One rejoinder to another.

1: He retreats from his nostalgia accusation, saying it was aimed at something called ‘the reactionary press in general’ (whatever that may be, such a construct would have been out of date in 1965, let alone now. Does he actually *read* the papers?). It looked pretty specific to me, but I’ll always take surrendered ground when offered, and not fuss too much about the face-saving words which the retreating person sometimes feels the need to say.

Well, the Murdoch press may peddle in soft-core porn but its political agenda has been to shift the discourse rightwards on welfare, immigration and economics. It’s a different sort of reaction to the variety found on the Hitchens blog. The desire to level the welfare state and return to the social squalor of a bygone age is the agenda of many reactionaries – particularly, Thatcherites. Not that I think this is the mission of the Hitchens blog.

To be fair, I did not mention nostalgia but I did say ‘turn the clock back’ in reference to Evelyn Waugh. It was a conflation, though it’s not necessarily in regard to nostalgia. A better metaphor might be GK Chesterton’s white post and the lick of paint.

2: But this was not my ‘main problem’ with what he wrote. It was his evasion of the problem of the left, that they cannot possibly have meant to foul up our society so completely, yet will never attribute any of the disasters they have caused to their own ideas.

It’s a somewhat weak point to dismiss my article as ‘evasive’. I did argue that the Hitchens prognosis is inaccurate. I think much of the social change since the 1960s largely came out of compromises. Overall, the picture looks ambiguous from where I’m sitting: in many ways progressive, in other ways regressive.

Multiculturalism is mostly a liberal compromise to manage newly settled communities. It conveniently presupposes culture as a self-enclosing entity, the truth is that it is neither the case nor should it be the case. Hybridity and immixing is far better than regulated forms of diversity.  Not only do I think monoculturalism isn’t preferable, I don’t think it’s possible. Even before non-white immigration, British culture was composed of a vast multiplicity of influences.

I don’t see the Left in the driving seat of such change for the most part. As Noel Ignatiev puts it, the momentum of neoliberalism “tends to reduce all human beings to abstract, undifferentiated, homogenous labour power”. None of the liberalising measures initiated since the 1960s threatens capital accumulation. On the contrary, this cultural revolution has been matched by Thatcher’s economic revolution. Capital can do without the old boundaries of sexuality, race, and gender, so it’s no problem to circumvent them.

I can’t accept the grammar of the question. For starters, I couldn’t really accept the presupposition of the Left’s role in this, or the claim that it is necessarily the case. Otherwise I would only be able to accept such points, either to affirm the aims or to denounce them. So I can only maintain an oppositional standpoint by giving the premise a good prod. Oh well, that’s adversarial politics for you!

3: After following the link, I still don’t think he addresses this. Perhaps he would care to.  I do very much recommend that he actually finds out what I think first. There are a number of books which he may read, starting with ‘The Abolition of Britain’, which may help. But he needs to grasp that I am not a Thatcherite or any kind of economic liberal,  and that I loathe the Tory Party, probably more than he does.

Maybe I’ll write a review of ‘The Abolition of Britain’, or ‘The War We Never Fought’. Right now, I’m more perplexed by what could only be a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of my views. In my first article, I clearly pointed out Hitchens takes issue with the Tory Party and Thatcher’s legacy.

I never suggested Mr. Hitchens was a Thatcherite; in fact, it speaks rather well of his writing that he’s not a market liberal. He’s not an unscrupulous phony like David Cameron. Nor does he face the problem of how to reconcile economic liberalism with social conservatism. It’s much more consistent, as I’ve already said, if you’re a traditionalist conservative, to see Thatcherism as just another problem and not a solution. This the Left has in common with Peter Hitchens.

Though I did imply that the line Hitchens takes on addiction comes across as more liberal than conservative, e.g. the view of the individual and their agency as prime. I don’t mean to suggest one has to be a determinist, but it’s evident that individuals don’t choose the circumstances under which they act. This extends as far to the culture they are born into and as deep as the genetic predispositions they inherit.

I don’t expect a reply to this post, Mr. Hitchens probably has a long list of enemies to engage with, and his patience must be wearing thin at this point. But I think the readers have enjoyed this back-and-forth.

This post was a response to a post by Peter Hitchens. Should anyone want to ask me a direct question, you can email me at: cainmosni@hotmail.co.uk

Why the Jews?

 

Earlier this year I reproduced Lenin's speech on anti-Jewish pogroms in Tsarist Russia. It has always been my view that the reactionary mind needs racism to bound together the system and externalise its systemic flaws onto an intrusive presence - an infection of sorts - which we are invited to purge. It is no coincidence that the proto-fascists of this world equate anti-racism with leftism, 'political-correctness' with Marxism, and Communism with Jewishness. Of course, there is nothing Jewish about Communism, just as anti-racism is not inherently left-wing. But it is the case that there is nothing progressive in racism. This is understood, at some level, by the majority of Far-Righters. It is their cause to safeguard capitalism by asserting race-consciousness over class-consciousness.

 

In an interview with Worker's Liberty Moishe Postone emphasises what he regards as the unique characteristic of anti-Semitism to other forms of racism. He explains "The way in which anti-Semitism is distinguished, and should be distinguished, from racism, has to do with the sort of imaginary of power, attributed to the Jews, Zionism, and Israel, which is at the heart of anti-Semitism. The Jews are seen as constituting an immensely powerful, abstract, intangible global form of power that dominates the world." We see this underlying a lot of cultural criticism put forward by traditional conservatives. It is surely no surprise that the traditionalists so often verge on and foray into the fields of anti-Semitism harvested in Europe for centuries.

 

Postone is dead clear in his words "Anti-Semitism is a primitive critique of the world, of capitalist modernity. The reason I regard it as being particularly dangerous for the left is precisely because anti-Semitism has a pseudo-emancipatory dimension that other forms of racism rarely have." Everyone should read Postone's article Anti-Semitism and National Socialism for a non-functionalist account of the phenomenon.

The point to be made here, however, is that a careful examination of the modern anti-Semitic worldview reveals that it is a form of thought in which the rapid development of industrial capitalism, with all its social ramifications, is/ /personified and identified as the Jew. It is not merely that the Jews were considered to be the owners of money, as in traditional anti-Semitism, but that they were held responsible for economic crises and identified with the range of social restructuring and dislocation resulting from rapid industrialization: explosive urbanization, the decline of traditional social classes and strata, the emergence of a large, increasingly organized industrial proletariat, and so on. In other words, the abstract domination of capital, which—particularly with rapid industrialization—caught people up in a web of dynamic forces they could not understand, became perceived as the domination of International Jewry.

The relation between the material base of class society and its overarching superstructure becomes lost easily as it would require a detailed analysis. The impetus for such an analysis was never there for the kind of people who tend towards anti-Jewish hatred. This is more like an ideological filter through which reality can be comprehended. All other possibilities are dismissed from the outset.

According to this interpretation, the Jews were identified not merely with money, with the sphere of circulation, but with capitalism itself. However, because of its fetishized form, capitalism did not appear to include industry and technology. Capitalism appeared to be only its manifest abstract dimension which, in turn, was responsible for the whole range of concrete social and cultural changes associated with the rapid development of modern industrial capitalism.

The Jews were not seen merely as representatives of capital (in which case anti-Semitic attacks would have been much more class-specific). They became the personifications of the intangible, destructive, immensely powerful, and international domination of capital as an alienated social form.

Certain forms of anticapitalist discontent became directed against the manifest abstract dimension of capital personified in the form of the Jews, not because the Jews were consciously identified with the value dimension, but because, given the antinomy of the abstract and concrete dimensions, capitalism appeared that way. The “anticapitalist” revolt was, consequently, also the revolt against the Jews. The overcoming of capitalism and its negative social effects became associated with the overcoming of the Jews.

This is what Postone rightly calls "pseudo-emancipatory". The fascist mission to defeat the Left is twofold: firstly, the working-class social base has to be stolen away and, secondly, the opposing progressive elements must be stamped out by force.

What kind of regime does Putin head?

The Western mass-media have had for many years the problem of how to characterise the Russian government under Vladimir Putin. The most often characterisation draws upon crude simplifications of Russian history: the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire. We're told Putin is a mini-Stalin and a mini-Tsar all in one. This is highly misleading for a number of reasons. Two come to mind immediately.

Firstly, it implies that the possibility of aggressive expansionism by Russia is a plausible likelihood. Putin has no plans to provoke a full-blown conflict with the European powers. He knows how vulnerable Russia is to such opponents. Putin now acts to hold-off encroaching Western influence and NATO outposts from the borders of the Russian Federation. It's not in the Russian interests to have NATO missile systems on its borders so close to major cities. He could live with Ukraine becoming a EU member-state, as long as the gas network is not effected seriously. In this regard, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and de facto annexation of Crimea does not compare to Stalin's 'spreading the revolution' by rifle and bayonet. Even when Stalin acted to build a buffer-zone of satellite states in Eastern and Southern Europe it was not a bid for global domination. It was about the consolidation of Soviet power by securing the country from any future Western intervention. The position Putin has taken is defined by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Secondly, the phase of development we currently see in Russia has little precedent in previous historical conditions. The Tsars of the 19th Century presided over a feudal society with an emerging industrial and capitalist base, perching over Orthodox Christendom at home and imperialism abroad. The USSR was defined by the exacerbation of such conditions of scarcity and dislocation in the First World War and Civil War. The mission was not to reproduce the feudal order of the past, nor to build from its remains a capitalist society, it was to establish the material pre-conditions for socialism. That amounted to the industrialisation of Russian society to create the material surplus of a capitalist society by non-capitalist means and ultimately to non-capitalist ends. The promised communist future never arose from this process. When the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 the whole edifice was then broken down and digested by economic shock therapy. Putin emerges out of this historical conjuncture.

So we find the situation in Russia is a period distinct from preceding epochs. The Russian Federation emerged out of the collapse of the Soviet Union to be forced through primitive accumulation by the Yeltsin administration. The immense resources were handed over to a small clique around Yeltsin as the Russian state-sector and public assets were dismembered and chucked to these ravenous beasts. The transformation of the material base of Russian society inevitably reverberated throughout its superstructure. The state became so weighed down by its own corruption that the oligarchs around Yeltsin decided to replace him with Putin. The hope was that Putin would deal with the officials looking to crackdown on corruption while simultaneously reinstating authority in the government. The liberalisation of the economy had led to the formation of an internationalising class, which in turn spurred on a recrudescent nationalism.

I've written before that it seem as if the Russian President stands at the apex where anti-political purism and ultra-political nationalism meet. He initially presented himself as a non-political man of action, who will enforce order and stability. Of course, there is nothing 'non-political' about the man at all. He appeals to Soviet nostalgia, particularly with regard to the defeat of German Fascism. Yet only in nationalist terms, the Soviet era was a great era when Russia wielded power on the world stage. The world was not unipolar and Russians did not have to live in fear of Western aggression. The victories in Georgia and Chechnya and now Ukraine can be understood as reactive. Putin wants to fend-off encroachments of non-Russian influence, primarily from the US, but also from independent actors, such as Chechen Islamists and separatists.

Many like to talk about 'Putinism' as if it signifies a clear characterisation of the Russian government. It is certain that the managed democracy in Russia represents a new order. The rapid and chaotic pace of primitive accumulation under Boris Yeltsin has been slowed by Putin, but it is not over by any means. It was Putin who furthered the privatisation of land. The concentration of economic power in the hands of oligarchs sits side-by-side with the state power. 'Putinism' is a very misleading and vague term. It's mainly another way of carrying out the spurious comparison between Putin and Stalin. The phrase 'Stalinism' was really used to signify a deviation from Marxism by the Soviet leadership. Perhaps in a similar vein 'Putinism' refers to a deviation from the Washington consensus which the Yeltsin administration was completely embedded in.

Aleksandr Buzgalin calls it 'jurassic capitalism' where the old state-order, as well as even older feudal structures (i.e. the Church), stand alongside a capitalist economy. We might see this as a developing form of corporatism or 'national' capitalism, rather than the internationalist and liberal variety we are so comfortable with in Western Europe. It's certain that Putin is a part of the right-wing economic consensus that has been ruling Russia since the Soviet Union was dissolved. But it is not the same as it was in the 1990s. The sympathies Putin has drawn from Westerners have been insightful. Among them we find the British journalist Peter Hitchens, a cultural-traditionalist conservative, who sees Putin as taking a stand against neoliberal globalization in defence of national sovereignty. Then there is the fascist Nick Griffin who sees Russia as the last bastion of the "white race".

Autocritique: Race and the Riots.

In the wake of the 2011 riots David Starkey appeared on BBC Newsnight in a set clash with Owen Jones and Dreda Say Mitchell. It was pure spectacle of course. I wrote an article on the media spectacle not long after. I wanted to deal with the comments by Starkey, such as "the whites have become black", but in retrospect I feel I didn't do so sufficiently. My conclusion from the outset is that we have to engage critically with the pervasive notions of racial identity with which we still live.

The historian made some nondescript comments and described the riots as 'extended commercialism' and 'shopping with violence' (actually not a bad way of summing them up) before injecting race into the discourse. The segment was swung into a discussion over Starkey's comments. Neither Jones nor Mitchell made their positions clear as they were put on a reactive game. It was another success for the Right in terms of obfuscating the lines of debate and pushing the bounds of acceptable opinion. Starkey wanted to ward-off any criticism of the market society in which we live, as well as any commentary from a black perspective on the riots. The debate became a matter of whether or not Starkey's comments were 'really' racist instead of the serious questions that should be asked in times of unrest: consumerism, poverty, police brutality and institutional racism. I made this point at the time and I stand by it.

The use of the terms 'white' and 'black' in Starkey's remarks required much more rigorous critical evaluation than what I originally mustered at the time. He identifies a 'nihilistic gangster culture' with black people, particularly Jamaican Patois, all the while insisting that it is not about 'skin colour, it's cultural'. Starkey said that David Lammy, the black Tottenham parliamentarian, "sounds white" if you hear him talk on the radio rather than speak on telly. So of course he could agree with Mitchell's come-back that there is little homogeneity across the black community, not one black culture but many cultures. Yet Starkey overtly equates respectability with being 'white' while projecting criminality onto a 'black culture'. It's the same reason people are surprised by 'articulate' black people in the public arena. The conception of race slides into cultural dimensions rather than biological in these words.

The little historian can even nod his head to the comments made by Owen Jones in regard to the socio-economic conditions that Black Britons face: higher rates of unemployment, discrimination in and outside of work, and a lower share of the national income. These symptoms of social deprivation, as well as racial and class oppression are perfectly compatible with the kind of cultural racism peddled by Starkey. The cultural reconfiguration of racial categories can leave the same assumptions of scientific racism intact. In cultural terms Starkey reasserted a white racial identity in the clean-cut, well educational and socially mobile figures such as David Lammy, an 'archetypical successful black man' who "sounds white". This is not unprecedented. In colonial Brazil a man could buy his way into the 'white race' regardless of his pigmentation. The objectivity of race is in social relations, not in cultural or biological terms.

However, this is not the full story as we have to critically engage with the social constructs we take to be neutral in common parlance and interaction. The presupposition in Starkey's comments is towards a collaborative relation of classes as 'white people' against the nonconforming hordes engulfed by 'black culture' as he puts it. The 'shopping with violence' is externalised to the difficult classes who aren't really 'white' anymore even if they look like it. It's not linked in with the class society of 'aspiration' and 'hard work' fetishes of a self-aggrandizing elite. If consumer culture is endemic to capitalist societies then so is the violent underbelly of consumerism. Appeals to race in this way are necessary to turn systemic aspects of the economy into aberrations. The exactitude of the distribution of the social product, the ownership of the means and the relations which uphold them are cleared from the field of discourse.

The common interests of the working-class are obscured in this way, class-consciousness is blocked by a white racial-consciousness. Months after the riots there was another race scandal worthy of excavation. It was in January 2012 just after two of the murderers of Stephen Lawrence were finally sent down (not an insignificant coincidence). It was a Twitter storm over the comments of Diane Abbott, the first black Labour MP, who tweeted "White people love playing 'divide & rule'. We should not play their game." Abbott was attacked by many conservative moralists as a 'racist' and eventually she apologised. Really the only problem with her tweet is that it was imprecise, it's the existence of 'white people' which is about social control. As Noel Ignatiev puts it "whiteness does not exempt people from exploitation, it reconciles them to it. It is for those who have nothing else." The hubbub over Abbott's comments further proved the case as so many white commentators and tweeters were dying to play the victim.

Communism: A Love Story.

Ye are Many - They are Few!

In the midst of ideological and economic crises, we find ourselves unable to venture out from neoliberal capitalism and when we do it is only to conserve the social democratic post-war settlement which cannot defend itself. Of course, there are those who might have the audacity to walk further to socialism as a political alternative to capitalism in its entirety. We must remember socialism is an intermediate stage which seeks ultimately to undo itself. The time has come to resurrect the language of political ideals in this so-called post-political era of liberal managerialism. This is meant to be a world with no need for ideas and has moved beyond ideology. The anaemia of discourse as it is has gone on long enough. This is the time for serious theory as well as devoted belief and dedicated activism. For these reasons, we should be on the side of those - from Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri - who have devoted their intellectual capacities to developing a new kind of communism.

Even the enemies of socialism might concede it has some moral weight, but communism is irredeemable by comparison because of 20th Century history. We are reminded that not all socialists are communists, though every communist is a socialist. It should be noted that the idea of communism predates Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and actually has ancient roots, but this is not reason to step over Marx to his predecessors. As Terry Eagleton reminds us, in classical Marxian terms, the establishment of communism is preceded by the development of the material base to the point at which it can negate itself and drop clean out of consciousness. The material transcends itself at a certain point of superabundance. It was slavery and feudalism which provided the material conditions for capitalism, but it is capitalism which will produce the conditions for socialism and eventually communism. In a strange sense then socialism is indebted to capitalism, but as the great Nye Bevan would remind us "There can be no immaculate conception of socialism."

To this ultimate end socialism is a self-abolishing project, similarly the idea of communism will remain relevant until it is realised. The end and the means are eschew from one another to the point that the material prosperity, which will fund freedom, is the fruit of unfreedom. As it is inseparable from the horrors of slavery and market forces which laid the path to liberation. We might see communism as the escape from scarcity to the extent that we can actually forget about the very possibility of it. The Marxist notion of communism requires the development of the productive forces, free from the blockages of pre-history, to the extent that the economic system can give birth to a surplus sufficient for the abolition of labour and the fulfillment of the needs of everyone. Capitalism is the only historical mode of production capable of generating such a surplus, but the forces of production are not teleological. The system is not in place for the sake of historical development as it generates the surplus it is committed to the creation of scarcities.

The dialectical twist is that it is the materiality will release you from the forces of the material. We're not free of determinants in class society, we make our own history but by circumstances we cannot choose as Karl Marx reminds us in the Brumaire. The real kind of freedom is that where we're determined in such a way as to sit loose from economic determinants and to free us from the alienation of labour. As Sigmund Freud foresaw without the coercive process of labour we would all lounge about in various postures of jouissance - and this may be le communisme! Here we find the political and the economic are indivisible, as the reality of class society has to be acknowledged in order to eventually get rid of it. Terry Eagleton draws an analogy with revolutionary nationalism, where the point is to assert the unique culture of a nation in order for it to take an ordinary place in the community of nations.

On the Idea of Communism
Why Marx was Right

Capitalism, Regular not Diet

18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Communism in 1848

A Crisis of Ideology.

Apart from the dire socio-economic consequences of the ongoing crisis the endemic contradictions of capitalism has led to a crisis of the prevailing ideology and the dust has yet to settle. As Terry Eagleton notes the tendency of market rationality runs towards the rationalist and materialist, as well as secular plurality, relativism and pragmatism. Naturally the forces of the market exert a subversive force on the metaphysical and ideological superstructure. Rather than question whether or not what we're saying meshes with what we're doing we might have to invoke the Virgin Mary at the World Bank. In the same way that Alan Greenspan took refuge as the crisis hit in the claim that it all down to human frailty, predatory instincts and so on. It is true that it was human behaviour which led to the crisis, but Greenspan resorted to this explanation only to protect the immaculate conception of free-market capitalism. The irony being that Alan Greenspan is an Objectivist dinosaur - a devotee of Ayn Rand - who buys into the virtues of selfishness.

The criminal assault on Vietnam and Indochina was a case in which there was an enormous gulf between the political justifications of the war and the grotesque details of the actions undertaken to devastate a country. It was claimed that the war was to combat and contain the spread of Communism, as the red flag was flying in North Vietnam and so the US embarked on a noble mission to fend off the tentacles of Communism - it then began bombing South Vietnam. The US had blocked every attempt at a peaceful settlement in the 1950s and installed the Diem regime in South Vietnam. As the Diem regime aroused resistance to it as it slaughtered around 70,000 people and in reaction to the resistance the Kennedy administration invaded South Vietnam. Even though he knew better Lyndon B Johnson continued with the line that "We have to stop the Communists over there [Vietnam] or we'll soon be fighting them in California." This was not enough after so many years spent bombing the country the ideological fissure was torn open with the wave of student activism.


A ideological crisis can emerge in the midst of a performative contradiction between what you're doing and how you explain those actions to yourself. To account for the gap there is a need for a new discourse complete with a theoretical understanding of the situation and the potential to establish a new orthodoxy. As the system requires new theories to justify itself and strengthen the ideological apparatus it seems to be struggling in it's desperate search for any such means of defence. The media has yet to find a narrative which could fill the void which has been opened up as political power came to the rescue of the financial colossus to which David Cameron and Barack Obama are bound almost as slaves. It was unthinkable that the banks should be allowed to collapse, it was a forced decision which no one can rightly oppose. But it seems that the system has lost it's sheath of market fundamentalism out of its own pragmatism. The utopia of the market has been stripped down for all to see, it is difficult to see how the system could ever double back on itself.

Today it is still rare to hear of the horrific details of the Vietnam War in spite of the memory of the demonstrations against it lives on. The objectives of the war will never be acknowledged in the media. The virus of independence and development in Vietnam had to be killed, and the region had to be inoculated, in order to preserve the accomplishments of the US in the Second World War. The virus might have spread to Thailand and Indonesia, then Japan might have to accommodate to an independent East Asian bloc and would no doubt become it's industrial heartland. The US aimed to maintain the Japanese empire under American control, the rise of Communism in China and Korea undermined these aims. The wars in Vietnam and Korea were fought for the same reason that the US installed Suharto in Indonesia. There are no apologies for the crimes, certainly no reparations and not even any recognition of the barbarism unleashed upon Indochina. Rather it has been swept under the rug as a noble quest which went awry and possibly an atrocity necessary in the Cold War which we will not repeat in this post-political world.

The system has lost the automatic claim to legitimacy, as Slavoj Žižek points out, the field is open in this time of crisis as the prevailing ideology has been disturbed. The limitations and perversions of the system can be seen publicly, we can see the desperate need for an alternative and we know not of an alternative. But this is not the basis for the system's legitimacy as the Thatcherites claimed. The greatest utopian belief is that the system of capitalism can go on indefinitely. Infinite growth in a world of finite resources is a fantasy even if you believe global warming is a liberal hoax cooked up to sell carbon credits to corporations and make you pay the congestion charge. There is a need for another kind of utopianism, not in the sense of the ideal society which ca never be realised but as a new space created out of the innermost urgency for survival. It is the way out we are forced to imagine by the impossibility of circumstances, which cannot be resolved within the coordinates of the possible. As Lenin said "There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." Right now, we need to make decades to happen!

David Starkey, Black Culture & the Riots.

Wiggers with Attitude?

In the aftermath of the riots David Starkey decided it was wise to bring up Enoch Powell and argue that a specific point made in the 'Rivers of Blood' speech was "absolutely right". He was keen to reassure the audience that Powell was wrong in that it was not "inter-communal violence" and that it is cultural rather than racial. It would be generous to David Starkey to designate him as a cultural chauvinist, which is perfectly consistent with the monarchism and nationalism to which he subscribes. David Starkey is a provocateur in the tradition of an insolent dinner guest crowing just to offend and shock. In this instance the bespectacled historian was at dinner with an Oxbridge liberal, a leftist and a crime novelist. The outrage was over comments such as "The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, they wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham." As if that were not bad enough Starkey went on to claim the problem is that "the whites have become black" and that the black politician David Lammy sounds "white" when you close your eyes.

At first he pinned the riots as an "extension of commercialism" and the exuberant consumerism of British society, though he is intelligent enough to understand that the consumer boom was born out of the implosion of social democracy and the emergence of Thatcherism in it's wake. Therefore to manage the contradiction between rapacious individualism and the moral opposition to senseless violence Starkey wheels in racially charged rhetoric which will scandalise the liberal intelligentsia and split the commentariat down the middle. At which point the working-classes can make a cameo appearance in the guise of the angry crowd yelling "Enoch was right!" It is now highly unlikely that there will be any debate over the issues behind the riots as the media discusses whether or not David Starkey is a racist. Notice David Starkey asks of Owen Jones "You glorify Rap?" and then backs off as Dreda Say Mitchell points out that the rappers only reflect the materialism of the world. Brian Cox was right to call Starkey "utterly corrupt" last year.

It could have been a conscious effort to further derail the political discourse away from any meaningful discussion of inequality and police brutality. It could just be a simple case of racism masquerading as cultural conservatism. Time will tell if David Starkey distances himself in the future from such remarks. The insinuation of a respectable historian that this is somehow related to an imported "black culture" of crime is just false. In the halcyon days of vanilla Britain, at the finest hour of our country, back in 1940 juvenile crime accounted for 48% of all arrests and there were over 4,500 cases of looting from then until 1941. There were even cases of firemen looting burned-out shops, teenagers stripped the clothes off of corpses to sell and some even cut-off the fingers of the dead to get at their rings. These could not have just been the "wiggers" who had watched too much MTV and absorbed an awful lot of 50 Cent's anger before going out to spit it out into society. As a result of this level of bullshiting we're unlikely to see any real solutions in Britain, just a right-ward shift that will lead us down the road to more riots in the future.

Cultural Blackness?

Originally the issue of race was raised on Newsnight before Starkey crawled out from his hole, it was Gavin Esler who wondered if the riots had anything to do with "black culture" or even MTV. We should bare in mind the relations of base and superstructure when we're talking about culture in this way, that the superstructure is generated by the base in order to justify and defend itself. Simultaneously the superstructure has the potential to undermine the base in spite of the interdependent relations between them. Take Rap music, usually it defends the status quo in it's portrayal of a anti-political and anti-intellectual form of underground capitalism in which collective organisations (e.g. gangs) can still function meaningfully. It at once embodies society's institutional corruption and it's opposite with an emphasis on a warped set of codes and rituals. The misogyny and homophobia found rampant in the music videos and lyrics is born out of a thoroughly impotent masculinity.

It is not coincidental that Rap music becomes incredibly popular and influential in the late 1980s onwards at the peak of Reaganism. Look at the socio-economic situation for young black men in particular, especially in the US where there was a brief opening for black people in the 70s as civil rights were gained through harsh struggle. But with the financialisation of the economy millions of African-Americans became part of a superfluous population. The black economy of drugs provides an alternative to the business system which has excluded black people for decades. Not only is it an alternative to financial capitalism, where the wasps of Harvard still thrive, it provides a welfare system that has been completely destroyed in the US. It is also an expression of rage against the police for the murder and persecution of black people, NWA captured the anger bubbling beneath the surface just before the battering of Rodney King sparked the LA riots in 1992. Ultimately, mainstream rappers are only looking to establish a black aristocracy which stands as a reflection of the white elites.

Rap music is not the source of riots and crime, rather it is linked to it through economic circumstances. The riots were not a coherent and organised expression of political dissent. It was mass-rage against the police along with elements of the same consumerism we have all indulged in. Where does this anger come from? In 1997 and 1998 there were around 8,000 stop-and-searches, by 2008 to 2009 that had risen to 150,000. The use of Section 60 between 2005 and 2010 has increased by 300%, originally Section 60 was introduced to combat football hooliganism; over the same time period the stop-and-searches of black people increased by 650%. From 1998 to 2010 over 330 people have died mysteriously in police custody, surprisingly 75% of the people who died were white and not so surprisingly 90% were male aged between 25 and 44. Let alone the level of unemployment and economic stagnation in this country which has plagued the poor for years. The decisions undertaken by the rioters were not justified, but the grievances are legitimate and real.

The Narrative of Terror.

Life After History.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which began with the Berlin Wall in 1989, the grand narrative that the US was engaged in a war against Communism came to an end. Out of the Second World War, the US came out the most powerful country in the world and it had a powerful military to justify. The threat of Communism was enough to play on to increase the defence budget. It began with the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s were actually started by the Democrats under Truman. It provided a pretext for the Korean war, as it would later provide for Vietnam and then lose in the mid 1960s. A performative contradiction emerged between the grand narrative professed by the US and the actual situation in the world. After all the US was bombing Vietnam to contain the spread of Communism, why was the US bombing South Vietnam then? A similar contradiction has arisen in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, why are we still in Afghanistan if Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan?

The collapse of the grand narrative of the Cold War came around 1990 and gave way for a new narrative. Though for a while things flat-lined as Fukuyama had declared the End of History. The events of 9/11 would open up such a narrative, though there are signs to be detected earlier than September 11^th 2001. As there was a global economic crisis in 1998, as well as the hysteria around Monica Lewinsky, US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed. Osama bin Laden was the mastermind and Bill Clinton immediately seized on it. Cruise missiles were fired and nothing was hit (except for a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan) so the media charged Clinton with trying to take the heat off himself. If a Middle East connection had been found behind the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing the US would have bombed just about anything in sight, with the press cheering it on all the way. It wasn’t until the atrocities struck on American soil in 2001 that the grand narrative was opened up as the “War on Terrorism” was declared.

The grand narrative of the “War on Terror” has been a self-serving narrative for the Bush administration, the commentariat and not to mention al-Qaeda. It gave the government and the media a meaningful way to simplify global events for public consumption. It also sells papers, boosts approval ratings for politicians and provides a way for Islamists to recruit young angry men in the Middle East. The US could have split the Jihadist movement in 2001, as there was a division between the Islamists who supported the action and those who opposed it. Instead the US invaded Afghanistan and in doing so united the Jihadist movement behind the new strategy to attack the “far enemy” and not just the “near enemy” of corrupt Arab leaders. In other words, the moves to "contain, minimise and marginalise" the threat referred to by Alex Massie couldn't include the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The same can be said of state-sanctioned kidnapping and torture.

As Patrick Cockburn has claimed, al-Qaeda might just be the most successful terrorist organisation in history. After all the attacks on 9/11 were committed in order to lure the US into an over-reaction in which it would wage a war against Islam. Ayman al-Zawahiri expressed hopes of this, these was the reason for the attacks on 9/11. The logic being to unite the Muslim masses against the West, the attacks succeeded in uniting the Jihadist movement as the US invaded Afghanistan and later Iraq. With the US and Britain committed to a ground war in Iraq, the threat of terrorism in the West increased significantly. George Bush and Tony Blair had done a good job of acting how al-Qaeda wanted them to. Despite warnings that the invasions would increase the threat of terror Bush led the way. We can all look and see the link between the invasions and the terrorist attacks which have struck in Western countries since then.

History Jump-Started.

The trial of Osama bin Laden would have surely demystified al-Qaeda, it seems as though the assassination has the potential to bring the grand narrative to a close. It could make way for a new narrative. With the snake decapitated there are few ways for the Republicans to criticise the administration and a second term may be secure. There are also few ways to justify the current occupation of Afghanistan, a contradiction could easily rise from the depths of American ideology to the surface and manifest itself in political crisis. Whether or not it can be managed by simply claiming that the US has to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan is another matter. If the man is dead what is the point of occupying Afghanistan? The hopes look slim for the “War on Terror” to be bolstered in any significant way. Yes, there are terrorists still out there. There are also Communist regimes in Cuba, North Korea and China among a few other places and yet there is no hope of kick-starting the Cold War.

The only conceivable way the grand narrative could be maintained is if there is another invasion. The most valuable, in strategic and economic terms, are Pakistan and Iran. But to even justify a war another baddie has to emerge from the shadows. There is no one in sight who can fill the shoes of Osama bin Laden. Not even Ayman al-Zawahiri, the de facto leader of al-Qaeda. It should be noted that there is word of new names being added to the terrorist watch-list, as a consequence of the raid and the information found at the compound in Abbottabad. There is a great deal of speculation over how the Pakistani government managed to ‘miss’ that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad. The Americans felt no obligation to inform Pakistani intelligence of the raid because they were "untrustworthy", as the CIA have pointed out. Even though Pakistan agreed to this kind of raid 10 years ago.

Barack Obama has faced a great deal of criticism from across the political spectrum. There has been legitimate criticism for his position on Israel-Palestine and then there are the allegations that he is an illegal alien, a Muslim and the bastard son of Malcolm X. It seems that there is little room for words which regard what change he has accomplished. Understandably so, there is a great deal of disappointment with him and general disillusionment with politics in the US. But Obama never pretended to be anything more than a centrist liberal. We forget that the presence of a black family in the White House has moved the perimeters of what is possible in the US. The statements he has made on torture and Guantanamo Bay have the same impact. Though the gulag is still open, we should not forget that it was totally impossible to even imagine the American President admitting torture and calling for Gitmo to be closed down. The assassination of Osama bin Laden may be the greatest contribution to ideological change Obama has made thus far.

American intelligence officials are expecting to add new names to the terrorist watch-list as a consequence of the raid on the compound. The information is from 10 phones, 10 computers and 100 memory sticks found at the compound in Abbottabad. So there are hopes for the “crazies” who will want to see the narrative survive. Nevertheless, there is a chance that this narrative might have to close and with that a new narrative will open up. The conditions for this new narrative are not unique. It would have to make room austerity at home and repression abroad. It would need to rationalise the lunge for resources in Central Asia and the Middle East. As the US loses its power it is possible that the grand narrative will be shaped even more by China. It is even possible that the decline of American hegemony could itself be the next narrative. We live in interesting times, as well as dangerous times.

Obama kills Osama.

The Justice Done.

Osama bin Laden has finally been wasted, at his notably immodest hideout, in Pakistan by US forces. For a long time he was the international personification of Islamist Terror for around a decade. A signifier of pure and radical evil in the West, the name itself was enough to conjure up the images of the Twin Towers crashing down after the planes struck. Osama stands out from the 52 children of Mohamed bin Laden, a multimillionaire who built 80% of roads in Saudi Arabia and died in a helicopter crash in 1968. In a sense Osama bin Laden personifies the contorted base and superstructure of Islamism. A son of the Saudi bourgeoisie, born to privilege and luxury as a result of capital accumulation which would have been impossible without the close relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia. The contradiction between the economic base of corporate oligarchy and the ideological superstructure of radical Islam is evident in the surroundings of which he was found. Only the face of Islamist Terror could hide in a mansion less than a mile from Pakistan's Sandhurst.

The BBC is eager to remind us that the ideas of Osama bin Laden are not dead, we ought to keep in mind that the ideas are not his own. It was Sayyid Qutb who advocated the formation of  state with all the advances of Western science and technology, but it would be purified of the decadence of liberalism through a strict adherence to a radical interpretation of the Qu'ran. These conclusions Qutb made after his travels in America throughout the 1940s and upon his return to his native land of Egypt he joined the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The Brothers supported the revolution led by General Nasser, a bourgeois nationalist committed to a non-aligned secular model of development. The CIA had trained the security services of Egypt. By 1954 Sayyid Qutb was imprisoned for his political activities, he was tortured and suffered a heart attack in his time in prison. The experiences of prison radicalised Qutb even further, he concluded that the possessive individualism of the West was a barbarous infection.

All the means of combating the spread of jahiliyyah in Egypt were justifiable and leaders like Nasser could be killed justifiably because he was no longer a Muslim according to Qutb. The Nationalist regime tried Qutb for treason and then executed him to set an example. The radical writings inspired a young doctor, another aristocrat, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In 1981 Zawahiri helped organise the assassination of Sadat, for his corruption and compromise to Israel. The Propaganda of the Deed was intended to provoke a mass-uprising against the Nationalist regime in Egypt. There was no such uprising in support of a Islamist state, Sadat was merely succeeded by Mubarak. In prison al-Zawahiri was tortured and he began to blame the Muslim masses for failing to rise up against the corrupt regime in Cairo. He went on to conclude that the masses had been corrupted and were no longer Muslims either. For him the slaughter of politicians, infidels and even ordinary Muslims would be necessary in order for Islamism to be realised in a country.

Once Ayman al-Zawahiri was released from prison he went to Afghanistan to help the resistance to the Communists and Osama bin Laden had moved there in 1979 for the same reason. The two of them would become heavily involved in the radical wing of the Mujahideen, which had been founded in 1978, just before the Soviet invasion, with money provided by the Carter administration. The flow of money to the Mujahideen was increased under Reagan, it was funnelled through Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Incidentally the regime of General Zia ul-Haq initiated the radicalisation of Pakistani society in the 80s and we are still seeing the consequences today. The corruption in Pakistan is the reason that Osama bin Laden managed to hide there for so long. The US not only funded but trained the "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan, ironically Osama bin Laden personally thanked Prince Bandar for securing the assistance from the Americans. Over 30 years of war has reduced Afghanistan to a backward narco-state, it was once a modern and forward-looking country.

The Terror of War.

The name bin Laden was rolled out on the news soon after the attacks on the Twin Towers took place on September 11th 2001. The televised images were horrifying and surreal. How could such a thing happen to America? When the attacks hit home, I had just got back from school to find the horrible news on telly. Looking back, my reaction is quite interesting. I immediately changed channel. The reason: I took the sight of people fleeing from an enormous dust cloud must be something to do with Israel-Palestine. The constant fighting over patches of sand seemed a wearisome issue at the time, an unsolvable conflict which had gone on forever and would go on forever. When my mother informed me of the dreadful truth, that the people in those towers were American and not the fresh victims of a conflict going back 60 years. At first I thought the planes must have flown into the Towers by accident somehow. No one would dare attack the beloved America, the land which brought us The Simpsons and Coca-Cola. It had to be an accident.

In the wise words of Hunter S Thompson "The Towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for peace in our time, in the United States or any other country." Soon the old men with grey hair were on TV and we were all assured that there would be justice. George Bush re-declared the "War on Terrorism", a declaration originally made by Ronald Reagan, the words of Thompson were proven deadly accurate. The justifications for warfare against "rogue states" were reminiscent of the words picked by LBJ "We have to stop the communists over there [Vietnam] or we'll soon be fighting them in California." Only the Western victims of terror mattered and the Persian Gulf War had demonstrated that the invasion of a country could be executed without major casualties (on our side). Don't mind the thousands of Iraqi slain, particularly civilians and the hundreds of thousands more who would be brutalised by economic sanctions.

The invasion of Afghanistan followed as the Taliban refused to extradite Osama bin Laden to the US, but would do so on the condition that there was evidence put forward. It is strange that the US seems perfectly capable of extraditing Julian Assange for rape, but not a man who was responsible for terrorism on an international scale. The regime in Kabul had been propped up on cash from Saudi Arabia and the US. Even radical Jihadists condemned Osama bin Laden at the time, so there was a chance to divide the Islamists and secure the extradition through unscrupulous methods not alien to the chickenhawks. Nevertheless, the invasion went ahead as the British and Americans were fully aware the military strike could lead to the deaths of over 7 million people just through starvation. It was not part of a reaction to 9/11. The war has united the Islamist movement against the West and the threat of private-terrorism increased sharply. Even more so after the invasion of Iraq.

We do not know if the invasion could have been avoided given the concentration of power in the US and the convergence of interests in favour of war. The bombing of Afghanistan killed civilians and was executed to demonstrate the might of the US. From the standpoint of neoconservatives it might have been seen a necessary war to be fought in order to take Iraq later on. The American people had to be brought together in a fight against a common enemy, which morphed from bin Laden to the Taliban in a couple of weeks. The value of Afghanistan is strategic as the country is situated on the edge of the oil spicket of the world. Not just the Middle East, but also Central Asia. The way in which India seeks to power it's growing economy is relevant here, rationally there could be agreements between India and Iran to run a fuel pipeline through Pakistan. The US wants to isolate Iran and force the Indians to make a deal with Turkmenistan, which would require a multi-billion dollar pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan to India.

What Justice Done?

It took 10 years to kill this man, though the extent to which the "War on Terror" was about capturing this man seems highly suspect. In death he has secured a second term for Obama, who has finally accomplished one of his election promises to kill Osama bin Laden and may have made the demagogues calling for Obama's birth certificate look irrelevant. We should remember that it was the idle threats bin Laden made in 2004 which secured a second term for the Bushites. In other words, the financier of international terror had earned a swift burial at sea from the Americans. No doubt the conspiracy theorists will be typing vigorously. The de facto leadership of al-Qaeda are still at large, the organisation has lost a useful financier and prominent ideologue. The former of which will be easier to replace than the latter. Despite the superficial role of bin Laden, the Taliban have sworn revenge and al-Qaeda may have acquired a useful prominent martyr.

The Republicans will seek to vindicate the Bushites of such criminal indulgences as kidnapping and torture at secret prisons around the world, as well as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The Democrats can forget about the lessons of the Bush administration and it will be up to the American people to force the US government to change. The United States of Amnesia at it's finest! Revenge is the word for it and far more appropriate than justice as the latter would require a degree of self-reflection and presuppose a lack of double-standards. If the US were to pull out of Afghanistan and leave the Iraqi people to decide the trajectory of their country it might mean more than simple vengeance. It would mean even more if the Bush administration faced trial for the crimes committed in the name of freedom and democracy. After all the Bushites are guilty of the supreme international crime - unprovoked aggression - established at the Nuremberg Tribunal.

There is something surreal about the death of bin Laden, a man who had avoided capture for 10 years and in the end was killed. There were theories that he had been killed or died years ago. Some even thought he had never existed or was not involved in 9/11 in any way. The corpse was buried at sea after it was not accepted by Saudi Arabia. It would have been the appropriate burial ground for a man who bought into the obscurantist Wahhabi brand of Islam, a puritanical reading of the Qu'ran propagated to protect the heart of capitalism in the Middle East. The assassination of Osama bin Laden has come at a vital moment for Obama, it will provide a 'boost' for Americans who are looking at huge austerity measures and economic turmoil. The impact of the man's death - which has even boosted the stock market - is far less noticeable in Europe where there are no gatherings of people chanting nationalistic slogans. Possibly because in Europe there is the stark perception of what the American government has done since the tragedy of 9/11.

The greatest victory of Islamism would be the self-destruction of Western values as a reaction against itself, a sadomasochistic method if there ever was one. The proponents of liberal interventionism, from American neocons to Blairites, are so eager to fight radical Islamism to defend Western values and the Judeo-Christian civilisation. Not only are the warriors on terror profoundly anti-Christian in their rejection of Christianity as a universalist doctrine and reversion to Paganism. The terrorists are prepared to destroy this world for love of another world, the counter-terrorists are ready to destroy the Free World out of a hatred of the Muslim Other. From waging illegal wars to legalising torture, the greatest infringement on freedom and democracy, made to defend freedom and democracy. This is a contradiction internal to late capitalism, the explicit need for a violence in the defence of freedom against violence and in doing so freedom is lost. After the "War on Terror" Americans should inquire what was it the US was fighting for?