Category: Guy Rundle

03 Jun

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SlutWalk: Not the right ‘kind’ of women’s movement?

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It seems each day there is a new item in an Australian newspaper or online forum about the nature, intention and value of SlutWalk. My lunch breaks of late have been reduced to reading articles and poring over the comments. The related discussion on Twitter seems equally unstoppable, and just when I think the end has arrived another aspect to the debate appears.
This is, to my mind, a very good thing. In recent decades the women’s liberation movement in Australia has failed to gather momentum, and even at the height of the Global Justice Movement in the early noughties there was scarcely a whimper of a revival (compared to say the GLBTI/Queer movement resurgence).

One of the week’s best contributions was from Jacinda Woodhead and Stephanie Convery on ABC’s The Drum. It looked at the distinction of SlutWalk locally, comparing Melbourne and Brisbane in particular, and argued that while the movement is welcome there are ‘next steps’ to be discussed and taken. As the authors point out, murmurings there may be but an ongoing movement is something to be argued for:

Debate is healthy and constructive; it’s how movements thrive and it shapes their demands. A movement that asks for nothing concrete — say, the dismissal of any police officer who suggests in any way that a woman’s clothing is provocation for rape — that invites us all to merely ‘show up’, simply continues the atomised existences we had before the rally. All those individual voices hurling demands is the opposite of collectivity; it becomes white noise.

The entrenching of the primacy of the individual in recent decades has been incredibly profound. The products pitched to women may be Calvin Klein Jeans, moisturiser or cosmetic surgery, but the ideological selling point is freedom and choice. The phrase ‘be free to be who you want to be’ could slot into the advertising campaigns of everything from hair colour to washing machines to international travel.
My agreement with Woodhead and Convery’s article is not universally shared, however. A friend I mostly find myself agreeing with thought it ‘patronising’, a label directed at many in this debate.
For me, the patronisation came thick and fast from the pen of Guy Rundle because — although he made some astute contributions on QandA this week — his piece in Crikey was awfully condescending. I’m not alone in this view, but condescending is not Rundle’s real problem but a symptom, which arises from his inability to appreciate that social movements (including SlutWalk) do not as arrive fully formed, perfect entities. Social movements never are, rather they are always features of the world we live in. While expressing dissent they are nevertheless not external to the societies they criticise. And as such, at times some of their ideas and practices fit better under the label ‘hegemony’ rather than ‘counter hegemony’.
This is not to say that I or others know the perfect form movements should take, or that it is just a matter of guiding a movement towards some ideal, but an acknowledgement that movements are internally differentiated entities with their own unique logics. Turning up your nose from the sidelines will never do. Neither will simply reflecting on one’s own student days through rose coloured glasses of when you were carving it up at Melbourne University with the Bloody Feminists student club (as Rundle does). In my own heady days at the same campus as Rundle, I found events like Reclaim The Night bizarre. I didn’t feel unsafe on the streets of the Melbourne CBD or in the brightly lit inner city, where most of the participants lived, but I did when I had to ride my pushbike home at 1am, from working at Werribee Plaza Pizza Hut, through deserted streets and open wetland areas. Reclaim The Night had its own challenges, not greater than SlutWalk just different.

Seemingly random origins
For the unfamiliar, Slutwalk emerged in the wake of an incident at York University in January this year, when a Toronto Police Officer delivering an information session on campus safety stated ‘women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised’. This was no slip of the tongue, as the officer gave a preamble to his comments to the effect of ‘I’ve been told I shouldn’t say things like this’. Outrage on campus ensued and on 3 April some 1500 protesters marched to Police Headquarters, swamping organisers who expected only a few hundred.
While the origins of this outrage may seem small, and for some critics of the movement random, this ignores that sexism remains a lived experience. At the same time that women are dressing to attend nightclubs in clothes the Police Officer would call ‘slutty’, their inability to really live liberated lives pushes against them. Although sexism is experienced differentially because of race, class and other oppressions, many women understand what it is to be called a ‘slut’ because they can appreciate that in contemporary society women are sold a certain image at that same time they are chastised for it when they adopt (and purchase) it.
As Elizabeth Schulte argues:

This new wave of activism is showing that, despite the prevalent idea that we live in a ‘post-feminist’ age, where women can sit back and enjoy their equality, many women and men know the truth — that sexism is alive and well…

A language thing…
Much of the focus in discussions about SlutWalk has been on the use of the word Slut – in particular debates over reclaiming that word (see here, here and here). And I’m with Mindelle Jacobs when she says:

Other than the terrible c-word, is there a worse word, a word more laden with misogyny, myth and the wretched history of cultural indoctrination than slut?

But this seems at this conjuncture — that of an emerging movement — an irrelevancy. And unlike a number of critics of SlutWalk, I think it is flawed to approach the event as simply about re-appropriating the term, or as some kind of novel and provocative protest of the university educated. While the stated aim of some SlutWalk events is to take back the word, the tone varies greatly (see the Sydney and Brisbane Facebook event pages) and there is some subtlety to what this might mean in practice.
On QandA two weeks ago, Pulitzer winning novelist Michael Cunningham articulated some of this gradation when asked about reclaiming language. He noted that reclaiming words was something activists did more generally, that in calling themselves gay or queer they could then say to others ‘go on call me queer’ and the word would have more limited effect. His response, variations which I have heard argued before in a number of social movements, seems more a defensive strategy and a rejection of shaming than a project of reclaiming language in and of itself. This is not to say that some in the movement are not especially focussed on reclaiming the word, or celebrating being a ‘slut’, but looking at this as the dominant feature at a time the movement form is still emerging, and when debate is raging internally, is a error.
There is another language question in this matter, which I see as far more important. It was highlighted for me by the ironic tweet from @benpobjie quoted in the Woodhead and Converey article. The word ‘protest’, and its synonym in activist circles ‘demonstration’, has been notably absent in some contributions to the debate. For example, the Slutwalk Toronto site’s extensive ‘About’ section (which covers four details pages titled How, What, Who and Why) does not use the words ‘protest’ and ‘demonstration’ in relation to SlutWalk ‘events’. This is a bigger issue than that of reclaiming language, and demonstrates why the dividing line in this debate is not between those who are and aren’t comfortable with the word slut but between those who see the need to build a movement for women’s liberation that can tackle the questions arising in a neoliberal world (as opposed to those untroubled by liberal individualism).
In the end my personal approach to SlutWalk is as simple as this: The essential element of SlutWalk is both ‘correct’ and important to say loudly and often — women should not be demonised for what they wear or their sexual choices. The further step that needs to follow is for the more general question of contemporary gender inequality to be tackled. SlutWalk is important because it yells its initial message to all that it crosses paths with, but also because those involved in it can be part of a wider revitalisation of a movement for women’s equality.
So although I am critical of Rundle, I cannot join with the likes of Sabine Wolff (a researcher at the Institute of Public Affairs) in condemning him for ‘lamenting the death of the earnestly serious second-wave feminism of the late 1970s and 1980s’. Women’s liberation remains a serious business, in particular given the disproportionately worse position of many women as the fallout of the GFC bites. Wolff epitomises much of what is wrong with the new ‘feminism’ or ‘post-feminism’ when she says:

I am not a spokesperson for my entire generation of women. However, I would cautiously guess that, like me, many young women aren’t particularly interested in separatist feminism or eschewing nice undergarments. I care about having the freedom to make my own choices, and having those choices respected.

Well break out the IPA champagne, another woman has bought the lie that choice under neoliberalism leads to liberation. Wolff might not want to make a toast yet though, given the IPA has zero women on the governing board and only five of the 25 staff listed on the website are women. Then again, perhaps she also has that strategy of busting glass ceilings and letting the crumbs of her individual choices and efforts trickle down the women below.
Time for a real fight, I’d suggest. One that looks at SlutWalk for the possibilities embodied within it, for a new, angry and aggressive women’s movement that demands more than the shabby choice of the market and the hollow promise of the ‘free’ liberal individual. 

Filed Under: feminism, Guy Rundle, the Right

22 Mar

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Barack Obama: How Mr. ‘Change You Can Believe In’ became Mr. ‘More Of The Same’

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Last time at Left Flank we noted that key neoconservative ideologues had encouraged the Obama administration to take action in Libya so that the United States could outflank the Arab revolutions by spreading its particular version of democratic reform. Stephen Walt, one of America’s most prominent realist foreign policy thinkers*, has suggested we shouldn’t be so surprised that this kind of thinking gets a run in the new, improved, liberal White House, because the ideological gap between neocons and liberal interventionists is not as big as you might think:

The only important intellectual difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is that the former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on U.S. power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance. Both groups extol the virtues of democracy, both groups believe that U.S. power — and especially its military power — can be a highly effective tool of statecraft. Both groups are deeply alarmed at the prospect that WMD might be in the hands of anybody but the United States and its closest allies, and both groups think it is America’s right and responsibility to fix lots of problems all over the world. Both groups consistently over-estimate how easy it will be to do this, however, which is why each has a propensity to get us involved in conflicts where our vital interests are not engaged and that end up costing a lot more than they initially expect.

So if you’re baffled by how Mr. “Change You Can Believe In” morphed into Mr. “More of the Same,” you shouldn’t really be surprised. George Bush left in disgrace and Barack Obama took his place, but he brought with him a group of foreign policy advisors whose basic world views were not that different from the people they were replacing. I’m not saying their attitudes were identical, but the similarities are probably more important than the areas of disagreement. Most of the U.S. foreign policy establishment has become addicted to empire, it seems, and it doesn’t really matter which party happens to be occupying Pennsylvania Avenue.

So where does this leave us? For starters, Barack Obama now owns not one but two wars. He inherited a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, and he chose to escalate instead of withdrawing.  Instead of being George Bush’s mismanaged blunder, Afghanistan became “Obama’s War.” And now he’s taken on a second, potentially open-ended military commitment, after no public debate, scant consultation with Congress, without a clear articulation of national interest, and in the face of great public skepticism. Talk about going with a gut instinct. 

There is a consistent logic to this approach of reproducing US relations of domination, which those on the pro-intervention Left want to dismiss by taking pot shots at what Guy Rundle calls “an archaic theory of imperialism, formed in the era of the Belgian Congo, and solidified, if not petrified during the decades of the Cold War.”
Of course the logic of imperialism can lead to imperial mis-adventure, but to imply (as Guy does) that its manoeuvres are based mainly in “ideological fantasies, obsessions, self-delusions [that] might motivate action” is to rely much too heavily on sheer contingency rather than social relations as the basis of explanation. In order to acknowledge but then set aside the depressing repetition-compulsion of Western military adventures ending in oppression and large-scale bloodshed, he inserts a disembodied idealist worldview in place of hard analysis of the social content of power relations. It leads him to make wild voluntarist claims about the ability of a marginal Western Left to deploy its “audacity” to affect national foreign policy, as if our rulers’ motives and actions are so easily changed by subaltern pressure, rather than explicable through the class interests they promote (if in a mediated fashion).
Modern theories of imperialism — which Rundle studiously ignores to construct his case that they are mired in some past era — recognise the dynamic of competitive relations between major national capitalisms wrestling over systems of control in economically and politically vital regions. Moreover, such analyses identify the increased competition caused by the disruption in circuits of capital accumulation in the Great Recession as both sharpening inter-state rivalry and provoking resistance from below that threatens to uproot relations of domination at both national and regional levels.
When you have a big hammer the whole world looks like a nail
Walt, in no sense a Marxist but recognising patterns of great power behaviour, has the good sense to point to the dangers of mission creep in Libya that result from the United States’ need to project itself as the world’s most important guarantor of stability.
Despite Obama’s declaration that he would not send ground troops into Libya — a statement made to assuage an overcommitted military, reassure a skeptical public, or both — what is he going to do if the air assault doesn’t work? What if Qaddafi hangs tough, which would hardly be surprising given the dearth of attractive alternatives that he’s facing? What if his supporters see this as another case of illegitimate Western interferences, and continue to back him? What if he moves forces back into the cities he controls, blends them in with the local population, and dares us to bomb civilians? Will the United States and its allies continue to pummel Libya until he says uncle? Or will Obama and Sarkozy and Cameron then decide that now it’s time for special forces, or even ground troops?

And even if we are successful, what then? As in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, over forty years of Qaddafi’s erratic and despotic rule have left Libya in very poor shape despite its oil wealth. Apart from some potentially fractious tribes, the country is almost completely lacking in effective national institutions. If Qaddafi goes we will own the place, and we will probably have to do something substantial to rebuild it lest it turn into an exporter of refugees, a breeding ground for criminals, or the sort of terrorist “safe haven” we’re supposedly trying to prevent in Afghanistan.

But the real lesson is what it tells us about America’s inability to resist the temptation to meddle with military power. Because the United States seems so much stronger than a country like Libya, well-intentioned liberal hawks can easily convince themselves that they can use the mailed fist at low cost and without onerous unintended consequences. When you have a big hammer the whole world looks like a nail; when you have thousand of cruise missiles and smart bombs and lots of B-2s and F-18s, the whole world looks like a target set. The United States doesn’t get involved everywhere that despots crack down on rebels (as our limp reaction to the crackdowns in Yemen and Bahrain demonstrate), but lately we always seems to doing this sort of thing somewhere. Even a smart guy like Barack Obama couldn’t keep himself from going abroad in search of a monster to destroy. 

This is not a mission creep that mainly emerges from personalities or bad policy ideas (although they always play a role). Rather, it is the behaviour of a superpower that remains top dog militarily, but has grown relatively economically weaker and politically less credible as time goes on — forced to rely on that big hammer to manage its global affairs above all else. This is not about the monolithism of imperialism — although to miss the militarily monolithic character of great powers is to deny their great power-ness. Rather, it is to recognise that what drives their actions is a perverse and brutal kind of rationality, although one embedded within an irrational system of competitive accumulation.
* Thanks to Kevin Ovenden for the link to the Walt article

Filed Under: Barack Obama, Guy Rundle, imperialism, Libya

20 Mar

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‘Humanitarian intervention’, the international community and Libya: The leopard has not changed its spots

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Many people have reservations about the UN Security Council authorising the use of “all necessary measures” in Libya. But in spite of this, many also think that something must be done and it would be much worse to do nothing. Leaving aside the more particular question of intervening in response to a call for support (which forms much of Guy Rundle’s position), I want to look at the concept of humanitarian intervention as a response to these crises.
There is a sense of desperation about the situation in Libya, spurred by genuine human empathy. But supporting military intervention in response to these crises reflects a lack of a sense of history and a lack of imagination. The leopard has not changed its spots.

The ‘international community’ — saviour or villain?

The key comparison, at least amongst international lawyers, is with the Rwandan genocide. In 1994, some 800,000 people were killed in a hundred days. If ever there was a moral justification for humanitarian intervention, Rwanda was it. But the “international community” — the United Nations and similar entities*  — did the opposite. The UN Security Council failed to authorise the use of force and, when the genocide commenced, did nothing to stop it.

The first conclusion to draw from this is that the international community is not compelled to intervene by morality.

But I also want to argue that it is a mischaracterisation to describe the Rwandan crisis as a situation where the international community’s failure to “do something” resulted in genocide. The failure to intervene is not the explanation for the genocide — it is simply more complicated than that.
As Anne Orford argues in Reading Humanitarian Intervention, the flow of international aid to Rwanda helped create and stabilise a powerful state structure, which later enabled the genocide to occur on such a large scale. The role of institutions like the World Bank and the IMF was central; even “right up until the last minute” before the genocide, Rwanda was seen by these agencies as a “model developing country”. Orford goes on to note that:

Aid agencies and the community of aid workers and foreign diplomats present in Rwanda during that period did little in response to the well-documented rise in government-sponsored human rights violations, racism, massacres and militarisation of society, all of which “were constitutive elements of the drive to genocide.”

There were plenty of steps that the international community could have taken to prevent the situation arising, including basic things like making aid dependent on an end to human rights violations. But this never happened.
In other words, it is simply wrong to see the failure of these states as something external or foreign from the way the international community operates more generally. This is capitalism shaping the world in its own image — the international community has a hand in creating these brutalities or, at the very least, the conditions in which they occur. It is therefore very problematic to think it can also be the solution.
The other obvious example, which has been well canvassed by others, is the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan. I will not reiterate the humanitarian disasters that have resulted there, but I note the idea that the West is a force for peace and freedom in the region has been brought into sharper focus by the uprisings in recent months. If Iraq and Afghanistan were not occupied by the US and its allies it is reasonable to suggest that the turmoil in Tunisia and Egypt might well have spread to them and they could have won regime change without a million dead.

Legal scholars tend to see these situations as a failure of the rule of law, rather than part of a system of international relations that is, by its nature, brutal and full of conflict. As China Mieville describes the argument in Between Equal Rights, “where there is a problem of disorder or violence, it is deemed a failure of law: the main problem about law is that there is not enough of it.” Of course, we all know that the legality of such steps is far from a primary consideration: consider Richard Perle’s brazen admission that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was illegal, indeed that international law had “stood in the way of doing the right thing.” One can only assume, therefore, that “more international law” would actually mean more authority to for military adventures like that in Iraq.

This kind of talk has always meant that international legal thinking has a troubled relationship with the concept of the state. As a law student, I was encouraged to see states as discreet sovereign entities, motivated by a number of factors including, at times, human rights. But these assumptions are clearly out of step with reality. As Mieville concludes: “a world structured around international law cannot be but one of imperialist violence. The chaotic and bloody world around us is the rule of law.” The crisis in Rwanda was something created by the system, not an exception to it. This is why a materialist conception of law, as opposed to an idealist or positivist understanding, is so helpful in these contexts. It encourages us to see the situation as a whole, rather than as discreet problems that require particular solutions.

What we should be doing
So what can be done to stop these kinds of crises in the future? Already there is criticism that the international community should have acted earlier; the no-fly zone in Libya may have come too late to be of any use. But when we start to consider how much earlier we should have acted, we should start reflecting on how long the West has, in fact, been intervening in these places.
As a start, we should oppose our government intervening in countries through aid budgets that are contingent on neo-liberal reforms and silent on human rights. Consider, for example, the historically cosy relationship that the Australian Government has had with Indonesia. The Australian Government spends $450 million each year in aid to Indonesia, our largest development assistance partnership. This is obviously something that the government likes to sell as something positive we do for our region. Yet there are very good reasons to be sceptical about our aid program with respect to both its quantity and quality.
This relationship was tested in East Timor in 1999. The Australian Government had supported the Indonesian occupation for decades and yet suddenly felt compelled to act when the killing started in the wake of East Timorese independence. The UN Security Council authorised a multinational force to restore peace and security in East Timor.  This was and continues to be controversial.
Once again, a major concern was that the intervention took place too late to be of significant benefit to those being slaughtered. A better way of understanding the situation is that we were too late in our criticisms of the actions of our own government in supporting the Indonesian military. Our relationship with Indonesia, stretching back to the 1950s, had been to explicitly ignore the occupation of East Timor and the massacres that took place during that time. It is impossible to understand the crises that erupted in 1999 without reflecting on our history of involvement in the region.
Needless to say, in the wake of that military intervention, the Australian Government took a very aggressive stance when renegotiating the bilateral treaty that covers the extraction of oil and gas in the Timor Gap. The result was that East Timor “lost a large swathe of important benefits under the Treaty’s provisions.” This is one of the many spoils of humanitarian intervention.
It is not hard to imagine another uprising occurring in any one of the many politically troubled regions of Indonesia today. It is difficult to see how we could not be in some way responsible for any military backlash that might take place given our involvement with the country and stated enthusiasm to “support improved economic management through support for key structural reform measures.”
And yet, our current relationship with Indonesia leaves no room for any serious criticism of human rights violations in West Papua. This is despite the fact that just last year, Indonesian soldiers brazenly posted footage on Youtube showing the torture of a West Papuan farmer. If we are going to seriously think about what we can do as an international community about human rights abuses, we should start putting pressure on our own government to take a stand on these kinds of issues.
I have only the space to touch on these complex arguments, which involve difficult concepts — particularly for lawyers. Such debate is not served well if we are unable or unwilling to reflect on the reasons for crises and how we plan to avoid them in the future. Desperation is the midwife of poor judgment and when we defer to the law on questions of morality, it becomes a coward’s charter. In expressing support for the no-fly zone on Friday, Professor Sarah Joseph, of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law, concluded that:
I believe (and fervently hope) the consequences of international intervention in Libya will be less horrific at this time than the fairly predictable consequences of Gaddafi rolling over the rebels. But I cannot know, and nor, frankly, can anybody else.
I disagree with the implications in this statement. We have to do our best to learn from history and think about these situations in context, otherwise we become complicit in making things worse. We need to build an international solidarity movement that criticises the involvement of the West in developing countries, both militarily and under the auspices of development. There are no shortcuts.
* I think it is fair to describe the “international community” as constituted by a number of states acting through forums like the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and NATO. The international community is made up of sovereign states that are nominally equal, but substantively unequal and each has its own particular agenda.

Filed Under: Afghanistan, Guy Rundle, imperialism, Iraq, Libya

17 Mar

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Guy Rundle, the ‘anti-imperialist Left’ and the calls for a no-fly zone in Libya

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Friends no longer
It’s important to give Guy Rundle credit for being one of the few mainstream commentators who still has interesting things to say from a genuinely Left perspective. But his intervention in the debate over whether the Australian Left should back calls for a Western-run no-fly zone in Libya — to save the revolution from a bloody defeat at the hands of military forces loyal to Gaddafi — has provoked a hostile debate between supporters and opponents of intervention.

Rundle’s original Crikey article is here (unfortunately paywalled). It was given a sympathetic treatment by Kim of Larvatus Prodeo, with a prolonged debate to be found in the comments beneath. Rundle then continued his argument, emphasising what he saw as more general failure of the radical Left here (again, paywalled). As if to make clear how much was to be said about the failures of the Left, he continued his argument at the Crikey blogs section on the same day (with my reply underneath).
The argument has spilled over into the Overland Journal Blog, with Jacinda Woodhead’s riposte quite reasonably pointing out that it is mistaken to expect Western powers to suddenly act in defence of the Libyan revolution when their record generally runs in the opposite direction (and indeed they seem to be supportive of the Saudi invasion of Bahrain to help repress the uprising there—a silence that former UK diplomat Craig Murray believes may be in exchange for Arab League support for a no-fly zone).
States and the international state system: whose states and whose system?
It’s good that Rundle has spelled out more of his position in his latest piece at Crikey*, because he gets closer  to the heart of the difference — which is not directly about the Libyan situation at all, but about understandings of imperialism and the state. Guy says he rejects “archaic” definitions of imperialism and talks of “how you should relate to your own state (and its military)”. This allows him to tie his quite understandable support for the Libyan revolutionaries to pro-Western intervention arguments.
But it is not clear what he wants to put in the place of (say) a Marxist theorisation of the state and imperialism — something that authors with views as diverse as Toni Negri, David Harvey and Alex Callinicos have tried to do in bringing a Marxist framework up to date with the massive changes in global geopolitics that have occurred since Lenin wrote on these questions. As Richard Seymour has noted, Guy’s deployment of terms like “colonial” to describe left-wing refusal to back intervention itself relates to quite outdated notions of how power-relations in the international state system work.
This leads him to essentially posit the actions of states, large and small, very much in terms of their disconnection from processes of capital accumulation:
But as the decades waxed and waned, power relations, the economy, identity, nature of class have changed substantially (at least on surface, even if one believes that the base is still chugging away beneath).
It simply will not do to say that things have changed but instead we need to have some idea of how they’ve changed that justify’s Guy’s approach. In effect he is arguing that when a subaltern grouping challenges the state they are arrayed against (in Libya, or Egypt, or wherever) then “we” (the Left) can help them by getting “our” state to give them a hand. Or, more correctly, demand that larger, much more powerful states get involved. It is these questions of the state and state system that Left Flank has foregrounded over the last nine months we’ve been writing.
In Guy’s position, by contrast, there is little sense of what interests drive the actions of “our” state, or — more importantly — those of NATO states. Why is it that these states so consistently support dictatorships over democracy, and stability over freedom? And why would we think that they would choose to intervene now for any other reason than a continuation of the service of those interests?
We end up with a world where bad states (e.g. Gaddafi’s) are ok to be overthrown, and in fact if the people of Libya aren’t up to it (and maybe they’re not, as Guy seems so certain) then better to get some other state to do it for them. The proposed agent states here are the very ones who have consistently been the enemies of freedom and revolution. How Guy presumes that “we” can really make sure that “our” states do the right thing I’m not sure.
Intervention and the Arab revolutions
What benefit Guy sees in the legitimation of direct US intervention in an Arab country would have for the general tide of popular uprisings (against local states and imperial control) is even murkier… unless he thinks that an NFZ will force the US state to act directly against the interests it normally serves so assiduously, even if at times only semi-competently.
Perhaps that is where Guy is at, with his discussion of seizing the moment. The problem here is that for the Left this is much more a case of “where fools rush in”, because the complexity of situation and the consideration of real power relations require more thinking through than Guy’s dismissal of “archaic” theories credits.
To repeat what I have said before, Guy’s talk of “solidarity” versus “passivity” has a decidedly hollow ring, too. Because the request is not for solidarity from us, but from our ruling classes and their military machines. We of the Australian Left will remain passive, except insofar as we cheerlead and construct justifications for our rulers’ self-interested efforts.
Of course that does leave the question of the Libyan leadership to discuss. I think Guy has misunderstood Richard Seymour’s point — which is not that the rebels are led by a uniformly crap bunch of people but that varied political positions emerge in revolutionary uprisings. The Bolsheviks, after all, had much less influence in February 1917 and so the war that the revolution was supposed to bring to a halt continued. Should the Western Left have simply offered solidarity to the Russian people by cheering that decision by the newly installed revolutionary leadership?
The point is that we have a responsibility to judge these things for ourselves — what real effect we think such actions will have. That actually means taking sides in the argument within the Libyan revolution about what we think is the best way forward. Guy has taken a different side to the one I have, but he should call it as such rather than elide those differences by deferring to the Libyan revolution’s currently leading elements.
It is important in that regard that if Gaddafi tries to take the key urban strongholds of the rebellion, he will have much more trouble — unless he wants to risk actually genocidal activity (i.e. killing millions). That kind of brutality risks a greater explosion of Arab militancy in the region, now also directed across borders at him. It is simply not realistic to conclude that it’s intervention or bust for the rebels.
An urban resistance movement in Benghazi would gain little from a no-fly zone and depend much more on the kind of grassroots organising that has been the Libyan revolution’s strength. Whether the political forces within the revolution align with that kind of resistance, one that can potentially link up with working class opposition to Gaddafi in Tripoli itself, or see the revolt in purely military terms will affect the nature of the resistance itself.
If Guy could refrain from his grand denunciations of the Marxist Left (all too much in evidence from some in the Larvatus Prodeo discussion as well) and stick to that argument, in its fullest sense, then we may get further. I fear that Guy’s tone of urgency has caused the moral imperative to help an inspiring revolutionary movement override sober analysis of the consequences of the action he supports. It has made him sound more like Christopher Hitchens than I think he would be comfortable with, which, as I have said elsewhere, has been a surprise and disappointment to me.
The Greens and humanitarian intervention
Finally, having been a Greens member from 2002-10 and actively involved at all levels of the party (in NSW and nationally) I can inform Guy that while there are many left-wing people inside the party, they mostly have a confused and contradictory attitude towards the state and imperialism. It is this that leads them to accept the idea that real social change must come through existing power structures, even though many have a genuine and deep commitment to mass struggle running alongside these beliefs. It has also led to an erosion of interest in building mass movements the more successful the party has become in electoral terms, because the reflex assumption is that real power lies in Canberra.
This has a direct ideological consequence (even if, as Gramsci would say, the change in thinking occurs “molecularly”): State policies come to be seen as “bad policies” (which they are) but the state itself comes to be seen as potentially “good” and to be defended against alternatives. Hence the initial Greens response to the Egyptian revolution was to call for process solutions — free and fair elections — rather than Mubarak’s ouster; at the time a position barely different to Hillary Clinton’s. Clinton also favours the NFZ, so perhaps this is the level of “radicalism” the Greens MPs are articulating.
It has been most dismaying to see Adam Bandt, whose victory in the seat of Melbourne last year has been an inspiration for so many on the Left, take such a strong pro-intervention position. Adam had told us that his PhD thesis (reportedly brilliant, but apparently still embargoed from public view) related directly to questions of international law and was in part a response to China Mieville’s Marxist critique of international law, Between Equal Rights. Mieville had been motivated to write his thesis to challenge the framework of the legal debates around the notion of “humanitarian intervention” in the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. We had presumed that Adam had pursued a line that while critical of Mieville, would have started with distrust for the notion of imperial intervention bringing positive results for oppressed peoples. Maybe we were wrong.
This debate has exposed a recurring lacuna in Left thinking on issues of the state, militarism and geopolitics — that of the interests that lie behind these phenomena. It is doubly striking because, as Guy has correctly grasped, the Arab revolutions have cracked open the edifice of power relations embodied in the aforementioned. Better to urgently talk through those issues than to run half-cocked into backing the very forces that have consistently proven themselves the enemies of the Left, progress and freedom.
*Although it is irritating that he can’t spell my surname.

Filed Under: Greens, Guy Rundle, imperialism, Libya, state

11 Dec

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Let me tell you a secret… WikiLeaks, the state and hegemony

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What is the nature of elite rule and how can it be challenged? This is the real question behind the political crisis caused by the WikiLeaks revelations. Compared with other leaks, the scale and breadth of the information being released makes it impossible not to reassess how state and citizens interact. Despite the attempts at distraction from the powerful actors most disrupted by the leaks — whether through attacks on the legality of the operation, prosecution of its founder on apparently unrelated charges, or allegations of its potential to cause more harm than good — they have profoundly shaken already waning trust in social institutions.

Suddenly the dissembling and sheer cynicism of politicians, military chiefs, state bureaucrats, diplomats and business leaders is out in the open; emperors stand uncomfortably naked, and statecraft (both internal and external) increasingly looks like the conspiracy against the people it has always been. It should not be surprising that one response from above has been to claim that really nothing surprising has emerged, as if to render their duplicity banal when for years they have assured us of most excellent intentions. “Move along, nothing new to see here,” they might say.

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Filed Under: Gramsci, Greens, Guy Rundle, Iraq, media, revolution, state, Wikileaks

23 Sep

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Adoption by male same-sex couples, or ‘The peculiar logic of Guy Rundle’

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It was a bit of a shock to read Crikey last week and find that Guy Rundle, usually reliable for a left-wing view of the world, had descended into railing against adoption by male same-sex couples.

Rundle’s piece can be found here. My reply was paywalled, but the text is copied below. Rundle then replied at the bottom of this, and there was one more salvo from a Luke Wallace here.

Make of it what you will.

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Filed Under: GLBT politics, Guy Rundle