Sunday Interesting Links

• Essay on the connections (and lack thereof) between Althusser and workerism, the relationship between Marxist theory and practice, and the nature of the communist parties in France and Italy in the ’60s and ’70s, from Viewpoint Magazine

• Polemic by Matt Taibbi against the recent cover story in The Atlantic arguing that the US has too much democracy and not enough of an insulated political establishment

• Book review of Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (2012)

• Report on the increasing unrest in Kashmir and anti-police attitudes

• Analysis of renewable energy’s negative impact on nuclear power and carbon mitigation goals

The depoliticized ideology of tech work, then and now

The nature of technical, scientific, and engineering work seems to continually produce an ideology that alleges that technology workers have the supreme ability to govern and progress society.  From a talk at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics:

As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you. The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable. But as anyone who’s worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence.

The talk goes on to argue about the inherently political nature of technology, and the fact that modern technology workers tend to depoliticize their work, to dangerous affects, as seen in the rise of “surveillance capitalism”.

What’s interesting here is that the perceived “arrogance” of science and technology workers has been around for a rather long time–it stretches back at least since the mid-1940s.  David Noble’s Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (1986) describes a proposed board of scientists and engineers, funded by the military, that would be totally autonomous and in charge of directing the nation’s research projects, that garnered fierce criticism:

…President Roosevelt killed the board by forbidding any transfer of funds to it from military appropriations. The sponsor of the executive action was Budget Bureau director Harold Smith, who had become concerned about the scientists’ attempt to circumvent Congress and insulate themselves from government oversight. He also viewed the entire plan as fundamentally anti-democratic, rejecting “the assumption that researchers are as temperamental as a bunch of musicians, and [that] consequently we must violate most of the tenets of democracy and good organization to adjust for their lack of emotional balance.” “The real difficulty,” Smith opined, was that the scientists “do not know even the first thing about the basic philosophy of democracy.” The New Republic agreed. In its own criticism of the ill-fated board, the journal noted wryly how “a good many well-known scientists…take their coloration from the conservative businessmen who are their associates.” Alluding to the “fantastic suggestion that in the long run the National Academy of Sciences should usurp the functions of the Executive,” the magazine argued that “the American people should no more acquiesce in the present scheme than to a proposal that the carpenters’ union [alone] should elect members of a board which is to plan public workers.”

Of course, looking at the present situation regarding climate change and state interference in climate science research, its worth re-thinking these criticisms…

Sunday Interesting Links

• Analysis of ethnic and caste politics in contemporary Nepal, via Jacobin Magazine

• Some sober and much-needed analysis of certain tendencies in the left when calling about hypocritical responses to right-wing violence

• Some nice reflections on left materialism and where it needs to go (hat tip to Marginal Revolution)

• Poverty shifts in the Bay Area from the city to the suburbs

• Protests have been rocking eastern Shia-dominated regions of Saudi Arabia, after the execution of a popular cleric who had been calling for democratic reforms

Friday Interesting Links

• Op-ed on radical left politics in the West in 2015, via Vice News

• Reflections from Latin America on recent electoral defeats of “progressive hegemony”, via Viewpoint Magazine

• In-depth piece from Washington Post Donald Trump and a resurgent/resurrected white supremacist movement

• Seymour Hersh on coordination between elements within the US military and the Assad regime; and a rebuttal from Vox

•  Older piece from this summer from Der Spiegel on the secular/Ba’athist core of ISIS

• Interesting analysis of ISIS as a state, and as their state-building strategy compares with various separatist and revolutionary movements

• It’s practically impossible to define “GMOs”

Notes on unrest in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is set to hold a mass execution of around 50 people, whom the regime accuses of being terrorists.  Many appear to be people who have been participating in anti-government protests in the eastern areas populated by the marginalized Shia minority.  This region saw massive, unprecedented protests in 2011 and 2012 with mass participation that verged on the brink of an insurgency, with protesters and security forces alike being injured and killed.

Map of Saudi Arabia and the key flashpoints of unrest, via Stratfor

The unrest here, based on what I have been reading in Toby Matthiesen’s Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring That Wasn’t (2013), is linked with increasingly rebellious networks of working-class Shia youth, who feel alienated from more conservative and reformist minded Shia community leaders who entered into a dialogue with Saudi elites in the 1990s and early 2000s (to little avail for the political, economic, and social position of the Shia masses).  These networks coalesced into an umbrella group, the Coalition for Freedom and Justice around the common demand for the end to the monarchy and the establishment of an democracy.

An interesting interview via Jadaliyya with one constituent organization, the Eastern Province Revolution, shines light on the history and experiences of local militants and activists.  Of note is that they appear to be non-sectarian and have mobilized in solidarity with other, more minor uprisings and protest movements in other parts of the Kingdom (such as protests by female students in Abha, south-western Saudi Arabia).

And of special note for folks in the West is their response to the question of what their biggest challenge is:

Our biggest challenge is US support for Al Saud on all fronts, including intelligence and military. Al Saud cannot act against the people without the “Americans.”

The radical left needs to be wary of the growing paramilitarization of cyber-space

I recently did a crash-course in recent Colombian history, with specific focus on class struggle and imperialism in the country.  One of the major takeaways was the concept of paramilitarism and its relationship with capitalism.  Paramilitarism is a term that is generally used to refer to armed groups that operate in conjunction with the state and the military, but have a certain degree of autonomy.  In the case of Colombia, paramilitarism developed as a response to the state’s inability to protect rural elites (a category that included everybody from drug cartel leaders to oil multinational executives to wealthy ranchers) from attacks and extortion by communist guerrillas in the ’70s and ’80s.  As such various sectors of the Colombian bourgeoisie founded and funded their own private militias, with assistance from military elites.  These outfits, ostensibly for self-defense, quickly mutated into offensive armies that helped elites expand their land holdings, assassinate political opponents, repress labor and peasant movements, and generally increase rate of capital accumulation.

The first phase of this pattern–the creation of autonomous and ostensibly defensive armed capabilities, with links to the military–is currently underway in the realm of cyber-space, with a growing global market for cyber-weapons, private cyber-security, surveillance technologies, and so on.  Details of this dynamic can be read about in Chapter 6 of Shane Harris’ @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex (2014).

One example of this is the success of Endgame, a leading cyber-security firm that at one point specialized in selling offensive cyber-weapons and analysis on vulnerable computers and networks worldwide; their biggest customers have typically been government agencies like the NSA and the CIA, but in the past few years major firms like Google have become major clients (Harris 2014: 103-104, 108).  Another, more interesting example is the case of Team Themis, a partnership between several cyber-security companies–Palantir Technologies, HBGary Feeral, and Berico Technologies–and a law firm–Hunton & Williams–to investigate and undermine opponents of the US Chamber of Commerce (notably, WikiLeaks) through online surveillance, data-mining, and analysis.  After an attack on HBGary Federal’s servers by Anonymous, it was revealed that the CEO, Aaaron Barr, was advocating and planning for a campaign of surveillance and intimidation against supporters of WikiLeaks, such as the journalist Glenn Greenwald (Harris 2014: 114-115).

These kinds of shady, offensive capabilities appear to be widespread.  From a New York Times article on the issue (emphasis added):

Jonathan E. Turner, who runs a Tennessee-based business that gathers intelligence for corporate clients, said that companies nationwide relied on investigators to gather potentially damaging information on possible business partners or rivals. “Information is power,” said Mr. Turner, former chairman of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.

He estimated that the “competitive intelligence” industry had 9,700 companies offering these services, with an annual market of more than $2 billion, but said there were limits to what tactics should be used.

And of course, the real question is how far companies will be willing to go in terms of cyber-warfare when it concerns “enemies” in the form of protesters, activists, and community organizers (let alone actual revolutionaries).  And according to Mark Weatherford, the former head of cyber security at the Department of Homeland Security, “We’ve already got the cyber equivalent of the Pinkerton Guards“.

Paramilitarism against Colombian civil society

Paramilitary groups were responsible for the vast majority of massacres and political killings during the 1990s, a political violence that has cost Colombia an average of three thousand to four thousand civilian lives a year between the late 1980s and 2000…

…An important political outcome of this para-repression has been to reduce the space for the political activities of trade unionists, Communists, peasant leaders of popular organizations, and human rights activists who were all (and continue to be) disproportionately targeted by paramilitary organizations.  These actors have long been viewed as suspect by the armed forces.  General Rafael Samudio Molina, minister of defense in 1988, argued that “subversive groups develop military activities that parallel political actions, and use this strategy of convergence in the political, social, labor, educational, judicial and armed fields”.  The commander of the armed forces in 1988, Manuel Jaime Guerrero Paz, stated in a public forum of business and party leaders that the favorite terrain for political action for subversives was the topic of human rights.  One commanding general of the army referred to a “civil insurgent population” consisting of “the union, student, peasant, and political movements”.  An analyst from the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, Sergio Otalora Montenegro, concluded that the origins and purposes of paramilitarism were not simply responses to guerrilla aggression, but “behind the death squads there have been 15 years of dirty war [designed] to take apart every legitimate, organized, popular movement, and thus destroy any real possibility of constructing a democratic alternative in open opposition to the traditional parties”. (Aviles 2006: 105, 107-108)

This is taken from William Aviles’ book Global Capitalism, Democracy, and Civil-Military Relations in Colombia (2006).  Its full of numbers and focuses largely on the political economy of Colombia as it relates to state violence and paramilitarism, and as such has lots of nice numbers about the economy, foreign direct investment, etc.  Its a very good follow-up read to America’s Other War: Terrorizing Colombia (2005) which I quoted a few weeks ago.

Tuesday Interesting Links

• From Jacobin Magazine: “In his last interview, Chokwe Lumumba discusses popular power and the past and future of revolutionary struggle in the American South.”

• Interfluidity on the Greek crisis, the betrayal of the political intentions behind the Eurozone, and the horrifying mess that creditors have made of Greek’s economy

• A right-wing Turkish perspective on the PYD and Rojava–perhaps a warning sign to radical leftist Kurds that the alliance with the West is going to come to an end soon?

• Once again, LNG exports from the US are hitting serious economic obstacles

• [PDF] The Political Economy of Liberal Democracy (June 2015)