November 25th, 2007 | admin
By Bill Weinberg, WW4 REPORT
The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy is this month to be released as a book—for which authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are said to have received a $750,000 advance from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. On this occasion, we present again the critique we ran last year of the work as it appeared in Middle East Policy Journal, then the latest version. This time the writer, who used the pseudonym “William X,” reveals himself as WW4 REPORT editor Bill Weinberg.
The lengthy essay entitled “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” first appeared in the London Review of Books in March 2006, against a backdrop of fast-escalating carnage in Iraq and renewed Israeli aggression in the Occupied Territories. It immediately sparked an outrage. Here a view long consigned to the left and right fringe—that the Israeli “tail wags the dog” of US foreign policy—was being voiced by thoroughly mainstream scholars. The authors were John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago professor and author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, and Stephen Walt, academic dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and author of Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy. An expanded version was posted on the Working Paper website of the Kennedy School.
By the end of March, Harvard had announced it was removing its logo from the study. It also appended a harshly worded disclaimer to the study, stating that it “does not necessarily” reflect the views of the university. The semi-retraction came after much protest from both the mainstream and Jewish press. Finally, the Kennedy School announced that Walt would step down as academic dean at the end of June, although he would stay on as a professor.
Yet a third version of “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” appears in the Fall 2006 issue of the journal Middle East Policy, this time with additional material addressing the criticisms. In the introduction, the authors state they are also preparing a detailed “Response to Our Critics,” adding that they have been “struck by how weak and ill-founded” many of the criticisms have been.
What Mearsheimer and Walt (hereafter M&W) refer to as “the lobby” is not only the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but a wider ideological complex of allied organizations, prominently including the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA), and the Israel on Campus Coalition
The controversy around the essay indicates how nearly all ideological struggle is narrowing to a clash of conservatisms. The opposition to M&W has come overwhelmingly from the Zionist right, which holds the upper hand in the Bush administration. M&W themselves subscribe to an American nationalist right position with overtones of xenophobia and (however much the charge has been abused) anti-Semitism. Ominously, even the anti-war “left” is increasingly lining up with the latter conservatism. There has been practically no effort to critique the essay from a position which is anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist, but also sensitive to anti-Semitism. The degree to which such perspectives have been sidelined is especially dangerous given how Israel replicates the historical cycles of Jewish scapegoating by serving as imperialism’s proxy.
What follows is an attempt to respond to “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” from a position which cuts slack neither for Israel’s real crimes, nor for US “foreign policy” (read: imperialism), nor for anti-Semitism, conscious or implicit.
Read the article here
The Case for DIS-unity in the Anti-War Movement:
Why there must be a clear break between those who support Iraq’s genuine civil resistance and those who support reactionary political Islam.
A Discussion with Bill Weinberg
While the majority of Americans are increasingly opposed to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the anti-war movement has been growing smaller and smaller. This has prompted a renewed call for “unity” within the movement, but is the problem simply that we are not united?
Many in the anti-war movement lend support to forces in Iraq that suppress the rights of women, workers, national minorities and GLBT people because these forces, presently, oppose the occupation. Is unity around a narrow and reactionary anti-imperialism the ground for building a mass anti-war movement or the development of a positive future for the people of Iraq?
In Iraq today, progressive, democratic and secular groups like the the Iraqi Freedom Congress and the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq are struggling against both the occupation and terrorist reaction in an effort to build a non-sectarian and multi-ethnic society. Can we build a new kind of anti-war movement based on solidarity with these struggles, as well as demanding the immediate end of the US occupation? This would be a movement that the majority of Americans can relate to because they share the aspirations of Iraqi workers, women and other ordinary people for freedom.
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Conspiracy theory continues to enjoy a generally positive reception within many sectors of the contemporary North American anarchist movement. As this presentation will argue, conspiracy models of social reality consistently distort and obfuscate the power relations they purport to explain. Instead of examining or refuting specific instances of conspiracy thinking within the popular anarchist milieu, this analysis will concentrate on the logical structure of conspiracy theory as such, and attempt to illuminate its psychological, political, philosophical, and historical roots.
This is a recording of a presentation given by Peter Staudenmaier at the 2004 Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. Peter Staudenmaier is an anarchist historian whose work focuses on modern European right-wing thought. He teaches at the Institute for Social Ecology.
Listen to the presentation here: Part 1, Part 2.
By Moishe Postone
As is well known, the period since the early 1970s has been one of massive historical structural transformations, frequently referred to as the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism (or, better, from Fordism through post-Fordism to neo-liberal global capitalism), entailing the undermining of the state-centric order of the mid-20th century. This transformation of social, economic and cultural life has been as fundamental as the earlier transition from 19th century liberal capitalism to the state-interventionist, bureaucratic forms of the 20th century.
Because these transformations have also involved the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union and of European Communism, they have been interpreted as marking the end of Marxism and of the theoretical relevance of Marx’s critical social theory. Yet recent historical transformations have also reasserted the central importance of historical dynamics and large-scale structural changes – the problematic at the heart of Marx’s critique (and precisely that which eludes the grasp of the major theories of the immediate post-Fordist era – those of Foucault, Derrida, Habermas).
Focusing on this problematic casts a number of important issues in a different light. For example, the question of the relation of democracy to capitalism and its presumed negation, communism – and, more generally, of the relation of historical contingency (and, hence, politics) to necessity – becomes inflected differently when considered in relation to the overarching historical transformations of the past three decades.
Recent structural transformations involve the reversal of what had appeared to be a logic of increasing state centrism. Consequently, they call into question linear notions of historical development – whether Marxist or Weberian. Moreover, the existence of large-scale historical patterns such as the rise of Fordism out of the crisis of 19th century liberal capitalism and, then, the demise of the Fordist synthesis indicates that the scope of contingency is constrained in capitalism. Focusing on the realm of politics alone, such as the differences between conservative and social democratic governments, for example, cannot explain why regimes everywhere in the West, regardless of the party in power, deepened and expanded welfare state institutions in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, only to cut back such programs and structures in subsequent decades. There have been differences, of course, but these have been differences in degree rather than in kind.
The existence of such large-scale patterns, which, I would argue, are ultimately rooted in the dynamics of capital, has been largely overlooked in discussions on democracy as well as in debates on the merits of social coordination by planning versus that effected by markets. These patterns imply a degree of historical necessity. By grounding such patterns in the categories of his critique, Marx grounded them in historically specific forms of heteronomy and indicated that overcoming capital entails more than overcoming exploitation and structural inequality; it also entails overcoming determinate structural constraints on action, thereby expanding the realm of historical contingency and, hence, the horizon of politics.
To the degree to which we choose to use the term “indeterminacy,” then, it should be as a goal of social and political action rather than as an ontological characteristic of social life. Positions that attempt to posit the latter emphasize that freedom and contingency are related. They overlook, however, the constraints on contingency exerted by capital as a form of social life. Within the framework I am presenting, the term “communism” can be reappropriated as the indeterminacy that becomes possible when the constraints exerted by capital are overcome; social democracy would refer to attempts to ameliorate inequality within the framework of the necessity imposed structurally by capital. As indeterminate, communism can only arise as a historically determinate possibility generated by the internal tensions of capital, not as a “tiger’s leap” out of history.
A second general issue raised by recent historical transformations is that of internationalism. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War has opened the possibility of a reinvigorated internationalism that is globally critical – as opposed to those Cold War forms of “internationalism” that were critical of one camp in ways that served as a legitimating ideology for other camps, which were very much part of a larger whole that should have been the object of critique.
In this essay, I shall begin addressing this second general issue, that of historical change, internationalism, and political mobilization today. However central Marx’s analysis might be to grasping the contemporary world, there has been a major hiatus between his critical theory of capitalism and much recent anti-hegemonic mass mobilization. I shall present some very preliminary reflections on what I regard as an impasse reached by many anti-hegemonic movements today, while reflecting critically on different forms of political violence.
The impasse to which I am referring has been dramatized recently by many responses on the Left – certainly in the USA, perhaps in Europe – to the suicide bombing of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, as well as by the character of the mass mobilizations against the Iraq War. In both cases the Left found itself faced with what should have been viewed as a dilemma – a conflict between a global imperial power and a deeply reactionary counter-globalization movement in one case, and a brutal fascistoid regime on the other. And in neither case did the Left (at least in the US) problematize this dilemma and try to analyze this configuration with an eye toward the possibility of beginning to formulate what has become exceedingly difficult in the world today – a critique with emancipatory intent. This would have required developing a form of internationalism that broke with the dualisms of a Cold War framework that frequently legitimated as “anti-imperialist” state structures and policies that were no more emancipatory than many authoritarian and repressive regimes supported by the American government.
Instead of breaking with such a framework, however, much of the Left has recently taken recourse to precisely such earlier conceptual frameworks and political stances whose increasingly anachronistic character highlights the difficulties of formulating an adequate critique today. At the heart of this neo-anti-imperialism is a concretization of the abstract, a fetishization of capital on the global level as the USA, or, in some variants, as the USA and Israel. It goes without saying that the disastrous imperious character of the Bush administration has helped mightily in this process. Nevertheless the results of this worldview, which in many respects recapitulates one of a century ago in which the subject position of the USA and Israel were occupied by Britain and the Jews, are very negative for the constitution of adequate anti-hegemonic politics today.
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This article was written for Green Anarchy magazine. It was written under the name, “Nick Griffin,” which is obviously a pseudonym. The “other” Nick Griffin is the head of the far-right British National Party, who by coincidence was being brought to trial on charges of ‘incitement to racial hatred’ when this article was first published. However, apparently multiple unscrupulous North American radicals used this opportunity to publicly accuse Green Anarchy of printing an article by the BNP’s Griffin - a ludicrous notion to anyone who has read the article themselves. However, because of this, it should be noted that the “Nick Griffin” of this article is not the same as the BNP’s Nick Griffin, but rather is a psuedonym of an anti-fascist monitor with a wry sense of humor. Go figure.
Recently a man who hung out in Eugene around green anarchists started promoting the idea of National Anarchism. A few years ago he had written a well-known essay from a green anarchist perspective, and he was a familiar face to many. [2007 note: “Chris” wrote the article “Against Mass Society,” which can be found on the cover of ‘Green Anarchy’ #6 (Summer 2001) and is reprinted in Our Enemy Civilization: An Anthology Against Modernity.] His new belief system advocated that people of different ethnic backgrounds should live in different villages, and he later wrote a letter to Green Anarchy in an attempt to propagate his views about supposedly “natural” hierarchies. [GA Note: We were going to print his letter, but it is almost as long as this article, and we did not want to provide a forum for his ideas on “natural hierarchies” and “National Anarchism”. If people are interested in the letter, and who wrote it, you can contact us.] Fortunately his attempt to spread this racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic (so-called) “anarchism” were quickly unveiled. But what is National Anarchism? How did it arise, and what does it stand for, and why are these racist Right-wingers attempting to recruit anarchists?
Radical politics of all kinds took a new turn after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and this accelerated after the demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle in 1999. Decentralized and networked political forms started becoming the predominant types of resistance. In the last few years, we have seen anarchism replace marxism as the dominant radical movement in the U.S., but changes have also occurred elsewhere. Parts of the white power movement started advocating “leaderless resistance” as early as the 1980s; the Islamic jihadists Al Qaeda are a state-less, transnational entity; and even marxist groups like Left Turn have rejected the tight “vanguard party” model in favor of a more network-based structure.
But anarchism itself has also became a magnet for the racist radical right, and a tiny fringe group in the UK called the National Revolutionary Faction has re-christened itself as National Anarchists. They are attempting to use anarchist symbolism and rhetoric to recruit both “White Nationalists” (WN, a catch-all term for the various kinds of white racists) as well as anarchists – especially green anarchists – to their strange belief system. They advocate a decentralized economic and political system which features ethnically-pure villages which are defined by racial separatism, anti-semitism and homophobia.
Continue reading this article in Green Anarchy magazine website
December 12th, 2003 | admin
By Peter Staudenmaeir
In August 1999, just a few months before the newly invigorated anti-capitalist movement scored a provisional victory in Seattle, an unemployed white supremacist named Buford Furrow shot a group of children at a Jewish preschool in Los Angeles. Furrow went on to kill an Asian-American mail carrier before turning himself in. This murderous outburst happened a month after a frighteningly similar racist rampage in Chicago. Such atrocities obviously represent the opposite of everything that the movement against global capital stands for. Yet Furrow’s motivations, murky as they may be, reveal a peculiar relationship with the reactionary and racist aspects of vague critiques of “international finance”.
In August 1999, just a few months before the newly invigorated anti-capitalist movement scored a provisional victory in Seattle, an unemployed white supremacist named Buford Furrow shot a group of children at a Jewish preschool in Los Angeles. Furrow went on to kill an Asian-American mail carrier before turning himself in. This murderous outburst happened a month after a frighteningly similar racist rampage in Chicago. Such atrocities obviously represent the opposite of everything that the movement against global capital stands for. Yet Furrow’s motivations, murky as they may be, reveal a peculiar relationship with the reactionary and racist aspects of vague critiques of “international finance”.
Continue reading here