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Middle East: Imperial assault and tasks for the left
Ardeshir Mehrdad interviewing Alex Callinicos
by Alex Callinicos
and Ardeshir Mehrdad
September 20, 2006
The present interview with Alex Callinicos was
performed over several weeks by email spanning late
July to mid September. The early questions took place
at the start of the Israeli attack on Lebanon. The
last five questions were answered in one go in mid
September. Because of the lengthiness of the interview
it was not possible to pose any further questions
arising out of these answers.
Ardeshir Mehrdad: Can we start with the political
context. In general terms, how would you describe the
current political situation in the Middle East?
Alex Callinicos: The current situation - not only but
especially in the Middle East - is defined by the
imperialist offensive mounted by the United States and
its closest allies (notably Israel and Britain) since
11 September 2001. Carried out under the slogan of the
'war on terrorism' the real aim of this offensive is
to perpetuate the global domination of US capitalism
(hence the title of the neocon 'Project for the New
American Century'). The Middle East - and more
generally Western Asia (what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls
the 'the global Balkans') - is the privileged site of
this struggle, both because of its strategic and
economic significance and because of the setbacks that
the US and its allies have suffered, notably thanks to
the effects of the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9 and of
Israel's disastrous 1982 Lebanon War.
This imperialist offensive suffers three main
problems. First and most fundamental, it has evoked
powerful resistance, above all in Iraq itself, where
the US seems to be bogged down in an unwinnable
counter-insurgency war. We now see Israel too
beginning to face similar difficulties thanks to
Hezbollah's very effective defence against the Israel
Defence Force's assault on Lebanon. Secondly, compared
to the 1991 Gulf War, the current 'war on terrorism'
lacks international legitimacy thanks to the Bush
administration's unilateralism and its contempt for
human rights (Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram ...).
Some commentators, for example Giovanni Arrighi, argue
that we are witnessing a broader crisis of US
hegemony. [1]
Thirdly, the ideological justification of the
imperialist offensive - what Condoleezza Rice calls
'the birth of a New Middle East' with the spread of
liberal democracy - is rebounding on its authors. This
is partly because when given the chance to vote people
seem to be backing radical Islamists such as Hamas and
the Muslim Brotherhood. Moreover, by giving legitimacy
to democratic demands the US threatens to undermine
its closest Arab allies, for example, the Saudi
autocracy and the Mubarak dynasty in Egypt. Finally,
of course, by allowing Israel to destroy Lebanon,
Washington is destroying the one clear success for its
democracy agenda in the region, the so-called 'cedar
revolution' thanks to which the US and France forced
Syria to pull out of Lebanon.
AM: Before proceeding to the next question you might
wish to clarify and expand on the seriousness of the
three main problems that you suggest challenge the
imperialist offensive. Could you, for example consider
following facts: First, the existing resistance
movements operating in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine,
and Lebanon appear to suffer from internal weaknesses,
resulting predominantly from sectarian rivalries and
factionalist tensions. Second, in recent years the
Bush Administration seems to have modified its
unilateralism significantly. The US has been seeking a
broader international consensus over its pre-emptive
strategy as witnessed, at least, in the current
referral to the UN Security Council of the war on
Lebanon or the Iran nuclear issue. And third, the
power of corporate media to modify and dampen down the
negative impact of the US Army's barbaric behaviour in
the region, and to conjure up spurious ideological
justifications for the continuation of its military
aggression.
AC: These are big issues. I'm afraid I disagree with
you on all three supposed 'facts'. First of all, when
it comes to 'sectarian rivalries and factional
tensions' it's important to draw distinctions. What we
have seen across the whole region is a process in
which the leadership of resistance to US imperialism
and Israel has passed from secular nationalists and
the left to the Islamists. This process began with the
Iranian Revolution of 1978-9 but we have seen some
very important developments in the past few months,
notably with Hamas's defeat of Fatah in the elections
to the Palestine Authority and the enormous acclaim
that Hezbollah and its leader Nasrallah have received
through the region for their resistance to the IDF.
It's misleading to describe this as 'factionalism'. It
is a historic shift that is a consequence of the
political failure of secular nationalists and the
left. We may not welcome this development - as a
revolutionary Marxist I don't, though I am glad that
someone is seriously taking on the imperialists - but
we have to recognize it if the left is ever to
re-emerge in the Middle East.
The case of Iraq has to be mentioned separately
because it is so complex. Here the resistance, which
appears to be a loose collection of Iraqi Ba'athists,
nationalists, and Islamists based mainly in the Sunni
Arab areas have succeeded in mounting a
counter-insurgency war that, to repeat, the US shows
no sign of winning. (It is essential to distinguish
the mainstream of this resistance from the sectarian
terrorists of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, formed by the
late and unlamented Zarqawi.) The US sought to isolate
the resistance through a policy of divide-and-rule,
and in particular by allying itself to those political
leaders of the Shia majority who, though having very
different agendas from Washington (most obviously,
often close links with Tehran), were prepared to
advance their interests through collaboration with the
occupation.
This policy has now badly rebounded on the occupiers.
Strategically it has strengthened Iran, thanks to its
influence on the Shia politicians who dominate the
Iraqi client regime. Politically the biggest single
bloc in the Iraqi parliament, the supporters of
Moqtada al-Sadr, belong to the ruling coalition, but
also oppose the occupation and have just mounted a
mass demonstration in Sadr City in solidarity with
Hezbollah. Finally, and disastrously from a human
perspective, divide-and-rule, and the government death
squads that it licensed have unleashed large-scale
sectarian killings, particularly in Baghdad, that have
developed a dynamic of their own. Last week the
Commander of US Central Command, General Abizaid,
acknowledged that 'it is possible that Iraq could move
towards civil war'. [2] The disintegration of Iraq,
which might be the result of such a war, would not
work to the advantage of the US. That was why George
Bush senior decided to leave Saddam Hussein in power
at the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
Secondly, the administration of George Bush junior
radicalized the unilateralism that was already a
visible feature of US global policy during the 1990s
under Clinton. Conquering Iraq was supposed to
vindicate the Bush Doctrine of unilateral preventive
war, first unfolded at West Point on 1 June 2002.
Instead, of course, the US has bogged down in Iraq,
which has gravely limited its ability to deal with
other crises such as North Korea's nuclear programme
and the challenge of Hugo Chavez and the new left in
Latin America. One wing of the American ruling class,
represented by Brzezinski and Brent Scrowcroft, Bush
senior's National Security Adviser, say the Bush
administration have behaved like idiots in abandoning
multilateralism: they need the European Union in
particular as junior partner in running the world.
What has happened since Condoleezza Rice took over as
Secretary of State in January 2005 has been
contradictory. On the one hand, she has tilted towards
the critics, in particular by involving the other
major powers in the negotiations over North Korea's
and Iran's nuclear programmes. On the other hand, the
administration's rhetoric, most notably in Bush's
Second Inaugural Address, has if anything become
harder in affirming what one might call Wilsonian
imperialism - using the power of the US to spread
American-style liberal democracy world-wide.
The present war in the Lebanon demonstrates that
Rice's more multilateralist style is a tactical
adjustment, reflecting an accommodation to the limits
of American power rather than a strategic
reorientation. The Iraqi quagmire has encouraged the
administration to see the Islamic Republican regime in
Iran as the major obstacle to securing its objectives
in the Middle East. Hence the war plans revealed by
Seymour Hersh back in April. It's clear the
administration saw the Lebanon crisis as a heaven-sent
opportunity to weaken Tehran through Israel
'degrading' Hezbollah, a powerful and strategically
placed guerrilla movement closely allied to Iran. The
crisis has also highlighted America's crisis of
international legitimacy since it has been almost
alone, backed only by Israel itself and by Britain, in
opposing an immediate cease fire in Lebanon. The US is
negotiating with France now because it needs French
troops in Lebanon - this is a sign of weakness, not
strength, on both its part and that of Israel.
Thirdly, I don't really see Iraq as a good example of
the power of the corporate media. In the US itself
public opinion has turned against the war much more
quickly than it did in the case of Vietnam. The
evident American failure in Iraq is one of the main
causes of the rapid decline in Bush's popularity since
Hurricane Katrina a year ago. In Britain today Tony
Blair is hugely unpopular, above all because of his
close support for Bush in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now
Lebanon. It's true that it's hard to translate this
popular opposition into the removal of the politicians
responsible for these disasters, but this reflects the
nature of the political system rather than the ability
of the media to deceive people about what's really
happening.
AM: In order to clarify the substance of my previous
question and to arrive at a more accurate picture of
the political conditions pertaining in the Middle
East, and also as revolutionary Marxists in order to
arrive at the means to a better prospect for the
region, it might be better to recast my previous
questions in a different mould. Let us assume that the
problems facing the imperialist offensive are those
you have enumerated. We then have to answer two
questions. First - how durable and robust are these
problems (as they stand today)? What are their
significances and how effective are they? Are they
capable of acting as a real barrier against the
implementation of the imperialist projects of the US
and her allies or merely elements that increase the
cost of these projects? Second - can the current
situation in the Middle East be reduced to the various
obstacles lying on the route of imperialist
aggression? Are there in the current political context
in the Middle East no other factors or grounds that
facilitate the furtherance of the dominating
imperialist offensive?
You will appreciate that your previous explanations
are not entirely clear on this score. It is indeed
correct that presently the Islamist movements (or to
put it in more general terms, religious and/or ethnic
ultra-conservative movements) play an important role
in the regional political arena. Indeed they have a
greater weight than seculars and leftists in the
resistance struggles against the US imperialist
assault. It is equally true that this superiority is
an expression of a "historic shift", the roots of
which should be sought, among others, in the political
defeats of secular nationalist, socialist and
communist movements. But such a reasonable emphasis
cannot excuse ignoring the internal weaknesses of the
present resistance and to leave out this feature from
our analysis of the conditions pertaining in the
region.
Specifically, it is difficult to ignore the fact that
the domination of religious and ethnic sectarianism or
political factionalism on large parts of the
anti-imperialist resistance has reduced its mobilising
power. It has meant that the entire popular potentials
of resistance in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, and
Afghanistan (which you chose not to mention) cannot be
mobilised, nor work in tandem. It has prevented the
Muslim, Jew, Christian (Assyrian, Armenians,
Maronites), and Zoroastrian; Shi'i, Sunni, Bahaii, and
Sheikhi; the religious and agnostic; the Kurd, Arab,
Persian, Turkmen, Turk, Pashto, Bluchi, Hazareh, and
Tajik to see themselves as belonging to the same camp.
A camp determined to stand up to the new order of
slavery that is in the process of being engineered by
the Pentagon and other imperialist agencies.
Moreover, the fact that the Bush administration has
radicalised unilateralism does not mean that this
government has become paralysed and has lost its
ability to manoeuvre. We have witnessed that this same
government, as you rightly pointed out, has to a great
extent albeit tactically, reduced the problem of
"international legitimacy" in pursuing the "war
against terrorism" through a series of retreats from
its previous unilateralist action. One can observe
this in the behaviour of the UN Security Council in
confronting Israel's barbaric military assault on
Palestine and Lebanon, or over the Iran nuclear issue.
It demonstrates that despite the crisis of hegemony,
the Bush government can still line up the
"international community" in support of its policies
and conduct in the Middle East.
And finally, if it is true that today's Iraq is not a
good illustration the power of the corporate media in
shaping public opinion, Iran is. The strong American
public opinion support for a new offensive in the
Middle East and a military intervention in Iran, even
while the US military machine is still sunk in the
Iraqi quagmire, cannot be explained except through the
illusion-creating power of the corporate media (see
for example: USA TODAY/CNN Gallup Poll
www.usatoday.com/news/polls/2006-02-13-poll.h tm and
Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg Pool
www.pollingreport.com/iran.htm).
AC: There's no law that says you have to agree with
what I say, but I'm becoming worried that the
interview will become bogged down by the repetition of
the same questions. Maybe going deeper may help to
short-circuit this problem. If we want to understand
what underlies the difficulties facing the US in the
Middle East we have to look at the more fundamental
situation of American capitalism. There is a basic
discrepancy between its economic and military power.
Militarily the US enjoys massive conventional and
nuclear superiority over any combination of other
states. Economically, however, it faces deep-seated
problems of competitiveness reflecting the challenge
from other centres of capital accumulation - Germany,
Japan, China, etc. - that are expressed in the
so-called global imbalances, notably the US balance of
payments deficit, which has to be financed by a
massive inflow of capital, mainly from East Asia. As
both David Harvey and I have argued, the neocon
adventure in Iraq was intended as the beginning of a
'flight forward' - the use of American military
superiority to reinforce Washington's domination of
the Middle East and thereby to begin to freeze a
global balance of forces that entrenched the hegemony
of US capitalism. [3]
The significance of this context of the resistance in
Iraq is that it has helped to precipitate a 'crisis of
overstretch' for American imperialism - in other
words, a crisis that highlights the limits of US
power. These limits are partly military - notoriously
the relatively small hi-tech force that Rumsfeld
insisted the Pentagon used, rejecting his generals'
demands for far more troops, was strong enough to
seize Iraq but not enough to control the country. [4]
They are also political - Washington's inability to
find a popular base in Iraq (or indeed elsewhere in
the Middle East) for the kind of political project it
is pursuing: hence the increasingly problematic
alliance it has had to forge with the Shia parties in
Iraq.
As I have already noted, being tied down in Iraq has
limited Washington's ability to take initiatives
elsewhere. You see the resulting retreats as
successful manoeuvres that have allowed the
administration to contain the crisis of international
legitimacy, but it is hardly a convincing
demonstration of US supremacy to be forced to
renounce, for the present at least, serious moves
against Kim Jong-il or Chavez: before the outbreak of
the Lebanon war, many neocons were complaining about
Bush's 'appeasement' of North Korea and Iran. As to
Lebanon itself, if you really believe that this is
going well for the US and Israel, you are alone in the
world. I prefer the judgement of my friend and comrade
Gilbert Achcar, who has written: 'Whatever the final
outcome of the ongoing war in Lebanon, one thing is
already clear: instead of helping in raising the
sinking ship of the US Empire, the Israeli rescue boat
has actually aggravated the shipwreck, and is
currently being dragged down with it.' [5]
This crisis of overstretch doesn't reflect an absolute
scarcity of the material resources available to
American imperialism. By the standards of the Cold
War, let alone the Second World War, US defence
spending constitutes a relatively small percentage of
national income. In principle, then, the Pentagon
could greatly increase its military capabilities. But
this would require much higher levels of taxation than
the American rich would find comfortable. It's also
quite possible that the East Asian and European ruling
classes would balk at lending the US the money it
would need to pursue a much more aggressive military
project given that America has already overwhelming
superiority over the rest of the world. The economic
and geopolitical situation is very different from the
late 1940s and the early 1950s, when Washington was
able to brigade together the advanced capitalist world
under its leadership and pay for the entire enterprise
itself.
This brings me to the question that you repeat about
factionalism. How serious a problem the divisions you
itemize are depends on the criterion by which you
judge the resistance. If you are simply considering
the resistance in terms of its capacity to disrupt and
impede the US project, then these divisions aren't
decisive. Iraq clearly shows this. So does
Afghanistan, which for some reason you imagine I am
trying to avoid discussing.
What's been happening there very clearly illustrates
the general crisis of overstretch. The US has been
trying to cut down its commitments in Afghanistan by
getting Canada and the European Union to take over
much of the country under the aegis of NATO.
Meanwhile, the farcical Karzai regime clearly has very
limited control outside Kabul. The absence of any
worthwhile government in the south has created a space
in which the 'Taliban' (in fact we know very little
about who is fighting the US and NATO forces in
southern Afghanistan) can resume activity and rebuild
support. The NATO troops now participating in the
US-led offensive in the south have run slap bang into
much stronger resistance than they anticipated. It's
true that all this further reinforces the
fragmentation of Afghanistan, a process that has been
going on, through the interaction of outside powers
and domestic political forces, for more than a quarter
century. [6] But this fragmentation is a problem for
the US in attempting to construct a viable client
regime capable of ruling Afghanistan as a whole.
If we are assessing the resistance forces in terms of
their ability to develop what Gramsci would call a
hegemonic project - that is, by their capacity to
present a programme that offers a way forward for
society at large, then the picture is different. The
sectarian Sunni jihadis of Iraq and Afghanistan are
certainly incapable of such a project. But I don't
think this is true of all of political Islam. In this
context, I find your formulation of 'religious and/or
ethnic ultra-conservative movements' unhelpful
analytically and politically, since it reduces all
forms of Islamism to reactionary identity politics.
One dimension of Islam's ideological power has always
been that the concept of the umma is a universalist
and therefore potentially an inclusive notion.
One very interesting development that is currently
taking place is the drawing together of Shia Islamist
radicalism - the Iranian regime, Hezbollah, the
Sadrists in Iraq - with the mother ship of Sunni
Islamism, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and its
close ally Hamas. Is this just a temporary tactical
convergence reflecting the fact that these forces have
common enemies or will it prove to be a more long-term
political and ideological realignment? This is an
important question for the left if it is to begin to
develop its own hegemonic project. In this context
it's worth pointing out that I didn't just refer to
'the political defeats of secular nationalist,
socialist and communist movements', but to their
failure - in other words, to their proven inability to
develop successful hegemonic projects in societies
such as Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, which created
the political space the Islamists have now filled.
This is a question that requires considerable analysis
and discussion.
Finally back again to the question of 'the
illusion-creating power of the corporate media'. The
problem with using this factor to explain American
public opinion's support for an attack on Iran is that
it can't account for the fact that this same public
opinion has turned against the war in Iraq. We need to
have a much more differentiated analysis of how the
corporate media exert an influence as part of quite a
complex constellation of forces that varies over time
and according to the issue. My guess is that the
decisive factor weighing with the American public over
Iran is the memory of the humiliations the US suffered
during and after the 1978-9 revolution (the Embassy
crisis etc), reinforced by the more general
Islamophobia that is a major constituent of
contemporary racism, and renewed by Ahmadinejad's
campaign against Israel. This campaign seems to have
been very effective in winning support for Tehran in
the Arab and Muslim world but it has had the opposite
effect in countries where there is a strong Israel
lobby.
It is interesting that in the US and Germany more
people see Iran as a great threat to world peace than
the number of those who believe the American presence
in Iraq is a major threat, but the opposite is true in
Britain, France, and Spain. [7] This contrast suggests
that we are not just the prisoners of structural
forces such as the corporate media: for example, the
kind of determined but broadly based anti-war movement
that we have in Britain can have help bring about a
dramatic change in popular attitudes,
AM: I understand your concerns and share in them. In
the rest of our dialogue I will try to avoid
repetition of questions and for the interview entering
a close circuit, even where I feel that my questions
may remain unanswered.
You will doubtless be aware that many of the
revolutionary left's past and present mistakes are
rooted in optimistic or pessimistic, and indeed
reductionist and one-sided, analyses of processes and
phenomena. It may be no exaggeration to say that one
of the main reasons that the socialist and Marxist
left was marginalised in the political arena of the
last few decades in many countries (including Iran),
and the failure of its efforts to build a better and
more humane society, is rooted in these kinds of
formulations in its analyses and assessments. My
emphases in previous questions were merely attempts to
arrive with your help, to the extent possible in an
interview, at an accurate and multidimensional
understanding of the political arena of the Middle
East - an area whose developments will undoubtedly
have profound effects on the future of our planet. In
my view your replies, particularly where it describes
the existing structural and political obstacles to the
imperialist assault on the region were illuminating. I
certainly learnt much from it.
In continuation, and in a closer look, I would like to
ask you opinion on the other actors in the political
scenes of the Middle East. We know that alongside
imperialism and the governments of the region (one or
perhaps two exceptions apart, dictatorial and corrupt
to the marrow) it is difficult to deny the effects of
collective political actions in shaping to the
developments of the region. Clearly these actions
cannot be limited to the anti-imperialist and
anti-Zionist resistance (of which we have spoken
above) and extent to other issues. Among these issues
one can identify: ethnic, gender, sexual, religious,
and national inequalities and oppression, class
inequalities and poverty, and political despotism
(religious or secular).
The Middle East today is witness to the growth and
spread of numerous socio-political movements among
which three groups stand out. First, the nationalist
movements of the oppressed nations and ethnic groups.
(for instance Arabs, Baluchi, and Azari in Iran,
Turkmen in Iraq and Iran, and Kurds in Turkey, Iraq,
Syria, and Iran). Second the secular anti-dictatorial
and democratic movements for freedom and legal
equality (with growing roots among women, students,
intellectuals, religious minorities - especially in
Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq). Third, anti-capitalist
movements fighting particularly against neo-liberal
policies (with an expanding social base among urban
and rural working people and the most deprived in most
of the countries of the region). Where do you see the
place and role these movements in the current
political developments of the region?
Before concluding the question, I would like your
indulgence to make two points in relation to my
previous question. First, I too do not believe that
Israel's attack on Lebanon, with all its potential
contradictory results, has had any positive result for
Israel or America. Moreover, I do not think that in
essence my comments on Lebanon in the previous
question could have permitted such a conclusion. Yet
however we interpret the results of the Israeli attack
on Lebanon, it is undeniably true that the US was able
to line up the "international community" behind it in
addressing this assault and was able to create
conditions where for nearly a month the UN Security
Council watched the slaughter of Lebanese women and
children without batting an eyelid!
Second, I agree with you that there are real
differences between the Hizbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in
Palestine, Al-Qaida, the Taliban, and the Islamic
regime in Iran. It is vital for the left to pay
attention to these differences in formulating policy.
Yet, in my view, it is equally important to pay
attention to the existing parallels between them. If
we assume that political ideology and social and
economic platforms are key factors in these parallels,
then I do not believe "ultra-conservative" as a
concept, provides us with a less useful analytical
tool than the "radicalism" used by you. What are your
views on these points?
AC: Look, I'm not an expert on contemporary Middle
Eastern political movements, and therefore I can't
answer your main question in any detail. Let me make
three points. First of all, I certainly agree that
multi-dimensional analysis is required. But I don't
accept that the main problem with the left in the
region is theoretical reductionism. What for many
decades crippled the left in the Middle East was the
formative influence of Stalinist ideology in one form
or other and in particular of the idea that the main
political task was to construct broad class alliances,
including in particular the 'progressive', 'national'
section of the bourgeoisie, against imperialism and
its local allies and clients.
This led the left to a schizophrenic attitude towards
the non-socialist forces confronting imperialism - in
the past, the secular nationalists (Nasser, Qasim, the
different sections of Ba'athism, Fatah, etc), more
recently the Islamists. I think in many cases one can
document an oscillation between political
subordination to whoever was identified as
representing the interests of the national bourgeoisie
and denouncing these forces as completely reactionary,
fascist, etc. This certainly implied a one-sided
analysis since it failed to grasp the contradictory
character of bourgeois nationalism (and here I intend
this expression to cover some of the Islamists as well
as Nasserites, Ba'athists and the like), which can, in
concrete circumstances, lead real struggles against
imperialism but will nevertheless subordinate these
struggles to its class aspiration to build its own
capitalist state, and therefore, ultimately, come to
terms with the dominant powers. I stress all this
because these political problems haven't gone away:
I'll return to this below
Secondly, if we look as the different political
movements in the Middle East, it seems to me that one
can identify there main trends. The first consists in
the remnants of secular nationalism and Communism.
These survive to varying degrees but are enormously
weakened and greatly disoriented. Witness, for
example, what has happened to the Iraqi Communist
Party, once the most important CP in the Middle East,
now shamed by the collaboration of one section in the
US occupation of Iraq. And I understand some Communist
fragments elsewhere in the region expressed sympathy
with the invasion of Iraq as a way of getting rid of
Saddam. This is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of
Popular Front politics - to imagine American
imperialism as an ally in the democratic struggle! Of
course, there are still many excellent revolutionaries
who haven't capitulated (there are, for example, fine
Iraqi Communists involved in the British anti-war
movement), but the left is deeply marked by defeat and
failure.
The second trend is much more interesting, because it
represents a new secular force. I am thinking of a
very influential tendency in the democracy movements
in countries like Egypt and Iran. The dominant
discourse is very familiar from the example of
non-governmental organizations elsewhere in the world,
as well as that of the movement for another
globalization - that of 'civil society' as a distinct
sphere separate from the state asserting human rights
against the existing regime. It is essential to
respond positively to this trend as it has given
expression to the entry of a new generation into
political activity against reactionary regimes.
But it is important also to stress that this ideology
is an ambiguous one, reflecting the fact 'civil
society' itself is a vague concept that isn't clearly
differentiated from the market economy. Those
influenced by it can move in a radical,
anti-capitalist direction if they recognize the power
of the transnational corporations, which greatly
limits the extent of capitalist democracy, but it is
necessary, especially in the Middle Eastern context,
to go further and identify the interrelations between
economics and geopolitics and therefore the close
connections binding the main Arab regimes to US
imperialism. If the ideology of civil society is not
deepened and radicalized, then the danger is that it
can be used by those in the region who see their
interests as being advanced by the Bush
administration's 'new Middle East' policy and by the
implementation of neo-liberal economic policies. Ayman
Nour and his followers in Egypt are a good example of
this option, as was the 'cedar revolution' last year
in Lebanon.
Finally, there are of course the Islamists. This
brings me to my third general point. I accept that
'radicalism' isn't a very precise term, but it is
still a lot better than 'ultra-conservatism'. Anyone
who at present denounces Nasrallah, for example, as an
ultra-conservative will simply make a fool of
themselves. Here again we need a careful and
differentiated analysis, not simply of the concrete
varieties of Islamism but also of what American
political scientists would call different issue-areas.
Depending on the issue, different forces may seem more
or less radical.
Thus if one were to identify the main ideological
element at work in popular mentalities in the Middle
East it would be anti-imperialist nationalism. The
reasons for this are obvious - reactivated memories of
the colonial past, the scale and visibility of the
Western domination of the region, the constantly
renewed wound of Israel, and the pathetic
subordination of most Arab regimes to Washington. What
the historic shift I referred to earlier represents is
the Islamists taking over the mantle of leadership of
the anti-imperialist struggle from the secular
nationalists and the left. To the extent to which they
translate words into action, as Hezbollah have against
Israel, then, on this central issue they cannot be
described as 'ultra-conservative'. Of course, when it
comes to social and economic issues the picture is
different - the Muslim Brotherhood, for example,
supports privatization in Egypt. But even here one has
to be careful. Both the Brotherhood and Hezbollah have
cultivated a popular base among the urban poor through
their welfare programmes, something that one can't
imagine American Republicans or British Tories doing.
In any case one has to analyse the ideologies of
different Islamist political forces as totalities.
Anti-imperialist nationalism isn't, as Ernest Laclau
has argued for many years, a neutral 'element' that
can be combined with others to make an indefinitely
broad variety of different political ideologies: it
has a definite class content. [8] Anti-imperialist
nationalism is the ideology of an actual or aspirant
capitalist class that seeks the way to its own
independent state blocked by imperialism and therefore
must mobilize the masses to help break down this
obstacle.
As I have already indicated, the logic of such
movements is to subordinate the interests of workers
and other exploited classes to those of the bourgeois
leadership. This is what explains the many defeats the
left has suffered in the region. It is important to
point out at this particular juncture, in the face of
the euphoria created by Hezbollah's successful
resistance to the IDF, that though its leaders dress
differently and use a different ideological language
from those, say, of Fatah, they can repeat the same
mistakes by, for example, tying their movement to
presently supportive states such as the Islamic
Republican regime in Iran and the Assad regime in
Syria that may well be prepared to use it as a
bargaining chip in their pursuit of their own
geopolitical interests.
AM: I think discussing political Islam requires a
separate interview. I will therefore limit myself to
posing only two further questions regarding the
application of "anti-imperialism nationalism" to
characterize the political ideology of Islamism.
First: There is no doubt that in their conflict with
imperialism, Islamist movements usually rely on
nationalist rhetoric, as well as, on the nationalist
sentiments of the people as their main instrument to
gain mass support. However, considering the fact that
concepts such as "umaat" are opposed to nation, the
fact that Islamist movements distinguish between
"mo'men" (believer) as opposed to "kaafar"
(non-believer) and consider such distinctions central
to their political ideology, how useful would it be to
apply nationalism in trying to identify these
movements? Furthermore, historically speaking how can
we, for instance, bridge the huge distance between the
pan-Islamism of Khomeini or Kashani (the spiritual
leader of Fada'ian-e Islam who supported the 1953 CIA
coup) and the nationalism of Mossadegh or Fatemi, one
giving priority to the national interests of Iran and
the other to the interests of political Islam and
Islamic world revolutionary movement in absolutely
opposite directions to each other? In fact the
ultra-nationalist tendencies of Khomeinism have
determined even the definition of the main organs of
the Islamic political system in Iran.
Constitutionally, the leadership of Islamic Republic
(vali-e faghih) is defined as the head of the Islamic
revolution (Enghelaab-e Mahdi), and the Revolutionary
Guards are described as the army of this revolution,
both non-territorial and non-national in terms of
their role and their political geography.
Second: as you suggest, Islamist forces are currently
the most powerful agents in the struggle against
imperialism and Zionism in the region. However, we
know that both the Taliban and Al- Qaidah developed
under the supervision of Berzhinsky, or that Hamas and
the Muslim Brotherhood owe their initial successes to
the support of Israel. The positions of the main Shia
organizations in Iraq (Hezb-al-Daveh and Majles-e-Ala)
or the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) in Turkey do not
need any elaboration. In addition, the Iran-Contra
affair or the Iranian collaboration with imperialist
aggression on Afghanistan and Iraq should suffice to
demonstrate the contradictory nature of the anti
western and anti-imperialist positions of the Islamic
regime in Iran. Considering these facts, do you think
one can apply the term anti-Imperialist as an epithet
to all political Islamist movements worldwide
(regardless of the stage of development or the
political circumstances in which they are acting).
Could this provide us with a useful analytical tool?
I do not need to remind you that the declared aim of
these movements is the seizure of state power and
aimed reconstruction of social and political
structures of countries with majority Muslim
populations according to their interpretation of
Sharia'.
AC: To be frank, I think the question of political
Islam dominates the concluding questions of this
interview. That is as it should be, since it is a very
important reality that any revolutionary socialist
strategy in the Middle East has to confront. I think
we should treat Islamism, not as something unique or
diabolical, but as a socio-political phenomenon that
must be understood using the normal Marxist tools of
historical interpretation. That means we should learn
how to read different Islamist ideologies and
organizations in order to locate them precisely within
the political field and within the larger
constellation of social forces nationally, regionally,
and globally. [9]
Consequently, of course I don't think 'one can apply
the term "anti-imperialist" as an epithet to all
political Islamist movements word-wide'. On the
contrary, I said that the classical Marxist analysis
of bourgeois anti-imperialist nationalism applied to
'some of the Islamists'. One has to be very concrete:
the Saudi monarchy, one of the closest allies of
American imperialism in the Middle East, is
legitimized by the same version of Sunni Wahhabi Islam
as is invoked by bin Laden and al Qaeda in waging a
global war against the US.
As to your specific points, I myself noted that the
Islamic concept of the umma is a transnational one. Al
Qaeda draws on this ideological resource in order to
project itself globally. But it would be a mistake to
conclude from this that Islamism is inherently
incompatible with nationalism. Gramsci stressed long
ago that ideologies are concrete combinations of
specific elements sometimes deriving from different
historical periods and articulating the interests of
different classes (though in each case one class
interest tends to predominate). In both Stalinism and
social democracy, socialism, an inherently
internationalist ideology, coexisted with and was
dominated by a form of nationalism. If we want to
understand the political success of Islamist
movements, and in particular their role in
anti-imperialist struggles in the Middle East today,
one has to see how this has involved appropriating
themes from the broader nationalist mentalities
prevailing in the popular masses and combining them
with interpretations of Islam.
Secondly, of course you are right that different
Islamist tendencies and regimes that may now present
themselves as anti-imperialist have a history of
collaborating with imperialism but I'm not sure what
this proves. Yes, al Qaeda emerged from the war
against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, in which
the CIA, the British SIS and the Pakistani ISI were
instrumental in orchestrating the armed struggle of
the mujahedin. But it's no secret that bin Laden's
relationship to the US has changed a little since
then. Yes, the ISI (not Brzezinski, who was long
before out of office in Washington) were very actively
involved in the foundation of the Taliban, but this
doesn't alter the fact that today in Afghanistan the
Taliban (maybe still with the support of elements of
the ISI) is fighting and killing American, British,
and Canadian soldiers.
And yes, to take the example that probably interests
you most, it's true that the Reagan administration
supplied arms to Iran in the mid-1980s, both to fund
the Contra attacks on the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and
to keep Iran and Iraq preoccupied with the war between
them. But when the policy was exposed it proved very
controversial in the American ruling class,
fundamentally because since the fall of the Shah the
Islamic Republican regime has been regarded by the US
as a strategic enemy and therefore such manoeuvres
were seen as undermining the long-term interests of
American imperialism. Hence, in 1986-88, in the wake
of the scandal and in response to the prospect of an
Iranian victory over Iraq, American naval and air
power was deployed to ensure that Saddam won. Of
course, that policy shift in turn rebounded against
the US when Saddam grabbed Kuwait in August 1990, but
the result was not reconciliation with Tehran but the
policy of 'dual containment' aimed at both Iran and
Iraq and pursued by Bush Senior and by Clinton after
the 1991 Gulf War.
It's important to stress this history because it would
be a huge mistake to conclude from the fact that
Tehran and Washington collaborated in the mid-1980s
that Bush Junior isn't serious in his threats of war
against Iran. As I have already noted, his
administration's attempt to break out of the
straitjacket of dual containment by overthrowing
Saddam has strengthened Iran. The Lebanon war was an
attempt to isolate Iran by removing one of its main
allies, Hezbollah. Israel's defeat may, if anything,
make Washington more determined on a direct attack on
Iran in order to shift the regional balance of forces
back in its favour.
The fact that the Islamic Republican regime was
prepared, despite its anti-imperialist and
anti-Zionist declarations, to collaborate with the US
and Israel in the mid-1980s (and indeed on other
occasions as well, for example the early stages of the
'war on terrorism') shows it is not a consistent
opponent of imperialism. But this is precisely what I
was arguing earlier. It is of the essence of bourgeois
nationalists that, when imperialism prevents them for
building their own independent capitalist state, they
may lead struggles against it, but they are striving
to carve out a place for themselves within the
existing system, not to overthrow it. This means that,
sooner or later, they will come to terms with
imperialism, just as Nehru and Nasser, Mandela and
Gerry Adams all did.
I think some of what you say tends to idealize secular
nationalism. For example, you talk about Mossadegh
'giving priority to the national interests of Iran':
what are these 'national interests'? Do they transcend
class antagonisms? Did Mossadegh represent the
harmonious unity of workers, peasants, and capitalists
in Iran? I don't think so. That is why the development
of independent socialist politics and organization is
so important in order to articulate the distinct class
project of the working class.
AM: In the campaigns that have taken shape for
creating "another world", where and do you consign the
importance and place of any efforts to create a "new
Middle East"? What developments are necessary to bring
us nearer to building a better Middle East? From your
perspective what are the obligation of the left and
progressive forces in Europe and America in this
regard?
AC: First of all I wouldn't talk about a 'new Middle
East' because this is the slogan of the Bush
administration's policy of 'democratic' imperialism.
Given the strategic importance of the Middle East and
the suffering of its peoples at the hands of their
'own' regimes, Israel, and the Western powers, the
development of a real left in the region is very
urgent. That left can begin to emerge through the
coming together of three agendas - democratic
(dismantling of the dictatorships, winning of real
citizenship rights for the entire population, equality
for women and for other oppressed groups, etc.) ,
social (against the exploitation of workers and
peasants, poverty and economic inequality, neo-liberal
'reforms', for redistribution of land and other forms
of wealth etc.), and anti-imperialist (against the
occupations in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan,
against the Western military presence and alliances,
against any new wars).
As the example of the democracy movements cited above
illustrates, any left that fails to address all three
agendas doesn't deserve the name. The duty of the left
in the imperialist countries is to help nurture and
support any signs of such a left emerging in the
Middle East. This means, above all, solidarity which
needs to be directed particularly in two areas - (1)
campaigning against the Western and Israeli
occupations and in support of those resisting them,
(2) against repression, especially though of course
not exclusively when it is practised by regimes
closely allied to the US and Britain.
AM: Part of the left in Europe and America, when
deciding on the stance they need to take in response
to imperialist intervention confine themselves to a
mirror image of the imperialist position and in the
first instance the US government. Wherever imperialism
places a negative mark, they automatically replace it
by a positive, and vice versa. For example tension or
conflict between Washington and the regime of any
country is enough for that regime to be labelled
"progressive" and the revolutionary or socialist duty
becomes not only to oppose the interventionist
imperialist policies and actions or defend the right
of self determination (or sovereignty) of the people
of that country, but to go further and to directly
support the regime. It does not matter if Castro or
Chavez is ruling there or Saddam and Milosovitch, or
Robert Mugabe and Ayatollah Khameni'i. Also the real
content of the conflict between that regime and
Washington appears to matter little, nor what are the
relationship of that regime with its people (even
ignoring specifically how it deals with its workers,
peasants and working people). Some go so far as to
consider any form of criticism to the policies of such
regimes as aiding and abetting imperialism and condemn
it with the justification that such criticisms provide
the ideological excuse for imperialist intervention
and aggression. In the face of such behaviour what do
you consider is a principled stance. Particularly
where the footprints of corrupt, repressive and
anti-people regimes are visible, which position do you
support?
AC: I find your description very general and lacking
in concrete examples. I can best respond by stating my
own view. At the heart of Marxism is the idea of
socialism as the self-emancipation of the working
class. Therefore what counts is the self-activity of
the masses. Existing regimes and states, all of which
part of the capitalist world system, have to be judged
in the light of this overall conception of socialism.
But a key feature of global capitalism is that the
world is organized into a system of states in which a
few - the imperialist powers - dominate the rest
economically, politically, and militarily. This poses
the question of what stance Marxists should take when
states fight each other.
Now it is possible to argue that since the conflicting
parties are all capitalist states the left should, as
a matter of principle, take no interest in who wins.
This is the line anarchists generally take, but it is
one that the great Marxists, from the revolutions of
1848 onwards, have always rejected. Marx, Engels,
Lenin, and Trotsky all judged the wars of their day
from the standpoint of what would advance the
interests of the international working class. We
should do the same now. So, when the US fights some
corrupt and repressive Third World state we should
ask: whose side's victory will be less harmful to the
interests of the world working class? Given the role
of the US as the main imperialist power maintaining
the global relations of capitalist exploitation and
domination, the question answers itself: the defeat of
the US is in these cases the better outcome.
Does this mean that we should remain silent about the
character of the regime (or movement) fighting the US,
concealing its class character and denying its crimes?
Absolutely not. I look forward to the moment when the
Iranian working class resumes the work it left
unfinished in 1978-9 and sweeps aside the Islamic
Republican regime and indeed the capitalist class
itself. But, all the same, if the US were to attack
Iran tomorrow, under the present regime, the better
outcome would be if the US lost - even if, as it
probably would, this temporarily strengthened the
regime. The global weakening of the relations of
domination, the greater space for mass struggle and
initiative that would result from a US defeat make
this outcome the lesser evil.
This problem isn't a new one. In 1937 Japan invaded
China. The ruling Kuomintang regime had drenched the
Communist movement in blood when it crushed the
revolutionary wave of 1925-7. Nevertheless, Trotsky
argued that Chinese revolutionary Marxists should work
for the defeat of Japan, an imperialist power seeking
to colonize China. He defined the appropriate stance
as one of political opposition but military support
for the Kuomintang. In other words, if revolutionaries
could facilitate the victory of the Kuomintang against
Japan, they should do so, but they should maintain
their political independence and promote the
self-activity of the workers and peasants in order to
prepare for the regime's overthrow. [10] Of course,
there are tensions in this formula, but they reflect
one of the things that I have been stressing all along
- the contradictory nature of anti-imperialist
nationalism itself.
AM: Here I ask your indulgence to give a brief
introduction before I pose a question on Iran. The
heightening crisis in the relations between the Bush
administration and the regime in Iran in the last few
years has coincided with the appearance and spread of
a new wave of protests and struggles by workers,
students, women and the oppressed nations, ethnic
groups and religious minorities in Iran. The protests
and struggles have had in the main a progressive,
democratic, freedom- and equality-seeking content and
are in direct confrontation to the policies and
actions of the ruling regime in Iran. The unilateral
attention of left groups in Europe and America on the
aggressive policies of imperialism in the region
(which is understandable in present tense atmosphere)
and the tendency in many of these groups
unconditionally support the Iranian regime in its
confrontation with imperialism has meant that the
social and mass struggles of the Iranian people remain
hidden from the view of European and American
socialists. This inattentiveness has handed over the
discourse over human rights, democracy and freedom
entirely to the neo-conservatives and liberal
imperialists. The Voice of America is the loudest
voice heard supporting the protests of the people of
Iran.
The Tehran Bus Drivers have struggled to create an
independent trade union, and for improvement in their
living and working conditions (a struggle that began
over a year ago and continues to this day), and more
than 1,200 were arrested without the slightest echo in
the left and revolutionary press of Europe and
America. In a peaceful gathering in Tehran in defence
of social and legal rights and for protest against the
policies of sexual apartheid tens of people were
beaten up, arrested and sent to prison without the
European and American left raising a finger in
protest. Over the last year we have been witness to
widespread mass protests in a number of cities with
Kurd, Arab, Azeri, and Baluch population to which the
regime responded by bloody and savage repression. Yet
the European and American left saw itself without any
duties in relation to the oppressed nations of the
country and kept silent in the face of the repression
and killings. At this moment about 10 Iranian Arab
youths are awaiting a death sentence accused of acts
that could be completely without foundation. Yet while
everyday thousands of pages are written to prove the
confluence of Ahmadinejad and Fidel Castro's paths and
surface in the publication and web-sites belonging to
the left, yet one can search in vain for one word in
support of these victims.
In your view how defensible are these policies on the
part of the left (socialist and communist)? What
ideological and morel consequences do you think these
forms of political behaviour will have for the
international left? Should one not consider these
behaviours of the same ilk as the mistakes that, as
you pointed out, resulted in the paralysis and
weakening of the left in Iran and the Middle East?
AC: This information is very interesting and
important. It should undoubtedly be more widely
publicized in the West, although I must emphasize
that, for example, Action Iran here in Britain has
combined campaigning against a US attack on Iran with
stressing the importance of the social, democratic and
national movements with Iran. I'm maybe less offended
that you by the comparison between Castro and
Ahmadinejad because I see them both as bourgeois
nationalists (though of very different kinds).
Certainly it is wrong to subordinate the independent
interests of the working class to those of particular
nationalist regimes and movements. But it would be
also wrong to imagine for a moment that American
imperialism could free the peoples of Iran from the
oppression you describe.
Of course you don't imagine this, but then you have to
face the question I have already posed. If Bush
attacks Iran tomorrow, which side are you on? I would
be on Iran's but - as Lenin put it - I would refuse to
paint Ahmadinejad in communist colours; in other
words, I would be for an Iranian victory despite his
anti-Semitic rantings, despite the regime's capitalist
class base, despite the repression it perpetrates.
This is the politics of permanent revolution, which
seeks the overthrow of imperialism and of the local
bourgeois regimes, with the complex relations of
collaboration and conflict that they have with the
main capitalist powers.
One final note of warning: the national minorities in
Iran were oppressed under the Shah, and continue to be
oppressed under the Islamic Republican regime
(incidentally, this shows how Islamism can co-exist
with, in this case, Farsi nationalism). Revolutionary
socialists should support their right of national
self-determination. But, at the same time, we should
remember what has happened with the Kurds of northern
Iraq, whose corrupt and clientilistic leaders have
sold themselves lock, stock, and barrel to US
imperialism, providing Washington (and Israel) with a
secure base in Iraq. There have been reports of agents
of the US, Britain, and Pakistan being active among
Iran's national minorities as part of Bush's strategy
of 'regime change'. It is important that the left
point to the example of Iraqi Kurdistan as a warning
against the temptation that some in these minorities
may have of improving their position by allying
themselves to American imperialism.
AM: How do you see the anti war movement? By its
powerful appearance in the prelude to the Iraq war it
raised hopes in a huge way. You reflected those hopes
in your excellent book The New Mandarins and American
Power, which came out that same year. Yet a few years
later, not only did this movement not grow and spread,
but we have indeed witnessed its downturn. Why? In
your view can we be optimistic for a resurgence of
this movement? How and in what direction?
AC: It is a common error to use the gigantic protests
of early 2003 to proclaim the death of the anti-war
movement. One of our greatest achievements is used to
hang us! The 2003 protests were on such a scale that
they could only go forward by bringing down
governments - which did in fact happen in Spain in
March 2004, albeit in an indirect and complex way. The
failure to achieve such an outcome on a broader scale
- and therefore prevent or end the Iraq war - did lead
to a certain ebbing of the anti-war movement relative
to the high point of 15 February 2003, but the extent
varied enormously depending on national conditions.
Thus in the US the mainstream of the anti-war movement
(including figures as principled as Chomsky) made the
fatal error of putting their efforts in defeating Bush
in 2004 by backing the pro-war Democrats under John
Kerry, a mistake from which they are only beginning to
recover.
By contrast, I think it is completely wrong to
describe the condition of the anti-war movement in
Britain as one of 'downturn'. The Stop the War
Coalition has been able to sustain an astonishingly
high level of mass mobilization for the past five
years - a succession of big demonstrations, usually
twice a year, all very big by historic standards, if
not on the scale of 15 February 2003 - and to gain
very deep roots in British society. This is reflected
in its ability to mount two large marches against the
Lebanon War at very short notice and at the height of
the summer holidays. More generally, his central role
in engineering the Iraq War fatally damaged Tony
Blair's government and his complicity in the
destruction of Lebanon is helping to end his
premiership.
This contrast suggests that the fate of the anti-war
movement has varied according to the state of the left
in different countries. In the US the left has been
crippled by its dependence on the Democrats. The
British anti-war movement has been led by forces of
the radical left that have been able to sustain it in
a way that has combined consistent opposition to
imperialism with an emphasis on building on a broad
and inclusive basis. Elsewhere the pattern is
confirmed by, for example, the decline of the Italian
anti-war movement, which in 2001-4 mobilized on even a
bigger scale than in Britain, but which has been very
negatively affected by the entry of Rifondazione
Comunista into a centre-left coalition government that
is sending troops to Afghanistan and Lebanon.
The international anti-war movement in any case faces
a very big challenge. The Lebanon War confirms that
the Bush administration is telling the truth when it
says that it is waging a global war. Iraq,
Afghanistan, Lebanon are all fronts in this war. Iran
may be the next one. The involvement of European
troops in both Afghanistan and Lebanon requires a
response for the left throughout the EU. Let us hope
that this very threatening situation will produce an
upsurge of anti-war activity, not just in Europe but
globally.
AM: Finally can I ask you to turn to the global
anti-capitalist movement. Where, in your view, does
this movement stand today? What are the real
potentials of this movement and what prospects can we
expect for it? As someone who has had an important
role in the formation and persistence of the regional
and world social forums, what role do you think these
forums have had in the global anti-capitalist movement
and what role do you see them having in the future?
AC: This introduces some very big questions that
extend well beyond the subject matter of the rest of
our discussion. I hope your readers will forgive me if
I refer them to writings where I have discussed these
matters in depth, particularly An Anti-Capitalist
Manifesto (Cambridge, 2003) and my contribution to H.
Dee, ed., Anti-Capitalism: Where Next? (London, 2004).
I would be happy to provide this latter text for
translation.
AM: Many thanks for giving your time. I wish you every
success in your struggles.
August/September 2006
Alex Callinicos is a member of the Central Committee
of Socialist Workers Party and Professor of European
Studies at Kings College London. His publications
include Trotskyism (1990), The Revolutionary Ideas of
Karl Marx (1999), New Mandarins and American Power
(2001), Anti-capitalist manifesto (2003).
Ardeshir Mehrdad is co-editor of iran-bulletin-Middle
East Forum.
Email: [email protected]
----------------------- -------------------------------------------------- -------
[1] G. Arrighi, 'Hegemony Unravelling', New Left
Review, II/32 and 33 (2005).
[2] New York Times, 4 August 2006.
[3] A. Callinicos, The New Mandarins of American
Power (Cambridge, 2003) and D. Harvey, The New
Imperialism (Oxford, 2003).
[4] M. Gordon and B. Trainor, Cobra II (London,
2006).
[5] G. Achcar, 'The Sinking Ship of US Imperial
Designs', 7 August 2006, www.zmag.org.
[6] B. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan (New
Haven, 2002).
[7] Pew Global Attitudes Project, 'America's Image
Slips, But Allies Shares US Concerns over Iran,
Hamas', 13 June 2006, www.pewglobal.org.
[8] See, most recently, E. Laclau, Of Populist Reason
(London, 2005).
[9] See, for an exemplary attempt to do so, C. Harman,
'The Prophet and the Proletariat', International
Socialism, 2.64 (1994), available at www.isj.org.uk.
[10] For example, L.D. Trotsky, 'On the Sino-Japanese
War', in Leon Trotsky on China (New York, 1976).
Middle East: Imperial assault and tasks for the left
Ardeshir Mehrdad interviewing Alex Callinicos
by Alex Callinicos
and Ardeshir Mehrdad
September 20, 2006
The present interview with Alex Callinicos was
performed over several weeks by email spanning late
July to mid September. The early questions took place
at the start of the Israeli attack on Lebanon. The
last five questions were answered in one go in mid
September. Because of the lengthiness of the interview
it was not possible to pose any further questions
arising out of these answers.
Ardeshir Mehrdad: Can we start with the political
context. In general terms, how would you describe the
current political situation in the Middle East?
Alex Callinicos: The current situation - not only but
especially in the Middle East - is defined by the
imperialist offensive mounted by the United States and
its closest allies (notably Israel and Britain) since
11 September 2001. Carried out under the slogan of the
'war on terrorism' the real aim of this offensive is
to perpetuate the global domination of US capitalism
(hence the title of the neocon 'Project for the New
American Century'). The Middle East - and more
generally Western Asia (what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls
the 'the global Balkans') - is the privileged site of
this struggle, both because of its strategic and
economic significance and because of the setbacks that
the US and its allies have suffered, notably thanks to
the effects of the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9 and of
Israel's disastrous 1982 Lebanon War.
This imperialist offensive suffers three main
problems. First and most fundamental, it has evoked
powerful resistance, above all in Iraq itself, where
the US seems to be bogged down in an unwinnable
counter-insurgency war. We now see Israel too
beginning to face similar difficulties thanks to
Hezbollah's very effective defence against the Israel
Defence Force's assault on Lebanon. Secondly, compared
to the 1991 Gulf War, the current 'war on terrorism'
lacks international legitimacy thanks to the Bush
administration's unilateralism and its contempt for
human rights (Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram ...).
Some commentators, for example Giovanni Arrighi, argue
that we are witnessing a broader crisis of US
hegemony. [1]
Thirdly, the ideological justification of the
imperialist offensive - what Condoleezza Rice calls
'the birth of a New Middle East' with the spread of
liberal democracy - is rebounding on its authors. This
is partly because when given the chance to vote people
seem to be backing radical Islamists such as Hamas and
the Muslim Brotherhood. Moreover, by giving legitimacy
to democratic demands the US threatens to undermine
its closest Arab allies, for example, the Saudi
autocracy and the Mubarak dynasty in Egypt. Finally,
of course, by allowing Israel to destroy Lebanon,
Washington is destroying the one clear success for its
democracy agenda in the region, the so-called 'cedar
revolution' thanks to which the US and France forced
Syria to pull out of Lebanon.
AM: Before proceeding to the next question you might
wish to clarify and expand on the seriousness of the
three main problems that you suggest challenge the
imperialist offensive. Could you, for example consider
following facts: First, the existing resistance
movements operating in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine,
and Lebanon appear to suffer from internal weaknesses,
resulting predominantly from sectarian rivalries and
factionalist tensions. Second, in recent years the
Bush Administration seems to have modified its
unilateralism significantly. The US has been seeking a
broader international consensus over its pre-emptive
strategy as witnessed, at least, in the current
referral to the UN Security Council of the war on
Lebanon or the Iran nuclear issue. And third, the
power of corporate media to modify and dampen down the
negative impact of the US Army's barbaric behaviour in
the region, and to conjure up spurious ideological
justifications for the continuation of its military
aggression.
AC: These are big issues. I'm afraid I disagree with
you on all three supposed 'facts'. First of all, when
it comes to 'sectarian rivalries and factional
tensions' it's important to draw distinctions. What we
have seen across the whole region is a process in
which the leadership of resistance to US imperialism
and Israel has passed from secular nationalists and
the left to the Islamists. This process began with the
Iranian Revolution of 1978-9 but we have seen some
very important developments in the past few months,
notably with Hamas's defeat of Fatah in the elections
to the Palestine Authority and the enormous acclaim
that Hezbollah and its leader Nasrallah have received
through the region for their resistance to the IDF.
It's misleading to describe this as 'factionalism'. It
is a historic shift that is a consequence of the
political failure of secular nationalists and the
left. We may not welcome this development - as a
revolutionary Marxist I don't, though I am glad that
someone is seriously taking on the imperialists - but
we have to recognize it if the left is ever to
re-emerge in the Middle East.
The case of Iraq has to be mentioned separately
because it is so complex. Here the resistance, which
appears to be a loose collection of Iraqi Ba'athists,
nationalists, and Islamists based mainly in the Sunni
Arab areas have succeeded in mounting a
counter-insurgency war that, to repeat, the US shows
no sign of winning. (It is essential to distinguish
the mainstream of this resistance from the sectarian
terrorists of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, formed by the
late and unlamented Zarqawi.) The US sought to isolate
the resistance through a policy of divide-and-rule,
and in particular by allying itself to those political
leaders of the Shia majority who, though having very
different agendas from Washington (most obviously,
often close links with Tehran), were prepared to
advance their interests through collaboration with the
occupation.
This policy has now badly rebounded on the occupiers.
Strategically it has strengthened Iran, thanks to its
influence on the Shia politicians who dominate the
Iraqi client regime. Politically the biggest single
bloc in the Iraqi parliament, the supporters of
Moqtada al-Sadr, belong to the ruling coalition, but
also oppose the occupation and have just mounted a
mass demonstration in Sadr City in solidarity with
Hezbollah. Finally, and disastrously from a human
perspective, divide-and-rule, and the government death
squads that it licensed have unleashed large-scale
sectarian killings, particularly in Baghdad, that have
developed a dynamic of their own. Last week the
Commander of US Central Command, General Abizaid,
acknowledged that 'it is possible that Iraq could move
towards civil war'. [2] The disintegration of Iraq,
which might be the result of such a war, would not
work to the advantage of the US. That was why George
Bush senior decided to leave Saddam Hussein in power
at the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
Secondly, the administration of George Bush junior
radicalized the unilateralism that was already a
visible feature of US global policy during the 1990s
under Clinton. Conquering Iraq was supposed to
vindicate the Bush Doctrine of unilateral preventive
war, first unfolded at West Point on 1 June 2002.
Instead, of course, the US has bogged down in Iraq,
which has gravely limited its ability to deal with
other crises such as North Korea's nuclear programme
and the challenge of Hugo Chavez and the new left in
Latin America. One wing of the American ruling class,
represented by Brzezinski and Brent Scrowcroft, Bush
senior's National Security Adviser, say the Bush
administration have behaved like idiots in abandoning
multilateralism: they need the European Union in
particular as junior partner in running the world.
What has happened since Condoleezza Rice took over as
Secretary of State in January 2005 has been
contradictory. On the one hand, she has tilted towards
the critics, in particular by involving the other
major powers in the negotiations over North Korea's
and Iran's nuclear programmes. On the other hand, the
administration's rhetoric, most notably in Bush's
Second Inaugural Address, has if anything become
harder in affirming what one might call Wilsonian
imperialism - using the power of the US to spread
American-style liberal democracy world-wide.
The present war in the Lebanon demonstrates that
Rice's more multilateralist style is a tactical
adjustment, reflecting an accommodation to the limits
of American power rather than a strategic
reorientation. The Iraqi quagmire has encouraged the
administration to see the Islamic Republican regime in
Iran as the major obstacle to securing its objectives
in the Middle East. Hence the war plans revealed by
Seymour Hersh back in April. It's clear the
administration saw the Lebanon crisis as a heaven-sent
opportunity to weaken Tehran through Israel
'degrading' Hezbollah, a powerful and strategically
placed guerrilla movement closely allied to Iran. The
crisis has also highlighted America's crisis of
international legitimacy since it has been almost
alone, backed only by Israel itself and by Britain, in
opposing an immediate cease fire in Lebanon. The US is
negotiating with France now because it needs French
troops in Lebanon - this is a sign of weakness, not
strength, on both its part and that of Israel.
Thirdly, I don't really see Iraq as a good example of
the power of the corporate media. In the US itself
public opinion has turned against the war much more
quickly than it did in the case of Vietnam. The
evident American failure in Iraq is one of the main
causes of the rapid decline in Bush's popularity since
Hurricane Katrina a year ago. In Britain today Tony
Blair is hugely unpopular, above all because of his
close support for Bush in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now
Lebanon. It's true that it's hard to translate this
popular opposition into the removal of the politicians
responsible for these disasters, but this reflects the
nature of the political system rather than the ability
of the media to deceive people about what's really
happening.
AM: In order to clarify the substance of my previous
question and to arrive at a more accurate picture of
the political conditions pertaining in the Middle
East, and also as revolutionary Marxists in order to
arrive at the means to a better prospect for the
region, it might be better to recast my previous
questions in a different mould. Let us assume that the
problems facing the imperialist offensive are those
you have enumerated. We then have to answer two
questions. First - how durable and robust are these
problems (as they stand today)? What are their
significances and how effective are they? Are they
capable of acting as a real barrier against the
implementation of the imperialist projects of the US
and her allies or merely elements that increase the
cost of these projects? Second - can the current
situation in the Middle East be reduced to the various
obstacles lying on the route of imperialist
aggression? Are there in the current political context
in the Middle East no other factors or grounds that
facilitate the furtherance of the dominating
imperialist offensive?
You will appreciate that your previous explanations
are not entirely clear on this score. It is indeed
correct that presently the Islamist movements (or to
put it in more general terms, religious and/or ethnic
ultra-conservative movements) play an important role
in the regional political arena. Indeed they have a
greater weight than seculars and leftists in the
resistance struggles against the US imperialist
assault. It is equally true that this superiority is
an expression of a "historic shift", the roots of
which should be sought, among others, in the political
defeats of secular nationalist, socialist and
communist movements. But such a reasonable emphasis
cannot excuse ignoring the internal weaknesses of the
present resistance and to leave out this feature from
our analysis of the conditions pertaining in the
region.
Specifically, it is difficult to ignore the fact that
the domination of religious and ethnic sectarianism or
political factionalism on large parts of the
anti-imperialist resistance has reduced its mobilising
power. It has meant that the entire popular potentials
of resistance in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, and
Afghanistan (which you chose not to mention) cannot be
mobilised, nor work in tandem. It has prevented the
Muslim, Jew, Christian (Assyrian, Armenians,
Maronites), and Zoroastrian; Shi'i, Sunni, Bahaii, and
Sheikhi; the religious and agnostic; the Kurd, Arab,
Persian, Turkmen, Turk, Pashto, Bluchi, Hazareh, and
Tajik to see themselves as belonging to the same camp.
A camp determined to stand up to the new order of
slavery that is in the process of being engineered by
the Pentagon and other imperialist agencies.
Moreover, the fact that the Bush administration has
radicalised unilateralism does not mean that this
government has become paralysed and has lost its
ability to manoeuvre. We have witnessed that this same
government, as you rightly pointed out, has to a great
extent albeit tactically, reduced the problem of
"international legitimacy" in pursuing the "war
against terrorism" through a series of retreats from
its previous unilateralist action. One can observe
this in the behaviour of the UN Security Council in
confronting Israel's barbaric military assault on
Palestine and Lebanon, or over the Iran nuclear issue.
It demonstrates that despite the crisis of hegemony,
the Bush government can still line up the
"international community" in support of its policies
and conduct in the Middle East.
And finally, if it is true that today's Iraq is not a
good illustration the power of the corporate media in
shaping public opinion, Iran is. The strong American
public opinion support for a new offensive in the
Middle East and a military intervention in Iran, even
while the US military machine is still sunk in the
Iraqi quagmire, cannot be explained except through the
illusion-creating power of the corporate media (see
for example: USA TODAY/CNN Gallup Poll
www.usatoday.com/news/polls/2006-02-13-poll.h tm and
Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg Pool
www.pollingreport.com/iran.htm).
AC: There's no law that says you have to agree with
what I say, but I'm becoming worried that the
interview will become bogged down by the repetition of
the same questions. Maybe going deeper may help to
short-circuit this problem. If we want to understand
what underlies the difficulties facing the US in the
Middle East we have to look at the more fundamental
situation of American capitalism. There is a basic
discrepancy between its economic and military power.
Militarily the US enjoys massive conventional and
nuclear superiority over any combination of other
states. Economically, however, it faces deep-seated
problems of competitiveness reflecting the challenge
from other centres of capital accumulation - Germany,
Japan, China, etc. - that are expressed in the
so-called global imbalances, notably the US balance of
payments deficit, which has to be financed by a
massive inflow of capital, mainly from East Asia. As
both David Harvey and I have argued, the neocon
adventure in Iraq was intended as the beginning of a
'flight forward' - the use of American military
superiority to reinforce Washington's domination of
the Middle East and thereby to begin to freeze a
global balance of forces that entrenched the hegemony
of US capitalism. [3]
The significance of this context of the resistance in
Iraq is that it has helped to precipitate a 'crisis of
overstretch' for American imperialism - in other
words, a crisis that highlights the limits of US
power. These limits are partly military - notoriously
the relatively small hi-tech force that Rumsfeld
insisted the Pentagon used, rejecting his generals'
demands for far more troops, was strong enough to
seize Iraq but not enough to control the country. [4]
They are also political - Washington's inability to
find a popular base in Iraq (or indeed elsewhere in
the Middle East) for the kind of political project it
is pursuing: hence the increasingly problematic
alliance it has had to forge with the Shia parties in
Iraq.
As I have already noted, being tied down in Iraq has
limited Washington's ability to take initiatives
elsewhere. You see the resulting retreats as
successful manoeuvres that have allowed the
administration to contain the crisis of international
legitimacy, but it is hardly a convincing
demonstration of US supremacy to be forced to
renounce, for the present at least, serious moves
against Kim Jong-il or Chavez: before the outbreak of
the Lebanon war, many neocons were complaining about
Bush's 'appeasement' of North Korea and Iran. As to
Lebanon itself, if you really believe that this is
going well for the US and Israel, you are alone in the
world. I prefer the judgement of my friend and comrade
Gilbert Achcar, who has written: 'Whatever the final
outcome of the ongoing war in Lebanon, one thing is
already clear: instead of helping in raising the
sinking ship of the US Empire, the Israeli rescue boat
has actually aggravated the shipwreck, and is
currently being dragged down with it.' [5]
This crisis of overstretch doesn't reflect an absolute
scarcity of the material resources available to
American imperialism. By the standards of the Cold
War, let alone the Second World War, US defence
spending constitutes a relatively small percentage of
national income. In principle, then, the Pentagon
could greatly increase its military capabilities. But
this would require much higher levels of taxation than
the American rich would find comfortable. It's also
quite possible that the East Asian and European ruling
classes would balk at lending the US the money it
would need to pursue a much more aggressive military
project given that America has already overwhelming
superiority over the rest of the world. The economic
and geopolitical situation is very different from the
late 1940s and the early 1950s, when Washington was
able to brigade together the advanced capitalist world
under its leadership and pay for the entire enterprise
itself.
This brings me to the question that you repeat about
factionalism. How serious a problem the divisions you
itemize are depends on the criterion by which you
judge the resistance. If you are simply considering
the resistance in terms of its capacity to disrupt and
impede the US project, then these divisions aren't
decisive. Iraq clearly shows this. So does
Afghanistan, which for some reason you imagine I am
trying to avoid discussing.
What's been happening there very clearly illustrates
the general crisis of overstretch. The US has been
trying to cut down its commitments in Afghanistan by
getting Canada and the European Union to take over
much of the country under the aegis of NATO.
Meanwhile, the farcical Karzai regime clearly has very
limited control outside Kabul. The absence of any
worthwhile government in the south has created a space
in which the 'Taliban' (in fact we know very little
about who is fighting the US and NATO forces in
southern Afghanistan) can resume activity and rebuild
support. The NATO troops now participating in the
US-led offensive in the south have run slap bang into
much stronger resistance than they anticipated. It's
true that all this further reinforces the
fragmentation of Afghanistan, a process that has been
going on, through the interaction of outside powers
and domestic political forces, for more than a quarter
century. [6] But this fragmentation is a problem for
the US in attempting to construct a viable client
regime capable of ruling Afghanistan as a whole.
If we are assessing the resistance forces in terms of
their ability to develop what Gramsci would call a
hegemonic project - that is, by their capacity to
present a programme that offers a way forward for
society at large, then the picture is different. The
sectarian Sunni jihadis of Iraq and Afghanistan are
certainly incapable of such a project. But I don't
think this is true of all of political Islam. In this
context, I find your formulation of 'religious and/or
ethnic ultra-conservative movements' unhelpful
analytically and politically, since it reduces all
forms of Islamism to reactionary identity politics.
One dimension of Islam's ideological power has always
been that the concept of the umma is a universalist
and therefore potentially an inclusive notion.
One very interesting development that is currently
taking place is the drawing together of Shia Islamist
radicalism - the Iranian regime, Hezbollah, the
Sadrists in Iraq - with the mother ship of Sunni
Islamism, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and its
close ally Hamas. Is this just a temporary tactical
convergence reflecting the fact that these forces have
common enemies or will it prove to be a more long-term
political and ideological realignment? This is an
important question for the left if it is to begin to
develop its own hegemonic project. In this context
it's worth pointing out that I didn't just refer to
'the political defeats of secular nationalist,
socialist and communist movements', but to their
failure - in other words, to their proven inability to
develop successful hegemonic projects in societies
such as Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, which created
the political space the Islamists have now filled.
This is a question that requires considerable analysis
and discussion.
Finally back again to the question of 'the
illusion-creating power of the corporate media'. The
problem with using this factor to explain American
public opinion's support for an attack on Iran is that
it can't account for the fact that this same public
opinion has turned against the war in Iraq. We need to
have a much more differentiated analysis of how the
corporate media exert an influence as part of quite a
complex constellation of forces that varies over time
and according to the issue. My guess is that the
decisive factor weighing with the American public over
Iran is the memory of the humiliations the US suffered
during and after the 1978-9 revolution (the Embassy
crisis etc), reinforced by the more general
Islamophobia that is a major constituent of
contemporary racism, and renewed by Ahmadinejad's
campaign against Israel. This campaign seems to have
been very effective in winning support for Tehran in
the Arab and Muslim world but it has had the opposite
effect in countries where there is a strong Israel
lobby.
It is interesting that in the US and Germany more
people see Iran as a great threat to world peace than
the number of those who believe the American presence
in Iraq is a major threat, but the opposite is true in
Britain, France, and Spain. [7] This contrast suggests
that we are not just the prisoners of structural
forces such as the corporate media: for example, the
kind of determined but broadly based anti-war movement
that we have in Britain can have help bring about a
dramatic change in popular attitudes,
AM: I understand your concerns and share in them. In
the rest of our dialogue I will try to avoid
repetition of questions and for the interview entering
a close circuit, even where I feel that my questions
may remain unanswered.
You will doubtless be aware that many of the
revolutionary left's past and present mistakes are
rooted in optimistic or pessimistic, and indeed
reductionist and one-sided, analyses of processes and
phenomena. It may be no exaggeration to say that one
of the main reasons that the socialist and Marxist
left was marginalised in the political arena of the
last few decades in many countries (including Iran),
and the failure of its efforts to build a better and
more humane society, is rooted in these kinds of
formulations in its analyses and assessments. My
emphases in previous questions were merely attempts to
arrive with your help, to the extent possible in an
interview, at an accurate and multidimensional
understanding of the political arena of the Middle
East - an area whose developments will undoubtedly
have profound effects on the future of our planet. In
my view your replies, particularly where it describes
the existing structural and political obstacles to the
imperialist assault on the region were illuminating. I
certainly learnt much from it.
In continuation, and in a closer look, I would like to
ask you opinion on the other actors in the political
scenes of the Middle East. We know that alongside
imperialism and the governments of the region (one or
perhaps two exceptions apart, dictatorial and corrupt
to the marrow) it is difficult to deny the effects of
collective political actions in shaping to the
developments of the region. Clearly these actions
cannot be limited to the anti-imperialist and
anti-Zionist resistance (of which we have spoken
above) and extent to other issues. Among these issues
one can identify: ethnic, gender, sexual, religious,
and national inequalities and oppression, class
inequalities and poverty, and political despotism
(religious or secular).
The Middle East today is witness to the growth and
spread of numerous socio-political movements among
which three groups stand out. First, the nationalist
movements of the oppressed nations and ethnic groups.
(for instance Arabs, Baluchi, and Azari in Iran,
Turkmen in Iraq and Iran, and Kurds in Turkey, Iraq,
Syria, and Iran). Second the secular anti-dictatorial
and democratic movements for freedom and legal
equality (with growing roots among women, students,
intellectuals, religious minorities - especially in
Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq). Third, anti-capitalist
movements fighting particularly against neo-liberal
policies (with an expanding social base among urban
and rural working people and the most deprived in most
of the countries of the region). Where do you see the
place and role these movements in the current
political developments of the region?
Before concluding the question, I would like your
indulgence to make two points in relation to my
previous question. First, I too do not believe that
Israel's attack on Lebanon, with all its potential
contradictory results, has had any positive result for
Israel or America. Moreover, I do not think that in
essence my comments on Lebanon in the previous
question could have permitted such a conclusion. Yet
however we interpret the results of the Israeli attack
on Lebanon, it is undeniably true that the US was able
to line up the "international community" behind it in
addressing this assault and was able to create
conditions where for nearly a month the UN Security
Council watched the slaughter of Lebanese women and
children without batting an eyelid!
Second, I agree with you that there are real
differences between the Hizbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in
Palestine, Al-Qaida, the Taliban, and the Islamic
regime in Iran. It is vital for the left to pay
attention to these differences in formulating policy.
Yet, in my view, it is equally important to pay
attention to the existing parallels between them. If
we assume that political ideology and social and
economic platforms are key factors in these parallels,
then I do not believe "ultra-conservative" as a
concept, provides us with a less useful analytical
tool than the "radicalism" used by you. What are your
views on these points?
AC: Look, I'm not an expert on contemporary Middle
Eastern political movements, and therefore I can't
answer your main question in any detail. Let me make
three points. First of all, I certainly agree that
multi-dimensional analysis is required. But I don't
accept that the main problem with the left in the
region is theoretical reductionism. What for many
decades crippled the left in the Middle East was the
formative influence of Stalinist ideology in one form
or other and in particular of the idea that the main
political task was to construct broad class alliances,
including in particular the 'progressive', 'national'
section of the bourgeoisie, against imperialism and
its local allies and clients.
This led the left to a schizophrenic attitude towards
the non-socialist forces confronting imperialism - in
the past, the secular nationalists (Nasser, Qasim, the
different sections of Ba'athism, Fatah, etc), more
recently the Islamists. I think in many cases one can
document an oscillation between political
subordination to whoever was identified as
representing the interests of the national bourgeoisie
and denouncing these forces as completely reactionary,
fascist, etc. This certainly implied a one-sided
analysis since it failed to grasp the contradictory
character of bourgeois nationalism (and here I intend
this expression to cover some of the Islamists as well
as Nasserites, Ba'athists and the like), which can, in
concrete circumstances, lead real struggles against
imperialism but will nevertheless subordinate these
struggles to its class aspiration to build its own
capitalist state, and therefore, ultimately, come to
terms with the dominant powers. I stress all this
because these political problems haven't gone away:
I'll return to this below
Secondly, if we look as the different political
movements in the Middle East, it seems to me that one
can identify there main trends. The first consists in
the remnants of secular nationalism and Communism.
These survive to varying degrees but are enormously
weakened and greatly disoriented. Witness, for
example, what has happened to the Iraqi Communist
Party, once the most important CP in the Middle East,
now shamed by the collaboration of one section in the
US occupation of Iraq. And I understand some Communist
fragments elsewhere in the region expressed sympathy
with the invasion of Iraq as a way of getting rid of
Saddam. This is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of
Popular Front politics - to imagine American
imperialism as an ally in the democratic struggle! Of
course, there are still many excellent revolutionaries
who haven't capitulated (there are, for example, fine
Iraqi Communists involved in the British anti-war
movement), but the left is deeply marked by defeat and
failure.
The second trend is much more interesting, because it
represents a new secular force. I am thinking of a
very influential tendency in the democracy movements
in countries like Egypt and Iran. The dominant
discourse is very familiar from the example of
non-governmental organizations elsewhere in the world,
as well as that of the movement for another
globalization - that of 'civil society' as a distinct
sphere separate from the state asserting human rights
against the existing regime. It is essential to
respond positively to this trend as it has given
expression to the entry of a new generation into
political activity against reactionary regimes.
But it is important also to stress that this ideology
is an ambiguous one, reflecting the fact 'civil
society' itself is a vague concept that isn't clearly
differentiated from the market economy. Those
influenced by it can move in a radical,
anti-capitalist direction if they recognize the power
of the transnational corporations, which greatly
limits the extent of capitalist democracy, but it is
necessary, especially in the Middle Eastern context,
to go further and identify the interrelations between
economics and geopolitics and therefore the close
connections binding the main Arab regimes to US
imperialism. If the ideology of civil society is not
deepened and radicalized, then the danger is that it
can be used by those in the region who see their
interests as being advanced by the Bush
administration's 'new Middle East' policy and by the
implementation of neo-liberal economic policies. Ayman
Nour and his followers in Egypt are a good example of
this option, as was the 'cedar revolution' last year
in Lebanon.
Finally, there are of course the Islamists. This
brings me to my third general point. I accept that
'radicalism' isn't a very precise term, but it is
still a lot better than 'ultra-conservatism'. Anyone
who at present denounces Nasrallah, for example, as an
ultra-conservative will simply make a fool of
themselves. Here again we need a careful and
differentiated analysis, not simply of the concrete
varieties of Islamism but also of what American
political scientists would call different issue-areas.
Depending on the issue, different forces may seem more
or less radical.
Thus if one were to identify the main ideological
element at work in popular mentalities in the Middle
East it would be anti-imperialist nationalism. The
reasons for this are obvious - reactivated memories of
the colonial past, the scale and visibility of the
Western domination of the region, the constantly
renewed wound of Israel, and the pathetic
subordination of most Arab regimes to Washington. What
the historic shift I referred to earlier represents is
the Islamists taking over the mantle of leadership of
the anti-imperialist struggle from the secular
nationalists and the left. To the extent to which they
translate words into action, as Hezbollah have against
Israel, then, on this central issue they cannot be
described as 'ultra-conservative'. Of course, when it
comes to social and economic issues the picture is
different - the Muslim Brotherhood, for example,
supports privatization in Egypt. But even here one has
to be careful. Both the Brotherhood and Hezbollah have
cultivated a popular base among the urban poor through
their welfare programmes, something that one can't
imagine American Republicans or British Tories doing.
In any case one has to analyse the ideologies of
different Islamist political forces as totalities.
Anti-imperialist nationalism isn't, as Ernest Laclau
has argued for many years, a neutral 'element' that
can be combined with others to make an indefinitely
broad variety of different political ideologies: it
has a definite class content. [8] Anti-imperialist
nationalism is the ideology of an actual or aspirant
capitalist class that seeks the way to its own
independent state blocked by imperialism and therefore
must mobilize the masses to help break down this
obstacle.
As I have already indicated, the logic of such
movements is to subordinate the interests of workers
and other exploited classes to those of the bourgeois
leadership. This is what explains the many defeats the
left has suffered in the region. It is important to
point out at this particular juncture, in the face of
the euphoria created by Hezbollah's successful
resistance to the IDF, that though its leaders dress
differently and use a different ideological language
from those, say, of Fatah, they can repeat the same
mistakes by, for example, tying their movement to
presently supportive states such as the Islamic
Republican regime in Iran and the Assad regime in
Syria that may well be prepared to use it as a
bargaining chip in their pursuit of their own
geopolitical interests.
AM: I think discussing political Islam requires a
separate interview. I will therefore limit myself to
posing only two further questions regarding the
application of "anti-imperialism nationalism" to
characterize the political ideology of Islamism.
First: There is no doubt that in their conflict with
imperialism, Islamist movements usually rely on
nationalist rhetoric, as well as, on the nationalist
sentiments of the people as their main instrument to
gain mass support. However, considering the fact that
concepts such as "umaat" are opposed to nation, the
fact that Islamist movements distinguish between
"mo'men" (believer) as opposed to "kaafar"
(non-believer) and consider such distinctions central
to their political ideology, how useful would it be to
apply nationalism in trying to identify these
movements? Furthermore, historically speaking how can
we, for instance, bridge the huge distance between the
pan-Islamism of Khomeini or Kashani (the spiritual
leader of Fada'ian-e Islam who supported the 1953 CIA
coup) and the nationalism of Mossadegh or Fatemi, one
giving priority to the national interests of Iran and
the other to the interests of political Islam and
Islamic world revolutionary movement in absolutely
opposite directions to each other? In fact the
ultra-nationalist tendencies of Khomeinism have
determined even the definition of the main organs of
the Islamic political system in Iran.
Constitutionally, the leadership of Islamic Republic
(vali-e faghih) is defined as the head of the Islamic
revolution (Enghelaab-e Mahdi), and the Revolutionary
Guards are described as the army of this revolution,
both non-territorial and non-national in terms of
their role and their political geography.
Second: as you suggest, Islamist forces are currently
the most powerful agents in the struggle against
imperialism and Zionism in the region. However, we
know that both the Taliban and Al- Qaidah developed
under the supervision of Berzhinsky, or that Hamas and
the Muslim Brotherhood owe their initial successes to
the support of Israel. The positions of the main Shia
organizations in Iraq (Hezb-al-Daveh and Majles-e-Ala)
or the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) in Turkey do not
need any elaboration. In addition, the Iran-Contra
affair or the Iranian collaboration with imperialist
aggression on Afghanistan and Iraq should suffice to
demonstrate the contradictory nature of the anti
western and anti-imperialist positions of the Islamic
regime in Iran. Considering these facts, do you think
one can apply the term anti-Imperialist as an epithet
to all political Islamist movements worldwide
(regardless of the stage of development or the
political circumstances in which they are acting).
Could this provide us with a useful analytical tool?
I do not need to remind you that the declared aim of
these movements is the seizure of state power and
aimed reconstruction of social and political
structures of countries with majority Muslim
populations according to their interpretation of
Sharia'.
AC: To be frank, I think the question of political
Islam dominates the concluding questions of this
interview. That is as it should be, since it is a very
important reality that any revolutionary socialist
strategy in the Middle East has to confront. I think
we should treat Islamism, not as something unique or
diabolical, but as a socio-political phenomenon that
must be understood using the normal Marxist tools of
historical interpretation. That means we should learn
how to read different Islamist ideologies and
organizations in order to locate them precisely within
the political field and within the larger
constellation of social forces nationally, regionally,
and globally. [9]
Consequently, of course I don't think 'one can apply
the term "anti-imperialist" as an epithet to all
political Islamist movements word-wide'. On the
contrary, I said that the classical Marxist analysis
of bourgeois anti-imperialist nationalism applied to
'some of the Islamists'. One has to be very concrete:
the Saudi monarchy, one of the closest allies of
American imperialism in the Middle East, is
legitimized by the same version of Sunni Wahhabi Islam
as is invoked by bin Laden and al Qaeda in waging a
global war against the US.
As to your specific points, I myself noted that the
Islamic concept of the umma is a transnational one. Al
Qaeda draws on this ideological resource in order to
project itself globally. But it would be a mistake to
conclude from this that Islamism is inherently
incompatible with nationalism. Gramsci stressed long
ago that ideologies are concrete combinations of
specific elements sometimes deriving from different
historical periods and articulating the interests of
different classes (though in each case one class
interest tends to predominate). In both Stalinism and
social democracy, socialism, an inherently
internationalist ideology, coexisted with and was
dominated by a form of nationalism. If we want to
understand the political success of Islamist
movements, and in particular their role in
anti-imperialist struggles in the Middle East today,
one has to see how this has involved appropriating
themes from the broader nationalist mentalities
prevailing in the popular masses and combining them
with interpretations of Islam.
Secondly, of course you are right that different
Islamist tendencies and regimes that may now present
themselves as anti-imperialist have a history of
collaborating with imperialism but I'm not sure what
this proves. Yes, al Qaeda emerged from the war
against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, in which
the CIA, the British SIS and the Pakistani ISI were
instrumental in orchestrating the armed struggle of
the mujahedin. But it's no secret that bin Laden's
relationship to the US has changed a little since
then. Yes, the ISI (not Brzezinski, who was long
before out of office in Washington) were very actively
involved in the foundation of the Taliban, but this
doesn't alter the fact that today in Afghanistan the
Taliban (maybe still with the support of elements of
the ISI) is fighting and killing American, British,
and Canadian soldiers.
And yes, to take the example that probably interests
you most, it's true that the Reagan administration
supplied arms to Iran in the mid-1980s, both to fund
the Contra attacks on the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and
to keep Iran and Iraq preoccupied with the war between
them. But when the policy was exposed it proved very
controversial in the American ruling class,
fundamentally because since the fall of the Shah the
Islamic Republican regime has been regarded by the US
as a strategic enemy and therefore such manoeuvres
were seen as undermining the long-term interests of
American imperialism. Hence, in 1986-88, in the wake
of the scandal and in response to the prospect of an
Iranian victory over Iraq, American naval and air
power was deployed to ensure that Saddam won. Of
course, that policy shift in turn rebounded against
the US when Saddam grabbed Kuwait in August 1990, but
the result was not reconciliation with Tehran but the
policy of 'dual containment' aimed at both Iran and
Iraq and pursued by Bush Senior and by Clinton after
the 1991 Gulf War.
It's important to stress this history because it would
be a huge mistake to conclude from the fact that
Tehran and Washington collaborated in the mid-1980s
that Bush Junior isn't serious in his threats of war
against Iran. As I have already noted, his
administration's attempt to break out of the
straitjacket of dual containment by overthrowing
Saddam has strengthened Iran. The Lebanon war was an
attempt to isolate Iran by removing one of its main
allies, Hezbollah. Israel's defeat may, if anything,
make Washington more determined on a direct attack on
Iran in order to shift the regional balance of forces
back in its favour.
The fact that the Islamic Republican regime was
prepared, despite its anti-imperialist and
anti-Zionist declarations, to collaborate with the US
and Israel in the mid-1980s (and indeed on other
occasions as well, for example the early stages of the
'war on terrorism') shows it is not a consistent
opponent of imperialism. But this is precisely what I
was arguing earlier. It is of the essence of bourgeois
nationalists that, when imperialism prevents them for
building their own independent capitalist state, they
may lead struggles against it, but they are striving
to carve out a place for themselves within the
existing system, not to overthrow it. This means that,
sooner or later, they will come to terms with
imperialism, just as Nehru and Nasser, Mandela and
Gerry Adams all did.
I think some of what you say tends to idealize secular
nationalism. For example, you talk about Mossadegh
'giving priority to the national interests of Iran':
what are these 'national interests'? Do they transcend
class antagonisms? Did Mossadegh represent the
harmonious unity of workers, peasants, and capitalists
in Iran? I don't think so. That is why the development
of independent socialist politics and organization is
so important in order to articulate the distinct class
project of the working class.
AM: In the campaigns that have taken shape for
creating "another world", where and do you consign the
importance and place of any efforts to create a "new
Middle East"? What developments are necessary to bring
us nearer to building a better Middle East? From your
perspective what are the obligation of the left and
progressive forces in Europe and America in this
regard?
AC: First of all I wouldn't talk about a 'new Middle
East' because this is the slogan of the Bush
administration's policy of 'democratic' imperialism.
Given the strategic importance of the Middle East and
the suffering of its peoples at the hands of their
'own' regimes, Israel, and the Western powers, the
development of a real left in the region is very
urgent. That left can begin to emerge through the
coming together of three agendas - democratic
(dismantling of the dictatorships, winning of real
citizenship rights for the entire population, equality
for women and for other oppressed groups, etc.) ,
social (against the exploitation of workers and
peasants, poverty and economic inequality, neo-liberal
'reforms', for redistribution of land and other forms
of wealth etc.), and anti-imperialist (against the
occupations in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan,
against the Western military presence and alliances,
against any new wars).
As the example of the democracy movements cited above
illustrates, any left that fails to address all three
agendas doesn't deserve the name. The duty of the left
in the imperialist countries is to help nurture and
support any signs of such a left emerging in the
Middle East. This means, above all, solidarity which
needs to be directed particularly in two areas - (1)
campaigning against the Western and Israeli
occupations and in support of those resisting them,
(2) against repression, especially though of course
not exclusively when it is practised by regimes
closely allied to the US and Britain.
AM: Part of the left in Europe and America, when
deciding on the stance they need to take in response
to imperialist intervention confine themselves to a
mirror image of the imperialist position and in the
first instance the US government. Wherever imperialism
places a negative mark, they automatically replace it
by a positive, and vice versa. For example tension or
conflict between Washington and the regime of any
country is enough for that regime to be labelled
"progressive" and the revolutionary or socialist duty
becomes not only to oppose the interventionist
imperialist policies and actions or defend the right
of self determination (or sovereignty) of the people
of that country, but to go further and to directly
support the regime. It does not matter if Castro or
Chavez is ruling there or Saddam and Milosovitch, or
Robert Mugabe and Ayatollah Khameni'i. Also the real
content of the conflict between that regime and
Washington appears to matter little, nor what are the
relationship of that regime with its people (even
ignoring specifically how it deals with its workers,
peasants and working people). Some go so far as to
consider any form of criticism to the policies of such
regimes as aiding and abetting imperialism and condemn
it with the justification that such criticisms provide
the ideological excuse for imperialist intervention
and aggression. In the face of such behaviour what do
you consider is a principled stance. Particularly
where the footprints of corrupt, repressive and
anti-people regimes are visible, which position do you
support?
AC: I find your description very general and lacking
in concrete examples. I can best respond by stating my
own view. At the heart of Marxism is the idea of
socialism as the self-emancipation of the working
class. Therefore what counts is the self-activity of
the masses. Existing regimes and states, all of which
part of the capitalist world system, have to be judged
in the light of this overall conception of socialism.
But a key feature of global capitalism is that the
world is organized into a system of states in which a
few - the imperialist powers - dominate the rest
economically, politically, and militarily. This poses
the question of what stance Marxists should take when
states fight each other.
Now it is possible to argue that since the conflicting
parties are all capitalist states the left should, as
a matter of principle, take no interest in who wins.
This is the line anarchists generally take, but it is
one that the great Marxists, from the revolutions of
1848 onwards, have always rejected. Marx, Engels,
Lenin, and Trotsky all judged the wars of their day
from the standpoint of what would advance the
interests of the international working class. We
should do the same now. So, when the US fights some
corrupt and repressive Third World state we should
ask: whose side's victory will be less harmful to the
interests of the world working class? Given the role
of the US as the main imperialist power maintaining
the global relations of capitalist exploitation and
domination, the question answers itself: the defeat of
the US is in these cases the better outcome.
Does this mean that we should remain silent about the
character of the regime (or movement) fighting the US,
concealing its class character and denying its crimes?
Absolutely not. I look forward to the moment when the
Iranian working class resumes the work it left
unfinished in 1978-9 and sweeps aside the Islamic
Republican regime and indeed the capitalist class
itself. But, all the same, if the US were to attack
Iran tomorrow, under the present regime, the better
outcome would be if the US lost - even if, as it
probably would, this temporarily strengthened the
regime. The global weakening of the relations of
domination, the greater space for mass struggle and
initiative that would result from a US defeat make
this outcome the lesser evil.
This problem isn't a new one. In 1937 Japan invaded
China. The ruling Kuomintang regime had drenched the
Communist movement in blood when it crushed the
revolutionary wave of 1925-7. Nevertheless, Trotsky
argued that Chinese revolutionary Marxists should work
for the defeat of Japan, an imperialist power seeking
to colonize China. He defined the appropriate stance
as one of political opposition but military support
for the Kuomintang. In other words, if revolutionaries
could facilitate the victory of the Kuomintang against
Japan, they should do so, but they should maintain
their political independence and promote the
self-activity of the workers and peasants in order to
prepare for the regime's overthrow. [10] Of course,
there are tensions in this formula, but they reflect
one of the things that I have been stressing all along
- the contradictory nature of anti-imperialist
nationalism itself.
AM: Here I ask your indulgence to give a brief
introduction before I pose a question on Iran. The
heightening crisis in the relations between the Bush
administration and the regime in Iran in the last few
years has coincided with the appearance and spread of
a new wave of protests and struggles by workers,
students, women and the oppressed nations, ethnic
groups and religious minorities in Iran. The protests
and struggles have had in the main a progressive,
democratic, freedom- and equality-seeking content and
are in direct confrontation to the policies and
actions of the ruling regime in Iran. The unilateral
attention of left groups in Europe and America on the
aggressive policies of imperialism in the region
(which is understandable in present tense atmosphere)
and the tendency in many of these groups
unconditionally support the Iranian regime in its
confrontation with imperialism has meant that the
social and mass struggles of the Iranian people remain
hidden from the view of European and American
socialists. This inattentiveness has handed over the
discourse over human rights, democracy and freedom
entirely to the neo-conservatives and liberal
imperialists. The Voice of America is the loudest
voice heard supporting the protests of the people of
Iran.
The Tehran Bus Drivers have struggled to create an
independent trade union, and for improvement in their
living and working conditions (a struggle that began
over a year ago and continues to this day), and more
than 1,200 were arrested without the slightest echo in
the left and revolutionary press of Europe and
America. In a peaceful gathering in Tehran in defence
of social and legal rights and for protest against the
policies of sexual apartheid tens of people were
beaten up, arrested and sent to prison without the
European and American left raising a finger in
protest. Over the last year we have been witness to
widespread mass protests in a number of cities with
Kurd, Arab, Azeri, and Baluch population to which the
regime responded by bloody and savage repression. Yet
the European and American left saw itself without any
duties in relation to the oppressed nations of the
country and kept silent in the face of the repression
and killings. At this moment about 10 Iranian Arab
youths are awaiting a death sentence accused of acts
that could be completely without foundation. Yet while
everyday thousands of pages are written to prove the
confluence of Ahmadinejad and Fidel Castro's paths and
surface in the publication and web-sites belonging to
the left, yet one can search in vain for one word in
support of these victims.
In your view how defensible are these policies on the
part of the left (socialist and communist)? What
ideological and morel consequences do you think these
forms of political behaviour will have for the
international left? Should one not consider these
behaviours of the same ilk as the mistakes that, as
you pointed out, resulted in the paralysis and
weakening of the left in Iran and the Middle East?
AC: This information is very interesting and
important. It should undoubtedly be more widely
publicized in the West, although I must emphasize
that, for example, Action Iran here in Britain has
combined campaigning against a US attack on Iran with
stressing the importance of the social, democratic and
national movements with Iran. I'm maybe less offended
that you by the comparison between Castro and
Ahmadinejad because I see them both as bourgeois
nationalists (though of very different kinds).
Certainly it is wrong to subordinate the independent
interests of the working class to those of particular
nationalist regimes and movements. But it would be
also wrong to imagine for a moment that American
imperialism could free the peoples of Iran from the
oppression you describe.
Of course you don't imagine this, but then you have to
face the question I have already posed. If Bush
attacks Iran tomorrow, which side are you on? I would
be on Iran's but - as Lenin put it - I would refuse to
paint Ahmadinejad in communist colours; in other
words, I would be for an Iranian victory despite his
anti-Semitic rantings, despite the regime's capitalist
class base, despite the repression it perpetrates.
This is the politics of permanent revolution, which
seeks the overthrow of imperialism and of the local
bourgeois regimes, with the complex relations of
collaboration and conflict that they have with the
main capitalist powers.
One final note of warning: the national minorities in
Iran were oppressed under the Shah, and continue to be
oppressed under the Islamic Republican regime
(incidentally, this shows how Islamism can co-exist
with, in this case, Farsi nationalism). Revolutionary
socialists should support their right of national
self-determination. But, at the same time, we should
remember what has happened with the Kurds of northern
Iraq, whose corrupt and clientilistic leaders have
sold themselves lock, stock, and barrel to US
imperialism, providing Washington (and Israel) with a
secure base in Iraq. There have been reports of agents
of the US, Britain, and Pakistan being active among
Iran's national minorities as part of Bush's strategy
of 'regime change'. It is important that the left
point to the example of Iraqi Kurdistan as a warning
against the temptation that some in these minorities
may have of improving their position by allying
themselves to American imperialism.
AM: How do you see the anti war movement? By its
powerful appearance in the prelude to the Iraq war it
raised hopes in a huge way. You reflected those hopes
in your excellent book The New Mandarins and American
Power, which came out that same year. Yet a few years
later, not only did this movement not grow and spread,
but we have indeed witnessed its downturn. Why? In
your view can we be optimistic for a resurgence of
this movement? How and in what direction?
AC: It is a common error to use the gigantic protests
of early 2003 to proclaim the death of the anti-war
movement. One of our greatest achievements is used to
hang us! The 2003 protests were on such a scale that
they could only go forward by bringing down
governments - which did in fact happen in Spain in
March 2004, albeit in an indirect and complex way. The
failure to achieve such an outcome on a broader scale
- and therefore prevent or end the Iraq war - did lead
to a certain ebbing of the anti-war movement relative
to the high point of 15 February 2003, but the extent
varied enormously depending on national conditions.
Thus in the US the mainstream of the anti-war movement
(including figures as principled as Chomsky) made the
fatal error of putting their efforts in defeating Bush
in 2004 by backing the pro-war Democrats under John
Kerry, a mistake from which they are only beginning to
recover.
By contrast, I think it is completely wrong to
describe the condition of the anti-war movement in
Britain as one of 'downturn'. The Stop the War
Coalition has been able to sustain an astonishingly
high level of mass mobilization for the past five
years - a succession of big demonstrations, usually
twice a year, all very big by historic standards, if
not on the scale of 15 February 2003 - and to gain
very deep roots in British society. This is reflected
in its ability to mount two large marches against the
Lebanon War at very short notice and at the height of
the summer holidays. More generally, his central role
in engineering the Iraq War fatally damaged Tony
Blair's government and his complicity in the
destruction of Lebanon is helping to end his
premiership.
This contrast suggests that the fate of the anti-war
movement has varied according to the state of the left
in different countries. In the US the left has been
crippled by its dependence on the Democrats. The
British anti-war movement has been led by forces of
the radical left that have been able to sustain it in
a way that has combined consistent opposition to
imperialism with an emphasis on building on a broad
and inclusive basis. Elsewhere the pattern is
confirmed by, for example, the decline of the Italian
anti-war movement, which in 2001-4 mobilized on even a
bigger scale than in Britain, but which has been very
negatively affected by the entry of Rifondazione
Comunista into a centre-left coalition government that
is sending troops to Afghanistan and Lebanon.
The international anti-war movement in any case faces
a very big challenge. The Lebanon War confirms that
the Bush administration is telling the truth when it
says that it is waging a global war. Iraq,
Afghanistan, Lebanon are all fronts in this war. Iran
may be the next one. The involvement of European
troops in both Afghanistan and Lebanon requires a
response for the left throughout the EU. Let us hope
that this very threatening situation will produce an
upsurge of anti-war activity, not just in Europe but
globally.
AM: Finally can I ask you to turn to the global
anti-capitalist movement. Where, in your view, does
this movement stand today? What are the real
potentials of this movement and what prospects can we
expect for it? As someone who has had an important
role in the formation and persistence of the regional
and world social forums, what role do you think these
forums have had in the global anti-capitalist movement
and what role do you see them having in the future?
AC: This introduces some very big questions that
extend well beyond the subject matter of the rest of
our discussion. I hope your readers will forgive me if
I refer them to writings where I have discussed these
matters in depth, particularly An Anti-Capitalist
Manifesto (Cambridge, 2003) and my contribution to H.
Dee, ed., Anti-Capitalism: Where Next? (London, 2004).
I would be happy to provide this latter text for
translation.
AM: Many thanks for giving your time. I wish you every
success in your struggles.
August/September 2006
Alex Callinicos is a member of the Central Committee
of Socialist Workers Party and Professor of European
Studies at Kings College London. His publications
include Trotskyism (1990), The Revolutionary Ideas of
Karl Marx (1999), New Mandarins and American Power
(2001), Anti-capitalist manifesto (2003).
Ardeshir Mehrdad is co-editor of iran-bulletin-Middle
East Forum.
Email: [email protected]
----------------------- -------------------------------------------------- -------
[1] G. Arrighi, 'Hegemony Unravelling', New Left
Review, II/32 and 33 (2005).
[2] New York Times, 4 August 2006.
[3] A. Callinicos, The New Mandarins of American
Power (Cambridge, 2003) and D. Harvey, The New
Imperialism (Oxford, 2003).
[4] M. Gordon and B. Trainor, Cobra II (London,
2006).
[5] G. Achcar, 'The Sinking Ship of US Imperial
Designs', 7 August 2006, www.zmag.org.
[6] B. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan (New
Haven, 2002).
[7] Pew Global Attitudes Project, 'America's Image
Slips, But Allies Shares US Concerns over Iran,
Hamas', 13 June 2006, www.pewglobal.org.
[8] See, most recently, E. Laclau, Of Populist Reason
(London, 2005).
[9] See, for an exemplary attempt to do so, C. Harman,
'The Prophet and the Proletariat', International
Socialism, 2.64 (1994), available at www.isj.org.uk.
[10] For example, L.D. Trotsky, 'On the Sino-Japanese
War', in Leon Trotsky on China (New York, 1976).