Michael Keaney:
>does any of this make sense?
I find this sort of concrete detail helpful when it comes to seeing the
larger picture. A forensic look at the way the secret state works and how it
interfaces with publically-acknowledged discourses of power, is useful. When
invited to contemplate the staggering political achievements of European
social-democracy, the majesty of Blair's 20-point poll lead,etc, we are
better positioned to see this pro-European posturing for the mystification
and atavism it really is.
This is not to argue that conspiracy theory determines everything, because
it doesn't and I think it's clear from the evidence that in any case the
secret services are as faction-ridden and inconsistent as everything else.
They share common misconceptions and false consciousness which they
exaggerate in a hallucinatory way. We do not need to indulge CIA/MI5
paranoia to agree with Lenin in 'State and Revolution': 'the state is a
special organisation of force: it is an organisation of violence for the
suppression of some class,' adding that parliamentary democracy is a
charade, 'curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich,' in
which 'the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which
particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and
repress them in parliament.'
This does not mean that bourgeois democracy has no meaning, or is not a
dynamic source of social renewal, of vital cumulative change and of
political relegitimation. But we need to seek for materialist explanations
of the caravanserai they parade before us, otherwise we end up suspending
disbelief and becoming incorporated into the process. As Michael Keaney
quite properly says, Europe is a battleground where the status-jostling of
members and aspirants takes the form of trying to combine two completely
antithetical things: the creation of a European state, with its own armed
forces, money etc, on one hand. And a servile, craven dependence on the US
on the other. That cannot be a permanent state of affairs. They can put off
the day of reckoning but they cannot cancel it, and sooner or later there
will be a decision.
Mark
