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A statement from the Resident Editorial Board of News and Letters CommitteesMarch 20, 2002 Confronting Permanent War & Terrorism: Why the Anti-War Movement Needs a Dialectical Perspective Any doubts that George W. Bush is determined to plunge the U.S. into a permanent war was dispelled by his State of the Union speech of Jan. 29, which posed an "evil axis" of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as potential targets of U.S. military intervention. At the same time, a Pentagon report leaked in March that calls for developing new nuclear weapons for use against North Korea, Iraq, Syria, and even Iran is a chilling indication of how far Bush is willing to take this militarism. It isn't that there is anything "progressive" about the forces Bush is attacking. The terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks are a serious threat to all who aspire for human liberation. We refuse to accept either side of this deadly equation, Bush or bin Laden. We must make our voices heard for a new alternative. Today's situation calls upon us to renew anti-war activism by developing a total view which expresses not only what we are against, but what we are for. Never has it become more important to connect political action with the development of a philosophy of human liberation. I. It appears from Bush's latest moves, which include imposing new restrictions on civil liberties and immigrant's rights-with hardly any opposition from the Democrats-that Bush is "dizzy with success." Now that the U.S. has defeated the Taliban faster than anyone expected, Bush is planning to attack states that have little or no connection with the forces which carried out September 11. The seeds of this predate Bush's election. When Clinton attacked Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, we wrote in News & Letters that this represented the opening of a drive for "permanent war" on the part of U.S. rulers. By now, it is clear that September 11 provided U.S. rulers with a long-sought after excuse to plunge this country into permanent militarism. The global implications of this is evident from the way Bush gave a green light to Israel's Sharon to launch a series of genocidal attacks against the Palestinians. Where Bush speaks of fighting a "permanent war" against terrorism, Sharon speaks of a "continuous war" against the Palestinians. If it were not for the carte blanch given to Sharon by Bush, the massive Israeli military attacks on Gaza and the West Bank of the past year would never have happened. In light of all of this, it has never has it been more important to develop a broad-based and effective movement against U.S militarism. Yet the experience since September 11 indicates that a serious reorganization is needed to achieve this. Many in the anti-war movement responded to events since September 11 by condemning the U.S. military build-up while refraining from issuing a serious critique of the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks or Islamic fundamentalism. By not directly speaking to the threat posed by forces like Al Qaeda, the anti-war protests failed to project an alternative to Bush's war against terrorism. As a result, they became smaller as the war proceeded-even though its outcome has increased the risk of new U.S. interventions. Some have even called for building alliances with fundamentalists. Jonathan Neale of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in Britain wrote, "There will be no hope of peace in the Middle East if the Left there cannot understand that the Islamists now lead the resistance...It would not be easy for the Left and the Islamists to march together. But if they did hundreds of thousands who support neither would fall in behind them." Nothing is further from the truth. In the Middle East and South Asia masses of people are not rallying in defense of the defeated Taliban or Al Qaeda because they know they are total reactionaries. The fall of the Taliban has actually led to an open outpouring of anti-fundamentalist sentiment, from Afghan women especially. Women have been in the forefront of the battle against fundamentalism for years. They were its first and most vocal opponents, as seen in the work of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), which attacked all forces which opposed women's freedom-be it the Russian invasion, the mujaheddin, or the Taliban. Support for RAWA over the past year has helped to breath new life into the international feminist movement. In light of this, to refrain from issuing a sharp critique of fundamentalist tendencies can only result in cutting the anti-war movement off from solidarizing with the true liberatory forces trying to transform society. The tendency to narrow the politics of anti-war protest to opposition to U.S. imperialism, without taking a firm stand against the forces which perpetrated September 11, characterizes not only the vanguardist groups which have tried to take control of the anti-war movement, but also independent radicals like Noam Chomsky. Chomsky denounced the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan as a hypocritical exercise in imperialist domination. Far more die from the effects of U.S. policies overseas, he says, than died on September 11. True enough. But why does Chomsky not discuss the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban? Why does he avoid critiquing Islamic fundamentalism, even while on a recent tour of India-a land that has experienced terrible fundamentalist violence, by both Muslims and Hindus? Why can't this anti-authoritarian anarchist bring himself to discuss anything but the crimes of the U.S.? Apparently, the power of U.S imperialism is so overwhelming that Chomsky feels we need to focus all our energy on opposing it alone. However such an approach is one-sided at best. Since September 11 U.S. workers have been asking questions like: What is the alternative to the bombing of Afghanistan? If Bush shouldn't be entrusted to defend us from terrorists, what should be done instead? By skipping over such questions, critics like Chomsky leave the field open for Bush or the Democrats to provide the answers instead. Today's situation calls for a comprehensive response because there are two reactionary forces at work, not one. By limiting ourselves to a critique of one side, we fail to penetrate capitalism's ideological armor. Capitalism has no problem deflecting one-sided and partial negations. It's strength lies in its ability to absorb critique by proclaiming that there is no alternative. Unless the we spell out the alternative, the rulers win out every time. II. The crisis facing today's anti-war movement is in part rooted in a failure to think through the difference between U.S. military intervention today as compared with the 1980s. In the 1980s the U.S. worked to crush revolutions in Nicaragua and Grenada and mass insurgences in El Salvador, Guatemala, elsewhere. The U.S. fought movements for national liberation, democracy, and social justice. It was therefore natural for opponents of U.S. policy to solidarize with the forces who were being attacked by U.S. imperialism. Today, the situation is different. The U.S. continues to repress and attack forces that try to remain outside of its control. However the U.S. is now not just fighting movements for national liberation, democracy, or social justice. It is also fighting dictators like Saddam Hussein and reactionary forces like the Taliban and Al Qaeda. When the target of U.S. intervention is movements for liberation, as in Nicaragua or El Salvador, it makes sense to oppose U.S. actions by supporting, even critically, the forces which the U.S. is attacking. But when the object of U.S. intervention is reactionary state powers and political tendencies, it makes little sense to respond in the same way. It simply isn't viable to oppose the U.S. in the name of the forces arrayed against it when those forces are reactionary state powers and fundamentalist sects. Nor is it viable to remain silent about the regressive politics of such forces for the sake of focusing on a critique of U.S. actions alone. When the U.S. battles outright reactionaries like Milosevic in Serbia or the Taliban in Afghanistan, a different response is called for. Otherwise, the ground of an effective liberatory politics is cut away. This is illustrated by the lessons of the Gulf War of 1991 and the war over Kosova in 1999. The Gulf War made it clear that we were in a new situation. In 1991 the U.S. did not attack a movement for national liberation. It attacked (for its own reasons) a brutal dictator who had earlier launched a genocidal campaign against a movement for national liberation, of the Kurds. For the most part the anti-Gulf War protests did not address the crimes of Hussein; in many cases a conscious decision was made not to, on the grounds that doing so would compromise the movement's focus against "U.S. imperialism." Though in the initial stages of the war some large anti-war demonstrations were held, as the war against Iraq unfolded the protests largely petered out. This was not inevitable. It flowed from the lack of a total view. This became clear at the end of war, when the Kurds and Shiites rose up against Hussein. Bush decided to call a halt to the war, allowing Hussein to crush the revolt. Faced with this, the anti-war movement failed to come out in support of the Iraqi masses' fight against Hussein since they had spent the preceding months focusing everything on critiquing U.S. actions alone. A similar problem emerged with Serbia's war against Bosnia and Kosova. Serbia's genocidal war against Bosnia (starting in 1992), in which 200,000 Bosnians were murdered and 30,000 Muslim women raped, was ignored by many in the U.S. The reason was that the U.S. didn't seem to be involved. For similar reasons, what also got studiously ignored was the genocide against 800,000 in Rwanda in 1995. When the U.S. intervened against Serbia in 1999, many leftists spoke out against the bombing of Serbia while ignoring the threat posed by Milosevic's attacks on the Albanian Kosovars. Many lost sight of the need to support the struggle of the Kosovars against Milosevic. By looking exclusively at U.S. actions, many leftists failed to solidarize with the victims of injustice. None of this means that U.S. military intervention has become "benign." U.S. military actions overseas, in Afghanistan included, have killed thousands of innocent people. The U.S.'s motives are anything but "humanitarian" and its acts must be opposed. Yet we are facing a new situation today which calls on us to rethink the very ground of anti-war politics, to ensure that we oppose not just U.S. but also its "Other" in such a way that we project the kind of new society we are for. Otherwise, we will be not effectively oppose the new militarism. III. Every historic moment gives rise to specific ideas which can advance or inhibit the struggle for a new society. Clearly the present moment centers on the U.S. drive for single world mastery. Its overwhelming power has led many to view "imperialism" as a conspiracy organized from a single imaginary center in Washington, rather than as the expression of the latest stage of world capitalism. This narrow view of imperialism is not based on an empty illusion. It is a false but necessary form of appearance, given the nature of the present moment. U.S. power has become so total that it seems "natural" to view it as the font of all evil. Yet this is a dangerous notion-not least because it dovetails with the position of reactionaries who reduce "anti-imperialism" to mean anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism. What drops from sight when "imperialism" is viewed as a kind of conspiracy, instead of as the latest stage of capitalist development, is any serious attack on the capitalist mode of production. Those who want to "transform the anti-globalization movement into an anti-war movement" could not be doing it a graver disservice. Instead of moving from a critique of the personifications of capital (the politicians, the head of world financial institutions, etc.) to an attack on the capital-relation itself, they take us back to a purely empirical attack on the rulers. We today face the following scenario: The U.S. is involved in a drive for single world domination. Faced with this, many activists focus exclusively on the ills of U.S. military intervention. However the U.S. often intervenes against reactionary regimes and tendencies. By failing to project a serious critique of them, leftists fail to anticipate the extent of mass discontent with such regimes. As a result, the Left is discredited while the U.S. pronounces itself "victorious." It has happened again and again-from Iraq 1991 to Kosova 1999 to Afghanistan 2002. In a word, the more the anti-war protests focus exclusively on opposition to U.S. policies, the less effective they prove to be in combating them. How can we break out of this vicious cycle and effectively oppose U.S. imperialism? The task begins by breaking from modes of thought trapped within the contours of the present, and reach out instead for a mode of thinking which expresses the kind of new, human society we are for. That mode of thought is dialectics, the dialectics of absolute negativity. Dialectical thought, especially as developed by the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism, has taken on new importance in light of the need to develop a ground of opposition which transcends the false opposites of imperialist war and terrorism. The "source of all dialectics," as Marx put it, remains the work of the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. To Hegel forward movement emerges from the negation of obstacles to freedom. It is not the embrace of what is, but its negation, that spurs development; not the acceptance of the given, but its critique, that is the path to liberation. Negation is not simply the refutation of the given, the tearing down of the old; negativity, at least when it becomes self-directed, self-related, or "absolute," is what creates the positive. The key is the difference between first and second negation-the two moments of the dialectic. The first negation is the negation of the 7 given; it takes what appears positive, the immediate, and imbues it with negativity. The second negation, "the negation of the negation," turns the power of negativity upon the act of negation; it takes what appears negative and shows that it is the source of the truly positive. In political terms, a genuinely dialectical opposition to capitalism and imperialism will not stop short at any apparent effort to negate the existing system-be it by bin Laden, Islamic fundamentalists, or some other narrow "anti-imperialist" tendency. The dialectician will "negate this negation," i.e., criticize the irrationality and inhumanity of all narrow forms of opposition to capitalism-imperialism. Marx built his new continent of thought and revolution on this dialectic of negativity. In his 1844 Manuscripts, Marx spoke of how communism, or the abolition of private property, is the first negation of capitalism. It is a necessary first step toward liberation, but it does not constitute liberation itself. If we stop at the first negation, the negation of private property, we get no further, Marx says, than "vulgar communism." That negation must itself be negated in order to reach genuine freedom. This concept later proved of critical importance in Raya Dunayevskaya's effort to rethink the revolutionary project in light of the rise of Stalinism. The emergence of a totalitarian state-capitalist society from out of a transformation into opposite of the Russian Revolution of 1917 showed how dangerous it was for revolution to stop at the mere abolition of private property, or the first negation. That negation itself needed to be negated through a transformation of human relations, starting at the point of production. Only then would we truly be free from capitalism. Today Stalinism may seem to be a thing of the past. Instead of "vulgar communism," we confront reactionary terrorists claiming to be "anti-imperialist." Can we therefore any longer assume that the first negation of capitalism will even move us in the direction of liberation? Have we reached the point where limiting oneself to the first negation fails to produce even the most minimal advance? Today's realities suggest that we must begin from the second negation to make forward progress in the struggle for human liberation. Without a new vision of revolution, of new human relations, of an end to the separation between mental and manual labor, our efforts to oppose the system will prove futile. It is this which makes Marxist-Humanism's central philosophic contribution-Absolute Negativity as New Beginning-is of critical importance for today's anti-war and anti-globalization activists. It is now possible to explore this through a new collection of essays on dialectics by Raya Dunayevskaya, founder of Marxist-Humanism, that has come off the press--The Power of Negativity. Today's realities call not only for a political response, not only movements and rallies of solidarity and protest, but also the rethinking and the concretization for today of the dialectical perspectives of Hegel, Marx, and Marxist-Humanism. Such a movement from theory has a life and death importance because it can aid us in finding a way ahead in a situation where the pathway forward is far from clear. As Dunayevskaya wrote in Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, "Without a philosophy of revolution, activism spends itself in mere anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, without ever revealing what it is for." We invite you to join us in a new "dialogue on the dialectic" that will help develop a total view in today's freedom movements. News and Letters Committees, 228 South Wabash, Room 230, Chicago, IL 60604 Contact us also to get our monthly newspaper, News & Letters, which combines voices of revolt with the development of philosophy of liberation. Subscriptions are only US$5 a year. |
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