No one likes to be called a turncoat. In politics as elsewhere, it’s sometimes easier to imagine that the world changed while you yourself maintained your original position. To the untrained eye it might look like certain leftist writers swapped political poles in the wake of 911 – but according to them in fact it was the rest of the left that moved. What looked like their rapid shift right-wards was just relative motion.
The logic runs: By forming alliances with Muslim groups the anti-war left has fallen into the hands of the far-right, or rather has itself become right-wing. The old left has leapfrogged straight over neo-conservatism and into the arms of ‘Islamofacism’.
In consequence the only option for a true left-winger is to ally with the neo-cons, now situated to the left of the old left. Rather than fight American militarism, a true leftie should support it, as the best hope of achieving traditional leftwing goals. Only when radical Islam is defeated can true leftists then get back on with the job of tackling capitalism.
Tortuous as this is – ally with the right to support the left – there’s a more fundamental reason not to take it at face value. Marxist or not there’s one tenet of Marxism that seems essential to anyone bothering to call themselves left-wing: Power boils down to economics not belief. Material wherewithal trumps any ideology.
This is only to say that is decidedly un-leftwing to find yourself siding with capital. It clashes with a fundamental leftist belief: Whatever the political situation, the rich are to blame not the poor. This is not just class stubbornness, but a rational observation. If anyone has the opportunity to bring an awful situation to a happy end it has to be the players with the economic advantage. You may have to pan out a little to see it, but the rich and powerful are always the ones ultimately wielding the power.
Accordingly, Britain was the only player capable of bringing liberty to India and Ireland; Indonesia and the US were the only people who could stop the slaughter in East Timor; Israel and the US are the only players capable of bringing peace to Palestine. It’s written into the military and economic imbalance.
Of course opposition movements are vital players but any changes they secure can only be concessions. Whether by fair means or foul, the disadvantaged can make no greater mark on the world than the material power they manage to attain or influence. For the poor and the oppressed political victory always takes the form of an act by the wealthy and powerful. It’s always the wealthy that have to start doing something, or stop doing something, if things are to get better.
Ownership overrules desire. Whatever you might want for the world it won’t happen if you don’t have the material clout. You can threaten human existence in speeches and writing, but your reach will never be greater than the extent of your material back-up. However frenzied some Islamists might seem, clearly they are ants next to the western military-corporate elephant. That power imbalance in itself should be enough to make any real leftie suspicious of this argument.
Of course the cruise-missile ‘left’ might counter that Nazism was ‘only’ a set of ideas and yet it grew to wield huge and terrible power. This only proves the point. All those neat uniforms and kinky boots didn’t pay for themselves. Cleary there was big money poured into that party and that movement. Whatever connections they might have in the oil industry no Islamic terror cell can commission and requisition large sectors of industry. They can’t befriend Raytheon and Boeing as Hitler befriended Messerschmitt and Heinkel.
Some mainstream commentators have taken to calling Islamic killers ‘dusty nuts’ and ‘rag-heads’, so they at least seem to acknowledge the point. Unlike Hitler, Osama doesn’t have a mass contract with Hugo Boss.
So eventually the whole Islamic threat to humanity boils down to, “They’ll get a nuke from an enemy state and use it on us because they’re just plain nuts/because they want to blackmail the world into converting to Islam. It’s the absurd end of an absurd position. No further theory or evidence needed, all complexity reduced to a classic red scare: Pure evil is poised to savage us, it will listen to no reason.
Rather than some exotic new left-ism this is quite conventional talk for those drifting to the right: The world really did change after X, these new devils really are devils, the IRA and Communists and Celts were schoolboys by comparison. For the first time in history, ideas so malevolent they can overcome a colossal material imbalance. Meanwhile oil – the centrepiece of any traditional left-wing analysis – slips off the radar. The material commodity at the heart of global production is outshone by unprecedented evil.
If upon examining the world you reach the conclusion that the wealthy and powerful are our best hope, fair enough, you are not on your own – but in so doing you forfeit any meaningful connection with the left. If experience leads you to believe that prayers and sermons and speeches can usurp Raytheon and Citibank any claim on the left evaporates. You might call yourself a liberal of some sort, and you certainly fit the bill for a classic right-winger, but you have no place on this cloud.
Thursday 29 March 2007
Sunday 4 March 2007
Political Pole-Reversal
Only a fool or a cynic would blame a Brazilian street urchin for its plight. It’s a terrible start in life, and quite understandable that it frequently ends up terrible too. Given a good home who knows? Some of yesterday’s barrio children might have become today’s concert pianists or physicists, only opportunity never knocked.
Conversely we all acknowledge the responsibility of the individual, to some degree. We all have the gut feeling that subsidising truly slack behaviour does no one any favours. Child, co-worker or politician, we should never bankroll shameless shiftlessness – it only encourages them.
But while we all have these capacities, for sympathy and its polar opposite, scorn, we vary greatly in who we apply them to. Some blow a gasket over insider dealing but speak-up for welfare claimants. Some bang on about sickness benefit but rush to defend the poor downtrodden CEOs. One person’s slacker is another’s victim of circumstance. One person’s welfare scrounger is another’s victim of de-industrialisation, one person’s corporate tax dodger is another’s victimised captain of industry.
Political belief is intimately related to this question – who do you blame for the state of things? Among us, who is it who drags us down, and who that offers us the chance to ascend? Both left and right agree that the central purpose of politics is to empower the worthy and deflate the cynical and the idle, it’s just that we differ over who is who.
Or to put it the other way round, we apportion blame and praise in accordance with our political beliefs. Our politics dictate whether we sympathise with an individual or social group or condemn them as the cause of their own woes.
Although there are no hard and fast rules it seems fair to say that the conservative mind tends to see the materially disadvantaged as responsible for their own condition. Likewise, they tend to see the wealthy as the agents of their own good fortune. It’s unavoidable if you are to maintain the core conservative assumption: The justice of the existing order. Conservatism must in some sense entail the desire to conserve things as they are, in the belief that the current system is fundamentally fair, just and meritocratic.
It can only follow then that domestic and global inequalities are a reflection of ability, rather than tyranny: The poor of Glasgow and New Orleans make their own beds. The governments of Ethiopia and Bangladesh are responsible for their own starving masses, and those starving masses should be ashamed for not ousting such corrupt leaders. To the ‘right’-minded it would be foolish to subsidise such indolence, as wrong as it would be to subsidise a teenager’s drug habit.
Obviously anyone bothering to call themselves left-wing would likely to reject all this and offer up different candidates for blame – the owners of production, western capital, the arms industry – they would more likely see the poor as the victim of the rich.
I say likely because as I said before there are no hard and fast rules. Humans can be very contrary beasts. Many supposed leftists care passionately about domestic living standards but remain quite indifferent to the welfare of foreigners. Nevertheless, certain arguments and world-views do tend to gravitate towards to the same sort of people. Certain views and theories mesh more neatly with our existing ones, reinforce them. Sympathise with the ‘war on terror’ and you’ll most likely also sympathise with Israel but scorn Chavez. Scorn the Bush camp and you’ll probably tend to sympathise with the Palestinians and the Bolivarians but scorn NATO.
Political beliefs accrete over a lifetime, but the ones we glean are the ones that appeal to our existing political outlook. It’s a bit like electrolysis. We each set out with a left and a right terminal, each biased to attract a certain type of belief and argument. By middle life one terminal has often grown much fatter than the other. We might have laid down a thousand reasons to commend Tony Blair, or a thousand to condemn him.
Of course people do change, sometimes violently. Overnight they reject the whole basis of their previous beliefs, a whole lifetime of observations. When right turns to left – the usual direction – all manner of previous convictions find themselves abandoned or reversed. Old sympathies turn to scorn, or are swept under the carpet; people and organisations previously vilified find themselves re-appraised, even commended. It’s like a sudden reversing of polarity. Deep seated beliefs strip off one terminal and rush to form incongruous lumps on the other.
To whatever degree they are aware of it, Aaronovitch, Cohen and Hitchens are currently undergoing this tiresome process – perpetual revision of previous beliefs, writings, conversations, alliances. The saints they spent the first half of their lives defending, suddenly morphed into sinners. Years of criticism and analysis reduced to embarrassment - something to argue away, or revise out of all recognition, rather than utilise.
Meanwhile on the right terminal a new sort of argument starts to accumulate; layer on layer, thicker each day.
Conversely we all acknowledge the responsibility of the individual, to some degree. We all have the gut feeling that subsidising truly slack behaviour does no one any favours. Child, co-worker or politician, we should never bankroll shameless shiftlessness – it only encourages them.
But while we all have these capacities, for sympathy and its polar opposite, scorn, we vary greatly in who we apply them to. Some blow a gasket over insider dealing but speak-up for welfare claimants. Some bang on about sickness benefit but rush to defend the poor downtrodden CEOs. One person’s slacker is another’s victim of circumstance. One person’s welfare scrounger is another’s victim of de-industrialisation, one person’s corporate tax dodger is another’s victimised captain of industry.
Political belief is intimately related to this question – who do you blame for the state of things? Among us, who is it who drags us down, and who that offers us the chance to ascend? Both left and right agree that the central purpose of politics is to empower the worthy and deflate the cynical and the idle, it’s just that we differ over who is who.
Or to put it the other way round, we apportion blame and praise in accordance with our political beliefs. Our politics dictate whether we sympathise with an individual or social group or condemn them as the cause of their own woes.
Although there are no hard and fast rules it seems fair to say that the conservative mind tends to see the materially disadvantaged as responsible for their own condition. Likewise, they tend to see the wealthy as the agents of their own good fortune. It’s unavoidable if you are to maintain the core conservative assumption: The justice of the existing order. Conservatism must in some sense entail the desire to conserve things as they are, in the belief that the current system is fundamentally fair, just and meritocratic.
It can only follow then that domestic and global inequalities are a reflection of ability, rather than tyranny: The poor of Glasgow and New Orleans make their own beds. The governments of Ethiopia and Bangladesh are responsible for their own starving masses, and those starving masses should be ashamed for not ousting such corrupt leaders. To the ‘right’-minded it would be foolish to subsidise such indolence, as wrong as it would be to subsidise a teenager’s drug habit.
Obviously anyone bothering to call themselves left-wing would likely to reject all this and offer up different candidates for blame – the owners of production, western capital, the arms industry – they would more likely see the poor as the victim of the rich.
I say likely because as I said before there are no hard and fast rules. Humans can be very contrary beasts. Many supposed leftists care passionately about domestic living standards but remain quite indifferent to the welfare of foreigners. Nevertheless, certain arguments and world-views do tend to gravitate towards to the same sort of people. Certain views and theories mesh more neatly with our existing ones, reinforce them. Sympathise with the ‘war on terror’ and you’ll most likely also sympathise with Israel but scorn Chavez. Scorn the Bush camp and you’ll probably tend to sympathise with the Palestinians and the Bolivarians but scorn NATO.
Political beliefs accrete over a lifetime, but the ones we glean are the ones that appeal to our existing political outlook. It’s a bit like electrolysis. We each set out with a left and a right terminal, each biased to attract a certain type of belief and argument. By middle life one terminal has often grown much fatter than the other. We might have laid down a thousand reasons to commend Tony Blair, or a thousand to condemn him.
Of course people do change, sometimes violently. Overnight they reject the whole basis of their previous beliefs, a whole lifetime of observations. When right turns to left – the usual direction – all manner of previous convictions find themselves abandoned or reversed. Old sympathies turn to scorn, or are swept under the carpet; people and organisations previously vilified find themselves re-appraised, even commended. It’s like a sudden reversing of polarity. Deep seated beliefs strip off one terminal and rush to form incongruous lumps on the other.
To whatever degree they are aware of it, Aaronovitch, Cohen and Hitchens are currently undergoing this tiresome process – perpetual revision of previous beliefs, writings, conversations, alliances. The saints they spent the first half of their lives defending, suddenly morphed into sinners. Years of criticism and analysis reduced to embarrassment - something to argue away, or revise out of all recognition, rather than utilise.
Meanwhile on the right terminal a new sort of argument starts to accumulate; layer on layer, thicker each day.
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