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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

its the same old song « Previous | |Next »
August 5, 2003

I noticed this the other day. Nothing unusual at one level. It's just another academic getting into the blog thing, and getting all excited about being carried along the media flows in cyberspace. I was mildly amused about the embrace of popular culture. Philosophers are fascinated by cricket. There was many a staff meeting --when philosophy was still a discipline--- that had test cricket going on in the background. The staff meetings were more about cricket than departmental matters. But it is the content that matters on a weblog. Normblog looked a bit light--with all the cricket and personal tastes in music and film etc.

But then I realised that I knew the guy. Norman Geras was a British Marxist when I was doing undergraduate studies in philosophy at Flinders University of South Australia. I had read his early books (The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, London: Verso 1983; Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend, London: Verso 1985).

The more I read of Hegel the more I moved away from this British Marxism because of its conception of Marxism as a universal science of history; it being analytic philosophy; the hostility to romanticism; and the antagonism to poststructuralism based on lack of understanding and knowledge of continental philosophy. My shift away from this analytic Marxism took place between Literature of Revolution: Essays on Marxism, (London: Verso 1986) and Discourses of Extremity: Radical Ethics and Post-Marxist Extravagances, (London: Verso 1990.) I read it as a growing conservatism that was exemplied by Christopher Norris around about this time. There was much more meat in Adorno who started from the crisis of Enlightenment's scientific reason and was able to think and write dialectically. That is enough to put one off side with analytic Marxism.

British Marxism was a politics sitting on top of a conservative, realist scientific metaphysics. I suspected that the latter would transform the former. I based that judgement on my experience of that transformation in Australia. The old style revolutionaries became cultural conservatives in response to poststructuralism. The French and Germans were constructed as the enemy for the good ole Anglo-American boys. It's a familar story with a twist. Some the analytic Marxists discovered ethics and took the ethical turn.

Once I realised all this Normblog closely. I thought that it was something that I could bounce off. I duly noted this post. The issue of contention would be about the ethics. Geras, I intuited, would be saying that the left has no ethics.

Then I came across this courtesy of Abu Aardvark This is Norman Geras writing about the moral failure of the left in the Opinion Journal of the Wall Street Journal. A lefty writing in the Wall Street Journal and criticising the left. That is a long march indeed!

Clearly the 1968 lefty's long march through the institutions of liberal society has been well and truely turned around. Something has happened on the long march. This turning is just like the previous shift of being lefty in the 1930s and then being conservative in the 1950s. Like then, those who have made the turn now, help to point the guns on their old friends. There can be little common ground between friends and enemies. It was a culture war then, its a culture war now.

So what is Geras now saying about the Left? It's pretty much a case of moral failure. As I'd suspected from reading normblog. So what sort of job does he do? Since he has good philosophical skills behind him, the text is going to be an improvement on the arguments of an Anne Coulter. Abiola over at Foreign Dispatches is impressed. He says that this article:

"....is a must read for anyone who wants to think seriously about morality in the context of international politics...."

Thats a good recommendation. Abiola then asks:

"What can we take from reading this article, other than that the concept of national sovereignty cannot be elevated to the status of a supreme law rendered immune to any compromise?"

And he answers in terms of a humanitiarian obligation to help those caught up in genocide:

"I believe it also indicates that where we see inhuman actions unfolding before our eyes, and we have the power to put a stop to them at no great cost to ourselves, it is not only open to us to act, but an obligation. This means not just in Iraq, but in places like Rwanda, Liberia and even the Congo. After the Holocaust, the common cry to be heard was "Never Again!"; and yet, when faced in our own times with mass criminality, in choosing to do nothing, how are we different from those of that earlier age who we so freely condemn? They, at least, could say in their favor that they lacked the benefit of a recent historical precedent to draw upon, which we certainly cannot."

Big ethical/political issues are at stake here. The shadow of Auschwitz looms long indeed. We still live in its history.

Let's have a look at what Geras is arguing.

Geras says that the (Stalinist) left (& some liberals) paid lip service to the morally criminal attack of September 11, which slaughtered the innocents in the US. He adds that they were opposed to the U.S. in hitting back at al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan; and opposed to the war to remove Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. This the anti-war left.

Fair enough. I'm one. I accept the 'slaughter of the innocents' but I would question 'gross moral criminality." I find it an odd way to talk about a war in the Middle East spreading out to the US homeland, but I will let it go. My unease indicates the way ethics is being approahed by Geras.

Geras then says that had:

"... this campaign succeeded in its goal and actually prevented the war it was opposed to, the life of the Baathist regime would have been prolonged, with all that that entailed: years more (how many years more?) of the rape rooms, the torture chambers, the children's jails and the mass graves recently uncovered."

Well, no. I do not accept that acount at all. This is pretty dam close to what the Howard Government and pro-war crowd were running at the time. In simply repeating it Geras is not engaging in critical, independent thinking. Why not?

The debate was about pre-emptive strike, unilateralism, implausible justification for war with respect to the threat to national interest and intervening under the UN. Saddam was a bad guy, his regime was a brutal dictatorship, millions had suffered. But he did not substantially threaten Australia's national interest. If it was shown in the court of international opinion (the UN) that the Hussein regime was a substantive threat, then we invade the sovereign country of Iraq under the flag of the UN. That was a common anti-war position in Australia and the UK. Humanitarian interventions are seen to be best handled by the UN. Bush, Blair and Howard could not convince the UN Security Council---and for good reason. The WMD case was not that plausible.

Geras then turns to the issue humanitarian intervention by outside powers under international law. The aim here is to stop a regime treating its own people with terrible brutality and massacring them. He says that the matter of internvention is disputed under the UN Charter, and adds that:

"Partly because the matter is disputed, I will not here base myself on a legal right of humanitarian intervention. I will simply say that irrespective of the state of international law, in extreme enough circumstances there is a moral right of humanitarian intervention."

So do I. So we have common ground. After all, Australians had supported the Howard Government's intervention into East Timor in the face of the terror being waged by the Indonesian army. That was done under the UN. What I would do is dispute the use of right. Humanitarian intervention can be justified without the turn to natural right. But that is another debate since there is common ground

So what does Geras say about the anti-war left? We need to be careful here because the humanitiarian case can hide a crude politics as Hesiod over at shows. We get this passage from Geras:

"It is... such realities--the brutalizing and murder by the Baathist regime of tens upon tens of thousands of its own nationals--that the recent war has brought to an end. It should have been supported for this reason, irrespective of the reasons (concerning weapons of mass destruction) that George Bush and Tony Blair put up front themselves; though it is disingenuous of the war's critics to speak now as if the humanitarian case for war formed no part of the public rationale of the Coalition, since it was clearly articulated by both the president and the prime minister more than once."

It should have been the justification, but it wasn't. John Howard,for instance, only used the humanitarian justification for war when welcoming the troops home. But it was clearly the WMD argument that was the central justification in Australia, and by all accounts the US. And also in the UK judging by all the kerfuffle. The justification for the war is a bone of political contention about the government's relationship to democracy being based on decit.

However, Geras considers that he has made his point about the humanitiarian justification. His concern is with the position of the anti-war critics. At this point he shifts gear and does a bit of moral philosophy:

'Let's now model this abstractly. You have a course of action with mixed consequences, both good consequences and bad consequences. To decide sensibly you obviously have to weigh the good against the bad. Imagine someone advising, with respect to some decision you have to make, "Let's only think about the good consequences," or, "Let's merely concentrate on the bad consequences." What?! It's a no-brainer, as the expression now is. But from beginning to end something pretty much like this has been the approach of the war's opponents.'

Hang a mo. What has happened to the language of right? How come we have shifted to moral consequences? What is this? A bit of utilitarianism? Well, lets put that aside for another debate and concentrate on the main thrust of the Geras argument: the ethics of the anti-war critics only concentrating on the bad consequences.

Geras ploughs on. The examples he mentions are Clare Short, who said that the war was not worth the loss of a single life. (I presume she is a pacifist.Does she justify it in terms of right rather than consequences?) The second example is the critics who point out all the negative things that have happened in Iraq, but fail to set this against the massive fact of the end of a regime of torture, oppression and murder since the regime fell. The third example is the antiwar interlocutor who will freely concede that that it is a good that that monster and his henchmen no longer govern Iraq; but then says that it is too stupid a point to dwell upon, for it doesn't touch on the issue dividing us, support or not for the war (on grounds of weapons of mass destruction, international law).

These 3 cases are examples of a failure to balance good and bad consequences. That onsidedness is the point where we can discern the moral failure of the left.

What is not considered by Geras is another position held by war opponents. One can oppose the war because of the lack of a substantive threat to the national interest but, now that the war is over, one can support and advocate for an Iraqi democracy.--the position of public opinion. This position is one that says that democracy enables the Iraqi people to live their own lives in a flourishing way. And the less suffering endured by the Iraqi people on the road to democracy the better. Once again the model is East Timor.

However, Geras is not interested in this, as his concern is moral failure. This is the gun that is being fired. So we then have an analysis of moral failure:

"If war opponents can't eliminate the inconvenient side of the balance[of good and bad consequences], they denature it. The liberation of Iraq from Saddam's tyranny can't have been a good, because of those who effected it and of their obviously bad foreign-policy record: Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua and the rest. It can't therefore have been a liberation..."

It is a not a simple good because the liberation still looks like an occupation. However, the occupation/liberation issue all depends on what happens in the future. It is a case of whether the US helps the Iraqi's to get their own Iraqi democracy; or the Iraqi people have to fight the US to get their own kind of democracy.

Geras then turns the moral screw a notch:

"Last and worst ... If the balance doesn't come out how you want it to, you hope for things to change so that the balance will adjust in your favor... What these critics of the war thereby wished for was a spectacular triumph for the regime in Baghdad, since that is what a withdrawal would have been. So much for solidarity with the victims of oppression, for commitment to democratic values and basic human rights."

I'm not convinced by this description. It was less a case of Saddam winning and a brutal dictatorship remaining, than a concern to lessen the suffering of the Iraqi civilians caught up in the war. The Stalingrad scenario meant untold suffering. It was good that the dictatorial Baath regime collapsed quickly because it meant less suffering for the Iraqi people.

Geras, however, considers that he has made his case: The left has a very bad case of moral failure. That is the point of the whole argument.

So what is the significance of the bullet fired into the anti-war left's moral body? Geras sums it up thus----and it's the big one:

"Whatever the case or the combination [of moral imbalance] it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-traveling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrongheaded--and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug--opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet."

Wow. Its th dark nightmare of totalitarianism all over again. Equivalent to the apology for the Soviet gulag or Auschwitz. When you boil it all down the anti-war critics are apologists for the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. All that philosophy and we end up with the same script that John Howard ran about his critics. What has happened to the crtitical thinking of philosophy in the political life?

Now you can see why the Wall Street Journal would love this kind of public philsoophy. It has the right kind of politics. That big historical significance of moral failure presses all the right buttons in the culture war. When you boil all the philosophy down it is saying that left were realy apologists for a brutal totalitarian dictatorship.

It doesn't take much to draw the obvious mplication. It's the one Anne Coulter draws--treason.. Geras does not go so far. But he clears the ground for others to walk on. He is their underlabourer.

'Tis a sad day for philosophy in political life.


| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:35 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (2)
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Comments

Comments

This is in no way a clear cut issue. Many who opposed the war also supported the East Timorese in their battle for their lives and self-determination, as well as supposing the tacit support of the Suharto dictatorship by various Australian govts. And some of the people who supported the war to oust Saddam actively opposed these people when they called attention to these matters or when they tried to shelter Timorese fleeing Suhartos butchers.

I have little time for Leninists, or the remaining authoritarian left - Stalinists, Maoists etc. In some of the countries that these people have worshipped or continued to worship, i would undoubtedly be imprisoned for expressing my beliefs.

However, i think it highly rich that many in this debate are claiming the moral high ground of caring for innocents when their own actions inflict misery on the poor in their own country. These lovers of liberty are the same people that gain sustenance from corporations that profit from the removal of sovereignty and self-determination of indigenous peoples around the world, poisoning the very land which they depend upon.

Sometimes i suspect that the ease with which ex-Stalinists or ex-Marxists become cheerleaders of the establishment says more about the similarities involved than the differences.

"All that philosophy and we end up with the same script that John Howard ran about his critics. What has happened to the crtitical thinking of philosophy in the political life? "

So if John Howard says it, then anyone else who says it is wrong?

You hide behind the argument that opposition was not about 'humanitarianism', but that is not a justification - it simply means that the issue was ignored.

You answer nothing and simply spiral round into the same position you started, ignoring anyone who disagrees with you - you claim that this sin't a simple subject, then act as if it is.

"In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny."
- John Stuart Mill

Mull on it, then look at the Balkans another regime that by your logic "One can oppose the war because of the lack of a substantive threat to the national interest", leaving the ethnic cleansing alone, our liberal souls pure and clean. Same with Rwanda of course.