Today. posted by Richard Seymour

The Independent puffs today's antiwar march on its front page - the last time a national newspaper did that was February 15th 2003. It's also mentioned on the BBC and ITV. (BBC News, it has to be said, is more interested in babbling away about something called "booster seats" for children travelling in cars - a topic, apparently, that has "so many of you talking"). It's going to be massive. Here, via Socialist Worker, is the route of the march (click to enlarge):



That's tens of thousands of people pouring into the 'no protest' zone. A good place to glorify the Lebanese resistance, I should think. We are marching today as protests have erupted all over the world, including up to a million Iraqis protesting, and thousands of mainly Arab-Americans marching through Detroit. Even the children are protesting in Bahrain.

Incidentally, one hopes this is true. It would be good to see a few of the Israeli airplanes that are busily tearing up working class estates in Lebanon get slammed with a surface-to-air missile. According to Lebanon Updates Lebanese resistance rockets are reaching further into Israel. In and of itself, I expect this is going to be ineffectual. Indeed, Israel has said that it will simply use any hit on Tel Aviv as an excuse to destroy Lebanon even more thoroughly. It would presumably be more effective to see the IAF given as thorough a clubbing as IDF ground troops are getting.

As we're on the topic of protests, it has to be at least mentioned that Mexico is boiling over. The attempt to rig the election that I discussed previously has led to a series of massive and angry protests, including a blockade of the stock market. That's the way to do it.

The connection? It is obvious, is it not? When the International Republican Institute sends its busybodies down to Venezuela to help overthrow Chavez, or meddles with the Mexican elections, is it not for the same reason that America, the UN and other bodies have been pushing for the victory of right-wing upper class forces in Lebanon? Consider: why should it be that Hezbollah and the trade unions were the two big forces resisting the neoliberal drive in Lebanon under Hariri and his successors? Is it not the case that the drive to make Lebanon a client-state is precisely part of the same policy that seeks to keep the whole of the Middle East, as well as Latin America and South Asia, safe for Western capital? The attempt to promote right-wing 'reformers' in Iran had nothing to do with gay rights or women, and everything to do with opening up Iran's markets, getting it into the World Trade Organisation and installing a pliable political elite. Students and trade unionists fought pitch battles against the privatisation drive, often receiving terrific beatings for their troubles. That having failed, the attempt is now to fight a war with Iran by proxy and eventually by direct bombardment or even invasion. Blair himself expresses this, in his wierd hybrid of New Age and Globalisation discourses, as a battle between "open or closed" (talking, you know, as if the unwillingness of trade unionists, socialists, anticapitalists, Islamists and so on to accept the undiluted prerogatives of capital were somehow a psychological drama, a refusal to accept the inviting embrace of the Other). It is perfectly logical for Blair to send more weapons to Colombia's death squads, help Israel bomb Lebanon, privatise here, proselytise for a neoliberal EU Treaty there, help conquer Iraq, roll back the welfare state... he says it himself. It is all part of the same fight against what he fatuously calls "the forces of conservatism". If you attack any link in this chain, you attack his whole agenda. But Blair is a lame duck: he is more unpopular than ever before, his policies are despised, and people are reaching for alternatives everywhere. I therefore hope to see a lot of Respect placards and banners today: it connects these things, linking the struggle against council house privatisation with opposition to the new imperialism. It focuses on ordinary working class people, whether they are identified as trade unionists, as Muslims, as tenants, as protesters or whatever: this is the agency that can break Blair's agenda, whether in London, Paris, Beirut, Tehran or Caracas.