The Putin Club

The ideological drift of Canadian communists, from Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin through Subhas Chandra Bose, and the urgency of communists rediscovering Lenin and Luxemburg.

By Stephen Gowans

March 2, 2023

If anyone should be challenging Russian president Vladmir Putin’s nonsense about Ukraine existentially threatening Russia by proposing to join the EU and NATO, it’s communists, who effectively showed in WWI how capitalist powers invented similar casus belli to justify plunging the world into the abyss of war. “When and where,” asked Rosa Luxemburg, “has there been a war since so-called public opinion has played a role in governmental calculations, in which each and every belligerent party did not, with a heavy heart, draw the sword from its sheath for the single and sole purpose of defending its fatherland and its own righteous cause from the shameful attacks of the enemy?”

All the same, it’s nominal communists (who think communism is defying the United States and therefore admire Putin for spearheading the project), along with the Far Right (which admires Putin’s reactionary values), who propagate the Kremlin leader’s nonsense. Rosa Luxemburg would be shocked to discover that the Communist Party of Canada (CPC), one of whose clubs bears her name, has tossed aside her thinking on war and imperialism—and even more shockingly, that of Lenin—to join the Putin Club.

Of course, that’s not how the party sees it. In a statement on the first anniversary of the war, the party conceded—as we’ll see, disingenuously—that Russia’s invasion is not justified. It made this concession only after a) listing a series of actions undertaken by NATO over three decades which the party says provoked Russia’s aggression, and b) describing the war as one in which the United States seeks “to weaken and destabilize the Russian government and foment ‘regime change’ in the Kremlin, and ultimately to carve up Russia into four or five weak and dependent mini-states in its place.”

To be sure, in its wildest dreams, Washington would love to topple Putin and replace him with a president it could control, while fragmenting Russia. But there is a wide gulf between wild dreams and actual plans. The party offers no evidence that these are the war aims of Washington and not just the fantasy of party leaders. Unless the US state has suddenly fallen under the sway of lunatics, it very likely has no such plan. The United States couldn’t defeat the rifle-toting Taliban; opted not to invade military pipsqueak Syria after the going got tough in a crippled Iraq; and shied away from giving tiny North Korea, with its rudimentary nuclear deterrent, a bloody nose. With a record like this, it’s highly improbable that anyone in Washington has serious thoughts about invading a country that possesses the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. While the party doesn’t say so, the implication of its line of argument is this: Moscow is defending itself against a leviathan bent on achieving a highly ambitious plan of destroying the Russian state. If what the party says about NATO’s actions and aims are true, could it sincerely believe that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is unjustified?

Lay aside for the moment that the origins of the Third International, the very same organization from which the CPC sprang, are found in the rejection of, and disgust with, socialists who blamed war in the modern era on one capitalist power provoking another. Lenin and Luxemburg wrote scathingly of socialists who invoked the idea of defensive war to justify their betrayal of socialist commitments to stay away from choosing sides in wars between capitalist states. These wars were never about self-defense and always about securing advantages for one capitalist class at the expense of another—an inevitable feature of a capitalist-driven, friction-producing, rivalry among states for profit-making opportunities.

What, according to the Putin Club, is Russia—or more precisely, the Russian oligarchy—defending itself against? Apart from the party’s evidence-free attribution of the war to the desire of Washington to overthrow Vladimir Putin and carve Russia into a series of weak states, club members cycle through a litany of reasons why we should understand Russia’s aggression against Ukraine as a defensive war, some matching the CPC reasoning, others bearing a close resemblance.

One argument is that Russia was provoked by NATO’s encroaching on Russia’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. This is true enough, but the argument follows with the false claim that Russia is thus justified in responding with war. To say that Russia is justified in maintaining a sphere of influence, is to justify empire and imperialism. That’s hardly the kind of argument one would hope to hear from a communist.

A related argument identifies Ukraine’s desire to exit the Russian sphere and attach itself to the EU and NATO as an economic and military threat to Russia. This is true. But does the threat justify Russia’s aggression against Ukraine? Cuba’s exit from the US empire threatened the United States economically and militarily, but that hardly justified a US invasion. Indeed, the exit of one colony after another from the empires of former colonial powers threatened all these powers economically and militarily, but no self-respecting communist would argue, for example, that the French war in Indochina was justified because Vietnam’s exit from the French empire threatened French profits and undermined the economic base on which its military power resided.

Others stoop to hyperbole to argue improbably that Russia is threatened existentially by NATO. The existence of an anti-Russian alliance is not equivalent to an existential threat. The Kremlin certainly faces threats, but not all threats are existential. Moscow, it should be kept in mind, has the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons and a formidable triad of nuclear-tipped ballistic and cruise missiles, strategic bombers, and ballistic missile submarines. A hostile military alliance may loom on its Western frontier, but the likelihood of NATO trying to do to Russia what Russia has tried to do to Ukraine is approximately zero. While NATO may threaten Russia militarily, few military threats are existential, a fortiori in Russia’s case, considering it commands the world’s most formidable nuclear deterrent. One NATO tank on Russian soil is the path to Golgotha, a reality unquestionably understood at the Pentagon. Russia is no more threatened existentially by NATO than Europe is threatened existentially by Russia (the Biden Club’s matching contribution to the flurry of nonsense.)

China, too, is a nuclear power, though compared to Russia it is far less formidably equipped with weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. It is also boxed in by rivals. By the reasoning of those who exculpate Russia for its aggression against Ukraine by depicting the aggression as a defensive war against a US proxy, the logic for a Chinese invasion of South Korea is even more compelling. The Korean peninsula is home to a complement of 27,000 US troops, stationed at the largest overseas US military facility in the world, backed by a sizeable South Korea military that serves under the de facto command of a US general. If any country is threatened by a US surrogate on its periphery, it is China by South Korea, and yet few people would defend, in advance of the fact, a Chinese invasion of the Korean peninsula. Significantly, few of the people who today defend the Russian invasion of Ukraine did so in advance of the actual invasion. They dismissed US warnings in late 2021 that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent as preposterous; mere US propaganda intended to besmirch Russia’s reputation. They believed then, as those of sound mind believe today, that such an act would be morally repugnant. And yet today, after the fact, their minds are changed. The mental journey from “Russia would never conduct itself in such a morally objectionable way” to “Russia has conducted itself in this way and its conduct is morally defensible” proceeds along the following path:

Defying the United States is morally excellent conduct.
Any country that defies the United States is morally excellent.
Russia defies the United States therefore it is morally excellent.
Prior to February 24, 2022: A morally excellent country wouldn’t invade its neighbor, therefore US warnings that Russia is about to invade Ukraine are preposterous, and are aimed at calling into question Russia’s moral excellence.
From February 24, 2022 forward: The invasion of Ukraine was undertaken by a morally excellent state. Therefore, the invasion is morally defensible.

Those who have travelled along this path are guided by no principle, but one: Defend whoever defies the United States. In this they reveal themselves to be unprincipled, grubby, propagandists.

This is surely not the path of communists. But it is a path that had been trod by non-communists, and rather disreputable ones at that. Take, for example, Subhas Chandra Bose. A charismatic leader of the Indian anti-colonial movement, and at one point leader of the Indian National Congress, Bose allied with Hitler initially, and Imperial Japan subsequently, in a failed effort to defeat British imperialism in India. While the project of evicting the British from India to remove an impediment to Indian independence was admirable, allying with empires that rivaled that of Britain to achieve this goal was not only morally unconscionable, but shockingly naive. Bose thought he could use imperialists to achieve an anti-colonialist aim, and imperialists agreed to use the anti-colonialist Bose to achieve their imperialist ends. By allying with Hitler and Tojo, Bose elevated the goal of ending India’s oppression above the goals of liberating from the yoke of his patrons’ imperialism Jews, Slavs, Koreans, Chinese, Indonesians, Indochinese, and Filipinos.

Germany and Japan sought to destabilize Britain’s colonial holdings in order to weaken Britain and defeat the empire in war. The outcome, had Britain lost the war, would have been the division of British colonial assets between Germany and Japan, not India’s independence. Bose’s naivete in believing that imperialist patrons would help him deliver India from the yoke of imperialism would have been touching in a child but was revolting in a man who had not been officially certified as feeble-minded. Kim Il Sung mocked nationalist leaders, like Bose, who joined forces with imperialist powers. He said they were like the man who appeals to the robber outside his house for help in evicting the robber already in his house.

Bose’s error was to fail to see that the oppression of India could be brought to an end with less difficulty and greater moral clarity as part of a project to end all oppression. Communists were committed to the project of freeing humanity from all oppressions, not just some. Bose’s approach was an affront to the communists’ universalism. He set the liberation of India above all other struggles against oppression, and indeed, even colluded in his alliance with Germany and Japan in the oppression of other nations. Brecht, the Marxist, wrote: “Everything or nothing. All of us or none.” Bose’s dictum, in contrast, was, liberate India from oppression, and damn the rest. Bose’s echo is heard in the Putin Club’s siding with Russian imperialism against that of the United States. The communist alternative is to oppose imperialism, tout court.

The Indian nationalist’s allying with the Far Right in the pursuit of a very restricted Leftist goal contains within it a cautionary lesson for advocates who today urge the Left to join with the Far Right in an alliance against NATO arming Ukraine.

The goals of the Left and Far Right in connection with war are fundamentally different.

The Marxist Left has been guided historically by five principles.

War is the result of capitalism.
The are no defensive wars between major capitalist states in the modern era.
To end war, capitalism must be transcended.
Working people have no country.
The working class does not take sides in wars between capitalist powers.

In contrast, the Far Right:

Sees no causal connection between capitalism and war.
Defends the idea of war guilt.
Supports the bourgeois order.
Promotes identities related to country, nation, people, religion, or civilization.
Takes sides in wars between capitalist states.

Hence, on questions of war, the Marxist Left and the Far Right are on different pages. So how could anyone think there is sufficient common ground between these two groups to even begin to talk of an alliance? The answer is that proponents of the alliance define the Left, not as the Left of Lenin and Luxemburg, but as the Left of those who think communism is defying the United States and defending anyone who spearheads the project—in other words, the Left of the Putin Club and not the Left of Lenin and Luxemburg. The Putin Club and Far Right do indeed agree on a few points and hence, are possible allies. They agree that: there is no connection between the war and capitalism; Russia’s war is defensive; NATO should cease all support to Ukraine. As we’ll see, four of five of the abovementioned Far Right characteristics are present in the CPC, which isn’t to say the party is Far Right (it isn’t) but that, unlike the traditional Marxist Left, it intersects in matters of war with the Far Right. Significantly, none of the five guiding principles of the Marxist Left are present in the party in connection with its stance on the war in Ukraine.

The Putin Club is not committed wholly to apologizing for Russia’s aggression by invoking the concept of defensive war. Club members sometimes deploy another argument: Russia’s war in Ukraine is a humanitarian intervention. According to this view, Moscow has launched a special military operation, not a war, to defend Russian-speakers in the Donbas, who, according to Mr. Putin and his votaries, are the objects of a campaign of Nazi-inspired genocide. The basis for the genocide claim is that Russian-speakers have been dying in the civil war between the secessionist Donbas republics and Kyiv government, the latter inspired by Ukrainian nationalism and nostalgia for Stepan Bandera. Where Bose collaborated with the Nazis against British imperialism, Bandera collaborated with the Nazis against what he saw as Russian imperialism. To the Putin Club, Bose is fine because he joined forces with the Nazis against British imperialism, which they dislike, but Bandera is reviled because he collaborated with the Nazis against Russia, which the Putin Club admires.

The Kremlin presents the civil war deaths of Russian-speakers as genocide by claiming Kyiv is motivated to liquidate Ukraine’s Russophone population. The problem is that (a) there’s no evidence of this and (b) a plausible alternative explanation is that the deaths happened in the course of a civil war, not because the Ukraine government seeks the annihilation of people who speak Russian as their first language. The fact that Moscow has not invoked the Genocide Convention, which it would do if it truly believed its allegation had any substance, is significant.

The Putin Club’s rallies against the war are aimed at NATO. Stop NATO! No to NATO. End the War. Nowhere does the club demand that Russia reverse its aggression or withdraw from Ukraine. This comports with the club’s position that NATO provoked Russia and that Russia is engaged in a defensive war. To end the war, NATO’s arming of Ukraine most stop, that is, NATO must stop impeding Russia’s invasion. In the hands of the Putin Club the demand “Stop the War” becomes the tacit “Stop Trying to Stop Russia.” This fits with the Club’s view that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a defensive response to a NATO plan to annihilate the Russian state and disarticulate it into a handful of easily controlled statelets answerable to Washington.

The Club’s position on the origin of the war represents a substantial departure from the thinking of Lenin and Luxemburg. The Marxist giants held that wars between capitalist powers originate, as Luxemburg put it, in roots which “reach deep down into the Plutonic deeps of economic creation.” Less poetically, Lenin urged his followers to consider “the economic essence of imperialism” as the key to understanding modern war and modern politics. The Putin Club will have none of this. “Bosh!” they say. “Russia is defending itself from an existential threat. Economics (i.e., capitalism) has nothing to do with it.” A fine analysis for communists!

Pressed on why, if they’re really against the war, they don’t demand Russia withdraw its forces from Ukraine, the Putin Club falls back on sophisms. “We’re dealing with our own imperialism first,” its members retort. One can only influence one’s own government, they explain. Non-Russians can demand Russia’s withdrawal from Ukraine, but because non-Russians exercise no influence over the Russian government (on par, it might be added, with most Russian citizens), the demand would be pointless. One can only influence one’s own government. Therefore, it’s only of one’s own government that demands should be made.

The first problem with this argument is that it’s made by people who have long histories of picketing the embassies of governments that are not their own. Canadian communists have held countless demonstrations outside the embassies and consulates of the United States and Israel, to name just two, demanding changes to the policies of these foreign governments. But now, when asked why they haven’t demanded Russia reverse its aggression on Ukraine, they answer that it is pointless to make demands of foreign governments—that Canadians must deal with their own imperialism first. That the argument is hypocritical is evidenced by the fact that one chapter of the Putin Club held its last “antiwar” rally outside the US embassy. It didn’t darken the doorstep of the Russian embassy. Unless the Canadian members of the Putin Club have a special influence over the US government about which we know nothing, their argument is constructed on a foundation of dishonesty. It is also the case that those who make this argument rhapsodize about the coordinated international protests that were organized against Apartheid South Africa and the war-obsessed George W. Bush administration. None of these people, so concerned about focusing only on the government they can influence and dealing with their own imperialism first, sat out these demonstrations. Their craven mendacity is revolting.

Imperialism is the relationship between countries competing for opportunities to accumulate capital on the world market. Any discussion of imperialism necessarily involves a discussion of two or more countries. One cannot talk of imperialism and talk of one country alone. When Hilferding, Kautsky, and Luxemburg wrote about war and imperialism, they didn’t limit their remarks to Germany, on the grounds that the German government was the only one over which they had influence and that discussion of the conduct of other governments was pointless. When Bukharin, Trotsky, and Lenin wrote on imperialism and war, they, like their German comrades, covered the world. They didn’t restrict their attention to Russia. They did this because they saw themselves as part of an international movement whose scope was all humanity. They rejected the idea that they were dues-paying members of a parochial party whose horizons stopped at national borders. “Working men have no country,” said Marx.

An antiwar campaign that says No to NATO but not No to Russian Aggression is like campaigning to ban boxing as a sport, by pressing Canadian boxers to hang up their gloves, and ignoring boxers from other countries. It entirely misses the point that the problem isn’t Canadian boxers—it’s boxing itself. What’s more, were the campaign successful and all Canadian boxers persuaded to stop boxing, the sport would continue anyway, just not with Canadian boxers. A campaign to pressure all boxers, regardless of nationality, to quit the sport is better, but still doesn’t go far enough. If boxing is to end as a sport, the conditions that support it must be overcome.

Lenin argued that a campaign to pressure all countries to lay down their arms wouldn’t end war, because it would fail to address what makes countries go to war in the first place. In his view, the peace movement was utopian; it promoted the illusion that peace could be achieved without eliminating the cause of war in the modern era—capitalism. The CPC’s stance on the Ukraine war doesn’t even rise to the standards of Lenin’s utopian propaganda of peace. That’s because it targets only one side of the war—like asking Canadian boxers to quit, while turning a blind eye to boxers from other countries. If peace campaigns are ranked from worst (presses only one side to lay down its arms) to better (presses both sides to lay down their arms) to best (seeks to overcome the conditions that compel countries to take up arms in the first place), the CPC campaign ranks as worst. Lenin would be dismayed.

The Putin Club relies on another sophism: We must remain silent on Russia’s aggression, or at least minimize what we say about it, lest we add to the cataract of invective against the country, thereby fueling belligerence against Russia at home and strengthening the hand of jingoists who wish to escalate the war. But if Russia has committed an egregious aggression, known to all, not least because Russia’s war-making is covered exhaustively in the media, then pretending it hasn’t happened, or trying to exculpate Moscow by blaming its aggression on NATO, is not only dishonest, it’s a losing strategy. Those who deny an obvious crime, or seek to blame it on others, are, for very good reasons, ignored, and should be. Far better and honest to show that two states, the US and Russia, are at dagger’s drawn, that their mutual hostility arises not from lofty motives but is rooted in economic rivalry, and that the confrontation of these states over economic advantage threatens the entire world.

Thus, there is an important sense in which making a demand of the Russian government from outside Russia is not pointless: when doing so establishes one’s credibility as a champion of the proletariat against all bourgeois governments involved in a war, and when not doing so arouses suspicions (true in this case) that one is not a champion of the international proletariat but an apologist, defender, and votary of one side of a bourgeois-led conflict which has arisen as a necessary consequence of the capitalist-driven, friction-producing, rivalry of states for profit-making opportunities.

The concept of imperialism was central to the writing of Bukharin, Lenin, and Luxemburg, but its meaning has eluded members of the Putin Club, some of whom believe Russia exists outside the circle of imperialist powers; that the country is a target and victim of imperialism, not a participant in it. In the classical view of Marxist imperialism, Russia is as much a part of an imperialist world order as is the United States, the European Union, and China. This is all too much for those whose politics is defined by the necessity of finding a state of presumed moral excellence to defend. And so, in self-defense, they dismiss the classical Marxist view as out of date, because it defines Russia as part of an imperialist system and thus oppugns the moral excellence they so desperately want to believe Russia embodies. Their ostensible reason for rejecting the classical Marxist view is that it was developed more than a century ago and therefore is out of date. Confining the counter-argument to the overt reason offered for rejecting the theory: If we’re to judge the utility of a theory based on how long ago it was formulated, then Marxism is also out of date—the Communist Manifesto was published 175 years ago. So too is the second law of thermodynamics and Darwin’s theory out of date by this reasoning.

Of course, the utility of a theory should not be judged by its age but whether it rests on sound principles and accounts for the facts.

At the core of the classical Marxist theory of war and imperialism are two propositions:

Capitalism incessantly drives states to seek expanded profit-making opportunities beyond their borders.
In a world divided among states, where each state competes against every other for profit-making opportunities in the world market, war is inevitable.

This view was expressed in the resolution of the 1907 Stuttgart Congress of the Second International, which Lenin and Luxemburg took a hand in writing. “Wars between capitalist states are as a rule the consequence of their competition in the world market, for every state is eager to preserve its markets but also to conquer new ones.”

The theory follows naturally from Marx’s and Engel’s observation in the Communist Manifesto about the expansionary nature of capitalism. “It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” Significantly, all of capitalism’s nestling, settling, and connecting, has been orchestrated by states, each vying with the other.

The classical view was hardly new or unique to Lenin and Luxemburg. It was expressed at the Second International’s London Congress as early as 1896. “Under capitalism the chief causes of war are not religious or national differences but economic antagonisms.” In 1910, the Copenhagen Conference reiterated this view: “Modern wars are the result of capitalism, and particularly of rivalries of the capitalist classes of the different countries over the world market.”

This, dear members of the Putin Club, is the classical Marxist theory of war and imperialism. As to the question of whether it is out of date, we must ask:

Has capitalism’s expansionary character changed since Marx and Engels commented on it 175 years ago?
Is the world no longer divided among capitalist states?
Is competition no longer a fundamental characteristic of the capitalist world?
Are states no longer under the sway of oligarchs scouring the world for profit-making opportunities?

All of these questions must be answered in the negative. However, the CPC disagrees. In its statement on the first anniversary of the war, the party declared the classical Marxist theory of war and imperialism to be “not a completely accurate or particularly helpful assessment, especially at this critical moment.”

The Second International in its vast majority was uncomfortable with what the classical Marxist theory demanded of socialists at the “critical moment” of war. So too is the CPC today. Above all, socialists, according to the Stuttgart Congress, were not to be misled by “national prejudices” that are “systematically cultivated in the interest of the ruling classes, in order to divert the mass of the proletariat from their class duties and international solidarity.” Ignoring this, socialists abandoned the radical Marxist apercu that the cause of war is the system itself and instead looked for a guilty party (and not a guilty system) to blame. War would not be seen as caused by a friction-producing rivalry among states driven by capitalist expansionary imperatives; instead, it was to be understood through a Manichean lens of conflict between evil states, starting aggressive wars, and good states, trying to defend themselves. With the Putin Club’s conviction that a morally excellent state, Russia, is defending itself from the provocations of an aggressive alliance, NATO, it’s clear on what side it has come down; not the side of Marxism and the international proletariat, but the side of Putin and the Russian bourgeoisie. Lenin and Luxemburg insisted on adding the following to the Stuttgart resolution: Socialists will “utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war in order to rouse the masses of the people and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.” The CPC has followed a different plan. It is trying to rouse the masses of the people to pressure NATO to get out of the way of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Putin Club’s ideology arises out of the Marxism that developed in connection with solving problems related to the defense of the Soviet Union. The peace movement that Lenin had scorned for fostering the illusion that peace was possible in a capitalist milieu became useful as a project to be assigned by Moscow to Communist parties in the US orbit. To occupy the time of nominally revolutionary parties operating in what Moscow saw as a non-revolutionary time and place, Communist parties in the capitalist world would be given the task of mobilizing support for peaceful coexistence between the capitalist and Communist worlds. Their role was not to “to rouse the masses of the people and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule,” using “the economic and political crisis created by” great power rivalry, as Lenin and Luxemburg had done. The times had changed. Rivalry among capitalist states for economic advantage had been superseded by rivalry between a US-led capitalist world and Soviet-led socialist world. The job of the Communist parties in this new world was to promote peaceful co-existence, so the Soviet Union could recover from its devastation in WWII and develop economically, free from the necessity of diverting critical resources to military competition with the capitalist world. They were to forget about revolution, pursue reforms within capitalism, and work, through the peace movement, to stay the aggressive hand of the United States. For many Communist parties, their main role became one of working on behalf of a foreign state to oppose the aggressions of their own state. For some, like the CPC, the mission carries on, even though the conditions that inspired it long ago quit the scene.

Times have changed. The Soviet Union has dissolved. The Russian state is vehemently anti-communist. China, whose “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is a euphemism for “capitalism as a tool to develop the means of production,” is integrated into the US economy as the United States’ main manufacturing center, but, at the same time, competes vigorously with its own home-grown capitalist enterprises against US, EU, and Russian businesses, and pursues the construction of its own informal empire by means of the Belt and Road Initiative. The bipolar rivalry of capitalism vs. communism has been replaced by a return to great power competition. Nowadays, the world looks much more like the one Lenin and Luxemburg inhabited than the one that shaped the politics and thinking of the CPC leadership.

When the Soviet Union dissolved, the Marxism that developed in connection with questions related to how to build and defend a socialist state in a collapsed empire devastated by war became an anachronism. When China took the capitalist path, and Soviet socialism was dismantled, the world turned more strongly toward the status quo ante. Rivalry between the capitalist and communist worlds metamorphosed into a competition among capitalist states in a world in which capitalism was triumphant. The new world was one Lenin and Luxemburg would recognize. All the same, communists who cut their political teeth during the Cold War, carried on as if nothing had changed, failing to grasp that the Marxism of Lenin and Luxemburg had become relevant again, while the problems addressed by the Marxism of Stalin and Khruschev—how to build and defend a socialist state in the old Russian Empire, and what role communists in the capitalist world were to play—had dissolved.

Today the CPC remains what it was during the Cold War. It promotes reforms for the working class within capitalism and works to restrain the aggression of Canada and its US patron against foreign states. It is indistinguishable in most significant ways from the social democratic NDP, expect that a) it proposes more robust reforms for the working class, many of which are utopian within a capitalist context, and b) opposes Canadian militarism, where the NDP generally supports it. It is a party of social reform and anti-militarism which reflexively springs to the defense of any state that defies the United States for the sole reason that it defies the United States. Compare the party against the four characteristics of the Far Right mentioned earlier in connection with the question of war:

Sees no causal connection between capitalism and war.
Defends the idea of war guilt.
Supports the bourgeois order (by pursuing reforms within the capitalist system).
Takes sides in wars between capitalist states.

This is not a party of which Lenin or Luxemburg would approve or recognize as communist.

It behooves communists to rediscover Lenin and Luxemburg, the giants of Marxism. Their insights have more relevance to the world we inhabit than the anachronistic Weltanschauung and politics of the CPC and the Putin Club.

There Are No Lesser Evils in Imperialism

December 19, 2022

By Stephen Gowans

According The New York Times, the US arms industry is profiting handsomely from the war in Ukraine.

The Pentagon has awarded at least $6 billion to arms companies to resupply weapons sent to Ukraine.
Raytheon has secured $2 billion in contracts to expand or replenish weapons used to help Ukraine.
Lockheed has secured nearly $1 billion to refill stockpiles being used in Ukraine.
The share prices of Lockheed and Northrop Grumman have jumped more than 35% this year.
US arms sales to foreign militaries—many of which have boosted military spending in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine—total $81 billion this year.

In response I tweeted the following.

Lockheed Martin and Raytheon say ‘Thank-You Mr. Putin!’

Raytheon has secured $2B in contracts to expand or replenish weapons used to help Ukraine.

Lockheed has secured nearly $1B to refill stockpiles being used in Ukraine.https://t.co/0qavd8Rygb
— Stephen Gowans (@GowansStephen) December 18, 2022

Had Moscow not pulled the trigger on war in Ukraine, the conditions would never have been set for Lockheed Martin and Raytheon to swim in a sea of new orders.

This elicited the following reply: “The bigger thanks goes to all the people who have blocked or refused to negotiate to end this war. Like the state department, Biden etc.”

Why would we expect the people who desired the war, viz., “the state department, Biden etc.”, to have the slightest inclination to want the war to end, when its clients—the US arms industry, the US oil and gas industry, and US industry generally—profit handsomely from it? Expecting Washington to negotiate the end of the war is tantamount to expecting wolves to become vegetarians—especially when the wolves have discovered a toothsome feast.

Did I mention that with Europe looking for a new energy supplier, after Washington pressed the EU to wean itself off Russian energy in the wake of the Kremlin’s assault on Ukraine, that the United States has become the world’s leading exporter of liquid natural gas? It is also the planet’s top petroleum producer.

At the same time, we wouldn’t expect Russia, the party that instigated the war and has failed to achieve its war aims, to have much desire to bring its assault to an end. It too is a wolf, with a hunger for sheep, so far unsated.

The notion that either the Russian wolf or a lupine Washington have, at this point, strong motivations to end their hunt for Ukrainian sheep is Quixotic.

The additional notion that the Fata Morgana of “the antiwar movement” can pressure “the state department, Biden etc.” or Moscow to negotiate an end to the war is equally illusory.

In the West, there exists a farrago of Washington-haters who call themselves antiwar but are merely anti-US. They flatter themselves that they are the nucleus of an antiwar movement. If capitalist imperialism is one of the greatest causes of human misery, they don’t know it. The critical problem, in their minds, is the people who run US foreign policy. If only the right people were elected, or the current set of leaders were pressured by popular opinion to conduct the country’s foreign policy differently, all would be well.

Almost to a person, this group of activists argued vehemently before the war, and with unbridled certitude, that Moscow would never invade Ukraine. In their astigmatic and decidedly un-Marxist Weltanschauung, military aggression, like imperialism, is a US monopoly. Russia would never, therefore, behave in so scurvy a (US) manner. To US warnings that Russia was about to invade Ukraine, they thundered scornfully, “US propaganda!” Despite Putin providing them with ample reason to revise their view of Moscow’s nature and capabilities, and notwithstanding the egg that still drips from their faces, they cling tenaciously to the now discredited theory that Putin’s Russia is not imperialist. They have discovered a multitude of reasons why it was obvious from 2014 that an invasion was not only predictable but desirable…and un-imperialist, of course. But if before the war they denounced the claim that Russia was capable of launching a war of aggression on its neighbor as a slander against Moscow, viz., that Moscow would never carry out so heinous an act (after all, wasn’t Moscow a member of the now forgotten Friends of the UN Charter?), how is that they have so quickly come to regard what they once saw as heinous as justifiable and even desirable?

If states were free to act just as they pleased, Russia could end the war now by reversing the act that instigated it. But true to their inability to see beyond Washington to rivalry among states as an immanent characteristic of the capitalist world economy, and one with a high probability of ending in war, the Friends of Neo-Imperial Russia demand Biden negotiate an end to the war, not that Russia do the same, and not that Putin withdraw his forces from Ukraine. They believe implicitly that the Kremlin is champing at the bit to negotiate a peace, out of a strong devotion to international harmony, and all that prevents the flower of peace from blooming is Washington’s intransigence. What they fail to mention is that the peace Putin aspires to is a peace in which Russia is allowed to digest those parts of Ukraine it has already gobbled up. In other words, it wants to achieve at least some of its war aims, and then to be left in peace to enjoy them. It is a commonplace that all belligerents want peace. What’s rarely acknowledged is that they want peace on their own terms. Peace preferably; war if necessary.

An antiwar movement, if one existed in either the West or Russia, would seek to end the war in order to lift the burden it has imposed on ordinary people. People everywhere, in Russia as much as Europe and North America, struggle to make ends meet as the war sends energy, food, and housing costs soaring.

Instead, Westerners who say they are against the war, but are really against the US part in it, seek fecklessly to mobilize energy for an antiwar movement based on the following arguments:

Putin’s cause is just.
The war escalates the risk of a nuclear exchange.
A world where Russia and China, and not just the United States, can throw around their weight, is desirable.

The trouble is that the power of any of these arguments to arouse opposition to the war is approximately zero, which is why there is no antiwar movement.

First, it is difficult enough to justify a war of aggression with good arguments. But the arguments for war offered by Moscow have been so risible that no one, except Russian chauvinists and a few mental defectives in the West, have taken them seriously. If we accept the argument that Russia has been provoked by escalating NATO military threats and that Moscow’s efforts to project influence into Ukraine through diplomatic means were rebuffed by Washington and NATO, there remain two objections: (1) Being provoked is not a legitimate reason for war; and (2) imperialist goals achieved through diplomatic means are still imperialist goals; they are no more acceptable for being achieved through soft power than hard.

Second, the threat of nuclear annihilation is a constant. People have learned to live with it. It will not move them to action and the intensity and scope of this war has not been great enough to meaningfully escalate the risk of a nuclear exchange.

Third, you can put lipstick on the idea of Russia and China having as much clout as the United States by calling three-power imperialism “multipolarity”, but the idea remains a pig no matter how much lipstick the sow is forced to wear. Anyone who thinks it’s possible to mobilize large numbers of people under the banner “we need three strong imperialist powers instead of one”, is detached from reality.

But what if people were mobilized for reasons that resonate with their suffering to oppose the war in numbers large enough to pressure governments to act? Would the movement not also be large enough to bring about a social revolution to overcome the very roots of the problem, namely, capitalist-driven competition for markets, raw materials, investment opportunities and strategic territory? In other words, wouldn’t a movement large enough and powerful enough to end a symptom of the disease also not be large enough and powerful enough to end the disease itself? Should the goal be to end this particular war, or to significantly reduce the probability of war by overthrowing the conditions that conduce to it?

Finally, is there much point in calling for an antiwar movement here, and not one there? The war affects all working people, Russians as much, indeed more than North Americans and (Ukrainians excepted) Europeans. An antiwar movement ought to unite, across international lines, all people affected deleteriously by it against the class that wills it and the system of capital accumulation that demands it. It must be international, not confined to one side.

People who call for Washington to negotiate an end to the war, but not Russia to reverse the act that instigated it; who argue that the ultimate responsibility for the war lies with US foreign policy and not the global capitalist economy (like saying flu is caused by a sore throat); whose reasons for opposing the war having nothing to do with the effect it has on ordinary people, and only on the effect it has on the imperialist aspirations of Moscow; and who call, not for a union of antiwar voices across international lines, but an antiwar parochialism confined to the West, are arguing for the side of the Russian ruling class against that of the United States.

Marxism, socialism, the workers’ movement, are not movements against US foreign policy alone, but against the capitalist class, no matter what its postal address. These movements are also for something: Not the rise of two great capitalist powers, Russia and China, against a third, the United States, but for socialism and workers of the world uniting. They are for an end to the division of humanity into classes and nations, and not, as the bogus antiwar activists would have it, the persistence of class and the rise of great nation states.

The United States has produced very few anti-imperialists. Noam Chomsky is not among them.

Imperialism has penetrated the fabric of our culture, and infected our imagination, more deeply than we usually think.—Martin Green. [1]

[Americans] have produced very, very few anti-imperialists. Our idiom has been empire.—William Appleman Williams. [2]

November 3, 2019

By Stephen Gowans

In a recent Intercept interview with the beautiful soul Mehdi Hassan, Noam Chomsky resumed his efforts to recruit the political Left into a scheme to support US imperialism.

In the interview, Chomsky spoke about his reasons for trying “to organize support for opposition to the withdrawal” of US troops from Syria. US troops ought to remain in Syria, he said, to deter a planned Turkish invasion and to prevent what he warned would be the massacre of the Kurds. Yet weeks after the Turks moved into northeastern Syria nothing on the scale of massacres had occurred.

The high-profile anarchist, former champion of international law, and one-time outspoken critic of wars of aggression, supports the uninterrupted invasion of Syria by US forces, despite the fact that the invasion is illegal and contravenes the international law to which he had so frequently sung paeans.

But the principles he once upheld appear to have been sacrificed to the higher goal of defending the anarchist-inspired YPG, the Kurdish group which had sought and received support from Washington to establish a Kurdish mini-state in Syria in return for acting as a Pentagon asset in the US war on the Arab nationalist government in Damascus. In this, the YPG recapitulated the practice of political Zionism, offering to act as muscle in the Levant in exchange for imperialist sponsorship of its own political aspirations. For Chomsky, the desired end-state—what he would like the political Left to rally in support of—is the restoration of the status-quo ante, namely, robust US support for a Kurd mini-state in Syria.

Washington’s illegal military intervention has been the guarantor of the YPG’s aspirations to create a state on approximately one-third of Syrian territory. A YPG state east of the Euphrates would be an asset to the US imperialist project of expanding Washington’s already considerable influence in the Middle East. A Kurd-dominated state under the leadership of the YPG would function as what some have called a second Israel. As Domenico Losurdo put it in a 2018 interview,

In the Middle East, we have the attempted creation of a new Israel. Israel was an enclave against the Arab World, and now the US and Israel are trying to realize something similar with the Kurds. That doesn’t mean to say that the Kurds don’t have rights and that they haven’t been oppressed for a long time, but now there’s the danger of them becoming the instruments of American imperialism and Zionism. This is the danger—this the situation, unfortunately. [3]

To make the US invasion palatable to the political Left, Chomsky misrepresents the US aggression as small-scale and guided by lofty motives. “A small US contingent with the sole mission of deterring a planned Turkish invasion,” he says, ‘is not imperialism.” But the occupation is neither small, nor guided by a mission limited to deterring a planned Turkish invasion. Either Chomsky’s grasp of the file is weak, or he’s not above engaging in a spot of sophistry.

Last year, the Pentagon officially admitted to having 2,000 troops in Syria [4] but a top US general put the number higher, 4,000. [5] But even that figure was, according to the Pentagon, an “artificial construct,” [6] that is, a deliberate undercount. On top of the infantry, artillery, and forward air controllers the Pentagon officially acknowledges as deployed to Syria, there is an additional number of uncounted Special Operations personnel, as well as untallied troops assigned to classified missions and “an unspecified number of contractors” i.e., mercenaries. Additionally, combat aircrews are not included, even though US airpower is critical to the occupation. [7] There are, therefore, many more times the officially acknowledged number of US troops enforcing an occupation of parts of Syria. Last year, US invasion forces in Syria (minus aircrew located nearby) operated out of 10 bases in the country, including “a sprawling facility with a long runway, hangars, barracks and fuel depots.” [8]

In addition to US military advisers, Army Rangers, artillery, Special Operations forces, satellite-guided rockets and Apache attack helicopters [9], the United States deployed US diplomats to create government and administrative structures to supersede the legitimate government of the Syrian Arab Republic. [10]

“The idea in US policy circles” was to create “a soft partition” of Syria between the United States and Russia along the Euphrates, “as it was among the Elbe [in Germany] at the end of the Second World War.” [11]

During the war on ISIS, US military planning called for YPG fighters under US supervision to push south along the Euphrates River to seize Syria’s oil-and gas-rich territory, [12] located within traditionally Arab territory. While the Syrian Arab Army and its allies focused on liberating cities from Islamic State, the YPG, under US direction, went “after the strategic oil and gas fields,” [13] holding these on behalf of the US government. The US president’s recent boast that “we have secured the oil” [14] was an announcement of a longstanding fait accompli.

The United States has robbed Syria of “two of the largest oil and gas fields in Deir Ezzour”, including the al-Omar oil field, Syria’s largest. [15] In 2017, the United States plundered Syria of “a gas field and plant known in Syria as the Conoco gas plant” (though its affiliation with Conoco is historical; the plant was acquired by the Syrian Gas Company in 2005.) [16] Russia observed that “the real aim” of the US forces’ (incontestably denominated) “illegal” presence in Syria has been “the seizure and retention of economic assets that only belong to the Syrian Arab Republic.” [17] The point is beyond dispute: The United States has stolen resources vital to the republic’s reconstruction, using the YPG to carry out the crime (this from a country which proclaims property rights to be humanity’s highest value.)

Joshua Landis, a University of Oklahoma professor who specializes in Syria, has argued that by “controlling half of Syria’s energy resources…the US [is] able to keep Syria poor and under-resourced.” [18] Bereft of its petroleum resources, and deprived of its best farmland, Syria is hard-pressed to recover from a war that has left it in ruins.

To sum up, the notion that the US occupation is small-scale is misleading. The Pentagon acknowledges that it deliberately undercounts the size of its contingent in Syria. But even if there are as few US boots on the ground in Syria as the US military is prepared to acknowledge, that still wouldn’t make the US intervention trivial.

US boots on the ground are only one part of the occupation. Not counted are the tens of thousands of YPG fighters who operate under the supervision of US ground forces, acting as the tip of the US spear. These troops, it should be recalled, acted as muscle for hire to seize and secure farmland and oil wells in a campaign that even US officials acknowledge is illegal. [19]

Another part of the occupation—completely ignored by Chomsky—is US airpower, without which US troops and their YPG-force-multiplier would be unable to carry out their crimes of occupation and theft. US fighter jets and drones dominate the airspace over the US occupation zone. Ignoring the significant role played by the US Air Force grossly distorts the scale of the US operation.

What’s more, Chomsky’s reference to the scale of the intervention as anodyne is misdirection. It is not the size of an intervention that makes it imperialist, but its motivations and consequences.

Additionally, Chomsky completely misrepresents the aim of the US occupation. It’s mission, amply documented, is to: sabotage Damascus’s reconstruction efforts by denying access to revenue-generating territory; to provide Washington with leverage to influence the outcome of any future political settlement; and to block a land route over which military assets can easily flow from Tehran to its allies Syria and Hezbollah. [20] In other words, the goal of the occupation is to impose the US will on Syria—a textbook definition of imperialism.

The idea that it is within the realm of possibility for Washington to deploy forces to Syria with the sole mission of deterring aggression is naïveté on a grand scale, and entirely at odds with the history and mechanisms of US foreign policy. Moreover, it ignores the reality that the armed US invasion and occupation of Syrian territory is an aggression itself. If a man who has been called the principal critic of US foreign policy can genuinely hold these views, then Martin Green’s contention that “Imperialism has penetrated the fabric of our culture, and infected our imagination, more deeply than we usually think,” is surely beyond dispute.

The US occupation, then, is more substantial than Chomsky alleges; it is an aggression under international law, not to say under any reasonable definition; the claim is untenable that the sole motivation is to deter Turkish aggression; and the US project in Syria is imperialist. All the same, one could still argue that US troops should not be withdrawn because their presence protects the YPG and the foundations of the mini-state is has built. If so, one has accepted the YPG’s and political Zionism’s argument that it is legitimate to rent oneself out as the tool of an empire in order to achieve one’s own narrow aims, even if it is at the expense of the right of others to be free from domination and exploitation.

Quoted in William Appleman William, Empire as a Way of Life, IG Publishing, 2007, p. 10.
Ibid. p. 33-34.
Domenico Losurdo, “Crisis in the Imperialist World Order,” Revista Opera, March 2, 2018
Nancy A. Yousef, “US to remain in Syria indefinitely, Pentagon officials say, The Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2017.
Andrew deGrandpre, “A top US general just said 4,000 American troops are in Syria. The Pentagon says there are only 500,” The Washington Post, October 31, 2017.
John Ismay, “US says 2,000 troops are in Syria, a fourfold increase,” The New York Times, December 6, 2017; Nancy A. Yousef, “US to remain in Syria indefinitely, Pentagon officials say,” The Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2017.
Ibid.
Dion Nissenbaum, “Map said to show locations of US forces in Syria published in Turkey,” The Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2017.
Michael R. Gordon, “In a desperate Syrian city, a test of Trump’s policies,” The New York Times, July 1, 2017.
Nancy A. Yousef, “US to send more diplomats and personnel to Syria,” The Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2017.
Yaroslav Trofimov, “In Syria, new conflict looms as ISIS loses ground,” The Wall Street Journal, September 7, 2017.
Ibid.
Raj Abdulrahim and Ghassan Adnan, “Syria and Iraq rob Islamic State of key territory,” The Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2018.
Michael R. Gordon and Gordon Lubold, “Trump weights leaving small number of troops in Syria,” The Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2019.
Abdulrahim and Adnan, November 3, 2018.
Ibid.
Raja Abdulrahim and Thomas Grove, “Syria condemns US airstrike as tension rise,” The Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2018.
Joshua Landis, “US policy toward the Levant, Kurds and Turkey,” Syria Comment, January 15, 2018.
Michael Crowley, “’Keep the oil’: Trump revives charged slogan for new Syria troop mission,” The New York Times, October 26, 2019.
Gordon Lubold and Nancy A. Youssef, “US weights leaving more troops, sending battle tanks to Syria,” The Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2019; Gordon and Lubold, October 21, 2019.

Once Again Chomsky and Achcar Provide a Service to the US Global Dictatorship

By Stephen Gowans

July 26, 2019

Noam Chomsky recently co-authored an op-ed in The New York Times, portraying the embattled Venezuelan government as an arbitrary undemocratic state, and calling upon it “to liberate all political prisoners, both military and civilian.” The occasion for the op-ed was the release from parole of Venezuelan judge María Lourdes Afiuni. Chomsky had weighed in on her case in 2011, in an interview with the British newspaper, The Observer. The newspaper ran the interview under the headline “Noam Chomsky criticises old friend Hugo Chavez for ‘assault’ on democracy”. The linguist denied he had done this, calling the headline “a complete deception.” It turned out the only deception was Chomsky’s denial.

Chomsky took issue with Chavez jailing people who threatened the Bolivarian Revolution, arguing that such harsh measures were only warranted “for specific circumstances, let’s say fighting world war two.” The implication was that US efforts to block the reform program set in train by Hugo Chavez—the 2002 coup, the attempted 2019 coup, economic warfare, destabilization, military intimidation, the attempted assassination of Maduro, US-organized diplomatic pressure on the government to step down—were not of the same magnitude as WWII and therefore emergency measures were unwarranted.

During both the first and second world wars, the United States suspended civil liberties, jailed dissidents and potential fifth columnists, and concentrated authority in the presidency, including the authority to direct the economy. Yet the threat posed to the United States by its enemies was vanishingly small. The United States, or at least the North American part of it, was protected on either side by two vast oceans and two friendly countries. There was no chance the WWI Central Powers would cross the Atlantic to invade the United States, and no chance either of fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, or militarist Japan crossing thousands of miles of ocean to launch a general assault on continental US soil. Nor were any of these enemies in a position to engage in anti-US economic warfare of any consequence, or to engineer a coup d’état in Washington.

The same, however, cannot be said about the power of the United States, its allies, and myrmidons, to topple the Venezuelan government. Venezuela has unquestionably faced a severe emergency from the moment Hugo Chavez came to power, with a vision of overcoming a semi-colonial past and resisting an imperialist present. At that point, Washington began organizing the overthrow of his revolution. To suggest, as Chomsky does, that the Venezuelan government has the latitude to assert a program of national independence in the face of US hostility while according full freedom to the US-backed opposition to organize its downfall, is either naïve, or artful. Whatever the case, it’s an invitation to the Maduro government to commit suicide.

Chomsky frequently complained that The New York Times wouldn’t run his op-eds because his points of view were outside the acceptable limits of ruling class opinion. Well, it seems that not all of them are.

No sooner had Chomsky performed his valuable service to Washington of traducing the Venezuelan government as undemocratic and arbitrary, than Gilbert Achcar, a Chomsky co-author, was revealed to be doing his own service to the United States’ global dictatorship by working with the British Ministry of Defense. Anyone who has followed Achcar’s work won’t be surprised. The University of London professor hasn’t met a US intervention he didn’t like. His speciality is to formulate arguments to prove that interventions against forces of national assertiveness and local sovereignty are, despite appearances, actually anti-imperialist and pro-socialist.

Achcar has been training the” British military “on ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and other topics,” for the past two years, according to The Morning Star. Why the British military would pay the slightest attention to him is mind-boggling. Achcar is a charlatan, much given to double-talk and sophistry, whose analyses of the topics on which he holds forth with studied authority are stunningly wrong.

I wrote an essay on Achcar in December of 2015 and January 2016, titled “The ‘Anti-Imperialist’ Who Got Libya Wrong Serves Up The Same Failed Analysis on Syria.” The essay examined Achcar’s arguments for Western intervention in Libya and Syria, showing that his grasp of the facts was not even shaky but dead wrong. As for his predictions, they turned out to be stunningly off the mark.

This raised the question of why an analyst with such a horrible track record would be sought after for articles, co-authorship, interviews, and training, by the likes of Jacobin, Chomsky, Democracy Now, and the British military? That, I guess, says something about Jacobin, Chomsky, Democracy Now, and the British military.

There has long been a cankered part of the political Left that has used sophistry to justify support for imperialism. Jacobin, Chomsky, Democracy Now, and Achcar, stand in a long tradition, stretching back to the socialists who supported their own governments in WWI, and presented what they said were perfectly sound socialist and anti-imperialist reasons for doing so. Then as now, their arguments and actions were a betrayal of the socialism and anti-imperialism to which they affected fidelity.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

The ‘Anti-Imperialist’ Who Got Libya Wrong Serves Up The Same Failed Analysis on Syria

Paris Match: Many people say the solution lies in your departure. Do you believe that your departure is the solution?

Syrian president Assad: What was the result (of NATO policy when they attacked Gaddafi)? Chaos ensued after Gaddafi’s departure. So, was the departure the solution? Have things improved, and has Libya become a democracy? [1]

Updated January 23, 2016
Originally posted December 24, 2015

By Stephen Gowans

For a professed socialist and anti-imperialist, Gilbert Achcar is surprisingly mainstream, in fact, so much so that he could be appointed to a key position in the US State Department and fit in quite comfortably. He replicated the basic understanding of the nature of the conflict in Libya in 2011, as presented by the US government, in his own analysis, and dissents in no significant way from Washington on how to end the conflict in Syria (Achcar and the US president, and, for that matter, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, all agree that Assad must go.)

In 2011, he supported the overthrow of Libyan leader Muamar Gaddafi, arguing wrongly, it turns out, that a post-Gaddafi Libya, whatever its faults, would be an improvement on what preceded it, which indeed it is, if chaos, societal breakdown, and various fanatical Islamist armies, including ISIS, vying for control of the country by arms, counts as an improvement. Said Achcar on March 24, 2011: “And if there is no clarity about what a post-Gaddafi Libya might look like….it can’t be worse than Gaddafi’s regime.” [2] It’s difficult to imagine he could have been more wrong. But then he’s in good company. NATO leaders—the architects of the debacle—said the same.

Achcar’s assurance that Gaddafi was an unparalleled evil, thus justifying his extermination without regard to the consequences, paralleled a similarly stunningly wrong prediction offered by supporters of the US-British war on Iraq. That argument held that elimination of the Iraqi leader couldn’t help but improve Iraq’s humanitarian situation—and it relied on a technique Achcar liberally uses of demonizing secular Arab nationalist leaders. Of course, it was not the expunction of Saddam Hussein that promised to ameliorate the humanitarian situation in Iraq but the abandonment by Western powers of their policy of murdering countless Iraqis through economic and conventional warfare in order to eliminate an impediment to their hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East. It is curious that the last remaining leaders of the principal obstacle to Washington’s hegemonic designs in the Arab world, namely, the secular Arab nationalist governments of Libya and Syria, should fall squarely within the sites of both Achcar and Washington; curious because Washington is clearly imperialist, and Achcar says he’s an anti-imperialist. So how is it that the anti-imperialist Achcar and the imperialist US foreign policy establishment see eye-to-eye on so much?

On Libya, Achcar had cast doubt, in error it turns out, on the idea that the uprising had a substantial Sunni Islamist component, dismissing this as a canard originated by Gaddafi to mobilize US support. Gaddafi’s implicating Al-Qaeda in the uprising “was his way of trying to get the support of the West,” Achcar said. [3] We know now that the uprising was, as Gaddafi averred, largely Islamist.

Similarly, Achcar blundered in declaring as preposterous the idea that “Western powers are intervening in Libya because they want to topple a regime hostile to their interests.” [4] As it turns out, Western powers did indeed view Gaddafi’s “resource nationalism” and efforts to “Libyanize” the economy as hostile to the economic interests of Western investors, a group that exercises considerable, if not decisive, influence over Western foreign policy. [5]

One year after then US secretary of state Hilary Clinton declared in connection with Gaddafi’s overthrow that “we came, we saw, he died,” The Wall Street Journal revealed evidence that the Achcar-supported NATO military intervention in Libya was rooted in objections to the Gaddafi government’s economic policies. According to the newspaper, private oil companies were incensed at the pro-Libyan oil deals the Gaddafi government was negotiating and “hoped regime change in Libya…would bring relief in some of the tough terms they had agreed to in partnership deals” with Libya’s national oil company. [6]

For decades, many European companies had enjoyed deals that granted them half of the high-quality oil produced in Libyan fields. Some major oil companies hoped the country would open further to investment after sanctions from Washington were lifted in 2004 and U.S. giants re-entered the North African nation.

But in the years that followed, the Gaddafi regime renegotiated the companies’ share of oil from each field to as low as 12%, from about 50%.

Just after the fall of the regime, several foreign oil companies expressed hopes of better terms on existing deals or attractive ones for future contracts. Among the incumbents that expressed hopes in Libyan expansion were France’s Total SA and Royal Dutch Shell PLC.

‘We see Libya as a great opportunity under the new government,’ Sara Akbar, chief executive of privately owned Kuwait Energy Co., said in an interview in November. ‘Under Gaddafi, it was off the radar screen’ because of its ‘very harsh’ terms, said Mrs. Akbar. [7]

The Journal had earlier noted the “harsh” (read pro-Libyan) terms the Gaddafi government had imposed on foreign oil companies.

Under a stringent new system known as EPSA-4, the regime judged companies’ bids on how large a share of future production they would let Libya have. Winners routinely promised more than 90% of their oil output to NOC (Libya’s state-owned National Oil Corp).

Meanwhile, Libya kept its crown jewels off limits to foreigners. The huge onshore oil fields that accounted for the bulk of its production remained the preserve of Libya’s state companies.

Even firms that had been in Libya for years got tough treatment. In 2007, authorities began forcing them to renegotiate their contracts to bring them in line with EPSA-4.

One casualty was Italian energy giant Eni SpA. In 2007, it had to pay a $1 billion signing bonus to be able to extend the life of its Libyan interests until 2042. It also saw its share of production drop from between 35% and 50%—depending on the field—to just 12%. [8]

Oil companies were also frustrated that Libya’s state-owned oil company “stipulated that foreign companies had to hire Libyans for top jobs.” [9] A November 2007 US State Department cable had warned that those “who dominate Libya’s political and economic leadership are pursuing increasingly nationalistic policies in the energy sector” and that there was “growing evidence of Libyan resource nationalism.” [10] The cable cited a 2006 speech in which Gaddafi said: “Oil companies are controlled by foreigners who have made millions from them. Now, Libyans must take their place to profit from this money.” [11] Gaddafi’s government had forced oil companies to give their local subsidiaries Libyan names. Worse, “labor laws were amended to ‘Libyanize’ the economy,” that is, turn it to the advantage of Libyans. Oil firms “were pressed to hire Libyan managers, finance people and human resources directors.” [12] The New York Times summed up the West’s objections. “Colonel Gaddafi,” the US newspaper of record said, “proved to be a problematic partner for international oil companies, frequently raising fees and taxes and making other demands.” [13] Achcar completely missed this. Worse, he declared the very opposite to be true. He wrote: “The idea that Western powers are intervening in Libya because they want to topple a regime hostile to their interests is just preposterous. Equally preposterous is that what they are after is laying their hands on Libyan oil.” [14]

Normally, a batter who swings and misses three times is thrown out of the batting circle, but Achcar’s strike out didn’t stop either Democracy Now or the Marxist publication Jacobin from recently offering the failed analyst a platform to hold forth on Syria. Achcar was treated fawningly in a Jacobin piece [15], with interviewer Nada Matta treating the US State Department echo-chamber as a docent for the Left. Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now interview with the failed Libya analyst [16] was also overly deferential, given Achcar’s uninspiring record on Libya, though to Goodman’s credit, she did challenge him on his support for NATO’s intervention in the North African country, an intervention which, now that it is widely acknowledged to have produced a debacle, Achcar claims not to have supported. This is indeed true if we accept that “intervention” means whatever Achcar says it means, but as we’ll see, he did support NATO’s intervention in Libya, notwithstanding his rather discreditable attempts since to obfuscate. But there’s another reason why Matta and Goodman might have passed on interviewing Achcar, apart from his egregious failures on Libya: they could have arranged an interview with a US State Department spokesperson and 90 percent of the answers would have been the same.

Having missed the chance to source the US State Department directly, Democracy Now and Jacobin had to settle for Achcar repackaging his failed Libya analysis to delineate a largely US State Department-consistent view of what is happening in Syria and of the kind of agenda the Left ought to support. Just as once he called for the elimination of Gaddafi as the only way to stop what he claimed was an impending massacre, and as the best way to open space for a popular democratic uprising, so too in Syria does he urge the Left to support the elimination of Assad as the only way to stop the war in Syria, and as the best way to open space for a true democratic awakening. A democratic flowering won’t happen in Syria, he says, until ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra take over from Assad and Syrians realize that salafists are as hostile to their interests as Achcar says Assad is. (What Achcar seems completely oblivious to, or doesn’t give a damn about, is that either of these groups coming to power would mean the massacre of Syria’s Alawite, Druze, Kurd, Christian and other minority populations.)

The problem with the view that the only way to bring about democracy in Syria is to first let murderous sectarian madmen run roughshod over the country until Syrians realize they are hostile to their interests is that it ignores concessions the Assad government has already made in response to the uprising to open up political space by abrogating the Ba’ath Party’s status as primus inter pares and opening presidential elections to a multi-candidate slate [17], a development that would seem to be more conducive to the peaceful flowering of popular democratic forces than the bloody and austere theocratic rule of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra.

Achcar also appears to be unaware of polling data that shows that Assad commands more support in Syria than does the armed opposition whose ascension to power he thinks would bring an end to the war. [18] By this fact alone, it wouldn’t. There is a significant opposition to Islamic fundamentalism in Syria. On top of this, Achcar swallows a fiction widely promoted by US officials and Western media that the war in Syria is a sectarian conflict between a Sunni majority and an oppressive Alawite minority. Western media unremittingly describe the armed opposition as predominantly Sunni, an undoubted reality, but hardly relevant, since the opposition’s major opponent, the Syrian Arab Army, is also predominately Sunni. Indeed, it may be said of the Syrian Arab Army that it is the only moderate armed Sunni fighting force in the country. The fundamental fault line in Syria is not between Sunnis and Alawis (or other minorities), but between proponents of a secular, non-sectarian constitution, on the one hand, and a political arrangement based on a Sunni fundamentalist interpretation of the Quran, on the other. Allowing Al-Qaeda affiliates to come to power in Syria would not bring peace to the country, since the Islamists’ rule would hardly be tolerated by the significant part of the population that opposes it and prefers a non-sectarian, secular government. It would also result in the massacre of populations the sectarian fanatics deem apostates and infidels. If Achcar expressed concern about the possibility of a massacre in Libya, and cited this as the basis for his support of NATO intervention in that country, how is it that he can so blithely accept the near certainty of massacres perpetrated by the fanatics he urges Western powers to give serious support to?

Achcar does not dissent from the US foreign policy establishment view on Syria at its most basic level, namely, the demand that Assad step down and for the same reasons the US State Department adduces: Because, says Washington and Achcar, Assad is a brutal dictator who is oppressing the Sunni majority and has lost the legitimacy that would allow him to govern the country peacefully. There is little space between Achcar’s views and the public views of the US government on the Syrian president, the nature of the opposition, and the route to peace, except that Achcar says he has arrived at his positions by taking an anti-imperialist stance. An ostensible anti-imperialist analysis which meshes comfortably with Washington’s position on Syria can be attractive to Marxists and other Leftists who would like to feel mainstream, while assuring themselves that they remain thoroughly Leftist. Therein may lie Achcar’s appeal to Leftist media. He’s like the TV pitchman who peddles a diet which promises rapid weight loss without sacrifice. In the summer of 1914, there were plenty of European socialists who discovered, as Achcar has today, that Marxist views can be forced to fit a Procrustean imperialist bed and made to appear to be Leftist justifications for supporting one’s own bourgeoisie. Lenin, who Achcar claims to have a sound knowledge of, called this social imperialism—socialism in words, imperialism in practice. It’s a label that fits Achcar’s views to a tee.

I believe that a number of Achcar’s positions on Libya and Syria (most, essentially US State Department positions) are mistaken. Below is a look at some of them.

Libya

While his views may have changed since, in the late winter of 2011 Achcar described the Libyan rebels as a progressive force. “What unites all the disparate forces (of the opposition to Gaddafi) is a rejection of the dictatorship and a longing for democracy and human rights,” he said. [19] Of course, we know today that the rebels did not yearn for democracy and human rights, and that the only dictatorship they opposed was a secular one. Neither do the rebels in Syria yearn for democracy and human rights. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US National Security Adviser and a principal figure in the influential Council on Foreign Relations put it: “You know, we started helping the rebels, whatever they are, and they’re certainly not fighting for democracy, given their sponsorship, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.” [20] The preference for the rebels in Libya was, as it is for rebels today in Syria, a dictatorship of the Quran, or at least their version of it. Dismissing the idea that the uprising was Islamist in character, Achcar argued that Gaddafi’s implicating al-Qaeda in the uprising “was his way of trying to get the support of the West” [21]. Achcar was clear on what position the Left should take: We “should support the victory of the Libyan democratic uprising,” [22] he said.

Gaddafi, as it turned out, had a firmer grasp on what was happening in Libya than Achcar did. The late Libyan leader, murdered at the hands of rebels Achcar urged the Left to support, claimed that the rebellion in Libya had been organized by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, and by the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which had vowed to overthrow him and return the country to traditional Muslim values, including Sharia law. A 2009 Canadian government intelligence report bore him out. It described the anti-Gaddafi stronghold of eastern Libya, where the rebellion began, “as an ‘epicenter of Islamist extremism’ and said ‘extremist cells’ operated in the region.” Earlier, Canadian military intelligence had noted that “Libyan troops found a training camp in the country’s southern desert that had been used by an Algerian terrorist group that would later change its name to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.” [23]

Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the Libyan rebellion’s most powerful military leader, was a veteran of the U.S.-backed Jihad against the Marxist-inspired reformist government in Afghanistan, where he had fought alongside militants who would go on to form al-Qaeda. Belhaj returned to Libya in the 1990s to lead the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was linked to his al-Qaeda comrades. His aim was to topple Gaddafi, as the Communists had been toppled in Afghanistan. The prominent role Belhaj played in the Libyan uprising should have aroused suspicions among Leftists in the West that, as Western governments surely knew, the uprising was not the heroic pro-democracy affair Western media were making it out to be. Indeed, from the very first day of the revolt, anyone equipped with knowledge of Libyan history would have known that the Benghazi rebellion was more in the mold of the latest eruption of a violent anti-secular Jihad than a peaceful call for democracy. [24]

“On Feb. 15, 2011, citizens in Benghazi organized what they called a Day of Anger march. The demonstration soon turned into a full-scale battle with police. At first, security forces used tear gas and water cannons. But as several hundred protesters armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails attacked government buildings, the violence spiraled out of control.” [25] As they stormed government sites, the rampaging demonstrators didn’t chant, “We want democracy”, “We want human rights”, or “No to dictatorship,” as Achcar might lead us to believe. Instead, they chanted “‘No God but Allah, Moammar is the enemy of Allah’.” [26]

Achcar vehemently denies that he supported intervention in Libya, but this is true only if intervention is defined as Western boots on the ground. Achcar was clear in 2011 that he was opposed to NATO ground forces entering Libya. But then so too was NATO. What Achcar did support was Western powers arming the opposition and neutralizing the Libyan air force—also NATO’s position.

Achcar’s position on UN Security Council Resolution 1973 establishing a no-fly zone over Libya was an exercise in double-talk. He acknowledged that the resolution could be used by Western powers to pursue their own agendas in Libya. “Now there are not enough safeguards in the wording of the resolution to bar its use for imperialist purposes,” [27] he concluded. All the same, he urged the Left not to come “out against the no-fly zone” but instead to “make sure” the Western powers “don’t go beyond protecting civilians.” How the Left was to do this, once the no-fly zone was in place, was never said, and why anyone would want to stop NATO from carrying on until Gaddafi was toppled was unclear, given that Achcar had described the Libyan leader and his government as thoroughly repugnant and hardly one any self-respecting Leftist should like to see survive. Indeed, it was clear than Achcar fervently hoped for Gaddafi’s demise. Achcar wrote:

“Does it mean that we had and have to support UNSC resolution 1973? Not at all. This was a very bad and dangerous resolution, precisely because it didn’t define enough safeguards against transgressing the mandate of protecting the Libyan civilians. The resolution leaves too much room for interpretation, and could be used to push forward an imperialist agenda going beyond protection into meddling into Libya’s political future. It could not be supported, but must be criticized for its ambiguities. But neither should it be opposed.” [28]

It should not be supported, but neither should it be opposed?! Perhaps, Achcar thought he was being clever. If NATO abused the resolution (as he thought it might) and a disaster ensued he could say “I predicted this, and never supported the resolution.” On the other hand, by counseling the Left not to oppose the no-fly zone, he was effectively calling for the absence of any obstacle to its implementation— in other words, supporting it, while claiming not to.

Achcar vehemently denies that he “supported intervention in Libya,” calling this “a canard.” “I never supported the intervention in Libya” he told Amy Goodman. “This is a falsity which has been spread all the time.” In Achcar’s recounting, “As soon as the siege of (Benghazi) was broken and there was no longer any threat, I said, I mean, I’m against the bombing…” [29] But Achcar’s criterion for when NATO’s bombing (that is, its direct intervention) should end was when the Libyan air force was neutralized, or more specifically when Libyan forces were so thoroughly weakened that they could no longer win a war against the rebels. Explained Achcar at the time: “It remains morally and politically wrong to demand the lifting of the no-fly zone—unless Gaddafi is no longer able to use his air force. Short of that, lifting the no-fly zone would mean a victory for Gaddafi” (emphasis added.) [30]

Achcar, then, did support intervention in Libya, despite all his vehement denials to Amy Goodman. He supported the direct intervention of Western warplanes to neutralize the Libyan air force in order to prevent “a victory for Gaddafi.” This was more than simply supporting a no fly zone to protect civilians. It was supporting bombing (that is, direct intervention) to tilt the war in favor of the rebels. As it turned out, Canadian pilots who participated in the direct intervention acknowledged privately that they were “al-Qaeda’s air force,” [31] supporting rebels who Achcar claimed falsely weren’t Islamists.

As he was railing against the lifting of the no-fly zone until the possibility of a Gaddafi victory was eliminated, and as NATO was intervening directly through a bombing campaign to accomplish this end, Achcar was hypocritically mouthing anti-imperialist shibboleths. “I mean, I’m against…direct intervention, because I know that the United States and its allies, when they intervene anyway, even if it is on the side of a popular revolt, it would be to control it, to try to steer it to their own interests. And that’s why I’m against them intervening directly.” [32] It might be pointed out that there’s no reason to believe that direct intervention is any more likely to be used to control and steer a popular revolt than is indirect intervention. Are rebels who are funded, trained and armed by Washington any less likely to be steered toward satisfying the agenda of their patron than those who receive direct battlefield support? Achcar’s distinction, then, between direct and indirect intervention is confused, to say the least, and on two levels. First, defining direct intervention as only “boots on the ground” is far too narrow. The violation of Libyan airspace by NATO warplanes was clearly a direct intervention, and clearly supported by Achcar. Secondly, indirect intervention is no less driven by imperialist ambition to control the forces on whose side the intervention is undertaken than is direct intervention. Direct or not, it’s still intervention, and it’s not done without the expectation of a pay off.

Syria

In a 17 December 2015 interview in Jacobin, interviewer Nada Matta asked Achcar, “Why are so many in the global Left confused over Syria? The Syrian regime is extremely oppressive and sectarian, and yet the Syrian revolution has not received the support that others have.”

Matta’s question itself reveals confusion over Syria. Embedded within it are a few untenable assumptions: that the Syrian government is a “regime”; that it is “extremely oppressive;” and that it is “sectarian.” But Achcar doesn’t object, and replies this way: Because “those who don’t know the history of the region think that because the Syrian regime is allied to Iran and to the Lebanese Hezbollah, it is anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist.” He then proceeds to tell us that the Syrian government is neither of these things. Indeed, says Achcar, “there is strictly nothing anti-imperialist about the Assad regime.” [33]

One might wonder whether Achcar has invested “anti-imperialism” with the kind of idiosyncratic meaning he’s given the phrase “direct intervention;” perhaps something like, “any government I don’t like cannot be anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist,” irrespective of its actual behavior.

The Syrian government defines itself as anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist, as evidenced by the preamble of the 2012 constitution of the Syrian Arab Republic, written under Assad’s leadership in response to the uprising and ratified by referendum. Syria is “the beating heart of Arabism, the forefront of confrontation with the Zionist enemy and the bedrock of resistance against colonial hegemony on the Arab world and its capabilities and wealth.” [34] One can dismiss this as cant, but explaining why such cant has been adopted by the Syrian government, in a world where the balance of power favors governments that capitulate to imperialist demands and accept the Zionist conquest of Palestine and the Golan Heights, is a far more difficult challenge, and one Achcar fails to rise to. Explaining, too, why Assad is loathed in Israel and opposed by the imperialists, and has been since well before the uprising of 2011—let’s not forget that Syria was designated in 2003 as part of a junior varsity axis of evil by the Bush administration and targeted for regime change—is no less challenging. Still, far from being anti-imperialist, Achcar assures us that the Syrian government is “a purely opportunistic mafia-like regime pursuing its own interest.” [35] Well, every government can be described in more or less the same terms, its interests varying depending on the class that dominates the state, and that this is so should hardly be a foreign idea to Marxists. The Obama administration is clearly a purely opportunistic mafia-like regime pursuing the interests of the dominant financial sector of the US capitalist class. Assad’s government pursues the interests of Syrian Arabs, and secondarily, the Arab nation, and the dominant economic class within it. It is not a Marxist government, privileging the working class; it is a secular Arab nationalist government. Indeed, the Syrian constitution forbids the formation of political parties based on class (as well as religion, gender, tribe, region, race, color and occupation [36]), consistent with a secular Arab nationalist orientation which emphasizes national identification over that of class and other groupings and liberation from the weight of a colonial past and defense against the predations of an imperialist present, rather than defense against capitalist exploitation. Therein may lie the reason the global Left is divided over Syria, namely, because it is already divided over the question of whether its allegiance is to all anti-imperialist governments, regardless of their class character, or only those that are working-class-led (combined with hostility to those that aren’t.)

Achcar further slanders the Syrian government, describing it as “one of the most despotic regimes in the region practicing extremely brutal repression.” [37] I use the word “slander,” not to deny that the Syrian government has been brutally repressive at times. It has been, though one would be hard pressed to name a single government that hasn’t at some point been despotic and brutally repressive in the face of existential threats, not to mention the United States, which has been despotic and brutally repressive even in the face of mild and virtually non-existent threats. During two world wars the United States centralized decision-making authority in the presidency to an extent that made the president a virtual dictator, and interned Japanese, German and Italian citizens, even though the safety of the United States was virtually assured by two vast oceans which separated it from its enemies. US economic, conventional and proxy warfare has been carried out throughout the world to brutally repress socialist, communist and national liberation movements that posed not even the mildest threat to the security of US borders or US citizens. Yet it is doubtful that Achcar would ever unreservedly launch a diatribe against US governments, denouncing them as mafia regimes that have practiced extremely brutal repression, but appears to have no reservations, and if anything, to delight, in unqualified denunciations of the Syrian government, all the while failing to acknowledge that states, by definition, are repressive in one way or another, and the more thoroughly threatened, the more repressive they are; and that, additionally, Syria has faced since its independence an unremittingly precarious security situation, beset by multiple existential threats, from Israel, the West, the reactionary Gulf states, and militant Islam, and multiple attempts by the United States to overthrow governments in Damascus. But even beyond this, what is additionally objectionable about Achcar’s characterization is its obvious hyperbole, since anyone of an unbiased mind will know that the despotic and repressive character of a number of governments in the region, from Saudi Arabia, to Bahrain, to Jordan, to Egypt, and Israel, are at least comparable to that of Syria, if not on an altogether different plane. Achcar is clearly way off base in describing Syria, a republic with an elected president and elected legislature as one of the most despotic regimes in a region that includes the Saudi autocracy, with its official misogyny, decapitations and amputations, and almost total abhorrence of representative democracy.

To the list of failings Achcar sees the Syrian government possessing, we must add its alleged embrace of neo-liberalism. “The Syrian regime has been implementing thorough neoliberal changes over the last 15 years with very visible results,” says Achcar. [38] This, however, hardly fits the reality. Odd would be a neo-liberal regime that wrote the following into its country’s constitution, as the Syrian government has its constitution: “Natural resources, facilities, institutions and utilities shall be publicly owned, and the state shall invest and oversee their management for the benefit of all people.” [39] Equally at odds with Achcar’s characterization of the economic policies of the Syrian government is the following: The U.S. State Department complains that Syria has “failed to join an increasingly interconnected global economy,” which is to say, has failed to follow the neo-liberal prescription of turning over its state-owned enterprises to private investors. The State Department is aggrieved that “ideological reasons” continue to prevent the Assad government from liberalizing Syria’s economy. As a result of the Ba’athists’ ideological fixation on socialism, “privatization of government enterprises is still not widespread.” The economy “remains highly controlled by the government.” [40]

The neo-liberally-inclined Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation are equally displeased. “Hafez al-Assad’s son Bashar, who succeeded him in 2000, has failed to deliver on promises to reform Syria’s socialist economy,” they complain.

Moreover,

The state dominates many areas of economic activity, and…marginalizes the private sector and prevents the sustainable development of new enterprises or industries. Monetary freedom has been gravely marred by state price controls and interference…[H]eavy state intervention, continues to retard entrepreneurial activity… Labor regulations are rigid, and the labor market suffers from state interference and control…[S]ystemic non-tariff barriers severely constrain freedom to trade. Private investment is deterred by heavy bureaucracy, direct state interference, and political instability. Although the number of private banks has increased steadily since they were first permitted in 2004, government influence in the financial sector remains extensive.” [41]

The U.S. Library of Congress country study of Syria refers to “the socialist structure of the government and economy,” points out that “the government continues to control strategic industries,” mentions that “many citizens have access to subsidized public housing and many basic commodities are heavily subsidized,” and that “senior regime members” have “hampered” the liberalization of the economy. [42] This sounds far from neo-liberalism.

If the Syrian government is not anti-Zionist, is not anti-imperialist, and has embraced neo-liberalism, it is difficult to understand how it is that foreign policy decision-makers in Washington have taken such an obvious dislike to it. Surely, a neo-liberal, pro-imperialist, non-anti-Zionist government in Syria would be defended and nurtured by Washington, as other Arab governments of the same ilk have been. That’s not to say that the Syrian government ought to be defended simply because it’s opposed by Western powers and Israel. But if the Syrian government is all that Achcar says it is, how are we to explain the hostility to the Syrian government of the pro-imperialist, pro-Zionist, neo-liberal centers of the world? It’s difficult, then, not to conclude that Achcar has deliberately set out to blacken the reputation of the Syrian government through a series of mischaracterization in order to portray it as the sort of government that Leftists could not possibly support. The problem is that his logic is tortured and premises are mistaken.

Equally tortured is Achcar’s logic with regard to the nature of the Syrian opposition, and equally fallacious are his premises. He pursues his usual tactic of making an argument based on two mutually contradictory claims. “In order to justify their support for the Assad regime, some people argue that the Syrian uprising, unlike other Arab countries, was led by reactionary Islamic forces,” he observes, before telling us: “This again is completely untrue…the basic fact is that there have been popular uprisings across the region.” [43] And yet Achcar grudgingly acknowledges that “Islamic fundamentalist forces (have) managed to become dominant among the organized forces.” [44] The apparent contradiction is resolved by arguing that reactionary Islamist forces did not initiate the uprising, but soon after moved into the vanguard. However, the question of whether militant Islamists were absent at the beginning of the uprising is a moot point, but let’s accept for the moment that they were. In that case, we’re still faced with the reality that the uprising is dominated today, and has been for some time, by al-Qaeda-linked militants. The question of why this is so—Achcar favors the view that it is due to the “weakness of the Left” [45]—is of no relevance whatever to the questions of whether the opposition ought to be supported, whether the global Left in supporting Damascus is confused, and whether Syria will be a better or worse place should the Assad government yield to the reactionary opposition that Achcar urges the global Left to support.

In a further instance of congruence with the US State Department positions, Achcar embraces a sectarian understanding of the conflict in Syria, much favored not only in Washington but in Riyadh as well, which amounts to the invoking of religious identity to mobilize militants for profane ends, in this case, the elimination of a secular Arab nationalist government which stands in the way of almost total US hegemony in the Arab world. Asked by interviewer Matta, “Aren’t the fighters on the ground in their vast majority Syrians who are fighting the dictatorship?” Achcar replies: “They are indeed.” He continues:

It’s out of the question that you could defeat ISIS through any alliance with Russia, Iran and the Assad regime, because that’s precisely what ISIS is pretending, that they are fighting all these people in defense of the Sunnis. So you need people who are seen as representing the overwhelming majority of the Syrian population, who are—who belong to the Sunni branch of Islam, and are seen as such, as representing this. [46]

But the majority of people in Syria are Sunni, including, not only the armed opposition, but also the Syrian Arab Army, and Assad’s wife. [47] The conflict is not one between Sunnis on the one hand and Shiites and Alawis on the other, but between religious fundamentalists, who seek to impose a sectarian religious dictatorship on the country, and non-sectarian Sunnis, who make up the bulk of the army, and are defending a vision of non-sectarian secular government. This isn’t a fight between an Alawite dictatorship that oppresses a Sunni majority, but between non-sectarian secularists and sectarian fanatics.

Compounding their mischaracterizations, Matta and Achcar continually refer to the Syrian government as a dictatorship. This is totally false. Syria is a republic, with authority divided among legislative, judicial and executive branches of government. Members of the legislature are elected. Assad, the president, was elected in a multi-candidate election in 2014. Calling the Syrian government a dictatorship is about as meaningful as defining intervention as nothing more than boots on the ground. It either reveals an ignorance of what’s really going on in Syria, sloppy analysis, or an attempt to mislead.

In addition to his other errors, Achcar embraces a position that Western leaders have tried to advance without success, for lack of evidence, and to much derision. “And that’s the opposition,” says Achcar, “I mean, the only force representing (the Sunnis) is this group of opposition forces, which are fighting Assad and fighting ISIS at the same time.” [48] Anyone who has followed events in Syria since 2011 will know that there is no opposition force of significance fighting both the Syrian government and ISIS, and that efforts to suggest there is have been regularly met with deserved disdain. The latest high profile attempt to propagate this nonsense was that of British prime minister David Cameron who claimed that there are 70,000 “moderate” rebels in Syria. Veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk estimates that at best there are 700, and more likely only 70. [49]

Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn writes:

Western leaders have said they do not have to choose between IS and Assad, because there is a moderate opposition prepared to fight both. The mythical nature of this claim was revealed earlier this year when a US general admitted that it had just four such ‘moderate’ fighters in Syria after spending $500 million in training them. Others had either defected to Jabhat al-Nusra or been murdered by it. [50]

Note that just about the only people claiming that there is a moderate opposition prepared to fight both ISIS and Assad are Western leaders and Achcar. Even the CIA estimated that just 1,500 militants “might be labelled moderate, but only operate under license from the extreme jihadists.” [51] And the extreme jihadists are fighting the Syrian Arab Army, not themselves.

But wait! Achcar appears, after all, to agree with Fisk that there are no moderate rebels in Syria fighting both the Syrian Arab Army and militant Islamists. Coming to his senses, he acknowledges that the main battle is between the government and sectarian theocrats: “The end result in Syria is indeed that the situation is dominated by a clash between two…forces: on one side, the regime and its allies, and, on the other side, an armed opposition in which the dominant forces uphold political perspectives that are deeply contradictory with the initial progressive aspirations of the uprisings as expressed in 2011.” [52]

That the main forces in the battle are both, in Achcar’s words, “counter-revolutionary,” means, according to the failed Libya analyst, that at “this moment, there are no prospects whatsoever for a progressive outcome.” [53] Syria getting out from under the yoke of domination by outside forces and eradicating the menace of murderous sectarian fanaticism doesn’t count as a progressive outcome in Achcar’s book. Instead, “the best that can happen,” he says is that “Assad must go.” [54] Predictably, on this score, Achcar agrees with the US State Department.

But with what or who is Assad to be replaced?

On this question, Achcar becomes vague and departs from the US State Department line, but his argument appears to be this: If Assad’s secular, non-sectarian government steps down, it will be replaced by Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS. The strength of the Islamist fundamentalists lies in Assad’s oppression of Sunnis (or what Achcar mistakenly sees as such.) With the source of the oppression removed, support for Islamic fundamentalism will dry up, and “people will see the vanity of both camps who have no solutions for the country’s problems.” [55] At that point, a progressive democratic movement will flourish.

To get there, Achcar advocates “serious support to the opposition, giving it the means seriously to defend itself, and again, especially with regard to airstrikes.” [56] Of course, this means serious support to ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra and other Islamist forces. Achcar would rather see Baghdadi in Damascus than Assad. For Achcar, eliminating secular, non-sectarian Arab nationalists is more important than preventing the rise of Sunni jihadists prepared to exterminate en masse apostates and infidels. And this from the ‘anti-imperialist’ who claims to have supported NATO’s direct intervention in Libya out of concern for the possibility that civilians might be massacred by the Libyan air force, but is prepared to support the massacre of the Alawite, Christian, Druze, and Kurdish populations of Syria, as surely these and other minorities would be massacred by the sectarian madmen Achcar urges Western powers to “give serious support to,” backed by a global Left he hopes to seduce to his morally bankrupt and politically offensive views. In this, Achcar is even more repellent than are Western leaders, for even they have no wish to bring the murderous sectarian fanatics of Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS to power in Damascus.

To grasp the kind of Syria Achcar is willing to tolerate (easy for him to do, since he’ll never experience the miseries himself) “consider the situation in the province of Idlib, where the rebels rule.”

Schools have been segregated, women forced to wear veils, and posters of Osama bin Laden hung on the walls. Government offices were looted and a more effective government has yet to take shape. With the Talibanization of Idlib, the 100-plus Christian families of the city fled. The few Druze villages that remained have been forced to denounce their religion and embrace Islam; some of their shrines have been blown up. No religious minorities remain in rebels-held Syria, in Idlib, or elsewhere. [57]

The not so charitable view of Achcar is that he deliberately promotes US State Department talking points to the global Left by dressing them up in Leftist language as a way of undercutting opposition to the United States pursuing its hegemonic ambitions around the world. A more charitable view is that he rejects simple binary explanations in favor of recognizing a multiplicity of opposing forces in the Middle East. His schema might include four major forces: (A) secular Arab nationalists; (B) Western powers; (C) reactionary Islam; and (D) popular, democratic forces. In Achcar’s view, the secular Arab nationalists are opposed to B, C, and D; Western powers are opposed to A and D but are willing to collude with C against A and D. And popular democratic forces are opposed to A, B, and C. Achcar, it would seem, is willing to support B against A in the service of D (for example, in supporting NATO against Gaddafi or the West against Assad, to clear the way, in his view, for the eventual victory of popular, democratic forces.) However, if opportunistic alliances are permissible, we might ask why Achcar hasn’t supported secular Arab nationalists against Western imperialism and reactionary Islam in the service of popular, democratic forces? Surely, Western imperialism and reactionary Islam are significant obstacles to “the victory of a popular democratic uprising” whose clearing away might well be desired, especially in Syria where the Assad government has opened space for these very same forces to flourish through a new constitution which allows for multi-candidate presidential elections and ends the Ba’ath Party’s lead role in Syrian society. But Achcar’s deep loathing of secular Arab nationalists leads him, not only to traduce them, serving up false and invidious descriptions seemingly aimed at drawing the Left into his campaign of hatred against them, but to reliably side with Western imperialism against them, as if secular Arab nationalists are holding back the working class from leading a proletarian revolution in the Middle East and must therefore be swept away by Western powers. It’s difficult to say whether this is a crafty effort to mislead the global Left by pushing its hot buttons, or is simply the lunacy of a man in the grips of a naive fantasy. Whatever the case, the old warning should come to mind whenever the failed Libya analyst is invited to hold forth on Syria. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

1. President al-Assad: Syria won’t be a puppet state for the West “full Text”, Syrian Arab News Agency, http://sana.sy/en/?p=20381

2. Gilbert Achcar, “Libya: A legitimate and necessary debate from an anti-imperialist perspective,” Z-Net, March 24, 2011.

3. Gilbert Achcar, “Libyan Developments,” Z-Net, March 19, 2011.

4. Achcar, March 24, 2011.

5. Stephen Gowans, “Gaddafi’s crime: Making Libya’s economy work for Libyans,” what’s left, May 6, 2012.

6. Benoit Faucon, “For big oil, the Libya opening that wasn’t”, The Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2012.

7. Benoit Faucon, “For big oil, the Libya opening that wasn’t”, The Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2012.

8. Guy Chazan, “For West’s oil firms, no love lost in Libya”, The Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2011.

9. Guy Chazan, “For West’s oil firms, no love lost in Libya”, The Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2011.

10. Steven Mufson, “Conflict in Libya: U.S. oil companies sit on sidelines as Gaddafi maintains hold”, The Washington Post, June 10, 2011.

11. Steven Mufson, “Conflict in Libya: U.S. oil companies sit on sidelines as Gaddafi maintains hold”, The Washington Post, June 10, 2011

12. Steven Mufson, “Conflict in Libya: U.S. oil companies sit on sidelines as Gaddafi maintains hold”, The Washington Post, June 10, 2011.

13. Clifford Kraus, “The scramble for access to Libya’s oil wealth begins”, The New York Times, August 22, 2011.

14. Achcar, March 24, 2011.

15. Gilbert Achcar and Nada Matta, “What happened to the Arab Spring?”, Jacobin, December 17, 2015.

16. “Obama Touts U.S. Strikes on ISIL, But Can Military Escalation Make Up for Failed Strategy?” Democracy Now, December 15, 2015.

17. Stephen Gowans, “What the Syrian Constitution says about Assad and the Rebels,” what’s left, May 21, 2013.

18. Stephen Gowans, “Suppose a respectable opinion poll found that Bashar al-Assad has more support than the Western-backed opposition. Would that not be major news?” what’s left, December 11, 2015.

19. Achcar, March 19, 2011.

20. As Assad Makes Gains, Will New U.S. Strategy for Syria Change the Dynamics?” PBS Newshour, June 14, 2013, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/world/jan-june13/syria2_06-14.html

21. Achcar, March 19, 2011.

22. Achcar, March 24, 2011.

23. Stephen Gowans, “Al-Qaeda’s Air Force”, what’s left, February 20, 2012. https://gowans.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/al-qaedas-air-force/

24. Ibid.

25. David Pugliese, “The Libya mission one year later: Into the unknown”, The Ottawa Citizen, February 18, 2012.

26. Ibid.

27. Achcar, March 19, 2011.

28. Achcar, March 24, 2011.

29. Democracy Now.

30. Achcar, March 24, 2011.

31. Pugliese.

32. Democracy Now.

33. Jacobin.

34. “Constitution of the Syrian Arab Republic – 2012”, Voltaire Network, 26 February 2012, http://www.voltairenet.org/article173033.html

35. Jacobin.

36. “Constitution of the Syrian Arab Republic – 2012”, Article 8:4.

37. Jacobin.

38. Jacobin.

39. “Constitution of the Syrian Arab Republic – 2012”, Article 14.

40. U.S. State Department website. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3580.htm#econ. Accessed February 8, 2012.

41. Index of Economic Freedom 2012. http://www.heritage.org/index/country/syria. Accessed February 8, 2012.

42. U.S. Library of Congress. A Country Study: Syria. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/sytoc.html

43. Jacobin.

44. Jacobin.

45. Jacobin.

46. Jacobin.

47. “Mr. Assad’s wife, Asma al-Akhras, comes from a prominent family of Sunni Muslims from Homs.” Neil MacFarquhar, “Assad’s response to Syria unrest leaves his own sect divided”, The New York Times, June 9, 2012.

48. Jacobin.

49. Robert Fisk, “Is David Cameron planning to include al-Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusra in his group of 70,000 moderates?”, The Independent, December 1, 2015.

50. Patrick Cockburn, “The West has been in denial over how to tackle the threat of Islamic state,” Evening Standard, November 19, 2015.

51. Patrick Cockburn, “Britain is on the verge of entering into a long war in Syria based on wishful thinking and poor information,” The Independent, December 1, 2015.

52. Jacobin.

53. Jacobin.

54. Jacobin.

55. Jacobin.

56. Jacobin.

57. Joshua Landis and Steven Simon, “Assad has it his way: The peace talks and after,” Foreign Affairs, January 19, 2016.

The dictator you didn’t know about

He’s a virtual dictator who presides over a virtual one-party state controlled by his own ethnic minority. True, he has been elected multiple times, but he relies on violence and intimidation to win “mind-bogglingly one-sided elections.” (1) In the last election, his party won all but two of 546 seats in parliament. (2)

When opposition supporters objected to one of his improbable election victories, he ordered regime forces to open fire, “killing 193 and wounding hundreds. Thousands of opposition leaders and supporters were rounded up and detained.” (3) Opponents who weren’t jailed were denied food aid, jobs and other social benefits. (4)

A rebellion against his regime has been met by “brutal campaigns” involving rape and the killing of his own people. (5) Last year, he sentenced two Western journalists to 11 years in prison for reporting on rebel groups fighting to overthrow his tyrannical regime. (6) And in 2006, he sent his forces into a neighbouring country to occupy it militarily, because it was weak and unable to defend itself.

Syria’s Bashar al-Asad?

Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe?

The description fits the picture painted of these two leaders by the US State Department and its echo chamber, the Western mass media. But it is neither of these men. Both are reviled in Washington—and so automatically by the Western press—for reasons allegedly having to do with their bad attitudes to democracy and human rights and so it’s easy to believe the leader depicted above is one of them.

But the real reason the US State Department–and in train the mimetic Western media—treat these men as heinous criminals has to do with their attitudes to Western free enterprise and domination from abroad. Neither man has been willing to open his country to untrammelled exploitation by foreigners (or in Zimbabwe’s case to the descendants of settlers.) Neither votes in the United Nations as Washington directs, and neither is willing to act as a military proxy for the Pentagon.

But Meles Zenawi, the leader I’ve described above—the dictator you haven’t heard about—was willing to do all these things.

Meles, the prime minister of Ethiopia, died last Monday. An anti-Communist, he dropped out of medical school in the 1970s to fight Ethiopia’s then Marxist-Leninist government. As prime minister, he shepherded Ethiopia through a free-market, free-enterprise takeover that opened Ethiopia’s economy to foreign investors. (7) In 2006, when the United States asked him to invade neighbouring Somalia, Meles—the uncompromising local agent of US interests—was only too happy to comply.

For his services the Ethiopian strongman was showered with aid—$1 billion from Washington in 2010, and nearly the same amount last year. (8) And his “military and security services” are celebrated in Washington as “among the Central Intelligence Agency’s favourite partners…in Africa.” (9)

While Meles was the kind of leader Washington professes to revile, there were no campaigns for Meles’s removal engineered by the US State Department, and then taken up by a compliant mass media, and from there by liberals, soft-leftists, non-violent pro-democracy activists, and “no-fly-zone-arms-to-the-rebels” Trotskyists. All of these forces were too busy trying to outdo each other in denouncing the rogue’s gallery of socialists and economic nationalists Washington trotted out for disdain, allegedly because they hate democracy and human rights, but actually because they hate foreign domination. Meles never made Washington’s list of rogues. Nor by consequence the Western mass media’s. Nor by consequence the aforesaid leftists’.

Writing Meles’ obituary, New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman felt moved to explain the gulf between Washington’s rhetoric about supporting democracy and human rights, and its practice of supporting their very enemies.

“Ethiopia,” wrote Gettleman, “is hardly alone in raising difficult questions on how the United States should balance interests and principles.” Contra Gettleman, the trouble here is that there is no balance between interests and principles. US interests—which is to say the interests of the one percent—vastly outweigh principles, which is why Washington continues to support leaders like Meles and tyrants in the Gulf. Principles are simply rhetoric to cover up the rape of other countries in the pursuit of profit.

“Saudi Arabia,” continued Gettleman, “is an obvious example (of interests trumping principles), a country where women are deprived of many rights and there is almost no religious freedom. Still, it remains one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East for a simple reason: oil.”

Right, but not oil, as a resource US consumers and industry depend on that can’t be obtained elsewhere. Indeed, the United States is one of the world’s top oil producers and more than half of US oil is sourced domestically. Neighbouring Canada supplies as much oil to the United States as do all of the oil producing countries in North Africa and the Middle East combined. (10) The loss of Saudi Arabia as an ally wouldn’t leave the United States short of oil. On the contrary, Saudi Arabia is a source of only a small part of the oil the United States consumes. But it is a source of gargantuan oil profits for US businesses, not only directly, but through the recycling of petro-dollars through US banks. Saudi Arabia remains one of the United States’ closest allies in the Middle East for a simple reason: not oil itself, but for what it delivers–immense profits.

Gettleman went on to point out that, “In Africa, the United States cooperates with several governments that are essentially one-party states, dominated by a single-man, despite a commitment to promoting democracy.” (11) But he didn’t say why. If it’s oil profits in Saudi Arabia, what is it in Africa? The Wall Street Journal is more forthcoming. Meles transformed a Communist-controlled economy by “loosening up of lucrative industries” and attracting “investment in agriculture and manufacturing.” (12) In other words, he helped make US investors—the one percent— richer.

Meanwhile, leaders who have resisted their country’s exploitation by the West’s one percent have been destabilized, sanctioned, bombed, and—with the help of plenty of leftists—tarred by the blackest campaigns of vilification.

1. Jeffrey Gettleman (a), “Ethiopian leader’s death highlights gap between U.S. interests and ideals”, The New York Times, August 21, 2012.
2. Peter Wonacott, “Ethiopia in flux after leader dies”, The Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2012.
3. Wonacott
4. Gettleman (a)
5. Jeffrey Gettleman (b), “Ethiopian leader’s death highlights gap between U.S. interests and ideals”, The New York Times, August 21, 2012.
6. Gettleman (a)
7. Wonacott
8. Wonacott
9. Gettleman (a)
10. Danile Yergin, “America’s new energy security”, The Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2011; Juliet Eilperin, “Canadian government overhauling environmental rules to aid oil extraction”, The Washington Post, June 3, 2012; Sheila McNulty and Ed Crooks, “US groups unlock secret recipe for oil”, The Financial Times, March 3, 2011.
11. Gettleman (b)
12. Wonacott

Richard Seymour: Hallucinating revolutions, pacifying resistance

While it may stir hopes that a popular rebellion is sweeping away oppression, the Syrian revolt, whatever its origins and proclamations, is hardly that. Its likely destination is a new US client regime in Damascus; its probable outcome the dismantling of what’s left of Syrian socialism, anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism. Would that it were all that romantic leftists fervently wish it to be, but a sober look at the rebellion, and recent history, strongly points in another direction.

Following blogger and author Richard Seymour, the views of many leftist who side with the rebels can be summarized as follows:

• All genuine popular liberation movements should be supported.
• The Syrian revolt is a genuine popular liberation movement.
• Western countries are intervening to tilt the balance in favour of an outcome they want.
• There is no sign they can achieve this.

Since few would disagree with the first point, we can move quickly to the second. Is the Syrian revolt “genuine” and is it “popular”?

If by genuine we mean the revolt is intended to advance popular interests, and that it doesn’t represent the pursuit of narrow interests under the guise of achieving popular goals, then the answer must surely be that the rebel movement’s genuineness depends on what section of it we’re talking about.

It’s clear that the aim of exiles in key leadership positions within the Syrian National Council is to turn Syria into a US client regime. The Muslim Brotherhood’s interests are undoubtedly sectarian, as are those of al Qaeda, a recent addition to the rebellion. Unless we pretend these groups are not part of the rebel movement, it cannot be said to be genuine in all its parts. To be sure, some parts of it are, but other parts—and very important ones—aren’t.

Is the rebel movement “popular”?

We don’t know exactly how much support the rebels have, or how much the government has. But we do know that each side appears to be able to count on the backing of significant parts of the Syrian population—the rebels on Sunnis (though less so the Sunni merchant class); the government on religious minorities. If the rebels represent a popular movement, then, inasmuch as the definition of “popular” depends on having the support of a significant part of the population, the forces arrayed against the rebellion are popular as well.

But should a rebel movement be supported simply because it’s popular? By definition, fascist regimes are based on mass support (without it, they’re merely authoritarian.) Most Democratic Party voters—as well as Republican Party ones—are part of the 99 percent. Both parties are popularly supported. Does that mean leftists ought to support them too? The Nazis too had a vaguely progressive section—that part on which the “socialist” in National Socialist German Workers’ Party turned. But its presence didn’t make the Nazis a popular movement for socialism or any less of a tool of capitalist-imperialist interests.

The counter argument here is that none of these popularly supported parties of the right are “genuinely” popular. (While popularly supported, they don’t advance popular goals.) But that gets us back to the question of whether the Syrian rebel movement is homogenous, united in aiming to oust the Assad government for a common purpose. Clearly, it is not.

On the other hand, we might say that the Syrian state isn’t popular, in the sense of its being said to represent narrow class interests, while the rebel movement seeks to overthrow those interests, and therefore is popular by definition. But there’s no evidence that any significant part of the Syrian rebellion is inspired by class interests, except perhaps key parts of the SNC, whose class interests align with those of the banks, corporations and wealthy investors who dominate the US state, media and economy. At best, parts of the rebel movement seek a liberal democracy, which would rapidly dismantle the remaining socialist elements of the Syrian economy. To be sure, Syria has never been socialist in the manner Trotsky’s followers favour—and a number of leftists on the side of the rebels, including Seymour, who Wikipedia notes is a member of the Socialist Workers Party— are devotees of the Russian revolutionary. But a liberal democracy would be even further from their ideal.

Seymour’s third point is that Western countries are intervening to tilt the balance in favour of an outcome they want. Since there’s no secret about this, we can move to point 4.

The fourth point is that there is no sign the West can hijack the rebel movement. There is an obvious objection to this: Were there a good chance Western governments couldn’t tip the outcome in their favour, they would be energetically opposing the rebellion, not ardently supporting it. Seymour’s point may be based, apart from wishful thinking, on the reality that there are large parts of the rebel movement that Washington does not trust, and therefore is reluctant to assist. The CIA’s role—at least that which is admitted to—has been to funnel Saudi- and Qatari-provided arms to the groups Washington wants to come out on top, and away from those it wants to keep from power. But therein lies the reason the United States will assuredly hijack the rebel movement. It will channel military, diplomatic, political, and ideological support to those parts of it that can be trusted to cater to US interests, and this overwhelming support will allow pro-imperialist elements, in time, to dominate the rebellion, if they don’t already. To think otherwise, is to ignore what happens time and again.

A brief example. In the summer of 1982 the Marxian economist Paul Sweezy hailed the rise of Poland’s Solidarity trade union movement as “heartening proof of the ability of the working class….to lead humanity into a socialist future.” [1] Maybe when you’ve lived on a starvation diet for years a discarded four-day old hamburger plucked from a McDonald’s dumpster starts to look like a steak dinner. Solidarity too was termed a genuine popular liberation movement, but it, like so many others so characterized, led, not forward, but backward. We know now that Solidarity’s high-profile supporters—The Wall Street Journal, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—had a better idea of what Solidarity was all about than Sweezy did—to say nothing of much of the anti-Communist left. Those who didn’t have their heads stuck in a utopian cloud saw clearly enough that Solidarity would not lead to “genuine” socialism, but to the breakdown of the Polish state, chaos in the Warsaw Pact, and a step along the road to rolling back Communism; which is what happened, and the decades since have been marked by the deepest reaction. Henry Kissinger recently concluded correctly that the Syrian rebellion “will have to be judged by its destination, not its origin; its outcome, not its proclamations.” Judging Solidarity by its destination and outcomes, we can hardly be optimistic about the Syrian rebellion, nor parts of the left grasping its probable destination.

The reply to this might be, “Well, at least we should support the genuinely popular elements of the rebel movement.” Seymour wants us to do this by seeing to it that arms flow freely to the rebels, as Gilbert Achcar (another follower of Trotsky’s thought), wanted to do with the Libyan rebels. This naively ignores who’s providing the arms, who they’re provided to, and what’s likely to be expected of the recipients in return. The main weapons suppliers, the Saudi and Qatari tyrannies—and who could ask for more convincing supporters of a genuine popular liberation movement?—are not channelling arms to genuine popular liberation groups. Instead, it seems very likely that military support is being heaped upon those sections of the rebellion that are amenable to a post-conflict working arrangement with US-allies Turkey, Israel and the Gulf Cooperation Council and to settling in comfortably to a subordinate role to Washington. The idea behind arms flowing freely to “genuinely popular” liberation forces is that Washington backs leftists while the Saudi and Qatari tyrannies arm democrats. The naivety is breathtaking—on par with Sweezy’s embracing Solidarity as heartening proof of an imminent socialist future.

There’s more than a soupcon of absurdity in any discussion among Western leftists of “supporting” the Syrian rebels, since support amounts to nothing more than a rhetorical endorsement without any practical, real-word, consequences. It’s not as if an International Brigade is being assembled (backed by what? Saudi and Qatari money) that fervent anti-Assad leftists of the West can join to show real, meaningful support. Except weren’t the last International Brigades fighting against rebels? And come to think of it, aren’t the Saudis and Qataris backing an international volunteer brigade…of jihadis? If supporting Syria’s rebels meant anything at all, Western leftists would be making their way to Turkish border towns to offer their services to the Free Syrian Army, or the local CIA outfit attached to it. Perhaps a collection can be taken up to raise airfare for Seymour to travel to the nearest FSA recruiting center to put real meat behind his support for Syria’s “genuine popular liberation” movement.

Despite its surface appearance of empty clap-trap, Seymour’s position does have a practical, real-world aim—to neutralize opposition in the West to Western intervention on the side of the rebels by the people who are most likely to mount it—the Western left. Once you accept the argument that the rebels are a genuinely popular liberation movement and that massive outside intervention by imperialist powers won’t tilt the outcome of the rebellion in their favour, then all that’s left to do—as a way of showing solidarity with the rebels—is to raise not a single objection to their receiving aid from your own government. Which means that Seymour, who fancies himself a champion of popular causes against powerful conservative forces, may, on the contrary, be a pacifier of dissent against the most reactionary force around—US-led imperialism.

1. Paul M. Sweezy, “Response to The Line of March Symposium,” Line of March, #12, September/October 1982, 119-122.

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