Perry Anderson

[Christian Gregory]

It's strange to me Anderson's argument overlaps the one posted by Michael Hardt a week or so ago, and yet the latter didn't draw nearly the kind of cathexis that Anderson's has. His argument is _not_ that the Bush administration isn't different than other of Washington's imperial regimes, but that, for the purposes of the European and Australian anti-war movements, it is different mostly in terms of style from the Clinton administration, whose continued bombardment of Iraq was meet with silence or shoulder shrugging in Europe and Australia in general. 

But Anderson doesn't just point out the logical contradictions and pass on--he recognizes that, as he puts it "[g]reat mass movements are not to be judged by tight logical standards." He does say that the protests in their timing, performance, rhetoric, etc., are beholden to some assumptions that in the long term such a movement should question. In particular, those that leave the five victorious powers after WW2 with unquestioned international political authority--ie to "justify" the war (which most people even  in the anti-war movement assent to if the UN gives the go ahead). That seems to me certainly worth saying, especially if you want a movement that isn't one-dimensional and dissolves after the war is won, under whatever auspices.

Christian