, we remain as powerless as ever, and the world continues moving in very dangerous directions. On the one hand, the limits of nature, certainly not in an absolute sense but very likely under this mode of production, are starting to become uncomfortably close. On the other hand, the resurgence of nationalism seems to echo the warnings from the 1930s, when the world slid from an economic crisis into a world war.

What can we do, aside from what Marxists have been doing for more than a century now? Is there any chance to avert these dangers, and to give a push to the existing objective conditions? Is democratic centralism, or its interpretation, as some suggest, a fundamental subjective obstacle to the realization of a Marxist mass party?

I certainly don’t have good answers for these questions. If I did I would be trying to put them in practice, instead of spending unhealthy amounts of my time polemisizing with capitalists and trying to convince people of the labour theory of value. Something a friend of mine said to me is that we should, as Marxists, make more use of the bourgeois sciences: marketing, psychology, theory of organisation, that kind of thing. It’s a good suggestion in principle, as much as it is hard to put it in practice. Writing this had mostly the purpose of clarifying these problems in my mind, trying to work out the state of play, and inviting people to give me their ideas, although I know that it’s not likely I’ll get a lot of comments. But if you think you have something to say, anything to contribute, please do comment and let me know. What do you think? What Is To Be Done?

An interesting experiment in publishing

How often have you wished for publishers to issue stories with more quality? Of course when we talk about quality this is inevitably subjective, so in the end what it comes down to is wanting more stories we like. Unfortunately, not all of us are editors, nor could we be. Editing is difficult, expensive and necessarily specialized work… or is it?

There’s something to be said for job specialisation: in many respects it has been the key factor in the increase of labour output, or certainly one of them. To people like Heinlein, who say specialisation is for insects, I reply that it’s no coincidence insects are such incredibly successful organisms. Nonetheless, there are many things that once upon a time required specialised knowledge, and which have become commonplace: reading and writing are the obvious examples. So is there a chance that publishing fiction could be one of those cases too?

This is one of those questions that requires an experimental answer. No deductions from first principles here. Fortunately, the attempt has been done, so it’s possible to give a reasonably reality-grounded answer, and the answer is yes, with reservations.

The experiment involved setting up a website and an e-mail address to receive submissions, as well as a request for stories under specific terms. Not incredibly favourable commercial terms, but as it happens sufficiently favourable to obtain more than enough stories of good quality. Of course, it’s in the nature of publishing–and that’s what this was, even if unorthodox–that one must be able to advance the money. It’s therefore not exactly a risk-free venture.

Aside from the interesting verification of the claim that it is possible–though commercially difficult, perhaps not yet viable–to become a publisher by advancing some money, using print on demand and so on, the experiment had also another object, which is rather interesting in itself:

Even if you don’t like all the stories in Thoughtcrime Experiments, I hope you’ll agree that they’re of similar quality to the stories you see in big-name print magazines. The “experiment” behind Thoughtcrime Experiments was to verify the existence of such stories floating around in editors’ slush piles. To get a firsthand look it was necessary to become editors.

It turns out that indeed there is an oversupply of stories, not only with respect to readers, but also with respect to editors.

It’s well known that there’s an oversupply of stories relative to readers. That’s why rates are so low. Our experiment shows that there’s an oversupply of stories relative to editors. By picking up this anthology you’ve done what you can to change the balance of readers to stories. I wrote this appendix to show that you’ve also got the power to change the balance of editors to stories.

Of course something being possible doesn’t make it necessarily easy. In this case, I suspect the experience takes enough money and time that it won’t be very widely replicated, for now. It makes one think though: if indeed stories are oversupplied with respect to readers, how come people keep, in one way or another, paying for them? The argument that people pay for consistently good stories isn’t sufficient, since the experiment shows–to the extent this sample size can–that consistently good stories are oversupplied as well.

Perhaps the essential reason is readers do not have the energy to search for the consistently good stories. This requires, of necessity, an editor role. An editor role must invest time and money in separating good from bad stories, but, more to the point, because an editor role must invest time and money, it won’t be possible to publish all the good stories. A form of artificial scarcity–beyond the copyright question itself–must be created in order to support the infrastructure of publishing and editing.

So this is yet another way in which the commodity form and its imperatives shape our life, in this case our culture, by reducing the potential amount of value. Nothing new, I suppose, but an interesting application of the principle.

Honduras and Iran

I find it interesting to consider how differently these two situations are treated, both by the mainstream media and the mainstream currents of opinion.

I’m not saying they should be treated identically–there are important differences to be considered, after all–but the reasons why they are seem to be political, and not necessarily good.

So I’m going to focus on the similarities for a bit, just as a counterpoise.

• Both countries are under threat of force by their own armed forces.
• Both countries have seen their liberties curtailed.
• Both states are using pretexts that are widely questioned by the people.

Force against protests has taken place in both countries. Aside from the actions of the military against Zelaya, the military and police have attempted to disband the robust and massive demonstrations whereby the people have asked for a resumption of democratic processes, free from arbitrary military interference. More to the point, the people of Honduras have demonstrated in favour of their ousted president, defying the military and police, the political establishment, the rogue institutions (Congress and the Supreme Court) as well as the disinformation put forward by much of the press. Likewise, in Iran, the people have quite unambiguously demonstrated, if not against the Islamic Republic as such, certainly against abuses and mismanagement by Ahmadinejad’s government. In both cases there have been protests supportive of the establishment, the de facto power. These protests are hardly noticed when they happen in Iran; but when they happen in Honduras, the right wing in the imperialist countries amplifies them as an example of people fighting to keep their constitution alive. On the other side of the isle, I’ve often read and heard leftists minimising the protests in Iran, calling them shills for imperialism, suggesting they are paid-for agents of the CIA through the National Endowment for Democracy and similar funding instruments. Although it’s undeniable that there is funding for “dissident groups” in Iran, it is also becoming increasingly difficult to ignore that the protests taking place there are real, and the real outgrowth of a popular mobilisation, against real shortcomings of the Islamic republic–the electoral fraud being in many respects a mere pretext. Incidentally, it is also rather likely that the military of Honduras, which was trained and receives technical advice from the US, wouldn’t go ahead with an operation like this without engaging in any sort of consultation. Whatever the case may be, though, it’s very hard to find out, and the US, after some hesitance, seems to have opposed the coup this time (unlike the one in Venezuela in 2002).

With respect to the limitations of liberties, in both cases the state acted in relatively similar ways. It seems a well-developed playbook for the repression of popular mass action. The press was directly or indirectly taken over and forbidden to report on the issues. Telecommunications were cut or intervened. Electricity seems to have been cut as well. Controls on the movement of people. Repression of the protests that resulted. From what we know at this point, the repression which took place in Iran was more brutal than that in Honduras. I hope that the armed forces and the police will at least not engage in further attacks against peaceful protests, but I fear things have not run their course yet.

The pretexts under which the state has intervened to curtail people’s freedom and threaten them with force are on both cases widely disbelieved by the people. I don’t know whether there was electoral fraud in Iran, although I think that is rather likely. If there was, I don’t know whether it was substantive enough to change the electoral results. What appears clear though, is that people in Iran widely doubt the transparency and honesty of their electoral process, but, more to the point, the protests are only tangentially about whether a particular fact or not is true–whether there was fraud–and seem to be an indictment, if not of the Islamic Republic as a whole, of the direction it has been going under Ahmadinejad’s government and the Supreme Leader’s direction. In Honduras, the questions of fact are rather simpler to sort out, and here is where one of the fundamental differences lies: we know that there was a coup in Honduras, we suspect that there was electoral fraud in Iran.

I have already heard calls for a war against the Islamic Republic. These calls come from the usual suspects: neoconservatives, in the main. They want to repeat the humanitarian intervention manoeuvre that they tried in Iraq: have to cluster bomb the brave and freedom-loving Iranian people to save it from its own State. Aside from the plausibility that an imperialist coalition could be put together at this juncture to invade the Islamic Republic, these calls are curiously absent in the context of Honduras. Somehow, the interventionists and advocates of humanitarian intervention are silent about this other case, when not explicitly and violently opposed to any kind of intervention in the inner affairs of Honduras. Of course, they realize that such an intervention, which in any event I don’t think too plausible either, would come delivered by ALBA, or a similar coalition, so it would not be followed by colonial military administration with the concomitant imposition of the free market blueprint. While neoconservatives do not speak up for the rights of Hondurans, their preoccupation for the rights of Iranians–the same ones that they would like to cluster bomb–will sound particularly hollow to my ears.

Honduras: frequently unasked questions that should be asked

Inevitably I must go back to the topic of Honduras. In spite of trying to dispel much of the disinformation floating about, people are still making the same incorrect claims. Obama is now being accused of being a commie! If we should be so lucky!

Here is an excellent article (in Spanish) on the coup that does a very good job of explaining the situation, but perhaps what’s needed is more of an FAQ, though I’m not calling it an FAQ because the questions that need asking aren’t actually being frequently asked. So here’s a little FUQ on the situation in Honduras (you work out if the pun was intended).

Didn’t Zelaya break the law when calling the referendum to extend term limits? Zelaya didn’t call a referendum. Zelaya didn’t call a consultation to extend term limits. Zelaya called a non-binding popular consultation, essentially a poll, to find out what people thought of the idea of calling for a constituent assembly on the upcoming elections in November.

Right, but wasn’t Zelaya’s term over when the army acted because he wanted to keep in power? No, Zelaya’s term ends at the end of this year. In November there will be elections in Honduras, which will elect a new president. The candidate list is already final. Zelaya is not on it. I must make this point again, because people seem to have some problems digesting it: the candidate list for the upcoming November elections in Honduras is already final, Zelaya is not on it.

OK, but the Constitution forbids an attempt to increase term limits: isn’t this what Zelaya was implicitly doing? No. Let me go over this once more, slowly:

• Zelaya did not call for a referendum.
• The non-binding consultation did not refer to term limits.
• Whatever would have been the result, Zelaya would stop being president at the end of his term.

OK, but a new constitution could have increased term limits, couldn’t it? Yes–and then again, it could not. The whole point is that a new constitution would be a new constitution. By definition, it would be outside the constitutional purview of the currently existing instrument. If it would have increased term limits, this would be a result of the constituting power of the sovereign people of Honduras democratically expressed in a constituent assembly. Whatever the case would be, though, Zelaya would not directly benefit from it, certainly not these upcoming elections: the constituent assembly would have taken place after the elections, when Zelaya would have stopped being president of Honduras.

Right, but doesn’t article 239 forbid the breach or modification, or direct or indirect support thereof, of the provision that sets presidential term limits? Yes, it does. It is extremely far-fetched though, to believe that this provision is breached or modified by the non-binding consultation on whether to call a constituent assembly. The following could have happened:

• The people could have said no.
• The people could have said yes, but the assembly not be convened (Remember? Non-binding)
• The assembly could have been convened and no agreement could have been reached on a new Constitution.
• An agreement on a new Constitution could have been reached, and the people not have approved it.
• The people could have approved the new Constitution, which could contain the same term limits.

Holding that all these contingencies can be ignored and that the popular consultation itself breaches article 239 is utterly laughable, and, not to put too fine a point on it, completely lacking in any basis in law. If we’re going to do a reductio ad absurdum, why not say running for elections breaches this disposition? After all the president of the republic is the one with the power to propose the popular consultation, placing themselves in the position to breach term limits! Yeah, right. The verbs on the article are clear: to breach (not done) and to propose its reform (not done). End of story. A weak argument could be made that if the constituent assembly had been convened, people proposing the removal of term limits may be breaching this article. It’s a weak argument for several reasons, chief of it being that no constituting power can bind the future with its will. If a constituent assembly were chosen by the people of Honduras and then through referendum the people would have chosen to rule itself under a new Constitution, the constituting power from 1982 has nothing to say about that. No person can, even willfully, enter slavery, nor nation can be hostage of a Constitution: the people of Honduras is the full sovereign subject who can, if it so wishes, abolish this arrangement and institute a new one.

OK, but didn’t Zelaya breach the law, at least, when going against the Supreme Court’s writ? Maybe. This is a difficult question I don’t pretend to have a definite answer for. I do have a definite answer for some other issues that should be considered in reference to this question. The popular consultation law had never been decreed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Disobedience by the military to the president of the republic–whose chain of command terminates–is certainly contrary to law. The president can dismiss military leaders who disobey orders, contrary to the Supreme Court’s claim. There is no provision in the Constitution or the laws for the president to be kidnapped and exiled by the military, completely without due process.

OK, so you say what the military did was not legal, how should they have gotten rid of a president who broke the laws? Zelaya probably didn’t break the laws, but let’s assume for a second that he did. The proper procedure in this case would be impeachment by the National Congress. Let’s recapitulate what actually happened: the president was kidnapped through force of arms, put into a plane, and flown abroad by the military; a resignation letter was forged, and the president of Congress assumed the presidence of the republic.

Perhaps the president’s exile was illegal, but didn’t the president of Congress have the right to assume power now? No. Congress should have impeached, for which there are also some laws to follow, and which conditions are in all likelihood not satisfied. Instead, Congress contradicts itself, claiming on the one hand the separation of the president from his powers due to breach of article 239, and on the other hand the substitution by the president of Congress on the basis of that ludicrous ploy, the resignation letter. Be honest here: does it look to you like Zelaya really did resign?

OK, but now that Zelaya is abroad, isn’t the right thing to let the people of Honduras sort their own future out? Sure, and they are trying to do that, through protests, civil disobedience against the illegal de facto regime, and so on. The people of Honduras want their constitution restored and their legitimate president reinstalled. At least this is the feeling I get from most sources. Incidentally, they’re acting legally on the basis of article 3 of their Constitution, a rather elegant expression of the people’s legitimate right of resistance against naked force and lawlessness.

But if Zelaya is reinstalled, communism will spread over the world, Chávez/the terrorists will win and America fwill lose a vital partner and a friend who protects its interests in Central America, won’t it? That’s bad, isn’t it? To the first, all I can say is the same I’ve said about Obama: if we should be so lucky! To the second, bad for who: the US? Perhaps, in which case maybe it should consider stop giving implicit (or even explicit) backing to military coups in Latin America. For the people of Honduras? It doesn’t look that way to me, but, more to the point, it doesn’t look that way to them: it’s their country, it’s their call. In any event, in November they will be able to make these choices through democratic elections. So let the sovereign people decide!

Madoff: a socialist perspective.

So I’m glad to see the WSWS, a news source I respect as much as I may have certain ideological differences, analyses the Madoff spectacle on a very similar manner to that which I propose. Because they are not sitting an administrative law exam tomorrow and they are better at this whole journalism thing, they have a lot more concrete and unarguable basis to ground their article on:

While acknowledging that Madoff’s decision to plead guilty and cooperate with investigators seeking to unravel his schemes would ordinarily count in his favor, Chin underscored the political reasons for imposing the maximum sentence possible under the law. Madoff’s fraud had left his victims “doubting our financial institutions” as well as “our government’s ability to regulate,” he said.

So here we have it from the judge himself: the essential evil in Madoff’s actions–from the viewpoint of the ruling class–lies not on the swindle qua swindle (where do profits come from?) but on the mismanagement of the swindle, which has scared the marks, alarmed the cattle, frightened the prey… etc. The unacceptable sin of a bourgeois is the destruction of a very carefully cultivated state of appearance, which hides the reality of class exploitation behind a façade of reward for effort, free agents, and just and equal exchange of value for value. When these pillars of the bourgeois edifice are seen to shake under violations as deep and blatant as Madoff’s scheme, the working classes, whose labour is the source of all use values but those with which nature itself selflessly provides us, can see the reality hidden behind the screens: exploitation, subjection, alienation, and, in summary, the eternal swindle of surplus value extraction.

I’m not simply being hyperbolic when I speak of the systematic and necessary swindle entailed by capitalism. If you don’t want to believe in the greater–profits–at least consider the lesser, and realize Madoff is not the rare aberration which the press is attempting to depict, in the manner of a scapegoat, to burden with Wall Street’s crimes entire. Consider this:

At least a half dozen big hedge funds and private investors had close relations with Madoff, and seem to have had advance notice of his collapse—the bankruptcy trustee is now suing them for making more than $10 billion in withdrawals in the months before December 2008.

So while the press have their feeding frenzy at the expense of their chosen villain of the week, remember that Madoff’s more successful homologues have engaged in a great redistribution of wealth–from the bottom to the top–under the unquestionable guise of profits and financialization. In the meantime, the holders of political power get elected on a hazy platform of change and immediately proceed to bail these operators out, but, after all, they paid for the campaign. While we workers keep our illusions, both in the pillars of a building ever more subject to shaking and quaking, from the misdesign and inner tension instituted by the blind architect which was history, and in the political power which is all too often counterpoised to that economic edifice, while in reality it functions but as buttress of it, we’ll continue getting swindled, and, from time to time, we will wonder: does it have to be like this?

Madoff’s punishment and other forms of theatre

Recently on German Joys, I’ve read a post about the sentencing of Madoff which has made me think a bit about the whole judicial system, in particular when applied to what in effect are criminal celebrities like Madoff, as a sort of spectacle, a mechanism with similar uses than the classics have been said to attribute to tragedy.

Madoff’s biggest crime, if it can be called a crime, is that he got caught. He put in question, in a public and embarrassing way, that this whole setup we live under is but a big swindle, a swindle which dimensions would dwarf the abilities of any man to construct. All too often we here about Madoff’s “victims”. Madoff’s victims were gamblers who chose to believe in the promises of a swindler, but in a way that implicates them too. What did they think Madoff was doing with their money? In the best cases, being the most charitable we may be without breaking with reality, they didn’t know and didn’t want to think about it too deeply, but educated people–and Madoff’s investors weren’t exactly paupers–know the only big machine for making free lunches is the capitalist system itself and its dynamic of exploitation of labour and nature. It’s unthinkable that they could have believed Madoff was not a swindler: they just thought he was swindling someone else.

As the Spanish idiom says, ladrón que roba a ladrón tiene cien años de perdón: a thief who steals from a thief has 100 years of pardons. Of course this idiom itself is little more than a nice turn of phrase, but it clearly encapsulates an intuition: that there is something, if not virtuous, at least not depraved in utilizing people’s avarice, greed, and complete unwillingness to think–especially when such thoughts may disturb the miracle, the chance of getting something for nothing–to one’s own benefit.

I don’t think of Madoff as a hero. In the best of cases, he managed to reallocate ill-gotten gains from one place to another. His punishment, though, is not so much derived from some notion of fairness or moral uprightness that was broken by his conduct–which is otherwise frequent enough–but rather from the embarrassing fact the swindler got caught. The bourgeois see one of their number fumble a task on which their livelihood as people and as a class depends, and can’t but unsheathe their knives. Don’t they do this every day to labour without any fuss? Why did this clumsy man have to call attention to the fact that, comes down to it, capitalism is the biggest swindle in history?

On Honduras: don’t buy the bullshit

There is a certain strain of thought that holds that, although the situation in Honduras is clearly regrettable, there is some sort of moral equivalence, or equal justice, or something to that effect, on both sides of the equation. Let us remind ourselves what both sides are: on the one hand, the legally constituted government, elected by popular vote; on the other, special bodies of armed men, and the unelected and reactionary Supreme Court.

This position, that may at first appear even handed and wise, is nothing more than the smoke under which the latest outrages of imperialism and militarism have hidden under, in order to better achieve their ends, which are essentially the subjugation of the world to the dictates of the free market capitalism and the decoupling of the economy from centres of political decision that could ever be subject to pressure by the people themselves. This manoeuvre isn’t new, but what is new is the success it has had. Almost anyone who talks about the situation in Honduras, thinks of it in terms of a president who tried to unlawfully extend his term of office. Even people sympathetic to Zelaya are willing to grant that he had called for a referendum in order to extend term limits so he could be re-elected again.

Because this is something that has taken place in other countries, like Venezuela, where Chávez–who is probably the most democratic politician on the planet at least in terms of deriving his support directly from popular will–sought and obtained popular support for re-election through constitutional change, the position is at least plausible, and I believed it at first. This article, however, does an excellent job at dispelling some of those myths, and I shall limit myself to a couple of judicious quotations. The rest, if you want to, is for you to find out:

…this is far from what President Zelaya attempted to do in Honduras the past Sunday and which the Honduran political/military elites disliked so much. President Zelaya intended to perform a non-binding public consultation, about the conformation of an elected National Constituent Assembly. To do this, he invoked article 5 of the Honduran “Civil Participation Act” of 2006. According to this act, all public functionaries can perform non-binding public consultations to inquire what the population thinks about policy measures. This act was approved by the National Congress and it was not contested by the Supreme Court of Justice, when it was published in the Official Paper of 2006. That is, until the president of the republic employed it in a manner that was not amicable to the interests of the members of these institutions.

Here we clearly notice how the actions of the president, which are universally being portrayed as seeking an illegal and unconstitutional extension of his term, or at best the ability to be re-elected, are merely seeking a public consultation–non-binding at that–in order to ascertain whether the Honduran people–the sovereign subject of this play, and not any bourgeois notion of rule of law or constituted power–desire to modify the manner in which they rule themselves. A matter which, I am sure, no convinced advocate of human rights can dispute is within their province alone. But there is more:

…the objective was not to extend Zelaya’s term in office. In this sense, it is important to point out that Zelaya’s term concludes in January 2010. In line with article 239 of the Honduran Constitution of 1982, Zelaya is not participating in the presidential elections of November 2009, meaning that he could have not been reelected. Moreover, it is completely uncertain what the probable National Constituent Assembly would have suggested concerning matters of presidential periods and re-elections. These suggestions would have to be approved by all Hondurans and this would have happened at a time when Zelaya would have concluded his term. Likewise, even if the Honduran public had decided that earlier presidents could become presidential candidates again, this disposition would form a part of a completely new constitution. Therefore, it cannot be regarded as an amendment to the 1982 Constitution and it would not be in violation of articles 5, 239 and 374. The National Constituent Assembly, with a mandate from the people, would derogate the previous constitution before approving the new one. The people, not president Zelaya, who by that time would be ex-president Zelaya, would decide.

So even assuming that Zelaya indeed had been seeking, under the guise of this consultation, a way to become elected president again, this is not something that would have immediate applicability, and which would in any case be a matter to resolve by the hypothetical newly constituted power that might have resulted from the constitutional assembly. Smoke and mirrors, comrades! Don’t buy the bullshit!