neoliberalism

Public discussion on “War and Capitalist Crisis” in NYC

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In New York next week there will be a public discussion, the event description of which you can read below, on the conflict in Ukraine. This is part of a broader effort to gather contributions for an upcoming issue of Insurgent Notes, which is devoted to the topic and will explore the same questions. Check out the call for submissions and list of recommended readings there for more information. You can see the poster below as well..

SATURDAY | September 10, 2022
WOODBINE | 545 Woodward Ave
5:00 PM | Ridgewood, NY 11385

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caught many off-guard across the political spectrum. Many leftists rushed to release statements in support of one side or the other. Groups and individuals with well-established records of being sympathetic to Russia and convinced that US imperialism is the only real enemy (mostly Stalinists, but more than a handful of Trotskyists) sided with Putin and his “Z” campaign, while others stood in solidarity with a national resistance led by the Ukrainian state (other Trotskyists, and even some anarchists). A few pieces by communists emerged that were more circumspect, trying to take stock of the situation, but these were few and far between.

In hopes of bringing greater clarity to the matter, and seeking to articulate a revolutionary approach, we have posed a series of questions clustered around four interrelated themes:

  1. Imperialism and anti-imperialism — perhaps a semantic question, but an important one. Is the war in Ukraine an example of a one-sidedly imperialist invasion of a formerly colonial or subject nation, or an interimperialist conflict (albeit by proxy, on one side)? Beyond the obvious aggression of Russia, what is the role of NATO? Do classical Marxist theories of imperialism still describe the world situation today? What, if anything, is different?
  2. National self-determination — this old concept has been invoked both by those backing Ukraine’s independence from Russia, as well as those promoting the autonomy of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk. How does the national question figure into the current conflict? For communists skeptical of the “right” to national self-determination in the first place, the invocation of this concept by both sides perhaps illustrates the antinomies of Stalinist and Trotskyist thought.
  3. Defeatism vs. defensism — in many ways this is the classic debate. What is the proper internationalist response? Is “no war but the class war” still an adequate slogan? Principled opposition to every side in a given interimperialist conflict usually rests on the notion of revolutionary defeatism. But we must still ask ourselves what this looks like when there is no realistic prospect for revolution in the next few years, when the working class is largely disorganized around the world.
  4. Geopolitics and phases of capitalism — How do geopolitical rivalries play into all this? Might an aspiring global hegemon, China, come out from this on top? Does the return of great power conflicts, direct on one side (Russia’s) and indirect on the other (NATO’s), signify a new phase of economic development after “neoliberalism”? What sorts of new struggles might arise from energy and food shortages linked to the war? Marxists have long regarded war as being linked to capitalist crisis, but as a cause or an effect? What kind of crisis (social, economic, political)?

Participants

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John Garvey has been involved in radical politics for more than fifty years. He coedited Race Traitor with Noel Ignatiev from 1993 to 2005 and has been the coeditor of Insurgent Notes with Loren Goldner since its inception in 2010. He also currently is a member of the Editorial Group of Hard Crackers: chronicles of everyday life.

Sanderr is a longtime member of the pro-revolutionary group Internationalist Perspective. Many of his articles can be found at the group’s website.

Lilya is an abolitionist organizer and legal worker originally from Ukraine who has been living in the US since the mid-1990s.

Andrew is a communist from Kharkhiv and author of the “Letters from Ukraine” published in Endnotes.

 

The Paradox of the Honest Liberal (reblogged)

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A Young Dan Carlin

An excellent reflection by C. Derick Varn, reblogged from his equally excellent blog, The Loyal Opposition to Modernity.  A blog well worth following.

The Left and the Right both square off with liberals–often for deeply divided reasons–for two major reasons: 1) this epoch is largely a liberal epoch shifting ever more towards the “right” side of liberalism, and 2) Liberalism is the current traditionalism of both the US and the EU, it has been the current traditionalism of the US for longer as both Republicans and Democrats in power until the middle 1970s functioned with liberal values. Indeed, classical liberal values spawn both the American Left and Right, and while Keynesianism, anarchism, Marxism has added to the thick veins of the American left-liberal tradition making it resemble its Marxist-Saint Simonian-LaSallean-Left Keynesian cousin, Social Democracy, and libertarianism has increasingly became close to reactionary elements in the “conservative” tradition obscuring the character of what is going on, both are heirs to a liberal tradition.

Furthermore, all the reactions against the Enlightenment are largely rooted in it: counter-enlightenment thinkers such as De Maistre or Herder or the fundamentalists or the Romantics are still locked in categories set by the Enlightenment. Also, “Left” critiques of the Enlightenment that material in origin are developments out of contradictions within liberal modernity itself–one can see this as analytic developments, or dialectical developments, and it would still stand. So in that sense, the background to the hostility non-liberals feel towards liberalism is partly cultural (Haidt’s research can be useful here) and partly pathological–we all see parts of our tradition reflected in what is currently deemed “liberal.”

In fact, I don’t think the failures of the Left are liberal failures, and leftists would do well to quit blaming our failures on outside parties or on competing but related traditions. No, but the failures of liberalism now is encapsulated by two things: a willingness to engage in almost tribal support for leaders whose compromises even disappoint liberals themselves, and often a failure to even conceive of the reactionary position liberalism has put itself in as a “current traditionalism.” In other words, the dominant thought form will be by-and-large concerned with maintaining its past gains, and given the inability of liberalism to deliver on Enlightenment promises, this will only get worse as the economic situation makes the contradictions obvious.

Look at Dan Carlin: Carlin is an independent, but crucially he is a liberal in the old sense of the term. Yet he sees the fundamental incoherence that both sides of a partisan debate have to can be illustrated in both healthcare and war policy. Carlin, being an honest man, no longer sees an answer, but his question as to the problem is corruption. His paradox is that his self-effacing honesty still has one hampering: he can not easily admit that the past he so valorizing contained all the contradictions of the current, and yet he does almost admit when he openly calls most of American self-conceptions “myths.”

The paradox of the liberal is that contradictions of the declining effacement are so great that they are left like the Soviets in the late 1980s, doing too little far too late, and letting resentment build so that the other side wins. Carlin sees the ad hoc nature of what the constitutional regime and the piecemeal developments of the 20th century have left so many elements of daily life, and he is furious at the disconnect with the leadership. Yet he can not square the circle either, and how can one expect it him to? He is in a defensive position. The questions for left-liberals and the paradox of the liberalism is thus though: if Carlin does square the circle, will what he produces look liberal anymore? Will it avoid the bloodshed? Further imperialism? Resource depletion? Or would maintaining the liberty he wants to maintain cost much in blood and treasure? Would he accept that cognitive dissonance? Or will he act like some Trotskyist or Maoist sectarians stubbornly refusal to acknowledge the contradictions of their own history and trying to pretend that so much of the past didn’t happen? Will anything that resolves these splintering and contradictions even be liberal anymore? I don’t know.

I doubt it. In the meantime, the Left has one major responsibility: to hold itself to account for its failures and to offer an alternative to the current–either through liberalism or against it. At the current, it does neither element of that responsibility well, and thus also cannot be said to have answers to the questions at hand.