Re: AUT: report from Argentina

[Scott Hamilton <s_h_hamilton@xxxxxxxxx>]

Harald reckons I misrepresented him when I said he
defended Hardt's article for the Guardian. Here's the
passage I was referring to:

"Capitalism does operate on different levels of
destructiveness. Hardt and Negri might reply that the
more effective a working class resistance towards the
announced war on Iraq, also the more you, in so far as
you are a part of this resistance, will also de facto
be supporting Empire. This is in principle no
different than that strong social revolutionary
currents within the working class once worked towards
bringing in social democracy. We of couse hope to take
it beyond that point  then as now ... but that is
another story."

In other words, capitalism in some countries (I'd call
them imperialist countries) is preferable to
capitalism in other countries, because workers there
have won democratic rights and left-wing reforms like
the welfare state. In his reply to Neil, Harald argued
that these rights and reforms were steps towards
communism. The suggestion is that a country like
Norway, which offers bourgeois democratic rights and a
welfare state, has more progressive features than a
country like Iraq, which is poor and tyrannical.

As I have pointed out many times, and anyone who can
be bothered can check for themselves, this argument is
basically identical to that of Kautsky and certain
other leaders of the Second International. Kautsky
argued that the progressive qualities of countries
like Germany were a result *not* of the bourgeoisie
but of working class struggle. The workers had to some
degree, some small but sometimes significant degree,
improved capitalism in the Western countries.
'Different levels of destructiveness' is the term
Harald uses.

At times, Harald and Kautsky go beyond all this and
argue that in relatively democratic countries a
section of the bourgeosie may at times share the same
interests as workers. Harald's posts on Palestine
suggested that an alliance might be made between the
Palestinians and anti-Zionist 'Israeli entrepeneurs'
as well EU politicians and the interests they
represent. Kautsky's theory of ultra-imperialism
claimed that imperialism was no longer in the
interests of capitalism - international capital was so
interpenetrated that the aggressive state was bad for
business. Like Harald, Kautsky believed that
capitalism had enough dynamism to transcend the nation
state and create international federations that were
an improvement upon the old state. Such a view finds
an obvious echo in Hardt's article:

"The common interests of the global elites are most
visible in the economic sphere. Business leaders
around the globe recognise that imperialism is bad for
business because it sets up barriers that hinder
global flows...Their common interests are equally
visible from the perspective of security...US military
actions will, in fact, most likely only feed the
antagonisms created by the inequalities of wealth and
power around the world, increasing exponentially the
insecurity of global elites. This is doubly true for
US elites since unilateral military actions paint a
bull's-eye on the US for anyone seeking to attack the
centre of global domination.

However, there is an alternative to US imperialism:
global power can be organised in a decentred form,
which Toni Negri and I call "empire". This is not
merely a multilateral coalition of leading nation
states. Think of it as multilateralism squared. Empire
is a network composed of different kinds of powers,
including the dominant nation states, supranational
organisations, such as the United Nations and the IMF,
multinational corporations, NGOs, the media, and
others. There are hierarchies among the powers that
constitute empire but despite their differences they
function together in the network."

If this isn't an appeal to global elites, what is?

So what is wrong with Harald's (and Kautsky's, and
Hardt's) view? It is correct to say that in the West
bourgeois democratic rights and the welfare state were
won by struggle, and are worth defending.
But it must be acknowledged that a *necessary
condition* for the winning of these reforms in the
North was the creation and maintenance of economic
semi-colonies in the South. Imperialism puts off some
of the crises of capitalism and limits to growth in
the North by superexploiting much of the South. No
Iraq, no Norway.

The danger of social imperialism arises when the
bourgeois democratic rights and welfare states of the
North are made into evidence for the more progressive
nature of these societies, in comparison to poor and
undemocratic societies in the South. At its best,
social imperialism develops a political strategy for
the left based upon bourgeois democray and a welfare
state as 'standards' achievable in the Third World
under capitalism. At its worst, social imperialism
justifies military adventures on the grounds that the
imperialist country is more 'progressive' than the
semi-colony being attacked.

Social imperialism is not just the province of
flag-waving jingoists - if it was, it would be much
less of a problem. Social imperialism arises because,
as Marx showed in the first chapter of Capital, people
living in a capitalist society tend toward an
empirical, or surface-level, view of reality, and so
miss the deep structure of the world they live in.

And how easy it is to do this, when we compare the
First and Third Worlds! Put Australia, with all its
warts, beside Indonesia, and it looks positively
progressive. Put the EU next to the Palestinian
Authority, or the UK next to Iraq, or the US to North
Korea - all of the 'left' arguments for imperialism
proceed from this logic. What revolutionary thought
does is get below the surface, and show the way that,
to use a phrase from Marx, 'the rich are rich because
the poor are poor'.

We have to show that Norway is Norway because Iraq is
Iraq, that capitalism is only less 'destructive' in
countries like Norway because it is ultra-destructive
in places like Iraq. Harald has dismissed this idea as
'simply not true', and clearly many of his political
ideas are dependent upon denying it. So far, though,
he has offered no alternative explanation for
underdevelopment and decline in the Third World, and
the assymetrical economic relationship between First
and Third World. Nor has he explained why the ruling
class of Norway, amongst other countries, spends so
much time supressing the struggle for democracy in the
Third World, if it isn't in their interests to do so.

Cheers
Scott








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"Revolution is not like cricket, not even one day cricket"

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