Contested Terrain

History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism

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.

This reawakened Manichaeism – which is at odds with some forms of anti-globalization, such as the anti-sweatshop movement, that had been developing in the last decade – has been reinforced by the reappearance of a deep confusion regarding political violence that had, at times, plagued the New Left. The result is a form of opposition that highlights the difficulties faced by anti-hegemonic movements in the Post-Fordist era. This form of opposition is inadequate to the contemporary world and, in some cases, can serve as a legitimating ideology for what 100 years ago would have been termed imperialist rivalries.

Let me elaborate by first turning briefly to the ways in which many on the Left (at least in the USA) responded to the attack of September 11. The most general argument made was that the action, as horrible as it may have been, had to be understood as a reaction to American policies, especially in the Middle East. While it is the case that terrorist violence should be understood as political (and not simply as an irrational act), the understanding of the politics of violence expressed by such positions is, nevertheless, utterly inadequate. Violence is understood as a reaction, not as an action. The politics of the violence involved are rarely interrogated. Instead the violence is explained (and at times implicitly justified) as a reflex, a response. Within this schema, there is only one actor in the world: the USA.

This sort of argument focuses on the grievances of those who carry out such actions without engaging the framework of meaning within which those grievances are made sense of. The actions that flow from those meanings are simply taken as expressions of anger, however unfortunate. Such arguments neither interrogate the understanding of the world that motivated this violence, nor critically analyze the sort of politics implied by violence directed intentionally against civilians. Consequently, such arguments become essentially apologetic rather than political. They make little attempt to understand the strategic calculations involved – not so much of the bombers as of their handlers – and ignore issues of ideology. It is a serious error, for example, to interpret the felt grievances underlying a movement like El Qaeda in very narrow terms (as many in the US did after Sept. 11), as an immediate reaction to American policies and Israeli policies. This simply ignores too many other dimensions of the new Jihadism. For example, when Osama bin Laden refers to the blow inflicted on the Muslims 80 years ago, he is not speaking of the founding of the state of Israel, but to the abolition of the Caliphate, and, hence, of the purported unity of the Muslim world, by Ataturk in 1924 – long before the US was involved in the Middle East, and before Israel was established. It is noteworthy that the vision he expresses is more global than local, which is one of the salient features of the new Jihadism, both in terms of the struggles it supports (transforming them into manifestations of a single struggle), as well as its driving ideology. And a central aspect of the global character of that ideology has been anti-Semitism.

Addressing anti-Semitism is crucially important when considering issues of globalization and anti-globalization, even if it can be subject to misunderstandings because of the degree to which the charge of anti-Semitism has been used as an ideology of legitimation by Israeli regimes in order to discredit all serious criticisms of Israeli policies. It is certainly possible to formulate a fundamental critique of those policies that is not anti-Semitic, and, indeed, such critiques have been formulated. On the other hand, criticism of Israel should not blind one to the existence today of widespread and virulent anti-Semitism in the Arab/Muslim world. And as I’ll try to elaborate, anti-Semitism poses a very determinate problem for the Left.

The aftermath of Sept. 11 revealed the degree to which anti-Semitic motifs have become widespread in the Arab world (in this essay I will not also address the issue of resurgent anti-Semitism and/or implicit Holocaust denial in Europe). Expressions of this ideology include the idea that only the Jews could have organized the attack on the World Trade Center, and the widespread dissemination in the Arab world of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”– the infamous Czarist fabrication, distributed widely by the Nazis and Henry Ford, purporting to show how the Jews conspire to rule the world. The extensive and intensive spread of such global conspiratorial thought was dramatically revealed recently by the Egyptian television series “Horseman Without a Horse,” and the spread of medieval Christian blood libel charges against the Jews in the Arab media.

An understanding of modern anti-Semitism is necessary if this development is to be comprehended. On the one hand, modern anti-Semitism is a form of essentializing discourse that, like all such forms, understands social and historical phenomena in essentialist, biologistic or culturalistic, terms. On the other hand, anti-Semitism can be distinguished from other essentializing forms by its populist and apparently anti-hegemonic character. It attributes an enormous power to Jews which – unlike the common imputation of concrete bodily/sexual power to the Other in most forms of race thinking – is viewed as abstract, universal, and intangible. At the heart of modern anti-Semitism is a notion of the Jews as an immensely powerful, secret international conspiracy. I have argued elsewhere that the modern anti-Semitic worldview understands the abstract domination of capital – which subjects people to the compulsion of mysterious forces they cannot perceive – as the domination of International Jewry.

Anti-Semitism, consequently, can appear to be anti-hegemonic. This is the reason that a century ago August Bebel characterized it as the socialism of fools. Given its subsequent development it could also have been called the anti-imperialism of fools. As a fetishized form of oppositional consciousness it is particularly dangerous, because it appears to be anti-hegemonic, the expression of a movement of the little people against abstract domination.
It is as a fetishized, profoundly reactionary form of anti-capitalism that I’d like to discuss the recent surge of modern anti-Semitism in the Arab World. It is a serious mistake to view this surge of anti-Semitism as simply a reflexive response to the United States and Israel. This empiricistic reduction would be akin to explaining Nazi anti-Semitism simply as a reaction to Versailles. While American and Israeli policies have doubtlessly contributed to the rise of this new wave of anti-Semitism, they occupy subject positions in the ideology that goes far beyond their actual empirical roles. In order to understand that subject position, one must look at the massive historical transformations since the early 1970s, to which I referred earlier, the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism.

An important aspect of this transition has been the increasing importance of supranational (as opposed to international) economic networks and flows, which has been accompanied by a decline in effective national sovereignty – by the growing inability of national state structures (including those of national metropoles) to successfully control economic processes. This has been manifested by the decline of the Keynesian welfare state in the West and the collapse of bureaucratic party states in the East. It has been associated with increasing vertical differentiation between rich and poor within all countries, and among countries and regions.
The collapse of Fordism has meant the end of the phase of state directed nationally-based development – whether on the basis of the communist model, or the social democratic model, or the statist Third World model. This has posed enormous difficulties for many countries and huge conceptual difficulties for all those who viewed the state as an agent of change and development.

The effects of the collapse of the mid-century Fordist synthesis have been differential; they have varied in different parts of the world. The East Asian success in riding the new wave of Post-Fordist globalization is well known, as is the disastrous decline of sub-Saharan Africa. Less well-known is the steep decline of the Arab world which was dramatically revealed recently in the United Nations Arab Human Development Report of 2002, according to which per capita income in the Arab world has shrunk in the past 20 years to a level just above that of sub-Saharan Africa. Even in Saudi Arabia, for example, the per capita GDP fell from $24,000 in the late 1970s to $7,000 at the beginning of this century.

The reasons for this decline are complex. It has taken place within the context of the fundamental restructurings alluded to above – restructurings that appear mysterious and that have resulted in a relative decline of the Arab world. This decline undermined Arab nationalism and the authoritarian state structures associated with it, which proved incapable of adjusting to these global transformations. At the same time, for a variety of reasons, progressive social and political movements directed against the status quo in the Middle East have been inordinately weak, or, as in Iraq, suppressed. A vacuum was created by the failure of Arab nationalist as well as putatively traditional monarchist regimes, both of which had suppressed progressive oppositions. This vacuum has been filled by Islamicist movements, which purport to explain the decline people experience.

A contributing factor to this ideological, reactionary mode of understanding the crisis of an entire region is the degree to which the Palestinian struggle for self-determination has been functionalized for decades by Arab regimes as a lightening rod to deflect popular anger and discontent away from domestic problems. (Again, to avoid unnecessary misunderstanding – to say that Palestinian struggles have been functionalized does not in and of itself discredit those struggles themselves.) The tendency to attribute the misére of the Arab masses to evil external forces, however, has become much more intense with the recent decline of the Arab world. The ideological framework that was already available to make sense of this decline was formulated by thinkers such as the ideologue of the Egyptian Brotherhood, Sayyed Qutb, who rejected capitalist modernity as a plot created by Jews (Freud, Marx, Durkheim), to undermine “healthy” societies. Within his anti-Semitic imaginary, Israel was simply the bridgehead for a much more powerful, pernicious, global conspiracy. This sort of ideology, which in the 1930s and the 1940s had been supported and promoted by Nazi propaganda efforts in the Middle East, was strongly reinforced by Soviet Cold War ideology after the 1967 war, which introduced anti-Semitic motifs into its critique of Israel.

I am suggesting, in other words, that the spread of anti-Semitism and, relatedly, anti-Semitic forms of Islamicism (such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian offshoot, Hamas) should be understood as the spread of a fetishized anti-capitalist ideology, sparked by Israel and Israeli policies, but, more basically, by the decline of the Arab world against the background of the massive structural transformations associated with the transition from Fordism to neo-liberal global capitalism. The result is a populist anti-hegemonic movement that is profoundly reactionary and dangerous, not least of all for any hope for progressive politics in the Arab/Muslim world.

Rather than analyzing this reactionary form of resistance in ways that would help support more progressive forms of resistance, however, many on the Western Left have either ignored it or rationalized it as an unfortunate, if understandable, reaction to Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank. This sort of apologetic political stance on the part of large segments of the American and European Left is closely related to a fetishized identification of the US with global capital. And this tendency to grasp the abstract (the domination of capital) as concrete (American hegemony) is, I would argue, an expression of a deep and fundamental helplessness, conceptually as well as politically.

Let me try to elaborate by reflecting on the mass anti-war mobilizations in so many parts of the world against the American war in Iraq, while considering some issues concerning political violence. At first glance, recent mobilizations appear to be a reprise of the great anti-war movement of the 1960s. And yet I would argue there are fundamental differences. Considering those differences may shed light on the current impasse of the Left.

The anti-war movements of the 1960s were spearheaded by many people who were cognizant of the fact that their opposition to the war waged by the US supported the Vietnamese Communists, who were considered to represent positive political and social change. This was also the case of movements opposed to US policies toward the regime in Cuba, the socialist government in Chile in the early 1970s, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s, as well as the ANC in South Africa. In all those arenas, the United States was seen as a force opposed to such change. Opposing the US was seen as supporting progressive alternatives. This was the case regardless of whether or not one agrees with the evaluation of the parties involved. Few were disingenuous enough to think that opposition to the US didn’t constitute de facto support for those against whom it was fighting. An anti-war movement can claim not to constitute de facto support for the other party only if it is directed against both sides (as the Second International sought to do on the eve of World War I).

The recent massive anti-war mobilizations appear at first glance to be the same. But closer consideration reveals that, politically, they are very different. Their opposition to the US was not in the name of a more progressive alternative. On the contrary, they de facto defended a regime that could not be considered progressive or potentially progressive in any way – a regime whose oppressive character and brutality far exceeded that of, for example, the murderous military regimes in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s.

This does not, in any way, mean that proponents of progressive change should have supported the Bush administration and its war. But recent mass mobilizations neither expressed nor helped constitute a movement opposed to the US war that, at the same time, was a movement for fundamental change in Iraq and, more generally, the Middle East. In the US, very little political education was undertaken that extended beyond the crude slogans proffered. It is significant in this regard that none of the massive demonstrations against the war featured oppositional progressive Iraqis who could provide a more nuanced and critical perspective on the Middle East. And this, I would argue, represents a political failure on the part of the Left.
One of the ironies of the current situation is that, by adopting a fetishized “anti-imperialist” position, one where opposition to the US no longer is bound to advocacy of progressive change, the Left has allowed the American neo-conservative Right in the Bush administration to appropriate and even monopolize what had traditionally been the language of the Left, the language of democracy and liberation. One can argue, of course, that the Bush regime speaks of democratic change in the Middle East, but will never really help effect such change. Nevertheless, that only the Bush administration raised this issue reveals starkly that the Left did not do so.

If a generation ago, opposition to American policy consciously entailed supporting struggles for liberation, today the opposition to American policy in and of itself is deemed anti-hegemonic. What the Cold War seems to have eradicated from memory is that opposition to an imperial power is not necessarily progressive, that there were fascist “anti-imperialisms” as well. This distinction was blurred during the Cold War in part because the USSR aligned itself with authoritarian regimes that had more in common with fascism than communism and that, in fact, sought to liquidate their own Left, as in Iraq. Anti-Americanism per se became coded as progressive, although there had and have been deeply reactionary as well as progressive forms of anti-Americanism.

Why did the Left – including those who did not regard the Soviet Union affirmatively – move in this direction? How did so many progressives back themselves into a corner where it appeared that the only issue was US policy, regardless of whom would be de facto defended by such a stance?

I’d like to begin addressing this problem with reference to the issue of political violence. As I mentioned, those who were critical of the enormous tide of anger and nationalism that swept the United States after September 11 frequently noted that there was a great deal of anger directed against the US, especially in Arab and Muslim countries. This sort of position, however, usually sidestepped the issue of the sort of politics the attack on September 11 expressed. It is significant that such an attack was not undertaken two or three decades ago by groups that had every reason to be angry at the United States – for example the Vietnamese Communists or the Chilean Left. It is important to note that the absence of such an attack then was not contingent, but an expression of political principle. Indeed, an attack directed against civilians was outside of the horizon of the political imaginaries of such groups.

The category of “anger” is not sufficient to understand the violence of September 11. Forms of violence have to be understood politically, not apologetically. Let me give an example: in the mid 1980s, there was pressure on the central committee of the African National Congress to begin a campaign of terror against white South African civilians. Such demands expressed the desire for revenge as well as the idea that white South Africans would only agree to dismantle apartheid if they suffered just as black South Africans had suffered. The ANC central committee refused to countenance such demands, not only for tactical and strategic reasons, but also for reasons of political principle. It was argued that movements for emancipation do not choose the civilian population as their main target.

I would like to suggest that there is a fundamental difference between movements that do not target civilians randomly (such as the Viet Minh and Viet Cong and the ANC) and those that do (such as the IRA, El Qaeda, Hamas). This difference is not simply a tactical one, but is a profoundly political one. A relation exists between the form of violence and the form of politics. That is, I want to suggest that a relation exists between social movements for fundamental social transformation and modes of violence that distinguish between military and civilian targets – for example, the Vietnamese NLF and the ANC. This, in turn, suggests that movements whose main targets are civilians are not movements primarily concerned with social change, however radical they may appear. Although I could elaborate about such movements, my concern here has more to do with contemporary metropolitan opposition movements and why they apparently have had difficulty distinguishing among these very different forms of ‘resistance.’

The attack of September 11, 2001 calls into question some notions of violence and resistance that spread among parts of the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as fundamentally as August 1968 and then, finally, 1989 called into question Leninism as a hegemonic discourse and marked the end of the trajectory that began in 1917.

Looking back to the late 1960s and the early 1970s, we can discern an important political shift when what was then the New Left moved from a loose movement advocating non-violent resistance and social transformation to a fragmented militant movement. Some of those fragmented groups began glorifying armed struggle and/or perpetrated violence themselves. Relatedly, there was in increase in support for groups like the provisional IRA and the PFLP, groups that had little in common with the communist and socialist movements that earlier had characterized and informed the Left. Increasingly a form of violence was promulgated domestically and supported internationally that was fundamentally different from that which had been hegemonic on the Left during the twentieth century.

The way violence became conceptualized had a great deal in common with the view of violence promulgated by Georges Sorel at the beginning of the 20th century. In Reflections on Violence (1908), he presented violence as a cleansing act of self-constitution directed against the decadence of bourgeois society. A similar notion of violence as a redemptive act of regeneration that expressed politically the dictates of pure will, was, of course, central to the Fascist and Nazi notion of the new man and the new order.

After World War II this complex of attitudes became adopted by some on the Left, transmitted in some cases via the medium of existentialism. This was particularly the case in the late 1950s and 1960s, as social critique focused increasingly on technocratic bureaucratic forms of domination and as the Soviet Union increasingly became perceived as sharing in a dominant culture of instrumental rationality. Within this context violence became seen as a non-reified, cleansing force erupting from the outside, identified now as the colonized, attacking the very foundations of the existing order.

Hannah Arendt provided a telling critique of the sort of thinking about violence found in the works of Sorel, Pareto, and Frantz Fanon. She distinguished between those who, motivated by a deep hatred of bourgeois society, glorify violence per se as inherently emancipatory (Sorel/Fanon) and those left-wing thinkers whose adoption of violent means is motivated by a desire for a just society. Thinking with Arendt, I will briefly suggest why there was a resurgence in the late 1960s of Sorelian-type glorifications of violence. The late 1960s were a crucial historical moment, one when the necessity of the present became fundamentally called into question. Viewed retrospectively, it was a moment when state-centered Fordist capitalism and its statist “actually existing socialist” equivalent ran up against historical limits. Attempts to get beyond those limits were, however, singularly unsuccessful, even on a conceptual level. As the Fordist synthesis began to unravel, utopian hopes were nourished. At the same time, the target of social, political, and cultural discontent became maddeningly elusive and all pervasive. The felt pressures for change were present, but the road to change was very unclear.

In this period, students and youth were not so much reacting against exploitation as they were reacting against bureaucratization and alienation. Classical workers’ movements not only seemed unable to address the burning issues for many young radicals, but those movements – as well as the “actually existing socialist” regimes – seemed to be deeply implicated in precisely what the students and youth were rebelling against.

Faced with this new historical situation, this political terra incognito, many oppositional movements took a turn to the concrete and particularistic. Examples were concretistic forms of anti-imperialism as well as the growing focus by those with contacts with Eastern European dissidents on concrete domination in the Communist East. As different as these may have appeared at the time, both occluded the nature of abstract domination just when capital’s regime was on its way to becoming even more abstract.

The turn to Sorelian violence was a moment of this turn to the concrete. Violence, or the idea of violence, was seen as countering structures of bureaucratization and alienation. In the face of alienation and bureaucratic stasis, violence was deemed creative and violent action per se became viewed as revolutionary. In spite of the association of violence with political will, however, I would argue, as did Arendt, that the new glorification of violence of the late 1960s was caused by a severe frustration of the faculty of action in the modern world. In a historical situation of heightened helplessness, violence both expressed the rage of helplessness and helped suppress such feelings of helplessness. It became an act of self-constitution as outsider, as Other, rather than an instrument of transformation. The idea of a fundamental transformation became bracketed and, instead replaced by the more ambiguous notions of the resistor and of resistance.

Resistance as a category, however, says little about the character of determinate forms of critique, opposition, rebellion and “revolution.” It is an undialectical category, incapable of grasping a dynamic and, hence, dialectical reality, and is related to a notion of violence that blurs important distinctions between politically very different forms of violence.

What I have characterized as a turn to the concrete in the face of abstract domination is, of course, a form of reification. It can take various shapes. Two that have emerged with considerable force in the past 150 years have been the conflation of British and, then, American hegemony with that of global capital, and/or the personification of the latter as the Jews. This turn to the concrete, together with a worldview strongly influenced by Cold War dualisms (even among leftists critical of the Soviet Union), helped constitute a framework of understanding within which recent mass anti-war mobilizations operated, where opposition to a global power did not even implicitly point to a desired emancipatory transformation, especially not in the Middle East. Such a reified understanding ends up tacitly supporting movements and regimes that have much more in common with earlier, reactionary – even fascist – forms of rebellion than they do with anything we can call progressive.

I have described an impasse of the Left today and sought to relate it to a form of reified thought and sensibility that expressed the disintegration of the Fordist synthesis beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In my view this impasse expresses a complex crisis of the Left related to a perception that the industrial working class was not and would not become a revolutionary subject, coupled with the end of the state-centric order, whereby the state no longer is an addressee important for social change, and the transformation of the global order from an international to a supranational one. There is an additional aspect I would like to briefly outline of the reification associated with the impasse of the Left in the face of the collapse of Fordism. Neo-liberal global capitalism has, of course, been promoted by successive American regimes. To completely conflate the global neo-liberal order and the United States would, nevertheless, be a mistake, politically as well as theoretically. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the hegemonic role of Great Britain and the liberal world order was challenged by the growing power of a number of nation-states, most notably Germany. These rivalries, which culminated in several world wars, were referred to as imperialist rivalries. Today we may be seeing the beginnings of a return to an era of imperialist rivalry on a new and expanded level. One of the emerging ongoing areas of tension is between the Atlantic powers and a Europe organized around a French-German condominium.

The war in Iraq can, in part, be seen as an opening salvo in this rivalry. Whereas a century ago, the Germans sought to challenge the British Empire by means of the Berlin-Baghdad railroad, more recently the Iraqi Baath regime was on its way to becoming a Franco-German client state. It is very significant that in 2000 Saddam Hussein’s Iraq became the first country to substitute the euro for the dollar as the currency mediating the sale of oil. This substitution, of course, challenged the dollar’s position as a world currency. At issue is not whether the Euro Bloc represents a progressive or regressive alternative to the United States. Rather, it is that this action (and the American reaction) express the beginnings of an intra-capitalist rivalry on a global scale. “Europe” is changing its meaning. It is now being constructed as a possible counter-hegemon to the US.

However objectionable the current American administration is – and it is deeply objectionable on a very wide range of issues – the Left should be very careful about becoming, unwittingly, the stalking horse for a would-be rival hegemon. On the eve of World War I, the German General Staff thought it important for Germany that the war be fought against Russia as well as France and Great Britain. Because Russia was the most reactionary and autocratic European Power, the war could then be presented as a war for central European culture against the dark barbarism of Russia. This would guarantee Social Democratic support for the war. This political strategy succeeded – and resulted in a catastrophe. We are very far from a pre-war situation. Nevertheless, the Left should not make the same mistake of supporting a rising counter-hegemon in order to defend civilization against the threat posed by a reactionary power.

However difficult the task of grasping and confronting global capital might be, it is crucially important that a non-dualistic internationalism be recovered and reformulated. Retaining the reified dualism of the Cold War runs the risk of constituting a politics that, from the standpoint of human emancipation, of “communism,” would be, at the very best, questionable, however many people it may rouse.

Published in Public Culture 18:1
© 2006 by Duke University Press

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