Deception is not new but as Chris's 'post modern' suggests, there is something new about the deployment of deception here. My point of reference would be Enron: Enron, Enron. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, etc.,etc.,etc.
What I allude to is a political economy OF deceit, not simply a political economy with deceit. Just-in-time inventory management is
primitive accumulation masqueradiing as the production of surplus value. In this _last_ stage_of_capitalism_plus_one, the form of
the subsumption of labour under capital is, literally "off the balance sheet" and it is this fundamental corruption of the mode of
production that ultimately finds its ideological expression in the off balance sheet accounting of an Enron.
We are undergoing the fall of the "other shoe", the first shoe of which was the collapse of the accounting system of the Soviet
Bloc. Few have noticed that the reasons for the collapses of the respective accounting systems are actually one reason. Falsehood
was no longer incidental but integral to expanded reproduction and accumulation on the basis of the old relations of production. The
fruit has gone from being over-ripe to being putrid.
I warm to the connection Tom makes. It is always difficult to prove a connection between the economic base and the superstructure, because the relationship is often not a simple linear one. There are intevening variables and complex dynamics. It is more a question of a tendency or trend, a rather weak but persistent force, of a probabilistic nature. Also the way in which the economic pull works does not produce just one pattern as a result. There may be a cluster of different patterns, which become more probable as a result of the economic substructure, compared to certain other patterns.
Back to the thread title, not to lose it and the connection here. Elbaradei (sp?) has not accused the British government of faking the evidence about Iraq's nuclear involvement: the embarrassing and pointed comments are that the British government accepted a source originating in the Ivory Coast from persons unknown, without conscientiously checking it, because it was useful to the UK case.
The faking may, one wonders have been done by Israeli agents or agents connected with certain sections of the US government. But if so the UK intelligence sources did not get a tip off from the CIA with whom they have good relations, and the mystery may lie buried deep within the politics of the US state, in which sources indirectly, and unattributively, closer to the US president did not mind the British fooling themselves, and therefore world opinion. They could be "economical with the truth" as the head of the UK civil service, who later became a director of Shell (Lord Armstrong), once said. Because the perpetrators of the fraud did not deny it, why should anyone else, or double check too closely?
Now I think the headling on the Guardian piece is absolutely justified: the UK government with wilful negligence passed as authentic fake evidence.
However how such crucial deception comes about in the 21st century is important to understand. Tom Walker cites Enron. The deception in Enron is significantly still difficult to pin down, but it also hinged on the sophisticated management of the fact that truth is relative.
A few months after Enron, someone who was until recently a senior executive in one of the four major monopolistic UK finance houses, commented to me at a small dinner party in polished and reasonable English tones that the problem was the different traditions of accounting in the UK and in the USA. In the UK the accountants add up the figures (the trick is to do it from the left -he told me, so we are very much in the business of accounting being an art rather than a science - we are in the realm of the relative nature of truth) but in the UK the auditing firms also take an overall view of the company's position, as well as the balance in the different departments. Part of the Enron scam was the large number of subsections each of which could balance their books according to simple rules, but the overall balance would not be looked at as a whole. His suggestion was that US accountants have a lower status as technicians, whereas UK accountants are professionals (They all of course work for finance capitalism.)
This Enron auditing dynamic couples of course with the extensive public relations that Enron practised with political leaders.
I think there is also a wider reason why Tom's strategic suggestions are worth pursuing. Marx critiqued classical political economy by use of his abstract and dialectical method. Superficial reading tends to apply this concretely in a simplistic way. However it is clear IMO that Marx was abstracting about the forms of capital accumulation in economic systems that are mainly but not exclusively based on the exchange of commodities, and which are dominated by the capitalist mode of production, but do not consist only of the capitalist mode of production.
What we are seeing is that late finance capital has ever more sophisticated ways of managing the porous boundaries between commodity exchange and non-commodity exchange, between subjective and objective activity, between different types of capitalism, and between capitalism and the economic activity of small producers. Finance capitalist companies have forward positions about managing public confidence and acceptability, which allows them to continue exploitation and accumulation. And yes - the preservation and increase in the total accumulated capital is an art which involves skill in managing the relative nature of truth. It is not always that there are straight lies - though these of course occur as always - it is about managing these enterprises as enormous dominating bodies of social and economic activity. Where the postmodernism is a gloss on the fundamental material reality, is that fundamentally the accumulation of capital continues to depend on the extraction of surplus value from working people, whatever the glossy and aetherial nature of the economic activity.
What is the connection between this sort of functioning of late finance capitalism (which I am sure could be described better than in this rather amateur sketch above) and the activities of the New Labour British government? I suggest, and I have held these views for several years, that New Labour is using all the methods of late finance capitalism in its political activity. It is entirely comfortable with this approach. It is not accidental that Gordon Brown is chair of the IMF's strategic committee. New Labour's closest links are with BP rather than with Shell, and still less with Esso, because coming from where it does, it still remembers that public acceptability is an important function of a political party. But it explicitly sees the great strength of a centrist government as being the fact that it is both a corporation in its own right, a player on the stage alongside the finance capitalist companies, and it can influence a process of self regulation which in any case goes along with the monopolistic tendencies of late finance capitalism. II therefore say self-regulation even when there are statutory instruments or government directives (eg the establishment of the Financial Services Authority was after a process of consultation, and more recently the ruling that credit card companies must exchange information on millions of later payers was after consultation. The latter has elicited no protest, and the former only some relatively minor objections which will just get processed through the consensus based review system.) This is not centralised socialism. This is a centrist government helping the monopoly tendencies of finance capitalism to a further stage of self-regulation.
Back in the geo-political frame of reference, finance capitalism needs a more stable middle east. It will make provisions to avoid the temporary fluctuations caused by a war, but will generally be sympathetic to the removal of smaller states that keep stocks of anthrax in deep bunkers just to be safe, or who will allow funds to go quietly to terrorists in order to buy off their acceptance of the continuation of a tribal monarchy. It is in this sense that fundamentally the war against Iraq that is just about to happen is a reflection of the struggle between finance capitalism (concentrated admittedly in some imperialist countries rather than others) and a sort of socialised national capitalism in Iraq. Nobody doubts who will win long term, even if the French succeed in postponing the war.
And part of this great battle is about the post-modern and creative management of news values. Yes the victors can sometimes get caught out, but they can always dismiss the little problems as ones of processology, when they can get away with it, which on the whole they can.
This above arguments are all perhaps a rather laboured exercise largely for my own benefit, to say why I feel Tom's strategic connections, while risky, are actually well founded, even if we might disagree with how to describe some of the intervening mechanisms.
I have to confess that I do not immediately recognise the sort of references that Ian Murray cites, which I suspect are deeper into post-modernism, philosophy and sociology than I have gone myself. But as I find Ian's newsclippings almost invariably a well judged and highly useful resource I feel that to a great extent we are travelling in the same general direction.
Regards
Chris Burford
London
