[lbo-talk] Graeber on wars

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Fri Feb 24 09:26:24 PST 2012


if i ever have time to unpack my books, there's an author discussed by Randall Collins (in a book abt Max Weber). The author has an historical sociological account of Weber's claim that one important way to understand the activities of nation-states on the world stage was not simply to think of them in terms of acting in order to communicate with other nation-states (I do X in order to intimidate my enemy and my allies) but also that nations are acting on the world stage in order to communicate to their citizenry.

Smacking around some pissant third world country every decade or so wasn't just to intimidate third world countries, or even our own allies, but to impress up the citizens of the u.s. IIRC, one of the PDFs at the neoconnery PNAC site had an entire argument spelling this out. Its focus was mainly on the point that all action on the foreign policy stage was never directed at the enemy but at one's so-called allies. For the neo-con there are no allies only nations not openly and actively seeking to undermine us. That is, their mind set was one in which, if you are the bully on the block, you should never ever get comfortable, you should be aware that every other dude is jealous and after your power. they might act like your friend, but they aren't. they're always spying on you, undermining you, etc.

Anyway, in this PDF stored at the site was a section devoted specifically to keeping the populace in line at home.

never got a sense if CG's own investigations of neoconnery yielded similar perceptions of what I would call their thorough-going romanticism about foreign policy. ' relatedly there used to be huge wars on the list about the why behind afghanistan and iraq, with impassioned arguments that the "no blood for oil" slogan was ever so much bullshit. it was clearly not a way motivated by desire for securing access to ME oil resources.

What's the wisdom on this, with hindsight now? If the war for oil logic is rejected, what WAS or IS the current explanation for why the u.s. waged the wars? Was there one? At 12:02 PM 2/24/2012, Doug Henwood wrote:
>I asked David Graeber what evidence he had for the claim that elites
>started wars because of the success of the Global Justice movement. His answer:
>
> > well I just noticed there was a pattern.
> > Civil Rights movement, with mass revival of civil disobedience, direct
> democracy movements (Port Huron statement) - government both gives big
> concessions and starts overseas war (Vietnam)
> > Anti-Nuclear movement, rapid rise of movement based on CD, direct
> democracy, again govt seems to panic unduly, make surprising concessions,
> and right afterwards ends detente and starts proxy wars (Afghanistan,
> Central America)
> > Global Justice movement followed by surprising concessions (well,
> surprised us how quick) and war on terror
> >
> > now, I have absolutely no idea how conscious any of this was, one is
> tempted to assume not that conscious at all, maybe there's some deeper
> process produced both things - and of course the war on terror had the
> biggest provocation possible supplied by Mr. Bin Laden (and I'm not a
> truther or anything like that). Still, it's such a pattern - sudden flare
> up of movement based on CD, direct democracy (in civil rights movement
> with SNCC, then SDS) etc, then a big overseas war and the whole thing has
> to turn into a peace movement which is always more hierachically
> organized. How the mechanisms work, I don't know exactly. But it always
> seems to happen.
> >
> > I'm a little optimistic because I think they've boxed themselves into a
> position where they can't really start a war this time. Obviously some
> are really pushing for it...
>
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