``There seems to be a pall over these lists...
...I would argue that a marxist reassessment must be based not just, and not mainly, on moral principles but on an analysis of the material balance of forces and the underlying processes. Such a materialist morality, paradoxically, is more moral than idealist versions, which may be spitting in the wind, and may by their arbitrariness divide people who ultimately could be on the same side...'' Chris Burford
``...The challenge for "us" (motley and bickering) is to reframe the debate, to not simply fall back on "No US War in Afghanistan!" which is now moot, and to say openly that, yes, there is a threat to citizens everywhere (and a threat to progressive values), a threat that cannot be excused or rationalized away. We should discuss how best to deal with this threat, in real terms that make sense to common people...'' Dennis Perrin
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Undoubtedly, there is a pall. Usually I would more or less agree on general principles that a material balance of forces is the most revealing approach. But curiously, in this case, I don't agree, because the motivations of the terrorist attacks on the US, and the US attacks on Afghanistan are not principally driven by material conditions. This isn't to say that ultimately, poverty, cultural marginality, and suppressed material development are not found somewhere down the list. However, these conditions seem more like context and background, breeding grounds so to speak but not the primary, frontal figuration of events.
Essentially this is a cultural war and is reducible to a conflict between differing reactionary religious fundamentalisms---in the US and west, against numerous traditional but equally reactionary and religious based fundamentalisms. I don't think it is a mere coincidence that bin Laden or whoever planned and timed the attacks, just happened to pick the first year of the Bush administration by accident. That is to say, I don't think that material constraints determined the timing. I suspect the Bush administration was picked in particular because Bush represents the reactionary Christians as the political power of the US state. Perhaps more to the point for many Middle Eastern Moslems, Bush and US also represents through its fundamentalist turn, a linkage to Jewish fundamentalism and its melding of religious law with definitions of state. By rhetorical elaboration, the representation becomes a political diatribe on US military, economic, and political support for Israel.
In my mind the universal enemy of all these reactionary religious and traditionalist movements is the secular European Enlightenment, which has through material and historical development become what we mean by modernity and postmodernity. That is they are mutual representations and expressions of each other.
Nevertheless, postmodernity in its cultural expressions is a secular form of a related reaction to the enlightenment---an enlightenment turned in upon itself, the hermeneutic and apocalyptic turn--the deep and otherworldly concentration on the interpenetrating spheres of linguistic analysis and transcendental subjectivity. These mirror in a secular universe, the fevered textual concentration of religious fundamentalism and its assurances of spiritual transcendence.
Both the hermeneutic turn in postmodernity and religious fundamentalism share a kind of reading process, in which in the unfolding of thought, an ideality or transcendent meaning is achieved between the interpreter and the text. However, while these critically self-conscious processes seem to erode the apparent absolute nature of the rational agent in a postmodern cultural context, in the religious and traditional cultural context, a similar process seems to lead to an further refinement of absolutism, manifested as profoundly held moral convictions. It is as if a complete relativity of values and meaning were the mirror equivalent to a thorough going absolutism of all value and meaning.
What seems to unite both these impulses is the complete rejection of plain old, dumb material reality---that is the utter indifference with which the material world seems to hold all human ideal and transcendent concerns.
While I certainly don't expect such a cultural view to become headlines hitting the news stands anytime soon, it seems to me, it is very important to understand these processes and where and how they position an intellectual life---both here in the west and in the other broadly non-western parts of the world. Part of the reason for that importance is its potential to create forms of solidarity between intellectual classes. After all, I see George Bush and Trent Lott, in relation to my world view, in something that could not be too dissimilar to the appalled regard that a de-classed Egyptian intellectual must see Mohammad Omar and Osama Bin Laden. They are all dinosaurs.
In political economic terms the problem becomes separating neoliberal, capitalist, and imperialist ideologies from their embedding in the broad histo-cultural context of western enlightenment---a process that obviously involves a developing marxist view. That is to say, there are western systems of thought and action in the world that are of extreme value to development and do lead toward a generally more equalitarian world---and these should be adaptable to other cultures---without at the same time erasing their cultural identities and history.
While this much at least is not news, I think the spectacle and drama of the WTC/Pentagon attacks along with the glittering crusade-like US military reactions have simply obscured the view. The underlying cultural confrontations and conflicts have been around for a very long time.
So, reframing the debate along these lines becomes a very difficult task. This is why, I think the western Left has simply fallen back on some vague anti-war rhetoric and then gone into a pall of silence. But I suspect it isn't just the western Left that has been brought down to silence. The same difficulties must be struggled through in progressive non-US/EU circles. In a sense the burden to develop intellectual responses (the ground of mass resistance) to these events also has to fall on progressive circles in the non-US/EU world. Its with them that I want to evoke the terms of debate, and not with the bellicose hate mantras of George Bush or the quietly vicious subversions of Osama Bin Laden.
Chuck Grimes