The Left Meets the Right
On the face of it, a book with such a title does not have much to say to anarchists. But I believe it does. Firstly, because the book is in fact questioning the modern history of what he views as “the Left” (broadly speaking, Marxist groups, liberals and middle-class Labour supporters), and in doing so raises some uncomfortable questions for us also. Secondly, by taking the measure of the arguments of someone like Cohen, it could strengthen our ideas and their practical application.
It initially concerns the experiences of a courageous Iraqi Trotskyist named Kanan Makiya, and his struggles to alert the world to the nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime. By Cohen’s account, the Left hailed him in the 1980s for exposing the reality of life under Baath Party rule and the West’s support for Iraq as a counterweight to the militantly Islamic Iranian regime which had come to power in 1979. However after Iraq’s attempted annexation of Kuwait led to defeat in the Gulf War, and the US and Britain subsequently established partial control over Iraq in the form of no-fly zones and the sanctions regime (the UN’s “oil for food programme”), Makiya was then spurned by many of his former supporters because he believed that the war should have been carried on so as to overthrow Saddam. Their hatred for US imperialism overrode everything else, even the recognition that Saddam’s Iraq was a modern form of fascism.
Cohen links this attitude of significant parts of the Left back to the 1930s, when the British Communist Party dutifully followed Moscow’s line after the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 and were more committed to struggling against the British government than the Nazis. He sees it paralleled in recent years by leftists praising the Iraqi resistance to the American-dominated “coalition of the willing”, even though this resistance is in large part made up of Islamists, Baathists and al-Qaeda supporters. Further examples of Marxist organisations he denounces on various grounds are the Workers Revolutionary Party (for the abuse of members by its leader Gerry Healy and support for Middle Eastern dictatorships in return for money), the Revolutionary Communist Party (which denied Serbian ethnic cleansing) and the Socialist Workers Party (for their alliance with the reactionary Muslim Association of Britain in the Stop the War coalition).
Anarchism
What he has to say about anarchism is in the context of Noam Chomsky’s adoption of it at the age of 13. Cohen describes it as “an honourable political philosophy that did not implicate itself in any of the criminal ideologies of the twentieth century from colonialism to Islamism, but also a facile one because its supporters could never put its theories into practice”. Taking the first half of that sentence, since the book details an appalling litany of political crimes, it should surely have given Cohen more pause for thought as to why and how anarchists were consistently on the side of freedom and not implicated in those crimes. The second half is mistaken in its blanket assertion about lack of practice. The efforts of such as Makhno in the Ukraine, Durrutti in Spain, and a host of attempts at communal living, free schools, etc in many countries should not be simply dismissed. However the uncomfortable truth is that some of our greatest examples are many decades old, and overall anarchism has historically largely existed on the margins, the way it is treated here showing how that marginalisation continues today. The problem remains how to make it relevant and practical for vast numbers of people, for of course anarchism could never be imposed or decreed in the manner of even the most “democratic” governments.
A Leftist Who Went West
Cohen is an example of someone from the “democratic” Left (Christopher Hitchens and Francis Wheen are other prominent examples) who see the world opened up by the admittedly terrifying objective of Islamists - a global theocratic dictatorship - as the overriding political reality of our time. It is certainly true that in its full flowering Islamism is a totalitarian movement with no room for dissent. It is also true that this was not widely understood for some time because legitimate grievances (e.g. the oppression of Palestinians or Chechens) were and continue to be confused with the underlying political objective of a “godly” dictatorship.
But the stance of Cohen and others overrides any sense of logic or history. What he and his ilk are asking us to believe is that current British and American policy has cut itself free from a history that includes “imperial wars in Kenya (and) Malaysia…the saturation bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos…the American-backed overthrow of the democratic governments of Iran, Guatemala and Chile” (pages 160-161). This partial list in itself is revealing of the background of politicians and writers such as Cohen. They know about this history, and it can be assumed that such knowledge went into their political formation as people of the Left. Yet somehow governments with this sort of past are supposed now to be only interested in freedom and humanitarianism.
The break-up of Yugoslavia through the ethnic slaughters of the 1990s, followed by the cataclysm of 9/11, the event where Islamism went global and which does indeed demand fresh thinking from all of us, has seen them only able to view the alternatives as being “the West” or Islamism. Even though some of the book rightly locates the malaise of what passes for the Left in the West in its decades-old divorce from class-based politics (so old-fashioned, unlike today’s nineteenth century-style exploitation in the “developing world” or the resurgent bigotries of nationalism or religion) it cannot imagine anything beyond “democracy”. But since this term is never defined, it can only be assumed that Cohen sees no need to do so because he actually regards the present system - despite the concentration of economic power and widespread sense of powerlessness - as something that really does serve the people in general. In fact any notion of economic democracy is absent from the book, that very absence which makes parliamentary democracy so hollow.
Similarly he has little time for anti-globalisers and anti-capitalists. This stems in part from his notion that countries such as America and Britain are only “allegedly capitalist” because they are “mixed economies”. It’s good of him to show us this mistaken denunciation of a system organised for profit, which depends on private ownership (or state ownership which increasingly imports the working practices of the private sector) and generates a class-ridden society. Perhaps labels are less important than concrete consequences: “a billion people (live) in abject poverty…access to adequate sanitation (is) unknown to 2.4 billion”.
Where Cohen is on stronger ground is in attacking the inchoate ideas of “anti-capitalism”. It is true that these still need to become more of a positive programme rather than simply exposing the injustices of the present order. This is an international movement still in its infancy, albeit one of the most significant examples of resistance in recent history not least because it is so self-critical of its own emerging programme. But he downplays how the incessant attacks of the ruling class and the mainstream media on anything outside the “centre ground” of politics, and how collapse of so-called communist and socialist parties has meant younger generations of activists are largely cut off from the past and consequently lack so much of what needed to understand the present. He also shows not a trace of understanding a politics in which all are involved rather than voting for others to run their lives.
Any War But the Class War
Where Cohen is at his most challenging and troubling is in his rejection of neutrality in the actual, and often literal, battlegrounds of the day. That said, for a thoughtful writer, he seems to have a remarkably untroubled approach to war. For him, rearmament to oppose the Nazis should have happened much sooner; bombing the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved the lives of thousands of troops; in the Gulf War, the US should have pushed on to Baghdad; the rest of Europe should have opposed Serbia militarily, or at least armed the Bosnians; and, in quite the most disgusting passage in the book, he accuses the millions of anti-war protesters who marched in February 2003 of doing so “to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime”. The prospect of massive slaughter presumably had no influence.
Nonetheless, if it is true that the Marxist left or the various shades of liberal have preferred to ignore the current plight of the Iraqis except insofar as it can be blamed on the Western forces, anarchists cannot continue on this path. For among our core beliefs are freedom, class unity and internationalism. However I am not aware of any organised, sustained effort to support or encourage anarchists in Iraq, or in the region generally. Yet this area of rampant authoritarianism and religious lunacy is precisely the kind in which a mass anarchist movement is both least likely to thrive and most in need of it.
The problem for anarchists of how to respond to wars can be traced back to the First World War, at a time when it could be reasonably hoped that international working-class unity might stop the war in its tracks. Subsequently most anarchists, such as Malatesta, held to this position. This standard anarchist position is a coherent one: ‘No War But The Class War’. This isn’t a cop out. War is essentially the result of competition over resources, which is seen as natural in capitalist societies, to whom war is therefore tolerable. Conversely, anarchists see scarcity or competition over resources as a fundamental social and economic failure caused by the ruling class, and we therefore reject involvement in or responsibility for their wars. The idea that we should be called upon to solve problems modern capitalism has created, without the removal of capital itself, is therefore nonsensical to the committed anarchist. We feel no responsibility for resolving capitalism’s problems, instead giving whatever help we can to relieve suffering resulting from wars and attempting to change the world before any more break out.
But that is very easy in a hypothetical situation and it is well known that one of our otherwise most coherent theorists, Kropotkin, supported Britain and its allies against Germany in World War One. Another example is that of participation in the Spanish government by some anarchists during the Spanish Civil War, along with Republicans battling Franco’s fascists. We look back on these episodes with some embarrassment because those anarchists failed to act as anarchists and support ‘no country’. Maybe, given the analysis above, we could account for them with the benefit of hindsight and suggest these mistakes were made at the point where war was still only emerging as a vital tool of capitalism, or that a clearer position on wars was reached only after those earlier mistakes had been made. On the other hand, no small number of people moving towards anarchism from socialism will have asked, ‘how can anarchists help those really being oppressed in the here and now if they don’t support wars defending the weak from the strong?’ Many anarchists have faced these questions, and so maybe it would be useful at this point in the development of our theoretical analysis to explore another line of argument.
We might start by suggesting that the point in both the cases of WW1 and the Spanish Civil War is that an actual situation of life or death struggle was not a case of clear-cut revolution versus reaction. Let’s consider that if anarchist politics mean anything they have to deal with such muddied situations and make a difference, and that only this sort of response can hope to attract and build support. What happens if we pursue this line of thought rather than rejecting it out of hand?
In the present day one of those situations is Iraq, and Cohen would reasonably ask if we prefer the political suffocation of Baath totalitarianism to the limited room to breathe in which, for example, socialists and communists can to some extent be visible again. Yet this has come about not through mass revolution, but because of an invasion by imperialist powers with dubious motives. This is not to support the invasion, with all of its slaughter, but to recognise that there is a real dilemma. If we believe that the kind of democracy and economy being implemented in Iraq are a fraud which ultimately will only really benefit the ruling class (both domestic and foreign), what are we doing to relieve the suffering, to seek allies and to offer a constructive alternative? Similar questions were asked of Anarchism in recent conflicts in the Balkans, and of course it was another of these which was the spark for the imperialist war in 1914.
Whether or not anarchists should be challenged by Cohen’s accusations, we are not doing ‘nothing’. An important example of concrete action by anarchists is away from the front line, in support of asylum seekers from repressive regimes, for example of Iraqi Kurds, Afghanis, Congolese and Darfuris, and as part of this putting forward a No Borders position. Anarchists have supported community-based movements of war-resisters & war-survivors in countries ranging from Serbia, which Cohen would consider an aggressor state and therefore ‘legitimate target’, to the Lebanon, a ‘victim’ in recent years. This is at the same time as taking a principled anti-war stance.
Naivety
Much of what Cohen writes is criticism, whether it be of Marxists, liberals, anti-capitalists, impenetrable theorists like Michel Foucault, or Noam Chomsky (Chomsky’s anti-Americanism is such that, allegedly, he has been an apologist for authoritarian regimes like Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge and Milosevic‘s Serbia. I think his position is rather more complex than that). His own stance seeps out from time to time, chiefly in the form of support for democracy and universal human rights, and concludes in support for the Euston Manifesto (available at www.eustonmanifesto.org ). This document, although Cohen did not contribute to it, well illustrates certain strands of contemporary social democratic and liberal thinking. Much as the McCarthy-era in America produced a reaction in the form of what was called anti-anti-Communism, these thinkers hold to anti-anti-Americanism. While it is of course mistaken to hold America responsible for all the problems the world faces, this absurd position tries to uphold it as a beacon of freedom and yet not deny its war crimes, support for dictators and right-wing parties, and the obscene gulf between the rich and the poor the economic system it promotes results in. To this mindset it is not possible to criticise both America or Britain to anything like the degree such regimes as China, Sudan and the Middle Eastern dictatorships merit: this would be “moral equivalence”. Being bombed to destruction or being tortured produces the same agony everywhere, yet to the Eustonians these are “lesser (though all too real) violations of human rights” when they are “closer to home, or are the responsibility of certain disfavoured governments”; what we should really turn our attention to is “other violations that are flagrantly worse”. This moral equivalence line is a great favourite nowadays. So Israel should not be criticised because of Hamas , nor America because of al-Qaeda. Or if there is an admission of the justice of what critics say, it will be quickly minimised by directing our attention to “other violations that are flagrantly worse” (even if, say, Chinese exploitation of workers is actively assisted by Western investment).
The desperate situations throughout the world today demand more far-reaching solutions than the continuing election of elites (miscalled democracy), and an economic system that generates parallel elites, can ever hope to produce. The blindness of Cohen and his cohorts to this is their own form of the naivety of which they are so quick to accuse others.