LENIN'S TOMB

Tuesday, June 05, 2012

American Insurgents book launch posted by Richard Seymour

I am pleased to say the organisers of my book launch in Boston, the fourth and final launch in the US, have posted the video up on the Howard Zinn Memorial Lectures website. I believe the audio from New York should be available soon. Here is the video:

Labels: american anti-imperialism, american insurgents, anti-imperialism, antiwar movement, colonialism, strategy, US imperialism

Saturday, May 26, 2012

American Insurgents reviewed posted by Richard Seymour

Znet has what I think is the first review of American Insurgents:

American Insurgents is a fantastic synthesis of a rich but often-neglected history. It offers inspiring stories of past US anti-imperialists as well as important advice for present-day organizers. At a time when the US government and ruling class remain committed to global domination and roguishly disdainful of international law and opinion, the book merits close attention from readers living in the belly of the imperial beast.

Labels: american anti-imperialism, american insurgents, anti-imperialism, liberalism, socialism, the complete and utter works of richard seymour, US imperialism

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

Marxism 2012 posted by Richard Seymour

It's coming up to that time of year again. The timetable for Marxism 2012 is up on the website. You'll see that I'm speaking on 'Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism in the Liberal Tradition' on Friday 6th June. There'll be time later to explain what that's all about. As for other speakers, well... I mean, do you need another reason to go?

Labels: anti-imperialism, historical materialism, liberal imperialism, liberalism, marxism, marxism 2012, socialism

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

Monday, January 30, 2012

Syria's revolution, and imperialism posted by Richard Seymour

The Syrian regime is fighting for its survival. I have no sympathy for it, and will welcome its consumption in a revolutionary overthrow. The struggle in Syria is fundamentally - not exclusively, and not in a crude, unmediated fashion - a class struggle. It is an open war of movement between, for the most part, the most advanced sections of the popular classes and a narrow state capitalist oligopoly which has always dealt with the surplus of political opposition by jailing it or killing it. In that struggle, inasmuch as it matters what I think, I situate myself on the side of the popular opposition. Not in an undifferentiated manner, and not without confronting the political problems (of eg sectarianism, pro-imperialism etc) that will tend to recur amid sections of the opposition to any of these regimes. But without conditions or prevarication.

Yet imperialism has its own reasons, of which reason knows a little, for seeking a different kind of ending to the regime: one which does not empower the currently mobilised masses. And I really think the chances of an armed 'intervention' in Syria under the rubric of the UN have noticeably increased. And how we orient ourselves to that situation politically is, I suspect, going to be an important problem in the coming months. The following pleonastic stream of head-scratching and arm-waving is my contribution to securing that orientation.

***

For what it's worth, this is how I read the international situation with respect to Syria at present. The revolutionary wave that was unleashed over one year ago has reverberated through every major social formation in the Middle East. Because it broke the Mubarak regime, which was a regional lynchpin of a chain of pro-US dictatorships, its effects could not be localised. The response of the US was one of confusion and fright, followed by the bolstering of some of the ancient regimes and simultaneously a very cautious 'tilt' toward some mildly reformist forces (in general the most right-wing and pro-capitalist forces). The Saudi intervention in Bahrain was an instance of the former. The invasion of Libya was an improvised policy along the latter lines. And the position within Yemen has been somewhere between these two, with the US attempting to manage a replacement of the leadership without empowering the actual popular forces calling for its downfall, some of whom were conveniently vaporised by US bombing raids.

In general, I think the liberal imperialists have won the ideological argument that the US must be seen to be on the side of reform, because today's insurgent forces are potentially tomorrow's regimes, and the US will have to deal with them on oil, Israel, and so on. However, the political argument as to what concretely to do about it is much more in the balance. The realpolitikers have dominant positions in the Pentagon, while the lib imps seem to have a strong voice in the State Department. It's schematic, but nonetheless a reasonable approximation of the truth to say that the former are very cautious about any Middle East wars, especially wars fought on a liberal (rather than securitarian) basis, while the latter are much more bellicose. Obama's 'state of the union' address, which undoubtedly had its share of theatrical sabre-rattling, made it clear that he would see the overthrow of the Syrian regime as a logical corollary to the overthrow of Qadhafi, which he boasted was made possible by ending the occupation of Iraq. Moreover, his administration has continued to ratchet up pressure on Iran, through sanctions, and we are beginning to hear serious arguments in the bourgeois media in favour of a war. I am not saying that an attack on Iran is likely in the short or medium term. But any escalation regarding Syria could not but be linked to the escalation against Iran.

Obama and Clinton are also highly responsive to pressure from the European Union and particularly France. Sarkozy is naturally leading the EU's response to the Middle East crisis. He may not have a triple A credit rating, but he does have nuclear weapons, a large army with extensive imperialist experience, and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. (Merkel, who has none of these, is taking a much more passive role.) And since the Sarkozy administration has been embarrassed and damaged by the extent of its relations with dictatorships in the Middle East, its 'tilt' toward potentially pro-EU reformist forces has been all the more pronounced. Britain, consistent with its imperial past in the Middle East, its adjusted but continuing role as a subordinate partner of the US, and the warmed over 'liberal interventionism' embraced by Cameron and Hague, has tended to align with France over both Libya and Syria.

***

Another important actor is the Arab League, and within it the prominent figure of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). In the latest Socialist Register, Adam Hanieh points out the strategic centrality of the GCC to the region as far as imperialism is concerned, due to its pivotal role in the region's capitalist development, its hold of enormous oil resources (a quarter of future production), and its articulation with the world economy. Three GCC states have experienced their own uprisings - Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman - all of which have been repressed with military force and marginalised in the ideological apparatuses. Even so, it is the GCC monarchies which have been most stable in the context of the global recession, and the most active in managing the fall-out. So, while the Arab League has not adopted a single, coherent policy response to the regional uprisings, GCC states have played a key role in manouevering the League to support selective interventions, monitoring missions, sanctions and so on against regionally awkward regimes. The League's support for the intervention in Libya was a decisive factor in enabling it to come about. Saudi Arabia, which has coordinated many policy initiatives to contain the region-wide uprisings, has involved itself deeply in the Syrian context. The involvement of Arab League monitors, received with some scepticism by the Syrian local co-ordination committees, was driven by Saudi Arabia; their recent withdrawal has also been triggered by Saudi Arabia. The subsequent lobbying for a UN resolution calling for the Assad regime to step down and supporting some form of UN intervention, has been led by Britain and France, but strongly supported by the Arab League. Russia is at present the only obstacle to the resolution, due to its long-standing relationship with Assad.

Finally, there is the Syrian opposition. The pro-imperialist bloc, the Syrian National Council (SNC), largely led by exiles based in France and Turkey, has not thus far been representative of the sentiment among the rank and file of Syrian opposition members. There is a left and nationalist contingent to the revolt, moreover, that complicates any attempt to simply annexe the revolt to the wider regional strategies of imperialism. Further, even in Libya, where no left or labour movement existed prior to the overthrow of Qadhafi, and where the revolt was quickly disfigured by a racist component, the opening of the political space subsequent to that overthrow has created a window in which germinal popular forces have been able to assert themselves. A political strike in the oil industry took out a pro-Qadhafi chairman, while unrest in Benghazi has resulted in a serious rift with the governing 'transitional council'. The ongoing struggles in Egypt, which is strategically central to the whole region, can also swiftly make calculations made on an ad hoc basis, moot. Nonetheless, complications and problems in a line of development do not necessarily mean that the line will be impeded. Were the Syrian opposition sufficiently crushed, I think it would be more likely that a pro-intervention 'line' could gain ground, and this would tend to divide the left-nationalist contingent. This has to be the assumption because, as Bassam Hassad has pointed out in his critique of the SNC and various pro-Assad types, the existing support for imperialist intervention is itself already the result of brutalisation, mediated by certain types of politics, (generally both liberal and Islamist).

There is also the problem of sectarianism. As far as I can tell, the majority reject any explicit political appeal along sectarian lines. The banners saying 'no to sectarianism' reflect a popular sentiment. The local co-ordination committees have explicitly opposed sectarianism in the movement. Every substantial report I have encountered indicates the strength of the determination to overcome sectarian politics. Nonetheless, the regime has a sectarian basis and has reinforced sectarian divisions as a technique of statecraft - not fundamentally dissimilar to a protection racket. Even though many of the Christians and Alawites supposedly protected by the regime are among the protesters, it would be astonishing if some sections of the opposition were not themselves driven by sectarian politics. It is noticeable that commentators dismissing the revolt as mere sectarian intrigue tend to focus on the role of the salafists. They exist as a subordinate stratum in the revolt, and they are among a number of forces which are against the regime on sectarian grounds. Far from constituting the main political current in the uprising, they nevertheless represent a problem and a weakness for the opposition. Such divisions are, moreover, always manipulated and amplified whenever imperialism is involved - Iraq, anyone?

Finally, there are divisions over the use of armed force against the regime. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) is a large army of defectors from the regime's armed forces, perhaps including tens of thousands of soldiers - at least 15,000 on recent estimates. This exists, to put it crudely, because the Israeli occupation exists. These soldiers, trained to defend Syria from Israeli aggression, are now defending Syrians from state aggression. But their remit has expanded. While their initial rationale was to defend communities against the security forces, they have consistently engaged in military attacks on the regime's infrastructure. The risk of doing so, of course, is that it brings down the regime's repressive apparatus. There is gossip and speculation to the effect that the FSA represents an imperialist conspiracy. I see little proof of this. Despite representing a layer of military defectors, it looks to have gained real support among the oppressed and exploited. The problem is that most of the movement's organised core has insisted on keeping it peaceful, on tactical grounds: the terrain of violent struggle is not where the regime is weakest. Yet, in some parts of the country, particularly the poorest, the regime is not leaving that option open. So, tactical divisions underpinned by geographical disparities and the regime's tactics of selectively striking out at opposition strongholds, are also a potential weakness. Now since the FSA is loyal to the Syrian National Council, which supports an imperialist intervention, there's an obvious dynamic that could come into play here. That is that in the event of the popular movement being crushed or at least severely set back, the armed component comes to the fore and substitutes for the masses; and in the event of a UN-sanctioned intervention, the FSA becomes an auxiliary of NATO, and alongside the SNC forms the nucleus of a post-Assad regime that is not representative of Syrians.

There is not an immediate move to bomb or invade Syria. There is, however, mounting external pressure to create the conditions that would allow this to happen fairly quickly and expediently. It would be a mistake to assume that because such a path would be riddled with problems, it would not be pursued.

***

With all that said, I intend to elaborate further in an abstract manner before coming up for air. From a marxist perspective, the most fundamental antagonism in the capitalist world system is class antagonism. These, of course, cut through the dominated regimes in the imperialist hierarchy just as much as they do in the dominant regimes. As such, in a popular struggle against these regimes, marxists start from the position of supporting those struggles. To be more specific, in various direct and indirect ways, these antagonisms are amplified by imperialism, inasmuch as the ruling classes of the imperialist chain benefit from the exploitation of workers and popular classes in the dominated societies. This is a fundamental cleavage which, arising from the outward extension of capitalist productive relations from the core, separates the dominant from the dominated formations. As a consequence, marxists also start from an axiomatic position of opposing imperialism. It is not simply that imperialism retards the social development of these societies, but that it constitutes an additional axis of exploitation and oppression.

Within the class and state structures of such societies, moreover, the domination of imperialism is reproduced in various ways, such that the modes of domination within those states cannot be extricated from the question of imperialism. As a consequence, popular movements arising against them will tend to have two targets: a domestic and international opponent. Their struggles will also have a tendency to be internationalized, and to have global effects. By the same token, where you have a national bourgeoisie that has developed in resistance to imperialism, that resistance will also be inscribed in its forms of class rule and in the state through which its political domination is secured. Its legitimacy will depend in part on the national bourgeoisie's promise to organise the society in its self-defence. It follows that where there is a break-up of the regime's social control, the issue of imperialism will be to the fore in its ideological and political strategies for retaining its dominant position. This isn't merely manipulation, nor can it be wished away. It poses a particular challenge to popular movements aiming to depose the regime, which is why the role of the anti-imperialist pole in the Syrian uprising is so critical.

But the reality is that these dying regimes can't effectively resist imperialism. The republics organised under the rubric of Arab nationalism have rarely, even in the rudest health, fared much better against Israeli aggression than the old monarchies, and have often been available for opportunistic or long-term alliances with imperialism. This is even true of partially resistant regimes. Hafez al-Assad's support for Falangists against the Palestinians provided the occasion for Syria's initial invasion of Lebanon. Assad senior was also a participant in the Gulf War alliance against Iraq. His son, Bashar al-Assad, has always notched up plaudits from Washington as a neoliberal reformer - the liberalisation of the economy along lines prescribed by the IMF has been one of the causes of the polarisation of Syrian society, and the narrowing of the regime's social base - and leased some of his jails to Washington during the 'war on terror' to facilitate the torture of suspects. The Islamic Republic has a similarly chequered record with regard to imperialism. So, if the regime's raison d'etre is partially that it is an anti-imperialist bulwark, the obvious answer is that it isn't even very good at this.

So how do we orient to this situation, politically? It seems obvious enough that the greatest bulwark against imperialist intervention in societies like Syria is the fullest and most active mobilisation of the masses themselves. Their defeat at the hands of their regime would represent a green light to those pressing for intervention. This is not the main reason why I think marxists should support these rebellions, but it is a very strong reason for doing so. Second, the organised opposition are for the most part, the most politically advanced sections of the popular classes in both Syria and Iran. They are the ones who, however they represent it, are responding to the class antagonism in a way that we would want the most radical workers in Europe, the United States and beyond to do. For this reason, arguments along the lines that both regimes continue to have a popular base and shouldn't be written off are fundamentally wrong. They do have a popular base, but it is not predominantly organised around any claims or values that the left, especially the revolutionary left, has a stake in. So, one must hope for that base to erode, and rapidly. Third, the same basic political grounds on which one opposes an undemocratic capitalist regime and supports its downfall are those on which one must oppose the regime of US imperialism, and work toward its downfall. Anti-imperialism is an indispensable and not merely occasional aspect of emancipatory politics.

These problems cannot, of course, be resolved with such abstract formulae: but such formulae have a role in reminding us of our political coordinates. In concrete struggles, socialists in the imperialist societies would be trying to maintain relations with the opposition to these regimes, linking with exile groups and supporting their protests. But at the same time, they would be the first to oppose military intervention, and would try to assemble the broadest coalition of forces to stop it. Even if the deep political logic of events suggests that there is a confluence of these positions, in the real time in which such practices are developed it means negotiating some potentially fraught alliances. Serious disagreements over the issue of imperialism are bound to emerge in any solidarity campaign; just as there will be sharp disagreements over the regime in any anti-imperialist campaign. Socialists would have to manage these tensions carefully, while being the ones to consistently argue that the two goals are mutually necessary, rather than opposed.

Labels: anti-imperialism, class struggle, david cameron, iran, Israel, middle east, obama, revolution, ruling class, sarkozy, syria, US imperialism, working class

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

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

Monday, April 04, 2011

Springtime for NATO in Libya posted by Richard Seymour

We now know what Washington's model is for the Middle East, in its most attractive guise. In answer to Tahrir Square, they have smoking craters filled with the charred remains of rebels, and conscript soldiers, and civilians and other blameless people who must have seen the joy in Egypt and Tunisia and wished it for themselves. In answer to the turbulent, democratic republic with a vibrant and assertive working class, with its tumult of leftist, Nasserist, Islamist and liberal currents, its 'revolution from below', they offer a prolonged civil war at best culminating in a settlement with Saif and his sibling. In answer to the popular committees, they have private agreements with regime defectors - not forgetting that, in a sense, the NATO powers prosecuting the aerial war are themselves very recent regime defectors. The Washington model has other variants, of course, which have been on display in Yemen and Bahrain. But the more glamorous liberal adaptation is present for all to see in Libya and it is notable for having more apologists than it has outright defenders.

Can I just risk a modest proposition? NATO, the CIA and the special forces belonging to the world's imperialist states are not forces of progress in this world. Does anyone disagree with that? If not, then it follows as surely as night follows day that the successful cooptation of the Libyan revolution by NATO, the CIA and special forces is a victory for reaction. It's no good hoping that the small, poorly armed, poorly trained militias of the east of Libya, who are now utterly dependent on external support, will somehow shake themselves free of such constraints once - if - they take power. Even if they eventually get some of the Libyan money that has been frozen by international banks, as UN Resolution 1973 promises, it will have come all too late to have been decisive.

I can well see how conservatives and liberals would see no loss at all in such a situation, nothing indeed but a net gain. It means after all that even if Qadhafi were to be overthrown at this point, it would not have been by a popular revolution. It would not have been because the revolution broadened its base and spread into Tripoli or Sirte. It would not have been under circumstances in which the panoply of social and political forces in Libya were fused into a victorious revolutionary bloc - e pluribus unum and all that. And it would not have seen Qadhafi's regime replaced by a popular one serving popular needs. Were Qadhafi to fall tomorrow, he would fall to a network of former regime elements and their external backers. The regime that replaced Qadhafi may well be more liberal, the sort that young Saif was to be entrusted to deliver at one point, but it would not be a popular or democratic one. The migration deals with the EU, the oil deals with multinationals, and the arms deals to ensure the suppression of more radical political forces (under the rubric of containing 'Al Qaeda', that ubiquitous, shapeshifting enemy of the free world) would all be central planks of a post-bellum regime.

The liberal argument, which is to the fore, is strikingly apolitical - and narcissistic. Only rarely do its advocates relate it to the shapeshifting revolutionary process currently underway in the Middle East. Rarer still is anything that could pass for analysis of Libya's internal dynamics. On the contrary, its preferred starting point is the solitary, decontextualised crisis point in which the 'West' can redeem itself through military action. There is in this the echo of colonial discourse: the missionaries, the deserving victims, the empire as protector of the meek and virtuous. It's very important for the defenders of 'humanitarian intervention', 'Responsibility 2 Protect' and so on (the clutter of inelegant jargon that accompanies such doctrines is a sure sign of their incoherence) that there should be an opportunity to use firepower, to moralise the means of violence. This is one reason, incidentally, why it never even occurred to them to wonder how it is that - unlike in Iraq, which war they castigate as irresponsible - there was never even the pretence of diplomacy. I am no pacifist, but I don't like to be told that there are no alternatives to air-borne death when the alternatives haven't even been tried.

If the issue was the minimisation of bloodshed, then a logical solution would have been to allow Turkey and others to facilitate negotiations. Yes, I know. A negotiated settlement would be a step back from outright victory for the rebels. But that is an increasingly improbable outcome anyway, and I thought we were trying to save lives here? And as it happens, a diplomatic solution seems to be exactly what is on the cards now. The transitional council leadership in Benghazi has acknowledged as much. Qadhafi is sending ambassadors to talk to interested parties about a ceasefire settlement. If this is how the situation is going to be resolved, then it would have been better that it had been resolved this way several weeks ago. If the aerial bombardment was supposed to stop massacres, it doesn't seem to have done so. From 'Save Sarajevo' to 'Save Benghazi', however, the liberal imperialists are in their glory when on the warpath, and as facile with rationalisations and false consolations as they are contemptuous of the same when deployed by the right.

So, as I say, it is natural that the usual assortment of cynics, security wonks and liberal hawks should be content with this annexing, even if their arguments in its favour make little sense. No one who supported the revolution, however, can be as content without also being a little naive or descending into bad faith arguments of the type: "we don't trust the bourgeois cops, but a rape victim should still call the police." Say what you like about the police, but one generally doesn't to find them blowing up neighbourhoods. Their role, in a word, is the suppression of conflict. The role of imperialist states in the world system is, to put it mildly, not that. And they are, I will not say 'lawless', but not susceptible to any of the constraints that apply to even the most British of police officers. And I am not myself prepared to see the US, or any of its surrogates, as a global policeman just yet. Worse still are the wised up comments to the effect that "the world is a murky place, blah blah, which should not be seen in black and white terms, yawn yawn, and we can't force people to die for the sake of some purist anti-imperialism, etc etc". No, indeed, but it's hardly better to expect people to die for the sake a woolly platitude. The war's handful of leftist apologists are living off the waning hope that out of this process will come a people's revolution. Why do they think this likely? No reason. Just cos. Press them particularly hard, and they'll revert to the parable of the good policeman, stretching the analogy beyond the point of satire in the process.

We can live in hope, of course. The proletariat, introduced into these arguments as a deus ex machina that will guarantee against any sell-out, betrayal, shoddy deal or undemocratic imposition, is the repository of this hope. But the workers of the eastern coastal cities and towns, having shown considerable courage in fighting Qadhafi's forces, were unable to defeat them. And they have not been able to prevent the former regime elements from asserting control of the revolt, or from cutting a deal with NATO. The number of rebels who are actually armed and in control is numerically small. As of late March, there were only about 1,000 trained fighters among the rebels. There are estimated to be about 17,000 volunteers, but they are untrained, poorly armed, and themselves a minority of the populations in which they operate. The Libyan working class - set aside the fact that much of the actual working class resides in areas beyond rebel control - is not in control of this process. General Abdel Fatah Younis, the former interior minister, is not even in control of this process. The opposition leaders are now adjuncts to a NATO strategy which may not even have been disclosed to them. Let's at least give credit where it's due. This is NATO's war. And that means, this is Washington's war.

Labels: anti-imperialism, dictatorship, liberal imperialism, libya, middle east, NATO, revolution, US imperialism

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Humanitarian intervention? posted by Richard Seymour

Me, interviewed at the New Left Project:

The professed rationale for the intervention in Libya is of course a humanitarian one, as is to be expected given the way Western powers (if not all states) portray themselves. The work of writers such as Noam Chomsky, Mark Curtis, yourself and a host of others has, however, shown that Western foreign policy tends to have as its primary concern the power and privilege of domestic elites. What, then, is the real motive of those backing the intervention in Libya? What, fundamentally, do you think they are seeking to achieve?
I think there are various motives. One is to re-establish the credibility of the US and its allies by appearing to side with an endangered population and thus partially expunge the ‘Iraq syndrome’ as well as efface decades of arming and financing dictatorships to keep the local populations under thumb and permanently endangered. But a more fundamental motive can be inferred from the context: the region is experiencing a revolutionary tumult, and the revolution in Libya is no less genuine than those in Tunisia and Egypt (and the uprisings in Bahrain and Yemen). The thrust of this revolution is not just anti-dictatorship, it’s also anti-imperialist, against the IMF and alliances with Israel. So I would hypothesise that the US and its allies have been desperate to find a way to halt this revolutionary process somehow and, where they can’t do that, shape it in a direction more favourable to continued American hegemony in the region. The former regime elements in the leadership of the Libyan rebellion have been more open to an alliance with the US than other revolutionary movements partly because of the particular history and nature of the Qadhafi regime, whose legitimacy continued to rely somewhat on his past standing as a regional opponent of imperialism. This has given the US and EU a unique opportunity to stamp their authority in the process, even if they can’t control it...

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', anti-imperialism, dictatorship, interview, libya, NATO, revolution, the liberal defence of murder, US imperialism

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Libya and transnational solidarity posted by Richard Seymour

It transpires that Libyan revolutionaries are well versed in the tenets of transnational solidarity:

On a per capita basis, though, twice as many foreign fighters came to Iraq from Libya -- and specifically eastern Libya -- than from any other country in the Arabic-speaking world. Libyans were apparently more fired up to travel to Iraq to kill Americans than anyone else in the Middle East. And 84.1% of the 88 Libyan fighters in the Sinjar documents who listed their hometowns came from either Benghazi or Darnah in Libya's east. This might explain why those rebels from Libya's eastern provinces are not too excited about U.S. military intervention.

Indeed. No analysis of Libya and the regional revolt in which it is embedded can have any credibility whatever if it doesn't place imperialism at its centre.

Labels: anti-imperialism, dictatorship, iraq, middle east, qadhafi, revolution, US imperialism

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Egyptian revolt posted by Richard Seymour

After Tunisia, they kept asking, where next? Algeria? Jordan? Albania, even? All of those places, yes, but the crown jewel of America's regional comprador oligarchy is in Cairo. Protesters planned that today would be a day of wrath, a day of revolution. The state warned that there would be arrests and worse if anyone dared to make good on this threat. The protesters, undeterred, have showed up in number - perhaps not unvanquishable number, but hardly cowed either. Armed police have resorted to every weapon in their arsenal from shock-sticks to "more potent weapons", but they look decidedly on the defensive in some of the footage. Portraits and posters of the dictator Mubarak have been torn down in public. As ever, check in at Arabawy for updates and links on this.

Update: apparently, bullets are being fired at protesters in downtown Cairo.

Jack Shenker reports:

Downtown Cairo is a war zone tonight – as reports come in of massive occupations by protesters in towns across Egypt, the centre of the capital is awash with running street battles. Along with hundreds of others I've just been teargassed outside the parliament building, where some youths were smashing up the pavement to obtain rocks to throw at police.

We've withdrawn back to the main square now were thousands more demonstrators are waiting and a huge billboard advertising the ruling NDP party has just been torn down. Security forces are continuing to use sound bombs and teargas to disperse the crowd, but so far to no avail.

Labels: anti-imperialism, capitalist crisis, egypt, middle east, palestine, socialism, US imperialism

Monday, January 03, 2011

Moving On from Zizek (or not) posted by Richard Seymour

I agree with those who say we should move on from Zizek. And I would have nothing more to say about this debate, if people would stop defending Zizek on utterly spurious grounds. However, I have had my ear nipped by a number of people who want to challenge my recent criticisms of Zizek, and the sheer irrationality of the defences offered is jaw-dropping. On Twitter, for example, @khephir argued that Zizek was not attempting to vilify gypsies, but to “immanentize” them. Asked if the specific claims about gypsies were correct, @khephir replied that “looking for truth in argumentation” is “silly”. The claims about gypsies being thieves and murderers are “rhetorical”, not “critical or exhaustive”, and anyway “we’re all thieves and murderers”. If you’re not laughing, you need to pinch yourself. There’s others, but I’ll spare you.

More seriously, though in my opinion not much more seriously, the blogger ‘Sebastian Wright’ has engaged in a critique of my overall criticisms of Zizek, which he attempts to read symptomatically in light of the SWP’s politics of anti-racism, with which Sebastian has differences. He alleges that after I started to criticise Zizek when he made what I thought was an appalling argument about the ‘Danish cartoons’ bullshit (sorry, ‘controversy’), I have “operated via a single strategy: take Žižek’s reflections on a subject, from whatever angle they might be, and simply shout them down with charges of racism: a kind of rhetorical ‘nuclear option’.”

Hot crackers, I take exception to that. I don’t go around baselessly accusing superstar philosophers of racism. Where I have accused Zizek of engaging in racism, I have dealt with specific examples, providing details and argument. In this specific instance, I simply ask: are Zizek’s claims about the gypsies, and specifically the Strojan family, true? Is he merely stating a well-known truth, something which the politically correct brigade is trying to suppress, or is he fabricating, lying egregiously? The answer is that it’s the latter. I find no evidence that the Strojan family are car thieves, and they didn’t murder anyone. It is true that locals blamed the Strojan family for a number of thefts, but it’s also true that they acknowledge when pressed that the Strojans have been scapegoated on this issue. So, what Zizek said wasn’t true and, pardon me, he had no good grounds for claiming it to be true. Did Sebastian bother to check this before reflexively leaping to Zizek’s defence? No sign of it in this post.

Next question: if it wasn’t true, then why would he say it? The context is that he’s denying, or at least putting in serious doubt, the idea that the pogrom against the Strojan family was racist, and that the mob itself was racist. He puts this charge in scare quotes. He’s trying to explain the terrible burden of living with a gypsy family nearby, in order to give a real, material pretext for the violence. I do not say that he cheered on the violence. I was quite specific about this. He championed the mob and its ‘legitimate grievances’ – a familiar technique of right-wing tabloids and shock-jock commentators. He’s acting as an advocate for the poor, ordinary guy whose son comes home beaten up by gypsies, and who lashes out in grief. So his fabrications – and they are fabrications – are an act of apologia.

Third question: can such allegations be separated from the racist discourses about gypsies that are current in Europe, and particularly in Slovenia where this pogrom took place? These discourses have long depict gypsies as anti-social thieves and killers. Such was a key component of the ideological basis of the Nazis’ extermination programme. These discourses scapegoat gypsies for real social problems – there is theft and murder and anti-social behaviour as a matter of course in all capitalist societies. They Other the gypsies, making them appear as an alien intrusion in an otherwise cohesive, integrative society. In Slovenia, there are over ninety gypsy settlements. Gypsies have long sought legal normalization, an end to segregation in schools, an end to de facto segregation in access to property, infrastructure, running water, and that sort of thing. The discourses which dehumanise them as anti-social, a burden, thieves and killers, aside from just happening to rely on anecdotes which – where they can be checked – prove to be untrue, blame gypsies for this appalling state of affairs, and validate their racial oppression. Zizek’s specific claims, aside from being untrue, and hitched to an unjustified apologia for a racist mob, are inseparable from these wider discourses from which they were undoubtedly culled.

It is so important to get the facts right about this, as the consequences could not be graver. The demonisation of gypsies is liable to get someone killed – how’s that for a rhetorical nuclear option? In light of this, to refer coyly to “real antagonisms” just isn’t good enough.

***

I am also, as part of this wider critique, misrepresented over the Danish bullshit: “Seymour simply asserts that cartoons lampooning Muhammed are racist, ergo any attempt to think the reaction to them as anything more than justified rage against an obviously evil act of injustice is also racist.” Those of you who spent time on the blog during that disgusting fiasco will remember that I was prepared to be quite boring on the subject. I went into some considerable length and detail, through a number of posts, explaining why these specific cartoons (not just any old cartoons lampooning Muhammad) were racist.

The cartoons collectively drew on a series of essentialising tropes about Islam that have nothing to do with the facts of Islam, but which have everything to do with the demonisation of Islam. These held that Islam is, from is inception, a doctrine of violence, fanaticism, and the oppression of women. It so happens that this isn’t true. The cartoon about the virgins for suicide martyrs, for example, reproduces with a commonplace idea held about Muslims and their beliefs among Europeans and Americans. But it is not based on anything in the Quran or the Prophetic Tradition. These are tropes which became important to colonial pedagogy because of the encounter with Muslim resistance to empire, in Indian in 1857, in Egypt in 1882, in Sudan in 1898, in Iraq in 1920, and so on. In each of these cases, resistance had to be explained in terms that did not reference the injustice of imperial predation. It was therefore explained in terms of, among other things, Mahometan fanaticism and a propensity toward violence.

“Imperial feminism” in the same era depicted colonised male subjects as being inherently more barbaric in their treatment of women. In practise this conviction, which was propagated by the likes of colonial administrator John Stuart Mill and perpetuated by conservative, bourgeois feminists, weakened the struggle against female oppression in Europe. It formed part of the advocacy for empire, as in Mill’s famous arguments, after the 1857 uprising, for the East India Company’s progressive social role in India. So, the treatment of Muslim males as being inherently more barbaric in their treatment of women has a pedigree, and its function today is not dissimilar to that of its original formulation.

The soliciting and repeated publication of these cartoons, the refusal to acknowledge diplomacy for months before there was a single protest, and the desperate attempts by newspapers to provoke a reaction by talking them up before there was a reaction, is obviously not separable from the context of the ‘war on terror’ and the civilizational narratives that have moralised and rationalised its prosecution. So, again, I charge racism on very specific grounds that the implied depiction of the subject is false, Othering, and is part of the means by which their oppression is validated and perpetuated. Sebastian may disagree with this. But no one, certainly none of Zizek’s defenders, has been willing to engage with the argument on its own level.

Sebastian also alleges that my position on the Danish cartoons logically entails that the “reaction to [the cartoons]” doesn’t deserve real anatomisation. Any attempt to read into them more than a reaction to injustice is written off as racist, he avers. This is not so. I am more than happy to countenance an analysis of protests against Danish cartoons which suggests that they are more than a protest against an injustice. Arguably, other dynamics included the willingness of US client-states to allow people to vent steam over the issue. But it is unreasonable, putting it no more strongly than that, to write off any injustice without proper consideration of the issues. Further, as I argued, Zizek is not plainly equipped to carry out such an anatomy. An important part of his argument was that Muslims were targeting Denmark despite its being a haven of tolerance, despites its efforts to be open to all races, creeds and cultures. But those who follow these sorts of things knew that this was false. Denmark was never the epitome of tolerance, and certainly neverparticularly tolerant of its Muslim minority. And unfortunately, when Zizek comes to explaining what the protests are “really” about, he falls back on a crude, essentialist analysis of Islam and its texts, which bears the same relation to Islam and its believers as Raphael Patai’s work does to the ‘Arab mind’.

***

Lastly, the symptomatic critique holds that the SWP is trying to uphold a liberal anti-racism, in its efforts to defend oppressed communities in the UK, and that my position on Zizek’s outbursts on the gypsies amounts to nothing more than a defensive This ‘liberalism’ is chiefly expressed in, whisper it, “permanent united fronts with Tories, right-wing Muslim groups, and so on”. This works by conflating a tactic, the united front, with an ideology. It also conflates specific work on combatting fascism, with wider anti-racist work and output. The SWP’s position on fighting fascism is simply that it will work with whoever is opposed to fascism. In Unite Against Fascism (UAF), this unites a part of the Labour Left, some of the trade union bureaucracy, mainstream Muslim groups, Jewish anti-racist organisations, the SWP and independents. We are open about our politics within UAF, but we don’t expect everyone else in that organisation to share our perspective. The Tories’ only involvement to date involved David Cameron signing the UAF’s founding declaration. I make no apologies for the fact that Cameron felt that he had to associate himself with this campaign. As for the SWP’s position on the short-comings of ‘multiculturalism’ and liberal anti-racism, this has been outlined in the journal, in the newspaper, and at public events. My view, stated plainly, has been that the neo-Powellite revival of racism has operated partially occupying some of the ideological terrain mapped out by official multiculturalism. Our analysis of racism is unapologetically marxist, our response based on that marxist analysis. But if it’s true that in my criticisms of Zizek I am basically upholding the SWP’s politics of anti-racism, then those politics would seem to be validated here. They certainly have a clear political advantage over any position which perpetuates malicious, racist falsehoods, in a context in which the perpetuation of those falsehoods is actually lethal.

Labels: anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, antifascism, colonialism, europe, gypsies, islam, islamophobia, racism, unite against fascism, zizek

Monday, June 29, 2009

Ahmadinejad and accumulation posted by Richard Seymour

Oh, I know, this is so last week. It's over already. The twittering has stopped, the protesters have been beaten into retreat, the Youtube videos aren't being uploaded at the same frequency. This week is all about celebrities turned zombie. Still, indulge me for a moment. This image of Ahmadi the pious populist, I think, arises in part from a certain spectacle positioning. After all, the corporate media find it difficult to construe someone as an enemy without also implying that they are some kind of 'commie', one of those heretics who rejects the sacred wisdom of property rights, free markets etc. The election commentary, with its condescending subtexts about Ahmadinejad's ability to win over the ignorant poor by tossing sacks of potatoes their way, surely reflected this. And anyway, it is not within the media's repertoire to explain the underlying divisions in Iran's ruling bloc, or to give anything but a crayola account of the class politics of elections. Partly, I suspect, such crude plot devices is what drove Juan Cole to dismiss the issue of class in his own analysis. Some belated analysis worth paying attention to, then, includes this discussion of labour under Ahmadinejad; this discussion of privatization and accumulation in Iran; and this useful discussion of the elections from the Middle East Research and Information Project.

The main point that arises, I think, is that the division that has been posited between a kind of socially conservative resource populism on the one hand, and a socially liberal austerity programme on the other, is not adequate. The more that comes out about the elections, the more it is clear that they exposed a raging war in the ruling class over political ascendancy and property, with relatively minor differences on other matters exaggerated. The second point is that the right-wing bloc behind Ahmadinejad has tended to use anti-imperialist rhetoric to justify the most naked transfer of wealth from the public sphere to capital, particularly to more influential players in the bazaari class and state-affiliated capitalists. They shake their fists at Washington just as they're about to go further toward neoliberalism than even the IMF proposed. And they justify it by referring to the need to break the sanctions imposed by Washington. This policy is obviously designed not to enrich the poor or sustain them in the long term, or strengthen their bargaining power as workers, but specifically to reduce their long-term wealth and purchasing power by redirecting a larger portion of socially produced wealth to a specific sector of the capitalist class. Ehsani et al are far too soft on Mousavi in their discussion (Ehsani called Mousavi's programme 'social democratic' on a mailing list, which I think is about as credible as Hamid Dabashi's claim that the man was a hardline socialist). This appears to stem from their assessment that the faction backing Ahmadinejad are uniquely dangerous and authoritarian, posing far greater dangers to democracy and labour than even the crooked neoliberals supported by Rafsanjani. Their tone may be unduly alarmist, and their approach to the elections is not one I share, but it is hard to argue with the overall analysis.

Labels: accumulation, ahmadinejad, anti-imperialism, capital, iran, privatisation, US imperialism

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Lion of the Desert posted by Richard Seymour

About Mussolini's conquest of Libya and the resistance:

Article here, review here.

Labels: anti-imperialism, colonialism, fascism, libya, mussolini, omar mukhtar, resistance

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Al-Afghani's response to imperialism posted by Richard Seymour

In an era in which the topic of Islam and associated political movements are subject to unprecedented scrutiny, with as many books, monographs, articles and polemics on the subject as there was on communism following the Russian revolution, it is striking what is omitted. The accent of most research and exposition is on those ideas that are held to have contributed to the 'Al Qaeda' brand, with Sayyid Qutb usually cited as the doyen: 'the philosopher of terror', as Paul Berman branded him. (This in an unimaginative article which apparently arose from an afternoon's tour of New York's Islamic bookshops, and in which Berman distinguishes himself by referring to the Israel-Palestine conflict as a 'border dispute'). It is unfortunate that this interesting but thoroughly excavated seam continues to be mined at the expense of other backgrounds and contexts, but then it has to be this way: an appropriate moral framework for the 'war on terror' cannot begin with colonial oppression and anti-colonial revolt. Among the figures I would wish for more discussion of would be Abd-el-Krim, Mir Said Sultan-Galiev (Mirsäyet Soltanğäliev) and Jamāl-al-dīn Asadābādī "al-Afghani". Krim, as regular readers know, is the old Rifian anticolonial rebel who inspired Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara (recent correspondence has brought my attention to material that suggests he had contact with both), and who had offered his services to the Spanish Republic during the civil war. Galiev, a far more neglected figure and every bit as interesting, is the Tatar communist whose thought on Muslim National Communism was in many ways a precursor to what would become known as 'Third Worldism', and whose attempts to synthesise Islam, nationalism and communism met with Stalin's disapproval. (See Maxime Rodinson's appraisal here.) Sadly, there's not much literature available about Galiev in English beyond an inaccuracy-laden book - which at least contains some translated writings - by Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: A Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World.

Al-Afghani has had a mountainous reputation in Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Iran. He was once a bit more prominently discussed in Anglophone writing about Political Islam, both because of his influence on conservative revivalist strains of Islamist thinking via Rashid Rida, and because he was seen as an example of a sophisticated Islamic reformer with liberal sensibilities. Albert Hourani's classic Arabic thought in the liberal age: 1798-1939 dealt at some length with the mysterious anti-imperialist. Nikki Keddie's now out-of-print work, An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jamal ad-Din "al-Afghani", is one of the few English language sources that contains a selection of his writings. And to give you an idea what that means, the book was first published in 1968 (it was reprinted during the Khomeini era). Though al-Afghani is generally referenced in books on 'Political Islam', the treatment is usually tentative and unenlightening. Perhaps this is because his legacy is a difficult one to assess. As Keddie points out, a certain amount of dissimulation was part of his persona. The very name "al-Afghani" results from his claim to have been born and raised an Afghan Sunni (it is no longer a controversial matter that he was an Iranian Shi'ite). In fact, while in Afghanistan, he professed to be a Turk. While in Turkey, he claimed he was Afghan. And the British thought he was a Russian agent, becxause of his attempt to persuade the Amir to side with Russia against the British Empire.

Though he was in some ways the first Pan-Islamist, there has always been some controversy over what he really believed. While some of his writing is concerned with refuting materialism, his 'Answer to Renan', written in 1883, indicates profound scepticism about religion, and he had earlier incurred the Ottomans' wrath for heretical speechifying. His vocal orthodoxy seems incongruent with the heterodox sources of his thinking. His modernism is curiously commingled with an idealized appreciation of the early years of Islam, the age of the Prophet and the first four caliphs. As a religious reformer and a defender of science and rationalism, he was also a vocal defender of traditionalism and orthodoxy, especially in his later years during which he shed his reputation as an apostate. Keddie, who treats al-Afghani's thought as a kind of proto-nationalism (see 'Pan-Islamism as Proto-Nationalism', The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 41, No. 1 March, 1969), resolves this by suggesting that al-Afghani evinced religious orthodoxy and traditionalism only when he was addressing the masses, whom he distrusted yet wanted to unite. The project of unity inhibited the project of reform. For, though al-Afghani wished to reform Islam in order to help meet the challenge of imperialism, he could offer no consistent programme without alienating a conservative constituency whom he needed to win over. His arguments against a certain kind of materialism, Keddie maintains, emphasised the practical virtues of religion, and were probably intended to bolster the cohesion of Islam vis-a-vis the West. Such a treatment, if decidedly vexatious for both his conservative and liberal admirers, seems to be consistent with al-Afghani's career.

One aspect of his life that there is no mystery about, however, is his hatred for imperialism, and particularly for the British. He opposed the British in India, in Ireland, and in Egypt. He participated in the Urabist revolt, although his role has been grossly exaggerated by his admirers. And it was his response to imperialism, particularly during his eight years in Egypt, that defined him. Here, the Indian background is essential for three reasons. First, it was in his contacts with Indian Muslims that he first became apprised of the discrimination they faced under British rule. Secondly, because it was in this context that he was immersed in an emerging pan-Islamist sentiment that British imperialism was arousing across south Asia. Thirdly, it was during his stay in India in the early 1880s that he noticed that those most explicitly embracing 'Westernisation' (an anachronistic term, but I don't know of a better substitute) were also the worst collaborators. His attacks on 'materialism' were really directed at the comprador followers of Sayyid Ahmad Khan. It shouldn't be assumed that Afghani was in some sense a supporter of 'communalism'. His Indian articles defended nationalism, and unity between Hindus and Muslims. This is not strictly congruent with his Pan-Islamism, but then Afghani was nothing if not inconsistent, and his modus operandi was to tailor what might seem to be abstract polemics over Islam, philosophy, the socio-linguistic basis of nationalism, etc., to whatever was best suited to the local situation, or to whatever would most advance the struggle against imperialism. Just as he mobilised Egypt's era of pre-Islamic greatness, so he appealed to a proud Hindu past when addressing Indian Hindus. Equally, when arguing with the Orientalist writer Ernest Renan, he mobilised his grounding in liberal rationalism, and his immense philosophical knowledge, and explicated an evolutionist view of religion that he would in obscure in other contexts.

Is it just an irony of history that a religious progressive should have inspired Rashid Rida and, later, Hassan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood? I don't think so. Their dilemma was much the same as his, even if they were devout where he was an occult atheist. They shared his hatred of the British, who had exploited Egypt ferociously before grinding its revolts with an iron fist. They agreed with him that a renewed Caliphate was the best defence of the Muslim world against colonial incursions. And they shared the elitist thrust of his thinking. Afghani's legacy is summed up by Keddie as a kind of proto-nationalism. This implies a natural progression in which religious identifications generally proceed toward national ones, but such a progression can no longer be relied upon. I would simply describe Afghani as a conservative anti-colonial nationalist. I have quoted Partha Chatterjee here before, but these quotes seem apt again:

'Nationalist thought is “born out of the encounter of a patriotic consciousness with the framework of knowledge imposted on it by colonialism. It leads inevitably to an elitism of the intelligentsia, rooted in a vision of radical regeneration of national culture”. This elite either pursues ‘modernisation’ through a period of tutelage until such time as its institutions and social bases allow for independence; or it takes a more uncompromising position against colonialism, and accentuates what is different, unique, non-Western – this movement is often behind chauvinist or fundamentalist cultural currents. For this elite to stand any chance against the colonists, it has to mobilise the peasantry (in an agrarian economy) – and since it does not intend to revolutionise their social conditions, it must appropriate their power and their consent.' (See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World, 1986)

'Indeed, both of these tendencies in the bourgeois-national elite are caught between on the one hand the desire to replicate the material modes of organisation that has made the West so effective, and on the other the desire to reinforce the national spiritual identity. Materially, the West has better means and methods; spiritually, the East is superior. In this, the justification resides for the selective appropriation of Western "modernity".' (Chatterjee quoted in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 1999)

Labels: anti-imperialism, british empire, colonialism, itjihad, jamal ad-din al-afghani, political islam

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Philippe Sands critiques Liberal Defence posted by Richard Seymour

"The generality of Seymour's conclusion, the broad sweep of his argument and the passion of his attack are overstated, dissipating their force. More nuance and context could have made this potentially important book compelling. It is a shame, as buried in these pages and their footnotes is a great deal of damning material on the apologists of recent illegalities."

I find little to complain about here - not because I agree with Sands, but because I can't object to someone with his views reaching the conclusions that he does. In general, Sands would like more "nuance" and less generality. In specific, he would have liked to see some discussion of international law and its centrality to justifying war. I don't see this as being particularly damaging to my case, since the book is about the ideas, rather than the legal institutions, that have helped justify imperialism - apparently a word that is absent from Sands' lexicon. Perhaps, however, it would have been worth stating a position on international law, however briefly, if only to outline the view that law is an expression of force and will, not morality. Thus, while Sands contends in several lucid and highly readable dispatches that that the problem with the Bush administration is its subversion of international law, I maintain that the rule of law in international affairs is itself barbaric. The post hoc legalisation of the occupation of Iraq is a condign example, both of law being the product of violence and of the barbarism in its application. Still, I realise that this is a controversial position, that Sands would not be receptive to such an argument and that, in fact, he wishes I had written a different book.

Otherwise, Sands would have preferred to have some acknowledgement that some "use of force", sometimes, can be justified. This is what I take the plea for "nuance" to mean. As he puts it, "it seems all force is wrong, so that any liberal support may be treated as liberal justification for murder". I do not, for the record, say that "all force is wrong". Sands seems to have confused anti-imperialism with pacifism. I do, however, go to some lengths to detail several interventions, over several centuries, that were strenuously moralised on humanitarian terms, from the Boer War to Operation Allied Force, and I do find the humanitarian case wanting. Clearly, such a gauche lack of subtlety on my part does not merit any particular leniency. However, as the critique does not address the substance of the argument, it is at best a missed opportunity.

Sands says that Liberal Defence "glosses over vastly important issues" such as: "Was the post-second world war human rights project intended to create new conditions of colonial domination? Has it contributed to circumstances in which there will be more oppression and misery, rather than less? Have the economic rules promoting globalisation engendered war?" It is easy to concede the point, but equally difficult to see its relevance. Again, he seems to have wanted a book about something else. Similarly, when he says that "the real critique of those who supported the latest Iraq war is that they killed off any hope, for now at least, of garnering support to use force where massive violations of fundamental human rights are taking place", I have a feeling that he and I have a different outlook on life entirely. The "real critique" is that they helped facilitate the very "massive violations of fundamental human rights" that Sands opposes, with the outstanding result of perhaps over a million excess deaths. Therefore, if one side-effect of the slaughter we have seen for the last five or six years is that people are less willing to exhort the United States to deploy its awesome machinery of violence, this ought to be welcomed. I do, in the conclusion, engage with those who see US imperialism as a potential guarantor of human rights and last resort terminator of genocide, but if Sands has read this, he shows no sign of having done so.

There is one part of the review that seems entirely out of place, jarring to the point of inducing nausea. Sands says: "those who are on the receiving end of what Seymour perceives as US excess have, through the acts of their own governments, or their failure to object, contributed to their own oppression." I confess I don't understand what this means - or, perhaps, I would rather not understand what this means. Perhaps it is best to leave this one to the readers' judgement.

Update: I've had a rather interesting exchange with Philippe Sands, and - just to set the record straight on the last paragraph of this post - I am, with his permission, reproducing his comment clarifying his remarks:

"The only point I was making is that a number of the conflicts you refer to were supported by Security Council action (even unanimous in some cases). To my mind, that takes the sting out of your critique, in the sense that not all the blame can be laid at the feet of the US or those on the left who may have supported the actions. In various cases many governments and many peoples supported a conflict, whether directly or indirectly. That raises issue of their own responsibilities, although it cannot in any way justify the illegalities and excesses once the conflict is underway, or the terrible suffering of innocents caught up in broader geopolitical nightmares."

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', anti-imperialism, international relations, pro-war 'left', the complete and utter works of richard seymour, the liberal defense of murder

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Sunny Hundal is not an Uncle Tom. He is an idiot. posted by Richard Seymour

How much of an idiot? This much. Censuring the "racist flip-side of anti-imperialism", the guru of New-Labour-revival-via-his-new-blog, asserts that Ralph Nader, John Pilger and Ayman al-Zawahiri have something in common. While Zawahiri (looking very lonely these days - wonder where his chums have gone?) referred to Obama as a 'house slave', both Nader and Pilger, describing Obama's inevitably disappointing policies, have fallen back on the epithet 'Uncle Tom'. You know what that means: Radical Left = Al Qaeda.

Before proceeding with Hundal's trashy diatribe, let's pause and meditate on that term 'Uncle Tom'. Although the epithet originates in an abolitionist book written by a Northern white liberal, progressive for its era, it has come through usage to refer to a black person who purportedly collaborates with the white power system, and in general to refer to a sell-out. It was the latter sense in which Nader used the term. Ralph Nader was not, in fact, talking about foreign policy, but about Obama's support for Wall Street interests. He suggested that Obama had a choice between being an "Uncle Sam for the people of this country, or an Uncle Tom for the corporations". Obama is clearly not an 'Uncle Tom' in this sense, since - despite his carefully calibrated marketing campaign - he has not promised to be anything more than a centrist. He channelled an anti-racist vote while pandering to racist pieties about poor black people and pandering to racist contempt for Muslims. He channelled an anti-war vote while using the most hawkish language on Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan and Pakistan. He channelled economic populism while effectively championing the agenda of Wall Street, his most munificent backers. His sell was progressive, but his literally expressed agenda was moderately to the left of the Bush administration. Further, Nader's choice of words, contrasting a Frank Capra kind of patriotism with a racialised code for sell-out, is highly unfortunate. It does not, of course, make him a racist, and that splenetic charge is mainly a means by which Obama's more uncritical supporters discipline those who want to retain a more critical perspective. Nader, as always, is the whipping post for this crowd.

That isn't the only thing that is problematic about the term 'Uncle Tom'. It is always going to be the case that some of the oppressed collude with the agents of their oppression and are rewarded for doing so. They get praise for denouncing the group they are held to represent, and the more vitriolic and less nuanced they are, they more praise is heaped on them. It isn't hard to come up with examples of this, and it isn't hard to see why it is particularly infuriating when it happens. For example, when Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji attack Islam and celebrate US foreign policy, they provide Islam-bashing racists with a cover they are not entitled to. They are themselves participating in a racist discourse that is ascriptively humiliating for the vast majority of Muslims who are not prepared to consider that they belong to an inferior culture (even if it could be said, which it can't, that there is a distinctive, monolithic Muslim culture). Similarly, when Kanan Makiya in his role as a notable Iraqi exile commentator described bombs falling on Iraq as 'music to his ears' and participated in pre-war planning for the 'new Iraq', he was derided by another Iraqi exile as an 'Iraqi Uncle Tom' for having allowed his identity as an Iraqi to be rented out for such atrocious purposes. And there is clearly a desire to express the sense in which such actions provide a sort of 'decoy', just in the same sense that Zillah Eisenstein suggests that the integration of women into military life while progressive also helped provide a decoy for essentially masculinist ventures.

There is clearly a sense in which Obama is being used to rebrand the empire. This isn't only by tapping his race. It isn't only by tapping his 'Muslim' middle name, either. It is also his experience of growing up in Indonesia, a poor society where he was schooled alongside Muslims. He is sold as a man who, unlike the upper class twit from Midland, Texas, might be able to empathise with the poor and oppressed. He is sold as an intelligent, rational man quite unlike the vicious reactionaries he is replacing. He is sold as someone who worked in poor communities and therefore understands their problems. This is the sell that Pilger ironised about when he noted in a November article for the New Statesmen that Obama's aggressive foreign policy will see many "brown-skinned" children killed in Afghanistan. In the January article in which he referred to Obama as an "Uncle Tom" who would bomb Afghanistan, he also noted Hillary Clinton's sell as some kind of blow for women's liberation, though she is in fact an anti-feminist. It is the decoy that is the target here. Nevertheless, the trouble is that the insult 'Uncle Tom', even with the best intentions, can in fact reinforce a kind of identitarian essentialism. Depending on the context, it can imply that there is a particular standard of behaviour to which someone with such-and-such an identity ought to conform.

Hundal's diatribe, however, hardly escapes such essentialism. For a start, he presumes to speak on behalf of a "younger ethnic minority generation"™ that it is by no means clear he can adequately represent. He can no more say what this "we" believes than I can speak on behalf of a "thirty-something pinkish-yellow generation" because it is no more univocal than the "younger ethnic minority generation"™. This is not mere narcissism on his part, though as ever it is unmistakeably present. The things he puts into the mouths of that "younger ethnic minority generation"™ are boringly obsequious, and are precisely for the purpose of mandating Obama as a terrific guy. In other words, having railed against the (entirely confected) supposition that all black people must think alike, he then mobilises an entire generation of imaginary black people to support his case. Having done that, he places a critique of Zionists (a political category) in the same rank as a paranoid whinge about Muslims (an ethnic/religious category). In its best light, this is just myopic. In its worst, it regurgitates the baseless claim that opposing Zionism is a form of racism.

Of course, Hundal doesn't even remotely begin to grapple with the seriousness of the problems that both Pilger and Nader raised. Nor does he seem to grasp that the commitment to increased aggression in Afghanistan and the fervent support for Israel (to whom Obama has already awarded Jerusalem as its capital) isn't actually negated by the various saving graces that Hundal raises (and breathlessly exaggerates). To be concerned about the slaughter entailed by an intensified 'war on terror', and to be disturbed by the efficacy of the repackaging that will make it more palatable and therefore allow more people to be killed, isn't some personality quirk or weird obsession of lefties. The vast majority of people on the planet are opposed to this war, including the majority of Americans, and it is a legitimate basis for criticism. He clearly understands that "the world has changed", although it might be argued that such a phrase is so vague as to be meaningless. Technically, the world changes every time one sheds a few skin cells or pees in the shower. Of course, if this just means that the "younger ethnic minority generation"™ "don't see everything as a fight between black and white, but rather about looking forward to a shared history", then it is hard to see where the change is. After all, when was it ever simply a "fight between black and white"? When was it not fundamentally about social justice? What makes him conclude that either Nader or Pilger think social justice a "black and white" issue today, other than his own admittedly impoverished imagination? However, all Hundal has done is demonstrated that he doesn't understand the critiques whose language he professes to be offended by, and in the process contributed to a spurious rumour-mill about the leftists that liberals love to hate. Next week: how liberal bloggers made the Obama presidency.

Labels: 'obamamania', anti-imperialism, obama, racism, red-baiting