False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right
by Bromma
As popular resistance to globalization and Western imperialism strengthens around the globe, something disastrous is happening: Leadership of the opposition is swinging steadily from the Left to the radical Right.
Right-wing forces around the world are gearing up to fight against capitalism’s new world order. Every day on the streets of Baghdad, of Mosul, of Tikrit, of Fallujah, of Samarra, of Basra, there is living, dying proof that rightists are in the vanguard of the fight against the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq. It is the same in Afghanistan. Indeed, as Western capital struggles to penetrate and control the so-called Islamic world, clerical fascist and other hard-core reactionary trends have spearheaded opposition in country after country. This right wing “anti-imperialism” isn’t confined to the Moslem-inhabited countries, either. Militant rebellious political movements on the Right are gathering strength everywhere, including North America. Often these trends are more radical, better rooted in popular culture and better armed than the current Left.
One would think that the Left would be galvanized by this phenomenon of right-wing “anti-imperialism”; would be bending every effort to understand it and combat its poisonous influence. In fact, the Left, with few exceptions, is doing its best to ignore it.
It’s not like we haven’t been warned. The catastrophe in Iraq is hardly the first time that the Left has witnessed powerful right-wing influence over anti-imperialist movements.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Left anti-imperialists fighting the Shah of Iran and his U.S. sponsors embraced a united front with radical right-wing Islamist fundamentalists. Most Iranian leftists (and their Western supporters) were convinced that anti-imperialist popular sentiment would “naturally” benefit the Left; they were sure that patriarchal fundamentalism would be quickly isolated and out-maneuvered after the revolution.
So when Iranian women struggled for their human rights, leftists criticized them for being “divisive.” It was alleged that women’s demands would weaken the anti-imperialist united front against America and its agents. Azar Majedi, an Iranian activist, recalls:
Women who had never before worn a Hejab [the Islamic head cover for women], put it on voluntarily for the sake of ‘society and revolution’….One common slogan in the demonstrations [was], ‘Sister, your Hejab is more potent than our guns.’
The sacrifice of women’s rights in order to appease the fundamentalists played a major role the violent decimation of the Iranian Left.
And again, in the 1980s, when Afghans were struggling to expel the Soviet invaders, many leftists around the world downplayed the difference between freedom fighters and right-wing fundamentalist criminals. Most of the Left (Soviet apologists excepted, of course) heartily endorsed any and all “popular resistance” to the Soviet imperialists, turning a blind eye to the actual program and practice of the rising Islamist reactionary groups. Afghan women’s criticisms of the fascist mujihedeen fell on deaf ears. After all, the jihadis were fighting for “national liberation”—that seemed, within the dominant Left paradigm, to trump everything.
Meanwhile, Afghan women’s organizations, and the secular resistance generally, were viciously attacked from two sides: the Soviets and the Islamist hard Right. It was the radical Right which ended up dominating that “anti-imperialist” war in Afghanistan. Today they dominate the armed resistance to U.S. intervention. The result is a shattered nation, endlessly brutalized within shifting combinations of imperialist genocide and clerical fascist terror.
Years after the Soviet defeat, some of the Western Left still clung to bizarre illusions about the political potential of the reactionary mujehedin. An Afghan revolutionary complained to the Journal of the Centre for Women and Socialism in 2001:
When Ahmad Shah Masood [the charismatic military leader of the Northern Alliance] was visiting France we heard that even ‘left’ organisations have supported him. A journal of [the] communist party of Italy had pictured him as the unique leader of Afghanistan and had suggested that Osama Bin laden and other terrorists should instead of blowing trade centres, use their ability to lead a revolution against ‘America’s Imperialism’ …Such organisations insist that they are leading the movements for freedom and justice. These kinds of attitudes make other left organisations unreal…in the eyes of people.
And now, there is the war in Iraq. Most of the Left was wildly euphoric about the early resistance in Iraq and the outpouring of mass global anti-war sentiment. Triumphal statements about the emergence of a new movement for social justice were the common currency of left-wing discourse. Larry Wing of “War Times” exulted that, “Most important of all, and underlying all the other developments, is the emergence of a new superpower: the world’s people. As one we rose up on Feb. 15 to smite the empire. Antiwar sentiment is so great in most countries that even most reactionary leaders dare not cross us.” Tom Hayden, not to be outdone, proclaimed, “There is rising a new movement in the world. It is bigger than the movement of the 1960s.” “A global anti-war movement unlike anything that has existed for three decades — that is, since the close of the Vietnam War,” trumpeted International A.N.S.W.E.R. According to the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, “The issue of the war and Bush military policy is beginning to coalesce an incredibly wide range of social forces: anti-globalization, anti-capitalists, labor, national movements, students, greens, liberals, anarchists, etc., etc. This movement is beginning to reflect, in embryonic form, the coalition of social forces that can ultimately transform society.”
Yes, but transform it in what direction?
Can it really be that leftists didn’t notice the actual politics of the forces leading the armed struggle against the Western imperialists in Iraq? Has the Left somehow missed the virulent global opposition to the Iraq war that comes from the Right? Can it be unaware that the “incredibly wide range of social forces” opposing the Bush and Blair regimes’ war includes millions of right-wing political Islamists, Baath Party torturers, reactionary Japanese nationalists, Hindu fascists, dozens of right-wing dictators, former heads of the CIA and NSA, the Pope, capitalists in every country, conservative Republicans, antisemitic Russian nationalists, Pat Buchanan, the hard right British National Party, generals and admirals, David Duke, and most neo-nazi organizations worldwide?
For some time after the anglo-american invasion, it was difficult to find mention—let alone serious analysis—of the role of right-wing religious fundamentalism, antisemitism, fascism and reactionary populism among the global forces opposing the invasion and occupation. In fact, the Left usually spoke and acted as if there were one big progressive anti-intervention coalition on the rise. There seemed to be an assumption that the Left was the natural vanguard of these forces. This assumption was—is—as false as it is dangerous.
With the passage of time and events in Iraq, this delusional attitude has become less and less rational. But that hasn’t provoked any self-criticism. Most of the Left still tries to downplay or evade the whole uncomfortable issue of right-wing anti-imperialism, hoping it will go away by itself. In fact some leftists have adopted an even more reprehensible course: They have decided to participate in an open alliance with the fundamentalists. These “super” anti-imperialists demand “unconditional support” for the “resistance,” and consider anyone uncomfortable with this formula to be liberal and chauvinist.
It’s as if the tragedies in Iran and Afghanistan had never happened. Once again, the Left is pushing women’s freedom to the sidelines, supposedly in the name of anti-imperialism. Once again, “politics” is being twisted into a struggle between imperialist men and “anti-imperialist” men—even if those “anti-imperialist” men enslave women.
It’s now glaringly obvious that right-wing Islamist fundamentalism has become a major actor in world politics; that fact puts the pathological denial among leftists into stark relief. But we should be clear that Islamist radicalism is only one version of the right-wing “anti-imperialism” in motion today. It might be most accurate to say that right-wing Islamist insurgency is the leading edge of a worldwide phenomenon. Right wing populism, with fascist elements contending for vanguard leadership, is coming to life in country after country. Including much closer to home than Iraq.
Militant right-wing “anti imperialism” is growing in the U.S. White supremacists and fascists like Louis Beam, Matt Hale and Tom Metzger hate the neo-cons and Bush; they despise globalization’s New World Order. Therefore they study Left-led movements, coopt their language and even try to attract the activists working within them. They reason that, as Beam writes, “The New American Patriot will be neither left nor right, just a freeman fighting for liberty…The new politics of America is liberty from the NWO [New World Order] Police State and nothing more.”
Many neo-fascists and Christian fundamentalists loudly “support” Palestinian struggle against Israel, and Left activists in the solidarity movement find that they are forced to weed antisemites out of web forums and events. Organizers against the Patriot Acts are consciously building a coalition between the Left and Right. “Third Position” neo-fascists in Europe and North America actively petition Leftists and progressives to a join in a common platform opposing U.S. interventionism and hegemony in the world. Today, just as in Mussolini and Hitler’s time, many fascists claim a “spiritual kinship” to the natural world and claim to “defend” it. (“Ecology is for Aryans too,” says Tom Metzger.) Criticisms of the New World Order and its negative effects on the domestic social contract in the metropolis now crop up everywhere on the Right; they sometimes sound indistinguishable from Left anti-globalization arguments.
Remarkably, some of the hard Right’s leadership is even moderating its public positions on race in order to pave the way for potential “anti-capitalist” alliances with non-white movements. Perhaps the races should be separate, they say, but we should all unite against the common enemy—global capital. James Porazzo, head of the neo-nazi skinhead group the American Front, argues for a program of “White autonomy, Black autonomy, Brown autonomy and death to the current twisted system. The only other obvious route would be an eventual winner take all race war: I don’t think anyone with any sense would want that.”
While the fascists are less developed in the U.S. than in Europe and other parts of the world, they are steadily growing in influence and organization. Their “anti-imperialist” views resonate widely within the ranks of militia members, Christian fundamentalists and ordinary conservatives, many of who are openly rebelling against the program of Bush and the neoconservatives—not just in Iraq but also on a range of domestic and international issues.
Judging by the reaction of leftists in U.S. antiwar movement, this is a good thing. Today, as rightists swell the ranks of anti-interventionists, they are being quietly tolerated, and frequently welcomed, by leftists. “What unites us is greater than anything that divides us,” says a leader of UFPJ. Anti-war speeches by Robert Byrd and writings by anti-war Christian fundamentalists appear on IndyMedia and other left-wing web sites. The Nation recently ran an entire article based on the pandering premise that Ronald Reagan, since he was a “true conservative,” would surely have pulled out of Iraq by now.
Left descriptions of the Iraqi resistance soft-pedal the right-wing forces that pervade it. Photos of huge all-male demonstrations in Muslim-populated countries are printed without comment; antisemitic slogans shouted at mass protests in Iraq and around the world are quietly edited out. Iraqi women’s fears about the possibility of a clerical fascist take-over of the country, widely reported in the mainstream press, are muted in the Left’s writings. Could it be that the Left is preparing to repeat, on a larger and larger scale, the mistakes made in Iran and Afghanistan?
It’s important to examine why there is a mass-based “anti-imperialist” right wing uprising in the world at this historical juncture and what that implies for the Left practically. Such an investigation may provide a window into the class changes enforced by the latest incarnation of global capitalism. It may also afford us perspective on the weaknesses of the post-WWII wave of revolutionary world struggle, weaknesses that allowed capitalism to surmount that movement’s powerful challenge. And finally, we may see hints of where we can look for the emergence of a new Left, able to survive and grow on the terrain of a transformed capitalist order.
A Right-Wing Class Struggle
For many years the international Left has been accustomed to thinking of the hard Right as an appendage of the ruling capitalists. To some extent, this is a conditioned reflex arising out of the realities of the post-WWII period. During this optimistic era of anti-colonial liberation and socialist revolution, anti-imperialism was virtually “owned” by the Left, whose forces were the ones challenging capital’s control over the Third World (and defending social contracts in the metropolis). The radical Right, whose international leadership was discredited and smashed in the world war, seemed to rely on patriotic flag-waving support for Western imperialists, racist frothing at the mouth, and kooky fringe politics. However, instrumentalist views of the extreme Right as a “tool of the ruling class” have never been particularly accurate, and are at any rate being rendered increasingly irrelevant by events in our time.
It’s crucial to remember that the fascist politics espoused by Hitler and Mussolini was much more than a stratagem of the bourgeoisie. In fact, prewar fascism was a mass revolutionary movement of the far Right, spun in freedom-fighting, anti-bourgeois terms. Rooted in class grievances and class ambitions, it was both populist and insurrectionary in practice. The radical Right worldwide is now adopting a similar rebellious spirit. This occurs in the context of massive global change, which is fundamentally transforming the capitalist system.
Part of what defines this change on the political level is that the wave of Left-led anti-colonial struggle in the world has largely exhausted its momentum, giving way to neo-colonialism and warlordism in case after case. The national liberation struggles of the 1950s, 60s and 70s shook world capitalism to its core. But capitalism has survived and metastasized, altering the dynamics of class struggle irreversibly in the process.
Once Left-led national liberation movements exerted an irresistible magnetic attraction on hundreds of millions of people; now we see huge reactionary mass movements gaining momentum using similar “anti-imperialist” rhetoric. This is a consequence of the onset of capitalist neo-globalization, which is shuffling the deck of world classes, causing despair and outrage among not only the most oppressed but also among middle classes desperate to protect ways of life, turf and privileges. Therefore a new social base—not just for right wing populism but also for fascist and other radical right-wing discontent—expands daily.
Neo-globalization has led to splits in the Right worldwide. Most fundamentally, it has caused a split between those who continue to cast their lot with transnational corporate capital (for instance, the neo-conservatives in the U.S.), and others, including most of the fascist Right, who see the new world order as a mortal enemy of their way of life—a threat, in fact, to the very existence of the classes out of which they emerge. Despite the ascendancy of a neo-conservative group in the current U.S. regime, the rebellious trend is the more dynamic side of this divide, growing in popularity and organization in many countries as it hones its “anti-imperialist” and “anti-corporate” message. Increasingly the international Right is positioning itself as the defender of the “little man” against an impersonal capitalist system (often seen as run by Jews) which is violating previously-sacrosanct national social contracts, caste systems, privileges and divisions of turf. It appears likely that the “blame game” sure to follow the neoconservative failures in the Middle East and the hollowing out of the U.S. economy will further energize the more rebellious tendencies.
Recipe for Rebellion
The place where the dramatic changes in class politics wrought by globalization are most sharply posed right now is in the so-called Islamic world—the very place where neo-globalization is most urgently projected by Western imperialism.
We know that capitalism must expand to survive, and Western imperialism, with its stagnant home economies, must penetrate the Moslem-inhabited countries in a whole new way to expand. On one obvious level, Western capital needs to continue to control the oil and other traditional resources in this part of the world. And from a geo-strategic point of view, whichever particular capitalists control the Middle East and Central Asia will have a tremendous advantage over their capitalist rivals, including rapidly emerging powers like China. This makes the race for penetration particularly pressurized.
But these imperatives explain only part of imperialism’s compulsion to expand—the part most familiar to the Left, since it is carried over from an earlier paradigm. On a deeper level, modern capitalism pushes to destroy and re-organize entire social structures in its drive for a new and different sort of economic expansion.
Capitalist neo-globalization seeks to enlarge and transform its presence in Muslim-populated regions, as elsewhere in the world, by means of extension, intensification and recombination. That is, it extends hungrily into all the remaining unexploited territories in the world, from the remotest regions of Central Asia to the Lacandon rain forest. In addition, it intensifies its commodification of all aspects of existence, including air, water, the airwaves, ideas, plant and animal species and human genetic material. (This is what Indian leftist Vandana Shiva calls “the new enclosure of the commons.”) It fosters and creates new “needs,” searching at an accelerated pace for ways to target, market and enhance consumption.
Finally, it “samples” and recombines formerly fixed economic and social elements—agriculture and manufacturing, labor forces, consumer markets, privileges, old and new classes, races, genders and nationalities. Thriving on fluidity, mobility and, significantly, on chaos, the new imperialism breaks down old borders, social formations and cultures, builds new ones, then breaks them down again.
In its drive to extend, intensify and recombine, neo-globalization promotes new technologies, especially biological and information technologies that allow capitalism to exploit human and natural resources faster, farther, more thoroughly and more flexibly. A central focus of neo globalization (as it has been for each stage of capitalism) is a dramatic reconfiguration of the means of controlling the proletariat, and especially proletarian women, whose exploitation is the foundation of the entire system. This is transforming traditional family and gender relations.
From the point of view of many classes in the Muslim-inhabited countries, the arrival of Western-led neo-globalization is an unmitigated disaster. Most of the Left is acutely aware of the savage impact of IMF-World Bank loansharking, commodity agriculture and hit-and run manufacturing on the poorest sectors of the colonial world. This pauperization leads to a tremendous rise in de-classed and desperately immiserated populations which constitute tinder-boxes for warlordism, ethnic conflict and radical populism of various sorts.
But we should also consider what Western globalization means for diverse middle classes, some of which comprise large populations and occupy significant niches in the national, regional and local capitalist economies of the “Islamic world.” For instance, the encroachment of globally integrated factory farming destroys the class position of even prosperous farmers in the Muslim countries. The new reach and thoroughness of global commodity markets undermines established ways of life for merchants, small bankers and regional or national manufacturers. Global homogenization of trade wipes out whole classes based on local or regional trading, transport and smuggling. (This is very much at issue in Afghanistan, which sits on top of one of the world’s most profitable smuggling routes.)
Local functionaries, clan leaders, intellectuals and professionals leading middle-class lives within existing national and local societies are well aware that they risk class demotion or extinction as global culture and centralized global authority moves onto their turf. Military officers, accustomed to influence and privilege, face an unpalatable choice between ceding power to a higher authority with its own agenda, or being replaced completely. Established religious leaders, who currently control dense networks of social, cultural and economic influence, realize that neo-globalization could eliminate or seriously weaken their position in society.
This is a pattern emerging in every part of the world: Many classes, including middle classes, are recognizing the new fragility of their economic and social status as the neo-globalization juggernaut advances.
Of course, some classes are actually benefiting, or hoping to benefit, from the changes. For example, some Indian middle classes which have caught a wave of cutting edge information technology and are riding it to a new standard of living. But overall, the pressure is downward on existing middle classes, since the whole former basis for social contracts between nationally based capitalists and “their” middle classes is disappearing.
During this time of transition, as the deck of classes is shuffled, old patterns of metropolitan privilege still provide some advantages. People with access to these privileges still do have a leg up in the competition for middle-class life within the new imperial order.
But this is likely to be a relative and temporary advantage, unlike what existed a generation ago. There’s not a whole lot of security of privilege today—in safety, in standard of living, in employment. One day you are a subsidized white settler in “Rhodesia,” the next day your farm is occupied by Africans, and you are planning your escape from Zimbabwe. One day you are sitting in a café in Belgrade sipping cappuccino, the next day NATO bombs are falling and you have no running water or electricity. One day you are a hot-shot systems designer in New York who can practically name his own salary, the next day your unemployment insurance is running out and you are reading about how well things are going in Bangalore. All this is excellent from the point of view of the giant corporations and finance capitalists. Global capital is shaking off the constraints of the old social order. Classes are being transformed and recycled at an accelerated pace; today’s social contract will likely end up in tomorrow’s dumpster.
At the end of the last capitalist era, middle classes had more options. Sometimes they supported the existing capitalist order (which, after all, had established roles for them). Other times they supported or allied with proletarian struggles that seemed to advance their class interests beyond the existing order. Today, many middle classes feel completely trapped. The former capitalist order is falling apart, and so is the former proletarian struggle. Global change is impacting their way of life, but they have virtually no political control over it. Therefore many middle-class populations are worried, angry, frustrated and nostalgic.
This is especially true in parts of the colonial world that are culturally and politically isolated from the centers of modern imperialist power—places like the Muslim-populated countries. Already angry about generations of old-style colonialism, discrimination and racist disrespect emanating from the Christian West, many middle classes in the Middle East and Central Asia now clearly recognize that they have little or no access to the levers and portals of the new global economy; that their social and economic functions are being treated as mere pawns and obstacles within Western-led globalization.
The middle classes endangered by neo-globalization are not all going quietly. And despite the hopes and expectations of the Left, some of them are linking up with desperate and de-classed populations of the poor—refugees, guerrillas looking for another war, the chronically unemployed, street gangs, etc.—in an alliance of reactionary anger against global capital. Frequently welded together by an ideology of cultural superiority and a traditionalist mythology, these political movements reflect a powerful yearning to turn back the clock to a time when their classes had leverage and hopeful futures.
But although they often fetishize the past, the forces of the rebellious Right are not just some exotic “traditional” holdovers from an earlier time. In fact the rebellious Right’s various trends embody very up-to-date attempts to defeat, influence or get a piece of the action within the new world order by struggling against the current leadership and agenda of world capital. This reflects an entirely correct understanding that only those who are prepared to fight will be able to survive and carve out space for themselves in the new capitalist landscape.
Men Against Neo-Globalization
Above all, various classes of men (worldwide, not just in Muslim-majority areas) have a special hatred of neo-globalization because it challenges their traditional ownership and control over women.
One of advancing neo-globalization’s key characteristics is that it accelerates the breakdown of traditional patriarchal family structures, in which individual men directly supervise and control women and benefit privately from their labor. Familiar forms of male dominance over women are being gradually replaced with post-modern systems of oppression that cut ordinary men out of the parasitic loop. For many men of the dispossessed classes, this is the ultimate loss, the ultimate insult.
Just as it did during earlier waves of genocide and colonialism, Western imperialism postures today as the world “protector” of women’s rights. And we are in fact witnessing the elevation of some women within the new capitalist order as a means of controlling the rest more effectively. This is part of the new style social contract that capitalists want and actively promote. Butch Lee puts it with characteristic bluntness:
Right now “post-feminist” women in the capitalist metropolis think life is just getting better and better. Hillary, women’s pro sports, flying jets over the Third World bombing away, and business opportunities, too. Who woulda imagined? It couldn’t be whiter for us. I think we are like those newly-enfranchised German women in the liberal Weimar Republic days during 1919-1933. Sleep walking on the edge of the precipice. For patriarchal capitalism is always dangerous to us. Deadly dangerous.” —(The Military Strategy of Women and Children, 2003.)
Needless to say, neo-globalization has nothing to do with “liberating” the masses of women. Quite the opposite.
Modern capitalism demands that more and more women and children be marshaled in concentrated, efficient commodity production and transnational service industries. It gathers them into large flexible labor pools directly tied to the world economy. Where this process is already well underway—for instance in the maquiladoras along the U.S.-Mexico border or the brothels of Bangkok or the burgeoning transnational domestic worker industry—it is revolutionizing gender relations: ripping young women out of traditional rural patriarchy and concentrating them into communities of women organized around their new work. Women’s lives are in many cases disciplined directly by the employer, who may control not just the workplace but also housing and access to health care, education, childcare and entertainment.
Simultaneously, neo-globalization creates significant sectors of unemployed, de-classed and often women-less men. Male street terror and warlordism feeding on this conveniently growing reservoir of outcast men plays a significant role in repressing women’s attempts at self-organization. This is a post-modern horror fitting to the current incarnation of imperialism on steroids.
The radical Right internationally is characterized by a united front of men of various threatened classes trying to protect or augment their role—their share of power—within capitalist patriarchy. From the perspective of many of these men, it’s better to die than to lose ownership of “their” women.
Broad support for the Right arises among men who live in traditional family settings and who feel endangered by the encroaching changes in capitalism. But the rebellious Right, and especially its rising fascist vanguard, is also populated by men who have basically already lost that battle. Within the warlord armies of the hard Right are whole populations of women-less men, such as the mujihedeen flowing out of the madrassas of Pakistan. Because of the chaos and radical reorganization of post-modern society, these men have little prospect of becoming the patriarchs of traditional, stable families. Many have hardly any “normal” contact with women at all. Instead, they have become outlaws in search of male power, dreaming of warrior empires where they can take whatever they want by force, especially women. At times, this fascistic fantasy becomes reality: post-modern world politics offers them chances to rule neighborhoods, whole cities (as in Iraq), or countries (like Afghanistan and Iran). There are endless opportunities to dominate, rape and terrorize women on a local scale.
The struggle around globalization currently raging between the rebellious Right and Western imperialism pivots around which men get to control women, and how. It’s no coincidence that gender figures so prominently in the unfolding of the dramatic confrontations in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world. It will probably play a central role in every struggle over neo- globalization to come.
The approaching tidal wave should alert us. In country after country, right wing men are re-enslaving women as a subhuman class….This is the largest mass political movement in the world by far. (Butch Lee, The Military Strategy of Women and Children, 2003.)
Continues at: http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/false-fro ... ist-right/