ISJ Conference: Imperialism and Austerity

International Socialism journal presents a one day conference on the twin crises of the liberal world — the economic crisis and the crisis of imperialism.

Saturday 25 September, Glasgow
Western Infirmary Lecture Theatre, Glasgow University, G12 8QQ

9.30am - 5pm
Tickets £10 waged/£5 unwaged.
Contact Gregor on 07738 334724 for more details.
For transport information, call Ben: 07805 590391.

SPEAKERS INCLUDE:

Chris Bambery (author, A Rebel's Guide to Gramsci, ISJ editorial board).

Alex Callinicos (Author, Bonfire of Illusions, Imperialism and Global Political Economy and editor of International Socialism).

Joseph Choonara (author, Unravelling Capitalism, ISJ editorial board).

Panos Garganas (editor of the Greek newspaper Workers' Solidarity).

Mike Gonzalez (author, Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, A Rebel's Guide to Marx, ISJ editorial board).

Jane Hardy (author, Poland's New Capitalism, ISJ editorial board).

Marnie Holborow (author, The Politics of English).

Boris Kagarlitsky (author, The Politics of Empire, The Twilight of Globalisation).

Richard Seymour (author, The Liberal Defence of Murder, The Meaning of David Cameron, ISJ editorial board).


SESSIONS INCLUDE:

The twin crises of the neoliberal world.
Imperialism contained? Russia and Latin America.
Racism, the far right and the crisis.
Finance humbled?
The struggle against austerity in Europe.

On the subject of the latter, check out material on the 'Eurozone Between Austerity and Default' here, while Stathis Kouvelakis‏ has an article on 'The Greek Laboratory: Shock Doctrine and Popular Resistance' in Monthly Review's MRzine.

Kick over this statue

The legendary 1980s band The Redskins once had a hit of sorts with a song entitled 'Kick Over the Statues' - not a bad sentiment, particularly in a country like Britain where one does not have to look too far for statues honouring various bloodsoaked ruling class 'heroes' - as chronicled by the late Colin Gill and Leon Kuhn in their marvellous little book Topple the Mighty.

It is therefore encouraging to see that a campaign has sprung up in the North East Welsh town of Denbigh against plans to build any new sculpture to pay tribute to a local ruling class 'hero', a particularly brutal imperialist adventurer HM Stanley, of 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?' fame and a central figure in the late nineteenth century European 'scramble for Africa'. As the campaigners letter of protest notes:

'We call on the people of Denbigh not to erect any statue to 'honour' the imperialist HM Stanley. A statue would convey uncritical approval and celebration of all aspects of Stanley - something not possible for such a controversial figure today. It is wrong to romanticise the African "adventures" of Victorian era imperialists. The racist ideas of the day led to hundreds of thousands of Africans being killed or mistreated - Europeans believing that their supremacy entitled them to confiscate land and exploit natives and resources.'

The nineteenth century diarist, W.S. Blunt, once recorded the following note after reading Stanley's autobiography, which gives some indication as to why Stanley became such a racist barbarian after arriving in Africa:

'Stanley, before going to Africa, though ill-bred and ill-educated, was a decent working man with a modest opinion of himself and a good heart, but the position he found himself in in Africa filled him with the usual idea of being the representative of a superior race, with right of command over the people of the country he was travelling through, and little by little he got into the way of shooting them if they did not obey his orders, or provide him with food. All of his later writing is an attempt to show that he had a high motive in excuse for these violences, the cause of Christianity, civilisation and the rest, till he became a contemptible humbug.'

Priyamvada Gopal on modernity, women and Afghanistan

The real effects of the Nato occupation, including the worsening of many women's lives under the lethally violent combination of old patriarchal feudalism and new corporate militarism are rarely discussed. The mutilated Afghan woman ultimately fills a symbolic void where there should be ideas for real change. The truth is that the US and allied regimes do not have anything substantial to offer Afghanistan beyond feeding the gargantuan war machine they have unleashed.

And how could they? In the affluent west itself, modernity is now about dismantling welfare systems, increasing inequality (disproportionately disenfranchising women in the process), and subsidising corporate profits. Other ideas once associated with modernity – social justice, economic fairness, peace, all of which would enfranchise Afghan women – have been relegated to the past in the name of progress. This bankrupt version of modernity has little to offer Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah-imitators. A radical people's modernity is called for – and not only for the embattled denizens of Afghanistan.

Full article here

John Newsinger on British Imperialism

What it is important to recognise is that Britain’s Imperial adventures have always met with domestic opposition, that there have always been individuals, organisations and sometimes mass movements that have opposed the Empire. One thing I tried to do in my book was to make clear that there was always opposition to Empire in Britain. What history shows is that it is when the British working class is fighting in its own interests that you get British workers beginning to identify with other people’s struggles.

Clearly we face an uphill struggle today as far as arguing for recognition of the realities of Empire is concerned. This is demonstrated most clearly by the new government’s intention to involve Niall Ferguson in developing the history curriculum for schools. But growing resistance both at home and abroad will strengthen our arguments, will make our words flesh, so to speak.

A timely interview with the author of The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire

In Defence of History

The news that the Tories are going to put the Tory pro-imperialist ideologue Niall Ferguson in charge of re-writing the national curriculum for history in British schools is not altogether such a surprise, but it does signal how the current age of permanent war we live in has come to shape and disfigure not only the present but risks now shaping and disfiguring how we all think about the past.

Traditionally, the British national curriculum brought in by Thatcher during the 1980s seems to have been largely about cultivating 'Little Englander' nationalist sentiment - leaving one with the impression that while the rest of Europe experienced 'totalitarianism' and dictatorship, and the most barbaric forms of exploitation and oppression (lots of learning about Hitler's Nazis and Stalinist Russia) somehow Britain was destined to rule forever in peace and quiet through parliamentary democracy (indeed as Thatcher herself believed, Britain had apparently already enjoyed a 'thousand years of British democracy'). The old curriculum did not focus on British imperial history at all - because that might bring up some slightly awkward facts - the glaringly obvious decline of Britain as a world power by the 1980s for one, but more importantly the fact that the British Empire had very little to do with 'British democracy' but quite a lot to do with the imposition of dictatorship and 'totalitarian' forms of rule, and indeed barbaric exploitation and oppression. Indeed, as one Pan-Africanist critic, George Padmore, put it during the 1930s, 'The British Empire Is Worst Racket Yet Invented By Man'.

New Labour in power did not challenge this lack of focus on the empire in the curriculum at all, though as they waged neo-imperial warfare abroad increasingly their leaders did what they could to encourage imperial nostalgia - and a revival of the old 'imperial spirit'. Gordon Brown in 2004 declared 'We should be proud . . . of the empire' and in 2005 while in East Africa told the Daily Mail that 'the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over' - and essentially re-introduced 'Empire Day', though Gordon Brown had to settle for it being called 'Armed Forces Day' instead of his more imaginative 'British day'.

Yet now under the old Etonian David Cameron and his merry Oxbridge men including Nick Clegg and Michael Gove, it is clearly high time for the Empire to Strike Back with a vengeance - and they have hired the arch-imperialist Tory historian Niall Ferguson to ditch what he calls 'junk history' (he highlights in particular teaching kids about the black civil rights leader Martin Luther King) and try and cultivate the kind of 'proper traditional history' designed to serve the interests of the rich and powerful that Cameron, Clegg and Gove themselves learnt at public school. Ferguson is famous of course for not just being nostalgic for the British Empire of old (he remembers fondly his 'magical' childhood growing up in the former British colony of Kenya during the 1960s) but also being sycophantic about the new masters of the universe - the American Empire. Currently it seems the need is to ratchet up the propaganda level of the war on terror so that the idea of fighting and dying in Afghanistan for the profits of multinational oil and arms companies can be made more appealing to British working class kids. According to the Guardian, at the Hay festival, Ferguson declared that his new 'grand narrative' would mean not simply imperial nostalgia for the British Empire but that British children should be taught that the 'big story' of the last 500 years 'is the rise of western domination of the world'.

This should not surprise us - as historian Stephen Howe has noted of Ferguson, his whole 'world view' flows from two inter-linked assertions.

'Some people – mostly poor and dark-skinned ones – need to recognise that they are conquered, accept the fact, indeed realise that it’s in their own best interests to be so. And other people, especially Americans, must know and accept that they are conquerors and imperialists, shoulder the accompanying burdens, understand that such a role benefits everyone. As Ferguson says in the introduction to Colossus (2004): "Unlike most of the previous writers who have remarked on this, I have no objection in principle to an American empire. Indeed, a part of my argument is that many parts of the world would benefit from a period of American rule."'

Planning to produce a guide and materials for 'a four-year history syllabus on the west and the world', Ferguson declared the big question the course would attempt to answer, he said, was how in 1500 'the small warring kingdoms of Europe, which looked so feeble compared with the Ming or Ottoman empires, got to be so powerful'. He said the syllabus was 'bound to be Eurocentric' because the world was Eurocentric.

Yet as Howe notes, it is Ferguson who is irredeemably Eurocentric in his narratives of empire.

'The fact is that Ferguson systematically bypasses or blanks out every source which analyses or presents the perspectives of the colonised. There thus emerges a consistent pattern of distortion or one-sidedness: a pattern which tends to reinforce the prejudices of those he seeks to influence. Much of the impact Ferguson’s writing has had on public debate, especially in the US, stems from his being perceived as an expert historian whose arguments about policy are based on specialist knowledge. Ferguson is indeed a proficient historian with a great deal of accumulated learning at his disposal. But his authority does not extend to the histories of any part of the non-European world. When he makes claims about these, they must be evaluated as the arguments of a talented, opinionated amateur, not a scholar.'

It is doubtful therefore for example that anti-colonial struggles, revolts or even just the critics of empire, the likes of George Padmore et al, will be included on Ferguson's syllabus (will the likes of Padmore ever be on a British school curriculum syllabus?) - yet there are bigger issues at stake. For example, a related 'big story' to that of the 'rise of the West' is the accompanying rise of racism towards the 'other' over the past 500 years - something that originated with the barbaric criminality of the slave trade and colonial slavery at a time when ideas of 'liberty' were becoming fashionable in European metropoles. Dealing with this is critical, not least because outside Eton and Oxbridge, Britain is itself now a modern multi-racial and multicultural society, and some of the black and asian kids being taught Ferguson's 'new imperial history' in particular might not appreciate being told to simply kneel down and worship at the shrine of Western imperial power. Yet as I noted on this blog in a critique of Ferguson back in 2006, Ferguson writes racism out of the story of the British and American Empires.

'One of the central theses of the 'Oxford school' that Ferguson represents is that there is no link between Empire and the rise of racism. The two have to be distinguished completely and utterly. Which explains why Ferguson insists it is with the decline of the British Empire at the start of the 20th century that racist killing comes into its own - and suggests that only a strengthening of American imperial power in the 21st century can allow humanity to avoid new holocausts. Unfortunately for Ferguson, and his supporters, there is a quite clear link between American imperialism and racist massacres - as testified by, for example, Haditha'.

Overall, Ferguson's 'new history' offers us a return to the most traditional oldest forms of history, ones where myths about Western cultural 'superiority' and uniqueness were taken for granted and are now propagated again only with just a little more subtlety and sophistication. Ferguson in particular seems to have bought into Samuel Huntingdon's notorious Islamophobic thesis about 'the clash of civilisations'. The War on Terror is regurgitating some of the oldest racisms associated with empire in a new form, and just as the historians most favoured by the British political establishment at the high point of the British Empire were the most utter reactionaries available, so pro-imperialist, warmongering propagandists such as Niall Ferguson are promoted and fettered today among the academic and political establishment as Western imperial power finds itself in retreat and decline amidst some of the most disastrous wars in imperial history. This latest propaganda offensive by our ruling class has to be resisted alongside all the other cuts and attacks being waged on education in Britain by the Con-Dem administration, and in the name of history itself all those concerned with teaching history - whether amateur or professional historians or history teachers themselves - need to try and find ways and means of organising to resist this new attack. Ordering copies for yourself and your school/college/university library of John Newsingers The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire might be one good place to start.

John Pilger on the warmongers wanting your vote

Here in Britain, Polly Toynbee anoints the war criminal Tony Blair as "the perfect emblem for his people's own contradictory whims". No, he was the perfect emblem for a liberal intelligentsia prepared cynically to indulge his crime. That is the unsaid of the British election campaign, along with the fact that 77 per cent of the British people want the troops home. In Iraq, duly forgotten, what has been done is a holocaust. More than a million people are dead and four million have been driven from their homes. Not a single mention has been made of them in the entire campaign. Rather, the news is that Blair is Labour's "secret weapon".

All three party leaders are warmongers. Nick Clegg, the darling of former Blair lovers, says that, as prime minister, he will "participate" in another invasion of a "failed state" provided there is "the right equipment, the right resources". His one reservation is the standard genuflection towards a military now scandal­ised by a colonial cruelty of which the Baha Mousa case is but one of many.

For Clegg, as for Brown and Cameron, the horrific weapons used by British forces, such as cluster bombs, depleted uranium and the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of its victims' lungs, do not exist. The limbs of children in trees do not exist. This year alone, Britain will spend £4bn on the war in Afghanistan. That is what Brown and Cameron almost certainly intend to cut from the health service.

Edward S Herman explained this genteel extremism in his essay "The Banality of Evil". There is a strict division of labour, ranging from the scientists working in the laboratories of the weapons industry, to the intelligence and "national security" personnel who supply the paranoia and "strategies", to the politicians who approve them. As for journalists, our task is to censor by omission and make the crime seem normal for you, the public. For, above all, it is your understanding and your awakening that are feared.

John Pilger on the warmongers running for Parliament who may not have 'broken Britain' but who collectively have done a pretty good job of 'breaking' both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Peter Gowan Memorial Conference

A one-day conference to discuss the contribution and ideas of Peter Gowan (1946-2009), author of The Global Gamble, founding editor of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, long-standing editor of New Left Review, and Professor of International Relations at London Metropolitan University.

Saturday, 12 June 2010, 10.00 to 5.30
School of Oriental and African Studies, Room G2

Agenda

10.00 – 12.30
Introduction: Tariq Ali
Session 1: Eastern Europe
Speakers: Gus Fagan, Marko Bojcun, Catherine Samary

12.30 – 1.30 lunch

1.30 – 3.00
Session 2: Imperialism and American Grand Strategy
Speakers: Gilbert Achcar, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Susan Watkins

3.00 – 3.30 coffee break

3.30 – 5.00
Session 3: The Dollar-Wall St Regime
Speakers: Robin Blackburn, Robert Wade, Alex Callinicos

5.00 – 5.30
Mike Newman: Peter Gowan as an educator
Awarding of the Peter Gowan Prize

The Conference is sponsored by Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and Historical Materialism. gus.fagan@ntlworld.com

New Book: Marx at the Margins

Kevin B. Anderson: Marx at the Margins:On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies

In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by the well-known political economist which cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with our conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. Marx at the Margins ultimately argues that alongside his overarching critique of capital, Marx created a theory of history that was multi- layered and not easily reduced to a single model of development or revolution. Through highly-informed readings on work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond.

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Colonial Encounters in the 1850s: The European Impact on India, Indonesia, and China
2. Russia and Poland: The Relationship of National Emancipation to Revolution
3. Race, Class, and Slavery: The Civil War as a Second American Revolution
4. Ireland: Nationalism, Class, and the Labor Movement
5. From the Grundrisse to Capital: Multilinear Themes
6. Late Writings on Non-Western and Precapitalist Societies
Conclusion
Appendix. The Vicissitudes of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe from the 1920s to Today
Notes
References

Kevin B. Anderson is professor of sociology and political science at the University of California–Santa Barbara and most recently, with Janet Afary, the coauthor of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

New Book: Bonfire of Illusions

Bonfire of Illusions: The twin crises of the liberal world
By Alex Callinicos (Kings College London)

Something dramatic happened in the late summer and autumn of 2008. The post-Cold War world came to an abrupt end. This was the result of two conjoined crises. First, in its brief war with Georgia in August 2008,
Russia asserted its military power to halt the expansion of NATO to
its very borders. Secondly, on 15 September 2008 the Wall Street
investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed. This precipitated a severe
financial crash and helped to push the world economy into the worst
slump since the 1930s.

Both crises marked a severe setback for the global power of the United
States, which had driven NATO expansion and forced through the
liberalization of financial markets. More broadly they challenged the
consensus that had reigned since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in
1989 that a US-orchestrated liberal capitalist order could offer the
world peace and prosperity. Already badly damaged by the Iraq debacle, this consensus has now suffered potentially fatal blows.

In Bonfire of Illusions Alex Callinicos explores these twin crises. He traces the credit crunch that developed in 2007-8 to a much more
protracted crisis of overaccumulation and profitability that has
gripped global capitalism since the late 1960s. He also confronts the
interaction between economic and geopolitical events, highlighting the
new assertiveness of nation-states and analysing the tense, complex
relationship of interdependence and conflict that binds together the
US and China. Finally, in response to the revelation that the market
is not the solution to the world's problems, Callinicos reviews the
prospects for alternatives to capitalism.

"The crisis of 2007-9 is an event of historic importance that has
affected economy, society and politics. Callinicos analyses its causes
within the broader development of capitalism in recent decades.
Particularly relevant is his stress on financialisation as well as the
implications he draws regarding the balance of imperial power across
the world. Written with the author's customary skill, this is a
welcome contribution from the left to the public debate."
Costas Lapavitsas, SOAS, University of London

Against Liberal Imperialist 'Marxism'

It is understandable that a Social Democratic student of imperialism can easily find arguments in his theoretical luggage if he wants switch to the other side. He only has to regard Marxism mechanically and say: ‘Socialism is only possible on the foundations of the highest capitalist development, of imperialist development; therefore, let us first help consolidate these foundations with all our power, let us protect the world power of our own country against foreign imperialism; today we must be imperialists, but socialism remains the ultimate goal’ —in the remote future, because it has surely become apparent that the proletariat is still far too weak for victory.

It is obvious that, with this attitude, the quasi-Marxists do not prepare and promote the realization of socialism, but rather inhibit and delay it. The realization of socialism depends solely on the strength, independence, energy and clarity of purpose of the working class.
Anton Pannekoek, 1915

Pirates!

St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great, who asked him "how he dares molest the sea." "How dare you molest the whole world?" the pirate replied: "Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an Emperor."
Noam Chomsky, Pirates and Emperors (2002).

Those wanting to know what Marxist historians think about pirates should obviously consult Marcus Rediker's Villains of All Nations; Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age and/or Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra, but the new issue of darkmatter looks equally fascinating. I will reprint the editorial notes below:

Editorial Notes: Pirates and Piracy – Material Realities and Cultural Myths by Andrew Opitz

This special issue of darkmatter sets out to examine the complicated and often incongruous cultural meanings assigned to pirates and piracy in the twenty-first century. Debates about piracy have long featured certain telling contradictions. At different times, pirates have been seen as both violent monsters and colorful folk heroes. They have been cast by historians and cultural critics as both capitalist marauders and militant workers fighting for a restoration of the commons. How can we account for these seemingly incompatible visions? Of course, it is important to observe that pirates were hardly uniform in their social and political orientations. Some were greedy opportunists. Some were desperate sailors and slaves driven to mutiny. Others were somewhere in-between. We should also recognize that our understanding of piracy is powerfully shaped by our economic interests and our relationship with the law. The propertied targets of piratical theft are quick to view pirates as criminal actors outside the bounds of civilized behaviour, but the dispossessed are inclined to take a more nuanced approach that admires the defiance of the pirates at the same time as it fears their violence. It is also important to note that pirates now have a symbolic importance that transcends the basic material conditions behind their banditry. Our enduring cultural fascination with pirates is tied to their status as celebrated figures of rebellion and nonconformity in popular novels and films. Although the actual history of maritime robbery is sordid and contradictory, the pirate has become a compelling symbol of freedom: freedom from oppressive work routines; freedom from polite behaviour; freedom from institutional controls; freedom from restrictive property laws; freedom from unjust social conventions surrounding race and gender roles. We now apply the pirate label to an assortment of activities – from the formation of transgressive sexual identities to the technology-assisted defiance of copyright law – that have little or nothing to do with the sea or those who “go down to it in ships.” The articles assembled in this special issue take a broad approach to the study of pirates and piracy, examining diverse subjects ranging from the working-class politics of transatlantic piracy in the eighteenth century to the actions of Nigerian media pirates in the twenty-first century and recent debates about Somali pirates within East African immigrant communities in North America. The authors who contributed to this special issue of darkmatter have approached the cultural politics of pirates and piracy from different angles. They are historians, literary critics, legal scholars and media/cultural theorists. However, their scholarship is linked by the shared understanding that modern piracy, like the modern world itself, is inextricably bound to the history of colonial and neocolonial relations of production and the legacy of racial and class conflict that they produced – a history that forged the global capitalist order that continues to shape our everyday relationships with other people. Pirates are often dismissed in the media as exotic anachronisms – colorful characters out of step with present realities. But the forces that produced and continue to produce pirates – global shipping, the extraction of resources from colonial and neocolonial holdings, the mobilization and control of labor in the service of investment capital – still drive our world today. Studying pirates and their ongoing cultural resonance is hardly a frivolous activity. It is necessary for a true understanding of the socially uneven, violent and unstable world in which we live – a world that is still very much at sea.
Andrew Opitz
Guest Editor

Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

Though I only saw the legendary 'people's historian of the United States' once, at the 'Marxism' conference in London in 2000 (where his play Marx in Soho was also performed), news of Howard Zinn's passing is still very sad - as it is I am sure for many many readers of Histomat. His writings on race, class and power in America, the nature of history and the role and responsibility of the historian in society more broadly were an inspiration, revelation and education personally - and his sane, courageous voice will be sorely missed in the struggles ahead. I will add tributes/obits etc etc below when I get time.

Ambre Ivol 'Howard Zinn: Bridging generations'
Howard Zinn on Making History (2007 interview)
Howard Zinn.Org
Brian Kelly 'Howard Zinn: a life of insubordination'
Alan Maass, 'The people's historian'
Dave Zurin 'Howard Zinn: The Historian Who Made History'
Geoffrey Hodgson 'Obituary'
Michael Greenwell 'Howard Zinn: Radical Historian'
Victoria Brittan 'Howard Zinn's lesson to us all'

Meanwhile back in US Occupied Haiti

[From The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1931) by George Padmore]

For over 15 years [since 1915] Haiti has been under the political domination of the United States, which maintains a military dictatorship over the island. During these years several revolts against American imperialism have broken out among the Haitian workers and peasants, but these have all been ruthlessly suppressed. It has been estimated that over 3,000 Haitians have been murdered by the United States’ marines during their occupation of the country.

Because of the position of Haiti proper, which overlooks the Panama Canal and the proposed canal through Nicaragua, the island is considered the most valuable strategic base for the United States navy in the Caribbean, as well as a fertile field for the investment of finance-capital in the development of tropical products, such as coffee, cotton, tobacco, cocoa, sugar, etc., etc. These are the principal factors which dictated the military annexation of the island in 1915.

On the occasion when the first batch of American marines landed their leader, Admiral Caperton, was instructed by the United States State Department to impose a treaty with the following conditions upon the Haitians:

1. That the mining, commercial and agricultural resources of the country be developed exclusively by American financial interests.

2. That the United States was to provide a general receiver and financial adviser to the Government and thereby assume complete control over revenue.

3. That Haiti would not float any new loans or change her tariff unless first approved by the United States.

4. That Haiti would neither lease nor cede territory to any foreign power.

5. That the United States should supply officers for the Haitian gendarmerie (police force).

Since the American occupation the conditions of the 2,500,000 Haitians, especially the workers and peasants, have become terrible.

Land Robbery

Nearly all the fertile lands held by the peasants since the establishment of the republic in 1804 have been appropriated by the imperialists and turned into large plantations controlled by foreign corporations. As a result of this policy most of the Haitians are now a landless proletariat and are compelled to become wage-earners on the plantations and in the factories of foreign corporations.

So intense has been the policy of exploitation and its effects upon the living standards of the toiling masses, that spontaneous revolts have broken out throughout the island from time to time. All these manifestations of the workers for liberation have been ruthlessly stamped out. The marines have spread a network of terrorism throughout the country. They have muzzled the press, abolished freedom of speech and assembly, and either exiled or thrown into prison all who dared to champion the cause of national independence.

In order effectively to carry out this programme of subjugation the United States State Department maintains naval rule under the direct supervision of a High Commissioner, General John H. Russell. This marine officer is the real dictator of Haiti. He operates through a puppet president, Louis Bruneo, and a Council of State. This council is a small committee or cabinet selected by the “president” from among his henchmen, who in turn select the “president.” Both the council and the “presidents” must be approved of by the High Commission, who in turn is responsible to the United States Government in Washington. Thus the Haitians have absolutely no voice in the Government.

All of the large plantations, railroads, street railways, electric and gas companies in Haiti are owned by American bankers. Thousands of natives are employed as unskilled labourers in these concerns. The average wage of a Haitian worker is between 20 and 30 cents a day. Wherever they are employed, whether on the plantations or in the factories, they are forced to work long hours, and are most brutally treated by the American superintendents and managers, who are some of the most cruel slave-drivers to be found in the colonies.

The Tipinor and the Reginier-Pinerd Companies, which own some of the largest coffee plantations in the island, have the reputation of being the most brutal exploiters. They employ over 10,000 Negroes, who are supposed to get one dollar a day; but out of this a tax of 75 cents is collected and turned over to the Government, in order to meet its interest on foreign loans. The balance goes to the workers, who are expected to provide themselves with food, clothing and shelter during the period of their contract.

Exclusive of the agricultural and transport workers, there are about 5,000 stevedores employed by European and American steamship companies at Port-au-Prince, the national capital. The rate of wage is between 40 and 50 cents for loading and unloading ships. These workers are unorganised, and as a result their labour-power is being exploited to the maximum. The stevedores, together with the railroad and factory workers in the sugar refineries, form the bulk of the industrial proletariat of Haiti.

Thousands of women and children are also employed as agricultural labourers on the coffee and tobacco plantations. These workers are even more viciously exploited than the men. The average wage for women is 15 cents per day and children 10 cents. Like the men, women and children work from 10 to 15 hours under the most awful conditions, especially during the rainy season of the year, when malaria is very prevalent. The low standard of living among the Haitian toilers due to small wages and the rationalisation of the American capitalists contribute to the high mortality. The majority of Haitian agricultural workers suffer from hookworm and other tropical diseases...

These high-handed methods of imperialist exploitation, perpetrated against the Haitians, especially the peasantry, were the underlying factors which led to the revolt in November, 1928, which was drowned in blood by the machine guns of the United States marines.

The Revolt

The underlying factors of the 1929 Haitian revolt against American imperialism, like the uprising in Nigeria, were (I) the worsening of the conditions of the peasantry, due to the world crisis which has caused a falling of the prices of agricultural products, especially coffee; (2) the expropriation of lands for the development of industrialised agriculture by American capitalists, and (3) the attempts on the part of the imperialists to force the natives to contribute labour for road building without pay.

As soon as the uprising occurred, martial law was proclaimed by Colonel Richards Coots, the American officer commanding marines in Port-au-Prince. The troops were immediately got in readiness, and bloody attacks were made against all those who participated in the uprising.

The first stage was a strike among the students of the National University. They held parades through the principal streets of Port-au-Prince, protesting against the educational bureaucracy saddled upon them by President Borneo and his American educational advisors. In order to cut down national expenses, the Government recently made a sweeping reduction in the education budget. So incensed are all sections of the population against the present fascist dictatorship that no sooner had the students walked out of their classes than the native staff in the Customs Department joined in the strike. The clerks attacked the American officials with ink bottles, parts of typewriters and other office accessories, chasing them out of the building. The dock workers also declared a general strike, and within a few hours the entire business life of the city of Port-au-Prince was at a standstill.

Thousands of Haitian workers gathered before the Government administration building and the President’s palace, shouting “DOWN WITH BORNEO!” “DOWN WITH AMERICAN IMPERIALISM!”

The most serious manifestations, however, took place in the country districts. Because of their impoverished condition the peasants showed the most militancy. Immediately after learning what had taken place in the city they organised their forces and began a march on the capital.

Thousands of them gathered at a place called Aux Cayes, an important agricultural settlement. An advance guard of about 150 men and women armed with machetes (long knives used for cutting sugar canes) and sticks, marched ahead of the demonstrators. They were bent upon driving the American officials and their puppet, Borneo, out of Port-au-Prince.

As the column advanced on the capital, shouting “DOWN WITH BORNEO!” “DOWN WITH FREEMAN!” (who is the most vicious agent of American imperialism on the island, enjoying a salary of $10,000), they were met by a regiment of marines armed with every device of modern warfare.

The soldiers demanded that the peasants halt and return to their villages, which they refused to do. The marines then opened fire, killing five and wounding twenty. Despite the overwhelming superiority in numbers and equipment of the American forces, the natives fought heroically, making successful counter-attacks upon the military outposts at Chatel and Torbecks. By bringing up their reinforcements the peasants were able to break into the national guard-house at St. Michael, where they inflicted a severe assault on Lieutenant George Bertein, a Haitian petty-bourgeois renegade in the service of the American imperialists.

As the struggle increased more marines as well as American business men, who volunteered their services as a special fascist corps, were hurried off in armoured cars to various sections of the island to suppress the insurrection which was spreading from village to village.

While all this was taking place in the outskirts of the city, General Russell, the then High Commissioner, telegraphed to President Hoover informing him of the uprising. The American “dictator,” who is fast adopting to himself the mantle of Mussolini, ordered the cruiser Galveston, then at its naval base in Cuba, to proceed to Haiti. The bombing plane, Wright, with 500 more marines, was also dispatched on its mission of “peace and goodwill.”

With this formidable array the revolt was crushed with the same ruthlessness which characterised the marine campaigns in Nicaragua.

The reaction that has followed has created an atmosphere of widespread terrorism. Workers are afraid to express opposition sentiments for fear of being thrown into jail or murdered by the soldiers.

These outrages have aroused such world-wide protests among the working class and toiling masses of the colonies, especially in Latin-America, where Yankee imperialism rules supreme, that the Wall Street controlled Government in Washington was forced to dispatch a commission to “investigate” conditions. The Commissioners will merely carry out in the commission the instructions of their masters and whitewash the marine murderers of their bloody crimes, as has been done in the past.

The Haitian toilers know this only too well, and on the occasion of the arrival of the Commission at Port-au-Prince organised boycott demonstrations, demanding the immediate withdrawal of the marines and the abolition of the present dictatorship. The masses are still in a fighting mood. This was demonstrated when 5,000 workers and peasants shouting “LONG LIVE LIBERTY!” held a protest meeting before the Government buildings.

Since this incident a number of minor skirmishes have occurred between the toilers and the police in different parts of the island. The Haitian toiling masses will carry on the struggle until their country is freed from marine rule and foreign domination.

Solidarity with the Haitian People

As the outstanding recent novelist of the Haitian Revolution, Madison Smartt Bell noted of the devastating earthquake in Haiti earlier this week, 'A disaster on this scale is opportunity for opportunism as well as an opportunity to do some real good; Haiti will undoubtedly get its share of both.'

Richard Seymour has superbly described some of the dangers associated with Western 'humanitarian intervention' that lie ahead (see also here, while Scott McLemee reminds people if they have not already done so to read CLR James's The Black Jacobins for an understanding of why racists like Pat Robertson still harbour so much hate for the people of Haiti and why Haiti finds itself in the materially if not culturally impoverished state it currently does.

This statement by Socialist Worker, 'A Very Unnatural Disaster', notes that 'Imperialist intervention and capitalism lie behind Haiti's nightmare' and after reminding people of the history of the island - on which also see here, puts forward the following demands:

We say:
-Rush food, shelter and other aid to Haiti now
-No to the use of aid as a political weapon to impose the US’s will
-End the neoliberal policies that squeeze Haiti’s poor
-End the occupation of Haiti by foreign forces

Others might add other demands such as allowing the return of former President Aristide to Haiti and the cancellation of Haiti's debt. I have also been informed of an emergency vigil in London, the details of which I will post below.

HAITI EARTHQUAKE – EMERGENCY VIGIL
In support of the people of Haiti
Wednesday 20 January 5-7pm
St Martin in the Fields Church steps
Trafalgar Sq, London WC2N
Survivors are increasingly desperate, and angry that despite promises the aid is not getting to them.

Edited to add: Despite the slow speed with which aid is arriving, Christopher Hitchens still predictably cheers the presence of US imperial power once more on Haitian soil ('the biggest [humanitarian] work of all will be performed by carrier groups and airborne brigades of the United States, the taxpayer-financed forces of a secular republic'), though Greg Palast rightly remains one angry and appropriately sceptical man:

Send in the Marines. That's America's response. That's what we're good at. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson finally showed up after three days. With what? It was dramatically deployed — without any emergency relief supplies. It has sidewinder missiles and 19 helicopters. But don't worry, the International Search and Rescue Team, fully equipped and self-sufficient for up to seven days in the field, deployed immediately with ten metric tons of tools and equipment, three tons of water, tents, advanced communication equipment and water purifying capability. They're from Iceland.

More on W.E.B. Du Bois

This blog has always had a soft spot for W.E.B. Du Bois, so Lenin's Tomb's long review of The End of Empires: African Americans and India by Gerald Horne was most welcome. Some issues of The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP that Du Bois founded and edited for a long period, seem to be available online - which is also nice.

Noam Chomsky Speaks

Chomsky on Global Crises and the Unipolar Moment
It is widely felt that the fall of the Soviet Union left a unipolar world, dominated by the remaining superpower, and that the "moment" is coming to a close with the collapse of the Anglo-Saxon "free market" economic model. Investigation of this two-decade "moment" can provide considerable insight into what came before, and possibilities for shaping the future.

Tariq Ali on the state of British politics today

As another NATO airstrike kills at least 90 people in Afghanistan (prompting this piece of genius analysis from the BBC) and as an aide of Brown's quits in protest at the slaughter going on out there, what better time to read an interview with Tariq Ali by Socialist Review, where among other things he discusses the state of British politics today.

Gordon Brown is relying on propaganda about "supporting our boys" and demonisation of the Taliban as his sole defence of the war in Afghanistan, but the rise in soldiers' deaths has opened up a public debate about the war and why we are there. Are we seeing the beginning of the end for the perception of this as "the good war" in contrast to the unpopularity of the Iraq war from the start?

Brown is a pathetic figure because he knows what he's saying is total nonsense. Tony Blair actually believed in holy wars. New Labour are so gutless and spineless that they cannot even now admit that their foreign policy of positioning themselves in the "arse of the White House and staying there" has been a disaster and is now leading to unnecessary deaths. Playing up these deaths as patriotism plays straight into the hands of the local fascists who have replaced Jews with Muslims in their demonology (at least for public consumption; in private they remain anti-Semites). The fact that not a single political party is calling for a withdrawal from Afghanistan is a symptom of where this country is at the moment, the moral equivalent of the Vichy regime in France during the Second World War...

The Labour government appears totally bankrupt and incapable of recovering, and everyone now assumes that David Cameron will be the next prime minister. What are your thoughts on the prospect of seeing the Tories back in power?

It will make absolutely nil difference. New Labour were very proud of being even more right wing than the old Tories. I think a crushing defeat for the New Labour project would be very positive, regardless of who wins. We shouldn't, of course, ever pretend that a New Labour defeat will automatically lead to an opening for the left. The mood in Europe is very right wing. The fact that the bank bailouts in Britain have excited little anger is a sign of the times. Those who cling on to New Labour from a sociological assumption that it represents the working class are living in the clouds.

The Shock Doctrine film

Though Naomi Klein has disassociated herself from it, I thought Michael Winterbottom's film of Klein's book The Shock Doctrine that was shown at the start of the month on More4 was actually pretty good as a critique of neoliberalism and a good introduction to anti-capitalism per se. Though perhaps one might quibble with a few of the details (the overstressing of the significance of the Falklands War for enabling Thatcher's project of smashing trade union power rather than say the cowardice and betrayals of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy in not supporting the NUM during the miner's strike etc etc), and of course the film - possibly like the book itself - overly focuses on Milton Friedman to the extent that one is left kind of almost feeling that had the guy never been born then somehow perhaps world capital would not resemble the disaster it does today, it is a documentary that is well worth looking out for.

An Anti-Imperialists Guide to Duxford

Since it is the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War, I may as well mention briefly my recent visit to Duxford, a one time RAF airbase in Cambridgeshire which is now part of the Imperial War Museum and which markets itself modestly as 'Europe's Premier Aviation Museum'. If you have ever seen the 1969 film 'Battle of Britain' starring among others Ian McShane from Lovejoy/Deadwood then you will have seen part of historic Duxford being blown up for cinematic effect. If you happen to hail from anywhere within easy driving distance of Duxford then it is more than likely you will have grown up having made several visits to the place over the years, whether school trips or whatever. If you have never been to the place, which I guess is the majority of Histomat readers, then this post may give you a better idea of whether you might want to bother to make a visit or not.

I have only actually been to the main Imperial War Museum in London a couple of times I think and a very long time ago but I understand that generally speaking the impression it aims to generally rightly leave in the mind of most visitors is one of horror at the barbarism of imperialist warfare. Lets just say that I think it is fairly safe to guess that the impression that Duxford leaves in the minds of the most visitors is not quite this. Rather one is left with a kind of imperial nostalgia for the heroism displayed by RAF pilots during 1940, 'their finest hour' to quote Churchill, when 'never before in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few'. Duxford resembles a kind of shrine, a homage to 'the few'. It kind of caters for the fantasies of British schoolboys who dream of flying either Spitfires engaging in dogfights with Messerschmitt 109s - dreams that I guess some never really grow out of going by a quick look around at some of the other visitors to the place. It is not surprising that part of Duxford itself is actually an army recruitment display ill-disguised as a history of the Royal Anglican regiment.

In part this is of course inevitable, and even were a dedicated anti-imperialist placed in charge of the place it would still be difficult for it to promote any other kind of 'message'. Any museum is defined by what it has as exhibits - and Duxford has hangers full of old planes, centred around a core of Spitfires, Hurricanes and Lancasters - and my personal favourite of this ilk, the Short Sunderland, (that I even have a personal favourite is a slightly worrying tendency for any Marxist - feel free to pick me up over it in the comments box). Of course, as you might expect from 'Europe's Premier Aviation Museum', Duxford does have a whole range of planes from around the world - new and old - including Tony Benn's beloved Concorde - as well as other things such as mini submarines/tanks etc etc - which it has accumulated over the years.

However, any self-respecting anti-imperialist who found themselves for whatever reason visiting Duxford would do well to take note of three notable aspects of the 'experience'. Firstly, hidden away in the small section detailing the colonial troops at the disposal of the British Empire ( the black West Indian RAF members who fought in the Second World War for example are often forgotten - see here), there is a small tiny box that does admit that during the 1920s the RAF spent its energies er, 'Policing the Empire' which involved among other things bombing innocent people in er, Iraq and Afghanistan. I would guess about 90 percent of visitors miss this amid the general glorification of the RAF that is going on - still I guess we should be grateful it is there at all.

Secondly, largely because it is an ex- RAF airbase in East Anglia mostly centred around RAF planes, the dominant narrative one has of the Second World War itself is a quasi nationalist almost romantic focus on the British at war. Aside from a few Soviet tanks hidden away in the very farthest darkest corner of Duxford (visiting them was of course my personal highlight of the day, though admittedly a tank called 'Josef Stalin II' was less impressive sounding than the legend that is the T-34) the Russian people's resistance to Hitler's war machine which was so crucial to the eventual victory of the Allied Powers is all but absent. I would guess about 70 percent of visitors to Duxford never even find the Russian tanks, and few of those lucky few who do realise their significance.

The only other Russian artefacts I saw was a MiG fighter from the Cold War - and a rather quaint exhibit about Captain Augustus Agar, 'the Mystery VC' who it seems won a medal for torpedoing a Soviet cruiser and rescuing a British spy from Soviet Russia in 1919 - for a breathless account by the raving and rabid reactionary Andrew Roberts of the alleged 'heroism' of 'Operation Kronstadt', 'a feat out of the annals of Drake and Nelson' apparently, see here. What I liked about this exhibit was the way in which it naturally assumed that British forces had every right to be 'intervening' in the Russian Civil War as though St Petersburg was just off the Suffolk coastline or something, an assumption naturally shared by Andrew Roberts.

However, and perhaps most objectionably of all, over the last ten years or so slap bang in the middle of Duxford has appeared the American Air Museum:

The American Air Museum in Britain stands as a memorial to the 30,000 American airmen who gave their lives flying from UK bases in defence of liberty during the Second World War, and also honours those who fought in Korea, Vietnam, Libya, Iraq and other conflicts and battles of the 20th and 21st centuries. This outstanding example of contemporary British architecture houses the largest collection of American warbirds on display outside the United States, including a vintage B-17 Flying Fortress, B-24 Liberator, B-25 Mitchell, P-47 Thunderbolt, and aircraft from the Cold War era such as a B-52 Stratofortress, SR-71 Blackbird and F-4 Phantom, with many suspended from the ceiling as if in flight.

This blog does not appreciate crude anti-Americanism. I once dug out a old pamphlet published by Ipswich Communist Party from the British Library written in about 1953 by the Marxist historian AL Morton, author of a People's History of England entitled bluntly 'Get Out!' - a litany of alleged corruption and abuses made by American service personel while in East Anglia during and after the Second World War. Naturally, I am against American military bases being in Britain and indeed elsewhere outside of well, America, (the New Statesman recently did a fascinating survey of the American bases that still exist internationally) - though the key problem is surely that they are military bases being used for imperialist purposes - rather than that they are American - something that the anti-Americanism of the old CP often didn't seem to grasp.

But that said, there is no doubt that if you happen to be looking for a celebration of the air-power of US imperialism outside of America itself, there is surely no better place to come than the American Air Museum - it truly aims to shock and awe. Throughout Duxford, of course pretty much all the exhibits are artefacts or symbols of imperialist barbarism in one way or another - yes, even the good old Soviet T-34 tank - and any decent human being often finds oneself thinking and wondering about the innocent people killed by this or that plane. Of course, the accompanying notes by each plane rarely encourage such a line of thinking but instead talk in euphemisms - 'this plane was used in counter-insurgency in the French colony of Algeria during the 1950s' - that sort of thing. In the centre of the American Air Museum is a massive B-52 Stratofortress bomber, one that was actually used in the Vietnam War. On its side are the huge number of 'successful' bombing missions marked by little bombs. Of course, I am sure there is a little sign somewhere in there retailing some of the horrors that this weapon of mass destruction inflicted upon the people of Vietnam (for 'balance'), just as they do mention in there somewhere the devastation left in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after American use of the atomic bomb. Nonetheless, it still remains that the B-52 is a symbol of actually existing barbarism and yet a whole museum is built around paying a kind of respect to this thing, as if to say 'don't mess with Uncle Sam or we will literally bomb the shit out of you'.

And yet, the contradiction stands out. The American Air Museum is full of highly technologically advanced killing machines and yet, and yet, for all this hardware they were unable to defeat the heroic ordinary peasants of Vietnam, just as Afghanistan is proving once again the graveyard of empires again today. Amid the horror and the barbarism on display at Duxford, there is at least one lesson of hope.

Edited to add: Mark Mazower on how war-time nostalgia blinds us to Britain's changed realities

Turn Imperialist War into Civil War

Writing in this week's New Statesman, the former supporter of the orthodox Trotskyist International Marxist Group turned New Labour's Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth attacks what he calls (in pseudo Leninist language) the 'defeatist' attitude of the British people with respect to the 'Good War' in Afghanistan. As Ainsworth argues, 'The coalition is operating as a force for good - not as an occupier or an invader.' I suppose if you say something enough times you may eventually convince yourself, though it don't necessarily make it so.

Yet what is particularly insidious about New Labour is less their lies and propaganda offensive at a time of war - those have a long pedigree both in Labour's history and in British history more generally and are in a sense inevitable. Nor is their authoritarianism and attacks on civil liberties - including attacks on the right of migrants to join anti-war protests - a surprise - such things are part and parcel of imperialist warfare. What I find insidious is that having lost the intellectual argument for war, they continue to attempt to 'bring the war home' by trying to get more active consent from the British public for their militarism and warmongering on behalf of multinational corporations and the American Empire under the guise of 'Britishness' by organising symbolic rituals such as 'Armed Forces Day' and military parades of the living and the dead. New Labour do this while hypocritically claiming that such things are not in any sense 'political' and having nothing to do with them trying to appease racists and the right wing press. As Ainsworth puts it, 'The war in Afghanistan is too important to be reduced to a political football'. As a result, as John Pilger noted recently,

These are extraordinary times. Flag-wrapped coffins of 18-year-old soldiers killed in a failed, illegal and vengeful invasion are paraded along a Wiltshire high street. Victory in Afghanistan is at hand, says the satirical Gordon Brown. On the BBC’s Newsnight, the heroic Afghan MP Malalai Joya, tries, in her limited English, to tell the British public that her people are being blown to bits in their name: 140 villagers, mostly children, in her own Farah Province. No parade for them. No names and faces for them. The suppression of the suffering of Britain’s and America’s colonial victims is an article of media faith, a tradition so ingrained that it requires no instructions.

The difference today is that a majority of the British people are not fooled. The cheerleading newsreaders can say "Britain’s resolve is being put to the test" as if the Luftwaffe is back on the horizon, but their own polls (BBC/ITN) show that popular disgust with the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq is strongest in the very communities where adolescents are recruited to fight them. The problem with the British public, says a retired army major on Channel 4 News, is that they need "to be trained and educated". Indeed they do, wrote Bertolt Brecht in The Solution, explaining that the people...

Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

In such an extraordinary 'officially apolitical' political atmosphere, and with the number of dead British soldiers in Afghanistan about to hit the 200 mark - it seems to me that the Left have to therefore redouble our efforts to also try and 'bring this war home' and make New Labour pay for their crimes. Everyone who is disgusted by New Labour's catastrophically bloody and disastrous war on the people of Afghanistan abroad - which every day brings more horror - as well as their war on public services and jobs massacre at home should try to join and help build two upcoming demonstrations, and so help cement the rising tide of resistance from below into a real movement for 'regime change at home'.

Rage Against New Labour - 27 September outside Labour Party conference in Brighton.

Troops Out of Afghanistan - 24 October, London.