Monthly: March 2011

27 Mar

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Rock-bottom redux: Last drinks rites for the Labor Party? Part One

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As a party able to offer itself as a viable government, Labor is not just under existential threat. It is finished. Unless, of course, it can engineer an extraordinary resurgence. Labor’s looming death as a stand-alone political entity is the biggest story in contemporary Australian politics.
—Peter Hartcher, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 March 2011
How the mighty have fallen.
Last October Left Flank wrote about the miserable state of the NSW Labor Party as it languished on a state Newspoll primary vote of just 23 percent, with even the Greens at 17 percent. At the time, cocky Victorian ALP ministers were publicly sledging the allegedly monolithic “NSW Right” for the disastrous federal election result, among other crimes against humanity. If only those not-so-faceless union bosses could have control of the party wrenched from their grip, peace would return to the land.

Since then, of course, the Victorians have suffered an ignominious defeat and the Gillard government has lurched from misstep to misstep, culminating in an all-time low primary of 30 percent for the ALP. In a remarkable article, the Sydney Morning Herald’s chief political writer Peter Hartcher has argued that the ALP is caught in an impossible bind: simultaneously leaking progressive, white-collar inner-city votes to the Greens on social and cultural issues on one side, and socially conservative “working class” votes to the Coalition on the other.
Most dramatically of all, yesterday the NSW opinion polls turned out to be mostly correct, but with an extra sting in the tail for the Left: The Keneally government was bundled out of power with a historic swing against it of over 16 percent, accompanied by a very small swing to the Greens and their possible failure to pick up a single lower house seat (Balmain remains too tight to call).
As results rolled in the Liberal spokesperson on the ABC News 24 coverage, Gladys Berejiklian, was shifting the party’s message from this being a vote against a rotten government to a vote giving Barry O’Farrell a clear endorsement (and therefore mandate). It was not long before the allegedly modest Tory leader was promising, “We’ll deliver the confident, limitless future we all [want] for ourselves and our children” and immediately invoking memories of John Howard’s mantra of governing “for all of us” when he said he would reject “sectional interests” to “govern for all people”. Already the Liberals are hinting they have supplanted the ALP as the party of the working class — in Sydney’s West and South-West as well as in industrial centres like Newcastle and the Illawarra.
Social conservatism and neoliberal politics
As I stood on a polling booth handing out for the Greens in Keneally’s seat of Heffron, the mood of voters sullen and indicative they were coming to treat the ALP to some “baseball bat” action. One of the Labor campaigners was a Keneally staffer. He told me that the notion the working class is “socially conservative” is hegemonic inside the party.
The mindset inside the ALP was on display from Gillard as she tried to define herself in a recent interview, describing her views on gay marriage, euthanasia and religion (recall she is an atheist) as “conservative”:
HOST: You sound a traditionalist. You sound very much a traditionalist, talking now. A cultural traditionalist.
PM: Well, I think in many ways that’s right, Paul. I had a pro-union, pro-Labor upbringing in a quite conservative family, in the sense of personal values. I mean, we believed in lots of things that are old-fashioned in the modern age. We believed in politeness and thrift and fortitude and doing duty and discipline. These are things that were part of my upbringing. They’re part of who I am today.
Earlier she had been challenged on her apparent capitulation to the Greens:
I know there’s some commentary to suggest I’ve only recently discovered a difference between the Labor Party and the Greens, what a load of old cobblers […]
To our right, we have the Liberal Party. In the modern age, climate change deniers and in denial about the power of markets.
To our left, we have the Greens, who do not have an economic philosophy about reform or about growth.
We drive mainstream change. That will play out in the climate change debate. Look at the CPRS. That didn’t go through the parliament because the Coalition under Tony Abbott didn’t care about climate change and because the Greens didn’t sufficiently care about jobs.
We were there in the mainstream. We’ll continue to drive the change this country needs for its future. That’s Labor heritage, Labor tradition.
The Left/Right definition here is carefully worded. The Right and Left are economic soulmates (both deny the “power of markets” the modern ALP worships); it’s just that Abbott is a climate denier and Bob Brown has contempt for ordinary people’s livelihoods.
At one level this could merely be a cover for the lack of a coherent program held by the ALP, and there is a large element of truth to this proposition. When you’re stuck for a way forward you simply claim you’re offering the safe middle ground. Yet as Left Flank has argued from the day we started, there has been a “flight from the centre” of politics that threatens any such centrist strategy. The polarisation of politics reflects a polarisation not so much along cultural lines demarcated by John Howard and largely accepted by a disoriented ALP (and the Greens), but along class lines produced by 30 years of neoliberalisation.
It is no wonder that the ALP finds itself in such a historically traumatic spot: It sees its version of looking after workers as more neoliberal economic reforms, ostensibly to protect and create jobs. Those very same reforms have delivered rising inequality, privatisation of public goods, cost of living pressures and the growing intrusion of market pressures into every sphere of life, starting from the workplace itself. These processes have hollowed out both Labor’s politics and social base. Yet even ALP and progressive commentators call for “reform”, and still more “reform” along these lines. It speaks to the absolute surrender of the mainstream Left to the neoliberal project that this could be seen as a solution to Labor’s woes.
Whatever happened to class?
Outside the elite echo chamber, things are somewhat more complicated (or perhaps less). In an important 2007 paper (pdf, starting page 401) of the effect of neoliberalism on public policy and popular opinion in Australia, “Neoliberalism, Inequality and Politics: The Changing Face of Australia”, Western et al concluded (among other things):
Alongside a major decline in union membership we see a decline in the view that unions have too much power, accompanied by an increase in the view that private business has too much power. The belief that redistribution of income and wealth should favour ordinary people and that surplus should be spent on social services rather than reducing taxation are two views that have increased in strength over the last two to three decades.
This chimes with the Australian Social Attitudes surveys carried out in the last decade, which also show that on “economic” (i.e. class) questions the public has moved substantially to the Left over the last 20 years, just as their political representatives have moved to the neoliberal Right. This Leftward shift includes questions of service delivery, where the opposition to user-pays, privatisation and cutbacks in health, education and transport runs very high.
It is not by coincidence that Barry O’Farrell ran a campaign that treated economic questions at a technocratic, anti-political level. He even sank the ALP’s power sell-off — despite considerable big business pressure to support it — on the basis that this would not be a “good deal” for NSW, not by ruling out support for privatisation in general. Iemma and Costa’s inability to ram through the sale was the beginning of the end for the government — precisely because the sale was a betrayal of any remaining core social democratic principles the party may have clung to. Into the vacuum O’Farrell could project the idea that his “moderate” politics could not possibly be worse than the ALP’s mess.
In this he was assisted by a mainstream media that depoliticised the class basis of Labor’s crisis, reducing it to issues of party “disunity”, or “Sussex Street games”, or a “toxic brand”, or “incompetence”, or more often a generalised moral critique of its decline as minister after minister exited in less than savoury circumstances. It was reminiscent of the last years of the UK Tory government in the 1990s, when the ruling class and its media machine turned on their favoured party by focusing on its scandals rather than the Thatcherite policies that really drove its electoral disintegration. It allowed Tony Blair to take office riding a wave of anti-Thatcherism only to simply continue her legacy.
Unable to seriously play the “class card” because of its continued obsession with securing some kind of electricity sale, the ALP was powerless to mount a challenge to such attacks on morals and “values”, and in fact Keneally mostly accepted them. Even the last minute attacks on O’Farrell’s hidden right-wing agenda had no teeth because the ALP had been implementing the same right-wing agenda for most of its 16 years in office, although the fear of the Liberals unleashed may have driven some potential Greens voters back to Labor.
This is the great contradiction at the heart of yesterday’s election. It was the Liberal Party that posed (falsely) as the progressive economic alternative to one of the most right-wing, pro-business state governments in living memory. To do this it had to tone down its deep commitment to neoliberal reform and its nasty social conservatism. Already some on the Left are bemoaning the lack of class consciousness among workers who seemingly voted against their material interests. But it was the way that class issues were depoliticised by the elite discourse that no major party (the Greens included) spoke directly to class interests — and even if Labor had wanted to, their record spoke louder than their words.
The voters of NSW have repudiated 16 years of economic rationalism. The problem is that there is no political party speaking for them.
Part 2 will look more closely at the Greens and whether Labor can recover

Filed Under: ALP, democracy, Greens, Julia Gillard, neoliberalism, NSW

24 Mar

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Western military intervention in Libya: There. Is. No. Alternative. Or is there?

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Egypt’s revolution — why has Libya been so different?

If there is one thought experiment that liberal supporters of Western military intervention in Libya ruled out of court (even forbade) it was the possibility that there were other social actors and strategies that could seriously affect the outcome of the battle between forces loyal to Gaddafi and the revolutionaries. For days we were told that a “massacre” or even “genocide” was imminent and that it could only averted by giving a vacillating United States some backbone to start a war help establish a no-fly zone. All considerations of the history of such actions had to be dismissed because of the urgency with which “something must be done” (the “something” meaning only one thing).

There were two groups who stood to benefit most from embellishing accounts of the impending humanitarian disaster in the most alarmist way possible: Western powers keen on intervening and the leadership of the uprising who saw this as the best option in their struggle. Our rulers have a long track record in propaganda designed to stoke popular passions for war, unafraid to tell plain lies if need be (the “Kuwaiti babies torn from their incubators” story was a prominent myth used to build support for the 1990-1 Gulf War).
A credible, pro-war Time report has pointed out that the talk of “genocide” was part of an Obama Administration attempt to “rehabilitate the doctrine of humanitarian intervention eight years after the Iraq war discredited U.S.-led military actions abroad.” The problem, however, is that “Gaddafi hasn’t done enough to justify humanitarian intervention—despite their rhetoric to the contrary, the administration and human rights organizations admit that reports of potential war crimes remain unconfirmed.”
The ability for the U.S. to muster international force to prevent thugs from killing innocent people is important. But the president and some of his advisers are so eager to rehabilitate the idea of preventive intervention that they’re exaggerating the violence they say they are intervening to prevent in Libya. “The effort to shoe-horn this into an imminent genocide model is strained,” says one senior administration official.
Indeed, Obama’s speech announcing US participation in the no-fly zone was phrased very much in the terminology of preventive war so favoured by Bush Jr.

Contradictions of the Libyan revolution

But the question of why the Libyan rebels, initially over-certain in their claims to represent the national-popular collective will, turned to such apocalyptic language more befitting the likes of Gaddafi himself is more interesting.
Libya lies geographically between Tunisia and Egypt, the sites of the two most advanced and complex revolutionary processes to have arisen in the Arab world in recent months. But its rebellion, while quickly achieving control of large parts of the country, didn’t play out the same way. Instead, there were rapid defections of significant sections of Gaddafi’s state structure (including many ambassadors) to the opposition. But the country remained geographically divided, in part because Gaddafi had cannily built networks of patronage through such mechanisms as provision of state employment in Tripoli, funded by oil revenues.
At this point the radicalisation hit a crossroads: To find a way to foment an urban uprising in Gaddafi’s strongholds or to pursue a more conventional military strategy. The directions chosen reflected not just the politics of the revolution’s self-proclaimed leaders (some until recently were key players in the dictatorship) but the response they received from the “International Community”:
Libya’s Transitional National Council (TNC), the body that grew out of the revolution, made a series of simple demands in the first crucial days of the uprising. It asked for the recognition of the TNC, access to the billions in sequestrated regime funds in order to buy weapons and other crucial supplies, and an immediate halt to the “mercenary flights” that provided Gaddafi’s regime with its foot soldiers.
For all those who argued that “something” must be done, such concrete steps could have made a massive difference to the balance of forces. So what was the response?
Western governments refused to accept even one of these demands. They even objected to weapons sales as they said these could fall into the hands of “Islamist terrorists.”
Instead, Western powers put a number of conditions on the revolution.
They demanded that any future Libyan government would honour all contracts signed by Gaddafi, including oil concessions.
They demanded that the strict repression of “Islamist” movements continue, and that any future government maintain Libya’s role as a guardian against African migration into southern Europe.
The West, in effect, blackmailed the revolution.
It is little wonder that the more conventional view of military engagement began to exert a greater hold on the revolution, especially once Gaddafi started to stage a serious fightback. Unlike Egypt, where the generals didn’t feel confident they could mobilise their troops without risking a military rebellion along class lines, in Libya a significant section of military leaders felt confident to throw their lot in with Gaddafi. In such a situation, a much more radical politics from below would be necessary to overcome the impasse created by a military asymmetry.
The seeking of an alliance with the West itself then creates new pressures on what type of politics the revolution’s leaders can pursue. As the rebellion’s foreign representatives rushed about from Western leader to Western leader, they would have had to adapt their message to get support.
With Western bombs smashing into the country, the performance of Libya’s former US ambassador on Al-Jazeera last night was ugly to watch. From the 19:00 min mark of the video he first dismisses a question about why Arab nations rather than the West can’t get involved (because Arab nations could never succeed) and then downplays the level of violence in US-backed Bahrain and Yemen, to make the case that Libya is an exception on moral grounds. Not much revolutionary solidarity at play there.

No-fly zone achieving what, exactly?

The disturbing thing for pro-interventionists is that the West’s war effort has so far not produced anything resembling a clear cut advantage for the rebels, apart from obligatory TV footage of them welcoming the fighter jets with cheers. A detailed report from Time suggests that Gaddafi has so far made substantial advances even while the no-fly zone operates, and that cracks are opening inside the revolutionary camp between more grassroots activists and ex-regime leaders. Already there is talk of the West settling for a partition as the best outcome, and one can only imagine how that will be policed in the long term. It is uncertainties such as these — coupled to the fear of mission creep and quagmire — that have exacerbated tensions within the Western camp.
More broadly, the immediate effect of Western intervention on the Arab revolutions has been to send the message to US allies that they can crack down harder on protest movements. For all its talk of moral purpose in Libya, the US continues to let atrocities occur in other states with barely a word of public criticism. This is not just a case of gross hypocrisy (although it is that). The double standard arises because the various moves and counter-moves being played out are part of Western efforts to reassert hegemony in the region through a mixture of outright force and “soft power” to shore up favoured dictators and/or pliant reformists. But the fact that they are so weakened — not just by the Arab uprisings but the grinding global recession of the last two years — means that their attempts to get back on top are fraught with massive risk. The high-stakes nature of the game also means that the human toll of their actions is likely to be much greater.
So if we’re not demanding more bombs be dropped on Libya, how might an anti-imperialist Left define some things “our” governments could do that would really help the rebellion? We could start with the TNC requests that the West refused, but Jamie Allinson has some other suggestions that I thought we should be raising.
Release the Gaddafi regime funds to the revolutionaries and allow them to buy weapons

Condemn the Saudi (GCC) invasion of Bahrain, cut ties with both regimes and with Yemen’s Ali Abdallah Saleh — removing also the military aid to his regime. Cancel all military contracts with them.

Allow Benghazi to become an open port for Arab — or other — revolutionary volunteers to join the fight.

Of course these won’t satisfy those on the Left who equate “doing something” with raining death and destruction on MENA countries, but they would be far more useful to both the Libyan rebels and the Arab revolutions more generally. 

Filed Under: Egypt, imperialism, Libya, revolution

22 Mar

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Barack Obama: How Mr. ‘Change You Can Believe In’ became Mr. ‘More Of The Same’

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Last time at Left Flank we noted that key neoconservative ideologues had encouraged the Obama administration to take action in Libya so that the United States could outflank the Arab revolutions by spreading its particular version of democratic reform. Stephen Walt, one of America’s most prominent realist foreign policy thinkers*, has suggested we shouldn’t be so surprised that this kind of thinking gets a run in the new, improved, liberal White House, because the ideological gap between neocons and liberal interventionists is not as big as you might think:

The only important intellectual difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is that the former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on U.S. power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance. Both groups extol the virtues of democracy, both groups believe that U.S. power — and especially its military power — can be a highly effective tool of statecraft. Both groups are deeply alarmed at the prospect that WMD might be in the hands of anybody but the United States and its closest allies, and both groups think it is America’s right and responsibility to fix lots of problems all over the world. Both groups consistently over-estimate how easy it will be to do this, however, which is why each has a propensity to get us involved in conflicts where our vital interests are not engaged and that end up costing a lot more than they initially expect.

So if you’re baffled by how Mr. “Change You Can Believe In” morphed into Mr. “More of the Same,” you shouldn’t really be surprised. George Bush left in disgrace and Barack Obama took his place, but he brought with him a group of foreign policy advisors whose basic world views were not that different from the people they were replacing. I’m not saying their attitudes were identical, but the similarities are probably more important than the areas of disagreement. Most of the U.S. foreign policy establishment has become addicted to empire, it seems, and it doesn’t really matter which party happens to be occupying Pennsylvania Avenue.

So where does this leave us? For starters, Barack Obama now owns not one but two wars. He inherited a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, and he chose to escalate instead of withdrawing.  Instead of being George Bush’s mismanaged blunder, Afghanistan became “Obama’s War.” And now he’s taken on a second, potentially open-ended military commitment, after no public debate, scant consultation with Congress, without a clear articulation of national interest, and in the face of great public skepticism. Talk about going with a gut instinct. 

There is a consistent logic to this approach of reproducing US relations of domination, which those on the pro-intervention Left want to dismiss by taking pot shots at what Guy Rundle calls “an archaic theory of imperialism, formed in the era of the Belgian Congo, and solidified, if not petrified during the decades of the Cold War.”
Of course the logic of imperialism can lead to imperial mis-adventure, but to imply (as Guy does) that its manoeuvres are based mainly in “ideological fantasies, obsessions, self-delusions [that] might motivate action” is to rely much too heavily on sheer contingency rather than social relations as the basis of explanation. In order to acknowledge but then set aside the depressing repetition-compulsion of Western military adventures ending in oppression and large-scale bloodshed, he inserts a disembodied idealist worldview in place of hard analysis of the social content of power relations. It leads him to make wild voluntarist claims about the ability of a marginal Western Left to deploy its “audacity” to affect national foreign policy, as if our rulers’ motives and actions are so easily changed by subaltern pressure, rather than explicable through the class interests they promote (if in a mediated fashion).
Modern theories of imperialism — which Rundle studiously ignores to construct his case that they are mired in some past era — recognise the dynamic of competitive relations between major national capitalisms wrestling over systems of control in economically and politically vital regions. Moreover, such analyses identify the increased competition caused by the disruption in circuits of capital accumulation in the Great Recession as both sharpening inter-state rivalry and provoking resistance from below that threatens to uproot relations of domination at both national and regional levels.
When you have a big hammer the whole world looks like a nail
Walt, in no sense a Marxist but recognising patterns of great power behaviour, has the good sense to point to the dangers of mission creep in Libya that result from the United States’ need to project itself as the world’s most important guarantor of stability.
Despite Obama’s declaration that he would not send ground troops into Libya — a statement made to assuage an overcommitted military, reassure a skeptical public, or both — what is he going to do if the air assault doesn’t work? What if Qaddafi hangs tough, which would hardly be surprising given the dearth of attractive alternatives that he’s facing? What if his supporters see this as another case of illegitimate Western interferences, and continue to back him? What if he moves forces back into the cities he controls, blends them in with the local population, and dares us to bomb civilians? Will the United States and its allies continue to pummel Libya until he says uncle? Or will Obama and Sarkozy and Cameron then decide that now it’s time for special forces, or even ground troops?

And even if we are successful, what then? As in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, over forty years of Qaddafi’s erratic and despotic rule have left Libya in very poor shape despite its oil wealth. Apart from some potentially fractious tribes, the country is almost completely lacking in effective national institutions. If Qaddafi goes we will own the place, and we will probably have to do something substantial to rebuild it lest it turn into an exporter of refugees, a breeding ground for criminals, or the sort of terrorist “safe haven” we’re supposedly trying to prevent in Afghanistan.

But the real lesson is what it tells us about America’s inability to resist the temptation to meddle with military power. Because the United States seems so much stronger than a country like Libya, well-intentioned liberal hawks can easily convince themselves that they can use the mailed fist at low cost and without onerous unintended consequences. When you have a big hammer the whole world looks like a nail; when you have thousand of cruise missiles and smart bombs and lots of B-2s and F-18s, the whole world looks like a target set. The United States doesn’t get involved everywhere that despots crack down on rebels (as our limp reaction to the crackdowns in Yemen and Bahrain demonstrate), but lately we always seems to doing this sort of thing somewhere. Even a smart guy like Barack Obama couldn’t keep himself from going abroad in search of a monster to destroy. 

This is not a mission creep that mainly emerges from personalities or bad policy ideas (although they always play a role). Rather, it is the behaviour of a superpower that remains top dog militarily, but has grown relatively economically weaker and politically less credible as time goes on — forced to rely on that big hammer to manage its global affairs above all else. This is not about the monolithism of imperialism — although to miss the militarily monolithic character of great powers is to deny their great power-ness. Rather, it is to recognise that what drives their actions is a perverse and brutal kind of rationality, although one embedded within an irrational system of competitive accumulation.
* Thanks to Kevin Ovenden for the link to the Walt article

Filed Under: Barack Obama, Guy Rundle, imperialism, Libya

21 Mar

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Libya, US intervention & the myth of the tail that wagged the dog

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Fissures emerge: abstentions in the Security Council
One of the justifications used by liberal and Left supporters of Western intervention in Libya is that the United States has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into this conflict. It is part of painting a picture that here, if only just this time, the situation of a revolution under siege and global humanitarian outcry is forcing the world’s largest military power to act for a good cause.
Sure, the argument goes, the US acted poorly and in self-interest in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sure, NATO went outside the law and made matters worse by bombing Serbia in 1999. Sure, the West was slow to support the people of Tunisia and Egypt against their American-backed dictators even as revolutions were unfolding before everyone’s eyes.
But Libya is different: Here we have a democratic rebellion begging for help and an overstretched imperial power reluctant to help but having its hand forced.

Indeed, for days those of us opposing intervention heard we must exert pressure on “our” leaders to convince a dithering Barack Obama. It appeared that while some European leaders — especially Nicholas Sarkozy and David Cameron, the latter recently back from a major arms sales tour of the region — were keen for a no-fly zone the Americans were highly reluctant. There was even the need to get the Arab League, that highly representative group of local despots, to provide its support before the motion could go to the UN Security Council. The word was that cautious voices like that of Defence Secretary Robert Gates were holding back US enthusiasm. Even after the Security Council gave the go-ahead, Hillary Clinton claimed that while the US was supporting the NFZ, “We did not lead this. We did not engage in unilateral actions in any way”.
But, as the Washington Post has reported,
… her modest words belied the far larger role the United States played as international forces began an open-ended assault on Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi’s military capabilities. U.S. warships fired more than 110 Tomahawk missiles into Libyan territory to disable air-defense systems. And the French and British warplanes that began to enforce the emerging no-fly zone operate under U.S. command.
Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, director of the Joint Staff, described the U.S. role to reporters at the Pentagon: “We are on the leading edge of a coalition military operation.”
And:
But U.S. diplomats were key in broadening and securing a United Nations resolution authorizing military force in Libya, and U.S. military power proved essential Saturday in preparing the battlefield for a no-fly zone to be enforced by European and possibly Arab nations.
As much as Obama has sought to strengthen the international organizations that the previous administration disdained, the United States remains essential to the operation in Libya, despite the president’s and Clinton’s efforts to play down the American role.
A US strategy, but not very grand
That the US dog is clearly wagging a global pro-intervention tail should not be surprising as there are clear reasons why it is in the interests of the United States and its allies to reposition themselves at head of a deeply damaged system of regional domination. The revolutionary process caught Western ruling classes on the hop and they’ve struggled to harness the popular movements into any kind of limited, liberal democratic model along the line of the “Colour Revolutions” of the last decade (no matter what fantasies are concocted by some liberal writers desperate to salvage a neoliberal kernel from social revolution).
It was a letter from leading neoconservatives last week that provides the clearest picture of the strategic import of US actions here:
As protests continue against repressive regimes around the world, the message currently being conveyed by our inaction is that killing and repression will go unpunished and are the best option for despots seeking to postpone reform. 
For the sake of our security as well as America’s credibility with people who seek freedom everywhere, we ask you to act as quickly as possible to ensure that the people of Libya — and the world — know that we are willing to back up our principles with action.
By choosing Libya, where the regime was less associated with US patronage and leading elements of the rebellion were seeking intervention, here was a way to put the US at the heart of the democratic uprisings as the only guarantor of a swift and stable outcome in favour of Western-style freedom. Indeed, it fits with the rapid rewriting of regional foreign policy that has been occurring in Washington — reining in radical popular aspirations in order that Western interests can be safeguarded and the whole mess once again brought to heel.
One could be forgiven for seeing a double standard in attacking Libya while simultaneously turning a blind eye to brutal repression of other democracy movements around the region — such as by the Saudi military in Bahrain and by the Yemeni government — but the issue here was of the opportunity the Libyan circumstances provided, and not some general humanitarian or revolutionary principle.
As British Marxist Alex Callinicos has argued, the intervention opens a new stage in the revolutionary process where geopolitical factors enter the calculus. For the Left to support the intervention would be to support US efforts to get its neoliberal plans for the region back on track, but the manoeuvre is also high risk for the US, potentially creating unexpected new regional instability and exacerbating tensions between established Western allies. Even matters as simple as how Gaddafi’s forces and rebels can be told apart from inside Western fighter jets can create a situation where many more innocent people are slaughtered, although now at “our” hands.
Revolution and anti-imperialism not separate
The problems with such an aggressive move could soon erupt and in the middle of this it is vital to be clear that the fight for revolutionary transformation in individual Arab nations cannot be separated from a clear opposition to Western imperial attempts to hijack the process.
Such an intertwining of forces was discounted by many on the Left who succumbed to the NFZ mania whipped up by the media and mainstream politicians here. Unable to imagine how cross-border solidarity could be delivered by Egyptian workers, for example, they have looked to Western states to save the Libyan rebels from an apparently inevitable “massacre”. In part this is perhaps due to the so far limited nature of the formal gains won in Tunisia and Egypt, and also rooted in the idea of revolutions as singularities rather than complex and often contradictory processes that can take months and even years to unfold, with different actors and groupings taking centre stage in response to events. Yet in Egypt, despite the limits of the constitutional reform process and the continuation of military rule, the workers’ movement continues to grow and radicalise — transmuting the political gains of the revolution into economic advances and then feeding back into the political. Indeed, much of the MSM coverage downplays the central role of the working class in the revolution.
This has similarly been downplayed in relation to Libya, but it is an urbanised country with a significant working class (including substantial numbers employed in the public sector using money from oil sales to create stability for Gaddafi’s rule). In some ways the revolution developed more dramatically in Libya than in Egypt or Tunisia, with a situation of dual power created and Gaddafi being forced to fight to try to reunify a state so closely identified with his rule. This meant that demands for social justice soon got subordinated to a more conventional military conflict.
By “picking winners” in Libya, Western powers hope to stamp their authority on the situation, push demands for social justice further into the background, and prevent any further fracturing of Arab states. Yet by unleashing military power they will do more than create suffering on a greater scale — they will also provoke more radicalism and more hatred for their foreign policies.

Filed Under: Barack Obama, Egypt, imperialism, Libya, revolution

20 Mar

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‘Humanitarian intervention’, the international community and Libya: The leopard has not changed its spots

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Many people have reservations about the UN Security Council authorising the use of “all necessary measures” in Libya. But in spite of this, many also think that something must be done and it would be much worse to do nothing. Leaving aside the more particular question of intervening in response to a call for support (which forms much of Guy Rundle’s position), I want to look at the concept of humanitarian intervention as a response to these crises.
There is a sense of desperation about the situation in Libya, spurred by genuine human empathy. But supporting military intervention in response to these crises reflects a lack of a sense of history and a lack of imagination. The leopard has not changed its spots.

The ‘international community’ — saviour or villain?

The key comparison, at least amongst international lawyers, is with the Rwandan genocide. In 1994, some 800,000 people were killed in a hundred days. If ever there was a moral justification for humanitarian intervention, Rwanda was it. But the “international community” — the United Nations and similar entities*  — did the opposite. The UN Security Council failed to authorise the use of force and, when the genocide commenced, did nothing to stop it.

The first conclusion to draw from this is that the international community is not compelled to intervene by morality.

But I also want to argue that it is a mischaracterisation to describe the Rwandan crisis as a situation where the international community’s failure to “do something” resulted in genocide. The failure to intervene is not the explanation for the genocide — it is simply more complicated than that.
As Anne Orford argues in Reading Humanitarian Intervention, the flow of international aid to Rwanda helped create and stabilise a powerful state structure, which later enabled the genocide to occur on such a large scale. The role of institutions like the World Bank and the IMF was central; even “right up until the last minute” before the genocide, Rwanda was seen by these agencies as a “model developing country”. Orford goes on to note that:

Aid agencies and the community of aid workers and foreign diplomats present in Rwanda during that period did little in response to the well-documented rise in government-sponsored human rights violations, racism, massacres and militarisation of society, all of which “were constitutive elements of the drive to genocide.”

There were plenty of steps that the international community could have taken to prevent the situation arising, including basic things like making aid dependent on an end to human rights violations. But this never happened.
In other words, it is simply wrong to see the failure of these states as something external or foreign from the way the international community operates more generally. This is capitalism shaping the world in its own image — the international community has a hand in creating these brutalities or, at the very least, the conditions in which they occur. It is therefore very problematic to think it can also be the solution.
The other obvious example, which has been well canvassed by others, is the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan. I will not reiterate the humanitarian disasters that have resulted there, but I note the idea that the West is a force for peace and freedom in the region has been brought into sharper focus by the uprisings in recent months. If Iraq and Afghanistan were not occupied by the US and its allies it is reasonable to suggest that the turmoil in Tunisia and Egypt might well have spread to them and they could have won regime change without a million dead.

Legal scholars tend to see these situations as a failure of the rule of law, rather than part of a system of international relations that is, by its nature, brutal and full of conflict. As China Mieville describes the argument in Between Equal Rights, “where there is a problem of disorder or violence, it is deemed a failure of law: the main problem about law is that there is not enough of it.” Of course, we all know that the legality of such steps is far from a primary consideration: consider Richard Perle’s brazen admission that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was illegal, indeed that international law had “stood in the way of doing the right thing.” One can only assume, therefore, that “more international law” would actually mean more authority to for military adventures like that in Iraq.

This kind of talk has always meant that international legal thinking has a troubled relationship with the concept of the state. As a law student, I was encouraged to see states as discreet sovereign entities, motivated by a number of factors including, at times, human rights. But these assumptions are clearly out of step with reality. As Mieville concludes: “a world structured around international law cannot be but one of imperialist violence. The chaotic and bloody world around us is the rule of law.” The crisis in Rwanda was something created by the system, not an exception to it. This is why a materialist conception of law, as opposed to an idealist or positivist understanding, is so helpful in these contexts. It encourages us to see the situation as a whole, rather than as discreet problems that require particular solutions.

What we should be doing
So what can be done to stop these kinds of crises in the future? Already there is criticism that the international community should have acted earlier; the no-fly zone in Libya may have come too late to be of any use. But when we start to consider how much earlier we should have acted, we should start reflecting on how long the West has, in fact, been intervening in these places.
As a start, we should oppose our government intervening in countries through aid budgets that are contingent on neo-liberal reforms and silent on human rights. Consider, for example, the historically cosy relationship that the Australian Government has had with Indonesia. The Australian Government spends $450 million each year in aid to Indonesia, our largest development assistance partnership. This is obviously something that the government likes to sell as something positive we do for our region. Yet there are very good reasons to be sceptical about our aid program with respect to both its quantity and quality.
This relationship was tested in East Timor in 1999. The Australian Government had supported the Indonesian occupation for decades and yet suddenly felt compelled to act when the killing started in the wake of East Timorese independence. The UN Security Council authorised a multinational force to restore peace and security in East Timor.  This was and continues to be controversial.
Once again, a major concern was that the intervention took place too late to be of significant benefit to those being slaughtered. A better way of understanding the situation is that we were too late in our criticisms of the actions of our own government in supporting the Indonesian military. Our relationship with Indonesia, stretching back to the 1950s, had been to explicitly ignore the occupation of East Timor and the massacres that took place during that time. It is impossible to understand the crises that erupted in 1999 without reflecting on our history of involvement in the region.
Needless to say, in the wake of that military intervention, the Australian Government took a very aggressive stance when renegotiating the bilateral treaty that covers the extraction of oil and gas in the Timor Gap. The result was that East Timor “lost a large swathe of important benefits under the Treaty’s provisions.” This is one of the many spoils of humanitarian intervention.
It is not hard to imagine another uprising occurring in any one of the many politically troubled regions of Indonesia today. It is difficult to see how we could not be in some way responsible for any military backlash that might take place given our involvement with the country and stated enthusiasm to “support improved economic management through support for key structural reform measures.”
And yet, our current relationship with Indonesia leaves no room for any serious criticism of human rights violations in West Papua. This is despite the fact that just last year, Indonesian soldiers brazenly posted footage on Youtube showing the torture of a West Papuan farmer. If we are going to seriously think about what we can do as an international community about human rights abuses, we should start putting pressure on our own government to take a stand on these kinds of issues.
I have only the space to touch on these complex arguments, which involve difficult concepts — particularly for lawyers. Such debate is not served well if we are unable or unwilling to reflect on the reasons for crises and how we plan to avoid them in the future. Desperation is the midwife of poor judgment and when we defer to the law on questions of morality, it becomes a coward’s charter. In expressing support for the no-fly zone on Friday, Professor Sarah Joseph, of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law, concluded that:
I believe (and fervently hope) the consequences of international intervention in Libya will be less horrific at this time than the fairly predictable consequences of Gaddafi rolling over the rebels. But I cannot know, and nor, frankly, can anybody else.
I disagree with the implications in this statement. We have to do our best to learn from history and think about these situations in context, otherwise we become complicit in making things worse. We need to build an international solidarity movement that criticises the involvement of the West in developing countries, both militarily and under the auspices of development. There are no shortcuts.
* I think it is fair to describe the “international community” as constituted by a number of states acting through forums like the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and NATO. The international community is made up of sovereign states that are nominally equal, but substantively unequal and each has its own particular agenda.

Filed Under: Afghanistan, Guy Rundle, imperialism, Iraq, Libya

19 Mar

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‘Capital’ Against Capitalism: Provisional Timetable

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>SATURDAY JUNE 25 – CENTRAL SYDNEY
9.00 – 9.15 
Welcome

9.15 – 10.45
Plenary 1 – AUSTRALIAN LABORISM
Speaker: Rick Kuhn
Respondents: Geoffrey Robinson and Tad Tietze

10.45 – 11.00
Short morning tea

11 – 12.30
Workshop 1A – MARXISM AND THEOLOGY

Roland Boer: ‘The Religion of Everyday Life’: Capital as Fetish
Tamara Prosic: Orthodox Christian Theology and Social Change
Remy Low: Religion and Revolutionary Praxis: Theologies of liberation in retrospect and prospect

Workshop 1B – READING CAPITAL IN OUR OWN TIME

Tom Barnes: From ‘surplus populations’ to informal labour: Is Capital relevant to class formation in the Global South?
Paul Rubner: Deciphering the Dialectic in Marx’s Capital
Mike Beggs: Zombie Marx and modern economics


12.30 – 1.15
Lunch

1.15 – 2.15
Workshop 2A – SOCIAL CHANGE

Jess Gerrard: Hegemony, Class and Culture
John Pardy: Patterns of schooling in Australia: Toward a historically materialist explanation.

Workshop 2B – TALKING REVOLUTION

Mark Steven: The Silliest Insurrection: On Marxism and the Marx Brothers
David Lockwood: Marxism and the Bourgeois Revolution

2.15 – 3.45

Workshop 3A – MARXISM AND LAW

Jess Whyte: Leaving the ‘Eden of the innate rights of man’: Marx’s Critique of Rights
Richard Bailey: Strategy, rupture, rights: law and resistance in Australian immigration detention
David McInerney: To read and speak the law: Althusser on Montesquieu

Workshop 3B – ACCUMULATION OF VALUE

Marcus Banks: How does workfare produce value?
Humphrey McQueen: Labour time
Ben Reid: Is there Australian Exceptionalism? Scenarios for capital accumulation and crises after the second great contraction

3.45 – 4.15
Afternoon tea

4.15 – 5.15

Plenary 2 – MARX’S CAPITAL
Speaker: Nicole Pepperell
Respondent: Dave Eden

5.15 – 5.20 Wrap up

Filed Under: Marxism

17 Mar

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Guy Rundle, the ‘anti-imperialist Left’ and the calls for a no-fly zone in Libya

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Friends no longer
It’s important to give Guy Rundle credit for being one of the few mainstream commentators who still has interesting things to say from a genuinely Left perspective. But his intervention in the debate over whether the Australian Left should back calls for a Western-run no-fly zone in Libya — to save the revolution from a bloody defeat at the hands of military forces loyal to Gaddafi — has provoked a hostile debate between supporters and opponents of intervention.

Rundle’s original Crikey article is here (unfortunately paywalled). It was given a sympathetic treatment by Kim of Larvatus Prodeo, with a prolonged debate to be found in the comments beneath. Rundle then continued his argument, emphasising what he saw as more general failure of the radical Left here (again, paywalled). As if to make clear how much was to be said about the failures of the Left, he continued his argument at the Crikey blogs section on the same day (with my reply underneath).
The argument has spilled over into the Overland Journal Blog, with Jacinda Woodhead’s riposte quite reasonably pointing out that it is mistaken to expect Western powers to suddenly act in defence of the Libyan revolution when their record generally runs in the opposite direction (and indeed they seem to be supportive of the Saudi invasion of Bahrain to help repress the uprising there—a silence that former UK diplomat Craig Murray believes may be in exchange for Arab League support for a no-fly zone).
States and the international state system: whose states and whose system?
It’s good that Rundle has spelled out more of his position in his latest piece at Crikey*, because he gets closer  to the heart of the difference — which is not directly about the Libyan situation at all, but about understandings of imperialism and the state. Guy says he rejects “archaic” definitions of imperialism and talks of “how you should relate to your own state (and its military)”. This allows him to tie his quite understandable support for the Libyan revolutionaries to pro-Western intervention arguments.
But it is not clear what he wants to put in the place of (say) a Marxist theorisation of the state and imperialism — something that authors with views as diverse as Toni Negri, David Harvey and Alex Callinicos have tried to do in bringing a Marxist framework up to date with the massive changes in global geopolitics that have occurred since Lenin wrote on these questions. As Richard Seymour has noted, Guy’s deployment of terms like “colonial” to describe left-wing refusal to back intervention itself relates to quite outdated notions of how power-relations in the international state system work.
This leads him to essentially posit the actions of states, large and small, very much in terms of their disconnection from processes of capital accumulation:
But as the decades waxed and waned, power relations, the economy, identity, nature of class have changed substantially (at least on surface, even if one believes that the base is still chugging away beneath).
It simply will not do to say that things have changed but instead we need to have some idea of how they’ve changed that justify’s Guy’s approach. In effect he is arguing that when a subaltern grouping challenges the state they are arrayed against (in Libya, or Egypt, or wherever) then “we” (the Left) can help them by getting “our” state to give them a hand. Or, more correctly, demand that larger, much more powerful states get involved. It is these questions of the state and state system that Left Flank has foregrounded over the last nine months we’ve been writing.
In Guy’s position, by contrast, there is little sense of what interests drive the actions of “our” state, or — more importantly — those of NATO states. Why is it that these states so consistently support dictatorships over democracy, and stability over freedom? And why would we think that they would choose to intervene now for any other reason than a continuation of the service of those interests?
We end up with a world where bad states (e.g. Gaddafi’s) are ok to be overthrown, and in fact if the people of Libya aren’t up to it (and maybe they’re not, as Guy seems so certain) then better to get some other state to do it for them. The proposed agent states here are the very ones who have consistently been the enemies of freedom and revolution. How Guy presumes that “we” can really make sure that “our” states do the right thing I’m not sure.
Intervention and the Arab revolutions
What benefit Guy sees in the legitimation of direct US intervention in an Arab country would have for the general tide of popular uprisings (against local states and imperial control) is even murkier… unless he thinks that an NFZ will force the US state to act directly against the interests it normally serves so assiduously, even if at times only semi-competently.
Perhaps that is where Guy is at, with his discussion of seizing the moment. The problem here is that for the Left this is much more a case of “where fools rush in”, because the complexity of situation and the consideration of real power relations require more thinking through than Guy’s dismissal of “archaic” theories credits.
To repeat what I have said before, Guy’s talk of “solidarity” versus “passivity” has a decidedly hollow ring, too. Because the request is not for solidarity from us, but from our ruling classes and their military machines. We of the Australian Left will remain passive, except insofar as we cheerlead and construct justifications for our rulers’ self-interested efforts.
Of course that does leave the question of the Libyan leadership to discuss. I think Guy has misunderstood Richard Seymour’s point — which is not that the rebels are led by a uniformly crap bunch of people but that varied political positions emerge in revolutionary uprisings. The Bolsheviks, after all, had much less influence in February 1917 and so the war that the revolution was supposed to bring to a halt continued. Should the Western Left have simply offered solidarity to the Russian people by cheering that decision by the newly installed revolutionary leadership?
The point is that we have a responsibility to judge these things for ourselves — what real effect we think such actions will have. That actually means taking sides in the argument within the Libyan revolution about what we think is the best way forward. Guy has taken a different side to the one I have, but he should call it as such rather than elide those differences by deferring to the Libyan revolution’s currently leading elements.
It is important in that regard that if Gaddafi tries to take the key urban strongholds of the rebellion, he will have much more trouble — unless he wants to risk actually genocidal activity (i.e. killing millions). That kind of brutality risks a greater explosion of Arab militancy in the region, now also directed across borders at him. It is simply not realistic to conclude that it’s intervention or bust for the rebels.
An urban resistance movement in Benghazi would gain little from a no-fly zone and depend much more on the kind of grassroots organising that has been the Libyan revolution’s strength. Whether the political forces within the revolution align with that kind of resistance, one that can potentially link up with working class opposition to Gaddafi in Tripoli itself, or see the revolt in purely military terms will affect the nature of the resistance itself.
If Guy could refrain from his grand denunciations of the Marxist Left (all too much in evidence from some in the Larvatus Prodeo discussion as well) and stick to that argument, in its fullest sense, then we may get further. I fear that Guy’s tone of urgency has caused the moral imperative to help an inspiring revolutionary movement override sober analysis of the consequences of the action he supports. It has made him sound more like Christopher Hitchens than I think he would be comfortable with, which, as I have said elsewhere, has been a surprise and disappointment to me.
The Greens and humanitarian intervention
Finally, having been a Greens member from 2002-10 and actively involved at all levels of the party (in NSW and nationally) I can inform Guy that while there are many left-wing people inside the party, they mostly have a confused and contradictory attitude towards the state and imperialism. It is this that leads them to accept the idea that real social change must come through existing power structures, even though many have a genuine and deep commitment to mass struggle running alongside these beliefs. It has also led to an erosion of interest in building mass movements the more successful the party has become in electoral terms, because the reflex assumption is that real power lies in Canberra.
This has a direct ideological consequence (even if, as Gramsci would say, the change in thinking occurs “molecularly”): State policies come to be seen as “bad policies” (which they are) but the state itself comes to be seen as potentially “good” and to be defended against alternatives. Hence the initial Greens response to the Egyptian revolution was to call for process solutions — free and fair elections — rather than Mubarak’s ouster; at the time a position barely different to Hillary Clinton’s. Clinton also favours the NFZ, so perhaps this is the level of “radicalism” the Greens MPs are articulating.
It has been most dismaying to see Adam Bandt, whose victory in the seat of Melbourne last year has been an inspiration for so many on the Left, take such a strong pro-intervention position. Adam had told us that his PhD thesis (reportedly brilliant, but apparently still embargoed from public view) related directly to questions of international law and was in part a response to China Mieville’s Marxist critique of international law, Between Equal Rights. Mieville had been motivated to write his thesis to challenge the framework of the legal debates around the notion of “humanitarian intervention” in the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. We had presumed that Adam had pursued a line that while critical of Mieville, would have started with distrust for the notion of imperial intervention bringing positive results for oppressed peoples. Maybe we were wrong.
This debate has exposed a recurring lacuna in Left thinking on issues of the state, militarism and geopolitics — that of the interests that lie behind these phenomena. It is doubly striking because, as Guy has correctly grasped, the Arab revolutions have cracked open the edifice of power relations embodied in the aforementioned. Better to urgently talk through those issues than to run half-cocked into backing the very forces that have consistently proven themselves the enemies of the Left, progress and freedom.
*Although it is irritating that he can’t spell my surname.

Filed Under: Greens, Guy Rundle, imperialism, Libya, state

12 Mar

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The revenge of nature

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The scale of the human death and suffering from Japan’s earthquake and Tsunami has been staggering. While not on the scale of human loss suffered during similar disasters that have hit poorer parts of the world, to see such rapid devastation of modern, solidly built roads, harbours and towns was almost too dramatic to believe.
As I post this we face the possibility of a major nuclear disaster, especially since an explosion rocked the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant near the town of Okuma, just 250km from Tokyo, one of our planet’s greatest metropolitan conurbations.

It’s just the latest event to remind us of humanity’s contradictory relationship with the rest of nature. This, from 1883’s Dialectics of Nature by Frederick Engels, seems strikingly modern and apposite*:
Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture. When, on the southern slopes of the mountains, the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, with the effect that these would be able to pour still more furious flood torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that they were at the same time spreading the disease of scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.
*Thanks to Alex Callinicos for reminding us of this passage

Filed Under: Engels, nature, nuclear power

04 Mar

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Drugs! Drugs! Drugs!

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As the state election skulks closer, it seems clear the NSW Greens will not be actively campaigning on their Drugs and Harm Minimisation policy in the community or the media. Their silence makes obvious that they have determined to stay mum on the question, despite the policy being one democratically endorsed by the membership after prolonged and lively debates.

This is pretty detrimental at a time when significant public interest questions are being raised about failed “zero tolerance” approaches to drug harm. While this silence is likely out of fear of Daily Telegraph front pages, which have in the past run shock horror claims that “The Greens want heroin sold to children in playgrounds by murderers”, this doesn’t mean it’s either a politically or ethically sensible approach. While gone are the days when pragmatic members would suggest candidates in more conservative electorates hide the party’s position in support of issues like same-s*x marriage and adoption, attempts to similarly conceal what are thought of as controversial parts of the party platform appear here to say.

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Filed Under: Bob Brown, drugs, Greens, health, Lee Rhiannon