Anti-imperialism: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, September 2021

I am against imperialism, be it French, British, US or Chinese. I am not an “anti-imperialist,” since that is a political position supporting national liberation movements opposed to imperialist powers.
—Gilles Dauvé

Mark Twain was an anti-imperialist, a member of the American Anti-Imperialist League (1898-1920) which opposed US annexation of the Philippines. For the League, just republican government was based on the principle of the “consent of the governed” as embodied in the Declaration of Independence, Washington’s Farewell Address, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The imperialism of US territorial expansion thus violated the classical liberal precepts of self-government and non-intervention as put forward by British writers like John A. Hobson. Twain’s dark sarcasm and claims of America’s liberatory intent notwithstanding, he was neither so generous nor as damning regarding the US continental expansion of Manifest Destiny that expropriated the native peoples. The raison d’être of this type of anti-imperialism was simple; empire was bad and needed to be morally opposed.

pt. 1: Perónismo and Third Positionism: “What’s Left?” July 2019 (MRR #434)

When faced with two bad choices, choose the third.

It’s the proverb I try to live by. Most prefer the lesser-of-two-evils approach to things. I prefer tertium quid every time.

Tertium quid started with Plato, who first used the term (triton ti) around 360 bce. In ancient Greek philosophy, it meant something that escapes classification in either of two mutually or more exclusive and theoretically exhaustive categories. What’s left after such a supposedly rigorous, exhaustive division is tertium quid. The third what. The third something.

Post Plato, what was considered tertium quid might be residue, sui generis, ambiguous, composite or transcendent depending on one’s philosophical inclinations. I encountered the concept indirectly via hoary Catholic theology when I briefly met a young heretical Catholic Worker named Alvin in 1969. Inspired by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, Alvin was a voluntary celibate who wanted to start a Catholic Worker commune in the Ventura County area. Which was why he was camped out in his VW microbus in the Ventura Unitarian Church’s foothill parking lot, where everything progressive and left-wing eventually wound up in those days. But Alvin was a little too radical even for the Catholic Worker. He was a fan of Paolo Freire and Latin American liberation theology, and he wanted to return to what he saw as the gospel of the early Christian church, with its emphasis on voluntary poverty, communalism, helping the poor, and liberating the oppressed. The latter required solidarity with armed struggles for socialist national liberation according to Alvin. But he was also knee-deep in the Church’s anachronistic fourth century Christological debates, specifically his championing of Apollinarism over Arianism. Both were discredited heretical doctrines, with Apollinaris of Laodicea speaking of Jesus as something neither human nor divine, but a mixture of the two natures, and therefore a “third something.” It was the first time I heard the term tertium quid. Not surprisingly, Alvin grew more personally frustrated being celibate in a time of aggressive hippie “free love,” until one day he suddenly disappeared. A quarter century later I visited San Francisco and ran into him in the Castro wearing the habit of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

Rojava and the ghost of Kropotkin: “What’s Left?” April 2019, MRR #431

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Karl Marx
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852

There’s no Left left.
riffing on Gertrude Stein

 

Does history repeat? Are we living through a rerun of the interwar period (1918-1939) with a repeat of the wealth-crazed Roaring Twenties, the dark rise of Fascism, the growing international crisis, and the imminent threat to progressive politics if not all of civilization as we know it? Karl Marx was using the debacle of Louis Bonaparte rhetorically to elicit historical comparisons, bitterly mocking the political situation of his time after the dismal defeat of the 1848 revolutionary wave. Dialectics kept him from falling into the aphoristic thinking of liberal historiography a la Santayana. In reviewing the current state of affairs, I’m tempted to sidestep Marx’s biting humor to acknowledge that history often happens first as tragedy and second as even greater tragedy.

Breathing Together: “What’s Left?” November 2015, MRR #390

With the outbreak of isms, like socialism, anarchism, imperialism or communism, sunspots start to multiply on the face of the golden orb. God refuses to enlighten the Reds! Scientists forecast an increase in sunspots due to the arrival of the beatniks and pacifists from certain countries such as Italy, France and Scandinavia!

Police Chief [played by Pierre Dux]
Z, directed by Costa-Gavras

I was into the Thor Heyerdahl/Kon-Tiki saga when I was as a kid in the 1950s and early 1960s. For those interested, Heyerdahl was a Norwegian adventurer with an Indiana Jones flair who, as a sailor, fought the Nazi occupation of Norway during the second World War. After the war, with a background in science—ethnography, biology, and geography—and as a proponent of cultural diffusionism to account for the spread of human civilizations, Heyerdahl famously built a large raft out of balsa reeds from Peru’s Lake Titicaca and sailed it from the western coast of South America to the French Polynesian island atoll of Raroia in 1947. His idea behind the Kon-Tiki raft and expedition was to demonstrate that ancient peoples could have made long, arduous sea voyages, using the primitive technologies of their day and creating contacts between diverse, widely separated cultures. The subject of a number of documentary books and films as well as re-creations, not to mention a variety of fictionalized depictions, Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki experiment did demonstrate one thing quite clearly:

Just because something can be done doesn’t mean that it was done.

There is little support in the scientific community for Heyerdahl’s theory that cultural ideas let alone trade goods, let alone people, made the journey from pre-Columbian South America to Polynesia. Anthropologists in particular are dubious about the notion that ancestors of the Incas colonized the Polynesian islands. His various projects were exciting, spectacular, and attention-grabbing, which tended to confuse the issue between what could have happened, and what did happen. It’s a variant of the false scenario fallacy, and its common.

Right-wing videographer and “journalist” James O’Keefe made a name for himself by selectively editing videos he secretly filmed in order to supposedly demonstrate that certain public individuals and organizations were knowingly promoting falsehoods, if not engaged in out-and-out fraud and crime. More recently, O’Keefe is involved in a cottage industry that tries to prove that various bad things can happen, without demonstrating that said bad things actually did happen. So, he demonstrates that voter fraud is quite easy to commit, or that someone dressed as Osama bin Laden can easily sneak across the US/Mexico border, without actually proving that rampant voter fraud or al-Qaeda infiltration have ever occurred. Critics of left-wing film maker Michael Moore have accused him of doing much the same thing with films like Fahrenheit 9/11, in which selective editing, humorous juxtaposition, and bald inference are used to suggest that the Bush Jr administration knew more than they were letting on about the lead-up, commission, and aftermath of the 9/11 Twin Tower terrorist attacks.

Showing that something can be done, without proving that it was actually done, is the stock-in-trade of conspiracy theorists everywhere. Take the Apollo moon landings. It’s quite easy to lay out how such lunar expeditions and landings could have been faked, without really confirming that the landings were actually falsified. Again, harking back to my youth in the 1960s, I spent way too much time worrying about who assassinated JFK—all the theories from the KGB and the Cubans to the Mafia and the CIA—without coming to any sound conclusions as to who actually did the deed. I’m certain that there’s more to the Kennedy assassination then what has been revealed, although I’m also certain I’ll never ever know the whole truth. There are left-wing and right-wing conspiracy theories, but by and large conspiracy theories transcend left-right political categories in pursuing their flights of paranoia. In addition, conspiracy theories often prove interchangeable with regard to their underlying structure and raison d’être, with that infamous international conspiracy for world domination trope easily substituting any number of key conspirators, from the Jews to the Freemasons, the Illuminati, Bolshevik communism, international bankers, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the international bourgeoisie, alien reptilian overlords, etc, etc, etc.

Historian David Hackett Wallace once identified an informal historical fallacy he called the furtive fallacy, which “is the erroneous idea that facts of special significance are dark and dirty things and that history itself is a story of causes mostly insidious and results mostly invidious. It begins with the premise the reality is a sordid, secret thing; and that history happens on the back stairs a little after midnight, or else in a smoke-filled room, or a perfumed boudoir, or an executive penthouse or somewhere in the inner sanctum of the Vatican, or the Kremlin, or the Reich Chancellery, or the Pentagon. […] In an extreme form, the furtive fallacy is not merely an intellectual error but a mental illness which is commonly called paranoia.” (Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought) The idea that certain historical events or facts are necessarily sinister, and part of some secret conspiracy, is contested by former MRR columnist and ex-shitworker Jeff Bale who argued that historians frequently underestimate the influence in politics of secret societies, vanguard parties, intelligence agencies, underground cabals, etc. due to the very nature and organizational methods of such clandestine groupings. Thus, groups like the P-2 Masonic Lodge and al-Qaeda on the right and Lenin’s Bolshevik Party and the guerrilla VietMinh on the left actually did engage in conspiracies to one degree or another.

In the realm of conspiracy, resolving the distinction between what can be done and what was done often muddles matters. (A related topic, the often violent rupture between how conspiracy theorists view reality, and reality itself, is beyond the scope of this column.) In particular, determining the perimeters of what was done is a sometimes a daunting task. Consider the Bolsheviks once again. The Bolshevik Party was a straight-up, clandestine vanguard party of professional revolutionaries, and so conspiracy was part of its MO. The Bolsheviks participated in the 1905 as well as the February 1917 Russian Revolutions, and actively, secretly organized the armed Red Guard putsch central to the October 1917 Revolution. It is even well documented that a member of the Bolshevik central committee, a number of high-ranking party members, and a fair percentage of the rank-and-file membership had been secretly agents of the Okhrana, the Czarist secret police, in a conspiracy within a conspiracy. But I am not convinced, from the historical evidence, that the Bolsheviks were inadvertent double agents of Czarism, or that they engineered the Russian Revolution from the get-go, or that they were pulling the strings to an international Communist conspiracy as far back as 1789. And to argue that the Bolsheviks were part of some worldwide Jewish conspiracy masterminded by the Elders of Zion is sheer lunacy.

Me, I tend to fall on the anti-conspiracy side of things whenever analyzing history or current events. Back in the day, when my friends and I were 60s New Leftie wannabe revolutionaries trying to figure out our politics but still barely scraping together the change for our next lid of bad weed, we joked that our checks from Moscow seemed interminably delayed in the mail. Indeed, the international Communist conspiracy has been a central hysterical trope on the right in one form or another, serviceable in all sorts of situations, gradations and permutations. Decades later, when I got to know some ex-Maoist types who’d been around the fractious New Communist Movement in the 70s, I learned that the joke for them was their checks from Beijing never seemed to arrive. Nowadays, the rightwing canard is that progressives and Leftists in this country are being funded, and hence controlled, by George Soros.

That’s Central Committee General Secretary Comrade Soros to you.

In a less flippant take, a common lefty conspiracy theory has it that the CIA imported heroin in the 1970s and that the FBI manufactured crack in the 1980s in order to specifically crush the Black Power/Black Liberation movements and to more generally suppress Black people in America. I don’t doubt that the proliferation of heroin and crack did, in fact, accomplish these things, but more as an afterthought rather than as a purposeful conspiracy. I think that the international drug trade is powered by a number of players with a variety of motives; everything from the good old-fashioned profit motive to drugs-for-arms type geopolitics, with plenty of opportunity and opportunism to go around.

And yes, there are conspiracies all the time in capitalism, everything from knowingly manufacturing and selling dangerous products to lobbyists secretly buying the votes of politicians. But by and large capitalists are pretty up-front about what they intend to do with their wealth and power. They organize quite openly in business associations and political parties, proudly found schools of economics and think tanks, and put forth their plans for running state and economy freely in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. When neoliberalism came to power in the late 1970s/early 1980s, the elections of Thatcher in England and Reagan in the United States were preceded by a neoliberal onslaught of propaganda and activism openly calling for, among other things, deregulating and financializing the economy, rolling back the welfare state, crushing organized labor, and privatizing the public realm. Neoliberalism proceeded to do just that with the election of the Republican president Reagan, coming to fruition under the Democratic president Clinton with the ratification of NAFTA and the abolition of welfare. There has been little hidden, or clandestine, or conspiratorial about the capitalist ruling class’s open class warfare against the rest of society carried out under neoliberalism.

Acknowledging the existence of a social class with common interests based on ownership of the economic means of production, even recognizing that the social class in question attempts to run things through owning most of society’s wealth and property, is not the same as tossing around dubious conspiracy theories. But I’ll leave the basic Marxism 101 for a future column. I’ll conclude with a quote from Zbigniew Brzeziński, that: “History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy.”

(Copy editing by K Raketz.)

Practical resistance: “What’s Left?” June 2014, MRR #373

The logic is inescapable. If US politics are irredeemably corrupt, then to try and reform them is a waste of time, even counter productive. If America is bound and determined to destroy the planet through its imperial activity, then to sustain this country is folly while to hasten its demise is necessity.

Only a fool fights in a burning house.

I’ve been on a doom-and-gloom jag lately. We’re all fucked, everything is going down the porcelain highway, the planet is bound for a slow-motion apocalypse. I keep harping on this pessimistic perspective, which allows for only two real choices; burn it all down, or party hard and die young. Well, this column I will mention a couple of political causes that you can get behind that might make a difference. Winning them won’t bring about The Revolution, which I’m convinced isn’t happening in my lifetime, but these small victories might make our lives a little bit easier, and counter the rampant nihilism in which I’m currently mired. But first, a sidebar with respect to relevance.

I once did an interview with David McReynolds in the 1980s for San Diego Newsline, a tiny independent community newspaper. McReynolds was a pacifist and democratic socialist, a member of the War Resisters League and the Socialist Party USA, of which he was their presidential candidate. He said something during that interview that has stayed with me, with regard to a central fallacy in Marxism. This fallacy holds true for both orthodox, vulgar Marxism (which called itself “scientific socialism”) and the plethora of Leninist variations of Marxism (all hail the science of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought!). As McReynolds explained, in science and the mathematics upon which science is based, 2+2=4. This formula is correct, and science is based upon a number of such correct formulations, truths that cannot be denied without denying reality itself.

If, however, your political ideology is defined as “scientific,” or “based on science,” or a “science” unto itself, then the formulations of your ideology are supposed to be scientifically correct. There are various and sundry Marxist and Leninist sects which promulgate their “correct political line” as scientific fact, on everything from whether or not to vote for Obama to who to support in the Syrian civil war. In the case of Syria, for instance, these sectoids fight over whether to support Assad whole heartedly, or provisionally, or as “objectively anti-imperialist,” debating in turn whether to support the Syrian opposition unreservedly, or reservedly, or just one or another opposition organization or individual. On this one issue alone, there can be a myriad contending positions, and believe me, there are scores of Leftoid sects vying against each other for possession of the correct political line on the Syrian civil war. Problem is, if all these groupuscules possess a political ideology based on science, and if their political pronouncements are all supposed to be scientifically correct, then why the fuck do they all disagree so vehemently with each other on virtually everything?

That’s because Marxism is not a science. But rather than argue this further (let alone probe the difference between ideology and theory), I will present a couple of political issues that most of us will consider important, broadly define as correct, and ultimately hope to see triumph in order to make our lives better. Unless, of course, you contend that “the worse things are, the better things are,” that the more miserable most of humanity becomes, the faster we all will inevitably rise up in revolution against state and capital. In which case, you can stop reading now.

STOP THE TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP

The Obama Administration is currently negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free trade treaty on steroids. Encompassing a dozen nations around the Pacific Rim (Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore,Vietnam, and the United States), with more hoping to join, the TPP is being negotiated behind closed doors. The rigid secrecy extends to members of the US Congress, who aren’t privy to most of what’s being discussed, and who are prohibited from disclosing the little they do know. Shit has been leaking out about the TPP negotiations however, and it ain’t looking good. In addition to all the official government representatives cutting deals in smoke-filled rooms, there are over 600 business representatives from the likes of Chevron, Walmart and Halliburton participating in these trade talks. Similar trade deals in the past have resulted in 3 billion plus dollars in corporate handouts.

There are provisions for media censorship and the banning of buy-local policies. Big Pharma will be allowed to limit access to medicines, and governments will be restricted from regulating food labeling. Workers rights, organizing, and safety will be severely undermined. Foreign companies will be able to legally challenge US environmental regulation. Increased fracking, and the increased export of all fossil fuels will be promoted. In turn, fossil fuel corporations will be allowed to sue governments that stand in their way. The TPP is not so subtly considered an effort to encircle and contain China internationally. Finally, this massive corporate power grab, neoliberal restructuring of government power, systematic suppression of human and workers rights, and gutting of the climate and environment which the Trans-Pacific Partnership represents is intended to be pushed through the US Congress using Fast Track. Fast Track is a legislative process by which treaties are railroaded through without any opportunity for discussion, debate or amendment by up or down vote only.

We need to stop the TPP by any and all means necessary.

SEE SOMETHING, LEAK SOMETHING

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was intended to provide clear democratic access and oversight of federal intelligence and security agencies—the CIA, NSA, FBI and DIA specifically—by giving individual citizens a mechanism to request and receive classified documents being held by those agencies. But when MIT PhD candidate Ryan Shapiro made FOIA requests of three of the above agencies for documents regarding allegations that a CIA tip led to the arrest of Nelson Mandela by South Africa’s apartheid government in 1962, and Mandela’s subsequent internment in prison for 27 years, all three stonewalled Shapiro and denied his FOIA requests on grounds of national security, national defense, and executive privilege.

The Catch 22 Squared around this needs to be emphasized. The CIA, NSA, FBI and DIA are tasked with protecting national security, and thus see threats to national security at every turn and under every rock. The anti-war, anti-apartheid, and radical green movements, everything from the Left to Occupy Wall Street, have all been considered threats to national security and potential sources of domestic terrorism. Nelson Mandela himself was denounced as a Marxist terrorist, and remained on the US terror watch list until 2008. US security and intelligence agencies have been, and continue to be instrumental in the surveillance and subversion of all these progressive movements. For these agencies, the FOIA itself is a threat to national security, and those who request classified material through the FOIA are also considered threats to national security. In the case of the NSA, that agency completely refused to acknowledge the very existence of the documents requested by Shapiro in denying his FOIA application.

Shapiro, who has made over 400 FOIA requests over other issues in the past, decided to draw the line when the CIA, FBI, NSA and DIA used their official position to thwart his FOIA requests regarding Mandela by issuing repeated national security exemptions. In January 2014, Shapiro filed a lawsuit against the CIA, DOD, DOJ and NSA for their non-compliance.

“The failure of the NSA, FBI, DIA, and CIA to comply with my FOIA requests for records on Mandela highlights that FOIA is broken and that this sad reality is just one component among many of the ongoing crisis of secrecy we now face,” Shapiro says. The issue for him is that the public needs to keep the government accountable. “It’s not surprising those in power wish to keep their actions secret. What’s surprising is how readily we tolerate it. We are all familiar with the security-oriented signage instructing us to ‘See something, Say something.’ In the interest of promoting a fuller conception of national security, I add, ‘See something, Leak something.’ The viability of our democracy may depend upon it.”

It’s simple. See something, Leak something.

***

I’ll mention principled political issues from time to time in future columns, to try and counteract my deep and deepening cynicism and pessimism. It’ll be an uphill struggle, all the way.