Category: imperialism

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

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

14 Feb

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The Egyptian Revolution: only the beginning — where to next?

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The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historical events.
— Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution
How good was that?

Here we’ll let some Egyptian voices speak: First, a statement on Friday from the Revolutionary Socialists of Egypt:
Glory to the martyrs! Victory to the revolution!
What is happening today is the largest popular revolution in the history of our country and of the entire Arab world. The sacrifice of our martyrs has built our revolution and we have broken through all the barriers of fear. We will not back down until the criminal “leaders” and their criminal system is destroyed.
Mubarak’s departure is the first step, not the last step of the revolution
The handover of power to a dictatorship under Omar Suleiman, Ahmed Shafiq and other cronies of Mubarak is the continuation of the same system. Omar Suleiman is a friend of Israel and America, spends most of his time between Washington and Tel Aviv and is a servant who is faithful to their interests. Ahmed Shafiq is a close friend of Mubarak and his colleague in the tyranny, oppression and plunder imposed on the Egyptian people.
The country’s wealth belongs to the people and must return to it
Over the past three decades this tyrannical regime corrupted the country’s largest estates to a small handful of business leaders and foreign companies. 100 families own more than 90 per cent of the country’s wealth. They monopolise the wealth of the Egyptian people through policies of privatisation, looting of power and the alliance with Capital. They have turned the majority of the Egyptian people to the poor, landless and unemployed.
Factories wrecked and sold dirt cheap must go back to the people
We want the nationalisation of companies, land and property looted by this bunch. As long as our resources remain in their hands we will not be able to completely get rid of this system. Economic slavery is the other face of political tyranny. We will not be able to cope with unemployment and achieve a fair minimum wage for a decent living without restoring the wealth of the people from this gang.
We will not accept to be guard dogs of America and Israel
This system does not stand alone. Mubarak, as a dictator, was a servant and client directly acting for the sake of the interests of [the United States] and Israel. Egypt acted as a colony of [the United States], participated directly in the siege of the Palestinian people, made the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace freezones for warships and fighter jets that destroyed and killed the Iraqi people and sold gas to Israel, dirt cheap, while stifling the Egyptian people by soaring prices. Revolution must restore Egypt’s independence, dignity and leadership in the region.
The revolution is a popular revolution
This is not a revolution of the elite, political parties or religious groups. Egypt’s youth, students, workers and the poor are the owners of this revolution. In recent days a lot of elites, parties and so-called symbols have begun trying to ride the wave of revolution and hijack it from their rightful owners. The only symbols are the martyrs of our revolution and our young people who have been steadfast in the field. We will not allow them to take control of our revolution and claim that they represent us. We will choose to represent ourselves and represent the martyrs who were killed and their blood paid the price for the salvation of the system.
A people’s army is the army that protects the revolution
Everyone asks: “Is the army with the people or against them?” The army is not a single block. The interests of soldiers and junior officers are the same as the interests of the masses. But the senior officers are Mubarak’s men, chosen carefully to protect his regime of corruption, wealth and tyranny. It is an integral part of the system.
This army is no longer the people’s army. This army is not the one which defeated the Zionist enemy in October 1973. This army is closely associated with [the United States] and Israel. Its role is to protect Israel, not the people. Yes we want to win the soldiers for the revolution. But we must not be fooled by slogans that “the army is on our side”. The army will either suppress the demonstrations directly, or restructure the police to play this role.
Form revolutionary councils urgently
This revolution has surpassed our greatest expectations. Nobody expected to see these numbers. Nobody expected that Egyptians would be this brave in the face of the police. Nobody can say that we did not force the dictator to retreat. Nobody can say that a transformation did not happen in Middan el Tahrir.
What we need right now is to push for the socioeconomic demands as part of our demands, so that the person sitting in his home knows that we are fighting for their rights. We need to organise ourselves into popular committees which elects its higher councils democratically, and from below. These councils must form a higher council which includes delegates of all the tendencies. We must elect a higher council of people who represent us, and in whom we trust. We call for the formation of popular councils in Middan Tahrir, and in all the cities of Egypt.
Call to Egyptian workers to join the ranks of the revolution
The demonstrations and protests have played a key role in igniting and continuing our revolution. Now we need the workers. They can seal the fate of the regime. Not only by participating in the demonstrations, but by organising a general strike in all the vital industries and large corporations.
The regime can afford to wait out the sit-ins and demonstrations for days and weeks, but it cannot last beyond a few hours if workers use strikes as a weapon. Strike on the railways, on public transport, the airports and large industrial companies! Egyptian workers! On behalf of the rebellious youth, and on behalf of the blood of our martyrs, join the ranks of the revolution, use your power and victory will be ours!
Glory to the martyrs!
Down with the system!
All power to the people!
Victory to the revolution!

 Send messages of support to info@e-socialists.net
Striking oil workers hit the oil minister’s poster with their shoes (Photo from http://www.arabawy.org/2011/02/13/workers-oil-shoes/)  
And here is the analysis of Egyptian blogger and journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy from his blog on Saturday:
Since yesterday, and actually earlier, middle class activists have been urging Egyptians to suspend the protests and return to work, in the name of patriotism, singing some of the most ridiculous lullabies about “let’s build new Egypt,” “Let’s work harder than even before,” etc… In case you didn’t know, actually Egyptians are among the hardest working people in the globe already.
Those activists want us to trust Mubarak’s generals with the transition to democracy — the same junta that has provided the backbone of his dictatorship over the past 30 years. And while I believe the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, who receive $1.3 billion annually from the US, will eventually engineer the transition to a “civilian” government, I have no doubt it will be a government that will guarantee the continuation of a system that will never touch the army’s privileges, keep the armed forces as the institution that will have the final say in politics (like for example Turkey), guarantee Egypt will continue to follow the US foreign policy whether it’s the undesired peace with Apartheid State of Israel, safe passage for the US navy in the Suez Canal, the continuation of the Gaza siege and exports of natural gas to Israel at subsidized rates. The “civilian” government is not about cabinet members who do not wear military uniforms. A civilian government means a government that fully represents the Egyptian people’s demands and desires without any intervention from the brass. And I see this hard to be accomplished or allowed by the junta.
The military has been the ruling institution in this country since 1952. Its leaders are part of the establishment. And while the young officers and soldiers are our allies, we cannot for one second lend our trust and confidence to the generals. Moreover, those army leaders need to be investigated. I want to know more about their involvement in the business sector.
All classes in Egypt took part in the uprising. In Tahrir Square you found sons and daughters of the Egyptian elite, together with the workers, middle class citizens, and the urban poor. Mubarak has managed to alienate all social classes in society including wide section of the bourgeoisie. But remember that it’s only when the mass strikes started three days ago that’s when the regime started crumbling and the army had to force Mubarak to resign because the system was about to collapse.
Some have been surprised that the workers started striking. I really don’t know what to say. This is completely idiotic. The workers have been staging the longest and most sustained strike wave in Egypt’s history since 1946, triggered by the Mahalla strike in December 2006. It’s not the workers’ fault that you were not paying attention to their news. Every single day over the past three years there was a strike in some factory whether it’s in Cairo or the provinces. These strikes were not just economic, they were also political in nature.
From day 1 of our uprising, the working class has been taking part in the protests. Who do you think were the protesters in Mahalla, Suez and Kafr el-Dawwar for example? However, the workers were taking part as “demonstrators” and not necessarily as “workers”– meaning, they were not moving independently. The govt had brought the economy to halt, not the protesters by its curfew, shutting down of banks and business. It was a capitalist strike, aiming at terrorizing the Egyptian people. Only when the govt tried to bring the country back to “normal” on Sunday that workers returned to their factories, discussed the current situation, and started to organize en masse, moving as a block.
The strikes waged by the workers this week were both economic and political fused together. In some of the locations the workers did not list the regime’s fall among their demands, but they used the same slogans as those protesting in Tahrir and in many cases, at least those I managed to learn about and I’m sure there are others, the workers put forward a list of political demands in solidarity with the revolution.
These workers are not going home anytime soon. They started strikes because they couldn’t feed their families anymore. They have been emboldened by Mubarak’s overthrowal, and cannot go back to their children and tell them the army has promised to bring them food and their rights in I don’t know how many months. Many of the strikers have already started raising additional demands of establishing free trade unions away from the corrupt, state backed Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions.
Today, I’ve already started receiving news that thousands of Public Transport workers are staging protests in el-Gabal el-Ahmar. The temporary workers at Helwan Steel Mills are also protesting. The Railway technicians continue to bring trains to halt. Thousands of el-Hawamdiya Sugar Factory are protesting and oil workers will start a strike tomorrow over economic demands and also to impeach Minister Sameh Fahmy and halt gas exports to Israel. And more reports are coming from other industrial centres.
At this point, the Tahrir Square occupation is likely to be suspended. But we have to take Tahrir to the factories now. As the revolution proceeds an inevitable class polarization is to happen. We have to be vigilant. We shouldn’t stop here… We hold the keys to the liberation of the entire region, not just Egypt… Onwards with a permanent revolution that will empower the people of this country with direct democracy from below…

Filed Under: Egypt, imperialism, revolution, state

04 Feb

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Who’s afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood?

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They are:

The tyrant’s strategy seems clear. After 30 years of brutality, repression and feathering the nest of his globetrotting fellow elites, at the moment his regime is in peril he will act as the reasonable one. He will act to reverse the “chaos” and “anarchy” in the streets as gangs of violent thugs attack and murder anti-government protesters.

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Filed Under: Barack Obama, Egypt, Gramsci, imperialism, Islamism

03 Feb

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The Egyptian revolution: Liberal democracy as the enemy of freedom

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In February 2003 I was part of the 400,000-strong rally in Sydney opposing the impending US-British-Australian invasion of Iraq. It seemed for a moment that we were going to disrupt the plans of the self-styled Coalition Of The Willing by sheer force of numbers, part of probably the largest coordinated protest in Australian and world history — one that led the New York Times to famously declare the people on the streets as a “second superpower”.
I’d say that the feeling of our potential power then — a feeling gutted by the subsequent invasion — was only a fraction of what the Egyptian masses have felt over the last week. Not only have more than a million people turned out in Cairo, there have been hundreds of thousands more in cities around the country. And their goal is not the prevention of a faraway military action but the destruction of a tyrant who has brutalised, oppressed and belittled them for 30 years.

As I tweeted on Monday:
Can I just say the #Egyptian revolution is the most inspiring thing I have seen in over two decades of political activism? #Jan25
Yet, oddly for some, the festive and determined feeling of demonstrators on the streets of Cairo as they fight for democratic rights has not met with approval from many of the most ardent defenders of liberal democracy in the West.
“Stability” contra democracy
One could have predicted that the Israeli government, so fond of touting itself as having by far the healthiest democracy (if not “the only true democracy”) in the Middle East, to be uncomfortable with democratic change in Egypt. But Netanyahu’s pro-Mubarak line has upset even many pro-Israel commentators because of its blatant assertion that the right of the Zionist state to pliant neighbours is more important than the Egyptian people’s human rights.
Then there are the elite liberals whose names include Obama, Clinton, Blair and our own two-time foreign minister, Kevin Rudd. These are the foreign policy players who have long championed “free and fair elections” and criticised (certain) Arab dictators. Yet the events in Egypt have seen them scramble for the cover of promoting “regional stability” and “orderly transitions”.
It’s not like they don’t have form. For example, in 2009 Clinton was playing up her good relations with the Egyptian dictator, “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.” As recently as Sunday she was still squirming about, refusing to back the Egyptian protesters against Mubarak, instead giving her support to some abstract “Egyptian People” despite claiming 30 years of support for “a democratic Egypt that provides both political and economic rights to its people.” Vice-President Joe Biden managed to be even more hamfisted, reluctant to admit that Mubarak was a dictator, saying he shouldn’t step down and even suggesting the protesters’ claims may not be “legitimate”.
Kevin Rudd, interviewed on Sky News last week, also dodged the question:
Newsreader: Mr Rudd, if I can turn now to what is happening there and what you see as the future, do you think the people want more freedoms in their country? What’s Australia’s view on that? Do we support that?
Rudd: Well, the political situation is highly fluid, as a number of my colleagues from elsewhere around the world have said. We have long supported democratic transformation across the Middle East. We have equally strongly argued that this transformation should occur peacefully and without violence. That remains our view in terms of recent developments in Egypt as well.
Newsreader: The White House is suggesting that the Egyptians turn the internet back on and the social networks, that sort of thing, and of course to end the violence. You’d be supportive of that, would you?
Rudd: Well, I’ve not seen White House statements to that effect. I go back to what I said before. We ourselves have long supported democratic transformation across the Middle East and across the Arab world, but equally we strongly emphasise the importance for those things to occur peacefully and without violence. Therefore we should be exceptionally vigilant about what is occurring in Egypt at the moment.
A large part of this stems from the seismic shifts in geopolitics threatened by a successful Egyptian revolution. The United States and its allies are desperately looking to prop up as much of Mubarak’s regime as possible so that their interests in the Middle East are as little disrupted as possible. The arch liberal imperialist Tony Blair has probably been the most honest regarding the wishes of elite Western interests, dreaming up sickening paeans to Mubarak as he goes, even suggesting the tyrant has “been immensely courageous and a force for good” before raising the spectre of an Islamist takeover if the political transition is allowed to happen too quickly. That transition issue has seen Obama work desperately to buy time, if only to ensure that pro-US figures are in place to take key positions in any post-Mubarak settlement. As Alex Callinicos has pointed out in his analysis of the dilemma facing the United States:
The New York Times reported after a meeting of the US National Security Council last week: “President Obama’s decision to stop short, at least for now, of calling for Hosni Mubarak’s resignation was driven by the administration’s concern that it could lose all leverage over the Egyptian president, and because it feared creating a power vacuum inside the country, according to administration officials involved in the debate.”
Overshadowing these deliberations will be the memory of the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9.
Then the US hung on to its ally, the Shah, for too long. When it dropped him the army collapsed in the face of the revolutionary movement. In Egypt too, the US will be relying on its close links with the military to influence the situation. But the Egyptian armed forces aren’t a homogeneous institution. They are vulnerable to external pressure.
Liberal democracy will not be saved by liberal democrats
But such concerns are not just the preserve of the elite circles that hold the reins of power. Even the Greens’ Bob Brown found himself unable to openly support the protesters in an muted press release on Sunday, a position that was probably to the Right of the US State Department’s fast-changing line at the time. Similarly, Adam Bandt’s statement to a solidarity rally in Melbourne was written in an oddly passive style, avoiding explicit support for Egyptian protesters’ demands for Mubarak’s immediate resignation.
This reflects a wider argument within the mainstream Left that the instability and uncertainty of the revolutionary process, not to mention its (relatively minor) violent characteristics somehow make it hard to support. Suddenly for many on the Left it has become harder to support a people’s movement against dictatorship and for democracy because it doesn’t fit neatly into preconceived criteria. Better to pass brief comment on how worrying the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood is, or to agonise that the result will be a replay of Iran in 1979, or even just get down to debating Gillard’s flood levy against that heartless Abbott.
Slavoj Zizek, back in form after his recent spate of dog-whistling around multiculturalism, nails the issues around Islamism well, asking “Why fear the Arab revolutionary spirit?” He stands wholeheartedly on the side of the revolution, accurately diagnoses its ability to sideline more conservative Islamist forces inside Egypt, points out that liberal democracy itself cannot deliver liberal democracy, attacks the Left liberal pining for a stable bourgeois state, and talks of the failure of the old secular Left in the Middle East.
His article gets to the heart of liberal democratic anxiety around Islamism. In reality, the introduction of a liberal democratic regime in Egypt would — while providing some welcome increase in political rights — do little to solve the country’s deep social and economic polarisation. In the longer term its inability to resolve those problems would provide a space for the Islamists to pose as a social alternative, and they indeed have a long record of doing so through their focus on social justice and networks of elite-sponsored charity (however partial such a solution would be).
The only thing that can save the ideals of liberal democracy (liberty, equality, fraternity) in this kind of situation is the struggle for a new social system, not a continuation of neoliberal (or even some mythical social democratic) capitalism. This is the great contradiction of capitalism, a social system that allows the formal political rights bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment while systematically denying economic justice because of its inbuilt class hierarchies and anarchic market relations. And it is why liberal democracy ends up repeatedly on the wrong side of revolutionary situations, with its utopian hope that capitalist social relations can somehow be smoothed away within a very limited range of political rights. In essence, it has to disavow the very freedoms it espouses in “normal times”.
While it is impossible to predict what will eventuate from the process underway in Egypt, one thing that we need to be clear on is that this is not a rerun of the Iranian Revolution. The balance of social and political forces is markedly different, as Juan Cole shows in his latest blog post.
But that doesn’t mean we can be sanguine about what happens next. The great danger is that the Western Left gets cold feet about the revolution and starts to ape our rulers in looking for safe, reasonable liberal democratic forces to support. Zizek cheekily suggests that only the radical Left can save bourgeois democratic ideals, and so the liberals will have to fall in behind the revolutionaries. There simply is too little social basis for a stable liberal outcome to the crisis currently spreading across the Middle East. We have to be open to the possibility that the only “stable” and just solution will be one based on fundamental social transformation that rids us of not just of this or that dictator, but breaks the ensemble of social relations that reproduces the rule of capital itself. That is, a new hegemony of the subaltern groupings to replace the very capitalist state the liberals hold dear. 

Filed Under: Barack Obama, Bob Brown, democracy, Egypt, Greens, imperialism, Kevin Rudd, revolution, Slavoj Zizek