Hobson's Choice

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Right, Left, and Imperialism-2

October 16, 2003

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Any time a leader takes away the freedom of his people, he has to resort to the same justification: a foreign (or alien) threat. This was done under conservative monarchies, and it was done under regimes like that of Louis Napoleon (emperor, 1852-1870). It was also done by regimes that characterized themselves as "leftist." In the case of Mao's Cultural Revolution, devotion to Mao's absolute power became a proxy for "leftist" and those who advocated limitations on the power of the Chairman were labeled "capitalist-roaders" or "rightists"—and often put to death.

But idealistically, the Left believes that civil order or convenience of management are less valuable than the things that humans are supposed to share a desire for.

If my object is to give you what you want, as soon as it can be done, why should I expect anything but cooperation from you? Clearly, part of the debate between Right and Left is about what humans want, and how to rank these wants.

I like the phrase, "national aspiration," partly because it's euphonious. It has a moving ring. And it embraces the environmental movement too, because "aspiration" means both "ambition" and "breathing." Our national aspiration is to breathe, to breathe free. But mostly I think of the final scene in Turandot, where the masses rise up and sing, and they do so in the same melody and key as Calaf did in his aria, "Nessum dorma." Calaf is singing about some great ambition he has, and the irony that his ambition has infected the city and now no one must sleep. And when he triumphs, it will be by the power of his love and he will liberate the people. Of course, what this means, is another matter. The Right has historically attacked the idea of being able to know what "national aspirations" are. Despite her Nietzschean philosophy, Ayn Rand seemed to believe she understood better than the left what the "national aspirations" really were; so, for example, she has the climax of The Fountainhead occur with an act of jury nullification in favor of Howard Roark; in Atlas Shrugged, Henry Reardon wins a spontaneous outburst of applause when he condemns the legal proceedings against him. In Rand's view, Roark and Reardon are worthy of love because they are fountainheads (of mental creation); this is why groups of informed observers will naturally take their side against "populists."

Marx argued (truthfully, in my view) that the very word "national" was itself a problem. The nation envisioned by the philosophes of the French Revolution was not in confrontation with other nations. And indeed, behold our own Declaration of Independence:

When, in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

Why? What are we to Holland, or Holland to us, that we should care what they think of our rupture with the English Crown? The correct answer is "decency." The implication is that we owe Mankind an explanation. Other nations—that's Mankind for you—have claims on our respect, our decency and our regard. This was the vision of the nation as conceived by the American or the French revolutionaries.

Early nationalism was used as a classification of humans that transcended class or religion. Under the revolutionary regime, the restrictions and legal stigmatizations of Jews or (in America) Roman Catholics were removed; the aristocracy lost its ancient privileges; the estates of the Church were liquidated, and treason was made a crime against the nation, not against the crown. This was intended to mean the end of an inner circle of people for whom France was merely an estate—an estate among many. Later nationalism was tinged with chauvinism; nationalism after the Napoleonic wars tended to be particularistic. National aspirations were typically seen as competing, or being thwarted by, other nations. Some recognized the perversity of this—Hobson and Angell—but they remained a minority. Under early nationalism, chauvinism made no sense; under modern nationalism, it is an ideological underpinning.

So then, the "Left" in the USA and other developed nations had to come up with somebody (aside from the nation) for whom aspirations mattered. As we saw, the appearance of competitive nationalism, or chauvinistic nationalism, meant simply that the Right had come to accept nationalism as its ace in the hole, its bulwark of productive social relations. The IWW was attacked with lynchings and arson because it argued that the nation was itself an instrument of repression. But in the less developed nations, those that were vulnerable to imperial control by the great powers, nationalism became a part of the leftist ideology. The reason: the Left was able to point out that the national aspiration of freedom from foreign, or unaccountable control, was the most urgent one of all.

Competitive nationalism leads inevitably to imperialism. The Right may demand a reduced role of the state in the affairs of the economy, but it wins elections by appealing to nationalism. Nationalism has been for over a century the way by which the Right defended the social relations of production. In the case of fascist revolutions in Europe, or falangist revolutions in the Western Hemisphere, the Right initiated the movements as part of a panicked defense against the logical progression of liberal ideas; that's how the Right can be implicated in a political revolution (Presumably everyone understands how the Left could be). In the USSR or the People's Republic of China, the Left relied for success on the national aspiration for freedom from foreign domination.

In Western Europe after WW2, the Left was positioned to succeed the Fascist regimes which had so utterly failed to fulfill any aspiration anyone could have. The Right had argued that militarization of society was necessary to prevent foreign invasion; figures such as Von Papen and Hjalmar Schacht had argued within the circles of power that this was required to defend against "Bolshevism" (a code word for the collapse of the familiar social order). If feminist women, gays, labor unions, and landless farmworkers were to use their political rights to fulfill their aspirations then Germany would cease to be productive. (Having just said this, I want to make it absolutely clear that, with few exceptions, the industrialists who saw Hitler as the solution to incipient social revolution eventually withdrew their support.) However, in the event, the fascist regimes of Europe left the Europeans under foreign occupation, general devastation, loss of life, collapse of civil order, poverty and humiliation. Logic would have suggested that, subtleties aside, the Left had been the most vehement opponent, it was allied with the main occupation force, and it was the one thing that had not been tried.

The picture is more complicated than that, of course, but almost at once many Europeans saw the Americans and the British as a sort of accessory to the resurgent Right. The same industrialists and managerial class who had sought any leader to resist socialism were now returning to their old offices and directing the reconstruction of the country. The economic philosophies had changed, and there was Marshall Plan aid, but the very fact that post-War Europe was "prevented"¹ from going Socialist was perceived by many as a violent outrage against the national aspirations of the continent.

For this reason, the European Left was increasingly defined as appealing to the nationalist desire for freedom from the unaccountable influence of the USA. The tendency to view everything American as monstrous or contemptible, previously a hallmark of the old Right, now became the sine qua non of the Left. (Occasionally it becomes obligatory to deny this; sometimes these denials are convincing to me, and sometimes they aren't.) Since European voters have some opposition to high taxes, Social Democrats or "old" Labour tended to rely on corporate income taxes and payroll taxes. They also were reluctant to favor the dissolution of empires, the way the New Deal Democrats had hastened to end the occupations of Nicaragua, Haiti and the Philippines.

In the USA and Great Britain, the Left had a difficult time making a convincing appeal. The national aspirations of Americans seemed fairly near at hand, if a bit crass. The USA suffered from internal colonialism (in the form of disenfranchised, underpaid, brutalized African Americans²) and hidden pools of internally displaced Indians and Chicanos.³ These were problems that were not visible to the majority of Americans, and the Left tended to present these in ways that provoked resentment. The other problem, of course, was the gap between the abstract reasoning of anti-imperialism, and the frightening image of the surly Black Panther in paramilitary uniform and ray-bans. Britons could quit India; but their cousins in the USA could hardly quit Detroit. No matter what people might feel about history, crime had to be dealt with at once.

But this is only part of the story. In my next entry I shall address the economic split.
NOTES: 1 The reason for the quotes are that I'm not sure the Europeans (aside from those who were indeed Communists or radical Socialists) would have really preferred a radical Leftist regime. Moreover, with hindsight, it would appear that post-War Europe has indeed come closer to fulfilling the Marxian ideal than any of the countries with actual Communist governments. Income distribution across the entire EU (in real terms) is probably flatter than it was in the USSR under Khrushchev—because of the immense corruption and regional variation in the latter; and EU member states have been fairly responsive to citizen concerns about pollution or the quality of health care. And the ability of countries like [West] Germany or France to pay for these things would have been immensely reduced had they all been under Communist rule.

2 Characterizing the African American community as subject to "internal colonialism" doesn't mean I'm endorsing any sort of separatism. But it does mean that a huge number of barriers prevented African Americans from full citizenship in American society. In a way, the liquidation of the empires (1945-1975) was a big overhyped disappointment for the subjugated peoples, and actually benefited the imperial powers more. In the USA, of course such separatism would do nothing to mitigate the problems faced by African Americans. Nevertheless, it does allow one to see clearly how institutional oppression "works" and how more inroads could be made against it in the future.

Incidentally, I think it also helps European American liberals to understand the point of view of African American writers on the subject a little better. It's not necessary to agree with Malcolm X to appreciate him.

3 The internal colonial "model" works differently to explain Native Americans or Chicanos. By "Native Americans" I mean those who live on reservations or other rural communities. In theory, a market economy would simply have absorbed the Indians as workers, and eventually their peculiar plight would vanish. But imperialism, even when it resorts to market fundamentalism to defend itself, is extremely wasteful. There is an enormous mismatch between the "demand for labor" and the demand for land, water and other natural resources. So the Indians were simply consigned to refugee camps.

The situation of the Chicanos is a bit similar. While there's been an influx of several tens of millions of Latino immigrants into the USA since the 1920's, it's also true that this was in large measure due to the semi-colonial state of Mexico. The industrialization of Mexican agriculture allowed cash crops to drive subsistence farmers from lands they had farmed for generations. This huge class of rural proletariats was not something the urban economy of Mexico could absorb, and this is why so many seek employment in the USA.