Chinese Hypocrisy, the Definition of Communism, and the Fate of Marxism in a Globalizing World III

3.  There are no universal human rights, but consensual extensions of liberties to individuals by the collectivity/polity enhance and deepen the potential for individual and collective/social human development in ways that promote the creation and sustainability of a new, aggressively entrepreneurial vision of communism. 

Western criticisms on the lack of respect by government and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials for basic human rights are certainly not new.  Pointedly, the Western reaction to the June 4, 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing represents the most significant episode of Western disapproval for Chinese policy with regard to democratic political participation, freedom of speech, and freedom to criticize the state.  Further criticisms are evident on the incarceration of political prisoners, the prevalence of capital punishment, and the treatment of prisoners.  It is not my intention here to dwell on any particular Western accounts attacking Chinese policies, especially when, with regard to the prevalence of incarcerations within the general population, the U.S. continues to incarcerate a larger percentage of the general population than any other country in the world (who is calling the kettle black?!).  Rather, my purpose is to approach the subject of universal human rights from a Marxian perspective in order to evaluate the CCP's position that universal human rights are incompatible with the political heritage of China and, more specifically, with China's appropriation of Marxism. 

In various posts on this blog (on gun control, on marriage equality, on U.S. Supreme Court decisions), I have attempted to make the point that there are no such things as universal, inalienable rights.  In this sense, I refer to rights in the strictest possible terms as concerning unconditional guarantees of the liberty of action by individuals.  I adamantly adhere to this position for several reasons.  First, approaching from a partisan perspective that prioritizes collectivity and democratic political practices, the notion of rights, as absolute guarantees of liberty against social/state interference that inhere to individuals regardless of the contexts in which they are exercised, manifest irresolvable constraints on the capacity of the collectivity/polity to exercise its will as a democratic sovereign.  At stake is the capacity of the state, acting in the collective interests of a democratic polity, to pursue those interests through legislative enactments that may impede the capacity of individuals to exercise their rights. 

Critically, the litigal "rights revolution" in America over the last half century (including not only the Civil Rights movement, but movements for animal rights, for gun rights, for rights to clean air and water, for the rights of the mentally ill, for marriage equality, etc.) did not precisely operate under an absolute and unconditional conception of rights and, in many circumstances, the judicial enforcements of claims by individuals either to freedom from social interference with individual actions (negative rights) or to equal treatment in subject social contexts (a particular subset of positive rights) has had significantly progressive consequences (e.g. the current spread of rights to marriage equality).  In important ways, we need to draw distinctions here between the extension of limited positive rights (i.e. demands for equal treatment in commodity markets or in the negotiation of contracts) and negative rights.  However, in general, the juridical affirmation and enforcement of a right must place some tangible restrictions on the liberty of the state and of the polity in whose name the state acts to enact needed policies (e.g. enactment of sensible restrictions on the purchase and use of handguns in the interest of public safety).  Approaching from another direction, the affirmation of rights by jurists forecloses any necessity to engage in the sort of public argumentation and institutional democratic consensus building in support of governmental constitutional or statutory enactments or, less formally, practical community support and extra-legal enforcement of respect for the subject of rights extension.  Citizens, thus, lose some measure of civic responsibility to engage with other citizens in order to shape the general direction of their collective governance, at divergent levels of government.  Moreover, judicial affirmation of individual rights is additionally important, in part, because establishments of rights through judicial pronouncement under particular constitutional interpretations may be withdrawn by subsequent jurists embodying alternative understandings on the meaning of constitutional provisions.  Fundamentally, the best protection of individual liberties within a democratic polity is mass consensus on the value of such liberties and the necessity to secure their recognition over time through enforced state policy.       

Individuals are not sovereign agents - sovereignty arises as a practical/contingent outcome of collective action/association.  This proposition is, at least partly, consistent with a Rousseauean civic republican view in which citizenship and the liberties that extend therefrom must be undertstood as a fundamental outcome of a social contract between constituent members of a polity, surrendering all claim to categorical/unconditional rights in favor of consensually conferred and mutually respected individual liberties.  Supporting such a view, I prefer to approach freedoms from social regulation of the actions of individuals not from the framework of rights (as unconditional, inalienable absolutes) but from the framework of mutual consent for individual liberties within a democratic polity, by a collective, democratic sovereign. 

Moreover, at a more abstract level within the Marxian tradition, the concept of a right is ontologically incompatible with the concept of a universe of seamless interconnection between processes (a holistic Althusserian structured totality) insofar as it relies on the capacity of the individual, as the executor of a sovereign will to act, to proceed as if his actions were wholly disconnected from the constitution of every other individual, a position that, as a Marxist, I reject. Every act undertaken by an individual agent constitutes, in part, the conditions within which every other individual agent is compelled to act because every action holds consequences for the collective ecological context, at every conceivable scale (in the limit, as we acknowledge the infinite connectiveness of material processes across space-time, for the universe).  Taking this ontological framework as the background for Marxist theorization, no space exists for the ontological centrality of the individual.  Effectively, Marxism, in this understanding, goes a step beyond the liberal/individualist ontological foundations of Rousseauean thinking to cross out the existence of the primordial autonomous individual (in the state of nature) altogether, in favor of the continuous prioritization of produced ecology (society and nature as mutually connected, mutually constituted, and inseparably reinforcing fields situating each human agent in relation to the universe of all human and non-human agents).

In my view, notwithstanding possible minor semantic differences with Maoist ontological conceptualizations (Althusser did, after all, derive his understandings of overdeterminist ontology, in part, from Mao's theorizations on contradiction), the CCP's rejection of universal human rights is wholly compatible with Marxian theory as I understand it.  Therefore, I cannot base my critique of the CCP's condemnation of universal human rights on Marxian ontological positions.  Rather, my larger critique must be based wholly on instrumental questions.  Most specifically, the question that I need to answer concerns the appropriate regime of individual liberties for maximizing the developmental potential of communist class structures, as the ultimate partisan goal of Marxian theory. 

Approaching this question from an abstract level, economic development clearly demands a certain range of liberties, especially liberties with respect to the use and alienation of property.  The English Common law principle sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas ("use your own  property so as not to harm others in the use of theirs"), for example, simultaneously expresses the terms by which individuals might expect to be free in the use of their property and provides the basis for others to obtain relief for property uses that violate their liberty to enjoy their property.  It, thus, provides basic guidance on the use of property with the polity's blessing, open to further narrowing or expansion in the polity's interest (e.g. reducing liabilities in specific uses of property in order to prioritize the development of specified sectors).  Associational economic liberties, like those concerning the free entrance of individuals into contracts and market exchange relationships, may involve a certain interpersonal extension from basic allowances on the use of property, but they may also form a critical argument for non-economic associational liberties, like those involved in the formal partisan regulation of the state through democratic suffrage.  In both economic and non-economic circumstances, the formative aspects of interpersonal interaction work to reshape autonomous/asocial individuals into members of a collectivity and, at least potentially, into democratic citizens.  Ideally, they teach a certain degree of civility and deference to the desires and needs of others in the process of defining mutual interests served by an association between individuals. 

Borrowing from liberal philosophical and juridical thought, the free communication of ideas within social contexts (e.g. public demonstrations, mass media, electronic forums, textbooks, and even marketing/advertising) constitutes a contribution to the metaphorical marketplace of ideas, within which individuals consume those ideas that seem most compelling and persuasive.  In this sense, free speech constitutes a preeminent form of associational liberty and a vitual prerequisite to all other associational liberties.  That is to say, the capacity of individuals to assemble, define their collective self-interests, and act on the behalf of these interests presumes the capacity of individuals to expressively articulate their ideas and the reasons why collective actions may serve their ends.  This instrumental (utilitarian) argument for the virtue of free speech originates, to a significant degree with J.S. Mill's On Liberty, but it also plays an important role in U.S. Supreme Court Justice Holmes' early Twentieth century dissents favoring an expansion of First Amendment protections over the short term benefits of suppressing subversive political speech (see, especially, Holmes' dissent in Gitlow v. New York (268 U.S. 652(1925)) at: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=268&invol=652.  In particular: "If in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way."). 

The formative aspects of free speech, moreover, cannot be limited to political speech (i.e. speech directed to transform state-political processes).  They must likewise be implicated in communications of a purely commercial nature, where producers compete for market share by persuading potential customers of the superiority of their products.  As such, marketing processes, as a subset of the larger production of cultural images in social contexts, demand a political environment unconstrained by social restrictions on communications.  Moreover, beyond purely commercial and purely political speech, we have the full range of cultural communications generated as arts and sciences (theoretic and analytic materials, theater, music, dance, romance novels, sports, etc.).  Taken as a totality, the codified or otherwise expressed ideas in a given social context forms the raw material through which human beings in particular places and at particular moments in history are shaped, through endless processes of formal/academic and informal/practical lifelong education, into fully social beings.  Thus, to constrain the flow of communicated information to individuals means to close off certain ways of thinking about, seeing, and linguistically articulating lived reality and, therefore, to stunt particular modes of mental and/or emotional human development and to accentuate others.  Such cultural processes of learning/socialization in turn shape the ways in which individuals come together with other individuals to articulate and resolve economic problems, expressing implicitly or explicitly their material needs and desires in order to steer the course of economic development from the most microscopic/microeconomic contexts through broader public policy debates on issues like health care or public education. 

Taking these abstract reflections on liberty as a starting point, market-oriented distributive systems for use values (i.e. goods and services) do not strictly require a full regime of liberties.  Marxian theory has been fairly consistent in arguing that market processes strictly require the liberty of individuals to alienate the particular forms of property to be exchanged, including labor power (i.e. the human capacity for productive labor).  Moreover, notwithstanding a broad history of arguments to the contrary within Western liberal thought, there is nothing strictly correlative between the existence of market exchange institutions and the extension of a broader range of liberties.  It might, thus, be axiomatic that markets demand a certain capacity for individuals to communicate information concerning the commodities in exchange, but liberalization of commercial communications need not lead to a broader institution of free speech, especially concerning partisan political discourse.  If China's example teaches us anything, then it should be instructive on the capacity of authoritarian states to encourage free exchange of commodities while simultaneously constraining the capacity of citizens to actively engage in democratic state-political processes. 

Furthermore, markets cannot be seen as naturalistic institutions - they are creatures of human developmental processes, through which the interactions of individuals produce particular institutions of mutually conducive exchange, define their social boundaries (e.g. defining what can be exchanged, when it can be exchanged, where it can be exchanged, etc.), and determine their relationship to state-political processes. The produced nature of market processes presumes the capacity of a polity to regulate such institutions through the state, and, as such, the associational liberties necessary to market exchange are always subject to regulation.  Rather than simply imaging that market processes axiomatically lead to either a free market in ideas or to full blown liberal civic republican institutions (e.g. rule of law, limited government intervention in the lives of autonomous individuals), we need to respect markets for the limited freedoms that they do, at least potentially, facilitate.  Under the appropriate (competitive) conditions, markets may convey greater opportunities for freedom of choice by consumers than other non-market mechanisms for the distribution of use values (e.g. "socialistic" centralized distributions of mass produced goods and services).  More importantly, in my view, market-oriented systems appear almost indisputably to offer greater opportunities for entrepreneurial innovation and spontaneous development of new entrepreneurial projects than do non-market systems.  If markets are structured to facilitate free entry at will by new entrepreneurs, then market institutions will maximize a decentralization of entrepreneurial initiative, driving the wider development of a given macroeconomic system. 

With these thoughts in mind, communism, understood again as a class structure incorporating the collective appropriation and distribution of surplus labor by its producers, can function within a variety of distributive systems for use values, including market-oriented systems.  In my view, communism, understood through the refractory lens of Western worker cooperatives that appear to achieve, in some measure, the collective appropriation and distribution of surplus labor by its producers, works better within market-oriented distributive systems.  That is, communist producers/collective entrepreneurs appear more apt to succeed in distributive systems within which they are able to compete for market share in suitable scaled market contexts based on a variety of cost and niche/qualitative (monopolistically-) competitive advantages.  Other, alternative non-monetary mechanisms, like localized barter-exchange networking, appear suitable for the development and sustainability of communist structures, but, if only because market mechanisms, making use of unified monetary means of exchange, are so ubiquitous, markets provide an easier path for the sustainability of collective entrepreneurial communist projects.  Conversely, centrally structured distributive systems appear least suited to the sort of entrepreneurial innovation that I associate with the development of communist class structures.  The difference here involves the selective injection of individual/collective and associative liberties with respect to the utilization and alienation of property apparent within suitably organized market contexts.

Concluding that market liberties are good for the development and sustainability of communism, as a partisan goal of Marxian theory and partisan activism, I am left to offer a final appraisal of the CCP's rejection of universal human rights, in view of China's recent record of market liberalization and its continued rejection of political liberties.  As I have suggested here, there are no axiomatic linkages between the extension of market-oriented economic liberties and political liberties.  There are evidently reasons for hope, however, in the progressive breakup of a national macroeconomy organized around exploitative, centralized state-capitalist enterprises.  In large part, such entities are being replaced by exploitative private, market-oriented capitalist enterprises, largely under domestic ownership but occasionally under foreign ownership and direction.  Clearly, there are possible spaces in the regional macroeconomies of the Peoples' Republic that appear quite conducive to the development of communisms.  Most notably, in non-urban economies, the development since the 1980s of township-village enterprises (TVEs), represents a potential space for communist development.  Over the last decade, many of these enterprises, under the ownership of local municipal governments, have been privatized.  In their place networks of private enterprises have occasionally developed.  Critically, I know very little about these developments or whether the collective appropriation and distribution of surplus value characterizes any enterprises emerging from the privatization of the TVEs.  On the other hand, it appears to be a hopeful avenue to interrogate the development of actual communist enterprises in China.  Beyond this, as a Western Marxist, committed, on the one hand, to communist development (as the democratization of surplus labor) and, on the other hand, to the expansion of a broad regime of individual liberties conducive to a broader democratic discourse, I hope that every moment of real communist development in China raises questions concerning the broader nature of the party autocracy and the unfulfilled promise of democratic spontaneity embodied in the Cultural Revolution. 

Chinese Hypocrisy, the Definition of Communism, and the Fate of Marxism in a Globalizing World II

2.  Neither communism nor capitalism uniquely determines a characteristic social formation.
Extending from my argument in the previous post, communism not only lacks a unique state-political form, but it also lacks a larger characteristic form of society.  By this I mean that, on the one hand, communisms may exist in almost any form of society and, on the other hand, that the mere existence of communisms within a society does not uniquely determine the larger organization of the society, including its state-political forms (e.g. liberal constitutional democracy, partisan totalitarian autocracy, etc.), its mechanisms for the production and distribution of goods and services (markets, centralized non-market distributions by proportional right, etc.), its media for the diffusion of information (diverse technologically organized free corporate press, state media with strict controls on dissemination of information, etc.), its religious rituals (free private ecclesiastical services, obligatory public rituals), or its diverse forms of entertainment (dancing, music, movies, etc).  In the same way that neither communism nor capitalism constitutes a form of government, neither communism nor capitalism nor any other class structural form constitutes a form of society. 

Rather, all class structural forms shape and define every other social process performed within any given form of society without uniquely determining every other social process.  This is a basic ontological foundation for Marxian theory as I understand it.  The point is that the existence of communism within any particular society has particular social consequences, manifest as the effects of communism on every other social process.  On the other hand, every other social process, likewise, shapes and defines the performance of communism in any given society where communisms exist.  In this manner, the differences between state political processes, distribution of goods and services, diffusion of information, religious practices, and forms of entertainment between Chinese and American societies would necessarily produce different performances of communism (and, also, different understandings of what communism even means!).  Conversely, the existence of dissimilar forms of communism in American and Chinese societies implies that the performance of communism within each of these societies will impose dissimilar effects on state-political processes, the distribution of goods and services, diffusion of information, religious practices, forms of entertainment, familial organization, and every other social process.

Four logical conclusions emerge from this understanding of the effects of class on other processes and of the effects of other processes on class.  First, the idea that social processes, like those involving class, are continuously shaping and reshaping each other by means of their interactions over time implies that all societies are dynamical/continuously changing.  This form of social dynamism through the interactions of the social processes internally constituting a society defines the particular dialectical character of Marxian thinking.  A dialectical understanding of society of this kind precludes looking at a society as a static thing, as something objectively given beyond a particular abstract moment in time.  Rather, in place of the concept "society," Marxism has traditionally employed the concept of social formation, implying that the formation of any society is continuous, that it is the product emerging at any given moment in time from particular overdetermined assemblages of political, economic, and cultural processes, and that any effort to arbitrarily isolate a particular human population at a particular place and a particular moment in time and label it a society without regard to the social processes that define the inclusive collectivity of its members would artificially solidify/ossify something that is permanently in flux. 

Second, following from the previous conclusion, the social formation concept refers precisely to the associations that individual agents create with other agents when they perform particular economic, political, cultural, or physical (biological, chemical, etc.) processes.  That is to say, a social formation exists when a set of individual agents jointly perform a given economic process (e.g. manufacturing a car).  Such an aggregate of individual agents are temporarily congealed for the purpose of performing the process, and we can look at them as an inclusive collectivity.  On the other hand, the same individuals might be simultaneously congealed by other processes (e.g. the political processes of national citizenship), and these processes might have a different temporal duration and a different spatiality than the economic process that brings them together.  Such alternative processes produce alternative social formations that may exert different intensities of collective belonging at different moments in time (i.e. citizens feel more unified as citizens when they are performing the political process of democratic participation in elections than when they are simply passing each other on the street, in the workplace, or in a marketplace).  In my reading of Marxian theory, we cannot privilege any one of the myriad alternative spatio-temporal scales and processually defined types of social formations.  The only thing we can do is describe their spatio-temporal overlaps, examine their continuous or discontinuous networked (piece-wise) characteristics, and theorize the ways in which they interact.  Ultimately, the most basic of all processually defined social formation may be homo sapien, a biologically defined collectivity unifying agents through biological reproduction (species-existence as a continuously changing relationship with the environment encapsulated, in part, by the theory of natural selection).  Beyond this uni-dimensional biological basis for human collectivity, however, myriad economic, political, and cultural processes, each defining their own collectivities, make the world an interesting place and a subject for infinitely complex studies. 

Third, again in conformity with the position asserted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the incongruity of Western ideas with Chinese political processes, the particular social formations produced in China must be unique for their complex constitution by ranges of economic, political, and cultural processes performed in Chinese spatial contexts.  The same can be said for social formations within the spatial contexts in the U.S.  On the other hand, it would be a mistake, especially in the current age of globalization, to infer that China's difference relative to Western contexts is incommensurable and permanent/permanently defensible by the CCP and its ideologues.  Making any such assertion would contradict a Marxist political argument as old as the Manifesto of the Communist Party, that modernity, encapsulating the geographic expansiveness of both capitalist and communist class structures, breaks down all "(n)ational one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness," rendering "a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country" (Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chapter 1, Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 6, at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm).  Globalization, in all of its economic, political, and cultural manifestations, is breaking down the very things that make Chinese social formations unique relative to Western social formations. 

To adopt a more contemporary conceptualization of what is taking place, the economic, political, and cultural processes constituting both Chinese and Western social formations are becoming multi-nationally networked.  In the Self-Strengthening period of the late Qing, Chinese scholars like Feng Guifen theorized the possibility of resurrecting Chinese dominance within the world by appropriating Western military technology and selectively adding such technologies to an essentially unchanged/unreformed national economy, politics, and culture.  It was not enough.  In its ongoing confrontation with the outside world, China had to revolutionize its state-political processes (overthrow the dynastic imperial regime and its Neo-Confucian bureaucracy and replace it with a republic), its distributive economic structures (progressively integrate regionally structured market economies into national economy, initially through state centralized distributions and more recently through market liberalization), and its modes of integrating non-Chinese ideas into Chinese intellectual milieux (selective rejection of ossified Confucian modes of understanding the world in favor of Western science and technologies).  For all that the CCP can continue to claim a particular cultural uniqueness for Chinese social formations, the Chinese context has been flooded for almost two hundred years by non-Chinese add-ons, in the same way that Western contexts have selectively appropriated Chinese ideas and Chinese technologies (e.g. gun powder, printing) for at least eight centuries.  Globalization is a continuum, constituted by the establishment of piece-wise, network connections transcending national boundaries, something that has characterized humanity maybe from the dawn of sedentary civilization. 

In this manner, when Xi Jinping and upper level CCP intellectuals posit, as a conservative partisan political position, the incongruity of Western ideas with Chinese politics, they undertake, in my view, profoundly un-Marxian thinking, theorizing the timeless permanence of Chinese political and cultural uniqueness in relation to the West, forgetting how both China and the West have been mutually transformed by their historical interactions, ossifying Chinese social formations in theory that, in reality, exist in a constant state of transformation, and pretending that China is somehow impervious to the global extension of economic, political, and cultural networks that are, at this time, dramatically, if highly unevenly, changing lived experiences of material existence within the Chinese population. 

Finally, returning to class structures, for Marxian theory, there is something idiosyncratic in labeling a particular, politically defined national collectivity a "capitalist society" or a "communist society."  Proceeding from the above conclusions, such a labeling would awkwardly mix a social formation defined by political processes with an identification referring to underlying economically defined social formations (e.g. capitalist firms, communist workers' cooperatives, etc.).  Approaching from the opposite direction, such designations deprive class of its unique specificity as a set of processes defining the production, appropriation, distribution, and receiving of surplus labor/value.  If Marxian theory has anything really interesting to contribute to an understanding of how economic processes shape non-economic processes (even as they are simultaneously shaped by non-economic processes), then it requires the analytical specificity of class as its entry point (see Resnick and Wolff (1987), Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy, pp 25-30, University of Chicago Press).  As distinct class structures, communism and capitalism generate different effects on political, cultural, and other economic processes within larger, overlapping social formations.  Marxian theory seeks, in part, to describe such differences and, consequently, to promote the social benefits arising from communist class structures relative to the costs and benefits of capitalism.  If both class structures exist simultaneously within larger social formations, then Marxian theory, as I understand it, constitutes itself, in part, as a body of partisan argument in the competition between these two class structures. 

Recognizing, moreover, the overdetermination of class structures in unique spatio-temporal contexts, like those of the new urban special economic zones of Guangdong province or those of the mixed urban, suburban, and rural communities of the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, both in the early Twenty-first century, it is highly conceivable that both capitalism and communism in China look very different from communism and capitalism, as each is practiced in Massachusetts.  In this manner, the different practices of capitalism and communism in Guangdong and Western Massachusetts must constitute a basis for the divergence of Marxian thought between Chinese Marxist thinkers in Guangzhou and Western Marxists like myself in Northampton, as our ideas are shaped by our diverse experiences with capitalism and communism.  Again, Xi Jinping and the CCP intellectuals are quite correct in positing differences between Chinese and Western thought, but we cannot infer that these differences are timeless, rather than transitory.  At this point in the historical trajectories of social processes characterized by globalization, we cannot comprehend how capitalism and communism, as class structures, will evolve in diverse spatial contexts, nor can we comprehend how such evolutions will reshape Marxian theory to bring Chinese and American thinkers closer together or farther apart.          

Chinese Hypocrisy, the Definition of Communism, and the Fate of Marxism in a Globalizing World I

This post seeks to advance a critique of official Chinese Communist Party (CCP) documents, citing the incongruity of certain Western principles with Chinese experience or Marxian ideals (see Buckley, "China Takes Aim at Western Ideas," The New York Times, August 19, 2013, at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-leadership-takes-hard-line-in-secret-memo.html?src=portal_starbucks3&_r=1).  Among the values the CCP is citing as incompatible with Chinese Marxism are "Western constitutional democracy," "'universal values' of human rights," and "media independence and civic participation."  Acknowledging up front my own limitations, drawing my information from a second hand account in a Western news source, I find it necessary, as a Western Marxist committed to envisioning a global future in which communism will have a prominent role, to address the arguments raised by the CCP and to posit the incongruity of Chinese Marxist ideologies with the contemporary realities of communism.  More pointedly, statements like these by the CCP political leadership, especially President Xi Jinping, not only convey a certain hypocrisy in the Party's effort to awkwardly mix Maoist ideological principles with the need for liberal, market-oriented reforms.  In a world where the Peoples' Republic remains the exemplar of the official, orthodox, Twentieth century version of socialism, statements like those of the CCP imprint a anti-democratic, anti-liberal black mark on communism as an ideal outside of China, hindering the arguments of Western Marxism for a non-capitalist alternative.  For these reasons, the CCP's enunciation of opposition to such quintessentially Western ideals must be interrogated in order to situate the position of the CCP against that of Western Marxism. 

1.  Communism conceptually lacks a unique state-political form. 
My conclusion here does not allude to Engels' famous formulation of the "withering away of the state" under communism (see Engels, Anti-Duhring, Part III, Chapter 2, in Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 25, at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm).  This formulation, which, in any case, I contest, implies that the lack of class struggle in communist society removes the necessity for a state, existing solely as the means for exercise of repressive violence in the interest of a particular class.  On the contrary, the particular understanding of communism to which I adhere recognizes class struggle as a continuous feature of any and every form of society, capitalist, communist, or otherwise, and, thus, recognizes the continuous necessity of an arbiter. 

In a larger sense, state political processes are irreducible to their functional roles relative to economic class processes.  The state is never just an arbiter between particular economically-defined groups within a society, competing for access to resources, including the means of repression.  On some abstract level, the state reflects a moment of common consent to the constitution of a sovereign collective body (a polity) against which the state exists as the embodiment of the sovereign's will to act in its collective interests by means of political processes aimed at continuously defining what these interests are at any moment in time.  Such political processes are apt to be highly contentious, producing winners and losers and cumulatively generating uneven distributions of control over institutional sources of political power.  This abstract (Rousseauian) understanding of the state lacks an obvious pathway connecting it either to capitalism or communism.

Proceeding from the version of Marxian theory to which I am indebted, capitalism and communism are class structures, defining the production, appropriation, distribution, and receiving of surplus labor/value (see Resnick and Wolff (1987), Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press).  State political processes certainly shape the lived experience of class structures and class structures, likewise, shape the performance of state political processes, determining, in part, the course of economic developmental policies.  However, the state does not (and, in fact, cannot) rigorously determine the composition of class structures across a polity and, in the same sense, particular class structures cannot uniquely determine the course of state political processes.  This is not the same thing as positing the relative autonomy of state political processes from class processes in the manner that Althusser argues (see Althusser, For Marx, p 111, at: http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/FM65i.html#s3).  The point is much more complicated because every social process is contained within a larger totality of social processes in which no process can uniquely determine the trajectory of the whole - all of the processes continuously and mutually shape each other, an overdetermination of the whole and all of its parts.  That is to say, the character of the state is determined not only by the multifarious class processes performed within a society, but also by the non-class economic processes (e.g. market distribution of commodities) and the whole range of cultural processes (e.g. formal educational processes, family life, religion, mass media production and distribution, popular entertainment, etc.), and it would be impossible to arbitrarily rip class out of its social context to say that either capitalism or communism uniquely determine the processes performed by the state.

So what does all of this mean relative to the denunciations of the CCP against "Western constitutional democracy?"  Clearly, Xi Jinping and other upper level Party functionaries and intellectuals make an important point, one that Chinese intellectuals have expressed repeatedly for over one hundred-fifty years, at least since the "Self-Strengthening" movement of the late Qing dynasty - China is culturally unique from the West.  The course of development of Chinese state political processes and their relationships to the articulation of the Chinese polity cannot mirror those of the U.S., Britain, or other Western states because the historically accumulated constellation of social processes (over-)determining the development of state political processes in China is different than those of the various Western states.  It is possible that Western constitutional democracy (i.e. rule of law, institutionally constrained majority rule, formal enshrinement of basic individual liberties, etc.) is actually incompatible with the particular, historically evolving, constellation of social processes determining the present existence of the state in China. 

An arbitrarily large set of explanations could account for this situation.  For example, we could appeal to the influence of a wide range of Neo-Confucian ideas about ethics, maintenance of social order, hierarchical social organization, and the role of the state in relation to society as relevant sources for a divergence in the Chinese state political processes relative to those of Western states.  Approaching from the opposite direction, it is unclear to me that China has ever experienced a moment as ontologically revolutionary as the Protestant Reformation, with its consequent reconceptualization of man in relation to the universe/God and in relation to other human beings in society (i.e. the ontological bases for methodological individualism as a broad point of departure for much of Western social thought).  To some extent, the diverse corpus of Western ideas, especially those associated with the Enlightenment, can trace its roots to the Reformation, against which even critical traditions must acknowledge some debt.  By contrast, the integration of Mahayana Buddhist thought into China around the Sixth century, as one of China's most profound philosophically transformative moments, could only reinforce existing indigenous ontological conceptions grounded in holism (e.g. the early Confucian and Taoist traditions) and preclude a more individualistic reading on the relationship of the self to the world at least somewhat characteristic of earlier Indian Buddhist (Theravada) schools. 

Truthfully, the ontological sources for an antagonist relationship between traditional Chinese political philosophies and those of the West may run very deep into the history of Chinese philosophical development.  Fundamentally, however, I mean to argue that Marxism, as a widely diverse body of thought, cannot be posited as the unique wellspring for this antagonism.  Rather, the relatively open and universalistic presumptions of the Marxist tradition (even as a body of thought originating in Western Europe) have been susceptible to reinterpretation based on the unique cultural frameworks within which Marxist theories and partisan political mobilizations have developed and evolved over time.  If, in this respect, Marx had intended to formally conceptualize the relationship between capitalism and the state in his larger plan for Capital, this aspect of his magnum opus remains an unfinished piece, about which we can only glean the skeletons of theory in documents like the "Critique of the Gotha Program," with its ambiguous and misleading conception of socialism as the "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" (see Marx, "Critique of the Gotha Program," Section IV, in Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 24, at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm).  The question of a relationship between the state and communism has always been left to the partisan practitioners of Marxian political practice, and, in this respect, the presumptive solutions inflicted on the world by the Bolsheviks, by Stalin, and, subsequently, by Mao and the first generation of Chinese Communists in power after the foundation of the Peoples' Republic have conveyed to the world inescapable precendents.  For this reason, it is difficult for me not to examine the courageous actions of the Bolsheviks in 1917 without concluding that the October Revolution was a wrong turn for Marxism!

More pointedly, the Soviet experience and, later, the Chinese experience of socialism both simultaneously reflect and refract the cultural traditions of the national contexts from which they emerge.  In an essentially agrarian country with no meaningful development of an urban propertied, entrepreneurial strata, vast disparities in the ownership of land, and a brutal tradition of monarchical despotism, the Russian Bolsheviks developed a regime that conformed to their expectations for the reorganization of repressive violence into the hands of the workers' vanguard party.  Drawing from a theoretic tradition primarily directed at the industrialized states of Western Europe and the U.S., they prioritized industrialization in both manufacturing and in agriculture (collectivization) as a means of advancing to a higher stage within which the workers could produce and consume, respectively, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."  That is to say, they did exactly what, in view of their circumstances, they thought the theory had instructed them to do.  The same can obviously said of the Chinese Communists' "Great Leap Forward."  Like Russia, China emerged from centuries of agrarian "backwardness," monarchical despotism, and state bureaucratic centralization, the last perhaps even more firmly entrenched in the case of the traditional Confucian civil bureaucracies of imperial China than with the state bureaucracies of Tsarist Russia.  Moreover, both incipient socialist societies revolted against the antiquated cultural processes of their pre-revolutionary past in the name of a universalistic, atheistic materialism.  They suppressed the churches and their transcendental theologies in the name of crude modernist objectivity and ideological commitment to the prospect of a better, communist future, anchored on the sacrifices of the present.  To their credit, the Chinese went even further than the Soviets - under Mao's influence, they recognized the anti-democratic faults of their Confucian past and revolted against state bureaucratic centralization in the name of mass participation and the spontaneous creation of a true workers' democracy from the lowest echelons of society.  I, of course, refer here to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, about which I will comment further in another part of this post.  For now, however, I simply want to argue that there is nothing universal about the experiences of the Russian Soviets or of Chinese Communism - both demonstrate an indebtedness to national contexts, and, this is exactly what Xi Jinping and the present generation of official CCP intellectuals have reinforced in their recent rejection of Western constitutional democracy. 

By contrast, Western Marxism, even in its most holistic variations (e.g. rigorously structuralist expositions in the theoretically anti-humanist Althusserian mold), must, in some degree acknowledge their indebtedness to intellectual traditions bearing the imprint of the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment.  In this manner, Marxian theorizations of the state, in Western cultural traditions nurtured by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and other foundational liberal thinkers, must exist simultaneously as a reflection and refraction of Classical liberal constitutionalist thought.  Likewise, the idea of a relationship between the state and communism, within Western Marxism, must simultaneously reflect and refract the cultural traditions of liberalism, while acknowledging that it is presently impossible to perform Marxian theory and political practice to the exclusion of Marxism's Twentieth century history (i.e. the Soviet, Chinese, and other experiences of socialism).  That is, as a Western Marxist, I have to come to terms with the Soviet and Chinese experiences as precursors to the Western communist present, to argue, if nothing else, why Soviet socialism was a wrong turn. 

My point here is not to denigrate political philosophy in either Western or non-Western contexts, but to acknowledge the incongruities that Chinese thinkers have identified for a very long time and, further, to argue, definitively, that such a divergence only secondarily reflects the particular, unique way in which intellectuals in various traditions have appropriated Marxian theoretic concepts (e.g. the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat) and practiced a politics informed by Marxism.  The arguments that I have presented here should suffice to argue that, with regard to cultural divergences, there can be no unique state political form associated with communism within the Marxian tradition.  Every Marxist experiment in reconstitution of the state and "civil society" in the quest to build communism takes place within a distinctive cultural tradition that leaves its imprint on Marxism. 

  

The Syrian Problem: Sorting through a national tragedy and the impossible choices facing American foreign policy

I plan to return shortly to wrap up my reflections on the foreclosure crisis, with a particular focus on the local economy of Springfield, Massachusetts, but two other intervening subjects have grabbed my attention and I will need to respond to each with a post.  The first of these is the problem of Syria, one of the two major national disasters (the other being Egypt) closing out the promise of the Arab Spring.  I plan to write some set of reflections on the sad situation of Egypt in the very near future, but Syria grabs my attention now if only because it looks extremely likely that we are about to go again to war, our actions will have serious implications for the course of the rebellion in Syria, for our relationships with numerous other states in the Middle East (Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran) and for our relationship with the other major nuclear powers (Russia, China), and, lastly, because I fully agree that we must respond to chemical weapons use by the Assad regime, but not necessarily through military force.  In this regard, I have to explain exactly what my position is with regard to Syria and why I think we have to get directly involved in the fate of the Syrian rebellion against the Assad regime.  I will approach this, like I have in a number of previous rants, through a series of propositions to illuminate my larger argument.

1.  The rebellion against the Assad regime has been an unmitigated disaster for the Syrian people, as a result of the initial violent reaction by the regime to protests favoring liberal reforms, the tepid initial support of Western governments for Syrian democratization, the direct interventions on Assad's behalf by Iran and by the Lebanese Shi'a Hezbollah movement, the direct and indirect obstruction of a tangible, U.N. authorized international effort to support anti-Assad forces by Russia and China, and, finally. the consequent radicalization of the Sunni resistance to Assad, implicitly and/or explicitly, under the monetary support of the Sunni monarchical Gulf states and benefiting from the organizational expertise and paramilitary training by the Al Qaeda networks.
It is profoundly unfortunate that the U.S. and the Western European states are contemplating military action against the Assad regime now, as opposed to one year or more ago.  At this point, nearly 1.75 million Syrian citizens have fled their country to crowd refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, and other places.  Several hundred thousand citizens may have already died in the rebellion and the Assad regime's reaction, and the rebellion may be sowing the seeds for broader sectarian (Sunni v. Shi'a) conflicts elsewhere in the regions, especially in Iraq, where the Shi'a dominated government appears to be losing its ability to squelch a growing Sunni insurgency.  Many of these lives could have been saved, and fewer displacements might have taken place, had Western governments moved more quickly, in the process reassuring the Russian government in regard to its tangible military interests, to bring about a governmental transition in Syria.  As it stands, it appears unlikely that the liberal, pro-democracy entities that began the anti-Assad protests in 2011, militarily unified since under the blanket of the Free Syrian Army(FSA), stand a fighting chance of overthrowing the Assad regime, by themselves or with limited military intervention by the U.S.  Rather, jihadi forces, like the Jabhat al-Nusra movement, supported or otherwise affiliated with al Qaeda and funded heavily through the Gulf states, appear to currently have the upper hand, especially in eastern areas on the border with Sunni-majority Anbar province in Iraq.  The possibility that such groups are making significant inroads around Aleppo at shifting the course of the rebellion toward the goal of establishing an anti-democratic Salafist state conforming to Sharia law and potentially forming a new national base for al Qaeda from which to wage war against Western states is extremely troubling.  More recently, the addition of Lebanese Hezbollah militia forces and the usage of the regime's chemical arsenal are introducing the possibility that, if unrestrained, the regime may retake significant territory in the south around Damascus and, perhaps, regain control of lines of communication from Damascus to Aleppo, the coastal Alawite enclaves, and the northern coastal region bordering Turkey.  Under such circumstances, the most likely long term scenario would feature a weakened but more aggressively repressive Assad regime dominating the major urban areas and holding tenuous control over lines of communication against a lingering, radicalized Sunni insurgency, periodically dominating within rural areas of central, southern, and eastern Syria, with, perhaps, the ascendancy of a Kurdish secession movement in areas bordering Iraqi Kurdistan.  In other words, it seems improbable that the civil war in Syria will end any time soon (maybe not for another five or six years, maybe longer), and it appears, similarly, unlikely that Assad is going to lose. 

2.  The Syrian civil war is a problem for the U.S. and Western states more generally because of the presence and active utilization of chemical agents. 
Minus the utilization of chemical agents in the Syrian conflict, the civil war becomes a humanitarian tragedy and a politically destabilizing force in the heart of the Middle East that needs to be dealt with, but it does not pose an eminent threat.  The use of chemical agents transforms the conflict because there is not only the potential for chemical agents to be exported from Syria by either side and the potential for use of chemical agents against neighboring states (especially Israel), but there is also the potential for proliferation of chemical weapons production within and outside of the region if the use of such weapons is not aggressively policed by the international community.  Failure to respond undermines the credibility, not of the U.S., but of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), intended to prohibit the usage or stockpiling of chemical weapons arsenals.  If Assad gets away with utilizing chemical weapons (even though Syria is not a signatory to the CWC), then it undermines the force of CWC as the primary means for preventing the use and proliferation of chem in the rest of the world. 

In this circumstance, the promise of nuclear powers like the U.S. and Israel that any use of chem against their citizens by a foreign state will be met with the ultimate retaliation does not suffice - Assad is gassing his own citizens.  He has not come close to threatening Tel Aviv with chem, and if he does, he must know where this is going to go.  Ultimately, Assad and his advisers are realists.  They understand that they will need to push the envelope against the opposition if they hope to stay in power, but they are not going to push the envelope beyond the points that the international community, under tangible threat of military force, have stipulated that chem should not be used. 

The key point here is not that Assad must be driven from power because he is a bad guy who butchers his own citizens to crush a democratic uprising.  Rather, it is that it would have been alright for Assad to butcher his citizens with conventional artillery shells, but that the use of chem trips a wire announcing the unacceptable character of Assad's actions to the rest of the world.  With this in mind, the primary concerns for the U.S. are to prevent the further use of chem, to prevent any exportation of chem to other states or leakage (through the rebellion) to organizations committed to violent actions against citizens of Western states (e.g. al Qaeda), and to clearly elucidate that the use of chem is always and forever unacceptable.  The operative question concerns how we go about doing this.

3.  Pin-point air strikes on command, control, and communications (C3) facilities, air defense sites, and surface-to-surface missile batteries (as the primary long range platforms for chem.) may achieve a certain level of immediate success in impeding the capacity of the Assad regime to utilize chem in the civil war, but it will ultimately generate minuscule effects in preventing the use of chem, and may lead to some form of retaliation by the regime or its allies. 
The weapons systems available to naval and air force commanders in the Eastern Mediterranean, including globally deployable U.S. air bomber capabilities (e.g. B-2 bombers from the continental U.S.), are excellent at delivering pin-point strikes against Syrian weapons systems, especially those systems capable of delivering chemical ordnance (both heavy artillery and surface-to-surface missiles, like variants of the old Soviet-era SCUD-B missile system).  Moreover, in a world where Google can deliver a reasonably detailed image of a house in Traverse City, Michigan to interested viewers in rural Bangladesh, I am fully confident that satellite visual surveillance technologies will be able to accurately identify targets of interest for time-sensitive pin-point strikes with Tomahawk cruise missiles in the Damascus area, even if the targets are relatively mobile.  Any truly mobile targets might be more suitably identified through airborne forward air controllers, likely to be most needed in targeting field artillery if such units are to be included in plans for air strikes.  That is to say, I have a lot of confidence that U.S. forces will not be throwing punches in the dark if air strikes are launched against the Assad regime.  The problem will not be the effectiveness of air strikes at successfully engaging ground targets with minimal loss of friendly aircraft and minimal collateral damage/civilian casualties (of course, an unhappy thought, but a certainty to any modern military campaign).  Rather, the problem concerns the effectiveness of pin-point strikes in damaging the capacity of the regime to use chemical weapons, either against rebel forces or in retaliation against the U.S., allied Western European states, or Israel.

It is certain that the sorts of pin-point strikes that the U.S. is contemplating will throw a temporary wrench into the Assad regime's counteroffensive against rebels in the Damascas suburbs, forcing the Syrian military to redeploy forces, harden existing facilities, and forestall plans for new attacks into rebel held areas.  That said, it is unlikely to the regime maintains a universal storage depot for its chemical arsenal.  Chemical ordnance must be dispersed among specialized field units and stored in multiple, hardened depots (some of which may now be in the hands of either FSA or, more frighteningly, al-Nusra!).  It is extremely improbable that a limited series of U.S. pin-point air strikes is going to destroy the combined Syrian chemical arsenal.  When the air strikes are over, there will still be available sarin and/or VX nerve agent stores left for use by Assad, by Hezbollah, or by the various rebel contingents and their global allies (i.e. the potential will remain for al-Qaeda to get its hands on chem).  Further, the potential exists not only for Assad to continue to use chem against FSA, al-Nusra, and other rebel groups, but it is equally possible that the regime will contemplate some form of retaliation against Western interests, most notably and easily against Israel, either directly or through the agency of Hezbollah.  Here, again, the use of chemical weapons against Israel would obviously risk the potential of a nuclear counterattack against the Assad regime, something that the current Likud government in Israel wouldn't be likely to think twice about!  In this sense, the range of complications likely to emerge from a limited air campaign against the regime should raise very obvious concerns for the greater political stability of the Middle East and the potential for a vast expansion of civilian casualties from subsequent rounds of retaliatory actions. 

4.  A more sustained air or a combined arms (land, air) campaign against the Assad regime, with the goal of "regime change" might be more promising for the goal of dismantling the Syrian chemical arsenal, but such a campaign may not fully eliminate all traces of chemical weapons if rebel forces are already in possession of chem.  Moreover, the sort of commitment by the U.S. for such a campaign does not currently exist domestically (within the Obama administration, within Congress, or within the general American public). 
Pin-point air campaigns are suited to securing very limited political objectives.  Theoretically, the U.S. should be capable of using a sustained air campaign, in cooperation with rebel ground forces, to overthrow the Assad regime outright.  The obvious problem here is that reliance on rebel forces, as in Libya, would deny the U.S. of any hope of steering political outcomes on the ground.  Would an air campaign against the Assad regime have to be followed by a supplemental air campaign, supported by FSA, against al-Nusra?  The only way to adequately ensure that a post-Assad Syria will conform politically to U.S. expectations for a (more-or-less) secular democratic state would be to buttress the U.S. political position with infantrymen and armor on the ground, a requirement that appears wholly unacceptable within the U.S. in the aftermath of Iraq and the soon to be ending but rapidly degenerating situation in Afghanistan. 

In any case, either of these options would no doubt require a much larger commitment on the part of the U.S., and the Obama administration has made it clear that it has no intention of undertaking such campaigns.  Succinctly, the only thing for which Obama may be able to generate domestic support is a limited air campaign with the truncated goal of punishing the Assad regime for use of chemical weapons. 

5.  Now that the Obama administration has thrown the gauntlet down on the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, it is absolutely indispensable for the U.S. to act, but there is no meaningful way for the U.S. to do so militarily without a larger commitment to U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war and the long term fate of Syria. 
The point here, for the U.S., is that the force of the Chemical Weapons Convention has to be upheld against Syria, or the CWC's legitimacy as a component of "international law" (in my view, a misnomer!) will be compromised.  There has to be a meaningful way for the U.S. to enforce the CWC against the Assad regime.  A pin-point air campaign will not do this and neither a sustained air campaign nor a combined arms campaign involving ground troops and a costly U.S. commitment in human and financial terms is acceptable to Congress or the larger American public.  What to do? 

The Obama administration, in its second term, is attempting to establish a lasting legacy for itself in foreign policy, particularly in restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.  However, it is very clear the administration never wanted to be handed the present portfolio of events in Syria as the raw materials against which to craft a foreign policy legacy, especially after Obama rather weakly enunciated a doctrine (in regard to Libya) through which the U.S. maintained a right to intervene in a foreign civil war to save the lives of civilians facing potential mass casualties.  The larger problem here is that the administration lacks any clear vision on what the U.S. thinks the Middle East should look like.  If the second Bush administration enjoyed such a vision, enmeshed in the imperial possibilities of "expanding democracy" to the Arab world, Obama, to a great extent, actively ran against this very vision without generating an alternative beyond the notion that the U.S. should be less directly involved in the future of the Middle East.  It is difficult to comprehend how such an amorphous doctrine could be meaningfully executed given substantial U.S. financial commitments to Israel, Egypt, and other states in the region, and the U.S. dependence on petroleum production and trade with the Gulf states.  Moreover, given increasing clandestine U.S. involvement in Yemen against al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, it is clear that the Obama administration is not succeeding in its attempts to reduce U.S. involvement in the region, whether or not that should ever have been the goal.

Rather than pursue such an impossible prerogative, the Obama administration needs to shelve the idea of restarting the peace process in Palestine (as meaningful as that might be if it was even possible at the present time) and concentrate on developing, for its remaining time in power, a new, sensible, realistic vision for the political future of the Middle East, writ large, based, in large part, on diplomacy and, to a lesser degree, on continued, low-scale/clandestine direct military engagement in the region.  Most emphatically with regard to Syria, direct military action is not going to solve anything.  Rather, the U.S. needs, most critically, to engage not only with its allies but with Russia and China to develop a joint plan to prevent further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime and to "wind down" the civil conflict, with or without democratic reforms in a post-civil war Syria.  That is, we may have to consign ourselves to the notion that Assad is there to stay for now and, further, that it is in everyone's best interests for the rebellion to end as soon as possible, without the exportation of conflicts to Iraq, Turkey, and/or Lebanon, and without any provocations against Israel.  The Gulf states must, thus, cease providing financial and military assistance to Sunni Islamist rebel forces in Syria and a broader effort must be taken to bring in all of the regional players, including Iran and Israel, to craft a durable and ongoing intra-regional plan for resolution of existing conflicts.  Beyond this, there might be ways for the administration to promote democratic reforms by a post-civil Assad regime.  In there very least, there need to be assurances that no genocidal violence (against Sunnis, Kurds, or any other non-Alawite ethnic groups) will follow the reestablishment of the peace. 

Much of this, in the present context, appears extraneously utopian, especially the notion of resolving intra-regional conflicts with diplomatic engagement.  Clearly, the Sunni/Shi'a fissures that erupted after the Iraq War and U.S. occupation will be active for a long time.  The Shi'a revolution of Iran has gained substantial strength through the ascendancy of the Shi'a majority in Iraq and the evolving axis of Shi'a power between Iran, Iraq, and Assad's Syrian regime represents a palpable threat to the Gulf states and their entrenched Sunni monarchies.  Such fissures need to be approached through a broader diplomatic effort between divergent stakeholders in the region, especially the U.S., Russia, and, increasingly, China.  Succinctly, the world's great powers need to convene and decide once again how the Middle East should look if the best interests of all the stakeholders are going to be mutually respected.  Clearly, the status of Israel and the situation of Palestine are not exempt from such considerations.  The larger point, however, is that the political destabilization of the Middle East that, arguably, began with the preemptive U.S. invasion of Iraq needs to be resolved diplomatically, the resolution must involve all of the major international parties with a stake in the region, the effort must be continuous, and there must be a consensus against any further unilateral military actions to resolve persistent problems (e.g. Iranian nuclear development). 

6.  The Obama adminstration was right to insist on deliberation with Congress on the possibility of a military intervention in Syria, notwithstanding the President's ability to undertake offensive military action without Congressional consent under the War Powers Resolution of 1973.  On the other hand, the capacity of the administration to act without democratic consent raises fundamental questions about the War Powers Resolution and its truncation of Congressional prerogatives with regard to foreign policy.  Fundamentally, the U.S. needs to reconsider the distribution of powers between the executive and legislative branches with regard to national defense and the deployment of U.S. forces for military actions of relevance to national security. 
It is possible that the Obama administration will walk away from its encounter with Congress over Syria with egg on its face, denied the approval that it is seeking to enforce the CWC.  Indeed, the administration does not need such approval.  On the other hand, if only as a means of fully accounting for its actions before the people's representatives, the administration is right to ask Congress to deliberate on this.  The remainder of this post has sought to emphasize that the military option in Syria is not a good one.  I am hopeful that Congress will recognize this fact, and, further, I am hopeful that at least some voices in Congress will seek to steer the conversation about Syria and the Middle East in general toward diplomatic avenues and away from the pointless military interventions that have become necessary in the endless night of the post-9/11 world. 

Beyond recognition that there is merit to the administration's approach here, in the long run, Congress needs to come up with some more meaningful restraint on military operations by the administration than currently exists through the War Powers Resolution.  Valid Constitutional questions are implicated in the War Powers Resolution, including especially the time limitations that it places on the deployment of military forces at the behest of the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. forces (i.e. the President) without the subsequent legal authorization of Congress.  In my view, Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution provides adequate authority for Congress to place such demands on the President as a "necessary and proper" means of executing Congress' enumerated power to "To make rules for Government and Regulation of land and naval forces."  However, I do not think that the War Powers Resolution in its current form goes far enough.  Rather, Congress should specify the terms under which the President should be allowed to commit U.S. forces to military action outside of the Continental U.S., it should differentiate between actions of a purely defensive nature involving U.S. bases on foreign soil and actions involving offensive warfare, it should differentiate between actions undertaken through multi-lateral treaty obligations and unilateral actions undertaken by U.S. forces, and, in the present world, it should differentiate between actions taken against a foreign state and its armed forces or actions undertaken against a non-state organizational entity (think al-Qaeda).  Parameters should be drawn to specify what sort of information needs to be presented to Congress in defense of prolonged unauthorized military commitments, and the administration should be compelled to rigorously define a timeline and an exit strategy, with the possibility that such information would be subject to subsequent revisions as events evolve.  Such requirements might make the sorts of military interventions occurring over the last decade more difficult for administrations to carry out without express approval by Congress.