The Intellectual Origins Of America-Bashing.
Shoot Muslims in the FACE!
The Intellectual Origins Of America-Bashing
By Lee Harris
A specter haunts the world, and that specter is America. This is not
the America discoverable in the pages of a world atlas, but a mythical
America that is the target of the new form of anti-Americanism that
Salman Rushdie, writing in the Guardian (February 6, 2002), says "is
presently taking the world by storm" and that forms the subject of a
Washington Post essay by Martin Kettle significantly entitled "U.S.
Bashing: It's All The Rage In Europe" (January 7, 2002). It is an
America that Anatol Lieven assures us, in a recent article in the
London Review of Books, is nothing less than "a menace to itself and
to mankind" and that Noam Chomsky has repeatedly characterized as the
world's major terrorist state.
But above all it is the America that is responsible for the evils of
the rest of the world. As Darius Fo, the winner of the 1997 Nobel
Prize for literature, put it in a notorious post-September 11 email
subsequently quoted in the New York Times (September 22, 2001): "The
great speculators [of American capitalism] wallow in an economy that
every years kills tens of millions of people with poverty [in the
Third World] - so what is 20,000 dead in New York? Regardless of who
carried out the massacre [of 9-11], this violence is the legitimate
daughter of the culture of violence, hunger and inhumane
exploitation."
It is this sort of America that is at the hub of Antonio Negri and
Michael Hardt's revision of Marxism in their intellectually
influential book Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000) - a
reinterpretation of historical materialism in which the global
capitalist system will be overthrown not by those who have helped to
create it, namely, the working class, but rather by a polyglot global
social force vaguely referred to as "the multitude" - the alleged
victims of this system.
America-bashing is anti-Americanism at its most radical and
totalizing. Its goal is not to advise, but to condemn; not to fix, but
to destroy. It repudiates every thought of reform in any normal sense;
it sees no difference between American liberals and American
conservatives; it views every American action, both present and past,
as an act of deliberate oppression and systemic exploitation. It is
not that America went wrong here or there; it is that it is wrong root
and branch. The conviction at the heart of those who engage in it is
really quite simple: that America is an unmitigated evil, an
irredeemable enormity.
This is the specter that is haunting the world today. Indeed, one may
even go so far as to argue that this America is the fundamental
organizing principle of the left as it exists today: To be against
America is to be on the right side of history; to be for it is to be
on the wrong side.
But let's pause to ask a question whose answer the America-bashers
appear to assume they know: What is the right side of history at this
point in history?
The concept of a right side of history is derived from Marxism, and it
is founded on the belief that there is a forward advance toward a
socialist future that can be resisted, but not ultimately defeated.
But does anyone believe this anymore? Does anyone take seriously the
claim that the present state of affairs will be set aside and a wholly
new order of things implemented in its place, and that such a
transformation of the world will happen as a matter of course?
And, finally, if in fact there are those who believe such a thing,
what is the status of this belief? Is it a realistic assessment of the
objective conditions of the present world order, or is it merely
wishful thinking?
Marx's political realism
The importance of these questions should be obvious to anyone familiar
with the thought of Marx. Marx's uniqueness as a thinker of the left
is his absolute commitment to the principles of political realism.
This is the view that any political energy that is put into what is
clearly a hopeless cause is a waste. Utopianism is not only
impractical; it is an obstacle to obtaining socialism's true
objective, since it diverts badly needed resources away from the
pursuit of viable goals, wasting them instead on the pursuit of
political fantasies.
The concept of fantasy as a political category assumed its central
place in Marxist thought in The Communist Manifesto, where Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels used it as the distinguishing mark of their own
brand of socialism: It was this that condemned all previous forms of
socialism to the realm of vague dreams and good intentions, and which
gave Marxism the claim to be a "scientific" form of socialism.
Marx's use of the term "scientific" in this text has often been
criticized. But, in his defense, it should be remembered that the
German Wissenschaft describes a far wider category than the English
"science." It means what we know as opposed to what we merely opine,
or feel, or imagine; the objective as opposed to the subjective;
realistic thinking as opposed to impractical daydreaming. And it is in
this last sense that Marx and Engels use it: For the opposite of the
scientific is none other than the utopian.
This is the basis of Marx's condemnation of all forms of utopian
socialism, the essence of which is the enormous gap between the
"fantastic pictures of future society" the utopian socialist dreams of
achieving, on one hand, and any realistic assessment of the objective
conditions of the actual social order on the other.
This concept of fantasy as "fantastic pictures" inside the head of
impractical daydreamers is a classic theme of German Romantic
literature and is perhaps most closely identified with the characters
of E.T.A. Hoffman's stories, such as Kapellmeister Kreisler. The
fantasist, in this literature, is a character type: He lives in his
own dream world and can manage only the most tenuous relationship to
the real world around him. But, unlike the character type of the
absent-minded professor, the Romantic fantasist is not content to
putter around in his own world. Instead, he is forever insisting that
his world is the real one, and in the process of doing this, he
reduces the real world around him, and the people in it, to an
elaborate stage setting for the enactment of his own private
fantasies.
Marx and Engels's wholesale condemnation of all previous socialism as
utopian fantasy is the fundamental innovation of their own work. It is
the basis of their claim to be taken seriously, not merely by
Hoffmanesque daydreamers, but by men of practical judgment and shrewd
common sense. To fail to make this distinction, or to fail to stay on
the right side of this distinction once it has been made, is to cease
to be a Marxist and to fall back into mere Träumerei.
This demarcation line arose because Marx believed that he had grasped
something that no previous utopian socialist had even suspected. He
believed that he had shown that socialism was inevitable and that it
would come about through certain ironclad laws of history - laws that
Marx believed were revealed through the study of the very nature of
capitalism. Socialism, in short, would not come about because a
handful of daydreamers had wished for it, or because pious moralists
had urged it, but because the unavoidable breakdown of the capitalist
system would force the turn to socialism upon those societies that,
prior to this breakdown, had been organized along capitalist lines.
Schematically the scenario went something like this:
. The capitalists would begin to suffer from a falling rate of profit.
. The workers would therefore be "immiserized"; they would become
poorer as the capitalists struggled to keep their own heads above
water.
. The poverty of the workers would drive them to overthrow the
capitalist system - their poverty, not their ideals.
What is interesting here is that, once you accept the initial premise
about the falling rate of profit, the rest does indeed follow
realistically. Now, this does not mean that it follows necessarily or
according to an ironclad scientific law; but it certainly conveys what
any reasonable person would take as the most probable outcome of a
hypothetical failure of capitalism.
For Marx it is absolutely essential that revolutionary activities be
justifiable on realistic premises. If they cannot be, then they are
actions that cannot possibly have a real political objective - and
therefore, their only value can be the private emotional or spiritual
satisfaction of the people carrying out this pseudo-political action.
So in order for revolutionary activity to have a chance of succeeding,
there is an unavoidable precondition: The workers must have become
much poorer over time. Furthermore, there had to be not merely an
increase of poverty, but a conviction on the part of the workers that
their material circumstances would only get worse, and not better -
and this would require genuine misery.
This is the immiserization thesis of Marx. And it is central to
revolutionary Marxism, since if capitalism produces no widespread
misery, then it also produces no fatal internal contradiction: If
everyone is getting better off through capitalism, who will dream of
struggling to overthrow it? Only genuine misery on the part of the
workers would be sufficient to overturn the whole apparatus of the
capitalist state, simply because, as Marx insisted, the capitalist
class could not be realistically expected to relinquish control of the
state apparatus and, with it, the monopoly of force. In this, Marx was
absolutely correct. No capitalist society has ever willingly
liquidated itself, and it is utopian to think that any ever will.
Therefore, in order to achieve the goal of socialism, nothing short of
a complete revolution would do; and this means, in point of fact, a
full-fledged civil war not just within one society, but across the
globe. Without this catastrophic upheaval, capitalism would remain
completely in control of the social order and all socialist schemes
would be reduced to pipe dreams.
The immiserization thesis, therefore, is critical to Marx, for without
it there would be no objective conditions in response to which workers
might be driven to overthrow the capitalist system. If the workers
were becoming better off with time, then why jump into an utterly
untested and highly speculative economic scheme? Especially when even
socialists themselves were bitterly divided over what such a scheme
would be like in actual practice. Indeed, Marx never committed himself
to offering a single suggestion about how socialism would actually
function in the real world.
Immiserization goes global
By the twentieth century the immiserization thesis was already
beginning to look shaky. Empirical evidence, drawn either by
impressionistic observation or systematic statistical studies, began
to suggest that there was something wrong with the classical version
of the thesis, and an attempt was made to save it by redefining
immiserization to mean not an absolute increase in misery, but merely
a relative one. This gloss allowed a vast increase in empirical
plausibility, since it accepted the fact that the workers were indeed
getting better off under the capitalist system but went on to argue
that they were not getting better off at the same rate as the
capitalists.
The problem with this revision lay not in its economic premises, but
its political ones. Could one realistically believe that workers would
overthrow an economic system that was continually improving their own
lot, simply because that of the capitalist class was improving at a
marginally better rate? Certainly, the workers might envy the
capitalists; but such emotions simply could not supply the gigantic
impetus required to overthrow a structure as massive as the capitalist
system. Before the workers of a capitalist society could unite, they
had to feel that they had literally nothing to lose - nothing to lose
but their proverbial chains. For if they had homes and cars and boats
and rvs to lose as well, then it became quite another matter.
In short, the relative immiserization thesis was simply not the stuff
that drives people to the barricades. At most it could fuel the
gradualist reforms of the evolutionary ideal of socialism - a position
identified with Eduard Bernstein.
The post-World War II period demolished the last traces of the
classical immiserization thesis. Workers in the most advanced
capitalist countries were prosperous by any standard imaginable,
either absolute or relative; and what is even more important, they
felt themselves to be well off, and believed that the future would
only make them and their children even better off than they had been
in the past. This was a deadly blow to the immiserization thesis and
hence to Marxism. For the failure of the immiserization thesis is in
fact the failure of classical Marxism. If there is no misery, there is
no revolution; and if there is no revolution, there is no socialism.
Q.E.D. Socialism goes back once more to being merely a utopian
fantasy.
Yet those who still claim to derive their heritage from Marx are
mostly unwilling to acknowledge that their political aims are merely
utopian, not scientific. How is that possible?
There might be several reasons advanced for this, but certainly one of
them is Paul Baran. A Polish born American economist and a Marxist,
Baran is the author of The Political Economy of Growth (Monthly Review
Press, 1957). In it, for the first time in Marxist literature, Baran
propounded a causal connection between the prosperity of the advanced
capitalist countries and the impoverishment of the Third World. It was
no longer the case, as it was for Marx, that poverty - as well as
idiocy - was the natural condition of man living in an agricultural
mode of production. Rather, poverty had been introduced into the Third
World by the capitalist system. The colonies no longer served the
purpose of consuming overstocked inventories, but were now the
positive victims of capitalism.
What needs to be stressed here is that, prior to Baran, no Marxist had
ever suspected that capitalism was the cause of the poverty of the
rest of the world. Not only had Marx and Engels failed to notice this
momentous fact, but neither had any of their followers. Yet this
omission was certainly not due to Marx's lack of knowledge about, or
interest in, the question of European colonies. In his writing on
India, Marx shows himself under no illusions concerning the brutal and
mercenary nature of British rule. He is also aware of the "misery and
degradation" effected by the impact of British industry's "devastating
effects" on India. Yet all of this is considered by Marx to be a
dialectical necessity; that is to say, these effects were the
unavoidable precondition of India's progress and advance - an example
of the "creative destruction" that Schumpeter spoke of as the essence
of capitalist dynamics. Or, as Marx put it in On Colonialism: "[T]he
English bourgeoisie . . . will neither emancipate nor materially mend
the social condition of the mass of the [Indian] people . . . but . .
. what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises
for both" the emancipation and the mending of this social condition.
The radical nature of Baran's reformulation of Marxist doctrine is
obscured by an understandable tendency to confuse Baran's theory with
Lenin's earlier theory of imperialism. In fact, the two have nothing
in common. Lenin's theory had evolved in order to explain the
continuing survival of capitalism into the early twentieth century,
and hence the delay of the coming of socialism. In Lenin's view,
imperialism is not the cause of Third World immiserization, but rather
a stopgap means of postponing immiserization in the capitalist
countries themselves. It is the capitalist countries' way of keeping
their own work force relatively prosperous - and hence politically
placid - by selling surplus goods into captive colonial markets. It is
not a way of exploiting, much less impoverishing, these colonies. It
was rather a way "to bribe the upper strata of the proletariat, and .
. . to . . . strengthen opportunism," as Lenin put it in Imperialism:
The Highest Stage of Capitalism (International Publishers, 1933).
This gives us the proper perspective from which to judge the
revolutionary quality of Baran's reformulation. For, in essence, what
Baran has done is to globalize the traditional doctrine of
immiserization so that, instead of applying to the workers of the
advanced capitalist countries, it now came to apply to the entire
population of those countries that have not achieved advanced
capitalism: It was the rest of the world that was being impoverished
by capitalism, not the workers of the advanced countries.
Baran's global immiserization thesis, after its initial launch, was
taken up by other Marxists, but it was nowhere given a more elaborate
intellectual foundation than in Immanuel Wallerstein's monumental
study The Modern World-System (Academic Press, 1974), which was
essentially a fleshing out in greater historical and statistical
detail of Baran's thesis. Hence, for the sake of convenience, I will
call the global immiserization thesis the Baran-Wallerstein revision.
America as "root cause"
What i now would like to consider is not the thesis itself, but the
role that this thesis played in bolstering and revitalizing late
twentieth-century Marxism. For it is here that we find the
intellectual origins of the international phenomenon of
America-bashing. If there is any element of genuine seriousness in
this movement - if, indeed, it aspires to be an objective and
realistic assessment of the relationship of America to the rest of the
world - then that element of seriousness is to be found in the global
immiserization thesis: America has gotten rich by making other
countries poor.
Furthermore, this is no less true of those who, like Chomsky, have
focused on what is seen as American military aggression against the
rest of the world, for this aggression is understood as having its
"root cause" in America's systematic exploitation of the remainder of
the human race. If American exploitation did not create misery, it
would not need to use military force. It is the global immiserization
thesis that makes the use of force an indispensable tool of American
foreign policy and that is responsible, according to this view, for
turning America into a terrorist state. This explains the absolute
centrality of the global immiserization thesis in the creation of the
specter of America now haunting so much of our world.
The Baran-Wallerstein revision of the classical immiserization thesis
into its global context was far better adapted to fix what was wrong
in Marxist theory than the revisionist notion of relative
immiserization discussed above. For, as we have seen, what was needed
was real misery, and not merely comparative misery, since without such
misery there would be no breakdown of capitalism: no civil war, no
revolution, no socialism. And who can doubt that great real misery
exists in the Third World?
In addition to providing a new and previously untapped source of
misery, the Baran-Wallerstein revision provided several other
benefits. For example, there was no longer any difficulty in accepting
the astonishingly high level of prosperity achieved by the work force
of the advanced capitalist countries - indeed, it was now even
possible to arraign the workers of these countries alongside of the
capitalists for whom they labored - or, rather, more precisely, with
whom they collaborated in order to exploit both the material resources
and the cheap labor of the Third World. In the new configuration, both
the workers and the capitalists of the advanced countries became the
oppressor class, while it was the general population of the less
advanced countries that became the oppressed - including, curiously
enough, even the rulers of these countries, who often, to the
untutored eye, seemed remarkably like oppressors themselves.
With this demystification of the capitalist working class came an end
to even a feigned enthusiasm among Marxists for solidarity with the
hopelessly middle-class aspirations of the American blue-collar work
force. The Baran-Wallerstein revision offered an exotic new object of
sympathy - namely, the comfortably distant and abstract Third World
victims of the capitalist world system.
Perhaps most important, the Baran-Wallerstein revision also neatly
solved the most pressing dilemma that worker prosperity in advanced
capitalist countries bequeathed to classical Marxism: the absolute
lack of revolutionary spirit among these workers - the very workers,
it must be remembered, who were originally cast in the critical role
of world revolutionaries. In the new theoretical configuration, this
problem no longer mattered simply because the workers of the
capitalist countries no longer mattered.
Hence the appeal of the global immiserization thesis: The
Baran-Wallerstein revision neatly obviates all the most outstanding
objections to the classical Marxist theory. This leaves two questions
unanswered: Is it true? And even if it is true, does it save Marxism?
Whether the immiserization thesis is true or not is simply too complex
a topic to deal with here. Indeed, for the sake of the present
argument, I am willing to assume that it is absolutely true - truer
than anything has ever been true before. For what I want to
concentrate on is the question of whether the Baran-Wallerstein
revision is consistent with Marxism's claim to represent a realistic
political agenda as opposed to a mere utopian fantasy. And the short
answer is that, no matter how true the global immiserization thesis
might be, it does not save the Baran-Wallerstein revision of Marxism
from being condemned as utopian fantasy - and condemned not by my
standards or yours, but by those of Marx and Engels.
This is because the original immiserization thesis was set within the
context of a class war within a society - an actual civil war between
different classes of one and the same society, and not between
different nations on different continents. This makes an enormous
difference, for it is not at all unreasonable to think that a
revolutionary movement could succeed, by means of a violent and bloody
civil war, in gaining the monopoly of force within a capitalist
society, and thus be able to dictate terms to the routed capitalists,
if any survived.
But this is an utterly different scenario from one in which the most
advanced capitalist societies have a monopoly of force - and brutally
effective force - at their disposal. For in this case it is absurd to
think that the exploited Third World countries could possibly be able
to alter the world order by even a hair, provided the advanced
capitalist societies were intent on not being altered.
What could they do to us?
9-11 calling
The answer to this question, according to many of those who accept the
global immiserization thesis, came on 9-11. Noam Chomsky, perhaps
America's most celebrated proponent of the Baran-Wallerstein thesis,
expressed this idea in the immediate aftermath. Here, for the first
time, the world had witnessed the oppressed finally striking a blow
against the oppressor - a politically immature blow, perhaps,
comparable to the taking of the Bastille by the Parisian mob in its
furious disregard of all laws of humanity, but still an act equally
world-historical in its significance: the dawn of a new revolutionary
era.
This judgment can make sense only in the context of the
Baran-Wallerstein thesis. For if 9-11 was in fact a realistic blow
against the advanced capitalist countries - or even just the most
advanced - then here was an escape from the utopian deadlock of the
global immiserization thesis. Here was a way that the overthrow of
world capitalism could be made a viable historical outcome once again,
and not merely the fantastic delusions of a sect. This explains the
otherwise baffling valorization of 9-11 on the part of the left - by
which I mean the enormous world-historical significance that they have
been prepared to attribute to al Qaeda's act of terror.
But was 9-11 truly world-historical in the precise sense required to
sustain the Baran-Wallerstein revision? For 9-11 to be
world-historical in this sense, it would have to contain within it the
seeds of a gigantic shift in the order of things: something on the
scale of the decline and collapse of capitalist America and with it
the final realization of the socialist realm.
But this investment of world-historical significance to 9-11 is simply
wishful thinking on the part of the left. It is an effort to transform
the demented acts of a group of fantasists into the vanguard of the
world revolution. Because if there is to be a world revolution at all
there has to be a vanguard of that revolution, an agent whose actions
are such as to represent a threat to the capacity of the capitalist
system simply to survive. This means that it is not enough to injure
it; it is not enough to wound or madden it; it is not enough to rouse
it to rage - the agent must kill it, too. He must be capable of
overthrowing the hegemonic power at the center of the capitalist world
system.
But this is absolutely implausible. Any realistic assessment of any
possible scenario will inevitably conclude that nothing that al Qaeda
can do can cause the collapse of America and the capitalist system.
The worse eventuality in the long run would be that America would be
forced to break its hallowed ideal of universal tolerance, in order to
make an exception of those who fit the racial profiling of an al Qaeda
terrorist. It is ridiculous to think that if al Qaeda continued to
attack us such measures would not be taken. They would be forced upon
the government by the people (and anyone who thinks that the supposed
cultural hegemony of the left might stop this populist fury is
deluded).
In other words, the only effect on America of a continuation of
September 11-style attacks would be an increasingly repressive state
apparatus domestically and a populist home front demand for
increasingly severe retaliation against those nations supporting or
hiding terrorists. But neither one of these reactions would seriously
undermine the strength of the United States - indeed, it is quite
evident that further attacks would continue to unite the overwhelming
majority of the American population, creating an irresistible "general
will" to eradicate terrorism by any means necessary, including the
most brutal and ruthless.
But this condition, let us recall, is precisely the opposite of the
objective political conditions that, according to Marx, must be
present in order for capitalism to be overthrown. For classical
Marxism demands, quite realistically, a state that is literally being
torn apart by internal dissension. Revolution, in short, requires a
full-fledged civil war within the capitalist social order itself,
since nothing short of this can possibly achieve the goal that the
revolution is seeking. Hence, 9-11-style attacks that serve only to
strengthen the already considerable solidarity between classes in the
United States are, from the perspective of classical Marxism, fatally
flawed. For such attacks not only fail to further any revolutionary
aims; they actually make the revolution less probable. A society of
300 million individuals whose bumper stickers say "United We Stand" is
not a breeding ground for revolutionary activity. Nor is it a society
that can be easily intimidated into mending its ways, even if we make
the assumption that its ways need mending.
But if the result of 9-11 was to strengthen the political unity of the
United States, then 9-11 was definitely not world-historical. The
unspeakable human horror of 9-11 should not blind us to the ghastly
triviality of the motive and the inevitable nullity of the aftermath.
The temptation of fantasy ideology
The baran-wallerstein revision of Marxism does provide a new global
reformulation of the immiserization thesis. But the locus of this
misery, the Third World, does not and cannot provide an adequate
objective foundation for a revolutionary struggle against the
capitalist system. Rather, this foundation can be provided only by a
majority of the workers in the advanced capitalist countries
themselves; but, as we have seen, the effect of 9-11 on the working
class of the United States was not one conducive to the overthrow and
demise of capitalism. On the contrary, nowhere was the desire to
retaliate against the terrorists more powerfully visceral than among
the working class of the United States. The overwhelming majority of
its members instantly responded with collective and spontaneous
expression of solidarity with other Americans and expressions of
outrage against those who had planned and carried out the attack, as
well as those who attempted to palliate it.
For those who are persuaded by the Baran-Wallerstein thesis, 9-11
represents a classic temptation. It is the temptation that every
fantasy ideology offers to those who become caught up in it - the
temptation to replace serious thought and analysis, fidelity to the
facts and scrupulous objectivity, with the worst kind of wishful
thinking. The attempt to cast 9-11 as a second taking of the Bastille
simply overlooks what is most critical about both of these events,
namely, that the Bastille was a symbol of oppression to the masses of
French men and women who first overthrew it and then tore it down,
brick by brick. And while it is true that the Bastille had become the
stuff of fantasy, thanks to the pre-1789 "horrors of the Bastille"
literature, it was still a fantasy that worked potently on the minds
of the Parisian mob and hence provided the objective political
conditions necessary to undermine the Bourbon state. But the fantasy
embodied in 9-11, far from weakening the American political order,
strengthened it immeasurably, while the only mobs that were motivated
by the enactment of this fantasy were those inhabiting the Arab
streets - a population pathetically unable to control even the most
elementary aspects of its own political destiny, and hence scarcely
the material out of which a realistically minded revolutionary could
hope to fashion an instrument of world-historical transformation.
These people are badly miscast in the role of the vanguard of the
world revolution. And what can we say about those in the West,
allegedly acting within the tradition of Marxist thought, who
encourage such spectacularly utopian flights of fantasy?
The Baran-Wallerstein thesis cannot save Marxism; and, in fact, it is
a betrayal of what is genuinely valid in Marx - namely, the insistence
that any realistic hope of a world-historical transformation from one
stage of social organization to a more humane one can come only if men
and women do not yield to the temptation of fantasy ideology, even -
and, indeed, especially - when it is a fantasy ideology dressed up to
look like Marxism.
Instead, the Baran-Wallerstein thesis has sadly come to provide merely
a theoretical justification for the most irrational and infantile
forms of America-bashing. There is nothing Marxist about this. On the
contrary, according to Marx, it was the duty of the non-utopian
socialist, prior to the advent of genuine socialism, to support
whatever state happened to represent the most fully developed and
consistently carried out form of capitalism; and, indeed, it was his
duty to defend it against the irrational onslaughts of those
reactionary and backward forces that tried to thwart its development.
In fact, this was a duty that Marx took upon himself, and nowhere more
clearly than in his defense of the United States against the
Confederacy in the Civil War. Only in this case he was defending
capitalism against a fantasy ideology that, unlike that of radical
Islam, wished to roll back the clock a mere handful of centuries, not
several millennia.
Those who, speaking in Marx's name, try to defend the fantasy ideology
embodied in 9-11 are betraying everything that Marx represented. They
are replacing his hard-nosed insistence on realism with a
self-indulgent flight into sheer fantasy, just as they are abandoning
his strenuous commitment to pursuit of a higher stage of social
organization in order to glorify the feudal regimes that the world has
long since condemned to Marx's own celebrated trash bin of history.
America-bashing has sadly come to be "the opium of the intellectual,"
to use the phrase Raymond Aron borrowed from Marx in order to
characterize those who followed the latter into the twentieth century.
And like opium it produces vivid and fantastic dreams.
This is an intellectual tragedy. The Marxist left, whatever else one
might say about it, has traditionally offered a valuable perspective
from which even the greatest conservative thinkers have learned -
including Schumpeter and Thomas Sowell. But if it cannot rid itself of
its current penchant for fantasy ideology of the worst type, not only
will it be incapable of serving this purpose; it will become worse
than useless. It will become a justification for a return to that
state of barbarism mankind has spent millennia struggling to transcend
- a struggle that no one felt more keenly than Marx himself. For the
essence of utopianism, according to Marx, is the refusal to
acknowledge just how much suffering and pain every upward step of
man's ascent inflicts upon those who are taking it, and instead to
dream that there are easier ways of getting there. There are not, and
it is helpful to no party to pretend that there are. To argue that the
great inequalities of wealth now existing between the advanced
capitalist countries and the Third World can be cured by outbreaks of
frenzied and irrational America-bashing is not only utopian; it is
immoral.
The left, if it is not to condemn itself to become a fantasy ideology,
must reconcile itself not only with the reality of America, but with
its dialectical necessity - America is the sine qua non of any future
progress that mankind can make, no matter what direction that progress
may take.
The belief that mankind's progress, by any conceivable standard of
measurement recognized by Karl Marx, could be achieved through the
destruction or even decline of American power is a dangerous delusion.
Respect for the deep structural laws that govern the historical
process - whatever these laws may be - must dictate a proportionate
respect for any social order that has achieved the degree of stability
and prosperity the United States has achieved and has been signally
decisive in permitting other nations around the world to achieve as
well. To ignore these facts in favor of surreal ideals and utterly
utopian fantasies is a sign not merely of intellectual bankruptcy, but
of a disturbing moral immaturity. For nothing indicates a failure to
understand the nature of a moral principle better than to believe that
it is capable of enforcing itself.
It is not. It requires an entire social order to shelter and protect
it. And if it cannot find these, it will perish.
Jeff
pushing back against the racist and bigoted barbaric religion which people
of the world are against. One can hear the shrill voices whining with fear
from all over the world. They are afraid and willing to let the barbarians
push.
"Shoot Muslims in the FACE!" <x-sh...@juno.com> wrote in message
news:37f86f54.04060...@posting.google.com...
Jon Young
> FROM ASHES TO LIGHT
>
> For publisher and owner of jihad Unspun, Khadija Abdul Qahaar,
> September 11th has special meaning, formely Bev Geisbrecht, Khadija
> comes up front to tell
> of her journey to Islam and share her views on the US war on
> "terrorism".
>
> "My name is Khadija Abdul Qahaar and I am the owner and publisher of
> Jihad Unspun. I am Muslim, who like many others, embraced Islam as the
> result of 911." "Many of our viewers will know me as Bev Kennedy and
> Paul Morris-Read, the pen names I have used on this portal, a
> necessary precaution particularly in the early days of publishing this
> portal, due to the nature of our work. I have chosen this occasion of
> 911 to tell my story, as two years on, I sense the tide is turning and
> it is my hope that this will inspire others to Islam and to take a
> stand against this shameful war on "terrorism"."
>
http://www.jihadunspun.com/articles/20030911-ashes.to.light/index.html
Next!!