[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Tony Hall

[Patrick Bond]

(Our dear comrade Tony asked me to post this, and he sincerely wants 
feedback. I told him that though there's terrific analysis below, the 
punchline is dreadful - probably my supervisor's worst-ever idea - and he 
has a responsibility to show how the balance of forces can be adjusted to 
make anything like a 'global new deal' happen, given the vast and growing 
weight of evidence to the contrary. But let's hope he's back more often on 
the debate list and can make his case... Do feedback to him at the cc line 
address - and here, too.)

***

Yes, in my name

Tony Hall resurfacing here, back on debate.as I have said before, as a 
journalist for many years, in many places, I have seen and written on a lot.

.Quiet, you at the back, and stop shifting in your seats! I am almost 70. 
Settle down, listen carefully and take in some wisdom already. Let's look 
today at geopolitics and the Islamic world, the lessons, what to do now. And 
come with me on my personal journey. Meander with me through my meanderings.

Some of my years I spent side by side with Palestinian secular and other 
colleagues and Arab and Islamic experts in London, editing international 
news magazines, working sometimes for moneyed Emirates and Saudi bosses who 
at least always tolerated my pro-PLO editorials; travelling in the Middle 
East, meeting some wonderful Palestinians; talking to a few fine Israelis - 
and attacking and exposing the worst. A cover line we did on Menachem Begin 
back then was "Once a Terrorist, Always a Terrorist".

With Arabs and Arabists, Muslims and Islamists, I was on friendly working 
terms - some of them are still in hailing distance over time. To name a few, 
I worked in London with Teddy Hodgkin, Malise Ruthven, Fathi Osman of Al 
Azhar University, Dilip Hiro, Helena Cobban, Ahmed Rashid, Ziauddin Sardar. 
I worked with Alastair Duncan, Michael Adams, Roger Hardy...

I still treasure meetings in West Beirut with Yassir Arafat and others of 
the leadership at PLO HQ (and evenings at the Commodore with foreign 
correspondents, with David Hirst in his Corniche seafront apartment), with 
Anwar Nusseibeh and other leading Palestinians in East Jerusalem, with Uri 
Avnery in Tel Aviv.

I recall, still intrigued, and with some dismay, the long wait in the 
ante-room of the simple offices in the Dubai creek, for an "audience" with 
the Sheikh Maktoum who owned our London-based magazine, and whose ruling 
family oversaw the Borgiastic explosion of Dubai as the city state 
playground of Western consumer capitalism that it is today.

Down the coast I dropped in on the tiny enclave state of Qatar, a one-hotel 
town then, under an old ruler subservient to Saudi Arabia, but today, under 
the reforming son who overthrew him, a most modern, open-society garbed and 
buzzing home of Al Jazeera, of World Debates, of mega-events and venues (as 
in Dubai) of the fastest growing airline...

How the West loves to pour so much of its ill-gotten capital into coastal 
City States which keep the trillions safely out of the hands of the people 
of the hinterland, and so mushroom into vast tax free offshore and enclave 
pleasure domes and moneypots for merchant banks: the ripoffs of British 
colonial piracy into Hong Kong  (and prewar Shanghai) leaching China, into 
Singapore, leaching Malaysia; the recycled Arab petrodollars which spawn the 
Dubais and the Qatars and suck up the skills of Western and other émigrés 
escaping their own unwieldy democratic homelands, and keep the money away 
from the Arab people. Or any other ordinary communities.

It's not been easy, with so many restless natives about, to nurture and keep 
these exotic places safe for Western capital, or safe until it can be 
parachuted out into banks. It's taken a lot of hard work by a lot of 
Intelligent men, to help prop up oppressive regimes against popular 
movements, to ensure that the zeal of young men is turned from a hunger for 
freedom and social equity to a lust for wealth, or its opposite, the extreme 
abnegations of religious fundamentalism.

Some names from earlier times come to mind: Von Meinertzhagen, Brit 
actually, the colonial soldier whose viciousness in quelling the Kisii 
uprising in Kenya early in the 1900s was legendary, went on to play many 
important games in Kuwait, and down the Gulf. Henderson was another who 
followed almost the same itinerary decades later. After hunting down and 
killing the freedom fighter Dedan Kimathi in the Kenya forests, he went on 
playing games there into early independence, until Oginga Odinga was able to 
deport him. Nothing daunted, he went on to do grand work in policing and 
quelling the restless Shia majority of the Gulf statelet of Bahrein, that 
earliest of British émigré Gulf outposts and Arab banking refuges.

Back to my own journeys.I recall with a shudder the brief, curt meeting I 
had, still further down that coast, with yet another of those legendary 
British males. He was John somebody, acting as a senior information official 
in Oman, where the young Sultan had ousted his intractable old father from 
the capital Muscat, with a little help from British Army friends, to ensure 
that said army would have a free hand in quelling a rebel movement in a 
large area between Oman and Aden, and so make Oman, the southernmost Gulf 
state, safe for the enterprise of Margaret Thatcher and her son.

Over in one of my favourite, real countries, Turkey - Muslim, but holding 
out still as a secular state - there was a long night in Ankara during 
military rule, secretly meeting with former social democratic prime minister 
Bulent Ecevit and his wife, when he was under house arrest, not allowed 
visitors and not allowed to be quoted. After being smuggled into their 
apartment block, past police guards, I shared with them a good meal and many 
confidences, the notes of which I have not published to this day. This was 
the man who ordered the invasion of Cyprus which has left half the island 
under Turkish rule up to now; an invasion which put the kaibosh on a Greek 
right-wing plot to overthrow Archbishop Makarios, and so indirectly led to 
the overthrow of the Colonels' vicious rule on the Greek mainland, and to 
the long social democratic premiership of Andreas Papandreou (though these 
two social democrats would never admit to having anything in common - 
perhaps under the EU umbrella today, they would). In more recent years, 
Ecevit returned to a quite long rule as Turkey's prime minister. He lost the 
last election to the present Muslim party leader, a good and moderate man 
who should lead Turkey into Europe. Ecevit's part in preparing the way, as 
that of the right of centre Suleyman Demirel, will one day be acknowledged 
by history.

Muslims I have known.In my boyhood I knew Transvaal Indian Muslim families. 
As an adult, joining Congress, I fell in with the Mosies and the Maulvis and 
the Aminas. Through struggle friends we met some great Algerians, Sahnoun, 
and Djoudi. Through many family postings in our own exile diaspora we were 
woken by the call of the muezzin, in Dar es Salaam, Delhi and Dakha, in 
Moshi, Mombasa, and Mogadishu, Hargeisa and Harar. "Awake! It is better to 
pray than to sleep."

I have worked with more Muslims, lapsed or devout, than I can remember. My 
wife too: when her UN project accountant wanted to borrow the Landrover to 
go to Friday prayers, she would have to throw him the keys because he had 
already washed, and should not risk defilement by touching a woman. "He was 
a sweet man, but sometimes I wanted to tease him, say boo! and reach out as 
if to prod him."

Some of those Muslims I knew may have been as mixed as I, a lapsed Anglican 
atheist leftist married into a Jewish-German family. Their mosque attendance 
was about as ceremonial as my church attendance, for weddings and funerals. 
Mind you, sometimes people like Archbishop Tutu almost make me want to pick 
up where I left off on the wine and the wafer. Wasn't he so lovely the other 
day? Taking his purply-covered grey mop-haired chortling self into quite a 
risky crowd scene in Haiti, just so he could show the diaspora's support for 
the victory of a halfway decent presidential candidate. A lively, important 
camera opportunity for BBC World - and was SABC there?.

I think the Anglicans would accept atheists. Christina Stead recalled that 
when she was asked her religion in her new school, she said 'atheist'. So 
the schoolteacher marked her down as Anglican. Perhaps I could have fellow 
traveller status with the Anglicans, as I have always had with Communists. 
The trouble with going back to the Islamic fold, though, as many left 
strugglers have done, is that there seems to be no room for fellow 
travelling membership.

Talk about cultural mix-ups: never will I forget the mind-blowing encounter 
I witnessed at Copenhagen's Bella Centre in 1980, during the Mid-decade UN 
Women's Conference. There was New York feminist Bella Abzug, as robust and 
almost as celebrated as the late Betty Friedan, slugging it out from the 
floor, in her rich Brooklynese, with a platform panel of newly-chadored 
young Iranian women, graduates from US universities who had gone home to 
join the revolution, trying to explain to Bella in the accents of 
Minneapolis and Ann Arbor why they valued the veil, and felt passionate 
about what Khomeini had wrought. (Ah, Iran!). As one of the international 
journalists on the team producing the conference daily newspaper I took 
feverish notes, and stood eagerly on the edges of the continuing debate in 
the passage as the crowd spilled out, between big Bella and the circle of 
black-garbed, soft spoken self-confident women.

I don't know which I remember with greater sharpness, my report on "Bella's 
encounter at the Bella Centre" (the coinciding names made a good headline) 
or my long interview with former plane hijacker Leila Khaled, still with 
PFLP (never PLO, note) but now in a peaceful teaching job.

But I digress. I wander. It's homily time.

I don't enter the lists much these days as I chill out and contemplate 
nature.

Lately though, it does concern me that leftists are losing the plot in a few 
crucial ways. So here I am, finger-wagging once more, because things are 
getting serious.

Awake comrades! It is better to be up early when you are dealing with the 
imperialists.

Was it Chomsky, or another luminary, who coined the elegant idea, after 
Seattle and the wave it started, that there were now just two great powers 
left, US imperialism, and the worldwide popular movement? If that is to be, 
then please, let us not have people on the left shooting their rhetoric wide 
and wild, in different directions on some issues, sometimes doing a Cheney 
the dick, and shooting a fellow hunter, sometimes shooting themselves, and 
their cause, in the foot.

We can't have the millions of the growing global movement hobbling about in 
slightly different directions. Know your enemy, and hold your focus, or you'll 
have well-meaning plain folk, not just racists, from Arnhem to Lille to the 
Potteries bending their right ears in wrong directions.

It is strange, though I don't mind, to find myself so often in recent years 
holding thumbs and cheering on the sidelines for the redoubtable French and 
German leadership, left and right of centre, keeping their heads, holding 
their course and they lead and steer the European project, the last 
surviving civilising mission, around the constant hazards and traps - 
usually Anglo-American in design.

But how many on the left have come to grips with the fact that Europe, the 
struggle for, is one main front line against imperialism? And how clear are 
we, that to hold firmly to the secular state, with its social protections, 
is critical?

And now those cartoons. Oye.

It's not nice when I am driven to nod at the words of the appalling 
Christopher Hitchens, the boy Trot of London days turned sleazy Washington 
reactionary, when he fights from the cartoon corner.

How does this happen? Because so many liberals, and on the left, some of the 
best and brightest, are writhing through convoluted arguments about 'racist 
Danes' and 'badly drawn, unfunny' cartoons (would the devastating wit and 
acid pen of a Steve Bell or a Steadman or a Zapiro have made it more 
justifiable?) out of misplaced tolerance for bigotry, chauvinism, and sheer 
male thuggery, in the name of a third world community oppressed by racialism 
and imperialism. And thus the fundamental decency and enlightenment of the 
faithful gives way to a primitive male frenzy one imagines helped the 
Inquisition to spark off the Catholic riots against Jews and Muslims in 15th 
century Spain.

To make the point just how politically outrageous it all is. Has any 
commentator noted that in all the Danish flags burned and Scandinavian 
embassies gutted and French consulates attacked for weeks, the Stars and 
Stripes and the Union Jack remained almost untouched? Yet these are the 
flags waved by the biggest imperialist rogues, the greatest killers and 
defilers of mostly-Muslim societies, the allies of Zionism and spoilers of 
Palestine liberation.

Is this because the British and American mainstream media didn't print the 
cartoons, out of fear, purporting to be good taste? Is it because the 
protesters were stirred up by extremists to behave like mindless, cowardly 
mobs, so that justified rage and frustration at Zionist Israel, at 
imperialist America and Britain (O Tom Paine, how we have fallen!) were 
warped into misdirected viciousness against a small social democratic state?

Is this the apotheosis of imperialism, to draw leftists towards a kind of 
validation of the anger of those same extreme fundamentalists whom the 
Americans armed, trained and let loose on the indigenous, yes, indigenous, 
women-liberating, land-reforming left leadership of Afghanistan in the late 
1970s, before the Soviets even went in*, to go on and on wreaking havoc, 
until the Twin Towers, Chechnya and beyond?
*(the CIA having first used Hafizullah Amin to destabilise the reform)

How many leftist commentators, by the way, have got those narrative 
historical ducks in a row, on Afghanistan, and who enabled the war?

So, comrades, get your minds and bourgeois consciences unscrambled: let's 
hear it for the following two straight-talking people.

One is called Fons. He is cool, he says it a bit like a post-hippie leftist, 
quiet and direct. And typically of the finest of all online and hard copy 
magazines, the great Counterpunch, they gave him space, along with all the 
more nervous reactions.

The other straight shooter is a most brave and important political figure, 
forced to seek political space on the right of centre (shame on the left!) 
called Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Here are their comments, first:
They're Just Cartoons
Chill Out Jihadis
By CHRISTOPHER FONS
9 February 2006
Many "leftists" have taken the position that the cartoons published in the 
Danish paper and elsewhere are primarily a representation of Western racism 
and should be condemned. Nonsense.
As a leftist I thought that our goal was liberation through thorough and 
robust debate and confronting irrational ideas and superstition in 
particular? This means that if someone is offended because we say that the 
world is round then too bad. The truth hurts. If we are constantly weary of 
offending, then truth, yes I believe in such a thing, will never overcome 
the backward state of affairs today that allows gays to be treated like 
second class citizens, intelligent design to be taught in schools and people 
in the US and Britain to believe that the war in Iraq is being prosecuted 
for humanitarian ends.
Much of the sentiment not to offend and to side with reactionaries at times 
comes from a sincere desire to defend oppressed people and expose the 
hypocrisy of Western imperialism that consistently speaks of democracy and 
tolerance and practices support for dictatorship and racist laws at home and 
abroad. In Europe and the United States it also comes from a desire to side 
with people of color who have traditionally not assimilated into our 
societies as well as people from other European countries. And this gets to 
the crux of the matter, assimilation. If a society is going to function a 
certain set of ideas must be widely accepted otherwise sectarian conflict 
will ensue. This is not to say that Vietnamese or Algerians that move to 
France should all have to become Christians or cook fancy entrees but they 
should accept that women's equality before the law or universal suffrage 
need to be accepted.
In the Western tradition, where today's Left traces its roots, the American 
and French revolutions put into practice universal values that have allowed 
us to create political systems that now allow universal suffrage and equal 
protection before the law. This is not the end of our program, nay it is 
just the beginning, but it is a start that puts us, those who embrace 
universal values, ahead of those who choose a chosen group or a sacred text 
as the basis for society. Anticipating the counter-argument, that the West 
at times uses these values to enforce intolerance and is just as exclusive 
as alternative systems, I would agree to a degree, but this does not negate 
the fact that the Rights of Man or the Bill of Rights allows ALL people to 
be accepted and treated as equals not just a specific ethnic group or a 
divinely anointed. We should then embrace liberal ideas when freedom will be 
advanced by such a defense. Not as Confederates did to defend slavery but as 
Northerners did to liberate.
The Left then should defend the oppressed, but not blindly. 
Multi-culturalists in particular have had a hard time with this idea 
seemingly supporting every movement from the Nation of Islam to the Tamil 
Tigers. Just because people are discriminated against doesn't mean that the 
movement that they found to overcome this discrimination is worthy of 
support. If the movement that would come to power as a result of victory 
would be worse for the women or workers of said movement, then it is not 
worthy of unconditional support.
Another way of looking at the issue is through the lens of immigration. 
Let's say there is a small Scandinavian country with a functioning social 
democratic system and you want to do your internationalist duty and allow 
millions of people to come into your country from all over the world where 
people are fleeing economic and political despotism. If said immigrants 
bring with them backward ideas, like sexism, religious superstition, belief 
in inequality, etc... what will be the result for your good deed? It could 
transform the place into a backward place not because said immigrants are 
inferior human beings but because their cultural traditions have been 
respected. Should we thus sacrifice equality and social democracy on the 
altar of tolerance for oppressed groups?
To the cartoons. They may have been published by racists to inflame. So 
what? Chill out Jihadis; fly a kite, smoke a joint and flip through the 
pages of Playboy if you are so uptight.
Christopher Fons lives in Milwaukee and runs the Red and the Black website. 
He can be reached at: fonscy at yahoo.com

Dutch MP backs Muhammad cartoons
The Somali-born Dutch MP who describes herself as a "dissident of Islam" has 
backed the Danish newspaper that first printed the Prophet Muhammad 
cartoons.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali said it was "correct to publish the cartoons" in Jyllands 
Posten and "right to republish them".
Her film-maker colleague Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim extremist in 
a case that shocked the Netherlands.
Ms Hirsi Ali, speaking in Berlin, said that "today the open society is 
challenged by Islamism". She added: "Within Islam exists a hardline Islamist 
movement that rejects democratic freedoms and wants to destroy them."
Ms Hirsi Ali criticised European leaders for not standing by Denmark and 
urged politicians to stop appeasing fundamentalists. She also said that 
although the Prophet Muhammad did a lot of good things, his decree that 
homosexuals and apostates should be killed was incompatible with democracy.
Media 'fear'
Ms Hirsi Ali wrote the script for Submission, a film criticising the 
treatment of women in Islam that prompted a radical Islamist to kill Van 
Gogh in an Amsterdam street in 2004.
Papers in several European nations have reprinted the satirical Danish 
cartoons. People have died in violent protests over the cartoons, which have 
also been denounced throughout the Islamic world. The drawings include an 
image of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.
Ms Hirsi Ali said the furore over the cartoons had exposed the fear among 
artists and journalists in Europe to "analyse or criticise intolerant 
aspects of Islam".
>From a report by BBC News, 9 February 2006

_______________________


Finally, I would like to pass on the warning I will put in the introduction 
to my own coming blog, as it deals with aspects of the same concerns:

We on the left, while constantly vigilant anti-imperialists, must be 
careful, in order to forge and focus our vigilance, how we criticise the 
actions of Western powers, what we castigate them for, and who we make 
common cause with. Four examples will show what I mean. The first three 
involve Africa, as it happens, and each leads  typically to generalising 
about an African situation, therefore to dehumanising the people involved by 
stereotyping them, one side only as perpetrators, the other side only as 
victims.

My first example was when Noam Chomsky, not long after 9/11, slipped into 
making an odious comparison. He said that Clinton's bombing of a 
pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (on wrong intelligence that it may be an Al 
Qaeda arsenal) led to the death of more people than the attack on the Twin 
Towers in New York. It was a rhetorical shock tactic too far.

My second is the case of Somalia, the implosion of Mogadishu into perpetual 
violence, disorder and warlord misrule from 1990 until today. The assumption 
is almost universal that the American troop landing and presence had a lot 
to do with it. Quite false. The US landing and presence was a feckless 
imperial knee-jerk, just as UN sponsored negotiations may have led to some 
kind of truce. But beyond that,
 the upheaval had nothing to do with outsiders. It started and continued 
with the contest for control over the capital between the leaders of two 
sub-clans of the same clan, at the very moment they should have been united 
in celebration: they had bravely and triumphantly, in house to house and 
street battles, ousted the president-turned-dictator and his heavily armed 
followers from the capital.

How did they snatch chaos from triumph? Mainly at fault was the leadership 
of the sub-clan which had marched into the city from their base to the 
north, claiming they were the rightful army, though the other sub-clan had 
done most of the fighting. The incomers fired their RPGs at the hotel owned 
by the rival leader - and 25 years of hunger and war began, on which no 
marines or blackhawks had any effect.

Third, there was a pointed reminder in a reader's letter from Scotland to a 
liberal left development magazine, under the heading "Just intervention":
"I am not a military or warlike person. I am not generally a supporter of Mr 
Blair. I was against the invasion of Iraq. But I have to say that you were 
quite wrong to include Sierra Leone in a list of interventions implied to be 
unnecessary and brutal. I have not yet met a Sierra Leonean who is not 
grateful for what the British Forces have done there in 2000 and since, or 
who does not believe that their actions were necessary, proportionate to the 
threat, and effective. The activities of the so-called rebels were utterly 
horrific; and we were the outside power under special obligation to help."
My fourth case may seem almost arcane, but it is actually at the heart of 
the problem: left misconceptions, and tactics, which are useful to corporate 
imperialism.
It is in the form of extracts from a post-Cancun commentary in 2003 by an 
activist in Canada, Yves Engler. It was headlined: How the Left swallows the 
anti-subsidy line.
He wrote: commentators, from the left and right, on the WTO ministerial 
meetings
in Cancun seemed fixated on the harm wealthy nations' farm subsidies are 
doing to the world's poor. From the tone of these pundits one could be 
convinced that European, Japanese, Canadian or US farm subsidies were at the 
root of all the poor world's problems.

The Guardian, for instance, bellowed, "there is only one way to address the 
growing gulf between rich and poor countries: abolish agricultural 
subsidies.


We should ask what country has ever escaped poverty by depending on 
agricultural exports? Dependence on commodity production has, in fact, 
always been a recipe for underdevelopment.

Egyptian author, Samir Amin, has a much better explanation of how 
agricultural subsidies should be understood. "Let us be perfectly clear: the 
Americans and the Europeans, like every other country or group of countries, 
have the right to formulate national or collective policies. They have the 
right to protect their industries and their agriculture, and they have the 
right to institute income-redistribution measures to meet the demands of 
social justice. To argue for the dismantling of the edifice supporting such 
rights in the name of some hypotheses of abstract liberal economic theory is 
another matter entirely.

"Should we, for example, demand that the industrialized nations reduce their 
levels of education and training, or their capacities for research and 
development, so as to bring them into harmony with less-developed countries 
on the grounds that their advantages in those domains have given them a 
competitive edge in world trade?

"Regretfully, the strategy for which the nations of the South have opted, 
which is to let the North set the rules of the liberal game, to achieve 
"free market" principles, makes no sense."


While some good came of Oxfam and others "on the left" railing against farm 
subsidies, in showing up the hypocrisy of rich countries, it is 
disconcerting that segments of the left seem to believe that agricultural 
subsidies are a significant cause of world poverty. More disturbing is that 
some of these groups' policy prescriptions consist of reinforcing economic 
liberalism.

It tells us how effective neo-liberal propaganda has been. Even many 
progressive people can only see the world through its lens. Perhaps it's 
time for a new lens.

So wrote Yves Engler. But there is a broader, and more sinister geopolitical 
motive in making rich country farm subsidies a main issue in the global 
anti-poverty campaign. It is to use this as a stick to beat the EU which, 
with France in the lead, strongly supports farm subsidies, exercising their 
right, and for the reasons, which Samir Amin outlines, as a tool to protect 
their economies and societies.

Never mind that the ACP tariff agreements with the EU protected the smaller 
African and Caribbean banana farmers, while the rival US tariff arrangements 
simply protected their own Central American mega-growing companies - with 
the WTO ruling for the US banana republics in the name of "free trade"! - 
Europe can be conveniently dumped in with the US, even by the anti-poverty 
left, in committing the ultimate sin, by holding on to subsidies.

The EU, particularly France, is dragged through the mud all the time in the 
British and American liberal media on this. And the liberals fall for it 
every time. Crusaders like George Monbiot, and many others, use this stick 
constantly, perhaps ingenuously - let us hope not disingenuously - because 
it is an easy issue to unite third world nations against all developed 
nations. In all EU, G8 and other forums, Blair pumps the issue, to round on 
the French.

On this, as on several other issues and events I have outlined here, it is 
indeed time for a new lens. A lens which can be used with more caution, but 
giving more clarity and a sharper focus, for firmer coordinated action.

I hope, by this my first entry, dredging up the exceptions, to shake up any 
one who expects to be lulled into a sequence of shared assumptions, or 
support for the tactical dictum that my enemy's enemy is my friend. There is 
no case in history where the good of humankind has been served by following 
that dictum.

Awareness of imperialism, outfacing it, countering its worst effects where 
possible, whether as Lula tries to in Brazil, like Nestor Kirchner in 
Argentina, Chavez, Morales, Castro of course - and even as Malaysia did to 
stop meltdown - is a necessary condition for broad-based national 
socio-economic progress. But it is not sufficient, if we make common cause 
with backward or oppressive political or cultural regimes. We must admit 
those cases where the upheaval is self-inflicted.
We cannot win over people, or win out, if we try to suggest that Bashir of 
Sudan, collaborator with the biggest massacre of Africa's oldest communist 
party 30 years ago, or Saddam the thug and betrayer of Arab nationalism who 
bloodily ousted a left regime 40 years ago, or Mugabe, manic betrayer of the 
liberation movement, are to be sided with, against all Clintons, or every 
British peacekeeping force.

We have to confront and defuse the imperialist weaponry, the corporate 
assault, where it really targets us, and to refresh and rebuild our own 
regional alliances and markets.

I will conclude, for a kind of synthesis, with the words of David Harvey, 
who points the way I think we should go, at least as a first step into the 
foreseeable future.

In his book The New Imperialism, 2003, geographer and social theorist David 
Harvey makes the case for a "New Deal" brand of imperialism in which the 
responsibilities of government are carried out by a "benevolent coalition of 
capitalist powers." Against foes of globalisation, he argues that the 
effects of global capitalism are undoable, that advocates of social reform 
must learn to work with it.


These were his words, from an interview with Nader Youssoughian.

"I share with Marx the view that imperialism, like capitalism, can prepare
the ground for human emancipation from want and need. In arenas like public
health, agricultural productivity, and the application of science and
technology to confront the material problems of existence capitalism and 
imperialism have opened up potential paths to a better future.

The problem is that the dominant class relations of capitalism.set in motion 
imperialist forms dedicated to the preservation or enhancement of the 
conditions of their own reproduction, leading to ever greater levels of 
social inequality.The US has no option except to engage in such practices 
unless there is a class movement internally that challenges existing class 
relations and their associated hegemonic
institutions and political-economic practices.

This leaves the rest of the world with the option of forming, for example, 
sub-imperialisms under the umbrella of US power. The danger is that 
anti-imperialist
movements may become purely and wholeheartedly anti-modernist movements
rather than seeking an alternative globalisation and an alternative 
modernity that makes full use of the potential that capitalism has spawned.


.I do not believe the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movement is 
currently
strong enough or even adequately equipped.In my own view, there is only one 
way in which capitalism can steady itself temporarily and draw back from a 
series of increasingly violent inter-imperialist confrontations, and that is 
through the
orchestration of some sort of global "new" New Deal, the abandonment of 
neo-liberalism and the reconstruction of some sort of redistributive 
Keynesianism as well as a coalition of capitalist powers ready to act in a 
more redistributive mode on
the world stage (a Karl Kautsky kind of ultra-imperialism).
Would people on the left be prepared to support such a move (much as 
happened in leftist support for social democracy and new deal politics in 
earlier times) or to go against it as "mere reformism"?  I am inclined to 
support it, otherwise the mass consequences of a capitalist collapse would 
be far more catastrophic now than in the past simply because of the way so 
much of the world's population is now integrated into, and crucially 
dependent upon, the functioning of the world market. We need
to think alternatives and to begin building them now in the interstices of 
capitalism.

.This question concerns, in very general terms, the issue of alliances that 
can be pinned together to realise reformist political goals. All manner of 
oppositional forces, including dissident voices (like those of George Soros, 
Paul Krugman or Joseph Stieglitz - if they really mean what they say) within 
the dominant classes, have a potential role to play.

My own view is that we should have one foot firmly planted within those 
conventional political movements that are prepared to take up the cause of 
reform and one foot implanted in the radical movements seeking more 
revolutionary solutions.
This straddling of political positions can sometimes be uncomfortable or 
even unbearable. But I think it wise to recognise that reformists and 
revolutionaries can often make common cause in a particular conjuncture, the 
only discernible differences sometimes being the long-term goals rather than 
the short term actions.

Given the political and military violence of neo-conservativism coupled with 
the economic violence of neo-liberalism, it seems to me that a powerful 
reformist movement deserves every ounce of support we can give it."

Thus spake David Harvey. Let's look at common ground, and try it.

Tony Hall
February 2006