One reader of last night's post was so offended by the flippant tone
I took that he sent a >'d copy back in a huff. This can't be helped. *All
historic social orders* look bizarre when they have passed away. That goes
for the one we are living in as well as those that have already gone. I sat
through the discussion on Opposing The Existing Global Order for weeks, and
got the distinct impression there is a consensus among you that there is
something *sensible* about world capitalism at this time, though it may
have certain obnoxious features. It is quite impossible that this is true.
Marx foretold that capitalism, being built-in crisis-prone, would destroy
itself. He was correct. It destroyed itself three times, two world wars
with the Great Depression sandwiched in between, in forty years (including
postwar wars). When it's finally gone and all the rocks are turned over,
we'll finally know what almost got us, but right now my favourite mind
game is: What is it I am not worrying about? That is what there is to
worry about.
When we look at historical societies and world systems, we are always
observing very strange, suboptimally performing, wasteful, often blindly
murderous self-destruction machines, which can perpetuate themselves,
sometimes for centuries, before they are done in. Sometimes the replacement
is an improvement, sometimes it is worse, all too often it is more of the
same under other names. When, moreover, some key variable, like relative
populations, gets drastically altered by epidemic disease or other catastrophe,
crises spiral all over the place from one end of the world system to the other.
Societies seemingly placidly decomposing for centuries suddenly seem very
much stranger over shorter periods. There are spectacular social explosions,
sometimes in chain reaction. We find these things with the smallpox-measles
epidemics of the late second and third centuries. With the Bubonic Plague
in the Early Middle Ages, and again in the Late Middle Ages. Just think
about the first one, for example. One morning, the people of Rome woke up
to find the city occupied by Albanians under the command of Septimius
Severus. *Please note*: I deliberately use "Albanians" in preference to
"Illyrians" because (a) We *know* Albania is the most backward country in
Europe; where we have no standard to evaluate "Illyrians" by except the
mythologizing of some historians about the noble, dutiful Illyrian Emperors
who Saved Civilization. Who were actually bullet-headed military thugs. And
(b) Classical Illyrian was ancestral, in the historical linguistic sense, to
modern Albanian.
That morning was 9 April, 193.
"The impression made by the troops of Severus on the people of Rome is
described by the historian Cassius Dio, Roman senator and eye-witness
of these events: 'Severus filled the city with a throng of motley
soldiers most savage in appearance, most terrifying in speech, and
most boorish in conversation' (75.2.6)." (John Wilkes, The Illyrians,
Blackwell, 1992.)
*At the other end* of the world system of Antiquity, the same sort of
rulership appeared in the dictatorship of Cao Cao, China's greatest military
genius, who however fought exclusively against other Chinese. Like Severus
on his end, Cao Cao was trying to kick some law-and-order into an empire
and social order showing rapid signs of indisciplined crumbling due to
ill-understood social and economic effects of diseases which, for all
anyone knew, might themselves have just fallen out of the sky. Complicated,
as tended to happen in China, but not the Mediterranean or Europe, by a
Daoist peasant war usually called the Yellow Turbans, but actually two
separate revolts, the Great Peace Daoists in the northeast and the Five
Pecks of Rice (= the tithe assessment) Daoists in Sichuan. That peasant
war broke out in 189, and by 193, when Severus occupied Rome, the Han
dynasty emperor was Cao Cao's prisoner.
What happened after 542, when the Plague of Justinian appeared, was
every bit as drastic in East Asia, where the plague did *not* appear as
where it did, because the stable relations between China, the Near East,
and the Mediterranean/Europe were disrupted for centuries. Nor can this
be a monocausal analysis, because there were social, political, religious,
and other kinds of revolutions going on from one end of the Eurasian land
mass plus North Africa to the other, maybe beyond, and these are all of
vast complexity and importance. Tibetan and Turkish empires were built
in Central Asia, for instance. Or, say, in 551, a people called the Juan
Juan (spelling varies) was driven out of North China. In 626, a people
called the Avars was besieging Constantinople. These two things are related,
nobody is exactly sure how directly. That the Avars represented exactly the
same gene pool as the Juan Juan is ridiculous.
It was not just bad luck that social revolution, known as the Abbasid
Revolution, broke out in Khurasan in 747, overthrowing the Umayyads by
750; and that *at this very time by sheer chance it just happened* that
Xuznzong sent his army in the direction of abu-Muslim's headquarters in
Samarkand. Xuanzong's conquests had expanded Chinese control over millions
of Iranians, Turks, Irano-Turks (as it happened, the rebel An Lushan had
a Sogdian, ie, Iranian, father and Turkish mother; another general had a
Turkish father and Iranian mother), and Others & Miscellaneous, of pagan,
Buddhist, Manichaean, Nestorian, and even Muslim faiths. Where political
control shifted, apostasy was to be expected. The Umayyads had proved
flabby in defending Iranians as well as the Faith. To suppose that someone
would be loyal to a Chinese colonial government rather than feeling a sense
of kinship with members of the same linguistic group across a political
frontier is crazy, which is just what Xuanzong was. Not even if you made
a Sogdian commander of the military district of the capital of the Chinese
Empire would you assure his loyalty to what is still, after all, a foreign
country who is paying him off. This was precisely the post to which An
Lushan was appointed.
We are getting just a bit ahead of ourselves. Look at the war of 751
again. The commander of the army beaten at the Talas River was a Korean,
Gao Hsianji. As it happened, he had a very good won-lost record to this
point. Unfortunately, we are not talking about a pitcher for the Chicago
Cubs. Had the Chinese been capable of taking opinion polls, they would have
found that half the population of Korea wanted Xuanzong dead, and the other
half would have killed him personally if they had the opportunity. That is,
the people of Korea regarded China not much more favourably in the eighth
century than they did Japan in the twentieth. What this predicts is that
Gao was not going to fight to the death for China; and as it happened, he
ran fast enough, killing anyone in his path if he had to, that he was one
of the very few to escape.
Yang Gaozhong, Lady Yang's evil cousin, was Minister of Revenue, for which
reason he insinuated the Lady into the imperial harem. To take the heat off
himself. Yang himself was paradigmatic of the featherbrained pedigreed
aristocrats who rose under the Tang system by hereditary right. He was
crooked and greedy. By 753, he was Prime Minister. To cover up the disaster
in Central Asia, he argued, a victorious war nearer home was necessary. The
target was Nan Zhao, a kingdom south of Sichuan, and hitherto on good terms
with the Tang. The Nan Zhao ruler threw himself into the arms of Tibet, the
only Major Power at war with the Tang. This made it an even struggle, and
the Tang, hitherto beating Tibet, started to lose. After a disastrous defeat,
the second, in Nan Zhao, An Lushan revolted. It was over.
When a bizarre social order/formation hits the skids, all sorts of weird
details acquire political weight. I tried to make this point yesterday, but
it was difficult, the whole subject was too messy. Rumours, for example.
Anyone recall the politcal consequences of the Tsarina of Russia's faith
in Rasputin? Of the buzz about Marie Antoinette? In routine politics, sex
scandals, real or imaginary, have entertainment value. When society as a
whole is going Over The Edge, they become something more. Xuanzong hated
women. He was scarred from youth due to struggles to the death with women
smarter than himself. The last of these was with his co-conspirator, Princess
Tai Ping, who was graciously allowed to commit suicide five years after the
coup of July 21-22, 710. Due in part to these troubles, he had a tendency
to favour macho He-Man-Looking military men for appointments to key commands.
In the USA this would raise homophobic suspicion today. The early eighth
century was an age when brawn counted for something. An Lushan was a hunk.
The logic went, Lady Yang liked sex, surprise, surprise. It followed that
There Was Something Between Them. So Xuanzong became the stereotype of
the old fool who fell for a beautiful woman who ran around on him behind
his back. When society is blowing up, all sorts of imaginary beings,
supernatural entities, and casual meetings on the street are Seen and
Interpreted and given imputed meaning. It was an argument over Who Lost
China among Chinese, where the understanding of what was available to
win or lose was dim.
This is *typical* of revolutionary situations.
To his Turkish and Iranian subjects, in the capital as well as Central
Asia, Xuanzong was a Chinese. To the mass of Chinese, he increasingly became
a Turk. *Nobody knew it at the time*, but what happened in the uprising of
December 11, 755 was Phase One of which Phase Two was the peasant war led
by Huang Zhao: a social revolution.
The pedigreed aristocracy was increasingly hated as (1) foreign, ie, of
Barbarian ancestry. This was proven by (2) their mounted lifestyle, and
(3) their women, whose habits were distinctly unChinese. They were distinctive
personalities, often of political importance. They rode horses. They had
big feet, which their menfolk prized, as it was conducive to staying on a
horse. Stories were told of how a Noble Lady would borrow her husband's
boots when she rode his horse. Noble Ladies played polo, a game imported
from Persia, and are portrayed in tomb sculptures playing it on horseback,
of course. This to Chinese smacked of Turkish, or even Mongol women, who
were as tough as their men.
All sorts of stories were told about Court sex scandals, some of them
true. There were alleged to be Daoist orders of monks and nuns devoted to
practices of perpetual sexual intercourse. Better documented is the extraction
by Daoist alchemists of human sex hormones from urine. Practices of Courtly
Love developed and spread to Japan, where texts which disappeared in China
itself in Phase Two of the revolution were preserved. The social revolution
which exterminated the aristocracy as a class was also a revolution *against*
women and *for* prudery. One of its consequences was footbinding, which
spread as a customary practice during the Five Dynasties (907-960).
If you do not maintain a sense of the bizarre, you will not, cannot
understand history. There is no such thing possible as a rational class
society, so there cannot be such a thing as a rational revolutionary
practice against class society *without great compromise*. Most societies
have had at most one social revolution sometime in their past, and that
is more than enough, thank you. There was *the* Russian or *the* French
Revolution. The Chinese have had four society-wide social revolutions, and
at least one or two more in North or South China during political division.
One argument against this is, there was more historical time in China. But
there was even more in Egypt. For Egypt, we have exactly one, in 968, made
by Isma'ili Islam. Which, by the way, gave Egypt the best and most honest
government it ever had, and was, moreover, the longest-lasting political
regime ever established by a vanguard revolutionary party run along lines
not dissimilar to Leninism.
Wagar is right about one thing. The capitalist world-system will all
go together at once. The nation-state is no longer a viable unit for social
revoution, or social revolution will take some new form, possibly one which
is Not Nice. Nobody now can say for sure what politics is, and even less
may be said about what politics is going to be. You wish to Get Through The
Day, then you wish to be deluded. Ideology works like this.
Consider that, for the Cold War Period there were two motors of the USA
economy. One of these was selling houses on thirty-year mortgages, along
with automobiles on credit to get from the mortgaged house to the place
of employment requisite to pay the consumer debt off, for where the US state
may go indefinitely into debt, for the consumer, every mindless bit of work
must be done till the last senseless bill is paid. the second is making
thermonuclear weapons and all the other war toys that help to make thermo-
nuclear weapons meaningful as well as the national security apparatus
whereto they have most meaning.
From this it follows that, if a politico-military crisis sufficiently
grave would remind the masses of the existence of the nuclear weapons, this
would call into serious question the continued existence of social life as
we know it for another thirty years, hence render problematic the reproduction
of the consumer sector. When such a crisis transpired in 1962, the theory
predicts that there would have to be a Peace Offensive forthwith to sustain
the fantasy that there would be another thirty years. As it happened,
President Kennedy did launch such a Peace Offensive, while as we know he
was waging the Vietnam war.
My suspicion is, that if the conditional probabilities of thermonuclear
war were aggregated in the mathematically appropriate way, it can be shown
that, probabilistically, we are likelier all dead than Elsewise; so we
should congratulate ourselves on our good fortune. But the point is, that
ideologically, we cannot have thriven in the suboptimal, deplorable way
that we have *without systematically unknowing what exists*. This will
always occur in societies with class, gender, and race hierarchies; and
the nastiest data may not come down to us.
For instance, on what kinds of fantasies did the comfortably-off Roman
get off? It might explain a lot. As it happens, a statue now in the Louvre
was dug up in North Africa. It shows a woman naked except for brief panties
mounted upright on a bull while a leopard tears her face off. Behind a
shield, an executioner crouches, prepared to make the final kill, of the
woman, when even he gets disgusted. It was thanks to the kind of conscious-
ness that got aroused by fantasies like this that St Augustine formulated
the Docrine of Free Will in the form that got it off the ground, but that's
another story.
If I thought social life were inevitably as disgusting as I tell you it
is, I wouldn't bother telling you. But it is.
So, therefore, let the bizarre be the System Default for the interpretation
of past, ie, historical, societies/world systems. And why should this be the
exception.
Daniel A. Foss