[Reader-list] Power and Complicity/Plan X

[Avinash Jha]

Isaac:

It is true that we cannot just conjure up an absolute other in the form of "US power" or anything else and sit pretty. US power is founded upon a complex set of institutions, relationships, dreams, desires. So much so that we can even look for our own complicity with this same very power which we are naming thus. 

For this we cannot rely on a small, boxed item which I had posted. This piece wanted to raise one doubt and ask some questions about the US regime, media and their interrelationship. But before we move on, I want to say something which is actually a matter concerning the politics of knowledge. In our search for the subtle and in our desire to escape the gross, we overlook the gross which exists. It seems obvious that a majority of world population today understands the US policy of domination and considers it illegitimate. This common perception is quite valid. Perception of the gross is not gross, even if it is tiresome. And what complex set of perceptions, attitutes, values it is associated with is varied and not easily deducible. Everyone begins from such common perceptions and then moves on to complexities. 

The problem arises when we reject what has been named thus in common perceptions not because they are not true, but because we have got hold of some subtelties. We are perfectly justified in challenging these perceptions and such naming if they are not true. Or, we can say - "so what?" - as you in some sense are saying. But in order to make precise, fine maps, we cannot forget what it is we are trying to make the map of. Such forgetting will cut the roots of our understanding. 

Having said that, I may have ignored the dimension of our own complicity with power which Shuddha and you were trying to point to. Our complicity cannot be reduced to the complicity of Indian state, though, and our complicity with the Indian state. That may be one dimension. I am taking the easy way out and posting a piece by Raymond Williams below. As one possible starting point for thinking about it...




Plan X (excerpted from *The Year 2000* by Raymond Williams; written in 1983)
 

It is usually taken for granted that to think about the future, as a way of changing the present, is a generous activity, by people who are not only seriously concerned but also, in those familiar adjectives, forward-looking, reforming, progressive. All the good ideas are on this side; all the bad or disappointing practice on the other. There is a question of how far we can go on with this easy assumption. As things now are, all the good ideas, and especially the ways in which they connect or might connect with how people are actually living, have to be rigorously re-examined.

 

Yet there is another check to the assumption. It used to be taken for granted that the opposing forces were not themselves forward-looking: that they were, in those equally familiar adjectives, conservative, regressive, reactionary. Many of them indeed still are, but we misread the current situation if we rely on this easy contrast. There is now a very important intellectual tendency, with some real bases in political power, which is as closely concerned with thinking and planning the future as any reforming or progressive group. Within this tendency the signals are not being jammed but are being carefully listened to. Yet there is then the deliberate choice of a very different path: not towards sharing the information and the problems, or towards the development of general capacities to resolve them. What is chosen instead, intellectually and politically, is a new hard line on the future: a new politics of strategic advantage.

 

I call this new politics 'Plan X'. It is indeed a plan, as distinct from the unthinking reproduction of distraction. But it is different from other kinds of planning, and from all other ways of thinking about the future, in that its objective is indeed 'X': a willed and deliberate unknown, in which the only defining factor is advantage. It is obvious that this has connections with much older forms of competitive scheming and fighting, and with a more systematised power politics. There are all too many precedents for its crudeness and harshness. But what is new in 'Plan X' politics is that it has genuinely incorporated a reading of the future, and one which is quite as deeply pessimistic, in general terms, as the most extreme readings of those who are now campaigning against the nuclear arms race or the extending damage of the ecological crisis. The difference of 'Plan X' people is that they do not believe that any of these dangerous developments can be halted or turned back. Even where there are technical ways they do not believe that there are possible political ways. Thus while as a matter of public relations they still talk of solutions, or of possible stabilities, their real politics and planning are not centred on these, but on an acceptance of the indefinite continuation of extreme crisis and extreme danger. Within this harsh perspective, all their plans are for phased advantage, an effective even if temporary edge, which will always keep them at least one step ahead in what is called accurately enough, the game plan.

 

The first obvious signs of Plan X politics were in the nuclear arms race, in its renewal from the mid-1970s. It was by then clear to everyone that neither staged mutual disarmament (the professed ultimate aim) nor any stable strategic parity (the more regular political ramification) could be achieved by the development of radically new weapons systems and new levels of overkill. Many sane people called these new developments insane, but within Plan X thinking they are wholly rational. For the real objective is neither disarmament nor parity, but temporary competitive advantage, within a permanent and inevitable danger.

 

There were further signs of Plan X in some of the dominant responses to the rise in oil prices. Other groups proposed a reduction in energy consumption, or a reduction in dependence on oil, or negotiations for some general stability in oil and other commodity prices. Plan X people think differently. Their chosen policy is to weaken, divide and reduce the power of the oil producers, whatever the long-run effects on supply, so that a competitive advantage can be retained. To argue that this cannot be a lasting solution is to miss the point. It is not meant to be a lasting solution, but the gaining of edge and advantage for what is accepted, in advance, as the inevitable next round.

 

Again, Plan X has appeared recently in British politics. As distinct from policies of incorporating the working class in a welfare state, or of negotiating some new and hopefully stable relationship between state, employees and unions (the two dominant policies of post-1945 governments), Plan X has read the future as the certainty of a decline in capitalist profitability unless the existing organisations and expectations of wage-earners are significantly reduced. Given this reading, Plan X operates not only by ordinary pressures but where necessary by the decimation of British industrial capital itself.

 

This was a heavy and (in ordinary terms) unexpected price to pay, but one which had to be paid if the necessary edge of advantage was to be gained or regained. Again many sane people say that this policy is insane, but this is only an unfamiliarity with the nature of Plan X thinking. Its people have not only a familiar hard drive, but one which is genuinely combined with a rational analysis of the future of capitalism and of its unavoidable requirements.

 

In this kind of combination, Plan X people resemble the hardest kinds of revolutionary, who drive through at any cost to their perceived objectives. But the difference of Plan X from revolution is that no transformed society, no new order, no lasting liberation seriously enters these new calculations, though their rhetoric may be retained. A phase at a time, a decade at a time, a generation at a time, the people who play by Plan X are calculating relative advantage, in what is accepted from the beginning as an unending and unavoidable struggle. For this is percentage politics, and within its tough terms there is absolute contempt for those who believe that the present and the future can be managed in any other way, and especially for those who try to fudge or qualify the problems or who refuse the necessary costs. These wet old muddlers, like all old idealists, are simply irrelevant, unless they get in the way.

 

Does it need to be said that Plan X is dangerous? It is almost childish to say so, since it is, in its own terms, a rational mutation within an already existing and clearly foreseeable extremity of danger. There is often a surprising overlap between the clearest exponents of Plan X and their most determined political opponents. The need for constant attention to the same kinds of problem, and for urgent and where necessary disturbing action in response to them, is a common self-definition by both groups. The difference, and it ought to be fundamental, is that Plan X is determined solely by its players' advantage. Any more general condition is left deliberately undefined, while the alternative movements see solutions in terms of stable mutual advantage, which is then the principle of a definable and attainable general condition: the practical condition which replaces the unknown and undefined X.

 

If we put it in this way the general choice ought to be simple. Yet we are speaking about real choices, under pressures, and we have then to notice how many elements there are, in contemporary culture and society, which support or at least do not oppose Plan X. Thus the plan is often presented in terms of national competitive advantage: 'keeping our country a step ahead'. In these terms it naturally draws on simple kinds of patriotism or chauvinism. Any of its damaging consequences to others can be mediated by xenophobia, or by milder forms of resentment and distrust of foreigners. Very similar feelings can be recruited into the interests of a broader alliance, as now commonly in military policy. Again, at a substantial level, there is a deep natural concern with the welfare of our own families and our own people. That they at least should be all right, come what may, inspires extraordinary effort, and this, in certain conditions, can appear as Plan X. Moreover, from the long experience of capitalist society, there is a widespread common sense that we have always to look to our own advantage or we shall suffer and may go under. This daily reality produces and reproduces the conditions for seeing Plan X as inevitable. It has then made deep inroads into the labour movement, which was basically founded on the alternative ethic of common well-being. When a trade union argues for a particular wage level, not in terms of the social usefulness of the work but, for example, in terms of improving its position in the 'wages league table', it is in tune with Plan X.

 

There are also deeper supporting cultural conditions. Plan X is sharp politics and high-risk politics. It is easily presented as a version of masculinity. Plan X is a mode of assessing odds and of determining a game plan. As such it fits, culturally, with the widespread habits of gambling and its calculations. At its highest levels, Plan X draws on certain kinds of high operative (including scientific and technical) intelligence, and on certain highly specialised game-plan skills. But then much education, and especially higher education (not only in the versions that are called business studies) already defines professionalism in terms of competitive advantage. It promotes a deliberately narrowed attention to the skill as such, to be enjoyed in its mere exercise rather than in any full sense of the human purposes it is serving or the social effects it may be having. The now gross mutual flattery of military professionalism, financial professionalism, media professionalism and advertising professionalism indicates very clearly how far this has gone. Thus both the social and cultural conditions for the adoption of Plan X, as the only possible strategy for the future, are very powerful indeed.

 

At the same time Plan X is more than any one of these tendencies; it is also more than their simple sum. To emerge as dominant it has to rid itself, in practice, whatever covering phrases may be retained, of still powerful feelings and habits of mutual concern and responsibility, and of the very varied institutions which support and encourage these. Moreover, to be Plan X, it has to be more than a congeries of habits of advantage, risk and professional play. This is most evident in the fact that its real practitioners, still a very small minority, have to lift themselves above the muddle of miscellaneous local tendencies, to determine and assign genuine major priorities. At the levels at which Plan X is already being played, in nuclear-arms strategy, in high-capital advanced technologies (and especially information technologies), in world-market investment policies, and in anti-union strategies, the mere habits of struggling and competing individuals and families, the mere entertainment of ordinary gambling, the simplicities of local and national loyalties (which Plan X, at some of its levels, is bound to override wherever rationally necessary) are in quite another world. Plan X, that is to say, is by its nature not for everybody. It is the emerging rationality of self-conscious elites, taking its origin from the urgent experiences of crisis-management but deliberately lifting its attention from what is often that mere hand-to-mouth behaviour. It is in seeing the crises coming, preparing positions for them, devising and testing alternative scenarios of response, moving resources and standbys into position, that it becomes the sophisticated Plan X.

 

To name this powerful tendency, and to examine it, is not to propose what is loosely called a conspiracy theory. There are many political conspiracies, as we eventually learn when at least some of them are exposed, usually after the event. Elements of Plan X are inherently conspiratorial. But we shall underestimate its dangers if we reduce it to mere conspiracy. On the contrary, it is its emergence as the open common sense of high-level politics which is really serious. As distinct from mere greedy muddle, and from shuffling day-to-day management, it is a way - a limited but powerful way - of grasping and attempting to control the future. In a deepening world crisis, it is certain to strengthen, as against an older, less rational, less informed and planned politics. But then the only serious alternative to it is a way of thinking about the future, and of planning, which is at least as rational and as informed in all its specific policies, and which is not only morally much stronger, in its concern for a common well-being, but at this most general level is more rational and better informed. For the highest rationality and the widest information should indicate a concern for common well-being, and for stable kinds of mutual general interest, as the most practical bases for particular well-being and indeed for survival.

 

 

 

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Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
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