Kabul fell in five weeks. The Islamic world has not erupted. So did the left get it all wrong - and does it matter?
Andy Beckett Thursday January 17, 2002 The Guardian
Guy Taylor is a political activist of great height and confidence. He used to be an organiser for the Socialist Workers Party. Nowadays he is a prominent member of Globalise Resistance, a loose network of British anti-capitalists. Since it was set up last February, he has loomed at demonstrations outside arms fairs and meetings of international leaders with his appropriately cropped hair and small, intense glasses. He talks in a clear, level voice, loud and relentless as a stand-up comedian, always optimistic, never stuck for an argument, throwing in the odd joke but without a flicker of self-doubt. In anti-capitalist circles, Taylor and his organisation have become so ubiquitous some rival groups call them "Monopolise Resistance".
Since September 11, however, Taylor has felt the need to adjust his political behaviour in a small way. A few months before the attacks on America, while taking part in the protests against last summer's European Union summit in Gothenburg, he bought a new T-shirt. It said "terrorist" across the front. He says he wasn't trying to look menacing - political violence in his view "achieves very little" - but he thought the T-shirt was a neat statement against the official tendency, then just becoming apparent, to brand all anti-globalisation activists as potential bombers and gunmen. He wore it on and off for the rest of the summer. Then, in mid-September, it stopped feeling so clever.
He can't quite explain why. "It just seemed..." He pauses. "Inappropriate?" He smiles a little. "You don't want to... pick arguments... offend people unnecessarily." His office is in Mile End, after all, not Hampstead. After several more pauses, enough time for him, usually, to summarise the entire workings of contemporary capitalism, he finally arrives at a position. "I just thought I should be a bit more careful."
These are delicate times for the left, in Britain and elsewhere. First, two of its traditional enemies, the Pentagon and New York's financial district, were bloodily assaulted. Then, the leaders of this revolt against American dominance of the world were revealed, almost certainly, to be religious radicals of considerable ideological ambiguousness. Then the traditional instruments of American oppression in the eyes of its critics - bombing and the use of dubious allies - were deployed in response, with apparent success. And a solid majority of the British public approved, as did the great majority of left-of-centre politicians in Britain and abroad.
Immediately before September 11, the outlook had seemed reasonably favourable for the left. Around the world, the long business boom of the past decade seemed to be collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.
In America, George Bush's government of tycoons and missile enthusiasts had just lost its senate majority and its momentum. In Britain, Tony Blair's attempt to convert the Labour party and the public to free-market thinking appeared to be struggling. Then there were the failings of Railtrack and the Private Finance Initiative, the swelling profile of anti-corporate protests since Seattle, the polemics against international trade and sweatshops selling well in high street book shops, the apparent revival of militancy in some unions - "Anglo-Saxon capitalism was in a state," says Tariq Ali, the veteran leftwinger and critic of America. "Bush was virtually on the floor. Now they've been able to cover it up. From every progressive point of view, September 11 has been a disaster."
In November, an editorial in the British leftwing magazine Red Pepper spoke of "a widespread feeling of powerlessness, even paralysis. The daily news makes you want to retreat back under the sheets." In a new book rushed out since the autumn's events, simply titled 9-11, Noam Chomsky, the dissident American academic who is probably the biggest influence on modern anti-capitalists, writes gloomily: "It is certainly a setback... Terrorist atrocities are a gift to the harshest and most repressive elements on all sides, and are sure to be exploited to accelerate the agenda of militarisation, regimentation, reversal of social democratic programmes, transfer of wealth to narrow sectors, and undermining democracy." Taylor puts it more plainly: "Standing protesting outside Gap is a bloody strange thing to do when civilians are being killed in Afghanistan."
Other people have been less polite. Within days of the deaths in New York and Washington, anyone, it seemed, who had ever been publicly critical of America or globalisation suddenly found themselves accused of complicity with Osama bin Laden - and worse. In the British press alone, they have been described as "defeatist" and "unpatriotic", "nihilist" and "masochistic", and both "Stalinist" and "fascist"; as "a Prada-Meinhof gang", "the handmaidens of Osama" and "an auxiliary to dictators"; as "limp", "lofty", "wobbly", "heartless and stupid", and "worm-eaten by Soviet propaganda"; as full of "loose talk", "wilful self-delusion" and "intellectual decadence"; as a collection of "useful idiots", "dead-eyed zombies", and "people who hate people".
The sheer fury and contempt of these sentiments has seemed to go beyond the usual name-calling of British politics. "I've never felt anything like it," says one anti-globalisation commentator, who would prefer not to be named. "The moment you put your head above the parapet, the pressure is just extraordinary. It does knock the fight out of you a bit."
And this new hostility towards the left has come not just from the places you might expect - the more warlike tabloids, the usual red-baiting columnists, and the 10 Downing Street press office, which last month published a list of journalists - including plenty from the Guardian - who had got the war "wrong". It has come from well-known radicals such as the journalist Christopher Hitchens, and the cabinet's token socialist, Clare Short.
In early October, the left-leaning literary fortnightly the London Review of Books published a selection of unexceptional remarks, by its own standards, about America's global status. This provoked a blizzard of hostile letters that has only recently abated. This evening, the prominent left-of-centre think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, is holding a public discussion about whether September 11 has made the left "irreconcilably divided".
Some of the energy has appeared to go out of recent anti-capitalist protests. In Washington in late September, a demonstration intended to rival Genoa and Seattle shrank to a few thousand people marching tentatively for world peace. In Brighton in early October, a promised blockade of the Labour party conference became a wet crowd herded around by the police.
At Doha in Qatar in November, the World Trade Organisation was able to meet almost unmolested, and America's trade representative was able to claim that the summit had "removed the stain of Seattle". When the heads of state of the EU met in Brussels last month, most newspapers gave the accompanying protests barely a paragraph.
Tariq Ali sits at his kitchen table in Highgate in north London as a cold drizzle spatters the windows. He has been opposing America and international capital since the Vietnam war. He says a little wearily: "September 11 and its aftermath have shown that the whole world is the United States empire. The Americans just do what they want. The intelligentsia all over Europe are pro-American now. They see the US as the only emancipatory project in town."
Not completely convincingly, he argues that the "naked power" of America's response to September 11, and its openly self-interested behaviour over Star Wars and environmental questions in recent years, "is easier to deal with". He sips his tea. "American imperialism has always been an imperialism that doesn't dare to speak its name. Now all that crap is gone."
He is writing a book exploring the similarities between Bush and Bin Laden, and their ambitions to impose their aggressive, religiously-based ideas on the rest of the world. Between chapters he has left his desk to address public meetings about the hypocrisies of Bush's widening, seemingly relentless "war on terrorism". It sounds like hard work. "You just try and raise morale," he says.
But then he adds something interesting. "The bulk of the people there, about 70%, I'd say, have been between 18 and 25." He goes on: "The anti-war movement in Britain is larger than anywhere except Italy." And, puzzlingly for those who have been celebrating the demise of the left since September, this appears to be the case.
At the first big British demonstration against the war in Afghanistan, in London in mid-October, somewhere between 20,000 (the police's estimate) and 50,000 people (the organisers' estimate) marched from Hyde Park Corner to Trafalgar Square. It was an unexpectedly warm day, but that did not sufficiently explain why columns of demonstrators were still arriving in the square over an hour after the speeches had begun. A confident coalition was visibly forming around the fountains and statues: between sunburnt students and respectable-looking young British Asians, well-dressed Londoners in their 30s and wispy old ladies from CND.
On the next London march, on a much colder afternoon in November, the organisers counted double the number of protesters. The police, as they tend to, insisted that there were only 15,000, but the significance of both demonstrations was clear by then: far more people than expected were prepared to actively oppose a war that, according to the government and most conventional wisdom, was so morally straightforward as to require little debate. And this anti-war coalition looked remarkably like the alliance that had been opposing globalisation prior to September 11.
At Globalise Resistance, the old computer that occupies about a quarter of the office holds a list of 2,500 email addresses. Taylor assumed that when his organisation came out against the war, at least "30 or 40" of these people would cancel their subscriptions to Globalise Resistance. No one broke ranks until mid-December, and no one else has done since. "Most people have taken to this anti-war position like a duck to water," he says, with a satisfied activist's grin.
If you look at the websites, magazines and flyers for events that the modern left uses, it is easy to see why. Apologias for Bin Laden and international terrorism are conspicuous by their absence.
Plenty of radical activities - Stop Esso Day, candlelit vigils for asylum seekers, the Anarchist Walking Group ("exercise, discussions, trespassing") - continue as normal, without reference to September 11. And where the events of that day and their consequences are mentioned, they have been neatly slotted into existing ways of thinking: the "war on terrorism" is "the military face of globalisation", or "old imperial power and nothing new"; America's current ability to win seemingly any war is the problem, not the solution; poor countries continue to be pushed around by rich ones.
There is evidence, moreover, that such analyses meet with public approval. Readers of the Big Issue recently chose Paul Marsden, the Labour MP who defected to the Liberal Democrats over his opposition to the war, as their "Hero of the Year" for 2001.
Talking now to the editor of Red Pepper, Hilary Wainwright, you get a sense of someone recovering their ideological poise. She is dismissive of the onslaught on the left: "Straw men have been set up. Hitchens, who is a friend really, said the left was not sufficiently critical of September 11." She looks politely exasperated."The left has been attacking the Taliban, and terrorism as the solution to anything, for ever."
But recent British history suggests that a blameless record on past foreign policy questions may be no defence for leftwingers accused of dithering in wartime. George Orwell began the modern tradition of abusing pacifists and war sceptics during the second world war. In 1942, he wrote:"Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist." Orwell's argument was that Britain's enemies were so politically and morally unattractive, in this instance, that the usual function of the left to question and rebel had become inappropriate. That Orwell was a famous leftwinger and usually a critic of governments has given life to this patriotic logic ever since.
"During Suez, Nasser was Hitler," says Ali. "During the Falklands, Galtieri was Hitler, then Saddam Hussein became Hitler, then Milosevic. Now it is the Taliban and al-Qaida." In each case, the character of the regime Britain has confronted has been used to justify the silencing of dissent. And because the British left generally did support the second world war, references to that conflict have always won over enough leftwingers during these subsequent, less justifiable wars to give the impression that the British left is split and in crisis. Hitchens is simply the latest radical to want to sound like a tough but righteous Orwell.
In other ways, too, the British political landscape since September 11 is actually quite a familiar one. As during the Gulf war and the Falklands, there has been only hasty debate in Parliament about the conflict. A feeling of inevitability has accompanied each military escalation. Yet the proportion of the public opposed to each has held up at between a fifth and a third. Meanwhile, the successes claimed by the soldiers and their supporters have steadily come to seem more questionable, as news has belatedly spread of mounting civilian casualties among the enemy dead, and the realisation has slowly dawned that the leaders of Britain's latest opponent may remain at large.
Perhaps what has been revealed in recent months has not been the inability of the British left to think properly about terrorism, but the inability of the British political system to weigh seriously the consequences of war."It was ever thus," says Ali. "At the height of the Vietnam war, I think we got 50 or 60 MPs [out of over 600] to sign an early-day motion against it."
The leftwing Labour MP Alan Simpson, one of less than a dozen who voted against the bombing of Afghanistan, sees the Commons' near-unanimity in wartime as part of a wider "crisis of representation". Serious discussion of the concerns of anti-globalisation protesters is just as absent, he says. Yet he also sees a narrowness and lack of maturity in the latter, which events since September have exposed. "They articulate a line of thinking that says: 'Governments are all bastards. The political system sucks.' That's right as far as it goes. But it retreats from the global to the local. It doesn't really have an internationalism."
The anti-globalisation movement, you could say, has spent the past decade or so developing a sophisticated critique of modern business - an economic policy, if you like - but it has neglected to draw up a foreign policy, a coherent set of proposals for how countries should operate and behave towards each other. "Everyone's been very boned up on sustainability and trade," says Wainwright, "but not the enormity and lawlessness of US power." As a result, whenever war breaks out, and the activities of Nike and Microsoft suddenly look less important than those of governments, which had been assumed to be diminishing in authority, there is a measure of disarray in anti-capitalist circles.
As the news first spread that the World Trade Centre had been attacked, members of Globalise Resistance were taking part in a protest outside an international arms fair in east London. Taylor says proudly: "We were already attacking death and destruction." What he neglects to mention is that, when a speaker at the rally announced what had just happened in New York, there was some cheering in the crowd.
Other leftwing responses have backfired for opposite reasons. Many opponents of American retaliation against Afghanistan placed a cautious, pragmatic-sounding emphasis on the difficulties of a military campaign. But predictions about battles are not best made by pacifism-inclined civilians, and once the Taliban's "strongholds" started falling, it was difficult to oppose the war on more fundamental grounds.
"The argument that the Americans would get bogged down in Afghanistan like the Russians did was a cop-out really," says Peter Wilby, editor of the New Statesman, who has opposed the war on principle. "The left should take its position on whether a war is right or wrong, not on the type of terrain in Afghanistan."
Suzanne Moore, the left-inclined Mail on Sunday columnist, wrote after the first few weeks of bombing in Afghanistan: "War isn't working." A month later, with a candour rare among her fellow sceptics, she confessed in print: "The bombing 'worked' far more effectively than anyone anticipated... I and others misjudged the situation."
"In retrospect," she says now, "I'm struck by how much we didn't know and still don't know about the situation in Afghanistan. There's been a progression since the Gulf war where we know less and less about how wars are going." In this way, among others, the tightening control of the western military over media access to its modern battlefields is a handy way of disarming critics: reliable information about the progress of military operations tends to emerge too late for anti-war commentators to make safe judgments about their success or otherwise.
Yet many of those who predicted disaster in Afghanistan remain unapologetic. "You have the most effect when you predict the worst," says Mark Seddon, editor of the leftwing Labour party journal, Tribune, and a member of the party's national executive committee. "There's a decent pacifist tradition in Britain, but you need to reach out beyond that. I know from going round various constituency meetings that there is a lot of opposition to the war. There is a feeling that it could be protracted and, who knows, it could well be."
Denis Healey, the former Labour defence secretary, and by no means an automatic opponent of British military actions, shares Seddon's doubts. "I was against the bombing of Afghanistan because it would kill more civilians and create more terrorists, and it has done that." Does he mind the abuse anti-war campaigners receive? He replies cheerfully: "I just say, 'Sod 'em'. Alistair [Campbell] is just doing his job. The easiest way to get people is guilt by association. But I'm very much against Osama bin Laden."
Another problem, though, with this kind of military pessimism is that it is difficult to distinguish it, at times, from that of war sceptics at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. Columnists in rightwing British newspapers and magazines who objected to the war in Afghanistan for containing a humanitarian element, or for being an initiative in which a Labour government was involved, do not make comfortable bedfellows for those who go on peace marches. "Any cause has good supporters and bad supporters," says Healey. But it is questionable whether the coherence and credibility of the left's view of the world is helped when it overlaps with that of the left's natural enemies.
Wainwright says that lessons have been learned from all this turbulence. Questions about the role of international law and the UN, which have been gathering dust for decades as idealists of the left have moved on to simpler, more easily-publicised topics such as the excesses of individual companies, must be revived, she says. Simpson agrees. The anarchist disdain for global institutions, which has been a major influence on modern anti-capitalism, looks less smart now that America is threatening to act as it pleases.
The anti-globalisation movement has been forced to grow up in another way, too. "Some people," says Wainwright, "used to think that if religious fundamentalists are anti-capitalist, then we don't need to challenge them." Now, she and others on the British left are hoping that there will be a proper, mutually critical engagement between the secular and religious critics of modern business, and between those in the rich world and those in the rest of the world.
The way such dissenters are treated by their respective police and governments may help with this process. Before September, the use of state violence and special prohibitions against anti-capitalist demonstrations - a regular occurrence in the developing world - was already becoming more common in wealthy, relatively liberal countries. Protesters were shot by police during last year's riots in Genoa and Gothenburg. With ominously vague "anti-terrorism" legislation recently passed in Britain and America, the left may soon find out whether, as the Globalise Resistance slogan has it,"clampdown makes us stronger".
Taylor is sure it will. In his cheeky, upbeat way, he promises there will be "more confrontational stuff in the offing" if the war widens. "We're learning a lot from the anti-Vietnam war movement," he says. But before we leave his office to continue our conversation in the pub across the road, he pulls the window blinds right down. "Need to keep the spies out," he says, half-smiling.