Leo Panitch
The meaning of September 11th for the Left
Forthcoming in Studies in Political Economy.
An
earlier version of this paper was presented to the panel, From
anti-globalization to anti-war, sponsored by the
New Politics Initiative, Ryerson University, Toronto, Nov 10, 2001.
The unresolved debate about whether the third millennium on the Christian calendar began with the year 2000 or the year 2001 was settled on September 11th. In political terms, the turn of the century will now forever be associated with the atrocity of that day -- the most spectacular act of symbolic violence against imperial power in history - and with the war unleashed by the imperial state in its aftermath. But no sense can be made of the appalling predicament that all humanity at the beginning of the 21st century now faces unless it is put in perspective of the two interrelated defining features of the last half of the 20th century: the rise of the global American capitalist empire and the defeat of progressive nationalism and revolutionary socialism throughout the globe. Opposition to capitalism and imperialism is inevitable, but the atavistic form it took on September 11th can only be understood in terms of what, on that day, tragically filled the vacuum of the 20th century Left’s historic defeat.
Whatever responsibility the Left must itself take for this defeat, there can be no doubt about the major role played by American imperium’s world-wide suppression of progressive forces. One aspect of this was its cynical sponsoring of reactionary religious fundamentalism as a tool against the secular left in that part of the world on which it has now made war, and from which it now stages that war. This is in no sense to excuse the perpetrators of the terror themselves, neither for the immorality of their deed, nor for its sheer counter-effectiveness insofar as it was designed as a response to imperialism. For its inevitable effect was precisely to stoke the self-righteous flames of imperial power, and fuel their spread.
The effect that the declaration of war in the name of peace, civilization and freedom has had in terms of unleashing the coercive power of the state must be measured domestically as much as internationally. In the USA, the Republican Party has always been made of a coalition of free marketeers, social conservatives and military hawks, and the latter are now in the driver’s seat. The increased influence gained by the military, coercive and security apparatuses in the wake of September 11th could be seen in that the first victory of the new war was scored at home, ironically against the US Treasury. It involved breaking the latter’s long-standing resistance (lest it would demonstrate the continuing viability of capital controls) to freezing bank accounts allegedly connected to terrorist organizations (arrangements the US state has always known about since it was involved in establishing them to facilitate money transfers to many of its favoured terrorists in the past). Of course, the effect has been felt much more personally and directly by the 1100 people added because of Sept 11th, without any pretence of procedural justice, to the two million already in US prisons. And the much broader and longer term consequences of the enhanced power and resources of the coercive and security apparatuses will be inevitably felt by the American Left for many years to come.
The legislative cover for this in the USA is called The Patriots Act, but the same thing is being replicated in all the states which are known as the imperial power’s closest allies, but are really is most immediate tributaries. The adoption of new coercive measures reflects considerable direct pressure from Washington, but it is also fuelled internally in those states by a disturbing sense of patriotism, not so much to the state in question as to the imperial power itself, a sense of patriotism emanating from a very substantial part of the mass citizenry as well as from the political and media elites. The disturbing phraseology if the Canadian anti-terrorism law about to be enacted (Bill C-36) is outdone in the European Union which has advanced a definition of terrorism so broad that it encompasses ‘offences which are intentionally committed by an individual or group against one or more countries, their institutions or people with the aim of intimidating them and seriously altering the political, economic or social structures of those countries’. It then goes on to includes vague reference in this respect to ‘urban violence’ and to the ‘structures’ of ‘international organisations.’ Talk about ‘the local to the global’!
The international consequences of the declaration of war are already being felt much more directly of course by the people of Afghanistan, who are being subjected to the terror of an aerial bombing campaign as part of an explicit attempt to scare several of the warlords who have supported the Taliban in recent years leaders to come over to the American side (at which point the direct bribery which has worked so well in the past will do its work again). But this war, even if it gets extended to other states in the region (and elsewhere), will not end terrorism and the Americans know it. Wesley Clark, the American general who commanded the NATO forces in the war on Yugoslavia, in an interview in the Financial Times in early October said as much: ‘There is an old expression: "I have a hammer, find me a nail."…If terrorism were a problem that could be solved by a hammer, we would have hammered it out a long time ago.’ That said, there is one aspect to this war that is indeed just about ‘getting’ bin Laden. Nothing is more infuriating to an imperial power than its own ‘operative’ having turned into its enemy. The sheer cynicism, but also the sheer foolhardiness, that governed strategy at the time bin Laden was used by the US was dramatically revealed in an interview Le Novel Observateur conducted in 1998 with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981, Madeleine Albright’s tutor, and recent author of the American imperialist handbook, The Grand Chessboard:
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?
Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported… [and] given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
September 11th was ‘blowback’ from this - with such vengeance as could only have been stoked up over half a century. (The term was first coined in Washington in 1954 as the CIA and Pentagon bureaucrats mulled over the consequences of their decision to overthrow of the left nationalist Mossadeq government in Iran). Bin Laden will pay for it with his life, and with that of the Taliban regime. He deserves to, although those untold many who suffer death from the ‘collateral damage’ surely do not. But the larger strategic imperial visions at play go far beyond al Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. They have much to do with what was still unsettled after the ‘liberation’ of Central Europe and end of the Cold War. The countries that have since the break-up of the Soviet Union been patronisingly called the ‘stans’ in the State Department and the Pentagon have been finally prised from the Russian sphere of influence. The American bases that are being established in post-Soviet Central Asia will not be dismantled with this war, and these will now circle the world from Japan to the China’s western border. The Russian resistance to the building of the National Missile Defence ‘shield’ – with all this implies for the militarization of space - has been definitively broken (or should we say bribed away?).
The world-wide coalition against terrorism that the US has built is explicitly designed to legitimate and sustain every state’s repression of the separatist groups (along with other dissident groups) within them. Less well known than the free hand being now given to the Russians in Chechnya is the free hand being given to the Chinese Communist-capitalist elite to act against the Muslim separatists in their westernmost province (where already 20 groups have been banned and many hundreds of people have been arrested in the past months) without fear that this will be used by the Americans against them in their ongoing negotiations over the terms of integration into the capitalist world economy. Consistency need not be a principle of imperial strategy, and this was never more evident than in the stunningly quick about face the USA has made since yesteryear’s war on Yugoslavia, when the justification for that war was the right of self-determination in the old Communist world for every ethno-nationalist group that demanded it.
The fact that war this time is not being prosecuted through NATO, much less the United Nations, but through a loose coalition in which all the world’s states are deemed to be ‘with us or against us’, is explicitly intended to allow for maximum unilateralism of strategic and tactical military action by the imperial state itself. Winning the agreement, however ultimately craven, of every single NATO state to the war on Yugoslavia was not easy, but it was worth it as a necessary means of establishing definitively that the imperial power would remain the policeman of Europe in the post-Soviet era. As for the United Nations, and reviving the Pearsonian nostrum that such a war could only legitimately have been prosecuted under its auspices, one should not forget what Stephen Lewis, Canada’s Ambassador to the UN at the time, had to say about the Gulf War:
The United Nations served as an imprimatur for a policy that the United States wanted to follow and either persuaded or coerced everybody else to support. The Security Council thus played fast and loose with the provisions of the UN Charter… In some respects…[this] may have been the UN’s most desolate hour. It certainly unnerved a lot of developing countries, which were privately outraged by what was going on but felt utterly impotent to do anything – a demonstration of the enormous power of US power and influence when it is unleashed.
It is difficult to believe things would have been much different had it suited the Americans to follow the UN route this time. Yet the contradictions of ruling the world are great. They were indeed brought home to Americans horribly on September 11th, but they are more likely in the immediate future to be measured in the instability that this war, and the extended American reach that accompanies it, brings about in places initially very far from New York and Washington (although its not impossible that the recession and the brutalities and costs of this war will eventually bring this to the imperial heartland too). A good deal of this instability will take anti-American forms, and this will only reinforce the self-delusion that ‘they hate us because we elect our leaders’ we have from the Bush administration (a self-delusion only matched in the immediate aftermath of September 11th by the apparently widespread credibility in the Muslim world given to the absurd rumour that Jews were forewarned from going to the World Trade Towers that day).
America is now requiring all states to restructure their coercive apparatuses to fit America’s strategic concerns. This would seem to reinforce the requirement that the imperium had already set out to them to restructure their economic apparatuses to fit with what Gowan has called Washington’s Global Gamble. But the possibilities of ‘blowback’ are visible everywhere, albeit nowhere more graphically today than in Pakistan. This is a country where 85-90% of the state budget is devoted to paying interest on the debt and for a military and coercive apparatus largely supplied and, in the case of the security service, even fashioned by the American imperium, leaving almost nothing for anything else. Little wonder, with no public educational system to speak of, that the poor in Pakistan – who do not vote for fundamentalist parties in any great numbers - have nevertheless been sending their boys to the religious madrasas, where they are indoctrinated in fundamentalism. And little wonder the imperium now worries about such a state losing control of its nuclear arsenal.
The consequences are incalculable precisely because the imperium, even if it has military bases everywhere, cannot rule except with and through such states. As Ellen Wood puts it in the conclusion to the most recent volume of the Socialist Register, A World of Contradictions:
The very detachment of economic domination from political rule that makes it possible for capital to extend its reach beyond the capacity of any other imperial power in history is also the source of a fundamental weakness… This is one of the deepest contradiction in today’s global capitalism: that the nation state is more than ever the point of concentration of capitalist power, the indispensable medium without which capital cannot navigate, let alone dominate, the global economy. National states implement and enforce the global economy, and they remain the most effective means of intervening in it. This means that the state is also the point at which global capital is most vulnerable, both as a target of opposition in the dominant economies and as a lever of resistance elsewhere. It also means that now more than ever, much depends on the particular class forces embodied in the state, and that now more than ever, there is scope, as well as need, for class struggle.
This has enormous implications for the Left today. Whether opposition to Imperialist Globalization will take rational and productive forms, as opposed to the destructive and irrational forms, will largely depend on the extent to which there can be a socialist renewal of the Left in each country around the world. Into the vacuum left by the failures and defeats of the old Left have not only stepped reactionary religious fundamentalisms but also the forces in every country that have fuelled the global anti-globalization movement. Will this movement now turn itself into an anti-war movement? I hope it can become that, but at the same time much more than that. One of the promising aspects of the anti-globalization movement, compared with the anti-war movement of the 1960s, has been that this movement has increasingly designated itself as anti-capitalist. This is also an important advance over its self-designation as an ‘anti-free trade’ or ‘anti-corporate’ movement through much of the 1990s. But the targets of that movement have still all too often been the international economic and financial institutions of globalization -- behind which stands the imperial state itself and the multitude of large and small, rich and poor nation states through which and with which it rules, or seeks to, the globe.
The dead end that, quite literally, religious fundamentalisms lead to, whether in North America or anywhere else, reinforces the need for socialist renewal in each country with the central goal of a democratic reconstitution of state power against today’s state-constituted capitalist American empire. Our task is to support those forces – such as the Pakistani Labour Party - wherever they exist, while throwing ourselves into this process at home, such as are already in train here through the New Politics Initiative and the Rebuilding The Left project to create new institutional expressions to renew the prospects of an independent socialist Canada. Only in this way can the impossible options demanded today by Bush, Blair and Bin Laden, of being either with them or against them, ultimately be refused. There has to be an alternative for the 21st century other than what September 11th and its immediate aftermath represent. That alternative can only be defined in terms of independent but cooperative democratic socialist states. It is up to us to start now developing the political movements and organizations that will make such states possible.