Readings for discussion
Platypus Historians Group, Friedrich Hayek and the legacy of Milton Friedman: Neo-liberalism and the question of freedom (In part, a response to Naomi Klein) (2008)
Robert Lekachman, Capitalism for Beginners (1981)
Michael Harrington, “Marxism and democracy” Praxis International 1.1 (1981)
Video recording
Audio recording
I must speak to my alleged “rational kernel of racism” comment, which has been deliberately distorted in its meaning. I did not mean that somehow it is reasonable or otherwise acceptable to be racist.
By this statement I was applying Marx’s comment about the “rational kernel” of the Hegelian dialectic, which aimed to take it seriously and demystify it, not debunk or dismiss it. The same is true in addressing racism as ideology — as the “necessary form of appearance” of social reality. I was trying to address the issue of supposed “racism” in terms of the Marxist tradition of “ideology-critique,” or the immanently dialectical critique of ideological forms of appearance, or, explained more plainly, the critique from within of ideologies according to their own self-contradictions, in the interest of seeking how they might be changed.
In this, I follow Wilhelm Reich, who wrote in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933/46) that Marxists had failed to recognize the “progressive character of fascism” — by which he meant of course not that fascism was itself progressive (Reich was a Communist), but that fascism was a new ideology that met a new historical situation more successfully than Marxism did, and that Marxists were wrong to dismiss fascism as irrational, by which they tried to alibi their own failure to do better politically. The point was why did members of the working class, to whatever degree, support an ideology that was against their interests? Reich thought that Marxists needed to be more like Marx in his critique of ideology.
So, what I meant by the “rational kernel of racism” was the need to address why otherwise rational people would have racist ideologies. It won’t do, I think, to try to dismiss racism as irrational. Rather, the question is, why are people racist? What social realities do racist ideologies express? What social needs are expressed, in however distorted form, by racist ideologies? For it is not a matter that those with racist attitudes have them in their own self-interest. Quite the contrary, it is against their better interests.
In other words, I think that racist ideologies need to be addressed not as straightforward expressions of interests, which concedes too much to the realities of competition of some workers against others, but rather as phenomena of self-contradiction, of living in a self-contradictory society, “capitalism,” which is something real that needs to be changed, not merely ethically deplored, and moreover changed from within: as Lenin put it, capitalism needs to be overcome “on the basis of capitalism itself;” as Marx thought, according to capitalism’s internal contradictions. Racist ideologies need to be regarded as part of this.
However, it must be admitted that nowadays racist ideologies are not nearly as centrally important a part of the social reality of capitalism as they once were. Racism is no longer considered anywhere near as reasonable as it once was. And this is a good thing — though it does present challenges to the “Left’s” own ideologies about the nature and character of social reality. Culturalism is not the same as racism, and what is often called “racism” today is actually culturalism, not biologically based: such cultural chauvinism would also be subject to a Marxist ideology-critique as a phenomenon of capitalism.
Beyond that, there is the issue of the actual politics of “anti-racism,” which my old mentor Adolph Reed has helpfully pointed out leads nowhere today, and so recommends junking present strategies of “anti-racist politics,” in favor of struggling against the concrete social and political disadvantages people face. There’s no point to a “politics” that tries to change people’s attitudes, where the real issue is material circumstances. But it does suit the “Left” today very well, in its own subcultural lifestyle consumerist taste community and paranoid authoritarian moral hectoring to focus on racist attitudes, as a substitute for real politics. | §
Published as part of a letter to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) Weekly Worker, June 6, 2013.
First presented at RamĂłn Miranda BeltrĂĄn’s art exhibit Chicago is my kind of town, Julius Caesar Gallery, Chicago, November 4, 2012. [PDF]
FOR MARXISTS, the division of modern socioeconomic classes is not the cause of the problem of capitalism but rather its effect.
Modern classes are different from ancient separations between castes, such as between the clergy or priestly caste, and the noble aristocracy or warrior caste, and the vast majority of people, âcommoners,â or those who were ignorant of divinity and without honor, who, for most of history, were peasants living through subsistence agriculture, a mute background of the pageantry of the ancient world.
Modern, âbourgeoisâ society, or the society of the modern city, is the product of the revolt of the Third Estate, or commoners, who had no property other than that of their labor: âself-madeâ men. During the French Revolution, the Third Estate separated itself from the other Estates of the clergy and aristocracy, and declared itself the National Assembly, with the famous Tennis Court Oath. This fulfilled the call of the AbbĂŠ Sieyès, who had declared in his revolutionary pamphlet What is the Third Estate?, that while under the ancien rĂŠgime the Third Estate had been ânothing,â now it would be âeverything.â
As the 20th century Marxist Critical Theorist Theodor Adorno put it, âsociety is a concept of the Third Estate.â What he meant by this was that unlike the previous, ancient civilization in which people were divinely ordered in a Great Chain of Being, the Third Estate put forward the idea that people would relate to one another. They would do so on the basis of their âwork,â or their activity in society, which would find purchase not in a strict hierarchy of traditional values, but rather through a âfree marketâ of goods. People would be free to find their own values in society.
Modern society is thus the society of the Third Estate, after the overthrow of the traditional authority of the Church and the feudal aristocrats. Modern, bourgeois society is based on the values of the Third Estate, which center on the values of work. The highest values of modern society are not religion or the honor of a warrior code, but rather material productivity and efficiency, being a âproductive member of society.â From this perspective, the perspective of modern bourgeois society, all of history appears to be the history of different, progressively developing âmodes of production,â of which capitalism is the latest and highest. The past becomes a time of people toiling in ignorance and superstition, held back by conservative customs and arrogant elites from realizing their potential productivity and ingenuity. The paradigmatic image of this state of affairs is Galileo being forced to recant his scientific insight under threat by the Church.
With the successful revolt of the Third Estate it appeared that humanity attained its ânaturalâ condition of Enlightenment, in relation both to the natural world and in humansâ relations with each other. Seemingly unlimited possibilities opened up, and the Dark Ages were finally brought to an end.
With the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th to early 19th centuries, however, a new âcontradictionâ developed in bourgeois society, that of the value of capital versus the value of the wages of labor. With this contradiction came a new social and political conflict, the âclass struggleâ of the workers for the value of their wages against the capitalistsâ imperative to preserve and expand the value of capital. This came to a certain head in the 1840s, known at the time as the âhungry â40s,â the first world-wide economic crisis after the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to go beyond a mere adjustment of the market, but pointed to new and deeper problems.
This new conflict between the workers and capitalists that raged in the mid-19th century was expressed in the desire for âsocialism,â or of society becoming true to itself, and the value of the contributions of all societyâs members being recognized and their being allowed to participate fully in the development and political direction of humanity. This was expressed in the Revolutions of 1848, the âSpring of the Nationsâ in Europe that resulted from the crisis of the 1840s, which called for the âsocial republicâ or âsocial democracy,â that is, democracy adequate to the needs of society as a whole.
For the socialists of the time, the crisis of the 1840s and revolutions of 1848 demonstrated the need and possibility for getting beyond capitalism.
In late 1847, two young bohemian intellectuals, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were commissioned by the Communist League to write a manifesto ahead of the potential revolutions that appeared on the horizon. Issued mere days ahead of the revolutions of 1848, the Communist Manifesto was a survey of the contradictory and paradoxical situation of modern society, its simultaneous radical possibilities and self-destructive tendencies in capitalism.
For Marx and Engels, as good followers of Hegelâs dialectic of history, the phenomenon of contradiction was the appearance of the possibility and necessity for change.
Marx and Engels could be confident of the apparent, manifest crisis of modern society and the need for radical change emerging in their time. They were not the originators of socialism or communism but rather tried to sum up the historical experience of the struggle for socialism in their time. They did not seek to tell the workers their interest in overcoming capitalism, but rather tried to help clarify the workersâ own consciousness of their historical situation, the crisis of bourgeois society in capital.
What Marx and Engels recognized that perhaps distinguished them from other socialists, however, was the utterly unique character of the modern, post-Industrial Revolution working class. What made the modern working class, or âindustrial proletariatâ different was its subjection to mass unemployment. Marx and Engels understood this unemployment to be not a temporary, contingent phenomenon due to market fluctuations or technical innovations putting people out of work, but rather a permanent feature of modern society after the Industrial Revolution, in which preserving the value of capital was in conflict with the value of workersâ wages. Unlike Adam Smith in the pre-industrial era, who observed that higher wages and lower profits increased productivity in society as a whole, after the Industrial Revolution, increased productivity was not due to workersâ greater efficiency but rather that of machines. This meant, as the director of the Marxist Frankfurt Institute for Social Research Max Horkheimer put it, that âmachines made not work but the workers superfluous.â
On a global scale, greater productivity increased not employment and wealth but rather unemployment and impoverishment, as capitalism destroyed traditional ways of life (for instance of the peasants) but failed to be able to provide meaningful productive employment and thus participation in society for all, as originally envisioned in the revolt of the Third Estate and promised in the bourgeois revolution against the hierarchy of the ancien rĂŠgime. The promise of the modern city is mocked by the mushrooming of slum cities around the world. The old world has been destroyed but the new one is hardly better. The promise of freedom is cruelly exploited, but its hope dashed.
Marxists were the first, and have remained the most consistent in recognizing the nature and character of this contradiction of modern society.
The difference between Marxâs time and ours is not in the essential problem of society, its self-contradictory form of value between wages and capital, but rather in the social and political conflicts, which no longer take the form primarily, as in Marxâs time, of the âclass struggleâ between workers and capitalists. âClassâ has become a passive, objective category, rather than an active, subjective one, as it had been in Marxâs day and in the time of historical Marxism. What Marxists once meant by âclass consciousnessâ is no more.
This lends a certain melancholy to the experience of âclassâ today. Privilege and disadvantage alike seem arbitrary and accidental, not an expression of the supposed worth of peopleâs roles in society but only of their luck, good or bad fortune. It becomes impossible to derive a politics from class position, and so other politics take its place. Conflicts of culture, ethnicity and religion replace the struggle over capitalism. Impoverished workers attack not orders whose privileges are dubious in the extreme, but rather each other in communal hatred. Consciousness of common class situation seems completely obscured and erased.
Not as Marx foresaw, workers with nothing to lose but their chains, but the unemployed masses wield their chains as weapons against each other. Meanwhile, in the background, underlying and overarching everything, capitalism continues. But it is no longer recognized. This is not surprising, however, since proper recognition of the problem could only come from practically engaging it as such. The issue is why it seems so undesirable to do so, today. Why have people stopped struggling for socialism?
We hear that we are in the midst of a deepening economic and social crisis, the greatest since the Great Depression of the early 20th century. But we do not see a political crisis of the same order of magnitude. It is not, as in the 1930s, when communism and fascism challenged capitalism from the Left and the Right, forcing massive social reform and political change.
This is because the idea of socialism — the idea of society being true to itself — has been disenchanted. With it has gone the class struggle of the workers against the capitalists that sought to realize the promise of freedom in modern society. It has been replaced with competing notions of social justice that borrow from ancient values. But since the sources of such ancient values, for instance religions, are in conflict, this struggle for justice points not to the transformation of society as a whole, but rather its devolution into competing values of different âcultures.â Today in the U.S., it seems to matter more whether one lives in a âred or blue state,â or what oneâs ârace, gender, and sexualityâ are, than if one is a worker or a capitalist — whatever that might mean. Cultural affinities seem to matter more than socioeconomic interests, as the latter burn. People cling to their chains, as the only things that they know. | §
Originally published in The Platypus Review 51 (November 2012). Re-published by Heathwood Institute, and Philosophers for Change.
The following was written for distribution as a flyer [PDF] at the occupation protests.
THE PRESENT OCCUPATION movement expresses a return to the Left of the late 1990s, specifically the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle.
They both have taken place in the last year of a Democratic U.S. Presidential administration, been spearheaded by anarchism, had discontents with neoliberalism as their motivation, and been supported by the labor movement.
This configuration of politics on the Left is the “leaderless” and “horizontal” movement celebrated by such writers as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Empire, Multitude, Commonwealth), John Holloway (Change the World without Taking Power), and others.
A dominant theme in the self-understanding of the 1990s-era Left was, as in the current occupation movement, âresistance,â rather than pressing for reforms â let alone revolution. ((See Michael Albert, Cutrone, Stephen Duncombe, and Brian Holmes, âThe 3 Rs: Reform, Revolution, and âResistanceâ: The problematic forms of âanti-capitalismâ today,â Platypus Review 4 (April 2008).))
The collapse of Stalinism in 1989 began a period of disorientation and retreat for the avowed “Marxist” Left in the 1990s. This changed in the late 1990s, as disenchantment with Clinton grew.
Something similar has taken place ever since Obama’s election, amid the financial crisis, in 2008. The anti-war movement collapsed with the end of the Bush II administration. There is a lesson to be learned about the treacherous political effect of election cycles.
The bailout of Wall Street at first prompted a Right-wing response, the “Tea Party” movement. But, after some brief rumblings in campus occupations against austerity in 2009, ever since the Republicans captured a Congressional majority in the 2010 midterm elections, there has been a shift towards Left-wing discontents, beginning with the Wisconsin State House occupation.
Looking back, the movement that emerged in the late 1990s (finding an exemplar in Hugo Chavez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” in Venezuela ((See Marco Torres: âThe dead Left: Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution,â Platypus Review 25 (July 2010).))), blossoming in the 1999 Seattle protests, was dealt a sharp blow, right after the Genoa G-8 protests in summer 2001 that sought to build upon Seattle, by the 9/11 attacks.
The standard narrative is that the anti-globalization movement was spiked and diverted by the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath â perhaps even intentionally so, as the Left-wing 9/11 “truth” movement (indicatively prominent in the current occupation movement) was paranoid that the U.S. (or Israeli) government, and not al Qaeda, had perpetrated the attacks. Anti-globalization protest became occluded in the âWar on Terrorâ era.
The Left that developed in the 2000s was in contrast to the 1990s. The 2000s Left saw the return of the “Marxist” political organizations, pulling the strings of the anti-war coalitions after the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, especially in the lead-up to and after the invasion and occupation of Iraq. ((See Kevin Anderson, Cutrone, Nick Kreitman, Danny Postel, and Adam Turl, âImperialism: What is it, why should we be against it?,â Platypus Review 25 (July 2010).))
The preceding 1990s Left consciousness expressed by Hardt and Negri et al. was displaced, precisely because the apparent reassertion of traditional great-power “imperialism,” regarding the U.S. neocons as the essential political players in the post-9/11 wars, defied notions of global neoliberal “Empire.”
The anti-war movement of the 2000s meant a more traditional âLeftâ of political sectarian groups orchestrating a protest movement that had as its target a Republican U.S. administration. This meant that the anti-war movement inevitably became a shill for the Democrats, especially after Bushâs re-election in 2004, as most of the sentiment of “Left” opposition to the wars was taken from the so-called “realist” vs. neocon foreign policy perspectives of many Democrats, European statesmen, and even some Republicans. ((See Cutrone, âIraq and the election: The fog of âanti-warâ politics,â Platypus Review 7 (October 2008).))
Obama’s election dispelled the Left that yearned for a Democratic administration, revealing the bankruptcy of the âMarxistâ Left opposing Bushâs wars.
But the âanti-imperialistâ turn in the 2000s had been regrettable from the perspective of the 1990s Left activists who had crystallized their experience in Seattle in 1999 and Genoa in 2001, as well as in the burgeoning “World Social Forum” movement.
The younger generation of Leftists who came of age around the anti-war movement was divided between those who received their political education from Marxism vs. anarchism. The young leaders in the new Students for a Democratic Society were, for example, mentored in the Chomskyan and Parecon perspective of Z-magazine writers Michael Albert, et al. The new SDS struggled to be more than an anti-war cause. Anti-Marxism informed the new SDS’s “anti-ideological” bias, whose echoes return today in the occupation movement. ((See Laurie Rojas, âRed-baiting and ideology: The new SDS,â Platypus Review 9 (December 2008).))
Certainly the âMarxismâ of the anti-war movementâs âanti-imperialismâ was deeply problematic, to say the least. The financial collapse and deepening economic crisis after 2008 is better ground for the Left than the U.S. wars of the 2000s had been. The issue of capitalism has re-emerged.
It is only right that such inadequate âMarxismâ falters after the 2000s. Today, the “Marxist” ideological Left of sectarian organizations struggles to catch up with the occupation movement and threatens to be sidelined by it â as Marxist groups had been in Seattle in 1999.
It is a measure of the bankruptcy of the “Marxist” Left that organizations could only rejuvenate themselves around the anti-war movement, in terms of “anti-imperialism,” submerging the issue of capitalism. But that moment has passed.
In its place, as in Seattle in 1999, an apparently unlikely alliance of the labor movement with anarchism has characterized the occupation movement. Oppositional discontents, not with neoconservatism and imperialism as in the 2000s, but with neoliberalism and capitalism as in the 1990s, characterize the political imagination of the occupation movement. This is the present opportunity for Left renewal. But it is impaired by prior history.
The issues of how capitalism is characterized and understood take on a new importance and urgency in the present moment. Now, properly understanding capitalism and neoliberalism is essential for any relevance of a Marxist approach. ((See Platypus Historians Group, âFinance capital: Why financial capitalism is no more âfictitiousâ than any other kind,â Platypus Review 7 (October 2008); and âFriedrich Hayek and the legacy of Milton Friedman: Neoliberalism and the question of freedom (In part, a response to Naomi Klein),â Platypus Review 8 (November 2008).))
The discontents with neoliberalism pose the question of capitalism more deeply and not only more directly than imperialism did. A Marxist approach is more seriously tasked to address the problem of capitalism for our time.
Anarchism and the labor movement, respectively, will only be able to address the problem of capitalism in certain and narrow terms. Marxist approaches to the labor movement and anarchism are needed. ((See Cutrone, âAgainst dogmatic abstraction: A critique of Cindy Milstein on anarchism and Marxism,â Platypus Review 25 (July 2010).))
The need for Marxism becomes the task of Marxism. Marxism does not presently exist in any way that is relevant to the current crisis and the political discontents erupting in it. Marxism is disarrayed, and rightfully so.
The danger, though considerable, is not merely one of the labor movement and the broader popular milieu of the occupation movement feeding into the Democratic Party effort to re-elect Obama in 2012. Rather, the challenge is deeper, in that what is meant by anti-capitalism, socialism, and hence Marxism might suffer another round of superficial banalization and degradation (“We are the 99%!”) in responses to the present crisis. The Left may suffer a subtle, obscure disintegration under the guise of its apparent renaissance.
Nonetheless, this is an opportunity to press the need for Marxism, to reformulate it in better terms and on a more solid basis than was possible during the anti-war movement of the 2000s.
This is the gauntlet that both anarchism and the labor movement throw down at the feet of Marxism. Can Marxist approaches rise to the challenge? ((See Cutrone, âThe Marxist hypothesis: A response to Alain Badiouâs âcommunist hypothesisâ,â Platypus Review 29 (November 2010).)) | §
Originally published in The Platypus Review 41 (November 2011).
Presented at the third annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, May 1, 2011 (audio recording).
The usual ways of categorizing various trends on the “Left” today have become less useful for distinguishing politically and indicating potential future developments. Trends have defied historical or expected trajectories — if these in fact ever applied properly — and so call for a new and different approach to sort out what we’re dealing with today and are likely to encounter going forward.
Other categories of the “Left:” Platypus has been rightly recognized (if only occasionally and intermittently) for traversing if not transcending these categories in the approach of our project:
1.) Socialist vs. liberal: Supposedly rooted in “class perspective,” as in “bourgeois-liberal” and “proletarian-socialist” (but not class character in terms of sociological “position,” but rather in Marx’s sense of the “petit bourgeois” horizon of politics thus aligning intellectuals with the “petite bourgeoisie”). But also perhaps expressing the antinomy of individual vs. collective freedom, certainly in ways we would not resolve as apparently simply as historical “Marxism” has done, for instance characterizing the Right as prioritizing “liberty” while the Left prioritizes social “justice.”
2.) Libertarian vs. authoritarian: The characterization supposed of the anarchist vs. Marxist division. Less about sociological position than political practice and concomitant organizational method: “horizontal” vs. hierarchical; decentralized vs. centralized, etc.
3.) Anti-Stalinist vs. Stalinist: The supposedly “Trotskyist” perspective, and perhaps the most problematic, considering the ISO/U.S. and others (SWP/U.K., et al.). This is not reducible to the libertarian vs. authoritarian division although apparently related to it; at an earlier, relatively less degenerate historical stage of the “Left,” this would have been characterized by internationalist vs. nationalist perspectives.
Because Platypus is in fact concerned with overcoming what are today inaccurate characterizations of the problems facing emancipatory perspectives moving forward, we must externally, publicly problematize but also internally not use unproblematically such categories, which are inherited unthinkingly from the “Left” of prior historical moments.
The set of categories we need to confront, which applies both clearly to the present but also to what might appear to be a rather obscure history, stemming from the earliest manifestation of “Stalinism” in the late 1920s-early ’30s, is that of “anti-fascism” vs. “anti-imperialism.”
We have, in large measure, the history of the German “Left” since the 1960s to thank for these categories, “anti-fa” and “anti-imp,” which however have a much greater international and historical significance than may apparently be the case. Indeed, we need to confront these categories as the true manifestation of the real controversies besetting the “Left” today, and for deep historical reasons.
Of course, for many, the distinction between “fascism” and “imperialism” is without a difference: fascists are imperialist and imperialists are fascistic. But this is only at the most superficial, pejorative meaning of these categories. What they refer to, analytically, and politically, however, are quite different kinds of problems. So, it becomes a matter of how one prioritizes the concerns of one’s politics. Are one’s concerns primarily “anti-imperialist” or “anti-fascist?”
In Tariq Ali’s book Trotsky for Beginners, there is a passage [p. 143] in which the Stalinist characterization of Trotsky as “fascist” is ridiculed by Ali, in light of the need for united anti-fascist political struggle by the Communists and Social-Democrats (and others) against the Nazis in Germany. But Ali’s “Trotskyist” common sense should not be taken at face value. Rather, one needs to understand why the Stalinists — that is, the vast majority of Communists, internationally, at the time — would have found this characterization of Trotsky’s perspective as “fascist” plausible:
We should not assume that Trotsky was right and the Stalinists wrong, however tempting this may be in retrospect. The Stalinists thought that Trotsky’s perspective would have meant strengthening — caving in to — the Social Democrats, who in turn would not scruple to unleash the fascists against the Communists, as indeed happened earlier in 1918-19 in Germany and during the Russian Civil War. Trotsky’s perspective was that the Communists could get the upper hand on the Social Democrats and indeed lead and split them in a united fight against the fascists. Perhaps. But this is precisely what the ISO and others think can happen today with the Islamists against the imperialists, or what “Trotskyists” earlier thought could happen in drawing close to the Stalinists, as the Pabloites (Mandelites) thought. In many respects this is an insoluble problem, and a key reason why tactical or even strategic judgments made by Marxists in earlier eras should not be hypostatized as abstract, timeless principles. Trotsky’s position was the more optimistic and indeed more interesting position in the dispute, but not some unalloyed truth we can reckon today.
The other side of the anti-imperialist/anti-fascist divide also comes from this period of Stalinism in the late 1920s-early ’30s. That is, why did the Communists make common cause at times with the Nazis, for instance in protests against the terms of the Treaty of Versailles? Out of “anti-imperialism,” namely, to have the forces of the Entente occupying Germany (French African troops in the Ruhr valley) removed. The Nazis had their own brand of “anti-imperialism” with which the Communists thought they could make common cause. [Show clip from Kiss of the Spider Woman: ~1:10:10 – 1:13:30.] Now, such “anti-imperialism” should remind us of the ISO with respect to Hezbollah, Hamas, and even al-Qaeda (Tariq Ali, after all, did publish the collected writings of Osama bin-Laden!).
It’s tantalizing for us to sympathize with Trotsky’s position as the path not taken. Even if Trotsky’s approach to fighting fascism had prevailed, it would have presented new problems. The point is that it didn’t, so we can only learn from it so much. We cannot afford to short-circuit the question of political judgment and turn the matter into one of abstract principles, quickly devolving into a moral or ethical stance: “Unite and fight against the Right!”
For who is the Right, essentially? In other words, who was the more dangerous Right? In some respects, this seems rather straightforward, the Nazis were the more dangerous and the Social Democrats the less dangerous Right. But is this really true, in terms of the actual, concretely practical political situation? Certainly the German and Russian counterrevolutionary civil wars, among other examples, demonstrated the vicious character of Social Democracy as a Right-wing force.
Now, we are clearly more sympathetic to the anti-fascist rather than anti-imperialist “Left.” This can be found in our orientations towards the Anti-Deutsch and others as our preferred objects of critique — more interesting, in certain respects, as objects of critical engagement, to be redeemed in some way. But we should not naturalize this but rather recognize how the current situation came about historically. For the worst offenders of the anti-imperialist “Left” today actually have roots in the anti-fascist “Left.” In other words, today’s divisions would not have applied in the past.
The ISO itself began as a more anti-fascist than anti-imperialist “Left” organization, for instance, prioritizing anti-Stalinism over anti-imperialism. This would have been the case until fairly recently, indeed perhaps one could say up to the collapse of Stalinism in 1989. In regarding the anti-fascist Left of Christopher Hitchens, Kanan Makiya, and others, we should recognize that the critique of Baathism in Iraq, for example, as fascist, is not enough to resolve the problem of imperialism in U.S. policy.
Another example is the RCP, which has in certain respects come to prioritize an anti-fascist as opposed to anti-imperialist politics.
But there are serious problems with the anti-fascist as well as the anti-imperialist “Left.” So it is important for us to be aware of this divide so that we can properly discern its — entirely symptomatic — character. We cannot afford to be either anti-fa or anti-imp in prioritizing our approach to the problem of the Left. | §
United States Navy Lieutenant Stephen Decatur and his men from USS Enterprise attacking the Barbary pirate ketch Mistico on December 23, 1803. Painting by Dennis Malone Carter (1827â81).
âAFTER ME, THE DELUGE,â the saying attributed to Louis XV (1710â74), would have been better said by his son and heir Louis XVI, who was soon thereafter overthrown by the French Revolution that began in 1789.[1] Muammar Qaddafi has said something similar, that if he is overthrown Libya will be condemned to chaos. Qaddafi even claims to be fighting off âal-Qaeda.â Perhaps he is.
On the one hand, this is all clearly self-serving on Qaddafiâs part. On the other hand, the kernel of truth in such a statement, specifically with regard to Libya, might bear scrutiny.
The U.S. administration that attacked Libya before Obama was that of Ronald Reagan. Reaganâs foreign policy advisor and United Nations ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, famously distinguished between âauthoritarianâ and âtotalitarianâ dictatorships, and thought that the U.S. should support the former and oppose the latter because of the relative ease with which the former could transition to democracy as opposed to the latter, whose pathology ran deeper, and so the effects would prove more lasting obstacles to freedom.
The comparison of Libya to its neighbor Egypt in the recent uprising against Mubarak seems to prove Kirkpatrickâs point. Egypt seems poised on a relatively painless transition to democracy, while Libya portends a much darker future, with or without Qaddafi. One might also, for good measure, point out the more intractably âtotalitarianâ tyranny of the political regime in the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose potential democratic replacement is also highly uncertain, not least because its Islamic Revolution in 1979 was âdemocraticâ in ways that the origins of the Egyptian or Libyan regimes were not.
Back in the 1980s, another famous dictator who was toppled, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, warned that if his âNew Societyâ was overthrown it would mean only the return of the traditional oligarchy of wealthy families, to the detriment of the people. While the Philippines today is certainly more politically democratic, and in this sense âfree,â than under Marcos, his prediction has come spectacularly true. The Philippines today is ruled by its traditional wealthy families, unimpeded, rather than by the upstart cronies cultivated under Marcos, himself a parvenu intolerable to the old Filipino elite. Furthermore, the rate of growth and development in the Philippines has stagnated, and is today much lower than it had been under Marcos. The wealth gap is much greater and poverty levels much worse at the bottom, and more endemically pervasive in the Philippines today than before. The Philippines remains, and will remain, just as swamped, in some ways worse than it was under Marcos.
Many of the former republics of the USSR after the collapse of Stalinism are as well.
But what is the point of saying so?
The potential further development of Libya after the passing of Qaddafi suggests something darker than what happened after âPeopleâs Powerâ in the Philippines, in terms of violence and other forms of overt brutality â as opposed to the âsofterâ brutality that continues to prevail in the Philippines, as elsewhere. Libya may become more like Somalia. Or Yemen. Or Afghanistan or Iraq. Who knows?
If Qaddafi thought that the tsunami that hit Japan would distract the U.S. from attacking his regime and allow suppression of the rebellion in Libya, he was mistaken. Rather, Qaddafi underestimated the global deluge of capital, at whose leading edge the U.S., for better or worse, operates. The flood was not to spare Qaddafi. It always stands poised to crash, cresting menacingly somewhere off shore. The rebels in Libya may have wished it to rain down on Qaddafi like a Biblical plague on the Pharaoh, tearing down the pride of his sinful glory. It will. But it may not spare them, either. There is little if any justice to history. Especially to a place like Libya, history happens.
Protest against the U.S./NATO/UN bombing of Libya is no less hopeless than Qaddafi is.
Interior of the ancient Berber city of Ghadames, Libya.
Qaddafiâs regime was, like Marcosâs in the Philippines â and the âtotalitarianâ regimes of the USSR and Eastern Europe, China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. that Kirkpatrick and Reagan opposed â a âmodernizingâ project. Horrifically so. Perhaps this is what Kirkpatrick actually had in mind in her distinction between âauthoritarian,â meaning more traditional, and âtotalitarianâ dictatorships â and why the former would end up being more benign than the latter. Perhaps.
The tsunami hits Japan, March 11, 2011.
Qaddafi moved the Berbers out of their traditional community in Ghadames into new apartment buildings. The ancient city â hallucinatory in its cavernous complexes â was left intact and preserved as a cultural museum. It still stands, alluring next to the decrepit hovels the modern high-rises have become. Perhaps the Berbers will return to their ancient city, evacuated by Qaddafi. But really it is no longer there, even if it remains in Libya. The deluge has not spared it. Nor will it. The only difference is how hard the wave might hit. | §
Originally published in The Platypus Review 34 (April 2011).
[1]. See my âEgypt, or, historyâs invidious comparisons: 1979, 1789, and 1848,â Platypus Review 33 (March 2011).
Presented on a panel with Issam Shukri (Worker-communist Party of Iraq) and Ashley Smith (International Socialist Organization) at the Left Forum in New York City, Pace University, March 21, 2010.
American political activist Danny Postel interviewed the British Left historian of the Middle East Fred Halliday in Chicago in 2005. They published the interview under the title âWho is responsible?â This is the question faced by purported âLeftistsâ internationally. What would it mean to practice a responsible politics on the Left in the face of phenomena like the Iraq war?
But we can turn this problem around slightly, in the issue of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, now winding up. The question is, âWho was responsible?â for the war. While the Spartacist socialist radical Karl Liebknecht may have said of Germany in the first World War, âThe main enemy is at home!,â he certainly did not think that the German ruling class was the only enemy or the main enemy of everyone, but rather the main enemy for the German Left, especially in the context of the war in which the German working class was held hostage. So the kind of inverted nationalism one sees in todayâs so-called âanti-imperialismâ is completely foreign to the perspectives of historic revolutionary Marxist politics. While U.S. policy is certainly responsible, it is not exclusively so. And while the U.S. ruling class and its government may be the âmainâ or principal enemy for American Leftists, it is not the only one â and, perhaps more importantly, it is certainly not the main or only enemy for Iraqi Leftists. Most have avoided this fundamental truth. But this is a measure of the unseriousness of their âpolitics.â
Baathism was responsible at least as much as U.S. Republicans and neoconservatives for the Iraq war. This can be demonstrated conclusively to the degree that Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime made two disastrous miscalculations: 1.) in feigning possession of WMDs; and 2.) thinking that it was possible to split Europe from U.S. hegemony and balance one against the other, preserving some breathing room for Baathist Iraq. That Iraqis had absolutely no ability to resist these catastrophic political miscalculations by the Baathist regime is the most fundamental fact conditioning the war. The truth is that the Baathist regime is what made the war possible — perhaps even inevitable — to begin with. The regime was willing to drag the rest of Iraq down with it.
On the Baathistsâ political calculus, would it have been better if Iraq had indeed had WMDs, or if Europe had actively opposed the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq? Were the Russian and Chinese vetoes in the U.N. Security Council in any way progressive or emancipatory in character? Who had the best interest of the Iraqis, let alone their potential emancipation, in consideration in this decisive context? Werenât the Europeans, Russians (and before them, the Soviets) and Chinese, and not only the U.S., responsible for not only the toleration but the very existence and continued subsistence of the Baathist regime in Iraq?
So the geopolitics of the Iraq war needs to be evaluated in light of Iraq and the greater Middle East, not exclusively and perhaps not even primarily in terms of U.S. hegemony — to which there is no actual alternative anyway. The U.S. was going to remain the cop of the world whether or not it invaded Iraq. That the U.S. risked and did not necessarily enhance its role as global cop/hegemon in invading and occupying Iraq should point this basic fact out clearly enough.
The truth is that all of the neighboring countries were hostile to Baathist Iraq. (This is also true, relatedly, for Iran today, so this is a historical lesson that needs to be learned!) Not only Europe but also Russia and China were no reliable friends of the Iraqis, to say the least. They have long been and remain perhaps worse enemies of the Iraqis than the U.S. has been, as seen in their erstwhile support for Saddamâs Baathist Iraq.
In this situation that the Worker-communist Party has described evocatively as the âdark scenarioâ for Iraq, we must face the deeper history that has made this possible today. Only in this way can we face squarely the tasks of the present — the potential possibilities internationally for a truly social-emancipatory politics. All else remains vain posturing or merely hand-wringing. In the U.S. itself, it is merely high-strung rhetoric covering, in the case of Iraq, a desire to have the Republicans voted out in favor of the Democrats. Now that this has happened, there is embarrassed silence about Iraq on the âLeft.â But Obama did exactly what he promised. And the Democrats more generally never offered anything of a progressive-emancipatory alternative to the Republican policy. — This can be seen in Bidenâs proposal to divide Iraq into three separate countries, punishing the Sunnis for their resistance by robbing them of access to Iraqâs oil wealth (which is concentrated in the Shiite South and Kurdish North). Leaving Baathist Iraq alone would have hardly been better for the Iraqis in the long term, if history is any kind of indication.
Why did the Iraq war happen? Because Saddamâs Baathist regime had turned Iraq into a pariah state internationally, and a grotesque house of horrors for its own inhabitants. The Baathist regime was becoming worse not better for the Iraqis as time went on. Saddam was willing to wager the Iraqi people, seemingly without limit, for the continuation of his regime. Did he really think he could outlast the hostility he had generated, not only with the U.S., but also with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and others? What was the actual future for Baathist Iraq, if not implosion and civil war, barring (also) foreign intervention of one form or other (if not invasion and occupation)? — Has Lebanon really been any better?
On the other hand, what about Iraq today, after the invasion and occupation? It is arguably true that, apart from Israel, Iraq is today the most politically âdemocraticâ state (if only in political dynamism) in the Middle East. The U.S. achieved its aims of removing Baathism and making Iraq a state more responsible not only to the international community but also to its own inhabitants. The only question is whether the cost for achieving this has been too great. If so, then one needs to ask, who actually made it so costly? Was the so-called âresistanceâ worth it? Was it even directed at the U.S. occupiers, or really at its sectarian opponents (on both sides)? Was it only or even primarily the U.S. that was responsible for the destruction, or were there other actors involved, and, if so, how do we hold them accountable — and how may any purported âLeftâ challenge and oppose them, moving forward? Isnât this the question we especially face today, when the U.S. is vacating the scene? Or will the âLeftâ simply forget about Iraq, end of story? — Werenât Iraq and the Iraqis always in fact forgotten in the estimations of the so-called âLeft?â
Who was responsible? | §
Presented on a panel with Tim Barker (Columbia University), Benjamin Blumberg (Platypus) and Pamela C. Nogales C. (Platypus) at the Left Forum in New York City, Pace University, March 20, 2010. Audio recording available at: <https://archive.org/details/PlatypusAtLeftForumNyc2010TheAmericanLeftAndTheblackQuestion>
The black American political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. recently wrote an essay on âThe Limits of Anti-Racismâ for the Left Business Observer, in which Reed stated that anti-racism as politics has clearly failed. Earlier, Reed had written about the Hurricane Katrina disaster that pointing to racism may prove to be an unacceptable âdistractionâ from more substantial politics. Reed also pointed out, however, that ârace is a class issue,â thereby bypassing, productively, the usual ârace vs. classâ antinomy that has long plagued the American âLeft.â Considering that, at present, anti-black racist attitudes have appreciably diminished, while the social conditions for the vast majority of black Americans have worsened and not improved since the 1960s, seen clearly in declining statistics of social welfare and employment, as well as more spectacularly in mass criminalization and incarceration, this raises serious issues for problems considering the question of American ârace and classâ for the âLeft.â But perhaps this question has passed into history, now.
The present moment may be a good occasion for a thorough and critical reconsideration of anti-racism as politics, both with regards to today, and retrospectively, as regards the history of the American Left, in what Ben Blumberg has termed its âUnmet Challenge.â The point is that if the problem of anti-black racism in the U.S. has been an âunmet challengeâ perhaps it will remain so, as it has now passed into history. Today, it may be less a matter of an existing challenge for the Left, but more the legacy of a historically missed opportunity for the American Left, a missed opportunity for which we continue to pay a steep price in the attenuated possibilities for a social-emancipatory and anticapitalist politics today in the U.S.
Clearly, the historical problem of anti-black racism in the U.S. has been resolved to a certain extent, but in the most politically conservative way possible. What the historical phenomenon of the Obama Presidency symbolizes with regards to the problem of anti-black racism is the historical result of a combination of: 1.) middle class anti-discrimination initiatives; with 2.) the post-1960s economic downturn (in which real incomes have declined for the American working class by as much as 40%) and labor union decimation; and 3.) culturalist politics. It has meant a naturalization and not an overcoming of the supposed black-working class divide. The âLeftâ since the 1960s, especially since the Black Power turn, has played into this supposed divide, with terrible results both for the vast majority of black Americans and for the American working class and Left politics as a whole.
I am going to offer a very provocative formulation of this problem: that what was most specific and peculiar about American anti-black racism historically was also an expression of its greatest emancipatory potential regarding capitalism. There is a great historical paradox in that the worst, most thorough-going historic racism in modern history, that of the condition of blacks in the Jim Crow-era Southern United States, coincided with the historic height of working class political movement and empowerment. I wish to raise this paradox as a question: What was the relation between the development of working class organization and politics and the exacerbation of racist divisions in American society? How was the âracialâ division of the American working class an expression of the self-contradictory character of working class politics under capital? — Relatedly, how was it that CIO unionism in the 1930s, which meant challenging segregation through inter-racial organizing, became, by the 1960s, the spectre of labor unions as conservative institutions: as white working class job trusts, excluding black workers?
Rather than taking on this very important question directly, I want to point out that, to my mind, there has been a false resolution of this historic problem in the transformation of American racism since that time, away from its sui generis ârace color-casteâ character (as in the âone drop ruleâ etc.) to harmonizing with the more globally typical racism associated with ethno-cultural divisions in society. In the post-1960s era, specifically, there was a romance of alternative models of racial identity, for instance in Brazil. But Brazil is a very brutal place for black people, if for different reasons of political history than the U.S. is. The degree to which the U.S. becomes more like Brazil in its racial dynamics, with a stark distinction between conditions for black middle class and (sub-)working class people, I think that this represents a regressive and not progressive trend. Let me explain.
The transformation of black Americans from a ârace color-casteâ into an âethnicâ or âculturallyâ distinct group, for instance seen in the substitution of âAfrican-Americanâ for âblack,â has meant the passing of an opportunity to overcome the specifically racist (and not âculturalâ) division of the American working class, in a potential transformation of working class organization and politics in a progressive-emancipatory and anticapitalist direction. Combating racist divisions was once an issue around which it was possible to organize workers for radical politics. No longer. The task of working class political integration was displaced into middle-class integration through the model of ethno-cultural âdiversity.â Whereas race was once a class issue, an issue for the American working class as such, it is now much less so, and hence it has ceased to be the same kind of issue — and challenge — for the Left and American society it once was. It has become the more direct matter of poverty.
Racism could have been a revolutionary issue, but was depoliticized, at least as an issue for the working class and for an anticapitalist Left. Now more than ever ârace is a class issueâ (in Reedâs sense), but it is now so in a way that (as Reed has noticed) can only be addressed effectively in purely class terms, as an issue of the black working class and so-called âunderclass.â
There is an irony of the earlier turn-of-the-20th century American socialist Eugene Debsâs declaration that socialism had nothing to offer blacks apart from their interests as workers. This was (mis)taken, especially by the 1960s âNew Left,â to be, not merely inadequate, but some evidence of American âOldâ Left or working class racism. But this formulation by Debs turns out to have been the actual historical task — long since failed — of the Left, up to the present. The problem is: how do we fulfill Debsâs task today? How do we make âracismâ into a âclass issue,â as Reed put it, after racism per se seems to have been defused as a political issue in American life? — Perhaps we donât!
It may seem that the W.E.B. DuBois/NAACP and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. program (of supposed âmiddle classâ integrationism) has been fulfilled, but really it was the Booker T. Washington program of accommodation to an invidious class and âracialâ situation which has ultimately succeeded. The black working class has been effectively âhandledâ by increasingly effective middle-class black political leadership (primarily in the Democratic but also the Republican Party), while its grievances have been successfully neutralized as a political matter in American social life. We have not only Obama but, more significantly, a host of black cops and prison wardens (not to mention U.S. military commanders) supervising the degradation of social life. These are not Uncle Toms or âhouse Negroes,â according to the old imagination, but rather a new, post-1960s black middle class of managers of American poverty. This is the deeply conservative-reactionary character of social politics in our time.
For black Americans did not want recognition of their supposed âculturalâ differences (think of Obama listening to Jay-Z on his I-Pod while shooting hoops at the White House), but have demanded, more basically, increased life-chances in American society. They have received one but not the other. We have gone all the way back to the beginning, in this sense. This is the way in which Debsâs formulation haunts us today.
It is not the 1960s-era politics of âBlack Powerâ and cultural politics of the â70sââ80s that comprise our open wound in the present, but rather the deeper post-Reconstruction era failures of American working class politics, which has shadowed historical developments ever since. It is not the historical figures of Malcolm X, the Black Panthers or Marcus Garvey who stand accusingly over the present, but rather Fredrick Douglass and Paul Robeson — and hence MLK and DuBois, but in the less familiar guise of a labor-Left and not a âracialâ politics. MLKâs âdreamâ has only apparently been realized; his core demand for âjobs and freedomâ (the slogan of the 1963 March on Washington) for all Americans has clearly not. What was supposedly a âreformistâ demand turns out to be the most revolutionary of all. | §
THE ELECTION CRISIS THAT UNFOLDED after June 12 has exposed the vulnerability of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), a vulnerability that has been driving its ongoing confrontation with the U.S. and Europe, for instance on the question of acquiring nuclear technology and its weapons applications.
While the prior U.S. administration under Bush had called for âregime changeâ in Iran, President Obama has been more conciliatory, offering direct negotiations with Tehran. This opening met with ambivalence from the Islamic Republic establishment; some favored while others opposed accepting this olive branch offered by the newly elected American president. Like the recent coup in Honduras, the dispute in Iran has been conditioned, on both sides, by the âregime changeâ that has taken place in the United States. A certain testing of possibilities in the post-Bush II world order is being mounted by allies and opponents alike. One dangerous aspect of the mounting crisis in Iran has been the uncertainty over how the Obama administration might address it.
The U.S. Republican Party and neoconservatives, now in the opposition, and recently elected Israeli right-wing politicians have demanded that the U.S. keep up the pressure on the IRI and have expressed skepticism regarding Iranian âreformâ candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi. European statesmen on both Right and Left have, for their part, made strident appeals for âdemocracyâ in Iran. But Obama has tried to avoid the pitfalls of either exacerbating the confrontation with the IRI or undermining whatever hopes might be found with the Iranian dissidents, whether of the dominant institutions of the Islamic Republic such as Mousavi or of the more politically indeterminate mass protests. Obama is seeking to keep his options open, however events end up resolving in Iran. While to some this appears as an equivocation or even a betrayal of Iranian democratic aspirations, it is simply typical Obama realpolitik. A curious result of the Obama administrationâs relatively taciturn response has been the IRIâs reciprocal reticence about any U.S. role in the present crisis, preferring instead, bizarrely, to demonize the British as somehow instigating the massive street protests.
The good faith or wisdom of the new realpolitik is not to be doubted, however, especially given that Obama wants neither retrenchment nor the unraveling of the Islamic Republic in Iran. As chief executive of what Marx called the âcentral committeeâ of the American and indeed global ruling class, Obama might not have much reasonable choice for alternative action. The truth is that the U.S. and European states can deal quite well with the IRI so long as it does not engage in particularly undesirable behaviors. Their problem is not with the IRI as such â but the Leftâs ought to be.
The reigning confusion around the crisis in Iran has been expressed, on the one hand, in statements defending Mahmoud Ahmadinejadâs claim to electoral victory by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and by individual writers in the supposedly leftist Monthly Review and its MRZine web publication (which also has republished without comment official Iranian statements on the crisis), and on the other hand by supporters of Iranian dissidents and election protesters such as Danny Postel, Fred Halliday, and the various Marxist-Humanist publications in the U.S.[1]
Slavoj Ĺ˝iĹžek has weighed in on the question with an interesting and sophisticated take of his own, questioning prevailing understandings of the nature of the Iranian regime and its Islamist character.[2] Meanwhile, the indefatigable Christopher Hitchens has pursued his idiosyncratic brand of a quasi-neoconservative âanti-fascistâ denunciation of the Islamic Republic, pointing out how the Islamic Republic itself is predicated on Khomeiniâs âtheologicalâ finding of Velayat-e Faqui, that the entire Iranian population, as victims of Western âcultural imperialism,â needed to be treated as minority wards of the mullahs.[3]
Halliday addresses the current protests as if they are the result of a âreturn of the repressedâ of the supposedly more revolutionary aspirations of the 1978â79 toppling of the Shah, characterizing the Islamic Republic as the result of a âcounter-revolution.â In a recent interview published in the Platypus Review #14 (August 2009), historian of the Iranian Left Ervand Abrahamian characterizes the present crisis in terms of demands for greater freedoms that necessarily supersede the accomplished tasks of the 1979 revolution, which, according to Abrahamian, overthrew the tyranny of the Pahlavi ancien rĂŠgime and established Iranian âindependenceâ (from the U.S. and U.K.).
All told, this constellation of responses to the crisis has recapitulated problems on the Left in understanding the Islamic Revolution that took place in Iran from 1978â83, and the character and trajectory of the Islamic Republic of Iran since then. All share in the fallacy of attributing to Iran an autonomous historical rhythm or logic of its own. Iran is treated more or less as an entity, rather than as it might be, as a symptomatic effect of a greater history.[4] Of all, Ĺ˝iĹžek has come closest to addressing this issue of greater context, but even he has failed to address the history of the Left.
Two issues bedevil the Leftâs approach to the Islamic Republic and the present crisis in Iran: the general character of the recent historical phenomenon of Islamist politics, and the larger question of ârevolution.â Among the responses to the present crisis one finds longstanding analytic and conceptual problems that are condensed in ways useful for critical consideration. It is precisely in its lack of potential emancipatory or even beneficial outcome that the present electoral crisis in Iran proves most instructive. So, what are the actual possibilities for the current crisis in Iran?
Perhaps perversely, it is helpful to begin with the well-reported statements of the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, who warned of the danger of a âvelvet revolutionâ akin to those that toppled the Communist Party-dominated Democratic Republics of Eastern Europe in 1989. The Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev sought to reform but only ended up undoing the Soviet Union. So it is not merely a matter of the intentions of the street protesters or establishment institutional dissidents such as Mousavi that will determine outcomes â as the Right, from Obama to the grim beards of the Revolutionary Guards and Basiji, do not hesitate to point out. By comparison with such eminently realistic practical perspectives of the powers-that-be, the Left reveals itself to be comprised of daydreams and wishful thinking. The Revolutionary Guards might be correct that the present crisis of protests against the election results can only end badly.
Perhaps Ahmadinejad and those behind him, along with the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, will prevail, and the protests against the election outcome will dissipate and those involved be punished, repressed, or eliminated. Or, perhaps, the protests will escalate, precipitating the demise of the Islamic Republic. But, were that to happen, maybe all that will be destroyed is the ârepublicâ and not its Islamist politics, resulting in a rule of the mullahs without the accoutrements of âdemocracy.â Perhaps the protests will provoke a dictatorship by the Revolutionary Guards and Basiji militias. Or perhaps even these forces will weaken and dissolve under the pressure of the protesters. Perhaps a civil war will issue from the deepened splitting of the extant forces in Iran. In that case, it is difficult to imagine that the present backers of the protests among the Islamic Republic establishment would press to undermine the state or precipitate a civil war or a coup (one way or the other). Perhaps the present crisis will pressure a reconsolidated regime under Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to continue the confrontation with the U.S. and Europe, only more hysterically, in order to try to bolster their support in Iran. If so, this could easily result in military conflict. These are the potential practical stakes of the present crisis.
Ĺ˝iĹžek has balanced the merits of the protests against the drive to neo-liberalize Iran, in which not only American neoconservatives but also Ahmadinejad himself as well as the âreformersâ such as Mousavi and his patron, the âpistachio kingâ and former president of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Rafsanjani, have all taken part. In so doing, however, Ĺ˝iĹžek rehearses illusions on the Left respecting the 1979 Islamic Revolution, as, for instance, when he points to the traditional Shia slogans of the protesters, âDeath to the tyrant!â and âGod is great!,â as evidence of the âemancipatory potentialâ of âgood Islam,â as an alternative to the apparent inevitability of neoliberalism. But this concession to Islamist politics is gratuitous to the extent that it does not recognize the ideological limitations and practical constraints of the protest movement and its potential trajectory, especially in global context. The protests are treated as nothing more than an âevent.â
But if the protests were to succeed, what would this mean? It could mean calling a new election in which Mousavi would win and begin reforming the IRI, curtailing the power of the Revolutionary Guards and Basiji, and perhaps even that of the clerical establishment. Or, if a more radical transformation were possible, perhaps a revolution would take place in which the IRI would be overthrown in favor of a newly constituted Iranian state. The most likely political outcome of such a scenario can be seen in neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq, a âsoftâ Islamist state more âopenâ to the rest of the world, i.e., more directly in-sync with the neoliberal norms prevailing in global capital, without the Revolutionary Guards, Inc., taking its cut (like the military in neighboring Pakistan, through its extensive holdings, the Revolutionary Guards comprise perhaps the largest capitalist entity in Iran). But how much better would such an outcome really be, from the perspective of the Left â for instance, in terms of individual and collective freedoms, such as womenâs and sexual liberties, labor union organizing, etc.? Not much, if at all. Hence, even a less virulent or differently directed political Islamism needs to be seen as a core part of the problem confronted by people in Iran, rather than as an aspect of any potential solution.
ŽiŞek has at least recognized that Islamism is not incompatible with, but rather shares in the essential historical moment of neoliberal capital. More than simply being two sides of the same coin, as Afghanistan and Iraq show, there is no discontinuity between neoliberalism and Islamism, despite what apologists for either may think.
Beyond Ĺ˝iĹžek, others on the Left have sought to capture for the election protests the historical mantle of the 1979 Revolution, as well as the precedents of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution and the âLeftâ-nationalist politics of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq, overthrown in a U.S.- and British-supported coup in 1953. For instance, the Tudeh (âMassesâ) Party (Iranian Communist Party), the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK, âPeopleâs Mujahedin of Iranâ) and its associated National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCORI), and the Worker-Communist Party of Iran (WPI, sister organization of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq, the organizers of the largest labor union federation in post-U.S. invasion and occupation Iraq) have all issued statements claiming and thus simplifying, in national-celebratory terms, this complex and paradoxical historical legacy for the current protests. But some true democratic character of Iranian tradition should not be so demagogically posed.
The MEK, who were the greatest organizational participants on the Left in the Islamic Revolution of 1978â79 (helping to organize the massive street protests that brought down the Shah, and participating in the U.S. embassy takeover), were originally inspired by New Left Islamist Ali Shariati and developed a particular Islamo-Marxist approach that became more avowedly and self-consciously âMarxistâ as they slipped into opposition with the rise to supremacy of Khomeini.[5] Shariati considered himself a follower of Frantz Fanon; Jean-Paul Sartre once said, famously, âI have no religion, but if I were to choose one, it would be that of Shariati.â The 44-year-old Shariati died under mysterious circumstances in 1977 while in exile in London, perhaps murdered by Khomeiniâs agents. Opposition presidential candidate Mousavi, and especially his wife Zahra Rahnavard, despite eventually having joined the Khomeini faction by 1979, were students of Shariati who worked closely with him politically in the 1960sâ70s.
A Mujahidin-i-khalq demonstration in Tehran during the Revolution. To the left, the figure of Dr. Ali Shariati; to the right, Khomeini.
However disoriented and hence limited the MEKâs inspiration, Shariatiâs critique of modern capitalism, from the supposed perspective of Islam, was, it had the virtue of questioning capitalist modernityâs fundamental assumptions more deeply than is typically attempted today, for instance by Ĺ˝iĹžek, whose take on the âemancipatory potentialâ of âgood Islamâ is limited to the rather narrow question of âdemocracy.â So the question of how adequate let alone well-advised the âdemocraticâ demands such as those of the present Iranian election protesters cannot even be posed, let alone properly addressed. 2009 is not a reprise of 1979, having much less radical potential, and this is both for good and ill.
On the Left, the MEK has been among the more noisy opposition groups against the Islamic Republic, for instance using its deep-cover operatives within Iran to expose the regimeâs nuclear weapons program. Most on the Left have shunned the MEK, however. For instance, Postel calls it a âStalinist death cult.â But the MEKâs New Left Third Worldist and cultural-nationalist (Islamist) perspective, however colored by Marxism, and no matter how subsequently modified, remains incoherent, as does the ostensibly more orthodox Marxism of the Tudeh and WCPI, for instance in their politics of âanti-imperialism,â and thus also remains blind to how their political outlook, from the 1970s to today, is bound to (and hence responsible for) the regressive dynamic of the ârevolutionâ â really, just the collapse of the Shahâs regime â that resulted in the present theocracy. All these groups on the Iranian Left are but faint shadows of their former selves.
Despite their otherwise vociferous opposition to the present Islamist regime, the position of the Left in the present crisis, for instance hanging on every utterance by this or that âprogressiveâ mullah in Iran, reminds one of the unbecoming position of Maoists throughout the world enthralled by the purge of the Gang of Four after Maoâs death in the late 1970s. Except, of course, for those who seek to legitimize Ahmadinejad, everyone is eager if not desperate to find in the present crisis an âopeningâ to a potential âprogressiveâ outcome. The present search for an âemancipatoryâ Islamist politics is a sad repetition of the Leftâs take on the 1979 Revolution. This position of contemplative spectatorship avoids the tasks of what any purported Left can, should, and indeed must do. From opportunist wishful thinking and tailing after forces it accepts ahead of time as beyond its control, the so-called Left resembles the Monday quarterbacking that rationalizes a course of events for which it abdicates any true responsibility. The Left thus participates in and contributes to affirming the confused muddle from which phenomena such as the Iranian election protests suffer â and hence inevitably becomes part of the Right.
This is the irony. Since those such as ŽiŞek, Halliday, Postel, the Marxist-Humanists, liberals, and others on the Left seem anxious to prove that the U.S. neoconservatives and others are wrong in their hawkish attitude towards the Islamic Republic, to prove that any U.S. intervention will only backfire and prevent the possibility of a progressive outcome, especially to the present crisis, they tacitly support the Obama approach, no matter how supposedly differently and less cynically motivated theirs is compared to official U.S. policy.
Like the Obama administration, the Left seems more afraid to queer the play of the election protesters than it is eager to weigh in against the Islamic Republic. This craven anxiety at all-too-evident powerlessness over events considers itself to be balancing the need to oppose the greater power and danger, âU.S. imperialism,â producing a strange emphasis in all this discourse. Only Hitchens, in the mania of his âanti-fascism,â has freed himself from this obsequious attitude of those on the Left that sounds so awkward in the context of the present unraveling of what former U.S. National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once, rightly, called a âloathsome regimeâ â a sentiment about the Islamic Republic that any purported Left should share, and more loudly and proudly than any U.S. official could.
Indeed, the supporters of the election protesters have trumpeted the rejection of any and all help that might be impugned as showing the nefarious hand of the U.S. government and its agencies.[6] Instead, they focus on a supposed endemic dynamic for progressive-emancipatory change in Iranian history, eschewing how the present crisis of the Islamic Republic is related to greater global historical dynamics in which Iran is no less caught up than any other place. They thus repeat the mistake familiar from the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the reactionary dynamics of which were obscured behind supposed âanti-imperialism.â The problems facing the Left in Iran are the very same ones faced anywhere else. âTheirâ problems are precisely ours.
With the present crisis in Iran and its grim outlook we pay the price for the historical failures â really, the crimes â of the Left, going back at least to the period of the 1960sâ70s New Left of which the Islamic Revolution was a product. The prospects for any positive, let alone progressive, outcome to the present crisis are quite dim. This is why it should be shocking that the Left so unthinkingly repeats today, if in a much attenuated form, precisely those mistakes that brought us to this point. The inescapable lesson of several generations of history is that only an entirely theoretically reformulated and practically reconstituted Left in places such as the U.S. and Europe would have any hope of giving even remotely adequate, let alone effective, form to the discontents that erupt from time to time anywhere in the world. Far from being able to take encouragement from phenomena such as the present election crisis and protests in Iran, the disturbing realization needs to be had, and at the deepest levels of conscious reflection, about just how much âtheyâ need us.
A reformulated Left for the present and future must do better than the Left has done up to now in addressing â and opposing â problems such as political Islamism. The present manifest failure and unraveling of the Islamic Revolution in Iran is a good occasion for thinking through what it might mean to settle this more than thirty year old score of the betrayed and betraying Left. | §
Originally published in The Platypus Review #14 (August 2009). A slightly revised version was published in The International Journal of ŽiŞek Studies 3.4 (2009).
1. In particular, see Danny Postelâs Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism, 2006; Fred Hallidayâs âIranâs Tide of History: Counterrevolution and After,â OpenDemocracy.net, July 17; and the Marxist-Humanist periodical News & Letters, as well as the web sites of the U.S. Marxist-Humanists and the Marxist-Humanist Initiative.
2. See Ĺ˝iĹžekâs âWill the Cat above the Precipice Fall Down?,â June 24 (available at http://supportiran.blogspot.com), based on a June 18 lecture at Birkbeck College, London, on âPopulism and Democracy,â and followed by the more extended treatment in âBerlusconi in Tehran,â London Review of Books, July 23.
3. See Hitchens, âDonât Call What Happened in Iran Last Week an Election,â Slate, June 14.
4. For excellent historical treatments of the Islamic Revolution and its local and global context, please see: Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (1982) and The Iranian Mojahedin (1992); Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran (2000); Fred Halliday, âThe Iranian Revolution: Uneven Development and Religious Populismâ (Journal of International Affairs 36.2 Fall/Winter 1982/83); and David Greason, âEmbracing Death: The Western Left and the Iranian Revolution, 1979â83â (Economy and Society 34.1, February 2005). The critically important insights of these works have been largely neglected, including subsequently by their own authors.
5. The MEK have been widely described as âcult-like,â but perhaps this is because, as former participants in the Islamic Revolution, in their state of betrayal they focus so much animus on the cult-like character of the Islamic Republic itself; the official term used by the Khomeiniite state for the MEK is âHypocritesâ (Monafeqin), expressing their shared Islamist roots in the 1979 Revolution. But the success of the MEK over Khomeini would have hardly been better, and might have indeed been much worse. Khomeiniâs opportunism and practical cynicism in consolidating the Islamic Revolution might have not only produced but also prevented abominable excesses of ârevolutionaryâ Islamism.
Of all the organized tendencies in the Iranian Revolution, the MEK perhaps most instantiated Michel Foucaultâs vision of its more radical ânon-Westernâ character (see Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, 2005). But just as Foucaultâs enthusiasm for the Islamic Revolution in Iran ought to be a disturbing reminder of the inherent limitations and right-wing character of the Foucauldian critique of modernity, so should the MEKâs historical Shariati-inspired Islamism stand as a warning against all similar post-New Left valorizations of âculture.â
More recently, the MEK has found advocates among the far-Right politicians of the U.S. government such as Representative Tom Tancredo, Senators Sam Brownback and Kit Bond and former Senator and Attorney General John Ashcroft â precisely those who are most enchanted by the ideological cult of âAmerica.â The MEKâs former patron, the Baathist Saddam Hussein, had unleashed the MEK on Iran in a final battle at the close of the Iran-Iraq war 1980â88, after which Khomeini ordered the slaughter of all remaining leftist political prisoners in Iran, as many as 30,000, mostly affiliated with the MEK and Tudeh, in what Abrahamian called âan act of violence unprecedented in Iranian history â unprecedented in form, content, and intensityâ (Tortured Confessions, 1999, 210). After the 2003 invasion and occupation, the U.S. disarmed but protected the MEK in Iraq. However, since the U.S. militaryâs recent redeployment in the âstatus of forcesâ agreement with the al-Maliki government signed by Bush but implemented by Obama, the MEK has been subjected to brutal, murderous repression, as its refugee camp was raided by Iraqi forces on July 28â29, seemingly at the behest of the Iranian government, of which the dominant, ruling Shia constituency parties in Iraq have been longstanding beneficiaries.
The grotesque and ongoing tragedy of the MEK forms a shadow history of the Islamic Revolution and its aftermath, eclipsed by the Khomeiniite Islamic Republic, but is essential for grasping its dynamics and trajectory.
6. See, for instance, Sean Penn, Ross Mirkarimi and Reese Erlich, âSupport Iranians, not U.S. Intervention,â CommonDreams.org, July 21.
Marx ridiculed the idea of having to âproveâ the labor theory of value. If Marxian theory proved to be the means whereby the real relations of bourgeois society could be demonstrated in their movement, where they came from, what they were, and where they were going, that was the proof of the theory. Neither Hegel nor Marx understood any other âscientificâ proof.
The more concrete the negation of the need, the more abstract, empty and flamboyant becomes the subjective mediation.
â C. L. R. James, âDialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanityâ (1947)
THE PRESENT CRISIS has prompted numerous calls for a reconsideration of “socialism” and even for a return to Marx.[1] It seems to augur fundamental changes, changes met with no less fear than desire.
We in Platypus have anticipated, since our inception in 2006, the possibility of a “return to Marx,” and have sought to inform the terms in which this might take place. We have sought the re-opening of historical issues on the Left with the intention of their fundamental reconÂsideration, taking nothing for granted, so that we could definitively close the books on stale “debates” in which the “Left” has remained stuck for more than a generaÂtion, since at least the 1960s. Given the confusion reignÂing on the “Left” today, the urgency for this is evident.
The difficulty in addressing the present crisis of capiÂtalism is that almost all commentaries on it, not least those emerging from the Left, begin with a fundamenÂtal misrecognition. We are not so much living through the crisis of capitalism as capitalism itself is the crisis. Capitalism is the â permanent â crisis of modern society. Only conjuncturally does capitalism become appreciably worse. But the history of capitalism is, whether in a fine-grained or a broad-gauged way, the history of going from one crisis to the next. It is in this sense that present circumstances and future prospects for capitalism must be addressed.
The election of President Obama is being regarded as an ambivalent phenomenon in this respect: On the one hand, Obama is saddled with responsibility of resolvÂing the crisis merely in order to restore some status quo ante, whether this is conceived as the 1990s heyday of Clintonism, before George W. Bush messed things up, or the post-WWII welfare state of the Roosevelt to Nixon years. On the other hand, Obama’s election is taken to express or indicate the possibility for more radical change, towards which his administration might be pushed. But perhaps neither response to Obama is appropriate. Such prognostication ignores the history of transformations in capitalism, of which the present crisis might be only the latest occasion.
Whatever changes may or may not be brought about by Obama (or despite him) in response to the present crisis, his administration cannot solve the problems of capitalism but only transform them. The changes that take place will matter to the extent that they lay the groundwork for the next period of history under capital, structuring the conditions under which any future struggle against capitalism must take place â just as contemporary social forms are the accumulated effects of prior attempts to master the dynamic of capital in modern history.
To grasp the stakes of the present, we need to anticiÂpate potential changes, rather than simply getting swept up in them. We need, paradoxically, to try to remain “ahead of the curve,” precisely because, like everyone else, we are conditioned by and subject to forces beyond our control.[2] For what is missing is any agency adequate to intervening against capital (or, more accurately, to intervening from within its unfolding process) with more democratic results.
The historical forces currently at work are beyond anyone’s, including Obama’s, control. However, the danger that the crisis presents is worse than this, which is, after all, the persistent characteristic of capital. The danger lies rather in the illusion that because of the economic crisis the workings of capital, which before had remained hidden, have now somehow revealed themselves to plain view. To grasp such workings requires more than experience. It requires us to attend to the vicissitudes in the history of theory, to distinguish affirmations and apologetics from critical recognitions.
The fate of Michel Foucault’s critique of modern sociÂety in the mid-20th century, during its last third and the first decade of the 21st century, can tell us a great deal about both the historical changes since the 1960sâ70s “New Left” and the high 20th century social-political forms against which Foucault’s critique was directed.
Foucault’s work of the 1960sâ70s retains great curÂrency in our time because it expresses discontent in a form that can find affirmation in the transformed society that came after its initial formulation and publication.[3] Foucault’s work was susceptible to being transformed from critique into affirmation and even common sense. This fact alone tells us a great deal about the historical changes with which Foucault’s work is bound up.
If Foucault’s work was expressive of forms of disconÂtent that helped give rise to post-Fordist, neo-liberal capitalism since the 1970s, if the re-found “anarchism” with which his work has such great affinity has become the predominant form of radical social-political disconÂtent on the supposed “Left,” this is because Foucault’s critique inadequately grasped its object, the Fordist capitalism of the mid-20th century. Consequently, when we read Foucault now, his work tells us â and affirms us in â what we already know. Only rarely, and, so to speak, despite itself, does it task us in the present. Only rarely does it help us to separate the critical from the affirmaÂtive, so that the one is not smuggled in under cover of the other. Hence, the question necessarily arises: Does Foucault’s work actually challenge us? Or does it merely entertain?
Film still, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
The “New Left” in the 1960sâ70s thought it was rebelÂling against capitalism, and thought it was doing so more profoundly than the preceding “Old” Left was able to do. But now it is difficult to deny that it was responding to one particular form of capitalism, one already in the proÂcess of dissolution. The New Left did not reach deeply enough to affect much of the subsequent transformaÂtion of capitalism in the 1980sâ90s, but it did serve to legitimize the replacement of what had grown obsolete. We read and accept, e.g., Foucault’s work, though we no longer have Fordist capitalism to critique. What we have instead is post-Fordism, of which Foucault’s work and other New Left thinking has become apologetic. If we find affirmation in Foucault, it is because we have long since flown the cuckoo’s nest of Fordist capital and are no longer in the care of Nurse Ratched.
By contrast with theories such as Foucault’s, Marx’s critical theory of capital has come up for repeated reconsideration since its origins in the mid-19th century, and will continue to do so, so long as capitalism as Marx understood it continues to exist. The other social thinkers whose work remain subject to such reconsidÂeration â whose thought continues to haunt us in the present â are those bound up in the historical trajectory from which Marx’s thought emerged, those that predate, are roughly contemporaneous with, or are immediately successive to Marx, such as Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Freud. Beyond these, the thinkers after Marx who primarily claim our interest are those who most rigorously pursue the Marxian probÂlematic, such as Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, LukĂĄcs, Benjamin and Adorno. This is because, like Marx, the best 20th century Marxists were able to perceive and grasp both the most fundamental, perennial historical problems of life in capital as well as the problems of the struggle to overcome them. The recurrent “return to Marx” is thus a feature of our objective social life and will remain so. There is a reason why Marx does not fade as other thinkers do.
In his important 1989 work The Condition of PostÂmodernity, David Harvey provided an excellent account of how transformations of capitalism do not leave old forms entirely behind, but rather reconstitute them. For instance, Harvey argues convincingly that the form of capitalism that emerges after 1973 ought to be underÂstood as post-Fordist, as the transformation of Fordism rather than its overcoming, just as 20th century Fordism was a transformation of the preceding, 19th century “liberal” form of capital.[4]
So the present crisis of post-Fordist/”neo-liberal” capitalism points not to the end of neo-liberalism, but rather to its transformed continuation. We will be movÂing into a period in which are accumulated and reconÂfigured the historical legacies of all previous periods of capitalism: the liberal one of the mid- to late 19th century; the era of monopoly capitalism and imperialÂism of the late 19th to the early 20th century; the Fordist era of the high/middle 20th century; and the neo-liberal era of the late 20th century. The question is whether this compounding of the problems of capitalism since Marx’s time makes it more politically and theoretically intractable.
Preceding forms of discontent with capitalism historiÂcally found their expression (however uncertainly) on the Left, and these were transformed along with capitalism itself. The history of the Left is thus closely bound up with changes in the problem it has sought to overcome since the mid-19th century. The exhaustion and underlyÂing despair of the “Left” today can be traced to its beÂcoming lost in a tangle of seemingly insoluble problems that have accumulated since Marx’s time. None of the problems raised in the history of preceding generations of the Left have been successfully worked through. All continue to haunt us.
What makes the present transformation of capitalÂism very different from preceding ones, however, is the absence of a Left, an absence that points to a problem of consciousness. If we are haunted by the past, this is largely in a repressed way. By treating the past as “anÂcient history” we proclaim it to be no longer relevant. For this very reason, it is unclear whether and to what extent the problems of contemporary capitalism have been brought to conscious recognition.
While every historical crisis in capitalism has been met with (premature) announcements of its demise (whether welcomed or regretted), a history of the Left’s conception of capitalism can help us understand the changes that capitalism has undergone. Specifically, such a history would tell us how acutely (or not) the problem of capitalism and its potential overcoming have been grasped on the Left historically, and this, in turn, would help to reveal lingering theoretical problems. By helping us to better grasp the problem of capitalism, we could better understand how it has survived up to now.
The disadvantage with which we approach the present crisis is conditioned by the absence of a Left that could be meaningfully critiqued and practically challenged, as Marx and the best Marxists did in prior periods. There is no Left to push forward. This severely constricts our ability to actually get a handle on the present.
Whereas prior periods provided the Left with a rich symptomology that could be critically interrogated and thereby advanced, the pathologies we must work through today threaten to be entirely phantasmal. We might be left in coming years wondering why anyone ever made such a great fuss about “credit default swaps” and the like. The sufferings of the present might strike future considerations of them as having been quaint.
To better understand the world we need to try to change it. But the paralyzed consciousness on the “Left” prevents any attempt from whose failure we might learn. Still, a critical encounter with the enigmas of past attempts to change the world might help motivate our thinking and action in the present. The restive dead will continue to haunt us, though they might be made to speak. They are the only meaningfully acute symptoms available in the present. | §
Originally published in The Platypus Review #12 (May 2009).
1. For instance, see: Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas, “We Are All Socialists Now” in Newsweek February 16, 2009; and the on-going forum on “Reimagining socialism” in The Nation, with contributions by Michael Albert, Tariq Ali, Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher, Jr., Doug Henwood, Christian Parenti, Robert Pollin, Rebecca Solnit, Immanuel Wallerstein, et al., beginning in the March 23, 2009 edition with Ehrenreich and Fletcher’s article “Rising to the Occasion.” See also my letter in response, published in the April 20, 2009 edition, on the relation of MarxÂism to reality, utopia and the necessity for revolution.
2. See, for instance, recent Nobel Laureate in economics Paul Krugman’s “loyal opposition” â supposedly from the “Left” â to the Obama administration’s policies, signaled by a New York Times op-ed column on how the policies were slipping “Behind the Curve” (March 8, 2009), followed by another column, “Conscience of a Liberal” (March 21, 2009) and the Newsweek cover story on Krugman by Evan Thomas, “Obama’s Nobel Headache” (March 28, 2009).
3. See, for instance, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961), The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1971) and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975).
4. Harvey’s more recent work, beginning at least with The New Imperialism (2003), up to and including his recent essay published in the Platypus Review 11 (March 2009), “Why the U.S. Stimulus Package is Bound to Fail,” has become more ambiguÂous if not incoherent, politically. He has therefore fallen below the threshold of the insight of his earlier work, which recognized the pitfalls of the nostalgia for Fordist capitalism that his more recent work evinces. This nostalgia is apparent in Harvey’s call, like others on the “Left” in the grip of the memory of the 1930sâ40s, for a “new New Deal.” On the other hand, Harvey repeats standard post-1960s warnings about supposed imperial “decline” that have proven unwarranted through the several criÂses the U.S. has weathered successfully since the Vietnam War debacle and the collapse of the post-World War II Bretton Woods system under Nixon.