The Congo: Male Concepts of War

A while back I read a book by Croatian essayist Dubravka Ugrešić titled Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays. The book, published in 1998, detailed some of most gruesome aspects of the war in the former Yugoslavia and the new media wars. With the bitter humanism and political interesse of the European critical theorist style, Ugrešić wrote some of the most profound descriptions and metaphors of political rape and misogyny I have read. "War is shooting and shagging, screwing and killing," she writes that a returnee from the front announced.

As the war spread throughout society in the former Yugoslavia, "War and sex were richly intertwined." The society that embraced war "simply activated what had always existed in the male mindset." Her analysis of the "traditional war-pornographic rhetoric" extended to the names of weapons (often women's names), war photographs, (ex.g. fighters with rifles sticking out or embracing the barrel of a fieldpiece), the subculture of war (cartoons, literature, jokes, humor), and the new media war over image, (symbolic exchange for Baudrillard).

This, for Ugrešić, is the male concept of war, where the homeland (a feminine word as in 'the mother country') is fought over with weapons of the male imagination. A "deeply homosexual war came about," she writes, "and the strategy of rape became a cruel everyday reality."

And since "in these lands every lie becomes a truth in the end," the silence about the war in the Congo has likewise become a truth. Many are unaware that the country is six years into a brutal conflict (though ten years since the new conflict began) in which up to 4.7 million people have died: the highest number of fatalities in any conflict since World War II says the Economist.

In her essays, Ugrešić is not talking about Croatian society in particular; the Culture of Lying is a global society. The myth of national priority allegiance is the myth of global media attention.

Harvard researcher Ethan Zuckerman has devised a useful "Global Attention Profile" that documents the amount of reporting that is done throughout the world in order to compare with points of interest. Looking at a timeline of this project, pan-African issues are systematically underrepresented. Our own struggle with irrationality is marked by inadequacies transmitted from the mythical national prioritization of state heads to the mythical faces of media and news management.

An article in The Nation describes several common ways in which marauding militias transmit the male message in the DRC. Unspared infants and old widows, for example, are brutally raped and left to die in the bushes. The men use the phallic barrels of rifles, bayonets, and "chunks of wood" to gang rape young women, piercing and padlocking their labias, and infecting them with HIV/AIDS (which 60% of the combatants carry.) One of these accounts tells the story of a 70 year-old woman whose entire family was murdered. But the armed men were not finished.

"They grabbed me, tied my legs apart like a goat before slaughter, and then raped me one after another."

Then,

"they stuck sticks inside me until I fainted."

This woman was left with a massive fistula and permanent incontinence, and her story is a common one. In an interview with filmmaker Lisa Jackson, she tells us that Congolese men who walk into their homes while their wives are being raped will often not interfere if it is done 'for the sake of the motherland'.

For the thousands of women who were raped in the Croatian homeland, Ugrešić writes that their bodies simply served "as a medium for the transmission of male messages," signals written by and sent to other men. It is a numbing 'procession of simulacra' from our perspective, to turn Baudrillard's phrase, but an everyday ministry of pain for the Congolese women.

The media desert is certainly not barren when it comes to information about the rape epidemic in the Congo. It is rather the trahison des clercs of the modern mainstream media which buries and re-prioritizes this information to fit the priorities of prominent heads of state. The "major-league press follows the geopolitical map," says a spokesperson from the UN World Food Program. The snake chews its own tail; we are all followers of each other's information. Even now, the links I provide are linking elsewhere, and the 'chain of signifiers' is unending.

During the conflict in Bosnia alone, NATO peacekeeping troops numbered 65,000, "and even that wasn't enough," a UN major said. Today, there are only 5,000 UN troops in the DRC, an area which is roughly the size of Western Europe, and most of the time peacekeeping forces are outnumbered by the warring militias.

"Never before have we found as many victims of rape in conflict situations as we are discovering in the DRC," said the UNWFP. It's "like Rwanda, only worse."

Fighters from six countries--Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia--have been fighting proxy wars in the DRC for years, plundering the country's tremendous mineral wealth to fill their pockets in a neo-mercantilist struggle for wealth accumulation: another male concept of war wherein the 'homeland' of the other becomes the object of immense jealousy and territories for spilling seeds of rape and war. The commerce of the "blood" minerals, such as coltan, is used in cell phones and laptops, and uranium, drives the conflict. Enriched Congolese uranium was used by the U.S. in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Since the old truth is that the West determines global priorities, is the new truth that the West simply does not care? Perhaps, but the West in fact has never prioritized Africa. Early on the Western powers, the U.S. included, used strongman imperialist tactics to rape the Congo 'motherland' for its resources: diamonds, rubber, tin, gold, silver, tungsten, manganese, uranium, palm oil, timber, etc. American professors, venture capitalists, colonialists and the like had all struck asymmetric bargains with the Congo since its 'invention'.

And now, as it was said by Kwame Nkrumah, the new colonialism is the highest stage of imperialism. We are constantly "running back again."

This, by the way, is how the Dictionary of Literary Terms defines the word palindrome. It is a running back of words and symbols. Ugrešić introduces us to her work with an analysis of the palindrome as a metaphor for political discourse. "In our normal understanding," she writes, "it is normal for there to be two sides, right and left, East and West, and it doesn't cross anyone's mind to suggest that they're identical."

The palindromic reality that is Africa today is that we are intimately connected to the region through globalization: our cellphones and laptops depend on this war. And it doesn't cross anyone's mind to suggest the interdependent relationship. With every cellphone minute used, we speak "the devil's verse", the language of the palindrome.

- Which is at once subversive and utopian. For Ugrešić the palindrome suggests the abolition of binary opposites and a commitment to sameness. "Shall we destroy each other, will the 'atom furl' us all in the end," she writes, "Will we be left with one single, final palindromic wail - kisik!"

In Croatian this means "oxygen".

The struggle for oxygen continues. There cannot be recrudescence in Africa when we are constantly "running back again" palindromatically but redefining our terms alphagrammatically as we go along.

One of Ugrešić's enigmatic verses ends this way:

"'Madam I'm Adam,' said Adam to Eve, and she introduced herself equally palindromatically: 'Eve.'"

Ready, Set, Congo!

I heard (through the blogvine) about an interesting blog event through Black Women Who Vote. Bloggers are calling for other bloggers to research and write about the rape epidemic in the Congo on Sunday, April 13th. Since April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month (see Document the Silence) this is a relevant duty for bloggers.

"A Brief, Bright Flash of Red Light"

This is a short film that I created.

Thanks to Nathan from Beyond Modernity for discussing Nietzschean values, feminist values, and the meaning of this film (before it was finished) on one of the earlier posts, "On Women Being Murderous in the Movies".

Next Step: The Full Semantic Web

It seems clear to me that the next stage in informatic integration is to break down the barriers that exist between the innumerable platforms and content online. The next stage should be a "mash up" of everything that exists so far, so that all the redundant content is no longer separable. For example, as an opinion in the Economist writes, how can one move furniture from Second Life into the newer metaverses like Entropia? This is not possible today, given modern conditions of production and exchange. But arguably, there is a greater metaverse out there, one in which all online content can be exchanged and flow fluidly to and from the existing "gated communities," if you will.

This does not apply to the virtual worlds exclusively, but rather, to all proprietary platforms. The article in the Economist says that these walled-off online communities are proprietary by nature, and adds that "only when a technology is established do standards emerge." As standards evolve over time it should make it easier to move content in and out of these walled-off communities. Today this is not happening, although it would only take some legal clarification and modifications to the XML code, along with some standardized APIs to change this.

Facebook, to use a familiar example, is reluctantly starting to open up. If you look at their growing list of embedded applications you can see the new kinds of "mash ups" internet visionaries are beginning to get excited about. For example, Facebookers can install web 2.0 specs like Twitter--the Derridean message-following, mobile-friendly news caster--onto their Facebook account and not have to worry about doing the exact same thing in two different places. This increases information while decreasing transaction. But this is only the beginning.

Gone were the days of AOL's "you've got mail!", notes the Economist. I remember when AOL had desperately sent copies of their free AOL time discs to millions of internet users in the mid-1990s. I also remember AOL signing me up for an expensive 6-month internet account that I never wanted in the first place. These technological dinosaurs have disappeared, though AOL still exists in new forms and has become a metaphor for slow-paced technological advances that do not open up to new ways. Now that we have greater serviceability through Web 2.0, the next step is to transform the databases into cross-searching, inter-operable networks. The next step is the "Full Semantic Web" and complete metaversal integration. Proprietary or not, whoever can successfully complete that dynamic leap will be more sustainable and not die out as the AOLs of an earlier era had.

We Should "Prize and Encourage" Monopolies

Assistant Attorney General Thomas Barnett of the antitrust division of the Department of Justice writes an interesting summary of what some would consider neoliberal views on antitrust. You can find his essay Maximizing Welfare Through Technology Innovation on the DOJ's website. Last year an article about his rejection of Google's claims against Microsoft appeared in the New York Times. This article I've written is an analysis of his substantive claims and rationale behind the more laissez faire position on trusts. It is also a critique of these views, arguing that Barnett and his colleagues have been nearsighted in their analysis of the collusive efforts of capitalists, workers and cartels.

For Barnett and the antitrust officials at the DOJ to adopt the approach, “first, do no harm” articulates a sort of Hippocratic, oath-like attitude toward maximizing society's welfare. Barnett explains that in the context of antitrust, the principle should be interpreted as a careful intention to not "kill the goose that lays the golden egg." This comes under his broader discussion of three different types of efficiency, static, incremental-dynamic, and leap frog-dynamic.

Under the administration of Barnett, the antitrust division finds the dynamic efficiencies, especially where "entirely new forms of production" (that is, to "leap frog") are realistic potentialities, to be the primary incentive for not punishing firms with greater market power. This is quite unlike the view that earlier administrations had taken to, as evidenced by the Philadelphia Bank case, where two banks with relatively little market power were broken up by the antitrust authorities in the 1970s.

The type of competition which Barnett says antitrust officials should not mistake for a violation of antitrust law is what Joseph Schumpeter terms "creative destruction". This sort of competition is a long run phenomena, dealing with "new technologies", "new sources of supply", "new types of organization", and "new commodities". It is the constant restructuring and reorganization of the market through competitive dynamism.

For this reason, here quoting Judge Easterbrook, Barnett believes that "aggressive, competitive conduct by a monopolist" should not be mistaken for anticompetitive conduct or performance since it is "highly beneficial to consumers." Competitive and exclusionary conduct looks the same from the court’s point of view. This is the difficulty, Barnett says. But instead of condemning the monopolists as social welfare-destroyers, courts should "exercise appropriate caution" when dealing with them.

He adds that the courts should to the best of their ability "prize and encourage" dynamic efficiency through antitrust enforcement. That is, prize and encourage monopoly market structure. Because monopoly structure does not determine monopoly performance, the drive towards greater exclusion is interpreted as an exemplification of sort of pro-competitive performances that do not warrant the DOJ's scrutiny toward the market's structure. Exclusionary conduct, in short, is welfare-maximizing. If two firms compete head-to-head in an industry, arguably, every bit of exclusionary conduct (provided a legal system conducive to competition) helps the firms to perform more efficiently, and thus more desirably.

Even if there is only one firm in an industry, the threat of potential competition through the sorts of dynamic efficiencies discussed by Schumpeter ensure the market performance will be efficient and desirable in the long run. If the monopoly firm is not dynamically efficient, it will be taken over by new entrants that are dynamically efficient, and the process of creative destruction continues.

Yet for this same reason, allegedly, Barnett believes that cartels should be the cause of tremendous worry. "Their entire purpose is to avoid disruptive forces of competition," he says. To live the "quiet life"—as Nobel Laureate John Hicks wrote—is their ultimate end. Barnett adds that cartels are not only dynamically inefficient, they are statically inefficient as well. This is to say that cartels not only decrease social welfare in the short run (static), but in the long run as well (dynamic). This is "double the ‘calamity’" and deserving of "severe sanctions available against them under U.S. law."



Now, if one were to attack Barnett's position on trusts, what would it look like? One position, that of the Marxist, might argue that antitrust forces like these only stave off the destruction of the capitalist system. By enforcing the laws on cartels, the DOJ ultimately keeps away the inevitable tendency toward the paroxysm of the capitalist system. I'm not sure whether the appropriate Marxist thing to do is to breakup the trusts (cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, etc.) and give the industries to the workers, or whether to allow capitalism the ultimate free-for-all it needs to force workers into revolt. I don't consider myself a Marxist so my confusion is warranted to some degree.

At any rate, the modern liberal, on the other hand, would argue that the monopoly structure is itself evidence of poor performance and poor conduct. To the liberal, market structure determines conduct which in turn determines performance. This was embodied in the work of Joe Bain during the 1970s, and to this day modern liberals have made essentially the same argument with regards to monopoly market structure. Since the 70s, countless empirical and econometric studies have shown this falsifiable hypothesis to in fact be false: market structure does not determine market performance.

Of course, there have been more modern restatements of the structure-conduct-performance paradigm, and yet there have also been restatements to counter this as well. For the most part, I don't agree with the liberal's basic contention that structure determines performance. It seems to me, as it does to Barnett, that performance determines structure. Especially when one takes into account the dynamic aspect of competition, the cost-benefits to dynamically efficient firms will lead to market structures in which inefficient and poorly performing firms must either vanish or simply refrain from entering a market.

Probably one of the less talked about areas of trusts are labor trusts, or unions as they are more commonly known. In general, modern liberals favor unions and disfavor monopolies. Yet a union is in fact a monopoly on the labor force. It seems to me that this is a one-sided view. If I would allow the performance of labor market to determine the structure of the labor market without interfering with its marketplace, I should also allow the performance of the capitalists' market to determine the structure of the industry without interfering with the marketplace.

Another point about labor forces is that they are more likely to be unionized when there are monopolistic structures than when there is perfect competition, since a firm's variable costs (among other things, this primarily denotes wages) are not fixed in the short run or in the long run. They can be cut if needed, and in a perfectly competitive market cuts to variable costs are needed more due to elasticities and lack of market power. In monopoly market structures, therefore, it would seem the level of cooperation (collusion, unionizing, etc.) increases relatively simultaneously with capitalists as it does with the labor force.

Because we ought not interfere with the aggregation and power of the capitalists, according to Barnett's analysis, why ought we to interfere with the aggregation and power of the labor force? I am not suggesting this is Barnett's position. I am merely using this example to make my argument more clear. It is within a labor union's interest to be dynamically efficient and exclusionary just as it for the monopoly capitalists. The union's performance keeps the firm in a position of market power and dominance, and, so long as the union has market power, the threat of striking or other predatory practices keeps the unions' profits high. With the background analysis that I have provided, I now wish to explain why I think Barnett's argument is ultimately unsatisfactory.

When capitalists collude with other capitalists, how is the DOJ to determine whether this is competitive or anticompetitive? Barnett suggests that performance, as opposed to structure, is the indicator the antitrust division should be concerned about. However, Barnett points to the need to break up cartels as the DOJ's highest antitrust priority. Yet existence of cartel is a structure; it is not an indication of performance. This is an important point. To say that monopoly structure is to be "prized and encouraged" because it may be performatively welfare-maximizing, while at the same time say that cartel structures are to be "severely sanctioned" because it is a structure which cannot possibly perform in a welfare-maximizing way is a non-sequitur.

Perhaps an economist or an attorney general has already come along and said this, but we must ask ourselves what reasonable distinction can be drawn between a collusive capitalist who merges, acquires, sets prices, restricts output, earns profit, (etc.) within a monopoly market structure, and a collusive capitalist who merges, acquires, sets prices, restricts output, and earns profit within a cartelized market structure? Another way to put this would be to ask, What is the difference between two capitalists, one in a monopoly structure and the other in a cartel structure, both whose "entire purpose is to avoid disruptive forces of competition"? To use John Hick's well-known phrase we can likewise ask, What is the difference between the "quiet life" of the monopolist, the "quiet life" of the cartel, and the "quiet life" of the unionized worker?

The argument goes that even if there are no other static competitors in a monopoly market, that the threat of potential competition through dynamic efficiency implores the market to become efficient. Firms may also be checked by gateway entrants from other markets who can enter the industry at the significant cost advantages. All attempts at exclusionary practice, arguably, lends itself toward greater social welfare through competition. Yet the greatest source competition, I would argue, comes from a firm's competition with the labor market. It seems this would be especially evident when there are no other market challengers.

Let me restate this last point. The labor market is the greatest source of competition, since, even if firms exclude to the point where even gateways from other markets have been exhausted, the competitive pressure from the labor market will continue to ensure revenues to capitalists do not exceed the cost of production by far. The standard microeconomic argument that "economic profits attract entrants into the market" and thus lower prices can equally be said to apply here. Instead of attracting entrants, however, it attracts greater demand for wage increases, which in this example would appear to be a form of inflation.

In short, it seems to me Barnett is having the same sort of dynamic misconceptions about collusion and the long run economy that attorney generals of an earlier era had, albeit, now applied to much greater forms of market power. Barnett and his colleagues may believe the DOJ in the 1970s had it wrong when it broke up two banks in Philadelphia with insignificant market power, yet attorney generals now show the same unfounded concern for collusive activity on a greater scale in this era. This shows the extent that the DOJ's views on dynamism reaches. Perhaps an economist or an attorney general will soon come out and say that we cannot make the analytic case against cartels for the same reasons that we cannot make the analytic case against the monopolies, as we once thought. But as of now such argument to my knowledge has not reached fruition.

Same Day Deportation

I came across an article on the WW4 Report about recent ICE raids in the LA area. It's also on Free Speech Radio here. Angélica Salas from the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights in LA (CHIRLA) said it "seemed strange" that recent detainees were "deported so quickly, because that doesn't happen unless they have final orders of deportation, and none of these people even had the chance to talk to a lawyer." The pace of deportation is becoming faster and faster, in accordance with Homeland Security's End Game plan to oust all illegal immigrants by 2012.

The phrase I'm using--"same day deportation"--characterizes these raids perfectly. That is exactly what had happened in these more recent cases. (If this becomes a popular phrase then I want my blog to get the credit for it.) At any rate, I'm going to use the phrase freely to talk about the new kinds of raids that are going on.

There's a very dry blog (Immigration News Briefs) that tries to document as many ICE raids it can. However, there should be a better resource out there in order to keep pace with End Game, especially when ICE's website (ice.gov) is in no way transparent. As should be expected, it is very unsatisfactory as a source for whistle-blowing. ICE itself prefers to publish selected events and topics which they presumably believe to be Homeland Security victories, leaving out the sorts of human rights failures that happen on a day-to-day basis. It is also worth noting that the larger project, End Game, cannot be found on their website. Or if it is there it's been buried so well it does not come up in any searches.