The new U.S. Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez, disregarded torture in his infamous, post 9/11 memorandum to Bush: "In my judgment, this new paradigm [the 'war on terrorism'] renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."
"Quaint," eh?
It might more aptly be applied to Magna Carta, the epitome of quaintness, though Professor Huntington of Harvard tells us in his screed to rid the nation of Hispanic cultural influence that the American creed, its cultural core, is Anglo, "going back to Magna Carta," which he thinks is somehow Protestant (Magna Carta 1215, Protestant Reformation 1517)! Furthermore, although it is such a quaint part of the Anglo core, it is not even written in English. Its most powerful part is chapter 39:
Nullus liber homo capiatur vel imprisonetur aut disseisietur de libero tenemento suo, vel libertatibus, vel liberis consuetudinibus suis, aut utlagetur, aut exuletur, aut aliquo modo destruatur, nec super eum ibimus, nec super eum mittemus, nisi per legale judicium parium suorum, vel per legem terræ.
Edward Coke provides the classic translation. Edward Coke was to the English Revolution of the 1640s as Rousseau was to the French Revolution or Marx to the Russian Revolution: though recently dead, his ideas caught fire among the leading actors, as did these very phrases: "No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or be disseised of his freehold, or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any otherwise destroyed; nor will we not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land."
We parse the sentence in three parts 1) the subject (no free man) is followed by 2) eight or nine proscribed actions making up the predicate which is then qualified by 3) a climax to the sentence stating two legal principles which provide the exceptions, trial by jury and law of the land. The first part used to be a favorite constitutional chestnut in cold war political science classes, when the professor with pedantic glee explained that a "free man" under feudalism actually meant someone with recognized privileges from the King, such as barons. To be honest, the Marxists weren't much better. Neither would countenance the serf. Thus, our passage to the middle ages was with a bucket of cold water poured on the warmth of our passions. Not until much later did I learn to read these things for myself, and find that Coke begins his commentary distinctly, "this extends to villeins."
It's the second part which has such variety, taking, arresting, imprisoning, exiling, banishing, ruining, destroying, victimizing, and disseiseing. It too contains a huge amount of commentary, legal and otherwise. Habeas corpus, trial by jury, due process of law, and prohibition of torture as principles of law have quaintly stemmed from this statement. It is the last one that concerns us.
In some conservative translations aliquo modo destruatur is rendered "ruined," or "molested," or "victimized." To interpret the prohibition of torture as molestation or ruin or victimizing is to displace the damage away from the body. Coke glosses "any otherwise destroyed" as "That is forejudged of life or limb, disinherited, or put to torture or death." The expression, "life or limb," appears elsewhere in the Charter of Liberty, and it makes clear that the destruction which is referred to, is an action on the body, an actual dismemberment, a real mutilation. It is important for us to retain this classic translation - 'in any way destroyed' for two reasons. First, it was retained in the Petition of Right (1628) whence chapter 39 was preserved and later perpetuated in the U.S. Constitution (see the 5th and 14th amendments among others), and second it was upon this translation that Edward Coke, and then the Levellers of the English Revolution based their opposition to torture.
On 19 September 2003 Paul Bremer promulgated Order 39, a "capitalist dream," according to The Economist. Two hundred state companies would be privatized, foreign firms can retain 100% ownership of Iraqi banks, mines, and factories, and 100% of the profits can be removed from Iraq. This was the charter of privatization public companies became private, contracts were private, and all was up for sale. Order 39 promoted both privatization and globalization because foreign companies were now permitted to buy and invest in Iraq companies, repatriating 100% of their profits. The moment of invasion and occupation was accompanied by putting Iraq up for sale. The brutal actions designed to 'free a sovereign country' submitted it forthwith to the ravages of globalization. It is not the corruption that is the principle of exploitation; it is the policy of expropriation.
The neo-liberal project, or capitalism unrestrained, or the universal application of buying and selling was established in Iraq by Order 39. At the same time Abu Ghraib prisoners were degraded, abused, and tortured in violation of Chapter 39 of Magna Carta. The coincidence is curious, and it becomes curiouser. The Structural Adjustment Policies of the International Monetary Fund, or SAPs, were the principle instrument by which global capital enforced neo-liberalism on exploited nations. At the same time the Pentagon's secret man-hunting and torturing outfit was also called an SAP, or, special-access program, responsible for out-sourcing victims to torture chambers in Singapore, Thailand, and Pakistan (Hersh, p.16). Indeed, I remember during the full hey day of JFK in 1961, my father, the U.S. Embassy political counselor, returning home for lunch, pale and aghast, from a tour of the Karachi police headquarters. At the table he was unable to swallow food, barely able even to speak, but willing at least to tell us the truth of what had passed before his eyes. This must explain surely why they make up these absurd euphemisms, as they could not stomach the tortures otherwise. (A Bureau of Imperial Nomenclature?)
Nothing can so clearly help us understand the torture and the project of neo-liberalism as this, for Federici describes a foundational process creating the structural conditions for the existence of capitalism. This is the fundamental relationship of capitalist accumulation, or (as it is called in decades of technical literature) 'primitive accumulation.' This mystery perplexed (however coyly) Adam Smith. It was the 'original sin' of the political economists, and for Karl Marx it was written in "letters of blood and fire."
The birth of the proletariat required war against women. This was the witch-hunt when tens of thousands of women in Europe were tortured and burnt at the stake, in massive state-sponsored terror against the European peasantry destroying communal relations and communal property. It was coeval with the enclosures of the land, the destruction of popular culture, the genocide in the New World, and the start of the African slave trade. The 16th century price inflation, the 17th century crisis, the centralized state, the transition to capitalism, the Age of Reason come to life, if the blood-curdling cries at the stake, the crackling of kindling as the faggots suddenly catch fire, the clanging of iron shackles of the imprisoned vagabonds, or the spine-shivering abstractions of the mechanical philosophies can indeed be called "life."
Federici explains why the age of plunder required the patriarchy of the wage. Gender became not only a biological condition or cultural reality but a determining specification of class relations. The devaluation of reproductive labor inevitably devalues its product, labor power. The burning of the witches and the vivisection of the body enforced a new sexual pact, the conjuratio of unpaid labor. It was essential to capitalist work-discipline. This is what Marx called the alienation of the body, what Max Weber called the reform of the body, what Norman O. Brown called the repression of the body, and what Foucault calls the discipline of the body. Yet, these social theorists of deep modernization overlooked the witch-hunt!
On 19 September 2003 Paul Bremer promulgated Order 39, a "capitalist dream," according to The Economist. Two hundred state companies would be privatized, foreign firms can retain 100% ownership of Iraqi banks, mines, and factories, and 100% of the profits can be removed from Iraq. This was the charter of privatization public companies became private, contracts were private, and all was up for sale. Order 39 promoted both privatization and globalization because foreign companies were now permitted to buy and invest in Iraq companies, repatriating 100% of their profits. The moment of invasion and occupation was accompanied by putting Iraq up for sale. The brutal actions designed to 'free a sovereign country' submitted it forthwith to the ravages of globalization. It is not the corruption that is the principle of exploitation; it is the policy of expropriation.
The neo-liberal project, or capitalism unrestrained, or the universal application of buying and selling was established in Iraq by Order 39. At the same time Abu Ghraib prisoners were degraded, abused, and tortured in violation of Chapter 39 of Magna Carta. The coincidence is curious, and it becomes curiouser. The Structural Adjustment Policies of the International Monetary Fund, or SAPs, were the principle instrument by which global capital enforced neo-liberalism on exploited nations. At the same time the Pentagon's secret man-hunting and torturing outfit was also called an SAP, or, special-access program, responsible for out-sourcing victims to torture chambers in Singapore, Thailand, and Pakistan (Hersh, p.16). Indeed, I remember during the full hey day of JFK in 1961, my father, the U.S. Embassy political counselor, returning home for lunch, pale and aghast, from a tour of the Karachi police headquarters. At the table he was unable to swallow food, barely able even to speak, but willing at least to tell us the truth of what had passed before his eyes. This must explain surely why they make up these absurd euphemisms, as they could not stomach the tortures otherwise. (A Bureau of Imperial Nomenclature?)
Why does torture accompany economic development or primitive accumulation? What is the relationship between the violation of Chapter 39 and the promulgation of Order 39? This is another way of expressing the relation between the tortures conducted at the Abu Ghraib prison and the project of neo-liberal economic policy. Why is the violation fundamental legal principle, the integrity of the body, necessary to the policy of oil extraction, modernization, and free marketing?
Capitalist work-discipline requires the mechanistic philosophy, it requires the enclosures and mapping of the world from the neighborhood to the GPS, it requires the tick tick ticking of the clock, the squared-out grid of the calendar of our days; it prohibits nakedness and public bathing; it forbids games of chance and games on the open field; it requires a belief in work, an ideology of work, a creed in work, and salvation through work. Labor power becomes self-managed. From signifying a work-stoppage, the phrase 'cakes and ale' became the gateway to consumerism. "We can see that the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism." The acquisitive, pure, trained, punctual, chaste, producing, and consuming body the "free owner" of "labor power" - to Marx appears as a gift of nature. Bechtel, Halliburton, and their contracted employees know otherwise. Shock therapy is applied to Iraq.
Historians of torture as practiced in England have limited their conception of it to a method of discovery, or of examination of witnesses; they call it 'interrogation under duress.' This however misconstrues its function which is not a misguided methodology of investigation; it is part of a policy to terrorize and to create a new type of human being. It is inherent in both the project of expropriation and the process of exploitation. From the marsh Arabs and the desert tribes: modern labor power is created by war, religion, and torture. Migration, diaspora, criminalization, pauperization result. The infliction of pain continues in several disciplining contexts: army, navy, imperial, Ireland, man and wife, parent and child, teacher and pupil, master and servant well into the 20th century.
We cannot describe a 'moment of torture' that is exclusive to the expropriations of the period of primitive accumulation which then disappears that when exploitation is routinized in the factory, because the factory itself is a habitat of pain, sleeplessness, and stress. The expansion of the scutching mills in Ireland with the development of the linen industry took women, sons and daughters of small farmers and fed them into the rollers of these mills. At one mill (out of 1,800) in Kildinan, near Cork, between 1852 and 1856 six fatal accidents and sixty mutilations. Dr White, surgeon for factories at Downpatrick, found a vast sacrifice of life and limb, "in many cases a quarter of the body is torn from the trunk" Dr. Simon in England wrote, "The life of myriads of workmen and workwomen is now uselessly tortured and shortened by the never-ending physical suffering that their mere occupation begets." Every part of the globe now has these stories. In Toledo, Ohio, we remember Larry Fuentes, mangled to death by a robot at the Daimler-Chrysler plant in May 2000.
The theme of globalization is immediately paired with a second theme of violent terror. Marx exemplified the relationship in chapter 31. The changing scale of rewards paid by Massachusetts for the scalps of Indians is at the beginning of the chapter and the "Herod-like slaughter of the innocents" at the end with an extensive quotation from John Fielden's Curse of the Factory System (1836) about the cruelty, flogging, and torture of children conducted by the factory masters of the industrial Lancashire. Fielden notes that murder and tortures of the factory occur in "the beautiful and romantic valleys of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Lancashire."
Marx returns to a dominant figure in his history, the trope of sanguinary exploitation, or blood. Inspired by the writing of T.J. Dunning, a trade union activist among the bookbinders, Marx observes that capital comes into the world "dripping from head to toe from every pore, with blood and dirt." The dripping's name now is Fallujah. The mutilation of the human body and the globalization of commerce are two sides of capitalism, empire and torture.
The regime prevailing in the U.S.A. is lawless, cruel, and inhuman, and though it will plead that its atrocities are 'accidents,' or that they should be exculpated having been motivated in 'good faith,' such excuses scarcely scratch the surface of its crimes, because its deepest purposes and strategic goals are the very primitive accumulation and endless dominion which characterized its beginnings in the Age of Plunder. 'Structural adjustment' and 'special access' are but new names for an old crime. That they were encouraged by order 39 must remind us of chapter 39 of the Charter of Liberty which must be dusted off from the shelf in the cabinet of quaint curios and become once again one of the politically potent potions for Sycorax and Iraq.
Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo. He is the author of two of CounterPunch's favorite books, The London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com
