Carnet intime
A fine piece in the Financial Times discusses not only the scientific but the cultural and linguistic dimensions of recycling the radioactive waste generated by nuclear power, which will be deadly for at least 100,000 years.
Global warming may turn out to be a minor feature of our legacy as a species.
See also: The Misplaced Anxieties of Green Ecology
The UK falls to ninth place, just ahead of Mexico and behind Indonesia. And that is the UK including Scotland. Data from the dastardly IMF, whose business is to be right about these things. Image of a graph in the Financial Times 2 July.
Sites change. Although I’ll continue to post longer pieces, mostly from my archives, this one will shortly assume a different beat.
Western audiences, out of ignorance, yield too easily
to fundamentalist Muslim claims that Islam is prescriptive
in simple ways. To argue otherwise requires knowledge
of Islamic hermeneutics, dialectics, and dialogics.
— Fischer and Abedi, Debating Muslims (p. 147)
Twenty years ago I published an academic piece on three North African writers which went largely unread — par for that course to be sure.
Jihad Ijtihad and other Dialogical Wars
I offer this link to the past because its matter remains topical. It explains in accessible terms to readers of English the concepts of jihad and its cognate ijtihad, as well as the relationship of each to the other.
They anchor each end of a dialogical continuum running from holy war through conversion (by various means) and maieutic (giving birth to ideas) on to the hermeneutics of ijtihad, which might be defined as “interpretative work”. Ijtihad began before jihad, since Allah’s edict to Muhammad at the moment of revelation was إقرا iqra! read! / recite!, which does after all require interpretation.
As interpretation of the work for which jihad calls, ijtihad must be understood dialectically (in light of the range of counter-arguments), hermeneutically (in terms of allusions and contexts, nuances and changes in word usage), and dialogically (in relation to the motives and manipulations of political others to whom one is opposed).
Both jihad and ijtihad are “ethical discourse”. They are conducted in a communicative environment driven by dialogue with others, by attempts to persuade those others “to join one’s own moral and political community” (Fischer and Abedi, p. 146). It should therefore not be surprising that poetry sometimes plays a persuasive role in Islamicist polemic and propaganda: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/29/poetry-used-as-a-perfect-weapon-for-recruiting-violent-jihadis-study-finds.
My point? Just read the epigraph again.
If you have declared someone an enemy or have been declared an enemy by someone else, best learn to know them (dixit Sun Tzu in The Art of War). The way it looks for the moment, the jihadis of Da’esh have a better grasp of the vulnerabilities of the so-called West — susceptibility to bouts of collective fear, self-indulgent materialism — than the West does of theirs, whatever either may be.
Liberals, neo- or not, tend to dismiss Marxist theory as voluntarist drivel, a reflection of evil intentions, not analysis amenable to verification. Hence my surprise the other day in reading this excerpt from the Financial Times in a series on China’s Great Game in Central Asia:
“Lenin’s theory that imperialism is driven by capitalist surpluses seems to hold true, oddly, in one of the last (ostensibly) Leninist countries in the world. It is no coincidence that the Silk Road strategy coincides with the aftermath of an investment boom that has left vast overcapacity and a need to find new markets abroad.” (13 Oct 2015, p. 9)
The debate over the economic causes of imperialism survived the crisis in orthodox, state-sanctioned Marxism, in part because it had been incorporated into Third World and World Systems theory then embraced by the anti-globalization movements which taddress the inequities among the most, the more, the less and the least economically developed societies around the globe. Inequities also prevail within each of those sectors.
Here, in what we persist in calling the West, prolonged stagnation of income, pervasive impoverishment and creeping lumpen-proletariatization have meant slumping internal markets. To export their surplus of profit, corporations based in the capitalist democracies now need foreign consumers — the unbridled creation of credit, aka debt, to feed domestic consumption having revealed its shortcomings in 2008.
In China, given its recent boom, the problem is similar, though more acute.
Beijing must find sufficient external demand for its products and goods to avoid recession, depression or even collapse, of the economy first, then of the regime. This is why China must expand into Central Asia. Its province of Xinjiang (New Frontier 新疆, or in its other official, Uyghur transcription شىنجاڭ) as well as the hinterland in the Stans are as important to this recently established, naturally continentally-minded dynasty as its maritime zones of influence, both the seas adjacent to the western Pacific which bear its name (East China Sea, South China Sea), and the “String of Pearls” which connects its prosperous coast through the Strait of Malacca to the Middle East and Europe. From a Leninist, though even from a purely merchantilist perspective, the Trans-Pacific Partnership which excludes China from crucial east Asian and west Pacific markets will push China even more strongly into central Asia.
Lenin’s argument was initially directed against his rival Karl Kautsky’s 1914 typically social-democratic bout of wishful thinking that capitalism’s tendency towards cartel monopoly would lead to a phase of ultra-imperialism in which the great powers subsume their nationalist antagonisms and cooperate jointly in the exploitation of the periphery, thus avoiding war. Lenin correctly saw — retrospectively in 1917, let us note — that the ever-shifting balance of powers among competitive capitalist states precluded such co-operation. Put another way: state politics trump economics.
So it is not odd, in fact the odds favour that the capitalist powers, soon prima inter pares China, will be drawn into military conflict in a tragic reprise of the internal contradictions which engendered the First World War, but also the first explicitly anti-capitalist revolution, the one associated with Lenin’s name. The next anti-capitalist revolution remains to be imagined. If the past is any measure, it will follow upon a cataclysm unavoidable as long as the logic of capitalist accumulation prevails as international law.
*
The Financial Times article can be accessed in on the Uyghur Human Rights Project / UHRP website (no firewall). http://uhrp.org/featured-articles/china’s-great-game-new-frontier-old-foes
Lenin’s theory of imperialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage_of_Capitalism
World Systems Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-systems_theory
Kautsky’s Ultra-imperialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-imperialism
China’s Silk Road initiative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silk_Road_Economic_Belt_and_the_21st-century_Maritime_Silk_Road
China’s String of Pearls strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_of_Pearls_(Indian_Ocean)
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership