How quickly things change.  It wasn't very long ago that most news articles highlighted the fractious, poorly armed, badly trained, indisciplined character of the opposition, and the territorial gains made by Qadhafi.  After the killing of General Abdel Fattah Younes, the entirety of the Transitional National Council was sacked by its head, Mustafa Abdel Jalil.  It looked utterly shamblic, more than ever locked in fratricidal power struggles, looking less and less like the real government that it claimed to be.  Then there were the criticisms for atrocities toward 'African' (ie black) migrant workers and others, which undermined the appeal to human rights which many of the leading figures in the rebellion have built their reputation on.

Certainly, the claim to represent a popular mass movement was hardly credible.  These were largely former regime elements wholly dependent on external powers, without whom they could not trade in oil or gain international recognition, and on whose military artillery and strategy they were completely reliant.  They had been compelled to turn to imperialism partly to overcome their lack of authority within the revolt.  Their weakest point had been the failure of the revolt to spread to Tripoli, which seemed unlikely to fall to the sorts of relatively light bombing sorties that NATO was deploying.  Aerial bombing was no substitute for the spread of the revolution, which was actually receding as the initiative passed into the hands of Africom planners and others.  Leading politicians in the UK and France were admitting that Qadhafi would not be driven out by military force, and calling for a negotiated settlement. 

But after a week of gains, the rebels suddenly look as if they've got Tripoli surrounded, and Al Jazeera is reporting gunfire from within the capital.  If I were the sort of person to make rash predictions, I would say that Qadhafi might not survive the next 48 hours.  But then, let me be even more rash and suggest what would follow from that.  I think we would see a recomposition of the old regime, without Qadhafi but with the basic state structures intact.  The former regime elements would become regime elements, within a pro-US, neoliberal state with some limited political democracy.  In addition, those calling for intervention in Syria would be strengthened, as the Pentagon's faith in military power would have been revived.  This would be a significant regroupment for the US and allied states after recent setbacks.  It doesn't matter how ridiculous this war has been, or how much of a mockery the process has made of the revolutionary process that instigated it.  And it doesn't matter what subsequently happens inside Libya as long as it isn't outright civil war.  Problems can be glossed over.  The only thing that would register in the spectacle is that the US and its allies had successfully piloted their own model for the Middle East, with the word 'quagmire' barely uttered.

The outlines of the deal between the White House and Congressional Republicans on the debt ceiling are now becoming clear.  The White House, of course, celebrates it as a victory for bipartisanship, compromise, economic prudence, and - but what else? - "the American people".  Ask not for whom the ticker tape falls... The deal is simply this.  The government will get its debt ceiling increase, so there will be no default.  The matter will not return to debate until after 2012, meaning that Obama doesn't have to go to the polls with this potential for sabotage hanging over his campaign.  And in return, he will fund repayment of the deficit almost entirely from spending cuts.  This will mean deep cuts to medicare and social security.  Obama is colluding with the Republicans to attack his base.  This is Jared Bernstein's account:

Of course, the centre-left commentators and economists are angry.  Paul Krugman and Robert Reich are typically nonplussed.  How could the president be so stupid?  How could he surrender?  He had alternatives to force through an increase in the debt ceiling.  He had legal manouevres, political manouevres.  He has thrown away the Democrats' advantage on medicare, caved in to blackmail from right-wing extremists, systematically refused to make the argument for protecting jobs and stimulus.  It's a comprehensive victory for the radical right.  

Well, all this is true.  But Obama isn't stupid, and he didn't surrender.  As Krugman has himself suggested, Obama has ideological (and as he did not suggest, strategic) reasons to embrace cuts.  He never subscribed to the Keynesian revival that intellectuals did - that was just emergency management.  He's a committed neoliberal, heading a neoliberal bloc within the Democrats.  He has demonstrated from the start that his major duty is to the banks, to finance.  Their hegemony the alliance of capitalist class fractions condensed within the Democratic leadership ensured that whatever took place, Obama would find a way to eviscerate public spending programmes.  And above all, he would eventually find his way to approaching, by some sleight of hand, the road to social security privatization - which I would predict will soon be on the agenda.

Recall that Bush attempted to attack social security in 2005, and was defeated by an impressive union-led campaign.  Obama was happy to capitalise on this, attacking McCain for favouring the privatization of social security.  He has continued to position the Democrats as defenders of social security and medicare.  Yet, things were never as rosy.  His cabinet was filled with Clinton-era retreads, and officials who had been complicit in the very neoliberal policies that brought about the crash.  His economic advisors were, from the start, neoliberals.  His strategically important debt commission was filled with apologists for spending cuts and privatization.  He consistently sends right-wing advocates of cuts and privatization to his commissions.  The leading Democratic opinion formers in the elite media, such as the Washington Post, and in think-tanks such as the Brookings Institute, have been pushing for social security 'reform' for some time.  Former president Clinton is himself a leading advocate of privatization who plotted with Newt Gingrich to try to bring it about, as are most of his former officials now recycled in the Obama administration.  The administration is studded with leading personnel from finance, and the banks are desperate to get their hands on social security.  And despite Obama's rhetoric, he and his Congressional allies have signalled a willingness to arrive at a more gradual, gentle and bipartisan route to social security privatization.   In short, there is every reason to believe that the Democrats will take any opportunity, particularly those presented by the blackmail of the Republican Right, to push for privatization.  These cuts, savage as they are, will almost certainly be used to demand privatization on the grounds that the economy can't sustain a publicly owned model. 

Of course, this isn't the end of the matter.  There is some Democratic opposition to the deal.  But more important, perhaps, is the intransigence of the 'tea partiers' (actually, just the Republican right) who think they can hold out for more.  Now, you may say this is insanity on their part.  You may say it is impolitic, especially if it inflicts embarrassing defeats on the GOP leadership just at their moment of apparent triumph.  But they have their uses, providing a suitable contrast to the apparently sober and rational Obama administration - in contrast to their 'ideological' and 'sectional' lobbying, the executive takes on the mantle of the nation, the blessed American people, on whose behalf he tries to negotiate a route out of catastrophe and national suicide.  It isn't quite correct that the 'tea party' movement can be reduced to a corporate astroturfing operation.  It resembles classical anticommunist networks in many respects, a movement with some (petty bourgeois) civil society roots enjoying the support of the most reactionary sectors of the ruling class.  So it is somewhat autonomous.  What it presently lacks is the support of the state, which made past anticommunist networks so deadly.  It has not occupied the Justice Department and is unlikely to take the executive or any such directive position, short of a major crisis and decomposition of the state apparatus.  So, though having some autonomy, it is subordinate.  It is a supporting player in the delicate choreography that has shifted the US from stimulus to austerity.  One would therefore expect the leadership to discipline them rather harshly as soon as this is all over, just to avoid any further embarrassments.

I have been trying to decipher the ongoing wars over the 'deficit ceiling' in the US.  Essentially, as you may have read, the Republicans in Congress are raising the prospect of forcing a default by refusing to raise the 'deficit ceiling', which would allow the US to borrow sufficient money to pay its bills.  They insist that they will only support an increase if the administration assents to a plan to repay the deficit with 100% spending cuts and no increase in tax revenues. 

There is precedent for this sort of conduct.  The creation of fiscal crises in order to force a transformation of class relations (as mediated through the public sector) is a mainstay of neoliberal ruling classes since, perhaps, the New York City fiscal crisis.  It's certainly how the Republicans have attempted to force through such changes in Wisconsin.  Even so, playing chicken with the government's ability to pay its bills might strike you as insanely counter-productive even from the perspective of the US ruling class.  A default would be deeply damaging to US capitalism.  And certainly, Wall Street is not happy with the Republicans' conduct, despite the latter's claim that they are merely deferring to the mighty bond markets.  It's important to appreciate just how far Obama has gone to meet the Republicans' demands.  He is quite insistent that trillions of dollars of 'savings' (cuts) need to be found over the next decade, and recently offered the GOP a $4000bn 'grand bargain', comprising deep cuts to social security and medicare - which has further alienated his base and shocked some on the left of the Democratic Party.  All the Democrats want is the ability to raise some of the money from tax revenues, and for a little bit of that to come from the richer tax payers.  As Shawn Whitney points out, there doesn't appear to be a difference of principle between Obama and his Republican opponents, merely one of degree. In fact, the strident articulation of neoliberal orthodoxy by the administration is one of the reasons why centre-left economists such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich keep bashing their heads against their keyboards.

There is a rumour, being encouraged by the administration, that by supporting cuts Obama is cannily positioning himself as a 'moderate' to win over frightened independent voters.  This seems superficially plausible, and feeds into the narrative, disseminated on both sides of the Atlantic, that Obama is trying to steer a sensible course between right and left whose silly ideological squabbles risks destroying the economy.  Yet governments always claim a pseudo-democratic mandate for policies they intend to pursue anyway by claiming that they're beholden to the voters.  The same governments, you tend to find, are quite happy to force through unpopular policies, while claiming that the issue is too important to treat as a political football (meaning it's too important for democracy). 

Obama will probably have no difficulty being re-elected, not because he has delivered for his voters, but because he has delivered for capitalism.  Yes, capitalism is now operating at a much lower growth rate, with a larger reserve army of labour.  But profitability has made a recovery, and some of the worst has been avoided, even if this does mean that there is a glut of unproductive capital that hasn't been destroyed.  (The Hayekians in the Republican Party are particularly exercised by this).  Jared Bernstein, a former Google exec who has moved through the revolving doors connecting silicon capitalism to the White House (I am assured I'm wrong about this, see comment thread), points out that the distributive trends under Obama's watch have been as terrible for wages as they have been a boon for profits, and provides this graph:

Note what's happened here.  Financialization has tended to mean not the dominance of financial corporations over industry, but rather the emergence of industrial and service firms as autonomous financial actors.  They tend to fund their investments from their own retained profits rather than from bank lending, and those profits have been increasingly augmented by financial holdings.  A classic example was GM making 40% of its profits from financial investments.  So, though industry is still sluggish, productive investment is low, and unemployment is settling at a higher new plateau (notably, the Obama administration accepts that this reflects a 'natural' or 'structural' rate of unemployment), the revival of Wall Street has boosted profitability.  

The result is that the US capitalist class is rallying behind Obama's re-election campaign.  His 2012 campaign manager has recently announced that Obama raised "$86 million for the first quarter - shattering previous fundraising records by incumbents, dwarfing the totals of the GOP field, and besting the campaign's own $80 million target".  The Republicans, as far as I'm concerned, are taking a dive this time.  The candidates they are fielding are heavily weighted toward the lunatic right, and the grandees don't appear to be disciplining the reactionaries ahead of the election.  As a consequence, no matter how much Obama disappoints his own base, his well-financed campaign, unchallenged in the Democratic Party, combined with revulsion over the Bachmanns, Santorums, Gingriches and Pawlentys, will probably ensure victory.  So, I'm saying that the dance-off between Obama and the Republicans is not mainly about the election.

What's really happening is that Obama is using the Republican right as a weapon against his own base to deliver policies that his class allies favour.  Yet he has no intention of allowing the GOP to force a default, and seems to be intent on avoiding a completely cuts-based approach to the deficit.  And he has the class power of Wall Street backing him up.  Apart from anything else, there's the strange relationship with Chinese capitalism to think about.  The US hasn't completely gone down the route of austerity in the way that EU ruling classes have, in part I think because the US-PRC axis which has basically driven global growth depends on America borrowing to buy Chinese products, while China ensures a profitable investment climate for overseas capital.  Defaulting, undertaking excessive or premature 'fiscal consolidation', or hitting consumer spending too hard, would presumably put that dynamic in some danger.  In other words, I think what's happening here is a relatively sophisticated and partially choreographed example of class praxis, with the political conditions being created for the rolling out of an austerity project with a degree of flexibility and pragmatism built in.  The deficit wars, from the White House's perspective, seem to be largely about putting manners on the Republican far right while using them to neutralise popular opposition to the coming capitalist offensive.

The Democrats have lost the House of Representatives but kept the Senate by a slim margin. The Tea Party 'movement' will be credited for giving the Republicans this energy in the polls, but in fact there will be little evidence when the dust settles that anything particularly remarkable happened here. A few whack jobs got elected, quite a few didn't, turnout was probably around 40% (which will be hailed as a record high if true), and capitalism remains firmly in control of the political process. The dominant faction of the 'political class' will still comprise rich corporate lawyers, the majority of senators will still be millionaires, and Wall Street will still control the Treasury.

The Republican sweep, announcing a "seismic shift", will be every bit as flimsy as the 'revolution' of 1994. This was when Gingrich's hard right rump took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in fifty years. They added 54 seats to their total in the House of Representatives (2010 equivalent: 36, with 14 undecided), while adding 8 senate seats to their total to gain the upper house (2010 equivalent, 5, with 3 undecided - and no prospect of gaining control of the upper house). But the 'Republican revolution' took place with the support of less than 20% of eligible voters, with a turnout of less than 40%. Many of the same personnel who drove that 'revolution', and drafted the 'Contract with America' that few read or understood, are now 'activists' in the Tea Party movement. The FT calls Dick Armey an 'activist', for christ's sake.

This change in the political composition of the elected chambers as a result of the 2010 mid-terms will be even less significant than the 1994 congressional elections. The GOP's 'surge' will be predicated on, again, just about a fifth of eligible voters. Bear in mind that voter eligibility is, thanks to a racist criminal justice system and voting laws that deprive convicted felons of the right to vote, biased against poor and black voters anyway. But it will be depicted as a populist upsurge against what is perceived to be a tax-and-spend administration with socialist, Muslim, Kenyan anti-colonialist roots. In fact, the Tea Party 'movement' will probably not have had the effect that the commentariat is looking for. It is the result not of 'grassroots' right-wing anger, but of class-conscious business intervention in the political process - particularly by the billionaire Koch brothers. The 'grassroots' that are mobilised tend to be whiter and wealthier than the population at large, and they are heavily dependent on the media to talk up their activities.

In reality, just as in Massachusetts in January, millions of Democratic voters will not have turned out. Obama and his supporters have relied on a strategy of condescendingly lecturing the base, telling them off for expecting too much, which is grotesque and pathetic. (He saved capitalism, you fools!) His staff, as well, have been known to insult the base, especially progressives, as idiots and morons for being furious over the healthcare sell-out. So, why would grassroots Dems mobilise for an elitist pro-Wall Street clique that treats them like dirt and tells them they should be grateful? More on this in a bit. The point is that voters, just like the Tea Party 'movement', and just like the Republican base, will be heavily skewed toward the whiter and the wealthier, and the majority of the working class will have been effectively squeezed out of the electoral system.

***

If we understand electoral politics as a particular expression of the class struggle in the US, the bizarre trends noted above can be comprehended better. First of all, the obvious. Unlike in much of the world, the United States does not have a party of labour, that is a party created by and rooted in the organised working class. The electoral system is entirely dominated by two pro-business parties. The Democrats have, since the 'New Deal', tended to gain from whatever votes are cast by the working class, and have ruthlessly and jealously guarded that advantage against all potential 'third party' rivals. But the correlation between class voting and Democratic voting declined in the post-war era. This has usually been measured by the gap between the number of 'working class' and 'middle class' voters supporting the Democrats in any given election. You subtract the percentage of the 'middle class' vote that backs the Democrats from the percentage of the 'working class' vote that backs the Democrats and you have a class voting index - the Alford Index. This is not particularly sophisticated, and tends to rely on simplistic, occupational grading models of class. But the results of applying it do disclose a trend, which is worth noting.

One study, which focused on white voters (because African Americans were for much of the relevant period prevented from voting in much of the country), noted that the gap in 1948 was 44%. In 1952 it was 20%. In 1960 it was 12%. In 1964 it was 19%. In 1968, it was 8%. And in 1972, it was 2%. This form of 'class voting' benefiting the Democrats is subject to considerable variation depending on the context. I suspect that it would have been relatively high in 2008 and relatively low in 2004, for example. But the secular trend is one of decline. And the declining relevance of this particular index of class to determining voter behaviour has been interpreted by the usual dirt - sorry, by some academics - as a decline in class voting as such. It's been tied into a broader claim about the demise of class as an important factor in American life, most notably by Terry Clark and Seymour Lipset. This is just the American version of 'electoral dealignment' theory, which became popular among psephologists in the UK in the 1980s, and it maintains that as class loses its social significance, voters become more like consumers, choosing electoral brands based on the values they associate with that brand.

More plausibly, it has been claimed that since the Goldwater campaign in 1964, the Republicans learned how to use 'culture wars' effectively to win over a sector of racist white wokers. This is arguably the very effect that Republicans were unable to produce in 2008. Thus, the 'southern strategy' using a fusion of racial and religious politics, helped depress the overall levels of class voting. But it's important not to exaggerate this. Most white workers still don't vote Republican. In most cases, a majority of them simply decline to vote. Further, 'class voting' in the sense of working class mobilisation for the Democrats was in decline well before the overthrow of segregation and the onset of the Nixonite 'southern strategy'. Most of the decline cannot be explained by racism. According to Michael Hout et al (1995) [pdf], adjusting the research to take account of advances in stratification and class theory, and using multivariate analyses rather than just the Alford Indez, produces a very different picture. They build on the approach of critical psephologists such as John Curtice and Anthony Heath in the UK to suggest that 'electoral realignment' is a more plausible description of the trends than 'electoral dealignment'. Class still profoundly determines voting behaviour, and it determines it all the more if you consider non-voting one form of that behaviour.

The study shows changes in the make-up and alignment of the electorate. The number of owners and proprietors has declined - perhaps as ownership becomes more concentrated. Meanwhile the number of professionals and managers has increased. There has been an overall increase in white collar non-managerial voters, the votes of unskilled and semi-skilled workers remain steady, and the representation of skilled workers has fallen sharply. So the class structure has been recomposed, and the electorate has changed accordingly. Secondly, when you look at the partisan preferences of different class, you see that skilled workers became less Democratic between 1948 and 1992, while white collar workers went from being modestly Republican to being strongly Democratic. Professionals became more Democratic, while owners and managers became strongly Republican. Finally, on turnout, you see that managers, professionals and owners are much more likely to vote in presidential elections than workers of all kinds. The study concludes "The gap between the turnout for professionals and for semiskilled and unskilled [workers] ... corresponds to a range of 77 percent to 40 percent (using 60 percent as the average turnout)."

***

Thus, you have an electoral system that vastly over-represents owners, managers and professionals, and under-represents the working class by a wide margin. Incidentally, there's no sign that education has any impact on this. The increase in high school and college education among 'lower socioeconomic groups' has not led to a corresponding increase in turnout. Other research looking at non-voting corroborates this picture. Reeve Vanneman and Lynn Cannon's classic study, The American Perception of Class, looked at voting and non-voting behaviour in the US, comparing it with the UK, for the period covering the Sixties and early Seventies. They found that voters who were most inclined to self-identify as working class overwhelmingly voted for Labour in the UK, but overwhelmingly didn't vote in the US. By contrast, they found that more than two-thirds of supporters of the Democratic Party, which claims a near monopoly on all social forces left-of-centre in national elections, self-identified as middle class. Thus the perception of class, which Vanneman and Cannon show is strongly correlated to the reality of class, powerfully drives voting and non-voting behaviour.

Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward argued, in Why Americans Still Don't Vote, that the exclusion of the working class from elections is actively desired by politicians. They suggest that if politicians were interested in crafting a policy mix that would appeal to the poor, the poor would respond, and they would be able to command electoral majorities. Pippa Norris of Harvard University concurs: the evidence suggests that turnout among the working class will increase at elections if there are left and trade union based parties that are capable of mobilising them. But it is again worth stressing that the exclusion of the poor from the electoral system is not wholly voluntary. Thomas E Patterson, in The Vanishing Voter (2009), points out that the electoral system in the US has had a long tradition of seeking to exclude the uneducated and the poor, and Patterson argues that voter registration rules still work to limit the size and composition of the electorate. He notes that the US has a disproportionately high number of non-citizens among its total population (7%), and ineligible adults (10%). Thus, 17% of the total adult population at any given time is legally excluded from voting. The exclusion of so many voters is the result of deliberate projects: in one case to manage labour migration flows to benefit capital (non-citizens cause less trouble than those permitted to naturalise); and in the other case to construct a carceral state that imprisoned more poor and black Americans than ever before. On any given day, 1 in every 32 American adults is directly in the control of the criminal justice system, either through jail, parole, probation or community supervision. This only hints at the wider effects that this behemoth has on American society, but suffice to say that it deprives millions of the right to vote where it would easily make a significant difference to the outcome.

***

The 2010 mid-term elections have thus taken place not only without the participation of the majority of voters, but with the pronounced exclusion of millions of working class Americans and particularly African Americans. Don't believe me? Let's look at the exit poll results. You can see that there's a strong Democratic bias among voters with incomes under $50k, but they only represent 37% of the total vote, while making up just over 55% of the population. Those earning $100,000 or more make up more than a quarter of the vote (26%) and have a strong Republican bias, yet they represent less than 16% of the population. Breaking it down even further, 7% of the electorate is composed of those on $200,000 or more - again, strongly Republican - which is more than double their representation as a whole. In fact, I'm over-representing the higher income earners and under-representing lower income earners because I'm relying on figures for households rather than individuals. The percentage of individuals on $50k or less is 75%. Those on $100k or more make up just over 6% of the population. So, the turnout is enormously skewed in favour of the wealthy.

The two main parties will have constructed their electoral coalitions with a disproportionate reliance on professionals, owners, and managers. Their leading personnel, those who frame and carry through policy, will be bankers, laywers, and other members of the wealthy minority. Their daily consultations and coordinations will be with the industrial and financial lobbies who fund campaigns. And the "seismic shift", the "grassroots insurgency" that is supposedly propelling reactionary populists to the levers of power will have been effected principally by a relatively small shift in an already exclusive electoral system in favour of middle class and rich voters. I raise all this merely to put it in perspective. The drama of headlines, and of the vaunted new political eras, does not have much bearing on the real state of American society.

Lastly, the Tea Party. If these results are supposed to demonstrate the enormous clout of this movement, its great popular resonance, and so on, I am singularly unimpressed. They were up against a hugely unpopular Democratic Party, whose control of the executive has disappointed so many, amid a recession that has made everyone terrified. The economy is the number one issue in this election, and the numbers of voters who said they were optimistic about the future for the economy were tiny. If the Tea Party was such a wildly popular 'movement', it would not have contributed only a small fraction to the GOP's small slice of the voting age population. As dangerous as these creeps can be, as a Poujadist movement seeking to mobilise a mass base, it's a flop. And that's a key lesson of 2010.

This furore about the 'ground zero mosque' - actually a mosque being built in a former business site four blocks away from 'ground zero' - reflects the fact that the Republican right's kulturkampf against 'socialism' has run out of steam as a mobilising tool, and they're now turning back to a trusted technique of whipping up hysteria about Islam. This was the other side of the race-baiting that McCain and Palin engaged in during the 2008 election. As you'll recall, the story had it that Obama was a Muslim terrorist from Kenya, and he was going to give people with brown skin the run of things. Across America, local bigots are organising against mosques, just as they are in the UK and much of Europe (other parts of Europe are prioritising a murderous purge against Roma). The GOP doesn't really give a shit about this, but knows how to throw red meat to its base. Hence, as Jamie points out, Republicans are going all out to capitalise on this, with Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas fulminating about terrorist babies - a dehumanising trope which, he also points out, has its origins in Department of Defense-Hollywood propaganda:



Not that this is a purely 'red state' phenomenon. A correspondent points out that naked anti-Muslim racism is emerging in liberal redoubts such as Seattle, where local sex columnist Dan Savage has engaged in vitriolic attacks on 'Muslim culture'. Here, traditional American nativism, imperial ideology, and pro-Israel doctrine are fusing into a vicious racist brew that, incubated by the 'war on terror', is now being used to buttress the prospects of the most reactionary class warriors for the rich, as a new recession looms. For this racist hysteria about the 1 or 2% of Americans who are Muslim is, while it has a lot to do with bolstering support for a flagging empire, certainly also a weapon of class struggle. As always when capitalism experiences a crisis, it regurgitates all existing barbarisms into a toxic new formula for bludgeoning the working class. In Arizona, the victim is immigrant labour, elsewhere it's the Muslims.

The big struggle today is no longer over healthcare - that's dead, killed for the second time by the Democrats and their allies in big capital, not least the pharmaceutical and insurance giants. The struggle now is over social security, which the Obama administration is going after: more of that accumulation-by-dispossession. Bush was soundly defeated when he tried this, but Obama is the 'progressive' president. Liberals will defend him to the bitter end. If the Republicans win big in the mid-terms, as they are expected to, they will provide a stronger bulwark of support for cuts to social security than even the most right-wing Democrats would. It will provide him with the alibi he needs - the country is right-wing, we can't risk running liberal programmes any more, we just have to save what we can, etc. So much for hope. So much for the small change you could believe in.

Wyclef Jean wants to be the president of Haiti. Promising to be the country's Obama, he claims to represent the "voice of the youth". Well, we'll see about that. The election process is sufficiently corrupt that, while the most popular party (Famni Lavalas) is banned from participating, a non-resident may well be allowed to participate against election rules. Wyclef Jean is an ideal candidate for the Obama administration, because his record is one of outright support for American imperialism in Haiti. He attacked the elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and supported the death squad 'rebels' that overthrew him. He has continued to support the brutal MINUSTAH occupation, on the grounds that it must contain the 'gangs' (there are gangs, but his associates are involved in them - he's referring to Lavalas). He has schmoozed with Bill Clinton and Ban Ki moon, and the usual array of corporate philanthropists and entrepreneurs. His charity, Yele Haiti, is crooked, though it has made him a small fortune in charges for services rendered.

The only election in Haiti that could possibly be legitimate would be one in which Famni Lavalas was a fully legal participant, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide their presidential candidate.

Obama and the Democrats are in trouble. Barring some unforeseeable development on a par with Katrina in terms of scale, the GOP is going to romp the mid-terms on a much reduced turn-out. The capitalist media will say that this is because of the Tea Party 'movement', or because the president moved too far to the left in a centre-right nation. Left-wing anger, and the disillusionment of working class constituencies previously supportive of Obama, will be ignored.

Obama's dual constituency in the 2008 election comprised the majority of the working class, and the dominant fraction of big capital, particularly the finance, insurance and real estate industries (the rentiers in other words) who gave Obama $37.5m toward his campaign. In the 2010 mid-term Congressional elections, the signs are that much of the working class component of that electoral coalition will fail to mobilise for the Democrats. This has already been foreshadowed in the Massachusetts by-election, where the core working class vote collapsed - and, of course, the media blamed it on Obama's excessive radicalism over healthcare, despite Massachusetts favouring socialised medicine by a wider margin than most states.

There will be almost no discussion this election as to what has been done, what has continued to be done, to the American working class. The generational stagnation and decline of working class incomes, and the stomach-wrenching fall [pdf] in the share of produced wealth going to the working class, has worsened under Obama's watch. In this recession, bosses have taken the opportunity afforded by the crisis to slash jobs and downsize in a way that is massively disproportionate to the impact the crisis has had on their profitability. David McNally reports:

The best description I have heard comes from an economist who I won't name for the moment because he's a real shithead. But he did nail this one when he said, "What the United States is experiencing is a statistical recovery and a human recession." That's precisely what's happened. A few statistical indicators have moved up, but for the vast majority of working class people, the recession continues.

If you add in the nearly 10 million who are involuntarily underemployed--they're taking part-time work because they can't find full-time work--you've got about 27 million people unemployed or underemployed in the U.S. economy right now. That translates into an unemployment rate of over 17 percent, and for Black and Latino workers, it's an unemployment rate of around 25 percent.

According to the Economist, one out of every six U.S. workers has taken a wage cut in this recession, and amazingly, four out of every 10 African Americans has experienced unemployment during this crisis. Looking at food stamps, an additional 37 million people went onto food stamps in the U.S. in 2009, and 40 percent of those recipients are working for a wage. They're not unemployed--they're simply the working poor that can't make ends meet.

As for the next statistic I'm going to give you, this one was so overwhelming that I did check it to be sure. Half of all U.S. children will now depend on food stamps at some point during their childhood, and the figure runs at 90 percent for African American kids. Imagine that--in the heartland of global capitalism.

The "new normal" is signposted by a catastrophic drop in income in the last year, and a long-term doubling in the ratio of "economically insecure" workers. This intensification of the rate of exploitation is a logical way for the ruling class to proceed, but it may not be good for the system as a whole. A section of the US ruling class is aware of the problem this poses for consumption, and therefore for the system's capacity to reproduce itself. Ben Bernanke argues in a speech published today that depressed wages and incomes, resulting in falling consumption and diminished revenues for local state budgets, is "weighing on economic activity". On that basis, he urges continued stimulus spending at federal and state levels.

In the coming elections, the GOP will naturally bluster about cutting spending, throwing red meat to this astroturf 'movement' they and their business allies have helped create. But few will buy this: the GOP co-engineered and voted for TARP, after all. And any stimulus spending they can attack is pittance compared to the truly astonishing transfer of wealth to the banks, which itself discloses the fatal dilemma posed by the current crisis. This transfer of wealth was not ostensibly just for the benefit of one sector of capital. The whole system in the neoliberal era has been financialised, so that manufacturing and service capital, along with a sector of the actually existing middle class, is substantially dependent on financial revenues. But that transfer really didn't rejuvenate the system, even though the attack on the working class has temporarily boosted profit margins. It just staved off the worst. And now the final act of the transfer, that being the cuts in social expenditure and privatization (the whole thing is an act of accumulation-by-dispossession), risks further slashing spending power and thereby prolonging and deepening the crisis.

However this conundrum is resolved, it will not be in the interests of the working class. David Harvey has written of how capitalists would usually rather retreat behind the flood barriers and watch everyone else get washed away in the deluge than sacrifice some of its wealth to boost consumption and save the system. Only under significant working class pressure do they ever take the latter option, and such pressure is not a significant factor in American political life at the moment. It is certainly not expressed in elections, as electoral insurgencies are very capably and swiftly stamped on by the Democratic Party machinery. The Democrats' hegemony on the working class vote (to the extent that workers vote) may have been eroding, but it has not been successfully challenged from the left since it was first consolidated in 1932. Only the Progressive Party came close, and they didn't come very close. Instead, most workers simply do not vote. It is also true that the Republicans have in the past taken an expanding layer of (esp. white) working class voters, partly on racist grounds as per the misnamed 'southern strategy'. But the main factor - as Kenworthy et al [pdf] have shown - is the disorganisation and de-unionisation of the working class since the 1970s, which led to millions of workers seeking individualist solutions to their material needs, sometimes identifying with a conservative agenda of low taxes as being more advantageous to their immediate economic wellbeing than social spending.

The main problem for the American working class is not a lack of class consciousness. It is the weight of the accumulated outcomes of successive class struggles over several generations. At each phase, workplace organisation has been smashed, left-wing political movements broken up and the remnants coopted. Chris Hedges argues that America needs a few good communists, and he's right. But a few won't cut it, and they won't be sufficient unless there's a movement of working class militants they can relate to. What do I mean by 'militants'? Well, a militant is a worker who has experience of dealing with management, who has learned how to stand up to them and how to protect her rights as well as those of her co-workers, and who has learned the need for a strategy, for planning, for meetings, for leafleting and so on. There are such people in America, but there aren't enough of them, because the strength of the ruling class has hitherto been such that being a militant, or being organised politically in any way, can be unrewarding and often downright hazardous. However, if this crisis continues to see a weakening in the global power and cohesiveness of the US ruling class there will be opportunities for a renaissance in the labour movement. Every US worker should be praying for the fall of the empire, and the opportunities it will bring. And then the conversation will change, and we won't be hearing about how Obama, the president of Goldman Sachs, is too left-wing for such a conservative country.

Riaz Ahmed speaks on the 'war on terror' in Pakistan.

War and its pseudo-histories
Our understanding of the war in Pakistan is bracketed by implicit, unspoken exclusions. The glimpses we get are like occasional narrow slits in an otherwise solid screen. We are encouraged to draw our attention to, for example, suicide attacks on government officials in Peshawar. But we otherwise have little context with which to interpret such bloody doings, apart from some general catch-all explanations about the medievalism and bloodlust of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). This narrowness of focus, instead of contextualising such attacks in the war launched by the Pakistani military, at the behest of the US, on the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), rather provides a pretext and pseudo-explanation for that war. A multi-faceted conflict is reduced to the simple dichotomy of 'extremists' and 'moderates'.

To the extent that there is context in the Anglophone press, it tends to come from the perspective of counterinsurgency, and reduces the population of the NWFP to a xenophobic, insular, ethnonationalist rump, and reduces the insurgency to the issue of nationalism. In Pakistan itself, this analysis has manifested itself as deep-seated bigotry toward the Pashtuns, as Riaz Ahmed recently wrote. In fact, the insurgency is more complex, transcending Pashtun nationalism in the name of pragmatic alliances and an Islamist ideology that is not specific to any ethnicity. Its primary motivation in this war is opposing the US expansion of the 'war on terror' into Pakistan and the decision of the Pakistani military to join Washington in attacking pro-Taliban forces in these areas. But its relationship with the state is by no means one-dimensional, as the Pakistani military has previously relied on the TTP to support Pakistani interests in Afghanistan, which is why some in the Pakistani ruling class are unhappy with the strategy of aligning with the Washington axis.

Pakistan's entanglement in this war has continued after the majority of the population rejected Washington's candidate, Musharraff, in the 2008 elections - Washington's military and economic clout, ensured that there would be no deviation from the script. If the military clout is expressed in the ability of the US to engage in attacks in Pakistani territory without seeking prior approval, the economic leverage has been expressed over billions of dollars in aid/bribes, and regular loans from eg the World Bank to keep the Pakistani treasury ticking over and assist with counterinsurgency and rebuilding in 'conflict' zones. Divisions in the Pakistani ruling class are matched by concerns about the long-term cohesiveness and territorial integrity of both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Class struggles and civil society movements intersect with the war in telling ways, as when the lawyers' movement was launched in response to the government's sacking of the chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, for the crime of revealing state complicity in the 'disappearing' of citizens to be rendered to the CIA for 'interrogation'. Thus, the war raises deeper questions about the direction of Pakistani society, and the relationship between imperialism and postcolonial statehood in the subcontinent, than are open for discussion in the press.

Postcolonial statehood, and the alliance with Washington
The creation of Pakistan as a Muslim state was driven by numerous processes. Among these were growing divergences of interest between the Indian National Congress and Indian Muslims. The former's tendency to sequester Indian nationhood on behalf of the Hindu bourgeoisie, and the failings of non-violent strategies which resulted in much unnecessary death and suffering, led to millions of Indian Muslims aligning with the Muslim League and its campaign for a separate Muslim state. Support for the state of Pakistan was not uniform. The Pushtun nationalists in the north-west wanted to create unity with India. When that was not possible, they fought for independence. The Red Shirts, and their celebrated leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan, were militarily crushed. But there, as in Balochistan, resistance to the Pakistani state project has fuelled an ongoing 'national question' that has flared up in repeated struggles. The state that issued was basically run by the country's landowners, businessmen, officers and civil servants, all of whom had come to the fore under colonial rule. The administrators were those who had been incubated and developed by the British empire, and the ruling class oriented toward Washington with the Baghdad Pact (now SEATO) in 1954. Institutions of formally representative government initially provided a facade of popular rule, but they didn't survive for more than a decade. By 1958, the army took power and the country was ruled by the Sandhurst graduate Ayub Khan and his clan.

Attempting to express popular interests were a variety of leftist parties. The Communist Party (CPP) had aligned itself with the bourgeosie in the Muslim League, but were driven out. It then attempted to go for a coup in alliance with another section of the bourgeosie, unsuccessfully, and was banned in 1951. Some of its exiles joined the National Awami Party (NAP), a coalition of progressive liberals, radical nationalists and socialists, rooted mainly in the peasantry. Its elderly leader, Maulana Bhashani, was rooted particularly in the East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) peasants movement, and was he and the party were driven to the left by the emergence of a militant labour movement in the 1950s. It was in response to this labour movement, emerging from Lahore but spreading across the country, that the military took control in 1958 and imposed martial law. A more entrenched ruling class with a robust civil society underpinning its rule would not have been compelled to resort to military rule. But the Pakistani ruling class has repeatedly had to resort to military dictatorship to contain challenges to its control. The NAP, for its part, muted its critique of Ayub Khan through much of the Sixties because of the latter's common pact with the People's Republic of China against India, which for some made him an 'anti-imperialist'.

From revolution to dictatorship
Out of the great revolutionary upsurge in 1967-68 came a new formation, the Pakistan People's Party. The conditions for the revolutionary movement to emerge had been provided by the intensified rates of exploitation in the society as capitalist social relations spread, and the concentration of society's resources - the banks, the insurance companies, industrial capital - in the top 22 families. Ayub himself became extraordinarily wealthy, of course, while the long-term interpenetration of military and capitalist elites has led to a situation today in which the Pakistani military is estimated to have a private capitalist empire worth £10bn. The labour movement showed its first signs of breaking out of the military straitjacket in the railway strikes of 1966. Then in 1967, a students movement arose. The established left parties showed no sign of understanding the significance of this, believing that it would easily be contained by the military dictatorship. But it was later joined by lower middle class layers and peasants. Only when workers in some urban centres responded to a call for a general strike from student leaders with an all-out stoppage did the ruling class, the established left, and the student movement itself begin to see what was being awoken. The labour movements arose amid revolutionary turmoil, as did a national independence movement in East Pakistan, which had long been exploited by the western ruling class. These combined forces were not sufficient to overthrow the rulers of Pakistan, but they did compel Ayub to declare that he would step back and allow the addled General Yahya Khan to take over in 1969. Yahya promised elections within a year.

The Pakistan People's Party (PPP), a radical socialist organisation led by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, won in the west. In the east, the Awami League, of which Maulana Bahsani was a co-founder, stormed to victory. But the new PPP government was not in a mood to negotiate a settlement with the Awami League and, by boycotting the new assembly set up in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan, gave the military space to plan an assault. The occupation, when it came, was supported by Bhutto's government, even as it degenerated into outright genocidal slaughter. There was an orchestrated massacre of left-wing activists and intellectuals, with the connivance of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Pakistani state's favourite Islamist party whose assistance in the slaughter helped them overcome their catastrophic loss in the 1970 elections. The Bhutto government, having aligned itself with the slaughter in what is now Bangladesh, largely failed to deliver on its radical social democratic programme, for example shelving the rural reform package to placate landowners. Instead, it cracked down on its left-wing opponents, banning the NAP in 1975 (it was reinvented in 1986, out of four pro-Soviet parties, as the Awami National Party), suppressing Balochistan provincial autonomy in the same year (resulting in an insurgency that the Pakistani army would crush with customary brutality) and attempted to outflank the religious right by adopting their policies. It was Bhutto who turned Pakistan into a nuclear state, and it was he who promoted his ultimate nemesis General Zia ul-Haq to army chief of staff.

This, and the PPP's manipulation of the 1977 elections, gave the military a chance to strike against the civilian government and introduce one of the deadliest phases in Pakistani politics. Zia had been most notable for his role in helping the Jordanian monarchy to crush increasingly militant Palestinian refugees in 'Black September', a horrendous period in which thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered. He was an outright reactionary, and when the civil unrest provoked by the PPP's ballot-rigging became impossible for the government to contain, he stepped into and imposed martial law. Bhutto was hanged. His crime as far as the ruling class was concerned had nothing to do with ballot-rigging, since they didn't care for democracy, but rather the mild reforms he introduced, which were duly reversed. Zia privatized and de-regulated industry, and oversaw the "Islamization" (sic) of the Pakistani polity, in an attempt to crush the Left and the trade unions. He re-founded the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) as a conservative bloc, the basis of today's PML-N (Nawaz Sharif's faction) and PML-Q (the other factions). Zia's willingness to cooperate with Carter's intervention in Afghanistan consolidated Islamabad's position as a key link in Washington's chain of pliable dictatorships, and Carter rewarded him by reversing a ban on nuclear fuels imposed two years earlier, allowing Zia to fortify the nuclear weapons programme initiated by Bhutto. (This ban was re-imposed after Pakistan tested a nuclear weapon in 1978, only to be lifted in time for the 'war on terror'). It was in this period that the Pakistani state began to incubate reactionary Islamist movements, among them the 'Talibs' who would go on to take over Afghanistan after the defeat of Soviet Union, and who would becomes allies of the Pakistani military in the NWFP and FATA.

The north-west remade by blood and iron
The combination of martial law and participation in the proxy war with Russia also meant that local martial governors had a great deal of authority and clout under the dictatorship. Lt Gen Fazle Haq could saturate the NWFP with heroin and weapons, Gen Rahimudden Khan could drench Balochistan in blood as he annihilated the insurgency, and Nawaz Sharif used his governorship of Punjab to build his political career as a conservative, pro-privatization administrator. Political power was increasingly parcellised, and religious, nationalist and ethnic ideologies used to divide people, with politicians playing one group off against the other. Both Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, who ran civilian administrations after Zia's death, learned how to play these games. It formed an important part of the state's strategizing. When Bhutto and Sharif supported the Taliban in Afghanistan, this was in part a way of consolidating support among some layers of Pashtuns, as well as a foreign policy interest in itself, and an assured way to open up trade routes through the Khyber Pass to central Asia. The Taliban could not have taken power without the assistance of Pakistan, just as its decision to withdraw rapidly in 2001 came at the behest of the Pakistani military leadership. In a similar way, both Sharif and Bhutto used the issue of Kashmir to mobilise local support, recruiting Islamist volunteers to fight India, thereby pursuing a domestic agenda and a foreign policy objective at the same time. As rulers used ethnoreligious divisions and clientelist politics to win support and cultivated armed gangs to fight important battles for them, Pakistan was flooded with weapons and fights between different gangs would periodically shut down parts of big cities like Karachi. The current demonisation of Pashtuns is of a piece with this method of divide-and-rule.

The FATA and NWFP in particular were dramatically transformed by the Afghan wars, the heroin traffick that followed raising the number of addicts in Pakistan from hundreds to millions, the arms trade, and the vast refugee flows that left millions of Pashtuns. Elements in the Pakistani military were able to make a fortune as narco-capitalists and arms dealers in this period, their money laundered by the notorious BCCI, and the ready use of reactionary militias to terrorise opponents was always handy for any ruling class. The origins of the present day TTP, and various allied groups, are in the madrasas and camps set up in the provinces to train and house international jihadis, with US, Saudi and Pakistani funding and equipment. The current corruption and weakness of law enforcement has roots in this period, as does the complete paucity of healthcare and education. The fact that the CIA pretty well turned the provinces into a theme park for warlords, gun-runners and drug-traffickers undermined any prospect for development of a sustainable infrastructure. Today, the FATA and NWFP are the poorest provinces in Pakistan, with local administrators almost wholly dependent on federal funding due to the absence of a local tax base. The 'war on terror' isn't doing either province any favours.

The collapse of the Left, the Taliban and the 'war on terror'
Zia's best efforts did not destroy the Left. For example, the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy, a coalition uniting the PPP with others on the Left, was launched to combat Zia's dictatorship, and the PPP experienced some rejuvenation as a result. What hammered the Left was its support for the USSR. The pro-Moscow parties failed to relate to the nationalist struggle in Balochistan in part because Moscow had, in its Afghanistan venture, opposed the traditional Leninist line on national liberation (not for the first time). The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan was a blow to those who opposed the 'Mujahideen' and saw Russia as the progressive force in the region. The collapse of the USSR was devastating. Most of the Stalinist groups moved to the right, and much of the Left disintegrated. The communist parties shrank to tiny groupuscules. The formerly leftist Awami National Party, which is strongly rooted in NWFP, has become a secular Pushtun nationalist party. The PPP is run by millionaires and property-owners. President Zardari has a personal fortune of almost $2bn. The vacation of socialism from the political scene left a vacuum, which the bourgeois parties have struggled to fill - their naked corruption and clientelism allowed the return of the military in 1999, to only muted protest at first.

Despite the state's patronising of Islamist parties and militias, a tradition continued by Musharraf, confessional politics has rarely enjoyed much popular support in Pakistan. Only in limited, localised circumstances have Islamists been able to gain any measure of mass support. The Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), also based in the NWFP, was able to channel petit-bourgeois hostility to government corruption during the real estate boom of the 1990s, and gain some support because of that. But since 2001, it has been mainly embroiled in combatting NATO forces in Afghanistan. The 2002 elections were won by the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) in NWFP, a reformist Islamist grouping standing against the government's corruption and promising to end nepotism and bring about a fairer justice system. In those stated goals, they failed by a spectacular margin, leading to their defeat by secular forces, as we shall see. What the MMA did accomplish was 'Islamization' of the education system, a ban on music in public transport, and prevented women from being treated by male doctors - in a vicinity with a dearth of trained healthcare professionals. As I say, secular forces largely benefited from the MMA's failures, but at the same time the escalation of Pakistan's war in FATA and NWFP between 2007 and 2009 led to the TTP showing its first signs of developing some support among masses of the population, particularly in the Swat valley where atrocities by Pakistani troops have included the levelling of villages and the destruction of schools and medical facilities, producing millions of refugees.

The Pakistani Taliban
The TTP started to coagulate as a de facto formation in around 2002, though it was only formally consolidated in December 2007 following a shura of 40 Taliban leaders. It is in many ways a deeply unpleasant, cruel and tyrannical grouping, reflecting both its reactionary social doctrines and its CIA/ISI training. Some of the Taliban membership in the early 2000s was drawn from among veterans of Afghanistan, who fled on orders from the Pakistani military. Throughout this period, they were being held in reserve for a future battle to conserve Pakistani interests in Afghanistan. It would seem that the decision to go after the TTP leadership when it was formed, was taken under heavy US pressure. The bounty on TTP leader Baitulla Mehsud's head is offered mainly by the US, with Pakistan reluctantly contributing $600k of the $5.6m bounty. The Taliban, in the period between 2002 and the escalation of war in NWFP in 2007, developed de facto institutions of government in some areas. Since the formation of the TTP, the party has promulgated some grisly discipline. To deter informers, for example, they have broadcast footage of men having their throats cut. In one brutal act, which backfired dramatically, the TTP broadcast the flogging of a Swati woman, and were forced by public outrage to dissociate themselves from it. Their allies have included the TNSM, which formed a brutal parallel government in the Swat valley in 2007. Musharraf and the CIA have claimed that the TNSM bore primary responsibility for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, though this is hardly believed by anyone in the PPP since Bhutto knew herself to be the target of potential assassination by leading elements in the state and military intelligence.

Such groups, though initially dependent on ties to the Pakistani state - which have not been completely broken - have also shown the ability to thrive in war. Meanwhile, the military has demonstrated that it can shift between rival gangs of Islamists, playing one group off against the other. It us currently using the Kashmir-based Lashkar e-Toiba group, supposedly banned in 2002, to attack the TTP in NWFP. According to Nasreen Ghufran, based at the University of Peshawar, part of the problem for the government was that in the period from 2001 to 2007, the Taliban had been using its relationship with the military to create a space for itself, gradually converting passive into active support among a layer of the population in FATA and NWFP. A succession of peace deals bartered by the Pakistani military, intended to gain the agreement of Taliban and tribal leaders not to give sanctuary to 'foreign' militants, failed. It failed partly because the term 'foreign' is inapplicable for those who don't recognise the Durand Line, and partly because the basis of support for the Taliban was their use of anti-imperialist rhetoric, which they would undermine by appearing to be party to the 'war on terror'.

Pakistan's reluctant - but once launched, brutal - war against the TTP and its support base has resulted in a dramatic escalation in the activities of the TTP and sympathetic groups. The Pakistani military's massacres, and the murderous drone assaults that Obama has escalated, threw people into the arms of the Taliban and other Islamist groups that are prepared to fight NATO and the military. The TTP have demonstrated their ability to strike in unpredictable ways, with devastating results. Between 2005 and 2008, the rate of insurgent attacks in Pakistan increased by 746%. Thousands were killed and injured as a result, as officials in the government, police and military headquarters. Neither a change in the national government, nor in the local administration has restrained this trend. In the February 2008 provincial elections, a 'progressive' coalition of the Pakistan People's Party and the Awami National Party (ANP) took control of NWFP, defeating the reformist Islamist grouping who had run the region until then.

If these parties had a solution to the grievances of local populations, they would have retained support. Instead the war continued, and the Taliban sought to position themselves as the most committed anti-US force in the province. There followed a sharp rise in attacks on local government officials, particularly in the provincial capital, Peshawar. Whatever people thought of the perpetrators, the targets didn't gain much sympathy. Unable to offer an alternative, the ANP sought to cut deals with the Islamists, and lost much of the support they had previously gained. The TTP have also lost support since mid-2009, however, due to their harsh disciplinary practises and the gruelling civilian toll of their insurgency. Gallup polls estimated that they had the sympathy of about 11% of people in NWFP by June 2009, and that it had fallen to 1%. It's possible that such polls underestimate Taliban support, as they have been known to do in Afghanistan, but the decline is likely to be real.

The state's attempt to overcome its unpopularity by using American dollars to bring food and development projects into these provinces, on the other hand, is hardly likely to work for as long as the military is butchering people. And for all that the Pakistani military has complied with the US, and remains dependent on American aid, there are strains in the alliance, as expressed in America's nuclear agreement with India, an attempt to outflank China. Pakistan can participate in the 'war on terror' on its own doorstep, but did not send a single soldier to Iraq. The more the US breaches Pakistani sovereignty, and the less the war in Afghanistan looks like succeeding, the more difficult and tenuous the alliance becomes. The middle ranking officers in the Pakistani military are already, Tariq Ali reports, deeply unhappy with the war they are being forced to prosecute, and such divisions are likely to come to the fore.

Conclusion
Of course, the Islamists don't have the answer to US imperialism, any more than they have an alternative to the corrupt state and brutally exploitative forms of accumulation that persist in Pakistan. But the weakened Left has often failed to offer anything in opposition, other than support for secular fractions of the ruling class and military. Just as sections of the Left fell behind Musharraf throughout the 2000s, many on the Left have supported the 'war on terror', and particularly the counterinsurgency in FATA and NWFP. Having collapsed into despondency and inward-looking sectarianism after the fall of the USSR, and having little faith in the potential strength of the organised labour movements, they see Pakistan's secular rulers as the last bulwark against the Islamists. Sadly, support for military rule and conquest is not new for sections of the Pakistani left (and even less happily, such stances are hardly unique to the left in Pakistan). The urban working class is, for sure, a minority in Pakistan, and anti-union laws and corrupt trade union officials have helped keep a lid on struggles. But it hasn't always worked, as Geoff Brown points out, struggles continued throughout the 1990s as the Left fell apart, and:

[m]ore recently, the fisherfolk in Sindh have been able to force the paramilitary Rangers to end their occupation of fishing areas near the border. The Serena hotel workers in Quetta have successfully fought victimisation and won official recognition. The power loom workers in Faisalabad, based mainly in medium and small workplaces, successfully organised a major strike over pay in 2005. Shortly before this the telecom workers occupied their workplaces against privatisation. It took the mobilisation ot hundreds ot soldiers, surrounding key exchanges, and the mass arrests of strike leaders to defeat them. The opposition ot the Karachi electricity supply workers was a major cause ot the collapse ot the deal privatising it in 2004. Thousands of farmers in Okara, near Lahore, have resisted attempts by the army to take control of their land for five years now. At an everyday level, there are countless protests over water shortages, housing and corruption.

Similarly, Sartaj Khan of the International Socialists of Pakistan, argues that the energy tarrif increases, price rises and lay offs that have come with the global recession are not being met without resistance. These are the constituencies that a left worth its name has to look to. These, as Geoff Brown points out, have been looking outward to the global antiwar and anticapitalist movements. In Balochistan, where the state is battling with local movements over the control of natural resources, a new radical left is emerging. Karachi provided a venue for the World Social Forum in 2006, and there are layers of activists looking beyond the dynastic, corrupt, bourgeois politics of the PPP. The old left that sees the Islamists as a greater enemy than the military, and thus aligns itself with US imperialism and the vicious Pakistani ruling class - the same forces that have hammered the Left and the working class for decades - has no answers for such people. A defeat for NATO in Afghanistan would put a stop this war, undermine support for the Islamists, weaken the Pakistani military, and give people a breathing space to organise. Pakistan's entanglement in such imperialist adventures has done nothing but strengthen the forces of reaction inside the country.