The Euston Manifesto
by John O’Mahony
That’ll teach me to make silly jokes! A few issues back, in a fit of self-indulgent whimsy, I mocked some ex-comrades of ours who had abandoned socialist politics to enlist in George W Bush’s neo-conservative crusade to bring bourgeois democracy and American-style capitalism to Iraq. In a little skit, I had one of them confuse the Communist Manifesto with “the Bourgeois-Democratic Manifesto”.
Now they and others have in all seriousness produced what I conjured up as an absurdist joke — a “Bourgeois-Democratic Manifesto”. Politics today has become satire-proof!
Mysteriously but appropriately, perhaps, for people evidently travelling fast to the right, they have named their manifesto after a railway station — the Euston Manifesto.
They say — and as if they have just discovered the political equivalent of penicillin — things that Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty have said, defended, and fought for over the last three decades. In 1990, for example, we wrote:
‘We live in a labour movement grown spiritually cross-eyed from the long pursuit of realpolitik and the operation of double standards, a movement ideologically sick and poisoned. In terms of moral ecology, the left and the labour movement is something of a disaster area because of the long-term use of methods and arguments which have corrupted the consciousness of the working class. The most poisonous root of that corruption was the Stalinist movement”. (Socialist Organiser 447, 10 May 1990).
But where we have said those things in an effort to build a better left, they say them as part of breaking from the left.
The “Euston Manifesto” consists of a preamble; a “statement of principles’, fifteen of them; an “elaboration” of them; and the conclusion.
They are, the authors say, “democrats and progressives”. For decades the use of “progressive” told you the speaker was, most probably, Communist Party or CP-linked.
Doppelganger: They like to recycle and play with old CP formulas and verbiage, then?
Oddly, or not so oddly, there are bits of patented CP language and old CP ideas and policies, scattered throughout the Manifesto. And the approach is vintage CP “Popular Front” stuff.
“Many of us”, they say, “belong to the left” — but not all. They reach beyond the left to “egalitarian liberals”. They “pay attention to liberal and conservative voices and ideas if they contribute to strengthening democratic norms and practices and to the battle for human progress”. Boldly they “reject the notion that there are no opponents on the left” and “that there can be no opening to ideas and individuals to our right”.
Curiously, in the form of a general manifesto we are offered a very narrow polemic against the kitsch-left. The Travelling People of the Euston Manifesto define themselves by negativism towards the kitsch-left.
Yet, though their impulse is to oppose the kitsch-left, with their “democratic” and “progressive” popular front the Euston Travellers parallel the SWP’s “popular front with clerical fascists”. They disagree with their choice of allies, not with their approach.
Doppelganger: At least Euston’s popular front with “egalitarian liberals” is better than a popular front with clerical fascists.
Is it? It might be, I suppose, but in both cases, the ally to the right limits what the accommodating “Popular Front” “left” can do. For practical purposes the grouping can go no further than its most right-wing element agrees to. That is as true for the Travellers’ ideological popular front with liberals and conservatives as it is for the SWP’s electoral and political popular front with Islamic clerical-fascists.
Doppelganger: They don’t claim to be socialists.
Some of them do, but evidently it doesn’t matter much to them. They say that the project “involves making common cause with genuine democrats, whether socialist or not”.
Doppelganger: What about their principles?
They want “democratic norms, procedures, and structures... freedom of opinion and assembly, free elections’, and “the separation of state and religion”. They “value the traditions and institutions, the legacy of good governance, of those countries in which liberal, pluralist democracies have taken hold”. They want “the separation of executive, legislative, and judicial power”.
Their second principle is: “no apology for tyranny”. They “draw a firm line” between themselves and those “left-liberals” who “explain’, indulgently “understand’, or apologise for tyrannical regimes, and movements that aspire to create such regimes.
Number three is “human rights for all. We hold the fundamental human rights codified in the Universal Declaration” of the UN in 1948, to bind “all states and political movements, indeed... everyone”.
Doppelganger: Aha. The categorical imperative in politics — do unto others as you would have them do to you. About time someone thought of that!
They proclaim themselves “egalitarians”. But nothing rough or precipitate, mind you! They “look towards progress in relations between the sexes (until full gender equality is achieved)... [and] between those of various religious affiliations... [or] diverse sexual orientations”.
Doppelganger: They are firmly in the ranks of progressive, liberal humankind? And that’s all?
No, they’re better than that. They “look towards progress... towards broader social and economic equality all round”. More even than that. “We support the interests of working people everywhere” — and even “their right to organise in defence of those interests”. “Democratic trade unions are the bedrock organisations for the defence of workers” interests and are one of the most important forces for human rights, democracy-promotion and egalitarian internationalism”.
Doppelganger: I bet I know what comes next. “Workers of the world, unite!” Am I right?
No. They want “the universal adoption of the International Labour Organisation Conventions — now routinely ignored by governments across the globe”. That, they say, “is a priority for us”.
Doppelganger: Remind me what the ILO is.
It was set up by the Treaty of Versailles, as part of the League of Nations, 87 years ago.
Euston gets even better. “We are committed to the defence of the rights of children, and to protecting people from sexual slavery and all forms of institutionalised abuse”.
Doppelganger: Ah, sure the poor craters! They mean well, anyway. Don’t be so meaen and snide about them! How are they going to achieve these things?
They think trade unions are a good thing.
Doppelganger: And how will they move “towards broader social and economic equality all round’?
There’s the rub! They “leave open... the question of the best economic forms of this broader equality”. “There are differences of viewpoint amongst us” on that.
But the Travelling People are “progressives”. They are against “structural economic oppression”.
Doppelganger: They are against wage-slavery then — against the exploitation of the working class? Nothing is more “structural” than the means of production being in the hands of the capitalist class, and the working class have to sell its labour power and let exploitation take place.
You may think that. The Euston people feel that they could not possibly comment. They differ on the economic “solution”.
Doppelganger: They also want “the benefits of large-scale development... to be distributed as widely as possible in order to serve the social and economic interests of workers, farmers and consumers in all countries”. How?
Evidently, they don’t know, but “we support radical reform of the major institutions of global economic governance (WTO, IMF, World Bank) to achieve these goals, and we support fair trade, more aid, debt cancellation and the campaign to Make Poverty History”. They explain: “Development can bring growth in life-expectancy and in the enjoyment of life, easing burdensome labour and shortening the working day”.
Doppelganger: They are against privilege?
Not so fast! They are against “unjustified” privilege and “unjustified” power. What “privilege” do they consider justified? They don’t say.
Doppelganger: These are youngsters – right? Cutting their political teeth? Students? Sixth-formers?
No, no. These are grown-ups, some deep in their tired and disabused middle age, or even elderly. The main author of the manifesto, Norman Geras, is a retired professor at Manchester University. The other is the Observer journalist Nick Cohen.
Doppelganger: Jaysus! But they’re new to politics, surely?
Geras was a member or supporter of the Mandelite “Fourth International” for decades. He has written a book on Rosa Luxemburg.
Doppelganger: They’ll have some stuff to say outside the common run, then?
Well, they are against racism. They “oppose... the anti-immigrant racism of the far Right”.
Doppelganger: And the racism-fomenting agitation of the New Labour government?
Don’t know. They don’t mention that.
Doppelganger: But at least they nail their colours firmly to the mast. They are against racism.
The truth, though, is that it would very hard to find other than fascistic morons in Britain who are not “against racism” in general. The problems begin after you have proclaimed “anti-racism” as a principle.
When the Travellers repeat a very tame and delimited version of what almost everybody proclaims, they are reinventing the wheel...
Doppelganger: They do a lot of that?
Lots and lots of it. Sometimes, as in their notions on democracy, it is the square wheel they reinvent! Perhaps that’s why they take the name of a railway station.
Doppelganger: Give up! There’s nothing funny left to say about the politics of Euston station.
Don’t be a faint-heart! Maybe it’s because they know that their grouping is a badly-buckled fifth wheel on the left-hand side of the neo-con float in the post 9/11 carnival of reaction!
The Travellers are for a two-states settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. They are vehemently against anti-semitism, which they think is growing alarmingly. But they even manage to be just a little peculiar and seriously off-target on anti-semitism. They write that things have “now developed to a point where supposed organisations of the Left are willing to entertain openly anti-Semitic speakers and to form alliances with anti-Semitic groups”.
Well, yes! But where have they been for the last 15 and more years? The SWP stepped up its level of its “anti-Zionism” as least as far back as 1987-8. It was part of its turn to kitsch anti-imperialism then. (It suddenly decided to back Iran in the Iran-Iraq war on the grounds that the USA was on the side of Iraq — as it had been for the whole near-decade of the war!).
The significant anti-Semitism of the kitsch left is not in their occasional association with open anti-Semites, but primarily in their own “anti-Zionism’, and specifically in the wish to destroy Israel, and to back those who go beyond merely wishing it to try to do it. The formula in the manifesto is perhaps deference to signatories who have only lately cottoned on to left-wing anti-Semitism.
The Travellers are “united against terror” —“in all its forms”. “The deliberate targeting of civilians” is, they note sternly, “a crime under international law”. That it is done in a just cause cannot make it right.
Doppelganger: That’s fine, surely? No cause can justify the deliberate slaughter of civilians. No militants in a truly good cause would want to.
You don’t think a would-be democratic manifesto should at least refer to terror by states —by Bush, for example, or Sharon, or Olmert?
Doppelganger: That’s the kitsch-left line: “Bush is the world’s no.1 terrorist”.
In terms of civilians killed — with indifference or criminal recklessness, if not with deliberate intent — surely there is truth in calling the “great statesmen” terrorists. Equating Bush with bin Laden is a reductio ad absurdum of something that is nonetheless true.
And “terrorism”? Terrorism today is the deliberate slaughter of civilians. What about terrorism that targets rulers and tyrants?
Doppelganger: Marxists have always opposed that!
Yes, but we sided morally with the terrorists —for instance, those who killed the Russian Tsar in 1881.
Doppelganger: Quibbling! You agree with the Travellers on “modern” terrorism!
With the branding, by an unholy alliance of Establishments, of all struggles which use “unofficial” violence as evil, wrong, unjust? Leftists who had not lost their political bearings, who had not suffered a complete moral collapse, would insist on the distinctions and brand the “war on terror” for the hypocrisy and sham and succour for tyrant regimes that most of it is.
Doppelganger: Ah, but surely they oppose Bush’s wars?
Read their tenth principle: “a new internationalism”. For practical politics, this is the most important thing in the manifesto.
“Humanitarian intervention, when necessary, is not a matter of disregarding sovereignty, but of lodging this properly within the ‘common life’ of all peoples. If in some minimal sense a state protects the common life of its people (if it does not torture, murder and slaughter its own civilians, and meets their most basic needs of life), then its sovereignty is to be respected. But if the state itself violates this common life in appalling ways, its claim to sovereignty is forfeited and there is a duty upon the international community of intervention and rescue. Once a threshold of inhumanity has been crossed, there is a ‘responsibility to protect’.”
They “stand for an internationalist politics and the reform of international law — in the interests of global democratisation and global development”.
In practice, this means open-ended support for “intervention” by the USA — “a great country and nation… the home of a strong democracy with a noble tradition” — wherever its interests can be presented as pursuit of democracy, or desirable “regime change”.
Now, it is true that there is more to imperialism than the true idea — which came to some of us with our mothers’ milk – that it is a foul, dirty thing.
Marx thought that the British rule in India was immensely progressive — ending the thousands of years of a stagnant Asiatic mode of production, opening up new possibilities. Engels applauded the seizure of Texas and California from stagnant Mexico by the dynamic and progressive USA.
And British rule did bring the progress Marx expected in India, though more slowly than he expected. Bourgeois democracy in India is the child of the British Empire. World War Two was an imperialist war on both sides. Nonetheless it brought the liberation of Europe from Nazi rule, and created the possibility of reconstructing bourgeois democracy in western Europe.
Doppelganger: So you are saying imperialism may be progressive?
It is a matter of historical fact that imperialism, throughout the 20th century, as well as bringing the immense destruction of two World Wars and countless lesser wars, also triggered progressive developments, and opened immense possibilities not there before. So, after all, has capitalism!
Without the epoch of capitalism creating its preconditions and, so to speak, putting it on History’s agenda, socialism would be impossible.
It is not even entirely ruled out — though it looks increasingly unlikely — that imperialism will bring some approximation to bourgeois democracy, or at any rate something better than the rule of the quasi-fascist Ba’th party, to Iraq.
Doppelganger: So we should support the imperialism of the USA, the UK, and other advanced countries! You say Marx supported the British in India?
Honest analysis and recognition of what is happening in the world is a duty we owe to reason. It is not “support” for capitalism, or abandonment of socialism, to say that the dominant world capitalist system continues to do “progressive” things.
But if we recognise progress, or potential or probable progress, we do it from our point of view. We do it as socialists, mortal enemies of capitalism.
We do not need to tell lies — least of all to ourselves —about capitalism and imperialism. They are bad enough without that!
Marx on India is a good model here. He saw great historical progress in the British rule in India, and yet when the “Indian Mutiny” broke out in 1857 — a backward-looking, regressive, reactionary (or mainly reactionary) movement — he indicted the British rulers for the savagery with which they put it down. “We have here given but a brief and mildly-coloured chapter from the real history of British rule in India. In view of such facts, dispassionate and thoughtful men may perhaps be led to ask whether a people are not justified in attempting to expel the foreign conquerors who have so abused their subjects”.
Marx recognised progress; but he stood apart from the British bearers of progress to India. He took no responsibility for them or their deeds — from which, remember, he expected, in the long term, immense advantage. He maintained his own viewpoint and his political independence.
He did not banish from the record the venality, profiteering, and robbery by the colonial power, or the terrible consequences of the neglect by the British of the prerequisites for Indian agriculture which the old Asiatic despotism had maintained.
Doppelganger: He was irresponsible, then!
No, he was responsible to the task of maintaining an independent, revolutionary, communist outlook on the world. Politically he was not a “developmentalist”, but a class-struggle revolutionary.
The Travellers are “developmentalists”, people for whom the possibility of objectively progressive developments triggered from above is all-important.
There is a curious continuity here. For many decades, “socialist” — Stalinist — politics was defined by the pursuit of industrial development, as measured by crude economic statistics, regardless of human cost. That was supposedly development towards socialism. Would-be Trotskyists, too, bought into that view. For them, the USSR was “in transition to socialism”. Stalinism defined the core value of “socialism” as the development of economies from backwardness to industrialisation.
With the Travellers we have something similar, but they are talking about capitalist development and imperialist-sponsored “progress”.
The Travelling people declare themselves for “a critical openness”. Self-preening, they say: “political honesty and straightforwardness are a primary obligation for us”.
But in fact the Travellers themselves now stand with forces in contemporary society that can’t tell the full truth.
Thus, they say nothing about the casual barbarity with which their “good guys” of contemporary history — because they are bourgeois, because they are imperialist — lace, poison and subvert even potentially good works, like smashing the Saddam regime.
They justly denounce the kitsch-left for dishonesty and for double standards. Yet they themselves use double standards. In a revealing sleight of mind, for example, they misquote the slogans of the Great French Revolution of the 18th century (in the last point of their statement of principles, no.15).
“We reaffirm the ideas that inspired... the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century: liberty, equality and solidarity”.
“Solidarity”? The French revolution said: “fraternity”. Fraternity did not explicitly exclude the competition of capitalism, the “war of all against all”; indeed, historically, it cleared the way for it. Solidarity explicitly does.
Here the crusaders for truth themselves employ the same sleight of mind and lamentable standards as the kitsch left.
Fighting the “dragon” of kitsch-leftism, they adapt to the shape of what they fight.
Doppelganger: Try not to be so f...ing pretentious!
All right then, forget Nietzsche! Take what Lenin said about what he saw as the warping of Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas by over-preoccupation with her political fight against Pilsudski’s Polish Socialist Party.
“To a mouse there is no stronger beast than the cat, it is said. To Rosa Luxemburg there is evidently no stronger beast than the “Fracy”.” (Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, 1914).
Loathsome though the politics of the SWP and much of the “revolutionary left” are — the allies of Islamist clerical fascists, Ba’thist quasi-fascists, and reactionary “anti-imperialists” — there are more powerful, and not less loathsome, forces in society!
The Travellers are an anti-SWP group, an inversion of the SWP.
The SWP’s mechanical inversion of official bourgeois politics makes them not an independent force but only a foolishly dependent negative imprint. The Travelling people’s inversion of the SWP turns them into a positive offprint of bourgeois politics.
No. 13 of their principles is commitment to “the traditional liberal freedom of ideas”. But don’t run away with the idea that they’ll cut up rough in defence even of that. They hasten to add that it must be “within the usual constraints against defamation, libel and incitement to violence”.
Britain has immensely restrictive libel laws (laws which, like so much else in liberal bourgeois-democratic society, greatly favour the rich). Who decides what is “defamation”? Especially under Blair’s new “anti-terror” laws, who decides what is “incitement to violence” (or “glorifying terrorism’, as the new law puts it)? The liberal democratic courts, of course!
The Travellers say boldly, however: “Respect for others does not entail remaining silent about their beliefs where these are judged to be wanting”. The philistinism and cliche-clotting of the language is itself an important part of their new politics!
Doppelganger: But they support “human rights; the pursuit of happiness... the brotherhood and sisterhood of all men and women. None should be left out, none left behind”. Here at last they raise a rallying cry; they nail their theses to the door of the cathedral. Here they stand; they can do no other! The Martin Luther touch. Something they will dig in and fight for. It’s good!
Not quite. They hasten to add — and it is characteristic of their whole enterprise: “We are partisans of these values. But we are not zealots. For we embrace also the values of free enquiry, open dialogue and creative doubt, of care in judgement and a sense of the intractabilities of the world”.
Doppelganger: These are our truths, but, er…they may be wrong! Here we stand — but we may be persuaded to move!
They desire to have more backbone than the invertebrate liberals they criticise, but — moderate in all things, and with a proper sense of the intractabilities of the world —not too much!
I prefer Trotsky. “Revolutionary ardour in the struggle for socialism is inseparable from intellectual ardour in the struggle for truth”.
Only the most feeble, liberal notion of class (as a duty of care to the poor), and no notion at all of class struggle, is in this manifesto. In a revealing passage, they complain that “even educated and affluent people” have bad attitudes, as if “affluent” people are those who can normally be expected to favour enlightenment, and it is scarcely surprising if the proles are yahoos.
Do not think, however, that they merely defend the status quo. Within their bourgeois-democratic “defencism”, they understand that “these democracies have their own deficits and shortcomings”.
Doppelganger: Because they are bourgeois class democracies? They bear the stamp of the bourgeoisie and embody — in access, control of assets, etc., if not in formal rights — the rule of the capitalist class over the working class.
No, none of that Marxist old guff! They say it is now a “battle for the development of more democratic institutions and procedures, for further empowering those without influence, without a voice or with few political resources”. This, they affirm “is a permanent part of the agenda of the Left”.
Doppelganger: Permanent? So a society where no-one would be left without influence, voice, resources is a myth-mirage that can never be attained?
They state that “the proper concern of genuine liberals and members of the Left should have been the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order and to rebuild the country’s infrastructure”.
Doppelganger: Surely you agree with that?
Yes, but also no! Read what they mean by it. They unceremoniously bundle Third Camp socialists into the same ash-can as the sharia-socialists and reactionary “anti-imperialists”. They are opposed not only to those, “but also to others who manage to find a way of situating a way of situating themselves between such forces [the sectarian militias in Iraq] and those trying to bring a new democratic life to the country” [Bush, Blair, etc.]
Those who are not entirely with them, and with Bush and Blair and their allies in Iraq, are against them. The parallel with the attitude of Stalinism when it was vigorous and expanding is striking here. These are the “Pabloites” of post-Stalinist bourgeois arrogance and expansion!
(“Pabloites” were would-be Trotskyists who looked to Stalinism to carry through the socialist revolution and saw their own role as critical cheer-leaders and auxiliary propogandists)
Doppelganger: But they do not agree with the invasion?
No, not all of them. But they all defer to those who did and do support the invasion. They agree to denounce those “many left opponents of regime change in Iraq” who perversely refuse to understand why “others on the Left” supported it. By “dishing out anathema” they “betray the democratic values they profess”.
Doppelganger: What are they themselves doing if not anathematising those who reject their — in fact, Bush’s and Blair’s — politics?
That’s all right! Double standards against the double-standards-blighted left are perfectly all right. Not only do they reject the idea that there are no enemies on the left; they reject the idea that there are friends on the left who disagree with their conversion to Bush and Blair.
They are fed up with left and liberal “progressive opinion” operating with “double standards” which make it see “lesser (though all too real) violations of human rights” at home, or in countries it dislikes, as “more deplorable than other violations that are flagrantly worse”.
Doppelganger: What’s wrong with that? The kitsch left operates with stark double standards.
Indeed. But, as we’ll see, they slip into the stance that “the main democratic friend is at home”.
They “roundly” condemn “the violation[s]... at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, and by the practice of “rendition” must be roundly condemned [as] a departure from universal principles, for the establishment of which the democratic countries themselves, and in particular the United States of America, bear the greater part of the historical credit” — and then direct their fire at the “double standards” by which “too many on the left... treat as the worst violations of human rights those perpetrated by the democracies, while being either silent or more muted about infractions that outstrip these by far”.
As a general statement about the left, it is true. But the idea that the main enemy is at home and our proper first concern is with the crimes of “our own” is also true. As when Karl Liebknecht first proclaimed it in World War One — knowing that Russian Tsarism was also an enemy, and a worse one than the German government — the core idea can be separated from its corruptions — those that arise if all notion is lost of scale and proportion; if the idea that there are, or may be, worse in the world than “our own” bourgeoisie and its allies, is lost; or if the guiding idea becomes “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”.
The Travellers’ motto is, by contrast: the main enemy is not at home, or in the USA. That is where the hope of the democratic future lies!
You must keep that in mind! Don’t forget that you must defend the workers’ state — sorry... bourgeois state — because it is “progressive”. (You see why they adopt old Stalinist language).
Don’t be unfair to our rulers; even where they fall, it is from the standards for the establishment of which they “bear the greatest historical credit”. None of the enemies of that “great nation”, the USA, with its “noble tradition” is fit even to clean its moral galoshes, so to speak! (The Euston Travellers will do that!)
Amnesty International compared Guantanamo with the Stalinist gulag (in a comment by its secretary-general, Irene Khan, in her preface to AI’s 2005 annual report). She presumably meant it was similar in type, not the same in scale or duration. The Travellers are outraged at this “grotesque” comparison!
But surely Guantanamo is the same sort of thing as the gulag — even if it would be nonsensical to compare the US regime in general with Stalin’s Russia.
The point is that, like the Stalinists and “Pabloites” of old, the travelling people feel that the righteousness of the perpetrating powers’ cause mitigates, if it doesn’t excuse, what they do.
Nowhere is the parallel with the attitudes of the old Stalinists and present kitsch-left so blatant. For example, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when a great outcry arose in the West in response to hard knowledge becoming available about Stalin’s slave labour camps, Ernest Mandel and others of the “orthodox” Trotskyists denounced the left-wing (and recent left-wing, like David Rousset) organisers of the outcry, and worked to blunt public awareness of the camps. The outcry was preparation for war, don’t you see, and you must never forget that the USSR is progressive compared to its opponents!
On things like Guantanamo, it is indispensable for any socialist or serious democrat to be hard and merciless in criticising “their own” government. The travellers claim to “roundly condemn” Guantanamo — but immediately hasten to defend its perpetrators from too-rough criticism. The kitsch left could not ask for better help in its foul attitudes than that its critics adopt such a posture.
The Travellers’ conclusion sums up what they are: “We must define ourselves against those for whom the entire progressive-democratic agenda has been subordinated to a blanket and simplistic “anti-imperialism” and/or hostility to the current US administration” (emphasis added).
They are the anti-anti-Bushites! But if you define yourself as the inverse of people who are themselves shaped by a simple-mindedly rigid and mechanical inversion of dominant capitalist and imperialist policies, then you turn into... a positive image and epitome of the Establishment.
You may choose to see that Establishment not as it is and has evolved and is evolving, but in an idealised “essentialist” notion of it —rooted in the 18th century! Leave aside for now the limitations of 18th century Whig “democracy”. Just as the Islamic fundamentalists who want to go back to the 7th century cannot do that, and in fact would construct a present-day caricature of it, so too the would-be time-travellers of an idealised capitalist democracy end up backing the all-too-real and none-too-democratic capitalism of Bush and Blair.
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USRED
The neo-cons have set the left a challenge. They have their idea of what a post-Kissingarian foreign policy looks like. The left has not yet worked out a version of its own. Thats why the neo-cons like us: we recognise they have set the agenda.
What is your alternative to the US and the Brits backing reactionary regimes in oder to preserve 'stability'. Do you think the world was better when we went along with Kissingerian accomodations?
And you are right, many people did think the invasion of Iraq would be a disaster if the US did not rethink their strategy for post-war/post Saddam recontruction and move rapidly towards 'Iraqification'. Some of the biggest advocates of that position were inside the Adminstration itself.
Do you think the current Iraqi situation was inevitable? Do you think impossible, or just undesirable for the bourgeoisie to intervene to prevent genocide and tyranny? Is this an eternal, universal truth?
neocon nonsense
There you go again.
Its an online manifesto anyone can sign and say what they like.
As for the Weekly Standard while I am also deeply uncomfortable with being praised by Bill Kristol his article ends with:
"The signatories of the document are liberals and progressives. They make clear their commitment to domestic and economic policies with which we at The Weekly Standard heartily disagree. But in the fight against tyranny and terror, against secular dictatorships and Islamic jihadism, is it too much to hope that decent liberals and conservatives could make common cause?"
So if a leading neocon expressly points out that he disagrees with us on domestic and economic policies we're still neocons?
Going back to Marx and Engels they freely associated with the neocons of their day (that is to say radical liberals such as Greeley, Bradlaugh, Cobden and Bright), writing in their newspapers and actively supporting their campaigns without ever losing sight of the prospect that one day they would end up on the other side of the barricades.
Modern leftists no longer appear to be capable of that level of discrimination.
Weak on anti-semitism
One of the most important points made in O'Mahony's assessment of the "Euston Manifesto" - which was, I believe, initially Jane Ashworth's brainchild - was that it does not deal seriously with "left" anti-Semitism. It mentions "left" anti-Zionism, and in a separate passage it indicts that "left" for allying with open anti-Semites. Yet it never links the two. In fact, the significant "left" anti-semitism, the anti-Semitism specific and peculiar to the "Left", is the one inhering in its absolute anti-Zionism and, specifically, in its proposal to destroy Israel, in one way or another, and the comprehensive hostility to most Jews alive, who will not agree to the destruction of Israel, to which this policy leads. That is "left" anti-Semitism today; shameless association with overt anti-semites is an important consequence and symptom of this characteristic anti-Semitism of the "left", but, nonetheless, it is only a secondary detail. The failure of the "EM" to deal with, or even to identify and describe, the core "left" anti-semitism is startling in a document heavily concerned with the defects and crimes of the kitsch-left. Anti-Semitism is a subject about which Jane feels strongly. Yet, in response to O'M's article she chooses to start a daft discussion about who did what in fighting against "anti-Zionism", etc, etc, etc, in SO a quarter of a century ago! As she herself rightly says, discussing that sort of thing is "dumb". Yes indeed! So why do it? Is it because that is easier than accounting for the very surprising failure of the "EM" to deal seriously even with "left" anti-Semitism? Because it deflects attention from what O'M said on this important subject? Do you do it instinctively, Jane, or is it deliberate? And if you are serious about fighting the real, the important, "left" anti-Semitism, why don't you discuss that unexpected failing in your "alternative" to the consistent Trotskyism of AWL? The, at first sight, odd thing about the "EM" is that it is so very feeble and inadequate as a democratic manifesto. Its weakness on "left" anti-Semitism is one aspect of that. I understand that part two of O'M's article deals with that aspect of it.
"Stupid Old Trot."
left anti-semitism
SOT: You might be right that the EM is weak on a-s. No on else has mentioned it but I'll to take another look. As you know very well such a document cannot hope to be totally sorted on all the issues it covers. It has to be roughly adequate, put down markers and nod in the right direction. For sure there will be a few comments like yours that maybe could be incorporated into a second draft, if indeed there is to be one. There is a case for another draft to clean up ommissions and confusions but its also important to start campaigning around the central themes. The literary exercise is less important than the action that follows.
For sure there isn't an 'issue' inside the EM on the question of Left a-s, so if you reckon you've found the polemical wedge you were looking for then you are wrong. Look elsewhere.
I eagerly await your second piece. Perhaps that will deal with a real point of difference - your attitude to humantiarian intervention, the issue you choose to masque by attacking on left a-s. Do you practice misdirection deliberatly or is the old Boshevik axiom - attack your opponent's strengths - so ingrained that you do it instinctively?
The group that is not a group?
One moment JA is assuring us that the EM grouping is not a "Group" in the sense that AWL is; the next she is dodging criticism of the EM by a) accusing me of raising the EM's startling defect on kitsch-left anti-semitism only as a "wedge" to drive into this group that isn't "really" "a group" into which "wedges" can be driven, and b) assuring us that even if the EM is deficient, that doesn't matter because privately they are all clear on what they mean to say!
That's all right then! We know what we know; and, moreover, we know what we mean and what we meant to say; and we know what we would have said if anyone had noticed the gap where an account of kitsch-left anti-semitism should be (in a document heavily concerned with the defects of the "left"; a document whose positive politics are largely arrived at as a negative imprint of the kitsch-left)!
Why would anyone raise this gap in the EM if not for some nefarious purpose, like driving wedges into their group? You think the text matters? Pah! "Such a document cannot hope to be totally sorted out on all issues which it covers"! Next thing you'll be accusing us of is issuing this only "roughly adequate" document as a full-fledged "Manifesto"! Anyone would think we had called it "The Euston Manifesto"! In any case, the "literary exercise" is less important than the action that follows! (Action?) Anyone would think our Manifesto.... sorry, our only roughly adequate document, proclaimed the primacy of reason in political disputes and honest statement of what is, on all occasions! It needs redrafting. This time we'll enlist the services of a recent Professor of Politics and a good Observer journalist - they're sure to do a good job! They know how to say what they mean and mean what they say!
The specific form taken by kitsch-left anti-Semitism is no small part of its malaise. Arguably, it is the root of many of the other things that are wrong with it. The absence of an account of the core kitsch-left anti-semitism in a polemic against that "left" is notable - indeed, startling!- and comment on it is a legitimate part of reasonable political discourse. Someone asking why there is this strange gap in the "EM" is entitled to a polite and proper answer. Where before JA had deflected discussion into a "dumb" dispute about who did what decades ago, she now, instead of giving us benighted Bolsheviks an object lesson in the techniques of rational discussion, uses bluster and evasion to avoid discussing the political point at issue. She wants to discuss my motive in pointing out the very strange gap! What does my motive in raising it matter? In so far as she touches on the political point, she paraphrases the excuse which used to reduce unfriendly observers to hilarity when the old Mandelite group, the IMG, would use it, as they repeatedly did, to explain away and excuse their endless progression of political confusions:- "a bad formulation, comrade!" Where does someone advocating reasoned discussion, rational politics, etc, get the right to respond as Ms A has - with a raw piece of Kitsch-Trot kiddie-town polemic?
Her assertion that the important difference between us is "humanitarian intervention", is on the same level of time-wasting obfuscation. Where there has been any approximation to "humanitarian intervention", as in Kosova, we have not denounced it. The difference is that we refuse to take political responsibility for, give political credence and political credit in advance to, or identify our own politics and political projects with, the powers making such interventions. They will intervene, if they do, for their own reasons, using their own methods, serving their own ends. The EM gives open-ended credit in advance to the USA, and, implicitly, even to the existing US regime. That too is spelled out in O'Mahony's article. Logically they would support US action against Iran. (J's own lucubrations on "humanitarian intervention" read like a bit of monologue by Peter Cook playing A L Wisty, leader and sole member of The World Domination League...)
Mechanically playing tit for tat, she asks me if it is instinctive with me to follow "the old Bolshevik axiom, attack your opponent's strength?" This is meant to be insulting? It is a basic axiom, of not only Bolshevik but of all serious discussion, to attack your opponent at the strongest and not at the weakest points! Otherwise you are not really engaging with the issues, only pretending to (as J is doing!). In context, I don't know what she is talking about. Jane and her friends in the Group-That-Is-Not-A-Group do feel strongly against "left" anti-semitism - that is something they learned in SO that they have not unlearned. But the EM's treatment of "Left" anti-semitism is only one of its "strong points" if we think not of the text presented to the world but - as JA, solipsistically, is doing - of their private opinions.
Stupid Old Trot
SOT
What's with the skit over describing the EM as 'roughly adequate'? That's what it is. Of course after reflection and time there are passages one would write differently and ommisions corrected. Its hard to imagine that not being the case. There is no shame in understanding a document could not be perfect.
On the substantial point - I agree with you. The left's attitude to Israel is the platform for left-specific anti-semitism. This isn't to say the left does not slip into other forms of anti-jewish racism, but I agree the EM would be made better by the inclusion of this point. Its ommission is a product of process not of political disagreement.
The AWL 'does not oppose humanitarian intervention.' Why not recognise the next step is to institutionalise a duty of rescue. That would be a positive reform and open to the same criticisms as other reforms - caveats like 'they do it for their own reasons' could apply to most reforms. Such a duty could indeed be a blank cheque for reactionary adventures but it need not necessarily be so. Its not inevitable. Why is this a Peter Cook-like position, an exercise in self-agrandisement? I'm looking to reform relations between states and use some of the existing instiutions to do so. From some angles, I would have thought including yours, it seems rather a modest reform and about as utopian as universal human rights or education or health and safety laws. It seems less utopian than making a revolution.
Utopian Revolution
I'm starting to get very confused by the EM side of this debate.
Jane what exactly do you mean by your last sentence "It seems less utopian than making a revolution" ? I've taken it to mean that you no longer believe that a revolution is necessary or possible. This would certainly fit with the rest of EM but not with everything else you have been saying.
Some people on the EM side are arguing that EM is a specifically non-socialist document because socialism is dead. Whereas yourself and Alan Johnson have been arguing that EM is consistent with socialism and necassary for socialists because the left has lost it's political bearings. Is it one or the other or both of these?
Wisty and Wells
On reflection, my invocation of Peter Cook's AL Wisty was too one-sided, and perhaps a little unjust to JA. The point is not self-aggrandisement, but crass unrealism - the savage contrast between Wisty in cloth cap and mac sitting alone on a park bench, on one side, and, on the other, his daft droning on in a Ken Livingstone-like nasal whine about taking over the world, or whatever. The situation is not improved much if the same sort of thing is coming from well-heeled and well-connected middle class fantasists.
I'd have been more accurate to have said that the Group That Is Not a Group was a cross between Wisty and H G Wells, with his fantasies on world government. Wells' starting point, like J's, was that it was so desperately needed. Yes, but the world doesn't work like that, J. Its easy for us to forget the relevant precedents.
The US intervention in Indo-China was never a piece of crude old-style imperialism. Those responsible for American involvement had all sorts of good liberal objectives, like establishing democracy, keeping the totalitarians at bay, etc. They were, almost certainly, more genuinely well-intentioned and purer in their motives than those - even if we concede the best case for them here - responsible for the invasion of Iraq. The nature of power politics, the methods of the US great power, brought disaster on everyone concerned, including the architects of the intervention. The US wound up committing crimes against the Vietnamese and others for which in a well-ordered H G Wells-ideal world, Kissinger would have been hanged as a war criminal and not awarded a Nobel Prize. America bombed Cambodia "into the stone age", as someone put it, and opened the way for the Khmer rouge...
Take the First World War. Even people on the right now say harsh things about that. In fact, a good case could be and was made out for seeing that war on the Allied side as a necessary international police operation against the "Prussianism" of Germany and Austro-Hungary. The Austrians committed vast slaughters against Serbians. Prussianism really was a sort of rough and distant approximation to the future Hitlerism (not, of course in its geno-imperialism.) Germany invaded other countries; they did commit atrocities. For example: the German army was marching in to occupy Louvain, having received the surrender. A single civilian sniped at the Germans from a roof top. In reprisal, they burned the Cathedral, and a library full of medieval and other ancient books.
The idea that the war to hammer back Germany was a necessary police action was accepted by those who for three and a half decades had built the Marxist movement in Britain. The Fabian socialist Wells accepted it. He, I believe, coined the slogan, "The War To End War". President Wilson of the USA sincerely believed in the principles he propounded about a world reorganises according to the principles of democracy and national self-determination (The same man conducted a reign of terror inside the US against opponents of the war, jailing, amongst many others, Eugene Debs...). What was wrong with these ideas?
In fact, those playing world policemen with Germany were themselves imperialists - those who had as distinct from those who aspired to have what they had, in the first place, Germany. When Germany was overcome, they carved up its colonies to their own advantage. They imposed a predatory peace on the defeated. People like HG Wells played only the role of foolish, ideologisingly mendacious spinners of fantasies around the hard real-politic of imperialist world politics (so to a degree did Woodrow Wilson himself...). In fact they functioned as a special sort of propagandist for one side in the great imperialist slaughter, which prepared the second great imperialist slaughter that started a quarter century after the first ended.
The US and Britain do what they will do for their own reasons, in their own way, with their own methods. Look at the bloody mess they have made in Iraq! Certainly, to blame them for the upsurge of sectarian conflict is to blame them for smashing the Saddam regime which held it down (and much else besides....) We don't need to do that to look with cold eyes on what they have achieved. Look at the large-scale economic looting, for instance...
Nonetheless, if they do something useful, humanitarian, etc, socialists - as distinct from the reactionary anti-Imperialist fuckwits - will note it, not denounce it, and be pleased at it. We won't surrender our overview, either of them or of ourselves and our responsibilities as socialists. We will not fall into the witch-doctor-dressing-in-green-to-make-the-Spring-come-back delusion that we can propound a "progressive" programme of action for them to carry out. We will not give them political credence or credit in advance, still less attempt to merge our political identity with theirs. The only people who would do that are people, like J and her friends, whose political identity has faded into invisibility.
Stupid Old Trot
what's not possible?
SOT
I have read your comments but still cannot find a definitional or determining reason why a capitalist world could not institutionalize a duty to protect and rescue and carry it out as effectively as circumstances allow. But still you seem to be only a step away from saying it is impossible for there to be such an international duty. On the other hand you seem to be only a step away from accepting it is possible. I take it you would not be against such a reform if it were acheived.
How many times has the left shouted, ‘this isn’t possible under capitalism’ only to look foolish when that very change is made? Loads of times. Think about the enormous changes seen over the last 100 years and tell me the left of 1906 would not have thought only the crazy would predict such progress.
A duty to protect and rescue might be one of these reforms: now it is denounced as idealistic or impossible perhaps because it is too big for the left to scope and/or because the left mistakenly thinks that capitalism is no longer able to accomodate progressive change.
The demand for a duty to protect is an achievable reform because, first as we agree, states can and do act outside the immediate, financial and strategic interests of the native bourgeoisie. (I refer you to the excitement caused by Mearsheimer & Walt's "Israel Lobby" when these right wing ‘neo-realists’ decided it was the fault of the Jews that America had acted outside these interests by invading Iraq).
And second, a close relative to the first, it is an achievable reform because as again we agree, states can do ‘something useful’
You write, ‘Nonetheless, if they do something useful, humanitarian, etc, socialists - as distinct from the reactionary anti-Imperialist fuckwits – we will note it, not denounce it, and be pleased at it. ….. We will not give them political credence or credit in advance….’
If institutionalizing the duty to protect and rescue amounts to ‘credit in advance’ then so be it. And ‘credit in advance’ to the state for the maintenance of other reforms and those yet to be won. Credit when the state carries out a duty to protect at home and in other countries.
****************
You write:
‘The US intervention in Indo-China was never a piece of crude old-style imperialism. Those responsible for American involvement had all sorts of good liberal objectives, like establishing democracy, keeping the totalitarians at bay, etc. They were, almost certainly, more genuinely well-intentioned and purer in their motives than those - even if we concede the best case for them here - responsible for the invasion of Iraq. The nature of power politics, the methods of the US great power, brought disaster on everyone concerned, including the architects of the intervention. The US wound up committing crimes against the Vietnamese and others for which in a well-ordered H G Wells-ideal world, Kissinger would have been hanged as a war criminal and not awarded a Nobel Prize....’
This is helpful. Where a political class is ‘well intentioned’ surely it is not bound to fail. There is no necessity of failure. (I’m not sure there is ever a necessity of anything in the sense I read you here.) Inside American Gvt and state there were huge rows about how best to topple Saddam. Some participants in those debates knew the eventually adopted strategy was likely to fail. These people lost the argument in the political rough and tumble, in real time, in actions between real people. They didn’t loose because the result was fixed in stone.
The mistakes made in Iraq should inform strategies for humanitarian intervention and may have set back the political cause of intervention. Straight Tories wanting stability for capitalism, isolationist reactionaries, the neo-realists and the Kissengarians alike will combine with yourself and fuckwit anti-imperialists to oppose calls for the institutionalization of a duty to protect and rescue. There is a debate to be had about the right strategy for wars of liberation, wars against totalitarianism. The world would be a better place if we knew how to liberate from tyranny and develop an emerging democracy.
The Call for Intervention
One problem with the call for intervention is that it can make left-wingers some of the most enthusiastic advocates of Western military action. How else can Western states intervene other than by coercive measures -- sanctions, bombing, invasion?
Calling for intervention leads to leftists lining up with the most fervent advocates of Western imperialism. Hence we have seen pro-war leftists as keen on seeing Iraq invaded as the neo-cons in and around the US government. So calls for intervention help chain the left to the ruling class, and to the most aggressive elements at that.
This happened before with the scrag end of the Shachtmanites, when the remnants of Shachtman's pals ended up supporting the Reaganites and other staunch Cold Warriors against Stalinism, whilst still calling themselves socialists.
Logically, the pro-war left should be agitating for Western intervention against Saudi Arabia, Burma, Iran, China, sundry Central Asiatic states, North Korea, on the grounds that these states' governments regularly violate the democratic rights of their citizens. This is justified in the Euston Manifesto: 'But if the state itself violates this common life in appalling ways, its claim to sovereignty is forfeited and there is a duty upon the international community of intervention and rescue.'
Neocon challenge?
There is an interesting historical argument to be had about who changed the agenda and Jane may be giving the neocons a little bit too much credit here giving that the real tipping points were Bosnia and Kosova back when the neocons were a long way from the levers of power.
But the fact of the matter is that what international capital really wants above all else is stability and that is better served by Kissingerian realpolitik than hare-brained neocon-led adventures.
That form of stability gave us genocide after genocide in the 1980s and 1990s and the left desperately needs to develop a new model of humanitarian intervention to set against the hopelessly flawed neocon one that has produced the Iraqi mess and the completely useless 'leave it to the UN' one that preceded it.
Judging by the documents on this site the AWL once had excellent debates around these issues in relation to Kosova and East Timor.
Its a shame that you can't rise again to that level instead of babbling about doppelgangers and neocons and quibbling over who was responsible for doing what in the AWL or SO in the early 1980s (talk about an argument over the ownership of a corpse).
Wisty and Wells
SOT:
'Well-heeled and well-connnected middle class fantasists' - this is just descending to ad hominem insults in place of argument - and in any case this one applies to the membership of every far left group I've ever been involved with.
Trots and other left groups predominantly recruit students, students are predominantly middle and upper class and remain so however long they affect scouse or mockney accents - this is just a statement of fact.
I am sure I am not the only person to have noticed that the far left found it much easier to recruit students back in the 1970s when there were far fewer of them and they were more homogenously upper-middle class than now when 50% of school leavers are being pushed into some form of higher education and the student body is rather more representative of the general population.
As for Wisty I seem to remember his having a cap which - to convolute your analogy further and introduce another irrelevant reference to ancient UK TV comedy - would fit most leftists I've met over the years far better than Keir Hardie's cap would.
Why drag Wells into it? - there are many better examples of orthodox Marxists going defencist in 1914-18 - almost all of the leaders of the Second International outside of Russia for a start - and these were all able to produce chapter and verse from Marx and Engels to justify their position.
In fact it was generally the despised reformists like Bernstein, Hardie, Jaures and MacDonald whose bourgeois humanism drove them into taking a stand against the war while the Marxists were among the most enthusiastic flag wavers in 1914.
As for Wells even Foot's ridiculous book makes it pretty clear that he was a convinced authoritarian, racist, statist and militarist (he invented wargaming as a hobby and delighted in descriptions of futuristic warmachines) well before 1914 so it was hardly surprising he became an enthusiastic warmonger.
In any case this was a direct war between rival imperialisms and has little relevance to Iraq.
You're on stronger ground with Vietnam but I can see several weaknesses:
1) Whatever America's formal line on defending democracy, the regimes it installed in Saigon were variously disguised dictatorships and it never allowed genuine elections in which communists and other opponents could participate as the US did in Iraq (albeit a year too late).
2) US and ARVN atrocities in Vietnam were on such a scale that even the most enthusiastic liberals sickened of them and turned against the war - American atrocities in Iraq while they have taken place have been on a far lesser scale than the daily atrocities committed by the 'resistance' and for all its grotesque incompetence the US is seriously seeking to minimise civilian casualties and keep its troops under control.
3) However wrong we may have been, in 1968 one could still reasonably have illusions that the Viet Cong, Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge represented a better and more progressive future for Indochina than the status quo - in 2006 reactionary anti-imperialist fuckwit is too kind a term for anyone who has similar illusions about the Iraqi Resistance or who cannot see the simple demographics that if the US precipitately withdraws its continuation will lead to the genocide rather than victory of the Sunni minority.
4) In any case to my knowledge nobody in the EMG supported the US in Vietnam (or would have supported it if they had been old enough to take a view) and this is a fundamental division between us and genuine neocons.
Turning to the last paragraph.
Your first two sentences are an excellent statement of what the socialist position with regard to bourgeois governments should be.
As regards the third sentence propounding progressive programmes for the bourgeoisie to carry out is in fact what Socialists do all the time - every demo, every demand directed at our governments is exactly this - and to be ruthlessly honest the reason we carry on doing it is more that it makes us feel good and that it communicates our position to a wider audience than because we generally expect our demands to be met.
To 'give them political credence or credit in advance' is pretty meaningless unless you assume that the defining characteristic of all socialist demands is that we should never expect them to be ever met even in part (as any such expectation requires 'credence or credit in advance').
'Merge our political identity with theirs' would only be true if the EM was so vague that it allowed neocons to support it - rather than their stating that they disagree with it radically on domestic and economic policy as for instance Kristol has done.
Your ultimate problem is that the EMG is primarily reformist and not neocon - treat them as reformists and some meaningful dialogue might be possible, treat them as neocons and there will be nothing other than ritualised episodes of name-calling.
Martin
I've been off line for a few days and missed this question.
I am a reformist - that's obvious isnt it? It seems a very long time since I deliberately said anything that could be taken to indicate revolutionary politics.
The EM has a limited scope, that is deliberate. Its scope does not demand agreement that production should be socialised. However, I am a socialist and think the EM is a helpful contribution to the debate amongst the left and the liberal left.
A socialist can agreee with many things that are not socialistic - like campaigns for wage claims or trail by jury or a million other things. Have I got your point? Not sure I have.
Response to Jane
"What is your alternative to the US and the Brits backing reactionary regimes in oder to preserve 'stability'"
Working to elect left-wing governments - arising out of mass movements -- that won't back reactionary regimes.
"Do you think the current Iraqi situation was inevitable?"
Yes. Absolutely. The idea of the Bush administration liberating anyone is insanity.
"Do you think impossible, or just undesirable for the bourgeoisie to intervene to prevent genocide and tyranny? Is this an eternal, universal truth?"
It's pretty damned close to impossible. When bourgeois-government intervention does prevent genocide and tyranny it's at best a happy accident.
Its social democracy not stalinism...
John doesn’t understand the Euston Manifesto. He looks to see if it’s the inverse of the SWP – but that doesn’t quite fit. He twiddles it around to see if the language is a clue. He’s right; some phrases do bare the CP brand, but is such choice of words loaded? He looks to see if the EM is a Stalinoid variant. That doesn’t fit too well either.
Actually, it’s very simple, there is no great mystery: the EM is reformist. Social democratic. Reformist.
John is right to see the EM’s call for Humanitarian Intervention as the most important difference, ‘in practical politics’, between the social democracy of the EM and the Trotskyism of the AWL. If this needs further spelling out then here it is:
Bourgeois states intervening (judiciously, cautiously) to prevent genocide and rapacious tyranny is good, to be supported, to be called for. The world would be a better place if an association of states committed to rescue.
The EM wants to see an international commitment to defend and rescue, John insists, ‘In practice this means open-ended support for intervention by the USA’. I don’t know why John thinks this was meant. His conclusion is a big leap and an unjustified one.
The world would be better if there was an international duty of care. It’s like health and safety legislation or mass education - a reform to be wrested from states. (To me it makes up a package with no immigration control and support for the international court of human rights). It’s odd that you Trotskyists are against such a grand political reform which could make a huge difference – the difference between life and death - but with great gusto demands far smaller reforms like increasing the level of national minimum wage.
The AWL knows that at any given moment troops, US or otherwise, can prevent mass death. Why not follow that through? Why not call for, anticipate the need for intervention? Why not make that insight a political reality and institutionalise the duty of care?
To bring this to life – imagine living in the Sudan. I would want British socialists to demand states come to my aid and bomb the lines or whatever the modern equivalent. It would seem utterly wild that you abandon me because there isn’t a workers’ militia to hand. Good sense surely dictates that the absence of your preferred tool, (a workers’ militia or the army of a workers’ state), should not condemn hundreds, hundreds of thousands, and in other places maybe millions to death. There is no workers’ army to hand and so another tool will have to serve. The working class is not the only agency able to make progressive change. Change that you agree with. The state and its instruments can do a positive job.
Instead of opposing the very idea of intervention, maintain a presumption against intervention but at least test it – case by case. Make a case by case judgement-call after answering these sorts of questions:
Will a proposed intervention prevent genocide or mass death?
Can intervention overthrow a fascist?
What are the chances of success?
Is there an exit strategy?
Will it make matters worse?
If the answers indicate intervention would improve the situation then support it. Support it with as many reservations as you like, distrust the ‘hidden motivations’ of Gvts if there are any, play the armchair general and doubt the competence of the army if you must, but to rule out supporting a genocide-denying intervention because it might advance the strategic or military aims of the US or of a disembodied ‘imperialism’ is downright mucky (and its miggery too).
This is how we anti-Iraq invasion leftists in the EM find common cause with pro-war leftists. It was a judgement call about the advisability of the invasion: it was not a matter of principle. As you say it was and still is a remote possibility that bourgeois democracy can result from the invasion.
********************
‘The best bits are ours and the rest is junk.’ is a fair précis of John’s opinion of the EM. This is the third article from Solidarity about the Euston Manifesto. Until today I didn’t know what the AWL thought about the idea of a left and liberal-left alliance dedicated to preventing the left from eating itself. I knew your objections to the EM (mainly that it isn’t a socialist programme) but didn’t know what you make of the idea of the project. Now you make it clear:
‘Doppelganger: At least Euston’s popular front with “egalitarian liberals” is better than a popular front with clerical fascists.
Is it? It might be, I suppose, but in both cases, the ally to the right limits what the accommodating “Popular Front” “left” can do. For practical purposes the grouping can go no further than its most right-wing element agrees to. That is as true for the Travellers’ ideological popular front with liberals and conservatives as it is for the SWP’s electoral and political popular front with Islamic clerical-fascists. ‘
Now I know. The EM is a popular front and you doubt that an alliance with the decent minded liberal (who does not want to socialize production but is a democrat) is preferable to running around with clerical fascists. ‘It might be’!
I was shocked to hear such equivocation from a soft-MIG, but from you? If this is to be taken at face-value then you have lost your marbles. Far better to be prisoner of decent minded liberalism than hostage to clerical fascism. But there are no prisoners. The EM isn’t a trot group, there are no prisoners. Just as the EM is not a ‘group’ in your sense of the word, neither is the EM a popular front. It might be an ‘ideological popular front’ but I can only guess what that might be. The EM does not deny workers’ organizations institutional or ideologically independence from Gvts. It is an alliance that a decent liberal might be happy with. It’s a social democratic project. Perhaps social democratic is what you mean by an ‘ideological popular front’.
John is equally wrong to think the EM is simply shaped by the SWP. He isn’t looking at the big picture. The SWP as the organisational embodiment of idiot-anti-imperialism is certainly a problem – not particularly because of their own strength but in the manner of the old CP. They infect the world around them and provide ideas and justifications and sometimes energy for the Guardianistas. For sure we are insulted by them but the now-conventional left wisdoms are the bigger problem. It is the erosion of the liberal values and standards (which underpin socialism) amongst the left-intelligentsia that most motivates me. That is where the bulwark against cultural relativism and anti-semitism ‘should’ be found. And that is where it’s most lacking. If the EM can undermine the complacency of this section of the intelligentsia, change their minds or discredited them then we have done well.
***************
Who owns what? John recognises some of the ideas of the EM and claims them as his own. In the first significant para he quotes from Socialist Organiser 447, 10 May 1990 to show he was first to catch onto the idea that much of the left is vile.
‘We live in a labour movement grown spiritually cross-eyed from the long pursuit of realpolitik and the operation of double standards, a movement ideologically sick and poisoned. In terms of moral ecology, the left and the labour movement is something of a disaster area because of the long-term use of methods and arguments which have corrupted the consciousness of the working class. The most poisonous root of that corruption was the Stalinist movement”.
For anyone who doesn’t know, a few of us, then in our late teens and 20’s were in the AWL and its antecedents. We worked at the Centre and or we sat on leading committees. We created the group’s student work. These were our politically formative years and the years when the group worked out distinctive positions on anti-semitism, idiot anti-imperialism, of the potential role of Parliament and Gvt in a British transformation. That’s when we realised it’s the job of socialists to defend, critique and promote liberalism and bourgeois democracy and to uphold the idea of truth.
However, the AWL does not hold the franchise on these ideas: in any circumstances that would be absurd. Here it is particularly ugly. At that time we all lived or died by them. They were not developed in the abstract, in the brain of an isolated, clever man, but during the scraps of the 80’s. For example, Feminism or Femocracy – when we first fought and lost to cultural relativism. For example, the banning of Sunderland Poly’s Jewish Society when we first fought and beat left anti-semitism. Simon Pottinger and I led these fights. You led the resistance to the idiot-anti-imperialism of the left which supported Galtieri in the Falkland’s War.
If there is to be a claim on ideas then the credit for making sense out of our collective, freaked-out horror at cultural relativism and the Jew-hating are as much ours as yours.
But this is a dumb argument. There is no copyright on ideas and really it doesn’t make sense for a propaganda group to complain when outsiders agree with it. What is more important and relevant to the core of this argument is that many other political traditions already knew what we were discovering. We thought it was so smart to break with kitch-trotskyism but in other traditions already knew what we were so pleased to work out. Labour’s right knew what we said in the small print – that a vote for joining the EEC was better than a no vote; decades before us Left Zionism knew that the 2 states position was right. Everyone in the world who wasn’t a Stalinist or a blind-folded Deutcherite or us knew that there were consequences of recognising Sweden was a better place to live than the USSR. Because of our insistence on staying within the cannon of Trotskyism it took us until perhaps ‘83 to start shouting that the Provos should disarm.
We praised ourselves for realising what the rest of the world already knew.
It's not what you do it's the way that you do it.
Jane, your defence of hanging about with a bunch of rightwing hacks is about as convincing as England's back four. No doubt, right now (at least in the minds of Jane's cabal) the EM "is where the action is" and contains all the elements that must be intoxicating to this particular group of ex-AWLers: academic stamp of approval, a few well known journos, a few Labour Party malcontents from way back when.
How crap is that?
careless questions
'How crap is that?' Well, given as you ask, I will answer. I'm sorry to say its very crap. But you must have half known that when you posed the question. I'm surprised you didn't catch onto yourself and self-censor.
Why don't you answer the points:
1.Humanitarian intervention is a progressive demand. Do you agree?
2.Liberalism, the idea of truth and bourgeoise democractic norms need defending against a nihilistic left.Do you agree?
3. Trotskyism rendered the even the AWL, (obviously the least Talmudic of the Trotskyist groups) blind to the insights of other traditions. Looking backwards, or inwards into the texts of Trotsky hinders sizing up the needs of today. Do you agree?
Yul Brinner rides again
I haven't been in the AWL for some time so I don't think it's fair to them for me to defend this or that part of Sean's set of articles. For what it's worth I think the AWL gets most things right most time (I'm sure they'll be relieved by that).
What I don't understand how a small group of ex-AWLers - actually ex-SOers would be more accurate - end up resurfacing, bound together by something like the EM - other than friendship. It made me think of the film The Magnificent Seven Rides Again, but I couldn't work out who was Yul Brinner. As for self censorship i thought i was pretty restrained. I mean I could have said that I thought it was crass to suggest that the EMers had played any significant role in the AWL's political development. The national question, Eastern Europe, attitude to the Labour Party, TU/workplace activity, South Africa. I could go on. OK I know very well than the template for student work was worked out in the mid-80s, but a lot was nicked from NOLS and the CP and the collapse of the IMG presented us with a great chance. Again I could go on, but one thing I learnt from some of our later day defenders of bourgeois norms was to get out when you're ahead.
Jealous guy
You are right to say those of us who are involved in the EM are more ex-SO than ex-AWL. Well, in a sense you are right. Timewise I'm pretty sure we were in the AWL, maybe we were not (perhaps we are I-CL, WSL, SO and not AWL) it doesn't matter much because politically it is more accurate to say we are ex SO.
If you want to get into an argument not about South Africa or the National Question as a whole - I made no claim to have been central to those policy developments - but about specifically the origins of the group's student work, cultural relativism and anti-semtism then we can. But its probably best not to.
Why dont you answer the political points instead? Here they are again.
1.Humanitarian intervention is a progressive demand. Do you agree?
2.Liberalism, the idea of truth and bourgeoise democractic norms need defending against a nihilistic left.Do you agree?
3. Trotskyism rendered the even the AWL, (obviously the least Talmudic of the Trotskyist groups) blind to the insights of other traditions. Looking backwards, or inwards into the texts of Trotsky hinders sizing up the needs of today. Do you agree?
Answers
1. Solidarity is better than intervention. A 'demand' is placed on a particular agency, and it matters who is to carry out this humanitarian intervention. 'Bush' and 'humanitarian' are two words that do not sit comfortably together, to put it mildly.
2. Liberalism needs defending against the right - including reactionary theocratic movements, and also including the US Republicans who routinely use 'liberal' as an insult.
It is the genuine left which needs to defend itself against the 'nihilistic left', which is a bit too pathetic to pose a genuine threat to liberalism but big and crap enough to threaten the political compass of the left. Allying with the right is not the way to do it.
3. Interesting. I'll have a think about that. But don't you have to be careful than in considering the "insights" of "other traditions" you don't take on the crap aspects of their politics too?
Liberalism and pathetic nihilists
Of course liberalism needs defending against the US right. You know I know that.
You say 'solidarity is better than intervention.' Solidarity might indeed be better than intervention, but doesn't it depend on the nature of the problem? How would solidarity have defended those slaughtered in Darfur? It wouldn't. It needs states, of whatever class nature to step in to rescue. I think states committing to rescue would be a positive reform. It doesn't seem right to abandon people because the help they need is greater than the solidarity of the labour movement. In these circumstances its not a choice between solidarity or intervention. Only one, internvention, has a chance of working. The self-activity of the labour movement itself is not able to sort out the problem - there needs to be a political answer and that seems to me to be a duty of rescue. The labour movement should fight for Gvts to accept this duty.
Unfortunatly, I think you are wrong to say, 'the nihilistic left is a bit too pathetic to pose a genuine threat to liberalism but big enough to threaten...the left' .
If the ideas of idiot-anti-imperialism or nihilism (or whatever you want to call it) were contained within the SWP and WP etc then you would be right and there wouldn't be much to worry about. But those ideas go beyond the Trot/hard-left ghetto. Its very serious that the Guardian promotes the polite, respectable end of this nihilism. Its very serious when the academics' union lurches towards anti-semitism. These politics undermine liberalism, they corrode the public discourse and drive down standards. This is happening right now.
And I dont want to be a drama queen but add nihilism and anti-semitism and on-the-run liberalism and its all rather ugly.
Reformist? - guilty as charged
As a (late) signatory to the Euston Manifesto who has never belonged to the AWL I feel something of a gatecrasher to what appears to be a bit of a family row.
The fundamental issue here appears to be an inability to draw real distinctions between classes and political positions - for a start 'right-wing' is not an insult (or at least not just an insult) it is a political term.
There are certainly people in the Manifesto group who to my mind are too Blairite or New Labour or centrist or even liberal - however I have yet to meet any who can be meaningfully described actual right-wingers (and trust me I do know a right-winger when I see one).
With one or two odd exceptions by and large they are reformists and social-democrats - as die-hard Trotskyists that's never going to be quite good enough for you but at least you should call them what they are.
Similarly if you are going to invoke that hoary old term 'bourgeois-democratic' you need to put in its proper Marxist context.
For Marx and Engels (if not for Lenin and Trotsky) bourgeois democracy was not just something to be either derided or taken for granted but something to be fought for and defended as an indispensable precondition of a successful workers movement.
I am sure I do not have to remind John of texts like:
"Every victory by reaction impedes social development and inevitably delays the time when the workers will be victorious. Every victory by the bourgeoisie over reaction on the other hand is at the same time in one sense a victory for the workers, contributes to the final downfall of capitalist rule and brings the moment closer when the workers will defeat the bourgeoisie".
and
"to drive the Party of Progress on to make real progress, as far as possible; to compel it to make its own programme more radical and to keep to it; to chide it and ridicule it mercilessly for all its inconsistencies and weaknesses"
Engels, the Prussian Military Question and the German Workers party http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/02/12.htm
So the task is always to keep pushing the bourgeoisie towards greater and greater democracy until finally the conditions are created for the working class to take power.
140 years on it is profoundly depressing that we are still at the stage of having to decide where we stand in a series of battles between a resurgent bourgeoisie and various forms of reaction, but that's the card history and our own past incompetence has dealt us.
The Euston Manifesto is not perfect but it says a bunch of things that needed to be said and while I don't believe it's not the foundation stone of yet another new left maybe it can be one slightly faltering step towards rebuilding the old one.
Right wingers?
Actually, the last time I looked at the EM website - admittedly, several weeks ago - one of the messages of support was posted by someone describing himself as an "unashamed neo-con" or words to that effect.
Interesting
All kinds of people sign all kinds of things. Some make mischief.
"For anyone who doesn’t
"For anyone who doesn’t know, a few of us, then in our late teens and 20’s were in the AWL and its antecedents. We worked at the Centre and or we sat on leading committees. We created the group’s student work. These were our politically formative years and the years when the group worked out distinctive positions on anti-semitism, idiot anti-imperialism, of the potential role of Parliament and Gvt in a British transformation."
is what you said Jane and I don't accept for a minute the enhanced role you ascribe to yourselves in the history of the AWL tendency. Not sure what I'm supposed to be jealous of either - it all strikes me as a bit bloody sad.
Read it again Paul
'For anyone who doesn’t know, a few of us, then in our late teens and 20’s were in the AWL and its antecedents. We worked at the Centre and or we sat on leading committees. We created the group’s student work. These were our politically formative years and the years when the group worked out distinctive positions on anti-semitism, idiot anti-imperialism, of the potential role of Parliament and Gvt in a British transformation. That’s when we realised it’s the job of socialists to defend, critique and promote liberalism and bourgeois democracy and to uphold the idea of truth.
However, the AWL does not hold the franchise on these ideas: in any circumstances that would be absurd. Here it is particularly ugly. At that time we all lived or died by them. They were not developed in the abstract, in the brain of an isolated, clever man, but during the scraps of the 80’s. For example, Feminism or Femocracy – when we first fought and lost to cultural relativism. For example, the banning of Sunderland Poly’s Jewish Society when we first fought and beat left anti-semitism. Simon Pottinger and I led these fights. You led the resistance to the idiot-anti-imperialism of the left which supported Galtieri in the Falkland’s War.
If there is to be a claim on ideas then the credit for making sense out of our collective, freaked-out horror at cultural relativism and the Jew-hating are as much ours as yours.'
Read it again and you will see what I'm claiming.
Read the whole post and you will alao see that I think this is a dumb argument. The positions we thought were so clever were all readily understood outside Trotskyism. That's the key point.
To put it bluntly...
Anyone who wants the Bush administration to intervene anywhere in the world, who thinks that the Bush administration can make any situation better rather than worse, needs to have his or her fucking head examined. Honestly. Get a fucking clue. To see Alan Johnson blathering on about the wisdom of Paul Berman -- it's just embarassing. It was absolutely predictable that the Iraq war would lead to an immense humanitarian tragedy. Any "leftist" who thought otherwise was and is an idiot who should never speak or write another public word. And for an erstwhile Marxist like Johnson to be interviewing Berman, taking him seriously...it almost makes me cry.
No socialist should be making peace with such people. They are no more part of the sane left than are the SWP or any others who want to make common cause with Political Islamists. They, like Hook and Shachtman and any number of others who signed up for the Cold War, are political enemies, and should be treated as such. The Euston Manifesto is a peace offering from putative anti-war lefists to pro-war "leftists". But no such offering should ever have been made. Shame, shame, shame on those who would make such an offering.
Reaching out to "liberals and rational conservatives" or whatever the language was? You'll have to explain to me how this differs from reaching out to strikebreakers. (Yes yes you only want to reach out to those who think that it's ok for unions to exist -- then explain to me why there are anti-union conservatives from the Weekly Standard praising the EM!)
USRed (like Barry Finger) is right
We have the ridiculous spectacle of another self-indulgent and bizarre article by "John" of the AWL (whose writing style is remarkably similar to Sean M. for its incoherence) that purportedly criticizes the Euston Manifesto (and is correct as far as it goes, to the extent it's understandable) but agrees with it far too much on the nature of imperialism. The only sensible comment on this thread is USRed's principled politics and Barry Finger (elsewhere on this site) courageously defending the notion of troops out of Iraq. The Euston people are not wrong when they suggest there are a lot of similarities between the AWL and their politics. Rank and file AWL members might want to deeply reflect on that and consider USRed and Barry's eloquent arguments. It might also help to specifically reconsider this whole notion of imperialism as progressive, a major concession that "John" makes to the Eustonites. Why not study the articles in New Politics (including an excellent piece by Aronson in the current issue) or the insights of Hillel Ticktin on decline? I think they provide a firmer footing, whether one's approach is social democratic or revolutionary socialist, to understanding the modern world and the need to insist on troops out of the disaster in Iraq that was entirely foreseeable.