Category: Anarchism

Jacobin stabs Venezuela in the front

May 2, 2019

By Stephen Gowans

On the heels of another Washington-backed attempt to engineer a coup d’état in Venezuela, Jacobin, a periodical that bills itself as “a leading voice of the American Left,” has published an assault on the Bolivarian Revolution. Following Oscar Wilde’s quip about enemies stabbing you in the back but friends stabbing you in the front,  Jacobin contributor Gabriel Hetland has aimed his dagger squarely from the front, though not before voicing a profusion of friendly bon mots about Leftist solidarity.  The University of Albany academic, another agent of imperialism masquerading as a beautiful soul, has done what a long line of Left imperialists has done before him: counselled against supporting those who have organized to overcome their oppression by Western states.

In “Venezuela and the Left,” Hetland draws on a 2016 article he wrote for The Nation, titled “Why Is Venezuela in Crisis?” In that article, the Jacobin contributor points to the near “impossibility of disentangling the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the crisis” in Venezuela, noting that “the government has not acted in a vacuum, but in a hostile domestic and international environment.” A reasonable person might agree. The hostile domestic and international environment has structured the viable range of responses available to the Venezuelan government, and we can’t understand or evaluate the government’s actions without taking account of the environment in which it has had to act. One might conclude, then, that Hetland is a reasonable person.

However, no sooner does he acknowledge the near impossibility of disentangling the internal and external aspects of the crisis, than he declares the Gordian knot cut. “To an agonizingly large degree,” he tells us, “Venezuela’s crisis is of the government’s own making.” And thereupon the hostile domestic and international environment vanishes, never again to trouble our thoughts.

According to the political sociologist, “Chávez committed several major errors that have come back to haunt Venezuela today. In particular, he failed to effectively tackle corruption, dismantle currency controls after they had served their purpose, and wean Venezuela from its extreme dependence on oil.”

http://www.barakabooks.com

Doubtlessly, Chavez made errors. But what Hetland calls Chavez’s errors are not errors at all, but failures to work miracles. Hetland presents weaning Venezuela from its extreme dependency on oil as a policy lever that Chavez could have pulled or not. In Hetland’s thinking, Chavez faced a binary choice: end oil dependency or continue it, and the Venezuelan leader chose to continue it rather than end it, and thereby blundered.

Does Hetland really believe that it was possible for Venezuela, over a little more than the decade Chavez was in office, in a hostile domestic and international environment, to wean itself from its extreme oil dependency? If so, he’s living on a planet of utopias. How many major oil-producing countries have successfully weaned themselves from oil dependency in half a century, let alone the 11 years Chavez was president?

The same can be said about corruption. Hetland seems to think that corruption in Third World countries is easily eradicated, as if a lever simply needs to be pulled, and shazam, corruption comes to an end. If we think like Hetland, then Chavez could have chosen to accept corruption or reject it. In Hetland’s agonizingly confused thinking, because corruption carried on, Chavez must have accepted it.

This isn’t serious analysis. To an agonizingly large degree it is superficial; a large dollop of virtue-signalling upon a veneer of utopianism. Hetland may just as well have said that to an agonizingly large degree, Venezuela’s crisis is of the government’s own making because Chavez failed to surround himself with angels capable of carrying out miracles.

http://www.barakabooks.com/

Hetland mimics the agonizingly didactic style of Patrick Bond, Stephen Zunes, and Gilbert Ashcar, other members of the academy, who also deliver pronouncements with great certitude on both empirical and moral questions, backed up by an agonizingly large degree of superficial thinking. Presumably, they can’t get away with this in peer-reviewed journals, but feel free to stretch their legs on Z-Net, Jacobin, and Counterpunch, where the demands for defensible analysis are less exacting.

Hetland appoints himself as a man with all the answers, able to sort through what he assures us are difficult questions, and to do so in only 1,000 words. He begins his Jacobin article by asking: “How should we respond?” to the crisis in Venezuela (which, let’s remember, was brought about by Washington seeking to topple the Maduro government) after which he proceeds to enumerate a series of “we shoulds,” as if he’s a pontiff declaring how the faithful ought to conduct itself. Amusingly, he tells us there are no easy answers, and then quickly furnishes us with some. Easy answer 1. Chavez should have ended Venezuela’s oil dependency. Easy answer 2. Chavez should have ended corruption. Easy answer 3. Chavez should have….And so on. If only Chavez had consulted Hetland, arbiter of difficult questions, the whole crisis could have been averted. Easy answer 4. We should support the angels.

I was also struck by this: “The first duty of leftists is to provide solidarity to the oppressed.” I would have thought that the first duty of leftists is to overcome oppression. Without reference to a concrete project of overcoming oppression the statement “We ought to provide solidarity to the oppressed” is meaningless. Counterpunch’s Eric Draitser also argued that the left should confine itself to showing solidarity with the oppressed of Syria, but it was unclear who he meant by the ‘oppressed.” He seemed to mean Syrians who neither support the US government’s attempt to dictate the political and economic policies of Syria or the government that zealously resists this.

Hetland and Draitser are simply calling for a withdrawal from the real world of politics and the abjuring of side-taking in clashes between an organized project of oppression and an organized project to overcome it. When they say we ought to provide solidarity with the oppressed they really mean we ought to avoid providing solidarity to organized projects which seek to overcome the international dictatorship of the United States.  Who comes out ahead in this is clear.

http://www.barakabooks.com

For all their attempts to present themselves as champions of the oppressed, Hetland and Draitser come down on the side of the US oppressor. Hetland makes a show of acknowledging the hostile domestic and international environment, but ends up attributing the hardships Venezuelans endure to Chavez’s “blunders” rather than the hostile domestic and international environment, or even to decisions Chavez made that were constrained by the hostile domestic and international environment. The regime-change efforts of the US government to bring the Bolivarian Revolution to an end—hardly secret—are dismissed by Hetland as a matter of little moment

Accordingly, the solution to the crisis appears, in Hetland’s view, to lie in the removal of the Venezuelan government; after all, isn’t it the Venezuelan government that, to an agonizingly large degree, has created the crisis in the first place? It would seem to follow, then, that its abolition would relieve Venezuelans of their crisis. Accordingly, Hetland endorses “a peaceful transition,” but to what he doesn’t say. Just as long as Maduro goes, the faux-neutral Hetland will be happy. So too will Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and Elliot Abrams.

 

Why the Occupy Movement Accomplished Nothing and Never Will

From Kate Khatib, Margaret Killjoy and Mike McGuire (editors), We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation, (AK Press, 2012): The occupy ‘movement,’

refuses to acquiesce to our traditional notions of analysis and action, shuns the antiquated idea that there is a single right answer to any problem, scoffs in the face of a single set of demands. Our demand? We want everything and nothing. Our perspective? We are all a little bit right and we are all a little bit wrong. What matters is that we are doing something.

The book might be more appropriately titled, Reflections on the Absence of Movement Strategy from Media Flash-in-the-Pan to Utter Irrelevance. Of course, I could be a little bit wrong here, but then again, I could be a little bit right too, depending on whatever your notion of analysis— traditional or otherwise—happens to be.

Wilayto vs. Landy

In the battle for public opinion over war on Iran, one strikes at the heart of Washington’s informal case for war while the other endorses it

By Stephen Gowans

Antiwar activist Phil Wilayto’s criticism of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy’s (CPD) petition condemning both Washington and Tehran, and the Campaign’s reply to him, illustrate the tensions in the antiwar movement among what I call challengers, formalists, and CPD anarchists. These three modes of opposition to Washington’s aggressions are largely defined by how the demonization of target regimes is responded to, and whether it is responded to at all. The challengers attack the informal campaigns of demonization aimed at building popular support for war, the formalists ignore them, and the CPD anarchists (self described peace and democracy campaigners) embrace them. In the battle against Washington for public opinion, the approach of the challengers has the greatest chance of success, the blows of the formalists fall wide of the mark, and the CPD anarchists play into Washington’s hands by endorsing the aggressor’s demonization campaign from within the antiwar movement itself.

The accustomed practice of countries that seek to change the political regime of other countries is to demonize the target of their aggression in order to justify the war, subversion, economic strangulation and other measures they have taken to achieve regime change. The aim is to legitimize their actions in the court of public opinion in order to secure at least popular acquiescence to, if not ardent support for, the toppling of a foreign government. Campaigns of vilification—typically based on hyperbole, distortion and occasionally outright deception–are invariably begun by aggressive governments and then amplified and carried on by a mimetic mass media (dishonestly labelled “independent” though dependent on the class of super-wealthy businesspeople who own them.) An emblematic case is the demonization of Iraq’s Ba’athist regime. A mighty oak sprang from a tiny acorn — an acorn that in the end, turned out to exist not at all. Iraq was said to represent a looming threat (the oak) on the basis of its alleged possession of banned weapons (the acorn.) If Iraq had indeed possessed hidden biological and chemical weapons, would it have posed any more danger than countries that possess infinitely larger and more deadly arsenals? That it did not pose even this modest threat shows that the aggressor never had a legitimate case for war. Today, the echoes of the demonization campaign are heard in the justifications of George Bush and Tony Blair for starting the war. We didn’t find weapons of mass destruction, they concede, but insist the war was just all the same, for a terrible tyrant was toppled. Since objections to this line of reasoning are heard only among a tiny minority of vocal opponents of Washington’s wars (and not all of them) we can conclude with some degree of certainty that creating an understanding that the head of a target regime is a brutal dictator—or simply emphasizing this where it is true–is enough to secure public acquiescence to the squandering of billions of dollars in military expenditure and the waste of countless lost and ruined lives.

The strategies of the various sectors of the antiwar movement are defined, on one level, by their orientation to the campaigns of demonization. There are three approaches. All share a common objection to the aggressive government’s stated reasons for waging war, but differ in how–and whether—they respond to the government’s attempted legitimization of its actions. One group challenges the invariable campaigns of demonization that depict target regimes as horrible and inhuman, another ignores them, while a third embraces them.

The Challengers

The first group, the challengers, seeks to undermine the emotional basis of popular support for wars that aggressive states and their media allies construct through their vilification of the intended victim. This the challengers do by scrutinizing the evidentiary basis of the informal campaign and exposing its lies and weaknesses. For example, against the charge that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for the physical annihilation of Israel, the challengers have shown that Ahmadinejad’s oft-cited call to “wipe Israel off the map” is a mistranslation of Farsi to English. What the Iranian president actually called for was regime change in Jerusalem (which is to say, an end to Zionist hegemony over—and clearing the way for Arab self-determination within—former mandate Palestine.) To be sure, Zionists and their supporters condemn even this progressive aim as the rankest Judeophobia, but it hardly constitutes a call for the destruction of the people of Israel. Similarly, the challengers place the accusation that Ahmadinejad is a holocaust-denier in context, showing that while the Iranian president’s position on the historical existence of the Nazi program to exterminate European Jewry is unquestionably ambiguous, his pronouncements on the matter are largely concerned with exposing how Zionists dishonestly exploit the holocaust to deny Arab self-determination. Hence, what Ahmadinejad has done is condemn in a highly visible way the Zionist project of dispossessing Arabs to create a Jewish homeland, while pointing to the exploitation of the holocaust by the same forces to justify Israeli actions and stifle objections to Israel as a colonial settler state. Inasmuch as this reinforces opposition to Israel—and the United States counts on Israel as an instrument of its foreign policy in the Middle East—Washington’s interest in eliminating the Islamic regime in Tehran is obvious. Tehran’s support for Hamas (which seeks Arab self-determination within former mandate Palestine) and Hezbollah (which exists as a bulwark against Israeli incursions into Lebanon) bolsters Washington’s enmity to Tehran. The latest salvo in the campaign to build an emotional rationale for replacing the government in Tehran is the claim that the last presidential election was stolen and that Ahmadinejad’s mandate is therefore illegitimate. To be sure, Western popular sympathies, no less on the left, lie with an opposition which appears to exemplify anti-theocratic values. All the same, evidence that the election was stolen is thin at best and evidence that it wasn’t is compelling. There is also reason to believe that the mass protests following the elections were helped along by the support of “pro-democracy” forces generously backed by payments taken out of the king’s ransom in destabilization program funding set up by the Bush administration and carried on by Obama. There’s nothing secret about this funding; it’s on the public record.

The challengers represent the most reviled sector of the antiwar movement. This is so because they carry on their debunking in the face of opposition, not only from pro-war forces, but also from some antiwar opponents, who are never as happy as when they can turn their venom on their nominal allies, accusing them of supporting thuggish regimes. Accordingly, the challengers are branded as dictator-lovers and tyrant-supporters and are accused of tripping over the logical error of assuming the enemy of their enemy is their friend. This accusation is hurled so frequently and uncritically as to have become a comfortable part of the dogma of a certain sector of the antiwar movement. That it is dogma, and not a particularly compelling explanation of the challengers’ position, is evidenced by the following: The support the challengers extend to targeted regimes is support, not for the regimes per se (though in some case it can be), but support for their struggles against the aggression of which they have become a target. No one ever accused Churchill of being a Soviet Marxist for supporting the Soviet Union against the Nazis, but those who support the Iranian government against the predations of the United States and Israel are regularly accused of being partisans of and apologists for political Islam. If Churchill’s support for the Soviet Union against Hitler didn’t make him a Stalinist, how is it that the challengers’ support for the Iranian government against US imperialism makes them Islamists? Challenging propaganda aimed at preparing and sustaining popular support for aggression against a regime—and supporting it in its struggle against unjust aggression– in no way amounts to support for the regime’s political content. Falsely equating one with the other is a means by which one sector of the antiwar movement pressures another to abandon its solidarity with the victims of US aggression.

The Formalists

Another sector of the antiwar movement, the formalists, ignores the demonization campaigns of the aggressor states altogether, choosing to focus its attack on the formal, legal, case for war. For example, rather than challenging the depiction of Ahmadinejad as a Judeophobe and holocaust denier whose political rule is based on electoral fraud, formalists dismiss these accusations as irrelevant to the question of whether there is a just or legal basis for war. A war cannot be prosecuted justly or legally, they say, simply because a leader’s views are unpalatable or because the election that brought him to power has been called into question. Therefore, even if the charges against the regime are true, there’s no legitimate case for war. Besides, the formal case for an attack on Iran, for example, rests, not on these allegations, but on fear that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons. The attack on the formal case then proceeds with an examination of the evidence that Iran is developing a nuclear arsenal, while pointing to the hypocrisy of nuclear armed countries denying Iran nuclear arms, as they allow Israel to dangle the threat of a nuclear strike over the heads of its opponents, while calls for Israel to disarm and join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty are blocked. Since threatened countries are compelled to seek nuclear arms to provide for their self-defense against nuclear-armed powers, a further argument is made that the key to preventing Iran and other countries from developing their own nuclear arsenals is to reduce the threat level, not increase it.

One view is that the formalists’ strategy is preferable to that of the challengers because it focuses debate on what is seen to be the weakest part of the war-promoters’ argument (the absent legal basis for aggression), and therefore prevents the war-promoters from turning to demonization to build emotional mass support for war. Moreover, since the formalists ignore the accusations of brutality, dictatorship, human rights violations and so on against the target regime as irrelevant to the question of whether there is a just or legal basis for war, they reduce their chances of being tarred as thug-huggers, dictator-lovers, and tyrants’ apologists. To the extent these labels stick, the antiwar movement is discredited within the larger population.

The alternative view is that the formalists’ strategy fails in practice. Neutrality on the question of whether the targeted leader is brutal, holds unpalatable views, and has come to power through electoral fraud, is met by accusations that the formalists, through their silence, are tacit supporters of the regime. The charge is loosed: Failure to condemn is tantamount to support! What’s more, trying to keep the debate focussed on the formal case doesn’t stop the emotional case being made. And while the formalists may win the debate on the terrain they’ve chosen, the emotional case remains a potent pacifier of popular opinion. “Oh sure,” reasons the man on the street, “Maybe the formal case for war was flawed, but a brutal dictator (or the misogynist Taliban, or the ethnic cleansing Serbs, and so on) was removed. ”

The formalists’ error, in training their attack on the formal case for war, is to mistake where the enemy’s strength lies. The formal case carries little weight in popular discourse. What matters is the public’s emotional reaction. Is the target regime and its leader brutal, thuggish, unpredictable, dangerous, hate-filled and detestable? In other words, is he a demon? If that’s what the public understands, the fact that there’s no case for war under the UN Charter; that war hasn’t been blessed by the Security Council; that the accused hasn’t done what he’s accused of doing; that there’s a double standard involved, doesn’t matter. The public will go along. First, because wars as they’re fought by imperialist powers today—invariably against weak countries—demand no obvious sacrifice on the part of the public; and second, because they can be rationalized as an enterprise whose outcome, on balance, is desirable. This rationalization, depends, of course, on a fair degree of blindness to the scale of humanitarian tragedy US-led wars of imperialist aggression have created in the former Yugoslavia and more clearly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it’s a blindness the mass media play a hand in creating and many people, besotted with patriotism, are happy to accept. The formalists, while perceiving their own path to be wiser than that of the challengers, have, on the contrary, stumbled into a cul-de-sac. If the goal is to arouse the public against preparations for war, their blows miss the real target.

The CPD Anarchists

The third sector of the antiwar movement, the CPD anarchists, neither challenges the campaigns of demonization that prepare public opinion for aggression against a target regime, nor ignore them. Instead, they embrace them. This sector of the antiwar movement is against the state—any state—whether it is a powerful aggressor or a weak victim, an imperialist power or a successor to a movement of national liberation, an enforcer of a regime of exploitation or an enforcer of a regime against it. During the Cold War CPD anarchists were against both the United States and the Soviet Union. In the Persian Gulf War they were against both the United States and Iraq, and remained so in 2003. Today they are against both the United States and Iran. Mostly, this sector is made up of anarchists who call themselves campaigners for peace and democracy. But while not all of its members self-identify as anarchists, they are guided by anarchist principles. Their invariable opposition to any state is accompanied by an invariable solidarity with anyone who challenges any state. They are for the dissidents in Cuba who take money from Washington to overthrow Cuba’s socialism and are against the Cuban state for jailing them. They were for the anticommunist Polish trade union Solidarity and anticommunist dissidents in Eastern Europe as ardently as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and The Wall Street Journal were. We can be sure that the State Department likes the CPD anarchists a good deal. They are for the same people they’re for (anyone working against the regimes the US is opposed to) and against the regimes they’re against (the Soviet Union, Cuba, Iraq, Iran.) True, the CPD anarchists are also against regimes the United States is for (like Saudi Arabia). And they’re against US foreign policy, but their opposition, as we shall see in a moment, is more a help to the State Department than a hindrance.

CPD anarchists have a curious habit of launching demonization campaigns of their own at the peak of the US state’s demonization of the next regime to be taken down. When Washington demonized the Soviet government to justify the Cold War, the CPD anarchists were not far behind. When Washington deplored Havana’s jailing of mercenary dissidents, the CPD anarchists joined in. On the eve of the 2003 US-British invasion of Iraq, they let it be known that they too condemned Saddam Hussein. Unlike the challengers, who expose the distortions and deceptions that make up Washington’s informal campaigns for war, the CPD anarchists accept them at face value, and in doing so, legitimize them from within the antiwar movement. They take the line of least resistance. Accept the propaganda against the intended victim holus bolus (because the victim is a state and it must, by the very definition of a state in the anarchist lexicon, be as corrupt and horrible as the press and State Department say it is.) Whereas the formalists ignore the aggressors’ informal case for war, the CPD anarchists buttress it.

Recently, the Campaign for Peace and Democracy issued a petition to rally opposition to both Washington and Tehran. The government in Tehran, the CPD anarchists argued, is hardly a government leftists should want to support. This confuses support for a government in its struggle against predation by imperialist powers with support for a regime’s political content. It’s true that leftists shouldn’t want to support the political content of the Islamic regime, but it’s untrue that leftists wouldn’t want to support a state that is resisting imperialist aggression. The Stalin government was the kind of government capitalists wouldn’t want to support, but Churchill and Roosevelt did support it, because, from the perspective of US and British capital at the time, it made sense to do so. Should Churchill and Roosevelt have abandoned the Soviets in their struggle against the invading Nazis and called instead for solidarity with anti-Soviet dissidents in Russia (i.e., a fifth column) simply because the Stalin government was not one a capitalist should want to support? If the goal were to allow the Nazis to swallow up the Soviet Union, no better advice could have been given. But neither Churchill nor Roosevelt were stupid enough to follow for their class the kind of fatuous reasoning the CPD anarchists advance for ours.

The CPD calls on leftists to abandon the Iranian government in its struggle against the predations of the United States and Israel and support anti-regime dissidents within the country instead. If the objective is to allow Iran to be brought once again under the US heel, this is, indeed, sound advice. Were CPD principal Joanne Landy and her allies around at the time we can be sure they would have condemned German fascism and Soviet socialism equally, waiting until the Nazis had launched their invasion to wish a pox on both their houses, at which point they would have called for solidarity with anti-Soviet dissidents in Moscow. If the result was that the Nazis swallowed up the Soviet Union, Landy et al would have washed their hands of responsibility for their actions, as they must have done when Solidarity helped return Poland to its place on the periphery of European capitalism, and anti-Soviet dissidents helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union and along with it a collapse in living standards and the demise of guaranteed employment, free health care, a robust social wage and substantial equality.

The CPD anarchists say they’re standing in solidarity with democracy activists in Iran who are challenging the illegitimate, electoral fraud-tainted Ahmadinejad government. But their solidarity is legitimate only to the degree the “democracy” activists challenge a real breach of democracy, and are not upholding a fiction spun to further US efforts at destabilization. As mentioned above, the evidence for electoral theft is pathetically thin, amounting to little more than assertion. On the other hand, substantial polling backs the counterclaim that the outcome of the election truly reflected the way Iranians voted. The balance of evidence, then, lies on Ahmadinejad’s side. What can be said of a campaign for democracy whose solidarity is with forces on the ground that are against the side backed by the majority? What can be said of a campaign for peace that reinforces the distortions and misinformation that make up the informal case for war by accepting it at face value and then seeking endorsement of it within the antiwar movement itself?

Needless to say, the CPD anarchists have little good to say about the challengers. They accuse them of falsely seeing the enemy of their enemy as their friend. The aim is to discredit the challengers’ work of exposing the distortions and fabrications that make up the aggressor states’ demonization campaigns. For how can the outcome of their work be sound if it is based on a logical error? What’s more, the demonization must be accepted at face value, for in keeping with anarchist principles, the state and its leaders must be opposed. How much easier to oppose demons. If Washington and The New York Times say that Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe is a dictator who clings to power for power’s-sake, then he is everything they say he is, for he is the leader of a state. If the State Department and Wall Street Journal say north Korea’s Kim Jong Il is a dangerously unpredictable tyrant who has an itch for war, the CPD anarchists will shy away from critical examination of the claim. Why risk undermining a depiction so favorable to the anarchist penchant for reviling heads of state? In fact, the CPD anarchists themselves practice the very same enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend thinking they accuse the challengers of practicing. Who are the heroes of the CPD anarchists? The Soviet, Eastern European and Cuban anti-socialist dissidents who, with US assistance, sought to overthrow socialist states; the “pro-democracy” dissidents in the former Yugoslavia who, with US assistance, overthrew the government of Slobodan Milosevic; the dissidents in Iraq who, with US assistance, sought to overthrow the Ba’athist regime; and the dissidents in Iran who, with US assistance, seek to overthrow the Islamic state. These are the CPD anarchists’ friends. Why? Because they are the enemies of the CPD’s enemy (the state — though, apparently, not enemies of the US state). The enemy of their enemy is their friend. For the CPD anarchists, it is all right to pledge solidarity with the enemies of a state, but not all right to pledge solidarity with a state the US is about to attack.

Conclusion

Of the three groups, the challengers would appear to have the best chance of success in countering Washington’s and the mass media’s efforts to build popular support, or at least, foster acquiescence to, wars of aggression. The formalists’ failure to challenge the informal campaign of demonization leaves the field open to pro-war forces, who are free to create popular revulsion to the targeted regime. Their attack on the legal basis for war, is too cerebral, and at the end of the day, is no match for the emotional hot buttons skilled politicians, public relations experts, and mass media manipulators are left free to push. Finally, there is no chance the CPD anarchists will counter Washington and the mass media’s war mongering in any effective way. On the contrary, their efforts only strengthen them, and one wonders how sincerely opposed to war are people who, on the eve of an attack, endorse the informal campaign of lies, distortions and exaggeration the aggressors use to garner popular support for their imminent predations.

**********

House of Latin America (HOLA), an Iranian NGO dedicated to solidarity and defense of the peoples of Latin America and the people of Iran, has initiated the following appeal to individuals and organizations worldwide to join with them in a campaign of solidarity with Iran in light of U.S. escalating threats and continuing sanctions.

Whereas, the escalating sanctions and threats of military intervention against Iran are intended to deprive the Iranian people of their internationally recognized right to live as an independent and free nation;

Whereas, the sanctions and threats are clear violations of Article 2 of the UN Charter, according to which member states must “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”;

Whereas, the United States is unequivocally obligated under the bilateral 1981 Algiers Treaty to refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Iran;

Whereas, sanctions often pave the way to war;

Whereas, Iran, as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has an “inalienable right” to develop and use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes;

Whereas, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, there is no evidence to back up the charge that Iran is “planning to produce nuclear weapons”;

Whereas, the hegemonic lobbies that portray Iran as a threat to peace today also lied about imaginary weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to convince the public that war was necessary;

The people of the world cannot allow such a crime against humanity.

Therefore, I (we) join with all who stand for justice, peace, sovereignty and self determination in raising my (our) voice to demand:

* Lift economic sanctions against Iran.
* Recognize the right of Iran to develop and use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
* Stop military threats against Iran.

A wrecking ball of imperialism

By Stephen Gowans

Brian Martin, a professor of social sciences at Australia’s University of Wollongong, has written a reply to my article Overthrow Inc.: Peter Ackerman’s quest to do what the CIA used to do and make it seem progressive , and then a reply to my reply. Martin is the author of a number of books and articles on nonviolence, including Nonviolence against Capitalism, Technology for Nonviolent Struggle, and “Nonviolent strategy against capitalism” (in Social Alternatives, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2008, pp. 42-46.)

In the latest exchange, I try to show that the disagreement between Martin and me is rooted, I believe, in a conflict between Marxist and anarchist perspectives on the state, and the question of whether the state is inherently good or bad.

I argue that because anarchists are opposed to domination, and because the state is an instrument of domination, anarchists often line up alongside imperialist forces seeking the overthrow of foreign states. Because the regime change efforts of imperialist forces are aimed exclusively at states operating outside the North Atlantic imperialist orbit, the effect is for anarchists who participate in campaigns to challenge these states to act as one of Western imperialism’s wrecking balls. While the anarchist aim is to challenge state authority, the aim of the imperialist forces that fund and provide training for the nonviolent resistance campaigns anarchists are often involved in, is to transfer control of the state from often popular and anti-colonial forces to comprador forces that are willing to facilitate the despoliation of their countries by North Atlantic banks, corporations and investors. Anarchist challenges to North Atlantic states, without the generous funding Western governments, corporate foundations and wealthy individuals are prepared to allocate to challenges to states operating outside the United States’ informal empire, are modest and ineffectual by comparison.

The State

I think Martin would agree that the state is an instrument of domination, which claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within a defined geographical territory, exercised by the police and military. In the Marxist view, the state enforces the interests of one class over another, which is to say, it is an instrument whereby one class dominates and oppresses another. Slave owner states oppress slaves, landowner states oppress serfs, capitalist states oppress workers, and working class states oppress capitalists to limit or prevent capitalist exploitation. To Marxists, the question of whether the state is good or bad depends on who controls it, and who’s asking the question. To people conscious of their membership in the working class, the capitalist state is bad, not because it’s repressive, but because it’s repressive against their interests. Similarly, to a capitalist, the working class state is bad, not because it relies on the use or threat of violence to enforce a system of laws that privilege the working class, but because the system of laws backed by violence is against the interests of capital.

Anarchists, on the other hand, regard the state as inherently bad because it is based on domination enforceable through violence. To Martin, nonviolence is “especially useful for those who want to challenge domination” and it “involves empowerment of the population to challenge groups backed by force.” In other words, nonviolent resistance (NVR) is useful for doing what anarchists do: challenge the state.

But what if the state is under the control of a previously oppressed class or nation and its repressive function is used to prevent its former oppressor’s return to power? The leaders of Zimbabwe’s national liberation, for example, have used the state, and its repressive powers, to advance the interests of indigenous people at the expense of a former colonial oppressor, European settlers, and would-be neo-colonialists. The Bolsheviks used state power to enforce a wide array of measures favourable to the working class at the expense of capitalists and landowners. Is the use of state power to crack down on forces which seek to reduce Zimbabwe to neo-colonial servitude inherently bad? And were the Bolsheviks wrong to use state power to repress class enemies, as a condition of advancing the interests of the working class?

To anarchists the answer is yes. The Zimbabwe state is repressive. It uses violence to enforce the interests of indigenous Africans over those of European settlers and their descendants. The Bolshevik state was also repressive. It used violence to repress capitalists, estate-owners, rich peasants, saboteurs, and political enemies. Whether working class or capitalist, anti-colonial or colonial, the state is repressive; it is an instrument of domination. For these reasons anarchists oppose it.

A movement which challenges the state in Zimbabwe, or the state in countries in which working class interests are dominant, earns the support of anarchists. Indeed, because anarchists are against any state, whether feudal, capitalist, working class or anti-colonial, they often find themselves lining up with capitalist and neo-colonial forces against working class-oriented and anti-colonial states. And because North Atlantic governments, corporate foundations and wealthy individuals are eager to bankroll challenges to working class-oriented and anti-colonial states, but not to North Atlantic states and their satellites, anarchists who participate in these campaigns act as a wrecking ball of imperialism; their function is to tear down independent states so that control can be transferred to forces acceptable to Western banks, corporations and investors. At the same time, anarchist nonviolent resistance aimed at Western capitalist states – which tends to be low-level and largely non-disruptive, owing to the absent or meagre funding received from governments and philanthropic foundations – poses no serious threat.

Interestingly, Martin took exception to what he believed was my description of NVR as being guided by the goal of seizing power. This wasn’t my description, but that of Peter Ackerman, one of the principal proponents of NVR. Anarchists don’t seek power (the ability to dominate); they only seek to undermine it. What Martin failed to recognize was that Peter Ackerman, while a proponent of nonviolence, is not an anarchist but a capitalist, and a very wealthy one, whose avocation is to assist in the transfer of state power abroad from forces not yoked to U.S. financial and export interests, to pro-capitalist forces beholden to the US ruling class. Ackerman defines NVR as the use of strikes, boycotts, mass demonstrations and other forms of civil disobedience, including nonviolent sabotage, to make a country ungovernable in order to seize power. And yet while Ackerman’s NVR aims are clearly at odds with those of Martin, Martin talks favourably of Ackerman, and Ackerman’s docent, Gene Sharp.

Nonviolence

Whether nonviolence is a defining feature of anarchism is a matter of dispute among anarchists. Martin, I suspect, would say it is. Peter Gelderloos, an anarchist whose book, How Nonviolence Protects the State, rejects exclusive nonviolence as an effective strategy for anarchists, would say it isn’t.

I agree with Gelderloos that proponents of nonviolence have claimed success in excess of what the data support. The modus operandi of NVR advocates is to exaggerate the achievements of campaigns which have featured the use of nonviolent tactics (India’s liberation from British colonial rule; the US civil rights movement; the anti-Vietnam War movement; the anti-nuclear weapons movement) and then to attribute the success of these campaigns to nonviolent tactics alone.

For example, in his reply to me, Martin credits the movements against nuclear weapons — “which used NVR as well as conventional political methods” — with saving the world from nuclear catastrophe. But how do we know that demonstrations and civil disobedience made any difference? The fact that some people used nonviolent tactics in an effort to deter superpower nuclear proliferation hardly means that nonviolence worked. If it did, I could say the crowing of the rooster causes the sun to rise, because the rooster crowed and the sun soon rose.

A more compelling case can be made that the end of the arms race came about because the United States no longer needed to expand its nuclear arsenal. It had embarked on an arms build-up to force the Soviets into bankruptcy. With the goal of toppling its ideological competitor achieved, there was no longer a need to pile weapon upon weapon. And after acquiring the capability to obliterate the world many times over, there was little point in acquiring more nuclear weapons. There comes a point where one more nuke makes no difference.

Moreover, were the decision to end the arms race attributable to nonviolent tactics, we could still say very little was achieved. The United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, and Israel still have nuclear arms, and evince not the slightest interest in giving them up. India, Pakistan and north Korea have acquired their own nuclear arsenals (or at least, capabilities.) The United States continues to threaten non-nuclear countries with nuclear weapons, thereby encouraging non-nuclear states to develop their own nuclear arms to deter U.S. aggression. What success was achieved was minor indeed.

Ackerman uses the same approach, attributing the success of campaigns that involved nonviolent tactics in some way to nonviolence alone, as if massive surrounding violence played no role. Believe his version of history, and the violence of a Western-sponsored armed insurgency in Kosovo, sanctions, a 78-day NATO terror bombing campaign, unceasing Western hostility, and a political fifth column, had nothing whatever to do with the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia in 2000. It was all due to anarchist activists practicing nonviolent resistance.

In the same manner, proponents of NVR attribute India’s political independence from Britain to Gandhian nonviolence. In doing so, they ignore the armed struggle led by Chandrasekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh’s campaign of bombings and assassinations, and the effects of the massive violence of two world wars and the armed resistance to British rule in Palestine in weakening Britain and sapping it of the manpower and resources it needed to hold onto its colonies. What’s more, the success was limited. Britain exchanged direct rule for indirect rule. It authored India’s constitution, handpicked its successors, and continued to dominate India’s economy. India’s independence was largely symbolic.

Relatedly, Martin disagrees with my point that NVR is a means to an end, and is therefore neither inherently good nor bad, but is good or bad depending on what it’s used for. Nuclear weapons, he rejoins, are inherently bad, because they are indiscriminate, and because they are a means of domination. The corollary, it seems, is that NVR is inherently good, because it challenges the state, an instrument of domination, and does so without recourse to violence, violence also being a means of domination. This follows consistently from the anarchist abhorrence of domination.

On the other hand, one could argue that Martin has to claim that NVR is good independent of its consequence, because the consequences of the Ackerman-Sharp-Helvey deployments that have been associated with regime change successes have been so negative from the point of view of the working class, that to do otherwise would leave his pro-NVR case in a shambles. NVR looks good only if its recent outcomes are ignored and the role of violence in the progressive outcomes it claims as its own are passed over. In other words, NVR’s positive reputation depends on ignoring the reality that NVR color revolutions have cleared the way for the ascension to power of Washington-aligned neo-liberal regimes that have privileged North Atlantic investors at the expense of domestic workers. At the same time the role of violence in the progressive developments (India’s liberation from British colonial rule, the end of the Vietnam War, and so on) that NVR advocates claim as their own must be ignored. Or you can simply say – as Martin and some peace advocates do – that the outcomes are immaterial; what matters is the process itself. This is sheer sophistry. A process cannot be evaluated independent of its outcomes. If so, a process that invariably produced bad outcomes, would be considered good.

A Marxist would say that domination isn’t always bad. It depends on who’s dominating who, and why. The domination of the formerly exploiting few by the formerly exploited many is not bad, but good, progressive and necessary. Marxists don’t want to dominate for the sake of domination, but if dominating a minority of exploiters and the use of violence are necessary to prevent the minority’s return to power, and to prevent the resumption of mass exploitation, then domination and violence are acceptable. Likewise, if a nuclear weapons capability allows north Korea to deter the United States from using military (including nuclear) aggression to dominate the Korean peninsula and integrate north Korea into Washington’s informal empire, can nuclear weapons be said to be inherently bad and necessarily bound up with the enforcement of domination? On the contrary, it would seem that north Korea’s nuclear capability challenges the domination of the most violent of all states, that of the United States.

Conclusion

At root, the disagreement between Martin and me seems to boil down to this: is domination and the use of violence always bad, or are domination and violence bad depending on who uses them, why they’re used, and what the outcomes are? These are normative questions.

An empirical question concerns whether the commitment of anarchists to challenge the state is useful to imperialist forces. Through their control of philanthropic foundations and such organizations as the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, involved in the training of (often anarchist) activists in techniques of destabilization, and through their control of the media, which shape public understanding of states that operate outside the North Atlantic imperial orbit as being based on unjustified authority, imperialist forces galvanize anarchists into action as one of their wrecking balls — challenging working class-oriented, anti-colonial, and North Atlantic-independent states. These challenges never develop to the point where the state collapses, as anarchists hope, but to the point where state control is transferred to comprador forces, as the imperialist sponsors of NVR campaigns intend. Despite their aim of challenging the state, NVR activists act in ways that help enhance the power of North Atlantic states to dominate and exploit the global south and Eastern Europe. Anarchist nonviolent strategy hasn’t threatened capitalism or challenged the domination of North Atlantic states. On the contrary, its record is one of service to North Atlantic imperialist forces in integrating hold-out countries into Washington’s informal empire, through the participation of NVR activists in campaigns to smash independent states.