Raw interview text - with Kees van der Pijl on the status of the
The below interview is conducted with Kees van der Pijl. The text, especially the questions still needs a good edit. Since I think Kees' answers are very worthy to share widely I am posting the text here without waiting for the edit. Please do not put it on a blog or page since it is not yet ready for publication. I would circulate the link, when it is put online. Orsan Global Rivalries Today - Interview with Kees van der Pijl Intro: Since almost the beginning of the neoliberal offensive in 1970s you have been leading an important research and theory work on the Atlantic ruling class, international capitalist class formation, transnational capitalist classes and global rivalries amongst capitalist classes, which finally led the world into a massive economic crisis in 2007. In the last decade you have been extremely productive in terms of publishing on these topics. Besides many articles, in 2006 Global Rivalries came out, in 2007 and 2010, Nomads, States and Empires and Foreign Encounter in Myth and Religion, the first and second volumes of the Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy trilogy were published. The last volume The Discipline of Western Supremacy is just came out. Besides this classical work, which in our opinion can be compared to Polanyi's Great Transformation, you have written and updated free online Handbook of Global Political Economy and again last year the Making of the Atlantic Ruling Class was republished. And currently are editing a very timely and exciting volume with titled International Political Economy of Production. Q1: Kees, after seven years how do you see the current status of global rivalries among ruling classes; could you give us your account especially in relation to the uprisings that have been happening in different kinds of state-society complexes around the world in the aftermath of 2008 financial crisis? Do you think these were the uprisings anticipated in infamous Pentagon reports and National Security Document which were released in the eve of 9/11? What do you think that Atlantic ruling classes have done to prepare their response to these early warnings? A1: Historical events as such are never entirely anticipated and even when planned, like, say, the invasion of Iraq, have consequences nobody had foreseen. Of course once events unfold, intellectual preparation will kick in, and then it depends on the quality of theoretical insight and the accuracy of contingency planning and the readiness of the apparatus to put it into practice, whether the planners can gain control over the course of events again. In the case of popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, there is no point looking for anyone 'behind them' other than those leading the outburst of mass indignation over inequality and related grievances. Thus in Tunisia, the typical pattern that would repeat itself elsewhere was that the ruling clique crossed a line in pursuing its strategy of neoliberal private enrichment whilst keeping the repressive state apparatus in place for the less lucky. The self-immolation of a graduate who had to make a living as a street-vendor, in protest over bureaucratic obstruction preventing him from even that, then sparked what obviously had been brewing for some time. Only at that point can we assume that preparation and planning came to play a role. As far as the Atlantic West is concerned, it had fashioned a machinery for provocation and repression abroad in 1946/'47, organised in the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), a unit for undercover operations and psychological warfare operating outside the CIA. It was folded into the CIA in the 1950s but since that coincided with Allen Dulles (one of the architects of OPC) becoming CIA director, it meant that the CIA inherited the covert operations portfolio. Knowledgeable observers like Peter Dale Scott claim that OPC took over the CIA rather than vice versa. Across NATO this covert structure fanned out into what later became known as the Gladio cells, small nodes of committed Rightists with access to hidden arms caches. They were conceived as stay-behind cells around which in the case of a Soviet invasion, resistance was to be organised. Of course there was no Soviet invasion either planned or expected, and these networks in practice turned out to function as relays of a NATO-coordinated strategy of tension. So whenever there was a threat from the domestic Left, it was from these quarters, working hand in glove with the intelligence services, that the political process could be destabilised by violence, infiltration and provocation. Italy and Turkey are examples of how the application of a strategy of tension worked to block the way for the Left when it could no longer be contained through the regular political process. From these countries some of the most insightful analyses have emerged of how the 'deep state' (a term coined in Turkey) actually operates. In the 1980s, these networks partially metamor
Ippolita Collective: In the Facebook Aquarium (Part One, #2, 1)
NB I the previous (first) installment of this feuilleton it was erroneously mentionned that the commercial rights for this book were resting with Feltrinelli editore (as for the Google book). In fact, the (commercial) rights rest exclusively with the Ippolita Collective. So the correct mention is: "This book and translation are published under Creative Commons license 2.0 (Attribution, Non Commercial, Share Alike). Commercial distribution requires the authorisation of the copyright holders: Ippolita Collective < i...@ippolita.net> " (Part One, #2,1) The era of democratic /attention-distraction/ The 'Web 2.0' does not stand for a set of new technologies [3], but rather refers to a (new) mode of behaviour: to stay on-line all the time in order to chat with friends, post pictures, texts and videos, to share all these with one's /community/, to remain connected, to be part of the 'Zeitgeist', of the on-line world. 'Share!' is probably the slogan best suited to describe this phenomenon. And maybe it's also the biggest stupidity ever invented, but then - going by the numbers, the public is for it, massively. E-mails, IRC chats, blogs, mailing lists, feeds, peer-to-peer, VoIP - you name it, wasn't that enough to share with? Nope, because as per the belief in unlimited growth, the gospel of Californian turbo-capitalism, one always needs more, bigger (or smaller but more powerful), faster. Many among us bemoan this, and yet we're doing it too, embracing with enthusiasm to-day's ideology: our latest mobile is more powerful than our old desk-top computer, our new laptop has more capacity that the old server at the office, this just-on-the-market messaging program enables us to send attachments larger than anything we have been sending before - combined, and our new digital camera has a better resolution than our old television set! With Facebook, the "we want it all and we want it now - but then faster!" has entered a new, quasi-religious phase. Salvation is the promise, and "Share and Thou Shall Be Happy!" is the message. With more than nine hundred million users in May 2012 (*), being the population of United States and European Union combined, exponential growth, a global scale of operation and yet organised as (separate) groups of "friends", well, that is something which couldn't escape the prying eyes of the Ippolita Collective. And indeed, a radical critique of Facebook is a must, not only because one should always go after the biggest quarry, but also because such is part and parcel of Ippolita's core tactics. This as we want to develop new (technological) instruments of self-management and of autonomy which are not pressed on us from above under a well-policed theory, but which have their basis in every-day usages and subversion practices on which we want to build our future worlds. Now, if you are Facebook fan (or of LinkedIn, MySpace, Groupon, Twitter, etc.), and that to the point that you are unable or unwilling to take a closer look at what is happening behind the scenes, then maybe you should stop reading here. Our aim is namely not to convince you that Facebook is the devil incarnate; if we study social networks here, the aim is merely to arrive at a better understanding of the present. Hence, this is not an 'objective' enquiry. Starker: our line is entirely subjective, opinionated, partisan, and based on a crystal clear postulate: the 'Web 2.0', and primarily Facebook, is a phenomenon of technocratic delegation, and is as such dangerous. It doesn't matter wether the instruments themselves are good or bad, or wether we love or hate them, and it doesn't matter either wether we are captive and deluded users or on the contrary, slick 'n' smart /geeks/. The key assumption that underlies all the research conducted by the Ippolita Collective is very simple: to connect to a network means tracing a line between a point of origin and another point. In a certain way, it is the same as opening up one's window to another world. It is not that easy to engage in exchanges and to open up, because neither is immediate or natural. Specific competences, which one must develop in accordance with one's personal needs and capacities, are necessary. And there is also no such thing as absolute security - the only security you can be sure of is when you do not connect - at all. But since we want to get in touch with /the others/ and because we want to create tools to make this possible, we are not going to renounce connectivity. Yet at the same time, we are unwilling to lamely adopt al the 'new new' tech gadgets. Our aim is rather to create tools for liberation you can't do without. The 'rhizomatic' diffusion of social networks creates its own dynamics of inclusion/exclusion which are the same as those we witnessed during the boom days of mobile phones. People without a Facebook account are part of no community at all! To put it even more strongly: they simply do not exist, and it becomes difficult for them to
