Sectarianism be Praised!

The Left has long been prone to sectarianism, and famously so, due to its fissiparous condition and natural inclination to the narcissism of fine distinctions - to borrow Freud's words. Socialism comes in about a thousand different shades of red. The same can be said of anarchism, communism and feminism. It's probable that the sectarian tendency will never be overcome, partly this is because there has to be disagreement and debate. Dissensus rather than consensus. It's clear that there is a need for discussion over serious issues in practice as well as theory. This is true of morality as well as the organisation of government. In such areas there is a need for a lot more dissensus and not less. The same can be said of the refinement of principle and development of theory itself. This isn't to endorse the destructive strain of sectarianism which tears apart groups and grinds away at mass-popular movements. It's this which has helped to further the Left's decline around the world since the end of the Cold War. We can't blame it all on the CIA, I must concede. But it's important to always insist on a subtle distinction.

It's the problem is the shift to an intolerant variety of sectarianism which is so troubling, and with good reason too. The point at which the disagreement becomes a hindrance to a social movement. To borrow the words of the late Alexander Cockburn "The Left's idea of a meeting is to form a circle, point the guns inward and then fire." This is exactly the kind of sectarianism that the majority of people find problematic. It can drive a wedge right into a movement, first causing friction and then leading to schismatic bursts that threaten the whole thrust of the organised efforts. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the successes of a movement in its commitment to a cause often in turn produce greater unity and solidarity. The sectarian elements are usually marginalised in this way, as it becomes more important to unify around a cause which is more important than our petty differences of theory. The victories of a movement are self-propelling in this way. This could go against Gramscian sequential schemas about the primacy of politics, in that the material conditions may come before the political - likewise, theory very often struggles to keep up with practice.

Sadly it's also true that the destructive sectarian streak of the Left is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Very often the Left is in a state of paralysis thanks to its own bitter squabbles and petty infighting, which would embarrass the Church of England - it truly does come down to a narcissism of fine distinctions! The inability of some to build alliances within the Left has even been matched by those who find it easier to coalesce with the Right. Alexander Cockburn received no end of criticism for consorting with Pat Buchanan over the Iraq war, yet it was a pragmatic move of a committed anti-imperialist. Though it's worth saying that the left-wing worry of a descent into a state of affairs where we take the side of anyone who is critical of US foreign policy is not an confused one. Many conservatives saw Fascism as a "lesser evil" to socialism, even libertarians thought Mussolini was a "moderate" who had saved private property from the red plague. No such calculation would go uncriticised on the Left. One of the reasons why the Right is not as sectarian, and not in the same way, as the Left is that leftists are better than rightists. It's about questions of action.

The rigorous assessment of principle and practice among leftists is not a reason for despair in every instance. The Left ought to be sectarian in this sense, in its commitment to outmatch liberals and conservatives when it comes to democracy, equality and liberty, as well as art, culture and even tradition. This requires a certain refinement and maintenance of principle. It is often overlooked that the conservative claim to a monopoly over culture and tradition is as ludicrous as the suggestion of a liberal monopoly over freedom. Notably it was Leon Trotsky who said "We Marxists have always lived in tradition." He wasn't speaking as a conservative, because there is an alternative conception of tradition to be found in radicalism. It is a cultural body which is constantly remade, as well as opening itself to the participation of ordinary people. At the same time it's not just conservatives who want to preserve the great canon of literature, whereas radicals are about accessibility and dissensus. But it's a fetishistic tendency of conservatives to take something as good just because it stood the test of time. Quality control is something the Left does better.

Democracy and Socialism.

In my essay on polyarchy I only addressed narrow questions of American liberal democracy with the Bush administration as a principle example. There are much more interesting questions raised by the concept. It's very easy to scrutinise the democratic institutions of capitalist society, but it is less clear what position should be drawn from such a critique. After all the notion of polyarchy picks away at the liberal ideal of representative democracy and seems to push us towards notions of a radical democracy. This is all especially relevant to socialists, who lack a theory of government - that's the breach that the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' filled in the 20th Century. It's easy to dismiss vanguardism, but it's less clear where to head next if we want to retain our commitment to socialism. It could be that this is just a matter of transition. In defence of historical materialism GA Cohen wrote of communism as freedom from social structure. It's possible to see radical democracy as consistent with such a notion.

I turned to my friend Chris Horner on this matter and first made a few clarifications "Well, from a Marxist perspective, class is abolished altogether - after a transitional period (socialism) to a point at which class antagonism no longer exists: proletariat abolishes itself at the same time." Before adding "So the way Marx envisaged it was that democracy would be vastly enhanced by socialism - in the interests of the proletariat - and the bourgeoisie would be in the state of the current proletarians - i.e., unable to use economic power to enforce de facto 'dictatorship of the bourgeoisie'. Would this be polyarchy? Possibly, but only briefly." He went further to stress that Karl Marx was never all that clear about this, though all Marxists seem to see the class struggle continuing after the revolution for a period. I recall that Mao pointed out that the ruling party can take on the role of the ruling-class after the revolution and so opens up the need for a mass-movement to undermine the party-state apparatus.

It's worth noting that Karl Marx thought it would be much easier for the working-class to achieve victories, to some extent, through the fledgling Parliamentary institutions of Europe. The dichotomy between the promise of grass-roots democracy and a sort of Hobbesian reaffirmation of statehood. The former has the comforting appeal of ultra-leftism while the latter takes the contrarian line in its unreconstructed defence of a strong state. It seems pertinent that the vanguardists have little use for concepts such as polyarchy. Instead you might tend to find more simplistic talk of oligarchy and plutocracy. This is where the Left is problematically sectarian, its inability to sustain fine differences. Rousseau had seemed to favour an egalitarian variety of an 'elective aristocracy', which could be seen as a version of representative or delegative democracy. Then there's the accusation that this is just 'reformist' meandering out of the revolutionary project. Yet it's very clear that the capitalist system can only be overthrown through revolution.
 

You could interpret the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' as a sort of polyarchy given it's representative composition of prevailing economic interests. Chris went on to say "The range of opinions is represented (as they are in liberal society), but the bourgeoisie no longer has its hands on the levers of economic power. Ultimately a radical democracy develops in a context in which class no longer exists. Again, I wish Marx had said more about this, but maybe he was being wisely cautious. That doesn't mean socialists of all stripes shouldn't think hard about what a democracy actually is!" Another friend of mine once joked that the ultimate victory over capitalism will be signified by the lack of presence of officially socialist/communist parties, as well as the insignificant presence of tiny capitalist parties that will never take power. There's some truth in this as it points at hegemony and that's something that the polyarchy model definitely appeals to. This is where we need theory more than ever.

Pussy Riot's Challenge.

"Holy Mother, Blessed Virgin, chase Putin out," they sang only to receive 2 years for less than 2 minutes of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. Out of the convicted Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich have participated in performances staged by Voina. In one such instance Samutsevich released Madagascan giant cockroaches into a courtroom and went on to kiss on duty female police officers. Tolokonnikova took part in an orgy staged in the Biology Museum in Moscow. Pussy Riot could be seen as an off-shoot of this movement in its devotion to shock and challenge the assumptions of conservative Russians. Predictably Pussy Riot has come up against the cursed spirit of Russian chauvinism in its personification of a pallid dwarfish man-beast. This hardline strain of intolerance ought to be a source of shame for a country that produced so many great artists - from Dostoevsky to Mayakovsky - and particularly great in literature with which the West can hardly compete to this day. Now art has become a battleground for the faithful and the political in present day Russia.

In defence of the trial and sentencing Alexander Nekrassov pointed to the cathedral as an anti-Stalinist monument. Except Nekrassov conveniently forgets that the parodic punk prayer was meant to strike at age old pillars of Russian authoritarianism. The first target was Putin's Kremlin, the secondary target was Russian Orthodoxy as a superstructural spectre of the conditions in Russian society. It has to be said that the Orthodox Church has long served to legitimise the status quo in Russia. This was true in the days when the Tsar stood as the semi-divine head of the Church and it's unfortunately true in the present Mafia state. It was the Russian Orthodox Church which fabricated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, blaming the evils of the world on the Jewish people, and in doing so contributed greatly to the Judeophobia rife in Europe at the time. Indeed, it became Hitler's "warrant" for genocide. Today it is the bedtime reading of neo-Nazis everywhere, it has been distributed by Henry Ford and Hamas while David Icke has cited it as a 'factual document'.

 

Even Nekrassov's claim that the Church can be taken as an anti-Stalinist symbol shouldn't be taken too seriously. Although the Church had flirtations with oppositional activity, the suicidal regime of Stalin's creation fell back on religiosity as well as nationalism to support the war effort. The campaigns against religion in the 1920s and 30s were put on hold until Khrushchev began to close churches once again in the 60s. Indeed, it made sense given that the war with Germany was a bloodbath for Russia – leaving in excess of 20 million dead. The breach left open after the fall of the Tsar was filled by Stalin as he took on the guise of a god-king complete with an era of heresy hunts, miracles and even an inquisition. It was the Orthodoxy that had worked to instil a cultural credulity among Russians to the benefit of the Tsars and later Stalinism. This isn't to say that the Soviet Union was a religious state, but the Church can hardly be taken as anti-Stalinist so totally. We should turn to the question of Russia's politics and the rudderlessness of organised religion.

The real test is whether or not the Orthodox Church will rise to its stated commitment to the principles by which Christ lived by. As Giles Fraser points out "The legal case against Jesus was that he violated the holy. He was criticised for allowing his disciples to eat without washing properly and for picking corn on the day set aside as holy. He said he was God yet he was born in a filthy stable and willingly laid hands on lepers. He had no problem with being touched by menstruating women or eating with those regarded as unwholesome." This constituted a thoroughgoing deconstruction of the holy, as Fraser notes, that had become an alibi for political injustice. The same challenge was made by the Hebrew prophets, being profane is precisely the point. This should be taken as an opportunity for Russia's progressive Christians to reassert themselves as an alternative to the Kremlin's mascot church. Right now, the Russian Orthodoxy is just another rod with which Putin can kosh dissidents. But the Church will survive as a weapon for future administrations. So it's vital that there be an alternative Christianity to the established Church.

When Nixon goes to China...

... Lower Your Expectations!

Only Richard Nixon could have gone to China to make peace with Mao, for it was Nixon who was the most staunchly anti-Communist of Republicans and had been embedded in McCarthyism in the 1950s. If the step had been made by a Democrat then they would have been torn apart by the right-wing media. Only Obama can legally enshrine killing American citizens aligned with the "associated forces" of al-Qaeda, even as the conservatives accuse him of being a 'socialist' and the liberals remain silent just to keep the Republicans out of office. This is the lowering of expectations that Alexander Cockburn talks about. The business of conventional politics is rooted in a kind of realism which forecloses any manifested opposition to the ruling-class. We can see this in Britain where the Labour Party signed onto the Thatcherite programme in the 1990s, which amounted to nothing less than an assault on the minimal living standards of working-class people.

The architects of New Labour were well aware that the trade unions would hang on no matter what, a large chunk of Scotland and the North would vote Labour no matter what, so it was only a matter of winning over the Southern middle-class. Under Blair the Party quickly dumped it's commitments to any kind of socialist development, indicatively the common ownership of the workplace by workers was abandoned. It was only because of Labour's history that it could hand over the Bank of England to the private sector and let the markets run amok in the NHS. So it should be no surprise that Ed Miliband has signed onto every pathetic decision of the Conservative Party to trash health-care, education, pensions and benefits in general. The opposition has been foreclosed. Now no one stands on the side of the vulnerable and the exploited in this time of great turmoil. No doubt if Blair was in power he would be pushing through bigger cuts than the Conservative Party could get away with.

So it would seem that the Labour Party is beyond reform, you can thank Tony Blair for that. In another sense then the ground is ripe for the radicals to tap into popular disillusionment, widespread grievances and the people's wrath. We need some major decisions, perhaps the trade unions should break off from the Labour Party and align themselves with the Greens. Of course, the unions won't because they're afraid that would forfeit any influence in Parliament whatsoever. The trite of Ed Miliband is the best they can hope for and clearly the unions have lowered their expectations. There is widespread outrage at what has gone on for the last 30 years. Now we have to think of what is to be undone. It wouldn't take much to reach out to ordinary people, we've seen nearly 1 million march against cuts through the streets of London. The Coalition of Resistance seems to have petered out since Ed Miliband gave a crap speech at the March for the Alternative. The Occupy movement is a good thing in terms of popular energy, but it is insufficient in many respects.

We can't lower our expectations and give in to this crowd. We should remind ourselves that it isn't all gloom and doom. Take a close look at the hubbub around SOPA and PIPA, what do you see? So Wikipedia goes on strike because libertarian Jimmy Wales wants to take a stand for free-speech online. Can't you just make out one of the contradictions of capitalism prevalent today? The more the common is captured as private property, the more its productivity declines and yet the further expansion of the common undermines the relations of property.  Neither the state nor the market has any substantive answers to this matter. Both have demonstrated a remarkable ability to shoot themselves and each other in the foot. Jimmy Wales took a stand for free-speech and undermined property rights in doing so. The state acted to defend the interests of corporations vested in private property, but it will only reduce the productivity of the system if it succeeds. This is just another repeat of when Nixon went to China, except we won't be lowering our expectations this time!


As for the question of what's your alternative? We shouldn't shirk away from central planning even though it was largely a disaster in the 20th Century. There does exist a model for socio-economic planning within the current system and this is reason enough to not dump all talk of planning from radical programmes. In a capitalist system the markets are meant to provide coordination to an intricate network of firms, the only alternative is central planning to coordinate a network of worker self-management. The Left doesn't want to talk seriously about the question of coordination. The corporation is the most advanced, sophisticated and dynamic command and control system in world history. It is a profit-based planning system but the corporate model is not a free-market one, it sends order through supply chains to extract and distribute resources. These techniques of planning can be ripped out of the capitalist system and applied to an egalitarian end.

Hobbes on Democracy.

Thomas Hobbes was a perfect foil for Machiavelli in a way, as Machiavelli claimed to have discovered a new continent of a new order but it was Hobbes who made that continent habitable. The focus of Leviathan, specifically in chapter 19, shifts onto the different kinds of commonwealth as distinguished from one another in terms of institutions and the succession to sovereign power, as well as in differences of convenience, aptitude in the creation of the peace and security of the people. For Hobbes there were only three main models of commonwealth: monarchic, aristocratic and democratic. This is due to the indivisible nature of sovereign power can only be peacefully manifested in representatives of “either one or more or all”.[1] For our purposes we will be focused particularly on what Hobbes has to say about democracy rather than aristocracy and monarchy. But the views he held on aristocratic and monarchic systems remain important only insofar as they can be distinguished from a democracy or a “popular commonwealth” as Hobbes deemed it.

Early on in the chapter democracy is marked out as distinct from monarchy and aristocracy, as a popular commonwealth in which representation comes in the form of “all that will come together”. Thomas Hobbes contrasts this with monarchy, where the representative is one man, and aristocracy, which is only partial assembly. In the case of a democracy every man has the right to enter into it, rather than in an aristocracy where only the men distinct from the rest can enter. Notably, if the power of the monarch has been limited then the state in question is not a monarchy as sovereignty fell into the hands of an assembly (which could be either democratic or aristocratic). For Hobbes the indivisibility of sovereign power is necessary for peace, an end for which sovereignty is instituted. Once power becomes divided it is no longer sovereign, so for conflict to be avoided it is vital for a duality of power to be averted.

For peace the sovereign must have absolute authority, be not a party to the covenants and hold absolute authority only to the extent that the sovereign has the power to enforce the law. Then it is absurd to think that there could be perpetual peace when sovereign power is in the hands of an assembly (as in a democracy) for the absolute representation of the people would fall to subordinate representatives and the power could very easily become divided. Thus subordinate representatives pose a danger to sovereign power insofar as such a system can become a source of division in the commonwealth.[2] So sovereign power can be divided, but it shouldn’t be because power ceases to be sovereign once it has been divided.[3] Think of instances in which states have collapsed into chaos amidst an uprising, a rupture of the order from which the sovereignty of the regime is undermined to the extent that a duality emerges and a rival for sovereignty appears.

There are also cases where the sovereign takes the form of a one-party state and a sudden rupture explodes the status quo. The revolution and subsequent civil war in Libya was one such example where power was stripped of its sovereignty as the people rebelled, but eventually sovereign power was manifested in a new government as the Gaddafi regime was brushed aside in Tripoli. We might even segue into theories of what makes a revolutionary situation. We might understand a revolutionary situation as defined by the emergence of what Charles Tilly called “multiple sovereignty”, which has three main features. First of all, the existing state suffers a loss of power to contenders and rivals. Secondly the rivals fall back on a base of popular support which is a significant portion of the population overall. Lastly, the existing state cannot, for whatever reason, repress the contenders and the base of support behind them. The fears of a divided sovereignty, which Hobbes had, are precisely a fear of this kind of situation arising.

Whether or not it is possible for a sovereign to hold absolute power regardless of its' form (whether monarchic or democratic) is not really explored by Hobbes at this point. For Hobbes, democracy is problematic for a number of reasons let alone the question of indivisible sovereignty. In a democracy the people of the assembly would not just represent the common interest of constituents. The individual has their own private interests which would rival the common interest and could easily come first, as Hobbes notes that the “passions of men are commonly more potent than their reason.” Where the public and private interests are unified the public is most advanced, Hobbes maintains that in a monarchy the private interest is the same as the public. The reasoning being that the wealth, power and honour of a monarch are derived from the subjects. The ability of the state to defend itself from enemies would be undermined if the people are poor, contemptible or too weak to maintain such a war. In a democracy, the prosperity of the people contributes not so much to a corrupt leadership as it does many times deceit, treachery and conflict.

Hobbes points out that a monarch can receive counsel wherever and from whomever he so deems fit, in secrecy, at whatever point before the time of action. In a democracy in which a sovereign assembly has been established, there is no time or place in which the assembly could receive counsel with secrecy because of the multitudinous nature of an assembly. So when such an assembly requires counsel, it will not be received except from those who have a right to do so and may not leave the confines of its own body to do so. Typically this will mean that the assembly will receive counsel from people who are more versed in the accumulation of wealth than knowledge. The advice could likely come in the form of long discourses, which would commonly call upon men to act in various ways rather than govern them. For Hobbes the assembly could reach out to counsel from the unskilled in civic matters, orators and so on, who give their opinions in speeches full of pretence and inept learning, this could only lead to the disruption of the commonwealth or do it no good at all.

It is possible that the assembly could strip good citizens of property to enrich friends of the assembly (e.g. friends of the people rather than the friends of elected representatives). Hobbes concedes that this is a possibility in a monarchy, he maintains that “we do not read that this has ever been done.” For the favourites of the assembly are more numerous than a monarch, so there is a greater temptation to serve the interests of their own kindred as well as to seductive orators – who have greater power to hurt than to help, as “condemnation than absolution more resembles justice.” Not only is it impractical for the assembly to be well advised there is a great potential for inconstancy as the potential for such in a monarchy is multiplied as with the mass of the representative. For Hobbes the resolutions of a monarch are subject to no other inconstancy than that of his own nature, whereas democratic resolutions are subject to the nature of the masses.

The assembly would be prone to disagreement as a result of the nature of man, as well as due to envy and interest, to the height of such disagreement a civil war maybe the consequence.[4] So it would seem that the stability of the state in question is at stake with the rise of a democracy. At the same time, the whole of the assembly cannot fail unless the multitude fail as well and there is no place for the question of the right of succession in a democratic government for the reason that anyone can enter into such a government. Though the death of a monarch differs from the death of an entire assembly, it would still dispossess the people of a representative and leave the multitude without a sovereign which unites them. The question of stability inevitably arises once again, without the guarantee of the “peace of men” it is likely that the state could return to the “condition of war in every age” and the only alternative to this is an “artificial eternity of man”.[5]

---

[1] Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (1994) pg.118-120

[2] It makes sense then that Hobbes considered it absurd that the monarchy could hold sovereign power as it invites the people to elect representatives capable of putting forth the advice from the people. In the rare case of a monarchy in which the monarch is never considered a representative, though called sovereign, the status of representative would fall to those who have been sent by the people to carry their petitions and give the monarch their advice. In such cases then it is imperative for the “true and absolute representative of a people” to instruct the people in such offices and watch how they admit any other representation on any occasion.

[3] Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (1994) pg.120-121

[4] For Hobbes, to say it is inconvenient to place sovereign power in the office of one man or an assembly of men (e.g. rather than a democratic assembly) is to hold that “all government is more inconvenient than confusion and civil war.” All danger must originate in the dispute between those who are for an office of such honour and those out to profit for themselves.

Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (1994) pg.122-123

[5] Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (1994) pg.124-125

Gaddafi is Dead.

As the old order has been obliterated in Libya it appears the country is passing through a zero-level of violence onto which the bourgeois framework of law and order can be constructed. The term 'law-creating violence' was used by Walter Benjamin to signify such instances of violence which underpin the enforcement of laws later on. In the battle to take Sirte, Muammar al-Gaddafi has been captured and killed. Before that it was clear there had been numerous civilian casualties and the killing of black men suspected of being mercenaries working for Gaddafi. Perhaps we should bare in mind that each advance made in civilisation is an advance in barbarism, as such an advance arrives head-to-foot in blood it heralds new possibilities of emancipation. The real problem is whether or not the enormous suffering was worth it in the end. It seems thoroughly doubtful that the effects of colonialism, slavery, genocide, war and capitalist exploitation can ever be compensated for in Africa. So we might be best to note a profound historical sense of tragedy here.

The new regime defines itself by its exclusion of Gaddafi, this is a basic aspect of the state as sovereignty constitutes the political body in its inclusion of people. The state holds the monopoly over the power to declare an exception, to suspend normal legal guarantees and deny basic rights to people. The situation might be extended across an entire society in the case of a state of emergency and even a civil war as the expectations of normal everyday life no longer apply. The state divides the people into those who qualify as fully human and those with the lesser status of bare life. The qualified life of politically recognised people is adorned with forms of meaning derived from political recognition and representation. This is what the bare life is devoid of, in fact the difference might be aptly described as the difference between being a human bodily organism and being recognised as a citizen or a person in the moral sense. These are the people who can be carted off to be tortured in Uzbekistan, as well as be killed at home in the middle of the night.

The Roman Empire had a word for an outlaw who could be killed and their property seized legitimately by anyone - homo sacer. The life of a homo sacer cannot be taken in ritual as a sacrifice, as the person has been expunged from society to a realm where all civil rights and civil religious functions are in suspension. To be more specific, the homo sacer resides on the boundaries of political and religious law which means the homo sacer is at once included and excluded from law. Only in the way that the individual has been excluded by law does that individual continue to be included. It is not law but the realm of valued life that the individual is excluded from when they become homo sacer. These people can't be sacrificed to the Gods because they belong outside the recognised terrain of valued life and there is nothing left in them worth sacrificing. To sacrifice such an individual would be sacrilege and for that reason they can be killed with impunity.

The power to distinguish between bare life and recognised life arises from the sovereignty claimed by the state. We'd like to think that the establishment of a liberal society of law based on rights and freedoms would inoculate society of these practices. But it seems that, at best, it just means everyone is potentially a sovereign as well as a homo sacer. It may be that in any state everyone is at risk of being declared a homo sacer. It is interesting that the Western media reached for the old label "mad dog" to describe Gaddafi, as states have traditionally relegated groups of people to bare life by rendering them to the level of animals with labels such as savages, feral, scum etc. It is quite a leap for Gaddafi to go from sovereign to homo sacer, from qualified life to bare life as he was deprived of his political status and reduced to a hunted man. This came about as the Transitional National Council laid claim to sovereignty as Berbers in the West of the country sought revenge against the regime which had brutalised them.

The death of Gaddafi, as homo sacer, is convenient for NATO and the Western governments that supported him even as he helped maim, mutilate and murder 1.2 million people in Sierra Leone. We can go back to moralising about the Lockerbie Bombing with the Colonel out of the way. The Left can theorise about what could have been in Libya if the revolution had not been "corrupted" while the Right will bask triumphantly in the light of a country set ablaze by over 30,000 bombs. The revolution in Libya might herald a bourgeois democracy in North Africa or at least a moderated form of the old regime. Potentially Libya could become a wonderful holiday destination for white people, whether or not that would lead to less poverty and injustice in the country is another matter. The fact that the rebels initially called for economic justice as well as freedom and democracy has been lost amidst the media hype over yet another "humanitarian intervention". Coverage of the Arab Spring shifted to the Libyan Civil War as it provided a normal narrative for the West, so who cares about what's going on elsewhere?

See also:

The Autumn of the Colonel

We are the People!

Gaddafi's Greatest Hits

Despair at American Injustice.

The Time for Rage.

As one of the people who lit candles for Troy Davis outside the US embassy on Thursday night, I feel obligated to write of the sheer obscenity of the case and others like it. Above us the Old Glory rippled in the wind as an armed guard was poised across from us, this is what marked the building apart from the others in Grosvenor Square. The statues of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan stand at the opposite ends of the embassy, perhaps to signify the beginning and end of the Cold War. Of course, the statues were not there to celebrate the savagery of the Korean War and the depraved crimes in which the US government indulged throughout the 1980s. The Old Glory had not been raised up above the embassy to take pride in the bloodied foundations of the United States, where the remains of millions of Native Americans and Africans rest in unsettled and unmarked graves. The statues no doubt commemorate "truth, justice and the American way" not to mention America as the "Land of the Free" and "Home of the Brave".

How many Americans will think of Troy Davis when they next pledge allegiance? The details of the Troy Davis case are almost as hideous as Justice Scalia's scrotum. As The Guardian rightly notes: Out of the nine witnesses, seven have since recanted their testimony and some have cited police intimidation. One of the witnesses was illiterate and could not read the statement which they signed at a police station. No murder weapon was ever recovered. There was no DNA evidence at all and the case against Troy Davis was based on the testimony of witnesses. Out of the remaining two witnesses it is possible that one of them is Sylvester Coles, who has been implicated by nine people as a serious suspect in the murder. When he was drunk Coles confessed to a friend that he was the real killer. He has admitted that he owned the same model weapon as that was used to kill Mark MacPhail, supposedly Coles gave away the gun earlier on the day of the shooting. The only reaction of a real human being to all of this is despair.

Bare in mind Rick Perry has signed around 235 death warrants in the last 10 years and it was his predecessor George the Anointed who signed 152 in 4 years as Texan Governor. This is out of 475 executions since 1976 and 413 currently stew on death row in Huntsville. But let's not shirk from criticism of the Democrats and remember it was Bill Clinton who saw to it that Ricky Ray Rector was executed in 1992. Rector had survived shooting himself in the head after he had shot a police officer in the back. He was left "seriously mentally impaired", to say the least, on death row in an Arkansas prison cell for over 10 years. The court had rejected the claim of "grave mental impairment" and gave him the death penalty. Rather than pardon the man Clinton exploited the situation to wipe the press clean of the latest sex scandal - with Gennifer Flowers - to blight his precious campaign. On the night of his execution, Rector saved a slice of pecan pie for later, not understanding his death would come first. It took them 45 minutes to find a vein to shoot full of sodium thiopental and Clinton had dinner with Mary Steenburgen.

The 40th anniversary of the Attica Prison riot passed a week or so ago, it was September 9th 1971 when the hostage situation was crushed at the behest of Governor Nelson Rockefeller with the support of Richard Nixon. Over 2,200 prisoners seized control of the jail and held 39 guards hostage for four days in reaction to the death of activist George Jackson at the hands of prison guards in an escape attempt at San Quentin. The troopers were sent in to the jail and let loose over 2,000 rounds indiscriminately, killing 29 prisoners and 10 guards before going onto beat and torture even more prisoners. Cornel West has a word for the process whereby people become deferential subjects to the Establishment to the extent that they consent to domination and control. West calls this process "niggerization", not just of blacks but of whites as well, and he holds that Attica was a counter-move against this process. For the Establishment the riot had to be brought down in case it spread to other prisons, as was the case with riots which swept across America in the 60s.

In the 1940s there was an opening for black people to enter the workforce as labourers and escape a system of de facto slavery which continued after the American Civil War. The rise of radical sentiments and civil disobedience in the 60s made way for greater progress. But the opening was closed in the 1970s as the economy became finance-based and the role of African-Americans became increasingly superfluous once more. So the need for a huge system of incarceration emerged, which might explain why there are currently over 7 million Americans in some phase of the penal system. Of course, the root problem is the neoliberal model which appears to have finally collapsed into stagnancy. It is clear that the American political system has long been broken, with the opposition as rudderless as the powerful themselves. In the words of Thomas Jefferson "God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion." For Jefferson rebellion is not a constant condition, though it does eternally return and the US is long overdue.

A few words about Dr No.

The Principles of Harm.

Once again we find Ron Paul is running for the Presidency as a Republican. The planks in his platform are libertarian in content and populist in form, with a strong isolationist stance on foreign policy which is attractive to less hawk-ish Americans. In the debates between Republican candidates, Ron Paul stood out as a maverick politician as usual and came second to Michele Bachmann in the Iowa poll. Even as the majority of the Republican candidates agreed that there should be a constitutional ban on gay marriage, Paul maintained that the government has no role to play in marriage at all. On foreign policy Paul maintained that the US had no role to play in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya, whilst he called for significant cuts to the US military. As Ron Paul is appropriately dubbed "Dr No" because of his voting record to oppose any legislation which is opposed to the principles of the US Constitution. At a deeper level this is significant of the brand of libertarianism to which Ron Paul subscribes for it rejects some of the most basic aspects of government and society which we take for granted.

The libertarians who say "No!" to paternalism will reject any legislation which is meant to protect the individual from harming themselves. So the laws which obligate individuals to wear seat-belts in cars and helmets when driving motorcycles can be burned. The people hurt must also pay for their own medical bills, the government has no right to dictate what risks a person can take with their bodies and lives. We might think that it is reckless to ride a motorcycle without a helmet and we know that a helmet law would prevent devastating injuries, we should oppose such laws anyway. We should do so on the grounds that it is a violation of the right of the individual to decide what risks to assume. It might be that a law on this issue is a slippery slope to totalitarianism. Of course, a libertarian may concede such laws from the position that these laws will prevent the harm of others from reckless decisions made by others. But that would presuppose a certain utilitarian leaning which is not always the case for free-market libertarians.

The opposition to paternalism leaves room for Ron Paul to stand in opposition to gay marriage and abortion in that the removal of legislation against such behaviour would in itself function as a form of paternalism - just as the imposition of legislation to ban gay marriage would be a form of paternalism. This is the same reasoning behind much of the libertarian opposition to civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Conveniently Paul can rely on this platform to bring in a portion of the homophobic vote. Effectively the same social constraints which are necessary for an unbridled marketplace emerge in the Ron Paul 'revolution' just as it does in mainstream American conservatism. Opposition to abortion might be justified along libertarian lines by taking the side of the baby over the woman, as in the Harm Principle limits the freedom of the individual to decisions which do not harm other people. This is a contentious issue as it is disputable whether or not a fetus constitutes a person in the same sense as an adult woman does. One of the implications of such an opposition to abortion is that the stance of isolationism may be broken.

The Politics of "No!"

A libertarian of this kind can also say "No!" to morality legislation in that the coercive force of law should not be used to promote any values at all. Just because the moral convictions expressed are majoritarian in nature does not mean it is automatically right to impose such convictions on everyone. We might object to prostitution morally, but that does not justify legislation which prohibit consenting adults from engaging in it. The same can be said of homosexuality and abortion. Of course, we find that these libertarians had no problem with opposing legislation which might strengthen or defend the rights of minorities. Both Reagan and Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights act on the grounds it violated the rights of the individual and gave too much power to the government. Here we find the liberal framework of rights and freedoms which is parasitic on the beliefs of individuals provides a space for racism to be expressed. The same goes for homophobia, misogyny and anti-Semitism. So we should not be surprised by Ron Paul's meandering racial populism.

The libertarian subscribes to a theory of rights which rules out any law that requires some people to help others, especially taxation for redistribution of income or wealth. The benefits that can be derived from welfare state measures to provide health-care, education and housing come at a cost to the individual. It should not be the role of government to mandate that cost. Charity is the name of the game for libertarians. Progressive taxation is a form of coercion and even theft to some. The state has no right to force affluent tax-payers to support social programmes for the poorest and most vulnerable members of society. The slogan "Tax is theft!" is often bandied about by this crowd. Of course, the suggestion that the sudden removal of welfare provisions in health-care is a form of theft escapes them. A free-market libertarian has no time for needs, wants and merits matter much more. So even though a patient on dialysis could do with one of my healthy kidneys it doesn't mean that they are entitled to my kidney. It's my kidney! The needs of another person cannot be allowed to trump my right to do what I want with my body and what I own.

You may notice a pattern here, these self-proclaimed libertarians are not on the side of a lot of people in society and certainly never on the side of the under-dog. The closest a free-marketeer like Ron Paul can get to the common man is to appeal to the prejudices of the American working-classes. There is no serious attempt to represent the interests of working-people at all. That's probably because it is up to working-class people to pursue their own interests as obedient atoms of consumption and the cogs kept turning for the extraction of surplus value. This is not the time for market liberalism, when BP has ruined an entire ocean and Wall Street has tore the US apart at the joints like a chicken.  Ron Paul's America would be one in which federal power is decentralised for the benefit of business while blacks sit at segregated tables in canteens, women die in back-alley abortions and poor people drop like flies from curable diseases on street corners. Meanwhile the state would be there to function only as a security apparatus in the defence of the borders and the incarceration of the population superfluous to the economy.

Liberal Violence.

Barbarians of Civilisation.

We might see John Locke as the father of liberalism today as the Two Treatises of Government were the earliest of liberal ideas. Though it is important to note that at the time John Locke was embedded in the English ruling class and was close to Lord Shaftesbury, the founder of the Whigs. So Locke was one of the elite when England was taken hold by a political crisis in the 1680s as the reign of King Charles II came to an end and the Duke of York succeeded him as James II. The new monarch had ambitions to restore Royal absolutism and Catholicism to England, which would have meant another war of religious sectarianism. The succession was inevitable as Charles II had plenty of illegitimate children, but no legitimate heirs, so when he died in 1685 it fell to his brother. There was a campaign to prevent the succession throughout the 1680s and just as James II stepped up to the throne. The King was successful in crushing all rebels, whether they be Archibald Campbell or the Duke of Monmouth (one of the illegitimate sons of Charles II).

Finally in 1688 the Whig nobles were successful in their treason and found a way for Prince William of Orange to invade England from Holland and seize the crown. This was the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Unsurprisingly, as he was involved in the plot, John Locke set out to provide a retrospective justification for instigating the downfall of King James II. If the Whigs had failed, Locke would not be the father of liberalism and 1688 would just be another year of another failed rebellion. The grand narrative of liberalism is accepted because it has been successful in achieving hegemony. These same writings went on to influence the American Revolution and directly influence the US Constitution. As opposed to the pursuit of happiness guaranteed by the US Constitution Locke advocated property along with life and liberty. The French Revolution was influenced in a more indirect fashion by Lockean philosophy, it was Rousseau and Montesquieu who had a greater influence over the French revolutionaries.

Despite the fact that the French Revolution smashed a lingering feudal order into pieces, which could only then be reconstituted as the liberal order for the sake of capital accumulation, the likes of Niall Ferguson and Simon Schama are not so happy with the "excessive violence" of Jacobinism. The American Revolution is commonly put forward as a favourable alternative of a bloodless revolutionary shift from colony to republic. The only blood that had to be spilled was from the millions of Native Americans and countless African slaves who were butchered and terrorised into subservience. Slavery destroyed the cultural heritage of African-Americans, the religions native to Africa were supplanted by Islam and Christianity. The hands of the East and the West are responsible for the destruction of Africa, but in particular without the material preconditions established in slavery the US would not exist as it is. Not only without slavery but without warfare and genocide, the United States would not exist as the vast concentration of a political and economic power today.

The American Dream.

In the US slavery would drag on for centuries and was officially abolished after the Civil War. During the war between states which raged from 1861 to 1865 at least 630,000 people (equivalent to 2% of the population) were killed out of the 3 million who fought in the war. Around 50,000 were slaughtered in the three-day battle of Gettysburg, close to the number of American soldiers who died in the Vietnam war. Without the bloodbath at Gettysburg the abolition of slavery may have come much later in the history of the United States. This great advance came under Abraham Lincoln, who had suspended habeas corpus, it brought emancipation as well as barbarism in even more advanced forms. After Reconstruction slavery was in effect re-established in the United States through an alliance between the corporations and state-authorities with the courts and prisons. It would last in a covert form through the prison system until the 1940s and slave labour was vital to the process of industrialisation.

As a colony of the British Empire, the American economy was prosperous, none of which would have been possible without slavery and ethnic cleansing, the revolution was a push for independence from which the process could be completed. The inspirational documents of the revolution, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution itself, were based on the ideas of John Locke and provided a retrospective justification for insurgent militias who had killed Crown troops. The white people who had settled in America and had done very well out of it's prosperity did not want to pay taxes, but they did want 'Indian' land and a lot more slaves. Some even wanted to seize Mexican and Canadian soil, which they would go onto attempt and succeed in the theft of half of Mexico. Though these tendencies were real in the colony, the prospect of American independence was not a popular one, it was the revolutionary leadership which had to win over the masses who were heavily armed.

New England had done particularly well out of the colonial experience, specifically out of shipbuilding, whaling and warfare. Out of the booming economy a merchant class emerged with such prominent figures as John Hancock, whose firm had done very well out of supplying the British army and Royal Navy. The idea that the American colonies should gain independence from Britain was held by very few in the Americas until the British began to impose further taxes on the colonies in a period of economic decline. The Treasury was heavily in debt and was looking for a way to shift the tax burden off of the British tax-payer in order to maintain the Empire. Prime Minister Grenville decided that the prosperous colonies should take on more of the burden. So new taxes were imposed on the Americans, the merchant class that had developed around shipbuilding, whaling and war resorted to tax-evasion and smuggling. Even while encouraging the British to smash Louis XV the Americans refused to pay their way.

Revolutionary Terror.

The accepted reading of the French Revolution functions to restore the counter-revolutionary doctrine, in that the cynical liberal wisdom cuts to the 'truth' that all revolutions fail and furthermore "anti-totalitarianism" is preferable to avoid the gulag. Naturally this involves avoidance of any historical analysis of the circumstances under which the Revolution emerged. The obscene situation in pre-revolutionary France is commonly ignored and even glossed over by liberal historians. The country had been devastated by crises of finance and food, which led to the repudiation of the national debt and the bread riots. It was a social order in which there was a huge gulf between the rich and the poor, the latter of whom were the only people who paid taxes in pre-revolutionary France. There was a great explosion in a French society which was inevitable because of the pressures that had mounted up in the stagnant order.

It ultimately led to the rise of the Committee of Public Safety, which initiated a slaughter that was only rivaled by the orgy of violence which would follow after its end. Thousands were slaughtered in reaction to the military assault launched against France by powers such as the Holy Roman Empire, Britain and Russia. Contrary to common sense, order and disorder are not opposites rather the imposition of a contingent order onto a chaotic situation is the highest level of disorder. In the words of Walter Benjamin "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism." This is the reason that if the Declaration of Independence of US was re-declared by a newly independent society today, we would rightly condemn them as Nazi-ish for the Declaration identifies black people as "subhuman". This is true regardless of the inspirational nature of the Declaration, which is based on the ideas expressed by John Locke and the Putney Debates at the time of the English Revolution.

Just as the unconscious is the founding act of repression upon which consciousness is established, the Act onto which a new political order is predicated are often unjustifiable at the time before the act. Only when looking backwards we might wonder whether or not it was justifiable for an Irishman to shoot a police officer in the head. The Act can lack a justification in preceding standards of justice, politics or even ethics. But violence is not just sequential, it is not just a necessary evil for the establishment of liberal society, it is synchronous to the development of civilisations and the US is no different. The debt owed by liberalism to feudalism and the institution of slavery is hardly, if ever, recognised. Especially by liberals and conservatives, for whom only seductive dreams of egalitarianism might lead to mass-murder. For them any revolution which doesn't fit the idealised vision of the Tea Party is a step too far. The truth is that if we the British had crushed the Americans then we would probably celebrate hanging Jefferson and Franklin as 'traitors'.

Interpellate This!

Ideology is not simply in the heads of human beings it is material in nature, in order for a belief to be held the minds of the masses it must first of all shape the lives of the people as a whole. Only in this way will the ideology retain its hegemonic status and continue to function in spite of what thoughts might go through the heads of certain people. It could be argued that the Saudi state preceded capitalism on the Arabian peninsula and so it played a large role in the way it emerged in the Middle East, though it might be more nuanced to say that the state can be deduced from the structural needs of capitalism. The state-repression in Saudi Arabia has guaranteed the free reign of capital. But it takes more than the repressive agencies of the state (e.g. the military and the police) to protect the social order and to reproduce the existing social relations of production. This is where Islam as ideology comes into the picture as embodied in the institutional forms of the state apparatus, which ranges from the family and schools to corporations and the media.

Osama bin Laden was born into the Saudi bourgeoisie, his father was the head of a company which built 80% of roads in Saudi Arabia and has done rather well out of the relationship between the Saudi ruling class and the US government. The life Osama bin Laden led mirrors the contorted relationship between corporate base and Islamic superstructure in Saudi Arabia, the transition from Saudi oligarch to radical Islamist. Initially it might seem as though a thing is defined by its function in the arrangement, while a hammer may be used to knock nails into wood it can also be used to bash someone's head in. But it is not that the hammer has been removed from it's intended usage, rather it is defined as a torture tool when it is used as one. So we might understood bin Laden's place in ideology as defined not as the "leap" from his privileged origins to his life of fanaticism. Rather we should designate him in regards to what exact function his actions played in the world, the impotence of Islamist Terror and the way al-Qaeda contributed to the ideological constellation in the West.

At the end of the Cold War the grand narrative that the US was in a war with the Soviet Union finally drew to a close as "shock therapy" swept Russia clean of really existing socialism. The interests of capital that were invested in that narrative were now deprived of a way to make sense of the world and, in particular, the actions undertaken by Western governments. Eventually a new narrative had to open up and the attacks of September 11th 2001 heralded a new narrative of the "War on Terror". The ideological development served the Bush administration, the liberal commentariat and even al-Qaeda. It gave the government and the media a meaningful way to report on 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 materiality of all of this was the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Osama bin Laden became the face of international terrorism as the constellation shifted from anti-Communism to counter-terrorism.

Louis Althusser developed a fascinating account of the way individuals become the subjects of ideology. It is through interpellation by the state apparatus in the process of socialisation that the individual is hailed. The individual recognises themselves in this call of a grand Subject capable of legitimately holding them accountable. The grand Subject might take a form appropriate to the context, from God and the Nation to the King and the Ulama. The media, as well as educational institutions and corporations are the materiality of ideology and each is a segment of the state apparatus. Ideology is not just belief in the heads of politicians, it is in the fabric of society and the practices of life on a day-to-day basis. It is more like the Freudian unconscious, it is not just a residue but it is central to the way we imagine our relation to specific experiences. This is the way ideology becomes engrained in the minds of citizens. Only through shaping the material can ideology shape people, so that the system and by extension the world can be understood in unquestionable terms as almost a natural phenomenon.

Ideology does not primarily involve theoretical explanations of 'how the world works', so much as provide accounts of who individuals are and where in the political world such individuals fit. In this ideological process, the relation of the subject to the world can become distorted as the subject is ascribed a functional role (as a citizen, a voter etc.) as if it is chosen by them. Thus, we find a man can go from an upstanding member of society from a respected family to a wanted criminal. The places we hold in such structures are politically decisive, whether it be in the pecking order in a corporation or in kinship as a son or a mother. People will perform as if these roles are the free realisation of their subjective potential. It took many years for Osama bin Laden to go beyond just the conservative reading of the Qur'an which he delved into as a student of economics. The notion of the autonomous individual is a product of ideological misrecognition. As Marx wrote in The Brumaire "Men make their own history, but not of their own free will not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted."

Self-Hating and Israel Threatening?

 

The anti-Semitism of Zionists.

In the disgraceful history of anti-Semitism there is an irony that the Jews have traditionally been depicted as both upper-class and lower-class, overly intellectual and too earthly, lazy and workaholic. For the Third Reich the Jew represented both the decadence of liberal capitalism and the Bolshevik spirit of socialism, the Fascists offered an alternative modernity devoid of class struggle and affirmed through a rebirth of the nation. For the Nazi conversion to Christianity is out of the question as the "guilt" of the Jews does not need to be proved, the "guilt" resides in the biological constitution of Jewishness. The source of the damnation was not theological but racial. The Jew first appeared as the enemy as the dark ages came to a close in Europe with the role of money in the rapid development of market exchange. The anti-Semitic depiction came in the form of parasites who disrupt the social fabric of society. Later, the wandering Jew came about just as capitalism began to emerge and as society was transformed it began to display the features that were attributed to Jewry.

The form of anti-Semitism prevalent today can be summarised in the words of Croat nationalist rockstar Marko Perkovic "I have nothing against [the Jews] and I did nothing to them. I know that Jesus Christ also did nothing against them, but still they hanged him on the cross."  Then there is the more recent development of Zionist anti-Semitism, which Žižek has pointed to, as the establishment of the Jewish state came so did the emergence of Jews who resist identification with the Jewish state. These are the Jews who insist on the "public use of reason" over the "private" domain offered by the nation-state being constructed in the Middle East. A standard case would be Noam Chomsky who stands against the self-designation of Israel as the state of the Jewish people on the grounds that it is based on the exclusion and oppression of the Palestinians. Chomsky was a Zionist Youth Leader and lived in a kibbutz in Israel for 5 years before leaving out of disgust with the ideological atmosphere of ultra-nationalism and even Stalinist sympathies expressed by some on the Left in those days.

A classic case of Zionist anti-Semitism can be found at www.masada2000.org where a list of over 7,000 S.H.I.T. (Self-Hating Israel-Threating) Jews can be viewed. The names listed often include detailed descriptions and unflattering photos of the person, along with an email address provided to enable hate mail. It has a lot in common with Red Watch and looks just like a Nazi list of decadent Jewish freaks. You will no doubt find Chomsky and Finkelstein on the list. The Jew who does not identify with the state of Israel is reconstructed along anti-Semitic lines as we can read in the manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik. The latter drew a distinction between "loyal" and "disloyal" Jews which is presupposed by a fundamental rejection of the Jewish contribution to European identity, which is a radical universalism. In Breivik's terms the "disloyal" Jew is a liberal opposed to nationalism and Zionist, for him these Jews are complicit in the multicultural experiment and the rise of cultural Marxism.

The Vilification Industry.

It is this reconstruction of the Jewish critics of Israel along anti-Semitic lines is how the anti-Semites of the Christian Right can support Israel. There's a great deal of projection involved clearly, notice that the Christianists will attack the media and the elites as left-wing whenever criticism of Israel is given public space. The conspiracy theory of Jews ruling the world is ripped from it's context to explain away negative reports of Israel as the plot of a ultra-leftist cabal in media. At the same time, the Christian Right support Israeli expansion out of a perverse attempt to bring about the Rapture which will herald the end for the Jews and the Muslims. Generally, the logic of anti-Semitism remains prevalent in Western civilisation as particular characteristics are still considered "Jewish". We find these features are sometimes morphed to the point that the greedy Shylock becomes the entrepreneurial spirit of Alan Sugar. Apparently, this is a compliment and not a racist insinuation!

Then there is the special case of the vilification of Norman Finkelstein orchestrated by Alan Dershowitz. Finkelstein had slammed the work of Alan Dershowitz on Israel and so Dershowitz went after him. The aim was not to refute Finkelstein's argument, it was to blast him out of the water, ruin his career and muddy the discourse to the extent that there can be no step forward. Dershowitz opted to go after Finkelstein's mother, who is a survivor of Auschwitz and he actually had the nerve to claim that she survived because she was a collaborator with the Nazi regime. It has been described by Chomsky as a "jihad" to try and prevent Norman Finkelstein from being appointed to tenure at DePaul University, a Catholic university, which is vulnerable to accusations of anti-Semitism that Dershowitz certainly has no qualms about making. The use of anti-Semitism as a label to vilify critics is cynically used to shoot out the opposition to the moral degeneracy of the Israeli government.


The consistent line of Alan Dershowitz is that all of the criticism of Israel comes from anti-Semites and self-hating Jews. This is nothing unique on his part, these same claims are often made to undermine the critics of Israel. The double-think here is that if you're opposed to mass-murder then you're a Nazi of course. It is clear that the facts of Palestinian suffering evoke outrage from normal human beings and not from people with a warped view of the world. The fact that (as of June 4th 2011) 124 Israeli children killed by Palestinians and 1,463 Palestinian children killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000 should move a normal human being. The same goes for the Israeli reaction to the deaths of three Israeli citizens as a result of around 2,000 rockets being fired into Israel, the reaction being that which had left over 1,400 Palestinians dead and thousands more injured. Of course, 10 more Israeli soldiers were killed in the mean time and the slaughter was called to a stop just before Barack Obama was inaugurated as President to avoid any embarrassment for the US.

Immodest Proposals?

At the time of the establishment of the Jewish state Hannah Arendt was one of the vocal critics of the particular statist formula that the leadership of the Zionist movement embarked upon. For Arendt the worst model for the Jews to emulate is the racial nation-state because that model had produced the horrors of Nazi Germany. To secure a future free of conflict it seemed imperative to Arendt that the Palestinians and Jews had to have equal rights and recognition as citizens based on justice. Instead of an Israel based on race carved out of the Arab world by force, Arendt proposed an independent state for Jews and Palestinians as part of the British Commonwealth of Nations that would ensure both ethnic groups got a fair deal. A Jewish homeland was a solution to the perpetual "rootless" status of the Jews and a federation amongst the Arabs and Jews in Palestine would be vital for the survival of a Jewish homeland. This was the alternative to the violence that has been used to carve a Jewish state out of a predominantly Arab region.


The concerns Hannah Arendt had about the future character of a Jewish state that had to live in agitation with its Arab neighbours were somewhat prescient. She foresaw that the Jews would have to live surrounded entirely by a hostile Arab population and secluded inside ever-threatened borders. The state would become inward looking to the extent that all other interests are marginalised by "self-defence". We have seen that the social programmes and welfare measures taken in other states have been reduced in Israel in order to raise military spending. The external threats would overwhelm social experiments, which we have seen as the most radical Kibbutzim were suppressed, whilst the military would take the centreplace of political theory and economic development. Israel was once an almost socialistic society for many years, but it is now in a state of immense inequality in which 18 families control 60% of corporate equity. Israel is second only to the US in terms of inequality.


Noam Chomsky has commented that the ideas which were considered Zionist before the establishment of the state of Israel would be considered anti-Zionist today for it is anti-statist. When Noam Chomsky was a Zionist Youth Leader he was for Arab and Jewish working-class cooperation to construct a bi-national socialist Palestine. The establishment of the state of Israel was a day of mourning for Chomsky and his pals. We can see the break between the kind of Zionism that Chomsky was involved in and the trajectory of Israel. In the country inequality has exploded as the military-industrial complex and high-tech industry (which are interconnected) have taken precedent over the welfare state. The wealth generated through financial services, chemical fertiliser and diamonds is concentrated in very few hands. Arendt went as far as to claim that the Jews of Palestine would change character to such a degree that they would no longer represent world Jewry as a whole. We find this is the case as the Israeli government differs greatly in policy to the liberal values of American Jews.