Cities and new wars: after Mumbai
Saskia Sassen
Open Democracy

The Mumbai attacks of 26-29 November 2008 are part of an emerging type of urban violence. These were organised, simultaneous frontal assaults with grenades and machine-guns on ten high-profile sites in or near the central business and tourism district.Also in openDemocracy on the assaults of November 2008 in Mumbai:

This has affinities with the asymmetric street warfare waged by the gangs in Rio de Janeiro that every now and then announce they will take over a major central area of the city from (say) 9am to 5pm: the result is shuttered shops and empty streets. If the police try to respond, it is open warfare, and the police rarely win - this is a challenge for which the police are not trained. After 5pm the gangs withdraw. It is often said that all of this results from inadequate policing or crime waves.

But that is too simple. There is a deeper transformation afoot. It is still rare but it is more frequently becoming visible. It is as if the centre no longer holds. Cities seem to be losing the capacity they have long had to triage conflict - through commerce, through civic activity. The national state, confronted with a similar conflict, has historically chosen to go to war. In my new research project - on cities and war - I am studying whether cities are losing this capacity and are becoming sites for a range of new types of violence.

Finance and Social Production
Adam Arvidsson
P2P Foundation

I’d like to expand a bit on a number of ideas that came out of a discussion with Christian Marazzi on the financial crisis, organized by the student movement at the University of Milano, last Friday. Marazzi has done a lot of innovative and thought-provoking work on the role of finance within the post-Fordist economy and the deep structural roots of the financial expansion that has marked the last two decades (or since 1979 and Paul Volker’s monetarist turn at the Fed). Indeed, the growing size and importance of financial markets is one of the two important structural trends that have marked the transition away from industrial Fordism (to an ‘information economy’ a ‘knowledge economy’ an ‘ethical economy’ or simply ‘post-Fordism’ the exact denomination is not an issue here). Indeed, with Geroge Soros, we can argue that the current crisis is the end of a financial ’super bubble’ that has run its course since the early 1980s. This has built on a continuous expansion of credit (refinanced by a massive inflow of cash from emerging economies like China). The consequence has been a substitution of credit and financial rent for wages as the source of income of the US (and Western European) middle class. The most visible structural consequence of this financial expansion have been a financialization of a number of services related to the reproduction of everyday life: credit card debt, housing and mortages, pensions, insurance, health care and education. To this transfer of the responsibility for the reproduction of life from the public sector and the welfare state to financial markets has corresponded a massive securitization of life conduct, that is; the invention of a number of often very complex financial instruments, the risks of which are are in the end related to the life conduct of human subjects (their liability to pay their mortages, to get sick and so on). Indeed Christian Marazzi argues convincingly that this link between finance and life conduct is one of the defining elements of the neoliberal political order, tracing it back to the New York City bancrupcy in 1975. At that point, the City relied heavily on the issue of municipal bonds. In turn, its ability to repay those bonds was contingent on its ability to reduce costs for social services and crime. This way, the financial rent that the middle class (that had purchased the bonds through, mainly pension funds) could receive, came to rely on the life conduct of the underclass (who were the main recipients of costly social services) and, consequently, policing the latter became a way of securing the income of the former.

"Terrorism or Tragicomedy?"
Giorgio Agamben, Libération

On the morning of November 11, 150 police officers, most of which
belonged to the anti-terrorist brigades, surrounded a village of 350
inhabitants on the Millevaches plateau, before raiding a farm in order
to arrest nine young people (who ran the local grocery store and tried
to revive the cultural life of the village). Four days later, these
nine people were sent before an anti-terrorist judge and "accused of
criminal conspiracy with terrorist intentions." The newspapers
reported that the Ministry of the Interior and the Secretary of State
"had congratulated local and state police for their diligence."
Everything is in order, or so it would appear. But let's try to
examine the facts a little more closely and grasp the reasons and the
results of this "diligence."

Hope in Common
David Graeber

We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scattered and incoherent; the global justice movement a shadow of its former self. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Faced with the prospect, the knee-jerk reaction—even of “progressives”—is, often, fear, to cling to capitalism because they simply can’t imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.

The first question we should be asking is: How did this happen? Is it normal for human beings to be unable to imagine what a better world would even be like?

What’s Left After Obama?
Simon Critchley
From Adbusters

Obama’s victory marks a symbolically powerful moment in American history, defined as it is by the stain of slavery and the fact of racism. It will have hugely beneficial consequences for how the United States is seen throughout the world. His victory was also strategically brilliant and his campaign transformed those disillusioned with and disenfranchised by the Bush administration into a highly motivated and organized popular force. But I dispute that Obama’s victory is about change in any significant sense.

Obama’s politics is governed by an anti-political fantasy. It is the call to find common ground, the put aside our differences and achieve union. Obama’s politics is governed by a longing for unity, for community, for communion and the common good. The remedy to the widespread disillusion with Bush’s partisan politics is a reaffirmation of the founding act of the United States, the hope of the more perfect union expressed in the opening sentence of the US Constitution. It is a powerful moral strategy whose appeal to the common good attempts to draw a veil over the agonism and power relations constitutive of political life. The great lie of moralism in politics is that it attempts to deny the fact of power by concealing it under an anti-political veneer. At the same time, moralism engages in the most brutal and bruising political activity. But the reality of this activity is always disavowed along with any and all forms of partisanship. Moralistic politics is essentially hypocritical.

"Today We Have Come Out"
Mass Uprising of Tribal People in West Bengal
Partho Sarathi Ray

The events that have been happening during the last one week in the adivasi (tribal) belt of West Midnapur district in West Bengal are so unprecedented that the authorities do not know how to respond to them, and the media doesn’t understand their significance.

Even the political parties and civil society are at a loss trying to come to terms with what is happening. What had started off as protests against police brutalities have turned into a full scale uprising against state oppression and dispossession. Nothing like this has been witnessed in West Bengal in living memory.

For all their differences and disputes, there is apparently one thing Barack Obama and John McCain agree upon wholeheartedly. The ultimate reason for their candidacy, for their desire to become US president, the most powerful political position in the world, is the opportunity to serve the American people. And what an interesting service they perform!

The Biggest ‘October Surprise’ Of All: A World Capitalist Crash
Loren Goldner

“There will be periods of 30 years which will pass with the seeming importance of a single day, and single days with the importance of 30 years.” (old Marxist maxim)

(Note: To avoid reinventing the wheel, and under the pressure of recent epochal events, I have used fragments of other texts I have written in the past few years, making up no more than 15-20% of the following article. I ask the reader’s forbearance for any annoyance.)

Given the fascination of the events of the past 14 months of “credit crunch”, many people (myself included) have sometimes tended to neglect the “deeper” sources of this crisis in production and reproduction. Analysis of a credit crisis has now become almost banal in the mainstream media. But as Marxists we know that there is rarely, if ever, a “pure” credit crisis without a deeper dimension in the material reproduction process (1).

We recall Hegel’s three stages of the introduction of a new idea: 1) total silence and indifference 2) great hostility and denunciation 3) “that’s what we’ve always believed”

It’s amazing to see how the media have gone in a year and a half from 1) to 3), barely stopping at 2), a marginal pastime over the last 30 years when dealing with “skeptics”. Suddenly the word “capitalism” has reappeared in popular discussion after decades of euphemisms such as “free-market economies” and Barack Obama’s support for massive government bailouts of Wall Street is attacked as “socialist” when in fact it is nothing but the old capitalist refrain of “privatization of profit, socialization of costs”.

Social Movements Against the Global Security Architecture! A Critique of the Militarisation of Social Conflict and the Securitisation of Everyday Life
Gipfelsoli

Recent unrest due to food price hikes, protests against rising energy costs, visions and realities of a climate crisis and growing concerns over scarce resources, in conjunction with the continued turmoil of financial markets, are creating a sense of insecurity for a neoliberal regime in severe crisis. The G8 states and their allies are seeking to contain these conflicts and the evident accumulation crisis of the global economy through market-orientated solutions in order to restore economic growth whilst calls for more state intervention in the regulation of financial markets are rife. At the same time, the 'war on terror' serves to justify ever-more militarisation of all spheres of life. Wars are waged to secure new markets, transport routes and resources. New techniques of governance are emerging within a logic of waging war against who- or whatever cannot be made profitable.

In 2009, a number of security policy changes whose consequences are as yet unclear, are planned for the EU. Under the banner of 'civil-military cooperation', internal and external security are to be merged into a 'comprehensive' and supra-national 'security architecture'. With a view to the US ministry, the 'Department of Homeland Security', founded after September 11th 2001 and comprising governmental, business and research organisations, EU security authorities are pushing for similar policy approaches for the European Union. 'Homeland Security' is to form the basis of the global security architecture of the most dominant states and richest economies, incorporating supranational institutions and multilateral agreements.

Notes on the "Bailout" Financial Crisis
George Caffentzis

0. These notes on the political-financial crisis were written in the last month while many US financial corporations were, in effect, nationalized in response to the bankruptcy of several major investment and commercial banks. The notes have been prompted by the fact that there has been remarkably little political activity in the streets, union halls, retirement communities of the country demanding a resolution of the crisis in favor of the millions of workers who are now losing wages, houses and pensions.
Certainly not even the most compliant unions and the retirement associations were invited to participate in the negotiations that were carried on concerning the legislation.

Is this lack of attention to workers' interests due to the "shock" tactics that the Bush Administration used to push the "bailout" legislation? Perhaps, but we also think that money and the financial sector of capitalism that deals directly with it have been inherently opaque to working class political analysis and action for more than a century. (The last time there was a self-conscious working class debate on a national level concerning the money form was the 1896 election when the fate of the gold standard hung in the balance.)

The purpose of these notes is to present in outline a way of understanding this crisis as developing out of class struggles taking place in the US and internationally in the last decade. This can be useful, I believe, since if class struggles had the power to create the crisis, then understanding them might guide us to the path that would lead us out of the crisis with more power.

1. Financial crises are difficult to understand from the point of view of class politics, for our model of class struggle to this day is still the factory where the workers' labor power is bought (through the payment of a wage) by capitalist firms and put to work along with machines and other inputs to produce a product that is sold for a profit. The workers are worked harder, longer, more dangerously and/or more productively in order to make a larger profit. They respond to this work regime by a combination of means, from compliance to a thousand and one ways of passive resistance to strikes to factory take-overs, while the capitalists devise strategies to resist this resistance. This struggle can take a myriad of forms (sometimes involving the most refined application of social and psychological sciences and sometimes the most brutal forms of assassination and torture), but the factory model is categorically straight forward: workers resist exploitation and capitalists resist their resistance; with profits and wages most often moving inversely. It is all apparently simple, but it can become complex because in a struggle there are many deceits and tricks each side plays both on each other and on observers (present and future).

When it comes to money and the financial corporations that operate with it (banks, mortgage loan corporations, and other money market firms) this model of class struggle seems not to operate. Why? There are at least three primary reasons.

First, money is quite a different "product" than either physical things like cars or services like massages. It is a bit mysterious. Words that combine the philosophical and necromantic like "magical," "abstract," "fetishistic," and "universal" are often used to describe money and to immediately give the impression that, compared to other commodities, the usual rules do not apply. For example, money is a unique kind of commodity, for it exchanges with all other commodities, a role that no other commodity plays.

Second, while industrial or commercial firms require the production and sale of a non-monetary commodity in order to "make money," financial firms make "money from money." They seem to operate in an abstract realm without a spatial location. This adds to the weirdness of the financial firms that during the history of capitalism have always attracted both fascination and hostility from other capitalists and workers.

Third, they claim a different form of income than other capitalists and workers: Interest. When it comes to making money they make it in the form of interest on loans to capitalists (who pay interest out of their profits) and workers (who pay interest out of their wages). In other words, the money financial firms "make" is created "elsewhere" by workers working for non-financial capitalists. The workers of the financial firms themselves may be exploited--e.g., be forced to work long hours and get paid in worthless stock bonuses--but the income that the firms' owners receive does not derive from these employees' efforts in producing a product. It comes from the profits and wages of those who received loans who are, in most cases, not their employees.

Where does the right to earn interest come from? How is it determined? These kinds of questions haunt our understanding of financial firms, since it appears that in a society where work is the source of value, interest appears to be like "creation out of nothing"!