Though Cowards Flinch

I note with grim bemusement some of the opinions coming out of this blog in recent weeks as regards potential operations in Syria, and the rather shocking attitude of Carl to people he believes hold principles that forbid military intervention in another nation. A deeply disturbing thesis, he calls these principles. Well, I for one disagree. I’m against any attack on Syria by any government.

Western governments cannot be trusted with a gun in their hand, period. It has nothing to do with the possible creation of safe zones, the potential for the Syrian people to rise up if they get Western help or their fate if they don’t. If you put guns in the hands of a movement which is not led by the independent organisations of the working class then, as in Libya, you invite disaster.

This disaster comes in the re-emergence of whatever social roots the criminal dictatorship can rely on, and it comes in the rise of racial, ethnic and tribal tensions. Separatism, as might be emerging some Libyan regions (not forgetting that this country was created by the West), becomes the focus of politics, as it attempts to bury the class struggle that must be waged against the privatisation which Gaddafi had come around to, and which the TNC will support.

If you think this is all abstract Marxist theorising, rather than being based on real events, look at the demands emanating from the local elites in Benghazi regarding Libya’s oil. Look at the details Amnesty International have of the looting of Black Libyan areas by the rebels. And I need not even mention how ethnic, racial and religious tensions became real with a vengeance in Iraq.

When socialists reproach pro-interventionists for listening to propaganda regarding the brutality of Bashar al-Assad, they’re not challenging the veracity of the stories. They’re challenging Western media emphasis on them, and the selection of these particular evils out of a whole world full of torture, oppression and misrule. Pro-interventionists aren’t being sufficiently critical in their approach to such evils. And they plainly haven’t learned the lessons of Western intervention elsewhere.

That lesson is an abject one in total hypocrisy. Concern for the victims of Assad now becomes indifference towards the victims of the Western militaries (and their less politically correct allies) and outright enmity towards those of divergent political aims. To foist such “help” upon the brave civilians who are standing up to Assad is absolute lunacy.

In the end, intervention is not an abstract instrumental question, it is a political one. The reckoning between the people of Syria and the dictatorship will not remain within those narrow parameters because of this. Eleven months into the uprising, the rebels have not been subdued. In fact, if reports are to be believed, Assad is using foreign hired guns to do what he dare not ask the army rank and file to do. Meanwhile the rebels must bring the rest of Damascus over to them – the stirrings of revolution.

Western intervention would almost certainly halt that – and may even result in some accommodation with the regime, after the removal of Assad. How is that justice for the thousands who have died?

These rebellions across the Middle East are not accidental or spontaneous. Dictators who have paid for their rule with oil wealth and relatively good living conditions are being hit by the global economic crisis. People are coming out into the streets not just to demand political freedom but to demand more from regimes that one by one succumbed to the depredations of market capitalism. The other capitalist nations will be more than happy to grant the former if they can forestall demands regarding the latter.

The sort of people the foreign powers are willing to deploy, to shut up the Syrian populace and prevent any further spread of the Arab Spring, is deeply telling however. Up until just this month, head of the Arab League observer mission was Mustafa al-Dabi, the Sudanese military official in post in Darfur whilst the genocide was going on. When the Western nations intervene, or the Arab League intervenes, the purpose will not be to limit civilian deaths, it will be to achieve an outcome satisfactory to those governments.

Moreover, looking at the sort of people likely to attempt to take control of Syria. Another unelected unaccountable trigger-happy transitional authority will simply release the same pressures as it released in Libya – and will thereafter pursue the same policies as Assad, perhaps resulting in worse casualties should any region or ethnic group dare to assert its separatist demands. By the time that happens, we’ll be lucky if there’s a Western media presence never mind a military presence.

Unlike Egypt, but like Libya, the Syrian people have started this with a handicap. They don’t have independent organisations of the working class. But they must develop them. The most we can do is hope on their behalf, and pressure our own governments to both stay aloof and to oppose Arab League intervention. That is not as satisfying perhaps as demanding the immediate bombing of every Syrian military installation in range of the 5th fleet, but that demand is not a solution to the problem – it complicates it. Meanwhile trust the Syrians to feel their way towards the right path. Assad’s continuing trickle of concessions are the surest sign that they will get there.

Meanwhile I wonder if the anti-war movement should be gearing up to oppose military intervention in a conflict closer to home, as it were, as the tension ratchets up over the Falklands again. I’m sure we’ll be hearing all the pro-interventionist piffle about democracy and self-determination on behalf of the islanders, should Argentina invade. As with Belgium in World War I, it is so much hypocritical twaddle in the mouths of capitalist leaders.

Which neatly brings me back to the deeply disturbing thesis. The capitalist state cannot be trusted to wield the military. Capitalist leaders, in their comfortable London drawing rooms, cannot be trusted to put the welfare of people in front of business when there are no lives at stake – why should they be trusted to put the welfare of people in front of what they consider to be the national interest when there are? Hands off Iran, Hands off Syria, Hands off the Falklands and while you’re at it, Hands off the NHS.

This is not a far left rant intimating that, in the aftermath of some successful industrial action, we’re ready to seize control of the country. We’ve achieved a little. Paul is right when he suggests that a lot of people will come away feeling buzzed by the mood of the marches, demonstrations and conversations on that day. I certainly went back to work the next day feeling like we had made our point.

Paul is also right when he suggests that there’s plenty more to do. There are concerns even more pressing than his particular objections to protesting and marching ad infinitum, or at least til the momentum has worn away as in the anti-war and anti-top up fees campaigns. Succinctly; we need to wrest control of the movement before we’re all bored to death by mid-level union bureaucrats.

Tory Canterbury answered the call to strike with fair aplomb. Somewhere around two hundred and fifty people met at a local hotel to hear union representatives from NUT, ATL, PCS and GMB speak. UCU and UNISON were also in marked attendance. As the pickets from around the city began to come in, this number swelled until there were some five hundred people either marching or milling at the Dane Jon.

Without intending to give offence to the speakers from the above-mentioned unions, however, having a captive audience for a full hour, they managed to lecture us all in hesitant style about why we were on strike. As I said afterwards, and several random people within earshot agreed, we don’t need to talk about why we’re there. We need to be talking about next steps – and a hall filled to bursting with the people who turned up to picket and protest strikes me as exactly where we should be talking about this.

The lack of questions from the floor, and the extended contributions from people who have no more authority than the rest of us, meant that when important matters were mentioned – e.g. the potential for a Canterbury-wide Trades Council, pulling in public AND private sector unions – there was no follow up. This comes back to something Paul was saying the other day, about how these meetings should be structured, if we’re not to be put off by continued pontification from above.

It’s all very well the unions stamping their feet like some latter-day Pompey Magnus. and expecting the foot soldiers to spring into action. But having answered grassroots anger with a coordinated strike, most will be content to going back to sleep, for now. We can’t let the momentum fade. The best way to do that is to establish, by locality, lists of people interested in continuing work as organisers not just within their own unions but in other venues too.

Whilst I have my own ideas about what exactly we need to organise, I’m more interested in the establishment of a local centre of gravity than in dictating the future, one which invites contributions from all workers of whatever political level, whatever role they hold or don’t hold in a union. Through these contributions, union reps can only improve their own performance, better representing their members and their class. And people are more than willing to share, with a little help from a ruthless, watch-wielding chair. This environment – of rigorous scrutiny and vigorous democracy – should be the backdrop to deciding where we go next.

And there are complicated questions to be answered about what comes next. Are we activists only, or is there a cross-over into electoral politics? What’s the fastest way to get rid of the Tory government? Is that the ultimate objective? Are we prepared to accept the Labour doctrine of continued cuts, albeit slower and shallower? Is our role limited to industrial questions? Are there practical ways one union can render support to others, even if we aren’t all on strike?

I suspect that last question should be the first answered; there are immediate, practical ways to begin rebuilding the political consciousness of the working class – a goal which should be common to socialists in Labour, in the Greens, in the smaller parties and those who don’t like the current gamut of party politics. For example, one goal should be the re-institution of the refusal by one worker to cross another’s picket lines. This sort of thing is vital to prepare the next national strike – and there must be more.

Rather than engaging in the sort of sectarian banter that gives Weekly Worker readers a hard-on, communists can use their skills and their knowledge of history, of other places and situations and tactics, to throw down deep roots in their class and establish a natural leadership. Merely by pushing for an aggressive line with the government and for the full accountability of those who claim to be our leaders we alienate nine-tenths of Labour Party hacks. Most Greens for that matter. This approach would be the making of any socialist, in my eyes.

One of the things which struck me so forcefully was how absolutely anathema the people brought out on Wednesday last would consider the usual sort of stilted, bureaucratic meetings that any local Labour Party basically runs on. Similarly, how ruinously dull would be judged the “political discussion” meetings so beloved of the smaller socialist parties? Millions of people are up for the challenge of beating the government and answering their ideologically-driven cuts agenda; to do them justice, we have to escape from the old paradigms. And the first step is making every meeting count.

Anders Breivik, in his fascist vanity tome “manifesto”, poured scorn on the influence of “cultural marxism” – leading some, like me old mucker Left Outside to ask: “What the hell actually is a cultural marxist by the way?”

His tongue is probably in his cheek (Left Outside, that is) when asking that, but let me just add a note to that particular debate.

The usual, post-Frankfurt crowd, identify cultural Marxism as the use of Marxian theory to analyse cultural relations. It’s as easy to view cultural Marxism as using Marxism as an analogy for the relations at play between individuals and groups.

Productive relations are played out between owners and non-owners of the means of production, and it is the opinion of thinkers such as Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton that this same terminology be applicable to cultural relations at play; making useful the notion of cultural hegemony.

Of course when Breivik references “cultural Marxism”, he doesn’t mean the embedding of equality within the fabric of society – which he would be opposed to anyhow – rather, he means political correctness. But rather than being a construct of 20th century Marxist thinkers, political correctness, or the societal disincentive to prejudice – works towards the public display of decency and/or sensitivity. Also, moreover, an acceptability to do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

As fascists and neo-fascists fail to understand, the notion of political correctness is not an unnatural tenet, against the natural tenet of prejudice – indeed there is nothing so unnatural as prejudice. Instead, it is an attempt to undermine discrimination against the most marginalised in society, women, homosexuals, religious and ethnic minorities – something which may have been acceptable in a bygone age (which the extreme Right aim to fetishise), but is by no means an organic state of play to cultivate through the active dismissal of that which has been demonised as “cultural Marxism”.

To conclude, Elizabeth Kantor in her 2006 book Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature suggested that for academia to allow great literary works – such as A Handmaid’s Tale – to disappear, on the grounds that they may be perceived as sexist, racist, or homophobic, “will destroy Western civilization and lead to barbarism.”

Yet, Atwood’s classic is still being taught at colleges and universities as a useful exegesis of a dystopian nightmare, and barbarism of late seems to be the preserve of racist fanatics with no more an understanding of the enlightenment as I have of the quantum harmonic oscillator.

‘Chav’. The word has disputed etymology, and yet everyone knows what it is – or rather, knows that they would prefer not be, themselves, identified as one. ‘Chav’ is that rare beast, denoting a section in society which almost nobody would want to touch with a bargepole, but yet, or so according to Owen Jones, has a well-defined target, at least as far as the mainstream media is concerned, as the newly consumerised working classes – and even in some cases the lower class made good.

Though, rather than being a category worthy of collected denunciation, ‘chav-bashing’ is a concerted campaign against the working class itself. The fact that many working class people would choose not to identify with the term is important in the way it has been used by many middle class people and self-appointed ‘neo-snobs’, such as Jemima Lewis, in the media.

The way in which the word ‘chav’ has been used can be seen within the framework Marxism has used to observe capitalism: as an agenda setting the workers against each other – Thatcher’s preferred means of governance. And yet, ironically, Marx himself would have been none too supportive of the so-called ‘chavs’. The assumption is that a ‘chav’ takes from society without actually giving back to it, and Marx had a word for this himself: the lumpenproletarian. This class, of whom Marx called ‘social scum’ in the Communist Manifesto, were unproductive and likely to be used as fodder for reactionaries.

But Jones has written, not a myth-busting book setting the world right about what is or is not a ‘chav’, but rather a reminder that in recent times, and quite under our noses, the working class have been institutionally demonised wholesale as the very worst, contemptible, subjects society can offer; rowdy, immoral and burdensome.

‘Chav’ is not a catch-all term, but its definition is loose enough so as to allow all to condemn the ‘chav’, thus playing into the hands of Thatcherite politics, key to which is dividing (the working class) and conquering.

As well as saying that this class-hatred (‘neo-snobs’ unto ‘chavs’) stems from the destruction caused by Thatcherite politics, and the age devoted only to a social mobility that sees being working class as a departure, not an ennobled end in itself, Jones is appealing against a rowdy headline-grabbing media, set on a course of snobbery and braggartry, who perceives somebody like Michael Carroll – dubbed the lotto lout – as the sum total of today’s working class.

Indeed, this is what was meant by local Dewsbury Moor community leader Julie Bushby, interviewed by Jones in his book, when she says “Ninety per cent of people here work. We’ve all taken money out of [our] own pockets for this [the search for Shannon Matthews]” (p.17). What she is saying here is Dewsbury Moor is not how the mainstream press paints it; namely as a scum setting with people who care only for themselves and not the communities in which they live.

It’s easy to see how the notion of ‘chav’ fits in neatly with Thatcher’s politics. In the same way that ‘chav-bashing’ is not unique to ‘neo-snobs’ in the mainstream press (the founder of website chavscum.co.uk for example identifies as working class) Thatcher’s policies were not avowedly anti-working class. In fact as Jones points out, for Thatcher class is a “Communist concept”, getting in the way of a society where one is out for oneself. There was one section of the working class Thatcher was happy to side by: the ‘Basildon Man‘. In the 1980s Basildon, a new town, generally speaking working class with a history of sitting Conservative MPs, was seen to epitomise the aspirational working class. In deed, Thatcher wanted to appeal to the “Basildon man” mentality, but in action she was setting about destructive measures which would hit working class families hardest.

In the economy, Thatcher’s 1979 Conservative government quickly “abolished exchange controls, allowing financial companies to make huge profits from currency speculation … at the expense of other parts of the economy, like manufacturing” (p.52). This was a sign that the rich were going to be given allowances, whereas at the lower end of the scale, a “de-industrialization of the economy” would sweep up jobs and opportunities – which many towns to this day have not recovered from.

Thatcher’s plans for society – a concept she was sceptical of – were worse still. Despite her words she did not want to get rid of social class, just stop us from perceiving we belonged to one. On her watch council estates were something to be feared, not somewhere to be proud of, and her callous derision of single Mother families ensured communities were divided (p.67). In an interview Jones conducted with Geoffrey Howe – the longest serving minister in Thatcher’s cabinet, and whose resignation was said to have hastened Thatcher’s own downfall – he was left surprised at how much the living standards of the poorest had become, left only uttering “…at the end of the period they’ve got better off, I think” (p.63).

As Jones rightly puts it: “Thatcher’s assumption of power in 1979 marked the beginning of an all-out assault on the pillars of working class Britain” (p.10). But surely not even she could have foreseen how far this assault would embed itself into future British politics. Jones points out that many New Labour policies were steeped in the kind of middle class triumphalism usually associated with the Tories. Stories about the lazy unemployed became a commonplace, and the era defined a new Labour politician, like James Purnell, who spent more time appeasing Tory attitudes and less time addressing the deep rooted problems that Britain inherited from Thatcherite destruction.

Today, now Labour are in opposition, things are not much better for the traditional party of the working class. While the nation apprehensively awaits Osborne’s deep cuts to the economy, effects of which will hurt the poorest harder, Blairites such as Peter Watt – Labour’s former General Secretary – are calling on the party to accept the Tories’ cuts agenda wholesale. The party historically linked to unions and working people, has become the party of the mainstream. The fire in the belly of the Labour party has been extinguished, leaving the door open for fringe parties to sweep up what has been left –  a gift for far right parties such as the British National Party (BNP).

Jones reflects upon a staggering 1958 gallup poll showing how 71% of britons were opposed to interracial marriage, however it is today, not the fifties, that the BNP is the most successful far right party in the UK to date (pp.222-23). Now that the New Labour party panders to a ruling metropolitan elite community for its votes and support, the BNP have stepped in to raise people’s legitimate concerns (housing, immigration, schools) framing the debate in racial terms. By and large, working class communities reject the appeals of the far right (they got a trumping in the last local elections), but the English Defence League are still making ground, tapping into local  concerns, and Labour is still doing little to counter this. Maurice Glasman, an academic at London Metropolitan University, has raised the debate of how Labour can win back the working classes, with his idea of a ‘blue Labour‘ – which is a start – but clearly there is much thinking left to be had inside the party, in order to reverse years of Tory pandering and working class abandonment.

But Jones doesn’t leave us hanging on what kind of action should be taken today, in order that the working class feel represented by politicians in parliament. He concludes by touching on just a few things likely to re-integrate the least well-off back into society again. Things like a national programme of social housing, reliant as it would be on “an army of skilled labour”. Today even the Tories are discussing ‘Britain making things again’, and so, opines Jones, “there is ample space to make the case for a new industrial strategy” (p.261). Furthermore, giving workers “genuine control and power in the workplace” is not unique to the Left any longer – the benefits of better workforce engagement has been researched across the board from The Work Foundation to centre right think-tank Respublica.  

Certainly the case for working class empowerment has gained traction again, the battle now is to harangue politicians to ensure they keep their word and start to deliver the changes necessary to reverse the tide of recent class prejudice, started by the Tories and carried on through to the present day via the appeasement of New Labour.

As Jones has cleverly noted in his book, ‘chav’ is the perfect embodiment of how far the class war, waged by the political establishment, and perpetuated by many in the mainstream media, has come. No longer is class prejudice simply fought along the lines of ‘them (the poor) and us (the wealthy)’, but a situation has arisen where their demonisation of the working class has created a ‘them and us’ within those very communities. That this happened alongside the political elites’ efforts to weaken working class institutions (such as trade unions) has frustrated working class strength and pride – laying the ground for the expansion of anti-working class politics. Hopefully this book, which is extremely readable and exceptionally researched, will be the wake-up call needed to combat today’s ‘neo-snob’ class warriors, whose sole aim is the destruction of all that the working class hold dear.

May Day this year could have gone either way; on the one hand it was possible trade unionists up and and down the country got all their marching needs out the way on 26 March during the TUC march. Though on the other hand of course activists have mobilised somewhat in the last year, particularly in anticipation of the pinch at the hands of Tory-LibDem cuts.

A woman I was speaking to at Clerkenwell Green told me she had counted around 100 police officers on her way to the square, which made her concerned about the nature of today’s march. Recent events have made some rather nervous (that, or more determined to act). 15 activists in Bristol were arrested recently as protests ripped through the stokes croft area, an individual arrested during the royal wedding event had been singing “we all live in a fascist regime”, and the activist Chris Knight was pre-emptively arrested – taking police power into Minority Report territory.

The same women also opined that May Day be returned to its original roots – that of celebrating the labour force in a more relaxed showing of solidarity, as opposed to the exclusive, family un-friendly event it has possibly become.

As the march started, however, it was clear that nowhere near the same numbers had come out as previous years – trouble was reduced to zero, and there was no presence of blac bloc activists at all (at least not in Trafalgar Square). The police numbers seemed almost irrelevant.

May Day is an important show of worker strength – which is all the more important now David Cameron has threatened to remove it as a public holiday (just another stab in the back for the most vulnerable in society, and a signal of things to come). But today all the energy seemed to be sapped out. And the woman I spoke to appeared to be right; generally the message has been lost (one half of Trafalgar Square seemed almost exclusively filled with banners of Stalin).

Aside from campaigning for speeches without shouting, those who have high regard for May Day should see that it returns to its traditional message – labor day, not Stalinist Labour bashing!

(For some of the best photos of the day, see Louise).

This is a guest post by Bob From Brockley

I think the two most powerful cases against liberal interventionism I’ve read recently are “The Innocence of the Liberal Hawk” by Gary Younge in the April 11 edition of The Nation, and “Thoughts on Libya and liberal interventionism” by Mike Marqusee at his website. The two pieces have different contexts – one by a British writer transplanted to the US, aiming at mainstream liberal US commentators like Thomas Friedman, the other by an American transplanted to the UK, aiming at more left-wing British opinionists like Jonathan Freedland. But they reach similar conclusions and make overlapping arguments.

Many of their strikes against liberal interventionism hit home. Marqusee correctly argues that liberal interventionism relies on the great powers, who they treat as neutral agents. He argues that liberal interventionism has a technocratic vision of military power, seeing it as a tool like raising taxes, which can be implemented in a time-limited, surgical way. He argues that liberal interventionism is blind to the imbalances in wealth and power between the states that intervene and the regions where they do so. Both Marqusee and Younge point to a logical fallacy in the interventionist position: the imperative to “do something” considers only one “something”, military intervention, dismissing or failing to conceive of other forms of solidarity.

However, a number of their strikes go amiss. Both of them linger on the West’s double standards: why Libya and not Bahrain? John Rentoul has called this the “why should I clean my bedroom when the world is in such a mess” argument, and its misses the fact that many liberal interventionists have been leading critics of the monarchies of the Gulf region and few of them embraced Gaddafi when Blair and Sarkozy did.

Marqusee has a clichéd vulgar materialist explanation for the double standards: oil. But his own examples show the weakness of this explanation. “If liberal interventionists were consistent,” he says, “they would advocate similar Western military action in relation to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the Congo, Kashmir, Iran, Israel, Burma, etc. etc. etc.” But a glance at this list shows several oil-producing countries where the West is failing to intervene, as well as places with other resources of huge geopolitical and economic significance to the West – Congo is extremely mineral-rich, and our mobile phones would be useless without the coltan mined there. In fact, the last things the oil industry wants in Libya is war, disruption, or democracy; they were perfectly happy with Gaddafi, no less than they are with the autocratic regime in Bahrain.

On the other hand, Marqusee recognises the limitation of the double standards argument, and persuasively argues that “We cannot cure our governments’ double standards with double standards of our own… We don’t demand the invasion of Burma or the bombing of Tel Aviv and no one called for NFZs over the townships during the apartheid years.”

However, Marqusee misses two crucial features of Libya, which makes it different from such examples. On the one hand is something that Younge recognises: the legitimacy of intervention in Libya is not derived from a legal case dreamt up on Capitol Hill or Whitehall, but from the demands of the rebels in Libya. As Younge puts it, “the invitation to attack did come from a credible resistance movement within Libya.” Marquesee says “we stand in solidarity with democratic struggles”, but what kind of solidarity ignores the cries for help of the masses rising up from under Gaddafi’s heal?

The second, related feature is the urgency of the situation in Libya. Younge responds to this, but with cynicism and casuistry. On the liberal interventionists who say that rebels and their civilian supporters are being crushed now, he says “Such sophistry treats “now” as its own abstract point in time: a moment that bears no legacy and carries no consequences. Amnesia and ignorance are the privileges of the powerful. But the powerless, who live with the ramifications, do not have the luxury of forgetting. They do not forget Shatila, Falluja, Abu Ghraib or Jenin—to name but a few horrific war crimes in which the West was complicit.” I find this argument utterly immoral as well as manipulative.

To take Shatila, there was a moment when the horrific massacre was about to happen, and a moment when it did happen. If it could have been stopped by Western action – if Israel had acted to stop the Falange, or if UN peacekeepers had protected the camps – would this not have been desirable? Wouldn’t the “legacy” of such intervention have been the saved lives of the powerless? Is the moral credibility of remembering Shatila a purchase worth the price of the inaction that allowed the massacre to happen?

Or, to take another of Marqusee’s examples, part of the reason the left did not “call for NFZs over the townships during the apartheid years” was that, heinous though the regime was there was not the immediate threat of mass slaughter which could be averted by implementing an NFZ. Similarly, although some leftists do demand the bombing of Tel Aviv (or salute the Palestinian “resistance” when it carries it out), the comparison between Israel and Gaddafi’s regime is absurd and obscene.

Both Marqusee and Younge rightly argue that there are other modes of solidarity, other forms of “doing something”, apart from military intervention. They are right that the left’s starting point should be solidarity with the oppressed rather than the West’s strategic interests. But it is hard to see what effective measures of solidarity we can deploy from here, which will address the urgency of the humanitarian situation.

It is instructive here to examine some of the comparisons and arguments from example the anti-interventionists discuss. In Bosnia, Marqusee places blame on an NFZ and Dutch troops on the ground for failing to stop the Srebrenica massacre. What this ignores is that the passivity rather than the intervention of the Dutch troops enabled the massacre to happen. There was no commitment to liberal interventionism at that point, and the Dutch troops were locked in a Cold War mentality of peace-keeping, when local wars were proxy wars between the superpowers and peacekeeping on the ground was backed up by great power diplomacy behind the scenes.

Similarly, Marqusee says that in Rwanda, “there were French troops on the ground, defending their national interests and nothing else.” This is true, and is a shame on the French. Again, however, it is not an indictment of liberal interventionism, but of the neo-colonial mentality of the French at that time, in reaction to which people like Bernard Kouchner articulated their liberal interventionist vision.

Looking at these examples, it is hard to see what concrete measures of solidarity, what other ways of “doing something”, could have made a difference. Workers Aid to Bosnia was effective in getting humanitarian supplies to the beleaguered anti-Milosevic movement, but it was utterly powerless once the ethnic cleansing began in earnest. The logistics of something comparable are less plausible in Libya. Arming the rebels would be one way forward, but again the practicalities of doing so present severe obstacles. What else do Younge and Marqusee suggest, apart from a gestural memorialising of the massacres once they have occurred?

More fundamentally, Marqusee and Younge both accuse liberal interventionists of an ahistorical analysis, which forgets or erases the whole history of imperialism and the destructive role of the West’s self-interest around the world. This is an accurate criticism in many cases. But Younge and Marqusee also write from an ahistorical analysis, one in which the world is frozen at some point in the Cold War past. Marqusee makes this clear in his last paragraph:

“this debate has reminded me of the gulf that separates my politics (and most of us on the left) from this type of liberalism. For me this gulf first opened when as a youngster I watched liberals launch the Vietnam War on a sea of “good intentions”. The gulf widened when, despite the ensuing nightmare, liberals continued to believe in the benign nature of US (or British or French) world intentions.”

Marqusee’s analysis is stuck in the Vietnam moment. Younge is younger, but his politics too were formed in the Cold War, in the period of Thatcher/Reagan, of the Iran/Contra scandal, the Falklands war, interventions in Grenada and Panama, American support for the crushing of national liberation movements in Africa. Their worldview essentially sees intervention as something only “the West” can do; it sees “the West” as a homogenous entity; it sees “the West” as the ultimate power in the world.

My politics were formed by similar contexts to Younge’s, so I am sympathetic. But the world has significantly changed in a number of ways. Marqusee claims that “In the name of pluralism [liberal interventionists] endorse a uni-polar world, governed perpetually by a few great powers.” But, in fact, we now live in a multipolar world: in which Russia is no longer the evil empire nor a defeated ex-superpower but a rising economic force with its own geopolitical agenda and its own proxy low intensity wars across central Asia, in which huge tracts of the continent on what Libya sits are being bought up by Saudi millionaires and  Chinese investment companies in a new scramble for Africa which makes the age of Cecil Rhodes look petty, in which Saudi military might exceeds that of most European nations, in which non-state actors like Hezbollah have offensive capabilities beyond some European nations, in which the Gulf states are the patrons rather than the clients of American capital.

Take again some of the examples Marqusee mentions: Burma is a major location for Chinese investment in oil and gas extraction and exploration, as well as the site of Chinese military installations at Great Coco Island. Similarly, the violence in Darfur is fuelled by Chinese weapons and economic interests, while UN action to stop the violence is blocked by China. As Christopher Hitchens said in a recent interview, “Darfur, Zimbabwe, Burma, North Korea, anywhere that the concept of human rights doesn’t exist, it’s always the Chinese at backstop. And always for reasons that you could write down in three words: blood for oil.” In other words, the anti-interventionists vision of US oil-thirsty gunboat diplomacy is a case of selective blindness.

Their unipolar vision also only obscures other examples of liberal interventionism. It ignores the Vietnamese liberation of Cambodia from Pol Pot, for example, in which a non-Western force eventually intervened to stop a genocidal dictator who was slaughtering its own people. (After I wrote this, I saw Anthony Barnett using the same example: “while the Cambodians did not want to be ruled by the Vietnamese, who they usually loathed, they were very pleased indeed, as one of them put it to me, “not to be genocided”. The Cambodian people were liberated from tyranny, their torture and terror was ended. The humanitarian justification for this trumped any form of theory or political schema.”)

The unipolar vision also ignores the times when African Union forces have policed some of the continent’s most horrific war crimes, such as Darfur, where their lack of resources critically undermines their effectiveness. It ignores instances of Western intervention that serve absolutely no geopolitical interest, such as Britain’s involvement in Sierra Leone, where the Indian-led UNAMSIL intervention in 1999 was utterly ineffective and British intervention (Operation Palliser) helped bring an end to the decade of blood-letting (violence, incidentally, which the Gaddafi regime aided and abetted). Most liberal interventionists, rather than simply cheer-leading Western action, have also supported these interventions too, even though they have not served Western interests.

In short, liberal interventionism may be flawed in both theory and practice, but unless Younge and Marqusee can provide a meaningful alternative, how can the left in strong nations help to stop civilians in places like Libya, Sierra Leone, Cambodia or Kosovo from being “genocided”?

As a young man I was a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party – until, that was, I gained my senses and left. In Southend, Essex, where I was at college and starting to get politically active, it was the only organisation taking to the streets nearly every week, and certainly were a notable presence campaigning against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I remember thinking how much I hated the navalgazing, spending weeknights listening to the same old lines on General Pincohet or the Poll Tax riots with a room full of other people who all knew the story, but felt they had to do something under the swappie banner they’d erected upstairs in The Railway Pub function room.

Among us common lot we’d do down on the Middle Class whenever we could – no matter our own backgrounds we knew our enemy, it was all those people not suffering, not cleaning the streets, not emptying the bins. We were decidedly bitter about the petit-bourgeoisie – we had an image in our heads of them we didn’t like, and we found the right company to share that in.

But come conference time, in London, among the Alex Callinicos’ and the other aristos bankrolling the newspaper production, we’d drop the Middle Class hatred like it was hot. Instead we did the dirty on the bourgeoisie proper; we sided with the squeezed middle before there was even such thing as a squeezed middle, it was the owners of the means of production – a significantly smaller percentage of people – that were our bugbear then.

The reason, implictly, being was that to shun the Middle Class at a Swappie conference is like Turkey’s voting for Christmas or noted Nazi Jews acting as architects for the final solution. For every wire-haired, gravel-voiced trade unionist in the room, there were ten double-barrelled silver spoons from Plumshire.

But while my old comrades carried on disavowing the Middle Classes, I learnt to embrace them, and actually see this embrace as being crucial to the eventual dissolution of the class system in general.

I’ve grown to the idea that inter-class relations within a state socialist system will actually spur the end of the class system far quicker than if Trotskyite groups, behind closed doors, denied their own Middle Class roots and/or embarked on class hatred themselves.

As a socialist, I think it is important to have a strong state, and a strong head of state to keep the Prime Minister, and the First Ministers in the devolved governments, under constant check. It will be of no surprise then to find that I am excited that our future King, Prince William (whose RAF salary is to the tune of £37,170), has decided to marry well outside his class – the lovely Catherine Elizabeth Middleton.

It might seem strange to hear, but the dreadful class system in this country, which has single-handedly ruined true social mobility (and with it the lives of many Working Class families), might be dealt its strongest blow to date by the marriage of William and Kate – for which the Left today ought to be truly grateful.

In a letter to Ludwig Kugelmann on December 13, 1870, on the subject of the combination of civil war with revolutionary wars, Karl Marx opined that socialists should embrace giving “the proletariat practice in arms.”

141 years later, capitalist governments such as the US have been given permission by the UN to arm rebels in Libya.

Today, also, Tory backbencher Mark Pritchard said the “international community should allow rebels access to arms”.

And what have the UK’s Marxist representatives said? Simon Assaf for the Socialist Worker has said:

It may seem callous to oppose intervention in the face of such harrowing repression. But any Western intervention will come at a heavy price.

Since arming the revolution would count as “Western intervention” I guess that’s out of the question.

The world has turned upside down.

(H/T @libyansunite cf here and here)

Hopi Sen, in his intellectually impure and prosaic manner, said on twitter last night:

Oh-ho, has the new left thingummy reached stage three of all left wing movements then (tedious internal bickering?) / Campaign model for all leftie “revolutionary “groups – Stage 1: Campaign. Stage 2: overblown rhetoric about transforming world. / Stage 3: Internal bickering. Stage 4: Assign blame for failure to achieve stage 2. Stage 5. Appear on Newsnight to criticise Labour party.

Droll, I’m sure. But what has been characterised here as ‘internal bickering’ is a vital component of assessing next stages of any successful movement of people.

Questions on whether applying theory to practice is necessary anymore have emerged (see NLP here, SWP) as well as questions on whether leadership is necessary in such an organised gathering of protesters (see Seymour; Seymour; and Seymour’s apology) – particularly concerning UK Uncut (a better summary of events can be found at The Great Unrest blog).

The argument against discussing theory – characterised by some as meaningless intellectual masturbation – and against leadership – characterised by some as the adoption of old, stale bureaucratic structures – is made while drawing on the current success of the movement (see Laurie Penny and Marcus Malarky on this, then see Owen Jones on the problems of leaderless youth). But to pretend these structures are unnecessary, and that the movement is unique and distinct from other movements, is a grave error, and one which has been host to so many casualties. Take for example the struggle of German labor movements from 1912 to 1923. Paul Mattick had this to say about them in 1947, and it sounds very familiar to the place where the student movement is at now:

In retrospect, the struggle of the German proletariat from 1912 to 1923 appeared as minor frictions that accompanied the capitalistic re-organization process which followed the war-crisis. But there has always been a tendency to consider the by-products of violent changes in the capitalistic structure as expressions of the revolutionary will of the proletariat. The radical optimists, however, were merely whistling in the dark. The darkness was real, to be sure, and the noise was encouraging, yet at this late hour there is no need to take it seriously. As exciting as it is to recall the days of proletarian actions in Germany – the mass meetings, demonstrations, strikes, street fights, the heated discussions, the hopes, fears, and disappointments, the bitterness of defeat and the pain of prison and death – yet no lessons but negative ones can now be drawn from all these undertakings. All the energy and all the enthusiasm were not enough to bring about a social change or to alter the contemporary mind. The lesson learned was how not to proceed. How to realize the revolutionary needs of the proletariat was not discovered.

Mattick recalls the excitement of the actions; I fear the excitement of the actions taking place during current demonstrations and direct actions today make it difficult to see the necessity of assessing next steps, theory and leadership. But so as to ensure nobody today is “whistling in the dark” internal dialogue must remain – even if Hopi Sen and the other New Labour Dinosaurs laugh about it.

A couple of moments ago, Wes Streeting, who is a Labour Councillor in Redbridge, said this in a tweet:

“Not sure it’s very ‘Tony’ but surely we should support Labour’s most electorally successful leader and PM having a statue?”

Statue aside (in his words, “am I bothered”) it is so easy for some people; we’ll support our tribe come what may, and that’s that (no doubt you’ve heard the argument before; we should support Blair/Mandelson as they bring in the votes, forgetting the price the party has had to pay for that experiment). Only for anyone in the Labour Party who really cares about it, and are politically committed to boot, this will not do. Surely a nodding dog who promised everything to everyone (like Barack Obama at the start of his term) would be more electorally successful, but the Labour Party is a political party, historically it has been a political machine and a socialist one as well. While it’s trying to please everyone it is pleasing nobody; Blair may have won his pathetic game against his contemporaries in the Commons, he may have smiled at the correct moments in a PR attempt to woo the heartstrings of the electorate, but he had no political fire in his belly to win the argument for socialism (in fact, by the end I’m sure he’d rather do anything else) and therefore we in the Labour Party should not “support” him. No way.

Yesterday I played a game that my Grandad received for Christmas. One of the questions raised – aimed at a certain generation – was: “should it be absolutely right for a person to fight for their country over anything else?” I was the elephant in the room, among mostly ex-service people (my parents and grandparents included) who said no – but I stand by my answer; today more than ever nation is a tribe that can serve only as sentimental value, ideas and convictions is a dish best served political, and in an age of postmodern disdain for ideas that can guide your uttermost convictions, it is the task of the left today to fight against that current – nationalism and tribalism were bad for politics in generations previous (obviously I justify British presence in WWII, but Churchill was an imperialist, it’s an old point, unpopular and often disavowed, but it’s true) and are bad today.

But who today are really to blame? Reading the above may lead you to think I’m not myself slightly tribal to a political party, but in many ways I am, but not in the sort of way damaging to my political convictions. My own brand of Labour Party tribalism means that I think TonyBlair was a monster – and it’s because I care about the party so much that I can say this. Those who send messages, such as the one above, are more damaging to the party than they realise.

Who I blame for the rightwards trajectory of the political party I am a member of is not necessarily those rightist figures themselves – it is young members of Trotskyite splinter parties like the Socialist Workers Party (born out of the IS, and founded as the SWP in 1977). In the days during the militancy period in the 80s, people were thrown out in a Kinnock, McCarthy-esque, early New Labour drive to rid the party of socialist ideas – history denialism. There were two elements to emerge; an element who embraced the sectarianism of the left who created the far left pressure groups we know awkwardly selling papers today, and then Grantite-entryists who as best as possible worked inside the Labour Party with the intention of bringing socialists together. Younger generations inside those parties don’t face the same problems; for them the Labour Party is sinking ship composed of capitalists and warmongers. However, these people have less fire in their bellies than the right wing of the Labour Party whose socialism has died with the size of their mortgages.

While sectarian factions choose not to touch the Labour Party with bargepoles, so the right of the party become vindicated in their place, and with the slow death of New Labour, and the sloppiness of Ed Miliband, now is the time to work inside and alongside the party, not against it. Owing to the constitution of the small far left parties, and their continual relevance among young socialists as opposed to working inside the longest existing, and historically the most idea rich socialist party in the UK – the Labour Party – they are by their very nature sectarian, and therefore it is justified to shut the door on their personal vindications to the Labour right wing, while offering a place to them if they wanted, and sharing ideas where possible (like the Labour Representative Committee do with smaller parties).