record on crime. But by dismissing the ideas behind yesterday’s demonstrations as a ‘spurious cause’, the prime minister made clear he does not simply want to demonise riotous protest, but also the increasingly influential anti-corporate movement that has fuelled them.
It is, of course, much easier to shock the bourgeoisie than to overthrow it, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm put it. And while a few ‘hardcore’ anti-capitalists appear to have succeeded in shocking the powers-that-be – or at least cabinet ministers and the tabloid press – they can hardly imagine that throwing stones at the police or smashing shop windows is going to shake the capitalist order. The only political violence that has ever achieved its aims has been either spontaneous or decisive: anything else merely tends to weaken the cause of those carrying it out. Groups that want a barney with the police have always attached themselves to large-scale demonstrations – whether against the Vietnam war, poll tax or apartheid – and the anti-corporate protests are more than usually vulnerable to such diversions because of their highly decentralised, ultra-democratic forms of organisation.
But far more significant in the longer run than apportioning blame for yesterday’s clashes is the fact that ten years after the end of the cold war and the supposed global triumph of liberal capitalist ideas, the international workers’ day has again become a focus of international protest, animated yesterday by a common political agenda from London to Sydney, Moscow to Seoul: rejection of neoliberal globalisation, opposition to the eclipse of democracy by corporate power and demand for international action to tackle the ecological crisis. Even by simply making the slogan of anti-capitalism common currency, the movement has raised the possibility of a systemic alternative, derided as a nonsense for most of the past decade.
And far from being a minority cause, the central concerns of the anti-corporate movement are becoming mainstream, finding support far beyond the ranks of environmentalists, animal rights activists and global economic justice campaigners on the streets of London and other British cities yesterday. This week’s NOP poll for Channel 4 found most people believe multinational companies have more power over their lives than Blair’s government, and that the corporate giants care ‘only about profits and not the interests of the people in the countries where they operate’.
The weakness of the anti-corporate movement, in Britain at least, is not so much that it lacks a common world view or programme of action – something of a strength at this stage – but that it is disconnected from other more socially rooted groups and organisations. A crucial factor behind the impact of the protests at the Seattle World Trade Organisation summit eighteen months ago was the alliance between trade union and direct action campaigners that underpinned them. So far, links have been at the margins of both movements; yesterday’s labour march was kept far from the anti-corporate protests. That is one gap that will have to be bridged if the central social demands of our time are going to be met.11
(2/5/01)
WARS ON TERROR AND TYRANNY (2001–02)
George Bush and Tony Blair launched the ‘War on Terror’ by invading Afghanistan on a wave of liberal-interventionist rhetoric. The casual slaughter of Afghan civilians and restoration of warlord rule exposed the campaign’s brutal reality, fuelling al-Qaida-inspired terror across the world. So did Israel’s US-backed onslaught against the Palestinian intifada in the months that followed. The ease of the Taliban’s overthrow also fed a new Western imperial triumphalism, as Bush and the neoconservatives prepared to settle accounts with Iraq and its ‘axis of evil’. The 9/11 aftermath had been rapidly transformed into a war to enforce US ‘full spectrum dominance’ across the globe.
Bush’s ocean of petrol on the flames
As US and British forces prepare to strike against the humanitarian disaster that is Afghanistan, the problems confronting George Bush’s latter-day crusade against terror are multiplying. The prospect of ‘surgical strikes’ against a disparate and well-hidden force is now increasingly recognised as implausible. Although raids on empty training camps will presumably be staged for CNN, that is unlikely to satisfy domestic demand for revenge. The embarrassing failure to produce convincing evidence of bin Laden’s responsibility for the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the difficulties of tracking him down have left the US administration falling back on a more visible enemy, in the form of the Taliban.
That has its own dangers. Overthrowing such a shaky regime, at least in what is left of Afghanistan’s cities, should prove straightforward enough, particularly with the help of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. But the alliance is a ragbag army, based on minority ethnic groups, with its own history of massacres and large-scale human rights abuses when it ruled the country in the early 1990s. A government based on it, the long-discredited king and a few more pliant fragments of the Taliban – the line-up currently being canvassed for a new order in Kabul – would be a pretty grim legacy for such an avowedly high-minded venture. No wonder Bush says he’s ‘not into nation-building’.
Then there is the threat to the survival of the pro-Western military dictatorship and nuclear-armed Taliban-sponsor in Pakistan, now offering logistical backup to the Western war effort. Even more incendiary is the demand for a full-scale assault on Iraq, which has triggered an open split in the Bush administration. War on Saddam would at least provide the US with a target serious enough to appear to match the scale of the slaughter of innocents in New York. But, with no evidence linking Iraq to the September 11 attacks, any such move would rupture its international coalition and destroy any hope of maintaining Arab support.
The fragility of that support was highlighted by the refusal of the Saudi regime, most dependent of all American client states in the region, to allow US forces to use their Saudi bases for operations against Afghanistan, out of fear of a domestic backlash. A taste of the mood in bin Laden’s homeland was given this week by Mai Yamani, anthropologist daughter of the former Saudi oil minister, who was startled to find young people ‘very pleased about Osama because they think he is the only one who stands against the hegemony of the US’.
Failure to read these signs would be the grossest irresponsibility. Those who insist that the attacks in New York and Washington had nothing to do with the US role in the Middle East – but were instead the product of existential angst about Western freedom and identity – not only demonstrate their ignorance of the region. They also weaken the pressure to address the long-standing grievances fuelling this rage: not only Western indulgence of Israeli military occupation, but decades of oil-lubricated support for despots from Iran to Oman, Egypt to Saudi Arabia and routine military interventions to maintain US control. Moral relativism does not lie in acknowledging that link, but in making excuses for this insupportable record.
Few can seriously hope that waging war on Afghanistan or Iraq – or the death of bin Laden, for that matter – will stamp out terrorism any more effectively than the alternative of legal, security and diplomatic action. But an end to the siege of Iraq, the use of Western clout to accelerate the creation of a viable Palestinian state and the withdrawal of US troops from the Arabian peninsula would begin to relieve the political pressure cooker by tackling the most inflammatory sources of tension in the region. Conservative politicians in the US are becoming impatient for the sound of gunfire. The Bush administration has a choice: it can go further in the direction it has begun tentatively to explore while assembling its coalition, for example over the Israel–Palestinian conflict – or it can cave in to the siren voices on its right, and pour an ocean of petrol on the flames.1
(27/9/01)
Lurching
