The End of Empire

Oct 15

Between equal rights : a Marxist theory of international law / China Miéville.

This one’s near the top of my “want to read” list

Too bad my “want to read” list exists below a huge stack of “required to read for class” list

If that title sounds familiar, I believe it comes from this bit of Marx:

The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working-days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the labourer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working-day to one of definite normal duration. There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class.

Check out more on China Miéville. This book was his PhD thesis, and he’s a fantasy fiction writer by trade these days.

The book

Table of contents for Between equal rights : a Marxist theory of international law / China Miéville.

Counter

Contents
Introduction 		1 
 1.	'International law has become important' 		1
 2.	Materialism and dialectics 		4
 3.	The structure of the book 		5
Chapter One: 'The Vanishing Point of Jurisprudence': 
International Law in Mainstream Theory 		9
	1.	Beyond deÞnition 		9
	2.	Classic writers and debates 		16
	2.1. Disentangling denial 		16
		2.1.1. The will of the sovereign: Austin 		18
		2.1.2. The triumph of politics: Morgenthau 		19
		2.1.3. A third way? Carl Schmitt 		25
	2.2. Monism, dualism, positivism, naturalism 		32
	2.3. The high point of formalism: Kelsen 		34
	2.4. From rules to process: McDougal-Lasswell 		37
Chapter Two: Dissident Theories: Critical Legal Studies 
and Historical Materialism 		45
	1.	Beyond pragmatism 		45
	2.	Koskenniemi and the contradictions of liberalism 		48
	3.	Marxism and international law 		60
	3.1.	The inadequacies of Soviet theory 		60
	3.2.	Radicalism with rules: B.S. Chimni 		64
Chapter Three: For Pashukanis: An Exposition and 
Defence of the Commodity-Form Theory of Law 		75
	1.	The rise and fall of Pashukanis 		75
	2.	The General Theory of Law and Marxism 		77
	2.1.	Marxist method and the failure of alternative theories 		79
		2.1.1. Law as ideology 		80 
		2.1.2. Law as iniquitous content 		82
	2.2.	From the commodity form to the legal form 		84
		2.2.1. A note on history and logic 		96
	2.3. The withering away of law 		97
	3.	Critiques and reconstructions 		101
	4.	The relevance for international legal scholarship 		113
Chapter Four: Coercion and the Legal Form: 	
Politics, (International) Law and the State 		117
	1.	The problem of politics 		117
	2. 	Pashukanis and state-derivation theory 		122
	3. (International) Law and the contingency of the state 		128
	4. (International) Law, politics and violence 		133
	4.1. Form, content, economics and politics in international law 		137
	4.2. The unlikely marriage of Pashukanis and McDougal 		141
	5.	Problems 		143
	6.	The violence of the legal form 		150
Chapter Five: States, Markets and the Sea: Issues in the History of 
International Law 		153
	1.	The invisibility of history 		153
	2.	Origins and prehistory: an eternity of international law? 		156
	2.1.	Pre-colonial theory: the non-Western birth of international 
		law? 		165
	3.	Colonialism and international law: the birth of a new order 		169
	3.1.	Amity lines: colonialism beyond law's boundaries 		179
	4.	The development of sovereignty: from politics to abstraction 		184
	4.1.	Absolute ownership and Roman law 		195
	5.	From maritime law to international law 		197
	5.1.	Early codes: the mercantile maritime roots of international 
		law 		197
	5.2.	Lineages of the mercantilist state 		201
		5.2.1. The Navigation Acts 		204
		5.2.2. The East India Companies 		206
		5.2.3. The freedom of the seas: a dissident interpretation 		208
	5.3.	Excursus: mercantilism and the transition to capitalism 		214
	5.4.	Categories and dialectics 		224
Chapter Six: Imperialism, Sovereignty and International Law 		225
	1.	The nature of the relation 		225
	1.1.	SpeciÞcity versus breadth 		226
	2.	The crisis of mercantile colonialism 		230
	2.1.	The imperialism of recognition 		235
	3.	Ad-hoc legality in the nineteenth century 		240
	3.1.	Positivism and its sources 		241
	3.2.	'Civilisation': a counterintuitive materialist analysis 		243
	3.3.	Into Africa 		248
	4.	The Berlin Conference and the 'scramble for Africa' 		250
	4.1.	Mandates, colonies and sovereignty: tendencies 
		and countertendencies 		256
	5. The empire of sovereignty 		260
	5.1. The international law of freedom? 		268
	6. New world order 		271
	6.1. Excursus: the Gulf War 		272
	6.2. The limits of legalistic opposition 		275
	7. The universality of legalism 		281
	7.1. Politics and the end of the rule 		282
	7.2. Force and law 		286
	8. Serving two masters: the imperialism of international law 		289
Conclusion: Against the Rule of Law 		295
	1.	Ideas, ideology and contestation 		295
	2.	The rule of law's new advocates 		304
	2.1.	From war to policing? 		308
	3.	Against the rule of law 		314
	4.	The future of the theory 		318
Appendix: Pashukanis on International Law 		321
Bibliography 		337
Index 		365

Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:

International law and socialism.

Sep 27

“The inflow of capital from the developed countries is the prerequisite for the establishment of economic dependence. This inflow takes various forms: loans granted on onerous terms; investments that place a given country in the power of the investors; almost total technological subordination of the dependent country to the developed country; control of a country’s foreign trade by the big international monopolies; and in extreme cases, the use of force as an economic weapon in support of the other forms of exploitation.” Che Guevara, on “development” and dependency

Aug 8

thepeoplesrecord:

In other Chevron news: Chevron faces deadline in $19 billion Ecuador case
August 7, 2012

U.S. oil giant Chevron has until midnight tonight to pay a US $19.04 billion Ecuador court judgment for polluting Amazon waterways or officially default and face another lawsuit to seize its assets, this time in Ecuador. Such collection lawsuits are pending against Chevron in Canada and Brazil.

Ecuador Judge Liliana Ortiz on Friday signed an order giving Chevron until midnight tonight to deposit the funds necessary to remediate the oil contamination, which included the dumping of more than 16 billion gallons of toxic waste from oil production into Amazon waterways.

Judge Ortiz’s order comes after almost 19 years of litigation.

The case, Aguinda v. ChevronTexaco, began on November 3, 1993 when 30,000 indigenous people and farmers from Ecuador’s Amazon filed a class action suit against Texaco in New York federal court alleging massive oil contamination of the rainforest.

For 10 years, Texaco argued before U.S. judges that the case should be transferred to Ecuador’s courts. In 2002, a U.S. federal judge granted Texaco’s motion and removed the case to Ecuador on the condition that Texaco submit to jurisdiction there and be bound by any ruling of the Ecuadorian courts.

In the meantime, Chevron bought Texaco in 2001, assuming its liabilities and defense of the case.

Texaco operated in Ecuador from 1964 to 1992, building hundreds of oil production facilities. The trial judge in Lagio Agrio found overwhelming evidence that the company dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into Amazon waterways as a cost-saving measure.

Five indigenous groups in the area have been harmed by the pollution that covers an area the size of Rhode Island. The contamination also caused an outbreak of cancer that has killed or threatens to kill thousands of people in the area, according to evidence before the court.

Judge Ortiz’s order is the final step under Ecuador civil procedure to certify the 188-page trial court judgment, which was issued on February 11, 2011. That judgement was unanimously affirmed on appeal in early January. It set the amount of the judgment at $18.2 billion.

Last week, Judge Ortiz raised the final amount of the award to $19.041 billion after calculating various mandatory costs required by Ecuador law.

Chevron stripped most of its primary assets, including service stations, from Ecuador years ago and the company no longer operates in the country.

Pablo Fajardo, the lead Ecuador lawyer on the case, says that for practical purposes, Judge Ortiz’s order allows the rainforest communities to execute the Ecuador judgment against Chevron’s remaining assets in their home country.

Fajardo estimates Chevron’s remaining assets in Ecuador are worth roughly $200 million, including a $96 million court judgment the company won recently in an international arbitration proceeding against Ecuador’s government.

Judge Ortiz’s order also puts the plaintiffs in a stronger legal position to pursue recognition of the Ecuador judgment abroad under various international treaties and domestic law statutes.

Collection lawsuits are pending against Chevron in Canada and Brazil, where the company has billions of dollars worth of assets. The plaintiffs are asking courts to seize these assets to satisfy the judgment and finance a cleanup of the oil contamination, said Fajardo.

“People in Ecuador are dying because of Chevron’s pollution and company’s utter contempt for the rule of law,” said Fajardo. “Chevron is going to have to be forced by courts to comply with its legal obligations.”

Chevron maintains the plaintiffs’ allegations that it is responsible for alleged environmental and social harms in the Oriente region of Ecuador are “false.”

Chevron says the company never conducted oil production operations in Ecuador, and its subsidiary Texaco Petroleum Co. (TexPet) “fully remediated its share of environmental impacts arising from oil production operations, before leaving Ecuador in 1992.”

“After the remediation was certified by all agencies of the Ecuadorian government responsible for oversight, TexPet received a complete release from Ecuador’s national, provincial, and municipal governments that extinguished all claims before Chevron acquired TexPet in 2001,” the company says.

“All legitimate scientific evidence exonerates Chevron and proves that the remediated sites pose no significant risks to human health or the environment,” Chevron says on its website.

If Chevron refuses to pay the court judgment, the company will face a greater risk of liability in the enforcement actions already pending, said Karen Hinton, the U.S. spokesperson for the indigenous and farmer plaintiffs.

If Chevron defaults, Fajardo said his legal team will file court actions to seize the intellectual property rights of various Chevron brands in Ecuador, including Havoline.

Source

Capital - will overrun you then outrun you, from your hometown and around the globe, fucking up your shit…

(via sabots-are-for-sabotage)

Jul 27

Basic Income Earth Network

FYI

Jul 20

يا عمال العالم اتحدوا: Lenin fans, please look up the Cheka.

determinatenegation:

wilnyc:

johngaltinabikini:

arielnietzsche:

naazee:

johngaltinabikini:

Also look up the Soviet-Polish War and the Ukrainian-Soviet War, among others. The Soviet Union was invading countries around them, trying to add them to the USSR.

Seeing the Lenin worship on…

Anti-Leninists please look up every significant struggle for working class and national liberation since his death. It is not possible to eliminate bourgeoisie social relations in the first 5 years of building socialism, why not blame the centuries of psychological damage that led to these excesses instead of the person who consistently fought against them? Or even perhaps the people who actually committed these acts? It is amazing to see that people are willing to go out of their way to condemn these incidents when the rap sheet of the capitalists is beyond measure or comparison. It really shows where once class allegiance lies when they go out of their way to condemn the worlds first workers led government instead of our actual murderers that are in power today.

If we are thinking historically, why not “look up” and condemn the white terror, which makes the red terror look like food not bombs. How about all the legitimate class enemies who were thwarted by these efforts? Were the soviets just supposed to let them organize and overthrow the mass supported revolutionary government?

Lenin fought vehemently for nations right to sovereign determination (read his book about it), and took the measures necessarily to assure that the gains of the revolution would not be destroyed by the innumerable oppositional forces which sought to revoke them. You can’t make a revolution in white gloves, and instances of excess do not determine the character of a revolution, but rather the legacy of the possibility of working class triumph. This legacy echoes from Latin America to Africa, and everywhere in between, and all the possibilities for the future lay within this trajectory.

How about: Lenin fans, please present your constructive criticism of Lenin, if you have any at all.

All to often, the subtext of the defense is: I don’t have any constructive critique of Lenin and the problems of the Russian revolution. If there aren’t any, then what can we actually learn and use today in our struggle other than reimpliment Bolshevism. Is it as simple as that?

I think the largest danger is the tendency for religious reverence to an ideology that clouds critical and independent thought. It’s hard not to act on the strong emotional reaction that happens when someone attacks a person that has helped you see the world in a revolutionary way (please forgive the pun).

Good discussions are based on presenting facts and debating interpretations.

Here’s one view from a Socialism 2012* podcast entitled Russia: How the Revolution was Lost. It presents a lot of interesting facts, and is a pretty open defense of Lenin from a Leninist perspective. I think what I dislike is the defensive tone of the talk and the general lack of criticism of the party or its leaders like Lenin. It does address Cheka briefly, but its hard to draw a verdict on the speakers opinion, from what I remember.

The most important factors, from what little I know, that this talk presents seem to be the devastation of the Russian economy - including vast tracks of annexed lands, a devestated working class, and being shut out from the world economy - and the real threat of counter revolution from reactionary forces. I think it’s interesting to compare how other revolutions, and revolutionary organizations, addressed these questions, like the CNT and other left orgs in Spain during the civil war.

Here’s another talk from Socialism 2012 called Anarchism and Revolution: Barcelona 1936.

I think it’s time I’d really look into these questions.

*Socialism 2012 is, as far as I can tell, run mostly by the ISO, a group which comes out of the Troskyist line. This is based on their history, though their group doesn’t take an explicitly Troskyist line, it’s pretty close to that. They seem to have a fairly broad base as a whole, while the core of the group may be more closely aligned with a clearer Troskyist picture.

Jun 21

Obama Trade Deal Worse Than NAFTA

“As a candidate, Obama promised to renegotiate NAFTA, the trade deal that has undermined workers and the environment. Now leaks of negotiations with eight Pacific countries reveal Obama’s intention to out-NAFTA NAFTA.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal has been negotiated in secret (except for 600 corporate advisors). The TPP would:

—reward outsourcing of jobs to lower-wage countries;
—give foreign corporations immunity from U.S. laws;
—allow foreign corporations to challenge U.S. laws in foreign (secret) tribunals; and
—wipe out national protections for workers or the environment.”

Mar 27

If you have natural resources, then you’ll receive food.

Feb 19

This is great

So much truth in satire

Thanks again, Andy Singer

Dec 9

From Occupy Manila

THIS is militant labor action

BOOM!

Oct 16

China's housing bubble could have international consequences

China would explode if this were to happen. I’m afraid the mass movements caused by unemployment would lead to terrible violence. Yet another crisis of capitalism.

By the way, this man’s Chinese is embarrassingly bad. Don’t quit your day job, Mr. Economist :)