To: SOCIALIST-REGISTER@xxxxxxxx, marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: A reply to a Doug Henwood article
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http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=special&s=henwood20011121
FEATURE STORY | Special Report
Terrorism and Globalization
by DOUG HENWOOD
The organizers of the Globalization and Resistance Conference, held at the
City University of New York's Graduate Center on November 16 and 17, had a
very bad stroke of luck. They started planning the conference over the
summer, with an agenda focusing on the origins and impacts of
globalization, and the protest movements that have organized against it.
Then came the September 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent US
response. Neither the conference speakers nor the attendees did a great
job of assimilating those facts to the agenda at hand.
Not, of course, that that's easy. But much of the talk, whether from the
stage or in the hallways, was either about globalization (and the
so-called antiglobalization movement) or the war (and the antiwar
movement). They were like two parallel discourses that never quite met.
[COMMENT: This reflects the failure of the anti-globalization movement to
root itself totally in Marxism. Their target was corporate abuse, which
supposedly had reached new heights with the decline of the nation-state
pace Hardt-Negri and Jeremy Rifkin. This kind of 'globaloney' is
ill-prepared to analyze, let alone confront old-style imperialism. ]
Susan George, the writer and activist on development and global poverty,
led off the conference by confessing that the bombing of Afghanistan
hadn't turned out to be the disaster she'd feared, leaving her a bit
confused about what to think.
[COMMENT: Based on his sketchy reporting, Henwood's readers would be left
just as confused. What did Susan George have in mind when she spoke of
disaster? Americans being sent home in body-bags? Suitcase nuclear bombs
at Yankee Stadium when Derek Jeter was at bat? The war certainly has been
a disaster for the Afghan people in any case.]
George then laid out a "planetary contract" for "hope and renewal"--an end
to our "foolish dependency" on oil, cancellation of poor countries' debts,
a program to meet the basic needs of the world's poorest (which would cost
$50 billion to $90 billion a year) and new global taxes on financial
transactions and multinational corporations. George offered this as worthy
of doing in itself, but also as a way of lowering the levels of despair in
which terrorists thrive (though she added, it wouldn't change the
terrorists themselves, who have a "fascist ideology," though she didn't
explain where this ideology came from.")
[COMMENT: George's proposals inhabit that new utopian world of financial
gimmickry that the Tobin Tax also belongs to. Obsessions with
out-of-control or wasteful financial activity is the hallmark of the
anti-globalization movement. The real solution is not in reining in
financial speculators, but in abolishing the capitalist mode of
production. To do this requires a strategy for taking *state power*,
something that anti-globalization activists with their anarchist
proclivities cannot develop.]
Though George presented her agenda as if no reasonable person could
object, her arguments go against nearly everything the United States and
its European junior partners stand for, and would amount to the first
steps in overturning the global economic and political hierarchy. A fine
idea, but it would mean taking on the most powerful interest groups in the
world, something George must know, but which she barely acknowledged.
Agenda-setters and activists also seem to inhabit parallel worlds that
never quite meet.
[COMMENT: What is an agenda-setter? Is that some kind of revolutionary
organization? Wall Street power-brokers who read Karl Marx for
inspiration? Hollywood liberals who peddle lemonade? Elected Democratic
Party officials? The outgoing Pacifica Radio board of directors?]
But what is the relationship between globalization and terrorism (even
loosely and imprecisely defined)? The conference buzz was that terrorism
is the product of marginalization and poverty, and marginalization and
poverty the products of globalization. But are things really that simple?
Latin America and East Asia, two of the regions most transformed by global
economic forces over the last two decades, have produced no terrorists of note.
[COMMENT: Henwood's two-decade frame of reference, while convenient for
his argument, is historically myopic. The same obsession with terrorism we
find today once existed with respect to Latin America. During the 1970s
and into the 80s, there was not a month that went by without a report on
some official of an American corporatation being kidnapped or its assets
blown up. This is where "Carlos the Jackal", the Osama bin-Laden of his
day, comes from. Urban terrorist formations often drew ideologically from
a corrupted version of Cuban Marxism or Maoism. While closer to our
traditions than the Islamic radicals, they were still a hindrance in the
final analysis. After their boneheaded adventurism collapsed, many of
their activists or the people under their influence turned to electoral
cretinism. What will follow the collapse of al-Qaeda is an open question.]
Saudi Arabia, home of Osama bin Laden himself and many of his funders, has
been embedded in the global oil economy since well before most Al Qaeda
members were born. And Afghanistan, their current home, is almost entirely
outside the circuits of global trade and capital flows--an exclusion that
contributes greatly to its extreme poverty and social disintegration. (As
the economist Joan Robinson once said, under capitalism, "the misery of
being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not
being exploited at all.") These facts complicate the simple derivation of
terrorism from globalization.
[COMMENT: What a cynical exploitation of Joan Robinson's good reputation.
Rather than being a patron saint of maquiladoras, Robinson was a defender
of the North Korean and Chinese socialist experiments. Furthermore, there
is no real correlation between being "outside the circuits of global
trade" and poverty. With every deepening of Central America's integration
into such circuits, the misery has only increased. Leaving aside the
question of socialism, which Henwood shows scant interest in, there is an
independent variable that is much more important in calculating
well-being. Namely, that is the ability of the working class to defend its
interests though militant trade unions and class-based political parties.
Jamaica was much less integrated into "circuits of global trade" under
Michael Manley, but with every increase of capital penetration into
Jamaica--as dramatized in the documentary "Life or Debt"--the suffering of
the Jamaican people has increased.]
But the biggest absence of all was the recognition that there's something
different about this war as compared to recent military interventions over
Kosovo and Kuwait. Speakers and attendees frequently cited longstanding US
geopolitical goals as lurking behind the war. This is undeniably true.
Washington's war strategy is not motivated by tenderness for the people of
Afghanistan. For all the professions of concern about the abuse of women
under the Taliban, George W. Bush and his cronies haven't been born-again
as feminists. But there was little serious acknowledgment that we were
attacked, and that some US response was inevitable and even justified.
Recognizing that doesn't mean assent to Bush's version of a response,
though lots of people in the peace movement seem to fear it does. But
anyone who wants to speak to an audience beyond the small circle of
believers has to consider these questions seriously.
[COMMENT: There are questions of principle involved that, alas, poor
Henwood does not take into account. Every major imperialist war has
involved unprovoked attacks on "us". From a certain perspective, the USA
was just as justified as taking revenge over Pearl Harbor as "we" are
today. The question that revolutionaries must address, however, is the
class character of the revenge. When you strip away the moral pieties, the
war against al-Qaeda and the war against Japan were just gangland
vendettas with no overarching moral or legal justification. It is "going
to the mattresses" on a grand scale. More to the point, some day in the
future during a war of national liberation, there is every possibility
that combatants will bring the war to the USA, risking civilian
casualties. On March 9, 1914, not only did Pancho Villa kill 26 civilians
in Columbus, New Mexico while procuring horses and guns, there is also
some evidence that the German military helped finance his expedition. So
what would Henwood make of this attack on "us" that was funded by the
Huns? I think we all know the answer to that.]
This has an importance far beyond the fate of one conference. Many
antiglobalization activists (not a fair name, since many of them are quite
global in their thinking and organization) have been hoping that after the
dust settles, the movement could go back to what it had been doing before
September 11. Speakers repeatedly invoked the list of place names that
have come to signify the movement's breadth and growth--Seattle, Quebec
City, Porto Alegre, Genoa...--as if the series will be shortly resumed.
But it may not. War, fear, and repression have thrown sand in the gears.
Linking the themes of peace and justice can be done, but it requires hard
thinking, and there's not enough of that going on right now.
[COMMENT: There is hard thinking going on, but not at the liberal Nation
Magazine unfortunately.]
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