Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

Yes, end medicare and social security. And due process. Only statists support medicare and social security. And due process.

You are getting at some important issues. However the extreme anti-State position you satirize is not my own, nor I think that of Rochester Red and Black.

From the previous piece:

In an effort to preserve their legitimacy, and as a result of class struggle, some states maintain programs with important positive social impact like Social Security and Medicare. These programs are ultimately unsustainable, as they are counter to the interests of the capitalists that the state actually represents. Therefore these programs are distorted and weakened over time to ensure that business interests are satisfied. To organize a revolutionary society, we must have popular and democratic institutions that replace the positive functions of the state. We believe in community self-management of society and the economy rather than state and capitalist control.

In the short term, this means that the working class has the power through direct action and class struggle to create immediate change. In a struggle for universal health care, there is great power in an organized body of health care workers refusing to deny services. In a struggle against the privatization of public utilities, there is great power in organized utility workers refusing to turn off people’s power. In the struggle against war, there is great power in dock workers refusing to ship arms. Ultimately it is within the grasp of the unified working class to bring the capitalist system of inequality and exploitation to a grinding halt through mass class struggle.

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[American Dream]

Matthijs Krul on Nazi settler colonialism

It's no secret that Nazi Germany set out to create a settler colonial empire in eastern Europe. But what role did this effort play in the larger Nazi project? How was it connected with Nazi economic, military, and racial policies -- including the annihilation of European Jews? Matthijs Krul's essay "What was Nazi Germany?" (in Parts I, II, and III) explores these questions in more detail than I have seen in other anti-fascist discussions. I don't completely agree with Krul's conclusions, but I think he offers an important piece of the picture, which has larger significance for understanding fascism more generally.

Krul is an independent Marxist who runs the blog Notes & Commentaries. "What was Nazi Germany?" appeared there in 2010, but I only discovered it this year.



Resettlement of German colonizers to annexed Polish territories. Bundesarchiv, R 49 Bild-0705 / CC-BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons
As Krul recounts, Nazi settler-colonialist ambitions involved military conquest of Poland and large sections of the USSR, forced removal of non-Germans from these lands, and their replacement by German settlers. This vision was inspired partly by earlier genocidal conquests elsewhere -- notably Imperial Germany's war against the Herero in what is now Namibia, and the United States' conquest of Native America -- but unlike most previous examples directed settler conquest against Europe itself. (Krul doesn't mention it, but the British also practiced settler colonialism in Europe, specifically Ireland, centuries earlier. See Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Volume One.)

Continues (w/links embedded) at: http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2013/ ... ttler.html

[American Dream]

Asian Dub Foundation - 19 Rebellions

[American Dream]

http://libcom.org/library/economy-making-women-care

The economy of making women care

A brief analysis of how capitalism systematically subjugates women, and therefore how women's emancipation is bound up with the struggle against capitalism.


The supposed ‘solution’ to the economic crisis is premised on cutting costs. It is therefore important to highlight the role that women’s subordinate position in the economy plays, as this will allow - and is allowing - for many activities to continue on an unpaid basis.

History has already shown how women are used differently at different economic junctures.

Whereas the war economy of the 1920s and 1930s put women to work, it sacked them in the 1940s to give their posts to the soldiers coming home from the front. The ‘marriage bar’, that is, the prohibition of married women to enter certain better-qualified professions, which was in place in some industries until the 1960s, kept women in low paid jobs. According to Maria Angeles Durán, 2/3 of the total working hours today are unpaid caring-type of activities - done almost entirely by women.

In this process, men remain the rightful workers and economy managers whereas women’s involvement in the labour market is dependent on their caring-burdens and market needs. A 2007 research paper by Aguiar and Hurst shows that in industrialised countries full-time working women spend an average of 23 hours per week in unpaid housework and between 6 and 12 hours in unpaid childcare, this latter being between 2 to 4 times more than what men do.1 In the UK, this can be up to 60% of the total activities women do.2



According to the latest data on occupation by gender in the UK 69.4% of the cleaners, 81.5% of the social workers, and 87.7% of the nurses, are women. But women only make up 6.8% of engineering professionals.3 Women overall earn about £90 less per week than men. As such, women do the bulk of unpaid caring activities, they represent the biggest percentage of care-type jobs, and of the lower-paid professions.

Keeping care as an unpaid or poorly paid activity not only allows for huge savings to the economy, but also it creates an economy based on competition, the market and growth, rather than on need and affection. More importantly, these parameters allow “the economy” to be defined quite apart from many activities relevant to our lives, such as childcare. This tends to assign responsibilities and value through constructed social hierarchies, ultimately giving privileges and control to heterosexual white rich men.

Looking at the economy of care brings up that ‘caring’ is not so much something that women do because they are born to do so, but because of very precise and at times coercive economic measures. It is on these bases that our feminism needs not to aspire to the privileges men have but to attack and subvert the social hierarchies that sustain capitalism.

Taken from Catalyst #29


1. Aguiar, Mark and Erik Hurst. 2007. ‘‘Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five Decades.’’ Quarterly Journal of Economics 122(3): 969–1006.
2. Office for National Statistics. 2006. The Time Use Survey, 2005. How We Spend our Time, London: HMSO. Table 4.4
3. Office for National Statistics. 2011. Emp16: All in Employment by status, occupation and sex. Quarter 2 (Apr - Jun). http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/ ... A77-215723

[American Dream]

It’s the signals from the future I’m interested in. I dunno, maybe its different for you. The fact you get paid, I guess, the fact that you’re on a salary, does give you a point of entry that, for the time being at least, I don’t really have access to. To be unemployed is to be a stowaway, at best. From where I’m sitting, all I can hear is a dull metronomic beating, sentimental rants about extermination and terror and the like. What are the psychogeographical signals set off by a fascist mob, for example, what galaxies and rhythmic swarms are they colliding with. Absolute magnetic compressions. History as a separable particle, a damp electric rag shoved down our kidnapped throats. I dunno, maybe I’m wrong. I wish you’d tell me. I wish you were capable of saying just one word that would convince me all narrative structures - including those of the so-called avant garde - haven’t been reduced to something as basic as a crowbar, a massive memory lapse, a constellation of chemical dirt and bizarre melodies that no-one is dancing to.

— Sean Bonney, “Letter Against Fear (Unsent)“

[American Dream]

http://class-struggle-anarchism.tumblr. ... 2180034155

[American Dream]

“European racism as the white man’s claim has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation of someone as Other: it is instead in primitive societies that the stranger is grasped as an ‘other.’ Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from the [white] wall, which never abides alterity (it’s a Jew, it’s an Arab, it’s a Negro, it’s a lunatic…). From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be. The dividing line is not between inside and outside but rather is internal to simultaneous signifying chains and successive subjective choices. Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out (or those who only allow themselves to be identified at a given degree of divergence). Its cruelty is equaled only by its incompetence and naïveté.”

— Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Year Zero: Faciality,” from A Thousand Plateaus (1980)

[American Dream]

"We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist."

— Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?

[American Dream]

"The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused. A revolutionary is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much force as these coercive machines have for producing breaks and mobilizing flows."

--Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

[American Dream]

http://snappalos.wordpress.com/2011/08/ ... o-we-have/

Consumer Medicine: what sort of power do we have?

In The Subject and Power, Michael Foucault lays out a framework for understanding relationships between how we are placed as subjects, power, institutionalized power, and struggles surrounding these issues [1]. In trying to understand these subjects, he looks at struggles against forms of power in his time that he felt illustrated these issues, for example: ”…opposition to the power of men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the population, of administration over the ways people live”. Medicine is an important example of power for two reasons. First, people overlook the ways in which medicine represents power held over others, particularly the popular classes. Second, our relationship with medicine has undergone some drastic revisions which both make understanding its power crucial and challenging.

Speaking about these struggles, Foucault notes,

“They are an opposition to the effects of power which are linked with knowledge, competence, and qualification: struggles against the privileges of knowledge. But they are also an opposition against secrecy, deformation, and mystifying representations imposed on people. There is nothing “scientistic” in this (that is, a dogmatic belief in the value of scientific knowledge), but neither is it a skeptical or relativistic refusal of all verified truth. What is questioned is the way in which knowledge circulates and functions, its relations to power. In short, the regime du savor“.

Whether or not we agree with the analysis, something important is discussed here. The power of medicine are connected to a few things: institutional privileges mediated by the state (qualifications), an ideological framework of knowledge which is the property of professionals, and that struggles against medicine focus on the relationships between the institutions, the privileges/powers of the professionals, and the subject. He recognizes components of these struggles as “…struggle against the forms of subjection-against the submission of subjectivity…”. That is, people struggling against the way in which Medicine makes them subjects.

Stepping back, medicine through its clinics, educational arms, hospitals, popular science, and media creates subjects through its relationships with people and it’s practices. The role grows up within capitalism, and is mediated and empowered by its position in relation to the State and capitalist business (which both constitutes and invests in its functions). Medical institutions are institutions of ideology and power, in a parallel manner to schools, prisons, the military, etc. They are important sites wherein ideology is reproduced.

This is obscured by the fact that in medicine, the ideology is not obvious as could be argued in say prisons or schools. Ideology instead is made up by the relationship of patients and family to physicians, the bureaucracy, other patients, etc. Patients at each step experience medicine through the prism of class, race, sex, sexuality, etc., relationships and the existing hierarchies therein. It teaches you to know your place, much in the way that schools are structured around and educational in learning one’s position in society. Healthcare is a vehicle to reproduce submission of one’s control over your body to professionals and institutions, whether literally in some cases or more often than not symbolically.

This is not to say that DIY-medicine is automatically liberating or a good way to go. Rather, everything we do in society is reflective of the dominant power relations created and reproduced through the relationships that make up capitalism and state hierarchy. There is not an “outside” where we could create a free medicine liberated from the bounds of power. Instead struggles around liberating healthcare need to occur around the constitutive power relationships that produce an industry of submission and subjugation.

However, the role of medicine that Foucault writes about here, and 20 years early in the Birth of the Clinic, does not exist. Today we find ourselves in a strange place where the prior obvious or naked power of the physician has been unalterably changed. With every day, patients have more and more power in a sense. As healthcare becomes increasingly consumer driven, advertisement laden, and funding tied to consumptive concepts, these roles are shifting. Yet the power healthcare consumers receive is not a power that liberates them from the poverty of healthcare resource availability, the domination by authorities over their bodies, or other such subjugation. Instead it becomes one of apparent choice and apparent freedom, which is increasingly determined by the market and indeed is leading to reduced standards of care.

Through the healthcare reform act, funding is now being tied to customer surveys by patients. Soon funding will be determined in part due to “outcomes” (hospital readmissions, overall health, etc). Such structural reforms by the state have already induced hospital management to revise how healthcare workers spend their time, towards giving patients the feeling of being well served. Hourly rounds aimed at giving patients the sense of people having enough time (while horribly understaffed) and being served like a hotel (at the expense literally of doing proper medical work to improve people’s health) are leading to large time shifts towards the manipulation of patient perception. This is a different form of subjectivity. When our relationship to our bodies and our families, increasingly is subjected to market psychology and competition, it is likely that people will find themselves more dependent upon a system that profits from their misery.

1. Foucault, Michael. The Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Summer, 1982), pp. 777-795

[American Dream]

Revolution, Music, and Raves

Raves came from many sources, some bourgeious, but most significantly working class origins (Detroit, LA, NY, Chicago). Raves spread throughout the world very quickly. They always had an antagonist relation with the state due to the illegal reclamation of public space and subversive use of sex and drugs. With the rise of a social formation which sought to build community not based around profit and that sought expression of human need and desire freely within a collective effort formations of capital and control arose which sought to gain profit and make controllable these formations. Likewise a current evolved which fought these approaches, and some went further underground. The state responded through mass militarized crackdowns both legislative and extralegally. In LA for example there was a rave squad that roamed the desert every weekend simply looking for and breaking up parties. Some police raids were blood baths, others spurred mass riots. Open agitation against the state was not infrequent. From the start to the finish raves reflect the problems and perspectives of working class existence throughout. The problem of having to work was a common discourse throughout. Some fought work altogether through dropping out, others through petit bourgeious small business approaches, others through class struggle. The party itself was seen as an antidote to the control of work throughout the rest of the week. Eventually capital and the state brought it under control and made it acceptable. The movement died and collapsed turning into ‘going to the club’.

http://snappalos.wordpress.com/2006/12/ ... and-raves/

[American Dream]

The capitalist machine does not run the risk of becoming mad, it is mad from one end to the other and from the beginning, and this is the source of its rationality. Marx’s black humor…is his fascination with such a machine: how it came to be assembled, on what foundation of decoding and deterritorialization; how it works, always more decoded, always more deterritorialized…; how it produces the terrible single class of gray gentlemen who keep up the machine; how it does not run the risk of dying all alone, but rather of making us die, by provoking investments of desire that do not even go by way of a deceptive and subjective ideology, and that lead us to cry out to the very end, Long live capital in all its reality, in all its objective dissimulation! Except in ideology, there has never been a humane, liberal, paternal, etc., capitalism. Capitalism is defined by…cruelty….Wage increases and improvements in the standard of living are realities, but realities that derive from a given supplementary axiom that capitalism is always capable of adding to its axiomatic in terms of an enlargement of its limits: let’s create the New Deal; let’s cultivate and recognize strong unions; let’s promote participation, the single class; let’s take a step toward Russia, which is taking so many toward us; etc. But within the enlarged reality that conditions these islands, exploitation grows constantly harsher, lack is arranged in the most scientific of ways, final solutions of the ‘Jewish problem’ variety are prepared down to the last detail, and the Third World is organized as an integral part of capitalism.

--Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

[American Dream]

http://libcom.org/news/article.php/inte ... ker-250106

Jan 26 2006

Interview with an ex-sex text worker



In the wake of the first unfair dismissal case for a sex worker, libcom.org interviews another sex worker about the industry, the work, and the possibilities for struggle

Last week, GMB member Irene Everett won the first ever unfair dismissal case for a sex worker, against Essex-based Datapro Service Limited. She had worked on their live adult chat lines for eight years. The GMB, following its merger with the International Union of Sex Workers in 2002, has been trying to organise in the UK, and this was their first victory.

This month the government also announced moves to legalise brothels of up to three prostitutes working together, whilst stopping short of full decriminalisation of the sex industry and even promising new crackdowns on street prostitutes. This underlines the difficulties for sex workers in organising and the ambivalent nature of state intervention, although it does point to new mainstream interest in the subject.

Research by Sophie Day has shown the diversity of approaches to self-organisation or legal reform amongst prostitutes. Some view their work very much as a small business and wary of legislation - which although it might mean better work conditions may also mean more regulation, less autonomy and more difficulties in remaining self-employed, and some are involved in public campaigns for legal recognition and work rights. However, the sex industry should not be seen as limited to prostitution, as Irene Everett's case shows.

With this in mind, libcom.org spoke to Jack, a libertarian socialist who worked for a sex-texting company during 2005.

Which company did you work for? For how long?

The company I worked for went by the ever so pleasant and subtle name of 'box-69'. The company did 'sex texting' - basically people would text sexual messages in to you (which you recieved on a computer, in a chat room type interface), and you would respond - the messages going directly to their mobiles. Obviously, in all but exceptional circumstances, these messages were of an extreme sexual nature. The company got most of its clientelle from a daily advert in the Daily Sport, but traded under various different names - such as 'Local Girls 4 U'. I lacked staying power, and only stuck at it for about 3 months full time before it started giving me serious problems, and I had to give it up.

How and why did you choose the job?

I mainly chose it because I needed the money! I was pretty depressed and had been out of work for a few months, and got told about it by one of my friends. Obviously, at first it sounded hilarious - I got to sit at home, pretending to be a girl, and getting guys off, and for (what looked like) not too bad money. So I searched about for a few companies on the internet, sat a 'test' (basically responding in a 'sexy' manner to a few form questions), and got offered the job. Probably more down to my ability to type quickly and accurately than any ability to be particularly sexy! I provided a scan of a (female) friends passport to 'prove' I was over 18 - I thought I would have to pretend to be female, although in retrospect I very much doubt they cared. Once I'd sat the test I waited about a week for them to get back to me, and then I was in!

What was the main content of the work?

The way the job worked was you had a number (usually around 4-6) of clients on the go at once. You could send them up to three texts for each one they sent you. I got paid around 10 pence for each text I sent - the customer got charged £1.50 for each one (the mobile network took around a third of this, the rest went to the employer). How it went depended upon how often the customer had been texting. If you got a 'new' customer it was pretty easy - you created a persona, spent about three texts introducing yourself and trying to make yourself sound sexy, and basically creating your character. Then you'd flirt a bit for a couple more, and soon enough (in almost all cases) be having sex text. A few people just wanted to 'chat' - although this was very much a minority. You had to keep notes on your character, so that you didn't mess up later and make the client realise you weren't real - most clients were under the impression you were another person texting in to try and meet dates, and had no idea you were an employee, although occasionally you would be accused of this, or being a machine, and had to spend (still paid for!) texts convincing them otherwise.

Things were much harder, however, if it wasn't a 'new' texter. Not just were we pretending to be other 'real' girls, but also oftentimes someone would text in again wanting to speak to a girl they had spoken with before. And often, the person who had worked as this girl wasn't working at that time, and so you would have to pretend to be this person - in fact the allocation of clients was almost totally random, so with the majority of clients you were continuing on from someone elses conversation, pretending to be them. This was much harder as you had to spend time checking and updating notes (which was unpaid), and could be very tricky with clients who had long, long histories. At first, it was easy, and a bit of a laugh - as well as funny talking point with my friends, but this didn't last for very long...

How were you paid for the work?

I was paid at a piece rate of around 10p per text. At first, this sounded amazing, especially as I could type them (140 characters average) with a keyboard - I figured I could average 3-4 texts a minute - which works out at over 20 quid an hour. This was paid either by paypal or direct bank transfer, and I never had any problems with lack of payment.

The problems, however, were multifold. Firstly, due to checking and updating notes and also getting information that matched the client (to keep them interested, I had to pretend to be local, so had to do stuff like look up info on local pubs etc. if I was asked where I liked to go), this rather never ever happened, because I wasn't constantly doing the 'paid' bit of the job. I was also further slowed down by (obviously) not being able to constantly able to type at my full speed for 6 hours in a row (I had to work straight shifts), and also having to constantly think up new ideas - there are only so many words for a cock, and only so many ways you can be taken from behind by the same guy before you start repeating yourself!

And to honest, for this reason. it just became really, really boring, so I wouldn't want to do it constantly at my full speed, and so my rate quickly began to drop.

There were also all the usual problems with piece rate, such as lack of a secure income and being unpaid for any kind of break in the work I made - so for example I wasn't paid when I needed the toilet on top of this. In the end with all this factored in, I was probably only making £3-4 an hour on average, and maybe £6 an hour if I was busy. On slow days when there weren't many clients, I could be making less than £2 an hour.

You mentioned things went wrong, what was this other that the money and the boredom?

Well, to be blunt it really started to fuck with me. While at first it was a novelty, and I laughed off the concept that it was ever going to 'get to me', or that I'd ever see it as more than sad old blokes wasting their money, it actually very quickly became really dehumanising.

Some of the clients I got were (perhaps predictably) real sick bastards. Two examples I remember specifically were a guy who had me act out in text form him shitting in my mouth, pissing on in, and then 'forcing it down with (his) long hard cock', and the trucker who wanted to take me in his cabin and fuck me with his gear stick. At first I thought this was a euphemism, until he added he wanted to me suck his penis while I did it. And obviously, given the nature of it, I had to act out enjoying all of this. It's really weird, because it's hard to describe and convey just why it was so wrong - I'm sure to a lot of people it just sounds funny, and on a conscious level to me, it was. But at the same time, it was really fucking me up inside, and really started depressing me.

I suppose it's not really that surprising - I spent 6 hours a day acting out as a vile fantasy who liked nothing better than being degraded and enjoying it - and I had no way of opting out (short of anyone who was racist or wanted something like rape, who could be disconnected) or I'd lose the job which at the time I urgently needed.

There was also a lot of pressure to constantly perform, to keep clients interested and coming back (the system tracked if you lost clients from the service) and to text in more and more - which obviously had its own problems, as I knew people were spending huge amounts of money on this service, thinking it was something it wasn't. In the end, I just couldn't do it anymore after I got a warning email that my performance was slipping and had to vastly improve - I desperately needed the money, but just couldn't hack it any more.

Did you work from home or an office? If from home, what were your communications with other workers and your bosses?

I worked from home - from my bedroom in fact! All communication with both bosses and co-workers was electronic, either over email, MSN mesenger (which we were required to log into when working) or the systems internal message boards, which were of course highly monitored. Although they had my mobile number (required as part of sign up), this was never used. A sense of competition was fostered (with prizes for the most successful texters), and while there was some sense of community, I had little contact with my co-workers - this being a mixture of only being able to communicate digitally, the monitoring of messages and (for me) the fact I was pretending to be a girl!

How much control did you have over the work in terms of hours, rate of work etc.?

The rate of work, I had quite a lot of control over, although mostly because I was a fast typer, and was in little danger of going too slow - I know a lot of people did it a lot slower than me and never hard of anyone getting any problems for going too slow - being piece rate it didn't really matter to the company, and they could just get more people online if people weren't servicing the clients fast enough.

Hours however, were another of the problems. I had to do (minimum) 4 hours shifts, starting at 6.30 am - I could work as much more than this as I wanted, but as a condition of me originally getting the work, I had to do a minimum for 6.30-11, 6 days a week. This was to make sure there was always a 'texter' logged in at any time a client could try and use the service. Compared to most jobs, I did have quite a lot of control over my hours, and most other texters weren't on as restricted hours as I was - but being at that time certainly added to the problem.

What were your interactions with customers like?

It veered between pity, digust, guilt and humour. Sometimes, it was just funny to think that some sad old perv was paying 1.50 per text (and bear in mind, I could send 3 for each of theirs - and 'text sex' would involve 3 in a row for each of their messages almost every time) while some depressed guy in his early 20's sat in his filthy bedroom earning a living. Sometimes, this moved to pity, partly that they were spending so much money (and for some of them it was a LOT) on this thinking it was a girl that really liked them - which is where the guilt came in. There were often really sad stories like guys working alone who couldn't meet girls or were stuck on an oil rig - with someone like this I'd vary my rate due to guilt and not wanting to feel like I was sucking out all their pay. Almost everyone would try and get your normal number so they weren't paying so much for the service, which led to a tedious cat and mouse game of different reasons I couldn't give it out (the service blocks it, I don't trust you enough yet, I've had bad experiences in the past etc. etc.) or receive their number, while still keeping them interested and involved in the process and still texting in.

But if I'm honest, any feelings of guilt and pity usually just dissolved into me thinking they were pathetic and feeling contempt for them, because when it came down to it, the sort of people who used the service were almost always nasty sexist assholes. The attitudes to women on display were revolting, and they didn't go to any effort to hide their low opinion of females. This actually sometimes made things a bit easy, as I could laugh to myself with glee as I extracted large amounts of money from these scumbags - probably not the most progressive attitude, but I think anyone who experience the sort of nasty shit some of them came out with, they'd feel similar.

Who were your co-workers?

Almost all of them were single mums, needing something they could do at home, while looking after kids. This obviously meant they were in little position to complain about any problems with conditions, as they absolutely had to keep the job. There were a few students, but a lot fewer than I expected - most were doing this as their fulltime job.

Although I only ever spoke to them over MSN or on the messageboards, so perhaps in reality half of them were really pervy old blokes! As much as I'd like to believe this to be the case though, I don't really think so - it was almost all really vulnerable people being really exploited.

You said interactions with co-workers were monitored, were the texts themselves monitored?

Yes, every single one. Not every one was read - they read a random selection to see if your stuff was up to scratch, that you had enough words per text etc. but mostly, they'd look where clients had disconnected from the service. If it was due to you not being good at it, making a mistake (eg. not reading notes carefully enough) or letting slip you weren't a 'real girl', then you'd get in a load of shit, and could lose the job.

Did customers ever make complaints about service?

Not to my knowledge - a few threatened, but it never got back to me or anyone I spoke to. The whole company was so dodgy, I'd think it'd probably have been pretty hard to have done so in any way, and it was totally legal so long as it followed certain guidelines. Adverts had to be worded a certain way, and they had to send a cost warning message for every £20 spent, but that was about it.

What potential was there for getting around the pay system - say sending standard responses out to customers?

Very little. For some basic stuff, you could get away with it - for example I had a few form character introductions over 2 texts I'd copy and paste to new people, but the whole point of the service was to be interactive, and you had to base it on their responses - if you were just copying and pasting, people really quickly got suspicious and started accusing you of being a machine - which obviously got you in a lot of trouble, and I know people got fired for it. I got warned just for using my standard intro. They were also wise to other tricks, such as putting in loads of xxx's at the end of messages to up your character count. I tried a bunch of different things along these lines, but either they didn't really work and weren't efficient, or were quickly sussed.

Were there any possibilities for collective struggle?

I'm sure there could be, but I never encountered any - the setup was perfect for avoiding it. There was no face to face contact with other workers, it was deliberately set up to be competitive, communication was highly monitored, there was a quite high turnover of staff (although many stayed within the industry - I was one of the few people at the company who hadn't done it for other companies) and most of the staff were really vulnerable and felt they couldn't risk their jobs. And just due to the nature of the work, any concept of workers rights was totally unheard of, and any transgression like that would just lead to instant dismissal. I'm sure stuff could happen - but it'd be amazingly difficult, and I think most people would just pack it in rather than try to organise.

Do you know how long your co-workers had worked at the company for?

The company was just under a year old, and quite a few had worked there since the start or near the start - but large number had worked elsewhere in the past, and several had been doing this or something similar like phone sex for years - I remember one woman who had been doing a mix of phone sex and text sex for 10 years.

Had you heard of the Internation Union of Sex Workers while you were at the job? And were you aware of the GMB's merger and attempts to organise sex workers?

I'd heard of both of them, but if I'm honest just didn't feel they were 'for me'. Mostly, this was because I hadn't really researched them, and thought it was just about prostitutes and the like. Part of it was because I was lying about my name, sex etc. to get the job, so would have been incredibly easy to dismiss (especially as I'd provided a copy of someone elses passport!).

Some of it was also just down to the personal trajectory I was on when I did it - either it was the initial period where I just found it amusing and so didn't really see it as something I needed protection in, or after that was really hating it and was depressed by the whole thing, and not wanting to do anymore to do with it than I had to.

I also never intended it to be a long term thing - it was just something I was doing for a while to sort out some money problems - which is probably one of the major hurdles in organising sex workers, as very few people see it as what they're going to do long term, and so are less likely to stick their head above the parapet.

But in retrospect, it was a really stupid decision - Even just on a personal level and how I felt about the job and myself, it would have been a lot nicer if I could have felt I was organising to make conditions better and making an improvement - and I may well have stuck at it longer if I'd done it. Although whether that in itself is a good thing is debateable - especially as I was hardly forced into doing it as a career due to the circumstances I found myself in.

Do you think the organising work by the GMB has potential?

Definitely, yes. The very specific nature of the work has several effects in this regard. First of all, is the obvious fact that these are people who really need protection. they are doing exceptionally demeaning work, with poor conditions and pay, for some of the worst employers you're ever be likely to meet. Clichés about Victorian Mill owners come to mind. Added to this is that, as mentioned before, it is usually exceptionally vulnerable people working in these sectors - so certainly, there is a real need for organisation.

However, on a more downbeat side, there are many real problems in terms of organisation, ranging from the dubious legal nature of much sex work (making claiming legal protection harder), the stigma attached to it as well as the violence and drug abuse that is often comes with the territory with other kinds of sex work such as prostitution. There's also the big issue that for many workers in the industry their immediate aim is to get out of what they're doing, rather than improving their conditions; this to a much larger degree than almost any other profession. Despite this, the recent organising we've seen has shown that it definitely is possible - and also that it can be worthwhile and successful. My experience was that the people doing it, despite putting on a brave face, knew how they were being treated and how badly they were being ripped off. Hopefully, recent organising moves aren't just an anomaly, and represent a real move towards an attempt for some of the worst off workers in modern society to take some control over their lives.

What possibilities do you see for self-management in sex-texting and chatlines?

This is a hard one. Whilst I was doing this, it was something we actually discussed - there are many places where you can buy into a service where if you provide the advertising and staff you get the full software and service to send out the texts and recieve money for it - getting almost a pound per text and being able to work the hours you chose - so it felt a real probability. However, it soon became apparent that there were several real flaws in this. Firstly, you had to have a significant cash outlay to be able to purchase the service, buy texts to send in bulk, buy advertising and so on. There is the need to learn an entirely new skill set, as well as having to spend time sorting out advertising, doing admin tasks, working out rotas and the like. There was also the major problem that the service needed to be staffed full time - it simply wouldn't succeed if people were texting in, and not getting replies. Without having the fear of losing a job, it's quite hard to get someone to want to self-manage themself to sit next to a computer at 3am on a Saturday night incase someone wants you to get them off via text message! It also raised all of the same problems that arise with any form of workers control under capitalism - that it is just self management of our own exploitation. In capitalism, if you were going to make the service a success, you really had to adopt capitalist models of efficency - such as cutting costs, increasing advertising, making people work when they didn't have to and having to ensure people kept their messages up to a required standard. And once you have this, the whole idea of self-organisation is just gone, and it'd become nothing better than the Co-op, but with dirty text messages.

And that's where the real crunch comes. Nowhere, but the most obscene parodies of syndicalism would want autonomous collectives of self-organising sex texters in any socialist society - it's as absurd as having a call centre run under workers control. In practise, it'd be little-to-no better than a prostitute who works without a pimp - better than working under the boss, but still far worse than most capitalist jobs. Not just is it socially unproductive and useless work, which (in my opinion, anyway) is inherently demeaning, but also it is entirely symptomatic of alienation under capital. I'd like to hope that in any society based around self-organisation, there wouldn't be the need for people to pay vast sums so that someone could sit at a computer and send them messages about how much they loved to feel their big cock inside of her. Call me naive, but I just don't see it happening, and I don't see many people wanting to do it - and anyone who did, probably wouldn't be doing it as a job! Real self-organisation in this sense, would be the ability to liberate oneself from having to do this sort of work - and I think this is the case for most of the sex industry.

Still, despite all this, in the society we live in today, if people really were stuck and not able to do anything else, but were in a position to run it under their own control, then it'd almost certainly be an improvement. There'd certainly be many, many problems, but if for no other reason than there wouldn't be some scumbag at the top leeching off a huge slice of the profits. I don't think it's absolutely absurd to think that some people working in the industry might well get pissed off and decide to do it for themselves. I really don't think it's going to be a major part in how struggle within the industry is going to develop, and if I'm honest I think the chances are that more likely than not, it'd probably 'fail' as an enterprise and way of making a living for those involved - or just soon revert to a standard capitalist model, but with those who'd previously worked on it as a new set of managers. If anything, it'll just play a minor, periphery role within the class struggle within the sex industry. So really, while I think it could happen, I don't really think it's the arena where self-organisation and workers control is most suited - we should work towards eliminating the exploitation and root causes of it, rather than trying to manage it ourselves; if people were ever to be in a position to be able to manage it in any significant way, then I think they'd have power to do a lot better than that.


Interview conducted by libcom.org news, January 2006

See also our coverage of the GMB sex worker unfair dismissal victory, and our New Year tube strike interview with an RMT member

libcom.org news additional note - this article has received a large number of comments. Many of them, purporting to be from different people, are supportive of box-69 and critical of this piece and its author but they have all come from one IP address, and so one computer. If we were cynical we might suggest this computer was being used by someone with a vested interest in box-69...

[American Dream]

In 1846, Britain annexed the vale of Kashmir, fabled paradise of beauty, and sold it to Maharaj Gulab Singh of Jammu for one million pounds.

How do you price a country? how to value its mountains and lakes, the scent of its trees, the colors of its sunset? What’s the markup on the shapes of fruit in the dreams of its people?

Article Ten from the Treaty of Amristar, 1846:
Majaraj Gulab Singh acknowledges the supremacy of the British Government, and will, in totken of such supremacy, present annually to the British Government:
– one horse
– 12 shawl goats of approved breed (6 male and six female)
– three pairs of Cashmere shawls

Kashmiri shawls. Woven on handlooms, patterned with ambi,
rich and soft and intricate as mist over Kashmir’s terrace
gardens. First taken to Britain by bandits- known as “merchants”
-in the employ of the British East India Company, they wove
their way through the dreams of Victorian wives like the
footprint of a goddess no one dared imagine.

There was a village in Scotland. Paisley. A tiny town of weavers who became known as radical labor agitators. Weaving offers too much time for dangerous talk. Weavers of Paisley learned how to churn out imitation ambi, on imitation Kashmiri shawls, and got to keep their index fingers and thumbs.

Until Kashmiri became cashmere. Mousleen became muslim. Ambi became paisley.

And a hundred and fifty years later, chai became a beverage invented in California.

How many ways can you splice a history? Price a country? Dice a people? Slice a heart? Entice what’s been erased back into story? My-gritude.

Have you ever taken a word in your hand, dared to shape your palm to the hollow where the fullness falls away? Have you ever pointed it back to its beginning? Felt it leap and shudder in your fingers like a dowsing rod? Jerk like a severed thumb? Flare with the forbidden name of a goddess returning? My-gritude.

Have you ever set out to search for a missing half? The piece that isn’t shapely, elegant, simple. The half that’s ugly, heavy, abrasive. Awkward to the hand. Gritty on the tongue.”

an excerpt from [i]Migritude by Shailja Patel[/i]

[American Dream]

http://www.voltairenet.org/article178787.html

The NATO Afghanistan War and US-Russian Relations: Drugs, Oil, and War

by Peter Dale Scott

Peter Dale Scott continues his analysis of the U.S. system of domination. In a conference held in Moscow, this former Canadian diplomat summed up the findings of his investigation into the funding of the system with money deriving from drug trafficking and hydrocarbon deals. Although widely known, such facts are nevertheless difficult to accept.


I delivered the following remarks at an anti-NATO conference held in Moscow on May 15, 2012. I was the only North American speaker at an all-day conference, having been invited in connection with the appearance into Russian of my book Drugs, Oil, and War. [1] As a former diplomat worried about peace I was happy to attend: as far as I can tell there may be less serious dialogue today between Russian and American intellectuals than there was at the height of the Cold War. Yet the danger of war involving the two leading nuclear powers has hardly disappeared.

Unlike other speakers, my paper urged Russians — despite the aggressive activities in Central Asia of the CIA, SOCOM (US Special Operations Command), and NATO — to cooperate under multilateral auspices with like-minded Americans, towards dealing with the related crises of Afghan drug production and drug-financed Salafi jihadism.

Since the conference I have continued to reflect intensely on the battered state of US-Russian relations, and my own slightly utopian hopes for repairing them. Although the speakers at the conference represented many different viewpoints, they tended to share a deep anxiety about US intentions towards Russia and the other former states of the USSR. Their anxiety was based on shared knowledge of past American actions and broken promises, of which they (unlike most Americans) are only too aware.

A key example of such broken promises was the assurance that NATO would not take advantage of détente to expand into Eastern Europe. Today of course Poland and other former Warsaw Pact members are members of NATO, along with the former Baltic Soviet Socialist Republics. And there are still proposals on the table to expand NATO into the Ukraine – i.e. the very heart of the former Soviet Union. This push was matched by U.S. joint activities and operations – some of them under NATO auspices – with the army and security forces of Uzbekistan. (Both these initiatives began in 1997, i.e. in the Clinton administration). There are other broken agreements, such as the unauthorized conversion of a Russian-approved UN Force for Afghanistan in 2001 into a force under the direction of NATO. Two speakers complained that America’s determination to locate a missile shield system against Afghanistan in Eastern Europe (rebuffing Russia’s suggestion that it be placed in Asia) constituted “a threat to world peace”.

The speakers saw these measures as aggressive extensions of the old American drive under Reagan to destroy the Soviet Union. Some of the conferees I spoke to see Russia as having been threatened for two decades after World War Two by active US and NATO plans for a nuclear first strike against Russia, before it could gain nuclear parity. While obviously these plans were never implemented, those I spoke with were sure that the ultras who desired them have never abandoned their desire to humiliate Russia and reduce it to a third-rate power. I cannot refute this concern: my recent book American War Machine also describes a relentless push since World War Two to establish and sustain global American dominance in the world.

Conference presentations were by no means limited to criticism of US and NATO policies. The conference speakers bitterly opposed Putin’s endorsement, as recently as April 11 of this year, of NATO’s military efforts in Afghanistan. They are particularly incensed by Putin’s agreement this year to the establishment of a NATO base in Ulyanovsk, nine hundred kilometers east of Moscow in Russia itself. Although the base has been sold to the Russian public as a way to facilitate US withdrawal from Afghanistan, one speaker assured the conference that the Ulianovsk outpost is described in NATO documents as a military base. And they resent Russia’s support of the US-inspired UN sanctions against Iran; they see Iran instead as a natural ally of Russia against American efforts to achieve global domination.

Apart from the remarks below, I was mostly silent at the conference. But my mind, almost my conscience, is heavy when I think of the recent revelations that Rumsfeld and Cheney, immediately after 9/11, responded with an agenda to remove several governments friendly to Russia, including Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran. [2] Ten years earlier the neocon Paul Wolfowitz told Gen. Wesley Clark in the Pentagon that America had a window of opportunity to remove these Russian clients, in the period of Russian restructuring after the breakup of the USSR.) [3] The agenda has not yet been completed in the case of Syria and Iran.

What we have seen under Obama looks very much like a progressive implementation of this agenda, even if we acknowledge that in Libya and now Syria Obama has shown greater reluctance than his predecessor to put US boots on the ground. (Nevertheless, under Obama, small numbers of US Special Forces were reportedly active in both countries, stirring up resistance to first Qaddafi and now Assad.)

What particularly concerns me is the relative absence of public response in America to a long-term Pentagon-CIA agenda of aggressive military hegemonism – or what I will call "dominationism." [4] No doubt many Americans may think that a global pax Americana will secure a period of peace, much like the pax Romana of two millennia ago. I myself am confident that it will not: rather, like the imperfect pax Britannica of a century ago, it will lead inevitably to major conflict, possibly nuclear war. For the secret of the pax Romana was that Rome, under Hadrian, withdrew from Mesopotamia and accepted strict limits to its area of dominance. Britain never achieved that wisdom until too late; America, to date, has never achieved it at all.

And so very few in America seem to care about Washington’s global domination project, at least since the failure of massive protests to prevent the Iraq War. We have seen much critical examination of why America fought in Vietnam, and even the American involvement in atrocities like the Indonesian massacre of 1965. Authors like Noam Chomsky and William Blum [5] have chronicled America’s criminal acts since World War Two, but without any prominent concern about the recent acceleration of American military expansiveness. Only a few, like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich, have written about the progressive consolidation of a war machine that now dominates America’s political processes.

It is also striking that, until quite recently, the nascent Occupy movement has had little to say about America’s unprovoked wars; I am not sure they have even targeted the militarization of surveillance, law enforcement, and detention camps which are so important a part of the domestic apparatus of repression that threatens their own survival [6] – the so-called “continuity of government” (COG) measures by which America’s military planners have prepared never again to have to deal with a successful American anti-war movement. [7]

If I were to return to Russia I would again, as a former diplomat and as a Canadian, call for US-Russian collaboration to deal with the world’s pressing problems. The challenge is to move beyond the crude trade-off of so-called “peaceful coexistence” between superpowers a half-century ago, which in fact permitted and even encouraged the violent atrocities of client dictators like Suharto in Indonesia and Barre in Somalia. The alternative, a total breakdown of détente, seems likely to lead to increasingly dangerous confrontations in Asia, most likely over Iran.

But can this breakdown be avoided? For a week I have been wondering whether I have not perhaps been blinding myself to the realities of America’s intransigent striving towards dominance. [8] Here in London I recently met with an old friend from my diplomatic days, a senior UK diplomat and Russian expert. I was hoping that he would dissuade me from my negative assessment of US and NATO intentions, but if anything he increased them.

So I am now publishing my talk with this preface for a North American and international audience. I believe that the most urgent task today to preserve the peace of the world is to curb America’s drive towards unchallenged dominance, and to re-energize the UN’s prohibition of unilateral and preemptive wars, for the sake of coexistence in a peaceful and multilateral world.

To this end, I hope that Americans will mobilize against American dominationism, and call for a policy declaration, either from the administration or from Congress, that would:

1) explicitly renounce past Pentagon calls for “full spectrum dominance” [9] as a military objective for American foreign policy,

2) reject as unacceptable the deeply-ingrained practice of preemptive wars,

3) renounce categorically any US plans for the permanent use of military bases in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Kyrgyzstan, and

4) recommit the United States to conducting future military operations in accordance with the procedures set out in the United Nations Charter.

I encourage others to join me in urging Congress to introduce a resolution to this effect. Such a resolution might not initially succeed. But it would help focus American political debate on what I consider to be a topic that is both urgent and too little examined: American expansiveness as a current threat to global peace.

Remarks at Invissin Conference on NATO, Moscow, May 15, 2012

I wish to thank the organizers of this conference for the chance to speak about the acute problem of the Afghan drug traffic, a current threat to both Russia and U.S.-Russian relations. I will discuss today the deep political perspective of my book Drugs, Oil, and War, which looks at factors underlying the international drug traffic and also U.S. interventions harmful to the interests of both the Russian and American people. I will also talk about the role of NATO in facilitating strategies for U.S. hegemony in Asia. But first I want to look at the drug traffic in the light of an important factor that is prominent in my book: the role of oil in U.S. policies for Asia, and also the role of the major international U.S.-aligned oil companies, including BP.

Oil has been a deep driving force behind all recent U.S. and NATO offensive actions: one has only to think about Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, and Libya in 2011. [10]

My book studies the role of oil companies and their representatives in Washington (including lobbies) in all of the major U.S. interventions since Vietnam in the 1960s. [11] The power of U.S. oil companies may need a little explanation to an audience in Russia, where oil companies are controlled by the state. In America the relationship is almost reversed: oil companies tend to dominate both U.S. foreign policy and also the U.S. Congress. [12] This explains why presidents from Kennedy to Reagan to Obama have been powerless to limit the oil industry’s special tax break called the oil depletion allowance, even now when most Americans are sinking deeper into poverty. [13]

The underlying cause of U.S. activity in Central Asia, in traditional areas of Russian influence like Kazakhstan, lies in the heightened interest of western oil companies and their representatives in Washington, for three decades or longer, in developing and above all controlling the underdeveloped oil and gas resources of the Caspian basin. [14] To this end Washington has developed policies that have produced forward bases in Kyrgyzstan and for four years in Uzbekistan (2001-05). [15] The overt purpose of these bases was to support U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. But the U.S. presence also encourages the governments in nearby Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, both areas of U.S. oil and gas investment, to act more independently of Russian approval.

Washington serves the interest of western oil companies, not just because of their corrupt influence over the administration, but because the survival of the current U.S. petro-economy depends on western domination of the global oil trade. A passage in Drugs, Oil, and War describes this policy, and how it has contributed to recent American interventions, and also the impoverishment of the Third World since 1980. In essence, the U.S. handled the quadrupling of oil prices in the 1970s by arranging, by means of secret agreements with the Saudis, for the recycling of petrodollars back into the U.S. economy. The first of these deals assured a special and on-going Saudi stake in the health of the U.S. dollar; the second secured continuing Saudi support for the pricing of all OPEC oil in dollars. [16] These two deals assured that the U.S. economy would not be impoverished by OPEC oil price hikes. The heaviest burdens would be borne instead by the economies of less developed countries. [17]

The U.S. dollar, weakening as it is, still depends largely on the OPEC policy of demanding U.S. dollars for payment of OPEC oil. Just how strongly America will enforce this OPEC policy can be seen by the fate of those countries that have chosen to challenge it. “Saddam Hussein in 2000 insisted Iraq’s oil be sold for euros, a political move, but one that improved Iraq’s recent earnings thanks to the rise in the value of the euro against the dollar." [18] Three years later, in March 2003, America invaded Iraq. Two months after that, on May 22, 2003, Bush by executive order decreed that Iraqi oil sales would be returned from euros to dollars. [19] Shortly before the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, Qaddafi, according to a Russian article, initiated a movement, like Saddam Hussein’s, to refuse the dollar for oil payments. [20] Meanwhile Iran, in February 2009, announced that it had “completely stopped conducting oil transactions in U.S. dollars.” [21] The full consequences of Iran’s daring move have yet to be seen. [22]

I repeat: every recent U.S. and NATO intervention has served to prop up the waning dominance of western oil companies over the global oil and petrodollar system. But I believe that oil companies themselves are capable of initiating or at least contributing to political interventions. As I say in my book (p.:

There are recurring allegations that US oil companies, either directly or through cutouts, engage in covert operations; in Colombia (as we shall see) a US security firm working for Occidental Petroleum took part in a Colombian army military operation "that mistakenly killed 18 civilians.”

More relevant to Russia was a 2002 covert operation in Azerbaijan, a classic exercise in deep politics. There former CIA operatives, employed by a dubious oil firm (MEGA Oil), “engaged in military training, passed ‘brown bags filled with cash’ to members of the government, and set up an airline…which soon was picking up hundreds of mujahideen mercenaries in Afghanistan.” [23] These mercenaries, eventually said to number 2000, were initially used to combat Russian-backed Armenian forces in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh; but they also backed Muslim fighters in Chechnya and Dagestan. They also contributed to the establishment of Baku as a transshipment point for Afghan heroin to both the Russian urban market and also the Chechen mafia. [24]

In 1993 they also contributed to the ouster of Azerbaijan’s elected first president, Abulfaz Elchibey, and his replacement by Heidar Aliyev, who then agreed to a major oil contract with BP, including what eventually became the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline to Turkey. Note that the U.S. background of the MEGA Oil operatives is unmistakable. However who financed MEGA is unclear; and may have been the oil majors, many of which have or have had their own covert services. [25] There are allegations that major oil corporations, including Exxon and Mobil as well as BP, were “behind the coup d’état” replacing Elchibey with Aliyev. [26]

It is clear that Washington and the oil majors have a common perception that their survival depends on maintaining their present dominance of international oil markets. In the 1990s, when it was widely believed that the world’s largest unproven reserves of hydrocarbons lay in the Caspian basin of Central Asia, this region became the central focus for both corporate U.S. petroinvestment and also for U.S. security expansion. [27]

Clinton’s close friend Strobe Talbott, speaking as Deputy Secretary of State, attempted to put forward a reasonable strategy for this expansion. In an important speech of July 21, 1997,

Talbott outlined four dimensions of U.S. support to the countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia: 1) The promotion of democracy; 2) The creation of free market economies; 3) The sponsorship of peace and cooperation ,within and among the countries of the region: and, 4) integration into the larger international community.… Inveighing against what he considers an outdated conception of competition in the Caucasus and Central Asia, Mr. Talbott admonished any who would consider the "Great Game" as a model on which to base current views of the region. He proposed, instead, an arrangement where everyone cooperates and everyone wins. [28] But this multipolar approach was immediately attacked by members of both parties. Only three days later the right-wing Heritage Foundation, think-tank for the Republican Party, charged that, "The Clinton Administration — intent on placating Moscow — has hesitated to take advantage of the strategic opportunity to secure U.S. interests in the Caucasus." [29] In October this critique was echoed in a new book, The Grand Chessboard, by former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, perhaps Russia’s most important opponent in the Democratic Party. Conceding that the “ultimate objective of American policy should be… to shape a truly cooperative global community,” Brzezinski nonetheless defended for now the “great game” that Talbott had rejected. “It is imperative,” he wrote, “that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of … challenging America.” [30]

Meanwhile, behind this verbal debate, the CIA and Pentagon, through NATO, were developing a “forward strategy” in the area that was antithetical to Talbott’s. Under the umbrella of NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PFP) Program, the Pentagon in 1997 began military training exercises with Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, as “the embryo of a NATO-led military force in the region.” [31] These CENTRAZBAT exercises had in mind the possible future deployment of U.S. combat forces; and a deputy assistant secretary of defense, Catherine Kelleher, cited “the presence of enormous energy resources” as a justification for American military involvement. [32] Uzbekistan, which Brzezinski singled out for its geopolitical importance, became the linchpin of U.S. training exercises, despite having one of the worst human rights records locally. [33]

The American sponsored “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan (March 2005) was another conspicuous product of the CIA-Pentagon forward strategy doctrine. It came at a time when George W. Bush repeatedly spoke of a “forward strategy of freedom,” and Bush later, when visiting Georgia, endorsed the changeover (more like a bloody coup d’état than a “revolution”) as an example of “spreading democracy and freedom.” [34] But the new Bakiyev regime, in the words of Columbia University Professor Alexander Cooley, "ran the country like a criminal syndicate.”In particular many observers accused Bakiyev of taking over and running the local drug traffic as a family enterprise. [35] To some extent the Obama regime has retreated from the hegemonic Pentagon rhetoric of (in its words) “full spectrum dominance.” [36] But it is not surprising that under Obama pressures to reduce Russian influence (e.g. in Syria) have continued. For a half century Washington has been divided between a minority (principally in the State Department, like Talbott) who have envisaged a future of cooperation with the Soviet Union, and those hegemonic hawks (principally in the CIA and Pentagon, like William Casey, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld) who have pushed for a U.S. strategy of unipolar global domination. [37] The latter have not hesitated to use drug-trafficking assets in pursuit of this unattainable goal, notably in Indochina, Colombia, and now Afghanistan. [38]

Significantly, the hawks have used the drug eradication strategies of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) as well. [39] As I wrote in Drugs, Oil, and War (p. 89),

The true purpose of most of these campaigns … has not been the hopeless ideal of eradication. It has been to alter market share: to target specific enemies and thus ensure that the drug traffic remains under the control of those traffickers who are allies of the Colombian state security apparatus and/or the CIA. [40]

This has been conspicuously true in Afghanistan, where the U.S. recruited former drug traffickers to join in its 2001 invasion. [41] Later the U.S. announced a drug reduction strategy that was explicitly limited to attacking those drug traffickers supporting the insurgents. [42]

Thus those concerned (as I am) with reducing Afghan drug flows are faced with a dilemma. Effective strategies against international drug trafficking must be multilateral, and in Central Asia they will require increased U.S.-Russian cooperation. On the other hand the energies of the principal pro-U.S. forces currently on the ground there – notably the CIA, U.S. armed forces, NATO, and the DEA – have in the past been intent primarily not on cooperation but on U.S. hegemony.

The answer I believe will lie in team efforts using the expertise and resources of both countries, housed in bilateral or multilateral agencies not dominated by either. A successful drug strategy will also have to be multi-faceted, like the successful campaign in northern Thailand, and will probably require both countries to consider people-friendly strategies not yet adopted by either. [43]

Russia and America share many features and concerns. They are both still superstates, even if now losing preeminence in the face of a rising China. As superpowers both were tempted into Afghan adventures that many wiser heads regret. Meanwhile Afghanistan, now a ravaged country, presents urgent problems for all three superstates: the menace of drugs, and the related menace of terrorism.

The whole planet has a stake in seeing Russia and America deal with these menaces constructively and not exploitatively. And any progress made in reducing these shared threats will hopefully be another step in the difficult process of learning to consolidate peace.

The last century saw a Cold War between the US and the USSR, two superstates which both armed heavily in the name of defending their people. The USSR lost, leaving an unstable Pax Americana much like the Pax Britannica of the 19th century: that is, a dangerous mix of globalizing commerce, increasing disparity of wealth and income, and wildly excessive and expansive militarism, leading to increasing conflict (Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya), and increasing danger of a possible new world war (Iran).

To preserve its perilous dominance the US today is arming against its own people, not just in defense of them. [44] All the peoples of the world, including the American, have a stake in seeing that expansive dominance reduced, towards a less militarist and more multipolar world.

Peter Dale Scott

[1] Also invited were the Swiss researcher Daniele Ganser, author of NATO’s Secret Armies, and Italian politician Pino Arlacchi, former head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

[2] Rumsfeld initially wanted to respond to 9/11 with an attack against Iraq rather than Afghanistan, on the grounds that there were “no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan” (Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies, 31).

[3] Wolfowitz told Clark that “we’ve about five or ten years to clean up those old soviet client regimes - Syria, Iran, Iraq — before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us” (Wesley Clark, Talk to San Francisco Commonwealth Club, October 3, 2007). Ten years later, in November 2001, Clark heard in the Pentagon that plans to attack Iraq were “being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, …beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan” (Wesley Clark, Winning Modern Wars [New York: Public Affairs, 2003], 130).

[4] Hegemony can have a soft as well as a hard sense, connoting friendly leadership in a confederation. The American drive for unchallengeable unipolar dominance of the globe is unprecedented, and deserves a name of its own. “Dominationism” is a hideous word, replete with perverse sexual overtones. That is why I have chosen it.

[5] William Blum’s most recent books are Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II—Updated through 2003, and Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire (2004).

[6] Paul Joseph Watson, “Leaked U.S. Army Document Outlines Plan For Re-Education Camps In America,” Infowars.com, Thursday, May 3, 2012 : “The manual makes it clear that the policies also apply ‘within U.S. territory’ under the auspices of the DHS and FEMA. The document adds that, ‘Resettlement operations may require large groups of civilians to be quartered temporarily (less than 6 months) or semipermanently (more than 6 months).’”

[7] See Peter Dale Scott, “Is the State of Emergency Superseding the US Constitution? Continuity of Government Planning, War and American Society,” Peter Dale Scott, "Continuity of Government’ Planning: War, Terror and the Supplanting of the U.S. Constitution."

[8] Two nights ago I had a vivid and unnerving dream, in which at the end I saw the opening of a conference where I would again speak as I did in Moscow. Immediately after my talk the conference agenda called for a discussion of the possibility that “Peter Dale Scott” was a fiction serving some nefarious covert end, and that no real “Peter Dale Scott” in fact existed.

[9] “Full-spectrum dominance means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations” (Joint Vision 2020, Department of Defense, May 30, 2000; cf. “Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-spectrum Dominance,” U.S. Department of Defense).

[10] Less obviously, but unmistakably, oil (or in this case an oil pipeline) was a factor also in the 1998 NATO intervention in Kosovo. See Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 29; Peter Dale Scott, “Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington’s On-Going Collusion with Terrorists, July 29, 2011.

[11] Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 8-9,11.

[12] Exxon for example is said to have paid no U.S. federal income tax in 2009, at a time of near-record profits (Washington Post, May 11, 2011). Cf. Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 19-20: “In some of the faraway countries where it did business,… Exxon’s sway over local politics and security was greater than that of the United States embassy.”

[13] Charles J. Lewis, “Obama again urges end to oil industry tax breaks,” Houston Chronicle, April 27, 2011; “Politics News: Obama Urges Congress to End Oil Subsidies,” Newsy.com, March 2, 2012, .

[14] Cf. an article in 2001 from the Foreign Military Studies Office of Fort Leavenworth:

The Caspian Sea appears to be sitting on yet another sea—a sea of hydrocarbons. …The presence of these oil reserves and the possibility of their export raises [sic] new strategic concerns for the United States and other Western industrial powers. As oil companies build oil pipelines from the Caucasus and Central Asia to supply Japan and the West, these strategic concerns gain military implications. (Lester W. Grau, “Hydrocarbons and a New Strategic Region: The Caspian Sea and Central Asia. (Military Review [May–June 2001]. 96; quoted in Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 31)

[15] See discussion in Peter Dale Scott, "Launching the U.S. Terror War: the CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Central Asia " The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, March 15, 2012, . There have also been diplomatic discussions of a possible U.S. base in Tajikistan: see Joshua Kucera, “U.S.: Tajikistan Wants to Host an American Air Base,” Eurasia.net, December 14, 2010).

[16] David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999), x: "In 1974 [Treasury Secretary William] Simon negotiated a secret deal so the Saudi central bank could buy U.S. Treasury securities outside of the normal auction. A few years later, Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal cut a secret deal with the Saudis so that OPEC would continue to price oil in dollars. These deals were secret because the United States had promised other industrialized democracies that it would not pursue such unilateral policies." Cf. 103-12.

[17] "So long as OPEC oil was priced in U.S. dollars, and so long as OPEC invested the dollars in U.S. government instruments, the U.S. government enjoyed a double loan. The first part of the loan was for oil. The government could print dollars to pay for oil, and the American economy did not have to produce goods and services in exchange for the oil until OPEC used the dollars for goods and services. Obviously, the strategy could not work if dollars were not a means of exchange for oil. The second part of the loan was from all other economies that had to pay dollars for oil but could not print currency. Those economies had to trade their goods and services for dollars in order to pay OPEC" (Spiro, Hidden Hand, 121).

[18] Hoyos, Carol & Morrison, Kevin, "Iraq returns to the international oil market," Financial Times, June 5, 2003. Cf. Coll, Private Empire, 232: “A desperate Saddam Hussein, toward the end of his time in power, had signed production-sharing contracts with Russian and Chinese companies, but these agreements had never been implemented.”

[19] [ Scott, Road to 9/11, 190-91. Cf. also William Clark, “The Real Reasons Why Iran is the Next Target: The Emerging Euro-denominated International Oil Marker,” Global Research, 27 October 2004.

[20] “Бомбежки Ливии – наказание Каддафи за попытку введения золотого динара, ” Live Journal, March 21, 2011; discussion in Peter Dale Scott, “The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus,” April 27, 2011.

[21] “Iran Ends Oil Transactions In U.S. Dollars” CBS News, February 11, 2009.

[22] In March 2012 Swift, the body that handles global banking transactions, moved to cut Iran’s banks out of the system, in response to American and UN sanctions (BBC News, March 15, 2012). Business Week (February 28, 2012) commented that the action “might roil oil markets on concern that buyers will be unable to pay the second-largest producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries for its 2.2 million barrels a day of oil exports.”

[23] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11, 163-64; cf. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7.

[24] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 164

[25] The World War II covert operations agency OSS was thrown together in part by recruiting Asia hands from oil companies like Standard Oil of New Jersey (Esso). See Smith, OSS, 15, 211.

[26] “BP oiled coup with cash, Turks claim”, Sunday Times (London), March 26, 2000; quoted in Scott, The Road to 9/11, 165.

[27] In 1998, Dick Cheney, when chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, remarked: "I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian" (Guardian [London], October 23, 2001, ).

[28] R. Craig Nation, “Russia, the United States, and the Caucasus,” Army War College (U.S.). Strategic Studies Institute. Talbott’s words are worth quoting at length: “"For the last several years, it has been fashionable to proclaim or at least to predict, a replay of the ’Great Game’ in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The implication of course is that the driving dynamic of the region, fueled and lubricated by oil, will be the competition of great powers to the disadvantage of the people who live there. Our goal is to avoid and to actively discourage that atavistic outcome. ….. The Great Game, which starred Kipling’s Kim and Fraser’s Flashman, was very much of the zero-sum variety. What we want to help bring about is just the opposite, we want to see all responsible players in the Caucasus and Central Asia be winners." (M.K. Bhadrakumar, “Foul Play in the Great Game,” Asia Times, July 13, 2005).

[29] James MacDougall, “A New Stage in U.S.-Caspian Sea Basin Relations,” Central Asia, 5 (11), 1997; quoting from Ariel Cohen, “U.S. Policy in the Caucasus and Central Asia: Building A New ’Silk Road’ to Economic Prosperity,” Heritage Foundation, July 24, 1997. In October 1997 Sen. Sam Brownback introduced a bill, the Silk Road Strategy Act of 1997 (S. 1344), providing incentives for the new Central Asian states to cooperate with the United States, rather than with Russia or Iran.

[30] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), xiv.

[31] Ariel Cohen, Eurasia In Balance: The US And The Regional Power Shift, 107.

[32] Michael Klare, Blood and Oil (New York: Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt, 2004), 135-36; citing R. Jeffrey Smith, “U.S. Leads Peacekeeping Drill in Kazakhstan,” Washington Post, September 15, 1997. CF. Kenley Butler, “U.S. Military Cooperation with the Central Asian States,” September 17, 2001.

[33] Brzezinski, Grand Chessboard, 121.

[34] Peter Dale Scott, “Kyrgyzstan, the U.S. and the Global Drug Problem: Deep Forces and the Syndrome of Coups, Drugs, and Terror,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus; quoting President Bush, State of the Union address, January 20, 2004; “Bush: Georgia’s Example a Huge Contribution to Democracy, ” Civil Georgia, May 10, 2005. Likewise Zbigniew Brzezinski was quoted by a Kyrgyz news source as saying “I believe revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan were a sincere and snap expression of the political will” (, March 27, 2008).

[35] Scott, “Kyrgyzstan, the U.S. and the Global Drug Problem;” citing 19 Owen Matthews, “Despotism Doesn’t Equal Stability,” Newsweek, April 7, 2010 (Cooley); Peter Leonard, “Heroin trade a backdrop to Kyrgyz violence,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 24, 2010; “Kyrgyzstan Relaxes Control Over Drug Trafficking,” Jamestown Foundation, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 7:24, February 4, 2010, etc.

[36] U.S. Department of Defense, Joint Vision 2020, May 30, 2000; discussion in Scott, Road to 9/11, 20.

[37] U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark has reported that back in 1991 one of the neocons in the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, told him that “we’ve about five or ten years to clean up those old soviet client regimes - Syria, Iran, Iraq — before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us” (Wesley Clark, Talk to Commonwealth Club, October 3, 2007. ). Ten years later, in November 2001, he heard in the Pentagon that plans to attack Iraq were “being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, …beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan” [Wesley Clark, Winning Modern Wars (New York: Public Affairs, 2003], 130).

[38] See Scott, American War Machine.

[39] For the hegemonic perversion of the DEA’s “war on drugs” in Asia, see Scott, American War Machine, 121-40.

[40] Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 89.

[41] An example was Haji Zaman Ghamsharik who had retired to Dijon in France, where British and American official met with him and persuaded him to return to Afghanistan (Peter Dale Scott, “America’s Afghanistan: The National Security and a Heroin-Ravaged State,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus; citing Philip Smucker, Al Qaeda’s Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror’s Trail [Washington: Brassey’s, 2004], 9. For other drug traffickers, see Scott, Road to 9/11, 125.

[42] Scott. American War Machine, 235 (insurgents); James Risen, “U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Lords Tied to Taliban,” New York Times, August 10, 2009: ”United States military commanders have told Congress that... only those [drug traffickers] providing support to the insurgency would be made targets.”

[43] Russia has understandably been aggrieved by America’s and NATO’s failure over a decade to deal seriously with the huge Afghan drug crop (e.g. “Russia lashes out at NATO for not fighting Afghan drug production,” RT, February 28, 2010). But the simple remedy Russia has proposed, destruction of crops in the field, would by itself probably drive peasants further into the arms of Afghanistan’s militant Islamic fundamentalists, another threat to Russia and America alike. Many observers have noted that poppy field eradication leaves the small farmers in debt to the landowners and traffickers, often having to repay “in cash, land, livestock, or – not infrequently – a daughter…. Poppy eradication just pushed them deeper into the poverty that led to their growing opium in the first place” (Joel Hafvenstein, Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier, 214); cf. “Opium Brides, ). Opium eradication in Thailand, often cited as the most successful program anywhere since China’s in the 1950s, was achieved by combining military enforcement with comprehensive alternative development programs. See William Byrd and Christopher Ward, "Drugs and Development in Afghanistan," World Bank: Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction Unit, Working paper series, Vol. 18 (December 2004); also “Secret of Thai success in opium war,” BBC News, February 19, 2009

[44] See e.g. Peter Dale Scott, "Is the State of Emergency Superseding our Constitution? Continuity of Government Planning, War and American Society, .