LENIN'S TOMB

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

Carry On the Brits posted by Richard Seymour

My latest for the Guardian deals with what is marketed as a light-hearted, satirical look at all the countries that Britain has invaded, and with the culture of empire nostalgia and nationalist reflux that it participates in:

The other countries must feel so left out. New research shows that practically everyone has been invaded by British troops at one point or another. A "staggering 90% of the world's nations" have been overrun by the turbulent Brits – Sweden, Mongolia and the Vatican City are among the 22 to have been tragically overlooked.
If you think this is a facetious tone to adopt, it is nothing compared with the knockabout, what-a-larf tone of some of the coverage that has been lavished on this new book. In a way, this is what the book set out to accomplish. As its author says, it is lighthearted fun, and it claims not to take a moral stance on Britain's empire.
In fact, that latter claim is not quite true. To begin with, the very posture of lighthearted satire implies a certain perspective on events that most people might find questionable. Imagine a gentle farce on the Rwandan genocide, and you see how incongruous it is. Moreover, when the author claims that there is much in Britain's imperial past to be proud of, and some aspects that would make one less proud, this is an explicit moral stance. It just happens to be a stance of, at best, moral ambivalence. Such just is the evasive register of empire nostalgia and apologia these days.

Labels: 'british values', british empire, colonialism, history, imperialism, liberal imperialism, nationalism

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Imperialist austerity posted by Richard Seymour

You'll remember Dov Weisglass's 'quip' about putting the Palestinians on a diet. As he put it:

“It’s like a meeting with a dietitian. We need to make the Palestinians lose weight, but not to starve to death.”

Now the cold calculus of Israeli near-starvation policy has been exposed in detail:

After a three-and-a-half-year legal battle waged by the Gisha human rights organization, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories has finally released a 2008 document that detailed its "red lines" for "food consumption in the Gaza Strip."

The document calculates the minimum number of calories necessary, in COGAT's view, to keep Gaza residents from malnutrition at a time when Israel was tightening its restrictions on the movement of people and goods in and out of the Strip, including food products and raw materials. The document states that Health Ministry officials were involved in drafting it, and the calculations were based on "a model formulated by the Ministry of Health ... according to average Israeli consumption," though the figures were then "adjusted to culture and experience" in Gaza.

....

In September 2007, the cabinet, then headed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, decided to tighten restrictions on the movement of people and goods to and from the Gaza Strip. The "red lines" document was written about four months afterward.

The cabinet decision stated that "the movement of goods into the Gaza Strip will be restricted; the supply of gas and electricity will be reduced; and restrictions will be imposed on the movement of people from the Strip and to it." In addition, exports from Gaza would be forbidden entirely. However, the resolution added, the restrictions should be tailored to avoid a "humanitarian crisis."

...

The "red lines" document calculates the minimum number of calories needed by every age and gender group in Gaza, then uses this to determine the quantity of staple foods that must be allowed into the Strip every day, as well as the number of trucks needed to carry this quantity. On average, the minimum worked out to 2,279 calories per person per day, which could be supplied by 1,836 grams of food, or 2,575.5 tons of food for the entire population of Gaza.

Bringing this quantity into the Strip would require 170.4 truckloads per day, five days a week.

From this quantity, the document's authors then deducted 68.6 truckloads to account for the food produced locally in Gaza mainly vegetables, fruit, milk and meat. The documents note that the Health Ministry's data about various products includes the weight of the package (about 1 to 5 percent of the total weight) and that "The total amount of food takes into consideration 'sampling' by toddlers under the age of 2 (adds 34 tons per day to the general population)."

From this total, 13 truckloads were deducted to adjust for the "culture and experience" of food consumption in Gaza, though the document does not explain how this deduction was calculated.

While this adjustment actually led to a higher figure for sugar (five truckloads, compared to only 2.6 under the Health Ministry's original model),
it reduced the quantity of fruits and vegetables (18 truckloads, compared to 28.5), milk (12 truckloads instead of 21.1), and meat and poultry (14 instead of 17.2).

Labels: free palestine, gaza, hamas, humanitarianism, imperialism, Israel, palestine, zionism

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

Marxism 2012 posted by Richard Seymour

Don't forget to come to Marxism 2012, starting tomorrow. There is so much to discuss this year, so many arguments to have, so many people who are wrong about everything, and so much at stake. Greece, austerity, the eurozone, Spain, the coalition, Syria, Egypt, Syriza, Gramsci, Lenin, Althusser, Chinese capitalism, Bolivarianism, the unions, the parties, the bosses, the state, revolution and imperialism. Come. My meeting, you should know, is this Friday at 11.45am, on 'Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism in the Liberal Tradition'. I'll be your badchen for an hour or so, then sign books or talk politics if you want.

Labels: althusser, american anti-imperialism, capitalist state, class, egypt, feminism, gramsci, greece, imperialism, lenin, liberal imperialism, marx, marxism, marxism 2012, race, revolution, socialism, trade unions

Sunday, April 29, 2012

American Insurgents: book and events posted by Richard Seymour

The latest book, American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism, will be hitting the shelves soon - certainly it should already start to be available in the US, and will be arriving in the UK very shortly. I will be doing a launch in the UK probably next month, but US readers should be aware of the following events that will take place while I'm visiting to do my PhD research:

Richard Seymour visits Busboys and Poets in Washington D.C. to discuss his latest book, American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism Sponsored by Teaching For Change, Busboys and Poets, & Haymarket Books Saturday, May 26, 2012 - 5:30am Bus Boys and Poets 2021 14th St NW Washington , DC 20009
American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism, Book Launch Wednesday, May 30, 2012 - 7:00pm TBD Philadelphia , PA 19103
American Insurgents: Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism, Saturday, June 2, 2012 - 7:00pm Puck Building 295 Lafayette Street 4th floor New York, NY 10012

If you do happen to be one of those east coast socialist intellectuals I've been reading about, make an effort to come to one of these events. I'll make it worth your while.

The other thing is, there will be a paperback version of The Liberal Defence of Murder. It will have a new chapter taking things up to date, and will be released (when else?) on 4th July.

Labels: american anti-imperialism, american insurgents, anti-imperialism, antiwar, imperialism, liberalism, socialism, US imperialism

Friday, April 13, 2012

Tahrir: "the revolution is not over" posted by Richard Seymour

Tahrir Square April 2012

Labels: dictatorship, egypt, imperialism, mubarak, occupation, revolution, socialism, tahrir square, US imperialism

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Free speech martyr posted by Richard Seymour

Azhar Ahmed is the latest victim of a concerted effort to re-define racism as "anything that could conceivably offend white people". Ahmed is being prosecuted by police over a statement he made on Facebook. The police say it is a "racially aggravated public order offence".

Look at the statement. There is not a hint of racism in it. To make it racist, one would have to assume that the troops were not just exclusively white, but somehow the bearer of whiteness in its essence. Maybe they are in this day and age; maybe it is through imperialist action and its effects both domestically and internationally that whiteness is produced. But the second assumption one would have to make is that white people are the victims of racist oppression by black people, Muslims and so on. We'll come back to this.

A spokesperson for Yorkshire police said: "He didn't make his point very well and that is why he has landed himself in bother." So, the penalty for not making a point "very well" is prosecution and potentially a sentence of up to six months in prison. The suggestion, though, is that aside from being "racially aggravated" this statement constitutes an incitement to disorder. Of course, it is considerably more even tempered than some sentiments I have expressed myself in the past, though I won't suffer arrest or prosecution for it. In addition, the internet - and Facebook in particular - contains an abundance of pages that really do exist to incite violence. Yet a Muslim sassing our brave boys is too much for the state. Either this suggests that Muslims are an excitable brown rabble, apt to start cutting white people up at the merest hint of block capitals and exclamation marks, or it implies that it is the feelings of offended white people that must be protected, lest they be the ones who are incited. Unsurprisingly the EDL and Casuals United dirt (may I say that, or is it "racially aggravated"?) are delighted. Muslims won't be allowed to sass our brave boys now that the bizzies are 'on our side'. Hurrah for the filth! (Is that okay, or...?)

What is really at stake here? Why are the police behaving like this? The blog of the Index on Censorship website suggests that suspicion of Muslims voicing opposition to the troops is rooted in fear and suspicion resulting from 7/7. To be honest, I think this is lame. The police and the Crown Prosecution Service are not acting out of paranoia. But the blog also makes another suggestion which gets close to the truth in my opinion: "Unconditional support for soldiers is now expected, even as we become increasingly unsure of what they’re doing out there. From the most ardent supporter of the war to the most strident critic, everyone claims to be acting in the interest of Our Brave Boys. This is now not a matter of politics, but loyalty ... the “racially aggravated” charge doesn’t stick, unless one is willing to buy into the notion that Afghanistan is part of an ethno-religious war between “Islam” and “the West”."

This suggests that it is the state, through its action, which is racializing this issue. We know that the state is involved in more than simply the bureaucratic and repressive organization of society. Fundamentally what it does is a kind of moral regulation, ordering the symbolic world, constituting norms and social classifications. Obviously the law, and the criminal justice system which executes the law, is critical to this constitutive action. The state's re-classification of racist crime in such a way as to efface the axis of oppression, to make it such that "racism cuts both ways", was an important precondition for this sort of action. But what is at stake now is an attempt to re-organize the social body behind a resurgent militarism. We have seen the PR efforts aimed at cementing a new consensus that can support war indirectly, or at least neutralise opposition, on the basis of pro-troops sentiment. I think the pukeworthy Military Wives, whatever the producers thought they were doing, was a masterpiece in this sort of propaganda. But consent does not exist in separation from coercion. Violence and, literally, terror is central to how consent is secured. How the police act in producing consent has been dealt with here.

So we could see this prosecution as aberrant, the criminal justice system over-reacting, over-playing its hand, being too fastidious with incitement laws, or whatever. No doubt some will attribute it to nanny-state authoritarianism, and the usual bores will say that the liberals who support anti-racist legislation caused this to happen. I think it would make more sense to see it as a speculative manouevre in the application of an emerging discourse of treason. For that is really the logic of this prosecution. One has to see this question of 'incitement' in connection with the repressive and racialized response to the riots last Summer, and the generalized unease of the British state about the combustibility of the social order. Those police actions extended the repertoire of repressive tactics already formed in relation to the student protests, G20, UK Uncut, the climate camp and so on. As importantly, I think, it has to be seen in the context of the new doctrine of 'total policing', which is essentially about giving the police more of a free hand to intervene in aggressive ways to solve problems of social order, coded as problems of crime prevention. A premium is being placed on preemptive action, literally - I repeat, literally - on terror. In this case, it is disloyalty that is being punished, in a racialized way. The action of the police and courts is about constituting a new field of punishable conduct. And when disloyalty is punished, there really isn't much that can't be included under its canopy.

Labels: 'reverse racism', capitalist state, imperial ideology, imperialism, islamophobia, police, racism, troops

Monday, February 27, 2012

The antiwar movement's dilemma posted by Richard Seymour

My article in The Guardian, drawing on some of the research I did for American Insurgents:

The war on Libya produced a strange effect in British politics. The majority of the public opposed the war, but very little of this opposition was expressed on the streets. Nor is the possibility of intervention in Syria producing sizeable protests as yet.
The first and most obvious reason for this abstention is that behind a general scepticism about war lies a more conflicted sentiment, as people overwhelmingly sympathise with the democratic uprisings in both Syria and Libya. In a situation like this, the ideological relics of "humanitarian intervention" can be reactivated, as they were when the government packaged its bombing of Libya as a limited venture in support of human rights. But this is not the only factor. In the US, the election of Barack Obama took tens of thousands of Democrat-supporting activists off the streets. It would be mistaken to discount an extension of this effect to the UK. The stabilisation of the occupation of Iraq and the subsequent withdrawal of troops has also contributed...

Labels: anti-imperialism, antiwar, egypt, imperialism, iran, libya, middle east, revolution, syria, US imperialism

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Salaried bourgeois on "revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie" posted by Richard Seymour

Zizek's latest for the LRB is proof of that old adage that those who attack multiculturalism in the name of class instantly forfeit their probity on both subjects. Actually, that isn't an old adage. I just made it up. But it is nonetheless true. To explain: Zizek has expended a lot of polemical energy attacking a certain kind of poststructuralist and post-marxist politics for its abandonment of class. But this critique was bound up with a simultaneous attack on 'political correctness', 'multiculturalism', and so forth, in the name of a 'leftist plea for Eurocentrism'. Of course, it was possible to appreciate the former critique without subscribing to the latter. (And if you want a serious critique of post-marxist fashion, you must read Ellen Wood's The Retreat from Class.) But it was never very clear what Zizek understood by 'class', apart from a structuring discursive principle: it was always invoked somewhat dogmatically. If one doesn't expect from Zizek a scientific analysis of social classes, one would at least expect him to know what he thinks classes are. It's quite clear from his latest piece, which re-states some of the theses earlier expounded in Living in the End Times, that he either has no idea, or has a novel theory of classes that he has yet to explain.

Rent, surplus value and the "general intellect"

Zizek's main argument is that the current global upheavals comprise a "revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie" in danger of losing its privileges. He begins by making an argument about the source of ruling class wealth in advanced capitalist formations. Taking the example of Bill Gates, he asserts that the latter's wealth derives not from exploiting workers more successfully - "Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary" - but "because Microsoft has imposed itself as an almost universal standard, practically monopolising the field, as one embodiment of what Marx called the ‘general intellect’, by which he meant collective knowledge in all its forms". In other words, Microsoft doesn't extract surplus value but rent, through its monopolistic control of information. This is paradigmatic of "the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge". The influence of post-operaismo in all this is clear: Zizek accepts and expounds the idea that intellectual labour is "immaterial" labour, which he maintains has a predominant or "hegemonic" role in late capitalism. On this basis, he asserts that orthodox marxist value theory has become problematic, as "immaterial" labour simply cannot be appropriated in the way that "material" labour can.

Before going any further, just note that this whole line of argument is a red herring. Even accepting the narrow focus on Microsoft's "intellectual workers" as a paradigm of 21st century work, their "relatively high salary" has no direct bearing on whether they are efficiently exploited. Or rather, if it indicates anything, it would tend to be that they are likely to be far more efficiently exploited than other workers. Globally, this is the trend: the higher the wages, the higher the rate of exploitation. It is also the trend historically: the famous high wages offered by Ford were possible in part because the techniques of Taylorism allowed the more effective extraction of relative surplus value. (The distinction between relative and absolute surplus value would be a fairly basic one for anyone claiming to operate within a marxisant radius.) This is not to say that all of Microsoft's "intellectual workers" are therefore diamond proletarians. Classes are formed in the context of class struggle, and the extent to which these workers are 'proletarianised' or 'embourgeoised' will depend on how successfully managers have subordinated the labour process, etc. Nor does it strike me as a wholly unreasonable proposition that Gates' main source of added value is monopoly rent - it is arguable, at least. But Zizek's argument in support of this idea is simply a non-sequitur.

Marx, the sock puppet

Zizek goes on to explain how his approach differs from that of orthodox marxism, and much of his argument hinges on how he sets up Marx as a foil. Thus: "The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension)." Setting aside the curious claim that Marx "overlooked" the "social dimension" of capitalist productive relations, it is worth re-stating what Zizek undoubtedly already knows: the writings on the 'general intellect' are part of an exceptionally brief fragment in the Grundrisse, and would thus be hard pressed to 'envisage' anything; nonetheless, the description of the "general intellect" in the Grundrisse as a "direct force of production" manifest in the "development of fixed capital" assumes that the "general intellect" is already privatized.

What Zizek means, I assume, is that Marx did not anticipate the monopolization of "general social knowledge", and therefore did not anticipate that the major class struggles in an advanced capitalist formation might be over the share of rent rather than over the direct extraction of surplus value. This is clear in the way that he treats the example of oil. For, according to Zizek: "There is a permanent struggle over who gets this rent: citizens of the Third World or Western corporations. It’s ironic that in explaining the difference between labour (which in its use produces surplus value) and other commodities (which consume all their value in their use), Marx gives oil as an example of an ‘ordinary’ commodity. Any attempt now to link the rise and fall in the price of oil to the rise or fall in production costs or the price of exploited labour would be meaningless: production costs are negligible as a proportion of the price we pay for oil, a price which is really the rent the resource’s owners can command thanks to its limited supply." So, this raises two questions: i) did Marx really not anticipate in his theory the possibility that rent extraction would be a source of major class struggles?; and ii) as a corollary, does the example of oil and its absurdly high prices undermine the labour theory of value?

This is fairly straightforward to establish. First of all, the evidence of Marx's writings is that he understood that there could exist a class or fraction of people whose income depended on rent extraction. Marx discussed two main types of rent. These were, differential rent, and absolute ground rent. To explain the first type of rent, it is necessary to specify some implications of the labour theory of value, which Zizek maintains is outmoded. First of all, if the value of goods is determined by the socially necessary labour time invested in them, it would tend to follow that if less labour time is needed to make the goods then over time the exchange value of these goods would decline. But the fact is that producers are in competition with one another for market share, so will tend to invest in labour saving devices so as to reduce their labour costs. And even if, over time, the replication of this tendency throughout the economy - enforced by imperative of competition - the result is to reduce the total profit on the goods, the immediate effect is to enrich whoever temporarily has a more efficient firm as a result. They obtain a differential rent because their investment enables them to obtain a larger share of a diminishing pool of surplus value. The second type of rent, absolute rent, needs no lengthy exposition here, but can be said to be that type of rent that would most naturally arise in monopoly situations. At any rate, it's reasonable to suppose that Bill Gates' wealth must embody some of both types of rent, alongside an unknown quantity of direct surplus labour.

Secondly, Marx's labour theory of value is not rebutted by the fluctuations of oil prices. The theory is not supposed to explain price fluctuations, which respond to supply and demand. The exchange value is an average across the productive chain; there is no mathematically fixed relation between the price of one particular commodity and the exchange value that exists as an average over the whole class of commodities which changes over time. Nor is the theory endangered by the fact that the relation between supply and demand can be manipulated in monopoly situations to drastically increase the actual price of a good. I am well aware that there are valid controversies regarding the labour theory of value. Nor do I imagine that Kliman's heroic work will completely save the orthodox theory from its doubters, many of whom aren't even operating on the same theoretical terrain. But Zizek's challenge is, purely on theoretical grounds, ineffectual. It is a straw man that he dissects to such devastating rhetorical effect in this article. For the sake of concision, I omit other instances in which he travesties Marx, both in this and other articles - we'd be here for a long, tedious time.

The "salaried bourgeoisie"

Zizek uses terms extraordinarily loosely. Take the "salaried bourgeoisie", whose "revolt" apparently motivates this piece. They are said to be leading most of the strikes taking place. Zizek thus presumably includes in this groups like the public sector workers who have struck in most European countries. Yet, he doesn't say what makes them a "salaried bourgeoisie". His useage implies a novel class theory, but the closest he comes to defining this term is where he specifies that he means those who enjoy a 'privilege', being a surplus over the minimum wage. Now, it's not at first clear what he means by the minimum wage. There are, of course, legally enforced minimum wages in a number of advanced capitalist societies, but he doesn't mean that. That would be arbitrary and would tell us nothing directly about productive relations. But mark what he does mean by the 'minimum wage': "an often mythic point of reference whose only real example in today’s global economy is the wage of a sweatshop worker in China or Indonesia". This no less arbitrary, as Zizek himself acknowledges.

Now, while the manner of his exposition implies a critical distance from such concepts, he nonetheless deploys them, arguing that they are themselves constitutive of a politically and discursively constructed division of labour: "The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers, as managers who are qualified to earn more by virtue of their competence (which is why pseudo-scientific ‘evaluation’ is crucial: it legitimises disparities). Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for – some – intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc). The evaluative procedure used to decide which workers receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability."

In this sense, the "surplus wage" that characterises the exploitation of the proletariat by the "salaried bourgeoisie" is a discursive fiction, unanchored in real productive relations. Still, having thus qualified his terms, it is nonetheless clear that it corresponds to some material processes. After all, if the labour theory of value no longer adequately captures the workings of surplus extraction, and if the 'hegemonic' pattern of accumulation is the extraction of rent, then the 'surplus wage' has some material basis as that which is paid out of a share of the rent (largely extracted by Western corporations from the citizens of the Third World). Further, Zizek goes on to maintain that the efficacy of such 'classes' is not the less real for their being political and discursive. It explains current political behaviour, he says (and here I must quote at length):

"The notion of surplus wage also throws new light on the continuing ‘anti-capitalist’ protests. In times of crisis, the obvious candidates for ‘belt-tightening’ are the lower levels of the salaried bourgeoisie: political protest is their only recourse if they are to avoid joining the proletariat. Although their protests are nominally directed against the brutal logic of the market, they are in effect protesting about the gradual erosion of their (politically) privileged economic place. Ayn Rand has a fantasy in Atlas Shrugged of striking ‘creative’ capitalists, a fantasy that finds its perverted realisation in today’s strikes, most of which are held by a ‘salaried bourgeoisie’ driven by fear of losing their surplus wage. These are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians. Who dares strike today, when having a permanent job is itself a privilege? Not low-paid workers in (what remains of) the textile industry etc, but those privileged workers who have guaranteed jobs (teachers, public transport workers, police). This also accounts for the wave of student protests: their main motivation is arguably the fear that higher education will no longer guarantee them a surplus wage in later life."

Zizek goes on to qualify this observation - each protest must be taken on its own merits, we can't dismiss them all, etc. - but is clearly arguing that the general thrust of the strikes and protests is in defense of relative privilege. This is especially true of the "special case" of Greece, where "in the last decades, a new salaried bourgeoisie (especially in the over-extended state administration) was created thanks to EU financial help, and the protests were motivated in large part by the threat of an end to this". So far the only evidence offered for the existence of this 'salaried bourgeoisie' is in its ostensibly discernible, concrete effects in the political behaviour of social layers affected by crisis. Yet this behaviour can be explained far more efficiently by the class interests of fractions of the proletariat who, due in part to superior organisation vis-a-vis their employers, have obtained a degree of job security and in some cases relatively high wages. In which case, the concept is useless.

As is typical with Zizek, each step in his argument is characterised by an astonishing lack of precision, a slipshod and loose useage of terms, straw man attacks, sock puppetry and so on. There are lots of fireworks, but little real theoretical action: all show, no tell, an empty performance of emancipatory politics. And I just thought I'd spell that out because so many people messaged, prodded and otherwise cajoled me into criticising this latest from Zizek. I hope you're satisfied.

Labels: austerity, bourgeoisie, class, class struggle, immaterial labour, imperialism, rent, ruling class, salaried bourgeoisie, strikes, working class, zizek

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

The case of the Nazi drinking game posted by Richard Seymour

Why do the rich and right-wing in Britain so love their Nazi uniforms? Whether it is Tory students, royals, politicians, or upper class jocks, the naughty pleasures of pretending to be a fascist bomber or concentration camp guard are irresistible for some. Lately, some LSE students, most likely fitting into the category of the aforementioned upper class jocks, were discovered engaging in a drinking game called the 'Nazi Ring of Fire'. You can imagine the sorts of rituals involved - saluting the fuhrer, that sort of thing. A Jewish student who objected to this display was assaulted. Now, I'm sure the students involved don't quite get the furore that has resulted. Most likely, they think the affair was maybe a bit off-side, but otherwise bloody good sport. Too bad for them. Let them suck it up.

I'm rather more concerned about the way the political reaction has panned out. First of all, it's worth saying that there's a fairly sensible article by Jay Stoll, president of the LSESU's Jewish Society in the LSE newspaper, The Beaver. (I don't know why they called it that.) Stoll rejects the scapegoating of Muslims for antisemitism, and suggests that the usual culprit is actually the upper middle class boarding school type. That's probably true in the UK. Even here, though, there's already something odd going on. The newspaper calls the affair an 'antisemitic' drinking game. Now, I hope you understand what I mean when I say this is bordering on euphemistic. I just mean that there's a lot more involved in Nazism than antisemitism, and the decision to inhabit a Nazi persona for kicks signifies something more than judeophobia.

What more? Well, what more is involved in 'national socialist' politics? Nationalism, anticommunism, anti-liberalism, patriarchy, homophobia, strains of virulent biological racism other than antisemitism, social Darwinism, extreme political authoritarianism, class chauvinism, contempt for the poor and weak, etc. It is absolutely correct to identify and attack the vicious antisemitism involved in such Nazi performance, particularly as it was a Jewish student who was assaulted. But antisemitism won't stand in for every evil of Nazism. I think what's really going on with such people is not just antisemitism, but more fundamentally a certain admiration for supermen, hatred for the weak and vulnerable, enjoyment in the imperial bunting, the festivities and aesthetics of domination and hierarchy. It's not fascism, but the licensed pleasure of a class on the offensive, people who are intent on clinging on to everything they have and taking more, exhaling with gratification and relief as the opposition is violently policed, or bombed.

In this connection, a less sensible response to the affair came from Tanya Gold of The Guardian, who usually makes her wedge writing lighter fare. (I click on the links, sometimes). She proves the old adage that if antisemitism prompts you to defend Israel, you have already forfeited your probity on both subjects. Actually, that isn't an old adage, I just made it up: but it is nonetheless true. I suppose one could make the 'paradoxical' point that Israel is organised antisemitism, which is also true. Or, in a more elaborate version of the same basic idea: Israel is an apartheid state that can only exist through the expropriation and murder of Palestinians, and to identify its interests with those of Jewish people as such is to defile the latter, to defame them, to blood libel them. This, while correct, is utterly inadequate, because the perspective of Israel's victims is lost in this. What I really mean is that defending the state of Israel by reference to instances of antisemitism in modern day Europe is, wittingly or otherwise, another way of identifying with a would-be master race - with no sense of irony. Worse still when they rank instances of legitimate protest by pro-Palestinian groups as examples of mounting antisemitism, or worry about a "demand that Jews denounce Israel if they wish to be accepted in polite society", as if it wasn't the victims of Israeli oppression and their allies who are debarred from 'polite society'. Of course, Zionism is not fascism, but nor is it the eternal other of fascism. You can't have it both ways. Either racist, nationalist, imperialist ideology is objectionable, in which case its organisation in a state is calamitous, or you must count the thuggish Nazi impersonators as bedfellows. This is a choice that Israel's founders and planners have always faced, and they have always opted for the latter without embarrassment.

Labels: antisemitism, chauvinism, class, fascism, gaza, imperialism, nationalism, nazism, palestine, racism, west bank

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Another humanitarian intervention. posted by Richard Seymour

I mentioned the divisions in Syria's opposition a while ago, principally over the question of imperialist intervention and armed insurgency. These divisions have recently frustrated unity talks between the different opposition factions. The fact that Syria has an organised left, and a strong anti-imperialist pole in its opposition, makes intervention for the US (and EU) a much more difficult proposition than the light blitz of Libya. It turns out that this may not be sufficient to prevent an intervention, however. A recent Salon article describes how a coalition of lib imps and neocons is organising around the possibility of a quick, flighty regime-change in Syria - not just in the US, but in Europe.

As has become the pattern in the Obama executive, the main vector for this kind of 'humanitarian intervention' in the administration is Clinton's State Department. It was by persuading Clinton of the virtues of intervention in Libya that the lib imps - people like Samantha Power, Susan Rice and Anne-Marie Slaughter - won the case for war against its Realist opponents. Beyond the US, France is once again leading the drive for war within the EU. This may represent (the culmination of) a shift from the old Gaullist policy of independence from Washington, but it has a certain logic. France is the original home of the doctrine of droit de l'ingerence, a concept it put to use in interventions in Chad, the Ivory Coast, Yugoslavia and elsewhere. More generally, France's political dominance within an EU that has no centralised military authority would tend to give it a leading role where European interests in the Middle East are concerned. The more intriguing factor here is Turkey. Ankara's elites aren't too fond of the idea of releasing their grip on Cyprus to please the EU, and have in recent years slowed down a spate of reforms intended to ease membership of the Union. Nonetheless, their hostility to the Syrian regime is plain enough in their decision to allow exiles and the 'Free Syria Army' to operate from within Turkey. Could it be that the Turkish regime will this time allow itself to be used as a launch pad for an imperialist intervention?

That, of course, would still leave the question of how the Syrian terrain can be negotiated by any imperial coalition of the willing. This is critical both for the warmongers and for the antiwar-mongers. Those waging the intervention will need to be assured of having some sort of social base for a post-Assad regime once they've created it. As for the antiwar-mongers. Well, I don't wish to be rude, but I can already imagine the divisions and recriminations - some defending Assad, others plugging humanitarian intervention, the balkanization of opinion among anti-imperialists, the hair-splitting. All that, unless there was actually a powerful Syrian revolt against intervention. The pro-imperialist position within the Syrian opposition is occupied by the Syrian National Council (SNC), comprising liberals and conservative Islamists, mostly led by emigres with little basis in the domestic grassroots. The SNC is calling for the establishment of "safe zones" Predictably, but not accurately, pro-war politicians and diplomats deem the SNC a more representative organisation than its rivals. The National Committee for Democratic Change, as well as the local coordination bodies, have warned against seeking intervention. Despite vicious repression, they have also resisted moves toward an armed insurgency, perhaps fearing a repeat of the Libyan situation where early gains were quickly reversed by a far better organised state.

Perhaps the greatest problem for any intervention is the resilence of the opposition, despite the killing which the opposition estimates has claimed 5,000 people. The regime doesn't look as if it is about to collapse, but at the same time the opposition continues to draw enormous crowds and inflict damaging strikes. Libya was a veritable cakewalk for NATO because the opposition was being defeated rapidly, its emancipatory impulse was being snuffed out, and a leadership comprising dissident bourgeois factions had filled the vacuum left by the masses when the latter began to retreat under Qadhafi's assault. Syria's opposition has not experienced anything like this yet, and is thus no easy meat for co-optation.

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', air strikes, dictatorship, imperialism, libya, middle east, NATO, revolution, syria, US imperialism

Tuesday, January 03, 2012

American Insurgents: A brief history of American anti-imperialism posted by Richard Seymour

Coming soon:

American Insurgents is a revealing, often surprising history of anti-imperialism in the United States since the American Revolution. It charts the movements against empire from the Indian Wars and the expansionism of the slave South, to the Anti-Imperialist League of Mark Twain and Jane Addams; from the internationalists opposing World War I to the Vietnam War and beyond. It shows that there is a surprising, often ignored tradition of radical anti-imperialism in the US. Far from being ‘isolationist’ in the fashion of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, the book contends, these traditions were often the most internationalist and cosmopolitan currents in US political history. The most ambitious movements formed direct relationships with the victims of US expansionism, from the abolitionists uniting with Native Americans to stop colonial genocide to the solidarity movements in central America and the ‘human shields’ in Palestine and Iraq. Far from being the privilege of the rich and educated, antiwar activism has been most evident among the poor and oppressed. It has been most militant when visibly connected to domestic struggles and interests, such as slavery, civil rights, women’s oppression and class. Above all, the book contextualizes each anti-imperialist movement in the evolving structure of US expansionism and dominance, and explains how some movements succeeded while others failed. In so doing, it offers a vital perspective for those organizing antiwar resistance today.

Labels: abolitionism, anti-imperialism, colonialism, feminism, imperial ideology, imperialism, left, liberalism, racism, slavery, socialism, us politics

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Military Wives and the sickening sentimentality of the serial killer posted by Richard Seymour

The Military Wives Choir is concentrated evil. It is vicious, stupid and banal. It is the worst form of sentimentality. Their husbands murder Afghans for queen and country, and they murder music for the same righteous cause. Wherever you are, soldier boy, know that the love of your counterpart is so strong, so thoroughly adequate, that it is apt to suddenly materialise into a substance able to "keep you safe" from the foreigners you are busy subduing in the rough hinterlands. Yet at the very same time, this love is so elevated, so ethereal, so much above the humdrum and quotidian, that it is almost as if her heart will, as it were, "build a bridge of light across both time and space". Oh, but there is more, cherished mercenary, much more to say on this love. For its cosmic ordering is capable of reducing the distance between Nottingham and Helmand by various simple expedients. Your hearts will "beat as one", for one. This while your amour holds you in her dreams each night "until your task is done", O "prince of peace".

Comrades and friends, you will forgive me if I end the assay there. There is only so much a man can wear his spleen on his sleeve. But lest I seem to fall into a crusty disdain for the cheesier tropes of the pop-tastic, and particularly the romantic ballad, allow me just to say that I have exactly the same weaknesses in this regard as every single one of you. For example, I cried when watching some piece of shit film whose name I forget. (Fuck you, that's what it was called.) And I emoted in a similar fashion over that song that everyone bought one Christmas, and I wasn't tipsy on mulled wine when I did. These cultural technologies produce many of the same reactions in all of us because they are intended to do just that, because they operate on basically identical raw material. But this imperial doggerel is a sick, chauvinist parody of love. If you like this song, you don't have love; you don't even have taste: what you have is a military-industrial infestation.

To illustrate. Jonathan Freedland's tribute notably fails to mention except obliquely the motivating context for this song, the "task" - of bombing, strafing, torturing, disappearing, poisoning, assassinating, subjugating - that is responsible for its sole element of genuine pathos. As such, he can't acknowledge the ethnocentric bases for his appreciation of the song, the mixture of patriotic and narcissistic affect that is mobilised within its construction of a community of harmonious vocalists. He is perhaps unwitting in his cliche when he describes the solidarity achieved through common struggle without the expense of losers, or of the sadism that usually comes with television pop spectaculars. But the idea that a national community forged in war suddenly discovers its manners, its civic virtues, its solidarity and mutualism, is a shopworn antique. And were Freedland aware of the pedigree of this old cynosure of reaction, he would also be aware that the cruelty and malice whose absence he celebrates is, in such cases, merely displaced. That is, the usual (class, racial, sexual) antagonisms that suppurate resentment and cruelty in the culture - which are so expertly manipulated by Endemol, Zodiak, RTL, the BBC and the producers of all that property porn and eugenic fetishism - have simply been externalised. They are still there, in the form of an absence. Behind the woefully lyricised sentiments of the gals in the 'queen and country' t-shirts, something is occluded. That is the emotional, intellectual, religious and social life of those designated by the euphemism, 'task'. Naturally, their love, their pathos, is a matter of indifference and barely submerged contempt, which one delicately builds bridges around and over.

I do not know what motivated BBC2 and Gareth Malone to turn The Choir into a special on 'Military Wives'. Possibly, it's an opaque satire intended to illustrate the Frankfurt school's analysis of popular culture, which in this day and age looks blithely over-optimistic. More plausibly, I suspect that the Ministry of Defence may have had a hand in this monster. Even if they did not, the aptitude of this sort of format for such appropriation and re-territorialisation is a reminder of an important aspect of our conjuncture. Ideologically, the ruling class is weak. Its legitimacy is fragile. Politically, it is disunited (though it doesn't do to underestimate what a cohering factor class struggle can be). Yet, its technologies of ideological rule are vastly more sophisticated than they have been in the past. The surprising 'visibility' of the military-industrial-entertainment complex during the 'war on terror' merely allowed us to see the tip of a cultural iceberg, one formed by the concentration and centralisation of cultural capital and its fusion with the state. The 'Military Wives' song that is presently #1 in the UK charts is a small tribute to its power, its ability to infantilise and temporarily stupefy audiences with artistic cliche and spectacle.

Far be it from me to suggest that a few more hit songs like this will have us marching cheerfully into Tehran - no such thing - but this does have long range effects, even if these aren't computable according to any simple calculus of stimulus-response. We cannot afford to be complacent about such ordure. We have to destroy it, instantly, utterly. It won't do to simply buy a few Nirvana singles to get them to the top of the charts instead of Military Wives. That won't even work at this point. We have to start confronting this military fetishism wherever it insinuates itself in daily life. The 'help for heroes' boondoggle should be noisily boycotted; anyone collecting money for military causes in a bear outfit should be mercilessly ridiculed; young air, navy and army cadets sent out to pack bags at Marks and Spencer should be told exactly how and where to get a life; the poppies should be burned - not just a few, in a symbolic Islam4UK-style action, but all of them in a mass cremation of postcolonial bunting; and any family members who actually sign up to wear a uniform of the armed forces in Afghanistan or anywhere else should be shunned, not loved. That's a map of our kulturkampf for 2012.

Labels: culture industry, imperial ideology, imperialism, military-industrial complex, Pop Culture

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Discovering the capitalist network posted by Richard Seymour

Obviously, the New Scientist is disingenuous to pretend that no studies have hitherto confirmed global structures of ownership in this pattern, or that it has thus far been the preserve of - what else? - 'conspiracy theory'. There has been tonnes of sociological work on the workings of capitalist class power, the role of corporations and finance, etc. Nonetheless, this looks serious:

From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

The research was apparently aimed at finding means of stabilising capitalism - an impossible dream. The significance of these findings lie elsewhere. It isn't about networks of 'conspiracy' either. Capital is value in motion. The class power of the capitalist class derives from its accumulation of surplus value by putting money into circulation as capital. These figures illustrate the concrete effects of the neoliberal phase of capital accumulation, in which the combined structures of imperialism and financialised capitalism have concentrated the control of surplus value, and thus of investment and all the prerogatives and benefits that come from that, in the hands of a very small number of people disproportionately based in Manhattan: that's the Dollar-Wall Street regime. It is on the basis of that general understanding that one can then drill down into the subject of networking and class cohesion, which is what is meant by 'conspiracy'. One of the points made in Michael Useem's study, The Inner Circle, is that class-wide perspectives and solidarity among the corporate ruling class is underpinned not just by social cohesion, philanthropy, lobbies and political action committees, but by practises such as the sharing of managers between multiple firms, dispatching promising managers to be non-executive directors on other company boards, etc. Such practises allow capitalist directors to gain a 'business scan', and collectively form part of what Useem calls the 'interlocking directorate'. Financial corporations play a particular role as the nerve centres of production, and the centralisation and concentration of capital has been most advanced in this sector. This means that the 'interlocking directorate' is much more condensed within finance. So, these findings can be used to expand on previous work to illustrate something about the current distribution of capitalist class power. It's the 1%, stupid.

Labels: capitalism, capitalist crisis, class struggle, finance capital, imperialism, neoliberalism, ruling class

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Libyan divisions, and a mirage of revolution posted by Richard Seymour

Oh, and while I'm here, this criticism overlaps with something I'm doing at the moment, so I may as well just deal with it now:

Richard Seymour has a more hardline anti-interventionist post on Libya which, while it makes a number of important points, nevertheless seems to me like it strikes rather the wrong note. Seymour observes that “The rebel army is commanded by someone who is most likely a CIA agent”, and goes on to predict that the US and its allies will quickly move to set up a pliable regime pro-Western “liberals” who will go along with the designs of neoliberalism.
I agree with this, as far as it goes. But Seymour goes on to say that “I don’t think we’re witnessing a revolutionary process here.” This strikes me as far too simplistic. The leadership of the TNC may not be revolutionaries, but they appear to have only the most tenuous control over the forces that actually defeated Gaddafi, like the Berber units in the Western mountains and the dozens of privately organized militias. Recall that it was just a few weeks ago that the rebels looked to be too busy assassinating one another to make any military gains. The usual bourgeois foreign-policy types are warning of splits and “instability” on the rebel side, because what the US and NATO want most is a stable and cooperative regime. But the fractiousness and disorganization that so terrifies the Western foreign policy intelligentsia is precisely what may yet allow a revolutionary dynamic to emerge.

A few quick points, then. First, tellingly, the author does not say that there is a revolutionary situation in Libya, merely that a "revolutionary dynamic" may emerge from the current chaos. So, although I may be accused of striking the wrong note, I am not accused of being wrong. Secondly, if there is a danger in striking the wrong note, at least part of that danger comes from wishful thinking. If a revolutionary situation is to emerge from the fratricidal chaos among Libya's elites today (which is real), we have to ask where it would come from, who would lead it, what would be its dominant political thrust, etc? If we're talking about something that is on the cards and not merely a distant hope, it should be possible to specify what sort of alliance and what sort of political leadership might be involved.

I grant that the divisions in the leadership reflect the difficulties that the dominant neoliberal clique have had in incorporating a wider array of social forces under their leadership. Even so, the basis for these divisions appears to be largely over fiefdoms, and very little over popular demands. On the other hand, there appears to be shockingly little dissent over the ongoing matter of racial cleansing which, far from abating, is intensifying. Put the hollow expressions of regret from the transitional council (NTC), regarding "a small number of incidents" for which they bear primary responsibility, to one side. Scapegoating 'Africans' is just how a neoliberal elite in alliance with former colonial powers preserves its 'national' legitimacy. Yet it is unlikely that this would work as effectively as it does if the opposition had a left-wing, or an organised labour contingent. As yet it has neither.

It is also true that there is a certain amount of fluidity in the situation and, in the interregnum, a limited space for localised grassroots initiative. Yet, for this to become a revolutionary situation, masses of people would have to not only break with the NTC, but also identify with a rising alternative leadership. The fact is that the Libyan uprising, from inception, has had no alternative leadership. (This is not unrelated to there being no left-wing, and no organised labour contingent).* The NTC's weaknesses do not, therefore, add up to strength on the part of potential popular rivals. And the NTC does now have the immense resources of imperialism backing it up.

So, where is this revolutionary potential? Is it anything other than a shibboleth at this point?

*This isn't an immutable fact, but it is the reality at present. And it happens to be rooted in a couple of facts about Libya's development under Qadhafi. First, the Jamahiriyya didn't allow political parties or independent trade unions because, in theory, it didn't need them. It was supposed to be governed by popular committees and workers' self-management (outside the crucial oil and banking sectors, of course). In practise, Libya was a national security state like its regional equivalents, in which the old ruling class - particularly those sections integrated into the state - saw its power consolidated, and even legitimised under a seemingly radical new regime. The only sustained opposition that could develop took the form of armed Islamist insurgency. Unsurprisingly, the only potential opposition to the neoliberals today are the Islamists who, contrary the scaremongering of some pro-Qadhafi opinion, are not in a position to take over the country. Secondly, the social basis of the dominant faction of the opposition derives from Qadhafi's re-orientation toward the US and EU since the late 1990s. This meant further integration into global capitalism along neoliberal lines as part of the price of relaxing sanctions, which had cost the economy billions.

The arrival of platoons of lobbyists, oil industry flaks, economists, statesmen and neoliberal technocrats, epecially in the latter half of the 2000s, did a great deal to accelerate the development of a private sector capitalist elite. Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter played an important role in a programme designed to "create a new pro-business elite", with dozens passing through a 'leadership' programme run by the Boston consultancy firm, Monitor Group. Porter, along with Saif al-Qadhafi, helped launch the Libyan Economic Development Board which pushed privatization policies. This was then headed by current chair of the National Transitional Council, Mahmoud Jibril. Vice-chair Ali al-Issawi also helped develop the same policies as a minister responsible for the Economy, Trade & Investment. Thus, only when a strategic cleavage opened up within Libya's ruling class - I would characterise it as one between a relatively conservative state capitalist elite cautious about reform and a neoliberal elite impatient for reform, a fissure accelerated by the region's uprisings - was it possible for a viable mass political opposition to emerge. It's precisely because of the ruling class split that the Libyan rebels were able to so quickly achieve an advantage that the Egyptian revolutionaries lacked - dual power, centred on the control of major urban centres. Yet it's quite logical in these circumstances for a section of the ruling class to be politically, ideologically and even institutionally dominant within that opposition. This is what happened. The alliance with NATO consolidated that dominance, after the revolutionary dynamic had been crushed by Qadhafi's forces.

Labels: imperialism, libya, middle east, NATO, qadhafi, revolution, US imperialism

Monday, August 29, 2011

Racist vengeance in Libya posted by Richard Seymour

"This is a bad time to be a black man in Libya," reports Alex Thomson in this worrying segment:

There is frightening evidence of racist killings taking place across Libya as elements in the opposition-cum-regime now act on the unfounded rumours that "African" mercenaries acted as Qadhafi's fifth column. As Kim Septunga reports:

Around 30 men lay decomposing in the heat. Many of them had their hands tied behind their back, either with plastic handcuffs or ropes. One had a scarf stuffed into his mouth. Almost all of the victims were black men. Their bodies had been dumped near the scene of two of the fierce battles between rebel and regime forces in Tripoli.

"Come and see. These are blacks, Africans, hired by Gaddafi, mercenaries," shouted Ahmed Bin Sabri, lifting the tent flap to show the body of one dead patient, his grey T-shirt stained dark red with blood, the saline pipe running into his arm black with flies. Why had an injured man receiving treatment been executed? Mr Sabri, more a camp follower than a fighter, shrugged. It was seemingly incomprehensible to him that anything wrong had been done.

There have been lynchings, mass arrests and beatings previously. A painted slogan of the rebels in Misrata read, "the brigade for purging slaves, black skin". But this, taking place as it does in the aftermath of triumph, is a qualitatively distinct phase, and it is a disgrace to the original emancipatory upsurge. I argued previously that the more conservative, bourgeois elements in the opposition had every reason to promote racist scapegoating. Since they had no interest in revolutionising Libyan society, it made perfect sense for them to say that the problem is just Qadhafi and some imported mercenaries, that all of Libya was united against the dictator and would throw him off were it not for the fifth columnists. By mobilising the elements of racism that had thrived under Qadhafi, it displaces social antagonisms that are internal to Libya, reflecting class and other divisions, onto a nationalist plane. No one need think of expropriating the wealth of the capitalist dissident if they're busy usurping the life of the black worker. I also argued that this was one area in which the rebels could even do worse than Qadhafi. If racism was never the dominant motive in the rebellion, it was nonetheless a motive of those dominant in the rebellion. The prisons of Benghazi and elsewhere would not have filled with black and immigrant workers without the approval of the rebel leadership. The coming days will tell whether this barbarism is to last. I suspect the pressure from the new regime's international sponsors will be to come down hard on it, as racist lynch mobs tend to make a fool of anyone calling them - I don't know - "human rights dissidents". But the new regime does have a promise to keep with the EU, viz. upholding the blockade on immigration from Africa to Europe, which will tend to institutionalise racist practises.

Labels: dictatorship, eu, immigration, imperialism, libya, middle east, NATO, qadhafi, racism, revolution

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Gilbert Achcar and the decent left posted by Richard Seymour

Gilbert Achcar separates the decent from the indecent left:

At the onset of NATO’s Operation Unified Protector in Libya, the main justification for it was that Gaddafi’s forces would massacre the resistance and civilians living in the places taken by the resistance, especially Benghazi. What has been learned since then about how likely such a scenario was?
In situations of urgency, there is no better judge than the people directly concerned, and there was unanimity on that score. Did you ever hear of any significant group in Benghazi opposed to the request of a No-Fly zone made to the UN and advocating another way to prevent Gaddafi’s troops from taking the city? ... Anyone who from far away disputes the fact that Benghazi would have been crushed is just lacking decency in my view. Telling a besieged people from the safety of a Western city that they are cowards – because that’s what disputing their claim that they were facing a massacre amounts to – is just indecent.
That’s about the balance of forces. What about the likelihood that if Benghazi had fallen there would have been a massacre? Isn’t that still a matter of speculation?
No, not at all. Let me first remind you that the repression that Gaddafi unleashed in February, from the very beginning of the Libyan uprising, was much greater than anything else we have seen since then. Take even the case of Syria: today, several months after the protest movement started in March, it is estimated that the number of people killed in Syria has reached 2,200. The range of estimates of the number of people who were killed in Libya in the first month alone, before the Western intervention, starts at more than that figure and reaches 10,000. The use by Gaddafi of all sorts of weapons, including his air force, was much more extensive and intensive than anything we have seen until now in other Arab countries.
... When Adolphe Thiers’s forces took back Paris at the time of the Commune in 1871, with much less lethal weaponry they killed and executed 25,000 persons. This is the kind of massacre that Benghazi was facing, and that is why I said under such circumstances – when the city’s population and the rebellion requested, even implored the UN to provide them with air cover, and in the absence of any alternative – that it was neither acceptable nor decent from the comfort of London or New York to say, ‘No to the no-fly zone’. Those on the left who did so were in my view reacting out of knee-jerk anti-imperialism, showing little care for the people concerned on the ground. That’s not my understanding of what it means to be on the left. [Emphases added]

How have we come from "a legitimate and necessary debate" to decrying opposition to NATO intervention as "indecent"? How has this lifelong anti-imperialist made this symptomatic descent into the trope of decency, the corollary of an attempt to morally browbeat opponents? It is probably indicative of a certain insecurity in Achcar's position. Let me explain. Achcar maintains that Benghazi was facing a massacre on a scale of Thiers' crushing of the Paris Commune - implicitly, by virtue of superior weaponry, it would be an even greater massacre in relative terms. If Achcar's example holds, then a proportionately similar massacre in Benghazi would have involved the systematic and indiscriminate killing of at least 8,000 people in a short space of time. Leaving aside the question of decency for a second, and also leaving aside the possibility of non-military resolutions to this crisis (no one else bothered to pursue this, so why should I?), have we any reason to doubt that something like this would have happened in the event of Benghazi being conquered?

We do. Taking Achcar's example further, a proportionately similar massacre in Misrata would result in the systematic and indiscriminate killing of about 5,000 people in a short space of time. But Human Rights Watch documents a total of 257 deaths over the first two months of war in the city of Misrata, including both combatants and civilians (though the majority are estimated to be combatants). Misrata suffered some of the worst, most sustained fighting. Its recapture by Qadhafi's forces during March would have provided the opportunity for a horrendous, indiscriminate massacre with thousands of executions. Yet nothing of the kind occured. Estimates of the total number of deaths vary, of course, and it is unlikely that HRW documented every single death. The highest estimate I've seen for the city is from a news report in mid-May, where the total number of deaths on all sides, from all war-related causes, was estimated at 1,000+. This is suggestive of deaths resulting from insurgency and counterinsurgency. In fact, there do not seem to be any documented massacres approaching the scale Achcar refers to, despite Qadhafi's advances in reclaiming much lost territory during the war. So, the entire case for the no-fly zone is indeed based on speculation. There are good grounds on which one may doubt it.

Deferring the question of decency for yet another moment, there is another problem here. Achcar depicts a range of estimates of deaths resulting from killings in the first month alone as ranging between somewhat higher than 2,200 and as high as 10,000. It is quite correct that Qadhafi went further, faster in repressing the rebellion than other Arab states had thus far done. Libyan police forces had opened machine gun fire on protesters. As the rebellion spread, Qadhafi opted to force a war on the opposition, presumably calculating that he stood a better chance of survival if he shifted the battle onto a terrain where had a clear advantage. Yet even given this, there is as yet no credible basis for the figure of 10,000 killed in the first month alone. Achcar has previously attributed this figure to the ICC. In the interview, the source for the estimates given is a Wikipedia entry, which cites an IRIB report attributing the figure to the ICC. In fact, the figure originates from a report initially posted on Twitter by the newspaper Al Arabiya, citing the comments of a Libyan ICC member based in Paris who claimed that after just one week of rebellion, the regime had killed 10,000 people and wounded 50,000. Bear in mind, that's not deaths on all sides and from all causes - it's regime killings during a single week. And it's not well founded. At the same time as this claim was being circulated, HRW put the total deaths at about 233. By the end of February, the UN general secretary estimated about 1,000 deaths. So Achcar misattributes his claim and gives it a credence it does not merit - the author of The Arabs and the Holocaust is not at his forensic best here, to put it no more strongly than that.

In fact, it was not until mid-June that such a figure was cited by a credible source. This was when the UN war crimes expert, Cherif Bassiouni, estimated that after four months of fighting including NATO bombing, there were potentially between 10-15,000 dead on all sides, both civilian and combatant. Parenthetically, Bassiouni's inquiry had presented evidence of war crimes by Qadhafi's forces, including attacks on civilians, as well as some by the opposition. But he did not allege indiscriminate massacres, and certainly nothing approaching a scale warned of by Achcar. So, there are yet further reasons to doubt Achcar's case that a massacre of close to ten thousand in one city alone was afoot in late March. We have not yet broached whether it would be decent to do so, but we'll come to that.

Another problem with Achcar's line of argument is that he refers to a "no-fly zone" as if this was what was under contention. It is now at the tail-end of August, and the argument over a no-fly zone has long since been passe. The UN resolution went far beyond a no-fly zone. NATO's intervention likewise went beyond a no-fly zone, involving a combination of bombardment, intelligence and special forces operations which subordinated the rebel movement to the military and political direction of external powers. This was precisely what was anticipated by the knee-jerk anti-imperialists. (Hitchens, much as one hates to cite him in this context, had a point when he used to say that a knee-jerk is a sign of a healthy reflex). But if there were reasons to doubt the idea of a coming massacre in Benghazi, and if the argument was not over a limited measure to prevent that outcome (a 'no-fly zone'), but rather over a more comprehensive intervention to subordinate the revolt to US interests, then what is left of Achcar's strictures? As he himself makes clear in the interview quoted above, the figures are important to his case. "One must compare the civilian casualties that resulted from NATO strikes with the potential civilian casualties that they prevented through limiting the firepower of Gaddafi's forces towards rebel-held populated areas." If he is right, then the intervention saved lives. If there is any reason for doubting it, then his position begins to look problematic. It won't do to pretend that such doubts amount to a claim that Benghazi rebels who supported intervention were "cowardly" - it's possible to understand the terrible position they were in, and the fears that they had of repression at Qadhafi's hands, without ceding the right to make an independent judgment. On the other hand, if a massacre really was afoot, and NATO intervention the only way to prevent it, is Achcar's critical-non-support and decent-non-opposition as wholesome as his strident posture suggests? Is anything short of active lobbying to secure the necessary intervention, even with all caveats and criticisms, "acceptable"? It begins to look like a very unstable, improvised and ultimately mealy-mouthed position. In fact, despite the strengths of his analysis, I think there are important aspects of his interpretation of events that have been flawed from inception.

For example, he began by asserting that Washington's interests indirectly and temporarily coincided with those of the opposition, in the following way: Qadhafi was likely to perpetrate a massacre to rival that in Hama in 1982. This would have obliged the US to seek an oil embargo against the regime which, at a time of rising global energy costs, was not sustainable. The invasion of Iraq notably came just as world oil prices were showing a structural tendency to rise. The only condition under which the US was prepared to relax sanctions against Iraq would be in the event of Hussein's overthrow. So, "regime change" became the mantra. Similarly, when Qadhafi's continued tenure threatened to drive up oil prices further, the US had an interest in overthrowing him.

Achcar continues to support this argument, but it falls down on a number of grounds. The first, obviously, is the dubious status of this coming massacre, leaving aside how the US would have been 'forced' to respond. The second is the actual imposition of sanctions affecting Libyan oil companies beginning in February. The third is the the fact that the US has not shown any sign of being particularly worried by high oil prices - indeed, while Achcar interprets the war on Iraq as an attempt to free up oil and reduce prices, he must be aware that one predictable consequence of the invasion and occupation of Iraq was to drive up energy prices to record highs. There is one more objection that we'll return to.

The above has some important implications. The imposition of the oil embargo, for example, was an important aspect of NATO's war, blocking the government's attempts to raise revenues. It meant that the opposition leadership could gain recognition, trading rights and permission to sell oil and thus survive as a viable material force calling itself a government - provided it satisfied its US and EU sponsors. So when Achcar asserted that NATO was deliberately drawing out the war and frustrating the rebels' chances of success, in order to give them time to bring the transitional council fully under control, he was arguably in denial about the extent to which the opposition was already fully under control. (In fact, the NATO strategy stands completely vindicated on military grounds alone. The targeted bombing, preventing the concentration of Qadhafi's forces and encouraging the fragmentation of the regime, ensured the opposition's ultimate success at minimal outlay and no real risk to NATO forces). If further evidence that Achcar is in denial on this score is needed, consider that he continued to depict the opposition leadership as "a mix of political and intellectual democratic and human rights dissidents", long after this had become a completely unrealistic and unworldly representation ignoring the multitude of former regime elements, businessmen, military figures, and people like Khalifa Hifter, who have no earthly business being called "human rights dissidents". It is they, people like General Abdallah Fatah Younes and Ibraham Dabbashi, who were the earliest and most vociferous advocates of an alliance with NATO. It is those elements whose hand was strengthened by NATO's intervention.

The biggest problem, though, is that his analysis of US strategy is far too reductionist, taking no account of the serious strategic cleavages evident at the top of the Washington foreign policy establishment. Some of the realists expressed a fear of being dragged into yet another Middle East 'quagmire'. Others were convinced that if Qadhafi was overthrown by a popular revolt, there would be a vacuum of authority in which jihadis would thrive. But the strongest supporters of intervention were 'humanitarian interventionists', whose case was similar to that of the liberal hawk, Anne-Marie Slaughter (who I believe has been an advisor of Obama on foreign policy). To wit, there's an expanding young and educated population in the Middle East, which has been deprived of political channels and economic opportunity, and which will therefore be a major problem for the US unless American power seems to champion their interests. The US, it is thus argued, must respond to this revolutionary wave by siding with reform and not just the old guard dictatorships. Leave aside the empirical basis of this analysis - it is sufficient to note that it is taken seriously by influential sectors of the US foreign policy elite. As such, the intervention can be seen less as a war for oil than an attempt to cohere a response to a revolution that threatened US control, limited enough to minimise the worries of realists and defence establishment figures like Robert Gates and Carter Ham while giving the US a chance to rebuild its 'humanitarian' credit.

This is what the indecent left opposed: not the staving off of a hypothetical massacre, but the predictable, successful hijacking of a popular revolt by imperialist powers in alliance with the relatively conservative elites dominant in the transitional council. By moralising about the decency or otherwise of anti-imperialist arguments, and pinning so much of his argument on the invocation of humanitarian emergency, Achcar obscures the politics of intervention. The question at stake was and is: should the population of Libya rule Libya? Since intervention ensured that the answer would be "no", it was correct to oppose it.

Labels: anti-imperialism, dictatorship, gilbert achcar, imperialism, liberal imperialism, libya, middle east, NATO

Friday, August 05, 2011

The choice for Israeli protests posted by Richard Seymour

The New York Times, of all publications, puts it bluntly:

But there is one issue conspicuously missing from the protests: Israel’s 44-year occupation of the Palestinian territories, which exacts a heavy price on the state budget and is directly related to the lack of affordable housing within Israel proper.
According to a report published by the activist group Peace Now, the Israeli government is using over 15 percent of its public construction budget to expand West Bank settlements, which house only 4 percent of Israeli citizens. According to the Adva Center, a research institute, Israel spends twice as much on a settlement resident as it spends on other Israelis.
Indeed, much of the lack of affordable housing in Israeli cities can be traced back to the 1990s, when the availability of public housing in Israel was severely curtailed while subsidies in the settlements increased, driving many lower-middle-class and working-class Israelis into the West Bank and Gaza Strip — along with many new immigrants.
Israel today is facing the consequences of a policy that favors sustaining the occupation and expanding settlements over protecting the interests of the broader population. The annual cost of maintaining control over Palestinian land is estimated at over $700 million.

Of course, the government will try to overcome the problem by continuing the colonization of the West Bank and encouraging more Israelis to participate. So, Israeli workers have a clear choice. They can continue to invest in Zionism, continue to uphold the chauvinism at the heart of Israeli society that validates the occupation and the repression of Palestinians, and hope to resolve their dilemmas at the expense of the oppressed. Or they can make that link which they have so far refused to make, between their situation and that of the Palestinians, and begin the work of undoing the Zionism which has hitherto held them hostage. I suspect that whatever decision they make in this respect will have a lot to do with what now happens to the Arab revolutions.

Labels: capitalism, class struggle, colonialism, gaza, imperialism, Israel, palestine, west bank, working class, zionism

Monday, July 25, 2011

On Press TV posted by Richard Seymour

I did a ten minute interview with Afshin Rattansi on Press TV. It was recorded just about the time the Murdoch stuff was first blowing up. You can watch it here:

Labels: austerity, capitalist ideology, deficit, imperialism, liberal imperialism, media, news of the world, obama, rupert murdoch, the liberal defence of murder

Friday, July 22, 2011

A morality lesson from the dirty digger posted by Richard Seymour

Such vile, self-serving stupidity should remind us why Murdoch's whole empire needs to be crushed.

Labels: capitalist ideology, imperialism, media, propaganda, racism, rupert murdoch

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Athens: working class resistance breaks Pasok government posted by Richard Seymour

I don't have time, and I'm feeling a little unwell thankyouverymuch, but I can't not mention this. Greece, as you all know, is on the precipice of default. The debt situation is unsustainable, and borrowing with strings attached is accelerating the crisis. But the government is in denial, insistent on sticking to the austerity remedy, ready to force through yet another round of cuts, including 20% wage cuts across the public sector and extensive privatization. It was only when I was speaking on the Eurozone crisis in Amsterdam a while back that the full scale of this expropriation was made apparent to me by a member of the audience. The sale of Greek public assets worth $71bn at fire sale prices, as a condition of the loans from the IMF and European Central Bank, includes not just the sale of public industries, not just the post offices and airports, not just the infrastructure, but acres and acres of prime real estate.

Today, parliament was due to vote on the latest cuts package. A 24 hour general strike was called, and hundreds of thousands of striking workers converged on parliament to cordon it off. Throughout today, the workers, together with the aganaktismenoi (outraged), have been periodically engaged in direct combat with riot police who are trying to disperse the protests (there's a live feed of the protests here, footage here). Signals from comrades, rumours from Twitter, feedback from mailing lists, etc., suggest that this is a significant departure from previous demonstrations in which the police like to finish off a protest by isolating factions of it and meting out a punishment beating. Instead, thousands of riot cops with batons, tear gas and water cannons have been fighting with the mainstream of the protest in Syntagma Square in an effort to break it up. And the protesters have held their ground. This could be seen as analogous to the way in which the Papandreou government has desperately sought to time and pitch their cuts and sell-offs to isolate specific sectors of resistance and beat them one by one - yet the scale of the cuts has necessarily produced a generalised response that has a real chance of defeating the government.

Notably, it is just workers who are involved in the struggle against the cuts. Not so long ago, an incoming PASOK government was able to carry the benefit of the doubt as it appealed to voters to support its cuts package. It could do so far more plausibly than their right-wing New Democracy predecessors. As a consequence, told that the alternative to cuts was bankruptcy, a majority acquiesced for a brief time in the cuts. In seemingly no time at all, the benefit of the doubt was frittered away, and now there is an extraordinarily broad coalition against the cuts, with some 80% opposing more austerity. Even small business owners are joining in over the near doubling of VAT. I don't know what implications this has for the Greek power bloc, which is probably extremely narrow, but the divisions at the level of the state suggest that there's a crisis of hegemony within the bloc, as well as over society as a whole. Mason describes the Greek state losing the functions of a state.

This doesn't necessarily have to benefit the left. The pitch of struggle is self-consciously militant, inspired by the Egyptian revolution and its shockwaves. The aim today would presumably be for the government to lose the vote and fall. But the government may not lose the vote, or if it does, the ruling class and the EU and IMF may find other means to force through austerity. The New Democracy would probably win any election in the short run, and - despite their opportunistic opposition - would attempt to do much the same. And if the working class response is not equal to the challenge, if the class begins to retreat, if repression gets the better of them, then there are some very dark possibilities. The Nazis are already mobilising in armed gangs, taking advantage of the despair and the rising street crime, and scapegoating immigrants. In fact, one of the features of this crisis is the asynchronicity between ideological, industrial and parliamentary effects. It is quite likely that the right will be able to benefit electorally from anti-austerity struggles in the short term, particularly where social democratic parties are the ones imposing austerity. That's certainly true of both Greece and Spain.

Nonetheless, the Greek struggle should be seen as part of a rising tide of class struggles globally, signposted by a series of mass strikes in Europe last year, the Middle East revolutions this year, and Spain's Tahrir moment. And their chances of success are increased by their tendency to generalise rather than remain sectional responses. This is why the UK government is threatening unions, warning them off coordinated strike action, especially after civil servants voted for strikes. The Greek example should tell us a lot. Greece is much further down the road of austerity than Britain is, and has a much more vibrant tradition of militancy. The entrenched, utterly inflexible position of the ruling class, backed of course by the US and EU ruling classes, shows the scale of mobilisation that is necessary to shift them, never mind defeat them. Yet, it may in the end also show how brittle the system is.

ps: As I write, there are rumours that Papandreou has offered to resign, and it's become clear that the administration can't govern. It is reported that Pasok is now in power-sharing talks with the New Democracy to form a grand cutters' coalition. If this is an example of Caesarism, then it is of a deeply reactionary kind that is likely to become more common in the present conjuncture. This would obviously raise the stakes for workers resistance. The ruling class would presumably rally behind any such coalition, determined to show its unity, and embark on a new round of offensives - politically, ideologically, and industrially. The media will reinforce again and again that there is no alternative; the state and the employers will go after the unions and left parties that back militancy, and parliamentarians will argue - as they have in the past - that strikes undermine the Greek economy and make the crisis worse. Pasok will bring pressure to bear within the labour movement, and the Communists (KKE) will be subject to a new round of red-baiting due to their influence in the unions. This makes it all the more important that none of the momentum that the working class has built up is squandered. But it also raises the obvious questions of political organisation. If traditional left-reformism leads to this cul de sac, then it's a certainty that alternative modes of organising the working class and its alliances will be hotly debated in the coming months. I doubt a single revolutionary party is yet in a position to offer that alternative, but the radical left and anticapitalist alliances such as ANT.AR.SY.A - which quadrupled its vote in the last regional election - can involve revolutionaries in productive relations with other political forces while sharply posing alternatives to the mainstream parties within the working class movement.

Labels: austerity, capitalism, capitalist crisis, class struggle, eu, greece, imf, imperialism, resistance, working class