The antisemitism of "the new antisemitism". posted by lenin

Supposedly, when Nixon was going off on one of his terminal antisemitic rants ("the Jews, Henry, they're the ones that are doing this to me, the Jews!"), Henry Kissinger soothingly replied, "yes, Mister President, but there are Jews, and there are Jews". The seemingly obvious implication is that there are Jews who conform to the racist stereotype, and others who are uncharacteristically loyal to an Anglo-Saxon quintessence. This recalls Winston Churchill's distinction between the 'International Jew' and the 'National Jew', the former a supposedly authentic incarnation of the antisemitic figment and the latter comprising nothing but good Europeans, doing what good Europeans do - vigorously colonising a territory inhabited by a putatively backward people. A more charitable if less tenable reading would be that Kissinger was subtly challenging Nixon's racism, by suggesting that there was a difference between his hallucinatory 'Jews', and actual Jews. Brian Klug, in a discussion of "the new antisemitism", phrased the question simply: "What, pray, is a Jew?":

In his essay, ‘The freedom of self-definition’, Imre Kertész, the Hungarian-Jewish winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature, reflects on Jewish identity in light of his experience during the Nazi Holocaust as a concentration camp inmate. He writes: ‘In 1944, they put a yellow star on me, which in a symbolic sense is still there; to this day I have not been able to remove it.’ He goes on to say that the name or label ‘Jew’ is ‘an unambiguous designation only in the eyes of anti-Semites’. I understand Kertész to be saying that the yellow star was not just a form of identification but a whole identity. Pinning the star to his breast, they were pinning down the word ‘Jew’, determining what it meant. Kertész observes that ‘no one whose Jewish identity is based primarily, perhaps exclusively, on Auschwitz, can really be called a Jew’. What he means is that they cannot call themselves a Jew – they cannot define themselves as Jewish – because the word is not theirs to use: it is someone else’s brand stamped on them and they are stuck with it: ‘Jew’.

...

Antisemitism is best defined not by an attitude to Jews but by a definition of ‘Jew’. Defining the word in terms of the attitude – hostility – rather than the object – Jew – puts the cart before the horse. Indeed, hostility is not the only ‘cart’ that the horse can ‘pull’ behind it.

...

Who, then, are the ‘Jews’ that the antisemite hates – or fears or despises or envies
or admires? What is the ‘unambiguous designation’ of the yellow star that Kertész ‘to thisday’ is unable to remove? When they pinned the badge on him and he became a ‘Jew’, what did he become? He ceased to be a mere mortal and became, in a way, timeless: a cipher of the eternal Jew, an expression of ‘Jewish spirit’ and ‘Jewish consciousness’. He became powerful, wealthy, cunning; rootless and cosmopolitan, merciless and vengeful, depraved and demonic; arrogant yet obsequious, secretive yet flamboyant, legalistic yet corrupt. He became a member – and agent – of a people apart, a state within a state, a cohesive community that holds itself aloof. At the same time, this powerful, wealthy, cunning group infiltrates society, pursuing its own selfish ends. Across the globe its hidden hand controls the banks, commerce and media, manipulating governments and promoting wars among nations. Wherever there is money to be made or power to be seized, he, Kertész, the ‘Jew’, can be found, even if only in disguise. Fundamentally, the yellow star designated the Jewish peril: a parasite that preys on humanity and seeks to dominate the world. This is what Kertész became when, stripped of everything except this badge, he was made a ‘Jew’ in Auschwitz.

In short, antisemitism is the process of turning Jews into ‘Jews’. (Brian Klug, 'The collective Jew: Israel and the new antisemitism', Patterns of Prejudice, Vol 37, No 2, June 2003)

If anti-Zionists replicate such a gesture, he maintains, then they certainly are antisemitic. That is, if they pin a 'yellow star' on Israel, converting the self-styled Jewish state into the 'Jewish' state, a sort of timeless cipher of a 'Jewish spirit' or in Bernard Lewis' phrase a manifestation of "cosmic evil", they are guilty as charged by Phyllis Chesler, Bernard Lewis, David Mamet, Gabriel Schoenfeld, Walter Lacqueur, Daniel Pipes, Abraham Foxman, Melanie Phillips, et al. I think this a fair standard. Since I am one of 'they', moreover, I am anxious to protest that 'they' largely do not and are not, and that antisemitism is logically incompatible with anti-Zionism. The problem with this is that the charge from the "new antisemitism" crowd is not susceptible to such a rebuke. It does not make the distinction that Klug does, insisting instead that while criticism of Israel is not in itself antisemitic (albeit its intensity and supposed unfairness, they argue, is evidence of antisemitism), opposition to Zionism as such is antisemitic. Israel is 'the state of the Jews', the 'Jew of nations', and the attempt to deligitimise it is merely antisemitism transposed onto another plane. Moreover, Zionist logic holds that only by 'normalising' the status of Jews as a nation, integrated into a global system of nations rather than dispersed among other countries as a 'foreign' element, can antisemitism be thwarted and security provided for Jewish people. The attempt to roll back or undermine this project can only be interpreted according to such logic as an attempt to prevent normalisation and security. Finally, cultivating hostility to the 'Jew of nations' has wider ramifications since, it is argued, it has resulted in a growing climate of hostility experienced by Jews beyond Israel, from verbal abuse and sleights to physical harrassment and violence. Assertions of such a rising arc of harrassment have often been expressed in the most strident and hysterical accents. Alain Finkielcroat Finkielkraut sputtered that 2002 was a "Kristallyear". In 2003, hearing of a poll in which 60% of Europeans considered Israel a threat to world peace, Natan Sharansky averred that the EU was "brainwashing" people against Israel, and in the process preparing to sink back into "dark sections of its past". Bernard Lewis asserted in 2006 that the supposedly reigning atmosphere of hostility to Israeli was like 1938 all over again. If it is disputable whether there is in fact a growth in antisemitic attitudes, or whether any such observable increase has to do with a "new" antisemitism, it is more than disputable that there is anything like the rise of a Third Reich and Kristallnacht actually taking place.

Nonetheless, the underlying idea has been reproduced by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia whose 2003 report considered displays of support for the PLO to be antisemitic, and by the All Party Parliamentary Inquiry Into Antisemitism (published a mere month after the end of Israel's invasion of Lebanon), which held that delegitimising Israel by reference to apartheid or calling it a racist state is an act of aggression against the "Jewish people", and thus antisemitic. Denis MacShane MP has recently written a book, 'Globalising Hatred', devoted to the idea of a 'neo-antisemitism' that no longer depends on racial and religious dogma but rather centres on the vilification of Israel. Based on the nebulous EUMC 'working definition' of antisemitism [pdf], which includes "claiming that the state of Israel is a racist endeavour" as an example of antisemitism, supporters of Israel at Leeds University are pushing a motion stating that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, with the implication that any groups championing anti-Zionism should be denied access to union funding and freedom to operate. (NOTE: I have been advised that, contrary to earlier reports, the motion has not been won yet, and may still be thrown out). In fact, the EUMC definition also includes disproportionately singling out Israel for criticism, even though doing so is by no means an obvious case of antisemitism. Disproportionate attention to a specific injustice may in fact be a morally scrupulous thing to do. It would be morally ineffective to deploy one's energies and attentions in an entirely equal and proportionate way. Even where it is not a matter of such scruple, it may have reasoning behind it other than antisemitism. It may just be partisan. The effect of such indiscriminate reclassification is obviously to inflate the number of antisemitic instances recorded, and thus reinforce the claim that the world is experiencing a rise in antisemitism.

Despite the insistence on novelty, the theory of a "new antisemitism" is not at all new. The term first emerged in the context of the 1967 war, and was the title of a 1974 book published by the Anti-Defamation League, which argued that radical Left and pro-Arab opinion were the new vectors of antisemitic ideology. It was, as I pointed out previously, a habitual theme of the neoconservative right during the 1980s. An important component of the current hypothesis, explicated by Bernard Lewis in his 1986 book Semites and Antisemites, is that the locus of this "new antisemitism" is the Middle East, from which it filters into traditionally antisemitic European centres via Muslim immigration and - in the past - the influence of antisemitic Soviets. Thus, the 'two Easts' were held co-responsible for the phenomenon, while the 'West', particularly the Anglosphere, was implicitly congratulated for its historically progressive, liberal and humane values which alone were sufficient to mandate Euro-American dominance. Today, Bat Ye'or and co-thinkers hold that Arabs, Muslims and certain European politicians have formed a pact that derails Europe from its natural alliance with the US and Israel, diverting it instead down a cul de sac called 'Eurabia'. Meanwhile there is a cottage industry devoted to collecting expressions, real or contrived, of Muslim and Arab antisemitism. MEMRI is the most notorious dispenser in this industrious and invidious trade.

Part of the charge against the anti-Zionist left, then, is that in its sympathy with anti-colonial forces and Third World liberation movements it has adopted a discourse that is objectively antisemitic, (and thus also liable to reproduce to a tee the antisemitic tropes of Old Europe). A corollary of treating anti-Zionism as objectively antisemitic is that pro-Zionism is objectively not antisemitic. The century old tradition of collaboration between antisemites and Zionists is acceptable because those antisemites objectively embraced the means by which their own doctrines would be undermined and the Jewish people strengthened. So, whether it is antisemites in the upper echelons of the British civil service cutting deals with Zionist leaders, or Israel working with the Nazi-inspired Phalange and allying with Anwar Sadat who fought alongside the Nazis in WWII, or Zionists embracing the most reactionary antisemites from the US Christian Right, it is all part of the necessary dirty work entailed by the need to build and conserve the purported safeguard. One could even go further and argue that the explicit colonialist and imperialist ethos of the Zionist founding fathers, from Herzl to Ben Gurion, was itself an unfortunate necessity in a world characterised by empires and colonies and in which the project's only chance lay in acquiring a colonial sponsor. Therefore, objectively, collaboration with European empires served anti-imperial ends that would be expressed when the Zionists finally expelled the Brits. And if it follows that the greater part of Palestinian Arab society must be destroyed, a process which Martin Shaw argues fits with current definitions of genocide, then it is only to prevent another Shoah. In just the same way, contemporary anti-Arab racism in Israel and among the pro-Israel commentariat is instrumental to creating a positive atmosphere for the 'Jewish state', and thus is objectively anti-racist. Anti-racist racism, anti-genocide genocide, anti-colonial colonialism: a great deal of arrant nonsense becomes 'objectively' true if one follows this logic.

The strangest thing about the "new antisemitism" charge is that its champions almost uniformly maintain that failing to distinguish between the state of Israel and Jewish people is a certain sign of antisemitism. This is true enough, but is usually explained just before they go on to insist that you can't be opposed to Israel without opposing the Jewish people (and also that people like this and this are traitors). To plant one flat-footed, strident assertion on top of the other, each new assertion obliviously contradicting the previous, is not a unique method of exposition and argument. It is just that in the case of this argument, it can't be avoided. Either the progenitors of "the new antisemitism" come out openly and admit that they themselves are among the most energetic disseminators of antisemitism, or they drop their charge, or they proceed as if they were blithely innocent of any contradiction on their part and return to shrill denunciations.

Labels: 'antisemitism', 'the new antisemitism', antisemitism, Israel, palestine

Also appearing... posted by lenin

Me, next Monday, 5.30pm at the Institute of Historical Research in Senate House, discussing "The Liberal Defence of Murder- the 'pro-war left' and US foreign policy since 1989". T-shirts will be on sale at reception.

Also: you can hear my interview with Doug Henwood on the WBAI archives if you scroll down to 5.00pm Thursday. It will also probably appear on Doug Henwood's radio archives at some point in the near future. You can download it for your ipod, and let the gentle sound of me babbling and umming away in the background remind you of a long lost childhood.

Labels: pro-war 'left', the liberal defense of murder, US imperialism

Mega bailout posted by lenin

I missed this. They've got a lot of what it takes to get along. The first column in the chart below represents the figure proposed to bail-out banks and credit institutions in TARP. The second represents the total amount that the US government is now committed to supplying to the same institutions.

Labels: banks, capitalism, credit, federal bail-out, tarp, us ruling class

Mumbai posted by lenin

The shocking and depressing news from India would seem to defy any glib conclusions or slogans beyond the patently obvious - namely, that this grotesque hunting and killing of innocents is likely to succeed in (what appears to be) its principle aim of generating both a repressive response from the Indian state and a communal reaction. The facts so far reported do point to some general conclusions about the likely aims, and possible culprits. There has been a claim of responsibility from the 'Deccan Mujahideen', which could be related to the 'Indian Mujahideen' (IM), who in turn are alleged to be the latest incarnation of banned right-wing Islamist groups, the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), and Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT). The former originated in Uttar Pradesh in 1977, inspired by the Iranian revolution, championing a Deobandi strain of Muslim revivalism. The latter originated in Kashmir in 1990 and is, alongside the Jaish-e Mohammed, one of the larger Islamist groups operating in Pakistan. It has been associated with figures belonging to 'Al Qaeda'. This is presumably the basis for Indian intelligence claims that the violence of the IM is the result of ISI subventions across the subcontinent. Whatever the ratio of truth and falsehood in those claims, two other dimensions are probably far more important: one is the domestic aspect of communal violence, and the other is the global politics of the jihadis presumed to be involved. The choice of targets suggests that the emphasis must be on the latter. One analysis in the Telegraph explains that the symbolic significance of the attack on the Taj Mahal hotel is that it was built to give the Indian upper class somewhere decent to stay in an age of colonial racism and segregation. The hotel is now "a symbol of Western decadence", because of the rich tourists it attracts. Similarly, the train station attacked was a terminus busy with tourists. Unlike the attacks in 2006, which were designed to exact maximum casualties among Hindu civilians, this attack seems to have been designed to kill foreigners.

Let's suppose that the 'Deccan Mujahideen' is indeed a name chosen by members of the IM based in the Deccan plain of Maharashtra. According to the Indian government, the IM is a front for members of the banned SIMI and LeT groups. But these are very different organisations - if not doctrinally, then certainly in origin and manner of organising. SIMI was originally the student wing of the Jama'at-i-Islami Hind (JIH), who expelled it on the basis of its ultra-radicalism (the JIH today work alongside the Indian communist parties against the BJP and Congress Party). It was a tiny sect for years. But the accelerating trends in communal violence over the last two decades of the twentieth century saw it gain members beyond its areas of strength in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, into some areas of the south. It has been banned several times, the first time shortly after 9/11 on the basis of claims of involvement in terrorist activities. Human rights advocates among others noted that Hinduta groups promoting racist violence, with close ties to the government, were not banned. They argued that the ban was a pretext for harrassing and terrorising Muslims in general, and indeed subsequent events bore this assessment out. The police slaughtered protesters supporting SIMI's legalisation in Lucknow shortly after the first ban was imposed. The subsequent massacre of 2,000 Muslims in the state of Gujarat, with the involvement of state officials including Narendra Modi, demonstrated that the Indian state was indeed on the war path against Muslims. The recent finding by the Justice Navati commission, exculpating Modi and pinning the blame for the violence on a 'Muslim mob' who are held responsible for the burning to death of 58 Hindu passengers on a train, rather suggests that the war is not over. Actually, a number of armed Hindutva groups were reportedly able to train and operate with impunity under the BJP.

At any rate, the bans on SIMI appear to have been based on insubstantial evidence of involvement in terrorism. In August this year, for example, a Delhi High Court tribunal lifted the ban, stating that evidence from the home ministry was inadequate to maintain it, although the Supreme Court threw this ruling out. The bans would certainly have seriously impacted on the organisation's size and ability to act, given that its members must retire from the organisation after thirty while new recruitment would have been impossible under conditions of illegality. This weakened organisation was held responsible by the Indian authorities for the Mumbai bombings in 2006 as well as attacks against Hindus in Malegaon the same year, both of which were communal attacks (subsequent attacks in Malegaon this year appear to have been carried out by Hindu nationalists seeking to re-create the fabled 'Aryan' state of old, the 'Hindu Rashtra' ideology of the BJP). It is possible that the SIMI, or elements of it, have engaged in some attacks. Eight years of repression, scapegoating, and some of the worst anti-Muslim violence for years, might have radicalised layers within it. However, the Indian state has too much of an interest in demonising all Islamist groups as a means toward repressing Muslims in general for its claims to be taken at face value.

LeT supposedly has connections with SIMI, but to the extent that these are reported they seem tenuous, and LeT is a very different kind of organisation. It was funded from the start by the Pakistani state to facilitate its control over the Kashmiri struggle for independence, which emerged through years of torture and murder by the Indian state (the Indian government's widespread practise of torture has led to the formation of a people's tribunal to combat it). This is part of the Pakistani state's general strategy of promoting various groups to create a pro-Pakistan consensus across central and southern Asia. Even under the conditions of the 'war on terror', the ISI has been able to redeploy these groups, including LeT, moving their camps to avoid detection by US bombers and so on. Unlike SIMI in India, LeT has some real social weight in Pakistan - after the US bombing of Afghanistan in 1998, it mobilised 50,000 youths at a religious gathering near Lahore at which attendees vowed to avenge the attacks. It also undoubtedly has a willingness and an ability to plan and execute highly sophisticated attacks. This doesn't mean any accusations against them are reliable, or that the ISI in any sense co-ordinated it. The Indian government is already more or less explicitly blaming Pakistan, which is one reason to be wary of such claims.

Whoever the 'Deccan Mujahideen' turn out to be, Jason Burke argues that the signs point to them being a home-grown movement. This means that any attempt to comprehend what is happening has to start with the Indian social structure, and particularly the position of Muslims in Indian society. So, let's stick with the obvious. Indian Muslims, comprising 13.5% of the population of India, are poor and disenfranchised: under-represented in most official organs, among the most exploited layers of society, and vulnerable to chauvanistic attack by Hindu nationalists. Their status as an insecure minority within a Hindu-majority state is one of the deadliest issues in Indian politics. The rise of atrocious Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) throughout the 1990s reflected the growth of communal politics that was due to a number of factors. Demographically, Muslims were a faster growing group than any other, a fact that right-wing politicians sometimes ascribed to illegal migration by refugees from Bangladesh (many of these were actually Hindus). The rise of Islamist politics amid the disintegration of Congress hegemony (the Congress Party had failed to alleviate the extreme polarities of wealth or fulfil its pledges on poverty as outlined in Ghandi's Garibi Hatao programme was accompanied by the rise of other forms of politics rooted in caste or regional interests - so, for example, the Dalit party sought to build a coalition between Muslims and low caste blocs. Hindutva politicians and activists successfully exploited these changes to argue that the Muslim population was a surging menace, and that it would become a threat to the security of the Hindu population. The BJP's rapid ascent helped to accelerate the rise of communal violence. The party, which had at its core another organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, known for its fascistic tendencies, began its most illustrious phase with bouts of vicious sectarianism. One of these was the demolition of the Babar mosque in Ayodhya, in 1992. The demolition was not really an attack on a religious symbol so much as an attack on a symbol representing the integration and acceptance of Muslims. It was an attack on the very idea that Muslims were a part of Indian society, which the BJP explicitly rejected in their literature and speeches. And it duly prompted one of the worst riots in recent Indian history. Subsequently, it incited pogroms against Muslims in Bombay/Mumbai in 1993. (Just in passing, it was the far right BJP ally Shiv Sena, whose candidate threatened the extermination of the city's Muslims, which changed Bombay's name to its Marathi name, Mumbai, in 1995). The BJP are the most vicious exponents of communal politics, and it is no exaggeration to say that they came close to fascism at times, albeit the Indian ruling class wasn't ready for that level of repression and instability. It is now quite possible that they will sweep back to power, and the Gujarat massacre may be multiplied many times over.

All of this bodes extremely ominiously for the future of the world's largest democracy. Every filthy reactionary and pogromist will be strengthened, while the more violent jihadi groups will probably expand under a wave of state terror and communal violence. The only hope is in the Left organising a coalition to stop this horrible political logic in its tracks, and to my mind that entails defending Muslims from the inevitable resurgence of anti-Muslim hatred, while opposing the politics of the jihadis. The hypocritical policy of banning Islamist groups over allegations of terrorism while tolerating and even encouraging violent Hindutva groups has to be opposed. Those who try to mount pogroms have to be fought in the streets. Any escalation of the struggle with Pakistan also has to be opposed. Even if Manmohan Singh's government doesn't treat Pakistani intelligence as the ultimate culprit, there are other ways in which escalation can take place. Given that the largest concentration of India's Muslims is based in Jammu and the Indian-occupied area of Kashmir, any generalised repression by the Indian state will inevitably intensify the Kashmir conflict - and provoke further set-piece atrocities such as we have seen over the last day or so.

Labels: communism, india, islamism, mumbai, racism, terror

The class composition of fascism. posted by lenin

From Socialist Worker, a breakdown of fascists by occupation:

Labels: bnp scum, fascism, nazism

That Gaza 'Holocaust' back on again posted by lenin

So maybe, while Ehud Barak was trying to find ways to justify bombing civilian targets, Israeli cops were headbutting Palestinian women who protested against demolitions in East Jerusalem, and Kadima was finding ways to cope with the Likud surge, you thought they were giving up on the project of putting Gaza on a 'diet'. Nope:

It has been two weeks since Israel imposed a complete closure of Gaza, after months when its crossings have been open only for the most minimal of humanitarian supplies. Now it is even worse: two weeks without United Nations food trucks for the 80% of the population entirely dependent on food aid, and no medical supplies or drugs for Gaza's ailing hospitals. No fuel (paid for by the EU) for Gaza's electricity plant, and no fuel for the generators during the long blackouts. Last Monday morning, 33 trucks of food for UN distribution were finally let in – a few days of few supplies for very few, but as the UN asks, then what?

Thing is, when you consider what has been done and what continues to be done against the Palestinians, it becomes grating when a nice chap like the UNRWA chief of operations says silly things like, "They are paying a very heavy humanitarian price for the actions of extremists". This is like saying, "Those Hindoo chaps paid a heavy price for the actions of brutes in Meerut".

Labels: blockade, gaza, genocide, Israel, palestinians, racism

I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll reflate the economy. posted by lenin

The Chancellor of the Exchequer has a big red lunchbox, and he knows what to do with it. So, is everyone excited by Darling's red hot budget injection? Best news since 1997, according to Polly Toynbee, who is delighted to see the Tories pushed into defending the richest 2% of income earners. Right direction, but inadequate, says Bill Emmott of the Economist - and while we're at it, he suggests raising the upper income tax level to 60% at least. That's Bill Emmott, defender of the "free market", "globalisation" and practically every chimera that is now falling around our ears. Martin Wolf of the FT thinks it's a gamble, but by and large one worth taking. These two views probably reflect the mainstream of business opinion. On the other hand, the budget was howwibly howwibly iwwesponsible according to the Tory wet Michael Brown, apparently reflecting the mainstream of Conservative Party thinking, also expressed by BoJo the Clown. All of this economic stimulation is apparently driving the 40k+ commentariat wild with exaggeration. Politicos' heads are swimming with rumours of a return to the Seventies, and the death of New Labour. Even an anonymous cabinet minister is supposedly high on this dope, claiming that: "Centrist consensus is dead, the old battle lines are back."

The measures announced yesterday won't make a great deal of difference to the crisis. To be clear, the pre-budget report at least had the virtue of not simply offering a moderate version of the Tory policy, which is to cut public spending in order to find tax cuts for businesses and higher income earners. It crossed a symbolic barrier by raising taxes on the top 2% of income earners, although that will only bring in £2bn per annum. When the Chancellor announced this, he used a turn of phrase that the poor man had obviously purloined from a Lenin's Tomb post some weeks back, so I want it remembered that I am personally responsible for the 'death of New Labour'. Me and the credit crunch. Darling also threw a few quid the way of people on 'lower incomes', which is welcome. The VAT cut at least means that you might pay a little bit less for a burger on the way to work, if you've still got a job. The overall effect, as this graphic suggests, is to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. The government has signalled a slight shift to the left, which is better than the habitual lurch to the right. Yet, despite the overheated imaginations of centre-left plaudits and Tory carpers, this was a moderate and inadequate response to a massive economic crisis. Given the expected slump in consumer spending, shops are offering price cuts of anything between 20% and 70% (one marvels at the inbuilt profit margin that they must have to be able to afford such cuts). A 2.5% cut in VAT will hardly make a dent in the current circumstances. Welcome as the tax changes are, it looks as if the government is depending on a revival in bank lending to enable people to really spend, but that is neither happening nor will people necessarily want to borrow more in this climate. The Bank of England is calling for another capital injection for banks to stimulate such lending - so we should throw billions at the banks in the vain hope that they will use it to help working class consumers rather than increase bonuses to the directors and management. In truth, the pre-budget report will surely be supplemented by future temporary cash boosts, resulting in further conservative cat-calls about government waste and high taxes.

But the Tories are, happily enough, in a mess over this crisis, and George Osborne's current incarnation as The Grinch Who Stole Christmas isn't going to alleviate the mess. It has eroded the poll lead that Brown and Darling handed them last year on a big silver platter, and it has widened Labour's lead on 'economic competence'. And the Tories have incurred the wrath of most of the large and small business organisations over their economic recovery plan, so even their core constituency doesn't trust them. For their part, retailers seem to think the VAT cut is a move in the right direction, but that the government should go further. So the Tories can't even carry the High Street. I daresay it won't be long before they are back below 40% in the polls.

Another matter of some urgency is that if Labour wins the next election, Brown is planning a massive contraction of public spending in 2011, when the polyannas of Her Majesty's Treasury supposedly conclude that recovery will begin. That means the public sector pay cuts we have already seen would be dwarved, as would the massive job cuts in the civil service. One alternative fund-raising scheme would be to cancel all PFI projects with immediate effect and to apply a windfall levy to the hucksters who have made off with billions of pounds of public money while providing a miserably poor service. Also, oil prices are falling at the moment, but the energy giants could still pay a lot more tax than they do, and a windfall tax would pay for a sizeable stimulus here and now. Or the government could always break another taboo by increasing corporation tax and shutting down the tax havens. It could also reverse the recent cuts to inheritance tax. The severity of the crisis may still force some such measures, but inevitably it will be too little, much too late.

Labels: budget, economy, neoliberalism, new labour, socialism, taxation, tories

I Want To Make You Happy, Darling posted by lenin

Labels: alistair darling, david cameron, economy, gordon brown, hazel blears, jack straw, jobs, neoliberalism, new labour, public sector pay, redistribution, tories

The Iraq Protocols posted by lenin

Labels: iraq, iraqi resistance, kurdish leadership, maliki, occupation, sadrists, siic, US imperialism

Alternative People's Meeting posted by lenin

It's one thing to have seen this crisis coming, and to have understood roughly why it was happening. Now that it's upon us, with the full horror emerging day by day, with headline after headline announcing massive job cuts, stagnant or falling wages, the threat of deflation, closures - its overwhelming and exhausting and terrifying just keeping up. Every day, it seems, somewhere else has officially slid into recession, and unemployment numbers rise. And there's always some jerk calling for huge public spending cuts - the Tory press is filled with this nonsense which, aside from being hateful and destructive for those depending on public service provision, is an unbelievably stupid idea when we actually need an economic stimulus, not to deflate the economy further. I don't even think British capital is up for massive spending cuts at this point. So, it becomes essential that we do something, build a movement to press our needs and demands, register dissent and create new alliances. This is the sort of thing we need to get us off the ground:



One important feature of meetings like this, which will be happening up and down the country, is that an argument is taking hold among union leaders - and it is sure to be filtering down to substantial layers of the rank and file - that we can't resist job cuts and pay freezes and closures precisely because the economy is in such a parlous state. This is nonsense, yet it has arguably contributed to a number of recent betrayals by union leaders who have reneged on strike pledges. Obviously, there is a great deal of pressure on the bureaucracy from the Labour leadership, with the usual combination of small carrots and big sticks. So we need to get together to hammer out our ideas, think through what we want to achieve, disseminate those ideas and give people the confidence to resist. That confidence is what will make the difference between lean years, and years of successful struggles. Anyway, if you're in London, you might want to come along.

Labels: economy, people before profit, socialism, trade unions

Before and After posted by lenin

One of the most amusing moments from the last presidential debate before the election was when Obama and McCain discussed Colombia. It was interesting at least to see that Obama would criticise the Colombian regime for not prosecuting the murderers of labour leaders. McCain's eyebrows went fucking wild with outrage and insane bewilderment. He couldn't believe that Obama would disrespect the Family. So maybe after watching that, you were thinking, "this Obama guy might not be too bad for Latin America". Maybe. But look at his latest presumptive appointment, Eric Holder for Attorney General. Now, the Chicago Tribune article tells you many things. It tells you that Holder would be the first African American to head the Justice Department, that he worked under Clinton, that he is really a jolly top rate lawyer with lots of experience doing complex cases. What are they missing out, I wonder? Well, his support for terrorism. Namely, his work on behalf of Chicquita executives who paid "protection money" to Colombian death squads, who duly "protected" the interests of said executives. To think, there's a District Attorney out their who's ready to indict Cheney and Gonzales - and Obama appoints the number one advocate for death squad capitalism in the US.

Labels: barack obama, colombia, death squads, democrats

Obama's two constituencies posted by lenin

At its simplest, Obama's electoral coalition can be expressed as comprising Wall Street dough on the one hand, and most oppressed social groups on the other, including African Americans, Latinos, women, and the poorer working class white voters (those earning less than $50,000 a year). As Socialist Worker put it last week:

Obama won huge support from the African-American population – some 95 percent of black voters backed him.

He also won two thirds of the Latino vote. This was a significant win – the Latino population favoured George Bush in 2004, and during the primaries they rallied behind Hillary Clinton.

One factor was crucial in breaking support for the Republicans among Latinos – the immigrant rights demonstrations of May 2006.

More than two million Latinos and their supporters came onto the streets to protest against a vicious anti-immigrant bill being pushed by the Republicans.

Among white Americans some 43 percent voted for Obama and 55 for John McCain. But these proportions were reversed for white voters under the age of 30.

And the Democrats registered some of their strongest swings in overwhelmingly white, rural and traditional Republican states such as North Dakota, Utah and Montana.

So there is no doubt that Obama’s appeal spanned racial divisions. But the class composition of his vote tells a more complex story.

If you divide Americans up by their income levels, the poorest households were the ones who voted the most heavily for Obama – 73 percent of voters with an annual family income of less than $15,000 backed him.

As you go up the income level, Obama’s vote steadily drops – until you reach the very top bracket, where this trend reverses.

A majority – 52 percent – of households that earned over $200,000 a year opted for the Democratic candidate.

The victorious Republican electoral coalition in 2004 mobilised quite different groups, with a hardcore of white Christian rightists among them. Bush lost every income layer below $50,000 and won every layer above $50,000. Bush won more Hispanic votes than McCain, but still didn't gain a majority. He lost overwhelmingly among African American voters. What Obama did was to win over white women, who voted 55% for Bush in 2004; he gained a larger majority among voters earning under $50,000 than Kerry had; he increased the Democratic support among both African American and Hispanic voters; and he cut away at Bush's 63% support among those earning $200,000 or more. It is also worth noting that Obama benefited from the demoralisation of a substantial sector of the Republican base. While Obama won a higher share of white voters than Kerry did in 2004, 1 million fewer turned out to vote. The increase in turnout was entirely made up of ethnic minorities.

Obama's appointments, the only major policy signals he can make at the moment, thus far reflect his commitment to the Wall Street constituency rather than to those worst off in American society. Thus, we have endless Clinton-era appointments, Senator Clinton offered the position of Secretary of State (which reports say she has accepted), Republicans offered top posts (it looks as if Robert Gates has been begged to stay on as Secretary of Defense) and a right-wing scumbag from the Chicago boss politics scene and the Democratic Leadership Council named Rahm Emmanuel made chief-of-staff. Thus far, organised labour hasn't got a look-in as far as appointments are concerned, but representatives of corporate America saturate the economic advisory board. Selecting Clinton as Secretary of State indicates that Obama intends to run a hawkish foreign policy, and it also demonstrates that he genuinely wasn't all that upset about the Clinton team's endless race-baiting and crazed smears in the primary. The vast majority of Obama's voters will already have cause for grave disappointment.

To the extent that Obama has to offer something to his majority supporters, he tends toward vagueness, and is already under immense pressure to back off from anything specific. Corporate America is getting terribly worked up about the Employee Free Choice Act, a moderate piece of legislation that they are working to ensure will either be bottled up and killed or watered down to near vacuity. Obama's efforts to 'tweak' the borderline criminal TARP plan includes redirecting some funds to help homeowners, while also protecting US auto manufacturers (to the chagrin of Gordon Brown). But so far the only concrete proposal is $25bn for the car companies. It is simply impossible to imagine that any 'bail-out' for working class households that gets passed will be remotely adequate. It will be better than nothing but, at best, like the modestly redistributive measures Obama has proposed, it will sweeten a lousy deal.

The vital question is, what are the majority of Obama's supporters going to do? For example, if those immigrant workers who marched in such vast numbers in 2006 recognise that they have not so much a friend in the White House as a brief window of opportunity opened up by a slightly more humane policy, they may well be the cutting edge of popular movements of the future. Immigrant groups are already protesting the escalation of ICE raids under Bush, and are pressuring Obama to scale them back. Any reforms they can win will enhance their ability to organise, and all indications are that they are the most militant and effective organisers when given the chance. They will drive up wages and conditions for other workers too. Similarly, if the antiwar movement has learned from its huge setback in 2004, when it subordinated its campaigns to help the pro-war Kerry to victory, then it can limit Obama's scope for widening America's brutal engagements in south Asia and Africa, and for any subversion in Latin America. Obama is already hinting through subordinates that he may be 'flexible' on withdrawal from Iraq, which means he may back off his already vague electoral promises. Given that the Sadrists are about to toss out the gradualist 'withdrawal' plan with its 'status of forces agreement', it would be an ideal point for the antiwar movement to apply pressure for rapid withdrawal with no further delays. The momentum that went into securing Obama's victory shouldn't be dropped for a second. Larry Summers, another Clinton-era revamp in the Obama administration (and former Reaganaut), is warning Wall Street backers that the administration won't be able to diminish the government's involvement in healthcare, and therefore any cost reductions will have to come from efficiency savings. The intriguing thing about this is that the emphasis for the corporate audience is miles away from the promise of increased government involvement to support universal healthcare that Obama has been touting. So, again, this is an issue on which organised labour in particular will have to be actively campaigning about right away. This is becoming a critical issue as state and city budgets plummet due to the economic crisis - so, if Obama can support a bail-out for investment banks, he ought to be able to bail out city treasuries to support existing public services, at a minimum. As it stands, threats of cuts to education and health budgets are already current.

The one advantage that the Left has now is that Obama needs his active constituents. He could not have won 'blue-collar' Pennsylvania as well as Jesse Helms' old state of North Carolina without them, and he can't necessarily repeat his success in 2012 without giving them something. So, there is an opportunity now to decisively shape the agenda of the new administration, precisely because their aim is to contain social movements and stabilise American capitalism. Silence and passivity at this point will simply be rewarded with condescending lectures, put-downs, attacks, and the occasional bit of flattery.

Labels: 'obamamania', american working class, barack obama, democrats, health care, immigration, left, unions

Death of the liberal world order posted by lenin

A set of parallel intuitions developed with the collapse of the USSR and quickly became hegemonic. Even if one didn't accept the more comical variants of the 'end of history' parable, public discussion was governed by three fundamental suppositions: 1) globalisation meant the end of national state economies with extensive regulation and inbuilt welfare safety nets; 2) the end of the USSR meant that state sovereignty was no longer as central to the world system, and new forms of cosmopolitan law were emerging which might override national sovereignty given a failure to respect certain basic norms. Pinochet might be arrested in London, Kissinger might end up on trial in the Netherlands, Milosevic might end his years in jail. UN forces and regional security alliances might mediate in domestic crises, not necessarily with the approval of the state, and always to reinforce a minimal liberalism in the treatment of people. The overthrow of authoritarian regimes in 1989 was seen to propel other, similar revolts in South Africa, Indonesia, South Korea, and eventually Serbia and perhaps the 'colour-coded' revolts of the early 2000s - however different these examples were, they were all seen as part of a democratising process immanent to the new world order; 3) subjacent to both processes was an unprecedented global unipolarity in which America, whose awesome dominion had invaded the previously hostile territory of the Warsaw Pact states, accumulated epithets including Hubert Vedrine's choice phrase: 'hyperpower'. Its resources, its domestic liberalism and rights culture, its pro-capitalism and its freedom to act outside the constraints of a dirty Cold War would - given a globally oriented executive - propel it to take liberal internationalism through its final negation, toward a cosmopolital liberal world order.

Unipolarity has a certain charm as a theory. The US is the world's largest economy, and military power. The second and third largest national economies in the world remain Japan and Germany (the EU is larger than the US, but is hardly a 'national economy'), both of whom developed under US tutelage and both of whom retain American garrisons. The fifth largest economy, the UK, remains committed to a strategic alliance with the US, and subordinates its foreign policy goals to those of Washington. Several regionally important countries around the world are tied to America by defense and economic interests - for example, South Korea on the Pacific side, Poland on the Atlantic side. The apparatus of economic and financial dominance belongs effectively to the United States. These include not just the IMF and WTO, but also organisations like the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which is mainly funded by the US and which oversees neoliberal restructuring in 'transitional' countries. The NATO alliance binds 25 European and Asian countries to the US, and comprises 70% of global military spending. Neither of the main emerging competitors, India and China, have the military clout or the economic leverage to match the US. India, the fourth largest economy by purchasing power parity, having embraced Washington-driven neoliberalism in the 1990s, is now party to a nuclear alliance with the US (voted for by both 2008 presidential candidates, incidentally). This deal is supposedly restricted to civilian nuclear fuel, but it is no secret that the Indian state was running out of uranium ore, was anxious to build up its nuclear threat in opposition to Pakistan as quickly as possible, and will use the opportunity to reclassify military sites as civilian ones to refuel, and use its domestic uranium resources for the remaining military sites. This is unmistakeably a military agreement in civilian drag. India's days of non-alignment were, realistically, over long ago, but this arguably sealed the deal: it is now effectively a US sattelite.

One could rattle off factoids and examples in a similar vein for some time, but it would only be more misleading. We can overstate the unity of the Euro-American alliance, only if we forget about South Ossetia. The capacity of American military power to defeat resistance met clear limits in Iraq, despite the obviously disarticulated, fractious nature of the opposition. Latin America, including Brazil - the ninth largest economy by purchasing power parity, and one of the largest emerging markets - is slipping out of the US grasp, partially through popular movements and partially by cutting deals with Russia, China and Iran. The US even embarrassingly lost a key 'lily pad' in Uzbekistan, after it bent over backward to defend its local torturing dictatorship. The trends militating against sustainable American dominance were already becoming visible in the latter half of the 1990s, but it is precisely at this point that a deranged triumphalism was most likely to be vocalised alongside clamorous demands for intervention here and there.

The particularism embedded in universal claims is a distinctive American tradition: an evangelising, universalising Americanism is equally suffused with an American parochialism, a nationalism that embodies a local ruling class interest. In his appearance before the G20 recently, Bush made a last-ditch appeal to respect the terms of free market ideology, placing particular emphasis on free trade. Such an appeal from such a highly protectionist American president would seem rather odd if it wasn't reasonably well understood that the jargon refers particularly to various 'free trade' agreements that are advantageous to the US. It obviously does not refer to an institutionalised framework of free trade in which America and the EU abandon agricultural subsidies in exchange for the concessions extracted from developing countries. Moreover, the president who oversaw a drastic expansion of the state's role in the economy, responsible for the largest nationalisations in history, might have seemed an odd person to be making reassuring noises about the fundamental aptitude of 'free markets', were it not obviously a conventional code for policies that run down the social-democratic content of the state. The evidence is that far from governing a gradual process tending toward the subsumption of national polities into a heavily institutionalised global order, the US continues to pursue the usual hub-and-spoke mechanisms of control, ad hoc bilateral agreements, status of forces agreements, security arrangements etc. Now, this obviously has implications for the seductive vision of a cosmopolitan liberal world order. American interests are often not only at odds with those of its subordinate allies, but so much so that they will actually buck the trend and throw out American-led agreements. Emboldened by anticapitalist movements, this is exactly what many states did at Cancun. Tensions with the EU over tarrifs, subsidies and WTO rulings may seem like small beer, but when substantial strategic differences, compounded by popular movements, lead to major European states (half-heartedly) obstructing an American-led war, it obviously has wider significance. Further, a great deal of US foreign policy can be explained by attempts to outmanoeuvre advanced capitalist rivals - think of the rapid efforts to supplant Germany and France in Yugoslavia, with additional benefits in encircling Russia. The resumption of the nuclear arms race with Russia in the 2000s, the pursuit of the defense shield, the expansion of NATO, and the placement of American bases across Central Asia ultimately led to a conflagration in South Ossetia in which Georgia took its American-trained troops and its American-supplied weaponry and carried out an indiscriminate attack on Tskhinvali which killed Russian peacekeepers. Russia responded with a brutal invasion of Georgia, would-be future NATO member. The US responded with some tough talk and threats, but also watched helplessly as European allies noisily broke ranks. It has been noted, and merits repetition, that if Georgia had been a NATO member at the time of the conflict, then other members of the alliance would have been obliged by its terms to 'defend' Georgia. No road to global peace, this.

So, what if the liberal teleology was wrong? What if the US was not the bearer of the Spirit of History, and what if its various auxiliaries were not governed by an obscure cunning of reason - in which, for example, the ICTY would eventually morph into a judicious and impartial world court? Suppose the US ruling class meant that shit when it told the ICC to go fuck itself and continued to support death squads, dictatorships and anti-democratic movements? Imagine that the presumed symbiosis between 'Western power' and global institutions of political, legal and economic governance did not materialise? What if the liberals' solipsistic conviction that political opposition to neoliberal hegemony was either temporary irrationality or non-existent proved a false consolation? What if the 'Pacific Union' of states bringing Japan, Europe and America together really was just a version of American hegemony, not an 'international community', and certainly not a germinal 'global state'? What if America's habitual disregard for the rules of the institutions that it promulgates, including the WTO and the IMF, proved to be less than accidental? What if the world didn't flatten, the global economy continued to be crisis-prone, and relations between the advanced capitalist states were not so pacific as to rule out inter-imperial rivalry of the pre-1945 variety? And, finally, what if the most likely future vista is one of increasingly autarkic states, more authoritarian government, an escalated arms race, riskier confrontations on the global frontiers, sustained economic turmoil and renewed political polarisation?

Labels: capitalism, cruise missile liberals, Georgia, international relations, liberals, neoliberalism, russia, US imperialism

CIA Aesthetics posted by lenin

It isn't all Jackson Pollock and Encounter, you know:

Not until 1996 did the CIA announce, with little fanfare, that it had established an Entertainment Liaison Office, which would collaborate in a strictly advisory capacity with film-makers. Heading up the office was Chase Brandon, who had served for 25 years in the agency's elite clandestine services division, as an undercover operations officer. A PR man he isn't, though he does have Hollywood connections: he's a cousin of Tommy Lee Jones.

But the past 12 years of semi-acknowledged collaboration were preceded by decades in which the CIA maintained a deep-rooted but invisible influence of Hollywood. How could it be otherwise? As the former CIA man Bob Baer - whose books on his time with the agency were the basis for Syriana - told us: "All these people that run studios - they go to Washington, they hang around with senators, they hang around with CIA directors, and everybody's on board."

There is documentary evidence for his claims. Luigi Luraschi was the head of foreign and domestic censorship for Paramount in the early 1950s. And, it was recently discovered, he was also working for the CIA, sending in reports about how film censorship was being employed to boost the image of the US in movies that would be seen abroad. Luraschi's reports also revealed that he had persuaded several film-makers to plant "negroes" who were "well-dressed" in their movies, to counter Soviet propaganda about poor race relations in the States. The Soviet version was rather nearer the truth.

Luraschi's activities were merely the tip of the iceberg. Graham Greene, for example, disowned the 1958 adapatation of his Vietnam-set novel The Quiet American, describing it as a "propaganda film for America". In the title role, Audie Murphy played not Greene's dangerously ambiguous figure - whose belief in the justice of American foreign policy allows him to ignore the appalling consequences of his actions - but a simple hero. The cynical British journalist, played by Michael Redgrave, is instead the man whose moral compass has gone awry. Greene's American had been based in part on the legendary CIA operative in Vietnam, Colonel Edward Lansdale. How apt, then, that it should have been Lansdale who persuaded director Joseph Mankewiecz to change the script to suit his own ends.

The CIA didn't just offer guidance to film-makers, however. It even offered money. In 1950, the agency bought the rights to George Orwell's Animal Farm, and then funded the 1954 British animated version of the film. Its involvement had long been rumoured, but only in the past decade have those rumours been substantiated, and the tale of the CIA's role told in Daniel Leab's book Orwell Subverted.

The most common way for the CIA to exert influence in Hollywood nowadays is not through anything as direct as funding, or rewriting scripts, but offering to help with matters of verisimilitude. That is done by having serving or former CIA agents acting as advisers on the film, though some might wonder whether there is ever really such a thing a "former agent". As ex-CIA agent Lindsay Moran, the author of Blowing My Cover, has noted, the CIA often calls on former officers to perform tasks for their old employer.

Labels: cia, hollywood, movies, propaganda

Hint posted by lenin

"I was convinced we'd have a revolution in [the] US and I decided to be its leader and prevent it. I'm a rich man too and have run with your kind of people. I decided half a loaf was better than none - a half loaf for me and a half loaf for you and no revolution." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Moral of the story: if you really want Obama to be like FDR, threaten him with revolution.

Labels: american working class, barack obama, democrats, fdr, revolution, socialism

Obama and the nuclear option posted by lenin

One of the ways in which popular movements achieve their goals is by exploiting divisions in the ruling class. One such may just rebound slightly to our advantage if elements of the US foreign policy elite move to return to pre-Bush disarmament procedures. Kate Hudson of CND points out in today's Morning Star that Obama's position on nuclear weapons is aligned to that of old right-wing 'realists' like Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, who favour a gradual disarmament process focused on bilateral agreements between the US and Russia. It's a grim moment when those two old blood-soaked war criminals represent the 'moderate' option on nuclear weapons, particularly since Kissinger was co-responsible for beefing up America's atomic diplomacy in the early 1970s in order to try to reverse America's declining leverage and help force North Vietnam and the NLF to accept Washington's peace terms. Yet, we have to reckon that this is indeed the situation, and those two figures have been joined in advocating such a process by William Perry and Sam Nunn, both utterly respectable specimens of the American foreign policy intelligentsia.

This is likely to be prompted by the perceived failure of the aggressive nuclear posture of the last eight years. The Bush gang systematically set about tearing up the existing structure of nuclear diplomacy from their first moments in government in 2001. Well before 9/11, one of their biggest foreign policy drives to abrogate the ABM treaty. They pressed for the development of new missile defense systems linked to 'first strike' doctrines, with China as the main target. All of this was very much a part of the PNAC doctrine of unleashing America's military might to re-order planetary arrangements and secure future US dominance. The Bush team fantasized about being co-equivalents to Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hay, and Alfred Thayer Mahan. Their strategy involved fast-forwarding a new array of missile defense shields that, once put in place, would be irreversible; engineering a 'revolution in military affairs' in order to enable America to convincingly and rapidly defeat enemies; and diversify existing bases and installations, the better to encircle rivals effectively. The Nuclear Posture Review in December 2001 placed particular emphasis on the development of a new nuclear deterrent which in turn had to result in the abrogation of the ABM Treaty, as well as the continued undermining of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

The published version of Rumsfeld's 'Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations' [pdf] highlighted the 'deterrence' value of a nuclear weapons system developed to capacities not seen since the Cold War. Specifically, it would "influence potential adversaries to withhold actions intended to harm US’ national interests". But it would also enable the US to "decisively" defeat adversaries "if deterrence fails". This document is quite explicit in stating that the US anticipates the physical destruction of civilian life, and only intends to ensure that such destruction is not "disproportionate" to "the concrete and direct military advantage expected to be gained." This is not necessarily new. The US has repeatedly threatened the use of nuclear strikes against enemies, as Joseph Gerson's Empire And The Bomb shows in some detail. And, lest the novelty of the Bush doctrine be over-stated, it is worth pointing out that it was really an extreme variation on traditional strategy, and that the Clinton administration had worked hard to develop more advanced nuclear weaponry and elaborated its own doctrine, The Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence, which expressed a commitment to terrorising potential opponents with the prospect of massive nuclear retaliation should they act in such a way as to seriously harm US interests.

Clearly, the Bush administration's entire strategy for securing future domination failed, and that failure was made abundantly apparent during Russia's assertiveness over South Ossetia. But is it realistic to expect the US to scale back its nuclear ambitions given the stupendous advantages that such weapons systems offer? Is it not more likely that realpolitikers favour the more effective management of the nuclear system, in order to prevent geopolitical rivals gaining possession of the requisite technologies? And is the US foreign policy establishment really about to turn against the 'missile defense shield'? Obama has cautiously supported the idea of such a shielf if the technology can be developed, but has been ambiguous to the point of obscurity about whether that means he supports the one being developed under the rubric of Bush's National Security Presidential Directive 23. When the Polish President Lech Kaczynski claimed on his website that Obama had assured him of his commitment to the shield, Obama's advisor was sent out immediately to repudiate the claim. It looks as if the Obama-Biden team is temporising by adhering to the 'when-the-technology-is-ready' argument for, despite confident claims about the workability of the technology, the Bush administration had to press ahead with it against a background of constant technological failure. The trouble is that if Obama seriously intends to engage in sustained bilateral agreements with Russia, then he can't also engage in a policy that the Russian ruling class won't stand for (because they know it is aimed at them). Medvedev has already sent some hard signals on this issue, threatening retaliatory measures and offering to withdraw them if the US backs off. Obama has indicated that he will not pursue any policy or diplomacy that weakens America's image. He is determined to be even more aggressive than the Bush administration has been in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He publicly supports Ukraine and Georgia's claim for admission to NATO. So, while the Obama executive may wish to forge a slightly more productive relationship with Russia, the belligerent programme that it is committed to substantially undermines this.

Labels: barack obama, democrats, nuclear megadeath, US imperialism

Humanitarianism went to war posted by lenin

Conor Foley's new book, The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, comes highly recommended. The author has been obliged to debate the oleaginous Oliver Kamm in the course of promoting his book, so I am doing my part to reduce the necessity of such an indignity. Foley does a number of things fairly effectively: first, he debunks 'humanitarian intervention' as an ideology from its origins in the Biafran War (there is some useful detail covering Bernard Kouchner's early ascent here, though he is much more generous to Kouchner than I would be); secondly, he demonstrates conclusively that key examples of such 'intervention' were far from humanitarian in effect (he leaves the question of intent or strategy largely unexamined), for example the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999; thirdly, he shows how the regnant discourse of a 'Responsibility To Protect' that emerged principally during the Balkans Wars provided much of the legal and moral cover for the invasion of Iraq - indeed, a consistent theme is just how much of the present barbarity was prepared in the decade of vicarious militarism that was the 1990s.

One of the strongest chapters in the book is the discussion of the Kosovo war. Foley takes the time to examine the context in which the KLA emerged, outlines some of their provocative conduct, shows with the help of some personal experience how they were active in ethnically cleansing Serb and Roma in the immediate aftermath of the war, and how their successors have been engaged in murdering members of both groups for years afterward. He nicely dissects Clare Short's post-hoc rationalising scheme for the war, and shows - with the assistance of the Campbell diaries - that even Blair, the most belligerent of the warmongers, was himself doubtful about what the bombing was supposed to achieve. Those doubts were obviously suppressed by the time Blair made his Chicago speech, adumbrating a new doctrine of interventionism, which explicitly bracketed Milosevic and Saddam Hussein as the main threats to global peace. Rigorously citing figures and context, he debunks the claim that the war prevented a genocide, showing that what was actually exacerbated by the intervention was an insurgency by an extremely dubious gang of 'Greater Albanian' nationalists, and a counterinsurgency by the Serbian military. The chapter closes with a quote from Tony Blair in 2001, bragging about the success of an intervention that had made a humanitarian crisis into a catastrophe, savouring the prospect of "one of the great dictators of the last century" ending up on trial, and citing it as a precedent for future action.

The overarching story of Foley's is a part-biographical one in which he observes up close how humanitarian organisations, traditionally committed to the politically neutral delivery of aid, end up as often unwitting auxiliaries to war-making states. One of the recurring themes is the way in which human rights and humanitarianism merged, particularly as left-wing politics subsided, into what he calls 'political humanitarianism'. He notes, for example, that Amnesty International today has over a million members, far higher than the Labour Party. Its advocacy on any particular issue can galvanise substantial constituencies and, even where it does not call for military action, it can provide the moral and intellectual case for such action with an authority that governments compromised by their own bloody actions cannot. Rony Brauman, the former head of Médecins Sans Frontières, makes the argument in my book (you know the one I mean) that this merger of the two trends is a dangerous one. The reason is that when supposedly neutral humanitarian agencies delivering relief end up calling for the enforcement of human rights standards, and then in turn become dependent on those making war, they become co-belligerents. The trust that they require from all sides in order to be able to deliver aid is ruined if they are seen as accessory to one party in a conflict. Further, in order to elicit support, they can all too often end up disseminating misleading or exaggerated information about a given conflict, which can feed into the propaganda for war or produce calls for solutions that are at best counterproductive. In this connection, Foley has been particularly scathing about the calls for military intervention into Darfur from advocacy groups like Save Darfur.

The trouble that 'political humanitarians' faced was that their criticisms of various governments were always blunted to the extent that they refused to take a clear position themselves on what might be done in a given circumstance. So, MSF can demand action on Kosovo, but without saying what that might entail, they exposed their urgent appeals to ridicule. And so, in a way that Alex de Waal and others have related previously, 'political humanitarians' - quietly at first, but with increasing openness - began to mandate military action as a necessary supplement to their own campaigns. The obvious question that occurs to an outsider is this: why should humanitarians, even those with a commitment to basic human rights standards, have the answers to the world's problems? How do they come to be the arbiters of just political action? Foley provides a very good sense from the inside of how it felt to be trying to bring about humanitarian outcomes, and how compelling the appeal to military force is when relief workers are trying to deliver people from terrifying physical danger and feel compromised by the bureaucratic structures, legalism and neutralism under which they are obliged to work. But he also shows how arguments for war on humanitarian bases came to be alibis for obvious, outright aggression - as when the Blairite inner circle appealled to international humanitarian norms to justify the invasion of Iraq. Behind all the moral and political arguments foregrounded by this discussion, of course, are immense historical, political and geographical facts which intersect in the fate of the 20th Century Left. (More on which can be found in my own book - you know the one I mean).

Foley is by no means a radical anti-imperialist. He is himself a humanitarian worker with extensive background experience in various 'theatres' from northern Iraq to Afghanistan. Nor is he necessarily opposed to all such ventures - he is just far more sceptical about the arguments supporting them than most of his liberal cohorts have been. And if a solution emerges from this book clearly, it is that the UN must be strengthened and reformed, and that multilateral policies should be engaged instead of unilateral ones. Foley doesn't take seriously the criticism that this refulgent Victorian humanitarianism is implicated in a renascent imperialism - in fact, it has to be said that his handling of these arguments is embarrassingly slight. While Foley is expertly equipped to deal with legalistic arguments about war, there is a basic failure to engage with theory on other levels: those of geopolitics and geoeconomics. To that extent, he seems to grapple with the arguments at their weakest - for example, he dismisses the idea that the invasion of Afghanistan was for the purpose of securing an oil pipeline dominated by Western energy concerns, as if this exhausted the anti-imperialist critique of that invasion. In general, it seems that unless there is some direct economic kickback, then there is no strategic interest involved - although we have just been through a dangerous Georgian spectacle in which the strategic ramifications of US action in Yugoslavia and southern Asia came increasingly to the fore. Similarly, he offers some shockingly blase justifications for the most controversial components of the failed Rambouillet Accords. Of the notorious clause admitting NATO personnel uninhibited access throughout the whole FRY, he dismissively refers to this as a normal part of UN peacekeeping: if this was so, why was it insisted on in the early negotiations phase and dropped in the final Ahtisaari-Chyrnomirdin-negotiated agreement that concluded the war? If it was so essential, why drop it? If inessential, why allow the negotiations to fail partially on account of it? Of the 'free market' clause, he says that Kosovo was going through a process of privatization and some stipulation had to be made about future property arrangements. One would not know that privatization in the former Yugoslavia was a deeply controversial matter, and that the process was itself implicated in the break-up of the country. A reading of Susan Woodward's Balkan Tragedy would have helped here. (More on this in my own book - you know the one I mean). I could go on in this vein, but it would seem to be beside the point, as well unduly diluting the force of my earlier recommendation. Foley is trying to get to grips with how humanitarianism has in different ways been usurped, side-tracked, co-opted and diverted into the blind alley of Western militarism. To that extent, you are unlikely to get a more honest appraisal of how utterly mendacious our governments have been in casting their recent interventions as humanitarian.

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', how humanitarianism went to war, human rights, imperial ideology, the liberal defense of murder, the thin blue line

Gramsci and the crisis posted by Roobin

"In this first crisis of the global age the old free market fundamentalism, no matter how it is dressed up, has been found wanting”. The £500 billion bailout is not “to help the bankers, but to help people like you who put away your savings in a bank, or need a loan to buy a house or start a business…"

This is what Gordon Brown said in Sunday’s Observer. It is a fantastically rich and revealing statement. I will restrict myself to regarding how much pressure Gordon Brown is under at the moment. He has to simultaneously rescue British capitalism and the Labour Party. Going into a recession he has to find a way to make working people pay without generating a passive (election defeat) or active (strike wave) reaction from the population.

If you take what he has done and what he proposes to do in the near future at face value, he intends to make workers pay, while rescuing savers and homeowners: there is, of course, a great deal of crossover between the categories.

We have moved from inflation and credit crunch to a full on banking crisis, which, as even Gordon Brown acknowledges, has completely destroyed the governing neo-liberal orthodoxy. The ruling class has to reorganise its system of government across all fronts, economically, politically and ideologically. If it doesn’t it faces the rise of a new politics that puts the entire system into doubt.

The concept of passive revolution, developed by Antonio Gramsci, can be a useful way into thinking about the coming period. Gramsci’s intellect flowered at a time when capitalism and anti-capitalism fought each other to a high stalemate across the globe. Gramsci noted in the related concept of revolution/restoration that this produced unusual and unstable political hybrids. He harvested great insight from comparing the hybrid results of the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions.

Let’s run through passive revolution:

1. Social revolution is the going over of a society from one socio-economic order to another.
2. Successful revolution is usually a combination of two factors, event and process: the storming of the Winter Palace and the toppling of the Provisional government next to the nationalisation and redistribution of land, the agitation for peace on the eastern front, and the establishment of workers control of major industries.
3. The link between these two factors is the mobilisation and organisation of the masses.
4. Significant social change has taken place without obvious mass mobilisations, especially without obvious revolutionary events.
5. Vincenzo Cuoco was a conservative philosopher who speculated upon “passive revolution” in Italy. He wanted to unite the Italian people under a modern state without passing through the Jacobin experience of the French revolution.
6. Antonio Gramsci used the term passive revolution to his own ends. He used it as a way to describe a process of change where the expected bearer of change does not carry out their function. He talked primarily of the Italian Risorgimento of the 19th century but expanded the concept in order to probe the realities and weaknesses of Mussolini’s fascist regime (to a lesser extent developments in the United States and USSR).
7. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels describe how non-capitalist countries adopt capitalist ways on “pain of extinction”. Revolutions of the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries created liberal states in Britain, France and the Low Countries, allowing capitalism to develop and grow. In order for the Holy Alliance countries to compete (economically and militarily) they had to adopt aspects of the new society, despite having formally restored the Ancien Regime. This is Gramsci’s related concept of revolution/restoration. The old society takes on aspects of the new in order to sustain itself.
8. In the absence of a wealthy bourgeoisie with a strong culture able to lead masses of ordinary people other actors filled the void. In the 19th century this was commonly the state. For Germany the Prussian monarchy, for Italy Piedmont, for Japan the restored emperor. These bodies, linked to old ruling classes, generally carried out basic reforms essential to the growth of capitalism: a unitary state with a single set of laws, customs and currency, a single monopoly of violence and so forth.
9. Gramsci took Mussolini’s regime to be a modern incarnation of the passive revolution. The working class proved itself unable to strike for power during the Red Years of 1919-20. The capitalist class could no more establish order and stable hegemony. Mussolini’s fascists became a middle-class proxy for capitalist rule. The regime firstly crushed the working class as an organised political force but secondly adopted aspects of the working class programme, in particular the planned economy, and used them for capitalist ends.
10. Another example of the adoption of socialist measures for capitalist ends is international co-operation. The working class invented international cooperation, practiced through several Internationals. As capitalism grows and ages it produces bodies and agencies such as the EU, NAFTA, IMF, WTO, the UN and so forth. The interpenetration of national capital requires international cooperation to work.
11. The progress of passive revolution toward socialism creates a problem. Capital and Labour are antagonistic opposites. There cannot be hybrid worker/capitalist formations therefore there cannot be (stable) worker/capitalist states.
12. The passive revolution can be adapted to modern conditions through the theory of deflected permanent revolution. Middle class radicals in 3rd world countries looked to the USSR, with a formally socialist framework left over after the defeat of the 1917 revolution, as a means of overcoming imperialism and underdevelopment. The revolutions carried out by these groups were bourgeois. They created independent centres of accumulation.
13. The only way to achieve genuine, worthwhile socialism is through an active revolution: the conscious actions of oppressed people, led by the organised working class.

There are some simple applications we can make to modern politics and the current situation. Firstly, international cooperation is the recognised future of mankind. Every serious political and economic force in the world today recognises this. All artistic and philosophical speculation about the future takes this for granted.

The International Working Men’s Association formally consecrated cooperation in 1864, when the ruling class was still trying to form bodies such as Italy, Germany and the United States. There is a reason for this.

Capitalism was founded by revolutions creating unitary states. Competition between different blocs of capital in time became fused with competition between different states. A new, global system was formed out of the feudal patchwork where the ruling class, through its internal competition, was crucially for and against itself.

All subsequent attempts to foster ruling class unity and harmony have foundered on the same fact. The United Nations, for example, was formed at the end of World War Two to promote understanding between peoples. If it ever fulfilled that function it was soon taken over by the five permanent members of the Security Council, dominated by the USA.

It’s worth remembering, with the calls for a new Bretton Woods agreement and the general revival of the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, ‘Keynesianism’ as JM Keynes understood it was never really put into practice. The original plan was to have an international super-currency for nations to multinationals to trade in. The American government nixed this, insisting the dollar become the international reserve currency. Much of modern economic and social history has been shaped by this fact.

The short answer is cooperation between competing blocs of capital and their associated states will be difficult to pull off and hard to sustain.

One final observation, there is a theme running through the list of actors in the passive revolution: deep authoritarianism. As Engels once said, a revolution is an authoritarian thing. There is a huge difference between authority imposed from above and authority developed from below, transformation driven by a minority and transformation driven by the majority. Whether it was led Hitler, Stalin or Joe McCarthy, the ruling class movement needed huge doses of violence and militarism to effect the passive revolution.

The global crisis of capitalism is the cue for the anti-capitalist actor to step in from the wings. If the movement against capitalism does not begin to reach for power, power may begin to reach for us. We could face an unpleasant future.

Labels: capitalist crisis, gramsci, passive revolution

What do Americans Want? posted by lenin

Universal healthcare, reduced military spending, reduced military presence overseas, higher taxes on the rich, strong state regulation of the economy, pro-union legislation, increased minimum wage, no privatization of social security, etc etc...

Labels: american working class, barack obama, democrats, us elections

A small victory in the struggle against Yankee Imperialist Orthography posted by bat020

"Why I went to Grant Park on November 4th" posted by lenin

Guest post by Tithi Bhattacharya:

I stood outside my hotel at midnight with my three month old daughter, Shayari, in her stroller. The wind had just picked up but the hundreds of people lining the sidewalks in front of our hotel refused to be moved by the sudden chill. We were all strangers standing shoulder to shoulder waiting. It was the night of November fourth. The hotel was a block away from Grant Park. Suddenly a cheer went up from the waiting crowd. CNN had just called the election for Barack Hussein Obama the first black president of the United States. Startled by the sudden noise Shayari woke up, looked around and then her face broke into a glorious toothless smile.

Over the past few months, I must admit I have felt like a recalcitrant hack. As a socialist I have argued furiously with friends and students about why they should not put their faith in Obama. How his servile agreement with McCain about the $700 billion bailout for the very corporations that he claims to attack was a forecasting of the economic direction of his presidency. How his repeated acquiescence to the three gods of American conservatism--nationalism, religion and family—only made him a more eloquent and more intelligent version of the republicans. How can you campaign for him, I have argued with my colleague and friend who teaches queer studies at my University, when he openly opposes gay marriage on the basis of his Christian faith? How can you campaign for him I have argued with my anti-war activist student when he plans to extend this war in to Afghanistan and Pakistan? But despite my (sometimes shrill) almost Cassandra-like hectoring, scores of friends, students, neighbours and co-workers campaigned for Barack Obama. My 53 year old Jewish friend who has never been on a picket line or anti-war march tirelessly knocked on doors to urge people to vote. My neighbour from a working class background who had never once held a banner spent hours in the campaign office making them. A student who had never voted before spent her entire month's earnings on petrol so that she could drive volunteers around. And that night as I stood on Michigan Avenue, thousands of these people across the country--somebody's friend, somebody's neighbour, somebody's student--celebrated the end of their campaign by "bending the arc of history".

When independence was declared at midnight on August 15 1947 in India, thousands of people took to the streets celebrating the end of more than 200 years of colonialism. The country had just been devastated by a bloody partition where millions had lost their lives and homes. The Indian National Congress had struck terrible deals during the transfer of power including collaborating with the British to defeat a brilliant strike by sailors. So when freedom finally came at midnight the young Communist Party, heavily influenced by Stalin, declared it to be a "false freedom" (yeh azadi jhoota hai) and refused to be a part of the festivities. How hollow and historically irrelevant their pitiful slogan must have sounded to the men and women who danced on the streets of Delhi and Calcutta that night. Men and women who had lost brothers and sisters to the freedom struggle, who had risked lives and either suffered or witnessed untold brutalities. Were the Communists right in their analysis that independence would not bring change to the lives of the majority? Absolutely. Were they right to criticize and distance themselves from the mass movement that brought that freedom? Absolutely not.

I understand that there are significant differences between the long years of political struggle that led to Indian independence and the US elections of 2008. For starters, there was no armed resistance from a powerful imperial government or its police force to prevent people from participating in the election campaign for Obama. The electoral defeat of John McCain can hardly be compared to the political defeat and ousting of the two-hundred year old British colonial government. There is however something to be said for the spirit that animated the crowds on Indian streets 60 years ago and those in Chicago that night. Every single woman, man and child came out on both occasions because they powerfully felt that a major change had been achieved. I say achieved, as opposed to a change that just happened. In both cases, as in the case of countless other political victories--in strikes, campaigns or nationalist struggle—the participants experienced a confident surge of empowerment for the gain achieved was in part because of them. This feeling so common in mass movements is however rare in electoral campaigns, as the bourgeois electoral process is by its very nature a passive exercise that requires minimal political commitment from ordinary people. And this is where the Obama electoral campaign will be remembered for its uniqueness. In an economy devastated by free market capitalism, in a society torn apart by racism, at a time when the combined cost of war in Iraq and Afghanistan has been over $3 trillion grassroot organizers campaigned tirelessly to elect a black, anti-war man who spoke openly about corporate greed. The campaigners gave the election campaign the flavour of a grassroots social movement.

This was done in several ways. As early as October 6 the much discussed Acorn claimed to have registered 1.3 million new voters. Although the NY Times argued that these numbers were vastly exaggerated the meticulous task of organizing these registration drives on a national scale, in door-to-door campaigns and campus mobilizations can hardly be denied. This process could not but have a historical resonance with people of colour in general and the African American community in particular where memories of the right to vote are still laced with violence. The usual process of voting was thus transformed in this election from the very start into a much more politicized practice.

Obama himself did not fail to see this transformation. His speeches repeatedly alluded to past social movements and more importantly to the power of social movements. "Words on a parchment" he told us in his speech on race in Philadelphia "would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage". What would be needed instead were actual people who "through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk" narrowed the gap between ideals and reality. At a large anti-war rally in Chicago in 2002 in a sharp invocation of classical left-wing rhetoric he urged us to stop "the arms merchants in our own country" from "feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe". More explicitly, dubbing the elections merely as an agitational platform in faux-Leninist fashion he reminded us that the campaign was merely "the occasion, the vehicle, of [our] hopes, and [our] dreams". Over and over during the course of the campaign words such as community, grassroots and organizing were used in a fashion that matched the fervour and the demographic of the anti-war and anti-globalization movements of the recent past. Whole sections of people roused by this call plunged into the campaign as though it were a social movement and not merely an electoral campaign. But the most important thing to understand is that their doing so actually made it such.

In my small mid-western University town the Obama campaign included old social and labour activists, young students who had never been at a demonstration before and whole sections of people, particularly women and minorities who have been actively disenfranchised not just from the electoral process in the past but from society itself. It is also significant to remember in this context that in Indiana for instance although Obama secured a historic victory for Democrats, the first time in 44 years, none of the other local Democratic candidates fared well. Indeed only 22.2% of the votes polled in my county were straight Democratic votes. A vote for Obama was thus only nominally a vote for the democratic party. It was largely I would argue a vote for a radical new direction that the voter felt he represented. The Democratic Party label became almost incidental, Obama the man and his historic significance spilled over the ordinariness of a democratic party ticket and that is the man the ordinary woman/man voted for. There was an African-American woman at our hotel in Chicago that night who had come to the rally with her 84 year old father. My partner's friend, an African American historian told us that he was "bawling like a baby" when Obama gave his speech at Grant Park. We will always remember those truly historic images of Jesse Jackson and even Oprah Winfrey crying that cold night at Grant Park. They all worked for the "movement" and not for the election of a Democratic Party candidate. So when victory was declared on November 4 th most of them were shocked to see Democratic party bureaucrats take over the floor of the campaign office and make speeches. One of my friends there told me "I was shocked to see these people. All I wanted to do was dance". . We had all apparently forgotten that this was an electoral campaign to elect the head of the leading imperialist nation.

So as President Obama surrounds himself with big-business backers such as Robert Rubin and Paul Volcker, shapes his foreign policy in consultation with former secretaries of state and ex-CIA officials what is to become of the all the people who joined the "movement"?

There is a short answer to that question, given by a young black woman in Harlem. When asked by CNN about Obama's victory, laughing and crying she said that she had helped achieve it and she was going to stay active to make him accountable. I cannot emphasize how right she is.

Again I come back to my small college town in Indiana. The context of the Obama victory in this town and on my campus must be clearly understood. In my university a very popular white male full professor seeing a young African American colleague on his cell phone commented that he thought that his black colleague was doing a drug deal. In my department when I had organized a very tame diversity forum earlier this year I received an anonymous letter which argued that all non-western (read non-white) histories and non-western historians should be scrapped from the curriculum and the department and in the field of American history we should not obsess about race and African American History. My partner who runs the American Studies program was accused by this eloquent letter writer of only being interested in historically marginalized groups. Since November 4 th graffitis saying "fuck obama" have gone up on campus and I know of at least one incident of a white male yelling "nigger" at a black student from a passing car.

And yet Obama polled 55% of the votes in my county whose population is 97% White. Despite Hilary Clinton trying to stir up racism against Obama by claiming to represent the white working class, the majority of Obama voters from Indiana was the white working class. Obama carried 15 Indiana counties compared to John Kerry's 4 in 2004. Northwestern Indiana counties, composed largely of the industrial working class voted overwhelmingly for him in this election. Workers here have been hit hard by the economy in areas like South Bend, Portage, Anderson, and south along the Wabash and Ohio Rivers in Terre Haute and Evansville. Nationally, 67% of the AFL-CIO voted for Obama. It is not the Democratic Party but Obama riding the wave of anger and hope that secured that vote. It was the movement that achieved this not the electoral process per se. It is now up to this multiracial movement—a movement that arose from homes, schools, churches, and the factory floor—to make sure that the gains of these last few months are protected. To defend and remember the racial solidarity that was the hallmark of the campaign. To mobilize in similar large numbers not just for voter registrations but to fight against all those small incidents of racism that will no doubt happen in other conservative public spaces like my campus. To demand that Obama deliver on his promises of healthcare, jobs and education. And when the time comes, and it will, to mobilize against him.

So unlike the Indian Communists in 1947, I was glad to have been there in Chicago on the night of November 4th. I would like to tell my daughter that I celebrated the movement that threw Bush out of office and elected the first Black President. I would like to tell my daughter that on that night I looked around me at the hundreds of people, black and white, young and old, gay and straight, that had lined the streets of Chicago with a true audacity of hope.

Labels: 'obamamania', american working class, barack obama, democrats, gop, racism

Strike videos posted by lenin

Following up to Wynn Stanley's guest post the other day, the striking union is now posting videos with footage and updates on the strike.

Labels: neoliberalism, strike, trade unions, universities

Flickr censors Egyptian blogger posted by lenin

You will know Hossam from his unrivaled reporting on the working class insurgency that has been rocking the Mubarak regime since 2006. One of the many ongoing services he provides is to give a visual account of the Egyptian struggle, including of the Mahalla 49 trial, but also of his various encounters with socialists in Ireland, Turkey and elsewhere. (Some nice pics of my own 'six counties' in there, by the way). It turns out that Flickr are giving him some stick, and there is implicitly the threat that his account may be deleted if he doesn't conform to some quite arbitrary and unnecessary restrictions. This is not the first time we have seen this kind of thing. You might remember that an Egyptian activist who posted videos exposing what was happening under the dictatorship had his Youtube account suspended. Now, he has had his Facebook account disabled. Anyway, Hossam is asking people to send a quick message of protest to: case982056@support.flickr.com.

Labels: activists, bloggers, censorship, egypt, mubarak

The battle begins posted by lenin

From the FT: Corporate America is preparing for a landmark political battle with the new Obama administration and a Democratic Congress over proposed labour union reforms, while expressing concerns about the direction of trade policy, healthcare and a range of other issues.

The business community has stepped up its oppositon to the union-backed Employee Free Choice Act, which Mr Obama has said he supports. It could revitalise the US labour movement by enhancing the ability of unions to organise.

Labels: american ruling class, barack obama, capital, democrats, trade unions, us working class

Historical Materialism conference: Many Marxisms posted by lenin

After the light-weight, syrupy spiritual uplift of the Obama victory, it's time to get hardcore again. Get down to SOAS today, why not, and take part in the fifth annual Historical Materialism conference:

THEMES COVERED WILL INCLUDE:

APPROACHING PASSIVE REVOLUTIONS * ART AND CAPITALISM * ASPECTS OF IMPERIALISM * BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE * BEYOND GLOBAL VALUE CHAIN ANALYSIS IN COMMODITY STUDIES * BOLSHEVISM: YESTERDAY AND TOMORROW * CAPITALISM / KNOWLEDGE CAPITALISM * CAPITALISM AND ARCHITECTURE * CLIMATE CHANGE, SUSTAINABILITY AND SOCIALISM * CONTEMPORARY RADICAL THOUGHT AND MARXISM: AGAMBEN, HOLLOWAY, ZIZEK * EARLY MODERN CAPITALISM * ECOLOGICAL CRISIS AND MARXIST THEORY * EVERYDAY LIFE * FINANCE AND NEO-LIBERALISM * FINANCIALISATION AND CRISIS * FOOD CRISIS * FROM THE GRUNDRISSE TO CAPITAL * FUTURE OF WORLD CAPITALISM * HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND LATE DEVELOPMENT * HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARXISM * INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS * IS TODAY'S CAPITALISM ACTUALLY-EXISTING BARBARISM? * LABOUR-PROCESS AND RESISTANCE * LATIN AMERICAN LEFT TODAY * LEARNING FROM ENEMIES AND RIVALS: SCHMITT, STRAUSS, WEBER * LIFE, POLITICS & CAPITALISM * MANY MARXISMS AND INDIA * MANY MARXISMS: KEY FIGURES * MANY MARXISMS: PROBLEMS AND POLEMICS * MARX AND FETISHISM * MARX ON WORLD ECONOMY AND WORLD POLITICS * MARXISM AND CINEMA: FILM NOIR AND NEO-NOIR * MARXISM AND METROPOLITICS * MARXISM AND PHILOSOPHY * MARXISM AND THE SCIENCES * MARXISM OUTSIDE THE WEST * MARXISM, FEMINISM AND WOMEN’S POLITICS * MARXISMS AND LITERATURE * MARXISMS AND RELIGION * MARXISMS AND SOUTHERN AFRICA * MARXISMS AND VIOLENCES: GENDER AND RACE * MARXIST THEORIES OF PRACTICE * MODES OF FOREIGN RELATIONS * MONETARY POLICY AND BANKING UNDER NEOLIBERALISM * MONEY * NEGATIVITY AND REVOLUTION * NORTH EAST ASIAN MARXISMS AND SOCIALISMS * ON THE CONCEPT OF SURPLUS POPULATIONS * PERSPECTIVES FROM ALTHUSSER * PERSPECTIVES FROM MARX’S ‘JEWISH QUESTION’ * PHILOSOPHIES OF REVOLT AND REVOLUTION * PHILOSOPHY IN THE EARLY MARX * POLITICAL CATEGORIES OF MARXISM * POLITICAL ECONOMY AND ECONOMICS TODAY * POLITICS OF THE PROMOTION OF GLOBAL COMPETITIVENESS * RACISM, CLASS AND POLITICS * RESTRUCTURING, CAPITAL AND LABOUR * REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS IN THE MIDDLE EAST * SEXUAL LIBERATION: HISTORICAL MATERIALIST APPROACHES * SITUATIONISM AT THE LIMITS: MUST WE BURN DEBORD? * SOCIALISM IN SEARCH OF AN ECONOMIC SYSTEM * STATE IN THE BOLIVARIAN REVOLUTION * THEORIES OF CLASS * THEORIES OF IMPERIALISM * TIME, TEMPORALITY, HISTORY * TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE NEOLIBERAL STATE * UNEVEN AND COMBINED DEVELOPMENT: TOWARDS A MARXIST THEORY OF ‘THE INTERNATIONAL’? * US FINANCIAL POWER IN CRISIS * UTOPIANISM * VALUE: POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS * ‘WESTERN’ MARXISM AND THE ANTI-COLONIAL WORLD/INTELLECTUALS * WINDOWS ON EMPIRE: PERSPECTIVES FROM HISTORY, CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY * WORKERISM: A GENERATION LATER *

PARTICIPANTS INCLUDE:

Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, Gilbert Achcar, Talat Ahmed, Greg Albo, Jamie Allinson, Kevin Anderson, Ricardo Antunes, Giovanni Arrighi, Sam Ashman, Antonio Carmona Báez, Richard Bailey, Metin Bal, Colin Barker, Kate Bayliss, Pınar Bedirhanoğlu, Mike Beggs, Riccardo Bellofiore, Aaron Benanav, Ted Benton, Henry Bernstein, Cyrus Bina, Werner Bonefeld, Mark Bould, Pepijn Brandon, Peter Bratsis, Robert Brenner, Dennis Broe, Dick Bryan, Ergun Bulut, Verity Burgmann, Alex Callinicos, Paul Cammack, Mauro Farnesi Camellone, Al Campbell, Bob Cannon, Gavin Capps, Thomas Carmichael, Emilia Castorina, Maria Elisa Cevasco, Hsiu-Man Chen, Vivek Chibber, Alexander Chryssis, Martin Cobian, Peter Custers, John Darwin, Neil Davidson, Charles Davis, Chuck Davis, Gail Day, Tim Dayton, Roni Demirbag, Radhika Desai, Pat Devine, Paulo dos Santos, Peter Drucker, Jean-Numa Ducange, Gérard Duménil, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Timm Ebner, Bolivar Echeverria, Juliane Edler, Ersin Vedat Elgur, Katsuhiko Endo, Sara R. Farris, Lucy Ferguson, Don Filtzer, Ben Fine, Robert Fine, Bridget Fowler, Carl Freedman, Alan Freeman, Andrea Fumagalli, Cristina Morini, Lindsey German, Melanie Gilligan, Ruth Wilson Gilmour, Saroj Giri, Richard Godden, Maya Gonzalez, Jamie Gough, Peter Gowan, Kevin Gray, Nick Gray, Chris Harman, Barbara Harriss-White, Owen Hatherley, Cristoph Hermann, Andy Higginbottom, Mike Hill, Christian Høgsbjerg, Evren Hosgor, Nik Howard, David Jack, Elinor Jean, Oliver Jelinski, Nicholas Joll, Ismail Karatepe, Ken Kawashima, Paul Kellogg, Geoff Kennedy, Sami Khatib, Aykut Kilic, Donald Kingsbury, Nick Knight, Martijn Konings, Michael Krätke, Rick Kuhn, Ishay Landa, Tim Lang, Spyros Lapatsioras, Paul LeBlanc, Sergio Lessa, Alex Levant, Peter Linebaugh, Alex Loftus, Rob Lucas, Dennis Maeder, Matteo Mandarini, Christian Marazzi, Jonathan Martineau, Paul Mattick, David Mayer, Andrew McGettigan, Philip McMichael, David McNally, James Meadway, John Milios, Owen Miller, Andrew Milner, Dimitris Milonakis, John Molyneux, David Moore, Cristina Morini, Adam Morton, Zwi Negator, Susan Newman, Jörg Nowak, Benjamin Noys, Bertel Nygaard, Bridget O'Laughlin, Keith O’Regan, Sebnem Oguz, Ulrich Oslender, Ceren Özselçuk, Maria Cristina Soares Paniago, Leo Panitch, F. Papadatos, Juan Pablo Painceira Paschoa, Leda Maria Paulani, Simon Pirani, Iain Pirie, Nina Power, Gonzalo Pozo-Martin, Thomas Purcell, Diana Raby, Michael Rafferty, Geert Reuten, Paul Reynolds, Ben Richardson, John Riddell, John Roberts, Bruce Robinson, John Rose, Thomas Sablowski, Spyros Sakellaropoulos, Jorgen Sandemose, Saskia Sassen, Michael Sayeau, Sean Sayers, David Schwartzman, Alan Sears, Lynne Segal, Ben Selwyn, Sanjay Seth, Stuart Shields, Nicola Short, Joe Sim, Rick Simon, Subir Sinha, Panagiotis Sotiris, Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos, Kerstin Stakemeier, Guido Starosta, Marcel Stoetzler, Robert Stolz, Gaspar Miklós Tamás, Bruno Tinel, Peter Thomas, Massimiliano Tomba, Alberto Toscano, Greg Tuck, Mehmet Ufuk Tutan, Kees van der Pijl, Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, Carlo Vercellone, Danga Vileisis, Sherryl Vint, Satnam Virdee, Andriana Vlachou, Elisa Waeyenberge, Jeffery R. Webber, Dominic Wetzel, Adrian Wilding, Evan Calder Williams, Frieder Otto Wolf, Andrew Wright, Steve Wright, Galip Yalman, Iván Zatz

Labels: anti-imperialism, anti-racism, capitalism, feminism, historical materialism, marxism, socialism, theory

Gore Vidal skewers Dimbleby posted by lenin

Labels: barack obama, david dimbleby, gore vidal, us elections

Mike Davis on Obama posted by lenin

Succinctly put:

More importantly, tens of millions of voters have reversed the verdict of 1968: this time choosing economic solidarity over racial division. Indeed, this election has been a virtual plebiscite on the future of class-consciousness in the United States, and the vote--thanks especially to working women--is an extraordinary vindication of progressive hopes.

But not the Democratic candidate, about whom we should not harbor any illusions.

Labels: barack obama, class consciousness, mike davis, us elections, us working class

The furnace of American mythology posted by lenin

So, what's up America? Forty-three years after Jim Crow (only forty-one in Virginia, which looks like it's gone Democratic for the first time since 1964), and despite a campaign laden with filthy, vicious racism and the incitement of a lynch mob mentality among the Palinites, you demolished the GOP and got yourself your first black president. On a landslide. Despite the massive vote-denying campaigns, you got out in record numbers - the highest turnout since 1908 by some estimates. And as for the white working class, all those supposed "Joe the Plumbers"?:

In another development not anticipated by the media, Pennsylvania exit polls found that one in four voters said race was a factor in their vote, but a majority said it was a positive factor--that is, that race was one of the reasons they voted for Obama.

The claim that Obama was weak among white workers was always overdone. After all, in the Democratic primaries, he made his breakthrough in the Iowa caucuses, where just 2.3 percent of voters are Black. In Virginia and Wisconsin, two other key victories during the primaries, Obama scored solid victories among whites.

Early returns from Macomb County, Mich., the stereotypical home of "Reagan Democrats" in the Detroit suburbs, had Obama up 57 percent to 41 percent. And in Ohio, Obama won among whites making less than $50,000 annually.

The number one reason, without doubt, was the economy (two and three being Iraq, and healthcare). Obama was able to recover his lost popularity after having tacked to the right in part by linking these themes in his broadcasts, pointing out that the Iraq war was costing billions and suggesting that this might be used to ease the burden on 'the middle class'. Whatever Obama now does, this historic vote stands as a massive popular repudiation of the agenda of the Right, but also as an affirmation of a new electorate. The last forty years have been characterised by variations on Nixon's 'southern strategy' - a misnomer, since it applied well beyond that region - which sought to mobilise and channel the "white backlash" against anti-racism and noisy protesters. Since then it has been obligatory to genuflect to this sentiment, whether it is Carter praising 'ethnic purity', Clinton attacking rappers and executing Ricky Ray Rector, Reagan belabouring "welfare moms" and the "reverse racism" of affirmative action, or Bush the Elder and his Willie Horton campaign. The frankly crude efforts by the McCain camp to quite literally 'Other' its opponent was an embarrassing failure, and that counts. A defeat for the vicious Islamophobia that was the signature of the 'war on terror' and that was nakedly deployed against 'Hussein', is particularly satisfying. And the rejection of red-baiting politics, in which Obama was habitually upbraided as a 'socialist', is equally gratifying. As Gary Younge put it, the election has almost been a referendum on whether Americans care about their jobs and income more than they hate black people. It has invited people to choose between economic justice and racial division, and most people have chosen the former. This doesn't mean the vote broke down neatly on race, or that the issue will go away - far from it. This is still the country of Katrina and the Jena Six. And there are dangers in a revivification of liberal nationalism. But it is a leap forward in class consciousness.

Amusingly, a poll of Republican supporters found that most of them think the government lost a) for not being conservative enough, and b) because of a hostile media. These scumbags really haven't been punished enough: I recommend that Obama supporters stage victory parades through upper class whitebread neighbourhoods. I also note that GOP supporters at McCain's rally are furious, absolutely bitter beyond words. When McCain tried to praise America's tolerance, which he said was demonstrated by the election of an African American to the office of president, the smatter of applause was surrounded on all sides by cold silence. When he even mentioned Obama's name, the shrill booing ran through the crowd like a shiver. They'll be the ones hailing Lou Dobbs for President come 2012.

I have no wish to piss on the worldwide celebrations, but be advised that Obama's team is even now trying to figure out ways to manage down your expectations. Beware that Obama, even if he had any liberal inclinations, is going to be under strict surveillance and pressure to 'govern from the centre', because practically every commentator on the box as well as the Democratic Leadership Council is demanding that Obama do just that and resist pressure from his constituents. As the DLC's William Glaston complains, "expectations are sky-high", and Obama must resist pressure from his supporters and avoid emulating FDR or LBJ, or he will risk an electoral disaster similar to that faced by Clinton in 1994. Galston's memory fails him: what destroyed Clinton's early popularity was his failure to deliver on populist promises on healthcare, job creation and redistribution of wealth. But this myth, that America is a uniquely conservative country, has just been heartily dispatched. The alibi won't stand: the Democrats control all three branches of government, with expanded majorities in the Congress and Senate. They have moved deep into Republican territory, including Indiana, which looks like it will fall to Obama by a narrow margin after having been Republican since the 1968 election. Obama is the first Democratic presidential candidate to get more than 50% of the vote since Jimmy Carter. He has taken vital swing-states like New Mexico, and has done much better there than Clinton did, with a convincing 57% of the vote. When Obama 'reaches out' to Republicans and starts blustering about bipartisanship, and when he appoints someone like Robert Gates as his secretary of defense, there will be no excuse. If he fails to carry out even his most limited reforms, he has no scope for blaming the Right. If he doesn't close Guantanamo and restore habeus corpus, he has no one else to blame.

All I'm saying is, to those hundreds of thousands of people marching and dancing in the streets, be prepared to be back on the streets soon. The system is designed to lock you out as quickly and quietly as possible.

Labels: 'socialism', barack obama, class consciousness, john mccain, neoliberalism, racism, us elections

A brave stance against 'liberal guilt' posted by lenin

It began by laying bare the supposedly brutal treatment of Republican prisoners at The Maze. I'd been under the impression that standards at this facility were carefully maintained, if only because the cunning Brits were keen to fend off international protests about their dubious judicial arrangements. This wasn't, however, my problem. That lay elsewhere. Far from being shocked at seeing the inmates roughed up a bit, I found myself wishing they'd been properly tortured, preferably savagely, imaginatively and continuously.

Labels: british occupation, film review, northern ireland, oirientalism, torture

Unlikely, but... posted by lenin

What to do if McCain wins by fraud:

Labels: barack obama, democrats, election rigging, gop, john mccain, voter purge

Striking Against Neoliberalism in the University posted by lenin

Guest post by Wynn Stanley.

Part 1
What is York University? If you ask different people, they’ll give you different answers. Some of us will say it is simply a place to get a degree, so they can get a decent job after they graduate. Some of us will wax poetic on the life of the mind, and rave about amazing professors and incredible resources. Still some of us will bitch about how this or that class sucks, unfair treatment, big class sizes. When it all comes down to it, all of these statements are true to a certain degree but don’t capture the magnitude of what York University is really all about.

York University is the organic outgrowth of scholars of all kinds, from first year undergraduates to tenured professors, engaging in the production of knowledge. In a society dominated by capitalist social property relations, knowledge, like so many things, is a material commodity, not, as some assert, something abstract and ephemeral. When we scholars at York, on all levels, produce knowledge, in the arts, sciences and points in between, we add value to York University as an institution. This value brings material gains to York University, in the form of funding, and in the form of enhancing its reputation as a serious institution that attracts students.

The material gains accrued by York University, alas, are not spread evenly among many of us who create value for this institution. For this reason, our union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Local 3903 is currently bargaining with our employer. We use that phrase “employer” because we - the workers and students, the worker-students, of York University are York Unviersity. We are simply demanding that we are treated fairly and with enough dignity to maintain a semblance of productive life, to eliminate tuition and to be paid a living wage .

As an aside, one would think that our employer would be foursquare behind our demands, considering not only the fact that the means of knowledge production at York is heavily dependent on our labour, but that to a certain degree, from the vantage point of education funding, our demands are a “win win”. To wit, the employer seems to want to cut off its nose to spite its face, as opposed to forming a united front with the workers across the post-secondary sector to demand that the “education premier” Dalton McGuinty increase funding to to Ontario’s universities. These funds would allow York University to modernize infrastructure, modernize security and pay student-workers, contract faculty and others what they are worth, improve child care for all members of the York community with children, and expand our health care benefits to reflect our growing needs and growing community. In so doing, we can also create a more equitable workplace to reflect the cosmopolitan character of our community.

As Graham Potts, our chief negotiator shows in the sidebar, this would enhance York University life for all of us. At this point, however, the ball is in the air. “"The employer has yet to address CUPE 3903's serious concerns arround the indexation of our funds given the recent rapid growth in our membership “ Potts tells me, adding that this amounts to an even smaller stake in what is already a paltry amount of funding. This is a particular stickling point given the increased consumer price index, particularly on staples such as food and transportation. More details of our bargaining demands can be found at:

http://tao.ca/~cupe3903/web/?q=node/708


Part 2

One manifestation of the devaluing alienation of the York community is the casualization of academic employment. Let us then pose the question, what in the evolution of post-secondary education is the meaning of this reduction of university workers to alienated labour?

Those of you who are undergraduates may have a great course director and wonder to yourself why she is not referred to as “professor” in the course outline. This is because the course is taught by “contract faculty”, that is to say, Unit 2 members of our union, CUPE 3903. What is more, these academics are forced to fight for these contracts, and lack job security, often having to do contracts for a variety of universities simply to make ends meet. The travel time alone, when one considers the price of petrol, increases the precariousness of the situation of a great deal of our workers. What is more, not only must these academics compete with themselves over jobs, not to mention salaried professors, but increasingly with those of us coded “unit 1,” that is to say teaching assistants. In regards to the material value created by these academics, the remuneration is shockingly low when one considers what undergraduate students are paying to attend this institution.

Another manifestation is the exploitation of those of us who are graduate students. Not only do we create value for this institution with our innovative research and scholarly practice, most of us are like the proverbial diner with no cash who has to wash dishes in the greasy spoon kitchen in order to pay off his ham and eggs. In exchange for long and stressful hours of work that adds yet more value to this institution – teaching assistantship, marking and grading, research and graduate assistant work – we are “paid” with little more than our tuition. The work we do, for example, helping professors who by virtue of their sterling reputations (which they deserve!) are “selling points” for students to attend university, has far more material value than the sub-poverty wages we earn, in a city that is one of the most expensive places to live on this continent. Some folks may have a stereotyped idea of privileged grad students, and while there are probably a few people who may be supported by their parents, the vast majority of us, especially those of us who have re-entered academia after some time away, live from grant to loan to slave wage. We barely scrape by, and we spend all of our money on books! An extended research fund surely would help!

Perhaps the most visible manifestation of what we can call the “neoliberalization of York University”, referred to earlier, is the atomization of undergraduate student life. Take huge class sizes. Gone are the days, for many undergraduates, of even having the ability to form a personal relationship with those who facilitate their education. For those who are shy in the first place, it certainly isn’t easy to comment in a lecture hall of over 100 students! Another manifestation is the increased regimentation of campus life. The university doesn’t want to alienate any potential funders, and given the conservative government, and general conservative tenor of Canada’s ruling class and leading foundations, it is no accident that political and social activity at York has become highly regimented. Let us not even start to talk about the corporate monopoly on food and beverage services, the marked up prices at the bookstore, the diversion of capital away from student development and towards exorbitant salaries for the administration. Look at Schulich, the business school that certainly has plenty of funders in the private sector, then take a look at many arts departments.

Are we starting to see what this is all about?

At the same time, the president of York University is making nearly half a million dollars this year, in addition to an interest free loan and a variety of perks that most public servants couldn’t even imagine!

So where are we now?

Our employer is still refusing to address a variety of very important issues, both in terms of wages and in terms of job security, and many points in between. There is a chance, however this may freak a lot of people out, that CUPE 3903 may be forced to go on strike. Such a drastic step may be necessary to prove our point that York University simply cannot function smoothly without the collective labour of CUPE 3903 TAs, GAs, RAs and contract faculty. With this being said, this isn’t written in stone. We’d all rather be in a situation in which the employer sees the light, so to speak. Much of this depends, however, on the mobilization of our rank and file, and solidarity from undergraduate students. A mobilized student body and academic community on behalf of social justice can have a ripple effect on the broad array of social and political movements at York University. We are depending on our allies.

Wynn Stanley is the pen name of a Steward with the Canadian Union of Publice Employees Local 3903

Labels: education, neoliberalism, strike, universities

Congo: whitey to the rescue? posted by lenin

Johann Hari has rightly pointed out that what is driving the wars in the Congo is fierce competition over mineral resources, particularly coltan. To this extent, he helps see off some of the more obnoxious 'heart of darkness' myths that habitually appear in coverage of the conflict, in which almost five and a half million have died. This murder is part of a process of modernity, of extraction, global trade and capital accumulation. Curiously, Hari does not refer to the imperial history, either that involving Belgium or the United States - perhaps he doesn't see the relevance. Nor does he discuss the problems with Kabila's rule, and its origins. Although it is incorrect to overlook the role of African states, which Hari doesn't (although there is a lack of detail here), to omit larger powers from the analysis is to neglect a big part of the story. I would just like to draw out one or two relevant issues, then.

The dream-team of David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner, both vocal advocates of humanitarian intervention, is on the way to Goma and then to Kigali, with the aim of resolving the current crisis - or, as a British official put it, to "deliver Europe in Africa". The UK government is urging Joseph Kabila, son of Laurent-Désiré Kabila who was assassinated in 2001, to talk to rebels led by General Laurent Nkunda. Nkunda is reportedly in a position to take control of substantial areas of the country's eastern regions. The first question that occurs to me, as an averagely ignorant consumer of the news, is "who the fuck is Laurent Nkunda when he's at home?" (The Guardian's Mark Tran is little help on this question, merely rousing more mysteries than he puts to bed). Secondly, why is there a rebellion, and who is in the right, if anyone? Thirdly, how does this relate to the 'civil war' that supposedly ended in 2003? There is an embarrassing paucity of detail in most attempted answers to these questions in the media, to the extent that these questions are even discussed. People are left to conclude that it must be some 'tribal' affair, some particularly African disorder that, if it cannot be remedied by outside forces, cannot be remedied at all: this is what is meant by a humanitarian crisis.

A couple of years ago, I mentioned one dynamic in the early insurgency that brought Laurent-Désiré Kabila to power, namely the impact of the Rwandan war and genocide: "The RPF did shortly win its war and deposed the regime, sending about a million Hutus (some of them guilty men) fleeing into neighbouring countries, mostly to what was then Zaire and is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was still ruled then by the CIA's local kleptocrat, Mobutu Sese Seko, and he found the regrouped Interahamwe (formed from among the refugees from the RPF advance) useful in terrorising opponents of his crumbling rule. The RPF government, for its part, backed Laurent Kabila's opposition movement ... Kabila was not himself a powerful figure at all - a gold and ivory trader, and a former military go-between for Mobutu and Garang (the late SPLA leader), he had no significant popular base, and his position relied chiefly on the support of Museveni in Uganda, Kagame in Rwanda and a loose alliance of four guerilla groups. They relied on child soldiers to intimidate civilians, and would not have got far had it not been for the Rwandan soldiers who committed acts of genocide against Hutu refugees in the Congo. However, having put Kabila in power, Rwanda, Uganda and later Burundi swiftly took advantage of the disintegration of the Congolese state and tried to undermine Kabila, who showed alarming signs of wanting to govern on his own."

The early insurgency was, incidentally, the background for one of the failures of 'humanitarian intervention' as the Interahamwe and former Rwandan troops regrouped themselves in refugee camps funded by the UNHCR, who also helped Mobutu form a security force intended to guard the camps and prevent militia control - but which effectively became an auxiliary to the militias. The RPF, at that point receiving extensive military aid and training from the US government - often via private military firms, acted in 1996 to destroy the camps, driving hundreds of thousands of refugees deeper into the Congo. In 1997, the RPF helped Laurent Kabila depose Mobutu with the assistance of Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Burundi and Eritrea (and also the United States who had turned against their former ally). As Renton et al outline in The Congo: Plunder and Resistance, the other dynamic involved was the citizenship crisis in the eastern regions of the Congo. This is a legacy of the colonial era, during which a strict racial/ethnic hierarchy was maintained with white settlers at the apex. At the bottom were the Banyamulenge, people who were not considered properly indigenous and denied citizenship rights (many of them labourers who had been encouraged by the Belgian authorities to migrate from Rwanda). The overthrow of colonialism had replaced white rule with black rule, but did not alter the situation for those denied citizenship. Hutus from this layer were adjoined to Hutu refugees and other groups in opposition to the RPF-supported forces and then to Kabila, and they participated in pogroms against the relatively privileged Tutsi layers who have sided with the RPF. It also happens that the eastern regions which they inhabit, particularly the Kivu province which is connected to the Great Lakes system, are where the richest coltan deposits are to be found, and it is over control of and access to those deposits that regional powers have clashed - even allies such as Uganda and Rwanda have enaged in combat in the territory, over respective spheres of influence that they each claim.

Kabila was a former Lumumbist influenced by Maoism, who had created a 'liberated' zone under the nose of Mobutu. He had worked alongside Che Guevara, whose account in The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo records an impression of hopeless incompetence on Kabila's part. Despite retaining his stronghold until the late 1980s, he had been effectively finished as a leading rebel until this loose alliance led by Rwanda thrust him to prominence. He had no coherent idea of what to do upon taking power, and little appeal. His success was the result of a regional dynamic rather than a national revolt. It could reasonably be surmised by his backers that his weakness and lack of a popular base would make him far more responsive to pressure. Western mining capital looked to him with hope: before his armies had even successfully overthrown Mobutu, he was reportedly signing deals with prominent multinationals for concessions in respect to the country's ample mineral resources. It was clear that the processes of exploitation, privatization and IMF-led 'structural adjustment' would find no obstacle in Kabila, and the new regime made no effort to expropriate Mobutu's kleptocratic family. Nonetheless, Kabila depicted his insurgency as a liberation for Zaire - soon renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo - and attempted to attenuate the concessions to multinational capital with appeals to popular nationalism and the iconography - if not the substance - of Lumumbism.

However, Kabila inherited a number of problems that would transform his own situation: in the post-Cold War era, many states had seen their ability to govern break down, and the slow decline of Mobutu's regime had been accompanied by a serious degeneration in the mining industry. The army (the Forces Armees Zairoises) had possessed diminishing authority, and borders were extremely porous. Thus, rebel forces from Uganda and Burundi as well as Rwanda had been able to operate from bases on the Congo, and their respective militaries had been equally able to penetrate Congolese territory to pursue their opponents. The mining contracts largely evaporated, the IMF and World Bank refused to endorse his proposals for economic expansion, former allies among the Banyamulenge turned against Kabila as he refused to grant them indigenous status, and Kabila adopted an increasingly autocratic style to remain in power, depending on sources of tribal support to make up for the lack of popular legitimacy. Finally, in order to assert decisive control over the country, he turned against his RPF backers, formed an alliance with the Hutu refugees, and sought to expel the Rwandan army.

The Rwandan ruling class, whose political expression is the Rwandan Patriotic Front, now simply depends upon the mineral resources of the Congo, as it lives well above the means that its own country's resources could provide. The exploitation of Congolese resources is built into government policy and is directed by a component of their External Security Organization. There was no way they were going to accept being deprived of leverage in the Congo, and this was the main cause of the war that then erupted in 1998. Kabila successfully galvanised substantial layers of the population against his former allies, but his rhetoric verged on genocidal as he called on them to "erase the enemy", lest they "become slaves to these little Tutsis". The US, for its part, backed the alliance of Rwanda, Uganda, and the Banyamulenge in order to get a new regime more aligned to its own priorities, with the justification being that the Banyamulenge were merely engaged in a legitimate revolt, while Rwanda and Uganda were intervening to protect the security of their own borders. (A subsidiary justification was that sponsoring Rwanda and Uganda would help contain the Sudanese state). In fact, Rwandan and Ugandan forces had plotted the overthrow of Kabila and directed the first rebellions in Goma and Kinshasa that marked the beginning of the war, and they were decisive in founding the Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie (RCD), which unites a disparate array of forces around an inchoate programme. Even the leftist elements that split from the alliance in 1999 to form the Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie - Mouvement de liberation (RCD-ML) were rapidly subordinated to the designs of Uganda's Museveni and extortion by the Ugandan People's Defense Forces (UPDF). What was a straightforward act of aggression by regional powers backed by the world's superpower, overwhelmingly targeting the civilian population, was to be sold as an obscure civil war.

Zimbabwe, which had backed Kabila's revolt with millions of dollars and weapons (themselves probably supplied by the UK before an incoming Blair government fell out with Mugabe), did not join the Rwandan-led alliance. Georges Nzongola-Natalaja argues that the Zimbabwean elite saw the Congo as an "attractive market for Zimbabwean goods and services" and was "determined to make good on its investment", which has resulted in land concessions and joint mining deals between the associates of Mugabe and Kabila. By August 2000, it had spent $200m on the Congo war, supporting Kabila's forces, and this was sufficient to get ZANU-PF in on the diamond-exporting business just as the 'international community' was turning against Mugabe and applying sanctions. Predictably, those sanctions were partially justified by Mugabe's involvement in the Congelese war, despite the fact that the US, the UK, the IMF and other global powers strongly supported Rwanda and Uganda during their worst phases of plunder. The biggest global donor to Rwanda and Uganda in the late 1990s was the UK, which abstained from criticising the two regimes despite their atrocities (sometimes genocidal in the case of the RPF), even as it launched intense rounds of invective against Mugabe.

It would be difficult to overstate the extent of corporate involvement in the DRC. In 2002, a detailed report by a UN Panel of Experts detailed the interests of 85 companies in the country, eight of them US-based companies including the world's largest coltan-refiner, the Cabot Corporation. Given the instability created by the war and de facto partition, a coherent national strategy for developing and exploiting those resources could hardly be generated, and one of the main forms of looting has been to simply buy concessions and then sell them off at a greater price. But for those with longer-term goals in the region, doing business with the Rwandan and Ugandan state has been a hugely profitable enterprise. And if their forces have to make up for a labour shortfall, often brought about by their killing, through enslavement, so much the better for the profit margin. Arguably, it would be better for commercial interests if a stable political structure amenable to global capital could be arranged, and to that extent the negotiations process may have seemed promising, particularly once Laurent Kabila was murdered by his bodyguard, enabling his son to take over. Laurent Kabila had, after all, been a disaster: his autocratic government, the viciousness with which he waged the war, and the incoherent polity and economy that he presided over, contributed to a massive contraction of the GDP with 500% inflation. His replacement was more open to negotiations, and a ceasefire was agreed in 2002, backed by EU forces operating under a UN mandate, and a withdrawal of most invading forces. It led to the creation of a Transitional National Government, and many of the mining interests that had avoided the Congo until then began to get involved. Rebel forces were included in discussions and integrated into the national army, while others were to be demobilised by their foreign backers. The UN placed 17,000 peacekeepers in the country (though they are themselves involved in the rapes of women and children, as well as the smuggling of resources). A constitution was eventually agreed, and presidential elections took place in 2006, which Joseph Kabila won. Hardly ideal, you might think, but still better than a viciously exploitative war that has killed millions.

Yet, here we are, six years after the original peace agreement. Fighting has continued, sometimes involving the Interahamwe, sometimes the forces demobilised by the invaders, and sometimes the Banyamulenge who remain unrecognised. If the Banyamulenge have at times committed terrible atrocities in the course of their insurgency, they have also been the subject of pogroms and massacres, such as the killing of 152 refugees at a camp in Gatumba in 2004. The atrocities may have abated in intensity, but they never stopped. The peace agreement that was signed accepted the legitimacy of forces aligned to Uganda and Rwanda, and thus conserved their interests by integrating them into the new state. The army itself remained fractured along the lines that developed in the war, with some elements aligning with Rwandan Hutu exiles to extract gold and tin. The elections themselves were essentially a contest between those who had gained a position of power in the context of the war of plunder, and were for that reason boycotted by the former elected Prime Minister Étienne Tshisekedi, who said that the process was fraudulent. The main opposition figure, Jean-Pierre Bemba, was a cellphone entrepreneur and a leader of the Mouvement de Liberation Congolais, which essentially represented Ugandan interests. Others in the race included the son of Mobutu Sese-Seko, leading a slate advocating an oxymoronic 'Mobutist Democracy'. And now we see an escalated rebellion by forces under the leadership of a Rwandan Tutsi in a mineral rich area on the border with Rwanda, who have reportedly engaged in the burning of refugee camps, and caused the flight of up to a million refugees. It has been three years since General Laurent Nkunda founded the National Congress for the Defence of the People, which operates in the Kivu region, having split a number of the Banyamulenge from the RDC. This latest insurgency has not emerged out of nowhere. He is alleging that his goal is to force the government to stop the atrocities of the Interahamwe against ethnic Tutsis, who continue to operate from within the Congo. The Congolese government holds Rwanda responsible for backing the insurgency. This is a reasonable assumption, repeated in the Francophone Congolese press, and it would appear to be borne out by the fact that negotiations are due to take place between Kagame and Kabila without bothering to involve Nkunda: what I mean is that if the negotiations to resolve this issue don't require Nkunda's involvement, he must be a subordinate. If this is correct, a further inference would be that the rebellion constituted an attempt by the Rwandan ruling class to affect the ongoing negotiations process inside the DRC and gain further leverage over the still fragile government. Perhaps it is futile to second-guess the situation to this extent, and the intricate dynamics of plunder, ethnic repression, state-building, regional aggression, insurgency, capital accumulation and UN superintendency don't necessarily yield to such a simple explanation. Even so, speculation of this order is at least superior to the miasmic non-explanations that have hitherto been offered in much of the reporting, which reduces it to a stark humanitarian drama to which the residents of the Congo can supply no answer.

David Miliband is threatening to send troops if there is no diplomatic resolution. Well, then - can whitey help? Can he deliver Europe to Africa? The terms of such a question, in light of the co-responsibility of European states for the plunder and massacre, are insulting. In fact, it is implicated in precisely the sort of racist colonial ideology that not only abetted one of the most vicious slave empires in the world, but also drove the United States to crush authentic self-determination for the Congolese people when they finally broke Belgian rule in 1960. The overthrow of Lumumba and his ultimate murder had been justified on the grounds that, as Claire Timberlake, the US ambassador to the Congo, argued, there was neither "a civilized people or a responsible government in the Congo". Lumumba was "anti-white", "just not a rational being", and was perpetuating a "Commie design", because he intended to govern the resources of the extraordinarily rich country in accordance with the interests of the population. The idea that whitey, not those who had just overthrown the vicious Belgian colonists, spoke for the interests of the native population, was as ubiquitous then as it is today. I would just point out, for those who think that those who destroyed Belgian rule have forgotten how to resist, that the civil society opposition in the Congo, based in the working class movement, made the first serious dents in the US-imposed Mobutu regime for all its brutality, imposing elected rule for a period (which rule was, incidentally, never supported by the West). The Kabila insurgency could not have happened without the prior development of a mass resistance, which both weakened the Mobutu regime and created the language of liberation that Kabila would try to usurp. Even in the early, brutal phases of the war, the population managed to contain Laurent Kabila's autocratic degeneration, and might well have been able to overthrow him if the military hadn't preemptively dumped him. The popular resistance to the plunderers expressed in the Mai-Mai was and is hardly perfect, but it has to be acknowledged as a major force holding off the armed groups, and its longevity shows that, despite the horrendous trauma of the war years that has been largely imposed by those now purporting to bear the solution, the people of the Congo are not reduced to bare-forked figures whose sole hope wears a cape and red underwear.

A closing note: the language being used to mobilise sentiment for a potential intervention is at times rather bizarre. Consider Bernard Kouchner's shrill warning that: "a massacre on a scale that has probably never been seen in Africa is happening virtually before our eyes." This is a manifest exaggeration, unless Kouchner really has evidence of killing to beat the Rwandan genocide. It does reflect France's imperial commitments, in which it supports the Interahamwe against the RPF. Kouchner, it is worth mentioning, was an interlocutor for the Mitterrand government during its intervention in the Rwandan genocide (or rather, its contribution to the genocide), and attempted to persuade the UN to assent to a French-led mission into the country which would inevitably involve backing the genocidaires. He still defends the French government's intervention in Rwanda, whitewashes its involvement in atrocities. He says only that they 'misunderstood' the politics of the situation, and otherwise it was humanitarian intervention. Had the French military intervened more than they did and thus helped the murder proceed much more efficiently, it would have been humanitarian intervention ultra. You see how this works?

Labels: colonialism, congo, democratic republic of congo, genocide, imperialism, interahamwe, kabila, mobutu, racism, rwanda, uganda