Who was Sihanouk?

 

Norodom Sihanouk, the self-styled King-Father of Cambodia, has died at the age of 89 in circumstances far more pleasant than the many Cambodians he outlived. He spent his last years in North Korea and China, the appropriate compatriots of a man who took the side of the Khmer Rouge out of his own opportunism. It's true that Sihanouk was just another man clutching at straws in the chaos of the American war on Indochina. He was both a hostage of and accomplice to the Khmer Rouge. Just as Sihanouk had juggled the various powers in the Vietnam war to maintain Cambodia's "neutrality" and hold onto the thrown, the demagogue went on to stand as a voice of opposition during the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. To this end Sihanouk took the side of the Khmer Rouge in those years as the respectable face to the international community. And yet Sihanouk began his reign as a playboy and demagogue, it seems he learned quick how to dance to the tune of foreign powers.

That was the case with the French until the old empire was on its last legs. Sihanouk moved to establish an independent state in 1953 and reinvented himself as the father of the nation. Yet the young King continued the alliance with France even after independence. In 1955 Sihanouk stepped down as King, letting his father take his place, only to lead the country on a populist appeal to cultural conservatism, revolutionary nationalism and Buddhist socialism. Though Sihanouk later took up the powers of King as a Prince when his father died. It was a balancing act, Sihanouk was keen to keep Cambodia out of the Indochinese conflict and played leftists against rightists. In the end, his former deputy, Lon Nol seized power in a putsch in 1970 with the approval of the CIA. It was then that Sihanouk forged a coalition with Pol Pot. Meanwhile the reactionary nationalist Lon Nol supported the US campaign to repeatedly bomb Cambodia thereby laying the road to Phnom Penh for the jungle-dwelling guerrillas.

As the Khmer Republic crumbled in 1975 Lon Nol opted for a last stand - it came straight out of Buddhist mysticism - and when the Khmer Rouge surrounded the capital the Marshall had a ring of consecrated sand spread around the entire city. The sand couldn't save Cambodia from what happened next. At first the mood was one of celebration as the youthful troops draped in black and red garb marched into town. The mood soon changed when the thugs started to evacuate the city, dumping the old and the infirmed at the side of the road to die. The rest of the people were marched into the jungle at gun-point. During all of this Sihanouk spent his time between Beijing and Pyongyang, upon his return to Cambodia he would serve briefly as a mascot monarch of the Angkar. He gave a lie-riddled speech at the UN defending Pol Pot, though Sihanouk was just a pawn in a game this was no trivial game. The Chinese supported Pol Pot in order to colonise Cambodia and counter the shift of power as Vietnam realigned itself with the Soviet Union.

For more on this period of Cambodia's history see my latest article.

Hideous Idols.

 

Democracy by Airstrike.

We might, in synoptic terms, see the invasion of Iraq as leading ultimately to the elections of an Iraqi government. This is not to take a teleological view of the invasion as undertaken in order to bring democracy and freedom to Iraq. It was a teleological calculation that led a great many Iraqi leftists to support the intervention. Similarly, David Aaronovitch argued that the prospect of free elections is good reason to bomb Afghanistan as well as the justification for, and ultimately the function of the intervention. It's democracy by airstrike. It can be said that this is not only highly mistaken, it is almost a bastardisation of historical materialism. Karl Marx would remind us that history progresses by its bad side. If we take this too literally then we might come to the conclusion that injustice now is necessary for justice later. The point is actually more subtle: The advent of democracy in Iraq is inseparable from the violence of the invasion and occupation, but it is not a justification of the aforementioned horrors. In this sense Iraq is not unique.

The evils of the war were not perpetrated for the good of Iraqis. But it is the case that the Iraqi people should make the best of their country now that they are free of Saddam. It is precisely because the war was not fought to free Iraq that another intervention was necessary. This time it came from the Iraqi people, including from those who had supported the invasion to remove Saddam Hussein from power. We shouldn't sneer at the Iraqis who supported the intervention, in their minds the invasion didn't have to lead to an occupation. In his writing on India Karl Marx likened progress to "that hideous, pagan idol," who drinks the nectar "from the skulls of the slain." He did so not to claim that there is no progress, but to emphasise the horrifying price that has to be paid for it. In the same line Marx writes that it's only when "a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production," and subjected them to the control of the people will we have broken with progress as a monstrous god.

It's worth noting that Marx was writing about British colonial rule in India, particularly with regard to the economic composition there. So it should be stressed that the ultimate emancipation of Iraq will come out of the economic conditions. As Terry Eagleton comes out with it, the moral and the material dance hand-in-hand, while at the same time the moral and the material are at daggers drawn. Material development equates to moral development insofar as the advance of productive forces promotes the unfolding of creative power and capacities in man. Yet every advance in civilisation is an advance in barbarism, as Walter Benjamin would remind us, if it brings in its wake new possibilities of emancipation it also arrives coated head to foot in blood. Once again in synoptic terms, we can see the processes of productive advance as a general movement onwards and upwards as generations amass the material preconditions for the new world, as Marx put it, through miserable toil. Capitalism was born indebted to feudalism and slavery in this way.

Defeating an Empire.

The US wanted to avoid any concessions as the resistance in Iraq wanted to end the occupation, in an attempt to hold-off the inevitable Washington managed to prevent elections for the first couple of years. In the meantime a series of market reforms were imposed to destroy Iraq's civil society, opening the country to multinational corporations and privatising everything in sight - the only law of Saddam's left in place was to prevent unionisation. These reforms were illegal until they could be ratified by an Iraqi government of some kind. The first moves towards a new government for Iraq were made for this reason. This included a new constitution, which was quickly typed up by unelected officials. As the Iraq war went on the US had to back down from its war aims, to the extent of trying to block free elections in Iraq. The grass-roots movement for democracy could not be suppressed because it had mass support in the country. It was Iraq's intervention in the US occupation.

Eventually the elections could not be avoided given the strength of the support for democracy in Iraq. So the US first tried to manipulate the elections and when that failed the US came out with its war aims explicitly in 2007. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the conditions were that the US have privileged access to Iraqi oil and that the US can continue its combat operations in Iraq indefinitely. The Bushites were determined to maintain these conditions in January of 2008, but the US government had to back down within a couple of months in the face of Iraqi nationalism. It was in 2009 that the US government finally conceded defeat and began to move to withdraw troops from the country. The privileged access of American corporations to Iraqi oil has been lost, that's not to say that the US has not plundered Iraq - but it does say that Iraq may finally be making the first steps towards independence. By 2010 the Obama administration had to give in to Iraqi "obstructionism" and initiated military withdrawal from Iraq.

It's true that Obama has attempted to maintain and expand the bloated US embassy in Iraq, there have been signs that the US have given up on the diplomatic presence in Iraq. In Febuary 2012 the Obama administration opted to initiate a reduction of funding and staff for the US embassy, which has over 16,000 people in staff and runs on an annual subsidy of $6 billion. More so the embassy will find itself hiring Iraqi staff and source goods and services from the Iraqi economy. Even still this event signifies the ongoing decline of American influence in Iraq. The war has been a disaster for the US overall, specifically in terms of its strategic goals for the region. The invasion had failed to reverse the increasing isolation of Israel on the world stage while Iranian influence in Iraq has only been increased. Elections have empowered Shi'ite conservatives and nationalists in Baghdad, the new Iraq will have peaceful relations with Iran. Washington can continue to dream of an isolated Iran that can be readily cowed.

At History's End.

In defence of the suggestion that it is preferable to export democracy by military intervention, Christopher Hitchens would point to the French role in the American Revolution to throw-off the British rule. So in his mind it remained possible to spread democracy by armed force. Democracy in India came as a by-product of British colonial rule, it was not an indigenous invention. The defeat of European Fascism is what led to the emergence of democracy in Germany and Italy. This still falls short of a justification for the criminal invasion of Iraq, as British rule in India was hardly about nurturing a democracy with a socialist constitution. At the same time, we may safely say that the defeat of Hitlerism in Germany only came about once 'appeasement' had failed and German expansionism came to threaten British interests abroad. Churchill's real concern was that the Fascists would seize the Suez Canal before moving on to India. In the end the British empire was lost in the war and frankly it was the best way to lose it.


The official line of the Communist Party in China is that the accumulative processes of capitalism are necessary in order to create the preconditions for historical change. So the capitalist revolution under Deng Xiaoping required such an ideological justification, the idea is that the Communist Party can push Chinese society through capitalist development to socialism and then to communism. Mao had tried to bridge the chasm between partially post-feudal China and socialism without giving ground to the burgeoning forces of capitalism; whereas Deng sought to "cross the river by feeling the stones". The teleology rears it's head once again in the guise of capitalism with Asian values, where capitalism can and must be drawn upon to construct socialism it is in place for that purpose. It is almost theodicy - vindication through the existence of evil. This really represents the victory of the capitalist roaders, the ultimate revenge of the anti-Maoists after the Cultural Revolution - that was made crystal clear in Tienanmen Square!

At the same time, it's worth acknowledging that, the historical materialist conception of history could be used to justify a non-interventionist stance. The US was not in favour of overthrowing Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War and even after it US policy remained supportive of Hussein's regime. So it shouldn't be forgotten that it isn't necessarily the case that history tends towards liberation. The US allowed Saddam Hussein to crush the massive uprising against him in 1991, specifically providing the authorisation for Hussein to use airstrikes against the Iraqi people. It's also not consistently non-interventionist to suggest that the US should've allowed Saddam to be overthrown by his own people. The economic sanctions imposed on the country by the US strengthened Saddam and devastated the population, leaving hundreds of thousands of people dead in the end. This devastation prevented an uprising which would have removed Saddam Hussein from power. A ruination of all is not out of the question at history's end.

Contradictions of Christopher Hitchens.

In one of his last interviews Christopher Hitchens insisted that he remains a leftist, but that he sees no socialist theory of an alternative economy to replace global capitalism. What are we left with then? The export of the American Revolution is the best we can do, with Hitch putting emphasis on the radical current of Jeffersonian thought.  There is no third camp between liberal capitalism and nihilistic Islamism, just us or them. Only a bulwark to totalitarianism is preferable and the bloodshed is worth it. It's the lowering of expectations in another sense, we couldn't bring down capitalism so let's just knock out all the dictators and make sure it's democratic. In a world beyond the monotheisms of the desert we can only hope to build a secular, multicultural and democratic version of the mess we're already living with. Furthermore the only way to assert human rights is through kidnapping, torture and killing. The best we can do, as it turns out, isn't very much at all.

What are we left with then? Not much in principles and not much to defend. We're dealing with an array of contradictions. At first hand, there is the gap between what we do and what we say we do as well as the means by which we seek to meet our ultimate objective. It looks more like Hitch was embedded in that disjunctive synthesis of passive and radical nihilism, the politics of security and terrorism. And to think Christopher Hitchens was once a garden-variety creature of the leftist culture of the 20th Century. He was well-versed in the work of George Orwell and easily drifted from Trotskyism to democratic socialism in later years. What was his Kronstadt? At first, the reaction of the SWP to the Portuguese Revolution, then it was the leftist opposition to intervention in the Falklands, the Balkans and, most infamously, Iraq. For the likes of Ian McEwan he was a man of the democratic Left still, while Richard Dawkins saw him as beyond left and right.

If Christopher Hitchens stood as the post-Marxist spirit of the democratic Left then he likely demonstrated its poverty of principles. The position he took may have just been social democratic in trajectory, as socialism no longer provided an alternative to global capitalism in his thinking. He took from the fall of the Berlin Wall that human nature is incompatible with dictatorship and slavery. Hitch would point to the French role in the American Revolution to throw-off British rule and nurture democracy. So in his mind it remained possible to spread democracy by armed force. Democracy in India came as a by-product of British colonial rule, it was not an indigenous invention. The destruction of European Fascism is what led to the emergence of democracy in Germany and Italy. This still falls short of a justification for the criminal invasion of Iraq, as British rule in India was hardly about nurturing a democracy with a socialist constitution.

You might go with the line that the deaths were necessary to produce a democratic society. But that would assume it was the aim to churn out a democratic Iraq. When it was actually the Americans who sought to oppose elections for as long as possible. The aim was originally to reconstitute the old order in a new guise that was more acceptable in appearance. The best outcome for the Americans would have been a Sunni military junta aligned with them. The battle to do so was lost and it is a credit to the Iraqi people that they fought valiantly for elections and against the occupation. The transformation of Iraqi society was at its most radical and utopian at the level of economic reform, an attempt build a perfect market economy. It was "shock therapy" like nothing seen before, not even in Yeltsin's Russia. Ultimately, the elections were allowed only to legitimate a series of illegal economic reforms that the Americans rammed down the slit throats of Iraq.

How then could these contradictions be harmonised? You know, Chairman Mao had a few words for us on contradiction. The major point that Mao made was that the principle contradiction does not overlap with the contradiction which should be treated as dominant in a particular situation. It is in this particular contradiction that we find the universal dimension. In every situation the particular contradiction is predominant, in order to resolve the principal contradiction one should treat a particular contradiction as predominant. All other struggles should be subordinated to this predominant contradiction. So when the Chinese Communists encountered the Japanese Fascist occupiers, the only option was to take the side of the Chinese Nationalists in a display of 'patriotic unity' as a necessary means to victory. If the Communists opted to engage in the class struggle it would ultimately be fighting against class struggle itself.

It's clear that Hitch held the Ba'athist regime in Iraq to be totalitarian with all the fascistic connotations included. No doubt the same applied to Islamism in his mind. This is the crux of the matter. Saddam Hussein was undoubtedly a monster, the same can be said of Osama bin Laden. This is not to agree that the only means to deal with dictatorship and terrorism is to back the military doctrines of the Bush administration. If the economic sanctions against Iraq had been withdrawn, but the military sanctions left in place then it would've opened up the possibility for the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam. The US invaded Afghanistan after it refused to provide evidence to warrant the extradition of Osama bin Laden for trial. Instead, we've seen the deaths of Saddam and bin Laden but at a huge human cost which has yet to be fully counted. The possibility of greater nuclear threats in the region has been raised, with Pakistan destabilised and Iran surrounded by American proxies.

The Death of a Stalinist.

So Kim Jong-il has died at the age of 70, going by Russian records, and the hermit state of North Korea is in transition to another leader and this time the successor seems to be a man who has yet to enter his fourth decade on this planet. The country descended into 10 days of mourning as it had when Kim Il-sung died in 1994. It was out of respect to the wishes of the "Great Leader" that Kim Jong-il was allowed to become the Chairman of the National Defence Commission. But it was not automatic, Kim Jong-il took 3 years to consolidate his power within the bureaucracy of the Workers' Party. It was decided in 1998 that the Eternal President of the Republic would be Kim Il-sung and so Kim Jong-il is technically not the President of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. So the notion of a President for life has been taken one step further, perhaps we should deem North Korea a "thanatocracy" as Christopher Hitchens suggested.

Now it looks as though Kim Jong-un will takeover the party-state apparatus in a similar manner, there have already been purges to undermine potential rivals for power. This was a surprise to Western commentators who predicted that the military establishment would not continue the Kim dynasty given the horrific state of affairs in the country. The importance of the Kim dynasty to the ruling ideology in North Korea cannot be understated. If the family goes then it is likely that the entire regime will have little to hold itself together. After all it was Kim Il-sung who fought the Japanese and oversaw the reconstruction of the country after the horrors of the Korean war, in which over 2 million were slaughtered. Even though the war was sparked after Kim Il-sung talked Stalin into backing an invasion of South Korea in 1950. But the Korean People's Army consisted of the same forces who had fought the Japanese and to this day the regime relies on this record of anti-colonial struggle.

As with figures such as Tito in Yugoslavia, Hoxha in Albania and Ceaușescu in Romania when Kim Il-sung died in 1994 commentators looked for signs of a coming collapse. It is likely that the military establishment tightened control of the population as Kim Jong-il consolidated his power. No doubt the privileged position of the military comes down to the interdependent relationship it enjoys with the Party. The military cannot rule nakedly and therefore requires some kind of justification and in turn the Kim clan fall back on the military for power. It is worth noting that the most recent amendments to the constitution have removed all references to communism and even Marxism-Leninism, instead old ideas of Juche (self-reliance) and Songun (military first) have become central. The old communist slogans have little appeal to the profoundly conservative establishment, no wonder then that the regime has become staunchly nationalist in character under Kim Jong-il.

As a consequence of the succession from father to son and now to grandson there has yet to be a process of de-Stalinization in North Korea. The personality cult around the family remains elaborate and in full swing as it was started by Kim Il-sung in the 1950s. But the Stalinist model became increasingly isolated as the Soviet Union underwent a brief period of liberalisation under Khrushchev. Then came the mutation of Maoism into a unique form of authoritarian capitalism and the collapse of really existing socialism in Eastern Europe. The mock Stalinism of Albania and Romania melted in the face of popular rage, as goulash communism ran dry in Hungary and the Berlin Wall came down in Germany. Tito’s death gave way to ethnic tensions which would eventually tear apart Yugoslavia in the most horrific manner. No one in the West saw it coming and the US took credit for it all, even though it came about as a result of internal tensions. The fallout left North Korea isolated and dependent on a now rationed flow of resources.

No doubt the power structure of North Korea and the scarcity of oil led to the food crisis of the 1990s. In Cuba the Soviet collapse prompted the decentralisation of agriculture, to prevent the shortage of fuel from creating a food shortage which could in turn create a famine. By contrast, North Korea opted to maintain the old structure of centralised control and even sought to intensify the Songun doctrine as the regime relied even more on the military establishment for its strength. The brutality of the regime apparently reached new heights. The intense militarism which came as Kim Jong-il took power exacerbated the famine, which came out of the centralised control of the state and the decline of ready access to oil. The military and scientific elites were given priority in the allocation of resources. In the consequent famine over 2 million people died as Kim Jong-il retained power and enjoyed a life of excessive indulgence.

The countryside became a source of great shame to the regime, which still seeks to conceal the disgraceful conditions from the outside world. The constraints on farming from a fuel shortage exacerbated by the Songun doctrine have left the countryside picked clean of vegetation as the military is given priority. The preference is to keep its tourists to the cities where the illusion of a workers’ paradise can be maintained. In the midst of the famine came rumours of cannibalism and the sight of people grazing on grass like cows. Since then there have been small openings for market forces in North Korea since the collapse of really existing socialism around the rest of the world. The relations with Russia and China descended into exploitative arrangements, with North Korean workers sold to chop wood in the Russian East as increasing numbers of Chinese entered the country to sell food and clothing. Most recently footage of women picking grass to sell has been smuggled out of the country.

The fears of a power struggle sparking violence on the Korean peninsula are not outlandish as North-South relations are at a low point. There was a power struggle in the 1990s between the old guard and the reformists who wanted to mimic the Chinese model of ‘capitalism with Asian values’. We don’t know the details of the tension, but it is clear that Kim Jong-il had taken over the Workers’ Party with his father elevated to Eternal President. It was clear that the few openings made for markets were the only concessions that would be made as the military establishment formed the base on which Kim Jong-il sat. The principle of Songun made it sure that the military was privileged over the rest of North Korean society. But it is likely that the regime has been preparing for this succession for a while. There have been purges throughout the year and it would likely be a method of securing the succession to Kim Jong-un. Any sign of an uprising against the regime remains to be seen, but when the collapse comes it won't be seen coming from afar.

Reconsider Lenin.

Life after Politics.

In our supposedly post-ideological wonderland where all great things have been done and all the grand narratives of history have come to an end. We have seen the collapse of Communism and the End of History, as Francis Fukuyama put it, to which George HW Bush gurgled the words "new world order". Conspiracy theorists have since drawn links between the words of Bush I, the events of 9/11 and the war embarked upon by Bush II. The irony being that the words were chosen to mark the closure of a grand narrative, while the events of September 11th 2001 seem to have opened up another grand narrative. For liberal revisionists, the fall of the Berlin Wall came at just the right moment. The demise of Communism in 1989 closed the end of the revolutionary era which began in 1789 with the French Revolution, in which the French passed through the Terror of the Jacobins in order to reach democracy and leave behind feudalism.

The revolutionary figure of Vladimir Lenin is irredeemable in this post-political era, where the greatest threat to Progress are beliefs, passions and ideologies. Let alone dirty words like 'class'. Of course, the irony is that the Enlightenment view of history as progress is at once superstitious - it was disproven by Hitler and Stalin - as well as a pillar of the prevailing ideology. It is also ironic that in such an era of managerial politics that people can only be mobilised by fear. The Bushites mobilised support for the Iraq war by manipulating legitimate fears of terrorism. Though the Bushites were ultimately derided as "extremists" in the same tone as Islamists and Communists. The secular rationality of the market contradicts with it's own perpetual striving, which requires a bit more than agnosticism. It needs reactionary populism, race-baiting and outright fear-mongering to secure itself. There is no place for revolutionary fervour of any kind.

The almost natural inclination of the market is towards pragmatism, into which moral relativism and scepticism are built. At the same time the capitalist system needs to legitimate itself through an ideological superstructure which could range from McCarthyism to right-wing forms of Christianity and populism. The problem emerges as the tendencies of the market begin to subvert the very structure to which it owes legitimacy and defence. For capitalism this contradiction is unavoidable, though it can be managed through cultural warfare. When there is a contradiction between ideology and action a crisis can emerge, so a new kind of discourse must be imported to account for the deficiency. It is not that liberalism is hostile to belief, it is supposedly indifferent to the beliefs of individuals provided those beliefs are not a threat to liberalism. To keep invasive identities at a safe distance there is a need for an invasive belief.

The only permissible positions on revolution are the calls for a revolution without revolution and the outright rejection. Coincidentally this is what differentiates the positions taken, on the French Revolution, by modern conservatives and liberals. In this guise the fullest realisation and logical conclusion of Lenin's work is Stalinism. The reactionary might also cite figures like Mao as evidence that every revolution fails and leads to a bloodbath. Only a conservative acceptance of the status quo is the morally acceptable position. From such a standpoint, Che Guevara is comparable to a Nazi because he fought alongside Fidel Castro to overthrow Batista. Even though the counter-revolutionary forces may have been responsible for the deaths of up to 20,000 Cuban civilians. We should rest assured that Guevara and Castro are the true villains because their revolution was violent. There can be an invasive belief in liberalism to oppose revolution, but to overthrow Batista no such belief in socialism is permissible.
  

The Fall.

Noam Chomsky denounced Lenin as a right-wing deviant of Marxism, for his opportunistic vanguardism and for laying the foundations for Stalinism. A core idea of socialism is democratic control of production by the workers, thus the point of trade unions is to represent the interests of workers and defend such interests. The swift repression of factory councils and soviets by the Bolsheviks is in opposition to this core idea of socialism. Chomsky stresses that by 1918 Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin held that there needed to be a militarised workforce, in order for progress and development to be secured. The various forms of oppression utilised by the Tsar were recreated under Lenin, e.g. the Cheka, and utilised throughout the Red Terror. For libertarian socialists like Chomsky the Soviet Union is a stain on socialism, for which Lenin and Trotsky are personally responsible.

From an orthodox Marxist perspective we can see that it was not possible to build socialism in backward conditions deprived of the enormous accumulation which takes place under capitalism. The attempt to do so would lead to what we now know as Stalinism. The Bolsheviks were looking to hold the Russian state in place until the revolution came in Germany. Socialism requires a plentiful surplus amassed under capitalism and a revolution could only take place in an advanced capitalist society. The accepted view that the Soviet Union was a socialist state is a bi-product of a convergence of 20th Century propaganda. For decades Communists and anti-Communists alike, depicted the Soviet Union as the first realisation of the socialist ideal. The US sought to demonise socialism by equating it with the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union portrayed itself as the leading socialist state in order to use the moral weight of socialist ideas.

At this point it is appropriate to delve into the issue of comfortable resistance, a tendency which is rife on the Left, it opts for the safe position at which criticism can be avoided and cheap moralisations can be made without consequence. It is also a position of privilege, unique to Western affluence and freedoms. The distance of power gives leftists room to theorise and act with a great deal of freedom. Though the same distance from power was officially maintained in China by the Maoists and in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, nonetheless a kind of totalitarianism functioned and left millions dead. The anarchic distance from power is not an avoidance of the horrors of totalitarianism. It may sound totalitarian to say that power is required to change the world, but it is not the case that every attempt at revolutionary change will lead to totalitarianism.

For Chomsky the Fall can be located in the moment when Lenin seized power. Similarly market fundamentalists invoke a vision of the free-market, which has never existed, in order to dismiss the critics of capitalism and to advocate further neoliberal reforms. These fundamentalists are quick to point out that the free-market has never truly existed and the current economic order is state-capitalist rather than laissez-faire. As Žižek has pointed out "to search for the intruder who infected the original model cannot but reproduce the logic of anti-Semitism." In order to criticise the history of socialism, it has to be acknowledged as "our own" past and not to comfortably jettison the foreign intruder responsible for the corruption of socialist ideals. The failure to do so led to strange parallels, with recent protests across Eastern Europe which locate the recent crisis in a cabal of socialists conspiring to prevent capitalism in it's most pure form.

Begin from the Beginning.

In order to stand for equality, human rights and freedoms it is imperative to not avoid consequences of doing so and go further to undertake the actions necessary to defend and assert such ideals. This is not a position only taken by "extremists", it was the position taken by Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln. Force was necessary to defeat Fascism and white supremacy in both instances. It doesn't mean that there every action undertaken are justified by such ends. We should keep in mind the bombing of Dresden by the Allies and the mass-rape of German women by the Red Army. Similarly the suspension of habeus corpus during the American Civil War, which may have been necessary, is certainly not above criticism. We should not refrain from appropriate criticism, as it would not be to deny the greatness of Churchill and Lincoln. This begs a serious question.

At what point do the means devalue the end? Where this point is located is deeply ambiguous. The neoconservatives will argue that it is necessary to use violence to defend freedom, but in effect these same people act to undermine freedom through such means of "defence". In other words, we must defend Western values by infringing upon them on a huge scale. So there are huge risks involved in the use of such force and this is a good reason for a cautious attitude towards power. The variables of a situation, the context and the details of which, are of the highest importance. As without such it can become easy to be led to "defend" our country only to find ourselves involved in torture and killing to snatch the natural resources of another country. Similarly a defence of socialism with gulags and show-trials would be to lose an order worth defending in any way.

As the First World War began in 1914 much of the Left, along with much of the intelligentsia, succumbed to nationalist fervour and supported war. The strident radicalism built up in the run-up to the rebellion of 1905 had been decimated in defeat and the revolutionaries were exiled. But it was the nationalism of 1914 which destroyed what remained of such radicalism. The Bolsheviks were among the few to oppose the First World War as Lenin thoroughly rejected the "patriotic line" of the day. The tragedy being that if the revolt of 1905 had succeeded in regime change for Russia the War might have been forestalled. Instead Lenin had to reinvent revolutionary politics at a time of total breakdown in 1914 and succeeded in doing so. After the Civil War the Bolsheviks had to retreat to the New Economic Policy in 1922, Lenin argued that we should "begin from the beginning over and over again".

In the current epoch of post-politics it would seem that we need to reformulate the socialist project in it's entirety. So it could be said that the full engagement with Lenin offered by Žižek is well overdue. The dominant belief that capitalism as a liberal democratic consensus can last forever is truly utopian. In a world of finite resources, which are in ecological decay, infinite growth is not possible and not a sustainable system for development. Even in a financialised global economy it is not possible to have 3% economic growth every year forever. The dependence on oil is particularly important in this respect, once oil prices spike and no one can afford a barrel of oil civilisation as we know it will quickly grind to a halt. When the crash occurs the free-enterprise system will no longer be an option. If we're lucky we may have to choose between socialism and barbarism.