Torture and Neo-Liberalism with Sycorax in Iraq

[Antid Oto]

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http://www.counterpunch.org/linebaugh11272004.html

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, they defined the freeman as a
bourgeois. 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.

History moved on: monarchy, republic, military dictatorship,
monarchy again, Jacobites, Whigs, came and went, leaving
chapter 39 as a residue which persisted despite the layering
sediments of passing imperial forms . In his Commentaries on
the Laws (1765-69) William Blackstone declared "the
constitution [of England] is an utter stranger to any
arbitrary power of killing or maiming the subject without
the express warrant of law." He explains that the words
aliquo modo destruatur "include a prohibition not only of
killing and maiming, but also of torturing (to which our
laws are strangers) and of every oppression by color of an
illegal authority." "Besides those limbs and members that
may be necessary to man, in order to defend himself or annoy
his enemy," he begins. Does this "man" not use his limbs to
fry an egg or caress a cheek? Is his subjectivity pure
aggression? Nevertheless, he continues, "the rest of his
person or body is also entitled by the same natural right to
security from the corporal insults of menaces, assaults,
beating, and wounding; though such insults amount not to
destruction of life or member."

Well, so much for Magna Carta's venerable 39th chapter whose
quaintness I hope I have established by means of Latin,
grammar, and old authorities. But not only is the matter of
torture said to be quaint, it's context is curious.

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
*torture*s 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?

In 1994 the U.S.A. ratified the UN Convention Against
*torture* that barred *torture* and other "cruel, inhuman or
degrading treatment or punishment." In Guantánamo Bay prison
six hundred prisoners kept in steel-mesh cages reminiscent
of the cages which uppity women used to be put in to during
the European Renaissance. In general however, an impression
of complacency is formed from reading over the various
American manuals of *torture* techniques that the CIA, the
School of the Americas, &c., employ because they seem to
avoid such devices, like cages, in the technology of
*torture*. The birch, the whipping post, the strappado, the
scold's bridle, the branks, the muzzle, the gag, the ducking
stool, the cackstool, the branding iron, the finger pillory,
treadmill the neck and wrist pillory, the thew, the kidcote,
thumbscrews, gibbet, are some of the *torture* instruments
of Renaissance England for disciplining women.

Decades of research in university psychology departments and
lavish CIA hand-outs have produced the "psychological
*torture*." General Miller in Guantánamo used sleep
deprivation, exposure to cold, placing prisoners in stress
positions for agonizing lengths of time. This however was
only to take a leaf out of the four-and-a-half centuries-old
classic, The Discovery of Witches (1647) by Matthew Hopkins,
the Witch-Finder General. He used swimming (cold water
ordeal), watching (forced to sit on stool for long period
under observation), and walking (deprived of sleep for long
periods) as well as pricking (using a needle to probe the
perineum) as a means of interrogating suspects and finding
witches. He was personally responsible for the death of
scores of women between 1645-6, including nineteen at one
mass hanging. Parliament disallowed his method of 'swimming'
the witch, or 'throwing a trussed-up woman into a pond to
see if she sank.' But Parliament permitted the others:
starvation, sleep deprivation, walking the accused up and
down until her feet blistered and mind wandered, solitary
confinement, and prolonged sitting in a single position in
order to produce utter exhaustion, or, euphemistically,
'stress.'

There is a tension in English history between the practice
of *torture* and its prohibition. Legal critics in the
middle ages, such as the fishmonger Andrew Horn, recalled
that Alfred the Great "hanged Osketil [a judge], for that he
judged Culling to death [who] was taken and *torture*d until
he confessed a mortal sin, and this he did to be quit of
further *torture*; and Osketil judged him to death on his
confession made to the coroner." Centuries later Coke said,
"there is no law to warrant *torture*s in this land, nor can
they be justified by any prescription ," and Blackstone
called the rack "an engine of state, not of law" Now, it
must be said, as we learn from Professor Langbein (an
authority which the Harvard *torture* booster, Alan
Dershowitz, depends on) that Edward Coke, like Francis Bacon
or Isaac Newton, himself participated in the *torture* of
suspects. Evidence that Blackstone did as well has yet to
come to light, and though we doubt that it shall, would we
be so surprised if it did?

The English will say they abhor and prohibit *torture* yet
practice it widely, especially in colonies. In 1804
proceedings began against the former governor of Trinidad,
Picton, who hung a young woman by her thumbs, when the
prosecution asserted "I shall not cite many authorities to
prove that *torture* is in itself absolutely illegal and
that it has ever been held so by the law of this country." I
learn from the researches of Anupama Rao of Barnard College
that the English in India applied *torture* to suspects
indirectly, that is to say, they required other Indians to
do it.

In American history the contradiction is similar: at one
pole, the 8th amendment prohibits cruel and unusual
punishment, while at the other pole, the application of
*torture* to Indians and of *torture* to slaves was
systematic. Joan Dayan, the brilliant historian of Haiti,
writes an article in The Boston Review called "Cruel and
Unusual" on the demise of the Eighth Amendment. The Abu
Ghraib *torture*s were prepared for by White House and
Pentagon lawyers. The "Working Group Report on Detainee
Interrogations in the Global War on Terrorism" refers to the
U.S. Supreme Court cases concerning prison which have
changed the meaning of the 8th amendment. It used to be that
it focused on the severity, deprivation, hurt, of the
prisoner's person. Under eroding decisions by the Rehnquist
court it came to focus on the intention, motivation, and
good faith of the prison keepers. Most astonishing was a
Defense Department analysis of March 2002 which concluded
that the President was authorized to use *torture* as long
as he could "negate a showing of specific intent by showing
that he had acted in good faith" (Hersh, 18).

Joan Dayan quotes Justice Clarence Thomas whose grammar
gives him away, "A use of force that causes only
insignificant harm to a prisoner may be immoral, it may be
torturous, it may be criminal, and it may even be remediable
under other provisions of the Federal Constitution, but it
is not 'cruel and unusual punishment.'" Here the question is
begged, the 'torturous' is compatible with 'insignificant
harm.' Dayan shows that the irrational inversion of the
meaning of the 8th amendment looks forward to the Abu Ghraib
*torture*s but the apparent ease with which it has been
accepted is explicable only within a deeper historical
context, namely, the slave codes developed by the French in
the Caribbean (then copied by John Locke and brought to
Carolina whence they spread to the other mainland American
colonies) which removed or degraded the humanity of the
slave as a person with legal standing.

The unspoken assumption is that prisoners are not persons.
Justice Brennan in Furman v. Georgia (1972) signalled the
significance of the 8th amendment as forbidding the
treatment of "members of the human race as nonhumans." A
category is created of the stigmatized, the dehumanized,
and, as it is essential to add, the demonized. The category
of the nonhuman in American history begins as the category
of the slave, Caliban. But free-born Caliban, as we remember
from The Tempest, had a mother, Sycorax. She was herbalist,
a shaman, she was African born in Algiers, she had powers
over trees, the birds, the weather, "one so strong that
could control the moon, make flows and ebbs." We must,
therefore, lengthen the beginnings of the *torture* regime
beyond the slave regime to include, so to speak, its parent,
the degradation of women, as one of the deep structures of
capitalism.

The continuity of the attempt to make some of us nonhumans
is established by the *torture*s in our monstrous prison
system. Marilyn Buck is serving an eighty-year prison
sentence at Federal Corrections Institution at Dublin on
charges of helping Assata Shakur escape, on conspiring to
destroy government property, and otherwise as bringing down
the imperial temple. In prison she is muzzled from direct
anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-sexist expressions,
therefore she resorts to the poetic license. She has had to
become a poet for reasons of state (the same thing happened
to Milton). "Without imagination there is little daring to
confront the old," she concludes. Wild Poppies is a CD of a
poetry jam on her behalf by scores of poetical voices -
South African, Puerto Rican, AfricanAmerican, Palestinian,
and native American ­ reciting her poems (and theirs).

Here is testimony on both sides of the prison walls on some
meanings of *torture* in the U.S.A. today. She writes
accusingly in a poem called "The *torture*d,"

     "Indifferent citizens don't care to look behind
prisoner masks;
     The *torture*d would stare back askant."

She has been behind the mask, yet looks at us with humanity
and knowledge. She has a long poem called "Revelation"
against the Puritanical strain of American imperialism. It
refers to a cauterized memory:

     "do you encounter the touch of the torch on the skin?"

     "they singe the air with sanctimony,
     light bonfires beneath the feet of non-conformity."

She refers to a rarely mentioned, still-silenced, profound
trauma on this civilization ­ the burning of the witches.

Published the same month, April 2004, that Fallujah first
turned back the American onslaught and that the photographs
of American *torture*s in Abu Ghraib prison were displayed
to the world, Silvia Federici's book, Caliban and the Witch,
although describing a time and place remote from the lawless
atrocities in Mesopotamia, being as it is a study of the
witch-hunt, of medieval heretical movements, and of European
mechanical and materialist philosophy from the 'Age of
Reason,' nevertheless, it is essential for understanding
either. At the same time, the paradox of the hideous pun of
the Structural Adjustment Program and the Special Access
Program as the SAP, or the grotesque contradiction found
between chapter 39 of Magna Carta and order 39 of the Iraq
occupation are explicated.

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 *torture*d 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!

The historic demonization of women is on the face of page
after page in profuse and magnificent illustration. The book
contains many and beautiful illustrations, such as Vegetable
Man, the Land of Cockaigne, the Fountain of Youth, and the
Witch's Herbary. It contains powerful images, many are
woodcuts (one of the first uses of the printing press). One
shows witches conjuring a rain shower, others show a 15th
century brothel, Dürer's depiction of the expulsion of Adam
and Eve from the common land, Jacques Callot's Horrors of
War, Dürer's woman's bath-house, The Parliament of Women,
and the Anabaptist's communistic sharing of goods.

If one image from Abu Ghraib gave us a crucifixion, another
as surely gave us a pyramid: these fundamental forms of
graphic design, known to every art student. Hans Grien's
Witches Sabbath (1510) or the title page of Andreas
Vasalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543). All its magic
has gone: the human body has become a factory, or a
mechanism of circulating blood, connecting tissues, little
cells, obedient to commands of science. The mechanical body
is depicted: to crown all, the hideous gathering in a
Corinthian-style rotunda of the Renaissance mob of bourgeois
at the anatomical theater where a pregnant woman's corpse
lies naked in the middle, on a table, her womb gashed open
as the assembly leers, gazes, peers, points, spies, shoves,
elbows each other, scrutinizes, assesses.

Product of intense debates within the international women's
movement, with a perspective on European history made
possible by three years' residence in the mid-80s in Nigeria
where a campaign of miscogyny accompanied the attack on
communal lands under the direction of the 'structural
adjustment plan' enabled her to understand the adjusting
structures of European capitalism at its violent beginnings.
Drawing on the non-conformity of British social history, on
the lucid periodization of French scholarship, on
Mediterranean openness to Asia and Africa, on the cultural
endurance of indigenous people of the Americas, on the power
of the women of west Africa, her scope is authentic and
broad, from the Saracens in the east to the Incas in the
west, with Europe in the north and the Caribbean in the
south. Its zones of interest are west Africa, England,
France, Germany, Mediterranean, Yucatan, Oaxaca, eastern
Europe, and the Caribbean. The global perspective is one of
a multiplicity of locales: not an envisioned totality but a
manifold of villages, neighborhoods, common lands.

In the neo-liberal era of postmodern shadows the proletariat
is written out of history, so the labors of the historian
must recover even its existential substance. Thus,
reproduction and the gender specification of the class
relationship, is fully and historically argued. Stating
horrifying truths of terrorism Silvia Federici has written a
book truly of our times. Written in an uncompromising prose,
addressed to scholars, young people of the
anti-globalization movement, accessible to students,
interesting to scholars, challenging to the intellectual. It
engages in up-front arguments with radical feminists,
Marxist socialists, as well as academic Foucauldians.
Neither compromising nor condescending, her book expresses
an unfailing generosity of spirit and the dignity of a
planetary scholar. As a passionate work of memory recovered,
it is an anvil. As a lucid exposition of terror against the
human body, it is a hammer. Brought together, they may be
used to forge humanity's agenda.

It is a book of remembrance of a trauma burned into the body
of Europe leaving a scar of loss comparable to those once
caused by famine, slaughter, and enslavement. Caliban is
proletarian, drawing water and fetching wood, his mother was
a witch. Prospero calls him a thing of darkness. If so, what
is she? The whiting out from the page of history inevitably
leaves behind such a darkness. Prospero acknowledged Caliban
("this thing of darkness I acknowlege mine") in contrast to
Bush, Cheney, Rumfield, Condeelza-Rice, and the other
pipsqueaks and bull-roarers in that chain of command some of
whose links are described by Seymour Herst.

The women of medieval Europe played a major role in the
heretical movements; the women of medieval Europe found
gender integration in the cooperative labors of the commons
which, indeed, depended on them. A true women's movement in
the popular culture was happily described by Chaucer which
often urst out in peasant revolt. John Ball repeated "now is
the time" and the serfs confidently announced "we'll have
our will in the woods, the waters, and the meadows." Thomas
Müntzer, the communist leader of the German Peasant's Revolt
of 1525, said simply, "all the world needs a jolt." This
initiated the vicious period when the body was transformed
from a repository of knowledge, wisdom, magic, and power to
a work-machine requiring both terror and philosophy. The
body under the terror of Rationalism is vivisected under a
new sexual pact, the conjuratio of unpaid labor. The maid,
the prostitute, and the housewife became the exclusive
labors of women, replacing the healer, the craftsperson, the
heretic, the herbalist, the sage, the commoner, the old, the
naturalist, the obeah woman, the single, the ill-reputed,
the freely-spoken, the finder of lost property, the lusty or
'free woman,' the obeah, the midwife.

Land expropriations, the lengthening of social distance, the
breakdown of collective relations, all the metaphysical
underpinnings of social order, the class struggle reduced to
the 'evil eye,' sexuality reduced to the functional
production of labor power, contraception, abortion were
outlawed by the Bull of Innocent VIII (1484), the
obliteration of the enchanted world where the stars and the
herbs were connected in correspondences that were friendly,
if occult, where luck, the unknown, and accident impeded the
progress of "scientific rationalization," anatomy,
vivisection, destruction, expropriation, exploitation.

She writes "just as enclosures expropriated the peasantry
from the communal land, so the witch-hunt expropriated women
from their bodies, which were thus 'liberated' from any
impediment preventing them to function as machines for the
production of labor."

Were there any exceptions? Did the sons, brothers, uncles,
fathers, did the men of the community come to the defense of
the women? Sadly, shamefully, there is but a single
exception to the otherwise universal answer: in 1609 when
the Basque fishermen of St. Jean de Luz heard that the women
were being stripped and stabbed for witches, they cut short
their Atlantic cod campaign and sailed back home and taking
clubs in hand they liberated a convoy of witches being
carted to the stake.

What we learn is the systematic, protracted, and global
practice of *torture*. It is systematic in the sense that in
the past church and state conspired to exercise it while
state theorists developed philosophy for it, such as Jean
Bodin ("We must spread terror among some by punishing
many"), René Descartes ("I am not this body"), and Thomas
Hobbes ("for the laws of nature, as justice, equity, mercy,
and, in sum, doing to others as we would be done to, of
themselves, without the terror of some power to cause them
to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions"). It
was protracted in the sense that it was not shock therapy
based on the blitzkrieg, or sudden 'structural adjustment
plan,' but an intermittent campaign of approximately two
centuries which ebbed or flowed with prices. It was coeval
with the European Renaissance, high and low, north and
south. Finally, it was global in the sense that the
degradation of women accomplished by means of terror of the
body belonged to the same epoch as the genocide of
indigenous people in America and the commencement of the
African slave trade. "It was here that the scientific use of
*torture* was born, for blood and *torture* were necessary
to 'breed an animal' capable of regular, homogeneous, and
uniform behavior, indelibly marked with the memory of the
new rules."

Such beginnings are never completed. This is why "the
sanctity of marriage" was a decisive electoral issue and the
*torture*s of Abu Ghraib were not. The policing of the
woman's body and the torturing of labor-power: two means of
creating labor power. The neo-liberal project requires a
policy of social reproduction. The body becomes a site of
resistance as shown by the "naked protests" of the women of
the Niger river delta in the summer of 2003 which virtually
stopped the flow of petroleum.

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
*torture*d 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 *torture*s 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 at yahoo.com

FURTHER REFERENCES

Marilyn Buck, Wild Poppies,
www.freedomarchives.org/wildpoppies.htm

Joan Dayan, "Cruel and Unusual: The End of the Eighth
Amendment," The Boston Review (October/November 2004)

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and
Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004).

John Fielden, The Curse of the Factory System (1836)

Matthew Hopkins, Discovery of Witches (1647)

Seymour M. Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to
Abu Ghraib (HarperCollins: New York, 2004)

Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? (2004)

Andrew Horn, The Mirror of Justices (c. 1290) (Selden
Society Publications, vol. 7, (1893)

John H. Langbein, *torture* and the Law of Proof (University
of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1976)

Karl Marx, Capital, translated by Ben Fowkes (Penguin, 1976)

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