HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK
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Did the left lose the war?
Kabul fell in five weeks. The Islamic world has not erupted. So did the
left get it all wrong - and does it matter?
Andy Beckett
Guardian
Thursday January 17, 2002
Guy Taylor is a political activist of great height and confidence. He
used to be an organiser for the Socialist Workers Party. Nowadays he is
a prominent member of Globalise Resistance, a loose network of British
anti-capitalists. Since it was set up last February, he has loomed at
demonstrations outside arms fairs and meetings of international leaders
with his appropriately cropped hair and small, intense glasses. He talks
in a clear, level voice, loud and relentless as a stand-up comedian,
always optimistic, never stuck for an argument, throwing in the odd joke
but without a flicker of self-doubt. In anti-capitalist circles, Taylor
and his organisation have become so ubiquitous some rival groups call
them "Monopolise Resistance".
Since September 11, however, Taylor has felt the need to adjust his
political behaviour in a small way. A few months before the attacks on
America, while taking part in the protests against last summer's
European Union summit in Gothenburg, he bought a new T-shirt. It said
"terrorist" across the front. He says he wasn't trying to look menacing
- political violence in his view "achieves very little" - but he thought
the T-shirt was a neat statement against the official tendency, then
just becoming apparent, to brand all anti-globalisation activists as
potential bombers and gunmen. He wore it on and off for the rest of the
summer. Then, in mid-September, it stopped feeling so clever.
He can't quite explain why. "It just seemed..." He pauses.
"Inappropriate?" He smiles a little. "You don't want to... pick
arguments... offend people unnecessarily." His office is in Mile End,
after all, not Hampstead. After several more pauses, enough time for
him, usually, to summarise the entire workings of contemporary
capitalism, he finally arrives at a position. "I just thought I should
be a bit more careful."
These are delicate times for the left, in Britain and elsewhere. First,
two of its traditional enemies, the Pentagon and New York's financial
district, were bloodily assaulted. Then, the leaders of this revolt
against American dominance of the world were revealed, almost certainly,
to be religious radicals of considerable ideological ambiguousness. Then
the traditional instruments of American oppression in the eyes of its
critics - bombing and the use of dubious allies - were deployed in
response, with apparent success. And a solid majority of the British
public approved, as did the great majority of left-of-centre politicians
in Britain and abroad.
Immediately before September 11, the outlook had seemed reasonably
favourable for the left. Around the world, the long business boom of the
past decade seemed to be collapsing under the weight of its own
contradictions.
In America, George Bush's government of tycoons and missile enthusiasts
had just lost its senate majority and its momentum. In Britain, Tony
Blair's attempt to convert the Labour party and the public to
free-market thinking appeared to be struggling. Then there were the
failings of Railtrack and the Private Finance Initiative, the swelling
profile of anti-corporate protests since Seattle, the polemics against
international trade and sweatshops selling well in high street book
shops, the apparent revival of militancy in some unions - "Anglo-Saxon
capitalism was in a state," says Tariq Ali, the veteran leftwinger and
critic of America. "Bush was virtually on the floor. Now they've been
able to cover it up. From every progressive point of view, September 11
has been a disaster."
In November, an editorial in the British leftwing magazine Red Pepper
spoke of "a widespread feeling of powerlessness, even paralysis. The
daily news makes you want to retreat back under the sheets." In a new
book rushed out since the autumn's events, simply titled 9-11, Noam
Chomsky, the dissident American academic who is probably the biggest
influence on modern anti-capitalists, writes gloomily: "It is certainly
a setback... Terrorist atrocities are a gift to the harshest and most
repressive elements on all sides, and are sure to be exploited to
accelerate the agenda of militarisation, regimentation, reversal of
social democratic programmes, transfer of wealth to narrow sectors, and
undermining democracy." Taylor puts it more plainly: "Standing
protesting outside Gap is a bloody strange thing to do when civilians
are being killed in Afghanistan."
Other people have been less polite. Within days of the deaths in New
York and Washington, anyone, it seemed, who had ever been publicly
critical of America or globalisation suddenly found themselves accused
of complicity with Osama bin Laden - and worse. In the British press
alone, they have been described as "defeatist" and "unpatriotic",
"nihilist" and "masochistic", and both "Stalinist" and "fascist"; as "a
Prada-Meinhof gang", "the handmaidens of Osama" and "an auxiliary to
dictators"; as "limp", "lofty", "wobbly", "heartless and stupid", and
"worm-eaten by Soviet propaganda"; as full of "loose talk", "wilful
self-delusion" and "intellectual decadence"; as a collection of "useful
idiots", "dead-eyed zombies", and "people who hate people".
The sheer fury and contempt of these sentiments has seemed to go beyond
the usual name-calling of British politics. "I've never felt anything
like it," says one anti-globalisation commentator, who would prefer not
to be named. "The moment you put your head above the parapet, the
pressure is just extraordinary. It does knock the fight out of you a
bit."
And this new hostility towards the left has come not just from the
places you might expect - the more warlike tabloids, the usual
red-baiting columnists, and the 10 Downing Street press office, which
last month published a list of journalists - including plenty from the
Guardian - who had got the war "wrong". It has come from well-known
radicals such as the journalist Christopher Hitchens, and the cabinet's
token socialist, Clare Short.
In early October, the left-leaning literary fortnightly the London
Review of Books published a selection of unexceptional remarks, by its
own standards, about America's global status. This provoked a blizzard
of hostile letters that has only recently abated. This evening, the
prominent left-of-centre think tank, the Institute for Public Policy
Research, is holding a public discussion about whether September 11 has
made the left "irreconcilably divided".
Some of the energy has appeared to go out of recent anti-capitalist
protests. In Washington in late September, a demonstration intended to
rival Genoa and Seattle shrank to a few thousand people marching
tentatively for world peace. In Brighton in early October, a promised
blockade of the Labour party conference became a wet crowd herded around
by the police.
At Doha in Qatar in November, the World Trade Organisation was able to
meet almost unmolested, and America's trade representative was able to
claim that the summit had "removed the stain of Seattle". When the heads
of state of the EU met in Brussels last month, most newspapers gave the
accompanying protests barely a paragraph.
Tariq Ali sits at his kitchen table in Highgate in north London as a
cold drizzle spatters the windows. He has been opposing America and
international capital since the Vietnam war. He says a little wearily:
"September 11 and its aftermath have shown that the whole world is the
United States empire. The Americans just do what they want. The
intelligentsia all over Europe are pro-American now. They see the US as
the only emancipatory project in town."
Not completely convincingly, he argues that the "naked power" of
America's response to September 11, and its openly self-interested
behaviour over Star Wars and environmental questions in recent years,
"is easier to deal with". He sips his tea. "American imperialism has
always been an imperialism that doesn't dare to speak its name. Now all
that crap is gone."
He is writing a book exploring the similarities between Bush and Bin
Laden, and their ambitions to impose their aggressive, religiously-based
ideas on the rest of the world. Between chapters he has left his desk to
address public meetings about the hypocrisies of Bush's widening,
seemingly relentless "war on terrorism". It sounds like hard work. "You
just try and raise morale," he says.
But then he adds something interesting. "The bulk of the people there,
about 70%, I'd say, have been between 18 and 25." He goes on: "The
anti-war movement in Britain is larger than anywhere except Italy." And,
puzzlingly for those who have been celebrating the demise of the left
since September, this appears to be the case.
At the first big British demonstration against the war in Afghanistan,
in London in mid-October, somewhere between 20,000 (the police's
estimate) and 50,000 people (the organisers' estimate) marched from Hyde
Park Corner to Trafalgar Square. It was an unexpectedly warm day, but
that did not sufficiently explain why columns of demonstrators were
still arriving in the square over an hour after the speeches had begun.
A confident coalition was visibly forming around the fountains and
statues: between sunburnt students and respectable-looking young British
Asians, well-dressed Londoners in their 30s and wispy old ladies from
CND.
On the next London march, on a much colder afternoon in November, the
organisers counted double the number of protesters. The police, as they
tend to, insisted that there were only 15,000, but the significance of
both demonstrations was clear by then: far more people than expected
were prepared to actively oppose a war that, according to the government
and most conventional wisdom, was so morally straightforward as to
require little debate. And this anti-war coalition looked remarkably
like the alliance that had been opposing globalisation prior to
September 11.
At Globalise Resistance, the old computer that occupies about a quarter
of the office holds a list of 2,500 email addresses. Taylor assumed that
when his organisation came out against the war, at least "30 or 40" of
these people would cancel their subscriptions to Globalise Resistance.
No one broke ranks until mid-December, and no one else has done since.
"Most people have taken to this anti-war position like a duck to water,"
he says, with a satisfied activist's grin.
If you look at the websites, magazines and flyers for events that the
modern left uses, it is easy to see why. Apologias for Bin Laden and
international terrorism are conspicuous by their absence.
Plenty of radical activities - Stop Esso Day, candlelit vigils for
asylum seekers, the Anarchist Walking Group ("exercise, discussions,
trespassing") - continue as normal, without reference to September 11.
And where the events of that day and their consequences are mentioned,
they have been neatly slotted into existing ways of thinking: the "war
on terrorism" is "the military face of globalisation", or "old imperial
power and nothing new"; America's current ability to win seemingly any
war is the problem, not the solution; poor countries continue to be
pushed around by rich ones.
There is evidence, moreover, that such analyses meet with public
approval. Readers of the Big Issue recently chose Paul Marsden, the
Labour MP who defected to the Liberal Democrats over his opposition to
the war, as their "Hero of the Year" for 2001.
Talking now to the editor of Red Pepper, Hilary Wainwright, you get a
sense of someone recovering their ideological poise. She is dismissive
of the onslaught on the left: "Straw men have been set up. Hitchens, who
is a friend really, said the left was not sufficiently critical of
September 11." She looks politely exasperated."The left has been
attacking the Taliban, and terrorism as the solution to anything, for
ever."
But recent British history suggests that a blameless record on past
foreign policy questions may be no defence for leftwingers accused of
dithering in wartime. George Orwell began the modern tradition of
abusing pacifists and war sceptics during the second world war. In 1942,
he wrote:"Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist." Orwell's argument was
that Britain's enemies were so politically and morally unattractive, in
this instance, that the usual function of the left to question and rebel
had become inappropriate. That Orwell was a famous leftwinger and
usually a critic of governments has given life to this patriotic logic
ever since.
"During Suez, Nasser was Hitler," says Ali. "During the Falklands,
Galtieri was Hitler, then Saddam Hussein became Hitler, then Milosevic.
Now it is the Taliban and al-Qaida." In each case, the character of the
regime Britain has confronted has been used to justify the silencing of
dissent. And because the British left generally did support the second
world war, references to that conflict have always won over enough
leftwingers during these subsequent, less justifiable wars to give the
impression that the British left is split and in crisis. Hitchens is
simply the latest radical to want to sound like a tough but righteous
Orwell.
In other ways, too, the British political landscape since September 11
is actually quite a familiar one. As during the Gulf war and the
Falklands, there has been only hasty debate in Parliament about the
conflict. A feeling of inevitability has accompanied each military
escalation. Yet the proportion of the public opposed to each has held up
at between a fifth and a third. Meanwhile, the successes claimed by the
soldiers and their supporters have steadily come to seem more
questionable, as news has belatedly spread of mounting civilian
casualties among the enemy dead, and the realisation has slowly dawned
that the leaders of Britain's latest opponent may remain at large.
Perhaps what has been revealed in recent months has not been the
inability of the British left to think properly about terrorism, but the
inability of the British political system to weigh seriously the
consequences of war."It was ever thus," says Ali. "At the height of the
Vietnam war, I think we got 50 or 60 MPs [out of over 600] to sign an
early-day motion against it."
The leftwing Labour MP Alan Simpson, one of less than a dozen who voted
against the bombing of Afghanistan, sees the Commons' near-unanimity in
wartime as part of a wider "crisis of representation". Serious
discussion of the concerns of anti-globalisation protesters is just as
absent, he says. Yet he also sees a narrowness and lack of maturity in
the latter, which events since September have exposed. "They articulate
a line of thinking that says: 'Governments are all bastards. The
political system sucks.' That's right as far as it goes. But it retreats
from the global to the local. It doesn't really have an
internationalism."
The anti-globalisation movement, you could say, has spent the past
decade or so developing a sophisticated critique of modern business - an
economic policy, if you like - but it has neglected to draw up a foreign
policy, a coherent set of proposals for how countries should operate and
behave towards each other. "Everyone's been very boned up on
sustainability and trade," says Wainwright, "but not the enormity and
lawlessness of US power." As a result, whenever war breaks out, and the
activities of Nike and Microsoft suddenly look less important than those
of governments, which had been assumed to be diminishing in authority,
there is a measure of disarray in anti-capitalist circles.
As the news first spread that the World Trade Centre had been attacked,
members of Globalise Resistance were taking part in a protest outside an
international arms fair in east London. Taylor says proudly: "We were
already attacking death and destruction." What he neglects to mention is
that, when a speaker at the rally announced what had just happened in
New York, there was some cheering in the crowd.
Other leftwing responses have backfired for opposite reasons. Many
opponents of American retaliation against Afghanistan placed a cautious,
pragmatic-sounding emphasis on the difficulties of a military campaign.
But predictions about battles are not best made by pacifism-inclined
civilians, and once the Taliban's "strongholds" started falling, it was
difficult to oppose the war on more fundamental grounds.
"The argument that the Americans would get bogged down in Afghanistan
like the Russians did was a cop-out really," says Peter Wilby, editor of
the New Statesman, who has opposed the war on principle. "The left
should take its position on whether a war is right or wrong, not on the
type of terrain in Afghanistan."
Suzanne Moore, the left-inclined Mail on Sunday columnist, wrote after
the first few weeks of bombing in Afghanistan: "War isn't working." A
month later, with a candour rare among her fellow sceptics, she
confessed in print: "The bombing 'worked' far more effectively than
anyone anticipated... I and others misjudged the situation."
"In retrospect," she says now, "I'm struck by how much we didn't know
and still don't know about the situation in Afghanistan. There's been a
progression since the Gulf war where we know less and less about how
wars are going." In this way, among others, the tightening control of
the western military over media access to its modern battlefields is a
handy way of disarming critics: reliable information about the progress
of military operations tends to emerge too late for anti-war
commentators to make safe judgments about their success or otherwise.
Yet many of those who predicted disaster in Afghanistan remain
unapologetic. "You have the most effect when you predict the worst,"
says Mark Seddon, editor of the leftwing Labour party journal, Tribune,
and a member of the party's national executive committee. "There's a
decent pacifist tradition in Britain, but you need to reach out beyond
that. I know from going round various constituency meetings that there
is a lot of opposition to the war. There is a feeling that it could be
protracted and, who knows, it could well be."
Denis Healey, the former Labour defence secretary, and by no means an
automatic opponent of British military actions, shares Seddon's doubts.
"I was against the bombing of Afghanistan because it would kill more
civilians and create more terrorists, and it has done that." Does he
mind the abuse anti-war campaigners receive? He replies cheerfully: "I
just say, 'Sod 'em'. Alistair [Campbell] is just doing his job. The
easiest way to get people is guilt by association. But I'm very much
against Osama bin Laden."
Another problem, though, with this kind of military pessimism is that it
is difficult to distinguish it, at times, from that of war sceptics at
the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. Columnists in rightwing
British newspapers and magazines who objected to the war in Afghanistan
for containing a humanitarian element, or for being an initiative in
which a Labour government was involved, do not make comfortable
bedfellows for those who go on peace marches. "Any cause has good
supporters and bad supporters," says Healey. But it is questionable
whether the coherence and credibility of the left's view of the world is
helped when it overlaps with that of the left's natural enemies.
Wainwright says that lessons have been learned from all this turbulence.
Questions about the role of international law and the UN, which have
been gathering dust for decades as idealists of the left have moved on
to simpler, more easily-publicised topics such as the excesses of
individual companies, must be revived, she says. Simpson agrees. The
anarchist disdain for global institutions, which has been a major
influence on modern anti-capitalism, looks less smart now that America
is threatening to act as it pleases.
The anti-globalisation movement has been forced to grow up in another
way, too. "Some people," says Wainwright, "used to think that if
religious fundamentalists are anti-capitalist, then we don't need to
challenge them." Now, she and others on the British left are hoping that
there will be a proper, mutually critical engagement between the secular
and religious critics of modern business, and between those in the rich
world and those in the rest of the world.
The way such dissenters are treated by their respective police and
governments may help with this process. Before September, the use of
state violence and special prohibitions against anti-capitalist
demonstrations - a regular occurrence in the developing world - was
already becoming more common in wealthy, relatively liberal countries.
Protesters were shot by police during last year's riots in Genoa and
Gothenburg. With ominously vague "anti-terrorism" legislation recently
passed in Britain and America, the left may soon find out whether, as
the Globalise Resistance slogan has it,"clampdown makes us stronger".
Taylor is sure it will. In his cheeky, upbeat way, he promises there
will be "more confrontational stuff in the offing" if the war widens.
"We're learning a lot from the anti-Vietnam war movement," he says. But
before we leave his office to continue our conversation in the pub
across the road, he pulls the window blinds right down. "Need to keep
the spies out," he says, half-smiling.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4336955,00.html
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