Over a year ago I complained about the false anti-imperialism that was being used to defend the NATO interventions in Libya. At the time, I argued that this was due to a failure to understand imperialism but assumed that those who made these arguments (then, people such as Gilbert Achcar and Jean-Luc Nancy) would be quickly relegated to obscurity, go the way of Christopher Hitchens, or hopefully recant in a year's time when imperialism consolidated its aims in those areas that these very uncritical "leftists" were woefully misunderstanding. And though it is clear that the majority of the left has either dismissed or chastised these pseudo anti-imperialists as cruise missile socialists, they still continue to babble on about NATO as some sort of "lesser evil" that is supposedly supporting organic freedom movements in Libya and Syria.
Internet leftists such as Pham Binh and Louis Proyect, for example, have continued to endorse this pro-imperialist leftism (which they attempt to sell as some sort of critical anti-imperialism when it is anything of the sort), screaming that their arguments are not at all identical to the arguments people like Hitchens made about Afghanistan and Iraq. A rather sad affair, to be sure, since both Binh and Proyect are responsible for websites that has also produced a lot of useful and interesting material… Thus, their capitulation to imperialism has been, at least in my mind, more tragic than Hitchens' capitulation since Hitchens had been a turn-coat since the Falklands War, and never as critically leftwing as his sympathizers wanted to believe, for a very long time.
These cruise missile socialists have produced innumerable essays that support, though claiming with hair shirts and self-flagellation that they aren't really supporting, the NATO interventions in Libya and Syria because––uncritically inspired by the intifadas of the Arab Spring that they seem to think are connected with the movements they're now championing as leftist martyrs against the rest of the left––these are supposedly revolutions. As I recently joked with an internet comrade, it would be fun to take these essays and substitute Libya with Afghanistan, Syria with Iraq, Gaddafi with the Taliban, Saddam Hussein with Assad… Because what they're arguing (as I noted in one of the links cited above) is identical to what pro-imperialists, especially leftists who pretended they weren't imperialists, argued about the imperialist interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the Taliban was far more reactionary than Gaddafi (who was once, and I emphasize once, an anti-imperialist), and Hussein was on the same level of reaction as Assad… Really, these ruling classes needed to be overthrown, but the majority of people who argued against imperialist intervention in these cases were conversely trying to argue that we should support the Taliban or Saddam Hussein (some did, but they were idiots) and you don't need to side with a local dictator to oppose imperialism. So why do we now, in the instances of Libya and Syria, have a forcing of this bullshit binary?
Well Pham Binh had a wonderfully genius answer in a comment string to one of his posts when someone mentioned Afghanistan. He rhetorically answered this critic with a comment about how they were "lumping every Third World country together as part of a 'foreignstan' where you can apply one-size-fits-all-cookie-cutter political lines." [It's in the comments section of this post, though I am loathe to send any traffic that way at this moment.] Wonderful rhetorical attempt to dodge the question, and an abdication of historical materialism. Thing is, Pham Binh, the revolutionary forces in places like Afghanistan [like the CmPA] do see the imperialist interests in the surrounding region as part of the same project. Hell, I guess they're also guilty of "foreignstaning" things. I also guess it's also wrong to look at similarities in imperialist strategy, because every instance is unique, and so why talking about a theory of imperialism to begin with? The rhetoric is telling because, with its reliance on a red herring fallacy, it clearly abdicates guilt by shifting the argument into tangental territory. It is also quite humorous because the same "foreignstan" argument applies to the Pham Binhs of the world: why do you think the movements of the Arab Spring are the same "one-size-fits-all-cookie-cutter" movements of Libya and Syria? Really, the only reason people such as Binh and Proyect care about Libya and Syria is because of Arab Spring [and the imperialists have been working hard to manufacture the supposed similarities, so it's not surprising] and they've been doing their own homogenization (only here it actually is a homogenization and not a universal theorization, geez guys work on your theory!) and then accusing their critics of such homogenization when they're the guilty party.
Let us be clear, as the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement once proclaimed, the prime contradiction in the world today is between imperialism and the oppressed masses. To imagine that imperialism is on the side of the oppressed masses is to deny this revolutionary insight, to falsely side with the oppressed masses by supporting that which guarantees oppression. (There are other contradictions that are mediated by this contradiction, most importantly the universal contradiction between proletariat and bourgeois, but I've discussed this elsewhere.) Point being, you side with the main representatives of imperialism in any way shape or form, you are also siding against the needs of the oppressed masses even if you have some sophistic arguments about how the masses want the help of imperialism. Yeah, imperialism argues this as well.
Perhaps this pseudo anti-imperialism is just some Obama era obsession with "peace-keeping"––you know, the friendlier face of imperialism that US citizens don't understand is still imperialism because they're used to confusing imperialism with George W. Bush style militarism. But up here in Canada, those of us who understand that Canada is also an imperialist country, are pretty aware that this way of doing interventions isn't somehow anti-imperialist. So perhaps the mistakes of people like Binh and Proyect can be written off as another version of American exceptionalism. After all, the global revolutionary movements that they don't care to understand (because they're not in Libya or Syria) have been saying the same thing about the imperialism they like. But oh well, I guess they can just mobilize their oh-so-clever "foreignstan" arguments against Afghani and Indian revolutionaries for daring to conceptualize an internationalism.
The problem, however, is that these cruise missile socialists have caused a problem for the anti-imperialists at the centres of global capitalism. For there is now a tendency that, in its outrage to reject this pro-NATO idiocy, is attempting to argue that Assad and his allies are staunch "anti-imperialists". So rather than reject this pseudo anti-imperialism on its own merits, anti-imperialists are constructing a counter pseudo anti-imperialism that is equally vacuous. If the NATO intervention in Syria is wrong, the argument goes, then the Assad government must be correct!
Just as we never needed to make this argument about the Taliban or Saddam Hussein in order to condemn imperialist interventions there, why do we suddenly need to make up a false anti-imperialist history for people like Assad? This was someone who had Palestinian revolutionaries hunted down, who permitted the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights, who occupied parts of Lebanon, who condoned the torture of foreign citizens who were shipped to him by CSIS and the CIA… a representative of the compradori at one point, more a leader who wanted to be part of the imperialist camp but never was very good at it and spent most of his time doing it for an imperialist power that wasn't the prime imperialist power––why are we supposed to suddenly see him as an anti-imperialist hero? Just because the Binhs and Proyects of the world support the anti-Assad NATO intervention, that's why, not because of anything actually concrete. But no matter: we can make up whatever we need to justify our support of a comprador regime that has fallen out of favour, and who the hell cares if we didn't do this for the Taliban or Saddam Hussein!
We need to return to a proper anti-imperialism that places the onus of oppression on the imperialists without necessarily assuming that the vilified parties are, just by virtue of being vilified, automatically anti-imperialists. Again: we didn't do this with the Taliban, and we didn't do this with the Iraqi Ba'athist regime, but at the same time we could grasp that the imperialist interventions in these contexts were imperialist. You don't need to support reactionaries to accept the fact that imperialists only intervene in "foreign" theatres in order to do imperialist things, and that the people they back will end up becoming (as they always have become) representatives of imperialist power. To suddenly pretend that Libya and Syria are moments of a low-level humanitarian intervention, and that what these interventionists are telling us about the forces on the ground is correct, is ludicrous. At the same time, to pretend that the targeted regimes are revolutionary, or anti-imperialist in a subjective sense (because anyone who opposes imperialist intervention, even for the wrong reasons, is temporarily objectively anti-imperialist, but this is always and only temporary), is just a knee-jerk reaction to idiotic pseudo anti-imperialism.
So levity, please! No more cruise missile socialism, nor more simplistic anti-imperialism that is tendered only to attack cruise missile socialism, and let's return to making leftist critical analyses of concrete situations. Because if the Binhs and Proyects of the world are incapable of making concrete analyses of concrete situations (and in the cases of Libya and Syria this incapability is clear), then it's rather pathetic to respond with the same idealism.
Internet leftists such as Pham Binh and Louis Proyect, for example, have continued to endorse this pro-imperialist leftism (which they attempt to sell as some sort of critical anti-imperialism when it is anything of the sort), screaming that their arguments are not at all identical to the arguments people like Hitchens made about Afghanistan and Iraq. A rather sad affair, to be sure, since both Binh and Proyect are responsible for websites that has also produced a lot of useful and interesting material… Thus, their capitulation to imperialism has been, at least in my mind, more tragic than Hitchens' capitulation since Hitchens had been a turn-coat since the Falklands War, and never as critically leftwing as his sympathizers wanted to believe, for a very long time.
These cruise missile socialists have produced innumerable essays that support, though claiming with hair shirts and self-flagellation that they aren't really supporting, the NATO interventions in Libya and Syria because––uncritically inspired by the intifadas of the Arab Spring that they seem to think are connected with the movements they're now championing as leftist martyrs against the rest of the left––these are supposedly revolutions. As I recently joked with an internet comrade, it would be fun to take these essays and substitute Libya with Afghanistan, Syria with Iraq, Gaddafi with the Taliban, Saddam Hussein with Assad… Because what they're arguing (as I noted in one of the links cited above) is identical to what pro-imperialists, especially leftists who pretended they weren't imperialists, argued about the imperialist interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the Taliban was far more reactionary than Gaddafi (who was once, and I emphasize once, an anti-imperialist), and Hussein was on the same level of reaction as Assad… Really, these ruling classes needed to be overthrown, but the majority of people who argued against imperialist intervention in these cases were conversely trying to argue that we should support the Taliban or Saddam Hussein (some did, but they were idiots) and you don't need to side with a local dictator to oppose imperialism. So why do we now, in the instances of Libya and Syria, have a forcing of this bullshit binary?
Well Pham Binh had a wonderfully genius answer in a comment string to one of his posts when someone mentioned Afghanistan. He rhetorically answered this critic with a comment about how they were "lumping every Third World country together as part of a 'foreignstan' where you can apply one-size-fits-all-cookie-cutter political lines." [It's in the comments section of this post, though I am loathe to send any traffic that way at this moment.] Wonderful rhetorical attempt to dodge the question, and an abdication of historical materialism. Thing is, Pham Binh, the revolutionary forces in places like Afghanistan [like the CmPA] do see the imperialist interests in the surrounding region as part of the same project. Hell, I guess they're also guilty of "foreignstaning" things. I also guess it's also wrong to look at similarities in imperialist strategy, because every instance is unique, and so why talking about a theory of imperialism to begin with? The rhetoric is telling because, with its reliance on a red herring fallacy, it clearly abdicates guilt by shifting the argument into tangental territory. It is also quite humorous because the same "foreignstan" argument applies to the Pham Binhs of the world: why do you think the movements of the Arab Spring are the same "one-size-fits-all-cookie-cutter" movements of Libya and Syria? Really, the only reason people such as Binh and Proyect care about Libya and Syria is because of Arab Spring [and the imperialists have been working hard to manufacture the supposed similarities, so it's not surprising] and they've been doing their own homogenization (only here it actually is a homogenization and not a universal theorization, geez guys work on your theory!) and then accusing their critics of such homogenization when they're the guilty party.
Let us be clear, as the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement once proclaimed, the prime contradiction in the world today is between imperialism and the oppressed masses. To imagine that imperialism is on the side of the oppressed masses is to deny this revolutionary insight, to falsely side with the oppressed masses by supporting that which guarantees oppression. (There are other contradictions that are mediated by this contradiction, most importantly the universal contradiction between proletariat and bourgeois, but I've discussed this elsewhere.) Point being, you side with the main representatives of imperialism in any way shape or form, you are also siding against the needs of the oppressed masses even if you have some sophistic arguments about how the masses want the help of imperialism. Yeah, imperialism argues this as well.
Perhaps this pseudo anti-imperialism is just some Obama era obsession with "peace-keeping"––you know, the friendlier face of imperialism that US citizens don't understand is still imperialism because they're used to confusing imperialism with George W. Bush style militarism. But up here in Canada, those of us who understand that Canada is also an imperialist country, are pretty aware that this way of doing interventions isn't somehow anti-imperialist. So perhaps the mistakes of people like Binh and Proyect can be written off as another version of American exceptionalism. After all, the global revolutionary movements that they don't care to understand (because they're not in Libya or Syria) have been saying the same thing about the imperialism they like. But oh well, I guess they can just mobilize their oh-so-clever "foreignstan" arguments against Afghani and Indian revolutionaries for daring to conceptualize an internationalism.
The problem, however, is that these cruise missile socialists have caused a problem for the anti-imperialists at the centres of global capitalism. For there is now a tendency that, in its outrage to reject this pro-NATO idiocy, is attempting to argue that Assad and his allies are staunch "anti-imperialists". So rather than reject this pseudo anti-imperialism on its own merits, anti-imperialists are constructing a counter pseudo anti-imperialism that is equally vacuous. If the NATO intervention in Syria is wrong, the argument goes, then the Assad government must be correct!
Just as we never needed to make this argument about the Taliban or Saddam Hussein in order to condemn imperialist interventions there, why do we suddenly need to make up a false anti-imperialist history for people like Assad? This was someone who had Palestinian revolutionaries hunted down, who permitted the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights, who occupied parts of Lebanon, who condoned the torture of foreign citizens who were shipped to him by CSIS and the CIA… a representative of the compradori at one point, more a leader who wanted to be part of the imperialist camp but never was very good at it and spent most of his time doing it for an imperialist power that wasn't the prime imperialist power––why are we supposed to suddenly see him as an anti-imperialist hero? Just because the Binhs and Proyects of the world support the anti-Assad NATO intervention, that's why, not because of anything actually concrete. But no matter: we can make up whatever we need to justify our support of a comprador regime that has fallen out of favour, and who the hell cares if we didn't do this for the Taliban or Saddam Hussein!
We need to return to a proper anti-imperialism that places the onus of oppression on the imperialists without necessarily assuming that the vilified parties are, just by virtue of being vilified, automatically anti-imperialists. Again: we didn't do this with the Taliban, and we didn't do this with the Iraqi Ba'athist regime, but at the same time we could grasp that the imperialist interventions in these contexts were imperialist. You don't need to support reactionaries to accept the fact that imperialists only intervene in "foreign" theatres in order to do imperialist things, and that the people they back will end up becoming (as they always have become) representatives of imperialist power. To suddenly pretend that Libya and Syria are moments of a low-level humanitarian intervention, and that what these interventionists are telling us about the forces on the ground is correct, is ludicrous. At the same time, to pretend that the targeted regimes are revolutionary, or anti-imperialist in a subjective sense (because anyone who opposes imperialist intervention, even for the wrong reasons, is temporarily objectively anti-imperialist, but this is always and only temporary), is just a knee-jerk reaction to idiotic pseudo anti-imperialism.
So levity, please! No more cruise missile socialism, nor more simplistic anti-imperialism that is tendered only to attack cruise missile socialism, and let's return to making leftist critical analyses of concrete situations. Because if the Binhs and Proyects of the world are incapable of making concrete analyses of concrete situations (and in the cases of Libya and Syria this incapability is clear), then it's rather pathetic to respond with the same idealism.
It's really sad to see tendencies like the Communist Party of Canada defend brutal authoritarian rulers like Gaddafi and Assad as "objectively anti-imperialist". It's the same problem that the International Socialists have when they defend Islamic regimes: that faulty the-enemy-of-my-enemy-must-be-my-friend logic.
ReplyDeleteOn the other side, the willingness of so many on the left to countenance imperialist meddling as so-called humanitarian intervention is disgusting. But I guess it's totally different when it's a "cool" black Democrat ordering the bombing instead of a white Republican.
Also, you'll find no disagreement from me that the entire NDP parliamentary caucus voting to support Harper's motion for intervention in Libya was absolutely shameful and a black mark in the party's history. Obviously the NDP is a reformist party in terms of its leadership. But still, that was a new low.
Mulciber - I think your racializing of the issue is not sufficient and indeed offensive. It's not about a "cool" president who is a person of colour. It is about an essentially political difference, between anti-imperialism and liberal internationalism, the latter of which is a perfectly coherent - and problematic - ideology, but one that is perhaps even more common among French Leftists than American ones (eg Achcar). Also, while I'm not fan of the IS, I haven't seen them defending Islamic regimes - it is true, however that the IST in Egypt are working with the Muslim Brotherhood - is that the reference you are making? Even if I find this position problematic, it is not even close to the far more problematic stance of the IMT on Palestine or Ireland.
ReplyDeleteAlso - to Josh: While I agree with you about Binh (and apparently he has been booted from well known spaces in which he had been an activist) and I think that its a shame as he's done some useful stuff, I really think that Project can be read as supporting any NATO or foreign intervention in Syria. I think his point is aimed at the large swathe of the US Left (including on a listserve that both Louis and I are on) that make RT-inspred claims about Syria's "Anti-Imperialism". So he's giving back a strong argument, which I think is refreshing. That Binh takes him one step further is clear. Make no mistake, I think his rhetoric lends itself to the kind of interpretation you are setting forth - and he annoys me on a lot of issues - but I don't think he's lending support to imperialism.
First of all, while I think there's good stuff on Binh's site, I think his arguments are precisely about supporting NATO intervention even when he claims they are not because (as his argument goes) he's not "generally" supporting NATO but only in this whole enemy-of-my-enemy kind of way, as if Assad is somehow a greater enemy than NATO could ever be, or as if NATO's interests in Syria are better than Assad's. Obviously I also pointed out the claims about Syria's "anti-imperialism" are a problem, but Binh's position is even worse, and I don't find it refreshing because other former members of the left camp made similar arguments about Afghanistan. Hell, even RAWA was saying that the intervention in Afghanistan wasn't an occupation and that at least it wasn't as bad as "the warlords" (and now they're beginning to recant). I think by arguing as he does, then he is indeed theoretically supporting imperialism. When you make this mistake on the level of global contradiction, it means you are against the oppressed masses. This does not mean, however, that he is a dyed-in-the-wool imperialist, only that his arguments theoretically lend support to imperialism.
DeleteAlso, forgot to add... Just to be fair to Mulciber's comments about Obama (though I agree with the essence of your reply, and think it is helpful to foreground the IMT's pro-colonial position on Palestine and Ireland), these were probably inspired by a paragraph where I joked that maybe the pseudo anti-imperialism of people like Proyect and Binh was inspired by the fact that Obama and not Bush was in charge of the NATO intervention––based, of course, on the way the Obama administration seemed to sap up a lot of the left's energy. This was more of a rhetorical flourish than a scientific/theoretical insight, done more for the sake of humour than anything else. So you can blame me that someone took that point and ran with it, lol.
DeleteMy point was not defending Binh - it was defending Proyect, who unlike Binh is not pushing for intervention... it was worded carelessly but I was trying to differentiate the two of them.
DeleteI also want to add that I am having trouble parsing the logic of how any given "stance" theoretically supports imperialism. Unless that position is articulated, then I don't see how one can find it "lending support" to imperialism. I don't like the idea that if I make an argument that can be used a certain way and that is amenable to a certain school of thought and practice that I oppose, then I'm supporting that school of thought/practice merely by not inoculating my arguments against how they could be used.
DeleteWhat I find flawed about both Binh and Proyect's perspective is not their support of NATO, but the premise from which it derives - that events in Syria are "revolutionary". Once something is found to be "revolutionary" there is no telling what positions one may end up with. But I have a feeling that both of them would be at the forefront of organizing against such a campaign, were a campaign to occur - which I think is unlikely. Incidentally, Israel is pushing to keep Assad in power.
I wasn't trying to racialize the issue, rather I was criticizing the liberal fixation on identity politics. But you're right, I should have just left race out of it altogether. It was an irrelevant and unnecessary addition.
DeleteThe main thing is the party label. Wide swaths of the anti-war movement in the United States seem to only oppose Republican wars. What was a mere rhetorical flourish for JMP, I believe is an issue that warrants greater attention: the tendency of so many on the left to forget their supposed principles when it's a Democrat/Liberal in power. I've said this many times, but it seems the majority of American liberals would vote for Vlad the Impaler if he had a (D) after his name.
Regarding the IMT's position on Palestine and Ireland, what you consider "pro-colonial", I consider to be adherence to Marxist first principles - "workers of the world unite" and all that. Obviously colonialism and imperialism are real and serious issues, but I feel that excessively fixating on that puts up more barriers between workers of different nationalities instead of focusing on what they share in common: their class.
Regarding the IS, I think I made an error. I believed they were defending the Iranian regime, but upon closer inspection it looks like that was some other tendency. However, I do think the IS' support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was misguided in the extreme.
Delete(Apologies for the multiple posts. I sometimes write a comment and then realize I forgot to mention something.)
Jordachev: sorry, I didn't realize you were speaking primarily about Proyect. As for how a stance can be imperialist without claiming it's imperialist, this should be pretty obvious. If you write something endorsing imperialist intervention as a "lesser evil" in a global context where we have to understand that the prime contradiction is between imperialism and the oppressed masses, if you side with the former in any way than you are rejecting class struggle and thus are intrinsically endorsing imperialism. It doesn't matter if you try to say "I'm not against imperialism generally" if you defend it, however weakly, in specific contexts.
DeleteMulciber: thanks for the clarification and yes I agree that the IS support for the Muslim Brotherhood was misguided. But most of the left, when it came to understanding the Egyptian uprising, was equally misguided. At least the IS concretely tried to name a significant force on the ground as revolutionary (and, of course, were/are wrong), compared to other organizations that simply assumed there would be some sort of spontaneous revolutionary emergence, that the Muslim Brotherhood (or in a possible world scenario a liberal organization, since this was the other coherent political faction) wouldn't emerge as the prime power, and that maybe the situation wasn't as revolutionary as they assumed without a revolutionary organization. Jordachev also pointed out how positions taken by the IS are possibly less politically problematic than situations taken by the IMT and I'm in agreement with his points. It is one thing to accuse the IS for tailing the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, but when it comes to Palestine (one example he gave) the IMT thinks a chauvinist colonial working class, whose very existence is dependent upon settler-colonialism and thus is clear-cut example of a labour aristocracy, is going to lead the revolution when, if you actually look at the history (even the history described by Israeli left radicals), this "working class" has done everything possible to support Israeli colonialism.
[cont.] These are not "marxist first principles" if you understand marxism as a living science that continues after Marx and Engels. Lenin considered the National Question as one of the primary questions of the third international. There has also been a history of anti-colonial struggle that this analysis clearly ignores. Revolutionary communists speak of "concrete analyses of concrete situations" and the IMT analysis in colonial situations is not concrete; it is abstract, it ignores history, it even ignores the analyses of the most advanced sectors of the Israeli working class on this issue. "Workers of the world unite" is correct as an abstract principle, but concretely (and as historical materialists we must always seek to understand the abstract through the material concrete or we are idealist dogmatists) it needs to be recognized that some workers can only exist as workers due to their parasitical dependence on others. Again, Lenin's theory of the labour aristocracy (developed from Engels' insights) is important in this context. Why should workers want to unite with those whose existence allows them a greater measure of privilege? Why should workers who are treated as an underclassed by a privileged group of colonial labour aristocrats want to unite with those whose very existence is contingent upon colonial labour? Fanon had some very important things to say about this; entire revolutionary movements outside of the eurocentric context developed universal truths based on this understanding. And as for Ireland... even Marx and Engels understood that the Irish workers needed to free themselves from the yoke of British domination––they were able to understand their "workers of the world unite" maxim [which, let's be fair, was a maxim and not a scientific axiom] in this context. We can use this as a germ for understanding Palestine, or for indigenous self-determination in places like Canada for that manner, rather than simply believing that it was oh-so-simple and everyone can get along and that the working class itself is not stratified due to historical and social context… this is a "why-can't-we-all-get-along" ideology and amounts to liberalism.
DeleteFirst off - I don't think Proyect (unlike Binh) has described a NATO intervention as a lesser evil. Binh has done so, and one could suggest he merely "ran with" Proyect's argument (and some are saying that), but I don't see how the argument that Proyect makes (which merely emphasizes the perfidy of the Syrian state and what is seen as the revolutionary character of the conflict, but does not actually call NATO intervention a lesser evil) contains a path dependency that leads inexorably to support of imperialism... Before the US obsession with Iraq, back in the eighties, it was Leftists who were the first to write critical accounts of Baath rule in Iraq. Later some of those accounts were used by others in support of the first Gulf war. Are those who made the initial arguments responsible for how they were later used? I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I agree that Binh has done damage, since he's not only bent the stick, he' broken it, but I think Proyect makes really important points about vulgar anti-imperialism - and the target of his points is not to build Left support for NATO, but to dull the vulgar MRzine style anti-imperialism that floats around some Marxist listserves. His posts can only be understood in the context of arguing against the incessant defenses of Syria (and before it Iran, etc.) Binh, on the other hand, goes overboard.
DeleteHmm, I never knew Lenin talked about a "labour aristocracy". I always thought that was a purely Maoist concept. Do you know what essay/book he talked about that in?
DeleteYour arguments are reasonable enough. From what I hear, most of the Israeli settlers hold fairly reactionary opinions about the Palestinians and Arabs. But what if you're a progressive-minded Israeli worker in, say, Tel Aviv who hates the hardcore right-wing nationalism of Likud types and sympathizes with the grievances of the Palestinians? Isn't there any way to bridge that gap? Or is the Israeli proletariat doomed to be forever at odds with Palestinian workers because they come from a more privileged culture?
I understand that as historical materialists we always need to look at the concrete situation on the ground. But one of the most inspiring aspects of Marxism for me has been the way it transcends petty divisions of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, all the crap that the ruling class uses to divide us. The idea that well-meaning workers from imperialist countries can never understand their working class brothers and sisters in colonized countries is a pretty depressing notion...
Jordachev: like I said before, my problem was more with Binh than Proyect, though I think the latter spends so much time defending the former that it makes him suspect.
DeleteMulciber: the theory of the "labour aristocracy" is Lenin's theorization based on a term taken from Engels, not Mao's. He wrote a lot about it, and the term showed up in a large number of his analyses of imperialism. [Just search it out on any Lenin archive… Off the top of my head (it's late!) "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism" and "Thesis on the Fundamental Tasks of the 2nd Congress of the Third International", but there are much more because he used this concept so frequently it's everywhere in his writing on imperialism] All marxist academics, even if they reject the term, will say it was mainly theorized by Lenin.
The point isn't that the colonizing working class is doomed forever to be at odds with the colonized working class, just that colonialism produces these odds. Eliminating colonialism, and in this the colonizing proletariat if it is truly revolutionary can participate, will level the playing field. This has been done in other contexts, and mass movements can happen but only if the national question [and this again was Lenin's insight] is grasped.
Divisions of race, ethnicity, nationality, sex, etc. are not just crap that the ruling class uses to divide us, and they aren't petty divisions. They are part of the way class is composed. I have written about this a lot; my previous post is precisely about this really simplistic way to approach other oppressions. Historically these differences have been overcome, but only by recognizing them as part of class and not as some super-added element fostered by a bourgeois conspiracy. Class is composed in colonial, racist, whatever environments so many times that we need to ask about its composition and not just assume easy answers that default on a wholly non-concrete notion of class. There can be solidarity here, but only if we recognize that "well meaning workers of imperialist countries" can understand their comrades only by recognizing the fact of imperialism. This has happened, this continues to happen, and this is necessary.
[cont.]
DeleteBut in a few days I think I might blog a bit on the concept of the national question, gleaned through Lenin, and why it is important. Otherwise, you should check out what Lenin wrote on this issue (and its connection with his theory of the labour aristocracy), and maybe even tangent off into the world of Frantz Fanon. I think all of this stuff only deepens our understanding of really existing communist struggle; it doesn't need to be taken, as some simplistic theorists fear, as anathema to solidarity. Again (and in a very dialectical sense) understanding the extent of these divisions can produce a true solidarity. Otherwise, we simply imagine that we are all united and ignore the fact that sometimes there are differences that are part of social class but that we don't want to admit are part of social class.
Definitely some food for thought there. I actually read Fanon's "Wretched of the Earth" last year and found it a fascinating new perspective (amusing side note: I was inspired to buy that book after reading a blog entry from a RCP supporter where they ridiculed Fightback's position on Israel/Palestine and said something like, "It's obvious that the so-called radicals at Fightback have never read a word of Frantz Fanon.")
DeleteI'll check out that last blog entry you mentioned as well as the Lenin articles. Looking forward to your proposed blog post on the national question.
Glad you liked Fanon. I think he's one of the great historical materialists and revolutionaries of the twentieth century. Unfortunately he's been much maligned by the post-colonial "identity politics" way of thinking, often treated as just a pre-cursor to their post-structural ideology, but he really did understand a lot of what they try to ignore. You should also check out James Yaki Sayles "Meditations on Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth"… he's someone who spent most of his life as a political prisoner in the US, and unrepentant commie who only died a few years ago after finally being released, because of his involvement with the radical wing of the Civil RIghts Movement. He wrote his reflections on Fanon, as a revolutionary communist, in prison, and he connects it with a lot of worldwide marxism and his own experience as a radical.
DeleteDon't know if my blog post on the national question will do it justice (I mean, Lenin wrote a book worth of essays on this issue, and it's probably better just to read Lenin, ahahaha), but I'll try to indicate the general contours, with maybe some quotes and references to Lenin for further insight. I dealt with this in greater detail in my PhD thesis, but it's not like that's going to be published anytime soon, contract semi-employed academic that I am, lol.
Proyect will expel people from his list who criticize Pham Binh. Proyect opossed the right of the Iraqis to engage in armed struggle against the US occupation forces. This objectively, means he supported the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
DeleteBinh is now allowing long winded comments in defense of the U.S. and U.K. invasion and occupation of Iraq, on his website, Northstar. Binh is now calling for participating in Democratic Party electoral campaigns.
Binh is constantly escalating. First, he started out trashing the Left and calling for the Left to liquidate. Next, he calls for U.S. military intervention in the Mideast, and finally his support of Socialists participating in the Democratic Party. What next Binh?
Well the call for socialists to participate in the Democratic Party cannot be blamed solely on Binh. There is a long standing tradition of socialists arguing for entryist tactics and usually Left-wing Communism an Infantile Disorder is used [badly] to justify this. The IMT, for example, is under the impression that the Democratic Party constitutes a mass worker's organization (as does the Labour Party in the UK, as does the NDP in Canada, etc.), in fact, in Canada at least, they spend most of their organizational energy canvassing for the NDP. So this might not be as strange as his capitulation to imperialism…
DeleteHow can Binh calling for participation in the Democratic Party not be blamed on Binh? True, Binh cannot be blamed for the action of other leftist who support participating in the Democratic Party. Binh can be blamed, for himself calling for support of the Democratic Party.
DeleteThe left tendency in the United States, that for all practical purposes. supported the Iranian regime in the 1980's was the Socialist Workers Party, then a sympathizing section of the United Secretariat Fourth International. The US SWP should NOT to be confused with an organization in the UK with the same name,which is part of the International Socialist Tendency.
Proyect now is on board with US military intervention in Syria. I jumping into this discussion a bit late, but even so, by late July of last year, Proyect was in agreement with Binh.
What an odd way to interpret my response. Obviously Binh can be blamed for his own position; my statement meant precisely what you said in the second sentence. The point I was making was that Binh is simply part of a larger revisionist tradition that, while he is responsible for advocating it, did not originate with him and would exist even without him, although he is a helpful ideologue for this tradition, yes. Please stop attributing positions to me that I do not make: I believe there was the qualifier of "solely" in the sentence you have misinterpreted, and the expansion *after* the sentence is about the general ideology of revisionism.
DeleteI do not disagree with anything you say in the second and third paragraphs, though the positions you are attributing to me are patently absurd. Where did I conflate the SWPs? I mentioned the IMT, which is its own tendency, as an example of how revisionist ideology is widespread, but not the SWP––either the UK or the US variant––in my previous comment.
I entered my comments about the SWP and Iran in the wrong place. It should have been at the reply prompt after the person who raised the issue. My apologies for that error. As you say, you never raised that issue. Are you able to make the technical adjustment, or should I re enter the comment at the proper location?
DeleteWhile true, Democratic Party entry did not originate with Binh, he comes from a political tradition that opposes that perspective. His mentor Proyect, at least in the past, has opposed entry into the Democratic Party. This is why this represents a change in Binh.
No, I can't juggle around posts: blogger pretty much wires them in where they are entered. Nor does blogger have a very good comment logic––once you are in a string of replies, it won't let you reply to specific people within that reply. One way to get around this, though, is simply to note who you are replying to on the reply string.
DeleteThanks for the label 'cruise missile socialists'. It is new to me. Have translated it to 'kryssningsmissilsocialister' (handy little word!) and think it may be used in my country too.
ReplyDeleteIt is a good term, isn't it? But I can't claim responsibility: I have no idea who coined the term, but it's been going around the internet left for the past five or six months.
DeleteI am pretty sure it was Edward Herman during the Bush years re Hitchens etc.
DeleteMaybe I should give you our local label which may correspond to the cruise missile gang: bombvaenster. ('ae' replaces a letter you are missing in your poor English alphabet, pronounced like 'ai' in 'air'.) Am not sure about the best translation, but it could be 'bomber leftists'.
DeleteThe earlier term was cruise missle liberal. The term cruise missle socialist came into use after Louis Proyect gave his support for Pham Binh, and Clay Claiborne, on Marxmail, aka petit bourgesoie dilettante mail,who advocate a US military intervention in Syria.
DeleteClaiborne had been active in the 1970's with the Communist Party, ML. He then descended into political obscurity until rescued by Louis Proyect. Claiborne is politically speaking, a one trick pony, with his support of the US military as a liberating force, globally.
Thanks for the background on the term.
DeleteHey, JMP. I've been reading you for a while and have come to ask your opinion. If this is a silly way to do it, I apologize.
ReplyDeleteI wrote a blog post recently about how socialism can actually be brought to the United states that claims, among other things, that principled communists in the United States should oppose any and all U.S. foreign military intervention. Once I posted this to /r/communism, someone soon hit me with what, especially at the moment, proved a real pickle to me: the U.S. bombing of ISIS outside of Kobane and their supplying the Kurds in Rojava with arms.
I found this post of yours today in the process of seeking out principled communists' opinions on tricky (or treated-as-tricky) foreign intervention scenarios. So now my question is, what do you think? What should a principled communist's line be on this particular intervention? And when you say..
> imperialists only intervene in "foreign" theatres in order to do imperialist things, and that the people they back will end up becoming (as they always have become) representatives of imperialist power.
.. do you feel that this applies to the Kurdish people receiving this assistance?
By the way, thank you very much for doing what you do.
Hello: this isn't a silly way to ask an opinion––after all, I see every comment posted in my comments folder. I think in the situation of Kobane things were not so cut-and-dried as the US actually backing the Kurdish resistance there. They provided arms in the hope of destabilization, the Kurdish resistance in Rojava took advantage of it, but it has become clear that the US is not interested in actually backing the Kurdish resistance there, considering that they still see Turkey as a client state. What seemed the case here was that the Kurdish resistance was taking advantage of a contradiction between imperialists, but at least the Rojava resistance was not interested in allowing the US to back them as as a patron aside from just taking weapons that were dropped. This has caused a stark division within the Kurdish camp, particularly in the way that it is reflected in the diaspora with a right line arguing that the Rojava resistance should work with the imperialists completely, and the left line representing the forces in Rojava who took the arms arguing that taking the weapons and using them against imperialist stooges was as far as they should go.
DeleteIn any case, the Rojava situation is somewhat complex, and there are always complexities beneath the abstract injunction that you quoted above. I think what does need to be elaborated upon further is what is meant by imperialist intervention: is it an imperialist intervention when revolutionary forces take weaponry from imperialists to use them for their own ends, or does everything and anything count as complete imperialist intervention? If the latter is the case, then we end up with a "you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools" narrative which has always struck me as somewhat idealist. At the same time, yes, there is a danger in taking weapons because many times there are strings attached, and there are those who take the weapons who will embrace those strings. Finally, I think we need to make a categorical distinction between the kind of interventions where weapons are taken and the kind of interventions where forces (such as the FSA) are directly and politically backed. I know this might not help, but I do feel that there is a level of complexity that the Rojava resistance has demonstrated and only time will tell how things are working out there, though I think it is pretty clear that the US wouldn't be happy with the continuation of that rebellion.
Thank you for your timely response! Your suggestion that we take care to understand the complexities of what counts as imperialist intervention is definitely helpful.
DeleteIt seems to me that you're making at least some suggestion that we shouldn't speak out against an imperialist power every last time it throws arms at someone--especially on the blue moon when it throws arms in the general direction of a significantly proletarian significantly revolutionary force.
So now another question that comes to mind (if you don't mind) is this: even if we don't denounce such particular actions (tossing arms toward proletarianish revolutionaryish forces), is it perhaps important for us to speak out if nothing else about the underlying connivingness of that arms-tossing?
And another question--and maybe my asking this will reveal some of my uncertainty about the principles that inform the way we ought to oppose imperialist intervention, so if you think you can identify the source of my confusion, please feel free to, say, recommend some reading material--what do we say about the United States bombing ISIS in ISIS-held Kobane and the surrounding area? Is there an important distinction we should make as regards choosing what we say publicly (and how we say it) when the action is tossing arms toward a force we may support versus bombing the immediate enemy of a force we may support?
That seems a little convoluted--I hope it's clear enough. Thank you!
sorry about the delay in responding... i've been off-line for a couple days. In any case, my previous response was not meant to indicate that we shouldn't denounce imperialists if they do something that is used by anti-imperialists, only that we shouldn't chastise the latter group. We should always denounce imperialists because they are the enemy. Which should answer your first question: yes it is important for us to point out "the underlying connivingness of arms-tossing."
DeleteAs for your second question we just say that we support the forces in Kobane but not the imperialists. I think it was pretty clear that the US attacked ISIS in such a way that they didn't really help Kobane: it's not like the US has contributed much to the Rojava revolution.