Kovel writes...

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed Feb 2 12:54:55 PST 2000


Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2000 11:52:55 -0500 From: joel kovel <jkovel at prodigy.net>

TO THE GREENS #1


>From Joel Kovel

[The following is the first in a series of occasional pieces I plan to release during the nominating process, so you can get to know me better as a potential Presidential candidate. I'll be commenting on news items, developing issues of green straegy, and also bringing in some matters of philosophical interest. I hope to get some out every few days for the next two and a half weeks; then, from the middle of Feburary to the March 7 primary, I'll be in transit and probably unable to release any. Responses are most welcome, though I cannot promise answering them all.]

On Green Universalism

"For everything that lives is holy." W. Blake

Senator Jesse Helms "warned the United Nations to keep its 'utopian' visions away from the American people." New York Times, Jan 21

Helms' comment, made during his unprecedented visit to the UN last week, is both radically misinformed and deeply revealing. Way off the mark is his implication that the UN, as currently constituted, represents anything at all "utopian." In fact, the UN has become thoroughly pacified under the relentless badgering of the United States, to the point where the present Secretary General, Kofi Annan, lists Adam Smith as his choice for "Man of the Millenium," and matches this in his incessant pandering to transnational capital.

Helms' bizarre attitude also plays a role as the "bad cop" in the scenario of American intimidation of the UN. This policy is continuous with the basic policy of the US security apparatus since the founding of the UN. As internal State Department documents from the mid 1940's make clear, high American officials viewed the nascent UN with horror and, although they could not openly attack it, vowed to do everything they could to weaken the organization and bring it under American control.

The reason for this was precisely the threat of the utopian impulse embedded in the original UN, an ideal contained in the concept of its name, as the "uniting of the nations," that is, making the world one. The impulses of the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," passed in 1948 and brutally ignored since, are quite revolutionary in substance. They include the right, simply by virtue of being born human, to good employment, health care, security of families, etc--in short, to a host of benefits that ran counter to the social conditions imposed by the world capitalist system that the US took over after the second World War. American hostility to the UN was grounded, therefore, in a quite rational assessment of what it boded for the forthcoming "American Century."

There is an organic unity between the notions of utopianism, universality, and social and economic justice. Each implies the other, and all stand outside the established power which divides and degrades us. Universality is a necessary condition for justice, since it establishes the fundamental equivalence of all peoples as holders of human rights. Without this, there would be no standard against which to judge the failings of the established society. At the same time, the notion of universality implies particularity as well, whether expressed as nationality, ethnicity, gender, locality, etc. Nation-states no longer are the dominant division of a universalist world, but they do not dissolve into a universalist soup, either--if they did, this would be an instance of "totalitarianism" and not universality. What is universal in human beings is the capacity to define individuality and a particular identity: thus universality is a dialectical concept, in which individuality is not abolished but raised to a new level. We become uniquely ourselves to the degree we participate in all others. Therefore the universalist idea is the doctrine of a whole composed of mutually interacting and self-defining parts. It is neither chauvinist nor undifferentiated, but affirms itself by affirming other selves. As Blake put it, everything that lives is holy--and unique. This affirmation is, or must be, utopian, since it otherwise could not stand radically apart from the given, unjust and unsustainable society and its anti-utopian doctrine that there is no alternative to the given system

So Senator Helms is expressing the actual logic of the dominant system when he comes down, fifty years after the fact, on the UN's utopianism. If he is a miserable excuse for a statesman, it is because the society he represents miserably fails to live up to its professed ideals.

But for us, long live utopianism! We should be the party of radical alternatives, of practical dreamers--otherwise we settle for being a loyal opposition and the handmaid to power. As Greens, we have to stand for the organic unity of utopianism, universality and justice if we are to be true to ourselves. This principle applies across a great range of practical political issues. One of special importance today applies to the red-hot struggle against the World Trade Organization and its brutal regime of free trade. The huge surge of agitation against the WTO presents the Greens with a great opportunity to play an active part in this struggle, as its political arm.

However, there are distinctly different logics of opposing the neoliberal regime of free trade. One way emphasizes the WTO's anti-democratic and anti-ecological character, and does so in the spirit of universality. It sees the WTO as denying the democratic rights of all peoples to self-determine their economic and ecological activity. What is wrong with the WTO--and the capitalism it serves--is that it professes to be universal with its "globalization," but in fact reduces humanity and nature to a set of instruments for the profit-making of a few. In this logic, the WTO does not go far enough: it represents a perversion of basic human rights, and it is these that we fight for. In this perspective, nationalities are respected as a valid type of difference within a basically internationalist perspective.

Another logic of opposing the WTO is to view it as an infringement of national sovereignty. In this scheme, the WTO goes too far, by violating the traditional boundaries of economic life. Here nationalism is affirmed as a chauvinism: my country over all others. Implicitly at least, this leads to a "lifeboat" strategy where the sufferings of the South--miseries largely inflicted by the Northern, metropolitan nations--are simply ignored.

It's useful if a bit oversimplified to views these two perspectives as Left and Right critiques of the WTO. We know in any case that the latter, economic nationalist, view is actively espoused by reactionaries, including Helms, who sees it as a defence against internationalism in the same spirit as he hates the UN; and most prominently, Patrick Buchanan, with his own presidential ambitions. Here the attack on the WTO is combined with a chilling affection for Nazi Germany--chilling but not surprising, for in fact the direction taken by this logic easily passes from national chauvinism to racial domination, thereby revealing its true dynamic, with horrific consequences.

Clearly, it is of the greatest importance that Greens recognize the difference between these two logics against the WTO, and reject the second one vigorously. To form even a tactical alliance with Buchanan's position is worse than opportunistic: it directly betrays our deepest and most valid principles. Economic nationalism is in any case a dead end that reproduces the given power structure and requires strong state intervention to sustain itself--intervention that can lead in authoritarian directions. In sum, it is vitally important that greens oppose the WTO in the name of a new, more universal and just society, and not in the defense of national sovereignty.

In future communications, I'll follow up on the implications of some of these points.



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