[Translator's note: In June of 1997 the following analysis of neoliberalism appeared in a European publication. Cecilia Rodriguez of the NCDM]

Date: Tue, 15 Jul 1997 18:46:30 -0700 (PDT) From: Cecilia Rodriguez

<moonlight@igc.apc.org>

THE FIFTH PIECE:

The Legitimate Violence of an Illegitimate Power?

The Fifth Piece is constructed by drawing a pentagon.

The State, in neoliberalism, tends to shrink to the "indispensable minimum". The so- called "Benefactor State" does not only become obsolete, it separates itself of all it was made up of as such, and it remains naked.

In the cabaret of globalization, the State shows itself as a table dancer that strips of everything until it is left with only the minimum indispensable garments: the repressive force. With its material base destroyed, its possibilities of sovereignty annulled, its political classes blurred, the Nation States become, more or less rapidly, a security apparatus of the megacorporations that neoliberalism builds in the development of this Fourth World War.

Instead of directing public investment towards social spending, the Nation States, prefer to improve their equipment, armaments and training in order to fulfill with efficiency a duty that its politics could no longer carry out some years hence: control of society.

The "professionals of legitimate violence" as the repressive apparatus of the modern states call themselves. But, what is there to do if violence is already under the laws of the market? Where is the legitimate violence and where is the illegitimate? What monopoly of violence can the battered Nation States pretend if the free game of supply and demand defies that monopoly? Didn't the Fourth Piece demonstrate that organized crime, governments and financial centers are more than well related? Isn't it evident that organized crime counts on real armies which have no borders except the fire power of its rival? And so the "monopoly of violence" does not belong to the Nation States. The modern market has put it on sale. . .

This is taken into account because under the polemic between legitimate and illegitimate violence, there is also the dispute (false, I think) between "rational" and "irrational" violence.

A certain sector of the world's intellectuals (I insist that their duty is more complex than to simply be of the "left or right", "pro-government or opposition", "good etcetera or bad etcetera") pretends that violence can be exerted in a "rational" manner, administered in a selective way, (there are those, also, who to something like the "Market technology of violence"), and can be applied with the ability "of a surgeon" against the evils of society. Something like this inspired the last stage of arms policy in the United States: precise "surgical" weapons, and military operations like the scalpel of the "new world order". This is how the new "smart bombs" were born (which, as a reporter who covered Desert Storm told me, are not that intelligent and have difficulty distinguishing between a hospital and a missile depository. When in doubt, the smart bombs don't abstain, they destroy). Anyway, as the compaÒeros of the Zapatista communities would say, the Persian Gulf is farther than the state capital of Chiapas (although the situation of the Kurds has horrifying similarities with the indigenous of a country who praises itself as "democratic and free"), and so let us not insist on "that" war when we have "ours". And so the struggle between rational and irrational violence opens an interesting and lamentable path of discussion, it is not useless in present times. We could take for example what is understood as rational. If the response is that it is the "reason of the State" (assuming that this exists, and that above all, one would be able to recognize some reason in the actual neoliberal state) and then one can ask if this "reason of the state" corresponds to the "reason of society" (always assuming that today's society retains some reason and furthermore if the rational violence of the state is rational to the society. Here there is no point in rambling (idly), the "rationale of the state" in modern times is none other than the "rationale of the financial markets".

But, how does the modern state administer its "rational violence"? And, paying attention to history, how much time does this rationality last? The time it takes between one election and another or coup (depending on the case)? How many acts of violence by the State, that were applauded as "rational" during that time, are now irrational? Lady Margaret Thatcher, of "acceptable" memory for the british people, took the time to prologue the book "The Next War" of Caspar Weinberg and Peter Schweizer (Regnery Publishing, Inc. Washington, D.C. 1996).

In this text Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, advances some reflections about the three similarities between the world of the Cold War and that of the Post Cold War: The first of these is that the "free world" will never lack potential aggressors. The second is the necessity of the military superiority of the "democratic" states above possible aggressors. The third similarity is that this military superiority should be, above all, technological.

To end her prologue, the so-called "iron lady" defines this "rational violence" of the modern state by stating: "A war can take place in different ways. But the worst usually happens because one power believes it can reach its objectives without a war or at least with a limited war that can be won rapidly, resulting in failed calculations."

For Misters Weinberg and Schweizer the scenes of the "Future Wars" are: North Korea and China (April 6, 1998), Iran (April 4, 1999), Mexico (March 7, 2003), Russia (February 7, 2006), and Arabs, Latinos and Europeans. Almost the entire world is considered a "possible aggressor of modern democracy".

Logic (at least in neoliberal logic): In modern times, the power (that is, financial power) knows that it can only reach its objectives with a war, and not with a limited war that can be won rapidly but with a total war, world wide in every sense. And if we believe the secretary of state Madeleine Albright, when she says: "One of the primary objectives of our government is to ensure that the economic interests of the United States can extend itself to a planetary scale" ("The Wall Street Journal". 1/21/1997), we need to understand that all the world ( and I mean everything, everything) is the theater of operations of this war.

We should understand then that if the dispute for the "monopoly of violence" does not take place according to the laws of the market, but is rejected and defied from the bottom, the world power "discovers" in this challenge a "possible aggressor". This is one of the defiances (of the least studied and most condemned among the many it represents), launched by the armed indigenous rebels of the Zapatista National Liberation Army against neoliberalism and for humanity. . .

This is the symbol of North American military power, the pentagon. The new "world police" seeks that the "national" army and police only be the "security corps" that guarantee "order and progress" in the neoliberal magapolis.

Continue on...

Sixth piece: "Megapolitics and the Dwarfs"