Category: Politics

Lord Ahmed’s Bounty

by Matthijs Krul

The news today in London is that the Labour Party is considering expelling their notorious peer, Lord Ahmed, for allegedly having put a bounty on the head of some war criminals.(1) This is a practice hardly unheard of – just recently, the United States set a $10 million bounty on the head of the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-i-Toiba, and they had previously done the same with Osama Bin Laden, various Iraqi figures, and so forth. This corsair approach to political operations stands the Party of Order in good stead, no doubt. But they had not counted on the wily Lord Ahmed, who is reported to have responded to this in the Pakistani Express Tribune by putting an equal sum of money on the heads of… Presidents Obama and G.W. Bush.

Lord Ahmed denies having done so, and claims his statement was merely an expression of opposition to the adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. This may be so. But the substance of the claim is interesting. Firstly, it seems fair to say that if the wholesale murder of civilians is to be deplored – which it surely is – on the part of Lashkar-e-Toiba, who are held responsible for the assassinations in Mumbai in recent times, then the same should surely apply to the orchestrators of several wars of a nature most devastating to civilians in the Middle East. Secondly, the immediate response on the part of the “Labour” Party to prepare to expel Lord Ahmed is telling. From its very origins onwards, this so-called “Labour” Party has failed every challenge set before it in the domain of chauvinism and expansionism abroad. It joined the Asquith government in the imperialist butchery that was World War I. It supported the campaigns against the ‘tribes’ in Iraq, the ‘neutrality’ policy in Spain, the rejection of a Soviet alliance in 1939; it supported colonization and imperialism in the Empire and worked as vigorously to maintain these possessions as one would expect of a society of shareholders in rubber futures. It supported the Suez adventure, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the adventures in Iran; it supported the two Gulf Wars and the occupation of Afghanistan, the fourth such by the United Kingdom. It has, in other words, appeared as the agent of the labour aristocracy in foreign affairs, the ‘left foot of imperialism’.

In a time when the International Criminal Court expresses the universal aspiration of mankind to a justice that is more than just partial, national, and one-sided, and when due to the forces of global ‘free trade’ the various nations and peoples are made ever more immediately aware of each other’s circumstances, such institutions as the ICC and the UN nonetheless manifest themselves as the Kantian-universalist banner under which imperialism is now forced to march. This makes their real functioning all the more despicable and all the more transparent. The ICC has only prosecuted and imprisoned those defeated or isolated by the great powers, it has been totally unable to challenge the militarism of these powers themselves. This despite the fact the Nürnberg precedent clearly indicates that “waging aggressive warfare” is a hanging offense. Under these circumstances, then, to clearly outline the hypocrisy on the part of the US government and its lackeys abroad is an important political step. To identify the American rulers as not being above reproach and not to be taken in by their sanctimonious aura of “good will to all men” is of great significance for any critical political understanding.

Militarism and chauvinism pervert the judgement of the citizen, lead to pointless hatred and slaughter, and achieve only division where their should be unity between working people. Active support for imperialism is tantamount to support for those classes in whose interest it is undertaken. Choosing the cause of the white labour aristocracy in the West over the cause of internationalism and the cause of the global working people is a political and strategic blunder, as great as that of 1914. For those reasons, whether or not Lord Ahmed actually said what is alleged, we say that he should have said it. And if push does come to shove on this matter, we say it is not the Labour Party that should expel Lord Ahmed, but it is Lord Ahmed that should expel the Labour Party, which has betrayed the interests of working people worldwide.

“My deeds upon my head! I crave the law,
The penalty and forfeit of my bond.”

1) “Peer suspended after bounty claim”. BBC News (April 15, 2012). http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17723890

Neoliberalism Closes the Nets Ever Further

by Matthijs Krul

Where there is capitalism, there will sooner or later be crisis. And where there is crisis, there will be resistance – and where there is socialism, there will be organized resistance. All the governments of West and East know this, and for this reason, everywhere the net is further closed, everywhere the political domain is restricted and the freedom of speech and of political expression further infringed. More and more the neoliberal era of capitalist rule shows its true face: in the name of liberating the citizen from the oppressive powers of the big state, it everywhere extends these powers and sharpens the knife it holds at the throat of anyone who might threaten to resist. In preparation for the 2012 Olympic Games in London, it has been announced that there will be “UK’s biggest mobilisation of military and security forces since the second world war”, and “during the Games an aircraft carrier will dock on the Thames. Surface-to-air missile systems will scan the skies. Unmanned drones, thankfully without lethal missiles, will loiter above the gleaming stadiums and opening and closing ceremonies. RAF Typhoon Eurofighters will fly from RAF Northolt. A thousand armed US diplomatic and FBI agents and 55 dog teams will patrol an Olympic zone partitioned off from the wider city by an 11-mile, £80m, 5,000-volt electric fence.”(1) So much for the spirit of peace and international sportsmanship the Games were to promote. The nakedness of the athletes has now been substituted with the nakedness of these displays of military power. The British state is imposing these on a city which only recently saw widespread rioting as a result of the exorbitant costs of living, the enormous rise in inequality, and the behavior of the state’s police force. It is for this reason that in Britain, comrade Seymour was quite right to oppose solidarity with the police forces in their campaign for the right to strike – at this particular juncture, such a right can only be used in order to give the police more resources with which to beat the working class into submission. Not coincidentally it is in the borough of Newham, where much of the Olympic activity will take place, that a great scandal has recently erupted over the aggressively racist behavior of the local police. Petty repression can only persist if backed up by displays of power, so as to say: “resistance is futile”. Continue reading “Neoliberalism Closes the Nets Ever Further” →

George Galloway’s Election Victory

by Matthijs Krul

The return of George Galloway is a political fact. Once expelled from the Labour Party for calling on British soldiers to resist the war in and against Iraq, he became the epitome of opportunistic, celebrity politics since. Under the banner of the Respect Party – a coalition of Trotskyist groups, Labour left locals, and largely Muslim petty bourgeois – he was elected MP for Bethnal Green & Bow, defeating the Labour candidate Oona King. Yet he failed to deliver on anything useful while in parliament. One must not overstate the significance of parliamentary elections as a vehicle for radical social change, but precisely a representative of a small party, agitating on the left, must make sure to do everything possible to maximize the parliamentary presence. One must either reject the parliamentary road altogether, which is leaving a possible lever on the state power unused and uncontested to our political opponents, or one must partake in it, and take it as seriously as one can as a forum for exposing the opposition and expanding practical means of socialist politics. What is disastrous are strategies which try to achieve neither, either by choosing parliamentary methods and abandoning all other modes of struggle altogether, or by the opposite, entering parliament and doing nothing at all with it.

Galloway undertook the latter – for a salary several times that of the median worker, he failed to vote or take part in parliamentary activity almost entirely. Between 2005 and 2009, only eleven MPs voted less often than he did, and that includes the abstentionists of Sinn Fein and the speaker and his deputies, as well as two MPs who died in office. Galloway claimed to have compensated for this by his public activities – making speeches against imperialism, challenging the reactionaries of the US Senate in their own chamber, and so forth. But he had precious little to show for it. Galloway also plays to religious, sectarian sentiments; he fails to clearly distinguish a meaningful anti-imperialism from hypocritical sycophancy towards regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria; the Respect Party itself has consistently shown its opportunism in its dalliances with reactionary religious groups and movements in the UK. His embarrassing participation in the reality TV programme “Celebrity Big Brother” only underlines his activities as being fundamentally opportunistically self-interested, self-aggrandizing, and making a mockery of socialism, which does not need such ‘friends’. Continue reading “George Galloway’s Election Victory” →

What Should Socialists Propose?

by Matthijs Krul

This is a copy of an article written for Demand Nothing.

In the quest for a scientific socialism, I think it is fair to say the former element has received undue attention compared to the latter. For several generations now, Marxists (and for that matter other socialists) have focused on defining capitalism, discerning its laws of motion, explaining and theorizing what it is and what it does, and how it is historically differentiated. This is an important task, that is not to be denied. Yet a socialist (or communist) politics is not the same as a socialist theory, and it does not have the same requirements. Like all radical movements of whatever stripe, a socialist politics is confronted immediately with the fact that its achievements need to be threefold: first, it must convince people of its understanding of present society; secondly, it must convince them that change is desirable; finally, it must convince people that change is possible, and in what way – including what it would look like. There is not necessarily any order of priority to these, although theorized for practical purposes, they will tend to flow from each other in that sequence. However, ‘centrist’ or ‘moderate’ politics – i.e., the politics suitable to the ruling establishment – has an easier job of it. All they need to do is the first, and they can safely ignore the other two, as they do not serve their purposes anyway. Liberals and conservatives do not need to convince anyone of systemic change, and can rest lazily on the comfortable bed that is technocratic management of existing conditions.

Sadly, the history of Marxist theorizing so far has seen a vast accumulation, if one may make that joke, of books detailing the first element, at the expense of the others. Continue reading “What Should Socialists Propose?” →

Excursus on Marxism and Religion

by Matthijs Krul

The rise of a movement known as the ‘New Atheism’ has given cause to much controversy among the left on the right attitude to develop towards religion. For a long time, the secularization of Western societies and the decline in active religious participation seemed to have made the question altogether redundant, but the open theoretical confrontation with theology initiated by the New Atheism has created an equal counter-reaction. Neither side has shown necessarily impressive motives here – there is little doubt that much of the anxious fervor of some of the New Atheist writers, such as Sam Harris, has been influenced by the perceived growing threat of Islam in Europe and elsewhere; a threat to secularism, freedom, equality, and perhaps even modernity itself, as the school of ‘Eurabia’ would have it. Equally, much of the response by religious figures has shown the same venal dishonesty, banality, and special pleading that has characterized ‘sophisticated’ apologetics for most of human history. Continue reading “Excursus on Marxism and Religion” →