Let’s please be clear about something. Regardless of the massive support that the PPP can depend on, Benazir was a corrupt, opportunistic, pilfering thug. She, like just about every other Pakistani prime minister or military crackpot before her, played with Islamism (remember the Taliban and Benazir’s role in bringing it to power?) and sucked up to the West. Indeed, one of the exceptions to sucking up to the West was her father, Zulfikar, but even he had his moments — and Benazir was nowhere near what her father was. Also, like most rulers, she and her husband Asif Ali Zardari engaged in massive looting of the public treasury and exploited their positions to make loads and loads of money. We’ll never really know how much.

Also, let’s be honest: Benazir was no symbol of democracy or anything like that. To the extent that she’s being hailed as such, it’s because the West and its lapdog media have no analysis of democracy except as some symbolic, formal process where people get to stuff a ballot in a box, rather than as a substantive reality whereby people make decisions about their own lives and are in control of their society and economy. To be more precise, she became a symbol of democracy because, all of a sudden, the United States felt it could use her. However, there can be no democracy — not even liberal democracy — when your country is under occupation or under the thumb of an imperialist power and its puppet dictator. For all we know, there have been “elections” in Pakistan for the past few years. Look how great that’s been working out.

Massive corruption and enforcing a rabid Islamist group onto a neighbouring country do not make a democrat. Having said that, I am sure there were some redeeming aspects to Benazir.

Update: Aijaz Ahmad on the assassination of Benazir and the movement for democracy in Pakistan, via TheRealNews:

Canada’s Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty says there are to be no cuts in income taxes. However, there will be — and need to be — cuts in corporate taxes. The reason for this is that the heavy hand of government needs to stay out of the economy.

The putrid hypocrisy of neoliberalism should be evident here: it doesn’t even conform to neoclassical economic theory. Here, at the least, individuals (or households) are seen as — for all intents and purposes — equivalents to firms (or corporations). Thus, to make the economy truly competitive — and we know that the particularly ardent free market ideologues (e.g., Austrian/Chicago school) argue this — one must eliminate all taxes. I would say, if your excuse is economic competitiveness, you should at least look to cutting taxes proportionately. That’s probably not going to happen.

The populism previously present in the Conservative platform (personal tax cuts, a little bit) is dissipating, leaving us with little more than baldfaced brown-nosing of corporations — that is, “enabling” conditions for business competitiveness. Whatever that means.

Update: In the October mini-budget the Conservatives did schedule tax cuts in personal income — and they said this is good for the economy. It doesn’t save most people a lot of money: money that, in the aggregate, would probably be well-spent on something like, I don’t know, national childcare. The post above refers to their plans for the future.

Four hours of research, writing and work. None of it for instrumental (read, coursework/degree-work) reasons.

Here is Part 2 of my response to Ward Churchill’s essay on Marxism. Part 1 is here.

Historical materialism

Churchill asserts that historical materialism is a way of looking at society not as a unified whole, but as a mass of contradictions. All of history is simply the course of contradictions in society reconciling themselves to production (i.e., the transformation of nature from one of its aspects into another). Churchill tells us that “‘Productive relations,’ in [the Marxist] schema, determine all and everything.” The “orthodox” Marxists, according to Albert and Hahnel, assert that Marxism downgrades the “importance of the creative aspect of the human consciousness” and that consciousness rests primarily on objective production relations.

There is some truth in some of these assertions, but Churchill does not provide a coherent account of historical (or, indeed, dialectical materialism) before he proceeds to criticize it—relying on quotations taken wildly out of context from Althusser and Baudrillard. For this reason I cannot proceed by addressing Churchill’s assertions in turn, but will provide a sketch of what historical materialism means. In doing this, I hope, we will take up Churchill’s criticisms and address them.

The main idea of historical materialism is that history—the course of development of human societies, including ideas and consciousness—is based on material realities. It is not the ideas in our heads that determine the conditions of our existence; so much as it is the conditions of our existence that largely contribute to the determination of the ideas in our heads. This is not to say that ideas do not have an effect on reality, but they do so when put into material action in whatever way. History is a chronology of changes: institutions, cultures, values and so on change over time. None of these are immutable, all of these are eminently historical—they exist, as they do, in particular times and spaces—and they are in constant flux.

Read the rest of this entry »