Marxism International

Whatever the precipitating cause of our current “anti-terrorism” imbroglio, two things are becoming clear.   First, the emerging winner after nearly four years of Bush’s crusade is none other than our ally Israel.    And, secondly, Bush and his allies in London and Tel Aviv are poised for a historic victory, however Pyrrhic it may eventually prove to be.

Why did we go to war in the first place.?    There were doubtless numerous reasons, ranging from China’s growing thirst for oil to the domestic political needs of the Republican party, but the major cause I think was the need felt in important quarters to make the world safe for Israel.   

Saddam Hussein, for all his many sins, rode tall among the occupied and friendless Palestinians.   He was for all intents and purposes the chief financier and patron of the Palestinian intifada.   I mean, this guy gave a small fortune to the economies of the West Bank and Gaza when the rest of the Arab world wouldn’t give the Palestinian resistance the time of day.   $25,000 was given to the families of each suicide bomber.   Along with it came much material support to both extended family and the community.    The UN’s Oil for Food Program was supposed to be a sop to the Israeli Lobby; the allies would leave the Baathist regime alone for now and would try to stop the flow of Iraqi cash to the Palestinians.   

The Oil for Food Program went south and the cash kept flowing into the Palestinian economy.

The Israelis, for their part. never liked leaving Saddam Hussein in power.    They were determined to plow him under and were increasingly anxous about doing so.  The only question was when.   Translated to mean: when could the Americans be talked into giving Saddam the boot?

After 9/11 and with the Bush regime in power, it became only a matter of time.    Bush at the very minimum wanted regime change in Baghdad.    Too, he and Karl Rove wanted to effect a major realignment by bringing American Jews en masse into the Republican party.    A complicit media or at least one muted and docile would come in handy when ”reforms” in social security, education, and taxes really started to bite.   

Then, there were the Christian apocalyptic prophesies, promoted by many party-connected hucksters and aimed at an important component of the Republican social base, the emotionally impoverished,  many of whom were already beset by cruel economies and corrupted priorities.   The stage was being set.

Now, four years later, we have witnessed the denouement; its sequel will be played out in Damascus and Tehren and perhaps elswhere.    Why is this happening, and why will the scenario continue to be played out until the intransigent (”rejectionsit”) Arab world is brought to heel, regardless of the cost?

First of all, there is for the moment no credible alternative.    Not to the really bad way that the Arabs have treated their own people (true the West was complicit in this to the extent they cajoled and corrupted various governments, but did those governments really need all that much corrupting?).    Nor to the model of development contemplated by the West waiting to be implemented in the newly “liberated” realms of Islam.   The Soviet Union and the visions of a just, equitable socialist society is for the moment gone.   The Americans and their allies have inherited a vast ideological vacuum into which they are rushing precipitously (with a Leninist zeal) to both fill and remake in their own image.    The Arab world is very much like Spain at the end of the nineteenth century when a nascent American imperialism seized with little effort the remains of a tattered empire in Cuba and in the Philippines.    

Arab “government” has evolved into a syphillitic, decaying near-cadaver rotting away before the very eyes of its stewards, its customs and religions choking its own people into a kind of stupefied ennui.   The bewildered Arab “street” can only look on in impotent rage as defeat after defeat, compromise after compromise inexorably rots away its sense of initiative and self-respect.   

Further, “solutions” to this connundrum will come not from within Arab society but in all likelihood will arrive as a seres of profound outside influences, first from the Anglo/American/Israeli axis of power and then and more decisively from Asia and a resurgent Russia.    But, by that time the structure of Islamic society in the Middle East will have changed beyond recognition and it will fall to a new generation to skillfully adapt to the new realities of a changed world, something its predecessors, suffering from centuries of tradition and superstitious obstinancy, failed to do.

Condorcet, while in prison awaiting the guillotine, rejected the consolations of religion in favor of those of history and wrote The Outline of a Table of Progress of the Human Spirit, in which history was seen for the first time as a progressive advance towards a future utopia.   Perhaps the awakened Arab masses, similarly rejecting the suffocating superstitions of faith and tradition, will turn to history and find a sense of future that at long last serves the people instead of a succession of unworthy rulers, foreign and domestic.

Now, that’s the kind of middle eastern “democracy” I’d really like to see…

Though I’ve done precious little of it, I am really getting rather fond of this blogging business.   I’ve had some help.  One person in particular kindly agreed to patiently answer my (often idiotic) questions about technicalities peculiar to the Harvard blogging world.   Others have offered more or less helpful suggestions about content.    Still more have written or called to ask why I of all people have undertaken to keep a blog in the first place.   To one and all (and especially my adroit tutor), I say “thanks”.

To everyone who has read this far, let me offer an updated explanation of my purpose here on Marxism International.   [The fact that haying season -- in any event, the first cutting -- is now over allows for a bit more time for gratuitous editorializing.   I'll try not to abuse it.]

Though I do not consider myself of the “official” Left  (I mean the galaxy of minute warring sects, each claiming to possess the Holy Grail of political purity and united only in their collective inability to attract more than an insignificant fringe of the working class), I have an abiding aversion to the system we call Capitalism.    So much so, in fact, that I can categorically state that I loathe the society in which I live as much as Lenin did his, though there are many obvious dissimilarities between his world and mine.  

I see American society — the myriad of relationships existing within that society — as hopelessly and definitively corrupt.   One cannot “destroy” American corruption.   If you destroy the corruption, you destroy the system.   Corruption holds the system together.   Not articulated goals.   Not shared values.   Corruption.   Or, perhaps I should say; “corrupt reciprocities”; by which I mean the countless thousands of habits and expectations that have been created and nurtured by the dispensation which now has a firm hold upon the imaginations of our civilization.   Unlike most on the Left, I locate the source of this malaise not in the market but within the state, and doing away with the capitalist state (as a necessary pre-requisite to doing away with the state, period) is my primary political goal.   

“So long as the state exists, there is no freedom; when freedom exists, there will be no state“ 

                                                                                                                        Lenin

                                                                                                                                           My primary purpose in blogging in this site is to explore alternatives to the capitalist state, and indeed to the state itself; that is the one topic that transfixes me and defines politically who I am.    I am not opposed to markets as such, but I want to see if we can have markets without a state, if we can in fact do without money or an exploiting class or the necessity of having large numbers of people who are wretched as well as poor.   

In short, what is needed to render the state superfluous?   

I am profoundly unhappy with our present situation here in the West, though I recognize any solution to the abject criminality of capitalism and its state must come primarily from people living within Western society.   It is unlikely to come to us courtesy of a “morally” superior developing world (this beast I believe does not exist) nor from some formulae devised by observant but dis-engaged intellectuals.

Hence my interest in alternatives; In the weeks to come, I will be continuing to look at emerging societies, trying to ascertain basically three things: a) What, that is new or prescient, are these societies attempting to achieve? b) Do they have tenable long-term goals? and c) Can we in the West learn anything from their experiences?

I hope mine is not an immodest ambition.   Only time will tell.   For those of you reading this, I can say honestly that I would enjoy hearing from you.   Learning from others makes urgent tasks easier.    Or seems to.

The debate about whether the China National Offshore Oil Corporation should be “allowed” to buy Unocal for close to $20bn (they’ve outbid cheapskate Chevron by nearly $2bn) is raging with a ferocity not seen since the early days of the Cold War.  Back then, the question of the day was “Who Lost China?” [sic], as if it was somehow “ours” to “lose”.   America’s pugnacious puppet Generalissimo Chang Kai Chek (who had earned the nickname “Cash My Check” by his mercenary dealings with the US State Department) had just fled to Formosa with his entourage of tennis rackets and grand pianos trailing in his wake.   “The Chinese people have stood up” declared Mao, precipitating a witch hunt within the State Department that ultimately ended careers and destroyed lives.

Well, times have changed.   Somewhat.    Now, the overwhelming concern in official Washington is that “protectionism” and “China-bashing” be reigned in before it puts a hole in the pocket of American investors in Asia.    There are it is true deep schisms within the ruling establishment which roughly play out to a struggle between “American values” and the ever-present hunger for the Almighty Dollar.   One should not make too much of this dichotomy; the Almighty Dollar will win, as it always does, if for no other reason then the ”values” choir is always more hot air than substance and is at heart no less mercenary than its “secular” brethren.   At the same time, the issues of dealing with the “Chi-Coms” (that’s Nascar talk for the bogey Chinese Communists who are waiting to buy the other 97,297 American companies — they already own parts of Maytag and IBM) are being thrown in sharp relief.   China is a looming fact of life.   And the Chinese are standing taller than ever.   

That, I suspect, is what has much of the American establishment in an uproar.