By Colin Foster
A presentation by Tariq Ali on "War and Empire" at an "Ideas" festival in Brisbane, Australia, this August provides a sidelight on Clive Bradley's review (Solidarity 3/41) <http://www.workersliberty.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Reviews&file=inde x&req=showcontent&id=67> of Ali's much-puffed new book, Bush in Babylon.
The "Ideas" festival was a big event, supported by the city council and state government. Most of its sessions were free. For a few star events we had to pay $25.
Tariq Ali's speech was top of the list. Not only did it fill the biggest hall at $25 a pop; a hastily-arranged repeat session almost filled the hall again.
It is very encouraging that so many people were willing to pay $25 to hear what they must have expected to be a revolutionary Marxist view, fresh from one of the capitalist world's great metropoles. But what did they get as "Marxism"?
Ali denounced the USA. The great evil today, he said, is that for the first time in history the whole world is engulfed in a single empire, the USA's.
It is not (as, for example, Ellen Wood's new book puts it) an "empire of capital" with the USA playing a keystone role. To say that is an evasion. The problem is nothing so diffuse and abstract as capitalism. It is US power.
Ali did not come before the audience as someone denouncing global capital in the name of global working-class solidarity, or of the working class from any angle at all. Indeed, as emphatically as any Thatcherite, he told them that there is "no alternative". "The communist ideal", he said, is dead. His speech stressed the collapse of the Stalinist states in the USSR and Eastern Europe, but made no distinction between them and that "communist ideal".
I used my short time for the floor to challenge him on that. He stuck to it. The USSR had been a poor version of communism, but with its collapse communism in general had collapsed too. The new anti-capitalist movements and the new workers' movements in the "Third World" do not amount to much. There is no alternative. None.
In the name of what was he denouncing US power, then? A world of many competing (and warring) empires? The EU, as the supposedly vegetarian alternative to the carnivorous Yankees? I do not know.
What could his audience do if they wanted to be active against US power? Just shout curses from a distance at the unchallengeable centre of power in Washington?
Ali did propose one other, more accessible, target for rage.
Why had the USA gone to war in Iraq? Oil, of course. But not just oil. The USA had other ways to secure oil supplies and oil profits. Some other pressure had pushed the USA into such a chancey and costly war.
Who could pull the strings of the almighty USA in that way? Who?
Israel. Israel wanted rid of Saddam Hussein, and had made the USA go for him. That explained the war.
Ali did not spell out the logic, and maybe would not want to. But it is clear. There is not much chance of budging the all-dominant USA, but those opposed to US policy can find one vulnerable point. They can hit at "the Zionists", who are the USA's evil demon.
"Marxism" - or scapegoating?
-- Michael Pugliese American imperialism has been made plausible and attractive in part by the insistence that it is not imperialistic. Harold Innis, 1948 http://www.monthlyreview.org/sr2004.htm