The Lit interview: Retort

In Afflicted Powers, war is still the force that gives us meaning

By Rob Eshelman

The recently published book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, written by a collective of authors organized under the banner "Retort," scrutinizes the nature of global politics in the shadow of the Sept. 11, 2001, aerial bombardments of New York and Washington, DC. Retort poses a vast array of questions, but essential ones, they argue, in beginning to grasp our present state of affairs. Did the Sept. 11 attacks usher in a new era, and have the methods of colonial expansion changed in light of them? Do the "peak oil" and "blood for oil" arguments fully explain the United States' rush to invade Iraq? Was this invasion a departure from the status quo or just the most recent episode in a state of permanent war, presided over by the US, since 1945? Why has the US maintained the appearance of inextricability with a failed state Ñ Israel? What is the genesis of revolutionary Islam? And how does the left respond to vanguardist efforts in light of those from al-Qaeda?

Recently, I sat down with Iain Boal and Joseph Matthews and spoke with them about a few of the ideas they take on in Afflicted Powers.

Bay Guardian: In Afflicted Powers you describe our time as "a lethal mixture of atavism and newfangledness." Explain.

Joseph Matthews: What we are trying to get at is that the crude military maneuvers of the American state seem to harken back to an earlier era of colonial invasions and occupations. At the same time, there is a highly technologized war of appearances between a sector of revolutionary Islam Ñ at this moment particularly al-Qaeda Ñ and the West. What we argue in the book is that imperial expansion by the American state has never receded and, in fact, has accelerated since the end of the Second World War, through the cold war and after. So there is a state, now, of almost permanent war in this most highly modern of moments. The notion that the bombing and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are somehow an atavistic moment, a return to some earlier gunboat era, is part of the false notion, which people have come to accept, that capitalism now operates smoothly along lines of trade and global corporate expansion and that the guns have been put away. No, we argue, in fact, the guns were never put away; they were simply used at different places, at different times, and their use called by different names. But simply because there aren't always declared wars doesn't mean that war hasn't been a constant element of the State's expansion for the last 50 years.

Iain Boal: The way we put it in the book is, "A brute return of the past, calling to mind now the scramble for Africa, now the Wars of Religion, is accompanied by an equally monstrous political deployment of Ñ and entrapment in Ñ the apparatus of a hypermodern production of appearances." So that is the weird mixture of atavism and newfangledness.

JM: Not that one is replacing the other or one exists and the other doesn't, but they go on simultaneously and have been doing so in sometimes hidden ways. The world has been full of war, constantly, in the service of empire, for the last 50 years. Yet, in most people's minds, at least in the global north, there are short periods of war, but it's mostly a matter of neoliberal adjustment. Well, neoliberal adjustment is always backed up by the gun.

BG: Right, the "invisible hand" of the market is in need of the repressive forces of the State. Some within the anticapitalist globalization movements seem to have looked at their efforts solely as a struggle against unfair trade agreements rather than as a struggle against the violent actions of the State acting in support of capital.

IB: Well, it was very noticeable that none of the slogans at Seattle in 1999, I think, were drawing attention to the war machine of the US empire.

JM: But our argument is that, particularly in the global south, resistance movements have always known that the suits are backed by the guns. Partly because they have colonial memory and partly because the guns are on the ground, in the streets Ñ they are not hidden away as they are in the north. It's that reality that we try to capture in Afflicted Powers with the term "military neoliberalism."

BG: In the chapter "Permanent War," you draw a distinction between being for peace and being against war.

IB: The impulse behind the book, as it turned out, was in a broadsheet produced precisely because we didn't want to go into the streets under the sign of peace. We felt that the notion of peace was much too partial. And so we felt we had to produce something that would amount to a critique of peace, and that was why the broadsheet was called "Neither Their War, Nor Their Peace."

BG: The notion of peace was too partial to what?

JM: Partial to an analysis of what imperial efforts were on an ongoing basis around the world. The notion that something called "war" is fundamentally different from something called "peace" has simply become untrue. The continuing effort to globalize, to primitively accumulate more and more of the world's peoples, resources, commons, and the distinction, although it is a real one, of course, that dropping bombs on Baghdad is different from sanctions, but both produce massive numbers of deaths in the service of expansionist interests, is part of what we feel is so dangerous about using the term "peace" as the sign that we want to align ourselves with. If the State appears to recede to something that is commonly thought of as peace, then what happens is that most people turn off their sensors about what is really going on in the world.

BG: It's argued that the invasion of Iraq was about securing a steadily depleting supply of oil, that resource scarcity was the motivation. You take a decidedly different view.

JM: Of course, we recognize in Afflicted Powers that oil is a massively important commodity in the world and that interest in the Middle East is extraordinarily heightened because of this. But, in the same way in which we didn't want to march under the sign of peace, we didn't want to march under the sign of "No Blood For Oil," because we didn't believe the blood was being shed for oil. Many people have come to realize, in the couple of years since the invasion, that the amount of oil flowing to the West is relatively unchanged by the war. And no one in the US oil industry, or the US state, is particularly bothered by that, because the short-term control of oil was never in doubt. Oil will run out eventually, but for the foreseeable future, the flow of oil is going to continue unabated. Whether it was under Saddam Hussein or anybody else, the struggle has always been, as we argue in the book, over the balancing of price and availability for Western consumers and high profits. It's always been about managing oil and its price, never about the quantity of oil.

BG: So you are saying that it is not necessarily a reflection of the US government's or US oil companies' fears over a dwindling supply of oil, but rather over a desire on their part to control the production and distribution of oil.

IB: Right. It is in very much the same way that thousands of children die in the world each night not because there isn't enough food in the world. In fact, the history of capitalism is the history of the production of scarcity. The reason that the American left in particular needs to attend to this is because we are very prone to accepting arguments about scarcity, partly because we live in a world in which the production of scarcity, artificially, it must be said, is something that surrounds us all the time.

JM: What we are essentially arguing is that the history of oil in the modern world has always been a history of arrangements, deals, manipulations of scarcity, price fluctuations, and never about its finiteness. There is no agreement among experts about when the peak of oil production will come. And remember, the arguments are only about when "the peak" will be reached, not when oil will run out, right? So we're talking about, I think someone is quoted in the book ...

IB: Sheikh Yamani.

JM: That's right, Sheikh Yamani, that the Stone Age didn't end for the lack of stone.v

Rob Eshelman is a writer who lives in San Francisco.

Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War

By Retort (Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts). Verso Books, 211 pages, $16 (paper).