Doug
Michael Pugliese wrote:
>Israel, USA and TINA-Marxism
><http://www.workersliberty.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article
>&sid=1505&mode=thread&order=0>
>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
>
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