It’s surely paradoxical that the more China takes its place as a major player in the global market economy, the more hope many communists seem to place in it as a leading force for socialist transformation, even as restraints on private enterprise are loosened from Harbin to Hainan. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with accepting some resort to private enterprise, as the experience of NEP (and perhaps of the trauma of its subsequent abrupt reversal) in 1920s Russia shows. But China’s rise to economic superpower status is fraught with contradictions and risks.
The reasoning and counter-arguments almost present themselves. China is using reliance on elements of capitalist economy to strengthen itself and raise its people’s living standards prior to renewed socialist effort nationally and internationally at some indeterminate time in the future, say its supporters. Critics point to the emergence of a large bourgeoisie, widening urban-rural economic disparities, erosion of worker’ rights, social dislocation through enormous internal migration flows, and reliance on transnational capital and western markets as alarming signs of danger to come. Others recall past actions, from Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution to later war with Vietnam and support for the Khmers Rouges, Zia’s Pakistan or the 1980s Afghan jihad as evidence of Chinese unreliability as a force for progress.
Nor is China’s rise as the new workshop of the world an unmixed blessing to other nations seeking to break out of poverty and underdevelopment. The decimation of nascent African textile industries through Chinese competition after the elimination of trade quotas in 2005 was a chilling warning of unwanted consequences for the world’s disadvantaged. While China’s demand for raw materials has boosted commodity export prices for many primary producers across the developing would, prices have slumped for just the kind of low-tech manufactures traditionally seen as a first step to industrialisation. And the gain for primary exporters has inevitably favoured enclave sectors rather than those offering a stimulus for economy-wide growth. To make matters worse, China’s growing demand for foodstuffs has brought its consumers into competition with many of the world’s poorest, a trend which has now extended into buying up land itself in parts of Asia and Latin America to feed the mainland’s 1.35 billion people.
But all is not doom and gloom. China still offers a source of revenue for countries hitherto starved of earning opportunities. China has a vested interest in supporting developing-country infrastructure that meets its needs, and in defending some semblance of order and economic sufficiency among its poorer trading partners. And its own economic expansion will inevitably bring it into commercial conflict with the imperialist countries which have ruled the roost virtually unchallenged for a quarter-century. For its part, the developing world has barely begun to exploit the potential for regional economic integration and increased “South-South” trade which may offer a more effective development route than reliance on exchange with the developed world: the liquidity offered by China could yet play an important role in eroding the fragmentation that helps keep poor markets poor.
That may all be fine and rosy for developed-country leftists, but is for them of little practical immediate consequence. Will China take up the role once played by the USSR and it allies in assisting communist organisation and propaganda in the west? I think that’s unlikely; nor given the complexities of China’s own situation would it necessarily be desirable to rely on it for the sustenance formerly offered by Moscow. China is not an outward-looking country in the sense of Russia from Peter the Great onwards: to the extent that its interests will raise its profile in world affairs, its primary concerns are likely to remain commercial and strategic rather than ideological. And its medium-term commercial interest is unlikely to be best served by promoting revolutionary upheaval in the countries that buy its manufactures.
China’s true promise lies in what it is not: to put it crudely, it's not the United States or Europe. It may not be the key to a global workers’ paradise, but its contest with western neoliberal elites will offer some opportunity for those excluded from power to reclaim the room for manoeuvre once provided by the world’s Cold-War division. The west has had its spell of global hegemony: it won’t be an easy ride as workers in today's developed countries find themselves in competition with their Chinese counterparts, but China’s resurgence at least holds out the hope of breaking a deadening imperialist ideological, economic and geopolitical stranglehold that has cost millions of working people dearly.
Sunday 14 February 2010
The left and Islam
It’s been there for nearly 1400 years, it commands at least the nominal adherence of a fifth of humanity, and it isn’t about to go away. In the eyes of imperialist elites it occupies a place comparable to that once held by communism: the source of a mortal ideological and geopolitical challenge to be contained, rolled back and destroyed or marginalised at all costs. But to many on the left Islam represents an outrage against reason and progress to be anathemised in terms similar to those used by the class enemy and no less strident than those directed against the worst of capitalism’s excesses.
The relationship certainly hasn’t been a happy one: in the 1980s emergent Islamism widely allied with the imperialists against the communist movement, recruiting jihadists to fight the revolutionary government of Afghanistan and its Soviet allies, threatening progressive regimes in the Middle East and putting communists on trial for their life in Iran. Yet today political Islam in many places claims the role once played by progressive movements, as a counter to imperialist domination and a voice for the dispossessed. To intellectual revulsion at the politicisation of a medieval faith is added an note of bitterness at its usurpation of the rightful position of socialists and genuine anti-imperialists. The distaste has even led some to welcome western armed involvement against Islam’s most extreme manifestations; others who once accepted government-controlled single-list elections in socialist countries now declare themselves in solidarity with bourgeois opponents supposedly defrauded of election victory by clericalist rulers.
So is Islamism devoid of any positive potential? Should we condemn it outright and support resistance to it even by rival enemies of progress, or is there scope for engagement?
The first thing to be said is that Islamism takes many forms, from the national Shia Islamic Republicanism of the Iranian Revolution or the Sunni Muslim Palestinian nationalism of Hamas to the pan-Islamist Sunni extremism of al-Qaeda and its allies. In light of its own stated disavowal of any intention to impose an Islamic state against other Lebanese communities, Hezbollah’s status as in practice an Islamist movement might be questioned entirely. Despite having contributed to the development both of Hamas and its al-Qaeda enemies, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood now proclaims its rejection of the violence that once characterised its opposition to the regime.
Nor can those proclaiming Islamic political doctrines be dismissed as a source of resistance to imperialist excesses. While the jihadist movement of bin Laden and his kind has been a disaster for Muslims, delivering two countries into US hands, Iran ranks as the bête noire of imperialist and Zionist circles for its support for movements confronting Israel and its efforts to strengthen its strategic position against US encirclement and Israeli threats of “pre-emptive” military action. Hezbollah commands respect far beyond its own religious or electoral base for its role in confronting Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. Hamas now constitutes effective Palestinian opposition to Israeli control while its rival Fatah seems ever more at risk of collaboration in a dependent, fragmented statelet under Israeli or western tutelage. In Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr’s anti-occupation stance seemed (for all his movement’s taint of opportunism and communal sectionalism) for a time to offer the hope of uniting opposition across Iraq’s menacing religious divide.
Would recognition of such Islamic regimes or movements as legitimate forces of resistance to imperialism be a betrayal of secularist progressives in the Muslim world? Well, for one thing, it would be nothing such radicals hadn’t themselves attempted in the past: Iran’s once-mighty Tudeh Party was condemned by its own rivals on the left for supporting the Islamic Republic regime against leftist opponents and thereby walking allegedly blindfold toward its own suppression in 1983. Nor is there much indication of a secular nationalist or revolutionary alternative rising to take the place of those who claim to reconcile the Quran with 21st-century nation-building. In part the present situation is a reflection of the left’s historical weakness, too often compounded by vacillation between sectarian antipathy to past nationalist regimes and opportunistic collusion with repressive rulers.
At the moment there’s simply little effective alternative in many countries to the inconsistent and ideologically flawed resistance offered by Islamists of the Iran/Hamas/Hezbollah variety. Far from betraying local progressives, it would be a disservice to populations which have rallied to such movements to reject them in favour of barely more socially progressive opponents more likely to collaborate with imperialism and Zionism. Recognising Islam’s anti-imperialist potential doesn’t mean siding with the hate-fuelled idiocy of reactionary jihadism or abandoning the search for a radical alternative to socially conservative Islamist regimes. But blanket denunciation of politics incorporating an Islamic dimension serves neither the fight against Islamophobia in the developed world nor solidarity with those confronting imperialism in Muslim lands denied a viable secular alternative.
The relationship certainly hasn’t been a happy one: in the 1980s emergent Islamism widely allied with the imperialists against the communist movement, recruiting jihadists to fight the revolutionary government of Afghanistan and its Soviet allies, threatening progressive regimes in the Middle East and putting communists on trial for their life in Iran. Yet today political Islam in many places claims the role once played by progressive movements, as a counter to imperialist domination and a voice for the dispossessed. To intellectual revulsion at the politicisation of a medieval faith is added an note of bitterness at its usurpation of the rightful position of socialists and genuine anti-imperialists. The distaste has even led some to welcome western armed involvement against Islam’s most extreme manifestations; others who once accepted government-controlled single-list elections in socialist countries now declare themselves in solidarity with bourgeois opponents supposedly defrauded of election victory by clericalist rulers.
So is Islamism devoid of any positive potential? Should we condemn it outright and support resistance to it even by rival enemies of progress, or is there scope for engagement?
The first thing to be said is that Islamism takes many forms, from the national Shia Islamic Republicanism of the Iranian Revolution or the Sunni Muslim Palestinian nationalism of Hamas to the pan-Islamist Sunni extremism of al-Qaeda and its allies. In light of its own stated disavowal of any intention to impose an Islamic state against other Lebanese communities, Hezbollah’s status as in practice an Islamist movement might be questioned entirely. Despite having contributed to the development both of Hamas and its al-Qaeda enemies, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood now proclaims its rejection of the violence that once characterised its opposition to the regime.
Nor can those proclaiming Islamic political doctrines be dismissed as a source of resistance to imperialist excesses. While the jihadist movement of bin Laden and his kind has been a disaster for Muslims, delivering two countries into US hands, Iran ranks as the bête noire of imperialist and Zionist circles for its support for movements confronting Israel and its efforts to strengthen its strategic position against US encirclement and Israeli threats of “pre-emptive” military action. Hezbollah commands respect far beyond its own religious or electoral base for its role in confronting Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. Hamas now constitutes effective Palestinian opposition to Israeli control while its rival Fatah seems ever more at risk of collaboration in a dependent, fragmented statelet under Israeli or western tutelage. In Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr’s anti-occupation stance seemed (for all his movement’s taint of opportunism and communal sectionalism) for a time to offer the hope of uniting opposition across Iraq’s menacing religious divide.
Would recognition of such Islamic regimes or movements as legitimate forces of resistance to imperialism be a betrayal of secularist progressives in the Muslim world? Well, for one thing, it would be nothing such radicals hadn’t themselves attempted in the past: Iran’s once-mighty Tudeh Party was condemned by its own rivals on the left for supporting the Islamic Republic regime against leftist opponents and thereby walking allegedly blindfold toward its own suppression in 1983. Nor is there much indication of a secular nationalist or revolutionary alternative rising to take the place of those who claim to reconcile the Quran with 21st-century nation-building. In part the present situation is a reflection of the left’s historical weakness, too often compounded by vacillation between sectarian antipathy to past nationalist regimes and opportunistic collusion with repressive rulers.
At the moment there’s simply little effective alternative in many countries to the inconsistent and ideologically flawed resistance offered by Islamists of the Iran/Hamas/Hezbollah variety. Far from betraying local progressives, it would be a disservice to populations which have rallied to such movements to reject them in favour of barely more socially progressive opponents more likely to collaborate with imperialism and Zionism. Recognising Islam’s anti-imperialist potential doesn’t mean siding with the hate-fuelled idiocy of reactionary jihadism or abandoning the search for a radical alternative to socially conservative Islamist regimes. But blanket denunciation of politics incorporating an Islamic dimension serves neither the fight against Islamophobia in the developed world nor solidarity with those confronting imperialism in Muslim lands denied a viable secular alternative.
What to do with the EU?
To most on the revolutionary left it’s seen as remote, undemocratic and a vehicle for international capital. The European Union project has been under way in one form or other for 60 years, yet it still inspires loathing across the political spectrum. For leftists it stands as a barrier to transformation of the socio-economic order through its insistence on “free” markets and restraint of state intervention, and as an enemy of the world’s poor through its featherbedding of European big business at the expense of progressive reform of the international trading and financial system.
To condemnation of the Union’s economic bias and perceived democratic deficit, critics add the defence of national independence against a remote supranational authority remote from the lives and interests of workers. The demand for national sovereignty can certainly be progressive, but is this the case among the imperialist powers and reactionary statelets of today’s Europe? The EU is inevitably problematical for any advocate of revolution which is naturally easier to embark on at national level than across an economic union of 500 million people. But complaints of an over-powerful multi-ethnic "superstate" and alienation of national authority hardly chime with the case for wholesale socialisation and amity of peoples. Nor have its critics come up with much in the way of evidence that the restoration of unlimited sovereignty to national regimes would offer an effective advance for workers in the event that the hoped-for socialist revolution doesn’t come off.
Those who wish an end to EU participation need first to demonstrate that its peoples would really be better off outside a project that’s undoubtedly raised living conditions in its member countries and provided a counter (albeit a grossly flawed and often ineffectual one) to some of the worst excesses of national elites locally and US neoliberalism internationally. I want a unitary socialist Republic of Europe as a stepping-stone to its eventual dissolution in a true global commonwealth: if doing away now with the present EU is a prerequisite to getting there, then so be it. But denunciation of “superstates” or lamenting the alienation of bourgeois power from its national citadels merely lends credence to the claims of national chauvinists and local bourgeois kleptocracies. Reluctance to reject the EU doesn't mean that we stop demanding a stronger parliament and more accountable executive, or that we accept its right to veto progress at national level. But until advocates of withdrawal or dismemberment can convince me its nationals are really better off outside or that a weakened or abolished EU would really be a good thing for the world given the likelihood in its absence of heightened US paramountcy, then for now I’ll take my chances with Brussels.
To condemnation of the Union’s economic bias and perceived democratic deficit, critics add the defence of national independence against a remote supranational authority remote from the lives and interests of workers. The demand for national sovereignty can certainly be progressive, but is this the case among the imperialist powers and reactionary statelets of today’s Europe? The EU is inevitably problematical for any advocate of revolution which is naturally easier to embark on at national level than across an economic union of 500 million people. But complaints of an over-powerful multi-ethnic "superstate" and alienation of national authority hardly chime with the case for wholesale socialisation and amity of peoples. Nor have its critics come up with much in the way of evidence that the restoration of unlimited sovereignty to national regimes would offer an effective advance for workers in the event that the hoped-for socialist revolution doesn’t come off.
Those who wish an end to EU participation need first to demonstrate that its peoples would really be better off outside a project that’s undoubtedly raised living conditions in its member countries and provided a counter (albeit a grossly flawed and often ineffectual one) to some of the worst excesses of national elites locally and US neoliberalism internationally. I want a unitary socialist Republic of Europe as a stepping-stone to its eventual dissolution in a true global commonwealth: if doing away now with the present EU is a prerequisite to getting there, then so be it. But denunciation of “superstates” or lamenting the alienation of bourgeois power from its national citadels merely lends credence to the claims of national chauvinists and local bourgeois kleptocracies. Reluctance to reject the EU doesn't mean that we stop demanding a stronger parliament and more accountable executive, or that we accept its right to veto progress at national level. But until advocates of withdrawal or dismemberment can convince me its nationals are really better off outside or that a weakened or abolished EU would really be a good thing for the world given the likelihood in its absence of heightened US paramountcy, then for now I’ll take my chances with Brussels.
Burying 1989
For 20 years the revolutionary left has been marginal to the mainstream of world politics. In some countries it remains strong, in a few it continues to exercise state power. But overall it no longer represents a viable counter to the globalising agenda of corporate capitalism. Where vocal opposition has challenged the right's ideological offensive it's tended to derive from loosely libertarian, romantic anti-capitalist perspectives rather than from the advocates of socialised production and disciplined revolutionary leadership. And there's no sign of that changing in the near future.
In 1989 the world's peoples were promised a new beginning: an end to Cold-War division and a "peace dividend" from the cessation of the 1980s arms buildup. Instead we've had 20 years of aggressive war, proxy conflicts across much of the developed world, reversal of social protection across the developed world and the imposition of usually disastrous free-market agendas on the world's poorest, followed by their formal incorporation into a global trading system dominated by transnational monopoly capital.
The classical Leninist left certainly survives, but outside its few strongholds it barely makes an impact. The question is, how to reverse the decline? And should we seek to?
This blog doesn't aim to romanticise the Marxist left or to overlook its failings. But I'll start by proposing that even to non-Marxists, its survival as a force for agitation, electoral competition and ideological discourse should be seen as a plus to those seeking a more just world. If you doubt that, just look at the undoing of social gains since the 1980s and burial of progressive agendas through the explosion of national, ethnic and religious hatreds. A diffuse liberal left simply hasn't delivered effective resistance to right-wing neoliberalism or the rise of racism and nationalism. And now other forms of division threaten to stifle collective advance and draw opponents of western capitalist primacy into violence devoid of a progressive social agenda.
But if the "old" revolutionary left's to make a comeback, can it do so on the basis of its own ideas of “business as usual”? This is where I think the answer’s a resounding No. The left was never perfect. Many today are reluctant to throw in their lot with the revolutionary parties of ideological uniformity not only because of the long shadow cast by the Soviet collapse, but because their own yearning for diversity of thought and expression runs counter to the Leninist model of party centralism, democratic in theory but too often top-heavy in practice.
And what of socialism? There can be no doubt that conservative and liberal trumpeting of the independent entrepreneur exercised a powerful appeal for millions who had no wish to follow their parents into a working life of poorly-rewarded factory drudgery. An agenda of comprehensive elimination of private enterprise offers little to those empowered by small-scale entrepreneurial success. Yet many of these same would-be capitalists feel no sympathy for the oppressive corporations which have been the principal beneficiaries of the neoliberal economic model. Are they to be doomed to constitute class enemies of progress?
This brings us to the movement’s social base, a divisive issue from at least the 1960s with the emergence of the first widespread countercultural challenges to bourgeois hegemony in the west. The industrial working-class base that was once the bedrock of Marxism in the developed countries has been steadily eroded since the 1980s, not merely in terms of legal rights, collective identification and trade union involvement, but numerically and economically. Industry now accounts for a dwindling share of a fifth to a quarter of the economic output of the bulk of the most developed countries, as services loom ever larger and manufacturing shifts to lands formerly excluded from the club of industrial powers.
If revolutionary socialism is to again become a force to be reckoned with, it can’t just adhere to its old ways of organising and engaging. A centralist party under an impenetrable leadership embracing ideological enmity to all forms of non-socialised economic activity and claiming its base solely in a weakening class ever more threatened with becoming an anachronism holds little appeal for many who yearn to strike a decisive blow against corporate domination. In practice, many Marxist parties were already entertaining such heresy long before the debacle of 1989. The disaster that followed should be no occasion for retreat into past approaches ever more at odds with 21st-century realities.
Does this spell the end of the ideologically disciplined party of revolutionary leadership and working-class militancy? Not necessarily, for gainful re-engagement with the broad mass of anti-imperialist sentiment must take the form of building alliances and foregoing sectional agendas in the short term in the interest of the wider progressive cause: this isn’t merely good tactics, it’s the only strategy that will convince non-communists of the movement’s credibility as a prospective mass force and open it to the independent critical thinkers most likely to question the socio-economic status quo and rally broader opinion behind creative challenges to the bourgeois order.
That will mean putting socialism to some extent on the back burner: rather than grudging acceptance of the improbability of an early end to capitalism, we should explicitly differentiate between its abusive, parasitical forms and those manifestations of individual enterprise which offer empowerment and diversity. We must break free of doctrinaire devotion to the leadership of a working class which may be irretrievable as a leading force in society. We should build coalitions whose agendas differ from our own, while emphasising the international dimension of capitalism’s injustices and above all the anti-imperialist solidarity in which communists can justly claim the leading role. And we should recognise that ideological strength needs to draw on constructive engagement and openness to new solutions, not merely discipline and conformity.
In 1989 the world's peoples were promised a new beginning: an end to Cold-War division and a "peace dividend" from the cessation of the 1980s arms buildup. Instead we've had 20 years of aggressive war, proxy conflicts across much of the developed world, reversal of social protection across the developed world and the imposition of usually disastrous free-market agendas on the world's poorest, followed by their formal incorporation into a global trading system dominated by transnational monopoly capital.
The classical Leninist left certainly survives, but outside its few strongholds it barely makes an impact. The question is, how to reverse the decline? And should we seek to?
This blog doesn't aim to romanticise the Marxist left or to overlook its failings. But I'll start by proposing that even to non-Marxists, its survival as a force for agitation, electoral competition and ideological discourse should be seen as a plus to those seeking a more just world. If you doubt that, just look at the undoing of social gains since the 1980s and burial of progressive agendas through the explosion of national, ethnic and religious hatreds. A diffuse liberal left simply hasn't delivered effective resistance to right-wing neoliberalism or the rise of racism and nationalism. And now other forms of division threaten to stifle collective advance and draw opponents of western capitalist primacy into violence devoid of a progressive social agenda.
But if the "old" revolutionary left's to make a comeback, can it do so on the basis of its own ideas of “business as usual”? This is where I think the answer’s a resounding No. The left was never perfect. Many today are reluctant to throw in their lot with the revolutionary parties of ideological uniformity not only because of the long shadow cast by the Soviet collapse, but because their own yearning for diversity of thought and expression runs counter to the Leninist model of party centralism, democratic in theory but too often top-heavy in practice.
And what of socialism? There can be no doubt that conservative and liberal trumpeting of the independent entrepreneur exercised a powerful appeal for millions who had no wish to follow their parents into a working life of poorly-rewarded factory drudgery. An agenda of comprehensive elimination of private enterprise offers little to those empowered by small-scale entrepreneurial success. Yet many of these same would-be capitalists feel no sympathy for the oppressive corporations which have been the principal beneficiaries of the neoliberal economic model. Are they to be doomed to constitute class enemies of progress?
This brings us to the movement’s social base, a divisive issue from at least the 1960s with the emergence of the first widespread countercultural challenges to bourgeois hegemony in the west. The industrial working-class base that was once the bedrock of Marxism in the developed countries has been steadily eroded since the 1980s, not merely in terms of legal rights, collective identification and trade union involvement, but numerically and economically. Industry now accounts for a dwindling share of a fifth to a quarter of the economic output of the bulk of the most developed countries, as services loom ever larger and manufacturing shifts to lands formerly excluded from the club of industrial powers.
If revolutionary socialism is to again become a force to be reckoned with, it can’t just adhere to its old ways of organising and engaging. A centralist party under an impenetrable leadership embracing ideological enmity to all forms of non-socialised economic activity and claiming its base solely in a weakening class ever more threatened with becoming an anachronism holds little appeal for many who yearn to strike a decisive blow against corporate domination. In practice, many Marxist parties were already entertaining such heresy long before the debacle of 1989. The disaster that followed should be no occasion for retreat into past approaches ever more at odds with 21st-century realities.
Does this spell the end of the ideologically disciplined party of revolutionary leadership and working-class militancy? Not necessarily, for gainful re-engagement with the broad mass of anti-imperialist sentiment must take the form of building alliances and foregoing sectional agendas in the short term in the interest of the wider progressive cause: this isn’t merely good tactics, it’s the only strategy that will convince non-communists of the movement’s credibility as a prospective mass force and open it to the independent critical thinkers most likely to question the socio-economic status quo and rally broader opinion behind creative challenges to the bourgeois order.
That will mean putting socialism to some extent on the back burner: rather than grudging acceptance of the improbability of an early end to capitalism, we should explicitly differentiate between its abusive, parasitical forms and those manifestations of individual enterprise which offer empowerment and diversity. We must break free of doctrinaire devotion to the leadership of a working class which may be irretrievable as a leading force in society. We should build coalitions whose agendas differ from our own, while emphasising the international dimension of capitalism’s injustices and above all the anti-imperialist solidarity in which communists can justly claim the leading role. And we should recognise that ideological strength needs to draw on constructive engagement and openness to new solutions, not merely discipline and conformity.
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