Breivik's Living Space.

The trial and conviction, a conclusion foregone long ago, of Anders Behring Breivik has, of course, drawn the attention of the world media. Breivik has been given the maximum sentence of 21 years for the bombing of a government building before a shooting spree on Utøya island. This act of lone-wolf terrorism left 77 people dead and 319 people injured. He has to serve a minimum of 10 years before he can appeal, but this is unlikely. It's more likely that Breivik will remain inside for the rest of his life with a review every 5 years after the initial 21 year period. This seems especially likely given that Breivik fully intends to continue "the war" from his prison cell. It's obvious from what "the war" is meant to be when he writes "We, the free indigenous peoples of Europe, hereby declare a pre-emptive war on all cultural Marxist/multiculturalist elites of Western Europe." The car-bombing and subsequent spree targeted the liberal political class in Norway was just the beginning of a battle that fits into a fascist millenarianism in his thinking.

As The Guardian has observed it was an open trial in an open society, the social democratic principles of Norway have endured this assault. The Norwegians have rightly seen to it that the liberal foundations of their society will not be compromised for this monster. This was an impressive display given the appalling actrocities that took place. There are plenty of people who want to execute Breivik, but that would be to do his work for him. Breivik has much more in common with the Islamists than he likes to admit. The suicide-bombers of al-Qaeda want to destroy this world out of love for another world, just as Breivik wants to reconstruct a European Christendom the Jihadists want to establish a Caliphate. Effectively Breivik wants to destroy the liberal societies of Europe in order to deal with the threat, as he sees it, of Islam. The failure of many Western countries since 9/11 has been to abandon the liberal democratic commitment to civil liberties and human rights. Instead, we have seen the kidnapping and torture of 'terror suspects' time and time again.

 

It's scary just how the views Breivik holds of Muslims in particular are so widespread and mainstream. He repeatedly cites mainstream conservative sources such as Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes and Melanie Phillips as well as liberals like Sam Harris. It's not just Fox News, it's the BBC as well as liberal rags and even leftist outlets such as CounterPunch. It's also clear that Breivik's views are not alien to the particularly reactionary elements in the media in Britain. He railed against multiculturalism, mass-immigration and political correctness, these are the favourite targets of cultural conservatives and nationalists alike. It's no coincidence that the massacre was met, in some quarters, with the sentiment that this wouldn't have happened if it weren't for the multicultural experiment. The rightist Melanie Phillips made it clear that she won't go back on any criticism of multiculturalism, Islamic extremism and immigration because of Breivik's killing spree. In short, the real battle is outside of the courtroom and Breivik's prison cell.

We have to stand by and build on the liberal ideals of Europe. Multiculturalism is certainly a flawed doctrine, but it is worth defending from these kinds of attacks. The only true friends of the Muslim community, at this time, will be the secularists keen to preserve Europe's atheist legacy with its religious freedoms and pluralism. It's clear why the Breiviks of this world see a 'cultural communism' lurking behind liberal multiculturalism. Leftists may criticise liberal promises of equality as a veneer over deeper forms of inequality, but it has to be acknowledged that the universality of human rights and freedoms was first advocated in liberal thought. It set the ground with the rights and freedoms limited to rich white men, but then the field of bourgeois individualism could be expanded to include women and so on. The egalitarian struggle has to be fought with liberalism as a starting-point. It's this that the likes of Breivik wants to destroy and that's exactly why we must defend it.

Culturale Hedonia!

Take your Desires for Reality.

In the mid 1960s Herbert Marcuse had reached a conclusion about capitalist society which went against the position he took in Eros and Civilization. He had reached back to utopian socialism for an alternative to the models of bourgeois capitalism and Soviet communism. In the work of Charles Fourier he had hoped to find a way of unlocking the instincts of human beings as part of the transition to a post-capitalist society. It was Fourier's view that capitalism compounds sexual repression in society with exploitation, driving down wages generating poverty. It's a fine system for the few, but it's disastrous for the many. The repression of sexuality is what led to perversions, if the passions were unleashed then we would be able to create a harmonious society. Fourier wanted to build a utopia with love and sex as the primary mechanisms of this new order. This is the origin of the leftist penchant for sexual liberation and the opposition to repressive norms.


Of course, there are various different variations on this cause. Fourier dreamed of a utopian society based on a primary unit, a communal block known as a phalanx in which as many as 1,800 people could live together. It would be a community built on solidarity without any of the repressive taboos of capitalist society. There would be complete sexual freedom and people would be able to change partners frequently. Radical stuff in the 18th Century. The family would be done away with as the phalanx would take its place as the centre of loyalty and affection. Fourier thought that entire countries could be organised in this way with these set up as councils where all participate in decisions. The phalanxes would form chains of councils across nations and coordinate through cooperation grand civil projects with volunteer armies. This was the material base of a vision that came with a metaphysical superstructure, a new religious order where priests advised congregants on sex.

At the heart of this utopian vision was the idea of Love, in which sex is just one aspect, the priests who would manage the dynamics of Love would 'cure' you of your unhappiness in the midst of rejection. We can see how this vision may have tapped into the hedonistic utopianism of the 1960s. All the different impulses of human beings require a diversity of roles suited to the variety of human nature, even potential murderers will be welcome and be put to work as butchers to work-off their own homicidal urges. Of course, Charles Fourier was written-off as a lunatic in his day. He conceived of a theory of history comprised of 32 stages, each ordained by God, beginning in savagery before passing through civilisation to socialism and Harmony. The advent of Harmony would herald an age of 70,000 years which would end in savagery as humanity approached the end of times. Civilisation could be shortened to bring on socialism much earlier and Harmony could then be extended in its duration.

Live without Dead Time.

As you might expect Fourier was an opponent of the authoritarianism and moral righteousness he detected in the Jacobins. He had little faith in governments and preferred a grass-roots oriented approach to socialism. Change was to be achieved from the ground-up and not from the top-down. After first entertaining the tenets of utopian socialism Marcuse had become pessimistic by 1964 when he wrote One-Dimensional Man. As part of his thesis Marcuse rethought the revolutionary project of socialism. The proletariat could not be relied upon to overthrow capitalism in Marcuse's view. The tensions were mounting to the point that the black under-class would be a better revolutionary agent. The capitalist system had no real focus on the manipulation of their desires at the time. The same goes for the exploited workers of the Third World. Then there are the student radicals of the West who have the power to see beyond false consciousness. We can see how both works related to the 1960s zeitgeist.

In the authentic socialist society women and men could live without fear and without being compelled to spend their lives in alienated performances. Marcuse thought that this element had been lost in the 20th Century with the advent of the Soviet Union. The Soviet project of socialism in one country necessitated Stalinism due to the material conditions of Russian society. The New Left sought to carve out a new project to do away with the old conventions that bound women to men as well as crushed gays and ethnic minorities. To some extent this was the beginning of identity politics and the post-materialist Left. But the line was drawn from the imperial adventure in Vietnam to economic exploitation at home in America. The early 1970s were an optimistic time for the American Left and there were a lot of radical ideas around. The commune movement sprung up as part of a utopian attempt to build an alternative model for society devoid of hierarchy, authority and power. It was a retreat in part from what the participants saw as the failure of the student movement.

The communal ideal was of nature, which they saw as a self-stabilising eco-system. It continues to serve as an effective means of organisation on the Left, but it fails to provide a positive vision. It was one of the biggest migrations in American history with over 500,000 participants. There were no alliances and no politics inside the communes, but there were sessions in which the communards would express themselves. This was meant to be the source of stability in the community, a sort of feedback system for the organism of many who act as one. In a set up without any factions allowed soon the strong bullied the weak. All of the communes failed, most lasting less than 3 years. Power could not be abolished and the self-organised system removed any obstacles to the domineering personalities of a few. So new hierarchies sprung up out of the egalitarian model, patriarchical power returned without any leashes at all. This is where Feminism emerged as a reaction to the catastrophic failures of the commune movement.

Enjoy without Chains.

The communal model spread to Europe, where the same failures were even more realised. The avant garde artist Otto Mühl set up the Friedrichshof commune as a kind of anti-society. The central aspect of this is a war against monogamy, he sought to replace fidelity with promiscuity in the extreme. This is where the tendencies towards sexual liberation going back as far as Fourier seemed to converge with the commune movement. The communards were forbidden to have sex with the same partner more than once a week and yet each were obligated to have sex five times a day. Fourier had developed a card-indexing system that would have facilitated casual sex for his communards - it would've been handy in Vienna! The commune outlasted its American precursors as it lingered for nearly 20 years when Mühl was thrown in jail for sex offences against children. A hierarchy had sprung up where the most attractive extricated themselves from the ugly herd, while Mühl laid claim to the virginity of the young members.

The commune had descended into the abusive exercise of power through desire. It was an extreme failure that came out of the one of the leftist modes of a politicization of sex as identified in Nina Power's book - it mistakenly took sex to be innately emancipatory and egalitarian. Desire isn't fair at all, inequality, hierarchy and anxiety are more normal than not. Certainly not all members of the commune were desirable and desire became literally tyrannical. There were other attempts at a sexual critique of bourgeois morality among the radicals. The Weather Underground had sessions where members were required to have sex with comrades they were not attracted to. Boyfriends were expected to watch other men sleep with their girlfriends. There was to be no more romance, only a destitution of the subjective and the sexual. This was the darker side of sexual liberation, the underbelly of the counter-cultural revolution of '68 which has been victorious in the destruction of stuffy conventions and rigid traditions.

As Badiou points out, one of the ways that a revolutionary movement can fail is to be defeated in its own victory in that it only takes over the old mantle of the enemy it vanquished. The utopian hedonism of the 1960s did fail in its youthful triumph over the old, it now constitutes the prevailing culture and there is barely anything left to rail against. The irony is that after this great liberation we find any lack of desire impermissible and intolerable. And yet we may live in a time of greater impotence and frigidity than we like to admit. The real problem seems to be love rather than lust. We can screw around as much as we want but the real difficulty is in long-lasting relationships. This is really what is behind the emergence of dating sites. The conservatives have no answer here, but to reinstate the old superstructure and hope that we enjoy cheating on the partners we pretend to love. There doesn't seem to be a clear answer here. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that the Japanese invention of love colleges will catch on in the West.

Bastards in Bahrain.

Well the Grand Prix maintained its record of holding races in horrible regimes. The little island of Bahrain is just the most recent example, but there were the races in Apartheid South Africa and Fascist Spain of yesteryear. It was good to find updates in the mainstream, just a glimpse at the courageous pro-democracy movement: particularly the ongoing hunger strike by Abdulhadi al-Khawaja. The most recent protests and deaths at the hands of the police forces have received much more attention than they would have otherwise. The repression in Bahrain now has John Yates, once a candidate for the top job in the Met, to defend the House of Khalifa. Well, you've got to pay the mortgage somehow! On top of this, King Hamad has been invited to dine at the celebrations of the Queen's Jubilee. All of this comes over a year since the Saudi intervention in Bahrain was waged. The intervention embodied the West's anxiety at the prospect of democracy in the Middle East.

First it was Bahrain, then it was Libya. By then, Ben Ali and Mubarak had been swept away by the revolutionary contagion spreading rapidly from country to country. You can say it was oil in Libya, but you can't simply say that about Bahrain. The island isn't simply a major oil-producer unlike it's neighbours. There is a reason that the US Fifth Fleet is stationed in Bahrain, it is well situated to defend the status quo. In the West the fear was that the uprising would establish a Shi'ite dominated state in the Gulf. This would go far to undermine the Arab facade of US client-states which keep a friendly hand on the oil spigot. It could mean a new ally for Iran, not to mention give ideas to the Shi'ite dominated eastern province of Saudi Arabia. This is at a time when the Iraqi government is looking to avoid another war with Iran and instead wants stable relations. Meanwhile a civil war rages in Syria with the Ba'ath Party just about clinging to power, its talons bloody as ever.

As with the violent repressions in Syria and Libya, the reason given in Bahrain was to defend the nation from 'foreign interference'. Similarly, in Egypt, Mubarak had anti-Semitic propaganda distributed as he called on Bibi Netanyahu to send the IDF into Tahrir Square. By then it was too late to save the tyrant, the military shunted Mubarak out of office hoping to buy-off the opposition. Meanwhile the Israeli political class watched with great unease as the US gave up on blocking elections in Egypt after it became impossible to save the dictator. And for good reason, Egypt has been a vital US proxy since Sadat dragged the country into a tacit alliance with Israel in the 1970s. By then Sadat had already imposed market reforms which destroyed the country's middle-class and opened the door to corruption. After the rebellions of 2011 suppressed, the serious question for the House of Khalifa is how to reformulate the old order.

Ironically, it was in eastern Arabia that a esoteric Ismaili sect set out to build a society based on reason and equality. By 899 the Qarmatians had established a utopian republic in what is now Bahrain. Its system of governance consisted of a council of six with a chief who was the first among equals. Out of a millenarian fervour the Qarmatians sacked Mecca in 930, stealing the Black Stone and dumping dead pilgrims in the Well of Zamzam. The Qarmatians may have first attempted to redirect the pilgrimage away from Mecca before holding it for ransom. Whatever the case, over 20 years later, the Black Stone was left shattered in the Great Mosque of Kufa in Iraq. The opportunity to seize control had come for the Qarmatians from the aftermath of the slave rebellion in Basra, which raged from 869 to 883 and had left Baghdad diminished in power. Hundreds of thousands of slaves participated as the rebels held that the most qualified man should reign - even if he is a black slave.

Even in recent history, Bahrain has seen uprisings and significant protest over the last 20 years for democracy with the state managing to fend-off each successive wave of opposition. Given that Bahrain is an important artery to the heart of capitalism in the Middle East, it may mean that the GCC itself has to been shaken up sufficiently to bring about democratic change. This would mean serious change in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and the UAE.  Notice there has been no regime change and no reform in any of these states. The repression was swift to prevent any serious opposition from even appearing on the streets. This is where most of the power in the region is concentrated, the epicentre of capital accumulation from an unsustainable energy trade. The Arab Spring has shaken a rotten status quo in the region to its core, but has yet to fundamentally change the Middle East. This isn't to say that it has been a failure, far from it, it means that it has to go further.