The rise of warfare capitalism

Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

Stephen Marshall
(Guerilla News Network, $13.22.
Available from <> and <amazon.co.uk>)

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism

Naomi Klein,
(London: Allen Lane, £25.00)

 

‘When new (forms of capitalism) emerged in the past …they sparked a flood of analysis and debate about how such seismic shifts in the production of wealth were altering the way that we as a culture worked [and…] the way [we…] process information. The new disaster economy has been subject to none of this kind of far reaching discussion.

(Naomi Klein, 2007)

There are those who think Naomi Klein has sold out. According to Stephen Marshall’s important but flawed book, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing, she’s just another ‘fallen liberal’ who either provides ineffective and impotent criticism of the present neo-conservative order or actually feeds it. It’s because of the essential truth in much of what Marshall says about former Left renegades in his book, that I decided to review it and Klein’s new work together. My conclusion is that while Klein’s acceptance of notions like ‘capitalist globalisation’ and ‘new world orders’ allude to the all-pervading impact of Stalinist(1) theories on left-wing thought, she has grasped that the ‘war on terror’ is now historically necessary for a decadent and declining imperialist capitalism that cannot sustain conconditions for capital accumulation through the law of value alone.

One problem with Marshall’s book is his annoying American habit of using of the word ‘liberal’ in place of ‘radical’ or ‘socialist’. What Marshall maps, but does not understand, in his highly readable book is a process whereby a capitalism too decadent to produce ideas of its own looks to a decaying Stalinist Broad Left to sustain its hegemony. This is actually more evident in Britain than the US and, indeed, much of Marshall’s book concerns itself with the British situation. Here, New Labour has completely replaced the Tories as the main party of British capitalism by hijacking the historical Labour Party in violation of its own constitution. But while Tony Blair had almost zero experience of labour movement politics and was certainly no intellectual, those who theorised and rendered the process possible – in terms of a Gramscian war of position or construction of a hegemony – were former members of the Communist Party or members of the Demos think tank. Names like Peter Mandelson, Stuart Hall, Martin Kettle and Martin Jacques spring to mind immediately

What particularly interests me about Marshall’s book is its dissection of Christopher and Peter Hitchins’s politics and what it says about the absorption of former Trotskyists into the dominant hegemony since the 1990s. We know that all these democratic centralist cults of the 1970s and 80s looked like secular versions of the Moonies and that their claim to be the vanguard of the working class was a sick joke. What is instructive about Peter Hitchens’ interview with Marshall is how clearly Hitchens saw the decline and disintegration of these Trotskyist sects as the demise of any credible left opposition to Thatcherism. Hitchens actually describes the 1990s as the first time in history that a Marcusian society without credible opposition came into existence.(2)It was in this context that he says, quite candidly, that he decided to join the winning side. While Stuart Hall, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, decided to reconcile the Labour Party to the inevitability of Thatcherism, at least Peter Hitchens became an ‘honest Tory’. Then again, he had a bit more to betray – and further to fall.

What Marshall also alludes to are significant episodes in Hitchens’ personal Calvary. The first was the reluctance of the Left to criticise the ANC in South Africa after its bloody suppression of its dissident faction from 1984. This involved the rape and murder of ANC dissidents both in the notorious Quatro gulag run by the MPLA in Angola and in Cuban prison camps. In this way did the ANC prepare itself for its reconciliation with South African capitalism, court the West, and lay the foundation for the corrupt and self-serving ANC regime that one sees in South Africa today. A similar attitude characterised the Left’s attitude to Zimbabwe and recreated the attitude of Stalinism towards the Spanish POUM in 1936 – and that of the Fourth International towards the murder of Vietnamese Trotskyists in 1949. Peter Hitchens once presented a TV documentary about the ANC’s betrayal of the South African revolution that was pretty much on the money and way ahead of anything the ANC’s left apologists might have come up with.

Fallen liberals?

But Marshall is a little too all-inclusive and wholesale in his dismissal of a whole generation of former lefts, lumping them together as ‘fallen liberals’. (3)Is there really no difference between someone like Nick Cohen (who supported the war in Iraq for what might be called principled reasons) and people like David Aaronovitch and Stuart Hall (who began life as Stalinist reactionaries) and Peter Hitchens (who went from being a Trotskyist to a Tory)? During the late 1990s, Cohen was the most scrupulous critic of New Labour in the mainstream media and particularly good on the racist regime at Campsfield Detention Centre. No way has this guy sold-out, simply because he recognised Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda as dangerously reactionary forces that need to be defeated. He saw the Left supporting Milosevic or the compliance of the UN in Bosnia, Kosovan and Rwandan genocides and said ‘Never again’. So did I. That’s why I initially supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq before their abject subordination to the economic and strategic interests of a declining imperialism forced me to withdraw that support. If Nick Cohen is a sell-out then so am I.

When Peter Hitchens accuses the SWP of anti-Semitism, questions the absurd idea that Israel is responsible for all of the problems of the Middle East and slams the Left for defining Hizbullah as freedom fighters, he is right. At its simplest, one could be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic when there was still a strong working-class movement in the Middle East. But that working-class movement wasn’t destroyed by Zionism. It was destroyed by a popular front between Stalinism and secular Arab nationalism that then collapsed, enabling Islamic fundamentalism to fill the vacuum. These days, I would argue that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism and the NUJ’s boycott Israel campaign (as an example) is an anti-Semitic campaign.

Another problem with Peter Hitchens is that he dismisses as irrelevant the kind of single issue campaigns that arose from the implosion of the Trotskyist Left, and which later fed into the global anti-capitalist movement. Now I might say that these groups were theoretically illiterate, ultra-left and incapable of connecting with the core of the working class; but does this make them irrelevant? Clearly, Stephen Marshall doesn’t think so because this is the historical milieu from which he is derived. He isn’t British and probably isn’t old enough to remember when Trotskyist groups were household names in the UK, or when a Trotskyist party was the obvious thing for any youngster on the left to join. Marshall has clearly started by considering Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein as his political heroes and become disillusioned with their political leadership. Only then has he sought out other species of former left who feed the dominant hegemony and have ‘sold out’.

If Hitchens had been a bit more open with Marshall (and if Marshall had interviewed Hitchens from a former Trotskyist perspective) he might have emphasised just why anarchist views became so attractive to young people in Anti-Fascist Action and the Anti-Poll Tax Union in the 1990s. Basically, there was a layer of left activists who were sick of the bureaucratic methods, e.g. of the SWP and Militant, and the way that they would parachute into various campaigns in an opportunistic way. These groups also showed utter contempt for things like environmental issues that were becoming more important to activist youth and the layers that later came together as the global anti-capitalist movement. The collapse of the Soviet Union simply amplified the view of Russian Marxism as totally irrelevant to the contemporary historical situation given the abject failure of democratic centralism as a political practice. But the contempt between the declining Trotskyists and the ultra-lefts of the single issue campaigns was mutually reinforcing.

Around the same time that Hitchens was reinventing himself as a Tory, David Rose of The Guardian was denouncing the Stop the City protest (in 1989) as thoroughly infiltrated by Third Position fascists.(4) This enabled a former SWP hack to defend state repression of left-wing protest. A few years later and he was describing the London Metropolitan Police as a force for socially radical change just weeks before Stephen Lawrence was murdered. A few weeks after that the Metropolitan Police bludgeoned anti-fascist protesters in Welling. Like Rose, Ken Livingstone denounced the protesters as having brought it on themselves.(5) Shortly after this, the Labour Party started trying to present itself as the main party of British capitalism (with Rupert Murdoch’s support) specifically by claiming to be a party of law and order. The role of former lefts styled as left-realist criminologists in this process was decisive.(6)Again, this provides a useful case study for precisely what Stephen Marshall is on about – namely, elements from the former Left becoming increasingly indispensable to the construction of a bourgeois hegemony.

Resurrecting Stalinism?

Clearly, what has focused Marshall’s mind is how individuals involved with the global anti-capitalist movement have lurched from ultra-leftism to opportunism much more rapidly than did the Trotskyist sects who preceded them. What he observes, but does not entirely understand, is how a movement whose major theoretician was Noam Chomsky (whom Marshall derides as a ‘liberal sell-out’) was bound to resurrect Stalinism on its deathbed. This was what much of the Trotskyist Left did after Glasnost.(7)In Chomsky’s case, by arguing that capitalism was still expanding its productive forces, which had nothing to do with the law of value, Chomsky was actually saying that opposition to capitalism was pointless.(8)Albeit in a more radical sounding way, he was from the outset saying the same thing as Stuart Hall and Peter Hitchens. He also wrote off the working-class as a significant political force and therefore agrees with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that ‘the class war is over’. How then, does he propose to change things? People can run around the world from G8 summit to IMF conferences with placards saying ‘down with everything’ for only so long, before they undergo the same kind of basic allergic reaction as Hitchens.

Marshall’s book also tells us something about the state of the Left and of the present anti-war movement. Having dumped the failed and discredited strategy of the Trotskyist groups based on democratic centralist vanguard parties, they seem to have started from a kind of ‘year zero’ (basically 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union). Prefigured in the years of the anti-poll tax revolt, when many young activists turned against the SWP and Militant, this was a period in which a number of single issue campaigns were entirely bereft of Marxist theory and largely disconnected from the core of the working class itself. Of course, the fact that the working-class had been politically defeated and that there weren’t any major class battles going on (other than the Liverpool Dock Strike and in Latin America) didn’t help. What happened with the global anti-capitalist movement was that it used the Internet to join the dots of these various single-issue campaigns without a Marxist program to enable it to root itself in the working-class. This is why within the global anti-capitalist movement infantile and often deeply reactionary and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (references to the Illuminati and all that crap) proliferated at the expense of Marxism. It was compounded to some extent by the naïve belief that anyone who made anti-imperialist gestures or used anti-imperialist rhetoric was somehow an ally; and by the embrace of a theory of capitalist globalisation that was actually Stalinist. (9) Hence members of this sixties New-Left-for-slow-learners wore Che Guevara t-shirts even though Guevara was a Stalinist who hated the working-class and shook hands with Trotsky’s killer, Ramon Mercarder. Hence the reluctance of this new Left to attack the ANC or Mugabe or support military action against a fascist like Milosevic and the tendency to style Saddam Hussein as an ally.

The Irish experience: local eccentricities and global trends

One of the reasons why I initially supported the war in Iraq was that I had seen this new Left, and what remained of the old Trotskyist groups, other than the WRP, shamefully supporting Serbian fascism and the inaction of the UN over genocide. Another was that I saw in the Irish anti-war movement in particular, a passle of Brit-hating, IRA-supporting, anti-Semitic shits who saw Israel as a metaphor for Northern Ireland and vented their al-Qaeda-loving, anti-Semitism accordingly. Faced with that its easy to think that ex-lefts like Henry Macdonald and Nick Cohen in The Observer (Irish edition, mainly) Kevin Myers in The Irish Times and Eoghan Harris in The Sunday Independent have a more credible position. I even started to think that David Aaronovitch has his good points – despite everything I said when I was an undergraduate and he was a student union bureaucrat in a right-wing Communist Party.

I know most of these Irish writers. With principle and integrity, all have at some time rightly denounced IRA terrorism and the use of Republican rhetoric by the gangster capitalists of Fianna Fail. In particular, they have shown how the relentless reference to a ‘United Ireland’ has driven Loyalist workers in Northern Ireland to support political reactionaries like Ian Paisley. I also still think that a simplistic, immediate withdrawal from Iraq would cause a horrendous sectarian blood-bath (for all that neo-conservative foreign policy has contributed to the crisis in the first place).

But unlike Eoghan and Kevin Myers and (to a lesser extent) Henry MacDonald, I haven’t lost sight of why I hold these views on Northern Ireland remaining British. These are that Republicanism is a barrier to working-class and socialist politics and that Sinn Fein’s claim to be a socially radical party is a fraud. When was the last time that any of these writers called for the establishment of a Labour Party in Northern Ireland? Harris and Myers don’t. And it gets worse! In the last election, they both defended Bertie Ahern over the growing controversy concerning his personal finances and called for votes to Fianna Fail.

Even before 9/11, Eoghan Harris and Kevin Myers had began to attack republicanism as a species of left-wing politics, particularly in the deeply reactionary Irish Independent newspaper. This was in part a consequence of their Stalinist abandonment of working-class politics and in part a response to the tendency of Trotskyist sects to afford left cover to the IRA. Unionists were seen as allies because they were political conservatives and the openly Thatcherite Progressive Democrats praised for keeping the Fianna Fail-dominated government on the ‘sensible’ path. The environmental movement came in for particular, irrational, attack by both Harris and Myers. At one point, Myers argued that there was no difference between the Irish Left supporting Cuban Stalinism and the Irish State and Catholic Church supporting Franco in the 1930s. They have also defended free speech for fascists and holocaust deniers and seen in any right-wing forces in Irish politics potential allies against republicanism.

This got particularly ugly after a ‘Love Ulster’ march in Dublin in 2006 precipitated a riot in O’Connell Street. There were a number of contributing factors to this riot. These included: the stupid way that the Unionists went about organising the march; the fact that the Garda Siochana are useless at public order; the hysteria of the press and media in the build-up to the march; the fact that someone had died in Garda custody shortly before; the presence of loads of republican and lumpen pubs between Parnell Square and Dawson Street; and the fact that every lumpenized thug these days has a mobile phone.

As it happens a journalist for Indymedia (an Irish-based radical Internet site) happened to be in Dublin that day to interview a young woman sacked by Dunnes stores for wearing a trade union badge. As he had his camera phone on him, and being caught up in a riot, he obviously filmed it, then e-mailed it to a friend of mine at Queens University, Belfast. The result was that I was actually present when the Indymedia documentary, A Riotous Wake for the Celtic Tiger, was made. (10) Eoghan Harris, writing in the Sunday Independent, proclaimed that, as radical, left-wing forces who were aligned to Indymedia had filmed the riot, they must have had a hand in precipitating it. It thereafter figured, in Eoghan’s twisted reasoning, that if radical Internet sites were in some way a second column to al-Qaeda, a state crackdown on radical Internet sites was both necessary and justified.

Although mediated through the complex eccentricities of Irish politics, it is abundantly clear that the political trajectory of former Stalinists like Eoghan Harris and Kevin Myers is similar to that of their British counterparts to whom Stephen Marshall refers. The ‘war on terror’ has enabled the coercive state to consolidate its attacks on democratic rights, particularly fueled by racism, in such a way as to strengthen the state executive against its legislature, transform the law into a resource of those in power and criminalise dissent. Everywhere however, it is the former Stalinists and leftists who have intellectualized the process in much the same way that they helped New Labour to reconcile the electorate to the inevitability of Thatcherite capitalism and to abandon working-class politics altogether.

A good example in point here is Peter Hain who, in 1984, wrote a really important book on the attack on democratic rights in Thatcher’s Britain. He was also one of the worst offenders on the Broad Left, when it came to taking a pro-Republican stand on Northern Ireland and alienating the Loyalist working-class from socialism. This latter point was remembered by Loyalists when Peter Hain became Northern Ireland Secretary and when he was once more cuddling up to the IRA for a different reason – because they are now necessary to the reproduction of conditions for capitalist exploitation throughout Ireland as a whole. When it comes to the rest of the UK however, Hain is to the fore in defending prolonged detention, the criminalisation of British Muslims and a return to the Suss Laws that even the cops don’t want!

Fictitious capital

Which brings me to Naomi Klein’s new book. Far from being the sell-out that Stephen Marshall claims, I would argue that Klein shows significant evidence of having moved to the left since she wrote No Logo in the 1990s. After all, No Logo was little more than a radical consumer’s manifesto and reminiscent of Susan George’s The Debt Boomerang, which lectured big business to change its wicked ways. In The Shock Doctrine Klein seems to grasp not only that the ‘war on terror’ is now vital to state repression of the Left (particularly in the US) but to capital accumulation as well. This doesn’t sound like a sell-out to me.

In writing No Logo, NaomiKlein’s point of departure was probably provided by Chomsky, and I doubt that she’d even read any Marxism up to that point. Most of the American Left, after all, define themselves as ‘liberals’ rather than ‘socialists’. In The Shock Doctrine, however, she’s making arguments consistent with those of Hillel Ticktin in the early 1990s, both in Critique and The International 10. Core to these arguments is an understanding that capitalism can no longer regulate itself, through the law of value alone, without massive intervention from the state. It also explains the growing ‘irrationality’ of capitalist foreign policy and the absence of coherent strategy in place of any mythic ‘New World Order’.

Geoff Piling(11) argued that finance capital had in part been superseded by ‘fictitious capital’: that the advancement of credit as capital – through state intervention – is necessary to conditions of expanded reproduction and capitalist exploitation at this time. It also has implications for the nature of capitalism’s crises in the future. We see this in the rise of the private equity fund, using huge debts to buy major capitalist concerns, and in the sale of debts by major clearing banks which is amplifying the present tendency towards recession. But we also see this in the importance of military expenditure, paid for by the taxpayer, in keeping capitalism afloat.

The privatisation of war, in short, complements and is integral to a general crisis of fictitious capital.(12) It is ‘good for business’ under conditions where, otherwise, business isn’t so good. What may appear as a ‘sell out’, from Stephen Marshall’s perspective, is that Naomi Klein is now more concerned with what happens in Iraq after British and American troops withdraw than getting those troops out. I think, as does Nick Cohen in The Observer, that the immediate withdrawal of British and American troops without a proper exit strategy would lead to a sectarian blood-bath and that the Left should be more worried about organisations like Blackwater. In shifting her emphasis in this way, Klein isn’t selling out – she’s growing up. It is also a characteristic of the whole anti-war and global anti-capitalist movement at the moment that it needs to grow up, get its head round some Marxism and root itself in the core of the working class movement if it isn’t going to pave the way for more defeats, demoralisation and betrayal in the future.

Long before I turned opponent of the war in Iraq, I at least grasped the fundamental folly and obscenity of the policy of ‘extraordinary rendition’ and of treating unconvicted suspects as ‘unlawful combatants’ at the US concentration camp at Guantanemo Bay. This, I recognised from the outset, was the best possible recruiting sergeant for al-Qaeda. Where Naomi Klein has gone one stage further is in grasping how the drum-beat of still further wars is being fueled by poor intelligence derived from ‘interrogations’ (i.e. torture) carried out by private intelligence consultants in privately run torture centres outside the US. This complements the cherry-picking of the best building contracts in Iraq by American companies and the fact that the number of private security personnel in Iraq now outnumbers serving British soldiers three to one. It is further complemented by the profits to be made in the manufacture of hi-tech security fences and biometric ID. All of this is meticulously catalogued in Klein’s important book. She also seems to grasp that this is being driven more by a crisis of finance and fictitious capital than by any coherent strategic overview suggested in references to any New World Order.

It is unlikely that Foreign and Commonwealth Office bureaucrats would advise anything as stupid or reckless as an invasion of Iran. In fact, the FCO is likely to favour involving Iran in the running of Basra. However, the proliferation of influential think tanks in the private sector (often staffed by former Stalinists) is likely to influence executive government in overriding what their own experts have to tell them. We saw this with Bush and Blair either ignoring or ‘sexing-up’ the evidence on WMD provided by the CIA and MI6. This process can only be fueled by defective intelligence derived from the privatised torture of hapless goat-herders and taxi-drivers who have been flown around the world in private aircraft, to make money out of telling the political leadership what they want to hear.

What’s instructive about both Klein and Marshall’s books is that they confound the idea that serious opposition to capitalism died with the 1980s or the Soviet Union. They also demonstrate the need for the latest in a cycle of ‘new Lefts’ to grow up fast and get their heads around some theory, in order to acquire some maturity and not burn itself out. In the struggle to achieve this, opposition to the privatisation of war is likely to be more important than tub-thumping about a British and American military withdrawal. It also needs to look more carefully at the failures of previous generations of lefts if it isn’t going to repeat those errors and find itself ill-equipped to face the challenges of the 21st century.

We are headed into very dangerous times.

Notes

1. Stalinism: A current within the international working class movement compelled (for material and historical reasons) to accommodate finance capital by attacking Marxism and disconnecting it from the working class. Its theoretical method, to this end, was to attack the role of the dialectic and all reference to humanism, criticism and historicism, particularly in the works of the younger Marx (The Economic and Philosophical Mansucripts and Grundrisse). This process began with Bukharin’s revision of Marxist economics to justify the dogmas of socialism in one country and State Monopoly Capital (on which all theories of capitalist globalisation are currently based) but was carried further by Althusser’s revision of Marxism as a species of structuralist sociology – dismissing the writings of the early Marx altogether. As post-structuralism and post-modernism are dialogues with Althusser, emphasising his fetish for linguistics to disregard the primacy of political economy, they can be considered as a continuation of Stalinism’s attack on Marxism, for all that they feed the bourgeois hegemony more directly.This view is shared by Hillel Ticktin in Critique, by David McLellan (see his Marx, Fontana Modern Masters, 1975) by Cyril Smith (see his Marx and Communist Society, Index, 1988); Marx at the Millenium, (Pluto, 1999) and Richard Sennett of LSE (see his Authority and the Fall of Public Man).
2. Marcuse first referred to the society without opposition in One Dimensional Man (Boston University Press, 1964).
3. The term actually comes from James Ellroy’s novels, for example The Cold Six Thousand.
4. On Rose’s account, this is before he was recruited by MI6 and became an asset of the Anglo-American intelligence and security services. On which see ‘The view from the bridge’ in this issue – ed.
5. This is the same Ken Livingstone who supported Gerry Healy and sat with Alex Mitchell and Corin Redgrave on the editorial board of Labour Herald. Livingstone made the charge that MI5 had engineered Healy’s expulsion from the WRP as recently as 1989.
6. See for example Robert Reiner, The Politics of the Police (third edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000).
7. Since the split in the Fourth International in 1953, the Trotskyist movement had basically been divided in adapting to Stalinism in both its Zinovievist and Bukharinist forms. The latter (represented by Mandel, Grant and eventually Healy) ended up adapting to Eurocommunism proclaiming Glasnost the political revolution predicted by Trotsky, etc., while the Spartacists and Sheila Torrence’s Newsline proclaimed the hard-line Stalinists and coup plotters of 1991 as the true Bolsheviks.
8. This had previously been Rosa Luxembourg’s argument against Bornstein in Social Reform or Revolution.
9. On globalisation theory being Stalinist: Bukharin’s theory of State Monopoly Capital (by which Chomsky’s theories were informed) was based on a revision of Marxist economics that refuted the law of value and assumed that the productive forces under capitalism were still expanding. This was how the Stalinist bureaucracy justified coexistence with capitalism and ‘socialism in one country’. It also refuted any historical role for the working class as the creators of value and surplus value under capitalism. If capitalism was evolving from the nation state into a truly globalised system then it would still be expanding its productive forces and, as Luxembourg said in her polemic with Bernstein (The Accumulation of Capital, Merlin, 1978) it would actually still be progressive. If you were a starving Somalian you’d much rather be transformed into a first world wage labourer – but capitalism can’t do that. The productive forces are stagnating and whatever capitalist governments do just creates more and more crisis that they cannot control. Rather than a New World Order typified by globalisation what you have is globalisation tendencies coming into collison with capitalist nation states and bringing them into collison with each other. As Lenin and later Ticktin said, this is is not a charactersitic of an expanding capitalist system but one in decline and decay. Hence the historical necessity of getting rid of it. Globalisation theory affords no prospect of getting rid of capitalism and replacing it with socialism nor can it identify a class capable of performing this task. Hence, it is a continuation of Stalinism’s refutation of Marxism – albeit in a more radical form than that of the post-modernist academics who advise New Labour.
10. Eamonn Crudden’s A Riotous Wake for the Celtic Tiger, is on Indymedia Ireland as is Eamonn’s best documentary, Berlusconi’s Mousetrap.
11. Head of the WRP economics commission (of which I was a part) whose reports were serialised in Workers Press in 1995.
12. This much was anticipated by Marx in Capital Volume II as well as by Rosa Luxembourg in The Accumulation of Capital, and even by Rudolph Hilferding.