Down with the so-called rebels!

I'm not saying there aren't any good arguments against intervention in Libya, but here, the author's self-identification with the left seems to me misplaced. This is because the "our-poor-vs-their-oppressed" routine tends to be the standard, unprincipled line of a nationalist reactionary. If only the West had allowed Gadaffi to kill a few more Libyans, a few more Americans could have had their teeth pulled for free—such is the noble logic of this article, only slightly exaggerated.
Posing as clued-up and streetwise, the argument simply reinforces the conventions of a system of production and distribution in which we are told that we can't have both—in this case, help foreigners and help ourselves—but must choose between them. In a world of great material abundance, however, in which economic textbook "scarcity" is, in some sense, socially created and imposed (which is one of the things that Marx means when he says that capitalist social relations have become a fetter on social progress), this appeal to greed and selfishness—exactly the human traits that capitalist social relations tap into and amplify—merely binds us more closely to that system. At the same time, it conspicuously fails to point the finger at a ruling ideology that carefully places outside of the jurisdiction of social policy the vastly lopsided income distributions which it conceals and protects, portraying them instead as an unalterable feature of the natural landscape, unquestionable, dangerous to tinker with, beyond choice. And this is the crux of the problem.
Also: nice scare-quotes sneer at the Libyan "rebels" (=not really rebels, not really worthy of our solidarity?) fighting for their freedom.

The path of despair

Hegel argues somewhere that an awareness of the inadequacy of our conceptions is what propels us towards self-criticism, making intellectual progress—which, for him, is the same as progress per se—possible. He calls this "the path of despair". Amid the current fad for shallow self-help books and studies of the "economics of happiness", it might be worth remembering that happiness is not the main goal of progress, freedom is. From the vantage point of enhanced freedom, people might be in a better position to hammer out whatever happiness is for them.

After the Iraq war, it became clear to me that, whatever the mainstream of Western left is, I'm not really a part of it, either in terms of philosophical outlook or political inclination. However, I do still consider myself a Marxist of sorts—in the sense that most of my political "starting points" come out of that tradition—and I still think that progress should be possible in extending the areas of popular political an economic control. I think of this as "socialism", although I don't suppose it really matters what its called. Is there an economics possible that raises living standards for most people on the planet and gives them greater control over their own lives? This has been our Holy Grail for some time, of course, but is still probably the most important question facing the left in this generation. There can’t be any socialism unless we get a plausible answer on this. But it is a huge task. To get anywhere would require a large number of like-minded, flexible-thinking, knowledgeable and talented people working closely together over many years. After Iraq, however, and the apparent retreat of many into the safety of the broad political dogmas that existed beforehand—most obviously, an oddly reactionary brand of "anti-imperialism"—it doesn’t seem as though the conditions are in place for the "ruthless criticism of all that exists". This would be only the starting point for such a programme, which would also have to turn its sceptical gaze in multiple directions, towards itself as much as to the outside world. Perhaps one reasons that this doesn’t happen very readily is that, for many, the left is something like a family, and, at the social-psychological level, not many family members want to risk becoming an outcast by speaking out of turn.

Right at the beginning of The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel says this:“The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be fixed, the more is it accustomed to expect either agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see reason for the one or the other in any explanatory statement concerning such a system. It does not conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that variety. The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant's existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole. But contradiction as between philosophical systems is not wont to be conceived in this way; on the other hand, the mind perceiving the contradiction does not commonly know how to relieve it or keep it free from its one-sidedness, and to recognize in what seems conflicting and inherently antagonistic the presence of mutually necessary moments.”

And, if you can get past the fancy language and the romantic metaphor, I think it’s the same with, say, Hayek, or neo-liberalism, or whatever is the left's current demonic totem. We should be asking: What in these outlooks is useful? What can be usefully absorbed? What remains after an all-out criticism to be absorbed? That is, there has to be an appreciation and a firm grasp of Hayek and of neo-liberalism, of their strong points and achievements, as well as their weaknesses and faults, before they can be superseded. The same applies to all previous intellectual and practical efforts towards developing a socialist economics, including the holy-of-holies, Capital. From the point of view of empirical investigation, it means distinguishing capitalist propaganda from results. For example, where have their development efforts or their standard macroeconomic policies been successful, and why? And where have they been unsuccessful? Do they have any tools that we can reuse? Despite the colossal scale of the current financial-economic crisis, I personally haven’t yet seen anyone coming close to grasping the nettle. Certainly not the so-called "hard" left, whose ham-fisted/ hare-brained attempts to oppose the injustices of capitalism somehow always reek of injustice themselves, appear not to have picked up any tips from the disasters of the 20th century and, somehow, intimate the preparation of something worse than run-of-the-mill late liberal/social-democratic capitalism. (Sometimes—who could have conceived it?—even the imperialists appear to be more progressive.) But also, if a bit more depressingly, not even intelligent Marxists such as Robert Brenner (to judge by his organisation's website), who otherwise looks pretty much correct, so far as I can see, about the causes of the current crisis being found in the monetary response to the problem of long-term decline in profitability in the advanced capitalist states.

If you want things to stay the same, everything has to change

In her recent book, Central Asia’s Second Chance, Martha Brill Olcott attempts to address an apparent contradiction at the heart of contemporary US foreign policy in the Central Asian region. This contradiction is that the failure of the current Bush administration to encourage democratic development more actively—instead relying on partnerships with authoritarian regimes out of short-term expediency linked to the prosecution of the so-called war on terror—risks reproducing long-term security threats to the West because of the potential for ongoing political, social and economic discontent to catalyse anti-Western terrorism.

She argues that the attention and resources of the US administration have been diverted from vital long-term democracy-promotion projects by the war on terror itself, and that this is shown by the low and declining level of US regional funding, which was just US$210m in 2004 (compared with US$1.9bn and US$2.7bn for the more significant US allies, Egypt and Israel, in the same year).

A second important theme of the book is that the nation-building approach adopted by international bodies may have been counterproductive for the region—in particular, in view of the interdependent histories, transport infrastructure, and energy and water resources of the countries involved, the country-specific approach may have encouraged rivalry and protectionism, hindering the development of a regional market.

In some ways, this is a frustrating book, since the author seems to share uncritically the terms and perspectives of the US policy establishment, so that the reader has the feeling of wading through quite a lot of policy-wonk material before getting to a discussion of the details of what has happened regarding the political systems of the Central Asian states themselves (the book might thus more accurately have been called America’s Missed Second Chance in Central Asia).

However, in relation to these political systems, the author makes the points that the countries' leaders were all products of Soviet political structures, and that their emergence, practically intact, from the wreckage of the Soviet Union following the failed Moscow coup of 1991 meant that they lacked the legitimacy that might have been conferred upon them had they risen to power as leaders of independence struggles. Although none of the region’s citizens enjoy as full a range of political rights and civic freedoms as those of the formerly communist countries of central and eastern Europe, there is some variety in the types of political systems that have obtained in Central Asia in the independence period, running along a line from “semi-democratic” to fully authoritarian, with the Kyrgyz Republic usually conceived of as the most democratic and Turkmenistan as the least.

The thesis that US funding was insufficient to allow it to influence positively the political outcomes in the region (in particular, to minimise the chances of political instability by helping to pave the way for the smooth, democratic handover of power) is illustrated by the case of the Kyrgyz Republic. Here, the author argues, such a policy had the best chance of success in the early years of the present decade, because of the country's experience of rapid democratic development in the early 1990s, and because the desire of the then president, Askar Akayev, to compete for prestige with other Central Asian leaders would have predisposed him to accept a high degree of conditionality in return for grant assistance for political reforms already under way, such as of local government, electoral mechanics and anti-corruption programmes. However, the sums involved were too small to yield any decisive influence (funds from the Freedom Support Act for democracy-building were just US$1.16 per head for the Kyrgyz Republic in 2002, although this was the highest per-head level of funding from the US for any country in the region). Instead, therefore, Akayev’s increasing authoritarianism went unchecked, and the chain of events leading up to the Aksy killings of 2002 and resulting in the president’s ouster in the Tulip Revolution of March 2005, while illustrating the greater political influence of public protest in the Kyrgyz Republic relative to its Central Asian neighbours, also began a curious phase of political instability and constitutional struggle that is probably not yet over. Indeed, the regime of Kurmanbek Bakiyev, which replaced Akayev’s, appears to have reproduced many of the features of its predecessor, re-employing many of its personnel, and adopting many of its operation and control techniques.

An empire tries to strike back

Two articles on the fate and aspirations of contemporary Russia, here and here.

The first, by George Schöpflin on openDemocracy, argues that, domestically, Russia is a "consensual authoritarian" system, "ruled by a rent-seeking elite", and glued together with xenophobia and support from eastern Orthodoxy; internationally, the author spies emergence of neo-imperialism the country's power plays with it hydrocarbons resources and infrastructure.

Though there might be a case for seeing this as neo-imperialism—if that means exercising control through economic strength rather than directly by force—I'm not sure that there's anything wrong per se in charging market prices for your oil. (If it is possible to see oil subsidies as a means of maintaining influence in post-Soviet countries, can raising prices also be? You would have to look at the specific political conditions in each case.) Nor does there necessarily seem much of a territorial claim implicit in the phrase "near abroad".

Also: the definition of "European" as somehow synonymous with democracy seems a little strange, given that half of Europe has only established (or re-established) democratic institutions in the recent past.

The second article, by Perry Anderson in the London Review of Books, is a more wide-ranging and historically well-informed piece. It starts off with the Russian authorities' touchy relocation of the funeral of the assassinated investigative journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, to an obscure cemetery on outskirts of Moscow, which is portrayed as both shabby and fearful, then moves quickly on to a speculative, though broadly plausible, account of the basis of Putin's appeal and high ratings in the opinion polls (basic answer: he's not Yeltsin); the intimate connections, despite differences, between the Yeltsin and Putin regimes; the re-merging of political and economic power under the latter, in parallel with the fusion of the state and security apparatus; the resubordination of the media; the lamentable fate of the liberal intelligentsia (but: they shouldn't have backed Yeltsin); the widespread indifference to the horrors of Stalinism; the demographic catastrophe that looms on the horizon; and the symptoms of ongoing cultural degradation and decline (symbolised by the decadent cult of "retro-Tsarism").

Mr Anderson lays into various commentators over for their benign assessment of the state of contemporary Russia: Andrei Schleifer (neo-liberal crook) and Andrew Jack (neo-liberal dupe/ colonial apologist). Richard Pipes gets a grudging thumbs up for his theory that Russians, hemmed in by a political culture that predisposes them to favour order over freedom, don't necessarily rate democracy that highly.

In addition, the author points to a number of interesting-sounding theorists of contemporary Russia more approvingly, such as Anna Ledvna's study of the informal practices that characterise Russian political and economic life (whenever this topic comes up, I think, for some reason, of the phrase "what you call corruption, we call culture", intoned in a rasping Mafioso baritone), and gives an outline of Dmitry Fruman's idea of Russia's present-day "managed democracy" as the phase of a process that broadly mimics the phases of the Soviet era (but this time heading towards real democracy?). This looks a bit like a regurgitation of the ever-popular "cycles" theory of civilisational ascendancy and decline—a recycling, in fact.

Yet, for all its astuteness in places (on the possible factors behind Putin's appeal, which often looks like a bit a mystery to outsiders), as well as for its obvious erudition and breadth, the essay leaves a certain teenage, "not as bad as Bush and Blair" impression behind it. This impression, while perfectly characteristic of the rather degraded political discourse of the day, still seems to me a bit unseemly in a Marxist historian fast approaching 70.

Whither Rus?

What's all this about? Why now?

Four thoughts:

• there is currently loads of oil money washing about (so I'm told), boosting the confidence of the ruling elite, who, Nero-like, continue with violin practice while the Third Rome burns;
• America, pinned down, appears relatively weak;
• ahead of the "difficult" changeover in 2008, an appeal to "great power" nostalgia looks as though it might be helpful at home in binding and rallying the swindled masses to the patriotic cause of the state; and
• those proposals for positioning missile-defence systems in central-eastern Europe can't have helped.