From: "M" <swerve-AT-onetel.net.uk>
Subject: R: AUT: Dunaveskaya's Group on 9/11
Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2001 07:21:03 +0100


Could someone send me the url for news&letters please

thanks

-----Messaggio originale-----
Da: owner-aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
[mailto:owner-aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu]Per conto di cwright
Inviato: sabato 29 settembre 2001 5.00
A: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Oggetto: Re: AUT: Dunaveskaya's Group on 9/11

I wrote this and sent it to their Resident Editorial Board.

 When Analysis is No Analysis At All
In their statement "Against the Double Tragedy", the resident editorial
board of News and Letters made a series of comments which, in the face of
Bush's current drive to war and the climate of xenophobia and intensified
anti-Muslim racism, must be sharply rebuked.  The concessions to U.S.
chauvinism, the use of standard anti-Muslim caricatures in place of a
Marxist analysis of the source of Islamic fundamentalism and its
relationship to globalization, and the general bowing to Euro-centrism
utterly undermine any attempt to explain why the politics of
anti-imperialism offer no guidance in the wake of current events.

The absence of analysis begins right away when the REB states, "The Sept. 11
attacks have nothing to do with any struggle against capitalism, injustice,
or U.S. imperialism. They were a brutal act of violence against U.S. workers
that has no rational cause, legitimacy, or justification."  This is simply
wrong.  To reject the possibility of rational cause in the same breath as
legitimacy or justification is to give up any explanatory power.  This may
be comforting, but it reduces the people who carried this out, obviously
Muslims, to being mindless.  Since N&L has already indicated this above in
their comment on 'mindless terrorism', they have chosen the same ground as
the US media.

The obfuscation of events continues with the statement that "No group took
responsibility for the attacks, and not a single political demand or
proclamation was issued by anyone. It is hard to discern any political
content to these acts, presumably carried out by Islamic fundamentalists
under the leadership of Osama bin Laden. They were simply geared to kill as
many people as possible, without any regard for class, race, or background.
Such cruelty could only have been carried out by the most reactionary,
backward elements imaginable."

It is not hard to discern willful blindness in this idiotic statement.  They
targeted the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and somewhere in Washington
D.C., such as Congress or the White House.  If anything, this was an attack
aimed directly at the symbols of U.S. military, political and economic
power.  Had it been geared towards 'simply killing as many people as
possible, it would have been done at 10am or 2pm, not 9am.  Had they wanted
to cause maximum loss of life, they would have driven a plane into a Major
League Baseball game, where the death toll would most certainly have been
thousands more.

Certainly, this was done with no regard for class, race, gender, or
background.  1,400 Middle Eastern and South Asian Americans lost their lives
in this incident.  So did many African Americans and Latinos.  And clearly,
the vast bulk of those killed were working class.  But is it on this basis
that we have to call the people who did this the "most reactionary, backward
elements imaginable"?  Is this act more cruel than the one million people
killed in Iraq by the US since 1991?  Is this act more cruel than what
Israel has done to the Palestinians?  Is this act more cruel than the
starvation and death by disease that happens at such a horrific rate
worldwide simply because it benefits capital?  I think not.  Rather, this
act is part and parcel of the daily terror which capital exacts upon the
world's population.  What makes this special is NOT the degree of death and
misery.  Rather, this is special because this is the first time since the
19th century that the U.S. has actually been attacked on the mainland.  This
is the first time since World War II that U.S. militarization for 'national
defense' has appeared as more than a pure sham.  This is what is hooking a
lot of people into blind-faith patriotism and militarism.

So why the references to 'mindless', 'the most reactionary, backwards
elements', the denial of rationality, and so on?  This kind of approach does
nothing more or less than support the racist construction of all Muslims as
irrational, mindless fanatics.  It supports the idea that Islam is, as a
body, more reactionary and backward than any other religion.

During a brief interlude in this non-analysis we get treated to a dose of
economic catastrophism as follows:  "First, the economic impact of the
attack on the World Trade Center--tens of billions of dollars of damage were
done and many airlines now teeter on the brink of bankruptcy as a result of
the disruption of air travel--will almost certainly send the U.S. into a
full recession."  While not offensive, this does seem to fail to understand
capital on some relatively serious level.  Catastrophe is essential to
capital's survival.  Catastrophes like these destroy dead labor (the WTC),
which no longer generates value, allowing capital to exploit new living
labor in construction and myriad other ways.  For the rest, airline travel
will recover fairly quickly because that is the only way to cover long
distances efficiently; planes will have to be refitted; security systems and
procedures upgraded; military order increased; and so on.  The fluctuation
caused by this in relation to 'confidence in the market' will probably blow
over quickly.  Historically, things like this have not caused more than
market fluctuations.  If we do plunge into the depths, then it will not have
been caused by this attack, but rather, this attack will simply have been
the proverbial 'stick' that broke the market's back.  That does not mean
this will not, in fact already is, hurting tens, maybe hundreds, of
thousands of workers.  The real 'economic' effects will come from the class
struggle over whether or not capital can use this as an opportunity to
impose a higher level of exploitation, as part of the process of recomposing
class relations in its own favor.

As the REB begins to wind up the statement, they treat us to a banality
which pits progressive "Western" (quotation marks will not save you,
comrades!) culture/society against Islamic Barbarism.  "These "explanations"
misconstrue the nature of the forces which conducted the attacks.
Reactionary Islamic fundamentalism is not simply driven by hatred of U.S.
imperialist acts against Iraq, Palestine, or any other country. Islamic
fundamentalism is just as much driven by hatred of feminism, homosexuality,
workers' rights, etc. Such groups as Afghanistan's Taliban, Algeria's FIA,
and the terrorist cells in Egypt which have murdered Marxist professors as
well as indigenous writers and singers represent a violent rejection of
everything "Western"--especially those aspects of western society created
through decades of struggles by workers, women, gays and lesbians and
minorities for a more open and free society."

Firstly, this ignores the choice of the United States.  Why here?  Because
the United States represents the center of Western capitalist power, not
just economically but politically and militarily.  The U.S. actions in the
Middle East and the rest of the world certainly do make us a target.  The
U.S. certainly does make us a target by its specific actions.  There is no
doubt that all of the actions and policies of the United States make it the
pole of attraction for these kind of attacks,

Secondly, this kind of Islamic fundamentalism is NOT anti-Western or
anti-Modernist or anti-capitalist.  This is exactly where the banality of
defending 'Westernism' comes to light and the long trek of the word Humanism
returns to its origins in an Us vs Them dialectic of 'Civilzation vs
Barabarism'.  Islamic fundamentalism parallels Western religious development
and ideas in some ways, harkening back to the role played by early
Methodism, Calvinism, and Puritanism in the creation and disciplining of the
working class.  Islamic fundamentalism uses older ideologies and cultural
practices, but revises them in accordance with the needs of capitalist
accumulation and modernization.  Nowhere has Islamic fundamentalism tried to
restrict the growth of capital.  Osama bin Laden is a very rich capitalist
with a family construction business.  In fact, he was building roads and
infrastructure for the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion.
Islamic fundamentalism seeks to control and discipline the population to
capital accumulation and towards production and reproduction.  Nobody is
questioning whether their acts are reprehensible and horrific, but they are
not counter-posable to some more humane 'Western' practices qua 'Western'.

If we mystify Islamic fundamentalism by taking it out of the context of
global capital and the transformation of social relations in those
countries, then we will certainly miss what is going on.  If we do not see
Islamic fundamentalism as part and parcel of the reaction of global capital
against workers, women, gays and lesbians and minorities, then we must make
these terrorists into devils.  Rather than that, Islamic fundamentalism
reflects the class struggle, the struggle against women, against racial and
religious minorities, etc. which marks the entire world in this period of
so-called globalization.  If it takes a particularly harsh form here, it
seems, then we should consider that the wretchedness of life has a direct
effect on the barbarity induced, such as in Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, the
former Yugoslavia, and other places of note.

Also, this idiotic paragraph assumes that there is something fundamentally
'Western' about women's liberation, workers' liberation, racial tolerance,
free sexuality, etc.  This is positively offensive.  'The West' reintroduced
mass slavery and the slave trade on a scale never before imagined.  The
'West' introduced the categories of heterosexual and homosexual in ways that
Othered homosexual practices as part and parcel of generating the 'home' as
the site of un-waged reproduction and all 'unproductive' sexuality as 'evil'
.  'The West' is, if nothing else, synonymous with the capital-labor
relation and all the other horrors that go along with it.  In so far as
struggles here have broken that down and expanded the realm of Freedom,
those struggles could be considered anti-'Western', precisely because they
are generated by 'Western' society.  This attachment to 'Western' society is
an attachment to the contradictions of the Enlightenment and Enlightenment
'humanism', which I suppose should not be surprising for an organization
that calls itself 'Marxist-Humanist'.

Finally, we get a tasty treatment of News and Letters' ongoing submission to
nationalism and the state in theory, having received heavy doses of
xenophobia and anti-Muslim chauvinism.  "The lesser-evilism which underlay
much of the Left's silence on Bosnia, and its refusal to support the
movement for national self-determination in Kosova, has only succeeded in
strengthening the power of U.S. imperialism. The reason so many despair of
the struggle for freedom and turn to patriotism, xenophobia and statism is
that they see no liberatory alternative to capitalism. Instead of responding
to each political crisis by repeating the same old slogans against "U.S.
imperialism," revolutionaries have a responsibility to oppose all societies
and tendencies based on alienated human relations while projecting a
positive vision of a new society, what Karl Marx called "positive humanism,
beginning from itself." Only in that way can humanity see that there is an
alternative to capitalism-imperialism."

Part of the problem lay in this defense of national self-determination.
After being against statism, patriotism, and xenophobia, News and Letters
would have us be for national self-determination.  That idea means nothing
without statism, patriotism and xenophobia.  There is no nation without a
state.  There is no such thing as national self-determination for the
working class.  The epoch in which capital had not yet enveloped the whole
world, in which the capital-labor relation did not dominate all other social
relations, such a notion was relevant because the spread of the
capital-labor relation spread the power of the working class.  But in the
last 50 or so years, in what few places can we say that capital has not
become dominant, not simply as the formal subsumption of labor to capital,
but as the real subsumption?

The idea of national liberation is nothing other than a reactionary utopia
harkening back to social democracy and Stalinism.  This approach does not
start from capital as an always-already global society, but as a system of
national capitals and national states.  It takes the form to be immediately
the essence, instead of understanding that the form is the mediated
appearance of the essence, or rather, the essence in the mode of being
denied.  National self-determination does not take the working class as
revolutionary subject but alien class forces (since for women and people of
color the issue is not 'national' liberation in any meaningful sense.)
National liberation is the separation of one territory from others through
the formation of a state that exists to draw capital to itself and to ensure
the control over labor within its boundaries.  What currently existing state
does not perform these tasks?  The maintenance of such positions in spite of
the substantive transformation of social relations globally into the real
subsumption of labor by capital reflects the under-theorization of the
changes that have taken place since the period of so-called 'classical
imperialism' as understood by Lenin and a host of others (a position which
always started theoretically from the nation-state and national capitals to
begin with, rather than global capital versus global labor.)  The position
of national self-determination will not offer any resolution to the
conflicts existing in the majority world because the possibility of
independent capitalist development is unrealistic.  The failures of the
post-WWII national liberation movements highlight this failure.  If
anything, the countries which engaged in national revolutions tended to
develop capitalist relations less thoroughly and often had political regimes
as or more repressive in relation to the working class than other states.

I agree that lesser-evilism is misplaced, but not because national
self-determination is at issue, but because the only mode of liberation left
open is the self-liberation of the working class.  The appeal to national
self-determination led to the position of defending the KLA, an organization
whose anti-working class tendencies were both intrinsic and explicit, even
before the post-NATO bombing period.  As in so many cases, rather than the
working class of Kosova being seen as Subject, the KLA became Subject in
substitution for the working class, a classically Leninist inversion of the
Party-Class relationship.  In Kosova, as in Serbia, there is no way in which
Kosova or Serbia could be seen as instances of opportunities for national
self-determination in anything but a reactionary sense.  The absence of the
working class for itself should in no way drive us to believe that any of
the alternatives could substitute for working class self-activity.  This
raises broader questions of whether or not Kosova was 'nationally
oppressed', which I think could be clearly defended.  Even so, the question
is what is the point of departure for the resolution of that oppression.  I
see no means of claiming that national self-determination offered Kosova
workers an actual respite to their social conditions of exploitation and
oppression.)

The statement of the REB should not be passed off as a more enlightened,
more rigorous Marxism.  It is not even an analysis as such, but the refusal
of an analysis! Nowhere do we get even a glimpse of an explanation that
might address the question that was so fervently asked by the public, and so
shamelessly evaded by the politicians and media, of "Why us?"  It seems that
News and Letters will have to take its place alongside the rest of the Left
in neither deciphering the causes nor mounting an adequate reply to the
latest tragedy of capital's murderous 'globalization'.  However, News and
Letters will also have to add to that miserable moment shameful concessions
to national chauvinism and utter submission to anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Cheers,

Chris

Note that while some people might enjoy my attack on national
self-determination, I would still propose it primarily as the opposition to
nationalism.  I took it farther than I normally would in part because I was
so infuriated with the N&L Statement.  I can think of several cases where I
would support apparently limited struggles for national independence (East
Timor and Palestine come immediately to mind), but more importantly, I think
it is necessary to chart what our relationship concretely to those struggles
would be.  Does the refusal to support nationalist politics mean we put
ourselves against the struggle itself?  Was it better for Angolan workers
and farmers to overthrow Portugese colonialism, even if the regime which
came into being was in many ways no better?  Should we have supported no
sides, or maybe no struggle at all?  That the Palestinian struggle is
embedded within a national framework does not mean that we all see the
Intafada as possibly breaking outside of national boundaries, but even if it
did not, it would benefit not just Palestine but the Middle East, to see
Israel cease to exist and be replaced by a secular, if bourgeois, state.

I refer to my other postings on this issue in recent months for a fuller
explanation, rather than rehash what I have said.




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