John McMurtry
London: Pluto Press, 2002, pb £15.99
I shouldn’t be reviewing this. I haven’t digested it properly and it is going to take some time to do so. But I don’t want to leave this for six months without promoting it. I used to try and preserve books in good condition, didn’t write on them or turn down the corner of the pages. Now I think of them as resources and after about 50 pages of this I noticed that I had turned down the corner of almost every page.
McMurtry is a Canadian Professor of Moral Philosophy and there is something about doing English-language philosophy which encourages clarity and precision. As with Tom Nairn’s book (see below) huge chunks of this are quotable and I will try and convey something of McMurtry’s thesis and style by direct quotation. Why have me paraphrasing it? All emphases are in the original. Here’s the opening sentences of the chapter 1, ‘Inevitability and Terror: the Unseen Pattern’.
‘The slogan “Marxism is dead” was proclaimed almost immediately on the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Very soon after, a strange ideological inversion occurred. In place of “the inevitable victory of the proletariat” which Marx had predicted almost 150 years earlier, there is instead the “inevitable process of globalisation”
‘Underneath public or learned notice, the traditional liberal conscience against claims of economic determinism and sacrificial restructuring of societies, always deemed totalitarian before, became silent.’ (p. 4)
‘Throughout the world reengineering by the global apparatchiks, there has been a transformative principle of representation across phenomena and crises: to invert social values and general facts into their contrary so that no bearings remain for intelligibility of resistance. For basic example, that a corporate oligopolist system in which over 60 per cent of international trade is between offices of the same firms or interlocked partners is the opposite of “a free market”, never arises as an issue. It cannot compute to the locked mind-set …..the closure of fanaticism is revealed by the evangelical repetition of certitudes and simultaneous abolition from view of whatever truth contradicts them.’ (p. 5)
‘For years on end the chorus of “inevitable restructuring” of one society after another absolved the dogma-delirium of the architects from any responsibility for what was overtly declared as the “axings”, “slashings” and “cuts” of the shared life infrastructure of whole peoples across national border and continents. To acknowledge that the effects were decided would have been to concede a deliberate reign of economic terror.’ (p. 7)
‘Slogans substitute for fact without the inhibiting reflecting of thought. The sea of contradictions is, thus, called “staying the course”, and remains publicly and academically unproblematicised…….the ineluctable destiny of all peoples on earth to compete to succeed in serving trans-national investors is the ultimate given of social value, and increasingly the regulating principle of life consciousness itself.’ (p. 8)
‘Whatever obstructs universal rule by for-profit corporations and trans-national financial institutions is marked and pursued for extinction as a matter of consistent documentable fact over an extended period without notable exception.’ (p. 20)
‘Beginning with Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and arcing across centuries to F.A. von Hayek’s ersatz “transcendent order”, an unseen deist metaphysics is at work legitimising the imposed order as ultimately moral even as it wages a campaign of war against civil and ecological life organisation itself….A sign of the collective mind’s submergence in global market totemism is that not even postmodernism contests its ultimate meta-narrative, or thinks beyond its desiring-machine images or self-referential circuitries as given.” (p. 21)
‘US and British heads of corporate states…..are creatures who, before all else, seek to stay in group favour. In the limelight they are bathed in by the corporate media, they are historic performers of heroic resolve. Yet the mass destruction they in fact order of innocent Third World citizens and their life-supports have one master theme in common across all their tasks. Like the economic paradigm they stand for, they are disconnected from the effects of their decisions. This is the defining feature of the psychopath.’
And so on and so on, page after quotable page. I could fill ten pages of this issue with quotes. Tremendous stuff.