Libertarian Anti-Imperialism

William Appleman Williams

I had come across Joseph Stromberg’s libertarian analysis of Anti-Imperialist American Historian William Appleman Williams, some time ago on the web and had the opportunity to cruise Stromberg’s column at antiwar.com again and thought it important enough to share.

I had not heard of Williams before, and appreciated Stromberg’s introduction to this overlooked American revisionist historian.

I came to appreciate why his socialist critique of American Empire and foreign policy would influence Americans of both the Libertarian Left and the Right. "Radicals have hailed him as a supreme anti-imperialist, while Libertarian conservatives have seen him as the ``second Charles Beard,'' renewing the perspectives of the nation's foremost historian.” says Paul Buhle.

Williams fell out of favour in the eighties and nineties as the neo-liberal ideology steamrolled over its opponents on the left after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Williams however is has not been left as an obscure footnote in history. His work is now considered essential in understanding American Imperialism in the age of Globalization.

With Stromberg’s appreciation of Williams, written in 1999 at the height of Clintons Popular Front War against Serbia, we see libertarian dialectical analysis unafraid to confront a marxian dialectic and appreciate it. Williams insight into American Imperialism became even more relevant as America pursued its new preemptive strike policy post 9/11 against the neo-cons old straw dog Iraq.

An essential aspect of Libertarian Dialectics is the praxis of revisionist history. In this we need no conspiracy theories to understand that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, and that theirs is a history of the winners and losers. Our revisionism arises from understanding this dialectic we look at history from below, not from the losers, but the actual historical actors who have created the social change in the first place, the people themselves, as individuals and as social beings.

Stromberg is not your papa's libertarianism. It is not Republicanism Right, nor is it "vulgar libertarianism" or "liberaltarianism". If Kevin Carson is a Free Market Anti-Capitalist then Stromberg is a Libertarian Anti-Imperialist.

Stromberg is a consistent and outspoken opponent of Imperialism and War from a Libertarian perspective. And he has been so when such opposition on the right was tantamount to treason, which it has been in every case of American intervention abroad regardless of the popular opposition to it. Even now as half the American population opposes the Iraq war the Right continues to wave the flag of patriotism (the last refuge of a scoundrel as Bernard Shaw said) for their boys, and girls, over there. Why they are there is less important than supporting them once they are there, says the patriot regardless of whether they belong to the Democrats or Republicans. Stromberg consistently has asked why they are there and his answer is a consistent Anti-Imperialism in the tradition of Mark Twain.

Carson and Stromberg are amongst the few and the brave, who use Libertarian Dialectics, to confront the right wing liberaltarians and those who would reduce revisionist history to being a caricature of itself; conspiracy theory. Revisionist history is not a creature of the right but of the left, its essence is historical materialism, unable to accept this basic fact, the right insists on reducing every act to those of conspiracies amongst the rulers over the ruled.

So I am pleased to offer this introduction to Williams by Stromberg and a link to the rest of the article on Williams here on my blog. As well as readers will know from my web writings I have included other references to Williams as well as examples of his writings available on the web.


William Appleman Williams:
Premier New Left Revisionist

A PROGRESSIVE HISTORIAN

by
Joseph R.
Stromberg

Last week in a discussion of Charles Austin Beard, "isolationist" Progressive historian, I mentioned Beard's influence on a number of younger scholars, among them William Appleman Williams and Murray N. Rothbard. Williams emerged in the late 1950s as the spearhead of New Left diplomatic history and has had an enduring influence on the writing of American history. "Mainstream" scholars take his insights into account but acknowledge his impact only in the most backhanded way possible. It is probably among libertarians and anti-imperialist conservatives that Williams now finds his true following.

A LIFE IN HISTORY

William Appleman Williams (1921-1990) was born in Iowa in and attended the U.S. Naval Academy. He served in the Pacific in World War II. As influences on his thought, I should mention Beard, John Adams, James Madison, Walter Prescott Webb (whose writings on the frontier – ending with The Great Frontier – treated a theme which Williams made his own), and – in a generic sort of way – Karl Marx. One doubts, however, that Williams was ever really a "Marxist," despite the Cold War liberals' joy in awarding him that title.

After the war, he took a PhD in History at the University of Wisconsin, which was still something of a bastion of the old-style Progressive history. His first book, American-Russian Relations, 1781-1947 [1952] had a small impact and led Mr. Vital Center himself – Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a founder of Cold War liberalism – to attack Williams as a "pro-Communist scholar."¹ In 1957, Williams returned to teach at Wisconsin, where he and his graduate students became known as the "Wisconsin school" of diplomatic history. Late in life, he taught at Oregon State University and served as President of the Organization of American Historians. Even in the turbulent "sixties," he was critical of New Left excesses. He would have hated the present university climate of political correctness.

A BODY OF WORK

His Tragedy of American Diplomacy [1959; 1972] was noticed by the scholarly community, although the Cold War liberals, of course, hated it. The House Un-American Activities Committee noticed his work and wasted his time with summonses which were suddenly revoked after he had spent money and time traveling to hearings. This petty harassment was continued for a while by another government agency I need not mention.

As the quagmire in Vietnam raised fundamental questions about the policies pursued – with mere differences of nuance – by Cold War liberals and conservatives, Williams began to find an audience for his ideas. Book followed book. Here I shall only mention the very important Contours of American History [1961, 1973], the two-volumes of readings in American diplomatic history (The Shaping of American Diplomacy [1966, 1967]), America Confronts a Revolutionary World [1976] and Empire as a Way of Life [1980].

Joseph R. Stromberg has been writing for libertarian publications since 1973, including The Individualist, Reason, the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Libertarian Review, and the Agorist Quarterly, and is completing a set of essays on America's wars. He is a part-time lecturer in History at the college level. You can read his recent essay, "The Cold War," on the Ludwig von Mises Institute Website. His column, "The Old Cause," appears each Tuesday onAntiwar.com

William Appleman Williams Learning From History
American Radicals , American Radicals series

Paul Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin

``I prefer to die as a free man struggling to create a human community than as a pawn of empire,'' wrote historian William Appleman Williams in 1976.

Annapolis graduate and World War II Naval officer, civil rights activist and President of the Organization of American Historians, Williams (1921-1990) is remembered as the pre-eminent historian and critic of Empire in the second half of this century. More than any other scholar, he anticipated, encouraged and explained the attack of conscience suffered by the nation during the Vietnam War. Radicals have hailed him as a supreme anti-imperialist, while Libertarian conservatives have seen him as the ``second Charles Beard,'' renewing the perspectives of the nation's foremost historian. Fellow historians consider him a great figure in American thought at large, one who looked for large patterns and asked the right questions.

Counterpunch also has an excellent article on Williams’s relevancy today in light of the new age of American Imperialism:

The Relevance of William Appleman Williams

History and the Tragedy of American Diplomacy

"William Appleman Williams suggested that in spite of its best intentions American foreign policy was based largely on a one-dimensional American belief that Americans and American democracy had all the answers. The sad truth is that that belief might not be far wrong, but the inflexibility of the administrators in charge of its application has contributed to a century of failure in foreign relations.

According to Williams, American diplomacy was based on three premises, which, for all intents and purposes, have not changed and maintain a contemporary validity and relevance. The first is the humanitarian impulse to help other people solve their problems. The second principle encourages self-determination, which insists that every society have the right to establish its own goals or objectives, and to realize them internally through the means it decides are appropriate. Third-and here's the kicker-American diplomacy has typically insisted that other people cannot really solve their problems and improve their lives unless they follow the American formula. The contradiction evident in this third premise effectively nullifies the genuine best interests of the first two, but it also speaks volumes about the global perception of American arrogance."

American Marxism: Theory without Tradition
by John B. Judis , Washington editor of In These Times and has recently completed a biography of William F. Buckley.

The Choice Before Us by William Appleman Williams
The American Socialist, July 1957

Preface: History as a Way of Learning
Excerpted from The Contours of American History
by William Appleman Williams (1966) pp. 17-23.

Martin Luther King and the New American Frontier
By William Appleman Williams and Lewis Kreinberg
for Renewal Magazine. Originally Published April 5, 1968.

William Appleman Williams and the Myth of Economic Determinism
Steven Hurst
Manchester Metropolitan University
Paper prepared for the APG Conference, Reading, January 3-5 2003

Kindleberger on Bretton Woods
Redefining the Past: Essays in Honor of William Appleman Williams

Why The Rage Against The War Machine Rally Is #AntiWarSoWhite

Jacqueline Luqman
08 Feb 2023



Leftists, especially the Black left, do not share common cause with everyone who wants to end U.S involvement in Ukraine. The politics of some who call themselves anti-war cannot be ignored.

I’m looking at this Rage Against The War Machine rally that is being organized by the Libertarian Party and I am genuinely confused about how folks on the left are involved in this at all. Oh, I understand the need to revive and mobilize a strong not just anti-war movement, but an anti–imperialist and people-centered human rights movement, so sure, sometimes we’re going to have to organize with people we don’t agree 100% on everything with. But THESE people?

And look, on the surface, if one would look at the list of demands on the Rage Against The War Machine webpage - and I do take offense at their play on the name of the band Rage Against The Machine - one easily agrees with not sending one more penny to Ukraine, to slashing the Pentagon budget, to abolishing war and empire, to disbanding NATO, and to freeing Julian Assange, among others reasonable sounding demands and think, “Well this is great, I agree with all of these things, so of course I’ll support/align with them!”

But, if you compare those nice-sounding words to the actual ideology of today’s Libertarian Party, and particularly of the Mises Caucus that has gained control of it, something starts to smell funny. So let me hip you to who these people are and why I’m now calling this and the support from too many white so-called leftists in the anti-war movement, #AntiWarSoWhite.

Back in May of 2022 Reason Magazine published an article examining the takeover of the Libertarian Party by the Mises Caucus which happened when the Caucus got their candidate Angela McCardle elected to chair the national party with 69% of the voting delegates. The article points out that while McArdle was the Mises Caucus candidate, the behind-the-scenes mastermind of its victory was caucus founder and leader Michael Heise.

The caucus's official platform is typical libertarian stuff - personal liberty, little to no federal government oversight or no federal government for that matter, no “unconstitutional” war, no federal regulation on guns, the primacy of private property - which has always screamed capitalist greed and a host of other problems including racism, since racists have taken the libertarian creed of freedom to associate with no federal oversight on freedom to exclude people of color. But the key to understanding the danger of the Mises Caucus isn’t in what their platform says; it is in what their members have said and have done. Because even old-guard libertarians say that too many of the Caucus members are obnoxious bullies, and are also often racist.

The Reason Magazine article cites the example of the New Hampshire L.P., a powerful vector of Mises Caucus messaging, tweeting on Martin Luther King Day that "Black people in America get special access to essential drugs, receive special federal funding due to race, and are first-in-line for every college and every job. America isn't in debt to black people. If anything it's the other way around."

Aside from the assertions that Black people get preferential anything in this country being typical racist drivel and patently false, the racist imaginary grievances were a response to Nicole Hannah Jones tweeting not her sentiments, but the words of Dr. Martin Luthe King, Jr. when he said in the oft miscontextualized “I Have A Dream” speech: “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds…” But sure, we get preferential essential drug and job and college admittance treatment at a time when economic inequality between Black and white persists , with whatever meager gains the so-called Black middle class has achieved not translating to increased economic stability for the Black masses, and all Black households are far behind white households in income and assets, including the much-celebrated Black petit bourgeoisie.

Then there’s the influential member of the Caucus Jeremy Kauffman who tweeted that transgender people should be killed to achieve a more moral world, as long as it doesn’t incur additional taxes. These tweets were deleted after pressure to do so, but you know twitter is forever and thank goodness it is so that we have evidence to back up the reasons for actual leftists to steer clear of these #AntiWarSoWhite people.

Let Mises Caucus Libertarians tell it, though, they are merely carrying on Ron Paul’s Revolution. But more evidence of their true ideology can be seen when they succeeded in deleting the line from the Libertarian Party’s long-time platform plank condemning bigotry as “irrational and repugnant.” Heise says that the anti-bigotry condemnation fed what he called a "woke," or "cultural Marxist" agenda. He said, "What is happening nowadays with the 'wokeism' is people are using language as dialectics along cultural lines to push for collectivist ends," says Heise. "So back in the day…the Marxist revolutions, they had the dialectics of the rich versus the poor and the owner versus the worker. And they were pushing towards collectivist ends. It's the same ideology that's happening now, but they're pitting cis versus straight and male versus female and trans versus whatever." Look at that, it’s the old communist gay/trans collectivist agenda trope!

And although they added a new line stating in their party’s plank stating that the party would "uphold and defend the rights of every person, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or any other aspect of their identity," it hard to see how that can be done when the Mises Caucus is shaping the L.P. environment to drown out discussions about people’s identity and how policies impact them differently from the majority. Amazing how allegedly freedom-loving Libertarians sound hauntingly like rights-stripping bigoted Republicans.

Then there’s the fact that The Mises Caucus also succeeded in removing the party's pro-choice plank, which McArdle said was called for because abortion represents "an irreconcilable difference" within the libertarian movement and they didn’t want to keep alienating Trump and socially conservative voters. "We tend to push out people who are a little bit more socially conservative," says McArdle. "And I think that there's room in the party for people who are libertine and socially conservative. And I would like them to feel that way."

Let me get this straight…there’s enough room in the party to protect women’s right to privacy and bodily autonomy and enough room for the people who want to take it away from them? What’s the floor plan in that big tent look like because I’m not seeing how you arrange enough room for both. You’re going to inevitably drive one group out, and that will always be the group that feels threatened, that IS threatened, by the other.

And old guard Libertarians agree, which is why many of them have been very vocal in their opposition to the Mises Caucus and its takeover of the L.P. One old-guard Libertarian elected official who quit her post in protest to the Mises Caucus takeover in New Hampshire said, "...we are a big tent party, but no tent is big enough to hold racists and people of color, transphobes and trans people, bigots and their victims.."

If a Libertarian can understand that there is no unity to be had between people who are fighting for their rights and people who want to deny them, what is wrong with so-called white Leftists who don’t get this? I know the answer, but I’ll get to that in a minute, because there is more to consider when examining why this #AntiWarSoWhite rally is such a problem.

There’s the fact that if the Libertarian Party and anyone else who sponsored and organized this event were serious about building the “anti-war movement,” why didn’t they reach out to the very visible and very active Black, Brown, and Indigenous-led anti-imperialist organizations and invite their representatives to speak? As many white leftists, or at least anti-war activists, are really dollar store Latte Leftists peddling vapid and narrow anti-war rhetoric without actually dealing with imperialism have told me, “...we all need to come together to stop this war in Ukraine because it presents an existential crisis for all of us!! ALL OF US WILL DIE FROM NUCLEAR WAAAARRRRR!!!!” they scream.

True enough. But considering the people most impacted by US imperialism and imperialist war have been organizing against it long before these Mises people came along, why haven’t I seen most of these white Latte Leftists engaged in organizing with us? I mean, Black, queer, trans, disabled, Global South, African people will certainly all die should there be a nuclear war, so why not include representatives of ALL OF THE PEOPLE who would be impacted if this war is not stopped on your platform?

And the organizers of this rally didn’t even have to reach out to real anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist organizations like the Black Alliance for Peace or ANSWER Coalition or the like. They could have been less obviously racist had they reached out to even a liberal formation like the Poor People’s Campaign.

But nope! The organizers looked at their speaker’s lineup and nobody said, “Dang this is mighty white up in here we need to get some legit Black anti-war speakers and really build a solid anti-war coalition.” But since that’s not who they want to build their base with, they didn’t.

And I’m not making this up. The new Mises Caucus-backed chair of the L.P. McArdle made it clear who the party wants to grow their base with in another Reason Magazine article where she says, “Mises Caucus supporters say they want to ‘make the Libertarian Party libertarian again,’ that it should no longer be concerned about offending progressives or Beltway types and shouldn't be afraid to reach out to the coalition that elected former President Donald Trump.” That’s right, their bold action to rejuvenate the Libertarian Party is not to reach out to the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist (they would never because private-property-loving Libertarians are NOT anti-capitalists) formations and activists, but to the right and alt-right young podcast edgelord personality-loving Trump voter. And to get unprincipled white Latte Leftists to give them public legitimacy by speaking at their opportunistic recruitment event they call an anti-war rally, or course, which too many are happy to oblige.

And despite how much some of the speakers now publicly whine about some others backing out because they succumbed to “the woke mob” or favored an LGBTQ+ agenda over participating in their little #AntiWarSoWhite rally, the truth is that people probably hadn’t looked into what the Libertarian Party has become with the Mises Caucus now leading it, and when they found out decided it wasn’t worth damaging their formations’ reputation associating with them, and ultimately decided that betraying the marginalized people within their formations and coalitions was also not worth the limited visibility their participation would have given them. Especially when you factor in that for the Libertarian Party, the purpose of this rally is really to seize the political moment to raise their flailing political party’s profile and gain some legitimacy from the speakers they invited.

Because it is worth noting that the money is drying up for the Libertarian Party because of this rightward shift the Caucus has created. Long-time significant donors to the L.P. have said that the Mises turn made them stop funding L.P. candidates. At the time the Reason article was published in March 2022, the number of active donors to the LP including several major ones, had been falling for seven straight months following the four-year battle for control of the party between the old-guard Libertarians and the Mises Caucus. And now that the Mises Caucus has won, this rally is part of their strategy to win and expand their party’s political power.

And here I have to go back to the folks who choose still after all that has come to light about the Libertarian Party and the Mises Caucus. I wonder if they are asking themselves what the Mises Caucus-led Libertarian Party will do with the political power they win if they are able to cash in on the legitimacy they are looking for with this event. And if they are asking themselves that, who do they think they would wield that political power against?

Of course, they will use that power against the people they have already told us with their own words and actions that they want to use it against, to disenfranchise the marginalized the way the GOP that they are actively courting to grow their ranks are already attacking. The Libertarian Party under Mises Caucus control will help the GOP do it, and what will these white Latte Leftists do then? Despite the delusional assurances of some who have engaged me, they will not change the minds of these people because the L.P. is not interested in changing their ideology. And these white Latte Leftists are not demanding that they do.

Among many of the white alleged leftists who challenged my analysis of this L.P.-backed #AntiWarSoWhite rally, I seem to recall none of them engaging with other anti-imperialist groups for nationwide protests against a potential war in Ukraine as far back as the beginning of February 2022. Facebook reminded me that I was at such a rally. You see, we anti-imperialists have been protesting imperialism, war, and THIS war in particular for quite some time, even before this war with Russia using Ukraine began. We saw it coming and were protesting against the possibility, if not the inevitability of the US/EU/NATO coalition pushing it. But let these alleged white veterans of the anti-war movement tell it, a real powerful anti-war coalition couldn’t have been built until the L.P. rally came along, so if we value our lives we’d better hop on that bandwagon.

The truth is, however, that if they ever valued our lives, they would have been organizing with us all along, but too many white so-called anti-war veterans have not been, and that’s why much of what is considered the anti-war movement - as much of it as there is left - is also an #AntiWarSoWhite formation.

Because I must point out that much of this discourse around defending these bigots and transphobes in the new Libertarian Party among white anti-war veterans looks, sounds, and feels like plain ol’ liberal racism, where the allegedly nice white people gaslight us for pointing out that the people they want to do business with would just as soon see us wiped out, so we cannot - for our own safety and that of our comrades - align with those forces and people. In response, the allegedly nice white people dismiss our concerns, tell us that we’re making too much of nothing like we always do, and that we’re the reason no change can happen because we don’t want to work with anybody. We’re too stuck on “ideological purity” or worse, “identity politics” rather than building a broad coalition. That’s racist gaslighting y’all and there is really no other way to call that. Especially when they try to support their flimsy arguments against us by using quotes by Frederick Douglass or the example of the original Rainbow Coalition led by the Black Panther Party to prove to us that we should unite with racist white people. Except that they, once again, remove all context from their examples, and have not done anything close to what those freedom fighters did to challenge racist domination. Hell, these white leftists won’t even ADMIT that the folks organizing this rally have a bigotry problem, let alone require them to repudiate it as the Black Panther Party did with the members of the Young Patriots who may have been racist, as Frederick Douglass did in challenging the system of white supremacist domination. No, these white Latte Leftists are not making ANY demands of the organizers of this event for their party’s bigotry and that of some of the speakers aligned with their party, but they are making all the demands of US to capitulate to them, So the misuse of our own history against us is an additional racist insult committed by the #AntiWarSoWhite crowd on the so-called left.

Further, there is also the very uncomfortable truth that too many white people on the so-called left do not want to be in coalition with people who aren’t like them. They don’t want to have to deal with conversations about their racism and white supremacist tendencies, their patriarchy, their homophobia and transphobia, their ableism, their superior attitude as if they know All Things Organizing, and their resistance to being led by nonwhite non-men. They want to organize with people who only want to talk about how war and maybe capitalism affect our class as a whole, but they do not want to talk about the additional oppressions that are heaped on those of our class because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc. There, I said it out loud for you - too many so-called white people on the so-called left who claim to be anti-war do not want to be led by people of color because they’re tired of talking about racism, and they want to continue to call the shots.

And look where that’s gotten us, a bunch of people who claim to be anti-war activists tripping over themselves to give a bunch of bigots legitimacy because western chauvinism and American exceptionalism has them really believing that a movement ain’t right unless it’s led by whites. The resistance to focusing the anti-war effort on the people who are and always have been most impacted by imperialist warmongering is something they refuse to confront, struggle with and overcome. So they don’t want a real anti-imperialist coalition, they want their own #AntiWarSoWhite movement.

My observations here are less of a condemnation of any of these groups - organizers or participants - and more an honest analysis of the factors that lead me to see this Rage Against The War Machine rally of the L.P. as a dangerous distraction from true anti-imperialist coalition building and organizing. People and formations must make decisions about who they align with based on their own principles of unity and shared interests, but there should also be principles of solidarity with the most marginalized to bring no harm to them with the alliances we make.

I just know that the interests of the working class, poor, oppressed, and colonized people who are marginalized additionally by racial oppression, gender oppression, ableist exclusion and other intersectional points of struggle are not served by aligning with people who would continue those oppressions should they ever win enough power to be able to do it.

We cannot afford to lend those groups legitimacy now, only so they can win the power to use it against us later. It is a grave betrayal of our humanity to demand that we do.

Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder of Luqman Nation , an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here  and here ) and on Facebook ; and co-host of Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary” .

The Need for Arab Anarchism

Sadly outside of Lebanon, the Left in the Arab world carries with it little or no poltical consequence. With perhaps the exception of the Workers Communist Parties of Iran and Iraq, which have mobilized workers, students, and women, there has been stagnation of the Left bringing it to the verge of historical extinction. Nowhere is this clearer than in Egypt. Once the hot bed of the Left and the Pan Arab movement, today the left wanders in the desert wondering What Is To Be Done. As Al-Ahram reports; What's left of the left?

He listed other reasons why the left was no longer a presence on the political scene. It is too scattered and divided, and on too many occasions the various factions have squandered whatever political capital they possessed on squabbling among themselves. "We need to unite, we need a party," he continued, "an Egyptian communist party that can Egyptianise Marxism... An elected, democratic party... We communists have never experienced democracy [from within].We know only centralization."

Without self-criticism and an honest acceptance of past mistakes the left "won't have any credibility with the people".

In the past, he continued, "the communist Egyptian left indulged in theoretical debates about Marxism. It learned Marxist texts by heart, adopted the experiences of others without devising mechanisms to fit our Arab reality. It approached Marxism as if it was sacred, ignoring the fact that it is not a monotheistic religion but a methodology."

"The left has been completely absent from [recent] national struggles, contenting itself with watching from the comfort of closed rooms while others were working."

But all is not yet lost. There is still hope, El-Hilali suggests, if leftists find a way to work together, though "not in the form of yet another political party". What is needed, he says, is a broad non-ideological coalition, "including as many factions as possible and able to steer away from the typical ghettoising of Trotskyites, Nasserists and the like".

Tamer Wageeh, of the Socialist Studies Centre, pointed to the "ill-defined" masses of activists who have taken to the streets in the last six years, citing Intifada solidarity demonstrations, anti-war protests and the more recent demonstrations demanding change in Egypt. But instead of swelling the ranks of left-wing factions these young and politicized activists are rejecting the left label.

"They don't define themselves as yassar (left) though they subscribe to its principles -- anti-privatisation, anti- imperialism, women's rights, Coptic rights and so on -- because the reputation of the Egyptian left has put them off. The challenge is to integrate these people into the movement."

So what label are they accepting do you think? Why like much of the anti-globalization movement, and those struggling around feminist or religious minority rights, they broadly call themselves Anarchist. And a good dose of anarchist zeal and organization is exactly what this old left in Egypt needs.

The fact they are discussing exactly this delimma one that all of the 'old' left, especially the Communist parties and the communist movement faced after 1989 at this late date, later than the movements in Europe which already had begun to move towards Euro-communism prior to the fall of the Berlin wall, is a good sign for a renewal of a more libertarian left in Egypt. Anarchist Organisation not Leninist Vanguardism

As Richard Day points out in his book Gramsci is Dead, this is also the debate in the Western Anti-Globalization movement, where groups like the Socialist Workers Party and its theroiticians have attempted to comandeer the anti-globalization movement flumoxed by its web like organizational features, which they embrace yet wish to place a structural form on.

These old style parties of the Left in Europe, are eqaually flumoxed by Hardt and Negri's Empire, and the idea of a multitude, a term that to me reflects a widing of the idea of the proletariat; to include all the sans papier, the illegal immigrants that are now swarming Europe and North America. The movement of labour that is created by the movement of capital under globalization. Much of this multitude being from the Third World, and muslim.

GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN - HARDT AND NEGRI'S EMPIRE

Akca, Ismet, 'Globalization', State and Labor: Towards a Social Movement Unionism


Though Hardt and Negri can't bring themselves to say it, any more than Foucault could bring himself to say it with his critique of Governmentability and the politics of control, this is the core of the Anarchist critique of the State and Authority, under capitalism.

That if as Herr Dr. Marx says that capitalism is not just about the production and distribution of good, prices and wages, but about 'the social relations of the means of production'. Then in advanced capitalism, the critique of the modern state capitalism, and the capitalist state, the critique of globalization and its contradictions requires a revitalized anarchist critique of ideologies (Islam, Evangelical fundamentalism, Neo-liberalism, The Third Way etc.).

A fundamental critique of the hegemony of ideologies that attempt to interpret the social relations of globalization as the politics of identity and soverignty. Religion versus mass culture, of Anti-Imperialism that is merely Anti-Coca Cola, Islamism that is radical social democracy of Allah with a gun. Of the Imperialism of Zionism, and the failed social revolutions in the Middle East.

The anarchist critique has always been about the dialectical relationship between the individual and the community, neither can come into existence without a radical awareness of the 'other'. That is community is always new, it's existenance is not based on tradition, of aprori existence but of the growth and existence of indvidualization, which includes then a greater sense of need for community.

Anarchism challenges the statist quo, the very nature of all previous communities, by saying a new world is being birthed within the shell of the old.

That a different future is possible. That resistance is growth, not failure, that hope is eternal, that you can make a difference. This then is the challenge not only for the Egyptian left, but for the Left in general. The old models of socialist organizing have failed. Failed because they only saw politics as a means to an end instead of the end in itself. That to be political is to be active is as much an individual choice as it is a collective responsibility.

The classic question of Anarchism being identified with the Politics of the Deed, whether it was the bombings and bank robberies of the 19th Century or the assisination of politicians, which made Anarchism a political pariah, now comes back full ciricle with Bush's phony War on Terror.

The officials I interviewed [at the American consulate] were very American, especially in being very polite; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of Martin Chuzzlewit [a Charles Dickens novel with an unflattering portrait of the U.S.], I have always found Americans by far the politest people in the world. They put in my hands a form to be filled up, to all appearances like other forms I had filled up in other passport offices. But in reality it was very different from any form I had ever filled up in my life. …

One of the questions on the paper was, "Are you an anarchist?" To which a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, "What the devil has that to do with you? Are you an atheist" along with some playful efforts to cross-examine the official about what constitutes atheist.

Then there was the question, "Are you in favor of subverting the government of the United States by force?" Against this I should write, "I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour and not the beginning." C.K. Chesterton Coming to America

The revival of the caricture of Anarchism as 'terrorism' came with the Black Block and the resulting news coverage of them during Seattle and the anti-globalization protests that followed. Once again direct action was misinterpreted by a fringe group as meaning destruction of property, rather than organising collective resistance. It found a niche in the media who wanted to exploit the image of Anarchism as mindless destruction, chaos, once again.


Ever since Haymarket the idea of the Anarchist as bomber, as terrorist has been used to create a state of fear and ideology of fear against Anarchy. As Richard Day points out in his introduction to Gramsci is Dead, this played into the hands of the state and its media quite nicely, since that has been the historic image of anarchism used to justify the police state. The origins of Interpol were founded in the International Anti-Anarchist league in the late 19th Century.

“Wild Beasts Without Nationality”: The Uncertain Origins of Interpol, 1898-1910

The United States, International Policing and the War against Anarchist Terrorism, 1900–1914

1899 -- US: Emma Goldman speaks at a large meeting at Cooper Union to protest the International Anti-Anarchist Conference in Rome.


Today in the United States the police under Homeland Security continue to spy on the modern day anarchist and social change movements; TARGETS of surveillance | PortlandTribune.com

As Kropotkin wrote this is NOT what anarchism is at all, but its very caricature. Anarchist Morality

In fact the Anarchist movement faced off squarely against the ultimate in statist reaction; fascism, during the Spainish Civil War. And it is this Internationalist anarchism that is needed again today in the Middle East. For exactly the reason that as a poltical ideology of the individual and the commons/community it provides an antitode to the new fascism of Islamism and the old medievalist regimes that dominate the region.

Finally it is anarchism that recognizes, and has done so historically, the key role of feminism as individualism that is important for the social revolution against Patriarchy.
In a patriarchical culture that is Islam this struggle is even more important in undermining the authoritarian statist quo of the Mullahs.Unanswered questions


Proponents of democratic reforms to Muslim states will talk about liberalism versus anarchism, and reduce the liberation struggles in the Middle East down to this which is a false dichotomy. Anarchism arose from liberalism and superceded it. Anarchism expresses a dialectic of individual and collective rights, not through the political state, as classical liberalism does, but through the 'free association of producers' which would be a real 'free market' unlike the current monopoly capitalist mode of geo-politics.

American Values, American Interests: The United States and Free-Market Democracy in the Middle East

Also see: anarchism

Can you be a Muslim Anarchist?

Gnostic Heresy in Islam

Dr. Marx on Islam

Islam = Fascism

Below are links to articles on both Arabic Anarchism, Anarchist critiques of Islam, and Anti-Zionist Anarchism. I have linked to articles dealing with the similarity between this new war on terror and the old bugaboo about anarchist terrorists.

Further Reading on Arab Anarchism, Anarchy and Terrorism, Anti-Zionist Anarchism:

Arab Anarchism

التحررية الجماعية Communism libertarian

LIBERTARIANS, THE LEFT AND THE MIDDLE EAST

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي ...

Left Hegelianism, Arab Nationalism, and Labor Zionism

Religious Fundamentalist Regimes: A Lesson from the Iranian Revolution 1978-1979

celebrating solitude

Social Philosophy Of Russian Anarchism (Kropotkin)
and of Muammar Al Qadhafi: An Essay In Comparison

An anarchist analysis of Islam

International Institute of Social History The Arab Middle East Section - collections from Egypt, Sudan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon.

Biography of Algerian anarchist Saïl Mohamed

Reality of the Egyptian Proletariat Sameh Saeed Abbood

Project for the creation of a Libertarian Studies & Research Centre in Morocco

SIYAHI INTERLOCAL Journal of Postanarchist Theory, Culture and Politics

Siyahi Interlocal began with a group of writers working in Istanbul, Turkey who had been interested in relations between anarchism and poststructuralist thought ('postanarchism') since the early Nineties. The group gave lectures around the country, wrote numerous essays on the subject, published an independent journal called 'Karasin' and produced several special issues of the country's oldest literary magazine 'Varlik'. By the turn of the millenium, they had begun integrating their work with similar projects already developing in Europe, North America and elsewhere, particularly through the translation of texts, as well as exchanging visits by writers working in that vein. This history finally culminated in the appearance of Siyahi Interlocal, the global electronic counterpart to the print journal by the same name that is currently published in Turkish. Today it is a meeting of minds hailing from France, Netherlands, Germany, Sicily, England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, the United States, Hawai'i, Australia and Turkey, all of whom have come together to create a space within which to develop new directions in radical theory and practice.

Anarchism, Terrorism and Al-Qaidah

Anarchism is NOT Comparable to Al-Qa`idah

Anarchist outrages, by Rick Coolsaet

german.pages.de - we will dance on their graves

Aljazeera.Net - Al-Qaida: The wrong answers

Apples and Oranges? Anarchism and Muslim Terrorists - Letters to the Editor

Dean's World: Terrorism of the Past

Troppo Armadillo: Are anarchists demanding the impossible?

Al-Qaeda, Victorian style
Graham Stewart
A bomb on the Underground was only one of the anarchist outrages that shook Europe a century ago

No War But The Class War
Against capitalism - Against the US government - Against state and fundamentalist terrorism

Anti-Zionist Anarchism

Islam and democracy: an interview with Heba Ezzat Rosemary Bechler One of my first articles was entitled “Anarchism: a Word Unjustly Maligned inTranslation– because the Arabic word for anarchism means “chaos

Eyal's Radical Corner

Co-opting Solidarity: Privilege in the Palestine

LAKOFF, Aaron. Interview : Israeli Anarchism – Being Young, Queer, and Radical in the Promised Land

Interview With An Anarchist Refusnik

BRIDGES: Rubies, Rebels and Radicals

Kibbutzim

Orthodox Anarchist

Anarchism and National Liberation

INTERVIEW WITH NOAM CHOMSKY

Anarchists Who Knew How To Party

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libertarian communism
socialism
libertarian socialism
Egypt
Islam
Arab Anarchism
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Left, Right and Liberty

My old pal from our Canadian University Press (CUP) days; Terry Glavin in his latest blog entry criticizes what he sees as the libertarian/anarchist underpinings of the new left, the anti-war and the anti-globalization movement.

And Glavin believes they are dangerous, American ideas influencing our glorious Canadian Social Democratic politics.

Glavin first quotes from Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, in Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t be Jammed (Harper Perennial, 2000)

Unfortunately, the idea of counterculture has become so deeply embedded in our understanding of society that it influences every aspect of social and political life. Most importantly, it has become the conceptual template for all contemporary leftist politics. Counterculture has almost completely replaced socialism as the basis of radical political thought. So if counterculture is a myth, then it is one that has misled an enormous number of people, with untold political consequences.”

The counterculture of music, smoke ins, Adbuster magazine, G@P anarchist hip clothing chic is recuperated by capitalism, thus it is not socialism it is protest chic. Well congratulations on discovering that the counter culture is a consumer form of capitalism which it always was anyways. 'Hip capitalism', as we called it in the seventies and eighties was a kinder groovier kind of capitalism. See my Hypocrisy of Hip Capitalism

It's an old debate in the Anarchist movement as well, lifestyle reformism versus social revolution. Today the debate over counter culture is exemplified by Murray Bookchin with his Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism and Richard Day with his new book Gramsci is Dead.

Do we create alternative drop out cultures that ignore the state (Day) or do we actively mobilize to create a social revolution based on class struggle (Bookchin). This debate is now occuring again in the anti-war/anti-globalization movement which I think is the point that Glavin is trying to make. I think, because it is far from clear, that he is identifying libertarian/anarchist politics with drop out politics of the old counterculutre.

But then he goes and says this.

Ron Dart is a Red Tory philosopher, a devout Anglican, an NDP supporter (at least for now), an authority on the beat poets and the Catholic mystic Thomas Merton, and the author more than a dozen books, including The Red Tory Tradition: Ancient Roots, New Routes. In conversation with Ron the other day, I heard more than just a faint echo of the Heath/Potter thesis.

Beware the “antistate” left, he said. It may be Harper’s loudest and most vociferous opposition, but listen carefully. It speaks the same language that Harper does. It cleaves to “liberal” ideas, but in the American meaning of the word. It is a “subtler imperialism” that threatens to render Canada incapable of articulating an effective, homegrown defence against neoconservatism.

Beware of the Anti-State Left. As if Anarchism and Libertarian ideas are somehow foreign to the Canadian Left, an American influence on good old Canadian Methodist Social Democracy. In a further leap of logic Glavin then tells us what kind of an outcome will happen if these dangerous libertarian, anti-state ideas influence the Canadian Left.

"And it comes with a warning Canadians should heed: Beware, else we end up with our own versions of Fox News shouting matches, and our own Al Frankens pitted against their Bill O’Reillys in the same degenerate American arguments, carried on in the same American language, and the same hoarse and hate-filled stalemate that has so horribly paralyzed and disfigured American politics."

I know Glavin has gone native, and lives in the heart of the counter culture beast on the Left Coast of Vancouver Island but really where has he been for the last thirty years since we both left university?

We already have those voices on the right, the Ezra Levants, the Fraser Institute, the Byfields, the Alberta/B.C./Western Report, etc etc. They have been around for ages. The right specializes in generalizations and outrageous statements, the social democratic left as I have complained before have been far too polite and nice in debates allowing these screaming ranting right wingers to brow beat them in media debates. Glavin appears to think that some how polite English school boy debate, tea and crumpets, good show ol boy, is the Canadian way.

But back to my main point Anarchism and the Libertarian Left are as Canadian as any other aspect of the New Left or the Old Left. Emma Goldman the famous anarchist agitator traveled across Canada and eventually died in Toronto in exile from the United States. The Revolutionary union, the IWW was active in Canada at the turn of last century and the radicals which formed it went on to form the One Big Union, the OBU. It was reviewed in Canada in the seventies by those of us young anarchists including some of us in CUP. And is is going strong again now.

George Woodcock the famous English professor from UBC and anarchist biographer and historian was one of the earliest promoters of anarchism in Canada in the sixties. By the late sixties the New Left in Canada had a strong anarchist compenent in it based on Our Generation, a magazine out of Quebec which represented what the editors broadly called the Extra Parlimentary Opposition in Canada, that is the New Left.

By the seventies we had Yippies and anarchist collectives in every city in Canada.
And Vancouver, Glavins home town was no exception. It was chock full of anarchists especially around the magazine the Open Road. Which is well documented in Alan Antliffs book Only A Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology

Besides the Social Democratic Left which would influence the Liberals and Progressives alike in the Forties, we had a tradition of both radical Communists and Anarchists in Canada.

Way before Stephen Harper and the neo-cons recuperated the term libertarian it was used by members of the new left. And as I have taken pains to show here on numerous occasions those on the right who call themselves libertarians are merely Lazzie-faire capitalists, not real libertarians.

And one of the major Libertarian theorists in the U.S. was Canadian Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3) who moved to LA from Edmonton. That is truly a 'subtle imperialism'. True SEK3 was a student of Murray Rothbard, the economic historian, who did much to promote the Libertarian ideology that so upsets Glavin and his Red Tory friend. A NEW AMERICAN REVOLUTION

But Red Tories are really classic liberals, fiscal conservatives and socially liberal. Not unlike Tommy Douglas and the old CCF. In fact that is the history of liberalism, it went from a radical idea to becoming the defender of the status quo. In fact old fashioned political conservatism in Canada is liberal. The success of the Manning Reform party, and indeed the so called libertarianism of Stephen Harper are not based on libertarianism at all but on populism, economic liberalism and American Republican conservatism.

Here is what Murray Rothbard has to say about liberalism the ideology of the Red Tories and the Social Democrats that Glavin claims are as Canadian as maple syrup and beaver pelts.

In England, the classical liberals began their shift from radicalism to quasi-conservatism in the early nineteenth century; a touchstone of this shift was the general British liberal attitude toward the national liberation struggle in Ireland. This struggle was twofold: against British political imperialism, and against feudal landlordism which had been imposed by that imperialism. By their Tory blindness toward the Irish drive for national independence, and especially for peasant property against feudal oppression, the British liberals (including Spencer) symbolized their effective abandonment of genuine Liberalism, which had been virtually born in a struggle against the feudal land system. Only in the United States, the great home of radical liberalism (where feudalism had never been able to take root outside the South), did natural rights and higher law theory, and consequent radical liberal movements, continue in prominence until the mid-nineteenth century. In their different ways, the Jacksonian and Abolitionist movements were the last powerful radical libertarian movements in American life.

Thus, with Liberalism abandoned from within, there was no longer a party of Hope in the Western world, no longer a "Left" movement to lead a struggle against the State and against the unbreached remainder of the Old Order. Into this gap, into this void created by the drying up of radical liberalism, there stepped a new movement: Socialism. Libertarians of the present day are accustomed to think of socialism as the polar opposite of the libertarian creed. But this is a grave mistake, responsible for a severe ideological disorientation of libertarians in the present world. As we have seen, Conservatism was the polar opposite of liberty; and socialism, while to the "left" of conservatism, was essentially a confused, middle-of-the road movement. It was, and still is, middle-of-the road because it tries to achieve Liberal ends by the use of Conservative means.

In other words the anarchist critique of socialism (being the left wing of the socialist movement), has been that its reliance on parilmentary politics and the idea of the seizure of state power by either elections or by revolution is flawed.

The anarchist or libertarian critique has been that social democracy, which is not socialism any more than Bolshevism is communism, is State Socialism, in other words Bismarkian socialism and thus a defense of the status quo. It is reformism an attempt to ameliorate the worst conditions of capitalism. European Social democracy died with WWI when it aided and abetted that war.

In Canada social democracy arose with the coming of the second wave immigrations of Central and Eastern Europeans who brought with them their growing revolutionary aspirations towards socialism and democracy that they lacked in the old country.They came to a Canada dominated by the English ruling classes and a French comprador class in Quebec.Canada's First Internment Camps

After WWI Canada saw the rise of a broad based immigrant workers and farmers movement. And again in the midst of the depression socialist ideas gained hold in the workers movement. After the second World War, the Progressives merged with the Conservatives, the CCF held power over a Liberal minority government, and Canada's war time state capitalist economy under C.D. Howe the Minister of Everything (and a darling of the neo-con right wing today ironically) easily shifted to welfare state capitalism of Keynesian model.

So Glavin and Dart are right in saying Canada's uniqueness in relationship to the U.S. is our social democratic values as a nation. I have said that here many times. That being said the libertarian spirit of Canadians also exists and is expressed on the left as well as the right. In particular in both Quebec and the Prairies where we have struggled against the English colonial mercantilist establishment of Ontario.Social Credit And Western Canadian Radicalism

What Glavin and Dart are attempting to do is identify social democracy with nationalism, with a unique Canadian identity of state capitalism. This is the same ideology of classic liberal nationalists like Mel Hurtig and Maude Barlow who run the amorphous mass organization the Council of Canadians. And while Hurtig is from Edmonton as a capitalist he always aspired, much like Peter Lougheed, to see the West as a real partner in late twentieth century Canadian Politics.

All Canadian nationalism is Ontario centric. It is based on the politics of Ontario's identity in relationship to the Americans and Quebec. Once upon a time Canadian Nationalism was the Ontario English ruling class identity, formed by its special relationship to the British Crown. Later as Canada became ten provinces, Ontario allowed the West to join in 'its' confederation not as a partner but as chattel colony for the mercantilist interests of its ruling class. Rebel Yell

Today Nationalism in Canada reflects the interests of Ontario, not the West or the Maritimes or Quebec. Today's social democrats be they Red Tories, New Democrats or Liberals, still cannot concieve of Canada as a different kind of federation. A more decentralized one, a real partnership, a renewed democracy with greater individual and community control and representation. The Bankruptcy of Liberal Federalism

In fact Toronto has become such a megacity it has veiewed itself as seperate from Ontario for many decades now, which is why Torontonians refer to Toronto, Canada. The base of Canadian nationalism is here in the heart of the beast. All the left has their base in Ontario, their national headquarters are either in Ottawa or Toronto. While capitalism has moved west.

Calgary is the new centre of Capitalism in Canada. Not Bay Street. Winnipeg was once what Calgary is today, the centre of rail, grain, furs and other real exports. Ontario was the industrial heartland where Winnipeg shipped goods to for processing. Winnipeg shared with Chicago the Grain Exchange and the Commodity exchange. Bay Street was le petit Wall Street. Real capitalism in Canada in the 20th Century has been a movement westward.

Toronto and Ontario cling to a rustbelt future, an old conservative elite whose time once was. Today the leaders of the liberal values of the status quo are interchangeable.

We have Bob Rae former NDP leader touted as a potential leadership candidate for the Federal Liberals. His brother already is.

We have the McQuinty brothers representing both the provincial and federal Liberals.

We have Jack Layton a former Toronto city counselor as federal NDP leader now joined in Parliment by his wife, Oliva Chow another former Toronto city conselor.

We have Belinda Stronach, millionaress, business scion of the new capitalism of post-fordism. She went from being a Conservative Leadership contender and MP to being a Liberal Cabinet minister and now MP and potential Liberal leadership candidate.

And we have Buzz Hargrove with his social democratic strategic voting in the last election endorsing the Liberals. While Ford and GM care not a wit who he votes for and still slash Canadian autoworkers jobs.

The political reality of Canada is that the base of social democratic power remains identified with the status quo, with its Nationalism and with its base in Ontario. This can be clearly seen from the last election. Where really nothing changed. The social democratic left is still stronger than the social conservatives who are now the government. But its base is the status quo, not radical change. Voting for Capitalism On January 23

On the other hand the election shows that libertarian/populist radical politics comes from the West and Quebec. Rather than embracing the staus quo as Glavin and Dart suggest, in order to revive a failed dream of a Federal NDP government, the left in Canada needs a good dose of libertarianism to thwart the right. Without it the contradictions of the Harper Conservatives will never be confronted their psuedo-libertarianism never exposed for the Republicanism it is. Whigs and Tory's

Glavin and Dart suggest we maintain the status quo, that the Left subsume itself into parlimentary politics, and existing trade union politics by extension. But the left has been doing that for fifty years and it has gotten us nowhere. It is the politics of the stationary bicycle. The libertarian left wants to put wheels on the bicycle and go somewhere.

See:

The Neo Liberal Canadian State

Historical Memory on the Eve of the Election

LABOUR HISTORY

The Edmonton General Strike Of 1919

Also references in the article: A greater union,

Calgary 1919-The Birth Of The OBU And The General Strike

The CCF:The Original Reform Movement

The Edmonton District Labour Council and Municipal Politics 1903-1906

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anarchism
social democrcaty
politics
socialism

left wing