Dear reader,
As you will by now already be aware, approximately 2 billion of earth’s human inhabitants have found themselves under voluntary or enforced, and everything along the continuum, home arrest, otherwise called ‘self isolation.’ These have also had foisted upon them a physical noncontact zone called ‘social distancing.’ As Prof. Chomsky has pointed out, see previous posts, social distancing is the normal state of affairs when everyone’s on a cellphone, locked, as Dr Leonard Cohen sings, into their ‘hopeless little screens.’
We have made, on this blog, two points:
1) the continuity of ‘cognitive bubbles’ with the now enforced or voluntary–and everything inbetween–bubbles we are expected to inhabit now, or those we have imposed by force on us, and everything inbetween (called foam or surf);
2) this is not life during wartime. It cannot be. In the same sense there has been no war since WWII.
How do states raise funds for war?
How do sovereign states raise the funds necessary to conduct war on other sovereign states? How do these sovereign states afford to mobilise themselves in defense?
On this the whole question would turn.
This: CANNOT.
Meaning: what cannot be done and what is impossible to do.
A state mobilised in its own defense, or in order to conduct war on another, can: rely on banks, issue its own government bonds, accrue debt, burdening future generations; depend on its people to support the cause, since they are what it represents, imposing higher taxes; control subsequent and consequent inflation by increasing the money supply–called today quantitative easing, and applied under an ongoing state of exception which makes peacetime states, under international fiscal directives, enact wartime austerities.
We know austerity to entail the privatisation of expensive public services and the selling of publicly owned state assets, fixed, like hospitals and schools, energy infrastructures and telecommunications networks, and working, circulating in labour markets, made to circulate, undercut and degraded and underpaid, but not only for profit. For in fact states to unburden themselves, and to incapacitate themselves, so as to be fleet, agile and adaptive; so as to move to a more managerial stance; and to the increase of economic capacity.
In the eventuality of war or of a mobilisation being called for to fight the scourges of drugs, terrorism or contagious disease, do we imagine states reburdening themselves with heavy responsibility? Or do we imagine a managerial stance to continue and a chain unfolding, like a Jacob’s Ladder, down through the level of service provision, through supervisors, branch managers to the frontline staff, where each divests unto the next above?
The Bluebridge frontline staffmember, with the magenta hair, told us in Picton, despite the extenuating circumstance of having been required to be present at 6am, on a Saturday, with others suffering the same circumstance, when, on a Saturday, there is no ferry sailing, that she could only go on what her supervisor had told her. The list for standbys would be made up at 11am. And not before. Our presence was required to be resumed if we hoped to go on the list.
To ask different of her, to be angry, is simply untoward. She cannot do any different than she has, and she cannot have done.
This was the time, contemplating the Cook Strait separating South from North Islands of our small Pacific nation, we felt like immigrants in wartime. Watching perhaps the last sailing.
The situation was of course complicated by the other service provider–Bluebridge does not have a monopoly–which, when approached, informed us of a limit of 200 per sailing. On boats with over a thousand capacity.
We retain the nomenclature ‘essential industry.’ But in truth, in modern wartime as in modern peacetime, can there be any requisitioning of such industry?
Would this not be the ideological crime called out by the current US President, the Orange Thing (not to speak of the other South American Thing [a Coisa]), as being a Chavez-ism?
And we are reminded of all those times there has been an absence of recourse, the Jacob’s Ladder having pursued its downwards trajectory which somehow looks to be upwards, from the underpaid, underinformed, almost mostly unformed frontline staff, when they told us this or that rationally available course of action was foreclosed. And not only that but as a line of rational inquiry, or one of argument, it was censurable.
At stake in the impossible of the it cannot be done is then the virtual category of capacity. It is not that the state is incapable in its current mobilisation. There is no capability at all.
Dear reader,
There is no capability at all left in its institutions.
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