The Language of Condemnation. posted by lenin

The moderate Jewish peace advocate Rabbi Michael lerner has written a thoroughly sensible article for Tikkun magazine, and which MediaLens have posted for the benefit of regular readers. "Unequivocally Condemn Palestinian Terror" it says, in reference to the attacks on two buses in Israel which left an estimated 16 dead. None of the 16, to my knowledge, had directly or intentionally participated in the oppression of Palestinians.

"Unequivocally Condemn Palestinian Terror". There's an invitation that is as warm as it is exhortative. Do your duty, otherwise you will not be a member of the community of goodness!

No sale. I will oppose it, but I will not condemn it. It is a small matter of not being coopted into the Israeli government's programme. If one can "condemn" the actions of the resistance, why not support measures to effectively put an end to those acts, such as building a 'peace wall', raiding Palestinian cities etc.? Opposing it, on the other hand, entails nothing more than refusing it as a strategy that has failed both strategically and morally - the latter, in part, because of the former.

I refuse to engage in abstract denunciations of bad things qua bad things. This would take me some rather dubious places - condemning the quite justified resistance of the Kikuyu when it got out of hand, or the more extreme actions of the NLF or indeed the FLN. No. I say we should stand firm with the Palestinian people, say we support them unequivocally, but do not support such actions as will at best result in rebarbative consequences for innocents on the other side, and at worst (most likely) result in greater repression, narrowing the scope for resistance, diminishing the number of one's allies. In other words, I should speak to the Palestinians as an ally and not a bearer of virtuous platitudes.

Hey, I'm not trying to win any popularity contests.


By the way, BBC News tonight announced that the attacks had interrupted "six months of relative calm". I wonder what planet they have been on ?

More follows.

More: The International Herald Tribune on the 'Ghandi option'.

Impeach Blair. posted by lenin

Is Tony Blair a liar, or merely a mass murderer? Well, according Impeach Blair.org , he's given to distortion and gimcrack illusioneering. Using information gathered by Glen Rangwala and Dan Plesch, Adam Price MP has launched an initiative to have Blair impeached under parliamentary precedent. The Duke of Buckingham, it seems, was impeached in 1628 following a series of disastrous errors or ineptitudes, so Adam Price thought... Possibly, malingering in the back-forests of his mind was the thought of what happened a few years later. At any rate, the evidence seems compelling. The Prime Minister stands accused of:

1) Wilful exaggeration. He claimed in early 2002 that Saddam Hussein had "stockpiles of major amounts of chemical and biological weapons", while the assessment of the Joint Intelligence Committee was that Saddam "may have hidden small quantities of agents and weapons.

2) Distortion. He claimed the UN "proved" that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons because of unaccounted for capacity. The assessment of UNMOVIC head Hans Blix at the time was that "one must not jump to the conclusion that they [unaccounted for weapons] exist".

3) Lying his ass off. He claimed after the invasion that "our intelligence" had proven that those two alleged mobile weapons laboratories were part of a larger network of such facilities - even though intelligence had yet to examine the sites and later found them to be unconnected to any potential weapons facilities.

4) Withholding key evidence. He didn't mention to the public the assessment of British intelligence that Iraq would be unlikely to use any weapons in its possession unless struck first.

5) Lying his ass off and plunging the world into considerable danger. This time he claimed that if "we" didn't act now, it would only be a matter of time before "terrorism and weapons of mass destruction come together". The assessment of intelligence was at variance with the PM's. The government later admitted that "the JIC assessed that any collapse of the Iraqi regime would increase the risk of chemical and biological warfare technology or agents finding their way into the hands of terrorists, and that the Prime Minister was aware of this." Was he now?

6) Etc.

Those are just some examples of the impressive and slightly nerdy array of information dug up by Plesch and Rangwala.

Although, of course, Blair would thoroughly deserve to have someone kick his balls up into his mouth and force him to chew them, I wonder what the impeachment proceedings will achieve. In all likelihood, they will fail before they even hear the word "go". The press will sigh, then return to euphemising the situation in Iraq. And it is the latter to which we ought to direct ourselves. The most important thing to do now is to stop British soldiers from killing Iraqis by getting them out of there. By remarkable coincidence, this will stop British soldiers from being killed - two birds with one stone. It will also allow Iraqis to develop a state of normality and build their own democracy. And, not to miss the finer points, its achievement would be so many bullets thudding into the already cadaverish body politic and the mutant parasites thriving in it.

If you want to end Blair, end the occupation.

Stuck in neutral. posted by lenin

Balance. Objectivity. Neutrality. It is axiomatic that the BBC is 'neutral' in political debate. It merely reports what the politicians say, and you may decide with the assistance of the lovely Andrew Marr. The fact that this apparent truism is coming under attack from Greg Philo and his band of academic subversives hasn't altered the general perception. But the limits of neutrality are conveyed to me, as if by a bat in the night, while reading Dave Renton's Fascism: Theory and Practise (1999). Discussing the historian's role, he says:

What is the meaning of objectivity when writing about a political system that plunged the world into a war in which at least 40 million died? How can the historian provide a neutral account of a system of politics which turned the continent of Europe into one gigantic prison camp? One cannot be balanced when writing about fascism, there is nothing positive to be said of it. (Page 18).

Unspectacular prose, admittedly, but there is something profound in that. The very spectre of 'neutrality' only persists so far as nothing scarier emerges. That is, if the very coordinates of liberal democracy are challenged, then objectivity becomes a point of view. Imagine the BBC reporting on the World Trade Centre attacks by having an Al Qaeda "military expert" phone in to the studio. Now change the words "World Trade Centre attacks" and "Al Qaeda" to "Gulf War" and "British army". Its an obvious point, I suppose, but one worth remembering. Neutrality is for the dead.

Islamophobia continued: The Strange Case of Tariq Ramadan. posted by lenin

Tariq Ramadan has spoken out against anti-semitic attacks in France and denounced fellow Muslims who have engaged in Judeophobia. He has spoken at a meeting organised by the anti-capitalist European Social Forum. He has opposed religious schools in France. As a believer, he has, using itjihad, argued against the stoning of women for adultery and the chopping off of thieves hands. Now, I know what you're thinking: he has to be a member of Al Qaeda. With a profile like that, its just a dead give-away. Actually, there are probably better reasons than that to think he's a potential plane-crasher. For instance, he opposed the US war on Iraq, saying it "served Israeli interests". Ominous. He is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brothers. Deathly. He has one of those names. Killer.

It should therefore be no surprise that he has had his visa to work in the United States revoked :

State Department spokeswoman Kelly Shannon cited the Immigration and Nationality Act, part of which deals with aliens who have used a "position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity." Another section bars aliens whose entry may have "potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States."

Both sections were amended under the USA Patriot Act, passed after the September 11 attacks.

Shannon did not immediately say whether either section applied to Ramadan's case.

"We don't know a reason why either of those should apply to Tariq Ramadan," said Matt Storin, a Notre Dame spokesman. "He's a distinguished scholar. He's a voice for moderation in the Muslim world."

Now, Daniel Pipes certainly has the dirt on Ramadan. Ramadan is suspected of various Islamist assocations by the CIA. His dad studied with bin Laden. He once praised Hassan al Turabi's activities in Sudan (although he has since recanted, which Daniel Pipes does not mention). He may have studied with someone who was involved in the attacks on the American embassies. He even suggests that there isn't any certain proof that bin Laden carried out the attacks on 9/11. Pipes also suggests that Ramadan "publicly refers to the Islamist atrocities of 9/11, Bali, and Madrid as "interventions," minimizing them to the point of near-endorsement", although in that statement Ramadan is discussing the reasons why one can support the Palestinian resistance and oppose bin Laden. There's more, and you should certainly pursue the link. Most of it is speculation, connotation, second-hand accusations.

Moreover, as Crooked Timber notes, "if there’s real reason to suspect this scholar will engage in felonies while teaching at Notre Dame, why would the State Department invite Ramadan to reapply for another kind of visa ?"

Sadr's Sharia Shame? posted by lenin

Although I have suggested on countless occasions that supporting the anti-occupation forces does not entail support for the specific political purview of those doing the fighting, I must admit that the following, from Crooked Timber , made me pause:

Bad news from some newspapers; there are suggestions coming through that Sadr was whiling away the time in Najaf by running a sharia court, complete with executions and mutilations.

The specific allegations about the 20 bodies in Najaf are not what I would call established fact - the bodies might simply be casualties of the fighting, and the fact that the allegations are being made by the Iraqi government undercuts their credibility somewhat given the number of fibs they’ve told about Najaf over the last few weeks - but the general historical sweep is likely to be accurate. When and if Sadr and Sistani are brought into the political process, it is very likely indeed that one of their main priorities will be to introduce sharia courts, and sharia courts execute and mutilate people.

While I recoil somewhat from the implicit suggestion that all sharia courts engage in these practises (its a matter of contex; the sharia courts soon to be made available to Canadian Muslims will presumably not be a source of torture), I think it is self-evident that this is what any theocratic or quasi-theocratic style government in Iraq would do. However, there are a couple of points that need to be made. While most Iraqis support al-Sadr's war against the occupiers, only 2% have expressed an interest in seeing him elected President. Presumably, however, the longer the occupiers stay and the more oppressive the Iraqi interim government becomes, the greater the support will be at elections for religious parties.


As Sami Zubaida has argued :

[T]he same formations are best placed to mobilise votes and intimidate dissidents, while political parties and civil associations have not had the chance to build up constituencies.

...

What, in any case, does it mean to “apply the shari’a”? We have seen how doubtful it is in the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In relation to public law and functions, the shari’a’s indeterminacy makes it a means of arbitrary rule. Its only clear hallmarks (though even these are much disputed) are in the spheres of family and women and of aspects of public morality. These become the fields of display of religious authority.

Although I remain sceptical of those whose stance has always been to support the war and the occupation (pretending, as if they didn't know better, that the Americans intended democracy), especially when they denounce "Islamo-fascists", I fear that if the occupation does not end and democratic elections are not obtained, we on the left will be having to denounce a regime that is almost as brutal as Saddam's - either because Allawi has promulgated martial law, or because Sistani/Sadr have promulgated shari'a law. And, in the background, US troops will be marauding around areas which continue to show any sign of defiance. (The recent assault on Najaf may have taken as many as 1,000 lives . The raids on Fallujah took 600. How long before Basra, Kufa or Sadr City are added to that list of atrocities?)

Those who simply wish to see the resistance crushed fail to understand the reasons for it. As Zubaida puts it:

"One year after the occupation and the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime the great majority of Iraqis are worse off."

Further, those worst off are precisely those most likely to support the Mahdi Army :

Reports indicate that the Sadrist support among the Shi’a resides in the poor slums of Baghdad, especially among the young in Sadr City. This location has always been the centre for radical agitation. It was built, with strong leftist support, in the late 1950s and early 1960s as Madinat al-Thawra or Revolution City by General Abd-al-Karim Qasim, who overthrew the Iraqi monarchy in 1958. It became a stronghold of the Iraqi Communist Party, and was one of the main centres of resistance to the Ba’thist putsch of 1963, occasioning a massacre. Saddam made the area his own as Saddam City, and in 2003 it was re-named Sadr City, after the martyr father Muhammd Sadiq al-Sadr (killed by Saddam in 1999).

There isn't, at the moment, any particular electoral support for al-Sadr. I guess most Iraqis see him as mooching off of his father's reputation (which he is) and attempting to illegitimately collect dues in the dead mujtahid's name (which, again, he is). Even as Iraqis sympathise with the rebellion against a corrupt and autocratic occupation, only his hard-core supporters regard him as a potential political leader. As Milan Rai reports, support for an religious state in Iraq is low , while most thirst for authentic democracy.

He also notes, however, that "Iraq is hungry for democracy. The US has little appetite for such dangerous fare.":

‘[T]he past year has shown that Iraq’s vision of democracy and the projection of American power do not necessarily coexist. The most glaring illustration is in Iraq itself, where the US has been resisting early elections out of fear that radicals, whether Shia or Sunni, would make gains.’ (Roula Khalaf, FT, 23 Mar., p. 21)

Withdraw the troops; free elections now; Iraq for the Iraqis.

Update: Tex links to a story about the same accusations in which it seems that they are likely to be a confection of the Iraqi police. I regret that my cynicism may have temporarily fucked off to the pub.

Sting of the Bumblebee posted by lenin

I check out technorati from time to time, just to see who has been kind enough to advertise my thoughts. I find, this time, that I have the attention of someone who describes him/herself as a "bumblebee" . He/she works in the banking industry, and would appear to be embittered by the experience if the following post on Suicides in the City of London is any guide:

Passengers [on the tube] have become increasingly accustomed to hearing the announcement that there are delays on the Central Line due to " a passenger under the train". It is rush-hour, you are desperate to go home, change your clothes, have a pee and relax, but you are now left standing there on the platform, waiting in vain for a train that will not be turning up for quite some time, as someone has chosen to end their existence by throwing themselves under it instead of in it. The selfish bastards!

...

Could there be a clue in the fact that all these incidents have occured within the world's most important financial district, a bastion of power, money and ruthless, steel-like intention? And if there is a clue in that fact, then what does it mean? Does the City merely inspire people to top themselves? If so it clearly doesn't inspire enough.

Ouch! Move over Emile Durkheim.

I wonder, however, if these city workers aren't simply following the advice of Bill Hicks:


"If you're in advertising or marketing: Kill yourself."

Surely not? By the way, if you are, do.

The ideologues of neoliberalism vs. the facts. posted by lenin

The Ideology

Foreign Affairs carries this interesting review article on globalisation. The article pays particular attention to refuting the arguments of "protectionists":

To those who complain that increased openness to trade during the 1980s and 1990s has failed to deliver faster growth, Wolf points to the contrary experiences of China and India. Both countries witnessed significant jumps in their growth rates as they opened up their economies to international trade and foreign investment. As Wolf points out, "Never before have so many people-or so large a proportion of the world's population-enjoyed such large rises in their standards of living."

The Reality

The above is so perpendicular to reality that it can only be deliberate obfuscation. To explain:

The experience of China and India - along with Japan, South Korea and Taiwan in earlier times - shows that countries do not have to adopt, first and foremost, liberal trade and/or capital policies in order to benefit from enhanced trade, to grow faster, and to develop an industrial infrastructure able to produce an increasing proportion of national consumption. All these countries, as Robert Wade has recently argued, have experienced relatively fast growth behind protective barriers, growth which fuelled rapid trade expansion focused on capital and intermediate goods. As each of these countries have become richer, it has tended to liberalise its trade policy ... these countries developed relatively quickly behind protective barriers, before they liberalised their trade. (David Held, Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus, Polity Press, 2004, pp. 49-51).

This House notes... posted by lenin

Astonishingly, the Bill Hicks web-page now advertises the following posthumous endorsement:

"That this house notes with sadness the 10th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks,
on February 26th 1994, at the age of 33; recalls his assertion that his words would be a bullet in the heart of consumerism, capitalism and the American Dream; and mourns the passing of one of the few people who may be mentioned as being worthy of inclusion with Lenny Bruce in any list of unflinching and painfully honest political philosophers."

- Stephen Pound MP; Parliamentary House of Commons

Did you hear that correctly? Stephen fucking Pound. Although Bill was an Anglophile, I can't imagine a better way to torture him in his grave than to lay on him the approbation of the House of Commons. Still, its nice to know he has a sense of humour.

Parliamentary blogging must die. posted by lenin

It would take a real bastard to point out how utterly shit Jody Dunn's blog is, but then someone has to. And I don't merely say that because she is the Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for Hartlepool. For one thing, she seems unduly concerned about her appearance , as The Guardian reports in a plug:

Extracts posted today, seen in advance by the Guardian, reveal her worrying over forgeting to eat while campaigning and struggling to concoct meals for her children, and having to buy suits to look presentable. "The worst thing about byelections is that you need to look smart, and it's worse being a woman," Ms Dunn, 35, writes.

"You can't just wear one suit every day and change your shirt for the occasion ... Court dress consists entirely of black and grey suits, and I refuse to spend two months being photographed wearing nothing but dull colours."

Obviously an issues person, then. But since when was it such a pressing issue for voters? Ann Widdecombe looks like a jumble sale model, and she's fared passably well at the polls. And has she ever seen the Blair 'babes' ?

Still, there's no reason to despair, as her blog reports:

Noted with some satisfaction that all the delivering has resulted in a weight loss of half a stone. Good news. But the real question for me today was what was going to happen to my court case. It was listed for five days. If it went ahead that would leave almost no time for campaigning all week. In the event however, the case was adjourned so I was free by three o'clock, and told my clerk not to put in any extra work for the rest of the week.

There is, occasionally, some politics on her blog (such as when she claims that Labour have issued a press-release calling her a single-mother; "lies", says she). Mostly, however, it is a prolonged effort in retailing dull tales from a dull campaign. And if I want to know what illiberal codswallop the Labour party strategists are purveying at the moment, I need only check out Tom Watson's blog . Watson, although he is given to insanely reactionary outbursts (like "why won't the Lib Dems lock up asylum-seeking single mums who smoke crack, and their kids who join teen gangs?"), does at least make an effort to talk about politics.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrat Richard Allan MP writes with about as much energy and conviction as a stuffed turkey. A quick perusal of his blog will tell you that he was excited about the Hodge Hill by-election, has been mistaken for a Labour MP, was very excited to catch a glimpse of Bill Clinton and is vexing himself over the question of copyright laws. Riveting.

Hardly surprising, therefore, that the Hansard Society report on "political blogging" reaches damning conclusions . My advice is, if you don't have any literary flair or combustible political views, or even an insurmountably huge ego like me, don't bother blogging.

Anyone interested in keeping up with that roller-coaster campaign in Hartlepool should check out Guacamoleville . Unlike most of the tiresome cretins discussed above, Guacamoleville is funny, informative and hearteningly contemptuous of the main three parties.

The 'F' Word. posted by lenin

My parodist has me screaming the word "Fascist" a lot, rehearsing Rik Mayall's schtick in The Young Ones, so I'd better allow life to imitate 'art' (if I may speak loosely).

I agree with Norman Geras that John Pilger is far too willing to use the term 'fascism' in inappopriate contexts. America is obviously not a country on the verge of fascist rule, notwithstanding the quips of certain cigar-loving Generals. (Although, if you follow the link you will see that I have conflated 'fascism' with authoritarian rule, which brings to mind Slavoj Zizek's point that we lack a concept to adequately capture such styles of governance, with terms like "proto-Fascist" and "crypto-Fascist" supplying a kind of stop-gap). Pilger still nails the essential truth about the upcoming US elections and I don't think that one can read anything essential about the state of the Left into such usage, as Geras seems to, because I don't think it is ubiquitous on the Left.

On the other hand, certain members of the pro-war Left have been entirely too promiscuous in their use of the term, using it to allude to the Ba'athist regime and certain Islamist formations. Nick Cohen's ignorant claim that "Islamism can't create a sustainable or good society: it can only kill and oppress" comes to mind, along with a number of similar statements in which political Islam is portrayed as a singular, hermetically sealed ideology that is either 'fascist' or merely death-dealing, depending upon what mood Cohen is in. Oliver Kamm's chosen "definition" of Fascism is particularly inept , as Charlotte Street notes:

The great elephant that was Oliver Kamm’s discussion of ‘Fascism and the Left’ turns out to have been standing on nothing more substantial than the following fragile tortoise:

The definition of fascism I am working with is the one from Roger Eatwell that I quoted in the second post in this series: "a form of thought which preaches the need for social rebirth in order to forge a holistic-national [An utterly rebarbative hyphenation] radical Third Way."

The idea that Fascism is primarily a ‘form of thought’ [a form of thought??], i.e., that it is primarily a matter of ideas, is - to say the least - highly contentious/ culpably incomplete; the irony, of course, is that it is just this idea, a frankly idealist one, that a Left analysis would want to contest and, I would argue, it just this error that a left analysis is able to correct. Even in its own terms (which are false) it is dubious – if Fascism preached the need for ‘rebirth’ one surely needs to qualify this by pointing out that this typically took the rhetorical form of a ‘return to roots’, pseudo-atavistic appeals to ‘Blut und Boden’ and so on. (For some reason Shelley’s proto-fascist lines “the world’s great age begins anew, the golden years return” just popped into my head.)

Kamm continues: ‘The value of this definition lies in its stress on the radical character of fascism.’ And the redundancy of it is that it is unusably broad, yokes together inherently diverse phenomena and fails completely to address the historical specificity of fascism; perhaps worse, it makes fascism itself sound rather innocuous.

Kaplan, as ever, riots in understatement. However, he is right to refer to the specificity of Fascism as against Kamm's feeble generality. I ought to point out, by the way, that anyone who had read Eatwell's book (Fascism: A History, 1996) will be aware that the sentences excerpted don't attempt to define fascism, but refer to its "ideological core". He does not reduce fascism to a "form of thought" as Kamm does, but accepts that it is a modern form of revolutionary, mass politics in which a mythic period of national decline is to be overcome in a new post-liberal order. I don't think his definition is sufficient, and Eatwell is too eager to impute a submerged left-wing tradition to Fascism (which is belied by his own evidence, in fact).

Christopher Hitchens, at a debate hosted by the London Review of Books, was challenged on the way in which such terms were being abused in relation to Iraq, to which he protested: "I never characterised the Ba'athist regime in that way." A year later, he could be found in the Mirror declaring that "He [Saddam] is Hitler...". Hitchens' earlier protestations lead one to think he understands that scrupulousness about the use of such allusions is not an attempt to confect a distinction without a difference (as he might say). On the contrary, the use of such language by politicians is generally supposed to raise the spectre of "the good war", conferring on their own imperial subventions the same aura of necessary, common struggle as attends the memory of World War II. There may not be a morally significant difference between the ousted Ba'athist regime and regimes that have issued from fascist movements, but there is an important distinction to be had.

Now, here's my ABC of F. A more authoritative version of what follows can be found in volume one of Ian Kershaw's outstanding biography of Adolf Hitler, or indeed in Leon Trotsky's The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. Fascism is, most importantly, a movement. It is a modern, mass movement originating in the social distress and dislocation created by capitalist crisis. The social character of such movements is disproportionately petit-bourgeois and 'lumpenproletariat'. Their success has typically only been made possible, however, through their being appropriated by conservative elites. They are nationalist, anti-socialist, anti-Marxist and anti-liberal. The "rebirth" they seek is one of organic, national unity, preserved in a new authoritarian state. Das Volk feature only as the blind puppets of history, transfixed by charismatic leader. The ideological quality of this renewal is mythical, miraculous and religious. As George Steiner comments:

"This is what Luther has been calling for, in his waking of the German nation. The cry is there in Fichte's famous letters to the German nation, but this time there is a validation of the Lutheran belief that the state must be a religious phenomenon, in a very concrete sense, that is to say, a collectivity transcending individual motives..." (George Steiner, No Passion Spent: Essays, 1978-1996, 1996, p. 229).

But the important point is that this dystopian appeal emerges directly from the squalor of market failure, and as a counter-blast to the potential communist revolution. And it is this latter which makes Fascism an appealing option for the ruling class. In other words, in every convincing formulation of Fascism must be an acknowledgment that it is both a popular and elitist movement, 'radical' precisely in order to conserve, 'socialist' all the better to crush socialism, and 'workerist' so long as it shall have the chance to break the power of the working class. Charlotte Street quotes Walter Benjamin :

The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Fuhrer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

The study of Fascism is reduced by the canards that seek to implicate all "extreme" political positions in it. Marxism is too Marxist to be reduced to a variant of some archetype or psychological disposition that includes Fascism. Political Islam is too varied, diffuse and internally contradictory to be simply equated with Fascism. And Ba'athism as a movement in the Arab world is more Stalinist than Hitlerite (notwithstanding the claim by Syrian Baathists that Hussein's regime was a deviation). Once again, fascism is not to be identified merely in ideological significations, or in certain "family resemblances" between what one ideology says and what fascists say; it should be understood as a movement, not simply as an idea.

To all those who casually disinter the putrid Cold War platitudes (extremists are bad, totalitarian etc.) to justify their present political stance, I simply say this: F off.

And Why Wasn't I Invited? posted by lenin

Backword Dave brings news of a British Blogger bash , including such luminaries as Chris Brooke, Chris Bertram, and some woman called Josephine Crawley Quinn. Blogging seems to amplify the sexism of the daily world, since I have no idea who JCQ is.

Chris Brooke, on the other hand, vaguely resembles a young AC Grayling, while Chris Bertram could easily be a gimp. Ah, fuck you guys. I'm going to have my own party with this lager. Ah, sweet sweet lager... Mmmmm...

A Few Links. posted by lenin

Yes, yes, yes, I'm a cheap, lazy, pie-munching, lager-guzzling fat tart, but there it is. Once again, I'm reduced to linking to other people who have something to say for want of having the energy to say anything myself.

First, Blood and Treasure performs an excellent take-down on the new tag team of Nick Cohen and Oliver Kamm, particularly with regard to Cohen's fatuous claim that "For the crime of preferring feudal bureaucracy to bourgeois democracy he would have tied copies of Das Kapital around the necks of the SWP leaders and thrown them into the Thames." We don't, he wouldn't have, and such a stance would not be novel even if it were accurately imputed to us.

James at Dead Men Left has a good article on the Nader campaign, and also hurls his guts up over a list of the "funniest Britons" .

Finally, presumably in a bid to win back some of his ailing influence, Ayatollah al-Sistani is to lead a march to Najaf to demand American withdrawal from the city . Meanwhile, in the same story, a peaceful demonstration by al-Sadr supporters was fired upon, allegedly by members of the new Iraqi National Guard. Obviously modelling themselves on the American version, then.

Update: Daniel Brett has some answers for those baffled about the alleged coup plot in Equatorial Guineau. And Dead Men Left talks over the head of Oliver Kamm on the topic of political Islam. Kamm wouldn't know what the term 'political Islam' entailed if you impressed it on his brow with a brickbat, as is so amply demonstrated in this case. And, the lardy lout of Iraqi politics, Muqtada al-Sadr, gains in popularity even as Ayatollah Sistani returns to Iraq .

Islamophobia and anti-semitism (Part II). posted by lenin

Eve Garrard, writing at Normblog , takes up a theme which has been discussed on this blog and also, less importantly, in The Guardian. She makes some points which I think should be uncontroversial, so I'll dally on the ones that I think ought to be controversial. Specifically, Garrard argues that since Islamophobia may be considered unfair criticism that is either untrue or true but also equally applicable elsewhere and therefore selectively applied, those who are concerned about such treatment applied to Muslims should also be equally concerned when it is applied to Israel:

Many people want to say that criticism of Israeli activities doesn't amount to anti-Semitism. And right enough, sometimes it doesn't. But for the kind of reasons I've set out, the matter is more complicated. Criticism of Israel for activities which are excused in others; criticism of Israeli misdeeds when far worse ones, committed by others, are passed over silently; hostility towards Jewish nationalism when other forms of nationalism are tolerated or lauded, all run the risk of being unfair and/or irrational. At the very least, the onus is on the critic to show why the selective attention she is paying to Israel's failures is in some way appropriate.

But criticism of Israel, even unfair criticism, is not anti-semitism. It is often a vehicle for anti-semites, but that does not amount to the same thing. Unfair or selective criticism applied to Muslims is diffuse and general, and usually involves a kind of racism. Unfair or selective criticism applied to Israel is specific and does not necessarily surreptitiously allude to the majority of Jews who choose not to live in Israel, or even to the minority who do. What is usually meant by criticism of Israel is criticism of the state's policies. That is to say, Garrard makes an entirely illegitimate comparison between hostility to a body of people who cannot be accused of being oppressive, tout court, and hostility to a state which definitely can.

The point about hostility to Jewish nationalism is answered, I think, partly by what I have written below. To summarise, nationalism in any form is an insufficient basis for liberatory or democratic politics. In itself, it merely involves the supposition that there is some shared experience rooted in language, history etc. That this supposition is usually false does not make it necessarily malign. The only grounds on which nationalism can be justified is when the self-determination of peoples is a necessary means to achieving the self-determination of people. I don't accept that Israel fulfills this criterion because a) most Jewish people have been able to live in relative security and comfort elsewhere in the world, and b) the condition for the formation of a Jewish state was the ethnic cleansing of approximately 750,000 Palestinian Arabs.

Garrard continues:

"Moreover, unfair prejudice against Israel, even when not motivated by anti-Semitism, can be as dangerous and damaging to a large sector of the Jewish population as anti-Semitism itself, especially where it takes the form of calls for the forcible destruction of the Jewish state."

Suppose calling for the forcible destruction of the Jewish state, either from without or within, can be considered entirely fair under a certain purview? And further suppose that this view does not entail anti-semitism, but that the call for the destruction of the Jewish state is made on the same grounds as one should oppose anti-semitism? The fact that there is a tenuous connection between the fate of Jews and the fate of Israel (in that some groups use hostility to Israel as a reason to attack Jews) would not make the persistence of the Jewish state necessarily just; therefore calling for it to be dismantled, altered or revolutionised would not necessarily be unjust. What we would then be left with is a very pertinent warning to express such views with diligence and care, to ensure they are indeed free of anti-semitism and to make them known in such a way as to avoid anti-semitism being read into them.

This is a fair warning, and even critics of Israel who resent being made to pass some "anti-semitism" test by its supporters nevertheless need to be on their guard. Anti-Zionism cannot thrive as a reputable position if it connotes anti-semitism, even though it is not in any way an anti-semitic position to hold in itself.

The Wrath of a Nation: Why They Can't Take Iraq. posted by lenin

Frederic Jameson once suggested that Marxists should develop the same dialectically subtle understanding of postmodernism as Marx had of capitalism itself:

"[A] type of thinking ... capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously, within a single thought, and without attenuating the force of either judgement. We are, somehow, to lift our minds to point where it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst." (Quoted, Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique, Polity Press, 1989).

It seems we have had to pursue a similar understanding of nationalism, neither accepting it as a sufficient ground for political action, nor ignoring its emancipatory potential. Nationalism, in the 18th Century and early 19th Century, was a revolutionary movement, often associated with liberal ideals rather than reactionary ones. Hence Garibaldi, L'Ouverture and Kolokotronis. In the 20th Century, it assumed the dimensions of extreme right and left. Given the overwhelming socialist rejection of nationalism, with the assessment (correct, in my view) that there no specific shared material interest between people living in a defined land-mass speaking the same language, it has often been a point of controversy about just what stance to take on, say, Arab nationalism, Irish nationalism etc. It has not been so difficult to know what to say about Russian, German and Eastern European nationalism.

According to Benedict Anderson, nationalisms are rooted in "imagined communities", in which people who have never had any contact with one another are assumed to have a shared experience. What made this possible initially was the development of the printing press, the standardisation of language and the emergence of vernacular literatures. (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso, 1991). The growing interest in philology, and the languages spoken by other cultures, was an indication of this - Edward Said's Orientalism documents the considerable interest displayed by Orientalists in Sanskrit, and interest which was not always or merely patronising, but did involve the assumption that there was some unbroken bond between the civilisation of yester-year and the subjugated peoples of the time.

But, as Terry Eagleton argues, nationalism was and is "a piece of romantic mystification". He goes on:

There is nothing in the fact of being Irish or Tibetan which entails that you have a right to political self-determination precisely as Irish or Tibetan, other than that to be Irish or Tibetan is to be human, and so to enjoy a right to self-determination on those grounds. The Irish qua Irish have no more title to self-determination than have the freckled, red-haired or bow-legged. (Terry Eagleton, "Nationalism and the Case of Ireland", New Left Review 234, series 1, p 44).

Acknowledging this, however, one can always make the case - as in fact Eagleton does - that the Irish being entitled to self-determination as human beings can entail them being entitled to self-determination as the Irish. That is, it is not possible to create the conditions for the real autonomy and self-determination of individuals living in Ireland without first having created a united statehood independent of the British, who have denied such autonomy. This, broadly, is how I view Iraq.

And I'll slip now from this discursive mode and discuss what this means in practise, particularly concering the uprising in Najaf, the position of the coalition and their inability thus far to break the resistance. First of all, the situation as I write is that coalition troops and their Iraqi recruits are closing in on the Imam Ali shrine, apparently 400 metres away from the beehive of resistance activity. That sounds a lot closer than effectively it is, because the surrounding area is a labyrinth of alleys and blind-spots. I would not be surprised, however, to see al-Sadr killed and the bulk of his men either killed or arrested. This would not terminate the resistance (even as this happens, another outfit has detonated a car-bomb in Kadisea in southern Baghdad), but it would be a substantial defeat.

Why are we here? William Pfaff , who has himself authored an impressive study of nationalism (The Wrath of Nations, Touchstone, 1993) sees it as a failure of politics, in which the Marines have been allowed to act too ruthlessly:

After the several U.S. private security operatives in the city were murdered and their corpses mutilated, the Marines mounted an assault to search for and arrest the unidentified murderers.

The attack provoking armed uprisings against the American occupation elsewhere in Iraq. This did attract attention in Washington, and American forces were eventually ordered to make a thinly disguised handover of Falluja to some of the same people they had just been fighting. Most of Falluja has since been no-go territory for Americans.

In Najaf, in early August, commanders of another newly arrived Marine force decided on their own to end a four-month defiance of American and Iraqi governmental authority by Moktada al-Sadr and his so-called Mahdi Army of radicalized young Shiites.

The Marines violated the agreed "exclusion zone" around the Imam Ali Mosque, Shiite Islam's holiest shrine, setting off an eight-day battle. The Marines had to be reinforced by U.S. Army and untested Iraqi forces. Truces followed but failed to hold, and at the time of writing the confrontation remains unresolved.

Who is in charge in Iraq, if military initiatives of the highest political sensitivity are being left to gung-ho Marine commanders, with a career interest in demonstrating how much tougher the Marines are than the army units they replace?

Why then is Ambassador John Negroponte in Iraq? He is now building up what is to become a 3,000-person U.S. mission to a nominally sovereign Iraq, whose new interim government is supposed to be taking political control of the country.

It is reported that when the shooting started between the Marines and the Mahdi army, and Negroponte was informed that Sadr was summoning help, he "decided to pursue the case" - apparently meaning that he backed what the Marines had started, leading to the present stand-off in Najaf.

The human cost of this recklessness has been under-reported and considerable. It is not even a matter of debate that Sadr would be a marginal figure if it weren't for his resistance against the Americans. 81% of Iraqis have reported an improved opinion of Sadr, while 64% said that his acts of insurgency made Iraq more unified. At the same time, only 2% wanted him to be President. (In the same poll, the coalition gained the approbation of 2% of Iraqis.) In previous polls , 67% supported Sadr while 57% wanted the Americans to "leave immediately". The theme that will not disappear from Iraqi politics, besides the desire for security, is the intensifying opposition to the occupation and the increasing willingness to support anyone, whatever they think of their politics, who will stand up to the 'coalition'.

Similarly, even those Iraqis who have joined the new army have expressed considerable reservations about attacking fellow countrymen, according to Knight Ridder :

At the station last week, several recruits stood outside Majeed's office, debating their predicament. Some said they don't consider al-Sadr's militiamen true Shiites and have no problem facing them. Most, however, said they would turn in their guns rather than fire at familiar faces.

"The Mahdi Army is, after all, Iraqi," said Sgt. 1st Class Emad Ali, 26, who comes from Sadr City. "These are my cousins, my uncles, my brothers. This is not an enemy. This is family."

This is not an army of conviction, which is why the coalition are being forced to consider increasing pay as recruits leave in droves . What is more, if any of them needed persuasion from their co-religionists, they now have a clerical edict to contend with that states, "It is forbidden for any Muslim to cooperate with the occupation forces and killing their own brothers and fellow citizens". This religious element compounds the nationalism, indeed is part of it. Not only must they not kill their "own brothers" (other Muslims), but they must also refrain from killing their "fellow citizens" (other Iraqis). This is analogous to the way Shi'ism was used to sustain Iranian nationalism after the 1979 revolution. (See Sami Zubaida, "Is Iran an Islamic State?", in Joel Beinin and Joe Stork eds, Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report, 1997).

Meanwhile, Sami Ramadani reports in The Guardian that Sadr is increasingly out-shining Ayatollah Ali Sistani:

Grand Ayatollah Sistani was being listened to attentively after the invasion. The number of his portraits on display was rising with every defiant statement. During the past few weeks, however, those portraits were fast disappearing to be replaced by Sadr's, and those of his father, his uncle, Ayatollah Khomeini, and those of another very potent and very popular junior, Nasrallah, leader of Hizbullah in Lebanon.

Again, we may assume that this is because of his willingness to challenge the occupiers in contrast to Sistani's pacific appeals. The consequence of all this is that it will be impossible, as long as the United States shall seek to exert its control over Iraq's destiny, for Iraq to obtain the much-desired stability, never mind self-determination. The movement which persists in Iraq is not, as President Bush claims, a few Ba'athist stragglers hoping to re-take the government. If they were that, they could have done so already by participating in the Iraqi National Conference and by collaborating with the occupation. But, as the conservative commentator Andrew Bacevich reports:

A year ago, when he assumed charge of United States Central Command and acknowledged that Operation Iraqi Freedom had given way to what he candidly called a “classical guerrilla war,” Gen. John Abizaid assessed the total number of insurgents to be 5,000. But according to a recent Associated Press dispatch all but ignored by major media outlets, official estimates of the enemy’s strength have risen to 20,000—this despite the fact that over the past year American forces have killed or imprisoned several thousand Iraqis and so-called “foreign fighters.” In short, enemy recruitment is easily outpacing our efforts to reduce his numbers.

There is a sense in which this hardly comes as a surprise. Despite periodic ebbs and flows, the fighting in Iraq over the past year has progressively intensified. Overall security has deteriorated. Bush administration efforts to portray the resistance as a last-ditch effort by a handful of Saddam loyalists have long since lost all credibility. The truth is that our adversary is shrewd, resourceful, and highly motivated. By and large, we find ourselves dancing to his tune: he blows up an oil pipeline, detonates a bomb in downtown Baghdad, or assassinates an Iraqi official—and we react after the fact.

The sympathy of Iraqis for Muqtada al-Sadr's fighters will continue to fuel the growth of an old-fashioned nationalist movement made even more combustible by a distinct religious element. This is not, obviously enough, without its dangers. it is possible that the unity now emerging could descend into factional rivalry the second US troops have been removed. It is possible that one or other demagogue may take control of the situation. It is also possible that Iraqis, having suffered enough to see Hussein overthrown and the coalition evicted, will be unwilling to accept anything but authentic democracy with real participation and the minimum of compulsion be it religious or secular. One must hope it will be the latter.

Quote of the Day; Fact of the Day. posted by lenin

Quote

Republican Congressman Tom Coburn:

"We've got to figure out what we believe in our country. Do we believe in capitalism and money or do we believe in human rights?" (Washington Post, May 15th, 1998).

Coburn, a staunch advocate of the former, nevertheless does believe that some sordid business interests should be curtailed. Sweated labour? Diamond mining involving children? Nope, the target of the good Congressman's ire is the sinful condom.

Fact

Access to food is not a human right. At a World Food Summit in Rome (1996), organised by the United Nations, one country stood out from the pack in objecting to an affirmation of the "right of everyone to have access to safe and nutritious food". The fear was that it could be interpreted in such a way as to allow poor countries to sue for special aid and trade provisions. Just to be sure, that country drafted a series of "interpretive statements" designed to minimise such risks. As Rolf Harris once famously quipped, can you guess who it is yet? (Washington Post, November 18th, 1996.) Congressman Coburn, all your questions have been answered.

Piece of Meat posted by lenin

An auld acquaintance of mine has started blogging . It should prove interesting if you want to know what its like teaching English in South Korea and living near the future site of World War IV. As he explains:

I am now living in a foreign land, full of foreign people, full of exotic, spicy, shit-inducing food, and is this not worth some public reflection? Is this not worth putting my thoughts out for all to digest, for the furtherment of understanding of nations, the bonding of international brotherhood, working people's solidarity, and world peace? Horseshit, I know, but if you've made it this far, you've already clicked on the link, so I better stop waffling and get to it.

He is (was?) a member of a comedy theatre outfit called Piece of Meat , which originated in Seattle, but then sold out and moved to LA. There it won a substantial fan base and critical acclaim . So what the fuck he's doing in South Korea is mysterious to me. At any rate, he's too funny for his own good and when the revolution comes (as it must) he will probably be shot. Of course, coming from Seattle, he may actually prefer to do the job himself...

Check him out.

Anti-semitism and Islamophobia posted by lenin

Via Normblog, I come across a Ha'aretz story alleging that a radical Muslim group was behind the arson attack on a Jewish community centre in Paris yesterday. They cite a report on Army Radio which suggests that a Muslim site based in Paris claimed that radical Islamists were behind the attacks. They also report that French investigators were "skeptical" about the claim of responsibility.

I should point out, for those who haven't yet clicked on the link, that the headline of Ha'aretz's story, "Report: Radical Muslim group behind arson of Jewish center", actually concerns only two very short paragraphs at the beginning of a story that is 25 paragraphs long (although they later mention that the wave of anti-semitic attacks in France is possibly related to the course of the Arab-Israeli "peace process"). You also need to know that Army Radio in Israel is owned by the Israeli Defense Ministry. It was created by David Ben-Gurion to help mobilise reserve troops and preserve cohesion among soldiers, but has since come to be regarded as vaguely anti-establishment (unlike its elder twin, Israel Radio). It is run by soldiers and civilian army employees, and is apparently widely listened to. It has been sourced by hundreds of news organisations across the world from Fox News to The Guardian. Reuters also carry a similar story, suggesting that a group known as Jamaat Ansar al-Jihad al-Islamiya accepted responsibility for the attack, although it is not clear whether their source is Army Radio. For my part, I can find no mention of this group anywhere else. If there is a website in Paris containing a statement from such a purported group, I can't find it. (Methods ranged from various word combinations in search engines to rummaging round Muslim websites based in France).

That's the set-up. Where am I going with this? Well, the argument from Israel its Prime Minister has been that the rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Europe is the result of its growing Muslim population. According to The Guardian:

The Israeli Forum to Coordinate the Struggle Against Anti-semitism - a group of Israeli intelligence and foreign ministry officials - defines anti-semitism in three forms: classic, new and Muslim.

The forum asserts that the most dangerous strand has its roots in Islam and that the rising number of Muslims in Europe is responsible for fuelling terror attacks, street violence and general harassment of Jews.

Muslims are also blamed for the spread of anti-semitism to countries such as Denmark, previously renowned for its efforts to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust. Mr Sharon described the growing Muslim population in Europe as "endangering the life of Jewish people."

"Of course the sheer fact that there are a huge amount of Muslims, approximately 17 million in the EU, this issue has also turned into a political matter. I would say, in my opinion, EU governments are not doing enough to tackle anti-semitism," he said.

There is an almost automatic ideological response which is inclined to see anti-semitism as somehow imported into a recently civilised Europe by Muslims. Usually, this is seen as having somehow been accomodated by the Left and their public hostility to Israel. Recently a flutter of books have been published in America which advance different variations of this thesis. Of course it is perfectly true that many recent anti-semitic attacks have been carried out by Muslims. It is probably true that some of this is motivated by hostility to Israel and its behaviour in the occupied territories. But let's be clear on one thing - anti-semitism in Europe is largely the territory of the far right, which usually doesn't get on very well with Muslims either.

A report issued this year by the European Monitoring Commission on Racism and Xenophobia identified those responsible as "young, disaffected white Europeans" ... followed by North African or Asian Muslims. Indeed, while a large percentage of anti-semitic attacks in France have been attributed to Muslims, it is also a country in which the Islamophobic, anti-Semitic politician Jean Marie Le-Pen can get almost 20% of the vote. Eastern European countries are experiencing a rise nationalist, anti-semitic sentiment, with hard right politicians accusing the Jews of having been the cause of Bolshevism etc. On the other hand, Portugal has a reasonable Muslim population, (about 36,000, far larger than the number of Jewish citizens) but has showed no particular signs of increased anti-semitism. Belgium has 410,350 Muslims living in it, but again there has not been the increase in anti-semitic attacks reported in France. Germany has 2,840,228 Muslims, almost double the number of France, but there is little evidence of growing anti-semitism there. As The Economist notes, there has been increasing criticism of Israel within the mainstream, but "though far-right violence has risen in the past few years (and dropped a bit last year), it is mainly directed against Muslims from North Africa and Turkey, not against Jews."

There is no clear correlation between the numbers of Muslims in European countries and the subsistence of anti-semitism there. Anti-semitism is certainly a growing problem in France, but anti-semitic attitudes seem to be spreading universally (although are still vastly stronger on the far right than anywhere else).

I don't know whether the attack on a Jewish centre in Paris was carried out by Muslims or non-Muslims. There are good grounds for being sceptical about the story emanating from Israel Army Radio, but it could equally prove to be accurate. The point is to decouple the serious and necessary fight against anti-semitism, from whichever quarter, from the Islamophobic connotations that have often come with it. Clearly, certain extremist Islamist groups nurture a very old-fashioned kind of anti-semitism which is also leavened by hostility to Israel. But hostility to Israel is not anti-semitism, the presence of large numbers of Muslims does not guarantee that anti-semitism will persist, and the fight against Jew hatred, intimidation and violence has to be allied with another struggle that is of equal import and even more urgent - that against the gathering storm of anti-Muslim prejudice across Europe today.

Update: Jonathan Derbyshire draws my attention to a story in Le Monde which corroborates Ha'aretz's story. Noting that I also link to a Reuters piece that does the same, he wonders: "since, as you observe, the Ha'retz piece itself acknowledges that French investigators have cast doubt over the veracity of the Islamist link, why mention Ha'aretz and Army Radio at all?" The only honest answer is, it was an ill-conceived gesture based on little more than suspicion. I'm not above folly, and not beneath admitting to it. It has diverted from my point rather than adding to it, so although I note the vaguely hostile tone of Derbyshire's intervention, I am glad he gave me the opportunity to clear this up. A Google translation of Le Monde's story can be found here .

Bittersweet parody. posted by lenin

Someone who styles him or herself as 'Oliver' has been doing the rounds at MediaLens and Harry's Place, crying foul over an apparently malicious piss-take. Following the provided link, I discover this :

Banausic, Irrelevant Gnats.
It has come to my attention that a certain parodist is wasting bandwidth and precious time in therapy attempting to poke fun at my blog. I used to take a great deal of pleasure in destroying such foetus-brains, but my new wife has instructed me not to bother. So sayeth she, and so shall it be. I will just point out, however, that as attempted satire, it completely misses the mark. It is literally packed with feeble non-sequiturs, portentous gibbering, pretentious cultural references, grammatical sniping, surreptitious name-dropping, self-advertisement, some feeble take-downs on some rather feeble Liberal Democrats and rhetorical attacks on the late Soviet regime.

As Christopher Hitchens once told me over the phone, "the united front against bullshit can withstand even the tidal wave of it emanating from the cavities of the European elite if we just hold firm."

I adhere steadily to that view, and would advise all future parodists that they are as gnats beating against a polished windscreen. Incidentally, anyone using the comments boxes to make incendiary, libellous, racist or other remarks will find their comments deleted. No exceptions.

Hmmm. Well, whoever you are, brave soul, I know exactly how you feel .

The Press! The Press! The Freedom of the Press! posted by lenin

Ewa Jasiewicz, a British free-lance journalist, is being held by Israel pending a hearing on whether she can be deported. According to the government there, she is a political activist whose reporting is biased. Noticeably, this response is not all that dissimilar to that offered by Colombia when it is accused of deporting journalists. She is, of course, a political activist, and a biased observer. The picture below shows what happens when she pisses off the Coalition in Iraq by asking an awkward question:



The trouble is that Israel and its defenders constantly repeat with wearisome predictability that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Now, that isn't any trick provided you don't have to put up with occupation or CIA/MI6 sponsored coups. But it seems a little incongruent for a nation so concerned with its democratic credentials to refuse access to a journalist simply because she says the wrong things, and isn't likely to fall under a steam-roller any time soon. Then again, as Mordechai Vanunu can tell you, the Israeli government prefers to err on the side of secrecy.

When the wind blows... posted by lenin

Marc Blitzstein was a 1930s communist playwright who enjoyed the honour of having his play The Cradle Will Rock fucked up by Orson Welles, banned by the US government, then played at the disused Venice Theatre before an audience that had literally marched through the streets to see it by actors who had been banned by their union from performing it. This play, an exhiliating musical polemic in the style of Bertolt Brecht, had sold between 14,000 and 18,000 tickets in advance. It was centred on a strike at a steel plant in Steel Town, USA. There was the archetypal capitalist, Mister Mister, who ran most of big steel, owned the local press and was head of the anti-union Liberty Committee. The union organiser, Larry Foreman. The capitalist's wife, Mrs Mister. The good Reverend Salvation. And the pressman, Editor Daily. The 'cradle' in question is the cradle of power, in which the rich, corrupt and powerful are shaken and blasted from branch to trunk. This is not a work, then, of subtle characterisation and ambiguity. Shades of grey are deliberately eschewed for the sake of political urgency.


Blitzstein, performing his musical in the Venice Theatre on 59th Street.

The tumult of 1930s America is illustrated with unusual clarity in Howard Zinn's breath-taking work, A People's History of America. With unemployment soaring and the economy contracting, workers were becoming restless and bosses terrified. Strikes for higher wages and better working conditions abounded, US corporations were busily flogging steel, oil and rubber to Fascist Italy to keep those tanks and trucks moving, and radical ideas proliferated. Striking workers were attacked by paid strike-breakers and police - many were literally beaten to death on behalf of the state. Meanwhile, President Roosevelt certainly knew what to do:

One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment... ; If it doesn't turn out right, we can modify it as we go along.

It didn't turn out right. The New Deal economy became the permanent war economy, and gave Harry Truman the idea of a lifetime when he lodged his ass in the Oval Office ("say, fellahs, why not have us a National Security State?"). But one of the many reforms Roosevelt attempted in order to combat unemployment was the erection of state-sponsored projects like the Federal Theatre Project, chaired by Halle Flanagan. The project paid for theatre productions and kept professional actors, writers and theatre workers employed. It was under the rubric of the FTP that Marc was initially to have his play performed. Orson Welles, assigned to direct the play, imagined that what the play really needed was a wild cacophony of glass set-pieces including "illuminated glass wagons" . These sets invariably crashed and smashed in rehearsal.

Then, however, a House committee (the Special Committee to Investigate Un-American activities, forerunner of HUAC) was formed to investigate the existence of communism within the Federal Theatre Project. Martin Dies, a blow-hard Democrat, headed the team, which swiftly began to hoover up whatever bilious emissions certain very willing witnesses were able to produce. Some of these communists in the FTP talked about familial sex, relationships with Negroes, all that crazy left-wing stuff - then it turned out that Halle Flanagan had been to Russia. And what was that play she was overseeing, The Cradle Will Rock? That was getting an awful lot of attention for one play, which was particularly worrying as it appeared to preach class war. Isn't there something we can do to stop this sumbitch?


Martin Dies.

Blitzstein, himself the son of a wealthy socialist banker(!), could not join the Communist Party because he was a homosexual. In that golden age, pink and red flags were not publicly mixed. But he was a communist, and he did blatantly wish to polarise his audience. Richard Eyre, commenting on Brecht's style, said he wanted audiences to relax, smoke cigars, take sides and analyse as if they were at a boxing match. None of this bourgeois deference to the theatre and its sacred traditions. Blitzstein was much the same. So, with the Senate pressing for the closure of the FTP, the government cancelled all new productions and shed 20,000 Federal Theatre Project jobs. The Cradle Will Rock, therefore, could not be performed at the Maxine Elliot theatre as planned. Armed security guards were stationed outside the theatre just to make sure. And so Jack Houseman, the producer of the play and Orson's homosexual friend and colleague, made arrangements to find a new theatre. Meanwhile, the actors union informed the cast that if any of them partook of any performance of Blitzstein's play, they would be unceremoniously ex-communicated.

But Blitzstein's play was about revolution, about collective action, about the organised power of working people. They had been reading it, living it, breathing it for months. They revolted. Blitzstein, not a member of the actors' union, was initially planning to perform the play all by himself from the stage of the Venice Theatre. However, several leading cast members broke their silence, even while seated in the back rows of the theatre, to sing their part. Having marched to the theatre with a militant audience, and cheered wildly when a Fascist flag was ripped down by an audience member, they now defied the government and their union to perform this delirious play.

So, what was in this play that made it so frightening, so dangerous for those in power? It was not the only play by Blitzstein to be banned for political reasons, but it is the most notorious. Well, the finale's chorus, with unionised workers marching round the stage, singing a terrifying warning to Mister Mister cowering in the wings, should clear it up:

That's thunder, that's lightning,
And it's gonna surround you!
No wonder those storm-birds
Seem to circle around you!
Well, you can't climb down and you can't sit still
That's a storm that's gonna last until
The final wind blows...
And when the wind blows...
The cradle will rock!

'I' is for 'Empty'... posted by lenin

The always excellent Charlotte Street has a fine post about 'individuality' in capitalist society today:

The increase in ideologies of ‘individuality’ and ‘individual expression’ is inversely proportional to the actual possibilities for such individuality within contemporary society. One might even say that the existence of the former is a symptom of the disappearance of the latter, that the emergence of the signifier (‘individuality’) is like an epitaph for its signified.

Not untypically, one’s ‘individuality’ mimics that of the commodity. The commodity must differentiate itself from other commodities by whatever means. Each must have its quirky tic, style, unique symbolic attachment etc in order to make it different. Its individuality is therefore the secondary effect of competition and bears no qualitative or expressive relation to the object itself. It ‘expresses’ nothing but the empty fact of differentiation.

Similarly the ‘individual’ today must quickly assume some trick or style with which to signify his individuality in the contemporary bazaar of individualities. Again, this is no more than a surface effect which exists only through differentiation and beneath which true individuality is smothered.

At this point, however, I start to wonder what 'true individuality' is. Slavoj Zizek, making fun of bourgeois notions of human rights, noted how human worth was located in some secret essence, some objet petit a like the plastic toy in the Kinder Surprise egg (which, although worthless, is the real point of it, the thing that kids always hurry to get, ignoring the chocolate). Is that where individuality resides? In the excremental excess?

I'm just asking, and certainly not in an aggressive way because, as you'll have guessed, I'm becoming a big fan of Charlotte Street. In fact, if Kaplan wants, I can be his academic groupie.

Dilemma and the Just War. posted by lenin

A certain impossibilist has been fantasising about slaughtering me. Not for some cranial movie to be replayed mid-masturbation, (although who truly knows?), but to make a point about the ideology of the just war. I suggest you read the post yourself if you wish to digest its slightly convoluted point, because I don't see a way of excerpting it without curtailing the process of discovery involved.

Basically, Bill's point is a variation on the theme of "if you had to kill one child in order to prevent an axe-murderer from killing a hundred, would you do it?" If you're an extreme utilitarian, you might just accept the calculation at face value and waste the little guy. If you're an ethicist, you might say 'not in my name' (which, as a slogan, stinks of narcissism and Beautiful Soul politics). If you're a moral consequentialist (influenced, perhaps by Marx and Aristotle*), you might say that although the consequences of such an action appear to be the lesser evil, the motives and likely behaviour of the axe-murderer are so inscrutable that it is really difficult to make such a choice and anything you do is really a gamble, a risky strategy with forces beyond your control. You might ponder on the wisdom of taking he axe-murderer at his word, and imagine what a berk you'd look on the ITV News if you killed the kid and then the axe-murderer just did what he wanted anyway. Then again, if you explained that you couldn't bring yourself to kill the child even though in the event it ensured the deaths of a hundred others because you didn't believe the murderer, had no good reason to trust him and could not in all conscience put one child to death on such tenuous grounds, few would fail to understand.

Whichever way our consequentialist acted, it would be with an understanding of considerable peril and the inevitability of tragedy. Now, I've weighted the argument in a particular direction, but it is just as possible to have a perfect dilemma. That is, in the philosopher Lemmon's terms, you could have a 'Sartrean dilemma' in which you both ought and ought not do something, each way for perfectly good reasons - but for reasons that are incommensurable. There is no way of choosing between them because they embody different values. To return to the theme of war, one ought to support the Palestinian resistance because every people has the right to resist oppression; similarly, one ought to oppose it because its tactics disgust one or because it is being waged much of the time by fanatical reactionaries who would do something terrible with their freedom if they ever got it. Or again, Britain ought to intervene in Darfur because it is an ex-colonial power, owes the country a debt, and should not stand by while atrocities occur; similarly, it ought not intervene precisely because it is an ex-colonial power, because it still has distorting interests in Africa, because its involvement has rarely done much but intensify the crisis, because there are better ways etc.

And, of course, the ethicist's value-judgments have totally different origins to those of the utilitarian. That said, I think that the grounding for such disputes is sufficient to make a reasonable choice between them. For instance, both the ethicist and the utilitarian would wish to minimise pain and misery; they differ over the wisdom and virtue of the means. Now it becomes possible to reintroduce the theme our moral consequentialist was mulling over: can I really trust this particular agent? Does it matter? Is motive really all that central?

I think it is, and I offer just one example: Vietnam. If the apologists for that war are correct, then Vietnam was a blunder (either because a well-meaning US misunderstood the reality of support for the NLF, or because they didn't bomb hard enough for long enough). In that view, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were defending some good, or thought they were. US imperialism therefore remains an inviolate ideal, and the only reasonable objection to further military incursions is that it may be unwise, may not obtain the stated goals or may bring adverse consequences on those conducting the intervention. If those who objected to that war are correct, Vietnam was a carefully planned assault on civilians with the aim of suppressing a national liberation movement. Cynical American planners described with cold precision the ways in which this movement had to be defeated, and were willing to accept a vast human cost because the ideals trumpeted by politicians were of little interest to them. (The latter view is correct. The Pentagon Papers demonstrate that US planners: were perfectly aware of the NLF's popular base as a national liberation movement first and as a communist organisation second; planned the bombing of civilians as part of strategy; and orchestrated the war with zero concern for the values espoused by successive Presidents. Similarly, Mark Curtis reports that his long trawl through declassified British planning documents have yielded not a single mention of or reference to such values as human rights, freedom etc.)

The consequence of the latter view is that the war was without question an exercise in extreme superpower malevolence, and any future war should be treated with scepticism. The consequence of the former view is that the war may well have been mistaken, but given the legitimate concerns of the time it was entirely justifiable, and future wars should be generally supported. That is not all, however. Harry at Harry's Place and Norman Geras have both expressed the view that in relation to Iraq, US motives are not of primary importance. For Harry, what is important is the intention, however motivated, to create a functioning democracy in Iraq. For Norm, objections based on an assessment of America's 'real' motives "loses the specific in the general", privileging suspicions about American hegemony over the immediate fate of Iraqis. A moral consequentialism that is not utilitarian, however, would have to weigh such factors. Consequences cannot be divorced from motives, and moral consequentialism, unlike utilitarianism, acknowledges that consequences extend farther into the future than our intelligence will allow us to calculate. All judgements about the justice of a war based on a view of consequences have to be leavened by an understanding of the actors involved and of alternatives. It would consider the possibility (discussed by Bill) of radically altering the conditions in which such choices have to be made.

Moral consequentialism exhorts us to choose between different modes of life as well as different choices within each mode. That is why I think Bill is wrong to consider himself an ethicist against 'just war'. He is a revolutionary against the system that can produce such awful concepts as the 'just war' and ought to be willing to get his hands bloody - so long as it is for a good cause.

*See Richard Miller's analysis of the relationship between Aristotelian ethics and Marxism. "Marx and Aristotle: A Kind of Consequentialism", in Alex Callinicos (ed), Marxist Theory, 1989, pp. 175-210.

The Allure of the Modern posted by lenin

Slightly obscure cultural reference? I can do that.

The word 'modern' appeared first in English toward the end of the sixteenth century. To begin with it meant little more than the present time, but it slowly came to carry a sense of novelty. 'Modern' meant something that had never existed before. The idea was conceived that the future would be different from the past. (John Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern, 2003).

Korsch cites Bacon, from the Novum Organum: "'Recte enim veritas temporis filia dictitur non auctoritas.' On that authority of all authorities, time, he had based the superiority of the new bourgeois empirical science over the dogmatic science of the Middle Ages." (Korsch, Karl Marx, cited in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 1927-1940).

A Few Links. posted by lenin

Admittedly this is lazy blogging, but I'm sort of busy with, y'know, work...

So, here goes. Chris Lightfoot has a take-down of Oliver Kamm that includes the following recipe for a Kamm rant:

[S]lightly obscure cultural reference, portentous tone, grammatical sniping, the inevitable bitching about a Liberal Democrat, and a rhetorical attack on Soviet communism, only fifteen years too late.

Kamm has many detractors on the 'net, and a few emulators as well. I guess he's just so full of piping hot crap that the very mention of his name draws flies.

Chris Brooke offers reasons to be cheerful if you're on the Left, and also has a nice little dig at Johann Hari for his recent, very poorly conducted interview with Antonio Negri . On that subject, I would just note that I find it very unlikely that Negri was really as sad and vacuous as Hari made him out to be. He is a serious thinker, a turbo-charged intellectual. He was bound to have something interesting to say. Unfortunately, Hari is on precocious, obnoxious form, and it all turns into a foil for him to rail against the evils of communism. Now, a good interviewer knows how to get the best out of his/her subject - Hari just seems intent on making Negri look like a baffled old fool with some objectionable views.

Charlotte Street has some unkind words to say about the same, comparing it to Andrew Marr's stunningly inept interview with Noam Chomsky in which Marr was so uninformed and so unfamiliar with Chomsky's work that he managed to misfire every single time. At the end, Chomsky had made Marr look rather foolish, but Marr was completely oblivious.

Harry's Place carries a fine dissection of that shamefully bloated ego, "Dr" Gillian McKeith. An utter fraud, this slimy, sanctimonious bitch has been the bane of my fucking existence for the last few weeks. I've considered larding up just to piss her off. I can't wait 'til some fat family, sick of being patronised by this contemptible wax-figure of a human being, decides to gang up and eat her. That will crack me up for fucking days.

Finally, I have attracted a parodist . My initial reaction, on Harry's Place , who informed me of the fact, was that it was an honour. Having read it, though, it's just a bore. It has all the biting satire of a put-down from Socialism in an Age of Waiting ("ya wee wanker, fuck away off" etc), and exhibits no particular sense of having either read my blog or grasped my style. It's just a litany of rather poorly conceived insults. It's childish. I personally don't see the funny side at all, and frankly it's rather immature and blah blah blah...

"Viva Fascismo!" posted by lenin

Gene at Harry's Place is understandably upset that the opposition did not win the referendum in Venezuela. Harry's Place has existed to decry the anti-war left in hysterical terms as apologists for "Islamofascism" or just "fascism". I am delighted therefore to welcome Gene to the fold, for he has now aligned himself with the forces in Venezuela about whom the "F" word could no less promiscuously be used.

Still, as Gene Pool at Barry's Place says:

Never mind. They can always have a coup next year.

David Cross posted by lenin

David Cross, an American comedian who has (justly) been compared to the late Bill Hicks, is performing at the Soho Theatre until August 28th. According to Jack Black,

If you miss a chance to see him perform, you're a total a-hole. I would crawl through glass to watch this guy take a shit.

Tsch, Hollywood! However, having got hold of his latest CD, I will definitely be attending and I recommend you do too. Why the comparisons with Bill Hicks? Because Cross's timing, attitude and material is very very similar to Bill's. Unlike certain other comedians who are still unfortunately very much alive, however, Cross didn't simply lift a load of Hicks' material, make a few minor alterations and call it his own. (I'm talking about you, Leary). Cross' material is original, cuts to the bone, and is in very poor taste. His take on bullshit pseudo-spiritual rock bands like Creed and Evanescence?

I would sooner listen to the death rattle of my only child than hear that fucking shit.

On Al Qaeda:

I don't think bin Laden sent those planes over to attack us because he hates freedom. I think he did it because of our support for Israel and our ties to the Saudi royal family, and all the military bases we have over there. You know why I think that? Because that's what he fucking said! What are we, a nation of six-year-olds? Answer, yes.

Which is as well because, like Bill Hicks, he is available for children's parties.

Viva Chavez! posted by lenin

"Chavez claims victory" , says The Guardian. What they meant to say was that the Venezuelan electoral commission had pronounced him victor, but you can't fit that into a headline. Hugo Chavez looks to have won the referendum on his presidency, in the face of a vast, well-funded and well-organised campaign against him. Putschists and propagandists have descended on Venezuela like noone's business, some of them funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which is basically a front-organisation for the CIA. They have not so far succeeded, and Chavez's proferred reason for this seems credible - there is too much grassroots democracy for a coup to succeed. Chavez has delivered enough for the poor to maintain the support of peasants and workers alike, and they are numerous enough and organised enough to prevent their gains from being quoshed.



Suffice to say, the British and American media can't believe it. Why, just last night the Independent was predicting a success for the opposition. Neither can the opposition accept the result, alleging fraud. Jimmy Carter, however, says the opposition lost and lost fairly. And he's a man who knows a lost cause when he sees it.



See Tariq Ali's op-ed for the Independent if you haven't already. And check out those letters ...

Open All Borders posted by lenin

From today's Daily Express:

"Plot to Kill Blair: Asylum seekers with hi-tech equipment and maps caught half a mile from PM's home."

Like I've always said, we have so much to learn from other cultures...

The Marching Dead!! posted by lenin

If Nick Cohen is right, then the Left is dead as a serious political project; but since he has rarely been right in the last year or so, I'm inclined to doubt it. I'm not here going to engage in yet another boring refutation of his argument, point by point - and this is at least in part due to the glib diluteness of his case. As Charlotte Street points out:

Resourcefully, the concept of this great world-historical shift has been cobbled together from a handful of current media events – reaction to Michael Moore’s latest film, the visit of an obnoxious Muslim cleric to the UK, and of course the morally insolvent decision of the Left (along with the majority of Europe) to oppose an imperialist (sorry ‘anti-Fascist’) war.

In the strange temporality of the media-world, great sea-changes in human consciousness, abrupt shifts in the Zeitgeist and epochal actions and speeches happen with alarming regularity, or can be telescoped through the lens of a few prepackaged headlines, before being inexplicably dispatched to oblivion by the ‘next big thing’.

I'd like to point a few things out about his article, however:

1) Noone besides Saddam Hussein himself pretended "that Saddam had no honourable opponents". It is just that the kind that Cohen opted to support (the jaw-dropping PUK) had no claim to honour of any kind. On the other hand, Cohen's output has often involved the suggestion that the war had no honourable opponents, which is a shame.

2) Iraqi communists did not, on the whole, support the war. Of the various communist parties only one has chosen to join the occupying forces (presenting it as a victory for themselves in the process, of course). Iraqi trade unionists who opposed the war have of course been working with British trade unionists and socialists, and one of their representatives made his case against the war and occupation at the Unison conference this year. When Cohen refers to "Kurdish socialists", he actually means Dr Barham Saleh of the PUK, so I will allow judgments to form themselves on that.

3) A small point, but the term "Marxism-Leninism" has a very specific meaning in political language, refering to the state-religion of the Stalinist regime. The SWP is both Marxist and Leninist, but it is not "Marxist-Leninist". He can claim if he likes that Marxism-Leninism died by putting its ideas into practise, but it is best to know what is meant by the terms he is using first.

4) The SWP may have "led" the Stop the War Coalition in some senses, but not in any sense that has morally significant consequences. The SWP did not impose its ideological preferences on the coalition (otherwise there would have been no coalition), and its performance in terms of gaining ideological hegemony, organisational strength and media coverage suggests that whatever the SWP did bring wasn't altogether bad. It just happens to be the case that when mass movements erupt, it is usually the far Left that takes a leading role. Organisation and debate is what revolutionary parties are good at (some would say that's the only thing they are good at).

5) Since when was Douglas Hurd revived "in liberal circles"? Does anyone know what he's talking about?


Now, all those points aside, I think I understand where Cohen is coming from when he mourns the demise of the "democratic left". With the end of the Cold War, it was expected that the disappearance of the communist Left would result in a renaissance of the other main tradition of socialism - that of social democracy. Instead, as Gregory Elliot points out, we have watched them sucked into the void with their embarrassing militant cousins. The reformist road to socialism was unavailing, but the reformist road to a more humane capitalism doesn't look much more hopeful.

Pursuing a strategy of accomodation with capitalism, rather than confrontation, parties of the centre-left and allegedly left-of-centre left (like the European Greens) have often done the job of the political right with greater alacrity than the right itself. The kind of anti-fascist Left that Cohen would like to see is that which sent volunteers to Spain in the 1930s; it is sad that the working class no longer appears to have that kind of international muscle*, but appealing to US military power as a surrogate is a profoundly mistaken approach. Given the record of the United States government, given its stated intentions (those embodied in important documents such as the National Security Strategy of 2002, and the literature of the Project for the New American Century), and given the peril involved in such a venture, it was entirely appropriate that people should have regarded the invasion and occupation with suspicion. And it was therefore entirely right that the Left should have taken a lead in this.

Because that tradition of the Left which Cohen supports has not fared well of late, he believes the Left is dead, (or maybe he is saying this to demoralise those who believe the Left has seen a modest but growing revival, who knows?). It would be more accurate to say that reformist socialism is giving way to its inner termites. That creates as many problems as it solves, but it does leave the decks cleared for a new Left oriented toward the new global situation. I believe that such a Left is emerging, conjoining a nascent, heterogenous anti-capitalism with full-blooded anti-imperialism. It is emerging thick and fast in Latin America and South Asia, trailed by growing numbers of supporters in Europe and North America. Trade unions are reviving their capacity for militant, grass-roots activity; street protest has never been so ubiquitous or so vibrant. Excellent grounds for hope if you have the stomach for it.

*This point needs to be qualified with one important consideration. The existence of large numbers of unemployed people, coterminous with the presence of an organised communist Left, made it easier to recruit people to go abroad and fight wars than today. There is perhaps an alarming sense in which subjectivity in late capitalism has become bourgeois, pacified, gentrified and less inclined to life-or-death struggle over such minor matters as principle. If that is so, I record it as a problem to be confronted rather than as a fatal truth to be stoically accepted.

Philosophica Naturae posted by lenin

Paul Craddick , a very intelligent and informed libertarian whom I blog-rolled recently, offers some thoughts on the nature and environmentalism. If you pursue the link above, Chris Young makes an excellent intervention on the topic.

I have to admit that I have been negligent in following these matters, assuming the debate over climate change to be more or less settled. I knew that human generated carbon dioxide emissions accounted for a minority of all such emissions. I also knew that this still left us with a huge crisis lumbering not far over the horizon. After all, it is clear that the human share of the problem is big enough to be decisive. And, even if this were not the case, it would still be up to human beings to make use of the less polluting technology available to us and to try to manage the crisis as best we can. Ceasing those activities that contribute to the crisis have to be part of the answer. But Paul, citing an obscure Professor whose motives I suspect, nevertheless throws up some fresh thinking on the matter. Example:

[C]onfronted with the reality of climate change and a human role therein, the central question for deliberation - What is to be done? - is an ethical-political one, not primarily a scientific one (not "primarily" because, while sober scientific judgment undoubtably must inform deliberation, the answer eludes science's competence). In other words, to suppose that science simply "tells" us how to address this issue is a blatant category mistake .

Right on the money, and absolutely pertinent.

However, courting controversy, he quotes this Professor Stott:

"In a system as complex and chaotic as climate, [limitation of emissions - ed.] may even trigger unexpected consequences. It is vital to remember that, for a coupled, non-linear system, not doing something (i.e., not emitting gases) is as unpredictable as doing something (i.e., emitting gases). Even if we closed down every factory in the world, crushed every car and aeroplane, turned off all energy production, and threw 4 billion people worldwide out of work, climate would still change, and often dramatically."

Again, these aren't irrelevant considerations, although the last sentence is presumptuous (is Professor Stott so sure that reinvesting in new forms of technology and environmentally sound energy production would not create a few jobs?). However, acknowledging that climate is inherently dynamic, and that making changes in complex systems can have dramatic, unanticipated consequences is insufficient. We don't have any evidence that ceasing gas emissions would be harmful to our environment, although there is plenty of direct evidence that it is harmful to continue emitting gases. Secondly, although climate is dynamic, that doesn't rule out the possibility that ultimately it is a vast, self-regulating system along the lines of James Lovelock's Gaia. If such a thing were true, it would force the conclusion that human beings ought, for their own safety, to make as little impact on the climate system through their own activity as possible. I don't know that it is, but attempts to manage the crisis ought to be encouraged; and if they are not viable within the present global economy, then we'll just have to buy ourselves a new one before we perish.

The Agony of Liberalism: Part II posted by lenin

Review of Steven Lukes, Liberals and Cannibals: The Implications of Diversity, Verso, 2003.

(Part II will be concerned with complementing and answering some of the issues raised by John Gray, discussed in Part I. For that reason I will focus mainly on Lukes’ arguments about universalism, relativism, tolerance and rationality.)

In Woody Allen’s 1996 film Deconstructing Harry, a man is accused by his wife of having killed his former family with an axe. What is worse, she says, in order to conceal the bodies he ate them. He matches her outraged accusations finally by blurting "so what are you making a big fuss? Some bury, some burn, I ate!" Steven Lukes, Professor of Sociology at New York University, understands what the big fuss is. Excerpting an episode from Herodotus’ "Histories", he shows how the Callatiae tribe from India understood that the best way to honour their dead was to eat their corpses. The Greeks, by contrast, burned their dead. King Darius, arbitrating the discussion on behalf of the Persians, knows full well that the Persian method of leaving bodies on high towers to be eaten by vultures is the right way – but nevertheless understands that a wise imperialist must tolerate these ethnic distinctions. Now, this is a kind of ‘tolerance’ which wasn’t really discussed by John Gray in his Two Faces of Liberalism, and it is a tolerance that is not only ethnocentric but has nothing at all to do with any genuine respect for the customs and moeurs of others.

In fact, for Lukes, every observer of such a discussion reads it in an ethnocentric way. It is something we simply cannot help. As Terry Eagleton argues in The Politics of Human Rights (Dobrad Savic, ed., 1999), we are caught between the cultural and the political, between the local and universal. Between body and language. And it was the illusion of the Enlightenment that we could ever escape the particular in favour of the purely universal. Ethnocentrism is a necessary fact of life, because there is no ‘view from nowhere’, no non-perspectival understanding. (To be absolutely clear, the difference of cultures as intended here is in the sense discussed by Mary Midgley: cultures "differ in a way which is much more like that of climactic regions or ecosystems than it is like the frontiers drawn with a pen between nation-states"). But such rootedness is enabling as well as constraining, facilitating certain insights while preventing others. And for that reason, there can be a variety of ethnocentric responses. For instance, an unthinking ethnocentrist today would shriek: "Eeeugh, everyone knows you’re supposed to bury the dead or burn them! Only perverts eat their dead." There is also the committed reaction of the religious fundamentalist who knows the rest of the world is wrong and is either to be saved or damned. There is the evolutionism of the 19th Century, influenced by Comte’s positivism and exemplified by Maine, Spencer & Tylor. According to J B Burrows (Evolution And Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory, 1966), this perspective involved a relativism that was also not relativist. That is, since evolutionism assumed that society evolved in a series of more or less precisely defined stages (for Comte, these were stages of intellectual development - first theological, then metaphysical, and finally positivist, or scientific; for the Scottish Enlightenment, they were stages of technological development – hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural, commercial; for Marx, they were "modes of production" – ancient slave societies, Asiatic, feudal and capitalist), one could speculatively understand ‘non-rational’, reverential, status-oriented societies as previous stages of one’s own society. The ‘noble savage’ could, of course, be understood as embodying a different kind of ethical value, but the evolutionists understood that the way of enlightened Europe was more correct than that of their apparent forebears.

Another kind of ethnocentrism is to assume, with Hume, that human beings are broadly the same in all times and places; or, like Rousseau, to seek to universalise by casting off one’s national or ethnic prejudices and understanding the differences of others as alternative manifestations of the same humanity. What is inescapably ethnocentric for the latter is that, as Lukes has it, one "can only understand the unfamiliar by analogy with the familiar". The rationalist response to difference is to claim that through reasoning and discourse and the exercise of the mind we can reach a common understanding of what is true. This is precisely the idea whose limits John Gray exposed so effectively, since discourse and reasoning can very well deepen our understanding of our differences without actually resolving them. Foundationalism, the idea that we can erect a social order on the basis of shared ideals that is applicable at all times and everywhere, becomes highly problematic once you have acknowledged this. The relativist issues the following challenge to such a view, for instance: what you judge as rational is informed by your discrete local circumstances, and the standard by which you judge another culture as rational is specifically your standard, not that of the culture you are judging. The incommensurability of cultures makes such judgements, if not impossible, fraught with complexity and error. Such a view does not always entail moral nihilism – as Slavoj Zizek once pointed out, relativists are usually only inclined to declaim the incommensurability of cultures insofar as local practises do not contain serious consequences for human rights. At precisely the point that you make such a distinction, you are imposing a standard which is strictly your own, not the local standard etc.

Lukes contends that, while each of these views has its strengths as well as its limitations, it is possible to formulate a reasonable synthesis. The essays in this book therefore work through the practical implications of this idea, and these are provocative, enlightening and witty. Lukes is not quite as funny as Terry Eagleton, but he proves at times to be at least as Irish, with such chapter titles as "Liberalism for the Liberals: Cannibalism for the Cannibals", (and then, presumably, rape for the rapists, torture for the torturers, murder for the murderers etc). It is not often you can read an elegant debunking of Hayek’s dismissal of social justice and a languid appraisal of Isaiah Berlin’s political and literary qualities in the same book, and you will rarely find such topics as "Is Universalism Ethnocentric?" quite so entertaining. Ordinarily, a discussion of communitarianism is about as pleasurable as a mild toothache, but Lukes gets to the point with little fuss.

On universalism as a mere particularistic fetish of the Enlightenment, Lukes is suitably concise. There is no contradiction between defending universalism and acknowledging cultural differences. Of course there is a great deal of fun to be had in exposing this or that idea’s pretensions of universality as merely the purview of a particular culture or group. Marx made great sport of exposing the social origins of ideological formations, while Mannheim liked to undermine ‘timeless truths’ by setting them against the clock. Lukes deals mainly, however, with the arguments of Clifford Geertz who argues that not only is universalism ethnocentric, but it can’t be otherwise. "Universalism is ethnocentric because ethnocentricity is universal". Lukes challenges this firstly by interrogating the notion of ethnocentrism. When first used by William Graham Sumner in 1906, it referred to an outlook which measured other cultures from the standpoint of one’s own, and which involved the supposition that my culture is superior to yours and to his. For Richard Rorty, we are all ethnocentric in that in order to participate in a discussion we have to assume that there are enough shared grounds to make the debate fruitful. As Eagleton once put it (in Ideology, 1991), if I think patriarchy is an objectionable form of social domination, and you think it is a small town in New England, we aren’t really disagreeing. However, the trouble with the term is that it seems to refer to cultural groups rather than ethnicities. Moreover, as already stated, Lukes thinks it possible to speak of ethnocentricity in a way that doesn’t involve a presumption of superiority. Indeed, Said’s Orientalism is partially about the kind of ethnocentric view that can involve a presumption of the superiority of ancient civilisations. Lukes opts for the general tendency to speak of ethnocentrism as the attitude of particular cultural groups.

And what of universalism? It involves the view that reason is a universal predicate and that anyone anywhere has the same access to the same scope of rationality, and there are therefore grounds for a global dialogue. Of course, such reason is expressed in and through cultural specificity, but the suggestion is that the reasoning process does not depend on local variables. Secondly, universalism involves the idea that there is some human essence, a common humanity which may be variously defined but which usually refers to the biological basis for cultural expression. Thirdly, it involves a view of moral judgment, the idea that moral concerns extend to the whole of humanity, therefore requiring that cross-cultural judgments be made. The implications of such a view are egalitarian, anti-particularist and cosmopolitan.

Absolutely Relative

Relativists like Peter Winch or Thomas Kuhn who believe that cultures or rationalities are varied and incommensurable, while objecting to the wholesale universalism of the French and Scottish Enlightenment nevertheless hedge their objections with important qualifications. Not so, postmodernists like Jean-Francois Lyotard, who believes that "to speak is to fight", because cultures are so radically incommensurable as to make agreement in any deep sense impossible. For Richard Rorty, "there is nothing beneath socialisation", it "goes all the way down", and so there can be no ‘common humanity’. Relativism is based on a "recognition of the force of enculturative conditioning in shaping thought and behaviour", according to Herskovits, which is its enduring strength. However, such an acknowledgment does not prevent relativists, even in their hardened postmodern form, from engaging in persuasive activity, reasoning, argument etc. Additionally, even Rorty bases much of his thought on such common human capacities as that to feel pain, love, speak a language etc. And he involves himself in another strange contradiction when he argues for a version of humanism based not on a notion of ‘common humanity’ but on an ever-expanding ethnos, with greater and greater variegation. Norman Geras retorts (in Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty, 1996) that either the ethnos must expand to include all of humanity, or it must stop somewhere (and thereby exclude certain human beings, like Africans or Russians), or it must finally expand to include a common humanity. If it does not, then presumably the excluded groups can be massacred or starve and you won’t be too troubled. "Strange humanism," Geras observes. "Strange human rights."

Another objection to the prevalent anti-universalism is that its proponents misconceive their idea of culture. Culture is not, says Isaiah Berlin, a "windowless box". Indeed, the multicultural idea that there are discrete local cultures which are not transmissible, do not mingle well, do not cross-fertilise is probably one of the most pernicious in political culture today. When Nick Griffin can announce that the correct response to racial tensions in Burnley is to segregate the cultures so that whites can have their culture and Muslims can have theirs, he is directly appropriating one of the major tropes of postmodernism. Borrowing Benedict Anderson’s phrase, Lukes notes that "culturally defined communities are ‘imagined communities’", not impermeable solids. Cultures interpenetrate, overlap and procreate as well as militate against one another as they sometimes do. Cultural difference is understandable to us because of this, and because we do share a great deal in how we reason and understand the world. In respect of this, Lukes has what I think is an unfair pop at Donald Davidson’s "Principle of Charity" in which human beings are held to broadly agree about the most directly important things in life, and that this is a sufficient ground for communication. By this, Davidson does not mean that we agree on the pressing issues of the day, merely that we can infer that most people are right about most things since these are things they have to be competent in to survive. We can get it so wrong about the flatness of the earth or the criminality of refugees because understanding these issues does not bear immediately on our day-to-day survival. Now, Lukes’ counter-point is that by "maximising our shared beliefs we minimise our chances of identifying our differences". Do we? Surely the point about the Principle of Charity is that our shared understanding gives us a ground to understand our differences?

Significantly, John Gray argued against egalitarianism and against universalism in his pursuit of modus vivendi. He thought that such values were incompatible with cultural understanding and tolerance. The assumption he most objected to, of course, was that there was anything like a sufficient shared ground for making universalist projections about the kind of life it is most suitable for human beings to live in. There are many goods, and many of them are incommensurable. Now, where Gray goes wrong, I think, is in identifying universalism by reference to its most extreme and unresponsive variants. This makes it all too easy for him to dismiss universalist values as rigid dogmas replete with culturally specific assumptions. In reality, however, we cannot do without some kind of universalism. There are enough things that human beings do share to make it possible for us to talk, and to understand why we disagree, and to see why two ‘goods’ may be incommensurable. And there is enough in our shared capacity for pain and pleasure to make moral concerns cut across cultural boundaries. Finally, his valorisation of tolerance above all other things, is all too compatible with injustice (albeit that such a notion may not have the same ring in the minds of torturers as it will in the minds of victims). I’d like to quote from Batty ’s contribution to a Slavoj Zizek meeting at Marxism 2001 in order to make my point:

"Tolerance, per se, is not a virtue. It just means putting up with something. And to promote it as a virtue suggests that somehow other people are a burden."

I think we should be for tolerance inasmuch as it means putting up with cultural manifestations and such that irritate us but which we have no legitimate complaint against. We should be for tolerance so long as it means accepting that others are just as sensitive and imaginative as ourselves, and yet may come to radically different conclusions. But there is no reason in principle to tolerate economic, social or political injustice. There was no reason to have tolerated any of the atrocious regimes of the 20th Century, whatever –ism it chose to grace itself with. Nor, and I touch this nerve deliberately, is there any reason to tolerate either local thugs or imperial interlopers posing as masked ‘liberators’.

The Agony of Liberalism: Part I. posted by lenin

Review of John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, Polity Press 2000

"You know, if I ever had to fight a dragon, I’d look at it from the dragon’s point of view" – Saint George, as depicted on The Young Ones.

1.
A liberal, according to the poet Robert Frost, is someone who cannot take his own side in an argument. Uncharitable as this assessment is, it does indicate one of the enduring strengths of liberalism, which is its emphasis on understanding other points of view, the importance to tolerance and allowing for the flaws of others as well as one’s own. John Gray, cites Voltaire on the matter:

"What is tolerance? It is the appurtenance of humanity. We are full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other for our follies."

The value of such insights is hard to miss in this increasingly intolerant age, and that isn't the only reason to invest in this book. About the author, I should tell you that he is an academic based in the London School of Economics. A prolific author, he was once an ardent Thatcherite and New Right intellectual. In the 1990s, however, increasingly apprised of the ugly side of free market fundamentalism, Gray exhibited an increasing interest in liberal ideas. It is his particular reading of these that causes him to reject neoliberalism. About the book, it will be obvious enough that it is a sympathetic reading of liberal ideas, if not an uncritical one. Liberalism's virtues are expounded with elegance, and at times a rather terse satirical cut. Nevertheless, Gray maintains that liberalism has a fatal fissure in its core – tolerance has been conceived, by various liberals, as either a rational means to consensus or as a means to modus vivendi, or human cohabitation. The former is universalist in its outlook, and does not for a second that there is objective truth to be reached. The latter, by contrast, is pluralist and interested in the peaceful coexistence of different sources of ethical value. Locke and Kant through to Rawls and Hayek advocate the regime of universalism, while Hobbes, Hume, Berlin and Oakeshott beg tolerance for different moral traditions. Conflicting judgements about ‘the best life’ can therefore either be seen as a symptom of error, or as an inevitable result of human difference. Gray adheres firmly to the pluralist view:

"The idea that the exercise of reason produces agreement is at least as old as Plato’s Socrates. Even so, there has never been much to support it. Reason can enlighten us as to our ethical conflicts. Often it shows them to be deeper than we thought, and leaves us in the lurch as to how to resolve them … The aim of modus vivendi cannot be to still the conflict of values. It is to reconcile individuals and ways of life honouring conflicting values to a life in common. We do not need common values in order to live together in peace. We need common institutions in which many forms of life can coexist."

"Many", take note, not all. One cannot imagine Voltaire offering his plea to someone who was in the process of slaughtering him (at least not with much conviction). Indeed, although Gray acknowledges this, it is precisely on the limits of tolerance that Gray is at his weakest for reasons I shall shortly come to. Gray does not deny that there are universal values – it is simply that they underdetermine moral choices. Peace and justice, however variously interpreted, are universal values – but when they conflict, which should prevail? Is war worse than injustice, for instance? And then again, the Israeli conception of justice fundamentally differs from that of the Palestinian. Doubtless, such differences may be rooted in self-justification. But justice itself "makes incompatible demands", since restitution to a community for a past wrong may be unjust to those living in the present. Therefore, "even if a conception of justice could be formulated that received universal assent, it would make conflicting demands about which reasonable people could differ."

This part of the argument is presented by Gray with considerable clarity, punctuated by occasional flares of brilliance, such as when he observes that "tragic choices cannot be eliminated from ethical life. Where universal values make conflicting demands, the right action may contain wrong … Then there is surely tragedy." The more sanctimonious voices in the current debate over the Iraq war, (particularly Martini-sodden journalists with an exaggerated sense of their own moralilty) would gain much by considering such a possibility. But how, then, to deal with conflicting ethical choices all of which exert valid claims on what is just? Liberals like John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin assert that the solution to such a plurality is to establish a universal regime of justice, with basic liberties and rights applicable to all. That is, if one only has a rigorous and workable theory of justice, it is possible to resolve conflict between differing goods. Since, however, Gray argues that there can be different conceptions of justice which are incompatible but nevertheless have equal validity, such talk is considered hallucinatory and often dangerous. The best regimes are very different from each other, as are the worst, and the good may come in a variety of forms. (To be fair to Rawls, he did not dispute this: in his The Law of Peoples, Rawls attempted to formulate a system of philosophical norms compatible with political reality in which he distinguished different kinds of viable state, including the modern liberal variety but also ‘decent societies’ which are hierarchical but also allow for some involvement of their citizens, and he cites traditional Islamic societies as examples of that). It is also futile, according to Gray, to try to smother rivalries about what is good under the blanket of human rights - rights often conflict as well. Appeals to social justice don’t get us very far either since there is not an idea of fairness that is shared widely enough for a conception of social justice to be grounded in it.

Now, it is this value-pluralism that underlies Gray’s devastating assault on neoliberal orthodoxy in False Dawn (1998). Different groups of people require different economic circumstances to enable them to live ‘the good life’, and it is this above all else that inspires Gray to attack notions of the universal validity of market principles. In this book too, Gray takes on Robert Nozick, a libertarian liberal who believes that markets must be universal as a simple matter of justice. Property rights are not merely legal constructs or social conventions which work variously well in different societies – they are an imperative of justice. Gray retorts:

"Thinking of market freedoms in this way, as derivations from fundamental human rights, is a fundamental error. Like other human freedoms, the freedoms embodied in market institutions are justified inasmuch as they meet human needs. Insofar as they fail to do this they can reasonably be altered. This … is true of all human rights."

Indeed, "markets are not free-standing" but are "highly complex legal and cultural institutions". The ‘negative’ liberties afforded by the functioning of the free market would be of limited value without the ‘positive’ liberties afforded by enabling institutions like the welfare state (this is a decisive break with Isaiah Berlin, in whose tradition he is working). But Gray’s target is not merely neoliberalism – it is any of the "dogmas of the Enlightenment" or of religion which think it possible or desirable to have a universal regime. Social-democrats, Marxists, neoliberals and fundamentalists of various stripes are all to be distrusted as proponents of a universalist regime. Even a moderate liberal like Rawls, so Gray argues, is wrong to think that it is sufficient that he is silent on the kind of economy which best fulfils the criteria of his theory of justice. His basic error is to think that there can be a single, transferable theory which will be workable under forms of capitalism and socialism – no such universally applicable model of justice exists. Similarly, Mill’s liberalism works best where he recognises the incompleteness and constitutive imperfectability of human understanding; it is Isaiah Berlin whose ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ makes the best contribution to modus vivendi, by understanding liberty as a means of allowing different goods to flourish rather than the best means of ensuring that the one true good will always prevail:

"Unlike most liberal thinkers, Berlin understood that liberty is not one thing, but many, that its various components do not all mesh together, but clash, that when they do conflict there is inevitably some loss and sometimes no solution that all reasonable people are bound to accept."

However appropriate it is for human beings to allow others their own cultural and moral norms, even though we may find them repulsive, there are immediate and obvious limits to such value-pluralism, as Gray implicitly accepts. Some regimes ought not to be tolerated, even if they have some claim to a notion of the good. Totalitarian regimes, for example. The one thing that is universally invalid for Gray is any ethical norm whose source is universalist in conception. And there are basic standards of human rights – conflicting or not – involved in Gray’s writing. The "worst regimes" are not okay in their particular context etc. There do seem to be universal values sustaining Gray’s pluralism, and this is for the perfectly excellent reason that human beings do share many things in common, a point often made against Peter Winch's rather extreme version of relativism. Our basic biology, for instance, our sensory range, our language capacity, our ability to feel pain, to love and to orgasm – all of these cut across cultural blocs and political coalitions. There are good reasons for thinking that some regimes will allow our common needs and capacities to be satisfied and developed better than others. Some ‘goods’ are incommensurable, as Gray avers. But at a certain point even good, tolerant value-pluralists like Gray have to take up arms on behalf of one and against the other, and there can be no doubt that what is at stake is a ‘better’ or ‘less-worse’ notion of the good. And that is likely to be rooted in what the young Marx called our ‘species-being’. If your local clergy consider themselves paragons of virtue while they molest children, value-pluralists will not feel compelled to accept this as another version of the good; the sexual abuse of children is wrong because of what we know about the universal human capacity for pain and degradation.

2.
The inconsistency which dogs anti-universalist, de-totalising postmodern philosophy is precisely its unwillingness to accept a hierarchy of normative claims. All narratives are equal under the sun, (except for the grand narrative). John Gray is not quite of that ilk. He accepts that some ways of life are of less value than others, and some choices are better than competing options; it is just that sometimes one is presented with what the philosopher E J Lemmon called the 'Sartrean dilemma'. Sartre tells of a student whose brother had been killed in the German offensive of 1940. The student wanted to avenge his brother and to fight forces that he regarded as evil. But the student's mother was living with him, and he was her one consolation in life. The student believed that he had conflicting obligations. Sartre describes him as being torn between two kinds of morality: one of limited scope but certain efficacy, personal devotion to his mother; the other of much wider scope but uncertain efficacy, attempting to contribute to the defeat of an unjust aggressor. These are moral choices which are incommensurable because they appeal on different levels - they are not competing in a logical way, because they are both choices that could be right to a reasonable person.

Which is fine so long as one recognises that they are both only right insofar as they address universal needs. This being the case, it is surely possible to conceive of one (or many) broadly universalist regimes which satisfy our shared needs while allowing sufficient autonomy for individuals to pursue their own conflicting goals. Rawls’ challenge is more daunting than Gray seems to think in this respect since, if there is such a diversity of goods, everyone surely has a right to the kind of conditions in which they can make a reasonable choice; this is a universal right, and it doesn’t help to say that two such rights may come into conflict, since either we can make a reasonable choice between them or they can be compromised. The universalist regime of which I speak is, of course, socialism. I am thinking particularly of Norman Geras’ "Minimum Utopia" in which even apparently modest accomplishments such as ensuring everyone has adequate nutrition, shelter, healthcare and reasonable protection from harm would represent a revolutionary break with capitalism. It is both an enabling and constraining regime, in that certain choices not presently available under capitalism would become so, while choices that relate to property rights could become obsolete. Unlike Nozick’s treatment of the market, socialists would hardly claim today that centralised or decentralised planning is a universally applicable model based on a universal right. It is a means to an end, a way of allowing human beings to share control over their environment and therefore enjoy a kind of autonomy presently denied them. But socialists do claim that there are some minimal rights which are not respected under capitalism and which can only be fulfilled by establishing direct democracy. The right to participate meaningfully in the decisions that affect one’s life is the most obvious of these; and direct democracy is also conceived as a coercive instrument, preventing the unfair accumulation of wealth and power. One can imagine many convincing objections to such a universalist project, but value-pluralism would not be the best of them. Either, the socialist analysis is correct, and capitalism is an exploitative, unjust social formation, or it is incorrect – in neither case would value-pluralism be a relevant objection. It is not the kind of issue about which one can say that two entirely incompatible choices may both be rational.

Arguably, the best means of securing peaceful cohabitation is to ensure such conditions as will remove the likely causes of social tension. Inequality is such a cause (see, for example, Penny Green and Tony Ward, State Crime, 2003, in which one key cause of criminal behaviour by states is the intense social stress created by large inequalities of wealth). Yet, for Gray, the liberal cause of equality is precisely what is so fatal to liberalism and tolerance. It is the egalitarianism of liberalism that makes it intolerant of hierarchical social forms; indeed, for Gray:

"Ancient societies were more hospitable to differences than ours. This is partly because the idea of human equality was weak or absent. Modernity begins not with the recognition of difference but with a demand for uniformity."

This is such an obvious elision that one’s instinct is to read the passage again and look for a misprint, or a set of scare quotes – but, no, it is written as intended. Human equality is the same as uniformity. Parity is conflated with sameness. Such a trite formulation invites ridicule and does a disservice to the rest of the book. For example, Gray claims that social justice is not a sufficient appeal to resolve competing claims, because there is insufficient consensus on what is socially just (he appears to be influenced in this by Hayek who thought that the very idea of 'social justice' was meaningless, functioning as a rationalisation for special interests). This objection raises two interesting questions. Firstly should appeals to social justice be judged on their consensual appeal? If Toussaint L'Ouverture had accepted such an outlook, slavery might still be ubiquitous in the Southern hemisphere. Secondly, what would be a sufficient consensus to ground an appeal to social justice? Fifty plus one per cent? As it happens, opinion polls regularly show that a majority of people in this country consider the income gap too wide. A plurality think this can be solved by redistributive taxation. But even if such a venture was supported by noone but me and the dog, I could claim to be able to make a valid case for it in which it is not difficult to make a reasonable choice. This is not a 'Sartrean dilemma' for most people; such a policy is either just or unjust, and the same is true with most basic political questions of the day.

3.
Probably the most objectionable feature of the book for many liberals will be its stated intention of abandoning "the liberal project as a prescription for an ideal regime and adopt instead a conception in which the pursuit of modus vivendi among incommensurable and conflicting values is central." They may object for two reasons that I can think of, and many more that I cannot: firstly, because the liberal project is not about "a prescription for an ideal regime", but about creating minimal conditions in which diverse human beings can fulfil themselves; secondly, because Gray makes it crashingly obvious that what he means by this is the acceptance of regimes that many liberals might consider undesirable. (I am with the universalist liberals on both counts, with reservations. That is, I am for creating minimal conditions for human fulfillment but don't think the liberal order gets us very far in that, and I am in favour of opposing undemocratic regimes but differ with many liberals on the correct means of doing this).

On the latter point, I ought to say that Rawls makes his case against liberal universalism with the usual flair. In the chapter entitled 'Rival Freedoms', Gray sets out to debunk the Rawlsian "Greatest Equal Liberty Principle" which was in fact enshrined in the manifesto of the Socialist Alliance in the 2001 elections as "the maximum liberty for the individual commensurable with the freedom of others". What is wrong with this principle, Gray avers, is that it unwisely assumes that any reasonable person can know what the 'greatest liberty' is. Freedoms, however, conflict. All states have to make choices between rival freedoms, and not even liberal states can do so on the basis of liberal values. The notion of 'greatest liberty' is strictly indeterminate, and choices about which liberties to curtail are usually based on pragmatic considerations of human interest and a culturally specific notion of 'the good':

"Like non-liberal regimes, liberal regimes embody specific conceptions of the good life. The liberties they embody can be justified only in terms of those conceptions. Of course, no liberal regime embodies a single conception of the good. All embody a local settlement of the claims of rival ideals. The freedoms that any liberal regime protects are part of this settlement."

Rawls is accused of omitting very important modern freedoms from his list of central freedoms as a result of the inaptness of his theory, in which there is no space for radical choice among conflicting values. As an example, Gray cites the possibility of Catholics, Muslims etc asserting their cultural autonomy and liberty in being allowed to found faith schools. At the same time as these schools appear to maximise cultural autonomy, they are also exclusionary in that - for example - a homosexual man may not teach in one. I think I know how I would answer in this case, but the point is that Rawls' Greatest Equal Liberty Principle does not allow for such radical incommensurability. This charge has some justice in it. The matter of implementing liberal principles in such decisions is rarely as simple as Rawls seems to make it. On the other hand, the choice is probably not as difficult as Gray makes it appear - for example, he cites the choice between allowing racist speech and curtailing free speech. Both contain harm, and both could be seen as reasonable by different people. Yet, not every liberal holds free speech to be an absolute, and a consideration of the consequences in each case, as measured against liberal principles, could yield a decisive answer. Now, this is where Gray is wrong to say that liberal principles can have no place in determining which freedoms are privileged and which are not. Taking the example above, we can imagine how a consideration of the consequences would weigh differently in the scales of a conservative racist than in those of a liberal 'multiculturalist'. These cannot simply be reduced to manifestations of culturally-specific notions of 'the good' - one purview does a better job of maximising the domain of those 'universal values' which Gray admits exist than the other.

Gray does a good job, however, of exposing some of the weaknesses in classical liberal thought on liberty. Mill's 'one simple principle' (in On Liberty) that states or collectivities may restrict individual liberty only in order to prevent harm is met by the obvious answer that one has often to decide between harms. Just like the 'Greatest Happiness' principle, this one founders in a sea of indeterminacy. On the other hand, David Held made more or less the same point in Models of Democracy, so it isn't an original argument. Isaiah Berlin, to whom Gray owes many of his most effective argumentative weapons, is also taken to task on his argument for 'negative liberty' (freedom 'from' various things) against 'positive liberty' (freedom 'to' do/have/be various things). For one thing, Gray challenges the prioritising of liberty over other liberal values on the basis of value-pluralism. Freedom of the kind envisaged in value-pluralism is not merely freedom from coercion, but is also the freedom to be partially the author of one's own life. In other words, value-pluralism specifically includes the possibility of 'positive freedoms', of enabling institutions and social structures.

Nevertheless, we are back to the basic theme of Gray's argument when he says:

"Autonomy is not a good that can be accorded priority over other values and thereafter promoted. Just as there are incompatible negative liberties, so there are rival autonomies. When autonomy makes conflicting demands, they may reasonably be resolved in different ways. Autonomy cannot be hived off from other values. The line between autonomy and other values is frequently unclear. In many cases, goods that seem to be wholly distinct from autonomy shape the options in terms of which autonomy is defined."

Freedom means different things to an Indonesian than to an Australian, then, and sometimes certain freedoms may reasonably be curtailed in the pursuit of a specific, shared notion of the good. Gray seems to accept a distinction of the kind made by John Rawls between 'decent' hierarchical societies and criminally negligent or barbaric states. The former, although illiberal and often lacking the minimum of democracy, can be accomodated as local versions of the 'good', while the latter may sometimes be too dangerous to cohabit with. On the other hand, it is the goal of his neo-Hobbesian view to establish "a modus vivendi among goods and evils", as he puts it. States are not to be judged according to how closely they embody a particular value, but according to how well they negotiate between rival values. "Ethical life is commonly a shifting compromise between ideals", and it is better to work with this uncomfortable fact than extinguish in attempting to end it.

Such is not my view, but it is the considered argument of an intelligent conservative who has as much to recommend him in spite of himself as because of himself. Although frequently wrong, he is always illuminating. As a conservative, he is open-minded and receptive; as a liberal, he is honest enough to admit its exclusiveness, to admit what liberalism cannot maintain (namely, universalism). As a socialist, I take pleasure in having the opportunity to disagree with him.

Quotes of the Day posted by lenin

Tariq Ali provides the first:

The fact is that Iraq is in a much bigger mess today than before the war. The situation was summed up by a former inmate of Abu Ghraib prison: "We want electricity in our homes, not up the arse."

While a Respect volunteer in Hartlepool offers the second:

At the offices of Respect, however, party workers are trying to persuade Derek Malcolm that nothing can be taken for granted. "This is Hartlepool," activist Pauline Cassim tells him. "We elected a monkey. Miracles do happen in this town."

Human Rights and International Law, Part II. posted by lenin

Last month, the Spectator carried a report suggesting that Slobodan Milosevic may have to be acquitted from most if not all charges levelled against him by the ICTY. I responded that:

perhaps part of the problem is the hypocrisy of those organising the trials. It reminds me of the way in which certain obvious war crimes were ruled legal at Nuremberg because the Allies were guilty of them too. How can one try Milosevic for, say, knowingly slaughtering civilians when Nato did the same by bombing a television centre they knew to be manned and by shifting to civilian targets after three weeks? There is a clear lesson here - monsters should be tried by their victims, not by imperial interlopers. Unlike the attempted Pinochet trial, this initiative emerged as the result of a Western desire to validate their aggression in the Balkans, not as the result of a grass-roots campaign to bring a murdering bastard to justice.

Now, a regular contributor to the MediaLens message board, Sue C, has provided an invaluable exhange from the Milosevic trial which illustrates my point:

Milosevic:"...... then the Vance-Owen Plan in May
1993, and surely it follows from this -- or it appears that you are reproaching me for not having resorted to some more drastic measures in favour of the Vance-Owen Plan as if I had abandoned it but in fact you abandoned it. And I don't mean you personally but I mean the international community. The Vance-Owen Plan was abandoned in the first place by the Americans, or rather they didn't even support it. They didn't want to support it. Isn't that true? And they made it known to the Serbs that they didn't consider the plan to be a good one. And then we from Belgrade acted as Don Quixote who advocated the plan which was being undermined by the international community and among that community the largest world power. Isn't that true or not?"

Owen: "There's a great deal of truth in that."

The trouble, once again, is not that Milosevic is innocent; it is that those pretending to hold him to account (the US & European powers) are themselves guilty several times over. The realpolitik behind it was hardly better than that which informed Milosevic's despicable behaviour. For example, a leaked Pentagon document, known as "The Planning Guide" (and reported in the New York Times on March 8th, 1992), said:

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival…. First, the US must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.

We must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.

...

It is of fundamental importance to preserve NATO as the primary instrument of Western defence and security as well as the channel for US influence and participation in European security affairs … We must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO.

Clearly not the armed wing of Amnesty International.

Chickenshits posted by lenin

According to the New York Times , the American army is pulling back from an attack on Najaf:

American forces have been close to capturing or killing Mr. Sadr before, but have repeatedly backed off. This time American commanders had vowed to crush his guerrillas, known as the Mahdi Army.

The delay came after a day of intense preparation for the attack, with a convoy of tanks and armored vehicles leaving its base.

Officers declined to discuss why they did not go ahead with the attack.

"Preparations to do the offensive are taking longer than initially anticipated," said Maj. David Holahan, second in command of the Marine battalion in Najaf.

"We never said what time we would do it."

American sissies. Go home before Sadr gives you a paper-cut.

Open Mouth, Insert Foot. posted by lenin

"You're either with us, or with the terrorists." - George W. Bush.

"That's known as asking for it." - Gore Vidal.

From today's Guardian on two British recruits to the Mahdi Army:

They planned their trip for months and when Mr Sadr emerged as a powerful leader after organising a series of uprisings in April, they de cided to volunteer to join his force. "Bush said 'you are either with us or against us'," Abu Haqid added. "We had to decide either to be with him or against him, and we are against him definitely."

Both were at pains to point out their disapproval of Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida network and insisted their presence in Mr Sadr's militia did not amount to terrorism, because they were fighting against uniformed soldiers.

"Bin Laden and his group are totally against our belief, killing innocent civilians," said Abu Haqid. "Killing innocent people we cannot do. That is terrorism, this is defending your country."

Spot the Difference. posted by lenin

Let's have some fun. I have two quotes for you. And, when I print them here, I want you to try and guess the authors. I'll make it relatively easy. One of them is Michael Howard and the other is Tony Blair. I won't provide links, for reasons comprehensible to any passing snail, and I would appreciate it if you gave it a stab without searching Google or looking it up otherwise. Ready? Okay, now the quotes are both on the subject of crime, so here they are in no particular order.

Number one:

"As a society we are in danger of being overrun by values which eat away at people's respect for themselves, each other, their homes and their neighbourhood.

"Most damaging of all has been the dramatic decline in personal responsibility. Many people now believe that they are no longer wholly responsible for their actions."

Number two:

"People ... want rules, order and proper behaviour...

...They want the society of respect. They want the society of responsibility. They want the community where the decent, law-abiding majority are in charge. Where those who play by the rules do well, and those who don't get punished."

The reason I've stuck in those elipses is because there are certain verbal tics which both politicians have, and which are dead give-aways. In fact, I would guess that some of you will be able to work it out purely on the rhetorical style. The answers will be published tomorrow.

Update: The answer is, Howard said number one and Blair said number two. But of course, in a deeper and more meaningful way, they both said number two.

If your answer is Gordon Brown, then you're asking the wrong question. posted by lenin

You know trouble is brewing when one of the most ardent exponents of the Blairite model rounds on the master. Here is how two editors of Renewal , until recently a Blairite house journal, announced their disaffection with Blair:

"Recent results and events disturbingly echo the fall of the Tories. First you lose your active members (on current projections we will have no members by 2018), then your councillor base, finally after a moment of epiphany (like Black Wednesday) the fall amongst the wider public is frighteningly far and fast.

"In the party, members simply walk away in silence, leaving behind them an increasingly empty shell - frustrated and disillusioned but, curiously, not especially angry."

They go on to say:

"As it stands, none of the major rationales for the war stand up. There are no weapons of mass destruction, the country, the region and the world are not safer places, the lives of the Iraqi people are not safer and it remains an open question whether they are or will be much better.

"And the debris has inevitably fallen primarily on Blair, given that he took an unwilling and unenthusiastic party and people into the conflict.

"Tragically, Blair still appears to believe that if he can only explain it one more time, we will get it. But Tony, we get the message - we just don't accept it.

"Iraq is Blair's poll tax, a fundamental breach of trust, demonstration of arrogance and strategic blunder for which the party as a whole is paying the price."

This is spectacularly wounding stuff from two intellectuals who might have been counted upon as staunch allies. And, more importantly, it is right on the money. The sad and frustrating aspect of this, however, is that the authors still believe that Gordon Brown might offer a way out of the current deadlock:

"It is undoubtedly the case that the social democratic successes of this government belong primarily to Gordon. If he becomes leader then the party will be more at ease with itself, the pace of redistribution could increase and the public sector will be safer from creeping privatisation."

This isn't even half-right. Economic policy (at least according to most accounts, to wit Anthony Seldon's recent biography of Blair) has been ceded to Gordon Brown from day one of New Labour being elected. Creeping privatisation, tax cuts for the rich and company profits, miserly redistributive measures and alarming opposition to EU laws which offer working people minimal protection - all of these policies can be traced right to Number 11 (although, if my memory isn't playing tricks on me, I think Blair and his family are currently holed up in Number 11, because next-door was too small for them). There is no justifiable reason to believe that Gordon Brown would offer anything but an even more boring version of Blairism.

It is a fact that income inequality has increased under New Labour, and that this is a direct reflection of the Chancellor's commitment to a slender version of egalitarianism in which the central priority is to improve the endowments for workers, thereby improving their chances in a globalising economy. Equality of outcome is eschewed in favour, not of equality of opportunity, but rather a certain supply-side levelling up (improving educational and training opportunities, etc.). And since Brown accepts the monetarist doctrine that there is a natural rate of unemployment, the priority is to lower that natural rate by improving conditions for investment (hence the cuts in corporate tax, small-business tax, and some highly repressive measures hidden in legislation supposed to benefit trade unions).

Brown has supported the New Labour project, has provided its intellectual backbone (albeit backbones are unfashionable in New Labour), has been supportive of or has actually promulgated most of this government's objectionable policies. As the slogan goes: If your answer is Gordon Brown, then you're asking the wrong question.

"Don't Squeeze the Rich or Growth Rates Will Suffer" posted by lenin

Nick Herbert, director of Reform assures Guardian readers that taxing the rich does not work for social justice as it lowers GDP, and would place Britain in an uncompetitive position in relation to the rest of Europe and the US. Reform, for the uninitiated, is "an independent, non-party think tank whose mission is to set out a better way to deliver public services and economic prosperity", and it seems to support the centre-right wing of the Liberal Democrats in their crusade to return the party to its 19th Century position (which the Guardian strangely calls "radical"). They are against stringent regulation; against nationalisation; for extended involvement of the market in public services etc etc. Their hobby-horse today is the old trope that higher taxes lead to lower growth rates and therefore lower revenues. This argument is drawn from the long discredited Laffer Curve . The idea is simply that increasing taxes beyond a certain level (T) will cause people to work less hard, so that 100% taxation results in 0% willingness to work. However, most research shows that labour supply is inelastic in regard to tax levels. Empirically, the theory has proven a disaster. Clinton passed the largest tax increase in US history and revenues went up. W has passed tax cuts and revenues went down.

FY YTD Receipts YTD Expenditures
2000 1,533,369 1,356,829
2001 1,582,034 1,413,088
2002 1,401,499 1,517,811
2003 1,352,680 1,622,396
2004 1,400,288 1,726,905

High tax rates did not reduce growth in the long post-war boom. In fact, the relationship appears to be the converse - lower growth rates tend to pressure governments to reduce taxation (or, more accurately, to shift the burden of tax from business to consumer, from progressive to regressive).

The reasoning behind Herbert's argument is spurious at any rate, reflecting the growth fetish of economists rather than the needs of ordinary people. Social justice is a matter of how equitably and fairly wealth, resources and opportunity are distributed in an economy, not the rate of growth per person in the economy. Although it is true that historically higher growth rates have been conducive to more equal distribution of wealth, it is not necessarily the case that a rising tide lifts all boats. Although the British economy has expanded considerably since the last recession, the income gap has grown dramatically. Poverty spread throughout the 1990s, and the modest reduction in the statistics made by this government are more to do with minimal ameliorative measures and covert redistribution than tax rates. The Working Families Tax Credit is responsible for shifting many children just above the poverty line, while the minimum wage will have had an impact on adults over the age of 18.

The real question, of course, is not how much you tax but how you tax. If your concern is social justice, it makes sense (as Herbert does suggest) to cut taxes for lower incomes. One of the Socialist Alliance's policy proposals was to abolish taxes for anyone earning less than £13,000 per year. Similarly, given that there is only a finite amount of wealth in the economy, in order to achieve real distributive justice it would be a good idea to tax that wealth which is in the hands of those who have not earned it at a sufficient level to pay for social welfare and public service provisions, which is why the SA proposed to sharply increase taxes on the handful of wealthy people and on their chief sources of income: inheritance and capital.

The argument that we must never tax the rich too highly for fear of losing the benefits which they are in a unique position to deliver (capital investment) has always been disreputable one, especially when the argument is uttered by those with the capacity to make it happen. As Gerry Cohen points out (in If You're An Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?), it is rather like a kidnapper pointing out that it would be wise to forward large payments of cash in order to prevent the kidnapped from being harmed. Distributive justice may not necessarily involve an idea of 'desert', but even if it did, Herbert's argument would still be as morally offensive as it is theoretically impoverished.

The 'growth' blackmail never was a particularly compelling reason to persist with an unjust distribution of wealth and opportunity. It actually becomes less so when one considers the "competitiveness! angle of Herbert's argument, for what is actually implied by it is a race to the bottom. If one must maintain low taxes just in order to compete with Poland, how long before Poland cuts its taxes further and your competitive advantage is gone - forcing you to reciprocate and perhaps produce a similar reaction? Nations, if they must compete (and I fail to see how they will ever not do so) ought to compete over such things as human rights, opportunity, healthcare, education, social justice, cultural freedom and so on. Competing for the highest GDP per capita is senseless if it means the former are neglected.

Resist or Die. posted by lenin

I guess it's just in my genes. Or it could be my hormones And if it isn't that, it's the way I was raised. Every time the hot months come round, I just get the urge to see leading cabinet members squeal like live piggies on a spit.

The Office of the Fat Controller has announced that the threat by FBU members to go on strike "irresponsible" . At the same time, airport staff are set for strike action , which they are likely to win - hence, management are desparately seeking arbitration and half-measures. The civil servants have already taken massive, solid strike action and may do so again over recent threats to jobs. And the RMT, having obtained most of the demands over which they recently struck , now threaten strike action over the loss of several hundred jobs in Network Rail. The RMT has gained a further 13,000 members since since breaking with Labour, while its membership had already grown dramatically under Bob Crowe's leadership.

But as a whole, the TUC is losing members. It is revising down its total membership by 300,000:

Research conducted by the TUC points out that, while the decline in union membership has halted in recent years, “unions have yet to experience the growth in membership that occurred in other periods of full employment and macroeconomic stability”.

The change in membership figures is related to the practice of counting “non-paying” members—for example, retired or unemployed members—in the returns unions send to the TUC.

This has the effect of making their overall membership larger than just “paying members”. Unions are required to send both sets of figures to the Certification Officer (CO), the civil servant responsible for overseeing trade union affairs.

According to unpublished data from the CO, Amicus registered only 685,000 paying members in its most recent submission to the CO. Reports claim the union is re-auditing its membership figures to strip out non-paying members.

Similarly, the fee-paying membership of the TGWU is 735,000, as compared to a total membership of 835,000.

The GMB, with a total membership of over 700,000, is also reported to be ending the practice of counting non-paying members, reducing its official membership by 104,000.

Figures for union membership have long been contentious. Unions have good reasons for wanting employers to believe they may have more members than is really the case.

And the “self reporting” involved in the returns to the TUC may well have involved some small inflation of the membership figures. Seen in this light, the TUC’s move is clearly meant as a wake-up call.

The official figures, from sources like the Labour Force Survey and the Certification Officer, show that levels of union membership have stabilised.

For example, the latest report from the CO shows a total union membership of 7.74 million (including non-TUC affiliates like the RCN and the BMA), only very slightly lower than last year’s total of 7.75 million.

But these figures mask a mixed picture of membership losses and gains. Most of the membership losses have been in areas where there have been job cuts, such as manufacturing.

In fact the job cuts in manufacturing go a long way towards explaining the decline in union membership in the 1990s.

This particularly affected the large general unions like Amicus, the GMB and the TGWU.

One response, and this is the tack being increasingly taken by Amicus, is to “grow by merger”, gobbling up smaller unions.

But the unions that have grown most spectacularly in recent years are those that have taken action in pursuit of their members’ interests.

For example, the CO’s annual report shows that the main civil service union, the PCS, has grown by some 25,000 over the past two years, and now has a total membership of 286,000.

Message to the unions: if you want to avoid extinction, get out of Labour and get militant. Resist or die.

Update: James has news that Labour have been attempting to sabotage a potential pay-deal with the FBU, thus guaranteeing strike action.

Preparing for Emergencies posted by lenin

Citizens! Prepare to be patronised.

The government is concerned that the public are insufficiently stable, educated and middle-class to be able to deal with terrorist emergencies. They have therefore issued a website containing invaluable information for Joe Sixpack and Jane Housework. I urge all safety-conscious citizens to digest the contents of this site very very slowly, carefully and lovingly.

Thanks for your attention.

"We do not do politics at the Department of Homeland Security" posted by lenin

Once upon a time, Slavoj Zizek thrilled an audience by announcing that "the War on Terror means they [the ruling class] are in a panic". Never mind the typically ludic quality of Zizek's writing and performance; what he meant, of course, was that by eroding basic human rights in some very obvious and egregious ways, the ruling class were giving up their hegemony on 'human rights' discourse - leaving the field open for a genuinely radical Left.*

It isn't a strictly analogous situation, but I am tempted to say that when the Department of Homeland Security ratchets up the security alert to Orange, it is a measure of their panic about the declining fortunes of the Bush regime. We now know that the reports on which these terror warnings were based originated from 2000-2001 :

Taken together with a separate, more general stream of intelligence, which indicates that Al Qaeda intends to strike in the United States this year, possibly in New York or Washington, the officials said even the dated but highly detailed evidence of surveillance was sufficient to prompt the authorities to undertake a global effort to track down the unidentified suspects involved in the surveillance operations.

"You could say that the bulk of this information is old, but we know that Al Qaeda collects, collects, collects until they're comfortable,'' said one senior government official. "Only then do they carry out an operation. And there are signs that some of this may have been updated or may be more recent.''

Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, said on Monday in an interview on PBS that surveillance reports, apparently collected by Qaeda operatives had been "gathered in 2000 and 2001.'' But she added that information may have been updated as recently as January.

Now, you wouldn't believe the cynicism about these alerts. Pure, naked scepticism! Take a look, for example, at the comments from readers of the BBC's website :

Kerry has a good convention on Friday...Terrorist alert on the Weekend. Bet you wouldn't have got good odds against that at the bookies! Now we find out the data is 4 years old. Bush is running scared of losing his job - most of us are scared he won't.
Jim Kirk, Basildon England

No I'm not scared. Great idea though, change a colour on a warning scale, raise oil prices because of instability, make more money while you can and at the same time scare everyone to oblivion. This scare tactic will only work for so long, one day there will be peace and the governments will be forced to keep the oil prices down for good.
Domenico, Hitchin, UK

...

Car bombs are not preventable, no matter how much security you have. These 'Terror Alerts' are not much more than a method to control people through fear. It's a very effective mechanism used to the maximum potential by the Bush Administration.
Clay, San Diego, USA

Well, I wouldn't accept the stuff about Kerry's "good" conference, because all indications are that the expected "bounce" has not materialised. I guess when you say stupid shit like "I'm John Kerry and I'm reporting for duty!" you have to expect a great, national yawn. Better would have been "I'm John Kerry, and I'm not George W. Bush!" Far more likely that the President realised that if the rising tide of cynicism and disaffection continues, it will not be good either for him or his loyal opposition.

But the gentleman's comment about car bombs seems highly apposite. I recall a similar feeling when tanks rolled into Heathrow. I thought "just what are you going to do?" Tanks are no good against hidden caches of semtex. They're only good in conventional, land warfare. Now, I admit I don't know a lot about the military, but I kind of feel that would be key. Similarly, why should a few rifle-bearing robocops standing around outside JP Morgan's building on overtime be sufficient to deter the impact of a car laden with explosives?

At any rate, if there is an increased terror threat to the United States, the President bears a lot of the blame .

*In this regard, I am tempted to conduct a simple historical experiment with advocates of 'human rights' discourse who privilege either the US or the UN as the agents protecting such elementary standards. What have been the greatest leaps forward in global human rights over the last quarter of a century? The 'velvet revolution' was carried out by the people of East Europe, with Bush Snr looking on with discernable worry. The fall of apartheid was due to the actions of black South Africans, often organised in trade unions. The old South Korean regime fell on the back of a wave of workers' struggle. Poland was liberated by Solidarnosc. Serbia by a combination of striking miners, truckers and student activists. A close look at all the peoples apparently 'liberated' by the US or the UN (or, usually, both) will reveal either mass murder (Latin America, Indochina) or undemocratic corruption (Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan) or desperate, raging instability fuelled by the unpopularity of the 'liberators' (Iraq, and to some extent Kosovo). Given the contrasting situations in Venezuela and Colombia, and given the stance of Iraqi trade unionists against the invasion and occupation of their country, now is the time above all others to emphasise that the only real guarantor of human rights is the organisation and resistance of ordinary working people.

Chomsky vs CY posted by lenin

Explananda are phenomena that require explanation. Explanans are the things that do the explaining. And, in Carl Hempel's formulation, there is always an implicit or explicit nomological rule involved in the deductive process. (That's too simple, but I'm not going to go get my revision notes for the sake of a blog.)

The thing that requires explanation in this case is Chomsky's blog post from a while back:

Not reported but quite important is the dispatch to Israel of 100 F16-I's, advanced jet bombers, with the very specific announcement that they can reach Iran and return, are updated versions of the F-16s that Israel used to attack the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 (thereby setting off Iraq's nuclear weapons program, though that part of the story, though pretty well confirmed, is avoided), and are equipped with "special weapons" (according to the Israeli Hebrew press).

This prompts the following from Chris:

Uhhhhhh, pardon? I've read a bit about the Israeli strike against that nuclear reactor and this is the first time I've seen anyone claim that the strike set off Iraq's nuclear weapons program.

...

Now, I'm actually a big fan of the idea that you can make crazy people crazier than they already are by provoking them. (E.g., it wouldn't surprise me much to discover that North Korea stepped up its nuclear weapons program after Bush made his "Axis of Evil" speech. On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me to discover that it hadn't.) So it's possible that the Israeli strike convinced Saddam Hussein to get a move on with the whole nuclear weapons project. But the main effect appears to be that it convinced Iraq that it needed to be a lot more savvy about hiding its nuclear program than anything else.

Does anyone know otherwise? I would be delighted to hear from you.

There is a lot of subsequent wrangling which I invite you to check out by pursuing the main link at the top of the page. To summarise, Chris answers his readers, e-mails Chomsky and is not particularly convinced by the reply. Well, Chomsky answers hundreds of e-mails every day, and he often comes across as quite curt in his replies because, as he once protested, you communicate differently over the e-mail than you do face to face. In this case, I would guess he has been obliged by time to refer to his book Hegemony or Survival and hope Chris is willing to visit his local Borders.

I think Chris is on a road to nowhere with this one, partly because how you view Chomsky's assertion depends to a great extent on which evidence you accept and how much weight you attach to it, but mainly because I think he's wrong. For example, the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) suggested in its September 2002 dossier that:

'Following the Israeli raid...Iraq's nuclear weapons programme went underground. The establishment of Iraq's clandestine nuclear weapons programme dates from...May 1982.'

Indeed, it does appear to be the case that the clandestine nuclear weapons programme was initiated following that strike. Prior to that attack, Osirak had regularly been inspected, and the IAEA saw no evidence of any attempt to construct a nuclear weapons programme. It seems that it was after that episode that Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, (who was the deputy minister for industry and is believe to have subsequently become the head of the nuclear weapons programme) convinced Saddam that it would be both possible and desirable to build such nukes clandestinely and remain within the NPT.

Recently Dr Imad Khadurri, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist (who subsequently joined the IAEA), suggested the same thing:

Dr Imad Khadduri, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist who was the head of the scientific experimentation group before the Israeli air strike, confirmed to the Power and Interest News Report, "Indeed, in 1981 all of our work was centered at the Tuwaitha site." In order to prevent such attacks from occurring in the future, Baghdad took prompt action after Israel's successful air strike. Khadduri explained, "We began to disperse our nuclear facilities to end up with eight or nine sites for production, processing, enrichment design and research."

...

In addition to the operational difficulties in destroying Iran's nuclear research program, there are also serious political risks involved. In 1981, when Israel attacked Iraq's Osirak reactor, Tel Aviv's move caused Baghdad to accelerate its quest for nuclear arms. By demonstrating Iraq's military weakness in its failure to prevent an Israeli air strike, Tel Aviv's decision merely caused the leadership in Baghdad to believe even more strongly that they needed nuclear weapons to shield against future aggression from hostile states. By acquiring nuclear arms, states are able to increase their defense capabilities since other states are hesitant to take military action against a nuclear-armed rival. As Khadduri writes in his recent book describing Iraq's nuclear research program, after Israel attacked the Osirak reactor, "Saddam took the political decision to initiate a full-fledged weapons program immediately afterwards."

Reuters reports that:

At first, the program focused mainly on the use of nuclear energy for power generation. Khadduri said that changed in 1981 after Israeli jets destroyed the country's Osirak nuclear reactor.

Now, Chris' view is that:

The story of Iraq's drive to develop nuclear weapons is an extremely complicated one, involving all kinds of regional, international, domestic and psychological causes.

That is true enough. Geopolitics is rarely pure, and never simple. However, I'm afraid it won't do as a rebuke to Chomsky who, if the above evidence is reliable, only repeated what the good inspector said: Iraq's clandestine nuclear programmes were indeed "kicked off" by the Israeli attack. This does not involve the suggestion that Saddam Hussein would have remained fission-free indefinitely in the absence of such an attack. Who knows? My educated guess would be that given the opportunity and encouragement from appropriate quarters, Saddam could well have developed an actual nuclear programme in the absence of Israeli aggression. But what seems relatively clear is that if there wasn't any intention to build nukes before the bombing of Osirak, that attack ignited the desire. And if there was such an intention, however thwarted by inspections, this attack precipitated the move from conception to action.

Now, before I finish, I have a treat for Chris and his readers. The passage from Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival which deals with Osirak is available online , as indeed is most of the book. I quote the relevant passage:

A more far-reaching example of establishing norms was Israel's bombing of the Osirak reactor in Iraq in June 1981. At first the attack was criticized as a violation of international law. Later, after Saddam Hussein was transformed from favored friend to unspeakable fiend in August 1990, the reaction to the Osirak bombing also shifted. Once a (minor) crime, it was now considered an honored norm, and was greatly praised for having impeded Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program.

The norm, however, required the evasion of a few inconvenient facts. Shortly after the 1981 bombing, the Osirak site was inspected by a prominent nuclear physicist, Richard Wilson, then chair of the physics department at Harvard University. He concluded that the installation bombed was not suited for plutonium production, as Israel had charged, unlike Israel's own Dimona reactor, which had reportedly produced several hundred nuclear weapons. His conclusions were supported by the Iraqi nuclear physicist Imad Khadduri, who was in charge of experimental work at the reactor before the bombing and later fled the country. He too reported that the Osirak reactor was unsuitable for the production of plutonium, though after the Israeli bombing in 1981, Iraq took the "solid decision to go full speed ahead with weaponization." Khadduri estimated that it would have taken Iraq decades to obtain the required amount of weapons-grade material, had the program not been sharply accelerated as a result of the bombing. "Israel's action increased the determination of Arabs to produce nuclear weapons," Kenneth Waltz concluded. "Israel's strike, far from foreclosing Iraq's nuclear career, gained Iraq support from some other Arab states to pursue it."

He attributes these quotes in his footnotes as follows:

Richard Wilson, “A Visit to the Bombed Nuclear Reactor at Tuwaitha, Iraq,” Nature 302, no. 5907 (31 March–6 April 1983): pp. 373–76. Michael Jansen, Middle East International 691 (10 January 2003). Imad Khadduri, Uncritical Mass, memoirs (manuscript), 2003. Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), pp. 18–19.

Good on Chris for stirring up the debate, but I think he's misfired on this one.

Reply from Norman Geras posted by lenin

Normblog defends himself from one of my charges against the pro-war Left, particularly himself, in which I accused them of a tendency "to abstract a situation from the mesh of geopolitical considerations in which it is embedded and reduce it to a stark moral question."

He cites two responses to Ken McLeod to make his point, which is that he does weigh the concrete geopolitical considerations in his judgment, and indeed they do press it home rather firmly. One thing I would say in my defense, however, is that the post of his that I was discussing accused "the antiwar left" tout court of a "moral failure" (on account of one of the more threadbare arguments proffered by UN-fetishists that the war was "illegal"). Since the antiwar Left has many currents, and since I know of virtually noone who's sole objection is the alleged illegality of the war, I think it unfair to condemn all of the antiwar left on such grounds. My assumption is that if Norm agrees that many of us weigh matters of US power and so on differently, then this does not necessarily constitute a "moral failure". As I argued, noone has a hegemony on the moral high ground on this issue - and those who claim to have such a hegemony may just as well lose their stake in it.

One question, just an aside really, to those who do think the war was objectionable on legal grounds - does that mean if the law could be construed in such a way as to make it legal, then the war would have been justifiable? Only asking.